Jim Britt/Michael Ochs Archive/Getty ImagesA federal appeals court Wednesday sided with the late Marvin Gaye's family, saying Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams' "Blurred Lines" did infringe on Gaye's song "Got to Give It Up," according to The Hollywood Reporter.

In a divided decision, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals mostly upheld a 2015 ruling that granted $5.3 million to the family of Marvin Gaye, citing the 1909 Copyright Act. The court ruled Gaye's song is "entitled to broad copyright protection because musical compositions are not confined to a narrow range of expression." The decision rejects the request to overturn a 2015 jury verdict or schedule a new trial.

The Gaye estate is also entitled to 50-percent royalties from "Blurred Lines" forever. Meanwhile, Wednesday's decision marked a victory of sorts for T.I., who contributed to one verse in "Blurred Lines." The rapper was found not personally liable and not responsible for damages.

Judge Jacqueline Nguyen wrote in her dissent that the decision may be may be harmful to future artists and creativity.

"The majority allows the Gayes to accomplish what no one has before: copyright a musical style," Nguyen wrote. "'Blurred Lines' and 'Got to Give It Up' are not objectively similar. They differ in melody, harmony, and rhythm. Yet by refusing to compare the two works, the majority establishes a dangerous precedent that strikes a devastating blow to future musicians and composers everywhere."

Copyright  2018, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.Snow In Sierra View Photos

A series of wet storms will continue to sweep through California into the weekend.

A Flash Flood Watch has been issued by the National Weather Service for the Sierra Nevada through 8 PM tonight.

The Atmospheric River continues to bring substantial rain to the foothills and mountains below 8,000 feet.

Heavy rainfall, in addition to snow melt, will create excess runoff and bring a threat of localized flash flooding, mud slides, rock slides and debris flows.

Some roads may become impassable or become washed out. Residents should be alert for rising waters on area streams with the possibility of flooding.

The National Weather Service has also issued a Winter Storm Warning for the Sierra Nevada above 6,500 feet until 11 PM tonight.

Additional snow accumulations will range from half-a-foot to three feet above the 6,500 feet elevation.

Plan on difficult travel conditions. Damage to trees and power lines is possible. Significant reductions in visibility is likely.

A colder system with lower snow levels and even heavier snow will drop over the region from Friday afternoon into the weekend.

A Winter Storm Watch has been issued for the Sierra Nevada above 3,000 feet from Friday afternoon through late Saturday night.

An additional one to three feet of snow is expected from Friday through Saturday.

A Flash Flood Watch means that conditions may develop that lead to flash flooding. Flash flooding is a VERY DANGEROUS SITUATION. You should be prepared to take action should Flash Flood Warnings be issued.

A Winter Storm Warning for snow means severe winter weather conditions will make travel very hazardous or impossible. If you must travel, keep an extra flashlight, food and water in your vehicle in case of an emergency.

A Winter Storm Watch means there is potential for significant snow, sleet or ice accumulations that may impact travel.The National Weather Service has issued a Flash Flood Warning for a potential Dam break in south central Tuolumne County on Moccasin Creek until 2:15 PM Friday

At 2:17 PM, dam operators reported the imminent failure of Moccasin Dam on Moccasin Creek.

At 2:51 PM, radar indicated a line of strong thunderstorms located in the Mother Lode from 10 miles northeast of Cooks Station to Arnold to Carson Hill to Tuttletown. Movement was east at 25 mph.

Winds in excess of 40 mph and dime size hail are possible with these storms.

Locations impacted include Sonora, Calaveras Big Trees State Park, Vallecito, Black Springs, Shriner Lake Campground, Jupiter, Springfield, Dorrington, Avery, Forest Meadows, Mountain Ranch, Rail Road Flat, Groveland-Big Oak, Tuolumne City, Murphys, Mi-Wuk Village and Twain Harte.

Very heavy rainfall is also occurring with this line of storms and may cause localized flooding.

Do not drive your vehicle through flooded roadways.

Brief funnel clouds are also possible with this line of storms.

The National Weather Service has issued a Flash Flood Warning southwestern Tuolumne County until 4:45 PM.

Heavy rain is likely during the next few hours in this region with the likelihood of flash flooding, mud flows and debris flows.

Additional rainfall of up to two inches is possible in the warned area this afternoon. Debris flows can consist of rock, mud, vegetation and other loose materials.

Move away from recently burned areas. Life-threatening flooding of creeks, roads and normally dry areas is likely. The heavy rains will likely trigger rockslides, mudslides and debris flows in steep terrain, especially in and around these areas.

The National Weather Service also issued an Urban and Small Stream Flood Advisory for southwestern Tuolumne County and all of Calaveras County until 5:15 PM.

Numerous flooded roadways and local streams have been reported, including mudslides and downed trees on roadways. Overflowing poor drainage areas continue to result in minor flooding in the Advisory area.

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. Please report flooding to your local law enforcement agency when you can do so safely.

The Atmospheric River continues to bring substantial rain to the foothills and mountains below 8,000 feet.

Because of that, a Flash Flood Watch remains in effect for the entire Mother Lode until 11 PM this evening.

And a Flash Flood Watch has also been issued by the National Weather Service for the Sierra Nevada through 8 PM tonight.

Heavy rainfall, in addition to snow melt, is creating excess runoff and bringing the threat of localized flash flooding, mud slides, rock slides and debris flows.

The severely burned areas are of particular concern. These areas are no longer able to absorb any rainfall, leading to enhanced runoff.

Rainfall rates could exceed one half inch per hour at times during the storm.

This could quickly become a dangerous situation. Hunters, residents and persons traveling in and around the burn areas should remain alert and take action should heavy rain develop.

Some roads may become impassable or become washed out.

Turn around, dont drown when encountering flooded roads. Most flood deaths occur in vehicles. Excessive runoff from heavy rainfall will cause flooding of small creeks and streams, urban areas, highways, streets and underpasses as well as other drainage areas and low lying spots.

The National Weather Service has also issued a Winter Storm Warning for the Sierra Nevada above 6,500 feet until 11 PM tonight.

Additional snow accumulations will range from several inches to twenty-five inches above the 6,500 feet elevation.

Plan on difficult travel conditions. Damage to trees and power lines is possible. Significant reductions in visibility is likely.

The series of wet storms will continue to sweep through California into the weekend.

A colder system with lower snow levels and even heavier snow will drop over the region from Friday afternoon into the weekend.

A Winter Storm Watch has been issued for the Sierra Nevada above 3,000 feet from Friday afternoon through late Saturday night.

An additional fourteen to twenty-eight inches of snow is expected from Friday through Saturday.

A Flash Flood Warning means that flooding is imminent or occurring. If you are in the warned area move to higher ground immediately. Residents living along streams and creeks should take immediate precautions to protect life and property.

A Flood Advisory means river or stream flows are elevated, or ponding of water in urban or other areas is occurring or is imminent.

A Flash Flood Watch means that conditions may develop that lead to flash flooding. Flash flooding is a VERY DANGEROUS SITUATION. You should be prepared to take action should Flash Flood Warnings be issued.

A Winter Storm Warning for snow means severe winter weather conditions will make travel very hazardous or impossible. If you must travel, keep an extra flashlight, food and water in your vehicle in case of an emergency.

A Winter Storm Watch means there is potential for significant snow, sleet or ice accumulations that may impact travel.A Kingwood mother is behind bars Wednesday after allegedly birthing her child in a toilet earlier this month.

Stephanie Annette Brock, 21, is facing a felony injury to a child charge stemming from the boy's birth on March 1. Harris County Sheriff's Office detectives claim Brock did not seek medical care for the boy after his birth.Associated Press Writer

The former chief internal watchdog at the FBI has pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting a 6-year-old girl and has admitted he had a history of molesting other children before he joined the bureau for what became a two-decade career.

John H. Conditt Jr., 53, who retired in 2001, was sentenced last week to 12 years in prison in Tarrant County court in Fort Worth, Texas, after he admitted he molested the daughter of two FBI agents after he retired. He acknowledged molesting at least two other girls before he began his law enforcement career, his lawyer said.

Conditt sought treatment for sex offenders after his arrest last year, said his attorney, Toby Goldsmith.

"The problem these people have is they don't really feel like it is their fault," Goldsmith said. "The treatment doesn't work unless you admit you are the one who instigated it, and he did that."

Conditt headed the internal affairs unit that investigates agent wrongdoing for the Office of Professional Responsibility at FBI headquarters in Washington from 1999 until his retirement in June 2001, the FBI said. He wrote articles in law enforcement journals on how police agencies could effectively investigate their own conduct.

FBI officials said Tuesday they had no information to suggest that Conditt had any problems during his career and he was never the subject of an investigation.

Tarrant County Assistant District Attorney Mitch Poe, who prosecuted the case, said he wanted a longer prison sentence and was skeptical of Conditt's claim that his molestation of children subsided during his FBI career.

"Both myself and the judge in open court, we were kind of skeptical but we don't have any evidence," Poe said.

A recently retired FBI whistleblower who brought allegations to Conditt's office that agents had not aggressively pursued evidence of sexual abuse in Indian country said Tuesday she now questions whether his personal history affected that decision.

"Before, it never made any sense," retired agent Jane Turner said of the FBI's decision to decline to further investigate her allegations. "Now I can understand. Why in the world wouldn't you want to investigate that?"

Goldsmith said he was concerned about the safety of his client in prison given that he is a former FBI agent and an admitted child molester. "He's not going to be comfortable in the penitentiary," the lawyer said.

Goldsmith said his client had admitted that he had molested at least two other girls before he became an FBI agent more than 30 years ago, but that there was no evidence of any wrongdoing while he served in the bureau.

"It seems that he never did because he had stricter control at that time," the lawyer said.

Conditt could have faced life in prison, and prosecutors requested he get 50 years. The judge sentenced him to 12 years in prison, in part citing Conditt's decision to spare the victim the trauma of a trial, Goldsmith said.

Conditt's conviction is the latest controversy to strike the FBI's Office of Professional Responsibility.

Last year, FBI Director Robert Mueller transferred the head of the office to another supervisory assignment outside Washington, three months after rebuking him for his conduct toward a whistleblower.

That whistleblower, John Roberts, alleged the FBI disciplinary office had a double standard that let supervisors off easier than rank-and-file agents.

Those allegations prompted investigations by Congress and the Justice Department inspector general. The inspector general concluded that there was no systematic favoritism of senior managers over rank-and-file employees but that there was a double standard in some cases involving crude sexual jokes and remarks.The San Antonio area is another step closer to having its own IKEA.

On Wednesday, city officials and IKEA representatives broke ground on their Live Oak location, located in the southwest corner of I-35 and Loop 1604. The city representatives at the ceremony included Live Oak Mayor Mary Dennis and city manager Scott Wayman.

The officials spoke in an indoor tent, flanked on either side by one of IKEA's room designs.

Chuck Coker, part of IKEA's development team, said the groundbreaking marked a big step in the progress of the store's construction.

RELATED: Photos show construction slated to start on San Antonio IKEA

"I speak for the entire IKEA team when we say we're very excited to open in Live Oak," he said. "After today, the real work begins for us."

Dennis celebrated IKEA as a big win for the city of Live Oak, but also claimed neighboring city's will reap economic benefits too.

"Although this is IKEA Live Oak, this is something that's four our region," she said. "It's for all of the cities that surround us. When one of us is lifted up, we all are lifted up."

The 289,000-square-foot furniture store will include a supervised children's play area, a Swedish restaurant and baby care rooms, according to a news release from the company.

The store is expected to open in the spring of 2019.

Click through the slideshow to see photos of the groundbreaking and renderings of the new store.

Fares Sabawi covers crime in San Antonio and Bexar County for mySA.com. Read more of his stories here. | fsabawi@mysa.com | Twitter: @FaresInSAJersey Mike's Subs is donating money to help feed Houston's hungry.

The company plans to donate 100 percent of all sales on Wednesday, March 28, at its 17 Houston-area locations to the Houston Food Bank as part of the company's Month of Giving campaign to support local charities.

The donations apply to the full meal, whether ordered in store or catered.

RELATED: Peli Peli will retain 'End Hunger' motto on former Food Bank site

Last year, Houston-area Jersey Mike's locations raised $42,665 for the campaign.David A. Funchess/HC staff intern

El Paso Electric is expanding its community solar program, which allows customers to subsidize a solar farm owned by the utility and get credits towards their electricity bill.

The utility launched its community solar farm nearly a year ago and plans to contract for additional 2 megawatts to accommodate 1,000 customers waiting to get into the program. (One megawatt is enough to power 200 homes on a hot Texas day.)Petrochemicals executives on Wednesday agreed that plastics and other materials will drive demand for oil and gas in the coming decades, but warned that the industry must spend carefully and seek advances in materials that help curb greenhouse gas emissions, reduce waste and improve agricultural productivity to help feed a ballooning population.

Speaking at the World Petrochemical Conference by IHS Markit, leaders from companies with major Houston-area operations outlined plans to invest more heavily in producing lightweight, durable plastics while emphasizing the need to hold down the costs of building and operating plants to remain competitive if the costs of natural gas and petroleum feedstocks rise.More than 600 communities in Texas could receive billions of dollars worth of new investment under a provision of President Donald Trumps $1.5 trillion tax overhaul.

Gov. Greg Abbott has nominated 628 census tracts in 145 Texas counties as potential opportunity zones under the tax bill  areas that reduce and perhaps eliminate capital gains taxes for developers and businesses in exchange for long-term investments in poor neighborhoods.

Abbotts office used a multi-step process to pinpoint areas suffering from chronic unemployment, lower population density and significant economic disruptors including natural disasters such as Hurricane Harvey during the last two years, the governors office said in a news release Thursday.

This program will help highlight areas of Texas that are prime for business investment, and it will serve to bring more opportunities to hardworking families across the entire state, Abbott said in a statement. As we continue to recover after Harvey, these Opportunity Zone designations will also provide a much needed boost for local communities impacted by the storm. With the potential for billions in new investment, I look forward to our state continuing to flourish, bringing further growth and opportunity to the people of Texas.

The Houston area, racked by Harvey, received nearly a fifth of the governors nominations. Abbott nominated 105 census tracts in Harris County, the most in any Texas county.

San Antonio Mayor Ron Nirenberg submitted 27 area census tracts for consideration by Abbotts office last month. Abbott ultimately nominated 24 tracts in Bexar County for the opportunity zone designation, though it wasnt immediately clear how many of those tracts aligned with Nirenbergs nominations.

Under the law, governors may nominate a quarter of all eligible tracts in their state  areas where the poverty rate is at least 20 percent and where median family income is no more than 80 percent of the regions median income.

Governors dont have the final say in the process: the Treasury Department is expected to certify the zones later this year.

This story is developing. Please check back with mySA.com and ExpressNews.com for further updates, or see Fridays Business section.Sappy songs, skinny jeans and plenty of screaming will soon take the stage in San Antonio.

Perhaps one of the most representative faces of "emo," a music genre that entered mainstream culture in the early 2000s, Hawthorne Heights is bringing their show to the Alamo City.Two very different families, one headed by an eccentric billionaire, the other struggling to make ends meet, come to TV this week via a thriller from an Oscar-winning director and a comedy revival that features one of the small screens most famous matriarchs.

Trust starts rolling out its 10 episodes at 9 p.m. Sunday on FX. The drama brings us the strange, dark, decadent, at times amusing  yet essentially unhappy  tale of J. Paul Getty and his family, with an emphasis on the grisly 1973 abduction of the oil tycoons grandson.

Its marked by big names on and off the screen. Donald Sutherland portrays Getty, Brendan Fraser is his colorful head of security, and two-time Oscar-winner Hilary Swank is his former daughter-in-law, the frantic mom of kidnapped teen J. Paul Getty III.

Danny Boyle, known for best picture winner Slumdog Millionaire and Trainspotting, is executive producer and the director of several episodes.

Roseanne, starring Roseanne Barr in the title role, also has a stellar pedigree, returning the likes of John Goodman, Laurie Metcalf, Sara Gilbert and Johnny Galecki to their former roles.

The reboot, which premieres at 7 p.m. Tuesday on ABC, is as raucous and rowdy as the original, thanks to its working-class feel, Barrs grating laugh and the series abundant one-liners.

More on both:

Trust

Initially, it feels icky to invest in a family with such an abominable man at its head. Getty senior, as depicted by Sutherland, is a soulless skinflint wholl lay down big bucks for a lion from Africa and penile injections so he can satisfy his multiple mistresses in the boudoir, yet he wont pay, as he puts it, a single solitary cent, for the ransom demanded for his kidnapped grandson.

A good-hearted Texan, however, manages to save the show  and rekindle our interest.

Fraser portrays James Fletcher Chace, an ex-CIA operative from the Lone Star State charged with investigating young Pauls disappearance in Italy.

He, unlike his boss, has a sense of humanity, following every lead he can with the sincere objective of returning the lad to his family, mom Gail (Swank), in particular.

Chace dominates the second episode  breaking the fourth wall with memorable insights.

Dressed in cowboy boots and a Stetson almost as expressive as his biblical quotes, Chace visits all the known haunts of the kid. His swagger may be easy, but his aim of uncovering the gangsters suspected of taking the boy is deadly serious.

Fraser made it clear at a recent session with TV critics how much he loved the nuanced role.

Hes a man with a textured past. Hes on a journey of redemption, he said. He wants to rescue this kid for personal reasons outside of just being beholden to his boss, the richest man in the world. I approached this from the boots and belt and hat up.

I wanted to show that he really cares. He cares about the family. He cares about Gail. Hes not just an employee of this Midas character.

Although the episode was directed by Boyle, its so different from the first and third, which he also helmed, youre left wondering exactly what direction he wants the drama to take.

No matter. If you can make it past the meandering pilot, youre bound to be intrigued. A big plus is young actor Harris Dickinson, who, under a curly red mop of hair, brings a likable intensity to Paul.

Despite the teens heavy drug use and wild Italian escapades, Dickinson makes us believe that, down deep, Paul is a decent, creative and rather lovely soul who simply gets caught up in something that spirals tragically out of control.

Roseanne

For many, it may be tough to get past the pilots polarizing politics, dominated by Trump supporter Roseannes anti-Hillary ravings around liberal sister Jackie (Metcalf).

Aunt Jackie thinks every girl should grow up and be president, she quips, even if theyre a liar, liar, pantsuit on fire.

Warmer moments in ensuing episodes, however, are worth your patience.

For starters, its refreshing to see a family in varnished sitcom land so economically challenged. Explaining why the Conner home hasnt changed much since her childhood, Darlene (Gilbert) deadpans: Its a decorating choice called poverty.

So far, my favorite scenes are in episode three, when Roseanne turns into a lioness protective of one of her cubs.

Darlene, divorced and jobless, has moved back home with her two kids. The youngest, Mark (Ames McNamara), 9, makes it quite clear that he likes wearing skirts and colors that pop.

This causes Roseanne and Dan (Goodman) to worry hell be bullied at school.

Barr, in particular, is excellent in a quiet scene that have grandma quizzing the kid on his style choices. Satisfied with his answers, she takes him to school, and noticing the gawking and taunts, asks the teacher if she can address the class.

She begins tenderly enough, but ends on an ominous promise thats bound to leave you smiling.San Antonio will join the famiglia on Saturday when the Carlo's Bakery chain officially opens its first foray into South Texas at The Shops at La Cantera.

Bartolo "Buddy" Valestro, star of the TLC show "Cake Boss," will be on hand for the ribbon-cutting at 7.a.m., according to a Facebook event page.

Carlo's Bakery will join Valestro's other business, Buddy V's, which opened at the premium shopping mall in January.

RELATED: New San Antonio business touts Instagrammable rooms for social media mavens

The shop will open immediately after the ribbon-cutting ceremony. Valestro and the famiglia will be available to take photos and sign autographs for free, according to the Facebook event page.

There are other perks too for those excited enough to wait in line. The very first person in line at the time of the official opening will win one free cannoli a day for 365 days. The 500 people who follow that person are going to get a key chain.

Though the Valestro family rose to fame when "Cake Boss" first aired in 2009, the family business is more than 100 years old. The chain has grown across the nation, from its origins in Hoboken, N.J., to California and everywhere in between  including a shop in Brazil.

With more than 20 locations, it's hard to imagine the Cake Boss would have time to return to San Antonio after the opening, but his spokeswoman Nicole Valdes said fans might still have a chance to spot him around town if they can't make it on Saturday.

"He will be down, of course, when we first open, just making sure everything is exactly as he wants it to be," Valdes said in an earlier San Antonio Express-News article. " But for him, he just goes places he falls in love with. He really likes to pick places he enjoys going to, and he enjoys going to San Antonio."

Madalyn Mendoza is a digital reporter for MySA.com. Read more of her stories here.| mmendoza@mysa.com | Twitter: @MaddySkyeJefferson and East Houston streets downtown will come alive Friday with food trucks, a mobile fashion shop and DJ beats.

From 10 a.m. to 2 p.m., The Spot on Houston at 111 Jefferson St. will host a one-off pilot event put on by Centro San Antonio as part of its Activate Houston Street initiative.

Vendors will include trucks and trailers from Sweet Pea by Estate Coffee Co., chef Andrew Morgans Taco ConFusion, wings and burgers by Maniacs Chefs Truck, sandwiches and wraps from 2017 Food Truck Throwdown champion Rock On Wheels, clothing from Red Cat and Co. and music from Houston Street resident DJ Soulstairs.

While this is a pilot activation, the ultimate goal is to develop significant programming and place-making opportunities by capitalizing on existing assets and underutilized spaces, said Liz Burt, Centros director of programming and place-making.

See the Facebook events page here for more details.1775: Patrick Henry delivered an address to the Virginia Provincial Convention in which he declared, "Give me liberty, or give me death!"

1942: The first Japanese-Americans evacuated by the U.S. Army during World War II arrived at an internment camp in Manzanar, Calif.Texas adults can "escape to happiness" with a grown ups-only summer camp.

Camp No Counselors, which tours the nation hosting adults-only, all-inclusive camps, is stopping in Austin three times this year: May 10-13, Oct. 5-8 and Oct. 11-14.

Those interested in a weekend of open bars, food you don't have to cook yourself, outdoor activities and themed parties can sign up online with prices starting at $550.

RELATED: Your guide to navigating Final Four March Madness in San Antonio

Though the Texas location is near Austin, the camp is called "San Antonio," located in "God's Country," or 500 acres of the Hill Country near the Guadalupe headwaters, according to the website.

Activities at Camp San Antonio include zip-lining, a climbing wall, canoeing, a slip-and-slide and many others.

See what past camps have looked like in the gallery above.

Madalyn Mendoza is a digital reporter for MySA.com. Read more of her stories here.| mmendoza@mysa.com | Twitter: @MaddySkyeNEWTOWN - The national system that encourages anonymous reporting of potential school violence, launched Thursday by Sandy Hook Promise, is designed to be more than a crisis hotline.

Mark Barden, a co-founder and managing director of the nonprofit, said the Say Something Anonymous Reporting System seeks to exploit the fact that 80 percent of school shooters told someone about their plan before they carried it out.

We have what is already the best in its class, because we have training that comes along with it, and a call center that is staffed 24/7 with trained experts who triage information, whether it deals with life safety or non-life safety, and then can report that to authorities, said Barden, who lost a son in the 2012 massacre. And as it goes live, we will continue to monitor it and will never stop working to make it better.

The system was launched with a chilling 30-second public service announcement.

Right now we are telling kids if they see something to tell a trusted adult, but some kids arent comfortable with that, said Tim Makris, a co-founder and co-director of Sandy Hook Promise. So this creates a channel for them to submit a tip anonymously.

Makris is referring to Sandy Hook Promises Say Something initiative - a free school-based program that teaches kids the warning signs that a peer is about to commit violence - particularly signs that are posted online.

Other signs that a peer is at risk to commit violence include bullying, social isolation, and bragging about weapons.

The program teaches youth to take each sign seriously, and to report them.

Barden said Sandy Hook Promise is not concerned about the reporting system being overwhelmed with false alarms.

We would rather have 100 false alarms if meant the 101st tip led to an intervention that prevented an act of violence, he said.

Barden noted that tips to the anonymous hotline are vetted and prioritized by a crisis center in Miami before verified concerns are forwarded to school administrators or police.

We have saved lives with our Say Something program, Barden said. We have prevented school shootings and suicides.

Students can submit an anonymous tip from a smartphone, a laptop or a telephone call.

For details about the initiative visit https://www.saysomething.net.

School districts are encouraged to register with Sandy Hook Promise to take full advantage of the system.

The debut of the anonymous system, which was soft-launched last year, follows the Valentines Day massacre of 17 students and staff at a Florida high school - the nations deadliest school shooting since the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre of 26 first-graders and educators.

Sandy Hook Promise posted a public service announcement Thursday to get the word about the tip hotline. The video features a teenager wondering why peers who see threats of violence are surprised when that red-flag behavior turns into a school shooting.

No one said anything, the teen in the video says as he loads an AR-15-style rifle. Im sure tomorrow somebody will wish they had said something.Scientists have connected a gene to the degenerative illness amyotrophic lateral sclerosis  better known as ALS, or Lou Gehrigs Disease.

According to a release from the National Institutes of Health, Kinesin family member 5A (KIF5A), a gene previously linked to two rare neurodegenerative disorders, has been definitively connected to ALS by an international team from several of the worlds top ALS research labs. The findings identify how mutations in KIF5A disrupt transport of key proteins up and down long, threadlike axons that connect nerve cells between the brain and the spine, eventually leading to the neuromuscular symptoms of ALS.

The discovery, published in the March 21 issue of Neuron, was led by Dr. Bryan Traynor of the Intramural Research Program of the National Institute on Aging at the National Institutes of Health and Dr. John Landers, of the University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester, with key funding support from the NIA, the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke at NIH, and several public and private sector organizations. Genetic data collected by teams of scientists worldwide contributed to the project.

To zero in on KIF5A, the NIH team performed a large-scale genome-wide association study, while the University of Massachusetts team concentrated on analyzing rare variants in next generation sequence data. Over 125,000 samples were used in this study, making it by far the largest such study of ALS performed to date.

The extraordinary teamwork that went into this study underlines the value of global, collaborative science as we seek to better understand devastating diseases like ALS, said Dr. Richard J. Hodes, director of NIA in a news release. These types of collaborative data collection and analysis are important in identifying the pathways underlying disease and in developing approaches to treatment and prevention.

KIF5A regulates part of the kinesin family of proteins that serve as tiny intracellular motors. Problems with these proteins are connected to ALS, Parkinsons disease and Alzheimers disease. KIF5A mutations were previously known to be connected to two other rare neurodegenerative diseases with muscle weakening, stiffening and spasticity symptoms similar to ALS: hereditary spastic paraplegia type 10 (SPG10) and Charcot-Marie-Tooth Type 2 (CMT2.) Scientists suspected KIF5A might be associated with ALS but lacked definite proof until now.

Traynor cautioned that the discovery, while exciting, still leaves much more work to be done. Next steps for the project include further study of the frequency and location of mutations within KIF5A and determining what cargos are being disrupted. He and his team hope this will help reveal what aspect of axonal transport is essential to maintain the cell.

According to the ALS Association, slightly more than 6,000 people in the U.S. are diagnosed with ALS each year and there are more than 20,000 Americans estimated to have the disease at any given time.

Most people who develop ALS are between the ages of 40 and 70, with an average age of 55 at the time of diagnosis. However, cases of the disease do occur in persons in their twenties and thirties. Generally though, ALS occurs in greater percentages as men and women grow older. ALS is 20 percent more common in men than in women. However with increasing age, the incidence of ALS is more equal between men and women.The University of Houston is touting a plan for its proposed medical school to focus on primary care, but a new U.S. News & World ranking notes that the city already has a pretty good exponent: Baylor College of Medicine.

Baylor, considered one of the nation's elite research institutions, ranks No. 5 at training primary-care doctors in the magazine's new survey of medical schools, behind only the University of North Carolina, the University of California-San Francisco, the University of Washington and UCLA.

"Houston has one of the best primary-care training grounds in the nation: us," said Dr. Paul Klotman, president of Baylor. "That speaks to our number of graduates going into primary care, which requires clinical role models to support such choices. That takes years to develop."

Indeed, Baylor's primary-care ranking in U.S. News has improved incrementally every year since 2012, when the magazine put it at 49. It cracked the top 10 two years ago before ascending to this year's best-ever mark.

RELATED: Is East Coast bias hurting the Texas Medical Center?

The ranking is based on a formula that takes into account the number of the school's fourth-year students who choose primary-care residencies, its reputation among the nation's residency directors and chairs of medicine, measures of student selectivity and faculty-to-student ratio.

The new ranking catapults Baylor back ahead of the University of Texas Southwestern, its Dallas rival. The two tied at No. 8 in primary care last year, but Southwestern dropped to 19th this year. It was also behind Baylor in research, the other category by which U.S. News ranks medical schools  the Houston private school ranked 16th, the Dallas public school 26th.

The research ranking was Houston's best in a decade and an improvement over last year, when U.S. News placed it 21st.

RELATED: Houston tops Dallas in US News ratings

Other Texas rankings in the survey include the UT Health Science Center at Houston and the UT Medical Branch at Galveston, which tied at No. 85 in primary care, behind Texas Tech at No. 68 and the UT Health Science Center at San Antonio at No. 72. In research, the UT medical schools at Houston, San Antonio and Galveston rank 52nd, 62nd and 66th, respectively.

Take of it what you will. The survey often is criticized as a popularity contest, but it remains hugely influential, trumpeted by hospitals that fare well and feared by those that don't.

Baylor definitely fits the first category. Klotman on Tuesday tweeted a photograph of a banner hung at the school's main lobby proclaiming Baylor the No. 1 medical school in Texas, based on the rankings.

You can read the full rankings by primary care here and research here.Middletown police reported the following arrests:

ASSAULT: Treshon Hill, 23, of Marlborough Street, Portland, was arrested March 11 on an active warrant and charged with strangulation, third-degree assault, disorderly conduct, criminal mischief and interfering with an emergency call. He was released on $15,000 bail and issued a court date of April 3.

ASSAULT: Rachel Hedrick, 46, of Grand Street, was arrested March 11 and charged with third-degree assault, threatening and disorderly conduct. She is accused of motioning to stab a man she knows with a knife during a verbal dispute. She also allegedly punched and kicked the man as he tried to leave the residence. She was released on a promise to appear April 13 in court.

DISORDERLY CONDUCT: Tiffany Patterson, 28, and Danielle Rogers, 47, both of Bartholomew Drive, were both arrested March 9 and issued a misdemeanor summons for disorderly conduct for allegedly getting into a physical altercation. Both were released on a promise to appear April 2 in court.

POSSESSION OF NARCOTICS: Bernard Wagner, 41, of Senate Brook Drive, Hebron, was arrested March 6 and charged with possession of narcotics and possession of less than half an ounce of marijuana, operating a motor vehicle with a suspended license and possession of drug paraphernalia. Upon searching Wagners vehicle, police allegedly found two glass pipes with burnt residue, 1.52 grams of cocaine and 1.58 grams of marijuana. He was released on $5,000 bail and issued a court date of April 24.

CONTROLLED SUBSTANCE: James Hardy, 40, of Ridgefield Drive, was arrested March 10 and charged with possession of a controlled substance, possession of less than half an ounce of marijuana, operating a motor vehicle with a suspended license and failure to drive right. Police pulled Hardy over for an alleged traffic violation, and, upon searching Wagners vehicle, they allegedly found 1.9 grams of methylone (molly) and 0.4 grams of marijuana. A check with dispatch revealed an active warrant, and Hardy was subsequently charged with failure to appear. He was released on a promise to appear April 17 in court.

DUI: Sasha Abely, 24, of Long Hill Road, was arrested March 4 and charged with operating under the influence and failure to drive in the proper lane. She was released on $500 bail and issued a court date of March 29.

EVADING RESPONSIBILITY: Luigi Raffa, 24, of Talcott Ridge Drive, was arrested March 10 and issued a misdemeanor summons for evading responsibility and following too close. He was released on $500 bail and issued a court date of April 10.

FAILURE TO APPEAR: Alexander Duncan, 26, of Pratt Street, was arrested March 15 on an active warrant and charged with failure to appear. He was released on $500 bail and issued a court date of March 23.

LARCENY: Patrick Donahue, 41, of Perry Lane, Enfield, was arrested March 15 on an active warrant and charged with fifth-degree larceny. He was released on $5,000 bail and issued a court date of March 23.

DRUG PARAPHERNALIA: Bryan Mclaughlin, 31, of High Street, was arrested March 14 and charged with possession of drug paraphernalia after a hypodermic needle, a crack pipe and glassine baggies were allegedly found in his possession. A check revealed Mclaughlin had an active warrant and was subsequently charged with failure to appear. He was released on a promise to appear in court.

DUI: Carlos Rivera, 31, of Washington Street, was arrested March 8 and issued a misdemeanor summons for operating a motor vehicle under the influence. He was released on $500 bail and issued a court date of April 30.

DUI: Domonic Barton, 22, of Indian Hill Road, Higganum, was arrested March 10 and issued a misdemeanor summons for operating under the influence and having an inoperable taillight. He was released on $500 bail and issued a court date of March 23.

DUI: Henry Mensa-Boateng, 28, of Blue Orchard Drive, was arrested March 13 and issued a misdemeanor summons for operating a motor vehicle under the influence, evading responsibility and failure to grant right of way. He was released on $500 bail and issued a court date of March 27.

TRESPASSING: Jeri McMakin, 35, of Spencer Drive, was arrested March 5 and charged with sixth-degree larceny and criminal trespassing. She is accused of attempting to shoplift more than $28 from Stop & Shop. McMakin allegedly shoplifted from the same location in April 2017 and was subsequently banned from the premises. She was released on $1,500 bail and issued a court date of April 2.For many in the Pearland community, the fact that the post office located directly across from the Pearland Police Department will carry Endy Ekpanya's name bears a special significance.

Ekpanya, a rookie officer with the department, was killed June 12, 2016 while on duty by a drunk driver. Ekpanya, 30, was the first officer from the department to have lost his life on duty in 40 years.

Following Ekpanya's death, Rep. Pete Olson, R- Sugar Land, introduced a bill in Congress to name the post office, 2700 Cullen Blvd., in the officer's honor.

"In order for a post office bill to go through, it must have the support of all members of the delegation - (which means) all Texas members in the House must co-sponsor the bill and both Texas senators must write a letter of support," said Melissa Kelly, Olson's deputy chief of staff.

Olson worked with the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform to move the bill to the House floor for a vote. The bill was passed by both the House and Senate and then signed into law by the president on March 16.

"I am pleased and grateful to Congressman Pete Olson for his work on the bill that will rename the post office on Cullen in honor of Officer Endy Ekpanya," Pearland Police Chief Johnny Spires said. "I think it is very fitting the post office will bear his name right across the street from the police department. Officer Ekpanya was a person who was committed to always giving his best to the citizens of Pearland and who ultimately sacrificed his life in service to this community. I am glad his family will have this visual representation of our community's appreciation of not only his sacrifice but also of theirs."

Said Olson: "Police officers, like Endy Ekpanya, risk their lives in the line of duty each and every day to keep our families and communities safe.

"Now, when Pearland residents visit the Endy Nddiobong Ekpanya Post Office Building, they will be reminded of his courage, service and sacrifice."

Kelly said that the next step will be to work with the Postmaster General to secure a plaque with the new name for the building.

Amber Willemsen is serving a 32-year prison sentence for intoxication manslaughter in Ekpanya's death. Willemsen, a former assistant principal in Clear Creek ISD, was out on bail on a felony drug charge when her car struck the officer's patrol car.Several people were arrested on meth charges in Galveston's east end Wednesday after calls from concerned neighbors resulted in a police investigation into criminal activity in the area.

Sgt Xavier Hancock of the Galveston Police Department said Richard Osborne, 49; Robert Henson, 21; Rodney Moore, 46; Tatum Frey, 39; Jennifer Jones, 45; and Maria Herrera, 46, were arrested on charges of possession of a controlled substance.

John Porretto, 42, was arrested on a prior warrant, Hancock said.

LEAGUE CITY: Couple charged with using meth near children

The March 21 arrests were made as search warrants were executed in the 100 block of Marlin, 100 block of 45th Street and 3800 block of R 1/2, the city of Galveston said in Thursday press release.

Michael Gray, Galveston's city marshal, said the home on Marlin also could be condemned as it was "too unsanitary for human habitation."

The city press release stated that three dangerous dogs were also seized during the investigation.

Specific details on the investigation are not being provided by police.

Galveston Police Chief Vernon Hale called for other residents to be vigilant and report suspicious activity in their neighborhoods.

"This type of citizen involvement and intelligence is what will make Galveston a safer place for those who call the island home," Hale said.

The police department asks that residents provide as much of the following information as possible when making a suspicious activity report:

1. What are the peak times you see the activity occurring? Narrowing the scope to a window of 2-3 hour blocks of time where peak activity is recognized is helpful.

2. What days do you see the most activity? Narrowing the days where you see the most activity to one or two days out of the week is the most helpful way to report suspicious behaviors that we can act on.

3. What do they look like? What are they driving? What makes them suspicious? The more descriptive information pertaining to the people involved in the suspicious activity, the better.

All tips can be called in anonymously to Galveston Crime Stoppers at 409-763-TIPS (409-763-8477) or submitted online here.College students may not typically choose to spend their spring break performing unpaid manual labor.

However, several college students from the New England region voluntarily spent their spring breaks camped out in area churches, such as Humble's First Baptist Church, over the past few weeks.

Despite the day of hard work ahead of them, several in the groups of college students smiled as they exited the church bright and early on Wednesday, March 21, and piled into vans that would transport them to locations around the greater Houston area.

Each week, a new group of students from New England have traveled to Humble to spend their break helping Hurricane Harvey-affected residents with restoration and rebuild efforts. The groups help homeowners and apartment dwellers move heavy furniture and appliances in addition to other tasks to help make the residence habitable.

The New England volunteers are participants in ServeUp 2018, an initiative to help in hands-on disaster relief and recovery efforts. The program was launched through a Christian organization called InterVarsity, which is a campus ministry stationed in over 700 college campuses around the United States, including approximately 60 in New England colleges.

"ServeUp kind of grew out of the Katrina disaster," said Tom Brink, InterVarsity New England regional and global coordinator. "We'd bring people down from New England and from all over the country to help. We did that until last year  for 12 years. Then, because of Harvey, we moved it over here this year."

ServeUp was launched by a Christian organization, but encourages interfaith participation, he explained.

"The students that come with us are from all different backgrounds," Brink said. "In fact, we want that."

Finding locations to house volunteers can be difficult, Brink said.

Other area churches, Forest Wood Baptist Church in New Caney and First Baptist Spring have been helping to house ServeUp volunteers.

Brink was put in touch with First Baptist Humble through people in other organizations ServeUp has worked with.

David Humphrey, Humble First Baptist's Family Life pastor, welcomed the ServeUp volunteers to stay at the Student Center for their four-week mission, which Brink said is especially inspiring since the church is still recovering from damage sustained from the two-and-a-half feet of floodwater it took on during Hurricane Harvey.

Humble First Baptist congregation members provided the ServeUp volunteers with facilities, sleeping arrangements and three-square-meals a day.

"One of the things we have appreciated about being here for our students is being able to get involved with a church that's involved in the community," Brink said. "I see what Humble First Baptist is doing as kind of a positive apologetic for 'This is what true Christianity is: not just saying things, but doing things.' So, it's really important that these students are here seeing a church that is not concerned just for themselves."

ServeUp hasn't been the only volunteer group Humble First Baptist's hosted after Harvey.

"We've hosted volunteer teams from about 20 states since Harvey  from Washington state, New York, Georgia, Florida  just everywhere," Humphrey said. "As soon as Harvey happened, of course we realized we're a disaster sight, but also our whole community is so we can't just focus here, we've got to focus out."

The church set up a way for Harvey-affected people to reach out about their needs and then volunteers go down the list trying to help those in need.

"It's connected us more to our community, which that's our desire as a church," Humphrey said. "We want people to realize we're right here and we love you and we're here for you. When this happened, we saw ways that we can truly show people God's love through this, so we've been doing that pretty much nonstop since Harvey."

ServeUp's volunteers have had a far-reaching impact, sending groups to sites in areas that include Humble, Kingwood, Atascocita, East Montgomery County, Spring and Cleveland.

This year's last group of ServeUp student volunteers will arrive for the final week of ServeUp's 2018 efforts in the greater Houston area. However, Brink said he hopes they will return next year, if not for several years to come.

"We'll have to see how the recovery goes here, but I can see us being here three or four years," Brink said. "I think next year, the talk will go around campuses more and I think more students will be involved. If possible, I'd like to come here again because I think there'll be momentum for students to come. We'd like to come back at least one more year."A Fly Jamaica Airways crew member is accused of attempting to smuggle nearly nine pounds of cocaine through John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York.

Federal officials said that during a security search late last week, Hugh Hall, a Jamaican citizen, was found to have four packages filled with white powder strapped to his legs and hidden underneath his pants. Authorities confirmed that the substance was cocaine - about $160,000 worth, according to a statement from U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

Hall was taken into custody Saturday on federal illegal drug smuggling charges, authorities said.

His attorney could not immediately be reached for comment Thursday by The Washington Post.

Federal officials said Hall and the other crew members from Fly Jamaica Airways Flight 272 were selected for inspection Saturday at the airport in Queens, New York. During pat-downs, Customs and Border Protection agents felt an object around Hall's leg, according to a complaint filed in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York.

When questioned by agents, Hall, who was flying from Montego Bay, Jamaica, said that the substance was cocaine, according to the court records.

He appeared in court Monday and was ordered to be detained, according to the U.S. attorney's office.

"This seizure is another example of our CBP officers being ever vigilant in protecting the United States from the distribution of illicit drugs," Leon Hayward, acting director of the Customs and Border Protection's New York field operations, said in the statement.

In the United States in 2016, there were more than 63,600 drug overdose deaths amid an opioid epidemic sweeping the nation, according to the most recent data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Though it is not an opioid, cocaine, a highly addictive controlled substance, was involved in nearly 6,700 overdose deaths the previous year - or 13 percent of the total number of overdose deaths, according to the research.

Cocaine comes from coca leaves grown in South America and about 90 percent of the powder shipped to the United States is produced in labs in Colombia, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Representatives for Fly Jamaica Airways did not immediately respond Thursday to requests for comment about the incident in New York.WESTPORT  The number of residents coming forward to protest the creation of two medical marijuana facilities in town has surprised leaders, especially so late in the process.

I think we were collectively surprised at the lack of reaction, Westport First Selectman Jim Marpe said at a zoning meeting March 15, referring to the process up until this point.

Since 2012, when Connecticut approved the medical marijuana program, Westport Planning and Zonning adopted six separate 12-month moratoriums on medical marijuana dispensaries in town. Meanwhile, zoning set up a subcommittee on medical marijuana, which drafted regulations for zoning of medical marijuana dispensary facilities.

Last summer, zoning approved medical marijuana zoning regulations, which became effective on July 25, when the last moratorium expired. The P&Zs unanimously approved medical marijuana zoning regulations permit two dispensaries to operate in nonresidential districts and at least 1,000 feet from any school, place of worship, public park, public building or public recreation area. In order to set up shop, applicants must first garner local approval and a state dispensary license.

Residents packed the Town Hall auditorium on March 15, urging zoning to deny two proposals for medical marijuana dispensary facilities in town. P&Z continued the hearings until April 4, given the volume of residents who wish to speak.

Many residents at the March 15 hearing questioned how the P&Z zoned for medical marijuana facilities without residents knowing. P&Z Commissioner Chip Stephens responded, saying the P&Z held several public hearings from February 2014 until March 2017 and said he was surprised a crowd like the one that assembled at the March 15 hearing was not present at the P&Zs previous meetings on the topic.

Now that two applications for medical marijuana facilities in town have been heard by zoning, one at 1505 Post Road E., the DXL Destination building, and the other at 833 Post Road E., formerly Bertuccis restaurant, the public has mobilized.

A third applicant, FFD Westport LLC, has come forward seeking a special permit and site plan for a medical marijuana dispensary facility at 345 Post Road E., the Academy of Dance building. The applicant will get a public hearing in April, according to zonings agenda.

A newly formed group called Concerned Westport Mothers, launched a Change.org petition at the beginning of the month opposing approval for the two medical marijuana dispensary facilities. As of March 22, the petition has received 774 signatures.

Lamia Hatsiandrou, of Edgemarth Hill, expressed many of the common sentiments included in the petition.

We did not move to Westport to be in this type of environment. We moved here because of the schools. We moved here to protect our children. We moved here because of Compo. We moved here because of all the wholesome and amazing things that this community brings us, Hatsiandrou said.

Following approval by the state Legislature, the state Department of Consumer Protection became responsible for administering the states medical marijuana program in 2012 and, since the program, 10 medical marijuana dispensaries have set up shop in the state. The closest facility is in Bethel.

The state re-opened applications for medical marijuana facilities in January and expects to award between three and 10 dispensary facility licenses after the application period closes in early April.

The two applicants seeking a special permit and site plan approval for medical marijuana dispensary facilities in Westport have also submitted paperwork for state permits. Acreage Connecticut LLC/Todd Corp. is the stated applicant for the 1505 Post Road E. facility, while Phil Hein, of Shoreline Alternative Care LLC,is the stated applicant for the 833 Post Road E. site.

Representative Town Meeting member Lauren Karpf spoke at the meeting saying shes not opposed to medical marijuana, but said the 1505 Post Road E. location is not appropriate for a dispensary. The corner were talking about is, in my opinion, the most child-centric corner in all of Westport, Karpf said.

RTM member Greg Kraut said he does not oppose medical marijuana, but thinks the town should propose a ban on the sale of recreational marijuana before approving a medical marijuana facility in Westport.

Marpe said he doesnt believe either of the locations meets the criteria of the zoning regulations and should be rejected, but believes the P&Z should consider permitting one dispensary thats of a modest size, in a nonprominent location, and located a significant distance away from schools and public buildings.

The hearing will continue on April 5.Erik Trautmann / Hearst Connecticut Media

NORWALK  Seaweed is having a moment. You can find it everywhere from high-end restaurants to the shelves of supermarkets. And Connecticuts coastline is prime seaweed territory. The University of Connecticuts 2018 Science Salon series stops in Norwalk to discuss this trend with its third event: Kelp Confidential: Secrets of Connecticuts Culinary Seaweed Scene.

Open to the public, an expert panel will discuss seaweed and how its grown, how its cooked, and how it has become an enjoyable food. Panelists include:Robert Linton / Getty Images

Its not too late to get a good plate of corned beef and cabbage this year.

The United Methodist Mens Club will serve its annual Corned Beef and Cabbage Dinner at 6 p.m. Saturday, March 24, in the Fellowship Hall of Cornerstone Community Church.Red Cross blood supply recovering from winter

FAIRFIELD  The American Red Cross reports that its blood supply is still recovering from severe winter storms in March. Red Cross representatives are urging people to get out and donate blood.

Winter weather in parts of the country forced more than 270 blood drives to cancel, resulting in over 9,500 uncollected blood and platelet donations in the first two weeks of March. In Connecticut, 39 blood drives were canceled due to winter weather in March, causing 1,287 donations to go uncollected. No matter the weather, the need for blood to help cancer patients, those undergoing surgeries, trauma patients and others remains.

Volunteer blood donors from across the country are needed to help ensure lifesaving blood products are available for patients this spring. Make an appointment to donate blood by downloading the free Red Cross Blood Donor App, visiting RedCrossBlood.org or calling 800-733-2767.

James and the Giant Peach opens Friday

WESTPORT  Coleytown Companys newest production, James and the Giant Peach, opens Friday at 7 p.m. and runs through the weekend with additional performances Saturday at 1 p.m. and 7 p.m. and Sunday at 1 p.m. Tickets are available at www.showtix4u.com or at the door.

Water main installation project announced

WESTPORT  Aquarion Water Company today announced a water main installation project beginning at the intersection of Main Street and Myrtle Avenue in Westport. The installation will progress southerly along Myrtle Avenue to the Post Road.

Scheduled to begin April 2, the work is expected to be completed by the end of July 2018. The project will install approximately 2,000 feet of new 16 inch water main and will greatly improve water distribution capacity.

During the project, customers in the area may experience temporary service disruptions or discolored water. Customers should refrain from washing laundry if water is discolored. Prior to resuming use, customers should run their cold water faucets until the water appears clear.

We greatly appreciate residents patience during this project, said Kevin Lott, Aquarions Manager of Utility Programs. We will work closely with our customers, contractors, and town officials to coordinate the work and minimize disruption.

Work along Myrtle Avenue will take place during the hours of 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. and will require rolling road closures. Residents can find the latest construction information at www.aquarionwater.com under the Alerts and Outages section on the homepage. True Blue Construction of Wallingford, CT was chosen as the contractor for this water main installation project.

Customers with project-related questions may contact Kevin Lott, Aquarions Manager of Utility Programs, at (203) 337-5906. For service or water-related issues, please contact Aquarions Customer Service Center at 1-800-732-9678.Seventy-nine thousand tons of plastic debris, in the form of 1.8 trillion pieces, now occupy an area three times the size of France in the Pacific Ocean between California and Hawaii, a scientific team reported on Thursday.

The amount of plastic found in this area, known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, is "increasing exponentially," according to the surveyors, who used two planes and 18 boats to assess the ocean pollution.

"We wanted to have a clear, precise picture of what the patch looked like," said Laurent Lebreton, the lead oceanographer for the Ocean Cleanup Foundation and the lead author of the study.

The garbage patch has been described before. But this new survey estimates that the mass of plastic contained there is four to 16 times larger than previously supposed, and it is continuing to accumulate because of ocean currents and careless humans both onshore and offshore.

The "patch" is not an island or a single mass, leading some scientists to object to the name (which the current study uses). Instead, it's a large area with high volumes of plastics, one in which concentrations increase markedly as you move toward its center. The debris ranges from tiny flecks to enormous discarded fishing nets, which make up 46 percent of the material, the study found.

The study was led by the Ocean Cleanup Foundation and researchers at institutions in New Zealand, the United States, Britain, France, Germany and Denmark, who published the findings in the journal Scientific Reports.

There's a key distinction between the mass of plastic within the patch increasing - which it is - and the overall size of the patch, which does not seem to be changing. Rather, it's just that trash within the patch seems to be accumulating, or growing more dense.

The plastic is probably mostly coming from Pacific countries, Lebreton said. But it could be coming from anywhere since plastic now travels across the entirety of the ocean and has even shown up in Arctic waters, where very few humans live. That suggests the plastic traveled there from elsewhere, riding the ocean currents.

Some of the debris probably also came from the 2011 tsunami that devastated Japan and washed large amounts of waste back out to sea, the study said.

The location of the patch is in a zone of slack currents where debris arrives and then lingers, increasing in the calm waters.

The study finds that, based on prior examinations dating back to the 1970s, the amount of plastic in the patch is steadily growing as more flows in than flows out - saying that plastic levels are "increasing exponentially."

"We think there's more and more plastic basically accumulating in this area," Lebreton said.

The most striking aspect of the findings - and perhaps the most damaging - was the large volume of fishing nets or "ghostnets," said Chelsea Rochman, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto who studies marine plastic but was not part of the current study.

"This suggests we might be underestimating how much fishing debris is floating in the oceans," she said in an emailed comment. "Entanglement and smothering from nets is one of the most detrimental observed effects we see in nature."

The fact that the plastic content of the patch is increasing is consistent with research that has been conducted on land, showing that waste volumes entering the ocean are large and increasing, said Jenna Jambeck, an environmental engineer at the University of Georgia who has studied plastic waste processes.

In a 2015 study, Jambeck found that humans are filling the oceans with an estimated 8 million tons of plastic every year, and that is expected to increase 22 percent by 2025.

That matches what is now being seen in the ocean, in the form of an ever-accumulating garbage patch in the Pacific, though Jambeck also noted that much plastic sinks to the ocean bottom, and the fishing nets are being tossed in from boats, rather than dumped from the shore.

"The logic plays out that if we projected it to be increasing, every year in terms of input, that you would see some potential increase in the ocean," Jambeck said. She also was not involved in the new study.

Jambeck and the research team both agree that there is far less plastic accumulating in the Pacific patch than is going in the ocean - and the study itself says that in light of how much plastic is being dumped, they would have expected volumes to be even higher.

Clearly, much plastic is sinking and doing its damage at the seafloor, or in lower depths of the ocean.

In this sense, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is, in the end, merely the most dramatic outward symptom of a far deeper problem of enormous volumes of human waste reaching places where it was never intended to be.

"The results are alarming; it really shows the urgency of this situation," Lebreton said.FAIRFIELD  For those who support Saturdays March For Our Lives but cant make it to Hartford, New York City or Washington, D.C., local resident Michele Hobart has come up with an alternative.

With buses to Hartford leaving from the Mill Plain Road commuter lot, Hobart decided to organize a rally for those who cant take part in one of the marches.A San Francisco police officer and five others, including a male juvenile, were wounded in a wild shootout inside a barber shop Wednesday afternoon near the busy intersection of Geneva Avenue and Mission Street, city officials and witnesses said.

The gunfire broke out about 4:40 p.m. at the Amazon Barber Shop on the 900 block of Geneva Avenue, on the edge of the Crocker-Amazon and Excelsior neighborhoods, sending dozens of schoolchildren and pedestrians ducking for cover.

The police officer was struck in the leg by a bullet and is in fair condition at San Francisco General Hospital. Two of the others wounded were in critical condition and three were in stable condition, according to police.

One of the five civilians hit was a suspect in the shootout and was arrested. He was in critical condition.

At 4:30, police received a call from a parent on the 200 block of Amazon Avenue, near Geneva Avenue, reporting that his or her son was in possession of a gun. As police officers arrived, the suspect fled to the barbershop at 949 Geneva Ave., about a block away. At some point after police entered the barbershop, the suspect started shooting at them.

Ed Nasrah, the owner of Daniels Pharmacy, which is adjacent to the barbershop, said he was in the back of the store with six or seven customers when he heard what sounded like 20 to 25 rounds fired.

He ran to the front and locked the door. I couldnt believe what was happening, he said. Ive never experienced something like this before, and Ive been here 30 years. We have had shootings before, but never in broad daylight or during business hours. It was scary, the way it happened.

He described a chaotic scene with adults ducking and diving behind cars and children crying. After the shooting, the police officer who was shot crawled along the sidewalk, seeking refuge behind a patrol vehicle in the street, where he was treated. Paramedics dragged one person who had been shot in the foot into the pharmacy, where they attended to his wound.

The guy was screaming in agony, I got shot, I got shot, Nasrah said. Everyone was running and ducking for cover. Two kids were screaming outside the barbershop because they didnt know if their father was OK.

The intersection is a hectic transit hub at rush hour where five bus lines converge. One witness said she was stepping off the 8-Bayshore bus when she saw the suspect and police officers trading gunfire outside the barbershop. She described a confusing scene, with pedestrians, some of them children, diving behind and under parked cars to avoid the bullets.

It was a shootout, and I saw an officer fall to the floor, she said. It was intense  everybody was trying to get away. A lot of people and kids were running from the scene toward Mission Street.

Supervisor Ahsha Safai, who represents the neighborhood, said, The good news is that the officer is in stable condition, and it looks like everyone else will pull through.

He called the Amazon Barber Shop a great family-run business with a loyal neighborhood customer base. I want people to know the neighborhood is safe and that barbershop has never been a problem at all. A lot of my strongest constituents frequent that place.

Sgt. Michael Andraychak of the San Francisco Police Department said there will be a town hall meeting about the incident within 10 days.

Its still the early stages of the investigation, with very little information available, he said. Folks are receiving medical treatment, and witnesses still need to be interviewed.

Chronicle staff writer Annie Ma contributed to this report.A San Antonio mother who went missing for more than a year after allegedly taping her daughter to an ice machine was found in Raleigh, North Carolina, according to a report from The News & Observer.

Michele Roode Boyd, 43, was arrested Monday by WakeMed police and accused of being a fugitive from justice.

RELATED: 73-year-old man accused of sexually assaulting child in New Braunfels

Boyd has been sought by San Antonio police since Nov. 25, 2016. On that morning, officers were called to a Walgreens store on Rigsby Avenue when an employee reported a child was found taped to an ice machine, authorities said.

The girl's mouth was taped shut and her hands were taped behind her back, according to the report.

Then, Boyd went missing.

Her family feared that Boyd experienced a mental breakdown. They said she began acting strangely after she and her husband separated, according to a previous mySA.com report.

READ MORE: S.A. nurse, mother went missing on Thanksgiving, family seeking help to find her

Boyd was reportedly found in North Carolina after she was hospitalized at WakeMed Hospital in Raleigh. She allegedly refused to give nurses her name for 10 days and was listed as "Jane Doe."

Boyd was reportedly taken to Wake County Jail and her bail was set at $200,000. Her mother is traveling to North Carolina to get her, according to the report.

Fares Sabawi covers crime in San Antonio and Bexar County for mySA.com. Read more of his stories here. | fsabawi@mysa.comAn Athens, Texas, man plead guilty to unlawful possession of ricin, a highly toxic poison fatal to humans.

Abel Keith Fulton, 19, plead guilty on Tuesday and admitted to a federal judge that he possessed the biological toxin at his home in Athens in 2016.

The U.S. Attorney's Office said Fulton made the ricin using supplies he purchased online. He may face up to 10 years in federal prison for the crime.

POLICE: Kingwood mother gave birth to boy in toilet while high on drugs

Ricin is best known for its use on AMC's "Breaking Bad," where the main character, Walter White, uses the poison to kill his rivals.

In real life, the deadly toxin was used to assassinate Georgi Markov, a Bulgarian dissident writer living in the United Kingdom. He died after being shot with a ricin pellet in 1978.

Above: See the Houston-area's most notable crimes of 2018.A former member of the Bandidos Motorcycle Club broke down Wednesday as he testified how he ended the life of a member of the Hells Angels on orders of two leaders who are facing a federal racketeering trial in San Antonio.

Robert Romo, 45, of San Antonio, said he was the triggerman in the March 2006 shooting of Anthony W. Benesh III, who was slain outside a pizza restaurant in Austin.

Beneshs killing was unsolved for 11 years, until federal authorities in early 2017 developed information that led them to charge Romo and three other Bandidos in the murder.

RELATED: Police arrest regional Bandidos president

The feds say the hit was ordered by then-Bandidos national president Jeffrey Fay Pike and passed on to underlings by former national vice president John Xavier Portillo. Both are on trial on charges that they led the Bandidos racketeering enterprise. They deny the allegations.

Romo testified that Benesh and another Hells Angels member were violating outlaw motorcycle club protocol by flying their clubs colors in Texas, which is considered the Bandidos territory.

Romo testified that he was trying to become a full-patched Bandidos member like his older brother, Johnny Downtown Romo, 47, and so agreed to join a six-man hit crew at his brothers request.

RELATED: Bandidos bloodshed and funerals in San Antonio

Robert Romo said his brother, who was then a national sergeant at arms like Portillo, told him that Pike ordered the hit.

The crew, using walkie-talkies to communicate while in two separate vehicles, staked out Beneshs home over two days, deciding to move in on the second day for the kill. The day of the slaying, Romo brought a hunting rifle fitted with a scope that he had borrowed from a friend over a year earlier.

As Assistant U.S. Attorney John Gibson walked Romo through the incident, Romo paused, turned his head and cried when he remembered his brother announcing from the other car, over the walkie-talkie, That our target is coming out.

Romo said he picked up the rifle, steadied it on the cars windowsill and peered through the scope.

When he was asked what he saw, Romo paused, turned his head from side to side, and sighed, but did not immediately answer. Senior U.S. District Judge David Alan Ezra broke the trial for lunch; afterward, Romo was a little more composed.

He said he aimed at drivers side of Beneshs truck, and before long, the head of a man he believed to be Benesh appeared in the rifle scope and Romo pulled the trigger.

The Bandidos member driving the car Romo was in sped off, and Romo said he didnt even know if he hit anyone or if the person in the rifle scope was actually Benesh.

I didnt even know what he looked like, Romo testified.

With some variations, Romos testimony matched that of his brother, who testified at the trial two weeks ago.

Both Romos testified that Portillo was part of another hit crew that was to hunt down the second Hells Angels member in College Station. Both Romos also testified that Robert Romo was rewarded by being made a full Bandidos member earlier than is normal and that he was made a part of a squad called the Fat Mexican Crew, tasked as enforcers for the Bandidos national chapter.

But lawyers for Pike and Portillo began picking apart Robert Romos testimony late Wednesday, pointing to the discrepancies and claiming the brothers were allowed to get their stories straight by being placed in the same jail in March 2017.

The Romos pleaded guilty in September to charges of murder in furtherance of racketeering and discharging a firearm in a racketeering murder. Both are awaiting sentencing along with two other ex-Bandidos who also pleaded guilty to similar charges for the killing.Gov. Greg Abbott on Thursday announced that the state is releasing $2.3 million in grants to six agencies offering assistance to the victims of the November mass shooting in Sutherland Springs.

The announcement comes four months and 17 days after Devin Patrick Kelley killed 26 churchgoers in the small, tight-knit community about 30 miles southeast of San Antonio.

According to a news release from Abbotts office, the funding will go to six agencies to provide a coordinated response to assist residents of Sutherland Springs and the surrounding areas with community resiliency and recovery programs.

The agencies  the University of Texas at San Antonio, the Childrens Bereavement Center of South Texas, the Ecumenical Center, Floresville Independent School District, the San Antonio Bar Association and the Camino Real Mental Health Authority  will offer varied services, including counseling, mental health screenings, education and legal assistance, the release said.

The act of pure evil inflicted on the faithful people of Sutherland Springs on Nov. 5, 2017, will deeply affect the community, especially the surviving victims, for the rest of their lives, Abbott said in the news release. That is why it is so important that we continue to offer any necessary support to our fellow Texans still suffering from this tragedy. I hope these services will provide some relief and comfort for those Texans that need it the most.

UTSA will receive $550,000 for counseling services targeting both children and adults, and the Childrens Bereavement Center will receive $268,000 to provide mental health screenings, case management and psychological education for children and their families.

With $550,000 in funding, the Ecumenical Center will offer licensed mental health clinicians for mental health screenings, case management, psychological education and will continue mental health services if requested by residents.

The Floresville ISD will receive $500,000 to provide ongoing victim services for students and faculty. The news release notes that the district has had an influx of traumatized children from Sutherland Springs.

The bar association will receive $15,000 to provide legal assistance to victims who need help with issues such as child custody, probate, wills and estates.

The mental health authority will receive $450,000 for recovery coordination, working with the other agencies, the release said.Millions of dollars have been allocated to support survivors of the Sutherland Springs shooting with mental health and legal services, Gov. Greg Abbott announced Thursday afternoon.

More than $2.3 million will be divided between six agencies to fund counseling, mental health screenings, education and legal assistance for those who lived through the November 2017 shooting that left 26 dead and 20 more injured.The Bexar County Sheriffs Office and the district attorneys office wont discuss the arrests last week of 11 people on charges of animal cruelty involving what one official described as some sort of unknown ritual involving dismembered goats and chickens.

Officials have not mentioned Santeria, but those arrested were practitioners of that religion, two of them confirmed in a TV interview.

The mixture of Catholic and African beliefs and its practice of animal sacrifice have been historically misunderstood and persecuted, academics say, and the ritual, as with any religion, is protected by the First Amendment, reinforced by a unanimous Supreme Court ruling in 1993.

Animal protection authorities, meanwhile, said killing animals such as chicken and goats isnt illegal. Both are routinely slaughtered for human consumption, not only in commercial facilities but also in residential settings, urban and rural.

The 11 people, ranging in age from 23 to 65, were charged with cruelty to livestock animals, a Class A misdemeanor. All have been released on bond.

A sheriffs office spokeswoman, Sgt. Elizabeth Gonzalez, declined this week to provide details about the investigation other than to say it was ongoing. On Thursday, she said the charges have not been dropped and referred questions to the Bexar County district attorneys office.

District Attorney Nico LaHoods media liaison, Leslie Garza, said in an email that his office was reviewing the case and any questions about the sheriffs actions can be referred to the Sheriffs Office.

State and federal laws protect endangered animals. For the others, arrests involving animal sacrifices are usually related to the conditions in which the animals were kept or the manner in which they were killed, said Lisa Norwood, spokeswoman for the city of San Antonios Animal Care Services.

Last weekend, Gonzalez, the sheriffs office spokeswoman, said deputies called by neighbors saw people cutting up animal parts and draining blood from a chicken into a container. They found multiple dead and mutilated animals inside a house, including goat heads.

An officer fluent in English and Spanish couldnt understand the language participants were speaking, she said.

Reliable estimates on the numbers of U.S. practitioners of Santeria dont exist. Many do it in secret. As a folk religion, it has no ordained clergy, central authority or associated groups.

Angela Tarango, an assistant professor of religion at Trinity University who teaches a class on Latino religious traditions, said Santeria believers pray both to Catholic saints and African spirits. Sacrificed animals are cooked and eaten afterward, Tarango said, adding, Theyre killed faster and more humanely than at a slaughter house.

Animal Care Services wasnt involved in the case but has seen two or three similar situations in the past five years, Norwood said. She said killing animals isnt necessary illegal, because chickens and goats, for example, arent protected species. She said animal cruelty charges can stem from how animals are sheltered and cared for and how they are killed.

Officer Carlos Ortiz in the public information office of the San Antonio Police Department couldnt put a number on the cases the department has handled involving possible animal sacrifice  they might be filed as animal abuse or as a disturbance, he said.

Officers reactions to the practice seems similar to attitudes in Latin America and the Caribbean toward African rituals as weird or sinister, said J. Brent Crosson, an assistant professor in the religious studies department at the University of Texas at Austin. The unknown language was probably Yoruba, he said.

Santeria is a practice inspired by the Yoruba civilization of West Africa, and rituals use this language, he said. Goat horns are placed on altars offered to Orishas, the Yoruba word for saints, he said.

The description of the arrest scene makes sense, but it is (presented) in a racist and lurid way that makes the practices seem weird, Crosson said.

Many religions involve forms of consecrated animal killing, including Islam and Judaism, he said.

Draining the blood out of an animal is what everyone does after they kill an animal, he added. But most Americans eat animals that factories kill, so they don't know that.

San Antonio executive Rafael Diaz Martinez, who was initiated into the religion as a child in Florida, said officers were probably unfamiliar with the ritual they came across, adding, These sort of arrests dont happen in other parts of the country with a higher Caribbean population unless there is gross negligence in the care of the animals prior to the ceremonies.

Some cities have instituted training and sensitivity classes to familiarize police with Santeria practices, which might not be a bad idea here, Diaz Martinez said.JOURDANTON  A jury here heard the ex-wife of Shaun Ruiz Puente testify Thursday how her life took a violent turn when she married the man now convicted of killing a San Antonio police officer.

Puente, 36, who shot Officer Robert Deckard, 31, in the forehead with a 9 mm Luger during a high-speed chase Dec. 8, 2013, was found guilty Wednesday of capital murder of a police officer.

In the punishment phase of the trial that began Thursday morning, the jury will decide whether Puente gets life in prison without parole or is sentenced to death. Both prosecutors and defense lawyers waived opening arguments.

Testifying for the state, Rebecca Herrera, 41, recalled through tears her three-month courtship with Puente that grew from a friendship between their daughters. When they decided to marry, she arranged and paid for everything, including Puentes $200 in back child support he owed so he would not get arrested, she said.

Questioned by prosecutor Bill Turner, Herrera said Puente became jealous, controlling and violent when he drank, starting from their first night as a new couple.

After they married on Feb. 21, 2010, she tried to call her daughter to check on her because she was ill, and Puente grabbed her phone because he thought she was cheating on him, Herrera testified.

He was drinking and thought I was calling someone else, she said. He broke my cousins windshield with his fist, broke the glass.

Three days later, Herrera said Puente was upset and drinking while they were at home. She said she tried to calm him down, and it angered him.

He pushed me through the sliding glass doors, causing her to get cut up, Herrera said.

She recalled several other instances of Puentes jealous rage leading to violence. She stayed because she wanted the marriage to work out, but they eventually divorced, Herrera said.

He threatened me that he loved me to death, hed die for me, kill for me, and that I didnt know what he was capable of. It scared me, she said.

Atascosa County Sheriffs Sgt. Kenneth Martinez told the jury earlier Thursday that Puente, while in custody, tried to hit him with a door, attacked him with a club made of bars of bath soap wrapped in a piece of blanket, and made a shank out of a filed down toothbrush.

Martinez said Puente needed to be physically restrained with cuffs and chains.

As soon as we put him in the chair, he was saying all kinds of stuff, making threats, the deputy said. If he would have got out, he said there would be a lot of cleanup because he was going to kill as many officers as he could.

Defense attorney Anna Jimenez asked if Puentes demeanor has changed since he has been in jail nearly four years, asking Have you had problems with him since that time he was on drugs?

No, Martinez replied.

Is he a different person than when he came in that night? Jimenez asked.

Yes, Martinez said.

Deckard, known as Bobby to relatives and police officers, was the father of two children. He was patrolling on San Antonios South Side when he saw and chased a gray Mitsubishi Lancer linked to a pair of armed robberies that night.

Police found methamphetamine paraphernalia in the vehicle with Puente and his girlfriend and co-defendant Jenevieve Ramos. Police said she drove the car while Puente shot at pursuing police cars on a chase that reached speeds of up to 115 mph. When Deckard was hit, his SUV veered off Interstate 37 and hit a tree. Puente shot at a Wilson County deputy when the Lancer ran out of gas, and he and Ramos were caught after hiding in brush for hours.A man and a woman in their 60s were hospitalized Thursday after they were struck by an SUV while trying to cross a road near the Rolling Oaks Mall.

The driver of the SUV struck the two around 7 a.m. on Nacogdoches Road, across from the mall. The man and woman were not using a crosswalk, police said.Sixteen people were arrested Thursday morning in Seguin after what law enforcement officials described as a months-long drug investigation.

Most of the suspects were arrested in connection with manufacturing or distributing heroin and methamphetamines, said Seguin Police Chief Kevin M. Kelso.

"It was a good day for the Seguin Police Department, and it will have a significant impact on the quality of life issues within our cities," Kelso said.

RELATED: Convicted sex offender arrested again after he allegedly sexually assaulted S.A. sisters aged 8, 11

The 16 were arrested as part of a city-wide joint operation with the Drug Enforcement Administration named "Operation Raging Bull," though it's unclear where the drugs were allegedly being manufactured.

Three others were arrested on unrelated charges and their relationship to the investigation is unclear.

DEA Assistant Special Agent in Charge Dante Sorianello said the investigation continues, and it's "very possible" there will be more arrests.

"The first thing you have to be aware of the drug situation and the drug abuse problem in the United States is that it is not isolated to any one community throughout the country," he said. "It affects all layers of the community."

RELATED: Burglars cut hole in roof to break into S.A.-area collectible coin shop, police said

All suspects were taken into custody without incident, and Kelso described it as one of the smoothest operations of his career.

In addition to the drugs, authorities found and seized a number of weapons Thursday morning, Kelso said.

Some of the suspects were related by family ties, and others were friends. It's also likely they had connections to prison gangs, Kelso said.

"As you know, narcotics is a large financial support for prison gangs, so the likelihood that they are related to the Mexican Mafia and/or other prison gangs is very strong," he said.

The suspects arrested Thursday morning are listed below. The first 16 were suspects in Operation Raging Bull, and the final three were arrested on unrelated charges. Click through the slideshow at the top of the page to see the specific charges each suspect faces and their mugshots.

Bobby Gallegos, 50

Alejandro Garcia, 27

Sonia Garcia, 30

Tara Greene

Carlos Lopez,23

Stephanie Morales, 36

Vada Neeley

Jose Quiroga, 37

Abigail Ramirez

Debra Rodriguez, 47

Andy Sanchez, 27

Joe Sepulveda, 26

Yara Tijerina, 37

Anthony Trevino, 33

Jeffrey Rodriguez, 32

Adan Diaz, 47

Andrew Davila, 35

Christopher Lopez, 22

Sabrina Hernandez, 19

Text "NEWS" to 77453 for breaking news alerts from mySA.com

Caleb Downs is a crime reporter for mySA.com. Read more of his stories here.| cdowns@mysa.com | Twitter: @calebjdownsSAN ANTONIO  A second man was arrested Wednesday, accused of hiding a missing man's body in a tarp back in December.

Mark Dion Payne, 48, was charged with attempting to alter, destroy, or conceal a human corpse, a second-degree felony, according to court records.

The body of Mario Martinez, 24, was found with several gunshot wounds on Dec. 20. in an apartment complex in the 9300 block of Perrin Beitel, according to an arrest warrant affidavit.

Reid Shizuo Kamitono, 47, was already being held in the Guadalupe County Jail on unrelated charges when detectives approached him about the case, the affidavit states.

RELATED: Police: Man wrapped body of missing father in tarp, left it in San Antonio apartment

Kamitono told San Antonio police that he purchased a tarp from an area sporting goods store and that he placed Martinezs body in it sometime between Dec. 10 and 20.

Family members told police that Martinez was last seen alive on Dec. 6.

Kamitono added that he was helped by both Payne and the man who shot Martinez, the affidavit states. The shooter has not yet been identified by police.

Detectives noted in the affidavit that Payne failed to mention he had helped them when they questioned him earlier in their investigation.

RELATED: Photos show how Austin bombing suspect lived

Prior to Paynes arrest, police said in the affidavit that they asked him if they could question him once more. Payne told police that his mother was ill, so he could not come in. He added that he already told investigators everything he knew, according to the affidavit.

Kamitono is currently in the Guadalupe County Jail on unrelated charges.

jbeltran@express-news.net | Twitter: @JBfromSAThe Bexar County Medical Examiner's Office has identified the 48-year-old woman who was beaten to death on Saturday along with her 11-year-old daughter.

Andrea Gonzalez and her daughter, Azriah Gonzalez, were slain around 5:30 a.m. in their home in the 9100 block of Beaudine Avenue. Both suffered severe blunt force trauma and were pronounced dead at the scene.One woman was killed and a man was injured early Thursday in an armed robbery on the Northwest Side, police said.

The suspect, dressed in all black with a white mask-like covering over his face, attacked three people walking home in the 5900 block of Danny Kaye Drive just after 3 a.m.Air Force veteran Gina Ortiz Jones has won the support of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in her race against former Bernie Sanders delegate Rick Trevino in the May 22 primary runoff.

The national committee, the House Democrats campaign arm, added Jones to its Red to Blue program, which provides fundraising support and guidance on campaign strategy.

Deep-pocketed Democratic donors have historically used the program to pinpoint competitive candidates in close districts.

Jones was one of 10 congressional candidates added Thursday; there are now 33 Democrats in the program nationwide.

Gina Ortiz Jones is the daughter of an immigrant, an Air Force intelligence officer, and went to college on an ROTC scholarship. She is the embodiment of the American Dream, DCCC Chairman Ben Ray Lujan said in a statement. When Gina is elected, I know shell fight every day to make sure that same dream is a reality for Texas families.

The 23rd District, held by Rep. Will Hurd, R-Helotes, is largely expected to produce Texas most competitive congressional contest in 2018. Hurd won in 2016 by about 3,000 votes out of nearly 229,000 cast, and the district, which stretches from San Antonio to El Paso, was one of a handful to swing in favor of Hillary Clinton and elect a Republican representative.

Jones received 41 percent in the first leg of the primary, while Trevino took in 17 percent, edging out Judy Canales by 216 votes.

Trevino said that although he expected the national organization to get involved in the race, the committees tendency to oppose progressive Democrats has upset him.

You do see that there's this legitimate movement within the party to evolve, and if anybody threatens the current power structure of the Democratic Party, they come in pretty aggressively, Trevino said. If anything, I think it shows that the DCCC, or at least the donor class, doesnt want what the American people want. Theyre going to support candidates that are going to evolve on their terms.

The DCCC has raised more than $50 million online ahead of the 2018 midterms.

Jones had spent $381,000 through mid-February, to Trevinos $20,000.

Meanwhile, Hurd did not face a serious primary challenge, allowing him to conserve campaign funds; he reported $1.2 million on hand in his latest campaign finance report.

To read more about what the committee does and what the candidates think, go to expressnews.comA top Mexican cartel boss was apprehended by law enforcement authorities earlier this week, local media reports say.

Gulf Cartel leader Luis Alberto Blanco Flores also known as "El Pelochas" or "M-28," was detained in Santiago de Queretaro, a Mexican city in the center of the country Tuesday, according to El Universal.

In December, the Tamaulipas government plastered a photo of Flores and two other wanted cartel members on billboards across the state, offering up 2 million pesos for information leading to an arrest.

RELATED: Mexican border state offers reward for top cartel bosses

Humberto or Steven Loiza Mendez, who also goes by "Betillo" or "Betito," and Petronilo Moreno Flores or "El Panilo" were also posted on the billboards.

El Universal reported Flores was turned into authorities by his partner. It is unclear if that partner works within the cartel or is personally involved with Flores.

Kelsey Bradshaw is a digital reporter for mySA.com. Read more of her stories here.| kbradshaw@express-news.net | Twitter: @kbrad5My abuelo, Guillermo Antonio Rullan Frau, says he wants to die in his homeland.

Its these words that I attribute to the worry creases in my moms forehead and the pauses when I talk to her on the phone  shes not hearing me, though I know she wants to. I once ended our conversation curtly: I have to go, I said, frustrated with her distractedness. She quickly told me she loved me and I said, OK and hung up the phone.

I first heard him say it when I visited my family home in Galesburg, Illinois, this past Christmas. Abuelo is from Puerto Rico, but he has been staying in Galesburg ever since Hurricane Maria slammed the island Sept. 20 with its 160 mph winds and cruel, persistent rain.

RELATED: Local Puerto Ricans join to help Hurricane Maria victims

Abuelo is in good health, but hes 92 years old. He might die soon.

I have uncles and cousins in Puerto Rico. My abuelas grave is there, too. My moms family history winds around stories of people leaving and returning to the magnetic island.

Abuelo showed me old photos during my visit  ever since I can remember, Abuelo has liked to share his memories with me. Some are of my mom and her siblings when they were little, others are black-and-whites from the days of him as a young man, a Borinqueneer soldier in the Korean War, surrounded by other members of his unit.

He talks about his dead friends with the brush of his hand, saying ya estan muertos, as if dying were as simple as his gesture, a passing through space from one moment to the next. I suppose it is.

I remember our family trips to see Abuelo, our car perpetually veering left on paved-over mule trails that spiraled toward the top of the mountain where Jayuya rests.

He had two identical chickens he collected eggs from, both called las hermanas because you cant tell them apart. And his yard stretched endlessly. My brother and I would put on our parents flannel shirts and thick jeans, and explore the backwoods brimming with tall trees and fanning leaves  and at night, the invisible, chanting coquis.

RELATED: Tim Duncan: After devastation from hurricane, I won't forget you, Virgin Islanders

Abuelo named my mother Flor de Quisqueya, which means flower of the Dominican Republic  her mom, my abuela, was from there. He named my uncle, who also lives on the island, Borinquen, an old Indian name for Puerto Rico.

Last month, we learned that electricity had reached his hometown. I rejoiced with my mother when she told me on the phone, thinking this, this is good news! But she was quiet. I thought of the creases on her forehead and felt them gripping my heart, pulling it down into my stomach where most unpleasant things lie.

Before, she was nervous that he would never make it back. Now, shes nervous about what awaits him when he does.

It was a Category 5 hurricane; the entire island was put on a flash flood warning.

In a place so defined by its land, the hurricanes destruction verges on unholy. Lush trees turned to stubs. Whole forests browned and broken. Homes gone. Jobs lost. The light is back on in Jayuya, but sometimes darkness is deeper than that.

We dont know what Abuelo will find when he returns, what horrors of destruction await him. But if you looked into his eyes like I did, and he told you those words  that he wants to die in his homeland  youd know he cant stay.

We never grew up going to church, but before my family went on any kind of trip, my mom always issued a prayer: Dios y la Virgen! shed exclaim, and me and my brother chanted along, sometimes exchanging furtive smiles because the impulse to pray is so foreign to us.

Today, Ill be flying to Puerto Rico with my mother to take Abuelo home. I imagine us during takeoff. I see my mom gripping Abuelos hand, her forehead creases as multiplicitous as his wrinkles. She issues a silent prayer to Dios y la Virgen and asks that the island be livable enough for her father to spend the end of his days.

Dying itself is simple to Abuelo. But when he discusses where your body dies  from what ground your spirit rises  his hand does not flit back and forth. It rises to his heart.The firing of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has reignited debate about the direction of U.S. foreign policy and leadership in world affairs. Tillersons announced successor, CIA Director Mike Pompeo, has a public record suggesting he will adopt a more pugnacious America First posture as the countrys top diplomat.

Pompeo seems likely to reinforce rather than question President Donald Trumps gut instincts toward Russia, North Korea and Iran, and to distance the United States even more from other countries policies on key global challenges such as climate change.

Although nationalist sentiments dominate our political conversation today, Americas standing in the world is the product of innumerable interactions  political, economic and cultural, not only through official channels of communication but also via personal exchanges. Now more than ever, individual diplomacy has the potential to play a larger role on the world stage.

This is not to underestimate the importance of a changing of the guard at the Department of State. Recent separate visits by Tillerson and Pompeo to the University of Texas at Austin showcased their very different approaches to the world. On Oct. 12, the CIA chief delivered the keynote address at the Texas National Security Forum. In his speech, Pompeo laid out a stark depiction of security threats confronting the United States from many directions, requiring aggressive and even vicious action by counterintelligence agents. Every minute, we have to be focused on crushing our enemies, Pompeo said.

A few months later, on Feb. 1, the secretary of state visited UT Austin in advance of a mission to Latin America. Using more traditional diplomatic language, Tillerson framed security challenges in the context of a broader set of objectives concerning regional economic partnerships and good governance.

Tillerson may have learned to employ the nuanced rhetoric of diplomacy, but in his brief and rocky tenure as secretary of state, he enjoyed neither the loyalty of his staff nor the trust of the president. Pompeos defenders argue that he will revitalize the Department of States morale by empowering midlevel staffers, as he did in the CIA, and that his close working relationship with Trump will bring greater attention, and perhaps more resources, to a beleaguered diplomatic corps.

Pompeo may be in lockstep with Trump, but he is no more likely than his boss to win over wary leaders abroad.

Long-standing allies of the United States already have been reaching out to individual states and even specific corporations to cooperate on key initiatives. One such instance is the effort to reduce carbon emissions in support of the Paris climate accords, despite the White Houses stated intention to withdraw from the pact. The leaders of major American cities, meanwhile, are increasingly vocal in taking positions distinct from the Trump administration on rights-based issues.

Individual citizens, moreover, can contribute to American diplomacy without ever passing the Foreign Service Officer Test. Since 1940, the Department of State has overseen an International Visitor Leadership Program, which relies on community-run organizations all over the country  linked in a Global Ties Network  to arrange cultural activities and provide hospitality for international visitors. In 2017, citizen diplomats in Texas alone volunteered to host more than 800 international visitors, all of whom were identified as rising leaders and who now carry memories of their American experiences in their home countries.

Hawkish and politicized rhetoric from our top policymakers is unlikely to galvanize world opinion in Americas favor. But through local governmental policies, community activism, business relationships and even personal travel, we all have the opportunity to shape the image of the United States in the minds of others, one exchange at a time.The Alamo Colleges construction plans for an education and training center in the deep South Side will be a major economic catalyst in an often-neglected sector of the county.

The quality of the public schools, the level of educational attainment and a well-trained workforce are vital components in a communitys success.

For decades, the needs of the South Side have been ignored while public resources have been diverted elsewhere. It is troubling that despite being in an urban county, some South Side children are still walking on unpaved roads to get to their school bus stop and that the nearest grocery store is miles away for many residents.

RELATED: Alamo Colleges board names first Chicano chancellor

Leveling the playing field and righting the inequities is not going to happen overnight, but projects such as the recently approved Southside Education and Training Center will go a long way toward that goal.

The Alamo Colleges secured a 50-year ground lease with the Southside Independent School District, at a cost of $1 per year for 10 acres behind Losoya Intermediate School.

The center, the community college districts third, will be constructed with $23 million from the bond package Alamo Colleges voters approved in the fall. Construction is expected to take two years.

Like the West Side and East Side education and training centers, the South Side center will provide workforce training, advising, career assistance and help with enrolling in college classes.

Staff will also help those who do not have a high school diploma prepare for the high school equivalency test.

Having these services available in the southern sector of the county is important in a community where access to public transportation is limited and often requires multiple transfers to get to a final destination.

RELATED: Facts about the five colleges of the Alamo Colleges District

When Palo Alto College was built in the 1980s, and even when Texas A&M-San Antonio was first proposed in the late 1990s, there were those who questioned the wisdom of the investments. Today, both the community college and the citys second four-year public university are thriving.

Access to higher education in the community is changing the lives of many who might not otherwise have been able to enroll while juggling family obligations and multiple jobs.

The schools are also encouraging growth and economic development. The training and education center will be a big assist in that effort.An unconfirmed report has claimed that there are at least 1 million African men and women in the bottom of Atlantic Ocean who were reportedly thrown overboard by European slave traders either because they were unruly or sick.

The unconfirmed report claimed the Africans belonging to different tribes such as Yoruba, Fulani, Igbos, Ashanti, AKan, Mandinka, etc. were thrown and fed to the sharks in the ocean.

Similarly, a report by the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) stated that thousands of migrants have died or disappeared globally since 2014, adding that more than half of them perish while attempting to cross the Mediterranean.

READ ALSO: Breaking: 76 of 110 abducted Dapchi schoolgirls released - Presidency

The IOM report in part: While overall numbers of migrants attempting to cross the Mediterranean by the eastern route were reduced significantly in 2016 by the EU-Turkey deal, death rates have increased to 2.1 per 100 in 2017, relative to 1.2 in 2016.

Part of this rise is due to the greater proportion of migrants now taking the most dangerous route  that across the central Mediterranean  such that 1 in 49 migrants now died on this route in 2016.

Since 2014, more deaths have been documented on this route than any other migration route in the world. In the first half of this year, the IOM said at least 3,110 migrants have died or disappeared globally, which is lower than the figure in 2016 (4,348), but the risk of dying has increased in the Mediterranean even though fewer migrants crossed into Europe.

The central Mediterranean route, ending at Lampedusa or the main island of Sicily, accounts only for about a quarter of almost 1.5 million people who have arrived since 2014 on all routes, but for 88% of all migrant deaths in the Mediterranean.

PAY ATTENTION: Read the news on Nigerias #1 new app

A data compiled by the UNs migration agency also shows that a clampdown on Europes eastern borders has forced migrants to choose more dangerous routes as the death toll in the Mediterranean continues to rise despite a drop in the overall number of arrivals.

Legit.ng previously reported that the prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, on Tuesday, March 20, said that an electric fence along the Israel-Egypt border had saved Jewish state from jihadist attacks or what he believed would be worse - a tide of African migrants.

Netanyahu's office quoted him as telling a development conference in the southern Israel desert town of Dimona that if it was not for the fence, the country would be faced with severe attack by Sinai terrorists and something much worse, which he said was a flood of illegal migrants from Africa.

The Interior Ministry stated that there are currently some 42,000 African migrants in Israel, mainly from Sudan and Eritrea, and the government has ordered that thousands of them must leave or face indefinite imprisonment.

Mass deportation: Tales of woes from Libya - on Legit.ng TV

Source: Legit.ngOn Wednesday, March 21, news broke over the release of 105 schoolgirls who were among the 110 students abducted by Boko Haram terrorists in Dapchi, Yobe state.

The federal government, presidency and a couple of minister confirming the release said the girls were returned by the terrorist in the early hours of Wednesday.

However, photos from the ongoing Federal Executive Council meeting which was presided over by President Muhammadu Buhari has shown how some of the cabinet members reacted to news of the girls' release.

101 Dapchi girls have been returned. Photo credit: Twitter, Bashir Ahmad

READ ALSO: Breaking: 101 of 110 abducted Dapchi schoolgirls released - Presidency

The federal government said the release of the girls was unconditional. Photo credit: Twitter, Bashir Ahmad

The federal government had said that the girls were released through a negotiation process and that no payment of ransom was made to the terrorist.

The girls were returned by Boko Haram terrorists on Wednesday, March 21. Photo credit: Vanguard.

Also the minister of information and culture, Lai Mohammed, reacting to the release of the girls said the return was through a back channel and with the help of friends of Nigeria.

READ ALSO: Dapchi girls: Yobe police command reveals how policeman was wounded during Boko Haram attack

He said while the release was unconditional, operational pause was maintained to ensure that there was no loss of lives during the process.

Five of the girls are said to have been dead before the release was secured. Photo credit: Vanguard

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Legit.ng earlier reported that the State Security Service (SSS) had confirmed that the released girls are in the custody of the secret police.

The released girls are currently in the custody of the State Security Services (SSS). Photo credit Vanguard.

The agency also assured that in the course of time, President Muhammadu Buhari will be briefed on the development of the incident.

Also, the Nigerian military has deployed helicopters to Dapchi community where the girls were abducted and subsequently released.

It was gathered that the major entrance to Dapchi community has also been blocked by security operatives.

Boko Haram Kidnappings: Will Buhari bring back Dapchi Girls? | - on Legit.ng TV

Source: LegitThe abducted Dapchi schoolgirls, brought back by the insurgents on Wednesday, March 21, have been profiled and taken to Maiduguri for onward movement to Abuja.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) gathered that 103 girls were brought back to Dapchi while one was held back. The surviving girls said five of their school mates died the very day they were abducted.

The parents commended the federal government for hastening the release of the girls.

Bashir Manzo, chairman of the abducted Girls Parents Association, commended President Muhammadu Buhari for living up to his words to secure the release of the girls when he visited Dapchi.

According to Premium Times, the girls in the convoy of soldiers were led by the General Officer Commanding 3-Division, Ben Ahanotu, a brigadier general.

READ ALSO: Saraki reacts to release of Dapchi girls

The girls would be received by three ministers sent by President Buhari at the Theatre command headquarters in Maiduguri

Legit.ng had reported that Boko Haram reportedly returned 101 out of the kidnapped 110 #DapchiGirls girls back to Dapchi township in Yobe state according to the presidency.

Channels Television correspondent who monitored the event disclosed this during a programme on Wednesday, March 21.

The schoolgirls were kidnapped from Government Girls Science Technical College (GGSTC), Dapchi On February 19, 2018 at about 5:30pm local time.

Meanwhile, Fatsima Abdullahi, one of the 91 Dapchi girls recently released by the Boko Haram insurgents granted a telephone interview to the press.

In a telephone conversation with one Modu Geidam, Fatsima, who was released along with other girls to Dapchi in the early hours of Wednesday, March 21, confirmed that truly, five of the abducted students died in the Boko Haram camp.

However, Fatsima claimed that she only knew two of the girls that died, and identified them as Aisha and Maimuna (no last name).

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Nigerians react as Boko Haram terrorists kidnap over 100 girls in Dapchi, Yobe - on Legit.ng TV.

Source: Legit- A motion has been file by the federal government for Ekweremadu's undeclared assets to be frozen

- The deputy Senate president is being accused of not declaring his assets

The federal government has filed a motion at the Federal High Court in Abuja to freeze the undeclared assets belonging to deputy Senate president, Ike Ekweremadu.

The motion was filed on Wednesday, March 21.

READ ALSO: Saraki reacts to release of Dapchi girls

Vanguard reports that the government applied for an interim court order temporarily attaching/forfeiting the properties listed in Schedule B hereunder, to the Federal Government of Nigeria, pending the conclusion of further inquiry/investigation by the Special Presidential Investigation Panel for the Recovery of Public Property and/or possible arraignment of the Respondent."

Festus Keyamo (SAN) filed the motion on behalf of the federal government.

It was reported that nine of the properties are in Nigeria, two are in London, eight in Dubai while three in the United States of America.

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Legit.ng had reported that Ekweremadu raised serious allegation against Okoi Obono-Obla who is an aide to President Muhammadu Buhari accusing him and some other persons of embarking on smear campaign.

The Cable reports that the Ekweremadu in a statement issued on his behalf by Uche Anichukwu, his spokesman, claimed that Innocent Umezulike, a former chief judge in Enugu state, stole his will and doctored it.

Reports had claimed that the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS) had written the government of the United Arab Emirates and the United States of America regarding some property said to belong to the deputy Senate president.

The report also claimed that the Nigerian government reportedly wrote to the Special Fraud Unit, Kingdom over the lawmaker through its chairman, Tunde Fowler.

But in reaction to the OAGF's claim, the FIRS described the information as false. A top source at the revenue service said FIRS challenged that such letters be published as verification to the previous publication.

Street gist: Should the Nigerian senate be scrapped? - on Legit.ng TV

Source: Legit.ng- The released Dapchi girls have been handed over to the federal government by the Nigeria Army

- The girls who were taken to Abuja are expected to meet with President Muhammadu Buhari

- About six abducted Dapchi schoolgirls are still unaccounted for

The Nigerian Army on Wednesday, March 21, formally handed over 106 abductees to federal government.

Those handed over comprised of 104 Daphi schoolgirls, one other girl and a boy who were freed by Boko Haram insurgents.

Maj.-Gen. Rogers Nicholas, the Theatre Commander, Operation Lafiya Dole, presented the released girls to the minister of information, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, at the 105 Air Force Composite Command, Maiduguri.

Nicholas explained that 104 of the girls were from the 110 abducted from Government Science and Technical School, Dapchi, released by the insurgents in the early hours of Wednesday, March 21.

Dapchi girls in custody of federal government. Credit: Twitter

READ ALSO: President Buhari hosts Dangote, Bill Gates to dinner (video)

He said the remaining six abducted schoolgirls were still unaccounted, noting that two other abducted girls who were not part of the abducted students were rescued from the insurgents by troops.

The theatre commander added that the rescued girls were brought from Dapchi to Maiduguri together with their parents and guardians.

The girls were flown to Abuja. Credit: Twitter

The minister of information said the federal government adopted proactive measures to secure release of the remaining girls and persons under insurgents captivity. Mohammed noted that government was working to end hostilities and enhance peace restoration in the northeast.

The girls handover was attended by minister of interior, Abdulrahman Dambazau; minister of state, foreign affairs, Khadija Bukar-Abba and chief of army staff, Lt.-Gen. Tukur Buratai.

The released girls, alongside their parents and some aid workers boarded a Nigerian Air Force aircraft en route Abuja at about 18.50pm

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Meanwhile, parents of abducted Dapchi girls who were released by Boko Haram said the terrorists have told them not to send their children back to western education.

Legit.ng had reported that the girls were released by the terrorists on Wednesday, March 21.

Security operatives were not available as the terrorists reportedly drove into Dapchi town were residents celebrated the return of their children and praised President Muhammadu Buhari.

Meanwhile, Nata Sharibu, father of the remaining student of Federal Government Science and Technical College, Dapchi, Yobe state still in captivity says his daughter refused to denounce God; and so, the terrorists decided not to release her.

Dapchi protests abduction of their daughters by Boko Haram - on Legit.ng TV:

Source: Legit- The Nigerian Army on Thursday, March 22, said a top commander of the Boko Haram terrorists group has surrendered

- Forty seven year old Ramat Alamin surrendered to troops of the Nigerian Army along Dikwa-Gulumba Gana road in Bama local government area

- According to Alamin, he surrendered himself because Boko Haram terrorists are presently in disarray

A top commander of the Abubakar Shekau's faction of Boko Haram group has surrendered to troops of the Nigerian Army.

Ramat Alamin, 47, surrendered to troops in Bama local government area of Borno state, the Nigerian Army has said.

The director of Army public relation, Texas Chukwu, a brigadier general in a statement said troops of the 22 Brigade intercepted Alamin along Dikwa-Gulumba Gana in the early hours of Tuesday, March 20.

READ ALSO: Dapchi parents reveal what Boko Haram terrorists told them after releasing their children

The Army spokesperson said Alamin had told the troops that he came to Dikwa to surrender himself because Boko Haram terrorists group could no longer hold itself. He said the group members are presently in disarray with little or no logistics to carry out their deadly attacks.

Ramat Alamin, one of Boko Haram's strongman surrendered to the Nigerian Army. Photo credit: Facebook, Nigerian Army

Chukwu said: "He disclosed that his personal weapon AK 47 rifle with Registration No: H3 2538, four AK 47 empty magazines and one motorcycle were hidden behind Government Teachers College Dikwa while trying to enter the town to surrender.

READ ALSO: Army hands over Dapchi girls to FG (photos)

"He also said that, many of the terrorists are willing to surrender due to hunger and lack of basic logistics but are scared of the consequences.

Alamin said he surrendered because Boko Haram has lost hold of itself. Photo credit: Facebook, Nigerian Army

"It is good and courageous for him to surrender and would be recommended for Government de-radicalization programme. He gave out some information and encouraged other terrorists to take a cue from him and surrender in order to ensure lasting peace and stability in the North Eastern part of Nigeria."

Legit.ng earlier reported that the Nigerian Army formally handed over 106 released Dapchi schoolgirls to the federal government.

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The theatre commander of the Operation Lafiya Doyle, Major General Nicholas, presented the girls to the minister of information, Lai Mohammed, on Wednesday, March 21. The presentation was made at the 105 Air Force Composite Command in Maiduguri, Borno state capital city.

The girls were released by the terrorists on Wednesday, March 21. Security operatives were not available as the terrorists reportedly drove into Dapchi town were residents celebrated the return of their children and praised President Muhammadu Buhari.

Meanwhile, parents of abducted Dapchi girls who were released by Boko Haram said the terrorists have told them not to send their children back to western education.

Dapchi protests abduction of their daughters by Boko Haram - on Legit.ng TV

Source: Legit.ng- The governor of Ekiti state, Ayodele Fayose, is skeptic about the release of the abducted Dapchi girls

- Congratulating the parents of the released schoolgirls, he said the abduction and release of the girls appeared to be arranged

- He also sympathised with the parents of five girls that reportedly lost their lives in Boko Haram

Governor Ayodele Fayose of Ekiti state has congratulated parents of the abducted Dapchi schoolgirls that were released on Wednesday, March 21 and sympathised with parents of five of the girls that reportedly died in captivity, The Nation reports.

Legit.ng notes that Fayose stated that the abduction was an indictment on the federal government, adding that their release was a "drama scripted by the government and its agents to swindle Nigerians".

He said: This appears like an arranged abduction and an arranged release, but we thank God that the innocent girls have returned home and we condole with parents of those that died.

In a statement issued on Wednesday, March 21, by his special assistant on public communications and new media, Lere Olayinka, the governor said that it was strange that the girls could be brought back to Dapchi by the insurgents without the security agents knowing when they were returned and who returned them.

READ ALSO: Boko Haram told us not to send our daughters to school - Dapchi parents

He said: Curiously, the same spirit who made sure that all military checkpoints in Dapchi and other surrounding towns were removed to pave way for abduction of the girls also made sure that the girls were returned without any security agent seeing them. One can only be hopeful that the real script writers behind this drama will be exposed one day.

Nigerians should recall that the Yobe state governor, Ibrahim Gaidam, said that military checkpoints were withdrawn from Dapchi and other communities a few days before the abduction of the 110 girls.

No doubt, withdrawal of military check-points from Dapchi and other communities, few days before the 110 students were abducted and failure of the security forces to act on advance warnings exposed the conspiracy of the federal government and its agents in the abduction of the school girls and other dastardly acts of the insurgents.

Those benefitting from Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) scams, payment of ransom (in dollars) to free those abducted by the Boko Haram insurgents, among others, will never wish to see the end of the insurgency.

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Legit.ng previously reported that some parents of the schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram insurgents from the Government Girls Science and Technical College, Dapchi, Yobe state, confirmed the release of the students.

Amharic M-grah, a father whose daughters were among the 110 abducted students, said that his children were brought back on the morning of Wednesday, March 21.

He said: The report is true. I have seen my two daughters who were kidnapped last month."

Meanwhile, the Nigerian Army on Wednesday, March 21, formally handed over 106 abductees to the federal government. Those handed over comprised of 104 Daphi schoolgirls, one other girl and a boy who were freed by Boko Haram insurgents.

Maj.-Gen. Rogers Nicholas, the Theatre Commander, Operation Lafiya Dole, presented the released girls to the minister of information, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, at the 105 Air Force Composite Command, Maiduguri.

Boko Haram kidnappings: Dapchi protests abduction of their daughters by Boko Haram - on Legit.ng TV

Source: Legit- Niger state government has approved N300 million to pay for WAEC registration for the states students

- The government said the move is part of its efforts to provide free education for students

- It also approved N700m for the procurement of water accessories and installation of some pumps to stabilize water supply in the state

The Niger state government has approved N300 million for the payment of registration fees for its citizens sitting the 2018 West African Secondary School Certificate Examinations (WASSCE).

Fatima Madugu, the commissioner for education, who disclosed this during a press conference on Wednesday, March 21, in Minna, the state capital said Governor Abubakar Bello approved the payment at the weekly executive council meeting, the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports.

She explained that the Bello-led government inherited a debt of N950m from its predecessor, saying that WAEC was being paid gradually.

READ ALSO: Dapchi parents reveal what Boko Haram terrorists told them after releasing their children

Legit.ng gathered that Madugu said the payment of the WAEC fees for students was part of the state governments efforts to provide free education for students.

Also speaking, Mamman Musa, the commissioner for water resources, said that the council also approved N700m for the procurement of water accessories and installation of some pumps earlier purchased by the government.

He said that the water equipment would be deployed to Minna, Bida, Suleja, Kontagora and New Bussa to stabilise water supply in those towns.

Sometimes last year, the state government declared a state of emergency on education and also promised to overhaul the water sector.

The N700 million will be used to purchase additional water equipment so as to have a constant water supply in the state, he said.

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Nasara Dan-Malam, the commissioner for justice, who also spoke, disclosed that the council also approved a bill for a law to establish Teachers Professional Institutes in three zones of the state.

He explained that the bill would be submitted to the House of Assembly very soon.

Legit.ng previously reported that following complaints by some Muslim stakeholders in the country, WAEC made some minor adjustments in its timetable for the 2018 May/June Senior Secondary School Certificate Examination (WASSCE).

WAECs director of public affairs, Demianus Ojijeogu, told the Tribune on Saturday, March 17, that the board had to adjust the timetable to accommodate the interests of Muslims.

Who should be held responsible for exam malpractice? Student, teacher or parents? on Legit.ng TV:

Source: Legit- Ijaw youths have asked to withdraw their threats to the federal government to recall former coordinator of the Presidential Amnesty Programme, Paul Boroh

- According to an Ijaw group, the threat will have negative repercussion

- The youths were enjoined to work with Pan Niger Delta Forum on all issues affecting the region to make the region move faster in development matters

Coordinator of Ijaw Monitoring Group, Joseph Evah, has cautioned Ijaw youths over the ultimatum given to the federal government to recall the sacked coordinator of Amnesty Programme, Major General Paul Boroh (retd), Vanguard reports.

Legit.ng notes that Evah, who cautioned the youths on behalf of his group and Ijaw elders, enjoined them to withdraw their threat and maintain peace in the region.

He said: The threat will lead to the military mobilising against our villages and our women and children will suffer. We urge the ex-militants to consult our national leader, Chief Edwin Clark and other elders of the region under PAn Niger Delta Forum (PANDEF) leadership at all times so that the world will see us as a united region.

READ ALSO: Fayose felicitates with parents of released Dapchi schoolgirls, says abduction suspicious

Recently PANDEF set up committee on the amnesty office, therefore, the ex-militants should consult PANDEF leadership. The planned demonstration of ex-militants around media houses will increase tension in the region and attract negative global flash points.

We need united front to tackle issues such as the Arewa group in the north, Afenifere in southwest and Ohanaeze Ndigbo in southeast. The youths in our region should work with PANDEF on all issues affecting the region to make the region move faster in development matters."

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Legit.ng previously reported that President Muhammadu Buhari sacked Brigadier-General Paul Boroh (Rtd) from his position as coordinator of the Presidential Amnesty Programme for former Niger Delta militants.

The development was contained in a statement by Femi Adesina, the special adviser to the president on media and publicity on Tuesday, March 13.

The president announced Professor Charles Quaker Dokubo as the new co-ordinator of the programme. He also ordered the National Security Adviser to carry out a full investigation into the financial engagement of the programme since 2015.

Meanwhile, a former security adviser to the government of Bayelsa state, Perekeme Kpodoh, commended President Buhari for the sack of Boroh, saying his removal would promote peace in the Niger Delta and the ongoing anti-corruption war.

Kpodoh said Boroh's removal from office remains the an answer to prayers by many indigenes concerned about the poor performance of the amnesty office and the rising threats to peace in the region.

Meet Sunny Ofehe, the new face of Niger Delta development - on Legit.ng TV

Source: Legit.ng- Forty-four African countries have signed an agreement establishing the African Continental Free Trade Area

- The two biggest economies in Africa, Nigeria and South Africa, were conspicuously absent as the agreement was signed at a summit in the Rwandan capital, Kigali

- Nine other African countries did not sign the agreement

Nigeria and South Africa, and nine others were on Wednesday, March 21, absent as 44 African leaders proceeded with the signing of the agreement that established the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), The Guardian reports.

Legit.ng gathered that although a minimum of 22 countries were required to sign to get the project started, 44 nations okayed the pact to establish the free trade bloc within 18 months. The other countries that did not sign are Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, Zambia, Burundi, Eritrea, Benin, Sierra Leone and Guinea Bissau.

In 2015 the African Union (AU) started talks to establish a 55-nation bloc that would be the biggest in the world, in a bid to increase intra-regional trade, which is currently 15 percent of the continents total commerce.

READ ALSO: Boko Haram told us not to send our daughters to school - Dapchi parents

The AfCFTA is expected to create a trade bloc of 1.2 billion people with a combined gross domestic product (GDP) of more than $2 trillion. The agreement commits countries to removing tariffs on 90 per cent of goods and to liberalise services.

44 African countries signed the trade deal agreement at the 10th Extraordinary Summit of the Assembly of the African Union. Photo Credit: Presidency ZA Twitter

Nigeria's President Muhammadu Buhari declared that his administration was not disposed to entering into any agreement that would make the country a dumping ground and jeopardise its security architecture.

The federal government announced the setting up of a committee to review the Continental Free Trade Area (CFTA) framework agreement which was signed in Kigali, Rwanda.

Nigeria had pulled out from the ongoing African Union extraordinary meeting as a result of protest by the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) among other stakeholders who argued that the free trade agreement would not augur well for the country.

The special adviser to the president on media and publicity, Femi Adesina, briefing State House correspondents after the Federal Executive Council (FEC) meeting said it was expected that the minister of labour would call for a stakeholders meeting with labour movement to brainstorm on the implications of the CFTA framework agreement.

He said: The explanation from the president which the FEC bought was that he would not want to agree to anything that would hinder local entrepreneurs. And on the surface, except if proven wrong, is that that agreement has the capacity to affect local entrepreneurship.

He also said that anything that could encourage the dumping of finished goods in Nigeria was going to be contrary to our interest. So, it is one of the reasons he declined. Then he said the country was yet to fully understand the economic and security implications of the agreement.

So, there has to be further consultations with different stakeholders and the final position was that a committee be set up to meet and review the contents of that proposal. They will do it within two weeks and get back to the Federal Executive Council.

Local manufacturers under the aegis of the Manufacturers Association of Nigeria (MAN) have stated that they would not support federal governments adoption and ratification of the AfCFTA unless issues of market access and enforcement of rules of origin, among other concerns, are addressed.

Meanwhile former president Olusegun Obasanjo in reaction to Nigeria's absence said: "It is criminal for any African leader to talk of not understanding what we are going to sign (Free Trade Agreement in Africa) and afford not to be here."

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In a previous report by Legit.ng, President Muhammadu Buhari on Saturday, March 17, cancelled his plan to attend the extraordinary meeting of African Union Heads of State and Government billed to hold in Kigali, Rwanda on Wednesday, March 21, Daily Trust reports.

This came a few day after the Federal Executive Council (FEC) gave President Buhari approval to join other African countries to sign the Agreement Framework for the establishment of African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA).

Sources at the presidency disclosed on Saturday that Buharis scheduled trip for Kigali on Monday, March 19, for the signing of the framework agreement for establishing the Continental Free Trade Area (CFTA) had been canceled.

Are Nigerians truly tired of President Buhari? on Legit.ng TV.

Source: Legit.ng News- There was pandemonium in Kaduna state over the death of a boy in his early twenties who was alleged to have been killed by a pastor

- As a result of his death, angry youths set ablaze a church, a vehicle and police outpost

- The youths also protested the killing and demanded to see the pastor

Following the death of a boy identified as Sylverster alleged to have been sacrificed by the pastor of a church, angry youths on Wednesday night, March 21, set ablaze a celestial church of God, a vehicle at Bayan Dutse in Chikun local government area of Kaduna state, Leadership reports.

Legit.ng gathered that the angry youths who also engaged the police set ablaze the Narayi police outpost in the process.

The deceased who was is in his early twenties and attends Evangelical Church Winning All (ECWA) Gospel church Narayi was serving as a mason boy to the pastor of the church. The pastor was building a demarcation inside a river beside the church when all of a sudden the deceased fell into the river and died.

READ ALSO: Boko Haram told us not to send our daughters to school - Dapchi parents

The pastor was said to have immediately gone to the nearby police outpost to report the incidence.

The youths on hearing of the incidencet alleged that the white garment church pastor may have used the boy as a sacrifice and immediately mobilised and burnt down the church, pastorium and a jeep belonging to a member of the church parked there.

The youths also took to the street protesting the killing and demanding to see the pastor who was said to have been taken to Barnawa police station.

Meanwhile, the remains of the deceased was to have been buried at about 10pm on Tuesday night, March 20, beside the river after prayers were offered for his remains by the pastor of his church, Pastor Mark Ayuba. However, the pastor urged the youths to accept what has happened as the will of God and should not take the laws into their hands.

Meanwhile, some protesting youths were said to have been arrested. ASP Mukhtar Aliyu, the police public relation officer confirmed the incident and arrest. He added that the pastor was in their custody.

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In a previous report by Legit.ng the convoy of Niger state governor, Abubakar Sani Bello, was on Thursday, March 8, 2018, attacked by angry youths from Bida local government area of the state and the governor and his entourage stoned by the mob.

The mob attacked the governor over alleged non-performance and constant travels outside the country on the claim of inviting foreign investors to in the state, Tribune reports.

Lets talk about salaries of Nigerian senators | Legit.ng TV

Source: LegitA Nigerian man has shown his optimism for creativity in Africa. On a recent trip to Rwanda, Yakubu Jimoh John revealed the many uses of banana stem which he believes can be put to good use in many areas of the country as well as create wealth.

Jimoh shared photos from the skill acquisition centre, where some creatives had used the stem of banana to do the seemingly unbelievable. He revealed; not only can they be used for very comfortable, rafia-type chairs they can also be used for sanitary towels.

John attended the training in which people were taught how to convert certain "waste" material into useful items in the household and offices. His passion for such initiative was expressed in his post, where he boldly claimed, Africa will be great again.

In his post, which was shared on Facebook, he said: "Today in My Training Flag Off in Nyanza, Rwanda While waiting for others that are due to be trained together with us, I was taking a look at different things at the centre, the place used to be a Government Centres For Different Skill( Skills Acquisition Centre). As I was looking around, I saw this chair and Stool made in Rwanda with Banana parts.

READ ALSO: 15-year-old boy emerges as 2018 UTME best candidate with 349 points

"I was actually amazed, and surprised, I haven't seen or heard people make Something out of banana Stem, rather than chop it off after cutting the main thing to eat, I actually love people who are creative, here in Nigeria people just cut it off.

Earlier in my post I wrote something, "Turning a Waste Products into a Real Wealth in Nigeria". This thing really serves as a good chair for homes, It is being sold at a reasonable price in Rwanda Markets here.

I learnt that in Rwanda here, You make something of something, I don't see them, Harvest Cassava and don't use the leave,use the stick not to dry, Chop off sugar cane and leave it to rotten or many other things.

I wants to implore our governments to do something in creating various opportunities you can do.

In the centre being a Government owned, there is actually a need to attach pictures of past training held there. I saw there how you make pads for women with banana. Kudos to Rwanda Government. Africa Will Be Great."

Clearly, Yakubu shares a deep passion for Nigeria and hopes that little things such as turning waste to wealth can further help develop the country.

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Meet Bayo Adedeji, the Nigerian businessman making millions from selling yam on Legit.ng TV:

Source: Legit- Bill Gates has described Nigeria as one of the most dangerous places in the world to give birth

- Gates urged the federal government to invest more in health and education

- The philanthropist said the country would do better rather than concentrating on investments in physical infrastructure

The chairman of Bill and Melinda Foundation, Bill Gates, on Thursday, March 22, said that Nigeria is one of the most dangerous places in the world to give birth, with the fourth worst maternal mortality rate in the world.

Gates stated this at the expanded National Economic Council alongside the chairman of the Dangote Foundation, Alhaji Aliko Dangote, and presided over by the Vice President, Yemi Osinbajo, at the old Banquet Hall of the Presidential Villa, Abuja.

L-R: Aliko Dangote, Bill Gates and VP Osinbajo at the event.

The theme of the event was Role of human capital investment in supporting pro-poor and economic growth agenda.

He said: The most important choice you can make is to maximize your greatest resource, the Nigerian people. Nigeria will thrive when every Nigerian is able to thrive.

If you invest in their health, education and opportunities-the human capital we are talking about today-then they will lay the foundation for sustained prosperity. If you dont, however, then it is very important to recognise that there will be a sharp limit on how much the country can grow.

Nigeria is one of the most dangerous places in the world to give birth with the fourth worst maternal mortality rate in the world ahead of only Sierra Leone, Central African Republic and Chad. One in three Nigerian children is chronically malnourished.

I urge you to apply this thinking to all your investments in your people. The Nigerian governments Economic Recovery and Growth Plan identifies investing in our people as one of three strategic objectives. But the execution priorities dont fully reflect peoples needs, prioritizing physical capital over human capital.

To anchor the economy over the long term, investments in infrastructure and competitiveness must go hand in hand with investments in people. People without roads, ports, and factories cant flourish. And roads, ports and factories without skilled workers to build and manage them cant sustain an economy.

Legit.ng previously reported that President Muhammadu Buhari played host to Bill Gates and Alhaji Aliko Dangote at the Presidential Villa. The president met the duo on Wednesday, March 21.

Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is visiting Nigeria to see first-hand the progress the country is making on primary healthcare provision, polio eradication, nutrition and financial inclusion.

He will be asking partners to prioritise supporting Nigerias poorest people to ensure a sustainable and inclusive economic future, and allow the county to meet its ambitious growth and development agenda.

N1,500 for health of Nigerians - on Legit.ng.

Source: Legit.ng- Reformed Niger Delta Avengers (RNDA) had earlier threatened to resume blowing gas pipelines if President Buhari does not reinstate Paul Boroh as amnesty chairman in 30 days

- However, another militant group has told President Buhari to ignore the threat

- The group said there is no point resuming blowing installations as the amnesty chairman is also an Ijaw man

Militants under the aegis of 21st Century Youths & Agitators with Conscience has condemned the threat issued by Reformed Niger Delta Avengers (RNDA) and other groups in the Niger Delta to blow up oil and gas facilities in the region in 30 days.

RNDA had given the federal government 30-day-ultimatum to reinstate Brig. Gen. Paul Boroh (retd) as chairman, Presidential Amnesty Programme (PAP) or it would resume its pipe blowing activities, Vanguard reports.

However, the militants asked President Muhammadu Buhari to ignore threats by the RNDA stating that members of the RNDA have been the brain against the establishment of the Maritime University, Okerenkoko in Warri South West local government area of Delta state.

READ ALSO: Breaking: PDP reportedly settles for APC governor, Aminu Tambuwal, as presidential candidate in 2019

Spokesperson of the Niger Delta Revolutionary Council (NDRC) W.O.I Izon Ebi in a statement on behalf of the group noted that one mans mistake, action and inaction must not be used to thwart the collective aspirations and determination of the Niger Delta people for the peace, progress, stability and development of the region.

He called on the Pan Niger Delta Forum (PANDEF) to speak up against the threat by RNDA.

He said: Prof Charles Dokubo is equally an Ijaw man like General Paul Boroh, so the issuing of threats to bomb oil installations and cause hostility and unrest in the Niger Delta is uncalled for.

The 21st Century Youths of the Niger Delta & Agitators with Conscience, condemn in strong term the ultimatum issued by the Reformed Niger Delta Avengers RNDA and some so-called ten militant groups that issued threats to commence the bombing of pipelines and cause hostilities in the Niger Delta in the next 30 days if General Paul Boroh is not reinstated.

Their perfidious act is the very reason sea piracy and kidnapping is increasing in the Niger Delta.

In as much as we condemn the perfidious act of some group of amnesty beneficiaries that protested in Abuja and in other parts of the Niger Delta that led to the sack of their fellow Ijaw man and the federal governments selective fight against corruption, we advise President Muhammadu Buhari to ignore the threats of the RNDA because these are the same set of militants that were against the establishment of the Maritime University, Okerenkoko. "

Advising the new amnesty boss to be transparent and innovative, Izon Ebi said: We advise Prof Dokubo to be transparent, innovative and accountable with the prudent management of the amnesty funds and always consult with the leadership of the Pan Niger Delta Forum, PANDEF that is made up of distinguished royal fathers, political leaders and representatives of all ethnic nationalities in the Niger Delta.

PAY ATTENTION: Install our latest app for Android, read best news on Nigerias #1 news app

We advise him to make sure that the amnesty beneficiaries and ex-agitators are trained as entrepreneurs to enable them to be employers of labour, rather than being idle, waiting for their monthly stipends.

Legit.ng previously reported that operatives of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) and Office of the National Security Adviser (ONSA) discovered $9 million cash at the residence of the sacked coordinator of the Presidential Amnesty Programme, retired Brig-Gen Boroh.

Boroh, who was special adviser on Niger Delta to President Muhammadu Buhari had also been arrested.

The discovery of the cash was made a few hours after his arrest by a combined team of EFCC and operatives of ONSA.

Meet Sunny Ofehe, the new face of Niger Delta development - on Legit.ng TV

Source: Legit- A Nigerian model is trending on social media because of her old school hairstyle

- The lady reportedly claimed that the hairstyle is worth N40 million

- She explained that she made the hairstyle to stand out and be unique

There are so many trends nowadays, from fashion trends, makeup trends to beauty trends and everyone wants a piece of that trend.

However, with the fact that everyone wants to try every new trend it, there are still others out there who want to stand out and be unique, this could be hard to due to fact that every new idea is copied and turned into trend.

A Nigerian model has proved to be one of those people who love to stand out and be unique. The model identified as Chika Lann decided to change her look by making an old school tread hairstyle that has become a hot topic on social media.

Photos of Chika Lann rocking her N40m hair Photo source: instagram user Chika Lann

READ ALSO: Adekunle Gold finally takes a picture in the snow

In an interview with Pulse, the model revealed that her old school tread hairstyle cost N40 million. Legit.ng had earlier reported that the Lann expressed that she made the hair to be unique.

Lann made the hairstyle to stand out Photo source: instagram user Chika Lann

PAY ATTENTION: Get all the latest gossips on NAIJ News

She also revealed that she feels as if everyone has the same style on these days. Lann said doesn't mind going through any stress or inconveniences to be unique.

She revealed that hairstyle is N40m Photo source: instagram user Chika Lann

Lann said she did so because she wanted to stand out Photo source: instagram user Chika Lann

Me and my children used to drink garri three times daily - Olajumoke the bread seller - on Legit.ng TV

Source: LegitThe President of ICMSA said that the week had been very interesting in the way it showed how different sectors of Irish society were viewed and how their work was evaluated.

Pat McCormack said many will have been struck by the demands of some organisations that the work carried out by their members during Storm Emma must be rewarded over and above even normal overtime rates and tasks like ensuring that public roads were kept clear and as safe as possible was worthy of extra payment outside all the normal arrangements.

Mr McCormack said the contrast this made with the farming community was both instructive and stark: The states payment to hundreds and hundreds of farmers all over the country, who used their own machinery and their own time and fuel, to keep clear public roads during the snowstorm was a pat on the head and an assurance that they wont be held liable for any accidents on the public roads that they had cleared through their own efforts and at their own expense.

The response to all the extra work involved in milking their cows and trying to get the milk collected so it could be processed was a cut of up to three cents per litre on their first decent milk cheque of 2018. It tells you a great deal about the way our work as farmers is just taken for granted and Im determined that that attitude is going to be challenged, said Mr McCormack.There was great excitement last week as students in Cashel Community School welcomed local farmer and past student Raymond Vere Hunt with a calf for their Bothar project.

The local farmer donated the cow when he learned about the Transition Year project .

The calf was then transported to Shelton Abbey prison as part of the prisons restorative justice programme. The prisoners who will hand-rear the calf get a sense of responsibility and a sense of what it is to do good, which is an important as part of their rehabilitation. Bothar representative Pat Mullins told the students about his experiences in Rwanda and reminded students to be grateful for everything they have.

In September 2020 the students hope to visit the prison to see their cow before she flies out to Rwanda .This cow will become a lifesaving hero in Rwanda as it will produce twenty times more milk than a local cow.

The students still need to raise money to cover training & preparation of a Rwanda family to receive the animal, transportation of the animal & full veterinary back up .

The students will organise a fundraising leg wax after Easter to help with these costs in what promises to be a fun filled day to remember for CCS.Independent TD Mattie McGrath has appealed to the Minister for Health, Simon Harris, and the HSE to definitively commit to funding the remainder of the works that are required at St Theresas Hospital, Clogheen.

Deputy McGrath was speaking after he raised the matter during the Order of Business in the Dail.

He said  Last September Minister Harris visited St Theresas where he saw for himself the amazing work that is being done and the potential the facility has to expand its services to the community.

He promised then that he would go back to the HSE and make the case for final funding for the extension works, new bedrooms, staff accommodation etc.

To date however, we have had no definitive commitment that the urgent funding that is required will be provided. It is being entirely left to massive fundraising efforts such as those organised by the Friends of St Theresas Hospital, Clogheen Hospice Suite Construction Fund (CHSCF) and Boston Scientific.

While these efforts are truly heroic, it is way past time that the HSE sanctioned the additional funding that will draw the project to a successful conclusion.

It is absolutely staggering to me, that the government of which minister Harris is a key member, can find 5 million to fund a spin unit for the Taoiseach, but it cannot find the resources necessary for an amazing hospital like St Theresas that has dedicated staff who work tirelessly for the community they serve.

The HSE, the Minister, and indeed the government itself must get its priorities in line and work to fund extensions like those at Clogheen and stop the foot dragging.

At present all we are seeing is a penny wise, but pound foolish approach from the HSE given the savings this facility could ultimately provide by becoming a vital link in our community healthcare infrastructure, concluded Deputy McGrath.(As delivered)

Prime Minister, Andrej Babis,

Welcome to NATO Headquarters, its great to see you here and thank you for very good discussions where we addressed a wide range of different issues which are all important for our security. And I also welcome this opportunity to express our gratitude to the Czech Republic for your contributions to NATO missions and operations and for Czech Republics commitment to the NATO Alliance. And your contributions to our shared security.

Today we mark the second anniversary of the terrorist attacks in Brussels. 32 people were killed and dozens of others were wounded.

And today marks one year since the attack at Westminster, in London.

These are reminders of one of the main challenges facing NATO.

We have stepped up our efforts to project stability beyond our borders and to contribute to the fight against terrorism.

NATO is a full member of the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS.

Our AWACS planes have been making the skies safer.

We are also working to strengthen the Iraqi Armed Forces ability to fight terrorism.

And I thank the Czech Republic for its contribution to this effort. I visited Iraq recently and there I saw how Czech instructors also play a key role in helping to strengthen the Iraqi armys capability when it comes to countering improvised explosives.

Our mission in Afghanistan, NATOs largest, is helping to train Afghan forces.

So that they can fight terrorism and secure their own country.

And again, the Czech Republic is contributing with trainers to this train, assist and advise mission of NATO in Afghanistan and I thank you also for your contributions to our mission in Afghanistan.

Over the past few years, Russia has changed European borders by force. And undertaken a significant military build-up.

In response to Russias aggressive actions, NATO has enhanced its presence in the eastern part of our alliance. To prevent a conflict, and preserve peace.

The NATO battlegroups in the Baltic States and Poland are a strong expression of NATO solidarity.

We are grateful for your contribution to our Enhanced Forward Presence in Lithuania, where the Czech Republic is part of the battle group we have deployed to Lithuania.

We want a meaningful dialogue with Russia. We seek to avoid confrontation, but we cannot ignore Russia breaking international rules. Earlier this month we saw a chemical attack in the United Kingdom. It was the first offensive use of a nerve agent on Alliance territory. NATO Allies are united in condemning this attack.

And they have offered their support to the ongoing investigation. This attack is a sad reminder of the value of the Czech Republics leading role in countering chemical, biological and nuclear threats.

The CBRN Centre of Excellence in the Czech Republic is a unique venue to share experience, technology and best practices.

Today we also talked about defence spending and about your countrys efforts to increase defence spending.

In 2014, all NATO Allies decided to stop the cuts, gradually increase defence spending and move towards spending 2% of their GDP on defence. And I welcome the fact that the Czech Republic has stopped the cuts in defence spending, has started to increase defence spending and has a clear plan on how to reach the 2% guideline by 2024. So I commend you for what we see, more defence spending in the Czech Republic is good for the Czech Republic but also for the whole NATO Alliance. And let me also add that we are impressed by the strong economic growth and by the fiscal balance of your country that creates the economic foundation for increased investments in defence also.

So once again, mister Prime Minister, its a great honour to have you here and welcome to the NATO Headquarters.

MODERATOR: Ladies and Gentlemen, we have time for a few questions. Yes please, gentleman here.

QUESTION [Czech News Agency]: Have you discussed in detail, the Skripal case, the Salisbury attack and accusation of by Russia that Czech Republic was involved, might be involved? Thank you.

JENS STOLTENBERG [NATO Secretary General]: We discussed of course the attack in Salisbury and all NATO Allies have strongly condemned the attack and we also have clearly expressed our support to the United Kingdom and we stand in solidarity with the United Kingdom, and NATO Allies have also offered their support to the ongoing investigation. We see this as something that takes place on the backdrop of a pattern of reckless behaviour of Russia. We have seen the illegal annexation of Crimea, we have seen Russia's attempt, or efforts, to destabilise Eastern Ukraine, we have seen Russia's significant military build-up, we have seen cyberattacks, hybrid tactics and so on, and therefore NATO is responding to this by implementing the biggest reinforcement to our collective defence since the end of the Cold War, with battlegroups deployed in the eastern part of the Alliance. The Czech Republic is part of that, with high-readiness armed forces and also now with increased defence investments, as part of our response to a more assertive Russia. The Czech Republic has strongly denied any accusations about that this chemical nerve agent has been produced in the Czech Republic, and we have no reason to doubt the assessment made by the United Kingdom, and also welcome the fact that the United Kingdom has established a very close cooperation with the OPCW, the organisation which is responsible for the treaty that bans chemical weapons. So, we call on Russia to answer all the questions the UK has put forward, and to provide full disclosure of its Novichok programme to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.

ANDREJ BABIS [Prime Minister of the Czech Republic]: Czech Republic strongly condemn this attack and we of course stay with our Allies, and we have strongly refused the speculation about the production of Novichok in Czech Republic. This is really a lie and we have refused it completely, and of course I think this case will be also discussed during the European Council and, of course, we have a clear position on this issue with NATO, with our Allies.

MODERATOR: Any other questions? Yes, please?

QUESTION: [Czech Television]: I would ask, following this Salisbury case, if you are planning, Mr Babis, some concrete steps, like expelling diplomats from Prague like London did? Russian diplomats of course.

ANDREJ BABIS [Prime Minister of the Czech Republic]: As I said, there was a consultation on Monday, during the meeting of Minister of Foreign Affairs, and we are in touch. I have spoken with the British Ambassador yesterday on the way to the airport, so we will of course discuss it during the European Council and we are of course looking for the unified position of Europe.

MODERATOR: OK, thank you very much, Ladies and Gentlemen.

JENS STOLTENBERG [NATO Secretary General]: Thank you.Meeting the Prime Minister Andrej Babis on Thursday (22 March 2018), NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg thanked the Prime Minister for the Czech Republics strong contributions to the Alliance.

The Secretary General highlighted that NATO has stepped up its efforts to project stability beyond Allied borders and contribute to the fight against terrorism. He welcomed the Czech Republics contribution to the Alliances mission in Afghanistan, as well as efforts to strengthen the Iraqi Armed Forces ability to fight terrorism.

The Secretary General also thanked Prime Minister Babis for his countrys contribution to NATOs enhanced forward presence in Lithuania. The NATO battlegroups in the Baltic States and Poland are a strong expression of NATO solidarity, said the Secretary General.

Mr. Stoltenberg underscored that NATO wants a meaningful dialogue with Russia, but cannot ignore violations of international rules. Earlier this month we saw a chemical attack in the United Kingdom. It was the first offensive use of a nerve agent on Alliance territory. NATO Allies are united in condemning this attack, he stressed.

The Secretary General noted that this attack was a sad reminder of the value of the Czech Republics leading role in countering chemical, biological and nuclear threats. He added that the CBRN Centre of Excellence in the Czech Republic is a unique venue to share experience, technology and best practices.

Mr. Stoltenberg and Prime Minister Babis also discussed NATO Allies efforts to increase defence spending. The Secretary General welcomed the Czech Republics efforts to meet its commitments and the countrys clear plan to increase defence spending to 2% of GDP by 2024.From 14 to 19 March 2018, Deputy Chairman of the NATO Military Committee, Lieutenant General Steven Shepro visited the United Kingdom where he met with Air Chief Marshal Sir Stuart Peach, British Chief of Defence, and key senior civilian and military staff at the Ministry of Defence. Lieutenant General Shepro also spoke at the Annual Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR), and Command and Control (C2) Battle Management Conference. The Deputy Chairman concluded his trip with visits to the Allied Rapid Reaction Corps (ARRC) HQ and the NATO Maritime Command in Norfolk.

Lieutenant Steven Shepro, Deputy Chairman of the NATO Military Committee kicked off his trip to the United Kingdom with a visit to Whitehall, the British Ministry of Defence. He met with Air Chief Marshal Sir Stuart Peach*, Chief of Defence the United Kingdoms role within the Alliance and European security. Lieutenant General Shepro thanked the United Kingdom for all its contributions to common goals and to NATO missions, operations and activities. The UK matters to NATO and NATO matters to the UK.

Echoing the recent Statement of the North Atlantic Council, Lieutenant General Shepro expressed his concern at the attack in Salisbury, this is the first offensive use of a nerve agent on Alliance territory since NATOs foundation and NATO regards any use of chemical weapons as a threat to international peace and security. NATO and Allies have expressed their solidarity to the UK and are standing by to provide any required assistance.

On 15 March, Lieutenant Shepro attended and spoke at the Annual Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR), and Command and Control (C2) Battle Management Conference. During his address, the Deputy Chairman stressed that ISR is strategically important for NATO and a pillar of effective defence which is why NATO has made significant Common Funded investments to modernise its ISR capabilities to deter and to respond to a crisis more rapidly and at the speed of relevance.

While visiting the Allied Rapid Reaction Corps (ARRC) HQ, Lieutenant General Shepro met with Lieutenant General Radford, Commander of the ARRC. For the last 26 years, the ARRC has provided NATO with a well-manned, rapidly deployable and flexible HQ. This allows for increased speed which translates into more effective, credible and survivable deterrence and crisis response, highlighted Lieutenant General Shepro.

At the NATO Maritime Command, Lieutenant Shepro received an update on NATO Maritime activities as well as a briefing from the NATO Intelligence Fusion Centre. Lieutenant General Shepro emphasized that NATO is currently reviewing its Command Structure and discussing how to reinforce its Maritime Posture because maritime command and control will be even more critical for our future deterrence and defence.

* Air Chief Marshal Sir Stuart Peach, Chief of Defence was elected new Chairman of the NATO Military Committee and is due to take over from General Petr Pavel, current Chairman, on 29 June 2018.(Natural News) Researchers from the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health in New York City have come up with a new tracking system that they claim will be able to predict the geographic spread of seasonal influenza before it starts to run its course.

Published in the journal PNAS, a paper outlining the new technology says that it possesses the capability to predict where the flu will travel up to six weeks ahead of time, giving population groups in its path a heads up so they can prepare.

Preparedness is how infectious disease experts are touting the program, which they claim will help to reduce both infection and mortality rates. But theyre also hoping it will act as a type of canary in a coal mine to scare more people into getting flu shots  even though its been shown that flu shots dont even work.

By boosting interest in flu shots, health officials at both the state and national level hope to stockpile more vaccines and anti-viral drugs in advance of a flu outbreak  which means more profits for drug and vaccine companies.

For the public, the flu forecast may promote greater vaccination, the exercise of care around people sneezing and coughing, and a better awareness of personal health, reads a report in Science Daily about the true purpose of this forecasting tool.

For health officials, it could inform decisions on how to stockpile and distribute vaccines and antiviral drugs, and in the case of a virulent outbreak, whether other measures, like closing schools, are necessary.

Scientists hope to expand forecasting tool to sell more drugs and vaccines for other diseases, too

While the technology isnt technically new, its latest iteration is said to be far more accurate than previous versions. This includes an increase in forecasting with regards to the onset of 35 percent, as well as a 31 percent increase in peak timing, and a 13 percent increase in intensity.

Their hope is to begin using the tool in conjunction with the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) starting later this year. The Mailman School research team has already worked with the CDC, it turns out, having won the 2014 flu forecast challenge put on by the agency.

The biggest beneficiary of the program wont be the public, however. Big Pharma is the real winner here, as flu forecasts basically use the cover of science to compel more people to get flu shots and take antiviral medications because its the scientific thing to do.

And according to reports, it wont stop with the flu. Researchers want to expand the program in the future to include all sorts of other diseases that scientists will claim to be able to predict the spread of in advance, resulting in increased drug and vaccine sales for those very conditions.

The system could also be adapted for use with other respiratory viruses, and with some modification, for infectious diseases more broadly, admitted lead author Sen Pei, a postdoctoral scientist studying Environmental Health Sciences at the Mailman School.

The Columbia-CDC partnership plans to eventually bring in a third ally: The Department of Defense (DOD). DOD weather prediction data, claim experts, can be combined with CDC data on laboratory-verified cases of influenza, which together can be incorporated with Census data put together an improved forecast model.

Influenza, like many infectious diseases, is spread from person-to-person and as people move from place to place, says Jeffrey Shaman, the studys lead author, who teaches Environmental Health Sciences at the Mailman School.

By assimilating information on commuting patterns, weve taken a big step forward and improved our ability to accurately forecast where the flu might crop up next.

Read Vaccines.news for more coverage of vaccine science.

Sources for this article include:

NaturalNews.com

ScienceDaily.com(Natural News) Over the course of the next year, more than 60 million acres of the monarch butterflys natural habitat are expected to be sprayed with dicamba herbicide. The shocking report from the Center for Biological Diversity, a U.S. environmental group, explains that the widespread use of this toxin spells big trouble for the butterflies. The report indicates that monarch butterflies will be at serious risk of extinction under dicambas reign.

This grim news comes on the heels of the release of dicamba-resistant GMO crops, developed by the worlds most hated company, Monsanto. DowDupont and BASF SE have also created dicamba-resistant crops. Who else would be behind the extinction of monarch butterflies besides the biotech industry?

What is dicamba and why is it such a massive threat?

As Modern Farmer explains, dicamba is an herbicide intended to target broad-leaf weeds, rather than weeds from the grass family. Typically, its used alongside other pesticides and herbicides, like glyphosate  which surely makes for the ultimate toxic chemical cocktail.

Dicamba works by imitating natural plant hormones, leading to unnatural growth and eventual death. Dicamba is considered to be more toxic than glyphosate, but less toxic than some other common herbicides like 2,4-D.

One thing that makes dicamba especially problematic is its capacity to drift. In the past, dicamba has only been applied to soil pre-season to reduce its ability to spread beyond the intended area. Now Monsanto and their brethren have developed dicamba-resistant crops  prompting more spraying of the drift-prone herbicide.

With its tendency to drift, the Center for Biological Diversity estimates that an additional 9 million acres of land will be contaminated with dicamba  on top of the 60 million acres that will be sprayed directly.

In 2017, dicamba-resistant GMO crops were planted on some 25 million acres of farmland  and the weed killer drifted far and wide. And as the Centers report revealed, In 2017 there were reports of at least 3.6 million acres of off-target, herbicide-induced damage to agricultural crops and an unknown amount of damage to native plants and habitats, including forests.

Monarch butterflies put at risk

Monarch butterfly populations have been decreasing steadily for the last 20 years. In fact, their numbers have dropped by 80 percent during the last two decades. This alone should be cause for alarm, but now, Big Ag is looking to spray their migratory habitat with yet another toxin  which is sure to be a recipe for further endangerment, if not flat-out extinction.

Center for Biological Diversitys senior scientist Nathan Donley said in a statement, Americas monarchs are already in serious trouble, and this will push them into absolute crisis.

One of the primary concerns is that dicamba (and dicamba drift) will wipe out the beloved butterflys food supply. Milkweed is the only food source for monarch caterpillars and is essential for reproduction. Beyond that, flowering plants in general will be at risk of destruction via dicamba drift.

Donely contended further, When dicambas use on [genetically engineered] cotton and soybeans comes up for reapproval later this year, the only responsible thing for the EPA to do is allow that approval to expire.

Of course, it would be a special occasion if the EPA actually did their jobs, wouldnt it? The letters in their name may stand for Environmental Protection Agency, but when push comes to shove, the federal agency falls short of actually protecting the environment. Take for example, the heartbreaking letter from a dying EPA scientist, begging her colleagues to stop hiding the truth about the dangers of glyphosate.

If the letter penned by Marion Copley is any indication, it seems that dicamba can expect reapproval despite the clear threat it poses to monarch butterflies and other species. Fortunately, some states are taking action; Arkansas recently banned dicamba. Even if the federal government cant get its act together, perhaps more states will continue to exercise their rights and ban these toxins. [Related: Learn more about dicamba and other toxic chemicals at Pesticides.news.]

Sources for this article include:

EHN.org

ModernFarmer.com

BiologicalDiversity.org [PDF]Two tiny tiger and jaguar cubs were discovered at the Tijuana International Airport near the U.S.-Mexico border this week, stashed inside wooden boxes, authorities in Mexico confirmed.

A bulletin Tuesday released by federal police in Mexico said the cubs  a Bengal tiger and black jaguar  were each found inside a wooden box in an area of the airport where packages move through daily.

Authorities opened the boxes as part of an operation seeking packages containing illegal drugs and other items suspected of being trafficked.

Authorities said the cubs hailed from Mexico but the boxes for each animal contained no documentation about where they came from or where they were going. The tigers were being transported against the countrys general wildlife law.

At this point, it is unclear where the cubs will be taken.

In an unrelated but similar case last August, a 6-week-old Bengal tiger cub was discovered by U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers at the Otay Mesa Port of Entry in south San Diego County.

The cub was stashed in the back of a car driven by Southern California resident Luis Eudoro Valencia, 18. Valencia was entering the U.S. from Mexico with the cub, which he initially claimed was just a house cat, and gave CBP a sales receipt for the animal that stated false details.

Valencias attorney said the teen wanted to keep the cub as a pet but prosecutors said Valencias cell phone data showed he was running an animal smuggling business and had boasted about making thousands of dollars by selling wildlife.

This past February, Valencia was sentenced to six months in prison for the smuggling of the Bengal tiger cub.

That tiger cub  later named Moka  was taken into the custody of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and, eventually, went on to live at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park.

The Safari Park continues to care for Moka. Earlier this month, the park said Moka had undergone emergency surgery after showing increasing signs of ill health likely related to his care, or lack thereof, in the felines early life.Concerned about cybersecurity, California is inspecting and reinforcing its elections systems on a daily basis.

Thats what the Secretary of State told NBC Bay Areas and Telemundo 48s public affairs show, Comunidad Del Valle.

In 2016 there is absolutely zero evidence that there was any hack, or breach, or compromise of any type, by the Russians or anybody else., said Secretary of State Alex Padilla. Not that they werent trying.

Padilla says California is already implementing some of the procedures suggested this week by the U.S. Senates Intelligence Committee. Committee member and U.S. Senator Kamala Harris said this week that the nation should implement a paper-only ballot system to avoid hacking by foreign entities.

Padilla says those threatening entities include Russia, North Korean and China.

A lot of the recommendations youre going to hear come out of Washington are from a national perspective a lot of those recommendations are based on what California already has in place," Padilla said.

In a wide-ranging interview, Padilla also said his offices pre-registration program has seen a huge spike in sign-ups since the high school shooting in Florida.

The program allows teens to register to vote before they turn 18, so they can hit the ground running when they become of age.

If what were seeing right now in high schools across the country is any indicator, were in for some strong leadership in a few years," Padilla said.

Comunidad Del Valle will air this Sunday at 4 p.m. on NBC Bay Area and 11 a.m. on Telemundo 48.One of the six people taken to the hospital following a shooting that involved a San Francisco Police Department officer and five others Wednesday has died.

Suisun resident Jehad Eid, 21, a suspect in the incident, was pronounced dead Wednesday evening.

The injured officer was shot in the leg and remains in fair condition, Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital officials said.

SF Police Officer Wounded in Shooting

San Francisco Police Department Chief William Scott said officers at around 4:30 p.m. responded to reports of a man with a gun in the 200 block of Amazon Avenue, near the Outer Mission and Crocker-Amazon neighborhoods.

Officers tracked down and made contact with the suspect at a business on the corner of Geneva Avenue and London Street. Shots were then exchanged, Scott said.

The officer and five others, including the suspect, were struck by gunfire, Scott said.



A police officer and five others are hospitalized following an officer-involved shooting Wednesday in San Francisco, officials said. Jean Elle reports.

Hospital officials said one of the people wounded by gunfire is a minor, who has since been discharged.

The four others injured in the shooting are men ranging in ages from 24 to 48, officials said. Of those four, one man was listed in critical condition and another man in serious condition, according to officials.

Video posted on social media shows what appear to be the initial moments following the shooting. The video shows armed officers and others in the area ducking for cover. It also shows an officer crawling away from the scene with an apparent leg wound.San Francisco Fire Chief Joanne Hayes-White admonished Supervisor Aaron Peskin in a letter for his "distracting" and "obstructive" behavior on Saturday night during a four-alarm blaze in the city's North Beach neighborhood.

Hayes-White sent Peskin a formal request on Monday asking him not to interfere with firefighters during an emergency.

"Your actions were distracting and obstructive to achieving containment and control of a volatile incident," she wrote in the request, saying Peskin jeopardized the safety of everyone at the scene.

Hayes-White said it was remarkable that there were no injuries during such a large fire.

During a Board of Supervisors meeting on Tuesday, President London Breed introduced a resolution commending firefighters for their work in North Beach.

She did not denounce Peskin's actions, but said the emergency responders should be celebrated for putting their lives on the line.

Peskin said on Tuesday that he has a "genuine love" for his constituents, and while it was inappropriate to raise his concerns at the scene of the fire, he would reserve the right to raise more questions about the department's response.

"I apologize to Chief Hayes-White, and I intend to personally convey this to her as soon as I return from the spring legislative recess," Peskin said in a statement.A San Francisco police officer and two people are recovering in the hospital after five people were injured in a shooting on Wednesday at a barber shop in San Francisco.

The alleged gunman, 21-year-old Suisun resident Jehad Eid, was inside the Amazon Barber Shop where he exchanged gunfire with officers outside, according to the shop's owner. The suspect later died from his injuries Wednesday evening at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, police said.

The unidentified officer was shot in the leg and remains in fair condition, hospital officials said.

One of the six patients submitted to the hospital following a shooting that involved a San Francisco Police Department officer and five others Wednesday has died. Pete Suratos reports.

Officers responded to reports of a man with a gun in the 200 block of Amazon Avenue, near the Outer Mission and Crocker-Amazon neighborhoods, at around 4:30 p.m. Wednesday, San Francisco Police Department Chief William Scott said.

The barbers told NBC Bay Area that they had never seen Eid before he entired the shop. It was unclear why he had firearm and no other details of the investigation were immediately available. The suspect's family could not be reached for comment.

The owner of a now bullet-holes-ridden Barber shop Vladimir Shtynberg told NBC Bay Area that two of his barbers were injured in the shooting but they are expected to recover.

A video of the shooting posted on Instagram shows an injured police officer crawling outside the barber shop, police surrounding the area and another injured man taking cover at a pharmacy next door.

SF Police Officer Wounded in Shooting

Naiel Nasrah, the manager of Daniels Pharmacy next door, said he heard several gunshots, ran up the stairs and saw the injured barbers running inside the store.

Nasrah said he was worried about everybody in the neighborhood because his family works at the pharmacy. "Everybody in heres tight knit. Everybody here knows the pharmacy and the barbershop," Nasrah told NBC Bay Area.

The Amazon Barber Shop has been around for over 100 years, according to Shtynberg and Daniels Pharmacy opened its doors to the neighborhood in 1949, Nasrah said.

A police officer and five others are hospitalized following an officer-involved shooting Wednesday in San Francisco, officials said. Pete Suratos reports.

Another video captured by J&J Hardware store's surveillance camera shows a group of police officers walking into the barber shop, and shortly after, the gunfire that followed.

While it wasn't immediately clear whether the injuries were caused by the alleged gunman or police, but one witness, Marvin Totah, said the suspect "wasn't looking at where he was shooting" and he could have "ended up hitting everybody else."

Police are still investigating the incident and anyone with information is asked to call the SFPD 24 Hour Tip Line at (415) 575-4444 or Text-A-Tip to TIP411 and begin the text message with SFPD.Police at San Jose State University are asking that potential witnesses or survivors come forward in connection with an ongoing sexual assault investigation involving at least three male victims.

Fourth-year student Luis Venegas, 21, allegedly assaulted three male students on campus between 2014 and March 3 of this year, according to university police.

The ongoing investigation kicked off on March 3 after a survivor reached out to campus police, according to university police. While investigating the reported case, police found out about two additional survivors. All three cases happened in Campus Village A, and the suspect and survivor knew each other in each case.

NBC Bay Area

Venegas was arrested on March 5 and later charged with sexual assault, assault with the intent to commit sex crimes, false imprisonment and sexual battery, according to university police.

A judge on Thursday denied Venegas' request to be released on his own recognizance. His bail remains at $210,000.

Anyone with information is asked to contact campus police at 408-924-2222 or Sgt. Justin Celano at 408-924-2218. People can also submit a report anonymously through TipNow at 408-337-2919 or sjsu@tipnow.org.Fremont High School in Oakland was on lockdown Wednesday morning after a student brought a loaded gun to campus, but everyone on the campus is safe, according to the Oakland Unified School District.

A student was called to the administration office for an unrelated discussion, OUSD spokesman John Sasaki said. He said the student started to act suspiciously when they were speaking with the school's security and police officers.

The student was then asked if they had any weapons, and it was revealed that they had a loaded gun in their waistband.

Officers took the gun from the student and arrested them. The student's name has not been released.

Investigators told school district officials that there was no threat to any individual student or the campus. They said they do not know why the student had a gun.

Sasaki said the campus underwent a brief lockdown but all students and staff members are safe.Shoppers who arrived at Toy R Us stores across the country for the toy chains liquidation sales were met with signs announcing that it had been postponed "due to circumstances beyond our control."

The liquidation sale was expected to begin Thursday after the company announced last week that it was shuttering its U.S. operations, jeopardizing the jobs of some 30,000 employees and bringing to end a 70-year run for a chain known to generations of children and parents for its sprawling stores and Geoffrey the giraffe mascot.

Customers looking for a bargain at one of the chain's remaining 740 U.S. stores will now have to wait a little longer to shop the liquidation sales.

Amanda Cacialli arrived at the Toys R Us store in Johnston City, New York, at 9:30 a.m. ET Thursday hoping to score some merchandise at discount prices. She was instead met with a sign that said "Liquidation Sales Will NOT Start Today as Originally Scheduled."

"I'm very upset," she told NBC. "There are lots of people here upset."

Similar signs were posted at Toys R Us stores around the country, according to social media posts. One Twitter user told NBC employees at a Toys R Us store in Ocala, Florida, said they didn't know when the sales would start.

A person familiar with the matter said the liquidation sales were were delayed due to unforeseen circumstances and were likely to start on Friday. The person did not say what those circumstances are.

An email request for comment from Toys R Us was not immediately answered.

The New Jersey-based retailer, which filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in September 2017, announced earlier this year that it planned to close 182 stores, citing increased competition and a shift in customers moving away from traditional brick-and-mortar stores to shopping online for the decision.

But after Toys R Us was unable to successfully reorganize, it decided it had to liquidate and announced last week that it would begin going-out-of-business sales Thursday and hope to complete those by the end of June 2018.

Meanwhile, The Associated Press reported that toy company executive Isaac Larian says he and other investors have pledged $200 million in financing and hope to raise more in crowdfunding in a bid to save potentially more than half of the 735 Toys R Us stores that will go dark in bankruptcy proceedings.A federal judge presiding over lawsuits that accuse big oil companies of lying about global warming to protect their profits is turning his courtroom into a classroom in what could be the first hearing to study the science of climate change.

U.S. District Judge William Alsup has asked lawyers for two California cities and five of the worlds largest oil and gas companies to come to court Wednesday to present the best science now available on global warming. He also wants them to go over the history of climate change research, focusing on ice ages and previous cooling and warming cycles, among other topics.

Legal observers say they have never heard of a court holding a tutorial on climate change, and they are eager to see how the oil companies explain global warming.

Alsup may want to get the companies views in the court record, said Michael Wara, a lawyer at Stanford Universitys Woods Institute for the Environment who studies climate and energy policy.

That could speak to the lawsuits claims that these companies were not forthcoming about their internal thinking about climate change, Wara said.

Alsup is considering two lawsuits, one by San Francisco and the other by neighboring Oakland, that accuse Chevron, Exxon Mobil, ConocoPhillips, BP and Royal Dutch Shell of long knowing that fossil fuels posed serious risks to the climate, but still promoting them as environmentally responsible. They also allege the companies mounted campaigns to downplay the risks of global warming and discredit research that human activity was to blame.

The companies have asked Alsup to dismiss the lawsuits. Federal law controls fossil fuel production, and Congress has encouraged oil and gas development, they said in court documents. They added that the harm the cities claim is speculative and part of a complex chain of events that includes billions of oil and gas users and environmental phenomena occurring worldwide over many decades.

The relief that plaintiffs seek would require a single judge sitting in San Francisco to unilaterally change the nations energy and environmental policies, Joshua Lipshutz, an attorney for Chevron, said on a call with reporters.

The lawsuits say the companies have created a public nuisance and should pay for sea walls and other infrastructure to protect against the effects of climate change  construction that could cost billions of dollars.

New York City, several California counties and another California city have filed similar suits.

San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera said the city looks forward to providing the objective history of climate change science.

Well see whether big oil acknowledges the scientific consensus and its role in causing climate change or doubles down, once again, on deception, he said in a statement.

Chevron will not engage in a debate about climate change, but instead present the conclusion of an international panel of scientists which said it is extremely likely that humans are the dominant cause of observed warming since the mid-1900s, said Avi Garbow, another attorney for Chevron.

Alsup said in a court filing about Wednesdays tutorial that he wants to know whether the collective heat from burning fossil fuels contributes to warming and if so, how. He also wants to know the main sources of carbon dioxide that account for the buildup of the gas in the atmosphere.

Deciding the lawsuits in favor of Oakland and San Francisco would be revolutionary and open the door to myriad similar lawsuits, so Alsup may want to establish a strong base of scientific knowledge on climate change, said David Takacs, a professor at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law who studies climate change.

He has to dot his is and cross his ts, he said. It has to be a long public display that The science is making me rule on behalf of the plaintiffs.It appears Cook County voters are in favor of legalizing recreational marijuana use in Illinois.

Tuesday's referendum question asked if Illinois should legalize "the cultivation, manufacture, distribution, testing, and sale of marijuana and marijuana products for recreational use by adults 21 and older."

By Wednesday morning, with 98 percent of precincts reporting, results showed 68 percent of voters were in favor of the idea in the nation's second most populous county.

The question on whether or not to legalize the drug for recreational use was non-binding, so the vote does not mean recreational marijuana use will automatically become legal in Chicago and Cook County's more than 130 municipalities. In the end, it is up to legislators to propose and pass a law.

The referendum's results can, however, now be used to gauge public opinion and determine whether to bring legislation forward in Springfield.

County commissioners voted unanimously last December to put the question on the primary ballot. The state Senate earlier this month passed a measure to put the question on ballots for statewide voters in November, according to The Chicago Tribune.

The full question on primary election ballots read as follows: "Shall the State of Illinois legalize the cultivation, manufacture, distribution, testing, and sale of marijuana and marijuana products for recreational use by adults 21 and older subject to state regulation, taxation and local ordinance?"

Supporters of legalization pointed to the increased tax revenue that has come with legalization, taxation and regulation in other states. Opponents often have concerns about social costs and the fact that marijuana use would remain illegal under federal law.

About six in 10 Americans nationally support marijuana legalization, according to a Pew Research Center survey released earlier this year. Support has nearly doubled what it was in 2000.



Recreational marijuana is now legal in Colorado, Washington, Alaska, Nevada, Oregon, Massachusetts, Maine, Vermont and California. All but Vermont passed the laws in binding ballot questions between 2012 and 2016.

Vermont Gov. Phil Scott in January signed into law a recreational marijuana legalization bill, the Associated Press reported. Scott's signing made Vermont the first state to legalize the drug through legislature instead of a referendum, which is the route Illinois would have to take.

The rollout has not been immediate for most states, and legalization has yielded different results for different states.

California voters approved legalizing recreational marijuana in 2016. The law went into effect in December 2017, but state legislators were already considering lowering the marijuana tax to fight persistent black market sales, the L.A. Times reported Thursday.

On the other end of the spectrum, Colorado brought in nearly $700 million in marijuana tax revenue since its lawwhich was approved in a 2012 referendumwent into effect in 2014, according to the Colorado Department of Revenue.

Primary election battles typically include the sacred tradition of a concession phone call with a promise to come together in the general.

Not so in the Republican race for Illinois governor.

Gov. Bruce Rauner held on to the nomination Tuesday, winning by a razor-thin two-point margin over his conservative challenger state Rep. Jeanne Ives.

For a well-funded incumbent, Rauner came stunningly close to being ousted by members of his own party - some of whom it would appear may not coalesce around him come November.

The race was ugly from the start and didnt end much better, as the two candidates did not speak on election night nor the following day.

A spokeswoman for Ives campaign confirmed Wednesday afternoon that she and Rauner had still not been in contact  and had no plans to speak in the future.

Why would she talk to him after the disrespect he showed last night announcing victory before all of the counties were in - without a call to the campaign, after he poured millions of dollars into an attack campaign that flat-out lied about her, and after he dispatched his slimy operatives to the media last night to disparage Ives, her campaign and all of her conservative supporters? Ives spokeswoman Kathleen Murphy said in a statement.

She has no reason to believe or trust anything he says, Murphy continued.

Rauner emerged to deliver an election night victory speech on Tuesday before the race had been officially called in his favor.

I am honored and humbled by this victory, Rauner said Tuesday night, claiming victory with a slim lead and even as voting machine problems delayed results from DuPage County  Ives home territory that she ultimately carried by four points.

You have given me the chance to win the battle against the corruption that plagues Illinois. Thank you, Rauner continued, adding, This primary election was hard fought, yes. I want to congratulate my opponent on her principled stand.

For those of you around the state of Illinois who wanted to send me a message, let me be clear: I have heard you, he said.

Rauner initially dismissed Ives as a fringe candidate before pivoting to take her more seriously after she garnered the support of various conservative organizations, and even some of his former backers that sought to take down the first-term governor from the right.

For her part, Ives publicly mulled a run for months before tossing her hat in the ring, saying her decision was sparked in part by Rauners signing of a measure to allow Illinois to cover abortions for state employees and Medicaid recipients, as well as his approval of an education funding reform plan and a bill to make Illinois a so-called "sanctuary state.

The race ended much closer than most anticipated, including Rauner  a largely self-funding billionaire who spent a record-breaking $65 million on his entire 2014 campaign and reloaded his committee with another $50 million in December 2016.

Rauner bought $16.7 million in airtime throughout the primary in comparison to Ives $2.9 million, media tracking firm Advertising Analytics found  but won by a relatively slim margin of less than 20,000 votes.

In a Wednesday morning television appearance, Rauner admitted that he had not spoken yet with Ives after a very difficult race.

Primaries are divisive, Rauner said, adding, but now is the time to move past that to come together.

I look forward to visiting with the representative, visiting with those who are hurt or have their feelings challenged by the difficulties of a primary, and find common ground, he added.

Rauners campaign has reached out to Ives, but in a radio interview Tuesday, Ives made it clear she felt no obligation to respond.

Gov. Rauner can talk to himself in the mirror and look at himself and decide whether or not hes proud of what hes done all around, from his governorship to the way that he ran this campaign, she said, adding, I really dont care to say anything to the governor at this point, quite frankly.

In her election night speech, Ives admitted that her revolt against the political ruling class fell just a bit short but the conservative fight was not over.

We had no money, we had no team, but we had a lot of grassroots supporters who knew that we needed to stand up once and for all against people who did not adhere to our policy and our partys platform, she continued.

Bruce Rauner thought he could get away with his betrayals, Ives said, but she added, a day of reckoning is coming.

Since claiming victory, Rauner has repeatedly vowed that its on to November  but as he will face billionaire Democrat J.B. Pritzker in what's known to be a solidly blue state, it remains to be seen whether the conservative base will turn out to give him another chance in Springfield.A suburban woman who came close to death following a terror attack in Jerusalem in 2002, faces an uphill legal battle after the United States Justice Department asked the Supreme Court not to hear her case against the Palestine Liberation Organization.

It doesnt make much sense to me how they are OK with just ignoring their own citizens, Shayna Gould told NBC 5. Its pretty much the unthinkable.

Gould was a teenager when she was one of more than 40 people shot by a gunman on Jaffa Street in Jerusalem in January of 2002. Clinically dead when she arrived in an Israeli hospital, she was saved by doctors and joined with 10 other families in a lawsuit filed against the PLO under provisions of the Anti-Terrorism Act.

We did it the right way---we went through the court system, Gould said. I was shot in 2002. This has been going on over a decade---that was 16 years ago!

Gould and her fellow plaintiffs were victorious in the first round, winning a $655.5 million dollar judgment in federal court. But that award was overturned on appeal, the judges ruling the lower court lacked jurisdiction and that the PLO had not been offered adequate due process.

After Gould and the others appealed to the Supreme Court, the Trump administrations Solicitor General filed a brief noting the lower courts rulings, and asking them not to take the case.

We dont understand it, her father Ron Gould said. They should stay out of it, or they should let the Supreme Court make the decision.

The Obama administration had also previously opposed pursuing the case. But while that opposition was based largely on fears of instability in an already volatile region should the Palestinian Authority be hit with a big judgment, the latest filing rests largely on the appellate courts technical readings of the law.

While great heft is often given to a Solicitor Generals position, the high court is known to overrule the office, and recently did so when they sent the Trump administrations DACA case back to the lower courts. Gould and her father say they understand that even if the Supreme Court hears their case, they could lose.

They say they just want that chance.

Well see where the chips fall, but give us this opportunity, she said. I absolutely feel the government is letting me down.Several hundred students, faculty, alumni and others demonstrated at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point campus over a proposed realignment to the school's majors.

Officials at the university, located about 100 miles north of Madison, proposed cutting 13 majors, mainly in social studies and the humanities, while adding sixteen majors in fields "that have demonstrated value and demand in the region."

The majors on the chopping block are:

American Studies

Art (Graphic design would still exist as a major)

English (English would continue for teacher certification)

French

Geography

Geosceince

German

History (Social science would continue for teacher certification)

Music Literature

Philosophy

Political Science

Sociology (Social Work would continue as a major)

Spanish

The proposed expanded or additional programs are:

Chemical Engineering

Computer Information Systems

Conservation Law Enforcement

Finance

Fire Science

Graphic Design

Management

Marketing

Aquaculture/Aquaponics

Captive Wildlife

Ecosystem Design and Remediation

Environmental Engineering

Geographic Information Science

Master of Business Administration

Master of Natural Resources

Doctor of Physical Therpay

Declining state K-12 enrollment, competition from public and private universities and a "significant increase" in graduation rates has left the school with a $4.5 million budget deficit over two years, the school announced in a March 5 press release.

Political science professor Jennifer Collins told WAOW-TV the reshuffling would radically change the nature of the university and reduce opportunities available to students in central Wisconsin.

Chancellor Bernie Patterson met the demonstrators Wednesday afternoon. He said the status quo is not an option to deal with the looming deficit.

"It is critical our students learn to communicate well, solve problems, think critically and creatively, be analytical and innovative, and work well in teams," Patterson said in the March 5 press release. "This is the value of earning a bachelor's degree."

Students currently enrolled in the dropped majors would be able to finish their degrees, the release said.

Before any action is taken on the proposal, it needs to go through a campus governance committee, the school chancellor and then the University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents, the school said. The process is expected to start in August.

The changes echo the direction Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has wanted to take the University of Wisconsin system.

Walker in 2015 quietly sought to redefine the UW system's mission statement, meeting intense backlash. He proposed making the mission statement to "meet the state's workforce needs," and to remove language about public service and searching for truth, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported.Egyptians go to the polls next week in what is essentially a one-candidate election considered by critics to be a return of sorts to authoritarian rule, after a 2011 revolution that sparked loftier expectations for the region. But the bigger picture is that in the Middle East as a whole, democracy has largely failed to take hold.

From Morocco in the west to Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf emirates in the east, monarchies have proven more stable than places that experimented with government of the people.

Non-monarchies like Syria and Yemen, which before their wars did have functioning central governments, never made much of a pretense of democracy  not even in the half-hearted sense of communist East Germany calling itself a "Democratic Republic." And today many argue that with so little democratic tradition and so much illiteracy  in the case of Egypt, at least a quarter of the population  some places are just not ready.

Countries that tried fairly free balloting  like Iraq and Libya after the fall of Moammar Ghadafi  tended to find the effort mired in tribal and sectarian voting. That largely predetermines the result and diminishes democracy into something of a census.

Such cases tend to be further undermined by a tyranny of the majority: it is rare to find respect for the rights of minorities, ideological or ethnic. That makes them desperate, disdainful of democracy, and likely to be tyrannical should political tides reverse. That's how the minority Sunnis of Iraq became vulnerable to the vicious appeal of the Islamic State group.

While the democratic record is dismal, the Middle East is hardly alone in what seems to be a global trend away from liberal democracy at a turbulent and complicated time.

Egypt's President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi is following a model perfected by Russia's Vladimir Putin, an equally illiberal leader who was re-elected this week after maneuvering his own chief opponent out of the running. El-Sissi has jailed opponents by the thousands  mostly Islamists  and, like Putin, placed security and the economy ahead of all else, delivering in those areas as best he can.

But el-Sissi insists that the real power rests with the people and boasts of an independent judiciary and parliament, claims disputed by rights groups. Under el-Sissi's rule women's representation in the acquiescent parliament and the Cabinet are at highs, Egypt has enacted important economic reforms, and he has also emerged as a strong global voice against Islamic militancy, advocating a moderate religious discourse.

Ironically, it is Egypt's continuing claims to be democratic that earn it the criticism that openly despotic countries in the Arab world seem more nimbly able to avoid.

Here's a look at some of those cases:

THE GULF

Freedom of assembly is prohibited throughout the Gulf states of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman and Kuwait, where kings, sheikhs, emirs and sultans inherit their posts. Criticism of the ruling system is a punishable crime and unfettered access to state institutions is rare. Local media is largely state-run or state-linked. In all six countries, which are U.S. allies and major U.S. weapons purchasers, government ministers are appointed by the ruler. In Saudi Arabia, where the only elections held have been for local council seats, dozens of activists, writers, intellectuals and moderate clerics are imprisoned for offenses such as "disobeying the ruler." Human rights experts have described the UAE's judiciary as under the "de facto control" of the country's executive branch  a common refrain throughout the Gulf. Bahrain, a small island-nation ruled by a Sunni monarchy, has crushed protests led by the country's majority Shiite population and cracked down on the media.

LEBANON

With a parliamentary system and regular presidential elections, Lebanon has trappings of a democracy, but politics are dominated by former warlords and family dynasties that have long used the country's sectarian-based power-sharing system to perpetuate corruption and nepotism, and the Hezbollah militia is very powerful. All senior government positions are allocated according to sect, including the head of state, who should be a Christian, the prime minister, a Sunni Muslim, and the parliament speaker, a Shiite. The formula is based on outdated demographic data and does not account for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who are denied citizenship and a vote. There hasn't been a parliament election since 2009, and lawmakers have unconstitutionally extended their terms. Lebanon has also been letting press freedoms slide, summoning talk show hosts to court and sentencing an analyst to jail for critical comments about the army.

JORDAN

Power rests with King Abdullah II who has the final say on policy issues, appointing and frequently reshuffling the Cabinet as a means of deflecting public frustration. Gerrymandering and the absence of political parties have rendered elections for the toothless parliament largely meaningless. The only significant organized opposition group, the Muslim Brotherhood, has been sidelined in recent years. Pressure after the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011 to introduce democratic reforms has ebbed after the revolts turned violent in several countries, causing many to agree to fewer freedoms rather than risk a descent into chaos. Jordanian journalists are careful not to cross the royal family or security forces.

IRAQ

Dysfunctional, dangerous and corrupt though it has been, Iraq is arguably more democratic than the regional norm. It has regular, competitive elections, but has been plagued by entrenched corruption and persistent instability that undermine its institutions. Iraq's constitution  drafted in 2005 with deep American involvement after the U.S.-led invasion toppled long-time leader Saddam Hussein in 2003  defines the country's government as democratic. But governments are deeply divided along sectarian lines, resulting in gridlock. Millions of Iraqis were allowed to gather for anti-corruption protests in 2015, but three years earlier, protests held in the country's Sunni heartland were brutally suppressed  and two years later, most of that area was taken over by Islamic state militants who ruled until their ouster last year. Iraq's constitution ensures freedom of the press, but Iraq remains one of the world's deadliest countries for journalists and many journalists self-censor, according to a study by Freedom House.

NORTH AFRICA

The Arab Spring started in Tunisia with the ouster on Jan. 14, 2011 of the nation's long-time autocratic president, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who fled to Saudi Arabia. Tunisia now grapples with Islamist extremists  who have killed dozens of foreign tourists in two major attacks  as well as an economy on the rails. But it is at least a budding democracy, the only one in the Maghreb region, where joblessness, especially among youth, poses a major threat of unrest. Algeria, which has had the same president since 1999, managed to keep Arab Spring unrest at bay, in part because the population lived through a decade of deadly violence in the 1990s battling Islamist extremists. And the kingdom of Morocco, known for its stability, goes through the motions of a democracy, but the real ruler is the monarch, Mohammed VI, and the invisible royal coterie known as the Makhzen.

THE WIDER REGION

The non-Arab nations of the region offer their own examples of flawed democracies. Turkey has free elections but an increasingly illiberal system whose politicized security apparatus and judiciary has put many thousands of opponents of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in jail. Iran has a supposedly free presidential vote  for the tiny number of candidates who are approved by non-elected clerics whose heavy-handed rule is in fact supreme. Israel has an impressively functioning democracy, though not for the millions of Palestinians it has occupied for over 50 years  and the nationalist government of Benjamin Netanyahu has tried to crack down on human rights groups and has lately also been targeting the media, as well as law enforcement, as tools of enemy "elites."

Associated Press writers Zeina Karam in Beirut; Aya Batrawy in Dubai; United Arab Emirates; Hamza Hendawi in Cairo; Karin Laub in Amman, Jordan, and Elaine Ganley in Paris contributed to this report.About 13,000 home health aides and patient care assistants received a major boost from the Connecticut General Assembly on Wednesday.

The House and Senate, with wide bipartisan margins, approved a new contract with the workers that included higher wages and, for the first time ever, workers compensation coverage.

Top Senate Republican Len Fasano, applauded the passage of the agreement. It passed the Senate 32-0.

"First and foremost this benefits people," Sen. Fasano said. "Second, it saves taxpayers money in the long run by keeping people out of expensive care facilities and instead helps elderly and disabled individuals live comfortably in their own homes."

Denitra Pearson is a Patient Care Assistant in New Haven where shes provided care for the same woman for four years. During that time, Pearsons client suffered a pair of strokes and bouts of dementia and Alzheimers.

"Shes more like family than a patient to me," Pearson said of her relationship with her client. "You know, you grow to have a bond with them because they need us, and we need them."

Pearson said she can rest easy now that she will have more money in her pocket and peace of mind knowing she will have coverage for workers compensation.

"Higher wages means I dont need to struggle on a day to day basis for gas, necessities for my kids, and workers comp, I dont have to stress if I get hurt on my job anymore," she said.

Gov. Dannel Malloy celebrated the bipartisan passage of the agreement.

"These professionals work around the clock to provide lifesaving, critical care for thousands of elderly residents and people who have disabilities  and they do it in homes, which ultimately is better for both patients and for taxpayers," Malloy said in a statement.

Rep. Joe Aresimowicz echoed the sentiments of the governor and said: We are talking about low wage workers with the enormous responsibility of caring for our loved ones, who are also saving taxpayers millions of dollars by helping people stay in their homes.Police have arrested two suspects in the murder of a 24-year-old man in Waterbury in August and said they have warrants for two others, including one who remains at large.

The arrests are for suspects in the murder of David Rivera-Mateo. Officers found him when they responded to 170 Willow St., at 10:30 p.m. on Aug. 31. Rivera-Mateo was transported to St. Marys Hospital, where he was later pronounced dead.

Police said they arrested 26-year-old Pedro Nieves, of Waterbury, 26-year-old 36-year-old Joseph Frye, of Waterbury and both have been charged with murder.

Police said they also have an arrest warrant for 27-year-old Tyrone Love, charging him with murder. He is incarcerated in the State of Connecticut Department of Corrections.

Juan Morales, 30, of Waterbury, is also wanted in on a murder charge and is considered armed and dangerous.

Anyone with information about where he is should call Waterbury Police detectives at (203) 574- 6941.Congressional leaders finalized a sweeping $1.3 trillion budget bill Wednesday that substantially boosts military and domestic spending but leaves behind young immigrant "Dreamers," deprives President Donald Trump some of his border wall money and takes only incremental steps to address gun violence.

As negotiators stumbled toward an end-of-the-week deadline to fund the government or face a federal shutdown, House Speaker Paul Ryan dashed to the White House amid concerns Trump's support was wavering. The White House later said the president backed the legislation, even as some conservative Republicans balked at the size of the spending increases and the rush to pass the bill.

Talks continued into Wednesday evening before the 2,232-page text was finally released.

"No bill of this size is perfect," Ryan said. "But this legislation addresses important priorities and makes us stronger at home and abroad."

Leaders still hoped to start voting as soon as Thursday. A stopgap measure may be needed to ensure federal offices aren't hit with a partial shutdown at midnight Friday when funding for the government expires.

Negotiators have been working for days  and nights  on details of the bill, which is widely viewed as the last major piece of legislation likely to move through Congress in this election year. Lawmakers in both parties sought to attach their top priorities.

Two of the biggest remaining issues had been border wall funds and a legislative response to gun violence after the clamor for action following recent school shootings, including the one in Parkland, Florida.

On guns, leaders tentatively agreed to tuck in bipartisan provisions to bolster school safety funds and improve compliance with the criminal background check system for firearm purchases. The bill states that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention can do research on gun violence, though not advocacy, an idea Democrats pushed.

But there was no resolution for Dreamers, the young immigrants who have been living in the United States illegally since childhood, but whose deportation protections are being challenged in court after Trump tried to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA.

Democrats temporarily shut down the government earlier this year as they fought for that protection. But the issue only rose to a discussion item when Trump made a late-hour push for a deal in exchange for $25 billion in border wall funds.

Instead, Trump is now poised to win $1.6 billion for barriers along the border, but none of it for the new prototypes he recently visited in California. Less than half the nearly 95 miles of border construction, including levees along the Rio Grande in Texas, would be for new barriers, with the rest for repair of existing segments.

In one win for immigrant advocates, negotiators rejected Trump's plans to hire hundreds of new Border Patrol and immigration enforcement agents.

"We are disappointed that we did not reach agreement on Dreamer protections that were worthy of these patriotic young people," said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.

The emerging plan removes a much-debated earmark protecting money for a rail tunnel under the Hudson River. The item was a top priority of Trump's most powerful Democratic rival, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, but Trump vowed to veto the bill over the earmark. Under the legislation, the project would remain eligible for funding, however, and a Schumer aide said it was likely to win well more than half of the $900 million sought for the project this year.

The core purpose of the bill is to increase spending for military and domestic programs that have been sharply squeezed under a 2011 agreement that was supposed to cap spending. It gives Trump a huge budget increase for the military, while Democrats scored wins on infrastructure and other domestic programs that they failed to get under President Barack Obama.

That largesse has drawn opposition from some fiscal conservatives and could make passage a potentially tricky process.

Last month, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul triggered a brief government shutdown over his objections to the deficit spending. On Wednesday, he tweeted his opposition to the emerging legislation, known as an "omnibus."

"It's a good thing we have Republican control of Congress or the Democrats might bust the budget caps, fund planned parenthood and Obamacare, and sneak gun control without due process into an Omni ... wait, what?" Paul tweeted.

Most essential was support from Trump, who has been known to threaten to veto legislation even when his team is involved in the negotiations.

Word of Trump's discontent sent Ryan to the White House, where he was invited to a face-to-face with the president, with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on the phone.

White House aides said the president's support was never in doubt, but one senior White House official said the president was concerned that details of the package weren't being presented as well as they could be, both to members of Congress and the public.

The group discussed how they could better sell the package, said the official, who was granted anonymity to discuss the private conversation.

"The president and the leaders discussed their support for the bill," said White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, adding that it would fund Trump priorities such as wall construction, add money to combat the opioid crisis and provide new infrastructure spending.

Both parties touted $4.6 billion in total funding to fight the nation's opioid addiction epidemic, a $3 billion increase. More than $2 billion would go to strengthen school safety through grants for training, security measures and treatment for the mentally ill. Medical research at the National Institutes of Health, a longstanding bipartisan priority, would receive a record $3 billion increase to $37 billion. Funding was also included for election security ahead of the 2018 midterms.

Child care and development block grants would receive a huge $2.4 billion increase to $5.2 billion. And an Obama-era transportation grant program known as TIGER would see its budget tripled to $1.5 billion. Head Start for preschoolers would get a $610 million boost, while an additional $2.4 billion would go for child care grants.The House Intelligence Committee voted Thursday to approve its final report into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, ending the panel's probe and giving a final endorsement to their conclusion that there was no coordination between Donald Trump's presidential campaign and Russia.

The Republican-written report will be released to the public after it goes to the intelligence community for a classification review. The document has been fiercely opposed by Democrats, who say that the investigation was shut down too quickly and that the committee has not interviewed enough witnesses or gathered enough evidence to make such an assessment. All the Democrats on the intelligence panel voted against approving the report.

Committee Republicans released a summary of 44 findings that concludes that there were Russian cyberattacks on U.S. political institutions and that Russians leveraged social media in the U.S. to sow discord. The report also echoes GOP criticism of the Justice Department and intelligence community as it investigated the meddling. The panel will release the context of those findings once intelligence agencies have reviewed it and decided what should be blacked out.

In terms of collusion with Trump's Republican campaign, the summary says that "none of the interviewed witnesses provided evidence of collusion, coordination or conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russian government."

The findings said that the committee found no evidence that Trump's "pre-campaign business dealings" formed any basis for collusion with Russia during the campaign or that meetings between the Russian ambassador and Trump associates represented coordination in any way.

Republicans on the committee also said there's no evidence that Trump associates had anything to do with hacked emails that were stolen from Democrats during the campaign, though they do note "numerous ill-advised contacts with WikiLeaks." Trump's eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., messaged with the group during the campaign.

Committee chairman Devin Nunes said in a statement that the report can help "to improve our election security before the mid-term elections" and "will be useful in thwarting any attempts by Russia or other foreign powers to further meddle in U.S. elections."

Minority Leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi condemned the conclusion of the investigation, saying in a statement that committee Republicans "cast a vote against Americas national security interests."

"The American people deserve American leadership, not a President willing to hand over our democracy to Putin," she said. "Democrats will continue to demand the Special Counsel investigation be allowed to continue to follow the facts, unhindered by the White House or Republicans in Congress, and will take real, immediate action to secure our elections from foreign interference."



In an intelligence assessment released in January 2017, the National Security Agency, CIA and FBI concluded that Russian military intelligence provided hacked information from the Democratic National Committee and "senior Democratic officials" to WikiLeaks. WikiLeaks has denied that Russia was the source of emails it released, including those from Clinton's campaign chairman, John Podesta.

Texas Rep. Mike Conaway, the Republican leading the House investigation, said in an interview with The Associated Press that the panel wanted to get the report out as the 2018 campaign season begins. He said that it would be difficult for Russians to have an impact on a specific congressional race but that they could "practice" this time around for bigger disruption during the 2020 presidential election.

On collusion and coordination, Conaway said, "We could not find a thread to follow that made sense."

The report recommends that the intelligence community immediately inform candidates if they find a counterintelligence threat and proposes that campaigns better ensure that "their counterintelligence defenses appropriately account for the role of cut-outs and intermediaries." It also says Congress should amend campaign finance laws to increase transparency with foreign entities.

After the committee vote, the panel's top Democrat, California Rep. Adam Schiff, said he had hoped Thursday's meeting could have been public.

"It is a rather sad chapter in our committee's long history with the ending of the majority's participation in the investigation, that ending taking place in secret session for no reason at all except a desire to avoid public scrutiny of this decision, to curtail an investigation into one of the most serious intrusions into our democracy and our history," Schiff said.

Democrats will have their own report and say they will continue to investigate the meddling. They have already set up at least one interview: Chris Wylie, a former employee of a political data-mining firm that obtained information from Facebook users without their consent. The firm, Cambridge Analytica, worked for the Trump campaign.

Wylie told news outlets that the company used the data to build psychological profiles so voters could be targeted with ads and stories.

It is unclear if Republicans on the committee will attend that interview.Connecticut residents could end up paying more in home and renters insurance because of the crumbling concrete crisis.

A proposal before the Connecticut state legislature would add a $20 annual surcharge to homeowners or renters insurance to help pay for repairs to help homeowners whose basements were damaged because of crumbling foundations.

Replacing a basement can cost more than $200,000.

Money from the proposed insurance surcharge would raise an estimated $20 million per year for the state's crumbling foundation assistance fund.

This surcharge is part of a new senate bill that also has language that would require insurance companies to cover crumbling concrete basements, something they don't currently do.

Sen. Paul Doyle, of Wethersfield, wrote the bill and said that while it might not satisfy everyone, it is a start.

I hate to say it; it's almost a drop in the bucket to the magnitude of the problem for all the homeowners that are having this problem. Still it is something to present and let the public weigh positive or negative, he said.

The Insurance Association of Connecticut said that requiring insurance companies to cover crumbling basements could cause premiums to double or more statewide.

The association calls the homeowner and renter insurance surcharge an intriguing idea, but points out that a similar proposal failed to pass the legislature last year.

They also said theres already $100 million of state government assistance to help people with crumbling concrete basements.

To date, 685 homeowners have filed complaints with the state saying they have crumbling concrete basements.

The hearing on the latest bill to help them is scheduled for Monday.Two African-American leaders in Fort Worth on Thursday called for the firing of a police officer who was recorded on video punching a man in the face with no apparent provocation.

Officer Jon Romer was indicted two weeks ago, accused of official oppression and perjury, over an incident that happened at Texas Health Harris Methodist Hospital in November 2016.

NBC 5 obtained video of the incident Wednesday.

"It's the climate of this city, said Rev. Michael Bell, one of the police departments most vocal critics. What will give a police officer the confidence to go up and just cold cock somebody? That's the climate we're in. Our community is under siege by police."

The department took Officer Romer's badge and gun the day he was indicted.

But he hasn't been fired.

"Why is Romer still a police officer, even on restricted duty?" Bell asked.

Another activist, Rev. Kyev Tatum, made the same point.

"He definitely deserves to be fired now, but he should have been fired a long time ago, Tatum said.

The incident happened the month before another video involving Fort Worth police sparked racial tensions -- the controversial arrest of Jacqueline Craig, a mother who reported a neighbor had assaulted her young son.

In the wake of that video, the city started a race and culture task force to take a hard look at race relations in the city. That task force is still meeting.

But Bell, for one, has no confidence that anything will come out of it.

"All that is is just a dog and pony show, he said. And they are not going to come up with solutions."

But some, like pastor Tatum, look at Romer's indictment and say the system worked. A special prosecutor was appointed and Romer was charged before anyone knew this video even existed -- even if it took nearly a year and a half.

"In Tarrant County, that's beyond progress, that's a win, Tatum said.

Bell said city leaders need to speak up.

"There is a sense of relief that the video is out, but what is the city going to do? What is their response?" he said.

Mayor Betsy Price has remained silent on Romers indictment.

Police Chief Joel Fitzgerald is off on medical leave.A San Diego County Sheriffs Department (SDSO) deputy was arrested this week for a 2011 case involving alleged lewd acts on a child, officials confirmed.

Deputy Sam Thomas Knight, Jr., 40, of Santee, was booked into the Cois Byrd Detention Center in the city of Murrieta, California. He's facing two felony charges of lewd acts with a child and a misdemeanor charge of annoying and molesting children.

Booking records from Riverside County indicate he was released on bail Wednesday. He is due back in court at the Riverside Hall of Justice on May 16.

The Riverside County Sheriff's Department (RSO) said Thursday that in July 2016, deputies at the department's Perris Sheriff's Station received information regarding the sexual assault of a minor victim.

According to a complaint filed in the Superior Court of California County of Riverside, the first of the alleged lewd and lascivious acts happened in between 2011 and 2012 in Riverside County when the victim was younger than 14 years old.

The second alleged lewd and lascivious act, as well as the misdemeanor, happened in March 2016 when the victim was younger than 18 years old.

The investigation identified the suspect as Knight. The SDSO deputy was arrested this week in San Diego in connection with the case, Riverside officials said.

NBC 7 asked the RSO why it took nearly two years to make the arrest, a department spokesperson responded with this statement:

"As you can see by the charges, the investigation spanned some time. You can imagine that when it comes to this kind of investigation that spanned possible years. It is a delicate process and one that we must be extremely attentive to. I can confirm the information was reported in 2016, and the DA filed a warrant for the arrest 2 weeks ago."

Riverside County Sheriff's Department

The SDSO said Thursday that the department was aware of the investigation into Knight from the beginning and fully cooperated with detectives handling the case from the Riverside County Sheriffs Department.

The SDSO said Knight was relieved of his peace officer powers and placed on leave from the department. However, the department would not confirm if Knight was on paid or unpaid leave.

The SDSO said it has no further comment on Knights arrest.

Public records show Knight was hired by the SDSO in late August 2007.

NBC 7 learned Thursday that Knight had been fired in 2014 after he used non-approved tactics in an unjustified takedown of an inmate at George Bailey Detention Facility in Otay Mesa.

The County Civil Service Commission disputed Knight's firing and he was later reinstated.

Further details of the allegations against Knight were not released.

Check back for updates on this developing story.The City of Miami Beach is expecting a large turnout Saturday for their "March for Our Lives" rally that's taking place in conjunction with rallies throughout the country.

The rally is being held with leadership from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School alumni, Miami Beach Senior High School students and other Miami-based youth leaders.

Attendees are encouraged to arrive at Miami Beach Senior High School at 2231 Prairie Avenue at 8 a.m., with a march scheduled for 10 a.m. The march will go to Collins Park via Dade Boulevard, taking a right on 23 Street and then another right on Liberty Avenue.

After the march will be the rally with a speaking program. Miami Beach Mayor Dan Gelber and City Commission, Marjory Stoneman Douglas current students and alum, Emily Estefan, Miami Mayor Francis Suarez, Susan Windmiller of the Miami-Dade County League of Voters and other special guests will attend.

"We're all just working together every day to make sure this march is successful and gets as many people involved as possible," organizer Hannah Gelber said.

The students are advocating for gun control and mental health counseling. They say they want to send a clear message to lawmakers.

"This is us telling them that we will be able to vote in the next election and that we will be able to make our voices heard," Gelber said.

Participants attending the Miami Beach event are encouraged to wear white clothing. On Wednesday evening, students participating in the march were recognized by the city commission.

"I want you to keep going until we finally make a change and get rid of these assault weapons in our schools," Commissioner Kristen Rosen Gonzalez said.

Parking on Miami Beach is expected to fill up quickly, so city officials are encouraging attendees to make arrangements with a charter or shuttle bus, use Miami-Dade Transit bus service or a ride-sharing service. Lyft has said they will be offering a limited number of free rides for people attending the march.

If you must drive, parking for the march will be available at the City Hall Garage located at 1755 Meridian Avenue (entrance on Meridian Avenue and 18th Street) with free shuttle service to Miami Beach High. Additional parking is available at the 17th Street Garage (entrance at 17th and Convention Center Drive) as well as Pennsylvania Avenue Garage (adjacent to 17th Street Garage, with an entrance on Pennsylvania Avenue and Lincoln Lane North, right off of 17th Street).What to Know 71-year-old Dayton Cramer was convicted in Tallahassee federal court Wednesday of attempted enticement of a minor.

Authorities say Cramer had responded to fake online ads in which investigators posed as a teen girl and as the stepmother of another teen.

A former Florida State University attorney has been convicted of trying to meet underage girls on the internet for sex.

A U.S. Department of Justice news release says 71-year-old Dayton Cramer was convicted in Tallahassee federal court Wednesday of attempted enticement of a minor. He faces up to life in prison at his June 5 sentencing.

The former FSU deputy general counsel was charged last February. Authorities say Cramer had responded to fake online ads in which investigators posed as a 14-year-old girl and also as the stepmother of a 13-year-old girl who was being offered for sex.

Authorities say Cramer discussed sexual activity with several undercover officers. He was arrested after going to meet what he thought was the 13-year-old girl's stepmother to arrange a sexual encounter.What to Know Justin Johnson and the babys mother, Rebecca Sanders, said they have filed complaints with various agencies after Sunday's incident.

The order was filled by Sanders mother, Betty Osceola, in tribal court shortly after the birth.

If the baby is with the grandmother on tribal land, only the federal government can get involved and possibly take the child back.

The battle over a baby born in a Miami-Dade hospital who was taken by Miccosukee Police officers days after her birth ended Thursday night as the child was reunited with her mother.

Justin Johnson and his attorney appeared at a 1:30 p.m. hearing inside a court in the Miccosukee Indian Village located in southwest Miami-Dade.

Johnson and the baby's mother, Rebecca Sanders, had been looking to regain custody of their one-week-old daughter, Ingrid Ronan Johnson, after she was taken from Baptist Hospital in Kendall on Sunday due to a court order obtained by the baby's grandmother.

After the hearing, the couple's lawyer said the baby would be reunited with her mother.

Bradford Cohen, the mother's attorney, said the couple went through a "horrific" experience.

"Getting a baby torn away from you on the second day, getting it taken out of your room when you are in the middle of breastfeeding. Its pretty horrific," Cohen said.

Johnson and Sanders said they filed complaints with various agencies  including Miami-Dade Police and the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs after Sanders says officers, along with hospital security and staff, came into her room shortly after Ingrid was taken by a doctor Sunday morning.

"He said something was filed where I lost custody of my daughter and I said 'how, I'm in the hospital, I haven't been given any notification, no hearing, nothing whatsoever,'" Sanders said Wednesday. "And he said he doesn't have an order, hasn't seen one and doesn't have it on him but was told to come to the hospital to take my daughter."

The order was filled by Sanders mother, Betty Osceola, in tribal court shortly after the birth. The couple claims Osceola is upset and does not want Johnson, who is white, in the childs life.

According to the order, the grandmother claimed the father was violent toward Sanders while she was pregnant. Sanders and Johnson denied those claims, with Johnson calling them "false."

"I cant even begin to explain how hard this has been. I dont see how people of the Miccosukee tribe can look me in the face and tell me this is OK, Johnson told the Miami Herald.

The Miccosukee Tribe, which currently has less than 600 members, does not fall under the jurisdiction of the state of Florida, which has led to issues in the past with officials in Miami-Dade and across the state.

If the baby is with the grandmother on tribal land, only the federal government can get involved and possibly take the child back.

One of Floridas two U.S. Senators, Marco Rubio, tweeted Wednesday night, calling the incident a kidnapping and saying that "this wont end well" for the tribe if they dont return the child.

Osceola, who owns a major airboat tour business on the reservation, convinced a Miccosukee judge to grant her temporary custody.

"This is what you would expect to see in any state court, in Florida, when it comes to the well-being of the children, there is a concern they are either going to end up in dependency court, or a relative getting temporary custody of them through the family courts," said an attorney for the grandmother, Spencer West.

Miami-Dade Police Director Juan Perez issued a statement that an immediate inquiry into what took place had begun to determine if there is anything the agency can do.Boynton Beach Police have arrested a man who they say impersonated a law enforcement officer.

Officers responded to a trespassing call at a local Best Buy store, in which employees say John OGrady was seen shoplifting several days earlier and stole an iPhone 10, according to a police report.

When officers approached OGrady, they noticed a US Marshals pin attached to his business suit and asked if he was a law enforcement officer. OGrady responded by saying he was a US Marshal.

Officers searched OGrady and found a firearm that turned out to be a BB gun, and what appeared to be an authentic US Marshals badge attached to his belt in the front of his pants. OGrady told officers that he was in fact not a US Marshal and that his firearm was fake when they asked for his supervisors name.

"Congratulations, that's a felony," said one of the officers on bodycam footage of the incident.

Authorities also found another Deputy US Marshal badge and a white iPhone X in OGradys car that store employees say matches the serial number of the device stolen days earlier.

OGrady was taken into custody and now faces charges of impersonating a law enforcement officer and retail grand theft.Police and rescue workers arrived at the scene of a pedestrian bridge collapse near a Florida university campus even before witnesses could finish making 911 calls for help, according to audio files released Thursday.

Miami-Dade Police released 15 calls made to 911 dispatchers in the moments after the collapse on March 15.

Sirens could be heard blaring behind several frantic callers moments after the 950-ton (860-metric ton) structure fell into traffic.

"Oh, my gosh. A lot of cars are under the bridge," one woman told a 911 dispatcher.

She started crying and added, "Hurry up, please," before realizing police had arrived at the scene.

Another woman said in a shaken voice that she was driving to work when the bridge fell in front of her.

"There are dead people," she said in Spanish to the dispatcher.

A male caller told a dispatcher the bridge had collapsed across the whole eight-lane roadway.

"They just put it up, they were working on it, and it collapsed into the middle of the road. We've got a big, big deal here," he said.

"It's a big, big, mess," he said, adding the police were already at the scene.

The dispatcher asked if anyone was injured.

"From what I see, it must have hurt somebody," he said.

The bridge was intended to span a busy roadway between Florida International University and the neighboring city of Sweetwater. The collapse killed six people.

The family of one of the victims filed a wrongful death lawsuit Thursday in state court. The lawsuit filed on behalf of the son and wife of victim Rolando Fraga seeks unspecified damages from Munilla Construction Management and FIGG Bridge Engineers, the two main entities involved in the bridge construction.

The lawsuit claims the two companies were negligent because they had warning that a public safety hazard existed and the flow of traffic beneath the bridge should have been shut down while work was being performed.

Several other lawsuits also have been filed since the collapse.What to Know Students from Douglas and other schools across the area have been vocal in their push for gun law reforms

Events are scheduled for Saturday across the country  including a massive event set to take place in Parkland and another in Miami Beach.

Groups of students, teachers and parents began the trek from South Florida to Washington D.C. for this weekends March for Our Lives event  a demonstration sparked by the deadly mass shooting inside Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

Some of those heading to the nations capital for Saturdays rally, aimed at continuing the push for gun law reform in the wake of 17 people being killed inside the Parkland school on February 14th, left early Thursday morning from Fort Lauderdale / Hollywood International Airport with a solid purpose.

Youre not just sitting at home being sad, youre actually doing something, said Emilie Smith, a senior at North Broward Prep.

Youre supposed to go to school, youre supposed to learn, Im supposed to be able to teach," said middle school teacher Debby Miller, one of the organizers of this trip. "Im not supposed to be scared.

Around 200 demonstrators will be taking part in a three day agenda that includes Saturday's rally as well as a meeting with former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords, who was shot in 2011.

Students from Douglas and other schools across the area have been vocal in their push for laws they say would have prevented people like suspected school shooter Nikolas Cruz from purchasing high capacity assault rifles.

Its a lot more powerful if the movement comes from students, said Smith. Were inspiring other students. Were fighting for a good cause.

Were not giving up, this is such an incredible and powerful movement," said Natalie Feehan, a sophomore at Monarch High School. Our message is that we demand change and were not gonna stop until we get it.



Events are scheduled for Saturday across the country  including a massive event set to take place in Parkland as well as a similar event in Miami Beach.

The rallies come days after the school was rattled by the story of three students being arrested  two for having knives on campus and a third for making an online threat  while a Broward Sheriffs Office deputy being suspended after it was revealed he was asleep in his vehicle on campus.

When students return from spring break to Douglas, they'll be required by Broward County Schools to use clear backpacks and wear identification badges at all times.

Superintendent Robert Runcie told parents in a two-page letter about the security changes. It said the backpacks will be given to students at no cost when they return to school on April 2. He also noted that metal detectors may soon be installed at the school.

Parents district-wide were told reinforced safety protocols will include expediting "single point entry" measures for visitors, locking all classroom doors and upgrading surveillance systems.Congress gave final approval Friday to a giant $1.3 trillion spending bill that ends the budget battles for now, but only after late scuffles and conservatives objected to big outlays on Democratic priorities at a time when Republicans control the House, Senate and White House.

Senate passage shortly after midnight averted a third federal shutdown this year, an outcome both parties wanted to avoid. But in crafting a sweeping deal that busts budget caps, they've stirred conservative opposition and set the contours for the next funding fight ahead of the midterm elections.

The House easily approved the measure Thursday, 256-167, a bipartisan tally that underscored the popularity of the compromise, which funds the government through September. It beefs up military and domestic programs, delivering federal funds to every corner of the country.

But action stalled in the Senate, as conservatives ran the clock in protest. Then, an unusual glitch arose when Sen. James Risch, R-Idaho, wanted to remove a provision to rename a forest in his home state after the late Cecil Andrus, a four-term Democratic governor.

At one point, Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., stepped forward to declare the entire late-night scene "ridiculous. It's juvenile."

In the end, Risch lost. But the fight contributed to late-night delays before passage of the massive spending package,

Once the opponents relented, the Senate began voting, clearing the package by a 65-32 vote a full day before Friday's midnight deadline to fund the government.

"Shame, shame. A pox on both Houses - and parties," tweeted Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., who spent the afternoon tweeting details found in the 2,200-page bill that was released the night before. "No one has read it. Congress is broken."

Paul said later he knew he could only delay, but not stop, the outcome and had made his point.

The omnibus spending bill was supposed to be an antidote to the stopgap measures Congress has been forced to pass  five in this fiscal year alone  to keep government temporarily running amid partisan fiscal disputes.

Leaders delivered on President Donald Trump's top priorities of boosting Pentagon coffers and starting work on his promised border wall, while compromising with Democrats on funds for road building, child care development, fighting the opioid crisis and more.

But the result has been unimaginable to many Republicans after campaigning on spending restraints and balanced budgets. Along with the recent GOP tax cuts law, the bill that stood a foot tall at some lawmakers' desks ushers in the return of $1 trillion deficits.

Trump only reluctantly backed the bill he would have to sign, according to Republican lawmakers and aides, who acknowledged the deal involved necessary trade-offs for the Democratic votes that were needed for passage despite their majority lock on Congress.

"Obviously he doesn't like this process  it's dangerous to put it up to the 11th hour like this," said Sen. David Perdue, R-Ga., who opposed the bill and speaks regularly to Trump. "The president, and our leadership, and the leadership in the House got together and said, Look, we don't like what the Democrats are doing, we got to fund the government."

White House legislative director Marc Short framed it as a compromise. "I can't sit here and tell you and your viewers that we love everything in the bill," he said on Fox. "But we think that we got many of our priorities funded."

Trying to smooth over differences, Republican leaders focused on military increases that were once core to the party's brand as guardians of national security.

"Vote yes for our military. Vote yes for the safety and the security of this country," said House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., ahead of voting.

But even that remained a hard sell. In all, 90 House Republicans, including many from the conservative House Freedom Caucus, voted against the bill, as did two dozen Republicans in the Senate.

It was a sign of the entrenched GOP divisions that have made the leadership's job controlling the majority difficult. They will likely repeat in the next budget battle in the fall.

Democrats faced their own divisions, particularly after failing to resolve the stalemate over shielding young Dreamer immigrants from deportation as Trump's decision to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program has left it for the courts to decide.

Instead, Trump won $1.6 billion to begin building and replacing segments of the wall along the border with Mexico. The Congressional Hispanic Caucus opposed the bill.

But the bill banned the administration from erecting the wall in Texas' Santa Ana Wildlife Refuge, where the starting point for construction was intended.

"None of the funds provided in this or any other Act shall be obligated for construction of a border barrier in the Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge," the legislation states, according to NBC News.

Also missing from the package was a renewal of federal insurance subsidies to curb premium costs on the Affordable Care Act exchanges. Trump ended some of those payments as part of his effort to scuttle President Barack Obama's health care law, but Republicans have joined Democrats in trying to revive them.

Bipartisan efforts to restore the subsidies, and provide additional help for insurance carriers, foundered over disagreements on how tight abortion restrictions should be on using the money for private insurance plans. Senate Republicans made a last-ditch effort to tuck the insurance provisions into the bill, but Democrats refused to yield on abortion restrictions.

Still, Democrats were beyond pleased with the outcome. Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., chronicled the party's many gains, and noted they could just have easily withheld votes Republicans needed to avert another shutdown.

"We chose to use our leverage to help this bill pass," Pelosi said.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said as the minority party in Congress, "We feel good." He added, "We produced a darn good bill."

Associated Press writers Matthew Daly and Jill Colvin contributed to this report.Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney is asking for a smaller property tax increase to better fund the city's schools.

The reason: properties across the city are worth more than last year.

Earlier this month, Kenney asked city council to increase property taxes by 6-percent to help erase a nearly $1 billion budget deficit at the School District of Philadelphia.

On Thursday, the mayor amended the proposal requesting only a 4.1-percent tax hike.

The mayor's office said real estate values in total increased by 11-percent in the past year. That's higher than expected and means the city can collect the money they need with less of a cost to individual property owners.

Under the original proposal, a homeowner whose home was valued at $113,000 (the past median value) would've paid $95 more a year.

Now, the median home value is $128,100. So, the current proposal would mean they pay an additional $73 a year, according to numbers provided by the city. Those with the Homestead Exemption would see larger reductions.

The revised proposal is sure to be more palatable to council members. The last property tax hike, in 2015, was 4.5-percent.With the first day of spring looking more like a mid-winter wonderland, many parents are bracing for what could become a difficult start to summer.

At least three local school districts have already extended the academic year because of snow days. Philadelphia, West Chester and North Penn school districts confirmed to NBC10 that classes will creep into mid-June thanks to the ongoing storms.

In a letter sent to parents, West Chester Area School District Superintendent Dr. James Scanlon acknowledged the inconvenience to parents but said that making up school days is no easy feat.

In previous years, the school board automatically listed June 18 as the last day. If no snow days were needed, officials would wrap up classes five days early. But people complained about this, Scanlon said.

Then, the school district started scheduling a full week for spring break and taking away make-up days as needed.

But people complained because it cut into their vacation plans.

And so on.

In short, Scanlon asked parents to be patient while the West Chester school district evaluates conditions and determines make-up days based on what makes the most sense.

Well be out driving roads, checking forecasts, and seeing how our snow crews are doing, he said.

Meanwhile, Philadelphia schools are fresh out of snow days as of Wednesday, spokesman Lee Whack told NBC10. That school district automatically builds five snow days into their calendar year, but ran out of them as a fourth noreaster pounded the region.

Thanks to the late winter storm, Philadelphia public schools will get out on June 13. That could change, however, depending on what mother nature has in store for the rest of the academic year.

NBC10 has a complete list of school closures. Click here to see if your school has been impacted.What to Know After dumping more than a foot of snow on parts of the region, the fourth nor'easter of the month moved out early Thursday.

The snow totals ranged from nearly a foot and a half in the Lehigh Valley to a foot in parts of South Jersey & the Pennsylvania suburbs.

The storm caused schools to close and made travel treacherous.

After dumping more than a foot of snow on parts of the region, the fourth nor'easter of the month exited our area Thursday morning leaving plenty of clean up behind.

The major winter storm that battered our area for more than 24 hours completely moved out of South Jersey Thursday morning.



The storm left lots of snow in its wake. On Wednesday, the snow totals ranged from nearly a foot and a half in the Lehigh Valley to more than a foot in parts of Montgomery County to nearly a foot in South Jersey to several inches in much of Delaware. Check here for snow totals across the area.



In Philadelphia there was a range of 5 to 8 inches of snow.

People are waking up Thursday with shovels ready to start clearing sidewalks and cars. Chestnut Hill was just one neighborhood hit with several inches of snow.

The storm also caused thousands of power outages, the majority being in South Jersey, as well as some coastal flooding.

The clean up is just beginning in South Jersey after yet another big storm. Many are hoping that this is the last winter storm of the year.

SEPTA had train and bus service mostly returned to normal by Thursday morning. It took New Jersey Transit until after 1 p.m. to get its Atlantic City Rail Line going again after signal problems.



The snow was heavy and wet. Sleet compacted the snow, making it strenuous to shovel. Those with heart conditions or back troubles should avoid shoveling in the morning.



As people dig out Thursday, the snow started to melt temperatures pushed into the low 40s.

Conditions should be partly sunny and in the low 40s for the next few days. Then we could see more snow Sunday. Check with NBC10 and the app for more details as Sunday draws closer.

Wednesday's storm made travel treacherous for anyone who ventured onto roadways Wednesday. By 10 a.m., poor conditions had already led to a tractor-trailer crash on the Pennsylvania Turnpike and a police-involved crash on I-95 in Philadelphia.



Most malls, museums, schools and offices throughout the region were closed for most of the day.

Mass cancellations were reported for air, rail, and transit travel. About 700 flights heading to and leaving from Philadelphia International Airport were canceled Wednesday. Some flights cancellations and delays remained Thursday.



A First Alert went into effect noon Tuesday and lasted until late Wednesday night. The National Weather Service issued a Winter Storm Warning lasting from Tuesday night through early Thursday.

Numerous towns and cities declared snow emergencies in preparation of the storm. The entire State of New Jersey was also under a State of Emergency.

The nor'easter  the fourth this month and the one that arrived on the first day of spring  struck in two parts.



The first wave of the nor'easter doused the region Tuesday morning with a wintry mix of sleet and rain. There was a lull late Tuesday night. But the storm slowly ramped up around midday Wednesday as the nor'easter intensified off-shore.



Colder temperatures, coupled with heavy snow bands, allowed the snow to accumulate on roads and sidewalks.



Schools in the Philadelphia suburbs dismissed early Tuesday and schools in both the Philadelphia Archdiocese and Philadelphia School District were closed Wednesday. They will open on a two-hour delay Thursday. Sign up for free school closing alerts here.Four days after a classmate opened fire in their school, students of Great Mills High School in St. Mary's County, Maryland, will participate in the March for Our Lives.

A couple of hundred students and alumni plan to go to D.C. on Saturday for the demonstration on the National Mall, recent graduate Newell Rand told News4.

"What needs to be brought about is awareness to school shootings and obviously gun violence," he said.

The students are organizing on Facebook to participate in the demonstration, which is expected to draw thousands of young people from across the country.

Their classmate Austin Wyatt Rollins, 17, opened fire in a hallway of the school just moments before classes were set to start Tuesday, authorities said. Rollins died, and two people were shot: a 16-year-old girl and a 14-year-old boy. The family of the girl identified her as Jaelynn Willey. She is critically wounded. The boy was released from a hospital on Wednesday.

Rand knew Rollins and said he can hardly believe what happened.

"It was kind of just surreal," he said.

"He wasn't this malicious person that came out yesterday. It just wasn't the same Austin we all knew," Rand continued.

A former coach at the school, Aaron Foreman, was rallying support to get students to the march. Foreman posted a video to Facebook on Wednesday calling for donations so students could attend.

Foreman said in an interview that churches have donated vans, stores have given food and gift cards, and others offered to buy Metro cards.

His daughter graduated from Great Mills last year. "This could've been her," he said.

On Facebook, more than 100 Great Mills High students said they were interested in going to the march.

"On Saturday we march with a purpose - to represent our hornet nation and spread awareness of gun violence. That's it," the page says. "We march with the acknowledgement that there are many ways to move forward, whether it be gun reform, actions pertaining to mental illness, establishment of stronger bonds within families and communities, or a combination of all three. We are not limited to any set way to move forward nor do we encourage any specific action. Something has to be done, and that is the only message we have to offer."

Days before the shooting, students walked out of class to protest gun violence in schools.Thousands of young people are expected to descend on Washington, D.C. and other cities across the globe Saturday to demand stronger gun control laws following the massacre at a high school in Parkland, Florida.

More than 800 events are planned worldwide for Saturday's "March for Our Lives," according to the event's website. In Washington, D.C., protesters will hold a rally at noon on Pennsylvania Avenue, between the U.S. Capitol Building and the Trump International Hotel.

Organizers expect 500,000 people to attend. The rally will feature of a number of speakers and musical guests, including Ariana Grande, Demi Lovato and Miley Cyrus.

The Feb. 14 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School reignited the simmering national campaign to curtail gun violence. Tens of thousands of students across the U.S. walked out of their classrooms on March 14 to demand action by politicians, a prelude to Saturday's "March for Our Lives."

"Were the only ones that can speak up," said Jaclyn Corin, a student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. "We have to be the adults in this situation because clearly people have failed us in the government.

Local students are also expected to participate in the massive demonstration.

More than 100 students from Great Mills High School in St. Mary's County, Maryland, plan to attend the march. This week, the school experienced the horror of gun violence firsthand, when a classmate opened fire moments before class was set to start Tuesday. The gunmand died, and two students were shot: a 16-year-old girl and a 14-year-old boy.

"What needs to be brought about is awareness to school shootings and obviously gun violence," said Newell Rand, a recent graduate of Great Mills High School.

The national gun-control movement seems certain to remain energized for the foreseeable future by the infusion of student-led activism, even if Congress and many state legislatures balk at meeting the activists' demands.

Shannon Watts, who founded Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America after the December 2012 school massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, says her nationwide organization has added 135,000 new volunteers since the Parkland shooting who have been helping press elected officials to curb gun violence.

"We've never seen this kind of outpouring of interest, and people getting off the sidelines," Watts said. "We're seeing our events so full, we have to move them to new venues."

Students are also planning a nationwide school walk-out on April 20, which marks the 19th anniversary of the Columbine school shooting.New England is getting a break from what was expected to be a fourth nor'easter bringing up to 10 inches of snow in parts of New England.

Residents around the region had been preparing for the nor'easter to move into New England Wednesday night, expecting the storm to bring another round of heavy, wet snow and possible coastal flooding.

Snow did begin falling in some areas Wednesday afternoon, but the storm is pulling away a lot quicker and the heavy snow bands that were anticipated to come in with this storm did not materialize all that well. They are offshore, far enough away that they will not be of a huge consequence to us Wednesday night.

The snow didn't establish in greater Boston like it was predicted to. It should have been snowing steadily in southeastern Massachusetts and increasing through the night but because it hasn't established yet, our meteorologists have scaled back on the snow amounts.

There will be periods of snow overnight, and the snow is still coming, but it will be a lot less than originally predicted.

With the snow fizzling out, this storm is now expected to bring 1-3 inches to Boston and 3-5 inches in southeastern Massachusetts.

Roads will be wet Thursday morning so there could be slippery spots during the morning commute.

The snow consistency will be on the wetter side, but due to the smaller accumulaton amounts, power outages shouldn't be a concern.

Coastal flood watches were issued, with wind gusts over 50 mph expected in some areas. There will still be gusty winds Wednesday night.



Some school districts across the region announced they will be closed Thursday.

Boston Mayor Marty Walsh announced Wednesday that schools would be closed Thursday.

"Although we're facing some uncertainty in the forecast, Boston is taking the precautionary measure to cancel school tomorrow to ensure the safety of our students," Walsh said in a statement.

Boston Centers for Youth and Families will be open from 7:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. for children 7 and older whose parents are at work.

Walsh said the Department of Public Works crews have up to 800 pieces of equipment ready to pre-treat and clear roadways. There are also 28,000 tons of salt on hand.

The mayor urged residents to stay off the roads and check in on neighbors during the storm, and clear sidewalks and pedestrian ramps once it passes.

In preparation for the storm, which was expected to intensify by late afternoon, dozens of schools announced early dismissals.

In Worcester, schools were dismissed two hours early Wednesday.

"It's a hard call, but I'd rather see the kids get home safe," parent Sonia Scanlon said.

Other parents were frustrated with the decision, especially since not a flake had fallen in most of Massachusetts by Wednesday afternoon.

I think they give them to us when we get nothing, when were expected to get a lot and we end up with nothing, parent Leeann Bronzo said, and then when we do have something, they end up having school and its a big mess.

The school superintendent in Westerly, Rhode Island actually apologized for canceling school. "It was the wrong decision," Superintendent Marc Garceau acknowledged on Facebook.

Some school systems in Massachusetts concerned about running out of time to make up snow days before July 1 have gotten creative.

"About two years ago, the state came out with this option called 'Alternative Structured Day Program,' which would allow us to do what people know as 'Blizzard Bags,'" Melrose Public Schools Superintendent Cyndy Taymore said.

The state requires 900 hours for elementary school students and 990 hours for secondary school students over 180 days.

In Quincy, residents and city workers were preparing for possible flooding after a nor'easter earlier this month caused serious damage. Recovery work has been difficult with storm after storm continuing to hit the area.

Matt Lyons and his family saw their home flooded with 75 inches of water during the nor'easter on the weekend of March 3. Now the water is gone, and Lyons, a carpenter, is getting his basement work space back together.

"We're 80 percent up and running... considering," he said. "We have a wood burning stove that went underwater. That's helping dry things off too.

"You can't get crazy over it. Just work with it," he added. "If the weather would cooperate with us we could get a lot more done."

Meanwhile, the flight-tracking site FlightAware reported more than 4,400 canceled flights within, into, or out the U.S. on Wednesday, with more than 400 of those to and from Boston Logan Airport. Most of those flights were to or from New York City, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C.

Other flights, though, were able to get out ahead of the storm.

"We're from Manchester, they booted us down here to Boston," said Terry Traut, who was at Logan Wednesday. "We are on the direct flight. So we're outta here, gonna be waving at the snow underneath us."

"Glad to miss it," said Marilyn Hoffman. "Glad that we're getting out before everything happens."

On the ground, Amtrak said it would scale back service on the Northeast corridor and some states banned certain types of trucks from major highways.

The MBTA said it will operate regular weekday service on the commuter rail and on the Red, Orange, Blue and Green lines Thursday. Ferry service will also operate regular weekday schedules.

The Wollaston Station bus shuttle that operates all day to and from North Quincy, Wollaston, and Quincy Center due to Wollastons closure will continue to operate, though it may operate on a modified snow route if necessary.

Some buses could also operate on their designated snow routes.

If conditions warrant, the Mattapan Trolley Line may be replaced with dedicated shuttle service Thursday. Customers should check T-Alerts, the MBTA website, and @MBTA on Twitter for the latest service information.Some business owners on Elm Street in downtown Manchester, New Hampshire are asking for the city's help to keep their customers and employees safe.

Mint Bistro owner Tim Baines, a newly elected Alderman in Manchester, said someone tried stealing cash from their register on Monday.

"My general manager came in for work around 1:15 in the afternoon and noticed that the bar drawer was smashed to the ground," Baines said.

Right before this incident, this same man was said to be a block away at Republic Cafe, also on Elm Street.

He came in our back door, said Republic Cafe Partner Peter Macone. He said, 'I was looking for an application,' and one of our cooks said, 'well you could have come in the front door but also why don't you walk out this way.'

Both Macone and Baines gave surveillance footage of those incidents to the Manchester Police.

On Tuesday, Manchester Police arrested Calvin Degreenia, 32, after they say he attempted to steal from a Bob's Furniture Delivery Truck. They say they recognized him from the restaurant surveillance video.

Baines says this incident is part of a bigger problem largely surrounding the opiod drug crisis in Manchester.

If you have these unsettling events when you're trying to walk in the door or going to your car at the end of the night, it can be bad for business, said Baines.

Baines said crime is one of the central reasons he ran for alderman.

I thought I would use my voice and try to fight for what we're all looking for at city hall, Baines said.

In a statement Manchester Mayor Joyce Craig said, I think the city can always be doing more to help businesses downtown, which is why I've been meeting with organizations and holding community office hours  so I can hear firsthand the issues our city is facing, and have real conversations about what we can do to help.

Down here on Elm street, were right here in it, we are talking we're having meetings, we're getting together and we're saying what can we do, said Macone.

Baines said right now the efforts to combat these incidents are largely led by the Elm Street business owners. He said two weeks ago business owners hosted a round table discussion attended by 100-percent local owners.

Macone said he wants to see the city step up.

Wed love to see a lot more police walking down here, Macone said.

I think we need to be more proactive in our approach to make sure that people are feeling safe down here, Baines said.Fire officials in the Three Rivers section of Palmer, Massachusetts say one person died early Thursday morning following a fire at a multi-family home.

Fire officials in the Three Rivers section of Palmer, Massachusetts say one person died early Thursday morning following a fire at a multi-family home.



The fire broke out at a brick home at 9-15 Springfield St. around 2 a.m. where heavy flames were shooting from a third-floor rear porch.

Fire Chief Scott Turner told WWLP-TV there were no additional reports of injuries.

The name of the person who died has not been released.

A total of 11 people live in the building.

The Office of the State Fire Marshal is investigating the exact cause of the fire.The trial of a Connecticut man police say was driving an SUV that crashed in Springfield, Massachusetts, killing four passengers, has been delayed because he has a new lawyer.

The Republican newspaper reports that 19-year-old Aaron Thorne was granted a new lawyer last week, pushing back the start of his trial. Thorne said his previous attorney didn't have a "positive attitude."

The New Haven man faces four counts of manslaughter and other charges stemming from the January 2017 crash in Springfield that claimed the lives of a 20-year-old man and three high school students.

He has pleaded not guilty.

Police say Thorne was driving more than 70 mph (112 kph) when he hit a tree. The SUV had been reported stolen.

The trial was scheduled to start in June. A new date hasn't been set.President Donald Trump's lead lawyer in the special counsel's Russia investigation has resigned amid a shake-up of the president's team, an exit that removes the primary negotiator and legal strategist who had been molding Trump's defense.

The departure of attorney John Dowd comes as the president has personally intensified his attacks on the special counsel and just days after the Trump legal team added a new lawyer, former U.S. attorney Joseph diGenova, who has alleged on television that FBI officials were involved in a "brazen plot" to exonerate Hillary Clinton in the email investigation and to "frame" Trump for nonexistent crimes.

Dowd confirmed his decision Thursday to NBC News, saying, "I love the President and wish him well."

He told the AP that he made the decision voluntarily and denied that his departure, first reported by the New York Times, had to do with Trump ignoring his legal advice.

It already was a delicate time in special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation as Trump's attorneys, including Dowd, have been negotiating with Mueller over the scope and terms of an interview of the president. Trump has told reporters that he was eager to speak with Mueller, but Dowd has been far more apprehensive, and the lawyers have not publicly committed to making Trump available for questioning.

Asked Thursday whether he still wants to speak with Mueller's team, Trump told reporters, "Yes, I would like to."

Dowd's exit nearly a year into Mueller's investigation threatens to undo the cooperation between prosecutors and Trump's lawyers and may herald a stark shift in strategy as the probe reaches closer into the White House and the president's inner circle.

Over the weekend, Dowd issued a statement calling for an end to special counsel's investigation. He said Saturday that he hoped it would conclude "on the merits in light of recent revelations," referring to the firing of former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe the day before.

"I pray that Acting Attorney General Rosenstein will follow the brilliant and courageous example of the FBI Office of Professional Responsibility and Attorney General Jeff Sessions and bring an end to alleged Russia Collusion investigation manufactured by McCabes boss James Comey based upon a fraudulent and corrupt Dossier," John Dowd told NBC News.



The White House and later Dowd had to clarify the statement, saying the president's legal team wasn't calling for Mueller to be fired.

But Trump has upped his public attacks on Mueller.

In a series of tweets since last week, the president has said that the probe never should have started, that it was based on "fraudulent activities," that it was a "WITCH HUNT" and that it is being led by "13 hardened Democrats, some big Crooked Hillary supporters."

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said earlier this week the tweets were a reflection of Trump's frustration with the process of the investigation. She said the White House did not think firing Mueller would be "the most productive step forward."

Another of Trump lawyers, Jay Sekulow, confirmed Dowd's resignation and praised his former colleague.

"John Dowd is a friend and has been a valuable member of our legal team. We will continue our ongoing representation of the President and our cooperation with the Office of Special Counsel," Sekulow said.

This is at least the second major reshuffling of Trump's legal team in the last year. Dowd had taken over the lead lawyer role last summer from New York attorney Marc Kasowitz, who has long been by Trump's side.

Steve Bannon, once a top advisor to Trump, offered his own analysis of the shakeup, saying the president is focused on bringing "aggressive attorneys" to his team in regards to the Russia investigation.

"I think it's very obvious that he is going to go to war on this," Bannon said Thursday at the Financial Times Future of News Conference.

On Dowd's resignation, Bannon claimed "he got fired."

Dowd is a veteran defense lawyer perhaps best known for producing a report for Major League Baseball on star player Pete Rose's gambling habits. He's also played a role in some of the defining legal quagmires of the last four decades  among them, the Iran-Contra affair, the Keating Five, the Enron collapse and a scandal over the firing of U.S. attorneys.

As the investigation progressed, Dowd has touted the cooperation of the White House and Trump campaign with Mueller's investigation, calling it "the most transparent response in history."

His work on behalf of Trump has previously raised eyebrows.

In December, he took ownership of a controversial tweet from Trump that said former White House national security adviser Michael Flynn was dismissed months earlier for having lied to the FBI. The tweet appeared to confirm for the first time that the White House knew at the time of Flynn's firing that he had misled the FBI. That was important because fired FBI director James Comey has alleged that Trump, in a private Oval Office conversation, had encouraged him to end an investigation into Flynn.

Amid media scrutiny of the tweet, Dowd claimed to have written it himself.Vice President Mike Pence visited New Hampshire to discuss the Trump administration's tax plan and speak at a fundraiser for Republican Gov. Chris Sununu's 2018 re-election campaign.

Pence spoke Thursday afternoon at Manchester Downtown Hotel as part of a series called "Tax Cuts to Put America First." America First Policies is a nonprofit organization that promotes President Donald Trump's policies.

Pence's visit comes three days after Trump stopped in Manchester to discuss policies to combat the opioid crisis, including his plan for punishments such as the death penalty for those caught trafficking highly addictive drugs.

Sununu has strong approval ratings in recent polls.Microsoft is set to make Windows Server 2019 generally available in the second half of the year, opening up access to its preview build through its Insiders program now and targeting data centers with new features to handle hybrid cloud setups and hyperconverged infrastructure.

The next version of Windows Server also adds new security features and enhances support for containers and Linux.

If you want to check out the release for yourself, sign up for the Insiders program.

In a Monday announcement, Microsoft noted that general availability of Windows Server 2019 will mark the next release in its Long-Term Servicing Channel (LTSC), which essentially rolls up semi-annual Windows Server releases and related tweaks for enterprises that do not want to continuously update their server software.

A semi-annual channel server update will also go out at about the same time as the Windows Server 2019/LTSC release, but Microsoft urges data centers that have workloads involving SQL Server, SharePoint, and Windows-Server-defined workloads to adopt the LTSC release.

Aiming at hybrid cloud

This is the first major release of Windows Server since 2016, and Microsoft is doubling down on features for hybrid cloud deployments. Cloud computing promises operational efficiency and cost optimization, but most big companies are operating hybrid computing environments for a variety of reasons, including compliance issues.

At its Ignite conference last September, Microsoft introduced Project Honolulu, a browser-based management application. Now, the company says that Windows Server 2019 together with Project Honolulu will allow administrators to integrate existing applications and infrastructure with services such as Azure Backup and Azure File Sync.

In a nod to the popularity of hyperconverged infrastructure, which merges compute and storage systems, Microsoft noted that with Windows Server 2016, it worked with hardware providers on validated HCI designs for customers. It says the next release of the server software it will beef up performance, reliability and the ability to scale for such designs.

Meanwhile, to simplify management of hyperconverged infrastructure, Microsoft is also enabling Project Honolulu to act together with Windows Server 2019 as a control dashboard for HCI deployments.

Microsoft Project Honolulus Hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) management dashboard in Windows Server 2019 Preview.

Microsoft is also enhancing Windows Server as an application platform, saying that one goal is to reduce container image size to optimize download and development time and performance. It says it's shooting to cut the Server Core base container image to a third of its current 5G size.

The company notes that Kubernetes support is now in beta and that Windows Server 19 will enhance compute, storage and networking of Kubernetes clusters.

The company has already offered the ability to run Linux containers side by side with Windows containers on a Windows server, and now with Windows Server 2019 will let Linux developers bring scripts to Windows using standard tools like Open SSH, Curl and Tar.

On the security side, it's broadening support for Linux: Windows Server Shielded VMs prevent tampering with virtual machines by anyone except for administrators, and Windows Server 2019 will extend Shielded Windows to include Linux VMs.

Though Windows Server 2019 has the same licensing model as Windows Server 2016, the company warns that it is "highly likely" that pricing will increase for Windows Server Access Licensing (CAL). More details will be available closer to general availabilityBecause Microsoft has shifted to a more gradual upgrade of Windows Server, many of the features that will become available with Windows Server 2019 have already been in use in live corporate networks, and here are half a dozen of the best.

Enterprise-grade hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI)

With the release of Windows Server 2019, Microsoft rolls up three years of updates for its HCI platform. Thats because the gradual upgrade schedule Microsoft now uses includes what it calls Semi-Annual Channel releases  incremental upgrades as they become available. Then every couple of years it creates a major release called the Long-Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) version that includes the upgrades from the preceding Semi-Annual Channel releases.

The LTSC Windows Server 2019 is due out this fall, and is now available to members of Microsofts Insider program.

While the fundamental components of HCI (compute, storage and networking) have been improved with the Semi-Annual Channel releases, for organizations building datacenters and high-scale software defined platforms, Windows Server 2019 is a significant release for the software-defined datacenter.

With the latest release, HCI is provided on top of a set of components that are bundled in with the server license. This means a backbone of servers running HyperV to enable dynamic increase or decrease of capacity for workloads without downtime. (For more on Microsoft HCI go here.)

GUI for Windows Server 2019

A surprise for many enterprises that started to roll-out the Semi-Annual Channel versins of Windows Server 2016 was the lack of a GUI for those releases. The Semi-Annual Channel releases only supported ServerCore (and Nano) GUI-less configurations. With the LTSC release of Windows Server 2019, IT Pros will once again get their desktop GUI of Windows Server in addition to the GUI-less ServerCore and Nano releases.

Project Honolulu

With the release of Windows Server 2019, Microsoft will formally release their Project Honolulu server management tool. Project Honolulu is a central console that allows IT pros to easily manage GUI and GUI-less Windows 2019, 2016 and 2012R2 servers in their environments.

Early adopters have found the simplicity of management that Project Honolulu provides by rolling up common tasks such as performance monitoring (PerfMon), server configuration and settings tasks, and the management of Windows Services that run on server systems. This makes these tasks easier for administrators to manage on a mix of servers in their environment.

Improvements in security

Microsoft has continued to include built-in security functionality to help organizations address an expect breach model of security management. Rather than assuming firewalls along the perimeter of an enterprise will prevent any and all security compromises, Windows Server 2019 assumes servers and applications within the core of a datacenter have already been compromised.

Windows Server 2019 includes Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) that assess common vectors for security breaches, and automatically blocks and alerts about potential malicious attacks. Users of Windows 10 have received many of the Windows Defender ATP features over the past few months. Including Windows Defender ATP on Windows Server 2019 lets them take advantage of data storage, network transport and security-integrity components to prevent compromises on Windows Server 2019 systems.

Smaller, more efficient containers

Organizations are rapidly minimizing the footprint and overhead of their IT operations and eliminating more bloated servers with thinner and more efficient containers. Windows Insiders have benefited by achieving higher density of compute to improve overall application operations with no additional expenditure in hardware server systems or expansion of hardware capacity.

Windows Server 2019 has a smaller, leaner ServerCore image that cuts virtual machine overhead by 50-80 percent. When an organization can get the same (or more) functionality in a significantly smaller image, the organization is able to lower costs and improve efficiencies in IT investments.

Windows subsystem on Linux

A decade ago, one would rarely say Microsoft and Linux in the same breath as complimentary platform services, but that has changed. Windows Server 2016 has open support for Linux instances as virtual machines, and the new Windows Server 2019 release makes huge headway by including an entire subsystem optimized for the operation of Linux systems on Windows Server.

The Windows Subsystem for Linux extends basic virtual machine operation of Linux systems on Windows Server, and provides a deeper layer of integration for networking, native filesystem storage and security controls. It can enable encrypted Linux virtual instances. Thats exactly how Microsoft provided Shielded VMs for Windows in Windows Server 2016, but now native Shielded VMs for Linux on Windows Server 2019.

Enterprises have found the optimization of containers along with the ability to natively support Linux on Windows Server hosts can decrease costs by eliminating the need for two or three infrastructure platforms, and instead running them on Windows Server 2019.

Because most of the new features in Windows Server 2019 have been included in updates over the past couple years, these features are not earth-shattering surprises. However, it also means that the features in Windows Server 2019 that were part of Windows Server 2016 Semi-Annual Channel releases have been tried, tested, updated and proven already, so that when Windows Server 2019 ships, organizations dont have to wait six to 12 months for a service pack of bug fixes.

This is a significant change that is helping organizations plan their adoption of Windows Server 2019 sooner than orgs may have adopted a major release platform in the past, and with significant improvements for enterprise datacenters in gaining the benefits of Windows Server 2019 to meet security, scalability, and optimized data center requirements so badly needed in todays fast-paced environments.

(Rand Morimoto is owner of the consulting firm Convergent Computing, which was Microsoft's Global Partner of the Year (2014) and an early adopter organization across all of the Microsoft products and services.)Is it only me who finds it just a bit dubious that carriers are advocating SD-WAN? SD-WAN was practically invented to get away from the clutches of carriers, and now we're supposed to trust them to be the stewards of WAN transformation?

Carriers lost that privilege when their business model grew out-of-step with how we do business. We grew tired of being charged double Internet prices for MPLS capacity. In an era of self-service, carriers were still making us wait to troubleshoot problems. And we were astonished that new MPLS circuits could take weeks, even months, to bring into a new site when you could often get started with broadband in a matter of days and upgrade to DIA when ready.

Carriers seem to look at SD-WAN as just another tool for keeping customers on MPLS. As Shawn Hakl, senior vice president of business products at Verizon, noted in this interview, customers arent replacing MPLS with Internet, theyre adding SD-WAN: What we see is a lot of MPLS plus LTE backup, he told SDXCentral.

It makes sense. After all, the revenue carriers see from an SD-WAN-over-the-Internet contract is a fraction of an MPLS deal. Thats usually a big disincentive for delivering SD-WAN without MPLS.

Over the years, my experience has been that carrier teams do their best selling with whats been lucrative and known  capacity. Have locations that need to be connected together with their lucrative MPLS or leased line services, and carrier teams will have all the right answers. Do something a bit different and thats another matter. The latest example came this past week.

The IT team at one of my Fortune 500 customers was evaluating SD-WAN services for its global network. The team was leaning towards an independent, secure SD-WAN provider when an executive pushed to evaluate the SD-WAN offering from one of the major carriers. He was more comfortable with an established provider than a young company. The team consented and invited the carrier in for a meeting.

From the outset, things were off. The carriers sales team couldnt answer some basic questions about the SD-WAN equipment and firewalls they sold. Fast forward to a Proof of Concept (POC) when they eventually received the hardware, the carrier sales engineers couldnt configure the SD-WAN appliances properly. For a week, they worked on the issue until bringing in the SE from the appliance vendor who got it to run in an hour.

But before that happened, the sales team had punted to another team who misstated the customers requirements, proposing a secure web gateway (SWG) to supplement the SD-WAN and its integrated firewall. Apparently, the initial intake was poorly executed, and the team failed to communicate the proper customer requirements to the new group. This required a complete rehash of our introductory meeting.

Carriers still seem to work at a different speed than todays business. Another client I had was told by their carrier they could start a Proof of Concept (POC) in just two or three weeks. After engaging with them, it ended up that the carrier would need 90 days just to get the hardware. Why? Because, apparently, sales didnt provide all of the necessary information, namely the public facing IP address the SD-WAN appliances would need to pull down the configuration profiles for installation and setup of appliances. There simply was not adequate communication among the carriers staff.

And once you sign with a carrier, the same kind of process and overhead continues to be a problem. Carriers need time to receive equipment from their suppliers which further delays deployment. How long? One product manager at a major U.S. carrier told me that while they have CPE inventory, they require at least eight weeks to restock that inventory. Which raises the question, if a bunch of different carrier customer installations implemented at once, will you be a victim of no more inventory?

A two-month window can make an awfully big difference for the bottom line. By switching from MPLS to a hybrid configuration, another customer of mine was going to save $5 million a year. Delaying that transition by eight weeks would mean paying $770,000 in MPLS and management costs alone.

Theres no reason why that should be the case. SD-WAN was a technology designed to be deployed in minutes not months. Yes, MPLS can and often should be part of a hybrid WAN today. But over the long term, enterprises should be able to abandon MPLS when they have a better approach. Simply using SD-WAN to lock enterprises into MPLS, isnt WAN transformation. Its just perpetuating the same WAN and carrier problems weve always had.The wildfire growth of IoT is arguably the most important trend happening in technology today, but the ease with which bad actors can exploit its manifold security vulnerabilities has been demonstrated many times in just the past couple of years.

Despite the generally laissez-faire stance the U.S. takes toward regulating technology companies, the severity of the threat  IoT security issues affect healthcare, infrastructure, transportation and many other crucial parts of society  has some calling for regulation of the IoT.

Regulations lag the technology



Given the speed at which technology, particularly around IoT, develops these days, from drawing board to prototype to production, plenty of people would argue that its impossible for a regulatory regime to keep pace.

According to James Waldo, a professor at Harvards Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and that departments CTO, theres little hope for a set of regulations that evolves along with the technology.

The timescale by which regulation and legislation works is immensely different than the timescale that technology development works on, he said. The regulators tend to be reactive, and reactive to things that happened four or five years ago.

That being the case, the simplest way to address many of the most grievous harms that insecure IoT systems can inflict is at a basic engineering level  its not unreasonable to expect devices produced today not to have unchangeable default passwords, nor to require them to be changed from the default by consumers once activated.

Nevertheless, current culture in the technology sector  including many of the brand-new entrants that are part of the IoT market, which is projected to reach 45.4 billion Internet-connectable devices by 2021, according to IHS Markit  is to get products out the door and into customers hands as quickly as possible.

This, of course, requires corners to be cut, and security is inevitably one of the first of those corners. Norman Sadeh, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, said that the problem could well be exacerbated by the influx of new companies in the connected device market.

IoT devices  arent just going to come from sophisticated vendors, but might also be developed by two guys in a garage, he said. A couple of sensors, an Arduino or Raspberry Pi, and an IoT gadget is born.

The FTC is pushing for IoT regulations



The U.S. has historically been hesitant to impose regulatory rules on businesses, particularly in the technology sector  witness the recent decisions rolling back the application of common carrier rules to ISPs  which means its likely that any attempt to regulate IoT technology will be done with a soft touch.The fundraising movie is shortlisted in the Charity Film Awards

Filming taking place at Mary Hare

HOT on the heels of the Oscar-winning film The Silent Child, pupils from Newburys Mary Hare School for deaf children are celebrating their own movie success.

Mary Hare Primary Schools film has beaten hundreds of other entries from around the country to make it to the finals of the prestigious Charity Film Awards 2018.

Peter Gale, principal and CEO of Mary Hare, said: We are delighted to have been shortlisted for the Charity Film Awards.

I am very proud of the primary pupils who took part and of the confidence they showed throughout the filming process.

As the only charity related to deafness through to the final round it would be lovely to be in with a chance of winning.

The film was made for the Primary Appeal, which was launched last July with the help of its Ambassador, Pippa Middleton. The Appeal is aiming to raise money to relocate the primary school to the same site as the secondary school at Snelsmore Common.

The idea behind the film was a spoof on a boardroom scene, with the primary pupils helping to write the script and star in it themselves.

The school said it was really proud of the pupils, who were very excited to be involved and who rehearsed for weeks, learning their lines and perfecting their pronunciation, which is particularly challenging for the profoundly deaf youngsters.

The film was then shot in The Great Hall of the current primary school at Greenham with a few takes needed.

Mr Gale urged everyone to get behind his schools entry and added: I would welcome our local community getting behind us and voting for our film for The Peoples Choice Award and would like to thank all those who have voted so far.

The awards are split into eight categories depending on the organisations turnover, to ensure even the smallest charities have a chance of winning.

An overall winner will also be chosen by the panel of judges and a Peoples Choice Award is up for grabs by the film that receives the highest number of public votes.

All of the winners will be announced at a gala awards ceremony in London in May.

To vote for Mary Hare click here.Following are some of the scholarship funds currently accepting applications from students in Greater New Milford this year.

The Greater New Milford Film Festival scholarship: Open to students who are planning to study some area of filmmaking, such as, directing, producing, acting, designing, audiotechnics, videography, etc. Applications available at www.filmnewmilfordct.org, on the commissions Facebook page and at New Milford High School.

New Milford Community Ambulance Scholarship: Deadline: April 1. Available to a New Milford resident enrolled in or planning to attend college or technical school and pursue a medical course of study. Applications available at NMHS guidance office.

Washington Environmental Council scholarship -- the Ken Williams Memorial Scholarship: Deadline: April 13. Grants of up to $1,000 to middle, high school and college students who live in Washington, Roxbury and Bridgewater, provided they attend or attended school in Washington, and who would like to attend environmentally oriented programs during the summer. Washington residents will have preference, but all other application factors will be equal. For more information, visit www.wec-ct.org/scholarships.

Washington Environmental Council scholarship -- Mary Anne Erichsen Memorial Scholarship: Deadline: April 13. Grants of up to $2,000 available to students from Washington, Roxbury or Bridgewater who are in sound scholastic standing, provided the student attended or has attended high school in Washington, and are interested in pursuing environmental studies in college. Residents of Washington will have preference, all other application factors being equal. Applications available at www.wec-ct.org/scholarships.

Roxbury scholarships: Deadline: April 22. Open to those who are Roxbury residents at time of award ceremony, and accepted into an undergraduate or graduate program at an accredited two- or four-year college, university or state approved school for trade instruction or special occupational training that offers a degree or certification. Part-time students with extenuating circumstances will be considered. Applications available at town hall, Minor Memorial Library, the guidance office at SVS and online at www.roxburyscholarshipfoundation.com. For more information, email roxburyscholarshipfoundation@gmail.com. Applications must be returned to Roxbury Scholarship Foundation, P.O. Box 106, Roxbury, CT 06783.

Gaylordsville Historical Societys Alan S. Farnham Memorial Scholarship: Deadline: May 1. A $500 scholarship is open to a graduating senior who lives within the Gaylordsville fire district. Scholarship is in memory of Alan S. Farnham. Lt. Farnham, who attended the one-room schoolhouse in Gaylordsville and died in combat in Vietnam. Applications are available at New Milford High School, Henry Abbott Tech and Nonnewaug.A team of researchers at the Universitat Politecnica de Valencia and the Instituto de Fisica Corpuscular, joint center between the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC, in Spanish) and the University of Valencia have participated in the development of a system that helps diagnose breast cancer and is able to reduce the number of false positives. This new method provides 90% detection reliability, the highest of this kind of systems, and it will be quite useful in clinical practice. Scientific groups from seven other international centers are taking part in this project.

According to the researchers, the methods used today by radiologists are limited in detecting potentially suspicious areas in the image. However, this device is able to reduce the number of suspicious areas and false alarms and still provide information about the presence of a cancer. To do so, it is based on artificial intelligence techniques such as neural networks and the use of predictive algorithms.

Mammograms are diagnostic tests that for years have proved to be efficient for the early detection of breast cancer, one of the most prevalent tumors in developed countries. This new system can reduce false positives in every age range and minimize false alarms, thus preventing the need to do more damaging tests for women. In addition, it will make it possible to reduce clinical costs, which will help to incorporate new risk groups into the detection campaigns.

"Moreover, if there are other clinical signs that make the professional suspect there is a positive cancer diagnosis but it's not obvious, the professional can expand areas where there is a greater suspicion of a tumor but is not detectable by the expert human eye. The aim is to locate future areas for biopsy," explains Francisco Albiol, researcher at CSIC in the Instituto de Fisica Corpuscular.

"A patient's life expectancy increases 20% for every year in advance that the breast cancer is detected. Thus, the algorithm we have designed can be a highly useful tool for the early detection of this kind of cancer, providing clinical professionals an additional expert system," says Francisco Albiol.

Now, the partners of the project are studying how can they translate this method into clinical practice. "One of the possibilities might be using it to screen for the easiest cases in order to reduce radiologists' fatigue," adds Alberto Albiol, researcher at the Institute of Telecommunications and Multimedia Applications (iTEAM, in Spanish) of the Universitat Politecnica de Valencia.

Digital Mammography DREAM Challenges

DREAM Challenges proposes challenges to the scientific community that are related to biology and medicine. The researchers submit their projects and those selected take part in the project, whose objective is to improve life for society in different aspects.

This system that helps diagnose breast cancer is the result of Digital Mammography DREAM Challenges, a global project promoted by the main American institutions fighting cancer, along with multinational companies such as IBM and Amazon. The aim is to improve breast cancer detection by interpreting the mammography with artificial intelligence techniques. 120 multidisciplinary teams have participated in the project. The Instituto de Fisica Corpuscular and the Universitat Politecnica de Valencia are the only Spanish partners.

In this scientific study, patients' data provided by USA medical institutions were analyzed. The results were recently presented at the International Society for Computational Biology Conference, held in New York.

"In order to use this kind of technology on a large scale, we need to generate and maintain local data collections from patients that generally represent the ethnic, nutritional and economical composition of a health system," explains Francisco Albiol.It is a principle of modern architecture that less may be more. This principle does not apply to information as a basis of far-reaching decisions, it seems. But: Many people shy away from going to the doctor's, because they are afraid of unpleasant truths, such as the diagnosis of a disease. Researchers of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and Tilburg University, Netherlands, have developed a method to overcome this fear, which is reported in the journal Management Science.

"It is a fundamental assumption in economics that decision-makers welcome information. The more knowledge they have, the better it is," Nora Szech, holder of the Chair of Political Economy, explains. "If the decision is of fundamental importance to one's own life, however, this is not always true," the economist continues. As an example, she mentions patients that may possibly be affected by a serious disease. "They often shy away from the diagnostic test." To solve this problem, Szech has developed a method that provides the patients with an alternative to the often feared precise tests.

Shying away from diagnosis reduces options of prevention and of adapting life. An example: The incurable hereditary disease Chorea Huntington has been predictable with the help of genetic tests for decades already. If one parent is affected, the descendants have a risk of 50% of being affected by the same disease at the age of about 40. The genetic defect causes most severe physical and psychic damage, such that the patients will need full-time care after a while. Empirical studies reveal that patients change their life drastically as soon as they know that they will remain healthy or fall ill. Professional, financial, and family plans are adapted accordingly. "Still, most risk patients decide against the test," Szech says. "People do not want to live with the burden of knowing that the disease will break out," Nikolaus Schweizer of Tilburg University adds. The reason for refusing tests typically is a reaction that anticipates future experience: "If I am 20 years old and get the information that I will fall ill at the age of 40, this will strongly affect my well-being in the next healthy years already," Szech explains. "Many fear to lose hope."

To cope with this problem, the economist uses findings of behavioral economics and psychology. Earlier studies of moral behavior by Szech focused on the unfavorable effects of diffusion or spreading of responsibility. "Whoever can hide behind others will behave more recklessly and greedily," she found. When having to choose between winning money or saving the life of a mouse, test persons more often decided in favor of the former option when the decision was made jointly in a group. If the persons were solely responsible and alone, they mostly refused the money and saved the mouse. "Group decisions are based on logics, the decision might have been made by another person in the group."

When fearing a bad diagnosis, however, the power of diffusion can be used positively. This is demonstrated by Schweizer's and Szech's new test methods: "If, for example, the samples of two risk patients are mixed, the test loses part of its horror." If the genetic defect does not exist, both patients will be relieved. They will remain healthy and can organize their lives accordingly. They may give birth to children without being afraid of the disease and of passing it on to them. They can choose their job accordingly or make old-age provisions. If the genetic defect exists, however, it remains unclear who has the defect or whether both patients have it. "The individual has a chance of 33% of not coming down with Chorea Huntington," Szech explains. Such a result may be worse than the initial situation when the risk of falling ill was 50%, Szech admits. "But there is still good reason for hope to remain healthy." Randomized methods might also help lower the barrier to testing, because many people, according to empirical studies, have a somewhat distorted picture of probabilities, Schweizer adds. "A clear diagnosis and all-clear signal are very good for the well-being. This is what the new methods offer without the feared risk of learning that the disease will inevitably break out in the future."

According to Szech, tests using mixed blood samples have already been made in many countries, but in a different context. Examples are examinations of donated blood or for the military sector, where diseases were to be excluded in order to save costs. Szech does not see any legal or ethic obstacles to such tests in Germany. The deliberately less precise tests can also be carried out for individuals when randomizing the evaluation of the sample. A mixed blood sample is not absolutely necessary. "So far, we have focused on making medical tests as precise as possible. It is good to have these tests. But when hardly anybody dares to have them made, we need additional options," Szech says.A study by the University of Tampere in Finland used protein profiling to find new prostate cancer mechanisms that are not shown by aberrations at the genomic level. Several new potential biomarkers of prostate cancer were also found.

Genes that affect prostate cancer evolution have been studied for a long time. However, changes in the protein levels are not well known.

The Center for Prostate Cancer Research and the Center for Proteomics and Personalized Medicine at the University of Tampere cooperated to profile the protein expression of prostate cancer by using mass spectrometry for the first time. The researchers compared protein expression to genomic and messenger RNAs in the same samples.

The result was that the changes in gene copy numbers and DNA methylation largely explain messenger RNA expression but not the changes on the protein level. The association between messenger RNA expression and protein levels was also weak. The study thus uncovered such mechanisms of prostate cancer that are not indicated by the alterations at the genomic level.

"In particular, changes in the citric acid cycle emerged in our analyzes," Adjunct Professor Leena Latonen says.

"The results enable exploring the significance of these changes," Latonen continues.

In addition to the disease mechanisms, protein profiling revealed several potential new biomarkers.

According to Professor Tapio Visakorpi, biomarkers able to recognize the aggressive forms of prostate cancer would be especially useful. That is one of the aspects on which the researchers will focus next.

Source: http://www.uta.fi/en/news/story/proteins-reveal-new-mechanisms-prostate-cancerBottom Line: A smartwatch coupled with a machine learning algorithm was able to detect irregular heartbeat, or atrial fibrillation (AF), with high accuracy in a small group of patients undergoing treatment to restore normal heart rhythm but with lower accuracy in a larger group of people with a self-reported history of AF.

Why The Research Is Interesting: Atrial fibrillation affects 34 million people worldwide and is a leading cause of stroke. AF often has no symptoms and it can go undetected until a stroke happens. There is interest in readily accessible ways to monitor for AF.

Who and When: 9,750 participants with an Apple Watch enrolled in the Health eHeart Study, including 347 with self-reported AF, and another group of 51 patients undergoing cardioversion, a treatment using medication or electricity, to restore regular heart rhythm from 2016 to March 2017; participants wore smartwatches to collect heart rate and step count data as part of the development and training of a deep neural network, which is a type of machine learning algorithm, to detect AF.

What (Study Measures): Validation of the neural network to detect AF with 51 patients undergoing cardioversion compared against the standard of 12-lead electrocardiography (ECG); and a second exploratory analysis using smartwatch data from 1,617 ambulatory individuals to classify those with AF compared against self-reported AF.

How (Study Design): This was an observational study. Researchers were not intervening for purposes of the study and cannot control all the natural differences that could explain the study findings.

Authors: Gregory M. Marcus, M.D., M.A.S., University of California, San Francisco, and co-authors

Study Limitation: All participants already owned a smartwatch or, among the patients undergoing cardioversion, had a coordinator provide assistance; therefore, it is possible these results would not generalize to less tech-savvy individuals.

Study Conclusions: These data support further research regarding the use of commercially available smartwatches coupled with a deep neural network for the purpose of detecting AF.Four faculty members at New Mexico State University have published findings of their study involving effective measures to remedy stress among adolescents.

The research, which was completed by faculty members from NMSU's College of Health and Social Services' School of Nursing and an associate professor from the University of San Francisco, focused on the use of two stress reduction devices  the EnergyPod and the SleepWing. Both devices provide users with a place to relax and sleep.

"The Energy Pod is a napping system where you lay in it for 20 minutes. It's kind of like a cat nap," said Stephanie Lynch, an assistant professor in the NMSU School of Nursing and a nurse practitioner who co-authored the study. "You wear headphones, there's music playing. The Sleep Wing is the same process but you lay on a pillow with a device under it. It's more portable."

In 2009, article co-author and NMSU School of Nursing Associate Professor Linda Summers, also a nurse practitioner, installed an EnergyPod, which had been purchased years earlier with the help of funding from the Community Foundation of New Mexico, to use at Gadsden High School. One day, two students who had been fighting were brought into the school nurse's office by a security guard. One student was asked to rest on a nurse's cot, and the other student was allowed to use the Energy Pod. Twenty minutes later, the student using the Energy Pod emerged feeling refreshed and less agitated, while the student on the cot continued to be aggressive.

Since then, both devices have been used in the nurse's offices at several local high schools. The SleepWing is being used at Mayfield High School and Arrowhead Early College High School, and the EnergyPod is in use at Las Cruces, Onate, Gadsden and Chaparral high schools.

"What we've seen is students when they're anxious or they're having a bad day will come in and lay in the pod for 20 minutes," Lynch said. "The nice thing about it is the students go back to class. They don't have to call their mothers; they don't have to miss a day of school. In some of the high schools we actually have teachers using it if they have a break between classes and they're having a rough morning."

Lynch said the devices also help migraine sufferers with sensitivities to light and sound during migraine attacks.

The study looked at 99 students in four area high schools who reported feeling agitated. The study found that all participants "showed an improvement in their mood after being in the Sleep Wing or Energy Pod for 20 minutes."

"Clearly there was a significant difference between before and after, and all of the kids went back to class after a 20-minute nap," Summers said. "Adolescents have a lot of stress in general. They have a lot of pressures, a lot of them have after-school jobs, a lot of them have after-school activities, homework, relationship issues, parental issues, and what we found is that a lot of adolescents are sleeping on couches, not necessarily in a bedroom where it's quiet. There are lots of reasons why people have disrupted sleep or are agitated."

Along with Lynch and Summers, the study's co-authors are Conni DeBlieck, an NMSU assistant professor in the School of Nursing; Anita Reinhardt, an NMSU associate professor in the School of Nursing; and Wanda Borges, an associate professor in the University of San Francisco School of Nursing and Health Professions.

Use of the SleepWing and EnergyPod devices in area schools attracted worldwide media attention since it allows for sleep-deprived and agitated students to take breaks within the school day. Researchers at NMSU are now looking at whether the devices, which are also located in a room in the College of Health and Social Services for anyone on campus to use, can be useful for nursing students experiencing test anxiety.

"We replicated the study here at the School of Nursing using the SleepWing and the EnergyPod, but what we're looking for in that replication is actually test anxiety within nursing students," DeBlieck said. "What we've found in the preliminary findings is that when we were testing the adolescents, there wasn't a change in heart rate. When we looked at the nursing students with anxiety we found that their heart rate and their blood pressure actually decreased."

Alexa Doig, director of the School of Nursing, said she feels that the NMSU nursing faculty are incredibly well positioned to conduct this kind of research because of their vast clinical experience and connection with community-based organizations, such as the school districts.

"Our nurse researchers are focused on improving the physical and mental health of people in this community by translating research evidence to practice and then ensuring that the intervention has a positive impact," Doig said.The Trump administration is weighing whether to allow Texas to receive millions of federal Medicaid dollars for its family planning program, which bars abortion providers.

The Lone Star State eliminated its Medicaid-funded family planning program five years ago when state officials said they wanted to specifically exclude Planned Parenthood because the group provides abortions. Dozens of women's health clinics closed as Texas established a wholly state-funded program that officials say today serves 220,000 women.

Medicaid's family planning program is optional for states and used by half of them to provide contraception services for low-income women who earn too much to qualify for traditional Medicaid.

Texas, Iowa and Missouri gave up that federal money to avoid supporting groups that offer abortion. Planned Parenthood says it does not use any government money for abortions.

Texas is the first state to appeal to a more conservative White House to restore the funds. The federal government has historically declined to provide Medicaid dollars to states that don't allow patients to choose between "any willing provider." Texas is asking for a change in that position.

As part of its Medicaid Nation series, Kaiser Health News is examining the far-reaching impact of Medicaid  which has expanded its services in the past decade  and how millions of American households routinely access health care through its programs.

The provision that covers only family planning is a tiny part of Medicaid, which now serves about 74 million Americans. But it is seen by advocates as a vital way to avoid unwanted pregnancies and for states to save money by reducing Medicaid-covered births and coverage for infants and children.

Nationally, about 2.8 million people were enrolled in the coverage last year, according to a Kaiser Health News survey of state Medicaid officials. California alone had 1.8 million people in the program.

"This is expanding Medicaid to cut Medicaid," said Elizabeth Momany, associate research scientist at the University of Iowa. "If you avert one childbirth, you save quite a bit," she said, noting that children on full Medicaid remain in the program for at least five years after birth, on average.

Medicaid began in 1965 as a way to provide for poor children, their mothers and people with disabilities. Maternal benefits are a key part of traditional Medicaid. It pays for half of all U.S. births and covers 45 percent of children under the age of 6.

The federal government encourages the benefit limited to family planning which does not include physician visits or hospital care  by covering 90 percent of the cost. In contrast, Medicaid covers births and related costs at 50 to 74 percent, with states picking up the rest of the tab.

The cost savings help explain why the family planning program is popular among states. Even some of those most opposed to the expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act  including the entire Southeast  largely take part in the Medicaid family planning program. North Carolina, South Carolina, Alabama and Florida rank in the top five by enrollment, behind California, the Kaiser survey found.

For two decades, states across the country, red, blue and purple, have expanded Medicaid eligibility for family planning services because doing so helps people to avoid unintended pregnancies and to plan and space wanted pregnancies," said Adam Sonfield, senior policy manager at the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health research organization that supports abortion rights. "In the process, that has also been proven to save the state and federal governments many millions of dollars.

While eligibility and benefits vary by state, the family planning programs generally provide free coverage for a wide array of contraceptives, including birth control pills and long-acting implants. Some also provide checkups, assistance in kicking tobacco, cancer screenings and testing for sexually transmitted infections.

In family planning programs around the country, services are generally provided by Planned Parenthood clinics, county health departments, federally funded community health centers and private physician offices. Critics say prohibiting Planned Parenthood from family planning programs would hurt patients' access to services.

Eligibility in some states starts as early as age 12, while others automatically enroll women in the programs after their maternity benefit expires, typically 60 days after giving birth.

In California and some other states, both men and women are eligible, but women make up the vast majority of the enrollees.

North Carolina Medicaid officials estimate the program saves the state about $15 million a year, according to spokesman Cobey Culton.

Alabama has also seen savings. Kari White, a health policy professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, said the program covers about 120,000 women in the state with income levels below 141 percent of the federal poverty level, or about $17,000 for an individual.

An evaluation she conducted for the state last year found the birth rate for women enrolled in the program was one-third of what would have been estimated without the coverage.

"It helps to save Medicaid dollars overall to have these programs," White said.

Even the Trump administration, which is seeking to reduce the number of adults on Medicaid rolls, signaled its support of the family planning program in late December when it approved a 10-year extension of Mississippi's program.

California's program  called Family Pact (Planning, Access, Care and Treatment)  covers people with incomes up to 200 percent of the federal poverty level (about $24,000) who don't have other sources of family planning coverage.

"It provides a very essential public health benefit to all Californians who otherwise wouldn't get these services," said Claire Brindis, director of the Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies at the University of California-San Francisco, who evaluated California's program.

A big reason California's enrollment is so much higher than other states, in addition to its much larger population, is that undocumented immigrants can also receive the services, although their care is paid for only with state funds.

Marta Mateo of Los Angeles is using the family planning program for a tubal ligation to prevent another pregnancy.

"I'm ready to have my tubes tied," she said in the lobby at Eisner Pediatric & Family Medical Center as the youngest of her four children slept in her arms. "I don't want any more babies."

Mateo said she's grateful for the coverage because her factory job doesn't offer it, and she can't afford to buy it on her own.

"I just don't have the money for that," she said. "This is a good opportunity for us to get care."

Nationwide, the number of women covered by the Medicaid family planning program dropped from 3.8 million in 2013 to last year's 2.8 million, as many people gained other coverage through the Affordable Care Act, according to the KHN survey and interviews with state officials. The enrollment decline was also due to several states discontinuing the program.

Three states that expanded Medicaid under the ACA dropped the program  Michigan, Illinois and Ohio. But the Medicaid expansion covers women up to 138 percent of the federal poverty level, which is an annual income of about $16,700 for an individual, while the family planning programs had an average eligibility level of 185 percent of federal poverty level, or $22,400.

KHN's coverage of women's health care issues is supported in part by The David and Lucile Packard Foundation.Sounds, photographs, light. Three elements are combined to create virtual nature spaces in Metla House, Joensuu. The famous wooden office building has housed innovative solutions since it was built. This time, the aim is to test virtual nature in practice and help budding enterprises find each other.

- This space is not about rushing in and turning the nature on. It is just another office space, but the one where you are exposed to nature and its empowering effects, explains Lauri Sikanen, principal scientist in Luke.

From elements to concepts

Two spaces - or as Sikanen says - virtual nature applications are being planned, one in the lobby and the other in one of the office rooms.

- We combine technology and contents. Together, good technology and content make a concept.

Business concepts are Sikanen's expertise in the project. The spaces will be build by entrepreneurs after workshops and a tendering process.

- We are bringing companies and experts together. Last week, a Portuguese sound system company and sound scientists of the University of Eastern Finland found each other in our workshop.

Sikanen hopes that new partnerships will create a cluster of virtual nature expertise in Finland.

The next trend?

Sikanen would not be surprised if virtual nature became a trend in interior decoration soon.

- Virtual nature should be included when designing buildings. The user groups are so varied and interesting: hospitals, prisons, schools, to name a few. Even luxury cruisers could take travelers to a virtual tour in places where the ship cannot access.

Concept development and clustering turn the thoughts to export markets. How far is Finland from it?

- Not very far, I would say. It takes the right companies to combine their skills and create a product, which is easy for the customers to use. Iron is hot and things are happening in the field, Sikanen says.

The spaces in Metla House should be ready for testing by the autumn. The feedback will be analyzed and used for further development.

- We have already had a lot of inquiries of when the spaces can be visited. Adds pressure to us, Sikanen nods, pleased.

Science says: nature supports our minds

Research professor Liisa Tyrvainen has worked with the well-being effects of nature since 2005. She is now waiting for the latest results of laboratory studies just finished in Otaniemi, Helsinki.

Luke scientists work in close collaboration with content designers and a brain researcher to investigate, if a short stay in a virtual nature environment helps knowledge workers to reduce their stress.

- We are not replacing recreation in nature with virtual technology. This is just one way to bring the benefits of nature to offices. We know nature supports cognitive performance and recovery from stress, and even watching nature photographs has an effect, Tyrvainen points out.

Collaboration with brain research

Virtual nature usually consists of live images and sounds or a computer-assisted virtual environment. Tyrvainen's group has built an experimental setting with sound and video. Scientists monitor changes in users' physiology and recovery from stress.

- We want to know, if rests in virtual nature help to unwind and which elements are the most effective ones.

A walk in forest has a stronger effect on us than virtual nature. On the other hand, rain or ambient noise could disturb the experience. That is why the controlled laboratory is important for the scientists.

- In the laboratory, we can create a pleasant soundscape. Experiencing nature with all senses, like smell, is important and it is possible to build more realistic virtual environments with technology. However, in our study, the aim is to recover from work. Therefore, the senses should not be overstressed, Tyrvainen explains.

The results will be used in concept development.

- Many of us have our own favorite places in the nature. In the future, the design of the virtual nature environments could use research-based information so, that choosing our favorite places would be possible also in the virtual environment, Tyrvainen describes.

Growing field of research

For professor herself, nature is an important part of a working day.

- I am lucky to have a beautiful landscape outside my window. I intentionally take a look outside when I need to rest. This is what fewer of us have, as the multipurpose offices offer no window views and cities are built densely.

The scientists have just started to calculate the results of the experiment.

- I cannot reveal anything at this stage, but what we are already sure of is that our experimental setting works. As the theme is so interesting, we plan to enhance its research in Luke in the future, Tyrvainen concludes.New Delhi: The proceedings of Lok Sabha became a casualty of noisy protests by the AIADMK and TRS members yet again on Thursday as the House was adjourned for the day without transacting any business.

The two notices of no confidence motion against the council of ministers were not taken up for the fourth day as Speaker Sumitra Mahajan said she could not proceed forward unless the House was in order.

The Question Hour was washed out in the morning due to protests by AIADMK and TRS members over Cauvery and quota issues respectively. As soon as the House met again, the ministers laid the listed papers even as the protests resumed.

The AIADMK is pressing for immediate setting up of the Cauvery river management board. The TRS, whose members held placards saying 'One Nation One Law', is demanding that the states be given the right to determine the proportion of reservations.

While AIADMK and TRS members were seen in the Well holding placards and raising slogans, members from the Congress and Left were heard asking the Speaker to bring order so that the notices of no confidence motion could be taken up.

Parliamentary Affairs minister Ananth Kumar said the government was ready to answer on all issues, including banking scam and no confidence motion, provided they are taken up.

He, like in the past, urged the agitating members to return to their seats so that the Lok Sabha can function smoothly.

When Mahajan took up the notices of no trust vote, the protesting AIADMK members raised their pitch. As several Congress, Left and Trinamool Congress members demanded that the Chair bring order in the House, Mahajan said she can't see anything from her seat (apparently due to placards being held by AIADMK and TRS members) and can't count the 50 members required to support the no trust move.

Leader of the Congress party in Lok Sabha Mallikarjun Kharge was seen repeatedly urging the Speaker to take up the motion.

Members from the Left raised their hands in support of the notices of no trustwhen Mahajan said she can't see members in favour of the move due to the ruckus.

TDP's Thotha Narsimhan, who has moved one of the notices, was seen holding the paper and asking the Speaker to go ahead with the issue.

She then adjourned the House for the day, saying she cannot proceed with the notices amid disruptions. Earlier, Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad was seen awaiting the Speaker's nod to introduce bills on commercial courts and amendment to the arbitration law. But the bills could not be introduced due to disruptions.

The House has been witnessing disruptions every day since March 5 when Parliament re-assembled for the Budget session after recess.New Delhi: It was in 2014 that then Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi came to power with the BJP, and became the Prime Minister. His thumping victory was a subject of great speculation and assumption all over the country. One striking fact about his campaign and eventual win was his use of big data and analytics to assure him there were no last mile problems.

Cut to 2018, data and analytics is still the hot topic of discussion. Over the years since Modi brought in the renewed face of election campaign in India, opposition parties have used data analytics in streamlining their decision-making better and help in respective elections. But how does big data exactly work? And how important is it to politics in India as of today?

Union Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad has accused the Congress party of using the services of Cambridge Analytica(CA), a controversial offshoot of British company SCL Group that deals in data mining and analysis for electoral procedures.

While the ruling party accused the opposition, Cambridge Analytica claimed in its website that it had worked with the BJP too. Its India partner Ovleno Business Intelligence (OBI) stated on its website that it had worked with the JD(U) in 2010 and secured its win. Interestingly, BJP was in alliance with the party back then.

Combine the Past, Present to Figure out the Future

Big data is a serious amount of data that is being processed, churned in a complex environment of various possibilities. Analytics of the same data is the application of it in the elections.

For Ashwani Singla, founder of Indias first science-based reputation management advisory Astrum, the intersection point of big data and the analytics of it is Indias large voter base. We will be going into 2019 with a voter base of almost 900+ million, he said.

Shedding some light on how the procedure of big data and analytics works in the Indian political scenario, he said all the data that he has ever used was only that available on the public data, which includes data from the Election Commission, Census and NSSO. Its an exhaustive data, he admitted, but the data is dated and not so rich considering demographic change (for example, the last updated Census data goes back to 2011).

He has his boots on the ground, thousands of volunteers going from door-to-door to conduct polls and to have conversations with the voter, which is further broken down into data and analysed.

Every voter is not a homogenous whole. And in India, it is more complex because there are various differences based on language, caste, socio-economic backgrounds. There is, of course, an SC list, an OBC list thats available in the public domain. But say, if Im working in a particular district, how many OBC groups do I have there? I have to find out for myself because that data is not in the public domain, he explained.

Once these door-to-door polls come back to the analytical team, they then figure out which direction the conversation among the voter is going.

One can look at farmers and women as two separate groups, but then an SC farmer might be different from an OBC farmer. We have to go down to that micro level. Otherwise theres no point, Singla added. The data allows him and his team to figure out the trend, starting from a panchayat election to a general election. While he refused to divulge which political party he was associated with, Astrums website states that he steered Modis 2014 general election campaign.

Based on voter history, I can figure out what my battlefield looks like. Where do I fight? Why is the voter voting in a certain way? How do I engage and who should I pitch as my candidate? Our polls tell us all that and help the party further in engaging with the voter at a very early stage, he said.

The layers of data, he added, eventually are only a solid supplement to support booth-level activities. Political parties help us with their insights, of course, but I am the one who knows how to read the data and to see the science behind it. It definitely helps in electoral strategy, but thats something where people like me dont have the decision power. I can only suggest based on my scientific research, he said.

The Politics of it All

While Singla might be a non-political entity in the big picture of electoral process and data analytics, parties like the BJP and the Congress, too, have their own data analytics team. Earlier this year, Congress President Rahul Gandhi announced a data analytics department led by political economist Praveen Chakravarthy. Speaking to News18, Chakravarthy said there was nothing new in political parties using data.

Analysis of data to glean insights for decisions is not new. Every sphere of society embraces use of data - business, arts, law etc. So does politics. There is nothing new nor different about using data, be it in politics or business, he said.

Asserting that big data does not mean private data, Chakravarthy said that the Congress was just using lots of public data, including electoral data, data from party workers and that his team was a group of scholars and experts who had their own methods of data analysis.

The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) too has its own team that does big data analytics for the party.

Amit Malviya, the national head of information and technology, leads the data team at the BJP. Numbers tell us what has happened historically. It helps us get an insight to what the numbers are saying in terms of electoral arithmetic, he said.

Adding that his team tries grill down to the booth-level, Malviya said that elections wasnt arithmetic but it was all about chemistry. Unless we look at it dispassionately, we cant do much with it, he added.

Once the analysis is in, the party builds strategies around it, which are purely political in nature. Do the numbers mean that we will lose an election? No. But will it help in winning? Certainly. It is one of the inputs to an electoral strategy but an important one, he added.

Malviyas statement could be seen in the light of the recent elections that the BJP lost-Gorakhpur, which is considered to be Uttar Pradesh CM Yogi Adityanaths bastion. Yogi accepted that overconfidence cost him and the party in the bypolls.

While the BJP lost Gorakhpur, the party did look at numbers in a few other states, including Tripura and where it won. "The state units handle by-polls," Malviya said. The focus is now on Karnataka.

Considering the level of interest and hard-core campaigns in state election by Congress President Rahul Gandhi and PM Narendra Modi, both Chakravarthy and Malviya were asked whether the leaders look at the data they churn out.

Chakravarthy said that Gandhi was a believer in data for its objectivity. Our approach to data is much more scientific than scheming, he added.

Malviya refused to divulge details on the PMs involvement in looking at data.New Delhi: Political leaders across the country have expressed dismay over the Supreme Court judgment that dilutes the stringent provisions of the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989.

BJP MP Udit Raj has sought an appointment with Prime Minister Narendra Modi to ask the government to file a review petition. Raj also has meetings scheduled with other MPs and leaders in order to work on getting the petition filed, as it exposes the "bias and prejudice of the system".

A review petition is the only way to roll back an order of the apex court.

The Supreme Court altered the basic structure of the SC/ST Act, stating that a FIR cannot be filed in a case under the Act until enquiry is made.

In case of employees, the appointing authority has to give in writing the reason for the arrest and for the public in general, the SSP has to permit the arrest. A magistrate can extend the custody only if the written permission is secured. So far, a case under the SC/ST Act would mean an automatic FIR and arrest.

Talking to News18, Raj conveyed his dismay and said, This judgment of the Supreme Court is not only unfortunate but also a fraud with caste prejudice. No law should be misused but it should also not be diluted or unutilised.

The MP went on to state that an appointing authority would not always give in writing the permission to arrest his junior. If the senior and junior enjoy a good rapport, the authority may not give in writing the permission to arrest his subordinate. The employee concerned could then resort to other methods like bribery or political interference to not be put in jail, said Raj.

The leader went on to wonder aloud if this was the only act that was being misused and said, The Anti-Dowry law has always been much more misused.

Udit Raj even went on to corroborate his claims and said, It has been found that about 64,000 males committed suicide due to the misuse of the Anti-Dowry law. The Act was slapped indiscriminately even if the cause was not dowry-related. There have been cases where the implicated relatives had no connection with the affairs of the family, so much so, that some of the relatives reside outside India.

According to Minister of Women and Child Development, Maneka Gandhi, out of the 361 dowry cases in 2015, 293 were false.

The BJP leader further said that ever since Section 376 was strengthened, men were afraid of meeting a woman alone or in some other place. A union minister told me this, said Raj.

According to National Crime Bureau Report (NCRB), atrocities on SCs and STs have increased 66 percent from 2007 to 2017. During this period, among other atrocities, six Dalit women are raped in India every 15 minutes.

Madhya Pradesh leads the list and conviction in such cases is between 2-6 percent. After this judgment, the Prevention of Atrocities Act will get further diluted. The Constituent Assembly has been entrusted to make laws and the judiciary is supposed to interpret them. Currently, the judiciary is making more laws than the Parliament, said Raj.

He further added that the SC delivered the verdict based on the fact that the conviction in these cases was low. The apex court could have looked at it in the way that fewer convictions should lead to strengthening the act further. This is subjective and depends on how one looks at things. The government should immediately push for a review petition. It is unfortunate that a law enacted by Parliament is being diluted and altered."Ahmedabad: A 23-year-old Dalit woman was brutally thrashed and her finger and one ear was chopped off after she was abducted by four men in Bhavnagar district of Gujarat.

The woman has been admitted to a hospital in Ahmedabad. In a police complaint she filed from the hospital bed, she said that she was going to her college in Botad when the men kidnapped her. She said that the men pulled her hair and beat her to the point that she lost consciousness.

Doctors at the VS Hospital said that in her statement, the woman has not mentioned anything regarding molestation or sexual assault. However, the hospital authorities will conduct a medical examination to ascertain whether she was raped or not.

The police has registered an FIR under sections of kidnapping and robbery against four unidentified persons. Deputy SP SK Chauhan, who is supervising the investigation in the case, said that more sections would be added once the medical report comes out.

The woman, a final year B.ED student, lives with her family in Bhavnagar.

Her brother said that he received a call on his mobile early on Thursday, informing him that his sister was being taken to a hospital in Botad and the family should reach there directly. The call was made from the victims phone by a male caller.

I am not sure who the caller was but I suspect that one of the four persons who kidnapped my sister must have called me on my mobile from my sisters phone, he said.

Jignesh Mevani, MLA and convener of the Rashtriya Dalit Adhikar Manch, also visited the family of the victim at the hospital on Thursday evening. He demanded a quick investigation and speedy justice, saying that culprits should be arrested by the police immediately.New Delhi: Pakistans envoy to India Sohail Mahmood, who was recalled by Islamabad more than a week ago amid a diplomatic standoff, is likely to return to New Delhi on Thursday. He is expected to host a 'Pakistan National Day' event at the Pakistan High Commission in Delhi on Friday.

Pakistans foreign office had said that Mahmood was called back for consultations as India had failed to take notice of the increasing incidents of intimidation of its diplomatic staff.

A total of 26 incidents of alleged harassment were reported by Pakistani diplomatic staff in Delhi in eight days, including two allegations of their children being approached in school. At the time the Pakistani High Commissioner was called back, Pakistani media had said that Mahmood is unlikely to return to India anytime soon.

There were alleged incidents of tit-for-tat ringing of doorbells of deputy high commissioners of both countries after midnight. India holds Pakistan responsible for the bitterness in ties and the complaints go back to 2017, when Pakistan according to Indian authorities, started blocking access to Indian government websites.

The Pakistan Foreign Ministry had claimed that its staff and their families have been facing "harassment, intimidation and outright violence" from Indian state agencies in recent weeks. In another claim, the ministry said that Indian officials stopped the car of the deputy high commissioner for 40 minutes and harassed the occupants of the vehicle.

The Pakistan High Commission said that it had shared with the External Affairs Ministry photographs identifying the individuals, who forcibly halted and took pictures of the officers but regrettably no positive action was taken by the Indian side so far.

The Indian government had played down the issue of the recall and said that it was a routine thing. It is pretty normal for an ambassador to go back to his country. It is a routine thing. Indian ambassadors abroad are also called back for discussions frequently, MEA spokesperson Raveesh Kumar said.

Kumar said that India is looking into the issues raised by Islamabad, but said that at the same time, the Indian High Commission there has also been facing issues that were raised several months ago.Thiruvananthapuram: The family of Irish national Liga Skromane (33) has accused the Kerala Police of not reacting to her disappearance quick enough.

While Liga went missing from here on March 14, her sister Ilze Skromane alleged that it took at least five days for the police to act.

"They intensified the search only by yesterday. When I went the police the first day, they took it lightly, they said she will come back and she might have gone somewhere because she was under depression," she said.

An unidentified body was found at Kulachal Port on Wednesday which was suspected to be Liga but the family says that it is not her. They said that the body had a tattoo on her hand but Liga did not have one. Police is planning to do a DNA test on the body now.

Liga came to Trivandrum along with her sister for ayurvedic treatment for depression. She reached India on February 3 and at the ayurvedic centre on February 21.

Ilze said, We came to India for a post-traumatic depression treatment for six weeks. We had been three for three weeks. She was showing improvement."

She said that on March 14, Liga had a headache and did not come for yoga class. She asked me to go and when I returned I could not see where in the room. I checked for her everywhere. An auto driver told us that Liga wanted to go to a beach and he took her to Kovalam (beach)," she said.

They looked for her at Kovalam Beach, where some people said they had spotted her, but in vain.

Ligas husband Andrew Jordan has also reached India to search for her and they are now putting up missing posters and have also announced a reward of Rs 1 lakh for information.

Andrew said, The way the police is acting we are not getting anywhere. It is really frustrating. Only in the last 24 hours have thing started moving locally. She is depressed, she is vulnerable. I think she has been held captive by someone otherwise she would have contacted us by now."

Andrew alleges that even after four days after she went missing, the police station at Vizhinjam, which is the next police station from Kovalam was not aware about Liga being missing.

"After going to Kovalam we went to Vizhinjam where nobody was aware that she was missing. Obviously, the police haven't gone there. It's only 2km from Kovalam, he said

A person had seen her and we went immediately to the Vizhinjam police where they were not even aware that she was missing. This was the third or fourth day after she was reported missing but the nearby police station was not even aware about it, he added.

Meanwhile, the police said that they are following all leads and enquiring into this missing complaint.New Delhi: After seeking legal opinion on University Grants Commissions directive on SC, ST and OBC faculty quota, the Ministry of Human Resource Development has decided to file a Special Leave Petition (SLP) in the Supreme Court against the decision by the Allahabad High Court.

On April 7, 2017 Allahabad High Court had allowed a plea which challenged an advertisement brought out by Banaras Hindu University (BHU), seeking to quash the clauses that assured reservation of SCs, STs and OBCs in teaching faculty.

The court ruled, The respondent University will carry out the exercise of applying reservation to the posts under advertisement treating the department/subject as a unit for all levels of teachers rather than treating the university as a unit.

After the directive became public, the Parliamentary Committee on the Welfare of Schedule Castes and Schedule Tribes made recommendations to form an inter-ministerial committee and re-look at the UGC's directive that tweaks quota policy. The government received their recommendations and has decided to file an SLP in the apex court, seeking a relook at the order.

The inter-ministerial committee of officials from the Law Ministry, UGC, Social Justice and Empowerment Ministry and DoPT and was headed by UGC chairperson DP Singh. The committee had advised the government to rethink the new directive and seek legal opinion because the quantum of SC/ST/OBC teachers would be adversely affected under the new formula.

The committee debated over the issue and found consensus in continuing with the system of implementing reservations on the basis of the institution as a whole rather than newer regulation that calls for reservation of the SC/STs on the basis of taking the department as a whole.

In October 2017, UGC issued a directive which directly affected the recruitment of SC/ST/OBC teachers. It found opposition from within the government. Recently, the Social Justice and Empowerment Minister Thawar Chand Gehlot asked HRD minster Prakash Javadekar for a rollback of the policy.

Gehlot said in the letter that the government was duty-bound to ensure proper representation of marginalized sections in teaching position and that the circular contradicts constitutional provisions.

The new notification has the potential to dent efforts that ensure SC/ST/OBC categories in getting 15%, 7.5% and 27% jobs, respectively as per the constitutional provision. Under the earlier reservation roster, when the university was taken as unit, the SC/ST/OBC got reservations to some extent. But with the new roster, according to which the reservations will consider the department as a unit, there will be a decline in the number of SC/ST/OBCs as professors, assistant professors and so on.New Delhi: In doing away with the automatic registration of FIR and mandatory arrest in SC/ST Act cases, the statistics placed on record by the central government played a key role in the Supreme Court.

Although the government resisted tweaking with the Atrocities Act, the statistics was tell tales about closure of cases without trials and the abysmal rate of conviction.

Representing the government, Additional Solicitor General Maninder Singh had sublimated that the top court has already upheld validity of the provisions in the Act and therefore, there arises no need to re-examine it.

The law officer also said that the government is not in favour of amending the law to provide for punishment for false complaint because that would be against the spirit of the Act.

About the safeguards, the ASG maintain that the Government of India had issued advisories in February 2005, April 2010 and May 2016, and also further amended the Atrocities Act in 2016 to provide for creation of special courts as well as exclusive special courts.

But the data placed by the government before the bench of Justices Adarsh K Goel and Uday U Lalit narrated a different story altogether.

Referring to the data submitted by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), Singh submitted that out of the total number of complaints investigated by the police in the year 2015, both for the persons belonging to the SC category and also belonging to the ST category, in almost 15-16% cases, police authorities filed closure reports. These complaints thus were shut without the need of trials.

Out of the cases disposed of by the courts in 2015, more than 75% cases resulted in acquittal, withdrawal or compounding of the cases.

The NCRB data of 2016 further disclosed that 5,347 cases against SCs were found to be false by the police. It was more than double the number of cases found to be true  2150. A total number of 40,801 cases were reported during the year.

A meagre 25.7% conviction rate was observed. As against 3,753 convictions, 10,862 acquittals were recorded by the NCRB.

As far as complaints by STs are concerned, the court noted that 912 cases were found to be false by the police as against 120 true cases that did not have sufficient evidence.

The conviction rate was 20.8% with 2,293 cases resulting in acquittal or discharge, as opposed to only 602 cases of conviction during 2016.

Perusing the statistics, the bench highlighted that in the year 2015, out of 15,638 cases decided by the courts, 11,024 cases resulted in acquittal or discharge, 495 cases were withdrawn and 4,119 cases resulted in conviction.

During the hearing, the Court was also informed about the Sixth Report of the Standing Committee on Social Justice and Empowerment (2014-15) on the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Amendment Bill, 2014.

The report in December 2014 had rejected the stand of the Ministry, which had decided that there was no need to provide for action against false or malafide implication under the Atrocities Act.

The parliamentary panel had stated as: The Committee is not inclined to accept the contention of the Ministry that those who are found to be misusing the provisions of the Act can be tried as per normal law of the land under the relevant sections of the IPC. The Committee is of the firm view that the PoA Act, being a special law, should be wholesome to the extent that it must contain an inbuilt provision for securing justice for those too who are falsely implicated with mala fide under it."

The panel buttressed its argument by citing Clause 14 (Punishment for false or malicious complaint and false evidence) in The Sexual Harassment of women at Workplace (Prevention, Prohibition and Redressal) Act, 2013.

Amicus curiae Amarendra Sharan, along with advocate Amit Anand Tiwary, on their part, batted for necessary safeguards against misuse of the law, and underscored the dangers of jeopardising one's liberty due to a unilateral version of the complainant. The lawyers also said that jurisdiction of a court to protect liberty of individuals cannot be ousted by literal reading of Section 18 in the Act, which negates pre-arrest bail.

The bench, in view of the statistics and the parliamentary panel's report, noted that operation of a law cannot be allowed to work itself out on caste-lines and cannot result in caste hatred.

"We are satisfied, in the light of statistics already referred as well as cited decisions and observations of the Standing Committee of Parliament that there is need to safeguard innocent citizens against false implication and unnecessary arrest for which there is no sanction under the law which is against the constitutional guarantee and law of arrest laid down by this Court," the bench said.

The court asserted that the" act cannot be converted into a charter for exploitation or oppression by any unscrupulous person or by police for extraneous reasons against other citizens".

The bench has now mandated a preliminary inquiry by police, not exceeding seven days, to decide whether an arrest is required or not. Even if the police make arrest, the apex court has ruled, a trial court will have the power to grant bail.

The judgment has created ripples in the political circle, with parties like Congress demanding a review of the verdict.

But as far as this bench in the Supreme Court is concerned, the decision of this nature was not a first. The same combination of judges last year laid down extensive guidelines in cases lodged under anti-dowry harassment law (Section 498A), whereby automatic arrests was ruled out, a preliminary inquiry was mandated.New Delhi: As the country is trying to get its head around the data leaks and political parties are accusing each other of using the services of foreign firms to influence Indian voters, Justice BN Srikrishna told News18 that India has no legal infrastructure to deal with issues pertaining to data theft.

British consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica has been accused of harvesting data of over 50 million Facebook users and helping political parties getting ahead of their opposition by tailoring election material and influencing voters.

According to SCL India, which is owned by SCL group and Ovleno Business, India's two major political parties - Congress and BJP - are clients of the firm. However, both parties have denied any links with SCL India.

Justice Srikrishna, who is spearheading the data protection law committee, said that India has "no legal infrastructure to deal with issues pertaining to big data, data theft/mining or analytics" and hence Indians have no remedy against such leaks.

"Big data and analytics have been tackled by us in the draft law. Today, there is no law. Take, for example, cryptocurrency on which there is no legislation and hence everyone says something or the other. Arun Jaitely says something, the RBI Governor says something and nobody knows what they are talking about because there is no law to deal with it," said Justice Srikrishna.

The committee is now in the final stage of drafting the data protection bill after several rounds of consultations and the former SC judge has informed News18 that the "draft bill would be sent to the government by the end of April".

Responding to the data breach on Wednesday, information technology minister Ravi Shankar Prasad warned Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg against "any data theft" and said that India will not stop short of taking stringent actions, even if it "includes summoning you".

He also said that the current legislation is geared to tackle such a problem.

However, Justice Srikrishna feels that such a statement is only good for "public consumption" because even if the government files a case against the accused, proving it would be a lengthy, complicated and difficult process.

"The government can resort to criminal procedure code and file a suit claiming theft. But that would be very complicated. IT law does not easily fit into CrPC. Talking of theft in IT situation is not an easy job. Hence it will be difficult and a long process to prove such a thing. But of course making a statement for public consumption is good. They can arm twist the companies act too to hold these firms responsible, but again they are all foreign firms with responsible people outside. Hence, suit can be initiated but it would be million miles away from being proven," said the data protection committee head.

"If IT law was good enough then what was the need for data protection law. IT law deals with issues involved in information technology. But what about data theft? It's not a physical theft hence the act is nebulous and hence we need proper infrastructure," said Justice Srikrishna.

Cambridge Analytica has denied media accusations that it improperly accessed millions of Facebook users' information and said it deleted the data after learning that it did not adhere to data protection rules. The government has now banned the India website of the British Consultancy.

Justice Srikrishna feels banning Facebook or such forms is not the way out as in an "international arena such practices would only push us way back to 1855."

"Banning such firms is like cutting your off your nose to spite your face. The question is how to control it. Today you cannot say that no foreign firm can come to India. That would be the safest method but that would take you back to 1855. This is an international arena which needs give and take," said Justice Srikrishna.New Delhi: India will soon roll out a shorter treatment for patients with multi-drug resistant Tuberculosis (MDR-TB), most probably on March 24  World TB Day.

In May 2016, the World Health Organisation (WHO) updated its guidelines to include a shorter treatment course for DR-TB patients, cutting the time from up to 27 months down to a maximum of 12 months.

Delhis state TB Officer, Dr Ashwini Khanna told News18 that India would be implementing the WHOs treatment plan based on differing resistance found in patients and various drug combinations. According to WHO, patients with MDR and confirmed resistance to rifampicin, the first-line TB drug, qualify for the same.

The WHO 2016 guidelines came after the standardised shorter treatments had been implemented to great effort in some countries, namely, Bangladesh, Rwanda, Central African Republic, Cote dIvoire, DR Congo, and a few others.

However, patients with resistance to any of the drugs in the shorter MDR regimen  either quinolones, which have levofloxacin or injectables with kanamycin  would have to stick to the longer, conventional treatment, said Khanna. In cases of extreme resistance, the patients would be put on bedaquiline.

Currently, Delhis TB programme has over 431 patients on bedaquiline, while the number in India stands at about 1100.

Globally, there are 4.8 lakh MDR-TB cases, out of which, 1.3 lakh are in India. The countrys total TB cases are 28 lakh.

One of the biggest concerns for rising drug resistance in the country is people not finishing their treatments. Often, a long treatment course, large quantities of medicines, not enough doctors and lack of healthcare providers to keep track of patients has led to people falling off the wagon. Missing doses during TB treatment can often lead to the disease coming back in the form of a drug-resistant strain. A shorter treatment can help keep patients in the treatment programme until completion.

The government has also recently said, through a notification on Tuesday, that all patients notified to the government system will receive counselling in their homes, and support to adhere to the treatment course.New Delhi: The Ministry of External Affairs welcomed Maldivian President Abdulla Yameen lifting the state of Emergency after 45 days but also reiterated that the island nation must implement the Maldivian Supreme Courts February 1 order.

On February 1, the Maldivian apex court had overturned the convictions of political prisoners, including that of its exiled former president Mohamed Nasheed.

The emergency was lifted a day after senior political opponents were locked up indefinitely for allegedly trying to topple him last month.

We call upon the Government of the Maldives to restore all Articles of the Constitution, to allow the Supreme Court and other branches of the judiciary to operate in full independence, to promote and support the free and proper functioning of Parliament, to implement the Supreme Court's Full Bench order of 1 February 2018 and to support a genuine political dialogue with all opposition parties, the MEA statement on Thursday said.

This is not the first time that the MEA has asked the Maldives to implement the February 1 order. When Yameen had imposed the Emergency and later when he extended it, MEA had voiced its concerns over the non-implementation of the order.

This time around too, it further said that it was important for the Maldivian government to ensure credible restoration of the political process, as well as the rule of law, before the elections are announced this year. Maldives goes to polls in September.

At a press conference held in Male earlier this month, Mohammed Shainee, Minister of Fisheries and Agriculture and also chairperson of the all-party talks committee had said that India must stay away from the political crisis as it was as an internal matter. He further said that Maldives didnt intervene in the Kashmir matter for the same reason.

India has been particularly concerned about developments in Maldives because China is looking to occupy India's place in being the primary player and associate of the tiny island nation. India had three decades ago militarily intervened and ended a coup restoring democracy in the country.New Delhi: In a big boost to healthcare for the poor, the Modi government hopes to cover 100 diseases under the centrally-sponsored Ayushman Bharat, the National Health Protection Mission. Dubbed Modicare, the scheme will provide health insurance cover of Rs 5 lakh per eligible family per year.

According to sources, the government is finalising a list of 70 preventive diseases and around 30 terminal diseases to be covered under the scheme.

There are talks of covering 70 preventive diseases under the scheme and around 25 terminal diseases. That can go up to 30 as well. However, discussions on terminal diseases are still going on. That is yet to be finalised, said an official on condition of anonymity.

The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare is also looking to fix a price ceiling on the cure of relatively more serious diseases. The government will cap the total money required to cure bigger diseases. For example, when somebody requires a stent in the heart, hospitals charge lakhs of rupees. That will no longer happen. Similarly, in the case of more serious diseases that incur relatively higher expenses, the government will fix a maximum bill for the same, the official added.

The Cabinet on Wednesday approved the National Health Protection Mission that marks the rollout of the mega scheme. The beneficiaries of the proposed scheme will be more than 10 crore poor families, based on the Socio Economic and Caste Census database.

Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana, which provided a health cover of Rs 30,000, and the Senior Citizen Health Insurance Scheme will be subsumed into the new healthcare scheme.

A government statement on Wednesday said this cover will take care of almost all secondary care and most tertiary care procedures.

"To ensure that nobody is left out (especially women, children and elderly), there will be no cap on family size and age in the scheme. The benefit cover will also include pre- and post-hospitalisation expenses. All pre-existing conditions will be covered from day one of the policy," the government said in the statement.

The Ayushman Bharat scheme will also have a defined transport allowance for each time a person is hospitalised.

The different categories in rural areas include families with only one room with kaccha walls and kaccha roofs, families having no adult member between age 16 to 59, and female-headed households with no adult male member between age 16 to 59, among others.

Also, families with disabled members and no able-bodied adult member, SC/ST households, and landless households deriving major part of their income from manual casual labour, will be entitled under the scheme.

For urban areas, 11 defined occupational categories are entitled under the scheme. The beneficiaries can avail benefits in both public and empanelled private facilities.

All public hospitals in the states under the scheme will be deemed empanelled for the scheme. As for private hospitals, they will be empanelled online based on a defined criteria.

To ensure that the funds reach state health agencies (SHAs) on time, the transfer of funds from the central government will be done through an escrow account directly.

Though the government is yet to come out with a fixed date, sources have confirmed that the scheme will be rolled out from August 15.New Delhi: Top Naxal 'commander' Arvindji, operating in Jharkhand, is reported to have died of a heart attack on Wednesday in the jungles of the state.

"His wife who lived in Jehanabad left for the Jharkhand forests yesterday which makes us believe that his last rites will be conducted in the jungle," a CRPF officer told CNN-News18.

The 'A category', most wanted Naxal leader was a member of the central committee of the banned CPI (Maoist) and carried a reward of Rs 1.5 crore on his head, declared by the police forces of Jharkhand and Bihar.

Arvindji, who hailed from Bihar's Jehanabad, was active in the Palamu, Garhwa and Chatra districts of Jharkhand that are hit by Left Wing Extremism (LWE). Considered an expert in inter-district Naxal operations, security forces had found that Maoists from other states used to seek Arvindji's suggestions on operations against the forces and other tasks.

A police dossier said he was a "strategist and mastermind" of Naxal operations in Jharkhand for years.

The forces had reported Arvindji moving in the Budha Pahar area and other jungle patches in the state on horse-back for years and several times he escaped by a whisker as security forces closed in on him.Lucknow: The Yogi Adityanath-led BJP government in Uttar Pradesh has begun the process to withdraw 131 cases related to 2013 Muzzaffarnagar and Shamli riots.

The riots, which took place during the regime of Akhilesh Yadav in August-September of 2013, left more than 40,000 homeless. A total of 502 cases were registered in connection with the riots, in which 6,867 people have been accused.

Reacting on the state government's move, Samajwadi Party spokesperon Sunil Singh Sajan said, The government, which came to power after the riots, is now trying to protect the riot accused as they are associated with these people. The Yogi government is misusing power and washing its own sins.

Rejecting Opposition's claim, senior BJP leader Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi said, The cases being taken back are the ones that were politically motivated, and not all the cases are being withdrawn.

Interestingly, News18 had reported in February, how Hindu-Muslim communities in the region had decided to give up their differences and amicably sort the issues. They had organised Hindu-Muslim panchayats to amicably resolve the issue without any political intervention.

The Hindu-Muslim Mahapanchayat was organised in Bulandshahr districts Barabasti on February 4 and saw Jat members of Purbaliyan and Muslims of Kutuba village greeting each other with a hug and ended with chants of Har Har Mahadev! (Hail Lord Shiva) by Muslims and Allah-O-Akbar! (Allah is great) by Jats.

Unanimously, it was decided to take back 20 cases against each other and members of both the communities. Around 12 people died from these villages in the communal clashes of 2013.

According to reports, the panchayat had also raised many eyebrows ahead of the 2019 Lok Sabha elections as some political leaders felt that the improving ties between the two communities would not let them earn brownie points.

Former Union Minister Sanjeev Balyan met UP CM Yogi Adityanath in Lucknow, along with BJP MLA Sangeet Som, farmer leader Naresh Tikait and a few others to solve the issues related to the riots.

The leaders demanded that most of the cases of arson filed against the Jats should be quashed. They claimed that of the 502 cases, around 400 were of arson and were mostly bogus just to get the compensation. The Yogi government had then promised to look into the matter.New Delhi: Making its rare presentation before the Supreme Court on Thursday, the UIDAI said that Aadhaar data of 1.2 billion Indians is protected by a 2048-encryption key that will take a supercomputer over 13 billion years to crack.

The Supreme Court allowed the CEO of the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) to make a PowerPoint presentation on the Aadhaar scheme on Thursday. While two screens were set up in the courtroom, all lawyers were handed hard copies of the presentation.

The constitution bench headed by Chief Justice Dipak Misra asked the petitioners opposing the Aadhaar scheme to prepare a questionnaire for UIDAI CEO, Ajay Bhushan Pandey.

Pandey insisted throughout his 80-minute presentation that UIDAI has ensured security of the biometric data with multiple layers of protection.

The UIDAI further informed the court that it has no data on those who have been denied benefits for want of the 12-digit biometric identification number.

The information was given by Pandey, after the top court asked him whether there was any official data on how many persons have been denied benefits either due to want of Aadhaar or due to failure of their authentication.

A five judge Constitution bench also pointed out that unaware and illiterate persons can "be left high and dry" as, over time, the finger prints faded.

"We had no means to know as to how many persons have been denied benefits... Is there any official data on denial of services," the bench, also comprising Justices A K Sikri, A M Khanwilkar, D Y Chandrachud and Ashok Bhushan, said.

The CEO, a 1984 batch IAS officer of Maharashtra cadre, said the UIDAI has no data about persons who have been denied benefits for want of Aadhaar or due to lack of authentication.

Pandey, however, said no person shall be denied of any benefit if there is any failure in authentication due to lack of updation of data and various circulars from authorities, including from the Cabinet Secretary, have been issued in this regard.

The Aadhaar Act and its regulation make sure that people are not denied of benefits, he said.

Seeking to allay apprehensions raised, the UIDAI CEO said Aadhaar provided a "robust, lifetime, reusable, nationally on-line verifiable ID" card to citizens, as the Supreme Court which posed queries on data security, exclusion of persons from getting benefits for want of authentication.

The bench then said that sometime biometric details like finger prints fade over a period of time and unaware and illiterate persons may not get them updated and can they "be left high and dry".

It also referred to the allegation of senior advocate Shyam Divan, appearing for Justice K S Puttaswamy, and asked why 49,000 certified private operators, out of total 6.83 lakh who carry out Aadhaar enrolment, have been blacklisted by UIDAI.

"Aadhaar enrolment is free. They charge people. We got complaints," the CEO said, adding that these operators also filled wrong details at the time of enrolment and "as we have a zero tolerance policy towards corruption, they were blacklisted."

At the outset, Pandey, with the help of two projectors, started the presentation and said, "a very large population had no nationally-acceptable IDs - children, old, migrant workers, poor, destitute".

"Most people used local proxy/domain IDs and faced language, format, jurisdiction barriers. Lack of identity and identification led to exclusion and denial of service," he said.

He then referred to the issue of duplicates and ghosts in the welfare schemes, PAN cards and shell companies, while Aadhaar provided a "robust, lifetime, reusable, nationally on line verifiable ID and identification" to citizens.

The Aadhaar ID has nationwide portability and uniqueness and one card cost less than one USD from the time of enrolment to its delivery to a citizen, he said, adding that so far, 1.2 billion people have been enrolled in the scheme.

The CEO then said that Aadhaar required minimum information from citizens like photograph, demographics, finger prints, iris, but does not collect details of "religion, caste, tribe, language, records of entitlements, income or medical history and profession".

He said UIDAI has reached to a level where it can generate, print and dispatch more than 1.5 million Aadhaar per day.

On the issue of safety of data, the CEO said that the once the enrolment agency submits the biometric details after enrolment, the data is encrypted and deposited at the Central Identities Data Repository (CIDR).

Dealing with the authentication process, he said the UIDAI is "blind" and does not keep track of any transaction done by using the Aadhaar card.

"If somebody opens a bank account or gets a mobile phone by using the Aadhaar, the UIDAI cannot know the account details or the phone number," he said, adding that no profiling can be done by using the Aadhaar.

The UIDAI chief said that Aadhaar has a superior 2048-bit encryption where as the standard encryption rate is 256.

The bench said that the failure in authentication should not lead to denial of benefits to the citizens and this has to be remedied.

The CEO said that from July onwards, besides fingerprints and iris, the photograph of the person will also be used for authentication and no person shall be deprived of the benefits.

The bench then referred to the allegation that there was a possibility of tampering of data as the software has been taken from outside.

"These are our software and developed by us," the CEO said, adding that only biometric matching software has been taken from three best companies and these were licenced software which ran the system.

Moreover, the Aadhaar software is not linked to internet because "we were aware some people may hack the system," Pandey said.

He then gave the example of softwares like Oracle used by banks and said if the banks were using foreign softwares, it does not mean that details are shared with the software providing company. The presentation remained inconclusive and would resume on March 27.

(With PTI inputs)New Delhi: The Supreme Court today closed proceedings against former Bihar minister Tej Pratap, son of jailed RJD supremo Lalu Prasad Yadav, in the murder case of a Siwan-based journalist.

The apex court had asked the CBI to investigate allegations relating to media reports featuring photographs and videos that showed Pratap, former Bihar health minister, along with two absconding accused, Mohd Kaif and Javed, who are presently in judicial custody in the Rajdeo Ranjan murder case.

A bench comprising Chief Justice Dipak Misra and Justices A M Khanwilkar and D Y Chandrachud considered the submission of Additional Solicitor General Aman Lekhi that CBI has not found any incriminating material against the RJD leader.

The bench ordered closure of proceedings against Tej Pratap and gave the slain journalist's widow the liberty to get her plea revised if some incriminating material surfaces in the future.New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Thursday directed the Uttar Pradesh government to place before it a draft of vision document on protection and preservation of the Taj Mahal and environment in the Taj Trapezium Zone (TTZ).

The Uttar Pradesh government informed the apex court that it was working on the vision document which would help in the protection and preservation of the 17th century mausoleum.

It sought four weeks time from a bench of justices Madan B Lokur, Kurian Joseph and Deepak Gupta for completing the work on the vision document.

The bench said that the Central Empowered Committee will look after the issue of felling of 234 trees for laying pipelines for water supply in the city.

Counsel for the state government said 122 km of pipelines out of the 130 km, had already been laid and for remaining eight km, the authorities need to cut 234 trees and the TTZ had granted permission for it.

On February 8, the apex court had directed the state government to place before it a vision document on protection and preservation of the Taj Mahal.

The TTZ is an area of about 10,400 sq km spread over the districts of Agra, Firozabad, Mathura, Hathras and Etah in Uttar Pradesh and Bharatpur in Rajasthan.

It had questioned why leather industries and hotels were coming up in the TTZ when such activities were stopped earlier.

The court had in December last year said that a detailed and comprehensive vision document and plan with a futuristic perspective which could protect and preserve the iconic monument, its environs and the TTZ for at least a few hundred years, should be prepared.

The state government had also filed an application seeking the court's permission to cut 234 trees in Agra for laying pipelines for water supply in the city.

The court asked the state government to apprise it within four weeks on where land to plant trees was available in the area and also give details about the number of trees planted there.

Environmentalist M C Mehta, who has filed a plea seeking protection of the Taj from the ill-effects of polluting gases and deforestation in and around the area, had told the bench that he had attended a meeting of the authorities concerned to discuss the issue related to protection of the monument.

The TTZ had earlier told the court that a "no construction zone" was declared in a-500 metre radius area of the Taj and the state government had envisaged a comprehensive plan to ensure balance between environment and development.

The top court has been monitoring developments in the area to protect the monument, built by Mughal emperor Shah Jahan in the memory of his wife Mumtaz Mahal in 1631. The mausoleum is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.Supreme Court Recruitment 2018 to fill 78 vacancies for the post of Junior Court Attendant and Chamber Attendant has begun on the official website of Supreme Court of India - supremecourtofindia.nic.in. 10th Passed i.e. Matriculate candidates are eligible to apply for the job posts.

Interested candidates can follow the instructions below to apply online by 15th April 2018.

How to apply for Supreme Court Recruitment 2018?

Step 1  Visit the official website - http://supremecourtofindia.nic.in/

Step 2  Click on Recruitment tab from the sidebar

Step 3  Click on Job Notification that you wish to apply for viz:

Online Application for Registration for Junior Court Attendant's Examination. Last Date - 15-04-2018

Or

Online Application for Registration for Chamber Attendant(R)'s Examination. Last Date - 15-04-2018

Step 4  Click on Apply Online.

Step 5  Fill the application form, pay the application fee and complete the application process

Step 6  Download the confirmation page and take a print out for further reference

Supreme Court Recruitment 2018 - Vacancy Details:

Junior Court Attendant - 65

Chamber Attendant - 13

Eligibility Criteria:

Junior Court Attendant

The applicant must be 10th Passed from any recognized Education Board. Candidates who have the knowledge and experience of driving motor cycle, cooking, carpentry will be given preference.

Chamber Attendant

The applicant must be 10th Passed from any recognized Education Board. Candidates having experience of housekeeping work, watch and ward, security and caretaking will be given preference.

Age Criteria:

The applicant must not be below 18 years and above 27 years of age as on 1st March 2018. There is no age limit for SC/ ST/ OBC/ Physically Challenged/ EX- Servicemen/ Widow/ Divorcee Women and dependents of freedom fighters.

Pay Scale:

The basic pay of Rs.21,700 will be paid to the selected candidates and the approximate Gross Salary as per existing rate of allowances including HRA is Rs.33315.

Application Fee:

Applicants are required to pay an application fee of Rs.300 however the application fee for SC/ ST/ OBC/ Physically Challenged/ EX- Servicemen/ Widow/ Divorcee Women and dependents of freedon fighters is Rs.150 only.

Selection Process:

Selection of the candidates will be based on a written test comprising Objective Type Questions.

Test Centers:

The written test will be conducted in following Centers:

Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru and Kolkatta.TNUSRB Common Recruitment Exam 2017 Answer Keys for Recruitment of Grade-II Police Constables, Grade-II Jail Warders and Firemen are scheduled to be released on 24th March 2018 by the Tamil Nadu Uniformed Services Recruitment Board (TNUSRB) on its official website - tnusrbonline.org. The Key answers for the written examination conducted for Common Recruitment 2017 -18 will be published on 24.03.2018. If any discrepancies found in the questions and answers, the candidates may send their representations with required proof on or before 02.04.2018 read a notification on the official website.

TNUSRB will accept challenges/objections against the provisional Answer Keys till 2nd April 2018 and candidates must submit the same along with supporting documentation from Authoritative source. The Recruitment Board will then consider the representations and will issue the Final Answer Keys on a later day, based on which the TNUSRB Common Recruitment Exam 2017 Result will be declared.

Candidates who qualify the written examination will be selected in 1:5 ratio to appear for the subsequent rounds that include Physical Measurement Test, Endurance Test and Physical Efficiency Test.

TNUSRB aims to recruit 6140 candidates for the posts of Grade-II Police Constables, Grade-II Jail Warders and Firemen for the state of Tamil Nadu. It had organized the exam on 11th March 2018 in which 35,695 candidates had appeared.New Delhi: Bengaluru is among the 10 cities in the world that might be on the verge of an imminent acute water crisis just as the one faced by Cape Town in South Africa, a CSE-assisted environment magazine claimed.

"The number of waterbodies in Bengaluru has reduced by 79 per cent due to unplanned urbanisation and encroachment - while built-up area has increased from eight per cent in 1973 to 77 per cent now," claimed Down To Earth, the magazine that Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) helps publish.

According to a statement issued by CSE ahead of World Water Day, the water table in Bengaluru has shrunk from 10-12 m to 76-91 m in just two decades while the number of extraction wells has gone up from 5,000 to 0.45 million in 30 years.

"Cape Town in South Africa is facing the prospect of all its taps running dry by June-July this year," it claimed. Bengaluru's population might reach 20.3 million by 2031 and is growing by 3.5 per cent annually, the CSE statement said.

"Many of the world's leading cities will see Cape Town-like water crisis in the not too distant future... 10 cities across the world are facing 'Day Zero' (when taps are expected to run dry), and severe water shortage will hit them in the not-too distant future unless cities innovate, diversify supply sources and use water judiciously," it said.

Besides Bengaluru, other cities facing similar situation include Beijing (China), Mexico City (Mexico), Nairobi (Kenya), Karachi (Pakistan), Kabul (Afghanistan) and Istanbul (Turkey), the statement said.The first edition of News18 REEL Movie Awards was unlike any other award ceremony that Bollywood has ever witnessed. To begin with, no blockbuster film was on the nomination list, neither were marquee-name movie stars. REEL Movie Awards consciously chose to take a departure from the formulaic award shows, which celebrate popular cinema with glamorous celebrities and decided to champion independent films and technical expertise instead.

The event began with a red carpet; however, the purpose of the red carpet was not only to shine the limelight on actors and actresses of independent cinema but also to bring the faces of technical excellence in front of the media. Therefore we saw sound designer Anish John, dialogue writer Amitosh Nagpal, and production designer Parul Sondh sashaying down the red carpet along with popular actors like Richa Chaddha, Dia Mirza, Ratna Pathak, and Rajkumar Rao.

Hosted by Cyrus Broacha, the REEL Movie Awards also did not go by the award ceremony playbook that every other major award show follows in India. There were no dance performances, no multiple hosts, and awards were not doled out on the basis of attendance. It was a welcome change from popular award shows which focus only on big stars sitting in the front row, with immaculate smiles plastered on their faces because they know that the camera will be on them for the entire duration of the event.

There were nine off-screen categories and seven on-screen categories at the REEL Movie Awards and the winners were decided by an audience poll as well as a four-member jury that comprised Farah Khan, Sudhir Mishra, Nikkhil Advani and Sujoy Ghosh. While the audience voted enthusiastically in several categories -- which showed that there are people in India who care about films such as these -- the jury had a hard time coming to a consensus because 'all the nominees were really good.'

The winners that were announced on the night of the ceremony were also very unconventional. The beautiful and talented Ratna Pathak Shah won the Best Actress Award for Lipstick Under My Burkha. While accepting the award the actress thanked News18, and said, "It's particularly interesting that you decided to award a 60-year-old in this category. That was quite a risk. Thanks for taking it."

The Best Supporting Actor trophy went to Pankaj Tripathi, who confessed that he was beginning to lose faith in awards. Tripathi has played several significant roles in popular Bollywood films and has never received an award before this.

The Best Actor Award went to Irrfan Khan, who was unable to attend the award ceremony as he is currently in London getting treatment for a neuroendocrine tumor. Sudhir Mishra accepted the award on his behalf.

The Best Film Award went to Subashish Bhutianis Mukti Bhawan, a film which also got a special mention at the National Awards and won many international accolades but did not get any acknowledgment in mainstream Bollywood award shows until now.

Meher Vij, who won the Best Supporting Actress Award for Secret Superstar, was teary-eyed while accepting the award. The actress said that REEL Movie Awards are different because both audience, as well as a jury, have voted for it and she will 'relish' this award more for this particular reason.

Rajkumar Rao received a special jury award for the Breakthrough Performance of the Year. The actor said, It's been a great year for cinema and I hope it continues. Rao himself had a significantly good 2017, with films like Newton and Trapped carving out a niche in Bollywood.

Not just the winners, many media outlets also praised REEL Movie Awards for its initiative and authenticity. Scoopwhoop said,"... finally, it seems there is one award show that decided to actually acknowledge sensible cinema and great acting. Yes, the News18 REEL Movie Awards have reinstated our faith in Bollywood award shows - at least partially!"

The Quint said that REEL Movie Awards 'bridge the gap between 'popular' and 'critics' choice.'

REEL Movie Awards serve as an important marker in the changing landscape of the Indian film industry. The award show was conceptualiSed to champion creative storytelling and encourage new age content and 2017 provided ample opportunities and options in terms of nominees. This year, with films like Mukti Bhawan, Newton, Lipstick Under My Burkha we saw the line between mainstream films and art house cinema blur; the REEL Movie Awards not only acknowledged this change, but also saluted it.

As the night of the REEL Movie Awards ceremony proceeded, a hall full of talented actors, filmmakers, writers, and technicians cheered for their colleagues who won in different categories, celebrated creative stories that were told in 2017 and toasted to fine performances by their peers.

However, the significance of REEL Movie Awards does not end here. This award show also happened to be the first major film award show to celebrate creative web content. With web series that have the technical finesse of big-budget films and innovative storylines, Indian audiences are being introduced to a new league of video content and REEL Awards celebrated just that with its Best Web Series category. TVF Bachelors (season 2) took the trophy of Best Web Series home this year.

The first edition of REEL Movie awards set the bar high for Bollywood award shows by not only rewarding new age content but also by being authentic and choosing to reward substance and talent over glamour and mainstream films that only cater to the lowest common denominator of the audience. Heres hoping that for years to come REEL Movie Awards will not only hold on to its integrity but also encourage more films with innovative content thats often overlooked at popular award shows.Its tremendously tough to write about a man whose own literary oeuvre is almost too prolific to quantify, or even qualify. From literally lighting up Indian televisions with gloriously crafted advertisements for chewing gum (the Happy Dent campaign, named as one of the top 20 commercials in the 21st Century) to making fully-packed cinemas across the world weep copiously for their mothers because of a songs lyrics (Maa from Taare Zameen Par, a film for which he won the National Award for Best Lyrics) to making Thanda matlab Coca-Cola.

We are speaking, of course, of Prasoon Joshi, lyricist, poet, screenwriter, CEO of McCann World group India and Chairman (Asia Pacific), and most recently, Chairperson of Central Board of Film Certification, as of August, 2017. Joshi was present at the News18 REEL Movie Awards ceremony, which took place in Mumbai on Tuesday, where he had a free-flowing dialogue with News18 Consulting Editor, Anuradha Sengupta.

Addressing how he came to accept the onerous role of Censor Board chief in addition to his many other responsibilities, Joshi began, Whenever a new challenge comes before me, and I feel that theres a real need for it, I find it very hard to chicken out. So when this responsibility came (to which one can always say no), I decided to take up this challenge and see what I could do to make a difference, in whatever way that I can.

Speaking of his journey as an artist, Joshi said that he believes everyone is blessed in various ways, whether with creativity or business acumen or anything else. Im wired a certain way, but I dont expect to be treated differently because I write or sing or compose. Its just how I am. So I dont take being an artist too seriously. Im a human being on a journey who uses art as a tool or discipline to explore life and to discover myself and what Im about, so thats what Im doing. Ive always stumbled upon things. I didnt what to do with my type of mind until I came into advertising, he said.

Growing up as a small town boy in the hills of Uttarakhand, Joshi said he spent his time reading and listening to music (both his parents are classical musicians). From a very young age, I was exposed to authors like (Friedrich) Nietzsche. In fact, after reading Nietzsche for the first time, I wrote my first book, which was published when I was 17. Of course, I didnt know how to monetize my creativity. I remember, after being published for the first time, my father saying to me, Dekh liya tumne kitne paise milte hain, kitaab likh ke. I was always writing but I had no idea how to earn my living. It was only when I was doing my MBA, that I came to know about advertising, and that this was somewhere I could fuel my creativity.

Joshi entered advertising when both it, and television, were at a nascent stage in the country. Advertising industry needed people who were truly bilingual, who truly understood the masses, the country and came from there because they need to connect. There were products being launched which had a whole new tenor, and so there was this need. So I stumbled upon advertising, as I stumbled in to films. I was not brought up on filmi music. Because of my parents, I was brought up listening to khayal, thumri and music like that. So my vocabulary was from poetry and other classical forms, and I didnt know there would be takers in the film industry, where my songs will be liked. And so I began writing songs and stories for films. Ive always stumbled into things because Im ready to try them out, he said, adding, So when this opportunity from the Censor Board came, I thought I should give it a shot and see what I can do.

Speaking of the dichotomy of being a creator of art and now also a censor of art, Joshi said, I've always believed that expression and responsibility go hand-in-hand and I think artists understand that; it is in-built. I want a world where a sense of conscientiousness is so deeply ingrained in artists, that there's no need for any intervention. I think that the more you have dialogues about this and try and understand each others point of view, then this will be possible.

Thats not to say it will be smooth sailing all the way. Joshi admitted, Of course, sometimes I have bizarre experiences. People have taken five girls to a farmhouse and shot for five days and that's something they try to get certified. Everyone has their own ideas of what films are, but you know what kind of content this would be. It's not even art for art's sake, also. That French term, art for art's sake - some people don't believe in it, but I'm a very strong believer and think it's important for art. But this is something else; when commerce comes in.

I come from the world of advertising and I know that any product that is made has a certain regulatory body that makes sure that its good enough to be presented to people. In the commercial world then, we shouldnt use this argument of art for arts sake; that is something very different. So kai baa raise kaam dekhna padta hai, and the balance youre supposed to strike between responsibility and expression, I think that debate goes on, said Joshi, concluding that he'd like to live in a world where this debate had ended.

"Theres no country in the world without a body like this (a Censor Board), which means a need for something like this felt. I would rather do what I can so that a conscientiousness exists in the people working there, between them and the filmmakers, a conscientious eco-system if you will, instead of listening only to one party or the other, signed off Joshi.The other day I got into an argument with one of my neighbours who washes the entire area around his house with a water pipe, every day. I would always wonder if this person realises what he is doing. So finally I gathered up the courage, went up to him, and told him how he is not using his mind.

"Sir, do you realise how much water you are wasting every day," I ask. What he says next sums up the attitude we have towards using water and how we treat this essential natural resource.

"It's my water, whats your problem," he says.

We are busy discussing politics, terrorism and other global issues without even giving a seconds thought to the resource that might very well define global politics and maybe even lead to wars in the future. As Cape Town heads towards 'Zero Hour' on July 15, 2018, the reality of global water crisis is still yet to hit billions across the globe.

Every March 22, on World Water Day, the global community comes together to highlight facets of the issues relating to water. This year's theme, 'Nature for Water', aims at exploring nature-based solutions to solve the issues of water scarcity.

While the spotlight is on Cape Town right now, the Indian scenario is not much different. According to a March 2017 UN report, India will be at the epicentre of the water wars in South Asia due to its geographical position in the region.

Not surprisingly, experts have already pointed at the possibility of a large-scale water war between India and China over the waters of Brahmaputra. The two major powers of the region have been carrying out developmental works around the river at the expense of the other's water requirements.

With India's surface water reaching its threshold, the country is already struggling to provide clean water to much of its populace. Data from the Ministry of Water Resources highlight how India is home to 18% of the world population but accounts for only 4% of the total usable water resources.

While the ever-increasing population is a major concern, equally important is the lack of incentive on part of the lawmakers to take measures to at least weaken the crisis. The lawmakers need to start focusing on groundwater regulation instead of looking at ways to solve issues of surface water

Until 2017, landowners saw groundwater as their own and a resource they can exploit without any need to protect and replenish it. The Union government recognised the need to modernise the regulatory framework and brought the Groundwater Bill, 2017 that recognises the unitary nature of groundwater and the importance of protecting it at the aquifer level.

The increasing industrialization and development works has brought its own set of problems  contamination of fresh water sources and excessive use by industrial plants has resulted in major vulnerabilities in groundwater reserves across the country.

The underlying point behind all the aforementioned statistics and studies is the fact that unless a doomsday-like scenario is presented to the people, they won't realise the gravity of the situation. Common understanding is limited to how water reaches their taps. There is need to make them aware of the source of water, how it is collected, and what it takes to process and transport it to the houses. This is critical to make them understand the value of such an essential resource.

While nations are claiming dominance over nuclear warheads and data systems, it wouldn't be surprising if a country claims dominance over others in terms of their power over water. Coming back to the conversation with that resident in my locality, "It's not yours or mine, its ours I say."

The next thing I know, he walked back inside his house without any sign of regret or even uttering a word.Its not yet March-end, but water woes are already un-ravelling in many parts of India.

Bengaluru, by all accounts, sits on acute water shortages akin to the ones witnessed by Cape Town. According to a statement issued by the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) ahead of World Water Day, water table there shrunk from 10-12 metres to 76-91 metres in two decades, while the number of extraction wells went up from 5,000 to 0.45 million in 30 years.

In Vidarbhas farm-suicide-torn Yavatmal, the government medical college has sent home its outstation students, following impending water scarcity. Much of western Vidarbha faces water shortages.

A three-hour drive from there, in coal city Chandrapur, the administration has told the super thermal power project managers to be judicious through the summer in their freshwater usage, as citizens stare at massive water shortages. Its a city that lives off a small river, now turned into small puddles.

While three units of the 3340-MW power station are likely to be shut down soon, citizens would get water once in two or three days starting from the first week of April. Chandrapur is not the only city to be facing cuts. Across the country, growing number of cities will soon cut water supplies.

Nagpur, the orange city, is witnessing unprecedented water scarcity and lopsided distribution. Yet the citys water utility, a private company called the Orange City Water Distribution Company Limited, gets a national award for being the most progressive water utility in India. The joke is on Nagpurians.

In drought-prone Marathwada, poignant stories abound of rural women spending hours in search for water.

Coastal Andhra is reeling under water scarcity. In parts of south-western Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Gujarat, Odisha and north India, next three months seem to throw a gigantic water crisis.

The Cauvery Delta region in Tamil Nadu is facing extreme water stress. The Godavari  the Ganges of the South  is sans water. The Krishna too, in many stretches, is but a stream of dry pebbles.

Tens of thousands of people from the arid Bundelkhand region are already boarding trains to migrate to the cities, or wherever they could, and escape both, hunger and water scarcity.

What is more, the usually ebullient Narmada that horizontally dissects the country has fallen silent in Bharuch, thanks to a mindless political decision that prompted authorities to quietly empty upstream dams into the Sardar Sarovar Project at a time when the rains were below normal.

Hundreds of sub-rivers across India have fallen permanently silent. The masses along their beds are up and marching towards the cities in steady streams, rocked by sagging agriculture and water scarcity.

Much to worry

On the World Water Day 2018, there is much to worry about. India sits on a freshwater time bomb that promises to alter her demographic and economic character, as many studies warn us.

While drought and water scarcity could be topical and usually grip several regions during the summers, our water crisis is turning more structural and stems from mostly the man-made factors.

Its also the reason why water conflicts between urban and rural masses, regions and states, districts and blocks, and sectors  from industrial to agriculture to domestic and commercial  are getting fiercer.

Add to that, the climatic aberrations, changing rainfall patterns, alarmingly overexploited ground-water, and we have a perfect recipe for disaster.

Yet, water, and related crises dont draw the political and economic attention they must, year after every year. Look at how our political-administrative regime has quietly pushed under the carpet, for a silent burial, a crucial July 2016 report on the reforms of water management institutions: it called for a comprehensive restructuring of Indias Central Ground Water Board and Central Water Commission in order to create a new 21st Century management authority equipped to tackle the impending crises.

We continue to flounder with the management of rivers and under-stress aquifers. In Maharashtra, the machines and not humans are a focus of a much-trumpeted programme called Jal-Yukta Shivar, where a rush to clear bills for the deployment of earthmoving vehicles outweighs the wise calls for holistic water management approach, including a re-look at our aquifers, cropping patterns, distributaries and demand.

We have a situation where some parts of India are about to see a biting water scarcity and in the same landscapes, bumper yields of water-guzzling sugarcane with record production of sugar.

Indias water crisis

As the 2016 report submitted by the committee on restructuring the CWC and CGWB observed: While big dams played a big role in creating a huge irrigation potential, today the challenge is to effectively utilise this potential, as the water that lies stored in our dams is not reaching the farmers for whom it is meant. At the same time, groundwater, which truly powered the Green Revolution, faces a crisis of sustainability.

Water levels and water quality have both fallen creating a new kind of crisis, where the solution to a problem has become part of the problem itself. The new challenge is to manage our aquifers sustainably so that we make sure we do not kill the goose that lays the golden eggs, it said.

This and many other ground reports indicate what we call drought is actually a full blown water crisis, accentuated by our poor planning, as a recent Water Resources Institute (WRI) report indicated.

It said water shortages are hurting Indias ability to produce power and that 40 percent of the countrys thermal power plants are located in areas facing high water stress, a problem since these plants use water for cooling.

Scarce water is already hampering electricity generation in these regions  14 of Indias 20 largest thermal utilities experienced at least one shutdown due to water shortages between 2013 and 2016, costing the companies $1.4 billion. Its an issue thats only poised to worsen unless the country takes action  70 percent of Indias thermal power plants will face high water stress by 2030 thanks to climate change and increased demands from other sectors.

We are putting our water-guzzling industries in water-stressed areas. What do we expect then?

The 2016 report on the CWC-CWGB restructuring says, if the current pattern continues, about half of Indias water demand will be unmet by 2030. Our water tables are falling in most parts; there is fluoride, arsenic, mercury, even uranium in our groundwater. Climate change poses fresh challenges as more extreme rates of precipitation and evapo-transpiration exacerbate impacts of floods and droughts. Our cities produce nearly 40,000 million litres of sewage every day and barely 20 percent of it gets treated; only 2% of our urban areas have both sewerage systems and sewage treatment plants.

The observations underscore that ticking time bomb.

Water stress is driving people to migrate out of their native places. I saw and reported this during the 2016-17 water crisis that hit the once-prosperous Cauvery Delta in Tamil Nadu; or in 2015 and 2016 in Marathwada, in Maharashtra, when the state government deployed a water-train from Miraj to supply drinking water to the citizens of Latur, daily.

In a discussion paper released last month by the FAO titled Water stress and human migration: a global, georeferenced review of empirical research, its authors from the Oregon State University note that the linkages between water stress and migration are understudied in India, Central Asia, the Middle East, and the Central Sahel.

The body of work reviewed by the authors finds a strong consensus among researchers that increased water stress can cause people to decide to migrate.

Come April, and some of Indias poorest would take that decision  driven by water stress, in distress.

(The author is a Nagpur-based journalist and a volunteer for the Peoples Archive of Rural India. Views are personal)Lucknow: Just days ahead of the UP Rajya Sabha elections, a petition has reached Allahabad High Court seeking to count the votes of two jailed MLAs.

Bahujan Samaj Party general secretary, Satish Chandra Mishra, filed the petition on Wednesday to allow the two MLAs to participate in the polls. Mishra had approached the Election Commission on Tuesday but as that did not bear fruit, he moved court. The matter is set for final hearing on Thursday.

With the BJP having eight out of the 10 seats in the bag and the SP assured of the ninth seat, the last Rajya Sabha spot is up for grabs. The competition is said to be between BJPs Anil Agarwal and BSPs Bhim Rao Ambedkar with every vote worth its weight in gold.

After the SP-BSP alliance worked together to wrest control of Gorakhpur and Phulpur from the ruling party during the recently concluded bypolls, both jailed leader  BSPs Mukhtar Ansari and SPs Hari Om Yadav  would be voting for Ambedkar.

On behalf of the state government, Advocate General Raghvendra Singh opposed the petition, arguing that as per 62(5) provision of Peoples Representative Act, anyone in police custody is not to be allowed to participate in voting.

SC Mishra justified to the court that the two MLAs were not in police custody, rather in judicial custody and imprisoned MLAs had been allowed to cast their votes in the past.

BSP MLA from Mau, Mukhtar Ansari, has spent the last decade in jail for his alleged involvement in the Mau riots and for killing BJP MLA Krishnanad Rai. SPs Hari Om Yadav had surrendered before a court after a warrant was issued against him for his alleged role in panchayat poll violence three years ago.

As per the math, a party needs votes from 37 MLAs to send a candidate to the Rajya Sabha. With 19 of her own, BSP supremo Mayawati is counting on the surplus 10 votes from SP, seven from Congress and one from Ajit Singhs party to make up the numbers.New Delhi: Congress president Rahul Gandhi ended his silence on the Facebook data scandal, accusing the government of inventing the story to divert attention from the deaths of 39 Indians in Iraq. In a tweet on Thursday morning, Rahul also faulted the media for biting the bait.

Problem: 39 Indians dead; Govt on the mat, caught lying. Solution: Invent story on Congress & Data Theft. Result: Media networks bite bait; 39 Indians vanish from radar. Problem solved. Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) March 22, 2018

This was Gandhis first reaction on the data leaks, but his party spent the better part of Wednesday firefighting allegations from the ruling BJP over private firm Cambridge Analytica. The BJP accused the Grand Old Party of "data theft" to woo voters ahead of 2019 Lok Sabha polls. The Congress hit back, alleging that the "BJP's factory of fake news has produced one more fake product" and accused it of hiring the firm's services in several elections, including in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls.

The trading of charges between the two parties came following the Facebook's admission last week that Cambridge Analytica used data that had been collected from 50 million users without their consent, an act of breach of privacy.

BJP leader Ravi Shankar Prasad, also the Union law and information technology minister, cited several media reports which said the company would work for Rahul Gandhi ahead of the next Lok Sabha polls, and asked how many times Gandhi had met Cambridge's now sacked CEO Alexander Nix.

Claiming that the illegal use of people's data from social media could turn out to be the Congress' "biggest scam", BJP spokesperson Sambit Patra said the government would launch a probe into the matter. "Stealing data from social media is your (Congress) weapon. Cambridge Analytica is now Congress Analytica," Patra alleged.

Rejecting the allegations categorically, Congress spokesperson Randeep Surjewala said neither his party nor its president has used and hired the services of Cambridge Analytica. "The BJP's factory of fake news has produced one more fake product today. It appears that fake press conferences, fake agendas and fake spins and fake statements have become the everyday character of the BJP and its 'lawless' Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad," he told reporters.

Claiming that Cambridge Analytica and another Indian firm OBI, run by the son of a NDA leader, complement each other's businesses, Surjewala said their achievements include managing four election campaigns successfully for the ruling BJP.

He claimed that Cambridge's local partner OBI talked of having achieved 'target 272+' (in 2014), providing constituency-wise database to BJP candidates and of extending support to it in national elections and state polls in Haryana, Maharashtra, Jharkhand and Delhi.

In the midst of the data breach revelations, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has admitted that his company made mistakes on user data secrecy and vowed to take steps to prevent the misuse or breach of personal data. Facebook, he said, was committed to prevent meddling in elections in India and Brazil.New Delhi: Upping its attack on the BJP, the Congress on Thursday accused the government of inventing a story on data theft to divert attention from key issues and likened Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad to Hitler's propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.

In a multi-pronged attack on the government, Congress president Rahul Gandhi and communications in-charge Randeep Surjewala alleged that it was managing headlines to deflect attention from issues such as the death of 39 Indians in captivity in Iraq.

While Gandhi accused the government of baiting the media, Surjewala said Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad was spreading "lies and falsehood" so it could avoid giving answers in Parliament.

"Problem: 39 Indians dead; Government on the mat, caught lying. Solution: Invent story on Congress and Data Theft. Result: Media networks bite bait; 39 Indians vanish from radar. Problem solved," Gandhi said on Twitter.

"Hitler had a commander named Goebbels and now Narendra Modi has a minister named Ravi Shankar Prasad," Surjewala said, sharply escalating the verbal duel between the Congress and the BJP.

The Congress and the BJP have been engaged in a war of words over British data firm Cambridge Analytica (CA) and its Indians arms being engaged during past elections. The company is under a cloud after social media firm Facebook accused it of data theft.

While the Congress is accusing the BJP of using the services of the company, the BJP has hit back alleging that it is the Congress and its chief that have hired the services of the company.

CA's Indian arm Ovelina Business Intelligence (OBI) is run by JD-U leader K C Tyagi's son Amrish Tyagi.

Seeking to corner the government, Surjewala posed a series of questions, asking for details on its links with the company.

He denied that the Congress or its president Rahul Gandhi had hired the services of the company and used the colloquial phrase "chor machaye shor" to say that the BJP had no right to fling allegations against the party.

Union minister Smriti Irani follows CA on Twitter and the BJP's former IT cell head Arvind Gupta had lauded work done by it on the microblogging site, Surjewala said at a press conference.

"The truth is that Modi government is denigrating and disrespecting the institution of Parliament. The truth is that the Modi government is running from accountability to Parliament.

"The truth is that Modi government is scared of replying to the relevant questions being raised by people of the country in front of Parliament and people," he said.

He said 'no confidence motions' were pending against the government but instead of considering them, Parliament was being adjourned.

Bringing up the PNB scam and the deaths of 39 kidnapped Indians in Iraq, he said 132 crore people want to know how Nirav Modi and Mehul Choksi ran away with the country's Rs 33,000 crore. The government, he added, misled the country on those kidnapped in Iraq for four years.

Surjewala also referred to agrarian distress, unemployment and the SSC paper leak scam.

"The Modi government does not want to answer these questions, that is why Parliament is not allowed to function... Instead, advice is being given to opposition parties and everyday new 'fake agenda' is prepared," he alleged.

The BJP government, he added, has become a "manufacturer of fake news and an epitome of post truth".New Delhi: Lok Sabha elections may be scheduled for next year, but Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh  the two biggest states in India by area  are heading to polls later this year.

After a string of losses in Assembly and Lok Sabha elections, the Congress is now in action mode.

Sachin Pilot is steering the ship in Rajasthan and Jyotiraditya Scindia is playing that role in Madhya Pradesh.

The Madhya Pradesh Congress leader, who has become Congress president Rahul Gandhis right-hand man in the state, spoke exclusively to News 18 Hindi. Scindia spoke about a range of issues, from the upcoming Assembly elections to a possible coalition with the Bahujan Samaj Party.

At Scindias bungalow in New Delhi, a picture of him with Sonia Gandhi hangs from the wall. In the picture, Scindia is sitting alongside Sonia Gandhi while senior leaders Kamal Nath and Digvijaya Singh stand behind the duo. But do the two senior MP Congress leaders still stand resolutely behind the young Scindia? While Scindia does not deny that there were differences in the state unit of the Congress at one point, he insists those differences are ancient history.

For me, Digvijaya Singh is a respected elder. I have always had a good relationship with him. We will come together and form the next government in Madhya Pradesh, he said. Singh is currently on a Narmada Parikrama.

Speaking on Singhs pilgrimage, Scindia said, The decision to go on this Yatra was a personal one for him and I admire him for it. Only someone with steely resolve and willpower can undertake and complete such a Yatra. Once his yatra is complete, he will join us and help the Congress win the next election.

Elections are a few months away, but Scindia claimed he is not taking anything for granted.

We should not be satisfied with the Congress victory in the Kolaras and Mungaoli bypolls. We have eight months to prepare. I believe we should not count the months, but the days, left for the Assembly elections. There are 240 days left and each day is a golden opportunity for us. We have to set daily targets and complete them, he said.

During the Gujarat Assembly Elections, the Congress was aided by Patidar Anamat Andolan Samiti (PAAS) leader Hardik Patel. Since MP, too, has a large Patidar population, Patel is preparing to enter the fray in the neighboring state to campaign against the BJP.

Scindia said he welcomed Hardik Patels entry into MP. We have good relations with Hardik. I welcome all like-minded people who fight against injustice. I have discussed this with him several times. The BJP conspired against Hardik and yet he mounted a tough fight against them.

Hardik Patel is not the only one who may come to the Congresss aid. Political circles in MP are abuzz with talks of a Congress-BSP alliance.

Our doors are open. Everyone with a similar ideology should work together. However, we have not started any formal talks with any party, he said.

Scindia has vowed not to wear a garland till he defeats Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chauhan. When asked about his vow, Scindia took a dig at the CM. The CM likes to wear a haar (garland). So the people of Kolaras and Mungaoli have handed him a haar (defeat).

The Congress MP said his party would corner the state government on unemployment, farm distress, health and education. But will the Congress, like it did in Punjab, announce a CM candidate? And will it be Scindia, who has already emerged as the face of the campaign?

The same formula does not fit everywhere. Whatever instruction the High Command gives us in that regard, I will follow it, Scindia said.New Delhi: Information minister Ravi Shankar Prasad on Thursday, in a counter attack on Congress party, said Cambridge Anayticas services were used by the Congress during Gujarat Assembly elections.

Earlier in the day, Congress president Rahul Gandhi accused the government of inventing data theft story and blaming it on his party to divert attention from the deaths of 39 Indians in Iraq.

Prasad alleged that Rahul Gandhis entire social media campaign during Gujarat elections was taken care of by Cambridge Analytica.

The minister also alleged that reports of Rahuls association with Cambridge Analytica came out five months ago.

Congress leader Shashi Tharoor accused Ravi Shankar Prasad of lying and strongly denied that the party had any links with Cambridge Analytica.

"It is shocking that they are accusing Congress this way. Congress has no relation with Cambridge Analytica...It is very shocking that a minister is lying like this," said Tharoor.

Cambridge Analytica, the firm at the centre of the row over illegal mining of Facebook data to influence elections, claims to have worked in India during the 2010 Bihar Assembly Elections on its website, but did not spell out which party hired it.

However, it did add that its client had achieved a landslide victory, with over 90% of total seats targeted by CA being won. The elections were won by the JD(U), which was in alliance with the BJP.

The BJP has denied any links and instead alleged that Cambridge Analytica had worked with Congress on electoral strategy.Mumbai: There was an uproar in the Maharashtra Legislative Council on Thursday after a senior BJP minister described Yoga guru Baba Ramdev as a "Rashtra Purush", while a Congress member called him "trader baba".

Opposition members took objection to the epithet "Rashtra Purush", saying it was an insult to national icons. Soon after the question hour, Congress's Sanjay Dutt raised a point of propriety and questioned allocation of land at Nagpur's MIHAN to the Ramdev-promoted Patanjali group.

He also asked why the government is allowing the Yoga guru to sell his products at the state government's facilitation centres, `Aaple Sarkar Seva Kendras'. These Kendras will sell Patanjali products along with locally made products, he said, asking the reason for government's "benevolence" towards Ramdev.

The government gave land to Patanjali group at a throw-away price at the Multi-modal International Cargo Hub and Airport at Nagpur (MIHAN), he said, adding that the group is yet to commence any production at the site.

Responding to Dutt, senior cabinet minister Girish Bapat said the Yoga guru has taken Ayurveda to the international level. "It is not appropriate on the part of the Congress member to make fun of Baba Ramdev, who is also a Rashtra Purush (national icon)," Bapat said.

The government has followed the rules while allocating land to the Patanjali group, he said. Opposition members, however, objected to Bapat's use of the term "Rashtra Purush".

Dutt said it was an insult to national leaders and icons. "The minister should tender an apology for equating a trader baba with national heroes," he said. Amid the uproar that followed, Council Chairman Ramraje Naik-Nimbalkar adjourned the proceedings for 30 minutes.New Delhi: Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah on Thursday continued his ongoing Twitter feud with the state unit of the BJP, calling it spineless and mocking its accountancy lessons on the issue of corporate loans write-off.

The Karnataka BJP is so spineless that instead of asking the center to waive farmers loans it is giving accountancy lessons on Twitter, the CM said in reply to tweets by the Karnataka BJP. People will not be fooled. Center can write off lakhs of crores of a few industrialists but cant give debt relief to crores of farmers (sic).

The Karnataka wing of the BJP had earlier this week taken on Congress President Rahul Gandhi, saying he didnt understand the difference between loan waiver and loan write-off.

#LieDetectedBanks have not waived off corporate loans, they have written off, meaning they will recover it. From someone who doesn't understand difference b/w bhrastachaar & balatkaar, it is unfair to expect understanding of difference between loan waiver & loan write off. https://t.co/wkDTsvisTF BJP Karnataka (@BJP4Karnataka) March 20, 2018

@BJP4Karnatakas tweet came after Rahul Gandhi, during his state tour, accused the Centre of extending loan waiver to corporates, but not farmers. In last few years, the BJP government waived off loan of Rs 2.5 lakh crore of 15 richest people. When farmers talk of loan waiver, PM Narendra Modi and Finance Minister Arun Jaitley says it isn't their policy. Siddaramaiah ji and the Congress government in Karnataka have waived off farm loans worth of Rs 8,000 crore in Karnataka.

Jumping to his party presidents defence, Siddaramaiah had asked the BJP to prove that it wasnt a suit-boot ki sarkar.

Good! At least you admit the loans of large industrialists have been written off. Now, please join us in requesting PM @narendramodi to write off the loans of our farmers if they cant be waived. Please show that yours is not a #suitbootkisarkar https://t.co/tVl8gBW1a1 Siddaramaiah (@siddaramaiah) March 20, 2018

Refusing to back down, the Karnataka BJP said fooling was Siddaramaiahs department. Looks like Rahul isn't only one who doesn't get difference b/w write off & loan waiver! CM is asking to fool farmers by writing off loans but continue recovery! Fooling is your dept, Sir! Only a lapsed socialist will wear a Rs 70 lakh Hublot watch & accuse others of #SuitBoot!

Looks like Rahul isn't only one who doesn't get difference b/w write off & loan waiver!CM is asking to fool farmers by writing off loans but continue recovery! Fooling is your dept, Sir!Only a lapsed socialist will wear a Rs 70 lakh Hublot watch & accuse others of #SuitBoot! https://t.co/u3SE2uzHy3 BJP Karnataka (@BJP4Karnataka) March 20, 2018

The war of words between the Karnataka BJP and the Chief Minister has picked up pace since the latter okayed separate religion status to Lingayats and threw the ball in the BJP-led Centres court.

Lingayat strongman and the BJPs CM face BS Yeddyurappa has dismissed the move as an election gimmick, accusing the CM of dividing people on emotional issues.Bengaluru: Sometime in April 2016, BS Yeddyurappa was made Karnataka state BJP president. A month later, the Lingayat strongman and former chief minister was interacting with a select media persons in New Delhi. Someone asked him about the possibility of Chief Minister Siddaramaiah being replaced with an original Congress leader. Yeddyurappa said it would be better for the BJP if Siddaramaiah was not removed as the CM.

Elaborating on that, he said, Siddaramaiah is unpopular as CM. His own party feels that the Congress has no chance if he continues till the 2018 polls. Moreover, he himself has declared that he would not be contesting in the next elections. We want him to complete full-term. So that we dont need to campaign much to win the elections.

According to his close circle, Yeddyurappa was totally wrong and must be regretting not mounting enough pressure for the removal Siddaramaiah as the Chief Minister because things changed rapidly in the last two years in favour of Siddaramaiah and against Yeddyurappa in Karnataka politics.

Many senior leaders of the Congress admit that Siddaramaiah is the last man standing between the BJP and Karnataka in this Assembly election. The same man who was considered a liability for the Congress by both the ruling party and the BJP has now become Congress saviour and BJPs formidable rival.

When Siddaramaiah, a former Janata Parivar leader and HD Deve Gowdas one-time blue-eyed boy, was made Karnataka CM side-lining party stalwart M Mallikarjuna Kharge in 2013, many eyebrows were raised. His meteoric rise in the highly hierarchical Congress set-up is truly amazing.

After a serious disagreement with Deve Gowda and his sons, Siddaramaiah was dismissed as deputy chief minister by the former prime minister in mid-2005.

Siddaramaiah-led AHINDA (Minorities, Backward Classes and Dalits mobilization movement) was the tipping point in their relationship. After he lost power, many hastily wrote his political obituary. Till then, Siddaramaiah was known more for his administrative abilities than political leadership.

He did something unthinkable by joining his sworn enemy, the Congress, a few months later and won a tough by-election from Chamundeshwari in Mysore. In 2009, he became the leader of the opposition in the state Assembly  a big achievement for someone who had joined the Congress just three years before.

Siddaramaiahs long-time friend Professor BK Ravi disagrees that he was not known for political leadership. He is an astute politician. He is a highly knowledgeable leader who understands the issues in seconds. He is a born leader. He has made the Congress stronger in Karnataka. He has taken on a formidable BJP at the Centre. He has earned the power. Nobody has given it to him on a platter, said Ravi.

Sometime in 2010, during a debate on alleged corruption in the Yeddyurappa government, Siddaramaiah had thundered in the Assembly that he would become the Chief Minister and nobody could stop that.

In the first three years of his government, Siddaramaiah had focused more on populist schemes even earning the title a chief minister of bhagyas (gifts or rewards).

He was inaccessible to the media and had no presence on social media. Surprisingly, all that changed after the sudden death of his 38-year-old son Rakesh in Belgium in July 2016. A few days after the tragedy, Siddaramaiah told his close friends that he would be seeking a second term in office and would lead the party in the next election.

After that, everything has changed so suddenly. We thought that he would retire from politics. It was a huge blow to him. But he swallowed the pain and decided to take on the BJP, said a personal assistant.

Siddaramaiah started interacting with the media often, opened Facebook and Twitter accounts. In the last one year, he has emerged as the most active chief minister on social media.

Normally, the BJP sets the agenda and the rest react to it. In his case, he sets the agenda and the BJP is forced to react. He is brave and has taken on the BJP courageously. He has clarity, said state Congress working president Dinesh Gundurao.

From backing a movement for the primacy of Kannada to separate religion tag to Lingayats, Siddaramaiah has taken several bold steps to put the BJP on the back foot.

Speaking to News18, Siddaramaiah said, I am all for Kannada and Karnataka. It does not mean that I am against outsiders. We want Kannada to get first priority in our state.

Talking about the Lingayat religion issue, he said, It is not our idea. The demand came from within the community. We have just forwarded it to the Centre.

Over the years, he has established a good personal rapport with Congress president Rahul Gandhi and it is now helping him in Karnataka elections. According to leaders close to Rahul Gandhi, he has full faith in Siddaramaiah and has given him full power to ensure that the party returns to power again.

Even though the party has not officially named him the chief ministerial candidate, few have doubts over Siddaramaiah continuing as the chief minister if the Congress is voted back to power.

Siddaramaiah knows that he is up against the formidable election machinery of the BJP and it is not going to be easy for him. He must be feeling the pressure of saving the Congress from BJP.

If he wins, Siddaramaiah will create history. If he loses, perhaps he will be history.Lucknow: The Samajwadi Party candidate for Rajya Sabha, Jaya Bachchan, has declared assets worth Rs 1000 crore, which could make her the richest candidate in the Upper House.

The wife of Bollywood actor Amitabh Bachchan and a former actor herself, Jaya submitted an affidavit to the Election Commission declaring her assets, along with those of her husband. In 2012, Jaya had declared the couples assets to be worth Rs 343 crore.

The current declaration claims movable assets worth Rs 540 crore and immovable properties over Rs 460 crore of the couple. The list says that Jaya owns a pen worth Rs 9 lakh, watches worth Rs 51 lakh, while her husband has a watch costing Rs 3.4 crore. Other than a 3,175 sq mt residential property in Brignogan-Plages, France, the couple also own properties in Bhopal, Noida, Delhi, Pune and Mumbai, and in Gandhinagar and Ahmedabad.

Amitabh is listed to own a plot in Daulatpur area of UPs Barabanki district worth Rs 5.7 crore, while Jaya has a 1.22 hectare land in Lucknows Kakori area costing Rs 2.2 crore. The Bachchans also own 12 vehicles, ranging from luxury cars like Rolls-Royce, Mercedes, Porsche, Range Rover to budget cars like Tata Nano and a tractor, totalling in value over Rs 13 crore.

The declaration puts Jaya Bachchan above BJP Rajya Sabha MP Ravindra Kishore Sinha, who had declared assets worth Rs 800 crore in 2014.New Delhi: CPI(M) leader Prakash Karat on Thursday said that any effort to build a non-BJP, non-Congress "federal front" was bound to fail as regional interests would prevent parties from coming together.

In an editorial in the latest edition of the party organ 'People's Democracy', the former general secretary of the party said that the most effective electoral tactic to defeat the BJP in the Lok Sabha elections was to ensure pooling of anti-BJP votes state-wise.

"Any effort to build a non-BJP, non-Congress 'federal front' mooted by Telangana Chief Minister KC Rao, is bound to fail. Some of the regional parties like the DMK and the RJD are with the Congress in their respective states. Further, there are many contradictions amongst the regional parties in terms of policies and regional interests which will prevent all the regional parties coming together, he said.

"So, the most effective electoral tactics to defeat the BJP in the Lok Sabha election would be to ensure pooling of anti-BJP votes state-wise. This is what happened in the UP by-elections," Karat added.

He also reiterated that even though the Congress was hoping to build an extended UPA-style alliance to counter the BJP, it would not succeed.

"The Congress has no credibility to lead such an alliance in terms of an alternative programme. An electoral alliance or understanding with the Congress, which adopts and follows the same neo-liberal policies like the BJP, would not serve the purpose," Karat wrote.

He said regional parties like the BJD in Odisha, the TRS in Telangana and the TDP in Andhra Pradesh would not agree to be partners in any alliance headed by the Congress.Hyderabad: There cannot be a federal front without the Congress being a part of it, senior party leader M Veerappa Moily said on Thursday even as he indicated that leadership of such an alliance is a matter of negotiation.

The former Union minister alleged that a non-BJP, non-Congress federal front, being promoted by Telangana Chief Minister and TRS supremo K Chandrasekhar Rao, is aimed at dividing the anti-BJP parties.

Moily said Rao's move for a federal front is "good and welcome" but all parties should be taken into confidence.

K Chandrashekhar Rao had recently said a non-Congress and non-BJP front should be formed in the country, and had called for a "qualitative change" in politics while announcing that he was ready to take on the mantle of leading a political front.

"There cannot be a federal front without the Congress. Bracketing the Congress along with the BJP will not help the purpose, nor help the national objective (to dethrone the BJP)," Moily told PTI.

Asked if such a federal front has to be led by the Congress, he said, "Leading and other things is matter of negotiation.. that is a different matter."

"But, keeping Congress out of the Federal front may not be desirable. It will also not work, it will not be effective. This is intended only at dividing the opposition," the former Karnataka chief minister said.

"Secular forces" would have to work out "minimum programme" and come under the federal front, only then it will be successful, Moily said.

Referring to the recent Congress plenary, he said party president Rahul Gandhi has gone on record that he will not sideline elders in the party.

"But, at the same time, youth will get more prominence. That's a welcome move. Because change means, you cannot maintain the status-quo and build the party. Congress needs a thorough change with youth force," Moily said.San Francisco: Facebook Inc Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg apologised on Wednesday for mistakes his company made in how it handled data belonging to 50 million of its users and promised tougher steps to restrict developers' access to such information.

The world's largest social media network is facing growing government scrutiny in Europe and the United States about a whistleblower's allegations that London-based political consultancy Cambridge Analytica improperly accessed user information to build profiles on American voters that were later used to help elect US President Donald Trump in 2016.

"This was a major breach of trust. I'm really sorry this happened. We have a basic responsibility to protect people's data," Zuckerberg said in an interview with CNN, breaking a public silence since the scandal erupted at the weekend.

Zuckerberg said in a post on Facebook the company "made mistakes, there's more to do, and we need to step up and do it."

He said the social network planned to conduct an investigation of thousands of apps that have used Facebook's platform, restrict developer access to data, and give members a tool that lets them to disable access to their Facebook data more easily.

His plans did not represent a big reduction of advertisers' ability to use Facebook data, which is the company's lifeblood.

Zuckerberg said he was open to additional government regulation and happy to testify before the US Congress if he was the right person.

"I'm not sure we shouldn't be regulated," he told CNN. "I actually think the question is more what is the right regulation rather than yes or no, should it be regulated? ... People should know who is buying the ads that they see on Facebook."

Zuckerberg said Facebook was committed to stopping interference in the US midterm election in November and elections in India and Brazil.

INVESTOR FEARS

Facebook shares pared gains on Wednesday after Zuckerberg's post, closing up 0.7 percent. The company has lost more than $45 billion of its stock market value over the past three days on investor fears that any failure by big tech firms to protect personal data could deter advertisers and users and invite tougher regulation.

Zuckerberg told the New York Times in an interview published on Wednesday he had not seen a "meaningful number of people" deleting their accounts over the scandal.

Facebook representatives, including Deputy Chief Privacy Officer Rob Sherman, met US congressional staff for nearly two hours on Wednesday and planned to continue meetings on Capitol Hill on Thursday. Facebook was unable to answer many questions, two aides who attended the briefing said.

Zuckerberg told the website Recode that fixes to protect users' data would cost "many millions of dollars."

The whistleblower who launched the scandal, Christopher Wylie, formerly of Cambridge Analytica, said on Twitter he had accepted invitations to testify before US and UK lawmakers.

The German government said Facebook must explain whether the personal data of the country's 30 million users were protected from unlawful use by third parties, according to a report in the Funke group of German regional newspapers.

'SCAPEGOAT'

On Tuesday, the board of Cambridge Analytica suspended its Chief Executive Alexander Nix, who was caught in a secret recording boasting that his company played a decisive role in Trump's victory.

However, the academic who provided the data disputed that on Wednesday.

"I think what Cambridge Analytica has tried to sell is magic, and they've made claims that this is incredibly accurate and it tells you everything there is to tell about you. But I think the reality is it's not that," psychologist Aleksandr Kogan, an academic at Cambridge University, told the BBC in an interview.

Kogan, who gathered the data by running a survey app on Facebook, also said he was being made a scapegoat by Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. Both companies have blamed Kogan for alleged data misuse.

Only 300,000 Facebook users responded to Kogan's quiz, but that gave the researcher access to those people's Facebook friends as well, who had not agreed to share information, producing details on 50 million users.

Facebook has said it subsequently made changes that prevent people from sharing data about friends and maintains that no breach occurred because the original users gave permission. Critics say that it essentially was a breach because data of unsuspecting friends was taken.

Analysts have raised concerns that the incident will reduce user engagement with Facebook, potentially lessening its clout with advertisers. Three Wall Street brokerages cut their price targets.

"Investors now have to consider whether or not the company will conclude that it has grown in a manner that has proven to be untenable," said Pivotal Research Group analyst Brian Wieser.

The company has risen more than 550 percent in value in the past five years.New Delhi: After the website of Ovleno Business Intelligence (OBI) was suspended, its director Himanshu Sharma has updated his LinkedIn profile to omit any references of him "successfully managing election campaigns for the BJP".

This comes after the Congress, in media reports, claimed that the BJP had used the services of Cambridge Analytica (via OBI) and showed the public LinkedIn profile of Sharma. OBI is the Indian arm of Cambridge Analytica, the firm that is at the centre of the row over illegal mining of Facebook data to influence elections.

A screenshot of OBI director Himanshu Sharma's LinkedIN profile before the Facebook data breach was revealed.

Sharma had earlier mentioned in his LinkedIn page that he had managed four election campaigns successfully for the ruling party BJP. His profile earlier read, Achieved target of Mission 272+ by managing Call Centre Management Project- profiling of each and every volunteer/ supporter who had extended his/her support to get involved in our Mission 272+ just by giving missed call, sms or whatsapp to our single nationwide toll free number 07820078200. Confidentially maintaining the database- Database to be provided constituency wise to BJP Candidate as an additional support for national elections and state elections of Haryana, Maharashtra, Jharkhand and Delhi.

Also read: Facebook Data Breach: If Germany and Brazil Can, What Stops India From Summoning Social Media Giant?

So, what did this toll free number- 07820078200- do that was mentioned in Sharma's profile?

According to a press release issued back on February 2014, this toll free number was launched as the 'NamoNumber initiative as a part of India272+, the Volunteering Portal for BJP's Campaign for the general elections of 2014.

Shri Modi launched the initiative by SMSing his Voter ID Number (also known as EPIC number) to 7820078200. This is the key message and call to action of NamoNumber, which asks all Narendra Modi supporters to SMS their voter ID to 7820078200, according to the press release.

The official press release explaining the functioning of NamoNumber:

"The unique tool (http://namonumber.india272.com) is a path-breaking technology that helps to map all BJP supporters based on their voter card ID number and also gives each supporter an opportunity to further mobilise supporters by asking them to do the same. The NamoNumber campaign aims to empower voters by letting them state their support and become more integrated with the larger cause of helping Shri Narendra Modi to become the Prime Minister. As the general election approaches, the NamoNumber will also help ground volunteers to ensure the true support base of BJP and Shri Modi turns up in huge numbers to cast their vote on election day."

Also read: Facebook Data Breach: Mark Zuckerberg Accepts Mistake; Here's What He Has to Say

"The NamoNumber also has an interesting gaming feature similar to that of a Multi-level Marketing exercise. It allows volunteers garner voter ID numbers of their friends and families to keep a track of their efforts. For the first time it allows them to objectively measure the support they have helped to get for the campaign, this helps to motivate volunteers and integrate them to the larger campaign goals." Read more about the NaMo Number Multi-level Marketing exercise here

So, what is the problem with BJP, Congress being clients of OBI or SCL India?

As per the current law, political parties should show the social media campaign expenses as part of part of a sworn affidavit that is required after every election. However, it is now unclear as to which parties were following this protocol.

"As far as the question of political parties' payment to data companies is concerned it should indeed be declared properly in the sworn affidavits but there is no proper authority to implement it," Jagdeep Chhokar, the head of the Association for Democratic Reforms (ADR) told BBC.

WATCH VIDEO: Samsung Flip First Look | Convert Any Space Into Smart Meeting RoomBrazilian prosecutors on Wednesday said they had opened an investigation into whether London-based political consultancy Cambridge Analytica acted illegally in Brazil, as controversy over the firm's data harvesting practices spreads across the globe.

Also Read: Facebook-Cambridge Analytica Scam Could Push Google, Twitter And Others to Tighten Data Sharing

Prosecutors for Brazil's Federal District, which includes Brasilia, the capital, said in a written statement that they will look into whether the firm, through its partnership with Sao Paulo-based consulting group A Ponte Estrategia Planejamento e Pesquisa LTDA, illegally used the data of millions of Brazilians to create psychographic profiles.

Also Read: Facebook-Cambridge Analytica Scam: Facebook Shares Continue to Fall For The Third Day

Calls to CA Ponte, as the partnership is called, were not answered. Prosecutors from a specialized data unit will look into whether there were security breaches that allowed the firm to illegally access personal data. Regulators and lawmakers in the United States and Europe have demanded an explanation of how the consulting firm, which worked on U.S. President Donald Trump's election campaign, gained access to data on 50 million Facebook users in order to build voter profiles.

Reports on Monday said that the firm may have improperly gained access to the data, and Cambridge Analytica has since suspended its chief executive Alexander Nix, while Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said his company made mistakes in its handling of user data. By many measures, Brazil is Facebook's third largest market.

WATCH VIDEO: Samsung Galaxy S9, S9+ First Impressions Review: Best Android Flagships of 2018?Big internet companies and small software developers alike are likely to face scrutiny over how they share customer information in the wake of the scandal involving Facebook and the British election consulting firm Cambridge Analytica. Lawmakers in the United States and the EU have called for probes into how Facebook allowed Cambridge Analytica to access data on 50 million users and use it to help the election campaign of President Donald Trump. Facebook shares have fallen 8.5 percent this week as investors fear the incident will lead to new regulation.

Also Read: Facebook-Cambridge Analytica Scam: Facebook Shares Continue to Fall For The Third Day

The scrutiny and the risk of regulatory action could affect Alphabet's Google, Twitter, Uber Technologies, Microsoft Corp's LinkedIn and the many others that make their user data available to outside developers. The interconnections between platforms such as Facebook and Google and third-party services sit at the core of the contemporary internet, enabling people to quickly share articles to Facebook from news websites and log into shopping apps using their Google account.

But the Facebook case has turned the application programming interfaces, or APIs, that enable such data sharing, into a new front in the escalating battle between lawmakers and tech companies over the monitoring and securing of their vast platforms. Threat of sanctions has already prodded companies into better policing of inappropriate commentary on their services.

Also Read: Google Doodle Honors Japanese Geochemist Katsuko Saruhashi on Her 98th Birthday

"All companies are going to need to do a lot more than just laissez faire policy to manage third-party data access moving forward," said Jason Costa, who helped run APIs at Pinterest, Twitter and Google and now works at GGV Capital. "The days of (the) 'we're just a platform and can't be held responsible for how users use it' line that many companies use, is no longer going to be tenable."

APIs have raised privacy concerns since they emerged around 2005, but their adoption and impact has grown rapidly as companies move data online and look for ways to make it more useful. Uber, for example, in 2016 enabled apps that provided tax and lending services to import driver paystubs. The company did not respond to a request for comment on its monitoring and auditing practices.

The economic dynamic behind APIs is simple: software developers create new tools that benefit big tech companies' users, and in return they gain instant access to a large number of consumers. The big platforms say they have built in protection, such as human reviews and automated scanning tools to detect abuse by partners. But software experts say policies are toothless because auditing is lax; Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, under intense public pressure, said Wednesday the company would now perform audits of the information it shared with partners before it tightened rules in 2014.

Also Read: BlackBerry to Provide Software For Jaguar Land Rover EVs

Dartmouth University engineering professor Geoffrey Parker, who has assigned students to develop apps based on APIs, said automated policing methods will detect spam-like apps and brazen efforts to steal data. It is much more difficult to enforce bans on storing or mashing together information, or acting against users' interest, he said. Some companies added safeguards in the last several years. Facebook stopped allowing developers access to information on its users' friends. But compliance audits were minimal, a former employee said on the condition of anonymity.

Twitter and LinkedIn limited free public access. For paid deals, LinkedIn said "partners are rigorously vetted and regularly declined." The company added that it regularly monitors API usage and takes "swift action when we see or hear of any abuse of our terms." Software developers acknowledged they often do not even read the terms of use for APIs. Rule-breakers can fly under the radar and amass significant information, said Andres Blank, chief executive of recruiting software maker Scout.

Also Read: India warns Against Social Media Data Misuse Ahead of Elections

"It's hard to police if the alarms aren't being sounded," said Blank, who has worked with APIs from LinkedIn and Google. Alex Moore, chief executive of Baydin Inc, which develops Boomerang, an app that can send emails on time-delay, said Microsoft scrutinized his services when the companies partnered on a new feature. But he was not aware of any auditing after it launched.

Google recently asked whether Boomerang could access less information, but that was a rare "poke," Moore said. "There's going to be things people took for granted about data sharing that come to light," he said. Google declined to comment. Microsoft did not respond to a request to comment. Clamping down could limit the supply of innovative tools built on data sharing. But some providers, including Royal Bank of Canada, which announced an API this week, have gone a step further to only allow access to vetted partners.

Paul Nerger, senior vice president at Developerprogram.com, which helps companies such as Cisco Systems Inc manage APIs, said clients have limited the number of partners so that software can be tested "to make sure they are not illegally harvesting" data. Startups are taking heed too. Affectiva, which last year released an API for identifying consumers' emotional states from speech samples, said that it would audit partners as its program grows.

Gabi Zijderveld, the company's chief marketing officer and head of product strategy, said, though, "we inevitably need regulation and legislation on ethical and transparent use of data."

WATCH VIDEO: Samsung Galaxy S9, S9+ First Impressions Review: Best Android Flagships of 2018?The German justice minister Katarina Barley has reportedly summoned Facebook to clarify whether the personal data of 30 million Facebook users in Germany were protected from unlawful use by third parties.

Meanwhile, Brazilian prosecutors have said that they had opened an investigation into whether London-based political consultancy Cambridge Analytica acted illegally in Brazil.

Now, if you think Germanys concern for the personal data of its 30 million users makes sense then what is stopping the Indian government? This is because, as per the latest statistics, India tops the list of Facebook users with a massive user base of 250 million.

Also read: Facebook-Cambridge Analytica Scam: Here's How it Helped Elect Donald Trump as US President

WATCH VIDEO: Samsung Flip First Look | Convert Any Space Into Smart Meeting Room

The Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data breach was quick to take a political turn in India with both BJP and Congress blaming each other for their alleged association with the controversial big data firm. While Law and IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad asked Congress to explain its connection with Cambridge Analytica, there is no concrete step from the government to ask Facebook about the fate of personal data of 250 million Indian Facebook users.

Also read: Brazil Prosecutors Open Investigation Into Cambridge Analytica

Having said that the minister has warned Facebook and said, Mr. Mark Zuckerberg, you better note the observation of the IT Minister of India. If any data theft of Indians is done through collusion of Facebooks system, it shall not be tolerated. We have got stringent powers in the IT Act, we shall use them, including summoning you to India.

Also read: Facebook Data Breach: Mark Zuckerberg Admits Mistake

Cambridge Analytica beginning in 2014 obtained data on 50 million Facebook users via means that deceived both the users and Facebook. The data was harvested by an application developed by a British academic, Aleksandr Kogan, according to Reuters.

Some 270,000 people downloaded the application and logged in with their Facebook credentials, said Facebook. The application gathered their data and data about their friends, and then Kogan passed the data to Cambridge Analytica, according to both Cambridge Analytica and Facebook.

Also read: Delete Facebook: WhatsApp Co-founder Brian Acton After Cambridge Analytica Data Scam

Can India legally summon Facebook? Of course.

The Information Technology Act, 2000 has extraterritorial applications as well. This basically means that the law can extend to offences committed outside India as along as the offences committed have been done by IT systems, network or data in India, including data of Indian users. This enables the court to summon to someone or a firm who have breached the data of Indian users, explained Namita Viswanath, Principal Associate, IndusLaw.

Why is Germany summoning Facebook?

According to the Reuters, Facebook's management in Europe must explain to the German government how data of millions of American Facebook users reached Cambridge Analytica, a consultancy hired by U.S. President Donald Trump for his 2016 election campaign.

Also read: Facebook-Cambridge Analytica Scam Could Push Google, Twitter And Others to Tighten Data Sharing

"The question of what happens with the data of 30 million German users is a central issue of consumer protection," the German justice minister Katarina Barley said. it was unacceptable that social media users are spied on in order to be targeted with election ads or bombarded with hate messages against political rivals, she added.

What Brazil plans to do?

Prosecutors for Brazil's Federal District, which includes Brasilia, the capital, said in a written statement that they will look into whether the firm, through its partnership with Sao Paulo-based consulting group A Ponte Estrategia Planejamento e Pesquisa LTDA, illegally used the data of millions of Brazilians to create psychographic profiles.

WATCH VIDEO: Google Pixel 2 Review | Should You Buy it Now For Rs 42,000?Soon after WhatsApp Co-founder Brain Acton suggested Facebook user to delete their Facebook accounts in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica data breach, CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a lengthy post narrated his side of the story.

Zuckerberg has accepted the breach of trust and said that he needs to fix that. I started Facebook, and at the end of the day I'm responsible for what happens on our platform, wrote Zuckerberg.

While Zuckerberg has promised to work through this and build a better service he claims that the most important actions to prevent a repeat of this have been already taken.

Also read: Facebook Data Breach: After Germany, Brazil, What Stops India From Summoning Social Media Giant?

So, what are the step announced by Mark Zuckerberg?

- We will investigate all apps that had access to large amounts of information before we changed our platform in 2014 to reduce data access, and we will conduct a full audit of any app with suspicious activity. If we find developers that misused personally identifiable information, we will ban them from our platform.

-We will tell people affected by apps that have misused their data. This includes building a way for people to know if their data might have been accessed via thisisyourdigitallife. Moving forward, if we remove an app for misusing data, we will tell everyone who used it.

-If someone hasnt used an app within the last three months, we will turn off the apps access to their information.

-We are changing Login, so that in the next version, we will reduce the data that an app can request without app review to include only name, profile photo and email address. Requesting any other data will require our approval.

-We already show people what apps their accounts are connected to and control what data theyve permitted those apps to use. Going forward, were going to make these choices more prominent and easier to manage.

-We will expand Facebooks bug bounty program so that people can also report to us if they find misuses of data by app developers.

Also read: Facebook-Cambridge Analytica Scam: Facebook Shares Continue to Fall For The Third Day

Mark Zuckerberg Explains the Cambridge Analytica Case:

In 2013, a Cambridge University researcher named Aleksandr Kogan created a personality quiz app. It was installed by around 300,000 people who shared their data as well as some of their friends' data. Given the way our platform worked at the time this meant Kogan was able to access tens of millions of their friends' data.

In 2014, to prevent abusive apps, we announced that we were changing the entire platform to dramatically limit the data apps could access. Most importantly, apps like Kogan's could no longer ask for data about a person's friends unless their friends had also authorized the app. We also required developers to get approval from us before they could request any sensitive data from people. These actions would prevent any app like Kogan's from being able to access so much data today.

In 2015, we learned from journalists at The Guardian that Kogan had shared data from his app with Cambridge Analytica. It is against our policies for developers to share data without people's consent, so we immediately banned Kogan's app from our platform, and demanded that Kogan and Cambridge Analytica formally certify that they had deleted all improperly acquired data. They provided these certifications.

Last week, we learned from The Guardian, The New York Times and Channel 4 that Cambridge Analytica may not have deleted the data as they had certified. We immediately banned them from using any of our services. Cambridge Analytica claims they have already deleted the data and has agreed to a forensic audit by a firm we hired to confirm this. We're also working with regulators as they investigate what happened.

This was a breach of trust between Kogan, Cambridge Analytica and Facebook. But it was also a breach of trust between Facebook and the people who share their data with us and expect us to protect it. We need to fix that.

WATCH VIDEO: Google Pixel 2 Review | Should You Buy it Now For Rs 42,000?Your office might be among one of the coolest places work in India but every meeting room has got one major fightthe age-old white board. To take care of this Samsung has just launched its Flip interactive digital display in India to replace the traditional whiteboard. So, what exactly is the Samsung Flip?

You can imagine the Flip like a huge 55-inch tablet running Samsungs Tizen 3.0 operating system that can convert any room into a smart connected meeting room. You can even mirror the display of your smartphone or Windows 10 PC.

WATCH VIDEO: Samsung Flip First Look | Convert Any Space Into Smart Meeting Room

The Flip comes with a wooden stylus of its own. But the fun part is you can write on the Flip with anything you want to, even your fingers. And dont worry about scratches, the glass on the display is well protected, you can even use a ball-point pen to write on itJust use your palm to erase anything that you have scribbled. The Samsung Flip tries to offer the same experience of using a whiteboard or even a blackboard. Yes, you can convert this digital display into a smart blackboard as well.

Also read: Samsung Galaxy S9+ Review: A Facelift Simply Perfecting The Galaxy S8+

As the name Flip suggests, you can turn display to landscape or portrait positions. Theres also a tray below to help you keep your laptop or mobile phone. The Flip can be move around easily as its mounted on a sturdy wheel-stand. But you will have to ensure that there is a power socket nearby to plug it. Dont worry if the Flip gets disconnected from power or if there is power cut, the Flip automatically saves the content.

As far as the features of the Flip are concerned, you can import files from a network storage or USB pen drive or even replicate content using an HDMI cable on the flip. Once you have finished working you can export these files when needed or can even mail it team members from the display itself or print it.

These means, you dont need someone to jot down the minutes of the meeting anymore. Your boss can simply mail all the discussions on the whiteboard directly to every team member. Also, if your boss has some file or chart on his smartphone which he intends to share with the entire team, he can simply tap at the NFC enabled stylus holder on the Flip to show it on the big screen.

Also read: Facebook Data Breach: If Germany and Brazil Can, What Stops India From Summoning Social Media Giant?

Now, you know that you have to take permission from the admin to wipe clean a whiteboard. Because there could something important that the other team might have written? On the Flip, you can simply save the content and even lock it with a password. This will ensure that the Finance team doesnt get to know what the marketing team was scribbling.

On the connectivity front, there is one HDMI port, two USB ports along with Wi-Fi and LAN port of course. The Flip is aimed at meeting rooms which needs goes through thorough brainstorming every day. It tries to make work smarter and easier especially for creative department and executives who require to work around charts every day.

WATCH VIDEO: Google Pixel 2 Review | Should You Buy it Now For Rs 42,000?New Delhi: In an unprecedented exchange, China has sold Pakistan a high-tech missile tracking system that will allow the Islamic republic to improve its military development.

A report in the South China Morning Post did not divulge details of how much Pakistan paid for it but said that it had evidence of China supporting Pakistans developing missile programme.

The revelation comes just as India announced the successful flight-test of its precision strike BrahMos weapon, which is also called the worlds fastest supersonic cruise missile.

Chinese authorities are said to have declassified information on the deal on Wednesday. The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) said that China was the first to export such sensitive equipment to Pakistan.

A researcher with CAS also confirmed the development to the newspaper. An optical system is a critical component in missile testing. It usually comes with a pair of high-performance telescopes equipped with a laser ranger, high-speed camera, infrared detector and a centralised computer system that automatically captures and follows moving targets, the paper reported.

Not just the exchange of the equipment, Chinese officials also reportedly enjoyed VIP treatment during the three months that it took for them to assemble and calibrate the tracking equipment and also train the staff in operating it.

The researcher was quoted as saying that China had given a pair of eyes. They can use them to look at whatever they want to see, even the Moon.

This is not the first time that there has been an exchange of defence equipment and weapons between the two allies. Pakistan has previously got warships, fighters, short-range missiles from China.Bangkok: At least 17 people were killed and dozens of others wounded when a bus travelling in northeastern Thailand veered off the road and smashed into a tree, authorities said Thursday.

The accident occurred Wednesday evening in Thailand's Nakhon Ratchasima province with the double decker bus carrying around 50 people returning home from a holiday.

"The current death toll is 17, and 33 are injured," an official from the Nakhon Ratchasima provincial emergency medical service told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Photos in local media of the accident's aftermath showed part of the bus lying on its side and officials standing beside a row of body bags.

Among the injured, some 10 people are in critical condition and receiving care at a nearby hospital, the official added.

The head of the Nakhon Ratchasima disaster prevention and mitigation department said the bus driver lost control while the vehicle was going downhill, before it veered off the road and jumped a traffic island then smashed into a large tree.

"The bus was torn into two parts," he said.

Lieutenant Colonel Pornpattana Pisitkarn from the Udomsap police station near where the accident occured said the bus breaks appeared to have failed.

Thailand's roads are some of the most lethal in the world, killing around 24,000 people each year according to the World Health Organization.

More than half of accidents involve motorcycles, bicycles and pedestrians though bus crashes involving tourists and migrant workers are also common.

In November 13 Myanmar nationals were killed when their van collided with a truck in central Thailand and burst into flames.Beijing: China should prepare for military action over self-ruled Taiwan and pressure Washington over cooperation on North Korea after the United States passed a law to boost ties with Taiwan, a widely read Chinese state-run newspaper said on Thursday.

Beijing was infuriated when US President Donald Trump signed legislation last week that encourages the United States to send senior officials to Taiwan to meet Taiwanese counterparts and vice versa.

Beijing has also been upset by Trump's threats to impose trade restrictions on China over its huge trade surplus with the United States.

US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Alex Wong said in Taipei on Wednesday the United States' commitment to Taiwan has never been stronger.

China claims Taiwan as its own and considers the self-ruled island a wayward province, which Chinese President Xi Jinping said on Tuesday would face the "punishment of history" for any attempt at separatism.

The Global Times said in an editorial China had to "strike back" against the U.S. law, for example by pressuring the United States in other areas of bilateral cooperation, like over North Korea and Iran.

"The mainland must also prepare itself for a direct military clash in the Taiwan Straits. It needs to make clear that escalation of US-Taiwan official exchanges will bring serious consequences to Taiwan," said the paper, which is published by the ruling Communist Party's official People's Daily.

"This newspaper has suggested that the mainland can send military planes and warships across the Taiwan Straits middle line. This can be implemented gradually depending on the cross-Straits situation," it said.

Taiwan is one of China's most sensitive issues and a potential military flashpoint. Underlining that threat, Taiwan sent ships and an aircraft on Wednesday to shadow a Chinese aircraft carrier group through the narrow Taiwan Strait, its defence ministry said.

Responding to requests for comment on the Global Times article and the carrier movement, a spokesman for the US State Department said: "We oppose unilateral actions by either side to alter the status quo across the Strait."

"The United States has a deep and abiding interest in cross-Strait peace and stability," Justin Higgins added. "We welcome steps by both sides of the Taiwan Strait to reduce tensions and improve cross-Strait relations."

Underscoring China's concerns, Taiwan's government and the de facto U.S. embassy on the island said a second senior U.S. official would be visiting Taiwan this week, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Manufacturing Ian Steff.

In Washington on Wednesday, the mayor of the Taiwanese city of Kaohsiung, Chen Chu, met with Susan Thornton, the US State Department's senior diplomat for East Asia, Taiwan's representative office in Washington said.

Chen is a key ally of Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, and a fellow member of the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party.

In Beijing, foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying reiterated China's opposition to official US-Taiwan contacts, urging people to reread Xi's comments from earlier in the week.

"The Chinese people share a common belief that it is never allowed, and it is absolutely impossible, to separate any inch of our great country's territory from China," Hua said, quoting Xi.

China's hostility towards Taiwan has risen since Tsai's 2016 election.

China suspects she wants to push for formal independence, which would cross a red line for Communist Party leaders in Beijing, though Tsai has said she wants to maintain the status quo and is committed to ensuring peace.Washington: President Donald Trump's lead lawyer in the US investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election said on Thursday he had resigned.

"I love the president and wish him well," Washington attorney John Dowd told Reuters in an email.

The resignation was first reported on Thursday by the New York Times, citing sources, including one who said Trump was increasingly ignoring Dowd's advice.

Dowd did not immediately comment on why he resigned.

Dowd and Jay Sekulow, who also represents Trump in the Russia probe, have been in negotiations in recent weeks over a possible interview for Trump with special counsel Robert Mueller, people familiar with the matter have told Reuters.

Sekulow said in a statement that Dowd was "a friend and has been a valuable member of our legal team."

"We will continue our ongoing representation of the president and our cooperation with the Office of Special Counsel," Sekulow said.

On Saturday, Dowd called for an end to the investigation, which he said was manufactured by former FBI director James Comey.

Dowd has been Trump's lead outside lawyer for the Russia probe since last summer, when longtime Trump personal lawyer Marc Kasowitz stepped down.

Earlier this week, Trump hired Washington lawyer Joseph DiGenova, who accuses the FBI and U.S. Justice Department of trying to frame Trump with what he says are false charges of colluding with Russia during the 2016 election campaign. DiGenova's hiring was viewed as possibly signaling an aggressive drive to discredit Mueller.

Washington lawyer Ty Cobb, who has been in the White House since last summer and has also been working on the probe, did not immediately respond to requests to comment on developments in the legal team.

Last week, a person familiar with the matter told Reuters that veteran Washington lawyer Emmet Flood was under consideration for a White House job assisting Trump with the Russia probe.

Mueller is investigating possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia to influence the 2016 presidential election. Moscow denies any interference and Trump has said there was no collusion.Paris: Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy was charged with corruption and illegal campaign financing on Wednesday over allegations that the late Libyan dictator Moamer Gaddafi helped fund his 2007 election campaign.

After five years of investigation and two days of questioning the rightwinger in police custody, judges looking into France's most explosive political scandal decided they had enough evidence to charge the 63-year-old.

The combative one-term president, who served from 2007-2012, was charged with corruption, illegal campaign financing and concealment of Libyan public money, the source added. He returned home Wednesday after being placed under court supervision.

Sarkozy denies the charges, which are the most serious out of the myriad investigations that have dogged him since he left office in 2012.

He will have six months to appeal the charges, which is he is likely to do, and the judges will have to make a further decision about whether they have sufficient proof to take the case to trial.

He was first taken into custody in the Nanterre suburb west of Paris on Tuesday morning before returning for another grilling on Wednesday morning.

Since 2013, investigators have been looking into claims by several figures in Gaddafi's ousted regime, including his son Seif al-Islam, that Sarkozy was on the take in 2007 from the man he helped topple four years later.

He is already charged in two separate cases, one relating to a system of fake invoices devised to mask overspending on his failed 2012 election campaign and another for alleged influence peddling involving a judge.

His right-wing Republicans party has so far backed him publicly.

"Friendship and loyal support to Nicolas Sarkozy in this test," the treasurer of his 2007 campaign, Eric Woerth, tweeted.

One of the party's lawmakers in northern France, Sebastien Huyghe, told BFM television he believed Sarkozy was the victim of "vengeance" by ex-Libyan regime members and by the French judiciary, with which he had a fraught relationship as president.

But there have been signs of unease among some senior conservatives who fear being contaminated by the mounting allegations against him.

Brice Hortefeux, a Sarkozy ally who was a top minister during his presidency, was also questioned Tuesday.

"Mr Hortefeux again assured that there was no financing from Libya or any foreign country," his lawyer Jean-Yves Dupeux told AFP.

Suitcases of cash?

In 2011, as NATO-backed forces were driving Gaddafi out of power, Seif al-Islam told the Euronews network that "Sarkozy must first give back the money he took from Libya to finance his electoral campaign."

Sarkozy has dismissed the allegations as the rantings of vindictive Gaddafi oyalists who were furious over the French-led military intervention in Libya that helped end Gaddafi's 41-year rule and ultimately led to his death.

The former French leader has also sued the investigative website Mediapart, which has led media coverage of the Libyan allegations since 2012 when it published a document allegedly signed by Libya's intelligence chief showing that Gaddafi had agreed to fund Sarkozy to the tune of 50 million euros ($62 million).

Le Monde newspaper reported Wednesday that several other Gaddafi regime members had come forward recently with more evidence.

The case drew heightened scrutiny in November 2016 when a Franco-Lebanese businessman admitted to having delivered three cash-stuffed suitcases from the Libyan leader in 2006 and 2007, when Sarkozy was preparing his first run for president.

The revelations came as Sarkozy was trying to make a comeback.

Ziad Takieddine claimed he provided 1.5 to 2 million euros in 200-euro and 500-euro notes each time and was given the money by Gaddafi's military intelligence chief Abdallah Senussi.

The legal investigation is looking into these allegations, as well as a 500,000-euro foreign cash transfer to Sarkozy's former interior minister Claude Gueant and the 2009 sale of a luxury villa in the south of France to a Libyan investment fund for a suspiciously high price.

Businessman Alexandre Djouhri, an associate of Sarkozy's, sold the property for 10 million euros to a fund managed by Gaddafi's ex-chief of staff Bashir Saleh.

In January, Djouhri was arrested off a flight at Heathrow airport and appeared in court in London on suspicion of fraud and money laundering linked to the French probe.

Legal pressures

In July 2014 Sarkozy became the first former French president to be taken into police custody over a separate inquiry into claims that he tried to interfere in another of the myriad investigations that have dogged him since leaving office.

He failed in his comeback bid for the presidency in November 2016 and has stepped back from frontline politics since then, but he still holds considerable influence with the Republicans party.

He is not the first former president to be charged with corruption, however.

In 2011, his conservative predecessor Jacques Chirac was given a two-year suspended sentence for embezzlement and misuse of public funds.Seoul: South Korean ex-President Lee Myung-bak was arrested and jailed on Thursday over a range of corruption allegations, becoming the latest in a series of disgraced leaders embroiled in scandals and other problems after leaving office.

A convoy of vehicles, including a black sedan carrying Lee, entered a detention center in Seoul after the Seoul Central District Court approved his arrest warrant, citing what it called serious alleged crimes and a possibility that he might try to destroy evidence. Prosecutors can detain him for up to 20 days before formally charging him.

"Right now, I feel it's all my fault and I have a guilty conscience rather than blaming others," Lee said in a statement issued shortly before his arrest, according to Yonhap news agency.

"Over the past 10 months, I've suffered a big pain that I couldn't endure ... I hope my arrest will relieve the pains of my family and those who worked with me."

Lee, 76, a conservative, briefly waved to former aides gathered at his Seoul residence but didn't make any comment as he entered the sedan with senior prosecutors to be taken to the detention center.

Prosecutors accuse Lee of taking a total of 11 billion won (USD 10 million) in bribes from his own intelligence agency, business groups and others. They allege he also used a private company as a channel to establish illicit slush funds totaling 35 billion won (USD 33 million), embezzled its official funds and evaded taxes.

Lee's arrest comes about one year after his conservative successor, Park Geun-hye, was ousted from office and put into jail over a separate corruption scandal that touched off months of massive street protests. Prosecutors have requested a 30-year prison term for Park, and the Seoul court is to issue a ruling on her on April 6.

High-profile corruption scandals often take place in South Korea, Asia's fourth largest economy, which achieved a genuine liberal democracy in the late 1980s following decades of military-backed dictatorships.

President after president strengthened anti-graft drives, but saw themselves, families or key aides entangled in bribery scandals at the close of their terms or after leaving office.

Lee has previously denied most of the allegations against him. He has accused the current liberal government of President Moon Jae-in of trying to retaliate over the 2009 death of Moon's friend, liberal ex-President Roh Moo-hyun, who leapt to his death during a corruption investigation of his family.

Lee's accusation prompted fury from Moon, who called it a challenge to the country's judicial order. Moon previously called the Roh investigation political revenge by the Lee government. Moon served as Roh's chief of staff.

Lee, a former Hyundai executive who led the company's rise during South Korea's rapid economic development from the rubbles of the 1950-53 Korean War, was the country's first president with a business background.

Lee's can-do image spawned hopes of an improved economy, but his five-year rule was tainted by rising animosities with North Korea, huge street rallies against imports of US beef and an economy hit by the global financial meltdown.

Other presidents who suffered bad endings include Park's father, Park Chung-hee, a dictator who was gunned down by his spy chief during a 1979 drinking party following an 18-year rule; and his successors Chun Doo-hwan and Roh Tae-woo, both ex-army generals who spent time in jail for bribery, treason, munity and other charges after leaving office.

Kim Young-sam and Kim Dae-jung, both former opposition leaders who fought against the dictatorships, left office in disgrace after their sons and close associates were embroiled in scandals.Great Mills (US): Tuesday's school shooting in southern Maryland that left the shooter dead and two students wounded increasingly appears to be the action of a lovesick teenager.

Authorities on Wednesday released a few additional details into the shooting at Great Mills High School in St Mary's County.

Austin Rollins, 17, was killed after shooting a schoolmate, 16-year-old Jaelynn Willey. A school resource officer got there within a minute and fired a shot at Willey, but it's not yet clear whether Rollins was killed by the officer's bullet or took his own life.

A 14-year-old boy who was shot in the thigh during the encounter was released Wednesday from a hospital.

The St Mary's County Sheriff's Office said Wednesday that Rollins and the girl had been in a relationship that recently ended. Authorities had previously only said that the two had had a relationship of some sorts. "All indications suggest the shooting was not a random act of violence," police said in a statement.

St Mary's County Sheriff Tim Cameron said earlier that a precise determination of Rollins' motive may be impossible now that he is dead.

The girl, Jaelynn Willey, was still fighting for her life at the University of Maryland Prince George's Hospital Center. A fundraising page to help Willey's family has raised more than $54,000.

Hospital spokesman Michael Schwartzberg said in an email Wednesday night that she remained in critical condition.

Attempts to reach Rollins' family were unsuccessful.

A day after the eruption of gun violence in one of the sleepy community's schools, the few residents who ventured out amid a snowstorm blanketing the East Coast praised the school resource officer who responded, Deputy First Class Blaine Gaskill.

"He did a very, very good job," said Sharon Eglinton, manager of a cafe in nearby Leonardtown.

Eglinton, herself a Great Mills alumna, noted that Rollins was by all accounts a good student who had not shown any warning signs. She said she thinks the best way to prevent future school shootings is to install metal detectors at schools.

"I have no problem paying for it," she said. "If you can protect people getting on a plane with metal detectors, you can protect people in schools."

While investigators are still determining whether Rollins took his own life or was killed by the officer's bullet, Cameron credited Gaskill with preventing any more loss of life.

Cameron said Gaskill, a six-year veteran with SWAT team training, responded within a minute and fired his weapon simultaneously with a final shot fired by Rollins. The officer was unharmed. Gaskill was praised a couple of years ago for his handling of a confrontation with an armed suspect.

A Maryland man was charged in 2016 after he was accused of confronting Gaskill with a gun at an apartment in an incident captured on body camera video. Gaskill can be heard in the video giving several commands to drop the gun before the man eventually complies.

The Enterprise, a local newspaper, reports Cameron said at the time that Gaskill had "used exemplary judgment."

On Wednesday, authorities said the Glock handgun used in the shooting was legally owned by Rollins' father. In Maryland, it is illegal for anyone under age 21 to possess a handgun unless it is required for their employment.

People who knew Rollins were trying to make some kind of sense of Tuesday's hometown horror.

"Never in a million years could I have imagined he would do something like this," said Adlai Traver, 18, who attended Great Mills and knew all three kids involved in the shooting. He recalled playing cards with Rollins during band class when the fellow percussionists had a little downtime during class. "I was in the car when I heard it was him. I pulled over and almost puked."London: Scotland Yard's newly appointed Indian-origin counter-terrorism chief, Neil Basu, has launched a new campaign to urge the public to help in the fight against terrorism.

The Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner of Specialist Operations revealed that last year more than a fifth of reports from the public produced intelligence which is helpful to police.

"Since the beginning of 2017, we have foiled 10 Islamist and four right-wing terror plots, and there is no doubt in my mind that would have been impossible to do without relevant information from the public," Basu said at the launch of Action Counters Terrorism (ACT) campaign in London yesterday.

"We have been saying for some time now that communities defeat terrorism, and these figures demonstrate just how important members of the public are in the fight to keep our country safe," he noted.

According to the police data, of the nearly 31,000 public reports to the Met Police's Counter Terrorism (CT) Policing unit during 2017, more than 6,600 (21.2 percent) resulted in useful intelligence information which is used by UK officers to inform live investigations or help build an intelligence picture of an individual or group.

Research carried out by CT Policing suggests that while more than 80 percent of people are motivated to report suspicious activity or behaviour, many are unclear exactly what they should be looking for.

The ACT campaign, accompanied by a 60-second film based on real-life foiled plots, aims to educate the public about terrorist attack planning and reinforce the message that any piece of information, no matter how small, could make the difference.

"Like other criminals, terrorists need to plan and that creates opportunities for police and the security services to discover and stop these attacks before they happen. But we need your help to exploit these opportunities, so if you see or hear something unusual or suspicious trust your instincts and ACT by reporting it in confidence by phone or online," Basu said.

He detailed some forms of suspicious activity, which could involve someone buying or storing chemicals, fertilisers or gas cylinders for no obvious reasons, or receiving deliveries for unusual items, or someone embracing extremist ideology, or searching for such material online.

UK Security Minister Ben Wallace added: "The police's fantastic ACT campaign is rightly highlighting the vital part that communities are playing in defending this country against terrorism. "The public should remain alert, but not alarmed, and I urge anyone who is worried about suspicious behaviour and activity to follow this advice and report their concerns to the police."Washington: The tempest over President Donald Trump's congratulatory phone call to Vladimir Putin quickly grew on Wednesday into an uproar over White House leaks, sparking an internal investigation and speculation over who might be the next person Trump forces out of the West Wing.

The White House said in a statement it would be a "fireable offense and likely illegal" to leak Trump's briefing papers to the press, after word emerged that the president had been warned in briefing materials to refrain from congratulating the Russian president on his re-election. Trump he did so anyway during a conversation.

Aides had included guidance in Trump's talking points for the call to Putin stating: "DO NOT CONGRATULATE," a senior administration official said Wednesday, speaking to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because the official had not been authorised to discuss internal matters.

The document had been accessible only to a select group of aides, two officials said.

They also said there now is an internal probe of leak but provided no other details. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal deliberations. The White House is not formally acknowledging the veracity of the presidential guidance first reported by The Washington Post.

The statement about a possible firing was an unusual threat by the White House. Other leaks of classified material, including partial transcripts of Trump's calls with foreign leaders, have not garnered specific warnings of termination or criminal action.

It was not clear whether the document in question was classified, but it was included with other classified papers.

It also was unclear whether Trump, who prefers oral briefings, had read the talking points prepared by his national security team before yesterday's call. National Security Adviser HR McMaster briefed the president in person before the conversation in the White House residence.

The leak further cast doubt on McMaster's longevity in the top foreign policy post: The guidance for Trump had been prepared by his staff. Trump has been moving toward replacing McMaster on the advice of Chief of Staff John Kelly and Secretary of Defense James Mattis, but has not settled on timing or a successor.

Trump's call of congratulations to Putin drew bruising criticism from members of his own party even before the revelation that he was advised against it.

"An American president does not lead the free world by congratulating dictators on winning sham elections," said Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee and has pressed the Trump administration to respond aggressively to Russia's interference in the US presidential election.

Senator Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, said Wednesday he wouldn't comment specifically on Trump's action, but he told CNN, "I think Putin's a criminal. What he did in Georgia, what he did in Ukraine, what he did in the Baltics, in London...That's a criminal activity. I wouldn't have a conversation with a criminal." The call was the latest indicator of Trump's personal reluctance to publicly criticise Putin.

The White House said Trump did not raise Russia's meddling in the US elections or its suspected involvement in the recent poisoning of a former spy in Britain in the call with Putin. Trump also said he and Putin might meet "in the not too distant future" to discuss the arms race and other matters.

He said that during their hoped-for meeting the two men would likely discuss Ukraine, Syria and North Korea.

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders defended Trump's call and noted that President Barack Obama made a similar call at the time of Putin's last electoral victory.

"We don't get to dictate how other countries operate," Sanders said.

Florida Sen Marco Rubio called the leak a "bigger outrage" than Trump's congratulations for Putin. "If you don't like President resign, but this ongoing pattern of duplicity holds potential for serious damage to the nation," he said on Twitter.

Russia has received global condemnation after Britain blamed Moscow for the recent nerve agent attack that sickened Sergei Skripal and his daughter. Russia has denied the accusation.

Trump's call came at a period of heightened tension after the White House imposed sanctions on Russia for its interference in the 2016 U.S. election and other "malicious cyberattacks." Sanders insisted that the administration has scolded Putin at the appropriate times.

"We've been very clear in the actions that we've taken that we're going to be tough on Russia, particularly when it comes to areas that we feel where they've stepped out of place," she said.

The Kremlin said in a statement that Trump and Putin spoke about a need to "coordinate efforts to limit the arms race" and for closer cooperation on strategic stability and counterterrorism.

"Special attention was given to considering the issue of a possible bilateral summit," the Kremlin statement said.Beijing: China has brought its frontier troops, including those guarding its border with India, directly under the military command removing civilian control over them, a state-run daily reported on Thursday.

Communist Party of China (CPC), headed by President Xi Jinping, announced complete withdrawal of civilian-oriented frontier defence troops from the People's Armed Police (PAP) to enhance the ruling party's management of the country's armed forces, Global Times reported.

Troops that were formerly part of the armed police and managed by institutes of the State Council have now officially withdrawn from this system in a bid to fully implement the party's absolute leadership over the People's Liberation Army, and other national armed forces, the daily said quoting an article published by the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA)'s official WeChat public account on Wednesday.

The withdrawal of armed police force units engaged in civilian affairs would disentangle the previous complicated chain of command, Chinese military analysts said.

This will also mean that the border troops including those posted along the 3,488-km long Line of Actual Control (LAC) would be brought directly under the PLA which functions under Central Military Commission (CMC) headed by Xi.

Xi was re-elected last week for second five-year term as the president and the chairman of the CMC by China's rubber stamp parliament National People's Congress (NPC), days after it removed the two-term limit for president, paving the way for his continuation in power perhaps for life.

Xi heads the CPC, the military besides the presidency, making him the most powerful leader after party founder Mao Zedong.

Last December, the CPC removed the civilian control over PAP all over the country and brought it directly under the control of the CMC headed by Xi.

The 1.5 million-strong paramilitary police force previously was under a dual command structure of the CMC and the State Council or cabinet through the Ministry of Public Security.

It served as a backup for the military in times of war and domestically has a role in putting down protests and counterterrorism as well as border defence and firefighting, the Hong Kong based South China Morning Post reported earlier.

The latest orders included integrating the China's Coast Guard whose ships often sail close to the disputed islands with Japan in the East China Sea, into the CMC chain of command.

The Coast Guard earlier functioned under the leadership of State Oceanic Administration and it now start to serve their duties as armed police forces.

Armed police forces that previously answered to civil-related duties including gold, forestry and hydropower troops have been transferred to State institutions accordingly while no longer part of army service, the Global Times report said.

Li Daguang, a professor at the National Defence University in Beijing defended the CPC's controls over police saying such reforms are being carried out alongside ongoing reforms of the party, state institutions and the military.

Such reforms could significantly correct misnaming errors and stressed the absolute leadership of the party over its armed forces including the armed police, Li said.

Since he took over power in 2013, Xi has been stressing absolute leadership of the party over military and all other organs power in China.404

We're sorry! The page you were looking for couldn't be found.Marvel Comics killed off Spider-Man, Scarlet Witch, and Dr. Strange right before their MCU returns . or did they?

Marvel seemingly killing Peter Parker, Wanda Maximoff, and Stephen Strange right before their big new movies has gotten complicatedChina sells highly-sensitive tracking system and missile technology to Pakistan

Beijing : China has sold a highly-sensitive tracking system to Pakistan, which could boost Islamabads ability to develop multi-war heads. According to the South China Morning Post, an influential Chinese think tank says that China is the first country to have given such sensitive equipment to Pakistan.

China is the biggest arms supplier to Pakistan, India's arch-rival. Zheng Mengwei, a researcher with the China Academy of Sciences (CAS) Institute of Optics and Electronics in Chengdu, Sichuan province, told the Post that Pakistan's military recently deployed the Chinese-made system "at a firing range" for use in testing and developing its new missiles.

The statement from the CAS said the Chinese team enjoyed VIP treatment during the nearly three months it spent in Pakistan assembling and calibrating the tracking system and training technical staff on how to use it.

"The system's performance surpassed the user's expectations," it said. The amount paid by Islamabad was not known.

An optical system is crucial in missile testing. It usually comes with a pair of high-performance telescopes equipped with a laser ranger, high-speed camera, infrared detector and a centralized computer system that captures and follows moving targets, the Post said.

The device records high-resolution images of a missile's departure from its launcher, stage separation, tail flame and, after the missile re-enters the atmosphere, the trajectory of the warheads it releases.

The uniqueness of the Chinese-made system lay in its use of four telescope units, "more than normally required", Zheng said. Each telescope, with a detection range of several hundred km, is positioned in a different location, with their timing synchronized precisely with atomic clocks.

Together, the telescopes provide visual information of unprecedented detail and accuracy, which missile developers can use to improve designs and engine performance. Using more telescopes allows the system to track more warheads simultaneously from different angles, reducing the risk of losing a target.

"We simply gave them a pair of eyes. They can use them to look at whatever they want to see, even the Moon," he said.Israel announces plan to stop using coal, gasoline, and diesel by 2030

The United States is far from the only country that is going all-in on renewable energy sources in the next few years. Middle Eastern country Israel has decided to set its sights on achieving certain renewable energy goals as well, and it aims to rely on only natural gas and electric sources by the year 2030.

This plan was revealed by Israels Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz at a recently concluded energy conference held in Tel Aviv. In his view, it should be possible to hit all of their renewable energy goals within the next 12 years or sooner, as Israel moves to switch from coal-based sources to more environmentally friendly alternatives in the production of valuable electricity.

According to Steinitz, Israel is now ready to drop its current energy sources and never look back. We intend to reach a situation in which Israels industry will be based on natural gas, and most importantly, transportation in Israel will be based on natural gas or electricity, he explained. From 2030 onwards, the State of Israel will create alternatives and will no longer allow the import of cars that run on gasoline and diesel fuel.

This new initiative signifies a dramatic shift away from the notion that renewable energy sources can be tapped while still keeping current fuel sources active and in operation. Just a few years ago, in 2014, half of all the electricity produced in Israel came from coal sources while the other half came from natural gas. Now, their new plan aims to hit 83 percent natural gas and 17 percent renewable energy, noting that they should produce zero pollutant along the way, said Steinitz.

The Energy Minister also mentioned this change directly in saying, We have abolished the strategy of diversification of fuels. He said that the decision to focus fully on renewable energy sources came from the realization that its possible for them to reach energy security even without the diversification that still involves the use of coal-based sources.

Israel is looking at more than just cost-savings as part of its move to switch to renewables. One non-monetary benefit would be the reduction of deaths due to air pollution, which the official number pegs at around 2,500 people each year. And the development of the countrys natural gas plans has led to the creation of Leviathan, the largest natural gas field in Israel. It hasnt begun operations yet, but it has already given a number of benefits.

Steinitz credits the Leviathan for playing a key role, in improving Israels relations with neighboring countries Egypt and Jordan. Steinitz admitted that continued development of the field allows them to sign the most significant export deals theyve ever had after signing the peace accords with them. This strengthens the peace axis, he said. It is a geopolitical success that has been made possible because of natural gas.

Not everyone is onboard with the countrys plan to move completely in favor of natural gas and electricity, however. A group of protesters has expressed its disapproval for the planned Leviathan construction, saying that instead of building that rig, companies should instead set up floating production storage and offloading facilities above it, instead of occupying all the space close to the shore of Dor Beach, where the rig will be built. But Steinitz remains steadfast, pointing out that those protesting are merely people who adhere to the not in my backyard philosophy and dont have an eye on the big picture.

Certainly, Israel has a long way to go before it meets all of its goals. But the mere fact that they have already started working on them and have remained determined all throughout despite opposition goes to show that they have a big chance of succeeding.

Check out other ways that the world is starting to embrace renewables at Power.news.

Sources include:

TimesOfIsrael.com

JPost.comA new process called Laser Wire Direct Closeout (LWDC) was developed and advanced at NASA to build a less-expensive rocket nozzle in significantly less time. LWDC is a different process than most 3-D printing technologies, which are powder-based and fabricated in layers. It uses a freeform-directed energy wire deposition process to fabricate material in place. This new NASA-patented technology has the potential to reduce build time from several months to several weeks.

Above- Through hot-fire testing at NASAs Marshall Space Flight Center, engineers put this nozzle through its paces, accumulating more than 1,040 seconds at high combustion chamber pressures and temperatures. Now, this technology is being licensed and considered in commercial applications across the industry. Credits: NASA/MSFC/David OliveToyota has temporarily suspended its self-driving car program after Uber fatal self-driving car accident. it would t suspend testing of its Chauffeur autonomous driving system on US roads.

Toyota (TM) had been road-testing robot vehicles in Michigan and California. The number of self-driving vehicles being tested by Toyota was small and didnt specify how long the suspension would last.

Toyota earlier this month said it planned to invest up to 300 billion yen ($2.8 billion) with the goal of developing its self-driving car capabilities.

Uber Technologies was talking about installing its self-driving system in Toyota vehicles as the U.S. ride-hailing firm seeks to sell its autonomous driving technology to outside companies, the Nikkei reported on Friday. They were negotiating a possible deal for Toyota to use Ubers automated driving technology in one of the automakers minivan models.The University of Connecticut has signed a three-year research agreement with a Fairfield County company that is developing high-capacity lithium-ion batteries for such uses as giving electric vehicles greater range between charges and energy storage for use at a later time.

The value of the research agreement with Wilton-based Cadenza Innovation is $700,000, according to UConn officials. The work UConn scientists will be doing for Cadenza involves highly specialized materials analysis and synthesis for use in lithium-ion-based energy storage.

Cadenza has developed a way of packaging lithium-ion batteries that increases the amount of energy the batteries can produce.

The work UConn will be doing is being conducted at UConns Center for Clean Energy Engineering in the lab of Dr. Radenka Maric, the schools vice president for research and Connecticut Clean Energy Fund Professor of Sustainable Energy, who is the principal investigator on the project. Additional work will take place at the recently opened Innovation Partnership Building at the UConn Tech Park by professors Sina Shahbazmohamadi and Steven Suib.

Cadenza has the technical capability and holds key patents to develop game-changing battery technologies, Maric said in a statement. UConn has the expertise and unmatched research facilities to conduct rigorous, reproducible, accurate specialty materials analysis to help their technology advance.

Cadenza was founded in 2012 by Christina Lampe-Onnerud, a leading entrepreneur in the field of energy storage. The company, which currently employs 25 people, had been located in Oxford before moving about a year ago into a space in Bethel that also houses the research laboratories of commercial battery maker Duracell.

The companys corporate offices are in Wilton. Cadenzas investors include Connecticut Innovations, the states quasi-public technology investment arm.

Lampe-Onnerud said the work UConns scientists are doing is vital research for energy storage and a range of other critical technologies.

They have developed some really important analytical capabilities over years, she said of the UConn researchers

The UConn research is designed to build upon Cadenzas partnership with Syrah Resources, the only major, fully funded, natural graphite development project in construction globally. Syrah is projected to be the worlds largest individual graphite producer by 2020 with approximately 40 percent market share from its operation in Mozambique.

The work UConns scientists are doing involves the characterization and fundamental study of Cadenza Innovations technology to synthesize low cost, natural graphite collected from the Syrah mines into an ideal base material for lithium-ion batteries. As the research proceeds, studies focused on improving battery performance will be done.

Cadenza already had several research projects going on with other UConn programs.NEW HAVEN  Carmen Mendez versus Dapper. No contest.

Mendez, a neighborhood specialist for the Livable City Initiative, was tired of seeing public property defaced with graffiti, which is not only upsetting for the immediate neighbors, but costs New Haven thousands to clean up every year.

Something gets ruined in a minute, Mendez said of the vandalism, in which taggers compete with each other to see who can leave their mark on the most surfaces without getting caught.

The more tags you have out there, the more famous you become, Mendez said.

She said through the efforts of Detective Orlando Crespo, who talks often with the New York Police Department on these cases, they are making progress arresting some of the taggers.

But Mendez said those who do to court can get off easy for what is characterized as a victimless crime.

While some friends said it would be a waste of time to testify against Justin Lewis, aka Dapper, in Superior Court in late January, Mendez wrote a letter to the New Haven States Attorneys Office to make her case and then showed up before Judge Philip Scarpellino.

She argued Lewis should not get accelerated rehabilitation, under which the charges would be dismissed if he followed stipulations set by the judge.

LCI unequivocally rejects the notion that graffiti tagging is a victimless crime, she wrote in her letter to Investigator Rosa Vasquez in the states attorneys office.

Mendez said graffiti demoralizes the LCI specialists charged with enforcing the citys anti-blight and property maintenance laws; discourages investors; lowers property values; robs residents of pride in their city; and just generally diminishes enjoyment of public property.

Consequently, the city and its residents lose current and potential future tax dollars, she wrote.

She said the city budgets around $30,000 a year to take care of this nuisance.

A judicial decision to have Mr. Lewis reimburse the city for these costs sends a powerful message to other graffiti artists and taggers. It makes clear the city of New Haven will not permit the defacement or destruction of public property and will seek to prosecute graffiti artists and taggers fully, Mendez wrote.

In Scarpellinos courtroom, she told the judge:

Getting rid of graffiti is very expensive and we are just exhausted by it. ... We would rather put the money into programs; housing programs for the elderly, for the low-income. ... We can beautify, do public improvements, anything else but spend it on graffiti. It just doesnt make sense, she told him.

Mendez said a taggers actions are willful, intentional and something has to be done. At some point weve got to say no. This cant continue to happen.

Scarpellino thought she made a good point.

In the end, he let Lewis enroll in accelerated rehabilitation for two years, but he also has to pay back the $9,200 it cost to remove his tags from around the city.

Starting on March 1, Lewis was told to pay a minimum of $100 per month for 20 months for a total of $2,000. Scarpellino then gave him approximately 21/2 more months after that to cover the remaining restitution.

If he comes up short, Scarpellino said he will be back in the same position, facing charges and a court record if he cant show he did his best to raise the money.

You want somebody coming to your house and putting their initials on your house? You know, think about it from that standpoint, Scarpellino told Lewis, according to a transcript.

When Mendez told her story to the Downtown Wooster Square Special District and the reimbursement coming back to New Haven, the audience of neighbors clapped.

Mendez gives all the credit to Crespo for his interest in fighting this type of blight and for using his contacts to get results. She said Dapper was picked up in New York based on shared information.

Next in the crosshairs in New Haven are Peach and Old, taggers on the rise.

Driving around the city, she points out where tagging has been removed by the firm hired to paint over it. It is supposed to be matched to the surface color, but that isnt always the case where big patches of new paint stand out.

She said sometimes it looks worse than the tags.

Some residual Dapper tags are still on Wallace Street, on a bridge over the railroad track. Mendez said LCI concentrates on cleaning up the main thoroughfares first and do other streets as long as there are funds.

Under the railroad tracks on Humphrey Street, a pedestrian tunnel is a constant source of frustration.

It has caused us a great deal of heartache because basically we see ourselves now as providing a canvas. We clean it up and we provide a canvas for a new tagger, Mendez said. If they are true artists, as they claim they are, they should really focus on doing something productive and constructive.

They just dont care, Mendez said.

A mailbox on Grand Avenue was also covered in tags.

On a bridge over the Mill River, next to the United Illuminating building, where people fish, someone painted Keep it Clean.

Did they have to do that? Although it is a good message, she said.

Mendez said the tags have a psychological cost to the residents. They feel nobody cares. ... After awhile they accept it as this is the way it will be. It beats the enthusiasm out of people. They feel it is a war they cant win.

Mendez, who is originally from Brooklyn, loves living in New Haven and said she wants it to shine.

I chose to be here and I always wanted to be a public servant. I want to see it prosper. Thats what drives me every morning to get to work, she said.

While this vandalism can be frustrating, we grapple with it and we dont give up, she said.

For every one of the neighborhood specialists ... their goal is to have a beautiful neighborhood and we compete with one another. Who can get things done faster. It keeps us motivated, she said.

With residents getting more and more involved in their communities, we want to show we are attentive, Mendez said as she did another loop around downtown and Wooster Square  her work district  to spot things she can make better.There were some slippery conditions and school delays Thursday morning as light snow continued to fall.

While snowfall totals didnt come close to the 12 to 18 inches originally forecast, the National Weather Service reported Milford received 5 inches of snow, Waterbury had 1.6 inches and North Haven had just 1 inch.Im guessing that Peter Lumaj believes hes immune to allegations of anti-immigrant bigotry since he himself is an immigrant. More than 30 years ago, his family fled persecution under communist rule in Albania. But Im also guessing that aint gonna fly with Connecticut voters.

The Republican gubernatorial candidate met this week with supporters in West Hartford. If he were running the state government, he said, so-called Dreamers wouldnt get tuition-free college, unions would lose some of their collective-bargaining power, and sanctuary cities would be forced to cooperate with federal immigration authorities.

In other words, were penalizing American citizens and rewarding illegals, the Fairfield attorney said. That must stop. If I were the governor, that would stop right away.

Its not every day that a candidate for statewide office takes positions deeply unpopular with a majority of that states voters. Its not every day that a candidate admits to a belief in politics as a zero-sum game. That might work in a racially, religiously and economically homogeneous state such as Kansas or Iowa, but not in a diverse coastal state like ours.

But more important, I think, is teasing out why an immigrant like Peter Lumaj is dead-set against other immigrants. You could say he wants them to obey the law, like he did. His defenders will say that. But the U.S. government makes exceptions all the time about who can and cant come. That was the case when Lumajs family sought political asylum. This is about more than the law.

Instead of seeing Lumaj as a hypocrite, as many of his critics will allege, we should see his inflammatory statements as part and parcel of a coherent ideology that pays more attention to who commits a crime than the crime itself. If immigrants such as first ladyMelania Trump worked briefly without authorization (a fact), thats fine. But if Nury Chavarria worked for decades illegally, paid her taxes, and raised her native-born children in Norwalk, thats bad.

Why? One of these immigrants, the Slovenian, fits into a particular social order that many conservative Republicans want to preserve. The other, from Guatemala, does not. That preferred social order is being steadily changed by forces beyond their control, things such as globalization, economics and immigration. This social order is not based on the ideals of liberty, equality, and justice for all that are Americas founding creed. It is based on race and power.

That may sound harsh, and I suppose it is, but I cant think of a better way to explain why a white, European immigrant such as Peter Lumaj is campaigning as if Donald Trump were by his side. He bragged about a former aide, Greenwich native Carl Higbie, working for the administration. He appeared unfazed by news of Higbies January resignation after racist, sexist, anti-Muslim and anti-LGBTQ+ remarks [Higbie] had made in 2013 on an internet radio program were revealed, according to Greenwich Time.

If racism doesnt bother you, consider this. Americans who value strongly their European heritage are more likely than not to prefer a strong leader who need not bother with voters, Congress or the courts, according to a new study by the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group. In other words, as I see it, a lot of those Americans who fear their preferred social order is eroding before their eyes dont care for the trappings of a constitutional republic. They would rather see, believe it or not, the rise of an authoritarian leader.

Im not saying Lumaj is one of those people. I want to make that very clear. Indeed, it could be that hes just a very good talker, as when he said the president offered him an ambassadorship to Albania without providing further details. I am saying, however, that hes courting people who value their European heritage to the detriment of American values. Luckily, if youre not one of those folks, there are plenty of other candidates from both parties to choose from this year.Close Get email notifications on {{subject}} daily!

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Email notifications are only sent once a day, and only if there are new matching items.Season 2, Episode 9: Alone

It turns out that The Assassination of Gianni Versace, this gorgeous mess of a television series, was neither about an assassination nor, really, about Versace, the fashion designer who was shot to death on the front steps of his Miami Beach mansion in 1997.

It would have been more accurately called The Agony and the Ecstasy of Andrew Cunanan, Versaces killer, whose spectacular orgy of violence briefly dominated headlines around the world at the close of the American century.

Over the eight previous episodes, starting with Versaces killing, the series drew us back in time, through Cunanans killings of four other people; his career as a drug addict and escort; his resentment of the fame and accomplishment of other gay men; his odd childhood; his troubled relationship with his doting but oppressive and mendacious father; and  in the closest thing to a Rosebud moment  an imagined encounter between Cunanan and Versace years before the murders.

The finale is a riveting hour of television, filled with anguish and revelation as Cunanan, played by Darren Criss, relives his crime spree through television and radio reports that fill the Miami Beach houseboat where he is hiding out  appropriately blown-up to larger-than-life proportions on a home theater projector, no less. But, like much of what preceded it, the episode is a muddle, never quite settling on a coherent thesis or a sustained argument.Its a script she hopes to replay versus Mr. Cuomo  albeit on a far larger stage and against a far more powerful politician, a two-term incumbent perched atop a $30 million war chest. And unlike Mr. de Blasio, who was an elected citywide official, Ms. Nixon has never held office.

The close relationship between Ms. Nixon and Mr. de Blasio is particularly notable because Mr. de Blasio and Mr. Cuomo have been locked in a yearslong battle over the Democratic direction of New York. Mr. Cuomo has even suggested the mayor orchestrated Ms. Nixons bid; there is no evidence he did so. But if Ms. Nixon were to overcome Mr. Cuomos advantages and prevail, it would certainly represent a triumph for Mr. de Blasio, as well.

As it is, Ms. Nixon is drawing on some of the same supporting cast from 2013: Bill Hyers and Rebecca Katz, two of Mr. de Blasios top former strategists, are guiding Ms. Nixons current run.

Back in 2013, the front-runner with an air of inevitability was Ms. Quinn, the City Council speaker with an inside track to be New York Citys first female and lesbian mayor. But Ms. Nixon, who is also gay, sided with Mr. de Blasio instead.

Most people assumed Christine Quinn was going to win that race and one of the lessons is the arrogance of being on top sometimes results in a terrible tumble, said Billy Easton, a friend of Ms. Nixon and the executive director of the Alliance for Quality Education, an advocacy group that seeks more money for schools, for which she served for years as a spokeswoman.After having to back a man accused of being a child molester, who then lost to a Democrat in crimson-red Alabama, the Republican Party leadership is having agita because a rich former coal executive, Don Blankenship, might win the partys primary in the West Virginia Senate race. Mr. Blankenship, you see, spent a year in prison on charges of conspiring to violate mine safety standards, after an inquiry into a mine collapse that killed 29 men.

One can see how these pols might be afraid they will be saddled with a convicted criminal as a Republican nominee. Mr. Blankenship has a lot of money to spend on the campaign, and is spending it, so he could beat his two mainstream opponents in the May 8 primary. In deeply conservative West Virginia, hes attacked one opponent for being a former Democrat and another for his wifes ties to Planned Parenthood. Party leaders fear that the broader electorate would be less forgiving of Mr. Blankenship and vote for the otherwise beatable Democratic incumbent, Joe Manchin.

If that happens, it would be karma for the G.O.P.

One of the powerful cons that helped the party win the 2016 election was Donald Trumps promise that he would restore coal miners jobs. Since coming to office, though, he has done little to increase employment in an increasingly mechanized industry losing the competition against cheaper natural gas.

But Mr. Trump has done a world of good for coal mine owners, like those of Massey Energy, the company Mr. Blankenship used to run, by gutting regulations on environmental protection and worker safety and health. Now a man with so little regard for regulation that he was convicted of violating federal mine safety standards might be the Republican standard-bearer in West Virginia  a state where miners, former miners, their relatives, friends and survivors make up much of the population.The former C.I.A. director John Brennan pulled no punches on Wednesday when he was asked why President Trump had congratulated his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin, for his victory in a rigged election, even after Mr. Trumps national security staff warned him not to.

I think hes afraid of the president of Russia, Mr. Brennan said, on MSNBCs Morning Joe program, of the phone call on Tuesday between the two presidents. The Russians, I think, have had long experience with Mr. Trump and may have things they could expose.

The possibility that Mr. Putin could have some hold on the American president has lurked in the background over the past year as Mr. Trump displayed a mystifying affection for the Russian leader and ignored or excused his aggressive behavior and nefarious activities, most important, his interference in the 2016 campaign, a subject of the special counsel Robert Muellers investigation.

Some Trump defenders noted that President Barack Obama also called Mr. Putin when he was elected president in 2012.When we published the first installment of the Overlooked project two weeks ago, we asked readers to suggest people they felt deserved, but didnt get, New York Times obituaries.

By now, we have received close to 2,500 submissions. Among these were about 30 from readers who told us of their own grandmothers or great-grandmothers who often fought strong institutional prejudice against them.

We found their stories moving, fascinating and inspiring and wanted to share them with you. A selection of these tributes, submitted by the grandchildren or great-grandchildren of the subjects, is below.A Memphis megachurch pastor whose congregation applauded him in January after he admitted that he had engaged in a sexual incident with a high school student in 1998 resigned from the church this week.

The decision by the pastor, Andy Savage, 42, came on the same day that Highpoint Church said it had completed a two-month investigation into his past and found no other cases of suspected abuse. But church leaders also said that while Mr. Savage had disclosed the episode with the woman, Jules Woodson, when he was hired in 2002, they had not been told the full story.

Before employing Andy Savage, the church leadership was informed of his past with Jules Woodson, and we understood that it had been thoroughly addressed at the time, the church said in a statement. We have since learned that this was not the case.

On the heels of the #MeToo movement, Ms. Woodson came forward with her story in a blog post in January about when she said she was 17 and Mr. Savage was a youth pastor at a church outside Houston. One night in 1998, she wrote, Mr. Savage offered to drive her home from the church but first took her to a wooded area off a dirt road and had her perform oral sex on him.The agency says it approves 99 percent of the requests it receives under this program, but in some cases, it recommends changes to protect patients before allowing the treatment to proceed.

Mr. Trump endorsed the right to try in his State of the Union address in January and again on Monday, on a trip to Manchester, N.H., where he described potential beneficiaries of the bill.

A patient is terminal, Mr. Trump said. Theres good progress made with a certain drug. Were going to make it possible for that patient to get that drug. And maybe its going to work. Its hope.

Thirty-five House Democrats voted for the bill on Wednesday night, along with 232 Republicans.

The Senate approved its version of the legislation in August without much debate. Opponents of the idea, unable to block it in the House, said they hoped the Senate would now scrutinize it more closely.

The bill taken up on Wednesday was the same one considered by the House last week under a special procedure intended to speed the approval of bills that have broad support. Under that procedure, the bill needed a two-thirds majority for passage, but fell short: 259 House members supported it, and 140 opposed it.

Republicans rejected warnings that the bill would give false hope to desperate patients.

Representative Joe L. Barton, Republican of Texas, explaining why he supported the bill, said he had helped his brother obtain an unapproved experimental drug for liver cancer.

He took the drug and it didnt work, but he had that last shot, Mr. Barton said. I dont know what this debate about false hope is. When you have no hope, perhaps false hope is better than none at all.WASHINGTON  John O. Brennan, the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, said Wednesday that he thought Russia may have some kind of compromising information on President Trump, setting off furious speculation about whether the former spy chief was basing that assertion on inside information.

In an appearance on Wednesday on MSNBCs Morning Joe, Mr. Brennan, who served as C.I.A. director from 2013 to 2017, speculated that Russians may have something on him personally when he was asked if he thought Mr. Trump was afraid of President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

The Russians, I think, have had long experience with Mr. Trump, and may have things that they could expose, he added.

Mr. Brennan was running the C.I.A. when a salacious dossier surfaced in 2016 that claimed the Russians had compromising information on Mr. Trump. If there were any current or former American officials who might know if there was truth behind the allegations in the dossier, Mr. Brennan would most likely be one of them. And his comments came the day after a phone call Mr. Trump made to Mr. Putin congratulating him for winning an election raised new questions about the presidents relationship with Russia.The effect of the China tariffs would be larger and more concentrated than the steel and aluminum measures and would have a bigger impact on United States consumers, who are heavy purchasers of electronics, clothing and other Chinese imports. The steel and aluminum tariffs would affect imports of roughly $33 billion, excluding Canada and Mexico, which are expected to be exempt from the measures, said Joseph Parilla of the Brookings Institution. The China moves would affect at least $50 billion a year in imports, officials said.

Chinese companies have also been placing big bets on American companies. New Chinese acquisition deals in the United States once totaled tens of billions of dollars annually, according to Rhodium Group, which tracks Chinese investments abroad, though last year they fell sharply to $8.7 billion as China cracked down on money leaving its borders.

Chinese companies have purchased many nonstrategic assets like movie theaters and the Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York. But they also sought out deals in cutting-edge areas like semiconductors and start-ups related to autonomous driving as China looked to upgrade its technological capabilities. China sees the American stranglehold on fundamental technologies as a long-term economic and security threat to its rise as a superpower.

Unlike the metal tariffs, which caused bitter divisions within the Trump administration and were opposed by many Republican lawmakers and businesspeople, the technology moves against China are likely to be politically popular on Capitol Hill and throughout some industries.

Their theft costs us over $350 billion per year, so the bigger the better, said Daniel DiMicco, a steel executive and trade adviser to the Trump campaign, referring to the forced transfer of intellectual property and other unfair practices alleged by the administration.

The business community, which long defended trade with China despite accusations of theft of intellectual property, has grown more dissatisfied with adverse treatment in the Chinese economy. With the Chinese government and state-owned enterprises playing an ever-larger role in the market, the environment for American companies has steadily deteriorated.

Still, American business groups expressed concern over the possibility that the United States tariffs would spur others around the world to raise their own trade barriers.WASHINGTON  President Trump defended on Wednesday his decision to disregard the advice of his national security team and congratulate President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on his re-election, lashing out at the news media for reporting on how he diverged from his script and attacking his predecessors for failing to improve relations with Moscow.

Mr. Trump, enraged after officials leaked the contents of confidential notes he was given for the private phone call on Tuesday that exhorted him DO NOT CONGRATULATE Mr. Putin, argued in a pair of tweets on Wednesday afternoon that the conversation was part of his effort to foster better relations with Russia. He said such engagement could help the United States confront a host of national security challenges.

I called President Putin of Russia to congratulate him on his election victory (in past, Obama called him also), Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter, referring to President Barack Obamas call to Mr. Putin in 2012. The Fake News Media is crazed because they wanted me to excoriate him. They are wrong!

But Mr. Trumps handling of the call and his defense of it also pointed up his aversion to confronting Mr. Putin about Moscows misdeeds, which has become a theme of his presidency even as a special counsel investigates Russias efforts to sway the 2016 election in his favor.The officer faced her impassively, absorbing some blows, evading others, but never striking back at her, then finally turned and, with his comrade, walked away. A few days later, a clip of the scuffle was broadcast on Israeli television, setting off a debate on both sides of the conflict and turning the blonde, blue-eyed and seemingly fearless teenager into a hero for supporters of the Palestinian cause.

Israelis argued over whether the soldiers had demonstrated admirable forbearance and fortitude or a kind of weakness and vulnerability that could send dangerous signals to the countrys enemies. Palestinians, while showering Ms. Tamimi with praise, asked whether publicizing the video might have been counterproductive, by showing the soldiers behaving with restraint, or helpful, by showing that even unarmed resistance can be effective.

But Ms. Tamimi, whose family is well known for its protests against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, also quickly became a symbol of how harshly the military justice system can treat young Palestinians. She was arrested in the middle of the night after the videos broadcast on television. Her mother and a 20-year-old cousin, Nour Tamimi, were also charged. And their trial in a military prison was closed to the news media to protect Ms. Tamimis privacy, according to Israeli officials, though her defense lawyer, Gabi Lasky, asked to waive that, insisting that publicity would provide far better protection.

All three women agreed to plea bargains on Wednesday. Ahed Tamimi pleaded guilty to attacking the soldier and to two other counts of disrupting a soldier and incitement, the Israeli military said. Other charges, including stone-throwing, were dropped.

Nour Tamimi was sentenced to the time she had spent behind bars before being released on bail, about two weeks. Aheds mother, Nariman Tamimi, who was charged with incitement for showing the altercation live on Facebook, was sentenced to eight months in prison, a suspended sentence and a fine of about $1,700. Mother and daughter are both expected to be released in July.Our guide to dance performances happening this weekend and in the week ahead.

REID BARTELME AND HARRIET JUNG at Works and Process at the Guggenheim (March 25-26, 7:30 p.m.). The design team of Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung, who have created sophisticated, understated costumes for dance with increasing frequency over the past few years, mastermind an evening created in collaboration with some of their clients and choreographers: Lar Lubovitch, Pam Tanowitz, Jack Ferver, Gwen Welliver and Burr Johnson. Mr. Bartelme and Ms. Jung met as students at the Fashion Institute of Technology; they formed Reid & Harriet Design in 2011. For this program, they discuss their careers and inspirations  alongside, of course, some dancing that will bring their costumes to life.

212-423-3587, worksandprocess.org

A CELEBRATION OF ARNIE ZANE at New York Live Arts (March 25, noon-8:30 p.m.). Bill T. Jones directs this day honoring Arnie Zane (1948-88), a founder of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company who would have turned 70 this year. The event, which pays homage to Mr. Zanes accomplishments in dance and photography, includes afternoon classes exploring his movement influences, like contact improvisation and karate; in addition, former company members Jennifer Nugent and Sean Curran will teach excerpts from two of his works, Continuous Replay and Freedom of Information. The finale, starting at 7:30 p.m., is Arnie Zane: An Introduction, a program of performances and stories.

212-924-0077, newyorklivearts.org

DAVALOIS FEARON at Mabou Mines Theater (March 27 at 7 p.m.; March 28-29 at 9 p.m.). Mabou Mines presents Ms. Fearons Time to Talk, a multimedia work featuring music by Mike McGinnis that explores race and identity using the frame of both American and dance history. Inspired by her personal experiences within the academic and dance worlds, the work blends movement and talking with live music to shine the spotlight on inequalities in society. In the end, she hopes that spectators will leave the theater considering their own behavior. The engagement is part of Mabou Mines Suite/Space, a performance initiative for artists.

866-811-4111, maboumines.orgLONDON  We sat down with five or six other little galleries and went to the pub and asked, Hows it going?  said Tot Taylor, co-founder of the contemporary art dealership Riflemaker, recalling a meeting he had in 2012 with a group of fellow London gallerists. Everyone said, Not very good. 

Mr. Taylor said he had then asked his colleagues if there was one big thing that had changed. All of them replied that fewer people were visiting their galleries. Why? We just dont know, they said.

Five years later, in September 2017, Mr. Taylors gallery, situated in a 19th-century gun makers shop in the Soho district of London, joined the art worlds ever-lengthening list of small and midsize dealerships that have closed.

Founded in 2004, Riflemaker was one of a crop of London galleries that sprang up when the generation that became known as the Young British Artists, or Y.B.A.s, was in vogue. The Soho gallerys entire inaugural exhibition, devoted to more than 450 drawings by the imaginary artist Naomi V. Jelish (an anagram of Jamie Shovlin, who made the works), was bought by the British collector Charles Saatchi for 25,000 pounds, about $45,000 at the time.Theres that loss of potential. You feel that on the victims side  these people were ripped from the world and they were achieving so much  and you feel it also with Andrew. Why couldnt he have converted his intellect and his consideration for other people into something great? What happened there?

You dont want to reduce an actual human being to an avatar of impersonal forces at work in the world, but Andrew is in one sense the weaponization of all the obstacles that have been placed in all those peoples way by homophobia. Even at Versaces funeral, the priest performing the ceremony refuses to take his partners hand in comfort.

Yeah. All of that is real. Weve got the footage of the priest pulling his hand away from Antonio. Thats not an inference  we can see it. That priest knew he was on camera, knew he was in front of thousands of people, knew he was at the funeral for this man, and still couldnt control his hatred. He still felt no need to control it. Versace was so successful he managed to overcome that, which was what was so extraordinary about him. But the whole point of Andrews personality was that he wanted to impress people, and hes born into one of the most marginalized groups in society. That paradox  How can you impress someone when they find you disgusting intrinsically before you even open your mouth?  thats the conundrum of Andrew.

I think its tricky. The most homophobic person in this story is Andrew, by far. When he becomes this killer, he becomes a horrific homophobic bully. Its like hes soaked up everything and unleashes it on Lee and Versace. Hes like, Im going to shame you. Youve achieved success and Im going to rip it down, both through physical destruction, but also through the act of scrutiny and having the world look down upon you.

Even when he was younger and acting as a welcoming figure in the gay community, he was pushing his racial identity as an Asian American to the side. Thats a stark contrast.

You know, he kind of did both. He wanted to change his name from Cunanan to DeSilva so he could say hes Portuguese rather than from the Philippines. Then he was saying he was Israeli. So yeah, he would push the racial thing to one side. But the sexual thing is interesting, if you look at the way his life tracks. He cant deal with anyone who might be critical. If he met someone who was homophobic and he wanted to be friends, he would say that he was straight, or that he had a wife and a daughter. He would play the audience. Eventually he went into an audience of these older men that he didnt have to play to, because he was instantly impressive. He was younger and witty and clever and appreciated. Once he lost that audience, he hit rock bottom.Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous nights highlights that lets you sleep  and lets us get paid to watch comedy. If youre interested in hearing from The Times regularly about great TV, sign up for our Watching newsletter and get recommendations straight to your inbox.

Be Vigilant

Trevor Noah on Wednesday excoriated Facebook for failing to keep millions of users data secure. He poked fun at Mark Zuckerberg, Facebooks chief executive, whose net worth has plummeted because of the scandal.1. The most important thing is that we fix this system.

Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, above, gave an unexpected interview to two of our reporters about the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Not everyone has been impressed by Mr. Zuckerbergs response to revelations that data from over 50 million Facebook profiles had been secretly scraped and mined for voter insights.

On The Daily, one of the reporters who interviewed Mr. Zuckerberg described how it went. (Facebooks outreach was so sudden, they had to ask him to hold while they read his just-posted public statement.)Arranged marriages. Whispered warnings. Outright theft.

For years, American companies have complained that the Chinese government finds ways to get them to hand over their most valuable trade secrets. Those companies  which usually complain anonymously, fearing Chinese retribution  have found a sympathetic ear in the Trump administration.

American trade officials on Thursday cited those practices as a major motivation for their plans to levy tariffs and penalties on $60 billion in Chinese imports and to take a tougher stance on the vast and lucrative trade relationship between the two countries. The report outlines in blunt terms how intellectual property  everything from product designs and sensitive data to general know-how  has become a point of contention in global trade relations, joining longstanding areas of dispute like steel.

The landscape is more complex than the Trump administrations complaint suggests. American companies sometimes willingly strike deals with Chinese partners because they feel China is too profitable to miss out on. And in some cases, Chinese companies have shown they still have much to learn, even after cozying up to American partners.

Arranged Marriages

In some industries, like car production, China has long required foreign companies to team up with local partners. Auto giants like General Motors and Ford, for example, make cars in Chinese factories that are jointly owned by Chinese partners.The bank said it has few gun manufacturing companies as clients, but those it does work with will be asked to provide details about their product and distribution networks.

If business customers decline Citigroups restrictions, the bank said it would work with them to transition their business away. The company declined to name clients or describe the extent of affected partnerships but said that real revenue is at risk if relationships fall through and customers protest. Some of Citigroups clients, like Walmart, already adhere to the new policies.

Citigroup said it did not have the technology nor the legal ability to monitor gun purchases at the payment-processing level, but said that the industry was discussing the possibility.

Edward Skyler, an executive vice president at Citigroup who helped craft the policy, wrote in a blog post that the companys announcement will invite passion on both sides. But he stressed that the policies were not centered on an ideological mission to rid the world of firearms.

Following various mass shootings, we have waited for our grief to turn into action and see our nation adopt common-sense measures that would help prevent firearms from getting into the wrong hands, he wrote. That action has sadly never come and as the weeks pass from the most recent mass shooting, it appears we remain in the same cycle of tragedy and inaction.

The company said it would not enforce a specific deadline and instead hoped to have all of its clients on board with the gun restrictions within a few months. Members of its corporate citizenship group, which also monitors whether clients engaged in coal mining and oil drilling are adhering to Citigroups environmental standards, will check in regularly on partners gun-selling procedures, the company said.

The Citigroup board was supportive of the decision. Mr. Corbat said that, in many recent discussions about the new policy, there hasnt been a consensus, but we also havent come to this decision in a vacuum.The war of words spilled over into Chinas state-controlled media, as the Global Times newspaper warned in an editorial that Chinese citizens would likely start campaigns to boycott American cars and other products.

Some American businesses in China also voiced concern. Our members do not want to see a trade war, said Kenneth Jarrett, the president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai. The stakes are too high and there would be no winner, Mr. Jarrett said.

But he added that American businesses in China wanted fairer treatment and improved market access in China. The Chinese government has the ability to deliver against that reasonable expectation.

In the United States, shares of large exporters, whose fortunes could be harmed by a trade war, were hit especially hard on Thursday and looked ready to bear the brunt of more selling on Friday. Shares of Boeing, one of the countrys largest exporters, and Caterpillar, which counts China as an important market, both fell by more than 5 percent.

Shares of large technology companies, which had already been reeling in anticipation of tougher government oversight, also took a hit. Facebook, which has been contending with a crisis over data privacy, slumped by more than 2 percent. Alphabet, Googles parent company, dropped by more than 3.7 percent.

Amid the dip in stocks, money flowed to government bonds as investors sought safety, briefly driving yields on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note below 2.8 percent. Yields move in the opposite direction of bond prices. Commodities heavily geared toward global growth also fell. The price of West Texas intermediate crude oil, the American benchmark, slipped 1.2 percent. Copper, an important industrial metal, dropped 0.9 percent.

Thursdays decline is the latest in a series of jolts to stock markets in the past two months.

After more than a year of calm, in which stock markets glided to one record high after another, a wave of volatility is suddenly cresting. There have been many causes of the turbulence this month and last. Investors initially were fearful that the economy was getting too strong, and that rising wages might cause inflation, which would push the Federal Reserve to hike interest rates faster than investors previously had expected. Those concerns have partly faded as recent economic data showed that inflation remained in check.At the entrance to the Rosemead, Calif., headquarters of Panda Restaurant Group, the parent company of Panda Express, Panda Inn and Hibachi-San, the artist Robert Indianas LOVE sculpture was recently unveiled.

The 12-foot-high multi-million-dollar installation, with those four bright red letters made of aluminum, perches atop a fountain of flowing water. It was a private donation by the companys co-founders and co-chief executive officers, Andrew and Peggy Cherng.

The sculptures message resonates with the Cherngs, who have spent the last 45 years building a Chinese restaurant empire that produced sales in excess of $3 billion last year, with over 2,000 Panda Express restaurants in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Japan, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Guatemala, and Aruba. Those restaurants each average about 480 guests on a given day, and the Cherngs employ more than 35,000 associates.Few white-collar defendants have been more reviled than the man known as the Pharma Bro, Martin Shkreli, even before he was convicted on multiple counts of securities fraud. The Atlantic called him the perfect and very hateable combination of arrogance, youth, and avarice, after he gained notoriety for acquiring the rights to generic drugs for rare diseases and then jacking up the prices.

Ben Brafman, Mr. Shkrelis defense lawyer, told me this week that in his four decades of representing high-profile clients, hed never encountered so many potential jurors who asked to be excused because they didnt think they could give his client a fair hearing. Ive represented people charged with murder and dismemberment, and jurors didnt bat an eye, he said. In Martins case, they asked to be excused because they hated him.

Mr. Shkreli was convicted of fraud for his activities at two hedge funds he ran, not for anything related to drug pricing. Mr. Brafman argued that Mr. Shkreli eventually repaid all of his investors, and some realized large gains. Still, a jury ultimately found Mr. Shkreli guilty on three counts  acquitting him on five others  and this month he was sentenced to seven years in prison.

In stark contrast, Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of the Silicon Valley blood-testing start-up Theranos, was one of the most lauded members of her young generation. By the time she turned 30, shed been the subject of glowing magazine profiles and flattering cover photos, the recipient of an honorary degree from Pepperdine University, and a member of the board of fellows of Harvard Medical School.Given this, no single country has the power to force China to reform its ways, the thinking goes. China can get around tariffs in one nation by sending its wares elsewhere. It can buy its way into markets by wielding its largess, building infrastructure and proffering loans.

Most experts assume that the only way to make progress in pressuring China to play fair is through collective action. Major economies must join forces, taking cases at the World Trade Organization and harmonizing their policies.

There are some grave concerns on China, who are massively subsidizing state-owned companies, the European Union trade minister, Cecilia Malmstrom, said in January, on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. And there, yes, we could work with the U.S.

Yet Mr. Trump is pursuing the opposite course.

In one of his first acts as president, he renounced American participation in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade bloc forged by the Obama administration in part as a counter to Chinas rise. The pact included prohibitions on state subsidies, in what was supposed to be a template that could eventually influence Chinas commercial realities.

Mr. Trump has also attacked the World Trade Organization  the linchpin of the global trading system and the ultimate venue for collective action  even suggesting that he might revoke American participation. In a formal statement to a congressional committee on Wednesday, a top White House trade official called the W.T.O. wholly inadequate to deal with Chinas version of a state-dominated economy that rejects market principles.

Mr. Trump has, at least for now, exempted Canada and Mexico from the bite of his tariffs on steel and aluminum. But that is conditional on their satisfying his demands for sweetened terms in the renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement.WASHINGTON  The Trump administration began imposing stiff tariffs on imported steel and aluminum early on Friday morning. But it granted a brief exemption to some allies, and in a twist, said it might impose import quotas to prevent too much foreign metal from flooding into the United States.

The White House detailed the decision in a pair of presidential proclamations late Thursday night. They gave allies that won exemptions a May 1 deadline to negotiate satisfactory alternative means to address what the administration calls the threat to United States national security resulting from its current levels of steel and aluminum imports. The exempted group includes Canada, Mexico, the European Union, Australia, Argentina, Brazil and South Korea.

President Trump also said in the proclamation that he would consider directing Customs and Border Protection to put in place a quota on imports from the exempted countries before the May 1 deadline, if necessary and appropriate. Mr. Trump wrote that he would take into account all steel articles imports since Jan. 1, 2018, in setting the amount of such quota.

The announcement also left the door open for other allies that did not win exemptions, most notably Japan, to negotiate with the administration over tariffs. Any country not listed in this proclamation with which we have a security relationship remains welcome to discuss with the United States alternative ways to address the threatened impairment of the national security caused by imports of steel articles from that country, Mr. Trump wrote.Son-mat, in Korean, translates literally as the taste of your hands. It refers to the natural instinct a cook brings to the kitchen, the inner jazz of cooking not by measurements but by feel, and the distinct culinary fingerprint that makes one persons food taste like no others.

For Jenny Jiae Lee, a young Seoul-born, California-bred architect now living in New York, no Korean food in the city could make up for missing her mothers son-mat. So two years ago, she asked her parents, Don and Sue Lee, who were living happily in retirement in a suburb of Los Angeles, to move across the country and open a Korean food stand in her new hometown.

They had never worked in a restaurant; her mother had never cooked outside the home. They said yes. (They love me! the younger Ms. Lee said.)South Sudan, the worlds youngest nation, appears to have stopped Guinea worm disease within its borders, the countrys health minister announced Wednesday.

Having known the suffering it inflicted, one is very happy today, the minister, Dr. Riek Gai Kok, said. Future generations will just read of Guinea worm in the books as history.

Dr. Kok made the announcement in Atlanta at the Carter Center, a philanthropy founded by former President Jimmy Carter that leads the effort to eliminate the parasitic worm.

Only 30 worm infestations were detected last year, 15 in Chad and 15 in Ethiopia. When Mr. Carter began the eradication drive in 1986, there were an estimated 3.5 million cases in 21 Asian and African countries.RUSSIAS ambassador to the Philippines said Wednesday he empathized with the decision of President Rodrigo Duterte to withdraw the countrys membership in the International Criminal Court due to its highly politicized activities. In an interview on the ANC News channel, Ambassador Igor Khovaev said his country, too, withdrew from the Rome Statute, the treaty that established the ICC, which was used to pressure selective governments [and] selective countries. We cannot accept certain approaches. Thats why my country decided to withdraw from the Rome Statute. I understand why your country took the same decision. Its up to the Philippine government [and] society to make assessments But for us, we respect it, Khovaev said. Moscow initially signed the Rome Statute in 2000, but did not ratify the document and later withdrew from the ICC in 2016. Russia opted to withdraw from the ICC after the tribunal published a report classifying Moscows annexation of Crimea from Ukraine as an occupation. For her part, US Embassy Press Attache Molly Koscina declined to comment on Dutertes decision, saying it was an internal matter for the Philippines even as she stressed the importance of cooperation with the tribunal. We are aware that President Duterte made the decision, made this call, but we are also aware that it takes a year for the withdrawal to take effect so there are many opportunities for greater conversations, she said, in the same television interview. Koscina acknowledged that Washington is also not a signatory to the Rome Statute but she said it continues to work for rule of law and the ability of the tribunal to continue its work.

Aside from pulling out of the ICC, Duterte said he would convince other countries to do the same. He called the ICC a project sponsored by the European Union, which he has criticized for interfering in the Philippines domestic affairs. The ICC announced last month that it was opening a preliminary examination into possible crimes against humanity over the alleged extrajudicial killings in the Duterte administrations anti-drug war. On Wednesday, Duterte insisted the ICC can no longer conduct its preliminary examination.The ICC has no jurisdiction over me because the Rome Statute which created the court is not even a valid law in the Philippines, Duterte said during the League of Municipalities General Assembly. The President argued that the treaty did not take effect in the Philippines because the previous government failed to publish it in the Official Gazette or in a newspaper of general circulationa requirement of all laws. He said ICC cannot continue the investigation because they have no basis. They say, we can continue with the investigation. Based on what? the President said. Why are you here? Whats your power? What vests you? The treaty? The treaty was not published. When it is not published, it is as if there is no law at all. Its that simple. The ICC has started a preliminary examination on the charges filed by lawyer Jude Sabio against Duterte in connection with the administrations campaign against illegal drugs. Duterte argued that the Rome Statute, which created the ICC, is considered criminal law that must be published before it can be effective and enforced in the country. At the Palace, chief legal counsel Salvador Panelo said it was unfortunate that Filipinos working in the ICC are siding with organizations that threaten the sovereignty of the Philippines. Panelo issued the statement after the ICC criticized Dutertes reasons for pulling out of the tribunal as a litany of poorly though-out pseudo-legal arguments and self-serving statements that focus on President Dutertes fear and resentment to face the investigation. The Palace has criticized the ICC for disregarding the principle of complementarity, which says it can only step in if local courts are unable or unwilling to prosecute the cases. The Philippines was induced to conclude the Rome Statute in the belief that the principle of complementarity will be upheld only to find out later that it will not give due regard to the said principle. The Philippines would not have signed up for the Rome Statute if it knew from the beginning that the ICC will just later renege on its obligations found in the said statute, Panelo said. The ICC should have immediately dismissed this case if only it was prudent enough to understand the situation in our country. Fraud in entering into international treaties or agreements is not a pseudo-legal argument as the ICC asserts, he said.Grade Level: 3-6 (all students, all proficiency levels)

Why We Chose It: Mr. Meyer writes, Students will learn journalism by doing journalism and, in the process, learn a lot of content and skills. We appreciate how this curriculum uses The Times to engage even young students  and empowers them to do their own reporting, then celebrates the results.

_________

What Mr. Meyer Did and Why, in His Words

As an education journalist, it didnt take me long to recognize how important a role journalism could play in the recent movement to bring more content-based curriculums into public schools. This was part of what prompted me to launch School Life Media (SLM) in 2012, and journalism education soon became a major focus of what we were trying to do.

From the beginning I knew we would use journalism to improve student literacy and from the beginning I knew that New York Times stories would be at the heart of the program. I have since compiled a list of dozens of Times stories that I believe not only beautifully illustrate journalisms broad content reach but also the quality of its reporting and writing in communicating that content. You can find some of them at the end of this post. In the summer of 2016, we introduced some 50 children  third through sixth grades  to the practice of journalism in various summer programs sponsored by the Hudson City School District in Hudson, N.Y.

At the invitation of our districts middle school, the M.C. Smith Intermediate School, the following winter and spring we brought the program to one third-grade class and one fourth-grade class during the schools regular school day as part of those classes state-mandated literacy unit. This fit perfectly with our mission to deliver a journalism program to all students. There were approximately 25 students in each class, representing a demographic and academic mix, including special education students and students both below and above grade level.

The pilot was successful, and the school principal invited us to present the program to the schools entire fifth grade, some 150 students in seven different classes, including one special education classroom. We began the year with a 12-lesson program and have since expanded it to 20 lessons. Each lesson is a 35-minute period at the end of the school day, in which we provide an instructor, an aide and a complete curriculum with lesson plans. The regular classroom teacher is in the classroom and assists us. He or she remains responsible for the classroom order, as well as ensuring that we are following all education rules and regulations. One of our goals is for teachers to continue to teach the program themselves after working with us.Who Speaks Wukchumni?, a nine-minute film that touches on themes of identity and tradition, profiles Marie Wilcox, the last fluent speaker of Wukchumni, a Native American language. Ms. Wilcox spent seven years creating a comprehensive dictionary of Wukchumni words, and worked on it with her daughter and grandson.

Students

1. Watch the short film above. While you watch, you might take notes using our Film Club Double-Entry Journal (PDF) to help you remember specific moments.

2. After watching, think about these questions:

 What moments in this film stood out for you? Why?

 Were there any surprises? Anything that challenged what you know  or thought you knew?

 What messages, emotions or ideas will you take away from this film? Why?

 What questions do you still have?Travelers tend to go where other travelers have gone, Teju Cole says. The photographer Alec Soth followed in the footsteps of fictional characters in the film Lost in Translation. Soth went to Tokyo and stayed in the Tokyo Park Hyatt hotel for five days and five nights and used Craigslist and other websites to bring people from around the city to him. Normally, I have a wariness of photographing in other cultures, Soth said of the project, but I felt as though I could get away with it here, because Im not even pretending to enter the city. I was totally lost in translation, presented with this fabulous surface of things that I dont entirely understand.The story of A Bag of Marbles follows two young Jewish brothers, Joseph (Dorian Le Clech) and Maurice (Batyste Fleurial), who flee Nazi-occupied Paris in 1942, as Hitler moves the policies of his so-called final solution into the city.

In Vichy France, the boys find a town by the sea that is almost idyllic; the Italians stationed there are not pursuing Hitlers goals. But when Italy surrenders to the Allies and Germany takes full control of Vichy, the rounding up of Jews begins there.

The boys go on the run once more. The movie takes a terrifying turn when the brothers are taken into Nazi custody, and an obsessive commandant, who wields a cigarette holder as if its a mustache hed like to twirl, is hellbent on getting them to admit theyre Jewish.In Back to Burgundy, Jean (Pio Marmai), the prodigal son of a winemaking family, returns to France from his current home in Australia after learning that his father is ill. The sensations of youth work on him like Proustian madeleines, though reuniting with his alliteratively named siblings isnt easy.

Juliette (Ana Girardot) is delighted at his return, but Jeremie (Francois Civil) wonders why his brother  away 10 years  never acknowledged their mothers death. While Jeans spoiler-ish reason for not returning then is surprisingly plausible, his estrangement in the intervening time is less so. As Back to Burgundy unfolds, it often seems that phone calls or the timely removal of a letter from a jacket pocket might have spared this clan wells of resentment.CINEVARDAUTOPIA: THE FILMS OF AGNES VARDA, PART 1 at the Museum of the Moving Image (March 24-April 1). Even if she went home without an Oscar for the documentary Faces Places, the 89-year-old Ms. Varda (and the cardboard cutout that stood in her place at the nominees luncheon) was a delight on the awards circuit. Faces Places, directed with the artist JR, was her most recent work in a filmmaking career that has spanned more than six decades. The museums series  the first part of a planned recurring retrospective  opens with Vagabond (on Saturday and Sunday), a dramatic feature that reconstructs the journey of a French drifter (Sandrine Bonnaire), who, at the films start, is found frozen to death.

718-784-0077, movingimage.us

FOROUGH FARROKHZAD ON FILM at Anthology Film Archives (March 23-24, 7:30 p.m.). Anthology honors the Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad (1935-67) with a double bill of two Persian cinema classics. The House Is Black, Ms. Farrokhzads own 21-minute documentary, shot at a leper colony, will screen with The Wind Will Carry Us, Abbas Kiarostamis 2000 portrait of a production crews disruptive arrival in a remote Kurdish village. Ms. Farrokhzads poetry is read aloud in the film.

212-505-5181, anthologyfilmarchives.org

TERENCE STAMP at the Metrograph (March 23-April 1). Many actors grow up onscreen, but Mr. Stamp actually had an early role recycled. In The Limey (on March 31 and April 1), from 1999, he plays Wilson, a laconic criminal who travels from London to Los Angeles to avenge his daughters death. The director, Steven Soderbergh, repurposed scenes from Ken Loachs Poor Cow (1968) to suggest Wilsons younger days. But Poor Cow (on Saturday), featuring Mr. Stamp as a good-hearted thief who briefly offers the prospect of happiness for the wife (Carol White) of an imprisoned colleague, is worth seeing on its own; it may come as a surprise to viewers who know only Mr. Loachs more didactic recent portraits of Britains working class. Those craving a more cryptic version of Mr. Stamp can catch him in Pier Paolo Pasolinis influential Teorema (on March 31 and April 1) as an interloper who upends a wealthy household in Milan.

212-660-0312, metrograph.comFrom the moment we hear the French cafe-style accordion music, we suspect that Final Portrait wont be painting too far outside the lines. Chronicling roughly two weeks in Paris in 1964 when the Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti (Geoffrey Rush) asked a friend, the American writer James Lord (Armie Hammer), to sit for what would be his last portrait, this flimsy feature from Stanley Tucci is essentially a 90-minute conversation that feels like three hours.

Image Clemence Poesy as Caroline, a prostitute and a model for Giacometti, in Final Portrait. Credit... Parisa Taghizadeh/Sony Pictures Classics

Confined for much of the time to an uncomfortable chair in Giacomettis dilapidated studio, hair slicked back, attired in an immaculate coat and tie, Lord seems the stoic opposite of his unkempt, mercurial host.

You have the head of a brute, Giacometti tells his subject, who has of course nothing of the kind. As the camera peers into Lords invisible pores, his friend futzes with art supplies and confesses faintly shocking non sequiturs, like his youthful habit of falling asleep by fantasizing about raping and killing women. (Oh, responds Lord, barely changing expression.) Musing on the worthlessness of his gift in an age of photography, Giacometti emerges as a testy celebrity who cares as little for the wads of cash delivered by his unflappable brother, Diego (Tony Shalhoub), as he does for the happiness of his long-suffering wife, Annette (an underemployed Sylvie Testud).Magical, subtle, sensitive and touching, I Kill Giants is everything the bombastic A Wrinkle in Time is not. Written by Joe Kelly (based on his graphic novel with J.M. Ken Niimura), this intimate story about a troubled 12-year-old whos on a mission to save her town is virtually tone perfect.

Thats not easy in a feature (the first from the Danish director Anders Walter, returning to ideas he explored in his 2013 Oscar-winning short film, Helium) that treads a fragile path between adult themes and childlike wonder. Their point of intersection is Barbara (Madison Wolfe), a driven loner who wears bunny ears  a nod to her spirit animal  and believes that giants are threatening her small coastal community. When we meet her, shes setting ingeniously intricate traps with a jam-like bait containing glitter and gummy bears. Later, she checks the protective amulets shes scattered around her school, brushing off a bully with sharp-witted confidence. Shes not afraid: shes the dragon slayer.Hello, Im Wes Anderson. Im the director and co-writer of Isle of Dogs. [music] So this is Atari, the mayors ward with the hero pack  the pack of dogs who he has befriended. And these men have come to try to take him back to civilization. Hes on a garbage dump island at the moment. Theres a lot to keep track of. Theres action happening up in the sky and over there, where the robot is. And from the beach side, the men and Atari and the dogs here. When youre doing an animated movie, you work from an animatic. You do a storyboard version of the movie, and you develop it that way. You make the movie in sketch form, but with sound and movement. In a scene like this, even if I was trying to do it in a live action movie, I would work the same way. Ill just tell a bit about the different devices and methods we used to animate all this stuff. The landscape, we wanted this dark area where this is happening and this whole hill is made of like, miniature cathode ray tubes. The water is all clingfilm, and what they call in England, Saran wrap  what I grew up saying. And its just animated to move like water. The smoke and when they fight, these clouds that happen, are all done with just cotton wool. And also, the music became a big part of this scene. We have a score by Alexandre Desplat. Its very heavy on percussion and saxophones, and it became a big part of what the scene became. We also, throughout the movie, we have different things that are happening on TV screens or projected. Those, weve all done in hand-drawn animation so the movies a mixture of stop motion, three-dimensional photographed objects  puppets  and 2D hand-drawn animation, for those parts of the story. It takes a significant focus, for me, to make it clear, how everything is working together spatially so you can follow the action clearly. Now here, we go into split screen, and its a very good technique, especially when you have a scene with a lot of visual information that needs to be communicated and you need to keep the pace. [explosion]The music is a backdrop for a gripping, often brutal story of the struggles of a girl growing up poor in Queens. Ms. Adams delivers a compassionate performance as a girl whose swagger and practicality hides a melancholy edge. Stardom changes her life, but less than youd think. Early scenes show Lolita resorting to petty crime to support her family and butting heads with her strict mother (Nia Long), a compelling character who could use more screen time.

And then theres a small galaxy of men that disappoint or abuse both mother and daughter. As her older love interest, Mahershala Ali gives a silky performance with ominous undertones that never turns into caricature. The scenes between him and Ms. Adams are charged, filmed with a patient if herky-jerky pacing. Some shots linger longer than necessary. At other times, Mr. Larnell cuts quickly, shifting from a shot of sex to pregnancy in a blink.

You get a sense of the films dramatic priorities from the first scene. Roxanne paces the streets preparing for a rap battle as a crowd of friends trail her. From the look on her face, you can tell shes formidable, and when she faces off against a guy who scoffs at her, you wait for the virtuoso performance. But then the film cuts away.

Dont worry: There will be rap battles and concert scenes and they do not disappoint. But they are the bass line beat. The drama of ordinary life is what makes this story stick in your head.PRESIDENT Rodrigo Duterte called Canada stupid for its aborted deal to sell $233 million worth of helicopters to the government, and said he would not hesitate to insult other countries that treat the Philippines like garbage. Look at how stupid the Canadians are, very stupid. They agreed to sell the helicopters. But when these were due to be delivered, they said, Ah but you cannot use these for [the] military or police. This is only good for evacuation and humanitarian operations. You cannot use these against your own citizens, the President told his audience of municipal mayors at the Manila Hotel Tuesday evening. My God, you Canadians how stupid can you get? Our citizens are joining the ISIS so we have every right to kill our citizens because we do not want to destroy the community with apathy, Duterte said during the general assembly of the League of Municipalities of the Philippines.

Duterte canceled the US$233-million contract to buy 16 helicopters from Canada after Prime Minister Justin Trudeaus government ordered a review over human rights concerns. The President ordered the Armed Forces of the Philippines to cancel the deal for 16 Bell 412EPI utility helicopters and told them to look to other countries such as Russia, South Korea or China for their choppers. The way you treat us, youre treating us like a garbage. The entire community of the world should know that there is a Republic of the Philippines which you cannot just f----ing sh-t [on], the President said.Do not do it to us because I will insult you. Anyway, who are you? the President said. He said the government has the right to run after citizens who have joined the Islamic State terror group. Duterte lashed out at the conditions that came with helicopter purchase, saying the government would instead shop for aircraft elsewhere. Idiots. We bought the helicopters and then once you complete the sale, you tell us we cannot use them, he said in Filipino.Feelings run deep and menacing in The Workshop, an intimate and timely film from the French director Laurent Cantet, about a group of young adults enrolled in a summer writing class in the South of France. Only this isnt the lavender-scented idyll of Provence or the gleaming luxury of the Riviera; the setting is La Ciotat, a port town that has gone from its midcentury glory days of building ships to its current slot in the global economy, servicing yachts. The students are a diverse bunch of working-class locals; the teacher, Olivia, is a famous novelist, brought in from elsewhere to help them write a book together that has to take place in the town.

The class differences between teacher and students are so pronounced that they threaten to plunge the film into a schoolhouse drama  that well-worn genre in which a charismatic authority figure, inevitably likable yet inevitably tough, gains her students grudging respect and eventual trust. (Mr. Cantet also directed The Class, a moving yet unsentimental film about a teacher and his young charges in one of Pariss poorer arrondissements.)

But Marina Foiss performance as Olivia pulls off a delicate balancing act. Even as Olivia emerges as a complicated character  an accomplished novelist with sympathy for her students as well as a surprisingly perverse imagination  she never quite sheds her remote cosmopolitan sheen.Around sunset, faint echoes of chatter and saxophone wails start to leak out of a basement-level steel door on East 53rd Street, between Second and Third Avenues. Customers descend the staircase  as if the ghostly melodies have summoned them there  to press a discrete buzzer. Seconds later, the door creaks open, revealing a speakeasy-style Japanese whisky bar and music club called Tomi Jazz.

Behind a wooden counter, bartenders rhythmically rock cocktail shakers. They garnish snow-white cocktails with smoldering cinnamon sticks for off-the-clock diplomats, while I.T. consultants and investment bankers sip Nikka and Yamazaki whisky. More liquor bottles sit on dusty shelves, alongside weathered photos of vintage music acts, a trumpet and woven lamps. After midnight, uninhibited couples get close at an L-shape table, just a foot away from the live music.After years of pleading for higher wages, thousands of workers at the airports that serve New York City are on the verge of securing one of the highest minimum wages in the country.

The directors of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which operates the airports, agreed on Thursday to consider raising the minimum wage for more than 40,000 airport workers to $19 an hour by the fall of 2023. That would amount to an increase of more than 80 percent in about five years for the lowest-paid workers at Newark Liberty International Airport, one of the three major airports operated by the Port Authority.

The possibility of a robust pay increase comes at a time of frustration that the wages of many American workers have not risen in line with the long expansion of the national economy.

The recommendation, which the agencys board is expected to approve in June, could bring an end to years of rancor and dissension over pay at the airports. Representatives of the two states have been so divided on the issue that they created an uneven pay structure on the two sides of the Hudson River.By contrast, 45 of the states 62 counties lost population between 2010 and 2017. Three counties upstate  Chenango, Delaware and Hamilton  lost more than 5 percent of their population from 2010 to 2017. Another five counties lost more than 4 percent.

But Dr. Salvo is concerned that the Trump administrations approach to immigration could hurt the city in the 2020 census. Of the 4.4 million foreign-born residents in New York State, 3.3 million live in the city, he said. If they are undercounted, he said, New York City will be hurt relative to the rest of the state.

The problem with the current environment is it affects more than just the undocumented, he said, because undocumented immigrants are often in families with legal permanent residents, theyre in families with U.S. citizens and theyre not distinguishing each other by their legal status. What they all have in common is fear. Theyre afraid for their relatives, and that might cause people not to respond to the census.

A federal law protects the confidentiality of the census, stipulating that census responses can be used only for statistical computations by the Census Bureau. An accurate account is vital because, among other factors, it determines how much federal aid flows to local communities.

The boom in the Bronx lifted the boroughs population to 1,471,160, so the Bronx has climbed to within a few hundred people of its largest-ever total, 1,471,701 in the 1970 census.

That head count was taken seven years before ladies and gentleman, the Bronx is burning became a catchphrase for the boroughs slide into urban despair. Lloyd Ultan, the longtime Bronx borough historian, said the final nail in the coffin was the 1981 film Fort Apache the Bronx.

The Bronx gained a reputation as a place with feral people living in rubble and ready to pounce on anybody passing by, he said. Its easy to get a bad reputation. Its much more difficult to recover from it, but finally, people are discovering what they should have known all along: the desirability of living in the Bronx.Charles P. Lazarus, who founded Toys R Us, the toy store chain that for decades captured the hearts of American consumers but that eventually faded and succumbed to bankruptcy, died on Thursday. He was 94.

His family said Mr. Lazarus, who lived in Manhattan, died of respiratory failure at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York.

Mr. Lazaruss death comes one week after Toys R Us announced that it would start liquidating its stores in the United States. Loaded down by debt and unable to attract new investment, the chain could no longer compete with more nimble toy sellers like Amazon and Walmart, and last September it filed for bankruptcy.

In the months since, company executives were unable to convince lenders that they had a viable plan to turn around the flagging business, and a dismal holiday sales season signaled that Toys R Us was nearing the end. The closings announced last week could result in more than 30,000 employees losing their jobs.Julie Yip-Williams, whose candid blog about having Stage IV colon cancer also described a life of struggles that began with being born blind in Vietnam and her ethnic Chinese familys escape in a rickety fishing boat, died on Monday at her home in Brooklyn. She was 42.

Joshua Williams, her husband, said the cause was metastatic colon cancer.

Ms. Yip-Williamss richly detailed blog, which she started writing after receiving her diagnosis in 2013, was more than an account of her siege with cancer. It was also a meditation on love and family as well as a message of openness to her young daughters, Mia and Isabelle, about her illness.

Ms. Yip-Williams wrestled with hope, which she cursed as an illusory sentiment.

Cancer crushes hope, leaving a wasteland of grief, depression, despair and a sense of unending futility, she wrote in 2014, adding: Hope is a funny thing, though. It seems to have a life and will of its own that I cannot control through the sheer force of my mind. It is irrepressible, its very existence inextricably tied to our very spirit, its flame, no matter how weak, not extinguishable.

Her blog, with additional material written by Ms. Yip-Williams, is being turned into a memoir by Random House, which expects to publish it later this year or early next year.Robert S. Rubin, an investment banker and philanthropist who as the chairman of the Brooklyn Museum deflected Mayor Rudolph W. Giulianis threat to censure an exhibit he considered sacrilegious, died on Saturday at a hospital in Manhattan. He was 86.

The cause was complications of pneumonia, his son Nathaniel said.

The show was titled Sensation: Young British Artists From the Saatchi Collection, and even before it opened in 1999 the mayor denounced it as pornographic and anti-Catholic.

He was so scandalized by one work, Chris Ofilis portrait of the Virgin Mary stained with elephant dung, that he sued in state court to remove the museums directors and evict the institution from its city-owned Beaux-Arts home. He also sought to slash the annual subsidies that made up about a third of the museums budget.

Mr. Rubin offered compromises, but the city rejected them, and the museum countersued in federal court, arguing that the mayor was defying the First Amendment.Austin, Tex.  Were the Austin bombings racially motivated? The suspect is dead, and we may never know for sure. Whatever the investigation yields, the bombings will forever feel like terror to the citys longstanding African-American and Latino residents. They are reminded once again that the narrative of Austins exceptionalism  the notion of the city as a politically progressive and countercultural oasis in the deep, conservative south  never really applied to them.

Anthony Stephan House, a 39-year-old African-American, was the first to be killed by a package bomb on March 2. Ten days later, Draylen Mason, a 17-year-old African-American, was killed by a similar device left at his doorstep. Draylens mother, Shamika Wilson, was injured in that explosion. Later that afternoon, Esperanza Herrera found a third package bomb and was severely wounded.

All three bombings took place east of Interstate-35, Austins main artery. East Austin is home to the majority of the citys African-American and Mexican-American residents, and it is synonymous with minorities and the citys history of segregation. Indeed, central East Austin, the Masons home, was once the heart of the citys Negro district, an area planned by the City Council in 1928 with the express purpose of segregating Austins black population during the Jim Crow era. Most of the citys Mexican-Americans were relegated to an area just to the south. By the end of the 20th century, gentrification pushed many of those Mexican-American families from this area to points further east, including the Montopolis neighborhood, where Ms. Herrera lives.

In the days after those first three bombings, residents voiced their fears that the bombings were racially motivated. Authorities cautiously acknowledged the possibility that they might be dealing with serial hate crimes, and police officials apologized for earlier statements they made which implied that Mr. House might have been partially responsible for his own death.The first question I posed was: Could Lamb  who did not face a primary  have won the seat if the contest had been held in 2016, during a general election? The answer was no:

We know that PA-18 was not winnable in a year with Hillary at the top of the ticket. Democrats did not win any seat with the demographic profile of this one anywhere in the country in 2016  save for handful of longtime incumbents.

How about 2020? Could a centrist like Bill Clinton get the nomination?

Id say the answer is no. I think the politics of the Democratic Party have changed significantly since that time and while it may not be the MOST liberal candidate who wins the nomination, all viable candidates will have to pass a certain threshold of liberal-ness.

One of the best case studies of center-left intraparty schism can be seen in the upcoming May 22 runoff election for the Democratic nomination in the 7th Congressional District in Texas  upscale suburban Houston.

The two candidates are Lizzie Pannill Fletcher, a local lawyer who led the primary with 29.3 percent and is generally viewed as the moderate, establishment candidate (referred to as Republican-lite by her opponents), and Laura Moser, a liberal political activist, author and former journalist, who came in second with 24.3 percent, and was described by the Houston Chronicle as the candidate of those who want a full-fledged push to the left to provide the starkest possible contrast with Trump.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, convinced that Moser would be a weak general election candidate, turned the primary contest into an internecine clash when it released a document on Feb. 22 designed to damage Mosers bid:

She is a Washington insider, who begrudgingly moved to Houston to run for Congress. In fact, she wrote in Washingtonian magazine, Id rather have my teeth pulled out without anesthesia than live in Texas. As of January 2018, she claimed Washington, D.C. to be her primary residence in order to get a tax break.

The attack by the D.C.C.C., viewed by many in the liberal wing of the party as aggressively centrist, generated a backlash, mobilizing the left in support of Moser. She now has endorsements from Howard Deans group, Democracy for America, Bernie Sanders Our Revolution and the insurgent Justice Democrats.

The D.C.C.C.s ridiculous attacks on Laura Moser are why Democrats nationally have lost over 1,100 seats. Laura is a rising progressive advocate that the workaday people of Texas desperately need, Jim Hightower, a board member of Our Revolution, said. She is an active organizer who takes on the Powers That Be on behalf of the Powers That Ought To Be  workers, consumers, small businesses, and just plain folks.

The district has been in Republican hands for 52 years, since George H.W. Bush first won the seat in 1966. In the 2016 election, however, Hillary Clinton beat Trump there, 49-47, abruptly putting the 10-term Republican incumbent, John Culberson, high on the Democrats target list.

Whoever wins the runoff, the general election will provide a test of Democratic competitive strength in what could be called Hillary districts  Republican-held seats where she did well. These districts are relatively affluent  in the case of the 7th District, the median household income is $71,183, substantially above the national median of $57,617 and the Texas median, $54,727; and well-educated  50.7 percent with a college degree or higher, compared to 30.3 percent nationwide and 28.1 percent in all Texas.

To bring this full circle, the upscale 7th District in Texas and the downscale 18th District in Pennsylvania effectively represent the dilemma of a party increasingly dominated by cultural liberals.Much of whats going on also reflects cynicism about the status quo. It is appalling that we are a country that has descended into a complete disregard for expertise, said Michael Specter, the author of Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet and Threatens Our Lives. But is this a rejection of reality or a rejection of politics? To argue that actual politicians are useless, so lets try something else, is not completely insane.

Indeed its not. On top of which, many experiences other than lower-level government work can be useful, as Michael Bloombergs New York mayoralty and Ronald Reagans California governorship show. Id argue that Winfrey now has a sturdier claim on office than Reagan did when he ran for governor. But she would be aiming straight for the presidency. Thats a bit much, as Trump has amply demonstrated.

Plenty of Democrats accused Nixon of similar overreach. Christine Quinn, the former speaker of the New York City Council, was among them. In a bizarrely worded comment to The New York Post, she called Nixon an unqualified lesbian who had failed to support her, a qualified lesbian, when she ran for mayor in 2013. Quinn later apologized for bringing sexual orientation into the discussion, but she isnt backing down from her assessment that Nixons accomplishments as an actress and dedication as an activist arent adequate credentials. Nor should she.

Its as if I decided I wanted to be an actor, Quinn told me. I speak in public. I get my picture taken. I need to lose a little weight, but aside from that, why cant I do this? Because I cant. The years I might have spent developing skills in that area, I spent developing other skills.

Nichols, a professor of national security affairs at the Naval War College in Rhode Island, said that the downgrading of experience and devaluing of expertise can be explained partly by the internet, which allows people to assemble their own preferred information and affords them the delusion of omniscience.

The narcissism of our era also comes into play, he said. Feelings have been accorded as much currency as facts. No one can claim more or better feelings than anybody else. And so Nixons empathy as a mother and frustration as a subway rider, to name two themes in her video, carry as much weight as a political veterans legislative wrangling and budget balancing.

Americans have a tendency to look around and think, We are all peers now, Nichols told me. It sounds lovely. Except that when youre up to your hips in water in the basement and youve got a plumber standing there, you hand the wrench to him and say, O.K., maybe were not peers.Posted Thursday, March 22, 2018 6:30 am

The 2018 legislative session has officially reached its halfway point. This week, there will be no debates in the Missouri Senate. However, many lawmakers like myself, will be hard at work in our districts.

Recently, several counties in the 33rd Senatorial District were declared a drought zone and are now officially able to receive assistance. The recent drought has affected the early growing season and because of the severity of the drought and impact on crops, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) through the Consolidated Farm and Rural Development Act named Webster, Wright, Texas, Douglas and Ripley counties as a natural disaster area due to the eight-week-long drought.

Affected farmers may be eligible for certain emergency loan assistance programs through the Farm Service Agency (FSA). Those affected must apply for the emergency loan within eight months of the disaster declaration. For more information, please contact your local FSA office.

I am sure each of us is guilty of not finishing a medical prescription given to us by our family physician. Whether we think we will use the medication later or we simply forget to finish the final dose, the truth is leaving excess prescription medications, especially painkillers, around our homes is dangerous.

The Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America reports most people who misuse opioid prescription painkillers get them from friends and family. However, there are steps that can be taken to prevent this from happening. Pay attention to how much medication you have remaining, never share your prescription medication with others and always dispose of unused medication. Leftover drugs can be discarded at a take-back event or by using a drug deactivation pouch.

Prescription medication take-backs offer a safe way for community members to dispose of unused or expired prescriptions and over-the-counter medications. There is no cost for disposal, and all medications except sharps, which include needles, syringes and lancets, are accepted. Labels and personal information do not need to be removed from packaging. Pharmacists and law enforcement are typically available to answer any medication disposal related questions.

Spring break officially marks the halfway point of the 2018 legislative session. During the first half of the legislative session, my Senate colleagues and I introduced 558 bills and 22 Senate Joint Resolutions. I look forward to working with my colleagues when we return to the State Capitol. While there are still numerous legislative issues that need our attention, I am looking forward to visiting with constituents and preparing for the final two months of this legislative session.

As always, I appreciate it when groups from around Missouri and from our community back home come to visit me at the Capitol. If you would like to arrange a time to come and visit me in Jefferson City, or if you ever have any questions, please dont hesitate to contact my Capitol office at 573-751-1882.

Sen. Mike Cunningham represents the 33rd District in the Missouri Senate. The 33rd District includes all of Webster County, as well as six additional counties to the east.This is like lashing a rope around the cracking foundation of a building. What we need is for an ethics of data to be engineered right into the information skyscrapers being built today. We need data ethics by design. Any good building must comply with a complex array of codes, standards and detailed studies of patterns of use by its eventual inhabitants. But technical systems are today being built with a minimal concern for compliance and a total disregard for the downstream consequences of decades of identifiable data being collected on the babies being born into the most complicated information ecology that has ever existed.

Mr. Zuckerberg and other Silicon Valley chiefs admitted in the wake of the election that their platforms needed fixing to help mitigate the bad actors who had exploited social media for political gain. It is not Mr. Zuckerbergs fault that our society has given him a free pass (and a net worth of $67 billion) for inventing his platform first and asking only later what its social consequences might be. It is all of our faults. Thus, however successful Mr. Zuckerberg will be in making amends, he will assuredly do almost nothing to prevent the next wunderkind from coming along and building the next killer app that will unleash who knows what before anybody even has a chance to notice.

The challenge of designing ethics into data technologies is formidable. This is in part because it requires overcoming a century-long ethos of data science: Develop first, question later. Datafication first, regulation afterward. A glimpse at the history of data science shows as much.

The techniques that Cambridge Analytica uses to produce its psychometric profiles are the cutting edge of data-driven methodologies first devised 100 years ago. The science of personality research was born in 1917. That year, in the midst of Americas fevered entry into war, Robert Sessions Woodworth of Columbia University created the Personal Data Sheet, a questionnaire that promised to assess the personalities of Army recruits. The war ended before Woodworths psychological instrument was ready for deployment, but the Army had envisioned its use according to the precedent set by the intelligence tests it had been administering to new recruits under the direction of Robert Yerkes, a professor of psychology at Harvard at the time. The data these tests could produce would help decide who should go to the fronts, who was fit to lead and who should stay well behind the lines.

The stakes of those wartime decisions were particularly stark, but the aftermath of those psychometric instruments is even more unsettling. As the century progressed, such tests  I.Q. tests, college placement exams, predictive behavioral assessments  would affect the lives of millions of Americans. Schoolchildren who may have once or twice acted out in such a way as to prompt a psychometric evaluation could find themselves labeled, setting them on an inescapable track through the education system.

Researchers like Woodworth and Yerkes (or their Stanford colleague Lewis Terman, who formalized the first SAT) did not anticipate the deep consequences of their work; they were too busy pursuing the great intellectual challenges of their day, much like Mr. Zuckerberg in his pursuit of the next great social media platform. Or like Cambridge Analyticas Christopher Wylie, the twentysomething data scientist who helped build psychometric profiles of two-thirds of all Americans by leveraging personal information gained through uninformed consent. All of these researchers were, quite understandably, obsessed with the great data science challenges of their generation. Their failure to consider the consequences of their pursuits, however, is not so much their fault as it is our collective failing.

For the past 100 years we have been chasing visions of data with a singular passion. Many of the best minds of each new generation have devoted themselves to delivering on the inspired data science promises of their day: intelligence testing, building the computer, cracking the genetic code, creating the internet, and now this. We have in the course of a single century built an entire society, economy and culture that runs on information. Yet we have hardly begun to engineer data ethics appropriate for our extraordinary information carnival. If we do not do so soon, data will drive democracy, and we may well lose our chance to do anything about it.Toronto  Tell me if youve heard this before: The spoiled son of a sprawling business dynasty positions himself as an anti-elite populist. During a pivotal campaign, he brushes off a history of crude remarks as political incorrectness to the delight of his base. Then, running against the establishment of his own party and an evidently more qualified female candidate, he loses the popular vote but manages, by way of an arcane voting system, to take power.

No, Im not rehashing the victory of President Trump. Im describing the rise of Canadian politician Doug Ford, who this month was elected leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario, the right-of-center opposition in the countrys most populous province. With his party leading in the polls ahead of a June 7 election, Mr. Ford has a strong chance of becoming premier.

Trumpism, it seems, has migrated north.

Several years before the 2016 United States presidential campaign, Mr. Fords brother, the deceased former mayor of Toronto, Rob Ford, more or less invented the politics of boorish, divisive populism the American president has since mastered. Rob Ford figured out as early as 2010 that riding out scandal, while blaming the media and other unspecified elites, was a winning political strategy.

Torontonians forgave flaws in his character, appreciated them, even embraced them as signs of authenticity. It didnt matter to his base that he smoked crack cocaine while in office. The Rob Ford era demonstrated that someone as shameless as Mr. Trump had a shot as a political figure.Days after a horrifying act of violence, a Democrat from Connecticut stood on the Senate floor and declared, I hope that this brutal, senseless killing will shock the Congress into backing me in this fight to take the guns from the hands of assassins and murderers. The senator was not Chris Murphy of Connecticut, who has become Capitol Hills leading voice for gun safety legislation. And the act of violence was not the kind of mass shooting that haunts our nation in the 21st century. It was 50 years ago, after the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., that one of Senator Murphys predecessors, Thomas Dodd, issued this stirring plea.

King was murdered in Memphis on April 4, 1968. That killing, together with the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy two months later, spurred the passage of the Gun Control Act that year. It was the first time since the 1930s that the federal government had passed a major gun control bill.

We are now witnessing the emergence of the most passionate movement for gun control since 1968. The countrys ordeal half a century ago illustrates that horrific episodes of gun violence do not themselves prompt legislative action; only the sustained pressure of an energized populace can do that. The students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., surely grasp this truth.

Those who organized for gun control in 1968 ultimately obtained a piece of legislation that President Lyndon Johnson admitted was not nearly enough. The question remains whether the eloquent and indefatigable Stoneman Douglas students, and their millions of allies across the country who will take to the streets in protest this weekend, can push legislators further.I am good at leaving places, but it was hard to leave Austin.

In 2005, I moved to Austin from San Francisco to work as a reporter at The Austin American Statesman and to attend graduate school at the University of Texas. I am a native New Yorker, but somehow I fell in love with Austin: with the open sky and the people I worked with, with my fellow Longhorns, with Torchys breakfast tacos, queso and good margaritas.

I bought a house and thought I might stay for five years. I lived there for eight, the longest I have lived anywhere at a stretch.

I left in 2013 for a lot of reasons. I started to realize that in a place like Texas, you needed kin, but I lost mine. In the space of two years, I lost both my parents, one to suicide, the other to cancer. In my grief, I tried to write through it, but it was more than I could power through alone.

And in Austin, I felt a loneliness that was hard to explain. I wasnt just a New Yorker in Texas. I was a tall, dark-skinned black woman with natural hair. I was an outsider in a place that is supposed to value weirdness, but I never felt like the right kind of weird.To the Editor:

Re Parole Must Mean Something (editorial, March 19):

Parole does mean something. Its relief granted to people who deserve a second chance.

Herman Bell doesnt fall into this category. It isnt as if he killed a police officer on the spur of the moment when the officer was trying to apprehend him for another crime, as sometimes happens. In fact, he plotted with his co-conspirators to waylay and murder Officers Waverly Jones and Joseph Piagentini in cold blood in Harlem in 1971.

In the case of Officer Piagentini, there is strong evidence that he was tortured by Mr. Bell and his accomplices, as they shot him 22 times while he begged for his life. And in San Francisco, Mr. Bell went on to kill a police sergeant with a shotgun blast, also in a premeditated and planned attack.

One shouldnt have a second chance after committing crimes like these no matter how carefully one rehearses a long-delayed statement of remorse. Crimes like these should be punished to the full extent of the law, which in New York State is life in prison.

Parole must mean something. So should justice.

JAMES P. ONEILL, NEW YORK

The writer is New York Citys police commissioner.To the Editor:

Re Tours of Nazi Camps to Curb Creeping Hate (news article, March 12):

Facilitating trips to Nazi concentration camps for German students is unquestionably a powerful educational tool that can greatly deepen their comprehension of one of the most tragic chapters in their countrys history.

And there is hope that the anti-Semitism and neo-Nazism festering in Europe today can be combated by enlightening young Germans about what happened just over 70 years ago.

By empowering them to get a firsthand look at the eternal memorials to the millions who perished, we are opening their eyes to the devastation and destruction that unadulterated bigotry and religious intolerance leave in their wake.

Not only would it be social malpractice if German lawmakers fail to collectively support these educational outings, but it would also be an abdication of their responsibility to the German leaders of tomorrow, their children.President Trump spoke with Vladimir Putin on Tuesday and, against the advice of national security advisers, congratulated the Russian president on his re-election to a fourth term. The New York Times has obtained a transcript of the call, published below:

The President: Pozdravlyayu!

President Putin: Spasibo, Donald.

The President: Whats your secret?

President Putin: No secret, Donald. My people love me. I win 77 percent of vote.

The President: You know, I also won 77 percent of the vote, if you dont count all the illegal Mexicans who voted for Hillary. Plus the gays and blacks. Howd you do it?

President Putin: I arranged for my only serious political adversary, Aleksei Navalny, to be convicted on trumped-up charges of embezzlement so he would be banned from running against me.

The President: Love that. Its like, Lock her up, Russia-style.

President Putin: Yes, though you should be careful to disguise your most outrageous acts in clothing of scrupulous legality and strict bureaucratic procedure. That way masses think everything is correct and nothing is political. Like you did with this man, McCabe. Very well played, if I may say.Other notable Vietnam novels, such as 13th Valley, Matterhorn, A Rumor of War, Fields of Fire and Tree of Smoke, have been celebrated as telling the war as it truly was  drudgery, demoralization, disinformation, dehumanization. They also all center on an American central character transformed in one way or another by a place that was not a country but a vehicle for American metamorphosis.

But in the realm of movies and literature, one might say creators have poetic license. Historical endeavors, such as the Ken Burns-Lynn Novick 2017 PBS documentary, or the Vietnam War exhibitions presented by the New-York Historical Society and the National Archives, would surely be different. They were not. All presented the Vietnam War along the same conventional trajectory that treats the Vietnamese perspective and experience as an aside.

Out of the myriad photos, videos and oral histories compiled and presented by the historical society and the National Archives, the Vietnamese were granted minimal space. Certainly, there was no outright exclusion, which would have been ludicrous and damning. But one got the sense that the Vietnamese elements were perfunctory, added only to allow the exhibitions to claim inclusion. By contrast, painstaking care was devoted to showing the full range of the American experience, from the mundane and ordinary to the more pressing immediacy of war.

With respect to the PBS documentary, almost universally lauded as definitive, one might object to my characterization by pointing to the many South Vietnamese who were in fact interviewed for the series. The truth is, despite professed desires to include multiple perspectives, this series privileges the American perspective, whether it is supportive or critical of the American war effort.

It could have embarked on the worthwhile project of soothing American souls and healing divisions without sidelining the Vietnamese. The South Vietnamese were portrayed as incompetent and corrupt, their government bordering on illegitimate. This was done in a subtle and sophisticated way, not in the imperial manner of the past in which the West pontificates about the shortcomings of the native. South Vietnamese interviewees were allowed to express themselves in their own words.

But hovering above the cacophony is the seemingly more objective and reliable narrator, Peter Coyote, whose disembodied voice signaled omniscience. His narrative was peppered with adjectives like corrupt or weak or beleaguered when describing the South Vietnamese.Background reading:

 Facebook, in crisis over the Cambridge Analytica data breach, vows to bolster security and privacy.

 A transcript of Mr. Zuckerbergs conversation with Mr. Roose and another Times reporter, Sheera Frenkel.

Tune in, and tell us what you think. Email us at thedaily@nytimes.com. Tweet me at @mikiebarb. And if youre interested in advertising with The Daily, write to us at thedaily-ads@nytimes.com.

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You can listen and subscribe to The Daily from any podcast player. If youre reading this from an iPhone or other Apple mobile device, tap this link to listen in Apple Podcasts. If youre on an Android device, tap this link to listen in Stitcher or this link to listen in RadioPublic.Our recent article The Yorkies Dominance: We Analyzed Every Dog Registration in New York told the story of the citys changing neighborhoods through the dogs that live in them, noting the curious phenomenon of how smaller dogs seem to predominate in areas where prices are rising.

The inverse, of course, isnt usually true: The appearance of larger dogs doesnt mean prices are falling. But if you own one of those big dogs, where are you likely to live?

This week, we dug into New Yorks dog registration database again, analyzing 583,841 dog registrations between 2012 and 2016, to determine where big dogs are most popular  or, to be precise, which boroughs have the highest percentage of dogs that weigh more than 50 pounds.Posted Thursday, March 22, 2018 9:00 am

As part of her Marshfield High School Senior Project, senior Kaylah Cottengim wanted the proceeds from her Volleyball Clinic to benefit the Barnes-Jewish Hospitals cancer center, which helped her grandfather while he was in the hospital. A check for $550, the proceeds of the clinic after expenses, was presented to the Barnes-Jewish Hospital by Cottengim.Nearly two decades ago, the rumors began: In the Atacama Desert of northern Chile, someone had discovered a tiny mummified alien.

An amateur collector exploring a ghost town was said to have come across a white cloth in a leather pouch. Unwrapping it, he found a six-inch-long skeleton.

Despite its size, the skeleton was remarkably complete. It even had hardened teeth. And yet there were striking anomalies: it had 10 ribs instead of the usual 12, giant eye sockets and a long skull that ended in a point.

Ata, as the remains came to be known, ended up in a private collection, but the rumors continued, fueled in part by a U.F.O. documentary in 2013 that featured the skeleton. On Thursday, a team of scientists presented a very different explanation for Ata  one without aliens, but intriguing in its own way.Since burial costs vary not just state to state but cemetery to cemetery, hybrid cemeteries  or those offering both conventional and green burials  offer a balanced look at the financial aspect of death. According to the Green Burial Council, a nonprofit that encourages environmentally sustainable death care, most hybrid cemeteries report that graves intended for green burial cost the same or somewhat less than their conventional counterparts; after the costs of vaults, coffins and embalming are factored in, the savings a green burial offers are significant.

The reason others choose green burial is right in the name: Its environmentally friendly. Green burials do away with both the embalming chemicals and the extraneous cement, steel or other non-biodegradable materials conventional burials put into the earth, and lack the carbon footprint of cremation, which has been calculated to be the equivalent of a 500-mile car journey.

Perhaps the most personal reason of all is one where the idea of green burial simply speaks to a person. They might find comfort in their body returning to nature, or want to take part in a conservation burial, where burial fees are also used to cover land protection, restoration and management. Not only does conservation burial help protect land, but the burial area becomes hallowed ground, restored to its natural condition and protected forever with a conservation easement, explains the Prairie Creek Conservation Cemetery. Citizens who support conservation are offered a more meaningful burial option with the certainty that protected land is the ultimate legacy to leave for future generations.

But isnt embalming necessary?

Generally speaking, no. Embalming  the preservation of human remains for public display through the use of a chemical mixture that delays decomposition and makes the body look natural  is more of a cosmetic procedure than a public health safeguard.

The easy elimination in traditional funerals is embalming, said Amber Carvaly, a service director at Californias Undertaking LA, referring to how to lessen a funerals environmental impact.

Its almost exhausting at this point to argue with people in the industry on whether it is good or bad, she said. You took a body that would have decomposed naturally, you put chemicals in it and a huge part that is left out is that most of the chemicals dont stay in the body: They are flushed down the drain when they are let back out of the bodys arterial system.

Still, popular culture tends to reinforce the idea that embalming is a necessary step: Just about 48 percent of people are aware that embalming isnt needed for a cremation service, according to the N.F.D.A.s consumer survey.PARIS  With the Calibre 3, we have fully embraced gender fluidity, Nicolas Beau, Chanels global head of watches and fine jewelry business development, said in a private presentation before the watchs introduction at the Baselworld fair this week.

The choice of gender fluidity to describe the Boy.Friend Skeleton Calibre 3, the fashion houses third in-house movement, was deliberate.

After all, Chanel is a fashion house founded on Coco Chanels love of incorporating traditional masculine elements into her womens designs, something of a precursor to the current cultural shift away from established gender norms.

Last year, it presented the Gabrielle handbag as a unisex model, its ad campaign showing Kristen Stewart (with a buzz cut) and Pharrell Williams, both wearing the same black Chanel jacket. In 2016, the house presented a genderless fragrance called Boy Chanel, which paired what it called a masculine fougere accord with a bouquet of feminine floral essences. And, back in 1999, the J12 watch collection was billed as the houses first unisex offering.MOTIERS, Switzerland  Forty granite steps and two wooden staircases connect the basement to the attic of the watchmaker Kari Voutilainens five-floor chateau-in-miniature. I know, because we traveled up and down the whole lot six times in the course of my interview  during which I discovered a man who has clearly found his vocation.

The picture-postcard house that serves as both his residence and his workshop was built in 1906 and occupies a prime site in Motiers, a town in the Swiss canton of Neuchatel that is well known for watchmaking. (Lately, Motiers may be more famous for the Maison de lAbsinthe, a museum celebrating the supposedly hallucinogenic drink long known as a bohemians favorite alcohol and banned in Switzerland for most of the 20th century.)

But strong drink doesnt have a place in Mr. Voutilainens life. His work demands the steadiest of hands, and he needs to be fit to negotiate all those steps that separate his watchmakers bench in the attic from his beloved collection of dozens of vintage, manually cranked lathes and milling machines in the basement.

Some of them are more than a century old, but to Mr. Voutilainen, 54, they are state-of-the-art  the art being the dying one of watchmaking entirely by hand, and he is known for being among the best in the business.Mr. Claret, who founded his factory in 1989 and introduced his own watch brand in 2009, employs 65 people. He produces about 100 complicated timepieces per year, considered some of the most complex of the industry. In 2012, he established a separate engineering division, Christophe Claret Engineering, in part to produce the robots he uses in his factory in collaboration with BC Technologies of Le Locle, Switzerland.

In Mr. Clarets view, the robots allow his workers to concentrate on the finer points of haute horlogerie. The robots dont mind repetitive tasks and, with proper programming, can perform multiple tasks at once, react to an irregularity or detect defects. And, if there is a malfunction, an engineer can intervene online from home.

Robots are in service of man, Mr. Claret said. We assemble and finish by hand, but we use these machines for a number of other tasks because, unlike man, they dont make mistakes.

Three decades ago, when the Japanese company Seiko Epson first used robots in its quartz watch production lines, it used a prescient slogan: Someday, all watches will be made this way.

It was not until 2013, however, that the first mechanical watch was assembled entirely by robots. The Sistem51 by Swatch, presented at Baselworld that year, was made without human intervention on a 65-foot-long assembly line in a clean-room environment. As such, it marked a milestone in the history of mechanical watchmaking.But those borders have a tricky way of dispersing. Frank OHaras 1964 Lunch Poems, a set of imagistic, peripatetic musings on a city in motion, are beloved in part because they manage to articulate the balance of work and life. Written on his breaks, their title an invitation to us to read them on ours, the seemingly dashed-off lines celebrate the pleasure a mind can take in wandering through its own busyness: Creative practice can be meditative flow, but it can also be worthy of a Ricky Gervais punch line. The author Sujatha Gidla, whose recent memoir, Ants Among Elephants, examined Indias caste system, has been a conductor for the New York City subway since 2009. Im very disorganized, she told me immediately, before I could frame my first question. You must factor that in to how difficult it is to manage work and writing. But for all the stress of brainstorming ideas during her commute and transcribing interviews in the M.T.A. break room, Gidla would never quit her day job. Its masculine; I fancy it, she said. Whats more, Gidla fervently believes that the individual should be participating in social production, something useful for society. She has met people from all over the world (even Liberia) at the M.T.A., drinking in their cosmopolitanism and openness. She enjoys their company. Writing is kind of lonely, she said. It doesnt make me feel like, this is my environment. At work I have no choice but to talk to people.

Some cultivate their art because it sustains their work, or because it fulfills a sense of civic responsibility. Writing childrens literature has helped me grow in confidence as a person, which in turn has helped me develop  as an officer, too, said Gavin Puckett, a U.K.-based policeman (it remains his primary income source) and author of the prizewinning 2013 Fables From the Stables series. Puckett, who joined the service in 1998, sketched the rhyming adventure Murray the Horse after passing a horse in a field while listening to a radio announcer report on sports and activities you can only complete backwards  he imagined a story about a horse that runs in reverse. He admits that telling stories still makes him feel as though hes stepping out of character. My role as a police officer came first, he told me.

Others are pulled, almost involuntarily, the other way. Edi Rama, the Prime Minister of Albania, sometimes feels his hand doodling as he contemplates a political decision. The art pours out to center and steady him. In 1998, Rama left a promising career as an artist in Paris to become Albanias minister of culture. Now the countrys leader, he shows his loose, improvisatory drawings and sculptures in galleries around the world. I found myself drawing almost all my working time whilst interacting with people in my office or on the phone, he said in a 2016 interview. I began to understand that my subconscious was being helped  by my hand to stay calm while my conscious had to focus on demanding topics.

Art, so often the wild or ephemeral factor in this equation, stabilizes the politician. Do politics abet the artist? Unlike Williams, Rama does not borrow directly from his waking life for subject matter; he aims to explore automated and preconscious processes. But perhaps the days noise makes the quiet of drawing more numinous and clarifying. A year ago, Rama papered the walls of the Kryeministria, Albanias main government building, with his own compositions. He wanted to remind himself of spaces in which politics, with its characters and struggles, has evaporated  to appreciate a freedom he might otherwise forget he had.How to Try and Where to Buy

While most of us rarely give our brooms a second thought, there are about a hundred people in America devoted to handcrafting them using techniques last improved upon two centuries ago. Here, a handful of makers around the country currently creating brooms.

At the broom workshop at Berea College in Kentuckys Appalachian foothills, some students make brooms  in return for free tuition  that are sold in the schools shop or online store. In addition to full-size brooms, Bereas students make a range of items including fireplace brooms, cobwebbers (for those high and hard to reach corners) and whisk brooms (for tight spots, to brush off upholstery or countertops, or to delint clothing). There are also student-made products for sale from their woodworking, ceramics and weaving studios.

Should you be interested in trying your own hand at broom-making, the John C. Campbell Folk School in the tiny town of Brasstown, North Carolina (a 2-hour drive from Asheville or Atlanta) is a wonderful American institution devoted to teaching handcrafts in an open, noncompetitive way. In other words, you dont have to worry about not being good! My teacher was the very affable and knowledgeable Georgia-based folk artist Mark Hendry. Despite its name, the Folk School was founded in 1925 by two women who researched the traditional folk schools of Europe in order to provide creative skills and a sense of community to the impoverished mountain people of Appalachia. Each day starts off with Morning Song, a Danish folkloric custom of singing and camaraderie (get ready, jaded urbanites!) and usually one evening is reserved for clogging (a kind of mountain dance that predates tap), where even the local kids join in.

The trio behind Haydenville Broomworks, lead by Janelle Higdon, 36, create some of the finest looking brooms around. About five years ago, the three young professionals were looking for an alternative to office life. Though they had never thought about brooms before, they bought the business from a Middlebury, Vermont, tree farmer and maple syrup producer who wanted to give up his 30-year side business in broom-making. (They apprenticed with him for a year; he in turn had learned from a Shaker.) While they use historical materials and techniques, they have found enough space for their own ruggedly elegant, modern sensibility to come through. Not even their traditional broom, with its foraged bark-clad sassafras handle and natural jute stitching, feels ye olde.

The Massachusetts-based furniture makers Alyssa Pitman, 37, and Winston Daddario, 28, also make a few small-scale brooms at Spire Woodshop, inspired by the weaving techniques of Asian countries and the Shaker flat brooms first made in New England, which are cut from wood they mill themselves. In addition to their whisks and dusters, because they are woodworkers, they also make a hand-carved dustpan, salvaged from local cherry.

The Sheboygan, Wisconsin-based naturalist and educator John Holzwart, 43, known as Little John, forages all of his broom handles from the woods near his home: buckthorn, box elder, ash  whatever he can collect during the winter. He leaves the bark on most of these pieces, to retain both the structural integrity and appearance of the broom, but he also offers a model with decorative plaiting all the way up the handle. Some of the broom corn he uses is grown for him by a local Amish farmer. (Broom corn is easy to cultivate, but is land and labor intensive, and so not a cost-efficient crop for American farmers. A single broom requires about 50 stalks.) Holzwart has been a full-time broom-maker for over a decade, having turned his hobby into his job when the factory where he worked closed. And each of his brooms comes with a little love note to counteract some of the hatred in the world.Each week, Kevin Roose, technology columnist at The New York Times, discusses developments in the tech industry, offering analysis and maybe a joke or two. Want this newsletter in your inbox? Sign up here.

You know those weeks when crazy things happen at work, your entire schedule goes haywire and the concept of a good nights sleep starts to resemble a hazy and futile dream, like full employment or healthy pizza?

Well, folks, this was one of those weeks. On Friday night, when Facebook published a blog post saying that it had suspended Cambridge Analytica for misappropriating user data  a post that was intended to pre-empt articles by The New York Times and The Observer of London about that very subject, which were published the next day  it became clear that this was a new kind of Facebook privacy scandal. It has already led to congressional inquiries and user revolts, thrusting the company into the kind of chaos it had not seen in its 14-year history.

On Wednesday, after a five-day silence and lots of speculation about his whereabouts, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebooks chief executive, finally re-emerged with a Facebook post and an interview with my colleague Sheera Frenkel and me, among others. You can read the transcript of our interview here, and read our article about Facebooks horrible week here.STRATFORD-UPON-AVON, England  Macbeth is Shakespeares shortest and most concentrated tragedy, shot through with well-known phrases and images. Why, then, is it so rarely satisfying when performed? You almost feel as if its infamous witches were having their wicked way with this vexed play, four centuries on.

That question is worth returning to in the wake of fresh sightings of Macbeth at two of Englands most established theatrical institutions, the Royal Shakespeare Company, or R.S.C., here and the National Theater in London. Both have opened hot on each others heels. (Enthusiasts of the Scottish play can also catch Verdis opera based on it at the Royal Opera House from March 25; the choreographer Mark Bruces dance-theater version, meanwhile, is touring England through May.)

The R.S.C. and the Nationals productions have their virtues. But after seeing them in quick succession, I found myself pondering the curse that apparently haunts this play: It fails more consistently than it succeeds. While many actors find lasting acclaim playing Hamlet or, in later life, King Lear, celebrated Macbeths are comparatively rare, and not a few productions of Macbeth have become legendary failures  Peter OToole at the Old Vic in London in 1980, to name but one.

Neither the R.S.C. nor the National production is a car crash. But both illustrate the difficulty in finding an appropriate physical landscape for a play whose real terrain is Macbeths diseased mind.Our guide to plays and musicals coming to New York stages  and a few last-chance picks of shows that are about to close. Our reviews of open shows are at nytimes.com/reviews/theater.

Previews and Openings

ANGELS IN AMERICA at the Neil Simon Theater (in previews; opens on March 25). The great work begins. Again. The National Theaters production of Tony Kushners A Gay Fantasia on National Themes arrives on Broadway, starring Andrew Garfield, Lee Pace, Denise Gough and Nathan Lane as the crooked lawyer Roy Cohn. Reviewing the two-part work in London, Ben Brantley wrote that the director Marianne Elliotts production confirms the plays place in the pantheon of dramas that stretch toward the heavens.

877-250-2929, angelsbroadway.com

LOBBY HERO at the Hayes Theater (in previews; opens on March 26). Second Stage inaugurates its new Broadway home with a couple of security guards and a couple of cops. Kenneth Lonergans 2001 play, set in the foyer of an apartment building, is a melancholy comedy of divided loyalties and overlapping moral predicaments. Trip Cullmans production stars Michael Cera, Chris Evans, Brian Tyree Henry and Bel Powley.

212-239-6200, 2st.com

MLIMAS TALE at the Public Theater (previews start on March 27; opens on April 15). A trunk show like no other, Lynn Nottages new play follows Mlima, a Kenyan elephant caught up in the ivory market. Under the direction of Jo Bonney, Sahr Ngaujah (Fela!) plays our thick-skinned hero, joined by Ito Aghayere, Jojo Gonzalez and Kevin Mambo in a variety of roles.

212-967-7555, publictheater.orgPresident Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in an interview ahead of this month elections has turned to the nation to help provide a $2-trillion budget that, he said, would enable him build the country.

Egyptians will be called to polls March 26-28 to choose between al-Sisi and Moussa Mostafa Moussa believed by many as a puppet of the regime.

Al-Sisi told Egyptian journalist, Sandra Nashaat, he would need a budget of $2 trillion to build the country, Middle East Monitor (MEMO) reports.

The comments confirm his critics belief that the one who ousted the countrys first democratically elected president in 2013 will get an outright win in the elections.

Al-Sisi led a military coup against President Mohamed Morsi on the ground it was a popular demand from the nation.

Several of al-Sisis potential challengers found themselves arrested even before they register their candidacy.

The former defense minister-turned President wished, in the interview, to have been challenged by several candidates in the presidential election.

I swear to God, I wish there were ten [candidates] standing against me of the best people and you could choose as you like from us. But we are still not ready yet, he told the interviewer.Whether its a hotel stay, shopping or dining out, a vacation to Paris can be a pricey proposition, especially if youve got your sights set on an upscale trip. But there are plenty of ways to stretch your dollar in the City of Lights and have a high-end getaway.

Barkley Hickcox, a Paris specialist and an owner of Local Foreigner, has a few tips to help travelers make the most of their Parisian getaway.

Travel at the Right Time

The ideal time to visit Paris is between November and April, when hotel prices are at their lowest. Some high-end properties offer even further discounts if you book a stay several months in advance.

Ms. Hickcox is a fan of visiting during the first half of December, when the city is decorated with holiday lights and particularly beautiful. If you prefer warmer weather, April can be a mild and sunny month to visit. But if youre on a budget, avoid going in June and September because hotel rates are at their peak.Whether youre planning a trip to Memphis, Tenn., for the National Civil Rights Museums commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther Kings assassination; to take in musical history at Graceland; enjoy some of the countrys best barbecue; or all of the above, heres what youll need.

Weve shared packing essentials for any 36-hour trip in previous lists, so when Elaine Glusac, our travel columnist, recently returned from Memphis, we asked her to share a few specific things she was glad she brought with her  or wished she had taken.

Then we turned to Ria Misra, an editor at Wirecutter, for the best items to fill those needs  and her expert suggestions for other things to pack to make the most of your trip. Here are their picks.

Dont forget your:

Collapsible travel tote. I wish I had a magical bag like Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter stories to swallow up all the gear I need to travel with. Catching live music is a vital part of visiting Memphis and its hard to dance with a giant tote, Ms. Glusac said. Since we cant magic away the inconvenience of carrying a bag around, the next best thing is a convertible bag thats flexible enough for different needs. Ms. Misra suggests the Patagonia Lightweight Travel Tote, which transforms into a backpack to carry a change of clothes and water bottle if youll be out all day, converts back into a tote for walking between shops and restaurants, and (while Ms. Misra notes that doesnt come with a vanishing spell) it can be packed down into its own pocket when empty.

Sun protection. A hat with a bill to shade your face is essential, noted Ms. Glusac. Wirecutter recommends the Tilley LTM6 Airflow Hat, which will protect both your neck and your face from the sun. Its comfortable and stylish, too. Even with sun protection baked into the hats fabric, though, youll still want to apply a good sunscreen and use it correctly.

Travel umbrella. We just mentioned sun protection, but keep in mind the weather can change quickly in Memphis. That means youll also want a small umbrella. This Lewis N. Clark Travel Umbrella is small and lightweight enough to tuck into a bag to protect you on days that rain, but not take up too much space on sunny days. Plus, if the wind kicks up, its sturdy enough to weather a sudden thunderstorm without buckling or breaking.PFLUGERVILLE, Tex.  Investigators sifted through mounds of evidence and hundreds of leads on Thursday, hoping to unearth a motive for a bombing spree that killed two people and terrorized the Texas capital.

Included in the evidence is a roughly 25-minute recording made by the bombing suspect, Mark A. Conditt, 23, the night before he died in an explosion as law enforcement officials closed in.

Weve got to follow up on everything, just to make sure theres nothing that we missed, Nicole Strong, a special agent with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, said on Thursday. No other people, no other evidence, any other clues like that.

Among the questions that investigators, as well as friends and family, were trying to answer: How had Mr. Conditt learned to make the bombs, and, more important, why had he done so?Two people were killed and five others wounded in a series of bombings centered on Austin, Tex., this month. The police have said the attacks are linked, and on Wednesday a man suspected of being the bomber, Mark Conditt, 23, blew himself up as officers approached him.

Both people killed by the bombings were black and belonged to prominent African-American families in the city, raising the specter that the violence was racially motivated.

Brian Manley, the Austin police chief, said investigators had not yet determined a motive for the attacks, in which homemade bombs were used to kill and maim people.

Chief Manley said on Wednesday that it was not clear whether more than one bomber may have been responsible for the explosions, which spread fear across the capital of Texas for nearly three weeks.Days after his inauguration last year, Mr. Trump ordered construction to begin immediately on a border wall. Customs and Border Protection then created a process to help decide where a wall was most needed on the border, and for how many miles.

The U.S. Border Patrol has been very clear that a border wall is essential to gaining operational control of the Southwest border, said Benjamine Huffman, the chief of the Border Patrols strategic plan and analysis directorate. The fact is, when it comes to border security, the border walls system works. Suggestions that the Border Patrol believes otherwise are false.

The Senate Democrats report comes as Mr. Trump is stepping up his calls for building a border wall. On Monday in New Hampshire, where he outlined plans to fight opioid abuse, the president again said that building a wall would block drugs from entering the United States. Well build the wall to keep the damn drugs out, he said.

Last year, Customs and Border Protection spent $20 million on border wall prototypes near San Diego. Agency officials said they have been testing the mock-ups to decide which best curbed illegal immigration and drug trafficking.

Congressional Democrats and some Republicans, including Representative Will Hurd of Texas, have questioned the need for a wall and instead called for more technology along the border, such as sensors and surveillance equipment. A February 2017 study by the Government Accountability Office found that Customs and Border Protection had not shown the extent to which fencing and walls have secured the border.

The House on Thursday approved spending money on border fencing, but not a border wall. The bill would fund nearly $1.6 billion for border security, including technology and repairs to existing barriers. That includes $641 million for about 33 miles of new border fencing in the Rio Grande Valley.

The administration wants to spend $18 billion over the next 10 years to build a wall on nearly 900 miles of the Southwest border. Currently, there are nearly 700 miles of wall and fences on the border.At the White House, Mr. Trumps top advisers worked to put the best face on a package they conceded fell short of fully funding his priorities and contained many items he would rather not have accepted.

In order to get the defense spending, primarily, but all the rest of our priorities funded, we had to give away a lot of stuff that we didnt want to give away to Democrats, Mick Mulvaney, the White House budget director, told reporters during a briefing where he also highlighted funding in important areas like the military, school safety, border security and combating the opioid crisis.

My job is to get the presidents priorities funded, which this does, added Mr. Mulvaney, a onetime budget hawk in Congress who routinely voted against large spending packages and sidestepped a question on whether he would have done so for this weeks measure. The president wants it to pass and wants it to be signed.

But the bill landed with a thud among conservatives who are still on Capitol Hill. The House Freedom Caucus, whose founding members included Mr. Mulvaney, formally opposed it and sent a letter to Mr. Trump urging him to reject it.

Another founding member of the Freedom Caucus, Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, said the spending bill was maybe the worst bill Ive ever seen and recalled the 2016 election that put Republicans in full control of Washington.

Nov. 8, 2016, I doubt that the voters were saying, Put Republicans in power so that they can pass a bill that continues to fund sanctuary cities, continues to fund Planned Parenthood, he said. Really? Really? Thats what the election was about?

Among other things, the bill includes $1.6 billion for more than 90 miles of physical barriers along the border with Mexico, as well as related technology. But that sum is far short of what Mr. Trump would need to construct the expansive border wall that he promised in his campaign for president.On Thursday, however, Mr. Trump summoned him to the Oval Office to discuss the job. Hours later, Mr. Bolton was on Fox, where he has been an analyst, for a pre-scheduled interview, in which he confessed surprise at how quickly Mr. Trump announced the appointment. This hasnt sunk in, he said.

The news of the appointment competed with an exclusive interview on CNN of a former Playboy model, Karen McDougal, who described to Anderson Cooper what she said was a 10-month sexual relationship with Mr. Trump in 2006. Mr. Trump has denied the affair.

In his interview on Fox News, Mr. Bolton declined to discuss his views on Iran, Russia or North Korea, though he acknowledged his positions were hardly a mystery after years of writing and speaking. He described the job of national security adviser as making sure that the bureaucracy did not impede the decisions of the president.

Officials said that General McMasters departure was a mutual decision and amicable, with little of the recrimination that marked Mr. Tillersons exit. They said it was not related to a leak on Tuesday of briefing materials for Mr. Trumps phone call with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, which infuriated the president and did not help General McMasters case. Mr. Bolton complained on Fox News that a munchkin in the executive branch was responsible for the leak and called it completely unacceptable.

Mr. Trump issued a statement that coincided with his tweet. H. R. McMaster has served his country with distinction for more than 30 years, the statement said. He has won many battles and his bravery and toughness are legendary. General McMasters leadership of the National Security Council staff has helped my administration accomplish great things to bolster Americas national security.

General McMaster said in a telephone interview on Thursday that his departure had been under discussion for weeks, and, really, the only issue that had been left open is timing. He would have preferred to stay in the West Wing until the summer, but the timing was dictated by what was best for him and the country, he said, referring to the president.WASHINGTON  Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson bade farewell to the State Department on Thursday in a brief and barbed speech that called for an era of respect and kindness after he was dismissed by presidential tweet.

This can be a very mean-spirited town, Mr. Tillerson said, a remark that generated a rare burst of applause from employees in a department that never embraced his distant and disorganized leadership.

But you dont have to choose to participate in that, he continued as the clapping crescendoed in the formal, flag-draped entrance of the State Departments headquarters. Each of us gets to choose the person we want to be, and the way we want to be treated, and the way we want to treat others.

President Trump fired Mr. Tillerson last week and announced in a post on Twitter that the nations top diplomat would be replaced by Mike Pompeo, director of the C.I.A. Mr. Tillerson had just returned from a weeklong trip to Africa, where he contracted an intestinal illness, and was surprised by the decision, said his spokesman, Steve Goldstein.No matter how much free time you have this weekend, we have TV recommendations for you. Come back every Friday for new suggestions from our TV critic on what to watch.

This Weekend I Have  a Half-Hour, and Im Ready for the Future

Muppet Babies

Where to watch: Friday at 10 a.m., on Disney Channel.

Add it to your Watchlist

If you want a pure and standard return to the Muppet Babies of yore, this will be a scorching disappointment. But if you are ready to embrace a new day, a new character, a new timbre, then this is a perfectly lovely show for the young children in your household. Its still imagination-oriented, and the characters personalities are intact (like that of Animal, who remains the wild child of the bunch). You cant go home again, but you can go to this redone house thats actually kind of nice if you want to.

 an Hour, and I Am Over EverythingEither way, the first vice president, Martin Vizcarra, 55, is expected to take power.

Im indignant with the current situation, like the majority of Peruvians, but Im convinced that together we will show once again that we can move forward, Mr. Vizcarra wrote on Twitter.

Mr. Vizcarra served one term as governor of his home region of Moquegua in southern Peru, which includes parts of the desert coast and the Andes, but did not seek re-election. Instead, two years later, he joined Mr. Kuczynskis ticket, as his first vice president. During the campaign, Mr. Kuczynski called Mr. Vizcarra one of his two insurance policies in case he died in office.

He was also a part of Mr. Kuczynskis first cabinet, becoming minister of transportation and communications, but was forced to resign after opposition lawmakers questioned his plans for a planned airport in Cusco, Perus most important tourist destination. After his resignation, he was appointed ambassador to Canada.

Even as Mr. Vizcarra was being summoned home from Ottawa, the scandal over Mr. Kuczynski continued to shake Peru. On Thursday, a Peruvian judge said he would consider a request to bar Mr. Kuczynski from leaving the country if the opposition-controlled Congress decided to accept the resignation, which would end his presidential immunity and make him vulnerable to prosecution.

Peru has a long history of presidents entangled in corruption scandals.

Alberto K. Fujimori diverted tens of millions in government funds in the 1990s to buy politicians and journalists, and until recently was imprisoned in Peru; Alejandro Toledo, was accused of receiving a $20 million bribe in the early 2000s from the construction giant Odebrecht; and Ollanta Humala and his wife were placed in pretrial detention over allegations of laundering $3 million in Odebrecht funds to support his 2011 presidential campaign.The Islamist Hamas movement ruling the Palestinian strip of Gaza has named Anas abu Koussa as main suspect in the assassination attempt on Palestinian Authority (PA) Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah early last week in the enclave.

Hamas Wednesday finger-pointed 25-year old Anas Abu Koussa as the lead suspect in the roadside bomb attack, which was directed at the Prime Minister.

Rami Hamdallah from the West Bank-based PA narrowly escaped assassination when a bomb exploded few minutes after his convoy crossed from Israel into Gaza, on his way to an inauguration ceremony.

Seven people including six of Hamdallahs security personnel were injured in the attack by the impacts of shrapnel. Hamas also informed the PA that two 15 kilogram-bombs were planted and that one failed to explode.

Hamas investigation committee also reported that Koussa has been at large. Three people, including members of the intelligence service answering to the PA, had been arrested in the investigations.

The Islamist movement pushed back accusations from PA leader Mohamoud Abbas who blamed the attack on Hamas as it controls the strip.

The attack incident has dealt a blow to the reconciliation efforts initiated in October.South Koreas current president, Moon Jae-in, won an election to replace Ms. Park last May with promises to root out corrupt ties between politics and business that have bedeviled the country for decades.

In recent weeks, state prosecutors have questioned or arrested several of Mr. Lees former aides as well as relatives and businessmen as they built their case against the former president. Mr. Lee, a former Hyundai executive, has long been dogged by allegations of corruption, and his arrest had been expected since he was summoned and questioned by prosecutors last week.

Mr. Lee was accused of collecting more than $10 million in bribes from various sources, including Samsung, the countys largest business conglomerate, when he was a presidential candidate and after he took office. Samsung has not commented on the case, although prosecutors have questioned one of its former vice chairmen and raided his home.

Prosecutors say that Mr. Lee hid his ownership of a lucrative auto-parts maker in the name of relatives and embezzled $32 million from the business. Mr. Lee was also accused of using his presidential power to help settle a legal case implicating the auto-parts company, getting a business conglomerate to pay $5.8 million in lawyer fees, they said. If convicted, Mr. Lee could be sentenced to life in prison.

Almost all of South Koreas presidents have seen their reputations tarnished toward the end of their tenure or during their retirement because of corruption scandals involving them, their relatives or aides. Mr. Lee is the fourth former president to have been arrested on corruption charges since the 1990s.At the Battle of Guadalcanal during World War II, hundreds of sailors  including five from the same family  lost their lives while serving on the same ship for the United States Navy.

The ship, the cruiser Juneau, was blasted apart by a Japanese torpedo on Nov. 13, 1942. For decades it was lost, resting in pieces somewhere in the South Pacific.

It was found on Saturday when a team aboard the Petrel, a research vessel funded by the Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Paul G. Allen, identified the wreckage about 2.6 miles underwater off the coast of the Solomon Islands.

Among the hundreds aboard the Juneau when it sank were five brothers from Waterloo, Iowa. Because they were all serving together, the sons of Thomas and Alleta Sullivan were well known even before they deployed.SYDNEY, Australia  Two American tourists were killed on Wednesday when their helicopter crashed near a coral-viewing site on the Great Barrier Reef off northeastern Australia, the authorities said.

The helicopter, operated by Whitsunday Air Services, was heading to a popular sightseeing pontoon along the reef about 40 miles north of the Whitsunday Islands.

Spectators already on the pontoon watched as the helicopter plunged into the water and the pilot desperately tried to pull a passenger from the wreckage.

This is a traumatic experience for anyone in the situation there, Inspector Ian Haughton of the Queensland Police said Thursday at a news conference.Damien Cave, our Australia bureau chief, shares insights on Australia, news of the world and reader feedback in this weekly newsletter. Want it by email? Sign up.

______

A few months ago, my wife and I were in an Uber in Melbourne talking to a driver from India who had a Ph.D in literature. He wrote essays for Indian media outlets but mostly drove, he said, in part because he had a hard time finding a teaching or writing job in Australia.

Ever since, Ive wondered how many more Uber drivers were like him  foreign, skilled but stuck in the gig or service economy.

I thought of this again last week, as I reported a story about Ola, the Indian ride-sharing company that just started offering service in Perth and Sydney. Ola has not explicitly marketed itself to drivers or riders of Indian origin, but the company does expect that the awareness of its brand among Indians will help  and that idea prompted me to do some more digging.PARIS  Travel was upended, schools were closed and tens of thousands of people took to the streets across France on Thursday as railway workers, teachers, students and air traffic controllers went on strike to protest President Emmanuel Macrons economic and social policies.

The protests are a new challenge for Mr. Macrons government as it gears up to overhaul Frances rail system and promises changes to unemployment benefits and the pension system. Railway workers are already planning rolling strikes in April and May.

This is a wake-up call for the government, said Laurent Berger, the secretary general of the second-largest railway union. He said the government needed to have real discussions with the unions before everything falls apart.MOSCOW  Numerous Russian news media outlets vowed on Thursday to curtail their coverage of the State Duma, the lower chamber of the Russian Parliament, a day after its ethics commission exonerated a lawmaker accused of sexual harassment by several female journalists.

Some two dozen publications have declared a boycott of the 14-member commission and of the lawmaker, Leonid E. Slutsky, a member from the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, a right-wing nationalist group, who is the chairman of the international affairs committee. Some organizations said they were stopping all professional interaction with Mr. Slutsky, while others like the popular Ekho Moskvy radio station announced a broader ban, withdrawing reporters from the Duma altogether.

Ekho Moskvy considers the State Duma an unsafe work location for journalists of both sexes, said Aleksei A. Venediktov, the stations editor in chief. The Parliament is widely viewed as a rubber stamp for the Kremlin, and its members rank among the least popular public officials in Russia.

The boycott was the first broadly public action to focus attention on sexual harassment since the #MeToo movement erupted in the West. While the stories of harassment resonated with some Russian women and men, the broader public response was yet another condemnation of the West, which is portrayed as so in the thrall of liberal values that men and women can no longer play their natural roles.BRATISLAVA, Slovakia  After an investigative journalist and his fiancee were gunned down last month, thousands of Slovakians took to the streets, week after week, demanding change and condemning the ruling party.

The protests, the largest in the country since the Velvet Revolution in 1989, forced Prime Minister Robert Fico, Interior Minister Robert Kalinak and several other officials to resign.

But when President Andrej Kiska named a new government on Thursday, many of those who had railed against the corruption of top officials feared that the new boss was not much different from the old boss.

The government refused to call new elections, as demonstrators had demanded, and the same three-party coalition that governed under Mr. Fico will remain in power. The new prime minister, Peter Pellegrini, 42, is a close ally of Mr. Fico, who will return to Parliament as the leader of the ruling SMER-SD party.MOSCOW  The Ukrainian Parliament on Thursday began enforcing a new law requiring lawmakers to check guns, explosives and other weapons at the door before entering the legislative chamber, after a member arrived this month with a pistol and three hand grenades.

No law had prohibited the lawmaker, Nadiya V. Savchenko, from entering with the weapons, it turned out, but the episode unnerved her colleagues, spurred a prosecutorial inquiry over her intentions, and led to the adoption this week of the weapons prohibition.

In the countrys raucous domestic politics, brawls are common in Parliament, and apparently enough lawmakers also carry weapons that the new law immediately became contentious.

On Thursday, two members of Parliament declined to walk through a metal detector, saying the law was being enforced in a partisan fashion, with members of some parties subjected to more stringent checks.ERBIL, Iraq  Markets are bustling with shoppers seeking new holiday outfits. Airport flight boards feature packed schedules. And political tempers, which were erupting a few months ago, are tamped back within the bounds of diplomatic niceties.

These scenes illustrate a remarkable turnaround in relations between Iraqs central government in Baghdad and the Kurdish regional government in Erbil since last fall, when Iraqi troops were battling Kurdish fighters after a controversial Kurdish referendum for independence. After the vote, Iraqi forces reasserted federal control over key oil installations and banned international flights to Kurdish airports, depriving the Kurds of two of their most potent symbols of autonomy.

Ahead of the Kurdish new year festival on Wednesday, Iraqi politicians announced an agreement capping months of back-room negotiations aimed at alleviating the political fallout and the Kurds economic hardships and ultimately at bringing Iraqs Kurdish region back into the fold.

Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi approved the transfer of $268 million to the Kurdish regional government to pay the salaries of Kurdish security forces and thousands of civil servants, whose livelihoods have been hostage to the dispute between the two capitals. Those political battles center on the Kurdish goal of independence from Baghdad, and the inconvenient fact for the Kurds that they are dependent on federal money while they pursue that dream.KILIS, Turkey  After two months of uncertain fighting, Turkey appears suddenly to be riding high in its military campaign to take control of a larger piece of northern Syria.

Along the border, studded with spring flowers and pistachio and olive groves, the artillery guns and fighter jets that until recently pounded the low mountains have fallen silent since Turkish forces captured the enclave of Afrin last weekend.

The victory has been widely celebrated in Turkey and has further emboldened President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has vowed to take his campaign across northern Syria and even into Iraq.

Yet the road ahead for Turkey in Syria is uncertain and fraught with risks.

The deepening inroads of Turkey and its allies have been tolerated so far by the two powers that control Syrias airspace, Russia and the United States. But Turkey may yet meet resistance if it pushes much further.Libyas shaky financial position, looming humanitarian crisis and the inability of State authorities to provide services have created a vicious cycle where groups with vested interests are trying to step in and undermine the Government, the United Nations envoy to the north African country warned on Wednesday.

For many Libyans this abnormal state of affairs has become the new normal. This vicious cycle must stop, Ghassan Salame, the Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Libya, told the Security Council Wednesday via teleconference from capital Tripoli, reports a UN press release.

In his briefing, Salame informed the 15-member Council that the UN Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL) remains focused on conducting free, fair and credible elections before the end of 2018.

In that process, UNISMIL recently concluded voter registration process, adding one million new voters to the rolls, he said, noting that the total number of voters stands now at 2.5 million.

At the same time, the country continues its efforts to adopt a permanent national constitution, including the approval of a draft by the Constitution Drafting Assembly in July last year.

However, challenges persists vis-a-vis a constitutional referendum and the question of referendum legislation remains hotly debated, added the senior UN official, noting that the political process must progress and a status quo is untenable.

In addition, Libya remains fraught with violence and localized conflicts, and armed groups  including those formally integrated in State structures  continue to operate outside the law and perpetrate human rights abuses, the UN press release said.

There has also been a sharp rise in crime, and human trafficking, while illegal flow of arms into the country continues unabated.

In a country awash with arms [] the arrival of more arms will only hamper such efforts and damage the political process, warned the senior UN official, calling on the Security Council to exert its utmost influence to stop arms from entering into Libya.

In his briefing, Salame spoke of the challenges confronting migrants  both those originating from Libya as well as those using the country as a transit  and called for the issues to be addressed taking into account its trans-boundary nature.

He also informed the Council of the Libyan Humanitarian Response Plan launched in January that aims to reach over a million people with assistance.

Acts that undermine the Libyan State must not become the new normal, UN Security Council told

Ghassan Salame (on screen), Special Representative and Head of the United Nations Support Mission in Libya (UNSMIL) addresses the Security Council.The first thing to remember when receiving substantial stock compensation, financial advisers say, is that no matter how stable your company, you are taking a gamble. Markets go up and down, and even the most stalwart stocks can take sudden turns.

Shares of General Electric climbed more or less steadily for decades until the year 2000, then tumbled. They regained some ground, but took another beating during the financial crisis. G.E. stock was climbing again in recent years, but last year began falling again.

Whether founders or executives, these individuals have a different risk appetite than other W-2 earning individuals, said Jeff Schnitz, head of wealth advisory for Silicon Valley Banks private bank. They have the opportunity to accept risk, and to create upside opportunities for themselves.

Some chief executives are taking this to new extremes. Elon Musk recently proposed a new compensation plan at Tesla. If approved, he will receive billions of dollars in compensation if he manages to double, triple and quadruple the value of the company. He will receive nothing if he does not.In an interview, Mr. Dopp said he was unconvinced that some of the problems he had seen in the estate transactions were simply mistakes. Mistakes like this dont happen in a vacuum, he said.

This is a good old boy network, he added. And here were some people from Atlanta coming into a small court in town, and they were having trouble finding a level playing field.

Mr. Noel has become convinced that some sort of parallel estate has control of assets that rightly belong to his wife and her brothers. He has not been able to obtain proof of its existence, however.

Dark Thoughts

The story of an invisible hand controlling assets from a protected distance might seem like an imaginative leap. Battles over estates are often the result of service providers charging a client  especially an elderly one  the most they can or of siblings taking large commissions to manage the financial affairs. Discrepancies can result simply from careless record-keeping.

This happens all the time, said William D. Zabel, founding partner at Schulte, Roth and Zabel, and one of the countrys leading trust and estate attorneys. Disputes are especially common in small towns, said Mr. Zabel, who is not involved in the McKee case. The banks collaborate. They close their eyes. They usually hurt the outside child whos gone off and relies on the siblings for information. You constantly have cases of siblings versus siblings over the mishandling of family trusts.

What drives the Noels now is a desire to know who is behind the trust entity with the tax identification number that differs from the banks.

Executives at the former Liberty Bank, which was eventually acquired by HomeBancShares, say that account is an old trust account that was never closed in the many mergers the bank has gone through. In a deposition, Lloyd McCracken, who was Libertys chief financial officer, referred to it as an administrative account. Executives from HomeBancShares have not been called to testify in the case.

But Mr. Noel said he remains unconvinced.

When simple questions go unanswered for so long you have to ask yourself why? Mr. Noel said. You have to get out of 30,000 feet and ask if theres a global reason why this is all happening.Regardless of whether any form of the fiduciary rule survives, however, consumers need to proceed with caution.

Given the uncertainty, there is more reason now than ever for an investor to simply ask a financial adviser whether he or she is acting as a fiduciary, at all times, said Arthur Laby, a professor at Rutgers Law School. Fiduciary is the legal term that means an adviser must put its customers financial well-being before their own.

One ally for consumers in lieu of the federal government could be the states. Champions of the Labor Departments fiduciary rule, include William F. Galvin, the Massachusetts secretary of the commonwealth, who recently called on the federal government to appeal the court decision striking down the rule.

In the meantime, he said his office would continue to aggressively pursue investigations to ensure retirees were protected. Just last month, he brought charges against Scottrade, now part of TD Ameritrade. If the Department of Labor will not enforce its own laws and rules, then the states must do what they can to protect retirees, he said at the time.

In anticipation of the fiduciary rule, Scottrade banned a list of activities that could tempt its representatives to put their own financial interests ahead of customers, including sales quotas and contests, bonuses and special awards. But Scottrade held two sales contests anyway, according to the Massachusetts regulators complaint.

Both contests perversely incentivized Scottrade agents to bring in new assets from customers, including through the rollover of retirement assets, the complaint said. It also noted that Scottrades own internal-use materials instructed agents to target a clients pain point and emotional vulnerability.

Ultimately, Secretary Galvins office charged the firm with engaging in unethical and dishonest conduct. TD Ameritrade declined to comment on the matter.When Silvercrest Asset Management Group launched its internal educational offering, Silvercrest Academy, the firm took pains in selecting the inaugural course. It had to set the right tone.

The financial advisory, which manages $21.3 billion for clients who have an average wealth of $29 million, wanted to use the program to bring together people within the firm, which has about 120 employees. The hope was to find a way to break down barriers among departments and ultimately build the kind of trust among colleagues that would enable the firm to work better with clients.

It had a long list of potential courses, including one explaining how its trading system worked and another that provided an overview of the firms marketing. There was even one on task management and goal setting.We were always treated like a married couple. And we started to think, the only reason were not married is to satisfy Tinas daughter, Mr. Anastasio said. We had talked about putting something in writing, saying, whatever happens she keeps her things and I keep mine and never the twain shall meet. But we decided its time for us to worry about us, not the kids. We have plans to put something in writing eventually, he said, but they chose not to before the wedding.

If a couple remains unmarried and one dies without a will, generally speaking the unmarried partner will get nothing, Ms. Guillen said. The property will go to blood relatives, with children being first in line.

Remarrying couples like Mr. and Mrs. Anastasio, on the other hand, have to plan ahead. What Ms. Guillen called the gold standard for such couples is signing both a will and a prenuptial agreement. Only then can they feel reasonably sure their grown childrens inheritance will not be contested or otherwise tampered with, she said.

Mrs. Anastasio, now on her third marriage after being divorced and widowed, said practical factors beyond citizenship convinced her to marry Mr. Anastasio. One was a health scare a few years ago. Navigating hospital rules after Mr. Anastasio was admitted would have been easier if they were legally married, she said. But if citizenship and health care proxy issues had not been factors, she would have preferred to remain Mr. Anastasios live-in partner rather than his wife. I didnt want to upset my daughter, she said.

Mr. and Mrs. Anastasio are outliers; many people over 55 remarry for moral or religious reasons. There are people who say, Im not going to live with someone without being married no matter what, Mr. Darling said.

In addition to a clear conscience, benefits for such couples include money saved by joining households and, in some cases, depending on the state and the combined income, lower taxes.

But for many couples the minuses of remarrying often outweigh the pluses. That might be a reason, according to Pew, that the number of people over 50 who cohabit with a partner rather than marry jumped 75 percent from 2007 to 2016.This is an unfortunate reality, said Eugene Soltes, an associate professor at Harvard Business School and the author of Why They Do It: Inside the Mind of a White-Collar Criminal, in an email. All too often a spouse  like their partner  will engage in motivated reasoning and miss the warnings signs that something is amiss, he said. This is tragic since the person often best positioned to help stop an individual from going down a slippery slope is their spouse.

The impact on children is also devastating, no matter how old they are. More than five years after the fact, Sarah Nolan, Ms. Francks 25-year-old daughter, is still sorting out the hurt and anger caused by her fathers deceit.

She was a college freshman when her parents came to tell her and her sister that their father had turned himself in to federal officials. Ms. Nolan promptly ran into the bathroom and threw up, she recalled in an interview. Until that point, she thought her parents had one of the better relationships out there; unlike most of her friends parents, they were still together. But it was all a lie.

For three months after getting thrown into an emotional cyclone, as she put it, she hid in her apartment. She didnt go to class; she was afraid to see people. With failing grades, she dropped out of school. The biggest thing to come to terms with was that my entire childhood was kind of bought with stolen money, she said. It was an identity crisis. As I look back, I beat myself up for kind of not paying attention. What was the indicator that I missed out on over and over?

Therapy has helped her try to make sense of it, although she hasnt seen her father in about two years.

Im not even mad about what he did to me, Im so mad at what he did to my mom, she said. Shes never hurt anybody in her entire life.

Ms. Franck struggled after her husbands crime. While she didnt have to file for bankruptcy, like Ms. Henry did, she did sell her Ford Thunderbird to pay off her daughters college debt and some of her own legal fees after she was investigated by the F.B.I., and she had to get a second mortgage to cover debt left behind by her husband. She was also diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and not long after, had two bouts of colorectal cancer, which she said was in remission. The doctor said it was stress-induced, she said.Nathalie Cabrol was 5 when she saw the first moon landing on television. Pointing at Neil Armstrong, she told her mother that this was what she wanted to do. Even before then, she stared up at the stars in the night sky near her home in the Paris suburbs and knew that questions were there waiting for her.

Cabrol is an explorer, an astrobiologist and a planetary geologist specializing in Mars. She is the director of the Carl Sagan Center at the SETI Institute, the nonprofit organization based in Mountain View, Calif., that seeks to explore, understand and explain the origin of life in the universe. Its work has the glamour of science fiction, but it involves rigorous research and, as Cabrol told me, people who are passionate enough that they can put themselves into dire straits. That is what she does, traveling to some of the worlds most extreme and dangerous environments in search of organisms that live in conditions analogous to those on Mars. Cabrol was the chief scientist on the team testing an experimental rover in the Atacama Desert in 2002 and was instrumental in choosing the landing site on Mars for Spirit, the rover that explored the planet from 2004 to 2010; she has dived in volcanic lakes at high altitudes to study the creatures within and has designed and installed an autonomous floating robot on an Andean lake that simulated lakes on Titan, one of Saturns moons.

I met Cabrol in October 2016 in Antofagasta, Chile, a port city of oxide-colored high-rises and copper sculptures that sprawls between dry hills and the dark Pacific. Over the next 26 days, she led an expedition to Chiles high-altitude deserts to test methods of detecting life on Mars. I was there to join the team; I had brought with me a sleeping bag, altitude-sickness pills and anxiety about the extreme conditions that lay ahead.

Petite and slight, with short-cropped silver hair and a striking, finely carved handsomeness, Cabrol, who is 54, resembles Isabella Rossellini with an otherworldly dash of David Bowie. Her eyes resemble gray-green polished granite, emphatically outlined with eyeliner, even when she is in the desert. Shes charismatic, warm and extremely funny but possesses an indefinable, unpredictable wildness: Talking to her sometimes disconcertingly reminded me of encounters I have had with forest animals uncertain whether to flee or defend themselves. That first bright morning in Antofagasta, I watched her break into peals of smoky laughter as she held up a SETI Institute flag for the camera.

The search for life beyond Earth has entered a new phase in the past few decades. Some models have suggested that perhaps 100 million planets in the Milky Way could hold complex multicellular life. We have learned too that planets need not closely resemble Earth to potentially harbor life; subsurface oceans on distant moons like Saturns Enceladus and Titan, for instance, could support microbial organisms. The universe, Cabrol told me, is probably full of such simple life, and the purpose of this expedition would be to refine methods of finding it  of detecting biosignatures. These are signs of life, or lives once lived: organisms, or the structures they have made, even the chemical compounds they have produced.

Searching for Mars on Earth Bolivia Salar Grande 1 El Tatio 3 Aguas Calientes 5 Laguna Lejia 4 Pacific Ocean Salar de Pajonales 2 Chile argentina

Over the next few weeks, we would visit five sites at varying altitudes. The higher we climbed, the further we went back in time  not on Earth, but on Mars. The high-altitude sites are water-rich, with a thin atmosphere and high levels of UV radiation. They resemble Mars at the beginning of the transition it underwent three and a half billion years ago, when solar winds began to strip away its atmosphere, allowing cosmic rays to reach its surface, and the water that once flowed there vanished into space or was locked deep underground or at the planets poles. During this period, any life on the surface would have died or taken refuge in the same kinds of places in which life exists in inhospitable regions like the Atacama. The surface of Mars is exposed to harmful radiation; no life can survive on it today, Cabrol told me, but it might still be hiding underground. The salty, arid sites we visited first were terrestrial analogues for present-day Mars.

Natalie Cabrol at Salar de Pajonales. Andrea Frazzetta/Institute, for The New York Times

For Cabrol, there is much more in the search for life on Mars than answering the old question, Are we alone? Billions of years ago, rocks thrown off by comets and asteroids colliding with Earth reached Mars, and vice versa. Perhaps some carried early life. Finding evidence of the transition from prebiotic chemistry to life here on Earth is impossible, because any such records were long ago destroyed by the Earths rapid geological activity, by erosion and plate tectonics. But ancient rocks from the time Marss crust cooled down are still present on that planets surface; if we share our ancestry with Mars, traces of our own life might still be found there. Mars may hold that secret for us, Cabrol says. This is why Mars is so special to us.

Salar Grande

In October 2016, Cabrol was in her second year of leading the SETI Institute team on its biosignature-detection expedition to Chile. A stiff Pacific breeze blew dead mimosa blossoms across the sidewalk as I climbed inside a minibus to join them on the long drive to our first field site, where the team would spend three days sampling and working out how to find signs of life. Through the blue-tinted windows, the soft yellows and buff oxides of weathered rock and sand were turned a dusty, livid red. Fredrik Rehnmark, a mechanical engineer from Honeybee Robotics, was delighted. If they built a road on Mars, it would look like this! he exclaimed.

Team members in a mobile lab at Salar de Pajonales. Andrea Frazzetta/Institute, for The New York Times

We drove north, passing pale rocks arranged in patterns of names and initials on hillsides. Almost nothing moves in this desert. There are places that havent much changed in five million years. Those names written in stone are a kind of biosignature that will outlive not just the people who set them there but all of us and all we know.

Salt began to spread along the edges of the sandy road as we turned inland. Time drifted. Everything outside the windows was so featureless that it seemed like a theatrical backdrop. At the site, we set up tents on the shores of Salar Grande, a nine-mile-long salt flat that was a lake millions of years ago. There are flats similar to this on Mars.

The salty air made my face twitch and burn; I blinked constantly. The hyperarid core of the Atacama was far to the east; where we were, fog rolled in from the Pacific to shape the landscape around us. Close up, the salt flat was composed of broad polygonal plates whose edges were heaped with something that looked like half-melted lemon sorbet, or the dirty, refrozen snow that collects along the roadside in winter. Other salt nodules were heaped in piles like dry and dirty bones, and the ground behind our tents was littered with the detritus of long-abandoned salt-mining operations.

Drills echoed in the morning air. The engineers from Honeybee were excavating salt cores to test prototype tools for future rovers. A team from the University of Tennessee deployed a drone to map the terrain, a tiny dark star that sounded like a distant nest of wasps. The SETI Institute research scientist Pablo Sobron analyzed salt samples with a laser spectrometer; one will be a feature on future rovers. And students from the Catholic University of the North in Antofagasta were collecting salt nodules for microbiological lab analysis with the SETI Institute/NASA scientists Kim Warren-Rhodes and Alfonso Davila.

Cabrol picked up a chunk of salt and held it to the light. Look, she said. Inside the nodule were two bright bands of color: pink on top, green below. These were communities of halophilic  salt-loving  microbes that can survive this extreme environment only by living inside translucent nodules. The green bacteria photosynthesize nutrients from the light filtering through the pink colony above. The pink pigment works as a sunscreen, protecting both colonies from UV radiation that would otherwise damage their DNA.

I had been walking on these nodules all day, and I hadnt seen the life beneath my feet. Habitability is not something very obvious, Cabrol said. It can be hidden. I looked at her slight figure, the salt dusting her gloved fingertips, the faintly mischievous smile on her face, and then stared out at the vastness of the landscape around us. It was dizzying to think of the scales her work spans: millions of miles of space, billions of years of planetary evolution, the vastness of the universe, the canyons and valleys of Mars, the expanse of salt here, our small forms standing upon it, and these exquisitely tough, tiny, almost invisible signs of life held between finger and thumb.

A team member at work at El Tatio. Andrea Frazzetta/Institute, for The New York Times

Paris

An only child, Cabrol spent a lot of time alone in her familys small apartment while her parents worked, and in her solitude she created an imaginative, hermetic world of her own to live in, filling her hours with words and symbols and numbers, writing stories and tracing lines upon atlases. She told me that as a child she had a talent for connecting things that were not obvious to others. She believes that this is still one of her greatest strengths as a scientist. But even as she started to apprehend the vastness of space, her social world remained circumscribed. For a long time, she said, I thought that I could do without interacting with others. I didnt have many friends at all, and I didnt look for them. I had enough. I was busy enough in my mind. Her parents saved to buy her astronomy books and magazines. Her mother understood her passion. Her father was less certain. For him, that was a phase, you know? she said wryly. That was a phase that lasted a long time!

Cabrols teenage years were troubled. Things were difficult at home, where her parents were fighting; she didnt fit in and was bullied at school. Some of her schoolteachers thought she lived in a fantasy world. Although she wanted to study planetary sciences, she studied the humanities, for until she taught it to herself later in her career, math was not her forte.

Cabrol was taking earth sciences in her final year at Paris Nanterre University when her lab director suggested that she visit the historic Meudon Observatory south of Paris to meet Prof. Andre Cailleux, a pioneer in planetary geology. Cailleux showed her maps of Mars and explained that his colleagues were working on the history of water on the planet. Would she be interested in joining them? All these years I thought I was going 180 degrees from where I needed to go, but the path was taking me exactly where I needed to be, she told me. Stepping out from that first meeting, she gazed around at the observatory domes and felt them strangely familiar. All these domes I had been drawing as a little girl, always repeating the same landscape, the planetary landscape, of a planet that was completely desert. And with Saturn in the background, always a dark sky and domes. At Meudon, she had finally found a way to get nearer to Mars.

The team at work at Salar de Pajonales. Andrea Frazzetta/Institute, for The New York Times

During the day she was working on her masters degree on the evolution of water-carved valleys on Mars, but she spent her nights looking through Meudons famous 19th-century telescope, the Grande Lunette, dragging a sleeping bag there to rest between hours of observing. Through the eyepiece, there was Mars, small. At first she couldnt see much, but the more she looked, the more she saw on the dusky, changing face of the planet that would become a focus of her career, a planet whose gullies and dried lakes have become as familiar to her as the backs of her hands. And it was at Meudon too that she had a moment that left an indelible mark. Prof. Audouin Dollfus, the eminent astronomer who discovered Saturns satellite Janus, asked her if she would like to see moon dust. Duh! Do I want to see lunar dust?!

He produced a small container from a safe, and Cabrol looked at it and was disappointed. I had a feeling like: So? Thats it? she told me. Politely enthusiastic but secretly unmoved, she left the lab to go home, but when she looked up and saw the moon hanging bright over Paris, she was suddenly stricken with awe. All of a sudden this moon dust that looked like nothing looked like the most precious thing ever, she said. Because it is not so much what it is but the journey it took to get here. It was a revelation. I dont think that anything I saw through an eyepiece told me the same thing: the journey it took, the spirit of exploration, the danger of exploration, the things you have to accept, that there is a sacrifice, and the sacrifice might be your own life.

Exploration lit her imagination. I breathe it, imagine it every day of my life, and I dream about it at night, she wrote recently in a private manuscript. She told me of a childhood memory: her father opening prickly sweet chestnut cases for her, uncovering the glossy, marbled nuts inside. She was entranced. Early moments like this planted the desire for discovery inside her, an urge to find again the wonder of seeing hidden things brought to light.

An expedition member drilling the soil. Andrea Frazzetta/Institute, for The New York Times

While working on the question of how flowing water formed lakes on Mars for her Ph.D. at the Sorbonne, Cabrol met Edmond Grin, an eminent retired hydrogeologist who had gone back to earn a Ph.D. in astrophysics. This is his thing, she told me. When he has nothing to do, he plays with Einsteins equations. She was 23 and he was 66 when she first saw him talking to a professor before her class began. For some reason, she said, I could not look in any other direction. I was stuck. I was looking at him, and at that time in my brain, that was like: I know this man. I know this person. From where do I know him? He sat near her in the class, they looked at each other and that was it  it took us, you know? she said. I cannot explain, but I was waiting for him to show up. In the years that followed, Grin helped focus her work and her research methodology and was a transformative presence in deeper ways. He did a magical act on me, she told me. From being an introvert writing those codes and symbols and novels and papers, its like he took a glove and turned it inside out, and all of a sudden everything that was inside came out.

When Cabrol traveled to NASAs Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley in 1994 to work on a landing-site study for a proposed mission to search for life on Mars, Grin went with her. All they took with them was a suitcase. Inside it was a map of the Gusev Crater on Mars, made of taped-together photocopied images from the Viking mission, the unmanned spacecraft that surveyed and landed on the planet in the 1970s. The two of us had to take a very big leap of faith, she said. More than 30 years later, they are still together, still inseparable, now married. In 2010, they edited Lakes on Mars, the first academic book on the subject. Cabrol calls him Merlin, after the magician. He has grown frail now, and this was the first time Cabrol had been to the Atacama without him. That he had to stay behind was a source of deep sadness for her, something that I realized only later in the expedition, when she left the group at a lookout near San Pedro de Atacama to walk down an incline and gaze at the pyramidal, distant slopes of Licancabur, a volcano they once climbed together. She looked small and terribly alone.

Salar de Pajonales

We moved south, up onto to the altiplano, the second-largest plateau on Earth, where the landscape had an astonishing luminosity; it glowed like a scene painted on fine bone china. It was wetter too; there were golden grasses on the hillsides. When Cabrol first came to this place and saw the snow-capped Andes, it was a shock. She felt as if she were back somewhere she belonged. There was a connection, just as when she first saw the Atacama Desert through a live feed from an experimental rover, its arid landscape projected onto a screen in a science-operation room. Even with that distance, that robotic mediation, she told me, the love story started, and there was something that I knew was drawing me to this place.

El Tatio, a geyser and hot-springs field, is among the highest in the world. Andrea Frazzetta/Institute, for The New York Times

She has a similar affinity to the Gusev Crater, a 100-mile-wide impact crater into which water may once have poured from the immense canyon of Maadim Vallis. She and Grin studied it and chose it as a landing site for the Spirit rover. I had the same feeling when I first saw Gusev from the surface. I was the first person on the planet to see a new landscape. And you dont get over this. You cannot. I will die with these images. Its in me forever.

On one long expedition drive, Cabrol stared out the window, her shoulders tense with what I realized was anticipation only when we crested a rise and saw the first dark peaks of volcanoes before us. She turned to us all with a blazing smile. Im home, she announced.

At first, Salar de Pajonales appeared as a white patch between dark volcanic slopes, but as we drove through its broad expanse of gypsum sands, sunlight flashed across thousands of crystalline flakes, ephemeral points of fierce white light. The salts here were chemically different from those at Salar Grande. Cabrol visited the site briefly five years ago and was thrilled to return and discover what it held. Underfoot, the ground crunched and tinkled  it was like treading on sugar mixed with broken glass. Huge bosses of gypsum were dotted around us, round structures like crumbling coral, the color of milk chocolate. Fascinated, I pulled out the sun-rotted blades closest to their surface with my hands, as if extracting teeth.

Life was less easy to locate here. Only when Bill Diamond, the SETI Institutes chief executive, kicked a rock did we find a broken chunk colonized by those familiar microbes in shades of pink and green. Her face half obscured by mirrored glasses and a scarf, Cabrol tenderly uncovered the fossilized imprints of ancient bacterial colonies called stromatolites. They looked like pitted fragile cups, chalky fingerprint impressions. Samples were photographed, noted, bagged to be sent on to the lab. Overhead, the drone was mapping this terrain, struggling in the wind.

That afternoon, I hopped in a truck with a biologist and a biochemist from the Catholic University of the North who wanted to take bacterial samples from a nearby lake. Its turquoise waters were surrounded with pale gypsum blades like thickets of kitchen knives. It was too surreal; I returned to the truck, feeling unaccountably blinded, though I could see. It was if a white light shone behind my eyes. My nose ran; my sinuses ached. The things I wrote in my notebook had become increasingly bizarre. I scrawled questions asked in glass across a whole page, an uncanny aide-memoire for something I never remembered. As we drove back to the main study site, I saw Cabrol in the distance, a slight shadow moving slowly across the pale fire of sunbaked gypsum, something strangely like a mirage of a person.

That night we slept in an abandoned mining camp. In the early hours, in the rat-dropping-dusted particleboard and corrugated-iron shack we were using in lieu of tents, I lay in increasingly irritated denial until I dragged myself out of my sleeping bag to pee. It was minus 0.4 degrees outside. Above me, the Southern Hemisphere stars were all dust and terror and distance and slow fire in the night, and I stared up, frozen, and frozen in wonderment.

Cabrol taking a rock sample at El Tatio. Andrea Frazzetta/Institute, for The New York Times

El Tatio

We climbed higher still, to volcanic sites that resemble formations found on Mars, so high that there wasnt enough oxygen for the engine of our minibus. It stalled halfway to our destination. We went back to Antofagasta and rented a new minibus. This also stalled. When we finally reached the geyser field of El Tatio, it was deserted. At about 14,000 feet, it is one of the highest active geothermal sites in the world. Tourists flock here at dawn, when the freezing air turns the site into columns of roiling steam. Some geysers were low to the ground and hardly visible, just a faint shimmering of warm air above them; others looked like tall berms of clay pouring out thick gouts of steam. This kind of volcanic, fumarolic environment would have been present four billion years ago on Mars, and old hydrothermal environments like it are one of the most likely habitats to hold life, or the remains of former life, on the planet.

Cabrol donned her red-and-black rucksack, black fleece hat and mirrored glasses, picked up a geologic hammer and started hacking at an inactive geyser. The surface looked devoid of life, but she was delighted to discover bright emerald colonies of chasmoliths  microbes that live in cracks and fissures  thriving on the underside of lumps of geyserite. The hot springs here were full of algal mats and organisms that had evolved to live in water that is almost boiling; they glowed purple and dark pink, their colors protection against UV rays.

Cabrol has always been drawn to both volcanoes and lakes, fire and water. Theyre completely opposite, she said, but if they work synergistically together, they create steam, which is a source of energy. And then you can produce power. And you create things with that. But if the water goes on the fire, then you have destruction. And my entire life is just trying to find this balance between creation and destruction. For the things that I create and the things that are eating me inside. And its a very fine balance. There is a pattern in her life, she tells me, where the highest of highs are swiftly followed by the lowest of lows. She spoke to me of the deaths of her mentors, friends and family members, of times she came close to death, of times when she struggled with inner darkness. What people see in me is the successful woman, the leader, but all of this is built on sweat and work and temper, you know? Its losses, tragedy, death and tears. I guess you cannot be strong if you never have been hurt and learn how to survive that. As she told me this, she looked bone-tired. It was the third week of our expedition, and she was sleeping badly, two or so hours a night, she said. And the altitude medicine she was taking was making her sick.

Cabrol showing a discovery under a desert rock. Andrea Frazzetta/Institute, for The New York Times

Cabrols search for life in extreme conditions began in the Atacama but took a turn in 2000, after she watched a French television documentary that showed the crater lake atop Licancabur on the Bolivian altiplano. There it was, onscreen, the perfect place to search for extremophile life adapted to the punishing conditions of high-altitude lakes. She wrote a research proposal and three years later donned a black wet suit with a weighted belt and free-dived into the lake at an altitude of nearly 20,000 feet, discovering zooplankton species new to science.

Water is my thing, Cabrol told me. I feel comfortable. I feel at peace. On a family vacation when she was 2, she wore water wings to float on the surface of Lake Garda in Italy. She clambered onshore, took off the wings and went back to the water. I am thinking to myself that if I go underwater, I cannot sink, she laughed. Submerged, she swam instinctively in a new world of shining pebbles and vivid colors. She learned to free-dive as a teenager in Cap dAgde in the south of France. It was always beautiful and peaceful; there was no stress, she said. There was this sense of being responsible for myself, of being in charge and seeing beautiful things, and exploration and discovery. We were talking in her tent, and the silence between her words was filled with the crack and ripple of nylon stock, the sides of the tent inhaling and exhaling in the wind, the floor billowing up around our planted feet.

When I entered that lake, she said, I was thinking I was entering the past, actually entering a time machine that was telling me what Mars was like four billion years ago. Its really a place where time and space get warped. Diving in these high lakes provoked emotional states, she said, that were intensely beautiful and spiritual. There was one time, in 2006, when she was suspended in the middle of the volcanic lake, caught midway between earth and sky, the water arctic blue and each ray of sunlight diffracting around her, so that she felt surrounded by diamonds. And on top of that, she said, copepods, little zooplankton, tiny shrimps, and they are so red. Its a symphony of color. Im suspended like that, and time stands still. And for one fraction of a second, everything is perfect. I dont need to have to explain anything. For that very moment, you understand everything. And there is nothing to understand. Then she remembered she was on a not-so-dormant volcano. I thought, I have a suit and 45 minutes of oxygen, she said and shook her head. My last thought would have been so serene and so peaceful.

Chilifornia

As we took the trucks in a convoy up to our final site, I looked back on the Atacama and thought of the Apollo astronauts. Far behind and below us was a haze-softened blue expanse streaked with clouds, making this climb feel like a journey away from Earth. We were among volcanoes now, vast blisters on the plateau. Cabrol pointed out Simba, which the group planned to climb to sample the bacteria in its crater lake. Cabrol has a history with Simba. In 2007, she was climbing it with her team when the Tocopilla earthquake hit. They avoided the avalanches, but when Lascar, the volcano sharing a slope with Simba, began to emit poisonous gases, Cabrol fell into what she called a surgically cold mind-set, concerned only with logic, practicality, survival. During their descent, a large tumbling rock just missed her. And this, she said, was when I got mad. She stood up in the middle of the gully and started yelling at the volcano.  Is it going to be all today?! Is there anything yet you can?! I was shouting! I was outraged! She got everyone down safely and then nearly passed out in the truck back to base camp  partly from an adrenaline crash, partly from the knowledge that everyone might have died.

We camped under an extinct volcano, in an abandoned military barracks that the team called Chilifornia. The cinder-block rectangle had no roof, but the walls sheltered our tents from the wind. Cabrol warned us not to go wandering. In the 1970s, this territory was disputed with neighboring Bolivia, and there are still land mines here. I grew even more anxious when I heard Cabrol and Cristian Tambley, who was handling logistics for the expedition, talking about installing UV-monitoring systems in this region. Strong UV radiation damages DNA. The World Health Organization warns against being outside when the UV index is over 11. In 2003 and 2004, Cabrol observed unexplained UV storms here of extraordinary intensity, though they lasted only a few hours. On Licancabur, she detected UV spikes of over 43. That night I dreamed of wearing a spacesuit.

It was an hours drive to Laguna Lejia the next morning, a copper-colored lake shivering with sunlight. Cabrol was shocked when we arrived. Its substantially reduced in size compared with when I last saw it, in 2009, she said. Our planet is actually changing in front of our eyes, she told me later, at a speed that is extremely scary. The route we were traveling was once a drive route for cattle from Argentina into Chile, and I couldnt look away from the bones littering the place. The skulls left behind were so old that the keratin layers of their horns had peeled apart, resembling delicate pine cones or the brittle pages of old books left in the sun.

The landscape of El Tatio. Andrea Frazzetta/Institute, for The New York Times

Cabrol has worked closely with robotics engineers for many years, and her 2011 Planetary Lake Lander project set an autonomous floating robot in Laguna Negra in the Andes. Ever since, Cabrol has made it her mission to push the two things together: climate change on Mars and climate change on Earth. The Planetary Lake Lander wasnt just preparation for future missions to lakes and seas beyond Earth, or simply an analogue for climate change on Mars, but a way of investigating climate change here and now. The region near Laguna Negra is suffering from rapid deglaciation.

We saw that change too. We traveled to another lake, surrounded by creeks and frozen grass. The wind was brutal, the sky the hardest blue. Cabrol crouched at a site where she found freshwater springs seven years ago. Fascinated and forlorn, she told us that this was like Mars three billion years ago. The surface water was receding, but there was some water underneath. She was shocked by how fast the climate was changing here. Seven years ago, this was a beautiful spring, a pond with zooplankton, but now you cant tell the difference between this and the rest of the desert. She scraped gently at frozen mud with the point of her geologic hammer. Later, she pointed out that the Earth itself in is no danger whatsoever. It will survive whatever we throw at it. What is in danger is the environment that made us possible. We are pretty much cutting the branch we are sitting on. So either we understand that very quickly, or life will go on  but a different one. She thinks it will not be a slow disappearance. Its going to be sudden and frightening, she said.

At night in my sleeping bag, I woozily speculated on the meaning of life and death, the fate of Earth, the end of things. I asked Mario, one of the expedition doctors, if deja vu was a recognized symptom of altitude. Absolutely, he said. I was relieved. It kept happening. It was starting to scare me. The day before, a llama sheltering from the wind behind an outcrop stepped down with leisurely, measured grace across talc-dusted slabs of rock. I knew Id seen it before. More than twice, certainly. Perhaps five times, six. I knew I hadnt, of course, but these miraged recollections were instantly telescoped and pleated together like a pack of cards all of the same suit flicked through with a thumb. There was a sense that reality is unreliable here, as if I could put a hand to the air and it could slip right through to another universe if I wasnt paying sufficient attention, or paying too much. As if I could free another reality by rubbing corners of air together like trying to open a recalcitrant plastic bag. And the wind poured on us as we drove, making dust devils spin over the distances, all outside seemingly inimical to breath.

The Valle de la Muerte, or valley of death, near San Pedro de Atacama. Andrea Frazzetta/Institute, for The New York Times

These high places, Cabrol told me, were sacred to the Inca people, who would climb the mountains here to make ritual offerings to the gods. Crouching behind a rock to keep us out of the sharp mountain wind, she explained how up here the scientific search for life beyond Earth and the spiritual search for meaning cannot help running in parallel. The Incas would come here to the mountains to ask questions of God  and so, in a way, are we, she said. Thats the same question. Who we are, where we are coming from, whats out there. We are trying to connect to our own origins. So we are doing this scientifically; they were doing it in a more intuitive way.

Cabrol deeply respects the cultural history of the landscapes she works in. Her Quechua guide Macario made offerings to Pachamama, an Incan goddess, before he and Cabrols team climbed volcanoes, and Cabrol always makes offerings, usually crystal spheres, to the high crater lakes she dives in on mountains. She had planned to climb to Simbas crater lake at the expeditions end, but she hadnt brought an offering to give its blood-colored waters. Tentatively, she asked me if I had anything that might work as a replacement. I gave her a piece of lapis lazuli polished into the shape of an egg that I bought in San Pedro de Atacama. The exchange seemed an entirely rational act. Both halves of Cabrol, scientific and spiritual, are perfectly conjoined in her work, in her insistent, careful reaching for the deepest of questions: Why are we here?

Lascar

Cabrol was staring at plumes of vapor that rose from the volcano on the near horizon. Bright white at their bases, they softened rapidly into haze that went up and up, before losing coherence and resolution against the sky. The steam was ascending vertically, even in this vicious wind, so there was serious force behind it. The volcano was Lascar, which shares a slope with Simba. And the team had people on Simba right now, local guides preparing our ascent.

The night sky over Salar de Pajonales. Andrea Frazzetta/Institute, for The New York Times

Cabrol called everyone in. We stood in a line before her, waiting for orders. She pushed her mirrored glasses up onto her hat, speaking with terse, absolute authority. As soon as the guides were down from Simba, she said, we would go back to camp. She would get out the satellite phone and speak to Bill Diamond, who was now back at the SETI Institute, and call the United States Geological Survey and the University of Chile to find out more about the situation here. And then we would need to decide not only if the team should cancel the planned ascent of Simba but also whether any of us should stay in camp at all.

There was no immediate bad news, so we decided to stay. Cabrol would keep an eye on Lascars activity and let us know if it worsened. She told us to sleep in our clothes and keep our passports at hand, ready to leave in the middle of the night if need be. All of this gave me a strange kind of dread. It had a lazy, slow, opiated quality. It had been a long time since I had none of the tools I needed to judge a situation. There had recently been a 5.5-magnitude earthquake in Calama, an hour and a half away. And if water made its way into the magma chamber beneath the volcano, the volcano might explode. These facts werent comforting. I withdrew to my little orange tent, sat on my cot and looked at photos of home on my phone. Outside, the light was dying on the old volcano. I could hear people packing and the generator buzzing behind the cinder-block wall. Tambley was assembling a weather station and playing Pink Floyds Shine On You Crazy Diamond, the saddest of songs, on his laptop. Zips, whispers, laughter, the sounds of Pelican cases being hauled over rough ground.

I stared at my hands. They looked like ancient lizard skin, each crease outlined in pale dust. All my clothes were white with it. My hair felt like greased fur. There was a moth in my tent, but I was too numb to move it. Blankly, I watched this scrap of life bump about the orange walls. The tent flap was open; all it needed to do was turn around and fly the other way. It didnt. I lost sight of it for long minutes, then jumped at its touch. It had bumbled its way onto my hand and rested there, quivering. I put it outside. We left the next day.A bizarre human skeleton, once rumored to have extraterrestrial origins, has gotten a rather comprehensive genomic work-up, the results of which are now in, researchers from the Stanford University School of Medicine report.

The findings stamp out any remaining questions about the specimens home planet  its without a doubt human  but more than that, the analysis answers questions about remains that have long been a genetic enigma.

After five years of deep genomic analysis, Garry Nolan, PhD, professor of microbiology and immunology at Stanford, and Atul Butte, MD, PhD, director of the Institute for Computational Health Sciences at the University of California-San Francisco, have pinpointed the mutations responsible for the anomalous specimen. The researchers found mutations in not one but several genes known to govern bone development; whats more, some of these molecular oddities have never been described before.

To me, it seems that when doctors perform analyses for patients and their families, were often searching for one cause  one super-rare or unusual mutation that can explain the childs ailment. But in this case, were pretty confident that multiple things went wrong, said Butte. Its an indication, he said, that looking for a single mutation, or even mutations that are already known to cause a particular disease, can discourage researchers from looking for other potential genetic causes and, in turn, potential treatments for patients.

Nolan, who holds the Rachford and Carlota Harris Professorship, and Butte, a former Stanford faculty member who now holds the Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg Distinguished Professorship at UCSF, are senior authors of the study, which was published online March 22 in Genome Research. Sanchita Bhattacharya, a bioinformatics researcher at UCSF, is the lead author.

A human? A primate? An alien?

The skeleton, nicknamed Ata, was discovered more than a decade ago in an abandoned town in the Atacama Desert of Chile. After trading hands and eventually finding a permanent home in Spain, the mummified specimen started to garner public attention. Standing just 6 inches tall  about the length of a dollar bill  with an angular, elongated skull and sunken, slanted eye sockets, the internet began to bubble with other-worldly hullabaloo and talk of ET.RTE News Midlands correspondent Ciaran Mullooly has taken leave of absence from his reporting role to fulfill a dream of travelling to Australia.

Notable was his absence from the station's St Patrick's Day parades coverage, the Longford man is already enjoying the sights and sounds down under.

He tweeted on March 11: "And so the adventure begins - 18 years after we first planned it with my late brother Pat by our side. Thanks to Mick for minding the house - will be saying goodbye to this gadget for a while and savouring the memories in real time. Gday mate ..until we meet again"

He has already savoured the views from the world famous Syndey harbour bridge and tweeted a picture of Sydney Harbour.

We can look forward to following his journey over the coming months on twitter.

Well ....I said I would cross it when I came to it ....so here goes ....#Oz2018 pic.twitter.com/xrysDy5UTM  Ciaran Mullooly (@ciaranmullooly) March 20, 2018BrahMos sucessfully test fired from Pokhran

India

oi-Vikas

By Vikas

Supersonic cruise missile Brahmos was on Thursday successfully test fired from Pokhran test range in Rajasthan. Dubbed as one of the most lethal weapons systems that currently exist in the world, BrahMos is capable of flights at supersonic speeds, making it hard for enemy radar to track.

It can cruise at an altitude of 15 km and as low as 10 meters above the ground and maintains supersonic speed (more than 1 km per second) throughout the duration of its flight. Once the missile is fired, it doesn't need any guidance from a control centre. This makes it a 'fire and forget' missile.

[BrahMos successfully test fired from Sukhoi; cruise missile triad achieved]

Last year in November, the air version of BrahMos supersonic cruise missile was successfully test fired from Sukhoi-30MKI fighter jet. With this test firing, BrahMos became first weapon system in the world to have the capability to be fired from land, sea and air.

[All fine with BrahMos, but what about cruise missile Nirbhay]

Developed by an Indo-Russian joint venture, the missile can be fired on three different targets or in a variety of other combinations near simultaneously.

Why is BrahMos feared?

Its high precision and penetration capabilities can effectively pierce the hull of a free-floating ship. Its Mach 3 velocity clubbed with an extremely explosive warhead can tear apart aircraft carriers in one strike. Hundreds of BrahMos missiles have already been inducted into the Indian Army and almost all Indian front-line warships now boast of this supersonic cruise missile.

BrahMos' strike range was recently increased from 290 km to 450 km following the technology upgradation.

OneIndia NewsGerman foot-wear brand walks out of China, to set up operations in Agra

Explained: What is Victory Day? Why is it celebrated on different date in Russia?

German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier arrives in India on-four-day visit

India

oi-Deepika

By Deepika

German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier arrived in India on Thursday, with an aim to strengthen bilateral ties. This will be his first visit to India as the German President.

In a statement issued by the German Embassy said: "The German Head of State will talk with Prime Minister (Narendra) Modi and other high-ranking politicians, such as Vice President Venkaiah Naidu and Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj."

Steinmeier will also hold talks with representatives of Indian civil society, science and industry, the statement said.

During the visit, Steinmeier will be accompanied by a CEO delegation, Indologists and a media delegation. He will be officially welcomed by President Ram Nath Kovind and his wife in New Delhi. Steinmeier will also visit Varanasi and Chennai.

Apart from his engagements here, Steinmeier, who will be accompanied by a delegation of top German businessmen and Indologists, will visit Varanasi and Chennai.

He had visited India several times in his former capacity as the Foreign Minister and Vice Chancellor of Germany.

The last German President to visit India was Joachim Gauck in February 2014.

Germany is India's largest trading partner in Europe and the sixth largest trading partner in the world. India was ranked 24th in Germany's global trade.

In 2016-17, the bilateral trade turnover was USD 18.76 billion. In 2016-17, India exported goods worth USD 7.18 billion to Germany and imported goods worth USD 11.58 billion.

Germany is the 7th largest foreign direct investor in India and the cumulative German FDI in India from April 2000 to December 2017 is USD 10.71 billion or 2.91 per cent of total FDI, according to official figures.

OneIndia News'How can it be case of fake identity' says SC, questions use of Aadhaar for drawing pension

India

oi-Vikas

By Vikas

Stating that there cannot be a doubt on the identity of retired government employees, the Supreme Court has questioned the mandatory use of Aadhaar for drawing the pension. The apex court said that there was no question of any impersonation as the pension accounts are operated by retired employees only.

A five-judge Constitution bench, headed by Chief Justice Dipak Misra, said, "How would it be a case of fake identity? The employee pension scheme deals with pension earned by employees after rendering services."

Justice D Y Chandrachud, who is a member of the bench, gave the example of his late father and former CJI Y V Chandrachud saying only he used to operate the pension account and hence there was no question of somebody else operating it, said a PTI report.

Meanwhile, the Centre on Wednesday (March 21) told the Supreme Court that Aadhaar provides a right to physically exist without lying on the pavement without food. The submission was made before a Constitution Bench which is hearing a batch of petitions that challenged the constitutional validity of Aadhaar.

The Centre represented by Attorney General, K K Venugopal said that the right to dignity is more important than the right to privacy.

Further, the Centre said that through Aadhaar food, shelter and employment are being given to those who lived on the fringe. For this, the government has taken care that the right to privacy is affected in the most minimal way.

The court said that those downtrodden who need food and shelter also had the right to privacy and the state cannot violate it.

OneIndia News with PTI inputsAs Pakistan bolsters military might, an uneasy disquiet at the border

Kupwara encounter: 'Four terrorists killed are of foreign origin', says J&K police

India

oi-Chennabasaveshwar

By Chennabasaveshwar

Jammu and Kashmir police Thursday said all the four terrorists killed in the Kupwara encounter are of foreign origin, prima facie appears to be related to Lashkar-e-taiba (LeT).

SP Pani, IGP Kashmir, said, "Operation is at controlling stage, searches are underway at some places. We have recovered arms and ammunition in large quantity, all those killed are foreign terrorists. Prima facie it appears they are related to LeT. "

The nearly 48-hour gunbattle occurred in the dense Kupwara forest in north Kashmir ended on Wednesday night, with five security personnel, including three Army jawans and two policemen, dead and an equal number of terrorists killed, police said.

The encounter has highlighted gaps in the Army's vigil along the Line of Control (LoC) as the group of militants had managed to sneak in nearly 8 kms after crossing two ridges of the Shamsabari mountain range, reports PTI.

The militants had met their "reception party" (overground workers and militants already present in the Valley) after crossing the LoC and were proceeding towards Kupwara town when they were spotted by police personnel, the officials told PTI.

(With agency inputs)Lingayats vs Veerashaivas: Congress has no magic wand and the ghost will continue to haunt it

Lingayats in Maharashtra now want separate religion status

India

oi-Vikas

By Vikas

The Lingayats in Maharashtra have now demanded a separate religion status, days after the Congress government in Karnataka decided to recommend to the centre to grant religious minority status to the community. The Lingayat community in Maharashtra is likely to put pressure on the Maharashtra government for the same, said reports.

The Lingayat/Veerashaiva community is a politically dominant group in Karnataka. After Karnataka, Maharashtra has the second highest number of Lingayats.

According to report, the Maharashtra government's request to the Centre for granting Lingayat community the status of a minority was turned down in May 2014.

Siddaramaiah's move, which was initially seen as a political masterstroke, has now become a complex issue. Lingayats are considered as the BJP's traditional voter base. This move by the Congress government was aimed at both dividing the BJP's vote bank and appeasing the Lingayat community.

The community has a strong presence in the state, especially in the north. Lingayats constitute 17% of the total population in Karnataka. They are dominant in close to 100 of the 224 assembly seats, mostly in North Karnataka. There have been nine chief ministers from the community, said an ET report.

[Why Siddramaiah's Lingayat 'appeasement' move may backfire]

The issue came at the centre stage last year when Chief Minister Siddaramaiah promised to consider the demand. One part of the community demands the minority status for both Veerashaiva and Lingayats considering them the same, while another wants it only for the Lingayats as it considers Veershaivas to be Hindus.

Karnataka State Minorities Commission had formed a seven-member committee, headed by retired high court Judge HN Nagamohan Das on the issue which submitted its report on March 2 stating that Lingayats in Karnataka could be considered as a religious minority.

Lingayats and Veershaivas:

Though many feel that Lingayats and Veerashaivas are one and the same and that the words were interchangeable, they are actually very different. Lingayats are followers of Basavanna, the 12th-century social reformer who staunchly opposed the caste system. Veerashaivism is an order of Shaiva faith, which in turn is one of the two major Vedic faiths - the other one being the Vaishnava faith. Both Shaiva and Vaishnava followers constitute the Sanatana Dharma.

[Yeddyurappa breaks silence, says religious minority tag to Lingayat 'election gimmick']

Siddaramaiah government's move to approve separate religion status to Lingayats in Karnataka has hit a major hurdle with All India Veerashaiva Mahasabha president, Shamanur Shivashankarappa, describing it as "height of injustice". Shivashankarappa, who is also a veteran Congress leader, said that the Mahasabha would decide the future course of action on the issue on Friday.

OneIndia NewsMuzaffarnagar riot: Yogi Adityanath to withdraw 131 cases?

India

oi-Chennabasaveshwar

By Chennabasaveshwar

The Uttar Pradesh government has started the process of withdrawing 131 cases related to Muzaffarnagar riots in response to the letter by BJP MP Sanjiv Balyan. Uttar Pradesh BJP leader Sanjiv Balyan in a letter to the state Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath proposed the move to withdraw 131 cases. The letter was written on January 5, 2018.

The Uttar Pradesh government has started the process of withdrawing 131 cases, The Indian Express reported on Thursday. These include 24 murder and attempt to murder cases. Balyan told The Indian Express that all the accused in the list given to Adityanath were Hindus. "In the meeting with the chief minister in February, I requested him to consider the withdrawal of 179 cases, in which over 850 Hindus were held accused," Balyan said.

According to reports, all 131 cases are registered against 'one community'. BJP MP Sanjiv Balyan says, 'Uttar Pradesh government should withdraw false cases related to riots. BJP government is trying to give justice to people who are falsely implicated.'

The cases were filed against UP minister Suresh Rana, former Union minister Sanjiv Balyan, MP Bhartendu Singh, MLA Umesh Malik and party leader Sadhvi Prachi.

The communal clashes in Muzaffarnagar and adjoining areas in August and September 2013 had claimed more than 60 lives while over 40,000 people were displaced. In the two riot cases, 22 activists, including Rana, are facing trial in which a special investigation team (SIT) has filed charge sheets.

(With agency inputs)Don't need lessons from a failed state like Pakistan: India at UN

Pak gives nod for PM Modis flight to use its airspace

Special envoys of China, Russia and Pak hold talks with Taliban officials in Kabul

Pakistan's envoy Sohail Mahmood likely to return to India today

India

oi-Deepika

By Deepika

Pakistan's High Commissioner to India Sohail Mahmood, who was called back to Islamabad last week for a meeting to discuss diplomatic tensions with India, is likely to return to New Delhi today.

Mehmood will host a 'Pakistan National Day' function at the Pakistan High Commission in New Delhi on Friday.

Over the past fifteen days, both sides have been trading charges over harassment of their diplomats and accusing each other of violating the Geneva Convention rules.

Pakistani officials even released a video of such 'harassment', in which a white car is seen blocking their diplomat's vehicle in Delhi and people on motorcycles abusing and filming the occupants. Meanwhile, New Delhi maintained that it uses diplomatic channels, and not the media, to protest.

Indian officials privately said that life had become 'very difficult' for diplomats at the Indian High Commission in Islamabad. "Forget aggressive tailing, we've had people throw garbage and spit on our diplomatic vehicles in Islamabad in full view of local police," one official said.

Last week, Pakistani media reports said Mahmood was unlikely to return to India any time soon.

Mehmood, who was summoned to Islamabad on Thursday, "will not return to India anytime soon," Pakistani media quoted foreign ministry officials as saying.

Pakistan also pulled out of a World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting held in New Delhi last week.

OneIndia NewsParliamentary proceedings washed out for 14th day in a row

India

pti-PTI

New Delhi, March 22: Owing to unabated protests by opposition parties and those from some southern states, parliament proceedings were disrupted for the 14th straight day on the second leg of the budget session.

For a change, the Rajya Sabha passed without debate a crucial legislation to amend the gratuity law before the House was adjourned for the day due to the noisy protests by the Congress, TDP and AIADMK on various issues.

As in the recent past, the Lok Sabha was first adjourned till noon and then for the day with Speaker Sumitra Mahajan said that she cannot take up the no-confidence motion as there is no order in the House.

In the Upper House, Chairman M Venkaiah Naidu said he has been adjourning the proceedings as he does not want the people to "see the ugly scenes", a reference to the slogan-shouting and display of placards by members of different parties protesting in the Well.

Both the Houses have been disrupted over various issues like the banking scam, Cauvery water dispute and demand for special status to Andhra Pradesh, ever since Parliament met on March 5 to carry forward the Budget Session.

When the Upper House met this morning, the listed papers were laid and then brief statements were made by TDP member C M Ramesh and AIADMK MP V Maitreyan on their demands -- special status to Andhra and setting up of the Cauvery river management board respectively.

Naidu then said that he had met leaders of various parties in the morning and it was decided that the House would take up the crucial Payment of Gratuity (Amendment) Bill as it was of importance to the employees. Labour Minister Santosh Kumar Gangwar then moved the bill for consideration and passage and the measure was passed by a voice vote, without debate.

A couple of amendments to the bill were not moved by Congress member T Subbarami Reddy. However, the semblance of normality was short-lived as slogan-shouting members from the TDP and the AIADMK soon trooped into the Well.

They were joined by some Congress members. Minister of State for Parliamentary Affairs Vijay Goel also requested the protesting members to return to their seats saying the government was willing to discuss all issues.

Amid the din, Naidu said he was being asked why he was adjourning the House. "Ugly scenes are being seen by people. I don't want these ugly scenes to be seen by people," he said.

As protesting members did not yield to the Chair's request, Naidu adjourned the House for the day after just 17 minutes of proceedings. Earlier, veteran Congress MP Motilal Vora, 89, was praised by the Chairman for being regular in attending the House and conducting himself in a "dignified manner", amid thumping of desks by members from the treasury and the opposition benches.

Naidu said young members of the House should try to emulate Vora. Before this, Naidu started the proceedings by mentioning that March 22 is celebrated every year as World Water Day and expressed hope that the entire House will join him in supporting conservation of freshwater resources through natural methods.

The members responded by thumping of desks. The proceedings in the Lok Sabha also became a casualty to noisy protests by AIADMK and TRS members, leading to its adjournment as the House again failed to take up the notices of a no-confidence motion against the government.

The Question Hour was washed out in the morning due to these protests within minutes of assembling. When the House met again, the protests erupted again soon after the listed papers were laid.

While AIADMK and TRS members were seen in the Well holding placards and raising slogans, members from the Congress and Left were heard asking the Speaker to bring order so that the notices of no-confidence motion can be taken up.

Parliamentary Affairs minister Ananth Kumar said the government was ready to debate all issues, including banking scam and no-confidence motion, provided they are taken up.

He also urged the agitating members to return to their seats so that the Lok Sabha can function smoothly. When Mahajan took up the notices of no trust vote, the protesting AIADMK members raised their pitch.

As several Congress, Left and Trinamool Congress members demanded that the Chair bring order in the House, Mahajan said she cannot see anything from her seat (apparently due to placards being held by AIADMK and TRS members) and hence cannot count 50 members needed to support the no-trust move.

The leader of the Congress party in Lok Sabha Mallikarjun Kharge was seen repeatedly urging the Speaker to take up the motion. Members from the Left raised their hands in support of the no trust notices when Mahajan said she cannot see the members favouring the move due to the ruckus.

TDP's Thotha Narasimhan, who has moved one of the notices, was seen holding a paper and asking the Speaker to go ahead with the matter. She then adjourned the House for the day, saying she cannot proceed with the notices amid disruptions.

PTITwo days ahead of his 87th birthday, Himachal Pradesh ex-CM Virbhadra Singh recovers from Covid

Former Himachal Pradesh CM & Congress leader Virbhadra Singh passes away at 87; Condolences pour in

Former Himachal CM Virbhadra Singh to be cremated at Rampur on July 10 at 3 pm

PMLA case: CBI Special court grants bail to former HP CM Virbhadra Singh

India

oi-Deepika

By Deepika

A special court on Thursday granted bail to the former Himachal Pradesh CM Virbhadra Singh, his wife and others related in a money laundering case. The court also directed them to furnish a bail bond of Rs 50,000 along with surety of the same amount.

Delhi's Patiala House Court has fixed 25 April as the next date for scrutiny of the documents.

Earlier last month, the Enforcement Directorate filed a supplementary charge sheet against Singh, his wife and others under the provisions of the PMLA.

The CBI had claimed that Singh had allegedly accumulated assets worth around Rs 6.03 crore which were disproportionate to his total income during his tenure as Union minister.

In a separate case filed by the CBI in the matter, Singh, his wife and Chauhan were charge-sheeted along with others.

OneIndia NewsDavid Magnus, PhD, senior author of the piece and director of the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics, said bias can play into health data in three ways: human bias; bias that is introduced by design; and bias in the ways health care systems use the data.

You can easily imagine that the algorithms being built into the health care system might be reflective of different, conflicting interests, said Magnus, who is also the Thomas A. Raffin Professor of Medicine and Biomedical Ethics. What if the algorithm is designed around the goal of saving money? What if different treatment decisions about patients are made depending on insurance status or their ability to pay?

The authors called for a national conversation about the perpetual tension between the goals of improving health and generating profit  since the builders and purchasers of machine-learning systems are unlikely to be the same people delivering bedside care.

They also put the responsibility for finding solutions and setting the agenda on health care professionals.

Ethical guidelines can be created to catch up with the age of machine learning and artificial intelligence that is already upon us, the authors wrote. Physicians who use machine-learning systems can become more educated about their construction, the data sets they are built on and their limitations. Remaining ignorant about the construction of machine-learning systems or allowing them to be constructed as black boxes could lead to ethically problematic outcomes.

The authors acknowledge the social pressure to incorporate the latest tools in order to provide better health outcomes for patients.

Artificial intelligence will be pervasive in health care in a few years, said co-author Nigam Shah, MBBS, PhD, associate professor of medicine. But health care systems need to be aware of the pitfalls that have happened in other industries, he added.

Shah noted that models are only as trustworthy as the data being gathered and shared. Be careful about knowing the data from which you learn, he said.

Could data become the doctor?

The authors wrote that what physicians learn from the data needs to be heavily weighed against what they know from their own clinical experience. Overreliance on machine guidance might lead to self-fulfilling prophesies.

For example, they said, if clinicians always withdraw care in patients with certain diagnoses, such as extreme prematurity or brain injury, machine-learning systems may learn that such diagnoses are always fatal. Conversely, machine-learning systems, properly deployed, may help resolve disparities in health care delivery by compensating for known biases or by identifying where more research is needed to balance the underlying data.Tej Pratap Yadav addicted to drugs, used to dress up like gods, says wife Aishwarya

I have been assaulted by Rabri Devi, driven out of her house: Tej Pratap's wife Aishwarya Rai

Rajdeo Ranjan murder case: SC gives clean chit to Tej Pratap Yadav

India

oi-Vikas

By Vikas

The Supreme Court on Thursday dismissed the petition filed by Asha Ranjan, whose husband and journalist Rajdeo Ranjan was murdered in Siwan district in Bihar, that alleged Lalu Yadav's son Tej Pratap of being involved in her husband's murder.

Ranjan was murdered in Siwan in May 2016. His widow had sought direction for registration of FIR against Shahabuddin and Yadav for "conspiracy and harbouring and sheltering the proclaimed offenders" in the murder case.

The CBI had last year taken custody of Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) leader Shahabuddin, whose name has cropped up as an accused in the investigation of Ranjan's murder. The four-time RJD MP from Siwan is alleged as having been involved in the murder of Ranjan, a journalist of a prominent Hindi daily.

Earlier on August 22, 2017, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) had filed a charge sheet against Shahabuddin

[Patna HC upholds RJD leader Shahabuddin's life sentence]

In February 2017, the Supreme Court had ordered that Shahabuddin is shifted from Siwan Jail in Bihar to Tihar Jail in the national Capital. The court order was based on a plea by Ranjan's widow. Shahabuddin is currently serving his sentence in Tihar Jail and stands accused in as many as 45 cases, including the murder of Ranjan in May 2016.

OneIndia NewsNot our point of view: RSS distances itself from Anti-National Infosys article

Kannur University: Controversial syllabus of VD Savarkar, MS Golwalkar will not be taught now

'RSS is a nationalist organisation', says Baba Ramdev on Kerala CM's remark

India

oi-Vikas

By Vikas

Yoga guru Baba Ramdev on Thursday came out in strong defence of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) after Kerala CM Pinarayi Vijayan accused the saffron outfit of carrying out illegal drills and arms training. Ramdev said RSS is a nationalist organisation that would never do anything against the country.

"I have seen the leaders of RSS closely. RSS isn't a terrorist or a naxal organisation, they're a nationalist organisation & they would never do anything against the country," Ramdev told news agency ANI.

Vijayan, during the question hour in the Kerala Assembly, said the government, if needed, would bring in a law to ban drills and arms training being conducted in public and in places of worship.

He said that the RSS uses certain places of worship, school grounds and also the unoccupied land of individuals for conducting drills using sticks.

"Stern action will be taken against those who indulge in illegal arms training and drills," Vijayan added.

Vijayan has been critical of the RSS ever since he took office. Last year, Vijayan had directed action against the manager and principal of the school in Palakkad, where RSS Chief Mohan Bhagwat had hoisted the national flag on Independence Day.

OneIndia NewsSchool suicide horror: Parents of Class 9 student protest outside school demanding justice

India

oi-Deepika

By Deepika

Days after a class 9 student a Delhi school allegedly committed suicide, her parents, family and friends protested outside the premises demanding the arrests of the 2 teachers and justice for the girl.

Demanding justice for her daughter, the father of class 9 student said "I will commit suicide if action is not taken against the 2 teachers. I don't trust the police since they have not made any arrests. The school principal was laughing like a monster during the press conference yesterday.

"Media are requested to support girls' father. Media should also put pressure to administration - Owner of the school also go behind the bar. CBSE should do the proper audit of the school fee collection & expenditure," he said.

HRD seeks report on school girl's suicide

The HRD Ministry has sought a report from Ahlcon Public School regarding issue."We have asked for details," HRD Minister Prakash Javadekar said when asked about the incident on sidelines of an event.

'We never received such complaints,' say principal

Reacting to the incident, Principal, Ahlcon Public School said "We mourn her death and we are with the family. If I see her record she was an average student, not very good at studies but a great dancer. Students' marks are given at PTMs but her parents didn't attend any. She didn't fail, had to give re-test."

"One of the teachers against whom allegations are being made is a woman, how can she sexually harass someone? Other teacher has been here since 25 years and we never got any such complain," he further said.

"I am a failure," she wrote in Note book

Meanwhile, the police have recovered a notebook used by the girl, which can provide a vital clue to the case.

"I am failure" has been scribbled twice on one of the pages of the notebook. While the phrase "I am dumb" has been mentioned once, a diagonal line towards the bottom of the page says "I hate myself". The page also bears multiple signatures of the teen.

The Police and the girl's family have confirmed that it is the girl's handwriting.

Ikisha Raghav Shah, a class 9 student of a private school in Delhi's Mayur Vihar committed suicide on Tuesday, allegedly for scoring low marks. However, Her family members claim that the 15-year-old took the extreme step due to low marks and harassment by teachers.

"She told me her SST teachers touch her inappropriately, I said since I'm also a teacher I can say they can't do it, might be a mistake but she said, 'I'm scared of them, no matter how well I write they'll fail me.' Ultimately they failed her in SST. School killed her," the father of the girl, who was a student of Ahlcon Public School, her father had told on Wednesday.

OneIndia NewsTDP to hold pan Andhra protests over special category status today

India

oi-Vikas

By Vikas

The Telugu Desam Party (TDP), which has severed ties with the NDA over the special category status to Andhra Pradesh, will on Thursday hold protests across the state in support of the party MPs' agitation in the Parliament.

Senior TDP leader K. Kala Venkatrao has urged the party workers to ensure that the protests are peaceful. In a teleconference with MPs, MLAs, MLCs, in-charges and other party leaders, Venkatrao had directed them to sit on demonstration and protest meetings in major junctions of all constituencies.

A party release later said the TDP would not, however, participate in the agitation along with the main Opposition YSR Congress since the "latter might create trouble."

Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu has, however, extended his government's support to the statewide National Highways blockade programme called by the Opposition parties.

"Organisers of the agitation requested our support and the party chief (Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu) consented to it in the interests of the state," Rao said.

Both Houses of Parliament are getting adjourned frequently without transacting any business, over disruptions from Opposition members. The Telugu Desam Party (TDP), which is demanding special category status for Andhra Pradesh, has been raising slogans both inside the House and outside near the Gandhi Statue.

OneIndia News'The armed forces are 52,000 soldiers short', says Govt

India

oi-Vicky Nanjappa

The government has said that there is a huge shortage in the armed forces. According to the details provided by Minister of State for Defence Subhash Bhamre in the Lok Sabha, the Army is reeling under a shortage of 21,383 personnel, while the number of vacant posts in the Navy is 16,348 and 15,010 in the Air Force.

Replying to a question, he said 7,680 posts of officers are lying vacant in the Army. To a question on the Rafale deal, Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said all relevant procedures were followed to ensure transparency in the acquisition of the 36 jets.

India had in 2016 inked an inter-governmental agreement with France for procuring 36 Rafale fighter jets at a cost of around Rs 58,000 crore. The delivery of the jets is scheduled to begin from September 2019.

The Congress has been demanding details of the agreement, including the cost of equipment and weapons, alleging that the deal negotiated under its rule was much cheaper than the contract signed by the Modi government.

"In the acquisition of 36 Rafale aircraft, all relevant procedure as laid down in defence procurement procedure were followed to ensure that due transparency existed in the entire acquisition process," Sitharaman said.

She said the government preferred the inter-governmental route to procure the jets considering the critical operational requirement of the Indian Air Force.

Replying to a question on whether the nuclear-powered submarine Chakra, which was leased from Russia, suffered extensive damage, she said the information cannot be divulged in the interest of national security.

Bhamre also declined to share information, citing national security, when asked if indigenous nuclear submarine Arihant suffered major damage.

Replying to a separate question, he said the government believes that artificial intelligence has the potential to have a transformative impact on security.

He said a task force headed by Chairman of Tata Sons N Chandrasekaran has been constituted to study the strategic implementation of the application of artificial intelligence for national security and defence needs.

Asked about the implementation of a project to strengthen 73 strategic roads along the India-China border, he said the work on 23 roads with a total length of 981 km had been completed.

He said the work on 33 other roads having a total length of 2,436 km was going on.

The project was approved by the government in 2006-07 and it was to be completed by 2012.

OneIndia NewsImmoral and un-democratic says TDP after four of its MPs join BJP

YSR Congress calls for state wide 'bandh', blocks highways

India

oi-Chennabasaveshwar

By Chennabasaveshwar

The demand for special category status for Andhra Pradesh escalated in the state as both Telugu Desam Party and YSR Congress Party hit the streets on Thursday. YSR Congress Party and other opposition parties called a statewide 'bandh', blocking national highways across the state demanding special status for the state.

On the other hand, Telugu Desam Party (TDP) held a protest in Vijayawada over the same issue. And the party MPs continue raising demand for special category status in Parliament premises.

Delhi: Telugu Desam Party (TDP) MPs hold protest in Parliament premises demanding special status for #AndhraPradesh pic.twitter.com/BTQR8opwas  ANI (@ANI) March 22, 2018

Senior TDP leader K. Kala Venkatrao has urged the party workers to ensure that the protests are peaceful. In a teleconference with MPs, MLAs, MLCs, in-charges and other party leaders, Venkatrao had directed them to sit on demonstration and protest meetings in major junctions of all constituencies.

CM Chandrababu Naidu, whose party, the TDP, quit the BJP-led NDA over the special category status issue, earlier called for a people's movement "till justice is done to the state."

Vizag: Visuals of state wide 'bandh' and national highways blockade called by opposition parties demanding special status for #AndhraPradesh. pic.twitter.com/2ha6fvrvXc  ANI (@ANI) March 22, 2018

OneIndia NewsFormer foes Russia and Pakistan are good friends today, thanks to Afghanistan and China

International

oi-Shubham

By Shubham

When Russian military personnel had reached Pakistan amidst the latter's heightened tension with India in the wake of the terror attacks in Uri in September 2016 for the first-ever joint drill with the Pakistanis, the Indian establishment was alarmed by the growing bonhomie between Moscow and Islamabad, although the Russians had assured New Delhi that they would be conducting the drills in the disputed areas.

For the time being, it was fine but if we keep a track on the relations between Russia and Pakistan in the recent times, the former Cold War foes have certainly seen an upward movement in their bilateral relations. India might not yet worry too much about losing old ally Russia, but President Vladimir Putin's gesture during the BRICS summit in Goa in 2016 clearly indicated that Moscow no more judges Pakistan through the eyes of India as it happened during the heydays of the Cold War when Islamabad was a trusted friend of the United States.

In Goa, India had tried to corner Pakistan by trying to run a no-confidence against it with help of the Russians and Chinese but the guests did not oblige. It was expected from China but not from Russia. Moscow's response suggested that the dynamics of international politics has changed in the current times.

That the Russia-Pakistan relations are better than the past were reiterated by a recent report by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. According to it, while a Russian military delegation visited the Asian country's lawless tribal areas last year, signposts featuring Russian language were put up in Pakistan's northwestern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and also on highways near Islamabad and then, Russia event went on to appoint an honorary consul in the Pakistani city of Peshawar in February.

For the observers, these are significant developments not just in Pakistan-Russia relations but also for the regional dynamics.

Once, Soviet Russia & Pak were enemies over Afghanistan affairs

It's an irony that the same Afghanistan where the occupation by the erstwhile Soviet Union between 1979-89 had seen Pakistan helping the West to boost the mujaheedins to corner Moscow has played a vital role in bringing the Russians closer to the Pakistanis. In fact, Pakistan is witnessing a low in its relationship with the US over backing the Taliban in Afghanistan for strategic reasons.

Today, Afghanistan behind Russia-Pakistan bonhomie

The bonhomie between Russia and Pakistan has been facilitated by the Afghanistan problem. Both these countries have a shared interest in aligning with the Taliban as well as a suspicion towards the United States' role in the war-torn country.

While Pakistan backs Russia owing to the latter's willingness to embrace the Taliban, Moscow supports Islamabad against Washington's efforts to corner it by suggesting that all concerned parties should be taken aboard while devising a strategy to stabilise Afghanistan.

The reality is that with each passing day, as the possibility of the West winning the Afghanistan war is fading fast, countries like Russia and China are turning more assertive in countering the American influence in that strategically key country. Pakistan, which has found itself at the receiving end of the new power game, understandably goes to the camp it finds safer.

Both Russia and Pakistan back Taliban

Pakistan's foreign policy-makers find it tough to dump Afghanistan for as long as they are there, its defence against other powers like India from interfering in Kabul will remain strong. And when Islamabad finds a like-minded power in Russia also backing the Taliban, its worry of facing the wrath of the US-led West subsides.

For Russia, backing the Taliban is a strategy to not just put the US troops under pressure in Afghanistan but also to defend Afghanistan and regions closer to Russian borders from the Islamic State militants who have gone towards those directions after seeing unfavourable conditions in Iraq and Syria.

China has also brought Russia and Pakistan closer

Besides the solidarity emanating out from the common take on the Taliban and Afghanistan, the Russia-Pakistan bonding has also been cemented by another factor: China. Moscow has actively engaged Beijing in its mission to defuse the Afghanistan crisis and this has impressed Islamabad.

Pakistan was so pleased with the Sino-Russian friendship over Afghanistan that a former Pakistani envoy to Russia even said that Islamabad's relation with Russia improved as a direct consequence of Russia's bonhomie with China over addressing Kabul's problems.

Russia is yet to intervene militarily in Afghanistan like its predecessor Soviet Union had done but even if that happens in the future, Moscow's cooperation with Islamabad in military terms would make the ball-game in Afghanistan completely different.

OneIndia NewsKim-Trump talks: Koreas, US conclude 'constructive' talks in Finland

International

pti-PTI

Tallinn, Mar 22: With Kim Jong Un having agreed to talk to Donald Trump, Finland's government has said that delegates from North Korea, South Korea and the United States concluded "constructive" unofficial diplomatic talks in the Nordic country.

The Finnish foreign ministry said in a brief statement yesterday that the tripartite talks were held in a positive atmosphere and were aimed at "building confidence and reducing tensions on the Korean Peninsula."

Many observers believe the Finland meeting was geared toward preparing an upcoming summit between the leaders of the Koreas and a planned meeting between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

Eighteen delegates, six from each country, plus observers from the United Nations and Europe attended the secretive two-day talks at a 19th-century manor house just outside Helsinki. The gathering kicked off Monday evening with a joint-dinner at a Helsinki restaurant where the delegations were seen arriving. Media were largely kept in the dark about the identities of the delegates and issues on the table, apart from Finnish Foreign Minister Timo Soini saying on Tuesday that denuclearization wasn't on the agenda. What is known, however, is that senior North Korean diplomat Choe Kang Il, who handles North American affairs for his government, was among delegates from Pyongyang, while the US delegation is believed to have included Kathleen Stephens, the former US ambassador to South Korea.

It was the first in a series of planned meetings between the Koreas and the US involving unofficial talks between current and former officials, and academics. The meetings are likely to be important for establishing summit expectations and possibly even agenda items. The Helsinki talks took place just a few days after North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho concluded separate diplomatic talks in neighbouring Sweden on Saturday. Finnish President Sauli Niinisto said Monday that his country, which has a long history of hosting international summits, received a request to host the meeting "through middlemen."

"We're happy to host it and hope that discussions can bring issues forward," he told reporters before the talks.

Senior South Korean officials who recently visited North Korea's capital said that Kim agreed to hold talks with South Korean President Moon Jae-in in late April. They said Kim also proposed meeting with Trump. Trump then agreed to meet Kim by the end of May. North Korea has yet to confirm talks with the US, but its official media on Tuesday carried a commentary saying there "has been a sign of change" in US-North Korean relations.

The developments have raised hopes for a potential breakthrough in the North Korean nuclear crisis. But many experts say tensions could flare again if the summits fail to make progress, leaving the nuclear issue with few diplomatic options. The South Korean officials who travelled to North Korea said that Kim is willing to discuss the North's nuclear weapons program.

PTIWhere did the 'out of control' Chinese rocket debris land after re-entering Earth?

Planning a trip to Maldives: You can do so from July 15

Maldives' ex-dictator Abdul Gayoom, top justice to be held through trial

International

pti-PTI

Male, March 22: Until the end of their trials on terrorism charges, a court in the Maldives ordered that former longtime dictatorMaumoon Abdul Gayoom and the Supreme Court Chief Justice Abdulla Saeed be detained.

Prosecutors have not explained the basis of the terrorism charge filed against nine people in all, including another Supreme Court judge, a judicial officer and four lawmakers including Gayoom's son. If convicted, each could be jailed 10 to 15 years.

Gayoom and Saeed were among several people arrested last month during a state of emergency amid political unrest that followed a Supreme Court ruling to release several jailed political opponents of President Yameen Abdul Gayoom, the former dictator's half-brother.

The state of emergency, which gave police sweeping authority to make arrests, search and seize property, and restrict freedom of assembly, expires today.

Saeed, Justice Ali and the judicial officer also have been charged with receiving bribes to help overthrow the government. After the arrests of the two judges, the three remaining on the Supreme Court reversed the order to release Yameen's political opponents. The country's traditional political alliances have been upended in recent years.

Gayoom had campaigned for Yameen in 2013 but is now an opposition leader and allied with the country's first president elected in a free election.

Mohamed Nasheed was a democracy activist repeatedly jailed during Gayoom's rule before defeating the dictator in the 2008 presidential election. He resigned from office amid public opposition to his order for the military to detain a judge and was jailed under the terror law for that decision.

After he was allowed to leave prison to seek medical treatment abroad, he received asylum in Britain. Had he been cleared of the charge if the Supreme Court's initial order had taken effect, Nasheed could have been a strong rival to Yameen in the presidential election scheduled for later this year.

However, Yameen is now poised to run for re-election virtually unopposed with all of his rivals either jailed or in exile. Since being elected, Yameen has rolled back much of the democratic gains and freedoms.

Apart from Nasheed, Yameen's former vice president and a defence minister are among the many who have been jailed since Yameen took office.

PTIPak anti-graft court rejects Nawaz Sharif family's exemption plea

International

pti-PTI

Islamabad, Mar 22: A Pakistani anti-corruption court today rejected a plea of the embattled family of Nawaz Sharif for a week-long exemption to go to London where the deposed premier's wife is being treated for cancer.

The court conceded with the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) argument that the trial was at a concluding stage hence Sharif's family should not be allowed to leave the country, Dawn newspaper reported.

The bureau had already requested accountability court to place their names on Exit Control List (ECL). Sharif and his family are facing investigations since July, when the Supreme Court disqualified the three-time prime minister from office as well as from heading the ruling Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz party over undisclosed assets.

The application was filed by defence counsels Khawaja Haris and Amjad Pervaiz with a medical report of Kulsoom Nawaz during the hearing of the Avenfield case filed by the NAB against former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, his daughter Maryam Nawaz and son-in-law Captain (retd) Mohammad Safdar.

In the request, they informed the court that they will be travelling to the United Kingdom to make decisions regarding Kulsoom's treatment plan for throat cancer. The application states that despite six cycles of chemotherapy, there was a relapse.

Following the submission, the NAB prosecutor asked whether it was mandatory for the entire family to be present at the hospital as Kulsoom's two sons, Hassan and Hussain, were already with her. The NAB prosecutor's question hurt Maryam, speaking to the media during a break in court proceedings she said she was not expecting an insensitive statement at a difficult time.

Taking to Twitter, Maryam said: "When we requested court to grant us a week-long exemption to visit mother, NAB asked whether is was necessary for the entire family to be present there?" Maryam later tweeted about a conversation with her mother where Kulsoom asked if the court had granted them exemption. After Maryam informed her in the negative, Kulsoom said it was okay, "God is with us."

PTIIsraeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the massive arrival of illegal African migrants in Israel is a worse threat than that of terrorists in the Sinai Peninsula.

According to Netanyahu, the electronic barrier placed at the Israeli-Egyptian border had saved Israel from jihadist attacks.

Without this barrier, we would face serious terrorist attacks from Sinai and, worse, a massive influx of illegal African migrants, he said on Tuesday.

The barrier, completed in 2014, was erected to block illegal immigration, drug and arms trafficking and terrorist infiltration. It extends along the 242 km border between Israel and Egypt from the southern tip of the Gaza Strip to the city of Eilat.

Israels Interior ministry says 42,000 African migrants, mainly from Sudan and Eritrea, live in the country.

The government earlier this year issued a notice for thousands of African migrants to leave the country or face imprisonment.

The migrants were promised up to $3,500 for leaving Israel within the next 90 days.

The order however, exempts children, women, parents of dependent minors and victims of slavery and human trafficking.

Netanyahu and his government have said they would not expel true asylum-seekers and were only going after economic migrants.

Since 2005, Israel has grappled with an influx of migrants prompted by neighboring Egypts crackdown on Sudanese refugees.Collapse of Kabul will go down as one of the greatest defeats in American history: Donald Trump

Trade war with China will only harm Americas own interests

International

oi-Shubham

By Shubham

US President Donald Trump was set to announce tariffs on the import of Chinese goods on Thursday, March 22, in what constituted a move at curbing theft of the American technology and the announcement was likely to invite Beijing's wrath and a possibility of a full-fledged global trade war.

Although it was not clear how the size and scope of the tariffs would be like, the US establishment said China's high technology sector was under the scanner and also the sanctions could also eye Chinese investments in the US.

Trump has thought of raising tariffs on a number of Chinese products like steel, aluminium etc. as well as initiating a probe against Beijing's intellectual property rights activities.

But how much of a success are trade sanctions?

According to Ka Zeng, a political science professor and the Director of Asian Studies at the University of Arkansas, Washington's policy of pressurising Beijing unilaterally to address unfavourable trade practices has not yielded desired results compared to other countries.

Explaining this, Zeng has written in the Washington Post that one has to understand the trade structure between the US and China to know why the former's tactic of adopting a trade war with the latter doesn't always pay off.

US and China share a globalised trade relation today

The first factor is globalisation. In the past two-three decades when China has witnessed rapid economic growth, the country's producers made use of their cheap labour and natural resources to boost export of labour-intensive products to the developed countries like the US.

In return, the US emphasises on technology-intensive products in lieu of imports that it finds too costly to produce at home. This puts in place a trade relationship which is the order in a globalised world. You give some; you take some and together we gain.

Against this background, not all companies in the US would back Trump's trade sanctions. Barring those that push for access to the Chinese market by means of ending copyright or those that are afraid of China's competition, not many would like to disturb the mutually beneficial trade arrangements with China, Trump's call for "America First" notwithstanding. For American firms that rely on labour-intensive products manufactured in China, trade sanctions would be akin to a death knell.

Why US can't have same trade war with China as it has with EU or Japan

Zeng also pointed out in his article that competitive trade relations with other countries maintain a national unity for the Americans and also make their stand more credible. It is because of this reason that US trade sanction threats work more effectively against partners like the European Union and Japan with which the US compete for overproduction of similar products.

Similar business interests make all firms back their government in imposing the trade sanctions. But with a country like China with which the US has more of a complementary trade relationship, it becomes difficult to achieve a national unity for domestic firms have beneficial terms with China and they would not like to dump them at any cost.

'America First' is a good political but bad economic slogan

To conclude, Trump's "America First" could be a remarkable political slogan but when applied to the daily economics, it might not be as effective because of a number of factors that come with the phenomenon called globalisation.

Trump's rhetoric cannot de-hyphenate the deeply rooted economic relations that the US shares with China and a forced sanction could eventually harm America's own interests more than those of the Chinese and reduce Washington's clout further in the international community. Post-Trump, the US's political image has taken a serious beating. It can't afford to see the same in the economic sphere as well.

OneIndia NewsForty-four African countries on Wednesday launched a $3 trillion continental free-trade zone encompassing 1.2 billion people. But Nigeria and South Africa, the continents biggest economies did not sign up, diminishing its impact.

The African Continental Free Trade Area (CFTA) is one of the blocs flagship projects.

Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari last week, called for more consultations after business leaders objected to joining the worlds biggest free-trade area in terms of countries. In his words, Nigeria will not agree to anything that will undermine local manufacturers and entrepreneurs, or that may lead to becoming a dumping ground for finished goods.

The continent most populous nation says it will investigate concerns of the business community before making major commitments.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa said Pretoria would sign up once domestic legal requirements had been satisfied.

Others staying out of the bloc are Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, Zambia, Burundi, Eritrea, Benin, Sierra Leone and Guinea Bissau.

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has welcomed the singing of the CFTA and congratulated African leaders for taking the leap into history by signing the pact.

This is an important step towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and delivering on the African agenda of peace and prosperity. said Guterres in a statement on Thursday.

He underscored that the entire UN system stands ready to support the continent as it moves towards the entry into force of the CFTA in the coming months.

Currently, intra-African exchanges stand at only about 16 percent.

According to the UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), the Organizations development arm in the region, the agreement has the potential both to boost intra-African trade by 52.3 per cent by eliminating import duties, and to double this trade if non-tariff barriers are also reduced.

It is expected that the key beneficiaries from the Free Trade Area will be Africas small and medium sized enterprises, which account for 80 per cent of the regions businesses; women, who represent 70 per cent of the informal cross-border traders; and the youth, who will be able to find new employment opportunities.Opposition Calls for Cancellation of Land Auction at Sakdrisi Gold Mine

Georgian opposition parties arrived at Sakdrisi Gold Mine and archeological site in Bolnisi Municipality, Kvemo Kartli region, where they protested against the announced 16 hectare land auction, which will be given to a winner company for disposal for 10 years only for 15,000 GEL ($6,133).The opposition parties call on the Ministry of Economy and Sustainable Development for the cancellation of the auction, claiming the land will be given to mining company RMG Gold, which has been obtaining gold from Sakdrisi mine since 2013.The land, which has been put up at auction, is located right next to the area, where RMG is carrying out works.14 opposition parties accuse RMG Gold of obtaining gold without observing necessary norms and of being connected to tycoon Bidzina Ivanishvili, founder of the ruling Georgian Dream (GD) party and former Prime Minister of Georgia.The protesters demanded from the leadership of the RMG Company to let them cross their land in order to look around the 16 ha territory, however, they were refused the entry.The situation escalated when around 200 representatives of the opposition parties broke into the territory where the company is carrying out the mining works. There was a physical and verbal confrontation as well.Ex-PM Ivanishvili wants to get more money from the state land We will not let him do that. With joint efforts we have to stop this process, one of the leaders of the United National Movement party, Nika Melia stressed.According to the leader of non-parliamentary opposition New Georgia, Giorgi Vashadze, the parties plan to take part in the auction and purchase the mentioned territory.We are going to take this area with the lease to prevent RMG Gold dispose this territory. However, the priority for us is the health of the locals, who suffer from grave diseases, Vashadze said.Along the opposition parties, the representatives of Sakdrisi Protection Committee, composed of Non-Governmental Organizations, environmentalists and ordinary people, also protest against the land auction.They say if the company is given additional land for mining, it will bring even more harm to the health of local population.Sakdrisi Protection Committee released a statement a few days ago, saying the auction raises many question, as only one company  RMG Gold expressed wish to participate in it.According to the recent research, the air, water and soil contamination by the RMG Gold activities at Sakdrisi field has exceeded the norms which led to increased cases of cancer and other diseases in the local population, the committee stressed.They also added the company has not fulfilled any undertaken commitment and still does not reimburse the environmental damage caused by its activities.Local and foreign archaeologists claim there are traces of old humans in Sakdrisi dating back to 5000. The Sakdrisi mountain-archaeological mine is believed to be the world's oldest gold-mining center. The settlement from the Bronze-Age period is found on this territory. In 2006, the mine was granted the status of cultural monument, which was lifted in 2013.The opposition and the Sakdrisi Protection Committee assure that RMG Gold activities damaged the historic value of the site.IDP policy and Action Plan 2017-2018

By Levan Khutsishvili

Ministry of Internally Displaced Persons from the Occupied Territories, Accommodation and Refugees of Georgia has handed keys to 40 IDP families in the new building built by the Ministry in Vaziani, Tbilisi. Deputy Minister of IDPs Gogi Patsatsia congratulated Internal Displaced families with the new flats, it is a five-story building with 15 one-room, 15 two-room and 10 three-room flats. It was not a one time event, but the part of the Action Plan for 2017-2018 years created by the Ministry and proved by the Georgian Government in February 2017. Residential spaces were distributed to the families in accordance with the long-term resettlement criterias.According to the official statistics, since 2003, up to 17 000 Internal Displaced families have been given flats and houses in different regions of Georgia, but much more is left. There are 273 411 IDPs in Georgia in total, distributed in 88 704 families, almost half of them living in Tbilisi  105 956 person (36 212 families).In order to solve the residential difficulties for IDPs, Ministry of Internally Displaced Persons from Occupied Territories, Accommodation and Refugees of Georgia works in several directions. Action Plan 2017-2018 continues the policy set by the previous planes and focuses on activities in three directions:1. Resettlement of IDPs in rehabilitated and newly-built buildings2. Redemption of IDP settlement facilities from private ownership3. Purchasing private houses for Internally Displaced families.According to the plan, during the 2017-18 years, Ministry will more be focused on building new blocks and other long-term resettlement programs than on rehabilitation projects, as number of the appropriated accommodation spaces owned by the Government is limited, also exploitation terms and rehabilitation costs are also taken into consideration.Another priority of Action Plan is purchasing private houses for families in countryside. In 2013, Ministry bought 30 houses for Internally Displaced families. In 2017-2018, it is planned to rise the finance and correspondingly, the number of purchased houses will be raised till 1700. Such a big focus on that component of the program is provoked by the fact that it's not only providing with accommodation but also creates the possibility for income.With the implementation of Action Plan 2017-18, Ministry of Internally Displaced Persons from the Occupied Territories, Accommodation and Refugees of Georgia plans to purchase 1700 houses in countryside of Georgia, provide up to 2096 IDPs with newly-build flats, rehabilitate block with 29 flats, redemption of around 100 houses, registration of ownership of houses to approximately 4 000 families.Ministry of IDPs, according to its strategic priorities, creates a two year action plan after every two years.Would you like to know how many people have read this article? Or how reputable the author is? Simply sign up for a Advocate premium membership and you'll automatically see this data on every article. Plus a lot more, too.

From Alon Ben-Meir Website

By Alon Ben-Meir and *Arbana Xharra



(Image by Graphic design Gent Selani) Details DMCA



Less than a month ago, in advance of the summit of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) in Istanbul, the Turkish daily Yeni Safak, which is considered one of the mouthpieces of Erdogan and his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), published an article entitled "A Call for Urgent Action." The same article was also published on the newspaper's website with the more explicit title, "What if an Army of Islam was Formed Against Israel?"

The article openly called on the 57 member states of the OIC to form a joint "Army of Islam" to simultaneously attack Israel from the east, west, north, and south. According to Israel's Shin Bet, the source of the article appears to be the Turkish company SADAT, which among other sinister plots is aiding Hamas with funds and military gear to create a "Palestinian" army to join in the fight against Israel.

The creation of an Army of Islam

The idea of creating an "Army of Islam" to destroy Israel was accompanied by an interactive map providing formation of military forces for a joint Muslim attack on Israel. It also provides details on military forces based in various locations and the role they can play to execute their scheme.



(Image by Map) Details DMCA



Yeni Safak further explained that "If the member states of the OIC unite militarily, they will form the world's largest and most comprehensive army. The number of active soldiers would be at least 5,206,100, while the defense budget would reach approximately $175 billion."

This article provided additional details of the scandalous plan, stating that "It is expected that 250,000 soldiers will participate in the first of a possible operation. Land, air and naval bases of member states located in the most critical regions will be used. Joint bases will be constructed in a short period of time" It is possible for 500 tanks and armored vehicles, 100 planes and 500 attack helicopters and 50 ships to mobilize quickly."

Regardless of how absurd and troubling this suicidal plan may seem, Erdogan did not disavow the report. In fact, he has reiterated on several occasions his ambition to resurrect the Ottoman Empire, in which context he wants to create the "Army of Islam."

Resurrecting the Ottoman Empire

The Ottoman Empire he speaks of is the same that committed genocide against more than one million Armenians in the wake of the Ottomans' defeat at the end of World War I. No one should dismiss Erdogan's yet hidden illusion to commit genocide against the Jews in Israel. Erdogan is dangerous because he is insane enough not only to think in these incomprehensible terms, but to act on them on numerous fronts, as he is now doing.

In recent years, Erdogan has been busy establishing military bases in Qatar and Somalia, and most recently reached an agreement with the Sudan to acquire a Sudanese island in the Red Sea to be used as forward military base. Meanwhile, he is throwing his brash and bearish weight on the Caucasus and former Soviet states such as Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, and others to follow his dictates. He has repeatedly threatened to invade Greek islands in the Mediterranean, not to mention his recent incursion into Syria for the express purpose of establishing a permanent presence in the country under the guise of fighting Kurdish terrorism.

Recently, at the commemoration ceremony marking the 100th anniversary of the death of Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II at the Yildiz palace in Istanbul, Erdogan stated that "The Republic of Turkey, just like our previous states that are a continuation of one another, is also a continuation of the Ottomans."

Declaring that Europe will be Muslim

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[The most thorough and incisive update on this alarming situation is this article:

click here|

"This merger will create the world's biggest and most powerful agribusiness corporation, which will try to force its genetically modified seeds and toxic pesticides into our food and countryside," warned Adrian Bebb, a food and farming campaigner at Friends of the Earth Europe. "The Commission decision also allows them, together with BASF, to become data giants in agriculture--the 'Facebooks of farming'--with all the pitfalls that entails," Bebb added. "The coming together of these two is a marriage made in hell--bad for farmers, bad for consumers, and bad for our countryside."

My article follows:

Ironically, Russia may be the only possible way to prevent this merger, given the probable acquiescence of the Trump Administration. The United States Senate should be weighing in on these matters to protect the interests of not only American farmers but the health of Americans and most of the rest of the world.

Nothing that I know came of Senator Klobuchar and Senator Merkley of Oregon's request of the Justice Department to guarantee an "impartial" and objective review of the merger, but still, the approval of the United States and of Russia are both necessary for this merger to take place.

See also: Bayer-Monsanto Merger Needs 'Impartial' Review, Senators Say

.bna.com/bayermonsanto-merger-needs-n73014462125/

What more monstrous corporate combination could we imagine? None, I think, since the European Commission approved Bayer's acquisition Monsanto (with conditions). The European Commission has approved under the EU Merger Regulation the acquisition of Monsanto by Bayer. The merger is conditional on the divestiture and a remedy package, which addresses the parties' overlaps in seeds, pesticides and digital agriculture. Doesn't the EU medical arms and World Health Organization get to weigh in on this at all? Anyone familiar with Monsanto knows of the danger of its products going back to one of the first, Saccharin, from 1904, causing bladder cancer.

Margrethe Vestager, Commissioner in charge of competition policy, the same person who put forth the $2.8 billion fine on Google,

[see also: click here] said the following today in Brussels:

We have approved Bayer's plans to take over Monsanto because the parties' remedies, worth well over --6 billion, meet our competition concerns in full. Our decision ensures that there will be effective competition and innovation in seeds, pesticides and digital agriculture markets also after this merger. In particular, we have made sure that the number of global players actively competing in these markets stays the same. That is important because we need competition to ensure farmers have a choice of different seed varieties and pesticides at affordable prices. And we need competition to push companies to innovate in digital agriculture and to continue to develop new products that meet the high regulatory standards in Europe, to the benefit of all Europeans and the environment. Today's decision follows an in-depth review of Bayer's proposed acquisition of Monsanto. Monsanto is the world's largest supplier of seeds, which generates most of its sales in the US and Latin America. Monsanto also sells glyphosate, which is the most used pesticide worldwide to control weeds. Bayer is the second largest supplier of pesticides worldwide, with a stronger focus in Europe. It is also an important globally active seeds supplier for a number of crops. The transaction creates the largest global integrated seed and pesticide player. As part of its in-depth investigation, the Commission has assessed more than 2,000 different product markets and reviewed 2.7 million internal documents. It concluded that the transaction as notified would have significantly reduced competition on price and innovation in Europe and globally on a number of different markets. The Commission also had concerns that it would have strengthened Monsanto's dominant position on certain markets, where Bayer is an important challenger of Monsanto. The commitments submitted by Bayer address these competition concerns in full: They remove all of the parties' existing overlaps in seed and pesticide markets, where concerns were raised, by divesting the relevant Bayer businesses and assets.

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22-03-2018

On March 22, 2018 Ministry of Foreign of Georgia hosted the meeting of the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Belarus, Vladimir Makei, and the Vice Prime Minister-Minister of Foreign Affairs of Georgia, Mikheil Janelidze.

During the meeting, the Heads of Foreign Ministries discussed the state and prospects for expansion of bilateral Belarusian-Georgian cooperation, further development of interstate contacts, the progress in the implementation of joint projects in trade and economy, collaboration within the framework of international organizations.

Following the meeting, the parties agreed to continue active cooperation between Foreign Ministries of Belarus and Georgia, including within the framework of the Program of cooperation between Ministries of Foreign Affairs for 2018-2019 that was signed earlier.

   

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From Consortium News

Shireen Al-Adeimi is a doctoral candidate at Harvard University. But she is having a hard time focusing on her studies, when friends and family back home in Yemen are under violent attack by the heavily armed, US-backed Saudi forces, with many going hungry as a result of the Saudi blockade.

Al-Adeimi said on Tuesday, March 20, "This month marks the third anniversary of the U.S.-backed, Saudi-led war on Yemen. Despite the dire humanitarian crisis, however, the United States continues to sell arms to the Saudis and provide them with military support."

Senators Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Mike Lee (R-Ut.), and Chris Murphy (D-Ct.) had introduced a bill that aimed to force a withdrawal of the United States from the Saudi-led war, based on violations of the War Powers Act. But the Bill, Senate Joint Resolution 54, cosponsored by 10 senators, was voted down 55-44 on Tuesday.

Of course it was no surprise, given the amount of lobbying money spent by the Saudis to buy congressional silence and support. The bill also was met with fierce opposition by various Trump administration officials.

The American Conservative Magazine reported that "the media has been laying out the red carpet for Crown Prince bin Salman in Washington. What the establishment press won't tell you is that no less than 25 American lobbying firms worked for the Saudi Arabian government in 2017 to the tune of $16 million, to burnish their image, manage the message, and get massive military contracts for the weapons of war that are now being used to kill, maim and slowly starve millions of civilians in Yemen today."

I spoke with Shireen Al-Adeimi on Tuesday, March 20, directly following the vote by Congress to continue aid for the US-supported, Saudi-led slaughter.

Dennis Bernstein: Shireen, what is your response to the Senate voting to continue aid to the Saudis?

Shireen Al-Adeimi: It is very disappointing because it ensures that millions more Yemenis will continue to suffer. On average, 130 children die every day in Yemen due to malnutrition and disease caused by the Saudi-led blockade. Many more will die because of US bombs which are dropped from Saudi jets. People continue to die for no reason at all.

DB: Could you give us a little background?

SAA: The Saudis began bombing Yemen in March, 2015. Right now, some 80% of a population of 24 million people are in desperate need of humanitarian aid. Yemen is experiencing the world's worst cholera outbreak in modern history, with over 1 million cases. There is a severe water crisis affecting 15 million people in Yemen.

Hundreds of thousands have died of malnutrition and disease because Saudi Arabia is not only bombing Yemen but is also blockading Yemen by land, sea and air, ensuring that no aid or medicine can come into the country. The Saudis have created what the UN calls "the worst humanitarian crisis on earth today."

DB: Could you describe the United States' role in all of this?

SAA: In January, the US Army published an article detailing their support for the Saudis, including training Saudi soldiers, advising military personnel, maintaining and upgrading vehicles and aircraft, providing courses on communication and navigation, and providing Saudi jets with mid-air refueling. This is in addition to the billions in weapon sales between the US and Saudi Arabia every year.

The bottom line is that the United States is benefiting from this relationship with the Saudis and it doesn't seem to matter that this has caused such a humanitarian toll in the process. Estimates are that over 75% of the targets in Yemen have been civilian targets.

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Slim Pickens, from Dr. Strangelove

(Image by Columbia Pictures) Details DMCA



The 25% of the voting public that accept Trump uncritically-- who WOULD vote for him even if he shot a man in Times Square-- plus the 15-20% of them who vote Republican uncritically (and these two groups have a certain overlap) is not going to be enough to elect a majority in the House of Representatives, to say nothing of the Senate, where the current margin is 2.

The House Intelligence Committee has clearly not done its job, and Rep. Devin Nunes has impeded it. To allow people like Lewandowski and Bannon to refuse to answer questions demonstrates that.

Luckily, Special Counsel Robert Mueller does not waver for partisan reasons. I am reminded of the bomber boring in on its target in the Peter Sellers film Dr. Strangelove, except that the explosion that eventually happens in this case will help to save the world, rather than destroy it, as in the movie.

Does anyone remember, BTW, how within days of being elected, President-elect Trump tweeted, "Let there be an arms race"? Remember when Marco Rubio had to inform Trump during a Republican debate in January of 2016 what the Nuclear Triad was?



Well, now Russia-- i.e. Putin-- has taken Trump at his irresponsible word, and has shown us all video presentations of nuclear weapons which he claims will evade all our counter-measures.

This is a surpassingly ignorant (almost completely unread), undoubtedly compromised, and therefore dangerous man who now is clearly operating beyond the control of his own national security team.

And now the talk is that the National Security Advisor, General McMaster (undoubtedly one of the moderates still around Trump) will be replaced by perhaps the co-head of the neoconservative foreign policy establishment (the other co-head being former Vice President Dick Cheney), the former UN Ambassador John Bolton, one of the very MOST dangerous men on the planet. Hope y'all are thinking about this.

Finally, for me the issue of Donald Trump's racism has never died. In the days since Trump made his s/ hithole comments, there has been so much news that the outrageousness of that has been, uh, trumped, by so many other outrageousnesses that the part of the public that does not support him uncritically has been overwhelmed with them.

I am a recording artist, a songwriter and international touring musician. For those of you that are still willing, and still more or less capable of keeping an eye and ear on the big picture, the whole profile, I offer this, which I may never go into the studio with, but which you can find a rough video of on my Facebook page:

SPITHOLE IN THE WHITE HOUSE

Now the man in the White House said, (don't forget),

I'm the least racist man you've ever met."

He smiles and moues for the camera crews,

Behind his back he says, "hey, boys, we can't lose!"

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Sometimes, authors delete their quicklinks after publishing them.



To see if the quicklink was renamed or re-published, please click here.Progressive Content Not Found

Sometimes, authors delete their progressive content after publishing.



To see if the progressive content was renamed or re-published, please click here.@alextdaugherty

The House and Senate are scheduled to vote on a massive $1.3 trillion spending package on Thursday and Friday, and the spending bill includes two bills that were a priority for the families of victims of the nation's deadliest high school shooting in Parkland.

The STOP School Violence Act and Fix NICS Act are both in the package. Both bills received widespread support from both parties though a few Republicans were opposed to the Fix NICS Act, which aims to improve the background check system for guns by penalizing federal agencies that fail to report records, and increases federal funding for reporting domestic violence records.

"Today, were moving a little closer to turning the voices of the students marching across the country into action. While we still have so much work to do, I am happy to see some movement on bipartisan legislation Ive worked on with Senator Rubio to help address gun violence in our country, including the Fix NICS Act and the STOP School Violence Act, which funds programs to help keep our schools safe," Florida Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson said in a statement.

The spending bill also stipulates that the Centers for Disease Controls can conduct research on gun violence, a measure pushed by Orlando Democratic Rep. Stephanie Murphy after the Parkland shooting. A number of Republicans, including Miami Reps. Carlos Curbelo and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, have backed the idea. Previously, the CDC was not allowed to spend money to research gun violence due to an amendment passed in 1996.

"We are very happy that by the end of this week there should be close to a billion dollars over the next ten years available so that states can set up these systems to identify potential shooters and stop them before they kill anybody," Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio said in a statement.Microgrid As A Service Market will grow at a CAGR of +16% during the forecast period 2018-2023

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A comprehensive analysis of the Global Microgrid As A Service Market is been done in this intelligence report. It includes the investigations done on the past progress, ongoing market scenarios, and future prospects. An accurate data of the products, strategies and market shares of leading companies in this particular market is mentioned. This report presents a 360-degree overview of the competitive scenario of the Global market. The report further projects the size and valuation of the Global market in the coming forecast period. The report also presents a thorough qualitative and quantitative data affecting to the projected impact of these factors on markets future growth prospects.Top Key Players:General Electric (U.S.), Eaton Corp. PLC (Ireland), Siemens AG (Germany), Pareto Energy (U.S.), Spirae, Inc. (U.S.), Green Energy Corporation (U.S), Northern Power Systems Corp. (U.S.), ABB Ltd. (Switzerland)Microgrid As A Service Market will grow at a CAGR of +16% during the forecast period 2018-2023Get Sample Copy of this Report:A microgrid is a power grid of a smaller level, that can operate on its own and independent of a locations primary electrical grid. Additionally, a microgrid can be used in conjunction with the primary grid, a factor that opens up a number of possibilities and opportunities. Small-scale and localized stations can be run with their own source of energy and contain generation and distribution equipment, as long as the station adheres to the policies as specified by the regions government. The core function of a microgrid is to be a fallback for structures or industries in the event of failure of the primary grid, or when the primary grind cannot supply sufficient power during peak hours.Get Upto 40% Discount on this Report:This statistical surveying research study presents an all-inclusive evaluation of the global market for Microgrid As A Service, taking various industry parameters, such as the capacity of production, product pricing, demand, supply, and sales dynamics, returns on investments, and the growth rate of the overall market into consideration.In the last sections of the report, the manufacturers responsible for increasing the sales in the Microgrid As A Service Market have been presented. These manufacturers have been analyzed in terms of their manufacturing base, basic information, and competitors. In addition, the technology and product type introduced by each of these manufacturers also form a key part of this section of the report.Purchase the Complete Report:Table of Content:Global Microgrid As A Service Market Research Report 2018-2023Chapter 1 Microgrid As A Service Market OverviewChapter 2 Global Economic ImpactChapter 3 Competition by ManufacturerChapter 4 Production, Revenue (Value) by Region (2018-2023)Chapter 5 Supply (Production), Consumption, Export, Import by Regions (2018-2023)Chapter 6 Production, Revenue (Value), Price Trend by TypeChapter 7 Analysis by ApplicationChapter 8 Manufacturing Cost AnalysisChapter 9 Industrial Chain, Sourcing Strategy and Downstream BuyersChapter 10 Marketing Strategy Analysis, Distributors/TradersChapter 11 Market Effect Factors AnalysisChapter 12 Market Forecast (2018-2023)Chapter 13 AppendixResearch N Reports is a new age market research firm where we focus on providing information that can be effectively applied. Today being a consumer driven market, companies require information to deal with the complex and dynamic world of choices. Where relying on a sound board firm for your decisions becomes crucial. Research N Reports specializes in industry analysis, market forecasts and as a result getting quality reports covering all verticals, whether be it gaining perspective on current market conditions or being ahead in the cut throat global competition. Since we excel at business research to help businesses grow, we also offer consulting as an extended arm to our services which only helps us gain more insight into current trends and problems. Consequently we keep evolving as an all-rounder provider of viable information under one roof.10916, Gold Point, Dr, Houston, TX,Pin - 77064.Global Precision Bearings Market Professional Survey Report 2018

Global Precision Bearings Market Professional Survey Report 2018

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The Global Precision Bearings Market Professional Survey Report 2018 is a professional and in-depth study on the current state of the Precision Bearings industry.Firstly, the report provides a basic overview of the industry including definitions, classifications, applications and industry chain structure. The Precision Bearings Industry analysis is provided for the international market including development history, competitive landscape analysis, and major regions development status.Secondly, development policies and plans are discussed as well as manufacturing processes and cost structures. This report also states import/export, supply and consumption figures as well as cost, price, revenue and gross margin by regions (United States, EU, China and Japan), and other regions can be added.Then, the report focuses on global major leading industry players with information such as company profiles, product picture and specification, capacity, production, price, cost, revenue and contact information. Upstream raw materials, equipment and downstream consumers analysis is also carried out. Whats more, the Precision Bearings industry development trends and marketing channels are analyzed.Finally, the feasibility of new investment projects is assessed, and overall research conclusions are offered.In a word, the report provides major statistics on the state of the industry and is a valuable source of guidance and direction for companies and individuals interested in the market.If you are interested in our report or have any special requirements, please let us know and we will offer you the report as you want. Email: tinaning@qyresearch.com.This report studies Precision Bearings in Global market, especially in North America, China, Europe, Southeast Asia, Japan and India, with production, revenue, consumption, import and export in these regions, from 2013 to 2018, and forecast to 2025.This report focuses on top manufacturers in global market, with production, price, revenue and market share for each manufacturer (we can add the regions/countries as you want), coveringSKFNSKSchaeffler GroupNachiThe Timken CompanyMike Davies Bearings LtdZYS BearingNomoAST BearingsBSCBarden USACollective BearingsOn the basis of product, this report displays the production, revenue, price, market share and growth rate of each type, primarily split intoBall BearingRoller BearingBy Application, the market can be split intoFor MachineriesFor AutomotivesOthersBy Regions, this report covers (we can add the regions/countries as you want)North America/ China/ Europe/ Southeast Asia/ Japan/ IndiaGet a complete report sample:Table of contents:Chapter One: to provide Industry Overview of Precision BearingsChapter Two: to provide Manufacturing Cost Structure Analysis of Precision BearingsChapter Three: to provide Technical Data and Manufacturing Plants Analysis of Precision BearingsChapter Four: to provide Global Precision Bearings Overall Market OverviewChapter Five: to provide Precision Bearings Regional Market AnalysisChapter Six: to provide Global 2012-2018E Precision Bearings Segment Market Analysis (by Type)Chapter Seven: to provide Global 2012-2018E Precision Bearings Segment Market Analysis (by Application)Chapter Eight: to provide Major Manufacturers Analysis of Precision BearingsChapter Nine: to provide Development Trend of Analysis of Precision Bearings MarketChapter Ten: to provide Precision Bearings Marketing Type AnalysisChapter Eleven: to provide Consumers Analysis of Precision BearingsChapter Twelve: to provide Conclusion of the Global Precision Bearings Market Professional Survey Report 2018Related Reports:Europe Precision Bearings Market Professional Survey Report 2018China Precision Bearings Market Professional Survey Report 2018India Precision Bearings Market Professional Survey Report 2018Korea Precision Bearings Market Professional Survey Report 2018USA Precision Bearings Market Professional Survey Report 2018Japan Precision Bearings Market Professional Survey Report 2018Contact Details:Company Name: QYResearch CO.,LIMITED | focus on Market Survey and ResearchTina| Sales ManagersTel: 0086-20-22093278(CN)Email: sales@qyresearcheurope.com or tinaning@qyresearch.comWeb:QYResearch established in 2007, focus on custom research, management consulting, IPO consulting, industry chain research, data base cand seminar services. The company owned a large basic data base (such as National Bureau of statistics database, Customs import and export database, Industry Association Database etc), experts resources (included energy automotive chemical medical ICT consumer goods etc industries experts who own more than 10 years experiences on marketing or R&D), professional survey team (the team member with more than 3 years market survey experience and more than 2 years depth expert interview experience),Excellent data analysis team (SPSS statistics and PPT graphics process team); QYResearch has always pursuit product quality, adhere to the quality is the soul of business.Room 2901 VILI International Building No.167 Linhe West RoadHydrazobenzene Market Projected to Hamper the Growth by 2025

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Global Hydrazobenzene Market: SnapshotHydrazobenzene is chemically studied to be a crystalline and colorless compound that when heated to decomposition discharges virulent nitrogen oxide fumes. It could find application in the manufacture of various pharmaceuticals while functioning as an intermediate. The dye manufacturing sector could engage hydrazobenzene primarily as an antecedent of benzidine, which is a dye intermediate. Based on experimental findings that prove the carcinogenicity of hydrazobenzene, it is rationally predicted to be a human carcinogen. Moreover, if humans are exposed to this compound, it can cause brain, kidney, and liver damage while irritating the lungs, throat, nose, and skin.Each country in the global hydrazobenzene market could have its own list of key suppliers. In both the U.S. and Europe regions, Chemos GmbH & Co. KG has been making its mark with more than 25 years of quality experience in the fine chemical industry. With a robust network incorporating chemical producers and custom manufacturing firms, Chemos operates as a strong support to the chemical companies and research institutions positioned in the aforementioned regions. Likewise, there could be Hangzhou Dayangchem Co. Ltd. and IBIS Chemie International operating as top companies in the Peoples Republic of China and India respectively.Request Sample Copy of the Report @According to the globally harmonized system of classification and labelling of chemicals (GHS), hydrazobenzene is very toxic to the aquatic environment with enduring effects to face and may even lead to cancer. Therefore, as per the laboratory chemical safety summary (LCSS), manufacturers and end users of this substance are required to follow certain regulations related to storage and handling, cleanup and disposal, exposure limit, first aid, and health and symptoms.Global Hydrazobenzene Market: OverviewThe rising number of applications of hydrazobenzene and the rising focus of key players on research and development activities are the key factors fueling the growth of the global hydrazobenzene market. Furthermore, the demand for hydrogen peroxide for the purpose of water treatment is anticipated to encourage the growth of the market.The research report provides analysis of the global hydrazobenzene market on a regional and global level. The study offers historical information and presents the forecast statistics between 2017 and 2025 in terms of revenue and volume. The key segmentation and the major factors encouraging the growth of the global hydrazobenzene market have been provided in the research study to provide a strong understanding for readers and new entrants. Furthermore, to provide a thorough view of the global market, the research study has included a detailed competitiveness analysis and a list of the leading company players.Request TOC of the Report @Global Hydrazobenzene Market: Drivers and RestraintsThe growing demand for hydrazobenzene from the pharmaceutical industry is the key factor expected to encourage the growth of the market in the next few years. In addition, the rising consumption of phenylbutazone and sulfinpyrazone in manufacturing different pharmaceutical products is expected to accelerate the growth of the global hydrazobenzene market in the forecast period. On the flip side, the carcinogenic properties of hydrazobenzene, which is considered as extremely harmful for human being due to prolonged exposure is one of the major factors projected to hamper the growth of the global hydrazobenzene market in the next few years. Nonetheless, the rising number of applications of hydrazobenzene and the growing demand from the automotive industry are likely to supplement the growth of the market in the next few years.Global Hydrazobenzene Market: Region-wise OutlookAmong the key regional segments in the hydrazobenzene market, Asia Pacific is estimated to witness rapid growth in the next few years. With the rising number of applications, this region is projected to account for a key share of the overall market and register a progressive growth. The high growth of this region can be attributed to the rising demand for hydrazobenzene from pigments and dyes industry.Read Comprehensive Overview of Report @In addition, the swift development of the agro-chemical sector in Asia Pacific is projected to boost the demand for hydrazobenzene throughout the forecast period. The agrochemical application of hydrazobenzene as a de-suckering agent, especially in tobacco plants is likely to contribute substantially in developing economies of Asia Pacific, including China, Indonesia, India, Malaysia, and Thailand. Furthermore, the increasing number of players in this region is expected to encourage the growth of the hydrazobenzene market throughout the forecast period.Key Players Mentioned in the Research Report are:The research study on the global hydrazobenzene market offers a detailed analysis of the competitive landscape, presenting insights into the prominent players operating in the market. In addition, the company profiles, financial overview, contact information, SWOT analysis, and the recent developments have been discussed at length in the scope of the study. Some of the key players operating in the market are Alfa Aesar, IBIS Chemie International, Gihi Chemicals Co., Limited, Tokyo Kasei Kogyo (TKK), and Chemos GmbH.About TMR ResearchTMR Research is a premier provider of customized market research and consulting services to business entities keen on succeeding in todays supercharged economic climate. Armed with an experienced, dedicated, and dynamic team of analysts, we are redefining the way our clients conduct business by providing them with authoritative and trusted research studies in tune with the latest methodologies and market trends.Our savvy custom-built reports span a gamut of industries such as pharmaceuticals, chemicals and metals, food and beverages, and technology and media, among others. With actionable insights uncovered through in-depth research of the market, we try to bring about game-changing success for our clients.Contact:TMR Research,3739 Balboa St # 1097,San Francisco, CA 94121United StatesTel: +1-415-520-1050Email: sales@tmrresearch.comCryopreservation Equipment Market - Rapid Advancements in Technology by 2025

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Cryopreservation Equipment Market: SnapshotCryopreservation equipment market has been gaining traction due to its widening applications. The increasing investments in research and development of stem cells is expected to fuel the growth of the global market in the near future. Rapid advancements in technologies and increasing healthcare expenditure have also been identified as the key factors likely to influence the trajectory of the global cryopreservation equipment market. The rising interest in bioengineered products for dealing with the various issues of the human body have also resulted in the soaring revenues for the global cryopreservation equipment market.On the downside, the global cryopreservation equipment market is likely to be hampered by the lack of skilled personnel to handle the equipment. The slightest slip in handling can lead to severe injuries, which is discouraging many to take up careers in this field. Furthermore, market is also likely to be hampered by the use of salts that can prove to be extremely toxic. However, growth of industries such as pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and contract research organizations are projected to offer the global cryopreservation equipment market several avenues for growth in the foreseeable future.Request Sample Copy of the Report @The growing number of government initiatives to raise awareness about preservation of stem cells has been noticed as the key emerging trend in the global market. If equipment manufacturers overcome the challenge of high cost and complicated operations systems, the global cryopreservation equipment market could have a wider consumer base. Companies are also expected to invest in product innovation to offer the global market a wider and a better choice of products.Global Cryopreservation Market: General OutlineCryopreservation refers to the preserving of intact biological cells and tissues at extremely low temperatures. It commonly involves the preservation of sperms, plant seeds, embryos and eggs are some of the most common applications of cryopreservation. Cryopreservation is when the cells or tissues are frozen off, generally in liquid nitrogen at a temperature of at least (-148) degrees. At this temperature, metabolic processes of the biological tissues slow down to a near halt and results in a delayed decaying process, successfully preserving them for future purposes and storage.During cryopreservation, however, there is a possibility of the destruction of cells as the liquids present in the cells may undergo anomalous expansion as they solidify. It is therefore essential to replace the liquid present in the tissue by cryoprotectants  aids that increase the concentration of solutes in a system  reducing the amount of ice at any given temperature. Dimethyl sulfoxide and glycerol are commonly used as replacements and are mixed with a media or serum in which the cells or tissues are suspended.Request TOC of the Report @Global Cryopreservation Market: Scope of the StudyThe media used in cryopreservation generally comprises protein sources, base mediums, and cryopreservative. The role of a cryopreservative is to protect the cell from both physical and mechanical stresses and also to reduce water content in the cells, thereby decreasing the creation of cell-lysing ice crystals. The optimum cell density required to freeze per 1 ml of cell suspension is dependent on the type of the cell to be preserved. For instance, mammalian cells are frozen at a concentration between 1x106 cells/ml and 1x107 cells/ml. The cryopreservation process is facilitated by the use of various cryopreservation equipment such as sample preparation, storage systems, and ultra-low freezers.The equipment in the global cryopreservation market can be segmented into freezers, storage systems, sample preparation systems, and accessories. Regulatory and approval policies are the core governing factors of the market currently. Geographically, North America and Europe exhibit a very high potential for growth in the global cryopreservation market, owing to the extensive use of preservation systems in various applications. Asia Pacific and the rest of the world show high promise to be lucrative regions for the growth and acceptance of these systems.Read Comprehensive Overview of Report @Global Cryopreservation Market: Key Trends and ProspectsThe top factors favoring the growth of the global cryopreservation market include a continuous rate of technological advancement, an increased use of cryopreservation equipment, and an increased investment by key players into the development of advanced systems that offer multiple freezing profiles and automated controls. However, high cost of cryopreservation systems, complicated operations and inaccessibility due to high costs of use are some of the factors that might restrain the global cryopreservation markets growth.Cryopreservation equipment holds multiple applications because of their growing utility in commercial and academic projects in stem cell research. These platforms are used in various setups, including stem cell banks, biotechnology and pharmaceutical manufacturers, contract research organizations, and stem cells research laboratories. Currently, several players from the global cryopreservation market are introducing products with specific or custom advanced features that can be capable of providing multiple freezing profiles along with enhanced connectivity through microprocessor controls and printers.Global Cryopreservation Market: Companies Mentioned in the ReportThermo Fisher Scientific, Inc., Praxair Technology, Inc., Advanced Cell Technology, Inc., Angioblast Systems, Inc., Boehringer Ingelheim, Gmbh, Cryologic Pty. Ltd., Custom Biogenic Systems, Haimen United Laboratory Equipment Development Co., Ltd., Genzyme Corp., Cell Therapeutics, Inc., Aastrom Biosciences, Inc. and Millipore Corporation are some of the leading players engaged in development of the global cryopreservation market.About TMR ResearchTMR Research is a premier provider of customized market research and consulting services to business entities keen on succeeding in todays supercharged economic climate. Armed with an experienced, dedicated, and dynamic team of analysts, we are redefining the way our clients conduct business by providing them with authoritative and trusted research studies in tune with the latest methodologies and market trends.Our savvy custom-built reports span a gamut of industries such as pharmaceuticals, chemicals and metals, food and beverages, and technology and media, among others. With actionable insights uncovered through in-depth research of the market, we try to bring about game-changing success for our clients.Contact:TMR Research,3739 Balboa St # 1097,San Francisco, CA 94121United StatesTel: +1-415-520-1050Email: sales@tmrresearch.comDiesel Fuel Market Region-based Analysis by 2025

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Global Diesel Fuel Market: SnapshotDiesel fuel is witnessing significant demand from various sectors, particularly automotive and transportation. The global market is set to witness interesting growth dynamics shaped by a wide spectrum of factors. The pricing of the fuel, technological advancements in the automobile industry, government regulations, and regional demographics are the crucial factors driving the shifts in the market. In addition, the emergence of alternative fuels, most notably natural gas, and improvements in various electric-based technologies such as regular hybrids, plug-in hybrids (PHEVs), and pure electric vehicles (EVs) are expected to alter the demand for diesel. These key aspects are instrumental in evaluating and understanding the demand patterns and supply dynamics in different economies. The rapid industrialization of emerging markets, coupled with the soaring use of diesel in non-transporting applications, such as for residential and commercial heating applications, has triggered the demand for diesel fuel across the regions.The market in leading industrialized regions such as the U.S., Canada, Europe, Japan, and Australia may witness a slowdown due to adoption of natural gas fuel alternatives in some sectors. However, as emerging nations in the process of industrialization undertake intensive oil extraction activities, they mainly undergo oil-driven economic expansion. The significant demand in emerging markets will make up for the slight slump in demand from advanced economies.Request Sample Copy of the Report @The reasons for declining demand in Europe and the U.S. vary widely. In the U.S., the bulk of the demand comes from commercial transportation while in Europe, diesel forms the key fuel in over half of the light vehicle fleets, and hence the demand for diesel majorly comes from private vehicles. Hence, stringent regulations related to fuel efficiency standards are expected to hinder the market growth in Europe to some extent.Global Diesel Fuel Market: OverviewThe growth of the global transportation industry is likely to increase the demand for diesel fuel over the coming years by a large extent. Gas oil, which is a heavy oil produced from fractional distillation of fuel oil, can be used for both automotive applications and heating purposes. Gas oil used for automotive purpose  commonly known as diesel fuel or even the 35 second oil  is quite the necessity in industrial, commercial and agricultural, and off-road vehicles applications.The dual application of diesel fuel depends on the type of diesel that is being used. Regular or white diesel can be used in automotive and industrial applications, while red diesel  which is another type of diesel but mixed with a red dye  can be used for domestic purposes. Red diesel is exempt of excise duty and the red dye makes it easy for users and authorities to identify which kind of diesel is being used. Diesel fuel can be segmented on the basis of source of production into bio-diesel, biomass to Liquid (BTL), petro-diesel, and gas to liquid (GTL).Request TOC of the Report @Global Diesel Fuel Market: Top TrendsThe global diesel fuel market is expected to grow in volume and revenue in tandem with the automobile industry, owing to the dependence of automobiles on diesel and the increasing reliance on newly proven technologies aimed at improving vehicle fuel efficiency. Vehicles running on diesel fuel are expected to deliver at least 20% to 40% more mileage per gallon then petrol or gasoline vehicles. Heavy-duty vehicles form the bulk of the demand volume in the global diesel fuel market. The commercial transportation sector is also improving swiftly around the world, especially in the developing economies of Asia Pacific and Latin America.Unreliable and low power supply is a problem plaguing a large number of nations today. Large power consumers whose daily operations are highly dependent upon a steady supply of electricity are opting for diesel fuel-based power backup systems in case the grid supply falters.Global Diesel Fuel Market: Future ProspectsDiesel generator sets are the preferred form of decentralized backup generation for large or industrial consumers of electricity. They are likely to become the key area of opportunities in the global diesel fuel market over the coming years. Diesel generators are also used for supplying intermittent power to rural households, where renewable energy generation is not possible and drawing new grid connections is not feasible. Diesel also finds a high scope of use in space-heating and other residential purposes. Many countries in Europe consistently use diesel fuel as an integral part of meeting their domestic energy requirements.Read Comprehensive Overview of Report @One of the key restraints acting on the global diesel fuel market remains its higher price than gasoline and the volatile price trends of the fuel in general. The reason for this higher price is that diesel is an international commodity and many countries rely on it. Ultra-low sulfur diesel (ULSD) specifications further increase the cost of diesel fuel. Additionally, the taxes imposed on diesel are also higher than gasoline. The end users of the global diesel fuel market can be segmented into transportation, domestic and commercial, and power generation.Global Diesel Fuel Market: Region-based AnalysisAsia Pacific is likely to be an extremely promising region for the proliferation of the global diesel fuel market in the forecast period. This can attributed to the increasing vehicular usage in the region and especially in commercial vehicles, coupled with the increasing need to decentralize rural electrification projects. Europe and North America are expected to continue being high-value regions for the global diesel fuel market in terms of both demand volume as well as rate of increasing in demand. However their transportation sector is likely to see a greater scale of penetration for fuels such as LPG, LNG, and CNG. The Latin American market is expected to show an attractive growth rate over the coming years, owing to its large rural population urban expansion.Global Diesel Fuel Market: Key PlayersOf the large number of players present in the global diesel fuel market, some of its leaders so far included Total, Exxon, Valero, Conoco Philips, and Shell.About TMR ResearchTMR Research is a premier provider of customized market research and consulting services to business entities keen on succeeding in todays supercharged economic climate. Armed with an experienced, dedicated, and dynamic team of analysts, we are redefining the way our clients conduct business by providing them with authoritative and trusted research studies in tune with the latest methodologies and market trends.Our savvy custom-built reports span a gamut of industries such as pharmaceuticals, chemicals and metals, food and beverages, and technology and media, among others. With actionable insights uncovered through in-depth research of the market, we try to bring about game-changing success for our clients.Contact:TMR Research,3739 Balboa St # 1097,San Francisco, CA 94121United StatesTel: +1-415-520-1050Email: sales@tmrresearch.comRFID in Pharmaceuticals Market Expected to Grow upto by 2025

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Global RFID in Pharmaceuticals Market: SnapshotThe U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has played a vital role in escalating the widespread adoption of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) in the pharmaceutical sector to strengthen anti-counterfeiting and track-and-trace efforts. Besides these benefits, RFID technology is acknowledged for its ability to increase supply chain efficiency, reduce errors by proper storage of information, boost patient safety and monitoring, enhance staff, patient, and asset workflow, easy adoption and flexible usage, and cut down labor requirements.With the pharmaceutical sector being a highly critical area, there is a pressing need to have highly efficient systems. Therefore, certain limitations of the technology restrict the RFID in pharmaceuticals market from realizing its utmost potential. These limitations include tampering concerns, technical issues, and compatibility and standardization issues. Another major factor holding back the market is the high cost of implementation. Industrial experts believe that these issues are interrelated. The high cost is limiting widespread adoption and at the same time, the implementation rate of RFID across the pharmaceutical sector is not considerable enough to make the technology cheap. However, the aforementioned limitations are being addressed by technological advancements, which are likely to render the global RFID in pharmaceuticals market highly opportunistic.Request Sample Copy of the Report @The majority of players in the global RFID in pharmaceuticals market are focusing towards technological advancements and product innovation to improve their visibility in the market. Large players are pouring hefty funds into research and development activities to offer products and services that are advanced and in line with the requirements of the pharmaceutical sectors. Most of the leading players in the market are players with strong brand name, high technical expertise, and strong capital muscle.Global RFID in Pharmaceuticals Market: OverviewRadio frequency identification, popularly known by the acronym RFID, has a host of applications in different areas. Healthcare and pharmaceuticals is one of them. RFID tracking systems have come in handy in lowering human efforts and errors in maintenance and control of healthcare inventory. Some of its popular applications are in tracking medical equipment in hospitals, identifying patients, monitoring blood transfer, and tracking of medication from pharmacy to patient. In the pharmaceutical sector, it helps in monitoring imports and exports of pharmaceutical raw materials, internal and external tracking of pharmaceuticals, and documenting the transfer of products from manufacturers to patients.Comprising of a small chip, which is capable of carrying up to 2000 bytes and an antenna, the RFID devices do a job similar to that of a bar code or a magnetic strip on the back of a credit card or ATM card  provide a unique identifier for an object. Like a bar code or magnetic strip, an RFID device must also be scanned to gather the identifying information.Request TOC of the Report @Global RFID in Pharmaceuticals Market: Trends and OpportunitiesThe pharmaceuticals sector is faced with many challenges on the logistics front. These include product recalls due to overstocking which often results in expiry of drugs. Counterfeit drugs is another issue hobbling as it puts the patients safety at risk. Further, prescription packaged drugs are difficult to read and patients not taking the proper prescribed dose medication is another problem. To tackle all such challenges RFID can be leveraged successfully.RFID technology enables better tracking and accountability resulting in improved reliability in drug approval process. It also allows tracking of drug intake via the testing protocol. Also, enhanced inventory tracking with RFID can aid in bringing down buffer stocks thereby slashing cost. All these benefits have majorly contributed to the demand for RFID in the pharmaceuticals sector.Read Comprehensive Overview of Report @This market is also filliped by the rising demand for more efficient anti-counterfeit solutions for drugs that would ensure product security, quality, and efficient usability. The US FDA has recommended a set of rules and regulations to be applied in RFID for the pharmaceutical industry. Countering the swift uptake of RFID in pharmaceuticals market, however, is the steep cost of installation and deployment of RFID tracking systems. Dearth of awareness about the long term financial advantages of RFID technology is another factor crimping growth in the market.Global RFID in Pharmaceuticals Market: Regional OutlookNorth America and Europe are dominant markets for RFID in the pharmaceuticals sector because of favorable government initiatives, growing thrust on cost reduction through operational efficiency, and major drug counterfeit events. Asia Pacific is slated to exhibit solid growth in the years ahead due to cheaper original equipment manufacturing (OEM) services provided by China and rapid uptake of RFID systems in healthcare in the region.Companies Mentioned in ReportTo present an accurate and detailed assessment of the competition prevailing in the market for RFID in the pharmaceutical sector, the report profiles companies such as IBM Corporation, Alien Technology, Hewlett-Pakard, Siemens, Motorola, Inc., Texas Instruments, Toshiba Tech, and Zebra Technologies Corporation.About TMR ResearchTMR Research is a premier provider of customized market research and consulting services to business entities keen on succeeding in todays supercharged economic climate. Armed with an experienced, dedicated, and dynamic team of analysts, we are redefining the way our clients conduct business by providing them with authoritative and trusted research studies in tune with the latest methodologies and market trends.Our savvy custom-built reports span a gamut of industries such as pharmaceuticals, chemicals and metals, food and beverages, and technology and media, among others. With actionable insights uncovered through in-depth research of the market, we try to bring about game-changing success for our clients.Contact:TMR Research,3739 Balboa St # 1097,San Francisco, CA 94121United StatesTel: +1-415-520-1050Email: sales@tmrresearch.comPain Management Devices Market is estimated to reach a valuation of US$6.28 bn, progressing at a 7.6% CAGR between 2015 and 2023

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The dynamic nature and immense potential held by the global pain management devices market have created high competitive rivalry among key players, observes Transparency Market Research (TMR) in a new study. Companies such as St. Jude Medical Inc., Medtronic PLC, and Boston Scientific Corp. are the torch bearers in the global arena, owing to the excellent distribution channels and extensive supply capabilities. This, along with their diversified product portfolio, ensure their prominence in the market.However, a raft of medical device manufacturers are expected to foray into the global market, which is likely to alter the current dynamics and intensify the competition over the coming years, says TMRs lead analyst. The global market for pain management devices is anticipated to reach a valuation of US$6.3 bn by 2023, progressing at a CAGR of 7.60% between 2015 and 2023.Read Report Overview:North America to Retain Dominance Owing to Presence of Robust Healthcare InfrastructureBased on product, the neurostimulation devices segment will continue to be the leading revenue contributor until 2023. The commercialization of pathbreaking technologies related to neurostimulation and widening pool of patients suffering from chronic pain such as cancer and musculoskeletal pain are fuelling the dominance of the segment. On the other hand, the analgesic infusion pumps segment will exhibit a significant CAGR of 10.3% during the review period.Geographically, North America will continue to lead the market until 2023, accounting for 48.7% of the overall market revenue. The increasing incidence of sports-related injuries and presence of advanced healthcare infrastructure are translating into the greater uptake of pain management devices in the region. Asia Pacific is estimated to be the most promising region, owing to the mounting cases of diabetes and chronic wounds.Request Sample of Report:Growing Geriatric Population to Boost Adoption of Pain Management DevicesThe expanding pool of patients suffering from chronic medical conditions such as cancer, diabetes, osteo and rheumatoid arthritis, obesity, and spinal problems, have resulted in an increase in the incidence of chronic pain in individuals. Several studies indicate that over 20% of the adult population across the globe suffers from chronic pain.Nearly half of the cancer patients, worldwide, have complained about the severe pain they experience at the time of diagnosis and about 75% of them experience a gradual rise in pain with the progression of disease. Occurrence of chronic pain has also been observed in nearly 70% of patients having spinal cord injuries, 28% of patients suffering from multiple sclerosis, and 8% of stroke patients. These factors, collectively, are augmenting the demand for pain management devices.Download Brochure of Report:Aged people, who require continual medical care and interventions, represent a sizeable pool of patients suffering from chronic diseases, says a TMR analyst. Thus, the rapidly growing geriatric population is providing a fillip to the global pain management devices market.Dearth of Pain Specialists to Hamper Growth ProspectsThe soaring concerns regarding pain management devices implantation are holding patients back from adopting them. This is further compounded by the dearth of primary care professionals and pain specialists. These factors are, therefore, keeping the global pain management devices market from realizing its utmost potential. Moreover, the high purchase and procedural costs of these devices are adversely affecting the growth of the market.In developing and less developed regions, the awareness levels pertaining to the availability and use of these devices are typically low. Along with this, there are limited number of pain clinics in these regions. Hence, the low adoption of pain management devices in these regions is negatively impacting the overall market. Nevertheless, the high unmet medical needs coupled with the rising disposable income of the populace in emerging countries are opening new avenues for players in the global pain management devices market.About us:Transparency Market Research (TMR) is a U.S.-based provider of syndicated research, customized research, and consulting services. TMRs global and regional market intelligence coverage includes industries such as pharmaceutical, chemicals and materials, technology and media, food and beverages, and consumer goods, among others. Each TMR research report provides clients with a 360-degree view of the market with statistical forecasts, competitive landscape, detailed segmentation, key trends, and strategic recommendations.Contact us:Transparency Market Research90 State Street,Suite 700,AlbanyNY - 12207United StatesTel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:Learning Management Systems Software Market, Top Manufactures, Segmentation, Industry Analysis, Emerging Trend, Business Opportunities & Forecast to 2022

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Global Learning Management Systems Software Market Size, Status and Forecast 2022A learning management system (LMS) is a software application for the administration, documentation, tracking, reporting and delivery of educational courses or training programs.They help the instructor deliver material to the students, administer tests and other assignments, track student progress, and manage record-keeping. LMSs are focused on online learning delivery but support a range of uses, acting as a platform for fully online courses, as well as several hybrid forms, such as blended learning and flipped classrooms. LMSs can be complemented by other learning technologies such as a training management system to manage instructor-led training or a Learning Record Store to store and track learning data.Get sample copy of this report:Top Manufacturers: Absorb LMS, Moodle LMS, Schoology LMS, D2L Brightspace LMS, Edmodo LMS, Grovo LMS, Instructure Canvas LMS, Litmos LMS, Axis LMS, SmarterU LMS, Adobe Captivate Prime, Docebo LMS, Talent LMS, The Academy LMS, ExpertusONEMarket Segment by Regions, regional analysis coversUnited StatesEUJapanChinaIndiaSoutheast AsiaMarket Segment by Type, coversCloud-BasedMobile TerminalMarket Segment by Applications, can be divided intoAndroidiOSWindowsOtherGet Discount of this report:An LMS delivers and manages instructional content, and typically handles student registration, online course administration, and tracking, and assessment of student work.Some LMSs help identify progress towards learning or training goals. Most LMSs are web-based, to facilitate access. LMSs are often used by regulated industries (e.g. financial services and biopharma) for compliance training. Some LMS providers include "performance management systems", which encompass employee appraisals, competency management, skills-gap analysis, succession planning, and multi-rater assessments (i.e., 360 degree reviews). Some systems support competency-based learning.Increasing adoption of digital learning among corporate organizations and academic institutes, Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend, growing usage of wearable e-learning devices, and emerging technologies such as gamification and virtual reality are some of the major driving factors for the Learning Management System market.Table of Content:Global Learning Management Systems Software Market Size, Status and Forecast 20221 Industry Overview of Learning Management Systems Software2 Global Learning Management Systems Software Competition Analysis by Players3 Company (Top Players) Profiles3.1 Absorb LMS3.1.1 Company Profile3.1.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.1.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.1.4 Learning Management Systems Software Revenue (Value) (2012-2017)3.1.5 Recent Developments3.2 Moodle LMS3.2.1 Company Profile3.2.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.2.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.2.4 Learning Management Systems Software Revenue (Value) (2012-2017)3.2.5 Recent Developments3.3 Schoology LMS3.3.1 Company Profile3.3.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.3.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.3.4 Learning Management Systems Software Revenue (Value) (2012-2017)3.3.5 Recent Developments4 Global Learning Management Systems Software Market Size by Type and Application (2012-2017)5 United States Learning Management Systems Software Development Status and Outlook6 EU Learning Management Systems Software Development Status and Outlook7 Japan Learning Management Systems Software Development Status and Outlook8 China Learning Management Systems Software Development Status and Outlook9 India Learning Management Systems Software Development Status and Outlook10 Southeast Asia Learning Management Systems Software Development Status and Outlook11 Market Forecast by Regions, Type and Application (2017-2022)12 Learning Management Systems Software Market DynamicsComplete Report:Contact Info:Name: Sameer JoshiEmail: sales@reportsweb.comCompany Name: ReportsWebWebsite: Reportsweb.comPhone: +1-646-491-9876ReportsWeb.com is a one stop shop of market research reports and solutions to various companies across the globe. We help our clients in their decision support system by helping them choose most relevant and cost effective research reports and solutions from various publishers. We provide best in class customer service and our customer support team is always available to help you on your research queries.533, 5th floor, Amanora Township,Amanora Chambers, East Block,Kharadi Road, Hadapsar, Pune-411028Oral Contraceptive Pills Market is anticipated to be worth US$22.9 bn by 2023, registering a steady CAGR of 6.6% therein

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Companies in the global oral contraceptive pills market are focusing on untapped markets with unmet needs and improving their hold in the market. A case in point would be Mankind Pharma. This Indian-based company has expanded its business by exporting oral contraceptive pills to countries such as Ethiopia, Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania. Some of the other strategies adopted by players include, launching of new products and increased effort in research and development of efficient products that have minimal side effects.As per Transparency Market Research (TMR), Teva Pharmaceutical and Allergan (Actavis) plc. are the two leading companies within this market. Some of the other local players in the market include: Taj Pharma, Alkem, and Zydus Alidec. It has been observed that a majority of the players offer combination oral contraceptive pills owing to their efficiency, low cost, and being most popular among women for birth control.Read Report Overview:According to TMR, the global oral contraceptive pills market is expected to be worth US$22.9 bn by 2023. On the basis of type, the position of combination oral contraceptive pill segment remains undisputed and is estimated to be worth US$18 bn by 2023. The segment is also identified as the fastest growing segment within the market. On the basis of category, the generic oral contraceptive pill segment will lead in the market. The segment will also witness highest growth rate in the forecast period, said a TMR analyst. On the basis of geography, North America shall continue to have a dominant hold over the market within the period from 2015 to 2023. However, Asia Pacific will expand at the fastest rate and emerge the most promising regional segment within the oral contraceptive pills market. High population and growing awareness among the people about the availability of oral contraceptive pills as an easy method to control birth will be key reasons behind the growth of this market.Request Sample of Report:Government Initiatives to Spread Awareness Programs Aids GrowthThe growing incidence of unwanted pregnancies is becoming a key factor fueling the demand for oral contraceptive pills. It has been found that the oral contraceptive pills are most consumed by women falling under the age group of 15 and 44. As per the The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the U.S. alone accounted for 37% of the total unwanted pregnancies in North America between 2006 and 2010. The staggering growth of unintended pregnancies, not just among unmarried women, but also among those married will is fueling the growth of the global oral contraceptive pills market, said a TMR analyst.It has been found in one of the studies by The United Nations, that there has been an increase in the number of married women using at least one method of contraception, boosting the growth prospects of this market. Some of the other factors propelling the demand for contraceptives include the growing awareness among women, increasing efforts taken by governments to spread the awareness of contraceptives, NGOs initiating awareness programs across nations, and increasing maternal age. Late pregnancies are also aiding the growth of this market.Download Brochure of Report:Religious and Ethical Norms to Deter Market from Growing to its Fullest PotentialAcross many countries in the Middle East, oral contraceptives are restricted by various ethical, social, and religious barriers. This will act as a impeding factor for the growth of the oral contraceptive pills market. Oral contraceptive pills are perceived as a means of abortion and thus their sales suffer in these areas. Strict legal frameworks and policies towards reproductive rights in many countries will also challenge the growth of this market.About us:Transparency Market Research (TMR) is a U.S.-based provider of syndicated research, customized research, and consulting services. TMRs global and regional market intelligence coverage includes industries such as pharmaceutical, chemicals and materials, technology and media, food and beverages, and consumer goods, among others. Each TMR research report provides clients with a 360-degree view of the market with statistical forecasts, competitive landscape, detailed segmentation, key trends, and strategic recommendations.Contact us:Transparency Market Research90 State Street,Suite 700,AlbanyNY - 12207United StatesTel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:Hospital Acquired Disease Testing Market is exhibiting a CAGR of 19.9% to reach US$2.07 bn by the end of 2023

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The global hospital acquired disease testing market is consolidated due to presence of very few number of players. However, these companies are engaged in high rivalry among themselves, exhibiting in the prevalence of a high degree of competition in the market. Transparency Market Research (TMR) in a report estimates that the scope for new players is very limited in the competitive landscape of this market. Some of the key players in this market include Thermo Fisher Scientific, Inc., Becton Dickinson and Company, Roche, Abbott Laboratories, and Alere, Inc. These companies are striving to capitalize on the emerging opportunities for expansion in the developing countries. These players are strengthening their position in the market while focusing on extensive research and development programs to build innovative hospital acquired disease testing products.Read Report Overview:Transparency Market Research has projected that the market value will reach US$2.07 bn by the end of 2023 from its valuation of US$416.7 mn in 2014. The market is anticipated to expand with a healthy CAGR of 19.9% for the forecast period 2015-2023.In the year 2014, North America emerged as the leading regional market for hospital acquired disease testing, holding nearly 38.5% to the global market. Within the region, the U.S held dominance owing to the increasing number of people suffering from hospital acquired infections. In the same year, Europe contributed the second largest share in the global market.Request Sample of Report:Increasing Awareness Regarding HAIs to Propel the Global MarketThe increasing incidence of hospital acquired infections (HAI) is one of the key factors propelling the global hospital acquired disease testing market. For the prevention of these infections many countries such as the U.S. have issued rules and regulations to be mounted in the hospitals and clinics. For instance, the U.S. has regulated HHS Action Plan to reduce infections auqired in hospitals. These government plans and movements and increasing investments are expected to poise to growth of the global market of hospital acquired disease testing. Furthermore, the rising number of pathogens with drug-resistant abilities is foreseen to help the market expand. Numerous hospitals around the world are facilitating the pathogen detection procedures with improved surveillance culture. To prevent the transmission of diseases, various health organizations are demanding for effective hospital acquired disease testing solutions.Factors such as growing concerns about control and prevention of nosocomial infections, increasing number of diseases that increase risk of hospital associated infections, initiatives taken up by governments to manage nosocomial infections, and increasing geriatric population are some of the key factors aiding the markets expansion. Furthermore, the developing health facilities of developing countries of Asia Pacific are most likely fuel the global hospital acquired disease testing market.Download Brochure of Report:Poor Regulations of Less Developed Countries Could Hinder the Market GrowthThe majority of regulations regarding molecular-biology-based diagnostics remain un-updated, which can act as a restraining factor. Furthermore, the absence of control authorities and efficient control programs in less developed countries could hinder the market growth. For instance, African countries such as Nigeria do not have any effective programs or authority to prevent or control hospital acquired diseases.Nevertheless, the rising health concerns among patients around the world are anticipated to help the market sustain its trajectory and grow over the forecast period. Furthermore, escalating number of urinary tract infection is anticipated fuel the demand for hospital acquires disease testing. Moreover, the increasing incidence of MRSA, pneumonia, and surgical site infection are expected to boost the market.About us:Transparency Market Research (TMR) is a U.S.-based provider of syndicated research, customized research, and consulting services. TMRs global and regional market intelligence coverage includes industries such as pharmaceutical, chemicals and materials, technology and media, food and beverages, and consumer goods, among others. Each TMR research report provides clients with a 360-degree view of the market with statistical forecasts, competitive landscape, detailed segmentation, key trends, and strategic recommendations.Contact us:Transparency Market Research90 State Street,Suite 700,AlbanyNY - 12207United StatesTel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:

Employees need  and companies should be providing  avenues to gain new skills in things like artificial intelligence, blockchain, design thinking and analytics. Skills can't be siloed, and we have to think about more than technology. The ideas that are shaping the next wave of businesses are born out of curiosity. - David Clarke, PwC



Since technology skill sets are in such high demand everywhere, its not sustainable to expect that we can poach from other markets. We need to invest and commit to training, developing and hiring talent locally. - Johanna Mikkola, Wyncode Academy I believe we wont work from an office anymore. We wont work for just one company. We will work per project, we will be more entrepreneurial, we will feel we will own our careers and our dreams again. I think the future will be fascinating. - Laura Gonzalez-Estefani, TheVentureCity

By Romina Ruiz-Goiriena

Miami is booming with startup activity. Over the past decade, South Florida tech companies are booking tens of millions in revenue and employing hundreds of employees. Its happening across other industries too. But, cultivating a robust entrepreneurial ecosystem is a process--one that cant be done without digital transformation.

In business, digital transformation has become the buzzword of the hour. So much so that companies are now not only tasked with advancing their technological innovations, but also the personnel to support those innovations. So how can companies develop the digitally savvy workforce needed to make Miami a hub for the future of business?

This month, business festival NewCo Miami (March 25-26), showcases the companies that are shaping the future of business, and among them a few addressing the digital workforce transformation head on. We asked NewCo Miami presenters David Clarke, Global Chief Experience Officer of PwC, Johanna Mikkola, Co-Founder of Wyncode Academy, and Laura Gonzalez-Estefani, CEO of TheVentureCity, about the realities of digital transformation and how South Florida companies must prepare.

Lets start with the biggest misconception of all: Many organizations define digital transformation as synonymous with IT. What does digital transformation mean?

David Clarke, Global Chief Experience Officer, PwC [DC]: Digital transformation is NOT migrating your enterprise systems or managing systems integration  thats an IT function.

Digital transformation is making your organization fit for the digital age. An age of disruption, innovation, and heightened competition. Successful digital transformations change businesses inside and out while harnessing the power of technology to create new experiences. Digital transformations reimagine business models and products with a digital-first mindset while also improving experiences for the people in the business, including employees, suppliers and partners. To succeed, we must change the way we work, that includes the technology we use, and the behaviors we engage in.

Johanna Mikkola, Co-Founder Wyncode Academy [JM]: Digital transformation is usually synonymous with technology because every industry is a technology industry. There is literally no company that can build, design, and market products without the use of technology.

Laura Gonzalez-Estefani, CEO, TheVentureCity [LGE]: What is digital transformation for me? Its a mindset, a leadership type of thinking. Its being able to take decisions based on data and not based in intuition and being able to operate fully through technology. To do that, you have to prepare your business to give you its "vital signs" in real time in a way that allows you to predict challenges and opportunities. Deep diving into all things business  team, processes, financials, expansion plans, legal, customer support  and being able to apply the required tech so that your business runs faster, smarter and more efficiently. Its not just about transforming the way your IT (tech infrastructure), marketing or customer relationship processes are built. Its about a new way of thinking and executing as leaders with technology at your core.

How does digital transformation and readiness directly correlate to the future of the workforce?

[DC] People are integral in shaping, deploying and powering digital transformations. We can invest in emerging technology, but without skilled workers to guide it, it will have little to no success. I believe that the power is in the people  not the technology. And right now, to successfully complete digital transformations that grow business, we need to dramatically change how were approaching development for our workforce. Employees need  and companies should be providing  avenues to gain new skills in things like artificial intelligence, blockchain, design thinking and analytics. Skills can't be siloed, and we have to think about more than technology. The ideas that are shaping the next wave of businesses are born out of curiosity. The problems and improvements that we can make for our customers and talent have to come from everywhere, not just a special incubator within the business. With those needs in mind, PwC's Digital Workforce Transformation helps businesses achieve successful digital transformation, starting with the workforce. Our workforce upskilling solution is powered through a mobile application called the Digital Fitness App, which provides personalized corporate training thats currently being used by thousands of PwC employees, and we're developing customized versions for other companies too.

[JM]: Workforce preparation comes down to quality training and education. Ensuring high quality and access to this type of training is what will help build a solid ecosystem in South Florida. Since technology skill sets are in such high demand everywhere, its not sustainable to expect that we can poach from other markets. We need to invest and commit to training, developing and hiring talent locally. We have seen first hand through 500+ developer graduates working at over 230 companies that this is not only possible but already happening.

[LGE]: The sooner you learn and embrace the opportunity it brings to your business, the sooner your business is going to run smarter. There are so many different things your business is doing already relying on tech. Rather than adapting one piece at a time, think it through once, roadmap and start to execute. Artificial intelligence will make certain jobs disappear and others be created. Education needs to change so that new generations get ready for whats coming. Its impossible to compete with AI when we still study like we did 50 years ago. There is a huge gap there that we need to solve or the workforce wont be ready. I believe we wont work from an office anymore. We wont work for just one company. We will work per project, we will be more entrepreneurial, we will feel we will own our careers and our dreams again. I think the future will be fascinating.

How does a company continue to work toward integrating what we now consider foundational technology (i.e. cloud, analytics, mobile, UX) while also keeping up with new technologies (i.e. IoT, AI, robotics)?

[DC]: Companies should invest in technologies that align with their overarching business strategy and goals not just adopt the latest technology for the sake of being cutting edge. Businesses need to be laser focused on customer needs and only implement technologies that smooth processes. Human experience is the strategy, and technology enables it. Ive never seen a company solve its problem through a technology strategy.

[JM]: Companies need to invest in technologies that improve the customer experience. Foundational technology is now expected, and companies need to be at the forefront of that field. Those who are can focus on testing new technologies and how they apply best to their industry.

[LGE]: You need to execute the upcoming opportunities in a smart way, thinking long-term and ambitiously. Transforming a business in terms of tech means exponential growth if done well. You need to transform and educate your talent first, insert that mindset and operate towards it.

What are the biggest challenges the entrepreneurial ecosystem faces when it comes to tackling digital transformation?

[DC]: I think the toughest challenge is preserving some of the "start up" mentality after a company has matured. Growing while being able to stay nimble, continuously improve and build new things is the biggest challenge, and entrepreneurs, like CEOs of legacy companies are under tremendous pressure to stay competitive. This factor, and the challenge of preserving talent and keeping them motivated are the two biggest challenges I see.

Every year we take the pulse on the Digital IQ of business and IT executives around the world. In our 2017 Digital IQ Survey, we found that just 52% of companies rate their Digital IQ as strong. The most common obstacles companies face when tackling digital transformation include lack of properly skilled teams, outdated technologies, lack of integration of new and existing data and tech, and inflexible or slow processes. Often, executives dont even have the skills needed to guide an organizations digital strategy. People have to be at the center of transformation projects, which often up-end years of processes, habits and cultural baggage.

[JM]: The biggest challenge is getting over the thinking that technology is only for developers. Understanding the language of technology (coding) is already as important as executing on things like marketing, finances and hiring. In the same manner in which we all learned to read and write but didnt necessarily go on to be published authors, having a baseline understanding of coding will empower you to be a better entrepreneur.

[LGE]: I dont think its that different from other places around the world. Maybe, this city is even in a better position because we are used to facing challenges constantly. Its in our DNA. We are always ready to fight whatever comes our way. So, this is more of a call to action to start thinking about the opportunity we have to become the fastest digitized state of the U.S.

What are the biggest opportunities for businesses?

[DC]: The biggest opportunity for businesses is creating a great culture, one thats centered on experience for both customers and employees and powering growth. Among all this new technology, the focus needs be on real people  and a lot of times this is a huge missed opportunities. Businesses that create a strong culture, maintain a good employee experience, and move quickly are the ones that are set up for success.

[JM]: Diversity. Unlike established technology ecosystems that have a deeply rooted diversity problem, Miami has an opportunity to show that a diverse ecosystem is not only possible but will produce the best talent and the best products. For example, given that women make up 47% of the workforce and account for 85% of household buying decisions it makes sense that a products creators and builders be more reflective of their end user, meaning attracting more women makes business sense. In turn, it leads to stronger products and services and thus better businesses.

[LGE]: Lets keep our talent home. Lets create meaningful jobs here for the brains of the future that normally leave. Lets be more open and inclusive to the crazy ideas the younger generations have and they want to test; from drone-based shipping to self-driven car circuits. Lets have South Florida running on clean energy and transform the educational system completely, teaching kids coding and entrepreneurship from the very beginning of their school years.

Register for NewCo Miami here.



Romina Ruiz-Goiriena is a seasoned journalist and digital media entrepreneur who has worked in Paris, Cuba, and Israel for France24, El Mundo, and Haaretz. Most recently, she co-founded Prowell Media in 2016, a digital media news company that produces content for 14 million people across Mexico and the U.S. Previously to returning to Miami in 2015, she worked for CNN out of Guatemala and The Associated Press, where she reported on key regional issues such as migration and drug trafficking. She consults for media projects including Newco Miami, by M + D. You can follow her on Twitter @RominaAdi.Powertrain Testing 2018 Global Industry Key Players - AKKA Technologies , Ricardo , ThyenKrupp , Horiba , Atesteo Market Analysis And Forecast To 2023

World Powertrain Testing Market

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World Powertrain Testing MarketExecutive SummaryPowertrain Testing is undergoing radical change, driven by the challenges that global society faces today. The need for reduced dependence on foil fuels and improved carbon footprints is driving advances in the technologies used in all vehicles. This in turn has a direct impact on approaches to testing of powertrain components and systems.There are three major areas of powertrain test: Hardware-in-the-loop and Component cells test sub-systems of the Powertrain and normally include simulation of other components that are absent from the test. These are generally focused on the development of hardware systems such as engine/prime-mover/transmiion control systems.Full-Powertrain cells provide a test of the full Powertrain solution, often in combination with a Robot Driver and real-world simulation tools.In-Vehicle tests allow the full powertrain to be tested in the vehicle, normally with a Robot Driver and again will often use real-world simulation technologies.Request a Sample Report @Powertrain Testing market research report provides the newest industry data and industry future trends, allowing you to identify the products and end users driving Revenue (M USD) growth and profitability.The industry report lists the leading competitors and provides the insights strategic industry Analysis of the key factors influencing the market.The report includes the forecasts, Analysis and discuion of important industry trends, market size, market share estimates and profiles of the leading industry Players.The Players mentioned in our reportAKKA TechnologiesRicardoThyenKruppHoribaAtesteoApplus+ IDIADAIntertekIAVMAEFEVA&DIBAGIFPFAKTCSA GroupKSTCRITT M2AGlobal Powertrain Testing Market: Product Segment AnalysisEngine TestGearbox TestTurbocharger TestPowertrain final testsGlobal Powertrain Testing Market: Application Segment AnalysisAutomotive powertrain components manufacturersAutomotive ManufacturersOthersGlobal Powertrain Testing Market: Regional Segment AnalysisUSAEuropeJapanChinaIndiaSouth East AsiaTable of Content-Key Points CoveredChapter 1 About the Powertrain Testing Industry1.1 Industry Definition1.1.1 Types of Powertrain Testing industry1.1.1.1 Engine Test1.1.1.2 Gearbox Test1.1.1.3 Turbocharger Test1.1.1.4 Powertrain final tests1.2 Main Market Activities1.3 Similar Industries1.4 Industry at a GlanceChapter 2 World Market Competition Landscape2.1 Powertrain Testing Markets by Regions2.1.1 USAMarket Revenue (M USD) and Growth Rate 2012-2017Market Revenue (M USD) by Applications, Through 2022Major Players Revenue (M USD) in 20172.1.2 EuropeMarket Revenue (M USD) and Growth Rate 2012-2017Market Revenue (M USD) by Applications, Through 2022Major Players Revenue (M USD) in 20172.1.3 ChinaMarket Revenue (M USD) and Growth Rate 2012-2017Market Revenue (M USD) by Applications, Through 2022Major Players Revenue (M USD) in 20172.1.4 IndiaMarket Revenue (M USD) and Growth Rate 2012-2017Market Revenue (M USD) by Applications, Through 2022Major Players Revenue (M USD) in 20172.1.5 JapanMarket Revenue (M USD) and Growth Rate 2012-2017Market Revenue (M USD) by Applications, Through 2022Major Players Revenue (M USD) in 20172.1.6 South East AsiaMarket Revenue (M USD) and Growth Rate 2012-2017Market Revenue (M USD) by Applications, Through 2022Major Players Revenue (M USD) in 20172.2 World Powertrain Testing Market by TypesEngine TestGearbox TestTurbocharger TestPowertrain final tests2.3 World Powertrain Testing Market by ApplicationsAutomotive powertrain components manufacturersAutomotive ManufacturersOthersChapter 3 World Powertrain Testing Market share3.1 Major Production Market share by Players3.2 Major Revenue (M USD) Market share by Players3.3 Major Production Market share by Regions in 2017, Through 20223.4 Major Revenue (M USD) Market share By Regions in 2017, Through 2022Chapter 4 Supply Chain Analysis4.1 Industry Supply chain Analysis4.2 Raw material Market Analysis4.2.1 Raw material Prices Analysis 2012-20174.2.2 Raw material Supply Market Analysis4.2 Manufacturing Equipment Suppliers Analysis4.3 Production Proce Analysis4.4 Production Cost Structure Benchmarks4.5 End users Market AnalysisContinued.Complete Report Details @Wise Guy Reports Is Part Of The Wise Guy Consultants Pvt. Ltd. And Offers Premium Progressive Statistical Surveying, Market Research Reports, Analysis & Forecast Data For Industries And Governments Around The Globe. Wise Guy Reports Features An Exhaustive List Of Market Research Reports From Hundreds Of Publishers Worldwide. We Boast A Database Spanning Virtually Every Market Category And An Even More Comprehensive Collection Of Market Research Reports Under These Categories And Sub-Categories.Wise Guy Research Consultants Pvt LtdOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, HadapsarPune - 411028Maharashtra, IndiaLaboratory Drying Ovens Market -Registering a Strong Growth by 2014 - 2020

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Global Laboratory Drying Ovens Market: SnapshotLaboratory drying ovens are a crucial part of the daily workflow of laboratories, allowing simple glassware drying to more complex ones, besides controlled heating applications. A number of market players offer laboratory drying ovens that feature superior reproducibility, temperature stability, lower consumption of energy, and temperature precision. Being a delicate process where drying too slow or too fast can ruin the process, perfection in drying improves the overall outcome of sensitive experiments. Therefore, a wide range of laboratory ovens, designed to address the varied needs of end users, pertaining to size, temperature range, ergonomics, price, and capacity, are made available by the leading market players.The size of ovens is a major factor to be considered, as laboratories can face space shortage or be focused on low energy consumption. For large sized, stationary lab items including ovens, refrigerators, and constant temperature baths, ergonomics becomes a key factor. Although laboratory ovens are characterized by simplicity, several manufacturers are working on second-tier features such as independent temperature safety and shutoff and enhanced reliability. Besides these, cooling-down capacity, temperature programmability, data logging, monitoring, alarms, and shelving options are also included in the list of features.Request Sample Copy of the Report @While Europe exhibits increasing adoption of laboratory drying ovens due to the growing uptake in clinical diagnostics, pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, and clinical research, Asia Pacific is not far behind in terms of volume of demand. The thriving industrial verticals that require laboratory drying ovens such as food and beverage and healthcare in countries such as China, Malaysia, Singapore, and India are encouraging the growth of the global market for laboratory drying ovens.Global Laboratory Drying Ovens Market: OverviewLaboratory ovens used in the processes of processing, drying, sterilization, and testing. It is primarily used to sterilize glassware equipment or sample equipment using convection heating, where the heating element is fixed in an envelope independent from the outer heating agents. Having an external heating element facilitates a more accurate temperature for the sterilization and also prevents the sample from getting burnt or denatured. The laboratory ovens can accomplish reaching the necessary heats due to gravitational or mechanical convection methods.In the former, cool air is displaced by warmer air which is directed towards the heating element until the entire chamber reaches the required temperature. Gravitational heating methods usually require a longer pre-heating time and hold a poorer heat distribution as compared to mechanical heating methods, due to mechanical convection is the more preferred method of sterilization in laboratory settings.Request TOC of the Report @Global Laboratory Drying Ovens Market: Key SegmentationsBased on mounting types, the global laboratory drying ovens market is classified into bench-top, cabinet and truck-in ovens. Bench-top ovens are installed over a workbench and are smaller than the other types. They are ideal for laboratories having a moderate sterilization requirement and face space challenges. Cabinet ovens are free-standing equipment, typically with a larger capacity and specialized applications. Truck-in ovens are capable of handling larger capacity and require a trained staff for handling and operating.The global laboratory drying ovens market can be segmented on the basis of applications into drying encompasses evaporation, sterilization, baking, and annealing. The sectors of chemicals and food are emerging as key end users in the global laboratory drying ovens market, owing to the growing applicability of these ovens in manufacturing dry thin film batteries and controlling the moisture content level for each respective sector. A lot of the drying ovens have an optimum temperature range of 300 C. Based on the application and utility desired, there are other types of ovens which can have operating temperature above 300 C.Read Comprehensive Overview of Report @Global Laboratory Drying Ovens Market: Drivers and TrendsThe average laboratory ovens are likely to become obsolete within seven years of manufacture and use and the repair of older and damaged ovens can be costly, time-consuming as well as risky. Lab ovens often fail to meet the specifications of use post repairs, making purchasing a new lab oven typically cheaper than repairing the older one. Regular maintenance of laboratory oven includes regular calibration or checkup of ventilation ports, gaskets, heating elements, blowers, and temperature sensors.Currently the leading drivers of the global laboratory drying ovens market include their superiority in safety and ease of handling as well as installing as compared to the conventional autoclave. Since laboratory ovens use dry heat, it makes them apt for conducting experiments with prions and other similar organisms that are otherwise temperature sensitive. Laboratory ovens are required to meet the requirement and reproducibility guidelines set by the ISO 9001 or ISO/IEC 17025.Global Laboratory Drying Ovens Market: Regional ProminenceGeographically, the global laboratory oven market can find an exceptional level of demand within North America, specifically the U.S. The regions growth rate is largely driven by the strong research and development investment their government and private players have made in life sciences. Swift adoption of upgraded versions in developed regions has also made them a more favorable market for top laboratory oven manufacturers. Asia Pacific, The Middle East and Africa, and Latin America market are highly promising regions due to their rising standard of living and improving healthcare expenditure.Global Laboratory Drying Ovens Market: Key Players Mentioned in the ReportThe list of key players operating in the global laboratory drying oven market so far has included Azbil Telstar, S.L, Carbolite Ltd., Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc. Panasonic Corporation and others.About TMR ResearchTMR Research is a premier provider of customized market research and consulting services to business entities keen on succeeding in todays supercharged economic climate. Armed with an experienced, dedicated, and dynamic team of analysts, we are redefining the way our clients conduct business by providing them with authoritative and trusted research studies in tune with the latest methodologies and market trends.Our savvy custom-built reports span a gamut of industries such as pharmaceuticals, chemicals and metals, food and beverages, and technology and media, among others. With actionable insights uncovered through in-depth research of the market, we try to bring about game-changing success for our clients.Contact:TMR Research,3739 Balboa St # 1097,San Francisco, CA 94121United StatesTel: +1-415-520-1050Email: sales@tmrresearch.comHigh Potency Active Pharmaceutical Ingredient (HPAPI) Market is projected to be worth US$25.11 bn with a CAGR of 8.3% by 2023

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The vendor landscape of the global high potency active pharmaceutical ingredient (HPAPI) market is highly fragmented due to presence of a large number of players. Some of the prominent players in this market are WuXi AppTec, Pfizer, Inc., Novartis AG, Lonza Group, Novasep, Dr. Reddys Laboratories Ltd., Cambrex Corporation, and Sigma-Aldrich Corporation. Transparency Market Research has estimated that the individual revenue share of these players range between 3% and 4% of the overall market. These players are focusing on cost containment to sustain their profit margins. Furthermore, various companies in this market are involving in strategic partnerships to remain significant occupant and gain the first-mover advantage in the market.Transparency Market Research has estimated that the HPAPI market valued at US$2.64 bn in 2014 and expected to reach US$25.11 bn by 2023, while exhibiting a steady CAGR 8.3% during the forecast period 2015-2023.Read Report Overview:Regionally, Asia Pacific is expected to show significant opportunities to the market due to soaring contract manufacturing activities in the region. Within this region, Japan contributes the leading share. However, due to supportive foreign exchange policies, well-equipped manufacturing plants, and low labor costs, China is expected to surpass Japans total revenue in the forthcoming years.Extensive Research and Development Aimed at Cost-efficiency to accelerate the Market GrowthThe high potency active pharmaceutical ingredient market is expected to grow exponentially over the next few years due to rising cases of diabetes, cancer, and various cardiovascular diseases and the booming ongoing oncology research. The cost of drugs have been reduced due the cost containment strategies followed by the players in this market. This has in turn made these drugs more affordable to a larger audience. This trend has boosted the market and is expected to help the market grow in the coming years. Furthermore, promising pipeline of targeted therapeutic drugs is most likely to add advantage to the market growth. Without any lingering after effects, these drugs help patients to impact targeted areas and recover faster. Continuous development and research going on in mimic branded drugs are envisioned to create cost-effective treatments, further accelerating the growth of the market.Request Sample of Report:Post treatment effects of chemotherapy such as infection to non-cancerous cells are motivating numerous health facilities to adopt targeted therapy as they do not harm non-cancerous cells. This trend is expected to fuel the market growth during the forecast period. HPAPI are extensively used in hormonal drugs that are used for treatment of breast cancer. The other prominent applications of HPAPI is for the treatment of glaucoma. The increasing incidences of glaucoma is most likely to poise to the growth of the market. Applications of HPAPIs in musculoskeletal drugs, central nervous system drugs, and cardiovascular drugs are increasing adding benefits to growth of the market.High Labor Cost for Drug Manufacturing Could Impede Market GrowthThe capital intensive nature of manufacturing activities of high potency active pharmaceutical ingredient have been a major subject of concern for the players in this market. Furthermore, the manufacturing of these drugs need highly skilled labors, which could increase the labor cost hence the cost of the pharmaceutical ingredient. This can act as a restraining factor for growth of the market. In addition, the absence of norms pertaining to environmental, health, and occupational safety while manufacturing and researching potency APIs is threatening the market growth.Download Brochure of Report:Nevertheless, the increasing incidence of cancer are expected to help the market sustain its growth. The escalating occurrence of cancer have augmented the research and development activities in healthcare sectors of various regions such Asia Pacific and North America. This has resulted in the increased demand for effective anticancer drugs, assisting growth of the high potency active pharmaceutical ingredient market.About us:Transparency Market Research (TMR) is a U.S.-based provider of syndicated research, customized research, and consulting services. TMRs global and regional market intelligence coverage includes industries such as pharmaceutical, chemicals and materials, technology and media, food and beverages, and consumer goods, among others. Each TMR research report provides clients with a 360-degree view of the market with statistical forecasts, competitive landscape, detailed segmentation, key trends, and strategic recommendations.Contact us:Transparency Market Research90 State Street,Suite 700,AlbanyNY - 12207United StatesTel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:Menopausal Hot Flashes Market is predicted to exhibit a sluggish CAGR of 3.7% to reach US$5,284.1 mn by 2023

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The global menopausal hot flashes market is fragmented moderately. The top eight players in the market collectively held a share of more than 50% in 2014. Novartis AG and Pfizer Inc., are the top two players within the market, accounting for nearly 30% of the market in 2014, states a new research study by Transparency Market Research (TMR). Pfizer is likely to benefit from its well established presence across North America whereas Novartis is gaining on account of its efforts directed towards expanding its product portfolio for the treatment of menopausal hot flashes.Read Report Overview:According to the report by TMR, the global menopausal hot flashes market will be worth US$5.28 bn by the end of the forecast period. On the basis of therapy, the demand for non-hormonal therapies for menopausal hot flashes is increasing. On the basis of geography, North America is leading on account of the rising incidence of menopausal vasomotor symptoms. Asia Pacific is anticipated to one of the most lucrative regional markets on account of the rising awareness among the population regarding menopause-related health issues.Initiatives taken by Governments to Increase Awareness Level Driving DemandAccording to a TMR analyst, the increasing incidences of women suffering from hot flashes, night sweats on account of menopause is a key factor boosting the growth of this market. Governments across the globe are taking several initiatives to create awareness among women regarding womens health after menopause. There are several private healthcare institutes which are also focusing on creating awareness and providing effective care and treatment for menopausal hot flashes.Request Sample of Report:Speedy Approval of New Drugs Boosting Growth of MarketA key factor boding well for the market is the speedy approval of several new drugs or therapeutics for menopausal hot flashes. This is also working well for market players as its is helping create new avenues of growth. The market is also benefitting from the rise in the number of working women and the growing importance of career for women, leading to a higher ability to spend on treatment and rise in demand for several hygiene products and treatment solutions for menopausal symptoms so as to be able to carry out their professional duties and responsibilities. As an increasing number of women worldwide are realizing that getting effective menopausal treatment boosts good health, self-confidence, self-esteem, and overall quality of life, the demand for these drugs will soar high.Download Brochure of Report:Patent Expirations of Key Drugs to Affect MarketOn the other hand, home remedies are being adopted by many women in underdeveloped nations, which is restricting the growth of the global menopausal hot flashes market. Also, the availability of cheaper alternative therapies is also affecting markets growth. The market will also be affected by the patent expirations of popular menopausal hot flashes drugs. This is anticipated to strike a blow to some of the most popular market players. Also, the emergence of cheaper generic drugs will impact the menopausal hot flashes market negatively.About us:Transparency Market Research (TMR) is a U.S.-based provider of syndicated research, customized research, and consulting services. TMRs global and regional market intelligence coverage includes industries such as pharmaceutical, chemicals and materials, technology and media, food and beverages, and consumer goods, among others. Each TMR research report provides clients with a 360-degree view of the market with statistical forecasts, competitive landscape, detailed segmentation, key trends, and strategic recommendations.Contact us:Transparency Market Research90 State Street,Suite 700,AlbanyNY - 12207United StatesTel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:Methyltriethoxysilane (MTES) Market Regional Overview Foreseen by 2025

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Methyltriethoxysilane is considered as an organic compound of silicon, which belongs to the organosilicon compound class. Methyltriethoxysilane is manufactured at an industrial scale from ethanol and trimethylsilyl chloride. The increasing use of methyltriethoxysilane is anticipated to encourage the growth of the overall market in the next few years. The key players operating in the global methyltriethoxysilane market are emphasizing on the expansion of the application base, which is likely to fuel the markets growth in the coming years.Among the regional segments, the developing economies in the methyltriethoxysilane market are projected to grow at a substantial rate in the coming years. The high pace of industrialization and the increasing construction activities are estimated to accelerate the growth of the overall market. The rising use of methyltriethoxysilane as water repellants, sealants, stabilizing and coupling agents in the chemical industry is one of the major factors anticipated to supplement the markets growth in the near future. The high performing characteristics offered by methyltriethoxysilane is likely to contribute significantly towards the development of the overall market in the next few years.Request Sample Copy of the Report @Furthermore, several new entrants are anticipated to enter the global methyltriethoxysilane market and enhance the competitive scenario of the market in the near future. Advancements in technology and the expansion of the product portfolio, thanks to the rising research and development activities are estimated to encourage the growth of the global methyltriethoxysilane market. These players are predicted to focus on emerging economies, which are expected to help them in enhancing their market presence and attain a leading position across the globe.Methyltriethoxysilane (MTES) Market: General OutlineMethyltriethoxysilane (MTES) (CH3Si(OCH2CH3)3 ) is an organic compound of silicon, belonging to a class of organosilicon compounds known as silanes, which are saturated hydrosilicones and are generally stable due to their high saturation. Methyltriethoxysilane (MTES) appears to be a colorless, clear, free flowing liquid, and readily hydrolyzes when mixed with water. The hydrolysis of methyltriethoxysilane (MTES) increases in basic solutions and reduces in acidic solutions. It is produced at an industrial scale from trimethylsilyl chloride and ethanol. It has a stable tetrahedral molecular structure, with a low flashpoint that readily catches fire at temperatures beyond 23 to 25 degrees Celsius. Methyltriethoxysilane (MTES) is usually supplied at purity levels higher than 98% in the market, and is classified as a toxic chemical and may cause harm when exposed.Request TOC of the Report @Methyltriethoxysilane (MTES) Market: Inclusive InsightsSilane compounds are commonly used as sealants, water repellents, coupling and stabilizing agents in the chemical industry. Methyltriethoxysilane (MTES) is primarily used as a cross-linking agent for curing of silicone rubber polymers at room temperature, and is also used as coupling agents for glass fibers and silicon oxide. It also acts as a strengthening agent, while treating and coating of plastic materials, and is widely used in polymer industry. The stability of methyltriethoxysilane (MTES) comes in handy for sol-gel systems, and acts as a chain protecting agent against water and polymerizing agents.Due to its high performing characteristics, silianes are predominantly used in the polymer industry for manufacturing polysiloxanes. It can be applied as sealants for caulking, used for insulating and sealing in construction industry, and act as semiconductors for electronics among others. The market is therefore expected to grow in the coming years. Demand growth is expected to be driven primarily with the increase of end use industries of methyltriethoxysilane (MTES) including construction, polymer, and electronic industries. The market growth is likely to be affected by the availability of substitutes and toxicity of the chemical. On the other hand, the prospective market opportunity is set to increase with new application of polymer manufacture and electronic products among others.Read Comprehensive Overview of Report @Methyltriethoxysilane (MTES) Market: Regional OverviewPolymer, construction, and electronics industries are the end users of methyltriethoxysilane (MTES), and due to its high demand in Asia Pacific, the region accounts for growing number of consumers. Industrial economies namely, China, India, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and Thailand are the main consumers of methyltriethoxysilane (MTES) for its usage in the manufacture of various plastics and coating materials.Two of the fastest growing industrial economies of Asia, China and India are the rapidly growing market for polymer industry, and in turn is responsible for driving the demand for methyltriethoxysilane (MTES) and other silanes. Cheap labor availability, land, and comparatively lenient norms and regulations against chemicals, have led several market players to establish their production facilities in Asia. The demand is high for methyltriethoxysilane (MTES) in North America due to its heavy usage in chemical industry, requirement of coatings for plastics and sealants for construction industry, making the region another key market for methyltriethoxysilane (MTES). In due course of time, the demand for methyltriethoxysilane (MTES) is likely to rise in Brazil, South Africa, and the Middle East.Methyltriethoxysilane (MTES) Market: Key Market PlayersThe key players of the marmethyltriethoxysilane (MTES) market are: Alfa Aesar (Johnson Matthey Group Company), Asia Silicones Association Ltd., BRB International BV, and Wynca Chemicals AG.About TMR ResearchTMR Research is a premier provider of customized market research and consulting services to business entities keen on succeeding in todays supercharged economic climate. Armed with an experienced, dedicated, and dynamic team of analysts, we are redefining the way our clients conduct business by providing them with authoritative and trusted research studies in tune with the latest methodologies and market trends.Our savvy custom-built reports span a gamut of industries such as pharmaceuticals, chemicals and metals, food and beverages, and technology and media, among others. With actionable insights uncovered through in-depth research of the market, we try to bring about game-changing success for our clients.Contact:TMR Research,3739 Balboa St # 1097,San Francisco, CA 94121United StatesTel: +1-415-520-1050Email: sales@tmrresearch.comEscalator Market 2018 Industry Global Top Manufacturers:- Kone Corporation, Thyssenkrupp AG, Dover, Fujitec, Hyundai, Mitsubishi, Sigma, Schindler, Otis, Omega

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In this report, the global Escalator market is valued at USD XX million in 2016 is expected to reach USD XX million by the end of 2022, growing at a CAGR of XX% between 2016 to 2022.Then, the report explores the international major industry players in detail. In this part, the report presents the company profile, product specifications, capacity, production value, 2017-2022 market shares for each company. Through the statistical analysis, the report depicts the global total market of Escalator industry including capacity, production, production value, cost/profit, supply/demand import/export.Market Synopsis of Escalator MarketThe global escalator market has seen a tremendous growth over the past decade and as per MRFR analysis, the global escalator market would retain its growth rate status during the forecast period. Rapid transformation of technology in the construction business has become one of the major reasons in the overall growth of global market. The global escalator market is mainly driven by the factors such as growing construction business, rapid urbanization, technological advancement, huge investment, high demand for security and several others. Asper analysis, Asia-Pacific is one of the leading region in terms of value and volume due to the presence of major region like China. Beside this, the high maintenance cost and installation cost could the major restraints to the market.SegmentationAs per MRFR analysis, the global escalator market has been segmented into:By Type: parallel, multi parallel, spiral type, crisscross and othersBy Application: residential and commercial.Regional Analysis of Escalator MarketThe global escalator market is poised to reach $XX billion in 2015 from $XX billion in 2021, with a CAGR of XX% during the forecasted period.Get Sample Copy of Report @Top Key Players Profiles:-Kone Corporation, Thyssenkrupp AG, Dover, Fujitec, Hyundai, Mitsubishi, Sigma, Schindler, Otis, Omega and others.The report covers brief analysis of geographical region includesNorth AmericaUSCanadaEuropeGermanyFranceItalyNetherlandsU.K.Rest of EuropeAPACChinaIndiaJapanRest of Asia-PacificRoWSouth AmericaMiddle EastAfricaComplete report on Escalator Market report spread across 112 pages, profiling 10 companies and supported with tables and figures available @About Market Research Future:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.MRFR team have supreme objective to provide the optimum quality market research and intelligence services to our clients. Our market research studies by products, services, technologies, applications, end users, and market players for global, regional, and country level market segments, enable our clients to see more, know more, and do more, which help to answer all their most important questions.Contact:Market Research FutureOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Pune - 411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.comGlobal Automotive Actuators Market: Size, Share, Trends and Forecast till 2022

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FACT.MR has been actively involved in offering comprehensive research data concerning various topics which are associated to industrial reference and investor utility. This particular research report titled Automotive Actuators Market Forecast, Trend Analysis & Competition Tracking  Global Review 2017 to 2022 has been added to the wide online database of FACT.MR which discusses the present as well as future market scenario. Readers can access knowledge related to market volume, regional expanse as well as competitive landscape prevailing in the globalAutomotive Actuators Market . In order to study development patterns, this smart assessment also focuses on market dynamics, which talks about drivers, restraints and opportunities estimated to influence the concerned market during the period until 2022.Request For Sample Report @Automotive Actuators are the vital part to control a mechanism or the system in the vehicle. Actuators respond to the received control signal by converting energy into motion. Actuators in the engine control system manage the speed, optimize the power and meter fuel for optimal combustion. Actuators are also used to lock and unlock car doors.Nowadays, manufacturers are providing powerful actuators with innovative design to help provide safety and offer various assistance functions. Smart actuators are also being developed for the automotive engine to offer reliability, minimize the cost and provide fuel-efficiency. These smart actuators perform various tasks using a microcontroller. Various market players are also introducing new actuators with new and compact design and advanced systems. Manufacturers of the auto component are also working on active kinematics control for vehicles, this includes electronically controlled active track actuator.According to a study by Fact.MR, the global market for automotive actuators is expected to experience healthy growth. The market is projected to reach US$ 19,801.6 million value by 2022 end. The rise in automotive industry across the globe is driving the development of innovative components used in vehicles. Automotive actuators are also witnessing increased demand due to the ability to offer maximum speed, reduce fuel consumption, etc.Waste-Gate Actuator- Top-Selling ProductCompared to all the other automotive actuator products, a waste-gate actuator is expected to emerge as one of the highest selling automotive actuators. The waste-gate actuator is anticipated to experience impressive growth. Waste-gate actuator is also projected to create more than US$ 900 million incremental opportunity during 2017-2022.Compact Passenger Cars to Witness Healthy GrowthAmong all the other type of vehicles, compact passenger cars are expected to use automotive actuators on a large-scale. Towards 2022 end, compact passenger cars are projected to surpass US$ 4,600 million revenue. Meanwhile, mid-sized passenger cars are also likely to be the second largest users of the automotive actuators.Competition TrackingThe report provides a detailed profile of key players that are anticipated to be active in the global automotive actuators market by 2022 end, which include Robert Bosch GmbH, Continental AG, Denso Corporation, Mahle Group, Hitachi Ltd, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries Ltd, Nidec Corporation, Delphi Automotive PLC, and Johnson Electric Holdings Limited.Browse Full Report with TOC @Table Of Content1. Global Automotive Actuators Market - Executive Summary2. Global Automotive Actuators Market Overview2.1. Introduction2.1.1. Global Automotive Actuators Market Taxonomy2.1.2. Global Automotive Actuators Market Definition2.2. Global Automotive Actuators Market Size (US$ Mn) and Forecast, 2012-20222.2.1. Global Automotive Actuators Market Y-o-Y Growth2.3. Global Automotive Actuators Market Dynamics2.4. Supply Chain2.5. Cost Structure2.6. Pricing Analysis2.7. Product Life Cycle Analysis2.8. List of Distributors2.9. Key Participants Market Presence (Intensity Map) By Region3. Global Automotive Actuators Market Analysis and Forecast By Product Type3.1. Global Automotive Actuators Market Size and Forecast By Product Type, 2012-20223.1.1. Waste-gate Actuator Market Size and Forecast, 2012-20223.1.1.1. Revenue (US$ Mn) Comparison, By Region3.1.1.2. Market Share Comparison, By Region3.1.1.3. Y-o-Y growth Comparison, By RegionContinue@@Check Discount @About Fact.MRFact.MR is a fast-growing market research firm that offers the most comprehensive suite of syndicated and customized Automotive Market research reports. We believe transformative intelligence can educate and inspire businesses to make smarter decisions. We know the limitations of the one-size-fits-all approach; that's why we publish multi-industry global, regional, and country-specific research reports.Contact UsFact.MR11140 Rockville PikeSuite 400Rockville, MD 20852United StatesEmail: sales@factmr.comWeb:3D Face Mask Market Growing Opportunities & Overview with Future Vision and Prominent Trend - Global Forecast 2025

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ReportsWeb adds 3D Face Mask Market report it contains in depth information major drivers, restraints, opportunities, challenges, industry trends, business structure and areas of operation, products and their impact on the market forecast. Component, Business Function, Type, Organization Size, Vertical and services offered by the company.Geographically, this report is segmented into several key Regions, with production, consumption, revenue (million USD), market share and growth rate of 3D Face Mask in these regions, from 2013 to 2025 (forecast), coveringUnited StatesEUChinaJapanSouth KoreaTaiwanGlobal 3D Face Mask market competition by top manufacturers, with production, price, revenue (value) and market share for each manufacturer; the top players including Nichiei Co.,Ltd., Magic Holdings, Shiawasedo, Sk-Ii and Sarah Chapman.Get FREE Sample Copy atOn the basis of product, this report displays the production, revenue, price, market share and growth rate of each type, primarily split intoType-RType-StType-SpOn the basis of the end users/applications, this report focuses on the status and outlook for major applications/end users, consumption (sales), market share and growth rate for each application, includingMenWomenGet more Information about this report atReport ScopeKey Points from Table of Content1 3D Face Mask Market Overview2 Global 3D Face Mask Market Competition by Manufacturers3 Global 3D Face Mask Production, Revenue (Value) by Region (2012-2017)4 Global 3D Face Mask Supply (Production), Consumption, Export, Import by Region (2012-2017)5 Global 3D Face Mask Production, Revenue (Value), Price Trend by Type6 Global 3D Face Mask Market Analysis by Application7 Global 3D Face Mask Manufacturers Profiles/Analysis8 3D Face Mask Manufacturing Cost Analysis9 Industrial Chain, Sourcing Strategy and Downstream Buyers10 Marketing Strategy Analysis, Distributors/Traders11 Market Effect Factors Analysis12 Global 3D Face Mask Market Forecast (2017-2022)13 Research Findings and ConclusionPurchase This Report -And Get, Discount on Report Purchase -(Note: If you have any special requirements, please let us know and we will offer you the report as you want.)Contact Us:Call: +1-646-491-9876Email: sales@reportsweb.comReportsWeb.com is a one stop shop of market research reports and solutions to various companies across the globe. We help our clients in their decision support system by helping them choose most relevant and cost effective research reports and solutions from various publishers. We provide best in class customer service and our customer support team is always available to help you on your research queries.533, 5th floor, Amanora Township,Amanora Chambers, East Block,Kharadi Road, Hadapsar, Pune-411028High Barrier Packaging Films Market 2018 - 2023 Market Players Ampac Packaging LLC, The Mondi Group, Constantia Flexibles Group GmbH, Berry Plastics Corporation, Huhtamaki Group | Global Forecast to 2023

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Global High Barrier Packaging Films Market Information Report, by Material (Polypropylene, Polyvinyl Chloride, Polyethylene, Ethylene Vinyl Alcohol, Low-Density Polyethylene And Linear Low-Density Polyethylene, Transparent high barrier films and Others), by Product (Pouches & Bags, Tray Lidding Film, Wrapping Film, and others), by Technology (Multi-Layer Film, Sustainable Barrier Coatings, Besela Barrier Film and Others), by Application (Food & Beverage, Pharmaceutical, Personal Care & Cosmetics, and Others) and By Region - Global Forecast To 2023On the basis of regions, global high barrier packaging films market is segmented as North America, Europe, Asia Pacific and Rest of the World (RoW). Asia Pacific dominates the global high barrier packaging films market, and is followed by North America. It is expected to be the fastest growing region in the market. Growing industrialization, and urbanization in developing countries such as China and India, provides boost to the market. Additionally, the availability of raw materials and low labor cost, together form a positive influence on the market growth. China accounts for the largest share of the Asia Pacific high barrier packaging films market.North America & Europe are the other major regions for the market. Increasing demand for consumer goods, and packaged food in these regions, drive the growth of the market. Additionally increasing applications for high barrier film packaging in the regions, also boosts the growth of the market. Latin America and Middle-East & Africa regions are also expected to have high growth during the forecast period, due to rising demand from the e-commerce sector.Hence, Global High Barrier Packaging Films Market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 6.2% during the forecast period.Get Sample of Report @Global high barrier packaging films market has been segmented as material, product, technology, application and region. On the basis of material, the market is segmented as Bio plastics, Polypropylene, Polyvinyl Chloride, Polyethylene, Ethylene Vinyl Alcohol, Low-Density Polyethylene and Linear Low-Density Polyethylene, Transparent high barrier films and others. Polyethylene is the largest and the fastest growing of all material segments, and is expected to be the fastest growing material segment. Majority of the end users use LDPE for high barrier packaging films. It has numerous benefits such as ease of processing, barrier to moisture, strength/toughness, flexibility, and ease of sealing. Transparent high barrier films are expected to gain significant share during the forecast period Extensive research and development, and continuous product development for advanced packaging, are fuelling the transparent high barrier films segment growth. PVC is a dense material. It is considered a common material in India, when clarity is an important selection criterion, particularly for consumer packaging.On the basis of technology, the market has been segmented as multi-layer film, sustainable barrier coatings, Besela barrier film, and others. On the basis of applications, the market has been segmented as food & beverage, pharmaceutical, personal care & cosmetics, and others. Food & Beverages dominates the application segment of the market and is expected to be the fastest growing application segment. Increasing population along with growing demand for food and beverages, drives the growth of the market. The food products packaged using these films, contain less preservatives than canned food products, which has increased their acceptance among health-conscious consumers. Transparent barrier packaging film is a preferred material for the packaging of meat, sausages, vegetable, and some beverages in the food industry. Pharmaceutical application is expected to contribute significantly during the forecast period.The prominent players in the global high barrier packaging films market include Amcor Limited (Australia), Bemis Company, Inc. (U.S.), Ampac Packaging LLC (U.S.), The Mondi Group (Austria), Sealed Air Corporation (U.S.), Constantia Flexibles Group GmbH (Austria), Berry Plastics Corporation (U.S.), Coveris Holdings S.A. (Luxembourg), Sonoco Products Company (U.S.), Wipak Walsrode GmbH & Co. KG (Germany), Huhtamaki Group (Finland), Printpack Inc. (U.S.), Linpac Packaging Limited (U.K.), and Sigma Plastics Group (U.S.).Ask for your specific company profile and country level customization on reports.Access Full Report @Table Of Contents1 Executive Summary2 Scope Of The Report3 Market Landscape4 Market Dynamics5 Global High Barrier Packaging Films Market, By Material6 Global High Barrier Packaging Films Market, By Product7 Global High Barrier Packaging Films Market, By Technology8 Global High Barrier Packaging Films Market, By Application9 Global High Barrier Packaging Films Market, By RegionContinue...About Us:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.MRFR team have supreme objective to provide the optimum quality market research and intelligence services to our clients. Our market research studies by products, services, technologies, applications, end users, and market players for , regional, and country level market segments, enable our clients to see more, know more, and do more, which help to answer all their most important questions.In order to stay updated with technology and work process of the industry, MRFR often plans & conducts meet with the industry experts and industrial visits for its research analyst members.Media Contact:Market Research FuturePune  411028Maharashtra, IndiaPhone No. :+1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.comMarket Insights: Global Wireless Access Control Market will be worth US$1,657.0 mn during 2017-2025

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Global Wireless Access Control market report provides analysis for the period 2015  2025, wherein the period from 2017 to 2025 is the forecast and 2016 is the base year. The data for 2015 has been included as historical information. The wireless access control report covers all the major types and application playing significant role in the global wireless access control markets growth over the forecast period. The report also include various drivers, restraints, and opportunities expected which affect markets growth during the above mention period. The study provides an entire perspective on the markets growth in terms of revenue in US$ Mn and volume in thousand units, across different geographical regions such as Asia Pacific, North America, Middle East & Africa, Europe, and South America.Click to get Sample PDF:The market overview section of the report demonstrates the market dynamics such as the drivers, restraints, and opportunities that influence the current nature and future status of this market, key indicators and trends. An attractiveness analysis has also been provided for every segment in the report, in order to provide a detailed understanding of the overall scenario in the wireless access control market. Moreover, the report provides an overview of various marketing strategies adopted by the key players present in the market. Key market indicators also been included in the report provide significance of the factors which are capable of changing the market scenario. These indicators are expected to define the market position during the forecast period.Global Wireless Access Control Market: SegmentationGlobal wireless access control market is bifurcated by components, by application, by end-use industry and by region. By components, the market is further segmented into Hardware, software and services Hardware segment is further bifurcated into Readers, locks, transceiver, batteries and others. Readers is further sub-segmented into biometrics ,RFID tags & readers, mobile credentials and others By application, wireless access control can segmented into door access control and non-door access control. By end-use industry, wireless access control market is bifurcated as residential, commercial and institutional.Global Wireless Access Control Market: Competitive LandscapeThe report also includes competition landscape which includes competition matrix and market share analysis of major players in the global large format display market based on their 2016 revenues and profiles of major players. Competition matrix benchmarks leading players on the basis of their capabilities and potential to grow. Factors including market position, offerings and R&D focus are attributed to companys capabilities. Factors including top line growth, market share, segment growth, infrastructure facilities and future outlook are attributed to companys potential to grow.View Complete TOC with Tables and Figures at:The prominent players in the wireless access control market includes ASSA ABLOY Group, Dormakaba Holding AG, Johnson Controls Plc., Salto Systems K.S, Bosch Security System, Honeywell Security Group ,Cansec System, Tyco Security Products, Godrej & Boyce Manufacturing Company, Altman Integrated Technologies and Nortek Security and Control LLC, among others.ResearchMoz is the worlds fastest growing collection of market research reports worldwide. Our database is composed of current market studies from over 100 featured publishers worldwide. Our market research databases integrate statistics with analysis from global, regional, country and company perspectives. ResearchMozs service portfolio also includes value-added services such as market research customization, competitive landscaping, and in-depth surveys, delivered by a team of experienced Research Coordinators.Albany NY - 12207United StatesTel: +1-518-621-2074Tel: 866-997-4948 (Us-Canada Toll Free)Email: sales@researchmoz.usFollow us on LinkedIn at:Temperature Switches Market: To Continuously Monitor Temperature Of Equipment And Machinery

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Temperature switches are finding lot of applications in the food and beverages industry. Temperature switches are being widely used in the food and beverages industry for the quality assurance of products through various stages of production to storage. Most of the products in the food and beverages industry need to remain fresh until consumed. Even small changes in temperature can damage quality of the product, contaminate it, and render the food unfit for consumption. Temperature switches are also extensively being used in the oil and gas industry. Temperature switches prevent the machines from getting overheated and reach the danger level. For example, temperature switches machines used deep inside the Earth such as machine drills.Request Brochure:Market Overview:The main function of temperature switches is to limit the temperatures in the industry. Temperature switches find application in the industry to continuously monitor temperature of equipment and machinery. When a machine overheats or the temperature of machine goes beyond a certain limit, temperature switches perform the task of switching off the machinery or switching on the fan that can lower down the temperature of the machine. Temperature variations taking place around the temperature switches or in enclosed spaces are sensed by the temperature switches. The mechanism of pressure switches and temperature switches is almost similar. In many designs of temperature switches, the temperature sensing element is placed in such a way that the internal pressure of gas or liquid can be increased or decreased as the temperature rises or drops. Pressure variations are able to actuate the mechanism of temperature switches.Market Dynamics:Increase in the demand for electronic products owing to the advantages offered by them is also a factor that is leading to the growth of temperature switches market. Apart from food and beverages and oil and gas industries, temperature switches are used in extensive applications. Temperature switches find application in the cooling and heating circuits, mobile hydraulics, motors, machine building, and compressors. High demand for temperature switches in the food and beverages industries and oil and gas industries is also driving the growth of the temperature switches market globally.Apart from food and beverages and oil and gas industries, slowing global growth is likely to be a restraining factor in the growth of temperature switches market in other end-user industries such as automotive, that require temperature switches.Infrared temperature switches are increasingly being used in the industries. In infrared temperature switches, switch process is triggered when the temperature switch recognizes a hot object in its vicinity that is without any contact. The infrared temperature switches position, count or recognizes hot objects, generally used in steel or forge works.Market Segmentation:Temperature Switches market is segmented on the basis of product type, end-user type, and region.Based on the product type, Temperature Switches market is segmented into Liquid Filled Temperature Switches, and Bimetallic Strip Temperature Switches.Based on the end-user type, Temperature Switches market is segmented into Food and Beverage Industry, Oil and Gas Industry, Consumer Electronics, Automotive Industry, and HVAC.On the basis of region type, Temperature Switches market is segmented into - Latin America, North America, Asia Pacific Except Japan (APEJ), Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa (MEA) and Japan.North America region is estimated to lead in the Temperature Switches market in the forecast period 2017 to 2027. The reason attributed to the growth of Temperature Switches market in this region is the high demand for temperature switches in the consumer electronics segment in the North America region. It is also estimated that the automotive industry segment in North America will grow at a fast pace in the forecast period, which is likely to drive the growth of the Temperature Switches market as well.Key Players:Some of the players operating in the temperature switches market include - Danfoss, Panasonic, Waytech, Microchip Technology, Barksdale Inc., Texas Instruments, Hytec Group, WICA, SOR Inc., ABB, United Products.Get TOC:Electric controls, analog devices, ashcroft, hydra electric and maxim integrated basic components used by WIKA for manufacturing temperature switches are bimetals. A bimetallic disc is provided in the temperature switches that sense the temperature that snaps over as soon as temperature crosses nominal switching temperature. As soon as the temperature goes below the nominal switching temperature, the temperature switch returns to its original state. In the TFS35 model of bimetal temperature switches from WIKA, bimetal disc does not carry any current thus the possibility of formation of an electric arc is eliminated.The Temperature Switches market will grow at a moderate pace in the forecast period 2017 to 2027 owing to slow global growth. Food and beverages and oil and gas industries are an exception to this factor. It is estimated that the demand for temperature switches will further grow in the forecast period.The report offers a comprehensive evaluation of the market. It does so via in-depth qualitative insights, historical data, and verifiable projections about market size. The projections featured in the report have been derived using proven research methodologies and assumptions. By doing so, the research report serves as a repository of analysis and information for every facet of the market, including but not limited to: Regional markets, technology, types, and applications.About TMRTransparency Market Research (TMR) is a global market intelligence company providing business information reports and services. The companys exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trend analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMRs experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather and analyze information.TMRs data repository is continuously updated and revised by a team of research experts so that it always reflects the latest trends and information. With extensive research and analysis capabilities, Transparency Market Research employs rigorous primary and secondary research techniques to develop distinctive data sets and research material for business reports.Contact TMR90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email:sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:Global Accident Insurance Market 2018 Key Players: Allianz, AXA, Nippon Life Insurance, American Intl. Group, Aviva, Assicurazioni Generali.

Accident Insurance Market

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Accident Insurance Market:WiseGuyReports.com adds Accident Insurance Market 2018 Global Analysis, Growth, Trends and Opportunities Research Report Forecasting to 2025reports to its database.Executive SummaryThis report studies the global Accident Insurance market, analyzes and researches the Accident Insurance development status and forecast in United States, EU, Japan, China, India and Southeast Asia. This report focuses on the top players in global market, likeAllianzAXANippon Life InsuranceAmerican Intl. GroupAvivaAssicurazioni GeneraliCardinal HealthState Farm InsuranceDai-ichi Mutual Life InsuranceMunich Re GroupZurich Financial ServicesPrudentialAsahi Mutual Life InsuranceSumitomo Life InsuranceMetLifeAllstateAegonAetnaCNP AssurancesPingAnCPICTIAA-CREFMitsui Mutual Life InsuranceRoyal & Sun AllianceSwiss ReinsuranceYasuda Mutual Life InsuranceStandard Life AssurancePrudential FinancialNew York Life InsuranceMeiji Life InsuranceMarket segment by Regions/Countries, this report coversUnited StatesEUJapanChinaIndiaSoutheast AsiaMarket segment by Application, Accident Insurance can be split intoPersonalEnterpriseIf you have any special requirements, please let us know and we will offer you the report as you want.Request Sample Report @Table of ContentGlobal Accident Insurance Market Size, Status and Forecast 20251 Industry Overview of Accident Insurance1.1 Accident Insurance Market Overview1.1.1 Accident Insurance Product Scope1.1.2 Market Status and Outlook1.2 Global Accident Insurance Market Size and Analysis by Regions (2013-2018)1.2.1 United States1.2.2 EU1.2.3 Japan1.2.4 China1.2.5 India1.2.6 Southeast Asia1.3 Accident Insurance Market by End Users/Application1.3.1 Personal1.3.2 Enterprise2 Global Accident Insurance Competition Analysis by Players2.1 Accident Insurance Market Size (Value) by Players (2013-2018)2.2 Competitive Status and Trend2.2.1 Market Concentration Rate2.2.2 Product/Service Differences2.2.3 New Entrants2.2.4 The Technology Trends in Future3 Company (Top Players) Profiles3.1 Allianz3.1.1 Company Profile3.1.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.1.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.1.4 Accident Insurance Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.1.5 Recent Developments3.2 AXA3.2.1 Company Profile3.2.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.2.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.2.4 Accident Insurance Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.2.5 Recent Developments3.3 Nippon Life Insurance3.3.1 Company Profile3.3.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.3.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.3.4 Accident Insurance Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.3.5 Recent Developments3.4 American Intl. Group3.4.1 Company Profile3.4.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.4.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.4.4 Accident Insurance Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.4.5 Recent Developments3.5 Aviva3.5.1 Company Profile3.5.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.5.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.5.4 Accident Insurance Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.5.5 Recent Developments3.6 Assicurazioni Generali3.6.1 Company Profile3.6.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.6.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.6.4 Accident Insurance Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.6.5 Recent Developments3.7 Cardinal Health3.7.1 Company Profile3.7.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.7.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.7.4 Accident Insurance Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.7.5 Recent Developments3.8 State Farm Insurance3.8.1 Company Profile3.8.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.8.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.8.4 Accident Insurance Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.8.5 Recent Developments3.9 Dai-ichi Mutual Life Insurance3.9.1 Company Profile3.9.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.9.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.9.4 Accident Insurance Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.9.5 Recent Developments3.10 Munich Re Group3.10.1 Company Profile3.10.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.10.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.10.4 Accident Insurance Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.10.5 Recent Developments3.11 Zurich Financial Services3.12 Prudential3.13 Asahi Mutual Life Insurance3.14 Sumitomo Life Insurance3.15 MetLife3.16 Allstate3.17 Aegon3.18 Aetna3.19 CNP Assurances3.20 PingAn3.21 CPIC3.22 TIAA-CREF3.23 Mitsui Mutual Life Insurance3.24 Royal & Sun Alliance3.25 Swiss Reinsurance3.26 Yasuda Mutual Life Insurance3.27 Standard Life Assurance3.28 Prudential Financial3.29 New York Life Insurance3.30 Meiji Life Insurance4 Global Accident Insurance Market Size by Application (2013-2018)4.1 Global Accident Insurance Market Size by Application (2013-2018)4.2 Potential Application of Accident Insurance in Future4.3 Top Consumer/End Users of Accident InsuranceContinuousFor further information on this report, visit Contact Us:Norah Trentsales@wiseguyreports.comPh: +1-646-845-9349 (US); +44 208 133 9349 (UK)About Us:Wise Guy Reports Is Part Of The Wise Guy Consultants Pvt. Ltd. And Offers Premium Progressive Statistical Surveying, Market Research Reports, Analysis & Forecast Data For Industries And Governments Around The Globe. Wise Guy Reports Features An Exhaustive List Of Market Research Reports From Hundreds Of Publishers Worldwide. We Boast A Database Spanning Virtually Every Market Category And An Even More Comprehensive Collection Of Market Research Reports Under These Categories And Sub-Categories.Addres:WISEGUY RESEARCH CONSULTANTS PVT LTDOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersPune - 411028Maharashtra, IndiaPhone :+91 841 198 5042Dry Onion Market: Global Industry Trends, Share, Size, Growth, Opportunity and Forecast till 2022

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FACT.MR has been actively involved in offering comprehensive research data concerning various topics which are associated to industrial reference and investor utility. This particular research report titled Dry Onion Market Forecast, Trend Analysis & Competition Tracking  Global Review 2017 to 2022 has been added to the wide online database of FACT.MR which discusses the present as well as future market scenario. Readers can access knowledge related to market volume, regional expanse as well as competitive landscape prevailing in the global Dry Onion Market. In order to study development patterns, this smart assessment also focuses on market dynamics, which talks about drivers, restraints and opportunities estimated to influence the concerned market during the period until 2022.Request for Sample Report-Dry onion is made by exposing onion to the heat at a very low level and all the moisture is removed to make it dry. The process of drying onion helps to preserve it for a long time. Dry onion is being used in a number of processed food products and non-processed food products like sauces, soups, salads, gravies, meats, seafood, etc. Although dry onions are slightly less pungent as compared to the fresh onion, they still add a great zing to many foods.4 Forecast Highlights on Global Dry Onion Market1. Asia Pacific Excluding Japan (APEJ) is expected to dominate the global dry onion market. APEJ dry onion market is estimated to create an incremental opportunity exceeding US$ 400 million between 2017 and 2022. High production of onion in various countries in APEJ is driving the market growth. Moreover, increased production is also resulting in the rise in exports of the dry onion globally, hence boosting the growth in APEJ.2. Meanwhile, North America dry onion market is also expected to witness healthy growth. By the end of 2022, North America is estimated to exceed US$ 800 million revenue. Increasing demand and use of dry onions in everyday cooking and increasing production of onion powder as an ingredient as some of the factors resulting in the growth of dry onion market in North America.3. Dry onion in form of flakes is expected to witness impressive growth. Flakes as a dry onion form is estimated to surpass US$ 1,900 million by the end of 2022. Meanwhile, powder form is also expected to show robust growth throughout the forecast period.4. Compared to the other drying processes, air drying process for making dry onion is expected to emerge as the highly adopted process. Air drying process is estimated to reach close to US$ 2,000 million revenue by the end of 2022.Browse Full Report with TOC-Table of Content:1. Global Dry Onion Market - Executive Summary2. Global Dry Onion Market Overview3. Global Dry Onion Market Analysis and Forecast By Form4. Global Dry Onion Market Analysis and Forecast By Drying Process5. Global Dry Onion Market Analysis and Forecast By Application Type6. Global Dry Onion Market Analysis and Forecast By Region7. North America Dry Onion Market Analysis and Forecast, By Country, 2012-20228. Latin America Dry Onion Market Analysis and Forecast, By Country, 2012-20229. Europe Dry Onion Market Analysis and Forecast, By Country, 2012-202210. Japan Dry Onion Market Analysis and Forecast, By Country, 2012-202211. APEJ Dry Onion Market Analysis and Forecast, By Country, 2012-202212. MEA Dry Onion Market Analysis and Forecast, By Country, 2012-202213. Global Dry Onion Market Company Share, Competition Landscape and Company Profiles 14. Research Methodology15. Secondary and Primary Sources16. Assumptions and Acronyms17. DisclaimerContinued.Check Discount on This Report-About Fact.MRFact.MR is a fast-growing market research firm that offers the most comprehensive suite of syndicated and customized Food & Beverages market research reports. We believe transformative intelligence can educate and inspire businesses to make smarter decisions. We know the limitations of the one-size-fits-all approach; that's why we publish multi-industry global, regional, and country-specific research reports.Contact UsFact.MRSuite 988427 Upper Pembroke Street,Dublin 2, IrelandTelephone: +353-1-6111-593Email: sales@factmr.com/Web:Latest Report on: Para Aramid Paper Market 2018-2025 DuPont, Tayho

Para Aramid Paper Market Forecast 2018

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A market study "Global Para Aramid Paper Market" examines the performance of the Para Aramid Paper market 2018. It encloses an in-depth Research of the Para Aramid Paper market state and the competitive landscape globally. This report analyzes the potential of Para Aramid Paper market in the present and the future prospects from various angles in detail.The Global Para Aramid Paper Market 2018 report includes Para Aramid Paper market Revenue, market Share, Para Aramid Paper industry volume, market Trends, Para Aramid Paper Growth aspects. A wide range of applications, Utilization ratio, Supply and demand analysis are also consist in the report. It shows manufacturing capacity, Para Aramid Paper Price during the Forecast period from 2018 to 2022.To Get Sample Report Click Here:Manufacturers Analysis and Top Sellers of Global Para Aramid Paper Market 2018 :DuPontTayhoPara Aramid Paper Market : By ApplicationElectrical InsulationHoneycomb CoresCommunication EquipmentPara Aramid Paper Market : By TypeType IType IIFirstly, the report covers the top Para Aramid Paper manufacturing industry players from regions like United States, EU, Japan, and China. It also characterizes the market based on geological regions.Further, the Para Aramid Paper report gives information on the company profile, market share and contact details along with value chain analysis of Para Aramid Paper industry, Para Aramid Paper industry rules and policies, circumstances driving the growth of the market and compulsion blocking the growth. Para Aramid Paper Market development scope and various business strategies are also mentioned in this report.Browse Full Report Here:The Para Aramid Paper research report includes the products that are currently in demand and available in the market along with their cost breakup, manufacturing volume, import/export scheme and contribution to the Para Aramid Paper market revenue worldwide.Finally, Para Aramid Paper market report gives you details about the market research findings and conclusion which helps you to develop profitable market strategies to gain competitive advantage.About Usqyresearchstore.com is a leading market intelligence team which making extensive reports that cover all the necessary details about the market assessments such as major technological improvement in the industry.Contact US:5001 Spring Valley Rd #400,Dallas,TX 75244, USAContact No. +1-214-661-1669Email: sales@qyresearchstore.comCold Chain Logistics Market 2018 Global Analysis By key Players  Americold Logistics, SSI SCHAEFER, Burris Logistics, DHL, Burris Logistics

Cold Chain Logistics Market

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Cold Chain Logistics Market 2018Wiseguyreports.Com adds Cold Chain Logistics Market Market Demand, Growth, Opportunities, Analysis of Top Key Players and Forecast to 2025 To Its Research Database.Report Details:This report provides in depth study of Cold Chain Logistics Market using SWOT analysis i.e. Strength, Weakness, Opportunities and Threat to the organization. The Cold Chain Logistics Market report also provides an in-depth survey of key players in the market which is based on the various objectives of an organization such as profiling, the product outline, the quantity of production, required raw material, and the financial health of the organization.This report offers an overview of the market trends, drivers, and barriers with respect to the Cold Chain Logistics market. It also provides a detailed overview of the market of different regions across United States, Europe, China, Japan, India, Southeast Asia and Others. The report categorizes Cold Chain Logistics market by by Cold Food Type, and application. Detailed analysis of key players, along with key growth strategies adopted by them is also covered in this report on Cold Chain Logistics market.This report focuses Global market, it covers details as following:Key PlayersAmericold LogisticsSSI SCHAEFERPreferred Freezer ServicesBurris LogisticsKloosterboerLineage Logistics Holding LLCPartner LogisticsAGRO Merchants Group, LLCNewCold Cooperatief U.A.DHLGruppo Marconi Logistica IntegrataBioStorage Technologies, IncNichirei Logistics Group, Inc.OOCL LogisticsJWD GroupCWT LimitedSCG LogisticsX2 GroupBest Cold Chain Co.AITCrystal Logistic Cool Chain LtdColdEXRequest a Sample Report @Key RegionsNorth AmericaUnited StatesCanadaLatin AmericaMexicoBrazilArgentinaOthersEuropeGermanyUnited KingdomFranceItalySpainRussiaNetherlandOthersAsia & PacificChinaJapanIndiaKoreaAustraliaSoutheast AsiaIndonesiaThailandPhilippinesVietnamSingaporeMalaysiaOthersAfrica & Middle EastSouth AfricaEgyptTurkeySaudi ArabiaIranOthersMain types of productsCold Chain Logistics Market, by Cold Food TypeAgricultural Productsmanufactured FoodDairy ProductsSpecial GoodsOthersCold Chain Logistics Market, byCold Chain Logistics Market, by Key ConsumerFood and BeveragesHealthcareOthersThis report has a complete understanding of market value and quantity, technological progress, macro-economic and governmental policy based on past and present data along with the current and upcoming trends in the market.If you have any special requirements, please let us know and we will offer you the report as you want.Complete Report Details@Major Key Points in Table of Content:Global Cold Chain Logistics Market Research Report 2017-2022 by Players, Regions, Product Types & ApplicationsChapter One Methodology and Data Source1.1 Methodology/Research Approach1.1.1 Research Programs/Design1.1.2 Market Size Estimation1.1.3 Market Breakdown and Data Triangulation1.2 Data Source1.2.1 Secondary Sources1.2.2 Primary Sources1.3 DisclaimerChapter Two Cold Chain Logistics Market Overview2.1 Market Coverage2.2 Global Cold Chain Logistics Market Sales Volume Revenue and Price 2012-2017Chapter Three Cold Chain Logistics by Key Players 2013-20183.1 Global Cold Chain Logistics Sales Volume Market Share by Key Players 2013-20183.2 Global Cold Chain Logistics Revenue Share by Key Players 2013-20183.3 Global Key Players Cold Chain Logistics Key Product Model and Market Performance3.4 Global Key Players Cold Chain Logistics Key Target Consumers and Market Performance..Chapter Six Global Key Players Profile6.1 Americold Logistics6.1.1 Americold Logistics Company Details and Competitors6.1.2 Americold Logistics Key Cold Chain Logistics Models and Performance6.1.3 Americold Logistics Cold Chain Logistics Business SWOT Analysis and Forecast6.1.4 Americold Logistics Cold Chain Logistics Sales Volume Revenue Price Cost and Gross Margin6.2 SSI SCHAEFER6.2.1 SSI SCHAEFER Company Details and Competitors6.2.2 SSI SCHAEFER Key Cold Chain Logistics Models and Performance6.2.3 SSI SCHAEFER Cold Chain Logistics Business SWOT Analysis and Forecast6.2.4 SSI SCHAEFER Cold Chain Logistics Sales Volume Revenue Price Cost and Gross Margin6.3 Preferred Freezer Services6.3.1 Preferred Freezer Services Company Details and Competitors6.3.2 Preferred Freezer Services Key Cold Chain Logistics Models and Performance6.3.3 Preferred Freezer Services Cold Chain Logistics Business SWOT Analysis and Forecast6.3.4 Preferred Freezer Services Cold Chain Logistics Sales Volume Revenue Price Cost and Gross Margin6.4 Burris Logistics6.4.1 Burris Logistics Company Details and Competitors6.4.2 Burris Logistics Key Cold Chain Logistics Models and Performance6.4.3 Burris Logistics Cold Chain Logistics Business SWOT Analysis and Forecast6.4.4 Burris Logistics Cold Chain Logistics Sales Volume Revenue Price Cost and Gross Margin6.5 Kloosterboer6.5.1 Kloosterboer Company Details and Competitors6.5.2 Kloosterboer Key Cold Chain Logistics Models and Performance6.5.3 Kloosterboer Cold Chain Logistics Business SWOT Analysis and Forecast6.5.4 Kloosterboer Cold Chain Logistics Sales Volume Revenue Price Cost and Gross Margin6.6 Lineage Logistics Holding LLC6.6.1 Lineage Logistics Holding LLC Company Details and Competitors6.6.2 Lineage Logistics Holding LLC Key Cold Chain Logistics Models and Performance6.6.3 Lineage Logistics Holding LLC Cold Chain Logistics Business SWOT Analysis and Forecast6.6.4 Lineage Logistics Holding LLC Cold Chain Logistics Sales Volume Revenue Price Cost and Gross Margin6.7 Partner Logistics6.7.1 Partner Logistics Company Details and Competitors6.7.2 Partner Logistics Key Cold Chain Logistics Models and Performance6.7.3 Partner Logistics Cold Chain Logistics Business SWOT Analysis and Forecast6.7.4 Partner Logistics Cold Chain Logistics Sales Volume Revenue Price Cost and Gross Margin6.8 AGRO Merchants Group, LLC6.8.1 AGRO Merchants Group, LLC Company Details and Competitors6.8.2 AGRO Merchants Group, LLC Key Cold Chain Logistics Models and Performance6.8.3 AGRO Merchants Group, LLC Cold Chain Logistics Business SWOT Analysis and Forecast6.8.4 AGRO Merchants Group, LLC Cold Chain Logistics Sales Volume Revenue Price Cost and Gross Margin6.9 NewCold Cooperatief U.A.6.10 DHLContinued.Contact Us:NORAH TRENTPh: +1-646-845-9349 (US)Sales@Wiseguyreports.ComPh: +44 208 133 9349 (UK)ABOUT US:Wise Guy Reports is part of the Wise Guy Consultants Pvt. Ltd. and offers premium progressive statistical surveying, market research reports, analysis & forecast data for industries and governments around the globe. Wise Guy Reports features an exhaustive list of market research reports from hundreds of publishers worldwide. We boast a database spanning virtually every market category and an even more comprehensive collection of market research reports under these categories and sub-categories.ADDRES:WISE GUY RESEARCH CONSULTANTS PVT LTDOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, HadapsarPune - 411028Maharashtra, IndiaVirtual Private Network Global Market Highlights and Major Players Analysis 2022

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IntroductionThe virtual private network (VPN) is an extension of a private network which is widely used among industries for secure data transmission via different portals. The VPN allows users to access data remotely with secure tunneling and encryption methods which also reduces the internal staff costs and enables business expansion.The VPN enhances the productivity of the organizations as the data is encapsulated into network protocols through a secure passage thereby minimizing and reducing the chances of data breaches and cyber-attacks. The VPN secures the private business data which might include customer information, product catalog, employee and customer information along with company projections. The VPN allows data sharing with a particular subset of stakeholders thereby helping in business continuity and reliability. Brown Bear Corporation (dealing in manufacturing, utility, and environmental applications) makes use of the VPN by allowing the supervisory staff to connect via VPN to the office or the Brown Bear store to increase the management efficiency and reduce the drive time.GET SAMPLE REPORT @The VPN allows a more secure mode of communication as compared to other networks. The VPN allows corporations to communicate over a secure network via internet protocol security this allows the communication to be secure even in public networks. For instance, the VPNs are largely useful for employees who frequently travel for organizational work as it allows them to access and communicate the companys data directly with enhanced security. Businesses in the U.S use the VPN services to boost their security and access the resources remotely.Key PlayersThe prominent players in the Virtual private network Market Microsoft Corporation (U.S), Private Internet Access (U.S), CyberGhost S.A. (Romani), NordVPN (Panama), Purevpn (Hong Kong), IPVanish (U.S), Golden Frog, GmbH (Switzerland), Buffered VPN (Hungary), SaferVPN (Israel), NetGear, Inc. (U.S) among others.Global Virtual Private Network Market Analysis & Forecast to 2022 To provide a detailed analysis of the market structure along with a forecast of the various segments and sub-segments of the virtual private network market To provide insights about factors affecting the market growth To analyze the virtual reality market based on Porter's five force analysis etc. To provide historical and forecast revenue of the market segments and sub-segments concerning four main geographies and their countries- North America, Asia Pacific, Europe, Middle East and Africa To provide country-level analysis of the market with respect to the current market size and future perspective To provide country-level analysis of the market for a segment on the basis of sourcing type, service type, end-user and application To provide strategic profiling of key players in the market, comprehensively analyzing their core competencies, and drawing a competitive landscape for the market To track and analyze competitive developments such as joint ventures, strategic alliances, mergers and acquisitions, new product developments, and research and developments in the virtual private network marketKey Findings The global virtual private network market is expected to reach USD 41.70 Billion by 2022 with 18.22% CAGR. By type, the market was dominated by hosted VPN, which has reached 5.52 billion in 2016. The cloud VPN is expected to show the highest growth rate. By deployment, on premises is dominating the market of VPN and has reached USD 9.87 billion in the year 2016. The on-cloud is expected to show the highest CAGR. By product, switches are dominating the market of VPN and have reached USD 5.14 billion in the year 2016. The firewalls are expected to show highest CAGR. By verticals, the government is dominating the market of VPN by verticals and has reached USD 3.05 billion in the year 2016. BFSI is expected to show highest CAGR Geographically, North America has dominated the VPN market in 2016, followed by Europe. Whereas, Asia Pacific is expected to be the fastest growing market.Regional and Country Analysis of Global Virtual Private Network Market Estimation and ForecastGlobal Virtual Private Network market, by region, was led by North America in 2016. In the forecast period, the technological advancements, increasing awareness regarding safety and security and increasing demand for cyber security will help the market in North America. Europe stands on the second position in virtual private network market globally in 2016. Asia Pacific among all the regions is considered to be the fastest growing market for the Virtual Private Network. Developing network infrastructure, and increasing adoption rate of data transmission via the internet are some of the prominent factors propelling the high market growth of VPN in the region.Table of Content: Key Points1 Executive Summary2 Market Dynamics3 Global Virtual Private Network Market, By Type4 Global Virtual Private Network Market, By Deployment5 Global Virtual Private Network Market, By Product6 Global Virtual Private Network Market, By Verticals7 Global Virtual Private Network Market, By Region8 Competitive LandscapeContinuedACCESS REPORT @Get in touch:LinkedIn:Twitter:Facebook:Wise Guy Reports understand how essential statistical surveying information is for your organization or association. Therefore, we have associated with the top publishers and research firms all specialized in specific domains, ensuring you will receive the most reliable and up to date research data available. We also provide COTS (Commercial off the Shelf) business sector reports as custom exploration agreeing your particular needs.WISE GUY RESEARCH CONSULTANTS PVT LTDOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersPune - 411028Maharashtra, IndiaLatest Report on: Payment Card Market 2018-2025 MasterCard, Visa, American Express, Banco Itau

Payment Card Market Forecast and Analysis 2018

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A market study "Global Payment Card Market" examines the performance of the Payment Card market 2018. It encloses an in-depth Research of the Payment Card market state and the competitive landscape globally. This report analyzes the potential of Payment Card market in the present and the future prospects from various angles in detail.The Global Payment Card Market 2018 report includes Payment Card market Revenue, market Share, Payment Card industry volume, market Trends, Payment Card Growth aspects. A wide range of applications, Utilization ratio, Supply and demand analysis are also consist in the report. It shows manufacturing capacity, Payment Card Price during the Forecast period from 2018 to 2022.To Get Sample Report Click Here:Manufacturers Analysis and Top Sellers of Global Payment Card Market 2018 :1. MasterCard2. Visa3. American Express4. Banco Itau5. Bank of America Merrill Lynch6. Bank of Brazil7. Bank of East Asia8. Chase Commercial Banking9. Diners Club10. Hang Seng Bank11. Hyundai12. JP Morgan13. SimplyCash14. Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation15. WEX Inc.16. Woori BankPayment Card Market : By ApplicationEnterprise UseIndividual UsePayment Card Market : By TypeContactless Payment CardContact Payment CardDual Interface Payment CardFirstly, the report covers the top Payment Card manufacturing industry players from regions like United States, EU, Japan, and China. It also characterizes the market based on geological regions.Further, the Payment Card report gives information on the company profile, market share and contact details along with value chain analysis of Payment Card industry, Payment Card industry rules and policies, circumstances driving the growth of the market and compulsion blocking the growth. Payment Card Market development scope and various business strategies are also mentioned in this report.Browse Full Report Here:The Payment Card research report includes the products that are currently in demand and available in the market along with their cost breakup, manufacturing volume, import/export scheme and contribution to the Payment Card market revenue worldwide.Finally, Payment Card market report gives you details about the market research findings and conclusion which helps you to develop profitable market strategies to gain competitive advantage.About Usqyresearchstore.com is a leading market intelligence team which making extensive reports that cover all the necessary details about the market assessments such as major technological improvement in the industry.Contact US:5001 Spring Valley Rd #400,Dallas,TX 75244, USAContact No. +1-214-661-1669Email: sales@qyresearchstore.comEmerging Role of Corrugated Packaging in Global Scenario

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Product packaging is an essential part of a product life cycle. Consumers need for convenient, light weight product packaging has driven the packaging industry to manufacture organized paperboard product packaging solutions with the aim to meet the consumer demands and tap the organized retail industry. The ongoing penetration of e-commerce and retail industry boom have resulted in the increased manufacture of innovative corrugated packaging solutions that contribute significantly to the global corrugated packaging market. Corrugated packaging materials are manufactured from recyclable card board boxes that are eco-friendly. Corrugated packaging market is expected to grow significantly owing to the rapid development of manufacturing sector during the forecast period.Download Brochure For Latest Industry Insights@Corrugated Packaging Market: Market DynamicsGrowth of processed food industry owing to increasing consumer demand have resulted into a growth of corrugated packaging market. Corrugated packaging market is majorly driven by the growing e-commerce business. Changing consumer lifestyle patterns have boosted up the growth of e-commerce business wherein, the manufacturers have widely adopted the use of corrugated packaging to ensure safe product delivery, thereby escalating the growth of global corrugated packaging market. Moreover, the organized retailing have a significant contribution to the increasing demand for global corrugated packaging market. The need for preserving the product shelf life, retailers store products in corrugated boxes thereby fueling up the demand for corrugate packaging market.However, corrugated packaging market witnesses few restraints that hinders the market growth. The major drawback of corrugated packaging is its durability factor. Corrugated packaging is incapable of withstanding harsh indoor and outdoor conditions and might cause damage to delicate products such as electronics, or fragile products made of glass and others.Corrugated Packaging Market: Market SegmentationCorrugated packaging market can be segmented on the basis of corrugated box types which includes:Slotted BoxFolder BoxTelescope BoxRigid BoxOthersCorrugated packaging market can be segmented on the basis of application which includes:Food & BeverageAutomotiveElectronicsHealth & HygienePharmaceuticalsOther Consumer GoodsObtain Report Details @On the basis of corrugated box types the corrugated packaging market can be segmented into slotted box, folding box, telescope box, rigid box and others. Out of these boxes, rigid boxes and folding boxes and folding boxes are widely used by e-commerce and retail sectors. Corrugated packaging can be segmented on the basis of application which includes food and beverage industry wherein, corrugated packaging is used for products like fruits and vegetables, liquid bottles (juice bottles, water bottles), processed food such as readymade soups, pizzas and others, bakery and confectionary products such as cakes, chocolates and biscuits and others. Corrugated packaging is also used in automotive and electronic industries for delicate components. Pharmaceutical and health and hygiene industry has a wide application of corrugated packaging for shipping and storing medicines, cosmetics and other consumer goods.Corrugated Packaging Market: Regional OutlookRegional coverage for corrugated packaging market includes North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia Pacific and China (APAC) and Middle East and Africa (MEA). North America accounts for a higher market share in corrugated packaging market as compared to other regions owing to the prominence of e-commerce business and retail sector, followed by Latin America and Europe which contributes significantly to the global corrugated packaging market growth. Steady growth in e-commerce business and food and beverage industry in APAC offers a potential opportunity for the corrugated packaging market to boom during the forecast period. MEA region is expected to grow significantly in terms of global corrugated packaging market.Corrugated Packaging Market: Market PlayersPlayers operating in the global corrugated packaging market include U.S Corrugated Inc., Georgia- Pacific, Smurfit Kappa Group, DS Smith, Mondi Group and others.About TMRTransparency Market Research (TMR) is a global market intelligence company providing business information reports and services. The companys exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trend analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMRs experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather and analyze information.Contact TMR90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:Ceiling Tiles Market - Improving the Acoustics of a Building and Enhancing its Thermal Insulation

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In this report, the global Ceiling Tiles market is valued at USD XX million in 2017 and is expected to reach USD XX million by the end of 2025, growing at a CAGR of XX% between 2017 and 2025.Geographically, this report is segmented into several key Regions, with production, consumption, revenue (million USD), market share and growth rate of Ceiling Tiles in these regions, from 2013 to 2025 (forecast), coveringNorth AmericaEuropeChinaJapanSoutheast AsiaIndiaRequest For Free Sample Of The Report @Global Ceiling Tiles market competition by top manufacturers, with production, price, revenue (value) and market share for each manufacturer; the top players includingAtkarComoEcophonArmstrongUSGRockfonDaikenOWAKnaufAMFRenhurstTroldtektRondoGyprockOn the basis of product, this report displays the production, revenue, price, market share and growth rate of each type, primarily split intoMineral FibreMetalGypsumObtain Report Details @On the basis of the end users/applications, this report focuses on the status and outlook for major applications/end users, consumption (sales), market share and growth rate for each application, includingResidentialCommercialIndustrialIf you have any special requirements, please let us know and we will offer you the report as you want.About Us-Future Generic Reports is a market research and consulting organization, offering premium collection of market research reports, custom research and consulting services to corporations, no-profit organizations and government institutions across the globe.The wide range of information is presented by a team of well-trained researchers of specific sectors through exhaustive research. We deliver premier market research services that cover all industry verticals, including chemicals and material, automotive, healthcare, electronics & semiconductor, food and beverage, pharmaceuticals and technology and media.We believe in building an eternal bond with our clients through offering them inclusive research study meeting their specific requirements. Our services are tailored specifically to our clients by proposing them the potential outcome, based on our in-depth analysis and insights for exploring the growth strategies through providing the best possible decision for quality production.Contact Us-USA Office244 , Madison AvenueNew York City, NY - 10016United StatesUK Office109 ,Straford Street,LeedsWest Yorkshrie LS11 6JGUnited KingdomSend Us An EmailE-mail: sales@futuregenicreports.comCall UsToll Free: +1- 844-445-2861Phone: +1- 347-983-9688Global Plate Energy Recovery Ventilators Market Trends Detailed in New Research Report 2018

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Qyresearchreports include new market research report "Global Plate Energy Recovery Ventilators Market Professional Survey Report 2018" to its huge collection of research reports.The report on the global market for Plate Energy Recovery Ventilators is a succinct description of multiple forces that cumulatively contribute to market growth. The researchers of the report employed pragmatic methodologies to measure key indicators such as growth rate, market value, and regional market share. Since the growth of the market for Plate Energy Recovery Ventilators relies on several factors, the researchers followed a multifaceted approach to gauge its progress. With an intent to provide a wide purview of the market, the report categorizes the market into multiple segments based on integral parameters. The equanimity of thought maintained throughout the report serves a better understanding to the readers. Ardent initiatives were taken by the researchers to minimize deviations while calculating growth rates and revenue shares.This report focuses on top manufacturers in global market,with production,price,revenue and market share for each manufacturer,coveringCarrier (United Technologies)Johnson ControlsDaikin IndustriesTraneNortekLennox International Inc.Mitsubishi ElectricGreenheckFUJITSUOstbergZehnderFor more information on this report, fill the form @The report has synchronized various extrinsic and intrinsic factors that are expected to augment demand within the market for Plate Energy Recovery Ventilators. An eye for detail and a rigorous scrutiny of the market for Plate Energy Recovery Ventilators has given a peek into key standpoints that usually remain disguised. Furthermore, the key end-use industries that run the wheel of growth in the market have also been analyzed within the report. Key marketing theories have been used to substantiate the fettle of the market, and to forecast a trajectory of growth for the future.An all-inclusive set of information and an unbiased portrayal of the market dynamics have been the catchphrases of the report. The intent behind crafting the report is to provide a yardstick for measuring the lucrativeness of the market for Plate Energy Recovery Ventilators over the coming years. Besides this, market players who contribute to the cut-throat competition in the market can refer to the report to steer clear of any discrepancies in the future.Table of ContentsGlobal Plate Energy Recovery Ventilators Market Professional Survey Report 20171 Industry Overview of Plate Energy Recovery Ventilators1.1 Definition and Specifications of Plate Energy Recovery Ventilators1.1.1 Definition of Plate Energy Recovery Ventilators1.1.2 Specifications of Plate Energy Recovery Ventilators1.2 Classification of Plate Energy Recovery Ventilators1.2.1 Wall-Mount1.2.2 Ceiling-MountTo Browse a Complete Report with TOC Visit @2 Manufacturing Cost Structure Analysis of Plate Energy Recovery Ventilators2.1 Raw Material and Suppliers2.2 Manufacturing Cost Structure Analysis of Plate Energy Recovery Ventilators2.3 Manufacturing Process Analysis of Plate Energy Recovery Ventilators2.4 Industry Chain Structure of Plate Energy Recovery Ventilators3 Technical Data and Manufacturing Plants Analysis of Plate Energy Recovery Ventilators3.1 Capacity and Commercial Production Date of Global Plate Energy Recovery Ventilators Major Manufacturers in 20163.2 Manufacturing Plants Distribution of Global Plate Energy Recovery Ventilators Major Manufacturers in 20163.3 R&D Status and Technology Source of Global Plate Energy Recovery Ventilators Major Manufacturers in 20163.4 Raw Materials Sources Analysis of Global Plate Energy Recovery Ventilators Major Manufacturers in 20164 Global Plate Energy Recovery Ventilators Overall Market Overview4.1 2012-2017E Overall Market Analysis4.2 Capacity Analysis4.2.1 2012-2017E Global Plate Energy Recovery Ventilators Capacity and Growth Rate Analysis4.2.2 2016 Plate Energy Recovery Ventilators Capacity Analysis (Company Segment)Enquiry For Discount Visit @List of Tables and FiguresFigure Picture of Plate Energy Recovery VentilatorsTable Product Specifications of Plate Energy Recovery VentilatorsTable Classification of Plate Energy Recovery VentilatorsFigure Global Production Market Share of Plate Energy Recovery Ventilators by Type in 2016Figure Wall-Mount PictureTable Major Manufacturers of Wall-MountFigure Ceiling-Mount PictureTable Major Consumers in OthersFigure Market Share of Plate Energy Recovery Ventilators by RegionsFigure North America Plate Energy Recovery Ventilators Market Size (Million USD) (2012-2022)Figure China Plate Energy Recovery Ventilators Market Size (Million USD) (2012-2022)About Us:QYResearchReports.com delivers the latest strategic market intelligence to build a successful business footprint in China. Our syndicated and customized research reports provide companies with vital background information of the market and in-depth analysis on the Chinese trade and investment framework, which directly affects their business operations. Reports from QYResearchReports.com feature valuable recommendations on how to navigate in the extremely unpredictable yet highly attractive Chinese market.Contact Us:1820 AvenueM Suite #1047Brooklyn, NY 11230United StatesToll Free: 866-997-4948 (USA-CANADA)Tel: +1-518-621-2074Web:Email: sales@qyresearchreports.comNorth America Sensor Market 2018 by Global Leaders: Delphi Automotive, ABB, Analog Devices, Honeywell International, Bosch Group, Meggitt Sensing Systems, Yokogawa Electric, STMicroelectronics

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Market Research Future published a research report on North America Sensor Market Research Report - Global Forecast to 2023  Market Analysis, Scope, Stake, Progress, Trends and Forecast to 2023.Market HighlightsIncreasing need for security in todays world is a major factor driving the growth of sensor market. North America region is very much concerned about their security and have very strict rules for security. To monitor terrorist attacks and maintain secured atmosphere in and around the city, high resolution cameras are a must. The growing awareness about security and surveillance is one major factor driving the growth of sensors market. Furthermore, there are different sensors such as image sensors, touch sensors, motion sensors, fingerprint sensors and others that are of great importance for security and surveillance purposes to keep track of people, monitor the area and also help in catching thieves. The night vision sensors are also available which can be implemented at residential areas and even at corporate sectors for surveillance purpose. Therefore the increasing security concerns are boosting the North America Sensors Market.According to MRFR analysis, Bosch Group is the leading company in Sensors Market. It is a leading industry in automotive sector and has excellent technical capabilities. The company provide wide range of sensor products to industries. Also, it has built strong corporate network by partnerships with different companies to increase their sales. It has strong market position and has large customer base which thereby supporting its hold on Sensors Market.Get Sample of Report @Key PlayersThe prominent players in the North America Sensor Market are Delphi Automotive LLP (U.K.), ABB Ltd. (Australia), Analog Devices, Inc.(U.S.), Honeywell International, Inc. (U.S.), Bosch Group Gmbh (Germany), Meggitt Sensing Systems (U.S.), Siemens AG (Germany), Yokogawa Electric Corporation (Japan), STMicroelectronics and, Infineon Technologies AG (Germany)Regional AnalysisThe competitive landscape of North America Sensor market is formed by major players of the market and some of the new entrants. North America leads the market for North America Sensor market. The technical advancements in the region, developed network architecture and high adoption rate of sensors by automotive and industrial sector are driving the growth in North America Sensor market.The North America Sensor market has led by U.S. in 2016 by generating highest revenue of USD 11 billion and is expected to grow with 12% CAGR. Whereas, Canada is projected to be the fastest growing country with 15% CAGR during forecast period 2017-2023.U.S. Sensors Market, by type has dominated by image sensor in 2016 and is expected to generate market value of USD 5 billion by 2023 growing with 11.24% CAGR. Followed by touch sensor, pressure sensor, and temperature sensor, respectively in 2016. These sensors are projected to grow with 9.06% CAGR, 7.94% CAGR and 12.53% CAGR, respectively. Position sensor, and proximity sensor are expected to mount with fastest growing 18.28% and 14.91% CAGR, respectively.Segmentation of North America Sensor Market:The North America Sensor Market has been segmented on the basis of type, technology, connectivity, and end-user. By type, the market is further segmented into flow sensor, image sensor, touch sensor, position sensor, temperature sensor, motion sensor, light sensor, pressure sensor, proximity sensor, and optical sensor. By technology, the sensors market is sub segmented into System on chip, System on Package, Hybrid Technology, CMOS Process, IC Compatible 3D Micro Structuring, Machine Vision, and, Vision Sensing. By connectivity, the sensors market is segmented into wired and wireless. The sensors market is segmented on the basis of verticals into different verticals as industrial, medical, automotive, consumer electronics and aerospace & defence.Get complete Report @Intended Audience Sensor providers Sensor operators Transit agencies Investors Research institute End usersAbout Us:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.MRFR team have supreme objective to provide the optimum quality market research and intelligence services to our clients. Our market research studies by products, services, technologies, applications, end users, and market players for global, regional, and country level market segments, enable our clients to see more, know more, and do more, which help to answer all their most important questionsMedia Contact:Market Research FutureOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Pune - 411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.comReciprocating Compressor Market Anticipated To Reach US$ 352.6 Mn by 2024

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"The Latest Research Report Reciprocating Compressor Market - Russia Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends and Forecast 2016 - 2024 provides information on pricing, market analysis, shares, forecast, and company profiles for key industry participants. - MarketResearchReports.biz"The Russia reciprocating compressor market report provides an analysis of the reciprocating compressor market in Russia for the period 2014 to 2024, wherein 2015 is the base year and 2016 to 2024 is the forecast period. Data for 2014 has been included as historical information. The report covers all the prevalent trends and technologies playing a major role in growth of the reciprocating compressor market over the forecast period. It also highlights various drivers, restraints, and opportunities expected to influence the market growth during the said period. Furthermore, analysis covering localization trends, investor support programs, laws and regulations has been added exclusively in the qualitative section of the report. The study provides a holistic perspective on market growth, throughout the above forecast period in terms of revenue estimates (in US$ Mn), for the Russian market. The report provides cross-sectional analysis of the Russia reciprocating compressor market in terms of market estimates and forecasts for all the segments. This research report provides in-depth analysis of the Russia reciprocating compressor market on the basis of compressor type and end-use industriesGet Sample Copy of this report @Reciprocating compressor market in Russia is anticipated to expand at a significant pace, led by the presence of large number of oil reservoirs and refineries. Growth factors such as rise in oil prices and some key initiatives by the Ministry of Industry and Trade of the Russian Federation and Association of Compressors have further supported the market growth of reciprocating compressors in Russia. The overall market is anticipated to reach US$ 352.6 Mn by 2024 expanding at a CAGR of 4.9% from 2016 to 2024.The Russia reciprocating compressor market on the basis of compressor types can be segmented into industrial process gas reciprocating compressor, liquefied natural gas (LNG) reciprocating compressor, and boil of gas (BOG) reciprocating compressor. Industrial process gas reciprocating compressor is further classified into API 618 compressor primarily used for downstream process and high-speed compressors used for upstream and midstream processes. The Russia reciprocating compressor market segmentation by end-use industry includes chemical industry, oil & gas industry, LNG industry, petrochemical industry and others. Oil & gas industry is further classified depending upon the operational activities covering upstream, downstream and midstream activities. LNG industry is further classified based on plant size into small and medium sized plants, and big and giant sized plants.The report also includes competitive profiling of major players along with the value chain analysis for reciprocating compressors. Key business strategies adopted by leading players, their market positioning, and various recent developments have also been identified in the research report. This research report also provides market positioning analysis of major players in the Russia reciprocating compressors market based on their 2015 revenues. Some of the prominent players dominating the reciprocating compressors in the Russia include Atlas Copco AB, Kobelco Compressors Corporation, Dresser Rand Group Inc., Howden Group Ltd., and General Electric (Oil & Gas) Co. These players hold significant market share in the Russian reciprocating compressor market collectively holding approximately 40% of the market share in 2015. The other key players profiled in the research study include Leobersdorfer Maschinenfabrik GmbH & Co.KG, Burckhardt Compression AG, Neuman & Esser Group, KwangShin Machinery Co. Ltd., BORSIG ZM Compression GmbH, Ariel Corporation, and SIAD Macchine Impianti S.p.A.Browse Complete Report with TOC @The Russia reciprocating compressor market is segmented as below:Russia Reciprocating Compressor Market: By TypeIndustrial Process Gas Reciprocating CompressorAPI 618High-speed Reciprocating CompressorLNG Reciprocating CompressorBOG Reciprocating CompressorRussia Reciprocating Compressor Market: By End-use IndustryChemicalOil & GasUpstreamMidstreamDownstreamPetrochemicalLNGSmall and Medium sized PlantsBig & Giant Sized PlantsOthersTable of Content1. Preface1.1. Report Description1.2. Analysis Coverage1.3. Research Methodology2. Executive Summary2.1. Russia Reciprocating Compressor Market Snapshot2.2. Russia Reciprocating Compressor Market Revenue, 2014  2024 (US$ Mn), Year-on-Year Growth (%) and Market Dynamics3. Russia Reciprocating Compressor Market Analysis, 2014  2024 (US$ Mn)3.1. Key Trends Analysis3.1.1. Localization Trends (Rules and Regulations Set by the Ministry of Industry and Trade of the Russian federation, and the Association of Compressor Manufacturers)3.1.2. Support Programs for Investors3.2. Market Dynamics3.2.1. Drivers3.2.2. Restraints3.2.3. Opportunities3.3. Opportunity Assessment, by End-use Industry3.4. Value Chain Analysis: Supply StructureView Sample PDF @3.5. Installed Base of Reciprocating Compressors in Russia3.6. Russia Reciprocating Compressor Market Analysis, By Type, 2014  2024 (US$ Mn) Overview3.6.1. Industrial Process Gas Reciprocating Compressors3.6.1.1. API 618 (downstream)3.6.1.2. High-speed compressors (upstream and midstream)3.6.2. Liquefied natural Gas (LNG) Reciprocating Compressors3.6.3. BOG Compressors3.7. Russia Reciprocating Compressor Market Analysis, By End-use, 2014  2024 (US$ Mn)3.7.1. Overview3.7.2. Chemical3.7.3. Oil & Gas3.7.3.1. Upstream3.7.3.2. Midstream3.7.3.3. Downstream3.7.4. Petrochemical3.7.5. LNG3.7.5.1. Small to Medium-sized Plants3.7.5.2. Big and Giant-sized Plants3.7.5.3. Others (Metal Processing, Industrial Metallic Tools, etc.)3.8. Competitive Landscape3.8.1. Market Positioning of Key Players, 20153.8.2. Competitive Strategies Adopted by Leading Players4. Company Profiles4.1. Atlas Copco AB4.1.1. HQ, Foundation year, Number of Employees4.1.2. Production Facilities4.1.3. Representative office in Russia (Name, Address, Telephone, Email, Web-site)4.1.4. Partners, Packagers and/or Facilities in Russia (Names, Addresses, Telephones, Emails, Web-sites)4.1.5. Market Presence, By Segment and Geography4.1.6. Range of products, applications and capacities4.1.7. Revenue and Operating profits4.1.8. Recent Developments4.1.8.1. Latest actions and Strategic Plans (JV, Restructuration etc.)4.1.9. Business Strategy4.1.9.1. Key Investment Objectives for 2015 - 20204.2. Kobelco Compressors Corporation4.2.1. HQ, Foundation year, Number of Employees4.2.2. Production Facilities4.2.3. Representative office in Russia (Name, Address, Telephone, Email, Web-site)4.2.4. Partners, Packagers and/or Facilities in Russia (Names, Addresses, Telephones, Emails, Web-sites)4.2.5. Market Presence, By Segment and Geography4.2.6. Range of products, applications and capacities4.2.7. Revenue and Operating profits4.2.8. Recent Developments4.2.8.1. Latest actions and Strategic Plans (JV, Restructuration etc.)4.2.9. Business Strategy4.2.9.1. Key Investment Objectives for 2015 - 20204.3. Dresser-Rand Group Inc.4.3.1. HQ, Foundation year, Number of Employees4.3.2. Production Facilities4.3.3. Representative office in Russia (Name, Address, Telephone, Email, Web-site)4.3.4. Partners, Packagers and/or Facilities in Russia (Names, Addresses, Telephones, Emails, Web-sites)4.3.5. Market Presence, By Segment and Geography4.3.6. Range of products, applications and capacities4.3.7. Revenue and Operating profits4.3.8. Recent Developments4.3.8.1. Latest actions and Strategic Plans (JV, Restructuration etc.)4.3.9. Business Strategy4.3.9.1. Key Investment Objectives for 2015 - 2020About usMarketResearchReports.biz is the most comprehensive collection of market research reports. MarketResearchReports.Biz services are specially designed to save time and money for our clients. We are a one stop solution for all your research needs, our main offerings are syndicated research reports, custom research, subscription access and consulting services. We serve all sizes and types of companies spanning across various industries.ContactMr. NachiketState Tower90 Sate Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-621-2074Website:E: sales@marketresearchreports.bizGlobal Optical Networking and Communication Market Growth, Technology & Revenue Upto 20125

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Qyresearchreports include new market research report "Global Optical Networking and Communication Market Research Report 2018" to its huge collection of research reports.The international market for Optical Networking and Communication has been thoroughly studied with every detail in the publication with augmented emphasis on various important factors such as restraints, market opportunities, and growth drivers. Each of the elements that pertain to the shaping of the market dynamics that has been analyzed and studied in detail by the research analysts, so as to offer the best and most evaluative and exhaustive study to the report buyers. The snapshot or the executive summary that has been provided in the market intelligence study has been designed in such a way so as to give a quick overview of the market for receiving information on the go. This could help readers with hands-on data needed to make quick decisions anytime during their growth journey in the market.Global Optical Networking and Communication market competition by top manufacturers, with production, price, revenue (value) and market share for each manufacturer; the top players includingHuawei Technology CoJDS Uniphase CorporationAlcatel LucentCIENA CorporationVerizon Communications IncCisco SystemsADVA Optical Networking SETransmodeEricsson IncMRV CommunicationsFujitsu LtdFill the form to gain deeper insights on this market @The study of market segmentations that has been offered with the publication that explores some of the most significant categories of the world Optical Networking and Communication market is deemed significant for the growth of industry participants. All of the segments that have been studied elaborately in the said publication have been deeply evaluated with assistance from best of the research techniques. The analysts have dissected each of the segments and have shed light on vital factors that influence the growth of the various segments. Using this crucial information, market players could rightly shape their business plans in favor of the betterment of their growth in the international market. Segments that have been analyzed in the publication could be related to product, end use, application, and geography.A group of experienced analysts who have prepared the said report delves deep into the various factors that hinder or fuel the global market for Optical Networking and Communication. It also discovers and mentions the important trends that are emerging in the said market. Cashing in on all of these information that has been gathered so far, it has come up with the best course of action for all the stake holders of the market.Table of ContentsGlobal Optical Networking and Communication Market Research Report 20181 Optical Networking and Communication Market Overview1.1 Product Overview and Scope of Optical Networking and Communication1.2 Optical Networking and Communication Segment by Type (Product Category)1.2.1 Global Optical Networking and Communication Production and CAGR (%) Comparison by Type (Product Category)(2013-2025)1.2.2 Global Optical Networking and Communication Production Market Share by Type (Product Category) in 20171.2.3 Fiber ChannelTo Browse a Full Report with TOC:2 Global Optical Networking and Communication Market Competition by Manufacturers2.1 Global Optical Networking and Communication Capacity, Production and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.1.1 Global Optical Networking and Communication Capacity and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.1.2 Global Optical Networking and Communication Production and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.2 Global Optical Networking and Communication Revenue and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.3 Global Optical Networking and Communication Average Price by Manufacturers (2013-2018)3 Global Optical Networking and Communication Capacity, Production, Revenue (Value) by Region (2013-2018)3.1 Global Optical Networking and Communication Capacity and Market Share by Region (2013-2018)3.2 Global Optical Networking and Communication Production and Market Share by Region (2013-2018)3.3 Global Optical Networking and Communication Revenue (Value) and Market Share by Region (2013-2018)3.4 Global Optical Networking and Communication Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)3.5 United States Optical Networking and Communication Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)3.6 EU Optical Networking and Communication Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)3.7 China Optical Networking and Communication Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)3.8 Japan Optical Networking and Communication Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)4 Global Optical Networking and Communication Supply (Production), Consumption, Export, Import by Region (2013-2018)4.1 Global Optical Networking and Communication Consumption by Region (2013-2018)4.2 United States Optical Networking and Communication Production, Consumption, Export, Import (2013-2018)4.3 EU Optical Networking and Communication Production, Consumption, Export, Import (2013-2018)4.4 China Optical Networking and Communication Production, Consumption, Export, Import (2013-2018)4.5 Japan Optical Networking and Communication Production, Consumption, Export, Import (2013-2018)To Get Discount Of This Report Click here @List of Tables and FiguresFigure Picture of Optical Networking and CommunicationFigure Global Optical Networking and Communication Production (K Units) and CAGR (%) Comparison by Types (Product Category) (2013-2025)Figure Global Optical Networking and Communication Production Market Share by Types (Product Category) in 2017Figure Product Picture of Fiber ChannelTable Major Manufacturers of Fiber ChannelFigure Global Optical Networking and Communication Market Size (Million USD), Comparison (K Units) and CAGR (%) by Regions (2013-2025)Figure United States Optical Networking and Communication Revenue (Million USD) and Growth Rate (2013-2025)Figure EU Optical Networking and Communication Revenue (Million USD) and Growth Rate (2013-2025)Figure China Optical Networking and Communication Revenue (Million USD) and Growth Rate (2013-2025)Figure Japan Optical Networking and Communication Revenue (Million USD) and Growth Rate (2013-2025)About Us:QYResearchReports.com delivers the latest strategic market intelligence to build a successful business footprint in China. Our syndicated and customized research reports provide companies with vital background information of the market and in-depth analysis on the Chinese trade and investment framework, which directly affects their business operations. Reports from QYResearchReports.com feature valuable recommendations on how to navigate in the extremely unpredictable yet highly attractive Chinese market.Contact Us:1820 AvenueM Suite #1047Brooklyn, NY 11230United StatesToll Free: 866-997-4948 (USA-CANADA)Tel: +1-518-621-2074Web:Email: sales@qyresearchreports.comGlobal Ethylene Propylene Diene Monomer (EPDM) Rubber Market 2018 - Lanxess, ExxonMobil, DOW, SK Chemical, JSR/Kumho, Sumitomo, Lion Elastomers

Global Ethylene Propylene Diene Monomer (EPDM) Rubber Market

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The global Ethylene Propylene Diene Monomer (EPDM) Rubber market accounted at US$ XX million for the present year, it was predicted this market will reach to US$ XX million by 2025. It is projected that the global Ethylene Propylene Diene Monomer (EPDM) Rubber market is expected to grow at a CAGR of XX%. The report provides detailed analysis of global and regional market. In 2018 North America XX market was expected to reach at US$ XX million.Request for the sample here:Global Ethylene Propylene Diene Monomer (EPDM) Rubber Market: Competitive PlayersLanxessExxonMobilDOWSK ChemicalJSR/KumhoSumitomoLion ElastomersMITSUIPJSC NizhnekamskneftekhimSABICEniSSMEJilin Xingyun ChemicalGlobal Ethylene Propylene Diene Monomer (EPDM) Rubber Market: Segmentation:-Based on type, the global Ethylene Propylene Diene Monomer (EPDM) Rubber market is mainly classified as:Solution PolymerizationSuspension PolymerizationBased on application, Global Ethylene Propylene Diene Monomer (EPDM) Rubber market is mainly classified as:Automotive IndustryBuilding & ConstructionWires & CablesOn the basis of region, the global Ethylene Propylene Diene Monomer (EPDM) Rubber market is segmented into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, Middle East & Africa.Global Ethylene Propylene Diene Monomer (EPDM) Rubber Market: Regional AnalysisThe global Ethylene Propylene Diene Monomer (EPDM) Rubber market is spread across the globe including North America Ethylene Propylene Diene Monomer (EPDM) Rubber Market, Europe Ethylene Propylene Diene Monomer (EPDM) Rubber Market, Asia-Pacific Ethylene Propylene Diene Monomer (EPDM) Rubber Market, Latin America Ethylene Propylene Diene Monomer (EPDM) Rubber Market and the Middle East as well as Africa Ethylene Propylene Diene Monomer (EPDM) Rubber Market. Use of advanced technology is expected to drive the global Ethylene Propylene Diene Monomer (EPDM) Rubber market in North America during the forecast period.Inquire before buying Ethylene Propylene Diene Monomer (EPDM) Rubber Market report:The global Ethylene Propylene Diene Monomer (EPDM) Rubber market is has noticed intense competition and expected to notice similar situation in coming years. Local as well as global Ethylene Propylene Diene Monomer (EPDM) Rubber market players make the competition aggressive and tough for new players. Various major players active into Ethylene Propylene Diene Monomer (EPDM) Rubber global market include Ethylene Propylene Diene Monomer (EPDM) RubberX.What Ethylene Propylene Diene Monomer (EPDM) Rubber Market Report Provides-1. Complete detailed in-depth analysis of the Ethylene Propylene Diene Monomer (EPDM) Rubber market.2. Vital changes noticed in Ethylene Propylene Diene Monomer (EPDM) Rubber market dynamics.3. Detailed segmentation and sub segmentation details of the Ethylene Propylene Diene Monomer (EPDM) Rubber market.4. Past, present and expected Ethylene Propylene Diene Monomer (EPDM) Rubber market analysis in terms of volume and revenue.5. Analysis of specific ( Ethylene Propylene Diene Monomer (EPDM) Rubber ) industry developments.6. Ethylene Propylene Diene Monomer (EPDM) Rubber Market share analysis.7. Key strategies and techniques implemented by major players in Ethylene Propylene Diene Monomer (EPDM) Rubber market.8. Upcoming segments and regional Ethylene Propylene Diene Monomer (EPDM) Rubber markets.9. Business strategies implemented by various players to hold and maximize their share in the Ethylene Propylene Diene Monomer (EPDM) Rubber market.About UsApex Market Reports offers elevating market research globally. We have collection of various syndicated reports of different categories. Apex Market Reports provides you to best services, weather youre searching for new trends in market or competitive scenario in emerging market.Customers can buys different reports across various categories such as Chemical and Material, Biotechnology, Healthcare, Food and beverages, Automobile and various sectors. Our Website offers safe and secure online ordering experience, convenient payment options.Contact UsFrank ValadezCorporate Sales Specialist155 North Wacker Drive, Suite 4250Chicago, IL 60606Phone: +17739042683Email id - sales@apexmarketreports.comWebsite -Global Osmometer Market 2018 - Arkray, ELITech Group, Precision Systems, Gonotec, Knauer

Global Osmometer Market

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The global Osmometer market accounted at US$ XX million for the present year, it was predicted this market will reach to US$ XX million by 2025. It is projected that the global Osmometer market is expected to grow at a CAGR of XX%. The report provides detailed analysis of global and regional market. In 2018 North America XX market was expected to reach at US$ XX million.Request for the sample here:Global Osmometer Market: Competitive PlayersAdvanced InstrumentsArkrayELITech GroupPrecision SystemsGonotecKnauerLoser MesstechnikShanghai Medical University InstrumentTianjin TianheGlobal Osmometer Market: Segmentation:-Based on type, the global Osmometer market is mainly classified as:Freezing Point OsmometerVapro OsmometerBased on application, Global Osmometer market is mainly classified as:MedicalChemical & Bio ResearchOn the basis of region, the global Osmometer market is segmented into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, Middle East & Africa.Global Osmometer Market: Regional AnalysisThe global Osmometer market is spread across the globe including North America Osmometer Market, Europe Osmometer Market, Asia-Pacific Osmometer Market, Latin America Osmometer Market and the Middle East as well as Africa Osmometer Market. Use of advanced technology is expected to drive the global Osmometer market in North America during the forecast period.Inquire before buying Osmometer Market report:The global Osmometer market is has noticed intense competition and expected to notice similar situation in coming years. Local as well as global Osmometer market players make the competition aggressive and tough for new players. Various major players active into Osmometer global market include OsmometerX.What Osmometer Market Report Provides-1. Complete detailed in-depth analysis of the Osmometer market.2. Vital changes noticed in Osmometer market dynamics.3. Detailed segmentation and sub segmentation details of the Osmometer market.4. Past, present and expected Osmometer market analysis in terms of volume and revenue.5. Analysis of specific ( Osmometer ) industry developments.6. Osmometer Market share analysis.7. Key strategies and techniques implemented by major players in Osmometer market.8. Upcoming segments and regional Osmometer markets.9. Business strategies implemented by various players to hold and maximize their share in the Osmometer market.About UsApex Market Reports offers elevating market research globally. We have collection of various syndicated reports of different categories. Apex Market Reports provides you to best services, weather youre searching for new trends in market or competitive scenario in emerging market.Customers can buys different reports across various categories such as Chemical and Material, Biotechnology, Healthcare, Food and beverages, Automobile and various sectors. Our Website offers safe and secure online ordering experience, convenient payment options.Contact UsFrank ValadezCorporate Sales Specialist155 North Wacker Drive, Suite 4250Chicago, IL 60606Phone: +17739042683Email id - sales@apexmarketreports.comWebsite -Global Shellfish Market 2018 - Maruha Nichiro, Kibun, ZONECO, Guo Lian, Aeon, Xing Ye, Hui Yang

Global Shellfish Market

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The global Shellfish market accounted at US$ XX million for the present year, it was predicted this market will reach to US$ XX million by 2025. It is projected that the global Shellfish market is expected to grow at a CAGR of XX%. The report provides detailed analysis of global and regional market. In 2018 North America XX market was expected to reach at US$ XX million.Request for the sample here:Global Shellfish Market: Competitive PlayersNippon Suisan KaishaMaruha NichiroKibunZONECOGuo LianAeonXing YeHui YangZhoushan FisheriesMarudai FoodLiao YuOriental OceanHomeyGlobal Shellfish Market: Segmentation:-Based on type, the global Shellfish market is mainly classified as:PrawnsCrabClamsWhelkOystersBased on application, Global Shellfish market is mainly classified as:SupermarketRestaurantOn the basis of region, the global Shellfish market is segmented into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, Middle East & Africa.Global Shellfish Market: Regional AnalysisThe global Shellfish market is spread across the globe including North America Shellfish Market, Europe Shellfish Market, Asia-Pacific Shellfish Market, Latin America Shellfish Market and the Middle East as well as Africa Shellfish Market. Use of advanced technology is expected to drive the global Shellfish market in North America during the forecast period.Inquire before buying Shellfish Market report:The global Shellfish market is has noticed intense competition and expected to notice similar situation in coming years. Local as well as global Shellfish market players make the competition aggressive and tough for new players. Various major players active into Shellfish global market include ShellfishX.What Shellfish Market Report Provides-1. Complete detailed in-depth analysis of the Shellfish market.2. Vital changes noticed in Shellfish market dynamics.3. Detailed segmentation and sub segmentation details of the Shellfish market.4. Past, present and expected Shellfish market analysis in terms of volume and revenue.5. Analysis of specific ( Shellfish ) industry developments.6. Shellfish Market share analysis.7. Key strategies and techniques implemented by major players in Shellfish market.8. Upcoming segments and regional Shellfish markets.9. Business strategies implemented by various players to hold and maximize their share in the Shellfish market.About UsApex Market Reports offers elevating market research globally. We have collection of various syndicated reports of different categories. Apex Market Reports provides you to best services, weather youre searching for new trends in market or competitive scenario in emerging market.Customers can buys different reports across various categories such as Chemical and Material, Biotechnology, Healthcare, Food and beverages, Automobile and various sectors. Our Website offers safe and secure online ordering experience, convenient payment options.Contact UsFrank ValadezCorporate Sales Specialist155 North Wacker Drive, Suite 4250Chicago, IL 60606Phone: +17739042683Email id - sales@apexmarketreports.comWebsite -Global Dispersants Market Forecast to 2023

Global Dispersants Market by Manufacturers, Countries, Type and Application, Forecast to 2023

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ResearchByMarkets / Press Release / Chemicals and Materials, "Global Dispersants Market by Manufacturers, Countries, Type and Application, Forecast to 2023", 16 Companies Profiled.Dispersant or Dispersing Agent is either a non-surface active polymer or a surface-active substance added to a suspension, usually a colloid, to improve the separation of particles and to prevent settling or clumping. The role of the dispersant is to make the dispersion process easier and more stable. Dispersants consist normally of one or more surfactants, but may also be gases.More Information:Scope of the Report:This report focuses on the Dispersants in global market, especially in North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, South America, Middle East and Africa. This report categorizes the market based on manufacturers, regions, types and applications.Request for Sample Pages of this report:Market Segment by Manufacturers, this report coversAir Products & ChemicalsAltana AGArkema GroupAshland Inc.Basf SEClariant AGCroda InternationalCytec IndustriesElementis PLCEmeraldEvonik IndustriesKing IndustriesLubrizolRudolf GmbhDow ChemicalUniqchemMarket Segment by Regions, regional analysis coversNorth America (United States, Canada and Mexico)Europe (Germany, France, UK, Russia and Italy)Asia-Pacific (China, Japan, Korea, India and Southeast Asia)South America (Brazil, Argentina, Colombia)Middle East and Africa (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa)Market Segment by Type, coversAnionic TypeCationic TypeOthersMarket Segment by Applications, can be divided intoPaints & CoatingsPulp & PaperDetergentsOil & GasOthersInquire more about this report:There are 15 Chapters to deeply display the global Dispersants market.Chapter 1, to describe Dispersants Introduction, product scope, market overview, market opportunities, market risk, market driving force;Chapter 2, to analyze the top manufacturers of Dispersants, with sales, revenue, and price of Dispersants, in 2016 and 2017;Chapter 3, to display the competitive situation among the top manufacturers, with sales, revenue and market share in 2016 and 2017;Chapter 4, to show the global market by regions, with sales, revenue and market share of Dispersants, for each region, from 2013 to 2018;Chapter 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9, to analyze the key regions, with sales, revenue and market share by key countries in these regions;Chapter 10 and 11, to show the market by type and application, with sales market share and growth rate by type, application, from 2013 to 2018;Chapter 12, Dispersants market forecast, by regions, type and application, with sales and revenue, from 2018 to 2023;Chapter 13, 14 and 15, to describe Dispersants sales channel, distributors, traders, dealers, Research Findings and Conclusion, appendix and data source.Contact:ResearchByMarketsMs. Lia Seth | Client Relations Managerenquiry@researchbymarkets.comResearch By Markets is an online Market Research Report Repository.Our repository contains reports segmented by Geography and Industry. We cover all major Industry Verticals - Information Technology, Semiconductor, Electronics, Manufacturing, Food & Beverages, Telecommunications, Healthcare, Pharmaceutical, Automotive, BioTechnology, Energy & Power, Banking and many more.Research By Markets3, Nagar Road,Pune 411 014, Maharashtra, Indiaenquiry@researchbymarkets.com+1-800-416-3124Global Linalool Market 2018 - Symrise, BASF, DSM, NHU, Jiangxi East, Tianxiang

Global Linalool Market

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The global Linalool market accounted at US$ XX million for the present year, it was predicted this market will reach to US$ XX million by 2025. It is projected that the global Linalool market is expected to grow at a CAGR of XX%. The report provides detailed analysis of global and regional market. In 2018 North America XX market was expected to reach at US$ XX million.Request for the sample here:Global Linalool Market: Competitive PlayersSymriseBASFDSMNHUJiangxi EastTianxiangJiaxing Sunlong Industrial & TradingPurong EssencesGlobal Linalool Market: Segmentation:-Based on type, the global Linalool market is mainly classified as:Natural LinaloolSynthetic LinaloolBased on application, Global Linalool market is mainly classified as:FragranceFlavorOn the basis of region, the global Linalool market is segmented into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, Middle East & Africa.Global Linalool Market: Regional AnalysisThe global Linalool market is spread across the globe including North America Linalool Market, Europe Linalool Market, Asia-Pacific Linalool Market, Latin America Linalool Market and the Middle East as well as Africa Linalool Market. Use of advanced technology is expected to drive the global Linalool market in North America during the forecast period.Inquire before buying Linalool Market report:The global Linalool market is has noticed intense competition and expected to notice similar situation in coming years. Local as well as global Linalool market players make the competition aggressive and tough for new players. Various major players active into Linalool global market include LinaloolX.What Linalool Market Report Provides-1. Complete detailed in-depth analysis of the Linalool market.2. Vital changes noticed in Linalool market dynamics.3. Detailed segmentation and sub segmentation details of the Linalool market.4. Past, present and expected Linalool market analysis in terms of volume and revenue.5. Analysis of specific ( Linalool ) industry developments.6. Linalool Market share analysis.7. Key strategies and techniques implemented by major players in Linalool market.8. Upcoming segments and regional Linalool markets.9. Business strategies implemented by various players to hold and maximize their share in the Linalool market.About UsApex Market Reports offers elevating market research globally. We have collection of various syndicated reports of different categories. Apex Market Reports provides you to best services, weather youre searching for new trends in market or competitive scenario in emerging market.Customers can buys different reports across various categories such as Chemical and Material, Biotechnology, Healthcare, Food and beverages, Automobile and various sectors. Our Website offers safe and secure online ordering experience, convenient payment options.Contact UsFrank ValadezCorporate Sales Specialist155 North Wacker Drive, Suite 4250Chicago, IL 60606Phone: +17739042683Email id - sales@apexmarketreports.comWebsite -Latest Report on: Power Monitoring Market 2018-2025 ABB Ltd, Eaton Corporation, Emerson Electric

Power Monitoring Market Forecast 2018

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A market study "Global Power Monitoring Market" examines the performance of the Power Monitoring market 2018. It encloses an in-depth Research of the Power Monitoring market state and the competitive landscape globally. This report analyzes the potential of Power Monitoring market in the present and the future prospects from various angles in detail.The Global Power Monitoring Market 2018 report includes Power Monitoring market Revenue, market Share, Power Monitoring industry volume, market Trends, Power Monitoring Growth aspects. A wide range of applications, Utilization ratio, Supply and demand analysis are also consist in the report. It shows manufacturing capacity, Power Monitoring Price during the Forecast period from 2018 to 2022.To Get Sample Report Click Here:Manufacturers Analysis and Top Sellers of Global Power Monitoring Market 2018 :1. ABB Ltd2. Eaton Corporation PLC3. Emerson Electric Co.4. Fluke Corporation5. Fuji Electric FA Components & Systems Co., Ltd.6. General Electric Company7. Littelfuse, Inc.8. Mitsubishi Electric Corporation9. Omron Corporation10. Rockwell Automation, Inc.11. Schneider Electric SE12. Siemens AG13. Yokogawa Electric CorporationPower Monitoring Market : By ApplicationManufacturing & Process IndustryDatacentersUtilities & RenewablesPublic InfrastructureElectric Vehicle Charging StationsPower Monitoring Market : By TypeHardwareSoftwareServicesFirstly, the report covers the top Power Monitoring manufacturing industry players from regions like United States, EU, Japan, and China. It also characterizes the market based on geological regions.Further, the Power Monitoring report gives information on the company profile, market share and contact details along with value chain analysis of Power Monitoring industry, Power Monitoring industry rules and policies, circumstances driving the growth of the market and compulsion blocking the growth. Power Monitoring Market development scope and various business strategies are also mentioned in this report.Browse Full Report Here:The Power Monitoring research report includes the products that are currently in demand and available in the market along with their cost breakup, manufacturing volume, import/export scheme and contribution to the Power Monitoring market revenue worldwide.Finally, Power Monitoring market report gives you details about the market research findings and conclusion which helps you to develop profitable market strategies to gain competitive advantage.About Usqyresearchstore.com is a leading market intelligence team which making extensive reports that cover all the necessary details about the market assessments such as major technological improvement in the industry.Contact US:5001 Spring Valley Rd #400,Dallas,TX 75244, USAContact No. +1-214-661-1669Email: sales@qyresearchstore.comFoot Care Tools Market  Opportunities in Key Application Sectors by 2025

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The report analyzes and presents an overview of "Foot Care Tools Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends and Forecast 2017 - 2025" worldwide.The main objective of this report is to define, describe, and forecast the global Foot Care Tools market on the basis of types of applications, major sectors, deployment models, organization size, and regions. The report contains an analysis of the major factors influencing the growth of the market (drivers, restraints, opportunities, and challenges). It aims to strategically analyze the micromarkets with respect to individual growth trends, prospects, and their contribution to the market. The report attempts to forecast the market size for 5 major regions, namely, North America, Europe, Asia Pacific (APAC), Middle East and Africa (MEA), and Latin America. It contains key vendor profiles and comprehensively analyzes their core competencies. The report also tracks and analyzes competitive developments, including partnerships, collaborations, acquisitions, new product developments, and R&D activities in the market.Get Sample Copy of this report @Rising number of individuals across the globe are getting concerned about hygiene and started to become conscious about their appearance. Individuals have increasingly started to visit salons for manicure and pedicure frequently. Owing to these reasons, foot care tools market is expanding with a significant CAGR across the globe. Increasing fashion trend and consciousness among individuals regarding status in society, the pedicure is increasingly adopted by people. Foot care tools are extensively used by podiatry professionals, pedicure centers such as salons, etc. and used by individuals for personal use as well.Foot care tools market is expected to increase in terms of revenue significantly over the forecast period, owing to increasing inclination of individuals towards pedicure.Foot Care Tools Market: SegmentationFoot care tools market can be segmented on the basis of product type, end-use, sales channel and region.On the basis of product type, foot care tools market is segmented into nippers, files, scissors, burs, curette, callus trimmers, tips, forceps, nail clippers, nail splitters and others.Foot care tools market can be further segmented on the basis of end-use into podiatry, pedicure and personal use.On the basis of sales channel, foot care tools market can be segmented into direct and retail sales. Direct sales refer to direct selling of tools to hospitals, salons, spa and beauty centers. Retail sales are further segmented into pharmacies/drug stores, beauty and cosmetics shops, specialty stores, online retail, modern trade, convenience stores and other retailing formats.On the basis of region, Foot care tools market can be segmented into seven key regions: North America, Latin America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Asia Pacific excluding Japan, Middle East and Africa and Japan.View Full Report @Foot Care Tools market: Drivers, Restraints, and TrendsIncreasing consciousness among individuals regarding personal care is expected to fuel the growth of the foot care tools market. Pedicure and manicure are getting popular among customers and increasing fashion trend is driving the sales of foot care tools. Owing to increasing inclination of consumers, salons and spa are increasingly buying the foot care tools. Increasing problems related to foot among individuals is also increasing demand for podiatry treatments which is fueling the demand for foot care tools in hospitals and podiatry clinics.Low penetration of foot care tools and weak distribution channel could be considered as a restraint and could hamper the sales of foot care tools. Regions with low disposable income and personal care spending such as African countries are expected to contribute minimal revenue share.Increasing sense of fashion among individuals is trending across the globe and is expected to increase the pedicure segment sales over the forecast period.Foot Care Tools Market: Regional OutlookDepending on the geographic regions, global foot care tools market is segmented into seven key regions: North America, Latin America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, APEJ, MEA and Japan.Foot care tools market is expected to have a relatively high share in North America and Western Europe. Latin America also holds significant value share.Asia Pacific excluding Japan is expected to expand with relatively high CAGR over the forecast period, owing to increasing fashion trend across the region and increasing cosmetics and personal care expenditure. The Middle East and Africa is expected to expand with relatively low CAGR over the forecast period. Japan is a saturated and fully grown market owing to which foot care tools market is expected to expand slowlyPopulation around the globe is getting concerned about their appearance among society and are increasingly adopting fashion trends.Foot Care Tools Market: Key PlayersSome of the prominent manufacturers of Foot care tools are A. Algeo Limited, Gehwol, CPC Healthcare, Supremed, Pedicare Professional Footcare Instruments Limited., Gebruder Nippes GmbH & Co. KG, and other regional players.The report offers a comprehensive evaluation of the market. It does so via in-depth qualitative insights, historical data, and verifiable projections about market size. The projections featured in the report have been derived using proven research methodologies and assumptions. By doing so, the research report serves as a repository of analysis and information for every facet of the market, including but not limited to: Regional markets, technology, types, and applications.Request For Enquiry @The study is a source of reliable data on:Market segments and sub-segmentsMarket trends and dynamicsSupply and demandMarket sizeCurrent trends/opportunities/challengesCompetitive landscapeTechnological breakthroughsValue chain and stakeholder analysisThe regional analysis covers:North America (U.S. and Canada)Latin America (Mexico, Brazil, Peru, Chile, and others)Western Europe (Germany, U.K., France, Spain, Italy, Nordic countries, Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxembourg)Eastern Europe (Poland and Russia)Asia Pacific (China, India, Japan, ASEAN, Australia, and New Zealand)Middle East and Africa (GCC, Southern Africa, and North Africa)The report has been compiled through extensive primary research (through interviews, surveys, and observations of seasoned analysts) and secondary research (which entails reputable paid sources, trade journals, and industry body databases). The report also features a complete qualitative and quantitative assessment by analyzing data gathered from industry analysts and market participants across key points in the industrys value chain.A separate analysis of prevailing trends in the parent market, macro- and micro-economic indicators, and regulations and mandates is included under the purview of the study. By doing so, the report projects the attractiveness of each major segment over the forecast period.Highlights of the report:A complete backdrop analysis, which includes an assessment of the parent marketImportant changes in market dynamicsMarket segmentation up to the second or third levelHistorical, current, and projected size of the market from the standpoint of both value and volumeReporting and evaluation of recent industry developmentsMarket shares and strategies of key playersEmerging niche segments and regional marketsAn objective assessment of the trajectory of the marketRecommendations to companies for strengthening their foothold in the marketAbout usMarketResearchReports.biz is the most comprehensive collection of market research reports. MarketResearchReports.Biz services are specially designed to save time and money for our clients. We are a one stop solution for all your research needs, our main offerings are syndicated research reports, custom research, subscription access and consulting services. We serve all sizes and types of companies spanning across various industries.Contact usMr. NachiketState Tower90 Sate Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-621-2074Website:E: sales@marketresearchreports.biz2018 Sterility Testing Market Worldwide Top Players: Avance Biosciences (U.S.), Boston Scientific Corporation (U.S.), Paragon Bioservices, Inc (U.S.) and more.

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Sterility Testing is considered as vital part of healthcare industries. Sterility ensures that the product is of superior quality. Sterility testing has found its application in cell banks and drug testing. All the drugs, medical devices, substance or any parenteral intended for human use need to be sterile in order to avoid any infection or contamination. There is an impressive growth of pharmaceutical and biotech sector in last decade. This has a synergetic impact on the sterility testing market. Standard operating procedures are provided by different types of pharmacopoeias like Europe Pharmacopoeia, USP, BP, IP and all the procedures must be followed as per these standard reference books. Increasing prevalence of diseases and increasing number of pharmaceutical companies lead the sterility testing market significantly. Increasing introduction of new drugs and because of various governmental support, the sterility market is increased in recent years. Moreover, increasing healthcare expenditure and rising government support for research and development have fuelled the market growth from the past few years. However, long approval time and need of proper environmental condition may slow the market growth.The Global Sterility Testing Market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 12.3 % during the forecast period 2017-2023.Request Sample copy @Sterility Testing Market Top Players are:Some of the major player in the market are Avance Biosciences (U.S.), Boston Scientific Corporation (U.S.), Paragon Bioservices, Inc (U.S.), Merck KGaA (Germany), Thermo Fisher Scientific, Inc. (U.S.), Charles River Laboratories International, Inc. (U.S.), Avista Pharma Solutions (U.S.), and Dynalabs LLC. (U.S.), WuXi AppTec Group (China), bioMerieux SA (France), SGS S.A. (Switzerland).Regional Analysis of Sterility Testing:The Americas dominate the global Sterility testing market owing to the development of new drugs and government support for research & development. Every year various drugs are introduced by the companies in the market and these companies involve in in depth research for introducing the best products to leads the market.Europe holds the second largest share of the global Sterility testing market as result of Increase in the number of small and medium organization in healthcare sector and focus of various government agencies. Moreover, the growing public awareness likely to boost the Europe market.Check Discount @Top 5 Reasons to Get this Report: Company profiling with detailed strategies, financials, and recent development activities Market Strategic Business Influence Data Market Research Future recommendations in key business segments based on the market estimations Market share analysis of the top industry players Market forecasts for a minimum of 5 years of all the mentioned segments, Trends and the regional markets With SWOT AnalysisLIST OF TABLES:Table 1 Sterility Testing Industry Synopsis, 2017-2023Table 2 Global Sterility Testing Market Estimates And Forecast, 2017-2023, (USD Million)Table 3 Global Sterility Testing Market By Region, 2017-2023, (USD Million)Table 4 Global Sterility Testing Market By Types, 2017-2023, (USD Million)Table 5 Global Sterility Testing Market By Tests, 2017-2023, (USD Million)Table 6 Global Sterility Testing Market By Application, 2017-2023, (USD Million)Table 7 Global Sterility Testing Market By End Users, 2017-2023, (USD Million)Table 8 North America Sterility Testing Market By Types, 2017-2023, (USD Million)Table 9 North America Sterility Testing Market By Tests, 2017-2023, (USD Million)Table 10 North America Sterility Testing Market By Application, 2017-2023, (USD Million)Table 11 North America Sterility Testing Market By End Users, 2017-2023, (USD Million)Table 12 US Sterility Testing Market By Types, 2017-2023, (USD Million)Table 13 US Sterility Testing Market By Tests, 2017-2023, (USD Million)Table 14 US Sterility Testing Market By Application, 2017-2023, (USD Million)Table 15 US Sterility Testing Market By End Users, 2017-2023, (USD Million) and more..For more Inquiry on Sterility Testing Market Report @About Market Research Future:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.ContactMarket Research FutureOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Pune  411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.comLatest Report on: Printed Thermal Paper Market 2018-2025 APPVION, Koehler, Oji, Mitsubishi Paper

Printed Thermal Paper Market Forecast 2018

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A market study "Global Printed Thermal Paper Market" examines the performance of the Printed Thermal Paper market 2018. It encloses an in-depth Research of the Printed Thermal Paper market state and the competitive landscape globally. This report analyzes the potential of Printed Thermal Paper market in the present and the future prospects from various angles in detail.The Global Printed Thermal Paper Market 2018 report includes Printed Thermal Paper market Revenue, market Share, Printed Thermal Paper industry volume, market Trends, Printed Thermal Paper Growth aspects. A wide range of applications, Utilization ratio, Supply and demand analysis are also consist in the report. It shows manufacturing capacity, Printed Thermal Paper Price during the Forecast period from 2018 to 2022.To Get Sample Report Click Here:Manufacturers Analysis and Top Sellers of Global Printed Thermal Paper Market 2018 :1. APPVION2. Koehler3. Oji4. Mitsubishi Paper5. Ricoh-thermal6. PM7. Nakagawa Manufacturing8. Panda Paper Roll9. TSI America10. Hansol11. Gold HuaSheng12. Siam PaperPrinted Thermal Paper Market : By ApplicationPrint ShopOfficeGovernment DepartmentPrinted Thermal Paper Market : By TypeFax Thermal PaperPrint Thermal PaperFirstly, the report covers the top Printed Thermal Paper manufacturing industry players from regions like United States, EU, Japan, and China. It also characterizes the market based on geological regions.Further, the Printed Thermal Paper report gives information on the company profile, market share and contact details along with value chain analysis of Printed Thermal Paper industry, Printed Thermal Paper industry rules and policies, circumstances driving the growth of the market and compulsion blocking the growth. Printed Thermal Paper Market development scope and various business strategies are also mentioned in this report.Browse Full Report Here:The Printed Thermal Paper research report includes the products that are currently in demand and available in the market along with their cost breakup, manufacturing volume, import/export scheme and contribution to the Printed Thermal Paper market revenue worldwide.Finally, Printed Thermal Paper market report gives you details about the market research findings and conclusion which helps you to develop profitable market strategies to gain competitive advantage.About Usqyresearchstore.com is a leading market intelligence team which making extensive reports that cover all the necessary details about the market assessments such as major technological improvement in the industry.Contact US:5001 Spring Valley Rd #400,Dallas,TX 75244, USAContact No. +1-214-661-1669Email: sales@qyresearchstore.comLatest Report on: Proppant Market 2018-2025 Carbo Ceramics, Fairmount Santrol, Hexion

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A market study "Global Proppant Market" examines the performance of the Proppant market 2018. It encloses an in-depth Research of the Proppant market state and the competitive landscape globally. This report analyzes the potential of Proppant market in the present and the future prospects from various angles in detail.The Global Proppant Market 2018 report includes Proppant market Revenue, market Share, Proppant industry volume, market Trends, Proppant Growth aspects. A wide range of applications, Utilization ratio, Supply and demand analysis are also consist in the report. It shows manufacturing capacity, Proppant Price during the Forecast period from 2018 to 2022.To Get Sample Report Click Here:Manufacturers Analysis and Top Sellers of Global Proppant Market 2018 :1. Carbo Ceramics2. China GengSheng Minerals3. Fairmount Santrol Holdings4. Hexion5. Hi-Crush Partners6. JSC Borovichi Refractories Plant7. Mineracao Curimbaba Ltda8. Saint-Gobain Proppant9. Superior Silica Sands10. U.S. Silica Holdings11. Yixing Orient Petroleum ProppantProppant Market : By ApplicationShale GasTight GasProppant Market : By TypeFrac Sand ProppantResin-coated ProppantCeramic ProppantFirstly, the report covers the top Proppant manufacturing industry players from regions like United States, EU, Japan, and China. It also characterizes the market based on geological regions.Further, the Proppant report gives information on the company profile, market share and contact details along with value chain analysis of Proppant industry, Proppant industry rules and policies, circumstances driving the growth of the market and compulsion blocking the growth. Proppant Market development scope and various business strategies are also mentioned in this report.Browse Full Report Here:The Proppant research report includes the products that are currently in demand and available in the market along with their cost breakup, manufacturing volume, import/export scheme and contribution to the Proppant market revenue worldwide.Finally, Proppant market report gives you details about the market research findings and conclusion which helps you to develop profitable market strategies to gain competitive advantage.About Usqyresearchstore.com is a leading market intelligence team which making extensive reports that cover all the necessary details about the market assessments such as major technological improvement in the industry.Contact US:5001 Spring Valley Rd #400,Dallas,TX 75244, USAContact No. +1-214-661-1669Email: sales@qyresearchstore.comGlobal Cosmetic Surgery Market Professional Survey Report 2018-2025: Merz Pharma, Alma Lasers, Blue Plastic Surgery, Salmon Creek Plastic Surgery, Sientra and Others

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Cosmetic surgery is process of enhancing ones appearance with the help of medical and surgical techniques. The cosmetic surgery includes surgeries for hair removal, breast uplift, eyelid surgery, tummy tuck, and dermal fillers surgeries among other.Increasing aesthetic attentiveness among the population and growing geriatric people and their desire of looking attractive are the major drivers which are likely to boost the growth of cosmetic surgery market. Escalating technological advancements and healthcare spending, and varying lifestyle are likely to add new opportunities for this market in the coming years.FREE | Request Sample Copy is Available atThe Global Cosmetic Surgery Market Analysis to 2025 is a specialized and in-depth study of the cosmetic surgery industry with a focus on the global market trend. The report aims to provide an overview of global cosmetic surgery market with detailed market segmentation by products, procedures, and geography. The global cosmetic surgery market is expected to witness high growth during the forecast period. The report provides key statistics on the market status of the leading market players and offers key trends and opportunities in the market.The report provides a detailed overview on the industry including both qualitative and quantitative information. It provides overview and forecast of the global cosmetic surgery market based on products and procedures. It also provides market size and forecast till 2025 for overall cosmetic surgery market with respect to five major regions, namely; North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific (APAC), Middle East and Africa (MEA) and South & Central America. The market by each region is later sub-segmented by respective countries and segments. The report covers analysis and forecast of 13 countries globally along with current trend and opportunities prevailing in the region.Inquire for Detail Facts and Figures atThe report analyzes factors affecting market from both demand and supply side and further evaluates market dynamics effecting the market during the forecast period i.e., drivers, restraints, opportunities, and future trend. The report also provides exhaustive PEST analysis for all five regions namely; North America, Europe, APAC, MEA and South & Central America after evaluating political, economic, social and technological factors effecting the market in these regions.The report also includes the profiles of key cosmetic surgery manufacturing companies along with their SWOT analysis and market strategies. In addition, the report focuses on leading industry players with information such as company profiles, products and services offered, financial information of last 3 years, key development in past five years.Some of the key players influencing the market are Johnson & Johnson Services, Inc., Alma Lasers, Merz Pharma, Allergan, Cynosure, Inc., Sientra, Inc., Galderma S.A., Valeant, Blue Plastic Surgery, and Salmon Creek Plastic Surgery among others.Access Complete Report With TOC and Company Profiles atContact Us:Call: +1-646-491-9876Email: sales@theinsightpartners.comAbout Us:The Insight Partners is a one stop industry research provider of actionable intelligence. We help our clients in getting solutions to their research requirements through our syndicated and consulting research services. We are a specialist in Technology, Healthcare, Manufacturing, Automotive and Defense.533, 5th Floor, Amanora Chambers,Amanora Township, East Block,Kharadi Road, Hadapsar, Pune-411028Latest Trend and Development of Learning Management Systems (LMS) Market in Global Industry 2018-2024

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Albany, NY, 22nd March : Recent research and the current scenario as well as future market potential of "Learning Management Systems (LMS) Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends, and Forecast 2016 - 2024" globally.The learning management system (LMS) market report provides analysis for the period 20142024, wherein the period from 2016 to 2024 is the forecast and 2015 is the base year.Get PDF for more Professional and Technical insights @The report covers all the major trends and technologies playing a key role in the LMS markets growth over the forecast period. It also highlights the drivers, restraints, and opportunities expected to influence the markets growth during the said period in terms of revenue (in US$ Mn), across the geographies including North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa, and South America.North America comprises of the U.S., Canada and rest of North America, while the Europe region covers the Scandinavia, Germany, and rest of Europe. The report further provides the in-depth analysis for countries in Scandinavia that include Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. Furthermore, the Asia Pacific region is divided into China, India, and rest of Asia Pacific. While the Middle East and Africa region includes Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), South Africa, and rest of Middle East and Africa. South America region provides the market size for Brazil, Argentina, and rest of South America.The report provides key market indicators that have a strong impact on LMS market. The market overview section of the report outlines the drivers, restraints, and opportunities that influence the current nature and future standing of this market. The report represents the market attractiveness for segments that include deployment type, user group, and module depending of various factor that influence the adoption of LMS. Moreover, the report provides an overview of the various strategies of key players in the market.Learning Management Systems Market: SegmentationThe report segments the global LMS market on the basis of deployment into on-premise and hosted. Furthermore, on the basis of modules the LMS market is divided into administration, content delivery and management, progress management, interaction and integration technologies, user management, and others (access management and reporting). Depending on the user group, the LMS market is dived into education and corporate sector. Furthermore, the education user group is further segmented into kindergarten, K-12, and higher education.The report provides industry evolution to understand the development of LMS over the years. Considering the competition in the market, supply-demand ratio, and macro and micro economic factors the prices are estimated for the forecast period. Thus, the report provides in-depth cross-segment analysis of the LMS market and classifies it at various levels, providing valuable insights at the macro and micro levels. Moreover, the report analyses potential opportunities for LMS in different regions and countries considering the macro and micro factors expected to aid the LMS market.View Complete TOC with tables & Figures @Learning Management Systems Market: Competitive LandscapeThe report also highlights the competitive landscape of the LMS market, positioning all the major players according to their geographic presence, solutions/services offered, focus on research and development, and key recent developments. Furthermore, global market share of the major players are estimated depending on the revenue generated from LMS in 2015. The comprehensive LMS market estimates are the result of our in-depth secondary research, primary interviews, and in-house expert panel reviews. These market estimates have been analyzed by taking into account the impact of different political, social, economic, technological, and legal factors along with the current market dynamics affecting the LMS markets growth.The major companies profiled in LMS market study include ACS Technologies Group, Inc., Blackboard Inc., Cornerstone Ondemand, Inc., IST AB, IBM Corporation, McGraw-Hill Education, Oracle Corporation, Saba Software, Inc., SAP SE, Skillsoft Limited, Upside Learning Solutions Pvt. Ltd., and Instructure, Inc. Details such as financials, business strategies, recent developments, and other such strategic information pertaining to these players have been duly provided as part of company profiling.The Learning Management System market is segmented as below:Learning Management Systems MarketBy DeploymentOn-premiseHostedBy ModuleAdministrationContent Delivery and ManagementProgress ManagementInteraction and Integration TechnologiesUser ManagementOthersBy User GroupEducationKindergartenK-12Higher EducationCorporateBy GeographyNorth AmericaThe U.S.CanadaRest of North AmericaEuropeScandinaviaNorwaySwedenDenmarkFinlandGermanyRest of EuropeAsia PacificChinaIndiaRest of Asia PacificMiddle East and AfricaGCC CountriesSouth AfricaBrowse Report @Rest of Middle East and AfricaSouth AmericaBrazilArgentinaRest of South AmericaResearchMoz is the one stop online destination to find and buy market research reports & Industry Analysis. We fulfill all your research needs spanning across industry verticals with our huge collection of market research reports. We provide our services to all sizes of organizations and across all industry verticals and markets. Our Research Coordinators have in-depth knowledge of reports as well as publishers and will assist you in making an informed decision by giving you unbiased and deep insights on which reports will satisfy your needs at the best price.ResearchMozMr. Nachiket Ghumare,90 State Street, Albany NY, United States - 12207Tel: +1-518-621-2074USA-Canada Toll Free: 866-997-4948Email: sales@researchmoz.usFollow us on LinkedIn @Follow me on :Digital Asset Management (DAM) Software Market Scope, Growth Opportunity 2018-2025 Value and Volume by Players,Types and Applications

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The global Digital Asset Management (DAM) Software market report, offers in-depth insights, revenue details, and other vital information regarding the global Digital Asset Management (DAM) Software market and the various trends, drivers, restraints, opportunities, and threats in the target market till 2025. The report also offers insightful and detailed information regarding the various key players operating in the global Digital Asset Management (DAM) Software market, and their financials, apart from strategies, acquisitions & mergers, and market footprint. The global Digital Asset Management (DAM) Software market is segmented on the basis of security type, component, application area, and region.Product innovation has become a vital concept for companies looking to explore new technology horizons. We witness daily how organizations use it to drive new methods of engagement and digital operations and execution.A report by Market Research Reports (MRR) sheds light on the dynamics that have contributed to the growth of the market. The report also encapsulates several factors that are expected to propel the market in the coming years. A pragmatic methodology has been employed to gauge several market indicators such as growth rate, market value, and regional market share.Get the sample copy report:Key topics covered in this report-Market size and forecast till 2025-Top factors driving the market growth-Key players and their market shares-Market growth opportunity-Competitive vendor landscape-Geographical segmentation and analysis-Top trends in the marketThis report studies the global Digital Asset Management (DAM) Software market, analyzes and researches the Digital Asset Management (DAM) Software development status and forecast in United States, EU, Japan, China, India and Southeast Asia. This report focuses on the top players in global market, likeADAM Software NV (Belgium)Adobe Systems Incorporated (USA)Canto, Inc. (USA)CELUM GmbH (Austria)Cognizant Technology Solutions Corporation (USA)EMC Corporation (USA)Extensis (USA)Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (USA)MediaBeacon, Inc. (USA)North Plains Systems Corp. (Canada)Nuxeo (USA)OpenText Corp (Canada)Oracle Corporation (USA)QBNK Company AB (Sweden)Market segment by Regions/Countries, this report coversUnited StatesEUJapanChinaIndiaSoutheast AsiaMarket segment by Type, the product can be split intoBrand Asset Management SystemsLibrary Asset Management SystemsProduction Asset Management SystemsOn Premise DAMs SoftwareDAMS Software-as-a-ServiceMarket segment by Application, the market can be split intoMedia IndustryPubling IndustryOthersRequest for complete TOC of this report:Table of Contents2018-2025 Digital Asset Management (DAM) Software Report on Global and United States Market, Status and Forecast, by Players, Types and Applications1 Industry Overview of Digital Asset Management (DAM) Software1.1 Digital Asset Management (DAM) Software Market Overview1.1.1 Digital Asset Management (DAM) Software Product Scope1.1.2 Market Status and Outlook1.2 Global Digital Asset Management (DAM) Software Market Size and Analysis by Regions1.2.1 United States1.2.2 EU1.2.3 Japan1.2.4 China1.2.5 India1.2.6 Southeast Asia1.3 Digital Asset Management (DAM) Software Market by Type1.3.1 Brand Asset Management Systems1.3.2 Library Asset Management Systems1.3.3 Production Asset Management Systems1.3.4 On Premise DAMs Software1.3.5 DAMS Software-as-a-Service1.4 Digital Asset Management (DAM) Software Market by End Users/Application1.4.1 Media Industry1.4.2 Publing Industry1.4.3 Others2 Global Digital Asset Management (DAM) Software Competition Analysis by Players2.1 Digital Asset Management (DAM) Software Market Size (Value) by Players (2017 and 2018)2.2 Competitive Status and Trend2.2.1 Market Concentration Rate2.2.2 Product/Service Differences2.2.3 New Entrants2.2.4 The Technology Trends in Future3 Company (Top Players) Profiles3.1 ADAM Software NV (Belgium)3.1.1 Company Profile3.1.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.1.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.1.4 Digital Asset Management (DAM) Software Revenue (Value) (2013-2018)3.1.5 Recent Developments3.2 Adobe Systems Incorporated (USA)3.2.1 Company Profile3.2.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.2.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.2.4 Digital Asset Management (DAM) Software Revenue (Value) (2013-2018)3.2.5 Recent Developments3.3 Canto, Inc. (USA)3.3.1 Company Profile3.3.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.3.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.3.4 Digital Asset Management (DAM) Software Revenue (Value) (2013-2018)3.3.5 Recent Developments3.4 CELUM GmbH (Austria)3.4.1 Company Profile3.4.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.4.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.4.4 Digital Asset Management (DAM) Software Revenue (Value) (2013-2018)3.4.5 Recent Developments3.5 Cognizant Technology Solutions Corporation (USA)3.5.1 Company Profile3.5.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.5.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.5.4 Digital Asset Management (DAM) Software Revenue (Value) (2013-2018)3.5.5 Recent Developments3.6 EMC Corporation (USA)3.6.1 Company Profile3.6.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.6.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.6.4 Digital Asset Management (DAM) Software Revenue (Value) (2013-2018)3.6.5 Recent Developments3.7 Extensis (USA)3.7.1 Company Profile3.7.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.7.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.7.4 Digital Asset Management (DAM) Software Revenue (Value) (2013-2018)3.7.5 Recent Developments3.8 Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (USA)3.8.1 Company Profile3.8.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.8.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.8.4 Digital Asset Management (DAM) Software Revenue (Value) (2013-2018)3.8.5 Recent Developments3.9 MediaBeacon, Inc. (USA)3.9.1 Company Profile3.9.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.9.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.9.4 Digital Asset Management (DAM) Software Revenue (Value) (2013-2018)3.9.5 Recent Developments3.10 North Plains Systems Corp. (Canada)3.10.1 Company Profile3.10.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.10.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.10.4 Digital Asset Management (DAM) Software Revenue (Value) (2013-2018)3.10.5 Recent Developments3.11 Nuxeo (USA)3.12 OpenText Corp (Canada)3.13 Oracle Corporation (USA)3.14 QBNK Company AB (Sweden)4 Global Digital Asset Management (DAM) Software Market Size by Type and Application (2013-2018)4.1 Global Digital Asset Management (DAM) Software Market Size by Type (2013-2018)4.2 Global Digital Asset Management (DAM) Software Market Size by Application (2013-2018)4.3 Potential Application of Digital Asset Management (DAM) Software in Future4.4 Top Consumer/End Users of Digital Asset Management (DAM) Software5 United States Digital Asset Management (DAM) Software Development Status and Outlook5.1 United States Digital Asset Management (DAM) Software Market Size (2013-2018)5.2 United States Digital Asset Management (DAM) Software Market Size and Market Share by Players (2017 and 2018)6 EU Digital Asset Management (DAM) Software Development Status and Outlook6.1 EU Digital Asset Management (DAM) Software Market Size (2013-2018)6.2 EU Digital Asset Management (DAM) Software Market Size and Market Share by Players (2017 and 2018)Request for enquiry:MRRbiz supports your business intelligence needs with over 700,000 market research reports, company profiles, data books, and regional market data sheets in its repository.State Tower90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207United StatesToll Free: 866-997-4948(USA-Canada)Tel: +1-518-621-2074E: sales@marketresearchreports.bizCyber Security Software Global Market 2018 Development Trend, Segmentation and Industry Forecasts to 2023

Cyber Security Software Market

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SummaryWiseGuyReports.com adds Cyber Security Software Market 2018 Global Analysis, Growth, Trends and Opportunities Research Report Forecasting to 2023 reports to its database.This report provides in depth study of Cyber Security Software Market using SWOT analysis i.e. Strength, Weakness, Opportunities and Threat to the organization. The Cyber Security Software Market report also provides an in-depth survey of key players in the market which is based on the various objectives of an organization such as profiling, the product outline, the quantity of production, required raw material, and the financial health of the organization.This report studies the global Cyber Security Software market, analyzes and researches the Cyber Security Software development status and forecast in United States, EU, Japan, China, India and Southeast Asia. This report focuses on the top players in global market, likeDXC Technology CompanyControl Risks Group HoldingsHappiest MindsEYMimecastDXC Technology CompanyLockheed MartinSophosSymantecSera-BrynnClearwater ComplianceIBM SecurityCiscoRaytheon CyberBAE SystemsDigital DefenseRapid7Market segment by Regions/Countries, this report coversUnited StatesEUJapanChinaIndiaSoutheast AsiaMarket segment by Type, the product can be split intoBasic VersionAdvanced VersionProfessional VersionMarket segment by Application, Cyber Security Software can be split intoHouseholdSchoolCommercial UseRequest a Sample Report @Major Key Points in Table of ContentGlobal Cyber Security Software Market Size, Status and Forecast 20251 Industry Overview of Cyber Security Software1.1 Cyber Security Software Market Overview1.1.1 Cyber Security Software Product Scope1.1.2 Market Status and Outlook1.2 Global Cyber Security Software Market Size and Analysis by Regions (2013-2018)1.2.1 United States1.2.2 EU1.2.3 Japan1.2.4 China1.2.5 India1.2.6 Southeast Asia1.3 Cyber Security Software Market by Type1.3.1 Basic Version1.3.2 Advanced Version1.3.3 Professional Version1.4 Cyber Security Software Market by End Users/Application1.4.1 Household1.4.2 School1.4.3 Commercial Use2 Global Cyber Security Software Competition Analysis by Players2.1 Cyber Security Software Market Size (Value) by Players (2013-2018)2.2 Competitive Status and Trend2.2.1 Market Concentration Rate2.2.2 Product/Service Differences2.2.3 New Entrants2.2.4 The Technology Trends in Future3 Company (Top Players) Profiles3.1 DXC Technology Company3.1.1 Company Profile3.1.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.1.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.1.4 Cyber Security Software Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.1.5 Recent Developments3.2 Control Risks Group Holdings3.2.1 Company Profile3.2.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.2.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.2.4 Cyber Security Software Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.2.5 Recent Developments3.3 Happiest Minds3.3.1 Company Profile3.3.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.3.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.3.4 Cyber Security Software Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.3.5 Recent Developments3.4 EY3.4.1 Company Profile3.4.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.4.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.4.4 Cyber Security Software Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.4.5 Recent Developments3.5 Mimecast3.5.1 Company Profile3.5.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.5.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.5.4 Cyber Security Software Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.5.5 Recent Developments3.6 DXC Technology Company3.6.1 Company Profile3.6.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.6.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.6.4 Cyber Security Software Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.6.5 Recent Developments3.7 Lockheed Martin3.7.1 Company Profile3.7.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.7.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.7.4 Cyber Security Software Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.7.5 Recent Developments3.8 Sophos3.8.1 Company Profile3.8.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.8.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.8.4 Cyber Security Software Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.8.5 Recent Developments3.9 Symantec3.9.1 Company Profile3.9.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.9.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.9.4 Cyber Security Software Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.9.5 Recent Developments3.10 Sera-Brynn3.10.1 Company Profile3.10.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.10.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.10.4 Cyber Security Software Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.10.5 Recent Developments3.11 Clearwater Compliance3.12 IBM Security3.13 Cisco3.14 Raytheon Cyber3.15 BAE Systems3.16 Digital Defense3.17 Rapid74 Global Cyber Security Software Market Size by Type and Application (2013-2018)4.1 Global Cyber Security Software Market Size by Type (2013-2018)4.2 Global Cyber Security Software Market Size by Application (2013-2018)4.3 Potential Application of Cyber Security Software in Future4.4 Top Consumer/End Users of Cyber Security SoftwareAt any Query @Continued....Contact Us: sales@wiseguyreports.comPh: +1-646-845-9349 (US) ; Ph: +44 208 133 9349 (UK)ABOUT US:Wise Guy Reports is part of the Wise Guy Consultants Pvt. Ltd. and offers premium progressive statistical surveying, market research reports, analysis & forecast data for industries and governments around the globe. Wise Guy Reports features an exhaustive list of market research reports from hundreds of publishers worldwide. We boast a database spanning virtually every market category and an even more comprehensive collection of market research reports under these categories and sub-categories.ADDRESS:WISE GUY RESEARCH CONSULTANTS PVT LTDOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, HadapsarPune - 411028Maharashtra, IndiaExclusive Market Study Estimates that Global Sulphur Bentonite Market will Grow at 5.0% CAGR During 2017  2027

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Future Market Insights (FMI) has published a new research report titled Sulphur Bentonite Market: Global Industry Analysis 2012-2016 and Opportunity Assessment 2017-2027. The report states that the global sulphur bentonite market is expected to foresee a lucrative future owing to the rising concerns regarding balanced plant nutrition. A substantial increase in the production of crop and crop yield with the use of sulphur bentonite is anticipated to create traction in the global market in the coming years. According to FMI, the global sulphur bentonite market is expected to witness a CAGR of 5.0% over the course of the forecast period.Request For Report Sample@Sulphur Deficiency in Developing Regions to Boost DemandGrowing sulphur deficiency in regions such as Asia Pacific and Latin America is driving the demand for sulphur bentonite. Over the recent past, key sulphur consuming countries like China have witnessed relatively slow economic growth. This, coupled with regulations pertaining to the permissible limit of sulphur especially in marine fuel (IMO) among other products is expected to further widen the gap between elemental sulphur production and consumption at a global level. On the Asia Pacific sulphur bentonite market front, a number of researches have verified the advantages of sulphur micronutrients to improve the yield of a number of cereals, crops, pulses, fruits, vegetables, etc. Studies have proved the advantages of sulphur micronutrients to improve the yield of a number of cereals, crops, pulses, fruits, and vegetables. Government subsidies are promoting the use of conventional sulphur based fertilisers such as SSP, Ammonium Phosphate Sulphate (APS), and Ammonium Sulphate (AS). On the other hand, speciality fertilisers such as sulphur bentonite are non-subsidised and are available at premium prices. Moreover, sulphur bentonite is also imported from other countries such as UAE, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and the U.S. Thus, the products are available at a relatively higher price due to import duties and taxes.Higher Usage of Sulphur Bentonite Across Different Agricultural PlantationsSulphur bentonite is highly used in harvests such as oilseeds, cereals and crops, fruits and vegetables, and others. Sulphur bentonite is used to increase oil content and to improve yield for major oilseeds including rapeseed, sunflower, groundnut, soybean etc. Sulphur bentonite has also provided excellent results after being used on cereals such as corn, rice, wheat and other crops such as cotton, pulses etc. Among fruits and vegetables, sulphur bentonite is increasingly being used to improve the odour and taste for crops such as onion, ginger, and garlic; and fruits such as citrus fruits, grapes, and oranges The other applications of sulphur bentonite include use in lawns, turf, trees and other recreational activities.Request For Report Table of Content (TOC):Vendors to Explore More Application AreasThe need of the hour for the manufacturers of sulphur bentonite is to explore more manufacturing areas and enhance their products to fit these areas. Investment in research and development is the core focus of top market players at present. Some of the companies operating in the market are Tiger-Sul Inc., NEAIS (National Establishment for Agricultural and Industrial Sulphur), H Sulphur Corp., Coromandel International Limited, National Fertilizer Limited, Deepak Fertilizers and Petrochemicals, and Coogee Chemicals Pty Ltd., among others.ABOUT US:Future Market Insights (FMI) is a leading market intelligence and consulting firm. We deliver syndicated research reports, custom research reports and consulting services, which are personalized in nature. FMI delivers a complete packaged solution, which combines current market intelligence, statistical anecdotes, technology inputs, valuable growth insights, an aerial view of the competitive framework, and future market trends.CONTACT:Future Market Insights616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage, NY 10989,United StatesT: +1-347-918-3531F: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite:Research of Narrowband IoT Chipset Market in Global Industry : Share, Trends and Application 2018-2024

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Albany, NY, 22nd March : Recent research and the current scenario as well as future market potential of "Narrowband IoT Chipset Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends and Forecast 2016 - 2024" globally.The world narrowband IoT chipset market is foretold to offer a host of benefits and birth impressive use cases which could answer for the cellular IoT troubles. Vendors will be able to produce service-level agreements suitable for certain services such as those related to healthcare.Get PDF for more Professional and Technical insights @Vodafone has stated that its upgrade costs could be kept low with the move to narrowband IoT. With the usage of licensed spectrum, narrowband IoT strongly competes with other low-power WAN (LPWAN) technologies such as LoRa and Sigfox. Besides this, narrowband IoT is pampered with a wider base of established vendors and telecom operators.The global narrowband IoT chipset market could be segmented on the basis of application, device, stationing, and technology. All of the key areas of the market are broadly discussed so as to gain a deep insight into the industry.The report on the international narrowband IoT chipset market is a profound study of the industry which presents some of the most conclusive factors deemed significant for any participant looking to cement its position.Global Narrowband IoT Chipset Market: Trends and OpportunitiesThe demand in the world narrowband IoT chipset market is envisaged to testify a telling growth rate on the back of a commanding network coverage and more number of connections provided with the help of narrowband IoT technology. However, the global market is not dependent on just one or two growth factors. The surge in the need for cellular IoT networks is anticipated to raise the bar of growth. On an international platform, the demand could gain strength as consumers become aware of the lower component costs and improvised penetration coverage offered by the narrowband IoT technology.Make An Enquiry About TOC with tables & Figures @The shortfall of standardization, high operational expenditure, fragmented nature of the market, and technological dependence for application are the main factors prognosticated to put the brakes on the growth of the narrowband IoT chipset industry. Nevertheless, vendors in the global narrowband IoT chipset market can keep their heads up with the surge in Internet penetration and an augmenting employment of the narrowband IoT technology.Global Narrowband IoT Chipset Market: Geographical StudySome of the top aspects of a significant growth expected on the part of the Asia Pacific narrowband IoT chipset market are the enhancement of the IoT technology furthered with the help of government grants and rapid rise of Internet application. As a result, the region is predicted to record a higher advancement in the global market. South Korea, India, Japan, and China could be the top countries primed for a convincing growth in Asia Pacific.North America is prophesied to secure a lions share in the global narrowband IoT chipset market as the government plans to develop smart cities with mammoth investments in place. Another major factor deemed responsible for the heavy growth in North America could be the presence of sundry communication networks resulting from vast Internet penetration.Global Narrowband IoT Chipset Market: CompetitionAmong others, Vodafone Group PLC, U-Blox Holding AG, Ericsson, MistBase AB, and Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. are foretold to present themselves as major players in the international narrowband IoT chipset market. The report presents a detailed profiling of each player along with an analysis of their key developments and future plans.Intel XMM 7115 is expected to be a breakthrough modem designed to support the first batch of industrial applications and devices based on narrowband IoT. Intel has taken confident strides forward for exploiting opportunities in the IoT market by collaborating with Nokia and Ericsson and achieving momentum for its long-term evolution (LTE) portfolio.Market segmentation based on geography:North AmericaAsia PacificEuropeRest of the WorldBrowse Report @This report gives access to decisive data, such as:Market growth driversFactors limiting market growthCurrent market trendsMarket structureMarket projections for the coming yearsResearchMoz is the one stop online destination to find and buy market research reports & Industry Analysis. We fulfill all your research needs spanning across industry verticals with our huge collection of market research reports. We provide our services to all sizes of organizations and across all industry verticals and markets. Our Research Coordinators have in-depth knowledge of reports as well as publishers and will assist you in making an informed decision by giving you unbiased and deep insights on which reports will satisfy your needs at the best price.ResearchMozMr. Nachiket Ghumare,90 State Street, Albany NY, United States - 12207Tel: +1-518-621-2074USA-Canada Toll Free: 866-997-4948Email: sales@researchmoz.usFollow us on LinkedIn @Follow me on :Growth of SaaS-based HRM Market in Global Industry : Trends and Application 2018-2024

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Albany, NY, 22nd March : Recent research and the current scenario as well as future market potential of "SaaS-based HRM Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends and Forecast 2016 - 2024" globally.Software as a Service (SaaS) based human resource management (HRM) refers to the human resource software operated in cloud computing environment. SaaS-based HRM applications enables to manage and control aspects of human resource activities to maintain all employees data from joining to retirement.Get PDF for more Professional and Technical insights @In addition, SaaS-based HRM applications include human resource activities such as application tracking, directory management, electronic forms processing, time & attendance management, and others such as leave management, and payroll management. SaaS-based HRM applications enables to enhance the productivity of human resource staff by offering self-service web interfaces. Moreover, SaaS-based HRM allows organization to access and manage their employee information effectively on a real time basis. Many software development companies and vendors are emphasizing on enhancement of SaaS-based HRM applications by integrating value added functionalities such as workforce analytics, human resource compliance management tools, and other features such as process design control.The global SaaS-based HRM market is predominantly driven by the increasing demand for cost saving solutions in HRM. The market demand is also supported by the growing importance for the deployment of employee-centric systems to enhance the human resource activities. Furthermore, the increasing workforce globalization is anticipated to supplement the large-scale adoption of SaaS-based HRM application by small and large enterprises worldwide. The growing demand for enhanced architectures for recruiting and talent functions is leading to the increasing implementations of SaaS-based HRM models such as employee verification, employment application processing, and employee benefit administration. Presently, internet connectivity is an essential requirement for SaaS-based HRM, as without internet accessibility it is challenging to operate the SaaS-based HRM application. In addition, security of employees information is a major concern in SaaS-based HRM application as the data is stored on cloud platform and vulnerable to the cyber intrusion. All these factors related to connectivity and data security are expected to restrain the growth of SaaS-based HRM market during the forecast period. The increasing automation and cost savings in human resource activities across the organizations are anticipated to provide prominent opportunities for SaaS-based HRM market in the long-term.Global SaaS-based HRM market is categorized by enterprise size, by solution, by industry, and by geography. By enterprise size, SaaS-based HRM market has been classified into small and middle enterprise, and large enterprises. Based on solution, SaaS-based HRM market is classified into time & attendance management, absence management, HR & payroll, integrated solutions, and others (scheduling, hiring). By industry, SaaS-based HRM market is segmented into IT and telecom, manufacturing, healthcare, banking, financial services & insurance (BFSI), and others (government, logistics, etc.). On the basis of geography, SaaS-based HRM market is divided into Europe, North America, Asia Pacific, South America and Middle East & Africa. The use of SaaS-based HRM software across North America and Europe is increasing primarily due to growing organizations preferences towards the automation and cost reduction in human resource activities. In addition, SaaS-based HRM market is anticipated to witness prominent growth due to rising emphasize on implementation of employee-centric systems in human resource activities across Asia Pacific and Middle East & Africa.Make An Enquiry About TOC with tables & Figures @The major players in global SaaS-based HRM market include Talentsoft SA, Cezanne HR Ltd., CloudPay, Inc., Oracle Corporation, Benrekia.com, SAP SE, Kronos, Inc., Ceridian HCM, Inc., ADP, LLC, Ascentis Corporation, and The Ultimate Software Group, Inc.The report offers a comprehensive evaluation of the market. It does so via in-depth qualitative insights, historical data, and verifiable projections about market size. The projections featured in the report have been derived using proven research methodologies and assumptions. By doing so, the research report serves as a repository of analysis and information for every facet of the market, including but not limited to: Regional markets, technology, types, and applications.The study is a source of reliable data on:Market segments and sub-segmentsMarket trends and dynamicsSupply and demandMarket sizeCurrent trends/opportunities/challengesCompetitive landscapeTechnological breakthroughsValue chain and stakeholder analysisThe regional analysis covers:North America (U.S. and Canada)Latin America (Mexico, Brazil, Peru, Chile, and others)Western Europe (Germany, U.K., France, Spain, Italy, Nordic countries, Belgium, Netherlands, and Luxembourg)Eastern Europe (Poland and Russia)Asia Pacific (China, India, Japan, ASEAN, Australia, and New Zealand)Middle East and Africa (GCC, Southern Africa, and North Africa)The report has been compiled through extensive primary research (through interviews, surveys, and observations of seasoned analysts) and secondary research (which entails reputable paid sources, trade journals, and industry body databases). The report also features a complete qualitative and quantitative assessment by analyzing data gathered from industry analysts and market participants across key points in the industrys value chain.Browse Report @A separate analysis of prevailing trends in the parent market, macro- and micro-economic indicators, and regulations and mandates is included under the purview of the study. By doing so, the report projects the attractiveness of each major segment over the forecast period.ResearchMoz is the one stop online destination to find and buy market research reports & Industry Analysis. We fulfill all your research needs spanning across industry verticals with our huge collection of market research reports. We provide our services to all sizes of organizations and across all industry verticals and markets. Our Research Coordinators have in-depth knowledge of reports as well as publishers and will assist you in making an informed decision by giving you unbiased and deep insights on which reports will satisfy your needs at the best price.ResearchMozMr. Nachiket Ghumare,90 State Street, Albany NY, United States - 12207Tel: +1-518-621-2074USA-Canada Toll Free: 866-997-4948Email: sales@researchmoz.usFollow us on LinkedIn @Follow me on :Latest Report on: RF Signal Generators Market 2018-2025 Anritsu, Fortive, Rohde & Schwarz

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A market study "Global RF Signal Generators Market" examines the performance of the RF Signal Generators market 2018. It encloses an in-depth Research of the RF Signal Generators market state and the competitive landscape globally. This report analyzes the potential of RF Signal Generators market in the present and the future prospects from various angles in detail.The Global RF Signal Generators Market 2018 report includes RF Signal Generators market Revenue, market Share, RF Signal Generators industry volume, market Trends, RF Signal Generators Growth aspects. A wide range of applications, Utilization ratio, Supply and demand analysis are also consist in the report. It shows manufacturing capacity, RF Signal Generators Price during the Forecast period from 2018 to 2022.To Get Sample Report Click Here:Manufacturers Analysis and Top Sellers of Global RF Signal Generators Market 2018 :1. Anritsu2. Fortive3. Keysight4. Rohde & Schwarz5. Teradyne6. Yokogawa7. Teledyne8. Cobham9. Cobham10. Giga-tronics11. Chroma12. Good Will Instruments13. B&K PrecisionRF Signal Generators Market : By ApplicationTelecommunicationsConsumer ElectronicsAutomotiveAerospace & DefenseIndustrialMedicalResearch & EducationRF Signal Generators Market : By TypeBenchtopPortableModularFirstly, the report covers the top RF Signal Generators manufacturing industry players from regions like United States, EU, Japan, and China. It also characterizes the market based on geological regions.Further, the RF Signal Generators report gives information on the company profile, market share and contact details along with value chain analysis of RF Signal Generators industry, RF Signal Generators industry rules and policies, circumstances driving the growth of the market and compulsion blocking the growth. RF Signal Generators Market development scope and various business strategies are also mentioned in this report.Browse Full Report Here:The RF Signal Generators research report includes the products that are currently in demand and available in the market along with their cost breakup, manufacturing volume, import/export scheme and contribution to the RF Signal Generators market revenue worldwide.Finally, RF Signal Generators market report gives you details about the market research findings and conclusion which helps you to develop profitable market strategies to gain competitive advantage.About Usqyresearchstore.com is a leading market intelligence team which making extensive reports that cover all the necessary details about the market assessments such as major technological improvement in the industry.Contact US:5001 Spring Valley Rd #400,Dallas,TX 75244, USAContact No. +1-214-661-1669Email: sales@qyresearchstore.comWood Coatings Market to Reflect Steadfast Expansion During 2014 - 2020

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Wood coatings refer to the process of refining or protecting a wooden surface, especially in the production of furniture. Wood coating applications include: interior wood, small furniture, panels, tables, cupboards, chairs, office furniture, kitchen furniture, doors and staircases among others. There are generally three types of wood coating: evaporative, reactive and coalescing. Wood coating starts with sanding either by hand or scraping. Imperfections or nail holes on the surface may be filled using wood filler. Often, the wood's color is changed by staining, bleaching, or any other techniques. Once the wood surface is prepared and stained, the coating is applied. It usually consists of several coats of shellac, drying oil, paint, wax or lacquer. Finally, the surface may be polished using wool, steel, rotten stone or other materials, depending on the shine desired. In addition, a final coat of wax is applied over the finish to add a degree of protection.Furniture, decking, and siding are the three largest applications in value terms. However, smaller doors, windows and cabinet applications are expected to achieve faster growth in the near future. Paint is the dominant wood protection product used on siding, windows and doors, but stains and sealers are more widely utilized on cabinets, decks, furniture, and flooring. Residential end-user is the largest market for wood protection products, driven by maintenance demand for items such as fences, siding and decks. Non-residential and non-building uses account for a much smaller market for wood protection products.Request For Report Sample@The growth in the housing market is the primary driver for the wood coatings market. Homeowners are investing more in the upkeep of their decks, fences, floors and siding. A well maintained home adds value of the home and saves money in the long term. In addition, stringent regulations, rising competition, growth in unique formulations and new product developments are some of the factors stimulating the growth of wood coatings market. However, availability of cheaper and quality substitutes, such as wood composites and plastic wood could hamper the growth of this market. These alternative are often more durable and require less maintenance as compared to wood products. Although substitutes are available, wood is a primary choice for commercial and residential purposes due to wide availably in the market. Wood coatings account for the majority of the wood protection demand with paints and stains holding the largest shares. In contrast, preservatives, which are applied to lumber by the wood treatment companies, account for smaller portion of wood protection demand.Asia Pacific is currently the largest market for wood coatings, followed by Europe, North America and Rest of the world (RoW). Sustained demand from the developed markets and burgeoning demand from emerging economies will continue to drive the wood coating market. The industry is witnessing a major shift of key market players from Europe and the U.S. to the emerging economies of Asia Pacific, comprising of China and India.Request For Report Table of Content (TOC):Some of the key players in this market are Akzo Nobel Coatings nv (Netherlands), PPG Industries Inc. (U.S.), Sherwin-Williams Co. (U.S.), DuPont Coatings and Color Technologies Group (U.S.), ICI Paints (UK), BASF Coatings AG (Germany), Valspar Corp. (U.S.), Nippon Paint Co. Ltd. (Japan), Dow Coating Materials (U.S.) and Kansai Paint Co. Ltd. (Japan) among others. Dow Coating Materials has launched two new acrylic binders for the wood coatings: EXP-4414 and EXP-77. According to the company, the new binders offer improved block, print and dirt pickup resistance and improved hardness development when applied to wood.ABOUT US:Future Market Insights (FMI) is a leading market intelligence and consulting firm. We deliver syndicated research reports, custom research reports and consulting services, which are personalized in nature. FMI delivers a complete packaged solution, which combines current market intelligence, statistical anecdotes, technology inputs, valuable growth insights, an aerial view of the competitive framework, and future market trends.CONTACT:Future Market Insights616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage, NY 10989,United StatesT: +1-347-918-3531F: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite:Propylene Glycol Market to Actively Foray into Emerging Consumer Marketplaces During 2014 - 2020

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Propylene glycol is a chemical that is produced by reaction of propylene oxide with water. It is a colorless, clear, almost odorless, viscous liquid which has a faint sweet taste. Propylene glycol is miscible with water, chloroform, and acetone and is hygroscopic in nature. It is chemically neutral that does not react with other substances. This property of propylene glycol makes it useful in mixing contrasting elements such as perfumes. Unique features of propylene glycol makes it useful in a wide variety of applications. It is used as solvent, holds and dissolves active ingredients equally in the medium, acts as an emulsifier and excipient, reduced freezing point and many more. Propylene glycol is manufactured in two grades namely, industrial or technical grade and USD/EP grade. It designates the requirements for the U.S. and European Pharmacopeia, but it has use in the personal care, food and feed applications. Dipropylene glycol is used in unsaturated polyester resins and personal care products and tripropylene glycol has application in acrylates and polyurethanes.Propylene glycol is used for many industrial and consumer applications such as feed, food and beverages, pharmaceutical and cosmetic among others. The major consumers of polypropylene glycol include the pharmaceutical and food and beverage industry, which account for major share in the market. Propylene glycol is also used as a humectant, preservative in tobacco and food products, solvents and as a major constituent of e-liquid that is used in electric cigarettes with vegetable glycerin. In case of food and consumables, propylene glycol is considered to be safe by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. As a solvent, in pharmaceutical which includes injectible, oral and topical formulations namely lorazepam, diazepam donot dissolve in water. In order to meet environment regulations or standards the industry is now focusing on developing bio-based propylene glycol. The major companies such as Cargill, ADM and The Dow Chemical company are manufacturing propylene glycol from glycerin.Request For Report Sample@About half of the propylene glycol produced is been used as a chemical feedstock to manufacture unsaturated polyester resins. The industrial applications of propylene glycol are to manufacture paints and coatings, resins and plastics, used as an intermediate to manufacture other chemical substances such as unsaturated polyester resins that are used in pipes or windmill blades and bath and kitchenware. Moreover, it has a significant role as ingredient of formulations for heat transfer fluids, air-craft de-icing and liquid detergents.Request For Report Table of Content (TOC):The key segments for propylene glycol market are North America, Asia Pacific, Europe and Rest of the World (RoW). The United States, Japan, China and Western Europe are the major markets for unsaturated polyester resins which is influenced by overall health of local economies and construction industry trends. Hence growing demand for unsaturated polyester resins to boost demand for propylene glycol in the near future.The key players for propylene glycol market include: Arch Chemicals, Lyondell Chemical Co, SKC Chemicals Group, The Dow Chemical Company, BASF AG, Huntsman, Repsol YPF and more.ABOUT US:Future Market Insights (FMI) is a leading market intelligence and consulting firm. We deliver syndicated research reports, custom research reports and consulting services, which are personalized in nature. FMI delivers a complete packaged solution, which combines current market intelligence, statistical anecdotes, technology inputs, valuable growth insights, an aerial view of the competitive framework, and future market trends.CONTACT:Future Market Insights616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage, NY 10989,United StatesT: +1-347-918-3531F: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite:Aluminum Market 2018  By Analyzing the Performance of Various Competitors

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Global aluminum market research forecast: by the application (transportation, building & construction, machinery & equipment, electrical, consumer goods, packaging, foils, others), and region till 2023Synopsis of Global Aluminum MarketAluminum is one of the most widely used metals and the third most abundant element on the planet Earth. Bauxite is the primary raw material used in the production of aluminum. Aluminum appears silver to white color, which is soft and non-magnetic ductile metal. The distinguished physical properties namely, great corrosion and oxidation resistance, higher electrical and thermal conductivity, low density, and reasonably high strength are attributed to the growing use of the metal in numerous applications such automotive & transportation, building & construction, and electrical and electronics.GET SAMPLE REPORT @The global aluminum market has been projected to register USD 221.13 billion by the end of 2023, by growing at a healthy CAGR of 6.48% during the review period. This is growth is primarily attributed to growing demand for the product from the rapidly growing transportation sector on the backdrop of rising global trend. Surging demand from the major end-use industries such as transportation and construction and steadily reviving housing sectors in developed regions may further propel the growth of the market. Moreover, flourishing automotive industry and continuously increasing demand for aluminum and its alloys from China are the major factors driving the growth of the market during the years to follow.Regional AnalysisRegionally, the global aluminum market is broadly spanned across five major regions: North America, Asia Pacific, Europe, the Middle East & Africa, and Latin America. Among these regions, Asia Pacific accounted for the largest share of the market as of 2016. During the years to follow this region is estimated to expand at the highest CAGR of 6.69%, among other regions. This is projected to help this region mark USD 141.95 billion by the end of the forecast period. The primary factors favoring the dominance of Asia Pacific are the swift industrialization, which is steadily heading north along with the increasing demand for aluminum and its alloys from China, India, South Korea, and other emerging economies in this region. Following Asia Pacific, Europe holds the second largest share of the market on account of growing renovation and repair work in the building and construction industry. In 2016, Germany accounted for the major share of 31.84% in this regional market and is likely to retain its dominance over the review period due to greater penetration of lading end-user industries such as construction and automotive.Lastly, the Middle East & Africa and Latin America are another substantial regions in the global aluminum market. As per our analysis, the U.A.E is registering significant growth in this market in terms of both value and volume.SegmentationThe global aluminum market is broadly segmented on the basis of application and region.On the basis of the application, the market is categorized into building & construction, transportation, electrical, machinery & equipment, consumer goods, foils, and packaging.Based on the region, the global aluminum market is divided into five key regions: Asia Pacific, Europe, North America, Latin America, and the Middle East & Africa.Key PlayersThe prominent players in the global aluminum market are Rio Tinto Alcan Inc. (Canada), Rino Tinto Australia (Australia), RUSAL (Cyprus), Norsk Hydro ASA (Norway), China Aluminum Corporation (China), DUBAL (U.A.E), Alcoa Corporation (U.S.), Century Aluminum Company (U.S.), Vedanta Ltd. (India), Aluminum Bahrain (Alba) (Bahrain), China Hongqiao (China), and BHP Billiton Aluminum Australia Pty Ltd. (Australia), and others.Key FindingsThe global aluminum market is estimated to reach at USD 221.14 billion by the end of 2023, by growing at a robust CAGR of 6.48% during the forecast period of 2017-2023. Among five major regions, Asia Pacific is accounted for the major share and is also estimated to register a healthy CAGR of 6.69% to attain a mark of USD 141.95 billion by the end of forecast period. This is due to the growing end-user industries in this region. Country-wise, China is the largest producer as well as consumer of aluminum and its alloys, which accounts for 57.02% of the global aluminum production. This market is a greatly fragmented market into significant numbers of tier 1 manufacturers, which are dominating the market.Geographic AnalysisThe global aluminum market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 6.48% during the estimation period 2017-2023. The Asia Pacific estimated to hold the largest share due to the growth of the major end-use industries in the region. Among other applications of the product, the building & construction industry is likely to dominate the global aluminum market during the forecast period 2017-2023.Intended Audience Manufacturers and distributors of Aluminum Manufacturers and distributors of Aluminum Suppliers and traders Government, associations and industrial bodies Investors and Trade experts Consulting with chemical expertsDC description Aluminum foil Industrial use for aluminum Aluminum alloy Aluminum mineral Bauxite Ore of aluminumTable of Content: Key Points1 Report Prologue2 Scope of the Report3 Research Methodology4 Market Dynamics5 Market Factor Analysis6 Competitive Landscape7 Company Profiles7.1 Alcoa CorporationContinuedACCESS REPORT @Get in touch:LinkedIn:Twitter:Facebook:Wise Guy Reports understand how essential statistical surveying information is for your organization or association. Therefore, we have associated with the top publishers and research firms all specialized in specific domains, ensuring you will receive the most reliable and up to date research data available. We also provide COTS (Commercial off the Shelf) business sector reports as custom exploration agreeing your particular needs.WISE GUY RESEARCH CONSULTANTS PVT LTDOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersPune - 411028Maharashtra, IndiaPolyvinylidene Fluoride (PVDF) Market to Reflect Impressive Expansion During 2014 - 2020

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Polyvinylidene fluoride, also known as polyvinylidene difluoride (PVDF), is a specialty plastic material belonging to the fluoropolymer family. It is a pure thermoplastic and highly non-reactive fluoropolymer which is produced by the polymerization of vinylidene difluoride. PVDF is primarily used in applications which require high resistance, strength and purity to solvents, bases, acids and heat. It is also used as an important ingredient in high-end paints for metal roofing in commercial and residential applications. Membranes of PVDF are widely consumed for the purpose of immobilizing proteins owing to its resemblance to amino acids. PVDF is also used extensively in sheets, films, membranes and coatings in various end-user industries such as chemical processing, oil & gas, construction and energy.Request For Report Sample@The global market for PVDF, along with its end products has been witnessing noticeable growth over the past few years. Increasing demand for lithium-ion batteries, coatings, and photovoltaic films are anticipated to be some of the major influencing factors for the growth of the market with increased emphasis on its various applications and their end-users. North America accounted as the largest consumer for PVDF, followed by Asia Pacific. Moreover, future market growth is expected to be from Asia Pacific on account of growing demand of PVDF in various applications such as oil & gas, and coatings for building & construction industries. The market for PVDF in Western Europe is also expected to grow significantly with certain PVDF expansion projects anticipated to stabilize the overall business in this region.Other regions such as Eastern and Central Europe as well as Latin America are also expected to host future global events which would supplement the growth of PVDF in different applications. In addition, proposals for improvement in infrastructure, rising residential construction industry and increasing demand for lithium-ion batteries is also expected to fuel the demand for PVDF in these regions.High demand from different end-user industries such as coatings, photovoltaic films, oil & gas, and electrical are expected to be the major growth factors for the PVDF market. However, increasing use of substitutes to PVDF is expected to slow down the growth of the market. Research & development (R&D) has been one of the key factors in the PVDF market. Various associations, end-user manufacturers and PVDF manufacturing companies have planned significant investments for future advancements and technology innovations in PVDF to replace other metals and plastics. This factor is expected to provide new opportunities for the growth of the market. Large scale companies such as Arkema have made significant investments for the expansion of PVDF polymer capacity in emerging economies such as China to meet the rapidly-growing demand for PVDF resins in emerging application such as new energies and water filtration. Moreover, the company plans to expand its PVDF business portfolio in Brazil with the expansion of their coatings production capacity. The new investment would help the company offer diversified and more domestically-produced additives and waterborne emulsions which are substantially taxed as imports in Brazil.Request For Report Table of Content (TOC):Arkema, Daikin Industries Ltd., Dyneon GmbH, Shanghai Ofluorine Chemical Technology Co. Ltd., Shanghai 3F New Materials Company Limited, Solvay S.A., Zhuzhou Hongda Polymer Materials Co. Ltd., Zhejiang Fotech International Co. Ltd., Kureha Corporation, Quadrant Engineering Plastics Products Inc. are some of the key manufacturers of PVDF dominating the market.ABOUT US:Future Market Insights (FMI) is a leading market intelligence and consulting firm. We deliver syndicated research reports, custom research reports and consulting services, which are personalized in nature. FMI delivers a complete packaged solution, which combines current market intelligence, statistical anecdotes, technology inputs, valuable growth insights, an aerial view of the competitive framework, and future market trends.CONTACT:Future Market Insights616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage, NY 10989,United StatesT: +1-347-918-3531F: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite:Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC) Market to Penetrate Untapped Regions During 2014 - 2020

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Polyvinyl Chloride generally known as PVC is a polymer which is widely produced after polyethylene and polypropylene. It is said to be the third largest most widely produced polymer. PVC is preferred against traditional materials that include iron, copper or wood in a number of profile applications due to its operational efficiencies and benefits. Pure polyvinyl chloride is a brittle solid white in color and slightly soluble in tetrahydrofuran whereas insoluble in alcohol. It can be made flexible and soft by adding plasticizers and phthalates. In flexible and soft form, PVC is used in electrical cable insulation, plumbing and inflatable products and some applications which can replace rubber. PVC has high mechanical and hardness properties, which enhance along with molecular weight and gradually decrease with rising or increasing temperature. PVC decomposes at high temperature as its heat stability is very poor. It has good insulation properties but owing to its high polar nature, its electrical insulation property is less significant to non-polymers that include polypropylene and polyethylene.Request For Report Sample@Polyvinyl Chloride can be produced from a wide range of hydrocarbons such as derivatives of plants including sugarcane and coal. Currently, PVC is produced from ethylene, which is a product of oil and gas industry. It is therefore known as a petrochemical product. Polyvinyl Chloride has a wide range of applications, which include electric cables, pipes, unplastisized polyvinyl chloride for construction, furniture and clothing, healthcare and plasticizers among others. It exists in a wide range of consumer products that include bottles, credit cards, cling films and packaging among others and construction materials such as window frames, pipes, cables, flooring and wallpaper among a range of products.The PVC production costs are based on types of production expenses that include raw materials such as chlorine, ethylene and acetylene. In Asia Pacific, the PVC costs are highly influenced by PVC prices in China, hence, in addition to ethylene prices; acetylene is widely used in the production of PVC and therefore has growing importance in this region.The construction industry is the major driver of global PVC market owing to a wide range of applications in the household, commercial and industrial sectors. Due to improving infrastructure and housing conditions in the developing economies are expected to maintain the demand for PVC. Long-term demand for PVC depends on the renaissance of the construction markets in the urbanized economies.The key segments for PVC market include the North America, Asia Pacific, Europe and Rest of the World (RoW). The demand for PVC remains moderate in Europe due to debt crisis along with depressed business climate and due to slow monetary recovery. Owing to huge manufacturing facilities in China, Asia Pacific is expected to be the fastest and largest growing market for PVC. The collapse of the building and construction industry in North America was the major reason for stagnant demand for PVC in this region. In addition, sluggish growth in construction industry in the large economies such as Italy, Germany and U.K. lead to stagnant demand in Europe.Request For Report Table of Content (TOC):The major companies profiled in the PVC market are: Aiscondel, Arkema, Chemplast Sanmar Limited, Chemson Group, Formosa Plastics Corporation, INEOS Group Ltd, LG Chem, Shin-Etsu Chemical Co., Ltd, Mitsubishi Chemical Corporation, Occidental Chemical Corporation, Solvay, Vinnolit GmbH & Co. KG, PolyOne Corporation and Georgia Gulf Corp among others.ABOUT US:Future Market Insights (FMI) is a leading market intelligence and consulting firm. We deliver syndicated research reports, custom research reports and consulting services, which are personalized in nature. FMI delivers a complete packaged solution, which combines current market intelligence, statistical anecdotes, technology inputs, valuable growth insights, an aerial view of the competitive framework, and future market trends.CONTACT:Future Market Insights616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage, NY 10989,United StatesT: +1-347-918-3531F: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite:Genetic Testing Reagents Market Key Trends and Opportunity Analysis until 2020

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Genetic testing is oftenly performed as a part of genetic consultation. These tests are performed either on blood, skin, hair, or amniotic fluid. Genetic tests include the analysis of an individuals genetic material (DNA or RNA), in order to determine the susceptibility to certain abnormalities or specific disorders or to identify the genetic differences (variants) if any. Currently, genetic tests have developed to a larger extent that in turn facilitates the doctors to detect any defective or missing genes. Specific genetic tests are designed for specific disorders to be identified. There are several instances where a doctor may recommend genetic testing or counseling, for example, if a couples first child suffers from a severe birth defect, or if a woman has more than two miscarriages, or a woman who is pregnant at or after age 35.Genetic consultation is crucial as it helps determination of a genetic or inherited disorder before giving birth to a child and hence avoids the serious birth defects. Diagnostic, pharmacogenetics, prenatal testing, preimplantation testing, presymptomatic and predictive testing and newborn screening constitute several types of genetic tests performed for various reasons. These tests involve the use of reagents of high purity and quality. These are essential in order to ensure accurate results of the tests. Any compromise in the quality and composition of the reagent results in deviation from accurate results and can be misleading.There is an extensive usage of reagents at each and every step of the process such as from deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) extraction to isolation and purification. With the rapid pace of technological advances in the field of genomics, more and more genetic tests are being implemented in several laboratories across the globe. This is leading to marketing of the genetic tests without proper regulation. Genetic testing finds application in various areas such as determination of genetic disorders, paternity testing, forensics and others.Request to View Brochure of Report -Three federal agencies namely, Center for Medicare and Medicaid services (CMS), Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) play a very significant role in regulating genetic tests. CMS regulates the clinical laboratories and confirms the quality of the lab processes implemented. FDA regulates the marketing of various test kits possessing reagents while FTC puts a check on misleading and false advertising. On July 31, 2014, FDA announced that it would release draft guidelines to regulate laboratory developed tests (LDTs) owing to the increased mismatch between the tests performed in commercial laboratories and the physicians ordered tests.Genetic tests has the capability to revolutionize the clinical practice however, increased adoption of these tests depends on coverage and reimbursement provided by several insurance providers. If these insurance providers are not willing to pay for the tests, it might result in stagnant growth of the Genetic Testing Reagents Market. There is very limited information available on the reimbursement decisions about genetic testing. The genetic test kits include the standard sample, distilled water, buffer solutions and other extraction and isolation reagents. The usage of these reagent kits is prominent in developed regions such as North America and Europe as compared to Asian countries such as India and China.Request to View ToC of Report -The genetic testing reagent kits market can be analyzed by various geographies such as Europe, North America, Asia Pacific and Rest of the World. Furthermore, this market can be analyzed by various application areas such as new born screening, prenatal testing, forensics and paternity testing. Factors such as regulatory and reimbursement policies govern the commercialization and marketing of genetic testing reagent kits. The major factors favoring the market growth are continuous technological advances, increasing acceptance of genetic consultation and counseling. On other hand factors such as high cost of the procedures and lack of reimbursement and medical coverage restrain the market growth.Danaher Corporation, Sigma-Aldrich Co., LLC. ThermoFisher Scientific, Hologic, Inc., Roche Diagnostics and Abbott Laboratories are some of the key players operating in this market.View Report -About UsTransparency Market Research (TMR) is a market intelligence company, providing global business information reports and services. Our exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trends analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMRs experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants, use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather, and analyze information. Our business offerings represent the latest and the most reliable information indispensable for businesses to sustain a competitive edge.US Office Contact90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA  Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:Asia Pacific Cancer Immunotherapy Market is expected to grow at an approximate CAGR of 15.5% | Top Competitors - Amgen, Inc. (US), Bristol-Myers Squibb Company (US), Eli Lilly and Company (US) and many

Asia Pacific Cancer Immunotherapy Market

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Cancer is condition of uncontrolled cell growth. It is one of the deadliest disease in the world and the second major cause for death. Cancer can be defined as an abnormal cell growth with the potential to spread to other part of the body. There are over 100 types of cancer which has affected human. According to survey carried out by Pfizer, in 2012, 6.7 million of cancer cases was registered in Asia Pacific region which will increasing continuously. Additionally, according to the American Cancer Society, in 2015, 4.2 newly diagnosed invasive cancer cases were registered in China. During last decade, there is a significant increase in the number of patients suffering from different types of cancer. Smoking is one of the most risk factor for the cause of the cancer. Due to deteriorating lifestyle, smoking, and alcoholism there is a rise in the incident of cancer. Increasing cancer population is the major reason for increasing the Asia Pacific immunotherapy market. Different treatment are available in the market but the advantage of immunotherapy is its high effectiveness compare with other therapy. This therapy is effective for patient suffering from melanoma cancer where chemotherapy and other radiation therapy did not work. Increasing government support for research & development and increasing healthcare expenditure have fuelled the market growth. However, side effect of the treatments and high cost of the therapy may slow the market growth during the forecasted period.Asia Pacific immunotherapy market is expecting a sound growth of CAGR of 15.5% during the forecasted period 2017-2023.Try Sample report @Key PlayersAs no absolute treatments are available for the treatment of cancer many manufacturers are investing in research & development to identify the novel drug against cancer. And this provides a wide range of opportunities for the development of market across the world. Beside this the key challenge for the manufacturers is to provide a cost-effective treatment to the people.The key players for the market: Amgen, Inc. (US), Bristol-Myers Squibb Company (US), Eli Lilly and Company (US), AstraZeneca Plc. (UK), GlaxoSmithKline Plc. (UK), Bayer AG (Germany), F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd. (Switzerland), Pfizer, Inc. (US), Merck & Co., Inc. (US), Novartis AG (Switzerland), Spectrum Pharmaceuticals Inc. (US), Janssen Biotech, Inc. (US), Sanofi (France), AbbVie Inc. (US), Takeda Pharmaceuticals (Japan), Oncomed Pharmaceuticals (US), and Immunomedics (US)Regional AnalysisOn the regional basis, Asia Pacific immunotherapy market is dominated by China owing to the presence of huge technological advances, increasing prevalence of cancer, and increasing government support. Beside this developing healthcare sector and increasing expenditure in healthcare have attracted many of the manufacturers to this region. Improvement in healthcare infrastructure, rise in healthcare expenditure and increase in per capita income in countries like India and China have makd this countries as a fastest growing countries in the market.SegmentationAsia Pacific cancer immunotherapy market is segmented on the basis of type of therapy, application, and end users. On the basis of type of therapy the market is segmented into monoclonal antibodies, cancer vaccines, immunomodulators, and others. On the basis of application, the market is segmented as lung cancer, blood cancer, melanoma, breast cancer, and other. On the basis of end user, the market is segmented into hospitals & clinics, research laboratories, cancer institute, and others.TABLE OF CONTENTChapter 1. Report PrologueChapter 2. Market Introduction2.1 Definition2.2 Scope Of The Study2.2.1 Research Objective2.2.2 Assumptions2.2.3 LimitationsChapter 3. Research Methodology3.1 Introduction3.2 Primary Research3.3 Secondary Research3.4 Market Size EstimationChapter 4. Market DynamicsGet Discount on Report @About Market Research Future:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.In order to stay updated with technology and work process of the industry, MRFR often plans & conducts meet with the industry experts and industrial visits for its research analyst members.Contact:Market Research FutureOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Pune  411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312Email: salesteam@marketresearchfuture.comBiobased Propylene Glycol Market to Reflect a Holistic Expansion During 2014 - 2020

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Propylene glycol, also known as 1,2-propane-diol, is a multifunctional chemical used in several industrial fields, pharmaceuticals, food and cosmetics. Conventionally, it is obtained from petroleum based feedstock for industrial scale production. Recent developments have uncovered a new technique for obtaining propylene glycol from corn starch. The process involves production of carbohydrates from starch.Biobased products are adopted on the premise that they are environment friendly attributed to their renewable origin. However, environment friendliness of any product depends upon various factors some of which include emission of green house gases throughout various steps involved in a products lifecycle, i.e., from raw material production to degradation of after-use residues through production, distribution and end-use. Some biobased products might be environment friendly until they are converted to finished products but might breakdown into toxic residual materials. Biobased propylene glycol process was compared to the petroleum based route to find out the environment friendliness of both methods by Archer Daniels Midland Company. The results showed that there is a 61% reduction in green house gases emissions, proving that biobased propylene glycol performs better than petroleum based propylene glycol in terms of carbon footprints.Request For Report Sample@Propylene glycol is a multi functional material that can be utilized for several applications. It can serve as solvent, connect and stabilize insoluble fluids as an emulsifier, help in binding and transportation of other substances as an excipient. It can also be used to hold and dissolve active ingredients in a medium, attract, hold, water or moisture as an hygroscopic material, reduce freezing point, and increase boiling point.Regulatory pressure to reduce carbon footprint and a general shift towards environment friendly products to enhance sustainability of processes is expected to drive the market for biobased propylene glycol. Additionally, with increase in disposable income of the rapidly growing population the market of personal care products and food products is expanding due to the escalating demand. This, in turn, adds to the demand for biobased propylene glycol. However, competing uses of the biobased feedstock sources such as corn and soy as foods and biofuels might hamper the market growth by causing supply shortages. Furthermore, supply of raw materials also depends upon the yield of the crops and the number of farmers undertaking the production of corn and soy.Polypropylene glycol is primarily used as a chemical intermediate, especially for unsaturated-polyester resins utilized in surface coatings and fiberglass reinforcement for structures. Polypropylene glycol is also utilized for the production of industrial chemicals and personal care products, cosmetics and pharmaceutical preparations and solvent for colors and flavors in food, liquid detergents & household products, plasticizers, pet food, lacquers & varnishes and tobacco humectants.North America and Europe are likely to be the leading markets supported by strict regulations regarding carbon footprint, green house gases emissions and sustainability initiatives. U.S. in North America and Brazil in South America are among the largest producers of corn and soy, which secures supply of the raw materials for biobased feedstock production in these regions. Asia Pacific and Rest of the World markets are expected to grow rapidly with initiatives being taken towards sustainability and reduced carbon footprint. China and Japan are leading in shift towards sustainable processes and reduction in carbon footprint of the industries in the region. This is anticipated to fuel growth of biobased propylene glycol in these regions.Request For Report Table of Content (TOC):Some of the key players producing biobased propylene glycol include Archer Daniels Midland Company, Ashland Incorporation, Cargill and the Dow Chemical Company.ABOUT US:Future Market Insights (FMI) is a leading market intelligence and consulting firm. We deliver syndicated research reports, custom research reports and consulting services, which are personalized in nature. FMI delivers a complete packaged solution, which combines current market intelligence, statistical anecdotes, technology inputs, valuable growth insights, an aerial view of the competitive framework, and future market trends.CONTACT:Future Market Insights616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage, NY 10989,United StatesT: +1-347-918-3531F: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite:Powered Surgical Instruments Market to Reap Excessive Revenues by 2020

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The market research report discusses the different types of powered surgical instruments and their diverse application in varied fields. The report also provides information about innovative products available in the global Powered Surgical Instrument Market. As per the report, the global powered surgical instrument market is expecting substantial growth thanks to technological advancement and a prime focus on reducing the duration of surgeries.The research report also provides an overview of the global powered surgical instrument market, including product segmentation and competitive analysis. The report makes use of analytical tools such as Porters five forces analysis, SWOT analysis, and value chain analysis to provide detailed quantitative and qualitative analysis of the global powered surgical instruments market landscape. It also includes strategic recommendations from industry experts, which can be incorporated in the business strategies of major players in the powered surgical instruments market.A powered surgical instrument is a precisely designed implement used for a particular procedure during surgery. Power sources for powered surgical instruments are either pneumatic or electrical, the latter of which includes batteries and line current. Pneumatic power sources make use of compressed gases such as carbon dioxide, nitrogen, or compressed air.Request to View Brochure of Report -The global powered surgical instrument market is anticipating substantial growth due to innovative technological advancements. For example, innovation of surgical robotics has significantly propelled market growth. Powered surgical instruments are mostly used in ophthalmic, orthopedic, and cardiac surgical procedures. The increasing prevalence of chronic diseases such as cancer, orthopedic conditions, cardiovascular diseases, and neurological diseases also necessitates surgical interventions.Major driving factors for the growth of the global powered surgical instrument market include medical tourism, increased healthcare spending, growing prevalence of lifestyle diseases, rising volume of surgical procedures, and rising accessibility of healthcare facilities around the world. On the other hand, lack of adequate sterilization processes, insufficient quality assurance, and continuous pressure on healthcare providers for reducing costs are expected to hamper the growth of this market.Request to View ToC of Report -Geographically, North America is expected to dominate the global market, followed by Europe, due to the growing aging population in both regions, favorable regulatory guidelines, high disposable income, and acceptance of innovative technologies. Asia Pacific has optimistic growth prospects in the near future due to growing prevalence of the same factors.The global powered surgical instruments market is highly fragmented owing to the large number of established and new players operating in the market. The market research report covers some of the key players operating in the global powered surgical instruments market, including Zimmer Holdings Inc., Conmed Corporation, Stryker Corporation, Medtronic Inc., Alcon Laboratories Inc., MicroAire, Carefusion Corporation, KLS martin group, Smith & Nephew PLC, and Ethicon Inc.View Report -About UsTransparency Market Research (TMR) is a market intelligence company, providing global business information reports and services. Our exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trends analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMRs experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants, use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather, and analyze information. Our business offerings represent the latest and the most reliable information indispensable for businesses to sustain a competitive edge.US Office Contact90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA  Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:Automated CPR Devices Market to Record Ascending Growth by 2020

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Cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) is an emergency and lifesaving technique consists of chest compression and artificial ventilation. CPR is performed to maintain the blood flow and oxygenation to brain in case of cardiac arrest. CPR main function is to maintain partial flow of oxygenated blood to brain and heart. The main purpose is to delay tissue death to achieve successful resuscitation and protecting brain from permanent damage.Increasing number of incidences has shown that manual chest compression in CPR is not effective as compared to actual clinical setting. Recent clinical investigations have demonstrated that improved hemodynamic effect and better coronary perfusion and increase incidence of return of spontaneous circulation can be achieved by mechanical and automated compression devices.Effective CPR can improve the survival rate of patients with cardiac arrest. It has been found that the quality of CPR performed by healthcare professionals in hospital and out of the hospital is poor. Assessment of CPR practices by medical professionals revealed that chest compressions are few and ineffective and have significant pauses during compression that results in decrease of survival rate. Automated CPR devices have overcome these drawbacks by the use of mechanical automated chest compression device, which may lead to improve perfusion pressures by overcoming the drawbacks of conventional manual CPR. Clinical and laboratory studies have shown, blood pressure level getting normal with automatic chest compression devices and enhanced neurological outcomes following extended cardiac arrest. According to American Heart Association, around 92 percent victims of sudden cardiac arrest die before reaching to hospital. According to statistics it has been proved if more people are aware of CPR, more lives could be saved.Request to View Brochure of Report -Application of CPR immediately can increase the survival rate of victims significantly. A study by American Heart Association states that 70% Americans feel helpless in case of cardiac emergency for the reason that they are not aware of how to administer CPR. The Automated CPR Devices Market has been witnessing an increasing and continuous growth. Many factors are responsible for the growth such as increasing rate of heart diseases, trauma, respiratory illness, geriatric population, increased accessibility to healthcare, growing prevalence of lifestyle diseases.Geographically, the global automated CPR devices market is segmented into four major regions: North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific and Rest of the World (RoW). In terms of geography, North America followed by Europe account for the largest market share of automated CPR devices market due to upcoming new technologies, high disposable income, growing geriatric population and favorable regulatory framework . However, Asia Pacific market is also witnessing a very positive growth due to the growing unmet medical and healthcare needs, increasing prevalence of chronic diseases, encouraging reimbursement scenarios and high adoption rate of precise medical instruments.Request to View ToC of Report -The automated CPR devices market is highly developing due to the participation of many new players in this market. New entrants are focusing on new technologies and introducing new product into the market. In addition, the market is expected to witness a high growth rate due to the growing demand for better products.Some of the major players in automated cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) market are ZOLL Medical Corporation, Zhuhai Kindway Medical Science & Technology Co., Ltd, CPR Medical Devices, Inc., Medtronic, Inc.View Report -About UsTransparency Market Research (TMR) is a market intelligence company, providing global business information reports and services. Our exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trends analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMRs experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants, use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather, and analyze information. Our business offerings represent the latest and the most reliable information indispensable for businesses to sustain a competitive edge.US Office Contact90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA  Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:Global Market for Bean Ingredients Market to Reflect Steadfast Expansion During 2017-2027

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Global Bean Ingredients Market: OverviewBeans ingredients are the perfect eco-friendly and economical source of protein. It is the delicious health food which contains low fat and high iron, fiber, and folic acid. Bean Ingredients provide various nutrients critical to overall health such as potassium, calcium, magnesium, antioxidants, and folate. Bean Ingredients are used in various applications including production of coffee flour, chocolate production, and various organic food productions. Many manufacturers offer gluten free, allergen free, organic and conventional bean ingredients which are beneficial for health. The one of the major application of bean ingredients is in coffee manufacturing industry whereas the production of coffee beans are mainly in Asia Pacific, Latin America, and EMEA regions.Global Bean Ingredients Market: Market DynamicsThe key factors which drive primarily the growth of the global bean ingredients market are significantly increasing demand for the coffee products along with growing health consciousness among consumers across the globe. The macroeconomic factors which drive the bean ingredients market are rapidly increasing population globally along with emerging countries such as China, Brazil, and India. Rapidly growing the demand for cocoa beans globally leads the beans ingredients market towards high growth over the forecast period. The technological advancements in bean ingredients products such as allergen free, gluten free and producing eco-friendly products drive the global bean ingredients market over the forecast period. Increase in mergers & acquisitions among key manufacturers & suppliers coupled with high innovation in packaged bean ingredient products are the major factors that help to grow the bean ingredients market with a significant growth rate over the forecast period. The key restraint factor such as high export & import cost in North America and Japan due to low production of bean ingredients hinders the global bean ingredients market to grow over the forecast period.Request For Report Sample@Global Bean Ingredients Market: Market SegmentationGlobal bean ingredients market can be segmented by product type, end-use and distribution channel type and region type.Based on the product type, global bean ingredients market is classified into followings:Allergen FreeGluten FreeOrganicConventionalBased on the end-use type, global bean ingredients market is classified into followings:Coffee-based productsCocoa-based productsResidential/Commercial PurposeProcessed food productionBased on the distribution channel type, global bean ingredients market is classified into followings:Wholesaler/DistributorModern TradeConvenience StoresOnline SalesOther Sales ChannelGlobal Bean Ingredients Market: Regional OutlookBased on geographies, the global bean ingredients market is classified into seven regions such as North America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Asia Pacific excluding Japan, Latin America, Japan and the Middle East and Africa. Among above-mentioned regions, North America accounts high market share in the global bean ingredients market over the forecast period, attributed to the high demand for coffee in corporate offices across the region. Western Europe is estimated to account second highest market share due to high consumption of chocolate based products across Germany, U.K., Switzerland and other major countries across the region over the forecast period. The Asia Pacific excluding Japan is anticipated to showcase a significantly high growth rate in the global bean ingredients market over the forecast period, owing to significant growth in consumption along with rapidly producing bean ingredients in China, India, and Vietnam, etc. across the region. Latin America is predicted to see extensive growth in the global bean ingredients market due to the significantly low price of coffee bean ingredients across the region. Japan is predicted to see a high CAGR in the global bean ingredients market over the forecast period, attribute to high usage of bean ingredients for residential and commercial purposes across the country.Visit For TOC@Global bean ingredients market: Key playersFew key players of the global bean ingredients market are Cargill, Incorporated., Olam International, Archer Daniels Midland Company, MARA GLOBAL FOODS, Faribault Foods, Inc., Globeways Canada, Inc, The Organic Collective Limited, BETTER BEAN COMPANY, Inland Empire Foods, Vermont Bean Crafters and other key bean ingredients market players. Key Manufacturers are focusing on innovation in products to account high market share. For Instances, Olam International, ADM Company, and other producers bring Allergen-free, Gluten-free and organic bean ingredients across the globe.ABOUT US:Future Market Insights (FMI) is a leading market intelligence and consulting firm. We deliver syndicated research reports, custom research reports and consulting services, which are personalized in nature. FMI delivers a complete packaged solution, which combines current market intelligence, statistical anecdotes, technology inputs, valuable growth insights, an aerial view of the competitive framework, and future market trends.CONTACTFuture Market Insights616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage, NY 10989,United StatesT: +1-347-918-3531F: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite: http.futuremarketinsights.comGlobal Market for Caramel Market to Incur Steady Expansion During 2017-2027

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Market Introduction:Caramel is produced when sugar is mixed with water and cooked. Caramel is a widely used confectionery product. Caramel consists of a unique sweet taste and appealing brown color. The process of formation of caramel is known as caramelization. Caramel is considered as one of the most popular flavors in the US market. Caramel can be consumed as an items such as candy, creams, nuts, cookies, marshmallows for the variety of confections and deserts. Through Mailard reaction caramel is produced when glucose and sucrose are being caramelized around 160C. There are varieties of flavors available in caramel. Various flavored ice-creams and dairy products are being made using caramel. The taste of each unique caramel product is created during the cooking process and developed through reactions. There are some new innovative products such as tea infused chocolates, java pop coffee soda which is being launched in the market.Market Segmentation:Caramel based products can be segmented on the basis of application, type, and form. On the basis of type, the caramel is segmented into fillings, toppings, inclusions, colors, flavors and others (icings & coatings).Request For Report Sample@On the basis of application, global caramel market is segmented into bakery products, confectionery products, ice creams and deserts, beverages and others. Beverage segment is further classified into alcoholic beverage and nonalcoholic beverage. Others segment is further sub segmented into sauces, malted foods and breakfast cereals.On the basis of form, the global caramel market is segmented into solid, liquid, granular & powder.Market Regional Outlook:Regional segment for the market of caramel is divided into five different regions: North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia Pacific and MEA. Among these segments, Europe is expected to have a major market share globally, as it is the largest producer and consumer of caramel. In Asia Pacific region the countries like India, China and Australia are generating major revenue. Moreover, the Asia Pacific region is estimated to account for the highest CAGR, owing to a large consumer base, combined with a higher number of retail outlets than any other region. The North America Market is expected to grow significantly during the forecast period, but is anticipated to account for a lower growth rate than the APEJ region, owing to greater number of emerging economies in Asia Pacific region.Market Drivers:Due to the rising trend of food decoration to drive the toppings segment with the caramel is considered as one of the important factors that is going to drive the market of global caramel market. Based on the food applications, due to the increase in demand of caramel usage for ice creams and deserts, the bakery segment is considered to be the one of the important factor which is going to increase the sales of global caramel market. Due to rising disposable incomes and urbanization in the emerging economies such as India, China, Australia and New Zealand, the demand for caramel market is expected to increase across these countries. Despite the positive outlook, there are certain factors which are hindering the growth of the global caramel market. The amount of sugar present in the caramel is the primary drawback of eating lots of caramel.Visit For TOC@Market Key Players:Some of the key players in caramel Market are Goetze's Candy Company Inc, Dallas Caramel Company, Warrellcorp, Caramel Limited and others.The research report presents a comprehensive assessment of the market and contains thoughtful insights, facts, historical data, and statistically supported and industry-validated market data. It also contains projections using a suitable set of assumptions and methodologies. The research report provides analysis and information according to market segments such as geographies, application, and industry.ABOUT US:Future Market Insights (FMI) is a leading market intelligence and consulting firm. We deliver syndicated research reports, custom research reports and consulting services, which are personalized in nature. FMI delivers a complete packaged solution, which combines current market intelligence, statistical anecdotes, technology inputs, valuable growth insights, an aerial view of the competitive framework, and future market trends.CONTACTFuture Market Insights616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage, NY 10989,United StatesT: +1-347-918-3531F: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite: http.futuremarketinsights.comMobile Coupon Product Market to witness astonishing growth with Walmart, Mobiqpons, Tesco, Valuecodes

Mobile Coupon Product Market

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HTF MI published a new industry research that focuses on Mobile Coupon Product market and delivers in-depth market analysis and future prospects of Global and United States Mobile Coupon Product market. The study covers significant data which makes the research document a handy resource for managers, analysts, industry experts and other key people get ready-to-access and self-analyzed study along with graphs and tables to help understand market trends, drivers and market challenges. The study is segmented by Application/ end users [Retailing Chain, Grocery Store, Departmaent Store & Others], products type [SMS Transiver, Readable Codes or Tags & NFC Devices] and various important geographies like United States, EU, Japan, China, India & Southeast Asia].Get Access to sample pages @The research covers the current market size of the Global and United States Mobile Coupon Product market and its growth rates based on 5 year history data along with company profile of key players/manufacturers. The in-depth information by segments of Mobile Coupon Product market helps monitor future profitability & to make critical decisions for growth. The information on trends and developments, focuses on markets and materials, capacities, technologies, CAPEX cycle and the changing structure of the Global and United States Mobile Coupon Product Market.The study provides company profiling, product picture and specifications, sales, market share and contact information of key manufacturers of Global and United States Mobile Coupon Product Market, some of them listed here are Motorola, Nectar, VoucherCloud, Telenor, Vodafone UK, Velti, Coupon Sherpa, CouponStar, SavingStar, Walmart, Mobiqpons, Tesco, Valuecodes, Qype & Safeway. The market is growing at a very rapid pace and with rise in technological innovation, competition and M&A activities in the industry many local and regional vendors are offering specific application products for varied end-users. The new manufacturer entrants in the market are finding it hard to compete with the international vendors based on quality, reliability, and innovations in technology.Global and United States Mobile Coupon Product (Thousands Units) and Revenue (Million USD) Market Split by Product Type such as SMS Transiver, Readable Codes or Tags & NFC Devices. Further the research study is segmented by Application such as Retailing Chain, Grocery Store, Departmaent Store & Others with historical and projected market share and compounded annual growth rate.Geographically, this report is segmented into several key Regions, with production, consumption, revenue (million USD), and market share and growth rate of Mobile Coupon Product in these regions, from 2012 to 2022 (forecast), covering United States, EU, Japan, China, India & Southeast Asia and its Share (%) and CAGR for the forecasted period 2017 to 2022.Read Detailed Index of full Research Study at @Following would be the Chapters to display the Global and United States Mobile Coupon Product market.Chapter 1, to describe Definition, Specifications and Classification of Mobile Coupon Product, Applications of Mobile Coupon Product, Market Segment by Regions;Chapter 2, to analyze the Manufacturing Cost Structure, Raw Material and Suppliers, Manufacturing Process, Industry Chain Structure;Chapter 3, to display the Technical Data and Manufacturing Plants Analysis of Mobile Coupon Product, Capacity and Commercial Production Date, Manufacturing Plants Distribution, R&D Status and Technology Source, Raw Materials Sources Analysis;Chapter 4, to show the Overall Market Analysis, Capacity Analysis (Company Segment), Sales Analysis (Company Segment), Sales Price Analysis (Company Segment);Chapter 5 and 6, to show the Regional Market Analysis that includes United States, EU, Japan, China, India & Southeast Asia, Mobile Coupon Product Segment Market Analysis (by Type);Chapter 7 and 8, to analyze the Mobile Coupon Product Segment Market Analysis (by Application) Major Manufacturers Analysis of Mobile Coupon Product;Chapter 9, Market Trend Analysis, Regional Market Trend, Market Trend by Product Type [SMS Transiver, Readable Codes or Tags & NFC Devices], Market Trend by Application [Retailing Chain, Grocery Store, Departmaent Store & Others];Chapter 10, Regional Marketing Type Analysis, International Trade Type Analysis, Supply Chain Analysis;Chapter 11, to analyze the Consumers Analysis of Global and United States Mobile Coupon Product;Chapter 12,13, 14 and 15, to describe Mobile Coupon Product sales channel, distributors, traders, dealers, Research Findings and Conclusion, appendix and data source.Enquire for customization in Report @What this Research Study Offers:Global and United States Mobile Coupon Product Market share assessments for the regional and country level segmentsMarket share analysis of the top industry playersStrategic recommendations for the new entrantsMarket forecasts for a minimum of 5 years of all the mentioned segments, sub segments and the regional marketsMarket Trends (Drivers, Constraints, Opportunities, Threats, Challenges, Investment Opportunities, and recommendations)Strategic recommendations in key business segments based on the market estimationsCompetitive landscaping mapping the key common trendsCompany profiling with detailed strategies, financials, and recent developmentsSupply chain trends mapping the latest technological advancementsBuy this research report @Reasons for Buying this ReportThis report provides pin-point analysis for changing competitive dynamicsIt provides a forward looking perspective on different factors driving or restraining market growthIt provides a six-year forecast assessed on the basis of how the market is predicted to growIt helps in understanding the key product segments and their futureIt provides pin point analysis of changing competition dynamics and keeps you ahead of competitorsIt helps in making informed business decisions by having complete insights of market and by making in-depth analysis of market segmentsThanks for reading this article; you can also get individual chapter wise section or region wise report version like North America, Europe or Asia.HTF Market Report is a wholly owned brand of HTF market Intelligence Consulting Private Limited. HTF Market Report global research and market intelligence consulting organization is uniquely positioned to not only identify growth opportunities but to also empower and inspire you to create visionary growth strategies for futures, enabled by our extraordinary depth and breadth of thought leadership, research, tools, events and experience that assist you for making goals into a reality. Our understanding of the interplay between industry convergence, Mega Trends, technologies and market trends provides our clients with new business models and expansion opportunities. We are focused on identifying the Accurate Forecast in every industry we cover so our clients can reap the benefits of being early market entrants and can accomplish their Goals & Objectives.Craig Francis (PR & Marketing Manager)HTF Market Intelligence Consulting Private LimitedUnit No. 429, Parsonage Road Edison, NJNew Jersey USA  08837Phone: +1 (206) 317 1218sales@htfmarketreport.comExclusive Market Study Estimates that Global Liquid Silicone Rubber Market will Grow at 4.5% CAGR During 2017-2026

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As molding processes gain grounds in the manufacturing sector, injection materials such as liquid silicone rubber are witnessing a sharp increase in terms of demand. Versatile characteristics and unique properties of liquid silicone rubber is driving its value in the elastomer industry, wherein a wide spectrum of consumer products, medical devices and industrial goods are being manufactured by injecting liquid silicone rubber into mold cavities. Future Market Insights estimates that by the end of 2026, the global market for liquid silicone rubber will touch a valuation of US$ 7.9 billion.The study foresees a moderate growth for the expansion of global liquid silicone rubber market during the period, 2017-2026. It has been estimated that the global liquid silicone rubber market will register a value CAGR of 4.5% over the forecast period. High carbon footprint of producing liquid silicone rubber at large scale, limitations to the reuse and recyclability of such elastomers and disposability challenges are set to deter the use of liquid silicone rubbers in the near future.A sample of this report is available upon request @Industrial Grade Liquid Silicone Rubber to Reflect Global Market Value Share of 45% through 2026Molding capabilities of liquid silicone rubbers will drive their use across several industrial applications. It has been observed that industrial grade liquid silicone rubber will showcase robust growth in demand in the coming years. Through 2026, nearly half of the global liquid silicone rubber market value will be accounted by sales of industrial grade elastomers. The report also foresees that liquid injection molding technology will be a sought-after in the global liquid silicone rubber market. In 2017, more than US$ 3.2 billion worth of liquid silicone rubbers will be used by liquid injection molding systems across the globe.Lucrative End-use Industries for Liquid Silicone RubbersThe study has identified key industries that will drive the end-use of liquid silicone rubber in the near future. Consumer goods industry will reflect highest profitability in the end-use of liquid silicone rubber for manufacturing fast-selling products such as buttons and rubber gaskets. By the end of 2026, US$ 1.76 billion worth of liquid silicone rubber will be used in the production of consumer goods worldwide. Furthermore, healthcare landscape will also exhibit fast-growing end-use of liquid silicone rubber over the forecast period. Liquid silicone rubber manufacturers will find lucrative profit margins will selling these elastomers in the production of expensive medical devices such as lung catheters. The report also observes the automotive industry as a lucrative end-user of liquid silicone rubbers. Over the forecast period, automotive end-use of liquid silicone rubber will reflect highest value CAGR of 5.4% in the global market.To view TOC of this report is available upon request @Liquid Silicone Rubber Manufacturing to Remain Concentered in AsiaChina National Chemical Corporation, Shin-Etsu Chemical Co., Ltd., KCC Corporation, Toshiba Medical Systems Corporation, and Zhejiang Xinan Chemical Industrial Group Co., Ltd. are among the prominent manufacturers of liquid silicon rubber based in Japan, China, Korea and other parts of the Asia-Pacific region. The report estimates that in 2018 and beyond, the Asia-Pacific excluding Japan (APEJ) region will represent largest marketplace for liquid silicone rubber, reflecting a weighted 35% share on global market value. Other key players in the global liquid silicone rubber market, namely Dow Corning Corporation, Momentive Performance Materials, Inc., Evonik Industries AG, Bluestar Silicones International, SiVance, LLC, NuSil Technology LLC, Simtec Silicone Parts, LLC, Wacker Chemie AG, Stockwell Elastomerics Inc., and Xinapse Systems Ltd. are also expected to bolster their presence across the APEJ region in the foreseeable future.ABOUT US:Future Market Insights (FMI) is a leading market intelligence and consulting firm. We deliver syndicated research reports, custom research reports and consulting services, which are personalized in nature. FMI delivers a complete packaged solution, which combines current market intelligence, statistical anecdotes, technology inputs, valuable growth insights, an aerial view of the competitive framework, and future market trends.CONTACT:Abhishek BudholiyaFuture Market Insights616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage, NY 10989,United StatesT: +1-347-918-3531F: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite:Life Science Multichannel Campaign Management Market Intelligence and Analysis for Period 2016-2026

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Life science multichannel campaign management system helps companies to orchestrate, define and communicate their product offers to customers through social, mobile, call centres, direct mails and websites. Digital marketing is an integral part of multichannel campaign management that includes addressable advertising/branding, transactional marketing and contextual marketing. In short multichannel campaign management is a marketing process that extends through channels like video, web, mobile, kiosks, terminals of point of sales, digital signage and social applications. Global companies have urged for advanced version multichannel campaign management solutions to get the valuable information from the customers and plan for new ways for customer retention and acquisition of new customers. The traditional marketing practices have reformed due to the implementation of such kind of multichannel campaign management solutions implementations. The global life science multichannel campaign management market is expected to expand at a modest CAGR in the forecast period.Global Life Science Multichannel Campaign Management Market: Drivers and RestrainsThe major drivers for global multichannel campaign management market are trending digital marketing, technological advancements, advanced mobility solutions such as tablets, smartphones, and other kind of hand held devices. Also the ease of marketing through these multichannel campaign management solution and better service to the customer through these solutions are propelling the growth of this market.However, the restrains for this market can be the factors like rapid technological advancements, due to which the companies needs to keep pace with the upcoming technology and their costly implementation can hamper the global life science multichannel campaign management market. Also most of the customers are still not accessible to the technologies needed to avail the benefits of these kind of multichannel campaign management solutions, this can again act as a barrier in the growth of global life science multichannel campaign management market.Request Report Sample@Global Life Science Multichannel Campaign Management Market: SegmentationOn the basis of Services, the global life science multichannel campaign management market can be segmented as follows:System implementationSystem integrationTraining & supportConsultingOn the basis of applications, the global life science multichannel campaign management market can be segmented as follows:AdvertisingBrandingPromotionSellingOn the basis of end-use industry, the global life science multichannel campaign management market can be segmented as follows:PharmaceuticalsRetailHealthcareTransportationTelecommunicationsInformation technologyTourismVisit For TOC@Global Life Science Multichannel Campaign Management Market: Region Wise OutlookThe global life science multichannel campaign management market can be divided into seven regions, namely North America, Latin America, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Asia Pacific, Japan and Middle East and Africa. Asia Pacific is the leader in the global life science multichannel campaign management market due to the upcoming retail, transportation and tourism industry in this region. China and India are the major contributors in this region for the growth of the market. North America is following Asia Pacific in term of the market share in global life science multichannel campaign management market owing to its ever increasing pharmaceuticals industry and the existing information technology sector. Europe is the next major contributor in the market due to its significant automobile sector and the other retail industry flourishing in this region due to the automobile sector. Latin America and Middle East and Africa are at a nascent stage in global life science multichannel campaign management market but are expected to expand at a significant growth in the forecast period.Global Life Science Multichannel Campaign Management Market: Key PlayersSome of the key players in the global life science multichannel campaign management market are:TeradataAdobe Systems IncorporatedMarketo, Inc.IBM CorporationSAP AGInforSalesforce.comSAS Institute Inc.About Us Future Market Insights (FMI) is a leading market intelligence and consulting firm. We deliver syndicated research reports, custom research reports and consulting services, which are personalized in nature. FMI delivers a complete packaged solution, which combines current market intelligence, statistical anecdotes, technology inputs, valuable growth insights, an aerial view of the competitive framework, and future market trends.CONTACT:616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage, NY 10989,United StatesT: +1-347-918-3531F: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite:Renewable Energy Technologies Market: Offer Huge Market Opportunities for the Players, Market Growth, Demand and, Research, Sales, Trends, and Forecast to 2022

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Renewable Energy Technologies Market projected to grow at CAGR of +10% from 2018 to 2023The report is titled, Global Renewable Energy Technologies Market Report 2026. The market is experiencing a transitional stage since past few years. The continual advancements in technologies and the growing augmentation in infrastructural and technological organizations have influenced the demand for the global market, munificently in a previous couple of years. The obvious rise in urbanization and the significant rise in the disposable income of individuals are expected to increase the demand for global sales in the coming years.Top Key Vendors: Sanxia, Duke Energy, Southern Company, Exelon Corporation, China Datang, China Guodian Corporation, China Power Investment Corporation, Sdic Power Holdings Co.,LtdGet Sample Copy @The report starts by presenting an introduction to the Global Renewable Energy Technologies Market. In this section, the current size of the market and its expected size at the end of the forecast period has also been presented. The technological developments taking place in this market and their impact on the development of this market has also been presented. The future prospects of the market and the key strategies adopted by players for better penetration have also been summarized under this study.Moving further, the manufacturers dominant in the Renewable Energy Technologies Market have been highlighted in the competitive landscape section of the report. The competitive situation and trends prevalent in the market have also been summarized under this section of the study.Furthermore, the mergers and acquisitions that took place in the market in past few years and their impact on the markets development has also been presented under this section of the report. The key manufacturers in this market have been analyzed in terms of their manufacturing base, product type, specifications, and competitors.Get 30% discount on this premium report @The introductory part of this research report discusses the market landscape in terms of Renewable Energy Technologies Market size and future market forecasts of the key national markets, which are North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Latin America, and the Middle East & African countries. The report analyzes and examines each of the aforementioned regional markets in terms of market size, demand drivers, restraints, ongoing trends, and competitive scenario.In the last sections of the report, the manufacturers responsible for increasing the sales in the Renewable Energy Technologies Market have been presented. These manufacturers have been analyzed in terms of their manufacturing base, basic information, and competitors. In addition, the technology and product type introduced by each of these manufacturers also form a key part of this section of the report.Report ScopeThe scope of this report is intentionally wide. We cover the major sources of renewable energy as primary fuelshydroelectric, wind, solar, geothermal and oceanic sources (wave, tidal and thermal) and liquid biofuels for transportation. There is no shortage in the marketplace of reports on each of these sources. However, what existing reports lack and what this report is intended to provide is a global perspective that places each source in a relevant context for decision makers in both the public and private sectors.Table of Content:Global Renewable Energy Technologies Market Research Report 2018-2023Chapter 1 Renewable Energy Technologies Market OverviewChapter 2 Global Economic ImpactChapter 3 Competition by ManufacturerChapter 4 Production, Revenue (Value) by Region (2018-2023)Chapter 5 Supply (Production), Consumption, Export, Import by Regions (2018-2023)Chapter 6 Production, Revenue (Value), Price Trend by TypeChapter 7 Analysis by ApplicationChapter 8 Manufacturing Cost AnalysisChapter 9 Industrial Chain, Sourcing Strategy and Downstream BuyersChapter 10 Marketing Strategy Analysis, Distributors/TradersChapter 11 Market Effect Factors AnalysisChapter 12 Market Forecast (2018-2023)Chapter 13 AppendixWe at, QYReports, a leading market research report published accommodate more than 4,000 celebrated clients worldwide putting them at advantage in todays competitive world with our understanding of research. Our list of customers includes prestigious Chinese companies, multinational companies, SME's and private equity firms whom we have helped grow and sustain with our fact-based research. Our business study covers a market size of over 30 industries offering unfailing insights into the analysis to reimagine your business. We specialize in forecasts needed for investing in a new project, to revolutionize your business, to become more customer centric and improve the quality of output.QYReportsJones John(Sales Manager)+91-9764607607sales@qyreports.comSolar Energy Products Market: Offer Huge Market Opportunities for the Players, Market Growth, Demand and, Research, Sales, Trends, and Forecast to 2022

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The report titled, Solar Energy Products Market presents a far reaching outline of the competitive scenario of the market all around, in this way helping foundations comprehend the significant forecasts and threats that the merchants in the market are managing. It likewise includes business profiles of some of the prime sellers in the market. The report involves a massive database concerning to the current disclosure and technological advancements perceived in the market, complete with an examination of the effect of these impedances on the markets future advancement.Top Key Vendors: GCL(CN),LDK(CN),China Jinglong(CN),Yingli Solar(CN),ReneSola(CN),Green Energy Technology(TW),Sornid Hi-Tech(CN),Jinko Solar(CN),Nexolon(KR)Get Sample Copy @With the far reaching market information concerning the critical components and segment of the Global Solar Energy Products Market that can influence the growth predictions of the market, the report makes for an exceedingly instructive archive. The report can capably help organizations and decision-makers in tending to these difficulties purposefully to gain the determined advantages in the exceptionally focused market.A far reaching examination of the circumstance of the Solar Energy Products Market is been done in this research report. It incorporates the examinations done in the past progress, current market scenarios and future forecasts. An accurate information of the products, methodologies, and market shares of the main organizations in this specific market is uncovered.Get 30% discount on this premium report @The report states an outline of the Global Solar Energy Products Market in terms of solution and end use. The report also provides import and export and consumption data along with price, cost, gross margin, and revenue according to the major regions. The regions in focus in this report are North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Latin America, and the Middle East and Africa. Other minor regions are also studied in the report.The research report estimates the Global Solar Energy Products Market in a widely inclusive way by clarifying the prime attributes of the market that is anticipated to affect its dynamic situations over the anticipated period. The major growth drivers, impediments, and inclinations affecting the worldwide market are investigated. The report likewise exhibits a comprehensive subjective and quantitative information identifying with the predictable impact of these elements on market's future growth projections.In the last sections of the report, the manufacturers responsible for increasing the sales in the Solar Energy Products Market have been presented. These manufacturers have been analyzed in terms of their manufacturing base, basic information, and competitors. In addition, the technology and product type introduced by each of these manufacturers also form a key part of this section of the report.Table of Content:Global Solar Energy Products Market Research Report 2018-2023Chapter 1 Solar Energy Products Market OverviewChapter 2 Global Economic ImpactChapter 3 Competition by ManufacturerChapter 4 Production, Revenue (Value) by Region (2018-2023)Chapter 5 Supply (Production), Consumption, Export, Import by Regions (2018-2023)Chapter 6 Production, Revenue (Value), Price Trend by TypeChapter 7 Analysis by ApplicationChapter 8 Manufacturing Cost AnalysisChapter 9 Industrial Chain, Sourcing Strategy and Downstream BuyersChapter 10 Marketing Strategy Analysis, Distributors/TradersChapter 11 Market Effect Factors AnalysisChapter 12 Market Forecast (2018-2023)Chapter 13 AppendixWe at, QYReports, a leading market research report published accommodate more than 4,000 celebrated clients worldwide putting them at advantage in todays competitive world with our understanding of research. Our list of customers includes prestigious Chinese companies, multinational companies, SME's and private equity firms whom we have helped grow and sustain with our fact-based research. Our business study covers a market size of over 30 industries offering unfailing insights into the analysis to reimagine your business. We specialize in forecasts needed for investing in a new project, to revolutionize your business, to become more customer centric and improve the quality of output.QYReportsJones John(Sales Manager)+91-9764607607sales@qyreports.comAviation Asset Management Market: Quantitative Market Analysis, Current and Future Trends

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Across the world, the aviation industry is touching new peaks owing to increase in aircraft deliveries, escalation in air passenger traffic and international trade, and development of new models of aircrafts. The aviation industry is built around a number of assets or activities and each of them must be managed effectively to achieve reliability and profitability in a long run. Consequently, the demand in the global aviation asset management market is projected to increment at a notable CAGR during the forecast period of 2017 to 2025.The vendors operating in the aviation asset management market provide support such as technical management, trading and remarketing, lease management, valuation of assets, trading and remarketing services, and surveillance. The value of an aircraft depends on numerous factors and therefore requires in-depth analysis of technology, industry, and market related parameters to evaluate the valuation. Currently, the commercial aviation segment provides for the maximum demand in the global aviation asset management market as an increasing number of airlines are now opting for new technologies to achieve ease of operations and attain excellence.Get Report DetailsSome of the new technological trends emerging in the global aviation asset management market are: advent of IoT-enabled devices and services that have proven their worth in easing asset management, growing usage of prescriptive and predictive maintenance, GR-aware software suite, and asset tracking.In addition to that, the vendors of this market stand to gain new opportunities from green initiatives set by the aviation industry across various regions and countries and increasing number of low cost carriers that are now being used for domestic and civil aviation. On the other hand, strict industry regulations, existing backlogs of aircraft deliveries, and limitations regarding the production capacity of suppliers are obstructing the market from attaining its true potential.Development of new aircraft models, growth of aftermarket & retrofit, and rise in air passenger traffic are the key factors fueling the growth of the aviation asset management market. Based on service type, the market is segmented into technical services, leasing services, and regulatory certification.Brochure With Latest Advancements and ApplicationIn 2016, among various service types, the regulatory certification segment dominated the market for aviation asset management followed by leasing services and is anticipated to dominate in the near future as well. In addition, the leasing services segment is expected to expand at the highest CAGR during the forecast period 2017  2025. Contract negotiation/renewal, remarketing and lease renewal among others are some of the major factors boosting the leasing services segment in the aviation assets management market.Based on end user, the market is segmented into MRO services and commercial platforms. In 2016, commercial platforms dominated the market for aviation asset management followed by MRO services and is anticipated to remain in the forefront in the coming years. Increasing demand for commercial platforms is one of the key factors likely to drive the demand for the commercial platforms segment in the aviation asset management market during the forecast period.Some of the key factors fueling the growth of the market are rise in aircraft deliveries and orders, rise in fleet size, growth of new aircraft models, and rise in aviation passenger traffic among others. The market in Asia Pacific is expected to expand at a high CAGR due to various factors such as increasing number of airline and green initiatives by the aviation industry. However, limited production of aircrafts due to limitations of suppliers and stringent industry regulations among others are some of the restraining factors for the market in Asia Pacific as well as globally.Table of Content For Detail AnalysisThe geographical split of the market includes North America, Asia Pacific, Europe, Latin America, and Middle East and Africa. In 2016, North America is the key market followed by Asia Pacific. In 2016, the U.S. is the major market in North America as well as globally. Development of new aircraft models is one of the key factors fueling the demand for aviation asset management in North America. However, in 2025, Asia Pacific is expected to be the largest market followed by North America.China is expected to be the major market in Asia Pacific as well as globally. In addition, the market in India is expected to expand at the highest CAGR during the forecast period 2017  2025. Rise in air passenger traffic is one of the key factors fueling the market in Asia Pacific as well as globally. The market in Europe is expected to grow at a sluggish rate during the forecast period. The U.K. and Germany are expected to be major markets for aviation asset management.Middle East and Africa region is expected to grow at a healthy rate during the forecast period. The aviation asset management market in the Middle East and Africa is expected to be dominated by the U.A.E. The market in Latin America is also expected to grow at a speedy rate. Brazil is expected to be the major market during the forecast period. Rise in air traffic is one of the major factors driving the market for aviation asset management during the forecast period 2017  2025.The major players in the aviation asset management market are Boeing Company (United States), Airbus Group (Netherlands), General Electric Company (United States) and Skyworks Capital, LLC (United States). Some of the other companies are BBAM LP (United States), GA Telesis, LLC (United States), AerCap Holdings N.V. (Netherlands), Acumen Aviation, Aviation Asset Management, Inc (Auckland) and Charles Taylor Aviation Ltd (United Kingdom) among others.About UsTransparency Market Research (TMR) is a market intelligence company, providing global business information reports and services. Our exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trends analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. We have an experienced team of Analysts, Researchers, and Consultants, who us e proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather, and analyze information. Our business offerings represent the latest and the most reliable information indispensable for businesses to sustain a competitive edge.Each TMR Syndicated Research report covers a different sector  such as pharmaceuticals, chemical, energy, food & beverages, semiconductors, med-devices, consumer goods and technology. These reports provide in-depth analysis and deep segmentation to possible micro levels. With wider scope and stratified research methodology, our syndicated reports thrive to provide clients to serve their overall research requirement.ContactTransparency Market Research90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA  Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:Digital Packaging Market: Pin-Point Analysis For Changing Competitive Dynamics

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Digital packaging refers to the use of modern digital technologies as a core part of packaging elements used for several products, especially in the consumer goods industry. This can imply the use of printed elements on the packaging that users or consumers can use to gain access to digital content or products. At the same time, digital packaging is being used on large scales internally by manufacturing companies and other corporations in order to identify packages faster and also to maintain delivering efficiency and product safety.The food and beverages industry, for instance, is increasingly making use of RFID technologies in packaging in order to speed up transportation, processing, and delivery of products, while additionally using rapid scanning technologies to ensure that the products being transported are protected and fresh. RFID is just one of the many technologies being used in the global digital packaging market that has transcended from being a niche quirk for developers and enthusiasts to large scale implementations that can cut down some serious time.Obtain Report DetailsQR codes are another key technology being used in the global digital packaging market. These codes are machine readable and mobile friendly codes that contain vital information regarding a package that can be used across the distribution chain to ensure safe transportation of a package. It also allows consumers to gain direct information of the products they are buying, including online manuals and warranty registrations.Digital packaging can be defined as the incorporation of digital technology into the packaging of products. Digital technology incorporated into packaging includes near field communication (NFC), radio frequency identification (RFID), Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, QR codes, Barcodes, etc. The implementation of digital packaging therefore encompasses broad range of packaging systems such as labels, tags, closures, flexible packaging, rigid packaging, etc.Get an exclusive brochure of this reportThe global digital packaging market is observed to be in the germination stage and is anticipated to expand considerably over the forecast period 2017-2027. The US$ 800 billion global packaging market offers enormous growth potential for the digital packaging segment in terms of engineering, design, innovation and product development activities. Market players entering into the digital packaging market are streamlining their product life cycle (PLC) strategies in order to grab the early movers advantage.Historical analysis into the evolution and growth of digital packaging market has brought to the surface innovative products in packaging that include smart tags, labels, smart pharmaceutical bottles, hydration reminder smart water bottles, interactive packaging, digitally connected packaging systems, etc.For Detail Analysis Get Table Of ContentEmergence of internet of things (IOT) has led to packaging manufacturers incorporating smart sensors into their packaging solutions in order to broaden the packaging functionality. Smart sensors used in the digital packaging market have the ability to track information regarding temperature, motion and pressure. Smart sensors, smart labels and barcodes have allowed manufacturers to track products in the supply chain and logistics processes. End use industries such as food, beverages and pharmaceuticals have prominently leveraged the use of connected technology to gauge and record information pertaining to temperature, internal atmosphere, pressure and motion.In February 2017, manufacturer of snacks foods Frito-Lay, Inc. incorporated digital technology in the packaging of their tortilla-chip snack Tostitos. The bags used for packaging of Tostitos are incorporated with alcohol sensors coupled with LED lights and NFC technology. The smart sensors allowed consumer engagement by promoting the notion safe driving.Manufacturers and especially consumer brands are looking at packaging as the gateway to the perceptual understanding among consumers. The use of QR codes on packaging has enabled consumer packaged goods (CPG) manufacturers to engage consumers in innovative ways and drive sales and business growth. QR codes have enabled brands to offer discounts, prizes, gather feedback or supply product related information.About UsTransparency Market Research (TMR) is a market intelligence company, providing global business information reports and services. Our exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trends analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. We have an experienced team of Analysts, Researchers, and Consultants, who us e proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather, and analyze information. Our business offerings represent the latest and the most reliable information indispensable for businesses to sustain a competitive edge.Each TMR Syndicated Research report covers a different sector  such as pharmaceuticals, chemical, energy, food & beverages, semiconductors, med-devices, consumer goods and technology. These reports provide in-depth analysis and deep segmentation to possible micro levels. With wider scope and stratified research methodology, our syndicated reports thrive to provide clients to serve their overall research requirement.ContactTransparency Market Research90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA  Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:Hardware Accelerators Market Structure and Overview of Key Market Forces Propelling Market

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Hardware accelerators are used to increase the efficiency and performance of a general purpose CPUs. Few examples of hardware acceleration include graphics processing units (GPUs). The hardware accelerators are more popularly known as 3D cryptographic accelerator. The market is expected to witness steady growth over the forecast period.There are several advantages associated with the use of hardware accelerators which are driving the demand for the market. Traditional processors were designed to run on general algorithms which are controlled by a fetch of instructions. In this scenario, the hardware accelerators are used to improve the execution of the pre-designated algorithm by improving their concurrency. Furthermore, it also helps in having a specific data path for temporary actions.Obtain Report DetailsIn addition, the use of hardware accelerators also reduces the overhead of instruction controls. In addition, the hardware accelerators are also applicable during repetitive algorithms. These factors are aiding to the demand for hardware accelerators globally. In addition, the hardware startups are actively focusing on developing hardware accelerators which is further driving the demand for the market. The startup companies are following a lean start up methodology to speed up the time taken to provide the services in the market.Hence, the companies cannot waste time in procuring new equipments and machineries to start with their operations. In such a case, the hardware accelerators are useful as it helps in the providing the business edge to old equipments for uninterrupted operations. This is one of the major factors boosting the demand for hardware accelerators globally.Download PDF Brochure For Future AdvancementsEven though, the hardware accelerators are used to enhance the performance of a system, some of the accelerators such as graphic accelerators can reduce the performance of the system as they ensure higher resolution and colors which can affect speed and performance of the systems largely. However technological advancements are resulting into the development of performance focused hardware accelerators which help in maintaining the performance of the machine while accelerating the software usage.The global market for hardware accelerators can be segmented by types, end use industries and geography. By types, the hardware accelerators can be bifurcated into Graphics processing unit, Video processing unit, AI accelerator, Regular Expression accelerator and cryptographic accelerator among others. The graphics processing units and cryptographic accelerators are expected to witness strong demand due to their wide area of application in several industries.For Detail Analysis Get Table Of ContentFurthermore, the market for hardware accelerators can be segregated by end use industries into information technology and telecommunication, banking and financial services, retail, hospitality, logistics, automotive, healthcare and energy among others. The banking and financial services along with information technology and technology industries are expected to witness strong demand for hardware accelerators owing to constant demand for upgraded performance in this sector. Furthermore, the ongoing investments by telecom and IT sector in developing regions such as India and China is further expected to boost the demand for hardware accelerators in these regions.By geography, the global market for hardware accelerators has been segmented into Europe, North America, Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa and Latin America. Europe and North America are expected to witness steady growth as the regions are early adapters of new technology and have already implemented the requirement for hardware accelerators largely. However, Asia Pacific region is expected to witness strong demand during the forecast period. The demand in this region is attributed to the growing information and telecommunication sector in developing countries such as India.The global hardware accelerator market is facing intense competition from its major players. The leading players operating in the hardware accelerators market include HAX (U.S.), Revvx (India), AlphaLab Gear (U.S.), HWTrek (Taiwan), Wazer (China) and Teradici (Canada) among other emerging players.About UsTransparency Market Research (TMR) is a market intelligence company, providing global business information reports and services. Our exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trends analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. We have an experienced team of Analysts, Researchers, and Consultants, who us e proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather, and analyze information. Our business offerings represent the latest and the most reliable information indispensable for businesses to sustain a competitive edge.Each TMR Syndicated Research report covers a different sector  such as pharmaceuticals, chemical, energy, food & beverages, semiconductors, med-devices, consumer goods and technology. These reports provide in-depth analysis and deep segmentation to possible micro levels. With wider scope and stratified research methodology, our syndicated reports thrive to provide clients to serve their overall research requirement.ContactTransparency Market Research90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA  Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:Automotive Center clusters Market: Understanding the Key Product Segments and their Future

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The automotive center cluster is the focal point of the driver for displaying critical information and vehicle system and status of the vehicle drive conditions. It includes gauges and segmented LCD displays for various parameters such as to communicate speed, tachometer, fuel level, battery voltage, oil pressure and engine temperature to the driver through displays and acoustical effects.With the increased complexity of vehicle electronics, better functionality requires information to be displayed to the drivers. Automotive center clusters industry provides solutions for the perfect combination of design, feel, ergonomics and quality through electronics. Given the complexity, theres demand for more user-friendly, lucrative and cost effective solution which will support a wide range of automotive center cluster applications.Get Report DetailsSome of the major drivers contributing to the overall growth of the automotive Center clusters market include increasing consumer awareness regarding advanced technologies, increasing per capita income of consumers, growing demand for technically advanced cars, and changing demand for vehicle electronics from analog to digital.Advancements in technology have given rise to market competition owing to which major leading organizations are heavily investing in R&D activities. However, complicated hardware and software designs and high expenditure in terms of manufacturing are challenges to the automotive Center clusters market. Growing interest in super cars and racing cars have also driven this market. The major challenge to look for in this market is designing of the products that have long product lifecycle.Obtain BrochureThe automotive industry has high reliability and safety standards to adhere to. The opportunities lie in investing in constant research and development as this segment is dominated by ever evolving technologies. The per capita car ownership has been on a continuous rise due to the worldwide increase in the middle-class population. According to the International Transport Forum of Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the number of cars worldwide would reach 2.5 billion by 2050.The Automotive Center clusters market is segmented into four parts based on the types, application, sales channel and geography. With the increased use in automobiles around the world and also consumers looking for more style, elegance and convenience in their vehicles, the manufacturers are constantly working on developing and producing new styles in their products which has been driving the automotive radiator grilles market.Obtain Table of ContentNorth America region accounts for a healthy share in terms of automotive center clusters primarily used in automobiles. The passenger car in the region is anticipated to further add value to the Automotive Center clusters Market in the region. In terms of developing region of Asia-Pacific, the growth of the clusters is significantly high and with comparatively high CAGR in forecast period owed to factors such as such as rapid economic development, globalization and increasing demand of the clusters in the automotive industry and its sub-verticals.In addition, Over the forecast period, Asia-Pacific market for is anticipated to grow significantly owing to the growth of automotive industry in the region. Overall, the global market for the cluster device is expected to grow significantly by the end of forecast period. Automotive Center clusters Market for MEA is also expected to witness rapid growth during the forecast period primarily attributed to the growth of the automotive market and increasing usage of the center clusters in GCC and South Africa.About UsTransparency Market Research (TMR) is a market intelligence company, providing global business information reports and services. Our exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trends analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. We have an experienced team of Analysts, Researchers, and Consultants, who us e proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather, and analyze information. Our business offerings represent the latest and the most reliable information indispensable for businesses to sustain a competitive edge.Each TMR Syndicated Research report covers a different sector  such as pharmaceuticals, chemical, energy, food & beverages, semiconductors, med-devices, consumer goods and technology. These reports provide in-depth analysis and deep segmentation to possible micro levels. With wider scope and stratified research methodology, our syndicated reports thrive to provide clients to serve their overall research requirement.ContactTransparency Market Research90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA  Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:Professional Mobile Radio Market, Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends and Forecast 2018-2025

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The Insight Partners has announced the addition of the Professional Mobile Radio Market to 2025  Global Analysis and Forecasts by Technology and Application report to their offering.Professional Mobile Radios are broadly used within the professional community to provide communications other than the normal cellular or public switch telephone networks. These types of mobile radios offer essential communication for security or business where there is a need for mobile communications with a variety of users and the requirements are very different to those provided by the telephonic network.The report aims to provide an overview of global professional mobile radios market with detailed market segmentation by technology, applications, and five major geographical regions. The global professional mobile radios market is expected to witness decent growth rate during the forecast period. Professional need such as integrated data communications and reliable communication across the service area will drive professional mobile radios market in the coming years.Request Sample Copy is Available atThe objective of this report is as follows:- To provide overview of the global professional mobile radios market- To analyze and forecast the global professional mobile radios market on the basis of technology and application- To provide market size and forecast till 2025 for overall professional mobile radios market with respect to five major regions, namely; North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific (APAC), Middle East and Africa (MEA), and South America (SAM), which is later sub-segmented by respective countries- To evaluate market dynamics effecting the market during the forecast period i.e., drivers, restraints, opportunities, and future trend- To provide exhaustive PEST analysis for all five regions- To profiles key professional mobile radios players influencing the market along with their SWOT analysis and market strategiesInquiry before Buying atSome of the leading players in professional mobile radios market are Sepura PLC, Motorola Solutions, Inc., Harris Corporation, Jvckenwood Corporation, Thales SA, Raytheon Company, RELM Wireless Corporation, Hytera Communications Corporation Limited, Tait Radio Communications and Simoco Some of the important playersSepura PLCMotorola Solutions, Inc.Harris CorporationJvckenwood CorporationThales SARaytheon CompanyRELM Wireless CorporationHytera Communications Corporation LimitedTait Radio CommunicationsSimocoComplete Report is Available atContact Us:Call: +1-646-491-9876Email: sales@theinsightpartners.comAbout Us:The Insight Partners is a one stop industry research provider of actionable intelligence. We help our clients in getting solutions to their research requirements through our syndicated and consulting research services. We are a specialist in Technology, Healthcare, Manufacturing, Automotive and Defense.Address533, 5th Floor,Amanora Chambers, East Block, Amanora Township,Kharadi Road, Hadapsar, Pune-411028Automotive Adaptive Front Light Market 2018-2023 Global Key Players: Autoparts, Hella, Koito Manufacturing, Magneti Marelli, Stanley Electric

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Automotive Adaptive Front Light Market 2018Automotive Adaptive Front Light Market Share, Size, Trends, And Business Opportunity Analysis Report 2018 include historic data, with forecast data to 2023. Automotive Adaptive Front Light Market report is helpful for future strategy development, and to know about Market Drivers, Restraints, Opportunities, And Global market size, share, Growth, Trends, key players forecast to 2023Global Automotive Adaptive Front Light Market Information Report by Type (Halogen and LED), Vehicle Type (Passenger Vehicle and Commercial Vehicle), and by Regions - Global Forecast To 2023Get Sample Report of Automotive Adaptive Front Light Market @Market Scenario:The Adaptive Front-lighting System (AFS) is a part of the active safety system of a middle-high end passenger car that provides an optimized vision to the driver during night time other poor-sight conditions of the road. This is done by adapting the headlight angle or intensity, and judging the speed of the car, the steering wheel angle, the weather condition. Adaptive Front-lighting System in vehicles optimize distribution of light from the headlights, according to driving circumstances. Depending on vehicle speed and steering input, the system points the low-beams headlights in the direction the driver intends to travel. The market for adaptive front light has registered high growth rate, mainly due to the booming automotive industry and growing awareness among individuals. Favorable government policies combined with increasing demand for safety features in vehicles has also push the sales in the automotive adaptive front light system market.High initial cost associated with automotive adaptive front light, may act as a major restraining factor in the automotive adaptive front light market.The global automotive adaptive front light market has been segmented on the basis of type as Halogen and LED. On the basis of vehicle type the market has been segmented as passenger vehicle and commercial vehicle. On the basis of region the market for adaptive front light has been segmented as North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East & Africa and South America.Key Players:The key players of global Automotive Adaptive Front Light market are Saicheng Autoparts (China), Hella (Germany), Koito Manufacturing (Japan), Magneti Marelli (Italy), Stanley Electric (Japan), North American Lighting (U.S.), Varroc (U.S.), OSRAM (Germany), Valeo (France), Neolite (China).Regional Analysis:Automotive Adaptive Front Light market is currently booming in the Asia Pacific region. Rapidly rising vehicle production in this region, is one of the primary driving factors. Improving infrastructure in this region, combined with improving living standards have, positively, impacted the automotive industry as a whole. Increasing incidences of vehicle electrification in the Asia Pacific region is also expected to, positively, impact the automotive adaptive front light market. Availability of cheap labor in this region, has also been a key factor in the automotive adaptive front light market.North America and Europe are the other two leading regions, mainly due to the established automotive industry. Existence of major manufacturers in this region, is also a key driver for the Automotive Adaptive Front Light industry. Heavy investment in research and development enable manufacturers in this region to develop new techniques and products to tap into the future market trends.The automotive industry is at a nascent stage in the Middle East and the South America. The market for Automotive Adaptive Front Light is expected to register a steady growth during the forecast period. These regions are expected to have opportunities in the future, with many automotive manufacturers pumping investments to capitalize on the abundant demand in these regions.The report for Global Automotive Adaptive Front Light Market of Market Research Future comprises of extensive primary research along with the detailed analysis of qualitative as well as quantitative aspects by various industry experts, key opinion leaders to gain the deeper insight of the market and industry performance. The report gives the clear picture of current market scenario which includes historical and projected market size in terms of value, technological advancement, macro economical and governing factors in the market. The report provides details information and strategies of the top key players in the industry. The report also gives a broad study of the different market segments and regions.Continued.About Market Research Future:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.CONTACT US:Market Research FutureOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Pune - 411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312sales@marketresearchfuture.comNitinol Medical Devices Market is Anticipated to Clock a CAGR of 8.2% Between 2017 and 2025

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Nitinol, an alloy of nickel and titanium, is one of the most important shape memory alloys having a wide range of biomedical applications. Characterized by superelasticity (or pseudoelasticity), exceptional elastic deformation, and marked biocompatibility, nitinol has gained vast acceptance in making a variety of medical devices. The factors such as increasing number of surgical procedures worldwide, rise in prevalence of cardiovascular diseases and increasing demand for minimal invasive procedures and among others are anticipated to contribute to the significant growth of the market during the forecast period.Request for Sample Copy of Report @The research is a combination of primary and secondary research, conducted for understanding and arriving at trends, used to forecast the expected revenue of drugs employed in the treatment of nitinol medical devices in the near future. Primary research formed the bulk of our research efforts with information collected from in-depth interviews and discussions with a number of key industry experts and opinion leaders. Secondary research involved study of company websites, annual reports, press releases, investor presentations, analyst presentation and various international and national databases. The report provides estimated market size in terms of US$ Mn for type of equipment, communication type, end-user, and geography for the period 2015 to 2025, considering the macro and micro environmental factors. The revenue generated from each product, application, and end-user was calculated by considering the preference for nitinol medical devices in different regions, and utilization of the nitinol based products across all the geographies.The market report comprises an elaborated executive summary, which includes market snapshot that provides information about various segments of the market. It also provides information and data analysis of the market with respect to market segments based on product, application, and end-user, and geography. The market overview section of the report analyzes market dynamics such as drivers, restraints and opportunities that influences the nitinol medical devices market in the current and future scenario. The report also provides key industry events and Porters five forces analysis for the market.Enquiry for discount on this report @Market share analysis among the market players is analyzed to signify the contribution of these players in the market in terms of percentage share. All these factors will help the market players to decide about the business strategies and plans to strengthen their positions in the global market. Based on geography, the market has been analyzed for major regions: North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, and Middle East & Africa. The study also covers detailed country analysis contributing majorly in the nitinol medical devices market.The report also profiles the major players in the market and provides various attributes such as company overview, financial overview, product portfolio, business strategies, and recent developments. Companies profiled in the nitinol medical devices market report are B. Braun Melsungen AG, C. R. Bard, Inc., Arthrex, Inc., Zimmer Biomet Holdings, Inc., Cook Medical, Medtronic, W. L. Gore & Associates, Inc., Terumo Corporation, Abbott Laboratories, Boston Scientific Corporation, and Endosmart GmbH among others.Report Overview @About UsTransparency Market Research (TMR) is a market intelligence company, providing global business information reports and services. Our exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trends analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMRs experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants, use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather, and analyze information. Our business offerings represent the latest and the most reliable information indispensable for businesses to sustain a competitive edge.Each TMR syndicated research report covers a different sector - such as pharmaceuticals, chemicals, energy, food & beverages, semiconductors, med-devices, consumer goods and technology. These reports provide in-depth analysis and deep segmentation to possible micro levels. With wider scope and stratified research methodology, TMRs syndicated reports strive to provide clients to serve their overall research requirement.US Office Contact90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:Rare Hematology Market to Reflect a CAGR of 6.2% Between 2017 - 2022

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The global rare hematology market is expected to witness a healthy growth attributed to growing prevalence of blood related disorders. Surge in demand to conduct the diagnosis process at the early phase is expected to impact growth of the global rare hematology market significantly. Moreover, increasing number of clinical trials to develop enhanced treatment process is further expected to encourage the progress of the global rare hematology market. With the growing demand for shorter diagnosis procedure, hematologists are increasingly focusing on enhancing their diagnosis skills.Request for Sample Copy of Report @The report offers an in-depth insight on some crucial aspects of the global rare hematology market and provides information on the growth patterns, factors fuelling the market growth, competitive landscape and important segments.Growth of the global rare hematology market is mainly bound by various macro-economic and micro-economic factors. The report reveals that the global rare hematology market is mainly driven by the growing prevalence of various blood related disorders. As majority of the treatment procedures for the hematology diseases are not certified by the FDA, the hematologists are increasingly focusing on development new and safe drug products for enhanced treatment procedure. As hundreds of the clinical trials that are at the final stage are mainly stuck in the FDA pipeline for approval and evaluation, the global rare hematology market is expected to witness an inhibiting growth. Moreover, the researchers, patients, advocacy groups and caregivers are uniting to spread awareness about the blood disorders.Enquiry for discount on this report @On the other hand, inadequate support by the disease-specific foundations for research is expected to restrain growth of the global rare hematology market. Moreover, the patients, advocacy groups, caregivers and patients are coming together in order to spread awareness. These factors are likely to contribute towards growth of the global market.The global rare hematology market is mainly segmented into treatment type, age and region. On the basis of treatment type, the global market is segmented as plasma derived factors, recombinant factors, hemophilia A, hemophilia B, von wilebrand disease, acquired hemophilia A and others. Based on age, the global market is segmented as adult and pediatric. By regions, the global rare hematology market is segmented as North America, Latin America, Europe, Japan, APEJ and MEA.Report Overview @Key players operating in the global market of rare hematology are Bayer Healthcare AG, Pfizer Inc., PRA Health Sciences, Alexion Pharmaceuticals, Inc., Shire plc, Pfizer Inc., Celgene Corporation, Amgen Inc., Biogen Inc., Novo Nordisk A/S, CSL Behring LLC and PRA Health Sciences.About UsTransparency Market Research (TMR) is a market intelligence company, providing global business information reports and services. Our exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trends analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMRs experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants, use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather, and analyze information. Our business offerings represent the latest and the most reliable information indispensable for businesses to sustain a competitive edge.Each TMR syndicated research report covers a different sector - such as pharmaceuticals, chemicals, energy, food & beverages, semiconductors, med-devices, consumer goods and technology. These reports provide in-depth analysis and deep segmentation to possible micro levels. With wider scope and stratified research methodology, TMRs syndicated reports strive to provide clients to serve their overall research requirement.US Office Contact90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:Superhydrophobic Coatings Market to reach US$37.1 mn by 2024

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Numerous manufacturers operating in the global superhydrophobic coatings market makes it fragmented and extremely competitive. This is expected to help the market attain a double digit growth vis-a-vis both revenue and volume over the course of the forecast period from 2016 to 2024. A recent report by Transparency Market Research on the market observes that despite steep initial upfront investment new entrants are prospering in the market on the back of product innovations leveraging latest technologies.Request Sample Report @Some of the prominent participants in the global market for superhydrophobic coatings are The Sherwin-Williams Company, P2i Limited, DryWired, LLC, Cytonix, LLC, Surfactis Technologies, UltraTech International, Inc., NEI Corporation, Sto Group, Nanex Company, NTT Advanced Technology Corporation, Artekya Ltd., Lotus Leaf Coatings, Inc., Rust-Oleum Corporation, and Aculon, Inc.Our finds that the worldwide market for superhydrophobic coatings will progress at a mind-boggling 34.3% CAGR from 2016 to 2024. Rising at this rate, by 2024-end the market is expected to clock a value of US$37.1 mn from US$2.90 mn in 2015. Volume-wise, our report estimates the market to expand at a phenomenal CAGR of 37.3% from 2016 to 2024.Some of the key end use application of superhydrophobic coatings are textile and leather, electronics and telecommunication, building and construction, medical and healthcare, automotive, and others such as power generation, optical, etc. Of them, the segment of electronics and telecommunications accounted for a substantial demand share of 32.0% in 2015. In the years ahead to the segment is expected to surge ahead because of the growing application of superhydrophobic coatings in semiconductors, consumer electronics, and other electronic components.Read Report Overview @Geographically, the key regions in the global market for superhydrophobic coatings are North America, Asia Pacific, Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East and Africa. North America, of them, powered by the U.S., currently leads the market in terms of volume. A well developed electronics and telecommunication industry and the swiftly recovering construction sector in the region is fueling its market majorly.About UsTransparency Market Research (TMR) is a global market intelligence company providing business information reports and services. The companys exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trend analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMRs experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather and analyze information.ContactTransparency Market ResearchState Tower,90 State Street,Suite 700,Albany NY - 12207United StatesTel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:Ethanolamines Market is set to cross US$4 bn by the end of 2024

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The top five companies in the global ethanolamines market  The Dow Chemical Company, INEOS Group Ltd., SABIC, LyondellBasell Industries N.V., and Huntsman Corporation  together accounted for a share of close to 48% in 2015. Transparency Market Research (TMR) finds that this highly fragmented market presents an increasing number of opportunities for players. Once the battle against high initial capital investment is won, companies in the ethanolamines market can benefit from a large number of suppliers of ammonia and ethylene oxide, low threat of substitutes, and a well-educated consumer base.Request Sample Report @An increasing number of companies has been focused on R&D as well as innovation as a key strategy in the ethanolamines market, the author of the study has observed. Companies have been striving for increased market penetration by forming partnerships, collaborations, joint ventures, and mergers and acquisitions, thereby rendering them with more and improved resources for research and development.Considering the rising focus on reducing the environmental footprint, vendors are likely to divert resources to satisfy the sustainability criteria, the analyst states. Looking to benefit from this leading trend, Akzo Nobel invested US$10 mn in a new R&D center in Strongsville, Ohio in December 2015. The facility is aimed at producing innovative and environmental friendly products.Surging Demand for Herbicides a Leading Growth DriverEthanolamines are one of the significant components used in the production of herbicides. The growing demand for and production of glyphosate  the largest consumed variety of herbicides  has considerably fueled the global ethanolamines market, finds TMR. The increasing cultivation of genetically modified crops and the rising popularity of no-till farming has spurred the demand for glyphosate, a TMR analyst states. Produced in over 20 countries around the world and used in over 130 countries, the demand for glyphosate is set to increase over the forecast period. This in turn will boost the global ethanolamines market.Read Report Overview @The ethanolamines market has also received impetus from the surfactants market, especially in the developing regions of Asia Pacific, Latin America, and the Middle East and Africa.On the flip side, the volatility in raw material prices threatens to hamper the growth of the ethanolamines market. The growing demand for gas sweetening agents, on the other hand, presents lucrative options for players in the ethanolamines market.About UsTransparency Market Research (TMR) is a global market intelligence company providing business information reports and services. The companys exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trend analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMRs experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather and analyze information.ContactTransparency Market ResearchState Tower,90 State Street,Suite 700,Albany NY - 12207United StatesTel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:Tert-butanol Market is poised to be worth US$2.6 bn by 2024

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The top five companies competing in the global tert-butanol market, namely LyondellBasell Industries Holdings B.V., Lotte Chemical Titan Corporation, Evonik Industries AG, TonenGeneral Sekiyu K.K., and Merck KGaA, accounted for a share of 43.2% in 2015. This reflects the moderately consolidated nature of the market. Analyzing the medium-level of competition among these and other players, Transparency Market Research has zeroed in on extensive research and development as the key strategy adopted by most. R&D activities focused on increasing the effectiveness of tert-butanol applications have surged in recent times.Request Sample Report @Mergers and acquisitions are also a go-to growth strategy for both established and smaller players, the author of the study observes. Over the past few years, prominent companies such as Merck KGaA and TonenGeneral Sekiyu K.K. have been expanding their businesses in newer product lines and regions to gain market share. In July 2015, TonenGeneral acquired Kyokuto Petroleum Industries, Ltd. to strengthen its domestic presence and expand its product portfolio. Merck Life Sciences, in November 2015, acquired Sigma-Aldrich to emerge as one of the most leading players.The development of bio-based solvents is yet another opportunity that players in the tert-butanol market can capitalize on. Presently, strict government regulations pertaining to VOC emissions restrict a number of players owing to the harmful effects associated with chemical and industrial solvents, the analyst states. However, this has encouraged manufacturers to move away from petroleum-based solvents and instead, focus on developing environment-friendly products.Rapid Economic Growth a Major Driving ForceConsidering that the demand for tert-butanol stems mainly from its application in paints and coatings and fragrances and flavors, the tert-butanol market is driven primarily by the rapid growth of the automobile, construction, and foods and beverages industries.Read Report Overview @Asia Pacific has, over the years, emerged as an increasingly lucrative investment option for players in the tert-butanol market, a TMR analyst states. Rapid industrialization and urbanization in countries such as China, India, and Japan has resulted in the massive expansion of the building and construction sector. In addition, economic growth has spurred the rise in disposable income, furthering the demand for automobiles. This has led to the increasing use of paints and coatings as well as tert-butanol. The constantly-rising population in the APAC region has also contributed toward the escalating demand for food and beverages, boosting the demand for tert-butanol as a key flavoring ingredient.About UsTransparency Market Research (TMR) is a global market intelligence company providing business information reports and services. The companys exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trend analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMRs experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather and analyze information.ContactTransparency Market ResearchState Tower,90 State Street,Suite 700,Albany NY - 12207United StatesTel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:Mobile Phone Accessories Market: Projection of Each Major Segment over the Forecast Period.

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Mobile phone accessories are software or hardware components that are not integral to the operation of mobile phone. The increasing adoption of smartphones and other handheld mobile devices has led to the rapid growth of the global mobile phone accessories market. An increase in disposable income across regions such as Asia Pacific and a dip in the prices of smartphones have fuelled the market for mobile phones as well as for their accessories. In emerging economies such as India, China, Brazil, and Indonesia, the sales of smartphones have increased, thereby creating secondary demand for accessories that are usually not sold along with smartphones.Mobile phone accessories include chargers, batteries, headphones/earphones, portable speakers, memory cards, protective cases, and power banks. The demand for protective cases has been the highest and is expected to surge during the period between 2016 and 2024. The demand for chargers and headphone/earphones is also anticipated to significantly increase in the coming years. It has been observed that accessories such as chargers and headphone/earphones are usually supplied by original equipment manufacturers (OEMs).Browse the Report to Know Worldwide Industry Analysis and New Market Opportunities Explored @The global mobile phone accessories market operates through a number of distribution channels such as online stores, single-brand stores, and multi-brand stores. With the introduction of e-commerce, online stores are being preferred by consumers over single-brand and multi-brand stores. As a result, brick-and-mortar distribution stores are projected to experience a dip in their revenue in the near future.Global Mobile Phone Accessories Market: OverviewMobile phone accessories complement the features, performance, and maintenance of mobile handsets. Technological innovations and the need for the effective maintenance of mobile phones have propelled the growth of the global mobile phone accessories market. The market is highly dynamic due to frequent product launches introducing new features. The compatibility and interchangeability of mobile phone accessories let consumers choose from a wide range of product offerings. The growing demand for mobile phone accessories and high profit margins of products has led many established players in the mobile handset market to launch their own accessories.Request Sample to Know Quantitative Market Analysis, Current and Future Trends @The presence of a large number of multinational as well as regional brands has boosted the growth of the global mobile phone accessories market. Compared to multinational brands, regional players in the market offer fewer mobile accessories to keep their prices competitive. As a result, the majority of customers buy mobile accessories from local stores or from online stores. In the coming years, the global mobile phone accessories market is expected to be dominated by local manufacturers due to their low production costs and competitive pricing.Global Mobile Phone Accessories Market: Region-wise OutlookThe global mobile phone accessories market has been segmented into four key regions: Europe, North America, Asia Pacific, and Rest of the World. Asia Pacific dominates the overall market owing to the increased adoption of smartphones in the region. North America is the second-largest market for mobile phone accessories, followed by Europe. In the near future, the mobile phone accessories market in Rest of the World is expected to witness significant growth.Get TOC of This Report @Some of the prominent players in the global mobile phone accessories market are Energizer, BYD Inc., Samsung Electronics, Sony Corporation, Panasonic Corporation, Beats (Apple Inc.), JVC Corporation, Otterbox, Sennheiser Electronics GmbH & Co. KG, Plantronics Pty Ltd, Bose Corporation, and Griffin Technology. Key players are focusing on mergers and acquisitions, along with new product launches to expand their business.About UsTransparency Market Research (TMR) is a market intelligence company, providing global business information reports and services. Our exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trends analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. We have an experienced team of Analysts, Researchers, and Consultants, who us e proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather, and analyze information. Our business offerings represent the latest and the most reliable information indispensable for businesses to sustain a competitive edge.Each TMR Syndicated Research report covers a different sector  such as pharmaceuticals, chemical, energy, food & beverages, semiconductors, med-devices, consumer goods and technology. These reports provide in-depth analysis and deep segmentation to possible micro levels. With wider scope and stratified research methodology, our syndicated reports thrive to provide clients to serve their overall research requirement.ContactTransparency Market Research90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA  Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:Electronics Adhesives Market by Regional Analysis, Key Players and Forecast 2020

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Vendors dealing in electronics adhesives have been offering customized solutions based on client requirements, a trend that has enabled most of them to establish a strong foothold in the market. Transparency Market Research (TMR) finds that in addition to this prominent trend, backward integration in order to maintain easy and quality supply of raw material will emerge as a new trend in the electronics adhesives market.Request Sample Report @An increasing number of players have been focusing on expansion activities in several Asian countries such as China, India, and South Korea, a TMR analyst observes. The growing demand for electronics adhesives, the availability of an established customer base and state-of-the-art manufacturing facilities, the increased production of consumer electronics, and the strong presence of local players present immense opportunities for companies in the electronics adhesives market.Making the most of these opportunities are several players, the most prominent one being 3M Company in terms of revenue. Although the company has a predominant presence in North America, it has been investing heavily in Asia with the support of local vendors. The promotion of its brands and enhancement of its production capacity are the prime reasons behind 3Ms ongoing trend.Overwhelming Demand for Consumer Electronics in China to Override Impact of Regulatory RestrictionsIn keeping with this trend, TMR has observed that developing economies such as China and India are presently characterized by the rise of a new class of consumers. The surging disposable income of this new class has resulted in the growing demand for automotive and consumer appliances. This, in turn, drives the global demand for electronics adhesives, states the author of the study.Read Report Overview @However, strict regulations against volatile organic compound (VOC) emissions from adhesive films are major concern in China. Despite being a leading producer of electronics adhesives, initiatives taken by the Chinese government to curb VOC emissions threaten to dampen the growth of the electronics adhesives in China. Be that as it may, TMR predicts that the massive production bases for and consumption of semiconductors, smartphones, and tablets is sure to override the negative impact of these regulatory restrictions in the coming years.About UsTransparency Market Research (TMR) is a global market intelligence company providing business information reports and services. The companys exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trend analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMRs experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather and analyze information.ContactTransparency Market ResearchState Tower,90 State Street,Suite 700,Albany NY - 12207United StatesTel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:Insulin Management System Market Industry Analysis, Trend and Growth,2016  2026

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Frederick B and John M in 1923 were Nobel Prize awardee in Physiology or Medicine for discovery of Insulin. This serves a milestone in history of diabetes management as the death rate due to diabetes significantly reduced after its discovery. Insulin is a natural and most essential preprohormone produced by INS gene by islets of langerhans in pancreas by allowing body to take up glucose as energy source. Insulin prevents hyperglycemia and maintain blood sugar levels in co-ordination with glucagon. Diabetes is a most common health problem causing high blood sugar level resulting into excessive thirst and large amount of urine production. It causes secondary health associated problems such as diabetic ketoacidosis, hyperosmolar hyperglycemic states, and other serious complications (heart attack, stroke, kidney failure, leg amputation) leading to premature death. Diabetes is divided into 3 types i.e Type I diabetes, Type II diabetes and gestational diabetes. According to NCD CCS, insulin treatment is essential treatment for diabetes. FDA approved genetically engineered recombinant human Insulin and Insulin analogues are used in insulin management system.It is being estimated by World Diabetes Foundation that there will be 438 million people with diabetes by year 2030 which interprets demand for insulin management system market or solutions to accompany escalating diabetes population. Insulin management system shows a promising market growth due high global prevalence and incidence, extensive research and advancement in technology for effective insulin delivery systems and support from government and health care centers in making insulin management systems available throughout globe. According to WHO since 1980, the global prevalence of diabetes in adult population has risen from 4.7% to 8.5%. While in past decade the prevalence of Diabetes in low and middle income countries is higher than in higher income countries. Also, according to research carried out in University of Florida the reason for the mortality of children with type I diabetes is lack of access to Insulin management systems due to its high price. Hence unavailability of cheaper or affordable insulin management system thus hinder its market growth while its availability would increase market size and demand in low and middle income countries.Request Report Sample@The market for global Insulin management system is classified on the basis of disease indication, product type, mode of action, route of administration, end user and geography. Based on product type, the market for global insulin management system is segmented into the following: Needle and syringe., Insulin Pen Injectors., Insulin jet injectors., External Insulin pumps., Implantable pumps., Insulin patches., Islet cell transplantation., Insulin inhalers.; Based on disease indication, the global insulin management system market is segmented into the following: Diabetes I., Diabetes II., Gestational Diabetes.; Based on product mode of action, the global insulin management system market is segmented into the following: Rapid acting insulin., Short acting insulin., Intermidiate acting insulin., Pre-mixed insulin.; Based on product route of administration, the global insulin management system market is segmented into the following: Based on end user, the global insulin management system market is segmented into the following: Speciality diabetic clinics., Home care setting., Non- Diabetic Clinics.Insulin treatment for Type II diabetes holds largest share due to its high prevalence and also availability of variety and advances in insulin management systems available to treat type II diabetes. Also in comparison to recombinant human Insulin there is greater share for insulin analogues due to its higher efficacy with fast and long lasting effects. Moreover in comparison to painful traditional methods of insulin administration by injections, use of inhaled insulins are expected to have larger share in insulin management system market. Inhaled insulins are easy to administer, fast acting and is eliminated from body in less time. Thus, Insulin that is affordable, easy to administer, readily available, fast acting with long lasting effect and quick elimination from body is expected to hold strong position in insulin management system market.Region wise, the global regions in Insulin Management System market is classified into, North America, Latin America, Western and Eastern Europe, Asia-Pacific (excluding Japan) and MEA (Brazil, Argentina, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia & Egypt). America dominates the global insulin management system market due to higher prevalence of diabetes, high income population and also due to significant patent protection for brands of biosimilar insulin. Europe holds second largest insulin management system market due to better disrtribution of network for key players in insulin management system market. While Asia Pacific and MEA is fastest growing due to adoption of various advancement in insulin management system. Initiatives taken by government in developing countries to provide better healthcare facilities and easy utilization of insulin management system plays a larger role in increasing market for insulin management systems.Eli Lilly and Company, GlaxoSmithKline, Biocon, Sanofi Aventis, Julphar, Novo Nordisk, SemBioSys, and WOCKHARDT, Abbott India Ltd., USV Limited, Torrent Pharmaceuticals Ltd and Piramal Enterprises Limited are key players.Request For Table Of Content @Future Market Insights (FMI) is a leading market intelligence and consulting firm. We deliver syndicated research reports, custom research reports and consulting services, which are personalized in nature. FMI delivers a complete packaged solution, which combines current market intelligence, statistical anecdotes, technology inputs, valuable growth insights, an aerial view of the competitive framework, and future market trends.Future Market Insights 616 Corporate Way, Suite 2-9018, Valley Cottage, NY 10989, United States T: +1-347-918-3531 F: +1-845-579-5705 Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.com Website:Geospatial Analytics Market: Comprehensive Evaluation Of The Market Via In-Depth Qualitative Insights

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Geospatial is the geographical data having locational information described in terms of coordinates (latitude and longitude), address, city or ZIP code. Geospatial data is gathered through satellite, global positioning system (GPS), geo tagging and remote sensing. Global Information System (GIS) is used for mapping and analyzing geospatial data. Remote sensing tool is used to acquire geographical data without physical contact through sensors such as radars, radiometers and lidar (a laser based light detection sensor).Global positioning system comprises 24 satellites that orbit around earth for determining exact position of an object on earth. Geo tagging is addition of geographical data to media such as images and websites in the form of meta-data. Geospatial analytics products combine geographic data and business data to gain information that supports business decisions such as logistics and marketing.Browse the Report to Know Influential Factors Determining the Trajectory of the Market @Geospatial Analytics Market: TrendsGeospatial analytics could be used for analyzing market segmentation on the basis of demography, lifestyle and behavioral. This analysis would help organizations to design their promotional programs and targeting new customers. The need for reducing operational and logistic costs by organizations is anticipated to drive the growth of geospatial analytics market. Government could use geospatial analytics to map crime locations, issue alerts in situation of natural calamities and designing disaster recovery mechanisms.Emergence of smart cities and increasing demand for innovating technologies in developing countries is likely to boost the market for geospatial analytics. The market is anticipated to grow with the increasing usage of GPS enabled smartphone devices. Innovations in drone technology would also increase the opportunities in geospatial analytics market. The major challenge for the market is the privacy issues related to storage of geospatial data. Legal issues related to storage of personal information could also hamper the growth of market.Request Sample to Know Advanced Technologies & Growth Opportunities in Global Industry @Geospatial Analytics Market: SegmentationGeospatial analytics market can broadly be segmented on the basis of service type, technology type, application and geography. On the basis of service type geospatial analytics market is segmented into surface analysis, network analysis and geo-visualization. Surface analysis analyses the properties of surfaces such as elevation, temperature and rainfall, whereas network analysis provides solutions to business problems such as transportation, warehouse and manufacturing location.On the basis of application the geospatial analytics market is segmented into defense intelligence, medical survey, disaster reduction, natural resources and climate change adaption. Moreover, in terms of geographies, the global geospatial analytics market is segmented into North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa and Latin America regions. Geospatial analytics market show its strong presence in Europe region as majority of players belong to European countries such as Sweden and Finland.Get TOC of This Report @Geospatial Analytics Market: Key PlayersThe major participants in the geospatial analytics market include companies such as Trimble Navigation Limited, Hexagon AB, Topcon Corporation, Garmin Limited, Harris Corporation, MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates Ltd., Environmental Systems Research Institute Inc., Fugro N.V., Bentley Systems Inc. and International Business Machine (IBM) Corporation.About UsTransparency Market Research (TMR) is a market intelligence company, providing global business information reports and services. Our exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trends analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. We have an experienced team of Analysts, Researchers, and Consultants, who us e proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather, and analyze information. Our business offerings represent the latest and the most reliable information indispensable for businesses to sustain a competitive edge.Each TMR Syndicated Research report covers a different sector  such as pharmaceuticals, chemical, energy, food & beverages, semiconductors, med-devices, consumer goods and technology. These reports provide in-depth analysis and deep segmentation to possible micro levels. With wider scope and stratified research methodology, our syndicated reports thrive to provide clients to serve their overall research requirement.ContactTransparency Market Research90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA  Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:Parking Reservation System Market: Granular View of The Market from Various End-Use Segments

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Growing economy in many developing countries have fostered high disposable income among population which has given rise to increase in number of vehicle purchase. This has led to sharp increase in the number of vehicles on road in recent years. Passenger and goods carrier vehicles contribute to the most of the numbers of vehicles compared to as compared other types. Increase in number of vehicles have given rise to huge traffic congestion thereby leading to serious parking issues in many countries.Most of these problems are associated with urban areas where parking problems arise due to space constraint. Vehicle drivers waste substantial amount of their time finding proper parking space thereby creating traffic congestion for other vehicles. Lack of proper on-street parking lots and slow development of new parking complexes is expected to further increase the traffic congestion in coming years.Browse the Report to Know Repository of Analysis and Information for Every Facet of the Market @Further, the current absence of parking slots in residential and commercial complexes creates serious concerns for employers and residential societies. Thus, the need for parking reservation or convenience parking is increasing owing to the time wasted in finding a proper parking slot. Parking complex providers are also facing problems in maintaining daily records related to parked vehicles thereby leading to inability to ensure round the clock security.Parking reservation system provides information of parking availability for both drivers and parking complexes providers in a certain area through continuous monitoring. Parking reservation system comprises software and equipment such as parking meters, cameras, sensors and automatic gates which help maintaining the smooth flow of traffic. Additionally, parking reservation system also enhances the aspect of security in parking lots.Request Sample to Know Quantitative Market Analysis, Current and Future Trends @Parking Reservation System Market: SegmentationParking reservation system can be classified as on-street and off-street parking system. Off-street parking system consists a single point of interaction between parking areas and access points. Thus, the application of off-road parking system is expected to see more adoption among parking complex and garage providers in coming years. On-street parking system provides information of parking slot on real-time basis through web, mobile and voice based solution. Thus, the demand for on-street parking system is expected to increase owing to the increase in rise in smart cities projects across various region.Parking Reservation System Market: Region-wise OutlookFurther, the demand for parking reservation system is expected to increase in transportation sector due to the traffic congestion caused in truck terminals. Developed countries such as the U.S. and Germany are investing heavily in implementing parking reservation system for trucks. The market can also be segmented on the basis of end-use sector such as retail, government, hospitality, transportation and logistics, airports and commercial and corporate parks.Get TOC of This Report @The market for parking reservation system is expected to get a boost with the adoption of smart parking system in developed countries. India and China is expected to be a potential market for parking reservation system market in coming years. However, a slower adoption rate of parking reservation system in developing countries is expected to pose a challenge for this market in coming years.Parking Reservation System Market: Key PlayersSome of the key parking reservation system providers in the market are VINCI Park S.A., Streetline, Inc., National Car Parks Ltd., APCOA Parking AG, Ace Parking Management, Inc., ParkMe, Inc., Siemens AG, 3M Company and Xerox Corporation.About UsTransparency Market Research (TMR) is a market intelligence company, providing global business information reports and services. Our exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trends analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. We have an experienced team of Analysts, Researchers, and Consultants, who us e proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather, and analyze information. Our business offerings represent the latest and the most reliable information indispensable for businesses to sustain a competitive edge.Each TMR Syndicated Research report covers a different sector  such as pharmaceuticals, chemical, energy, food & beverages, semiconductors, med-devices, consumer goods and technology. These reports provide in-depth analysis and deep segmentation to possible micro levels. With wider scope and stratified research methodology, our syndicated reports thrive to provide clients to serve their overall research requirement.ContactTransparency Market Research90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA  Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:Global Hydroxyapatite Market: In-Depth Examination and Forecast for the Next Five Years

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Hydroxylapatite is calcium apatite in mineral form which occurs naturally. A new research study has been added to the repository of Market Research Hub (MRH), titled 'Global Hydroxyapatite Market by Manufacturers, Countries, Type and Application, Forecast to 2023'. This comprehensive research report revolves around an in-depth study of Hyroxyapatite market. Hydroxyapatite is hexagonal in structure, consisting of apatite same as a bone.Request For Sample Report:OverviewThe report is prepared with the help of a team that includes expert analysts of the industry who have conducted an exhaustive research process in order to curate all the useful insights. The data curated includes drivers that are driving the growth of Hydroxylapatite market, limitations that are restricting market growth, opportunities that are expected to be offered by the market and also the factors trending the market. The analysts have taken into consideration the importance of the sales channel and the data required to comprehend it. They have also observed the key strategies of the leading companies and their moves to combat intense competition. This includes an examination of all the acquisitions and collaborations that have taken place in the past and are expected to take place in the near future.Global Hydroxylapatite Market: Report StructureThis comprehensive report is structured in a manner so as to depict easy understanding of the market scenario. To gain accurate analysis from the research process, the market is segmented into various segments based on parameters like hydroxylapatite types, major regions and also the product's application. The types of hydroxylapatite application include orthopedic, dental, biochemical research etc.The type of hydroxylapatite includes Medical Grade Hydroxyapatite and Research Grade Hydroxyapatite. The regions that are being considered for the research process are North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, South America and Middle East & Africa. All these segments are individually scrutinized to arrive at an accurate forecast for the upcoming years and to identify the most lucrative segments for businesses operating in the industry. The section focusing on segmentation is followed by a competitive analysis of the market. It provides information on all the key players that are ruling the market currently. The report comprises a detailed profile of the top companies which includes their strategic analysis as well as a SWOT analysis. The key players mentioned in the report include SofSera, Bio-Rad, Fluidinova, Bonesupport Sigma Graft, AB, GE Healthcare, Berkeley Advanced Biomaterials, Nano Interface Technology and Zimmer Biomet.Browse Full Report with TOC-Key USPs of the ReportThe research report guides a reader to get their hands on the market forecast, sales data and also the market dynamics. Competitive landscape analysis helps companies strategize and plan their moves according to trends prevailing in the market. It gives them an access to make competing more efficient. All the data curated in the process of analysis is contributed by trusted sources that also include interviews of industry experts. The insights given by these analysts add great value to the report. The collected information and market numbers also go through various levels of validation to ensure data accuracy.Enquire about this Report-About Market Research Hub:Market Research Hub (MRH) is a next-generation reseller of research reports and analysis. MRHs expansive collection of market research reports has been carefully curated to help key personnel and decision makers across industry verticals to clearly visualize their operating environment and take strategic steps.MRH functions as an integrated platform for the following products and services: Objective and sound market forecasts, qualitative and quantitative analysis, incisive insight into defining industry trends, and market share estimates. Our reputation lies in delivering value and world-class capabilities to our clients.Contact Details:90 State Street,Albany, NY 12207,United StatesToll Free : 800-998-4852 (US-Canada)Email : press@marketresearchhub.comWebsite :Read Industry News at -Blockchain Technology Market: Expected To Boost The Growth By Fintech Investments In The Coming Years

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Market HighlightsGlobal Blockchain Technology Market Research Report 2018 is a professional and in-depth study on the current state of the Blockchain Technology market. The global blockchain technology market size was valued at USD 5.09 billion dollars in 2015.Annual estimates and forecasts are provided for the period 2018 through 2022. Also, a six-year historic analysis is provided for these markets. The global market for Blockchain Technology is expected to reach about 7.28 B USD by 2022 from 6.05 B USD in 2016, registering a Compounded Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 3.13% during the analysis period, 2018-2022.One of the key drivers for the growth of this market is the rapid increase in FinTech spending. FinTech is a service provided by companies and is based on software. Over the years, the purview of FinTech has extended to include new and innovative front-end consumer products. Several FinTech startup companies provide solutions, which are operable through smartphones or tablets, directly to the customers through licensing or by means of white label services. FinTech spending is directly correlated with BT spending as the FinTech companies are developing advance payment solutions for financial firms. Also, the exponential increase in the FinTech investments is expected to boost the growth of the global BT market in the coming years.Request a Sample Report @Market Outlook:One of the latest trends gaining traction in this market is the advent of artificial intelligence (AI). BT powered by AI is the most advanced IT development taking place in the blockchain and cryptocurrency market. AI provides several features to manage decentralized monetary systems. AI algorithms can be used to predict the value of bitcoins, which can help bitcoin traders to manage bitcoin transactions. It will also help the customers to have easy access to comparative information and will allow investors to be better informed before making decisions about their financial plans. This, in turn, will augment growth in the global BT market during the forecast period.Top Industry Players:This report studies Blockchain Technology in Global market, especially in North America, Europe, China, Japan, Southeast Asia and India, focuses on top manufacturers in global market, with production, price, revenue and market share for each manufacturer, covering: Microsoft Corporation, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited, IBM Corporation, R3, Chain Inc., Consensus Systems (ConsenSys), Ripple, Digital Asset, Holdings LLC, CreditsRequest Discount on this report @Market SegmentsMarket Segment by Regions, this report splits Global into several key Regions, with production, consumption, revenue, market share and growth rate of Blockchain Technology in these regions, from 2011 to 2021 (forecast), like North America China Europe Japan Southeast Asia IndiaSplit by Product Types, with production, revenue, price, market share and growth rate of each type, can be divided into Public Private HybirdSplit by applications, this report focuses on consumption, market share and growth rate of Blockchain Technology in each application, can be divided into Financial Services Consumer/Industrial Products Technology, Media, and Telecom Healthcare Transportation Public SectorBrowse Report @About Future Genic ReportsFuture Generic Reports is a market research and consulting organization, offering premium collection of market research reports, custom research and consulting services to corporations, no-profit organizations and government institutions across the globe.The wide range of information is presented by a team of well-trained researchers of specific sectors through exhaustive research. We deliver premier market research services that cover all industry verticals, including chemicals and material, automotive, healthcare, electronics & semiconductor, food and beverage, pharmaceuticals and technology and media.We believe in building an eternal bond with our clients through offering them inclusive research study meeting their specific requirements. Our services are tailored specifically to our clients by proposing them the potential outcome, based on our in-depth analysis and insights for exploring the growth strategies through providing the best possible decision for quality production.Contact us:Future Generic Reports244 , Madison AvenueNew York City, NY - 10016United StatesToll Free +1- 844-445-2861Email: sales@futuregenicreports.comAutomotive E-tailing Market 2018 Is Estimated to Reach US$ 55.22 Billion and Growing at 12% CAGR by 2022

Automotive E-tailing Market 2018

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Automotive E-tailing Market 2018Automotive E-tailing Market Share, Size, Trends, And Business Opportunity Analysis Report 2018 include historic data, with forecast data to 2022. Automotive E-tailing Market report is helpful for future strategy development, and to know about Market Drivers, Restraints, Opportunities, And Global market size, share, Growth, Trends, key players forecast to 2022Global Automotive E-tailing Market Information Report by Vendor Type (OEM Vendor, Third Party Vendor), by Components (Electrical & Electronics, Chassis, Powertrain), by Vehicles (Commercial Vehicles, Non Commercial Vehicles) and by Region - Global Forecast to 2022.Request For Sample Report @Market ScenarioE-tailing is defined as the buying and selling of goods through electronic media (Internet).It includes only Business-to-Consumer (B2C) segment where the business sells goods to the consumers through online platforms. E-tailing for automotive is growing due to increasing demand for automobile components as the automobile sales in increasing. Convenience in online shopping, availability of broad range of products and increasing investments in e-commerce platforms are the major driving factors for the growth of Automotive E-tailing market. However, there are certain factors such as fraud and security concerns that are restraining the growth of Automotive E-tailing market.Global Automotive E-tailing market is expected to register a CAGR of about 12% during the forecast period, to reach USD 55.22 Billion by 2022.Key PlayersThe leading players in the Automotive E-tailing market are Advance Auto Parts, Inc. (U.S), Delticom AG (Germany), eBay Inc. (U.S), Rock Auto LLC. (U.S), Genuine Parts Company (U.S), CARiD.com (U.S), O'Reilly Auto Parts (U.S), AutoZone, Inc. (U.S), JEGS High Performance (U.S), K&N Engineering, Inc. (U.S) and others.Industry/ Innovation/ Related News:Dec, 2017 - Openbay entered into partnership with eBay Motors to provide the availability of millions of searchable automotive parts and accessories for its online marketplace for auto repair and service. Powered by eBay Motors, businesses can research, source and acquire automotive parts directly through the Openbay dashboard.Sep, 2017- Genuine Parts Company and Alliance Automotive Group, entered into a definitive agreement under which Genuine Parts Company will acquire Alliance Automotive Group from private equity funds managed by Blackstone and AAG's co-founders. The acquisition is valued at a total purchase price of ~ USD 2 billion, an amount that includes the repayment of AAG's outstanding debt upon closing.Oct, 2017 - Genuine Parts Company acquired for its U.S. Automotive Parts Group. The company aims to Expands U.S. Automotive Footprint with Acquisition of Monroe Motor Products. The addition of Monroe consolidates the U.S. Automotive operations and is expected to generate approximate annual revenues of $25 million.Automotive E-tailing Market SegmentationThe Automotive E-tailing Market can be segmented in to three key dynamics for the convenience of the report and enhanced understanding;Segmentation by Vendor Type - OEM Vendor, Third Party VendorSegmentation by Components - Electrical & Electronics, Chassis, Powertrain, Interior, Exterior and infotainment & multimediaSegmentation by Vehicle - Commercial Vehicles, Non Commercial VehiclesSegmentation by Regions: North America, Europe, APAC and Rest of the World.Intended AudienceAutomotive components OEMsAutomotive aftermarket manufacturersE-tailing service providersTechnology investorsGovernment as well as Independent Regulatory AuthoritiesGeographic AnalysisGeographical analysis across 21 countriesCompany InformationProfiling of key market playersSWOT analysis, and strategy information of top five profile players in the reportCompetitive landscape including emerging trends adopted by major companiesThe report covers brief analysis of country level market information North AmericaU.S.CanadaMexicoSouth AmericaBrazilArgentinaRest Of South AmericaEuropeGermanyU.K.FranceItalyRest Of EuropeAsiaPacificChinaIndiaJapanRest of Asia PacificMiddle East & AfricaSaudi ArabiaUAEQatarSouth AfricaRest Of Middle East & AfricaThe report for Global Automotive E-tailing Market of Market Research Future comprises of extensive primary research along with the detailed analysis of qualitative as well as quantitative aspects by various industry experts, key opinion leaders to gain the deeper insight of the market and industry performance. The report gives the clear picture of current market scenario which includes historical and projected market size in terms of value, technological advancement, macro economical and governing factors in the market. The report provides details information and strategies of the top key players in the industry. The report also gives a broad study of the different market segments and regions.Continued.About Us:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR) and Market Research & Consulting Services.MRFR team have the prime objective to provide optimum quality market research and intelligence services to our clients. Our market research studies depending on products, services, technologies, applications, end users, and market players for global, regional, and country level market segments enables our clients to know more consequently do more, which gives them answer for their each and every important question. In order to stay updated with technology and work process of the industryCONTACT US:Market Research FutureOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Pune - 411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312sales@marketresearchfuture.comGlobal Food Delivery Software Market Size,Status and Forecast 2025 NetWaiter, Naxtech, Restolabs, Trackin,

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Researchmoz added Most up-to-date research on "Global Food Delivery Software Market Size,Status and Forecast 2025" to its huge collection of research reports.This report studies the global Food Delivery Software market, analyzes and researches the Food Delivery Software development status and forecast in United States, EU, Japan, China, India and Southeast Asia. This report focuses on the top players in global market, likeAldeloBigTree SolutionseDeliveryFlipdishLivedispatcherNetWaiterNaxtechRestolabsTrackinRoamsoft TechnologiesBusiness Software SolutionsNectareon TechnologiesTo Get Sample Copy of Report visit @Market segment by Regions/Countries, this report coversUnited StatesEUJapanChinaIndiaSoutheast AsiaMarket segment by Type, the product can be split intoWeb-basedOn-premiseManagedMarket segment by Application, Food Delivery Software can be split intoHypermarket & SupermarketFood & Drink SpecialistsConvenience StoresRestaurantsTable of ContentsGlobal Food Delivery Software Market Size, Status and Forecast 20251 Industry Overview of Food Delivery Software1.1 Food Delivery Software Market Overview1.1.1 Food Delivery Software Product Scope1.1.2 Market Status and Outlook1.2 Global Food Delivery Software Market Size and Analysis by Regions (2013-2018)1.2.1 United States1.2.2 EU1.2.3 Japan1.2.4 China1.2.5 India1.2.6 Southeast Asia1.3 Food Delivery Software Market by Type1.3.1 Web-based1.3.2 On-premise1.3.3 Managed1.4 Food Delivery Software Market by End Users/Application1.4.1 Hypermarket & Supermarket1.4.2 Food & Drink Specialists1.4.3 Convenience Stores1.4.4 Restaurants2 Global Food Delivery Software Competition Analysis by Players2.1 Food Delivery Software Market Size (Value) by Players (2013-2018)2.2 Competitive Status and Trend2.2.1 Market Concentration Rate2.2.2 Product/Service Differences2.2.3 New Entrants2.2.4 The Technology Trends in Future3 Company (Top Players) Profiles3.1 Aldelo3.1.1 Company Profile3.1.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.1.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.1.4 Food Delivery Software Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.1.5 Recent Developments3.2 BigTree Solutions3.2.1 Company Profile3.2.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.2.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.2.4 Food Delivery Software Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.2.5 Recent Developments3.3 eDelivery3.3.1 Company Profile3.3.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.3.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.3.4 Food Delivery Software Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.3.5 Recent Developments3.4 Flipdish3.4.1 Company ProfileGet Complete TOC With Tables and Figures @3.4.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.4.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.4.4 Food Delivery Software Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.4.5 Recent Developments3.5 Livedispatcher3.5.1 Company Profile3.5.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.5.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.5.4 Food Delivery Software Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.5.5 Recent Developments3.6 NetWaiter3.6.1 Company Profile3.6.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.6.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.6.4 Food Delivery Software Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.6.5 Recent Developments3.7 NaxtechContinue...About ResearchMozResearchMoz is the one stop online destination to find and buy market research reports & Industry Analysis. We fulfill all your research needs spanning across industry verticals with our huge collection of market research reports. We provide our services to all sizes of organizations and across all industry verticals and markets. Our Research Coordinators have in-depth knowledge of reports as well as publishers and will assist you in making an informed decision by giving you unbiased and deep insights on which reports will satisfy your needs at the best price.For More Information Kindly Contact:ResearchMozMr. Nachiket Ghumare,Tel: +1-518-621-2074USA-Canada Toll Free: 866-997-4948Email: sales@researchmoz.usFollow us on LinkedIn @Follow me on @Global Hybrid Cooling Towers Market Professional Survey Report 2017 SPX, HARRISON, JACIR,

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Researchmoz added Most up-to-date research on "Global Hybrid Cooling Towers Market Professional Survey Report 2017" to its huge collection of research reports.This report studies Hybrid Cooling Towers in Global market, especially in North America, China, Europe, Southeast Asia, Japan and India, with production, revenue, consumption, import and export in these regions, from 2012 to 2016, and forecast to 2022.This report focuses on top manufacturers in global market, with production, price, revenue and market share for each manufacturer, coveringBabcock & Wilcox EnterprisesENEXIO MANAGEMENTEVAPCOJohnson ControlsSPXHARRISONJACIRBaltimore Aircoil CompanyDelta Cooling TowersEvaptechHamonJohnson ControlsTo Get Sample Copy of Report visit @FANSKUKEN KOGYONorth Street Cooling TowersPaharpur Cooling TowersOn the basis of product, this report displays the production, revenue, price, market share and growth rate of each type, primarily split intoOpenClosedBy Application, the market can be split intoOil and GasPower GenerationHVACFood and BeverageChemicalPetrochemicalBy Regions, this report covers (we can add the regions/countries as you want)North AmericaChinaEuropeSoutheast AsiaJapanIndiaTable of ContentsGlobal Hybrid Cooling Towers Market Professional Survey Report 20171 Industry Overview of Hybrid Cooling Towers1.1 Definition and Specifications of Hybrid Cooling Towers1.1.1 Definition of Hybrid Cooling Towers1.1.2 Specifications of Hybrid Cooling Towers1.2 Classification of Hybrid Cooling Towers1.2.1 Open1.2.2 Closed1.3 Applications of Hybrid Cooling Towers1.3.1 Oil and Gas1.3.2 Power Generation1.3.3 HVAC1.3.4 Food and Beverage1.3.5 Chemical1.3.6 Petrochemical1.4 Market Segment by Regions1.4.1 North America1.4.2 China1.4.3 Europe1.4.4 Southeast Asia1.4.5 Japan1.4.6 India2 Manufacturing Cost Structure Analysis of Hybrid Cooling Towers2.1 Raw Material and Suppliers2.2 Manufacturing Cost Structure Analysis of Hybrid Cooling Towers2.3 Manufacturing Process Analysis of Hybrid Cooling Towers2.4 Industry Chain Structure of Hybrid Cooling Towers3 Technical Data and Manufacturing Plants Analysis of Hybrid Cooling Towers3.1 Capacity and Commercial Production Date of Global Hybrid Cooling Towers Major Manufacturers in 20163.2 Manufacturing Plants Distribution of Global Hybrid Cooling Towers Major Manufacturers in 20163.3 R&D Status and Technology Source of Global Hybrid Cooling Towers Major Manufacturers in 20163.4 Raw Materials Sources Analysis of Global Hybrid Cooling Towers Major Manufacturers in 2016Get Complete TOC With Tables and Figures @4 Global Hybrid Cooling Towers Overall Market Overview4.1 2012-2017E Overall Market Analysis4.2 Capacity Analysis4.2.1 2012-2017E Global Hybrid Cooling Towers Capacity and Growth Rate Analysis4.2.2 2016 Hybrid Cooling Towers Capacity Analysis (Company Segment)4.3 Sales Analysis4.3.1 2012-2017E Global Hybrid Cooling Towers Sales and Growth Rate Analysis4.3.2 2016 Hybrid Cooling Towers Sales Analysis (Company Segment)4.4 Sales Price Analysis4.4.1 2012-2017E Global Hybrid Cooling Towers Sales Price4.4.2 2016 Hybrid Cooling Towers Sales Price Analysis (Company Segment)5 Hybrid Cooling Towers Regional Market Analysis5.1 North America Hybrid Cooling Towers Market Analysis5.1.1 North America Hybrid Cooling Towers Market Overview5.1.2 North America 2012-2017E Hybrid Cooling Towers Local Supply, Import, Export, Local Consumption Analysis5.1.3 North America 2012-2017E Hybrid Cooling Towers Sales Price Analysis5.1.4 North America 2016 Hybrid Cooling Towers Market Share Analysis5.2 China Hybrid Cooling Towers Market Analysis5.2.1 China Hybrid Cooling Towers Market Overview5.2.2 China 2012-2017E Hybrid Cooling Towers Local Supply, Import, Export, Local Consumption Analysis5.2.3 China 2012-2017E Hybrid Cooling Towers Sales Price Analysis5.2.4 China 2016 Hybrid Cooling Towers Market Share AnalysisContinue...About ResearchMozResearchMoz is the one stop online destination to find and buy market research reports & Industry Analysis. We fulfill all your research needs spanning across industry verticals with our huge collection of market research reports. We provide our services to all sizes of organizations and across all industry verticals and markets. Our Research Coordinators have in-depth knowledge of reports as well as publishers and will assist you in making an informed decision by giving you unbiased and deep insights on which reports will satisfy your needs at the best price.For More Information Kindly Contact:ResearchMozMr. Nachiket Ghumare,Tel: +1-518-621-2074USA-Canada Toll Free: 866-997-4948Email: sales@researchmoz.usFollow us on LinkedIn @Follow me on @Global Process Burners, Process Flares & Thermal Oxidizer Systems Market 2018 - Fives, ZEECO, AEREON, Bayeco, Torch

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Apex Market Reports, recently published a detailed market research study focused on the Process Burners, Process Flares & Thermal Oxidizer Systems Market across the global, regional and country level. The report provides 360 analysis of Process Burners, Process Flares & Thermal Oxidizer Systems Market from view of manufacturers, regions, product types and end industries. The research report analyses and provides the historical data along with current performance of the global PP Pipe industry, and estimates the future trend of Process Burners, Process Flares & Thermal Oxidizer Systems on the basis of this detailed study. The study shares Process Burners, Process Flares & Thermal Oxidizer Systems performance both in terms of volume and revenue.Get Free Sample Copy of Report Here:Top Manufacturers Analysis of This ReportHoneywell InternationalJOHN ZINK COMPANYFivesFoster WheelerZEECOSAACKE GroupCSIC-711Anguil EnvironmentalProcess Combustion CorporationSunpower GroupB&W MEGTECTORNADO Combustion TechnologiesAEREONBayecoRuichangTorchThe market research report explores the Process Burners, Process Flares & Thermal Oxidizer Systems Market across the globe along with major regions and countries. The research report provides a detailed study on each and every aspect of Process Burners, Process Flares & Thermal Oxidizer Systems Market. The research report studies the entire value chain from raw material to end user industries. The report also shares import/export statistics along with production and consumption for all major regions and countries. Moreover, the research study classifies the Process Burners, Process Flares & Thermal Oxidizer Systems Market based on major product types, application and end users industries of Process Burners, Process Flares & Thermal Oxidizer Systems. Besides, the report also covers geographical segmentation for Process Burners, Process Flares & Thermal Oxidizer Systems Market. The report further provides production, capacity, price per region, gross margin, production cost, for all major regions and countries listed in report.The competitive landscape of the global market for Process Burners, Process Flares & Thermal Oxidizer Systems is determined by assessing the major industry participants, production capacity, production capacity utilization rate, Process Burners, Process Flares & Thermal Oxidizer Systems Markets production chain, pricing by each manufacturer and the revenue generated by each manufacturer in the Process Burners, Process Flares & Thermal Oxidizer Systems Market globally.Inquire Before Buying @The Global Process Burners, Process Flares & Thermal Oxidizer Systems Market 2018 is further analyzed on the basis of product pricing, Process Burners, Process Flares & Thermal Oxidizer Systems production volume, data pertaining to demand and Process Burners, Process Flares & Thermal Oxidizer Systems supply, and the revenue garnered by the product. The report provides upstream and downstream analysis covering major raw material used in manufacturing of Process Burners, Process Flares & Thermal Oxidizer Systems along with detailed manufacturing sources. The report also shares list of major raw material manufacturers along with their manufacturing locations. Detailed raw material price trend analysis along with manufacturing cost analysis is also incorporated into the report. Various methodical tools such as investment returns, feasibility, SWOT analysis and market attractiveness analysis has been implemented in the research study to present a comprehensive, detailed study of the industry for Process Burners, Process Flares & Thermal Oxidizer Systems across the world.About UsApex Market Reports offers elevating market research globally. We have collection of various syndicated reports of different categories. Apex Market Reports provides you to best services, weather youre searching for new trends in market or competitive scenario in emerging market.Customers can buys different reports across various categories such as Chemical and Material, Biotechnology, Healthcare, Food and beverages, Automobile and various sectors. Our Website offers safe and secure online ordering experience, convenient payment options.Contact UsFrank ValadezCorporate Sales Specialist155 North Wacker Drive, Suite 4250Chicago, IL 60606Phone: +17739042683Email id - sales@apexmarketreports.comWebsite -Global NFC Chips Market Driven by Increasing Demand For Smart Phones Across The Globe Forecast to 2025

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Industry HighlightsA surge in demand for smart phones across the globe is driving the demand for NFC chips in global market. Owing to the raising demand of NFC chips among end-users and the increasing initiatives by the government followed by the numerous supporting subsidiaries. Moreover, the increasing adoption of NFC chips in medical field and healthcare sector is also propagating the growth of this market on a large scale. With the deployment of this technology in electronics to increase and boost contactless safe data transfer. Additionally, the swift technological advancements in radio frequency identification and increasing applications of NFC chips in consumer electronics are another factors fueling the growth of the global market.Thus, the conjoint effect of all these drivers is set to strengthen the growth of the global NFC chip market in the coming years. However, the complexity in product design of NFC chips coupled with the lack of unawareness about such chips among consumers is the factors that are capable of hindering the growth of this market during the forecast years. Furthermore, the adoption of these technical chips in real estate sector along with the mergers and acquisitions in NFC based industries are the factors that contribute as the opportunities to NFC chips market.Request a Sample Report @Major Industry Players:Some of the key players in the global NFC chips market include: AMS AG Broadcom Corporation Marvell Technology Group Ltd. MediaTek Inc. Mstar Semiconductor Inc. NXP Semiconductors Qualcomm Inc. Sony Corporation STMicroelectronics Texas Instruments IncMarket ScenarioNear Field communication (NFC) chips are the communicating system that are best for electronic applications. The NFC chips are also potential of detecting the radio frequency identification technology. The technological advancements have further aided the evolution of shorter range radio identification technologies between two devices. This development also assist the simplifying the safer data transfer. A key trend that has been observed in the recent past years and the rising demand of NFC chips among consumer electronics manufacturer is a key driver that propels this market during the upcoming years.Market SegmentsThe global NFC chips market can be segmented on the basis of type and region. On the basis of application, the global NFC chips market can be segmented into smart phone, television, medical equipment, car and others. On the basis of storage capacity, the global NFC chips market can be segmented into 64 Bytes, 168 Bytes, 180 Bytes, 540 Bytes and others. On the basis of end-users, the global NFC chips market can be segmented into consumer electronics, automotive, retail, medical, aviation and others. On the basis of region, the global NFC chips market can be segmented into North America, Europe, Middle East & Africa, Asia-Pacific, and Latin America.Browse Report @About us:Xpodence Research have the most extensive collection of market research reports of many categories. Xpodence Research provides the best market research solution for every industry by publishing the best possible results of great market research firms worldwide. For every particular problem, theres a particular solution, so according to the customer needs, we provide the best possible results to them from different market research organization, whether its a Custom Research or Syndicated Research reports because the product that wins is the one that bridges customers to the future, not the one that requires a giant leap.Every organization, whether it is related to Pharmaceuticals, Technology, Eatables, Consumable Goods and many more demands a market research results so that they can take important decisions for more productivity and better output in this swift world. Xpodence Research gives the best possible outcome, perfect forecast, analysis and insights of market research in the form of report which is beneficial for various organisations and also to the manufacturing companies in taking the best decisions for quality production.Contact us:Xpodence Research244 , Madison AvenueNew York City, NY - 10016United StatesToll Free +1- 844-445-2861Email: sales@xpodenceresearch.comFRP Rebar Market Production Types, Applications and Growth Prospects by 2025

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DescriptionGlobal FRP Rebar Market professional survey . The well curated survey by the leading research experts and domain knowledge professionals provides clients with the true picture of the Global FRP Rebar Market. The survey is expected to push the understanding of the market and its trends for the clients and help drive the market. The survey report consists of all key parameters such as the industry overview, which includes the definition, specifications, classification, applications, industry chain structure, global and regional analysis of the market, and the policy and news analysis.Access Complete FRP Rebar Market Report @Owing to the thorough nature of the survey report, it contains an in-depth analysis of the market for the global FRP Rebar market as well as for individual regions. The report also covers the latest trends, developments, upcoming R&D in the market, and also critical components such as technology, competition, supplies, capacity, production, and price and profit. Cost structure analysis and manufacturing plans analysis for all parameters is covered in detail in the Global FRP Rebar Market survey report.The competition analysis and regional market analysis are the mainstay of the Global FRP Rebar Industry survey report. Each region is immaculately analyzed in the survey report without any knowledge gaps to ensure the clients are greatly benefitted by the Global FRP Rebar Industry survey report. Furthermore, the competition analysis covers all the key players in the market along with their detailed information, applications, and contact information.Request a PDF Sample of FRP Rebar Market Report @The extensive Global FRP Rebar Industry survey report covers other key information such as the values and facts of the market such as revenue, volume, market share for each region, and revenue and market share of key players in the market. The survey also covers FRP Rebar Industry analysis by type and application, and concluding with a SWOT analysis and investment feasibility analysis of the market.As with every report put up on Orbis Research, the FRP Rebar Market survey report aims to meet the client requirements in terms of complete information and analysis of the market. The report is compiled and presented in an immaculate fashion by the industry experts and domain experts along with seasoned research professionals and notable industry personalities for their expert comments which are also included in the report.Place a Purchase Order for FRP Rebar Market Report at @The Point Mentioned in FRP Rebar Market Report are:Chapter One: Industry Overview of FRP Rebar1.1 Definition and Specifications of FRP Rebar1.1.1 Definition of FRP Rebar1.1.2 Specifications of FRP Rebar1.2 Classification of FRP Rebar1.2.1 GFRP Rebar1.2.2 CFRP Rebar1.2.3 Others1.3 Applications of FRP Rebar1.3.1 Road Building1.3.2 Bridges & Port1.3.3 Underground Construction1.3.4 Others1.4 Market Segment by Regions1.4.1 North America1.4.2 China1.4.3 Europe1.4.4 Southeast Asia1.4.5 Japan1.4.6 IndiaChapter Two: Manufacturing Cost Structure Analysis of FRP Rebar2.1 Raw Material and Suppliers2.2 Manufacturing Cost Structure Analysis of FRP Rebar2.3 Manufacturing Process Analysis of FRP Rebar2.4 Industry Chain Structure of FRP RebarChapter Three: Technical Data and Manufacturing Plants Analysis of FRP Rebar3.1 Capacity and Commercial Production Date of Global FRP Rebar Major Manufacturers in 20163.2 Manufacturing Plants Distribution of Global FRP Rebar Major Manufacturers in 20163.3 R&D Status and Technology Source of Global FRP Rebar Major Manufacturers in 20163.4 Raw Materials Sources Analysis of Global FRP Rebar Major Manufacturers in 2016.Chapter Eight: Major Manufacturers Analysis of FRP Rebar8.1 Hughes Brothers8.1.1 Company Profile8.1.2 Product Picture and Specifications8.1.2.1 Product A8.1.2.2 Product B8.1.3 Hughes Brothers 2016 FRP Rebar Sales, Ex-factory Price, Revenue, Gross Margin Analysis8.1.4 Hughes Brothers 2016 FRP Rebar Business Region Distribution Analysis8.2 Schoeck8.2.1 Company Profile8.2.2 Product Picture and Specifications8.2.2.1 Product A8.2.2.2 Product B8.2.3 Schoeck 2016 FRP Rebar Sales, Ex-factory Price, Revenue, Gross Margin Analysis8.2.4 Schoeck 2016 FRP Rebar Business Region Distribution Analysis8.3 Armastek8.3.1 Company Profile8.3.2 Product Picture and Specifications8.3.2.1 Product A8.3.2.2 Product B8.3.3 Armastek 2016 FRP Rebar Sales, Ex-factory Price, Revenue, Gross Margin Analysis8.3.4 Armastek 2016 FRP Rebar Business Region Distribution Analysis8.4 Hebei Yulong..About Us:Orbis Research (orbisresearch.com) is a single point aid for all your market research requirements. We have vast database of reports from the leading publishers and authors across the globe. We specialize in delivering customized reports as per the requirements of our clients. We have complete information about our publishers and hence are sure about the accuracy of the industries and verticals of their specialization. This helps our clients to map their needs and we produce the perfect required market research study for our clients.Contact Information:Hector CostelloSenior Manager  Client Engagements4144N Central Expressway,Suite 600, Dallas,Texas  75204, U.S.A.Phone No.: +1 (214) 884-6817; +9164101019Follow Us on LinkedIn:Global Head-Mounted Display (HMD) Industry Share Size Trends 2018, Trends and Forecast Report

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Researchmoz added Most up-to-date research on "Global Head-Mounted Display (HMD) Industry 2018, Trends and Forecast Report" to its huge collection of research reports.Head-Mounted Display (HMD) Report by Material, Application, and Geography Global Forecast to 2022 is a professional and in-depth research report on the world's major regional market conditions, focusing on the main regions (North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific) and the main countries (United States, Germany, united Kingdom, Japan, South Korea and China).The report firstly introduced the Head-Mounted Display (HMD) basics: definitions, classifications, applications and market overview; product specifications; manufacturing processes; cost structures, raw materials and so on. Then it analyzed the world's main region market conditions, including the product price, profit, capacity, production, supply, demand and market growth rate and forecast etc. In the end, the report introduced new project SWOT analysis, investment feasibility analysis, and investment return analysis.To Get Sample Copy of Report visit @Table of ContentsPart I Head-Mounted Display (HMD) Industry OverviewChapter One Head-Mounted Display (HMD) Industry Overview1.1 Head-Mounted Display (HMD) Definition1.2 Head-Mounted Display (HMD) Classification Analysis1.2.1 Head-Mounted Display (HMD) Main Classification Analysis1.2.2 Head-Mounted Display (HMD) Main Classification Share Analysis1.3 Head-Mounted Display (HMD) Application Analysis1.3.1 Head-Mounted Display (HMD) Main Application Analysis1.3.2 Head-Mounted Display (HMD) Main Application Share Analysis1.4 Head-Mounted Display (HMD) Industry Chain Structure Analysis1.5 Head-Mounted Display (HMD) Industry Development Overview1.5.1 Head-Mounted Display (HMD) Product History Development Overview1.5.1 Head-Mounted Display (HMD) Product Market Development Overview1.6 Head-Mounted Display (HMD) Global Market Comparison Analysis1.6.1 Head-Mounted Display (HMD) Global Import Market Analysis1.6.2 Head-Mounted Display (HMD) Global Export Market Analysis1.6.3 Head-Mounted Display (HMD) Global Main Region Market Analysis1.6.4 Head-Mounted Display (HMD) Global Market Comparison Analysis1.6.5 Head-Mounted Display (HMD) Global Market Development Trend AnalysisChapter Two Head-Mounted Display (HMD) Up and Down Stream Industry Analysis2.1 Upstream Raw Materials Analysis2.1.1 Upstream Raw Materials Price Analysis2.1.2 Upstream Raw Materials Market Analysis2.1.3 Upstream Raw Materials Market Trend2.2 Down Stream Market Analysis2.1.1 Down Stream Market Analysis2.2.2 Down Stream Demand Analysis2.2.3 Down Stream Market Trend AnalysisPart II Asia Head-Mounted Display (HMD) Industry (The Report Company Including the Below Listed But Not All)Chapter Three Asia Head-Mounted Display (HMD) Market Analysis3.1 Asia Head-Mounted Display (HMD) Product Development History3.2 Asia Head-Mounted Display (HMD) Competitive Landscape Analysis3.3 Asia Head-Mounted Display (HMD) Market Development TrendChapter Four 2013-2018 Asia Head-Mounted Display (HMD) Productions Supply Sales Demand Market Status and Forecast4.1 2013-2018 Head-Mounted Display (HMD) Capacity Production Overview4.2 2013-2018 Head-Mounted Display (HMD) Production Market Share Analysis4.3 2013-2018 Head-Mounted Display (HMD) Demand Overview4.4 2013-2018 Head-Mounted Display (HMD) Supply Demand and Shortage4.5 2013-2018 Head-Mounted Display (HMD) Import Export Consumption4.6 2013-2018 Head-Mounted Display (HMD) Cost Price Production Value Gross MarginGet Complete TOC With Tables and Figures @Chapter Five Asia Head-Mounted Display (HMD) Key Manufacturers Analysis5.1 Company A5.1.1 Company Profile5.1.2 Product Picture and Specification5.1.3 Product Application Analysis5.1.4 Capacity Production Price Cost Production Value5.1.5 Contact Information5.2 Company B5.2.1 Company Profile5.2.2 Product Picture and Specification5.2.3 Product Application Analysis5.2.4 Capacity Production Price Cost Production Value5.2.5 Contact InformationContinue...About ResearchMozResearchMoz is the one stop online destination to find and buy market research reports & Industry Analysis. We fulfill all your research needs spanning across industry verticals with our huge collection of market research reports. We provide our services to all sizes of organizations and across all industry verticals and markets. Our Research Coordinators have in-depth knowledge of reports as well as publishers and will assist you in making an informed decision by giving you unbiased and deep insights on which reports will satisfy your needs at the best price.For More Information Kindly Contact:ResearchMozMr. Nachiket Ghumare,Tel: +1-518-621-2074USA-Canada Toll Free: 866-997-4948Email: sales@researchmoz.usFollow us on LinkedIn @Follow me on @Rakhibazaar.com is Back Again with Stunning Rakhi Gifts for Brother

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New Delhi, India : Raksha Bandhan is a propitious festival that makes the brother-sister relationship stronger. Traditionally, the festival involves Rakhi Tying by sister on brothers wrist after Pooja. Heres come the time for the exchange of gifts. Sisters buy Rakhi gifts for brother and present it to brother as a token of love. In return, brother also makes their sister feel special by giving Rakhi Return Gifts. Rakhibazaar.com offers an amazing range of Rakhi and gifts for brother () that are easy to buy online in just a few clicks.Rakhibazaar.com is the ultimate destination for a sister who is in search of unique Rakhi and Rakhi Gifts for Brother for the forthcoming Raksha Bandhan. This online Rakhi and Rakhi gift shop help to select the best Rakhi gifts that a sister can buy online without going out in the crowd of the market. All one has to do is browse the different category of Rakhi that has Fancy Rakhi, Bracelet Rakhi, Traditional Rakhi, Pearl Rakhi and many other varieties of Rakhi. In addition to this, the online Rakhi stores also have an ample number of gift items that includes Apparel, perfumes, Chocolates, Accessories and lot more.While talking with one of the executives of the online Rakhi store stated, The unique love bond between a sister & brother can be explained in words. A sister can make brother feel happy and surprised by offering unique Rakhi gifts. Likewise, she can gift him Apparel such a T-shirt, shirt or any other dress depending upon his personality, choices and the types of dressing he likes such as Western or Indian outfit. For a stylish brother, buy a cool Sunglass and give him as a surprise on this Rakhi. Just in case if your brother is in some other state and you somewhere else, then no need to panic. We also offer to you to send Rakhi and Rakhi Gifts for Brother anywhere in India and Worldwide without any hassles.On this portal one can shop freely for the beautiful Rakhi Gifts such as Chocolates, Dry Fruits and Sweets, grooming products, coffee mugs, personalized cushions, watches, gourmet gifts, photo frames, accessories and much more.On more discussion with the authentic executive of the portal further added, Gone were days when sending Rakhi and Rakhi Gifts for Brother was a tough task. Now it is very easy, simple and reliable and on the top of everything, it is not as much expensive as the traditional method used to be. With the help of the internet, you can very well send Rakhi and gifts to brother at any corner. Whether you want to send any music gift item, gourmet, flower, cake, Sweets, Cake, or any hampers, it is easily affordable as we offer products in different price range. So, for this upcoming Raksha Bandhan, select the best Rakhi and Rakhi Gifts for brother who is with you & give a stunning surprise. In fact, you can also send Rakhi Gifts along with Rakhi who is away from you for job, education or any other allied reasons and not able to visit you for Rakhi celebration.In addition to Rakhi Gifts, one can also buy Rakhi Gift Hampers () such as Rakhi with Sweets, Rakhi with Rasgulla, Rakhi with Pooja Thalis, Rakhi with Sweets, Rakhi with Dry Fruits, Rakhi with Photo Gifts, Rakhi with Cookies, Rakhi with Flowers, Rakhi with Greeting Cards, Rakhi with Barfi, Rakhi with Gulab Jamun, Rakhi with Mugs, Rakhi with Soan Papdi and much more.Rakhibazaar.com is a recognized online Rakhi shop that offers eye-catchy Rakhis such as Silver Rakhi, Bracelet Rakhi, Pearl Rakhi, Golden Rakhi, Designer Rakhi and lot more. One can buy Family Rakhi Sets and Rakhi Gifts for Brother online and give surprise on this Raksha Bandhan. For more information, please feel free to visit the Companys website.Media Contact :-Rakhi BazaarMayur Vihar Phase 1, Pandav NagarPostal Code :- 110091City - DelhiCountry - IndiaCustomer Service No. : +91 8470001155Email - support@rakhibazaar.comWebsite :-Global Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) Market by Trends, Key Players, Driver, Segmentation, Forecast to 2022

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Market Study Report Add New Global Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) Market by Manufacturers, Countries, Type and Application, forecast to 2022 to its research database presenting an informative study covering the market with detailed analysis. The report will assist reader with better understanding. The report spread across 123 pages with table and figures in it.This report focuses on the Global Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) Market, especially in North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific, South America, Middle East and Africa. This report categorizes the market based on manufacturers, regions, type and application.Advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) are electronic components installed in vehicles, which present an intelligent driving experience to the driver. These systems comprise of unique sensors such as ultrasonic, image, RADAR, LiDAR, infrared and LASER. Deploying ADAS to enhance comfort levels and ensure safety and security on road is the majorly growing trend within the automobile sector. The implementation of ADAS has been considered as a revolution as it provides dynamic features such as adaptive.As an initial stage of automatic driving, ADAS's promotion received support from several countries, such as NHSTA Level 0-Level 4 (Manual, ADAS, PA, HA, FA), the German VDA rating (PA, HA, FA)Get Sample Copy of this Report:Market Segment by Manufacturers, this report covers:Continental Ag, Delphi Automotive PLC, Robert Bosch Gmbh, Aisin Seiki Co. Ltd., Autoliv Inc, Denso Corporation.Market Segment by Type, covers:Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC), Lane Departure Warning (LDW) System, Park Assist, Blind Spot Detection, OthersMarket Segment by Applications, can be divided into:Passenger Car, Light Commercial Vehicle (LCV), Heavy Commercial Vehicle (HCV).Market Segment by Regions, regional analysis covers:North America (United States, Canada and Mexico), Europe (Germany, France, UK, Russia and Italy), Asia-Pacific (China, Japan, Korea, India and Southeast Asia), South America (Brazil, Argentina, Colombia), Middle East and Africa (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa).Objective of Studies: To provide strategic profiling of key players in the market, comprehensively analyzing their core competencies, and drawing a competitive landscape for the market. To provide insights about factors affecting the market growth. To analyses the Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) market based on various factors- price analysis, supply chain analysis, porter five force analysis etc. To provide detailed analysis of the market structure along with forecast of the various segments and sub-segments of the global Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) market. To provide country level analysis of the market with respect to the current market size and future prospective. To provide country level analysis of the market for segment by application, product type and sub-segments. To provide historical and forecast revenue of the market segments and sub-segments with respect to four main geographies and their countries- North America, Europe, Asia, and Rest of the World. To track and analyses competitive developments such as joint ventures, strategic alliances, new product developments, and research and developments in the global Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) market.The next part also sheds light on the gap between supply and consumption. Apart from the mentioned information, growth rate of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) market in 2022 is also explained. Additionally, type wise and application wise consumption tables and figures of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) market are also given.Following are major Table of Content of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) Industry: Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) Market Overview. Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) Market Competition by Manufacturers. Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) Market Analysis by Region. Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) Market Analysis by Type. Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) Market Analysis by Application. Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) Market -Manufacturers Analysis.More Report At:Related Report:World KVM Switches Market Research Report 2022 (covering USA, Europe, China, Japan, India, South East Asia and etc)KVM Switches market research report provides the newest industry data and industry future trends, allowing you to identify the products and end users driving Revenue growth and profitability.Marketstudyreport.com allows you to manage and control all corporate research purchases to consolidate billing and vendor management. You can eliminate duplicate purchases and customize your content and license management.Market Study ReportThe Green Suite #4594,Dover, DE 19901United StatesPhone: 1-201-355-0868US Toll Free: 1-866-764-2150Email:sales@marketstudyreport.comWebsite:News:More Report at:Urinalysis Test Market Analysis 2018: Global Industry Top Players Including Bio-Rad Laboratories Inc., ACON Laboratories Inc., Siemens AG and other

Urinalysis Test Market

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Urinalysis is the analysis of urine for the diagnosis and monitoring of number of diseases such as kidney disease and diabetes. The test is mostly recommended during pregnancy to determine the levels of hormone called human chorionic gonadotropin. Therefore, the demand for these test instruments and devices is growing across the globe.The demand for urinalysis test is increasing with increasing prevalence of chronic diseases and demand for new point of care devices. The Global Urinalysis Test Market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 6.3% during the forecast period.The market for urinalysis test take a look at is anticipated to expose exponential increase thanks to growing demand for factor of care testing gadgets, growing incidence of chronic sicknesses, and developing generation in the area of diagnostics. Any other factor contributing to the marketplace increase is value-effectiveness of the check and better call for urine automatic urine analyzers.Moreover, the boom of the Urinalysis Test market is stricken by the dearth of skilled specialists and stringent regulations governing the manufacturing and the sales of chemistry analyzers across the globe.According to the World Health Organization (who), approximately fifty nine% of the mortality throughout the globe is due to chronic sicknesses and nearly 35 million human beings die of the persistent illnessesTaste the market data and market information presented through more than 120 market data tables and figures spread over 158 pages of the project report. Avail the in-depth table of content (TOC) & market synopsis on Urinalysis test market research reportGlobal forecast till 2023.Try Sample Report Here @Major Players in the Urinalysis Test Market:Some of the key players in the global market are Dahaner (U.S.), F. Hoffmann-La Roche Ltd (Switzerland), Bio-Rad Laboratories, Inc. (U.S.), Siemens AG (U.S.), ARKRAY, Inc. (Japan), Sysmex Corporation (Japan), and ACON Laboratories Inc. (U.S.).Key Questions Answered In This Report What will the market size and what will the growth rate be? What are the key market trends? What is driving this market? What are the challenges to market growth? Who are the key vendors in this market space? What are the market opportunities and threats faced by the key vendors? What are the strengths and weaknesses of the key vendors?Regional AnalysisThe Americas is the largest urinalysis tests market across the globe owing to extensive use and demand for automated point-of-care testing devices, and rising prevalence of chronic kidney diseases (CKD). According to the National Chronic Kidney Diseases Report, CKD is common among adults in the U.S.Europe is the second largest market and it is expected to show positive growth in the near future due to the increasing prevalence of Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD) and diabetes. As per American Society of Nephrology, the prevalence of CKD across the European countries is varied. According to the World Health Organization, about 60 million European have diabetes and the prevalence of diabetes is relatively high among people over 25 years.In Asia Pacific, the market is expected grow at the fastest rate owing to increasing prevalence of chronic disease such as diabetes, kidney diseases, and others. Furthermore, the demand for diagnostics services in this region is increasing with the increasing medical tourism. India is one of the international medical tourism destinations across the world, which further exhibits growth opportunities for the market due to availability of cost-effective treatment and rising success rates. Furthermore, the increasing healthcare expenditure in the developing countries of Asia Pacific also contributes to the market growth.The Middle East and Africa also shows a steady rise in the market owing to rising demand for agnostic solutions and point-of-care testing devices.Segments of Urinalysis Test Market:The global urinalysis test market is segmented on the basis of product type, test type, application, and end user.On the basis of product type, the market is segmented into instruments and consumables. The instruments type includes urine chemistry analyzer such as automatic urine analyzers and semi-automatic urine analyzers, automated urine sediment analyzers, point-of-care devices, and strip analyzer. The consumables are further segmented into plastic consumables, test strips, and chemical agents.On the basis of test type, the market is segmented into macroscopic urinalysis, biochemical urinalysis, and sediments/microscopic urinalysis.Get Discount on Report @On the basis of application, the market is segmented into disease diagnosis including the diagnosis of diseases such as kidney disease, liver disease, diabetes, pregnancy tests, and others.On the basis of end users, the market is segmented into hospitals, independent laboratories, and physician practices.TABLE OF CONTENTS1 REPORT PROLOGUE2 INTRODUCTION2.1 Introduction2.2 Research Objective2.3 Assumptions & Limitations2.3.1 Assumptions2.3.2 Limitations3 RESEARCH METHODOLOGY3.1 Introduction3.2 Primary Research3.3 Secondary Research3.4 Market Size Estimation4 MARKET DYNAMICS..ContinuedAbout US:Market Research Future (MRFR), enable customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.Contact:Market Research Future+1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.comReasons Why the Moisture Analyzer Market Will Witness A Decline During 2017 to 2025?

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In industries, moisture analyzer is an essential instrument in quality control departments, warehouses, R&D labs and any other application where moisture content is critical while developing or meeting established manufacturing criteria. It is generally specified by regulatory bodies and industry trade associations. Moisture analyzer is based on sensors measuring temperature and humidity measurement. Moisture analyzers vary according to their way of application which could be industrial, process, materials etc. and also according to their resolution of measurement. It consist of two important components a balance and a heater and incorporate heating technology to measure moisture.Request to View TOC @Moisture analyzers are useful when climate measurement is necessary for storing or operating of raw materials, additives, semi-finished or finished products.Moisture Analyzer Market: Drivers and RestraintsFactors such as increasing industrial and process automation resulting in high demand of in-line Moisture Analyzer, technological advancements resulting in more reliable heat-base moisture analyzing, increased awareness for maintenance and protection of industrial devices from for enhanced efficiency are driving the growth of Moisture Analyzer market.However, lack of skilled labour for operating and developing Moisture Analyzers is a factor restraining the growth of Moisture Analyzer market.Moisture Analyzer Market: SegmentationMoisture analyzer Market can be segmented by equipment type, by analysing technique, industry vertical, and region wise. On the basis of equipment, it can be further segmented into desktop-mounted, handheld, and In-line. On the basis of analysing technique, moisture analyzer market can sub-segmented into Loss-On-Drying, Karl Fischer Titration, Microwave, Capacitance, Drying Owen, Near-Infrared, Radio Frequency and Others. By industry vertical, this market can be sub-segmented into Metal and Mining, Semiconductor, Plastic and Polymer, Pharmaceuticals, Chemical and Petroleum, Food and Beverage, Wood, Paper and Pulp, Research and Academics, Construction, and Water treatment and Biomass. Region wise, moisture analyzer market can be segmented into North America, Latin America, Asia Pacific, Japan, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, and Middle East & Africa.Moisture Analyzer Market: Regional OverviewNorth America region is the largest market for moisture analyser market followed by Latin America due to presence of many moisture analyzers manufacturers in this region. In Europe and Asia-Pacific region Moisture Analyzer market is also growing at a significant pace due to presence of various industries such food and beverages, and pharmaceuticals adopting moisture analyzers. Middle East moisture analyser is growing at a considerable pace due to industry norms.Request Sample Report@Moisture Analyzer Market: Competitive LandscapeKey PlayersThermo Fisher Scientific Inc., General Electric Co., PCE Instruments, Michell Instruments Inc., Ametek Inc., SpectraSesnsors Inc., A&D Co., Ltd., Kett Electric Laboratory, Mettler-Toledo International Inc., Sartorius AG, Shimadzu Corp., Gow-Mac Instrument Co., Mitsubishi Chemical Holdings Corp., Sinar Technology, and U-Therm International (H.K.) Ltd. are some of the key players in moisture analyzer market.About UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a third-platform research firm. Our research model is a unique collaboration of data analytics and market research methodology to help businesses achieve optimal performance.Contact UsPersistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA  Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb:Dissolved Gas Analyzer Market to Represent Significant Revenue Growth

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In industries, dissolved gases are often generated by equipments majorly in energy and oil and gas industries. These gases consist of complex chemical components and huge amount of hydrocarbons and are generally generated during power transformer operations. These gases get dissolved in oils used in transformers and dissolved gas analyzer identifies the level of gas generated by these equipments. Analysis of these dissolved gases in oils assist in diagnosing the presence of gases, thereby identifying and monitoring critical transformers, the probability and nature of faults in power transformers. The information about identity of these gases generated by a unit helps in preventive maintenance program.Request to View TOC @Dissolved gas analyzers simplify decision-making about when to service, upgrade, or refurbish the power transformers in industries and helps in preventing the failure expensive power transformers.Dissolved Gas Analyzer Market: Drivers and RestraintsFactors such as increased investment in power transformers and industrial infrastructure, several regulations regarding to the environment and power industry, which are being enacted by different government agencies of different countries, growing awareness regarding the fault probability of high voltage transformers and the high cost of replacing depreciating transformer are driving the growth of dissolved gas analyzers market. The rise in adoption of online DGA (dissolved gas analysis) is another significant factor which driving the growth of dissolved gas analyzer market.However, limitations in diagnosis techniques to precisely locate the fault is a factor restraining the growth of dissolved gas analyzer market.Dissolved Gas Analyzer Market: SegmentationDissolved gas analyzer market can be segmented on the basis of analysis type, power rating, extraction type and region wise. On the basis of analysis type, it can be further segmented into smoke alarms, early warning DGA monitoring, comprehensive DGA monitoring, laboratory services, database software, and portable DGA devices. On the basis of power rating, dissolved gas analyzer market can sub-segmented into 100 MVA  500 MVA, 501 MVA  800 MVA, 801  1200 MVA. By extraction type, this market can be sub-segmented into rack method, head space extraction, stripper column method and others. Region wise, dissolved gas analyzer market can be segmented into North America, Latin America, Asia Pacific, Japan, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, and Middle East & Africa.Dissolved Gas Analyzer Market: Regional OverviewAsia Pacific region is the largest market for dissolved gas analyzer due to large power transformer based and adoption of online DGA analysis. North America is the second largest market due to demand for increasing lifespan of aging power transformers followed by Europe region due to rising environmental concerns about power generation. Dissolved gas analyzer market in Latin America and Middle East region is also growing at a significant pace due to growing awareness in industries.Dissolved Gas Analyzer Market:Key AcquisitionsIn May 2017, ESCO Technologies, global provider of highly engineered products and solutions acquired Morgan Schaffer, a Canadian utility solutions provider. This acquisition will help ESCO Technologies and Morgan Schaffer to offer a wide range of solutions for dissolved gas analysis (DGA), oil testing, and data management.Request Sample Report@Key PlayersGeneral Electric, Morgan Schaffer Corporation, ABB Ltd, LumaSense Technologies Inc., Weidmann, Doble Engineering, Gatron Gmbh, OELCHECK Gmbh, SD Myers, Inc, Qualitrol Company LLC, EMH Energy-Messtechnik GmbH, and Sieyuan Electric Co. are some of the key players in moisture analyzer market.About UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a third-platform research firm. Our research model is a unique collaboration of data analytics and market research methodology to help businesses achieve optimal performance.Contact UsPersistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA  Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb:Growth Factors Market Trends Research and Projections for 2021

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Growth factors are group of proteins, which play an important role in the stimulation of cellular differentiation and cell division in the human body. There are different kinds of growth factors present in the human body. Some of the major growth factors include insulin-like growth factors, platelet-derived growth factors, epidermal growth factors, and nerve growth factor. Moreover, some cytokines, such as small proteins secreted by one cell to regulate the function of another cell, also act as growth factors.Request for Table of Contents @Growth factors are mainly used in the treatment of chronic diseases, such as anemia, renal disorders, cancer, etc. For instance, erythropoietin, which stimulates the growth of Red Blood Cells (RBCs), is used to treat anemia. Granulocyte-Macrophage Colony-Stimulating Factor (GM-CSF) and Granulocyte Colony-Stimulating Factor (G-CSF) are involved in the stimulation of White Blood Cells (WBCs) in cancer patients. However, abnormal production of growth factors causes several diseases. For instance, vascular endothelial growth factor provokes endothelial cells to penetrate tumor in blood capillaries.The global growth factors market covers various blood growth factors and tissue growth factors. Blood growth factors include colony stimulating factors, erythropoietins, interferons, and interleukins.In terms of geography, North America dominates the global growth factors market. This is due to improved health care infrastructure and increasing prevalence of chronic diseases in the region. In addition, growing demand for recombinant growth factors has also propelled the growth of the market in North America. The U.S. represents the largest market for growth factors in North America, followed by Canada. In Europe, Germany, France, and the U.K. account for the major share of the growth factors market.The growth factors market in Asia is also expected to expand at a higher rate in the next five years. This is due to the rising awareness about therapeutic applications of growth factors in the treatment of chronic diseases in the region. In addition, increasing prevalence of chronic diseases and growing aging population are driving the expansion of the growth factors market in the region. Growing demographics and economies in developing countries, such as India and China, are expected to lead to the rise in the growth factors market in Asia. Moreover, India, China, and Japan, are expected to be the fastest growing markets for growth factors in the region.Increasing prevalence of chronic diseases and rising awareness about therapeutic applications of growth factors in treatment of various diseases are among the major driving factors for the global growth factors market. Also, increasing research in the field of synthetic blood growth factor has propelled the growth of the global growth factors market.Risk and complications associated with synthetic growth factors in treatment of diseases is a key restraint for the global growth factors market. In addition, the imposition of stringent regulations for the approval of synthetic growth factors inhibits the growth of the market. Rapid product launches and increasing number of mergers and acquisitions between growth factors manufacturing companies are some of the major trends observed in the market.Request a Sample Brochure of the Report @The major companies operating in this market are Wockhardt Ltd., F. Hoffmann-La Roche AG, Alseres Pharmaceuticals, Inc., Bayer HealthCare Pharmaceuticals Inc., Amgen Inc., BioMimetic Therapeutics Inc., Ceregene, Inc., FibroGen, Inc., Novo Nordisk A/S, Johnson & Johnson Limited, Merck Serono International S.A., PeproTech Inc., NsGene A/S, Insmed Inc., Reliance GeneMedix Plc., and Lonza Group.About UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a third-platform research firm. Our research model is a unique collaboration of data analytics and market research methodology to help businesses achieve optimal performance.To support companies in overcoming complex business challenges, we follow a multi-disciplinary approach. At PMR, we unite various data streams from multi-dimensional sources. By deploying real-time data collection, big data, and customer experience analytics, we deliver business intelligence for organizations of all sizes.Contact UsPersistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,Telephone - +1-646-568-7751USA  Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb:Global Osteoporosis Drugs Market Segments, Key Driver, Strategies, Analysis and Forecasts Till 2022

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The, Osteoporosis Drugs Market inquire about report is developing with the quick pace; chiefly due the prospering Healthcare Sector. As per a current report distributed by the Market Research Future, The Osteoporosis Drugs Industry Research report is blasting and anticipated that would pick up unmistakable quality over the conjecture time frame. The Market is anticipated to exhibit a colossal development by 2022, outperforming its past development records as far as esteem and volume.You can get easy access to samples from the report here:Global Osteoporosis drugs Market  Major Players:Eli Lilly and Company, Merck & Co., Novartis International AG, Amgen Inc., F. Hoffmann La Roche Ltd., Pfizer Inc., Novo Nordisk, Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd. and others are some of the prominent players at the forefront of competition in the global osteoporosis drugs market and are profiled in MRFR Analysis.Global Osteoporosis drugs Market  Regional Analysis:The global osteoporosis drugs market is segmented into five major regions including Americas, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Middle East and Africa region.America dominates the global osteoporosis market owing to a well-developed healthcare sector and huge patient population for osteoporosis. Apart from this, changing lifestyle and increasing healthcare expenditure have boosted the growth of the market in America. In 2015, according to the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, in the U.S. the total healthcare expenditure accounted for 17.8% of the total gross domestic product (GDP), which accounted for USD 3.2 trillion.Europe is the second largest osteoporosis market, which is followed by Asia Pacific. Availability of funds for research, huge patient population, increasing healthcare expenditures, well-developed healthcare sector and government support for research & development are projected to drive the market growth during the forecasted period. Regionally, Europe is divided into Western Europe and Eastern Europe. Western Europe hold the major share of the regional market, which is majorly contributed by Germany, the U.K., and France. However, Eastern Europe is the fastest growing region due the huge opportunities in the untapped market.Asia Pacific is the fastest growing region in global the market due to the presence of a huge patient population. Moreover, continuously developing economies like India and China, and presence of huge opportunity in the market fuels the market growth. According to Indian Brand Equity Foundation in 2017, the Indian healthcare sector is one of the fastest growing industries and is expected to advance at a CAGR of 22.87% during the review period to reach USD 280 billion by 2020.On the other hand, the Middle East & Africa holds the least share in the global osteoporosis market due to presence of poor economy.Global Osteoporosis drugs Market  Overview:Patients with osteoporosis are at increased risk of suffering fractures due to a loss in bone strength. These fractures place a considerable burden on public health systems, and significant unmet need remains for osteoporosis therapies that are safer and more efficacious, particularly in reducing the risk of nonvertebral fractures. Growing geriatric population, rising prevalence of the osteoporosis and increasing per capita healthcare expenditure will drive the market growth during the forecast period, from 2017-2022Furthermore, rising number of initiatives to increase the awareness levels pertaining to osteoporosis care amongst the patients as well as the physicians is expected to widen the osteoporosis market growth potential during the forecast period. For instance, National Osteoporosis Foundation (NOF), a healthcare organization responsible for National Bone Health Alliance and Fracture Liaison Service (FLS) care coordination programs that focuses on elevating awareness levels as well as provides training to healthcare professionalsOwing to the increasing number of the people suffering from osteoporosis many companies are involved in the manufacturing and introduction of the better and effective treatment and diagnostic options. A number of diagnostic treatment such as imaging (X-rays, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), bone scan), joint fluid analysis and others are available. However these are not that effective thus, many private and government organizations are providing support to the manufacturer for the development of the new and advanced devices.The key participants are employing sustainability strategies promoting the adoption of osteoporosis therapeutics to gain competitive advantage. For instance, Actavis Inc. announced to acquire Warner Chilcott PLC in order to widen their product portfolioThe global osteoporosis market is expected to grow with a CAGR of approximately 4.7% during the forecast period from 2017-2022.Industry Updates:May 2017 Ablynx, a biopharmaceutical company headquartered in Belgium, announced the completion of a preclinical package for a novel nanobody, ALX-1141 for the treatment of the osteoarthritis. Merck will now be responsible for further clinical development of the molecule.Jul 2017, Kolon Pharmaceutical got the approval for the Worlds first cell and gene therapy for knee osteoarthritis in Korea.Aug 2016, Bioventus, a global leader in orthobiologic solutions launched GELSYN-3, a three-injection hyaluronic acid (HA) product for pain relief associated with osteoarthritis (OA) of the knee.Feel free to get in touch for discounts and customized details:Segments:Global osteoporosis drugs market has been segmented on the basis of drug class which comprises bisphosphonates, calcitonins, selective estrogen receptor modulators (SERMS), parathyroid hormone (PTH) and others. On the basis of route of administration; market is segmented into oral, injectable and others. On the basis of gender the market is segmented into male and female.Major TOC of Global Osteoporosis Drugs Market:Chapter 1 Introduction1.1 Definition1.2 Scope Of Study1.3 Research Objective1.4 Assumptions & Limitations1.5 Market StructureChapter 2 Research Methodology2.1 Research Process2.2 Primary Research2.3 Secondary ResearchChapter 3 Market Dynamics3.1 Drivers3.2 Restraints3.3 Opportunities3.4 Challenges3.5 Macroeconomic IndicatorsChapter 4 Market Factor Analysis4.1 Porters Five Forces Model4.1.1 Bargaining Power Of Suppliers4.1.2 Bargaining Power Of Customer4.1.3 Intensity Of Competitors4.1.4 Threat Of New EntrantsChapter 5 Global Osteoporosis Drugs Market, By Drug Class5.1 Introduction5.2 Bisphosphonates5.3 Calcitonins5.4 Selective Estrogen Receptor Modulators (SERMs)5.5 Parathyroid Hormone (PTH5.6 OthersCONTINUED FOR FULL TOCAny query or specific requirement? Ask to our industry expert:About Market Research Future:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.In order to stay updated with technology and work process of the industry, MRFR often plans & conducts meet with the industry experts and industrial visits for its research analyst members.Contact:Market Research FutureOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Pune  411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.comPatient Monitoring Devices Market 2018 Key Driver: GE Healthcare, Roche Diagnostics, BIOTRONIK SE & Co. KG, Abbott Laboratories, Siemens Healthcare, Philips Healthcare, CAS Medical Systems, Honeywell International

Patient Monitoring Devices Market

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The, Patient Monitoring Devices Market inquire about report is developing with the quick pace; chiefly due the prospering Healthcare Sector. As per a current report distributed by the Market Research Future, The Patient Monitoring Devices Industry Research report is blasting and anticipated that would pick up unmistakable quality over the conjecture time frame. The Market is anticipated to exhibit a colossal development by 2022, outperforming its past development records as far as esteem and volume.You can get easy access to samples from the report here:Regional Analysis:Depending on geographic region, Patient monitoring devices market is segmented into four key regions: Americas, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and Middle East & Africa. Considering the global scenario of the market, North America comprise largest market share in global Patient monitoring devices market. Moreover, the European market is also growing continuously. On the other hand, Asia-Pacific market is expected to grow at the fastest pace and rapidly in the Patient monitoring devices Market segment during the forecasted period. Middle East & Africa region are likely to have a limited but steady growth in the market.Considering the global scenario of the market, North America region is believed to be the largest market for Patient monitoring devices. Moreover the European market is also growing and second largest market for Patient monitoring devices. On the other hand, Asia-Pacific market is expected to grow at the fastest pace in the Patient monitoring devices during the forecasted period. Rest of the World is likely to have a limited but steady growth in the market.The report for Patient Monitoring Devices Market of Market Research Future comprises of extensive primary research along with the detailed analysis of qualitative as well as quantitative aspects by various industry experts, key opinion leaders to gain the deeper insight of the market and industry performance. The report gives the clear picture of current market scenario which includes historical and projected market size in terms of value and volume, technological advancement, macro economical and governing factors in the market. The report provides details information and strategies of the top key players in the industry. The report also gives a broad study of the different markets segments and regionsGlobal Radiology Information System Market Players:There are plenty of large and small market players which operate in this market all over the globe. GE Healthcare, Roche Diagnostics, BIOTRONIK SE & Co. KG, Abbott Laboratories, Siemens Healthcare, Philips Healthcare, CAS Medical Systems, Inc., Spacelabs Healthcare, Honeywell International, Inc., Shenzhen Mindray Bio-Medical Electronics Co.Market Highlights:The global Patient monitoring devices market has been evaluated as steadily growing market and it is expected that the market will continue to grow similarly in the near future. These monitoring devices continuously check patients vital signs by using a medical monitor. Patient monitoring devices market has various functions such as glucose monitoring, blood monitoring, temperature monitoring, cholesterol monitoring, weight monitoring etc. Electrocardiography is fastest growing sub-segment, it is largest in cardiac monitoring market and fastest growing in neurological device. Electrocardiography is the process that checks for problems with the electrical activity of your heart. Electrocardiography is very helpful to diagnose unexplained chest pain or pressure, cause of symptoms of heart disease, to check how well medicines are working and see if they are causing side effects that affect the heart. Increase in consumer awareness is driving the market growth which expected to grow in same pace in near future. Patient monitoring devices manufacturers trying to make more advance, accurate and innovative device to provide desirable solution.Global Patient monitoring devices market is segment into two major segments and its sub-segments such as based on type, based on product type and based on end user. Global Patient monitoring devices market is expected to reach USD 23.4 billion by 2022 at a CAGR of 5.7%. North America is the largest market for patient monitoring devices while Asia-Pacific region is fastest growing. Europe is second largest market for patient monitoring device and expected to grow steadily during forecasting period.Taste the market data and market information presented through more than 120 market data tables and figures spread over 80 numbers of pages of the project report. Avail the in-depth table of content TOC & market synopsis on Patient Monitoring Devices Market Research Report Global Forecast to 2022.Feel free to get in touch for discounts and customized details:Segmentation:Patient monitoring devices Market has been segmented on the basis of product type which comprises of Central monitoring stations, Portable bedside monitors, Electrocardiogram (ECG) Devices, Hemodynamic Monitoring Devices, Fetal and neonatal monitors, Respiratory Monitors, Weight management monitors, Temperature monitoring devices, and others. On the basis of end user, the market is segmented into Hospitals and clinics, Ambulatory care centers, Home care and others.MAJOR TOC:Chapter 1. Report PrologueChapter 2. Introduction2.1 Definition2.2 Scope of the Study2.2.1 Research Objective2.2.2 Assumptions2.2.3 Limitations2.3 Market Structure2.4. Market SegmentationChapter 3. Research Methodology3.1 Research Process3.2 Primary Research3.3 Secondary Research3.4 Market Size Estimation3.5 Forecast ModelChapter 4. Market Dynamics4.1 Drivers4.2 Restraints4.3 Opportunities4.4 Mega Trends4.5 Macroeconomic IndicatorsChapter 5. Market Factor Analysis5.1 Value Chain Analysis5.2 PORTERS Five Forces5.3 Demand & Supply: Gap Analysis5.4 Pricing Analysis5.5 Investment Opportunity Analysis5.6 Merger And Acquisition Landscape5.7 Upcoming Trends5.7.1 Market Trends5.7.2 Technological Trends5.7.3 Insurance & Regulations5.7.4 OthersCONTINUED FOR FULL TOCAny query or specific requirement? Ask to our industry expert:About Market Research Future:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.In order to stay updated with technology and work process of the industry, MRFR often plans & conducts meet with the industry experts and industrial visits for its research analyst members.Contact:Market Research FutureOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Pune  411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.comGenmai Cha Market : Recent Industry Trends and Projected Industry Growth, 2017 - 2025

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Genmai cha is a traditional Japanese green tea prepared from roasted brown rice and consequently possesses a pleasant nutty flavor combined with the taste of green tea. Along with rice, it contains many other herbs and amongst consumers, is popularly called as the popcorn tea. The commercialization of all the Japanese recipes around the world has led to the rise of genmai cha market around the world.The genmai cha has many applications in healthcare and food industry and is mostly consumed as a functional beverage and an alternative to the conventional tea beverages. The consumer with high awareness and acceptability for continental food and beverages contribute significantly to the genmai cha market. The growth of the genmai cha market is directly linked to the rise in green tea consumption and varieties of green tea available in the tea.Genmai Cha Market: SegmentationThe genmai cha market can be segmented on the basis of source, applications and distribution channel.On the basis of source, the genmai cha market can be segmented as organic and conventionalOn the basis of applications, the genmai cha market can be segmented as pharmaceuticals and functional beverage industry.On the basis of packaging, the genmai cha market can be segmented as tea-bags, carton boxes and aluminum seal packagesOn the basis of distribution channel, the genmai cha market can be segmented as modern trade, convenience stores, retailers and other retailers.Request for Table of Contents @Genmai Cha Market: Drivers, Restraints, and TrendsThe genmai cha market across the world is largely driven by the consumers preference for functional beverage. The extensive brands and the brewing stories behind the traditional Japanese recipes, is the major factor in driving the consumer base, and is fuelling the growth of the genmai cha market. The rise in the genmai cha market is also attributed to the increase in Japanese restaurants and cafes around the world, and the availability of the genmai cha in many hotels.Macro-economic factors like the introduction of export target by the Japanese government is also likely to nourish the genmai cha market globally. The distribution channel also plays an important role in the growth of the genmai cha market, like availability of genmai cha at popular grocery and convenience stores has made the product within reach to the consumers. Many consumers around the world are influenced by the false health claims made by the companies for the promotion of the product and hence, the genmai cha market may face slack in regions where consumer acceptability of the product is on the base on scientific basis. The taste of the genmai cha is a demand side factor and is likely to be weak restraint in the growth of the genmai cha market.Genmai Cha Market: Regional OutlookThe genmai cha market in North America and Latin America is impacted by the tea and coffee consumer base. Consumers in this region are opting for a healthy alternative in food and beverage. The coffee-consumers are opting for more caffeine-free beverages. In Europe, the genmai cha market is influenced by the growth in Japanese cafes and restaurants.Request to View Sample of Research Report @Japan remains the strongest region in the genmai cha market. Other regions influenced by the Japanese cultures, like China, are likely to see a growth in the genmai cha market. Overall, the Asia Pacific will show growth in the genmai cha market. The Middle East and Africa may see a very slow growth in the genmai cha market. Availability of products and consumer awareness is a key factor affecting the growth of genmai cha market in this region.Genmai Cha Market: Key PlayersYamamotoyamaGranum, Inc.D?MatchaMAIKONOCHA-HONPOSasaki Green Tea CompanyKyoto Obubu Tea FarmsABOUT US:Persistence Market Research (PMR) is a third-platform research firm. Our research model is a unique collaboration of data analytics and market research methodology to help businesses achieve optimal performance. To support companies in overcoming complex business challenges, we follow a multi-disciplinary approach. At PMR, we unite various data streams from multi-dimensional sources. By deploying real-time data collection, big data, and customer experience analytics, we deliver business intelligence for organizations of all sizes.CONTACT:Persistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA  Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb:Handset Power Amplifiers Market - comprehensive evaluation of Industry Trends & Opportunities

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Handset Power Amplifiers used to support various operating modes like UMTS, CDMA, GSM/EDGE LTE and multiple frequency bands which offer premium performance with very small form factor. Most of the power amplifiers for the mobile applications are been manufactured using gallium arsenide based bipolar transistor and a comparatively small number of handset power amplifiers are being manufactured using silicon CMOS. CMOS does offer the tantalizing possibility of having much higher levels of integration and comparatively lower cost to GaAs. The growth of handset power amplifier market is highly reliant on the increasing internet penetration globally.Download Research Brochure For More Information@For purpose of in depth analysis, the handset power amplifiers markethas been segmented on the basis of technology, type, application andgeography. Based on the technology, the market has been segmented into two types they are like GaAs, GaN, & SiGe and CMOS. Based on the type, the market has been segmented into two types they are like audio power amplifier and radio power amplifier.Various types of applications of handset power amplifiers includes application in featured phones, smart phones and others.. Moreover, this report also provide cross functional analysis of all the above mentioned segment across different regions such as Europe, North America, Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa and Latin America.Increased internet penetration is one of the major driver for the growth of the handset power amplifiers market. Growing demand for the higher network bandwidth and continuously increasing M2M communication are the key growth drivers for this market. Therefore, thecontinued global migration from 2G to 3G devices is also one of the main factor anticipated to catalyze the growing demand of different handset power amplifiers during the forecast period from 2017 to 2025. In addition, growth of the audio and video conference using the notebook platform is also anticipated to increase the demand of handset power amplifiers in the upcoming years. In turn this is also projected to affect the market of handset power amplifiers in a positive manner during the forecasted period.In spite of many driving factors, the handset power amplifiers marketis expected to show a fluctuation in growth rate because of the more stringent requirement in performance, functionality, cost and size in multimode multiband power amplifier. The added complexity inthe multi-band and multi-mode handsetsis also one of the key restraining factor for handset power amplifiers market. Increase in the wafer size and rise in number of M&A is going to create significant opportunity for handset power amplifiers in coming years.By application, the smartphone segment held the largest market share because of the strong demand for the smartphones with advanced technologies like 3G and 4G, gesture recognition, hapticsand voice recognition. This segment is expected to maintain its dominance in the forecast period because of surge in the use of the mobile and internet subscriber base.Geographically, the global handset power amplifiers market is mainly driven by Asia Pacific region. Increasing awareness about the data center and the better availability of the high-speed network such as 3G, 4G and LTE will further spur the growth of the handset power amplifiers market in the region. Rapid adoption ofthe smartphones among different developing economies like China and India is expected to influence the growth of the handset power amplifiers market in this region. This region is expected to maintain its dominance in the market during the forecast period owingto the presence of huge number of semiconductor wafer manufacturers in countries like South Korea and Japan among others.Request For Discount On This Report@Some of the leading players operating in the handset power amplifiers market includes Broadcom (The U.S.),Qorvo (The U.S.),Skyworks Solutions (The U.S.),Texas Instruments (The U.S.),Analog Devices (The U.S.), Maxim Integrated (The U.S.) ,Alcatel-Lucent (France), Hitachi Kokusai Electric (Japan),Infineon Technologies (Germany) among others.About Us:-Transparency Market Research (TMR) is a next-generation provider of syndicated research, customized research, and consulting services. TMRs global and regional market intelligence coverage includes industries such as pharmaceutical, chemicals and materials, technology and media, food and beverages, and consumer goods, among others. Each TMR research report provides clients with a 360-degree view of the market with statistical forecasts, competitive landscape, detailed segmentation, key trends, and strategic recommendations.Contact Us:-State Tower,90 State Street,Suite 700,Albany NY - 12207United StatesTel: +1-518-618-1030Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comCalcium Propionate Market: What Are The Competitive Analysis? What Will Be The Industry Forecasts by 2023?

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Calcium propionate is calcium salt of propionic acid, formed by reaction of calcium hydroxide with propionic acid. The compound exhibits mold inhibiting property, which is extremely beneficial for prevention of growing microorganisms in food and beverages. Growing consumption of calcium propionate as a preservative and leavening agent in bakery and dairy products is a major driver of the global market. The increasing applications of calcium propionate in bakery products hold a major share of the market in terms of value. It is used for milk fever prevention in cows and is a great feed supplement for poultry, dogs, cattle, and horse. The use of calcium propionate in baked products depends upon various influencing factors such as storage method, storage temperature, product type, and others. It acts as an anti-microbial agent which is beneficial in the production of pharmaceuticals, especially for skin disease caused by a parasite. This property is also useful in preventing bacterial growth and preventing cosmetics from spoiling. Being less toxic and cost-effective compared to other substitutes such as sodium propionate, sorbates, and others are the primary drivers of the market growth.Request for sample@Market SegmentationThe global calcium propionate market is segmented on the basis of its application and region.Based on the applications, the global market is segregated into bakery products, dairy products, animal feed, processed meat, pesticides, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, and others.Regional AnalysisThe global calcium propionate market is segmented into five major regions of North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Latin America, and the Middle East & Africa.North America is the leading region in the global calcium propionate market owing to the presence of well-established mature foods & beverages industries in this region. Countries such as the U.S. and Canada hold a major share of the regional market and may further witness healthy growth in the coming years due to the high production and consumption of bakery and dairy products in this region.Europe is another substantial region expected to witness positive growth in the market. The increasing need for the longer shelf life stability and growing awareness of the foodborne disease is anticipated to fuel the regional market in countries such as the U.K, Germany, France, Italy, and others.Access Report Details @Competitive Analysis A-M chemicals co., Ltd (China) ADDCON (Germany) Fine organics (India) Kemira Oyj (Finland) Impextraco NV (Belgium) Krishna Chemicals (India) Niacet (U.S) Macco Organiques inc (Czech Republic) Perstorp Orgnr (Sweden) Cargill Incorporated. (U.S) AB Mauri India Pvt.Ltd. (India) BASF SE (Germany) Triveni Chemicals (India) Kemin Industries, Inc. (USA) Eastman Chemical Company (U.S).If Interested Please ask for Discount@About Market Research Future:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.MRFR team have supreme objective to provide the optimum quality market research and intelligence services to our clients. Our market research studies by products, services, technologies, applications, end users, and market players for global, regional, and country level market segments, enable our clients to see more, know more, and do more, which help to answer all their most important questions.In order to stay updated with technology and work process of the industry, MRFR often plans & conducts meet with the industry experts and industrial visits for its research analyst members.Contact:Market Research FutureOffice No. 524/528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, HadapsarPune - 411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.comThank You.Embedded Processors Market Predicted to Witness Steady Growth During the Forecast Period 2017-2025

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Embedded processors are invented to satisfy the need of multifunctional processors. Embedded processors are microprocessors, which consists of variety of Chips embedded in one single processor. An embedded processors are gaining popularity in recent years mainly because of its ability to perform multiple functions at a time. Due to recent innovations in the usability of the embedded processors the end use applications are rising rapidly. Embedded processors are used in the charging applications, and memories. Also, an embedded processor supports different interfaces for its implementation such as USB 3.0, UART, SATA3, JTAG, HDMI, etc.Request to View TOC @Embedded processors are highly in demand because of their processing speed and storage capacity which is based on the number of bits in the processors. The consumer electronics manufacturers are using an embedded processors in smartphones, tablets to enhance performance, speed, and end user experiences.In the electronics sector, rapid changes are going on continuously for past decade which has resulted into new and better technology introduction in the market.Global Embedded Processors Market: Drivers and RestraintsAn embedded processors are used in different instruments, applications, appliances also they are compatible with the wide range of platforms this factor is expected to increase the demand for an embedded processors in the forecast period. The manufacturers are focusing on innovations in embedded processors and its possible increasing operations continuously which is resulting in expansion of end uses of processors. The rising deployment of the embedded processors in the automotive and consumer electronics is responsible for driving the market for embedded processors globally. In addition to this, the rapid adoption of IoT in the industries is also going to drive the demand for embedded processors in the forecast period. On the other hand, embedded processors have very high cost for implementation this factor is a major challenge for the global growth of the embedded processor market.,,Global embedded processors Market can be divided into three segments, based on number of bits, End use application.,, By number of bits, 16 bit, 32 bit, 64 bit, By end use application, Connectivity solutions (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, USB, SATA), Camera, Display/ LCD, Multimedia, Security, DSP, Memory, Others, By industry, Automotive, Electronics, Telecommunication, Industrial, Enterprise system, Consumer electronics, HealthcareThe global market for an embedded processor is divided regionally into North America, Latin America, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, Asia Pacific excluding Japan, Japan, and Middle East and Africa. Among these regions APEJ region is predicted to grow at highest CAGR owing to the rapid industrialization and higher technological growth going on in the developing countries such as India, China also presence of higher processor vendors. The North America region dominates the market in terms of revenue generation followed by Latin America and Europe.Request Sample Report@Global Embedded Processors Market: Industry Key PlayersSome of the key players in embedded processors providers includesQualcomm Technologies, IncMouser Electronics, Inc.NVIDIA CorporationRenesas Electronics CorporationTexas Instruments Inc.Intel CorporationApplied Micro Circuits CorporationNXP SemiconductorsInfineon Technologies AGAbout UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a third-platform research firm. Our research model is a unique collaboration of data analytics and market research methodology to help businesses achieve optimal performance.Contact UsPersistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA  Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb:Membrane Bioreactor System Market : Value Chain, Dynamics and Key Players (2020)

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Membrane bioreactor (MBR) is a combination of membrane filtration techniques such as micro filtration and ultra filtration and suspended growth bioreactor. Membrane bioreactors are used widely in large-sized wastewater treatment plants. In membrane bioreactor treatment process, membrane unit is exposed to the sludge that has been treated combine with biological process and the solid-liquid separation process together in the single stage. Membrane bioreactor system (MBR) is very effective against some of the most commonly found pathogens such as cryptosporidium and giardia witch cannot be eliminated with other traditional waste water treatment process such as chorine.On the basis of the various application of membrane bioreactor system, the overall market can be divided into two broad categories namely, industrial wastewater treatment and municipal waste water treatment. Based on the various configurations of membrane bioreactor system the global membrane bioreactor market can be divided into two broad segments namely internal membrane bioreactor system, and exterior membrane bioreactor system.Request for Table of Contents @North America is the largest market for membrane bioreactor system followed by Europe and Asia-Pacific. The U.S. is the largest market for membrane bioreactor in North America mainly attributed to the high share of sludge treatment plant and manufacturing industries of this region. The U.K. is the largest market for membrane bioreactor in Europe. Asia Pacific is the fasted growing region for membrane bioreactor system fueled mainly from growing manufacturing industries of India and China.The global membrane bioreactor is going through many merger and acquisition in recent years in order to enhance technological base, geographical reach, product portfolio and larger consumers base. For example, Veolia Water Solutions & Technologies (US based membrane bioreactor manufacturer) has come into an agreement with Shell Canada (Canadian based membrane bioreactor company) to design and manufacture a waste water treatment equipment to recover the water used for steam production at Shell's Carmon Creek project.Some of the leading companies operating in global membrane bioreactor System include Ge Water & Process Technologies, Kubota Corporation, Koch Membrane Systems, Inc. Mitsubishi Rayon Co., Ltd., Toray Industries, Inc., Adi Systems Inc., Bioprocessh2o LLC Degremont Sa., Evoqua Water Technologies LLC., GLV Inc., Huber SE, Layne Christensen Company, Pall Corporation, United Envirotech Ltd., Veolia Water Solutions & Technologies Wehrle Umwelt GMBH, and X-Flow B. VRequest to View Sample of Research Report @ABOUT US:Persistence Market Research (PMR) is a third-platform research firm. Our research model is a unique collaboration of data analytics and market research methodology to help businesses achieve optimal performance. To support companies in overcoming complex business challenges, we follow a multi-disciplinary approach. At PMR, we unite various data streams from multi-dimensional sources. By deploying real-time data collection, big data, and customer experience analytics, we deliver business intelligence for organizations of all sizes.CONTACT:Persistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA  Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb:Which Factors increases the Demand of Investment Analysis of Construction Industry in Construction Industry and Know the Key Players with Forecasts 2021?

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Study Objectives of Investment Analysis of Construction Industry in Indonesia To provide detailed analysis of the construction industry along with forecast for the next 5 years of the of the Indonesia Construction Market To provide insights about factors affecting the market growth To provide country-level analysis of the market with respect to the current market size and future prospective To provide country-level analysis of the market for construction industryRequest for Sample@Market Synopsis of Investment Analysis of Construction Industry in IndonesiaIndonesia is known as the second most productive and profitable construction market in Asia, where a huge number of construction projects are undergoing in both residential as well as non-residential sectors. For example, one of the head ventures which were started by the property developer named Lippo Karawaci is the Millennium Village and The Global Smart City which is situated on a 70 hectare in Lippon town. The development cost for these projects would be approximately $15 billion. In Indonesia, the construction industry has been growing 8% to 9% annually, due to huge demand for residential properties and growth of the property sector in major cities around the country. The public works investment is a key point in the governments plan to provide water resources, roads and human settlement infrastructure for the long-term development.The investment board in Indonesia is favoring to draw assets into the nation as it dispatches a huge framework program intended to quicken modernization and advanced development. Considering the historical trends, the GDP of the construction industry has grown at a higher rate than overall countrys GDP. From 2003 to 2013, the GDP has grown from 125.3 trillion RP to 907.3 trillion RP, where the industry accounts for around 10% of GDP.Access Full Detail @Key Findings As per MFRF analysis, it has been estimated that the majority of the market is dominated by non-residential properties approximately around 56.67% in 2015 as compared to residential construction activities. The total spending in construction industry in Indonesia is accounted to USD XX Billion in 2015. The annual production growth rate is accounted for XX % during the forecasted period. The market share of Indonesia Construction Business is estimated around XX%.If interested please check for Discount@About Market Research Future:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.MRFR team have supreme objective to provide the optimum quality market research and intelligence services to our clients. Our market research studies by products, services, technologies, applications, end users, and market players for global, regional, and country level market segments, enable our clients to see more, know more, and do more, which help to answer all their most important questions.In order to stay updated with technology and work process of the industry, MRFR often plans & conducts meet with the industry experts and industrial visits for its research analyst members.ContactMarket Research FutureOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Pune - 411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312Email: sales@marketresearchfuture.comThank You.Digital Fare Meters Market : Opportunities and Forecast Assessment, 2017 - 2025

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Global Digital Fare Meters Market: OverviewDigital fare meters are electronic devices which are installed in taxicabs and auto rickshaws, which is used to calculate fare on the basis of distance travelled and waiting time. The digital fare meters have ticket receipt printers embedded in them, GPS systems to assist with the location and safety of the travelers. Credit and prepaid card support, Bluetooth support for communication with smartphones and tablets and other electronic devices, USB support. GPS technology has been used in digital taxi meters in order to protect the citizens from overpaying.Initially the digital taxi meters were based on optical transducer but due to the difference in the timer in the measurement controller and the module the reading were inaccurate, and the taxi owners chose longer roots to fake the digital fare meter readings. With the digital meter the customers can get benefits of a printed copy and SMS notifications. The digital fare meter has three basic functions which are for hire, Hired and stopped. The digital fare meters have built-in real time clock for automatic transitions from day fare to night fare, as the fare prices change from day fare to night fare.Request for Table of Contents @Global Digital Fare Meters Market: Market DynamicsThe global digital fare meter is driven by factors such as accurate reading, easy to install, temper proof, weather proof, high durability and easy compatibility. As the digital fare meters are low in maintenance they are widely preferred by end users. The demand for global digital fare meters is expected to increase due rules and regulations set by governments regulatory bodies. The restrain for the global digital fare meter would be the cab services offered by new market players which use online technology to calculate the fare such as android based fare meter.Global Digital Fare Meters Market: Market SegmentationThe global digital fare meters market has been classified by digital fare meter type, vehicle type and sales channel.On the basis of type of digital fare meters, the global digital fare meters market is segmented into:Meters with printersMeters with without printersOn the basis of vehicle type of digital fare meters, the global digital fare meters market is segmented into:Auto RickshawTaxiOn the basis of sales channel, the global digital fare meters market is segmented into:OEMAftermarketAuto rickshaw segment has the higher rate of usage of digital fare meters. Digital fare meter with printers are expected to grow at a higher CAGR.Global Digital Fare Meters Market: Regional OverviewBased on the geographies, the global digital fare meters market is fragmented into seven key regions- Latin America, North America, Eastern Europe, and Western Europe, Middle East & Africa, Asia-Pacific except Japan and Japan. Among the regions mentioned above, Asia-pacific except japan has highest share for global digital fare meters followed by Japan. North America and Western Europe will see a decrease in the usage of digital fare meter due to increase in android based technology.Eastern Europe has a sluggish growth rate for the global digital fare meter market, other than Asia pacific the global digital fare meter market is expected to witness a steady growth rate. Overall the global digital fare meter market is expected to grow at a steady growth rate for the forecasted period. Auto rickshaw segment has the higher rate of usage of digital fare meters. Digital fare meter with printers are expected to grow at a higher CAGR.Request to View Sample of Research Report @Global Digital Fare Meters Market PlayersSome of the market players identified in the global digital fare meters market includes:Sansui ElectronicsPulsar Technologies (I) Pvt. LtdPrecision Electronic Instruments Co.Pricol LimitedSuper Meter Mfg. Co.MIJO AUTO Meter Pvt. LtdSuperb Meter Mfg. Co.Automotive Techno Co. Inc.National Meter Mfg. Co.Maruti Meter Mfg. CorporationUnique Digital MetersHydaker IndustriesSrisenthilnathan Meter WorksAr. Micro Equipment Pvt. Ltd.Smart Technology systemsABOUT US:Persistence Market Research (PMR) is a third-platform research firm. Our research model is a unique collaboration of data analytics and market research methodology to help businesses achieve optimal performance. To support companies in overcoming complex business challenges, we follow a multi-disciplinary approach. At PMR, we unite various data streams from multi-dimensional sources. By deploying real-time data collection, big data, and customer experience analytics, we deliver business intelligence for organizations of all sizes.CONTACT:Persistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA  Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb:Wireline Services Market 2017 Key Players, Share, Trend, Segmentation and Forecast To 2022

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Market Study Report Add New Global Wireline Services Market by Manufacturers, Countries, Type and Application, forecast to 2022 to its research database presenting a deep study of the market growth factors and drivers. The report spread across 123 pages with table and figures in it.This report focuses on the Global Wireline Services Market, especially in North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific, South America, Middle East and Africa. This report categorizes the market based on manufacturers, regions, type and application.Wireline Service is the routine maintenance of a wellbore with wireline tools or any other devices so that well completion operations can be further worked upon. The service uses a cabling technology that a wireline service provider in oil and gas exploration and production business provides. This cabling technology together with the tools perform functions like intervening, pipe recovery and reservoir evaluation, etc.Get Sample Copy of this Report:Scope of the Report:Market Segment by Manufacturers, this report covers:Schlumberger, Halliburton, Baker Hughes, Weatherford, Superior Energy Services, Pioneer Energy Services, C&J Energy Services, Expro Group, Archer, COSL, Basic Energy Services, Oilserv, Wireline Engineering, SGS SA, CNPC/CPL, EQT/Qinterra.Market Segment by Regions, regional analysis covers:North America (USA, Canada and Mexico), Europe (Germany, France, UK, Russia and Italy), Asia-Pacific (China, Japan, Korea, India and Southeast Asia), South America (Brazil, Argentina, Columbia etc.), Middle East and Africa (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa).Market Segment by Type, covers:Electric Line, Slick Line.Market Segment by Applications, can be divided into:Wireline Logging, Wireline Intervention, Wireline Completion.The Major objectives of the study are as follows: Define, analyzes and forecast Wireline Services Market by Product type, applications, key players and region. Forecast the market size with the help of value & volume for various segments regarding main regions (United States, Canada, Mexico and Rest of the World). Provide detailed information concerning the major factors (opportunities, drivers, restraints, and industry-specific challenges) influencing the growth of Wireline Services market. Analyze the industry with respect to individual growth trends, prospects and contributions to the total Wireline Services market. Analyze opportunities in the market for various stakeholders by identifying the high-growth segments of Wireline Services market. Profile the key players and comprehensively analyses their market position in terms of ranking and core competencies along with detailing the competitive landscape for the market leaders.Key questions answered in the report include: What are the key role in Wireline Services market report? What was the market size in 2017 to 2022? How will market change over the forecast period and what will be the market size in 2022? Who are the key market players and what are their strategies in the Wireline Services market? What are the key market trends impacting the growth of the Wireline Services Industry? What are the market opportunities and challenges faced by the vendors Wireline Services market? What trends, drivers and barriers are influencing its growth? What are the key outcomes of the five forces analysis of the Wireline Services market?More Report At:Related Report:China Wireline Services Market by Manufacturers, Regions (Province), Type and Application, Forecast to 2022This report focuses on the Wireline Services in China market, to split the market based on manufacturers, Regions (Province), type and application.About Us:Marketstudyreport.com allows you to manage and control all corporate research purchases to consolidate billing and vendor management. You can eliminate duplicate purchases and customize your content and license management.Contact Us:Market Study ReportThe Green Suite #4594,Dover, DE 19901United StatesPhone: 1-201-355-0868US Toll Free: 1-866-764-2150Email: sales@marketstudyreport.comWebsite:News:More Report at:Global Printed Antenna Market - Industry Analysis, Growth, Trends and Forecast 2017 - 2025

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Presently, the rising adoption of printed antennas in the aerospace and defense industry is shooting growth of this market by leaps and bounds. To study in-depth about the market status, a new study has been added to the wide database of Market Research Reports Search Engine (MRRSE). The research report is titled Printed Antenna Market - Global Industry Analysis, Size, Share, Growth, Trends and Forecast 2017  2025, which covers the analysis and forecast of the printed antenna market at the global as well as regional level. Further, the study also provides historic data of 2016 with addition to forecast for the period between 2017 and 2025 on the basis of revenue (US$ Bn).Request Sample Copy of the Report @Printed antennas have considerable applications in telecommunications industry. Such antennas form an integral component of numerous mobile communication devices, thus enhancing the data transmission abilities of these devices. In the first section of the report, the readers can access data about the drivers and restraints governing the dynamics of the market along with their impact on demand during the forecast period. Further, the report also includes data about potential opportunities in the printed antenna market both on the global and regional level. Readers can also access latest market trend running in the market which helps to evaluate future prospective demand of this device.The next section of the report includes information about the market division for in-depth analysis based on numerous factors. Based on printing technology, the global market for printed antenna is segmented into Ink-jet Printing, Screen Printing, Flexography Printing, Gravure Printing and others. Further, on the basis of end-use industry, the prime fields include automotive, telecommunication, pharmaceuticals, aerospace & defense. Presently, the concerned market is active in the regions of North America, Asia Pacific, Middle East & Africa and Latin America. These regions have been further sub-segmented into countries which also includes demand for individual end use industries across all areas.To Know More About Printed Antenna Market, Click on the link:The later part of the report discusses the competitive landscape with exact focus on the various players from the printed antennas sector. The prime manufacturers include Neotech AMT GmbH (Germany), Shure Inc. (U.S.), nScrypt Inc. (U.S.), Optisys Inc. (U.S.), Optomec Inc. (U.S.), Cobham plc (U.K.), Mars Antennas & RF System (U.S.), GSI Technologies (U.S.), Thales S.A. (France) and Texas Instrument Inc. (U.S.). In addition to this, strategic overview, SWOT analysis and historical revenue details for each company is carefully enclosed in the report.About MRRSEMarket Research Reports Search Engine (MRRSE) is an industry-leading database of market intelligence reports. MRRSE is driven by a stellar team of research experts and advisors trained to offer objective advice. Our sophisticated search algorithm returns results based on the report title, geographical region, publisher, or other keywords.MRRSE partners exclusively with leading global publishers to provide clients single-point access to top-of-the-line market research. MRRSEs repository is updated every day to keep its clients ahead of the next new trend in market research, be it competitive intelligence, product or service trends or strategic consulting.ContactState Tower90, State StreetSuite 700Albany, NY - 12207United StatesTelephone: +1-518-730-0559Email: sales@mrrse.comWebsite:Vibration Control Systems Industry Growing at a CAGR of 5.2% to 2023

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According to Publisher, the Global Vibration Control Systems Market is accounted for $1.84 billion in 2016 and is expected to reach $2.64 billion by 2023 growing at a CAGR of 5.2% during the forecast period. Factors such as enhanced aircraft performance, increasing demand for high-rise buildings in vibration control systems for fundamental safety, and advanced automobile durability are favoring the market growth. However, strict industry regulations and low-cost alternatives are hampering the market.By end-user, mining and quarrying segment is anticipated to remain as largest end user segment. Moreover, transportation segment is expected to rise significantly during the forecast period. Based on product, automation control segment commanded the largest market share. Depending on geography, North America commanded the largest market share and Asia Pacific is projected to grow at a highest CAGR.For more informationSome of the key players in this market include Guangzhou YiTaoQianChao Vibration Control Technology Co Ltd, VSL International Ltd., ACTOM (Pty) Ltd, Dynamic Solutions Systems, Inc., Mupro Services GmbH, Fukoku Co., Ltd., Farrat Ltd, Lord Corporation, Gerb Vibration Control Systems Pvt. Ltd., DynaTronic Corporation Ltd., Resistoflex (P) Ltd., Fabreeka, Isolation Technology Inc., Kinetics Noise Control, Inc. and VICODA Gmbh.Sales Channels Covered:-Aftermarket-OEMProducts Covered:-Vibration Control-Automation Control-Motion ControlEnd-Users Covered:-Electrical Equipment, Appliance, and Component-Petroleum and Coal Products Manufacturing-Beverage and Tobacco Product Manufacturing-Transportation-Oil and Gas Extraction-Machinery Manufacturing-Chemical Manufacturing-Textile Mills-Food Manufacturing-Utilities-Mining, QuarryingRequest Sample CopyRegions Covered:-North Americao USo Canadao Mexico-Europeo Germanyo U.K.o Italyo Franceo Spaino Rest of Europe-Asia Pacifico Japano Chinao Indiao Australiao New Zealando South Koreao Rest of Asia Pacific-South Americao Argentinao Brazilo Chileo Rest of South America-Middle East & Africao Saudi Arabiao UAEo Qataro South Africao Rest of Middle East & AfricaBuy Now:Contact Info:Name: Sameer JoshiEmail: sales@reportsweb.comOrganization: ReportsWebPhone: +1-646-491-9876ReportsWeb is a one stop shop of market research reports and solutions to various companies across the globe. We help our clients in their decision support system by helping them choose most relevant and cost effective research reports and solutions from various publishers.505, 6th floor, Amanora Township,Amanora Chambers, East Block,Kharadi Road, Hadapsar, Pune-411028Commercial Aircraft Carbon Brakes Global Market by Product, Analysis and Outlook to 2022

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According to Publisher, the Global Commercial Aircraft Carbon Brakes market is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 13.6% during the forecast period of 2015 to 2022. The present scenario of cost management and environment concerns in aviation industry, without compromising on customer experience, had lead to the rise of carbon brakes. Rising demand for fuel-efficient & light weight aircrafts and growing aircraft fleet size are driving the market. However, stringent certification process is hampering the new entrants and hence the market.For more information @Narrow-body aircraft segment is expected to drive the market owing to the growing demand for fuel-efficient and narrow aircrafts. North American market is dominating the production across the globe, due to its strong economy and new opening air routes. However, growing demand for energy-efficient aircrafts and cost-efficient business model had augmented the market growth in Asia Pacific region, making it a fastest emerging market.Some of the key players of the Commercial Aircraft Carbon Brakes Market include Safran Landing Systems (Messier-Bugatti-Dowty), Meggitt Aircraft Braking Systems, Honeywell International and UTC Aerospace Systems.Applications Covered:- Narrow-body aircraft- Wide-body aircraft- Regional jets Feed AcidifierRequest Sample CopyRegions Covered:- North Americao USo Canadao Mexico- Europeo Germanyo Franceo Italyo UKo Spaino Rest of Europe- Asia Pacifico Japano Chinao Indiao Australiao New Zealando Rest of Asia Pacific- Rest of the Worldo Middle Easto Brazilo Argentinao South Africao EgyptMake an enquiry:1 Executive Summary2 Preface3 Market Trend Analysis4 Porters Five Force Analysis5 Global Commercial Aircraft Carbon Brakes market, By Application6 Global Commercial Aircraft Carbon Brakes market, By Geography7 Key Developments8 Company Profiling8.1 Safran Landing Systems (Messier-Bugatti-Dowty)8.2 Meggitt Aircraft Braking Systems8.3 Honeywell International8.4 UTC Aerospace SystemsPurchase Report atContact Info:Name: Sameer JoshiEmail: sales@reportsweb.comOrganization: ReportsWebPhone: +1-646-491-9876ReportsWeb.com is a one stop shop of market research reports and solutions to various companies across the globe. We help our clients in their decision support system by helping them choose most relevant and cost effective research reports and solutions from various publishers. We provide best in class customer service and our customer support team is always available to help you on your research queries.505, 6th floor, Amanora Township,Amanora Chambers, East Block,Kharadi Road, Hadapsar, Pune-411028Nephrology and Urology Devices Market to Grow at a CAGR of 7.2% to 2022

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According to Publisher, the Global Nephrology and Urology Devices is valued at $17.28 billion in 2015 and is expected to grow at a CAGR of 7.2% to reach $28.27 billion by 2022. Rising occurrence of chronic kidney diseases, increased spending on healthcare among the emerging regions and growing aged population across the world are some of the factors favoring the market growth. Moreover, the growing awareness about the benefits of these devices such as abridged recovery and treatment time is also propelling the global market. On the other hand, the high cost linked with these devices hampers the market.For more informationDialysis devices commanded the largest market share and BPH treatment devices are anticipated to witness the fastest growth during the forecast period. Fresenius was leading the market in dialysis devices followed Baxter Corporation. Benign Prostatic Hyperplasia is a major concern and is expected to affect around 75% of male over the age of 55, thus driving the market to grow. Regionally, Europe is presently leading the market owing to the increasing need to keep up with the infrastructural requirements in hospital in region. Asia-Pacific is expected to grow at a faster pace due to the promising medical tourism industry in the region. New Product launch, merger and acquisition, and research and development are the successful strategies followed by the players in the market to gain the traction.Some of the key players in global Nephrology and Urology Devices market are Nikkiso Co. Ltd., Boston Scientific, American Medical Systems, LLC, Cook Medical, Olympus Medical Systems, Asahi Kasei Corporation, Rockwell Medical Technologies Inc., Dornier MedTech, Coloplast, Terumo Corporation, Fresenius Medical Care, B Braun Group, Nipro Corporation, Baxter International Inc., NxStage Medical, Inc. and C. R. Bard, Inc.,.Products Covered:-Benign Prostatic Hyperplasia Devices-Urinary Stone Treatment-Prostate Cancer-Urinary Incontinence Devices-UI-Bulking-UI-Slings-Urological Endoscopes-Urological Catheters-Dialysis Devices-Erectile Dysfunction Device-Nephrostomy-Pelvic Floor Repair-Ureteral Access Devices-Endoscopy DevicesType of Diseases Covered:-Urinary Incontinence (UI) and Pelvic Organ Prolapsed (POP)-Incontinence Products-Interventional Therapies-Urinary Stone-Open Surgery-Percutaneous Nephrostolithotomy (PCNL)-Laser Lithotripsy-Extra-Corporeal Shock Wave Lithotripsy (ESWL)-Benign Prostatic Hyperplasia (BPH)-Holmium Laser Enucleation of Prostate (HOLEP)-Transurethral Radio Frequency Needle Ablation of the Prostate (TUNA)-Stenting (Prostatic Stents)-Surgery for BPH-Catheterization-Transurethral Microwave Thermotherapy of the Prostate (TUMT)-Chronic Kidney Disease And Renal Failure-Hemodialysis-Kidney Transplant-Peritoneal DialysisEnd Users Covered:-Hospitals and Clinics-Ambulatory Surgical Centers (ASC)-Home-Other End UsersRequest Sample CopyRegions Covered:-North America-US-Canada-Mexico-Europe-Germany-France-Italy-UK-Spain-Rest of Europe-Asia Pacific-Japan-China-India-Australia-New Zealand-Rest of Asia Pacific-Rest of the World-Middle East-Brazil-Argentina-South Africa-Egypt10 Company Profiling10.1 Nikkiso Co. Ltd.10.2 Boston Scientific10.3 American Medical Systems, LLC10.4 Cook Medical10.5 Olympus Medical Systems10.6 Asahi Kasei Corporation10.7 Rockwell Medical Technologies Inc.10.8 Dornier MedTech10.9 Coloplast10.10 Terumo Corporation10.11 Fresenius Medical Care10.12 B Braun Group10.13 Nipro Corporation10.14 Baxter International Inc.10.15 NxStage Medical, Inc.10.16 C. R. Bard, Inc.,Make an enquiry:Contact Us:Call: +1-646-491-9876Email: sales@reportsweb.comReportsWeb.com is a one stop shop of market research reports and solutions to various companies across the globe. We help our clients in their decision support system by helping them choose most relevant and cost effective research reports and solutions from various publishers. We provide best in class customer service and our customer support team is always available to help you on your research queries.505, 6th floor, Amanora Township,Amanora Chambers, East Block,Kharadi Road, Hadapsar, Pune-411028Genital Herpes Treatment Market is expected to surge and reach a market size of over US$ 2,400 Mn by the end of 2027

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Global Genital Herpes Treatment Market: OverviewGenital herpes is a common sexually transmitted disease. With the increase in population of various regions, there is also an increase in the rate of health issues around the world. As the rate of diseases grow, the treatment markets are also expected to grow substantially. With respect to sexually transmitted disease like genital herpes, its treatment market includes different drug types like Acyclovir, Valacyclovir and Famciclovir. The indication of genital herpes include HSV-1 and HSV-2. A new research report highlights the upcoming growth of global genital herpes treatment market. This comprehensive research by Future Market Insights is titled Genital Herpes Treatment Market: Global Industry Analysis (2012  2016) and Opportunity Assessment (2017  2027). According to the market projections given in the report, global genital herpes treatment market is expected to surge and reach a market size of over US$ 2,400 Mn by the end of 2027. The market is expected to register a CAGR of 4.4% of during the forecast period of 2017-2027. The market growth is primarily driven by the increase government spending on healthcare industry. Various countries are focused on prevention of infectious diseases which in turn, has a positive impact over the herpes drugs market leading to its high demand from local governments and third-party payers.Global Genital Herpes Treatment Market: Trends and OpportunitiesThe global genital herpes treatment market may witness new opportunities in the market. Globally, the increasing disease burden of herpes continuously provides an opportunity for the diagnostic and treatment market. According to WHO, more than 2/3rd of the world population (3.7 Bn) under the age of 50 was suffering from hsv-1 infection in 2012. This represents substantial growth of the global HSV disease treatment market over the forecast period.Request Report Sample@The companies are also trying to introduce cost effective treatment methods. New vaccines provide complete protection against a variety of strains of HSV1 and HSV2. Companies are increasing research and development activities for the treatment and prevention of genital herpes diseases. Most of the companies are focusing on approval and launch of generic drugs in the undeveloped countries to provide low cost drugs for the treatment of genital herpes.Global Genital Herpes Treatment Market: Key Highlights from the Segmental AnalysisMEA is expected to come up as the most lucrative region in the industry. With the rise in sexually transmitted diseases in the region, the demand for genital herpes treatment is also expected to rise. Regional analysis shows that MEA will witness a robust CAGR of 5.2% during the forecast period in the global genital herpes treatment market. Based on the route of administration oral is the main segment, with the highest growth rate and highest market share in the global genital herpes treatment market. It is expected to reach a market share of over US$ 1,600 Mn by the end of 2027, growing at a CAGR of 4.9% during the forecast period.Amongst various distribution channels, retail pharmacies hold the highest market size, but the segment lags behind in terms of growth rate. With the growth of online marketing and e-commerce, online pharmacies is the fastest growing segment which is expected to register a growth rate of 5.4% during the forecast period.Visit For TOC@Global Genital Herpes Treatment Market: Top CompaniesSome of the leading companies mentioned in the research report are Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd., Abbott Laboratories, Sun Pharmaceuticals Industries Ltd., Mylan N.V., Pfizer Inc., GlaxoSmithKline plc., Dr. Reddys Laboratories, ltd., Novartis AG, Valeant Pharmaceuticals International Inc., etc.About Us  Future Market Insights is the premier provider of market intelligence and consulting services, serving clients in over 150 countries. FMI is headquartered in London, the global financial capital, and has delivery centers in the U.S. and India.Contact Us:Future Market Insights616 Corporate Way,Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage,New York 10989,United StatesTel: +1-347-918-3531Fax: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite:Interceptor Missiles Market Scenario, Opportunities, Trends and growth prospective 2024

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MarketStudyReport.com Adds New Interceptor Missiles Market research report for the period of 2017  2024 to its research database covering information and data by surface, by range, by technology, industry analysis report, regional outlook, growth potential, price trends, competitive market share & forecast spreading across 250 Pages with table and figures in it.The global Interceptor Missiles Market Research Report for the period of 2017-2024 that shows the growth of the market is rising at a Steady CAGR to 2024.Global Interceptor Missiles Market is expected to cross 3,000 units till 2024. Continuously increasing threat of attacks from rival countries has resulted in proliferating demand for interceptor missiles over the forecast timeframe. Multiple countries across the globe including Netherlands, U.S, Israel, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, etc., have purchased patriot interceptor missiles to strengthen their defense inventory, impacting the industry positively.Interceptor Missiles Market is estimated to surpass USD 14 billion by 2024. Industry is witnessing regular upgradations and innovations in interceptor missiles. For instance, HQ-19 is a significant upgradation of HQ-9 and has gained prominence in 2017. It is capable of targeting satellites and ballistic missiles in lower earth orbit and is featured with kinetic kill vehicle. Moreover, it can intercept the ballistic missiles from a range of 3,000 kms. These innovations are anticipated to induce immense growth potential to the interceptor missiles market over the coming years.Surface to air missiles are expected to capture maximum interceptor missiles market revenue share of more than 80% by 2024. Some of the benefits offered includes light-weight and portability which in turn will drive the industry demand. Water to air missiles will exhibit approximately 7% CAGR owing to rising adoption of these missiles in various countries across the globe for naval border protection.Get Sample Copy of this Report:Countries across the globe have witnessed a considerable increase in their defense budget. For instance, in 2015, the defense budget of China was USD 131 billion, which was increased by 11% and crossed USD 145 billion in 2016 and was further increased by 7% in 2017. This will accelerate the revenue generation owing to their enhanced purchasing power for defense systems. However, high initial investment and high manufacturing costs may restrain new entrants from entering the interceptor missile market.Interceptor missiles of up to 125 kms range are anticipated to dominate the interceptor missiles market, generating a demand of over 2,000 units till 2024. Continuously increasing penetration of missiles conforming to this range such as PAC-3, Iron Dome, and SM-3, from MEA including UAE, Israel, and Saudi Arabia will primarily support the industry dominance. Interceptor missiles of range above 200 kms will exhibit over 18% CAGR in terms of revenue owing to rising deployment of advanced missiles such as HQ-19. Regular innovations in these missiles in countries such as China will further strengthen the industry penetration over the forecast timeframe.PAC-3 is expected to account for highest interceptor missile market share crossing USD 6 billion over the coming years. Proliferating demand of these missiles, especially in developed countries will primarily support the revenue generation. For instance, in January 2013, the U.S. army entered into several contracts worth USD 755 million for purchasing 168 PAC-3 missiles and associated services and equipment. HQ-19 will exhibit over 40% CAGR till 2024 owing to its continuously rising usage as an upgradation of HQ-9. Its enhanced features as compared to its counterparts will further support the industry growth till 2024.Lockheed Martin Corp., Boeing Co., Raytheon Co., Aerojet Rocketdyne, and Rafael Advanced Defense Systems are among the major industry players. Regular product innovations is among prominent strategies implemented by these participants. For instance, in January 2018, Lockheed Martin made enhancements in Aegis missile that is anticipated to result in rapid detection of threats and reduction in reaction time.Interceptor missiles market research report includes in-depth coverage of the industry with estimates & forecast in terms of volume in units and revenue in USD million from 2013 to 2024, for the following segments:Interceptor Missiles Market by Technology:THAAD, PAC-3, SM-3, HQ-19, Iron dome, FD-2000, Patriot GEM-T, Aegis ashore, Aster.The above information is provided for the following regions and countries:North America, U.S., Canada, Europe, Germany, UK, France, Italy, Spain, Russia, Poland, Asia Pacific, China, India, Japan, Australia, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand.Report Table of Content: Chapter 1. Methodology and Scope Chapter 2. Executive Summary Chapter 3. Interceptor Missiles Industry Insights Chapter 4. Interceptor Missiles Market, By Surface Chapter 6. Interceptor Missiles Market, By Technology Chapter 7. Interceptor missiles Market, By Region Chapter 8. Company ProfilesRelated Report:Global Surface-to-Air Missiles Market Professional Survey Report 2017This report studies Surface-to-Air Missiles in Global market, especially in North America, China, Europe, Southeast Asia, Japan and India, with production, revenue, consumption, import and export in these regions, from 2012 to 2016, and forecast to 2022.More Report At:About Us:Marketstudyreport.com allows you to manage and control all corporate research purchases to consolidate billing and vendor management. You can eliminate duplicate purchases and customize your content and license management.Contact Us:Market Study ReportThe Green Suite #4594,Dover, DE 19901United StatesPhone: 1-201-355-0868US Toll Free: 1-866-764-2150Email:sales@marketstudyreport.comWebsite:News:More Report at:Timber Harvesting Equipment Market is Anticipated to Register a CAGR Growth CAGR of 5.5% by 2025

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According to the new report published by Persistence Market Research titled Timber Harvesting Equipment Market: Global Industry Analysis (2012-2016) and Forecast (20172025), the global timber harvesting equipment market is expected to expand at a value CAGR of 5.5% over the forecast period (20172025). It is expected that the market will reach a value of US$ 26,785.9 Mn by 2025 end. In terms of volume, the market is expected to increase at a CAGR of 4.3% over the forecast period and account for the sales of 4,888,581 units by 2025 end.Request for Table of Contents @The rise in demand for wood as fuel as well as construction material is the main driver influencing the growth of the timber harvesting equipment market. It has been observed that the sales of timber harvesting equipment is highly correlated with the demand for wood and products derived from wood. In the current scenario, forest products such as fuel wood, round wood, saw wood among others trigger the demand for timber harvesting equipment.Conversion of forest areas to agricultural lands- Rapid conversion calls for mechanized operation to process felling thereby improving the demand for timber harvesting equipment. Rise in urbanization from rural to metro areas- The growth in population and demand for more residential areas will also support the demand for timber harvesting equipment over the forecast period. Increasing requirement for mechanization and automation- There is a growing demand for equipment such as harvesters that in a single movement can cut the tree from the base, debark it and cut into required lengths in less than a minute.Growth in the expatriate population and tourism- Modern timber harvesting equipment are efficient and decrease the amount of wastage produced, which is expected to be a major factor driving the growth of the timber harvesting equipment market over the forecast period.On the basis of product type, the global timber harvesting equipment market is segmented into chainsaws, harvesters, feller bunchers, forwarders and skidders. Harvesters and feller bunchers are sub-segmented into wheeled type and tracked type. The most preferred timber harvesting equipment in the market today is the chainsaw segment representing a myriad of advantages in relation to costs, availability, low maintenance and versatility.Mechanized timber harvesting equipment such as harvesters and feller bunchers among others are preferred in the northern countries of Europe in order to increase productivity though they pose high initial investments.This segment includes full tree, cut-to-length and tree length segments. Full tree harvesting is forecasted to dominate the global market in 2017. Companies are striving to develop better technological products owing to rising consumer demands. The segment is estimated to be valued at US$ 11,264.2 Mn by the end of 2017 and is likely to reach US$ 17,957.0 Mn by the end of 2025, expanding at a CAGR of 6.0% throughout the projected period.The global market is segmented into the key geographies of North America, Latin America, Europe, APAC, and MEA. As a market driven by the demand for wood including round wood, pulpwood among others, Asia Pacific, North America and Europe will draw in a large market share in the current and upcoming years. The potential of the market in the Middle East and Africa region will be relatively slow owing to the lack of harvestable areas in the region.Get Sample Copy of this Report @Deere & Company, Komatsu Ltd., Ponsse Oyj,Caterpillar Inc., Tigercat International Inc., ogset Oy,Eco Log Sweden AB,Rottne Industri AB, Husqvarna AB, Andreas Stihl AG & Company KG, Stanley Black & Decker, Inc., Hitachi Ltd., Kesla Oyj, Barko Hydraulics L.L.C., Bell Equipment Ltd., Volvo AB, Sampo-Rosenlew Oy and Echo Inc. are some of the key leaders operating in the global timber harvesting equipment market.About UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a third-platform research firm. Our research model is a unique collaboration of data analytics and market research methodology to help businesses achieve optimal performance.To support companies in overcoming complex business challenges, we follow a multi-disciplinary approach. At PMR, we unite various data streams from multi-dimensional sources. By deploying real-time data collection, big data, and customer experience analytics, we deliver business intelligence for organizations of all sizes.Contact UsPersistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,Telephone - +1-646-568-7751USA  Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comGlobal Car Fuel Filter Business Report 2017-2022: Poised to Reach US$ 440 Mn Worldwide Market Growth By Fact.MR

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FACT.MR has been actively involved in offering comprehensive research data concerning various topics which are associated to industrial reference and investor utility. This particular research report titled Car Fuel Filter Market Forecast, Trend Analysis & Competition Tracking: Global Review 2017 to 2022 has been added to the wide online database of FACT.MR which discusses the present as well as future market scenario. Readers can access knowledge related to market volume, regional expanse as well as competitive landscape prevailing in the global Car fuel filter market. In order to study development patterns, this smart assessment also focuses on market dynamics, which talks about drivers, restraints and opportunities estimated to influence the concerned market during the period until 2017 to 2022.Request For Sample Report-Highlights of the Car Fuel Filter Market1- Diesel has had a reputation for some time now as the dirtier fuel which is why it is expected to comprise nearly 3/5th revenue share in the car fuel filter market by fuel type. Commercial vehicles in particular, both light commercial vehicles as well as heavy commercial vehicles often rely on diesel over gasoline and they would need fuel filters to ensure that their emissions are in-line with governmental norms. Diesel is much more popular in Europe as opposed to North America and the Europe diesel fuel filter market is on track to be worth almost US$ 64 million in 2022.2- Gasoline occupies the balance 2/5th revenue share in the car fuel filter market. Gasoline is generally considered cleaner than diesel which explains its popularity in the passenger vehicle segment. However, the fuel quality in emerging markets is often of an inferior quality when compared to developed countries for a number of reasons. If fuel filters are not deployed, there is a high probability that the combustion engine can get damaged with dust particulates. Thus, a market opportunity of just under US$ 180 million by 2022 exists in the gasoline fuel filter market as well. Companies could look at targeting North America over Europe as consumers there express an overwhelming preference for gasoline vehicles over their diesel counterparts.3- The premium passenger car segment represents a small market opportunity in the car fuel filter market in terms of vehicle type. However, it would be unwise to ignore a market of nearly US$ 50 million by end 2022 as rising disposable incomes would make consumers demand premium passenger cars in the long run. Europe and APEJ are neck-and-neck in the premium passenger car segment and it will be interesting to see if and when APEJ outpaces Europe.4- The compact car segment accounts for a third of the revenue share in the car fuel filter market by vehicle type and is especially important in emerging economies where the price-sensitivity is higher than in Europe or North America. The compact car segment is predicted to be worth roughly US$ 120 million in 2022 and companies in the car fuel filter market are advised to make their business strategies keeping this in mind.5- The mid-sized segment consists of a quarter of the revenue share by vehicle type in the car fuel filter market but is likely to lose market share to both premium and compact cars. Key stakeholders are advised to target Europe and APEJ as these are the only two regions that should push past US$ 28 million by the end of the study period.Browse Full Report With TOC-Table of ContentGlobal Car Fuel Filter Market - Executive SummaryGlobal Car Fuel Filter Market OverviewGlobal Car Fuel Filter Market Analysis and Forecast By Product TypeGlobal Car Fuel Filter Market Analysis and Forecast By Sales ChannelGlobal Car Fuel Filter Market Analysis and Forecast By Vehicle TypeGlobal Car Fuel Filter Market Analysis and Forecast By Fuel TypeGlobal Car Fuel Filter Market Analysis and Forecast By RegionNorth America Car Fuel Filter Market Analysis and Forecast, By Country, 2012-2022Latin America Car Fuel Filter Market Analysis and Forecast, By Country, 2012-2022Europe Car Fuel Filter Market Analysis and Forecast, By Country, 2012-2022Japan Car Fuel Filter Market Analysis and Forecast, By Country, 2012-2022APEJ Car Fuel Filter Market Analysis and Forecast, By Country, 2012-2022MEA Car Fuel Filter Market Analysis and Forecast, By Country, 2012-2022List of TablesTABLE 1 Global Car Fuel Filter Market Value (US$ Mn), 2012-2016TABLE 2 Global Car Fuel Filter Market Value (US$ Mn), 2017-2022TABLE 3 Global Car Fuel Filter Market Value (US$ Mn) and Y-o-Y, 2015-2022TABLE 4 Global Spin-on Fuel Filters Segment Value (US$ Mn), By Region 2012-2016TABLE 5 Global Spin-on Fuel Filters Segment Value (US$ Mn), By Region 2017-2022TABLE 6 Global Spin-on Fuel Filters Segment Market Share, By Region 2012-2016TABLE 7 Global Spin-on Fuel Filters Segment Market Share, By Region 2017-2022Continued.Request For Discount On This Report-About Fact.MRFact.MR is a fast-growing market research firm that offers the most comprehensive suite of syndicated and customized market research reports. We believe transformative intelligence can educate and inspire businesses to make smarter decisions. We know the limitations of the one-size-fits-all approach; thats why we publish multi-industry global, regional, and country-specific research reports.Contact UsFact.MRSuite 988427 Upper Pembroke Street,Dublin 2, IrelandTelephone: +353-1-6111-593Email: sales@factmr.com/Web:pharmaceutical filtration market is anticipated to be worth more than US$ 17 billion by the end of the forecast period in 2022

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Active pharmaceutical ingredients are a key component of the pharmaceutical industry in the 21st century. Filters are essential in a number of cases during the course of API creation and are necessary in bioscience laboratory applications as well. An increased production of large biologics and molecules, nano fibre technological advancements, generic market growth, and regulatory guidelines for cleanroom pharmaceutical production are the main factors driving the pharmaceutical filtration market. Additional funds diverted towards R&D expenditure by major biopharmaceutical organizations also boost the profile of the pharmaceutical filtration market. According to Future Market Insights, the pharmaceutical filtration market is expected to record a robust CAGR of 6.1% for the period from 2017 to 2022.Manufacturing has the major portion of the revenue share in the pharmaceutical filtration market by operation in 2017 and is likely to remain so throughout the duration of the forecast period. The manufacturing segment is expected to cross a value of more than US$ 9.3 billion by end 2022 making it imperative for companies to be present in this operation segment of the pharmaceutical filtration market. The pilot scale segment follows at a considerable distance but cannot be overlooked entirely in favour of manufacturing. The pilot scale filtration segment has strong scope in North America as the continent represents a little over a third of the pharmaceutical filtration market and is estimated to retain this share going forwardRequest Report Sample@The cell separation segment comprises slightly above a sixth of the pharmaceutical filtration market by application and is predicted to lose popularity in the future. Nonetheless, the North America cell separation market alone is on track to push past a billion dollars by end 2022 and companies are advised to take this into account while devising their business strategies. The water purification segment has a similar revenue share to the cell separation segment in the pharmaceutical filtration market by application. After North America, the water purification segment is particularly prominent in EuropeIn terms of technology, microfiltration is quite popular as it contributes nearly half the revenue share in the pharmaceutical filtration market in the year 2017. Furthermore, microfiltration is anticipated to witness a high CAGR of more than 5.5% for the period 2017-2022 ensuring that all key stakeholders have ample opportunity in this lucrative technology. Ultrafiltration is not as prominent as microfiltration in the pharmaceutical filtration market but is gaining traction recently. Ultrafiltration technology has the greatest scope in both North America and Europe as these two continents are projected to cross a billion dollars in terms of value by end 2022North America is the largest region in the pharmaceutical filtration market and is poised to grow to more than US$ 6 billion by end 2022The report has profiled a few of the companies in the pharmaceutical filtration market. These include The Marmon Group LLC, Sartorius Stedim Biotech, Meissner Filtration Products, Parker Hannifin Corporation, Pall Corporation, Merck KGaA, GE Healthcare Inc., Eaton Corporation Plc., Amazon Filters Ltd., and 3M Companies.Visit For TOC@About Us  Future Market Insights is the premier provider of market intelligence and consulting services, serving clients in over 150 countries. FMI is headquartered in London, the global financial capital, and has delivery centers in the U.S. and India.Contact Us:Future Market Insights616 Corporate Way,Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage,New York 10989,United StatesTel: +1-347-918-3531Fax: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite:Cyber Security Market valuation in excess of US$ 53 Bn by 2025

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Ongoing technological evolution has increased the emergence of new pathways for accessing restricted data from the World Wide Web. Information stored on online platforms, databases and websites continues to be at the risk of malicious breach from hackers and unethical cyber professionals. Steadfast proliferation of information technologies across multiple business verticals has created a vast network of IT-enabled companies and enterprises. Since these companies continue to use information technologies actively, the need for adopting appropriate security measures has escalated. Cyber security has emerged as the key aspect companies must consider prior to the implementation of IT-based business models.Persistence Market Researchs latest report on the global cyber security market reveals that in the upcoming years, the adoption of cyber security will gain steadfast momentum against the backdrop of rising attacks of hackers and an overall upsurge in the global cybercrime levels. Key findings from the report estimate that the global cyber security market will be worth over US$ 200 Bn by the end of 2025. The report also projects that during the forecast period, 2017-2025, the global cyber security market will expand robustly at a CAGR of 12.0%.Key Players in the Global Cyber Security LandscapeCompanies that have built the very systems used for IT operations have been putting considerable efforts towards the development of cyber security solutions. Leading manufacturers of computing systems such as Microsoft Corporation and International Business Machines Corporation have been recognized as key developers of cyber security in the global market. Intel Corp.  a leading manufacturer of computer peripherals, chips and operating systems  has also stepped up its contribution in the global cyber security market. The study has profiled prominent developers of cyber security software as well as cyber security service providers, which include Trend Micro, Sophos, Check Point Software Technologies, Secureworks, Symantec Corp., and Verizon Communication Inc.Growing Focus on Improving the Features of Cyber Security SoftwareFor developing in-depth forecast on the market, the study has analyzed the global cyber security market on the basis of components, technology, industrial vertical and region. Rising penetration of attack vectors such as ransomware, botnets and autonomous vehicles has propelled the adoption of end-point cyber security technologies. Moreover, threats such as identity theft and data manipulation are stimulating the need for implementing unified threat management technologies against cyberwarfare.Request to Sample of Report @In the recent past, several companies in industrial verticals such as banking, healthcare, process manufacturing and telecommunication have faced tangential issues involving threat to data sovereignty, data path tracing from digital trails and an unethical leveraging of technology talents. In the view of such developments, the demand for robust cyber security software continues to gain traction. The study projects that by the end of 2025, cyber security software sold across the world will bring in revenues worth over US$ 50 Bn in the global market. Nevertheless, the demand for services will spearhead the global cyber security market, procuring the largest piece of the revenue pie throughout the forecast period.Cyber Security: Technology Challenges & Regional OpportunitiesCloud computing networks can be observed as a veiled threat for the effectiveness of cyber security solutions. While increasing uptake for cloud computing boosts the need for adopting cyber security software, these networks create a vast maze of gateways for security breach. End-point security services are unable to trace the source of attacks or loopholes for hacking in the vast cloud networks. With the passing years, more companies are anticipated to switch to edge computing, providing a temporary respite for cyber security solution providers.Countries such as the US and Europe have recorded highest job openings in cyber security over the past few years. The study anticipates that sales of cyber security software in North America will witness robust expansion at a CAGR of 9.4% over the forecast period. Technological advancements in manufacturing operations will fuel the presence of the Asia-Pacific excluding Japan (APEJ) region in the global cyber security market. Increasing use of data encryption among enterprises based in Western European countries will also create lucrative grounds for the adoption of cyber security in the years to come.Download and View Report TOC, Figures and Tables @About UsPersistence Market Research (PMR) is a third-platform research firm. Our research model is a unique collaboration of data analytics and market research methodology to help businesses achieve optimal performance.To support companies in overcoming complex business challenges, we follow a multi-disciplinary approach. At PMR, we unite various data streams from multi-dimensional sources. By deploying real-time data collection, big data, and customer experience analytics, we deliver business intelligence for organizations of all sizes.Contact UsPersistence Market Research305 Broadway7th Floor, New York City,NY 10007, United States,USA  Canada Toll Free: 800-961-0353Email: sales@persistencemarketresearch.comWeb:Global Small Molecule API Market is anticipated to grow at a moderate rate to register a CAGR of 4.9% during the period of forecast, 2017-2027

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An exhaustive market evaluation put forth by Future Market Insights on the small molecule API market in a new research study titled Small Molecule API Market: Global Industry Analysis 2012-2016 & Opportunity Assessment 2017-2027 focusses on the demand from in-house production as well as outsourced API production. The market research involves analyses on various grounds covering all the major geographies with an excellent forecast model that portrays the global market picture 10 years down the line.Global Small Molecule API Market: Regional InsightsThe APEJ region shows a high growth to register a CAGR of 5.8% during the forecast period, followed by Japan, Western Europe, North America and Eastern Europe. The main reason for this growth in the APEJ region can be attributed to the outsourcing of APIs done on a large scale. Top contributors in the APEJ region are China and India, which exhibit the highest production of API. In India the local consumption is also high making it more essential to focus on higher manufacturing of APIs. China stands first in the line as far as growth is concerned, followed by India and rest of APEJ. Moreover, the easy availability of raw materials needed to manufacture APIs coupled with low labour cost fuel the growth of the small molecule API market in the APEJ region. Moreover, the distribution network of companies in China and India manufacturing APIs is strong in the overseas market, especially in South Africa, United States, and Europe.Request Report Sample@Global Small Molecule API Market: Segment-wise HighlightsThe high potency API (HPAPI) segment by molecule is poised to show higher growth rate during the period of forecast as compared to the standard API. However, as of 2017, the standard API dominates the market in terms of revenue. The HPAPI (High Potency API) is anticipated to register a CAGR of 7.6% during the period of forecastThe Oncology Segment by therapeutic area is expected to grow at a higher rate during the period of forecast. Neurology and urology segments reflect similar growth patterns and are poised to grow at an equal pace in the forecast period. However, the infectious diseases segment by therapeutic area will experience sluggish growth throughout the 2017-2027 periodOutsourced segment by production will grow at a robust rate to reflect a 6.4% CAGR during the period of forecast. The Asia Pacific excluding Japan (APEJ) region is the main contributor for this segment to grow, as many companies in the developing countries of China and India manufacture APIs on a large scale and outsource themIn terms of application, the commercial segment will dominate in terms of value and register a CAGR of 5.0% during the forecast periodTrends and Drivers Impacting the Overall Growth Rate of the MarketThe report covers all the drivers and trends that influence global market growth during the 2017-2027 period. Few of these are highlighted below.The high growth rate of HPAPI is a key driver fuelling the global market growth during the period of forecastMany pharmerging countries are being explored as alternative destinations for sourcingThe increased sourcing of APIs from U.S based Indian pharmaceutical manufacturersIncrease in investments thereby facilitating an increase in in-house production of APIsThe current strong demand for CMO/CDMO services is driven by a number of factors, which include a robust industry pipeline, the ability to raise public and private financing, and successful market approvalsGrowing demand for Quality-by-Design (QBD) servicesRapid increase in the Indian generics market will aid regional market growthVisit For TOC@Competitive Landscape: Tier Companies and their AnalysisThe report on the global small molecule API market presents a detailed analysis of the leading companies involved in this market. Some of the top companies profiled in the report are Johnson Matthey, Siegfried Holding AG, Pfizer, Sanofi S.A, Novartis AG, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Boehringer Ingelheim GmbH, GlaxoSmithKline PLC, Albany Molecular Research Inc., Bachem Holding AG, PCAS, Patheon N.V, AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, Merck & Co. Inc., BASF SE, Catalent Inc., Teva Pharmaceuticals, F. Hoffman-La Roche Ltd., Cambrex Corporation and Gilead Sciences Inc.About Us  Future Market Insights is the premier provider of market intelligence and consulting services, serving clients in over 150 countries. FMI is headquartered in London, the global financial capital, and has delivery centers in the U.S. and India.Contact Us:Future Market Insights616 Corporate Way,Suite 2-9018,Valley Cottage,New York 10989,United StatesTel: +1-347-918-3531Fax: +1-845-579-5705Email: sales@futuremarketinsights.comWebsite:Gout Therapeutics Market Research 2018  Economic Impact on Medical Industry and Analysis of Top Key Players By 2024

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A recent report published by Infinium Global Research on gout therapeutics market provides in depth analysis of segments and sub-segments in global as well as regional gout therapeutics market. The study also highlights the impact of drivers, restraints and macro indicators on the global and regional gout therapeutics market over the short term as well as long term. The report is a comprehensive presentation of trends, forecast and dollar values of global gout therapeutics market. According to report the global gout therapeutics market is projected to grow at a CAGR of 19.1% over the forecast period of 2018-2024.Get Sample Copy of this Report:Segment CoveredThe report on global gout therapeutics market covers drug class segments. On the basis of drug class the global gout therapeutics market is categorized into colchicine, corticosteroids, NSAIDs and urate-lowering agents.Geographic CoverageThe report provides regional analysis covering geographies such as North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and Rest of the World. In this section the key trends and market size for each geography is provided over the period of 2016-2024.The countries covered in the North America region include the U.S., Canada, and Mexico; while Asia-Pacific includes China, Japan, India, South Korea, Malaysia, and among others. Moreover, Germany, U.K., France, Spain, and Rest of Europe are included in the European region. The U.S. drives the growth in the North America region as it is the largest market in the region. The Asia-pacific region offers a substantial potential for the market growth owing to rapid growth in markets such as India and China.Companies Profiled:The report provides profiles of the companies in the global gout therapeutics market such as, Boehringer Ingelheim, GlaxoSmithKline, Alder Biopharmaceuticals, Eli Lilly, Antares Pharma, KaloBios Pharmaceuticals, Astellas Pharma, Can-Fite BioPharma, JW Pharmaceutical and Ironwood Pharmaceuticals.For More Enquiry on This Report:Report Highlights:The report provides deep insights on demand forecasts, market trends and micro and macro indicators. In addition, this report provides insights on the factors that are driving and restraining the global gout therapeutics market. Moreover, IGR-Growth Matrix analysis given in the report brings an insight on the investment areas that existing or new market players can consider. The report provides insights into the market using analytical tools such as Porter's five forces analysis and DRO analysis of gout therapeutics market. Moreover, the study highlights current market trends and provides forecast from 2018-2024. We also have highlighted future trends in the gout therapeutics market that will impact the demand during the forecast period. Moreover, the competitive analysis given in each regional market brings an insight on the market share of the leading players. This report will help manufacturers, suppliers and distributors of the gout therapeutics market to understand the present and future trends in this market and formulate their strategies accordingly.About UsInfinium Global Research and Consulting Solutions is started with a single motto of being business partner of first choice. We at Infinium work on the strengths of our clients to ensure we help them consolidate their market position. We firmly believe in the fact that if you are able to develop newer opportunities then you find there is no dearth of opportunities for you. With our strategic research approaches and deep dive in the market segments, we try to find out new opportunities that our clients can encash with their existing resources. Our experts with over 100 years of cumulative experience in research offer the best in the industry services to our clients to ensure that they achieve their business goals.Contact UsInfinium Global Research,Toll Free:U.S. + Canada: 1-800-638-0796,Website :Email: sales@infiniumglobalresearch.comMolecular Diagnostics Market: Global Market Estimation, Dynamics, Regional Share, Trends, Competitor Analysis 2012-2016 and Forecast 2017-2023

Molecular Diagnostics Market

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Global Molecular Diagnostics Market: Molecular diagnostics are the tests that are carried out for the detection of sequences present in the DNA and RNA including deletions, insertions, rearrangements, single nucleotide polymorphism, and others for the diagnosis of diseases. Molecular diagnostics are cumulative techniques analyze the biological markers at molecular level, like proteome and genome. Molecular diagnostics are commonly used in the diagnosis of cancer, infectious diseases, and others. These are also used in the genetic predisposition checking to a disease.Increase in the prevalence of infectious diseases and various cancers, rise in demand for personalized medicines, technological advancements in the diagnostic tests, and rise in the preference for biomarker identification tests are anticipated to fuel the molecular diagnostics market. Moreover, rise in geriatric population, increase in healthcare expenditure, developed healthcare infrastructure, and favourable government initiatives for preventing the genetic disorders are also expected to boost the molecular diagnostics market over the forecast period. However, stringent regulatory policies, high cost for testing, issues with quality control, and lack of reimbursement policies for the diagnosis might restrain the growth of molecular diagnostics market.A sample of this report is available upon request @Molecular diagnostics market is segmented on the basis of product type, technology, application, and end userBased on the product type, molecular diagnostics market is segmented into the following: Reagents Kits Instruments SoftwareBased on technology, molecular diagnostics market is segmented into the following: Polymerase chain reaction Microarray Next generation sequencing Isothermal nucleic acid amplification Hybridization OthersBased on the application, molecular diagnostics market is segmented into the following: Caner Blood screening Infectious diseases Microbiology Genetic tests OthersBased on the end user, molecular diagnostics market is segmented into the following: Hospitals Diagnostic centres Research institutes OthersTo view TOC of this report is available upon request @Molecular diagnostics market is in the developing stage owing to increase in the prevalence of cancer, infectious disease such as HIV (according to World Health Organisation, global health observatory (GHO) data, in 2013, approximately 34-38 million people suffered from HIV infection worldwide), and hepatitis among others. Rise in research activities for the prevention of genetic disorders also fuels the molecular diagnostics market. Acquisitions & mergers, collaborations, and innovation of novel diagnostic methods are some key strategies followed by companies for increasing their revenue in the molecular diagnostics market. For instance, in August 2015, Roche Diagnostics has acquired GeneWeave Biosciences, Inc. for strengthening its portfolio in microbiology diagnostics. Moreover, in April 2015, Alere Inc. received FDA approval for Alere I Strep, a molecular diagnostic test for the detection of Group A Streptococcus bacteria.Need more information about this report @Geographically, global molecular diagnostics market has been segmented into following regions Viz. North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Latin America, and Middle East & Africa. Increase in the prevalence of various infectious diseases, rise in the government funding for the research in molecular diagnostics, wide range of applications, and availability of skilled workforce in North America anticipated to create dominant for molecular diagnostics in the region. Europe molecular diagnostics market is growing significantly owing to well-developed healthcare infrastructure, initiatves for the prevention of genetic disorders, and increase the number of biotechnological companies are driving the molecular diagnostics market. Moreover, rise in geriatric population in Japan China, and India, and increase in the prevalence of infectious diseases and cancer in Asia Pacific has created lucrative growth for molecular diagnostics market in the region.Some of the players in molecular diagnostics market are Cepheid Inc. (Danaher Corporation) (U.S.), Biomerieux (Sofiana s.a.) (France), Beckman Coulter, Inc. (Danaher Corporation) (U.S.), Becton, Dickinson and Company (U.S.), Siemens Healthcare GmbH (Germany), Abbott Laboratories (U.S.), Grifols (Spain), Hologic, Inc. (U.S.), Qiagen (U.S.), Alere Inc. (U.S.), Roche Diagnostics (U.S.), and DiaSorin S.p.A. (American Standard Companies) (Italy) to name a few.Get access to full summary @About Precision Business InsightsPrecision Business Insights is one of the leading market research and business consulting firm, which follow a holistic approach to solve needs of the clients. We adopt and implement proven research methodologies to achieve better results. We help our clients by providing actionable insights and strategies to make better decisions. We provide consulting, syndicated and customised market research services based on our client needs.Contact to Precision Business Insights,Kemp House,152  160 City Road,London EC1V 2NXEmail: sales@precisionbusinessinsights.comToll Free (US):+1-866-598-1553Website @Fire Extinguish Agents Market: Key Drivers, Restraints, Opportunities and their Impact Analysis on the Market

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Qyresearchreports include new market research report Global Fire Extinguish Agents Market Size, Status and Forecast 2025 to its huge collection of research reports.This report studies the global Fire Extinguish Agents market, analyzes and researches the Fire Extinguish Agents development status and forecast in United States, EU, Japan, China, India and Southeast Asia. This report focuses on the top players in global market, likeChemguardNational FoamDICAmerex CorporationAngus FireBuckeye Fire EquipmentOil Technics (Fire Fighting Products)Dr. Richard SthamerProfoamIFP INDIADelta FireDafo FomtecHD Fire ProtectDownload Free exclusive Sample of this report:The study of market segmentations that has been offered with the publication that explores some of the most significant categories of the world Fire Extinguish Agents market is deemed significant for the growth of industry participants. All of the segments that have been studied elaborately in the said publication have been deeply evaluated with assistance from best of the research techniques. The analysts have dissected each of the segments and have shed light on vital factors that influence the growth of the various segments. Using this crucial information, market players could rightly shape their business plans in favor of the betterment of their growth in the international market. Segments that have been analyzed in the publication could be related to product, end use, application, and geography.A group of experienced analysts who have prepared the said report delves deep into the various factors that hinder or fuel the global market for Fire Extinguish Agents. It also discovers and mentions the important trends that are emerging in the said market. Cashing in on all of these information that has been gathered so far, it has come up with the best course of action for all the stake holders of the market.Table of ContentsGlobal Fire Extinguish Agents Market Size, Status and Forecast 20251 Industry Overview of Fire Extinguish Agents1.1 Fire Extinguish Agents Market Overview1.1.1 Fire Extinguish Agents Product Scope1.1.2 Market Status and Outlook1.2 Global Fire Extinguish Agents Market Size and Analysis by Regions (2013-2018)1.3 Fire Extinguish Agents Market by Type1.3.1 Water and Foam1.3.2 Carbon Dioxide1.3.3 Dry Powde1.3.4 Clean Agen1.3.5 Others1.4 Fire Extinguish Agents Market by End Users/Application1.4.1 Residential1.4.2 Commercial1.4.3 Industrial2 Global Fire Extinguish Agents Competition Analysis by Players2.1 Fire Extinguish Agents Market Size (Value) by Players (2013-2018)2.2 Competitive Status and Trend2.2.1 Market Concentration Rate2.2.2 Product/Service Differences2.2.3 New Entrants2.2.4 The Technology Trends in Future3 Company (Top Players) Profiles3.1 Chemguard3.1.1 Company Profile3.1.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.1.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.1.4 Fire Extinguish Agents Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.1.5 Recent Developments3.2 National Foam3.2.1 Company Profile3.2.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.2.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.2.4 Fire Extinguish Agents Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.2.5 Recent Developments3.3 DIC3.3.1 Company Profile3.3.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.3.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.3.4 Fire Extinguish Agents Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.3.5 Recent Developments3.4 Amerex CorporationRead Complete Table of Content @List of Tables and FiguresFigure Global Fire Extinguish Agents Market Size (Million USD) Status and Outlook (2013-2018)Table Global Fire Extinguish Agents Revenue (Million USD) Comparison by Regions (2013-2018)Figure Global Fire Extinguish Agents Market Share by Regions (2013-2018)Figure United States Fire Extinguish Agents Market Size (Million USD) and Growth Rate by Regions (2013-2018)Figure EU Fire Extinguish Agents Market Size (Million USD) and Growth Rate by Regions (2013-2018)Figure Japan Fire Extinguish Agents Market Size (Million USD) and Growth Rate by Regions (2013-2018)Figure China Fire Extinguish Agents Market Size (Million USD) and Growth Rate by Regions (2013-2018)Figure India Fire Extinguish Agents Market Size (Million USD) and Growth Rate by Regions (2013-2018)To Get Discount Of This Report Click here @QYResearchReports.com delivers the latest strategic market intelligence to build a successful business footprint in China. Our syndicated and customized research reports provide companies with vital background information of the market and in-depth analysis on the Chinese trade and investment framework, which directly affects their business operations. Reports from QYResearchReports.com feature valuable recommendations on how to navigate in the extremely unpredictable yet highly attractive Chinese market.1820 AvenueM Suite #1047Brooklyn, NY 11230United StatesToll Free: 866-997-4948 (USA-CANADA)Tel: +1-518-621-2074Web:Email: sales@qyresearchreports.comOptogenetics Market: Global Market Estimation, Dynamics, Regional Share, Trends, Competitor Analysis 2012-2016 and Forecast 2017-2023

Optogenetics Market

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Global Optogenetics Market: Optogenetics is the biological technique in neuroscience used for controlling the cells in the living tissue with the help of a light. Optogenetics is majorly used for monitor and control the activities of neurons in living tissue. Light sensitive proteins are used as key reagents in the optogenetics. The neuronal control achieved by using optogenetic actuators such as halorhodopsin, channelrhodopsin, and archaerhodopsin. Optical recording of the neuronal activities made with optogenetic sensors for neurotransmitter, membrane voltage, vesicular release, or calcium. Optogenetics is adopted in the ophthalmology, cardiology, behavioral science, neuroscience, and others.Increase in the adoption of optogenetics in the behavioral and neuroscience, technological advancements in optogenetics, growth in ultrafast laser tool technology are the key factors driving the growth of optogenetics market. Moreover, rise in the number of research laboratories adopting optogenetics technology around the globe and development in the genetic engineering research expected to propel the optogenetics market over the forecast period. However, high cost of the technology, lack of awareness about the optogenetics, and dearth of skilled professionals for optogenetic research might hamper the optogenetics market over the forecast period.A sample of this report is available upon request @Optogenetics market is segmented on the basis of product type, targeting technology, application, and end userBased on the product type, optogenetics market is segmented into the following: Sensorso Genetically encoded calcium indicatorso pH sensorso Chloride sensorso Neurotransmitter release sensorso Voltage-sensitive fluorescent proteins Actuatorso Halorhodopsino Archaerhodopsino Channelrhodopsino Others Light equipmento LEDso Lasero OthersBased on the technique, optogenetics market is segmented into the following: Viral vectors Transgenic animals Cre-Dependant Expression systemBased on the application, optogenetics market is segmented into the following: Neuroscience Behavioural science Cardiovascular diseases Retinal disease treatment OthersBased on end user, optogenetics market is segmented into the following: Pharmaceutical & Biopharmaceutical companies Biotechnology companies Academic research institutesTo view TOC of this report is available upon request @Global optogenetics market is growing at a significant CAGR owing to rise in the adoption of optogenetics technology in neuroscience and behavioral science. Innovation of newer technologies for various diseases such as obesity and retinal diseases on optogenetics platform might fuel the optogenetics market growth in near future. For instance, in August 2015, Boehringer Ingelheim and Circuit therapeutic has collaborated to develop the novel medicines for obesity on optogenetics technology platform. Acquisitions and mergers, collaborations, technological advancements, and fund raising are the strategies adopted by the companies for increasing their revenue in optogenetics market. For instance, in November 2015, RetroSense Therapeutics secured US$ 6Mn Series B financing from various organizations for the clinical development of RST-001 for the treatment of Retinitis pigmentosa. Moreover, in November 2016, Bruker targeted on optogenetics market by commercializing NeuraLight 3D an optical module for stimulating and imaging the multiple neurons.Need more information about this report @Geographically, optogenetics market is segmented into North America, Latin America, Asia Pacific, Europe, and Middle East & Africa. Increase in the R&D activities in neuroscience and optogenetics and availability of professional researchers in North America are anticipated to create demand for optogenetics research in the region. Moreover, the optogenetics market is developing in the Europe region owing to collaboration between the companies for developing newer technologies on optogenetics platform. However, technological developments in optogenetics market, increase in the applications of optogenetics, and rise in R&D activities in Asia Pacific region plays a key role in optogenetics market growth.Some of the players in optogenetics market are Coherent, Inc. (U.S.), Noldus Information technology (Netherlands), Thorlabs, Inc. (U.S.), Bruker (U.S.), Laserglow Technologies (Canada), Regenexbio, Inc. (U.S.), GenSight Biologics S.A. (France), Jackson Laboratory (U.S.), Applied Genetic Technologies Corporation (U.S.), and Circuit Therapeutics, Inc. (U.S.) to name a few.Get access to full summary @About Precision Business InsightsPrecision Business Insights is one of the leading market research and business consulting firm, which follow a holistic approach to solve needs of the clients. We adopt and implement proven research methodologies to achieve better results. We help our clients by providing actionable insights and strategies to make better decisions. We provide consulting, syndicated and customised market research services based on our client needs.Contact to Precision Business Insights,Kemp House,152  160 City Road,London EC1V 2NXEmail: sales@precisionbusinessinsights.comToll Free (US):+1-866-598-1553Website @Real-Time Locating Systems (RTLS) Market 2018 : Impinj, SAVI Technology, Ubisense Group, Airista, Centrak

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Qyresearchreports include new market research report Global Real-Time Locating Systems (RTLS) Market Professional Survey Report 2018 to its huge collection of research reports.The global market for Real-Time Locating Systems (RTLS) has been witnessing a transitional phase. With a highlight on these changes, this research study presents an in-depth analysis of the worldwide Real-Time Locating Systems (RTLS) market during the period from 2018 to 2025.The market report provides a comprehensive picture of the latest and upcoming trends in the global Real-Time Locating Systems (RTLS) market, underlining the major market practices and the key rules and regulations associated with various types of market products available across the world.In this research study, the global market for Real-Time Locating Systems (RTLS) has been analyzed by taking significant market factors into consideration. It further makes future predictions for this market, using significant statistical information. The availability of products, production volume, pricing structure, and the revenue generated in the market are the key factors, based on which the report determines the performance of the worldwide Real-Time Locating Systems (RTLS) market. The production chain and the sales dynamics have also been evaluated in this research report.Download Free exclusive Sample of this report:With the help of a number of tables and figures, the report makes a valuable source of guidance for market participants. It also includes the general overview of the global market for Real-Time Locating Systems (RTLS), such as the definition, products, application, end users, and the market chain structure.The competitive landscape prevalent in the global Real-Time Locating Systems (RTLS) market has also been evaluated by performing SWOT analysis on the key market participants. It further discusses the industry chain and the government norms and policies, boosting the demand for Real-Time Locating Systems (RTLS) across the world at length.The main objective of this study is to deliver a clear picture of the global market for Real-Time Locating Systems (RTLS) to market participants, stakeholders, and consultants, assisting them in creating appropriate strategies to gain a competitive edge over their peers.Table of ContentsGlobal Real-Time Locating Systems (RTLS) Market Professional Survey Report 20171 Industry Overview of Real-Time Locating Systems (RTLS)1.1 Definition and Specifications of Real-Time Locating Systems (RTLS)1.1.1 Definition of Real-Time Locating Systems (RTLS)1.1.2 Specifications of Real-Time Locating Systems (RTLS)1.2 Classification of Real-Time Locating Systems (RTLS)1.2.1 RFID1.2.2 Wi-Fi1.2.3 Ultra-Wideband (UWB)1.2.4 Infrared (IR)1.2.5 Ultrasound1.2.6 ZigBee1.2.7 Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)1.2.8 Global Positioning System (GPS)1.2.9 Other RTLS Technologies2 Manufacturing Cost Structure Analysis of Real-Time Locating Systems (RTLS)2.1 Raw Material and Suppliers2.2 Manufacturing Cost Structure Analysis of Real-Time Locating Systems (RTLS)2.3 Manufacturing Process Analysis of Real-Time Locating Systems (RTLS)2.4 Industry Chain Structure of Real-Time Locating Systems (RTLS)3 Technical Data and Manufacturing Plants Analysis of Real-Time Locating Systems (RTLS)3.1 Capacity and Commercial Production Date of Global Real-Time Locating Systems (RTLS) Major Manufacturers in 20163.2 Manufacturing Plants Distribution of Global Real-Time Locating Systems (RTLS) Major Manufacturers in 20163.3 R&D Status and Technology Source of Global Real-Time Locating Systems (RTLS) Major Manufacturers in 20163.4 Raw Materials Sources Analysis of Global Real-Time Locating Systems (RTLS) Major Manufacturers in 20164 Global Real-Time Locating Systems (RTLS) Overall Market Overview4.1 2012-2017E Overall Market Analysis4.2 Capacity Analysis4.2.1 2012-2017E Global Real-Time Locating Systems (RTLS) Capacity and Growth Rate Analysis4.2.2 2016 Real-Time Locating Systems (RTLS) Capacity Analysis (Company Segment)4.3 Sales Analysis4.3.1 2012-2017E Global Real-Time Locating Systems (RTLS) Sales and Growth Rate Analysis4.3.2 2016 Real-Time Locating Systems (RTLS) Sales Analysis (Company Segment)4.4 Sales Price AnalysisRead Complete Table of Content @List of Tables and FiguresFigure Picture of Real-Time Locating Systems (RTLS)Table Product Specifications of Real-Time Locating Systems (RTLS)Table Classification of Real-Time Locating Systems (RTLS)Figure Global Production Market Share of Real-Time Locating Systems (RTLS) by Type in 2016Figure RFID PictureTable Major Manufacturers of RFIDFigure Wi-Fi PictureTable Major Manufacturers of Wi-FiFigure Ultra-Wideband (UWB) PictureTable Major Manufacturers of Ultra-Wideband (UWB)Get discount copy @QYResearchReports.com delivers the latest strategic market intelligence to build a successful business footprint in China. Our syndicated and customized research reports provide companies with vital background information of the market and in-depth analysis on the Chinese trade and investment framework, which directly affects their business operations. Reports from QYResearchReports.com feature valuable recommendations on how to navigate in the extremely unpredictable yet highly attractive Chinese market.1820 AvenueM Suite #1047Brooklyn, NY 11230United StatesToll Free: 866-997-4948 (USA-CANADA)Tel: +1-518-621-2074Web:Email: sales@qyresearchreports.comReal Time Health Monitoring Devices Market 2018  Key Vendors: are Qualcomm, Jawbone Inc., Fitbit Inc. and many

Real Time Health Monitoring Devices Market

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The Global Real Time Health Monitoring Devices Market is growing with a rapid pace. According to a recent study report published by the Market Research Future, the Global Real Time Health Monitoring Devices Market is booming and is expected to gain prominence over the forecast period with a sound pace. The market is projected to demonstrate a sound growth by 2022, surpassing its previous growth records in terms of value with a sound CAGR during the anticipated period (2017-2022).Try Sample Report Here @In the process of enhancing healthcare outcomes and minimizing costs for the patients, healthcare providers suffer various problems, especially in terms of the infrequent interactions with their patients, giving them negligible understanding of the patients activities impairing their overall health. Healthcare providers can make effective decisions if there is an automatic flow of information between patients and the care givers. This is achieved the integration of the real time health monitoring devices in the healthcare sector. Factors such as increasing use of smartphones and wearable devices into healthcare is a major driver for the market growth during the forecast period. Additionally, introduction of real time health monitoring device in developing economies is estimated to fuel the market growth during the forecast period. However, lack of awareness and reluctance in sharing health related information are the major restraining factors for the market growth.Key Players for Global Real Time Health Monitoring Devices Market:Some of the key players in this market are:GE Healthcare (U.K.)Qualcomm (U.S.)Jawbone Inc. (U.S.)Withings SA (France)Fitbit Inc. (U.S.)Garmin Ltd. (Switzerland)Global Real Time Health Monitoring Devices Market - Competitive AnalysisCharacterized by the presence of several well-established and small players, the Global Real Time Health Monitoring Devices Market appears to be highly competitive and fragmented. International players are increasingly expanding their footprint in the developing economy, making it difficult for regional vendors to compete with them, especially in terms of features such as product differentiation, product portfolios, quality, and pricing. The market is witnessing intensified competition which is expected to get more intensified further during the forecast period. The intense competition prevalent in the market dictates the consolidation among marketers.Well established players incorporate acquisition, collaboration, partnership, expansion, and product launch in order to gain competitive advantage in this market and to maintain their market position.In July-2016, GE Healthcare acquired Biosafe Group, which supplied integrated cell bioprocessing systems for the cell therapy and regenerative medicine industry, for an undisclosed sum. The acquisition of Biosafe expanded GE Healthcares end-to-end ecosystem of products, solutions, and services for its cell therapy customers and expanded GEs technology reach to a number of new cell and therapy types.In October-2017, Qualcomm, along with Netgear, Ericsson, and Australian carrier Telstra, is announced launch of the first product to support gigabit LTE, a mobile hotspot. The hotspot makes use of a variety of technologies to hit those high speeds, including carrier aggregation. It runs on Telstras existing LTE networks.In February-2017, Nokia re-launched the entire Withings portfolio of digital health devices under the Nokia brand, the company announced the same at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona.In May-2016, Fitbit, Inc., the leader in the connected health and fitness market, acquired wearable payment assets of Coin, a Silicon Valley consumer electronics and financial technology company. The deal includes key personnel and intellectual property specific to Coins wearable payment platform. There were no plans to integrate Coins wearable payments technology into the 2016 Fitbit product roadmap, the acquisition accelerated Fitbits ability to develop an active NFC payment solution that could be embedded into future Fitbit devices, broadening its smart capabilities. The acquisition excluded smart payment products, such as Coin 2.0.Global Real Time Health Monitoring Devices Market - Regional AnalysisNorth America dominates the global real time health monitoring devices market increasing diseases management for the growing geriatric population. Moreover, the presence of the developed economies like the U.S. and Canada provides the technological backgrounds for the market growth. Europe holds the second largest market. The need to reduce the healthcare costs and improve patient health management for the ageing population has led to the adoption of real time health monitoring devices in this region. The Asia Pacific region is expected to be the fastest growing region while the Middle East and Africa holds the least share of the global market.Segments:Global Real Time Health Monitoring Devices Market has been segmented on the basis of type which comprises of wearable devices, home health medical devices. On the basis of end user the market is segmented into hospitals, clinics, ambulatory centers and homecare settings.TABLE OF CONTENTS1 INTRODUCTION1.1 Scope Of Study1.2 Research Objective1.3 Assumptions & Limitations1.3.1 Assumptions1.3.2 Limitations1.4 Market Structure2 RESEARCH METHODOLOGY2.1 Primary Research2.2 Secondary Research3 MARKET DYNAMICS3.1 Introduction3.2 Drivers3.2.1 Increasing Use Of Smartphones And Wearable Devices Into Healthcare3.2.2 Cost Effectiveness And Patients Convenience To Use These Devices3.2.3 Increased Usage Of Smart Devices For Health Management3.3 Restraints3.3.1 Lack Of Awareness About The Possible Applications Of Real Time Health Monitoring Devices3.3.2 Reluctance To Share Information Regarding The Health3.4 Opportunities.ContinuedGet Discount on Report @About Market Research Future:At Market Research Future (MRFR), we enable our customers to unravel the complexity of various industries through our Cooked Research Report (CRR), Half-Cooked Research Reports (HCRR), Raw Research Reports (3R), Continuous-Feed Research (CFR), and Market Research & Consulting Services.In order to stay updated with technology and work process of the industry, MRFR often plans & conducts meet with the industry experts and industrial visits for its research analyst members.Contact:Market Research FutureOffice No. 528, Amanora ChambersMagarpatta Road, Hadapsar,Pune  411028Maharashtra, India+1 646 845 9312Email: salesteam@marketresearchfuture.comGlobal Premium Beauty & Personal Care Products Market Strategic Business Report: Fact.MR Forecast

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FACT.MR has been actively involved in offering comprehensive research data concerning various topics which are associated to industrial reference and investor utility. This particular research report titled Premium Beauty & Personal Care Products Market Forecast, Trend Analysis & Competition Tracking: Global Review 2017 to 2022 has been added to the wide online database of FACT.MR which discusses the present as well as future market scenario. Readers can access knowledge related to market volume, regional expanse as well as competitive landscape prevailing in the global premium beauty & personal care products market. In order to study development patterns, this smart assessment also focuses on market dynamics, which talks about drivers, restraints and opportunities estimated to influence the concerned market during the period until (2017 to 2022).Request For Sample Report-Key Report Highlights1- Premium beauty & personal care products are likely to be extravagant for common consumers, but high-spending consumers in countries such as the US and Canada will continue to promising customer demographics in the global market. In the report, the premium beauty & personal care products market in North America is projected to dominate the global market.2- Manufacturers of premium beauty & personal care products, however, are reluctant to set up their production bases in North America. For reasons namely, low wage costs, easy raw material availability, and lenient manufacturing laws, key players in the global premium beauty & personal care products market are expanding their manufacturing presence across the Asia-Pacific excluding Japan (APEJ) region. By the end of 2017, over 20% of the global market revenues are likely to come from sales recorded in the APEJ region.3- Europes premium beauty & personal care products market is also expected to grow steadily, and will bring in US$ 36 Bn towards the end of the forecast period.4- The report stresses the high demand for premium skin care products across the globe. With changing climatic conditions and rising exposure to televised media platforms, consumers will be drawn towards adopting premium skin care in their daily routines. With an approximate one-third revenue share, premium skin care products will procure over US$ 45 Bn in global revenues by the end of 2022.5- Sales of premium beauty & personal care products through e-commerce websites is slated to gain traction towards the latter half of the forecast period. However, hypermarkets/supermarkets will be observed as the largest channel for sales of premium beauty & personal care products in the global market.Browse Full Report With TOC-Table of ContentChapter 1. Global Premium Beauty and Personal Care Market - Executive Summary. 22Chapter 2. Global Premium Beauty and Personal Care Market Overview. 24Chapter 3. Global Premium Beauty and Personal Care Market Analysis and Forecast By Product Types. 28Chapter 4. Global Premium Beauty and Personal Care Market Analysis and Forecast By Sales Channel. 44Chapter 5. Global Premium Beauty and Personal Care Market Analysis and Forecast By Region. 57Chapter 6. North America Premium Beauty and Personal Care Market Analysis and Forecast, By Country, 2012-2022. 79Chapter 7. Latin America Premium Beauty and Personal Care Market Analysis and Forecast, By Country, 2012-2022. 83Chapter 8. Europe Premium Beauty and Personal Care Market Analysis and Forecast, By Country, 2012-2022. 89Chapter 9. Japan Premium Beauty and Personal Care Market Analysis and Forecast, By Country, 2012-2022. 101Chapter 10. APEJ Premium Beauty and Personal Care Market Analysis and Forecast, By Country, 2012-2022. 103Chapter 11. MEA Premium Beauty and Personal Care Market Analysis and Forecast, By Country, 2012-2022. 115List of TablesTABLE 1 Global Premium Beauty and Personal Care Market Value (US$ Mn), 2012-2016 17TABLE 2 Global Premium Beauty and Personal Care Market Value (US$ Mn), 2017-2022 18TABLE 3 Global Premium Beauty and Personal Care Market Value (US$ Mn) and Y-o-Y, 2015-2022 19TABLE 4 Global Premium Skin Care Segment Value (US$ Mn), By Region 2012-2016 23TABLE 5 Global Premium Skin Care Segment Value (US$ Mn), By Region 2017-2022 24TABLE 6 Global Premium Skin Care Segment Market Share, By Region 2012-2016 25TABLE 7 Global Premium Skin Care Segment Market Share, By Region 2017-2022 25TABLE 8 Global Premium Skin Care Segment Y-o-Y, By Region 2015-2022 25@@ContinuedRequest For Discount On This Report-About Fact.MRFact.MR is a fast-growing market research firm that offers the most comprehensive suite of syndicated and customized market research reports. We believe transformative intelligence can educate and inspire businesses to make smarter decisions. We know the limitations of the one-size-fits-all approach; thats why we publish multi-industry global, regional, and country-specific research reports.Contact UsFact.MRSuite 988427 Upper Pembroke Street,Dublin 2, IrelandTelephone: +353-1-6111-593Email: sales@factmr.com/Web:Trichlorosilane Market Poised for an Explosive Growth in the Near Future

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Trichlorosilane (TCS) is a colorless, volatile, inorganic compound usually in liquid form. It is a compound made up of silicon, hydrogen, and chlorine, with the chemical formula HSiCl3. It is manufactured by treating powdered metallurgical grade silicon with hydrogen chloride or hydrogen and silicon tetrachloride at high temperatures. The reaction is then cooled down to produce liquid trichlorosilane.View Report Preview:Trichlorosilane is an intermediate product formed while manufacturing polycrystalline silicon. Polycrystalline silicon is used by the electronics industry as raw material in manufacturing of their equipment. Trichlorosilane is manufactured for the production of purified polysilicons. It is also used in the making of various other chemical products. Trichlorosilane is used as a monomer in the production of silicone based resins and polymers.Trichlorosilane is a colorless liquid which forms a fog like cloud when it comes in contact with the outside atmosphere. It easily reacts with water, air, and moisture and forms byproducts such as hydrogen chloride, hydrochloric acid, SiO2 or silica. The product is flammable and may ignite when in contact with vapors. It forms an explosive mixture when in contact with air. It easily dissolves with organic solvents and with fumes which are present in air. Triclorosilane has a sharp odor.Trichlorosilane can be bifurcated based on its applications in varied industries. The product is used in the electronics & electrical industry in the manufacturing of semiconductors. It is also used in manufacturing polymers and resins. The product is used as a raw material in the manufacturing of various chemicals such as phenyltrichlorosilane, vinyl chlorosilanes, allyl chlorosilanes, methyl chlorosilanes, triethoxysilane, and nonylchlorosilanes.The trichlorosilane market was dominated by the Asia Pacific region in 2015, as China was the major producer and consumer of trichlorosilane. Asia Pacific accounted for the largest share of the mica market in 2015 due to the substantial growth in the electronics industry. The electronics industry is expanding significantly in China and India. This is expected to boost the trichlorosilane market in Asia Pacific. The scenario is anticipated to be similar during the forecast period due to the growing electronics industry in the region.Trichlorosilane is majorly used in the manufacturing of semiconductors which are used in the electronics & electrical industry. The growing electronics & electrical industry in the Asia Pacific region, specifically China is a major reason for it to dominate the market. Growing population and developing countries with emerging economies in Asia Pacific is expected to boost the trichlorosilane market in the region. This is also expected to add to the global sales of the product.Demand for trichlorosilane in North America and Europe is on the rise due to increasing usage of trichlorosilane in the manufacturing of semiconductors and polymers. As North America and Europe are developed regions with mature industries, which is expected to increase the demand for trichlorosilane. Latin America and Middle East & Africa has regular demand for trichlorosilane, due to increasing usage of the product in manufacturing of different chemicals.Key manufacturers and major players in the trichlorosilane market are Dow Corning Corporation, Wacker Chemie AG, Qianjiang Tianxiang Chemical Co. Ltd., Fuji Chemical Industry Co. Ltd., Tangshan Sunfar Silicon Industries Co. Ltd., Jingzhou Longhua Petroleum Co. Ltd., DESHAN Chemical (Zhejiang) Co. Ltd., Chengdu Huarong Chemical Co. Ltd., Wynca Group, Chongqing Tianyuan Chemical Co. Ltd., and others.Request to view Sample Report:The report offers a comprehensive evaluation of the market. It does so via in-depth insights, understanding market evolution by tracking historical developments, and analyzing the present scenario and future projections based on optimistic and likely scenarios. Each research report serves as a repository of analysis and information for every facet of the market, including but not limited to: Regional markets, technology developments, types, applications, and the competitive landscape.About UsTransparency Market Research (TMR) is a market intelligence company, providing global business information reports and services. Our exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trends analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMR's experienced team of Analysts, Researchers, and Consultants, use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather and analyze information.Our data repository is continuously updated and revised by a team of research experts, so that it always reflects the latest trends and information. With a broad research and analysis capability, Transparency Market Research employs rigorous primary and secondary research techniques in developing distinctive data sets and research material for business reports.Contact UsTransparency Market Research90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:Carbon Disulfide Market to have Good Business Opportunities in the Coming Years

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Global Carbon Disulfide Market: OverviewCarbon disulfide is a volatile colorless compound with molecular formula CS2. It smells akin to ether and is generally used in the liquid state. Carbon disulfide occurs naturally in small amounts in volcanic eruptions. Earlier, carbon disulfide was manufactured by mixing coke and sulfur at a high temperature. Currently, the production process is carried out at a much lower temperature, using natural gas as carbon source and combining it with sulfur and either silica gel or aluminum acting as a catalyst. Carbon disulfide is used as a fumigant, insecticide, non-polar solvent, and optical dispersant in spectroscopes. It is also employed as building block in the production of various chemicals. Furthermore, carbon disulfide is used in the production of chemicals such as agricultural chemicals, rubber chemicals, cellophane, rayon, and carbon tetrachloride.View Report Preview:Global Carbon Disulfide Market: Trends and OpportunitiesProduction of new chemicals such as cellophane, rayon, and carbon tetrachloride accounts for significant share of the carbon disulfide market. Carbon disulfide acts as building block in the production of these chemicals. High demand in end-use industries such as food packaging, textile, and refrigeration is expected to boost the demand for chemicals such as cellophane, rayon, and carbon tetrachloride. This, in turn, is anticipated drive the carbon disulfide market. Usage of carbon disulfide as non-polar solvent is another major application. Carbon disulfide is used as a solvent for phosphorus, sulfur, bromine, selenium, iodine, asphalt, rubber, resin, and fats. Therefore, it is used in cleaning carbon nanotubes. Rising demand for nanomaterials, especially carbon nanotubes, is anticipated to propel the demand for carbon disulfide as bipolar cleaning solvent. This, in turn, is estimated to augment the carbon disulfide market. Increasing demand for carbon disulfide in the agriculture end-use industry is projected to drive other niche applications such as insecticide and fumigant, thereby boosting the carbon disulfide market.Global Carbon Disulfide Market: Geographical and Competitive DynamicsAsia Pacific was the largest market for carbon disulfide in 2014. The region accounted for significant share of the carbon disulfide market in the year. This trend is likely to continue during the next few years owing to growth in end-use industries in emerging economies such as China and India. Application of carbon disulfide in the production of various chemicals is expected to be the major market driver in the region due to expansion in end-use industries such as textile, food packaging, refrigeration, and agriculture in countries such as China and India. China held the largest share of the global carbon disulfide market in 2014. This trend is anticipated to continue during the forecast period. Europe is estimated to witness a similar trend, led by presence of the well-established food packaging industry in the region. Premium clothing and rayon textile industries are projected to further augment the carbon disulfide market in Europe owing to high disposable income of consumers in the region. The food packaging industry is likely to drive the carbon disulfide market in North America due to stringent food packaging norms in the region. The carbon nanotubes industry is expected to be a highly attractive market for carbon disulfide owing to increase in research activities related to nanomaterials in the region. The carbon disulfide market in Latin America is anticipated to witness steady growth rate during the next few years owing to expansion in textile and agriculture industries in economies such as Brazil. Middle East & Africa is projected to be a highly lucrative market for carbon disulfide due to expansion of textile and packaging industries in GCC and growth in the agricultural industry in South Africa during the forecast period.Major players in the carbon disulfide market include Shanghai Baijin Chemical Group Co., Ltd., Akzo Nobel N.V., Arkema Group, PPG Industries, Inc., Alfa Aesar, and Univar Inc.Request to view Sample Report:The report offers a comprehensive evaluation of the market. It does so via in-depth qualitative insights, historical data, and verifiable projections about market size. The projections featured in the report have been derived using proven research methodologies and assumptions. By doing so, the research report serves as a repository of analysis and information for every facet of the market, including but not limited to: Regional markets, technology, types, and applications.About UsTransparency Market Research (TMR) is a market intelligence company, providing global business information reports and services. Our exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trends analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMR's experienced team of Analysts, Researchers, and Consultants, use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather and analyze information.Our data repository is continuously updated and revised by a team of research experts, so that it always reflects the latest trends and information. With a broad research and analysis capability, Transparency Market Research employs rigorous primary and secondary research techniques in developing distinctive data sets and research material for business reports.Contact UsTransparency Market Research90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:Self-healing Materials Market are expected to represent the highest growth rate In Global

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Global Self-healing Materials Market: OverviewSelf-healing materials refer to materials that have the ability to repair damages without human intervention. These materials are inspired from biological systems that display the ability to restore after being damaged.Self-healing materials are categorized as biomaterials, reversible polymers, inorganic capsules, self-healing coatings, shape memory materials, and vascular systems. These materials are used across several end-use industries such as automotive, healthcare, military, construction, electronics, aerospace, and energy generation.View Report Preview:The market study is a collective of facts and factoids that presents developments in the global self-healing materials market in a chronological order.Global Self-healing Materials Market: Trends and OpportunitiesThe key factor driving the self-healing materials market is that self-healing materials significantly reduce the maintenance needed for restoring damages. Self-healing materials such as self-healing mortars and self-healing cements used in the construction sector have displayed significant demand over the past few years. The trend is expected to continue in the forthcoming years as well.The Automotive sector displays a significant demand for self-healing materials. This is because automotive OEMs apply an exterior covering to automobiles that work as a healer in the event of a scratch or a cut. Thus, the frequency of maintenance required due to scratches and cuts on automobiles is reduced significantly and also the frequency of regular maintenance.The electronics industry displays a significant demand for self-healing materials. Electronic giants such as Apple and LG are recommending the usage of self-healing materials in electronics such as laptops, desktops, and mobiles.The healthcare industry presents lucrative growth opportunities to the self-healing materials market. This is because self-healing materials have the potential to be used in the production of biomimetic, thereby bolstering the growth of the self-healing materials market.Global Self-healing Materials Market: Regional OutlookNorth America is anticipated to be the leading regional market for self-healing materials. Increasing research and development initiatives for the development of self-healing materials has led to the significant growth of North America self-healing materials market. Europe is also expected to be a significant regional market for self-healing materials due to their increasing utilization in construction, electronics, and automotive end-use industries. Besides this, Europe has a developing healthcare industry with massive investments in biomimetic. The presence of several major OEMs in the region are also boosting the growth of this regional market.Asia Pacific is expected to emerge as a significant market for self-healing materials due to their increasing applications in construction and automotive applications. In particular, economic development in countries such as China and India propelling the construction sector is also leading to the growth of this regional market.Latin America is expected to display steady growth in the self-healing materials market predominantly driven by the growth of the construction sector in the region. The regional market of Middle East and Africa are expected to rise on similar lines on account of economic development in South Africa and economic development in countries of GCC.Request to view Sample Report:Global Self-healing Materials Market: Competitive LandscapeSome of the key players in the global self-healing materials market are ACCIONA, Applied Thin Films Inc., Autonomic Materials Inc., INNCEINNMAT, Bayer AG, Evonik Industries Corporation, PPG Industries Inc., SENSOR COATING SYSTEMS LTD., Fescon Oy, GENERAL MOTORS, Volkswagen, Apple Inc., BASF SE, ALSTOM, Avecom, S.L., Critical Materials, NEI Corporation, SLIPS TECHNOLOGIES, Flame Spray Technologies, GKN Aerospace, Nissan Motor Corporation, Ford Motor Company, and LG Electronics.About UsTransparency Market Research (TMR) is a market intelligence company, providing global business information reports and services. Our exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trends analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMR's experienced team of Analysts, Researchers, and Consultants, use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather and analyze information.Our data repository is continuously updated and revised by a team of research experts, so that it always reflects the latest trends and information. With a broad research and analysis capability, Transparency Market Research employs rigorous primary and secondary research techniques in developing distinctive data sets and research material for business reports.Contact UsTransparency Market Research90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207Tel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:SMT Placement Equipment Market Size Global Analysis: Universal Instruments, Hitachi High-Tech, Mirai, Fuji, EvestCorporation

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MarketStudyReport.com Adds New Global SMT Placement Equipment Market 2017  2022 research report providing information and data By Product, By Application, Industry Analysis Report, Regional Outlook, Growth Potential, Price Trends, Competitive Market Share & Forecast spreading across Enhance data and table & figures in it.Get Sample Copy of this Report:The market is expected to expand at 7.62% CAGR over the period between 2017 and 2022.The major players in global market, includingJUKI(JP), Yamaha Motor(JP), Assemblon(NL), ASM PT(NL), Panasonic(JP), Samsung Techwin(KR), Universal Instruments, Hitachi High-Tech(JP), Mirai(KR), Fuji(JP), EvestCorporation(TW), Mycronic(SE), Versatec(US), Europlacer(UK)Global Surface Mount Technology (SMT) Equipment Market 2017-2022, has been prepared based on an in-depth market analysis with inputs from industry experts. The report covers the market landscape and its growth prospects over the coming years. The report also includes a discussion of the key vendors operating in this market.SMT Placement Equipment market research report provides the latest industry data and industry future trends, allowing you to identify the products and end users driving revenue growth and profitability.The industry report lists the leading competitors and provides the insights strategic industry analysis of the key factors influencing the market. The report includes the forecasts, analysis and discussion of important industry trends, market size, market share estimates and profiles of the leading industry Players.Scope of Report:Global SMT Placement Equipment market report classifies this industry extensively in terms of the regional landscape. Market Segment by Regions, regional analysis covers:The report includes the forecasts, Analysis and discussion of important industry trends, market size, market share estimates and profiles of the leading industry Players.Key Point Covered in this ReportThis report provides pin-point analysis for changing competitive dynamicsIt provides a forward-looking perspective on different factors driving or restraining market growthIt helps in understanding the key product segments and their futureIt provides pin point analysis of changing competition dynamics and keeps you ahead of competitorsIt helps in making informed business decisions by having complete insights of market and by making in-depth analysis of market segmentsFor More Tactical Information:Market Segment by Regions, regional analysis coversNorth America (USA, Canada and Mexico)Europe (Germany, France, UK, Russia and Italy)Asia-Pacific (China, Japan, Korea, India and Southeast Asia)South America (Brazil, Argentina, Columbia etc.)Middle East and Africa (Saudi Arabia, UAE, Egypt, Nigeria and South Africa)Global SMT Placement Equipment Market: Product Segment AnalysisHigh-speed SMT PlacementMid-speed SMT PlacementGlobal SMT Placement Equipment Market: Application Segment AnalysisNetwork communicationComputerConsumer electronics fieldOtherTable of Content:Chapter 1 About the SMT Placement Equipment Industry1.1 Industry Definition1.1.1 Types of SMT Placement Equipment industry1.2.1.1 High-speed SMT Placement1.2.1.2 Mid-speed SMT PlacementChapter 2 World Market Competition Lanscape2.1 SMT Placement Equipment Markets by regions2.1.1 USAMarket Revenue and Growth Rate 2012-2017Market overviewMajor players Revenue in 20172.1.2 EuropeMarket Revenue and Growth Rate 2012-2017Market overviewMajor players Revenue in 2017Chapter 3 World SMT Placement Equipment Market share3.1 Major players Market share by production3.2 Major players Market share by Revenue3.3 Major Regions Market share by Production in 2017, Through 20223.4 Major Regions Market share By Revenue in 2017, Through 2022Chapter 4 Supply Chain4.1 Industry Supply chain Analysis4.2 Raw material Market analysis4.2.1 Raw material Prices analysis 2012-20174.2.2 Raw material Supply Market analysis4.2 Manufacturing Equipment Suppliers AnalysisChapter 5 Company Profiles5.1 JUKI(JP)5.1.1 Company Details (Foundation Year, Employee Strength and etc)5.1.2 Product Information (Picture, Specifications and Applications)5.1.3 Revenue, Price and Operating Profits5.2 Yamaha Motor(JP)5.2.1 Company Details (Foundation Year, Employee Strength and etc)5.2.2 Product Information (Picture, Specifications and Applications)5.2.3 Revenue, Price and Operating ProfitsRelated ReportGlobal and Chinese Calcium Plastic Box Industry, 2018 Market Research ReportGlobal and Chinese Calcium Plastic Box Industry, 2013-2023 Market Research Report' is a professional and in-depth study on the current state of the global Calcium Plastic Box industry with a focus on the Chinese market.More Reports:Market Study ReportThe Green Suite #4594,Dover, DE 19901United StatesPhone: 1-201-355-0868US Toll Free: 1-866-764-2150Email:sales@marketstudyreport.comWebsite:News:More Report at:Marketstudyreport.com allows you to manage and control all corporate research purchases to consolidate billing and vendor management. You can eliminate duplicate purchases and customize your content and license management.Sun Protection Products Market: 2017 Global Demand, Trend, Key Manufacturers, Production, Supply, Growth Analysis and 2022 Industry Forecast Research Report

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FACT.MR has been actively involved in offering comprehensive research data concerning various topics which are associated to industrial reference and investor utility. This particular research report titled Sun Protection Products Market Forecast, Trend Analysis & Competition Tracking: Global Review 2017 to 2022 has been added to the wide online database of FACT.MR which discusses the present as well as future market scenario. Readers can access knowledge related to market volume, regional expanse as well as competitive landscape prevailing in the global sun protection products market. In order to study development patterns, this smart assessment also focuses on market dynamics, which talks about drivers, restraints and opportunities estimated to influence the concerned market during the period until 2017 to 2022.Request For Sample Report-Following projections from Fact.MRs report on the global market for sun protection products are expected to outline the markets future prospects1- Demand for sun protection products will continue to be higher than suntan and other sun block products. Over US$ 5,675 Mn worth sun protection products are estimated to be sold by the end of 2022. Currently, sun protection products command for over one-third revenue share of the global market. Cosmetic brands are emphasizing on herbal and natural ingredient owing to increasing concerns over side-effects from use of sun protection products that are prepared from synthetic chemicals.2- Hypermarket/supermarket has emerge as the top distribution channel for sun protection products. Increase construction of hypermarket/supermarket in emerging countries such as India and China is allowing the global market for sun protection products to gain further momentum. Huge stocks of wellness items including sun protection products can be stored in hypermarket/supermarket giving consumers the option to select form a range of different sun block products. Online retail stores are also a key distribution channel for sun protection products as a large portion of the young population chose to shop online. The online sales segment is projected to surpass a market valuation of US$ 2,879 Mn, registering 5.1% CAGR.3- The market for sun protection products in Asia Pacific excluding Japan (APEJ) is project to remain highly lucrative during the forecast period. The regions market revenue is expected to expand at over 6% CAGR over 2022. This is attributed to the increasing disposable income and rising purchasing power of consumers in APEJ. Furthermore, growth of the economy in various countries in the region is resulting in improving lifestyle and standard of living. The markets in North America and Europe are also anticipated to register impressive growth rate during the assessment period. Meanwhile, Latin Americas market is also projected to command for a considerable market share in terms of revenues over the forecast period.Browse Full Report With TOC-Table of ContentGlobal Sun Protection Products Market - Executive SummaryGlobal Sun Protection Products Market OverviewGlobal Sun Protection Products Market Analysis and Forecast By Product TypeGlobal Sun Protection Products Market Analysis and Forecast By Distribution ChannelGlobal Sun Protection Products Market Analysis and Forecast By RegionNorth America Sun Protection Products Market Analysis and Forecast, By Country, 2012-2022Latin America Sun Protection Products Market Analysis and Forecast, By Country, 2012-2022Europe Sun Protection Products Market Analysis and Forecast, By Country, 2012-2022APEJ Sun Protection Products Market Analysis and Forecast, By Country, 2012-2022MEA Sun Protection Products Market Analysis and Forecast, By Country, 2012-2022Global Sun Protection Products Market Company/Manufactures/Distributors/Suppliers Profile and Revenue ProjectionsList of TablesTABLE 1 Global Sun Protection Products Market Value (US$ Mn), 2012-2016TABLE 2 Global Sun Protection Products Market Value (US$ Mn), 2017-2022TABLE 3 Global Sun Protection Products Market Value (US$ Mn) and Y-o-Y, 2015-2022TABLE 4 Global Sun Protection Products Segment Value (US$ Mn), By Region 2012-2016TABLE 5 Global Sun Protection Products Segment Value (US$ Mn), By Region 2017-2022TABLE 6 Global Sun Protection Products Segment Market Share, By Region 2012-2016TABLE 7 Global Sun Protection Products Segment Market Share, By Region 2017-2022TABLE 8 Global Sun Protection Products Segment Y-o-Y, By Region 2015-2022TABLE 9 Global After Sun Products Segment Value (US$ Mn), By Region 2012-2016TABLE 10 Global After Sun Products Segment Value (US$ Mn), By Region 2017-2022@@ContinuedRequest For Discount On This Report-About Fact.MRFact.MR is a fast-growing market research firm that offers the most comprehensive suite of syndicated and customized market research reports. We believe transformative intelligence can educate and inspire businesses to make smarter decisions. We know the limitations of the one-size-fits-all approach; thats why we publish multi-industry global, regional, and country-specific research reports.Contact UsFact.MRSuite 988427 Upper Pembroke Street,Dublin 2, IrelandTelephone: +353-1-6111-593Email: sales@factmr.com/Web:Pumped Hydro Storage Market Trend to 2024 Profiling Voith Hydro, EDF, Absaroka, Genex, Toshiba, Schluchseewerk AG, Dongfang Electric, Snowdonia, SinoHydro, Eskom, Enel

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MarketStudyReport.com adds a new Pumped Hydro Storage Market research report for the period of 2017-2024 that focuses on the major drivers and restraints for the Global key players providing analysis of the market share, segmentation, revenue forecasts and geographic regions of the market. The report spread across 390 pages with tables and figures in it.The government entities across the world are taking vigorous efforts to unleash the commercial potential of pumped hydro storage market. With the globe treading on the path of sustainability trends, innumerable renewable energy projects have of late gained a momentum in response to the favorable tax incentives implemented for renewable energy consumption. For instance, the Chinese National Energy Administration (NEA) has recently announced its plan of investing USD 361 billion in renewable power generation in the next five years. Growing global concern over the energy security and a subsequent increase in renewable power projects, has undeniably favored pumped hydro storage market proliferation. Speaking of China, the regional pumped hydro storage market is forecast to surpass a production capacity of 45 GW by 2024.Request a Sample Copy of Global Pumped Hydro Storage Market Research Report @Pumped storage hydropower projects have been providing transmission ancillary benefits and energy storage capacity in Europe and America since ages. Grid stability, high storage capacity, and above all energy efficiency are the prime factors driving the pumped hydro storage industry share. As claimed by EASE (European Association for Storage of Energy), pumped hydro storage systems have an average efficiency of almost 70% to 80% which is much higher when compared to its other counterparts. Ongoing energy efficiency reforms toward the integration of clean storage system have also favored pumped hydro storage industry size. For instance, recently the International Finance Corporation has proclaimed to invest USD 1.2 billion in Indias clean energy sector.Pumped hydro storage is mainly categorized into open loop system, close loop system, and innovative system. Free flowing water is the oldest and one of the most reliable sources of generating electricity across the world. In accordance to this fact, open-loop pumped hydro storage market has apparently garnered mass popularity across myriad end-use sectors. In fact, this particular business sphere covered almost 90% of the overall pumped hydro storage industry share in 2016. As reported by the Department of Energy (DOE), there are presently 34 open loop storage plants operational in China. However, low environmental profile of these systems is prompting some of the end-use sectors to incline toward close loop pumped hydro storage systems. As per estimates, Closed-loop pumped hydro storage industry is forecast to surpass a revenue of USD 16 billion by the end of 2024. Technological advancements in generator and turbine design along with a comparatively lesser effect on aquatic habitat are the two chief factors that propelled the business outlook.Considering the humungous initiatives that are continuously being undertaken worldwide toward the expansion of micro grid infrastructure, pumped hydro storage industry is sure to embark on a profitable path in the forthcoming years. In this regard, it is prudent to note that Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) has authorized 24 pumped hydro storage projects, accounting for a total installed production capacity of 16.5 MW. Expansion and upgradation of existing plants along with technological interventions in product design have incredibly upscaled pumped hydro storage market potential. Speaking along the similar lines, U.S. holds a prominent position in the global business space, subject to the extensive initiations by the U.S. government toward the refurbishment of grid infrastructure. The U.S. Department of Energy in its 2015 report claimed that there are almost 40 pumped storage plants operational in the country, accounting for almost a total capacity of 22 GW.For more information on this report, Please visit at:Pumped hydro storage market is characterized by the active participation of major biggies which include Absaroka, EDF, Toshiba, Alstom, Northland Power, Voith, SinoHydro, and Schluchseewerk AG. Development of cost effective storage systems and technological incorporations in product design are two of the major strategies adopted by the leading industry players. With the ever-increasing demand for uninterrupted power supply, pumped hydro storage systems are set to witness a massive deployment rate in an extensive range of projects. depicts pumped hydro storage market to surpass a revenue of USD 350 billion by 2024.Order a copy of this premium research report @Related Reports: -Global and Chinese Pumped Hydro Storage Industry, 2018 Market Research ReportThe 'Global and Chinese Pumped Hydro Storage Industry, 2013-2023 Market Research Report' is a professional and in-depth study on the current state of the global Pumped Hydro Storage industry with a focus on the Chinese market. The report provides key statistics on the market status of the Pumped Hydro Storage manufacturers and is a valuable source of guidance and direction for companies and individuals interested in the industry.More Report @Marketstudyreport.com allows you to manage and control all corporate research purchases to consolidate billing and vendor management. You can eliminate duplicate purchases and customize your content and license management.Market Study ReportThe Green Suite #4594,Dover, DE 19901United StatesPhone: 1-201-355-0868US Toll Free: 1-866-764-2150Email:sales@marketstudyreport.comWebsite:News:More Report at:Global and Chinese Virtual Machines Industry, 2017 Market Research Report

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The 'Global and Chinese Virtual Machines Industry, 2012-2022 Market Research Report' is a professional and in-depth study on the current state of the global Virtual Machines industry with a focus on the Chinese market. The report provides key statistics on the market status of the Virtual Machines manufacturers and is a valuable source of guidance and direction for companies and individuals interested in the industry.Firstly, the report provides a basic overview of the industry including its definition, applications and manufacturing technology. Then, the report explores the international and Chinese major industry players in detail. In this part, the report presents the company profile, product specifications, capacity, production value, and 2012-2017 market shares for each company. Through the statistical analysis, the report depicts the global and Chinese total market of Virtual Machines industry including capacity, production, production value, cost/profit, supply/demand and Chinese import/export. The total market is further divided by company, by country, and by application/type for the competitive landscape analysis. The report then estimates 2017-2022 market development trends of Virtual Machines industry. Analysis of upstream raw materials, downstream demand, and current market dynamics is also carried out. In the end, the report makes some important proposals for a new project of Virtual Machines Industry before evaluating its feasibility. Overall, the report provides an in-depth insight of 2012-2022 global and Chinese Virtual Machines industry covering all important parameters.Request Sample Copy of the Business Report @1.1 Brief Introduction of Virtual Machines1.2 Development of Virtual Machines Industry1.3 Status of Virtual Machines IndustryChapter Two Manufacturing Technology of Virtual Machines2.1 Development of Virtual Machines Manufacturing Technology2.2 Analysis of Virtual Machines Manufacturing Technology2.3 Trends of Virtual Machines Manufacturing TechnologyGet discount on this report :Chapter Three Analysis of Global Key Manufacturers3.1 Company A3.1.1 Company Profile3.1.2 Product Information3.1.3 2012-2017 Production Information3.1.4 Contact Information3.2 Company B3.2.1 Company Profile3.2.2 Product Information3.2.3 2012-2017 Production Information3.2.4 Contact Information3.3 Company CIf you have any special requirements, please let us know and we will offer you the report as you want.About WMR :Worldwide Market Reports is your one-stop repository of detailed and in-depth market research reports compiled by an extensive list of publishers from across the globe. We offer reports across virtually all domains and an exhaustive list of sub-domains under the sun. The in-depth market analysis by some of the most vastly experienced analysts provide our diverse range of clients from across all industries with vital decision making insights to plan and align their market strategies in line with current market trends. Worldwide Market Researchs well-researched inputs that encompass domains ranging from IT to healthcare enable our prized clients to capitalize upon key growth opportunities and shield against credible threats prevalent in the market in the current scenario and those expected in the near future.1001 4th Ave, #3200 Seattle, WA 98154Ceramic Tiles Market 2018 : Global Top Industry Players Analysis and Forecast to 2025 - Iris Ceramica, Crossville Inc, Florida Tile, Interceramic, Florim

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Researchmoz added Most up-to-date research on "Global Ceramic Tiles Market Research Report 2018" to its huge collection of research reports.In this report, the global Ceramic Tiles market is valued at USD XX million in 2017 and is expected to reach USD XX million by the end of 2025, growing at a CAGR of XX% between 2017 and 2025.Geographically, this report is segmented into several key Regions, with production, consumption, revenue (million USD), market share and growth rate of Ceramic Tiles in these regions, from 2013 to 2025 (forecast), coveringNorth AmericaEuropeChinaJapanSoutheast AsiaIndiaTo Get Sample Copy of Report visit @Global Ceramic Tiles market competition by top manufacturers, with production, price, revenue (value) and market share for each manufacturer; the top players includingMohawk IndustriesIris CeramicaCrossville IncFlorida TileInterceramicFlorimEMIL AMERICAShaw Industries GroupDel ConcaOn the basis of product, this report displays the production, revenue, price, market share and growth rate of each type, primarily split intoGlazed Ceramic TilesUnglazed Ceramic TilesPorcelain TilesOthersOn the basis of the end users/applications, this report focuses on the status and outlook for major applications/end users, consumption (sales), market share and growth rate for each application, includingHousehold UsageCommercial UsageMake an Enquiry about TOC @able of ContentsGlobal Ceramic Tiles Market Research Report 20181 Ceramic Tiles Market Overview1.1 Product Overview and Scope of Ceramic Tiles1.2 Ceramic Tiles Segment by Type (Product Category)1.2.1 Global Ceramic Tiles Production and CAGR (%) Comparison by Type (Product Category)(2013-2025)1.2.2 Global Ceramic Tiles Production Market Share by Type (Product Category) in 20171.2.3 Glazed Ceramic Tiles1.2.4 Unglazed Ceramic Tiles1.2.5 Porcelain Tiles2 Global Ceramic Tiles Market Competition by Manufacturers2.1 Global Ceramic Tiles Capacity, Production and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.1.1 Global Ceramic Tiles Capacity and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.1.2 Global Ceramic Tiles Production and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.2 Global Ceramic Tiles Revenue and Share by Manufacturers (2013-2018)2.3 Global Ceramic Tiles Average Price by Manufacturers (2013-2018)3 Global Ceramic Tiles Capacity, Production, Revenue (Value) by Region (2013-2018)3.1 Global Ceramic Tiles Capacity and Market Share by Region (2013-2018)3.2 Global Ceramic Tiles Production and Market Share by Region (2013-2018)3.3 Global Ceramic Tiles Revenue (Value) and Market Share by Region (2013-2018)3.4 Global Ceramic Tiles Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)3.5 North America Ceramic Tiles Capacity, Production, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)4 Global Ceramic Tiles Supply (Production), Consumption, Export, Import by Region (2013-2018)4.1 Global Ceramic Tiles Consumption by Region (2013-2018)4.2 North America Ceramic Tiles Production, Consumption, Export, Import (2013-2018)4.3 Europe Ceramic Tiles Production, Consumption, Export, Import (2013-2018)4.4 China Ceramic Tiles Production, Consumption, Export, Import (2013-2018)5 Global Ceramic Tiles Production, Revenue (Value), Price Trend by Type5.1 Global Ceramic Tiles Production and Market Share by Type (2013-2018)5.2 Global Ceramic Tiles Revenue and Market Share by Type (2013-2018)5.3 Global Ceramic Tiles Price by Type (2013-2018)5.4 Global Ceramic Tiles Production Growth by Type (2013-2018)About ResearchMozResearchMoz is the one stop online destination to find and buy market research reports & Industry Analysis. We fulfill all your research needs spanning across industry verticals with our huge collection of market research reports. We provide our services to all sizes of organizations and across all industry verticals and markets. Our Research Coordinators have in-depth knowledge of reports as well as publishers and will assist you in making an informed decision by giving you unbiased and deep insights on which reports will satisfy your needs at the best price.For More Information Kindly Contact :ResearchMozMr. Nachiket Ghumare,Tel: +1-518-621-2074USA-Canada Toll Free: 866-997-4948Email: sales@researchmoz.usFollow us on LinkedIn @Electric Underfloor Heating Market Trend to 2024 Profiling Uponor, Danfoss, Warmup, Emerson Electric, Honeywell, Siemens, Schneider, Pentair, Nexans, Robert Bosch, Mitsubishi

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Electric Underfloor Heating Market Size, Industry Analysis Report, Regional Outlook (U.S., Canada, Germany, UK, France, Italy, Spain, Russia, China, India, Japan, South Korea, Australia, Brazil, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, UAE, South Africa), Application Development status, Price Trend, Competitive Market Share & Forecast, 2017  2024.The evolving demand for reliable & efficient heating systems have had a perpetual impact on electric underfloor heating market, with regards to its profitability landscape. Over the years, there have been a plethora of strict regulatory compliances focusing on energy conservation and green building construction which have further massively proliferated electric underfloor heating industry trends. A notable instance that validates the aforementioned aspect is of the German government launching the Energy Saving Ordinance initiative to reduce the carbon footprints. Another initiative validating the increasing deployment of electric underfloor heating systems is the Energy Efficiency Directive of 2012 focusing on energy efficient renovations to retrofit at least 3% of government establishments across the European countries.Request a Sample Copy of Global Electric Underfloor Heating Market Research Report @It is prudent to mention that not only the government bodies but also the private entities such as Siemens, Warmup, Schneider Electric, Danfoss, Honeywell, Nexans, Mitsubishi, and Sensata Technologies, constituting the competitive landscape of electric underfloor heating market, in response to these building standards and codes to limit energy consumption, are vigorously innovating their product portfolios to come up with advanced heating technology for residential and commercial environments. Such moves are overt to leave a substantial impact on electric underfloor heating industry share, which as per estimates recorded a valuation of USD 1.5 billion in 2016.In conjunction with the initiatives undertaken by private and government companies toward energy consumption, industry analysts also speculate the increasing rate of disposable income to be a vital factor favoring electric UFH installations. According to reports, in FY 2016, the UK household disposable income was record at USD 34,930, which was USD 790 higher than what was recorded in 2015. These statistics elicit a clear picture of the rising trend of installing high value & energy efficient heating systems. Given the low power consumption and heating cost associated with electric UFH systems than the conventional fossil fuel based heating systems, analysts are anticipating electric underfloor heating market to chart a lucrative roadmap in the ensuing years. As per the latest report compiled by Global Market Insights, Inc., the global electric underfloor heating market is expected to witness an annual growth rate of 6% over 2017-2024.Reportedly, the massive demand for efficient heating technologies, particularly from the residential and commercial sectors, is one of the major factors profoundly influencing electric underfloor heating industry size, courtesy  the increasing rate of restructuring and retrofitting activities across these sectors. Citing an instance, the recent announcement of Saudi Arabias plan to invest USD 20 billion for retrofitting and restructuring activities in the U.S. has considerably propelled the regional electric underfloor heating industry share. According to reliable reports, it is found that even the basic energy retrofit program implemented on the existing buildings can provide significant economic and environmental benefits. In fact, a basic or level 1 energy efficiency retrofit program targeting the residential building stock could significantly reduce the electricity consumption by 10,054 GWh per year and carbon emission by 7.611 million tons per year.In response to the fact that energy efficient systems are gaining considerable traction throughout the regulatory drive, the residential sector is witnessing massive deployments of electric underfloor heating systems. The statistics provided by EIA, states the U.S. residential energy consumption to be over 20.47 quadrillion British thermal unit in 2016. These statistics depict the growing need to limit the power consumption of the residential sector by deploying energy efficient systems. Furthermore, according to the European Commission, the residential sector accounted for more than 64.7% of energy consumption chiefly from the home heating systems. Needless to say, the exponentially rising rates of energy consumption from the residential sector, is one of the most profound factor that is driving the of the electric underfloor heating industry growth. Estimates claim the residential electric underfloor heating market to witness a CAGR of 6% over 2017-2024, subject to the growing demand for localized heating systems. In parallel with the residential sector, the commercial sector is also likely to emerge as a lucrative growth ground for electric underfloor heating market. The extensive demand for these heating systems from healthcare, educational institutions, hospitality, offices, retail, and logistics & transportation are expected to provide significant impetus to the overall electric underfloor heating market outlook.Taking into consideration the geographical landscape, UK is one of the leading regions practicing strict regulatory compliance and energy standards toward improving energy consumption and curbing GHG emissions. Owing to such measures, the GHG emissions across Europe were plumped by 22%, recording a significant reduction of 1,265 million tons of CO2 since the 1990 level. Add to this, in the year 2015, U.K. introduced an energy saving directive which asserted on the achievement of carbon-neutral buildings target by 2050 and reportedly claimed to reduce the energy consumption across new buildings by 25%. As per the estimates, U.K. electric underfloor heating market is slated to register a CAGR of 7% over 2017-2024.North America and APAC are further anticipated to emerge as strong contenders in the global electric underfloor heating market landscape, with expanding infrastructure sector and increasing appetite for advanced heating technologies. Not to mention, the growing emphasis on energy conservation and curbing GHG emissions will further fuel the global industry demand. Japan and China have massively contributed to the APAC electric underfloor heating market, recently, holding 15% and 36% of the regional share in 2016, respectively.For more information on this report, Please visit at:Taking into account the massive penetration of these systems globally, the competitive landscape of electric underfloor heating market is overt to be dynamic. In a bid to sustain the market position, industry players are anticipated to adopt M&As, product upgradations, and geographical expansion as their key growth strategies. The worldwide electric underfloor heating market to exceed a valuation of USD 2.5 billion by 2024.Order a copy of this premium research report @Related Reports: -Hydronic Underfloor Heating Market Size By Facility (Existing Buildings, New Buildings), By Application (Residential (Single Family, Multi Family), Industrial, Commercial (Education, Healthcare, Retail, Logistics & Transportation, Offices, Hospitality, Others)) Industry Analysis Report, Regional Outlook (U.S., Germany, UK, Italy, Russia, China, India, Japan, South Korea, Brazil, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, UAE, South Africa), Application Potential, Competitive Market Share & Forecast, 2017  2024Stringent government regulations pertaining to decarbonization of building along with upsurge in clean energy technology will stimulate the hydronic underfloor heating market size. High end technology acceptance and decrease in capital cost will further augment the business growth. In 2016, the European Commission introduced the updated Energy Efficiency Directive with a target inclusion of 30% energy efficiency by 2030.More Report @Marketstudyreport.com allows you to manage and control all corporate research purchases to consolidate billing and vendor management. You can eliminate duplicate purchases and customize your content and license management.Market Study ReportThe Green Suite #4594,Dover, DE 19901United StatesPhone: 1-201-355-0868US Toll Free: 1-866-764-2150Email:sales@marketstudyreport.comWebsite:News:More Report at:Beauty Supplements 2018 Global Market Key Players -The Boots Company, Murad UK Ltd., BeautyScoop, Life2good Inc., Neocell Corporation, HUM nutrition.....

Beauty Supplements Market 2018

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Beauty Supplements Market 2018Wiseguyreports.Com Adds Beauty Supplements Market -Market Demand, Growth, Opportunities, Manufacturers, Analysis of Top Key Players and Forecast to 2022 To Its Research Database.Description:In this report, the global Beauty Supplements market is valued at USD XX million in 2016 and is expected to reach USD XX million by the end of 2022, growing at a CAGR of XX% between 2016 and 2022.Geographically, this report split global into several key Regions, with sales (K Units), revenue (Million USD), market share and growth rate of Beauty Supplements for these regions, from 2012 to 2022 (forecast), coveringUnited StatesChinaEuropeJapanSoutheast AsiaIndiaGlobal Beauty Supplements market competition by top manufacturers/players, with Beauty Supplements sales volume, Price (USD/Unit), revenue (Million USD) and market share for each manufacturer/player; the top players includingThe Boots CompanyMurad UK Ltd.BeautyScoopLife2good Inc.Neocell CorporationHUM nutritionRequest for Sample Report@On the basis of product, this report displays the sales volume (K Units), revenue (Million USD), product price (USD/Unit), market share and growth rate of each type, primarily split intoPillsCapsulesSoft GelsPowderLiquid FormOn the basis on the end users/applications, this report focuses on the status and outlook for major applications/end users, sales volume, market share and growth rate of Beauty Supplements for each application, includingFor SkinFor NailsFor HairFor TeethFor OthersComplete report details @If you have any special requirements, please let us know and we will offer you the report as you want.Table of Contents:Global Beauty Supplements Sales Market Report 20171 Beauty Supplements Market Overview1.1 Product Overview and Scope of Beauty Supplements1.2 Classification of Beauty Supplements by Product Category1.2.1 Global Beauty Supplements Market Size (Sales) Comparison by Type (2012-2022)1.2.2 Global Beauty Supplements Market Size (Sales) Market Share by Type (Product Category) in 20161.2.3 Pills1.2.4 Capsules1.2.5 Soft Gels1.2.6 Powder1.2.7 Liquid Form1.3 Global Beauty Supplements Market by Application/End Users1.3.1 Global Beauty Supplements Sales (Volume) and Market Share Comparison by Application (2012-2022)1.3.2 For Skin1.3.3 For Nails1.3.4 For Hair1.3.5 For Teeth1.3.6 For Others1.4 Global Beauty Supplements Market by Region1.4.1 Global Beauty Supplements Market Size (Value) Comparison by Region (2012-2022)1.4.2 United States Beauty Supplements Status and Prospect (2012-2022)1.4.3 China Beauty Supplements Status and Prospect (2012-2022)1.4.4 Europe Beauty Supplements Status and Prospect (2012-2022)1.4.5 Japan Beauty Supplements Status and Prospect (2012-2022)1.4.6 Southeast Asia Beauty Supplements Status and Prospect (2012-2022)1.4.7 India Beauty Supplements Status and Prospect (2012-2022)1.5 Global Market Size (Value and Volume) of Beauty Supplements (2012-2022)1.5.1 Global Beauty Supplements Sales and Growth Rate (2012-2022)1.5.2 Global Beauty Supplements Revenue and Growth Rate (2012-2022)2 Global Beauty Supplements Competition by Players/Suppliers, Type and Application2.1 Global Beauty Supplements Market Competition by Players/Suppliers2.1.1 Global Beauty Supplements Sales and Market Share of Key Players/Suppliers (2012-2017)2.1.2 Global Beauty Supplements Revenue and Share by Players/Suppliers (2012-2017)2.2 Global Beauty Supplements (Volume and Value) by Type2.2.1 Global Beauty Supplements Sales and Market Share by Type (2012-2017)2.2.2 Global Beauty Supplements Revenue and Market Share by Type (2012-2017)2.3 Global Beauty Supplements (Volume and Value) by Region2.3.1 Global Beauty Supplements Sales and Market Share by Region (2012-2017)2.3.2 Global Beauty Supplements Revenue and Market Share by Region (2012-2017)2.4 Global Beauty Supplements (Volume) by Application.9 Global Beauty Supplements Players/Suppliers Profiles and Sales Data9.1 The Boots Company9.1.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base and Competitors9.1.2 Beauty Supplements Product Category, Application and Specification9.1.2.1 Product A9.1.2.2 Product B9.1.3 The Boots Company Beauty Supplements Sales, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2012-2017)9.1.4 Main Business/Business Overview9.2 Murad UK Ltd.9.2.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base and Competitors9.2.2 Beauty Supplements Product Category, Application and Specification9.2.2.1 Product A9.2.2.2 Product B9.2.3 Murad UK Ltd. Beauty Supplements Sales, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2012-2017)9.2.4 Main Business/Business Overview9.3 BeautyScoop9.3.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base and Competitors9.3.2 Beauty Supplements Product Category, Application and Specification9.3.2.1 Product A9.3.2.2 Product B9.3.3 BeautyScoop Beauty Supplements Sales, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2012-2017)9.3.4 Main Business/Business Overview9.4 Life2good Inc.9.4.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base and Competitors9.4.2 Beauty Supplements Product Category, Application and Specification9.4.2.1 Product A9.4.2.2 Product B9.4.3 Life2good Inc. Beauty Supplements Sales, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2012-2017)9.4.4 Main Business/Business Overview9.5 Neocell Corporation9.5.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base and Competitors9.5.2 Beauty Supplements Product Category, Application and Specification9.5.2.1 Product A9.5.2.2 Product B9.5.3 Neocell Corporation Beauty Supplements Sales, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2012-2017)9.5.4 Main Business/Business Overview9.6 HUM nutrition9.6.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base and Competitors9.6.2 Beauty Supplements Product Category, Application and Specification9.6.2.1 Product A9.6.2.2 Product B9.6.3 HUM nutrition Beauty Supplements Sales, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2012-2017)9.6.4 Main Business/Business OverviewContinued..Contact US:NORAH TRENTPartner Relations & Marketing Managersales@wiseguyreports.comPh: +1-646-845-9349 (US)Ph: +44 208 133 9349 (UK)About Us:Wise Guy Reports Is Part Of The Wise Guy Consultants Pvt. Ltd. And Offers Premium Progressive Statistical Surveying, Market Research Reports, Analysis & Forecast Data For Industries And Governments Around The Globe. Wise Guy Reports Features An Exhaustive List Of Market Research Reports From Hundreds Of Publishers Worldwide. We Boast A Database Spanning Virtually Every Market Category And An Even More Comprehensive Collection Of Market Research Reports Under These Categories And Sub-Categories.Addres:: Wise Guy Research Consultants Pvt Ltd: Pune  411028: Maharashtra,: Ph: +91 841 198 5042Dermatoscope Market Detailed Study Analysis with Forecast by 2024

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Dermatoscopy is a process through which the examination of skin lesions can be determined using an instrument, i.e., dermatoscope. The instrument is used by dermatologists to distinguish benign tumors and malignant (cancerous) lesions, especially in the diagnosis of melanoma. Modern dermatoscope uses the liquid medium and polarized light in order to cancel out the skin surface reflection.The images or videos are digitally processed using a digital epiluminescence dermatoscope. 3Gen introduced the first polarized dermatoscope known as DermLite, which allows visualization of skin structures using an immersion fluid. The convenient method of detection and different optimization of images as compared to glass dermatoscope added an advantage over vascular pattern diagnosis. However, new developments in dermatoscope allow image at the cellular and vascular level, paving way for earlier diagnosis and treatment of cancer disease.Download Report Brochure @High prevalence of skin cancer disease, rise in patient awareness about skin cancer, growth in research and development initiatives, reduction of the frequency of unnecessary surgical procedures, and high cost of treatment and diagnostic imaging procedures through MRI and X-ray devices are important driving factors of the dermatoscope market. According to the American Academy of Dermatology 2017, the World Health Organization has estimated that more than 65,000 people worldwide are likely to die of melanoma.In 2017, 9,730 deaths due to melanoma are estimated in the U.S. According to the WHO, 2015, the number of new cases of cancer is expected to rise by about 70% over the next two decades. Growth in technologies such as USB imaging and video technology of imaging melanoma is likely to fuel the growth of the global dermatoscope market. However, introduction of biological agents for melanoma detection and new technologies such as SPECT and PET are expected to hamper the market growth.The global dermatoscope market has been segmented based on product, technology, modality, application, and geography. In terms of product, the dermatoscope market is classified into contact dermatoscope, hybrid dermatoscope, and non-contact dermatoscope. Polarized dermatoscope (non-contact dermatoscope) is a rapid growing product segment owing to increase in prevalence of skin cancer diseases globally. In terms of technology, the market is classified into LED, xenon, halogen, and ultraviolet. In terms of modality, the market of dermatoscope is classified into hand-handled, trolley mounted, and headband.Request for TOC @According to the Skin Cancer Foundation 2017, more than 419,000 cases of skin cancer are projected to be reported in the U.S. each year, out of which are likely to be 168,000 squamous cell carcinomas, 245,000 basal cell carcinomas, and 6,200 melanomas; these are linked to indoor tanning. In terms of application, the market is classified into skin tumors, scabies, warts, fungal infections, and others. Based on geography, the market is distributed over North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Middle East & Africa.Geographically, North America dominates the global dermatoscope market due to increase in number of melanoma cases among men owing to tanning and ultraviolet rays. Early-phase diagnosis and treatment of the disease is driving the medical biotechnology market, which in turn is expected to drive the North America dermatoscope market. Europe is the second leading market for dermatoscope as there are favorable government policies regarding health care infrastructure and awareness among population against skin cancer.The market in Asia Pacific is expected to grow at a higher rate due to rise in population, changing lifestyle, increase in awareness about skin cancer, and growth in per capita expenditure. In addition, economic growth and rise in medical tourism along with research and cancer laboratories are supporting the health care infrastructure improvement in developing countries such as India, Brazil, and China. Thus, all the above mentioned factors collectively support the growth of the dermatoscope market in Asia Pacific and Latin America.Enquiry for discount on this report @The major players operating in the global dermatoscope market include FotoFinder Systems GmbH, Optilia Instruments AB, Dino-Lite, 3Gen, Rudolf Riester GmbH, NIDEK CO., LTD., ILLUCO Corporation Ltd., KIRCHNER & WILHELM GmbH + Co. KG, and Canfield Scientific, Inc.About UsTransparency Market Research (TMR) is a global market intelligence company providing business information reports and services. The companys exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trend analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMRs experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather and analyze information. Our business offerings represent the latest and the most reliable information indispensable for businesses to sustain a competitive edge.Contact UsTransparency Market ResearchState Tower,90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207United StatesTel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:Fetal Doppler Monitoring System Market Review with Forecast Research Report 2016 - 2024

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Fetal doppler monitor, commonly known as baby heartbeat monitor, is a handheld ultrasound transducer used to detect the fetal heartbeat for prenatal care. Fetal doppler monitor provides information about the fetus, which is similar to that of fetal stethoscope, and it acts as an indicator of stress. The stress usually occurs during birth and labor period, which can be detected using the ultrasound probe and electrocardiography.Over the counter sale and use of Doppler ultrasound heartbeat monitors are used for listening to the heartbeat of a fetus. These are legally marketed as prescription devices and should be used under supervision of health care professionals. Doptone is a type of handheld portable ultrasound tool used for fetal monitoring. The tool is beneficial due to its waterproof technology. However, fetal monitoring increases the risk of C-section due to high rate of technological uses, which can develop many complications for the fetus and the mother during pregnancy.Download Report Brochure @Increase in number of childbirth, awareness program for preventing the complications in childbirth, and demand for at-home fetal heart monitors are important driving factors of the global fetal doppler monitoring system market. In 2014, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration declared the usage of Doppler ultrasound heartbeat monitors and fetal ultrasound imaging should be by trained health care professionals, and they are not intended for over the counter sale or use. Cost of treatment or ultrasonography and sensitivity of child toward ultrasound devices are expected to hamper the fetal doppler monitoring system market growth.The global market has been segmented based on monitoring process type, end-user, and geography. In terms of monitoring process type, the fetal doppler monitoring system market is classified into electronic fetal monitoring, external fetal monitoring, and internal fetal monitoring. In terms of end-user, the market for fetal doppler monitoring system is classified into diagnostic laboratories, hospitals, and research & development. In terms of geography, the market is distributed over North America, Latin America, Europe, Asia Pacific, and Middle East & Africa.Request for TOC @Geographically, North America dominates the global market due to increase in advent of technology of ultrasound monitoring devices and growth in child development plan. Early-phase diagnosis and treatment of disease during pregnancy is driving the medical biotechnology market which in turn is expected to drive the fetal doppler monitoring system market in North America.Europe is the second leading market for fetal doppler monitoring system as there are favorable government policies regarding health care infrastructure and awareness of population development. The Asia Pacific market is expected to grow at a higher rate due to rise in population, changing lifestyle, rise in awareness between patients, and increase in per capita expenditure. In addition, economic growth is supporting the health care infrastructure improvement in developing countries such as India and China.Enquiry for discount on this report @The major players operating in the global fetal doppler monitoring system market include Medline Industries, Inc., Bionet Co., Ltd, Huntleigh Healthcare Limited, Promed Group Co., Ltd., ELCAT, Hadeco, Inc., Shenzhen Biocare Bio-Medical Equipment Co., Ltd., Advanced Instrumentations, and SonoScape Medical Corp.About UsTransparency Market Research (TMR) is a global market intelligence company providing business information reports and services. The companys exclusive blend of quantitative forecasting and trend analysis provides forward-looking insight for thousands of decision makers. TMRs experienced team of analysts, researchers, and consultants use proprietary data sources and various tools and techniques to gather and analyze information. Our business offerings represent the latest and the most reliable information indispensable for businesses to sustain a competitive edge.Contact UsTransparency Market ResearchState Tower,90 State Street, Suite 700Albany, NY 12207United StatesTel: +1-518-618-1030USA - Canada Toll Free: 866-552-3453Email: sales@transparencymarketresearch.comWebsite:Global Cross-Channel Performance Advertising Platform Market 2018 Analysis By Key Players  Marin Software, Marilyn, Adobe, Accenture, Improvado, Sizmek, AdRoll

Cross-Channel Performance Advertising Platform 2018

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WiseGuyReports.Com Publish a New Market Research Report On  Global Cross-Channel Performance Advertising Platform Market 2018 Analysis By Key Players  Marin Software, Marilyn, Adobe, Accenture, Improvado, Sizmek, AdRoll.Description:This report studies the global Cross-Channel Performance Advertising Platform market, analyzes and researches the Cross-Channel Performance Advertising Platform development status and forecast in United States, EU, Japan, China, India and Southeast Asia. This report focuses on the top players in global market, likeMarin SoftwareMarilynAdobeAccentureImprovadoSizmekKenshooAdRollChoozleGet a Sample Report @For more information or any query mail at sales@wiseguyreports.comMarket segment by Regions/Countries, this report coversUnited StatesEUJapanChinaIndiaSoutheast AsiaMarket segment by Type, the product can be split intoCloud-BasedOn-PremiseMarket segment by Application, Cross-Channel Performance Advertising Platform can be split intoSmall BusinessMedium BusinessLarge EnterprisesAsk Query @Table Of Contents  Major Key PointsGlobal Cross-Channel Performance Advertising Platform Market Size, Status and Forecast 20251 Industry Overview of Cross-Channel Performance Advertising Platform1.1 Cross-Channel Performance Advertising Platform Market Overview1.1.1 Cross-Channel Performance Advertising Platform Product Scope1.1.2 Market Status and Outlook1.2 Global Cross-Channel Performance Advertising Platform Market Size and Analysis by Regions (2013-2018)1.2.1 United States1.2.2 EU1.2.3 Japan1.2.4 China1.2.5 India1.2.6 Southeast Asia1.3 Cross-Channel Performance Advertising Platform Market by Type1.3.1 Cloud-Based1.3.2 On-Premise1.4 Cross-Channel Performance Advertising Platform Market by End Users/Application1.4.1 Small Business1.4.2 Medium Business1.4.3 Large Enterprises2 Global Cross-Channel Performance Advertising Platform Competition Analysis by Players2.1 Cross-Channel Performance Advertising Platform Market Size (Value) by Players (2013-2018)2.2 Competitive Status and Trend2.2.1 Market Concentration Rate2.2.2 Product/Service Differences2.2.3 New Entrants2.2.4 The Technology Trends in Future3 Company (Top Players) Profiles3.1 Marin Software3.1.1 Company Profile3.1.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.1.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.1.4 Cross-Channel Performance Advertising Platform Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.1.5 Recent Developments3.2 Marilyn3.2.1 Company Profile3.2.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.2.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.2.4 Cross-Channel Performance Advertising Platform Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.2.5 Recent Developments3.3 Adobe3.3.1 Company Profile3.3.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.3.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.3.4 Cross-Channel Performance Advertising Platform Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.3.5 Recent Developments3.4 Accenture3.4.1 Company Profile3.4.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.4.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.4.4 Cross-Channel Performance Advertising Platform Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.4.5 Recent Developments3.5 Improvado3.5.1 Company Profile3.5.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.5.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.5.4 Cross-Channel Performance Advertising Platform Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.5.5 Recent Developments3.6 Sizmek3.6.1 Company Profile3.6.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.6.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.6.4 Cross-Channel Performance Advertising Platform Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.6.5 Recent Developments3.7 Kenshoo3.7.1 Company Profile3.7.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.7.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.7.4 Cross-Channel Performance Advertising Platform Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.7.5 Recent Developments3.8 AdRoll3.8.1 Company Profile3.8.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.8.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.8.4 Cross-Channel Performance Advertising Platform Revenue (Million USD) (2013-2018)3.8.5 Recent DevelopmentsContinueFor more information or any query mail at sales@wiseguyreports.comABOUT US:Wise Guy Reports is part of the Wise Guy Consultants Pvt. Ltd. and offers premium progressive statistical surveying, market research reports, analysis & forecast data for industries and governments around the globe. Wise Guy Reports features an exhaustive list of market research reports from hundreds of publishers worldwide. We boast a database spanning virtually every market category and an even more comprehensive collection of market research reports under these categories and sub-categories.Office No.528,Amanora Chambers,Magarpatta Road,Hadapsar,Pune-411028.Aviation Leasing 2018 Global Market Key Players -AerCap, BBAM, CIT Commercial Air, GECAS, SMBC Aviation Capital-Analysis And Forecast To 2022

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Aviation Leasing Market 2018Wiseguyreports.Com Adds Aviation Leasing -Market Demand, Growth, Opportunities, Manufacturers, Analysis of Top Key Players and Forecast to 2022 To Its Research Database.Description:This report studies the global Aviation Leasing market, analyzes and researches the Aviation Leasing development status and forecast in United States, EU, Japan, China, India and Southeast Asia. This report focuses on the top players in global market, likeAerCapBBAMCIT Commercial AirGECASSMBC Aviation CapitalKSCCILFCBOC AviationSAAB Aircraft LeasingCMB Financial LeasingMinsheng Financial LeasingICBC Financial LeasingCDB LeasingRequest for Sample Report@Market segment by Regions/Countries, this report coversUnited StatesEUJapanChinaIndiaSoutheast AsiaMarket segment by Type, Aviation Leasing can be split intoDry Leasing?Wet LeasingMarket segment by Application, Aviation Leasing can be split intoWide Body Aircraft (WA)Narrow Body Aircraft (NA)Very Large Aircraft (VLA)Business Jet (BJ)Complete report details @If you have any special requirements, please let us know and we will offer you the report as you want.Table of Contents:Global Aviation Leasing Market Size, Status and Forecast 20221 Industry Overview of Aviation Leasing1.1 Aviation Leasing Market Overview1.1.1 Aviation Leasing Product Scope1.1.2 Market Status and Outlook1.2 Global Aviation Leasing Market Size and Analysis by Regions1.2.1 United States1.2.2 EU1.2.3 Japan1.2.4 China1.2.5 India1.2.6 Southeast Asia1.3 Aviation Leasing Market by Type1.3.1 Dry Leasing?1.3.2 Wet Leasing1.4 Aviation Leasing Market by End Users/Application1.4.1 Wide Body Aircraft (WA)1.4.2 Narrow Body Aircraft (NA)1.4.3 Very Large Aircraft (VLA)1.4.4 Business Jet (BJ)2 Global Aviation Leasing Competition Analysis by Players2.1 Aviation Leasing Market Size (Value) by Players (2016 and 2017)2.2 Competitive Status and Trend2.2.1 Market Concentration Rate2.2.2 Product/Service Differences2.2.3 New Entrants2.2.4 The Technology Trends in Future..3 Company (Top Players) Profiles3.1 AerCap3.1.1 Company Profile3.1.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.1.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.1.4 Aviation Leasing Revenue (Value) (2012-2017)3.1.5 Recent Developments3.2 BBAM3.2.1 Company Profile3.2.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.2.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.2.4 Aviation Leasing Revenue (Value) (2012-2017)3.2.5 Recent Developments3.3 CIT Commercial Air3.3.1 Company Profile3.3.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.3.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.3.4 Aviation Leasing Revenue (Value) (2012-2017)3.3.5 Recent Developments3.4 GECAS3.4.1 Company Profile3.4.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.4.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.4.4 Aviation Leasing Revenue (Value) (2012-2017)3.4.5 Recent Developments3.5 SMBC Aviation Capital3.5.1 Company Profile3.5.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.5.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.5.4 Aviation Leasing Revenue (Value) (2012-2017)3.5.5 Recent Developments3.6 KSCC3.6.1 Company Profile3.6.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.6.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.6.4 Aviation Leasing Revenue (Value) (2012-2017)3.6.5 Recent Developments3.7 ILFC3.7.1 Company Profile3.7.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.7.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.7.4 Aviation Leasing Revenue (Value) (2012-2017)3.7.5 Recent Developments3.8 BOC Aviation3.8.1 Company Profile3.8.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.8.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.8.4 Aviation Leasing Revenue (Value) (2012-2017)3.8.5 Recent Developments3.9 SAAB Aircraft Leasing3.9.1 Company Profile3.9.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.9.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.9.4 Aviation Leasing Revenue (Value) (2012-2017)3.9.5 Recent Developments3.10 CMB Financial Leasing3.10.1 Company Profile3.10.2 Main Business/Business Overview3.10.3 Products, Services and Solutions3.10.4 Aviation Leasing Revenue (Value) (2012-2017)3.10.5 Recent Developments3.11 Minsheng Financial Leasing3.12 ICBC Financial Leasing3.13 CDB LeasingContinued..Contact US:NORAH TRENTPartner Relations & Marketing Managersales@wiseguyreports.comPh: +1-646-845-9349 (US)Ph: +44 208 133 9349 (UK)About Us:Wise Guy Reports Is Part Of The Wise Guy Consultants Pvt. Ltd. And Offers Premium Progressive Statistical Surveying, Market Research Reports, Analysis & Forecast Data For Industries And Governments Around The Globe. Wise Guy Reports Features An Exhaustive List Of Market Research Reports From Hundreds Of Publishers Worldwide. We Boast A Database Spanning Virtually Every Market Category And An Even More Comprehensive Collection Of Market Research Reports Under These Categories And Sub-Categories.Addres:: Wise Guy Research Consultants Pvt Ltd: Pune  411028: Maharashtra,: Ph: +91 841 198 5042Global Geotechnical Instrumentation and Monitoring Market by Regional Outlook, Latest trend, Share Analysis, Growth, Application and Forecast to 2024

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Geotechnical Instrumentation and Monitoring report states import/export, supply and consumption figures as well as cost, price, revenue and gross margin by regions (North America, EU, China, Japan, Southeast Asia, India) and other regions can be added. Development policies and plans are discussed as well as manufacturing processes and cost structures.Data Bridge Market Research provides new industry report "Global Geotechnical Instrumentation & Monitoring Market" accounted for USD 2.25 billion in 2016 growing at a CAGR of 11.4% during the forecast period of 2017 to 2024.Request for Free Sample Report @Complete report on Global Geotechnical Instrumentation & Monitoring Market Research Report 2017-2024 spread across 350 Pages, profiling Top companies and supports with tables and figuresMajor market drivers: Global Geotechnical Instrumentation & Monitoring Market Increasing rate of disastrous failure of the geotechnical structures Increasing awareness and superior benefits of GTIM Increasing infrastructural investment across various countries all over the world Rigid environmental regulations pertaining to the sustainability of structures Errors in readings lead to inaccurate results High cost involved in the installation and monitoringGlobal Geotechnical Instrumentation & Monitoring Market, By Geography; Offering (Hardware, Software, Services); Structure (Tunnels Bridges, Buildings Utilities, Dams); Technology (Wired Networking Technology, Wireless Technology); Application (Pore Water Pressure, Soil Stresses, Lateral Deformation, Vertical Deformation), End-Users (Building, Infrastructure, Energy, Power, Oil, Gas, Mining)  Industry Trends and Forecast to 2024Key Questions Answered in Global Geotechnical Instrumentation & Monitoring Market Report:-Our Report offers:- What will the market growth rate, Overview and Analysis by Type of Global Geotechnical Instrumentation & Monitoring Market in 2024? What are the key factors driving, Analysis by Applications and Countries Global Geotechnical Instrumentation & Monitoring Market? What are Dynamics, This Overview Includes Analysis of Scope, and price analysis of top Vendors Profiles of Global Geotechnical Instrumentation & Monitoring Market? Who are Opportunities, Risk and Driving Force of Global Geotechnical Instrumentation & Monitoring Market? Who are the opportunities and threats faced by the vendors in Global Geotechnical Instrumentation & Monitoring Market? Business Overview by Type, Applications, Gross Margin and Market Share What are the Global Geotechnical Instrumentation & Monitoring Market opportunities, market risk and market overview of the Market?Request for TOC:Top Key Players: Cowi A/S Deep Excavation LLC DST Consulting Engineers Inc. Eustis Engineering LLC. Fugro Geocomp Corporation Geokon Incorporated Geomotion Singapore Geosig Ltd James Fisher and Sons plc Keller Group plc Nova Metrix LLC RST Instruments Ltd. SISGEO S.R.L. Smart Structures Geotechnical Instrumentation Durham Geo Slope Indicator, Inc.For more Insightful information visit@Market Segmentations:Global Geotechnical Instrumentation & Monitoring Market is segmented on the basis of Structure, Networking Technology, Application End-Users Geography.Market Segmentations in Details:On the basis of Structure tunnels and bridges, buildings and utilities, dams, and other structures.On basis of Application, the geotechnical instrumentation & monitoring market is also segmented into pore water pressure, soil stresses, lateral deformation, and vertical deformation.On the basis of Networking Technology the global geotechnical instrumentation & monitoring market is further segmented into wired networking technology, and wireless technology.On the basis of End-user, the geotechnical instrumentation & monitoring market is further segmented into building and infrastructure, energy and power, oil and gas, mining, and others.On the basis of Geography, North America South America Europe Asia-Pacific Middle East & AfricaCustomize report of "Global Geotechnical Instrumentation & Monitoring Market" as per customers requirement also available.Geotechnical Instrumentation & Monitoring Market Company Share Analysis:The Global Geotechnical Instrumentation & Monitoring Market Report include detailed vendor level analysis for market shares in 2016 for Global, North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa and South America specifically. Also impact and development analysis of key vendors is registered in the market and factored on the basis of Vendor Positioning Grid Analysis which measures the vendors strengths and opportunities against present market challenges, measure providers ability to identify or satisfy present market needs, map providers market vision to current and upcoming market dynamics among others. The report also measures technology life line curve and market time line to analyze and do more affective investments.Speak to Author of the Report @Other ReportGlobal Fitness Equipment Market  Industry Trends and Forecast to 2024Global Fitness Equipment Market, By Type (Cardiovascular Training Equipment (Treadmills, Elliptical Trainers, Stationary Cycles, Rowing Machines, Stair Steppers, Others), Strength Training Equipment (Single Stations, Plate Loaded Equipment, Free Weights, Benches and Racks, Multistations, Accessories), Body Composition Analyzers (Bioimpedance Analyzer, Skinfold Caliper, Dual Emission X-Ray Absorptiometry (Dexa), Hydrostatic Weighing, Air Displacement Plethysmography), Fitness Monitoring Equipment), By End-User (Health Clubs, Gyms, Home Settings, Corporate Settings, Apartments, Hotels, Hospitals, Clinics), By Geography (North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, South America, Middle East and Africa, Rest of the World)  Industry Trends and Forecast to 2024.Report Access:About Data Bridge Market Research:Data Bridge Market Research set forth itself as an unconventional and neoteric Market research and consulting firm with unparalleled level of resilience and integrated approaches. We are determined to unearth the best market opportunities and foster efficient information for your business to thrive in the market. Data Bridge endeavors to provide appropriate solutions to the complex business challenges and initiates an effortless decision-making process.Contact:Data Bridge Market ResearchTel: +1-888-387-2818Email: sopan.gedam@databridgemarketresearch.comEurope Telehealth Market 2018 Regional Analysis, Top Key Players, Segments, Development and Opportunities by Forecast to 2024

Europe Telehealth Market

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Europe Telehealth Market, By Hardware (Telehealth Monitors, Monitoring Devices), By Software (Standalone, Integrated), By Services (Remote, Real Time, Store and Send), By Deployment (Web Based, Cloud Based, On Premise), By End-User (Healthcare Payers, Healthcare Providers, Patients), By Country (Germany, France, U.K., Spain, Italy, Russia, Turkey, Switzerland, Netherlands, Belgium, Rest of Europe)  Industry Trends and Forecast to 2024The Europe Telehealth Market has accounted for USD 3.1 billion in 2016 and is expected to reach USD 18.3 billion by 2024, growing at a CAGR of 24.6% in the forecast period 2017 to 2024. The new market report contains data for historic years 2015, the base year of calculation is 2016 and the forecast period is 2017 to 2024.Download PDF Sample Report @Frequently Asked Questions? What will the market size be in 2024? What are the key factors driving the European market? What are the challenges to market growth? Who are the key players in the market? What are the market opportunities and threats faced by the key players? What will be the growth rate in 2024? Which strategies are used by top players in the Europe Telehealth Market?To Avail 10% Discount On This Report Mail us on @sopan.gedam@databridgemarketresearch.comMarket SegmentationBy hardware, is categorized into telehealth monitors and monitoring devices. The monitoring devices sub segment is further classified by device type into blood pressure meters, blood glucose meters, weight scale, pulse oximeters, peak flow meters, ECG monitorsThe software market is further segmented into integrated and standalone software. The services market is further segmented into remote monitoring, real-time, and store and send.Based on deployment, the market is categorized into web-based, on premise, cloud-basedThe market by end user is segmented into providers, payers, patientsInquiry before Buying @Based on geography the market is segmented into 11 countries, Germany, France, U.K., Italy, Spain, Russia, Turkey, Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland and rest of EuropeBelgium and rest of Europe. Germany is expected to dominate the European telehealth market due to the massive healthcare expenditure and paradigm shift towards more efficient continuous healthcare monitoring.Belgium and rest of Europe. Germany is expected to dominate the European telehealth market due to the massive healthcare expenditure and paradigm shift towards more efficient continuous healthcare monitoring.Major Market CompetitorsSome of the major players of the Europe digital health monitoring devices market Cerner Corporation, GE Healthcare, Honeywell Life Care Solutions, McKesson Corporation, Ergotron, Inc., Medtronic, Inc., InstaMD, The Medvivo Group, Philips HealthcareAbout Data Bridge Market Research:Data Bridge Market Research set forth itself as an unconventional and neoteric Market research and consulting firm with unparalleled level of resilience and integrated approaches. We are determined to unearth the best market opportunities and foster efficient information for your business to thrive in the market. Data Bridge endeavors to provide appropriate solutions to the complex business challenges and initiates an effortless decision-making process.Contact:Data Bridge Market ResearchTel: +1-888-387-2818Email: sopan.gedam@databridgemarketresearch.comWanigas Credit Union elected its 2018 Board of Directors and Credit Committee at its recent annual meeting at the Horizons Conference Center in Saginaw.

The members of the 2018 Board of Directors include: Sheldon Matthews-Chairperson, Gerald Little-Vice Chairperson, Oscar Gonzales-Treasurer, Michael Balls-Secretary, Lisa Wilson-Director, Valorie Green-Director and Michael Malmo-Director.School shootings across the nation have forced every school district across the country to address school safety and Midland County schools are not any different.

Superintendents Shawn Hale from Bullock Creek Schools, Jennifer McCormack of Coleman Community Schools and Craig Carmoney from Meridian Public Schools each appeared before the Midland County Board of Commissioners requesting a student resource officer (SRO) for each of their districts.

There are increased external and internal threats to security, Hale said. Our residents expect us to keep the safest environment possible for our students and we also want that.

The general response from the board was mostly in agreement.

I would love to see resource officers in the schools. Having to pay for them is something we need to deal with, Board Chairman Mark Bone, R-2nd District, said.

Recent national shootings have included the 17 deaths in Parkland, Florida, along with Tuesday's shooting at Great Mills High School in southern Maryland. But, the quick response of SRO Blaine Gaskill at Great Mills, prevented more victims at the school.

An SRO would be able to develop relations with students and staff, listen to them and report on any dangers to students.

For the three county school districts, the issue is two pronged: philosophically, is it something that commissioners believe is a priority; but how would they pay for each SRO?

If three new deputies are hired as school resource officers, estimated personnel costs, for the first year would be $187,640. If three experienced deputies are hired, estimated personnel costs for the first year would be $388,282.

Each district has already been proactive by collaborating with law enforcement to implement security initiatives. Regular crisis response drills, a lockdown system, video security and other measures have become routine.

But, the out-county location of each school system provides a logistical problem. National statistics state that each shooter incident lasts 12.5 minutes on average. National response time is averaging 18 minutes. The Columbine and Sandy Hook shootings lasted 16 minutes and 11 minutes, respectively.

Commissioners have already begun discussing funding possibilities. However, a discussion of the issue will take place at the next Executive Committee meeting of the Whole on April 10. The meeting will begin at 9 a.m. in the Commissioner's Board room in the Midland County Services Building, 220 W. Ellsworth. Executive meetings are for discussion only. Votes cannot be taken.

Executive meetings do not provide opportunity for public comment. Public input will be available when the issue comes up at a regularly scheduled board meeting or by contacting a commissioner. Commissioner contact information can be found at: http://bit.ly/2DN8hiU

Other ideas that have been raised include:

 A millage This might include funding for the Dow and Midland High SROs that are hired by the City of Midland. Any millage that this board wants to consider for school resource offices or public safety needs to include conversations with the city, County Administrator/Controller Bridgette Gransden said.

 Arming teachers  That is not their expertise, Hale stated. Their expertise is working with kids and helping them become adults.

 Provide funding from the countys $10 million surplus with the anticipation that sustainable funding would become available. But, if you do that and dont get a millage, then what? What if you cant find the money in the budget for the following year and the schools are just starting to get connected with the SRO? Gransden responded.

 Add SROs, but also provide additional security measures.

 Add metal detectors

 Have each school district provide a portion of the expense

 Seek outside financing for the SROs.

If the board decides to proceed with SROs, the final question then becomes, How soon?On Friday at 7 p.m., the Delta College Planetarium in Bay City will host a presentation about the Aurora Borealis or "Northern Lights."

Planetarium Manager and Astronomer Mike Murray will unwrap the mystery of the Aurora using the unique wrap-around environment of the planetarium's Dome360 Theater.Uncertainty spurred by reports of bombings in Texas led to the Michigan State Police Bomb Squad landing in Midland County on Tuesday.

The Midland County Sheriff's Office reports the response came after a call from a 32-year-old Homer Township man who said a package that he did not order, addressed to him, was delivered to his home. The package was sent from Austin.The Blue Star Mothers of Midland County have scheduled a summit tonight at Grace A. Dow Memorial Library auditorium to address post traumatic stress disorder and provide information on how to combat it.

The disorder, commonly known as PTSD, is something that often affects veterans of war. That's why the Blue Star Mothers have a particular interest in this area. The Blue Star Mothers of America is a national support group for our armed forces and our veterans.

Most Americans know that veterans of combat can experience traumatic events that sometimes have lasting effects. If we didn't have personal contact with a veteran, we learned that through big-screen movie dramas such as "The Deer Hunter," "Born on the Fourth of July" and "Coming Home," and most recently with "Thank You for Your Service."

But there are other causes of PTSD, and we salute the Blue Star Mothers for helping and educating the public that has suffered any kind of lasting trauma. These include auto accident victims, assault victims, and even residents who have had their homes broken into or flooded. These are often shocking events that can cause a person anguish and loss of sleep, which then permeates other aspects of their lives.

Some of the trauma affects children, and some of the trauma affects adults.

Some victims recover with time. But others do not. They may have to cope with their experience in some minor way for the remainder of their lives.

Tonight's event at the library is a great step in helping the public, many of whom may not have sought professional help in the past. It may also help people who live with someone who has PTSD.

If you cannot make it, the Blue Star Mothers have encouraged you to contact them, as they may consider more, similar seminars in the future. For more information from that group, call Kathy Bate at 989-859-9595, Mary Fisher at 989-859-6086, or Debby Baker at 989-859-1004.

And we thank the Blue Star Mothers for taking this initiative.To the editor:

Equal Pay Day 2018 is Tuesday, April 10. This date symbolizes how far into the year women must work to earn what men earned in the previous year. Equal Pay Day was originated by the National Committee on Pay Equity (NCPE) in 1996 as a public awareness event to illustrate the gap between men's and women's wages. Tuesday was selected to represent how far into the next work week women must work to earn what men earned the previous week.

Recent U.S. Census Bureau data indicates that all women working full time on average still make 80 cents compared to every dollar men make. The wage gap is even greater for women of color and other ethnic groups. At the current rate of progress in closing the gap, women will not receive pay equity until the year 2119.

The Midland Area branch of the American Association of University Women (AAUW) is calling on all AAUW Branches in the area and other women's groups such as League of Women Voters (LWV), Zonta and WOMAN to join us at the Michigan Equal Pay Day Coalition's Equal Pay Legislative Day Rally in Lansing on April 10 on the steps of the state house. We urge as many women as possible to gather in Lansing to raise our voices for equal pay. Please contact Judy Donahue, judydonahue57@gmail.com, or Kim Steinke, kimsteinke@mac.com if you or your group is interested.

JUNE TURLEY

MidlandSome might say the internet was built on anonymity, paving the way for a place where free speech reigns supreme. But after years of learning about who's snooping into everything we do online, privacy on the web is hardly a given.

It's not just about government spying; it's also about how much data big companies such as Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft have collected in order to serve up targeted adsnot to mention how much of your personal data gets scooped up in all the breaches and hacks.

There are always going to be good reasons for people to go online without being tracked. For one, anonymity may be the only way for a real whistleblower to reveal corruption, considering how some have been treated. But there's nothing wrong with wanting to stay anonymous, no matter what you're doing.

Is it even possible to take control of your own personal privacy online? Ultimately, the only way to stay truly anonymous online is...not to go online at all. That's not a real option for most of us, though. Here's a rundown of what you can do to minimize spying, targeted ads, and ID theft as you explore the online world .

Check Your System

Phone Call Confidentiality

If you want to be anonymous, forget about using a smartphone. The big-name mobile OS makers are control freaks (Apple) and ad servers (Google). To be anonymous when you use a phone, your choice is a prepaid phone, aka a burner.

Even with a burner, call records exist, so your location can still be triangulated via GPS and tower locations. As you've seen in movies, though, you can always throw the phone into a passing truck and lead whoever might be tracking you on a wild goose chase. The upside of a burner is that your real name isn't associated with the device.

But when you already own an expensive smartphone, buying more hardware is painful. Thankfully, there are apps aplenty to get you temporary, anonymous numbers you can use with Android or iOS. (One of those apps is named, aptly, Burner.)

Light That Firewall

Is your desktop or laptop computer connected directly to a broadband modem? That's a very bad idea. Hackers are constantly bombarding IP addresses to see if they can get onto a system.

You should always have a router on your home network that can mitigate attempted hacks with its built-in firewall. A router uses network address translation (NAT) to assign an IP address to every device on your home network: those are then only visible on that network. Direct attacks can sometimes be stopped dead right there. You need the router anyway, for sharing the internet connection and Wi-Fi. Even a router that comes integrated into the modemthe kind you get from your ISPis better than no router at all.

You could also use firewall software that's installed on your PC. Windows 10 comes with a pretty decent solution calledyou guessed itWindows Firewall. You can also find firewalls as part of security suites. But as PCMag's Lead Analyst for Security, Neil J. Rubenking, explains, you don't really need another firewall if you use the one that ships with Windows.

For real anonymity based on your OS, stop using Windows or macOS on the desktop and move to a Linux distro that specializes in all forms of keeping you secret. Your best bet is Tails: The Amnesic Incognito Live System.

Sleuth Your Own Stealth

What does your computer (or tablet or smartphone, for that matter) give away about you when you visit websites? At the very least, a site knows your IP address (and that's necessary; otherwise you'd get no results).

In most cases, it also knows your approximate physical location (by checking where your ISP supplies those IP addresses; see it in action at IPLocation) and probably your time zone and which language you speakall good info for advertisers. Your browser can also offer up your operating system, browser type, and which versions of software you run for browser plug-ins. It even reports on the fonts you have installed. All this gives your system a unique fingerprint. And as anyone who's watched Law & Order knows, a unique fingerprint is sometimes all it takes to track you.

If you don't believe it, visit MyBrowserInfo or BrowserLeaks.com for a full report. Then check out the EFF's Cover Your Tracks tool to see how well your browser and VPN are protecting you.

You can use browser extensions in Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and Edge to enhance your privacy. The EFF has its own Privacy Badger to monitors sites that monitor you. The Ghostery browser extension blocks all sorts of trackers and advertising on almost all browsers. The DuckDuckGo search engine for privacy also has a similar extension, called Privacy Essentials.

What's more, even if you've got a VPNvirtual private networkrunning, as you should (see below), it could be leaking. Here's how to get yourself back into stealth mode.

Safe Surfing

(Illustration: Vik Kay/Shutterstock)

Make sure your browser isn't storing too much personal info. In the settings menu, turn off the ability for the browser to store the passwords you use to access websites and services. That can be a pain, since you should have a different password for every service you use. The better alternative is to use a dedicated password manager that works across all your devices.

Browsers store images, surfing history, and what you've downloaded, as well as cookie files, which can remember helpful things such as settings and passwords. Obliterate that info occasionally by clearing your browser cache.

Major browsers have anonymous surfing modes. Chrome's is called Incognito (hit Ctrl+Shift+N to access); in Firefox, it's Private Browsing; and in Microsoft Edge, it's In Private browsing. Using an anonymous mode prevents the browser from saving passwords, cookies, downloads, and cached content such as images.

Any browser you use for privacy should have JavaScript deactivated. JavaScript can help a web server identify all sorts of things beyond your browser, such as your monitor's sizeand that info goes toward fingerprinting your system and you. You can turn JavaScript off and on for specific sites (some websites require it) using extensions such as NoScript and ScriptSafe.

A number of browsers are billed as privacy-focused. Of course, they use the same rendering engines as the big names, especially Google's Chromium engine; the difference is that the browsers don't share any info with Google. Examples include Epic, Comodo Dragon, Comodo IceDragon (based on Firefox), and of course the Tor Browser (more below).

If you're looking for a more mainstream browser with some extra security, consider Operait has a free VPN built right in. (Note that its VPN protects only your browser traffic, not the other apps on your computer that use the internet.)

Use a search engine other than Google or Bing, which want to sell, sell, sell you. Go to DuckDuckGo or Swisscows, or check out these options.

To summarize, using stealth modes, special browsers, and private search engines won't make you completely anonymous. But they prevent sites from writing info to your computer, including cookies, which can be used to figure out your browsing habits.

Proxies and VPNs and Tor, Oh My

The way to ensure outsiders don't gather information about you while you're browsing the web is to appear to be someone else in a different location. This requires a proxy server or a virtual private network (VPN) connectionor even better, both. With the right combo, you can not only be anonymous but also surf sites in other countries as though you're a native.

A proxy servera computer system or router that functions as a relay between client and serverisn't for newbies, but FoxyProxy can get you started. It works with the major browsers and offers proxy services and VPN tools.

VPN services are everywhere. They have the advantage of securing the traffic between your computer and servers and masking your IP address and location. For example, by connecting through my work VPN, sites I visit believe I'm at corporate HQ, although I work from home.

VPNs also double as a way to get access to location-blocked content. If you're in a country that can't get the BBC iPlayer or Netflix, for example, a VPN could be your ticket. Netflix, for one, is cracking down on this tactic when it can.

No discussion of anonymity online is complete without mentioning Tor. The name comes from once being the acronym for "the onion router"a metaphor for many layers of security.

Tor is a free network of tunnels for routing web requests and page downloads. It's not the same as a VPN but might be even more secure for masking your identity. Tor's supposed to make it impossible for a site you're visiting to figure out who you arebut does it?

The National Security Agency's spying controversy leaked by Edward Snowden in 2013 included what some thought was a workaround to identify users of Tor. But it wasn't that simple. As explained by security expert Bruce Schneier in The Guardian, the NSA actually monitors what's called the Tor "exit nodes"the agency could tell users were using Tor but not who the users were. The NSA set up a "man in the middle" attack, pretending to be the site the user wanted (Google, for example), and could send data back to the user that would take advantage of exploitable holes in the browsernot a hole in Tor.

The lesson there: Keep your browsers up to date, or use one of the previously noted anonymizing browsers.

Guess which company also offers an anonymizing browser? Tor has a browser bundle for Windows (run it off a flash drive to take with you), macOS, or Linux; it's available in 16 languages. There's also a Tor Browser for Android devices; iOS users can try the third-party VPN + TOR Browser and Ad Block app.

Tor is not entirely foolproofthe theory is you could still be tracked by someone skilled enough (even if they can't read what you send). The list of potential Tor weaknesses is long.

A newish browser with a built-in search engine is trying to take some of Tor's privacy thunderan open-source project called Brave. As a free download, it's worth a try, but Brave has already had some issues and is branching into cryptocurrency to change the game on how websites make money.

If you're sensing a trend in that no software can keep you 100% anonymous, you're paying attention. But these steps are all like a lock on a door: Sure, someone could kick it inbut why make it easy by leaving the door open?

Anonymous Email

As nice as it is to remain perfectly private as you surf, it may be even more essential for your email to be anonymous, to avoid spam or surveillance. The problem is that email simply wasn't built with security in mind.

Secure email services exist, of course. They use encryption to scramble what you send and require the recipient to have a password to decrypt your message. Edward Snowden used a webmail service known as Lavabit, which was so secure the government insisted that it hand over the private keys of users. Lavabit, to its credit, immediately shut down to protect its customers. Later, it returned with even more user-forward security features. So be aware that such a service can be compromised. Most will not die to protect you.

If you want a Webmail service that's going to handle encrypted messages, the best we've seen is the free PreVeil, which offers secure cloud storage as well as weapons-grade encryption, and it's easy to use. For more options, read The Best Email Encryption Services and How to Create an Anonymous Email Account.

You might think your Gmail account is safe, since you see that lock icon on the browser and access it with a secure sockets layer (SSL) connection (indicated by https:// in the URL). But SSL only encrypts data as it's transferred from your device to the server.

That is always going to be a problem with web-based services. Some services can provide encryption for those types of email: Virtru is one that's specific to Gmail running on Chrome. Mailvelope is an extension (for Chrome, Edge, and Firefox) that will secure Gmail, Outlook.com, Yahoo Mail, and more. FlowCrypt is another.

Perhaps the smart move is to eschew web-based mail and stick with desktop client software. Outlook 2007 and later has built-in encryption tools, and Mozilla's Thunderbird has add-ons galore (including many in our email encryption services roundup, like PreVeil) to handle message encryption/decryption.

Avoiding Spam, Spam, and Spam

Beyond the obvious safeguardsnever, ever click on a link in a spam message or even open a spam emailthe best way to defeat spam is never to let spammers get your email address. That's almost impossible, unfortunately, but there are methods to mitigate.

Number one is to use an alias or dummy email, which works with any service that requires an email address. You might be able to set one up if you own your own domain name. In Google Workplace, for example, you have a primary address, such as [email protected], but you could also use [email protected] as an alias for online sign-ups; messages to the second one can be forwarded to the main address. When spam begins to collect, change or kill that second address. You can create up to 30 aliases per individual.

Gmail is a little more straightforward: To make an alias, append something to the user name. Turn "[email protected]" into "[email protected]"; Gmail ignores everything after the plus sign. Once the alias in question accumulates spam, filter it right into the trash. Here's a video on how to do that in Gmail:

Yahoo Mail offers Disposable Addresses (under Settings > Security), which are similarthere's a base name, then a secondary keyword appended, like "[email protected]" Outlook.com also supports aliases, up to 10 per account. Look for Account Aliases under the Account settings. If you have your own domain name, check the control panel at your web hostit's likely to have tools for creating aliases galore.

If you need an alias temporarily, a disposable address is very handy. We have reviews of five products that offer disposable email addresses: Abine Blur, Bulc Club, Burner Mail, ManyMe, and SimpleLogin. Note that Abine Blur Premium lets you shop online without revealing your true email address, phone number, or credit card details, and it also manages your passwords. The program received a 4.5 (outstanding) rating from our reviewer and also comes in a free version.

Social (Network) Security

Should you care about security when it comes to social networks such as Facebook? Of course. Facebook isn't an altruistic nonprofit! It makes money by having lots of users looking at lots of ads. That occasionally means it makes your data available to questionable entities. And you might not want all your "friends" or their extended networks to know your business.

You can take several steps to regain some Facebook anonymity. First, on a desktop, go to the Account menu in the upper right and select Settings & Privacy > Settings > Privacy. Click the "Edit" link on every choice on this page to personalize who can see what, who can friend you, and even who can look you up. Make sure your posts are not spidered by search engines. Get as granular as you wantmaking sure, for example, that old boyfriends or girlfriends don't see your posts (even the old posts). You can also perform a full Facebook Privacy Checkup.

Finally, inspect your contact info. Go to your General Account Settings, and again click "Edit" next to every entry. Double-check the email address and phone numbers entered. Minimize the list of who has access as much as possible to maximize anonymity.

If you want to get out of Facebook entirely, delete your account. Deactivating is a different thing; it leaves your data on the site for your potential return. Go to this page and follow the instructions. It'll deactivate your account for two weeks, just in case you really, really, really didn't mean it. After that, it's gone. But even then, some digital photos may linger.

On LinkedIn, go to the Settings icon of your face in the upper right and select Settings & Privacy. In the center, select the Privacy tab.

What about Twitter? Don't list your website or real email in your profile. Make sure your password is different from that of any other site. That's good advice across the board, but we know people don't follow it, so we repeat it a lot. You really should with Twitter, which has had some security breaches. You also have the option, under Settings > Privacy and Safety, to protect your tweets, meaning only those followers you approve get access to them. Protected tweets aren't searchable or retweetable, and you can't share permanent links to them with non-approved followers.

That said, you're fooling yourself if you think using social networking (or posting anything online) is private whatsoeverall it takes is an "approved follower" to take a screengrab and share it with the world.

If you're worried about getting tracked as you surf, sign out of the above services, as well as Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Apple, when you're done using them. Otherwise, the ad servers and cookies and so forth that are run by those services or their affiliates will pretty much know where and when you go online at all times. Signing out is a pain, because logging back in is a painand that's exactly what the big companies tracking you are counting on.Skiers: ACL injury prevention starts now

Even though the ski season is a couple of months away, many in the north are starting to get their body ready to hit the slopesAUSTIN, Texas  Three down after the first seven holes against Justin Thomas, Luke List just wanted to make their match last until the 18th hole.

List managed to do exactly that on Wednesday in the first round of the WGC-Dell Technologies Match Play. Overcoming such a large deficit against the FedExCup leader is never easy, but List also had an unexpected challenge to overcome. He had to use a wedge as his putter for the final 11 holes.

Frustrated with his putting as he walked to the 8th tee, List took a swipe at what he thought was a small group of bushes, only to realize there was a brick wall behind them that took the brunt of the punishment and bent his putter in the process.

"It bent the putter a fraction of an inch just below the grip," List said. "Unfortunately, I couldn't use the putter the rest of the way. It was stupid on my part."

With his putter out of commission  a club bent outside the course of play is deemed non-conforming  List switched to a lob wedge and something clicked. He went on to halve the next five holes before rallying with three birdies on Nos. 13-16  the highlight was an 18-footer for birdie on 15  to take the match to the last.

Thomas birdied the final hole for a 2-up victory in the rematch of their playoff at The Honda Classic, which Thomas won on the first hole. This was just Thomas second win in seven matches at this event. He went 0-3 in his debut in 2016 and 1-2 last year.

"I was thinking about it, how bad that would hurt if I couldn't get it done," said Thomas, who was battling the effects of strep throat after having his wisdom teeth removed two weeks ago. "He hit some great putts and he made some good ones when he needed to.

"I told Jimmy we just need to hit a lot of greens and make him have to make putts with that wedge. He made  I was looking at a putt that was going to possibly win the match there on 15, and he makes it and I have a nasty lip-out and lose the next hole. Next thing you know, I'm looking at maybe losing the match"

List's furious charge on the back nine with a lob wedge in his hands was reminiscent of Robert Streb's final round at the 2015 Greenbrier Classic, where he managed to card five birdies while using a sand wedge on the greens. He played his way into a four-way playoff won by Danny Lee.

List, the No. 60 seed, wound up making more birdies with the wedge (three) than he did with his putter (one) on Wednesday. Despite his lack of success with the putter early in the match, List said the plan was to get the club back in game shape for the final two matches.

"I'll get the club fixed and it'll be ready to go tomorrow," said List, whos making his debut in this event. "I have two more matches so anything can happen."Unibet Open Partners with Cash Game Festival and Unibet Deepstack Open

March 22, 2018 Jason Glatzer

The Unibet Open has announced two exciting partnerships extending their approach to bringing quality live poker festivals to recreational and professional players alike.

Unibet Open Partners With the Cash Game Festival

The first partnership is with the Cash Game Festival which takes effect immediately at the next stop of the year at the Banco Casino Bratislava in Bratislava, Slovakia on April 4-8.

The Cash Game Festival features more than 120 hours of consecutive live cash games at stakes low and high along with two televised feature tables a day. In addition to the action-packed games, the Cash Game Festival hosts plenty of exciting activities away from the felt for online qualifiers and those that take part in the much talked about hospitality package.

As has been the case for more than a dozen Cash Game Festivals, the PokerNews Live Reporting Team will be on hand to cover both this festival and future ones including the following stop in the Estonian capital of Tallinn on April 25-29.

Unibet Open Joins Forces With the Unibet Deepstack Open

In May, the Unibet Open will be joining forces for the first time with the Unibet Deepstack Open in conjunction with Casino Malta at the luxurious Intercontinental Hotel in the vibrant area of St. Julian's, Malta.

The festival will kick off with the two-day 330 Unibet Deepstack Open Cup on May 16-17 with the final day streaming on the Unibet Open website.

Unibet Opens Head of Events and Sponsorship Nataly Sopacuaperu is thrilled about the Unibet Open and the Unibet Deepstack Open joining forces.

"Were very excited about this partnership," said Sopacuaperu. "Malta is going to be a sensational event and it will be great for Unibet Open and Unibet Deepstack Open regulars to get the chance to meet up and compete against each other."

In total, the Unibet Open Malta will feature 10 action-packed events highlighted by the 1,100 Unibet Open Main Event. The last time the festival visited Malta in May 2016, Czech Republic's Martin Soukup outlasted a field of 292 entrants to win the trophy and the massive 65,000 top prize.

Martin Soukup

Other events on the schedule include the 220 NL Turbo Bounty tournament, a 330 Deepstack tourney, and a special 110 Ladies Event hosted by Daiva Byrne. In addition to Byrne, many other Unibet ambassadors are confirmed including Espen Uhlen Jorsad, Rauno "Estonian Jesus" Tahvonen, two-time Unibet Open champion Dan Murariu, and The Chip Race podcast hosts Dara O'Kearney and David Lappin.

Another highlight to the festival in Malta is the 10,000 invitational Battle Royale freeroll where eSports stars will be competing for a top prize of 5,000. During the last Battle Royale at the Unibet Open London in February, Dutch player Thijs Molendijk shipped the title with Phil "syrinxx" Schoenebaum taking second place, and Scott "Sco" McMillan also cashing in third place.

Player of the Year

The Unibet Player of the Year contest was launched during the Unibet Open London with every player earning points in live and online events. As was the case in London, players that participate in the Unibet Open Malta will earn leaderboard points based on their performance.

The top four players on the annual live leaderboard will join the top four players on the annual online leaderboard and the overall leader in the Unibet Deepstack Open leaderboard for a Battle of Champions event where the winner will be declared the Unibet Player of the Year.

In addition to having the honor of this title, the winning player will also be awarded a live events package valued at 10,000 with others that participate also receiving amazing prizes.626 SHARES Facebook Twitter Whatsapp Pinterest Reddit Print Mail Flipboard

On Tuesday, at a White House event discussing so-called sanctuary cities, GOP Representative Martha McSally of Arizona made what seemed to be a serious suggestion: building a wall between California and Arizona.

Most people will agree that McSallys proposal is off the wall. However, in a state with a history of right-wing elected officials such as Sheriff Joe Arpaio, anything might be possible.

McSally said a wall is needed to protect her constituents in The Grand Canyon State.

As we look in Arizona, we often look into the dangers of the southern border, McSally said while she was attending a round-table discussion on sanctuary cities at the White House.

But if these dangerous policies continue out of California, we might need to build a wall between California and Arizona as well to keep these dangerous criminals out of our state, she added.

McSally also complained that Arizonas large western neighbor, with over 40 million residents, cant just provide sanctuary for these criminals and think that its only impacting California dangerously.

In October, California openly defied the Trump administration by becoming the countrys first sanctuary state.

Earlier this month, California Governor Jerry Brown accused President Trumps administration of declaring war on California after Trumps Department of Justice filed a lawsuit trying to stop Californias policies protecting undocumented immigrants from being deported by federal authorities.

Governor Brown is correct that the Trump administration has severely criticized Californias sanctuary cities policies. Trumps administration has indicated quite forcefully that they plan to challenge any of the Golden States policies that attempt to restrict local law enforcement from working with federal immigration enforcement authorities.

Perhaps McSallys comments will be popular in Arizona where she is trying to advance her political career. In January she announced that she is running for the U.S Senate to replace Sen. Jeff Flake who is retiring.

Another notorious candidate in the primary to replace Flake includes former Maricopa County, Ariz. Sheriff Joe Arpaio who was pardoned by Trump after being convicted of a crime.Interim Austin Police Chief Brian Manley confirmed early Wednesday that the suspect in a string of bombings in Austin is dead.

Manley said that police had tracked down the suspects vehicle to a hotel in the Round Rock area of Austin. The law enforcement team began following the vehicle, and as their SWAT team approached it, the suspect detonated a bomb in the car, killing him.

The suspect was identified only as a 24 year old white male.

BREAKING NEWS: Austin bombing suspect dies as police close in, official says #AustinBombings https://t.co/Z58k4iTwMY pic.twitter.com/yu7kFidgGf  Austin Statesman (@statesman) March 21, 2018

The name of the suspect was not released because the family had not yet been notified according to Manley.

Manley also confirmed that police are still investigating the possibility of accomplices but do not have any leads in that direction. We believe this individual is responsible for all of the incidents in Austin, Manley said.

Police are now requesting that the Austin community remain vigilant for possible other explosives because the suspect may have placed additional bombs around the area. Manley made clear that we do not know where (the suspect) has been in the past 24 hours.

According to Manley they have not yet identified any motive for the string of bombings which had occurred recently in Austin.

The suspect had been identified yesterday based mostly on information police obtained after he shipped a package with a bomb in it from a FedEx store in Sunset Valley, a suburb of Austin. The primary piece of evidence was a security video, police said.

Additional evidence used by police included receipts from the store which showed transactions they deemed to be suspicious. This allowed them to obtain a search warrant for his Google search history. Reviewing his Google searches gave them more evidence of suspicious activity, police said.

Authorities then used cell phone tracing technology to identify the suspects location as a hotel in Williamson County.

Four bombs, killing two men and injuring four people, have exploded in Austin since March 2. A fifth bomb exploded early Tuesday at a FedEx sorting facility in Schertz, Texas, which is located 60 miles southwest of Austin.1.7k SHARES Facebook Twitter Whatsapp Pinterest Reddit Print Mail Flipboard

People often ask why the news media gives so much attention to Donald Trumps personal life, such as affairs with porn stars and allegations of sexual misconduct. The answer is that these are the kinds of things that often lead to blackmail. If the leader of the free world is at risk of being blackmailed because of his personal behavior, then that is a national security issue.

So when news comes out about nondisclosure agreements Trump has paid women to sign in exchange for their silence about sexual relationships with him, the first question we must ask is this: how much is out there that we dont know about?

Another relevant and important question is this: how much does Putin know about Trump that we dont know about? And even more importantly: Is Putin holding something scandalous over Trump and in effect blackmailing him to follow Putins wishes?

That is the theory of a former CIA Director, John Brennan.

Video:

Former CIA Director John Brennan says Trump is afraid of Putin. https://t.co/cp1TaFur16 pic.twitter.com/hyPH7Zz4d6  Sarah Reese Jones (@PoliticusSarah) March 21, 2018

I think he is afraid of the President of Russia, Brennan said on MSNBCs Morning Joe. The Russians could have something on him personally that they could always roll out and make his life more difficult.

Brennan pointed out that the Russians have known Donald Trump for a long time and have had many years of experience working with him. As a result, he said, they may have knowledge of things that they could expose and hurt the president (or at least make him afraid of this happening). When asked if he thought Russia definitely had compromising information they were using against Trump Brennan simply replied, perhaps.

But the fact that (Trump) has had this fawning attitude toward Mr. Putin, has not said anything negative about him, I think continues to say to me that he does have something to fear and something very serious to fear, stressed Brennan, who had served in the CIA for decades before being named head of the intelligence agency by President Barack Obama.

The former CIA director was highly critical of Trumps congratulatory phone call to Putin on Tuesday. In this call he did not mention Russias meddling in the 2016 U.S. elections or the alleged nerve agent attack against a former spy in the United Kingdom.

To congratulate (Putin) and treat him so nicely while he treats Americans with such disdain, I think it just demonstrates he looks at the world through a prism of what is going to help and protect Donald Trump, Brennan said of Trump.

Brennans speculation that Russia and Putin may be blackmailing Trump has not been proven or confirmed by U.S. intelligence agencies. However, President Obama did receive classified documents which contained allegations that Russian operatives were making claims that they do have dirt on Trump, of both a personal and financial nature. If Bob Mueller or U.S. intelligence agencies have confirmed these allegations, the information has not been made public yet. But someday it probably will be made public, and then Trump will really have something serious to worry about.Facebooks Mark Zuckerberg issued a statement late Wednesday on the Cambridge Analytica data scandal which has embroiled his company in global controversies and seen a loss of up to $50 billion in market value.

We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we cant then we dont deserve to serve you, Zuckerberg said on his Facebook page.

Zuckerberg statement said he would direct Facebook to provide notices to all users of the social media platform if their data was given to Cambridge Analytica .

He said they would also do the following:

 Investigate all apps with access to Facebook data, and demand audits of any app with suspicious activity

 Restrict developers data access even further to prevent other kinds of abuse

 Launch a tool at the top of the News Feed that will show users which apps have access to their data and allow them to revoke those apps permissions

Zuckerberg will be on CNN at 9:00 EDT this evening to further discuss the situation.

Here is the full text of Zuckerbergs statement:

I want to share an update on the Cambridge Analytica situation  including the steps weve already taken and our next steps to address this important issue.

We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we cant then we dont deserve to serve you. Ive been working to understand exactly what happened and how to make sure this doesnt happen again. The good news is that the most important actions to prevent this from happening again today we have already taken years ago. But we also made mistakes, theres more to do, and we need to step up and do it.

Heres a timeline of the events:

In 2007, we launched the Facebook Platform with the vision that more apps should be social. Your calendar should be able to show your friends birthdays, your maps should show where your friends live, and your address book should show their pictures. To do this, we enabled people to log into apps and share who their friends were and some information about them.

In 2013, a Cambridge University researcher named Aleksandr Kogan created a personality quiz app. It was installed by around 300,000 people who shared their data as well as some of their friends data. Given the way our platform worked at the time this meant Kogan was able to access tens of millions of their friends data.

In 2014, to prevent abusive apps, we announced that we were changing the entire platform to dramatically limit the data apps could access. Most importantly, apps like Kogans could no longer ask for data about a persons friends unless their friends had also authorized the app. We also required developers to get approval from us before they could request any sensitive data from people. These actions would prevent any app like Kogans from being able to access so much data today.

In 2015, we learned from journalists at The Guardian that Kogan had shared data from his app with Cambridge Analytica. It is against our policies for developers to share data without peoples consent, so we immediately banned Kogans app from our platform, and demanded that Kogan and Cambridge Analytica formally certify that they had deleted all improperly acquired data. They provided these certifications.

Last week, we learned from The Guardian, The New York Times and Channel 4 that Cambridge Analytica may not have deleted the data as they had certified. We immediately banned them from using any of our services. Cambridge Analytica claims they have already deleted the data and has agreed to a forensic audit by a firm we hired to confirm this. Were also working with regulators as they investigate what happened.

This was a breach of trust between Kogan, Cambridge Analytica and Facebook. But it was also a breach of trust between Facebook and the people who share their data with us and expect us to protect it. We need to fix that.

In this case, we already took the most important steps a few years ago in 2014 to prevent bad actors from accessing peoples information in this way. But theres more we need to do and Ill outline those steps here:

First, we will investigate all apps that had access to large amounts of information before we changed our platform to dramatically reduce data access in 2014, and we will conduct a full audit of any app with suspicious activity. We will ban any developer from our platform that does not agree to a thorough audit. And if we find developers that misused personally identifiable information, we will ban them and tell everyone affected by those apps. That includes people whose data Kogan misused here as well.

Second, we will restrict developers data access even further to prevent other kinds of abuse. For example, we will remove developers access to your data if you havent used their app in 3 months. We will reduce the data you give an app when you sign in  to only your name, profile photo, and email address. Well require developers to not only get approval but also sign a contract in order to ask anyone for access to their posts or other private data. And well have more changes to share in the next few days.

Third, we want to make sure you understand which apps youve allowed to access your data. In the next month, we will show everyone a tool at the top of your News Feed with the apps youve used and an easy way to revoke those apps permissions to your data. We already have a tool to do this in your privacy settings, and now we will put this tool at the top of your News Feed to make sure everyone sees it.

Beyond the steps we had already taken in 2014, I believe these are the next steps we must take to continue to secure our platform.

I started Facebook, and at the end of the day Im responsible for what happens on our platform. Im serious about doing what it takes to protect our community. While this specific issue involving Cambridge Analytica should no longer happen with new apps today, that doesnt change what happened in the past. We will learn from this experience to secure our platform further and make our community safer for everyone going forward.

I want to thank all of you who continue to believe in our mission and work to build this community together. I know it takes longer to fix all these issues than wed like, but I promise you well work through this and build a better service over the long term.The Unknowable isnt one of those free jazz projects thats spear-headed by one particular musician. With saxophonist Dave Liebman being flanked by two percussionists, you can be forgiven for wrongly assuming that hes a the star of the show here. Instead, The Unknowable is one of those bizarre meeting of the minds where two percussionists seem to have just as much power over the sound as does one wind instrument  perhaps even more. From the first track alone, its clear that this isnt an Ornette Coleman kind of experiment. These three guys are sailing up, up and away, far from what most people would call contemporary jazz.

Dave Liebman, Adam Rudolph, and Tatsuya Nakatani have known each other and worked with each other in various ensembles over the years, but this disc marks their first time as a trio. Between the three of them, no less than 18 instruments are being used in real time to create a stew of sounds that would put a musical therapist on edge. These include a thumb piano, a Fender Rhodes, four pieces of a handrumset, three different kinds of flutes, a mbuti harp, pieces of metal, and live electronic processing. The Unknowable may come across as some sort of studio Frankenstein on paper, but Liebman, Rudolph, and Nakatani can probably replicate most of these weird sounds on stage if you asked them to.

This music marks the point where noise and ambient meet while on free jazz turf. Completely improvised, it shows no allegiance to genre or geographic location. Just when you think that Eastern sounds will prevail, the wind blows the notion away to either the west or nowhere familiar. Song titles like Skyway Dream, The Turning, and The Simple Truth are intentionally vague, almost suggesting that these titles are of little-to-no importance. The percussive aspect is certainly more than just two guys banging on things. The sounds they conjure range from minimalist onstinatos to metallic screeching. Liebmans saxophone will occasionally get an echo treatment where the ends of his phrases will morph into a new soundscape of its own before it fades away completely.

The Unknowable is one of those albums where I find myself checking the credits over and over again. Is nobody playing a distorted electric guitar? Did a fourth person drop into the studio to lay down some synthesizer? Was everything here truly improvised, or did someone start with a germ of an idea and not admit it? And am I certain that this album wasnt recorded in a Tibetan cave miles above sea level and not some studio in New Jersey? The credits prove me wrong on all counts, but that still leaves the challenge of coming up with a label for this kind of music. But if song titles for improvised instrumental pieces are about as important to you as genre labels, then you have nothing to lose by taking the plunge into The Unknowable.Get the SC business stories that matter.

Our newsletter catches you up with all the business stories that are shaping Charleston and South Carolina every Monday and Thursday at noon. Get ahead with us - it's free.Gregory Yee covers the city of Charleston. He's a native Angeleno and previously covered crime and courts for the Press-Telegram in Long Beach, CA. He studied journalism and Spanish literature at the University of California, Irvine.Allen Deaton's building on Nance Plaza in Myrtle Beach held a bingo parlor before he sold it to Myrtle Beach in 2017. The building is on the superblock, which could become home to a library and museum. Chloe Johnson/StaffSyndicated and guest columns represent the personal views of the writers, not necessarily those of the editorial staff. The editorial department operates entirely independently of the news department and is not involved in newsroom operations.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.Assistant Columbia bureau chief

Adcox returned to The Post and Courier in October 2017 after 12 years covering the Statehouse for The Associated Press. She previously covered education for The P&C. She has also worked for The AP in Albany, N.Y., and for The Herald in Rock Hill.Two men were remanded to the custody of the U.S. Marshals Service after federal authorities executed a controlled delivery of a FedEx envelope containing 114 grams of crystal methamphetamine and raided their Barrigada home, where they had conducted a controlled delivery six years ago.

Jesse Leon Guerrero and Jarette Anthony Leon Guerrero were charged with attempted possession of meth with intent to distribute.

On Tuesday, agents with Homeland Security Investigations seized the envelope and found the drugs hidden inside a white bubble envelope containing white paper towels, court documents state.

The next day, they obtained a federal tracking warrant and a warrant to search a residence on Lubanos Street in Barrigada. The drugs were replaced with a sham substance, and the package was sprayed with clue spray and outfitted with a tracking device.

A federal agent went undercover as a FedEx driver and delivered the package to Jarette Anthony Leon Guerrero, who confirmed that he knew the addressee on the parcel. Several hours later, a signal came from the package and agents raided the home where they found Jarette Anthony and Jesse Leon Guerrero, and a woman with her two minor children.

Agents used a black light and examined each of the occupants' hands and body looking for clue spray. They detected the spray on Jesse Leon Guerrero's hands and he refused to sign or waive his rights.

Jarette Anthony's hands also tested positive under the black light. Upon being shown the residue, Jarette Anthony Leon Guerrero mumbled, "That (expletive), I shouldn't have accepted the package. I shouldn't have accepted the package!" The federal complaint states additional clue spray residue was also seen on the front of his shirt.

Agents recovered narcotic packaging material, a scale, improvised glass pipes and a piece of cardboard with numerous amounts written on it that was suspected to be a ledger for narcotics transactions, court documents state.

During an interview with agents, Jarette Anthony Leon Guerrero admitted he received the package but denied handling it after that. When asked to explain the clue spray residue on his hands and shirt, he said he did not know and that it could have come from all the trash that he had picked up earlier or the automotive materials he was working on, the complaint states.

The two remain in federal custody while they await a detention hearing.PR-Inside.com: 2018-03-22 16:35:02

A.M. Best Revises Outlooks to Positive for Partners Life Limited

A.M. Best

Jason Shum, +65 6303 5020

Associate Director, Analytics

jason.shum@ambest.com

or

Chi-Yeung Lok, +65 6303 5016

Director, Analytics

chi-yeung.lok@ambest.com

or

Christopher Sharkey, +1 908-439-2200, ext. 5159

Manager, Public Relations

christopher.sharkey@ambest.com

or

Jim Peavy, +1 908-439-2200, ext. 5644

Director, Public Relations

james.peavy@ambest.com

A.M. Best has revised the outlooks to positive from stable and affirmed the Financial Strength Rating of B++ (Good) and the Long-Term Issuer Credit Rating of bbb+ of Partners Life Limited (Partners Life) (New Zealand).

The Credit Ratings (ratings) reflect Partners Lifes balance sheet strength, which A.M. Best categorizes as very strong, as well as its adequate operating performance, limited business profile and appropriate enterprise risk management (ERM).

A.M. Best assesses Partners Lifes balance sheet strength as very strong. As a relatively young life insurer that continues to grow rapidly through the financial adviser channel, the capital required for writing new business still significantly exceeds the cash flows generated out of its in-force business, which gives rise to short-term funding risk. However, this risk is mitigated partially by the company now holding a significant level of solvency margin and a further capital commitment from its largest shareholder (the Blackstone Group) until fiscal-year 2019, as well as a secured multiyear financing treaty with reinsurers until fiscal-year 2022.

While the size of Partners Lifes in-force portfolio has continued to grow rapidly, claims experiences have remained broadly in line with the companys expectation and recent results have seen a continuous reduction in its operating expenses ratio. Furthermore, starting April 1, 2018, Partners Life will enter into a new reinsurance contract that is expected to result in a positive impact on the financing of its future new business. A.M. Best thus believes Partners Life not only will continue to generate positive earnings, but also gradually improve its operating cash flows over time.

Established in August 2010, Partners Life is a direct insurer that operates in New Zealands life insurance industry. Currently, the company only offers protection-type products in New Zealand, including life insurance, income protection, medical insurance, disability insurance, trauma cover and business risk protection. A high percentage of new business is generated through several large dealer groups. Although the degree of reliance on these large dealer groups has steadily reduced year on year, A.M. Best remains cautious about the companys business profile, as Partner Life is a young life insurer that has grown rapidly with some concentration in its distribution sources.

A.M. Best views Partners Lifes ERM to be appropriate, based on its current size and risk profile. Given its plan to pursue rapid growth in the life insurance space through the independent financial adviser channel, the companys risk profile shows moderate exposure to strategic risk and distribution concentration risk. Nevertheless, Partners Lifes risk management capabilities are considered to be aligned appropriately with its risk profile. This is supported by the companys low product and investment risk profile, conservative reinsurance arrangements, and various strategic initiatives to develop and maintain its relationship with the large dealer groups and individual financial advisers.

The outlook revisions to positive indicate that possible rating upgrades could occur if Partners Life continues to perform in line with A.M. Bests expectations, which include sustained profitable growth, as well as growth in premium revenue at a slower rate over time as the business continues to mature. Conversely, the ratings could be downgraded if experience variations lead to a large impairment in net insurance contract assets. Additionally, the ratings may face pressure if Partners Life fails to generate capital on a timely basis to support its operating plan.

Ratings are communicated to rated entities prior to publication. Unless stated otherwise, the ratings were not amended subsequent to that communication.

This press release relates to Credit Ratings that have been published on A.M. Bests website. For all rating information relating to the release and pertinent disclosures, including details of the office responsible for issuing each of the individual ratings referenced in this release, please see A.M. Bests Recent Rating Activity web page. For additional information regarding the use and limitations of Credit Rating opinions, please view Understanding Bests Credit Ratings. For information on the proper media use of Bests Credit Ratings and A.M. Best press releases, please view Guide for Media - Proper [..].

A.M. Best is the worlds oldest and most authoritative insurance rating and information source. For more information, visit www.ambest.com.

Copyright  2018 by A.M. Best Rating Services, Inc. and/or its affiliates. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180322005PR-Inside.com: 2018-03-22 08:20:05

FSCwire / Press ReleaseThe following press release was disseminated by FSCwire for Anglo Pacific Group PLC--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---London, England (FSCWire) - Anglo Pacific Group PLC (LSE:APF). has issued a press release with the following headline:Anglo Pacific Group PLC Revision to Dividend Timetable, Notice of Full Year 2017 Results and Date of AGMTo view this press release on the FSCwire website, please either click on the link below, or copy and paste the link into your browser:If you would prefer, you can also view this press release as a PDF file, please either click on the link below, or copy and paste the link into your browser:For more information on Anglo Pacific Group PLC, or to see additional press releases issued by this company, please either click on the link below, or copy and paste the link into your browser: http://www.fscwire.com/public-company/Anglo Pacific Group PLCSource: Anglo Pacific Group PLC (LSE: APF, TSX: APY, OTC Bulletin Board: AGPIF, FWB: HGR, WKN: 871733)Date: March 22, 2018Time: 3:00 AM EDT--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---The story mentioned above was issued on behalf of Anglo Pacific Group PLC and disseminated through FSCwire.About FSCwireFSCwire (a division of Filing Services Canada Inc.), is a global newswire dissemination, SEDAR, SEDI, and EDGAR / XBRL service provider.FSCwire is a full service global newswire dissemination company and is fully approved by all exchanges in Canada and the U.S. Press releases can be distributed for all sizes of public, private or not for profit companies and any other organization requiring news distribution. In addition to individual companies; public relations, communications and investor relations firms trust FSCwire to distribute press releases for their respective clients.In addition to newswire dissemination FSCwire also offers EDGAR, XBRL, SEDAR, SEDI, and additional services for publicly traded companies. For more information, please go to our website: http://www.fscwire.com Maximum News Dissemination by FSCwire. http://www.fscwire.com Copyright 2018 - FSCwire (a division of Filing Services Canada Inc.)PR-Inside.com: 2018-03-22 18:12:02

Almere, The Netherlands

March 22, 2018

ASM International N.V. (Euronext Amsterdam: ASM) today publishes its 2017 Annual Report.

ASMI's Annual Report is also available on the company's website www.asm.com. The Annual Report includes the Corporate Responsibility Report and the Remuneration Report in order to increase the relevancy and quality of reporting to all stakeholders.

ASMI will hold its Annual General Meeting of Shareholders (AGM) on May 28, 2018. The AGM agenda with all related documents will be available in due time.



About ASM International

ASM International NV, headquartered in Almere, the Netherlands, its subsidiaries and participations design and manufacture equipment and materials used to produce semiconductor devices. ASM International, its subsidiaries and participations provide production solutions for wafer processing (Front-end segment) as well as for assembly & packaging and surface mount technology (Back-end segment) through facilities in the United States, Europe, Japan and Asia. ASM International's common stock trades on the Euronext Amsterdam Stock Exchange (symbol ASM). For more information, visit ASMI's website at www.asm.com .

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements: All matters discussed in this press release, except for any historical data, are forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements. These include, but are not limited to, economic conditions and trends in the semiconductor industry generally and the timing of the industry cycles specifically, currency fluctuations, corporate transactions, financing and liquidity matters, the success of restructurings, the timing of significant orders, market acceptance of new products, competitive factors, litigation involving intellectual property, shareholders or other issues, commercial and economic disruption due to natural disasters, terrorist activity, armed conflict or political instability, epidemics and other risks indicated in the Company's reports and financial statements. The Company assumes no obligation nor intends to update or revise any forward-looking statements to reflect future developments or circumstances.



CONTACT

Investor contact:

Victor Bareno

T: +31 88 100 8500

E: victor.bareno@asm.com

Media contact:

Ian Bickerton

T: +31 625 018 512





This announcement is distributed by Nasdaq Corporate Solutions on behalf of Nasdaq Corporate Solutions clients.

The issuer of this announcement warrants that they are solely responsible for the content, accuracy and originality of the information contained therein.

Source: ASM International NV via Globenewswire

PR-Inside.com: 2018-03-22 11:30:14

FSCwire / Press ReleaseThe following press release was disseminated by FSCwire for Banyan Gold Corp.--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---Calgary, Alberta (FSCWire) - Banyan Gold Corp. (TSX Venture:BYN). has issued a press release with the following headline:Banyan Increased Indicated and Inferred Gold Ounces with Updated Resource Estimate for Main Zone at Hyland Gold Project, YukonTo view this press release on the FSCwire website, please either click on the link below, or copy and paste the link into your browser:If you would prefer, you can also view this press release as a PDF file, please either click on the link below, or copy and paste the link into your browser:For more information on Banyan Gold Corp., or to see additional press releases issued by this company, please either click on the link below, or copy and paste the link into your browser: http://www.fscwire.com/public-company/Banyan Gold Corp.Source: Banyan Gold Corp. (TSX Venture: BYN)Date: March 22, 2018Time: 6:30 AM EDT--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---The story mentioned above was issued on behalf of Banyan Gold Corp. and disseminated through FSCwire.About FSCwireFSCwire (a division of Filing Services Canada Inc.), is a global newswire dissemination, SEDAR, SEDI, and EDGAR / XBRL service provider.FSCwire is a full service global newswire dissemination company and is fully approved by all exchanges in Canada and the U.S. Press releases can be distributed for all sizes of public, private or not for profit companies and any other organization requiring news distribution. In addition to individual companies; public relations, communications and investor relations firms trust FSCwire to distribute press releases for their respective clients.In addition to newswire dissemination FSCwire also offers EDGAR, XBRL, SEDAR, SEDI, and additional services for publicly traded companies. For more information, please go to our website: http://www.fscwire.com Maximum News Dissemination by FSCwire. http://www.fscwire.com Copyright 2018 - FSCwire (a division of Filing Services Canada Inc.)PR-Inside.com: 2018-03-22 22:19:17

FSCwire / Press ReleaseThe following press release was disseminated by FSCwire for Bitterroot Resources Ltd.--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---West Vancouver, British Columbia (FSCWire) - Bitterroot Resources Ltd. (TSX Venture:BTT). has issued a press release with the following headline:Bitterroot Resources Ltd. Hackberry Silver Project Drilling UpdateTo view this press release on the FSCwire website, please either click on the link below, or copy and paste the link into your browser:If you would prefer, you can also view this press release as a PDF file, please either click on the link below, or copy and paste the link into your browser:For more information on Bitterroot Resources Ltd., or to see additional press releases issued by this company, please either click on the link below, or copy and paste the link into your browser: http://www.fscwire.com/public-company/Bitterroot Resources Ltd.Source: Bitterroot Resources Ltd. (TSX Venture: BTT, OTC Pink: BITTF, FWB: BQ51, WKN: 578085, ISIN: CA0919011084)Date: March 22, 2018Time: 5:18 PM EDT--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---The story mentioned above was issued on behalf of Bitterroot Resources Ltd. and disseminated through FSCwire.About FSCwireFSCwire (a division of Filing Services Canada Inc.), is a global newswire dissemination, SEDAR, SEDI, and EDGAR / XBRL service provider.FSCwire is a full service global newswire dissemination company and is fully approved by all exchanges in Canada and the U.S. Press releases can be distributed for all sizes of public, private or not for profit companies and any other organization requiring news distribution. In addition to individual companies; public relations, communications and investor relations firms trust FSCwire to distribute press releases for their respective clients.In addition to newswire dissemination FSCwire also offers EDGAR, XBRL, SEDAR, SEDI, and additional services for publicly traded companies. For more information, please go to our website: http://www.fscwire.com Maximum News Dissemination by FSCwire. http://www.fscwire.com Copyright 2018 - FSCwire (a division of Filing Services Canada Inc.)PR-Inside.com: 2018-03-22 12:00:34

FSCwire / Press ReleaseThe following press release was disseminated by FSCwire for Great Atlantic Resources Corp.--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---Vancouver, British Columbia (FSCWire) - Great Atlantic Resources Corp. (TSX Venture:GR). has issued a press release with the following headline:Great Atlantic Welcomes Reg Wilson, P. Geo to Advisory BoardTo view this press release on the FSCwire website, please either click on the link below, or copy and paste the link into your browser:If you would prefer, you can also view this press release as a PDF file, please either click on the link below, or copy and paste the link into your browser:For more information on Great Atlantic Resources Corp., or to see additional press releases issued by this company, please either click on the link below, or copy and paste the link into your browser: http://www.fscwire.com/public-company/Great Atlantic Resources Corp.Source: Great Atlantic Resources Corp. (TSX Venture: GR, FWB: PH01, WKN: A1JZ4T, ISIN: CA3900871045)Date: March 22, 2018Time: 7:00 AM EDT--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---The story mentioned above was issued on behalf of Great Atlantic Resources Corp. and disseminated through FSCwire.About FSCwireFSCwire (a division of Filing Services Canada Inc.), is a global newswire dissemination, SEDAR, SEDI, and EDGAR / XBRL service provider.FSCwire is a full service global newswire dissemination company and is fully approved by all exchanges in Canada and the U.S. Press releases can be distributed for all sizes of public, private or not for profit companies and any other organization requiring news distribution. In addition to individual companies; public relations, communications and investor relations firms trust FSCwire to distribute press releases for their respective clients.In addition to newswire dissemination FSCwire also offers EDGAR, XBRL, SEDAR, SEDI, and additional services for publicly traded companies. For more information, please go to our website: http://www.fscwire.com Maximum News Dissemination by FSCwire. http://www.fscwire.com Copyright 2018 - FSCwire (a division of Filing Services Canada Inc.)PR-Inside.com: 2018-03-22 14:29:29

FSCwire / Press ReleaseThe following press release was disseminated by FSCwire for Lithium Corp.--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---Elko, Nevada (FSCWire) - Lithium Corp. (OTCQB:LTUM). has issued a press release with the following headline:Lithium Corporation Quiet Title Hearing ResultTo view this press release on the FSCwire website, please either click on the link below, or copy and paste the link into your browser:If you would prefer, you can also view this press release as a PDF file, please either click on the link below, or copy and paste the link into your browser:For more information on Lithium Corp., or to see additional press releases issued by this company, please either click on the link below, or copy and paste the link into your browser: http://www.fscwire.com/public-company/Lithium Corp.Source: Lithium Corp. (OTCQB: LTUM, ISIN: A0YJFZ, WKN: US5368041076)Date: March 22, 2018Time: 9:20 AM EDT--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---The story mentioned above was issued on behalf of Lithium Corp. and disseminated through FSCwire.About FSCwireFSCwire (a division of Filing Services Canada Inc.), is a global newswire dissemination, SEDAR, SEDI, and EDGAR / XBRL service provider.FSCwire is a full service global newswire dissemination company and is fully approved by all exchanges in Canada and the U.S. Press releases can be distributed for all sizes of public, private or not for profit companies and any other organization requiring news distribution. In addition to individual companies; public relations, communications and investor relations firms trust FSCwire to distribute press releases for their respective clients.In addition to newswire dissemination FSCwire also offers EDGAR, XBRL, SEDAR, SEDI, and additional services for publicly traded companies. For more information, please go to our website: http://www.fscwire.com Maximum News Dissemination by FSCwire. http://www.fscwire.com Copyright 2018 - FSCwire (a division of Filing Services Canada Inc.)PR-Inside.com: 2018-03-22 16:21:15

FSCwire / Press ReleaseThe following press release was disseminated by FSCwire for PPX Mining Corp.--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---Vancouver, British Columbia (FSCWire) - PPX Mining Corp. (TSX Venture:PPX). has issued a press release with the following headline:PPX Processes 1,898 tonnes of Bulk Sample Grading 9.50 gpt Au at Mina Callanquitas during February 2018To view this press release on the FSCwire website, please either click on the link below, or copy and paste the link into your browser:If you would prefer, you can also view this press release as a PDF file, please either click on the link below, or copy and paste the link into your browser:For more information on PPX Mining Corp., or to see additional press releases issued by this company, please either click on the link below, or copy and paste the link into your browser: http://www.fscwire.com/public-company/PPX Mining Corp.Source: PPX Mining Corp. (TSX Venture: PPX, WKN: A2APYX, ISIN: CA69354U1003)Date: March 22, 2018Time: 11:20 AM EDT--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---The story mentioned above was issued on behalf of PPX Mining Corp. and disseminated through FSCwire.About FSCwireFSCwire (a division of Filing Services Canada Inc.), is a global newswire dissemination, SEDAR, SEDI, and EDGAR / XBRL service provider.FSCwire is a full service global newswire dissemination company and is fully approved by all exchanges in Canada and the U.S. Press releases can be distributed for all sizes of public, private or not for profit companies and any other organization requiring news distribution. In addition to individual companies; public relations, communications and investor relations firms trust FSCwire to distribute press releases for their respective clients.In addition to newswire dissemination FSCwire also offers EDGAR, XBRL, SEDAR, SEDI, and additional services for publicly traded companies. For more information, please go to our website: http://www.fscwire.com Maximum News Dissemination by FSCwire. http://www.fscwire.com Copyright 2018 - FSCwire (a division of Filing Services Canada Inc.)PR-Inside.com: 2018-03-22 22:01:01

RhythmOne Names Luke Bussell as Managing Director ANZ

Media Industy Contact:

Seismic PR for RhythmOne

Melissa Laverty, 540-272-6465

Melissa@teamseismic.com

RhythmOne plc (LSE AIM: RTHM), an advertising technology company that connects brands to audiences, announced the promotion of Luke Bussell to Managing Director ANZ, a new position for the rapidly growing Australian arm of the business.

Chief Revenue Officer, Michael Hudes, said Lukes promotion would see the ANZ operation handed over to a highly capable leader.

In Luke, were lucky to have a seasoned professional with the depth of Media and Commercial sales experience. He has the leadership skills to drive an expert team around him and were excited by the opportunities that the Asian Pacific region as a whole provides our new end-to-end programmatic offering, so I look forward with confidence to this next phase of growth.

Luke joined RadiumOne (now RhythmOne) in 2016 and has over 18 years of experience in advertising and media across digital, radio, publishing, content and TV. He has held leadership roles in sales, strategy, cross-platform and business development at Southern Cross Austereo, Brand New Media and in the UK.

Speaking on his new role, Bussell stated, Since RhythmOne acquired RadiumOne and YuMe, we have established a strong team that is excited to be taking the combined product suite and offerings to market. I look forward to leading the ANZ operation through the next phase of growth, driven largely through the RhythmOne products now available in Australia. While Sharing and Dark Social are still a big part of what we do, Influencer Marketing (RhythmInfluence) and RhythmOne Creative Services, underpinned by guaranteed supply, now complete our offering.

About RhythmOne

RhythmOne drives engagement between advertisers and targeted audiences - resulting in real, measurable business outcomes. The Company offers fully integrated, cross-screen solutions that span desktop, mobile and connected TV, across high-impact video, rich media, display, social and native advertising formats - ensuring advertisers reach high-propensity audiences wherever and however they consume content. The connections we make are further enhanced through unique audience data and powered by our unified programmatic platform, RhythmMax. The RhythmMax platform includes unique verification technology, RhythmGuard, which ensures quality audiences in brand safe environments. RhythmOne's end-to-end platform - coupled with the world-class service of its account teams - provides more direct, efficient and effective connections, driving ROI for advertisers and publishers. Founded in 2004 in the UK, the Company is headquartered in San Francisco with offices in the US, UK, Europe, APAC and Canada. For more information, please visit www.rhythmone.com.

Forward-Looking Statement

This press release contains forward-looking statements, including those in management quotations. In some cases, you can identify forward-looking statements by the words "may," "will," "expect," "intend," "plan," "objective," "anticipate," "believe," "estimate," "predict," "project," "potential," "continue" and "ongoing," or the negative of these terms, or other comparable terminology intended to identify statements about the future. All statements other than statements of historical fact are statements that could be forward-looking statements, including, but not limited to, statements about the new leadership and future growth opportunities in the Asian Pacific region. These forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties, assumptions and other factors that could cause actual results and the timing of events to differ materially from future results that are expressed or implied in the forward-looking statements. Factors that could cause or contribute to such differences include the dynamic and rapidly evolving sector, as well as the highly competitive industry that RhythmOne operates in, which make it difficult to evaluate prospects. These and other risk factors are discussed in RhythmOnes Annual Report for the period ended March 31, 2017. The forward-looking statements in this press release are based on information available to RhythmOne as of the date hereof, and we assume no obligation to update any forward-looking statements.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180322006ADVERTISEMENT

Kenyan woman who was verbally and physically abused after giving birth on the floor of a state-run hospital in Kenya won a landmark 2.5 million shillings ($24,789) in damages on Thursday.

Josephine Majani delivered her baby on the floor of Bungoma District Hospital in 2013 because all the beds were occupied.

When nurses found her lying on the ground, she said she was slapped and insulted for dirtying the hospital floor.

Bungoma High Court Judge, Abida Ali Aroni, said the hospital violated her right to health and dignity, adding that the authourities failed to dedicate adequate resources for maternal healthcare across the country.

Majani said I was neglected, abused, and shamed at Bungoma District Hospital.

Im hopeful that the courts judgment today will force government to do the right thing and ensure that all women receive the maternal healthcare they need with respect and dignity,

Kenya is one of the worlds 10 most dangerous countries for women in labour, with 488 women dying of pregnancy-related causes per 100,000 live births, according to the UN.

It stated that no fewer than 8,000 Kenyan women die from pregnancy-related complications each year.

It added that the deaths were largely due to the lack of funding for maternal health, inadequate training and supervision of health workers, negligence and unethical practices.

Campaigners say there are many cases like Majanis where government hospitals are ill-equipped to provide women with free maternal services and, as a result, deny them quality health care, and sometimes subject them to abuse.

The courts decision is historic and should help prevent such abuse in the future, the New York-based Centre for Reproductive Rights (CRR) said.

CRR added that it would put pressure on the government to prioritise maternal care.

This is a landmark case for Kenyan women, the CRRs Africa Director, Evelyne Opondo, said in a statement.

It sends a very clear message to Kenyan health-providers and to the government  that neglect of women in health care settings will no longer be tolerated nor will it be without consequences for those responsible Opondo added.

(Reuters/NAN)ADVERTISEMENT

A grim-faced Lee Myung-Bak was driven away from his home in southern Seoul for a detention facility late Thursday, becoming the fourth former South Korean president to be arrested on corruption charges.

The district court in the South Korean capital approved a warrant for Myung-Baks arrest earlier in the day on the grounds that the 76-year-old former conservative leader could destroy evidence against him, according to local broadcasters.

Mr. Myung-Bak was driven in a black saloon by prosecution authorities to the Seoul Eastern Detention Centre, where he was assigned to a solitary cell, Yonhap news agency reported.

He faces least 12 charges, including bribery, embezzlement, tax evasion, abuse of power and breach of trust, the report added.

I feel that this is all my fault, and I feel a sense of guilt, Mr. Myung-Bak wrote in a handwritten note posted late Thursday on Facebook.

During his time in office  from 2008 to 2013  Mr. Myung-Bak is suspected of taking money from the secret service, companies and other organisations to the tune of 11 billion won (10.2 million dollars).

Mr. Myung-Bak is also suspected of using a car parts supplier operated under the name of his elder brother as an illicit secret fund to misappropriate 34.8 billion won for political activities and personal use, according to Yonhap.

If convicted of all charges, he faces up to 45 years in prison, according to Yonhap.

State prosecutors requested the arrest warrant on Monday following five months of investigations that also focused on Myung-Baks family and aides.

Mr. Myung-Bak was questioned for 21 hours on March 14 and 15 before being allowed to return home.

He has called the investigations political revenge by the current left-leaning socially liberal government.

Park Hye, who succeeded Myung-Bak as president but was impeached in March, is also currently facing charges of corruption.

She is in detention awaiting trial, with a verdict expected in April.

Former president Chun Doo-Hwan and his successor Roh Tae-Woo were sentenced to death in 1996 for rebellion and high treason.

Both were fined heavily for corruption in office. The two were pardoned in 1997 and are still alive.

(dpa/NAN)ADVERTISEMENT

The Federal Government of Nigeria has accused the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) of plumbing the depths of infamy for saying the adoption and release of the Dapchi schoolgirls were stage-managed.

About 110 girls were kidnapped from their secondary school in Dapchi town of Yobe State by Boko Haram insurgents on February 18.

About 104 of the girls were however returned to their village by the insurgents Wednesday morning.

A boy and another girl, separate from the Dapchi schoolgirls, were also released, the government said.

The spokesperson of the PDP, Kola Ologbondiyan, addressed a press conference on Wednesday where he accused the governing All Progressives Congress (APC) and certain officials in the presidency for staging the abduction of the schoolgirls for political purposes.

Our party considers this act as wicked, callous and tormenting to use innocent schoolgirls as pawns in an ignoble script that was designed to hoodwink Nigerians and orchestrate a great rescue and security prowess of a conquering general, all to push a 2019 reelection bid, is an unpardonable gamble with human lives, PDP said.

However, in a statement issued in Abuja on Thursday, the Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed, said such postulation portrays the PDP as an inhuman, insensitive, unpatriotic and unworthy party.

He said since the release of the Dapchi girls were negotiated by friendly countries and reputable international organisations, it would have taken a conspiracy of global proportion to have stage-managed the adoption and release of the girls.

Mr. Mohammed said the reaction of the PDP amounts to an expression of sour grapes, especially because, he said, the party failed woefully  when it was in power  to quickly resolve a similar abduction of schoolgirls.

Boko Haram had in 2014 invaded a school in Chibok, Borno State, taking away over 200 school girls. About 100 of the girls are still with the terror group.

As we have said many times since the abduction of the Dapchi schoolgirls, no government is exempted from its own share of tragedies. What makes the difference is the way such tragedies are managed.

 Whereas it took the PDP all of 18 days to even acknowledge the abduction of the Chibok girls in 2014, the APC Federal Government acted promptly and responsively when the Dapchi schoolgirls were abducted 19 Feb. 2018, hence their quick release, the minister said.

The minister also said it is unfortunate that the PDP that failed woefully as a ruling party has also failed grievously as an opposition party, going by its insensitive and crude response to the release of the Dapchi schoolgirls  a development that calls for non-partisan celebration.

In its 16 years in power, the PDP redefined governance as cluelessness, massive looting of the public treasury and crude exhibition of power. In its over three years in opposition, the PDP has again shown it does not understand the role of the opposition in a democracy. How then can the PDP convince Nigerians that it has learnt its lessons and that it is ready to rule the country again? Nigerians must say never again to this primitive and soulless party, he said.

Mr. Mohammed said the federal government has not been responding to the amateurish and jejune statements from the PDP precisely because the party has failed to learn the ropes of being an opposition party, even when we have advised them to take a crash course on the role of the opposition in a democracy.

We broke our own rules this time because the PDP over-reached itself and scored an own goal at a time it could simply have congratulated the government and people of Nigeria on the release of the girls or just keep quiet, he said.

The minister assured Nigerians that the federal government will intensify the ongoing efforts to secure the release of the remaining Chibok girls and return them safely to their families, just like over 100 other Chibok girls who have so far been released, unlike the PDP that could not secure the release of even one of the girls before it was

booted out of power.The spokesperson for the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) has reacted to a THISDAY newspaper report that narrated how anti-graft operatives allegedly recovered $9 million dollar after a search at the home of Paul Boroh, the recently sacked head of Presidential Amnesty Programme.

I am not aware of such discoveries, Wilson Uwujaren told PREMIUM TIMES by telephone Wednesday morning.

The newspaper said in its Wednesday edition that detectives from the EFCC and the Office of the National Security Adviser (ONSA) raided the home of the former head of Presidential Amnesty Programme on Tuesday morning in Abuja.

It said Mr. Boroh, a retired brigadier-general, was arrested on Monday and investigators took him to his residence in Gwarimpa Estate around 3:00 a.m. on Tuesday to comb his apartment for items that could aid their investigation.

A week earlier, President Muhammadu Buhari sacked Mr. Boroh from office over corruption allegations and other malfeasance, marking an inglorious end to his three-year reign at a department created to address Niger-Delta grievances but which has been dogged by mismanagement since inception.

The president named Charles Dokubo, a foreign policy expert, as Mr. Borohs replacement with immediate effect.

THISDAY said detectives also sifted through the property of Mr. Borohs wife, Ibinye, during the search, adding that the $9 million recovered had been handed over to ONSA.

But the EFCC spokesperson said he could only confirm that a raid was carried out, but had no details of how much was recovered.

Similarly, Mrs. Boroh and Olusola Oke, the familys lawyer, denied the allegations at a press briefing in Abuja on Wednesday afternoon.

The publication by a section of the press stating the contrary is fabricated, false in its entirety, malicious and calculated to mislead the public, the Vanguard quoted Mrs. Boroh as saying in a release distributed to reporters who attended the briefing.

Mrs. Boroh confirmed a raid by security agencies at their residence, but couldnt immediately confirm which agencies the operatives belonged. She decried the untold embarrassment the THISDAY report had inflicted on her family and demanded immediate retraction and apology.

Mr. Oke said the EFCC had informed him that his client is in its custody, but the anti-graft agency denied informing THISDAY of any recovery.

The lawyer dismissed the report as disparaging and fallacious, and gave THISDAY and other platforms that repeated the story up to 48 hours to retract it.

THISDAY has not responded to the rebuttal by Mr. Borohs wife and lawyer as at Thursday morning.

Other EFCC sources contacted by PREMIUM TIMES could not immediately corroborate the THISDAY report that $9 million was found at Mr. Borohs house.

Before Mr.. Boroh, former heads of Presidential Amnesty Programme, established by late President Umaru YarAdua, had been investigated on several occasions for diverting money meant to resolve issues in the oil-rich region for suspicious use.

Mr. Kuku, who Mr. Boroh succeeded, is still being sought by the EFCC over alleged looting of funds meant for the programme.

He declined EFCCs invitation to report for questioning on July 28, 2015 on medical grounds, promising to do so on September 30, 2015. But he has remained at large ever since, amidst indications that he fled out of the country.

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There was pandemonium in Narayi community of Kaduna State on Thursday morning when protesters burnt down a church and a police outpost in the area.

The church set ablaze by the youth is called Celestial Church Narayi.

The protesters were reportedly angry over the death of 21 years old Sylvester Friday who was working in the church before his death, PREMIUM TIMES learnt.

The mob accused the pastor of the church, 78 years old Steven Shitu, of being responsible for the death.

The death occurred on Wednesday but police quickly put the pastor in protective custody because the protesters tried to lynch him. They alleged that the victim was used for ritual by the church pastor.

However, on Thursday morning, the protesters gathered again, setting the church and the police station ablaze.

The police had already taken the pastor away from there and there were no casualties from the violence, PREMIUM TIMES learnt.

Confirming the incident, the Kaduna State Police Command Public Relations Officer, Aliyu Muktar, said five people were arrested in connection to the incident.

Yes its true that some miscreants set ablaze a Celestial church and a police outpost in Narayi. The church was completely burnt but the police outpost was not burnt completely, he said.

The youth were angry that police gave the church pastor 78 old Steven Babatunde Shitu protective custody. They demanded for his released so as to lynch him. But our personnel refused to hand him over to them so they decided to take laws into their hands.

Our men dispersed them on Wednesday but they regrouped around 4 a.m. Thursday to attack the church and the outpost. So far five people have been arrested, he told PREMIUM TIMES in a telephone interview.

Mr. Muktar said normalcy has since returned to the area. He said the police will ensure all those involved are arrested and prosecuted.ADVERTISEMENT

The House of Representatives on Thursday resolved to investigate the operations and legality of the Special Presidential investigation Panel (SPIP) to ensure that it is in tandem with the law.

The resolution came after a deliberation on a motion titled, Motion of urgent public importance on the need to investigate the legality of the operations of the special presidential investigation panel for the recovery of public property.

The motion comes a day after the Federal Government moved to freeze all hidden assets that were reportedly traced to the Deputy Senate President, Ike Ekweremadu.

This move was made via an ex-parte motion filed by legal practitioner, Festus Keyamo on behalf of the Special Presidential Investigation Panel for the Recovery of Public Property.

The motion marked FHC/ABJ/CS/284/2018, specifically applied for an interim court order temporarily attaching/forfeiting the properties listed in Schedule B hereunder, to the Federal Government of Nigeria, pending the conclusion of further inquiry/investigation by the Special Presidential Investigation Panel for the Recovery of Public Property and/or possible arraignment of the Respondent.

Kingsley O. Chinda (PDP, Rivers state), who sponsored the motion explained that following the activities of the SPIP, the Attorney-General of the Federation (AGF), Abubakar Malami, has received several complaints from the general public on the need to take an in-depth look at the law viz-a-viz the various anti corruption agencies that are now established, particularly the Code of Conduct Bureau (CCB) and the Code of Conduct Tribunal (CCT).

He stated that the Public Property (Special Provision) Act is a spent law by virtue of the Code of Conduct Bureau and Tribunal Act and the functions specified by the Act to be performed through panels established by the President are now performed by the CCT which serves as a special court headed by a qualified Judge of a superior court of record in Nigeria to try the offences regarding the breach of approved conduct of public officers.

Beside the Code of Conduct Act, being a newer law on the subject matter, has made specific provisions on the matter.

It is a trite law that the court would construe a later act as repealing an earlier one if the two provisions cannot stand together or if they both make the same provisions dealing with a similar subject matter as established in Trade Bank Plc Vs. Lagos Island Local Govt.

There cannot be two parallel agencies of government no matter the manner of operation undertaking the same functions in whatever guise or form.

This more so where the functions are so similar that the public are meant to go through repeated processes and procedures which may infringe on their rights and give rise to series of litigation and the consequential loss of revenue both in overheads and the execution of awards in the damages.

The Special Presidential Investigation Panel (SPIP) ought not to have been set up in view of the existence of such institutions as the EFCC, ICPC and especially the CCB and the CCT, both created by law and supported by the 1999 constitution, he said.

Mr. Chinda further explained that the CCT is a special court whose Chairman is a qualified Judge of a superior court of record dealing with matters related to the subject whereas the Public Property (Special Provision) Act, gives jurisdiction to the Federal High Court under Section 2(2)b which is not only inconsistent with the Code of Conduct Bureau and Tribunal Act but inconsistent with section 251 of the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria which did not include the code of conduct matters under the jurisdiction of the Federal High Court Trade Bank plc Vs Lagos island Local Govt (2003).

He also expressed concern at the consequential economic implication of setting up multiple agencies with its ravaging effect on the revenue of government.

The House thereafter, unanimously resolved to investigate the activities of the SPIP.ADVERTISEMENT

A Federal Capital Territory High Court has adjourned the trial of former National Security Adviser, Sambo Dasuki, in the alleged money-laundering charges brought against him by the federal government till May 2 and 3 for definite trial.

A judge of the court, Husseini Baba-Yusuf, announced the new trial date in Abuja after being presented with the Supreme Court judgement of March 2, 2018 which ordered accelerated hearing into the case.

However, to ensure effective management of the two separate charges against Mr. Dasuki and other defendants, the court fixed April 13 for a pre-trial conference to be attended by seven Senior Advocates of Nigeria (SAN) involved in the case so as to enable them take common positions on documents from the prosecution and those from the defendants.

During the conference which will be presided over by Mr. Baba-Yusuf, all documents that are not contentious will be admitted from the bar while the contentious ones are to be tendered during trial to ensure speedy hearing of the cases which was filed in September 2015.

Senior counsels involved in the matter, especially Rotimi Jacobs for prosecution, Ahmed Raji, Akin Olujimi, Olajide Ayodele, Kayode Olatoke, Hakeem Afolabi and Solomon Umoh who are standing for different defendants in the trial all agreed with the Supreme Court decision for accelerated hearing and the pre-trial conference to sort out all the contentious issues.

Ahmed Raji, who led the legal team of Mr. Dasuki, had told the court that the decision of the Supreme Court indicated that the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) is different from State Security Service (SSS) and that both are not serving the same government.

The federal government had slammed charges against the former NSA Sambo Dasuki; Salisu Shuaib, Director Finance ONSA; Aminu Baba-Kusa, Acacia Holding Limited and Reliance Referral Hospital on alleged money-laundering and criminal breach of trust.

Although the charges was filed in 2015, proper trial could not commenced due to the failure of the federal government to allow the principal defendant in the matter, Sambo Dasuki, to enjoy the bail and other bails granted him by different courts since 2015.

In the bid to enforce the bail order, Mr. Dasuki had approached the Court of Appeal and Supreme Court to compel the federal government to allow him go on bail as ordered by the trial court, just like other defendants, to enable him access his lawyers and prepare for his defence as required by law.

However, both the Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court had in their separate judgements disagreed with Mr. Dasuki that the federal government did not obey the bail order.

The two court held that since his bail at the Kuje Prison was endorsed by the Controller of Prison and was released before he was re-arrested by another of the federal government, the bail had been obeyed at that level.

With the new Supreme Court decision, especially on accelerated hearing, full scale trial is now expected to commence on May 2.

Justice Baba-Yusuf in his brief comment had appealed to the senior lawyers involved in the matter to cooperate with one another, especially with the prosecution to allow the trial to flow so that justice of the case can be met within a reasonable time.

The judge said that as minister in the temple of justice, the senior lawyers should do away with sentiments and do their jobs as legal practitioners of reputable standing in the interest of justice for both parties.

At the proceeding, apart from Mr. Dasuki, former Governor of Sokoto, Attahiru Bafarawa; and former Finance Minister of State, Bashir Yuguda among others were all present in court to answer the charges against them.ADVERTISEMENT

Teleology Holdings Limited, the preferred bidder for Nigerias fourth largest telecom firm, 9mobile, has made a non-refundable deposit of $50 million to the Trustee for the Nigerian bank syndicate currently running the company.

In a statement on Thursday, the management of Teleology Holdings said it was putting finishing touches on its acquisition of 9mobile (formerly Etisalat) ahead of the March 22 deadline set by the financial advisers.

In the last few days, the company said, key executives of the organisation had been deep in meetings with the Nigerian bank syndicate, the regulatory authorities, and advisors. These meetings, it added, had culminated in the signing of the Share Purchase Agreement (SPA) and other contractual documents pertaining to the acquisition.

Adrian Wood, Teleologys Director, said the $50 million payment underscores the firms financial capability and readiness to revive the organisation.

9mobile is transiting into a new phase that will be defined by optimal value delivery: value to our employees, value to our customers, value to local communities and indeed to all stakeholders, said Mr. Wood, who was the pioneer Managing Director of MTN Nigeria.

He added that the new organisation to emerge would be engineering led and brand driven. In delivering service, we will strive to ensure that 9Mobile operations deliver fulfillment to our customers, empowerment to local communities, protection to the vulnerable, and excellent rewards not only to our shareholders but to all stakeholders.

Mr. Wood said Teleology has set out a 10-point plan that aggregates its mission and how it intends to turn the 9mobile organization around.

According to him, it plans to double the 9mobile network with new 3G/4G specific cell sites as well as several thousands of kilometers of fibre optic cable across the country. It will also drive a special program of rural internet coverage, focusing on 4G with broadband access planned for all of Nigerias 774 Local Government Areas.

Youth engagement and employment programs are also planned with all build contractors, distributors and consultants, he said, while investment in broadband internet access technologies which are completely new to Nigeria are also planned. Very importantly, he added, the 9mobile network will be optimized for high speed and high capacity data including imaging, video, games, music, IPTV and more.

Any 3-point plan or 3-dimension idea is naive and completely missing the scope and complexity of the urgent Nigerian need to be brought into the 21st-century broadband era, Mr. Wood said.

Teleology, he added, envisages an increase of 50% in direct employment in the new 9mobile. There is also an active plan to introduce within the first year, several million 4G-capable premium quality smartphones, at exceedingly affordable pricing.

Nigerians should look forward to a new regime of intensely exciting and innovative brand loyalty rewards programs, from the new 9Mobile, he said.

He disclosed that Teleology had entered into an alliance with Safaricom, the largest network operator in East Africa. Safaricom is famous for its global mpesa mobile financial services system, which advances financial inclusion and supports the network with the highest operating efficiencies in Africa.

Coming at a period when competition in the Nigerian telecom industry has for some years been limited to price wars between the various GSM companies, clearly, Teleologys coming will very likely herald a new era of intense competition and quest for market share among Nigerias telecom operators, said Mr. Wood.

Teleology is promoted by a group of 12 telecom industry veterans with considerable experience not only in Nigeria and Africa but in the global telecom space as well.

Mr. Wood used the opportunity to express thanks to Barclays Africa, the Financial Advisers to the transaction, the Nigerian bank syndicate, the fulsome backing and support of the Nigerian Communications Commission and the Central Bank of Nigeria for making 9mobiles survival possible, as well as the 9mobile management and staff who carried on in the face of skepticism, doubt and negative market sentiment.

Mr. Wood assured that additional details including formal relaunch plans would be unveiled in due course.A former governor of Jigawa State, Sule Lamido, on Thursday said his presidential ambition was not out of desperation for power, but for genuine service to the people of Nigeria.

Mr. Lamido made the statement in Lagos during a meeting with members of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in the state.

He said his decision to contest for the number one seat in the country was out of commitment to fix the country and reposition it for greatness.

The former governor said the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) had not done well in government, and so must be flushed out in the next election.

Mr. Lamido said the country had not fared better in security, economy and anti -graft war, on which they anchored their manifesto.

He cited the herdsmen killings and the resurgence of Boko Haram atrocities as some of the failings of the present government.

Mr. Lamido said the abduction of Dapchi schoolgirls, who were eventually returned, reflected the lack of capacity of the present government government to ensure security.

He urged the PDP to put its acts together to defeat the APC in 2019.

We in the PDP should put our acts together and ensure we flush APC out in 2019.

God would judge us if we allow the APC to return to power, the ex-governor who is being prosecuted for corruption, said.

Mr. Lamido urged the would-be delegates to the PDP national convention to look out for merit, consistency and loyalty to the party in choosing the partys presidential candidate.

He said he was eminently qualified to pick the party s ticket as he was consistent, committed and an avowed member of the PDP.

Mr. Lamido thanked members of the Lagos PDP for the warm reception accorded him and thanked the party chairman in the state for facilitating his coming to Lagos.

He said he once worked in Lagos and felt at home being with the PDP family in the state.

In his comments, the state party chairman, Moshood Salvador, said members were delighted to have Lamido in their midst.

He said the high turnout at the reception showed how much members loved him.

Mr. Salvador dismissed the insinuations in some quarters that PDP was divided in the state.

He said the fact that party executives across the state were at the reception meant that PDP in the state was one.

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PDP is not divided in the state. All the council excos are here. Everybody is here. The party is not divided.

Whatever bad people are saying about the party in the state is nothing but all lies, he said.

Mr. Salvador said he had done a lot to reposition the party since he was elected, and the spirit in the party was very high.

The News Agency of Nigeria reports that Lamido was accompanied on the visit by former Minister of Works, Mr Mike Onomalemen, among others.

(NAN)ADVERTISEMENT

Parents and residents of Dapchi village in Yobe State have said they have not come to the end of their collective grief over the abduction of their schoolgirls who were released by Boko Haram on Wednesday, until the 105th girl, held back because of her Christian faith, is rescued.

Of the 110 girls kidnapped in February from their secondary school in Dapchi, 104 were released on Thursday, with five others said to have died during the abduction. Leah Sharubu is the only one still with the Boko Haram.

PREMIUM TIMES was in Dapchi, Thursday morning, to meet a community still in grief over the non-release of the 15 years old schoolgirl whom her colleagues said was held back for failing to denounce her religion. The residents are also mourning five of their daughters who lost their lives on their way to captivity.

The residents said before the February Boko Haram attack, they were living in peace and relative harmony without anyone minding the religion or creed his or her neighbour practices.

We thank the Federal Government of Nigeria for releasing most of our daughters from the abduction of Boko Haram, but the government must understand that one of our daughters is still being held by the insurgents, said Dori Kadau, a community leader in Dapchi.

Today we mourn the death of five of our daughters after they were abducted by Boko Haram while pursuing their education in a public school. As humans we have no means of reversing their painful deaths even though they were supposed to be under the care and protection of government, but our sorrow will know no bound if one of the girls who was held back base on the religion she practices is not brought back to us.

We in Dapchi, believe that Islam is built on a foundation of freewill, where no one is compelled the religion except if he or she choses to. That Boko Haram decided to force Leah to become Muslim, was strange and unheard of. If the federal government claims it facilitated the release of our girls, we see no reason why they have to accept a situation where one of them is profiled base on her religion.

The community members later visited the family of Mr. and Mrs. Sharubu in their Dapchi home where they commiserated with the grieving parents and assured them of their collective solidarity until their daughter is released.

We cant accept any deal on our girls without one of them, Mr. Kadau told the Sharubus.

That is why we told our chairman of the abducted girls parents, Bashir Manzo, who is currently with the girls in Abuja that he should tell the president that the only favour we want from him is nothing but the rescue of Leah, our daughter who is still in captivity. An injury to one is an injury to all, that is the spirit that has been driving us here in Dapchi.

And to the Boko Haram, we have also sent across our plea through the media that they should fear God and empathise with the poor girl and release her for us.

Mr. and Mrs. Sharubu, natives of Hong Local Government Area of Adamawa State, who said they got married in Dapchi village where they have lived almost all their lives, thanked the leaders of Dapchi community for their continued love and solidarity.ADVERTISEMENT

The wife of Benue State governor, Eunice Ortom, says Eunice Spring of Life Foundation (ESLF) has treated over 20,000 people under its phase two of free medical outreach in the state.

Mrs. Ortom disclosed this on Thursday in Utonkon, Ado Local Government Area of the state, during the flag off of the third phase of the programme organised by ESLF, her pet project.

She said that the people were treated of various ailments such as malaria, diarrhoea and typhoid fever.

Mrs. Ortom emphasised that at the third phase of the free medical outreach, more people would be treated because the outreach was taking place in all the council wards in the state.

To strengthen the primary healthcare system for better service delivery, ESLF will donate autoclaves, blood pressure apparatus, needle holders, artery forceps, a complete kit for a surgeon to work successfully in a theatre.

These items will be donated to the most needy health centre at Ikpomolokpo.

Let me thank Echo Scan Services Limited, Abuja, for donating 10 modern hospital beds to us and we will distribute the beds to the needy primary health centres soon, she said.

The Programme Officer, ESLF, Tine Agernor, said that it was the utmost desire of the founder that all and sundry should have easy access to healthcare delivery.

Mr. Agernor emphasised that the establishment of the foundation was to intervene in three critical areas of education, health and economic empowerment.

He said that the third phase of the medical outreach would cover all the 276 council wards in the state.

The Executive Secretary, Benue Primary Health Care Board, Bem Ageda, appreciated the wife of the governor for reducing the burden of the board by embarking on free medical outreach and pledged the boards support.

The Deputy Speaker, Benue House of Assembly, James Okefe, Anthony Ogbu and Ekpe Ogbu all applauded the wife of the Benue governor for taking care of the downtrodden.

The APC Chairman, Ado Local Governmant Area, Alex Adadu, and the traditional ruler of Elonye, Obande Obeya, promised that the kind gesture would be reciprocated in 2019 by ensuring that the governor got overwhelming votes from the area.

(NAN)ADVERTISEMENT

President Muhammadu Buhari on Thursday in Gusau, Zamfara, presided over a town hall meeting in continuation of his tour of troubled areas across the country.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the president in company of his aides landed at the Gusau helipad at about 10.40 a.m. after taking off from Umaru Musa YarAdua international airport, Katsina.

The governors of Sokoto and Kebbi states, Aminu Tambuwal and Atiku Bagudu respectively, some cabinet ministers, traditional and religious leaders, top government officials were among those that received the president.

President Buhari reviewed a parade mounted by the Army and Air Force.

He is scheduled to address traditional rulers and other stakeholders during the visit, and condole with families and communities that suffered from various forms of violent crimes in the state.

Zamfara has witnessed cases of attacks by armed bandits with hundreds of innocent people killed and property worth billions of naira carted away or destroyed.

The recent attack by bandits at Birane village in Zurmi Local Government area of the state left over 50 people dead.

One of the most notorious bandits, Tsoho Buhari, popularly referred to as Buhari Daji, was recently killed by a repentant cattle rustler in the state.

(NAN)ADVERTISEMENT

Jigawa state government says in order to curb farmers/herders crises, it has identified 452 grazing reserves and will thus donate 5000 hectares of land to the Federal Governments initiative of cattle colonies.

Rabiu Miko, the state Executive Secretary Farmers/Herdsmen Board, told journalists this on Thursday in Dutse, Jigawa state capital.

Mr. Miko stated after surveying, the state mapped out the reserves and demarcated 80, out of which 57 are gazetted and the process of gazetting others is ongoing.

He explained that the process was done by the ministry of agriculture in collaboration with ministry of justice and the legislative arm of government.

He said Jigawa is among the state with large numbers of gazetted grazing reserves in the country.

Jigawa is among the first states to donate 5000 hectares of land to federal government for cattle colony, the hectares of land were not in one place, we split it across senatorial districts in the state so that each area can benefit.

The prevalence of clashes between Herders/Famers in Jigawa North-east zone was as a result of high concentration of livestock along the riverine area, the river Hadejia cut across the state from Ringim up-to Guri Local Government Area.

Those areas are blessed with vast land and fertile soil, farmers normally go there and cultivate, herders too go there for rearing of their animals, hence, conflict as a result of the concentration.

The agency is now retrieving all illegally encroached grazing reserves. The state has constituted a committee at the local and state level and we are retrieving and demarcating grazing reserves in the state.ADVERTISEMENT

Aminu Dayyabu, Executive Director, Katsina State Rural Water Supply and Sanitation Agency (RUWASSA), says 1.3 million people have gained access to clean water between 2015 and March 2018 in the state.

He said this in an interview with News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) on Thursday in Katsina.

He said that that out of the number, more than 850,000 people were provided with clean water through the Sanitation, Hygiene and Water in Nigeria (SHAWN) project.

Mr. Dayyabu said that 20 local government areas in the state were participating in the programme, which was supported by the United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF).

He said that the remaining 450,000 people were provided with potable water through the construction of boreholes in rural communities across the state by the state government.

Over 1,600 boreholes with hand pumps have been drilled for the rural dwellers under the SHAWN project.

Ten boreholes with hand pumps were also rehabilitated by the administration in each of the 34 local government areas to assist the people to have access to potable water.

Twenty-five motorised boreholes were also drilled, all in an effort to enhance potable water supply, particularly to the rural dwellers across the state.

Besides, six compartments of Ventilated Improved Pit (VIP) latrines were constructed in 240 primary schools in the state during the period under review, he said.

Mr. Dayyabu said that the schools were also provided with water and other sanitation facilities to enhance environmental sanitation and personal hygiene, which would strengthen efforts to prevent disease outbreaks.

He also said that the agency would provide water and sanitation facilities for 261 schools, 121 health centres, and 1,334 communities across the state before the end of the year.

(NAN)ADVERTISEMENT

The Kaduna state governor, Nasir El-Rufai has cautioned residents of the state to desist from taking laws into their hands.

Mr. El-Rufai gave the warning while condemning the burning of a church and police post by a mob at Narayi area of Kaduna state.

The mob accused the pastor of the church, 78-year-old Steven Shitu, of being responsible for the death of one Sylvester Friday.

The death occurred on Wednesday but police quickly put the pastor in protective custody because the protesters tried to lynch him. The mob alleged that the victim was used for ritual by the church pastor.

However, on Thursday morning, the protesters gathered again, setting the church and the police station ablaze.

Kaduna State Police Command Public Relations Officer, Aliyu Muktar, said five people were arrested in connection to the incident.

In a statement signed by Mr. El-Rufais spokesperson, Samuel Aruwan, the governor also directed security operatives to investigate the death of the labourer which was the genesis of the crisis.

It is wrong and illegal for anyone or group to take the law into their hands, the governor said.

He commiserated with the family of the deceased, but added that everyone who had concerns about the circumstances of his death would allow the law enforcement agencies to handle the matter.

Kaduna State Government will not tolerate attacks on places of worship and public property such as the police post. In a state that has endured four decades of violent conflict, there can be no condoning an attack on the offices of security agencies or a place of worship, an act that has often invited needless reprisals and escalation.

The government is determined to ensure vigorous prosecution of anyone indicted by the police investigation into the matter.A federal lawmaker, Shehu Sani (APC, Kaduna Central) has said that Nigeria is at war with deadly guerilla within the axis of Zamfara, Kaduna and Niger forests.

He made this statement on his official Facebook and twitter accounts while reacting to the recent killing of eleven soldiers in the state few days ago.

PREMIUM TIMES reported that 11 Nigerian soldiers were killed during an attack by armed bandits on a Nigerian military detachment at Kamfanin Doka, along Funtua road in Birnin Gwari Local government Area of Kaduna State.

The attack occurred on Tuesday night.

A former chairman of the local government who asked not to be identified because he has no authority to speak on it confirmed the incident, adding that three other soldiers and nine members of a vigilante group sustained gunshot injuries.

The bandits attacked the military based at Kamfanin Doka along Funtua road. Eleven soldiers lost their lives while three sustained injuries, he said.

The bandits also ambushed our vigilantes at Maganga, about 44 kilometres from Birnin Gwari this morning (Wednesday) when they were rushing there to assist the soldiers. About nine sustained gun shot injuries. They were rushed to General Hospital Birnin Gwari for treatment, he said.

The Kaduna State Governor, Nasir El-Rufai has condemned the killings. The army has, however, not spoken on the casualty from the attack.

In his post, Mr. Sani said, The Killings of Eleven soldiers by Criminal elements in Kampanin Doka and the earlier attack in Maganda in Birnin Gwari LG Kaduna state,stands condemned.

These killings once again confirms the tragedy that has become of the lives of the people of Birnin Gwari.We appreciate the service and the ultimate sacrifices of the fallen soldiers.My condolences to the Nigerian Army and the families of the deceased.This issue as always will be raised on the floor of the Senate.

We will demand more effort from Mr President to protect the people of Birnin Gwari from the siege and systemic killings.

When eleven soldiers were killed by bandits,it cannot just be about banditry.The nation is at war with a deadly guerrilla within the axis of Zamfara,Kaduna and Niger forests.Its time for the President to decisively & effectively act to protect the locals.

Some Nigerians have reacted to his tweets. Below are the reactions:

Not only the president, we the affected people should also play a role, a very prominent one, not just making noise but given important information that will guide the https://t.co/5kI8Tk6JQ6 apprehend the culprits.  Ahman Sheikh (@sheikh_ahman) March 22, 2018

I doubt, seriously, if the locals are of any interest to him. I mean how can, when the insurgents are funded through ransom money. Any Ransom paying government is insurgents friendly government  The Roaring Lion.(TRL) (@Oga__Boss) March 22, 2018

We're really at war with "ghost forces" but can the FG see them coming.  Uboh E. (@EmelikeUboh) March 22, 2018

As a Senetor of the federal republic of Nigeria what action have you taken beside the tweet ..you owe Nigerians security protection too sir  Dahiru Machu (@dahiru_machu) March 22, 2018

Sorry but the president is one of them. He has shown it by his attitude. The man who could deal decisively with IPOB and Niger Delta militants. He can't deal with them cause they are executing one agenda.  Akaelu Dora (@DoraAkaelu) March 22, 2018

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As long as the attack will not affect the flow of crude oil Mr President will not budge. Only those that their trouble will affect the flow of oil that Crocodile and Python will smile and dance.  Ezeudene (@Ezeudene) March 22, 2018

https://twitter.com/nollywoodshots7/status/976840276688998400

This is what happened in 48hrs in the US. Crime is not in Nigeria alone. The so called developed world suffers more than we do, so stop advertising your ignorance! pic.twitter.com/jbIViO6O0X  AMIABLE (@aminuAbdl) March 22, 2018

I appreciate you.. for the fact that you are saying things the way you see them, and not considering the damage it is causing to your party that forms the ruling government. May God Guide you in your ways  MR BASSEY (@donjossy) March 22, 2018

I AGREE WITH YOU SENATOR SANI, ESPECIALLY WHEN BOKO HARAM HAS TURNED TO UBER,PICK AND DROP AFTER RECEIVING PAY.GOVERNMENT WENT TO VARIOUS HOUSES TO RECOVER AND PACKAGE THE GIRLS.  ALOZIEORJI (@ALBELUSHI1970) March 22, 2018ADVERTISEMENT

Five students of Obafemi Awolowo University were on Thursday charged to court.

PREMIUM TIMES reported how the students were handed over to the police by the university management on Wednesday. The school accused them of assaulting a university official.

Witnesses told this paper the students opposed the forced eviction of students from a female hostel, Moremi, on Wednesday.

The five students, Gbenga Olaniran, Oyedeji Samson, Olajide Adedamola, Jimoh Oladipupo and Adeniji John, were present at the Ife Magistrate Court during the trial.

Students and journalists were denied access to the court room by the Federal Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) of the Nigerian Police. The team led by Askme Moses said it was so instructed by the Area Commander (AC) of the police.

The AC said no student or journalist should enter the court room, Mr. Moses said.

PREMIUM TIMES learnt from Opeyemi Oprah, the acting Students Union security officer present in court, that the arraigned students were granted bail. The bail terms for each of the students include N500,000 bond and provision of two sureties, who must be civil servants of level 11 and above as well as tax payers.

A counsel to the students, Barrister Philip, told PREMIUM TIMES the bail application was the first step before further court proceedings.

After the court sitting, students protested outside the court premises against the bail terms by raising placards and chanting songs.

Samuel Dunnex, a student and a member of the Democratic Socialist Movement (DSM), stated that the bail conditions were too stringent.

How do they expect the students to get N500,000, he said.Dozens of private waste operators on Wednesday marched to the Lagos House of Assembly to demand the intervention of lawmakers in the increasingly filthy state of the metropolis.

The operators appealed to the Assembly to save their business and the thousands of jobs they created.

In a letter addressed to the Speaker, Mudashiru Obasa, the waste operators pleaded that they be allowed to continue operation in both domestic and commercial waste collection.

That foreign investors should be encouraged to invest in the lacking infrastructure that will support effective waste management such as Material Recovery Facilities, Engineered Sanitary Landfill sites, etc, read the letter written by Ola Egbeyemi and Taiye Kolade, the groups chairman and secretary respectively.

For months, the private waste operators (also known as Private Sector Participants, PSP operators) in the state have been at loggerheads with the executive arm of the government over the latters decision to remove them from the domestic waste collection.

Governor Akinwunmi Ambode, last year, signed into law an environmental bill that empowered a concessionaire to take over the domestic collection of refuse across the state.

Afterward, the government launched a Cleaner Lagos Initiative that saw a Dubai-based firm, Visionscape Sanitation Solutions, contracted to handle domestic waste collection.

Aggrieved at the governments decision to remove them from the lucrative domestic waste business, the PSP operators headed to court where the judge encouraged an out-of-court settlement between the parties.

The settlement has remained deadlocked, as both parties have refused to shift grounds.

A PREMIUM TIMES report last month detailed how the Dubai-based firm had begun to recruit some of the local PSP operators to help in the evacuation of waste.

In their letter on Wednesday, the private waste operators said they are now facing a situation where a foreign company without capacity is trying to engage PSP operators who have almost 1,000 trucks and over 20 years of experience on the job.

The government has decided to restrict the PSP operators to manage only the commercial waste collection which is less than 20 per cent of our current activities, the letter read.

Private waste operators protesting at the Lagos House of Assembly

The current market value of the commercial waste collection is N301 million while the number of enlisted PSP operators are 365 with a total number of trucks of 931.

The commercial premises if shared based on capacity will result in revenue that is grossly inadequate for any operator hereby affecting our viability.

File photo of a local PSP operator evacuating the waste at Tinubu Square.

The problem is compounded by the closure of Olusosun dumpsite which will result in an increase in our logistics cost and adversely affect the turnaround time.

The operators said that an analysis of the commercial business currently offered them showed that only 31 companies earned 52 per cent of the commercial revenue.

Private waste operators protesting at the Lagos House of Assembly

The 31 operators represent only eight per cent of operators and they are nervous at the risk of seeing their revenue reduced significantly as a result of redistribution.

On the other hand, 92 per cent of operators either solely operate in the domestic waste collection or earn a significant revenue from it. They are currently facing a 100 per cent loss of revenue if and when Visionscape takes over the domestic waste collection.

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Private waste operators protesting at the Lagos House of Assembly

While the sharing of the commercial waste collection provides some revenue, it is still grossly inadequate to make them viable. The conclusion is that the policy to restrict the waste operator to only commercial waste collection will destroy all existing operators and investments.Several environmental and rights advocacy groups on Thursday marched to the Lagos House of Assembly to protest the planned privatisation of the state government-owned water corporation.

The Nigeria Labour Congress and some of its affiliate organisations including the Amalgamated Union of Public Services; Joint Action Front; as well other groups like the Labour, Health and Human Rights Development Centre; Center for Dignity; African Women Water Sanitation and Hygiene Network; and the Environmental Rights Action/Friends of the Earth Nigeria (ERA/FoEN) participated in the protest.

The organisers said the rally was held to commemorate the International Water Day and to address water challenges in the state.

The march began at the Under Bridge in Ikeja, the state capital, and ended at the House of Assembly where the protesters were barred from entering the building.

A government representative, Abdulkareem Dauda, received the letter from the protesters.

One of the protesters, Hassan Soweto, said the government should consider its actions in the water sector to avert further protests.

We will not stop until the Lagos State Government desists from privatising water. As you can see, new barricades have been erected to prevent Lagosians from accessing their lawmakers and it means they are not representatives of the people and they are not ready to listen to the people and they are telling people to take over the government and if that is what they want they will get it.

Veronica Nwanya, a representative of ERA/FoEN, said, Is it too much to ask that they make water accessible and available to Lagosians?

Muali Subair, President, South West zone of the Amalgamated Union of Public Corporation Civil Service and Recreational Services Employees (AUPCTRE), said it is governments responsibility to provide affordable water to its citizens.

We are here to celebrate International Water Day and it is the time to tell our government that we are saying no to any water bill. The responsibility of the government is to provide social amenities and water is paramount. Without water, there is no life and we need to remind our governor that his duty is to provide potable water for the people and not privatisation of water.

World Water Day: Groups protest Lagos govts planned water privatisation World Water Day: Groups protest Lagos govts planned water privatisation World Water Day: Groups protest Lagos govts planned water privatisation

Achike Chude, Vice Chairman of the Joint Action Front, warned the politicians to desist from pushing the people against the wall.

We must express the displeasure of the people of the state. Before 2015, we did not vote for officials to put a gate against the people that voted them in, Mr. Chude said.

World Water Day: Groups protest Lagos govts planned water privatisation World Water Day: Groups protest Lagos govts planned water privatisation World Water Day: Groups protest Lagos govts planned water privatisation

Everybody you see here are here to express their displeasure in the privatisation of water in the state. We cannot tax everything. The government has the responsibility to provide for the welfare of the people and on the issue of privatisation of water we are saying a capital no.

We want to inform Nigerian politicians that the people have been pushed to the point of resistance and the only way to avoid this is to change course. We cannot continue to tolerate all the hardship from the politicians to the people. Power belongs to the people and not to those in Abuja or anywhere.

World Water Day: Groups protest Lagos govts planned water privatisation World Water Day: Groups protest Lagos govts planned water privatisation World Water Day: Groups protest Lagos govts planned water privatisation

Suggesting an alternative to the water privatisation, Babalola Medayedupin, Executive Director of the Centre for Dignity said, Lagos set up a security trust fund and people contributed money to ensure Lagos is safe and you can attest to the fact that Lagos is safer.

Let the government set up a water trust fund to make water accessible to everybody. We know this privatisation is not to the favour of the common man but a selected few. We are saying no and until they agree to our terms we wont agree to theirs.

Responding, Mr. Dauda apologised to the protesters for the barricades erected to deny them entrance into the House of Assembly complex.

World Water Day: Groups protest Lagos govts planned water privatisation World Water Day: Groups protest Lagos govts planned water privatisation World Water Day: Groups protest Lagos govts planned water privatisation

Let me start on the barricade issue, it is not a problem to let you in if you can assure us that there will be total coordination. Not all protesters would be coordinated like you and we apologise for the barricade.

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On the water issue, I have received the letter given to me by the leader of the group and I would ensure that it is delivered to the governor as soon as he returns to the state and we would contact the names given for proper discussion. On behalf of the governor, we thank you for a peaceful protest.



World Water Day: Groups protest Lagos govts planned water privatisation World Water Day: Groups protest Lagos govts planned water privatisationADVERTISEMENT

The Independent Electoral Commission (INEC) in Oyo State says it has registered 231,072 new voters in the Continuous Voter Registration (CVR) since April 27, 2017.

Mutiu Agboke, the state INEC Resident Electoral Commissioner (REC), disclosed this on Thursday while addressing journalists in Ibadan, the state capital.

Mr. Agboke said the figure comprised of 118,590 males and 112,482 females.

He said that a total of 14,072 registered voters also approached the commission for transfer of their voting units from one location to another.

INEC has also attended to 13,860 registered voters whose Permanent Voter Cards (PVC) were defaced or lost.

Between April 27, 2017, and March 22, 2018, a total of 14,213 PVCs were distributed to their owners.

He, however, said that 648,840 PVCs have yet to be collected by their owners.

Mr. Agboke implored owners of the uncollected PVCs to visit designated INEC offices for collection.

He also urged eligible voters who had yet to register to visit INEC offices in their respective Local Governments Areas (LGAs) to register.

Mr. Agboke disclosed that the second phase of the CVR would begin on April 3, across the 33 LGAs in the state.

He gave assured the electorate that the commission would continue to work hard to ensure a hitch-free exercise.

Mr. Agboke disclosed that 102 capturing machines and 50 backup machines were used in the first phase and that additional machines had been deployed by INEC headquarters to ensure the success of the second phase.

He further said that INEC would commence the display of voters data from March 26 in all its offices across the 33 LGAs.

He enjoined all registered voters to visit their respective registration centres to check the correctness or otherwise of their data.

(NAN)Worried about the heaps of refuse across the Lagos State, the state House of Assembly on Thursday summoned three Commissioners, their respective Permanent Secretaries as well as the Accountant General of the state.

The resolution followed a motion moved under Matters of Urgent Public Importance, by Lanre Ogunyemi the Chairman, House Committee on Education.

Mr. Ogunyemi expressed his displeasure that refuse had taken over Lagos.

The House summoned the Accountant-General, Abimbola Umar, to come and brief them on all issues surrounding the handing over of the state environmental matters to Visionscape.

The Assembly also summoned the Attorney-General and Commissioner of Justice, Adeniji Kazeem; the Commissioner for Finance, Akinyemi Ashade and the Commissioner for Environment, Babatunde Durosinmi-Etti.

The House directed the permanent secretaries of the affected ministries to appear before its ad hoc committee on the matter alongside the commissioners.

They also said the Commissioner for Finance and Accountant-General of the State should stop further payment to Visionscape pending the outcome of their investigation.

The House constituted an eight-member Ad-Hoc Committee that the affected public officers should report to.

The committee is headed by Bayo Oshinowo, Chairman of the House Committee on Lands.

Other members include Yinka Ogundimu, Chairman, House Committee on Finance and Funmilayo Tejuoso, Chairman, House Committee on Judiciary, Human Rights and Petitions.

Abiodun Tobun, Chairman, House Committee on Works and Infrastructure, Saka Fafunmi, Chairman, House Committee on Environment and Mosbood Oshun, Chairman, House Committee on Public Accounts (State) are also members.

The rest are Gbolahan Yishawu, the Chairman, House Ad hoc Committee on Budget and Economic Planning and Rasheed Makinde, Chairman, House Committee on House Services.

Mr. Ogunyemi representing Ojo Constituency II in the House, said there was the need to avert serious epidemic in the state.

It is known by everybody that refuse is now taking over the streets of Lagos.

I observe that there is need to address the menace. It is an eyesore that brings shame to the State, Mr. Ogunyemi said.

The lawmaker recalled that the state witnessed serious flooding in previous years due to drainage blockage.

He said the refuse in the state posed more danger that could lead to a recurrence.

The lawmaker said the company in charge in the collection and disposal of the waste  Visionscape  had failed to meet up line in with the vision provided in the new law passed to tackle issues around refuse in the state.

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In his remarks, the Speaker of the House, Mudashiru Obasa, said: the consolidated law on the Environment which the House passed was in order.

But it needs to be pointed out that a provision of the concession included in the law was not complied with.

The government ought to revert to the House before bringing in Visionscape.

The law was made in the interest of Lagos residents; it is to benefit the people.

We dont know visionscape, so we can only invite those that we know  those that the law recognises.

The lawmakers took turns to condemn inappropriate management of waste in the state, saying it would have adverse effects on health of residents.

Some lawmakers said that the handing over of waste management to Visionscape was retrogressive.

Mr. Yishawu wondered how the state government was funding visionscape despite the resolution of the House in 2018 budget that the fund should be domiciled in Consolidated revenue in the ministry of budget.

(NAN)ADVERTISEMENT

A Lagos High Court, Igbosere, has fixed May 3 for the hearing of a case filled by PSP operators seeking to stop the Lagos State Government from relieving them of their job of managing domestic wastes.

Justice Taofiquat Oyekan-Abdullahi on Thursday ruled that the matter should proceed for trial after both parties failed to reach out of court settlement as directed by the court.

Ms. Oyekan-Abdullahi had on March 7 given the parties a two-week ultimatum to settle out of court.

The counsel to the PSP operators, Tosin Adesioye, however, told the courtt on Thursday that they could not reach an agreement within the two-week mandate given by the court.

Mr. Adesioye said that the defendants only sent their counsels on the three occassions the parties met at the office of the Attorney-Genenal of the state.

Joined in the suit as respondents are the Commissioner for Environment and the Attorney-General/Commissioner for Justice.

Others are Visionscape Sanitation Solutions Ltd and ABC Sanitation Solutions Ltd.

The counsel to Visionscape Sanitation Solutions Ltd and ABC Sanitation Solutions Ltd., Francis Akinlotun, said that the issue of willingness to collaborate had been resolved.

Mr. Akinlotun said that there were four issues of contention but two among them had been resolved.

In principle, there is no disagreement. The issues here are the granular terms of this marriage. We have resolved all but two, which has to do with pricing and duration.

Save for price, we have moved on all other issues. However, the claimants are not satisfied with the degree of compromise that we have reached.

Even as we speak, the negotiations are ongoing, there is a disagreement on price, the price is even being calculated for different geo locations and that is where we are, he said.

Counsel to first, second and third defendants, Adetokunbo Ladega, said that the position of the defendants was to probably proceed to trial.

We seem to have made progress, but there are two fundamental issues that had continued to surface, Ms. Ladega said.

Responding, Justice Oyekan-Abdullahi, said I think you should go to trial.

To that extent, she fixed May 3 for hearing of pending application.

(NAN)Contact

Devart

***@devart.com Devart

End

--Devart team, a recognized vendor of professional database management software for developers and DBAs, has announced the release of Devart Excel Add-ins 1.7. The update allows much more convenient and flexible editing and refreshing cloud and database data, including:1)that eliminates a lot of previous limitations. Now a user can freely: Copy and paste data in the Edit Mode, including pasting multiple rows, and copying data in the same workbook and worksheet with the imported table Use many Excel editing features, like formulas, scripts, Autofill, etc. Sort and filter of the table with imported data, hiding and unhiding columns, allows editing data outside of the imported table on the same worksheet, etc. ...and many more.2)that preserve user's data, entered outside of the table with imported data on the same worksheet, data sorting settings in this table and table styles. Moreover, the new Refresh options allow users: See the refresh operation progress and cancel it if necessary Disable confirmation dialog boxes when starting refresh3)that include the following handy features: Excel Add-in for Zendesk has supported custom fields for certain Zendesk objects Excel Add-in for Magento offers a more convenient connection editor for connecting to Magento 2 servers Excel Add-in for Salesforce now allows connecting to Salesforce SandboxIt's worth to mention that Devart Excel Add-ins now fully support Windows scaling for high-DPI devices and display progress of commit changes operations.For more information about improved Devart Excel Add-ins, please visit https://www.devart.com/ excel-addins/ Devart is one of the leading developers of database tools and administration software, ALM solutions, data providers for various database servers, data integration and backup solutions. The company also implements Web and Mobile development projects.Learn more about Devart at https://www.devart.comOver the past 40 years of China's reform and opening up, the State Council has carried out seven major institutional reforms, in which the approach of "dissolving" was almost always prioritized. Take the reform in 1998 as an example: the constituent departments of the State Council were streamlined and reorganized from 40 to 29 in number, with the administrative staff downsized by nearly half.

In its latest institutional reform, in addition to "dissolving," the government has attached greater importance to "optimizing." Take the restructuring in agriculture area as an example. In the past, the management functions related to agriculture were divided among departments including the Ministry of Agriculture, the Ministry of Water Resources, the National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Finance and the State Forestry Administration. No matter how hard the civil servants worked, the communication and coordination of multiple departments still reduced work efficiency and increased costs. There was a joke in describing the situation: "A frog will be under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Agriculture when it jumps into a rice field, and it will be under the jurisdiction of the State Forestry Administration when it jumps into the nearby woods."

The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs established after the reform has assimilated the scattered functions related to agriculture and thus put right the relation between authority and responsibilities. At the same time, its management function has expanded to the "rural areas," which is a social sphere. This symbolizes the increasing attention paid to the social and personal development in the countryside following this round of institutional reform.

Everybody knows reforms are difficult, especially when they involve the redistribution of powers and interests. Therefore, they require good design and resolute enforcement, with no compromises or exemptions at any time for any individuals or events. As the curtain rises, the administrative restructuring, as other reforms of the country, will be carried out in full sail.

A Chinese proverb goes like this: the government functions well, and the people enjoy peace. The on-going institutional reform will help bring about positive changes to China's economic and social development, and it echoes the founding mission and objective of the Communist Party of China and the Chinese government. That is: serve the people.

China Mosaic

http://www.china.org.cn/video/node_7230027.htm

A good government and a harmonious people  the goal of China's all-round institutional reform

http://www.china.org.cn/video/2018-03/22/content_50736248.htm

About China.org.cn

Founded in 2000, China Internet Information Center (China.org.cn/China.com.cn) is a key state news website under the auspices of the State Council Information Office, and is managed by China International Publishing Group. We provide round-the-clock news service in ten languages. With users from more than 200 countries and regions, we have become China's leading multi-lingual news outlet introducing the country to the outside world.



We are one of the country's authoritative outlets for government press releases and are authorized to cover various major events. "Live Webcast" is our online webcasting service to present State Council Information Office press conferences in both Chinese and English languages. We are reputed for timely and accurate delivery of news and information, and wide interactions with audiences. In addition, we are authorized to publish and live broadcast major events and press conferences of ministries, local government agencies and institutions as well as enterprises.



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In the future, CIIC will continue to offer authoritative information about China, tell China's stories, voice China's opinions, and introduce a vivid, panoramic and multicultural China to the world through multi-language, multi-media and multi-platforms.

SOURCE China.org.cnFinal Interpretation of Geophysics

The TEM (transient electromagnetic survey) testing has detected substantial aquifers over a broad area at its Chiron Project in the Pocitos Salar, Salta Province, Argentina. Low resistivity sequences at 10 meters, 20 meters and 100 meters are interpreted as rich sandy acquifers. See below.

The surface acquifer can easily be seen but it is quite narrow in comparison to the acquifer at 3605m MASL (meters above sea level) which is 80 metres in depth. These extremely low values suggest the brines are highly conductive and not consolidated at this depth. We would expect middle size grains of sand and some clay components (that improve conductivity).

The brines at the southern end of the concession have built up close to the tectonic/fault structure adjacent to the concessions. The geological model of the alluvial fans filling the basin with sands and lithium bearing minerals from the local ignimbrites and andesites is consistent with a porous sandy medium.

Drilling at Chiron

The Puna region has experienced unusually high levels of rains due to "La Nina" weather patterns over the last several weeks. The company is ready to mobilize a drilling crew as soon as the Salar dries and drill pads are in. All the necessary permitting is in place and drill hole locations have been finalized. The company has sufficient funds to carry out the drilling program. A total of 3200 meters is planned across all tenements.

Guayatayoc Permit Update

The company has completed all the necessary requirements under current mining legislation for the approval of its drilling permit and we are waiting for the Government of Jujuy to set the date for our UGAMP meeting. The meeting is comprised of several government agencies, communities and the company to discuss the project and final approval of a drilling permit.

Qualified Person

Phillip Thomas, BSc Geol, MBusM, MAIG, MAIMVA, (CMV), a Qualified Person as defined under NI 43-101 regulations, has reviewed the technical information that forms the basis for portions of this news release, and has approved the disclosure herein. Mr. Thomas is not independent of the Company as he is an officer and shareholder.

On Behalf of the Board of Directors,

A.I.S. Resources Limited

Marc Enright-Morin

President and CEO

About A.I.S. Resources



A.I.S Resources Limited a TSX-V listed investment issuer, was established in 1967 and is managed by experienced, highly qualified professionals who have a long track record of success in lithium exploration, production and capital markets. Through their extensive business and scientific network, they identify and develop early stage projects worldwide that have strong potential for growth with the objective of providing significant returns for shareholders. The Company's most recent activities have been the exploration of lithium properties in Northern Argentina.

Contact

A.I.S. Resources Limited

Marc Enright-Morin

President and CEO

T: 778-892-5455

E: [email protected]

W: www.aisresources.com

ADVISORY: This press release contains forward-looking statements. More particularly, this press release contains statements concerning the anticipated use of the proceeds of the Private Placement. Although the Corporation believes that the expectations reflected in these forward-looking statements are reasonable, undue reliance should not be placed on them because the Corporation 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. The intended use of the proceeds of the Private Placement by the Corporation might change if the board of directors of the Corporation determines that it would be in the best interests of the Corporation to deploy the proceeds for some other purpose. The forward-looking statements contained in this press release are made as of the date hereof and the Corporation undertakes no obligations to update publicly or revise any forward-looking statements or information, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise, unless so required by applicable securities laws. Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

Contact

A.I.S. Resources Limited

Marc Enright-Morin

President and CEO

T: 778-892-5455

E: [email protected]

W: www.aisresources.com

SOURCE A.I.S. Resources Limited

Related Links

http://www.aisresources.com

MELBOURNE, Australia, March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- An AJC leadership delegation has just concluded a three-day mission to Australia. The visit included stops in Canberra, the nation's capital, and Melbourne.

The program in Australia was led by AJC CEO David Harris and coordinated with AJC's longstanding partner organization, AIJAC, led by its executive director, Dr. Colin Rubenstein, and chairman, Mark Leibler.

The delegation met with, among others, Senator Mathias Cormann, Minister for Finance and Government Leader in the Senate; Alan Tudge, Minister for Citizenship and Multicultural Affairs and Member of Parliament; Bill Shorten, Leader of the Labor Party and Leader of the Opposition; Justin Bassi, National Security Advisor to Prime Minister Turnbull; Senator Jim Molan; Senator Kristina Keneally; Lloyd Brodick of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade and seven of his colleagues; Mark Dreyfus, Member of Parliament and former Attorney-General of Australia; Matthew Guy, Leader of the Opposition in the state of Victoria; U.S. Charge d'Affaires James Caruso; and Israeli Ambassador Mark Sofer.



A highlight of the visit was a reception hosted by Ambassador Sofer, a longtime friend of AJC, in honor of David Harris and the AJC delegation. In attendance were parliamentarians, diplomats from the United States, Israel, Japan, Egypt, Greece, and Cyprus, and Jewish community leaders.



Additionally, the group met with several top journalists and political thinkers, had a luncheon in Parliament with ten senators from the Parliamentary Friends of Israel, one of the largest such groups in Parliament, and met with 70 leaders of the Jewish community in Melbourne.

The principal topics discussed during the mission were: (i) Australian-U.S. and Australian-Israeli relations; (ii) the Iranian nuclear threat and the JCPOA; (iii) Asia-Pacific regional developments; and (iv) Australia's approach to immigration and integration.

"We came to Australia to express our gratitude and admiration for the country's indispensable alliance with the United States and steadfast support for the State of Israel," said AJC CEO David Harris, who has visited the country many times. "This is truly an exceptional nation, one that has stood with us shoulder-to-shoulder time and again. In today's turbulent world, the links only become still more important. And the Australian Jewish community is among the most impressive, vibrant, and dedicated in the world."

AJC maintains close ties with Australian diplomats in the U.S. through its Asia Pacific Institute, led by Shira Loewenberg and chaired by Jeff Stone. The institute, the first of its kind, was founded to address the growing importance of the region to the U.S. and the Jewish people.

SOURCE American Jewish Committee

Related Links

http://www.ajc.org

PASADENA, Calif., March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Inc. (NYSE: ARE), an urban office REIT uniquely focused on collaborative life science and technology campuses in AAA innovation cluster locations, today announced that its board of directors has appointed Stephen A. Richardson and Peter M. Moglia as co-chief executive officers, effective April 23, 2018. Together, Mr. Richardson and Mr. Moglia will jointly lead the company and will report to full-time executive chairman Joel S. Marcus and the board of directors. In addition to serving as co-chief executive officer, Mr. Moglia will continue his responsibilities as chief investment officer.

"With their collective 38 years at Alexandria, Steve and Peter represent the essence of Alexandria's DNAsmart, passionate and mission-driven people with total humility," said Mr. Marcus. "They are both exceptional leaders and culture carriers. Their strategic expertise and insights, combined with their dedication to our noble mission and talented team, are vital to driving our company performance. I look forward to continuing to work closely with Steve and Peter and ensuring a seamless transition for our employees, tenants, shareholders and partners."

Mr. Richardson joined Alexandria in 2000 and has served as the company's chief operating officer since 2011. He has also guided the management and growth of all aspects of the San Francisco region since 2005, including leading and growing the respected regional team; maintaining and deepening key real estate, life science, technology and government relationships; and driving and participating in key strategic acquisitions over the years, most notably the 2004/2005 acquisition of land parcels and related entitlements to develop 1.4 million SF of state-of-the-art office/laboratory space in Mission Bay, San Francisco. Mr. Richardson played a meaningful role in the company's early recognition of the cross-pollination of life science and technology companies and in leveraging the trend to drive demand for its urban innovation cluster campuses. With his long-term focus on the company's strategic planning and revenue growth, Mr. Richardson is a crucial member of Alexandria's executive management team. In his new role as co-chief executive officer, he will assume additional leadership responsibilities.

Since joining Alexandria in 1998, Mr. Moglia has served the company in many important roles of increasing scope and responsibility, most recently as chief investment officer overseeing the company's strategic growth through a focus on acquisitions and dispositions, development and redevelopment, leasing and joint ventures. He also concurrently leads Alexandria's real estate finance team, which provides critical support across a range of underwriting, due diligence and financing activities. During his two-decade career at Alexandria, Mr. Moglia has been very instrumental in the company's disciplined allocation of capital and has directed pivotal, value-added acquisitions, including the Alexandria Center for Life Science  New York City, the Illumina campus in San Diego and the Alexandria Center at One Kendall Square in Cambridge. Prior to his role as chief investment officer, he managed the company's Seattle asset base and operations from 2003 through 2008, during which time the region doubled its revenue. As a real estate veteran with extensive industry and market knowledge, Mr. Moglia has directly contributed to Alexandria's strong performance and is well positioned to assume the additional responsibilities of co-chief executive officer.

About Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Inc.



Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Inc. (NYSE: ARE), an S&P 500 company, is an urban office REIT uniquely focused on collaborative life science and technology campuses in AAA innovation cluster locations, with a total market capitalization of $17.9 billion and an asset base in North America of 29.6 million SF as of December 31, 2017. The asset base in North America includes 22.0 million RSF of operating properties, including 1.7 million RSF of development and redevelopment of new Class A properties currently undergoing construction. Additionally, the asset base in North America includes 7.6 million SF of future development projects, including 1.6 million SF of near-term projects undergoing marketing for lease and pre-construction activities and 3.8 million SF of intermediate-term development projects. Founded in 1994, Alexandria pioneered this niche and has since established a significant market presence in key locations, including Greater Boston, San Francisco, New York City, San Diego, Seattle, Maryland and Research Triangle Park. Alexandria has a longstanding and proven track record of developing Class A properties clustered in urban life science and technology campuses that provide its innovative tenants with highly dynamic and collaborative environments that enhance their ability to successfully recruit and retain world-class talent and inspire productivity, efficiency, creativity and success. Alexandria also provides strategic risk capital to transformative life science and technology companies through its venture capital arm. We believe our unique business model and diligent underwriting ensure a high-quality and diverse tenant base that results in higher occupancy levels, longer lease terms, higher rental income, higher returns and greater long-term asset value. For additional information on Alexandria, please visit www.are.com.

CONTACT: Joel S. Marcus, Chief Executive Officer, Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Inc., (626) 578-9693

SOURCE Alexandria Real Estate Equities, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.are.com

EMERYVILLE, Calif., March 21, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The success of a low-cost online master's degree program at the Georgia Institute of Technology has demonstrated the unique needs of online degree-seekers. According to a study of the program, the online computer science degree did not appear to draw away any of the on-campus student body from their higher-tuition courses. However, despite the success of this program, many online degrees remain expensive. American Financial Benefits Center (AFBC), a document preparation company that helps student loan borrowers apply and recertify for federal programs that may lower payments, encourages borrowers who want to further their education online to seek out affordable options.

"So many online programs are just as expensiveor more sothan on-campus degrees," said Sara Molina, Manager at AFBC. "But for people who already have student loans, these are the only options for furthering their education that fit into their lives."

The master's degree program at Georgia Tech in question is one of the biggest of its kind, with upwards of 6,000 enrolled students. Students are paying around $6,600 for their degree. This degree is becoming popular as massive online open courses (MOOCs) become popular, which also offer lower-cost learning experiences. While the master's program is not open to everyone, it is more accessible in the same way MOOCs are. Students in the Georgia Tech program and enrollees of MOOCs are often working individuals who are looking to advance their careers with a new credential.

However, a lot of online degrees are still pricey. Tuition and fees vary widely with each institution, but this website cites $29,000 as the cost of an online graduate degree from a public university. Though the online student may be able to work concurrently and forgo the expense of moving or living near campus, an online degree may still be burdensome.

AFBC urges any student loan borrower to seek out more affordable options that work for them. While quality should not be ignored, lower-cost master's degrees or MOOCs that offer certificates may be good alternatives to expensive online advanced degrees. Many online programs can be financed with federal student loans, but AFBC asks current borrowers to be careful before adding to their debt balance.

AFBC helps clients apply for and recertify enrollment in federal repayment plans intended to keep their payments affordable. Borrowers in these plans are obligated to make payments on their loans which are calculated based on income and family size.

"AFBC helps clients maintain enrollment in federal repayment programs by assisting with annual recertifications that are intended to keep the borrowers up-to-date with the loans they have now," said Molina. "And we want to encourage smart decisions in all areas of life, including when it comes to getting more education or possibly taking on more debt."

About American Financial Benefits Center

American Financial Benefits Center is a document preparation company that helps clients apply for federal student loan repayment plans that fit their personal financial and student loan situation. Through its strict customer service guidelines, the company strives for the highest levels of honesty and integrity.

AFBC is a member of the Association for Student Loan Relief (AFSLR), and each representative on the phone has received the Certified Student Loan Professional certification through the International Association of Professional Debt Arbitrators (IAPDA).

Contact

To learn more about American Financial Benefits Center, please contact:

American Financial Benefits Center

1900 Powell Street #600

Emeryville, CA 94608

1-800-488-1490

[email protected]

Related Links

AFBC home page

SOURCE American Financial Benefits Center

Related Links

http://afbcenter.com

NEW YORK, March 21, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- American Media, Inc. today made the following statement regarding its interest in media brands being offered for sale by Meredith Corporation.

"American Media, Inc. no longer has any interest in acquiring any of the former Time Inc. brands being made available for sale by Meredith Corporation and remains focused on continuing to grow its recent acquisitions of Us Weekly and Men's Journal as well as its current roster of celebrity and lifestyle media brands."

SOURCE American Media, Inc.ROHNERT PARK, Calif., March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- By the time graduate students start school, they are often independent and do not have the same financial support from family that they might have had as an undergraduate. Graduate students without support may have to take out student loans to cover not only the tuition but also the total cost of attending their school. This can translate to a high loan balance upon graduation. Ameritech Financial, a private document preparation company that assists student loan borrowers to understand and apply for federal loan repayment programs that potentially lower their monthly payments, encourages graduate school loan borrowers to understand their repayment choices.

"Student loan borrowers don't always fit the stereotypical image of someone fresh from undergrad," said Tom Knickerbocker, executive vice president of Ameritech Financial. "They are often grad students who are more established in their careers and lives, but still face a lot of student debt."

While there are different types of loans available to graduate students, federal PLUS loans allow students to borrow up to the full cost of attendance. These loans are direct loans, issued directly from the Department of Education. Depending on the kind of degree, PLUS loans can amount to high five-figure loan balances or even six-figure balances by the time a student leaves a graduate program.

Having a high debt balance because of graduate school can be daunting. Additionally, PLUS borrowers who were graduate students may be older, with families of their own, married or totally financially independent. Such circumstances may complicate their finances. However, borrowers of existing PLUS loans are currently eligible for certain repayment plans and forgiveness programs that may make their repayment process easier.

Income-driven repayment plans, for instance, refer to several different programs that base the borrower's monthly payment on income and family size. Even for borrowers who may have a higher salary because of their credentials earned in graduate school, their student loan debt may still be high relative to their income. An income-driven repayment plan may lower the borrower's monthly payment in order for the borrower to stay current on the loan and not fall into delinquency or default.

Income-driven repayment plans require an application and yearly recertification. Ameritech Financial is a private company that offers assistance to borrowers with these application and recertification processes.

"As student loan borrowers get older and have more responsibilities, they may need more repayment options when it comes to their loans," said Knickerbocker. "Ameritech Financial helps with the application process for income-driven repayment plans in order to assist borrowers in hopefully having a better repayment experience."

About Ameritech Financial

Ameritech Financial is a private company located in Rohnert Park, California. Ameritech Financial has already helped thousands of consumers with financial analysis and student loan document preparation to apply for federal student loan repayment programs offered through the Department of Education.

Ameritech Financial is a member of the Association for Student Loan Relief (AFSLR), and each representative on the phone has received the Certified Student Loan Professional certification through the International Association of Professional Debt Arbitrators (IAPDA).

Ameritech Financial prides itself on its exceptional customer service.

Contact

To learn more about Ameritech Financial, please contact:

Ameritech Financial

5789 State Farm Drive #265

Rohnert Park, CA 94928

1-800-792-8621

[email protected]

Related Links

Ameritech Financial home page

SOURCE Ameritech FinancialIRVINE, Calif., March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- ATTOM Data Solutions, curator of the nation's premier property database, today released its Q1 2018 Single Family Rental Market report, which ranks the best U.S. markets for buying single family rental properties in 2018.

The report analyzed single family rental returns in 449 U.S. counties each with a population of at least 100,000 and sufficient rental and home price data. Rental data was from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, and home price data was from publicly recorded sales deed data collected and licensed by ATTOM Data Solutions (see full methodology below).

View interactive map displaying SFR returns in all 449 counties analyzed

The average annual gross rental yield (annualized gross rent income divided by median purchase price of single family homes) among the 449 counties was 8.9 percent for 2018, down from an average of 9.2 percent in 2017.

"Despite declining returns in many areas, the single-family rental market continues to grow thanks to more activity by smaller and middle-tier investors," said Daren Blomquist, senior vice president at ATTOM Data Solutions. "The biggest increase in market share over the past year has come among investors owning six to 10 single family rentals, followed by those owning between 11 and 100 rentals. These smaller to mid-tier investors are benefitting from newfound efficiencies in acquisition, financing and property management that allow them to buy outside their backyard in areas with higher potential returns, and to leverage their money to buy more properties."

Counties in Baltimore, Macon, Montgomery, Detroit, Atlanta post highest rental returns

Counties with the highest potential annual gross rental yields for 2018 were Baltimore City, Maryland (28.6 percent); Bibb County, Georgia in the Macon metro area (21.8 percent); Montgomery County, Alabama, in the Montgomery metro area (21.7 percent); Wayne County, Michigan in the Detroit metro area (21.7 percent); and Clayton County, Georgia in the Atlanta metro area (20.3 percent).

"With continued job growth in Cleveland and Atlanta, Divvy is seeing a significant year-over-year increase in the percent of highly-qualified single-family renters, who are often less than two years away from mortgage qualification," said Tiffany Li, co-founder of Divvy Homes, a tech startup that provides lease options with an equity-building component. "This population is seeking SFRs in neighborhoods that are largely owner-occupied and with family-friendly amenities and good schools. We've continued to see strong and growing demand through the Midwest and Southeast for lease options and other unconventional rental options that allow highly-qualified renters to move towards homeownership."

Along with Wayne County, Michigan, the highest potential annual gross rental yields among counties with a population of at least 1 million were Cuyahoga County (Cleveland), Ohio (11.6 percent); Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania (10.0 percent); Cook County (Chicago), Illinois (9.5 percent); and Harris County (Houston), Texas (9.5 percent).

"At Roofstock we are seeing increasing interest from investors in a number of SFR markets that have historically not gotten much love from the large institutional players," said Gary Beasley, CEO and co-founder at Roofstock, an online marketplace for single family rentals. "These include many cities in the Midwest, South, Southeast and even certain markets in the Northeast. Investors are attracted to the strong rental yields in many of these less flashy cities like Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Detroit, as well as perennial favorites like Atlanta, Houston and Charlotte which have been popular with investors for several years. The nice thing about SFR is there is enough variety out there that there really is something for every investor, depending on their unique objectives."

Rental returns increase from year ago one-third of counties

Potential annual gross rental yields for 2018 increased compared to 2017 in 150 of the 449 counties analyzed in the report (33 percent) led by Rowan County, North Carolina in the Charlotte metro area (up 36 percent); Randolph County, North Carolina in the Greensboro metro area (up 32 percent); Tazewell County, Illinois, in the Peoria metro area (up 21 percent); Baltimore City, Maryland (up 21 percent); and Kings County, California in the Hanford-Corcoran metro area (up 20 percent).

"As the stock market starts to show some weaknesses, investors continue to put their money into cash flowing assets such as rental properties," said Ross Hamilton, CEO at Connected Investors, an online community for real estate investors. "Many view rental real estate as a way to recession-proof their income and retirement."

Among counties with a population of at least 1 million, those with the biggest increase in potential annual gross rental yields for 2018 compared to 2017 were Harris County (Houston), Texas (up 7 percent); King County (Seattle), Washington (up 7 percent); Queens County, New York (up 5 percent); Contra Costa County, California (up 4 percent); and Cook County (Chicago), Illinois (up 3 percent).

"The single-family rental market in Seattle remains strong, which is a good thing for the people who own the rentals, but not so good for tenants as rents continue to escalate," said Matthew Gardner, chief economist with Windermere Real Estate, covering the Seattle market. "Demand for rentals is high but some of this is due to Seattle's rising home prices. Growth in rental rates is robust in the core Seattle market, but as you move further away from the city it starts to soften due to more modest income growth in those areas."

Counties in DC, Bay Area, Nashville, Brooklyn post lowest rental returns

Counties with the lowest potential annual gross rental yields for 2018 were Arlington, Virginia, in the Washington, D.C. metro area (3.6 percent); Santa Clara County, California, in the San Jose metro area (3.6 percent); San Mateo County, California, in the San Francisco metro area (3.7 percent); Williamson County, Tennessee, in the Nashville metro area (4.0 percent); and Kings County (Brooklyn), New York (4.0 percent).

Along with Santa Clara County, California and Kings County, New York, the lowest potential annual gross rental yields among counties with a population of at least 1 million were in Orange County (Los Angeles metro area), California (4.5 percent); Fairfax County, (Washington, D.C. metro area) Virginia (4.6 percent); and Los Angeles County, California (4.9 percent).

Rents rising faster than wages in 84 percent of markets

Rents rose faster than wages in 375 of the 449 counties analyzed (84 percent), including Los Angeles County, California; Cook County (Chicago), Illinois; Harris County (Houston), Texas; Maricopa County (Phoenix), Arizona; and San Diego County, California.

Wages rose faster than rents in 74 of the 449 counties analyzed (16 percent), including Nassau County (Long Island), New York; Pima County (Tucson), Arizona; Westchester County, New York; Erie County (Buffalo), New York; and Duval County (Jacksonville), Florida.

Best SFR growth markets in Cleveland, Columbia, Pittsburgh, Rockford, Atlanta

The report identified 24 "SFR Growth" counties where average wages grew over the past year and with potential 2018 annual gross rental yields of 10 percent or higher.

The 24 SFR Growth markets included Cuyahoga County (Cleveland), Ohio; Richland County (Columbia), South Carolina; Westmoreland County (Pittsburgh), Pennsylvania; Winnebago County (Rockford), Illinois); and Clayton County, Georgia in the Atlanta metro area.

"Relatively low home prices combined with rising rents in most areas make Ohio still very attractive for single family rental investors," said Matthew L. Watercutter, broker of record for HER Realtors, covering the Dayton, Columbus and Cincinnati markets in Ohio. "Demand for these single family rentals is helping to push up home prices faster than rents in the majority of Ohio markets, indicating that the opportunity may not be as stellar in future years."

View interactive table showing all 25 best SFR growth markets.

Best low-risk, high return SFR markets in Greensboro, Joplin, Atlanta, Charlotte

The report identifies 30 "Low Risk-High Return" counties where the 2018 potential annual gross rental yields were 10 percent or higher and where the investment property vacancy rate was 5 percent or lower and where the property tax rate was 1 percent or lower.

These counties were led by Randolph County (Greensboro), North Carolina; Jasper County (Joplin), Missouri; Newton County (Atlanta), Georgia; Rowan County (Charlotte), North Carolina; and Wicomico County (Salisbury), Maryland.

View interactive table showing all 30 best low-risk, high return markets.

Methodology

For this report, ATTOM Data Solutions looked at all U.S. counties with a population of 100,000 or more and with sufficient home price and rental rate data. Rental returns were calculated using annual gross rental yields: the 2016 50th percentile rent estimates for three-bedroom homes in each county from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), annualized, and divided by the median sales price of residential properties in each county.

ATTOM Data Solutions also incorporated weekly wage data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and demographic data from the U.S. Census into the report.

The millennial generation was defined as someone who was born between the years 1979 to 1993.

About ATTOM Data Solutions

ATTOM Data Solutions blends property tax, deed, mortgage, foreclosure, environmental risk, natural hazard, and neighborhood data for more than 155 million U.S. residential and commercial properties multi-sourced from more than 3,000 U.S. counties. A rigorous data management process involving more than 20 steps validates, standardizes and enhances the data collected by ATTOM, assigning each property record with a persistent, unique ID  the ATTOM ID. With more than 29.6 billion rows of transactional-level data and more than 7,200 discrete data attributes, the 9TB ATTOM data warehouse powers real estate transparency for innovators, entrepreneurs, disrupters, developers, marketers, policymakers, and analysts through flexible delivery solutions, including bulk file licenses, APIs and customized reports.

Media Contact:

Christine Stricker

949.748.8428

[email protected]

Data and Report Licensing:

949.502.8313

[email protected]

SOURCE ATTOM Data Solutions

Related Links

http://www.attomdata.com

ATLANTA, March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- BioIQ, a healthcare technology company driving the shift to value-based care, announced today it has raised $26.5M. The financing was led by HealthQuest Capital, with Arboretum Ventures and select insiders joining the syndicate. BioIQ will use the funding to fuel continued growth and support its mission to help transform the U.S. healthcare system and impact more than 100 million lives.

"BioIQ is committed to helping all people understand their health risks and connect to personalized interventions. Our intelligent technology fundamentally changes how individuals navigate the national healthcare system, resulting in greater convenience, improved access, higher quality outcomes and reduced costs," said Justin Bellante, CEO, BioIQ. "This capital gives us additional resources to strengthen and expand the value of our solutions to clients, further helping them drive the shift to value-based care."

BioIQ works with some of the largest health plans, employers and health service providers in the nation, as well as a network of retail pharmacies, laboratories and accountable care organizations. These partnerships facilitate consumer navigation and the secure exchange of healthcare data -- all part of a streamlined, simplified approach to care gap closure and preventive health testing. Since its inception in 2005, BioIQ has launched thousands of successful programs serving millions of participants.

Said Todd Creech, Partner at HealthQuest Capital, "We look forward to working with the BioIQ team and helping them achieve a new level of growth and success as they deliver quality care solutions for payers, providers and patients."

With this capital investment, BioIQ will continue to expand its reach into new markets and accelerate product growth and innovation. The company's dramatic growth has been driven by increased demand among health plans and employer organizations including four of the five largest health plans in the U.S. and many of the leading Fortune 100 companies.

Paul McCreadie, Managing Director at Arboretum Ventures added, "BioIQ has developed a unique solution to driving meaningful patient engagement across health system and provider clients to deliver better health outcomes at lower cost. We're excited to be partners in this exciting opportunity."

With this investment, Todd Creech and Paul McCreadie have joined BioIQ's board of directors. Stifel acted as exclusive financial advisor to BioIQ for the financing.

About HealthQuest Capital

HealthQuest Capital makes early growth investments in innovative commercial-stage healthcare companies that are improving both patient outcomes and healthcare economics. Investments focus on medical products, diagnostics, healthcare IT and technology-enabled healthcare services. The HealthQuest investing team includes deep operational, clinical and scientific expertise and worldwide relationships throughout the healthcare industry that can be leveraged to add value to its portfolio companies. HealthQuest Capital is headquartered in Belmont, California with west coast and east coast offices. Learn more at www.healthquestcapital.com.

About Arboretum Ventures

Arboretum Ventures is a venture capital firm specializing in the healthcare sector. Founded in 2002, the firm manages $450 million across four investment funds. The investment team targets capital efficient companies that can meaningfully reduce healthcare costs and improve efficiency in focus areas of medical devices, diagnostics, healthcare IT and healthcare services. Arboretum is headquartered in Ann Arbor, Michigan. More information is available at www.arboretumvc.com.

About BioIQ

BioIQ simplifies health testing for health plans, employers and enterprises of all sizes and empowers people to take action to improve their health. The BioIQ Platform provides tools for orchestrating health testing programs and biometric screening events across multiple vendors, as well as multi-channel communication tools for engaging and motivating participants at every step of the way. BioIQ also provides a means to intervene when risks for chronic conditions are found  with a unified solution for keeping at-risk populations up-to-date with health testing, along with data analysis for managing risks and resources to help people live their healthiest lives. Since 2005, BioIQ has launched thousands of successful health testing programs serving millions of participants.

Contact:

Charles King

VP, Marketing, BioIQ

805.310.4260

[email protected]

SOURCE BioIQ

Related Links

https://www.bioiq.com

STOCKHOLM, March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

Professors Bruce Rittmann and Mark van Loosdrecht are named the 2018 Stockholm Water Prize Laureates for revolutionizing water and wastewater treatment.

Professors Mark van Loosdrecht and Bruce Rittmann are widely recognized as leaders in the field of environmental biotechnology-based processes for water treatment. Their pioneering research and innovations have led to a new generation of energy-efficient water treatment processes that can effectively extract nutrients and other chemicals - both valuable and harmful - from wastewater.

Mark van Loosdrecht is Professor in Environmental Biotechnology at Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands. Bruce Rittmann is Regents' Professor of Environmental Engineering and Director of the Biodesign Swette Center for Environmental Biotechnology at the Biodesign Institute, Arizona State University, USA.

On receiving news of the prize, Professor van Loosdrecht said: "I'm very excited and pleased! This is a recognition not just of our work but of the contributions microbiological engineering can make to the water sector."

In its citation, the Stockholm Water Prize Nominating Committee recognizes Professors Rittmann and van Loosdrecht for "pioneering and leading the development of environmental biotechnology-based processes for water and wastewater treatment. They have revolutionized treatment of water for safe drinking, and refined purification of polluted water for release or reuse - all while minimizing the energy footprint".

The professors' research has led to new processes for wastewater treatment currently being used around the globe. "Traditionally we have just thought of pollutants as something to get rid of, but now we're beginning to see them as potential resources that are just in the wrong place," says Professor Rittmann.

"Together, Professors Rittmann and van Loosdrecht are leading, illuminating and demonstrating the path forward in one of the most challenging human enterprises on this planet - that of providing clean and safe water for humans, industry, and ecosystems," says SIWI's Executive Director Torgny Holmgren.

Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden will present the prize to Professors Rittmann and van Loosdrecht on behalf of H.M. King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden, Patron of Stockholm Water Prize, at a royal award ceremony on 29 August, during World Water Week in Stockholm.

Note to Editors:

For more on the Laureates: http://www.siwi.org/swp2018

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/SIWImedia

Twitter: https://twitter.com/siwi_water hashtag: #SWP2018

Contact information: Rowena Barber, SIWI, +46-812-136-039

[email protected]

SOURCE Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI)JERUSALEM, March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

Cyber 2 Automotive Security, (c2a) today announced that its patented Stamper technology, which protects the connected car from cyber threats, is now being made available to auto manufacturers and suppliers worldwide on a royalty free license basis. The news comes in response to a recently issued warning from The U.S. Homeland Security Cybersecurity response team, cautioning automobile makers to review new research highlighting significant flaws in vehicle control modules affecting the security of chips in cars, and to review their current systems to prevent possible denial-of-service attacks and other mischief.

Michael Dick, CEO of c2a Security said, "We are proud to offer the market a royalty free solution to this problem. Upcoming compliance requirements will drive the development of innovative frameworks that support the early identification, mitigation and management of risks and we are happy to contribute to the safety of drivers and passengers worldwide."

Cyberattacks have dominated the headlines and devastated a slew of companies over the past few years, compromising millions of people's personal information and costing billions of dollars in losses to those businesses. Recently the world has seen the devastating effects of chip level attacks such as Spectre and Meltdown affecting processors worldwide. c2a has developed a revolutionary safety and security layer for the next generation of connected vehicles to protect all of the hundreds of semiconductor chips and processors in the car. This revolutionary solution includes bringing its Stamper firewall type functionality into the car network, as well as multi-network anomaly detection, microprocessor protection and diagnostics over IP infrastructure.

Moshe Raines, Managing Partner at Labs/02, c2a's lead investor said, "The automotive industry now realizes the critical need for cyber protection. Bringing this critical functionality to car manufacturers around the world on a royalty free basis will make all cars much safer from cyber hackers."

Notes to Editors

ABOUT C2A SECURITY: The key pain-point of the next generation vehicles (connected and autonomous cars) is the networks' safety and security. c2a Security has developed a revolutionary safety and security layer for the next generation vehicle starting from the chip level, with a unique, easy to implement and low-cost solution to protect connected cars from malicious attacks. These solutions include patent-pending firewall type functionality into the car network, multi-network anomaly detection, microprocessor protection and diagnostics over IP infrastructure. C2A is endorsed by the Israel Innovation Authority as a cybersecurity company. For more information on c2a Security - http://www.c2a-sec.com / email: [email protected].

For press materials click here.



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SOURCE Cyber 2 Automotive Security (c2a)IRVING, Texas, March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Caris Life Sciences, a leading innovator in molecular science focused on fulfilling the promise of precision medicine, today announced the acceptance of four abstracts, including two featured poster presentations, for presentation at the Society of Gynecologic Oncology (SGO) Annual Meeting on Women's Cancer, being held March 2427, 2018, in New Orleans, LA. The studies were conducted in collaboration with industry-leading academic and clinical institutions employing the company's proprietary Caris Molecular Intelligence Comprehensive Genomic Profiling Plus (CGP+) tumor profiling platform that assesses DNA, RNA and proteins to aid clinicians in delivering the most optimal and personalized treatment plan for each patient.

"The success of immunotherapies is opening a new era in the treatment of gynecologic tumors. Caris is leading the way in identifying patients more likely to respond to these drugs with our PD-L1, MSI and TMB testing," said W. Michael Korn, M.D., Chief Medical Officer of Caris Life Sciences. "We are excited to be a part of the annual SGO meeting where we can share our experience with these important biomarkers across several gynecologic cancer types."

Featured Poster Sessions:

Immune checkpoint expression, microsatellite instability, and mutational burden: Identifying immune biomarker phenotypes in uterine cancer

(Abstract #84)

Sunday, March 25 , 3:45  4:45 p.m. CT

Elite Hall AB

Authors: N.L. Jones , J. Xiu, T. Herzog, I. Winer.

Institutions: University of South Alabama Mitchell Cancer Institute, Caris Life Sciences, UC Health Barrett Cancer Center, Wayne State University

Mutational burden, tumor immune checkpoint expression, and microsatellite instability in gynecologic malignancies: Implications for immune therapy

(Abstract #85)

Sunday, March 25 , 3:45  4:45 p.m. CT

Elite Hall AB

Authors: I. Winer, N.L. Jones , J. Xiu, A. Ellerbrock, J. Brown, T. Herzog.

Institutions: Wayne State University , University of South Alabama Mitchell Cancer Institute, Caris Life Sciences, Levine Cancer Institute, Carolinas Medical Center, UC Health Barrett Cancer Center

Poster Sessions:

Distinct molecular profiles and potential therapeutic targets in androgen receptor stratified ovarian cancer patients

(Poster #395)

Sunday, March 25 , 3:30  4:30 p.m. CT

Empire A

Authors: N.L. Jones , J. Xiu, J.M. Scalici, M.A. Finan, I. Winer, J. Young Pierce , R.P. Rocconi. Institutions: University of South Alabama Mitchell Cancer Institute, Caris Life Sciences, Wayne State University

Molecular variation in uterine carcinosarcoma: Are there therapeutic opportunities?

(Poster #391)

Sunday, March 25 , 3:30  4:30 p.m. CT

Empire A

Authors: E.K. Crane, K. Poorman, R.W. Naumann, D.L. Tait, R.V. Higgins , J. Brown,T. Herzog. Institutions: Levine Cancer Institute, Carolinas Medical Center, Caris Life Sciences, UC Health Barrett Cancer Center

About Caris Life Sciences 

Caris Life Sciences is a leading innovator in molecular science focused on fulfilling the promise of precision medicine through quality and innovation, and the world's leading immunotherapy diagnostic expert. Caris Molecular Intelligence, the company's Comprehensive Genomic Profiling Plus (CGP+) molecular testing service, assesses DNA, RNA and proteins, including microsatellite instability (MSI), tumor mutational burden (TMB) and PD-L1, to reveal a molecular blueprint to guide more precise and personalized treatment decisions. The ADAPT Biotargeting System, the company's revolutionary and unbiased profiling platform, is currently being utilized for drug target identification, therapeutic discovery and development, fixed tissue-based companion diagnostics, blood-based cancer screening and biomarker identification. Headquartered in Irving, Texas, Caris Life Sciences offers services throughout the U.S., Europe, Asia and other international markets. To learn more, please visit www.CarisLifeSciences.com.

Media Inquiries:

The Ruth Group

Kirsten Thomas / Joanna Zimmerman

[email protected] / [email protected]

Tel: +1-508-280-6592 / +1-646-536-7006



SOURCE Caris Life Sciences

Related Links

http://www.carislifesciences.com

"I'm thrilled to be collaborating with Hong Kong Airlines on this exciting project. There are so many similarities between what I do at Cockscomb every day and what they do in the air so there was a natural synergy from the beginning. I'm really looking forward to being a part of another group that puts their guests first and truly values hospitality above all else," said Cosentino.

He added: "I've been mesmerized with Hong Kong for years and am excited that more people will get to explore its vibrant culture and rich culinary history via this new route."

Hong Kong Airlines is bringing Chef Cosentino's flair for innovative cuisine onboard its flights out of San Francisco, and will offer a new Business Class inflight menu consisting of delectable dishes  described by the chef as "big in flavor, rich in texture." Chef Cosentino has designed a comprehensive menu of 12 dishes, consisting of a series of appetizers, main courses and desserts that will be rotated regularly. Highlights include charred avocado & shrimp louie; roasted chicken breast persillade, celery root puree & oyster mushrooms; as well as chocolate cremeaux & fennel pollen shortbread cookies. Chef Cosentino's new menu will also be expanded to flights out of Los Angeles later in the year.

Mr George Liu, Hong Kong Airline's Chief Marketing Officer, commented: "Hong Kong Airlines remain committed to offering the very best inflight dining experience to our customers. Having already previously worked with several well-established names within the culinary field, we are now extremely excited to partner with Chef Cosentino who has created a hearty menu filled with dishes that showcase popular San Franciscan cuisine with his very own signature twist."

About Hong Kong Airlines

Established in 2006, Hong Kong Airlines is a full-service airline firmly rooted in Hong Kong. The airline flies to nearly 40 destinations across Asia Pacific and North America and also maintains codeshare and interline agreements with 95 airline partners. Hong Kong Airlines has been awarded the four-star rating by Skytrax. Hong Kong Airlines has also been recognised for its excellent On-Time Performance, having been ranked by air travel intelligence company OAG as Asia's most punctual airline and the second globally in 2017.

SOURCE Hong Kong AirlinesBRUSSELS, March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approves label change for UCB's CIMZIA  (certolizumab pegol)

(certolizumab pegol) Data added to the label includes first-of-their-kind pharmacokinetic studies demonstrating negligible to low transfer of CIMZIA through placenta and minimal transfer to breast milk from mother to infant1,2

UCB announced today that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved a label update that includes pharmacokinetic data showing negligible to low transfer of CIMZIA (certolizumab pegol) through placenta and minimal transfer to breast milk from mother to infant. These data provide essential information to healthcare providers to inform the care of women with chronic inflammatory disease, including rheumatoid arthritis (RA), ankylosing spondylitis (AS), psoriatic arthritis (PsA) and Crohn's disease (CD), throughout their reproductive health journey.

Chronic inflammatory diseases such as RA, AS, PsA and CD often affect women of childbearing age.3 Approximately 17% of patients with these chronic inflammatory diseases in the U.S. are women aged 18-45.4 Research in RA and CD patients has shown that the consequences of active disease during pregnancy can have serious implications for both mother and infant, including an increased risk of miscarriage,5 difficulties in the third trimester and birth, an increased risk of preterm delivery, and the infant being small for gestational age.6, 4

"It is well recognized that women with chronic inflammatory disease face uncertainty during motherhood, given the lack of information on treatment during pregnancy and breastfeeding. Many women with chronic inflammatory disease discontinue their biologic treatment during pregnancy, often when they need disease control the most," said CRADLE lead study author Megan E. B. Clowse, MD, MPH, Duke University Medical Center. "These data for CIMZIA provide important information to empower women and healthcare providers making decisions about treatment during pregnancy and breastfeeding."

"Recognition and public support for the unique family planning needs of women with chronic inflammatory disease is crucial for this underserved population. The label change for CIMZIA is important for women and their treating physicians to make informed decisions to manage their condition along their pregnancy journey. During this significant time in their lives, we're proud to offer support and important treatment information to women and their physicians as they plan for pregnancy and adequate disease management," said Emmanuel Caeymaex, Head of Immunology and Executive Vice President, Immunology Patient Value Unit, UCB. "UCB is executing on its Patient Value Strategy to connect the unmet needs of patients with innovative science. This new label update reaffirms UCB's commitment to providing cutting edge research, developing medicines that treat serious, chronic diseases and supporting underserved patient populations with unmet needs, like women of childbearing age."

Limited data from the ongoing pregnancy registry on use of CIMZIA in pregnant women are not sufficient to inform a risk of major birth defects or other adverse pregnancy outcomes.

Some women with rheumatic chronic inflammatory disease experience persistent moderate-to-high disease activity during pregnancy. These women are faced with difficult questions regarding the impact of active disease flares on themselves and their babies, and need more information on therapeutic intervention.7-12 Given the fact that postpartum disease flares occur in 50-90% of women with chronic inflammatory diseases, women who are considering breastfeeding, along with their treating physicians, face a conflict between the risks of maternal medications and the health benefits of breastfeeding for mother and infant.2,7

UCB has been leading the way in studying how biologic drugs impact women of childbearing age. Two key areas of focus are the transfer of a biologic drug through the placenta to the fetus and via the mother's breast milk to the infant. Anti-TNF lactation data historically has been based on case reports without any controlled studies. However, UCB is changing the way this research is conducted. The findings from two first-of-their-kind studies have strong implications for this patient population as they consider pregnancy. Based on results from the landmark CRIB study, there is negligible to low placental transfer evident from mother to child during pregnancy. Data from CRADLE, the prospective pharmacokinetic trial measuring the presence of an anti-TNF in breast milk, found minimal transfer of CIMZIA during lactation. UCB developed the CRADLE study with input from the FDA, including the agency's Division of Pediatric and Maternal Health.

The approval of the CIMZIA label update is based on data from the post-marketing pharmacokinetic CRIB and CRADLE studies. The studies included women with RA, PsA, AS and CD.

About the CRIB Study1



CRIB was a pharmacokinetic study assessing the potential level of placental transfer of certolizumab pegol (CZP) from pregnant women to their infants. The study followed sixteen women ( 30 weeks gestation) who were already receiving CZP at approved doses.

The study found that CZP levels were below the lower limit of quantification (LLOQ = 0.032 micrograms/ML) in 13 out of 15 infant blood samples at birth, and in all samples at weeks four and eight. One infant had a minimal CZP level of 0.042ug/ML, which was 0.09% of the mother's plasma concentration at birth. In a second infant, delivered by emergency Caesarean section, the concentration was 0.485 mcg/mL, which was 4.49% of the mother's plasma concentration at birth. At Week 4 and Week 8, all 15 infants had no measurable concentrations. No anti-CZP antibodies were detected in mothers, umbilical cords, or infants. Among 16 exposed infants, one serious adverse reaction was reported in a neonate who was treated empirically with intravenous antibiotics due to an increased white blood cell count; blood cultures were negative. These data indicate negligible to low placental transfer of CZP from mothers to infants, suggesting minimal in-utero fetal exposure during the third trimester.

About the CRADLE Study2



The primary objectives of the CRADLE pharmacokinetic study were to determine the concentration of CZP in human breast milk and the average daily infant dose, an estimation of the daily dose of maternal CZP ingested by the breastfeeding infant.

Among 137 breast milk samples from 17 mothers, 56% had no measurable CZP; the remaining samples showed minimal levels of CZP. The median of the estimated average daily infant doses was 0.0035 mg/kg/day (range: 0 to 0.01 mg/kg/day). The percentage of the maternal dose (200 mg CIMZIA dosed once every 2 weeks), that reaches an infant ranged from 0.56% to 4.25% based on samples with measurable certolizumab pegol concentration.

In CRADLE, no serious adverse reactions were noted in the 17 infants in the study. Adverse events in mothers exposed to CZP were consistent with the known safety profile of CZP.2

About CIMZIA in the US

CIMZIA is the only Fc-free, PEGylated anti-TNF (Tumor Necrosis Factor). CIMZIA has a high affinity for human TNF-alpha, selectively neutralizing the pathophysiological effects of TNF-alpha.

CIMZIA is indicated for the treatment of adults with moderately to severely active rheumatoid arthritis, adults with active psoriatic arthritis (PsA), and adults with active ankylosing spondylitis (AS).

In addition, it is indicated for reducing signs and symptoms of Crohn's disease and maintaining clinical response in adult patients with moderately to severely active disease who have had an inadequate response to conventional therapy. See important safety information including risk of serious bacterial, viral and fungal infections and tuberculosis below.

Important Safety Information about CIMZIA in the US

Risk of Serious Infections and Malignancy

Patients treated with CIMZIA are at an increased risk for developing serious infections that may lead to hospitalization or death. Most patients who developed these infections were taking concomitant immunosuppressants such as methotrexate or corticosteroids. CIMZIA should be discontinued if a patient develops a serious infection or sepsis. Reported infections include:

Active tuberculosis, including reactivation of latent tuberculosis. Patients with tuberculosis have frequently presented with disseminated or extrapulmonary disease. Patients should be tested for latent tuberculosis before CIMZIA use and during therapy. Treatment for latent infection should be initiated prior to CIMZIA use.

Invasive fungal infections, including histoplasmosis, coccidioidomycosis, candidiasis, aspergillosis, blastomycosis, and pneumocystosis. Patients with histoplasmosis or other invasive fungal infections may present with disseminated, rather than localized disease. Antigen and antibody testing for histoplasmosis may be negative in some patients with active infection. Empiric anti-fungal therapy should be considered in patients at risk for invasive fungal infections who develop severe systemic illness.

Bacterial, viral and other infections due to opportunistic pathogens, including Legionella and Listeria.

The risks and benefits of treatment with CIMZIA should be carefully considered prior to initiating therapy in patients with chronic or recurrent infection. Patients should be closely monitored for the development of signs and symptoms of infection during and after treatment with CIMZIA, including the possible development of tuberculosis in patients who tested negative for latent tuberculosis infection prior to initiating therapy.

Lymphoma and other malignancies, some fatal, have been reported in children and adolescent patients treated with TNF blockers, of which CIMZIA is a member. CIMZIA is not indicated for use in pediatric patients.

Patients treated with CIMZIA are at an increased risk for developing serious infections involving various organ systems and sites that may lead to hospitalization or death. Opportunistic infections due to bacterial, mycobacterial, invasive fungal, viral, parasitic, or other opportunistic pathogens including aspergillosis, blastomycosis, candidiasis, coccidioidomycosis, histoplasmosis, legionellosis, listeriosis, pneumocystosis and tuberculosis have been reported with TNF blockers. Patients have frequently presented with disseminated rather than localized disease.

Treatment with CIMZIA should not be initiated in patients with an active infection, including clinically important localized infections. CIMZIA should be discontinued if a patient develops a serious infection or sepsis. Patients greater than 65 years of age, patients with co-morbid conditions, and/or patients taking concomitant immunosuppressants (e.g., corticosteroids or methotrexate) may be at a greater risk of infection. Patients who develop a new infection during treatment with CIMZIA should be closely monitored, undergo a prompt and complete diagnostic workup appropriate for immunocompromised patients, and appropriate antimicrobial therapy should be initiated. Appropriate empiric antifungal therapy should also be considered while a diagnostic workup is performed for patients who develop a serious systemic illness and reside or travel in regions where mycoses are endemic.

Malignancies

During controlled and open-labeled portions of CIMZIA studies of Crohn's disease and other diseases, malignancies (excluding non-melanoma skin cancer) were observed at a rate of 0.5 per 100 patient-years among 4,650 CIMZIA-treated patients versus a rate of 0.6 per 100 patient-years among 1,319 placebo-treated patients. In studies of CIMZIA for Crohn's disease and other investigational uses, there was one case of lymphoma among 2,657 CIMZIA-treated patients and one case of Hodgkin's lymphoma among 1,319 placebo-treated patients. In CIMZIA RA clinical trials (placebo-controlled and open label), a total of three cases of lymphoma were observed among 2,367 patients. This is approximately 2-fold higher than expected in the general population. Patients with RA, particularly those with highly active disease, are at a higher risk for the development of lymphoma. The potential role of TNF blocker therapy in the development of malignancies is not known.

Malignancies, some fatal, have been reported among children, adolescents, and young adults who received treatment with TNF-blocking agents (initiation of therapy 18 years of age), of which CIMZIA is a member. Approximately half of the cases were lymphoma (including Hodgkin's and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma), while the other cases represented a variety of different malignancies and included rare malignancies associated with immunosuppression and malignancies not usually observed in children and adolescents. Most of the patients were receiving concomitant immunosuppressants.

Cases of acute and chronic leukemia have been reported with TNF-blocker use. Even in the absence of TNF-blocker therapy, patients with RA may be at a higher risk (approximately 2-fold) than the general population for developing leukemia.

Postmarketing cases of hepatosplenic T-cell lymphoma (HSTCL), a rare type of T-cell lymphoma that has a very aggressive disease course and is usually fatal, have been reported in patients treated with TNF blockers, including CIMZIA. The majority of reported TNF blocker cases occurred in adolescent and young adult males with Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis. Almost all of these patients had received treatment with the immunosuppressants azathioprine and/or 6-mercaptopurine (6-MP) concomitantly with a TNF blocker at or prior to diagnosis. Carefully assess the risks and benefits of treatment with CIMZIA, especially in these patient types.

Melanoma and Merkel cell carcinoma have been reported in patients treated with TNF-antagonists, including CIMZIA. Periodic skin examinations are recommended for all patients, particularly those with risk factors for skin cancer.

Heart Failure

Cases of worsening congestive heart failure (CHF) and new onset CHF have been reported with TNF blockers. CIMZIA has not been formally studied in patients with CHF. Exercise caution when using CIMZIA in patients who have heart failure and monitor them carefully.

Hypersensitivity

Symptoms compatible with hypersensitivity reactions, including angioedema, dyspnea, hypotension, rash, serum sickness, and urticaria, have been reported rarely following CIMZIA administration. Some of these reactions occurred after the first administration of CIMZIA. If such reactions occur, discontinue further administration of CIMZIA and institute appropriate therapy.

Hepatitis B Reactivation

Use of TNF blockers, including CIMZIA, has been associated with reactivation of hepatitis B virus (HBV) in patients who are chronic carriers of this virus. Some cases have been fatal. Test patients for HBV infection before initiating treatment with CIMZIA. Exercise caution in prescribing CIMZIA for patients identified as carriers of HBV, with careful evaluation and monitoring prior to and during treatment. In patients who develop HBV reactivation, discontinue CIMZIA and initiate effective anti-viral therapy with appropriate supportive treatment.

Neurologic Reactions

Use of TNF blockers, including CIMZIA, has been associated with rare cases of new onset or exacerbation of clinical symptoms and/or radiographic evidence of central nervous system demyelinating disease, including multiple sclerosis, and with peripheral demyelinating disease, including Guillain-Barre syndrome. Rare cases of neurological disorders, including seizure disorder, optic neuritis, and peripheral neuropathy have been reported in patients treated with CIMZIA. Exercise caution in considering the use of CIMZIA in patients with these disorders.

Hematologic Reactions

Rare reports of pancytopenia, including aplastic anemia, have been reported with TNF blockers. Medically significant cytopenia (e.g., leukopenia, pancytopenia, thrombocytopenia) has been infrequently reported with CIMZIA. Advise all patients to seek immediate medical attention if they develop signs and symptoms suggestive of blood dyscrasias or infection (e.g., persistent fever, bruising, bleeding, pallor) while on CIMZIA. Consider discontinuation of CIMZIA therapy in patients with confirmed significant hematologic abnormalities.

Drug Interactions

An increased risk of serious infections has been seen in clinical trials of other TNF blocking agents used in combination with anakinra or abatacept. Formal drug interaction studies have not been performed with rituximab or natalizumab; however, because of the nature of the adverse events seen with these combinations with TNF blocker therapy, similar toxicities may also result from the use of CIMZIA in these combinations. Therefore, the combination of CIMZIA with anakinra, abatacept, rituximab, or natalizumab is not recommended. Interference with certain coagulation assays has been detected in patients treated with CIMZIA. There is no evidence that CIMZIA therapy has an effect on in vivo coagulation. CIMZIA may cause erroneously elevated aPTT assay results in patients without coagulation abnormalities.

Autoimmunity

Treatment with CIMZIA may result in the formation of autoantibodies and, rarely, in the development of a lupus-like syndrome. Discontinue treatment if symptoms of lupus-like syndrome develop.

Immunizations

Do not administer live vaccines or live-attenuated vaccines concurrently with CIMZIA.

Adverse Reactions

In controlled Crohn's clinical trials, the most common adverse events that occurred in 5% of CIMZIA patients (n=620) and more frequently than with placebo (n=614) were upper respiratory infection (20% CIMZIA, 13% placebo), urinary tract infection (7% CIMZIA, 6% placebo), and arthralgia (6% CIMZIA, 4% placebo). The proportion of patients who discontinued treatment due to adverse reactions in the controlled clinical studies was 8% for CIMZIA and 7% for placebo.

In controlled RA clinical trials, the most common adverse events that occurred in 3% of patients taking CIMZIA 200 mg every other week with concomitant methotrexate (n=640) and more frequently than with placebo with concomitant methotrexate (n=324) were upper respiratory tract infection (6% CIMZIA, 2% placebo), headache (5% CIMZIA, 4% placebo), hypertension (5% CIMZIA, 2% placebo), nasopharyngitis (5% CIMZIA, 1% placebo), back pain (4% CIMZIA, 1% placebo), pyrexia (3% CIMZIA, 2% placebo), pharyngitis (3% CIMZIA, 1% placebo), rash (3% CIMZIA, 1% placebo), acute bronchitis (3% CIMZIA, 1% placebo)and fatigue (3% CIMZIA, 2% placebo). Hypertensive adverse reactions were observed more frequently in patients receiving CIMZIA than in controls. These adverse reactions occurred more frequently among patients with a baseline history of hypertension and among patients receiving concomitant corticosteroids and non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs. Patients receiving CIMZIA 400 mg as monotherapy every 4 weeks in RA controlled clinical trials had similar adverse reactions to those patients receiving CIMZIA 200 mg every other week. The proportion of patients who discontinued treatment due to adverse reactions in the controlled clinical studies was 5% for CIMZIA and 2.5% for placebo.

The safety profile for patients with psoriatic arthritis (PsA) treated with CIMZIA was similar to the safety profile seen in patients with RA and previous experience with CIMZIA.

The safety profile for AS patients treated with CIMZIA was similar to the safety profile seen in patients with RA.

For full prescribing information, please visit www.ucb.com

About CIMZIA in the EU/EEA

In the EU, CIMZIA in combination with methotrexate (MTX) is indicated for the treatment of moderate to severe active RA in adult patients inadequately responsive to disease-modifying anti-rheumatic drugs (DMARDs) including MTX.

CIMZIA can be given as monotherapy in case of intolerance to MTX or when continued treatment with MTX is inappropriate. CIMZIA in combination with MTX is also indicated for the treatment of severe, active and progressive RA in adults not previously treated with MTX or other DMARDs. CIMZIA has been shown to reduce the rate of progression of joint damage as measured by X-ray and to improve physical function, when given in combination with MTX.

CIMZIA, in combination with MTX, is also indicated for the treatment of active psoriatic arthritis in adults when the response to previous DMARD therapy has been inadequate. CIMZIA can be given as monotherapy in case of intolerance to MTX or when continued treatment with MTX is inappropriate.

CIMZIA is also indicated in the EU for the treatment of adult patients with severe active axial spondyloarthritis (axSpA), comprising:

Ankylosing spondylitis (AS)  adults with severe active AS who have had an inadequate response to, or are intolerant to non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs).

Axial spondyloarthritis (axSpA) without radiographic evidence of AS  adults with severe active axSpA without radiographic evidence of AS but with objective signs of inflammation by elevated C-reactive protein (CRP) and/or Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) who have had an inadequate response to, or are intolerant to NSAIDs.

About CIMZIA in Fertility, Pregnancy and Lactation in the EU/EEA

Women of childbearing potential

The use of adequate contraception should be considered for women of childbearing potential. For women planning pregnancy, continued contraception may be considered for 5 months after the last CIMZIA dose due to its elimination rate, but the need for treatment of the woman should also be taken into account (see below).

Pregnancy

Data from more than 500 prospectively collected pregnancies exposed to CIMZIA with known pregnancy outcomes, including more than 400 pregnancies exposed during the first trimester, does not indicate a malformative effect of CIMZIA. However, the available clinical experience is too limited to, with a reasonable certainty, conclude that there is no increased risk associated with CIMZIA administration during pregnancy.

Animal studies using a rodent anti-rat TNF did not reveal evidence of impaired fertility or harm to the foetus. However, these are insufficient with respect to human reproductive toxicity. Due to its inhibition of TNF, CIMZIA administered during pregnancy could affect normal immune response in the newborn.

CIMZIA should only be used during pregnancy if clinically needed. Non-clinical studies suggest low or negligible level of placental transfer of a homologue Fab-fragment of certolizumab pegol (no Fc region).

In a clinical study 16 women were treated with certolizumab pegol (200 mg every 2 weeks or 400 mg every 4 weeks) during pregnancy. Certolizumab pegol plasma concentrations measured in 14 infants at birth were Below the Limit of Quantification (BLQ) in 13 samples; one was 0.042 g/ml with an infant/mother plasma ratio at birth of 0.09%. At Week 4 and Week 8, all infant concentrations were BLQ. The clinical significance of low levels certolizumab pegol for infants is unknown. It is recommended to wait a minimum of 5 months following the mother's last CIMZIA administration during pregnancy before administration of live or live-attenuated vaccines (e.g. BCG vaccine), unless the benefit of the vaccination clearly outweighs the theoretical risk of administration of live or live-attenuated vaccines to the infants.

Breastfeeding

In a clinical study in 17 lactating women treated with CIMZIA, minimal transfer of certolizumab pegol from plasma to breast milk was observed. The percentage of the maternal certolizumab pegol dose that was reaching an infant during a 24 hour period was estimated to 0.04% to 0.30%. In addition, since certolizumab pegol is a protein that is degraded in the gastrointestinal tract after oral administration, the absolute bioavailability is expected to be very low in a breastfed infant. Consequently, CIMZIA can be used during breastfeeding.

Important Safety Information about CIMZIA in the EU/EEA

CIMZIA was studied in 4,049 patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) in controlled and open label trials for up to 92 months. The commonly reported adverse reactions (1-10%) in clinical trials with CIMZIA and post-marketing were viral infections (includes herpes, papillomavirus, influenza), bacterial infections (including abscess), rash, headache (including migraine), asthaenia, leukopaenia (including lymphopaenia, neutropaenia), eosinophilic disorder, pain (any sites), pyrexia, sensory abnormalities, hypertension, pruritus (any sites), hepatitis (including hepatic enzyme increase), injection site reactions, and nausea. Serious adverse reactions include sepsis, opportunistic infections, tuberculosis, herpes zoster, lymphoma, leukaemia, solid organ tumours, angioneurotic oedema, cardiomyopathies (includes heart failure), ischemic coronary artery disorders, pancytopaenia, hypercoagulation (including thrombophlebitis, pulmonary embolism), cerebrovascular accident, vasculitis, hepatitis/hepatopathy (includes cirrhosis), and renal impairment/nephropathy (includes nephritis). In RA controlled clinical trials, 4.4% of patients discontinued taking CIMZIA due to adverse events vs. 2.7% for placebo.

CIMZIA is contraindicated in patients with hypersensitivity to the active substance or any of the excipients, active tuberculosis or other severe infections such as sepsis or opportunistic infections or moderate-to-severe heart failure.

Serious infections including sepsis, tuberculosis and opportunistic infections have been reported in patients receiving CIMZIA. Some of these events have been fatal. Monitor patients closely for signs and symptoms of infections including tuberculosis before, during, and after treatment with CIMZIA. Treatment with CIMZIA must not be initiated in patients with a clinically important active infection. If an infection develops, monitor carefully and stop CIMZIA if infection becomes serious. Before initiation of therapy with CIMZIA, all patients must be evaluated for both active and inactive (latent) tuberculosis infection. If active tuberculosis is diagnosed prior to or during treatment, CIMZIA therapy must not be initiated and must be discontinued. If latent tuberculosis is diagnosed, appropriate anti-tuberculosis therapy must be started before initiating treatment with CIMZIA. Patients should be instructed to seek medical advice if signs/symptoms (e.g. persistent cough, wasting/weight loss, low grade fever, listlessness) suggestive of tuberculosis occur during or after therapy with CIMZIA.

Reactivation of hepatitis B has occurred in patients receiving a TNF-antagonist including CIMZIA who are chronic carriers of the virus (i.e. surface antigen positive). Some cases have had a fatal outcome. Patients should be tested for HBV infection before initiating treatment with CIMZIA. Carriers of HBV who require treatment with CIMZIA should be closely monitored and in the case of HBV reactivation CIMZIA should be stopped and effective anti-viral therapy with appropriate supportive treatment should be initiated.

TNF-antagonists including CIMZIA may increase the risk of new onset or exacerbation of clinical symptoms and/or radiographic evidence of demyelinating disease; of formation of autoantibodies and uncommonly of the development of a lupus-like syndrome; of severe hypersensitivity reactions. If a patient develops any of these adverse reactions, CIMZIA should be discontinued and appropriate therapy instituted.

With the current knowledge, a possible risk for the development of lymphomas, leukaemia or other malignancies in patients treated with a TNF-antagonist cannot be excluded. Rare cases of neurological disorders, including seizure disorder, neuritis and peripheral neuropathy, have been reported in patients treated with CIMZIA.

Adverse reactions of the haematologic system, including medically significant cytopaenia, have been infrequently reported with CIMZIA. Advise all patients to seek immediate medical attention if they develop signs and symptoms suggestive of blood dyscrasias or infection (e.g., persistent fever, bruising, bleeding, pallor) while on CIMZIA. Consider discontinuation of CIMZIA therapy in patients with confirmed significant haematological abnormalities.

The use of CIMZIA in combination with anakinra or abatacept is not recommended due to a potential increased risk of serious infections. As no data are available, CIMZIA should not be administered concurrently with live vaccines. The 14-day half-life of CIMZIA should be taken into consideration if a surgical procedure is planned. A patient who requires surgery while on CIMZIA should be closely monitored for infections.

CIMZIA was studied in 325 patients with active axial spondyloarthritis (axSpA) in a placebo-controlled clinical trial for up to 30 months and in 409 patients with psoriatic arthritis (PsA) in a placebo-controlled clinical trial for up to 30 months. The safety profile for axSpA and PsA patients treated with CIMZIA was consistent with the safety profile in RA and previous experience with CIMZIA.

Please consult the full prescribing information in relation to other side effects, full safety and prescribing information. European SmPC date of revision December 2017.

http://www.ema.europa.eu/docs/en_GB/document_library/EPAR_-_Product_Information/human/001037/WC500069763.pdf

CIMZIA is a registered trademark of the UCB Group of Companies.

For further information, UCB:

Corporate Investor Relations Brand Communications Communications





Antje Witte, Andrea Levin Christopher, France Nivelle, Investor Relations, UCB Immunology Communications, UCB Global Communications,



UCB









T +32.2.559.9178, T +32.2.559.94.14, T +1.404.483.7329 [email protected] [email protected] [email protected]





Laurent Schots,



Media Relations, UCB









T +32.2.559.92.64,



[email protected]





About UCB

UCB, Brussels, Belgium (www.ucb.com) is a global biopharmaceutical company focused on the discovery and development of innovative medicines and solutions to transform the lives of people living with severe diseases in immunology or neurology. With more than 7 500 people in approximately 40 countries, the company generated revenue of 4.5 billion in 2017. UCB is listed on Euronext Brussels (symbol: UCB). Follow us on Twitter: @UCB_news

Forward looking statements  UCB

This press release contains forward-looking statements based on current plans, estimates and beliefs of management. All statements, other than statements of historical fact, are statements that could be deemed forward-looking statements, including estimates of revenues, operating margins, capital expenditures, cash, other financial information, expected legal, political, regulatory or clinical results and other such estimates and results. By their nature, such forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and are subject to risks, uncertainties and assumptions which could cause actual results to differ materially from those that may be implied by such forward-looking statements contained in this press release. Important factors that could result in such differences include: changes in general economic, business and competitive conditions, the inability to obtain necessary regulatory approvals or to obtain them on acceptable terms, costs associated with research and development, changes in the prospects for products in the pipeline or under development by UCB, effects of future judicial decisions or governmental investigations, product liability claims, challenges to patent protection for products or product candidates, changes in laws or regulations, exchange rate fluctuations, changes or uncertainties in tax laws or the administration of such laws and hiring and retention of its employees. UCB is providing this information as of the date of this press release and expressly disclaims any duty to update any information contained in this press release, either to confirm the actual results or to report a change in its expectations.

There is no guarantee that new product candidates in the pipeline will progress to product approval or that new indications for existing products will be developed and approved. Products or potential products which are the subject of partnerships, joint ventures or licensing collaborations may be subject to differences between the partners. Also, UCB or others could discover safety, side effects or manufacturing problems with its products after they are marketed. Moreover, sales may be impacted by international and domestic trends toward managed care and health care cost containment and the reimbursement policies imposed by third-party payers as well as legislation affecting biopharmaceutical pricing and reimbursement.

USP-CZ0917-0107

REFERENCES

1 Abraham B, Mariette X, Flynn AD, et al. Lack of Placental Transfer of Certolizumab Pegol During Pregnancy: Results from CRIB, a Prospective, Postmarketing, Multicenter, Pharmacokinetic Study. Gastroenterol. 2017;S0016-5085(17)343767.

2 Clowse ME, Forger F, Hawng C, et al. Minimal to no transfer of certolizumab pegol into breast milk: results from CRADLE, a prospective, postmarketing, multicentre, pharmacokinetic study. Ann Rheum Dis. 2017;0:17.

3 Forger F. Treatment with biologics during pregnancy in patients with rheumatic diseases. Reumatologia. 2017;55(2):5758.

4 Mahadaven U, Cucchiara S, Hyams J, et al. Am J Gastroenterol 2011; 106:214223; doi: 10.1038/ajg.2010.464; published online 14 December 2010

5 Brouwer J, Laven JS, Hazes JM, Dolhain RJ. Miscarriages in Female Rheumatoid Arthritis Patients: Associations With Serologic Findings, Disease Activity, and Antirheumatic Drug Treatment. Arthritis Rheumatol. 2015;67(7):173843.

6 Bharti B, Lee SJ, Linday SP, et al. Disease severity and pregnancy outcomes in women with rheumatoid arthritis: results from the Organization of Teratology Information Specialists autoimmune diseases in pregnancy project. J Rheumatol. 2015;42:13761382.

7 Brouwer J, Hazes JMW, Laven JSE, et al. Fertility in Women with Rheumatoid Arthritis: Influence of Disease Activity and Medication. Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases 2015;74:1836-1841.

8 Jethwa H, Lam S, Giles I. O26. Does Inflammatory Arthritis Really Improve During Pregnancy? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Rheumatology. 2014;53(1):i40-i40.

9 Mouyis MA, Thornton CC, Williams D, Giles IP. Pregnancy Outcomes in Patients with Psoriatic Arthritis. J Rheumatol. 2017;44:128-129.

10 Polachek A, Li S, Polachek IS, et al. Psoriatic arthritis disease activity during pregnancy and the first-year postpartum. Semin Arthritis Rheum. 2017;46:740-745.

11 de Man YA, Dolhain RJ, van de Geijn FE, Willemsen SP, Hazes JM. Disease activity of rheumatoid arthritis during pregnancy: results from a nationwide prospective study. Arthritis Rheum. 2008;59(9):1241-1248.

12 Pedersen N, Bortoli A, Duricova D, et al. The course of inflammatory bowel disease during pregnancy and postpartum: a prospective European ECCOEpiCom Study of 209 pregnant women. Aliment Pharmacol Ther. 2013;38:501-512.

SOURCE UCB

Related Links

https://www.ucb.com

ATLANTA and CHERRY HILL, N.J., March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Corporate financial professionals are bullish about the economy and their own companies for 2018, according to a survey released today by Strategic Treasurer and TD Bank, America's Most Convenient Bank. Bank professionals, who were also polled in the survey, are even more optimistic but indicate less appetite for acquisitions than corporations.

Survey respondents in the United States indicated that the East Coast offers the largest opportunities, trailed by the Central and Western regions. Among the overall reported growth expectations:

67 percent of corporations expect the gross domestic product (GDP) of their headquarters (HQ) country to expand during the next year, and 73 percent anticipate an increase in their company's sales/revenue during the same time period.

77 percent of financial institutions believe the GDP of their HQ country will grow, while 92 percent project that their institution's revenue will increase over the next 12 months.

Tax reform, which went from being a possibility to a reality in late 2017, contributes to this positive outlook. Forty-two percent of businesses believe tax reform presents a significant economic benefit for their company, and 28 percent of corporations with cash abroad plan to repatriate income back into the U.S. An even larger number of banks (58 percent) stated that corporate tax reform will positively impact business, and 37 percent said it will directly benefit company financial performance. Along with cash repatriation, companies report plans to use their newly-freed capital to make investments in the U.S.

When considering overall spending plans, corporations anticipate allocating excess cash (from all sources) for:

Capital expenditures (43 percent), including IT upgrades and plant and equipment

Debt repayment (33 percent)

Future investments (28 percent)

"The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act implementation could cause businesses to have extra capital to deploy, but it is even more encouraging that organizations expect to have cash on hand through the normal course of business in the coming year," said Tom Gregory, Manager of Treasury Management Sales, TD Bank. "Together, these factors mean that companies could invest more funds, hire employees and generally spend on both their businesses and communities."

"To be clear, the highly optimistic economic sentiment represents both an opportunity and risk for companies," said Craig Jeffery, Managing Partner of Strategic Treasurer. "The opportunity these strong tail winds provide for growth must be calibrated carefully with the risk of inadequate positioning for the inevitable down-cycles."

Even with this rosy view, businesses and banks did report several operational concerns. The no. 1 concern for both companies and financial institutions is increasing cyber fraud, followed by the cost of compliance, gridlock in Washington and healthcare reform.

The 2017-2018 Treasury Perspectives Survey was sponsored by TD Bank and conducted by Strategic Treasurer. A copy of the survey data, an infographic and registration for a webinar about the full results are available at https://strategictreasurer.com/surveys/2017-treasury-perspectives. There were 336 respondents, including corporate treasurers, treasury professionals and corporate bankers from around the globe (primarily from North America and Europe).

About TD Bank, America's Most Convenient Bank

TD Bank, America's Most Convenient Bank, is one of the 10 largest banks in the U.S., providing more than 9 million customers with a full range of retail, small business and commercial banking products and services at more than 1,200 convenient locations throughout the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, Metro D.C., the Carolinas and Florida. In addition, TD Bank and its subsidiaries offer customized private banking and wealth management services through TD Wealth, and vehicle financing and dealer commercial services through TD Auto Finance. TD Bank is headquartered in Cherry Hill, N.J. To learn more, visit www.tdbank.com. Find TD Bank on Facebook at www.facebook.com/TDBank and on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TDBank_US.

TD Bank, America's Most Convenient Bank, is a member of TD Bank Group and a subsidiary of The Toronto-Dominion Bank of Toronto, Canada, a top 10 financial services company in North America. The Toronto-Dominion Bank trades on the New York and Toronto stock exchanges under the ticker symbol "TD". To learn more, visit www.td.com.

About Strategic Treasurer

Strategic Treasurer provides consulting services for treasury management, security, technology, and compliance. Since 2004, corporate clients, banks, and fintech providers throughout the world have relied on their advisory services which are backed by a deep awareness of current practices, plans, and perceptions through their annual surveys and decades of treasury experience. The mission of Strategic Treasurer is to elevate and enhance the practice of treasury by advising individual clients and informing the industry at large. Headquartered in Atlanta with consultants based out of Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Washington DC, Strategic Treasurer guides treasury and finance professionals through real-world, mission-critical issues that organizations face today. To learn more, visit strategictreasurer.com.

SOURCE TD Bank

Related Links

http://www.TDBank.com

FOXBORO, Mass., March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The Summer Cosmetic Bootcamp will be held in Aspen, June 21-24, 2018 and due in part to the generosity of industry partners, many more core residents will have the opportunity to attend Summer Bootcamp and receive training from luminaries in the aesthetic specialties.

Co-Founder of Cosmetic Bootcamp, Dr. Vic Narurkar explains, "Residents have always been an important community at Cosmetic Bootcamp. We are thrilled for the opportunity to teach and also learn from the residents." Co-Founder, Dr. Mary Lupo continues, "We are investing more energy recruiting and funding residents for Summer Bootcamp 2018  the residents are the future, after all."

To apply for a Grant to supplement travel costs and registration fees, residents should submit an application and a letter of recommendation. Visit the following link for more information. http://cosmeticbootcamp.com/summer-bootcamp/

About The Cosmetic Bootcamp

The Cosmetic Bootcamp is the leading training platform for certified core cosmetic medicine physicians in the United States, producing and distributing live as well as documented content to Bootcamp participants. We promote patient safety and optimal outcomes in the use of facial fillers, neuromodulators, lasers and innovations in aesthetic medicine. The Meeting was founded in 2004 by Dr. Kenneth Beer, Dr. Mary Lupo and Dr. Vic Narurkar.

http://cosmeticbootcamp.com

Media Contact:

Lauren Snider Brandt

[email protected]

866-306-5210

SOURCE Cosmetic Bootcamp

Related Links

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OAK BROOK, Ill., March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Delta Dental Plans Association (DDPA) has hired Joseph M. Dill, DDS, MBA to serve as its vice president, dental science & network strategy. In his role, Dr. Dill will oversee dental policy, network strategy and provide thought leadership for the Delta Dental brand. DDPA is the national association of the independent Delta Dental companies which make up the nation's leading dental insurance provider, with enrollment of over 75 million Americans.

Dr. Dill brings more than 30 years of experience in the dental field, including eight years in private dental practice and 16 years in the dental insurance industry. He most recently served as vice president of professional services and dental director for Delta Dental of Virginia (DDVA). In that role, he led DDVA's clinical professional services, dental policy, utilization management, fraud and abuse and quality care areas. Prior to joining DDVA, Dr. Dill spent eight years with Delta Dental of California where he served as their dental director  western states region.

"Joseph is a dental science thought leader with strong business and management skills," said Steven Olson, DDPA president and CEO. "With this combination of skills and expertise, he will be an asset to the DDPA team and lead the Systems dental policy and network strategy as we continue to fulfill our mission of expanding access to oral health care."

Dr. Dill also spent two years working for the U.S. Public Health Service as a commissioned officer where he provided dental care to residents of the Fort Peck Indian Reservation in Northern Montana. After eight years managing a private practice, he returned to business school and was co-founder and COO for Propel Biomedical Consulting where he helped biomedical firms achieve financial success through comprehensive commercialization strategies. Additionally, he founded a start-up medical device company, Otoimage, Inc. to develop a reliable means of diagnosing otitis media in infants and children. He also worked at Premera Blue Cross in Washington and Alaska as director of dental products.

Dr. Dill earned his dental degree and bachelor's degree from the University of the Pacific. He also holds a masters of business administration from the University of California at Irvine.

Follow us on Twitter @DeltaDental and Facebook: Delta Dental Plans Association

About Delta Dental Plans Association

Delta Dental Plans Association, based in Oak Brook, Ill., is the not-for-profit national association of the 39 independent Delta Dental companies. Through its companies, Delta Dental is the nation's leading dental insurance provider, covering more than 75 million Americans, and offering the country's largest dental network with roughly 152,000 participating dentists. Delta Dental companies invested more than 69 million dollars in 2016 to help improve oral healthcare in local communities across the country. For more information, visit our website at deltadental.com.

SOURCE Delta Dental Plans Association

Related Links

http://www.deltadental.com

LOS ANGELES, March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

FN Media Group Presents USA News Group News Commentary

It appears that one of the last frontiers for the EV revolution is getting a boost as UPS opens its fleet to plug-in vehicles in 2018.

This news comes as demand for lithium supplies are already forecasting a shortfall as early as the end of this year.

Lithium companies are bracing for the push from global increases in demand including NRG Metals Inc. (TSX-V: NGZ) (OTC: NRGMF), Pilbara Minerals Ltd (OTC: PILBF), Neo Lithium Corporation (TSX-V: NLC) (OTCQX: NTTHF), and Galaxy Resources (OTC: GALXF).

The electric vehicle revolution seems to kick into higher gear every day as more and more transport services adopt EVs. With Tesla having already made a foothold in the family sedan car category, new categories like mass freight and delivery services now look ripe for the taking.

No one could be more concerned about where all the lithium to power this increased demand will come from than the EV industry.

Newly developing sources for lithium like NRG Metals Inc. (TSXV: NGZ) (OTCMKTS: NRGMF) offer a potential supply. That junior miner is developing a potentially large lithium brine project in South America's well known lithium triangle.

The trend for lithium demand also has advanced lithium miners working overtime in order to bring on greater supplies of the valuable metal including Pilbara Minerals Ltd (OTC: PILBF), Neo Lithium Corporation (TSXV: NLC) (OTCQX: NTTHF), and Galaxy Resources (OTC: GALXF).

The lithium-focused producers are all experiencing heightened activity and wild price hikes in lithium.

UPS READY TO ADOPT EVs STATESIDE

In late 2018, UPS will introduce a fleet of 50 plug-in delivery trucks in the US with the expectation of an even larger fleet in 2019.

UPS already has a sizeable fleet of electric vehicles in service across the US and Europe, but the new fleet comes at a much lower cost that is almost similar to diesel-fueled trucks. As such, the company is able to scale up its electric fleet much faster without the need for subsidies.

UPS is working with transport company Workhorse Group to design and build the trucks from scratch.

The trucks are reportedly able to perform at four times the efficiency of combustion engine trucks while emitting lower noise and zero pollutants.

With delivery services expected to grow steadily due to online shopping, UPS's stance to turn to electric trucks is crucial in the fight against greenhouse gas emissions.

Carlton Rose, the president of global fleet maintenance and engineering at UPS sees the improving battery charging and mileage as a crucial factor in the success of the company's fleet. Rose described UPS's new trucks a "quantum leap forward" for the company's delivery fleet.

The new trucks have a range of about 100 miles on a full charge, which makes them for service in dense city areas. A number of cities including Los Angeles, Dallas and Atlanta have been selected as test zones for the trucks.

UPS currently has around 35,000 combustion-engine trucks in its fleet. While replacing that volume with fully electric trucks will be a tall order, advancements in battery technology will continue to make it progressively easier to move in that direction.

Longer range trucks will enable unrolling in rural areas and for long distance parcel delivery, making the electric fleet more suitable for the company.

JUNIORS SEE THE WRITING ON THE WALL

This unique climate has created a significant opportunity for all lithium companies.

A likely scenario that will become increasingly popular over the next few years is direct investment into junior lithium exploration companies. One of the early movers in that category is NRG Metals - A Canadian company committed to creating lithium resources.

NRG Metals, a start-up focused on the development of lithium brine assets in Argentina, has already attracted a Chinese battery material producer through closing on a $1.4 million private placement to fund ongoing exploration activities in Argentina and the potential, as an Off-Take producer, for future lithium products extracted.

The company has two projects, with the most significant project being the "Hombre Muerto North Project" or HMNP. HMNP is located in the Salta and Catamarca provinces and comprises a total property package of over 3,000 hectares encompassing six concessions.

The company has reported good surface sample collections, magnesium to lithium ratios, and is located across from Galaxy Resources' Sal de Vida lithium development project.

Most importantly, the project is within 20km of FMC Corporation's well established Fenix lithium brine project.

With an offtake agreement of this kind, it's possible that NRG Metals will sell lithium before it's even mined or at least provide a great asset value to the company.

ADOPTION OF EV FLEETS ANOTHER DRIVER

As electric vehicle technology reaches into new frontiers, the demand for batteries will most certainly grow exponentially and with it, the demand for lithium, the most vital battery metal at present.

Demand for the metal has been on a continual upward trend in the last few years and its price has equally soared. Current installed lithium production capacity is unlikely to sustain demand growth for many more years to come and it will be up to mining companies, especially juniors to explore and bring new reserves into production.

Normally with mined commodities, investors tend to wait for prices to soar to attractive levels before risking their capital in expensive mining infrastructure. These mining operations also take considerably long to set up, hence it is expected that demand will outstrip supply growth for some time.

The environment is ripe for reward. The price of lithium ore is set for massive spikes, which is an attractive prospect for investors looking to find the upside in lithium.

POTENTIAL COMPARABLES

Pilbara Minerals Ltd (OTC: PILBF)

Pilbara Minerals is an emerging lithium and tantalum producer focused on the development of its world-class 100% owned Pilgangoora Lithium-Tantalum Project, located approximately 120kms from Port Hedland in the Pilbara region of Western Australia. Pilgangoora has been confirmed as one of the largest spodumene (lithium pyroxene) and tantalite projects in the world and is set to be developed into one of the world's largest lithium mines, also producing tantalite as a valuable by-product.

Neo Lithium Corporation (TSXV: NLC) (OTCQX: NTTHF)

Neo Lithium Corp. engages in the exploration and development of resource properties. The company explores for lithium deposits. It holds interests in the 3Q Project comprising 10 mining claims covering approximately 35,000 hectares located in Tinogasta area, Catamarca province, Argentina. The company has filed a Technical Report with Positive PEA Results on its 3Q Project Showing a Capital Cost reduction of US$98.5M. The company was incorporated in 2016 and is based in Toronto, Canada.

Galaxy Resources (OTC: GALXF)

Galaxy Resources Limited is a lithium-focused resources company, with assets spanning Australia, Canada and Argentina. Galaxy is currently advancing plans to develop the Sal de Vida Lithium and Potash Brine Project ("Sal de Vida") in Argentina, which is situated in the Lithium Triangle, a region where Chile, Argentina and Bolivia meet. Sal de Vida is a proven high quality resource has excellent promise as a future low cost production facility. Galaxy also owns the Mt Cattlin Spodumene Mine near Ravensthorpe in Western Australia and the James Bay Lithium Pegmatite Project in Quebec, Canada.

For a more in-depth look into NGZ you can view the in-depth report at USA News Group: http://usanewsgroup.com/2018/03/12/analysts-predict-lithium-sector-is-growing-faster-than-any-other-sector-in-the-past-decade/

Article Source:

USA News Group

http://usanewsgroup.com

[email protected]



Legal Disclaimer/Disclosure This piece is an advertorial and has been paid for. This document is not and should not be construed as an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to purchase or subscribe for any investment. No information in this Report should be construed as individualized investment advice. A licensed financial advisor should be consulted prior to making any investment decision. We make no guarantee, representation or warranty and accept no responsibility or liability as to its accuracy or completeness. Expressions of opinion are those of USA News Group only and are subject to change without notice. USA News Group assumes no warranty, liability or guarantee for the current relevance, correctness or completeness of any information provided within this Report and will not be held liable for the consequence of reliance upon any opinion or statement contained herein or any omission. Furthermore, we assume no liability for any direct or indirect loss or damage or, in particular, for lost profit, which you may incur as a result of the use and existence of the information, provided within this Report.



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SOURCE USA News GroupSAN FRANCISCO, March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

The Global Endoscopy Equipment Market is expected to develop at a substantial CAGR in the forthcoming years. The progress of the general Endoscopy Equipment market credited to increasing reserves, resources, and donations by government organizations all over the world, increasing number of hospitals; and increasing funds in hospitals. Furthermore, increasing patient inclination for slightly intrusive surgical procedure, technical progressions, promising repayment coverage in certain nations, growing elderly populace, and the increasing occurrence of target sicknesses that necessitate Endoscopy Procedures have contributed to the progress of the market.

The international Endoscopy Equipment Market is divided by Type of Product, Type of Use, and the Area. Based on Type of Product, the Endoscopy Equipment market is classified into Visualization Systems, Endoscopes, additional Endoscopy Equipment, and Accessories. Endoscopes are additionally divided into Flexible, Rigid, and Capsule Endoscopes. Visualization Systems consist of Camera Heads, Endoscopy Cameras, Video Convertors, Video Recorders, Carts, and Transmitters &Receivers among others.

The additional Endoscopy Equipment is categorized into Additional Electrical Endoscopy Equipment and additional Mechanical Endoscopy Equipment. The accessories of endoscopy equipment consist of Needle Forceps & Needle Holders, Channel Brushes, Surgical Dissectors, over tubes and Mouth Pieces among others. The Endoscopes division was responsible for the maximum share of the Endoscopy Equipment market during the past few years.

Based on Type of Use, the Endoscopy Equipment market is divided into Obstetrics/Gynecological Endoscopy, Urology Endoscopy, Bronchoscopy, Laparoscopy, Gastrointestinal Endoscopy, Arthroscopy, Mediastinoscopy, Otoscopy, and Laryngoscopy. The Laparoscopy subdivision was expected to responsible for the biggest stake of the Endoscopy Equipment market during the past few years. Gastrointestinal Endoscopy was the second-major usage area in the bygone years. The division of the international Endoscopy Equipment Market on the source of Area extends North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, Middle East & Africa, and Latin America.

By means of area, the international market for Endoscopy Equipment is separated into North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific, and Rest of the World (that comprises Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa). The area of North America was responsible for the biggest stake of the endoscopy equipment market, tracked by the areas of Europe and Asia-Pacific, during the past few years. Yet, the Asia-Pacific market is estimated to develop at the utmost CAGR in the years to come.

Access 112 page research report with TOC on "Endoscopy Equipment Market" available with Radiant Insights, Inc. @ https://www.radiantinsights.com/research/global-endoscopy-equipment-2016



During the approaching years, the Endoscopy Equipment market is estimated to observe maximum development in the area of Asia-Pacific, by way of stress on Japan, India, and China. The greater progress in China and India is credited to government investments in project funds' in China. North America is expected to hold the biggest stake of the international endoscopy equipment market. North America's headship in the endoscopy equipment market is credited to the promising repayment situation in the U.S.. Growing occurrence of cancer in the U.S. and Canada, study on new-fangled expertise in the U.S.A, and new-fangled finance model for Canadian hospitals.

On the other hand, the shortage of qualified surgeons, endoscopists and contaminations produced by endoscopes are expected to restrict the progress of the market in the years to come. Some of the important companies operating in the Endoscopy Equipment Market on the international basis are Cook Medical Incorporated, Pentax Medical Corporation, Olympus Corporation, Ethicon, Inc., Fujifilm Holdings Corporation, Medtronic plc, Boston Scientific Corporation, Richard Wolf GmbH, KARL STORZ GmbH & Co. KG, Smith & Nephew plc, and Stryker Corporation.

This report studies Endoscopy Equipment in Global market, especially in North America, Europe, China, Japan, Southeast Asia and India, focuses on top manufacturers in global market, with Production, price, revenue and market share for each manufacturer, covering

 Stryker

 COOK

 Smith-nephew

 Olympus

 Richard Wolf GmbH

 Henke-Sass Wolf GmbH

 WIN-US TECHNOLOGY CO., LTD.

 PENTAX Corporation

 ENDO-FLEX GmbH

 XION GmbH

 Medtronic Xomed, Inc.

 Linvatec Corporation d/b/a ConMed Linvatec

 SPINENDOS GmbH

 Endo Optiks,Inc.

 Fentex

 SCHOELLY FIBEROPTIC GMBH

 Polydiagnost

 HOYA

Market Segment by Regions, this report splits Global into several key Regions, with production, consumption, revenue, market share and growth rate of Endoscopy Equipment in these regions, from 2011 to 2021 (forecast), like

 North America

 Europe

 China

 Japan

 Southeast Asia

 India

Split by product type, with production, revenue, price, market share and growth rate of each type, can be divided into

 Rigid endoscopes

 Flexible endoscopes

 Type III

Split by application, this report focuses on consumption, market share and growth rate of Endoscopy Equipment in each application, can be divided into

 Application 1

 Application 2

 Application 3

Browse reports of similar category available with Radiant Insights, Inc.:



About Radiant Insights, Inc.:

At Radiant Insights, we work with the aim to reach the highest levels of customer satisfaction. Our representatives strive to understand diverse client requirements and cater to the same with the most innovative and functional solutions.

Contact:



Michelle Thoras.

Corporate Sales Specialist

Radiant Insights, Inc.

Phone: +1-415-349-0054

Toll Free: 1-888-928-9744

Email: [email protected]



Web: https://www.radiantinsights.com/

SOURCE Radiant Insights, Inc.SAN FRANCISCO and MILANO, Italy, March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Trianni, Inc. ("TRIANNI") and Enthera, S.r.L. ("ENTHERA") jointly announced today that ENTHERA has entered into a license agreement for The Trianni Mouse, a best-in-class monoclonal antibody discovery platform.

"TRIANNI is pleased to add ENTHERA as an important new licensee," stated Dr. David Meininger, TRIANNI's Chief Business Officer. "TRIANNI continues to innovate to the benefit of our growing list of partners. We're excited to enable ENTHERA's antibody discovery efforts through this agreement."

"We are confident that the access to TRIANNI's technology will dramatically improve our discovery efforts. It is a real pleasure entering into this collaboration," declared Prof. Paolo Fiorina, Chief Scientific Officer at Enthera.

No financial details were disclosed.

About Trianni, Inc.

Trianni, Inc. is a privately held biotech company specializing in antibody discovery technology. TRIANNI's lead technology, The Trianni Mouse, is a powerful, next-generation platform enabling efficient generation of fully-human monoclonal antibodies. TRIANNI's transgenic platform leverages a novel approach to design made possible by advances in DNA synthesis and genomic modification technology making it a best-in-class therapeutic antibody discovery platform. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, CA. Additional information about TRIANNI is available through its corporate website, www.trianni.com.

About Enthera, S.r.L.

Enthera S.r.l. is a new Italian biotech start-up which mission is to find new therapeutic approaches to treat diabetes and related gastrointestinal complication (enteropathy), as well as other intestinal disorders sharing the same biological pathway. Its name comes from the crasis of the terms entero (referring to the intestine) and therapy.

Enthera was founded by BiovelocITA in October 2016 in collaboration with the scientists: Prof. Paolo Fiorina and Dr. Francesca D'Addio.

Contacts: TRIANNI

Mandy Boyd

Director of Marketing

1.415.231.0256 [o]

1.866.674.9314

[email protected]

SOURCE Trianni, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.trianni.com

Project or Program Award The Gerald L. Ignace Indian Health Center, Inc., a nonprofit community clinic, is the recipient of a $10,000 project or program award. While the clinic's mission is to improve the health, peace, and well-being of urban Native Americans in the greater Milwaukee area, it is available to all community members seeking the wide range of culturally responsive physical, social, and behavioral health services it offers. With financing from Impact Seven (supported by proceeds from the FHLBank Chicago's Community First  Fund), the center was recently expanded to include a full-service dental clinic and pharmacy with the capacity to treat more than 2,000 low-income and underserved patients each year.

"Improving the quality of life for vulnerable populations like those cared for at the Gerald L. Ignace Indian Health Center is one way we can build stronger, more equitable communities," said Suzi Thackston, FHLBank Chicago Community Investment Officer. "We're proud that FHLBank Chicago members like Impact Seven help make this work possible."

"With the clinic having no boundaries to comprehensive health care, this project epitomizes the name of the award, 'Community First,'" said Brett Gerber, Impact Seven President and CEO. "Impact Seven is honored to be included in such a project."

The FHLBank Chicago named two Community First Award recipients earlier this week at its member meeting in Oak Brook, Illinois, and will announce the final 2018 award today at its member meeting in Madison, Wisconsin.

About the Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago

To learn more about the FHLBank Chicago and its full range of Community Investment programs, please visit fhlbc.com or @FHLBC. "Community First" is a registered trademark of the Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago.

SOURCE Federal Home Loan Bank of Chicago

Related Links

http://www.fhlbc.com

a comprehensive approach committed to the issues of clean water, hygiene and sanitation

a continuous commitment since 2010, echoing the right to water and sanitation, recognized by the united nations as a human right that same year

activities in the most deprived communities in partnership with Unicef USA , Green Cross International and, as of 2018, WaterAid

For the ninth consecutive year, Acqua for Life is continuing its global development program. Since 2010, Acqua for Life has invested over 5.5 million euros in projects worldwide. To date, this has brought 880 million liters of water to 130,000 people in 146 communities across three continents*. In order to reach even more beneficiaries, as of 2018 Acqua for Life will partner with WaterAid, a UK based NGO, as well as historic partners Unicef USA and Green Cross International.



(Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/657352/Giorgio_Armani_Acqua_for_Life_Logo.jpg )





(Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/657358/Giorgio_Armani_Acqua_for_Life.jpg )





(Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/657353/Acqua_for_Life_Barbara_Palvin.jpg )





(Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/657354/Acqua_For_Life_Sri_Lanka.jpg )





(Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/657355/Acqua_For_Life_Children_in_Sri_Lanka.jpg )





(Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/657356/Acqua_for_Life_jerrycan.jpg )





(Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/657357/Acqua_For_Life_Barbara_Palvin__local_community.jpg )



"The issue of the environment intimately involves everyone: it should be addressed in a concrete way. We can in no way ignore that the future of the next generations depends on our choices." Giorgio Armani

* 2017 Green Cross International figures for the Acqua for Life program

The program: Acqua for Life

Acqua for Life is a comprehensive program that focuses on providing access to clean water, which has a positive socio-economic impact on communities' health and livelihood.

The Acqua for Life program helps install water points, latrines, as well as rainwater collection, water filtering and purification systems in areas that lack water, a natural element fundamental to life. This results into people having water to drink, prepare food every day, wash, and maintain water crops and their livestock. Children can attend school more regularly. Women have more time to focus on their children, dedicate time to their literacy and be productive for their community, instead of having to fetch water.

With Acqua for Life, people reclaim the right to drinking water and sanitation recognized by the United Nations in 2010.

Barbara Palvin: what #WaterMeans

Barbara Palvin, face of Giorgio Armani's fragrance Acqua di Gioia, travelled to the water scarce communities of Sri Lanka. She was visibly moved by the people she met, and learning about their hardships due to no access to clean water. Seeing the enormous impact access to clean water has on literally every aspect of people's lives, has caused a strong commitment to the Acqua for Life program.

After her visit Barbara Palvin stated: "Concretely, the actions of Acqua for Life let kids be kids, and help them to go to school. The access to clean water means improved health conditions for the full community and a better overall livelihood. Thanks to the Acqua for Life program, people can actually live their lives instead of spending their days trying to get safe water."

Following her discovery of what #WaterMeans in Sri Lanka, Barbara Palvin is committed to raising awareness about the water scarcity issue, engaging people to share on social media what #WaterMeans in their daily lives.

ACQUA FOR LIFE - BARBARA PALVIN: WHAT #WATERMEANS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajq6-6LWT_k

ACQUA FOR LIFE - #WATERMEANS education: https://youtu.be/n8YqFxReL4c

ACQUA FOR LIFE - #WATERMEANS health:https://youtu.be/ZteCdbGChnU

ACQUA FOR LIFE - #WATERMEANS letting kids be kids: https://youtu.be/2KXLtk6fkyY

ACQUA FOR LIFE - #WATERMEANS sustainable futures: https://youtu.be/81MBgEgydQ8

Acqua for Life with Unicef in the United States

For the ninth year running, Giorgio Armani's Acqua for Life campaign continues to help Unicef provide safe, clean drinking water to children by donating $5 for every Acqua di Gio or Acqua di Gioia fragrance purchased in the United States during the month of March. Since 2010, Giorgio Armani has raised $4 million to support Unicef's Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH) Programs in Belize, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Nicaragua, Ivory Coast, Guatemala, Haiti, Mauritania, Togo and Vietnam. For the March 2018 campaign, funds raised will support Unicef's WASH programs in Haiti.

Acqua for Life with Green Cross International

Green Cross International builds wells, latrines and washbasins to provide hygiene means and protect the immediate environment for the most deprived communities. In addition, Green Cross International conducts awareness campaigns on local water issues and hygiene, especially in schools, so that children understand already from an early age the importance of simple actions, such as washing hands with soap, to prevent the spread of germs. Finally, the sustainability of the project also involves training adults in the proper use and maintenance of infrastructure.

Since 2011, Green Cross International has implemented projects for Acqua for Life in Ghana, Ivory Coast, Senegal, China, Sri Lanka, Argentina, Bolivia, Mexico and Brazil. For 2018 the focus will be in Senegal, Sri-Lanka and Bolivia.

Acqua for Life with the new partner: WaterAid

Acqua for Life is honored to have an additional partnership for 2018 with international non-profit organization WaterAid. WaterAid is working to make clean water, decent toilets and good hygiene normal for everyone, everywhere within a generation, and is currently working in 34 countries globally to change the lives of the poorest and most marginalised people.

Giorgio Armani's Aqua for Life initiative selected WaterAid to join existing partners Unicef US and Green Cross International due to their technical expertise in the water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) sector. Other key factors beneficial to the partnership include WaterAid's global presence, collaborative approach and commitment to finding sustainable solutions to the WASH crisis.

In 2018, the Acqua for Life initiative will be supporting three new WaterAid programs focusing on schools and health care facilities in Madagascar, Nepal and Papa New Guinea.

SOURCE Giorgio Armani BeautyNEW YORK, March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Gululu, the interactive water bottle for kids, has joined hands with Generosity.org, a humanitarian organization that provides sustainable solutions to the global water crisis, one community at a time, and Monroe Elementary School from California, United States, to launch the "School-to-School" program. "School-to-School" is a program designed to connect students in the United States with schools in developing countries. This program will educate kids for social responsibility and create fundraising campaigns to build more water projects for partner schools. The first program funded a water project for students in Peru. Schools are encouraged to join this mission by contacting Generosity.org via Antonia Buban, the Community and Donor Engagement Coordinator.

For every Gululu bottle sold - you will provide clean drinking water for life to one child in a developing country. (PRNewsfoto/Gululu)

Gululu's "School-to-School" mission is to advance hydration for kids around the world and to provide clean drinking water to all children. The first project matched Monroe elementary school to a sister school (#60102), located in a community in Peru, where the community used to collect rainwater for use. The United States based school ran a fundraiser for their sister school and accomplished building the first well, allowing for this community of 400 plus children and their families to have access to clean water and advance their health. In recognition of this success, in 2017 Gululu was invited to speak at the United Nations about the water initiative.

Philip Wagner, the founder of Generosity.org noted, "Our partnership with Gululu and Monroe Elementary has been incredibly unique and inspiring for our team, as safe water consumption and hydration are so important for early childhood development and overall health. This collaboration with both the private and public sectors is one we look forward to continuing so that we can end the clean water crisis, together!"

The "School-to-School" program began to form in early 2017, after Gululu joined forces with Generosity.org and announced that for every bottle sold, a portion of the revenue would be contributed to building a new water project for a school in Peru, to improve the quality of drinking water for the school's students. Inspired by Gululu and Monroe Elementary, Generosity.org will launch its official "School-to-School" program in Fall 2018.

Nate Manderfeld, a Monroe School teacher said, "We're excited to pilot the 'School-to-School' program and make a significant impact on children and their community in Peru. This program also allows us to educate our kids about generosity, the value of water, sustainability and how they can impact other people's lives, which is a lesson I'm sure they will carry throughout their lives."

Eighty percent of all diseases are caused by a poor water environment, which is greater than the impact of wars and hunger on people's lives. Lack of clean drinking water has a direct impact on the health and safety of the kids, which has become one of the key obstacles of developing countries to further advance and reform.

Alvin Chiang, founder and CEO of Gululu noted, "As Gululu has committed itself to children's health, the gene of corporate social responsibility is deeply rooted in our company's culture, which is also our original aspiration. I hope Gululu can continue to collaborate with Generosity.org and have additional schools in the USA, China and other countries that share the same vision. By raising money for charity through Gululu sales, we help kids in poor areas have access to safe drinking water and we can contribute to solving the problem for communities around the world."

Upholding the mission of improving children's health in the world, Gululu has further pushed forward the pace of carrying out corporate social responsibility globally while focusing on solving the problem of drinking safe and clean water for kids in developing countries. For the next step, Gululu is going to systematically carry out more charitable efforts, especially to further promote the innovative "School-to-School" program. This will be done while providing lessons that teach kids and families the importance and effects of good hydration, while cultivating those habits in kids from a young age, using high-tech products of the highest quality for the kids all over the world.

Gululu expects to cooperate with related institutions and humanitarian organizations in all walks of life to create a healthy and safe living environment for the global community and kids who need help.

About Gululu

Gululu, the first innovative product invented by Bowhead Technology, is an interactive water bottle and connected app that helps children and parents keep up with hydration by caring for a virtual pet in an ever-expanding Gululu Universe. Designed for ages 3+, the drinking device is shockproof, health-focused, and kid approved. Since its debut in mid-2016, Gululu has reached the doors of families across 50 countries. Forbes magazine named it one of the 5 coolest water bottles worldwide. In 2017, Gululu was featured at the Innovation Lions at Cannes Lions Int'l Festival of Creativity. Gululu is officially available in the US, China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. In 2017 The company closed its series Pre-A investment round, invested by Jonathan Lu, the former Alibaba Group CEO.

For more information visit, www.mygululu.com.

About Generosity.org

Generosity.org is a humanitarian non-profit organization that is helping to end the clean water crisis in developing countries, one community at a time, with 813 projects funded, Generosity.org has served more than 470,000 people in 20 countries

Contact:

Selena Rodriguez

Child's Play Communications

(212) 488-2060 x13

[email protected]

SOURCE Gululu

Related Links

http://www.mygululu.com

NEW YORK, March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The Human Vaccines Project, a nonprofit public-private partnership focused on decoding the immune system to improve human health, welcomes Moncef Slaoui, PhD, to its Board of Directors.

Moncef Slaoui, PhD, has had a highly distinguished career in vaccine R&D and has led the development of numerous vaccines that are in use worldwide. In 2016, he was recognized as one of Fortune Magazine's "50 Greatest World Leaders" for his work on under-researched diseases that are common in the developing world. Dr. Slaoui is currently a partner at Medicxi, a leading European venture capital firm.

"We are honored to have Dr. Slaoui join the Project's Board of Directors. He brings tremendous expertise in technology development and vaccine research to the table that is specifically relevant to the Project's mission," said Wayne C. Koff, PhD, president and CEO of the Human Vaccines Project. "We look forward to his guidance on this next phase of development, as the Project's clinical research advances our understanding of the immune system."

Previously, Dr. Slaoui served as chairman of Pharmaceutical R&D and the vaccines division at GSK where he spearheaded the overhaul of its pharmaceutical R&D and redesigned its discovery organization. While at GSK, Dr. Slaoui engineered a vaccine pipeline that has had immense public health impacts, including vaccines against pneumococcal disease and rotavirus, two of the leading causes of childhood death worldwide, as well as vaccines against shingles and HPV, the virus that causes cervical cancer.

Dr. Slaoui earned a PhD in molecular biology and immunology from the Universite Libre de Bruxelles in Belgium, he completed postdoctoral studies at Harvard Medical School and Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston, and was a professor of Immunology at the University of Mons, Belgium. He has authored more than 100 scientific papers and presentations.

"I am pleased to be able to use my experience to assist the Project in accomplishing its goal of helping scientists better understand how the immune system fights disease," said Moncef Slaoui, PhD, partner at Medicxi. "This is the kind of impactful work that will truly benefit global health."

About the Human Vaccines Project

The Human Vaccines Project is a nonprofit public-private partnership with a mission to decode the human immune system to accelerate the development of vaccines and immunotherapies against major global diseases. The Project brings together leading academic research centers, industrial partners, nonprofits and governments to address the primary scientific barriers to developing new vaccines and immunotherapies. Support and funders for the Project include the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Michelson Medical Research Foundation, GSK, MedImmune, Illumina, Sanofi Pasteur, Johnson & Johnson/Janssen, Pfizer, Moderna, Boehringer Ingelheim, Aeras, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, University of California San Diego, The Scripps Research Institute, J. Craig Venter Institute and La Jolla Institute for Allergy and Immunology. To learn more, visit www.humanvaccinesproject.org and follow @HumanVacProject on Twitter.

For media inquiries, contact Kierstin Coatney at [email protected] or 716-378-1602.

SOURCE Human Vaccines Project

Related Links

http://www.humanvaccinesproject.org

NEW YORK, March 21, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Deutsche Bank today announced the addition of presenters for its Depositary Receipts Virtual Investor Conference ("dbVIC") on March 22nd, featuring live webcast presentations from international companies with American Depositary Receipt (ADR) programs in the US.

Representatives from participating companies based in Denmark, Germany, South Africa and the UK will respond to questions during formal presentations, and will also interact with investors via virtual trade booths. The conference is targeted to all types of investors as well as analysts interested in non-US companies.

There is no fee for participants to log in, attend live presentations or ask questions.

To register, please use the following link: https://tinyurl.com/MarchDBVIC

Pre-registration is suggested to save time.

March 22nd Agenda (US Eastern Standard Time):

8:30 AM : GEA Group AG ( Germany : G1A, OTC Pink: GEAGY)

: GEA Group AG ( : G1A, OTC Pink: GEAGY) 9:00 AM : adidas AG ( Germany : ADS,OTCQX: ADDYY)

: adidas AG ( : ADS,OTCQX: ADDYY) 9:30 AM : Murray & Roberts Holdings Limited ( South Africa : MUR.JO, OTC Pink: MURZY)

: Murray & Roberts Holdings Limited ( : MUR.JO, OTC Pink: MURZY) 10:00 AM : Harmony Gold Mining Company Limited ( South Africa : HAR.JO,NYSE: HMY)

: Harmony Gold Mining Company Limited ( : HAR.JO,NYSE: HMY) 10:30 AM : Legal & General Group plc (UK: LGEN, OTC Pink: LGGNY)

: Legal & General Group plc (UK: LGEN, OTC Pink: LGGNY) 11:00 AM : Continental AG ( Germany : CON.DE, OTC: CTTAY)

: Continental AG ( : CON.DE, OTC: CTTAY) 11:30 AM : Merck KGaA, ( Germany : MRK.DE, OTC Pink: MKKGY)

: Merck KGaA, ( : MRK.DE, OTC Pink: MKKGY) 12:00 PM : Marks and Spencer Group plc (UK: MKS,OTCQX: MAKSY)

: Marks and Spencer Group plc (UK: MKS,OTCQX: MAKSY) 12:30 PM : Genmab A/S ( Denmark : GEN.CO, OTC Pink: GMXAY)

After the Conference, presentations will be available for replay.

In addition to specializing in administering cross-border equity structures such as American and Global Depositary Receipts, Deutsche Bank provides corporates, financial institutions, hedge funds and supranational agencies around the world with trustee, agency, escrow and related services. The Bank offers a broad range of services for diverse products, from complex securitizations and project finance to syndicated loans, debt exchanges and restructurings.

For further information, please contact:

Deutsche Bank AG

Press & Media Relations

Lawton King

Phone: +1 212 250-0622

E-Mail: [email protected]

Deutsche Bank is a leading client-centric global universal bank serving 28 million clients worldwide. Deutsche Bank provides commercial and investment banking, retail banking, transaction banking and asset and wealth management products and services to corporations, governments, institutional investors, small and medium-sized businesses, and private individuals. Deutsche Bank is Germany's leading bank, with a strong position in Europe and a significant presence in the Americas and Asia Pacific.

Deutsche Bank is sponsoring the Deutsche Bank Depositary Receipt Investor Conference solely for informational purposes. Deutsche Bank does not prepare, review, approve or edit any presentations, statements, documents or other information or materials, whether in written, electronic or verbal form, provided by any company participating in such conference, and disclaims any responsibility for the accuracy or adequacy of any such information or materials. Deutsche Bank is not promoting, endorsing or recommending any company participating in the conference.

The Depositary Receipts have been registered pursuant to the US Securities Act of 1933. Nothing in this communication constitutes an offer or solicitation by Deutsche Bank or any other issuer or entity for the purchase or sale of any securities, nor does it constitute a solicitation to any person in any jurisdiction. No part of this communication may be copied or reproduced in any way without the prior written consent of Deutsche Bank. Depositary Receipts Services referenced in this communication are provided by Deutsche Bank Trust Company Americas, an indirect subsidiary of Deutsche Bank AG and a member, FDIC. Depositary Receipts are not deposits or obligations of or guaranteed by Deutsche Bank Trust Company Americas, are not insured by the FDIC, and are subject to investment risks (including the possible loss of principal invested). Copyright March 2018 Deutsche Bank AG. All rights reserved.

SOURCE dbVIC - Deutsche Bank Virtual Investor ConferenceVANCOUVER, March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ - International Tower Hill Mines Ltd. ("ITH" or the "Company") - (TSX: ITH) (NYSE American: THM) announces the appointment of Damola Adamolekun to the Company's board of directors effective March 22, 2018, filling the vacancy created by the resignation of Victor Flores.

Victor Flores was nominated for election as a director in accordance with an investor rights agreement with the Company's largest shareholder, Paulson & Co. Inc. ("Paulson"), and served in that capacity since his election at the Company's 2017 annual general meeting. Upon the resignation of Mr. Flores, Paulson has designated Mr. Adamolekun as its nominee. Subsequently, Mr. Adamolekun has been appointed to serve as director of the Company until its next annual general meeting.

"On behalf of the Board of Directors, I welcome Damola's appointment as Paulson & Co remains a committed and long-term shareholder of International Tower Hill" said Marcelo Kim, Board Chair.

Mr. Adamolekun is an Associate at Paulson, where he has played a vital role in the sourcing and subsequent management of a number of the firm's largest investments. Prior to joining Paulson, Mr. Adamolekun worked in the Investment Banking Division of Goldman Sachs and as a Private Equity Associate at TPG Capital in the North American Buyout Group. Mr. Adamolekun received a Bachelor of Arts in Economics and Urban Studies from Brown University and a Masters of Business Administration from the Harvard Business School.

About International Tower Hill Mines Ltd.

International Tower Hill Mines Ltd. controls 100% of the Livengood Gold Project located along the paved Elliott Highway, 70 miles north of Fairbanks, Alaska.

On behalf of

International Tower Hill Mines Ltd.

(signed) Karl L. Hanneman

Chief Executive Officer

This news release is not, and is not to be construed in any way as, an offer to buy or sell securities in the United States.

SOURCE International Tower Hill Mines Ltd.

Related Links

http://www.ithmines.com

NEW YORK, March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Infor, a leading provider of industry-specific cloud applications, today announced the success that Invenergy has seen with Infor Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) Mobile. Invenergy, one of North America's largest privately-held renewable energy companies, decided to adopt more mobile enterprise asset management processes to help optimize and digitize turbine maintenance operations, and help streamline asset management with better, more up-to-date data. Infor EAM Mobile is designed to help organizations get maximum value from their EAM system by providing technicians with access to the system virtually any place and any time.

Like many asset management operations, Invenergy's maintenance checklists were paper-based when the team first began considering new technology options several years ago. Technicians at the organization would go out with paper checklists and fill out steps as they were completedsometimes legibly, sometimes not. That paper had to be uploaded into EAM, and then stored in binders for physical record-keeping. Adopting Infor EAM Mobile provided a way for the Invenergy teams to get that data out of binders and into a more easily reportable format.

After two beta tests, the company decided to move to fleet-wide implementation. Over a six-month period in 2016, the company extended its mobile platform across its North American operations, buying one AppleTM iPad for each maintenance crew. After a successful rollout, Invenergy decided it wanted to add even more efficiencies to the system and truly digitize its asset management operations by removing the paper from the system. Maintenance management was still based on "paper" copies, filed electronically in PDF form. The physical binders were gone, but key operational data still wasn't reportable, which meant the company still wasn't using its own front-line experience to track trends, identify and solve maintenance hot spots, and optimize deployment of personnel and resources.

"All of those capabilities make EAM Mobile a powerful tool that can be expanded into other applications," said Frank Santiago, Operations Support Manager, Invenergy. "With EAM, we're putting the work orders at the technicians' fingertips, literally and figuratively."

Invenergy then introduced mobile checklists in a format that was comfortable and recognizable for technicians. Mobile devices gave teams prompt access to central data, and a record of work is stored when it is finished. The searchable, end-to-end system can be particularly useful for a consolidated operation with multiple unitsin this case, up to several hundred wind turbines on a single sitewhere periodic changes in ownership or share structure can produce sudden calls for complete maintenance records on one or several specific components.

"Being able to keep critical maintenance and asset data complete and up-to-date at all times is incredibly important to the health of a business," said Kevin Price, Infor EAM Technical Product Evangelist, Infor. "By extending the power of Infor EAM to the field, organizations can help empower mobile workers to record as they work, provide the ability to automate work order tasks and requests for labor, and can help improve response times and avoid unnecessary travel."

For more information please visit http://www.infor.com/solutions/EAM/.

About Invenergy

Invenergy drives innovation in energy. Invenergy and its affiliated companies develop, own, and operate large-scale renewable and other clean energy generation and storage facilities in the Americas and Europe. Invenergy's home office is located in Chicago and it has regional development offices in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Japan and Europe.

Invenergy and its affiliated companies have developed more than 17,500 megawatts of projects that are in operation, construction or contracted, including wind, solar, natural gas-fueled power generation and energy storage projects. For more information, please visit www.invenergyllc.com.

About Infor

Infor builds business software for specific industries in the cloud. With 16,500 employees and over 90,000 customers in more than 170 countries, Infor software is designed for progress. To learn more, please visit www.infor.com.

For more information:

Christina Ledger

Infor

312-662-2135

[email protected]

Mary Ryan

Senior Manager, Communications

Invenergy

312-582-1424 or [email protected]

SOURCE Infor

Related Links

http://infor.com

SAN FRANCISCO, March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Invitae Corporation (NYSE: NVTA), one of the fastest growing genetic information companies, today announced an expansion of its network of rare and ultra-rare patient registries in its Patient Insights NetworkTM (PIN) program to include five additional collaborations with leading advocacy groups across a variety of genetic conditions. The programs are designed to empower patients to be active participants in their networks and further expand Invitae's work to connect patients with rare genetic disorders to research, clinical trials and information on managing their condition.

The first PIN to launch is led by No Stomach For Cancer, a leading research and advocacy organization focused on stomach cancer. Known as the Global Gastric Cancer Registry, the program enables patients, advocates, clinicians and researchers to share and access deidentified data on a number of different stomach cancers, including Diffuse Gastric Cancer, Proximal Stomach Cancer and Noncardia (Distal) Stomach Cancer.

"Having access to information on clinical experience and outcomes continues to help improve care for patients and accelerates access to clinical trials for both patients and researchers. These networks are making a powerful contribution to advancing our understanding of diseases, particularly in rare disorders." said Robert Nussbaum, M.D., chief medical officer of Invitae. "We're proud of our collaborations with these organizations and their membership to empower patients and help advance research and improve support for people living with these rare conditions."

"Two of the many important ways we can help patients and families facing stomach cancer are to connect them with research opportunities and to help them better understand their condition," said Jon Florin, Executive Director at No Stomach For Cancer. "Our registry program will help the global gastric cancer community by better characterizing how stomach cancer is currently treated through patient provided outcomes, as well as by connecting researchers with patients who may benefit from new therapies. The more people who join the Global Gastric Cancer Registry, the more the network will achieve."

People diagnosed with gastric cancer or a genetic predisposition to gastric cancer may learn more and join the Global Gastric Cancer Registry by visiting: http://gastriccancerregistry.org

In addition to the Global Gastric Cancer Registry, Invitae will be partnering with four other leading advocacy groups to host and launch additional Patient Insights Networks:

The Bow Foundation will be launching a registry for patients with GNAO1 disorders, an ultra-rare pediatric genetic disorder causing developmental delays and neurological symptoms impacting fewer than 100 people worldwide.

disorders, an ultra-rare pediatric genetic disorder causing developmental delays and neurological symptoms impacting fewer than 100 people worldwide. A registry aimed at gathering data on the GM2 Gangliosidoses, such as Tay Sachs disease and Sandhoff disease, rare neurodegenerative lysosomal disorders, in partnership with the National Tay Sachs & Allied Diseases Association (NTSAD).

The RASopathies Network will launch a network aimed at gathering information across a number of rare genetic conditions associated with genetic variants in the Ras-MAPK pathway, that cause developmental delays, heart defects and neurologic problems.

The Spastic Paraplegia Foundation is creating a network for families impacted by Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia or Primary Lateral Sclerosis, a group of rare primary upper motor neuron disorders that cause progressive spasticity (stiffness) and weakness of the leg and hip muscles.

Patient Insights Networks have reimagined the traditional patient registry to maximize the ability of patients to contribute and control their own data and amplify the impact that data can have for other patients, clinicians and researchers. Patient Insights Networks build powerful data sets of symptoms, history, diagnostic journey, quality of life and cost of living with serious health conditions. Patients, advocates, clinicians and researchers then have access to the de-identified data and research-ready patient communities to drive insights that can improve care, increase access to clinical trials and accelerate treatment development. Invitae's program currently covers more than 400 different health conditions. A complete listing of network partners can be found at https://pindirectory.invitae.com/.

For more information visit invitae.com/patient-insights-network.

About No Stomach for Cancer

No Stomach For Cancer, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization whose mission is to support research and unite the caring power of people worldwide affected by stomach cancer. Serving families across the globe, NSFC advances awareness and education about stomach cancer, including Hereditary Diffuse Gastric Cancer (HDGC), provides a support network for affected families, and supports research for screening, early detection, treatment, and prevention of stomach cancer. Headquartered in Wisconsin and serving families across the globe, No Stomach For Cancer is a worldwide thought leader in stomach cancer awareness and education. For more information, please visit www.nostomachforcancer.org

About Invitae

Invitae Corporation (NYSE: NVTA) is bringing comprehensive genetic information into mainstream medical practice to improve the quality of healthcare for billions of people. As one of the fastest growing genetic information companies, Invitae is advancing the broad potential of genetics, helping to expand its use across the healthcare continuum. The company provides genetic information services for all stages of life  from preconception screening, to newborn diagnosis, to inherited disease screening, to proactive health management  and a unique, rapidly expanding network of patients, hospital systems, and advocacy partners that is moving genetics from one-dimensional testing to complex information management. For more information visit www.invitae.com, or follow us on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.

Invitae Corporation Safe Harbor Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including statements relating to the benefits and effectiveness of establishing PIN programs; the company's expectations regarding future partnerships with advocacy groups; and the advocacy groups' hosting and launching of the registry programs. Forward-looking statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially, and reported results should not be considered as an indication of future performance. These risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to: the company's ability to utilize the registry information effectively; the company's continued partnerships with advocacy groups; the risk that the advocacy groups may not be able to launch, expand or continue their registry programs; security breaches, loss of data and other disruptions regarding information obtained from the advocacy groups; laws and regulations applicable to the company's business; and the other risks set forth in the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including the risks set forth in the company's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2017. These forward-looking statements speak only as of the date hereof, and Invitae Corporation disclaims any obligation to update these forward-looking statements.

Contact:

Laura D'Angelo

[email protected]

314-920-0617

SOURCE Invitae Corporation

Related Links

http://invitae.com

VANCOUVER, British Columbia, March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Lifestyle Delivery Systems Inc. (CSE: LDS), (OTCQX: LDSYF), (Frankfurt: LD6, WKN: A14XHT) ("LDS" or the "Company") announces launch of Reveur, a new luxury brand of cannabis products for the California medical cannabis market.

CSPA Group Inc. has received all required third-party testing results for the new Reveur product line which confirmed zero pesticides and zero residual solvents. The test also revealed high levels of terpenes (up to 13%) and THC levels in the mid 80% range. Completion of the required testing now allows for distribution of the product line in selected retail stores in California. CSPA Group is managed by the Company's subsidiary, LDS Scientific Inc. CSPA Group and LDS Scientific conducted a product informational seminar for distributors in both Southern and Northern California. The resulting orders will be delivered this month after all required transportation, distribution and retailer verifications have been received and processed into the track-and-trace system for the State of California. Brad Eckenweiler, LDS's CEO, remarked, "The Reveur product launch marks a significant milestone in the Company's development. The response to the new product line from distributors was very encouraging and clearly supports the Company's decision to add an additional revenue component derived from the Company's extraction expertise." The Company will update the market with the selected retailers, and their locations in California, where the Reveur product line can be purchased as that information becomes available.

About Lifestyle Delivery Systems Inc.

Lifestyle Delivery Systems Inc. is a licensed, state-compliant vertically integrated cannabis-related company. From our isogenic pollination nursery to our cutting edge, state-of-the-art production facility located in Southern California, LDS has become one of the most diverse, innovative and scientifically based cannabis companies throughout North America. The Company's technology produces infused strips (similar to breath strips) that are not only a safer, healthier option to smoking but also a new way to accurately meter the dosage and assure the purity of the product. From start to finish, the production process tests for quality and composition of all the ingredients used in each and every strip, resulting in a delivery system that is safe, consistent and effective.

On behalf of the board of directors of Lifestyle Delivery Systems Inc.

Brad Eckenweiler

CEO & Director

FOR MORE INFORMATION, PLEASE CONTACT:

[email protected]

1-866-347-5058

Cautionary Disclaimer Statement:

The Canadian Securities Exchange has not reviewed and does not accept responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of the content of this news release.

Information set forth in this news release contains forward-looking statements that are based on assumptions as of the date of this news release. These statements reflect management's current estimates, beliefs, intentions and expectations. They are not guarantees of future performance. The Company cautions that all forward looking statements are inherently uncertain and that actual performance may be affected by a number of material factors, many of which are beyond the Company's control. Such factors include, among other things: risks and uncertainties relating to the Company's limited operating history and the need to comply with environmental and governmental regulations. In addition, marijuana remains a Schedule I drug under the United States Controlled Substances Act of 1970. Although Congress has prohibited the US Justice Department from spending federal funds to interfere with the implementation of state medical marijuana laws, this prohibition must be renewed each year to remain in effect. Accordingly, actual and future events, conditions and results may differ materially from the estimates, beliefs, intentions and expectations expressed or implied in the forward looking information. Except as required under applicable securities legislation, The Company undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise forward-looking information.

SOURCE Lifestyle Delivery Systems Inc.

Related Links

http://www.lifestyledeliverysystem.com

NEW YORK, March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- LIM College, which is located in New York City and focused exclusively on the study of business and fashion, has announced that registration is now open for its 2018 Summer Fashion Lab for high school and visiting college students.

LIM College's Summer Fashion Lab is a pre-college program that gives students the opportunity to "try-on" studying fashion at the college level and living in New York City. One-week courses in subjects such as fashion buying, styling, fashion illustration, photography, visual display, event planning, social media marketing  and more  are available.

New courses include Backstage Pass: Publicity and Event Planning where participants will go behind the scenes to learn how to publicize a fashion event, and Red Carpet Ready! which explores the influence of art, music, and pop culture on celebrity fashion.

Also new this summer is Fashion Media: Making a Magazine, a hands-on experience in which students will create their own fashion magazine, and Digital Trend Forecasting, which will focus on fashion analytics and trend forecasting platforms.

A record-setting 400+ students are expected to enroll in 2018's Summer Fashion Lab. Last year, young people came to LIM College from all around the globe  including from as far away as the United Arab Emirates and Hong Kong to as close by as Westchester and New Jersey.

Summer Fashion Lab will run for four weeks: June 25-29 and July 9-13, 16-20 and 23-27. Tuition for non-credit courses is $200 per course, with discounts offered when registering for more than one class. Courses that offer one college elective credit are $350 each and eligible participants may earn a maximum of three credits over the course of the four weeks.

Housing is available in LIM College's residence hall on Manhattan's Upper East Side for $495 per week. The residence hall has staff on duty around the clock and features air-conditioned double and triple rooms with private bathrooms. Students who stay in the residence hall can also take part in activities such as New York City sightseeing tours and outings to Broadway shows.

A complete schedule and course descriptions are available on LIM College's website. For more information, or to register, email [email protected] or go to www.limcollege.edu/summerfashionlab.

About LIM College

Founded in 1939, LIM College educates students for success in the global business of fashion and its many related industries. As a pioneer in experiential education, LIM College fosters a unique connection between real-world experience and academic study in business principles, offering master's, bachelor's and associate degree programs. LIM College is located in four buildings in Manhattan  the nation's fashion and business capital  giving students vast opportunities for hands-on experience and professional development. Alumni have gone on to excel at top companies, including Refinery 29, Harper's Bazaar, Barneys New York, Chanel, and Neiman Marcus.

Contact:

Melissa Krantz 917.653.6716

[email protected]

Meredith Finnin 646.218.2156

[email protected]

SOURCE LIM College

Related Links

http://www.limcollege.edu

CONCORD, Calif., March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Lodgepole Fund No. I, LLC just closed its books for 2017 and has reported to its investors its eighth consecutive year of 10 percent plus net returns.

"The Lodgepole Fund has continued to outperform all other private money construction loan funds by earning over a 10% net return for its Members for 8 consecutive years now," says John W. Simonse, President of LHJS Investments, LLC and one of the Managing Members of Lodgepole Fund.

St Ives House, Beverly Hills Santa Cruz Hwy house, Los Gatos

Simonse went on further to explain, "not only is the Lodgepole Fund outperforming most other real estate loan investment funds by 2-3 percent, but it is also out performing many other secured investments." Most people don't realize it, but the Lodgepole Fund loans are secured primarily by first deeds of trust, one of the highest forms of security available in the market place today." Mr. Simonse went on to say that "For an investment to have such a high rate of return with such a low risk of loss to principal is almost un heard of."

When asked how Lodgepole Fund accomplished this achievement, Mr. Simonse stated, "Our fund management company, LHJS Investments LLC has a very experienced management team and staff. Almost all of the staff has been with LHJS for over 10 years. The depth of experience is evident in that Lodgepole Fund has not had one foreclosure of a loan during this same 8 year period."

Asked how an individual could invest in Lodgepole Fund, Mr. Simonse stated, "The Fund plans to be open for new investors in May of this year."

About Lodgepole Fund No. I, LLC

Lodgepole Fund No. I, LLC has been providing construction and development loans in California since 2010. Lodgepole specializes in providing bridge loans and construction loans for high-end residential homes, small subdivisions and mixed use properties.

About John W. Simonse

John Simonse has been actively involved in the development and investment in Real Estate in the San Francisco Bay Area for nearly 40 years. He has personally overseen the funding and management of over $1 billion in loans and development projects. Currently Mr. Simonse actively manages a portfolio valued over $200 million, which includes three real estate investment Funds.

Mr. Simonse graduated with highest honors from the United States Merchant Marine academy with a Bachelor's of Science degree in Marine Engineering. After graduation, Mr. Simonse worked for the Department of Defense and was an officer in the United States Naval reserve. Mr. Simonse then worked in the U. S. Merchant Marines, where he sailed on cargo ships to over 65 countries and attained a United States Coast Guard license as a Chief Engineer. After leaving the Merchant Marines, Mr. Simonse formed his first real estate Investment fund in 1999.

Mr. Simonse has been successfully managing real estate investment funds and development projects ever since. He currently resides in Danville, CA with his wife Annie and their brood of 6 children.

Contact:

John W. Simonse

Lodgepole Fund No., I, LLC

Phone: 925-603-0433

Email: [email protected]

SOURCE Lodgepole Fund No. I, LLC"Thanks to the leadership of this community, Lorain County Community College was the first community college with a permanent campus in Ohio in 1963 and the first community college to offer a comprehensive University Partnership Program; both of which have been game changers for this community," said LCCC President Marcia J. Ballinger, Ph.D. "Today is yet another historic day for our college and our community."

For more than two decades, LCCC has offered more than 50 bachelor's and master's degrees from leading universities on its campus through the University Partnership. The applied bachelor's degree in microelectronic manufacturing will be an enhancement to LCCC's University Partnership and the first bachelor's degree program offered entirely by LCCC.

According to the Community College Baccalaureate Association, an Affiliated Council of the American Associate of Community Colleges, 20 states already allow community colleges to confer bachelor's degrees. The passing of House Bill 49 in June 2017 confirmed legislation that would allow Ohio to join these other states and instructed Chancellor Carey to approve programs that met specific requirements. Lorain County Community College will now move forward with seeking approval from the Higher Learning Commission, the accrediting body for public colleges and universities in Ohio.

In the letter to Dr. Ballinger from Chancellor Carey notifying Lorain County Community College of the approval, he states, "In the case of Lorain County Community College's request, the Ohio Department of Higher Education observed exceptionally strong evidence of workforce need in the field of microelectronic manufacturing. Although there are other engineering technology programs in the region, there was no evidence of duplication with regard to microelectronic manufacturing. There was clear evidence of collaboration and agreements with multiple employers, including paid internship program with employer commitments to hire interns and graduates of the programs."

"This program is being developed with strong input from industry. We are partnering with area employers and designing our curriculum to meet their workforce needs," said Ballinger. "This is all about advanced manufacturing and growing a talent base to help companies not only compete, but grow and thrive especially as new technologies emerge."

Microelectronic manufacturing is an interdisciplinary field that combines mechanical and electrical engineering technology with science, mathematics and communications. This emerging advanced manufacturing field helps companies make products and processes "smart" by embedding sensors and micro electromechanical systems (MEMS).

In 2014, LCCC answered industry need by launching the state's first associate degree program in mechatronics technology with a focus in MEMS. The program is one of only 16 in the United States and the only one of its kind in Ohio.

"We have a 100 percent job placement rate for our current mechatronics technology associate degree. Now we will be able to offer our students the opportunity to complete a pathway from certificate to bachelor's degree in this highly specialized and in-demand field," said Johnny Vanderford, LCCC assistant professor and project manager for Mechatronics Technology program.

Ohio has set a target to have 65 percent of its workforce earn an industry recognized credential or degree by 2025. Institutions of higher education are pursuing new models of instruction  like the applied bachelor's degree  to reach these goals.

"LCCC is ready to step up and this program hits the mark. Students are excited because they will earn a bachelor's degree for less than $15,000 while simultaneously completing a paid internship that averages $18,000. Our students will be financially ahead even before they land their first job," Ballinger said.

In fact, graduates of the associate degree MEMS program are often offered full-time work following the completion of their degree with their internship provider. Through this "Learn and Earn" model, graduates of the associate program are earning average starting salaries of $65,000.

"The authority to deliver applied bachelor's degrees, especially in fields like this, expands upon our commitment to our community to keep access to higher education affordable and relevant to the job market. This is the return on investment our community expects and deserves," said Ballinger.

SOURCE Lorain County Community CollegeKATY, Texas, March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- PushFire announces today that Rae (Hoffman) Dolan has stepped down as the Chief Executive Officer for the firm, concurrent with the announcement that she is retiring from SEO consulting and affiliate marketing.



Sean Dolan, who has served as the company's President and COO since co-founding the company in 2012, has moved into the CEO role.



(Hoffman) Dolan has been a visible fixture in the digital marketing community for almost two decades. She started her digital marketing career in 1998, founding the first international support group for parents and families of pediatric stroke survivors to ever register with the American Stroke Association.



In 2000, Rae entered the affiliate marketing and search engine optimization industries, becoming a well-known voice within them over the tenure of her career.



Described by award-winning author Jonathan Fields as "a legend in the online world," (Hoffman) Dolan has given over 200 conference presentations at marketing conferences all over North America. She has columned at leading publications within the marketing industry and has been featured in multiple national media outlets as an acknowledged expert in the field. Rae has been nominated for the affiliate marketing industry's most prestigious awards, the Affiliate Summit Pinnacle Awards, four times  taking home the award for Affiliate of the Year in 2016.



(Hoffman) Dolan has served as an educator in the online marketing space for over a decade, freely sharing information through her speaking engagements and personal website, Sugarrae.



"I've had an unbelievable career in online marketing, but it was time for a change," (Hoffman) Dolan said. "I'm so proud of what we've built with PushFire and am excited to watch the company expand on its success. The 'Sugarrae' brand will always be a part of me, but retiring it was a necessary component to execute my plans." Rae expanded on her retirement from the SEO consulting and affiliate marketing fields in a blog post published this morning on Sugarrae.



(Hoffman) Dolan's exit from a public-facing role in the company has been prepared for behind the scenes for over a year. "Current clients shouldn't even notice the change. We've worked hard to ensure the transition was seamless." (Hoffman) Dolan said.



Rae will remain a co-owner of PushFire, and has moved into an advisory role for the agency, but will have no involvement in client fulfillment, services, operations, or public branding efforts for the company moving forward.



Her change in position will allow (Hoffman) Dolan to focus on new ventures in real estate: Audrey Micah Investments - a real estate investing company she co-founded with her husband last year and AMI House Buyers - a company that buys houses as-is in the Katy & Houston areas she launched in February of 2018. (Hoffman) Dolan is also a licensed real estate agent in Texas, having launched Selling Katy as representation of her license in March of 2018. "The use of my digital marketing skills will be limited to promoting my real estate endeavors from this point forward," she said.

(Hoffman) Dolan will also make a move to using her married name  Rae Dolan  in the business world moving forward.



PushFire recently brought in Jessica Frick to serve as VP of Operations in preparation for the change, allowing Sean Dolan to assume the CEO position without affecting operations.



"Rae had a large hand in helping PushFire get to where it is today," said Sean Dolan. "We're fortunate to have had her reputation and expertise behind the company over the last six years."



Mr. Dolan is well qualified to be assuming the CEO role. With ten years of experience in the Internet marketing industry, he is a recognized expert on paid search and digital advertising. Like (Hoffman) Dolan, he is a popular conference speaker at industry conferences nationwide and has been featured in multiple international media outlets. With a strong reputation for providing result-oriented marketing services, his talent and skill-set will be an invaluable asset to growing the company from this point forward.



"I couldn't ask for better hands to leave the company in as I step down from the CEO role. Sean is incredibly talented, dedicated, and I have no doubt he will hold the company's production and reputation to the same high standards as I did. PushFire is poised for some incredible growth over the next few years, and Sean is the ideal person to drive and oversee it."



About PushFire



PushFire is a nationally recognized digital marketing firm that provides paid search and digital advertising management to a wide range of clientele that spans from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies.



Contacts



PushFire

Jessica Frick, VP of Operations

[email protected]

888.663.9994

https://pushfire.com

Audrey Micah Investments

Rae Dolan, Co-owner & Managing Director

[email protected]

832.409.1116

https://audreymicah.com

SOURCE PushFire

Related Links

https://pushfire.com

LOS ANGELES, March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The mental health watchdog group, Citizens Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) International is offering Law Enforcement Officers (LEOs) and school officials a free copy of its compelling new report about a common denominator found in many mass shootings: psychotropic drugs. The report, called Psychiatric Drugs Create Violence & Suicide: School Shootings & Other Acts of Senseless Violence, provides information on more than 30 studies that link antidepressants, antipsychotics, psychostimulants, mood stabilizers and sedative hypnotics to adverse effects that include hostility, mania, aggression, self-harm, suicide and homicidal thoughts.

CCHR campaign launched to educate law enforcement, policy makers and school officials about violence- and suicide-inducing drug risks

The 64-page report details more than 60 examples of school and mass shootings, stabbings and senseless violent acts committed by those under the influence of psychotropic drugs or experiencing serious withdrawal from them.

Jan Eastgate, President of CCHR International, said, "The goal of this report is to help law enforcement, educators and policy makers to learn how psychotropic drugs are a hidden link to the prevalence of violence and suicide in the community. Facts, statistics, studies and expert opinion in the report show the medical concerns about the rise of senseless acts of violence coincident with the increase in psychotropic drug prescriptions and usage.

"Psychiatric drugs create dependence, suicide and violence in a percent of individuals taking them. That is a documented fact. The disastrous consequences are felt by all. As so many lives are at stake, it is vital that each person who is in a position to take action avail themselves of this information to help protect our communities."

Experts Speak Out About Psychotropic Drugs, Violence & Suicide

Some of the information the report covers:

An Australian judge said an antidepressant was the "overwhelmingly probable" reason for turning a peaceful, law-abiding man into a brutal killer of his wife.[1]

A Wyoming jury awarded $8 million to the relatives of a man who, with no history of aggressive or suicidal behavior, went on a shooting rampage killing three family members after taking an antidepressant. The jury determined that the drug was 80 percent responsible for the crime and "can cause some people to become homicidal and/or suicidal."[2]

A Harvard Medical school psychiatrist says: "The irritability and impulsivity" from antidepressants "can make people suicidal or homicidal."[3]

An affiliate professor of Biology at Loyola University Maryland says: "The link between antidepressants and violence, including suicide and homicide, is well-established."[4]

A leading international psychopharmacology expert and professor of psychiatry reports: "Violence and other potentially criminal behavior caused by prescription drugs are medicine's best-kept secret."[5] He also believes that an estimated 90 percent of school shootings, over more than a decade, were linked to SSRI antidepressants.[6]

27 international drug agency warnings link psychiatric drugs to the adverse effects of violence, mania, psychosis or homicidal ideation; 49 warn of self-harm or suicide/suicidal ideation and 17 report addiction or withdrawal effects.[7]

The Adverse Event Reporting System (AERS) of U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has at least 1,530 cases of homicide/homicidal ideation associated with psychiatric drugs.

Researchers took the FDA ADR data and identified 25 psychotropic drugs that are disproportionately associated with violence.[8]

A New York forensic psychologist says that most of the young murderers he has personally examined had been "in 'treatment' and were using prescribed stimulant/amphetamine type drugs before and during the killing events. These medications did not prevent but instead contributed to the violence."[9]

Drug Withdrawal Effects Create Havoc

The Council for Evidence-Based Psychiatry in the UK has determined: "Withdrawal from psychiatric drugs can be disabling and can cause a range of severe physical and psychological effects which often last for months and sometimes years." [emphasis added][10]

A study in The Journal of Psychoactive Drugs reported: "It is now accepted that all major classes of psychiatric medication produce distinctive withdrawal effects."[11]

Withdrawal effects from sedative hypnotics, also known as benzodiazepines, can last weeks and sometimes months or years, and include increased anxiety, perceptual distortions, depersonalization, paranoid thoughts, rage, aggression, and irritability, according to leading British expert with the Institute of Neuroscience, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne.[12]

Psychiatric Drug-Induced "Suicide by Cop"

Ann Blake Tracy, Ph.D., head of the International Coalition for Drug Awareness, says there is a whole new vocabulary today as a result of widespread antidepressant use, with terms such as "road rage," "murder/suicide," "going postal" and "suicide by cop."[13] For example, a suicidal veteran fired 11 shots during an encounter with police in Spokane, Washington, admitting during his trial that he had unloaded his gun (in the air) before walking out into the alley where he intended to provoke the police to shoot him as part of a "suicide by cop" plan. He'd been prescribed an antidepressant documented to cause suicidal thoughts.[14]

CCHR is clear that not every violent killer has been on or withdrawing from a psychotropic drug at the time of committing a crime, but in many cases such drugs emerge when learning of the killer's background. "It begs the question whether in taking the drug or when the drug or other treatment failed them, did this help propel them on a path towards the destruction of others?" the report poses.

CCHR says that in any official response to the Vegas concert shooting, Texas Church Shooter and Parkland Florida school shooting, LEOs, educators and legislators should not lose sight of the fact that there is a driving force behind someone picking up a gun, knife or even making a bomb to carry out violent and deadly acts. And there is sufficient evidence to investigate the role of prescribed mind-altering drugs in inducing altered states of mind in a percentage of people taking these drugs.

Some of the recommendations in the report include:

Legislative hearings should be held to fully investigate the correlation between psychiatric treatment and violence and suicide.

Toxicology testing for psychiatric drugs should be mandatory in cases where someone has committed a mass shooting or other serious violent crime, the information from which would become part of a national database that all branches and levels of law enforcement could access.

Eastgate summarizes: "The information in this report is not to excuse violent crimes and make the perpetrator blameless, but to demonstrate why there may be a much different type of violent behavior that police and the community face today compared to 50 years ago. All psychotropic drugs are called that because they are mind-altering or mind-turning. For some of those taking them, the consequences can be serious for them and the community. CCHR wants to educate as many officials and educators as possible in launching this report."

CCHR Urges: Take Action Against Violence in Our Schools and Community

Law Enforcement Officers and School Officials wishing a free printed copy of: Psychiatric Drugs Create Violence & Suicide: School Shootings & Other Acts of Senseless Violence can email [email protected].

As a nonprofit, CCHR relies on memberships and donations to help it to provide information about psychotropic drugs and other psychiatric treatments that are not generally publicized. It is responsible for helping get over 180 laws enacted, including the 2004 Federal Prohibition of Child Medication Safety Amendment that prohibits schools from forcing children onto psychotropic drugs as a requisite for their education.

Contact: Amber Rauscher, [email protected] or (323) 467-4242

References:

[1] Sarah Boseley, "Prozac class drug blamed for killing," The Guardian (London), 2 May 2001, https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2001/may/26/sarahboseley.

[2] Jim Rosack, "SSRIs Called on Carpet Over Violence Claims," Psychiatric News, Vol. 36, No. 19, 5 Oct. 2001; David Healy,Andrew Herxheimer, and David B Menkes, "Antidepressants and Violence: Problems at the Interface of Medicine and Law," PLoS Medicine, Sept. 2006, 3(9): e372, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1564177.

[3] "FDA Mulls Antidepressant Warnings," Daily Press, 21 Mar. 2004, http://articles.dailypress.com/2004-03-21/news/0403210207_1_dr-joseph-glenmullen-corey-baadsgaard-school-shootings-and-murder-suicides.

[4] Patrick D. Hahn, "Antidepressants: a deadly treatment?," Baltimore Sun, 11 Apr. 2015, http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/bs-ed-antidepressants-violence-20150411-story.html.

[5] John Horgan, "What '60 Minutes' Gets Wrong in Report on Mental Illness and Violence," Scientific American, 2 Oct. 2013, https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/what-e2809c60-minutese2809d-gets-wrong-in-report-on-mental-illness-and-violence.

[6] "Psych meds linked to 90% of school shootings, WND, 18 Dec. 2012, http://www.wnd.com/2012/12/psych-meds-linked-to-90-of-school-shootings/#i1JviHwg3g2T7KSt.99.

[7] https://www.cchrint.org/school-shooters.

[8] Thomas J. Moore, Joseph Glenmullen, Curt D. Furbert, "Prescription Drugs Associated with Reports of Violence Towards Others," Public Library of Science ONE, Vol. 5, Iss. 12, Dec. 2010, http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0015337.

[9] David Kirschner, Ph.D., "Mass shooters received only limited treatment," The National Psychologist, 10 Sep 2014, http://nationalpsychologist.com/2014/09/mass-shooters-received-only-limited-treatment/102638.html.

[10] "Withdrawal from psychiatric drugs can be disabling and can cause a range of severe physical and psychological effects," Council for Evidence-Based Psychiatry, 15 Mar. 2015, https://ravimid.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/psychiatric-drug-withdrawal-can-be-disabling-010314-1.pdf.

[11] Joanna Moncrieff, M.B.B.S., David Cohen, and Sally Porter, "The Psychoactive Effects of Psychiatric Medication: The Elephant in the Room," J Psychoactive Drugs, Nov. 2013; 45(5): 409415, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4118946.

[12] C. Heather Ashton, DM, FRCP, "Benzodiazepines: How They Work and How to Withdraw," Institute of Neuroscience, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, 2002, http://www.benzo.org.uk/manual/bzcha03.htm.

[13] Ann Blake Tracy, "Suicide & Death Can Lurk in Each SSRI Pill," http://www.rense.com/general77/lurk.htm.

[14] "Man seeking 'suicide by cop' found guilty of assault," The Spokane-Review, 11 Feb. 2016, http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2016/feb/11/man-who-encouraged-spokane-police-to-shoot-him-fou/; Jeff Humphrey, "Army vet gets nine years for suicide by cop attempt," KXLY, 3 Mar. 2016, http://www.kxly.com/news/local-news/spokane/army-vet-gets-nine-years-for-suicide-by-cop-attempt_20161121034442715/176407731.

Related Links

Psychiatric Drugs Create Violence & Suicide: School Shootings & Other Acts of Senseless Violence

SOURCE Citizens Commission on Human Rights InternationalUNION CITY, Calif., March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Mizuho OSI, a leading manufacturer of specialty surgical tables, pressure management solutions, and table specific patient care kits, will host a lecture on the Risk Factors for Pressure Injury while exhibiting at the 2018 AORN Global Surgical Conference & Expo in New Orleans. The CE Certified lecture will be taught by Cassendra A. Munro, MSN, RN, CNOR, the creator of the Munro Pressure Ulcer Risk Assessment Scale for Perioperative Patients (Munro Scale), which is used by clinicians to determine a patient's risk factors for pressure injury to ensure preventative measures are in place for those likely to develop an injury. This lecture will be held at Booth #1531, where Mizuho OSI will also be demonstrating their advance pressure management solutions.

The risk of pressure injuries for patients undergoing lengthy surgical procedures is a major concern in healthcare, but by using the most advanced tools, perioperative care can be proactive towards pressure injury prevention and healthcare providers are better prepared for wound management before an injury occurs. Hospitals no longer receive reimbursements for late-stage pressure injuries that occur during a patient's hospital admission, so risk assessment and pressure management tools provide the first line of intervention and can create personalized patient care thereby identifying risk. Along with Mizuho OSI's advanced pressure management solutions, AORN attendees can learn about the impact of pressure injuries, risk assessment using the Munro Scale as an intervention, and the prevention of pressure injury.

The 30-minute lecture on Risk Factors for Pressure Injury: The CMUNRO SCALE Teaching Tool will be hosted at Mizuho OSI booth at the following times:

Monday, March 26 th , 2018: 10:15am , 11:00am , and 1:45pm

, 2018: , , and Tuesday, March 27 th, 2018: 9:45am , 11:15am

The Munro Scale is the most comprehensive risk assessment scale available for use. While the Munro Scale continues to undergo psychometric, validity and reliability testing, the CMUNRO SCALE is a teaching tool ready for use that supplements the education and use of the Munro Scale through the addition of perioperative pressure injury risk assessment.

"By focusing on patient safety and quality of care, there is a clear need for preventative measures that address the problem of hospital-acquired pressure injuries. In using a risk assessment scale and incorporating critical tools into the OR, nurses and post-operative staff members can better ensure patient safety," said Cassendra A. Munro, MSN, RN, CNOR. "That's why I developed the Munro Scale for pressure injury risk assessmentit's a method of communicating the level of risk to support the continuation of preventative measures to the next phase of care, which attendees can learn about at the Mizuho OSI-hosted lecture."

During AORN, Mizuho OSI will also showcase its new and innovative Avra Intelligent Pressure Sensing System, designed to measure the pressure between the patient and surface, alerting caregivers of pressure levels and locations that may lead to injury. Additionally, Mizuho OSI experts will be available to demonstrate the Levo Head Positioning System, which allows for full surgeon control of a patient's head position and provides better safety while performing spinal surgery.

"As hospitals look to reduce the incidence of costly pressure injuries when patients are admitted for surgical procedures, we're honored to have Cassendra as part of our presence to provide an opportunity for AORN attendees to learn how to prevent pressure injuries through the latest techniques in risk assessment and our advanced surgical suite solutions," said Greg Neukirch, vice president of Marketing and Sales at Mizuho OSI. "By demonstrating our integrated operating room capabilities, we can introduce attendees to what the future of surgical patient care can look like when clinicians have the most advanced tools and technology to do so.

About Cassendra A. Munro, MSN, RN, RNFA, CNOR

Cassendra has been a perioperative nurse for over 20 years and a member of AORN for over 16 years. At Providence Saint John's Health Center in Santa Monica CA, she has served in the roles of clinical coordinator for hip and pelvis, clinical nurse specialist, financial coordinator and perioperative educator for the department of surgery. Her current position is the Magnet and Professional Practice Manager. Throughout her perioperative career she has independently functioned in the role of registered nurse first assistant and is a qualified expert witness. She is the creator of the Munro Pressure Ulcer Risk Assessment Scale for Perioperative Patients and is currently partnering with AORN on further development.

About Mizuho OSI

Mizuho OSI is a U.S. based company and the leader in the markets for specialty surgery and patient positioning. The company's portfolio includes specialty surgical tables for procedure-specific approaches that improves patient outcomes in spine and orthopedic surgeries, a range of general surgical tables, and consumable surgical patient care products. Mizuho OSI products are sold direct in the U.S. and Germany, and by the Mizuho Corporation in Japan. Both companies sell their products and solutions worldwide through authorized international distributors. Mizuho OSI is a wholly owned subsidiary of Mizuho Corporation located in Tokyo, Japan, a leading surgical table manufacturer in Asia. The Mizuho Group also includes Trilux Medical, a subsidiary of Mizuho OSI. Trilux Medical is a provider and manufacturer of surgical lights, surgical pendants, operating room patient integration, video management systems, and turn-key operating room solutions. Trilux Medical products and solutions are sold direct in Germany and worldwide through authorized international distributors. More information is available at www.mizuhosi.com

SOURCE Mizuho OSI

Related Links

http://www.mizuhosi.com

REDWOOD SHORES, Calif., March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- New research conducted in partnership with Informa Engage / Pharma Intelligence reveals that 62% of drug safety experts have implemented or plan to implement Artificial Intelligence (AI) to improve adverse event processing. The findings point to an industry-wide push for a faster, more accurate, and more secure approach to pharmacovigilance using new technologies.

The success of pharmacovigilance efforts hinges on the ability to spot risks early, manage them effectively, and comply with increasingly complex regulations. Drug safety teams view AI as a means to achieve this, and have already begun to explore its potential:

27% have or plan to implement AI for quality assurance

23% have or plan to implement AI for follow-up processing

19% have or plan to implement AI for faster reporting

Andrea Charles, Editor, Custom Content, Informa Pharma Intelligence said, "Safety teams are under immense pressure to work quickly and accurately, but their biggest concerns are patient safety and the protection of their data. They need a robust approach to pharmacovigilance that allows them to work faster while maintaining a high standard of accuracy and security, which is why they are replacing and enhancing their systems with advanced technologies that are fit for the job."

The research also reveals an industry-wide shift towards cloud-based systems to improve security. Almost 60% of respondents already have safety solutions in the cloud or are planning to move there within the next two years.

Bruce Palsulich, VP of safety product strategy for Oracle Health Sciences, said, "With the increase in adverse events reported, and the flat growth in resources to manage safety case processing, pharmacovigilance teams are under extreme pressure to do more with less. Fortunately, adverse event processing is becoming faster and smarter with the help of AI and the cloud. Both technologies are helping drug safety experts to improve quality and accuracy in the handling of the data they work with, and drive down their reporting costs. The time is ripe for wider adoption, and it's encouraging to see the industry embrace new ways of working that will benefit them and the public."

For this study, data was gathered from 153 professionals (director level and above) with titles including regulatory affairs, risk management, head of pharmacovigilance and adverse event case reporting, within pharmaceutical companies, CROs and sponsors from around the globe (North America, Europe, Asia Pacific, South America, Middle East and Africa). The data was gathered from November 2017 to December 2017.

On 22 March 2018 at 11:00 a.m. ET, Oracle Health Sciences and Pharma Intelligence will host a webcast to explore these trends in detail. Experts from both organizations will outline the forces behind the uptake of AI and cloud-based systems in the drug safety sector, and share insight into how these technologies will improve pharmacovigilance efforts. Click here for more information and to register for the live webcast.

Additional Resources

About Oracle

The Oracle Cloud offers complete SaaS application suites for ERP, HCM and CX, plus best-in-class database Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) from data centers throughout the Americas, Europe, and Asia. For more information about Oracle (NYSE:ORCL), please visit us at oracle.com.

About Oracle Health Sciences

Oracle Health Sciences breaks down barriers and opens new pathways to unify people and processes, helping to bring new drugs to market faster. As the number one vendor in Life Sciences (IDC, 2017) and the number one provider of eClinical solutions (Everest Group, 2017), powered by the number one data management technology in the world (Gartner, 2017), Oracle Health Sciences is trusted by 29 of the top 30 pharma, 10 of the top 10 biotech, and 10 of the top 10 CROs for clinical trial and safety management around the globe.

About Pharma Intelligence

Informa Pharma Intelligence powers a full suite of analysis products - Datamonitor Healthcare, Sitetrove, Trialtrove, Pharmaprojects, Medtrack, Biomedtracker, Scrip, Pink Sheet and In Vivo  to deliver the data needed by the pharmaceutical and biomedical industry to make decisions and create real-world opportunities for growth. With more than 500 analysts keeping their fingers on the pulse of the industry, no key disease, clinical trial, drug approval or R&D project isn't covered through the breadth and depth of data available to customers. For more information visit pharmaintelligence.informa.com.

About Informa Engage

Informa Engage is the marketing research arm for Informa Pharma Intelligence. We connect marketers with B2B decision makers. By combining unrivaled reach, deep knowledge of specialist markets and sophisticated marketing, we engage buyers  activating real results for marketers.

Trademarks

Oracle and Java are registered trademarks of Oracle and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

SOURCE Oracle

Related Links

http://www.oracle.com

IRVINE, Calif., March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Netwrix Corporation, provider of a visibility platform for data security and risk mitigation in hybrid environments, today announced the launch of a new global channel program in North America. Ken Tripp, Director of Channel Accounts at Netwrix, will be responsible for running this program and expanding the partner network in North America.

The aim of the new partner program is to accelerate growth across all North American regions and create a proactive partner community network that addresses all industry verticals, sizes and routes to market. The new channel program includes:

1) Acknowledgement of highly engaged partners. The new channel program will reward top performers that grow the Netwrix business. Netwrix supports highly motivated partners who represent its award-winning platform, and protects their investments as they develop new opportunities.

2) New tools to help partners stay ahead of the competition. Netwrix provides partners with various sales and marketing enablement tools, such as a revamped partner portal and prebuilt campaigns-in-a-box, to help them run their businesses better, faster and more efficiently.

3) Focus on all industry verticals and organization sizes. Netwrix targets both SMBs and the enterprise sector, and supports the activities of all partners, from local boutique partners that focus on certain industries to large international resellers with broad portfolios.

With almost 20 years of work in the IT industry, Ken Tripp brings substantial experience to his role at Netwrix, including channel sales and management, business development, strategic planning, and product marketing. Prior to joining Netwrix, Ken worked for AT&T and Futura International.

"Our new channel strategy aims to strengthen relationships with our partners in North America, as well as encourage more companies in the region to join our partner network. The revamped channel program enables us to acknowledge highly motivated companies and bring more value to partners by providing them with all the resources and tools they need to respond to increasing customer demand and drive successful sales," said Tripp.

"One of our top priorities is to build relationships with partners in North America based on trust and healthy competition. A new, solid channel strategy is a very important step for us, since it empowers us to acknowledge our most enthusiastic partners and make doing business with Netwrix easier. We offer even more transparency into opportunities with Netwrix to help our partners track their milestones and grow their businesses. Netwrix will continue to collaborate with partners in the US and offer them continuous sales and marketing support, as well as reward top-performing companies regardless of their size or the markets they operate in," said Michael Fimin, CEO and Co-Founder of Netwrix.

For more information about Netwrix Partner Programs, visit:

https://www.netwrix.com/netwrix_partner_program.html

About Netwrix Corporation

Netwrix Corporation is a software company focused exclusively on providing IT operations and security teams pervasive visibility into user behavior and system configurations across hybrid cloud IT infrastructures, empowering them to protect data regardless of its location and sleep soundly at night instead of worrying about security blind zones or yet another compliance check. Over 9,000 enterprises worldwide rely on Netwrix to detect and proactively mitigate data security threats on premises and in the cloud, pass compliance audits with less expense, and increase the productivity of their IT security and operations teams.

Founded in 2006, Netwrix has earned more than 140 industry awards and been named to both the Inc. 5000 and Deloitte Technology Fast 500 lists of the fastest growing companies in the U.S. For more information, visit www.netwrix.com.

CONTACT:

Erin Jones

Avista PR for Netwrix

P: 704.664.2170

E: [email protected]

SOURCE Netwrix Corporation

Related Links

http://www.netwrix.com

PALO ALTO, Calif., March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Nok Nok Labs, a leader in modern authentication and the founder of the FIDO (Fast IDentity Online) Alliance, today announced that it has entered into a partnership with NTT DATA, a leading IT services provider headquartered in Tokyo, Japan. With this partnership, NTT DATA becomes an authorized reseller of the FIDO-certified Nok NokTM S3 Authentication Suite (Nok NokTM S3 Suite) and Nok Nok Labs continues to expand its global footprint.

The Nok NokTM S3 Suite will form the cornerstone of a new systems integration offering from NTT DATA focused on biometric authentication. Executives from NTT DATA are forecasting that the new systems integration offering will produce an additional 1 billion yen (over $8 million USD) in sales by 2020. Additionally, NTT DATA will leverage the experience of using and deploying Nok Nok Labs' next-generation authentication technologies to further develop new solutions for the Mobile Network Operator (MNO), Financial Services, and Public Sector marketplaces all over the world.

With the ability to resell the S3 Suite, NTT DATA can now offer their customers an authentication platform that is flexible, extensible, scalable and secure. The S3 Suite has been shown to deliver a 60 percent reduction in password reset requests, as well as providing seamless integration with new technologies.

"NTT DATA is a worldwide leader in IT services and we will work closely with them to bring secure, scalable, modern authentication to customers around the globe," said Phillip Dunkelberger, President and CEO of Nok Nok Labs. "Providing high assurance of customer identity is a cornerstone of modern security architecture. Together, Nok Nok Labs and NTT DATA will deliver these benefits through next-generation authentication technology."

"Nok Nok Labs has shown that they are skilled in building robust, advanced authentication technology and their vision for eliminating the need for usernames and passwords and delivering better privacy, security and a more seamless customer experience is one we think is very exciting," said Katsufumi Fukunishi, Head of Mobile Business at NTT DATA. "We look forward to leveraging a standards-based approach to help our customers future-proof their authentication investments in existing and emerging fields, such as the Internet of Things (IoT)."

As a founding member of the FIDO Alliance, Nok Nok Labs is the world-leader in deploying FIDO-based solutions. The NNLTM Authentication Server is the back-end to many of the world's largest FIDO-certified implementations and Nok Nok Labs has been a key technical partner in assisting several biometric authentication vendors to achieve FIDO-certification. The S3 Suite is commercially deployed at Internet scale  supporting tens of millions of users across a broad range of applications including payments, Telco services, fintech, healthcare and IoT. Such expertise and performance made Nok Nok Labs the ideal partner for NTT DATA.

The Nok NokTM S3 Suite is now available to NTT DATA customers. For more information about Nok Nok Labs and the Nok NokTM S3 Suite, please visit www.noknok.com

About Nok Nok Labs

Nok Nok Labs provides organizations with the ability to bring a unified approach to deploy easy to use and secure authentication infrastructure to their mobile and web applications, using standards-based solutions that include support for FIDO and other specifications. The Nok Nok S3 Authentication Suite enables organizations to accelerate revenues, reduce fraud, and strengthen security and privacy. Nok Nok Labs is a founding member of the FIDO Alliance with industry leading customers and partners that include NTT DOCOMO, PayPal, Alipay, Samsung and Lenovo. For more information, visit www.noknok.com.

SOURCE Nok Nok Labs

Related Links

http://www.noknok.com

WORTHINGTON, Ohio, March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The Ohio Corn & Wheat Growers Association (OCWGA) and the Ohio Soybean Association (OSA) today urged Congress to again reject the steep reductions to the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative proposed in the Trump Administration's budget. The president has proposed a 90 percent cut, which would reduce funding from $300 million to $30 million.

Ohio's corn, soy and wheat farmers have been strong supporters of the program for almost a decade. Since 2009 the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative has provided more than $300 million annually in water quality improvement efforts and generated more than $2 billion for previously unfunded restoration work over the past eight years. These investments protect the public health and the environment.

"Congress stepped up in support of Lake Erie last year, and we need them to do so again now," said OCWGA President Jed Bower. "The Great Lakes are the source of nourishment, fishing and recreation for millions of Americans, and we must protect them."

"The administration's proposal would halt the positive momentum we have going with respect to water quality in Lake Erie and all the Great Lakes," said OSA President Allen Armstrong. "We appreciate the support our senators and representatives demonstrated last year, and we ask for that support again."

The Trump administration proposed severe cuts to Great Lakes funding for the remainder of the 2017 fiscal year budget and proposed eliminating it in 2018. However, in both instances, led by Ohio Sens. Sherrod Brown and Rob Portman, Congress voted to keep programs at their current funding level of $300 million.

About OSA

Headquartered in Worthington, Ohio, OSA is governed by a volunteer farmer board dedicated to education and promotion, as well as to uniting producer interest through support of legislative activities beneficial to the Ohio soybean industry.

About OCWGA

Headquartered in Delaware, OCWGA advocates, promotes and enhances opportunities for Ohio grain farmers by staying ahead of issues that have the potential to impact the way farmers make a living.

SOURCE Ohio Corn & Wheat Growers Association; Ohio Soybean AssociationNEW YORK, March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- A profile of Smile Train, the world's largest cleft organization, kicks off the 22nd season of The Visionaries, an award-winning public television series, hosted by acclaimed actor Sam Waterston. The Visionaries documentary series highlights the stories of individuals and nonprofit organizations that are working to create positive social change throughout the world. Visionaries has selected Smile Train to be profiled because the organization's impact represents a unique opportunity to explore the seldom discussed issue of "appearance" in human society.

Experience the interactive Multichannel News Release here: https://www.multivu.com/players/English/8293751-smile-train-the-visionaries-documentary-pbs-series/

The Visionaries series takes viewers around the world to experience the lives of extraordinary people tackling some of humanity's toughest challenges. The series guides viewers on a journey that leads to real solutions with proven outcomes, many of which have the potential to change the world.

Smile Train is an international children's charity with a sustainable approach to a single, solvable problem: cleft lip and palate. Millions of children in developing countries with untreated clefts live in isolation. While they are in isolation due to how they "appear" to others in the community, the fact is that they also often have medical and health related issues such as difficulty eating, breathing and speaking. Cleft repair surgery is simple, and the transformation is immediate. Coupled with comprehensive cleft care services, like speech therapy and orthodontics, children with clefts then have the opportunity to go on and lead healthy lives.

The social impact is profound, a recent independent study quantifies the economic value of global cleft repair surgery, using patient data from Smile Train. For every $250 invested in a single cleft repair, as much as $42,000 is put back into the local economy as former cleft patients go on to contribute to economic productivity and lead full, productive lives in their communities.

"Smile Train is proud to be a part of The Visionaries series as we continue to raise much needed awareness about the real challenges children with untreated clefts in the developing world face. The episode on Smile Train sheds light on the work that our local medical partners are doing 365 days a year to help give children with clefts not only their forever smiles, but second chances at life," said Smile Train's CEO Susannah Schaefer.

The episode titled "Powerful Images  Empowering Stories" takes viewers to Nigeria and Ghana. In Nigeria, Smile Train's local partner hospital, Lagos University Teaching Hospital (LUTH), is featured and viewers hear from Professor Olugbemiga Ogunlewe, who was the first woman to become an Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeon in Nigeria and the first woman nominated President of the Nigerian Association of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons. Viewers also learn directly from patients and their families in both Nigeria and Ghana about how Smile Train has changed their lives for the better.

This episode was made possible by the generous support of Smile Train's corporate sponsors: Masimo, GroupM and InnerWorkings.

For more information about Smile Train and updated information on local listings for The Visionaries series on PBS visit smiletrain.org

About Smile Train

Smile Train provides free cleft surgery and comprehensive cleft care to children in developing countries. Through training local doctors and empowering partner hospitals around the world, we advance a sustainable solution and scalable model to treat clefts, drastically improving children's lives, including their ability to eat, breathe, and speak over time. To learn more about how Smile Train's sustainable approach means donations have both an immediate and long-term impact, please visit smiletrain.org.

Press Contacts

Smile Train

Nijha Diggs, Director of Public Relations

646.751.3231

[email protected]

SOURCE Smile TrainMINNEAPOLIS, March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- PowerObjects, an HCL Technologies Company, is excited to announce their sponsorship of Field Service USA. This year's event will be held April 17-20 in Palm Springs, California. This industry-leading conference brings hundreds of service leaders together to network and discuss the latest innovations in Field Service and Support.

"PowerObjects is excited to be a sponsor at Field Service USA this year," says Steve Thompson, Vice President of Sales at PowerObjects. "Our team is looking forward to meeting with industry professionals and showcasing our Dynamics 365 solutions at the event."

PowerObjects' team of Field Service experts will be at the conference to answer questions, demo products, meet with attendees and showcase our exclusive IoT smart house. In addition, Peter Bertell, National Business Development Director Manufacturing/Hi-tech at PowerObjects, will host two roundtable discussions on digital transformation on Thursday, April 19.

Those who are interested in attending Field Service USA can use promo code FSUSA18HCL to get 20% off their registration. Registration information can be found here.

About PowerObjects, an HCL Technologies Company

PowerObjects, an HCL Technologies Company, is a leader in delivering Microsoft Dynamics 365 solutions through unparalleled offerings of service, support, education and add-ons. Winner of the 2017 Microsoft Worldwide Partner of the Year Award for Dynamics 365 Consulting and Systems Integration, PowerObjects has built an unmatched team of Dynamics 365 experts that help organizations increase productivity, streamline business processes, and build better relationships.

SOURCE PowerObjects, An HCL Technologies Company

Related Links

http://www.powerobjects.com

HOUSTON, March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- RadiaDyne announces milestone commercial sale of their OARtrac system, a transformational diagnostic patient dose monitoring platform to one of the leaders in cancer treatment, University Hospital's Cleveland Medical Center (UH), located in Cleveland, Ohio. UH was an early pioneer utilizing OARtrac, and the first hospital to utilize the technology to monitor rectal dose during a SBRT prostate treatment and skin dose during a gynecologic radiotherapy treatment.

"As one of the pioneers in evaluating the OARtrac system and the only cancer center in the Cleveland area to offer such technology, we are pleased to now have the on-site capability to routinely monitor specific cancer treatments. For the first time, we will have real-time data to adjust and personalize a patient's radiation treatment, which we suspect will help us to improve outcomes and reduce radiation side effects," said Rodney Ellis, M.D., Vice Chairman for Research and Development, Radiation Oncology at UH, and Associate Professor, Radiation Oncology at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine.

"We are excited to partner with UH, one of the nation's leading cancer centers to implement the OARtrac system and continue the early adoption momentum of this transformational technology," said Bret Boudousquie, RadiaDyne's President. "With every new OARtrac installation we are witnessing the transformation to real-time patient dose monitoring during cancer treatment, and one step closer to realizing the clinical benefits this technology offers the industry," said John Isham, RadiaDyne's founder and CEO.

ABOUT THE OARTRAC PLATFORM. OARtrac is the first of its kind patient dose monitoring platform which provides gold standard accuracy, real-time pinpoint measurement, and proprietary intracavitary delivery devices to measure physical dose during radiation treatment. OARtrac provides critical dose feedback which helps facilitate adaptive radiotherapy with the goal to reduce side effects and offer better clinical outcomes.

ABOUT RADIADYNE: RadiaDyne is a privately held diagnostic and medical device company focused on patient dose monitoring technology to improve cancer treatment outcomes. RadiaDyne designs and innovates specialized sensor technology and medical treatment devices which assist Radiation Oncologists in delivering radiation dose to the cancerous targets, while minimizing damage to the surrounding healthy tissue.

SOURCE RadiaDyne

Related Links

http://www.radiadyne.com

TUSCALOOSA, Ala., March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Randall-Reilly announced today that it has completed the acquisition of Smart Rhino Labs, which offers recruiting services in the trucking industry. Randall-Reilly is the leading provider of B2B data and data-driven marketing services, media and events for the trucking, construction, agriculture and additional industrial markets. Key company leadership at Smart Rhino Labs, including CEO Scott Evanson, COO Ben Paynter, CTO Brett Evanson, and CMO Jared Beauchamp, will remain in their respective roles.

Founded in 2011 and named one of Utah's 100 Fastest Growing Companies, Smart Rhino Labs helps HR professionals find talent at scale. The firm specializes in candidate acquisition, job distribution, mobile recruiting, analytics, high-volume hiring, as well as owning and operating a network of twenty-five job boards.

"Smart Rhino Labs has pioneered the use of technology for lead nurturing in truck driver recruiting, among many other things. We have begun to share a growing recruiting client-base for the past two years, and they have been an ideal partner," said Brent Reilly, CEO of Randall-Reilly. "As we look to evolve our business model and add new capabilities to deliver greater value to our clients, they are a natural fit with our current offerings."

"We couldn't be more excited to join forces with Randall-Reilly. After a great partnership and huge client successes together, we see immense opportunities to serve all our clients even better by combining what we offer with what Randall-Reilly brings to the table. We see teaming up as a '2+2=5' scenario and look forward to the coming years of continued growth and innovation," said Scott Evanson, CEO of Smart Rhino Labs.

About Randall-Reilly

Randall-Reilly is the leading B2B data provider in the industrial markets they service, including trucking, construction, agriculture, and select other markets. More than 4,400 clients utilize Randall-Reilly's data and data-powered services and platforms to generate sales, marketing, and recruiting insights and measurable outcomes. Headquartered in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, the company also has offices in Charlotte, North Carolina, and Anniston, Alabama. Visit: www.randallreilly.com

About Smart Rhino Labs

Smart Rhino Labs is a growing recruitment marketing company located in Salt Lake City, Utah. Started in 2011 by marketers and technologists, Smart Rhino has a data-driven approach to high-volume recruitment that includes using scalable technology and robust performance data to identify quality candidates and optimize the hiring process for employers. Visit: www.smartrhinolabs.com

SOURCE Randall-Reilly

Related Links

http://www.randallreilly.com

REDWOOD CITY, Calif., March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Reach Analytics, the leading provider of self-service predictive marketing for brands, agencies and nonprofits today announced a partnership with V12 Data, providing them Reach's real-time predictive modeling platform.

V12 Data is an omnichannel data powerhouse, and the industry leader in automotive data, who powers the right connections through the right channels at the right time with their market-leading data solutions, real time technologies and powerful analytics.

Due to growing market demand, V12 Data sought to enhance their predictive modeling system to improve the cycle time, from days to minutes, to provide custom audiences particularly in the digital ecosystem. With Reach's predictive marketing platform, V12 Data will be better able to find net-new customers and identify top responders to optimize and refine omnichannel campaigns over time and drastically improve key metrics like: total customers acquired, campaign response rates, cost of customer acquisition, and overall campaign ROI.

In particular, the predictive platform will allow V12 to greatly improve their offline audience modeling process and convert it from highly manual to a real-time, automated, end-to-end predictive system.

Reach was chosen from a selection of multiple competitive vendors after a thorough search. V12 conducted reviews of platform architecture and ran tests with live data. After a rigorous analysis, Reach was ultimately chosen because of its real-time modeling, end-to-end automation, use of AI decisioning, best-in-class wrangling and intuitive visual reporting.

"Reach impressed us with their platform as an easy-to-use, automated solution in the cloud, that could tackle all our requirements," said Todd Dziedzic, VP of Analytics at V12 Data. "To cut cycle time, we needed more than just powerful modeling. We needed a true end-to-end predictive marketing option that also wasn't heavy and cumbersome to use. Reach fit the bill entirely."

Reach's predictive platform produces ideal consumer and prospect profiles, making prospect information instantly available for download based off of the results. V12 Data customers can now leverage Reach's predictive marketing platform to rapidly build profiles using their current V12 data and segmentation strategy of choice - per product line, per geography (zip, state or region), per channel, per store, per purchase type (online vs. offline; high average purchase), etc.

"With self-service predictive marketing, V12 is greatly boosting their ability to provide fast, accurate predictive modeling and improve campaign results for clients," said Bruno Delahaye, CEO at Reach Analytics. "The combination and power of great data and a true end-to-end predictive solution means great results for consumer marketers."

Reach Analytics' cloud-based predictive marketing software is available for white label licensing for brands, agencies and nonprofits, and offers eligible partners the ability to plug in any data set and run real-time predictive marketing, using their own first-party data. In minutes, a Reach white label cloud creates profiles with sophisticated data wrangling and state-of-the-art machine learning technology without the need for large teams of data scientists.

Designed for brands, and new customer acquisition, the Reach Analytics predictive intelligence platform lets consumer marketers uncover insights about their customers and find prospects faster, easier and more accurately than ever before.

The Reach predictive cloud offers brands and agencies something they've never had access to beforethe ability to input data, create predictive profiles and get visual customer and prospect reports and transparent, direct access to consumer data and contact info for your best prospectsall in real-time, without needing to wrangle data or involve data scientists.

Request a Demo or Try It for yourself.

About V12

As an omnichannel data powerhouse, V12 Data combines rich data assets with robust technology to provide brands with a seamless and connected customer view. Our solutions bridge the right data across channels to power right time omnichannel engagement when, where, and how a brand's customers and prospects prefer. For more information, visit www.v12data.com.

About Reach Analytics

Reach Analytics provides cloud-based, automated predictive marketing with the only predictive platform designed specifically for brands. Delivering advanced consumer targeting, profiling and customer acquisition, Reach Analytics enables marketers to develop a deeper understanding of their customers and accurately discover and reach their best prospectsin minutes rather than weeks or months. Reach Analytics is a privately held technology company headquartered in Redwood City, California. www.reachanalytics.com

Contact:

Ben Barenholtz

650-422-3859

SOURCE Reach Analytics

Related Links

http://www.reachanalytics.com

MALVERN, Pa., March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Scala will feature consumer engagement solutions from the STRATACACHE family of digital media/marketing technology companies at Digital Signage Expo 2018, displaying shopper engagement solutions that feature the intersection of intelligent visual display, consumer analytics and actionable shopper data used to impact the consumer journey. Also featured in the booth are some of Scala's top partners from Latin America, the US and Canada, giving DSE visitors a look at the extended capabilities of the Scala platform and the expertise of the partner network, who have vast experience designing and deploying successful digital networks. Scala and its featured partners' booths can be found in booth #2508 at DSE 2018, being held March 27-28 in Las Vegas.

"With the scale and strength of the larger STRATACACHE organization, we are way ahead of the competitive market in bringing consumer intelligence, big data, artificial intelligence and shopper insights to more than 2 billion consumer interactions a day around the globe," said Chris Riegel, CEO of Scala and the STRATACACHE family of companies. "We are delivering real, measurable, profitable results to our customers, showing how their investment in improving consumer experiences can pay significant dividends." Riegel added, "Additionally, we're growing globally and are looking to have conversations at DSE with ambitious new talent who are ready to evolve their professional careers."

Highlighted solutions in booth #2508 include:

Scala media players: These devices were designed from the ground up to work with Scala software and deliver superior performance for its class. Optimized architecture delivers high performance throughout the entire lifetime of the media player. Robust 247 operation ensures you are always able to deliver your visual communications.

Scala content accelerator: New Scala-branded multimedia caching devices ensure reliable, timely delivery of rich media experiences and are backed by the expertise and technology of SuperLumin, a STRATACACHE company featured in a partner booth.

Consumer Insights: Analytics dashboards of the solutions running on the show floor, including session time and upsell conversions, are updating in real time using our in-house marketing analytics platform, part of last year's Walkbase acquisition. All the insights gathered are flexible and customizable to examine your KPIs and assist with marketing and retail strategy definition.

Outdoor Digital Displays: High quality and manufactured in the USA, our outdoor digital displays have a life expectancy of 10 years and feature a modular design, allowing all components to be field serviceable in 15 minutes or less. Durable and rugged, the fixtures operate 24/7 in any environment and weather condition. The sensor-rich design gives deeper understanding of customer behavior and even predicts when something might go wrong.

Interactive Display Coolers: Display full-motion video to attract shoppers to the cooler containing the featured product. Content can include a short game which highlights and promotes the items inside the cooler, fully visible behind the transparent glass. Monetize the display content to generate ad revenue from partner brands. The Primasee coolers and freezers come in multiple sizes for flexibility in deployment in various retail store footprints.

Additional Scala booth experiences include: an automotive solution that combines audience intelligence with guided selling; a "Wellness Technology" corner which features an in-aisle assistive selling kiosk, an interactive mannequin that provides health tips and the "Scala Step Challenge" which leverages and displays fitness tracker data in real time; an altered reality audience engagement experience from STRATACACHE company enVu; a gaming lounge that lets visitors play a quick fun game on large format screens; and an interactive solution that provides shoppers with customized assistance to help navigate the product discovery process.

Scala partners' booths, located on the perimeter of the larger Scala booth, highlight the strength of Scala's long-standing global partner channel, demonstrating the power of the Scala platform through real-world demos and integrations across variety of verticals.

DSE Featured Speakers:

Manolo Almagro, managing partner of STRATACACHE's retail consultancy Q Division: Manolo will lead a 45-minute session during the Emerging Tech Talks. His session, "The Role of AI Machine Learning, and Robots in the Future of Connected Commerce," will offer an influential look at the fast-moving world of emerging technology as it relates to the use of AI and other cutting-edge technology in shaping tomorrow's retail experiences. Almagro's session will be held March 28 at 11 a.m. in booth #2576.

Chuck Billups, SVP of Brand Advertising and Retail Partnerships at PRN, a STRATACACHE company: Chuck will share the floor with industry leaders for a lively conversation discussing how DOOH and mobile advertising come together to provide new value, expand revenues and deliver compelling experiences that respect privacy. The session, "Blending of DOOH with Mobile and Its Impact on the Market," will be held March 27 at 11:20 a.m. in room S231.

Learn more about Scala's activities at DSE at www.scala.com/DSE-2018.

About STRATACACHE

STRATACACHE, Inc. is the leading provider of intelligent digital signage, digital merchandising, mobile enablement, and rich media customer engagement at retail. These solutions help influence customers at the point-of-decision, generating new sales opportunities and enhanced retail profitability. With over 2 million software activations globally across multiple platforms, we have the deepest footprint in the market and consistently enhance our offerings to better serve our customers. STRATACACHE is based in Dayton, Ohio, and serves 28 countries with offices in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Bentonville, Dallas, San Jose, Calgary, Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, London, Oslo, Sittard, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Adelaide, Luxembourg and Bangalore. Learn more about STRATACACHE and its family of companies  Scala, PRN, Carmanah Signs, Optika, SuperLumin, enVu, RDM  by visiting us at www.stratacache.com, following us on Twitter @STRATACACHE or Liking us on Facebook.

About Scala

Scala solutions deliver engaging retail experiences by connecting networks of digital signs, kiosks, mobile devices, websites and Internet-connected devices. Scala, a STRATACACHE company, provides the platform for marketers, retailers and innovators to easily create and centrally manage deployment of shopping experiences while retaining the flexibility to rapidly adapt to local business conditions and preferences of customers in the store. Headquartered near Philadelphia, PA, with 30 years of experience entertaining and educating audiences, Scala is well-known for its innovation and leveraging best-of-breed technologies, such as mobile and predictive analytics, to create award-winning solutions that are easy-to-use, yet infinitely customizable. Visit www.scala.com.

SOURCE Scala, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.scala.com

SODERTALJE, Sweden, March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Carbon emissions need to be halved every decade to stop global warming. In line with this, Scania now sets two firm targets to be fulfilled by 2025. Globally, CO2 emissions in its operations will be halved with the same target for land transport logistics in Europe and Latin America.

To deliver on the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement as well as on Scania's commitment to a to a sustainable transport system, Scania's continuously works to minimise greenhouse gas emissions from its products. This ambition also applies to reducing emission levels generated from its own operations and transport footprint.

"We have the long-term vision of carbon neutral operations. To reach our vision, we are challenging ourselves to cut CO2emissions by 50% in all of our owperations globally by 2025, says Ruthger de Vries, Executive Vice President and Head of Production and Logistics.

Scania will achieve the target(1) by further optimising its production processes, by improving energy efficiency and by converting to renewable sources. In 2017, Scania announced the commitment to switch to fossil-free electricity by 2020.

The daily logistics flows in Scania's operations are vast and the second new target relates to its role as a major transport service buyer.

"Each day, we speak with our customers and their customers about the most sustainable alternatives for their specific transport assignments. Our own logistics operations are in many ways a laboratory where we test new ideas and develop our capabilities. As a large transport buyer it is therefore natural that we also strive to be a benchmark and commit to significantly reduce our emissions footprint," says de Vries.

By adopting a model where CO2reduction is valued as much as cost in choosing the transport solution, Scania aims to reduce emissions from its land transport logistics flows in Europe and Latin America by 50% by 2025.

For more information, please see Scania's Annual and Sustainability Report 2017, pages 31 and 34.

For further information, please contact:

Andreas Foller

Sustainability Manager

Scania CV AB

Phone: +46-8-553-700-34

e-mail: [email protected]

Hans-Ake Danielsson

Press Manager

Scania CV AB

Phone: +46-- 553-856-62

e-mail: [email protected]

(1) This target is set using 2015 as a baseline

CONTACT:

This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com

http://news.cision.com/scania/r/scania-commits-to-halve-its-co2-emissions-by-2025,c2478106

The following files are available for download:

http://mb.cision.com/Main/209/2478106/809575.pdf Scania commits to cutting CO2 emissions in operations and transport by 2025 http://news.cision.com/scania/i/17286-008,c2371540 17286-008

SOURCE ScaniaOn a daily basis, 326 dedicated associates load 65 tractor trailer trucks that hit the road delivering 3 million pounds of paint product to 700 S-W paint stores across 8 states (TX, LA, OK, AR, NM, CO, MO, KS).

S-W's $39 million investment along with Waco community support, spotlights the company's long-term commitment and partnership.

The Sherwin-Williams leadership team welcomed Waco community leaders for a ribbon cutting and plant tour. (2 pictures attached)

Wiley Stem  Waco City Manager

 City Manager Jana Hixson  District Director to Congressman Bill Flores

 District Director to Congressman Matt Meadors  President/CEO Greater Waco Chamber of Commerce

This is a great day for the Sherwin-Williams Company and the Waco community.

S-W values this partnership. The company has a long history here and we look forward to the future. Sherwin-Williams and the Waco community have both made major investments and we think this innovative facility will be a major boost for our customers and the region.

S-W Distribution Service Center Background:

615,000 square feet: 10 football fields/14 acres.

Built in 166 days. S-W investment: $39 million . Work Force: 326.

. Work Force: 326. During the year 234 S-W Waco tractor trailers cover 12.4 million miles delivering paint products to 700 S-W paint stores.

tractor trailers cover 12.4 million miles delivering paint products to 700 S-W paint stores. The 12.4 million S-W Waco miles would be like circling the earth 498 times or 52 trips to the moon.

miles would be like circling the earth 498 times or 52 trips to the moon. Sustainability/Green Initiatives: 2 fuels driving success-good for the environment and our customers.

Carbon footprint reduction: Many truck deliveries are done at night or early morning. By avoiding traffic, S-W can reduce drive time and save fuel.

footprint reduction: Many truck deliveries are done at night or early morning. By avoiding traffic, S-W can reduce drive time and save fuel. Continuous recycling & waste reduction program: Waco recycles 86% of its materials. Plastic wrap (42,000 lbs.), wooden pallets (77,000 lbs.), cardboard (42,000 lbs.), scrap metal (21,000 lbs.).

recycles 86% of its materials. Plastic wrap (42,000 lbs.), wooden pallets (77,000 lbs.), cardboard (42,000 lbs.), scrap metal (21,000 lbs.). Our LED lighting system with on/off motion detectors reduces energy consumption.

Community Involvement: 50 activities a year with Habitat for Humanity; Charitable donations/sponsorships; Greater Waco Chamber LEAD Program and Technology Business Briefings; Disaster relief assistance.

About Sherwin-Williams

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.

The company manufactures products under well-known brands such as Sherwin-Williams, Valspar, HGTV HOME by Sherwin-Williams, Dutch Boy, Krylon, Minwax, Thompson's Water Seal, Cabot and many more.

With global headquarters in Cleveland, Ohio, Sherwin-Williams branded products are sold exclusively through a chain of more than 4,100 company-operated stores and facilities, while the company's other brands are sold through leading mass merchandisers, home centers, independent paint dealers, hardware stores, automotive retailers, and industrial distributors.

The Sherwin-Williams Performance Coatings Group supplies a broad range of highly-engineered solutions for the construction, industrial, packaging and transportation markets in more than 115 countries around the world.

In 2017 Sherwin-Williams reported sales of $14.9 billion. The company employs approximately 60,000 associates worldwide.

It has a prominent market position in architectural paint in North America, South America, China, Australia and the UK. In industrial coatings, the combined company is a global market leader in packaging coatings, coil coatings, general industrial coatings and industrial wood coatings. Sherwin-Williams shares are traded on the New York Stock Exchange (symbol: SHW). For more information, visit www.sherwin.com.

Contact: Mike Conway: Sherwin-Williams Director, Corporate Communications

Cell: 216.978.1074 [email protected]

SOURCE The Sherwin-Williams Company

Related Links

http://www.sherwin.com

SAN FRANCISCO, March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

The global solar PV market is expected to reach 489.79 GW by 2020, according to a new report by Grand View Research, Inc. Rising demand for sustainable energy resources coupled with favorable regulatory policies, is expected to drive the market growth over the forecast period.

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160524/371361LOGO )



Supportive regulations involving federal subsidy and incentives expected to be the prime factors impacting the industry growth on a positive note. Europe has been a major market for solar PV owing to early adoption of the technology in the region owing to high consumer awareness and positive government outlook in region.

Increasing demand for renewable energy sources owing to rising consumer awareness towards cost benefits associated with the technology is expected to propel growth. Furthermore, depleting fossil fuel resources coupled with growing demand for durable energy sources is expected to have a positive impact on the industry growth.

The technology offer low conversion efficiencies as compared to conversional energy sources including oil and biomass. Furthermore, the solar PV performance gets affected by various factors including type of raw material used for solar cell manufacturing, availability of sunlight and solar PV designs which is expected to hamper its growth over the forecast period.

Browse full research report with TOC on "Solar PV Market Size, Share & Trend Analysis Report By Application (Residential, Non-Residential/Commercial, Utility), Value Chain Analysis, Market Dynamics, And Segment Forecasts, 2012 - 2020" at: https://www.grandviewresearch.com/industry-analysis/solar-pv-industry

Further Key Findings From the Report Suggest:

Utility is expected to be the fastest growing application segment, progressing at a CAGR of 21.3% over the forecast period, owing to the high demand for solar PV in electricity, and transportation

Non-residential application segment accounted for 26.3% of the total market share in 2016, high employment of solar PV in industrial processes for fulfilling heating requirements

European market is expected to witness a slow growth rate as compared to other regions, on account of early adoption of the technology in the region which led to saturation of the industry

Asia Pacific accounted for 17.9% of the total market share in 2016, on account of the favorable government regulations and initiatives taken by the government to install clean energy resources in order to curb the prevailing issue of pollution

accounted for 17.9% of the total market share in 2016, on account of the favorable government regulations and initiatives taken by the government to install clean energy resources in order to curb the prevailing issue of pollution The major players in the market are investing in R&D activities in order to come up with efficient and high performance systems in order to tap the rising consumer attention and to compete with the alternative energy resources

Browse related reports by Grand View Research:

Solar Power Market - Rising environmental concerns such as greenhouse gas emission is expected to drive solar power market over the next seven years.

Solar Cell Market - The Global solar cell market size was estimated at 182.4 GW in 2014. Rising penetration of renewable energy sources owing to environmental benefits coupled with increasing electricity demand is expected to propel market growth.

Wind Power Market - Increasing need to replace conventional sources of energy with renewable energy is expected to drive the market for wind power generation over the next decade.

Solar Pumps Market - Increasing agricultural activities coupled with water extraction for irrigation based on renewable energy is expected to drive the global solar pumps market over the forecast period.

Grand View Research has segmented the global solar PV market on the basis of application, and region:

Solar PV Application Outlook (Installed Capacity, MW; 2012 - 2020) Residential Non-Residential/Commercial Utility

Solar PV Regional Outlook (Installed Capacity, MW; 2012 - 2020) North America Europe Asia Pacific China Latin America Rest of the World



Read Our Blog By Grand View Research: https://www.grandviewresearch.com/blogs/energy-and-power

About Grand View Research

Grand View Research, Inc. is a U.S. based market research and consulting company, registered in the State of California and headquartered in San Francisco. The company provides syndicated research reports, customized research reports, and consulting services. To help clients make informed business decisions, we offer market intelligence studies ensuring relevant and fact-based research across a range of industries, from technology to chemicals, materials and healthcare.

Contact:

Sherry James

Corporate Sales Specialist, USA

Grand View Research, Inc

Phone: +1-415-349-0058

Toll Free: 1-888-202-9519

Email: [email protected]



Web: https://www.grandviewresearch.com

SOURCE Grand View Research, Inc.BOSTON, March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- SquareWorks, a leading provider of NetSuite Consulting Services and Solutions, is excited to announce the company was recently named one of the most promising NetSuite Solution Providers by CIOReview. The technology magazine, long respected for its history in identifying and highlighting innovative entrepreneurs, praised SquareWorks for its ability to provide premium services to NetSuite customers through its offering of high-quality support packages, project services, and NetSuite bundles.

"We are extremely proud of this recognition by one of the most respected technology publications. Our team celebrates this achievement, and we continue our efforts to bring a superior experience to NetSuite customers by combining our Premium Support offering with our Project Services and NetSuite Bundles," said Bernardo Enciso, Managing Director at SquareWorks.

CIOReview recognized SquareWorks' ability to drive customer success by focusing on best in class customer service through their Premium Support Plans. This unique offering allows SquareWorks to assist NetSuite customers that require day-to-day NetSuite assistance in an organized forum. To enable efficient resolution of customer requests, SquareWorks implemented a customer portal where clients can easily interact with members of the SquareWorks team. By utilizing this portal, customers know the status of their request and have a repository of information that they can access as needed. With its dedication to customer satisfaction, SquareWorks builds lasting partnerships with customers that reflect the company's commitment and care.

In the rapidly changing landscape of technology, CIOReview noted SquareWorks' pension to stay adaptable. One way SquareWorks is exhibiting adaptability is by working with companies going through mergers and acquisitions. As many companies look to inorganic growth to maintain market share, SquareWorks has found success in assisting companies realize the full potential of their software platform during a significant time of change. Utilizing years of business experience, as well as a deep understanding of the NetSuite platform, SquareWorks helps companies gain efficiencies in NetSuite, creating space for customers to focus on important business initiatives. Through their assistance with the planning, designing, and executing of change, SquareWorks works with customers to meet them where they are in their business lifecycle offering clear guidance and delivering high quality results.

Read more about what CIOReview has to say about SquareWorks https://magazine.cioreview.com/magazines/March2018/NetSuite/

About CIOReview

CIOReview is a technology magazine that aims to showcase the innovations of enterprise organizations. The magazine acts as a space for inventors and entrepreneurs to present their solutions and insights to an expansive audience of readers.

About SquareWorks

SquareWorks is a leading provider of NetSuite Support, NetSuite Project Services and NetSuite Bundles for mid-size organizations. The company's mission is to transform Business Applications Services into an experience that delights organizations across the world. SquareWorks has clients across the US and Canada. For more information, visit http://www.squareworks.com or Email us at [email protected]

SOURCE SquareWorks, LLC

Related Links

http://www.squareworks.com

DAYTON, Ohio, March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The STRATACACHE family of digital media/marketing technology companies is bringing its next generation store environment booth to GlobalShop 2018, demonstrating the power of using technology for shopper engagement and visual merchandising. Booth experiences will show retailers how marketing technology improves every aspect of retail engagement, encouraging shopper interaction while using in-store marketing analytics to measure success. Each experience is represented in unique "departments" throughout the booth, with a common goal  using marketing technology, sensors and artificial intelligence to directly improve the in-store experience from the customer, the retailer and the brand's points of view. STRATACACHE is in booth 2444 at GlobalShop, being held March 27-29 in Chicago.

STRATACACHE's in-store retail analytics platform will also be used in the booth, displaying data gathered from interactions with the solutions on display. The real-time software stack enables shopping experience personalization through highly advanced mobile tracking, mobile messaging and artificial intelligence-based mobile ad targeting systems, allowing retailers to build a 360 degree view of shoppers, linking online interests to in-store behavior.

Highlighted solutions in booth 2444 include:

Outdoor Digital Displays: High quality and manufactured in the USA, our outdoor digital displays have a life expectancy of 10 years and feature a modular design, allowing all components to be field serviceable in 15 minutes or less. Durable and rugged, the fixtures operate 24/7 in any environment and weather condition. The sensor-rich design gives deeper understanding of customer behavior and even predicts when something might go wrong.

Cafe: Ordering  and waiting for!  coffee is as entertaining as it is efficient with our cafe experience. Shoppers use a tablet to send baristas their gourmet coffee order and take a selfie, which pops up on displays when their order is ready for pick up. Guests are entertained while waiting by using tablets to play a quick, fun game on large format screens behind the counter.

Fashion: As brand value and sense of community become increasingly relevant and important to shoppers, digital can play a pivotal role in conveying the message. This solution invites shoppers to learn more about the quality and story by interacting with the apparel, triggering sensors embedded in the clothing.

Wellness: Our in-aisle wellness kiosk provides shoppers with a simple, convenient way to navigate the cough, cold & flu aisle  and quickly identify the most appropriate OTC medications for their needs. Using an intuitive touchscreen interface, shoppers select their symptoms and medication preferences, and are presented with a list of relevant OTC results. Individual product pages display detailed medication information and give shoppers the option to receive a product photo and savings offer via text message.

Automotive: Finding the correct accessory, part or attachment for a product in an aisle full of choices can be a challenge for shoppers, especially those who aren't equipped with the knowledge to assist themselves. This solution makes it easy to identify and locate the correct automotive part to fit the needs of the shopper's specific vehicle by combining audience intelligence with guided selling.

Customer Insights: Enhance and personalize the customer experience by learning more about your shoppers' preferences and behaviors. Analytics dashboards of the solutions running on the show floor are displayed and updated in real time. Information such as session time, most popular product and upsell conversions give valuable insight into the success of your store's operations, marketing and customer experience.

For more information visit www.stratacache.com/global-shop-2018/.

About STRATACACHE

STRATACACHE, Inc. is the leading provider of intelligent digital signage, digital merchandising, mobile enablement, and rich media customer engagement at retail. These solutions help influence customers at the point-of-decision, generating new sales opportunities and enhanced retail profitability. With over 2 million software activations globally across multiple platforms, we have the deepest footprint in the market and consistently enhance our offerings to better serve our customers. STRATACACHE is based in Dayton, Ohio, and serves 28 countries with offices in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, Bentonville, Dallas, San Jose, Calgary, Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, London, Oslo, Sittard, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Adelaide, Luxembourg and Bangalore. Learn more about STRATACACHE and its family of companies  Scala, PRN, Carmanah Signs, Optika, SuperLumin, enVu, RDM  by visiting us at www.stratacache.com, following us on Twitter @STRATACACHE or Liking us on Facebook.

SOURCE STRATACACHE

Related Links

http://www.stratacache.com

CHICAGO, March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Sugatsune America, manufacturer of high-quality hardware is excited to exhibit their retail showcase line-up at the 2018 Global Shop, in Chicago. At this year's event, several products will be highlighted including a lineup of new premium retail showcase and decorative hardware exhibited in a setting meant to inspire new ideas and creations for designers, builders and manufactures in the retail design industry. The pops of color along with many unique designs will be sure to get the creative juices flowing for any design professional seeking new and innovative ways to create the perfect retail environment. Join the Sugatsune team at booth 4305 at the McCormick Place Convention Center in Chicago, Illinois March 27-29.

Introducing premium glass showcase hardware at booth 4305, Global Shop 2018

"We are excited to introduce exciting new hardware solutions to those designing and building new retail environments," says Sugatsune's Vice President of Sales and Marketing; Curtis Nakamura. "Understanding the importance of creating exceptional experiences for retail customers, we aim to excite the retail design community with a line-up of component hardware designed to help bring their visions to life."

Sugatsune's booth this year is designed to give people the ability to see first-hand, the quality and function that is incorporated in their products highlighting their fresh new line-up of glass hinges, brackets, locks and decorative hardware, perfect for any retail store application. Stop by booth 4305 and join the team for happy hour at the Chicago Showroom located at 121 W. Wacker Dr. Suite 1007 from 5pm-8pm to become inspired by the details around Sugatsune hardware.

About Sugatsune America, Inc.

With a heritage dating back to 1930 and established in 1982, Sugatsune America Inc. is ISO 9001 certified and has a rich tradition of manufacturing and distributing Japanese quality hardware, designed around universal design. Sugatsune America stocks over 6,000 unique parts in the U.S. to provide the highest level of service. LAMP is a registered trademark of Sugatsune Kogyo, Inc. For more information, visit www.sugatsune.com. Connect with Sugatsune America via Facebook (facebook.com/sugatsune), Instagram (instagram.com/sugatsuneamerica) and Twitter (twitter.com/sugatsune).

SOURCE Sugatsune America, Inc.

Related Links

http://www.sugatsune.com

GOTEBORG, Sweden, March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

The shareholders of Concordia Maritime AB (publ), 556068-5819, are hereby summoned to the Annual General Meeting to be held on Tuesday, 24 April 2018, at 1 p.m. The Annual General Meeting will be held at Elite Park Avenue, in Gothenburg. Entrance to the venue opens at 12:15 p.m.

Right to attend and notice of attendance

Shareholders who wish to attend the Annual General Meeting must:

be registered as shareholders in the share register kept by Euroclear Sweden AB on Wednesday 18 April 2018 ;

in the share register kept by Euroclear Sweden AB on Wednesday ; notify the company of their intention to participate and the number of guests (max. two) who will accompany the shareholder at the following address: Concordia Maritime AB, SE-405 19 Gothenburg, Sweden , by telephone +46-(0)-31-855102 or by e-mail [email protected] no later than Wednesday 18 April 2018 .

At notification, name, the name of the guests, personal identification number/registration number, address and telephone number must be stated.

Nominee-registered shares

Shareholders whose shares have been registered in the name of a nominee must temporarily re-register their shares in their own name to be entitled to vote at the Annual General Meeting. Such registration must be effected at Euroclear Sweden AB no later than 18 April 2018. This means that shareholders must inform the nominee to effect such registration well before 18 April 2018.

Nominee

Shareholders who are represented by proxy shall issue a power of attorney for the representative. A copy of the certificate of registration (and should such certificate not exist, a corresponding document of authority) of the legal entity shall be attached to a power of attorney issued by a legal entity. In order to facilitate the registration at the Meeting, powers of attorney in original, certificates of registration and other documents of authority should be sent to the company so as to be available by Wednesday 18 April 2018. A form for proxy is available at the company's head office and on the company's website, www.concordiamaritime.com.

Agenda

1. Election of Chairman of the meeting.

2. Preparation and approval of the voting list.

3. Approval of the agenda.

4. Election of persons to verify the minutes.

5. Consideration if the Annual General Meeting has been duly convened.

6. Presentation of the Board of Directors and statement by the Chairman of the Board.

7. Statement by the Managing Director.

8. Presentation of

a) the annual accounts and the consolidated annual accounts;

b) the audit report and the audit report for the group;

c) the auditor's statement regarding the company's compliance with the guidelines for remuneration to members of the executive management in effect since the previous Annual General Meeting.

9. Resolutions regarding

a) adoption of the income statement and balance sheet and the consolidated income statement and the consolidated balance sheet;

b) the allocation of the company's profit according to the adopted balance sheet;

c) the discharge from liability towards the company in respect of the Board of Directors and the Managing Director.

10. The Nomination Committee's report on its work and the Nomination Committee's motivated statement concerning its proposals regarding the Board of Directors.

11. Resolution regarding the number of members and deputy members of the Board of Directors to be elected by the Annual General Meeting and the number of auditors and deputy auditors.

12. Resolution regarding the remuneration to the Board of Directors and the auditors.

13. Election of members of the Board of Directors and the Chairman of the Board.

14. Election of auditor.

15. Resolution regarding the establishment of an Nomination Committee for the next Annual General Meeting.

16. Resolution regarding guidelines for remuneration to the executive management.

Election of a Chairman for the meeting (item 1)

The Nomination Committee proposes that Carl-Johan Hagman is elected as Chairman of the meeting.

Proposal of profit allocation (item 9 b)

The Board of Directors does not propose any distribution of dividend.

Resolution regarding the number of members and deputy members of the Board of Directors and the number of auditors and deputy auditors (item 11)

The Nomination Committee proposes that the number of Board members elected by the shareholders shall be five and that no deputies should be appointed. The number of auditors is proposed to be one.

Resolution regarding the remuneration to the Board of Directors and the auditors (item 12)

The Nomination Committee proposes that remuneration to the Board members shall be SEK 400,000 to the Chairman and SEK 225,000 to each of the other Board members elected by the shareholders. No additional remuneration shall be paid for work in Board committees. The proposed Board remuneration accordingly amounts to SEK 1,300,000 (last year SEK 2,085,000).

The remuneration to the auditors shall be paid according to invoice approved by the company.

Election of members of the Board of Directors and the Chairman of the Board (item 13)

The Nomination Committee proposes that Carl-Johan Hagman, Stefan Brocker, Mats Jansson, Michael G:son Low and Helena Levander shall be re-elected as Board members. Carl-Johan Hagman is proposed to be re-elected as Chairman of the Board of Directors. The Nomination Committee does not propose any Deputy Chairman of the Board of Directors. Dan Sten Olsson and Morten Christian Mo have declined re-election.

Election of auditor (item 14)

In accordance with the Audit Committees recommendation, the Nomination Committee proposes that KPMG is elected as auditor of the company. If the Annual General Meeting resolves to elect KPMG as auditor, KPMG has announced that the current authorised public accountant in the company, Jan Malm, will continue as the main responsible auditor at KPMG.

Resolution regarding the establishment of Nomination Committee for the next Annual General Meeting (item 15)

The Nomination Committee proposes that the Annual General Meeting resolves to establish a Nomination Committee for the Annual General Meeting 2019 in accordance with the Nomination Committee's proposal that comprises the following procedure. The members shall comprise one representative from each of the two largest shareholders (in terms of voting power) as of the last bank day in August the year before the Annual General Meeting members of the Nomination Committee, provided they desire representation on the committee, and the company's Chairman of the Board. After the shareholders have been contacted they shall inform whether they wish to serve on the Nomination Committee or not within fourteen days. If no response is received from the shareholder, contact is made with the next largest shareholder. The largest shareholder in terms of voting power appoints the Chairman of the Nomination Committee. The names of the members of the Nomination Committee shall be published on the company's website as soon as they have been appointed, but no later than six months before the Annual General Meeting of 2019. The Nomination Committee's period of mandate lasts until a new nominations committee has been appointed.

Resolution regarding guidelines for remuneration to the executive management (item 16)

The Board of Directors proposes that the following guidelines for remuneration for the executive management are resolved.

Remuneration consists of a fixed salary, variable remuneration, a pension and other benefits. In order to attract and retain expertise, the company aims to offer employees an attractive, competitive fixed salary. The absolute level depends on the scope and complexity of the position in question and on the individual employee's annual performance. Performance is reflected in particular in the variable remuneration. Variable remuneration shall be based on annually established factors with respect to, among other things, the development of the company and reaching e.g. commercial, operational and financial targets. These targets are to be determined by the Board of Directors. Agreements on additional remuneration can be entered into when considered necessary to be able to attract and retain key expertise, or to persuade individuals to move to another location or to accept a new position. Such remuneration shall be of limited duration.

The company's policy regarding pensions is to follow the practice applied in the local market in each country. A premium corresponding to 35 per cent of the Managing Director's monthly pensionable salary and remuneration at any time is paid up until the pension. For other senior executives in Sweden, a defined contribution plan is applicable for retirement pensions over and above the base pension plans on the Swedish labour market

The basic rule is that other benefits, e.g. a company car, should be in accordance with the local market. For senior executives in Sweden, the mutual period of notice is 3 to 12 months depending on the position. Severance pay amounting to a maximum of 24 monthly salaries is paid in the event of termination of the Managing Director by the company.

Annual Report, etc.

The Annual Report in Swedish, the audit report, the auditor's opinion in item 8 c), and complete proposals and motivated statements regarding items 10-16 are available at the company's headquarters and the company's website, www.concordiamaritime.com, in connection to the issue of the summons. The above documents will also be sent to shareholders upon request, provided that such shareholder states a postal address. Such a request may be made in the same manner as notice of attendance must be made as described above. The Annual Report in Swedish will be available at the Annual General Meeting.

Shares and votes

The total number of shares in the company amounts to 47,729,798 shares, whereof 4,000,000 Series A shares and 43,729,798 Series B shares, representing a total of 83,729,798 votes. The company does not own any of its own shares.

Information at the Annual General Meeting

The Board of Directors and the Managing Director shall, if requested by a shareholder and if the Board considers that it will not cause significant damage to the company, provide information on circumstances that could affect the assessment of a matter on the agenda, circumstances that could affect the assessment of the company's or a subsidiary's economic situation and the company's relations with another group company.

12:15 p.m. Entrance to the venue for the Annual General Meeting opens

1 p.m. Opening of the Annual General Meeting

After the meeting, light refreshments will be served.

Gothenburg in March, 2018

Concordia Maritime AB (publ)

Board of Directors

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SOURCE Concordia MaritimePORT CHESTER, N.Y., March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The Shade Store, a third generation family-run, leading resource for premium custom window treatments with a rich heritage in luxury textiles and interior design, will show at the Architectural Digest Design Show for the fourth time, March 22-25 in New York City at Pier 94. A variety of recent and upcoming product introductions, including the Pendleton by Sunbrella collection and the One Kings Lane for The Shade Store collection, will be displayed within a new booth design. Vignettes throughout the booth will display new offerings and bestsellers, including a wall of motorized window treatments, all demonstrating The Shade Store's leadership and authority in the custom window treatment and home decor space.

"We're continuing to push the envelope in the window treatment category with new brand offerings and partnerships," said Ian Gibbs, Co-Founder and Chief Creative Officer of The Shade Store. "We've found great success at the Architectural Digest Design Show the last three years and are proud to present a new booth design that better showcases our new collections with engaging and inviting installations."

The Architectural Digest Design Show marks the first time the Pendleton by Sunbrella collection, which launched in February 2018, will be displayed in New York. The collection of drapery and Roman shades celebrates the shared appreciation between The Shade Store, Pendleton and Sunbrella for authenticity, artistry, and quality of process with signature Pendleton patterns and designs that have been adapted to the new materials with a fresh color palette for a contemporary look. Available in three patterns and 12 materials, the collection is made with high performance fabrics by Sunbrella that lend exceptional durability ideal for both private spaces and high traffic areas. The Shade Store first formed a partnership with Sunbrella in 2016 with the launch of the Sunbrella Ventana Collection and this new collaboration builds on the relationship and introduces Pendleton designs to the window treatment category for the first time.

The Shade Store booth will also introduce a first look at a collaboration with One Kings Lane, featuring the designs of in-house artisans from the luxury home decor and design services provider, launching in early April. The collection marks the entree for One Kings Lane in the window treatment category and introduces unique embroidery offerings and textures to drapery and Roman shade offerings at The Shade Store. The patterns and designs, inspired by a variety of sources including vintage textiles and contemporary fashion, are meant to be layered and will work particularly well with decor from the One Kings Lane assortment.

The Shade Store has a rich heritage tracing its roots back to 1946 and a small fabric shop in Mount Vernon, New York. When the current generation came into adulthood, they undertook the objective of modernizing the way consumers shop for custom window treatments, 'making custom simple' with a groundbreaking business model. With these changes, The Shade Store has maintained an emphasis on craftsmanship and supports hundreds of skilled American artisans who hand-make premium custom window treatments in workrooms across the country. By specializing in a category that can be difficult to understand, The Shade Store has been able to grow to 59 showrooms nationwide with a strong online business  providing access to expertise previously held only by industry insiders.

The Shade Store's booth will be open throughout the Architectural Digest Design Show, March 22-25, 2018. The Shade Store will host a cocktail reception with Sunbrella during the trade day at the show Thursday, March 22 from 4:30PM  6:30PM at The Shade Store booth #801. The following day, Friday, March 23, The Shade Store will host a second cocktail reception from 4:00PM  6:00PM again in booth #801. To learn more about The Shade Store and its involvement and activity during the Architectural Digest Design Show visit the website at TheShadeStore.com and Instagram at @TheShadeStore.

ABOUT THE SHADE STORE

About The Shade Store

The Shade Store is a family-run, premium custom window treatment company with a rich heritage in luxury textiles and interior design. Its exclusive collection of more than 1,300 fabrics and materials provides customers with an unparalleled level of style and customization options. Every window treatment is handcrafted by a skilled artisan, hung and tested for quality assurance and ships free in 10 days or less. The Shade Store offers a complete range of design services for consumers and design-trade clientele, including free swatches, photo rendering services and a national network of professional measure and installation experts. The Shade Store has over 55 showrooms nationwide. Additionally, The Shade Store is an advocate for environmental sustainability and for every purchase made the company provides the 'gift of shade' by planting a tree in partnership with the Arbor Day Foundation. For more information on The Shade Store, please visit http://www.theshadestore.com.

SOURCE The Shade Store

Related Links

http://TheShadeStore.com

WASHINGTON, March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The Society of Industrial and Office Realtors (SIOR), which represents the world's elite in industrial and office brokerage, today announced its Top Transactions Award Winners of 2017. The Top Transaction Awards are presented to the largest sales and lease transactions, ranked by dollar volume, completed by SIOR members worldwide. This year, 600 SIOR members reported 2,000 transactions, totaling USD $10 billion in leases and sales in the industrial, investment, office, land, alternative assets, and redevelopment sectors.

The largest transaction of 2017, both by dollar volume and square footage, was arranged by Jack Fraker, SIOR, of CBRE, who arranged the $475 million sale of 7,796,633 square feet of industrial space across the Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Houston, Columbus, and Memphis markets. This is one of the largest SIOR transactions ever reported.

"This has been an incredible year for SIOR transactions, and we want to congratulate all of our members for their successes in 2017," said Del Markward, SIOR's Global President. "The Top Transactions Awards Winners submitted some of the largest transactions ever recorded by SIOR, and, in an association that already consists of the absolute best of our industry, these members have truly distinguished themselves as premium producers."

Behind the largest transaction, the next largest transactions, all exceeding $88 million, were among the highest in the industry:

Kenneth Block , SIOR , of Block Real Estate Services arranged the $305 million sale of 2,200,000-square-foot office space in Overland Park, Kansas ;

, of Block Real Estate Services arranged the sale of 2,200,000-square-foot office space in ; Mark Detmer , SIOR , and Bo Mills , SIOR , of JLL arranged the $196 million sale of 2,833,405-square-foot industrial space in Las Vegas ;

, and , of JLL arranged the sale of 2,833,405-square-foot industrial space in ; Barbara Johnson , SIOR, and Vic Galanis , SIOR, of CBRE arranged the $89 million lease of a 170,000 square-foot office space in Salt Lake City .

In total, 19 members won awards for 14 different categories. For a complete list of the 2017 SIOR Transaction Awards, click here.

About the Society of Industrial and Office Realtors

The Society of Industrial and Office Realtors (SIOR) represents the world's elite in industrial and office brokerage. SIORs are held to the highest standard by completing thorough requirements and proving excellence in securing successful transactions. They are the most trusted resource in commercial real estate. SIOR is more than a designation, it's a symbol of excellence. It's a reflection of a global network of more than 3,000 industry leaders driven by camaraderie and innovation. SIORs value the power that comes with building relationships and sharing ideas that are on the leading edge of the industry. For more information, visit sior.com.

SOURCE Society of Industrial and Office Realtors

Related Links

http://www.sior.com

ST. LOUIS, March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- TierPoint, a leading provider of secure cloud and data center solutions at the edge of the internet, today announced it will host the inaugural BraveIT event at Revel Fulton Market in Chicago on September 13. Dr. Daniela Rus  recognized as the world's leading authority on robotics and artificial intelligence  will deliver the keynote presentation.

In an era of rapidly accelerating opportunity and risk, BraveIT offers a dynamic community of technology leaders, their peers and partners a unique platform to stay current with industry best practices, pressure-test operating assumptions, and enrich plans to address a range of shared challenges, from cybersecurity to business continuity. The 2018 event will feature a fast-moving and diverse array of workshops, panels, interviews, and peer-to-peer sessions on disaster recovery, artificial intelligence, the Darknet, post-breach recovery, cryptocurrencies, and more.

As director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at MIT, keynote speaker Dr. Daniela Rus has led groundbreaking research projects in the areas of transportation, security, environmental modeling and monitoring, underwater exploration, and agriculture. Her team has developed modular and self-reconfiguring robots, systems of self-organizing robots, networks of robots and sensors for first-responders, mobile sensor networks, techniques for cooperative underwater robotics, and new technology for desktop robotics.

Future updates on agenda, speakers and registration will be available at tierpoint.com/braveit.

About TierPoint

With a unique combination of secure, reliable, and connected infrastructure solutions at the edge of the internet, TierPoint (tierpoint.com) specializes in meeting enterprises where they are on their journey to IT transformation, helping them solve data storage, compute, and recovery challenges. TierPoint has one of the largest customer bases in the industry, with over 5,000 clients ranging from the public to private sectors, from small businesses to Fortune 500 enterprises. TierPoint also has one of the largest and most geographically diversified footprints in the nation, with 40 world-class data centers in 20 markets and 8 multi-tenant cloud pods, connected by a coast-to-coast network. Led by a proven management team, TierPoint's network of highly experienced IT professionals offer a comprehensive solution portfolio of private, multitenant, hyperscale, and hybrid cloud, plus colocation, disaster recovery, security, and other managed IT services.

Contact: Pete Abel, 314-720-3129, [email protected]

SOURCE TierPoint

Related Links

http://tierpoint.com

LAGOS, Nigeria, March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

More than 150,000 Africans from 114 countries worldwide applied to join the 4th cycle of The Tony Elumelu Foundation's (TEF) 10-year, $100 million TEF Entrepreneurship Programme. Today, the Foundation announced the African entrepreneurs with the most innovative, high-potential business ideas.

The 2018 cohort includes an additional 250 entrepreneurs to the standard selection of 1,000 - thanks to a $1,000,000 partnership with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to support 200 entrepreneurs in conflict and fragile zones of Nigeria (the North East where the Boko Haram scourge is felt and the Niger Delta region which suffers environmental degradation from oil spillage) a $200,000 agreement with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to support 40 pan-African entrepreneurs and a $50,000 partnership with Indorama to support 10 Nigerians.

TEF Founder, Tony O. Elumelu, CON, commented: "The number and quality of applicants, 151,000 in total, was outstanding - it illustrates the strength and depth of entrepreneurial promise and commitment on our continent. Selection is never easy, and we profoundly regret that we cannot help all. Our partnerships with the Red Cross, UNDP and Indorama, alongside ongoing discussions with other international organizations, reflect the growing global recognition of what we have known all along - that entrepreneurship is the most effective path to sustainable development on our continent and our Programme is the model to follow."

There was a near 50-50 split between male and female applications, reflecting the entrepreneurial ambition of Africa's women. Agriculture was the leading sector among selected entrepreneurs at 30.5%, followed by technology (10.5%) and education & training (7%).

TEF CEO, Parminder Vir OBE, said: "Over the next nine months, the entrepreneurs will receive online training and mentoring, and will use the skills acquired to develop business plans prior to receiving $5,000* in seed capital. This will bring TEF's total Programme investment so far to $15 million in direct funding to entrepreneurs and $5.8 million in Programme & technology development and operations."

"Our beneficiaries have created more than 55,000 jobs and counting, and will convene from across all of Africa's 54 countries to Lagos this October for the TEF Forum - the largest gathering of African entrepreneurs in the world."

For a list of the selected 2018 Tony Elumelu Entrepreneurs and information on our applicants, please visit http://www.tonyelumelufoundation.org

* $5,000 seed capital is calculated on the official Central Bank of Nigeria naira equivalent value at the date of selection for the programme.

SOURCE The Tony Elumelu FoundationCLERMONT, Ky., March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Two Kentucky icons are embarking on an alliance to preserve and protect the pristine limestone water in the Clermont area.

Jim Beam, the world's No. 1 selling bourbon whiskey, and Bernheim Arboretum & Research Forest, a 15,625 acre privately held forest just south of Louisville, have joined forces to develop a natural water sanctuary on Bernheim grounds immediately adjacent to the Jim Beam distillery.

Beginning as a one-year agreement, the Natural Water Sanctuary Alliance will protect water quality, restore wildlife habitats, and reintroduce native plants and trees. This group is also working toward a long-term agreement to enhance environmental education, improve watershed protection planning, and secure quality water.

"Great bourbon starts with great water," said Freddie Noe, eighth generation Beam Distiller. "In fact, the water in Clermont is one of the main reasons my family chose to settle here back in 1795. Jim Beam bourbon gets its distinct and wonderful taste, in part, from the local water, which is filtered naturally through limestone. We're proud to team up with our neighbors at Bernheim to preserve this vital natural resource."

The Jim Beam Natural Water Sanctuary Alliance at Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest will concentrate on conservation activities across Bernheim, particularly within the Long-Lick and Wilson Creek watersheds. These areas feature large forest expanses, wetlands and the head waters of three creeks and several small lakes that support wildlife, the surrounding communities, and the production of Jim Beam Bourbon.

Through this alliance, Jim Beam will also support Bernheim's work to protect the federally endangered Indiana Bat, and co-host an annual landowners' workshop to educate the community and promote best practices in water conservation and forest stewardship.

"The importance of clean water cannot be overstated. It's essential for wildlife. It's essential for human life and it's essential to our economy," said Mark Wourms, Bernheim's Executive Director. "We are grateful to have a corporate partner like Jim Beam that values protecting this vital natural resource."

The Natural Water Sanctuary Alliance is the latest example of Beam Suntory's dedication to protecting water and the environment, inspired by corporate parent Suntory Holdings, which has established 20 Natural Water Sanctuaries throughout Japan. These more than 20,000 acres of forest protect quality water to supply its facilities, and nurture surrounding communities for many years to come.

"Both the Beam and Bernheim families have deep Kentucky roots and centuries of heritage in the Clermont area," added Noe. "We have long shared a common respect and love for the land here and we understand the critical role protecting our environment, especially our natural water, plays in our future  not only the future of our business but the future health and well-being of our families, friends and colleagues who call this area home. We feel privileged to be able to give back to the community that has given us so much."

About Beam Suntory

As the world's third largest premium spirits company, Beam Suntory is Crafting the Spirits Brands that Stir the World. Consumers from all corners of the globe call for the company's brands, including the iconic Jim Beam and Maker's Mark bourbon brands and Suntory whisky Kakubin, as well as world renowned premium brands including Knob Creek bourbon, Yamazaki, Hakushu and Hibiki Japanese whiskies, Teacher's, Laphroaig, and Bowmore Scotch whiskies, Canadian Club whisky, Courvoisier cognac, Hornitos and Sauza tequila, EFFEN and Pinnacle vodka, Sipsmith gin, and Midori liqueur.

Beam Suntory was created in 2014 by combining the world leader in bourbon and the pioneer in Japanese whisky to form a new company with a deep heritage, passion for quality, innovative spirit and commitment to Growing for Good. Headquartered in Chicago, Illinois, Beam Suntory is a subsidiary of Suntory Holdings Limited of Japan. For more information on Beam Suntory, its brands, and its commitment to social responsibility, please visit www.beamsuntory.com and www.drinksmart.com.

About Bernheim Arboretum and Research Forest

Bernheim's mission is to connect people with nature. Bernheim is the largest privately held contiguous forest block in the Eastern United States dedicated to conservation and education. Bourbon maker Isaac Wolfe Bernheim established the arboretum and forest in 1929 as a gift to the people of Kentucky. Fun, educational programs, diverse tree collections, 40 miles of hiking trails and varied landscapes are available every day except December 25 and January 1. Admission is free weekdays and to members. Weekends and holidays have a $5 environmental impact fee per vehicle. Schools and tour groups are welcome; please call in advance for scheduling and fees. Bernheim is located in Clermont, Ky., about 20 minutes south of the Louisville airport. From I-65 take exit 112 and follow the signs. Bernheim is a non-profit organization that relies on memberships, grants and donations for support. Come visit and enjoy the beauty of nature.

Drink Smart

Jim Beam Original Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey, 40% Alc./Vol.

2018 James B. Beam Distilling Co., Clermont, KY

CONTACT:

Emily York Amy Landon Beam Suntory Inc. Bernheim Arboretum & Research Forest P: 312.964.6945 P: 502.215.7150 E: [email protected] E: [email protected]

SOURCE Beam Suntory Inc.

Related Links

http://www.beamsuntory.com

Once the 118,166-square-foot space is renovated, it will offer about 1,300 self-storage units with high-tech security features and indoor climate-control and heating options. U-Haul Remote 24/7 access, the Take A Box, Leave A Box program and much more will also be available on the 5.17-acre lot.

Contact U-Haul Moving & Storage of Melrose Park at (708) 498-0579 or stop by to visit general manager Oneg Pilsner and his team. Hours of operation are 9 a.m.-5 p.m. every day. Reserve equipment at uhaul.com or contact Reservations at 1-800-GO-UHAUL.

"We've been looking to expand in this area, and we're excited to bring our self-storage product to Melrose Park," stated Benjamin Shock, U-Haul Company of Central Chicago president. "We'll be providing a much-needed service while also offering employment opportunities at our new facility."

Shock expects to hire a staff of 25 or more Team Members when the facility is fully operational. U-Haul will look to hire locally to promote job growth within suburban Chicago communities.

The recent acquisition of the Melrose Park facility was driven by U-Haul Company's Corporate Sustainability initiatives: U-Haul supports infill developments to help local communities lower their carbon footprint. Our adaptive reuse of existing buildings reduces the amount of energy and resources required for new-building materials and helps cities reduce their unwanted inventory of unused buildings.

"Reuse is extremely important to U-Haul and this community," Shock said. "Chicagoland takes great pride in its history and ability to adapt to change. By repurposing vacant buildings, we are following that model and preserving the future through green initiatives. This is a huge part of our success and allows us to become part of many vibrant neighborhoods across Chicagoland."

The arrival of U-Haul Truck Share 24/7 is revolutionizing the moving industry through its more convenient, more secure way to pick up and return a truck. U-Haul live verification technology allows rental transactions to be carried out entirely on a smartphone at any hour  day or night. There are no membership fees. Simply visit uhaul.com to create an online account.

About U-Haul

Since 1945, U-Haul has been the No. 1 choice of do-it-yourself movers, with a network of more than 21,000 locations across all 50 states and 10 Canadian provinces. U-Haul Truck Share 24/7 now offers customers access to U-Haul trucks every hour of every day through the self-service options on their internet-connected mobile devices. U-Haul customers' patronage has enabled the U-Haul fleet to grow to more than 150,000 trucks, 112,000 trailers and 40,000 towing devices. U-Haul offers more than 581,000 rooms and more than 51 million square feet of self-storage space at owned and managed facilities throughout North America. U-Haul is the largest installer of permanent trailer hitches in the automotive aftermarket industry and is the largest retailer of propane in the U.S.

Contact:

Andrea Batchelor

Jeff Lockridge

E-mail: [email protected]

Phone: 602-263-6981

Website: uhaul.com

SOURCE U-HaulAs Governments around the world push to eliminate TB, PrimeStore MTM serves as a crucial new tool to facilitate safe and accurate TB diagnosis and expedite detection of M. tuberculosis drug resistance gene mutations

BETHESDA, Md., March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Longhorn Vaccines and Diagnostics LLC (LHNVD), a private pre-analytical systems and molecular solutions company, has spent the last six years validating PrimeStore MTM for inactivation of M. tuberculosis (TB) and stabilization of the DNA to facilitate point of care and centralized molecular detection of TB. In addition, high quality DNA in the original sample is preserved in PrimeStore MTM allowing further drug sensitivity testing by line probe assays or next-generation sequencing. After two years of thoughtful discussions and careful review, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), through its de novo process, cleared PrimeStore MTM as a new class of medical device.

"We are excited to announce the FDA clearance of PrimeStore MTM, a paradigm shift in biological sample transport technology. Leaders of the TB community are driving the rapid phase out of centuries old diagnostic methods, and fully embracing current and evolving technologies in molecular diagnostic testing, next-generation sequencing, digital radiology, and software including DNA analysis and artificial intelligence," states Jeff Fischer, President of Longhorn Vaccines and Diagnostics LLC. "Industry competition which relies on quality peer- reviewed science, and trusted, transparent, and unbiased regulatory review such as the US FDA 510(k) process is essential to the rapid adoption of emerging technologies and maximizing the value of government and donor funding to truly make a difference for those that are and those that will be afflicted with this terrible, highly curable disease."

Statistics from the United States Center for Disease Control (CDC) state that one quarter of the world's population was infected with TB in 2016, and over 10 million people progressed to active infection with 1.7 million deaths. According to Peter Sands, Executive Director of the Global Fund, "We've been making progress on 'bending the curve' on TB. Now we should 'break the curve' and achieve a decisive shift in trajectory towards ending the epidemics."

In 2016, the World Health Organization estimated that 4.3 million patients with active TB go undiagnosed. To diagnose TB in many parts of the world, it is recognized that safe, efficient, reliable sample transportation is critical. "It is clear that we need to invest in systems for rapid, reliable transport of samples up the referral chain," states Madhukar Pai, a professor of epidemiology, and Director of McGill Global Health Programs and colleagues. Multiple technologies will need to be employed to cover the entire range of testing platforms and the varying environmental conditions where patients will be sampled.

The unique characteristics of PrimeStore MTM allow safe and efficient ambient temperature transport anywhere in the world, thus improving access to timely and sensitive TB diagnostic testing. Studies have demonstrated that PrimeStore MTM is compatible with the Cepheid GeneXpert point of care system, or higher throughput qPCR systems run in hospitals and centralized laboratories. Many sputum samples collected for molecular testing for TB do not meet the standard volume requirements. Published studies have shown that tests on the Xpert MTB/Rif cartridge, as well as qPCR testing can be conducted with as little as 1/10 the sample amount used in standard procedures after being placed in PrimeStore MTM.

Transporting live infectious agents for testing can facilitate the spread of unknown pathogens from one region to another. As TB is highly infectious and can be resistant to many or all current antimicrobials, inactivating all of the pathogens in the sample and stabilizing the RNA and DNA improves safety at all stages of the transport and testing process (healthcare worker and laboratory technician safety is an essential issue) and allows a single sample to be tested multiple times for TB and for other respiratory pathogens that can co-infect TB patients.

LHNVD is prepared to engage with The Global Fund, as well as other funding entities, to negotiate PrimeStore MTM pricing to support the effort to "break the curve" on TB and positively impact the fight against the wide range of endemic and epidemic diseases around the world. While PrimeStore MTM is cost effective at current pricing, as it reduces costs throughout the healthcare process, LHNVD will seek to negotiate pricing that will reflect the high-volume purchase of samples that will need to be collected for molecular detection and characterization of TB, and other endemic and emerging regional and global microbial threats.

About PrimeStore MTM

PrimeStore MTM is FDA cleared and intended for the stabilization, transportation and inactivation of infectious unprocessed nasal washes suspected of containing Influenza A virus RNA. PrimeStore MTM is also intended for the stabilization, transportation and inactivation of infectious unprocessed sputum samples suspected of containing Mycobacterium tuberculosis DNA from human samples.

Peer reviewed journal articles, abstracts, posters, and vaccine development clinical trials have demonstrated PrimeStore MTM's ability to generate highly sensitive results with multiple pathogens and sample types on several Real-Time PCR platforms to include Roche's LightCycler and Thermo Fisher's ABI 7500, as well as next-generation sequencers including Thermo Fisher's Ion Torrent and Illumina's MiSeq. PrimeStore MTM has been demonstrated to be compatible with manual and high-throughput extractions systems from LHNVD, Qiagen, Thermo Fisher, bioMeriuex, and Roche. Published studies have shown it to be compatible with Cepheid's GeneXpert MTB/RIF test.

LHNVD has received over 25 issued patents Worldwide (including the US, EU, China, India, South Africa, Canada and Australia) for the composition and use of PrimeStore MTM.

About LHNVD

Longhorn Vaccines and Diagnostics is a closely held, Veterans' Owned, Limited Liability Company headquartered in Bethesda, MD with laboratories in San Antonio, TX and Gaithersburg, MD. www.lhnvd.com

SOURCE Longhorn Vaccines and Diagnostics LLC

Related Links

http://www.lhnvd.com

"Solving the global water crisis is perhaps the biggest step we can take toward ending extreme poverty, and we'll get the job done first in Rwanda," said World Vision U.S. President Rich Stearns. "Finishing the job in Rwanda will be a resounding declaration of what can be done when compassionate people are united together to show God's love to those who are suffering."

This task will mean bringing clean water to one million people over a five-year period. It's part of World Vision's ambitious timeline to reach 20 million people with clean water between 2016 and 2020. So far, the organization is on track, having reached nearly eight million people with clean water in the first two years of the commitments.

"While we are making tremendous progress toward our goals, we need to have a sense of urgency in solving this crisis. We know clean water saves the lives of children and transforms communities to achieve their God-given potential. Reaching one million people in Rwanda is well within our grasp. Let's show the world that we can solve the global water crisis starting in Rwanda," said Dr. Greg Allgood, Vice President of Water for World Vision U.S.

The announcement comes on the 25th anniversary of World Water Day. Stearns is currently traveling in Rwanda, meeting families in communities who don't yet have access to clean water as well as those whose lives are now forever changed because World Vision has brought access to clean water to their communities.

The need is urgent:

Nearly 1,000 children under age 5 die every day from diarrhea caused by contaminated water, poor sanitation, and improper hygiene.

Women and children are responsible for water collection in more than 80 percent of households in 61 developing countries; often, the walk is dangerous, children miss school, and the water is unhealthy.

Globally, 844 million people lack access to clean water and in Rwanda alone, 47 percent of the rural population is without clean water.

The progress is encouraging. In the past 25 years since World Water Day began:

Two billion people have been reached with clean water worldwide.

In the early 1990s, World Vision was reaching an estimated 200,000 people per year in just a select number of countries including Ghana , Mali , and Niger . Today, the organization reaches an estimated 3.2 million people a year with clean water. That means reaching one new person with clean water every 10 seconds and reaching three more schools every day with clean water.

, , and . Today, the organization reaches an estimated 3.2 million people a year with clean water. That means reaching one new person with clean water every 10 seconds and reaching three more schools every day with clean water. World access to improved water sources has gone from 76 percent in the 1990s to 89 percent of the global population today who have basic water service, meaning access within a 30-minute round trip (http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs391/en/).

"Supporting the Rwandan government's ambitious goal of 100 percent water coverage by 2024, we'll demonstrate global leadership by finishing the job, paving the way to do the same in other countries like Ghana, Honduras, and Zambia. Rwanda's leaders have made a bold commitment to turn their legacy from one of horrific genocide to hope and health. We are excited to come alongside them in this effort," Stearns said.

Anyone can join with World Vision in the effort to bring water to those in need. One way is by joining World Vision's Global 6K for Water. On Saturday, May 19, 2018, people from around the globe will walk or run 6 kilometers for an extraordinary cause, uniting in the world's biggest 6K for water. Every $50 registration fee will provide life-changing clean water to one person. Register or learn more today by visiting worldvision6k.org.

Tweet this: For #WorldWaterDay, @RichStearns announces goal of universal water coverage for all communities where @WorldVisionUSA works in #Rwanda.

About World Vision:

World Vision is a Christian humanitarian organization dedicated to working with children, families, and their communities worldwide to reach their full potential by tackling the causes of poverty and injustice. World Vision serves all people, regardless of religion, race, ethnicity, or gender. For more information, please visit www.worldvision.org or follow us on Twitter @WorldVisionUSA.

SOURCE World Vision U.S.

Related Links

http://www.worldvision.org

VALETTA, Malta, March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

During the course of the campaign Play2Live achieved their hard-cap of sales, with a total supply of 1,308,800,000 LUC tokens, 62% of which were sold on the open market. Total funds raised - $30M. Earlier this year Play2Live (P2L) secured $16M in private pre-sale. Following the results of a public pre-sale on January 26 - February 6, 2018, the Level Up Coin (LUC) tokens were sold at $18M, while almost $2M were raised in the first hour.



(Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/632229/Play2Live_Logo.jpg )



The origin of the investors was distributed as follows: 18% of the involved funds came from China, 16% came from Vietnam, 15% came from South Korea and 8% came from Russia, the rest was contributed from other regions.

"We are super excited and happy with the results of the main token sale event! This is an outcome of a carefully executed day-to-day operating of the highly professional international team. There is already a lot to be proud of: we held the world's' very first esports tournament in CS:GO with crypto prize pool - Play2Live CryptoMasters. Peer-to-peer CDN technology tested during the tournament allowed us to save up to 30% of traffic per separate stream. That means everyone, including the viewer, will be able to earn with us. Beta version with this monetization channel will already be available this summer, and our team is ready to deliver all the unique features that we've promised in our White Paper", comments Alexey Burdyko, CEO and Founder at Play2Live.

Founded in 2017, Play2Live aims to merge blockchain technology with streaming services. P2L will have 15 sources of revenue, which is three times more compared to the streaming industry leaders. Streamers will be able to monetize their content in 11 ways versus 4-5 available on existing platforms. They can earn from the first stream, regardless of their audience size, as well as boost their audience via interactive tasks during the streams, betting service, enhanced chat communication and other engaging activities. Viewers will have 5 monetization tools - compared to zero elsewhere in streaming industry. They can earn by watching adverts, performing tasks set by streamers, voting for content, sharing their internet bandwidth via peer-to-peer CDN.

Play2Live uses a token called Level Up Coin (LUC) which can be easily converted to other cryptocurrencies or to fiat money through a special exchange service/API.

Contact: Daria Golikova, PR Manager, [email protected]

SOURCE Play2LivePreuss was most recently the senior vice president of marketing and communications for Aptiv (formerly Delphi Automotive), a position he has held since 2014. Prior to joining Delphi, Preuss was head of communications for the Americas and Global Product at Ford Motor Company, so Mr. Preuss knows the blue oval well.

Preuss' career also includes more than a decade of experience at General Motors, where he held various leadership roles, including president and CEO of OnStar, GM's in-vehicle safety and security unit.

"Chris is a strategic and experienced communications pro. From product to public affairs, his acumen strengthens an already talented team," said Satish Korde, chief executive officer of WPP's GTB.

Preuss takes the reins from Gary Koops, who has, until now, served as the team's lead and played an indispensable role supporting Ford since 2007. Koops, who is also the global media practice chair for the newly merged Burson Cohn & Wolfe, will stay on as a key member of the team. "We're thrilled Gary will continue his great work on the Ford business in addition to his unparalleled, ongoing counseling for our top clients," said Don Baer, chairman of Burson Cohn & Wolfe. "He's one of the most respected professionals in the entire public relations world, so the team has only gotten stronger with Gary now working alongside Chris."

Preuss will report directly to Satish Korde and be headquartered at GTB's offices in Dearborn, Michigan.

About GTB

Headquartered in Dearborn, Michigan and founded in 2007, GTB is an industry-leading advertising and communications agency. Formerly known as Team Detroit, Blue Hive, and Retail First, the agency unified under the single name GTB in May of 2016 and acquired Zubi Advertising Services in January 2017. A WPP company, GTB has 52 global offices across 6 continents. Clients include Ford Motor Company, Johnson Controls, and Aptiv, among others. Visit http://www.gtb.com for more information.

SOURCE WPP

Related Links

http://www.gtb.com

HAIFA, Israel, March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

ZIM Integrated Shipping Services Ltd. (IL0065100443, IL0065100856) (the "Company") hereby notifies, in accordance with the provisions of Section 4.03 of an Indenture entered into between ZIM Integrated Shipping Services Ltd. (the "Company") and Hermetic Trust (1975) Ltd. on July 16, 2014 (the "Indenture"), as follows:

1. The Company's audited consolidated financial statements for the period ended on December 31, 2017, the operating and financial review for such quarterly financial statements and a report on certain financial data as of December 31, 2017 (collectively, the "2017 Annual Reports") are availbale on both the Company's website (http://www.zim.com/aboutus/pages/reports.aspx) and on the official website of the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange (http://maya.tase.co.il).

2. The Company will host on March 27, 2018 at 3:00 p.m. Israel time (2:00 p.m. CET), a confrence call for the holders of its Series 1A, 2A, 1B and 2B Notes to discuss the 2017 Annual Reports. In order to participate, please use the following numbers (at least ten minutes before the scheduled start time):

Israel: 972-3-9180610

USA: 1-888-668-9141

UK: 0-800-917-5108

Germany: 0-800-182-6846

France: 0-800-903-025

Contact:

Avner Shats

[email protected]

+972-52-6002520



SOURCE ZIM Integrated Shipping Services Ltd.SAN FRANCISCO, March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Zimperium, the global leader in enterprise mobile security, will host a webinar titled, "Compliance and Mobile Devices: The Forgotten Endpoint" on April 4, 2018 at 10:00 a.m. Central Daylight Savings Time (CDT). Registration is open here.

Organizations in practically every industry, including financial services, retail, healthcare and more, are required to meet cybersecurity compliance requirements set by federal and state regulators. Penalties for non-compliance include massive fines in some cases, including:

According to new rules from the British Government, UK transport, water, energy and health businesses could be fined as much as 17 million ( $23.9 million ) "if they don't have the 'most robust' safeguards in place to guard against cyber-attacks," as reported by CNBC.

) "if they don't have the 'most robust' safeguards in place to guard against cyber-attacks," as reported by CNBC. Organizations in breach of GDPR can be fined up to four percent of annual global turnover or 20 million, whichever is greater.

Non-compliance with PCI could result in consequences of $5,000 to $500,000 , with banks and credit card institutions increasing fines the longer the organization stays non-compliant.

to , with banks and credit card institutions increasing fines the longer the organization stays non-compliant. Penalties for HIPAA violations can range from $100 to $50,000 per violation (or per record), with a maximum penalty of $1.5 million per year for each violation.

Now, more than ever, mobile devices are becoming the target of choice for hackers and cybercriminals. Most mobile devices have access to the same corporate information that is accessible by other endpoints such as desktops and laptops. Yet mobile devices are the forgotten endpoint when it comes to compliance. The regulations still apply but many organizations are at risk as a result of inadequate or absent mobile security. During this webinar, JT Keating, Zimperium's vice president of product strategy, will cover the following topics:

The mobile attack surface and current mobile threats facing the enterprise

How to ensure mobile device data is protected appropriately while meeting regulatory requirements

The role the Zimperium Platform plays in enabling organizations to meet the mobile mandates of GDPR, PCI DSS, HIPAA, NDB, NERC and more

"As the number of cyber attacks targeting mobile devices continues to grow, early detection and effective response planning is critical," Keating said. "At the same time, many organizations in highly-regulated industries are in need of mobile threat defense that not only protects sensitive information, but meets strict compliance requirements. Zimperium's mobile security platform minimizes compliance risk while ensuring data remains private and secure."

Details about the webinar are included below.

Who: JT Keating, vice president of product strategy, Zimperium

What: "Compliance and Mobile Devices: The Forgotten Endpoint" webinar

When: April 4, 2018 at 10:00 a.m. CDT

Register: http://go.zimperium.com/compliance-webinar

About Zimperium

Zimperium, the global leader in mobile security, offers real-time, on-device protection against Android and iOS threats. The Zimperium platform leverages our award-winning machine learning-based engine, z9, to protect mobile data, apps and sessions against device compromises, network attacks and malicious apps. To date, z9 has detected 100% of zero-day mobile exploits without requiring an update or suffering from the delays and limitations of cloud-based detectionsomething no other mobile security provider can claim. Headquartered in Dallas, TX, Zimperium is backed by Sierra Ventures, Samsung, Telstra, Warburg Pincus and SoftBank. Learn more at www.zimperium.com or our official blog at https://blog.zimperium.com.

Zimperium, the Zimperium name, and logo, Powered by Zimperium, zIPS, zIAP and z9 are registered trademarks or trademarks of Zimperium, Inc. in the US and other countries.

Media Contact

Tracey Workman

InkHouse PR for Zimperium

E-mail: [email protected]

SOURCE Zimperium

Related Links

http://www.zimperium.com

The Australian Prime Property Fund (APPF) Commercial, managed by Lendlease Investment Management, has joined one of Australias largest superannuation funds, First State Super, to jointly acquire Two Melbourne Quarter, a next-generation office building located in the Melbourne Quarter precinct.

A development agreement has been signed with Lendlease Development to build the tower.

Two Melbourne Quarter is the second of three commercial towers planned for the precinct. The first tower, One Melbourne Quarter, was acquired by APPF Commercial in 2016. It is 90 per cent leased and on schedule for completion later this year.

Two Melbourne Quarter has also secured EnergyAustralia as anchor tenant, the largest tenant to date for the precinct. With construction to commence this month, EnergyAustralia has agreed to lease approximately 22,000 sqm of the 50,000 sqm tower, taking up 10-and-a-half levels of the buildings high-rise floors.

With almost half the Woods Bagot-designed tower now leased, this leaves approximately 12 contiguous floors remaining. The building features flexible 2,000 sqm floor plates and is expected to house up to 4,500 new workers.

First State Super and APPF Commercial will each hold a 50 per cent interest in the 25- storey tower, which will target leading sustainability outcomes and ratings in energy and water consumption, waste management, and indoor environment quality, including a 6- Star Green Star Design & As Built rating and a 5.5 Star NABERS Energy rating.

Developed by Lendlease, the Melbourne Quarter precinct will seek to deliver a range of attractive workplace and wellbeing amenities including end-of-trip facilities, business amenities and childcare services.

APPF Commercials investment in Two Melbourne Quarter follows a recent equity raising.

The fund leveraged its off-market access to Lendleases leading office development and urban regeneration capability in acquiring the asset. APPF Commercial is the first Australian fund to be awarded a 6-Star Green Star portfolio performance rating and was also ranked number one in the 2017 Global Real Estate Sustainability Benchmark (GRESB) across all sectors globally.The Sydney investment management firm KSI Investments has successfully raised $6.4 million from investors using the DomaCom crowdfunding platform.

They have transacted on the first of two side by side parcels of land in the South-West Sydney suburb of Rossmore which is 5km from the new Badgerys Creek airport for Sydney and 5km from the planned strategic regional centre at Leppington.

Robin Luo, CEO of KSI Investments says it was a significant milestone "not just for KSI Investments, but for all Australian property investors."

"We have successfully gathered together a group of likeminded investors interested in buying land and helped them transact on a prime piece of land in Sydneys South-West growth corridor.

KSI Investments believe their key to success has been transparency.

Endre Kollo, Investment Director of KSI Investments says unlike failed land banking schemes of the past, "we are a totally different proposition."

" We do not have complex structures involving many different companies and trusts, we do not borrow any money and we do not hide behind the veil of a wholesale fund status.

DomaCom CEO Arthur Naoumidis said DomaCom was delighted to be involved.

"We manage an ASIC registered retail managed investment fund under an Australian Financial Services Licence.

"This transaction strongly demonstrates the vision behind the DomaCom platform, as were helping investors pool money together to purchase quality land assets that would normally be the domain of institutional investors.

The 64 Devonshire Road property at Rossmore is the first in a series of planned acquisitions by KSI Investments.

Although the first land fund is now closed, the adjoining block of land is now open for investment through the second fund.

The fund is able to accept investment from SMSF investors as well as private investors, companies and trusts with a minimum investment of $2,000 for 60 Devonshire Road, Rossmore (6.32 acres).

The site is expected to accommodate between 110 to 140 houses if rezoned residential which is anticipated to occur over the next 5 to 7 years.

DomaCom offers investors a liquidity facility that enables investors to trade units in the fund freely at any time, provided there is a matching buyer and seller before the eventual land sale.

The fund will incur a 2 per cent annual management fee and 20 per cent performance fee at the time of the sale of the land.

The expected timeframe of investment is 5-7 years with maximum term of 10 years.The Agency has partnered with the Australian Turf Club, and as part of its sponsorship, the prestigious George Ryder Stakes will now be The Agency George Ryder Stakes.

Matt Lahood has assisted the ATC for 20 years as a property advisor.

"I am thrilled to re-connect with this much-loved Australian sporting institution," he said.

He caught up with the ATC chairman Laurie Macri to celebrate their working together (above).

The Agency George Ryder Stakes  one of five Group 1 races on Longines Golden Slipper Day  is also ranked as one of the highest rated races in the world.

The worlds equal highest rated horse Winx has won the past two The Agency George Ryder Stakes and is again aiming for the $1 million Group 1 race.Dubbed the Versace of Brisbane, one of Queenslands most elaborate mansions is on the market for the first time.

The six-storey residence at 53 Wendell St, Norman Park has a design inspired by the owners international travels.

Construction was completed less than three years ago with the brief to capture the view of Brisbanes CBD.

NGU Real Estate CEO Emil Juresic is marketing the five-bedroom, six-bathroom residence.

It includes a nine-person lift, swimming pool, two spas, an entire floor master suite, six-car garaging, cellar, outdoor shower, theatre, gas fire pit, outdoor barbecue and self-contained top-floor accommodation.

This is a home so sublime, its hard to find the right words to describe it properly, Juresic said.

Ive sold a large volume of luxury homes but this one is on another level and has to be one of the best homes in Australia.

No dollar has been spared in its creation, he added.

Bubble feature walls wrap the internal stairwell, replicating the nuts and bolts pattern on the heritage-listed Story Bridge.

A glass cut-out in the floor of a hallway was inserted following a visit to the Grand Canyon Skywalk.

It is a six-storey mansion fitted with the finest materials, on the best street in Brisbane and with the most spectacular views of the Brisbane River, CBD and New Farm Park, Mr Juresic said.

NGU Real Estates marketing video for 53 Wendell St, Norman Park has received more than 204,000 Facebook views since launching online on March 18.Apartments in Brisbane are continuing to achieve significantly higher yields than those in Sydney and Melbourne, with Consolidated Properties reporting it has tenanted all available apartments in its newly-completed inner city Spire development at an average yield topping five per cent.

The result includes 27 furnished apartments in the $200 million residential building - one of only two towers to be recently completed in the heart of Brisbane City - that Consolidated Properties has rented at yields of 5.6 per cent and above.

According to Urbis director Paul Riga, yields across inner Brisbane remain high at an average of 4.5 per cent, with Sydney and Melbourne trailing at 3.8 and 4 per cent respectively.

Mr Riga said solid yields were supported by high absorption of quality rental stock, with recent research showing the forecast future pipeline of inner Brisbane apartments was shrinking, boding well for the strength of the rental market in the short to medium term.

"Perceptions of an oversupply in the inner city are really off target - demand has remained solid and the market is normalising in terms of the future development pipeline," he said.

"Our latest Inner Brisbane Apartment Rental Review shows the new apartment vacancy rate is just 2.8 per cent.

"Although there were a record number of apartment settlements in 2017, vacancy rates have not jumped through the roof as predicted by some, and we expect rental demand will remain solid as the number of new apartment approvals has dropped significantly from a high of about 11,000 in 2015.

"Most of this stock has now been completed and occupied, and we saw just 3,141 new approvals in 2017 - which is only slightly higher than the approximately 2,000 approvals in 2011 and 2012, at the bottom of the market."

Consolidated Properties executive chairman Don O'Rorke (below) said Spire's outpacing of inner Brisbane's average yield - in itself already the highest among eastern seaboard capitals - showed that quality buildings well located in the Brisbane CBD continued to perform strongly.

He said all apartments available for lease in Spire that were under Consolidated Properties management had been tenanted following completion in September (2017) of the landmark building, situated on Queen Street in the heart of the city. In total, Spire features 340 one and two bedroom apartments.

"There has been a lot of talk of an oversupply in the Brisbane apartment market - but quite simply put, you don't achieve yields of the level we have in an oversupplied market and in fact, they point more towards an undersupply," he said.

"We had a waiting list of prospective tenants before the building was even completed and, in many cases, investors had several choices of who to lease their apartment to. We actually still have a waiting list of prospective tenants keen to lease any more apartments that become available in the building.

"What we are seeing is strong demand for apartments that are well located and, certainly, the CBD location of Spire - and its high level of connectivity - was a significant factor, as was the high build quality and the exclusive resident amenities."

O'Rorke said the 'crowning jewel' of the Spire building, designed by award-winning John Wardle Architects, was its rooftop which included Brisbane's highest pool, dining and entertaining zones and a 20-seat cinema.

"We invested significantly in creating a building that would become a true landmark and place to call home, and the rooftop facilities is an important aspect of that," he said.

"Here, residents can take in the Story Bridge, Brisbane River and Kangaroo Point Cliffs from the infinity edge pool - there are very few places in Brisbane where you can do that."

The grand hotel-like lobby will feature restaurant Spice Den - the second to open under restaurateurs Scott Wilson in conjunction with partners, whose first Spice Den at Casuarina in northern New South Wales has become a local institution.

O'Rorke said Spire had appealed to investors and owner-occupiers, with more than $190 million of sales achieved, making Spire Brisbane's fastest-selling project upon release.

"Both investors and owner-occupiers have been looking at all the strong fundamentals underpinning the Brisbane market, such as employment growth and high levels of migration," he said.

"At the same time, the average price of apartments in Brisbane remains significantly more affordable than Sydney and Melbourne, and the yields significantly higher.

"When you consider a two bedroom apartment in Spire is priced from $630,000 to $750,000 and rents for $780 per week - in comparison to a Barangaroo apartment in Sydney which costs $3 million to $3.5 million and rents for only $1800 per week - it makes a lot of sense."If you are new to iQ you can schedule a demo and learn more about this opportunity.

PSFK iQ - Where Innovators Turn for Research. Our professional-grade research platform is designed specifically for Retail and CX leaders who want to know whats next. Whether youre staying current on trends or need a real-time research partner to help you get ahead, count on PSFK iQ to deliver the info you need to make your next move.News

From Bulgaria

The Energy Minister, Temenuzhka Petkova, announced the start of a public meeting for opening requests

AUTHOR: publics.bg



 ICGB AD



On 16 March, a public meeting was held in Sofia at the office of the ICGB AD project company. The meeting opened the requests for participation in the restricted procedure for line pipe manufacture and supply for the needs of the Greece-Bulgaria gas interconnector. In front of media representatives, the Bulgarian Energy Minister Temenuzhka Petkova announced the onset of the session for opening all requests submitted before the deadline. Ten participation requests have been submitted to the procurement procedure. Both Bulgarian and European countries, together with countries from other continents, expressed their interest in the project.

Requests have been submitted by the following candidates:

1. Jindaw SAW Ltd.

2. JSC "Zagorsk Pipe Plant"

3. Welspun Corp. Limited

4. Salzgitter Mannesmann International GmbH

5.     .

6. Umran Celik Boru Sanayii A.S

7. Erciyas Celik Boru Sanayi A.S (Erciyas Steel Pipe Co)

8.  -2 

9. Korinth Pipeworks S.A Pipe Industry S.A

10. Public Joint Stock Company "Chelyabinsk Pipe Plant"

"The high interest in the tender is a proof that we have managed to guarantee public, transparent and competitive conditions for participation", Minister Petkova pointed out.

The procedure was a restricted one, which meant that it would take place at two stages - a pre-selection phase and an examining, evaluating and ranking offers phase. The project company has decided upon that type of procedure as it provides sufficient time for all stakeholders to participate. Under the current procedural order, in the first phase all applicants should submit documents to prove they fulfill the selection criteria. Offers shall be submitted only by participants who have passed the pre-selection phase. This saves the candidates efforts to draw up an offer and significantly reduces the administrative burden.

At the second stage of the procedure, the candidates who have passed the pre-selection phase will be sent invitations. ICGB is going to invite only five candidates for the second phase of the selection process. For the time being, the scheduled date for sending the invitations is April 20, 2018. "Participants in the second phase will be given enough time to prepare their offers," the ICGB Executive Officer for Bulgaria,Teodora Georgieva, stated. According to her, if the procedure runs smoothly, the selection of line pipes supplier is expected to be finalized by the end of June.

According to the contractual strategy adopted by ICGB, the line pipes supply is assigned separately from the main procurement contract for engineering, procurement, construction and supply of the equipment. The main procurement for the award of the construction, which will also be a limited two-phase procedure, is expected to be announced at the beginning of April. By the end of the first half of the year, the tenders for the assigning of archaeological research and construction supervision will also be announced.

We can assure all participants that ICGBs actions for selection of contractors will be fully transparent and all applicants will receive timely and complete information, including assistance when needed, ICGBs Executive Officer for Bulgaria outlined.Cookies

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A cookie is a small text file that a website saves on your computer or mobile device when you visit the site. Cookies are widely used in order to make websites work, or work more efficiently, as well as to provide information to the owners of the site.Website use Google Analytics, a web analytics service provided by Google, Inc. ("Google") to help analyse the use of this website. For this purpose, Google Analytics uses"cookies", which are text files placed on your computer.The information generated by the cookies about your use of this website - standard internet log information (including your IP address) and visitor behaviour information in an anonymous form - will be transmitted to and stored by Google including on servers in the United States. Google will anonymize the information sent by removing the last octet of your IP address prior to its storage.According to Google Analytics terms of service, Google will use this information for the purpose of evaluating your use of the website and compiling reports on website activity.We not use, and not allow any third party to use the statistical analytics tool to track or to collect any personally identifiable information of visitors to this site. Google may transfer the information collected by Google Analytics to third parties where required to do so by law, or where such third parties process the information on Google`s behalf.According to Google Analytics terms of service, Google will not associate your IP address with any other data held by Google.You may refuse the use of Google Analytics cookies by downloading and installing Google Analytics Opt-out Browser Add-on. The add-on communicates with the Google Analytics JavaScript (ga.js) to indicate that information about the website visit should not be sent to Google Analytics.Cookies are also used to record if you have agreed (or not) to our use of cookies on this site, so that you are not asked the question every time you visit the site.You can control and/or delete cookies as you wish. You can delete all cookies that are already on your computer and you can set most browsers to prevent them from being placed.Most browsers allow you to:If you chose to delete cookies, you should be aware that any preferences will be lost. Also, if you block cookies completely many websites (including ours) will not work properly and webcasts will not work at all. For these reasons, we do not recommend turning cookies off when using our webcasting services.Salem Media reported that sales in its publishing group fell 4% in 2017, declining to $24.4 million. That figure is down from the from $25.5 million the publisher made in 2016. The publishing division includes Regnery Publishing as well as Salems self-publishing and magazine operations.

Regnery president and publisher Marji Ross said the the unit saw small gains in sales and earnings last year. Two political books led the way: The Big Lie by Dinesh DSouza and Ed Kleins All Out War. (D'Souza's book was Regnerys top seller in the year.)

Outside of its core politics category, the publisher found success with The Last Fighter Pilot and the backlist title Drinking with the Saints: The Sinners Guide to a Holy Happy Hour. The success of Saints was particularly encouraging to Ross, as Regnery tries to lessen its dependence on political books and improve its backlist sales. An increase in backlist sales last year, which helped to lower Regnerys return rate, was one factor in improving the publisher earnings, Ross said.

Sales of e-books fell last year, even though units rose 3%. The unit gain was offset by price decreases as Regnery continued to experiment with pricing to improve discoverability on Amazon, Ross said.

The Regnery Faith imprint had a big jump in sales over 2016, and Ross is expecting another significant gain in 2018 as the company prepares for the April 2 release of The Rational Bible: Exodus by Dennis Prager. The book, which is set for April 2 and features commentary on every verse in Exodus, has received the most pre-orders on Amazon than any other Regnery book ever and the publisher plans to ship 50,000 copies of the $34.99 hardcover.

Regnery also received a sales boost earlier this week for Marlon Bundos Day in the Life of the Vice President, written by Vice President Mike Pences daughter Charlotte and illustrated by Pence's wife, Karen. The book was lampooned Sunday night on the HBO show Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. During the episode, Oliver unveiled his own book featuring the titular rabbit: A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo. While the Oliver book has become a hit, Ross said the Regnery title has also seen a sales spike. Of all the books we will do this year, I thought this one would be the least controversial, Ross said.

Regnerys big book for 2018, however, is almost certain to ruffle some feather. The Briefing, by former White House press secretary Sean Spicer, is set for a July release and will, Ross said, give an inside look at the Trump administration. The book will also provide Spicers firsthand account of what it was like to be on the frontlines. Regnery is planning a first printing of 200,000 copies for the book.Despite a snowstorm that snarled travel, librarians filled the auditorium at the 2018 Public Library Association conference in Philadelphia yesterday to hear former Deputy U.S. Attorney General Sally Yates deliver a highly anticipated opening keynoteand Yates did not disappoint.

In a stirring speech, which was followed by a Q&A with PLA president Pam Sandlian Smith, Yates urged librarians to stand up for truth in these unprecedentedand exhaustingpolitical times. Over the course of our nations history we have faced inflection points, where we had to decide who we are as a country and what we stand for, Yates told librarians. Now is such a time.

Yates stressed that statement wasnt intended to advocate for any particular political party or policybut rather for a vigorous debate that is based on truth and facts.

Part of what makes our country so strong is that we have different views, and we debate a whole range of issues. Because it is out of open, vigorous, and hopefully respectful debate come the best answers to the vexing policy issues facing our country, she said. In our best moments, we put country before party, and the common good before personal ambition. And in our very best moments, the moments that have defined what it means to be American, we have stood up and we have acted to ensure that our country lives up to its promises. We have lived our patriotism, not just declared it. The question is: will this be such a moment? Because beyond the partisan gamesmanship thats going on in Washington D.C., theres really something much more fundamental hanging in the balance.

Yates served as Deputy Attorney General in the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) from January 2015, through January 2017, and briefly as Acting Attorney General. She later shot to national prominenceand became a symbol of resistanceafter being fired by President Trump for refusing to defend the administrations controversial Muslim travel ban.

Over the course of her keynote, Yates spoke eloquently of the ideals we as a nation aspire to (even if we often fail to live up to them). And without mentioning the name Trump once during her hour onstage, Yates decried the systematic undermining of trust in our nations essential institutions, including the FBI and the free press, as well as attacks on objective truth itself.

 Were not living in ordinary times, and its not enough to admire our nations core values from afar. 

We cant control whether our public servants lie to us, but we can control whether we hold them accountable for those lies, she said, or, whether from exhaustion, or to protect our own political objectives, we look the other way from those lies, and normalize indifference to truth.

Truth, Yates stressed, is the very foundation of our democracy.

There is such a thing as objective truth, she said to applause. You can debate policies and issues, and we ought to debate policies and issues, but those debates have to be based on common facts and truth, rather than just on raw appeals to emotion, or fear, or appealing to something people are anxious to believe.

That, she said, is where libraries are especially important. You all are the keepers of the gateway to the truth, Yates told librarians. An informed electorate is essential to our system of checks and balances, to holding our elected officials accountable. But an informed electorate requires access to information, and the tools necessary to be able to determine whats true, and what isnt.

She went on to acknowledge the challenges facing libraries, including the rise of social media and "echo chamber stories," to budget cuts, and fatigue. She urged librarians to stay vigilant.

Were not living in ordinary times, and its not enough to admire our nations core values from afar, she said, noting that the Oxford Dictionarys 2016 Word of the Year was post-truth. But just because it was the word of the year that doesnt mean we have to allow it to happen, she said. The only way that we devolve into a post-truth world is if we acquiesce to it. And I know it can be exhausting to stay in a constant state of rage, but we also cant normalize conduct that is not normal.

In the Q&A with Smith, Yates was asked about the travel ban and her dismissal by President Trump. She told librarians that first learned about the ban against seven Muslim-majority nations late on a Friday afternoon from her assistant, via a New York Times article. Even though the DOJ would have to be in court the next morning to defend the ban, the White House never involved the DOJ, or even let them know the order was coming.

Ultimately, she said, after studying the ban as quickly as she could, Yates said she wasnt convinced it was lawful or constitutional. "To defend it, we were going to have to argue a pretext that I didnt believe was true, and that was that the travel ban had nothing to do with religion," she said. "At that point it was a simple decision for me to make. I wasnt going to be part of that. The Department of Justice should never be involved in advancing a pretext."

The other question, she said, was whether to resign. She decided that as Acting Attorney general, she had a greater responsibility to uphold justice. "If I resigned, that would protect my personal integrity," she said, "but it would still have left the Department of Justice to advance an argument that was not grounded in truth."

And she closed by reflecting on the things that give her hope, including the people who turned up at airports to protest the travel ban, and more recently, the kids in Parkland, Florida, who after a school shooting have organized to fight for sensible gun control.

"With stuff like that happening across the country, you know were going to be okay."

The Public Library Association conference runs through March 24.The BBC is set to launch news services in Igbo, Pidgin and Yoruba, following the opening of its new bureau in Nigerias capital Lagos.





Over 100 new jobs are being created by the move, which is part of the biggest expansion of the BBC World Service since the 1940s.The bureau  which will act as the BBCs headquarters in West Africa  comprises a TV studio and two radio studios. The three new local language services join BBC News broadcasts Hausa and English across Nigeria.We will big on original journalism that impacts the lives of Nigerians at home and abroad. We are expanding our editorial offer to cover politics, culture, business, health, investigations, among others, said Oluwatoyosi Ogunseye, BBC head of West Africa.We will focus more on young people and women, ensuring that we cover Nigeria and the whole of West Africa like never before. Well remain true to our ideals and values of objectivity, truth and impartiality, she added.The BBC claims its international news currently has an audience of 36 million in Nigeria, the largest of any country.The corpration is also planning a mentorship and internship scheme for the next generation of West African journalists, said Jamie Angus, director of the BBC World Service. This is part of BBCs contribution to the growth of media best practice and professionalism in Nigeria, and the fight against fake news  and well benefit from the young journalists insight into West Africa, he said.BBC News in Igbo, Pidgin and Yoruba will now be available online and on social media, along with a 60-second audio round-up, BBC Minute, twice daily.The BBC is also joining forces with Channels Television on Connect Africa, a new weekly current affairs show in English that will launch later this year.A range of other new TV programming for Africa  in English, Hausa, French and Swahili  is also promised by the BBC , and some TV teams are expected to join the Lagos bureau.After the deaths of Osama bin Laden and several other leaders in 2011 and 2012, followed by the rise of Islamic State, many considered al-Qaeda a spent force. But in an important brief, (with an expanded version for the Lowy Institute), leading terrorism scholar Bruce Hoffman argues that Ayman al-Zawahiri has used the past seven years to rebuild al-Qaeda. So while counterterrorism specialists have celebrated the rolling up of Islamic States caliphate, al-Qaedas resurgence shows that much work remains to be done.

Zawahiri cut his teeth in Egypts jihadi culturehe was arrested at 15, joined the Muslim Brotherhood and later led Egyptian Islamic Jihadbut hes no charismatic leader. Following the death of Osama bin Laden and the rise of the Islamic State, Zawahiri opted to focus on three key objectives.

Survival: In 2011, al-Qaeda faced irrelevancy. It lacked an operational space and existed at the mercy of the Afghan Taliban. That may explain why Zawahiri swore allegiance to Mullah Mansour, Mullah Omars successor, in 2015. When Mansour was killed in a US drone attack and Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada became the new leader of the Taliban, Zawahiri pledged allegiance to him. That allowed Zawahiri to remain hidden somewhere along the AfghanPakistan border.

Reorientation: In the 1990s and 2000s, as al-Qaeda was asserting itself on the global stage as the premier Salafijihadi terrorist group, its ideology and action inspired tremendous bloodletting, especially among Muslims. By the 2010s, Zawahiri recognised the limited value of that approach and reoriented the organisation away from mass casualty-terrorism, especially against Muslims.

To highlight how attuned Zawahiri is to shifting perceptions, he clearly noted that by the late 2000s, pollsters were pointing out that public opinion, especially in Muslim-majority countries, had shifted against suicide bombing. In Lebanon, for example, 74% of the population thought that such attacks could be justified in 2002; by 2007, that support had fallen to only 34%. At that time, WorldPublicOpinion.org noted that large majorities in Egypt (88%), Indonesia (65%) and Morocco (66%) opposed attacks on civilians.

Zawahiris al-Qaeda even chastised Islamic State, accusing it of deviation and misguidance and saying that the group exceeded the limits of extremism. That has meant that the prospect of another al-Qaedainspired 9/11 has decreased, as Zawahiri appreciates that such an attack is likely to harm his cause more than to help it.

Rebuilding: Zawahiri has had to deal with an organisation that had been decimated. It had lost leaders, key ideologues, strategic thinkers and fighters. Al-Qaeda was also facing a major challenge from Islamic State and its leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, who publicly rejected Zawahiris order to keep al-Qaedas Jabhat al-Nusra affiliate separate from Islamic State.

Because Zawahiri couldnt compel Islamic States compliance, he opted to engage in a franchising program. A key aspect of the rebuilding was using secure communications to spread al-Qaedas message. Secure communications have also allowed Zawahiri to reconstitute al-Qaedas Shura Majlis (advisory councils). This allows al-Qaeda to adopt a glocalist strategy that links local grievances to its globalist campaign.

Zawahiris careful three-prong strategy has enabled al-Qaeda to knit together a global movement of more than two dozen franchises through which it now commands around 20,000 men in Syria, 4,000 in Yemen, 7,000 in Somalia and 3,000 in Indonesia. These are all strategically important locations from which al-Qaeda can and will seek to advance its brand.

Interestingly Zawahiri appears to have adapted the ideas of his arch-enemy, Abdullah Yusuf Azzam, who argued that after the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan, it was time for the Arab Afghans (Arabs who had made the hijrah (migration) to Afghanistan) to shift their attention to the near enemyapostate Muslim regimes and Israel. Zawahiri had argued that the mujahedeen should focus on the far enemy (the US and the West in general), as it was Washington that was keeping the Arab leaders in power.

Zawahiris current strategy seems to indicate that al-Qaeda is moving away from its initial focus, the far enemy, and focussing instead on the near enemy, specifically Arab countries with fragile governments. There are many such governments across the Muslim and Arab World, especially in sub-Saharan Africa and the Maghreb.

So where are you, Zawahiri asks his followers in his latest message. Where is your Islamic zeal? Where is your eagerness? Where is your settlement of your duties for the inheritance of your fathers?

Hoffman has provided a powerful reminder that we cant bask in the defeat of Islamic State. We must reorient our attention to al-Qaeda, which remains committed to freeing Muslim lands, ending the suffering of Muslims at the hands of the infidels and restoring the Muslim umma (nation) to its old glory.

In recognising that al-Qaeda remains a potent force, counterterrorism policymakers face several challenges, such as how to disrupt its operations through activities such as limiting its use of encrypted messaging, which terrorists seem to increasingly rely on, without undermining basic rights.

An additional challenge is addressing low-intensity conflicts, civil wars and flagrant abuses such as those ones inflicted on the Rohingya, the Cham and others, which feeds the Salafijihadi narrative of the Wests moral relativism. Theres evidence that both Islamic State and al-Qaeda are using the Rohingya as a rallying cry.

Clearly, the demise of the caliphate has been a huge boost to the counterterrorism world, but Hoffmans briefs are a timely reminder that we ignore al-Qaeda at our peril.(CNN) Donald Trump is poised to stick a second thumb in the eye of China and its newly ordained President for life, Xi Jinping. On Thursday, it was $50 billion worth of ill-advised tariffsagainst a country fully able to retaliate with a devastating tariff war of its own. Last week, the first thumb was in the form of a simple two-line note from the White House. Sandwiched between three congressional bills renaming post offices, Trump signed into law the Taiwan Travel Act, which encourages "visits between officials of the United States and Taiwan at all levels."TEL AVIV  Despite no shortage of foreign policy challenges, President Trump appears intent  like the last three occupants of the Oval Office  on mediating the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. His administration has proceeded with laudable circumspection, insisting that the aim is not to impose a settlement but to assist the sides in reaching a mutually satisfactory agreement. By seeking still less than that, Trump may be able to achieve much more than his predecessors.

Last week the White House hosted representatives of 20 countries  including Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates as well as Israel  to develop policies to ameliorate the humanitarian crisis faced by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, which Hamas has ruled despotically since 2007. The Palestinian Authority, however, boycotted the meeting. PA President Mahmoud Abbas is in a huff because the Trump administration acknowledged reality last December by formally recognizing Jerusalem as Israels capital. By forging ahead on Gaza, the White House showed its willingness to improve conditions for Palestinians with or without the PA.

Palestinian Authority resentment also does not leave the United States bereft of options for dealing with the West Bank, or as the Israeli right prefers, Judea and Samaria  home to around 3 million Palestinians  which Israel has controlled since its victory in the 1967 Six Day War. A recent exchange in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz suggests growing support in the country, after decades of deadlock, for a better approach. Therein lies an opportunity for the United States.

In mid-February, Micah Goodman restated the case for pragmatism he outlined last year in his Israeli bestseller, Catch-67: The Ideas Underlying the Conflict Tearing Israel Apart (Yale University Press will publish a translation this summer). Director of a West Bank religious academy that stresses pluralism, Goodman argues that the harsh, protracted struggle has disabused the Israeli left and the right of their dreams. The left no longer believes that relinquishing the West Bank will yield a flourishing and full peace; the right has lost faith that placing settlements in the heart of the Jewish peoples ancient homeland will bring redemption.

Their hopes dashed, both sides now proceed from fear. The left maintains that continued rule over West Bank Palestinians will further degrade and demoralize Israelis and will deepen the countrys international isolation. Eventually, it will produce demographic catastrophe: Either Israel will be compelled to grant citizenship to West Bank Palestinians, which will erode its Jewish character; or, by refusing to, it will subvert its democracy.

Meanwhile, the right argues that withdrawal from Judea and Samaria poses grave security threats. The 2011 Arab Spring unleashed waves of violence in the region: Iraq is in disarray; Libya and Syria have collapsed into civil war; and, already fragile, Lebanon and Jordan each struggle to absorb more than a million Syrian refugees. There is little reason to suppose, maintains the right, that a Palestinian state would survive amid the tumult. In the event of its demise, they assert, jihadists will flood into the West Bank and establish on the doorsteps of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv a theocracy  or warring theocracies  sworn to Israels destruction.

Both sets of arguments, Goodman writes, possess tremendous weight. And an increasing number of Israelis realize it. Emancipated from the dreams of left and right, they are forming a new consensus consisting of Israeli Jews who fear that remaining in the territories will endanger Israels national majority but leaving them will endanger Israels national security.

Goodman concludes that the conflict cannot be ended as the left long hoped, and the status quo should not be perpetuated as many on the right still maintain. But he does not despair. Thats because resolving the conflict and managing it do not exhaust Israels options. The wiser way, he contends, is minimizing the conflict. That calls for fashioning discrete and incremental initiatives that provide for Israeli security while reducing Israeli rule over Palestinians.

In his recent Haaretz article, Goodman proposes four minimizing measures that, though not widely discussed in Israel, have been examined by government officials. First, Israel should increase Palestinian Authority breathing room by transferring to it some of the approximately 60 percent of the West Bank under complete Israeli administrative and military control. Second, Israel should help construct a network of bridges, tunnels, and roads connecting PA-governed areas and over which the PA would exercise control. Third, Israel should cease expansion of settlements situated outside of the Jerusalem neighborhoods and the large blocs that will remain part of Israel under any conceivable agreement. And fourth, Israel should advocate changes to the Paris Protocol (a part of the Oslo Accords signed in 1995 that regulates economic relations between Israel and the PA) that promote Palestinian economic independence.

None of these steps, Goodman observes, requires a peace treaty. Moreover, there would be little consequence for Israeli security, because the Israel Defense Forces would retain a presence on the ground and the work of the Shin Bet security service would remain unaffected. At the same time, such actions would indeed shrink the Palestinians dependence on Israel and vastly minimize their sense of humiliation. Implementation of these initiatives would also reorient thinking about the conflict by demonstrating that it is possible to minimize Israels rule over the Palestinians without also minimizing security for Israels citizens. Abandoning the delusive quest for a comprehensive solution would enable Israel to advance its interests as well as those of the Palestinians.

In a response in Haaretz to Goodman from the left, Ami Ayalon (former director of the Israeli Security Agency), Gilead Sher (a former peace negotiator), and Orni Petruschka (a high-tech entrepreneur and former fighter pilot) reject shrinking the occupation as a goal. They seek to end the occupation. And they find Goodmans interim measures insufficient. But, tellingly, they endorse them insofar as they go.

To make Goodmans proposals effective, Ayalon, Sher, and Petruschka would go considerably further. They back legislation providing financial incentives to encourage Israelis living in the territories outside of the Jerusalem neighborhoods and large settlement blocs to relocate. They also want Israel to formally renounce all claims to Judea and Samaria beyond the existing major Israeli population centers. While disputing important policy details, the three authors nonetheless agree with Goodman that partial reforms are available in the here and now that advance both sides short-term interests.

Former Prime Minister Ehud Barak entered the fray, or returned to it, last week. In May 2017, he published in Haaretz a sharp critique of Catch-67, contending that Goodman created a false symmetry between left and right because he was captive to right-wing ideology. In Baraks view, remaining in the West Bank, as the left maintains, does present an existential threat to Israel but, contrary to the right, withdrawingthough raising tricky security challengesdoes not. In his new contribution in Haaretz to the debate, Barak congratulates Goodman on abandoning the notion of symmetry while advancing the sorts of measures that, asserts Barak, have long been advocated by the responsible left.

One could wonder whether it is Goodman who has moderated his position or Barak who has tempered his rhetoric. Either way, the burgeoning debate about minimizing the conflict and the appropriate measures is a promising development.

And it is an Israeli debate, drawing together a wide swath of the country stretching from the center left to the center right, of which the Trump administration should take notice. Particularly in the face of persistent PA defiance, the presidents team should assist Israel  and the Palestinian people  in achieving more by seeking less.WASHINGTON -- President Donald Trump congratulated Russian President Vladimir Putin for winning re-election, even though national security aides had issued a warning beforehand stating "DO NOT CONGRATULATE."

Like so many other moments at the Trump White House, the story set off dueling narratives about what happened and why it occurred. First, critics pounced on the president for congratulating the authoritarian Putin for winning a rigged election.

"An American president does not lead the Free World by congratulating dictators on winning sham elections," Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said in a statement.

McCain continued that Trump had "insulted every Russian citizen who was denied the right to vote in a free and fair election to determine their country's future, including the countless Russian patriots who have risked so much to protest and resist Putin's regime."

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told CNN, "When I look at a Russian election, what I see is a lack of credibility," before adding that a Putin call "wouldn't have been high on my list."

Former CIA Director John Brennan told MSNBC's "Morning Joe," he thinks Trump is afraid of Putin, and "the Russians could have something on him personally that they could always roll out and make his life more difficult." (Brennan's remarks appear to be a reference to unconfirmed allegations made in a dossier written by a former British intelligence agent -- and it illustrates why Trump would distrust the intelligence community.)

The Democratic National Committee sent out a statement that noted Trump also congratulated Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan after voters approved his power-grab referendum.

White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders acknowledged later Tuesday that Trump also did not mention the recent nerve agent attack against a former Russian spy and his daughter in the United Kingdom -- for which the U.S., the U.K., France and Germany have blamed Russia.

The administration's posture fed the perception that, even as special counsel Robert Mueller has been investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election, Trump is too infatuated with Putin to criticize him. That view persists even though his administration has imposed economic sanctions on Russian entities and citizens behind malicious cyber attacks, sold arms to Ukraine and boosted U.S. energy output to Russia's disadvantage.

In response, Trump supporters pointed out that former President Barack Obama called Putin to congratulate him after he won the presidency in 2012.

"MEDIA SO DISHONEST: (Flashback) Obama calls to congratulate Putin," Fox News host Laura Ingraham tweeted.

"Wrong then wrong now," Heritage Foundation senior fellow James Carafano tweeted of both the Obama and Trump calls to Putin.

Trump himself weighed in Wednesday afternoon on Twitter, arguing that getting along with Russia "is a good thing" because Moscow can help solve problems with North Korea, Syria, Ukraine, the Islamic State, Iran and the arms race.

The White House, which was essentially closed for official business Wednesday due to a snowstorm, also sought to undercut the Washington Post story that first reported the "DO NOT CONGRATULATE" warning. The administration said Trump never saw the report, nor did he hear that warning when he was briefed over the phone.

Then came the follow-up questions: Who in the tight circle of aides aware of that instruction leaked it to The Washington Post? And what can be done about it?

"If this story is accurate," an anonymous U.S. official told CNN, "that means someone leaked the president's briefing papers. Leaking such information is a fireable offense and likely illegal."

"If you don't like the guy, quit," Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., told reporters. He added, "I really hate that there's someone in his inner circle that's willing to leak this stuff."

The Putin phone call leak recalls Trump's early months in office, which were plagued with leaks about phone conversations with Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto and Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.

The administration has tried to put a stop to the steady drip of leaks.

The New York Times reported Wednesday that Trump pushed then chief of staff Reince Priebus to direct staffers to sign nondisclosure agreements. White House counsel Don McGahn eventually complied, even as he told aides the agreements they were signing probably were not enforceable.

That may leave the White House with only the surefire method of firing aides for leaking, since loyalty seems to be in such low supply.

COPYRIGHT 2018 CREATORS.COMMarch has definitely been a month of madness, not just in basketball, but also in Athens government and candidate forums.Got some scoop for our reporters or editors? Click on the link below to send us your information.

Send your newsPaul Hanks drove to Joshua Tree National Park last week to celebrate his 54th birthday. The California attorney intended to boulder for a few hours and return home. Then he fell. A few hours turned into five days alone in the unforgiving Southern California desert.

A seasoned climber, Hanks told KSHB he hasn't slipped in "45 years." But he did this time  about 20 feet down. Clad in just a T-shirt and shorts, with only a few hours' worth of water and energy packs, the hiker started crawling and yelling for help.

Rescuers found him Thursday. He shared his harrowing story on Monday from a hospital bed at Desert Regional Medical Center in Palm Springs, where he is recovering from a shattered left heel and broken pelvis.

RELATED: Man who went missing 6 nights in Yosemite shares survival tips on Facebook

The first night in the desert, with the temperature plummeting and sunlight waning, Hanks said he took shelter beneath a Joshua tree, covering himself with dirt for warmth.

Before slumber overtook him, his water supply ran out.

"By the very first night, I was drinking my own urine," he told CBS Los Angeles.

The challenges continued to stack up on the Santee, Calif. resident, who describes himself as an experienced hiker.

Later in the ordeal, Hanks fell again  15 feet this time, with a head bump on the way down. The energy packs ran out, too, so he ate cactus for nourishment.

Throughout it all, Hanks said he continuously went in and out of consciousness, buoyed forth by the knowledge that "to quit out there is basically a death sentence," he said.

ALSO READ: California parents who housed kids in desert shack released

"Multiple times I had written myself off as dead," he told CBS. Then, "three angels appeared." Rescuers.

They transported Hanks to a hospital, where he was later reunited with his family. He is expected to make a full recovery.

Michelle Robertson is an SFGATE staff writer. Email her at mrobertson@sfchronicle.com or find her on Twitter at @mrobertsonsf.Cambodia on Thursday rejected a 45-nation submission to the U.N. Human Rights Council demanding that Phnom Penh reinstate the countrys now-dissolved main political opposition party ahead of national elections in July, calling the document illegitimate and politically motivated.



The appeal, submitted on Wednesday by New Zealand on behalf of the documents signers, voiced deep concern at what it described as a serious decline of civil and political rights in Cambodia, including the shuttering of independent media and civil society organizations and moves by state-controlled courts to close the opposition Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP) and jail its leader, Kem Sokha.



An electoral process from which the main democratic opposition party has been arbitrarily excluded cannot be considered genuine or legitimate, the appeal to the Geneva-based Human Rights Council says. For the Cambodian government to retain its legitimacy, any elections must be free, fair and credible.



In a response, Cambodian ambassador to the U.N. Ney Sam Ol slammed the submission, describing it as an attempt to interfere in Cambodias domestic affairs and promote pre-selected candidates favoring regime change in the Southeast Asian country.



Writing on Thursday on the Telegram messaging platform, Sok Eysanspokesperson for the ruling Cambodian Peoples Party (CPP)also criticized the submission to the Geneva-based Human Rights Council, calling it politically motivated and unacceptable.



Not only does [this] move violate the will of the entire Cambodian population, but it also undermines democracy in Cambodia, Sok Eysan said. Cambodia treats [this] statement as an act of interference into the internal affairs, independence and sovereignty of Cambodia.



Sok Eysan did not elaborate on how the will of the Cambodian people was being gauged since the banning of the CNRP and the effective nullification of 2017 commune election results, in which that opposition party fared well.



'Rebellion'



In September, Cambodian authorities arrested CNRP chief Kem Sokha on charges of treason, and two months later the Supreme Court ruled to disband his party for allegedly planning a rebellion with backing from Washington, essentially eliminating any challenge to the CPP ahead of the vote this year.



Cambodian authorities have also used a pretext of tax and administrative violations to close independent radio stations carrying reports from RFA and Voice of America, and forced the closure of the American-owned Cambodia Daily newspaper in early September. RFA shuttered its Phnom Penh bureau soon after.



Speaking to RFAs Khmer Service, Cambodian political analyst Lao Mong Hay said that the U.N. Human Rights Council must now address the deteriorating political situation in Cambodia, as the international community shares responsibility for ensuring that Cambodia respects human rights and democracy.



These countries are obliged to raise this matter in a timely manner, he said.



In a statement Thursday, the international rights group Human Rights Watch (HRW) welcomed Wednesdays joint submission to the Human Rights Council, noting though that [the] Council has so far failed to take meaningful action.



Cambodia is on the path to once again becoming a one-party state, HRW said, adding, Julys election will lack legitimacy without the participation of the opposition.



The Council should demand the release of all political prisoners and reinstatement of all politicians and parties. The Council should not stand idly by as Cambodia descends into authoritarianism, it said.



'Insulting an official'



In a ruling that underscored concerns about deteriorating freedoms in Cambodia, the trial court of Kampong Speu sentenced Sam Sokha to two years in prison and a fine of five million riles ($1,250) for throwing a shoe at billboard photos of Prime Minister Hun Sen and National Assembly President Heng Samrin.



Sam Sokha, 38, had posted a video on social media on April 1, 2017, saying: "These are the men who are destroying our nation."



She was sentenced in absentia in 2017 to a two-year term for "incitement to discriminate" and "insulting a public official" by the same court after she fled to Thailand. Thai authorities arrested her in early January 2018 and deported her on Feb. 8, when she was sent straight to prison in Kampong Speu.



Reported by RFAs Khmer Service. Translated by Nareth Muong. Written in English by Richard Finney.Authorities in the eastern Chinese province of Jiangsu have charged a prominent rights activist with subversion after detaining her last month on a lesser charge of "picking quarrels and stirring up trouble."



Xu Qin, a key figure in the China Human Rights Observer group founded by detained veteran dissident Qin Yongmin, had recently spoken out in support of a number of high-profile human rights cases.



She is currently being held in Jiangsu's Yangzhou Detention Center, where her lawyer had planned to visit her on Thursday, a source close to the case told RFA.



"Her lawyer Peng Jian had planned to visit her on March 22, but the local authorities called him up and told him that the meeting wouldn't be allowed," the source said.



Police told Peng the meeting was canceled because the charges against Xu had been changed to "incitement to subvert state power."



Repeated calls to Peng's cell phone rang unanswered on Thursday.



"Picking quarrels and stirring up trouble is slightly less serious, because it means it is a common criminal case," the source said. "But this charge makes it into a political case, and the sentencing will be harsher."



"This is clearly a case of the criminalization of speech, and yet none of her words or actions breached United Nations rights covenants, or China's constitution," the source said. "She has always acted as an independent human rights observer, which isn't against the law."



He said it was hard to predict exactly how harsh a sentence Xu could be facing, however.



"Incitement to subvert state power" carries a maximum jail term of five years, but in cases where the person is judged to have played a leading role, or in cases regarded as having "serious consequences,"

the crime carries a minimum penalty of five years.



Late Nobel peace laureate and political prisoner Liu Xiaobo was handed a 13-year sentence for "incitement to subvert state power."



Link to writings



A friend of Xu's who asked to remain anonymous said the charges were likely linked to articles she had written during her work for the China Rights Observer website and its sister rights group Rose China.



"She also supported other people's activism," the friend said. "They are currently investigating Rose China all across the country, and some of its members have been called in for a chat with the state security police, who want to find out certain things about it."



Rose China was also founded by Qin Yongmin, who is currently awaiting trial for "incitement to subvert state power" at the Wuhan No. 2 Detention Center.



He had been scheduled to stand trial in late December, but the date was postponed at the last minute by the authorities, who cited "procedural" reasons.



Qin's wife Zhao Suli was detained alongside her husband in January 2015, and both were initially held in unknown locations.



But while Qin has since been tracked by friends and lawyers to a detention center in the central city of Wuhan, Zhao had been held in an unknown location for nearly three years before resurfacing briefly last month to spend time with relatives and call her son in the eastern province of Anhui.



She is now believed to be back under residential surveillance.



Reported by Wong Lok-to for the Cantonese Service, and by Gao Feng for the Mandarin Service. Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.U.S. President Donald Trump and trade officials after signing a plan to slap tariffs on about $50 billion in Chinese goods to retaliate against the alleged theft of intellectual property, in the White House, March 22, 2018.

U.S. President Donald Trump signed a presidential memorandum Thursday calling for tariffs on $50 billion of imports from China, but imposed a 60-day consultation period before they take effect, and proposed other measures aimed at cutting the $375 billion annual American trade deficit with Beijing.

In addition to the tariffs, which Trump said were "the first of many" trade actions and could cover as much as $60 billion worth of goods, Washington will tackle discriminatory Chinese technology licensing practices in the World Trade Organization (WTO) and examine Chinas investment in critical U.S. industries and technologies.

The U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) has been tasked with producing within 15 days a list of products that could be targeted, and any decisions would be followed by a 60-day consultation period before tariffs go into force, officials said.

USTR has already identified 1,300 product lines worth about $48 billion as potential targets, the Associated Press reported.

President Trump has made it clear we must insist on fair and reciprocal trade with China and strictly enforce our laws against unfair trade. This requires taking effective action to confront China over its state-led efforts to force, strong-arm, and even steal U.S. technology and intellectual property, said U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer.

Years of talking about these problems with China has not worked. The United States is committed to using all available tools to respond to Chinas unfair, market-distorting behavior. Chinas unprecedented and unfair trade practices are a serious challenge not just to the United States, but to our allies and partners around the world, he said in a statement.

The tariffs and investment restrictions fall under the USTRs "Section 301" investigation into alleged Chinese theft of U.S. intellectual property and into Beijing policies which force U.S. investors to turn over key technologies to Chinese firms in exchange for access to Chinas market.

"Many of these areas are those where China has sought to acquire advantage through the unfair acquisition and forced technology transfer from U.S. companies ... establishing its own competitive advantage in an unfair manner," Everett Eissenstat, deputy director of the National Economic Council, was quoted by Reuters as telling reporters.

The independent Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property welcomes Trumps actions on trade secret theft.

This is the first time foreign intellectual property thieves face real consequences beyond hearing lectures. This is a solid first step toward dealing with Chinese economic aggression against this country. It is unlikely to be the last, Admiral Dennis Blair, co-chair of the IP Commission, said in a statement.

Threat to retaliate

In a statement issued in Beijing before Trump issued Thursdays directive, China repeated its threat to retaliate against U.S. measures.

"With regards to the Section 301 investigation, China has expressed its position on many occasions that we resolutely oppose this type of unilateral and protectionist action by the U.S.," Reuters quoted the Commerce Ministry as saying on Thursday.



"China will not sit idly by while legitimate rights and interests are hurt. We must take all necessary measures to firmly defend our rights and interests."

Analysts predicted China would target U.S. products such as soybeans and passenger aircraft that dominate exports to China, with an eye toward getting those industries to lobby against the tariffs. Rural America and the farm sector is seen as a key part of trumps electoral base.

Soybeans accounted for $12.4 million of the $19.6 billion of U.S. agricultural exports to China in 2017.

In Geneva, Beijing's ambassador to the WTO, Zhang Xiangchen, told Reuters China is considering a WTO complaint against Trumps tariffs, but had other options.



"This is a legitimate right for China to do that. But I would not exclude other options, because if the flood approaches you have to bank up to keep it out," he told Reuters.



"Appeasement of protectionism will not work. If you surrender to protectionism you will lose your credibility and leadership in this organization."

In Beijing, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying repeated a longstanding Chinese assertion, rejected by most economists and U.S. businesses, that U.S. export controls on some high-tech products were responsible for the trade deficit.



Hua added, however, that China still hopes it can hold constructive talks with the United States.Beijing human rights lawyer Yu Wensheng is "at risk of torture" while he remains in incommunicado detention in the eastern Chinese province of Jiangsu, a London-based rights group has warned.



Yu was placed under criminal detention on Jan. 19, on suspicion of obstructing public servants in the course of their duties," but has since been transferred from Beijing to Jiangsu's Xuzhou city on a more serious charge of incitement to subvert state power.



Yu's wife Xu Yan and his two defense attorneys Chang Boyang and Xie Yang went to the Tongshan district police department in Xuzhou on, but Xu was prevented from entering the building, while Chang and Xie went in to apply for a meeting with their client, fellow activists told RFA.



Video footage of their bid to enter the building showed Xu and fellow rights activist Ni Yulan waiting outside a door to the police department, in heated discussion with a uniformed officer.



"The lawyers want to apply to meet with him," Xu is heard telling the officer. "As his family, I want to give him some money."



"This is an office environment," the officer replies.



"We know it's an office; that's why we came," Ni replies. "Where do we go if we need to visit the toilet?"



Hotel room search

Ni said Xu was eventually allowed into the building, however.



"They blocked our way and wouldn't let us inside," Ni, an award-winning rights activist and housing activist, told RFA in an interview afterwards. "Xu Yan was unable to prove that she is a relative of Yu Wensheng."



"They didn't decide to let Xu Yan in for a very long time; it was very unreasonable. They also told us not to go 'shooting off our mouths'."



Ni said the group had been closely followed by a police car since their arrival in Xuzhou, and police officers had demanded to be allowed in to search their rooms after they settled in, although the group refused to open the door to them.



"We paid for our rooms and showed our ID, and we had already taken up residence our rooms," Ni said. "We hadn't done anything illegal ... [yet] they came to search our rooms; we thought that was illegal."



In an Urgent Action statement calling on its members to contact Chinese officials about Yu, Amnesty International said it is unclear exactly where Xuzhou police are holding him.



"While [Jiangsu police] have admitted that they are holding him, his exact whereabouts are unknown," the group said. "He is at risk of torture and other ill-treatment."



It said Tongshan district police department in Xuzhou notified his family that Yu was being held under "residential surveillance in a designated location" on Jan. 27, but that no official information has been forthcoming since.



Yu's lawyers have been repeatedly denied permission to visit him in detention, with officials saying the case involves matters of national security.



"They haven't allowed his defense lawyers to visit Yu Wensheng ... and I really don't know if they are going to," Xu told RFA in an interview recorded on . "We have been [to Xuzhou] but they have never let them meet with Yu."



"It's not looking very good ... the initial charge when they detained Yu Wensheng on Jan. 19 wasn't anything to do with state security," she said. "Now, they are charging him with incitement to subvert state power."



Criminal procedure flouted

Xu said it remains unclear why her husband was transferred to Jiangsu in the first place.



"To this day, we still don't have any answers," she said. "We asked the police ... but they didn't answer the question. Yu Wensheng is from Beijing, not Xuzhou."



Lawyer Chang Boyang said the authorities have flouted criminal procedure and due process since Yu's detention.



"They have engaged in methods that aren't in strict accordance with the law," Chang said. "They have him under residential surveillance, but it is doubtful that they will stick to the law."



Police can hold suspects in cases deemed to "endanger state security" for up to six months with no access to lawyers or family visits for up to six months, under China's Criminal Procedure Law.



"Yu Wensheng is a prisoner of conscience, detained solely for exercising his right to freedom of expression," Amnesty International said.



It said Xu Yan was also prevented from entering Hong Kong on Feb. 24, because she might "endanger state security" by doing so.



Amnesty International China researcher Patrick Poon said the group is hoping to step up pressure on the Chinese authorities, for fear that Yu is being subjected to "torture or inhumane treatment" while in incommunicado detention.



"He was subjected to torture-like treatment during his 99-day incarceration in 2014," Poon said. "They can lock you up under residential surveillance at a designated location for up to six months with no explanation whatsoever."



"But this period can also be extended for a very long time, by saying it is the decision of the state prosecutor whether or not to indict you," he said. "There are no protections for detainees under this system."



Reported by Gao Feng for RFA's Mandarin Service, and by Wong Lok-to for the Cantonese Service. Translated and edited by Luisetta Mudie.Russian railway police are increasing their scrutiny of trains bound for North Korea after a handgun was found last month in the baggage of a North Korean worker returning home, North Korean sources say.



The pistol was discovered just before the trains departure from Moscow and after the number of bags found on the train failed to match the number said to have been loaded, a source in North Koreas North Hamgyong province told RFAs Korean Service.



"Russian police noticed a difference in the number of bags reported by North Korean workers from the actual number on board, RFAs source said, speaking on condition of anonymity.



They then unloaded all the baggage from the train and rescreened them with an inspection device. The weapon that was found was a handgun, he said.



The woman in whose bag the gun was discovered was immediately arrested, but denied all knowledge of the weapon that was found, the source said, adding, She said that she was only carrying the bag to Pyongyang because an acquaintance had asked her to.



Police had at first failed to carry out a proper inspection of passengers luggage owing to the large number of bags, about 30 per person, being brought onto the train, the source said.



There were too many [North Korean] workers with a lot of bags on that day, so they did not perform a careful inspection, and the weapon was taken on board, he said.



The incident put Russian security authorities on heightened alert, he said.



Inconvenience to travelers



Speaking separately, a second source in North Hamgyong confirmed the incident had taken place.



There was a weapon-smuggling attempt not so long ago on an international train to Pyongyang from Moscow, RFAs source said, also speaking on condition he not be named.



Following this incident, inspections have been strengthened on trains going to Pyongyang, and this has caused inconvenience to travelers taking the trains, he said.



Trains on the Moscow-to-Pyongyang line run about seven times each month, with North Korean train crews boarding the trains in Russia bound for North Korea, and Russian crew members boarding the trains in North Korea for the return trip, the source said.



With trade between North Korea and China now hampered by international sanctions imposed to punish Pyongyang for its illicit nuclear weapons and missile tests, North Korean military authorities have set greater hopes on trade with Russia, sources say.



But increased inspections on the Russian rail lines may now slow this trade as well, they say.



Reported by Jieun Kim for RFAs Korean Service. Translated by Leejin Jun. Written in English by Richard Finney.Myanmar protesters demand compensation for land confiscated by the Chinese and Myanmar operators of a pipeline project in Ann township, western Myanmar's Rakhine state, March 22, 2018.

About 600 Myanmar protesters on Thursday demanded compensation from the Sino-Myanmar operators of dual pipelines in western Myanmars Rakhine state for land they confiscated for the massive and controversial project.

The U.S. $2.5 billion Shwe pipeline project and deep-water port, which transports oil and natural gas from the countrys offshore reserves overland to China, has been dogged by complaints about little or no land compensation along with a loss of livelihoods for local fishermen.

The protesters from Ann township in Kyaukphyu district demanded that Chinese state-owned oil company China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), or PetroChina, and Myanmars state-owned Myanma Oil & Gas Enterprise (MOGE) pay them for land they had to give up for the pipeline project.

Because of this gas pipeline, many villagers lost their land, and CNPC and MOGE havent taken any responsibility for it, said protest leader Zaw Win Lay. Thats why we are protesting.

The Rakhine state government promised last year that it would resolve the problem for those who lost land to the pipelines which cross 40 villages in Ann township, but it has yet to deliver on account of delays by MOGE, protesters said.

Neither the Rakhine state government nor the two companies had issued a response to the protesters as of Thursday local time.

The pipeline project spans a distance of 771 kilometers (480 miles) from Kyaukphyu in Rakhine state across central Myanmar to Kunming in southwestern Chinas Yunnan province.

The first pipeline began transporting natural gas to China in July 2013, while the other one for transporting crude oil from the Bay of Bengal to China began operating in May 2017.

Other pipeline protests

Its not the first time that hundreds of locals have protested against the project.

About 600 residents and fishermen in the deep-water port town of Kyaukphyu demonstrated last May against Chinese oil tankers moving into the area, as the operation of the long-delayed oil pipeline got under way.

Fishermen boarded more than 100 motorboats and piloted them from Kyaukphyu to Maday Island, site of CNPCs local office, which operated the tankers.

They demanded that local officials do something to ensure their livelihoods after Myanmars Fisheries Department banned them from fishing in the area but allowed the tankers to operate there.

They also called on officials to deliver electricity to their homes 24 hours a day and to build communication towers, high schools, and dams that would benefit the community.

Two months later, residents and representatives from the Kyaukphyu Rural Development Organization and Kyaukphyu Fishermens Association complained to Yanghee Lee, the United Nations special rapporteur for human rights in Myanmar, about a lack of benefits from the project.

During one of Lee's periodic missions to Myanmar, they complained about not having enough technology and education to land jobs at the pipeline project and voiced concern about farmers and fishermen losing their land and livelihoods.

They also complained about the project operators failure to deliver expected job opportunities to the underdeveloped region.

Reported by Min Thein Aung for RFAs Myanmar Service. Translated by Khet Mar. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.Soldiers from the Karen National Liberation Army march in a parade marking the 66th Karen Revolution Day at their headquarters in southeastern Myanmar's Kayin state, Jan. 31, 2015.

UPDATED at 1:16 P.M. EST on 2018-03-20

An ethnic Karen civil society group and local residents urged the Myanmar army on Monday to withdraw troops from Hpapun township in southeastern Myanmars Kayin state, where about 2,000 civilians from 15 villages have fled their homes after soldiers confiscated their land for an infrastructure project.

Government troops began entering the area on March 4 to build a new road, and more soldiers are arriving by the day, residents said.

Since then, the soldiers have been appropriating their farmland for the project, they said.

The government army has encroached upon more than the territory it was permitted to take to build a road, said Saw Oae Muu, a villager from Kaepu Village in Hpapun township. The villagers dont want it. They said they just want to live peacefully.

The Karen Peace Network issued a statement urging international NGOs to help internally displaced persons though local civil society organizations instead of through the government.

People who have to flee from their homes want the government army to withdraw its troops from the places where they must work for their survival, said Saw Wai Lay from the Karen Peace Network.

They want leaders from both sides to meet and talk to solve this problem as soon as possible, he said. Because people are now living in the forest, they are in need of food, and were concerned about their health.

Prayers for peace

Displaced residents from the 15 villages held a peace prayer event on Monday in Lo Kway village and demanded that the Myanmar government withdraw troops because they are afraid to live in the area while soldiers are there. They also demanded that the soldiers stop building the road.

The Karen National Union (KNU), an ethnic political organization with an armed wing called the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA), issued a statement on March 16 calling on the government to withdraw its soldiers from the area.

The KNU/KNLA fought the Myanmar army for more than 60 years until it signed a bilateral cease-fire accord with the military-backed civilian government in 2012. Over the year, the hostilities forced tens of thousands of Karen civilians to flee to safety across the border to Thailand.

The KNU/KNLA was one of eight ethnic armed groups that signed a nationwide cease-fire agreement (NCA) with the Myanmar government in October 2015.

KNU vice president Padoh Kwe Htoo Win told RFAs Myanmar Service that the political organization has arranged for a union-level and state-level group from the cease-fire Joint Monitoring Committee to meet with government armys Division No. 5 to try to settle the matter.

At present, the KNU has given the government army permission to provide food for its troops by horses in this area, but not by cars or trucks, because people feel as though they cant trust them, he said, adding that both locals and soldiers are using the old road to access the area.

The current problem has occurred because the government army is trying to build a new road, Padoh Kwe Htoo Win said.

Those who reside in the area used to live in the forest, but they moved back only a while ago, so they are not accustomed to dealing with soldiers, he said.

When government troops entered their area, they became worried, he said. Thats why the KNU said it is not the right time to permit the government army to stay in this area. But we might let them when we build more trust between both sides.

Formed in late 2015 after the signing of the NCA, the JMC monitors the cease-fire implementation for NCA signatories and verifies complaints lodged by parties involved in the accord.

The JMC has established state- and regional-level joint cease-fire monitoring subcommittees in five locations in Karen, Mon state, Shan states, Bago region and Tanintharyi region.

Reported by Kyaw Thu, Kyaw Lwin Oo, and Nay Rein Kyaw for RFAs Myanmar Service. Translated by Khet Mar. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.Former rights lawyer and political prisoner Zaw Win appears in court on defamation charges in Pyigyitagon township, central Myanmar's Mandalay region, March 22, 2018.

Myanmar authorities on Thursday charged a former rights lawyer and political prisoner with defamation for throwing a shoe at a sign outside the courthouse in Pyigyitagon township in central Myanmars Mandalay region after a judge issued a decision with which he did not agree.

Zaw Win was at the courthouse to support political activist Zar Zar Tun, who was sued on March 14 and charged with defamation for insulting the court and threatening a judge to show her disagreement with a decision involving a relative.

He became angry when the judge sentenced Zar Zar Tun to four months in jail after authorities detained her without permitting access to a lawyer, the online journal The Irrawaddy reported.

Khin Khin Cho, a judicial officer at the Mandalay Region Judiciary Office, told The Irrawaddy that Zar Zar Tun was sentenced because she refused to speak in court and did not produce a witness.

Zaw Win was arrested on Wednesday at his home in Pyin Oo Lwin, a hill town about 67 kilometers (42 miles) east of Mandalay, for insulting and defaming the judicial system, a day after plaintiff Kyaw Soe, a deputy administrator in Pyigyitagon township, filed charges against him, a court official said.

What he said at court endangers the countrys stability, said Khin Mar Oo, a Pyigyitagon township court judge.

Thats why he has been charged under section 505 (b), she said, referring to the section of Myanmars penal code that criminalizes the circulation of statements and reports with the intent to cause fear or alarm in the public, whereby someone may be induced commit an offense against the state or disrupt public tranquility.

The provision, which carries a maximum punishment of two years imprisonment, a fine, or both, usually does not allow for bail to be granted.

After the second time that Zaw Win hurled a slipper at the court sign on March 15, a township deputy judge filed charges against him under four sections of Myanmars criminal code.

Zaw Win, who is being held in Mandalays Obo Prison, went on trial on Thursday. He said he would send the central government an open letter about his arrest. His next hearing is scheduled for March 28.

An increasing number of defamation suits have been filed in Myanmar under vaguely worded laws by government and judicial officials, Buddhist monks, and military officers to silence their critics, especially journalists.

As a result, Myanmar journalists and rights groups have slammed the nearly two-year-old civilian government under de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi for appearing to backpedal on press freedom and other rights after decades of stifling military rule in Myanmar.



Reported by Khaymani Win for RFAs Myanmar Service. Translated by Khet Mar. Written in English by Roseanne Gerin.Authorities in northwest Chinas Xinjiang are using age as one of the criteria to determine whether to detain Uyghurs in the regions network of political re-education camps, as those born after 1980 are considered violent and untrustworthy, according to official sources.



Since April 2017, Uyghurs accused of harboring strong religious views and politically incorrect views have been jailed or detained in re-education camps throughout Xinjiang, where members of the ethnic group have long complained of pervasive discrimination, religious repression, and cultural suppression under Chinese rule.



Official announcements have stated that those who are sent to the camps include former prisoners, suspects and anyone who has travelled overseas, and say the camps will cleanse them of ideology that endangers state security.



But official sources in Bayanday township, Ili Kazakh (in Chinese, Yili Hasake) Autonomous prefectures Ghulja (Yining) county, recently told RFAs Uyghur Service that some of the detainees from their villages had been pre-emptively targeted for re-education simply because they were younger than 40 years of age and susceptible to influence by dangerous elements.



People born in the 1980s and 1990s have been categorized as part of a violent generationmany of whom have been taken into re-education under this category, the security chief of Bayandays No. 2 Village said, speaking on condition of anonymity.



Similar criteria are being used to blacklist residents of Bayandays No. 3 Village for re-educationeven if there is nothing suspicious about their words or actionsaccording to the villages head of womens affairs, who also declined to be named.



Young people who were born during the 1980s and 1990s are branded as members of an unreliable and untrustworthy generation, she said.



As they belong to that generation, they are easily influenced by dangerous people, therefore there is a need for them to be sent for re-education in order to prevent them from adopting incorrect ideology.



The head of womens affairs said that the majority of those being sent to re-education camps from her village had been born in the two decades prior to the new millennium, adding that indoctrination at the camps prevent[s] them from choosing the wrong path, because their youth makes it easy for them to be misled.



When asked about the recent arrest of a 32-year-old woman from her village named Hanipe Kerim, the womens affairs official said that she was taken into custody under the category of young people who were born in the 1980s and 1990s, who are considered to be from an unsettled, violent generational period.



Kerims mother confirmed that authorities had given the same reason to her family when they detained her.



They said that people who were born in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s are categorized as unsettled people, she said, adding that she could think of no other reason why her daughter might have been taken away.



[The police] told me to remember the reason. I wrote it down because I was worried that I would forget. I remember they said that she belongs to the generation of unsettled youth.



Camp network



China's central government authorities have not publicly acknowledged the existence of re-education camps in Xinjiang, and the number of inmates kept in each facility remains a closely guarded secret, but local officials in many parts of Xinjiang have in RFA telephone interviews forthrightly described sending significant numbers of Uyghurs to the camps and even described overcrowding in some facilities.



Maya Wang of the New York-based Human Rights Watch told The Guardian in January that estimates of Xinjiang residents who had spent time in the camps went as high as 800,000, while at least one Uyghur exile group estimates that up to 1 million Uyghurs have been detained throughout the region since April 2017, and some Uyghur activists say nearly every Uyghur household has been affected by the campaign.



Since Xinjiang party chief Chen Quanguo was appointed to his post in August 2016, he has initiated unprecedented repressive measures against the Uyghur people and ideological purges against so-called two-faced Uyghur officialsa term applied by the government to Uyghurs who do not willingly follow directives and exhibit signs of disloyalty.



China regularly conducts strike hard campaigns in Xinjiang, including police raids on Uyghur households, restrictions on Islamic practices, and curbs on the culture and language of the Uyghur people, including videos and other material.



While China blames some Uyghurs for "terrorist" attacks, experts outside China say Beijing has exaggerated the threat from the Uyghurs and that repressive domestic policies are responsible for an upsurge in violence there that has left hundreds dead since 2009.



Reported by Shohret Hoshur for RFAs Uyghur Service. Translated by RFA's Uyghur Service. Written in English by Joshua Lipes.Political prisoner Tran Thi Nga was transferred to a distant prison in Vietnam without informing her family, her partner, Phan Van Phong, told RFA's Vietnamese Service on Wednesday

Ngas transfer is the second case this week in which a Vietnamese political prisoner has been moved to a jails far from his or her hometown, apparently to increase their isolation and make it difficult for family and friends to visit them.

Ha Nam province had told me before that she would be transferred to Dak Trung. However ,when I went to Dak Trung, they told me they could not handle political prisoners so they transferred her to Gia Trung prison, where other female activists were held before, Phong told RFA by telephone.

Gia Long Province, where she is now incarcerated, is more than 1,000 km (620 miles) from Ha Nam.

At Gia Trung prison, they were polite and nice to me. They told me that Tran Thi Nga has been there and she is in good health. Her place is clean. They told me she came about 1 month ago and has gained about 3 kg, said Phong.

However, they told me that Tran Thi Nga has not cooperated so she is not allowed to see her family. I was sad that we could not see her, he added.

A human rights defender noted in Vietnam for her online activism, Nga, 40, was sentenced on July 25 to nine years in prison for spreading "propaganda against the State" under Article 88 of Vietnams penal code, a provision frequently used to silence dissident bloggers and other activists.

Her appeal was rejected in December.

On Monday the wife of prisoner of conscience Nguyen Van Oai said he had been moved to a prison far from his hometown without notifying his family,



Chau said the family did not get any notice from authorities about this transfer from a prison in Nghe An province, where he was serving five years, to Gia Trung, some five hours away.



Oai, 36, had been sentenced in September 2017 to five years, with an additional four years to be served under house arrest, after allegedly violating the terms of his probation after serving an earlier prison term for attempting to overthrow

Vietnams government under Article 79 of the countrys penal code.



Article 79 is one of a number of vague statutes that authorities often use to detain writers and bloggers who criticize the countrys communist government and its policies.

Reported by RFAs Vietnamese Service. Translated by Viet Ha. Written in English by Paul Eckert.Atta Mohammad Noor, the powerful governor of Afghanistans Balkh Province, has agreed to resign, ending a long standoff with the countrys president.

Noor, who for months had rejected President Ashraf Ghani's efforts to remove him from office, on March 22 told a rally of supporters that he has decided to step aside now that our demands have been met.

"I say goodbye today, but I will still be here and always with my people," Noor said during a rally in the provincial capital, Mazar-e Sharif.

"Big political games are ahead, including the elections, and we will be major players," he added.

Noor is a leading figure in Jamiat-e Islami, a party that represents Afghanistan's Tajik ethnic group.

His resignation will allow his hand-picked successor, parliament member Mohammad Ishaq Rahgozar, to assume the governors position.

News agencies reported that under terms of an agreement between the governor and the president, Noor was also allowed to choose a new police chief for Balkh Province, name a new education minister in the national government, and to choose the ambassador to Kazakhstan.

The resignation appears to peacefully end a stalemate between Noor, who is known as the "King of the North," and the central government in Kabul.

The presidential palace on December 18 announced it had approved the resignation of Noor.

However, Noor said he was rescinding a previous offer to resign, claiming Ghani had reneged on the terms of an agreement between the two, and he vowed to fight for his job.

That raised fears of potential conflict as the Western-backed government in Kabul has been struggling to fend off the Taliban and other militant groups since the withdrawal of most NATO troops in 2014.

Noor is one of several powerful regional and ethnic leaders whom Ghani has struggled to control since he took office after a disputed election in 2014.

Observers say the standoff has raised Noors national profile, making him a potential rival to Ghani in the presidential election scheduled for 2019. Afghanistan is also planning to hold parliamentary elections later this year.

Balkh remains one of Afghanistans most stable provinces. It profits from its position as a trade route to the former Soviet republics in Central Asia and has not seen as much militant activity than some other regions.

With reporting by AFP and ReutersKHOLMIVKA, Ukraine -- Crimean Tatar activist Nariman Memediminov has been taken in for questioning by Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) officers and may face charges of propagating terrorism, his wife says.

Lemara Memediminova told RFE/RL that their house in the village of Kholmivka in the southern Bakhchysaray district was searched on March 22.

"They took him to Simferopol to the Russian FSB headquarters for questioning and it will be known later if they let him go or not. They have launched a probe against him for his video he placed on YouTube as a blogger," Memediminova said.

She expressed concern that Memediminov may be charged with calling for terrorist activities via the Internet.

Memediminova also said that the FSB officers were rude and confiscated a tablet, two mobile phones, and several books from their house.

Rights groups and Western governments have denounced what they call a campaign of oppression targeting members of the Turkic-speaking Crimean Tatar minority and others who opposed Moscow's seizure of the Ukrainian peninsula in March 2014.



The majority of Crimean Tatars opposed the Russian takeover of their historical homeland.



In March 2017, the European Parliament called on Russia to free more than 30 Ukrainian citizens who it said were in prison or other conditions of restricted freedom in Russia, Crimea, and parts of eastern Ukraine that are controlled by Russia-backed separatists.



BRUSSELS -- Thirty-five members of the European Parliament have criticized the European Unions position toward Belarus in a letter, saying that the bloc's relationship with Minsk is centered on economic cooperation, trade, and assistance instead of being focused on human rights, democracy, and the rule of law.

The March 21 letter, seen by RFE/RL, was addressed to Federica Mogherini, the EU foreign policy chief, and Johannes Hahn, the bloc's representative for neighborhood policy.

We wish to reiterate our concern that the EU-Belarus relations, as they are being currently developed, tend to be increasingly dominated by questions of economy, trade, and assistance. We remain confident that EU-Belarus relations must continue to be based, first and foremost, on respect for human rights, democracy and the rule of law," the letter says.

The EU introduced sanctions on four Belarusian companies and 174 individuals, including President Alyaksandr Lukashenka, after a violent crackdown on demonstrators that followed the December 2010 presidential election.

In February 2016, the bloc's foreign ministers removed the companies and 170 of individuals from the list, including Lukashenka, citing what it said were improvements in the human rights situation in the ex-Soviet republic.

At the same time, the EU also allowed enhanced cooperation between Minsk and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and the European Investment Bank (EIB), and abolished textile quotas.

The letter notes that "in spite of meaningful steps of goodwill and openness demonstrated by the EU side, the situation with regard to basic human rights and democracy in Belarus is far from showing signs of any tangible progress and change."

Belarusian authorities continue to detain two political prisoners, Mikhail Zhamchuzhny and Dzmitry Paliyenka, and not a single previously released political prisoner has been ever rehabilitated, the lawmakers say in their letter.

Over the recent months, judicial and other kinds of harassment were used against independent journalists with foreign accreditation, such as Belsat TV. Also, two leading independent internet portals, Charter 97 and Belarusian Partisan, experienced restrictions and blocking from the Ministry of Information, the lawmakers said.

The Kremlin has voiced "regret" over the European Union's decision to recall its envoy to Russia after the bloc concluded it was "highly likely" that Moscow was responsible for the poisoning of a former Russian double agent in England.

President Vladimir Putin's spokesman made the remarks on March 23, hours after EU leaders said there is "no plausible alternative explanation" than Russian responsibility for the nerve toxin attack on Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia.

At a summit in Brussels, the leaders said they would recall EU envoy Markus Ederer. He is expected to arrive back in Brussels over the weekend, an EU statement said.

"We regret in this context that again such decisions are made using the wording 'highly likely' and judgments are based on this," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told journalists.

"We don't agree with this and we repeat again that Russia absolutely definitely has nothing to do with the Skripal case," Peskov said. He said the Kremlin specifically regrets the "recall [of the envoy] for consultations."

Peskov said Russia did not know what "precise information the British side used when it discussed the topic of the Skripals with its colleagues."

"We also don't know what exactly the leaders of the EU states agreed with when they talked about their support for Britain," he said.

Russia "unfortunately is not able to receive any information at all directly on the so-called Skripal case," Peskov complained.

Sergei Skripal, 66, and Yulia Skripal, 33, remain hospitalized in critical condition after they were found collapsed on a bench in the city of Salisbury on March 4. A British judge said on March 22 that they might have suffered brain damage and the prospects for recovery were uncertain.

Britain accuses Moscow of using a military-grade nerve agent that it developed during the Cold War, part of a series known as Novichok, to attack them with intent to kill.

Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said on March 16 that it was "overwhelmingly likely" that it was Putin's decision "to direct the use of a nerve agent on the streets of the U.K., on the streets of Europe for the first time since the Second World War."

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has said the bloc is mulling further punitive measures against Moscow, which has already been subjected to EU sanctions over its interference in Ukraine.

"We are determined to react together, with the language we used here, but also possibly through additional measures," Merkel said on March 22.

Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite said she was ready to expel Russian spies from her country -- following the lead of Britain, which has kicked out 23 Russian diplomats it said were spies.

Other Baltic states as well as Poland and the Czech Republic said they are also considering taking steps, such as expelling Russian diplomats.

Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis said on March 23 that the country will "probably" expel Russian diplomats. Babis said he would consult with Foreign Minister Martin Stropnicky over the weekend and announce a decision on March 26.

Latvian Foreign Minister Edgars Rinkevics said that his government will support the United Kingdom and could expel Russian spies operating under diplomatic cover, Latvian public broadcaster LSM reported.

The concrete details will be coordinated [with other EU countries], and it could take place next week, Rinkevics said.

Meanwhile, a convoy of vehicles left the British Embassy in Moscow on March 23, ahead of Moscow's deadline for 23 British diplomats to leave the country, Reuters television footage showed.

Russia announced on March 17 that it was expelling 23 British diplomats in a retaliatory move against London and gave the Britons a week to leave the country.

In addition to expelling the Russian diplomats, Britain has suspended high-level contacts with Moscow and said British ministers and royal family members will not attend the soccer World Cup in Russia in June and July.

With reporting by Reuters, AFP, dpa, and APDid you hear the one about the Georgian TV presenter, Jesus, and tree-collecting ex-Prime Minister Bidzina Ivanishvili?

A group of far-right activists did, and they didn't find it funny.

Instead, they sparked a parking-lot brawl that landed six of them in jail and one journalist in the hospital after the on-air comment.

The incident started on March 18 when moderator Giorgi Gabunia quipped during a show on Rustavi-2 television that Christ should have come to the Georgian region of Ajara in two or three years instead of Israel 2,000 years ago, since there won't be any trees left to make crosses from.

The comment was an allusion to the billionaire Ivanishvili, who has stepped away from politics but is still seen as wielding enormous power through his contacts. Ivanishvili, who keeps exotic animals including penguins and lemurs, has a well-documented hobby of moving giant trees from Ajara and other areas to a personal arboretum he is curating in Ureki.

The next afternoon, dozens of members of the March Of Georgians, a group espousing xenophobic, homophobic, and Islamophobic views whose members have rallied against immigration and Western-funded NGOs since its establishment in 2017, showed up at the television station.

Tensions quickly spilled over into violence, with activists jumping on cars and attacking two other journalists, Davit Eradze and Davit Kakulia. Eradze was taken to the hospital with minor injuries.

"Gabunia is a provocateur! What was on the air is an insult to the feelings of believers and an insult to Christ," Sandro Bregadze, one of the leaders of the March Of Georgians movement, said.

For its part, Rustavi-2's general director, Nika Gvaramia, said Gabunia had been reprimanded for his comments.

Gvaramia said that the activists' actions were "a criminal offense" and that the attack was not just on his journalists, but on freedom of speech in general.

Gvaramia also apologized to "every believer whose [religious] feelings were insulted," though he added that he did not consider March Of Georgians to be a religious group.

The Georgian Patriarchate said in a statement that Gabunia's joke was "a challenge to the society with its brazen, sarcastic, and cynical nature."

"We cannot support violence, but at the same time, we call for strict reaction from the government so that the believers do not have a feeling of injustice and insecurity," according to the statement. "Freedom of expression is one of the main pillars of a democratic society and of human rights protection, but this right carries responsibility [as well] and is related to protecting others' rights and freedoms."

A group of eight civil-society organizations, united under the No To Phobia coalition, however, countered that under no circumstances was it unacceptable "to limit freedom of expression on the grounds of preventing the so-called insult of religious feelings."

"We respond to the developments in the building of Rustavi-2 on March 19 and call on law enforcement agencies to have a strict policy toward any action that contains violence against the interference of journalistic activities and, in general, the freedom of expression," it said in a statement.

Last year, Human Rights Watch warned of potential government interference in Rustavi-2, the country's biggest independent television station, and a reduction in the space for critical opposition in the media.

With reporting by Current Time TVAn asylum seeker who claims to be from Afghanistan was sentenced by a German court on March 22 to life in prison for the rape and murder of a woman.

Hussein Khavari, who arrived in Germany without identification in 2015, had admitted to attacking 19-year-old Maria Ladenburger in the southwestern city of Freiburg in October 2016.

Prosecutors said Khavari pushed the woman off her bicycle, then bit, choked, and raped her. She was left alive on the bank of a river, where she subsequently drowned.

Khavari was arrested seven weeks later after a manhunt.

Khavari had previously received a 10-year sentence for attempted murder in Greece, only to be freed in 2015 because of overcrowded prisons.

German authorities have not been able to confirm Khavaris age and nation of origin. He originally claimed to be a teenager, but after examining dental records and X-rays, experts said they believe him to be 22 to 29 years old.

The case triggered protests in Germany against Chancellor Angela Merkels immigration policies.

Under German law, a life sentence means 15 years in prison with no chance of parole and the possibility of "security detention" after release.

Based on reporting by AFP and the BBCA British court has opened an inquest to establish the circumstances surrounding the death of Russian businessman Nikolai Glushkov, who was found at his home in London earlier this month.

The inquest at West London Coroner's Court comes amid a diplomatic dispute following the poisoning of a former Russian spy and his daughter in the English city of Salisbury.

But police say there is "nothing to suggest any link to the attempted murders of Sergei and Yulia Skripal, nor any evidence that Glushkov was poisoned.

West London Coroner's Court heard evidence of how paramedics arrived at Glushkovs home in London on March 12 and declared him dead shortly after.

Court officer Terry Waple confirmed that a postmortem had concluded that Glushkov died of compression to the neck.

The inquest was later adjourned pending further police investigation.

The court proceedings are to determine when and where Glushkov died, his medical cause of death, and the circumstances surrounding it.

Also on March 22, the Russian ambassador to Britain, Aleksandr Yakovenko, suggested that Britain was deliberately ignoring our requests and continues to avoid any contacts with Russias Embassy to London on the case.

Police have launched a murder investigation and said counterterrorism officers were leading the case "because of the associations Mr. Glushkov is believed to have had."

Glushkov had lived in London in recent years, after being granted political asylum in Britain in 2010 and becoming a critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

A former deputy director of Russian state airline Aeroflot, Glushkov was jailed in 1999 for five years for money laundering and fraud. He was also given a suspended sentence for another count of fraud in 2006.

Glushkov was a close associate of Russian oligarch turned Kremlin critic Boris Berezovsky, who was found hanged in his home outside London in 2013.

An inquest failed to establish if he had committed suicide.

Sergei and Yulia Skripal remain hospitalized and in critical condition after they were found collapsed on a bench in the southern English city of Salisbury on March 4. Britain accuses Russia of using a military-grade nerve agent known as Novichok against the pair, while Moscow denies involvement.

With reporting by AFP, dpa, The Guardian, and TASSGreek Foreign Minister Nikos Kotzias has traveled to Macedonia for talks on settling a decades-old dispute over the name of the former Yugoslav republic, ahead of UN-mediated talks later this month.

Kotzias is set to meet his counterpart, Nikola Dimitrov, and Prime Minister Zoran Zaev in Skopje on March 23 to discuss draft proposals the two sides recently exchanged for resolving the dispute. He will also hold talks with opposition leaders.

Kotzias' flight to the Macedonian capital was the first direct one from Athens to Skopje in more than 10 years.

It was made possible after Macedonian authorities renamed Skopjes airport from Alexander the Great -- the famed ruler of the ancient Kingdom of Macedonia, who is also celebrated in Greece -- to Skopje International Airport in a goodwill gesture to Athens.

Greece objects to the former Yugoslav republic's use of the name Macedonia, which Athens says could imply territorial claims over its own northern region of the same name.

Negotiations between the two neighbors have been inconclusive since 1991, when Macedonia gained independence from the former Yugoslavia.

The row has hampered Macedonia's efforts to join NATO and the EU. Greece is a member of both entities.

Skopje and Athens have recently stepped up United Nations-brokered negotiations to resolve the dispute, and the Greek and Macedonian foreign ministers are to meet again in Vienna on March 30 at talks hosted by UN special envoy Matthew Nimetz.

Macedonia has said it was ready to add a geographical qualifier to its name to help resolve the dispute. An agreement could include Macedonia adding "Upper," "New," or "North" to its name.

But mass protests in both countries are an indication of popular resistance to any compromise.

On March 4, about 10,000 people took to the streets of the Macedonian capital to protest a possible change to the name of the country. A demonstration in Athens drew tens of thousands of people a month earlier.

With reporting by AP and dpaTen women from countries including Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, and Kosovo were honored with the U.S. State Department's International Women of Courage Award (IWOC) for 2018.

Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan hosted the annual IWOC ceremony on March 23, while First Lady Melania Trump delivered remarks at the event.

"The women of courage we honor here today are heroes," the first lady said. "They are heroes in the countries they call home. They are heroes for the entire world."

The award is presented annually to women from around the world who have shown leadership, courage, resourcefulness, and willingness to sacrifice for others, especially in promoting women's rights.

The 2018 awardees include:

Roya Sadat of Afghanistan is a well-known rights defender who uses television and cinema to tell stories of Afghan women and girls despite enormous personal risks linked to cultural, bureaucratic, and financial obstacles.

"This Washington gathering is inspiring and educational, and it is through this kind of interaction that we learn ways of overcoming major challenges experienced by different people all over the globe," Sadat told RFE/RL shortly before the ceremony.

Aiman Omarova of Kazakhstan is a prominent lawyer who specializes in sexual abuse crimes committed against women and children, and works with political and rights detainees.

"Gender-based violence is a common problem to all countries and it's a problem for the international community...if we join our forces and work together to combat this common issue, then we will be more successful," Omarova told RFE/RL.

Feride Rushiti of Kosovo is the founder and executive director of the Kosovo Center for the Rehabilitation of Torture Victims, whose activism led to a landmark government ruling on awarding pensions to victims of Kosovo wartime sexual violence.

"This Women of Courage award is an honor for me but, at the same time, I believe it has honored and respected the more than 20,000 other women who were victims of sexual violence during [the 1998-99] war time in Kosovo," Rushiti told RFE/RL.

"This award has made them stronger, so they can challenge the prejudices that still exist in KosovoAbove all, we believe these victims still need continuous support in rehabilitation and [in the search for] justice," she said.

The other seven are Aura Elena Farfan of Guatemala, Julissa Villlanueva of Honduras, Aliyah Khalaf Saleh of Iraq, Maria Elena Berini of Italy, L'Malouma Said of Mauritania, Godelive Mukasarasi of Rwanda, and Sirikan Charoensiri of Thailand.

CORRECTION: This article has been amended to reflect the fact that the 10 women in question are awardees, not finalists.The United States has had "constructive" talks with France, Britain, and Germany about creating a side agreement to the Iran nuclear deal but is making contingency plans should the effort fail, the lead U.S. negotiator has said.

"We have had constructive talks with the Europeans towards a supplemental agreement, but I can't predict whether we will reach an agreement with them or not," Brian Hook, a U.S. State Department policy director and lead U.S. negotiator, told reporters on March 21.

"We are engaged in contingency planning," Hook said, without elaborating. "We are kind of dual tracking this."

U.S. President Donald Trump has called on the European powers to "fix" what he has called "the terrible flaws" of the 2015 nuclear deal or he will refuse to extend U.S. sanctions relief for Iran as required under the deal in exchange for curbs on Iran's nuclear activities.

Trump has laid down a May 12 deadline for reaching an agreement with the Europeans, which are among the six world powers that signed the deal negotiated by Trump's predecessor Barack Obama.

For the European powers, diplomats said Trump's ultimatum presents a dilemma as U.S. negotiators have been unable to guarantee that, even if they meet all of Trump's demands, Trump won't still decide to walk away from the nuclear agreement.

'Three Defects'

Trump is seeking to remedy what he sees as three defects in the deal: its failure to address Iran's ballistic missile program, its restrictions on when international inspectors can visit suspected Iranian nuclear sites, and "sunset" clauses which allow key curbs on Iranian activities such as uranium enrichment to expire after 10 years.

Aides said Trump has threatened the pull the United States out of the nuclear agreement if all three of his criticisms are not addressed.

Hook said that, if there's no agreement with the Europeans by May, Trump will certainly withdraw. If there is an agreement, he said Trump's advisers will present it to him.

"Then he will make a decision on whether he wants to remain in the deal," Hook told reporters during a conference call on March 21.

Diplomats said Trump's ultimatum puts some of America's closest allies in the uncomfortable position of trying to anticipate what is likely to satisfy Trump, even as they resent his demand to tinker with the nuclear deal in the first place.

The European nations only begrudgingly agreed to negotiate a side deal after it became clear that placating the U.S. president was the only way to salvage the nuclear deal, they said. Iran has objected to any changes in the nuclear pact.

Moreover, diplomats said differences have arisen between European allies and the United States over such issues as whether to address both medium and long-range ballistic missiles in the side deal.

'Opaque Economy'

Hook acknowledged that Iran is technically complying with the nuclear agreement as it was written.

However, he repeated the Trump administration's view that Iran is violating the deal's preamble, which expressed the "expectation" that the agreement's "full implementation...will positively contribute to regional and international peace and security."

Iran and Russia have argued that the "expectation" mentioned in the preamble does not amount to a binding commitment on Iran's part.

Iran, moreover, argues that it is not receiving the full benefits of sanctions relief mandated by the deal because big banks have continued to shy away from doing business with Tehran for fear of falling foul of U.S. sanctions not related to the nuclear deal.

Hook rejected this argument.

"Irans opaque economy makes it hard for investors to know whether theyre supporting commerce or supporting terrorism," he said. "Iran needs to stop sponsoring terrorism and overhaul its banking and business sectors."

He also dismissed Iranian concerns that Trump has yet to approve licenses for Western aircraft companies to sell planes to Iran as envisioned under the deal.

"I said to them, you use your commercial airlines to move terrorists and weapons around the Middle East, including to Syria, and we will not issue licenses at the expense of our national security," Hook said.

European planemaker Airbus and its U.S. rival Boeing have agreed to sell 180 jets to renew the aging fleet of Iranian state carrier IranAir. But the deal depends on getting U.S. support and licenses.

With reporting by AP and Reuters

The presidents of Serbia and Kosovo are scheduled to meet in Brussels on March 23 as the Balkan neighbors attempt to normalize relations.

Aleksandar Vucic and Hashim Thaci will seek ways to end the bitterness between their countries, something the European Union insists upon before Serbia and Kosovo can join the bloc.

The talks will be hosted by EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini.

Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008 following a decade-long struggle, including a bloody period of armed resistance in 1998-99 that ended after a 78-day air-strike campaign by NATO against Serbia to stop a crackdown against Kosovo's ethnic Albanian majority.

Some 117 countries recognize Kosovos independence, although Serbia and its ally Russia do not.

The EU-sponsored dialogue between Belgrade and Pristina has already produced agreements in areas such as freedom of movement, justice, and the status of the Serbian minority in Kosovo -- as well as enabling Serbia to start EU accession talks and Brussels to sign an Association Agreement with Kosovo.

Ahead of the Brussels meeting, Vucic was in New York to meet with UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, while Thaci was in Washington for talks with U.S. officials, including Wess Mitchell, the assistant secretary of state for Europe and Eurasia.

Im here to coordinate our engagements with the U.S. government, since we are now entering a new and an important phase in a dialogue, Thaci told RFE/RL

Our commitment has to be very clearly coordinated today and in the future. It is a process that will open a way for achieving a final agreement to completely normalize relations between Kosovo and Serbia, he said.

Thaci said the sensitive issue requires coordination with all friends and partners, but he added that the main address for Kosovo remains in Washington.

Kosovos president said he was working on an agreement with Serbia that would be legally binding and based on the condition that Serbia will recognize Kosovo, and that Kosovo will get a seat at the UN.

He also said he hopes an agreement would mean the end to all dark chapters and open the way to a new era of cooperation, understanding, normalization, and conciliation.

Vucic, meanwhile, said he told Guterres that Serbia was ready to compromise, but not to sacrifice all of its interests."

"I will do my best as the president to protect our interests. I have to go before the people, to offer something to our people," he told Serbian media from New York.

With reporting by RFE/RLs Balkan Service, B92, AP, AFP, and Balkan InsightMalta's financial regulator has ordered the Iranian chairman of a bank investigated by slain journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia to step down following his arrest in the United States on charges of evading U.S. sanctions on Iran.

The Malta Financial Services Authority said in a statement on March 21 that it was ordering the removal of Ali Sadr Hashemi Nejad, 38, as Pilatus Bank director and suspend his voting rights as a shareholder.

The regulator's decision came after charges were filed in a U.S. court in Manhattan on March 19 saying Sadr "allegedly funneled more than $115 million of a nearly $500 million Venezuelan construction contract through the U.S. banking system for the ultimate benefit of Iranians," in violation of U.S. sanctions.

U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman said that Sadr "created a network of front companies and foreign bank accounts to mask Iranian business dealings in Venezuela and evade U.S. sanctions."

Caruana Galizia's sons Matthew, Andrew, and Paul said on March 21 that Sadr's arrest as he was visiting the United States on March 19 ended the impunity with which he had operated and vindicated their mother's work.

Caruana Galizia was killed in a car bombing in October.

Pilatus Bank had filed a defamation lawsuit against the investigative journalist over articles in which she accused Sadr and the bank of facilitating corrupt activities and money laundering. The bank said her reports were false.

Her sons said Malta's actions against Sadr "vindicate our mother's work, but it has come at a terrible cost."

For months, "Malta's authorities failed to hold Ali Sadr Hashemi Nejad to account, leaving our mother to do so alone. Hashemi Nejad threatened our mother relentlessly," they said.

The move against Sadr came one day after Maria Yefimova, a Russian employee at the bank and whistle-blower who helped Caruana Galizia expose alleged corruption in the highest circles in Malta, handed herself over to authorities in Greece, saying she feared for her life.

In the U.S. sanctions case against Sadr, prosecutors said his family controlled an Iranian conglomerate called Stratus Group, which had international business operations and that led a project to construct thousands of housing units in Venezuela.

The project stemmed from agreements that Iran and Venezuela entered into in 2004 and 2005 calling for cooperation between the two governments in constructing housing in the South American country.

The indictment said an Iranian company that Stratus incorporated called Iranian International Housing Corporation entered into a $476 million deal in 2006 with a Venezuelan state-owned energy company to build 7,000 housing units.

Sadr belonged to a committee overseeing the project's execution, prosecutors said.

They said Sadr took steps as part of the project to evade U.S. economic sanctions by concealing the role of Iran and Iranian parties in payments sent through the U.S. banking system.

With reporting by dpa, Reuters, and AFPIn a very rare move, Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbaev has marked the Norouz new year holiday in the ancient city of Samarkand in neighboring Uzbekistan, a sign of improving ties following the death of divisive Uzbek leader Islam Karimov in 2016.

Norouz is the pre-Islamic Persian New Year celebration of spring that is marked in many countries in Western and Central Asia, the Caucasus, the Black Sea Basin, and the Balkans.

Uzbek President Shavkat Mirziyoev met Nazarbaev in Samarkand, Mirziyoev's office said on its website. It pointed to what it said were recent improvements in bilateral ties between the two Central Asian countries.

A video posted on the website showed Nazarbaev and Mirziyoev standing side-by-side, not wearing ties, and the Kazakh president congratulating the "brotherly Uzbek nation" on the Norouz holiday and stressing the importance of "our being together."

"May Allah support us. Kazakhs and Uzbeks share the same history, language, religion that we have preserved through centuries and all the legacy left to us by our ancestors we have to preserve as well. In these difficult times we have to assist each other, to learn from each other," Nazarbaev said.

Nazarbaev's visit to Samarkand came six days after he hosted a rare Central Asian summit in Astana, an event initiated by Mirziyoev, who has taken steps to improve Uzbekistan's ties with its neighbors since he became president after Karimov died in September 2016.

During the autocratic Karimov's 27-year rule in Central Asia's most populous nation, its relations with Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan were strained by disputes over transit routes, border security, water resources, and other issues.

Nazarbaev has declared 2018 the Year of Uzbekistan in Kazakhstan.As astounding as it may sound to those familiar with Turkmenistan's previous parliamentary elections, it's true: For once, there's something interesting about the Turkmen parliamentary elections.

The voting is scheduled for March 25. Turkmenistan's Central Election Commission has registered 284 candidates to compete for the 125 seats in Turkmenistan's Mejlis (parliament). Most of the candidates are from the three registered political parties -- the Democratic Party of Turkmenistan (DPT, formerly the Communist Party); the Party of Industrialists and Entrepreneurs, founded in 2012; and, making its first appearance in parliamentary elections, the Agrarian Party, founded in 2014 -- although public initiative groups are fielding a small number of candidates.

The latter two parties were arguably formed to create the illusion of multiparty elections. Both parties support President Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov's policies. Neither has proposed any initiatives and, in fact, the two parties are rarely mentioned at all in state media except at election time. The same is true of the DPT.

Turkmenistan's parliamentary elections have been a farce from the start. The first elections in December 1994, three years after Turkmenistan became independent, featured 51 candidates running for 50 seats; the last parliamentary elections, in December 2013, had 283 candidates, 99 of them from the DPT, running for 125 seats.

It makes little difference who wins seats, since Turkmenistan's parliament is a rubber-stamp body for the country's president; and the current parliament was lowered in status after the presidential election in February 2018. The higher legislative body, such as it is, in Turkmenistan at the moment is the Council of Elders, though a subsequent decree from Berdymukhammedov made it possible for younger people to join the council.

RFE/RL's Turkmen Service, known locally as Azatlyk, has been interviewing citizens in Turkmenistan about parliamentary elections for many years; and it has become apparent that most, nearly all, know little or nothing about the people running in their districts or any other districts.

That is where these elections are different.

Because there is one candidate this time whom most citizens in Turkmenistan probably do know: Serdar Berdymukhammedov, President Berdymukhammedov's only son.

Serdar, 36, is already a member of Turkmenistan's parliament. He won a seat in snap elections on November 20, 2016.

The brief announcement of those impending by-elections was made on November 18 and did not include the names of the candidates who left their seats or why they were leaving; nor did it include any information about who was running for the vacant seats. It was not until November 23 that state media reported that the younger Berdymukhammedov had won the seat in the Dushak voting district of Ahal Province.

Serdar is running to reclaim that seat on March 25, and there is very little doubt he will win.

But there's more.

Serdar was just in Astana, Kazakhstan, at the same time Kazakhstan's capital was hosting the first summit of Central Asian leaders. President Berdymukhammedov did not attend -- he went to Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates instead -- and instead sent the speaker of parliament, Akja Nurberdieva, in his place.

If there were any photos of Nurberdieva in Astana, they were not widely distributed; but there were photos of Serdar meeting with Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbaev.

According to Turkmenistan's constitution, the speaker of the parliament is the second-highest post in the government, the person who takes over as president if the serving president is unable to perform the duties of office.

Nurberdieva has served as speaker of parliament, officially, since February 23, 2007 (acting speaker from December 22, 2006), an impressive term considering that most high-level Turkmen officials rarely last more than a couple of years, and often much less than that.

Nurbedieva is or will turn 61 years old this year, four years older than the minimum retirement age for women in Turkmenistan.

Should she vacate her post, it would clear the way for Serdar to become speaker of parliament -- thus becoming the constitutional successor to the president, his father.

Admittedly, it did not work out that way when independent Turkmenistan's first president, Saparmurat Niyazov, died. The announcement of Niyazov's death on December 21, 2006, was soon followed by news that then-speaker of parliament Ovezgeldy Ataev had been arrested. Ataev was later charged with inciting interethnic rivalries and sentenced to prison.

Serdar Berdymukhammedov, at the moment, would seem to be better positioned for assuming control if his father became ill or died suddenly.

Those following Turkmen state media in recent months will be aware of the growing exposure Serdar has been receiving.

There is one more interesting aspect to these upcoming parliamentary elections. They are not being held in December, as all the previous five parliamentary elections have been (1994, 1999, 2004, 2008, and 2013). No reason has been given for the change; but with Turkmenistan facing the worst economic crisis in its 26-year history, there might be a desire to get the elections over before major changes -- possibly a long-overdue currency devaluation, for example -- are implemented.

(The views expressed in this blog post do not necessarily reflect the views of RFE/RL)Russian journalists accusing a senior lawmaker of sexual harassment faced criticism and insinuation themselves at a parliamentary hearing this week, including suggestions they may have been part of a conspiracy -- and that one was overly "intrusive" in dealing with her alleged harasser.

The Russian-language news site Meduza obtained leaked audio from the March 21 closed hearing held by a parliamentary Ethics Commission to examine the accusations against Leonid Slutsky, head of the Foreign Affairs Committee in Russia's lower house of parliament, the State Duma.

At least three female journalists have accused Slutsky of making crude, unwelcome advances, including inappropriate touching and attempts to kiss them.

An accompanying transcript of the Ethics Commission hearing published by Meduza shows lawmakers at times joking and chuckling in their interactions with two of Slutsky's accusers -- Darya Zhuk, a producer with independent Dozhd TV, and BBC Russian correspondent Farida Rustamova -- who appeared before the commission.

The commission's decision later to exonerate Slutsky has triggered outrage across the Russian media landscape, with several outlets opting to pull their correspondents from the State Duma.

"Just look at how deputies justify harassment by Slutsky. And this is the Ethics Commission!" the Russian news portal Znak.com said in a March 22 tweet that featured a video fragment from the hearing.

Here's a look at some of the comments, based on the Meduza transcript, from members of the Ethics Commission during its hearing on the accusations against Slutsky.

'A Delicate And Unpleasant Topic'

Early in the hearing, lawmaker Sergei Ivanov -- a colleague of Slutsky's in the Liberal Democratic Party (LDPR) -- said there was an "unhealthy frenzy" surrounding the hearing, noting the "huge number of journalists" outside in the hallway.

Following comments by Zhuk, who accused Slutsky of trying to forcibly kiss and touch her in a Dozhd TV studio in 2014, commission Chairman Otari Arshba requested that lawmakers "not insist on the details" of the accusations.

"In my opinion, there's no need to ask if he approached from the right or kissed on the left cheek -- or didn't kiss at all," Arshba, a member of the ruling United Russia party, said.

Another lawmaker, Yaroslav Nilov of the LDPR, added, "It's a delicate and unpleasant topic."

'Quite Intrusive'

In one exchange, lawmaker Irina Rodnina -- a United Russia member and former Olympic champion figure skater -- impugned Rustamova's professionalism and used a Russian verb -- "domogatsya" -- that can be translated as "harass" to describe her reporting methods.

Rodnina said she recalled Rustamova being "quite intrusive" in her attempts to get comments from Slutsky about Russian lawmakers' meeting with French right-wing politician Marine Le Pen in Moscow in March 2017 -- the same day that the journalist says Slutsky groped her and tried to kiss her.

"You literally used all means to get information from Slutsky," Rodnina said.

Rustamova responded to Rodnina by saying, "With all due respect, what you call 'intrusiveness' is the kind of job we do, unfortunately."

"I wouldn't call that a job," replied Rodnina, who in 2013 came under fire for a racist tweet she posted about then-U.S. President Barack Obama.

Rustamova said Rodnina had never worked as a journalist. The lawmaker said that she had interacted with journalists for many years and suggested that Rustamova's reporting efforts "isn't a job" but rather a "behavioral pattern."

'Boss-Subordinate' Relationship?

Rustamova later appeared perplexed when Ivanov, the LDPR deputy, asked whether she had a "boss-subordinate" relationship with Slutsky, saying she didn't understand the question.

"Is there some sort of dependence?" Ivanov asked.

Rustamova noted that she is not a State Duma employee and that "no, Deputy Slutsky is not my boss."

'With Your Consent, It Wouldn't Be Harassment'

At one point Rustamova responded to a question about why she did not immediately report the incident, explaining that nothing similar had ever happened to her and that she did not know what to do.

"You know, when harassment like that happens without my consent and against my will," she said before being interrupted by an unidentified man in the room.

"If it was with your consent, it wouldn't be harassment," the man said, triggering chuckles in the room, according to the Meduza transcript.

"Yes, that's mutual consent," lawmaker Raisa Karmazina of United Russia added.

'Well-Orchestrated'

Aleksandr Karelin, a United Russia parliament member and former Olympic champion wrestler, suggested that the "information storm" surrounding the allegations against Slutsky emerged at a suspicious moment: just ahead of the March 18 presidential election that President Vladimir Putin won in a landslide.

"Was there no synchronization? Everything was so well-orchestrated," Karelin said.

Zhuk said there were no special plans for a campaign. Rustamova said later in the hearing that she and Zhuk only met one another this week, and that she had never met the third accuser -- Yekaterina Kotrikadze of the Russian-language RTVI television company.

'Young Girls' And 'Enemy Media'

Shortly after the exchange with Karelin, an unidentified man is heard addressing Zhuk and Rustamova with a Russian word -- "devochki" -- typically used to refer to young girls.

After that, lawmaker Shamsail Saraliyev echoed Karelin's line of questioning about the timing of the accusations and said that "all of the journalists who have raised this issue today are journalists from the Western media."

"I call them enemy media," Saraliyev said.

While the BBC is a British media outlet, and RTVI is based in New York, Dozhd is a Russian entity that reports critically about the government.

'Friendly' Relations?

Karmazina asked Rustamova if she had "friendly" relations with State Duma deputies and staff, to which the journalist replied, "I don't know what this has to do with the matter at hand."

"It is directly related," Karmazina said.

Rustamova said she had "excellent relations with many deputies in the State Duma," many of whom are "civilized and excellent people whom I respect greatly."

'Without Excess Publicity'

Valery Gartung, a lawmaker with the Kremlin-loyal Just Russia party, suggested that if Rustamova had reported the incident to him immediately after it happened, Slutsky could have been punished if the allegations proved to be true.

"I think we could have handled this matter, so to speak, without excessive publicity," Gartung said. "And I think that you would not have been subjected to this pressure."

He added that "there would likely have been a different reaction" if the allegations against Slutsky had been lodged earlier.

"I'd just like to say that too many coincidences have arisen in this situation," Gartung said.Nearly two dozen members of the pro-Kremlin motorcycle group Night Wolves have visited Banja Luka, the administrative center of Bosnia's predominantly Serb entity, Republika Srpska, as part of what they are calling a "Russian Balkans" tour.

Because of bad weather conditions, instead of riding in on motorcycles, the group rode in cars on March 21 to visit the site where the construction of a new Russian-Serbian center is planned.

Group members then visited Christ the Savior Church in the city center and lit candles. They were welcomed by a few dozen people before proceeding to Holy Trinity Church and laying flowers at a nearby statue of the last Russian emperor, Nicholas II.

The group did not meet with Republika Srpska President Milorad Dodik as expected, although Dodik, like the biker club members, is a strong admirer and supporter of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The Night Wolves club, known for promoting Russian nationalism as well as allegiance to the Kremlin, has been hit with sanctions from the West over its support for pro-Russia separatists in eastern Ukraine.

Earlier this month, Bosnia-Herzegovina authorities banned the leader of the group Aleksandar Zaldostanov, who calls himself "the Surgeon, from entering the country as he was deemed a potential threat to Bosnias national security.

Also banned was Sasa Savic, a Serbian citizen who heads a Balkan branch of the Night Wolves.

Officials in Bosnia have alleged the tour is aimed at intimidating non-Serbs in the divided country, where a 1992-95 ethnic war killed more than 100,000 people.

The tour coincides with what Western intelligence officials say has been an increase in efforts by Moscow to expand its influence in the region.British Prime Minister Theresa May said the poisoning of a former Russian spy in the southern English city of Salisbury was "part of a pattern of Russian aggression against Europe."

As she arrived for a summit in Brussels on March 22, May also said that she would tell other European Union leaders that they must unite to counter a threat from a Russia that "doesn't respect borders."

Media reports said May would ask the European Council to join London in condemning Russia for allegedly poisoning ex-spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter with a deadly nerve agent.

May's request for a strong statement, while reportedly stopping short of calling for a new round of sanctions against Russia, is expected to meet with resistance from some relatively Moscow-friendly members, media reported, citing senior British officials.

"We're not looking for confrontation or regime change," a senior government official told reporters in London on condition of anonymity. But Britain wants other EU leaders to acknowledge that "Russia is a strategic enemy not a strategic partner."

Britain accuses Russia of using a military-grade nerve agent known as Novichok against the Skripals in the first known offensive use of a nerve toxin in Europe since World War II. Britain has expelled 23 Russian diplomats it says were spies and suspended high-level contacts over the incident."

Russian Denials

Russia has repeatedly denied involvement in the poisoning of Sergei Skripal, 66, and his daughter Yulia Skripal, 33. It has ordered the expulsion of 23 British diplomats and the closure of Russian operations of the British Council in Russia, which promotes cultural ties between the two countries, in retaliation for Britain's measures.

Amid a heated war of words between London and Moscow, the Kremlin on March 22 said President Vladimir Putin discussed Britain's "unfriendly and provocative" policy toward Russia with its Security Council.

Meanwhile, the Russian ambassador to Britain, Aleksandr Yakovenko, said his country "can't take British words for granted" and accused British officials of blaming Russia for the poisoning "without any evidence."

On March 21, Moscow held a briefing for foreign envoys during which it suggested that Britain or the United States might have staged the attack. The British ambassador to Moscow skipped the briefing and the British Embassy accused Russia of spreading "lies and disinformation," saying "we received no credible explanation why a nerve agent produced in Russia was used on UK soil."

Arriving in Brussels, May said "Russia staged a brazen and reckless attack" against Britain.

"It's clear that the Russian threat does not respect borders and indeed the incident in Salisbury was a pattern of Russian aggression against Europe and its near neighbors from the Western Balkans to the Middle East," she added.

The prime minister was expected to hold talks on the poisoning with French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel before briefing all the EU leaders on the British investigation.

EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini told journalists that the bloc will express its strongest possible solidarity with Britain.

The strongest political sign we can give is unity, unity, and unity," she added.

But the EU's 28 members can only release a joint statement if there is unanimity, and May will probably need to overcome reluctance from relatively Moscow-friendly EU members Greece and Hungary.

Officials said both countries held back from laying the blame fully on Russia in a special joint statement issued by EU foreign ministers on March 19.

Britain's biggest supporters in Europe hope that Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras will be more open to their arguments than his foreign minister Nikos Kotzias, who diplomats said refused stronger language linking Moscow to the toxin attack in the earlier statement.

One EU diplomat told the Reuters news agency that Britain's backers at the summit want to "go beyond" the wording of the foreign ministers' statement, which said the European Union takes "extremely seriously the United Kingdom government's assessment that it is highly likely that the Russian Federation is responsible" for the poisonings.

According to draft conclusions seen by RFE/RL ahead of the summit, EU leaders are set to ask foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini to look into ways to improve the 28-member bloc's strategic communication, counterintelligence, and cyberdefense in the wake of the attack in Britain.

The bloc's leaders agree that "the European Union must strengthen its resilience to chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear-related risks, including through closer cooperation between the European Union and its member states as well as NATO," the draft document said.

It added that the EU "should also continue to bolster its capabilities to address hybrid threats, including in the areas of cyberdefense, strategic communication and counterintelligence."

It did not put direct blame on Moscow, repeating some of the wording from the foreign ministers' statement, but opened the door for potential new sanctions by saying member states "will coordinate on the consequences to be drawn in light of the answers provided by the Russian authorities."

The United States, Germany, and France last week backed London's conclusion that Moscow was to blame.

'Solidarity' With U.K.

In a March 21 telephone call between U.S. President Donald Trump and his French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron, the White House said the two "reiterated their solidarity" with Britain and "agreed on the need to take action to hold Russia accountable."

In Paris, Macron said the Salisbury attack "cannot remain without a response," but did not elaborate.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel emphasized Germany's solidarity with Britain in a speech to lawmakers in Berlin on March 21. She said that "a lot of evidence points to Russia and so transparency from Russia is required to quell the suspicion."

Merkel added: "I would be happy if I didn't have to name Russia here, but we can't disregard evidence because we don't want to name Russia."

Also on March 21, European Council President Donald Tusk, who will chair the Brussels summit, appeared to side with Britain, saying: "It is clear we should improve our preparedness for future attacks."

One senior EU diplomat said that, for some governments, the lack of direct proof from London about Russia's involvement in the poisoning is a problem.

OPCW Probe

While not offering public proof that Russia was behind the attack, Britain has invited the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) to join its investigation of the incident. The organization began examining contaminated sites on March 21.

Russian officials have said they will not recognize the results of any investigation by the OPCW, however, if it does not involve information-sharing with Russia.

Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, who had arrived from Moscow on March 3 to visit her father, were found collapsed on a bench in the southern English city of Salisbury the following day. They remain hospitalized and in critical condition.

Judge David Williams of the Court of Protection said on March 22 that their mental capacity may have been compromised to an "unknown" degree.

The court gave doctors permission to take blood samples from the Skripals to send to chemical-weapons experts.

A team from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons arrived in Britain this week.

Meanwhile, a police officer who fell ill after being exposed to the nerve agent was discharged from hospital.

Skripal is a former Russian military intelligence officer who was convicted of treason in 2006 after a court found that he passed the identities of Russian intelligence agents to Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, MI6.

He was one of four Russian prisoners released in 2010 in exchange for 10 Russian sleeper agents uncovered in the United States in one of the biggest spy swaps since the Cold War.

With reporting by RFE/RL Correspondent Rikard Jozwiak in Brussels, AFP, Reuters, AP, and the BBCSeveral media outlets have pulled their correspondents from the Russian parliament's lower chamber after a parliamentary Ethics Commission exonerated Leonid Slutsky, a senior State Duma lawmaker who is facing sexual harassment allegations from at least three journalists.

Ekho Moskvy radio "is withdrawing its journalists from the State Duma," the prominent Moscow-based station's editor in chief, Aleksei Venediktov, wrote on Telegram on March 22. He said the station "is disappointed with the parliamentary ethics commission's decision and "considers the State Duma an unsafe place for journalists to work."

The RTVI Television channel's chief editor, Aleksei Pivovarov, also announced his decision on March 22 to withdraw his correspondents from the State Duma.

The announcements followed similar statements from news agency RBC and Internet channel Dozhd (TV Rain).

The newspaper Kommersant and website Lenta.ru said they were breaking off all contacts with Slutsky.

Sergei Dorenko, the editor of radio station Govorit Moskva, condemned the Ethics Commission's ruling to clear Slutsky and called on all media outlets in the country to boycott the lawmaker.

Oksana Pushkina, a Duma deputy from the ruling United Russia party and a former journalist, expressed support for the media outlets.

"The problem [of sexual harassment] exists in this country and it must be tackled through legislation," she told state-run news agency RIA Novosti. "I will do everything that depends on me."

The State Duma Ethics Commission concluded on March 21 that Slutsky -- who was accused of making crude, unwanted advances toward the women, including trying to kiss them and touching them inappropriately -- had violated no "behavioral norms."

Commission Chairman Otari Arshba said that public allegations from three women were timed to create controversy ahead of the March 18 presidential election, in which incumbent President Vladimir Putin's victory was never in doubt.

The commission concluded that accusations against Slutsky were "selective, targeted, and planned," Arshba said.

He said the women -- Yekaterina Kotrikadze, a deputy editor with New-York-based RTVI television: Darya Zhuk, a producer with independent Dozhd TV; and BBC Russian correspondent Farida Rustamova -- accused Slutsky "almost simultaneously and on the eve of the presidential election and a significant period of time after the alleged harassment."

Slutsky, 50, is a Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR) deputy who chairs the Foreign Affairs Committee in the Duma. In one of the exchanges in question, which was caught on audiotape, he is heard saying, "you don't want to kiss me, you've hurt my feelings," and later suggesting that the engaged journalist could be "my mistress."

Slutsky asked for forgiveness on Facebook on March 8, which Russia and other countries mark as International Women's Day. But he has denied wrongdoing and threatened to sue his accusers for defamation.

Duma speaker Vyacheslav Volodin, Putin's former chief deputy of staff, told a group of female journalists that if they believed it was "dangerous" for them to work in the legislature they should change jobs.

Zhuk and Rustamova were invited to the commission's closed-door session. They reportedly declined to talk to journalists.

The text of the commission's final decision says that the commission is not authorized to perform forensics or tests of audio and other materials presented by the women as evidence.

With reporting by Kommersant, Dozhd TV, RBC, RIA, Ekho Moskvy, Govorit Moskva, Interfax, and TASSThe Kremlin says a breakthrough is still remote in Russia-U.S. relations despite talk about a possible meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin.

"Let's not talk about any breakthroughs; first we should talk about a starting point getting a dialogue going. We have a long way to go before any breakthrough," Putin's spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, told reporters in a daily conference call on March 22.

In a phone call on March 20, Trump congratulated Putin on his election to a new six-year term and said the two would "probably get together in the not-too-distant future."

Bilateral relations are at lows not seen since the Cold War, severely strained by issues including Russia's takeover of Crimea, its support for separatists in eastern Ukraine, and its alleged meddling in the 2016 election won by Trump.

Based on reporting by Reuters, TASS, and Interfax

Belgium and Britain have commemorated separate terrorist attacks committed in 2016 and 2017 the same day.

Thirty-two people were killed and more than 300 injured in three coordinated suicide attacks in Belgium on March 22, 2016 -- two at the Zaventem airport in Brussels, and one at the Maelbeek subway station in the center of the Belgian capital.

The attacks, claimed by the Islamic State (IS) extremist group, were commemorated in a ceremony at Zaventem.

In London, on March 22, 2017, five people were killed and 50 injured when a British convert to Islam, Khalid Masood, used a vehicle to run down pedestrians on the Westminster Bridge in central London before fatally stabbing a police officer on guard outside the British Parliament.

The IS group again claimed responsibility, but investigators have said they found no evidence of an association.

Following the March 22 rampage, Britain was the target of four other attacks, including three in the capital at London Bridge, Finsbury Park, and the Parsons Green subway station.

Home Secretary Amber Rudd and the leader of the House of Commons, Andrea Leadsom, said they would attend a commemorative event in Westminster Hall, inside the parliamentary complex, on March 22 to mark the anniversary.

Based on reporting by Reuters, AP, and AFPThe United States has added an Uzbek militant group fighting in the Syrian civil war to its list of "global terrorists."

The State Department said on March 22 that it had designated Katibat al-Imam al-Bukhari (KIB) as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist.

A statement said that the move seeks to deny KIB the resources needed to plan and carry out terrorist attacks.

The groups property subject to U.S. jurisdiction is blocked and U.S. citizens are prohibited from engaging in any transactions with it, it also said.

The statement described Katibat al-Imam al-Bukhari as the largest Uzbek fighting force in Syria.

It said that KIB has played a significant role in the fighting in northwestern Syria, battling alongside groups including the Al-Qaeda affiliate Al-Nusra Front.

In December 2015, KIB posted a video of a training camp for children in which they were taught to handle and fire weapons, according to the State Department.

KIB published another video in April 2017 showing armed men taking part in clashes.Cancun flights from US on schedule despite Winter Storm Toby

Cancun, Q.R.  Another winter storm saw more than 600 flights leaving airports along the east coast of the US yesterday delayed or canceled including flights into Cancun, however major airports are now announcing clear sailing.

Cancun flights from the US are now on schedule despite Winter Storm Toby. The storm effect was far and wide as airport authorities reported thousands of flights were canceled across the US. Dubbed Foureaster, Winter Storm Toby was the fourth to hit the east coast this month.

Airlines were forced to cancel flights and waive change fees as passengers scrambled to accommodate the never-ending snow that hampered thousands for the Easter long weekend.

According to FlightAware, on Wednesday 4,151 flights were canceled with another 1,374 delays.

As of Wednesday afternoon, Baltimore/Washington International Airport canceled 40 percent and 48 percent of their flights, respectively, while New Yorks LaGuardia Airport had canceled 73 percent of its flights and Philadelphia International Airport canceled 240 flights.

Flights arriving from LaGuardia were also expected to be canceled due to Winter Storm Toby. Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey canceled 462 flights. John F. Kennedy International Airport says it canceled 618 flights so far.

Airlines including American, Delta, United, Southwest, Alaska, Spirit and Frontier have all announced a waive of fees for passengers needing to rebook.

The winter storm, which dumped more than a foot of snow in some areas of the east coast, has passed with JFK International Airport reporting clear blue skies, noting the 8.7 of snowfall has been cleared from runways.

According to FlightView, JFK Thursday departure flights bound for Cancun remain on schedule as airlines such as Delta and AeroMexico were able to successfully take off on time late this morning.

Other scheduled Cancun-bound flights for today, including American Flight 1434, Delta Airlines flight 488, AeroMexico 4603, Air France 5930 and KLM 7900 are scheduled to leave JFK on time, arriving at the Cancun International Airport later today.Cancun, Playa del Carmen ring in spring equinox Mayan style

Cancun, Q.R.  Thousands of people gathered in different places around Cancun and Riviera Maya to participate in the Mayan spring equinox events.

The archaeological site of Chichen Itza was one of the busiest as nearly 10,000 spectators headed to the ancient Maya ruins to witness the archeoastronomy phenomenon of the spring equinox that marked the beginning of the cultivation cycles among the Mayans.

The fully visible sun formed the seven isolate triangles on the north side of the building referred to as El Castillo. The triangles give the appearance of the forming body of a snake, which ends in a large head located just below the base of the great pre-Columbian construction and that was built in honor of the god Kukulkan (the feathered serpent).

Other events around Cancun and Playa del Carmen included Mayan ceremonies to ring in the new cultivation cycle. Hundreds gathered in Playa del Carmen to watch as the prehispanic priest, Luis Nah, performed the annual Mayan spring equinox ceremony.

During the traditional observance, music from pre-Hispanic percussion and wind instruments were played along with chants in the Mayan language hoping for peace, positive energy and a successful season.

Hermelindo Be Cituk, head of indigenous cultures within the Institute for Culture and Arts said, Part of the positive energy of the equinox and the Mayan people is the beginning of a season of hope and joy for all.Hearing for Russian in Cancun murder case moved to April

Cancun, Q.R.  A hearing for Aleksei Makeev in the death of a local man has been pushed to April by a Cancun judge.

Russian, Aleksei Makeev, was scheduled to be transferred from the Center for Social Reintegration of Chetumal to a court room in Cancun where prosecutors were going to request an abbreviated trial, however, Makeev did not attend the hearing.

Sources say judicial management from the Cancun court failed to notify authorities at the Center for Social Reintegration of Chetumal of the hearing.

Prosecutors were hoping for an abbreviated trial where Makeev would have plead guilty to the charges against him, but without his appearance, a Cancun judge has moved the date ahead into April.

In May of 2017, dozens of people from a neighborhood in which Makeev lived attacked him after they discovered numerous derogatory photos and videos posted online of the Russian mocking Mexicans.

During the altercation, Makeev stabbed a 20-year-old man as he reportedly tried to enter Makeevs home. The young man died from his wounds.

Makeev was severely injured and hospitalized after the attack. He was arrested and sent to the Center for Social Reintegration in Chetumal where hes been held for the past 10 months.

During this time, Makeev has undergone a psychological evaluation, however doctors say he does not suffer mental illness.

The control judge ordered another hearing for Makeev regarding the murder of a young man, which will be held sometime in April in a Cancun court room. If found guilty, he could face a minimum of 18 years in Mexican prison.Two exotic cats discovered in wooden boxes during drug check

Tijuana, Baja California  Two exotic cats have been discovered inside shipping boxes at the Tijuana airport in Baja California.

Federal police found the two baby cats in separate wooden shipping crates, neither of which accompanied the paperwork required to have such animals. Inside the parcel area, police found a baby Bengal tiger and black jaguar.

The package originated in the state of Mexico, bound for a destination in Tijuana. The General Law of Wildlife prohibits the shipment of these types of animals without the proper documents. The animals were seized by local police who said the babies have been passed on to the appropriate wildlife authorities.

The animals were found by airport police while they carried out a routine drug inspection on arriving shipments. Animal trafficking and the exploitation of animals is illegal in Mexico. Hundreds of animals are found each year and seized by authorities for rescuing.President calls for ending aggression forces control over Yemeni oil [21/March/2018] br> SANA'A, March 21 (Saba)  President of the Supreme Political Council Saleh Al-Sammad called on Wednesday the international community to end the control of the aggression forces over Yemens oil sources, which he considered a sovereign right.



This came during the president's meeting with Head of the European Union (EU) Delegation to Yemen, Antonia Calvo Puetra, and ambassadors of France and the Netherlands to Yemen, who are currently visiting Yemen.



The meeting discussed the situations on the Yemeni arena in light of the continuing aggression and all-out blockade imposed by the Saudi-led coalition on the country since three years, which exacerbated the suffering of Yemeni people.



The president called on the international community to stop wasting Yemens funds by the United Arab Emirates and the aggression forces.



Al-Sammad pointed out that the international organizations relief work is good, but it is not enough with respect to the magnitude of the humanitarian disaster caused by the aggression.



In this regard, the president directed the national salvation government to facilitate the international organizations work in the humanitarian aspect.



As for the political situation, the president said: Our position is clear and we are with peace and extend our hands to the honorable peace. We must dispel fears from all sides and take the necessary guarantees to instill confidence.



In the meeting, the president hailed the positive and humanitarian positions of some European countries, topped by the position of the Netherlands in the UN Human Rights Council.



For her part, head of the EU delegation affirmed that the solution in Yemen would only be political and peaceful away from violence.



She noted that the conflict in Yemen does not serve the Yemeni people, but rather contributes to the strengthening of the extremist forces in south Yemen, and this situation will disturb the international community as well as the Arab region and the Red Sea ports.



BA





Saba[MANILA] Sourcing data on water management from private corporations has been identified by the World Resources Institute (WRI) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as a new way to respond to the water crisis plaguing developing countries.

According to a paper by the WRI published this month (March), while extensive data is available on global water scarcity, very little exists on water management practices. Poor management could create scarcities even where water is abundant, says Colin Strong, an author of the paper and corporate water stewardship analyst at WRI.

Meanwhile, multinational corporations (MNCs) have reliable data on water management in their local areas because the information is vital for minimising business risk.

By contributing data to our project, they help generate momentum to improve local water management and, therefore, reduce their business risk Colin Strong

The WRI-MIT initiative aims to produce the first geodatabase on municipal water management that relies on MNCs to provide information on public water management. Crowdsourcing is due to start running at full capacity this summer, according to Strong, with data grouped into four broad categories: availability of information, state of infrastructure, water access regulations, and crisis response.

"The reason [why] companies are willing to help crowdsource is that companies experience poor water management as a risk to business," Strong tells SciDev.Net. "By contributing data to our project, they help generate momentum to improve local water management and, therefore, reduce their business risk."

The new methodology has practical applications for those involved in water management. For instance, utility operators can use the geodatabase as a third-party certified feedback mechanism to help improve services.

National governments that struggle to understand what is happening at the local level, such as India, will find the geodatabase useful in better connecting with local problems and be able to channel investments more precisely in locations with issues", says Strong.

Meanwhile, international institutions that finance utilities based on self-reported information, like the Asian Development Bank, will be able to use the independent geodatabase to put pressure on utilities to perform better.

Diana Suhardiman, a Lao-based senior researcher for policy and institutions at the International Water Management Institute, tells SciDev.Net that while the initiative will help fill information gaps in water management, it runs the risk of framing data in a way that is not neutral or apolitical.

Suhardiman stresses that private companies collect water management information to justify their business and investment strategies, regardless of the impact to society at large. There is also the issue of who will gain access to the collected data, she says.

"Unpacking how power relationships and political processes shape and reshape informed decision is key to link this new initiative with the broader question of water governance and social justice, says Suhardiman. There are questions over how it can meaningfully contribute to solving problems such as unequal water distribution, environmental degradation, water scarcity and water pollution, she adds.



This piece was produced by SciDev.Nets Asia & Pacific desk.Almost all organisms have an internal biological clock that synchronizes their behavior with the environment in which they live. Endogenous biological clocks follow the major cyclical rhythms: the solar-influenced 24-hour transition of day and night, the tidal 12.4 hour rising and falling of the tides that is governed by the lunar cycle, and the annual seasonal changes.

Organisms that live in shallow waters are presumably influenced by the lunar and tidal cycles to a greater extent than the solar ones and therefore mostly exhibit circatidal, rather than circadian rhythms. As its name implies, the circa (about) tidal rhythmicity is a ~12.4-hour rhythm following the tidal oscillation with its high and low tides that alternate approximately every six hours. Consequently, intertidal organisms are typically covered in water for part of the day and exposed the rest of the time. Having evolved in this type of environment has presumably been a very strong driving force for them to adapt an endogenous tidal clock.

Countless studies conducted over the past century have helped establish a comprehensive understanding of how the circadian clock works, and importantly, which genes are involved in its ticking. These studies have been predominantly conducted in the usual biological model organisms but have expanded in recent years into further 'real world' species, such as tropical corals, arboreal monkeys and many others from wide ranging habitats.

Life on earth began its journey at sea, presumably influenced to a great extent by the tidal cycle, which perhaps went on to evolve into a 24-hour cycle. So in order to understand how timing works, it is important to first understand how it works in the sea, particularly in its shallow waters.

In a first-of-its-kind, transcriptomic study conducted over four years, researchers at Bar-Ilan University set out to broadly examine the rhythmicity of Cellana rota, an intertidal limpet. The aim of this study was to use C. rota to understand the temporal landscape of a world manifested by two strong exogenous rhythms, circadian and tidal cycles, and their impact on the biological clock/s of the organism. To date, very few studies have been conducted in this realm and still little to nothing is known about the molecular basis of tidal rhythmicity. The results of their findings were published today in the journal Scientific Reports.

Throughout the course of the study, the researchers collected hundreds of thousands of images through a customized camera setup deployed on the sea shore of Eilat in southern Israel. The camera setup monitored a limpet population for several years, day and night. Few studies have conducted such a long-term, high-resolution sampling of animal behavior in such a challenging environment as the tidal zone. Portions of this data were quantified, showing that these limpets have a robust tidal rhythmicity, and curiously only exhibiting a circadian component to their behavior only at one particular time of the year.

The researchers then removed the limpets from their natural habitat of high and low tides and brought them into the lab, where they were held under constant conditions -- i.e., no tidal or circadian cues, in order to establish that they indeed possess an internal clock and are not just behaving in tune with the rising and falling of the tides. The researchers correctly predicted that if the organism has an internal clock it would continue to behave in the tidal manner in the lab, and so they did. The limpets were then kept under these constant conditions for longer periods of time in order to desynchronize their rhythmicity. The researchers then set up an aquarium with a novel mechanism that sprayed them with water every 12.4 hours, mimicking the tidal cycle. This procedure once again entrained the limpets to a rhythm mimicking which they are exposed to in nature.

"We established that limpets have a tidal rhythm. Under laboratory conditions, they didn't take the day and night cycle into account at all," says Yisrael Schnytzer, of the Mina and Everard Goodman Faculty of Life Sciences at Bar-Ilan University, who conducted the research as part of his doctoral dissertation under the supervision of Prof. Yair Achituv and Prof. Oren Levy.

The researchers subsequently returned to Eilat and sampled limpets off a boulder every four hours over the course of 48 hours on two separate occasions. They wanted to obtain a high-resolution sampling that would aid in deciphering the pattern of the limpets' gene expression over the course of time.

The researchers worked in collaboration with Dr. Mali Salmon-Divon at Ariel University, as well as Dr. Hiba Waldman Ben Asher at Bar-Ilan University who assembled the transcriptome. They further collaborated with Prof. Michael Hughes And Dr. Jiajia Li, at the Washington University School of Medicine, who conducted the rhythmicity analysis of the transcriptome. "We found that far more genes are expressed in a tidal rather than a circadian rhythm, which is not surprising based upon what we saw at sea and in the lab," says Schnytzer. This is in contrast to previous studies which have suggested that even in the tidal zone the circadian cycle is the dominant one. More importantly, the researchers found that none of the core circadian clock genes exhibited a typical circadian rhythm. They were mostly arrhythmic, an observation which has been seen by others studying non model marine organisms, particularly those residing in the tidal zone. They did, however, find that some genes which are known to have a connection to the circadian clock, albeit not at its core, exhibited a tidal rhythmicity.

"This leads us to believe that the tidal and circadian clocks are either one and the same and that there is a certain plasticity in how these genes are expressed under different environmental conditions, or that at the very least some of the "putative" circadian clock genes are involved in both timing mechanisms, yet the core of the tidal clock still evades us....," says Schnytzer.

To date these researchers are the first to conduct such a comprehensive study combining long-term observations in nature, as well as the lab supported by a transcriptomic investigation. They have provided further clues, including a checklist of genes possibly connected to the tidal "clock," that bring us a step closer to understanding how this evasive mechanism works which, as stated above, perhaps predates our own clock.Most women experience some morning sickness during pregnancy, but about 2 percent of pregnant women experience a more severe form of nausea and vomiting.

Sometimes the symptoms are so serious that hospitalization is required. Known as hyperemesis gravidarum, the condition is the same one that Kate Middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge, endured in her pregnancies.

A new study led by researchers at UCLA and published in the journal Nature Communications has identified two genes associated with hyperemesis gravidarum, whose cause has not been determined in previous studies. The genes, known as GDF15 and IGFBP7, are both involved in the development of the placenta and play important roles in early pregnancy and appetite regulation.

"It has long been assumed that the pregnancy hormones, human chorionic gonadotropin or estrogen, were the likely culprits of extreme nausea and vomiting, but our study found no evidence to support this," Marlena Fejzo, the study's first author, said. She is an associate researcher at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. The two genes, she added, coincidentally are linked to cachexia, a weight loss and muscle wasting condition that leads to death in about 20 percent of cancer patients and has similar symptoms to hyperemesis gravidarum.

Fejzo herself had hyperemesis gravidarum and lost a pregnancy to the condition in 1999. The debilitating symptoms can include rapid weight loss, malnutrition and dehydration due to persistent nausea and/or vomiting.

Current medications to treat the condition are largely ineffective and can lead to serious health consequences for both mother and baby. The condition is the second leading cause of hospitalization during pregnancy. Women often require intravenous fluids and, in the most severe cases, feeding tubes.

Previous research has shown that severe nausea and vomiting during pregnancy often runs in families, suggesting that genetics plays a role. For this study, the team compared the variation in DNA from pregnant women with no nausea and vomiting to those with hyperemesis gravidarum to see what the differences were between the two groups. DNA variation around the genes GDF15 and IGFBP7 was associated with hyperemesis gravidarum. The findings were then confirmed in an independent study of women with hyperemesis gravidarum.

In a separate follow-up study, researchers then proved the proteins GDF15 and IGFBP7 are abnormally high in women with hyperemesis gravidarum. They presented these findings at the International Colloquium on Hyperemesis Gravidarum in 2017.

The next step is to determine whether GDF15 and IGFBP7 protein levels can be altered safely in pregnancy to minimize nausea and vomiting.

The findings help to suggest a new avenue of research into a condition for which treatments have progressed little in the past.

"It is my hope that one day a medication that affects this pathway will be used to successfully treat and possibly cure hyperemesis gravidarum," Fejzo said.In 1812, the governor of Massachusetts, Elbridge Gerry, approved a narrow and winding voting district for the state senate that curved from Marblehead around to Salisbury. It looked like a long-necked salamander, Federalist newspaper editors declared. They labeled the district "The Gerry-Mander," and the Salem-Gazette warned that it was a "monster brought forth to swallow and devour your Liberties and equal Rights."

More than two centuries later, the fight over gerrymandering continues. Though there is general agreement that to gerrymander is intentionally drawing voting districts so as to advantage one group over another, the best ways to find and measure this problem are hotly contested.

Now a University of Vermont mathematician, Greg Warrington, has developed a new tool to help ferret out gerrymandered districts. "It's called the declination," he says. "Because there is no single standard of what exactly gerrymandering is, there is no one way to test for it. But our measure is better in a lot of ways than the other approaches now being used."

Analyzing U.S. congressional elections since 1972, Warrington's method indicates that the most extreme gerrymander favoring Republicans was in the 1980 election in Virginia. For Democrats, it was the Texas election of 1976. In more recent years -- 2012 to 2016 -- his analysis shows Pennsylvania, Ohio and North Carolina strongly gerrymandered for Republicans, while Maryland's and California's voting districts have been strongly tipped in favor of Democrats.

Warrington's research was published March 12 in the Election Law Journal and could become an important tool -- for both courts and legislatures -- in the wake of a pair of U.S. Supreme Court cases now being considered that might outlaw certain partisan gerrymanders.

Focus on 50%

Like the declination on a compass that shows the angle between magnetic north and true north, Warrington's declination is also a simple-to-compute angle. It can reveal when a voting district plan treats the 50% threshold of votes -- which is the difference between winning and losing, of course -- as unusually important. If a state's voting districts have been drawn without considering whether they will place a party over or under the 50% boundary, a plot of the districts from least Democratic voters to most (or vice versa for Republicans), should make a nice straight line. However, if the line takes a sudden turn at 50%, "watch out," says Warrington, that can be a signal that districts were drawn unfairly, to claim more seats for one party than the other.

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In one example, Warrington has plotted out the results of the 2014 congressional election in North Carolina, above. The ten districts that were won by Republicans all hover in a close-to-flat patch ranging from above 30% to less than 45% Democratic votes, while the three seats that were won by Democrats were each captured by districts with well above 70% Democratic voters. The line to the "center of mass" of the Republican seats below the 50% line is shallow; above 50%, on the Democratic side, the line is steep. In other words, the strongly positive declination suggests that the districts in North Carolina were gerrymandered to favor Republicans.

In a forthcoming follow-on study, Warrington and UVM professor of statistics Jeff Buzas, both in the College of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences, use the declination measure to estimate that the number of seats won in the U.S. House of Representatives was biased in favor of the Democrats prior to the mid-1990s and biased in favor of Republicans since then.

Shift from Shape

Historically, gerrymanders have been pegged by their shape. Weird-looking, snaking districts that sprawl across the landscape have been viewed suspiciously. Some mathematical approaches have looked, therefore, for measures of compactness as protection against this. However, shape does not necessarily reveal a gerrymander. For example, districts drawn to disenfranchise African Americans and other racial minorities are outlawed by the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Some voting districts, therefore, have been drawn with complex, irregular shapes -- like North Carolina's much-litigated 12th District -- to secure minority representation. Sometimes, unlikely shapes promote the goals of democracy. And, conversely, recent research has made clear that gerrymanders can exist without contorted boundaries. "Just as one can be ill and yet not have a fever," Warrington notes, "so can one have a gerrymander without violating compactness."

While Voting Rights Districts have been upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, decades of cases built on a complaint of partisan gerrymandering -- claiming that districts were drawn in favor of one or the other of the major U.S. political parties -- have been almost entirely unsuccessful in federal court. However, in 2016, a circuit court ruled in the case of Gill vs. Whitford that districts drawn by Wisconsin's Republican-dominated state legislature were an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander -- and the U.S. Supreme Court took up the case last October. Then, in December, the high court added a second related case, Benisek vs Lamone, brought by Republican voters in Maryland. A ruling on both cases is expected this June. If the justices uphold the claims that either state's voting maps are unconstitutional, it could redraw American political life.

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Packing and Cracking

A central part of the Gill vs. Whitford case, and topic of conversation among the justices during oral arguments, is a measure called the efficiency gap. Instead of focusing on the shape of voting districts, this analysis considers the distribution of votes. It's a newly developed mathematical approach that focuses on "wasted votes" -- both those votes beyond what one party needs to win and votes cast for a losing candidate. As a recent report from the Public Policy Institute of California notes, "Partisan gerrymanders seek to foist more wasted votes on the other party," making their own votes more efficient. If the party drawing the voting districts succeeds in this aim, they will "pack and crack" the opposing party: packing their opponent's voters into a handful of districts that the opponent will win easily while evenly spreading -- cracking -- the rest of their opponent's voters across a large number of districts that they will lose by small margins.

While the efficiency gap has been at the center of the current Supreme Court debate, it "unfortunately, in its basic assumptions, requires proportional representation," Warrington says -- and proportional representation is not a constitutional right. (Just consider that Vermont's Senate delegation has the same number of seats as California's.) Which is where Warrington's declination looks to be a better tool.

If the Supreme Court rules that some partisan gerrymanders are unconstitutional, the declination -- in combination with measures of compactness, an assessment of the intent of those who drew the maps, and a look at the impact of the redrawn maps -- could be a "manageable judicial standard," Greg Warrington says. Not only does it avoid "the constitutionality issue presented by the efficiency gap," he notes, but it also "does not rely on the shape of districts, is simple to compute, and is provably related to the 'packing and cracking' integral to gerrymandering."Hoppy beer is all the rage among craft brewers and beer lovers, and now UC Berkeley biologists have come up with a way to create these unique flavors and aromas without using hops.

The researchers created strains of brewer's yeast that not only ferment the beer but also provide two of the prominent flavor notes provided by hops. In double-blind taste tests, employees of Lagunitas Brewing Company in Petaluma, California, characterized beer made from the engineered strains as more hoppy than a control beer made with regular yeast and Cascade hops.

Bryan Donaldson, innovations manager at Lagunitas, detected notes of "fruit-loops" and "orange blossom" with no off flavors.

Why would brewers want to use yeast instead of hops to impart flavor and aroma? According to Charles Denby, one of two first authors of a paper appearing this week in the journal Nature Communications, growing hops uses lots of water, not to mention fertilizer and energy to transport the crop, all of which could be avoided by using yeast to make a hop-forward brew. A pint of craft beer can require 50 pints of water merely to grow the hops, which are the dried flowers of a climbing plant.

"My hope is that if we can use the technology to make great beer that is produced with a more sustainable process, people will embrace that," Denby said.

Hops' flavorful components, or essential oils, are also highly variable from year to year and plot to plot, so using a standardized yeast would allow uniformity of flavor. And hops are expensive.

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A former UC Berkeley postdoctoral fellow, Denby has launched a startup called Berkeley Brewing Science with Rachel Li, the second first author and a UC Berkeley doctoral candidate. They hope to market hoppy yeasts to brewers, including strains that contain more of the natural hop flavor components, and create other strains that incorporate novel plant flavors not typical of beer brewed from the canonical ingredients: water, barley, hops and yeast.

Using DNA scissors

The engineered yeast strains were altered using CRISPR-Cas9, a simple and inexpensive gene-editing tool invented at UC Berkeley. Denby and Li inserted four new genes plus the promoters that regulate the genes into industrial brewer's yeast. Two of the genes -- linalool synthase and geraniol synthase -- code for enzymes that produce flavor components common to many plants. In this instance, the genes came from mint and basil, respectively. Genes from other plants that were reported to have linalool synthase activity, such as olive and strawberry, were not as easy to work with.

The two other genes were from yeast and boosted the production of precursor molecules needed to make linalool and geraniol, the hoppy flavor components. All of the genetic components -- the Cas9 gene, four yeast, mint and basil genes and promoters -- were inserted into yeast on a tiny circular DNA plasmid. The yeast cells then translated the Cas9 gene into the Cas9 proteins, which cut the yeast DNA at specific points. Yeast repair enzymes then spliced in the four genes plus promoters.

The researchers used a specially designed software program to get just the right mix of promoters to produce linalool and geraniol in proportions similar to the proportions in commercial beers produced by Sierra Nevada Brewing Company, which operates a tap room not far from the startup.

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They then asked Charles Bamforth, a malting and brewing authority at UC Davis, to brew a beer from three of the most promising strains, using hops only in the initial stage of brewing -- the wort -- to get the bitterness without the hoppy flavor. Hop flavor was supplied only by the new yeast strains. Bamforth also brewed a beer with standard yeast and hops, and asked a former student, Lagunitas's Donaldson, to conduct a blind comparison taste test with 27 brewery employees.

"This was one of our very first sensory tests, so being rated as hoppier than the two beers that were actually dry-hopped at conventional hopping rates was very encouraging," Li said.

From sustainable fuels to sustainable beer

Denby came to UC Berkeley to work on sustainable transportation fuels with Jay Keasling, a pioneer in the field of synthetic biology and a professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering. The strategy developed by Keasling is to make microbes, primarily bacteria and yeast, ramp up their production of complex molecules called terpenes, and then insert genes that turn these terpenes into commercial products. These microbes can make such chemicals as the antimalarial drug, artemisinin, fuels such as butanol, and aromas and flavors used in the cosmetic industry.

But the brewing project "found me," Denby said

"I started home brewing out of curiosity with a group of friends while I was starting out in Jay's lab, in part because I enjoy beer and in part because I was interested in fermentation processes," he said. "I found out that the molecules that give hops their hoppy flavor are terpene molecules, and it wouldn't be too big of a stretch to think we could develop strains that make terpenes at the same concentrations that you get when you make beer and add hops to them."

The final hook was that a hoppy strain of yeast would make the brewing process more sustainable than using agriculturally produced hops, which is a very natural resource-intensive product, he said.

"We started our work on engineering microbes to produce isoprenoids -- like flavors, fragrances and artemisinin -- about 20 years ago," said Keasling. "At the same time, we were building tools to accurately control metabolism. With this project, we are able to use some of the tools others and we developed to accurately control metabolism to produce just the right amount of hops flavors for beer."

Denby and Li first had to overcome some hurdles, such as learning how to genetically engineer commercial brewer's yeast. Unlike the yeast used in research labs, which have one set of chromosomes, brewer's yeast has four sets of chromosomes. They found out that they needed to add the same four genes plus promoters to each set of chromosomes to obtain a stable strain of yeast; if not, as the yeast propagated they lost the added genes.

They also had to find out, through computational analytics performed by Zak Costello, which promoters would produce the amounts of linalool and geraniol at the right times to approximate the concentrations in a hoppy beer, and then scale up fermentation by a factor of about 100 from test tube quantities to 40-liter kettles.

In the end, they were able to drink their research project, and continue to do so at their startup as they ferment batches of beer to test new strains of yeast.

"Charles and Rachel have shown that using the appropriate tools to control production of these flavors can result in a beer with a more consistent hoppy flavor, even better than what nature can do itself," Keasling said.

The work was funded from grants awarded by the National Science Foundation. These include an initial grant awarded to UC Berkeley to use synthetic biology in yeast to produce industrially important products, and subsequent funding from a Small Business Innovation Research grant to Berkeley Brewing Science.

In addition to Denby, Li, Costello, Keasling, Donaldson and Bamforth, other coauthors are Van Vu of UC Berkeley, Weiyin Lin, Leanne Jade Chan, Christopher Petzold, Henrik Scheller and Hector Garcia Martin of the Joint BioEnergy Institute in Emeryville, which is part of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and Joseph Williams of UC Davis.A team of researchers led by an MIT economist has found that medical expenses account for roughly 4 percent of bankruptcy filings among nonelderly adults in the U.S.

The scholars combined medical records and financial data for hundreds of thousands of people to pinpoint the percentage of bankruptcies caused by medical costs, thus giving new empirical precision to a topic of considerable policy importance.

The 4 percent figure is lower than some commonly cited estimates, but the new statistic comes with a twist: It is part of a larger research project that found multiple negative economic consequences of having medical problems, including a 20 percent drop in earnings and an 11 percent drop in employment for adults between ages 50 and 59 who had been hospitalized.

This combination of effects -- fewer medically rooted bankruptcies but pervasive workplace troubles for people with health issues -- underscores the need to understand the full range of financial challenges people face due to their medical needs, the researchers say.

"It doesn't mean there aren't really adverse economic consequences from adverse health," says MIT economist Amy Finkelstein, co-author of a new paper outlining the findings. "It just turns out they're not [strictly] about bankruptcy. They're much more about lost employment and earnings."

The article, "Myth and Measurement -- The Case of Medical Bankruptcies," appears today in the New England Journal of Medicine. The co-authors are Finkelstein, who is the John and Jennie S. MacDonald Professor of Economics at MIT; Carlos Dobkin, a professor of economics at the University of California at Santa Cruz; Raymond Kluender, a PhD student in economics at MIT; and Matthew Notowidigdo, an associate professor of economics at Northwestern University.

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The study's main source of data consists of hospitalization records from the years 2003-2007 and credit reports from 2002-2011, from the state of California, for people over age 25. The study included about 780,000 people with health insurance and roughly 150,000 people without health insurance. That information was available to the research team only under particular conditions that preserved the anonymity of the people being studied.

By examining cases where previously healthy people were hospitalized, then tracking the finances of those people in subsequent years, the researchers were able to study the issue in a way that delivers a solid link between cause and effect -- namely, how often medical events themselves are the principal cause of changes in financial status.

Some of the previous research on the frequency of medically caused bankruptcies used survey data to produce estimates; one commonly cited figure is that 60 percent of bankruptcies have medical causes. However, those estimates used self-reported data about health issues, among those who filed for bankruptcy, without establishing that medical costs were the principal cause of those bankruptcies.

"The approach of the prior literature was just conceptually not right," Finkelstein says.

The current study found that poor health has a larger impact on the uninsured than the insured: For instance, as a related, recently published paper by the research team shows, four years after being admitted to the hospital, people with insurance owe $300 more in unpaid medical bills, on average, while people without insurance have an average increase of $6,000 in unpaid medical bills.

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The researchers also found that medically caused bankruptcies are minimal among the elderly -- those over age 64 -- who are likely to have Medicare and who tend to be retired, thus not suffering the earnings reductions that ill people in the workforce experience.

"We suspect what's driving the [level of] bankruptcy we find is the fact that some people lose their job because of adverse health, and in turn that causes them to go bankrupt," Finkelstein says. "That's just not going to [apply to] the elderly, because they're not working, so they don't have the labor market risk from poor health."

To be sure, Finkelstein acknowledges, the current study has some aspects that may need additional scrutiny. By focusing on examples involving hospitalization, the researchers could be missing some cases in which accumulated medical costs of other kinds drive people to bankruptcy -- including medical costs incurred by children, parents, or other relatives.

"We're not going to go to the mat over the idea that [the rate of medically caused bankruptcies] is always going to be 4 percent in every context and by every measurement," Finkelstein says. Still, she notes, the accurate figure is likely to be much lower than other recent estimates imply.

To Finkelstein, the findings also have a clear upshot for policymakers and legislators. Grasping the full breadth of the economic consequences of poor health might affect the priorities of lawmakers, directing them to seek solutions for the lost income that many people endure after a serious medical event.

"Focusing on bankruptcy might lead you to think about bankruptcy protection reform," Finkelstein says, "and while that may or may not be useful in its own right, if you're interested in the economic consequences of poor health, you're missing a main issue and potential policy responses -- thinking about how we might want to structure sick pay and disability insurance."On the outskirts of our galaxy, a cosmic tug-of-war is unfolding-and only NASA's Hubble Space Telescope can see who's winning.

The players are two dwarf galaxies, the Large Magellanic Cloud and the Small Magellanic Cloud, both of which orbit our own Milky Way Galaxy. But as they go around the Milky Way, they are also orbiting each other. Each one tugs at the other, and one of them has pulled out a huge cloud of gas from its companion.

Called the Leading Arm, this arching collection of gas connects the Magellanic Clouds to the Milky Way. Roughly half the size of our galaxy, this structure is thought to be about 1 or 2 billion years old. Its name comes from the fact that it's leading the motion of the Magellanic Clouds.

The enormous concentration of gas is being devoured by the Milky Way and feeding new star birth in our galaxy. But which dwarf galaxy is doing the pulling, and whose gas is now being feasted upon? After years of debate, scientists now have the answer to this "whodunit" mystery.

"There's been a question: Did the gas come from the Large Magellanic Cloud or the Small Magellanic Cloud? At first glance, it looks like it tracks back to the Large Magellanic Cloud," explained lead researcher Andrew Fox of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. "But we've approached that question differently, by asking: What is the Leading Arm made of? Does it have the composition of the Large Magellanic Cloud or the composition of the Small Magellanic Cloud?"

Fox's research is a follow-up to his 2013 work, which focused on a trailing feature behind the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. This gas in this ribbon-like structure, called the Magellanic Stream, was found to come from both dwarf galaxies. Now Fox wondered about its counterpart, the Leading Arm. Unlike the trailing Magellanic Stream, this tattered and shredded "arm" has already reached the Milky Way and survived its journey to the galactic disk.

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The Leading Arm is a real-time example of gas accretion, the process of gas falling onto galaxies. This is very difficult to see in galaxies outside the Milky Way, because they are too far away and too faint. "As these two galaxies are in our backyard, we essentially have a front-row seat to view the action," said collaborator Kat Barger at Texas Christian University.

In a new kind of forensics, Fox and his team used Hubble's ultraviolet vision to chemically analyze the gas in the Leading Arm. They observed the light from seven quasars, the bright cores of active galaxies that reside billions of light-years beyond this gas cloud. Using Hubble's Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, the scientists measured how this light filters through the cloud.

In particular, they looked for the absorption of ultraviolet light by oxygen and sulfur in the cloud. These are good gauges of how many heavier elements reside in the gas. The team then compared Hubble's measurements to hydrogen measurements made by the National Science Foundation's Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope at the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia, as well as several other radio telescopes.

"With the combination of Hubble and Green Bank Telescope observations, we can measure the composition and velocity of the gas to determine which dwarf galaxy is the culprit," explained Barger.

After much analysis, the team finally had conclusive chemical "fingerprints" to match the origin of the Leading Arm's gas. "We've found that the gas matches the Small Magellanic Cloud," said Fox. "That indicates the Large Magellanic Cloud is winning the tug-of-war, because it has pulled so much gas out of its smaller neighbor."

This answer was possible only because of Hubble's unique ultraviolet capability. Because of the filtering effects of Earth's atmosphere, ultraviolet light cannot be studied from the ground. "Hubble is the only game in town," explained Fox. "All the lines of interest, including oxygen and sulfur, are in the ultraviolet. So if you work in the optical and infrared, you can't see them."

Gas from the Leading Arm is now crossing the disk of our galaxy. As it crosses, it interacts with the Milky Way's own gas, becoming shredded and fragmented.

This is an important case study of how gas gets into galaxies and fuels star birth. Astronomers use simulations and try to understand the inflow of gas in other galaxies. But here, the gas is being caught red-handed as it moves across the Milky Way's disk. Sometime in the future, planets and solar systems in our galaxy may be born out of material that used to be part of the Small Magellanic Cloud.

As Fox and his team look ahead, they hope to map out the full size of the Leading Arm-something that is still unknown.In an outbreak of Legionnaires' disease, finding the exact source as quickly as possible is essential to preventing further infections. To date, a standard analysis takes days. Researchers at the Technical University of Munich have now developed a rapid test that achieves the same result in about 35 minutes.

Legionella are rod-shaped bacteria that can cause life-threatening pneumonia in humans. They multiply in warm water and can be dispersed into the air via cooling towers, evaporative recooling systems and hot water systems.

The most dangerous among the almost 50 species of Legionella is Legionella pneumophila. It is responsible for 80 percent of all infections. When an outbreak occurs, the source of the germs must be identified as soon as possible to prevent further infections.

Similar to a paternity test, the origin of the outbreak is confirmed when the germs in the process water of a technical system exactly match those identified in the patient. However, often numerous systems must be tested in the process, and the requisite cultivation for the test takes around ten days.

Faster detection with antibodies

Meanwhile there is a rapid test for detecting the Legionella pathogen in the clinic. It identifies compounds of Legionella in the urine of patients. "Unfortunately, this quick test serves only as a first indication and is not suitable for screening the water of technical systems," says PD Dr. Michael Seidel, head of the research group at the Chair of Analytical Chemistry and Water Chemistry of the Technical University of Munich.

The team of scientists thus developed a measuring chip in the context of the "LegioTyper" project funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. This chip not only detects the dangerous pathogen Legionella pneumophila but also identifies which of the approximately 20 subtypes is present.

Fast, inexpensive and versatile

The foil-based measuring chip uses the microarray analysis platform MCR of the Munich company GWK GmbH. Using 20 different antibodies, the system provides a complete analysis within 34 minutes.

"Compared to previous measurements, the new method not only provides a huge speed advantage," says Michael Seidel, "but is also so cheap that we can use the chip in one-time applications."

The system can be deployed for environmental hygiene as well as clinical diagnostics. In combination with a second, DNA-based method, the system can even distinguish between dead and living Legionella pathogens. This allows the success of disinfection measures to be monitored. The project participants will present their system to the public for the first time at the Analytica 2018 trade fair in Munich (Hall 3, Booth 315).Vous etes confrontes a une infestation par la puce, la punaise de lit ? Voici plusieurs actions qui sont a mettre en uvre pour faire []The Securities and Exchange Commission has obtained lifetime officer-and-director and penny stock bars against the CEO of a syringe manufacturer who a federal jury found committed securities fraud.

The SEC charged Revolutions Medical Corp. and its CEO, Rondald L. Wheet, in 2012 with fraud for issuing a series of press releases that falsely portrayed Revolutions Medical as a successful manufacturer of a safe and effective syringe that was slated for imminent mass production and distribution. The agency also alleged that Revolutions Medical had secured significant sales agreements, including one with the U.S. Department of Defense. As the SEC alleged, and the jury found, none of these statements were true.

The final judgment, entered on March 16, 2018 by the Honorable Leigh Martin May of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia, also ordered Revolutions Medical and Wheet, to pay civil penalties in the amount of $2.325 million and $465,000, respectively, and to pay, jointly and severally, disgorgement of $115,000. The judgment also enjoins both Revolutions Medical and Wheet from violating Section 17(a) of the Securities Act of 1933 and Section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and Rule 10b-5 thereunder.

The SEC's case is being handled by M. Graham Loomis, Paul T. Kim, Pat Huddleston II, and H.B. Roback of the Atlanta Regional Office.Washington D.C., March 22, 2018 - This past week, the Securities and Exchange Commission charged a former chief information officer of a U.S. business unit of Equifax with insider trading in advance of the company's September 2017 announcement about a massive data breach that exposed the social security numbers and other personal information of about 148 million U.S. customers.

According to the SEC's complaint, Jun Ying, who was next in line to be the company's global CIO, allegedly used confidential information entrusted to him by the company to conclude that Equifax had suffered a serious breach. The SEC alleges that before Equifax's public disclosure of the data breach, Ying exercised all of his vested Equifax stock options and then sold the shares, reaping proceeds of nearly $1 million. According to the complaint, by selling before public disclosure of the data breach, Ying avoided more than $117,000 in losses.

The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of Georgia announced parallel criminal charges against Ying.

The SEC's complaint charges Ying with violating the antifraud provisions of the federal securities laws and seeks disgorgement of ill-gotten gains plus interest, penalties, and injunctive relief.

The SEC's investigation, which is continuing, has been conducted by Elizabeth Skola and Justin Jeffries. The litigation is being led by Shawn Murnahan and Graham Loomis. The SEC appreciates the assistance of the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of Georgia, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and Financial Industry Regulatory Authority.A federal court has ordered a Tennessee-based limited liability company to produce documents to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which is investigating possible fraud in connection with defaulted Chinese bonds offered and sold by the company.

On February 8, 2018, the SEC filed a subpoena enforcement action against American Bondholders Foundation, LLC (ABF), a Tennessee-based limited liability company, for failing to produce documents in response to an investigative subpoena. On March 16, 2018, the Honorable Matthew F. Kennelly of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois entered an order requiring ABF to produce all non-privileged documents responsive to the SEC's subpoena by April 6, 2018. ABF consented to the order.

The SEC is continuing to conduct its fact-finding investigation into these matters and has not concluded that there have been any violations of the federal securities laws.On March 9, 2018, Judge Katherine B. Forrest of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York sentenced Robert W. Murray, a defendant in a pending SEC litigation, to two years imprisonment in connection with a scheme to manipulate Fitbit securities through false filings on the SEC's EDGAR system. Murray pled guilty on November 7, 2017.

The criminal charges against Murray arose from the same conduct alleged in the complaint the SEC filed on May 19, 2017, the same day the criminal charges were announced. According to the SEC's complaint, Murray allegedly purchased Fitbit call options just minutes before a fake tender offer that he orchestrated was filed on the SEC's EDGAR system purporting that a sham company sought to acquire Fitbit's outstanding shares at a substantial premium. Fitbit's stock price temporarily spiked when the tender offer became publicly available on Nov. 10, 2016, and Murray sold all of his options for a profit of approximately $3,100. Murray took steps to conceal his identity and actual location, including using an alias to create an email account and using an IP address registered to a company located in another state.

The SEC's action was stayed pending the outcome of the criminal case.

The SEC thanks the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service for their efforts in prosecuting the case.The Securities and Exchange Commission today announced settled charges against the operators of a real estate investment business who engaged in a years-long scheme to bilk hundreds of investors - including many retail investors - out of millions of dollars. As a result of the settlement, Defendants will be ordered to return all ill-gotten funds to investors.

The SEC alleges that from 2012 through 2016, Tobias Preston, his brother, Charles Preston, and his son, Caleb Preston, along with their investment advisory entity, McKinley Mortgage Co. LLC (McKinley), raised more than $66 million from approximately 300 investors, most of whom were retail investors, by falsely stating that investments in their fund, Alaska Financial Company III, LLC (AFC III), were secure and that AFC III earned high returns from its portfolio. In reality, AFC III has been insolvent and unable to generate sufficient revenue to meet its interest obligations for years. According to the SEC, although a portion of the raised funds were invested as promised to investors, Tobias Preston misused more than $17 million to fund personal businesses and to pay for personal expenses, and McKinley misused an additional $14 million to pay for its own operational expenses. The SEC also alleges that Charles Preston, Caleb Preston, and Accounting Manager Laura Sanford helped hide the fraud by preparing or distributing investor materials with false information and concealing information from AFC III's auditors.

The SEC's complaint charges violations of the anti-fraud and registration provisions of the federal securities laws. Without admitting or denying the SEC's allegations, all defendants agreed to permanent injunctions against future violations. McKinley Mortgage Co. LLC, Tobias Preston, Charles Preston, and Caleb Preston consented to entry of a final judgment permanently enjoining them from future violations of Sections 5 and 17(a) of the Securities Act of 1933 (Securities Act), Section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 (Exchange Act) and Rule 10b-5 thereunder, and Sections 206(1) and 206(2) of the Investment Advisers Act of 1940. Caleb Preston also consented to a permanent injunction against future violations of Section 15(a) of the Exchange Act; affiliated entity McKinley Mortgage Company, LLC consented to a permanent injunction against future violations of Section 17(a) of the Securities Act and Section 10(b) of the Exchange Act and Rule 10b-5 thereunder; and Laura Sanford consented to a permanent injunction against future violations of Section 17(a) of the Securities Act.

The Prestons and McKinley agreed to repay the almost $30 million they improperly received that has not already been returned to AFC III and to the appointment of new management at McKinley, AFC III, and their affiliates. Tobias Preston also will be ordered to return assets he improperly acquired and to pay a $2.5 million penalty. Charles Preston and Caleb Preston agreed to pay penalties of $425,000 and $150,000, respectively. The settlements are subject to court approval.

The SEC's investigation was conducted by John P. Mogg and Crystal F. Boodoo, and supervised by Steven D. Buchholz and Erin E. Schneider of the San Francisco office. The SEC appreciates the assistance of the Alaska Department of Commerce, Community, and Economic Development - Division of Banking and Securities.

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Otherwise, click here to view your options for subscribing.Two city supervisors  including mayoral candidate London Breed  and dozens of members of the public raised questions Wednesday about whether Mayor Mark Farrell has a conflict of interest in handling closed-door contract negotiations with the citys police union.

Supervisor Malia Cohen blasted the mayor at a Government Audit and Oversight Committee hearing that she had called, criticizing him for supporting Proposition H, the controversial police Taser measure on the June ballot, and his retention of police union spokesman Nathan Ballard as an adviser.

Im very concerned that Nate Ballard was a consultant to the Police Officers Association, Cohen said. Beyond this perceived conflict, Im concerned about the mayors endorsement of the (unions) Taser initiative. This action undermined our own police chief and citizens.

Ballard has stepped away from his role with the police union temporarily while he serves as an adviser to Farrell, who denied any conflict of interest on Wednesday.

I have full faith in the professionals of our Human Resources Department who are tasked with the confidential negotiations to perform their responsibilities of protecting the public safety of our residents and the economic health of our city, the mayor said in an email. Any suggestion to the contrary is election-year shenanigans.

Ballard also defended himself, saying, As a former deputy city attorney, and an adviser to several mayors, I have always made a practice of strictly following all conflict of interest laws.

Breed also questioned whether Farrell is capable of impartially overseeing the negotiations due to his relationship with Ballard.

The Police Officers Association put Prop. H on the June ballot before the Police Commission voted last week on its own stun gun policy. If passed, the proposition would establish less restrictive guidelines for when police can deploy stun guns.

Police reform advocates have criticized the measure, saying it undermines the city and police chiefs efforts to implement hundreds of reforms recommended by the U.S. Department of Justice in 2016, after several controversial police killings in the city.

In the past, Farrell supported Prop. H, but said Wednesday in an email: I have always said that I would support a (stun gun) policy that works best for the community and for our officers, and the plan approved by the Police Commission does exactly that. At this point Prop. H is unnecessary.

Cohen said she called Wednesdays meeting to bring more light to the negotiations between the city and the police union. She left midway through the public comment portion of the hearing.

The Department of Human Resources and the union have been working on a new agreement, known as a memorandum of understanding, since October, and have until May to hammer out a deal to replace to 10-year-old police contract.

The talks have been overseen by three mayors, first by Mayor Ed Lee, who died of a heart attack in December, then by Breed as acting mayor, before progressives on the Board of Supervisors voted in Farrell, a moderate and longtime police union ally, as a caretaker mayor until the June election. Cohen did not vote for Farrell.

Drought Map Track water shortages and restrictions across Bay Area Check the water shortage status of your area, plus see reservoir levels and a list of restrictions for the Bay Areas largest water districts.

Representatives for the Police Officers Association didnt attend Wednesdays meeting, but sent a letter to Cohens office, calling claims that theyve been impeding the Justice Department reforms codswallop.

With exception of the dispute of the manner in which the Police Commission implemented its Use of Force Policy in late 2016, the POA has not filed a single challenge, asserting a labor right or otherwise, to impede, delay or otherwise stand in the way of implementation of any DOJ recommendation, the unions negotiator, Gregg McLean Adam, wrote in the letter.

Wednesdays hearing came one week after more than 30 police accountability groups, calling themselves the No Justice, No Deal Coalition, sent a letter to the mayor demanding that he cede direction of the Department of Human Resources to the Board of Supervisors for the limited purpose of negotiating the police contract.

The group, comprising the Asian Law Caucus, La Raza Centro Legal, the Coalition on Homelessness, the local chapter of the National Lawyers Guild and others, demanded that Farrell recuse himself from the talks.East Bay leaders said Wednesday they want to improve Oaklands preschools and make them more affordable through a new parcel tax on the November ballot.

The proposed measure, called the Oakland Childrens Initiative, would raise about $30 million annually for the next 30 years for early-childhood education and a cradle-to-college program championed by Mayor Libby Schaaf that aims to increase university attendance and completion by city students.

The measures supporters will begin this weekend collecting the 35,000 signatures necessary for placement on the ballot.

At a news conference rolling out the initiative, Schaaf called the citys racial disparities in kindergarten readiness and educational attainment shameful statistics.

Just 15 percent of Oakland students go on to earn a college degree within six years of graduating high school. And assessments show that while 82 percent of white children in the city are considered kindergarten-ready, only 29 percent of Latino kids and 36 percent of African American kids meet the same marker.

We know that this is the best investment that our community can make, and by making it as the voters of Oakland, no one can take it away from us  no matter whos in the White House or whos in the statehouse, said Schaaf, who has publicly butted heads with the Trump administration in recent weeks over immigration and sanctuary-city issues.

The tax at $198 per property would exempt low-income, senior and affordable-housing units. It requires the approval of two-thirds of voters to pass.

Most of the funds raised would go to Oaklands Head Start and state-funded preschools. Proponents say the money would help create scholarships for low-income families and improve facilities, among other efforts.

Drought Map Track water shortages and restrictions across Bay Area Check the water shortage status of your area, plus see reservoir levels and a list of restrictions for the Bay Areas largest water districts.

Alameda County has a complementary measure headed to voters earlier, on the June ballot, that would raise funds for preschools in the county through a half-cent sales tax.

Were not where we need to be. Until we have universal preschool for every single California child, Im not going to be happy, said Assemblyman Rob Bonta, D-Oakland, whos co-chairing the childrens initiative with Schaaf.

Bonta said the biggest hurdle will be overcoming tax fatigue, with a large number of expected local revenue-generating initiatives up for a vote this fall.In a court hearing billed as one of the most far-reaching legal debates on climate change, attorneys for petroleum giants told a San Francisco federal judge Wednesday that human activities are clearly responsible for global warming, but that the science isnt sophisticated enough to point fingers at big oil.

F ive oil companies including Chevron and ExxonMobil argued that because the heating of the planet is a collective problem, legal efforts by the cities of San Francisco and Oakland to wring billions of dollars in damages from fossil-fuel firms for coastal flooding are misguided.

U.S. District Judge William Alsup ordered the unusual climate tutorial to better understand a pair of lawsuits that the cities have filed against the companies. Oakland and San Francisco are among several California communities suing the industrys heavyweights for making products that have heated the atmosphere and raised sea levels. They want the firms to pay for losses from past and future flooding.

Legally, the issue of climate accountability remains largely unsettled, with enormous financial implications for the fossil-fuel industry as well as for coastal cities. San Francisco estimates that reinforcing a three-mile seawall along the Embarcadero to keep homes and businesses above water will cost $500 million over the next several years and $5 billion in coming decades. Improvements elsewhere will be similarly expensive.

Jeff Chiu/Associated Press

Interest in Wednesdays hearing was so high that a live video feed was set up in a second courtroom at the federal courthouse on Golden Gate Avenue to accommodate the crowd.

Chevron atttorney Ted Boutrous didnt dispute that humans are contributing to climate change. With support from fellow defendants ExxonMobil, Shell, BP and ConocoPhillips, he said Chevron agreed with assessments by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, one of the worlds foremost authorities on the subject. The panel has determined that greenhouse gas emissions from industries such as oil, gas and coal have probably warmed the planet and caused oceans to rise, and will continue to do so.

However, Boutrous pointed to uncertainty on the part of the panel and others about how bad sea level rise will be. For example, he noted, the state of California issued a recent report that said the chances of water levels rising more than 3 feet by the end of the century in the Bay Area are less than 50 percent.

Boutrous also cited findings by the climate change panel that stopped short of attributing the increase in greenhouse gas emissions since the 1950s to specific businesses.

They dont say its the production and the extraction of oil and gas that are to blame for rising temperatures, Boutrous said. Its broader than that, he suggested: The driver of the warmer atmosphere is economic growth around the globe, the way people are living their lives.

Unlike the oil companies lawyers, attorneys for San Francisco and Oakland did not participate in the conversation. Instead, they called on three climate scientists to present the cities view.

Their outlook was largely consistent with what the oil companies had to say, except their projections were more certain and their accounting of blame ran deeper. Oxford University Professor Myles Allen said scientists are now capable of attributing specific amounts of global warming to specific businesses, which could implicate the five defendants.

The contributions from individual companies have increased rapidly, Allen said.

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Michael Macor / The Chronicle 2017

The experts did not delve into the two cities legal claims that the fossil-fuel industry has long known more about climate change than it has disclosed. The lawsuits allege that oil firms covered up evidence linking their products to the problem and sought to block regulations to limit greenhouse gases.

Judge Alsup, who has a history of probing deeply into the minutiae of technical issues, asked the two sides to answer eight questions about climate change during the five-hour session. The inquiries ranged from what caused the ice ages to what happens to the exhaust from automobile tailpipes.

This is a serious proposition to educate the judge, said Alsup, who will decide later whether the cities can proceed with their suits.

Attorneys for the oil companies are hoping that Wednesdays debate is ultimately irrelevant. On Tuesday, the firms filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit on grounds that the case is not an issue for a judge but for regulatory agencies.

Federal courts have ruled before that greenhouse gas emissions should be governed by the Environmental Protection Agency. The cities say that emissions constitute a public nuisance and that their cases belong in the courts.The first time Kay Morrison tried to get wartime work, in February 1942, she went down to the boilermakers union headquarters in San Francisco and saw a sign: No women or blacks wanted here.

She was crushed but undeterred.

About a year later, Morrison, who was 19 at the time, joined the union and was hired as a journeyman welder in a Richmond shipyard.

By then, most of the men were gone, she said. They needed us.

Morrison worked the graveyard shift and commuted by ferry from San Francisco, because gas was rationed. She made $1.38 a hour  a good wage at the time  and her husband, Ray, worked right alongside her as a shipwright.

She came to love her work as a welder.

It was kind of like embroidery, almost, Morrison said. It was incredibly precise. The women always made the most beautiful welds. The mens welds might have been just as strong, but they werent as pretty.

Liz Hafalia/The Chronicle

On Wednesday, about 75 years after her first day on the job, Morrison sat in the Visitor Education Center at the Rosie the Riveter/World War II Home Front National Historical Park in Richmond, not far from where she used to weld at Kaiser Shipyard No. 2. She was joined by six other women who took up the torch  figuratively and literally  during World War II, along with one of their husbands, a veteran. For the second year in a row, Congress designated March 21 as National Rosie the Riveter Day.

Morrison was one of some 6.5 million women who entered the workforce during World War II, when many jobs were vacated as men went to war overseas. These women were made famous in pop culture by the enduring icon Rosie the Riveter, a woman pictured on workforce recruitment posters.

Her dark hair pulled back by a red-and-white bandanna, Rosie flexes a bicep and raises a clenched fist under the speech bubble, We can do it!

We did it, said Morrison, now 94, flexing her arm and wearing a red-and-white polka dot shirt.

Though many of the women sported versions of Rosies bandanna and denim uniform, their stories are unique. Contrary to the stereotype, not all the women worked in physical labor.

Marian Sousa, 92, had an art teacher who recommended a six-week course in engineering drafting at UC Berkeley. She spent the years between 1943 and 1945 working on blueprints for ships.

The room I was in was almost all women, Sousa said.

She was 17 when she started, which required her to lie about her age to get the job.

Josephine Lico, 103, worked at one of the first IBM centers. She punched buttons on a computer the size of a grand piano, which helped calculate expenses in the factories.

At the time, many of the women didnt consider themselves to be on the vanguard of gender equality.

Not all all, Morrison said. We wanted to do our part to help back up the troops and win the war.

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Of course, after the war many of the women had to leave their jobs  some to stay at home with children, and others to find new roles in an evolving American workforce.

There were four women in my family who worked in the war effort, and we never talked about it afterward, Sousa said. It was expected that it was for the duration.

Over time, the legacy of these women has become an important part of history. Five of the Rosies are now regulars at the Visitor Education Center on Fridays, when they give presentations about the lives of working women from 10 a.m. until noon, and again after lunch at 1:15 p.m.

Like many national parks, this place has historic buildings and spaces, but it also has these women who will tell you stories, said Richmond Mayor Tom Butt, one of several speakers at Wednesdays event.

At the conclusion of the ceremony, Morrison turned with a friendly but serious look to a female journalist and photographer.

Now, she said, are you getting paid equally as the men who do the same work?A San Francisco police officer and five others, including a male juvenile, were wounded in a wild shootout inside a barber shop Wednesday afternoon near the busy intersection of Geneva Avenue and Mission Street, city officials and witnesses said.

The gunfire broke out about 4:40 p.m. at the Amazon Barber Shop on the 900 block of Geneva Avenue, on the edge of the Crocker-Amazon and Excelsior neighborhoods, sending dozens of schoolchildren and pedestrians ducking for cover.

The police officer was struck in the leg by a bullet and is in fair condition at San Francisco General Hospital. Two of the others wounded were in critical condition and three were in stable condition, according to police.

One of the five civilians hit was a suspect in the shootout and was arrested. He was in critical condition.

At 4:30, police received a call from a parent on the 200 block of Amazon Avenue, near Geneva Avenue, reporting that his or her son was in possession of a gun. As police officers arrived, the suspect fled to the barbershop at 949 Geneva Ave., about a block away. At some point after police entered the barbershop, the suspect started shooting at them.

Now Playing: What are your chances of becoming a victim of violent crime or property crime in San Francisco compared to other major US cities. Video: Ted Andersen, SFGATE

Ed Nasrah, the owner of Daniels Pharmacy, which is adjacent to the barbershop, said he was in the back of the store with six or seven customers when he heard what sounded like 20 to 25 rounds fired.

He ran to the front and locked the door. I couldnt believe what was happening, he said. Ive never experienced something like this before, and Ive been here 30 years. We have had shootings before, but never in broad daylight or during business hours. It was scary, the way it happened.

He described a chaotic scene with adults ducking and diving behind cars and children crying. After the shooting, the police officer who was shot crawled along the sidewalk, seeking refuge behind a patrol vehicle in the street, where he was treated. Paramedics dragged one person who had been shot in the foot into the pharmacy, where they attended to his wound.

The guy was screaming in agony, I got shot, I got shot, Nasrah said. Everyone was running and ducking for cover. Two kids were screaming outside the barbershop because they didnt know if their father was OK.

The intersection is a hectic transit hub at rush hour where five bus lines converge. One witness said she was stepping off the 8-Bayshore bus when she saw the suspect and police officers trading gunfire outside the barbershop. She described a confusing scene, with pedestrians, some of them children, diving behind and under parked cars to avoid the bullets.

It was a shootout, and I saw an officer fall to the floor, she said. It was intense  everybody was trying to get away. A lot of people and kids were running from the scene toward Mission Street.

Supervisor Ahsha Safai, who represents the neighborhood, said, The good news is that the officer is in stable condition, and it looks like everyone else will pull through.

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He called the Amazon Barber Shop a great family-run business with a loyal neighborhood customer base. I want people to know the neighborhood is safe and that barbershop has never been a problem at all. A lot of my strongest constituents frequent that place.

Sgt. Michael Andraychak of the San Francisco Police Department said there will be a town hall meeting about the incident within 10 days.

Its still the early stages of the investigation, with very little information available, he said. Folks are receiving medical treatment, and witnesses still need to be interviewed.

Chronicle staff writer Annie Ma contributed to this report.A Petaluma attorney is challenging the removal of a controversial sculpture from a historic monument in San Franciscos Civic Center.

Frear Stephen Schmid has filed an appeal challenging the Historic Preservation Commissions decision last month to approve a plan to put the sculpture into storage. The statue, titled Early Days, depicts a conquering vaquero and a missionary looming over a fallen American Indian. Its one of five bronze statues that make up the Pioneer Monument, an 800-ton shrine to the settling of California that sits between the Main Library and the Asian Art Museum.

For decades, critics have castigated the statue as an offensive celebration of native peoples subjugation by European settlers. Hundreds of thousands of American Indians died as the state was being settled.

The Arts Commission had previously approved a measure to remove Early Days, but it needed the blessing of the Historic Preservation Commission because the statue is in a historic district.

Schmid, however, thinks the preservation commission erred. Relegating the statue to long-term storage, he said, was equivalent to destroying it outright.

Whether they dynamite it or keep it in an obscure, unknown place  whats the difference? Schmid asked. He resides and practices intellectual property law in Petaluma now but said he previously lived for decades in San Francisco.

The Historic Preservation Commission focuses on preserving, not destroying, he said. The statue has long been part of California and San Francisco history. Different people have different interpretations of it. Some might take exception to it, but its part of history.

Mariposa Villaluna, a community activist who organized a citizens campaign calling for the statues removal, said that no one is opposed to taking it to a museum. We just want it taken down.

Villaluna said she is optimistic that the citys Board of Appeals will uphold the Historic Preservation Commissions decision.

Its just another delay, she said. How long do we have to wait? We already won.

A hearing on the issue has been scheduled for 5 p.m. April 18 in Room 416 of City Hall.

 Dominic Fracassa

The name game: Slain gay icon Harvey Milk may finally get his name on San Francisco International Airport, five years after then-Supervisor David Campos first pitched the idea.

The Board of Supervisors Budget and Finance Subcommittee voted Thursday to approve an ordinance by Supervisor Hillary Ronen, which would name airport Terminal 1 after Milk. He took office as the citys first openly gay supervisor in January 1978, serving for 10 months before he was fatally shot by former Supervisor Dan White.

Her proposal is a scaled-back version of the one Campos introduced in 2013, which would have put Milks name on the whole airport. It will go to the full board next month.

Drought Map Track water shortages and restrictions across Bay Area Check the water shortage status of your area, plus see reservoir levels and a list of restrictions for the Bay Areas largest water districts.

Campos had pressed for a charter amendment that would have put the matter to voters. He abandoned the effort after hitting unexpected resistance from the Airport Commission, which also opposed Ronens legislation.

Speaking at Thursdays committee meeting, Ronen was defiant.

David received so much vitriol for leading the charge to honor Harvey Milk, but hes also received an outpouring of support, she said.

On Thursday, Ronen added an amendment to her law that would limit the Airport Commissions role in designing the Harvey Milk signs and instead give primary oversight to the Arts Commission. The signs would cost about $350,000, which would come out of the airports $2.4 billion renovation budget for Terminal 1.

Campos, mayoral candidate Mark Leno, drag performer Honey Mahogany and several city officials spoke in favor of the renaming.

 Rachel SwanAfter days of silence, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg finally responded to revelations that a rogue partner misused millions of users personal data and admitted that his company  which runs the biggest social network in the world  violated its users trust.

We need to fix that, he wrote in a 937-word Facebook post.

Facebook has spent the last few days enmeshed in controversy over revelations that Cambridge Analytica, a political firm connected to Donald Trumps 2016 presidential campaign, gained access to data about millions of users. Zuckerbergs long-awaited statement stopped short of an apology, instead outlining some steps the company will take to keep that data out of the hands of those who would violate users trust.

The 33-year-old CEO said the company had made changes to its privacy settings in 2015, in an attempt to give people more control over their profiles. But, he added, We also made mistakes, theres more to do, and we need to step up and do it.

Now Playing: An undercover investigation by the UK's Channel 4 News dug into the data firm behind Trump campaign. Video: NowThis News

Zuckerberg did not say when some of these changes will occur, and it was not clear how Facebooks compliance might be monitored. In 2014, Zuckerberg promised developers that the company would give them two years warning before making major changes to their access. Facebook didnt immediately respond to a request for comment.

In an interview with CNN, the 33-year-old CEO apologized and said he would testify in front of Congress  as lawmakers have asked him to do  if it is the right thing to do.

Central to the whirlwind of criticism surrounding the Menlo Park company are concerns from users about how their information is shared with other businesses. Millions of people log on to countless apps using the social network every day, while companies  from dating networks to car-sharing services  rely on Facebook to verify their users identities.

But what many people dont realize is the extent to which they have voluntarily shared their data with dozens, if not hundreds, of app makers.

In response to the criticism, the company will place a link at the top of News Feeds to a tool that lists the apps members have shared data with. There will also be an option to revoke that access. This tool currently exists, but it is buried in the social networks privacy settings.

Zuckerberg said the company will also put stronger protections in place to prevent abuse by developers. Some of those steps include:

Restricting developers access to prevent abuse. This means if a user hasnt logged onto an app in three months, Facebook will remove developers access to their data.

 Providing only name, profile photo and email address when someone uses Facebook to sign in to an app. Some apps currently can gain access to lists of peoples friends and the pages they have liked.

Auditing any app with suspicious activity, and ban any developer that does not agree to a thorough audit.

On CNN, Zuckerberg said the company needs to make sure that there arent any other Cambridge Analyticas out there. He said the company is going to do a comprehensive audit of the thousands of apps that have access to Facebooks data.

He admits that this is an enormous endeavor, and something the company should have done already: In 2016, we were not as on top of the issue as we should have  whether it was Russian interference or fake news.

Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Fremont, applauded Zuckerberg for taking accountability for the data sharing and his apparent willingness to testify in front of Congress. But, he said, it should be up to lawmakers, not tech companies, to regulate such behavior.

It is not for Zuckerberg or entrepreneurs to solve an issue of how to protect the privacy of Americans and our national security, he said. This is the responsibility of the United States Congress to have the right framework.

The changes announced Wednesday came too late for people like Chris Oxford, 52, of Spokane, Wash., who decided to delete his Facebook account after the revelations of how data could be used.

Air Quality Tracker Check levels down to the neighborhood Ratings for the Bay Area and California, updated every 10 minutes

Im still deleting it, Oxford said, after reading Zuckerbergs statement. Im just feeling free from this thing, and Im excited to get back to normal interactions with people.

On the other hand, some developers who integrate Facebooks data in their services said they are trusting the company to come up with a solution so they can continue using the data in good faith.

Mike Janes, chief marketing officer of Vacatia, a resort marketplace tailored toward families, said companies like his are counting on Facebooks innovation to solve the bad actor problem, referring to developers who deliberately break Facebooks rules.

Janes said new Vacatia customers typically use Facebook as a way to quickly sign up, and then they share pictures of their trips on the social network.

This is an example of the positive value of Facebook that businesses certainly hope remains pristine amidst the drama, he said.

Getaround, the person-to-person car-sharing service, requires a Facebook account to verify users identities, the company said, making the service safer to use.

We hope Facebook can restore confidence in its platform so developers can continue building applications that benefit the community without fear of data breaches, said John Marshall, vice president of product and engineering, in an email. (Facebook has objected to characterizations of the misuse of data as a breach.)

But Michael Cusumano, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, warned that Facebook needs to toe a careful line between protecting users and preserving the significant revenue it gets from ads that make use of their data.

If you control it too tightly, it becomes difficult to use, and then people wont use it, Cusumano said, He has to be very careful not to kill the golden goose, so to speak. But I dont think he has any other choice at this point.Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg finally said what users, developers and investors have been waiting to hear since the company admitted it allowed the data of millions of users to be misused: Sorry.

This was a major breach of trust, and Im really sorry this happened, the 33-year-old said in an interview on CNN Wednesday evening.

Zuckerberg was responding to revelations that Cambridge Analytica, a political firm that worked for Donald Trumps 2016 presidential campaign, gained access to data on some 50 million users, in contravention of Facebooks rules for data access. It was his first interview since the company admitted to the violation last week.

In the interview, he admitted the company needs to do a better job monitoring third-party apps that use Facebooks data. Millions of people log on to apps using Facebook every day, but the average user is unaware of how many apps actually have access to their data.

Users who may have been affected by the Cambridge Analytica breach will be notified, he said, but did not offer a timeline. And going forward, Zuckerberg said Facebook will do a comprehensive review of thousands of apps to make sure they are using data in good faith.

When asked if he would testify in front of Congress on this issue  as lawmakers have called for him to do  he said, Im happy to if its the right thing to do.

Now Playing: Facebook's stocks are plummeting and some people are calling for users to delete their accounts on the social media site. What's the scandal all about? Here's an explanation of Cambridge Analytica's misuse of Facebook data. Video: Alix Martichoux / SFGATE

These revelations come as Facebook grapples with criticism for not doing enough to stop the spread of Russia-linked fake Facebook accounts and ads to influence the 2016 presidential election.

Air Quality Tracker Check levels down to the neighborhood Ratings for the Bay Area and California, updated every 10 minutes

Zuckerberg said it is hard to have a full assessment if the social network had an influence on the 2016 campaign, saying there were many factors at play.

But he admitted that the company fell short: In 2016, we were not as on top of the issue as we should have  whether it was Russian interference or fake news.Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is once again asking everyone for their trust.

But in making new promises, he may have broken an old one.

In his first public response to revelations of a massive misuse of 50 million Facebook users data, Zuckerberg vowed to make changes. Most involved tightening up the way app developers can use the data they access through Facebooks online interfaces  what the company calls the Facebook Platform.

We will restrict developers data access even further to prevent other kinds of abuse, Zuckerberg wrote Wednesday. For example, we will remove developers access to your data if you havent used their app in 3 months. We will reduce the data you give an app when you sign in  to only your name, profile photo, and email address. Well require developers to not only get approval but also sign a contract in order to ask anyone for access to their posts or other private data. And well have more changes to share in the next few days.

Those changes may reassure users. But they will likely alarm developers  especially those who attended Facebooks 2014 F8 developer conference. And the turnabout should give pause to anyone evaluating Zuckerbergs new statements.

At the 2014 event, Facebook strove to mend fences with app makers who were rattled by the social networks rapid-fire tweaks to its rules for access to user data and posting on Facebooks News Feed. Facebook, Zuckerberg said, was abandoning its famous move fast and break things slogan in favor of a new, clunkier ralling cry: Move fast with stable infra, or infrastructure.

Specifically, Zuckerberg said, Facebook would wait two years after announcing changes to its application programming interface, or API  the gateway used by developers  to implement them.

Air Quality Tracker Check levels down to the neighborhood Ratings for the Bay Area and California, updated every 10 minutes

In his Wednesday post, Zuckerberg did not make clear when the changes he outlined would take effect, though his language suggested alacrity. Facebook did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Therein lies Zuckerbergs dilemma: Breaking his 2014 promise breaches developers trust. Sticking to the two-year timeline for making urgent changes would outrage users, politicians and regulators demanding swift action. Either way, any reasonable person would conclude hes not keeping his word.Sonoma County plans to sue Pacific Gas and Electric Co. over last falls deadly Wine Country wildfires, as the utility battles dozens of suits seeking to hold it responsible for the blazes.

The countys Board of Supervisors voted 5-0 in closed session Monday to pursue a suit that could demand tens of millions of dollars from PG&E to cover cleanup costs, lost tax revenue and damage to public parks.

The vote comes even though the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection has not yet named a cause for any of the fires that broke out across Northern California on Oct. 8, killing 45 people.

Cal Fires chief said last week that determination could come within months, although the department has no set deadline. But Cal Fire officials have listed power lines, blowing in a fierce windstorm, as one of the possible causes under investigation.

The due diligence weve done, that the attorneys have done, has given us reasonable cause to believe that the fires did originate with PG&E equipment, said Sonoma County Counsel Bruce Goldstein. If something comes out conclusively the other way, wed have to re-evaluate, of course.

The county plans to work with California Fire Lawyers, a coalition of law firms.

There has been no determination on the causes of the fires, and we remain focused on doing everything we can to help Sonoma County recover and rebuild, said PG&E spokeswoman Ari Vanrenen. Our thoughts are with everyone impacted by these devastating wildfires.

James Gore, chairman of the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors, said his colleagues did not take this step lightly, and he called PG&E great partners for the county.

Were not trying to jump on some ambulance-chasing bandwagon, Gore said. At the same time, you have to protect your rights. And theres a lot of evidence that does tie to power lines.

Air Quality Tracker Check levels down to the neighborhood Ratings for the Bay Area and California, updated every 10 minutes

PG&E reported to state regulators finding damaged equipment at the suspected ignition points for all four of the largest Wine Country fires. And a Chronicle review of emergency dispatch logs from the first night of the fires found that the utility was notified of sparking or falling equipment in at least 54 locations in Sonoma County alone.

Goldstein said the county could face up to $25 million in cleanup costs, money the county will seek from PG&E. Gore said the board also wants PG&E to pay for moving many power lines underground, to help prevent fires.

PG&E faces more than 50 lawsuits from North Bay residents blaming the company for the fires, which caused an estimated $10 billion in damage. It considers the financial threat significant enough that in December, it suspended dividend payments to shareholders for the first time since the utility declared bankruptcy in 2001.

David R. Baker is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: dbaker@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @DavidBakerSFNurse Vivian was blunt.

As she was my mother, I was in no position to complain, but her bluntness wasnt always a good thing.

The story goes that when I was born, Pop showed up with a Brownie camera. It was a brown leather box with a hole on two sides, from which black-and-white pictures appeared several months later. Pop loved that Brownie and had taken pictures of Brother X as Peter Rabbit, and Brother Not-Xs first holy communion and the two brothers joining the Boy Scouts. But Nurse Vivian held her hand up, Harold, put the camera away. This is the ugliest baby Ive ever seen. And I should know. Ive worked in a delivery room for 20 years.

The camera went into the bottom drawer of the china cabinet, underneath the pinochle cards and the flatware that Nurse Vivian had won on Stairway to the Stars.

From 1958 until 1963 there were no pictures of the Paulsons in South Ozone Park. Whenever Grandma Sadie visited, Nurse Vivian turned me facedown in the crib, saying, Doesnt he have lovely hair?

But in kindergarten, Sister Mary Florence sent a note home telling the parents to send in a picture of their child for the bulletin board. Nurse Vivian sent back a picture of Brother X, who was renowned as a beautiful baby.

But Sister Mary Florence was no nuns fool. The kindergartner in front of her did not have blue eyes, dimples and curly hair. She called Nurse Vivian. Simply put, Mrs. Paulson, it is your Christian duty to take pictures of your son. I dont care how he looks.

Nurse Vivian, a devout Catholic, took the Brownie out of the drawer. And every time she picked up pictures from the camera store, she said, Oh well, I guess you dont get to choose family.

We talk a lot about chosen family in this column, and most of the time chosen is off the record. Uncle Brother-X and Uncle Brother-Not-X both live on the East Coast, and the boys have only seen them a handful of times, so for a while, the going rate was that if you took the boys to the movies three times, you got Uncle status. After Dorla, our neighbor, had taken Zane for his fourth walk to the top of McClaren Park, Zane announced, You Unca Doya now.

And since we have chosen family, we choose our holidays as well. And this Sunday, March 25, is adoption day. We dont often get the chance to make those we love into legal family but it was on this day in 2005, that Zane Thaddeus officially became a Fisher-Paulson.

Brother X came out for the occasion, as did Mrs. X and son of X. Annamanda flew out from New York, Nana flew from Maine, and the Alameda County Courthouse was packed with uncles. Turns out that Brian had taught ballet to the judges daughter, so even she started crying at the adoption of the handsomest boy in the world.

For a family that loves ritual, there wasnt much ceremony to the event, really just a lot of signing of papers, about the last of which Judge Nancy announced, And this will be his new birth certificate.

There we saw typed: ZANE THADDEUS FISHER-PAULSON and right above that Father: Brian Fisher. Took me a moment to figure it out, but there it was, right below, Mother: Kevin Thaddeus Paulson.

The forms are outdated, the clerk stammered.

Thats all right, Crazy Mike offered. We already knew Kevin was an ugly mother.

Judge Nancy announced, Zane is now adopted. Much cheering, much applause and more than a few tears. We drank Champagne, and then went to Yet Wah for Chinese, the traditional restaurant for adopting babies. My fortune that night? Your children will inherit your wit.

But not my looks. Thank God, not my looks.

I tend to farm out my vices, but not my looks. Just as Brian is my designated drinker, Zane is my designated curser. I expect Aidan will have to have an affair with a 20-year-old, another vice Ive never quite gotten around to.

Nurse Vivian may have been blunt, but I get in the last word. Let me quote the Velveteen Rabbit: When a child loves you ... then you become Real. ... Generally ... most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out, and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But ... you cant be ugly, except to people who dont understand.

So Happy Adoption Day. Choose to make it a great day.Peter Drachsler thought he was stopping by Kaiser Permanentes San Francisco medical building for a routine EKG, but when the doctors took a look at the results, they told him he needed to get to the emergency room, in the hospital across the street and up the hill, immediately. A few hours later, Drachsler underwent surgery for the installation of a heart stent.

The item here is that when he said he would walk over to the ER, he was told that he couldnt do that. Drachsler was put into a wheelchair, and the doc and the EKG tech, a woman named Julia, together pushed him there. And because he had been anticipating a short visit, Drachsler had left his car parked on the street. Julia said she thought she remembered how to operate a stick shift, and she drove it for him into the Kaiser garage.

Its not the sort of thing advertised on Thrive commercials, but what greater kindness is there in San Francisco than finding a stranger a parking space? Drachslers feeling fine now.

P.S. Douglas Kroll was in line at the pharmacy at Costco in Novato when he heard the pharmacist ask the person at the head of the line, Who is your primary care provider? My mother, said the patient.

P.P.S. In other unrelated medical notes: The product to be enjoyed at home instead of some stale waiting room, mentioned herein last week, was a home testing kit for STDs. Depending on the result, you might bring some new magazines to refresh that waiting room.

The latest newsletter for the site www.repurposedmaterialsinc.com includes one teachers practical use of scrap materials: Tiffany Parker, a Kansas kindergarten teacher, has discovered a way to cut up used fire hoses, turning them into sleeves 4 to 6 inches long that fit on top of classroom door hinges. This makes it impossible to open the doors from the outside.

The newsletter says that these have already been distributed through elementary and middle schools in Tonganoxie, the city where she teaches. But the Safety Sleeve is not a Tonganoxie school district-only kind of thing, Parker told the Lawrence Journal-World newspaper. If its going to protect kids somewhere else, spread the word. Its as simple as a donation from your fire department.

As to whats wrong with absolutely everything, its encapsulated in a comment Bruce Hamilton heard an elderly woman with purple hair make at the Breakfast Club in Seaside (Monterey County): I dont vote. I just complain.

At Book Passage in Corte Madera on Monday, March 19, Linda Spalding read from her new novel, A Reckoning, which is based on 165-year-old stories of her family. The bones of the tale are true: Spaldings ancestors descended from Quakers, they owned slaves, they moved west. The author grew up in Topeka, KS, where one of her high school classmates grew up to be the good friend who introduced her at the reading, journalist Elizabeth Farnsworth.

Spalding  who, with husband Michael Ondaatje, splits her time between Toronto and the Bay Area  was surrounded by friends, some of the best-known members of the Bay Area literary/filmmaking gang: poets Robert Hass and Brenda Hillman, journalist Elizabeth and lawyer Chuck Farnsworth, director Philip Kaufman and designer Kelly Sultan, writer David Thomson and photographer/playwright Lucy Gray, filmmakers Dan Geller and Dayna Goldfine, food consultant Eleanor Bertino, Kitchen Sister Davia Nelson and lecture/literary agent Steven Barclay.

The authors reading style was unassuming, low-key, but the scarcity of aural exclamation points seemed to underline the drama content of what she read, particularly a passage about a teenage boy and his pet bear, wandering in the woods.

Spalding had used family details, she said, but freely built on some and changed others. In real life, she was at one point in Virginia with two cousins, together visiting the grave of one of the books main characters. She told the cousins she hoped they wouldnt be upset about alterations shed made to suit her story. Oh, never mind, answered one. Theyre all dead.

That was greeted with laughter from the listeners, most of whom had come to the same conclusion. The author and her posse of artists understood that the most heartfelt tributes are crafted by tenderly  although sometimes mercilessly  picking at ones forebears bones. That wisdom shared, the crowd adjourned for pizza.

Leah Garchik is open for business in San Francisco, (415) 777-8426. Email: lgarchik@sfchronicle.com; Twitter: @leahgarchik

Public Eavesdropping

I have dozens of little furry psychiatrists.

Woman to man, overheard on Ocean Avenue in San Francisco by Dennis PiontkowskiThere are breaches in the Pacific Ocean, and out of it can come really humongous monsters, and theres no pleasing any of them. They show up angry, and all they want to do is walk into office buildings. Last time  as depicted in Pacific Rim  they made a mess out of San Francisco and some other less-interesting places before the breaches could be closed and monsters defeated.

In Pacific Rim Uprising, its 10 years later, and so far, no monsters. And it would have been so nice if it might have stayed like that, because the movies first five minutes hint at something interesting: What is it like 10 years after a completely resolved catastrophe? That is, not an apocalypse, but a world trying to get back to normal 10 years after human life almost ended. John Boyega is shown at a raucous pool party, and in voice-over he says, Some of us live better in a broken world.

Thats one of only two good lines in the movie, but its definitely a good line.

Alas, Pacific Rim Uprising cannot be a story about the deep life questions of people living with the memory of disaster, because the audience for that kind of movie wouldnt see Pacific Rim Uprising, and the people whod go to see Pacific Rim Uprising want the monsters  or kaiju  to come back. So the kaiju return. And 10 years in confinement have done nothing for their attitude.

Boyega plays Jake, the son of the great hero played by Idris Elba in the previous movie. In the world of Pacific Rim Uprising, theres only one thing that can beat the kaiju, and thats a machine called a Jaeger, an enormous, robot-like thing, operated by two pilots who stand together making synchronized gestures that, in turn, cause the robot to either run, jump or punch something. (Its usually one of those three.) Jake is a Jaeger pilot, and his operating partner is Nate, played by Scott Eastwood, who sounds so much like his father, Clint, that at times you might think that hes joking around.

A large percentage of screen time in Pacific Rim Uprising consists of battles, sometimes between Jaegers, sometimes involving drones and sometimes featuring the sight of kaiju feet pounding ever closer, as Tokyo residents flee for shelter. How you feel about the movie will be determined by how much you relish fake destruction as created on a computer. In any case, it should be noted that Pacific Rim Uprising was directed by Steven S. DeKnight, making his first feature, and DeKnight doesnt attempt to invest his monsters with majesty, the way Guillermo del Toro did in the previous film. With DeKnight its just a lot of pounding, smashing and driving, purely functional.

The good news, to the extent there is any, is that the non-action scenes have their moments. The movie introduces an engaging newcomer, Cailee Spaeny, as a teenager who likes building Jaegers in her spare time. And the movie finds good things to do with Burn Gorman and Charlie Day, who provided the most entertaining element of the previous installment, as a comical pair of bickering scientists. Here theyve become more serious and more integral.

Theres also a second good line of dialogue. The identity and gender of the person who says it must not be revealed, so as not to give away a major plot point, but suffice it to say the line is said well. Unexpectedly well, as in chilling. When this person says it, for some reason, you believe it.

The line comes in response to the question, What are you doing? The answer: What Ive been planning for the last 10 years. Ending the world.

Maybe you had to be there.

Unfortunately, as Pacific Rim Uprising wears on, the monsters and the machines take over  not the world, but the movie.

Mick LaSalle is The San Francisco Chronicles movie critic. Email: mlasalle@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @MickLaSalle

Pacific Rim Uprising

Science Fiction. Starring John Boyega and Charlie Day. Directed by Steven S. DeKnight. (PG-13. 111 minutes.)

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Hear Mick talk about Pacific Rim Uprising and some of the weeks movies on the Movies With Mick LaSalle podcast.The giant mass of floating plastic that has imperiled birds and wildlife between San Francisco and Hawaii contains 1.8 trillion pieces of trash covering an area nearly four times the size of California  significantly bigger than previously thought  and it is growing, a study published Thursday concluded.

A team of scientists from the Ocean Cleanup Foundation, based in the Netherlands, said the debris field, known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, covers about 618,000 square miles of deep ocean and weighs 80,000 metric tons.

It is the largest accumulation of ocean plastics on Earth, and a serious threat to both marine animals and people, according to the three-year mapping study published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports. Thats because eating plastic, which contains several harmful chemicals, can be toxic, so the birds and fish that eat it and the humans who in turn eat them can suffer health problems.

It is a particularly difficult problem to stop because the discarded plastic collects algae that smells to birds like seafood, according to a 2016 UC Davis study. Other studies have shown that as many as 90 percent of seabirds have plastic in their guts.

Ocean Cleanup/TNS

It is important to quantify it, to understand it and to monitor it to see how it has moved over time, said Laurent Lebreton, a French scientist and lead author of the study, which he contends is the most comprehensive analysis ever done of the garbage patch. Marine life is eating that, so all of this is going up the food chain ... and ending up on our plates in some aspect.

The amount of detritus found  which also includes chemical sludge, fishing nets and other floating rubbish  was four to 16 times greater than shown in the two previous studies, which estimated the quantity of debris using different methods of measurement.

Taken together, the debris in the North Pacific would weigh as much as 500 jumbo jets. And if all of those floating bits of trash were divvied up, they would provide every human on the planet with 243 variously shaped chunks of junk, Lebretons study said.

The plastic ranges in size from large buoys to bottle caps to microscopic particles, and it is trapped in the upper water column  meaning near the surface of the ocean  by the swirling currents known as the North Pacific Gyre, where fish, whales, sea turtles and sea birds feed.

Ocean Cleanup/TNS

Conservationists have long worried about microplastics, the tiny bits that have been found in the stomachs of seabirds, including many petrels, auklets and gulls that live along the California coast.

But the researchers at Ocean Cleanup found that, although there are billions of pieces of plastic in the Pacific patch, 92 percent of its mass consists of larger objects. Those heavier pieces should be removed before they break down, scientists said.

We were surprised by the amount of large plastic objects we encountered,said Julia Reisser, an expedition scientist. We used to think most of the debris consists of small fragments, but this new analysis shines a new light on the scope of the debris.

The new study is based on two exploratory expeditions.

The first was in 2015, when a 30-boat armada used booms and 652 fine mesh nets to scoop out 1.2 million samples of plastic, which were classified and analyzed by lab technicians over the next two years. The second happened in 2016, when a C-130 Hercules aircraft out of Moffett Field took 3-D scans of the patch using infrared and high-resolution cameras and a laser sensor known as lidar.

Analysis of the debris field and surrounding water during the 2015 boat voyage, which stretched for 30 days, found a steady inflow of plastic into the patch. Researchers said that will continue to grow exponentially unless drastic measures are taken to reduce the proliferation of plastic garbage and litter back on land, and to prevent it from flowing out storm drains into waterways that lead to the ocean.

The huge sprawl of junk is particularly vexing to environmentalists in San Francisco and other eco-friendly population centers in California, where much of the debris probably originated. Mariners also dont like it because the debris can foul up ship propellers.

In an effort to attack the problem, scientists with the Ocean Cleanup program have designed a floating 2,000-foot-long crescent-shaped barrier that uses a hollow plastic scoop jutting several feet under water to capture bits of plastic. The barrier, which slowly collects the debris as it drifts, is being assembled at the former Alameda Naval Air Station.

It is expected to be ready for a trial in a couple of months, officials said.

These results provide us with key data to develop and test our cleanup technology, but it also underlines the urgency of dealing with the plastic pollution problem, said Boyan Slat, the founder of Ocean Cleanup and co-author of the study. Since the results indicate that the amount of hazardous microplastics is set to increase more than tenfold if left to fragment, the time to start is now.SACRAMENTO  A protest over the fatal shooting of an unarmed black man briefly shut down a major California freeway and disrupted the start of an NBA game Thursday.

The game between the Sacramento Kings and Atlanta Hawks got under way about 20 minutes late as thousands of frustrated fans waited outside. Protesters shouting Shut it down formed a human chain blocking fans from entering Golden 1 Center while dozens of police initially attempted to clear entrances before fans were told to go home.

There was shouting but no apparent violence.

Kings officials moved the few hundred fans inside to courtside seats and offered them free nonalcoholic beverages before the game began in the largely empty arena. A half hour after the delayed tip-off, officials announced no more fans would be admitted.

Fan Doug Hillblon said he thought protesters upset at Sundays shooting of 22-year-old Stephon Clark went too far in blocking the entrances.

Their rights dont supersede everyone elses, he told the Sacramento Bee as he waited with his wife and a family friend outside the arena.

But season ticket holder Barbara Mitchell, who is black, told the newspaper she is appalled by what happened to the young man. It was a travesty. So as much as I love basketball, its OK. Im not angry. I admire them for taking the time to protest an injustice.

Earlier, the several hundred protesters marched from Sacramento City Hall onto a nearby freeway, disrupting rush hour traffic and holding signs with messages such as, Sac PD: Stop killing us!

They were upset that Clark was shot in the backyard of his grandparents home. Police say they feared he had a handgun when they confronted him after reports that he had been breaking windows in the South Sacramento neighborhood.

But police found only a cell phone.

We are at a place of deep pain because of recent violence directed at black people in Sacramento and elsewhere, said the Rev. Les Simmons, a community leader. He said the citys first black police chief, Daniel Hahn, is doing what he can but protested the actions of Hahns officers.

Clinton Primm said he was friends with Clark for about six years and fears others are also at risk at being shot by police.

He was a great dad, he recalled of Clark, the father of sons ages 1 and 3. He loved both of them to death.The nations Founding Fathers had numerous brilliant, innovative ideas for designing our new form of self-government, many of which endure to this day. One of them was a thorough disdain for coarse political parties.

However, the rejection of parties did not last long. Humans, like wolves and whales, have an apparently innate need to inhabit packs, pods and political groupings. So, here we are about a quarter-millennium later stuck with two major political parties, neither of which is functioning very well.

Both U.S. political parties have gone through identity crises and internal turmoil before, though rarely at the same time. The Democratic and Republican parties, the worlds second- and third-oldest parties, have been amazingly resilient  yes, and loud  political organisms, adaptive and roughly balancing each other out.

Like a playground teeter-totter, when one was down, the other was up and ruled as the dominant political grouping until the other provided voters with a more attractive alternative. Think of the Democrats 20-year White House rule under Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman, which ended in 1953 when Gen. Dwight Eisenhower led Republicans out of the political wilderness.

But what happens when both parties are down? The system is out of balance.

Were living through that difficult experience right now with partisans at both ends of the spectrum happy in their fervent bitterness  and the rest of us feeling a mounting, disturbing sense of unease and disquiet.

Nothing is set in concrete in such turbulent times. But as spring starts its slow northward creep across the country, the outlook is for prolonged political paralysis. If historical midterm election patterns stick, Democrats will recapture at least the House of Representatives, where all financial legislation originates.

Tracking polls in last weeks special House election near Pittsburgh revealed Trump animus motivated far more voters to overcome the districts long-term GOP tilt and narrowly elect a Democrat.

The historical average for first midterm loss for a presidents party is 30 House seats. Turnover of just two dozen would give returned Speaker Nancy Pelosi and her minions control of all House committees with their broad investigative and subpoena powers. Can you say Donald Trump impeachment?

That would return Washingtons power balance to the partisan gridlock that modern-day voters seem to prefer, one party holding the White House, the other controlling one or both chambers of Congress.

But either way, neither party has shown an ability to get much done. While Democrats pine for Barack Obama to play a key role, hes shown more interest in the show business that produced his successor. Hillary Clinton is only 70, but shes on an Asian book tour falling down almost daily and explaining how American women voted for Trump as ordered by their husbands.

Democrats political bench is thin and wobbly. For lack of anyone else, its led by Pelosi, who turns 78 next week. Her co-leaders are Jim Clyburn, who also turns 78 this year, and Steny Hoyer, whos already there. Joe Biden is standing by. But hes 75 and if he had a job, hed be fired these days over his penchant for pawing women in public.

Ideologically, the party has drifted far left and has become mired in anti-Trumpism with no fresh alternatives. Members routinely split over issues like banking reform. Last weeks narrow House win in Pennsylvania opened a new rift as the Democratic victor is a moderate who opposes not Trump but Pelosi.

Republicans, too, are leaderless. A lifelong Democratic donor, Trump took on the GOP label out of convenience in 2015. His judicial picks and tax cuts please conservatives, not so much his tariff ideas. Or his managerial mayhem.

Trump is basically leading his own Party of Trump, based on his own ego and millions of disaffected Americans sick of the ineffectiveness and unresponsiveness of both two-faced parties. The lack of substantial legislative results last year revealed both deep rifts within the me-first GOP congressional factions and Trumps inability or unwillingness to act as a real party leader.

Drought Map Track water shortages and restrictions across Bay Area Check the water shortage status of your area, plus see reservoir levels and a list of restrictions for the Bay Areas largest water districts.

Hard to blame wary GOP members on Capitol Hill, given their presidents mercurial temperament, political double-crosses and Twitter attacks on his own would-be allies.

When Trump does venture out to campaign for party picks  in the Alabama Senate and Pennsylvania House races, for instance  staunchly Republican voters ignore his urgings and elect Democrats. Another ominous November sign for the GOP.

Third parties in the United States have erupted over the decades around hot passing issues such as the Vietnam War or charismatic figures. Think Teddy Roosevelt in 1912 and Ross Perot in 1992.

The United States has never had a third-party presidency. Their pre-election purpose has been as political safety valves that serve to split one of the two parties, launching the other to victory.

The unprecedented thing this time is were experiencing, in effect, a third-party presidency thats broken the teeter-totter and split both parties. The journey and long-term outcome are unknown.

McClatchy Newspapers, Washington, D.C., bureauFacebook has always dwelt in two worlds: the sunny, cat-video-infused social network atop a sophisticated data-collecting operation. Its billions of users may have known this, but not the extent of the companys negligent handling of their personal information.

Now its Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerbergs turn to explain how the two can coexist, and his effort shouldnt lead anyone to click the like icon. Hes offering a mea culpa but not any major solutions. Hes confessing that the social media giant doesnt really know the scope of the damage to data security and personal privacy. The tentative fixes tried out in recent years havent worked.

His awkward, unsatisfying explanation  which came four days after the storm broke over the Cambridge Analytica disclosures  isnt nearly enough. The scandal is attracting all sorts of trouble for a once-golden enterprise that is stumbling over its size, importance and design weaknesses. Facebook, it seems, hasnt really wanted to repair the flaws that might upset its data-hungry outside customers.

Already theres a cry for hearings in Washington, an avenue that should worry Facebook and Zuckerberg, who would be expected to get the hot-lamp treatment. The company fears regulations on its lucrative information sifting. Its also dragged its feet in the past by ignoring signs that it was manipulated by Russian provocateurs who interfered in the 2016 elections here and elsewhere. Topping that is the Cambridge operation itself, which gained access to personality profiles of millions of users with the goal of helping the Trump campaign. Its a politically tinged moment in an election year.

Effective, balanced reforms could be produced. But orchestrated hearings on Capitol Hill with lawmakers throwing loaded questions at a once-favored company are too cynical to take seriously. Another protest gesture such as deleting accounts may not go far, given the addictive popularity of the social network. A Federal Trade Commission inquiry and challenges from several state attorneys general are also under way.

But Facebook alone cant be left in charge of reforming itself. Zuckerberg hasnt shown a willingness to clamp down on abuses that exploit Facebook and manipulate its army of users. An ocean of data, which is becoming the worlds truest currency, is at stake. If the company refuses to explain itself and offer genuine privacy protections, then it will face limitations handed down. Thats the predicament not only in this country, but also elsewhere in the world, where some 2 billion users sign on each month.

This commentary is from The Chronicles editorial board. We invite you to express your views in a letter to the editor. Please submit your letter via our online form: SFChronicle.com/letters.As California voters begin paying more attention to the upcoming June 5 primary, Democrat Gavin Newsom is pulling into a strong lead position in the race for governor as a pair of Republican candidates gain strength, according to a new poll by the Public Policy Institute of California.

Theres now a big gap between (Newsom) and everyone else, said Mark Baldassare, the institutes CEO and director of the poll.

The lieutenant governor, who has long been seen as the front-runner to replace termed-out Gov. Jerry Brown, has the support of 28 percent of the states likely voters, double the 14 percent for Republican businessman John Cox.

The new numbers are anything but good news for Democrat Antonio Villaraigosa. The former Los Angeles mayor, who trailed Newsom by only 2 percentage points, 23 percent to 21 percent, in the institutes January survey, saw his support skid to 12 percent. That puts him between Cox and GOP Assemblyman Travis Allen (10 percent) in the clash for the second ballot spot. The top two candidates advance to the November election, regardless of party.

Democrats John Chiang (6 percent) and Delaine Eastin (5 percent) round out the top contenders.

The biggest change in the poll is probably the number of people who now are paying attention to news about the governors race, Baldassare said. People seem to be getting focused about what the candidates are doing and saying, and thats helped Newsom and Cox.

Nearly half of Californias likely voters are now following the governors race at least fairly closely, a jump of 18 percentage points since January.

Thats helped Cox, who was at 7 percent in the previous poll. He has been focusing his advertising on Republicans and talking about lower taxes and less regulation, which resonates with some of the voters, Baldassare said.

But while Newsom seems to be in a strong position to finish in the top two, Baldassare said, the tight grouping of the rest of the pack and the 24 percent of voters who havent picked a candidate means second place is very much in play.

Its very different in the U.S. Senate primary, where incumbent Sen. Dianne Feinstein continues to hold a commanding lead over fellow Democrat Kevin de Leon, a state senator from Los Angeles.

Feinstein, seeking her fifth full term in office, holds a 42 percent to 16 percent lead over de Leon, who has argued that the former San Francisco mayor is too much of a centrist to represent California properly. But 54 percent of likely voters approve of the job Feinstein is doing in the Senate, and she even outpolls de Leon among likely Latino voters, 41 percent to 22 percent.

The Democrats-only battle for the Senate seat is likely to continue until November, since no credible Republican has signed on to challenge Feinstein. Thats likely the main reason that 71 percent of Republicans are unhappy with their potential choices in the contest.

The poll also included a bright red flag for groups seeking to put tax measures on the November ballot. A PPIC poll record 49 percent of adults and 58 percent of likely voters say they believe California is near the top nationally in state and local taxes, while 61 percent of likely voters say they are paying more taxes than they should.

Thats an attitude that could influence any measure that affects taxes, Baldassare said.

But voters also signaled their willingness to back a state water bond on the June ballot and an affordable housing bond expected for November. Although they were presented with no details about the bonds, a bipartisan 66 percent of likely voters backed the water bond, while a Democrat-heavy 64 percent favored an affordable housing measure.

Theres concern over taxes, but voters continue to view bonds as free money for projects they like, Baldassare said.

The poll is based on a telephone survey conducted March 4-13 of 1,706 California adults, including 931 likely voters. The margin of error is plus or minus 3.4 percentage points for the entire survey and plus or minus 4.5 percentage points for likely voters.As 450 guests tucked into a Paula LeDuc dinner March 17 during the American Red Cross Gala at City Hall honoring chef Tyler Florence, a four-alarm fire was blazing in North Beach.

While it looks like the Coit Liquors building  filled with a variety of restaurants, bars and (surprisingly) empty apartments  is toast, no lives were lost. However, water damage displaced eight next-door neighbors. And thats when the Red Cross rides to the rescue, assisting disaster victims with temporary housing and comfort.

Led by gala co-chairs Lindsey Haswell and Lillian Phan, this elegant evening funded life-saving Red Cross services and also honored the Unity Council for its work during the Ghostship fire in Oakland and the corporate efforts of Wells Fargo Bank.

Also on hand: model-actress Devon Aoki and her brother, DJ Steve Aoki, who served as honorary co-chairs. Her brother not only fired up the postparty dance floor but he was also a hot-ticket live auction item, garnering $40K for three couples to join him on a jet  that night  to groove at his 3 a.m. gig in Las Vegas.

Food and wine run in the Aoki family: The siblings late father, Rocky Aoki, founded Japanese cuisine restaurant chain Benihana. And Devons father-in-law, Jim Bailey, was evacuated in October from his Knights Bridge Vineyard that was in the path of the devastating Tubbs Fire.

Fundraising for the Red Cross, which was so extraordinary during the Napa fires, is an honor, said Devon Aoki. Ive also been a recipient of two blood transfusions, which were most likely the result of the Red Cross, that nations largest blood donation bank. Ever since that experience, Ive wanted to find a way to thank the Red Cross.

Chef Florence was recognized for his fast action organizing some 200,000 meals for Napa County fire victims and first-responders. He also joined forces with LeDuc to create an alfresco Thanksgiving lunch straddling the county line between Napa and Sonoma. The event honored first-responders and raised money for the Red Cross to support fire victims.

Every year climate change is impacting our cities, our nation and the world. And the American Red Cross is always the first organization to arrive at a disaster, providing victims with shelter, clothing and financial aid, Florence said. My wife, Tolan, and I moved to Northern California in 2006 and have dug in deep roots here. This is our community; our home. I will stand with all my neighbors, shoulder to shoulder, during difficult times and be on the front lines.

Two of those victims were also Florences fellow gala honorees: Santa Rosa teens Patrick Foley and Jackson Phillips, both Red Cross volunteers, who each lost their homes to the firestorm that also damaged their Cardinal Newman High School in Santa Rosa.

Food Guide Top 25 Restaurants Where to eat in the Bay Area. Find spots near you, create a dining wishlist, and more.

Theyd joined the organization to fulfill their schools senior-year service elective, working with grade-school children to prepare for disaster. Both had dreamed of deploying somewhere afar to assist those in need affected by disaster. Then the October fires exploded right in their backyard.

Working with the Red Cross, we became that shoulder for people to cry on and give people a blanket or a sweatshirt. We spent countless hours in the shelters, providing material and emotional support, and realize what an important experience that was, said Phillips. It changed our perspectives: Were not alone and were able to help other people in our community.A UC Berkeley student and activist with the animal rights group Direct Action Everywhere covered herself in animal feces outside a San Francisco Trader Joe's on Thursday morning.

The woman, Cassie King, was protesting at the store on Fourth Street in San Francisco's SoMa neighborhood over conditions at farms that supply eggs to Trader Joe's. A recent investigation by Direct Action Everywhere allegedly found starving chickens living amid heaps of their own waste at a supplier in Michigan.

Trader Joe's has denied that the farm in question is a Trader Joe's supplier.

ALSO: San Francisco becomes largest U.S. city to ban fur

"The supposedly 'humane' eggs sold at Trader Joe's come from birds who lived their entire lives in piles of waste," King said, adding that deceptive labels "mislead consumers into paying for cruelty."

MORE: Berkeley butcher shop hangs sign decrying animal slaughter to stop group's protests

"We have spoken with Dutch Farms, who supplies three offerings of eggs to our stores in the Midwest, and have been assured that the footage shown in the video is not from a farm that supplies eggs to Trader Joe's," Trader Joe's spokeswoman Kenya Friend-Daniel said in a statement.

"At Trader Joe's, we hold our suppliers to high standards for animal care and food safety and expect for them to treat animals in accordance with all legal animal welfare regulations," she added. "If we were to discover that any Trader Joe's supplier is not meeting our expectations, we would take immediate action, up to and including terminating our relationship."

Direct Action Everywhere's attention-grabbing demonstrations crop up frequently around the Bay Area. The activists have stormed the dining area at iconic Berkeley eatery Chez Panisse, protested turkey sales at an East Bay Whole Foods around Thanksgiving time, and pushed for the ban on sales of new fur that was approved by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors this week.

Filipa Ioannou is an SFGATE staff writer. Email her at fioannou@sfchronicle.com and follow her on TwitterCalifornias U.S. senators and several Democratic colleagues called Thursday for an investigation into the resignation of a federal immigration agency spokesman who quit after a Northern California sweep for undocumented migrants, saying he was being asked to perpetuate false statements by Trump administration officials about the operation.

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agencys spokesman in San Francisco, James Schwab, told The Chronicle this month that he resigned in frustration over statements by ICE chief Thomas Homan and Attorney General Jeff Sessions that 800 people had eluded the agency because of Oakland Mayor Libby Schaafs public warning before the operation. Schwab said the number was probably far lower.

The mayors Feb. 24 warning came on the eve of a four-day immigration sweep that resulted in 232 arrests.

On Thursday, California Democratic Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Kamala Harris asked the Department of Homeland Securitys Office of Inspector General to look into Schwabs allegations and the accuracy of administration officials statements about the operation. Homeland Security is ICEs parent agency.

We have serious concerns that Trump administration officials are misrepresenting the facts and statistics surrounding this enforcement action for political purposes, Feinstein and Harris wrote in a letter to Homeland Security, which was also signed by 10 other Democratic senators, including Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Cory Booker of New Jersey and Dick Durbin of Illinois.

The senators are asking the inspector general to look into key details about the operation, including communications between Schwab and others in the agency, data on who was arrested, and whether Trump administration officials knowingly made false statements. They are also asking whether officials had political motives for ordering the sweep.

Public policies and law enforcement operations must be informed by facts, the senators wrote, and, not the fabricated overstatements or distortions of political officials.

Schwab, who was hired in 2015 and resigned earlier this month, told The Chronicle he had wanted the agency to correct the assertion that 800 people avoided ICE because of Schaaf, and didnt want to deflect media questions about it.

I quit because I didnt want to perpetuate misleading facts, Schwab said. I asked them to change the information. I told them that the information was wrong, they asked me to deflect, and I didnt agree with that. Then I took some time and I quit.

Sessions said in a March 7 speech in Sacramento that he had learned from Homan that ICE failed to make 800 arrests that would have been made if the mayor had not made her statement. Those are 800 wanted criminals that are now at large in that community.

A day after that, President Trump said ICE had been prepared to arrest close to 1,000 people before Schaafs warning.

Following Schwabs resignation, ICE spokeswoman Liz Johnson said in a statement: Even one criminal alien on the street can put public safety at risk and, as Director Homan stated, while we cant put a number on how many targets avoided arrest due to the mayors warning, it clearly had an impact.Nothing blurred about this ruling

A federal appeals court on Wednesday upheld a jurys finding that Robin Thickes song Blurred Lines infringed on the copyright of Marvin Gayes Got to Give It Up  and the courts damages award of $5.3 million. The family of Gaye, who died in 1984, argued that Got to Give It Up was copied without permission, and that it had helped make Blurred Lines the biggest hit of 2013. Lawyers for Thicke and Pharrell Williams, who helped write and record the song, disputed that claim, and in the wider music industry, many worried that suit went too far in trying to protect generic elements of a songs style and feel.

Medical bankruptcies rarer than thought?

Medical bills can push patients over the financial cliff, but a new study says this may not happen as often as previous research suggests. Hospitalizations cause only about 4 percent of personal bankruptcies among non-elderly U.S. adults, according to an analysis published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine. This contrasts with previous research by U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren and others that pointed to medical reasons as the trigger for more than 60 percent of U.S. bankruptcies.

What does Kalanick have in store?

Former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick is once again a chief executive  tweeting Tuesday that he will head City Storage Systems, a holding company that redevelops distressed real estate, particularly parking, retail and industrial property. Kalanick described it as a 15-person startup, and Recode reported that its offices will be in Los Angeles.The biggest bank in the Nordic region will no longer let its sustainable investment unit buy more stock in Facebook.

Nordea Bank has decided to quarantine Facebook investments in the asset management unit, given the high-level revelations and the turmoil surrounding the company with a strong public backlash, tweeted Sasja Beslik, the head of sustainable finance.

What were worried about are systemic issues and how they are managed once they emerge, Beslik said by phone.

Courts

Thwarting IRS

gets a bit easier

The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday to make it harder for the federal government to use a section of tax law to convict someone of obstruction.

The government had interpreted a section of the tax code to give it a broad ability to charge someone with obstructing or impeding the work of the IRS. It argued that someone could violate the statute by doing something intended to obstruct the IRS work, like shredding records, even if the person wasnt under investigation at the time or was under investigation but didnt know it.

But the Supreme Court ruled 7 to 2 to limit the application of the statue. The justices said that to convict someone, the government must show a connection between the obstructive action the person takes and a particular investigation or audit that was pending, or at least reasonably foreseeable.

Africa

Huge trade

pact gets OK

African leaders have signed what is being called the largest free trade agreement since the creation of the World Trade Organization.

The deal creates a continental market of 1.2 billion people, with a combined gross domestic product of more than $3.4 trillion. A major goal is to boost intra-African trade and rely less on the volatility of commodity prices that affect exports.

The aim is to have an agreement, signed by 44 of the African Unions 55 member states, go into effect this year, said the chair of the AU Commission, Moussa Faki Mahamat. States now must ratify the deal, but the number of countries needed to put the agreement into force has not yet been agreed upon.

Concerns remain. The president of Nigeria, one of Africas largest economies, skipped the summit amid trade unions objections. And while Africas largest economies are expected to benefit most from the deal that progressively eliminates tariffs and other trade barriers, some worry that more people from poorer countries will migrate their way.

Chronicle News ServicesAn Indiana state trooper found his police cruiser seriously challenged when he tried to pull over a speeding Dodge Challenger Hellcat on the Indiana Toll Road.

Trooper Dustin Eggert was merging back into traffic near Bremen on Tuesday after helping a broken-down motorist when the reddish-orange Hellcat passed him at a high rate of speed, according to a police statement obtained by Jalopnik. Police said Eggert witnessed the 707-horsepower muscle car weaving in and out of traffic without using turn signals as it passed slower vehicles.A young airline with big ambitions will turn its attention to San Francisco International Airport on Sunday when it launches a non-stop flight between its home airport in Hong Kong and SFO.

Hong Kong Airlines will operate the non-stop service four times a week, on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. The airline plans to expand to daily flights by August 18.

With the addition of this flight on Sunday, the San Francisco-Hong Kong route will boast up to six flights per day.

"Being able to connect these two big developing areas, and being able to offer travelers one more option, I think Hong Kong Airlines is in a very special place to do that," said George Liu, the airline's chief marketing officer.

On the route, the airline will operate its new Airbus A350-900 airplanes that come equipped with 33 lie-flat business class seats, 108 extra-legroom economy comfort seats, and 193 seats in standard economy.

On the SFO-HKG route, Hong Kong Airlines will face intense competition from Cathay Pacific, which operates three round-trip flights every day. United Airlines and Singapore Airlines also provide a single non-stop flight daily.

With all that competition, rates on the SFO-HKG route have tumbled over the last few months. Checking now for flights in May, nonstop roundtrip fares are running about $600-$700 in economy class on all airlines. (If you are willing to make a stop, there are even cheaper options from SFO, such as a $493 round trip fare on China Eastern.)

But it's in business class where Hong Kong Airlines fares are significantly cheaper-- running about $3,100 round trip while United, Cathay and Singapore are currently charging close to $6,000.

"Cathay and Singapore are both very good, they're very established," Liu said. "I think Hong Kong Airlines offers everything they offer, but we bring a little bit more Hong Kong style. We define our product as affordable luxury  you can call it the new luxury."

To lure customers into its business class cabin, Hong Kong Airlines sought the help of former 'Top Chef' champ Chris Cosentino to bring some quintessentially San Francisco dishes from his South of Market Area restaurant, Cockscomb, to premium fliers on eastbound flights.

It wasn't easy.

"It took a lot of time to finagle the menus," Cosentino said at an event at Cockscomb celebrating the new flights.

For weeks, he worked with airline caterer LSG SkyChefs to replicate his favorites.

"We made the dishes at their kitchens, and reheated them in the same ovens that will be used on the airplanes," Cosentino said. "Everything that will be done is exactly how we do it in our kitchens."

Cosentino's menu includes dishes like his twist on Shrimp Louie served in a charred avocado shell, hearty main entrees that include braised lamb, and an assortment of tempting desserts, like Panna Cotta served with fresh California berries. (See the slideshow at the top of this post for a look at some of the dishes and the event.)

At SFO, business class passengers will use the increasingly crowded Air France lounge in International Terminal A. In Hong Kong, they will use the airline's own Club Autus or Club Bauhinia lounges.

The airline is a relative newcomer to long-haul flying, but it has laid out an aggressive expansion plan to directly challenge the the higher-yielding long-haul flying of its Hong Kong competitor, Cathay Pacific.

Hong Kong Airlines only recently operated its first flight to North America when it launched non-stop service to Vancouver, British Columbia in June 2017. In December, it began flying to Los Angeles. The airline will also launch service to New York and London later this year.

Currently, Hong Kong Airlines is not a member of any of the big three airline alliances or a partner with any US carrier, so you won't be able to earn or burn your frequent flyer miles on these flights. However, since it is part of the larger Hainan Airlines Group, which is partnered with Alaska Airlines, I'm hopeful we'll see something along these lines soon. It will need a frequent partnership like this to win over frequent business travelers.

Hong Kong's third-largest airline operates a fleet of 31 Airbus single and dual-aisle jets. It has ordered 21 Airbus A350 jets as part of its expansion to North America and Europe. (See the slideshow at the top for a look at the plane.)

The airline says it offers fliers connections to more than 30 cities from their Hong Kong International Airport hub.

Hong Kong Airlines began operating in 2006 primarily as an airline flying from Hong Kong to other parts of Asia and Australia. The airline is wholly-owned by mainland Chinese conglomerate, HNA Group, which also owns Hainan Airlines, hotels and several financial firms across China. See here how Hainan and Hong Kong Airlines jets look nearly identical.)

"We are very much Hong Kong," Liu said. "We're more relaxed. We're more flexible. We're more personal and we're quick to adapt. And we're bringing in a lot of fun ingredients to our service."

More about Hong Kong Airlines on its website.

On Sunday we'll be out at SFO for the inaugural flight's arrival and a walk through the plane so stay tuned for a slideshow!

Read all recent TravelSkills posts here

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Chris McGinnis is the founder of TravelSkills.com. The author is solely responsible for the content above, and it is used here by permission. You can reach Chris at chris@travelskills.com or on Twitter @cjmcginnis.Police have arrested a man for allegedly threatening a Muni bus driver before threatening and pushing another man nearby.

Officers responded to reports of a bus driver being threatened by a passenger at Sacramento and Cherry streets on the night of March 7. The driver had arrived as the end of the line when a male passenger lingered on her bus, police said, and the driver told the man he had to exit.

The man, later identified as 51-year-old Eugene Stevens, of San Francisco, made threats to harm the driver, police said, before getting off the bus.

Responding officers located and detained Stevens in the 3700 block of California Street, police said. A man approached officers and told them that Stevens had threatened and pushed him while the two were inside a medical facility on California Street.

Stevens was later connected to a separate assault on another MUNI driver on March 3 in the Richmond district.

Stevens was arrested and booked into county jail on suspicion of threats and misdemeanor battery, police said, in addition to felony battery on a transit employee. He is being held on $35,000 bond.One man was killed and two others were wounded Wednesday night in a shooting outside an elementary school in Oakland, authorities said.

Officers responded to a shooting that occurred about 8:40 p.m. on the 1600 block of Eighth Street, near the intersection with Peralta Street, just outside elementary school PLACE @ Prescott, said Officer Johnna Watson of the Oakland Police Department.WASHINGTON  For the second time in just over four months, California Sen. Dianne Feinstein called for tougher gun control laws  including a ban on assault weapons  while prosecutors, police chiefs and gun violence survivors stood by her side.

Thursdays news conference was nearly identical to one she held last fall after mass shootings in Sutherland Springs, Texas, and Las Vegas. But this time, three of the survivors were from last months school massacre in Parkland, Fla. And instead of fading away into the next news cycle, as in the past, the push for gun controls is expected to draw hundreds of thousands of people to the March for Our Lives protest Saturday in Washington, D.C., and more than 600 other U.S. cities.

Organizers in San Francisco are expecting more than 100,000 gun violence protesters at the Civic Center starting at 1 p.m.

We are just inundated, hundreds of people are showing up at our events, said Elizabeth Moore, head of community outreach for the San Francisco chapter of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America. Sometimes its just the way the stars are aligned  public opinion, the level of energy behind a movement or idea. My sense now is were there. Were very close. Its a tipping point.

Among the gun proposals Feinstein is pushing is her own legislation to reinstate a ban on assault weapons. In the 14 years since her original assault weapons ban expired in 2004, Congress has enacted no legislation restricting guns. Instead, Congress has sought to ease gun controls, including a bill passed by the Republican-led House this session that would allow permitted gun owners to carry their concealed weapons across state lines, and a pending House bill that would make it easier to purchase gun silencers.

Since the Feb. 14 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland that killed 17 and wounded 17, both those bills have lost momentum. The House and Senate instead on Thursday approved two provisions aimed at reducing gun violence that were tucked into a $1.3 trillion spending bill.

One would lift a 22-year-old ban prohibiting the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from studying the effects of gun violence. The new provision would allow the CDC to study gun violence, while barring the agency from advocating for gun controls.

Another provision in the spending bill would provide incentives to states to enter the identities of people who are disqualified from owning guns into the National Instant Criminal Background Check System.

Gun control activists at Feinsteins event Thursday called both measures baby steps. They demanded that Congress pass legislation to extend background checks to those purchasing weapons online and at gun shows. They also want a ban on assault weapons and whats known as a gun violence restraining order law, which would ease the ability of families and law enforcement to temporarily remove weapons from people suspected of harboring an intent to commit violence.

California enacted such a law after a 2014 mass shooting in Isla Vista (Santa Barbara County). The parents of shooter Elliot Rodger had alerted authorities to his troubling behavior before the shooting, which left six dead and 14 injured, but law enforcement had no legal grounds to confiscate his weapons.

Rep. Salud Carbajal, D-Santa Barbara, has introduced a similar bill in the House.

Legislation by Rep. Mike Thompson, D-St. Helena, to expand background checks to most gun sales has a record 204 co-sponsors, just shy of the 218 votes needed for House passage.

Feinstein introduced her latest assault weapons ban in November following the mass shootings at an outdoor concert in Las Vegas in October that left 58 dead and 851 wounded and at a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, weeks before that that killed 26 and wounded 20. But soon afterward, the news coverage of the massacres faded along with interest in tighter gun laws.

These are military weapons designed to kill large numbers of people in close combat, Feinstein said of the guns used by the shooters. They are not hunting weapons. They are not defensive weapons.

Her legislation has 29 co-sponsors, less than half the 60 votes the legislation would need to pass the Senate.

Its a long road, its a hard road, Feinstein acknowledged, but she noted that the weapons were banned in the past and can be again. Every American should be saying enough is enough.ED NOTE: Eds: Updates details from latest, final agreements, White House reaction. With AP Photos.

By Andrew Taylor

Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP)  Negotiators on a $1.3 trillion government spending bill dropped protections for so-called Dreamer immigrants and gave President Donald Trump only a partial victory on funding for his U.S.-Mexico border wall as talks entered the final stage on Wednesday.

A meeting of top congressional leaders produced tentative accords on two tax provisions and a decision to strengthen the criminal background check system for gun purchases. House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., said an official agreement on the sweeping measure would likely come very soon.

GOP aides said that Trump would win $1.6 billion for a border wall and physical barriers along the border, which would construct older wall designs and repair existing segments. But Trump would be denied a more recent, far larger $25 billion request for multi-year funding for the wall project. Democrats said just $641 million would go to new segments of fencing and walls that double as levees.

Negotiators planned to unveil the massive government-wide spending bill later in the day in hopes of passing it before a Friday midnight deadline to avoid a government shutdown.

A senior administration official said the White House is generally happy with the emerging deal. The person said the plan addresses the presidents top priorities, including a large funding increase for the military, border security measures and money to fight the opioid epidemic.

The top four leaders of both House and Senate met Wednesday and emerged saying they basically had a deal.

Were finalizing, said House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., told reporters, saying the bill would shortly be made public. Were in a good place.

The bill would give Trump a huge budget increase for the military, while Democrats would cement wins on infrastructure and other domestic programs that they failed to get under President Barack Obama. It funds a 2.4 percent pay raise for military personnel touted by Republicans.

The aides required anonymity because the agreement is not yet public.

Battles over budget priorities in the huge bill were all settled, while a handful of non-budget issues remained, including a GOP effort to fix a poorly drafted section of the recent tax cut law that is harming Midwestern grain companies.

At Wednesdays meeting, GOP aides said, top leaders including Ryan agreed to fix this so-called grain glitch  while adding a tax-credit provision sought by Democrats to boost low-income housing units.

They also said the agreement would add Fix NICS legislation designed to beef up compliance with gun background check reporting requirements.

As expected, the measure wont renew protections for young Dreamer immigrants facing possible deportation. It also wont provide subsidies to insurers who cut costs for low-earning customers. And it wont have federal payments to carriers to help them afford to cover their costliest clients.

Another fight would remove an earmark protecting money for a rail tunnel under the Hudson River thats a top priority of Trumps most powerful Democratic rival, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y. The project would remain eligible for funding, however, and a Schumer aide said the project was likely to win well more than half of the $900 million sought for Gateway this year under rules governing various Department of Transportation accounts.

The measure on the table would provide major funding increases for the Pentagon  $80 billion over current limits  bringing the military budget to $700 billion and giving GOP defense hawks a long-sought victory.

We made a promise to the country that we would rebuild our military. Aging equipment, personnel shortages, training lapses, maintenance lapses  all of this has cost us, said House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis. With this weeks critical funding bill we will begin to reverse that damage.

Domestic accounts would get a generous 10 percent increase on average as well, awarding Democrats the sort of spending increases they sought but never secured during the Obama administration.

Both parties touted $4.6 billion in total funding to fight the nations opioid addiction epidemic, a $3 billion increase. More than $2 billion would go to strengthen school safety through grants for training, security measures and treatment for the mentally ill. Medical research at the National Institutes of Health, a longstanding bipartisan priority, would receive a record $3 billion increase to $37 billion.

Community development block grants, which are flexible funds that are enormously popular with mayors and other local officials, would receive a huge $2.4 billion increase to $5.2 billion despite being marked for elimination in Trumps budget plan. And an Obama-era transportation grant program known as TIGER would see its budget tripled to $1.5 billion. Head Start for preschoolers would get a $610 boost, while an additional $2.4 billion would go for child care grants.

We have worked to restore and in many cases increase investments in education, health care, opioids, NIH, child care, college affordability and other domestic and military priorities, said Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., a key negotiator of the measure.

Agencies historically unpopular with Republicans, such as the IRS, appear likely to get increases too, in part to prepare for implementation of the Republicans recently passed tax measure. The Environmental Protection Agency, always a GOP target, would have its budget frozen at $8 billion.

Lawmakers agreed on the broad outlines of the budget plan last month. The legislation implementing that deal is viewed as possibly one of few bills moving through Congress this year, making it a target for lawmakers and lobbyists seeking to attach their top priorities.

And while Democrats yielded on $1.6 billion in wall funding, none of that money would go for the new prototypes that Trump recently visited in San Diego. Negotiators rejected Trumps plans to hire hundreds of new Border Patrol and immigration enforcement agents, congressional aides said.

Republican conservatives are dismayed by the free-spending measure, which means Democratic votes are required to pass it. That gave Democrats leverage to force GOP negotiators to drop numerous policy riders that Democrats considered poison pills.MIAMI  A clash between the authority of a sovereign Indian nation and non-native officials is shaping up in Florida, where tribal police entered a hospital in Miami to seize a newborn from her parents, a Miccosukee mother and a white father.

Two days after the girl was born, tribal detectives entered Baptist Hospital, which is outside the tribes reservation in the Everglades, and took Ingrid Ronan Johnson from her parents, Rebecca Sanders and Justin Johnson. The Miami Herald reported that the Miccosukee police were accompanied by Miami-Dade officers and carried a court order. Miami-Dade now says its officers were misled.

The parents have filed complaints with police, prosecutors and the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs, saying the tribal order was concocted by the babys grandmother, Betty Osceola, to keep Johnson out of the girls life. The tribal order grants custody to Osceola.

Im still trying to wrap my head around how this has happened, Johnson, 36, told the newspaper. I cant even begin to explain how hard this has been. I dont see how people of the Miccosukee tribe can look me in the face and tell me this is OK.

Sanders, 28, said she too feels like she has no rights.

I thought the tribe was to protect its people, not use its own rulings to control its people, she told the Herald.

Fort Lauderdale attorney Bradford Cohen, who represents Sanders, said the baby is missing critical bonding time with her mother.

We dont know the health of the baby. We dont know if she is receiving proper care, Cohen said.

Authorities are reviewing what happened at the hospital, which said in a statement that its officials followed a court order. Miami-Dade police said its officers were asked to provide backup while tribal officers executed a federal court order, but the order came from the tribe, not the federal government.

The tribes police chief hasnt returned a phone call for comment.

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio said in a tweet on Wednesday night that the tribe used its court to kidnap the baby.

They dont have any jurisdiction outside reservation, Rubio tweeted.1 Police shooting: A black man who Sacramento police say was seen breaking into at least three vehicles and later into a neighbors home was killed by officers who fired 20 shots, igniting questions by relatives, activists and others after it turned out he was holding only a cell phone. The shooting Sunday night happened in the backyard of the unidentified mans grandparents home, where he was staying, after police said he refused orders to stop and show his hands. Sacramento police say he advanced toward the officers holding an object extended in front of him. The officers thought he was pointing a handgun and opened fire. No gun was found and only the cell phone was found near his body.

2 Pennsylvania election: Democrat Conor Lamb has increased his slim lead over Republican Rick Saccone as vote counting winds down in last weeks special U.S. House election in southwestern Pennsylvania. Lambs lead is 758 votes, based on totals reported Wednesday by the four counties in the 18th Congressional District. An Allegheny County spokeswoman says election officials will sort out 24 challenged provisional ballots on Friday and could certify totals there April 2. Washington and Greene counties have started a five-day certification process while Westmoreland County plans to start its Friday. Lamb has declared victory, but Saccone has not conceded. Republicans have said theyre exploring recount requests.There are a host of islands in San Francisco Bay. They range in size from small rocks to land masses big enough to house mid-size cities. Some are extremely obscure even to locals, others are world renowned tourist destinations. Depending on how you count, there are as many as 48 islands in the bay as documented in James Martin's book, "The Islands of San Francisco Bay."

Among these islands, Alcatraz is easily the most well known. The former federal prison is one of San Francisco's biggest tourist attractions where people can visit the cells that housed Al Capone and the "Birdman of Alcatraz" and see where the famous escape was made in 1962 that remains unresolved to this day. The Alcatraz penitentiary closed 55 years ago this week.

Read More: Here's why Alcatraz was shut down

Alameda Island and Bay Farm Island together form the City of Alameda, which is the most populous of the islands in San Francisco Bay. Alameda has a population of 78,906 people and connects to the southern end of Oakland.

Those who cross between San Francisco and the East Bay are familiar with Treasure Island and Yerba Buena Island, which is a midpoint along the Bay Bridge. Yerba Buena Island was so named in 1850 by the first California legislature but for a brief period from 1890 to 1931 its name actually changed to Goat Island.

Treasure Island is a manmade island created for the 1939 World's Fair. The island has a popular flea market and an annual music festival. Treasure Island and Yerba Buena Island together have a population of close to 2,500 people.

Angel Island is a popular island for tourists and locals looking to camp, hike, bike or ride around on a Segway tour. People access the island via ferry from nearby Tiburon. School groups also make frequent trips to Angel Island to see the site of the WWII Japanese internment camp.

The Brothers Islands are located near the Richmond Bridge. East Brothers Island, the bigger of the two, is home to a lighthouse and a popular bed and breakfast inn. These islands are in San Pablo Bay, which forms the northern estuary of San Francisco Bay.

On the opposite side of San Pablo strait are the Sisters Islands, which are two small rocks near Pt. San Pedro just off the Marin coast. Just south of the Sisters Islands and directly off the coast of San Rafael Bay are the Marin Islands, two rocky formations which make up the Marin Island National Wildlife Refuge.

Just to the south of the Richmond Bridge is Red Rock Island, the only privately owned island in San Francisco Bay. It achieved some fame in 2012 when the owner tried to sell it for $22 million. With no takers, the island again hit the market in 2015, this time the asking price was a mere $5 million.

Brooks Island is a 373-acre preserve located just off the Richmond Inner Harbor. Over 18 species of birds nest here and it is off limits to visitors unless you are part of an East Bay Regional Parks naturalist's tour.

In Marin lies Belvedere, perhaps the wealthiest of all the islands in San Francisco Bay. Accessible by bridge from Tiburon, the median home cost in Belvedere is currently $3,834,800.

In the southern San Francisco Bay, Station Island is not to be forgotten. Within the Fremont city limits, this is the site of Drawbridge, the Bay Area's only ghost town. While it has a colorful past, nowadays there are only remains of decaying cabins from Drawbridge's heyday in the 1920s.

Look in the above gallery to see some of these San Francisco Bay islands. Many will appear very familiar while others you may be experiencing for the first time.You may have seen a sign in your local pet store or dispensary advertising CBD  the chemical compound in cannabis that doesnt get you high and has shown multiple health benefits in people  for pets. Cannabis businesses are flocking to the $30 billion pet market, offering CBD dog supplements and other pot-infused wellness products for animals. As California joins seven other states in legalizing the plant for adult use, pet owners, veterinarians and dispensaries are looking at how cannabis might benefit animals.

The problem is that while physicians can recommend (but not prescribe) cannabis for their human patients, California veterinarians are legally prevented from giving pet owners advice or recommendations regarding the use of medical cannabis. While all cannabis, even CBD, is still federally illegal, pet owners can purchase and give CBD to their pets in legal states. But depending on their state rules, vets may risk losing their licenses if they broach the subject.

As with many things cannabis, when it comes to pot for pets, the rules have not caught up with the science, the business or the culture.

But what do veterinarians think about the safety and benefits of marijuana for animals?

RELATED VIDEO: Medical marijuana role in treating pet illnesses

Dr. Gary Richter, 47, a veterinarian for 20 years, is the owner and medical director of both Montclair Veterinary Hospital and Holistic Veterinary Care of Oakland. Richter has been outspoken on the topic of cannabis for pets, researching its uses for the past three years.

Richter is part of a movement among vets to change the regulations so that vets can oversee medical cannabis for animals. The movement was started largely by Dr. Doug Kramer, a Los Angeles vet who died in 2013.

Richter gave a presentation on cannabis for animals before the California Veterinary Medical Association in October. The issue is at the forefront of the conversation in the veterinary world right now, he said, as legislation will be debated over the next few months.

While there are some differences in how cannabis affects pets compared to humans, they can benefit in many of the same ways people do, Richter said. He adds that his professional experience has shown me that there is enormous potential to treat medical conditions with cannabis.

More for you Owners treat sick animals with cannabis

But Richter warns that while CBD is medically beneficial, THC, the chemical compound in cannabis responsible for the high effect, can be dangerous to animals. THC overdoses in dogs in particular may lead to medical complications and, in extreme cases, death. He believes cannabis should be given to pets only as a medicine, based on a veterinarians professional analysis and dosages to prevent complications.

There is an impression that cannabis is 100 percent safe, he said. This is not true, especially in pets. ... An overdose of cannabis can lead to loss of balance, loss of appetite and sometimes collapse. In rare cases, an overdose of cannabis can be fatal.

Liz Hughston, a 47-year-old vet in San Jose, and founder and head technician of VetTechXpert, is also an administrator of the Veterinary Cannabis Academy on Facebook and an advisory board member for Phyto Animal Health (a division of Medical Marijuana Inc.), which produces hemp CBD oil for pets.

She first grew interested in marijuana for pets after her dog reacted badly to a pharmaceutical anxiety medication her vet at the time recommended. Cannabis supplements did wonders, she said, without the side effects of the drug.

She says people are giving cannabis to dogs and cats to reduce noise phobia, anxiety and itching; control pain, especially with arthritis; lessen the severity and frequency of seizures; and treat many other conditions.

The wiring that makes cannabis effective in humans and animals is called the endocannabinoid system, a series of receptors in the human brain and throughout the body that regulate many physiological processes like pain, mood, appetite, memory and more.

Every animal with a spinal column also has an endocannabinoid system, so it stands to reason that cannabis can help many species, she said. I think weve reached an inflection point in society now where cannabis use in humans has become much more widespread and accepted. People see the good it does in people and want to provide the same benefits to their pets.

Robert Silver, a retired veterinarian of 35 years from Boulder, Colo., is also a veterinary herbalist and past president of the Veterinary Botanical Medical Association. He has spent years of his career advocating for the veterinarian use of hemp, and more recently cannabinoids. He consults with the hemp company Folium Biosciences as their chief veterinary officer and the veterinary nutraceutical company RxVitamins as chief medical officer.

Silver, 68, was skeptical about medical marijuana, but over the years began to see how animals benefit from cannabinoid treatments.

As I explored the phytopharmacological aspects of this plant, I fell in love with it, he said.

Unlike in California, the Colorado Veterinary Medical Association recognizes the potential benefits of marijuana therapies, so Colorado allows its vets to offer cannabis advice. After Colorado legalized marijuana in 2012, Silver observed animals undergoing cannabinoid therapies and recovering from conditions that had been hard to treat with either conventional or other integrative medicine approaches.

Silver said he has seen cancer tumors shrink with cannabis, noting that in some cases CBD will do the trick, and in others a blend of THC and CBD works best. Hes also seen dogs that have been given CBD in place of their prescribed arthritis medication do better than on the NSAIDs.

Hes also observed dogs with low-grade seizures who were able to stop their anticonvulsant therapies by switching to cannabis, but notes that this doesnt happen in every case and cautions that it is always dangerous to take an animal off a prescribed seizure medication.

This needs to be done with your veterinarian to avoid a visit to the ER, he said.

Despite stacks of anecdotes and many animal studies (often designed to compare and assess the potential effects of cannabis for human use), Silver notes that veterinary studies of cannabis are lacking because the DEA has put a hold on research by veterinarians, making it very difficult for them to use even non-psychotropic hemp.

Silver recommends pet owners stick to CBD and hemp to avoid the complex and potentially dangerous effects of THC in dogs and other animals, and notes that pet owners in states lacking medical marijuana laws can purchase CBD pet products online. However, anyone looking into purchasing cannabis, even for their pets, should be careful to check on their states laws surrounding the purchase of CBD products, and remember that even in states where cannabis is legal, CBD and other cannabis products are not federally legal.

Kat Donatello, CEO and founder of the Seattle CBD dog treat company Austin and Kat, says she gives her product to her dog, Austin, every day.

Her company started as a home kitchen project to help her aging dog Brady and young pup Austin, but it quickly became a business as demand increased.

Now her products are found online and in stores and vet clinics as well as animal rehabilitation centers in 15 states, including California. She said the vet clinics are able to carry her hemp-derived CBD product as they have reseller permits, making them technically retail establishments selling a hemp product.

While Im not a vet, I care very deeply for our customers pets, she said. Im happy to work one on one to help owners find solutions to their pets issues. Many times we are the last resort after failed medications and other treatment options.

The quandary keeping vets from advising their patients on pot effectively forced Dr. Tim Shu, an emergency vet of seven years in Los Angeles, out of the medical field and into the market. Frustrated with the inability to legally offer cannabis to pets after hed witnessed the many benefits the plant could provide them, the 35-year-old quit his practice in 2015 to open his L.A. company VetCBD, which offers CBD pet supplements. He started his company so that pet owners would have access to safe, effective cannabis products for their pets.

He notes that for any pet owner looking for a product, formulation and dosing are the key things to watch for.

Products should clearly state the cannabinoid contents and should be lab-tested by third-party laboratories for potency, pesticides and solvents to ensure safety and efficacy.In the days it took Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to personally respond to news that a political data firm used by President Trumps campaign had obtained information on 50 million users without their knowledge, the media obsessed about his silence.

Where is Mark Zuckerberg? the BBC blared. Missing from Facebooks Crisis: Mark Zuckerberg, the New York Times wrote.

The feverish focus on Zuckerberg exemplified his ridiculously outsize influence on our lives. That one 33-year-old technology CEO, who created a cool way to share information, should be perceived as critical not only to his companys future but to the future of democracy is absurd. He should not be this powerful.

Facebooks sense of responsibility  or its abilities  has not grown in tandem with its influence. It has failed to anticipate threats. And when it solves one security problem, another pops up. It has already shown it cannot completely prevent its service from being used for bad purposes.

Facebook has also proved how much we enjoy sharing with each other. Social media is probably an irreversible part of our culture now. The problem is, unlike in the case of Uber, where users disgusted by its sexual harassment culture could switch to Lyft, there is no alternative for people fed up with Facebook who want access to such a network.

Zuckerberg, in his first response, said the company had already taken steps to prevent bad actors from accessing peoples information, pledged to further restrict developers data access and said hes serious about doing what it takes to protect our community.

But weve heard similar pledges before.

Like when the Federal Trade Commission found that Facebook engaged in deceptive practices by making public the data that users considered private.

Or when terrorists used Facebook to recruit.

Or as people began committing suicide on Facebook Live.

Or as fake news permeated the service.

Or as hate speech spread on Facebook in Myanmar, fueling a genocide there.

Zuckerberg pledged to have 20,000 employees working on security by the end of the year. Strikingly, he acknowledged that the company doesnt have a handle on what happened with peoples data in the past. Even if you solve the problem going forward, theres still the issue of ... were there apps which could have gotten access to more information, and potentially sold it, without us knowing, Zuckerberg told the New York Times as part of a media blitz that included interviews with CNN and Recode, too. He promised a full investigation of every app that got access to a large amount of information.

His statements were a belated, seemingly genuine, expression of good faith to want to fix the problem.

But we cant wait any longer for Facebook to figure out how to protect us. Its time for those preaching more humane, responsible technology to form a social network with the algorithms and humans needed to prevent abuse, which isnt afraid to feature credible, fact-based journalism and eradicate fake news. One that is transparent about how its business model works. Perhaps one of more modest ambition that wont become as dominant or as hard to police, and that will help dilute Facebooks negative impacts. Id pay to be part of such a social network so that my likes and shares werent how the company made money.

Revelations that Cambridge Analytica obtained so many Facebook users information is only the latest example of the companys negligence. The story hit a nerve here and in Europe, and the furor poses serious legal, financial and reputational threats to the company.

But even if Facebook wins lawsuits and avoids regulation that could undercut a business model that relies on marketing user data, the social media giant will inevitably face subsequent crises unless it finally abandons the idea that its just a neutral technology service without responsibility for what happens there.

Facebook clung to this definition in 2012, when it was hijacked by jihadists seeking new followers. Social media is no longer simply a fun way to share updates on the harmless idiosyncrasies of our lives, I wrote then. It can undermine national security, and there ought to be a more robust discussion between the Bay Area technology world and Washington on what to do about it.

That didnt happen. Then came other awful behavior, like teen bullying and suicides on Facebook Live, which led to even more lawsuits but not any fundamental change.

Facebook grew to dominate more of our lives, including our news consumption, where it helped amplify conspiracy theories and fake news and propaganda by a foreign power during the 2016 election campaign.

Its executives initially played down the notion that fake news influenced the results. Then the company put out ridiculously small estimates of the number of people affected. Finally, it acknowledged that 126 million users may have seen Russian propaganda (researchers put the number even higher). General counsels from Facebook, Twitter and YouTube (sites that were similarly manipulated) testified on Capitol Hill and got out of there without pledging much. Russia will try to exploit them all again in November.

Still, the Cambridge Analytica story may be even more damning. Beyond the reporting, Facebook insiders are exposing the companys true priorities. They really didnt want to know, to a certain extent, what was happening with the data once it left Facebook, Sandy Parakilas, an operations manager at Facebook in 2011 and 2012, told NPR on Tuesday. Parakilas says he pushed the company for more protection of user data. But they didnt seem to prioritize protecting users over the growth of Facebook apps, he added.

The risks of third-party applications have long been known. This is a story about an ecosystem full of privacy risk and the inevitable abuse that resulted, said Daphne Keller, director of intermediary liability at Stanfords Center for Internet and Society.

Even if Zuckerberg moves to stem that risk, the damage has been done. What worries me is that this data trove is out there, Krishna Bharat, the founder of Google News, told me. Theres not a chance it was deleted, since it is so valuable to campaigns. Who is going to use it in the future? People dont change that much, and it will be current. Combined with fake memes, you can still inflict great harm on the democratic process.

Sadly, I cant entirely escape Facebook yet. As a journalist, it remains an essential reporting tool. I might still want to view information in a Facebook parent group at my daughters school. As a first step, Ive downloaded an archive of my posts and deactivated my account to allow for re-log-ins should I need information I cant get elsewhere. Theres no way to ensure that my past data arent misused. But at least I  and you  have the power not to post there anymore.SAN FRANCISCO (BCN)

A lawyer for Chevron Corp. told a federal judge in San Francisco today that the company "accepts the consensus of the scientific community" that climate change is real and is caused primarily by human activity.

"That has been Chevron's position for a decade," attorney Theodore Boutrous told U.S. District Judge William Alsup.

Boutrous spoke at an unusual tutorial session scheduled by Alsup in connection with two lawsuits filed against San Ramon-based Chevron and four other oil and gas companies by San Francisco and Oakland.

The cities claim the corporations created a public nuisance by promoting the use of oil and natural gas while knowing that the fuels lead to the "grave danger" of global warming and rising sea levels.

They also claim the companies engaged in public relations campaigns to downplay the risks in the 1990s and early 2000s.

The suits ask for financial compensation, possibly in the billions of dollars, to pay for seawalls and other infrastructure to protect people and property against rising sea levels and global warming.

Alsup did not issue any rulings during the session, but is expected to schedule a hearing later this spring on a bid by the five companies for dismissal of the case.

The companies claim in a motion filed Tuesday that the case doesn't belong in federal court.

"There's no doubt that warming is a global issue that requires global debate and engagement," Boutrous told Alsup. "This is not a case about whether global warming exists. It is about whether a court like this one is the right way to deal with it."

Tutorial sessions are occasionally used by judges to gain background on scientifically or technologically complex cases. For this session, Alsup asked for information about the history of scientific study of climate change and current science on global warming and sea level rise. He gave each side two hours.

Boutrous said Chevron is relying on a 2013 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an international agency that synthesizes research by hundreds of scientists.

He said Chevron accepts the report's conclusion that "It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century."

But Boutrous sought to emphasize parts of the IPCC report and other reports that showed uncertainty in predicting the extent of future temperature and sea-level increases.

In one example, Boutrous showed a 2017 state of California report that showed a 96 percent chance of a rise of one foot in the sea level at the Golden Gate entrance to San Francisco Bay by 2100, a 70 percent chance of a 2-foot rise and a 28 percent chance of a 3-foot rise.

But Alsup commented, "In other words, there's a 50-50 chance of something between two and three feet. That's still a lot of water, isn't it?"

In addition to Chevron, the other companies sued are BP PLC, ConocoPhillips Co., Exxon Mobil Corp. and Royal Dutch Shell PLC. The other companies did not make presentations today, but Alsup instructed them to tell him within two weeks of any Chevron statements they disagree with. Otherwise, they will be deemed to agree, he said.

While Chevron chose a lawyer for its tutorial, San Francisco and Oakland selected three scientists.

Gary Griggs, an earth sciences professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz, noted that the 2017 California report said the rate of ice melting in Antarctica and Greenland has increased and that "waiting for absolute certainty is not an option."

Griggs said the effects of sea level rises are worsened by other phenomena such as king tides and El Nino events.

He showed pictures of the San Francisco Embarcadero flooded during a king tide and a hypothetical map showing that more than half of Oakland International Airport would be submerged if the sea level rises by 3 feet.

University of Illinois atmospheric science professor Don Wuebbles, who contributed to the 2013 IPCC report, said, "The science did not stop at 2012. There is a lot we have learned in the past five years."

Wuebbles said predictions are now more certain and the rate of increase in sea level is higher than at any time in the last 2,800 years.

"Our projections are a rise of one to 4 feet by the end of the century, but it could be as high as 8 feet," he said.

Alsup has set a briefing schedule for the companies' motion to dismiss that could extend to the end of April, meaning that a hearing would not be held until May.

San Francisco City Attorney Dennis Herrera said in a statement today, "What we saw today was one oil company begrudgingly accepting the scientific consensus while trying to overemphasize the extent of scientific uncertainty.

"These companies have made enormous profits while putting our cities in harm's way. Now the bill has come due. It's time for them to pay for the seawalls and other infrastructure needed to protect San Francisco and Oakland," Herrera said.

###3 1 of 3 SAM DEANER Show More Show Less 2 of 3 Brant Ward/The Chronicle Show More Show Less 3 of 3





Diablo Valley College has cancelled all classes and college activities Thursday at their main Pleasant Hill campus due to a "potentially serious threat" that has been made against the college, according to the college's website early this morning.

Diablo Valley College Police Lt. Ryan Huddleston said the threat was found somewhere on campus and the administration made the decision to close the Pleasant Hill campus for the day. The police department is currently investigating the threat.SAN FRANCISCO (BCN)

A San Francisco man was arrested earlier this month on suspicion of attacking one transit employee and threatening another, police said today.

Eugene Stevens, 51, was arrested March 7 shortly after police were dispatched at 7:08 p.m. to the corner of Sacramento and Cherry streets in the city's Presidio Heights neighborhood.

Police said they were sent there because someone was allegedly threatening a San Francisco Municipal Railway driver.

The Muni driver alleged that Stevens threatened her after she told him he needed to leave the bus because it was at the end of its route when all passengers are required to exit, according to police.

Stevens allegedly made threats before getting off the bus and walking away.

Police said they detained Stevens in the 3700 block of California Street because he allegedly matched the description of the person who threatened the Muni driver.

As police were investigating, a person told officers that Stevens was inside a medical building when he allegedly made threats against him and pushed him before leaving the building.

Police said their investigation also revealed that Stevens had allegedly attacked a Muni driver on March 3.

Stevens was arrested on suspicion of making threats, misdemeanor battery, and felony battery.

The investigation is ongoing. Police are asking anyone with information about the case to call the Police Department's tip line at (415) 575-4444 or text them at TIP411 and begin the message with SFPD.

All tips can be made anonymously.

###SANTA ROSA (BCN)

Seven men from the East Coast pleaded not guilty in Sonoma County Superior Court this morning to charges in connection with three home invasion robberies near Petaluma last week.

The defendants were allegedly looking for marijuana when they kicked down doors of three different homes in the 100 and 200 blocks of Eugenia Drive in unincorporated Sonoma County around 3 a.m. March 12, according to the Sonoma County Sheriff's Office. None of the residences had marijuana inside, the sheriff's office said.

Allegedly at least one homeowner was tied up and reportedly pistol-whipped, sheriff's Sgt. Spencer Crum said. The seven men were arrested the same day.

The seven men were booked in the Sonoma County Jail on suspicion of robbery of an inhabited dwelling, burglary, false imprisonment, kidnapping and conspiracy. Six of the men are being held on $1 million bail and one on no bail.

An eighth suspect, 20-year-old Jade Lafay Johnson, of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, was arrested March 15 in Winston-Salem. She is being held there on $1 million bail and she is expected to be extradited to Sonoma County to face prosecution, Crum said.

The eight suspects are from the Richmond, Virginia and Winston-Salem, North Carolina areas, Crum said.

Four of the men were arrested after a pursuit into Novato and three men were arrested when they allegedly tried to board a plane to the East Coast at San Francisco International Airport, Crum said.

Attorneys have been appointed for the seven defendants in custody and preliminary hearing dates were set for May 1 to 3.

The Petaluma home invasion robberies are the second marijuana related offenses in Sonoma County this year.

Three men from Mississippi, New York and Virginia and a Santa Rosa man were arrested and booked in to the county jail on Feb. 8 for two home invasion robberies, burglary and a murder during one of the robberies. Their next court date is March 28.

Two of the four defendants are being evaluated to determine whether they are mentally competent to participate in court proceedings.

A fifth suspect in the February robberies, Amber Hembree, 20, of Richmond, Virginia remains at large.

Authorities are investigating whether the two home invasions are connected.

###

(707) 565-2311A San Francisco police officer was shot this afternoon on the northern edge of the city's Crocker Amazon neighborhood, police said.

The shooting was reported at about 4:30 p.m. in the area of Geneva Avenue and Mission Street.SAN FRANCISCO (BCN)

A terminal at San Francisco International Airport will likely soon be named after the late Harvey Milk, San Francisco's first openly gay politician elected to the Board of Supervisors in 1977.

The city's Board of Supervisors budget and finance committee today recommended approving legislation to name SFO's Terminal 1 after Milk. The name change proposal will now go to the full board for approval.

Milk was assassinated in 1978 along with Mayor George Moscone at City Hall by former Supervisor Dan White. Milk was known as a pioneer for gay rights and also fought for migrant farm workers, low-income tenants, laborers and homeless youth among others.

The renaming of the terminal has been a long time in the making.

The first attempt was by former Supervisor David Campos in 2013 but that idea was abandoned in the face of opposition. Instead, Campos reached a compromise agreement to form a committee to recommend which of SFO's terminals or other facilities should be renamed.

Then in 2017, following a vote by the Airport Facilities Naming Advisory Committee in support of the renaming, Supervisor Hillary Ronen introduced new legislation to begin the process of renaming the terminal.

"Thank you for daring to declare SF a city of acceptance, of celebrated diversity and of hope no matter one's background," former state Sen. Mark Leno said on social media today regarding the legislation.

Leno, a current San Francisco mayoral candidate, is also openly gay.

On Twitter, Campos, also openly gay, thanked Ronen and Supervisor Jeff Sheehy, among others, for supporting the effort, saying, "In the age of Trump it is critical to remember Harvey's legacy."

###Diablo Valley College has canceled all classes and college activities today at their main Pleasant Hill campus after graffiti was found threatening gun violence on campus, according to the Contra Costa Community College District.

Diablo Valley College police Lt. Ryan Huddleston said the department is currently investigating the threat.BCN38)

SAN FRANCISCO (BCN)

A San Francisco police officer and five other people suffered gunshot wounds this afternoon in the city's Excelsior neighborhood and one is in critical condition, police said.

Initial information from police indicated the shooting was on the edge of the Crocker Amazon neighborhood.

Police Chief William Scott said officers responded at about 4:30 p.m. to the 200 block of Amazon Avenue after police learned a man had a gun.

Officers confronted several people inside a business on the corner of Geneva Avenue and London Street and gunfire was exchanged, injuring the six, including the suspect.

Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital spokesman Brent Andrew said the police officer is in fair condition.

A minor was shot. Andrew said hospital officials are not releasing the minor's condition.

One of the other four shooting victims is in critical condition, one is in serious condition and two are in fair condition, Andrew said. The four are men between 24 and 48 years old.

Scott asked anyone with information about the shooting to call the Police Department's 24-hour tip line at (415) 575-4444 or text a tip to TIP411 and start the message with SFPD.

Anyone who provides a tip can remain anonymous.

Scott said police will hold a townhall meeting within 10 days to provide information on the shooting.

###SAN FRANCISCO (BCN)

A San Francisco police officer and five others suffered gunshot wounds in a police shootout this afternoon in the city's Excelsior neighborhood and the suspect may die, police said.

Officers responded at about 4:30 p.m. to the 200 block of Amazon Avenue after police learned a man had a gun, Police Chief William Scott said.

Officers confronted several people inside a business on the corner of Geneva Avenue and London Street and gunfire was exchanged, injuring the six people.

Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital spokesman Brent Andrew said the police officer is in fair condition.

Andrew said a minor was shot and hospital officials are not releasing the minor's condition.

Police said the man who had the gun and one other person have life-threatening injuries. Andrew said two others are in fair condition. The four are men between 24 and 48 years old.

Scott asked anyone with information about the shooting to call the Police Department's 24-hour tip line at (415) 575-4444 or text a tip to TIP411 and start the message with SFPD.

Anyone who provides a tip can remain anonymous.

Scott said police will hold a townhall meeting within 10 days to provide information about the shooting.

###Former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger made some bold statements at a centrist GOP summit in Los Angeles on Wednesday morning, comparing the Republican Party to the Titanic "after it hit the iceberg" and calling on Republicans dissatisfied with the party to withhold their donations until changes are made.

"Today we are the Titanic after it hit the iceberg but before the last bit of the ship submerged," said Schwarzenegger at the New Way California Summit. "But unlike the Titanic, we might be able to save Leonardo Dicaprio before he goes under."

But as Schwarzenegger sat onstage beside Ohio Gov. John Kasich, there was one thing more attention-grabbing than his rhetoric: His shoes, black boots adorned with the eagle and flag of the Great Seal of the United States government, against a backdrop of even more American flags.

The shoes, reportedly made by an Oklahoma bootmaker whose prices start at $5,000, are definitely a statement piece, though the nature of the statement isn't 100 percent clear.

"My opinion? Girl, it's a lot of look but I celebrate his bravery," said Chronicle style columnist Tony Bravo.

Amazingly, the shoes are not the most stereotypically ultra-American thing Schwarzenegger has been spotted in around SoCal in recent years. In 2014, he was photographed wearing a cowboy hat, cowboy boots and camo tee with American crest while smoking a cigar and driving a Hummer. (In something of an ironic reversal, he is now suing oil companies for first-degree murder.)

They might not even be the most patriotic pair of cowboy boots in his collection of more than a dozen pairs, which he was photographed lovingly polishing in 2014  there's another pair adorned with an American flag.

Lest you think he's forgotten his roots as a little farm boy in the Austrian village of Thal, fear not! he also has a pair of boots emblazoned with the Austrian flag, according to Oklahoma craftswoman Lisa Sorrell, on whom he has relied for many of his cowboy-boot needs.

World's most patriotic footwear or violation of the flag code? You decide!

Filipa Ioannou is an SFGATE staff writer. Email her at fioannou@sfchronicle.com and follow her on TwitterSeattle's ABC affiliate is running right-leaning segments from the pro-Trump Sinclair Broadcast Group during local news.

On Wednesday, Queen Anne & Magnolia News editor Joe Veyera pointed out one of the segments that aired during KOMO-TV's 6 p.m. newscast. Wednesday's segment was based on a Monmouth University poll, which found that 74 percent of those polled believed in the existence of a "Deep State" in the United States government.

(Editor's note: KOMO News and SeattlePI have a content-sharing agreement.)

RELATED: KOMO owner Sinclair asks workers to give to political fund

President Donald Trump has blamed the Deep State for undermining his presidency, an argument echoed in the Sinclair segment by Sebastian Gorka, a former Trump adviser. Gorka, who stepped down from his White House post last August after less than eight months on the job, holds views on Islam and national security dubbed "extreme even by Washington standards" by Harvard professor of international affairs Stephen Walt.

The Sinclair segment, produced to look like a newscast, left out the fact that until they were given a definition for "Deep State," 63 percent of those polled said they were unfamiliar with the term. Once it was defined as "a group of unelected government and military officials who secretly manipulate or direct national policy," nearly 74 percent of respondents said they believed in it.

The segment was produced by Sinclair political correspondent Kristine Frazao, who before coming to Sinclair was a reporter and anchor for RT, a news network funded by the Russian government that has been described as "the Kremlin's propaganda outlet" by the Columbia Journalism Review.

RELATED: Report: Q13 to be sold once Sinclair, Tribune merger finalized

Sinclair distributes the "must-runs" to affiliates every day with orders to broadcast them within 48 hours, according to a 2017 article by The New York Times.

Many KOMO employees view the segments as propaganda that doesn't meet the station's editorial standards, according to the Times article. In the past, they have tried to limit their exposure by scheduling them during times of low viewership.

But Wednesday's segment shows Sinclair, which currently owns or operates 193 television stations in the U.S., has succeeded in getting the must-runs on during prime time.

SeattlePI has reached out to KOMO general manager Janene Drafs for comment.

Seattlepi.com reporter Stephen Cohen can be reached at 206-448-8313 or stephencohen@seattlepi.com. Follow Stephen on Twitter at @scohenPI.The widely popular Netflix show "13 Reasons Why," which films around the North and East Bay Area, has not made a fan of everyone.

Some of its most vehement critics have said the show is "irresponsible" in the way it presents the issue of suicide to its viewers. Others, including members of two Bay Area families, believe the show was a "trigger" for their teen daughters, who last year took their own lives.

On Wednesday, the streaming site announced that the second season of the show will be more upfront on the issue, in part by including a warning video (below) featuring the show's cast members addressing teens and other people watching the show. Netflix came to the decision after commissioning a Northwestern University study on how viewers responded to the series.

The study of 5,400 people  including adolescents, young adults, and their parents  found, among other things, that teens who watched the show had an increased empathy towards individuals who may be going through their own mental health issues and bullying. It also found that "tough topic programming" like "13 Reasons Why" can be a coping mechanism and can ignite such important conversations between teens and their parents and peers.

However, another major finding of the study was that Netflix and "13 Reasons Why" could provide more resources to those watching who may be vulnerable to such triggers.

"A major finding of this study is that while adolescents and parents appreciate that '13 Reasons Why' offers an authentic portrayal of tough topics like bullying, suicide, and depression, they express a desire for the show to offer more resources on these issues," the conclusion reads.

"We didn't know in Season 1 that the conversation was going to be this big," Brian Wright, Netflix's vice president of original series, told BuzzFeed News of the change. "What we're doing now with the lead-up to launch is working with organizations all over the globe, mental health organizations, and school counselor organizations to make sure that people are armed with information and ready for these conversations."

In addition to the video, "13 Reasons Why" set up a website at 13ReasonsWhy.info to provide resources and contact information for suicide hotlines and crisis text lines.

Find more information on the study at Buzzfeed.

Alyssa Pereira is an SFGATE staff writer. Email her at apereira@sfchronicle.com or find her on Twitter at @alyspereira.

KILIS, Turkey  After two months of uncertain fighting, Turkey appears suddenly to be riding high in its military campaign to take control of a larger piece of northern Syria.

Along the border, the artillery guns and fighter jets that until recently pounded the low mountains have fallen silent since Turkish forces captured the enclave of Afrin last weekend.

The victory has been widely celebrated in Turkey and has further emboldened President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has vowed to take his campaign across northern Syria and even into Iraq.

Yet the road ahead for Turkey in Syria is uncertain and fraught with risks.

The deepening inroads of Turkey and its allies have been tolerated so far by the two powers that control Syrias airspace, Russia and the United States. But Turkey may yet meet resistance if it pushes much farther.

There is every risk that Turkey, which has a less than illustrious history dealing with its Kurdish population, could find itself embroiled in a guerrilla war in Syria, an extension of its decades-old battle against the Kurdish insurgency at home led by the Kurdistan Workers Party, or PKK.

Afrin is not a region easy to command for Turkey, said Ozgur Unluhisarcikli, director in Turkey of the German Marshall Fund of the United States. Not only is the majority of the population there Kurdish, but an important part of the population is sympathetic to the PKK.

Even Turks euphoria surrounding their sudden win in Afrin was quickly tempered by the messy aftermath of that battle. No sooner had Turkeys proxies on the ground, the Free Syrian Army, captured Afrin city than social media lit up with video and messages depicting looting by its fighters.Egyptians go to the polls next week in what is essentially a one-candidate election considered by critics to be a return of sorts to authoritarian rule, after a 2011 revolution that sparked loftier expectations for the region. But the bigger picture is that in the Middle East as a whole, democracy has largely failed to take hold.

From Morocco in the west to Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the gulf emirates in the east, monarchies have proven more stable than places that experimented with government of the people.

Non-monarchies like Syria and Yemen, which before their wars did have functioning central governments, never made much of a pretense of democracy  not even in the half-hearted sense of communist East Germany calling itself a Democratic Republic. And today many argue that with so little democratic tradition and so much illiteracy  in the case of Egypt, at least a quarter of the population  some places are just not ready.

Countries that tried fairly free balloting  like Iraq and Libya after the fall of Moammar Khadafy  tended to find the effort mired in tribal and sectarian voting. That largely predetermines the result and diminishes democracy into something of a census.

Such cases tend to be further undermined by a tyranny of the majority: It is rare to find respect for the rights of minorities, ideological or ethnic. That makes them desperate, disdainful of democracy, and likely to be tyrannical should political tides reverse. Thats how the minority Sunnis of Iraq became vulnerable to the vicious appeal of the Islamic State group.

While the democratic record is dismal, the Middle East is hardly alone in what seems to be a global trend away from liberal democracy at a turbulent time.

Egypts President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi is following a model perfected by Russias Vladimir Putin, an equally illiberal leader who was re-elected this week after maneuvering his own chief opponent out of the running. El-Sissi has jailed opponents by the thousands  mostly Islamists  and, like Putin, placed security and the economy ahead of all else, delivering in those areas as best he can.

But el-Sissi insists that the real power rests with the people and boasts of an independent judiciary and parliament, claims disputed by rights groups. Under el-Sissis rule, womens representation in the acquiescent parliament and the Cabinet are at highs, Egypt has enacted important economic reforms, and he has also emerged as a strong global voice against Islamic militancy, advocating a moderate religious discourse.

Ironically, it is Egypts continuing claims to be democratic that earn it the criticism that openly despotic countries in the Arab world seem more nimbly able to avoid.PARIS  Travel was upended, schools were closed and tens of thousands of people took to the streets across France on Thursday as railway workers, teachers, students and air traffic controllers went on strike to protest President Emmanuel Macrons economic and social policies.

The protests are a new challenge for Macrons government as it gears up to overhaul Frances rail system and promises changes to unemployment benefits and the pension system. Railway workers are already planning rolling strikes in April and May.

This is a wake-up call for the government, said Laurent Berger, secretary-general of the second-largest railway union. He said the government needed to have real discussions with the unions before everything falls apart.

More than 200,000 workers and students joined in protests around the country, about 48,000 of them in Paris, according to a consortium of journalism organizations that hired a company to estimate crowd sizes to avoid relying on police estimates.

The student presence in Thursdays strike was an echo of Frances historic protests of 1968, which were led by students and began on the same day, March 22, 50 years ago. Those strikes started in French universities and were quickly joined by union members and others, bringing the country to a standstill and forcing reforms in many sectors.

This time, the unions have complained that the Macron government has moved ahead with its plans without true consultation or compromise.

We are obviously keeping a listening attitude, but also a very big determination to pursue the transformation, said Benjamin Griveaux, a government spokesman, after a Cabinet meeting Wednesday.

One poll this week painted a conflicted picture of public opinion, with most people supporting the demonstrations but also favoring the governments reform projects. Another found that nearly 3 of every 4 people in French believed that the Macron governments policy overhauls were unjust, but that almost half saw the overhaul of the railway system as warranted.

Official estimates Thursday said the strikes affected 40 percent of intercity trains and 30 percent of flights.

Though the largest protests were in Paris, there were also large turnouts in Marseille, Nantes, Lyon and other cities.Mercedes Benz is buying the site off-market from Phil Ridgway, of Ridgway Plumbing, who last appeared in Capital Gain in 2011, after selling 660-670 Elizabeth Street, Carlton, to Yarra Housing Australia for $8.5 million. Earlier this year, a BMW occupied car dealership neighbouring the Metropolitan Ring Road in Bundoora was withdrawn from sale after failing to sell following a private sale campaign where it was asking $24.7 million. Last November, Mercedes Benz opened its seventh global Mercedes Me concept store, in a leased space beneath the Rialto Towers complex, in Collins Street. No record to see here Agents have changed strategy to sell a Toorak compound which it was expected would smash the then-Victorian state price record for a residential home, when it hit the market in January with price hopes of up to $50 million.

The six dwellings on the approximate 4696 square metre site  a historic mansion and renovated townhouses  are now being offered individually. Toorak's Evans Court estate. Known through the initial campaign as the Evans Court Estate, the compound of six adjoining properties was amassed over a 20 year period by the late couple James Stafford-Fox, the former head of BP, and his wife, Moyna. In 2013, the wealthy Roche family, which began a civil engineering and mining business in the 1920s, but is now a wealthy private investment house, paid an undisclosed sum, speculated to be about $12 million, for the compound (the sale proceeds were donated entirely to funding dementia research). The family appointed CBREs Julian White and Mark Wizel with Abercrombys Jock Langley to sell the site this year.

Last month, the record price paid for a residential home in Victoria was set at $52.5 million when art dealer Rod Menzies sold Melbournes ex-government house, the Stonington mansion, in Malvern, to an as-yet-undisclosed Asia-based buyer. Tupperware ends era Tupperware is the latest company to be considering whether to rent, rather than owner-occupy, its Melbourne headquarters. Tupperware is selling its Melbourne headquarters. Credit:Cameron Commercial The manufacturer and retailer, which adopts the home party business model, has listed its six hectare Ferntree Gully office warehouse for sale, after 60 years, and with vacant possession.

It could be in for an eight figure payday, sources say, given the location, 32 kilometres east of the CBD, is now one of suburban Melbournes more valuable high-tech industrial areas. Tupperware's factory in Ferntree Gully. Credit:Cameron Commercial A Tupperware spokesperson said the company will review its accommodation options after any sale of 19-21 Brenock Park Drive, but plans to stay in the Knox (municipal) area. Agents David Johnson and Nic Sal of agency Cameron listed the Ferntree Gully building for sale just prior to Christmas. UP leases Banco office United Petroleum has leased a Hawthorn office building developed in 2005 for health group HBA.

The 600 Glenferrie Road building includes some 7000 square metres of lettable area above a three-level underground car park. Local outfit Banco Group was the office developer and is the owner. In recent years part of the site has been subject to a redevelopment application for a seven storey residential building, but this is off the cards for the medium-term, sources say. United Petroleum currently owner-occupies its headquarters in Hoddle Street, Abbotsford, in Melbournes inner north-east  a busy road which government planners have discussed widening in recent years. The 3800 square metre Hawthorn lease deal was struck by Lemon Baxters Paul OSullivan and Jay Pavey. It comes in the week plumbing supply business Reece announced it would move from suburban Burwood, where it has been based since 1986, to an office private developer Zig Inge Group plans to build on top of a historic ex-Rosella factory, in the inner-east Richmond pocket of Cremorne.

Mr OSullivan said that over the past two years, many building owners in Melbournes east have shelved residential proposals and retained their propertys as offices. This has coincided, he said, with businesses realising creative staff, in particular, prefer to work in vibrant inner-city areas, over the outer suburbs. Footscray reception centre selling The western suburb venue hall known as 501 Receptions has found a buyer following a campaign launched five weeks ago. Covering 495-507 Barkly Street, Footscray, the 6289 square metre site has been on and off the market for several years. Most recent campaigns, including this one, targeted residential developers  being offered with plans for a medium density complex containing 198 dwellings and eight shops. Owner occupiers were also invited to bid on the property, configured with a 2590 square metre building and 79-open air car parks.Swiss prosecutors confirmed on Wednesday they were investigating whether miner Rio Tinto paid bribes linked to the landmark Oyu Tolgoi copper-gold mine.

A Mongolian former finance minister who helped launch the project in 2009 said earlier in the day that he expected to be cleared by the Swiss inquiry into the alleged transfer of $US10 million ($13 million) into his account.

As finance minister, Bayartsogt Sangajav signed the investment deal that granted 66 per cent of the giant Gobi desert property to Robert Friedland's Ivanhoe Mines, now known as Turquoise Hill Resources and majority-owned by Anglo-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto.

The Swiss attorney-general's office (OAG) is conducting a criminal investigation into a seized account that court documents say was used to transfer $US10 million to Mr Bayartsogt in September 2008, the month he was appointed minister, Reuters reported on Monday.Mark Zuckerberg finally said the word everyone wanted to hear: Sorry.

"This was a major breach of trust and I'm really sorry it happened," he said in an interview with CNN.

Looking nervous and shaken, the 33-year-old mega-billionaire finally fronted the media, three days into a massive data harvesting scandal that has rocked his $US500 billion ($645 billion) company to its core.

Yet, following the CNN appearance and after interviews with multiple US media outlets also landed online, it seems there is a simple reason he and his top lieutenant Sheryl Sandberg have been silent, until now.They were looking to encourage Australian companies to move their head office to their island state. Our corporate tax rate was over 30 per cent at the time, while Singapores rate was 15 per cent. But for handpicked companies like mine there was a special price of just 7 per cent. But I believe in the Australian system that creates the sort of society that enabled me to build a successful business. Avoiding tax, even if it seems legal, is a very shortsighted ambition. Appalling tax practices When the matter of tax comes up, Charlie always tells the story of an international company that became involved with a local company. The Australian company had a profit of around $50 million and paid tax of about $15 million without question. Within two years of the involvement of the international company, the tax had been reduced to $5 million and the year after that to zero. And the company was just as profitable. Loading

I could be boring and tell you all the ways that this happens, but Im sure that our tax officials and their masters know. We have just got to get smarter and be able to collect a fair share from the likes of Google, which pays almost nothing on a turnover of $2.5 billion. Charlie once attended the board meeting of a European company as it received a report from its director in charge of tax matters. He tabled a note from the companys auditor which described their tax practices as sharpish and on a scale of 10 rated their method a seven, and rising. Its appalling that international tax can be dealt with in these ways. Were missing out on an enormous amount of tax as we try hard to balance our budget. Personally, I dont think that we ever will balance it while these practices continue. Our budget officials keep forecasting better and better returns in the future. But its a future that will never arrive unless there is major change. Bowen's sleeper JK Rowling: "I think my country helped me." Credit:APThe title of Robertson's book was inspired by the comment of a senior British public servant when a Blair-government minister intended to appoint Robertson to a European judicial position. "What a brilliant idea, Minister  But  he is  rather his own man, isn't he?"

As this scrupulously informed and charmingly written memoir proves, Geoffrey Robertson, AO, QC, is far more entertaining than some lawyers dare to be and far more literate than some writers have the right to be. He is certainly (rather than rather) his own man.

Robertson got the joke, but not, alas, the job. "In other words, I could not be trusted always to do what the government might want," he writes, at once consigning the own-man remark to literary immortality and (he hopes) to his tombstone. But not for a while yet: Robertson, at 71 and a long-time human-rights advocate, still has a lot of living to do.

What a life he has had so far. One doesn't know the half of it. In fact, Robertson, like another expatriate and acclaimed reliable memoirist, Clive James, is a long-time Oz-Anglo personage, equally at home in either land: "  a dual citizen whose prostate is felt in Harley Street in London and whose teeth are fixed in Sydney's Macquarie Street. (If you have seen an Englishman smile, you will understand.)"

For those of us on this side of the world, it is tempting to view Robertson as fixed in amber as the man who brought the Hypothetical to Australian television back in the mid-'80s. Who could forget that prowling, hand-wringing Oz lad with the salt-and-pepper hair and suave voice that suggested weekly elocution lessons from Henry Higgins? In his defence, Robertson says his plummy intonation has been there since childhood.

The Down Under part is, for Robertson, always on top, which sounds like something his estranged wife, Kathy Lette, might say in one of her riper literary moments. Yet, Robertson's ancestry boasts some extraordinary European connections that may or may not be true (the lawyer in him is always keen to examine the evidence). For example, is he really descended on his mother's side from Kaiser Wilhelm? Well, maybe. Did his father, Francis, making an emergency landing in his light aircraft in the middle of the night on a flat roof in a Victorian country town, having bounced off a strand of power lines, really meet a lady in a nightgown with long white hair, and believed he had died and gone to heaven? Well, almost. Francis didn't meet his maker until recently.

Robertson is only too happy to share his rich and rewarding life with us. Reading him is, I suppose, the next best thing to breaking bread with him. I hope  in the light that he intends to pre-record his own eulogy  that he narrates the audio version of this book. Meanwhile, through the cold light of print, it is nevertheless beguiling how refreshingly straightforward and honest he is. He's deeply affectionate, too, especially about his parents and other immediate family, and their stories are naturally intertwined in the Robertson chronology.Martin's previous documentary was 2014's All This Mayhem, the story of Melbourne professional skateboarders Ben and Tas Pappas, whose careers were followed by drug abuse, mental illness and the former's death. The filmmaker is drawn to disaffected youth, fellow outcasts from broken homes who achieved great success despite their flaws.

"I didn't want to make a hagiography with talking heads. I wanted the story to connect on a human level," says the documentary's director, Eddie Martin. "I knew it wasn't so much a story about an artist, but really a story about a young father with a young family who just happens to be an artist."

An iconoclast with a brush, Lister put his belief to the test with the new documentary Have You Seen the Listers? The film reveals an artist whose success comes with a sobering price: the dissolution of his marriage and the disenchantment of his children.

"I've found the most freedom by being open with my life," says Anthony Lister, the internationally renowned Brisbane painter who has taken street art into galleries and courtrooms.

Have You Seen the Listers? Credit:Transmission Films

In Lister, whose gallery works have been snapped up by prominent collectors while his public pieces have seen him charged with wilful damage by the Brisbane police, he found another ideal subject. In turn the artist, who had admired Martin's work since his 2005 cult classic debut Jisoe, gave him unfettered access to not only his studio but the archive he'd accumulated during the past 20 years: VHS tapes, first-gen mobile phones, and cratered hard drives. In the end there was 12 terabytes of data to create a narrative from.

"I definitely was not interested in influencing his direction and what he wanted to show the world. Eddie and I developed a relationship early on and based on that I invested my trust in him," says Lister, who along with Martin was in Melbourne earlier this week for a Q&A session to accompany an advance screening of the film. "I respected Eddie as an artist himself and I knew that he would be making the film he knew would work best."

The documentary's spine is not Lister's art, with its neon pulse and empathetic bodies, but the value of his family. His former wife Anika was his true love from high school, and they had the first of their three children when the couple were still teenagers. On screen she recalls how she believed wholeheartedly in her husband's gifts, accommodating his obsessive creativity until excess and exhaustion, absence and infidelity took their toll.

"That's a side you often don't hear, that of the supporting partner," Martin says. "It was a big decision for her and I'm very grateful, but she just wanted to tell the truth instead of creating that romantic mythology about the wonderful artist who never does anything wrong."She found a respite from these feelings in acting, joining Australian Theatre for Young People at 12, where she met a bunch of like-minded teens. "Acting felt like something that was my own, it was like this secret community of other quirky kids that I could spend time with over the holidays and after school. It was this really nice escape for me." Someone suggested to Phoebe's mother that she get an agent, which quickly led to an audition for Home and Away. Phoebe missed out on that part, but landed the next  playing Cleo, a teenage girl who turns into a mermaid, on H20. "I didn't have too long to decide what I was going to do for the rest of my life," she laughs. Phoebe had just turned 16 when she she got the role and within a week she had quit school and was on set on the Gold Coast. Three seasons of H20 led to her film debut in the screen adaptation of John Marsden's young adult novel Tomorrow, When the War Began. Phoebe then moved to LA in her early 20s to chance her luck at pilot season, and quickly scored a role in The Secret Circle, playing a young witch. She was hailed the breakout star of the show, and subsequently cast as a secret werewolf in The Vampire Diaries, before taking a lead part in its spin-off, The Originals. It's fitting that a girl who claims to have "witch instincts" has spent most of her career playing supernatural characters. But as much as The Originals delivered Phoebe fame in the US, not to mention lifelong friends and a boyfriend for much of its run (co-star Paul Wesley), she started to yearn for something more. "It was a big chunk of my 20s and I have so many great memories, but I was definitely ready to move on to something else," she says. "It's been hard to do the one thing for six years."

Tired of playing "the witch or the bitch", it took Phoebe some soul searching to figure out what she wanted in her career. Watching Olivia Wilde play the mother of an abducted child in the devastating 2015 film Meadowland provided the answer. "I kept saying to myself, 'That's what I want to do, stories about real people, stories that ask people questions about flawed characters. Those are the kinds of roles I want.' " And then along came Safe Harbour, the story of a group of Australians on a sailing holiday to Indonesia who cross paths with a fishing boat overloaded with asylum seekers, sparking a cascade of moral dilemmas. "I've definitely been dreaming of a role like this for a few years now," Phoebe confides. "Now that I've gotten it I'm much more grateful for it." Phoebe plays Olivia, a troubled woman who is suspected of casting the asylum seekers adrift in the middle of the night. "This show is about decisions and the ripple effects that those decisions create. Olivia's part in the whole situation posed a lot of questions about my own morals and ethics and I hope that her storyline does that for audiences as well."

Shirt by Strateas Carlucci. Credit:Simon Lekias She hopes Safe Harbour will lead to other meaningful  and preferably Australian  roles. "I definitely realised that I gravitate towards more grounded work," she says of shooting the drama. "I thought I would be terrified because it is really different to anything I've been in, but the challenge was just so exhilarating." While she calls herself a "professional Cinderella", Phoebe is at pains to demonstrate her highly developed social conscience. Between glam red-carpet shots and acting stills on her Instagram account are calls to action on issues such as gun control, #TimesUp and #blacklivesmatter. "If you're going to use [social media] to talk about a product that you're using or a movie that you're promoting, then it's equally important to use those platforms for something that's more selfless," she explains. "If I can get a 15-year-old girl who is enraged about a certain relationship on a vampire show and get them equally enraged about the situation with black lives and police issues in America right now, then great."

Phoebe proudly calls herself a feminist and bears the battle scars of navigating the male-dominated acting industry, with its inherent sexism and pay disparity. "It sucks to go through periods of your life where your role is literally Hot Girl No. 1 in movies  you feel like you are worthless." But she feels positive that the tide is turning in Hollywood, with the number of projects written and directed by women increasing. "It's really important to show women who are not just offshoots of men. I would love to keep playing roles that challenge stereotypes of women, that educate the audience a little bit." Despite her A-list existence (her good friends include Teresa Palmer and Lara Worthington), Phoebe retains some of her childish shyness and reserve. Asked about her love life she visibly squirms and says "I don't really want to talk about that", and is equally reticent when it comes to explaining the origin of her tattoos (one on her wrist and the other on her foot). "I got them years ago  I probably wouldn't get any more." She's hesitant to discuss her flaws, but says that acting has taught her resilience, patience and independence. She finds being away from her family hard, and insists the reality of her globetrotting lifestyle is spending too many hours in airport terminals waiting for delayed flights. "There are bouts of being alone and unemployed in weird countries," she says. "I've had to create a bit of independence  and build up a bit of a tough skin. Any time you get close to a job and you don't get it, I find that such a heartbreaking experience."Residents have escaped uninjured after multiple shots were fired into a home and vehicle in Canberra on Wednesday night.

ACT Policing is investigating the shooting, which happened in Wannon Lane, Harrison.

While no one was hurt during the incident, which police were called to about 11.20pm, residents were at home at the time.

Police said they could not rule out the involvement of criminal gangs at this stage, and Taskforce Nemesis would assist with the investigation.

Police urged anyone who saw any suspicious activity in Harrison about 11pm on Wednesday night, or who may have any information or CCTV that could assist police, to contact Crime Stoppers on 1800 333 000 or via their website.The NSW education minister, Rob Stokes, touched a nerve when in an address to a Mosman girls' school, he criticised the current heavy emphasis on STEM subjects  science, technology, engineering and mathematics  to the exclusion of others, particularly the humanities. The reaction, both for and against his view, has been immediate and loud.

This dissent by a state minister is significant, because within Australia's education hierarchy the promotion of STEM subjects has become almost a test of competence. The Education Council (made up of state and national ministers from Australia and New Zealand) agreed in 2015 on a 10-year strategy to promote STEM subjects to students and to improve their performance at them. The hype surrounding STEM also fits well into the federal government's famous innovation strategy. Who will forget Malcolm Turnbull's call for Australians to be more nimble and agile? The issue thus affects schools and students across the country.

Education is susceptible to fads, which distract and mislead educators, schools and the public.

Some criticism has been misdirected. The minister said nothing to denigrate STEM subjects, or to imply that students should avoid them. He did say STEM was overemphasised and that it was a fad. It is a fair point. Education is susceptible to fads, which distract and mislead educators, schools and the public. Time was when Australian students were being urged to learn Asian languages, and for the same reason they are now urged to take up STEM subjects  to boost the economy and find good jobs. From the 1960 to the 1990s they heeded the message, only to find that unless they spoke them at home, their mastery of those languages was insufficient to be useful to employers. The fad has now passed. Will the present one last any longer or have any greater benefit?

Ironically, Mr Stokes made his remarks at a girls' school, when girls' participation in the so-called hard subjects at the core of the STEM agenda tends to be lower than boys'. The Herald maintains girls should certainly be encouraged to take up science and maths-based subjects, and at the highest level, but there is a false distinction here between science as hard and the humanities as soft  which is to say weak, easy, unworthy. Both the sciences and the humanities contain hard and soft options; neither has a monopoly of difficulty. In both cases, students should be encouraged to do hard things.The political fight over tax reform is turning into a brutal argument about the rich versus the poor and the old versus the young. This is a familiar pattern at a time of budget deficits, setting voters against each other over who should lose most.

Two numbers help shape the argument about the Labor plan to raise $5.6 billion every year from people who will lose refunds for the tax credits on their share dividends.

Labors internal estimate is that 37 per cent of the revenue will come from individuals while 63 per cent will come from superannuation funds. This helps explain who will bear most of the burden: self-managed super funds.

Illustration: Simon Letch

Labors own costings assume the self-managed super funds will make up almost all of that 63 per cent, which means about 200,000 funds will account for $3.5 billion of the revenue that would stay in the Commonwealth coffers from the cancellation of the cash refunds.Wayside Chapel leader Graham Long, left, with his successor Jon Owen.

Every week Graham Long, the pastor and chief executive of the Wayside Chapel in Sydney's King Cross, sends a weekly letter to his "inner circle" that has grown over the years to include more than 13,000 people.

This week's email was different.

After 14 years at the Wayside, Rev Long, 66, wrote that Pastor Jon Owen - a fearless, extraordinary and sometimes seemingly "crazy" man - would take over as CEO and pastor of the Wayside from July this year.

Started in 1964 by Reverend Ted Noffs, the Wayside is Australia's best known provider of services for the homeless, the sad, the lonely, those suffering from addictions and mental illness - anyone who has fallen by the wayside of life.The NSW government decided to reform the previous CTP scheme as it was 18 years old, and it took an injured person an average of three to five years after a vehicle accident to get compensation.

The government is slated to return about $300 million to motorists in partial refunds, so here is how to get your portion of the funds.

Thanks to a NSW government reform of compulsory third-party insurance last year , most NSW motorists are eligible for a partial refund.

Fraudulent claims ate up about $75 in the cost of each green slip, but only 45 in each CTP dollar was paid out to injured people. NSW also had some of the highest premiums in the country.

Following consultation in 2016, the government came up with reforms to address those problems. In October last year, it announced a reduction in green slip prices for most classes of vehicle (you can see a price comparison here).

How much will I get back?

The most a private motorist can receive is $125 and the minimum is $10, but the amount depends on when you renewed your green slip. As the new CTP scheme started on December 1 last year, the people who paid premiums closer to that date will get a greater refund.

First, if you would like to see an estimate of what refund you're entitled to, you can check this online table based on premiums by vehicle class and the date of green slip purchase.New arrivals are powering the states population growth with overseas migration accounting for 80 per cent of the increase in the NSW population last year.

Net overseas migration to the state was a record 98,800 in the 12 months to September 2017, up 17 per cent on the previous year. The majority of overseas arrivals to NSW typically settle in Sydney.

The annual increase in overseas migrants to NSW was 4400 more than the number of new births in the state, meaning migration contributed more to population growth than newborns in the year to September.

The new population statistics released by the Bureau of Statistics on Thursday come amid national debate over population levels and as governments struggle to relieve pressure on overstretched transport infrastructure and social services.

The figures revealed the number of births per woman in NSW slumped to 1.645 last financial year, the lowest in Australia, raising the prospect that soaring house prices in Sydney are taking a toll on the fertility rate.While there is hot debate around whether cockroaches could survive a nuclear war, a sure bet is that they could not survive the toxin from a bootlace worm.

Queensland and Swedish researchers discovered the toxin was also strong enough to kill a crab and believe it could be used to create a new and very potent insecticide.

Lineus longissimus, also known as the bootlace worm.

The marine bootlace worm, commonly found in the United Kingdom and in the North Sea on the west coast of Sweden, can stretch up to 55 metres long and is the world's longest animal.

University of Queensland senior research fellow Dr Johan Rosengren said tests showed the toxin would not be as effective if it came into contact with humans.The Round House is the oldest building still standing in Western Australia, built as a jail and opened in 1831, with the Whalers Tunnel added in 1838.

The City of Fremantle closed the tunnel to the public after receiving adice that the limestone cliff face above the entrance had become eroded and that overhanging rock "could be unstable."

The "high risk of a rock fall" has forced the closure of the Whalers Tunnel beneath Fremantle's historic Round House.

Fremantle Mayor Brad Pettitt said the council will look for fixes that allow the area to be reopened.

Although the Round House and the Whalers Tunnel itself are fine, there are a few places on the cliff faces that have significant erosion and we cant take any chances with safety," he said.

Our immediate response is to close the tunnel and fence off the areas where there is a high risk of a rock fall.

In the short term, well look to shave off the overhanging rock where we can to remove the immediate danger and investigate erecting nets or scaffolding above the entrance so we can re-open the tunnel.

Longer term well work with the state government to come up with a plan to stabilise the cliff faces and prevent further erosion while also being respectful of the heritage of the area."Some of the young people getting preyed upon are screaming they don't want to fight and they even run away but the other keeps going after them. "Either that or they just stand there and take the abuse. In the crowd, there's other young people filming it and laughing." After numerous reports made by parents and other users, the account was removed on Thursday. In response to the accounts, Fremantle College principal Myles Draper said he had been made aware of the Instagram pages on Wednesday, and reported them to WA Police and Instagram. "We shouldn't assume students set these pages up, however we are using any resources we have available to determine this," he said.

"Some of the sites have been removed and as new sites appear we monitor and report them and work to identify any students who are following the sites. "Any students involved with bullying, cyberbullying or distributing inappropriate content are dealt with through the college's behaviour management processes which could involve the WA Police where appropriate. "We have a strong stance on bullying and work with the school community to teach students about appropriate behaviour and making positive choices." The college sent out an email to parents informing them of the accounts, and reinforced its anti-bullying policy. The reboot.

However, another account soon appeared called "freocollegesuprise" [sic], which not only requested students to send in their fighting videos, but naked photos of themselves or others. And Curtin University law lecturer Anna Bunn says the owner of the page could be getting themselves into more trouble than they realise. "It's an increasingly common problem," she said. "Kids post things on social media that are either things like this, or photos and images that are potentially going to cause distress and embarrassment for the people depicted. "And in this kind of case, [it could have] reputational effects for the school.

"Let's just say that a teenager was stupid enough to send in a naked photo to someone. "The fact they're a child means consent really means nothing, and whoever receives it even if its been "freely sent" is going to be in trouble for possessing child abuse material, even if the person receiving it is a child themselves. "It can be considered very serious." But Ms Bunn says it's becoming increasingly harder to police, and a legal grey area means it's hard to determine how to crackdown on the account owners. "Of course schools have a duty to keep their children safe but, it doesn't necessarily extend in terms of what they're doing off campus. It is a bit of a grey area.

"What students are doing off campus still effects students when they're back at school, so when the students are on the school grounds they have a duty of care, and that may extend to making sure there is efficient supervision to prevent these kinds of things happening. "And also following up with students who have been identified in any videos that come to their attention either in terms of offering them support, or possibly disciplining the ones who have been involved in the fight. "The duty of care only requires schools to do what's reasonable and its accepted that as long as you have sufficient staff supervising, you can't always be everywhere." The youth worker who came across the page agrees with this assessment, and says she has firsthand knowledge of watching the situation escalate. "As a youth worker I found out so much information that sometimes my ears can't actually believe what they are hearing," she said.

"I know that this problem is not just within this school. "I believe that violence and bullying is so rife through schools and I am not too sure if local schools have anything in place to deter or prevent this kind of behaviour. But if they do then it isn't working. "It does make it hard for the young people to talk to anyone within the school system as nothing gets done. It is just a suspension and then back to school. Loading "My advice to parents is to really know how your children are. They may tell you they are okay but really ask them, and take the time to pull them aside and ask and listen. Build a relationship with your children where they won't fear coming to you if they need to talk. Be aware of the issues going on within the schools. Don't stand back and let this happen and act like this is normal, because all of this is not normal. It is plain and simply wrong."Labor's policy committee is considering a plan to lift Australia's refugee intake to 50,000, as left-wingers jostle to soften the party's position on asylum seekers at this year's national conference.

Party members, unionists and MPs - including Left co-convenor Andrew Giles - are seeking to get elected as delegates to the triennial conference on a pro-refugee platform, promising to make a "real difference" to the party's policies and to make them "humane".

Fairfax Media has learnt a working group on the powerful National Policy Forum is investigating proposals to increase Australia's annual refugee intake to 50,000 - the same target as the Greens.

It is understood the proposal is in a "maybe pile" of ideas that merit further discussion, although any final recommendation to change the policy would need the backing of the party's leadership.The former NSW chief scientist, Mary OKane, says the STEM debate has been misguided and the focus should be on maths, starting in primary school, not the broader science and technology areas.

Professor OKane, who now chairs the state's Independent Planning Commission, said she welcomed the comments NSW education minister, Rob Stokes, made on the issue of STEM.

Former NSW chief scientist Mary O'Kane says the STEM debate has been "misguided". Credit:Steven Siewert

Mr Stokes gave a public lecture at Mosman girls school Queenwood on Wednesday night, where he said preferencing STEM at the expense of the arts is demonstrably ludicrous.

From government ministers to journalists  from industry CEOs to senior public servants  people of influence are piling in to denounce the value of philosophy, the arts, and the social sciences  insisting that only by bowing before the altar of STEM will todays students be adequately equipped to thrive in the 21st century, Mr Stokes said.The world's biggest technology firms face an extra 5 billion ($7.95 billion) tax bill each year to operate in the EU as governments face "an ever-bigger black hole" in their finances.

Technology companies with global revenues of more than 750 million and EU revenues above 50 million face a charge of 3 per cent of those revenues.

Facebook, Google, Amazon, Uber, Airbnb and other large technology firms - typically from the US - are among the most high-profile firms that face the tax. Credit:Bloomberg

It will target companies that make money from digital marketplaces, apps to share goods and services, and online adverts - which include social networks, search engines and retail sites such as Amazon.

Between 120 and 150 firms are expected to pay the charge. "Our pre-internet rules do not allow our member states to tax digital companies operating in Europe when they have little or no physical presence here," said Pierre Moscovici, the European commissioner. He said: "This represents an ever-bigger black hole for member states, because the tax base is being eroded. That's why we're bringing forward a new legal standard as well an interim tax for digital activities."As social networking giant Facebook and "big data" firm Cambridge Analytica find themselves at the centre of a privacy scandal involving the election of US President Donald Trump, the question must be asked: is time up for companies that bury important privacy info in long and baffling terms of service, and then claim that users are agreeing to give their lives away by clicking yes?

If you haven't caught up on the whole kerfuffle, this is what transpired: approximately 270,000 people installed a Facebook "personality quiz" app that connected to their account and sucked up not only their detailed personal information, such as Facebook likes, but also the personal information of their Facebook friends. Cambridge Analytica collected the personal Facebook information of more than 50 million users; way more than the number of people who installed the quiz.

Facebook CEO has said the company will make changes, but do they go far enough?

The "techlash" appears to be in full-swing, with #deletefacebook trending and even the founder of WhatsApp, which was acquired by Facebook for $US19 billion, suggesting that users delete their Facebook profiles.

The answer to "at what cost?" has finally been provided; the cost of your personal information being divulged by Facebook to a third-party  without you truly consensenting to it  and it then being used by firms such as Cambridge Analytica and their various clients to perform so-called data-driven behavioural change, or manipulation of your beliefs through data mining.Nairobi, Kenya: A Nigerian minister said on Wednesday that 104 of the 110 schoolgirls abducted last month by Islamist terrorist group Boko Haram in the north-eastern town of Dapchi have been returned home.

Aishat Alhaji, second right, was among those kidnapped from the government Girls' Science and Technical College in Dapchi. Credit:AP

Information and Culture Minister Alhaji Lai Mohammed did not confirm the whereabouts of the remaining six girls, but said those who were freed had been identified. In addition to the schoolgirls, a further girl and a boy were released.

People gather outside the hospital where the released girls were being treated in Dapchi. Credit:AP

Mohammed denied reports that a ransom had been paid or that a prisoner swap-deal was reached to secure their release.A Facebook image of the suspect behind the Texas bombings, Mark Anthony Conditt, who blew himself up. Credit:AP The six bombs used similar components that made it easy for officials to link the devices: unusual batteries, apparently purchased online from Asia, and nails used as shrapnel, according to Republican Mike McCaul, chairman of the US House Homeland Security Committee. Trying to find the buyer of the nails, officials "went to every hardware store" in the area to find buyers who had made large purchases, and they struck gold with a Home Depot store in Austin. "The fatal mistake that led law enforcement to him - because he was pretty good at evading surveillance cameras - was when he walked into Home Depot," McCaul said. Investigators obtained surveillance footage of Conditt walking into the store in a wig but then walking out to a vehicle with a licence plate connected to his name. From there, McCaul said, investigators obtained a mobile phone number linked to Conditt, which had been turned off for "a while" - until Wednesday morning.

Conditt turned on the phone, McCaul said, allowing investigators to locate him at a hotel, which led to a police chase that ended with Conditt blowing himself up in his red SUV. Officials work at the scene where the Texas bombing suspect blew himself up. Credit:AP Officials, who discovered a bomb-making room in Conditt's home in the Austin suburb of Pfluegerville, still haven't offered any theories for why Conditt embarked on a bombing campaign that left two dead, four injured and an entire city unnerved. But they discovered at least one chilling piece of evidence after the hunt was over: a "target list" with "additional addresses we believe he was using for future targets," McCaul said. Investigators detained and questioned two roommates of Conditt as officials sought to determine whether he had any help. One of the roommates has been released, while the other was still being questioned, Austin police said on Twitter.

A portrait emerged on Wednesday of an introverted Christian conservative who had been home-schooled and worked at a local manufacturing company before being fired last year. Law enforcement near the area where a suspect in a series of bombing attacks in Austin blew himself up. Credit:AP In a statement released to CNN, Conditt's parents said they were in shock and grieving for the victims. "We are devastated and broken at the news that our family could be involved in such an awful way," the family said. "We had no idea of the darkness that Mark must have been in. "Our family is a normal family in every way. We love, we pray, and we try to inspire and serve others. Right now our prayers are for those families that have lost loved ones, for those impacted in any way, and for the soul of our Mark. We are grieving and we are in shock." In Pflugerville, federal and local law enforcement officials searched two sheds and trash bins outside the Conditts' home.

Austin Police Homicide Detective David Fugitt said the Conditt family has been "very cooperative," adding that officials didn't have any indication the family knew Conditt was involved with the bombings. "They have gone above and beyond to answer any questions we have had," Fugitt said. "They're having a difficult time," Fugitt said. "It's understandable with everything they have had to deal with. This is certainly a shock to the conscience. They're taking it in stride. They're having a difficult time as well, which would be expected." Loading In an old blog under Conditt's name, started apparently as part of a community college class assignment, the author wrote in 2012 that he was conservative but "not that politically inclined," writing posts opposing abortion, favouring the death penalty and arguing gay marriage should be illegal. One of Conditt's former friends, Jeremiah Jensen, 24 - who was home-schooled in Pflugerville - said Conditt's blog posts for class were being taken out of context in media reports.

"Certainly a lot of the home-school community in Pflugerville, Texas, is conservative and a lot of kids were raised that way," Jensen said. "I think a lot of people jump to conclusions and want to make him out to be a conservative terrorist. But I think it has more to do with loneliness and anger than it has to do with anything else." Conditt was smart, "straight-laced" and "definitely came off as a little intense, and it was hard for him to get along with people and make friends," Jensen said. Jeff Reeb, a neighbour of the Conditts since they moved to the area 17 years ago, described Conditt as "a quiet youngster" who played with Reeb's grandson. Conditt, who had two younger sisters, moved away from home in recent years and bought a house but returned to visit, Reeb said. "They're church-going people, extremely good neighbours. I like them a lot," Reeb said, adding that he was surprised to see reporters arrive at his street, the first clue the bombing suspect could be someone he knew.

Agents investigate the scene at a FedEx distribution centre where a package exploded in Schertz, Texas. Credit:AP Investigators began closing in on Conditt over the last two days, and officials were moving to make an arrest at a hotel when Conditt began driving away, Manley said. The vehicle ran into a ditch, and as officers approached, the suspect detonated an explosive that killed him and knocked one officer back, Manley said. Police fired a single shot at the car. Conditt's death followed days of rapid developments in the case. On Tuesday, a bomb inside a package exploded on a conveyor belt at a FedEx shipping centre in Schertz, northeast of San Antonio. One worker was treated at the scene for minor injuries.Mvita MP Abdulswamad Nassir has sensationally claimed that talks are ongoing for Deputy President William Ruto to drop his presidential bid in favour of Mombasa governor Hassan Joho.

The lawmaker said on Wednesday that Ruto has been engaged on the matter and is aware of their intentions, The Star reports.

Nassir reportedly said that the agreement will endear Ruto to the Coast and also foster national unity.

Our stand is simple. We are asking Ruto to join us to support our own Hassan Joho for the presidency, he said.

The MP said calculated steps were taken before Coast MPs agreed to embrace Ruto and accompany him to his events.

DP Ruto toured Mombasa on Friday, Kwale on Saturday and Taita Taveta on Sunday and was accompanied by a host of opposition MPs.

This was the first time in almost three years that the DP has worked closely with the regions legislators who are allied to Raila.

Nassir further disclosed that the plan will also make the newly-found partnership between President Uhuru Kenyatta and Opposition leader Raila Odinga workable.

What we are pleading with him (Ruto) is that in the spirit of working together, he must support Johos quest, he said.

However, the DP, through his spokesperson David Mugonyi, dismissed that such talks are ongoing.

This is a joke for a question. Are you serious you can ask this? Mugonyi said when contacted for comment.

Additional Reporting by The StarAddressing the Internet Of Things (IoT) and challenges in device design using a comprehensive approach

As the number of connected devices increases worldwide, the ways that they are being used, designed, and tested have also expanded. The rise of connected devices is demanding engineers to harness the power of the internet of things, which is expected to hit 28 billion by 2025. A comprehensive approach to device design is needed more than ever to address the challenges that this rapid growth will bring. Why engineers should be using IoT technology in product design The demand for devices designed to use the Internet of Things (IoT) technology is increasing as more industries are finding expanded ways to put them into use. Industries such as healthcare, automobiles, and agriculture are becoming more dependent on cloud capabilities and are therefore in need of new devices able to connect to it. Due to this rise in demand, an increasing amount of devices are delivering a multitude of benefits both to consumers and companies. However, this new wave of products has led to a growing list of challenges for engineers as they are forced to address IoT tech in regards to connectivity, regulations, longevity, and security. Ways to use IoT in the development process Engineers are facing these new challenges along with the normal pressure of deadlines and test considerations. By approaching all of these issues from a comprehensive point-of-view, the solutions become clearer and new device capabilities can be born. Lets look at the challenges individually as well as possible solutions for them. Improving connectivity IoT enables data to be transferred between infrastructure, the cloud, and devices, making the process smooth Because IoT is based around connection, its no surprise that the primary challenge for engineers to overcome is the improvement of connectivity between devices. IoT enables data to be transferred between infrastructure, the cloud, and devices, so making this process as smooth as possible is crucial. The main challenges involved with connectivity have to do with development and product testing while meeting industry standards and best practices. Additionally, many companies lack the necessary equipment and technology to develop new IoT devices, which makes it difficult to create scalable prototypes and test new products. Suggested solutions To address the issue of not having the expertise and necessary tools for testing, we suggest outsourcing the prototyping and evaluation process instead of attempting to tackle this in-house. By doing this, youre able to free up resources that would otherwise be needed for expensive equipment and qualified staff. Helping comply with regulations When working with devices that are connected across the world, there is a complex web of regulations and conformance standards that can lead to challenges for engineers. The necessity of complying with these regulations while also pushing to meet deadlines can be burdensome and lead to an increase in production time and expenses. Failure to comply with global and regional laws, as well as system and carrier requirements, can lead to fines and costly setbacks. This type of failure can destroy a companys reputation on top of causing financial losses, often leading to the loss of business. Suggested solutions By testing the IoT device design and components early, engineers can address any pre-compliance issues that may arise. During the early stages of development, we suggest using scalable and automated test systems readily available in the marketplace. Improved communication with other devices New challenges arise as new devices hit the market and existing technologies are redesigned to offer a better experience In the rapidly growing number of connected devices, new challenges will arise as new devices hit the market and existing technologies are redesigned to offer a better user experience. This rapid growth in devices will lead to congested networks leading to the necessity of devices being able to function in the midst of increased traffic and interference. Failure to do this will lead to delayed responses which could prove to be fatal. Suggested solutions The best solution for this issue is found in the evaluation process and supporting test methods that the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) published in the American National Standard for Evaluation of Wireless Coexistence (ANSI). This process addresses the interconnectivity issues present in radio frequency environments. The outlined process involves defining the environment and evaluating the wireless performance of the equipment through thorough testing. An in-depth version can be found in its entirety online. Increasing the longevity of devices IoT devices are being used in vital industries such as healthcare and automotive so battery life and power consumption are two challenges that engineers must take seriously. A failure in this area could potentially lead to loss of life or safety concerns on the road. As new firmware and software are being designed to address these factors, engineers must be implementing them into IoT devices with the ability to be continually updated. Suggested solutions Longevity should be addressed in all aspects of the design process and tested thoroughly using a wide range of currents. By doing this, an engineer can simulate consumer applications to best predict performance. Security Security and privacy are concerns with any technology, but with the use of IoT in medical devices, its paramount Security has been a controversial issue for IoT since its inception. Security and privacy are concerns with any technology, but with the widespread use of IoT in medical devices, smart home appliances, and access control and surveillance, its paramount. For example, medical devices may store information about health parameters, medications, and prescriber information. In some cases, these devices may be controlled by an app, such as a smart pacemaker, to prevent heart arrhythmias. Naturally, a security issue in these devices could be devastating. Another example of dangerous security concern is with surveillance cameras and access control, such as for home or business security systems. These intelligent door locking systems contain locks, lock access controllers, and associated devices that communicate with each other. Suspicious activities are flagged with alerts and notifications, but if a hacker gains access, it can lead to real-world, physical danger. Security design points Here are some key points for security design: Physical security: IoT devices may be in external, isolated locations that are vulnerable to attack from not only hackers but by human contact. Embedding security protection on every IoT device is expensive, but its important for general security and data safety. Security of data exchange: Data protection is also important because data gets transmitted from IoT devices to the gateway, then onto the cloud. With surveillance and access control information or sensitive medical information, and encryption is vital to protecting data from a breach. Cloud storage security: Similar to data exchange, the information stored in medical devices, surveillance and access control systems, and some smart appliances with payment features, must be protected. This includes encryption and device authentication through access control, which can police what resources can be accessed and used. Update: Security vulnerabilities will always occur, so the key to addressing them is having a plan to address errors and release patches. Customers should also have options to secure devices quickly and effectively. Suggested solutions Engineers can include security and protection into IoT devices with early and perpetual testing throughout the design process. Most security breaches occur at endpoints or during updates, giving engineers a starting point for how to address them. Creating more secure devices Ensuring the security of connected devices should be of supreme importance for engineers as these devices are vulnerable to security breaches. The ultimate security of devices goes beyond the scope of engineering as the network and enterprise levels must also be secure to protect against potential threats. However, engineers play a role in this protection as well and should consider device security in the design process. Suggested solutions On a device level, engineers can help protect IoT devices from vulnerabilities by implementing early testing and continuing it throughout the design process. Most security transgressions occur at endpoints so this continual testing can, and should, create barriers to breaches. Regulations and compliance For IoT engineers, the complex web of regulations and compliance standards present new challenges Regulations and compliance surrounding data and technology are nothing new, but for IoT engineers, the complex web of regulations and compliance standards present new challenges. Engineers are already addressing obstacles in security and connectivity, all while meeting deadlines, and working around regulations adds time and expense to the process. Unfortunately, a failure to comply with global, regional, or local laws can lead to setbacks and fines. In addition to time lost in production and possible fines, the damage to a companys reputation can lead to even more losses. Suggested solutions Compliance should be considered early and often in the design process. In the early stages of development, the IoT device or components can be tested to address and compliance issues. If possible, use a scalable and automated test system. The comprehensive solution As we stare at an uncertain future full of possibilities, its clear to see that new challenges will continue to be presented as technology evolves and new innovative devices are designed by engineers. By addressing these issues early and often, solutions can be implemented and problems prevented before they even have a chance to occur thanks to sound engineering and solid design.You have permission to edit this article.

Edit CloseComplex and beautiful patterns adorn the icy surface of Jupiter's moon Europa, as seen in this color image intended to approximate how the satellite might appear to the human eye. The data used to create this view were acquired by NASA's Galileo spacecraft in 1995 and 1998.

Europa is one of the Galilean moons of Jupiter, along with Io, Ganymede and Callisto. Astronomer Galileo Galilei gets the credit for discovering these moons, among the largest in the solar system. Europa is the smallest of the four but it is one of the more intriguing satellites.

The surface of Europa is frozen, covered with a layer of ice, but scientists think there is an ocean beneath the surface. The icy surface also makes the moon one of the most reflective in the solar system.

Researchers using the Hubble Space Telescope spotted a possible water plume jetting from Europa's south polar region in 2012. A different research team, after repeated attempts to confirm the observations, saw apparent plumes in 2014 and 2016. The researchers cautioned that the plumes haven't yet been fully confirmed, but they do provide a suggestion that there is water in Europa's ocean jetting to the surface.

Several spacecraft have done flybys of Europa (including Pioneers 10 and 11 and Voyagers 1 and 2 in the 1970s). The Galileo spacecraft did a long-term mission at Jupiter and its moons between 1995 and 2003. Both NASA and the European Space Agency plan missions to Europa and other moons that would leave Earth in the 2020s.

Facts about Europa

Age: Europa is estimated to be about 4.5 billion years old, about the same age of Jupiter.

Distance from the sun: On average, Europa's distance from the sun is about 485 million miles (or 780 million kilometers).

Distance from Jupiter: Europa is Jupiter's sixth satellite. Its orbital distance from Jupiter is 414,000 miles (670,900 km). It takes Europa three and a half Earth-days to orbit Jupiter. Europa is tidally locked, so the same side faces Jupiter at all times.

Size: Europa is 1,900 miles (3,100 km) in diameter, making it smaller than Earth's moon, but larger than Pluto. It is the smallest of the Galilean moons.

Temperature: Europa's surface temperature at the equator never rises above minus 260 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 160 degrees Celsius). At the poles of the moon, the temperature never rises above minus 370 F (minus 220 C).

List of missions to Europa

Pioneer 10 (1973 flyby of Jupiter system). This passed too far away from Europa to get a detailed picture, but the mission did note some variations in albedo (brightness) on the moon's surface.

Pioneer 11 (1974 flyby of Jupiter system). The spacecraft made a flyby of Europa at nearly 375,000 miles (600,000 km) away, only allowing it to see some variation on the surface.

Voyager 1 (1979 flyby of Jupiter system). Made a distant flyby of Europa, and also yielded insights about how the gravity of one moon in Jupiter's system influences the gravity of others. For example, Io's volcanism was traced in part to interaction of Io with the moons, as well as with massive Jupiter.

Voyager 2 (1979 flyby of Jupiter system). One of its major discoveries was confirming brown stripes across the surface of Europa, suggesting cracks in the icy surface.

Galileo (orbited Jupiter between 1995-2003). Its most famous discovery at Europa was finding strong evidence of an ocean beneath the icy crust at the moon's surface.

Europa Clipper (proposed for 2020s). Will fly by Europa dozens of times. One of its major goals is to seek out evidence of the apparent plumes that Hubble researchers spotted several times.

JUpiter Icy Moons Explorer (JUICE) (proposed for 2020s). Will look for molecules, such as organic molecules, that are associated with life-giving processes. (Organics are common in the solar system, but the molecules themselves do not always indicate life.)

A translation of the key passages of Galileo Galilei's journal detailing his discovery of four moons orbiting Jupiter. Galileo made these sketches after discovering four moons orbiting Jupiter in January 1610. The moons, later named Io, Europa, Callisto and Ganymede, were the first discovered beyond Earth. (Image credit: NASA)

Discovery

Galileo Galilei discovered Europa on Jan. 8, 1610. It is possible that German astronomer Simon Marius (1573-1624) also discovered the moon at the same time. However, he did not publish his observations, so it is Galileo who is most often credited with the discovery. For this reason, Europa and Jupiter's other three largest moons are often called the Galilean moons. Galileo, however, called the moons the Medicean planets in honor of the Medici family. [Photos: Europa, Jupiter's Mysterious Icy Moon]

It is possible Galileo actually observed Europa a day earlier, on Jan. 7, 1610. However, because he was using a low-powered telescope, he couldn't differentiate Europa from Io, another of Jupiter's moons. It wasn't until later that Galileo realized they were two separate bodies.

The discovery not only had astronomical, but also religious implications. At the time, the Catholic Church supported the idea that everything orbited the Earth, an idea supported in ancient times by Aristotle and Ptolemy. Galileo's observations of Jupiter's moons  as well as noticing that Venus went through "phases" similar to our own moon  gave compelling evidence that not everything revolved around the Earth.

As telescopic observations improved, however, a new view of the universe emerged. The moons and the planets were not unchanging and perfect; for example, mountains seen on the moon showed that geological processes happened elsewhere. Also, all planets revolved around the sun. Over time, moons around other planets were discovered  and additional moons found around Jupiter.

Marius, the other "discoverer," first proposed that the four moons be given their current names, from Greek mythology. But it wasn't until the 19th century that the moons were officially given the so-called Galilean names we know them by today. All of Jupiter's moons are named for the god's lovers (or victims, depending on your point of view). In Greek mythology, Europa was abducted by Zeus (the counterpart of the Roman god Jupiter), who had taken the form of a spotless white bull to seduce her. She decorated the "bull" with flowers and rode on its back to Crete. Once in Crete, Zeus transformed back to his original form and seduced her. Europa was the queen of Crete and bore Zeus many children.

These images show the trailing hemisphere of Jupiter's moon Europa taken by the Galileo spacecraft at a distance of about 677,000 km. The left image shows Europa in approximately true color and the right image shows Europa in enhanced color to bring out details. The bright feature towards the lower right of the disk is the 45 km diameter crater Pwyll. (Image credit: NSSDC Photo Gallery)

Characteristics of Europa

A prominent feature of Europa is its high degree of reflectivity. Europa's icy crust gives it an albedo  light reflectivity  of 0.64, one of the highest of all of the moons in the entire solar system.

Scientists estimate that Europa's surface is about 20 million to 180 million years old, which makes it fairly young.

Pictures and data from the Galileo spacecraft suggest Europa is made of silicate rock, and has an iron core and rocky mantle, much like Earth does. Unlike the interior of Earth, however, the rocky interior of Europa is surrounded by a layer of water and/or ice that is between 50 and 105 miles (80 and 170 km) thick, according to NASA.

From fluctuations in Europa's magnetic field that suggests a conductor of some sort, scientists also think there is an ocean deep beneath the surface of the moon. This ocean could contain some form of life. This possibility of extraterrestrial life is one of the reasons interest in Europa remains high. In fact, recent studies have given new life to the theory that Europa can support life.

The surface of Europa is covered with cracks. Many believe these cracks are the result of tidal forces on the ocean beneath the surface. It's possible that, when Europa's orbit takes it close to Jupiter, the tide of the sea beneath the ice rises higher than normal. If this is so, the constant raising and lowering of the sea caused many of the cracks observed on the surface of the moon.

Obtaining samples of the ocean may not require drilling through the icy crust, should the repeated observations of possible plumes turn out to be actual jets of water. While researchers spotted evidence in 2012, 2014 and 2016, the true nature of the plumes  and why they appear sporadically  requires more observations.

In 2014, scientists found that Europa may host a form of plate tectonics. Previously, Earth was the only known body in the solar system with a dynamic crust, which is considered helpful in the evolution of life on the planet.

Europa: Where life may evolve?

The presence of water beneath the moon's frozen crust makes scientists rank it as one of the best spots in the solar system with the potential for life to evolve.

The icy depths of the moons are thought to contain vents to the mantle much as oceans on Earth do. These vents could provide the necessary thermal environment to help life evolve.

If life exists on the moon, it may have gotten a kick from deposits from comets. Early in the life of the solar system, the icy bodies may have delivered organic material to the moon.

In 2016, a study suggested that Europa produces 10 times more oxygen than hydrogen, which is similar to Earth. This could make its probable ocean friendlier for life  and the moon may not need to rely on tidal heating to generate enough energy. Instead, chemical reactions would be enough to drive the cycle.

Future exploration of Europa

In 2013, the U.S. National Research Council's Planetary Science Decadal Review issued its 10-year recommendation for NASA's planetary exploration program. Exploration of Europa was ranked as the highest-priority mission. Since then, NASA has been working toward a mission to Jupiter's icy moon. In 2017, the mission was officially called Europa Clipper after several years of the researchers and media informally using the moniker.

According to NASA, this mission  which will leave sometime in the 2020s, perhaps late in the decade  would perform 40 to 45 flybys of Europa with a spacecraft orbiting Jupiter. There will be nine scientific instruments on board including cameras, radar to peer beneath the ice and try to figure out its thickness, a magnetometer to measure the magnetic field (and by extension, how salty the ocean is), and a thermal instrument to search for signs of eruptions. The flybys would range in height between 16 miles (25 km) and 1,700 miles (2,700 km). This brings the flybys well into the radiation-heavy zone of Europa, which is tough for a spacecraft to survive. Bringing the spacecraft in and out of the zone will extend its lifetime and make it easier to transmit data back to Earth.

One of Europa Clipper's priorities will be to follow up on the Hubble observations of plumes. "If the plumes' existence is confirmed, and they're linked to a subsurface ocean, studying their composition would help scientists investigate the chemical makeup of Europa's potentially habitable environment while minimizing the need to drill through layers of ice," NASA said in a statement.

The European Space Agency also plans a mission to Europa and two other moons called JUICE, or JUpiter ICy moons Explorer. The mission is expected to launch in 2022 and arrive at Jupiter's neighborhood in 2029 for at least a three-year mission. Once it gets to Europa, the mission will look at organic molecules and other components that could make the moon friendly to life. Also, the spacecraft will probe how thick the crust is, particularly over any active regions it finds.A Stunning Display

NASA

On March 23, 1965, NASA launched the Gemini 3 mission, NASA's first crewed flight of the Gemini program, with astronauts Gus Grissom and John Young aboard. See how the mission went in photos in this space history gallery. This Image: In 1964, the Gemini-Titan spacecraft stands proudly on the launch pad at night. The rocket is lit brightly by the launch pad lights and spotlights shine in the background.

Gemini 3 Crewmembers

NASA

On April 13, 1964, chosen crewmen for the upcoming Gemini 3 mission pose for an official NASA photo. From left to right, prime crew John W. Young and Virgil I. "Gus" Grissom, and backup crew Walter M. Schirra and Thomas P. Stafford.

Simulator Time

NASA

At McDonnell Aircraft Corp. in St. Louis, Missouri, astronauts Virgil I. Grissom, also known as Gus, and John W. Young (right) sit inside a Gemini mission simulator.

Checking Out the Digs

NASA

On Nov. 19, 1964, astronauts Virgil I. Grissom, at center, and John W. Young, on the left, examine the Gemini spacecraft interior.

Straddling the Craft

NASA

During a water egress training at Ellington Air Force, astronaut John W. Young, the Gemini-Titan 3 prime crew pilot, sits atop a Gemini spacecraft.

Liftoff Ready

NASA

Before the March 23, 1965 launch of the Gemini 3 mission, the Gemini-Titan launch vehicle stands on the launch pad with the erector lowered.

Meal Planning

NASA

Dehydrated beef pot roast, bacon and egg bites, toasted bread cubes, orange juice and a wet wipe make up part of the rations for the Gemini 3 mission. As seen here, water is inserted into the pouch to rehydrate food before consumption.

Eyes for the Journey

NASA

During a physical before the Gemini 3 mission launch, astronaut Virgil I. Grissom undergoes an eye exam.

Assisted Entrance

NASA

As the Gemini-Titan 3, three-orbit, manned mission launch looms close, astronaut John W. Young enters the Gemini spacecraft in the white room on top of the Gemini launch vehicle with assistance from a McDonnell Aircraft Corp. engineer.

Checking Their Work

NASA

On March 25, 1965, astronauts Virgil I. Grissom and John W. Young, on the right) look over photographic negatives from their three-orbit mission around the Earth.

Final Checklist

NASA

Suit technician Joe Schmitt studies a checklist with astronaut Virgil I. Grissom in the suiting trailer at Pad 16.Interior Cabinet Secretary Fred Matiangi has ordered the immediate closure of all bars in Kiambu county.

The directive is part of the ongoing crackdown on illicit brews and drugs across the country that Matiangi launched yesterday.

Speaking in Makwa village Gatundu North Constituency which is notorious for illicit liquor brewing, Matiangi said the directive will give Kiambu bar owners a chance to apply for licenses afresh and county government the opportunity to vet and issue licenses to those who will meet the set conditions as stipulated in the recently enacted Kiambu County Alcoholic Drinks Control Act.

The CS singled out Kiambu as one of the most affected counties noting that it has more bars than schools.

Kiambu has a mysterious history with illicit brews. Its the only county with more bars than all the primary and secondary schools put together, said the CS.

The county has 1,226 public primary and secondary schools while there are 3,062 liquor outlets across the region.

We must sort this out once and for all. Illicit liquor has become the worst hiccup in the governments Big Four agendas for the country, the CS said.

We cannot be burying over 10 people from one village every week.

The CS, however, faulted the judiciary over claims of helping bar owners operate using court orders.

Let us work together. We are one country. I urge the judiciary to be part of the solution not part of the problem. The challenges we are facing are our administrators battling court orders every day, he said.

Matiangi also warned county leaders against taking bribes that facilitate the scourge.

We will act on every chief hindering the fight against illicit brews. We are doing our best to support chiefs to deliver services to the people, he said.

Those caught in the wrong will be sacked. We will part company with them if they dare take bribes.

The CS said the crackdown will be immediately rolled out in other counties and urged other governors to follow in Governor Waititus footsteps.

I also call upon Nacada to come up with a drunkenness index to tell the world which county is beaten in fighting the menace. Stop pushing and shoving.

Matinagi was accompanied by PS Interior Karanja Kibicho, Inspector General of Police Joseph Boinnet, Thika MP Patrick Wainaina, Kiambu MP Gathoni Wamuchomba, Gatundu South MP Moses Kuria among others.The Gravity Assist Podcast is hosted by NASA's Director of Planetary Science, Jim Green, who each week talks to some of the greatest planetary scientists on the planet, giving a guided tour through the Solar System and beyond in the process. This week, he's joined by author Andy Weir to explore the fascinating intersection of science and science fiction, delving into the biggest surprises about Mars and the Moon, and how Weir's novel, "The Martian," has provided a powerful gravity assist for young readers.

You can listen to the full podcast here, or read the transcript below.

Jim Green: I usually ask this question at the end of an interview, but it seems more appropriate to begin with it. What was your gravity assist, Andy? How has science inspired you to get into writing science fiction?[Making a Moon Base With 'Artemis' Author Andy Weir]

Andy Weir: Well, it was probably through my father  he's a scientist himself. He's a linear accelerator physicist. He's retired now, but he spent his whole career shooting electrons down a tube. He's always been a science dork and a science fiction fan, and he had an inexhaustible supply of science-fiction books in the house for me to read. So, I guess you could say I was indoctrinated from birth.

Jim Green: I see. So, you had an opportunity to read the library. Who were some of your favorite authors?

Andy Weir: Well, my "holy trinity," so to speak, are (Robert) Heinlein, (Isaac) Asimov and (Arthur C.) Clarke. I'm 45 years old, but I grew up reading my father's science fiction collection, reading the juvenile (novels) from the 50s and 60s and early 70s.

Jim Green: They still hold up really well.

Andy Weir: Some of them, yeah. Parts of them don't. Parts of them didn't age well, but other parts of them still hold up really well, especially when they decided to stick with real physics.

Will Mars be the future of humanity, or is that just science fiction? (Image credit: NASA/ESA/Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA))

Jim Green: What really surprised you about Mars when you were doing the research for your first book, 'The Martian'?

Andy Weir: I had a lot of fun doing the research, and that's always the part of writing that I enjoy the most. I already knew a lot about it to start with because I've spent my life being a space dork. I feel like I'm in a building where that's very much accepted here at NASA Headquarters in D.C. I've always been into it. So, I started with more than a layman's knowledge of this stuff, but among the things that I discovered while researching Mars that I didn't know before was how fast Phobos' orbit really was, how ludicrously close to the planet it is. It's well within whatever Mars' geosynchronous orbit is called and, in fact, it's nearing the Roche limit, and it's probably going to be a ring in a few hundred thousand years. So, that means that even though Phobos and Deimos both go the same direction around Mars, if you're on the surface of Mars, they appear to be going opposite directions, because Phobos is going around Mars faster than Mars can rotate. That's one thing I found really interesting.

I was also fascinated by Olympus Mons on Mars, the tallest mountain in the Solar System, but it also has an incredibly wide base, almost the size of the state of Texas. The grade is so gradual that the curvature of the planet actually has more of an effect on the horizon than the grade. So, you could be standing on the slopes, for lack of a better word, of Olympus Mons, and you would think you're on a flat plain.

Jim Green: Yeah, it's really spectacular, and this is one of the features that a lot of our scientists point to that says Mars doesn't have plate tectonics. And so, as magma just pokes through the surface, it just sits there and accumulates. But then

Andy Weir:  Well, I'm going to interrupt you there because recently, within the past year, they [scientists] were able to prove that Mars had an active volcano that lasted on the order of over two billion years, maybe. And the way they were able to prove that is by examining a specific shergottite, a meteorite that had fallen to Earth but originated on Mars. They were able to analyze that and prove that it came from basically the same lava source that these other shergottites came from, and that proved that the same lava source had been active for two billion years. Well, that shergottite that they did the proof with? I have a shergottite at home, a Mars rock at home that was a little gift from me to me with my 'Martian' money. I have it at home and it is that same on, a different piece from the same fall, but it's the same meteorite. So, it was funny when I was reading that news, because of course, I read space news. I was like, it's from this [meteorite] NWA7635  wait, that sounds familiar, so I go into my living room and look at the little plaque that I have, because of course, I have it in a little display case, and that's my meteorite.

Jim Green: Hang onto it!

Andy Weir: Well, I'm not going to be giving it away. It cost a lot.

The Mars 2020 rover will collect core samples on Mars, leaving them for a return mission to pick up. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Jim Green: That's true. It may have other secrets to behold. This is really important why we need to do that next Mars mission, the sample return mission. We're going to core rock, and we're going to bring that back, and that's going to tell us how fast the climate on Mars changed.

Andy Weir: That sounds fantastic.

Jim Green: It's called Mars 2020.

Andy Weir: I'm still catching up on some of the details. That will collect the samples and leave them behind for a future return mission?

Jim Green: Once we land it in a geologically diverse area  probably where the water has modified the minerals, where the ancient shoreline on Mars has been  we'll start coring rock. It cores about a three-inch-long chalk-like cylindrical, a core sample, and it puts them into a metal sleeve, and after it does several of those, it lays them in a pile and moves on. Then later on, we're going to come and pick them up, take them back to a Mars ascent vehicle. Then we'll bring it all back [to Earth] because we really want to interrogate those [samples] in the laboratory. That's where the gold is, in bringing back those samples and really studying them.

Andy Weir: Yeah, I mean, you guys are sending entire laboratories to Mars to look at the samples, but, boy, they're nothing compared to what we can do on Earth with the facilities here.

Jim Green: Right now we call it Mars 2020, but next year [2019] we're thinking about having some sort of contest where kids from across the country can name it.

Andy Weir: Sure. That's how you named Curiosity.

Jim Green: And Spirit and Opportunity and Sojourner. So, that's an important next step that we'll do.

Andy Weir: You know, they're just going to call it 'Marsy McMarsFace'. I mean, that's going be like the top voted one. That's the thing now.

Jim Green: Well, we hope not! But I'm sure we'll get that as an entry, and it'll be from Andy Weir, at least.

Andy Weir: Oh, no, I'll be much nicer than that.

An artist's impression of humans exploring Mars. (Image credit: Pat Rawlings/NASA)

Jim Green: What I really enjoyed in The Martian is the concept of what happens when humans first get to Mars. Why did you pick the era that's just around the corner to write about?

Andy Weir: Well, I wanted it to take place as close to the modern day as possible, but I needed to give enough time in the fictional future to actually develop the technologies that would be necessary. The main kind of tech that's in The Martian that we don't have in reality yet is the strength of the ion drive that Hermes uses. Like, the technology's all proven. It works, but we don't have anything like the scale that would be necessary for it. So, I gave us about 20 years to work that out.

Jim Green: The art direction in the movie, the things that [Production Director] Art Max did, was really spectacular.

Andy Weir: Absolutely beautiful.

Jim Green: What was it like to see The Martian in the theater for the very first time?

Andy Weir: Oh, man, it was great. [Twentieth Century] Fox brought me onto their lot, and we watched it in one of those little, you know, test theater rooms where they watch it internally. The first cut that I saw was missing most of its special effects, so it's just a bunch of people walking around in front of green screens, or big obvious black wires holding them up in the zero-G scenes. But still, I'll tell you, right at the beginning, when it started that intro and it put 'The Martian' up on screen, I cried.

Andy Weir, left, and Jim Green in the Gravity Assist recording booth. (Image credit: Aubrey Gemignani/NASA)

Jim Green: Tell me about your new book, Artemis.

Andy Weir: Artemis takes place in a city on the Moon, humanity's first off-Earth city. And the main character is a woman who's a small-time criminal, and she gets in way over her head.

Jim Green: Way over her head, I might add.

Andy Weir: It's less about national space exploration and more about the colonization of space, so the stuff that happens a little bit later on. I had to come up with an economic reason why the city of Artemis exists and so on.

Jim Green: I thought you did it really well. It's very exciting to see how, as a science fiction writer, you can think about the future. I always say, if we don't spend time thinking about our future, we don't have a future, and I think science fiction plays a very important role in that.

Andy Weir: Every reality starts with a dream, right?

Jim Green: What kind of lunar science research did you do to help write that book?

Andy Weir: Well, quite a lot. Actually, the vast majority of that information came from the Apollo missions. Mainly, I needed to know the mineral breakdown of the ores that are available on the surface. What I learned was just amazing. I had no idea that the Moon was being so cooperative in us colonizing it. Eighty-five percent of the rocks in the lunar highlands are anorthite, which is aluminum, silicon, calcium and oxygen all put together into a very stable molecule. If you can break that apart, you end up with aluminum to build your Moon city and oxygen to fill it. I mean, the Moon is made of moon bases, just some assembly required. That was just the most awesome part. From there, I'm like, okay, how do I smelt anorthite? It takes a ludicrous amount of energy. Okay, fine, we're going to need a ludicrous amount of energy, we're going to need some [nuclear] reactors. It would be cheaper to ship the entire city to the Moon than it would be to ship the solar panels necessary to smelt anorthite, so it's going to have to be a reactor. I just kind of built out from there how the city got built and how it grew and how to make maximum use of the resources on the Moon. In fact, they would generate so much oxygen that the people in the city can't breathe it fast enough. They'd be venting it out into space. And oxygen is really handy. For every kilogram of hydrogen you want to bring to the Moon, you can make nine kilograms of water.

Much of Andy Weir's research for his second novel, Artemis, came from what was learned during the Apollo missions. (Image credit: NASA)

Jim Green: This is really thinking ahead in the sense that just in the last few years, there's been quite a bit of thinking about how to go out into our Solar System, go to the asteroids, potentially go to the Moon and be able to mine and get those resources. I think your book goes right at that very important point. That's in our future.

Andy Weir: Well, possibly, although to be fair, all of their mining and resource collection is to build the city itself. So, that works out to be economically neutral for them. It's like they get the resources from the Moon, they use the resources on the Moon. They don't really export it to Earth. It's still cheaper even within the setting of Artemis to just mine whatever you want on the planet you're on.

Jim Green: Well, indeed. Typically, the concept is we would want to mine material and then use it in that framework, use it in space. So having space helps sustain us as we move out. It's a critical new way of thinking about how to go well beyond low-Earth orbit, and I think your book really hits that.

Andy Weir: Thanks. Yeah, it's building out infrastructure, right? It's no different than the westward expansion. You don't go straight to California. You build railroad stations along the way.

Jim Green: Some people ask, why go back to the Moon? I think, as you point out in the book, there's all kinds of different reasons.

Andy Weir: The whole conceit of Artemis is based on [the fact that] it takes place in the 2080s timeframe, when the price [of reaching] low-Earth orbit has been driven down, and it's been driven down far enough that middle class people can afford to go to space. Once you have that, you have economics in space. You have a tourist destination. Artemis is 40 kilometers away from the Apollo 11 landing site, aka Tranquility Base, and there's a visitor center built there. So, you stay in pressure and look through windows at it. And the historical site is, of course, very well-protected and they don't let anybody mess with it.

A lunar colony could use the natural resources found on the Moon to create oxygen, rocket fuel, water and materials to build habitats out of. (Image credit: Pat Rawlings/NASA/SAIC)

Jim Green: What kind of advice do you have for those budding science fiction writers that would follow your footsteps?

Andy Weir: Well, I guess for not just science fiction but any writers, the first step is you have to actually write. You can get stuck in world building and day dreaming and planning it out forever, but you're not actually writing until you're putting words into your word processor. So, you have to actually sit down and do it, and that's when you start to notice the problems. That's why it's not fun. It's fun to sit there and go like, oh, this will be my five book series. But, when you start writing it, you're like, oh, I see all the problems now. So, that's step one.

Step two, and this is difficult but more important, is to resist the urge to tell your story to your friends and family, especially if it's good. It's even worse if it's good because they'll be, wait, and then what happens, oh, tell me more, tell me more. You have to not do that.

The reason is most writers are driven by a desire to have an audience. We want other people to experience the stories that we've created and by telling the story to people verbally, it satisfies that need and saps your will to actually write the thing. So, if you make yourself a rule that says, okay, no one can find out anything about my story except by reading it, then that motivates you, at the very least to say, okay, I'll finish this chapter, and then I'll give it to my buddy to get his feedback, and so on.

Jim Green: Well, you know, that must be the case because I think while we had chit-chatted at a couple of events about The Martian at various stages along the way, I had asked you about your next book, and you were

Andy Weir: I was cagey.

Jim Green: Well, you were pretty darned cagey. I couldn't get any information out of you on that. I assume you're working on another project?

Andy Weir: My next project--well, this is my plan is that my next project would be a follow up book to Artemisthat also takes place in Artemis, but Jazz [the character Jasmine 'Jazz' Bashira] is not the main character. It's a different person, and it's a different story. I would love to write a bunch of stories that all take place in Artemis as it goes forward through its own history.

Jim Green: Now there's quite a bit of thinking about how the Moon, or at least being near the Moon in what's called a (Deep Space) Gateway, could help us move to Mars. I think what we'll see over the next few years is a lot more thinking about going back to the Moon and doing a variety of science.

Andy Weir: I think the Moon would be a fantastic stepping stone on the way to Mars, because if Artemis really existed, a manned Mars mission would be monumentally easier because you have this entire infrastructure, including fuel generation and metal working and everything like that, in a gravity well that's considerably lower than Earth's.

Will the Moon become a deep space gateway for Solar System explorers? (Image credit: Bill Ingalls/NASA)

Jim Green: Do you have any plans [in your future writing] to go back to Mars?

Andy Weir: Well, I don't know. I mean, not as a sequel to The Martian. I may have things take place on Mars in the future, but The Martian is sort of a "one-and-done" story. I have never been able to come up with an idea for a sequel to it that wasn't stupid. It's like if Mark Watney gets in trouble again, well, NASA starts to look really incompetent, right? And if somebody else is in trouble and Mark is helping, then Mark isn't really the main character any more. People really liked Mark, so I just don't see any way to make a sequel on that. But Mars itself is a setting where lots of fun stuff could happen.

Jim Green: One of the things that I really liked about the opening to The Martian was that the scientists were out deploying instruments, the astronauts were doing a variety of things, and Mark was picking up samples, and he was throwing a little dirt in his little box. I would have loved, as he goes back and gets his helmet for the last time to leave the station, Ares 3, that he picks up that file and takes it with him.

Andy Weir: Well, actually, in the book he remained an astronaut and a scientist throughout the whole ordeal during his long trip from Acidalia [Planitia] to Schiaparelli [Crater].He deliberately would still like take samples of the area, label them, tag them, put them in a box and leave them out on the surface for possible future sample returns. And I did have an idea of something like, ooh, we found something interesting, now we have to go back to where Mark was at this one point. But, still, it's hard to make a story out of that. These are things that it's really difficult because some of these things that you can imagine would be unbelievably exciting if they happened in real life are not that interesting if you write it as a story. Like if we just found there's actually la little microbe that lives on Mars, that would be the most amazing scientific discovery. But in a movie, that's like, so what? Are they going to invade? I really have to temper what would excite me compared to what would excite a mainstream audience of readers.

Jim Green: In your career, you really fell hard into the ability to write science fiction. What's changed in your life since then?

Andy Weir: Well, you know, I was writing The Martian just as sort of a labor of love. I was posting it to my website at the time. I spent 25 years as a computer programmer, a software engineer, and I really liked that, too, by the way. I enjoyed that job. Now, every aspect of my life is different. I'm a pretty social guy, and I used to really like going into work in the morning, and there were all my co-workers and, "Hey, how ya doing, can I buy you some coffee?" Now what I do is I go down to my home office, and I'm by myself, and I write. I do miss having a large group of people that I work with as part of a team. But, on the other hand, what is still probably the best week of my life was about two years ago when NASA brought me out to Johnson Space Center, and I got a week of VIP tours around everything. The access that I have gotten to various people and places as a result of The Martian  imagine this Venn diagram that's surrounded by awesome scientists, awesome writers, movie stars and then I'm right there in the middle. I get to play with all of them.

Jim Green: You're writing at a level where all the kids of this generation just eat it up. What kind of letters from kids do you get?

Andy Weir: Well, it's really cool. I had no idea when I wrote The Martian that it would be such a useful educational tool, but it turns out that it is, of course, because it's basically a long series of algebra questions and with the answers later on. I've learned that a lot of teachers are using it in the classroom. That's why we made a classroom edition with all the swearing toned down. And so, that's fantastic. I do get a lot of information about that from people and parents. I received an email just this morning from a woman whose son is severely autistic and doesn't really engage well with things, but loved The Martian and would read the book, and that was a method by which she could interact with him.

I think my favorite though was right around the time the film was out in theaters, a woman sent me a picture of her little girl's Halloween costume, and the little girl was seven or something like that, and she had dressed up as Commander Lewis from the book for, so she had her little astronaut outfit on, it said Melissa Lewis on it, and she had a cardboard box that was labeled Hermes and stuff like that. I just thought it was awesome that because of my book, this little girl decided to be an astronaut for Halloween instead of a princess, you know?

This story was provided by Astrobiology Magazine, a web-based publication sponsored by the NASA astrobiology program. This version of the story published on Space.com. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+.A new solar-sailing spacecraft will be a call to all (future) occupants of interplanetary craft. The Planetary Society's LightSail 2 spacecraft will be a test bed for future missions wanting to use solar sails  including NASA's proposed cubesat, the Near-Earth Asteroid Scout (NEA Scout).

LightSail 2 will launch no earlier than June 13 from the Kennedy Space Center near Orlando, Florida, using SpaceX's new and powerful Falcon Heavy rocket. The spacecraft's ultimate destination will be medium-Earth orbit of about 725 kilometers (450 miles)  roughly double the altitude of the International Space Station.

The mission's ultimate goal is to test out "flight by light," as The Planetary Society calls it  solar sailing in space. This type of propulsion uses the gentle push of photons streaming from the sun to move the spacecraft around. The greatest benefit is that the spacecraft doesn't have to carry fuel with it. On a small satellite like a cubesat, said Bruce Betts, chief scientist of The Planetary Society, every gram of weight counts. [The Evolution of Solar Sails in Photos]

"We've been waiting for a launch where we could get to a higher altitude [above Earth], where solar pressure will dominate over the atmospheric drag," Betts told Space.com.

"We actually will be trying to do controlled solar sailing  every half an [Earth] orbit, we will be pushed by the sunlight, and for the other half of the orbit, we will be edge-on to the sunlight," added Betts, who is also The Planetary Society's director of science and technology.

Improvements from LightSail 1

LightSail 2, set to launch no earlier than June 13, 2018, will be visible to observers on the ground as it orbits Earth for a month or more. (Image credit: The Planetary Society

The Planetary Society's LightSail 1 launched on May 20, 2015, along with the Air Force's supersecret X-37B space plane. It survived for just under a month in low Earth orbit. While it met its major mission objective of deploying the sail, the test flight had several issues along the way.

Just two days after launch, a software glitch delayed plans to deploy the solar sail until June 7. The spacecraft transmitted an image June 9 showing that the sail unfurled successfully, meeting its primary mission objective. But then, more problems arose.

"Before engineers could get a picture from the opposite-side cameras, LightSail's radio began transmitting a continuous, nonsensical signal, and the spacecraft stopped responding to commands," said the Planetary Society's Jason Davis in a blog post on June 15, 2015. The spacecraft also stopped transmitting on June 10, shortly before it entered the atmosphere as originally planned.

"We learned a lot from LightSail 1," Betts said. "It taught us a lot about the spacecraft, and after the various issues, we made a lot of improvements."

The Planetary Societys LightSail cubesat captured this image of its deployed solar sails in Earth orbit on June 8, 2015. (Image credit: The Planetary Society)

Some of the key improvements will help LightSail 2 make more efficient use of the particles coming its way. The most dramatic hardware difference is a momentum wheel, or a rapidly spinning wheel that helps LightSail 2 maintain position in space. Its attitude determination and control software is different from LightSail 1's equipment. The cameras were also upgraded to transmit higher-quality images of the sails.

Other improvements were intended to make the spacecraft more robust. Instead of "waiting for reboots to sometime, magically happen," Betts said, there are timers on board with automatic settings to restart processes, or, at worst, to reboot the entire spacecraft in case of trouble. More information will be included in the radio signal to give controllers information about the spacecraft's health status. Engineers also added reflectors to make the position of LightSail 2 easier to track from the ground.

Interplanetary craft

This photo shows Japan's Ikaros solar sail as it sailed by the planet Venus (which appears as the crescent at upper right) on Dec. 8, 2010. The Ikaros solar sail was about 80,000 kilometers from Venus during the flyby. (Image credit: JAXA)

A couple of other spacecraft have successfully tested out solar sailing in space. The most notable example is the Japanese Ikaros (Interplanetary Kite-craft Accelerated by Radiation Of the Sun), which successfully traveled using a solar sail in 2010 during Japan's Akatsuki mission to Venus. It's the only spacecraft that uses that method to move so far in deep space  in 2012, Ikaros received the Guinness World Record as the first solar sail spacecraft between planets. [Are Solar Sails the Future of Space Travel?]

NASA also deployed a solar sail on the NanoSail-D2 in low Earth orbit in 2010 as well; that mission focused more on the sail's deployment, and how the sail behaved in low Earth orbit. (The agency planned another solar-sailing mission called Sunjammer, but it was canceled before launch.)

The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency's Ikaros solar sail is seen in deep space after its deployment on June 14, 2010, in this view taken from a small camera ejected by the sail. (Image credit: JAXA)

This means LightSail 2 will add vitally needed, real-world information about how solar sails behave in space. Its team is in contact with another solar sail experimental team as well: the NEA Scout team, which will use a solar sail to fly by an asteroid. "They are planning on using a solar sail with similar type design and characteristics to LightSail 2," Betts said.

NEA Scout is scheduled to join a dozen other tiny missions aboard the Orion's Exploration Mission-1, which will also be the first test flight of NASA's Space Launch System and is currently scheduled for no earlier than 2019. NEA Scout is expected to fly past an asteroid called 1991 VG, although the decision to fly by the asteroid hasn't been finalized yet.

Solar sailing is a possible propulsion method for distant-future interstellar missions because fuel doesn't need to be carried on board. NASA has played around with various mission-concept ideas. Similarly, the privately funded Breakthrough Starshot initiative plans to use a laser in combination with a sail to send a tiny probe to Earth's nearest star system, Alpha Centauri.

Editor's Note: This article has been corrected to note that LightSail 2 is propelled using photons streaming from the sun, not charged particles in the solar wind.

Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.NASA's InSight Mars lander is a stationary probe designed to study the interior of the Red Planet. Its permanent position  unlike NASA's Perseverance, Opportunity, Spirit and Curiosity rovers that roll across the surface of Mars  is necessary for its major science goals, which include learning more about the Martian composition and how tectonically active Mars is. The mission was also notable for its CubeSats, which were the first such tiny spacecraft fly beyond Earth before they fell silent in 2019.

InSight launched toward Mars on May 5, 2018, from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, on an Atlas V vehicle from United Launch Alliance. The mission landed successfully on Nov. 26, 2018 at the Martian Elysium Planitia, an equatorial zone just south of an ancient volcanic area. InSight was originally slated to send back data about the Red Planet's interior for about 1 Mars year, or 728 Earth-days (a little more than two Earth years), but NASA has extended the mission through December 2022.

Related: You can see launch photos here.

In its first year on Mars, InSight returned information on earthquakes on Mars (marsquakes), some possible models for the core of the planet and the tiny wobbles in the planet's orbit. Unexpectedly hard soil or regolith, however, prevented the lander's mole-like robot attachment from drilling its way under the surface, and that project was abandoned.

This artist's concept from August 2015 depicts NASA's InSight Mars lander fully deployed for studying the deep interior of Mars. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

InSight is short for a rather lengthy name: Interior Exploration using Seismic Investigations, Geodesy and Heat Transport. The mission has a total cost of $814 million, NASA officials have said.

How InSight was built

InSight was one of 28 submissions for NASA's next Discovery-class mission in 2010. This type of mission is a lower-cost explorer of the solar system. During InSight's selection round, individual proposals weren't allowed to exceed $425 million, excluding the cost of the launch vehicle.

InSight  then known as the Geophysical Monitoring Station (GEMS)  and two other finalists (Titan Mare Explorer and Comet Hopper) each received $3 million in May 2011 to perform a concept study. InSight was tapped in August 2012 for the next launch. Construction began on InSight in May 2014. Its manufacturer is Lockheed Martin Space Systems.

NASA's InSight Mars Lander: 10 Surprising Facts

In December 2015, NASA announced it could not launch as planned in March 2016 because of a leak in one of the craft's instruments, the Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS). At the time, agency officials said the mission might be removed entirely from the launch manifest. One limitation the agency cited was concern about exceeding the $675 million cost of the mission that included launch, data analyses and scientific operations. (At the time, they had spent $525 million.)

By the following fall, in September 2016, NASA announced a revised launch date for InSight. The announced delay to spring 2018 was no large surprise to the community, because the orbits of Mars and Earth only align favorably for a spacecraft flight every 26 months; outside of that window, it takes too much fuel to easily get to the Red Planet.

"The instrument redesign and two-year delay add $153.8 million" to the $675 million mission cost, NASA said in a statement. "The additional cost will not delay or cancel any current missions, though there may be fewer opportunities for new missions in future years, from fiscal years 2017-2020," it added.

InSight's landing zone is a flat stretch of the western Elysium Planitia, near the Martian equator. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

InSight lander's scientific goals

InSight has two major science goals, according to NASA. The first is to examine the interior of Mars  what it is made of, and what processes occur below the surface. The lander will provide information on the size and composition of the Martian core, crust and mantle. It also will show "how warm the interior is and how much heat is still flowing through," NASA said.

The second goal is to learn if Mars is tectonically active (including where seismic activity is located), and how frequently meteorites slam into its surface.

InSight in Pictures: NASA's Mission to Probe Mars's Core

"Previous missions to the Red Planet have investigated its surface by studying its canyons, volcanoes, rocks and soil. But the signatures of the planet's formation can only be found by sensing and studying its vital signs far below the surface," NASA said.

InSight's instruments

InSight has three instruments that are designed to look at the deep interior of Mars and learn about the planet's geological activity, warmth and elements of its evolution, according to NASA.

The Seismic Experiment for Interior Structure (SEIS) detects seismic waves from meteorite impacts, magma movements inside the planet, or marsquakes.

The Heat Flow and Physical Properties Probe, or HP3, will burrow about 5 meters (16 feet) into the surface. It's often referred to as a "mole." Its main job was to sense heat underground, although it was unable to dig below the surface and work with the mole was discontinued as of Jan. 14, 2021.

The Rotation and Interior Structure Experiment, or RISE, provides information about the composition of the Martian core. It will keep careful track of where the lander is located, and from that information, discern any wobbles in the orbit of Mars as the planet orbits the sun. The composition of the core will influence the degree and type of oscillation Mars experiences.

InSight also has a robotic arm that is more than 7 feet (2.4 m) long. This arm placed the seismometer and heat-flow probe on the surface for their measurements, and gave the heat-measuring mole probe a nudge when the mole could not dig below the surface. The arm also features a camera that will take "color 3D views of the landing site, instrument placement, and activities," according to NASA. In addition, InSight has sensors to provide information on the weather, and any changes in the local magnetic field nearby the lander.

Riding along with InSight were the first cubesats to fly beyond Earth. The experiment, which encompasses two spacecraft, is called Mars Cube One. The cubesats flew behind InSight during its journey to Mars. NASA named the cubesats "Wall-E" and "Eva" because they used fire extinguisher fluid as thruster propellant, just like the animated robot in Disney's "Wall-E" movie.

The cubesats were nearly lost, but successfully witnessed and sent information back to Earth about the spacecraft's last few minutes flying to the Red Planet's surface.

Additional resources

See NASA's InSight Mission page

Read more on the humming InSight has reported in National Geographic

Follow the mission on Twitter

This article was updated on Mar. 22, 2021 by Space.com Reference Editor Vicky Stein.Optimization

Are you frustrated with a slow pc or a hard disk not performing as it should?

Try SLOW-PCfighter to speed up boot time on a slow PC, or try a free scan of FULL-DISKfighter to recover space on a full disk. The latest offering is DRIVERfighter to update your driver updater. Get complete PC optimization and extend the life of your PC with these must-have software tools.Kigali (Rwanda), March 22, 2018 (SPS) - The President of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR), Secretary General of the Frente POLISARIO, Brahim Gali, has yestarday signed the Treaty of African Free Trade Area in the Rwandan capital, Kigali, the Treaty of Free Circulation of Persons, as well as the Kigali Protocol, on the promotion of trade within the continent.

The act is part of the work of the Extraordinary Summit, held in Kigali, in order to lay the foundations of economic integration in the continent.

The Protocol that was signed by more than 44 African countries is committed to promoting integration through the Free Trade Area, which guarantees the creation of a duty-free area.

It is important to remember that both the SADR and Morocco signed the three treaties that were presented to the Extraordinary Summit. SPS

125/090/TRAKigali (Rwanda), 03/22/2018 (SPS) - The President of the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR), Secretary General of the Frente POLISARIO, Brahim Gali, affirmed in Kigali, the SADR's willingness to work together with the rest of members of the African Union, to apply the Treaty of the African Free Trade Area and the Protocol of Kigali, on the promotion of economic integration within the continent.

The head of the State, said in his speech to the Summit, that both the Treaty and the technical protocols reflect the will of the leaders and peoples of Africa, to fulfill the objectives of the 2063 Agenda, as well as to put an end to conflicts and all kinds of colonialism on the continent.

In this regard, Brahim Gali thanked the community institutions for the preparation of the treaties, as well as the president of Rwanda, Paul Cagame, for hosting this important extraordinary summit, which will lead to a new level of integration within the African bloc.

It should be recalled that the SADR, signed Wednesday, the three treaties presented to the Kigali Summit: the Treaty of the African Free Trade Area; the Kigali Protocol; and the Treaty of Free Circulation of Persons. SPS

125/090/TRAEntrepreneurship often seems distinctly "American. After all, it encapsulates the American Dream of unlimited upward social mobility and the belief that as long as you have a good idea and good work ethic, you can start your own company and make plenty of money.

Related: What Global Entrepreneurship Week Teaches Us About The World

Then there's the whole thing about entrepreneurs as modern-day folk heroes: We tend to celebrate the billionaire college dropouts (Think: Mark Zuckerberg) who deviated from the norm, and the renegades (Elon Musk), who pushed for an idea that their contemporaries didnt think would work.

But, how do cultures other than our firmly established Western one view entrepreneurship, and what can we learn from them?

Germany

Germans have a culture built around work ethic, and are a notoriously driven people. However, starting a business is much more difficult in Germany than it is in other countries -- the World Bank ranks it 113th in the world in terms of ease of starting a business.

Part of the reason is that Germany prioritizes jobs in the government and in big established firms. The hardest working people and the best talent gravitate toward established jobs, for prestige and advancement. This leaves entrepreneurial opportunities less explored and less celebrated, at least by German standards.

Overall? The country still sees decent rates of entrepreneurship, thanks to an immigrant population that brings more entrepreneurial values into the country.

New Zealand

The World Bank has ranked New Zealand as the top country for ease of starting a business, but the culture of this island nation presents some unique challenges for local entrepreneurs -- namely, the phenomenon of tall poppy syndrome, or TPS. The term refers to the tendency of New Zealanders to collectively cut down or devalue exceptional individuals, seemingly as a way to level the playing field.

Related: These 30 International Entrepreneurs Really Are Solving the World's Problems

According to a recent NZ Entrepreneur survey, about 75 percent of business owners in New Zealand said they regarded TPS as a real phenomenon, and 42 percent reported having personally experienced TPS as a business owner. Accordingly, entrepreneurs tend to make fewer alternative decisions and take fewer approaches that deviate from the norm.

That said, New Zealand is particularly inviting to entrepreneurs; its entrepreneurial visa program accepts and rewards entrepreneurs capable of seeing high growth.

China

For the past few decades, China has been themanufacturing hub of the world, but Chinese culture is shifting to focus on the merits of entrepreneurship as China attempts to reposition itself as a growing tech innovator.

The Chinese government has taken multiple initiatives to foster increased rates of entrepreneurship, including a $338 billion foray into government-backed, tech-centric venture capital firms. The increased availability of cash available for entrepreneurial ventures is fueling a renewed interest in innovation.

In addition to monetary opportunities, Chinese culture is driving more aggression and competition between entrepreneurs.

Chinese citizens are hungrier for success and are willing to make great sacrifices for the chances of success; accordingly, Chinese startups tend to grow more rapidly than their American counterparts.

Brazil

Brazil is another interesting example; its rate of entrepreneurship has increased significantly over the past several years, thanks in part to increasing interest from both government-sponsored programs and American venture capitalists. As a developing market seeing high rates of economic growth, Brazil has a society that sees entrepreneurship as a promising opportunity to climb into a new social class (especially considering Brazils class inequality).

In addition, Brazilian citizens tend to favor working for small- to mid-sized enterprises (SMEs), rather than large firms; a whopping 98 percent of companies in Brazil are SMEs, and theyre responsible for 96 percent of available jobs. This makes entrepreneurship and business ownership even more appealing, and drives faster, more sustained growth.

American culture

Alongside the mythological figure of the entrepreneurial billionaire sits a very different reality. This reality defines entrepreneurial culture in the United States as being inconsistent with the notion of "America."

According to Yasuyuki Motoyama of the Kauffman Foundation, our education system is still weighted toward placing graduating students into existing top companies, rather than equipping them with the skills or incentives necessary to start their own businesses.

In addition, the culture of entrepreneurship is still relatively new; Motoyama suggests that the prestige of entrepreneurship came as a response to recession-era layoffs in the 1970s and 1980s that left entrepreneurship as the only option for advancement.

For these reasons, opening up your personal perspective on entrepreneurship is important if you want to become a more successful business leader. Your history, your culture and your values are all important, but they shouldnt blind you to other perspectives from around the world.

Related: 7 Tips for the International Entrepreneur

And, after all, we now live in a global world. So, learning more and broadening your approach will likely help you find more creative solutions, build a stronger business and possibly even find more fulfillment in your work and your new role --business leader.

Related:

How Other Cultures Think of Entrepreneurship

The Right Way to Grow Your Business Internationally

Traveling the World Is an Adventure That Makes You a Better Entrepreneur



Copyright 2018 Entrepreneur.com Inc., All rights reserved



This article originally appeared on entrepreneur.com

Organizations are more segregated today than they were 40 years ago. And entrepreneurs are to blame.

Related: Why Diversity In the Workforce Is Imperative

A study released in January by John-Paul Ferguson of Stanford University and Rembrand Koning of Harvard Business School, found that "occupational segregation" (where minorities are relegated to certain roles within a company) has decreased since 1970. "Establishment segregation" (companies' emphasis on diversity) has increased.

Whats interesting is that establishment segregation was decreasing until the 1990s. So, what caused the reversal?

Companies started becoming less diverse around the same time it became common for larger organizations to acquire startups. Ferguson and Koning suggest that since startups tend to be less diverse, they dilute the diversity of larger organizations when theyre acquired. This, they say, is what has led to the increase in establishment segregation.

With many companies focusing increasingly on diversity, corporate executives and investors may think twice before investing in or acquiring a less-than-diverse startup. In other words, if you're a startup owner, you should be focusing on diversity now to ensure a smooth exit strategy later. Here's how:

Hire outside your comfort zone.

Entrepreneurs often focus narrowly on fast growth. They make the mistake of surrounding themselves with other people honed in to the same short-sighted goal. This is why Dallas-based strategic leadership consultant Keith Martino advises that leaders hire for diversity early on.

Related: The Myriad Benefits of Diversity in the Workplace

As the business begins to take on momentum, the owner often fuels the fire by hiring individuals who share his or her perspective, Martino told me in an email. Its convenient.

But the price for this convenience is a company built on a foundation that lacks diversity, Martino said. So, from day one, hire outside of your company's comfort zone. Find people who challenge decisions and ask questions. Start by looking outside of the startup world.

Then, during the interview, ask potential employees about their perspective of the company. What weaknesses do they see? Where do they see potential? What would they do differently? While their answers may prove they're not the right fit, the process will show if the candidate can bring something unique to the table.

Avoid employee referrals.

Often, employee referrals lead to some of the best hires. But when a company is small, so is the pool of employees family and friends.

As San Francisco-based advisor to tech startups Lever, Bravado and AdRecruits, Leela Srinivasan pointed out, this often means a companys early hires are exactly like its current employees. Even if the founding team is made up of people from a minority group, theres no further diversity.

Ive seen this in countless startups with an 'about us' page that is predominantly male and non-diverse, Srinivasan said in an email.

Instead of relying on employees networks, turn to more diverse pipelines. For technical positions, Srinivasan suggested hiring coding-bootcamp participants. These training programs provide people with the skills employers need. And, since bootcamps occur all over the country, they give access to talent from a variety of backgrounds.

Another great option is veterans groups. While they might require more on-the-job training, veterans are an underutilized but talented and diverse workforce.

Ask the right questions.

Most leaders dont set out to build companies that lack diversity. But that can happen when they are blind to their own biases.

Startup leaders should assess their current strengths and weaknesses from a 'people' perspective, Tim Gates, the Pittsburgh-based senior regional vice president of the staffing and temp agency Adecco USA, said in an email. In many cases, diversity gaps in the workplace arent intentional, but leaders simply arent asking the right questions.

Dig into your company's demographics. Look beyond race and gender. Consider other sources of diversity, like education, employment history and personality. Determine if these demographics are represented proportionally throughout the organization. The answers to these questions will show where holes exist in your companys diversity.

Train for diversity.

When an organization is diverse, leaders have access to multiple perspectives and ideas. While employees backgrounds play a big part in their point of view, so does their training.

Dont train people in mass quantities like big, traditional companies, Andres Angelani, CEO of Oakland, Calif.-based digital transformation company Softvision, told me. Instead, expose young people to different emerging technologies, new design trends and agile mindsets.

Give each employee a unique learning experience. Have him or her work with different types of customers and under different managers. Try to match employees with unfamiliar experiences.

Related: Why You Need to Focus on Diversity Before It's Too Late

For example, if an employee is a white man from an affluent background, assign him to a manager who is a female minority. This will expose him to a variety of experiences that will help him develop new, diverse ways of thinking.

Related:

Is Your Ad Racially Insensitive? What Entrepreneurs Can Learn From Missteps by Gap, Dove and H&M.

The Shocking Factor Putting Your Entire Exit Strategy at Risk

Evernote's Head of 'People' Explains How the Company Employs Tech Tools to Reinforce Its Values



Copyright 2018 Entrepreneur.com Inc., All rights reserved



This article originally appeared on entrepreneur.com

Nominated Senator Millicent Omanga will not be the next Deputy Governor of Nairobi. The Senator had been shortlisted by Governor Sonko to take over from Polycarp Igathe alongside 21 others.

She has, however, issued a statement turning down the offer saying she is comfortable serving Kenyans in her current position in the Senate.

Im aware that Nairobi County Governor H.E Mike Sonko asked Nairobi residents to help him make a choice of his deputy from a list of motley personalities. I happen to be among the individuals the governor feels convinced can deputise him and help him implement his vision for Nairobi, she said on Tuesday.

Noting that she is qualified for the job, Omanga thanked Sonko for the nomination and stated that Sonko needs to settle for a young person since the bulk of the votes he got were from the youth.

Even though Im qualified to be a Deputy Governor, I strongly feel that Governor Sonko ought to settle for a young person. The bulk of votes he got were from the young people. More than 70 percent of Nairobi population is youth. He, therefore, needs a young DG to inject vibrancy, freshness and innovativeness as he steers Nairobi to greatness, she said.

I wish to thank the governor for the faith he has in me and also wish to thank all those who suggested and continue to propose my name to him for the said position.

That notwithstanding, I wish to clarify, and I hereby do vide this statement, that Im comfortable serving Kenyans in my current capacity as a nominated Senator in the Senate of Kenya for the next five years.

On Sunday evening March 18, Governor Sonko sought help from his over one million Facebook followers on who to pick as the new Nairobi Deputy Governor.

Among those listed were NRM General Miguna Miguna, Citizen TV presenter Ann Kiguta, businesswoman Ann Kagure, Bishop Margret Wanjiru and former Nairobi Town Clerk John Gakuo.

Others in the list include; Nairobi Education CEC Janet Ouko, former Member of Parliament Dennis Waweru, EALA member Simon Mbugua, Nairobi lawyer Karen Nyamu, former KTB Chairman Raymond Matiba, former PS James ole Kiyiapi and PS Irungu Nyakera.

The Nairobi Deputy Governors seat fell vacant after Polycarp Igathe tendered his resignation in January this year.

Governor Sonko has, however, assured Nairobianss that due process will be followed when choosing his deputy.You've seen a highboy dresser in museums, antiques shops, and your mother-in-law's boudoir. But what is this item's purpose, exactlyand where does it come from?

"This great-looking piece seems like it should fit in the Victorian era, but it's actually French in origin, from the time of Louis XIII," explains Sara Chiarilli, an interior designer with Artful Conceptions, in Tampa, FL.

How can this pretty piece be used in the homeand what's the difference between highboy, tallboy, and lowboy dressers? Our experts on antique furniture set the record straight. Read on.

What is a highboy dresser?

Photo by Panageries

A "highboy" is the layman's term for a tall chest of drawers, says Julie Muniz, a curator and art consultant at ArtMuser.com in the San Francisco Bay Area. "Other names for this piece of furniture are 'chest-on-chest' or 'chest-on-stand,' because it's composed of two case pieces that stack vertically," she says. They are also called "high chests."

While highboys were once made of two pieces that could be taken apart, now you'll likely find them fused together with the smaller one on top. Drawers might span the length of the piece, though some highboys have both full-length and smaller drawers in a row in the upper section.

Where did the name 'highboy' come from?

"The term 'highboy' came about in the late 19th century as a corruption of the French word bois, which means woodso the name literally means 'high wood,'" explains Muniz.

Today, the term might be applied to any dresser that's higher than it is wide or any chest or bureau that stands upright.

"Highboys can be fantastic antique finds. And if they're associated with famous American makers, they can be enormously valuable," says Beverly Solomon of Beverly Solomon Design.

Highboy vs. tallboy vs. lowboy

Photo by Maya Design Studio

Highboy and tallboy might seem interchangeable, but there's a distinct difference between these two types of dressers.

"A tallboy includes a wardrobe on top, while a highboy is all drawers," says Chiarilli. "'Tallboy' is generally thought of as a European term, whereas 'highboy' is more American," Muniz says.

A lowboy, however, generally refers to a dressing table or console.

Today, you might hear the term "lowboy" to describe any low or long dresser, console table, or bedroom vanity that comes up to about waist level. "Today's lowboys typically have a mirror, art, or a TV above them," says Liz Toombs, an interior decorator and president of PDR Interiors, in Lexington, KY.

Where can you find highboys in a home?

Working a highboy into your home's design scheme means you'll be adding extra storage. But beyond holding your clothes in your bedroom, highboys can be useful and stylish in other rooms, too.

Chiarilli suggests using a highboy as a foyer piece. Stash a coat rack close by and a tray on top for mail, keys, and loose change to create a landing spot when you come in the door.

This piece can also work in the dining room to hold tablecloths, napkins, and candles.

"China cabinets, buffets, and credenzas are sometimes mistakenly call highboys when placed in a dining area, but this is technically incorrect," Muniz explains.

You might also place a highboy in a large bathroom to store towels and soaps.

"It's fine to use a piece in a nontraditional way because that's what makes a home more interesting," says Toombs.

The post Highboy vs. Tallboy vs. Lowboy: What's the Difference Between These Dressers? appeared first on Real Estate News & Insights | realtor.com.N ot long ago I received a letter from Equifax, a company about which I knew nothing, informing me that my personal data had been stolen in a cyberattack and that the loss could expose me to fraud. The letter did not explain how or why Equifax had acquired my name, address and telephone number, nor did it admit liability or offer compensation. Instead, it suggested I take up their offer of free protection.

I put the letter in the bin. The offer of protection from a stranger who suggested I might be in danger sounded too much like a bad gangster movie. I later discovered that Equifax was a credit-rating agency, the data theft was real and some 700,000 UK consumers had sensitive personal data taken despite never having been customers of Equifax.

The data was supplied by financial service companies and my consent to the data dump to a person unknown was buried in those pages and pages of terms and conditions that I never read because I know you cant negotiate with the bank.

Nor can you negotiate with Facebook. When you signed up, you were more concerned about your profile picture than the deal you were offered. You probably didnt think it was a deal; Facebook is free, right? Wrong. In the small print you didnt read, Facebook states in return for sharing pictures of your holiday with your chums, you are handing over something valuable: you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide licence to use any IP content that you post.

In other words, Facebook can exploit your intellectual property as it wishes and use it to sell ads: You give us permission to use your name, profile picture, content and information in connection with commercial, sponsored or related content.

This is how Facebook makes money and until recently the stock market was convinced it was a money machine. But doubts have emerged. On Monday, the stock price fell 7%, a loss of $37 billion after weekend stories Cambridge Analytics, a data analysis firm, had harvested the Facebook profiles of tens of millions of Americans without their direct consent. Vast amounts of personal information was extracted from the social media companys platform in order to target people with campaign propaganda during the last US presidential election, according to the stories in the New York Times and Observer newspapers.

No one is suggesting Facebook connived in this data hijack but the stock market has woken up to political risk. Not the risk that the US election was hijacked (the stock market doesnt care about that) but that social media companies, such as Facebook, Google and Twitter will suffer intense regulation.

And so they should; the European Union is already well ahead of the US with its General Data Protection Regulation, which will impose maximum fines of 4% of worldwide turnover for serious data security breaches. But this fails to get to the root of the problem: the enormous market share and global reach of the social media colossi, their ability to control data, manipulate markets, avoid taxation and escape responsibility for publishing dangerous material. Up until now, most politicians have swallowed the libertarian tosh served up by the social media tycoons  its all about free speech. They didnt read Facebooks terms and conditions, which dump responsibility for dangerous, libellous or criminal content on to users. Facebook can make money out of the stuff you do on its platform but if you do bad stuff, thats your fault.

Social media is a cash machine. Some cash was spread among the political class in Washington to smooth the bumps but the embarrassment has become intolerable. Its one thing for politicians to be accused of being too close to corporate power. It is quite another to be thought to be a puppet, the plaything of a data analytics company.

There is a solution which avoids more rules, regulation and compliance. We have seen huge infrastructure providers ride roughshod over consumers and the political process before. When energy companies were too big, we broke them up, taking their pipelines and grids away and carving them into small bits.I t has been a tough 10 months for Petrofac chief Ayman Asfari but today he rewarded the board and investors for their loyalty by snapping up 10 million of shares in the firm.

Billionaire Asfari, who has been chased by both the Serious Fraud Office and Italian authorities in the past year, increased his stake from 18% to 19%, giving the oilfield giants share price a much-needed boost.

Syrian-born Asfari only resumed full chief executive duties this month after his role was restricted in the wake of an ongoing investigation launched in May last year by the SFO into Petrofac over suspected bribery, corruption and money laundering. The SFOs investigation is focused on the companys dealings with Unaoil, a Monaco-based consultancy that is accused of paying bribes to secure work for clients.

In January, Asfari  who is never far from controversy  was cleared by UK courts in his battle against Italian authorities who accused him of insider trading. But analysts thought Asfaris and Petrofacs luck could be changing: shares rose 9.2p to 515.4p.

But it wasnt all good news in the oil sector after small-cap oil rigger Lamprell said it expected lower revenue this year and posted a loss for last year  hurt by lower spending and losses at a windfarm. Shares fell 4.4p to 66p.

Oil major BP was also down  off 2.5p at 470.11p  as the FTSE 100 trod water, down 34.64 points at 7004.33 points.

Commodity giant Rio Tinto followed the index south after Swiss prosecutors confirmed they were investigating whether the miner paid bribes linked to the landmark Oyu Tolgoi copper-gold mine in the Gobi Desert back in 2009.

Separately, it agreed the sale of Winchester South to Whitehaven for $200 million (141 million).

Among the small-caps, Sabre released its first set of results since its stock market listing in December.

The insurer said gross written premiums rose to 211 million from 197 million the year before, and underwriting profit rose to 59 million from 55.9 million. However, it wasnt enough to impress the City and shares lost 36p to 241p.

Elsewhere on AIM, listed Quixant  a provider of computing platforms and monitors for gaming and slot machine applications  increased its revenue by 21% to $109.2 million.

The group made a profit of $17.7 million, up 28%, and shares gained 32.4p to 411.4p.

Finally, Secure Trust Bank reported a rise in full-year profit after the group successfully moved away from the high-risk consumer credit market. The challenger bank posted a 28.9% increase in pre-tax profits to 25 million in the year.Meanwhile Chancellor Philip Hammond has unveiled a string of measures to boost UK fintech.

Hammond said he was committed to helping fintech grow and flourish by taking a series of domestic steps and forging links overseas.

As part of that, a new task force will help the UK to manage the risks around cryptoassets, as well as harnessing the potential benefits of the underlying technology, Hammond said in a statement ahead of a fintech conference hosted by the Treasury.

Investors have flocked to cryptocurrencies like bitcoin despite wild price swings.

Regulators have warned that investors could lose all their money, but see promise in the blockchain technology that underpins cryptoassets.The Orange Democratic Movement (ODM) has asked the Jubilee Party to come clean on the role British data mining firm Cambridge Analytica played in its campaigns.

In a statement, ODM secretary-general Edwin Sifuna said Jubilee should, in the spirit of dialogue and following the historic reconciliation between President Kenyatta and Raila Odinga, say what exactly the firm did for them in the 2017 elections.

The target of their fear campaign was of course the NASA presidential candidate Raila Odinga.We want our Jubilee counterparts to come clean on the role Cambridge Analytica played in their campaigns so that we can openly deal with the rifts created by these political mercenaries on the fabric of Kenyan society, Sifuna said.

Sifuna added that ODM was extremely concerned about the British firms involvement following an expose by Channel 4 News TV that captured the firms officials bragging for having fixed the Kenyan election in favour of President Kenyatta.

We saw very distasteful propaganda and fear-mongering directed at stoking ethnic animosity against Mr Odinga during the campaigns, a dangerous adventure given existing ethnic fissures in Kenya.

Sifuna further proposed that laws should be formulated to ban foreign entities which are known to undermine democracy.

In order to protect our nascent democracy from such Foreign Political Mercenaries it may be desirable to curtail or ban, through legislation, their involvement in our politics, he said.

Cambridge Analytica is at the centre of an election manipulation scandal involving Facebook.

According to the expose on Channel 4, the companys Managing Director Mark Turnbull was recorded saying that the company rebranded both The National Alliance and Jubilee parties, conducted research on behalf of the Kenyatta campaign and wrote Jubilees manifestos and speeches.

Jubilee Party on Tuesday said that it had paid SCL, an affiliate of Cambridge Analytica to brand its campaign gears during the 2017 presidential election.

They were basically branding and all that but not directly, said Jubilee party vice-chairman David Murathe.D o you like your takeaway food with a side of side-eye? Then step into the Waterloo station branch of Wasabi, where this week I was transformed from casual weekend whinger to serious filer of official complaints.

Id gone in before a work event, hoping to grab a bite and sit down to eat. But instead of getting my usual  traditional chirashi salad with an extra sachet of spicy sauce  I got an unsolicited lecture on antenatal healthcare. The server at the cash desk (male, early 20s, an idiot) pointed to my TFL Baby on Board badge and said: You know, pregnant women shouldnt eat sushi.

Actually, according to current NHS guidelines, raw fish is safe to eat in pregnancy if it comes from a parasite-free source and/or has been frozen before consumption  as is the case with Wasabi and almost all sushi for sale in London. But still, persisted the young man when I politely corrected him, its not good for the baby.

Erwhat the? Why was I, a grown woman, having the basics of maternal nutrition twerp-splained to me by someone with no medical training (presumably) and no uterus (again, presumably)? Had I accidentally wandered onto the set of The Handmaids Tale season two?

Id have dropped down dead from the effrontery, were it not for previous experience. Having my first baby made me familiar with this weird social phenomenon whereby a womans body becomes communal property when shes pregnant. Suddenly everyone from anti-choice law-makers to randoms in Waterloo station believe it their right  nay duty  to make decisions on your behalf. Its sweet. And then its annoying. And then its a downright threat to your hard-won liberty.

I offered my card, hoping to be allowed to pay and leave. No such luck. They tell us to say this to women, he went on  I took they to mean Wasabi management. He then added sarcastically: But I suppose you know better? At that I gave up and left in search of somewhere else to eat. Later, as I choked down a burrito seasoned only by my salty tears of frustration, I made a resolution: it was time to make my first-ever complaint about customer service.

Wasabis UK head office was brilliant. Within an hour of my arsey email theyd offered a proper apology, some lunch vouchers and the reassurance that it is not in fact company policy to refuse service on spurious medical grounds. So soothed am I by this sensitive response, I can even admit that the guy probably did mean well. And, yeah, maybe my attitude to lunchtime interactions had been coloured by lingering bitterness over the fact that no Pret server has ever once offered me one of their free coffees! Not once!

Yet I maintain that when the stranger behind the counter feels comfortable offering any advice beyond have a nice day, the service has crossed a line. Ill meekly endure all manner of unsmiling transactions and pointless queues, but not that. Never that. And dont call me hun either.

Why Cynthias set for success in the city

Cynthia Nixon / Getty Images

Cynthia Nixon, actress and recently announced New York State gubernatorial candidate, was born and raised on the Upper West Side and made her name playing a thirty-something, single career woman, so theres no doubting her real New Yorker credentials. There are plenty of people, however, who doubt her qualifications for office. Do these people have no understanding of TVs place in modern US politics? More damningly, have they never seen an episode of Sex and The City?

Admittedly, its hard to say what counts as relevant political experience in these days of a Trump presidency but everyones got to start somewhere. The 40th US President, Ronald Reagan, had never run for office before he announced his candidacy for California Governor in 1966, and in his Hollywood actor days he mostly played cowboys. Nixon, on the other hand, has surely picked up some pointers as both Eleanor Roosevelt (in 2005s Warm Springs) and Nancy Reagan (2016s Killing Reagan). Shes also actively campaigned for public education, LGBT rights and cancer awareness (as a breast cancer survivor) for over a decade.

Yet surely, in front and centre of all of Nixons campaign materials, should be her time playing Miranda Hobbes on Sex and The Citys six seasons and two films.

After peacemaking between former co-stars Sarah Jessica Parker and Kim Cattrall, all that Albany politicking will be a doddle.L ondon will be plunging itself into darkness on Saturday night for Earth Hour, a worldwide lights-out event that seeks to call attention to climate change.

At 8:30pm on March 24, iconic monuments across the globe like Big Ben, the Eiffel Tower, the Trevi Fountain and Sydney Harbour Bridge will power down for 60 minutes in support of the World Wildlife Funds climate change movement. Across the capital, sites including Piccadilly Circus, the London Eye and Parliament will power down for the evening.

Earth Hour began in Sydney in 2007 and has been going strong in March of every year since. This year rings a bit differently than the rest as the WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature) is using the United States withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement as an extra incentive to go green Saturday night, a definite dig at Donald Trump.

Still, the hour is calling for more than just a political change and bit of dark. The movements main target is the everyman and calls for green changes to everyday activities. For each individual that promises to live a more environmentally friendly life on Earth Hours website, Ariel Laundry Detergent will donate 1 to protecting the planet.

Trevi Fountain in the dark for Earth Hour. / Lisa Maree Williams/Getty ImagesR ecently Ive been making an effort to be less uptight about getting my hair cut. Then, last week, I forced myself to the barbers, stared at my big weird head in the mirror and immediately began to feel uptight.

I dont like having my hair cut. This is partly because it makes my head seem even bigger and weirder  and partly because Im a coward who doesnt like to contradict people, which means that I often end up with a hairstyle I really dont want. Lately, prevailing trends have meant that I usually walk out of the barbers with the drastic short back and sides plus floppy fringe of a flamboyant 1930s fascist. Ill use the clippers, shall I? asks the nice bloke I see on my lunch break in Borough. Ill smile, nod and inwardly resign myself to looking like a Black Shirt Mr Potato Head for the next few weeks.

When I first moved to London, I nervously went to a hipster hairdresser in Shoreditch. The girl didnt even ask what I wanted. Im going to give you something that matches your style, she said, breezily.

She was true to her word, and for a while I looked even more like a bachelor geography teacher than I usually do. I couldnt even style it out as ironic because nobody had explained irony to me at that point.

Then, for years my flatmates and I would all go to the same Bangladeshi barbers in Bethnal Green. Although the results were rudimentary  we all ended up looking like Jimmy Somerville  it was worth it for the weird vibrating machine hed strap to his hand and rub over your shoulders afterwards. One day I finally broke out giggling and knew I could never go back. Then Id see a Romanian barber in Shadwell, a cheerful fellow who kept insisting that I too was Eastern European.

My protests were always laughed away, so I gave up and wed spend lots of time slagging off the English. Then one day, he was gone: hed made his pile and gone back home to live like a king. Which was a relief, because his haircuts were atrocious.W hat to do

Visit the royal horse stables by parliament (below), probably the prettiest youll find. I often sneak over at lunchtime  the smell of horses is a nice antidote to fashion. Stroll in Christiania, the legendary freetown (above) north of the city. The fact that we make space for this social experiment  a hippie commune, creative and full of contrast  says a lot about Denmark.

Characteristic house at the freetown Christiania in Copenhagen / Alamy Stock Photo

Where to shop

Head to Jerome Vintage for retro finds ranging from Eighties glitter bags to gowns by Christian Dior. the apartment (below) is full of to-die-for interior finds. My friends Mette and Rolf are the founders of lifestyle brand hay. They have a knack for creating everyday objects that make life so much more stylish. For jewellery, treat yourself to a private session with SOPHIE BILLE BRAHE, who takes bespoke orders on her amazing creations; her studio is also the epitome of Copenhagen chic.

Royal Stables, Christiansborg Palace, Copenhagen, Denmark / Alamy Stock Photo

What to see

The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (below) is one of my favourites. The architecture blends in beautifully with the coastline north of Copenhagen, and the art is in a league of its own. I love watching the changing of the guards at Amalienborg Palace people sometimes forget we have a royal family. Although Thorvaldsens Museum is huge, I always come away feeling re-energised. For a master class in the Scandinavian aesthetic, visit the House of Finn Juhl, home of the late architect. He had immaculate taste, in a very Danish down-to-earth way.

Alamy Stock Photo

Where to stay

Hotel Sanders (above) is the newest boutique hotel by former ballet dancer Alexander Klpin. Elsewhere, the hotel DAngleterre, established in 1755, is the epitome of five- star luxury. Located just a skip from the Nyhavn canal, it is also home to my favourite spa. With only one room, Central Hotel & Cafe is a little gem, situated on one of the cutest streets in town, and squeezed between posh Frederiksberg and hipster Vesterbro.

Where to eat

Fashions latest crush is Apollo Bar at Kunsthal Charlottenborg Gallery. La Banchina (above) by the sea is where the young and beautiful eat, while geranium offers perfect, if pricey, Nordic dining. For a traditional take on smrrebrd (open sandwich), SLOTSKAELDEREN HOS GITTE KIK is a total institution.

Where to drink

The interior has been the same since forever at ANDYS BAR; people still smoke inside and any attempt at pretentiousness falls flat. Right by the harbour where touristy Nyhavn ends, DEN VANDRETTE is the perfect place for after-work drinks. vinhanen is the closest thing we have to a Parisian wine bar. Its super-casual but has a great wine list.L ast night I woke up and thought a stranger was in the room.

Waaah, I squawked. But it was just a pile of clothes. Who knew nine Zara items could look so menacing in the dark? I always bulk-buy from Zara: spend more than 50 and its free delivery. Actually, I spent 240, but sent everything back except the navy jumper because I am trying to shop mindfully which, when youre over 25, just means being more basic than ever.

Online shopping is convenient  too convenient  but nothing beats the theatre of a good store. Im increasingly poleaxed by the sheer volume of everything-in-every-colour crying out to be loved.

Alamy Stock Photo

Alas, theres not enough love in the world. Some players on the high street are too prolific, too reactive, for their own good. They need to stop chasing the Balenci-Vetements Instabloggers and focus on the second-coolest girl in the room. Remember, she is price sensitive, and can buy a sweatshirt for 8.46 on Romwe. You dont know Romwe? Honey, it makes Primark look expensive.

Ill tell you who the high street needs to court: tweens. While millennials are busy worrying about making the rent, tweens have time on their hands and pocket money in their piggy banks or, if their parents have their s*** together, bank accounts (hello, you can get a debit card aged 11). Their needs are simple: free stickers and proximity to a food source. Aged 10, they discover Brandy Melville, swiftly moving on to Urban Outfitters, which they will describe as peng until someone older rolls their eyes. Topshop is also peng, because it does the best mom jeans, and the Oxford Circus branch also sells sweets. Hook these customers while theyre still unencumbered by the prescriptive aesthetic influence of the Kardashians, and maybe theyll be loyal for life. As theories go, its no more groundless than the race-to-the-bottom for sponsored posts by people who bought their followers.

EYES WITHOUT A FACE

The eyes of Dr TJ Eckleburg have nothing on Zayn Malik. If you havent read The Great Gatsby (who even are you?) they feature on an old billboard, with Fitzgerald describing how his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days, brood over the solemn dumping ground. Which is EXACTLY what Gigis eyes are doing, only tattooed on poor Zayns chest. Why, Zayn? Why? Have you not made enough dodgy decisions in your life without having the eyes of the girlfriend you had at 24 indelibly inked on to your body? You can never do the missionary position again. Nobody wants Gigis eyes looming over them: it kills the mood. Youll have to wear a vest. Either that, or get her eyes converted into Celtic symbols. Can they do that? Calling Dr Woo.

BAP ATTACKH ome is

Glasgow with my husband, Alan Clements, and my daughter, Caitlin, who is a journalist, too. My son, James, lives in New York.

Where do you go to let your hair down?

Occasionally, after Newsnight, drinking late in the Riding House Cafe.

Where do you stay when youre in London?

Our apartment is two minutes walk from Oxford Circus, where I can look across red chimney pots to the London Eye in the distance. It has so many good spots for food  Gitane, Honey & Co, Kaffeine.

Biggest extravagance?

Shoes. Last week I just had to renew my Roger Vivier black patent flats. The old pair was more than 10 years old. I have been known to buy two pairs of the same shoes if they are perfect.

Who is your hero?

Robin Day (left). I was a producer on the World at One in the early Eighties when he presented it. He was rigorous, erudite and a lot of fun.

Best place for a first date?

If the first date is breakfast then head to The Wolseley (above). Its not scarily intimate but wonderfully airy and always abuzz. If its lunch. then it has to be the new Mortimer House Kitchen, which has a great menu and a lovely atmosphere. If its dinner and it is likely to go well then head to Salt Yard. I cooked there for MasterChef and its delicious food is designed for sharing.

Who do you call when you want to have fun?

If I want to have fun I call my girlfriends  BBC and non-BBC. We are the voice of the beehive!

Bus or Tube?

Bus over Tube, but the whole transport system is great. When the Tube is rammed it is frightening. I prefer the little underground in Glasgow. It used to be painted orange  hence its nickname  the Clockwork Orange.

Most iconic Londoner?

Elizabeth I (left).

Queen Elizabeth I / Alamy Stock Photo

What would you do if you were Mayor for the day?

Id make everyone stop for two minutes and have a conversation with someone they didnt know.

Favourite London discovery?

If Hampton Court counts as London, then there.

Last play you saw?

The Ferryman (above). I went with my dear friend Ruth Pitt and was totally immersed in it. The cast is great. Jez Butterworth found the humour in the hellish.

Favourite shops?A friend today paid tribute to a university student who was shot and stabbed to death in an unprovoked attack and said he was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Russell Jones, 23, was ambushed outside shops near Ponders End station, Enfield, at 12.40am on Saturday.

He was found collapsed with knife injuries and a suspected gunshot wound and pronounced dead at the scene half an hour later.

Today, Jordon Welsh, who attended Lea Valley High School with Mr Jones, described him as bubbly and humble.

He said: Russell was a kind, loving guy and very humble in school. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Mr Jones, who is believed to have been in his final weeks at the University of Hertfordshire, was in South Street with a friend, also 23, when four hooded suspects attacked them. His friend was also stabbed but not seriously injured.

Detective Chief Inspector Andy Partridge, who is leading the murder investigation, described the attack as totally unprovoked, with an utterly deplorable level of violence.

He said: Whilst the attack itself only took minutes to carry out, I want to hear from members of the public who may have seen them in the area before the attack, or afterwards when they fled towards Sandhurst Road.

There have been no arrests and inquiries are continuing.

Mr Joness death was one of eight killings in the capital since Wednesday last week.

Tributes were paid today to caring father of two Tyrone Silcott, 42, who died from knife wounds on Sunday morning after a St Patricks Day party. The car mechanic was attacked outside a friends house in Homerton at 8.45am, allegedly in a row over two girls at the party.

Mr Silcott, who worked at the Mr Clutch car garage in Leyton, had two daughters, aged four and seven.

Employer Michael Wood, 44, said: He was the hardest worker here. I have told five or six customers about what happened and they all left with tears streaming down their faces. That says a lot about him.

A man, 28, has been charged with his murder and was due to appear before magistrates today.

In another case, two men have been charged with the murder of 48-year-old Balbir Johal from Slough, who died of a stab wound in Southall on Monday.

Hassan Mohammed, 23, of Southall, and Yassin Yussuf, 21, of no fixed abode, were due to appear today at Ealing magistrates court.

Detectives are still appealing for information about the fatal stabbing of a 20-year-old man in the Stratford Centre in east London on Tuesday.

He has been named locally as Romanian Beniamin Pieknyi, from Milton Keynes.

The victim was chased through the shopping centre by a gang before being stabbed. There have been no arrests.A kind and helpful young man died in his friends arms after being chased and stabbed by a gang in a shopping centre.

Romanian Beniamin Pieknyi, 20, reportedly stepped in to protect his friend during an altercation at the Stratford Centre in east London.

But he was stabbed during the row and pronounced dead at the scene on Tuesday evening.

The takeaway worker had come to Britain just two months ago and was living with his brother in Milton Keynes, a friend said. He had recently celebrated his 20th birthday.

Police and Forensic officers at the crime scene in Stratford after a man was stabbed to death / Nigel Howard

He was really kind, and always trying to help everybody," friend Ion Robert told the Standard.

"He gave his life to save his friend He died in the arms of his best friend.

These guys were trying to attack his friend and he intervened  he was trying to save his friends life.

'The Stratford Centre is becoming a no-go zone at night,' said one shop worker / Nigel Howard

Mr Robert, 28, said Beniamin was enjoying his life in Britain, adding: He was really happy with his job, he was a good guy.

Mr Pieknyis death was one of eight killings in the capital since Wednesday last week.

University of Hertfordshire student Russell Jones, 23, was shot and stabbed to death after being ambushed outside shops near Ponders End station in Enfield at 12.40am on Saturday.

Bubbly: Russell Jones was in his last weeks at the University of Hertfordshire

He was found collapsed with knife injuries and a suspected gunshot wound and pronounced dead at the scene half an hour later.

"Caring father of two Tyrone Silcott, 42, died from knife wounds on Sunday morning after a St Patricks Day party.

The car mechanic was attacked outside a friends house in Homerton at 8.45am, allegedly in a row over two girls at the party. A man, 28, has been charged with his murder and was due to appear before magistrates today.

In another case, two men have been charged with the murder of 48-year-old Balbir Johal from Slough, who died of a stab wound in Southall on Monday.

Hassan Mohammed, 23, of Southall, and Yassin Yussuf, 21, of no fixed abode, were due to appear today at Ealing magistrates court.

Tributes were also paid today to a 36-year-old found stabbed to death in a hotel room near Heathrow Airport.

Police named the victim of the stabbing in Hounslow as Hersi Hersi, who was a trans woman called Naomi.

Police named the victim as Hersi Hersi, who was a trans woman called Naomi.

The 36-year-old was found with knife injuries at Heathrow Palace in Haslemere Avenue, Hounslow, at 10.50am on Sunday and was pronounced dead at the scene 30 minutes later.

Police are still appealing for information about the killing of Mr Pieknyi. There have been no arrests.T he Met Police were forced to apologise after officers sparked fury by posting a selfie from a murder scene in Stratford.

Two Forest Gate North police officers posed with their heads together in front of the Stratford Centre in east London on Thursday morning.

It was captioned: "Crime scene at Stratford mall today."

The officers were guarding a police cordon outside the centre where Beniamin Pieknyi, 20, had died in his friend's arms after being chased and stabbed by a gang in the shopping centre on Wednesday night. He had reportedly stepped in during an altercation to help his friend.

Newham officers posted this selfie from the crime scene

Scotland Yard has since removed the image and apologised after the tweet sparked anger from people who accused the Met of being "too busy taking a selfie" to hunt for the perpetrators.

Police in Newham tweeted: "We apologise for any offence caused by the selfie picture that was posted from the scene of a serious crime this morning.

"The officers showed a lack of judgement and sensitivity in posting this and they will be spoken to and reminded of how to use social media responsibly."

The picture had sparked outrage online as the young man's death marked the eight murder in the capital since last Wednesday.

Police and Forensic officers at the crime scene in Stratford after a man was stabbed to death / Nigel Howard

Natalie responded on Twitter: "Quite a few murders in the capital this week. I know!!!....lets take a selfie by the crime scene."

While Mike Law wrote: "Have you caught the perpetrator(s) yet? Of course not, too busy posing for a selfie."

And Zara Lewis shared the picture, writing: "Um why are my local police posting selfies from a murder scene?"

Young Romanian man identified as victim of Stratford murder

Police were called to Stratford at 9.30pm following reports of a disturbance at the shopping centre.

Mr Pieknyi was found suffering from stab wounds. Emergency services battled to save him but he was pronounced dead at the scene at 10.30pm.

Friends described him as a "kind and helpful" young man.Y orkshire MP Philip Davies has demanded a debate on freedom of speech after a man was found guilty of making a "grossly offensive" video online.

YouTuber Count Dankula, real name Mark Meecham, taught his girlfriend's pug to react to phrases such as "Sieg Heil" and "gas the Jews" in a viral video.

A self-described "professional s*** poster" and free speech advocate, Meecham said the video had been taken out of context.

Speaking in the House of Commons, Mr Davies said: "We guard our freedom of speech in this House very dearly indeed...but we don't often allow our constituents the same freedoms.

The dog was taught to react to phrases such as 'Sieg Heil' and 'gas the Jews' / CountDankula/YouTube

"Recent court cases have put the whole issue of freedom of speech into the public domain. Ricky Gervais and David Baddiel have joined forces on this issue.

"Ricky Gervais said 'A man has been convicted in a UK court for making a joke that was deemed grossly offensive. If you don't believe in a person's right to say things you might find grossly offensive then you don't believe in freedom of speech'.

"Can we have a debate about freedom of speech in this country - something this country has long held dear and is in danger of throwing away needlessly?"

Andrea Leadsom, leader of the Commons, responded: I absolutely commend (Mr Davies) for raising this very important issue.

We do of course fully support free speech, however, there are limits to it and he will be aware there are laws around what you are allowed to say and I dont know the circumstances of his specific point, but he may well wish to seek an adjournment debate to take this up directly with ministers.

Meecham's video was watched more than 3 million times on the video sharing platform. He was arrested after sharing the footage in April 2016.

Speaking after the verdict, he said: "There has been a huge miscarriage of justice.

"I think it is a very, very dark day in terms of freedom of speech and freedom of expression.

"One of the primary things that must be considered in cases like this is context and intent and today context and intent were completely disregarded.

"For the system to disregard such things means that your actions no longer matter - they decide what your context and intent is.

"For any comedians making jokes in Britain, I'd be very, very worried about your future because - the context and intent - apparently they don't matter anymore."The Kenya Civil Aviation Authority (KCAA) has published regulations for the commercial use of unmanned aerial vehicles  commonly known as drones.

Drones can now be operated freely in Kenya subject to registration by the Authority, KCAA Director General Gilbert Kibe stated in an advert placed in the local dailies.

Kibe said operators of the remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems must also abide by the regulations guiding their use.

Any person who wishes to import, own or operate an RPAS in Kenya shall apply to Kenya Civil Aviation Authority in the prescribed form and pay the requisite fee for the due process.

A person commits an offence if they own, operate, manufacture, assemble or test an RPAS without authorisation from KCAA, Kibe said in a statement on Wednesday.

He explained that anyone who already owns a drone imported into the country at the commencement of the regulations gazetted on October 6 should apply to the authority within six months.

According to RPAS regulations, KCAA may grant permission, upon application, a temporary permit to a person intending to operate a drone not registered in Kenya for a period of thirty days renewable once.

An applicant must, however, demonstrate general knowledge, flight performance, and navigation skills to be allowed to acquire one.

The assembly or manufacture of drones without clearance by KCAA attracts a penalty of Sh2 million or six-month imprisonment.

A similar punishment will be meted out to anyone who operates drones with military specifications.

Failure to disclose drone specifications, airworthiness, insurance policy, operating speeds, maximum climb rates and coverage area attracts Sh1 million fine or six months imprisonment.

Under the regulations, civilians are limited to flying drones at a height of not more than 400 feet above ground level to avoid collision with aircraft.

Another rule further states that the drones must be within 50 meters of any person, vessel, vehicle or structure which is not under the control of the person in charge of the remotely piloted aircraft system.

The regulations do not, however, apply to state aircraft, unmanned free balloons (hot air balloons), airships and toys.

Provided that no toy shall be operated within an aerodrome and not less than 500 meters from the aerodrome boundaries, in and around strategic installations, radar sites, high tension cables and communication masts, prisons, police stations, courts of law and scenes of crime, Kibe said.

A drone with less than 2 kilograms gross weight, not powered by fuel, not fitted with a camera, not carrying a payload, is operated at a maximum height of 50 feet above ground and not more than 50 meters radius from the operator, qualifies as a toy.

Drones can be used for sports, recreational and private use, and commercial purposes, according to the authority.L ondoners will unite for a day of commemoration one year on from terror attacks which rocked the capital.

Events to remember all the victims who died in the four terror attacks in London last year will be held today.

The message #LondonUnited will be projected in four locations.

Mayor Sadiq Khan said the projections were an act of solidarity and said Londoners stand together united against terrorism and hope in the future.

Westminster Bridge Terror Attack: One Year On 1 /20 Westminster Bridge Terror Attack: One Year On 6 people including the killer died in the attack Jeremy Selwyn Theresa May laying a wreath at Parliament Square Jeremy Selwyn Message from Theresa May on her floral tribute at Parliament Square Jeremy Selwyn #Londonunited one year on from the Westminster attack Nigel Howard People paid tribute to the victims who were killed in the Westminster terror attack last year Jeremy Selwyn Emergency services workers lay flowers and pay their respects at Parliament Square in Westminster on the anniversary of the Westminster Bridge attack in London Reuters Sadiq Khan, Mayor of London, poses with the #LondonUnited memorial at City Hall, marking the anniversaries of the four terror attacks in London Reuters A message is beamed onto a map at the #LondonUnited memorial at City Hall, marking the anniversaries of the four terror attacks in London Reuters A desolate Westminster bridge where the attack took place Jeremy Selwyn Londoners left messages and tributes for the victims Jeremy Selwyn Londoners leave messages and tributes for the victims Jeremy Selwyn People lay flowers for the victims Jeremy Selwyn Police walk past truibute at Westminster today Jeremy Selwyn The attack occurred on Westminster bridge near the houses of Parliament Jeremy Selwyn Woman and child look out over the River Thames on Westminster bridge Jeremy Selwyn Man carries memorial flowers across Westminster bridge Jeremy Selwyn Theresa May laying a wreath at Parliament Square Jeremy Selwyn Theresa May stands by her floral tribute at Parliament Square Jeremy Selwyn Londoners leave messages and tributes for the victims Jeremy Selwyn Londoners leave messages and tributes for the victims Jeremy Selwyn

The London United campaign was originally spear headed by ES Magazine when it invited six artists to design its cover to celebrate Londons resilience in the face of the tragedies.

Fourteen people in total died in the attacks on London Bridge, Finsbury Park Mosque and the Houses of Parliament which took place between March and September 2017. The attack at Parsons Green underground station, where a homemade bomb partially detonated injuring about 50 people, is also being commemorated.

Five people died and 49 were injured in the attack in Westminster on March 22 last year. The attacker also died.

Terror attacks in London 2017 March 22: Five people were killed when Khalid Masood mounted the pavement and mowed down people on Westminster bridge. On duty officer PC Keith Palmer was stabbed to death. Mr Masood was shot by responding armed officers June 3: Eight people were killed when a van driven by three muslin extremists drove into pedestrians on London Bridge. The attackers then launched a knife attack in Borough Market. All of the attackers were shot dead by police June 19: Darren Osborne drove a van into worshippers leaving Finsbury Park Mosque . He killed 51 year-old Makram Ali and injured nine others. He was sentenced to life imprisonment September 15: Iraqi teenager Ahmed Hassan, 18, detonated a homemade bomb on the District Line train at Parsons Green tube station injuring 50 people. Mr Hassan was found guilty of attempted murder

The sister of one of the victims today spoke out about the horrific event in a heartbreaking interview.

Magda Tois said she refuses to dwell on the killer. Her sister Andreea Cristea, 31, was flung into the River Thames when Khalid Masood ploughed into Londoners on Westminster Bridge on March 22 last year.

Victim: Andreea Cristea fell into the Thames when Khalid Masood ploughed into tourists on Westminster Bridge (Metropolitan Police ) / Metropolitan Police

Although she survived the fall, she died in hospital two weeks later.

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A close friend and colleague of Pc Keith Palmer paid tribute to the officer describing him as proud and courageous man.

He said Pc Palmer was a true and loyal friend, utterly reliable and added: "Most of all I will remember him as a family man who idolised his wife, daughter and his family; they're the important ones that I think about a year on from the Westminster attack."

Tributes: murdered policeman Keith Palmer pictured with his wife Michelle

Ms Toi told the BBC: I'm not interested in it because my sister is dead and no-one and nothing will bring her back."

Recalling the moment she found out that her sister had been involved in the incident, Ms Toi said: "You don't expect to hear on the phone that something tragic has happened."

MP Tobias Ellwood breaks down recalling Westminster attack explanation to son

A junior doctor who rushed to the aid of the victims who were mowed down during the attack spoke of the Mayhem she encountered.

Dr Colleen Anderson rushed to the aid of the victims / PA

Dr Colleen Anderson was working at St Thomas' Hospital, on the bank of the Thames opposite Parliament and next to the bridge, when a colleague saw the attack.

The doctor, who was only eight months into her training, said much of the two hours she spent attending to the wounded on the bridge was with Pc Kristofer Aves, who has been left paralysed by the injuries he suffered.

Westminster Bridge vigil - In pictures 1 /20 Westminster Bridge vigil - In pictures Schoolgirls on Westminster Bridge during the vigil today Jeremy Selwyn An injured man holding a rose is wheeled on to Westminster Bridge during an event to mark one week since a man drove his car into pedestrians then stabbed a police officer in London Stefan Wermuth/Reuters Police officers hold flowers at the event on Westminster Bridge Matt Dunham/AP Communities across London unite one week on from the attack in which four people died Metropolitan Police Police officers stand guard on Westminster Bridge ahead of the vigil Dan Kitwood/Getty Images Imams honour the victims of the attack on Westminster Bridge Carl Court/Getty Images Muslim men pray during an event to mark one week since a man drove his car into pedestrians on Westminster Bridge Hannah McKay/Reuters A group of Muslim men hold banners on Westminster Bridge Stefan Wermuth/Reuters Superintendent Jon Williams (centre) joins a vigil held on Westminster Bridge in London, exactly a week since the Westminster terror attack took plac Yui Mok/PA A vigil is held on Westminster Bridge in London, exactly a week since the Westminster terror attack took plac Yui Mok/PA Memorial Service on Westminster Bridge today a week on from the terror attack last week Jeremy Selwyn Memorial Service on Westminster Bridge today a week on from the terror attack last week Jeremy Selwyn People arrive to take part in a vigil on Westminster Bridge in London, exactly a week since the Westminster terror attack took place Yui Mok/PA Police block Bridge Street outside the Palace of Westminster as a vigil on Westminster Bridge is held a week since the terror attack took place Victoria Jones/PA People pay their respects and hold roses on Westminster Bridge as they attend a vigil to remember the victims of last week's Westminster terrorist attack Dan Kitwood/Getty Images People walking across Westminster Bridge in London after a vigil to mark a week since the Westminster terror attack took place BBC Police officers hold white roses on Westminster Bridge during a vigil to remember the victims of last week's Westminster terrorist attack Dan Kitwood/Getty Images Members of Ahmadiyya Muslim Association pay their respects in Parliament Square, London David Mirzoeff/PA Memorial Service on Westminster Bridge today a week on from the terror attack last week Jeremy Selwyn People hold posters on Westminster Bridge during an event to mark one week since a man drove his car into pedestrians then stabbed a police officer in London Stefan Wermuth/Reuters

Looking back one year later, Dr Anderson said: "I remember it vividly and perhaps I would not remember so much if there were not these constant reminders.

"There was a show on looking back at 2017 and all the attacks and unfortunately I was on call when London Bridge happened.

ES Magazine 07/07 Covers - In pictures 1 /7 ES Magazine 07/07 Covers - In picturesI ndividuals seeking to divorce in London after Brexit risk being left at a disadvantage in cross-border EU cases, an eminent former judge said today.

According to legal experts, transposing EU law into the English legal system, through the EU Withdrawal Bill, means courts here will continue to follow orders made by judges on family matters in other European countries.

But Baroness Butler-Sloss, who was president of the Family Division of the High Court, today warned that EU courts could ignore judgments made in England because reciprocity requirements would no longer apply to them after Brexit.

It could also lead to parallel court cases, in two countries, on divorces, child maintenance and other family disputes. We do not want someone starting a divorce in London and in Warsaw and carrying it through to the end, where we may find that we have to obey what Warsaw says and Warsaw has absolutely no need to take the slightest notice of us, she said. This is a truly worrying thing. There is no point us applying European law if the various countries of Europe do not have to apply ours. That really will be such a disadvantage for British citizens.

She said the reciprocity issue also needed to be addressed to help to track down partners refusing to pay child maintenance.

About 140,000 international divorces take place in the EU each year, many involving British citizens.

After Brexit, EU countries will still co-operate with Britain on child custody cases under the Hague Convention on The Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction. But Baroness Butler-Sloss said the current EU system often resolves these case more quickly.

Legal experts say that replicating the current arrangements would only work if the UK remains subject to the European Court of Justice.A close friend and colleague of the hero police officer stabbed to death in a terror attack as he guarded the gates of Parliament has praised the proud and courageous man on the anniversary of his death.

Pc Keith Palmer was killed by terrorist Khalid Masood as he stood guard at the Palace of Westminster.

As London prepared to mark a year on from the tragic event, Pc Palmers colleague and long-time friend Pc Shaun Cartwright paid tribute to the police officer.

And he relived the horrifying incident, describing how the attack unfolded on March 22 last year.

Tragic: PC Keith Palmer stationed in front of the Houses of Parliament, posing with visitors / Will Robins/Tyler Chatterley-Russell

"Keith loved being a police officer, he just wanted to help people and do his best, Pc Cartwright said in a statement.

Keith was always happy, always the first to help anyone out, first in to work and the last one out.

Attack: Tobias Ellwood MP was one of the people who tried to save PC Palmer after he was stabbed / Stefan Rousseau/PA Wire

"He was a proud and courageous police officer who did his job and never wanted any fuss or to be the centre of attention.

He said Pc Palmer was a true and loyal friend, utterly reliable and added: "Most of all I will remember him as a family man who idolised his wife, daughter and his family; they're the important ones that I think about a year on from the Westminster attack."

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The pair had previously worked together on the on the Territorial Support Group and Pc Cartwright was due to be on shift after Pc Palmer at the gates on the day of the attack.

Describing the moment the alert was issued, he told LBC: "I was getting myself changed when the alarm went off, that there'd been a terrorist attack, there'd been a large explosion in the area of Portcullis House, Westminster Bridge, so I quickly pulled on all of my kit.

PC Keith Palmer Funeral - In pictures 1 /43 PC Keith Palmer Funeral - In pictures The coffin of Pc Keith Palmer is removed from Westminster's Chapel of St Mary Undercroft in London before it makes its way to Southwark Cathedral Alex Lentati The funeral of Pc Keith Palmer Sky News Pall bearers carry the coffin of PC Keith Palmer into the Southwark Cathedral in London Frank Augstein/AP A police officer reacts outside Southwark Cathedral ahead of the funeral of PC Keith Palmer Hannah McKay/Reuters The funeral cortege of PC Keith Palmer makes its way from The Palace of Westminster to Southwark Cathedral Chris Jackson/Getty Images The coffin of Pc Keith Palmer is removed from Westminster's Chapel of St Mary Undercroft Yui Mok/PA The coffin of Pc Keith Palmer is removed from Westminster's Chapel of St Mary Undercroft in London before it makes its way to Southwark Cathedral Yui Mok/PA A couple hug as a Police officer lowers his head as the hearse carrying the coffin of PC Keith Palmer Daniel Leal-OlivasAFP/Getty Images The coffin of Pc Keith Palmer is removed from Westminster's Chapel of St Mary Undercroft in London before it makes its way to Southwark Cathedral Alex Lentati A man lays a single red rose in front of the police helmet of PC Keith Palmer Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty Images The coffin of Pc Keith Palmer is removed from Westminster's Chapel of St Mary Undercroft Sky News Police officers march towards Southwark Cathedral in London Daniel Leal-Olivas/AFP/Getty Images London Metropolitan Police Officers (MPS) on duty outside Parliament in London Facundo Arrizabalaga/EPA The names of fallen officers Pc Keith Palmer and Pc Gareth Browning are added to the National Police Officers Roll of Honour & Remembrance during a Police Roll of Honour Trust ceremony in London Rick Findler/PA Cressida Dick (right) the new Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police arrives on her first day in the job, at Southwark Cathedral ahead of the funeral of PC Keith Palmer Stefan Wermuth/Reuters Police officers arrive in Southwark for the funeral of PC Keith Palmer Dan Kitwood/Getty Images Floral tributes at Parliament Square ahead of the funeral of PC Keith Palmer Chris Jackson/Getty Images Security in Parliament Square before the Funeral of PC Keith Palmer Alex Lentati Security in Parliament Square before the Funeral of PC Keith Palmer Jeremy Selwyn London Metropolitan Police Officers (MPS) prepare to line the route of the funeral procession for PC Keith Palmer to the police funeral service at Southwark Cathedral Facundo Arrizabalaga/EPA Flowers at Carriage Gate Parliament Square before the Funeral of PC Keith Palmer Jeremy Selwyn Floral tributes at Parliament Square ahead of the funeral of PC Keith Palmer Chris Jackson/Getty Images Police officers arrive near Southwark Cathedral ahead of the funeral of PC Keith Palmer Stefan Wermuth/Reuters Police officers arrive near Southwark Cathedral ahead of the funeral of PC Keith Palmer Jeremy Selwyn Flowers at Westminster today Jeremy Selwyn Police officers and well-wishers line the route in Southwark as the funeral procession of PC Keith Palmer makes its way to Southwark Cathedral Dan Kitwood/Getty Images Police at a ceremony by the Police Roll of Honour Trust to add the names of fallen officers Pc Keith Palmer and Pc Gareth Browning to the National Police Officers Roll of Honour & Remembrance in London Rick Findler/PA Security in Parliament Sq before the Funeral of PC Keith Palmer Jeremy Selwyn Police officers arrive near Southwark Cathedral ahead of the funeral of PC Keith Palmer Stefan Wermuth/Reuters Flowers at Westminster today Jeremy Selwyn Security and flowers in Parliament Square before the Funeral of PC Palmer Jeremy Selwyn Police officers march towards Southwark Cathedral in London Daniel Leal-Olivas/AFP/Getty Images Police officers arrive near Southwark Cathedral ahead of the funeral of PC Keith Palmer Stefan Wermuth/Reuters London Metropolitan Police Officers (MPS) keep watch over the route of the funeral procession for PC Keith Palmer to the police funeral service at Southwark Cathedra Facundo Arrizabalaga/EPA Floral tributes at the Palace of Westminster ahead of the funeral of PC Keith Palmer Getty Images Police officers arrive in Southwark for the funeral of PC Keith Palmer Dan Kitwood/Getty Images A police officer rubs his eye outside the Houses of Parliament, London, ahead of the funeral of Pc Keith Palmer Jeremy Selwyn Police officers arrive near Southwark Cathedral ahead of the funeral of PC Keith Palmer Hannah McKay/Reuters A young girl looks at floral tributes at Paliament Square ahead of the funeral of PC Keith Palmer Chris Jackson/Getty Images Police officers march towards Southwark Cathedral in London Daniel Leal-Olivas/AFP/Getty Images A couple watch as the coffin of PC Keith Palmer, who was killed in the recent Westminster attack, is transported from the Palace of Westminster Stefan Wermuth/Reuters The coffin of Pc Keith Baker is removed from Westminster's Chapel of St Mary Undercroft in London Jeremy Selwyn Police officers line the route in Southwark as the funeral procession of PC Keith Palmer makes its way to Southwark Cathedral Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

"It took me 30 seconds or so, run down towards the scene once I'd picked up my radio and battery and I went down to very close to the scene... I saw roughly what had happened.

"Obviously, we were unsure what was happening, whether it was going to be like a lone wolf attack or if it was a multi, marauding attack.

Funeral: PC Palmer was killed last year / Frank Augstein/AP

That's the thing that most people were unsure about. We didn't know whether the person was acting alone or whether he was part of a bigger team."

He told LBC that getting back to work had been "incredibly tough for an awful lot of people," especially for those that responded first of all, and that PC Palmer's family were "coping as best they can, like people do in terrible circumstances".

Mourning: He said that it had been hard for police officers to continue working after the attack / Jeremy Selwyn

Senior officers are expected to attend a number of private memorial services on Thursday to mark the first anniversary of the atrocity, but the force has not made details public.T he MP who rushed to save murdered Pc Keith Palmer broke down in a live interview as he recollected trying to explain the tragic event to his son.

Tobias Ellwood was in Parliament when terrorist Khalid Masood stormed the gates of the Palace of Westminster and launched a fatal knife attack on Pc Palmer.

The politician, who has medical and military training, ran towards the scene of the attack in a desperate bid to help the wounded police officer but medics were not able to save him.

Mr Ellwood broke down in a live interview on Thursday  a year on from the attack  as he relived the moment he tried to rationalise the horror to his son.

Emotional: Tobias Ellwood broke down during the BBC Breakfast interview

The other reflection and vivid image I have is returning home after what had happened and finding my son on the top of the stairs, he said in a BBC interview.

He said he was in tears and he was just on his own before his voice cracked and he trailed off.

Tragic: He struggled to contain his tears as he described the aftermath of the event

An emotional Mr Ellwood went on: I sat next to him and he just asked why?

He couldnt understand why I had stepped forward, why someone had been killed, why someone was yielding a knife in a place that he had visited so many times.

Caught up in the attack: Tobias Ellwood MP tries to save PC Keith Palmer outside the Palace of Westminster / Stefan Rousseau/PA Wire

And all I could offer him was that there are some bad people in the world but there are good people and it is the good people who win.

In the interview, the Defence Minister said the UK is going through a "dark chapter" facing the terrorist threat and paid tribute to the police for their work in a country "that seems to be getting more dangerous and more volatile".

Bloodied: Pictures of Mr Ellwood looking devastated emerged after the attack / PA

Mr Ellwood, who has lobbied within government for extra funding for the armed forces, said: "These attacks will continue unless we step forward and actually participate, become more pro-active in dealing with what is a very changing and dark chapter that we are enduring."

Mr Ellwood, who had been walking through the Palace of Westminster at the time of the attack, praised the work of the police on duty that day: "They were the ones that were defending Parliament and us, huge tribute to them.Today I will be remembering and honouring those affected in the Westminster attack with my colleagues in the very place that the terrorists tried to destroy  our Parliament. I will be remembering the bravery of our emergency services, including Pc Keith Palmer who made the ultimate sacrifice. And I will be thinking of those left behind whose lives have been forever changed.

When our values come under attack that is the time when we must commit more than ever to that which unites us. We are proud to live in a decent, open and respectful society. Terrorists want to attack our way of life and cause maximum disruption in society. They thrive over the divisions their actions cause and hope that we respond with panic. Islamists and far-Right terrorists have one thing in common  they are united through their adherence to hate. Daesh want nothing more than for all British Muslims to feel under attack in this country too. This only helps to feed a grievance narrative that is deployed by predatory recruiters. That is why it is important to tackle all forms of terrorism, whether Islamist or far-Right.

We need to respond by stamping out those recruiters, whether it is an Islamist terrorist disseminating material that inspires and instructs how to carry out an attack, or a racist who uses Westminster to provide justification for further acts of cruelty and hatred.

We cannot only deal with those who have been already been drawn into terrorist activity. We need to intervene earlier and stop people being radicalised in the first place.

We cannot be complacent. Westminster was the first of five attacks in this country last year, including three more in our capital at London Bridge, Finsbury Park and Parsons Green. But we must recognise the professionalism of those who are protecting us and the 10 Islamist terrorist plots and four far-Right terrorist plots that have been thwarted since March last year.

As I make my way to Westminster today I will see Londoners and tourists enjoying the sights and freedom this great city has to offer. And I will remember how we all came together to stand united against the terrorists. This is something to be proud of. We will not be defeated.B oris Johnson and Alexander Nix, the disgraced CEO of Cambridge Analytica, held an undisclosed meeting in December 2016. The Spectator posted that fascinating claim on its website late last night. Fraser Nelson, the magazines editor, stated that Nix was positioning himself as a Trump insider after working with the President-elects campaign team. And with Trump set to take office in January 2017, Johnson, above, needed an in to the Presidents team since his diplomats had been taken by surprise by The New Yorkers win. Where on earth could such a story have come from? Certainly it would be useful for the Foreign Secretary or someone close to him to pre-empt any suggestion that he had broken the ministerial code by not disclosing a meeting with Nix.

Nix, who was caught on camera boasting about entrapment with Ukrainian prostitutes, met a handful of other officials across Downing Street and the Foreign Office. The meeting with Johnson was apparently conducted on the advice of officials.

The move came as Nigel Farage was boasting of his own links to Trump. The President-elect had tweeted in November 2016: Many people would like to see Nigel Farage represent Great Britain as their Ambassador to the United States. He would do a great job!

British officials had no desire to see Farage installed in 3100 Massachusetts Avenue, the UK Ambassadors residence in Washington DC. But the 20-minute meeting between Johnson and Nix was not a success. Nelson, writing in the Spectator, reports that Johnson thought Nix was a blowhard.

Why did Johnson fail to disclose the meeting? An FCO spokeswoman: The meeting was not registered in the FCOs transparency records due to an oversight. This is being corrected. Perhaps Johnson rumbled Nix as a blagger, one he might recognise from his school days: the Cambridge Analytica CEO was, like Johnson, a pupil at Eton.

Nixs contemporaries would have included Tom Parker Bowles, Tory MP Kwasi Kwarteng and adventurer Bear Grylls. Floreat Etona.

---

Damien Hirsts spot paintings are genuinely ubiquitous: the YBA reveals that he painted Keith Allens taxi with splodges (the cab was bought for other people to drive him around when he was out of his mind in the Nineties). He also inked the design onto the arm of former Pulp bassist Antony Genn. That would certainly make an interesting lot at Sothebys.

---

George Michaels death in 2016 is still raw for Kirsty Young, a close friend. I miss him every day, she says. A record of his came on the radio and I just sat and cried. But he left me his music, and that is the best source of comfort. The Londoner suggests Skepta to help take her out of herself.

Hugh did not find God at university

Unpersuaded: Hugh Bonneville (Photo by: Zach Pagano/NBC/NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images) / NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images

Hugh Bonneville doesnt do God. Even when presenting a documentary about Jesus. I went to university as an atheist and I came out agnostic, he says. Can we blame Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury, who was his theology tutor at Corpus Christi, Cambridge? Bonneville preaches: I have a healthy respect for all religions, but being outside the leap of faith myself, I found historical objectivity a better methodology for me... I found it a more engaging way to tell the story and make it more accessible by not having a Christian predisposition.

Memories of Blair rule the roost at a floral gathering at Waterloo

Scenting a good time: Debbi Clark, Tony Robinson and Melanie Sykes (Photo by David M. Benett/Dave Benett/Getty Images) / Dave Benett/Getty Images

Who was causing a stink in Waterloo last night? TV presenter Melanie Sykes was among the guests at the Perfumer's Story at the Sensorium alongside Blackadder star Tony dont call me Sir Robinson. Queen of the scene India Rose James, the granddaughter of porn property tycoon Paul Raymond, was chaparoned by her friend Twiggy Garcia, the DJ who once tried to perform a citizens arrest on Tony Blair.

While working as a waiter at Tramshed, in 2014, Garcia spotted Blair having dinner at one of the tables. He tapped him on the shoulder and tried to apprehend him for crimes against peace ...namely the decision to launch an unprovoked war against Iraq. The former PM declined the offer to join Garcia a local police station.

Garcia is a fan of the current Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, but Robinson isnt.

SW1A

Will Chris Williamson MP be accused of anti-Semitism again? On Monday he was criticised by the CST, a Jewish charity, for saying Ken Livingstone was unfairly suspended by Labour. Earlier this week his aide, Lewis Bassett, said he wouldnt donate to The Guardian because: I owe Jonathan Freedland, Nick Cohen and all the rest less than nothing. Bassett denies that he is anti-Semitic and says he did not know that both journalists are Jewish. I oppose anti-Semitism in all its forms... On being informed of this I deleted the tweet.

---

Has Jon Lansman been left out in the cold? The founder of Momentum hasnt been present at weekly off-site meetings held by Jeremy Corbyns inner circle. Brrr-utal.

---

When East Renfrewshire MP Paul Masterton tweeted his support for the new All Party Parliamentary Group on Single Parents last night, his wife messaged him, saying is there something you want to tell me?

Puppy love to lead next mayoral poll?

Unleashed: Ed Vaizey (Photo by Tristan Fewings/Getty Images) / Getty Images

Now that Ed Vaizey has confirmed that he is considering running for Mayor, he may want to unveil his secret weapon: his cockapoo, Pepper. The Tory MP for Wantage told guests at a Creative Industries event last night that he likes Sadiq Khan but will "obviously thump Sadiq in an election. It will be a dog-eat-dog contest, especially if the two men bring their puppies into play. Khan owns six-month-old golden labrador Luna. The Londoner is loath to take sides but Pepper has an edge in the cute stakes. (Sorry, Luna.)

Kate Moss in Machu Picchu

Is Kate Moss taking a leaf out of Johnny Depps style book? Kate and her boyfriend Count Nikolai von Bismarck were up Machu Picchu in Peru yesterday. The pair are in South America for a friends wedding.

Quote of the day

Many of us love the BBC. The BBC, however, does not love us backPassport row:

Meanwhile the firm that makes British passports today saw its share price plummet after it was revealed that the blue document promised by Brexiteers will be manufactured in France.

My colleague Joe Murphy reports that the boss of De La Rue bitterly criticised Brexit-backing ministers who had been more than happy to boast of reviving an icon of British identity.

Chief executive Martin Sutherland said:

Im going to have to go and face those workers, and try and explain to them why the British government thinks its a sensible decision to buy French passports, not British passports.E uropean leaders are gathering in Brussels to discuss whether to rubber stamp the Brexit transition deal and clear the way for trade talks.

Theresa May told MPs on Wednesday that an agreement struck between Brexit Secretary David Davis and EU chief negotiator Michel Barnier would allow talks on the future trade relationship to be triggered later this week.

European Council president Donald Tusk said he had recommended that EU leaders welcome the transition deal "in practice" as it would "allow to delay all the negative consequences of Brexit by another 21 months".

Under the terms of the joint legal text agreed by Mr Barnier and Mr Davis, the UK will be able to negotiate and ratify trade deals with outside countries following Brexit Day in March 2019, to enter into force after the end of a transition period lasting until the end of 2020.

Mrs May told the Commons that for the first time in 40 years, Britain would be able to "forge our own way by negotiating our own trade agreements".

However, the PM faces warnings that the deal could be scuppered by her own MPs unless she tears up "unacceptable" proposals for fishing.D octors were granted permission to take blood samples from Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia for testing by chemical weapons experts after a specialist court hearing.

Mr Justice Williams said doctors at Salisbury NHS Foundation Trust could provide blood samples and copies of medical notes to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).

The pair both remain in a critical but stable condition in hospital after the nerve agent attack in Salisbury, officials in Salisbury confirmed on Thursday.

The judge announced his decision on Thursday after a private hearing in the Court of Protection, where issues relating to people who lack the mental capacity to make decisions are considered, earlier this week.

Russian Spy Sergei Skripal: Salisbury Nerve Agent Incident 1 /14 Russian Spy Sergei Skripal: Salisbury Nerve Agent Incident Investigators in protective gear pursue the probe into the nerve agent attack on Sergei Skripal Getty Russian spy 'poisoning': Sergei Skripal and Yulia Skripal are fighting for life in hospital PA Personnel in hazmat suits work to secure a tent covering a bench in the Maltings shopping centre in Salisbury, where former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were found critically ill by exposure to a nerve agent Andrew Matthews/PA ilitary personnel are deployed to help remove vehicles from the scene after former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter were found critically ill after exposure to a nerve agent in Salisbury Getty Images Military in protective clothing remove vehicles from a car park in Salisbury EPA Police cordon: Military personnel in Salisbury PA Traces of the nerve agent used to poison Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were found at Zizzi in Salisbury PA Amber Rudd: she visited the scene where Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were found after having been poisoned by a nerve agent REUTERS Personnel are helped from their hazmat suits (right), after securing a tent covering a bench in the Maltings shopping centre in Salisbury, where former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were found critically ill by exposure to a nerve agent Andrew Matthews/PA Personnel in hazmat suits walk away after securing a tent covering a bench in the Maltings shopping centre in Salisbury, where former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were found critically ill by exposure to a nerve agent Andrew Matthews/PA Police put a red bag inside a police evidence bag immediately after the nerve agent attack on a Russian spy. Officers previously issued CCTV of a woman clutching a red bag Solent news Snap Fitness 24/7 Police activity in the cul-de-sac in Salisbury that contains the home of former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal who was poisoned along with daughter Yulia with a nerve agent PA Sergei Skripal shops at Bargain Stop in a CCTV image from five days before his apparent poisoning

He said both Mr and Ms Skripal were unconscious in hospital in Salisbury and therefore unable to give their consent to blood samples being taken or tested.

The judge, who is based in the family division of the high court in London, said he had concluded that such moves were in the best interests of Mr and Ms Skripal.

The ruling came as a police officer who was hospitalised after the original responses, Nick Bailey, was discharged from hospital on Thursday.

Mr Skripal, 66, and his 33-year-old daughter Yulia have been in hospital since they were found slumped on a bench in the Wiltshire city on March 4.

They were found unconscious by police after reportedly being attacked by nerve agent.D onald Trump has announced he is replacing national security adviser HR McMaster with John Bolton, a former US ambassador to the United Nations.

The US President tweeted that Mr McMaster has done "an outstanding job & will always remain my friend." He said Mr Bolton will take over on April 9.

It is the latest in a series of high-profile departures from the White House, following the dramatic ousting of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson last week.

The president has repeatedly clashed with Mr McMaster, a respected three-star general, and talk that he would soon leave the administration had picked up in recent weeks.

HR McMaster is the latest in a series of high-profile departures from the White House / AFP/Getty Images

It also comes after someone at the White House leaked that Mr Trump was urged in briefing documents not to congratulate Russian President Vladimir Putin about his recent re-election win. Mr Trump did it anyway.

Mr McMaster was brought in after Mr Trump's first national security adviser Michael Flynn was dismissed.

He was sacked because he did not tell White House officials, including Vice President Mike Pence, about the full extent of his contacts with Russian officials.

In a statement released by the White House, Mr McMaster said he would be requesting retirement from the US Army effective from this summer, adding that afterwards he "will leave public service".

The White House said Mr McMaster's exit had been under discussion for some time and stressed it was not due to any one incident.

Mr Bolton, probably the most divisive foreign policy expert ever to serve as UN ambassador, has been a hawkish voice in Republican foreign policy circles for decades.The baddest femcee outta 254 and Africa, Stella Mwangi, has unleashed the visuals for her banging record 10 Toes.

The Haba Haba rapper is known to be the Hip Hop Queen of Scandinavia and Africa, and she holds the crown steady on this new record, serving hot catchy bars and keeping fellow rappers well on their toes.

10 Toes comes a month after her second single Kuchizi under her independent record label in Norway: Badili Akili Music.

10 Toes is a definite treat for the hip-hop lovers and the visuals are made even better by the yet to be beaten Norwegian-Spanish professional boxer Katharina Thanderz who stars in the all-female video.

You would need to have totally bad taste in music to hate on 10 toes. Press play below and enjoy!D onald Trump has said former Vice President Joe Biden would "go down fast and hard crying all the way" in an astonishing threat of physical violence after Biden said Trump deserved a beating for crude comments about women.

Joe Biden said yesterday he would "beat the hell out of" Trump if they were in high school together, over reports of the President's crude comments about women.

Trump tweeted today: "Crazy Joe Biden is trying to act like a tough guy.

The President accused Mr Biden of "trying to act like a tough guy" / AP

"Actually, he is weak, both mentally and physically, and yet he threatens me, for the second time, with physical assault.

"He doesnt know me, but he would go down fast and hard, crying all the way. Dont threaten people Joe!

Mr Biden made the remarks during a speech at the University of Miami's 'It's On Us' rally which is aimed at "creating an environment where sexual assault and gender based violence is unacceptable," reports the Washington Post.

During his time as vice-president, he was a strong advocate for tackling sexual assault on college campuses.

During the Oscars in 2017, he introduced Lady Gaga's performance which featured victims of sexual assault singing alongside her. Mr Biden called for a change to the victim blame culture surrounding rape.

Donald Trump mocks 'tough guy' Joe Biden

He said: Despite significant progress over the last few years, too many women and men on and off college campuses are victims of sexual abuse.

We must and we can change the culture so that no abused woman or man - like the survivors you see here tonight - ever feel like they have to ask themselves, 'What did I do?' They did not do anything wrong.

This isn't the first time Joe Biden has made similar comments about Trump.

AP

During a campaign rally for Hillary Clinton in 2016, Biden said: The press always ask me, Dont I wish I were debating him? No, I wish we were in high school  I could take him behind the gym. Thats what I wish.

Following the Charlottesville violence in 2017, Biden branded Trump's presidency as a "tragedy" for the American republic adding that Trump is "doing great damage."

There has been speculation that Mr Biden, 74, may run for presidency in 2020 despite him publicly denying any concrete plans.A major fire has broken out in the upper floors of a three-star hotel in Dublin.

Several floors of the complex in Ballymun near Dublin Airport were engulfed in flames on Wednesday night as at least eight fire crews battled to stop the blaze spreading.

The Dublin Fire Brigade said there were no immediate reports of injuries or missing people.

The Metro Hotel building compromises hotel rooms on the lower floors and residential apartments on the upper floors.

The Dublin Fire Brigade said there were no reports of injuries / PA

Witness Anthony Flynn said: "It looks like everybody is out of the hotel."

Mr Flynn, a co-founder of the Inner City Helping Homeless organisation, said pieces of debris could be seen flying from the blazing building in scenes similar to the Grenfell Tower tragedy in London.

Firefighters were tackling the blazer at the Metro Hotel near Dublin Airport on Wednesday evening / PA

He added: "We are looking at the top seven floors that appear to be alight. It seems to be spreading like mad. It's exactly what it looked like at Grenfell. It appears to have started on the top two floors but has spread downwards and upwards."

As well as the large Dublin Fire Brigade presence, gardai and ambulance crews were also on site.

People watch the flames from the foot of the Metro Hotel / PA

Erica Fleming, whose apartment overlooks the hotel said she could see and hear windows exploding as a result of the heat.

"One of the apartments is completely engulfed. There is smoke belllowing up through the floors."T he EU has secured itself a temporary stay on US steel and aluminium tariffs, following emergency talks between the blocs trade chief and her American counterparts.

Two senior EU sources told the Evening Standard that the US intends to suspend the application of the tariffs to the EU.

The tariffs - a 25pc tax on most foreign steel and aluminium exports - were due to kick in on Friday.

The bloc has not been granted a full exemption, but EU trade officials are in Washington to negotiate a lasting solution over the next few weeks.

The suspension was expected to be confirmed by the Trump administration on Thursday afternoon.

EU trade commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom briefed EU ambassadors on Thursday morning on what she said was a good meeting with US commerce secretary Wilbur Ross.

The prime minister is due to attend an EU leaders summit this afternoon, where she and her counterparts are expected to welcome the move.

EU diplomats this week roundly condemned US President Donald Trumps announcement, saying it is illegal under World Trade Organization (WTO) rules, and voiced fears of an impending transatlantic trade war.

The European Commission, which handles trade talks on EU countries behalf, published a retaliatory list of US products it had intended to target if the tariffs went through.

The EUs list includes bourbon, whiskey, rice, orange juice, clothing and shoes, and once approved by the WTO, would allow the bloc to impose tariffs of up to 25pc on some US products.F acebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has apologised for a major breach of trust and admitted the social network made mistakes which led to an international data scandal.

UK firm Cambridge Analytica is accused of improperly using data from 50 million Facebook profiles to help Donald Trump win the 2016 US presidential election.

Mr Zuckerberg said the political consultancy had provided formal assurances that the data had been destroyed after Facebook first learned of the breach in 2015.

In an interview with CNN, he said he was really sorry and accepted that some people were trying to use the site for political ends.

Apology: Mark Zuckerberg said he would be 'happy' to testify before US Congress / REUTERS

He also said he would be happy to appear before US Congress "if it's the right thing to do".

Facebook has been rocked in recent days by the row involving Cambridge Analytica, which has prompted calls from politicians on both sides of the Atlantic for Mr Zuckerberg to answer questions.

"This was a major breach of trust, and I'm really sorry that this happened," he told CNN.

"I don't know about you, but I'm used to when people legally certify that they are going to do something, that they do it. But I think this was clearly a mistake in retrospect.

Mr Zuckerberg explained that journalists at The Guardian had told Facebook in 2015 that Alexander Kogan, a Cambridge University professor, had shared data from an app he had developed with Cambridge Analytica.

Facebook immediately banned Prof Kogan's app and demanded that he and the firm delete the data, for which they provided "certifications" that they had.

Last week the company was alerted that Cambridge Analytica may not have deleted the data as they had said and the firm was banned from Facebook.

Prof Kogan is alleged to have surveyed more than 270,000 Facebook users through an app he created.

Facebook's settings at the time allowed app developers to access the personal data of not just the people who used their app, but of all of their friends as well.

Theresa May on 'very concerning' Cambridge Analytica allegations

Mr Zuckerberg said Facebook has already taken the most important steps to prevent such a situation from happening again.

He told CNN the site would be reviewing thousands of apps in an "intensive process".

"There are going to be some new tactics that we need to make sure that we observe and get in front of, he said.

Mark Zuckerberg announced plans to protect users' data in the future. These include: Investigating all Facebook apps that had access to 'large amounts' of data before 2014 policy changes came into force Remove an app's access to your data if you have not used it in three months Developers will be required to sign a contract in order to ask for access to user posts Reduce the amount of data it is possible to hand over to an app without explicit permission Place a tool which easily allows data permissions to be revoked at the top of your news feed

"This isn't rocket science. There's a lot of hard work we have to do to make it harder for nation states like Russia to do election interference.

Facebook will ban developers who do not agree to an audit, and an app's developer will no longer have access to data from people who have not used that app in three months.

Mr Zuckerberg's apology came after a former employee of the company told MPs that Facebook had a "wild west" approach to looking after its users' data and had "little detection" of any violations of its policies.

Whistleblower Sandy Parakilas, who worked in policy compliance and data protection for Facebook between 2011 and 2012, claimed the company "had very few ways of discovering abuse or enforcing on abuse when it was discovered".

Facebook shares have slid by more than 7.6% since the first allegations were reported at the weekend by the Observer, and the firm received a backlash online - with a number of users reporting that they were deleting their accounts, including the co-founder of WhatsApp, which was bought by Facebook in 2014.

The company is also facing legal action from some of its own shareholders, who claim the company made "materially false and misleading statements regarding the company's business, operational and compliance policies".

CA chief executive Alexander Nix was suspended after recordings emerged of him making a series of controversial claims, including boasts that CA had a pivotal role in the election of Donald Trump.

The company has denied using Facebook data in its work on the president's election campaign.

Downing Street confirmed on Wednesday that the Government employed CA parent company SCL for a contract with the Ministry of Defence, but said this had ended before the recent allegations came to light.

"We are looking across Government to see if there were any other contracts," said a spokesman. "As the Prime Minister said, we are not aware of any current contracts."

The Conservative Party said it had been approached by CA with a pitch for work during David Cameron's leadership, but said this was rejected.23 March 2017

U.S. President Donald J. Trump gets in the driver's seat of an 18-wheeler while meeting with truck drivers and trucking CEOs on the South Portico prior to their meeting to discuss health care at the White House in Washington, DC, USA, 23 March 2017. The House of Representatives has yet to vote on the Republican-crafted American Health Care Act, that would replace the Affordable Care Act, as it remained unclear whether Republicans had enough votes to overcome opposition from Democrats and those within their own party. EPA/JIM LO SCALZO

EPATo the students of Parkland 

We wanted to let you know how inspired we have been by the resilience, resolve and solidarity that you have all shown in the wake of unspeakable tragedy.

Not only have you supported and comforted each other, but youve helped awaken the conscience of the nation, and challenged decision-makers to make the safety of our children the countrys top priority.

Throughout our history, young people like you have led the way in making America better. There may be setbacks; you may sometimes feel like progress is too slow in coming. But we have no doubt you are going to make an enormous difference in the days and years to come, and we will be there for you.

Barack Obama Michelle ObamaA Palestinian teenage protester has been sentenced to eight months in prison for slapping and kicking a pair of Israeli soldiers outside her West Bank home.

Ahed Tamimi, 17, accepted the sentence as part of a plea bargain following a case which has sparked uproar in the Middle East and attracted international attention. Taking into account time already served, she will remain in prison for a further 5 months.

Tamimi, who was 16 at the time of the offence, has become a Palestinian hero and a symbol of the struggle against Israeli occupation.

The teenager told reporters in court there is no justice under occupation and we are in an illegal court.

Her lawyer, Gaby Lasky, said she agreed to the sentence as part of a plea deal with prosecutors that allowed her to avoid more serious charges that could have imprisoned her for years.

Under the deal, she is also being fined the equivalent of about 1,000.

Ahed Tamimi reacts in front of Israeli forces during a demonstration in 2017 / AFP/Getty Images

Ms Lasky called the legal proceedings a "farce". She said "they are trying to deter other Palestinian youth from resisting occupation as Ahed did".

The judge agreed to a similar plea deal for Tamimi's mother Nariman, who has been charged with incitement.

An Israeli supporter of Tamimi slapped a prosecutor after the ruling and was later arrested by police.

Tamimi was arrested in December after video surfaced of her kicking the soldiers outside her West Bank home.

While some praised the soldiers for showing restraint, hard-line politicians criticised what they felt was a weak response and called for tough action against the girl, whose family has a long history of run-ins with the Israelis.

But the full-throttle prosecution of Tamimi, who turned 17 behind bars, has drawn widespread international criticism.P olice are hunting a US woman who attacked a McDonalds worker after receiving the wrong breakfast sandwich.

The woman had ordered a bacon breakfast sandwich at a drive-thru in Wisconsin on Sunday but was mistakenly given a sausage sandwich instead.

She suddenly became angry and hit the employee in the back with the bag of food, Glendale police said.

CCTV footage shows the woman then walk into the store and begin shouting at workers, accusing them of not replacing the sandwich with the correct one.

She tried to confront the manager, despite apparently receiving a refund, before a 17-year-old female worker attempted to intervene.

But the woman, wearing a blue shirt, shoved the teenager into the fry station. She subsequently hit her head on the machinery and again on the floor.

She was taken to hospital to be checked over but did not suffer any serious injuries, and was not burned by the fry grease.P rince William and Harrys rumoured cameo in the latest Star Wars film has been showcased online.

The clip is the first time fans were able to witness the princes transform into Stormtroopers for the role, alongside actor Tom Hardy.

John Boyega, who stars in the franchise, previously revealed that the princes made their appearance in a scene alongside Benicio del Toro, who plays DJ, and Kelly Marie, who plays Rose.

The scene, which was cut from the final film, made an appearance as part of the deleted scenes on the DVD.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi - Trailer

It is believed that the royals feature in the top left hand side of the frame as the two Stormtroopers are particularly tall.

Actors playing the esteemed role are typically requested to be 5ft 11in so that they appear uniform on-screen.

However, the Princes stood out with Williams 6ft 2in frame and Harrys similar 6ft 1in.

Alongside them, Tom Hardy is believed to be the Stormtrooper that speaks to Boyega, whilst Take That star Garry Barlow is rumoured to be amongst the masks.

Star Wars: The Last Jedi European premiere 1 /25 Star Wars: The Last Jedi European premiere The Duke of Cambridge and Prince Harry The Duke of Cambridge and Prince Harry attend the European premiere of Star Wars: The Last Jedi, at the Royal Albert Hall in London PA Daisy Ridley and Mark Hamill Matt Crossick/PA John Boyega Dave Benett Mark Hamill John Stillwell/PA The Duke of Cambridge and Prince Harry Matt Crossick/PA Daisy Ridley and Mark Hamill Dave Benett PA Gwendoline Christie Dave Benett Daisy Ridley Dave Benett Kelly Marie Tran Dave Benett Andy Serkis and Lorraine Ashbourne Dave Benett Myleene Klass Dave Benett Laura Dern Dave Benett Rian Johnson Dave Benett Benicio del Toro Dave Benett John Boyega Dave Benett Anthony Daniels Dave Benett Mark Hamill Dave Benett Adam Driver Dave Benett Domhnall Gleeson Dave Benett Oscar Isaac and Elvira Lind Dave Benett Danny DeVito Dave Benett Jimmy Vee Dave Benett Andrew Garfield Dave Benett Ivy Mae Dave Benett

The news comes after English actor Boyega told how he misses London when hes away for work.

The actor, 25, who was born in Peckham and shot to fame in 2015s Star Wars: The Force Awakens, said he misses everything about the capital while hes working.

He told the Standard: London is my home. I miss everything. I miss the straight faces in public, I miss the gloomy weather  sometimes. It gives me a reason to stay inside. I miss it every time.W es Anderson has been accused of cultural appropriation by a reviewer of his new movie Isle Of Dogs.

The film, Andersons first since The Grand Budapest Hotel, follows an animated pack of dogs as they fight for survival following exile from Japan to a remote island following a dog flu outbreak.

Having had its US premiere, American film critics have had their first look at the film and one critic, Justin Chang, from the Los Angeles Times laments Anderson for his weakness for racial stereotyping.

He wrote: It's in the director's handling of the story's human factor that his sensitivity falters, and the weakness for racial stereotyping that has sometimes marred his work comes to the fore.

Isle of Dogs trailer

Anderson, a stickler for verisimilitude even in the weirdest situations, has the human residents of Megasaki City speak their native Japanese, a choice that would seem respectful enough except for the conspicuous absence of English subtitles.

Much of the Japanese dialogue, especially Atari's, has been pared down to simple statements that non-speakers can figure out based on context and facial expressions; longer, more complicated exchanges are translated aloud by a handy on-screen English interpreter.

Chang goes on to point out the dogs speak in clear American English, calling this ridiculous, charming and a little revealing.

Spotlight: Wes Anderson's new film has been the topic of much debate since new reviews / Imeh Akpanudosen/Getty Images for Aquafina

He continued: You can understand why a writer as distinctive as Anderson wouldn't want his droll way with the English language to get lost in translation.

But all these coy linguistic layers amount to their own form of marginalization, effectively reducing the hapless, unsuspecting people of Megasaki to foreigners in their own city.

Changs review was met with widespread praise after he shared it on his social media account, although he later returned to Twitter to clarify that his issue was not the films location, rather the way Anderson went about it.

But not everybody agreed and mused that Anderson was trying to create a more futuristic account of Japan and defended the filmmaker from such accusations.If the bank is saying that a probate is necessary, what must of happened was that your mother neglected to fully fund her trust with her assets.

Both she, and you, are likely victims of the Living Trust Myth."

The Living Trust Myth, perpetrated by trust mills and some lawyers who dont do such a good job in advising their clients, comes down to this: Now that I have a trust, everything will go to my children automatically when I die, and it will all be for free.

This cannot be further from the truth.

Creating a trust to avoid probate is usually a very good idea. It is easier, cheaper, and less time-consuming to administer a trust than it is to probate an estate in court.

However, trusts are not automatic. They have to be properly funded and administered in order to work.

Your mother may not have retitled her accounts into the name of the trust. Anything titled solely in her name upon her death belongs to her probate estate, not her trust.

If these assets are worth less than $150,000 in total, then probate isnt necessary and you can collect her estate using small estate declarations prepared by an attorney or using a form supplied by the bank (not all banks do this).Review at a glance









Y ou havent seen Derry Girls yet? Really? Youre in luck.

Episode One originally went out at 10pm on Thursday January 4 this year and it was at once apparent just what a hit Channel 4 had on its hands. The initial audience was 1.6 million and it had soon been viewed by 2.5 million.

In Northern Ireland, Derry Girls has had simply the best viewing figures of any series since records began. It became C4s most successful comedy launch for many years, scoring more highly than The Inbetweeners, The It Crowd and Catastrophe.

The first act in post of Channel 4s new director of programmes, Ian Katz, was to commission a second series, even before the second episode of the first had aired.

So here it is again on E4, as well as being available in its entirely on All 4.

Derry Girls, scripted by Derry native Lisa McGee (Being Human), is set in Derry/Londonderry/Stroke City in the early Nineties, when the bombs were still going off, here treated as just a routine, sometimes inconvenient, backdrop, at least until the end of episode six.

The four 16-year-old girls, all pupils at Our Lady Immaculate College, are immediately emphatic presences, all boldly over-acted  truculent, crumple-faced aspirant writer Erin (Saoirse-Monica Jackson), always close to hysteria, her wacko cousin Orla (Louisa Harland), their foul-mouthed friend Michelle (Jamie Lee ODonnell) and the panicky baby of the group, Clare (Nicola Coughlan).

Maybe their unfortunate hanger-on, the wee English fella, James (Dylan Llewellyn), Michelles much-derided cousin, isnt quite up to their pace  but the rest of the cast is superb, above all Sister Michael (Siobhan McSweeney), the brutal, terrifyingly impassive headmistress. And Lisa McGees script is full-on funny from the get-go, manic and fizzy, the gags richly Irish, Derryish even.

For her first day back at school, Erin has plotted to wear a denim jacket to express her individuality, until her mother puts a stop to it. So Clare immediately sheds hers too  Im not being individual on my own, she wails. Complaining about delays caused by a bomb clearance, grumpy Granda Joe (Ian McElhinney) says: How long does it take to defuse a fecking bomb now? Sure, the wee robots do all the work.

New TV shows to look forward to in 2018 1 /17 New TV shows to look forward to in 2018 The Little Drummer Girl Florence Pugh as Charlie with Alexander Skarsgard as Becker in the John le Carre thriller BBC / The Little Drummer Girl Distribution Limited. The Cry Jenna Coleman and Ewen Leslie Synchronicity Films Ltd/Lachlan Moore Vanity Fair ITV and Amazon's remake of William. M. Thackeray's classic novel starring Olivia Cooke and Tom Bateman ITV Wanderlust Toni Collette and Steven Mackintosh star in BBC's new raunchy drama BBC/Drama Republic Press Charlotte Riley and Ben Chaplin go head-to-head as rival newspaper editors in new drama from Doctor Foster creator Mike Barlett BBC Death and Nightingales Jamie Dornan, Ann Skelly and Matthew Rhys star in a three-part drama for BBC Two BBC Maniac Emma Stone and Jonah Hill star in the limited Netflix series coming September Michele K. Short / Netflix Disenchantment Matt Groening is back and on Netflix with new adult comedy following Princess Bean and friends Netflix / Matt Groening Age Before Beauty Age Before Beauty on BBC One with Polly Walker, Sue Johnston and Lisa Riley follows a family business with plenty of secrets BBC/Mainstreet Pictures/Todd Antony Hard Sun Luther creator Neil Cross has another dabble at the cop show format in this crime/sci-fi drama inspired by the Bowie song Five Years. BBC/Euston Films A Very English Scandal Hugh Grant stars in this drama from Doctor Who/Sherlock writer Russell T Davies, which adapts John Prestons book about the scandal that surrounded Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe BBC/Blueprint Television Ltd Kiri National Treasure writer Jack Thorne pens a four-part drama about the abduction of a young black girl. The ever-reliable Sarah Lancashire is unconventional social worker Miriam, who finds herself being blamed. Channel 4 Britannia Filmed in Wales and Prague, Jez Butterworths historical drama is set in 43AD, when Roman General Aulus (David Morrissey) is attempting to conquer the Celts. Sky Collateral David Hares four-part drama (his first original TV series) explores the repercussions after a pizza delivery man is shot dead. Carey Mulligan plays Detective Inspector Kip Glaspie, who investigates. BBC/The Forge Save Me In the absence of Doctor Foster, Suranne Jones stars as the mother of a missing girl who believes that her ex- (Lennie James, who wrote the show) is guilty of the abduction, forcing him to work to clear his name. Sky Atlantic Troy: Fall of a City Swords and sandals epic in eight parts made in a collaboration with Netflix, written by David Farr (who also wrote The Night Manager). BBC/Wild Mercury Productions Patrick Melrose Benedict Cumberbatch looks right at home in this adaptation of the Edward St Aubyn novels about an outrageous aristocrat struggling to overcome the damage inflicted by an abusive father. Dave Benett

For all the novelty of the setting, there are echoes here of Father Ted, The Inbetweeners and every high school show ever made, from Mean Girls to High School Musical, maybe even St Trinians  and much of its zing depends on the snappy editing (when single scenes or shots go on too long, they turn a touch more ordinary).

But where Derry Girls feels fresh is the way it puts these girls  girls and not, as usual, teenage boys  centre-stage and is then so truthful to the raw aggressions, the sudden insecurities, the wild yearnings and hapless confusions of being 16.

Its broad stuff, played as hard as possible for laughs, almost slapstick sometimes, but it has this irreducible kernel of reality, in touch with the inner adolescent we all harbour.

Whats all the more astonishing is that the actresses here are so much older than the roles they are playing. They all turn out to be in their mid-20s except for Coughlan who, incredibly, is 31.

Putting them back into school uniform could have been a slightly pervy embarrassment, couldnt it? But the sheer brio and self-belief of Derry Girls carries all before it.

Derry Girls airs Thursday, March 22 at 9.30pm on Channel 4.

Pick of the day

Seal Team

The pilot episode of this all-action American drama series follows the activities of an elite Navy SEAL unit (Bravo Team), led by troubled master chief special warfare operator Jason Hayes (played by David Boreanez, who previously distinguished himself as vampire-turned-private-detective Angel in Buffy The Vampire Slayer).

Hayes appears to be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, and is undergoing therapy about the death of a colleague, while also being pressured by his estranged wife to make it to their daughters choir concert. Happily, hes distracted when sent on a mission to Liberia to capture a high-level ISIS leader who has taken a woman hostage.

His team includes rebellious Clay Spenser (Max Thieriot) and Amanda Mandy Ellis (Jessica Pare, who played Don Drapers wife Megan in Mad Men) as the teams CIA liaison.

Directed with gusto by Christopher Chulack, who won an Emmy for his work on ER, and written by Benjamin Cavell (ex-Homeland), the storyline transcends politics, focusing on the personal dramas of the team.

Sky One, 9pm

Screen Time

Contagion! The BBC Four Pandemic

Dont be fooled by the jaunty, MasterChef incidental music. This science experiment is designed to alarm. It seems theres no shortage of things to worry about, warns Dr Hannah Fry. Global terrorism, the devastating effects of climate change, and volatile world leaders. And yet, she continues, according to the government, the risk of a killer flu pandemic is greater than all of them.

The show follows the results of an app designed to track the spread of a possible pandemic, and help offer solutions. Identifying social superspreaders is one possible solution, along with washing our hands more often, though  worryingly  London takes an early hit from the theoretical virus.

BBC Four, 9pm

London Go

In a reaction to ever-unfriendlier public spaces, artist Stuart Semple is staging The Hug Huddle next to Tower Bridge next Monday, this interactive and communal event being part of a new series of works.

Host Luke Blackall wont be able to escape a hug as he talks to Semple about how Happy City, his new project, came about.

Tomorrow, London Live, 7pm

Dancer in the Dark

Bjorks debut as a cinematic lead in Dancer in the Dark earned her the Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival, an Academy Award nomination, and a place in Oscar folklore after she arrived at the ceremony and laid an egg on the red carpet.

This brand of trippiness permeates the film which airs on London Live tonight at 10.15pm. Bjork plays a poor Czech immigrant in Sixties America who is saving for an operation to save her failing eyesight  and as her condition worsens, she slips ever further into vivid daydreams, her imagination illuminated by Hollywood musicals and songs.

The film is essentially critical marmite, but whether you love it or hate it, it is certainly unforgettable.

London Live, 10.15pm

Catch Up TV

The End of the F****** World

Something of an upset at the Royal Television Society Awards this week, where The End of The F****** World (All 4) beat The Crown (Netflix) to the award for Best Drama series. An adaptation of Charles Forsmans comic, it follows alienated teens James (Alex Lawther), who thinks hes a psychopath, and loner Alyssa (Jessica Barden), on a murderous road trip.

All 4

Soap Box

EastEnders

EastEnders has made a habit of reviving long-lost characters of late, to the extent that even death does not provide a guaranteed escape from the grim environs of Walford. Tonight the cheerful floozy Kat Slater returns, wearing a leopard, despite her apparent demise in the spin-off show Redwater.C at Deeley has been tipped to take over from Ant McPartlin for the remaining episodes of Saturday Night Takeaway.

Fans are calling on the TV star to stand-in alongside Declan Donnelly after McPartlin terminated his work commitments for the foreseeable future in order to return to rehab.

Deeley  who previously worked with the Geordie duo on SMTV Live  lives in the US so could be the perfect candidate to co-host the series finale in Orlando, Florida.

She currently has odds of 2/1 to step in according to Betfair behind current Saturday Night Takeaway regulars Scarlett Moffat (11/10) and Stephen Mulhern (5/1).

Good friends: Cat Deeley with Ant McPartlin and Declan Donnelly / Rex

Fans begged for show bosses to hire Deeley with one tweeting: A lovely opportunity for @catdeeley to step into Ants shoes, shes the perfect stand in for the last 2 eps. Loved you three together.

Another wrote: If Cat Deeley doesnt replace Ant for Saturday Night Takeaway I will be fuming she is literally the ONLY acceptable choice.

McPartlin was yesterday charged with drink-driving after he crashed his vehicle into two cars in Richmond, south west London on Sunday afternoon.

The troubled TV star looked sullen as he was pictured leaving his house for the first time the crash to make his way to Kingston Police Station.

Ant McPartlin charged with drink driving

McPartlin has reportedly given Donnelly his blessing to host Saturday Night Takeaway without him, with a source telling the Daily Mirror: Dec wouldnt go ahead without Ant giving him the OK.

Because of their previous pact to work together throughout their career.

Troubled: Ant McPartlin has been charged with drink-driving / John Stillwell/PA

Donnelly confirmed he will front the remaining episodes to honour the competition winners who have won a holiday to Orlando.

He said in a statement: Whilst I never thought Id be in this position, after much discussion and careful consideration weve decided that the remaining two shows of this series of Saturday Night Takeaway will go ahead.

Ant and Dec - In pictures 1 /52 Ant and Dec - In pictures National Television Awards 2021 National Television Awards 2021 - London PA Anthony McPartlin and Declan Donnelly host 'I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here! in 2015 ITV Anthony McPartlin and Declan Donnelly AKA PJ and Duncan with their hit single 'Let's get ready to rumble Anthony McPartlin, Cat Deeley and Declan Donnelly on SM:TV in 2000 Rex PJ and Duncan (Ant and Dec) in Byker Grove Anthony McPartlin and Declan Donnelly in theri breakthrough programme Byker Grove Newcastle United fans and entertainers Ant (Anthony McPartlin) and Dec (Declan Donnelly) at the launch at St James' Park in 1995 Getty Images Anthony McPartlin and Declan Donnelly star in Byker Grove in 2000 BBC Anthony McPartlin and Declan Donnelly host SM:TV Live in 2000 Rex Features Anthony McPartlin and Declan Donnelly with Cat Deeley presenting Party in the Park Anthony McPartlin and Declan Donnelly host 'Friends Like These' in 2000 BBC Anthony McPartlin and Declan Donnelly hosts of The Brit Awards in 2001 ITV Pop Idol presenters Ant McPartlin and Dec Donnelly celebrate with Will Young after he won the inaugural series in 2002 PA Pop Idol judges Simon Cowell, Pete Waterman, Nicki Chapman and Neil Fox pose with show hosts Ant and Dec in 2003 /PA Anthony McPartlin and Declan Donnelly host Ant & Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway in 2003 ITV Anthony McPartlin and Declan Donnelly in disguise present Ant & Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway in 2003 ITV Ant McPartlin and Declan Donnelly for Most Popular Entertainment Programme for Saturday Night Takeaway with Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne, at the 10th Anniversary National Television Awards 2004 PA Anthony McPartlin and Declan Donnelly host Ant & Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway ITV Anthony McPartlin and Declan Donnelly provide the voices behind CITV's engaging pre-school animation series Engie Benjy - Dec is the voice ITV Spitting Image puppets mimic Anthony McPartlin and Declan Donnelly in 2006 PA Anthony McPartlin and Declan Donnelly with Britain;ls Got Talent winner Paul Potts in 2007 Rex Features Anthony McPartlin and Declan Donnelly laugh backstage at Britain's Got Talent in 2007 ITV Red Or Black with Anthony McPartlin and Declan Donnelly in 2011 ITV Ant McPartlin and Declan Donnelly at House Festival, Chiswick House & Gardens in 2012 Getty Images Anthony McPartlin and Declan Donnelly hosts for 'I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here! ITV Anthony McPartlin (L) and Declan Donnelly, winners of Best Entertainment Programme for "Ant & Dec Saturday Night Takeaway", pose in the winners room at the House of Fraser British Academy Television Awards at Theatre Royal in 2015 Dave Benett George Shelley takes part in his final trial, watched by Anthony McPartlin and Declan Donnelly in 2015 Rex Kim Kardashian West, Anthony McPartlin and Declan Donnelly attend the BRIT Awards 2015 Dave Benett Anthony McPartlin and Declan Donnelly host Ant & Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway in 2016 Ant vs Dec in Saturday Night Takeaway ITV Britain's Got Talent presenters Anthony McPartlin, left, and Declan Donnelly arrive for the Blackpool auditions for 'Britain's Got Talent' at The Opera House in 2017 Getty Images Ant and Dec on stage in Britain's Got Talent ITV Ant and Dec arrive at Buckingham Palace, London, where the pair will be awarded OBE's by the Prince of Wales at an Investiture ceremony in 2017 PA Anthony McPartlin and Declan Donnelly in Ant & Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway: The Missing Crown Jewels (Part 3) with Michael Sheen in 2017 ITV Ant and Dec and their wives Lisa Armstrong and Ali Astall arrive at Buckingham Palace, London, where the pair will be awarded OBE's by the Prince of Wales at an Investiture ceremony in 2017 PA Ant and Dec in the press room with the award for Best Challenge Show 'I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here' at the National Television Awards 2017 PA Ant McPartlin (left to right), Alesha Dixon, Amanda Holden, Simon Cowell, David Walliams and Declan Donnelly attending the Britain's Got Talent Photocall at the Opera House, Church Street, Blackpool in January 2018 PA Ant & Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway ITV Ant & Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway ITV Anthony McPartlin and Declan Donnelly on 'I'm a Celebrity... Get Me Out of Here!' in 2017 Ant & Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway ITV Britain's Got Talent with Anthony McPartlin and Declan Donnelly ITV Britain's Got Talent with Anthony McPartlin and Declan Donnelly ITV Anthony McPartlin and Declan Donnelly on Britain's Got Talent in 2019 Syco/Thames Presenters Anthony McPartli and Declan Donnelly at a photo call for Britain's Got Talent at the London Palladium in 2019 PA Ant McPartlin and Declan Donnelly on Britain's Got Talent 2019 ITV Anthony McPartlin and Declan Donnelly with Colin Thackery on Britain's Got Talent TV Show, Series 13 in 2019 Dymond/Thames/Syco/Rex Features Anthony McPartlin (left) and Declan Donnelly attending the Virgin Media BAFTA TV Awards 2019 Matt Crossick/PA Ant McPartlin and Declan Donnelly with guide dog puppies who have been named Ant and Dec to mark the launch of the Guide Dogs Pups to Partnerships Appeal. Christopher Ison/Guide Dogs/PA Ant McPartlin and Declan Donnelly attend "Ant and Dec's DNA Journey" BAFTA TV Preview at Barbican Centre Getty Images Declan Donnelly (right) at St Michaels church, Heckfield for Ant McPartlin's wedding PA National Television Awards 2021 National Television Awards 2021 Dave Benett

We made a promise to take hundreds of deserving winners to Florida to watch the series finale, and we will honour that.

Everyone at ITV and the Takeaway team feels we owe it to the audience to complete the series.Countries & Areas

Search for country or area A Afghanistan Albania Algeria Andorra Angola Antigua and Barbuda Argentina Armenia Australia Austria Azerbaijan B Bahamas Bahrain Bangladesh Barbados Belarus Belgium Belize Benin Bhutan Bolivia Bosnia and Herzegovina Botswana Brazil Brunei Bulgaria Burkina Faso Burma Burundi C Cabo Verde Cambodia Cameroon Canada Central African Republic Chad Chile China Colombia Comoros Costa Rica Cote dIvoire Croatia Cuba Cyprus Czechia D Democratic Republic of the Congo Denmark Djibouti Dominica Dominican Republic E Ecuador Egypt El Salvador Equatorial Guinea Eritrea Estonia Eswatini Ethiopia F Fiji Finland France G Gabon Gambia Georgia Germany Ghana Greece Grenada Guatemala Guinea Guinea-Bissau Guyana H Haiti Holy See Honduras Hungary I Iceland India Indonesia Iran Iraq Ireland Israel Italy J Jamaica Japan Jordan K Kazakhstan Kenya Kiribati Kosovo Kuwait Kyrgyzstan L Laos Latvia Lebanon Lesotho Liberia Libya Liechtenstein Lithuania Luxembourg M Madagascar Malawi Malaysia Maldives Mali Malta Marshall Islands Mauritania Mauritius Mexico Micronesia Moldova Monaco Mongolia Montenegro Morocco Mozambique N Namibia Nauru Nepal Netherlands New Zealand Nicaragua Niger Nigeria North Korea North Macedonia Norway O Oman P Pakistan Palau Palestinian Territories Panama Papua New Guinea Paraguay Peru Philippines Poland Portugal Q Qatar R Republic of the Congo Romania Russia Rwanda S Saint Kitts and Nevis Saint Lucia Saint Vincent and the Grenadines Samoa San Marino Sao Tome and Principe Saudi Arabia Senegal Serbia Seychelles Sierra Leone Singapore Slovakia Slovenia Solomon Islands Somalia South Africa South Korea South Sudan Spain Sri Lanka Sudan Suriname Sweden Switzerland Syria T Taiwan Tajikistan Tanzania Thailand Timor-Leste Togo Tonga Trinidad and Tobago Tunisia Turkey Turkmenistan Tuvalu U Uganda Ukraine United Arab Emirates United Kingdom Uruguay Uzbekistan V Vanuatu Venezuela Vietnam Y Yemen Z Zambia ZimbabweOne of the most discouraging aspects of the musical chairs being played among the members of the White House inner circle is that every change reflects an inexorable move to the right in foreign policy, which means that the interventionists are back without anyone at the White House level remaining to say no. President Donald Trump, for all his international experience as a businessman, is a novice at the step-by-step process required in diplomacy and in the development of a coherent foreign policy, so he is inevitably being directed by individuals who have long American global leadership by force if necessary.

The resurgence of the hawks is facilitated by Donald Trumps own inclinations. He likes to see himself as a man of action and a leader, which inclines him to be impulsive, some might even say reckless. He is convinced that he can enter into negotiations with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un with virtually no preparations and make a deal that will somehow end the crisis over that nations nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programs, for example. In so doing, he is being encouraged by his National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster and his Pentagon chief James Mattis, who believe that the United States can somehow prevail in a preemptive war with the Koreans if that should become necessary. The enormous collateral damage to South Korea and even Japan is something that Washington planners somehow seem to miss in their calculations.

The recent shifts in the cabinet have James Pompeo as Secretary of State. A leading hawk, he was first in his class of 1986 at the United States Military Academy but found himself as a junior officer with no real war to fight. He spent six years in uniform before resigning, never having seen combat, making war an abstraction for him. He went to Harvard Law and then into politics where he became a Tea Party congressman, eventually becoming a leader of that caucus when it stopped being Libertarian and lurched rightwards. He has since marketed himself as a fearless soldier in the war against terrorism and rogue states, in which category he includes both Iran and Russia.

Pompeo was not popular at the CIA because he enforced a uniformity of thinking that was anathema for intelligence professionals dedicated to collecting solid information and using it to produce sound analysis of developments worldwide. Pompeo, an ardent supporter of Israel and one of the governments leading Iran haters, has been regularly threatening Iran while at the Agency and will no doubt find plenty of support at State from Assistant Secretary of State for the Near East David Satterfield, a former top adviser of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.

Pompeo has proven himself more than willing to manipulate intelligence produce the result he desires. Last year, he declassified and then cherry picked documents recovered from Osama bin Ladens compound in Pakistan that suggested that al-Qaeda had ties with Iran. The move was coordinated with simultaneous White House steps to prepare Congress and the public for a withdrawal from the Iran nuclear arms agreement. The documents were initially released to a journal produced by the neocon Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where Pompeo has a number of times spoken, to guarantee wide exposure in all the right places.

Pompeos arrival might only be the first of several other high-level moves by the White House. Like the rumors that preceded the firing of Secretary of State Tillerson two weeks ago, there have been recurrent suggestions that McMaster will be the next to go as he reportedly is too moderate for the president and has also been accused of being anti-Israeli, the kiss of death in Washington. Former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton has been a frequent visitor at the White House and it is believed that he is the preferred candidate to fill the position. He is an extreme hawk, closely tied to the Israel Lobby, who would push hard for war against Iran and also for a hardline position in Syria, one that could lead to direct confrontation with the Syrian Armed Forces and possibly the Russians.

Bolton, who has been described by a former George W. Bush official as the most dangerous man we had during the entire eight years, will undoubtedly have a problem in getting confirmed by Congress. He was rejected as U.N. Ambassador, requiring Bush to make a recess appointment which did not need Congressional approval.Setting itself apart from other major Wall Street banks, Citigroup took a stance in Americas renewed debate on gun control through a commercial firearms policy announced Thursday.

Citis new policy mandates that the banks new retail sector clients or partners do not sell firearms to someone who has not passed a background check. The policy also requires that those clients restrict the sale of firearms for individuals under age 21 and do not sell bump stocks or high-capacity magazines.

Ed Skyler, Citis executive vice president for global public affairs, said in a statement that clients that choose not to adhere to the new policy will have their businesses transitioned away from Citi.

The announcement was not spurred by calls to rid the world of firearms, Skyler said in the statement. Rather, he said, its a response to the fact that grief in the wake of mass shootings rarely inspires lasting action to prevent firearms from falling into the wrong hands.

We know our clients also care about these issues, and we have begun to engage with them in the hope that they will adopt these best practices over the coming months, Skylers statement read.Clearly Donald Trumps Presidency is entering a new phase. He is feeling his oats: he now has successes under his belt, and seems emboldened, and ready to pursue his impulsive, instinctive personal style, which he believes, took him to the Presidency. Things are about to get interesting (in the Chinese sense). He is throwing off his restraints (Tillerson on JCPOA; and Cohn on tariffs). And other conventionalist impedimenta (i.e. McMaster) may go, too, in coming days. General Mattis will cut a somewhat lonely figure in the future, perhaps.

Tillerson, last October said: "The president is a very unconventional person, as we all know, in terms of how he communicates, how he likes to create action-forcing events. And so, the President often takes steps to force an action when he feels things are just not moving." So, it seems that Trump is forcing action now. But with what end in mind? And, more importantly, is that end realistic, or will it take us to disaster  even to war?

Trump relishes risk, and elevating the stakes, sky-high. And his choices for replacements to this weeks dismissals reflect this: David Stockman describes Larry Kudlow as being off the very (deep) deep-end for years, on the more important matters of deficits, tax-cut magic, Fed money-printing, wild-eyed economic growth rates, and, above all else, incorrigible cheerleading for Wall Street's serial financial bubbles. In short, Trump is casting aside Cohns conventional bankers caution, in order to double-down on supply-side economics (a big risk when government debt already stands at 105% of nominal GDP, and the US has a three trillion plus borrowing requirement already baked in, for the next three years ).

And he has just cast overboard, Tillersons old-style, courteous and conventional diplomacy, for that of a polarizing hawk  Mike Pompeo. Not just any old hawk, but an North Korea hawk, as well as an Iran hawk; and a Russia hawk too. And, is, just to round off the picture, an Islamophobe (as extensively documented by Jim Lobe), and  like Trump  a partisan, Israeli loyalist.

Just two days before he was named Rex Tillersons successor as secretary of state, Uri Friedman has noted in The Atlantic: CIA Director Mike Pompeo  an unsparing critic of the nuclear agreement with Iran, vowed to not repeat Barack Obamas mistakes. What he promised was breathtaking: that President Trump would secure a better deal with North Korea  than his predecessor did with Iran, which had yet to acquire nuclear weapons. Friedman continues: The previous administration was negotiating from a position of weakness. This administration will be negotiating from a position of enormous strength The administrations plan for the talks, [Pompeo] explained, is to maintain and increase economic pressure on North Korea while aiming for the complete, verifiable, irreversible denuclearization of North Korea  [unlike Obama, who left] the Iranians with a breakout capacity to produce nuclear weapons, Pompeo noted. The human capital and enrichment capacity behind Iran's nuclear-weapons program continues to remain in place despite its pause in testing, he cautioned  and President Trump is determined to prevent that from happening in North Korea.

Friedman comments: What made Pompeos comments remarkable wasnt just his assertion that the United States could compel North Korea to do what most experts believe North Korea never will: fully give up its nuclear weapons. It was also how confidently he made the claim, given what hes said in the past about North Korea.

Not surprisingly, the American and European press is replete with questions about whether Trump, by making Pompeo Secretary of State, finally has fully succumbed to the neo-cons (especially as John Bolton appears to be being considered for a senior position in Trumps Administration, too). It has prompted serious and cool-headed commentators to predict that Pompeos appointment, plus Bolton hovering in the wings, suggest that we are heading for war with Iran and Russia.

The latter may well be right, but perhaps we should try to unpack this a little further. The anti Trump, covert US state, and its collaborators amongst Europeans and globalist European intelligence services, evidently is ratchetting-up the pressure on Russia at every point  hoping to push President Putin into some ill-judged over-reaction, that would compel Trump to take some irreversible, rupturing action against Russia. They hope to corner Trump into burning his bridges with Putin, for good. But Trump bends a bit under the extreme force of these winds, but stays afoot  and the Russian President does the same, despite the heat of severe provocations.

Does Trump seek war with Russia? No. But the covert state does; and will try everything to get it. Trump does want war with Russia. In fact, he wants President Putin to help him make peace in the Middle East.

Tillerson is cast aside not because Trump wants nuclear war, but as a result of the mismatch between Trumps mode of negotiation  as expressed in the Art of the Deal  and the conventional diplomacy of building good relations and a rapport with ones counter-parties, as conducted by Tillerson. Trump simply does not believe that Tillersons way works. The latter clearly is not Trumps way. He does not believe in it. He demands leverage. He insists to show strength. He hikes his threats to Armageddon levels; pushes the stakes sky-high, and just when it seems that tensions inexorably will explode, he tries to secure a deal.

This is the point of Pompeo, I suggest: He is the enabler to push the stakes to the very limit; the hawk that makes everyone fear  and come to believe  that conflict is inevitable; but who  at one minute before midnight  offers a deal. It is a process wholly different to the laboured, incremental, step-by-step approach of conventional diplomacy. Could Tillerson really have made such a bluff  of imminent war, of fire and fury  credible? He is perhaps, too nice.

So, what is going on? Trump, it seems, is emboldened sufficiently to try to unfold his plan for Middle East peace. It is not so much a plan in a conceptual sense, but rather a series of transactional steps that he seems to have in mind. But key to this sequencing, is the seed planted by Mark Dubowitz and the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD), which is funded primarily by right-wing supporters of Israel, including billionaire Sheldon Adelson, a close ally of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It is a long standing advocate for war on Iran.

Politico describes Dubowitz as a key outside adviser to the Trump Administration on Iran. And the point on which Dubowitz has been insisting with Trump, is that any North Korean nuclear deal is intimately interconnected with the Iranian JCPOA  and that both ultimately connect to making peace in the Middle East.

The FDD thesis is that the Iran-North Korea axis dates back more than 30 years. The two regimes have exchanged nuclear expertise, cooperated widely on missile technologies, and run similar playbooks against Western negotiators. The fear: Tehran is using Pyongyang for work no longer permitted under the 2015 nuclear deal [i.e on nuclear warheads] while [Iran is] perfecting North Korean-derived missile delivery systems, back home [which are not covered by the JCPOA]. Or, in other words, that Pyongyang has sub-contracted to itself the development of an ICBM capable nuclear warhead, whilst Tehran  on the other hand  is focused on developing missile capability. And this presumption of a division of labour between North Korea and Iran essentially is at the root of Trumps demand that the Europeans must get Iran to relinquish the so-called sunset clauses, and the Iranian missile programme  lest Iran enable North Korea to achieve the capability to land a nuclear bomb on the US.

Is there really this conspiracy? There may have been some co-operation years ago, in the era of Pakistans A. Q. Khan, but the FDD thesis is more speculation, than substance. North Koreas and Irans aims differ: North Korea wants inter-continental missiles that can reach America. Iran doesnt. It wants short and medium range missiles for self-defence.

Be that as it may: there are grounds to believe that Trumps working hypothesis is based on the FDD theory. And further, that ending this supposed interplay between Iran and North Korea constitutes the pillar on which Trumps deal of the century for the Middle East rests.

So, Pompeos job is to convince Kim Il Jung that he faces utter destruction unless he takes the path of divesting the state of its nuclear programme; and to do something similar to Iran in respect to its (hypothetical break-out capacity), and its missile programme: i.e. Pompeo must achieve double de-nuclearisation by escalating the stakes sky-high to the point that everyone fears war  in the expectation that North Korea and Iran will be the ones to back down (The Art of the Deal).

And this double de-nuclearisation  this line of thinking goes  will make Israel and Saudi Arabia will feel safer: Saudi can normalise with Israel, and the latter can then do something for the Palestinians (according to this White House optic). With the final part to this construct being the quiet understanding that Russia will restrain Iran, Syria and Hizbullah; and Trump will commit to restrain Israel  Peace in our time?

Maybe. But just to be clear, this is a highly risky project, which may well lead, instead, to war. North Korea may call Trump and Pompeos fire and fury bluff (leaving Washington without any off ramp, except the very military action which the bluff is supposed to obviate). Iran may elect to ignore Pompeo too; it has learned to distrust Americas word. Israel may fear Irans conventional weapons as much  or more so  than Irans nonexistent nuclear war heads, and seek to entangle the US in a war to destroy Iran, and thus preserve Israels regional hegemony.

And, then there is the question of whether America is at present agreement capable? The unitive US state is fragmented. For whom or what does Trump speak? Can Trump give either North Korea or Iran any credible security guarantees, in the event of some agreement? Would Congress co-operate? Would the covert state co-operate? Will super-hawk Pompeo remain loyal to Trumps vision? Will the neo-cons manipulate this process towards the conflicts that they seek to ignite?

Eliot Cohen in The Atlantic has written of Pompeo:

He is sometimes described as a Trump loyalist, but that is nonsense: No one is loyal to Trumphe is too indecent a human being to attract such normal personal attachments. The administration is not divided into people who are loyal to Trump and those who are not. Rather, it is divided between those who know how to manipulate his vanity, his hatreds, his sensitivities, and those who do not.

Trump may discover that the intransigence of his presumed opponents is not his biggest problem, but taking Washington  and all its burning hatreds  with him, represents the bigger challenge.One of the advantages of having NATO members on the Russian border is that now NATO has intelligence agencies in those former parts of the Soviet empire regularly contributing to NATO knowledge of what is going on in Russia. As a result the American, and Western European, intel agencies are finding insights about Russia and contacts inside Russia never before (1991) available. While these insights are often surprising they are also usually accurate and invaluable in knowing, and understanding, what is going on inside the former superpower and Cold War adversary.

American intel about the Soviet Union during the Cold War was often misled by not paying attention to what was really going in inside Russia. Even the American CIA, as late as the 1980s, was surprised to hear confirmation that there was no national standard in the Soviet military for many things. The confirmation came when some New York City cops, who were in a local reserve unit (an armored reconnaissance battalion) decided to invite recent Russian immigrants (let out as Jews as a good will gesture in large numbers in the 1980s) who had recently done their conscript service. The policemen realized that these Russians had up-to-date information on how combat units trained and operated. But when over a dozen of these Russians were brought together at the reserve unit training center the Russians, and the Americans, quickly discovered that every division had a different spin on some essential training methods and combat tactics. Even many of the Russians were unaware of this as the official line was that everyone did things the same way. It wasnt that way at all. When the CIA was told (by someone from New York who heard the story from some reservists and happened to know the guy in the CIA who was in charge of the analysts who covered the Soviet ground forces) they checked it out and soon had a program where new immigrants were interviewed for useful information like this. Thus even before the Cold War ended and Soviet Union dissolved in 1991 American intel analysts were aware that there was much they didnt know or misunderstood about Soviet Russia. In the early 1990s there were a few years when the Soviet archives were accessible (often with the help of a few hundred dollar bills) and all sorts of Cold War misinformation was set right.

After 1991 many Russian neighbors feared a revival of the traditional Russian aggression and empire building. Thus in 2004 Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia joined NATO, putting parts of the former Soviet Union (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) within NATO. Many Russians did not like this, for Russian policy since 1945 has been to establish a "buffer" of subservient (preferably Russian occupied) countries between Russia itself and the rest of Western Europe (especially Germany). This attitude is obsolete in a practical sense but old habits die hard. These new NATO members realized that their understanding of post-1991 Russia often differed from the Western NATO nations and set about issuing intel reports that clarified and explained these misunderstandings.

As a result the intel on Russia from the former Russian states was often more insightful and less scary than the reports Western agencies were still putting out. Old habits die hard and the Western intelligence agencies didnt want to stray too far from the conventional wisdom about Russia still favored by politicians and journalists in the West. The conventional wisdom was not only often wrong but could be dangerous as well.

These former parts of the Soviet Union reported a lot of these contrary insights in their local media (leaving out secret stuff that relied on agents and secret contacts they had across the border in Russia.) A much larger proportion of the East NATO nations intel personnel spoke Russian and many had personal experience dealing with Russian military and government officials. Some of these East NATO nations began publishing annual unclassified reports on Russia in English to make it easier for their Western (especially American) counterparts to access a different view of what was happening in Russia. Estonia has published three of these annual reports now and they have become required reading in American intelligence agencies and the State Department because Estonia and other East NATO intel reports have demonstrated time and again that they better understand the Russians. .

The East NATO analysts report that Russian boasts of renewed military power are very exaggerated and that Russian public opinion about their government, especially among young Russians who were born after the Soviet Union collapsed were at the same time willing to accept the return of a police state government but at the same time far more hostile and outspoken about government policies they felt hurt them personally. These young Russians are particularly hostile to military service and expensive overseas military operations. At the same time the young Russians are patriotic.

At the same time there is some push back from Western Russian experts who make a living depicting Russia as a growing military threat. The East NATO experts refute that with firsthand knowledge of what is going on in Russia and, if challenged, can go into classified meetings armed with compelling proof of the eastern analysis.

The East NATO analysts point out that Vladimir Putin, the former KGB officer who has run Russia since 1999, is seen as a fraud when it comes to claims that corruption is being eliminated and the Russian economy is coping with the lower oil prices and economic sanctions Russia brought down on itself for invading Ukraine in 2014 and declaring Russia once again confronting a hostile and aggressive NATO. That was the official Soviet view of the Cold War conflict. Many Russians dont believe it but go along with the propaganda because Russians, above all, want peace and order. Most Russians are reluctant to support any radical economic change and accept that Western sanctions as an excuse for continued lack of economic growth.

But old habits die hard. For decades the Western intel agencies officially went along with the official view that Russians backed their governments aggressive attitude towards the West. The East NATO analysts point out that this myth plays into the Putin propaganda about a need to revive the Cold War. The Russian people remain apathetic and the majority accept the government propaganda about success at keeping the economic policies that are not improving living standards but are also not causing catastrophic collapse. The government controls all mass media and managed to suppress widespread knowledge of the minority that is campaigning for change and more accountability for corrupt government officials. The Russian government regaining control over most of the economy has not made the economy more efficient, but it has eliminated potential political opponents in for the form of wealthy and politically active business owners. Russians, more so than most Europeans, are actually very risk averse. A minority of Russians believe in eliminating Cold War paranoia and instituting more internal reforms to enable Russia to compete in a modern world and achieve the kind of personal freedoms and economic prosperity long enjoyed in neighboring states that were once part of the Russian empire. Ironically the Russian aggression against Ukraine was largely because they saw Ukraine, the largest portion former Russian empire to gain independence, resisting Russian efforts to use bribes and intimidation to force Ukrainian politicians to be realistic and remain more like Russia and less like the West. In 2014 the Ukrainian people overthrew a pro-Russian government (that had got elected on a pro-Western platform) and that was something Russia felt it could not tolerate. In short, the Russians are different and most Ukrainians and people in the Baltic States prefer not to think or act like their former Russian overlords.The U.S. Navy has a patrol boat problem. In 2010, only a few years after finding a real job in the fleet (in the Persian Gulf), the U.S. Navy's Cyclone class patrol boats were facing the scrap yard because these ships are, well, worn out and falling apart. This sad tale of missed, or lost, opportunities began in 2005 when the navy scrambled to get the Cyclones fit for duty in its new brown water (along coasts and up rivers) operations. This was the newly formed NECC (Navy Expeditionary Combat Command) and it needed patrol boats and the navy had very few of those, mainly the Cyclenes). That led to a refurbishment of the 13 Cyclones the navy had and that extended their useful life to 30 years. Even though these ships will be too worn out for use by the late 2020s, they are now undergoing another upgrade to give Cyclones new weapons, electronics and UAVs.

The Cyclones were a 1990s experiment that appeared to have failed. Then came September 11, 2001. Of the fourteen Cyclones built, 13 are now with the U.S. Navy and one with the Philippines Navy. But before 2005 the navy was trying to give them away. The fourteen 55 meter (179 feet) long Cyclone class PC (Coastal Patrol) boats were built in the 1990s. But after operating them for six years, the navy decided they had made a mistake, and loaned some of the Cyclone class ships to the Coast Guard and SOCOM (Special Operations Command), while seeking foreign buyers for the rest. Only the Philippines was interested and ended up with one of the Cyclones. In 2005 the navy began building the NECC coastal force, complete with naval infantry. For this brown water navy, the Cyclones were perfect, and the navy got them back to work.

The Cyclones are more like a PT boat than a typical seagoing warship. Cramped conditions on board mean that the crews live in barracks on land when the ships are not at sea. Living conditions for the 28 man crew (four officers and 24 sailors) are austere on these 336 ton ships. When in service, the ships come back to base once a week for supplies. Often a SEAL team or a boarding detachment is carried. But there are rarely more than 36 people assigned to one of these PC class ships.

The PCs are not considered "boats", but are designated the smallest warships in the U.S. Navy. These ships are normally armed with two 25mm autocannon, five .50 caliber (12.7mm) machineguns, two 7.62mm machineguns, two 40mm automatic grenade launchers, six Stinger missiles and now, with the latest upgrade, two quad tube Griffin missile launchers. Air defense is provided by the shoulder-launched Stinger missiles. While many nations mount anti-ship missiles on ships 336 tons or smaller, the U.S. Navy designed the Cyclone class strictly for coastal patrolling. The ships can cross oceans, and have done so whenever distant American naval bases needed additional protection.

Cyclones began receiving the Griffins in 2014. The Griffin first entered service during 2010 on UAVs and AC-130 gunships. The surface launched version has an 8,000 meter range and is laser guided. Before getting the Griffin the longest ranged weapons on the Cyclones was the 25mm autocannon that were accurate to 4,500 meters. The 15 kg (33 pound) Griffin has a 5.9 kg (13 pound) warhead. The shipboard version of Griffin was tested against remotely controlled small boats of the type Iran often uses in the Persian Gulf. The Iranian boats have small crews armed with machine-guns, RPGs and sometimes small missiles. These boats often swarm American warships having several boats get close in. With Griffin the Cyclones can knock out these swarming boats at a greater distance and handle many of these boats at once.

Navy sailors like the Cyclones for the same reason their Coast Guard brethren like their own smaller ships. Everyone knows everyone, there's more responsibility for each sailor, and a less regimented attitude when at sea. It's also been discovered that the Cyclones can do anything a larger warship can do when it comes to coastal operations. Actually, the Cyclones are better along the coasts, as they draw less water, and are faster (moving at up 65 kilometers an hour).

In the Persian Gulf, the Cyclones began service there guarding the Iraqi offshore wells and pumping stations, as well as stopping and inspecting suspicious ships. Crews serve six months in the Persian Gulf, then fly back to the United States. The ships themselves served at least 18 months before traveling back to the United States. Now ten of the 13 Cyclones are stationed at the American naval base at Bahrain where they mainly patrol shallow waters close the Iran and the Strait of Hormuz (entrance to the Persian Gulf). Originally the Cyclones were to be replaced by the LCS (Littoral Combat Ship) which has ten times the displacement and much less successful track record. There is no direct replacement for the Cyclones but the navy is building 48 smaller Mk VI patrol boats for NECC. The 26 meter (85 foot) craft have a top speed of over 70 kilometers an hour and a range of over a thousand kilometers (at a much slower cruising speed.) Armed with a 25mm remotely controlled autocannon and small arms, these ships cost about $6 million each. There is a crew of ten plus eight passengers. The Mk VI can be transported overseas by navy LPDs (Amphibious ships). For the moment there is no replacement for the Cyclones although using the fifty ton Mk VI, with the addition of a Griffin launcher and more powerful electronics, is still an option.TICKERS: HL,

Source: Streetwise Reports (3/21/18)

Three analysts shared the details and their opinions of the proposed transaction.



Analyst Jamie Spratt with Clarus Securities reported in a March 20, 2018 research note that Klondex Mines Ltd. (KDX:TSX; KLDX:NYSE.MKT) announced Hecla Mining Co.'s (HL:NYSE) offer to acquire all of its Nevada assets for $462 million ($462M), or $2.47 per share. This price represents a 59% premium to the 30-day volume weighted average price. "In our view, the transaction is positive," Spratt added.

Hecla's strong balance sheet and operating team with narrow vein mining expertise "should allow unlocking of value of Klondex's prospective Nevada properties," explained Spratt. In addition, the deal "significantly reduces financial and execution risk while giving Klondex shareholders an immediate premium."

A third-party bid is "unlikely given the valuation and the significant premium paid by Hecla," Spratt pointed out. As such, Clarus changed its rating on Klondex to Tender from Speculative Buy but maintains its $3.25 per share target price.

PI Financial analyst Philip Ker agreed that the sale of Klondex's Nevada assets is "positive," and "prevents Klondex shareholders from potential equity dilution should the company have needed funding for upcoming capital outlays," according to a March 19, 2018 research piece. However, he pointed out that such a transaction would have been more accretive had it taken place when Klondex had a higher valuation, rather than at its 52-week low. At the same time, though, he noted that for Klondex to regain market confidence and get a rerating, it would have had to reach major milestones. In other words, he concluded, "the sale comes at the bottom but with fewer hurdles."

Ker explained that Klondex's Canadian assets, the True North mine and recently acquired Bison Gold property, which are not part of the Hecla deal, would be spun out to existing shareholders in a company called "Klondex Canada." "Hecla will also subscribe for a $7M or 13.46% equity stake in the spin-co which has a pre-investment valuation of $45M."

In consideration of the transaction, PI Financial changed its rating on Klondex to Tender from Neutral and has lowered its target price to $3.05 per share from $3.35 per share.

Should the transaction close, Klondex could then better delineate the ore body at True North and "should be cash flow neutral after production from tailings processing," Ker purported. "A primary focus on Canada should result in positive momentum" for that and the Bison Gold projects.

A third analyst, Don Blyth with Paradigm Capital, expressed similar sentiment in a March 20, 2018 research report, writing the Hecla bid is "a good deal for Klondex shareholders," given the company's recent and ongoing challenges. They include "declining grades at Fire Creek, disappointing gold recovery rates for the Hollister ore and a decision to put the True North mine into a 'care and maintenance' mode owing to poor operational performance." Klondex's stock price had declined 73% over the previous year, and a turnaround was expected to take months.

Blyth, too, stated Hecla is well positioned financially to outlay the capital needed to effect improvements at the various Klondex operations in Nevada and has a strong team with the experience to do so.

As for Hecla's bid, Blyth noted that it consists of a "mix of cash and common shares of Hecla: $2.47 in cash (all-cash alternative) or 0.6272 of a Hecla share (all-shares alternative)." He also wrote the offer represents a 72% premium based on both companies' closing prices on March 16 and Klondex's board approves the proposed deal. A shareholder vote is expected in June and closing thereafter, likely by the end of Q2/18.

Paradigm changed its rating on Klondex to Tender from Hold and has suspended its price target. Klondex is currently trading at around $2.86 per share.

Want to read more Gold Report articles like this? Sign up for our free e-newsletter, and you'll learn when new articles have been published. To see a list of recent articles and interviews with industry analysts and commentators, visit our Streetwise Interviews page.

Disclosure:

1) Doresa Banning compiled this article for Streetwise Reports LLC and provides services to Streetwise reports as an independent contractor. She or members of her household own securities of the following companies mentioned in the article: None. She or members of her household are paid by the following companies mentioned in this article: None.

2) The following companies mentioned in this article are sponsors of Streetwise Reports: Klondex Mines Ltd. Click here for important disclosures about sponsor fees. The information provided above is for informational purposes only and is not a recommendation to buy or sell any security.

3) Comments and opinions expressed are those of the specific experts and not of Streetwise Reports or its officers.

4) The article does not constitute investment advice. Each reader is encouraged to consult with his or her individual financial professional and any action a reader takes as a result of information presented here is his or her own responsibility. By opening this page, each reader accepts and agrees to Streetwise Reports' terms of use and full legal disclaimer. This article is not a solicitation for investment. Streetwise Reports does not render general or specific investment advice and the information on Streetwise Reports should not be considered a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Streetwise Reports does not endorse or recommend the business, products, services or securities of any company mentioned on Streetwise Reports.

5) From time to time, Streetwise Reports LLC and its directors, officers, employees or members of their families, as well as persons interviewed for articles and interviews on the site, may have a long or short position in securities mentioned. Directors, officers, employees or members of their immediate families are prohibited from making purchases and/or sales of those securities in the open market or otherwise from the time of the interview or the decision to write an article, until one week after the publication of the interview or article.

Disclosures from Clarus Securities, Klondex Mines Ltd., March 20, 2018

The analyst has visited the Company's mining operations in Manitoba, Canada and Nevada, USA. Partial payment or reimbursement was received from the issuer for the associated travel costs.

Within the last 24 months, Clarus Securities Inc. has managed or co-managed a public offering of securities of this company.

Within the last 24 months, Clarus Securities Inc. has received compensation for investment banking services with respect to the securities of this company.

The research analyst and/or associates who prepared this report are compensated based upon (among other factors) the overall profitability of Clarus Securities and its affiliate, which includes the overall profitability of investment banking and related services. In the normal course of its business, Clarus Securities or its affiliate may provide financial advisory and/or investment banking services for the issuers mentioned in this report in return for remuneration and might seek to become engaged for such services from any of such issuers in this report within the next three months. Clarus Securities or its affiliate may buy from or sell to customers the securities of issuers mentioned in this report on a principal basis. Clarus Securities, its affiliate, and/or their respective officers, directors or employees may from time to time acquire, hold or sell securities discussed herein, or in related securities or in options, futures or other derivative instruments based thereon.

Each Clarus Securities research analyst whose name appears on the front page of this research report hereby certifies that (i) the recommendations and opinions expressed in the research report accurately reflect the research analysts personal views about the Company and securities that are the subject of this report and all other companies and securities mentioned in this report that are covered by such research analyst and (ii) no part of the research analysts compensation was, is, or will be directly or indirectly, related to the specific recommendations or views expressed by such research analyst in this report.

Disclosures from PI Financial, Klondex Mines Ltd., Corporate Update, March 19, 2018

I, Philip Ker, hereby certify that all of the views expressed in this report accurately reflect my personal views about the subject securities or issuers. I also certify that no part of my compensation was, is, or will be, directly or indirectly related to the specific recommendations or views expressed in this report. I am the research analyst primarily responsible for preparing this report.

Research Disclosures:

1) PI Financial Corp. and its affiliates holdings in the subject companys securities, in aggregate exceeds 1% of each companys issued and outstanding securities. No

2) The analyst(s) responsible for the report or recommendation on the subject company, a member of the research analysts household, and associate of the research analyst, or any individual directly involved in the preparation of this report, have a financial interest in, or exercises investment discretion or control over, securities issued by the following companies. No

3) PI Financial Corp. and/or its affiliates have received compensation for investment banking services for the subject company over the preceding 12-month period. No

4) PI Financial Corp. and/or its affiliates expect to receive or intend to seek compensation for investment banking services from the subject company. Yes

5) PI Financial Corp. and/or its affiliates have managed or co-managed a public offering of securities for the subject company in the past 12 months. No

6) The following director(s), officer(s) or employee(s) of PI Financial Corp. is a director of the subject company in which PI provides research coverage. No

7) A member of the research analysts household serves as an officer, director or advisory board member of the subject company. No

8) PI Financial Corp. and/or its affiliates make a market in the securities of the subject company. No

9) Company has partially funded previous analyst visits to its projects. Yes

10) Additional disclosure: No

Analysts are compensated through a combined base salary and bonus payout system. The bonus payout is amongst other factors determined by revenue generated directly or indirectly from various departments including Investment Banking. Evaluation is largely on an activity-based system that includes some of the following criteria: reports generated, timeliness, performance of recommendations, knowledge of industry, quality of research and investment guidance, and client feedback. Analysts and all other Research staff are not directly compensated for specific Investment Banking transactions.

Disclosures from Paradigm Capital, Klondex Mines, Research Note, March 20, 2018

The analyst (and associate) certify that the views expressed in this report accurately reflect their personal views about the subject securities or issuers. No part of their compensation was, is, or will be, directly or indirectly, related to the specific recommendations expressed in this research report.

Analysts are compensated through a combined base salary and bonus payout system. The bonus payout is determined by revenues generated directly or indirectly from various departments including Investment Banking, based on a system that includes the following criteria: reports generated, timeliness, performance of recommendations, knowledge of industry, quality of research and investment guidance and client feedback. Analysts are not directly compensated for specific Investment Banking transactions.

Paradigm Capital Inc. expects to receive or intends to seek compensation for investment banking services from the subject companies in the next 3 months.Chief of Army Staff (COAS) General Qamar Javed Bajwa called on Oman's Minister for Defense His Excellency Sayyid Badr bin Saud bin Harib Al-Busaidi on Thursday, according to the Inter-Services Public Relations (ISPR).

Gen Bajwa is in Oman on an official visit where he has also met the Chief of Sultan's Armed Forces General Ahmed bin Harith bin Nasseer Al- Nabhani.

Matters of mutual interest including defense and security cooperation were discussed in the meeting with Busaidi. General Nabhani was also present during the meeting, according to the military's media wing.

Omans defense minister acknowledged Pakistans efforts in the fight against terrorism and establishment of regional peace and stability.

The COAS later met the chief of Royal Oman Air Force.

Earlier, on General Bajwa's arrival in Oman, a reception was hosted by General Nabhani.Former Malir SSP Rao Anwar, earlier absconding in the Naqeebullah Mehsud encounter case, is likely to be produced before a court on Thursday.

The accused was arrested on Wednesday following his appearance before the top court.

Rao Anwar will be produced before a court today in order to get his physical remand, said a senior Sindh police official privy to the matter.

Police investigators said that the former SSP will be quizzed keeping the FIR against him in view. Rao Anwar will have to prove his innocence, one official added.

Rejecting his protective bail, a three-judge bench headed by CJP Saqib Nisar ordered the constitution of a five-member JIT team to probe the case. Sindh AIG Aftab Pathan will preside over the team. Other members include Zulfiqar Larak, Dr Rizwan, Azad Ahmed Khan and Waliullah.

Raos counsel requested the bench to include agency officials in the JIT. The court declined his plea saying, We are constituting our own JIT. The bench directed the team to work independently.

The court also ordered IG Allah Dino Khawaja to ensure Anwars safety during police custody, it is your duty to protect him, the court told Khawaja.

The bench also asked Naqeebullahs relatives to not harm Anwar. The SC also directed his name remain on the Exit Control List (ECL).

The bench also directed Sindh Police to escort Anwar to Karachi. The court also ordered police to ensure the safety of the former SSP and all JIT members. The court further stated that Sindh police needed no further clearance to escort Anwar to Karachi.

Anwar, seen wearing a surgical mask, reached court earlier today in a white car. Security was beefed up at court premises and police cordoned off the entrance. The bench resumed the suo motu hearing of the case and disposed off the contempt notice against him.

You used to act brave. Where had you been all this time, the CJP remarked. You went into hiding. Do you not trust the courts? Justice Nisar added.

I am innocent, the former Malir SSP told the bench. The court then ordered the constitution of a new JIT.

You arent doing anybody a favour by appearing before court, the CJP remarked. Your letter to the Supreme Court was not befitting, he said. The court then ordered Anwars bank accounts, passport and CNIC to be unblocked.

The people of Pakistan and the legal fraternity are my strength, the CJP further added. When the bench went for recess, the CJP stressed this was not being done to obtain instructions as the courts functioned autonomously.

Naqeebullahs father thanked the people for standing by the family while talking to reporters outside the court. He also expressed his gratitude to the judiciary. Naqeebullah was Pakistans son, he said.

Rights activist Jibran Nasir said justice had prevailed. The only heat Anwar faces is from the courts. We want to strike fear of law, Constitution and judiciary in every law enforcement officer involved in extra-judicial killings.

The Mehsuds told reporters Anwar should fear no harm. We are peace-loving people. We only want justice. Anwar killed over 450 innocent people across Karachi. We will not take recourse to violence. We believe in the courts, they said.

On Monday, the CJP had reiterated that those facilitating Anwar and others accused in the Naqeebullah case would not be spared. During that hearing, Justice Nisar said if Anwar appeared before the court, he would be provided security and be kept safe.

The CJP also wondered who had provided Anwar help at the airport. AD Khawaja told the court that Anwar had been presented a private airline boarding pass.The body of PPP MNA and former provincial law minister Ayaz Soomro was on Thursday brought back from United States after he died in Manhattan two days back. His funeral prayers would be offered in Larkana at 2:00 PM today.

His body was sent back to Pakistan through Emirates  Flight EK-202  via Dubai.

The body was received by the family members at Jinnah International Airport Karachi and would be shifted to Larkana via ambulance.

The funeral prayers would be attended by the provincial ministers, PPP leaders and other people. He would be laid to rest beside his parents in family graveyard in Shahdadkot.

Another funeral prayers of Ayaz Soomro who breathed his last on Tuesday were offered in a Brooklyn mosque yesterday.

His family and friends joined the funeral prayers held in Makki Masjid in Brooklyn after Asr prayers.

The PPPs MNA breathed his last at a hospital in Manhattan, New York on Tuesday. His family said he will be laid to rest in Larkana, his native town.

He was born on 31 December 1958. He was elected as the member of the National Assembly on PPPs ticket from NA-204 (Larkana) in general election, 2013.

Earlier, he was elected as an MPA from PS-37 Larkana in 2002. He served as law minister Sindh during Qaim Ali Shahs tenure.Bay of Plenty

You will be operating the Roller and also required to help out the team hands on. You will be working near Bayfair for a...



View or Apply on GoodWork.co.nzFarm Street residents fighting council plans for a bus interchange in their street are being given a hearing before councillors on Monday.

They are opposing the plan to put bus stops along both sides of Farm Street, outside the northern end of the Bayfair Shopping Centre.

The council claims it is a temporary interchange, but residents say the street isnt suitable for the buses.

The proposal is for six bus stops either side of the street, which residents spokesman Jon Jenner says directly contravenes a previous city council agreement to provide a safe, continuous access route around Bayfair.

Farm Street is a local road and is entirely unsuitable for a major bus interchange, says Jon.

It will make this local road far more dangerous than it already is, and operationally the buses will be hampered by being forced into an unsuitable road corridor.

Buses on both sides of the street at the same time will delay other traffic using Farm Street which is becoming busier as an alternative route for traffic avoiding the B2B construction.

The residents are also concerned the city council has unilaterally agreed to double accesses to Farm Street from Bayfair form two to four.

Farm St is not wide enough to accommodate these commercial exits  this is a Bayfair resource consent issue to be investigated, says Jon.

Instead of clogging the increasingly busy Girven-Concord link with buses, Farm Street needs remedies for the increasing number of commuter cyclists using the street.

There are no proper paths for them, says Jon. Residents have huge concerns around school cyclists and pedestrians biking and walking to Mount Intermediate and Mount College.

The Bayfair Expansion and the B2B Projects have produced a huge increase in traffic volumes over the existing levels. The rat run traffic, especially in evenings  will worsen as construction proceeds.

Bike Mount is proposing a shared cycle path along the western side of Farm Street, says Jon.

Tauranga City Council has permitted the use of Farm St for heavy construction vehicles until early 2019 despite Bayfair resource consent conditions clearly indicating local roads should not be used, says Jon.

There has never been an agreement with residents about the interchange, says Jon. And consultation is required by council policy.

They want the interchange back on Bayfair property or on Girven Road, or Owens Place or in between Baywave and St John Ambulance, or at Baypark.

The Farm Street residents will be presenting their case in the public forum of the Audit, Finance and Risk Committee meeting at 1pm in the council chamber.Convicted, but paroled, killer Dean Wickliffe is back in court after allegedly breaching his parole conditions.

Wickliffe, 69, has spent 41 years of his life behind bars as a result of more than 50-or-so convictions in his lifetime including manslaughter, aggravated robbery, escaping, kidnapping, driving with excess breath alcohol and possessing methamphetamine for supply.

Between 1987 and 2011 he has been freed and recalled to prison five times.

His most recent release was granted in May last year and he is now living in the Bay of Plenty.

Wickliffe made a brief appearance via AVL at Tauranga District Court on Thursday. He faces one charge of breaching his bail conditions by consuming alcohol.

Judge Thomas Ingram remanded Wickliffe in custody without plea until his next appearance on April 11.

Wickliffe was also ordered to abide by several special conditions expected to last five years.

He was also banned from drinking alcohol and taking illegal drugs or taking psychoactive substances

Wickliffe gained infamy in 1972 when he was charged in relation to the death of Wellington jeweller Paul Miet during an armed robbery.

He earned further infamy after being the only person to successfully escape from Paremoremo prison - twice.

Wickliffe was originally charged with murder but the Court of Appeal ruled the charge should be downgraded to manslaughter.

He was released on parole in May 2017, around the same time he completed writing an autobiography of his life.

- Stuff

Other complaints involved welfare fraud, some found to have merit and other dismissed.

In one case, an employee assigned to a project worked enormous amounts of overtime beyond what a person could realistically work. The district attorney didnt prosecute because the employees supervisor had signed the time sheets, but the behavior stopped and the supervisor was disciplined, Padilla-Scholtens said.

The Solano County program makes it optional for complainants to give their names and contact information. It warns complainants that the online forms are the least secure method of reporting, given these forms are not encrypted in transmission.

State law forbids retaliation against employees reporting legal violations, gross mismanagement and waste.

Minahen said the Napa County program will treat all information received as confidential to the extent allowed by law. The goal is to investigate and correct possible fraud, waste and abuse while maintaining as much anonymity as possible, he said.

Whether Napa Countys program will resemble the one in Solano County remains to be seen.

We do steal (good ideas) from our colleagues up and down the state, Minahen said. Were trying to determine what will work best for Napa County.Bay of Plenty

Ever thought of joining the civil construction industry? if so then this is your chance to get a foot in the door. We are...



View or Apply on GoodWork.co.nzThe Lakes homeowners evicted from their properties prior to the arrival of Cyclone Hola, may not be allowed back home for some time.

At a meeting held at the council offices last night, residents were told that 19 of the 21 buildings could be issued with dangerous building notices.

This news comes after engineers have raised a new issue with the basement concrete block walls after checking the designs of two properties.

"Over the past week, Council has received advice from four experts from different companies who have identified a number of new issues," says a statement released by Tauranga City Council.

"This includes problems related to geotechnical, structural and building compliance."

As part of the ongoing assessments, geotechnical experts have carried out a survey of the Bella Vista site, and tested above and below the ground using Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR).

Structural engineers have also completed invasive testing on four homes by removing areas of GIB board, so they could assess the structure behind the walls, says the council.

The buildings are near completion.

"The initial advice is that two of the homes have the same structural issues as three buildings previously deemed to be dangerous.

"Engineers have also raised a new issue with the basement concrete block walls after checking the designs of two properties.

"On one of the properties, tests have shown the basement wall is not able to support water pressure loads."

Council says the basement walls at the former Bella Vista development are designed to withstand the pressure of dry dirt.

"Because the drainage at the site is inadequate, this places a heavier load on the walls and presents a risk.

"The assessment of design for the other buildings wall showed that its able to withstand the pressure, but the engineers need to confirm what has been built is the same as what has been designed.

"All but two of the buildings at this development have this type of basement wall and therefore we need to check that all these walls are safe."

At last nights meeting, which was also broadcast live outside of Tauranga, including in Australia, residents were told they they wont be able to return to their homes within the next three weeks.

"Over the past month and a half, Council has been undertaking a comprehensive assessment of all homes following the liquidation of Bella Vista on 30 November 2017.

"On Friday 9 March, Council issued a warrant to evacuate the properties in advance of a predicted extreme weather event and to allow for emergency works at the subdivision," says the council.

"Part of the reason for the evacuation was a concern with an unretained slope and the potential for the slope to fail.

"The geotechnical advice is that the unretained slope remains an issue, but it is only part of the problem.

"Council has also presented owners with three potential options that it is considering, which include: working with owners on remediation; Council buying the properties, demolishing the buildings and on-selling them to a developer; and, Council undertaking its regulatory functions only. We are not able to make any commitments on these. Elected members will make the final decision as to how we are to proceed.

"Then we will work with owners individually. Expert assessments are due to be completed by 12 April. At that point, Council will engage with owners on a way forward."Australian Firms Promise Investment For Tax Cuts

by Mary Swire, Tax-News.com, Hong Kong

22 March 2018

The CEOs of several major Australian firms have pledged to amp up investment if the Senate passes the Government's proposed company tax cut.

Under the auspices of the Business Council of Australia (BCA), the business leaders wrote to senators on 21 March. The letter said that a reduction in the company tax rate "is urgent and vital to keep Australia competitive."

The letter added that if the Senate passes the Government's legislation, "we, as some of the nation's largest employers, commit to invest more in Australia which will lead to employing more Australians and therefore stronger wage growth as the tax cut takes effect."

The letter was signed by the President and CEO of the BCA, and by the CEOs of Woolworths, Wesfarmers, Qantas, and BHP, among others.

This is the Government's second attempt at passing its Enterprise Tax Plan through parliament. The legislation proposes increasing the turnover threshold for access to the lower, small business company tax rate each year to 2023-24, and a reduction in the headline rate to 25 percent for all businesses by 2026-27.

If it is to succeed, the Government will need the support of nine cross-bench senators, as both the Labor Party and the Greens are opposed to the proposals. Four crossbenchers have now indicated that they will vote with the Government.

Pauline Hanson, leader of the One Nation party, told Sky News this week that she is "talking to the Government" and has "an open mind about this." Hanson controls three Senate votes.EU Announces New Digital Tax Plans

by Ulrika Lomas, Tax-News.com, Brussels

22 March 2018

The European Commission on March 21 released two proposed amendments to international tax rules to ensure digital business activities are taxed "fairly" and in a growth-friendly way in the European Union.

The proposals are in response to calls from member states for a permanent and lasting solution, to ensure a "fair share" of tax revenues from online activities where digital firms derive revenue from users in their territory, which might otherwise go untaxed.

The Commission noted: "Profits made through lucrative activities, such as selling user-generated data and content, are not captured by today's tax rules. Member states are now starting to seek fast, unilateral solutions to tax digital activities, which creates a legal minefield and tax uncertainty for business. A coordinated approach is the only way to ensure that the digital economy is taxed in a fair, growth-friendly, and sustainable way."

The Commission has proposed two solutions. The first initiative  the Commission's preferred long-term solution  would reform corporate tax rules so that profits are registered and taxed where businesses have significant interaction with users through digital channels.

The second proposal responds to calls from several member states for an interim tax that would cover the main digital activities that currently escape tax altogether in the EU.

Specifically, the first proposal would enable member states to tax profits that are generated in their territory, even if a company does not have a physical presence there. The new rules would ensure that online businesses contribute to public finances at the same level as traditional "brick-and-mortar" companies.

A digital platform will be deemed to have a taxable "digital presence" or a virtual permanent establishment in a member state if it fulfills one of the following criteria:

It exceeds a threshold of EUR7m (USD8.58m) in annual revenues in a member state;

It has more than 100,000 users in a member state in a taxable year

Over 3,000 business contracts for digital services are created between the company and business users in a taxable year.

The new rules will also change how profits are allocated to member states. The Commission argues that this will better reflect how companies can create value online: for example, depending on where the user is based at the time of consumption.

The Commission said the measure could eventually be integrated into the scope of the Common Consolidated Corporate Tax Base (CCCTB)  the Commission's already proposed initiative for allocating profits of large multinational groups in a way which better reflects where the value is created.

The second, temporary solution is intended to ensure there is at least a harmonized EU approach to digital taxation, in the absence of a global agreement, to deter member states from introducing unilateral measures.

The Commission has explained that its second proposal is the introduction of an indirect tax, with a three percent rate put forward by the Commission, which would apply to revenues created from certain digital activities which escape the current tax framework entirely. According to the Commission, the tax will apply to revenues created from activities where users play a major role in value creation and those that are the hardest to capture with current tax rules, such as those revenues:

Created from selling online advertising space;

Created from digital intermediary activities, which allow users to interact with other users and which can facilitate the sale of goods and services between them;

Created from the sale of data generated from user-provided information.

Tax revenues would be collected by the member states where the users are located, and will apply only to companies with total annual worldwide revenues of at least EUR750m and EU revenues of EUR50m.

These legislative proposals are to be submitted to the Council for adoption and to the European Parliament for consultation.

Releasing its proposals, the EU said it remains committed to global discussions on digital taxation under the auspices of the G20 and OECD and will continue to push for ambitious international solutions to the issues posed by the digital economy.

Valdis Dombrovskis, Vice-President for the Euro and Social Dialogue, said: "Digitalization brings countless benefits and opportunities. But it also requires adjustments to our traditional rules and systems. We would prefer rules agreed at the global level, including at the OECD. But the amount of profits currently going untaxed is unacceptable. We need to urgently bring our tax rules into the 21st century by putting in place a new comprehensive and future-proof solution."

Pierre Moscovici, Commissioner for Economic and Financial Affairs, Taxation, and Customs, added: "The digital economy is a major opportunity for Europe and Europe is a huge source of revenues for digital firms. But this win-win situation raises legal and fiscal concerns. Our pre-Internet rules do not allow our member states to tax digital companies operating in Europe when they have little or no physical presence here. This represents an ever-bigger black hole for Member States, because the tax base is being eroded. That's why we're bringing forward a new legal standard as well an interim tax for digital activities."

On March 21, the Commission published the following related documents:EU Announces Sanctions For 'Blacklisted' Countries

by Ulrika Lomas, Tax-News.com, Brussels

22 March 2018

The European Commission is to take steps to ensure that EU external development and investment funds cannot be channelled or transited through entities in countries included on the EU's "blacklist" of non-cooperative tax jurisdictions.

The Commission has published guidelines which set out the applicable legislation on how EU funds should be treated when it comes to tax avoidance and non-cooperative jurisdictions. The guidelines are intended to ensure that the rules are interpreted and applied consistently.

The guidelines provide information on how the EU's implementing partners should assess funding projects that involve entities in jurisdictions listed by the EU as non-cooperative for tax purposes. The assessment process includes a series of checks designed to pinpoint a risk of tax avoidance.

For example, the Commission said that before funding is channelled through an entity, it should be established that there are sound business reasons for the particular structuring of a project, which must not take advantage of the technicalities of a tax system or of mismatches between two or more tax systems for the purpose of reducing a tax bill.

An exemption is made for direct financing, where a project is physically implemented in a listed non-cooperative tax jurisdiction and is not linked to money laundering, terrorism financing, tax fraud, or tax evasion. This exemption is intended to safeguard the EU's development policy.

Tax Commissioner Pierre Moscovici said: "The EU's blacklist of tax havens is a living document and more countries will be added if they don't live up to the commitments they have made to improve their tax systems."

"The Commission will not allow EU funds to contribute to global tax avoidance. These EU level countermeasures should act as a wake-up call for those jurisdictions as they show the EU is serious about tackling tax avoidance on a global scale."

The Commission called on international financial institutions and other bodies involved in the management of the EU budget to review their internal policies on non-cooperative jurisdictions.

The following countries are on the blacklist: American Samoa, the Bahamas, Guam, Namibia, Palau, Samoa, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Trinidad and Tobago, and the US Virgin Islands.

The "grey list" comprises: Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Bahrain, Barbados the British Virgin Islands, Dominica, Grenada, Macao, the Marshall Islands, Panama, Saint Lucia, South Korea, Tunisia, and the United Arab Emirates. Jurisdictions on the grey list are subject to close monitoring, having made reform commitments.France, Luxembourg Sign New Tax Treaty

by Ulrika Lomas, Tax-News.com, Brussels

22 March 2018

A new tax treaty incorporating the latest international tax standards was signed by France and Luxembourg on March 20.

The new treaty is based on the latest version of the OECD model tax treaty and includes the BEPS minimum standards. It replaces the existing treaty between France and Luxembourg which has been in place since 1958.

In an important update to the treaty, the tax situation of French residents employed in Luxembourg, of which there are approximately 95,000, has been clarified.

Under the new treaty's "tolerance rule," French residents working in Luxembourg will remain taxable in the Luxembourg provided they spend no more than 29 days per year working outside of Luxembourg.

The revised treaty is expected to become effective from the beginning of the year following its ratification by both countries.HMRC Changes Position On VAT On Cost-Sharing Groups

by Jason Gorringe, Tax-News.com, London

22 March 2018

The UK tax agency, HM Revenue and Customs, has released new guidance on its policies concerning cost-sharing groups following rulings from the European Court of Justice on their VAT treatment.

It has released Revenue and Customs Brief 3 (2018) and VAT Information Sheet 02/18.

Article 132(1)(f) of the EU VAT Directive (2006/112) provides an additional exemption for certain activities that are in the public interest. The exemption allows persons who carry on these activities to join together to form a cost share group (CSG) so that they can acquire services and recharge their members for their use of the services at cost without incurring any additional sticking VAT.

A CSG is a separate, independent entity, set up to enable its members to supply themselves with certain qualifying services at cost and exempt from VAT. As a result, a "co-operative self-supply" arrangement is created  a term coined by the EU Commission. Because the CSG is a separate taxable person from its members, it's able to make supplies for VAT purposes to its members. This exemption allows small providers who can't afford to acquire assets on their own account to benefit from the same overall VAT position as larger providers who can afford to purchase the assets themselves. Therefore, the more members of a CSG there are, the greater the potential savings and lower the costs per member of operating the relevant CSG.

In UK law, the exemption is reproduced in Item 1 of Group 16 to Schedule 9 of the VAT Act 1994. There has previously been some uncertainty over what exactly the exemption was intended to cover, HMRC explained, but this has now been clarified by the European Court of Justice.

The discussed cases are:

Commission v. Luxembourg (Case C-274/15)

Polish Finance Ministry v. Aviva Towarzystwo Ubezpieczen na Zycie S.A. w Warszawie (Case C-605/15)

DNB Banka AS (DNB) v. Estonia's state tax administration (Case C-326/15)

Commission v. Germany (Case C-616/15)

Specifically, the VAT information Sheet explains what transitional arrangements are in force for CSGs that have applied the exemption correctly based on earlier guidance. It also explains where current guidance is amended by Brief 3 (2018), which discusses the judgments' impact in greater depth.

According to the VAT information sheet, the practical, immediate effects of the judgments are as follows:

(a) The CSE will be restricted to members who engage in the exempt activities in the following Exemption Groups in Schedule 9 of the VAT Act 1994, with effect from March 22 (the date on which the brief was released):

Postal service (Group 3)

Education (Group 6)

Health and welfare (Group 7)

Subscriptions to trade unions and professional bodies (Group 9)

Sport (Group 10)

Fund raising by charities (Group 12)

Cultural services (Group 13)

The judgments don't cover non-business activities and therefore CSGs engaged in these activities are unaffected by this change, HMRC said.

There'll be interim measures for existing CSGs that have operated the previous guidance correctly. Housing associations can continue to apply the CSE for the time being until HMRC gives more guidance.

In any case of avoidance or abuse, HMRC will apply the guidance from the court from the date of the judgments.

(b) HMRC policy will be amended to restrict the CSE to members located in the UK. It'll no longer be permitted to apply the exemption for transactions with members located in other EU member states. The CSE has not been permitted for members located outside of the EU, and this will remain the position, HMRC said.

(c) A CSE won't be permitted where an uplift has been charged on transactions for transfer pricing purposes. It'll remain the position that the CSE won't be permitted in any other case where exact reimbursement can't be evidenced.India Consults Taxpayers On Income Tax Law Reform

by Lorys Charalambous, Tax-News.com, Cyprus

22 March 2018

India has launched a consultation on efforts to reform the country's 1961 income tax law, to be led by a newly constituted task force.

Stakeholders are being invited to submit input via an online form on the Income Tax India website.

The tax authority is seeking information in particular on how it can ease filing and e-filing tax return obligations, improve the accuracy of tax credit calculations, streamline tax return processing and prevent errors, and improve the effectiveness of dispute resolution and refund recovery procedures. The reform will also look at changes to the current penalty regime.

Comments are invited by April 2.Portugal To Respond To ECJ VAT Ruling On Vacant Property

by Ulrika Lomas, Tax-News.com, Brussels

22 March 2018

The Portuguese Government has said that it is reviewing a recent decision by the European Court of Justice with a view to amending the country's value-added tax regime with regards to the leasing and letting of property.

Assistant Secretary of State for Finance Ricardo Mourinho Felix told reporters at the last meeting of European Union finance ministers that the Government would soon take the necessary steps to align Portugal's VAT law with the ECJ's ruling.

In February 2018, the ECJ decided against the Portuguese tax and customs authority in favor of a taxpayer who challenged the authority's decision that it should be retroactively precluded from deducting tax incurred on inputs in relation to a supply of leasing and letting transactions.

Portugal has elected to derogate from the general rule provided in Article 135(1)(l) of the VAT Directive, that leasing and letting transactions should be generally exempt from VAT. Therefore, in Portugal, such transactions may be taxable, generally allowing taxpayers to claim input tax credits.

However, the tax and customs authority required the taxpayer in the case, Imofloresmira, to make adjustments to VAT deductions on the ground that the properties at issue had been unoccupied for over two years and were therefore regarded as no longer being used for the purposes of its own taxed transactions, even though, during that period, the company always had the intention of letting those properties and undertook the necessary steps to that end.

The ECJ said that, under Article 167 of the VAT Directive, a right of deduction arises at the time the deductible tax becomes chargeable. Consequently, only the capacity in which a person is acting at that time can determine the existence of the right to deduct. It said: "It follows that, once the tax authority has accepted, on the basis of information provided by a business, that it should be accorded the status of a taxable person, that status cannot, in principle, subsequently be withdrawn retroactively on account of the fact that certain events have or have not occurred."Switzerland Opposed To EU's Temporary Digital Tax

by Ulrika Lomas, Tax-News.com, Brussels

22 March 2018

The Swiss Government has warned against the introduction of short-term measures targeted at tackling the problems of taxing the digital economy.

The Government said that it had made clear during this week's meeting of G20 finance ministers and central bank governors that the digital economy should be appropriately taxed. However, the Government recommended that the existing tax rules and possible options for reform should be discussed in the OECD. It stressed that in order to guarantee legal certainty, avoid over- and double taxation, and to combat high administrative burdens, governments should avoid the introduction of short-term measures.

During the summit, Swiss Finance Minister Ueli Maurer also set out his views on crypto capital. He emphasized that crypto capital poses risks associated with money laundering, terrorist financing, and investor protection.

Switzerland supports multilateral efforts in these areas, and would like to see the Financial Action Task Force prioritize work on the links between crypto capital and money laundering and terrorist financing, it was said.ARCATA -- The quaint town plaza here is lined with locally owned stores, their names and products recalling the post-Flower Power migration from San Francisco decades ago: Moonrise Herbs, Heart Bead, Hemp Recycled Solutions.

The shops trade largely in cash with customers who are paid in cash - the marijuana growers, distributors and "trimmigrants," seasonal workers who cut back the flowering plants for market each autumn. But business is stalling as marijuana's dark cash economy comes into the light, pushed by the state's legalization of the drug earlier this year.

Humboldt County, traditionally shorthand for outlaw culture and the great dope it produces, is facing a harsh reckoning. Every trait that made this strip along California's wild northwest coast the best place in the world to grow pot is now working against its future as a producer in the state's $7 billion-a-year marijuana market.

A massive industry never before regulated is being tamed by laws and taxation, characteristically extensive in this state. Nowhere is this process upending a culture and economy more than here in Humboldt, where tens of thousands of people who have been breaking the law for years are being asked to hire accountants, tax lawyers and declare themselves to a government they have famously distrusted.

"We're at that moment in the movie 'Thelma and Louise' when they have driven the car off the cliff," said Scott Greacen, a longtime Humboldt resident and environmentalist who is both a supporter and critic of the marijuana trade. "We're just waiting for the impact."

Fewer than 1 in 10 of the county's estimated 12,500 marijuana farmers are likely to make it in the legal trade. Growers who have anticipated legalization are preparing for a shift from badlands to boutique, a cultural transformation they hope will make this county a destination to visit for its rich history, artisanal strains of cannabis, and matchless natural beauty.

The shift, already underway with property values falling and growers departing, will be painful and unfamiliar. Marketing and consulting operations are appearing, along with logos branding various marijuana strains. Even the local terminology is changing. "Cannabis" is now the preferred public term for "marijuana," though in casual conversation it is still just "weed."

Once prized, Humboldt's remoteness is a drawback in the age of legal pot, and the industry is moving to meet California's population. Places to the south that have never been known for marijuana production - such as Santa Barbara County and the Salinas Valley - are licensing hundreds of greenhouse growers to take advantage of proximity to roads, rails and airports for distribution.

But the state licensing process is slow, threatening a fledgling legal marijuana economy by failing to eliminate a stubborn illegal one quickly enough. Of the state's projected $4 billion legal marijuana market, industry experts say at least that much is still being supplied by illegal growers who can charge lower prices.

Less than 1 percent of the estimated 69,000 growers statewide have received a permit to farm marijuana since the beginning of the year. Thousands more are in the works, but nowhere near the total number of those now cultivating cannabis; any cannabis farmer operating without a license is cultivating illegally, and government officials could begin enforcing the law when the growing season begins in the next six weeks.

The state has issued more than 2,000 licenses to about 600 growers this year, some of whom hold dozens of them. These already-licensed growers will produce about 4.1 million pounds of marijuana annually - almost double the demand for legal weed, with tens of thousands of farmers still deciding what to do. Growers in Humboldt County, an area the size of Connecticut, produce enough marijuana each year to supply the state's entire legal market.

The glut in legal and illegal supply has kicked the bottom out of prices at a time when small growers most need the money to begin complying with California's stiff regulatory demands. At the same time, the state's licensing of retail shops has been slow, leaving a lot of legal product without a legal place to be sold.

Marijuana from Humboldt that used to sell for $1,200 a pound three years ago is now selling at a 75 percent discount. State officials and many growers predict the vast overproduction will be curtailed by the new rules, likely by consolidating cultivation among large agriculture companies that can afford the regulations.

"The future of weed in Humboldt County will not be in its production," said Mikal Jakubal, who owns a cannabis nursery in the south end of the county. "We'll become the Napa Valley of weed. But we're going to see a rough transition for a lot of people, and then this place will gentrify."

- - -

Before pot, there were fish and timber.

Humboldt's economy first relied on the salmon that ran in the Mattole and Eel rivers, so plentiful once that canneries lined the Eel's mouth as it emptied into the Pacific Ocean and the shores of Humboldt Bay just to the north. Then came the logging of the pines, firs and redwoods. Lumber mills, disused for years, sit along the roads and streams that run through Humboldt's thickly forested hills.

The population grew and changed in the 1970s, when disaffected hippies migrated north, a "back to the land" exodus from the Bay Area that brought a contempt for government ethos here. Marijuana emerged as the county's next-generation commodity.

There is no reason people chose Humboldt to grow marijuana other than that Humboldt, as a society, allowed it to be grown. The same was true for neighboring Trinity and Mendocino counties. Collectively, the three are known as the "Emerald Triangle," a globally renowned pot paradise.

Swami Chaitanya has been growing marijuana on a farm in Mendocino County for 15 years, drawing water from the Blue Rock Creek, a tributary of the protected Eel River.

He called the traditional marijuana economy one of "shared risk," where everyone on the farm-to-joint supply chain could be busted if just one were caught. He felt protected by that shared risk in a way he no longer does after declaring himself to the state.

"The location of the farm was the one thing no one could mention; it was the biggest secret in the business," said Chaitanya, who has spent nearly $40,000 in the permitting process. "Our whole attitude toward the government has always been 'Come and get me.' "

Chaitanya arrived along with thousands of other growers after state voters approved Proposition 215 in 1996, which made marijuana legal for medical use. The law opened a gray market for pot that made it virtually impossible to crack down on illegal "grows."

The farms moved farther into the forests, and with them came the environmental damage from illegal road-building and water consumption driven by a water-intensive, unregulated crop.

"Marijuana was just something you didn't talk about openly," said Mark Lovelace, referring to the political climate when he joined the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors in 2008.

The huge spike in cultivation drew public concerns about rising crime and environmental impact, which was increasingly obvious. Many of the cannabis migrants were far less back-to-the-land than in-it-for-the-money, and the politics around pot began to shift.

"The grows and the people doing them became very in your face," Lovelace said. "Now, though, the free market is going to drive people out of those hills. They won't be able to make money there anymore."

Greenhouses made growing anywhere possible, and many of those more recently cultivated places have required makeshift roads and hilltop grading to connect them with markets. Aerial shots show once-pristine ridgelines pocked with bald patches, grows that more closely resemble mining operations than agriculture.

But local law enforcement was ill-equipped to take on what even marijuana enthusiasts could see as an industry running wild. Medical marijuana use had given many farmers a legal cover to grow - it was nearly impossible to prove they were not producing for the medical market - and local law enforcement agencies have never been big enough to police Humboldt's armed and hidden industry.

Sheriff William Honsal, a police officer's son known locally as Billy, grew up in Humboldt as the county cannabis industry exploded.

"You had people coming here, many in organized crime, that just wanted to suck as much out of this county as they could," he said.

Local law enforcement carried out raids by helicopter - tactical teams fast-roping down onto pot farms - backed by long police convoys that churned up the dirt roads. Those operations were more symbolic than substantive, numbering roughly 100 a year in a county with more than 10,000 growing operations.

Now Honsal has state law and more effective tools to use - civil penalties rather than criminal. No longer is there a gray market for marijuana; growers either have a permit to cultivate or they do not. If they do not, a $10,000-a-day fine can be levied against them for each violation and, after 90 days, a lien attached to the property.

"We are very happy that the lines are drawn as black and white," Honsal said. "There's too much risk and not enough reward, and in years past here, it was the opposite."

- - -

The south fork of the Eel River, protected by state and federal law, runs through Humboldt's marijuana heartland. The color of dull copper, it flows swiftly after a recent storm despite an ongoing drought, snow appearing auspiciously on the top of Rainbow Ridge.

But the river's color is a problem, even if the depth of its channel this time of year is where it should be. Silt clouds the current as it runs through valleys heavy with marijuana cultivation, which both draws water from the river and fills it with runoff that stifles the once-thriving Coho, Steelhead and Chinook salmon populations.

Greacen, the environmentalist, works for the nonprofit Friends of the Eel River. With the group's executive director, Stephanie Tidwell, the two guided a few kayaks down the south fork recently, through giant redwoods and invisible cannabis plantations, like those in Panther Gap that Greacen said hold "more weed than you've ever seen."

"They're like the 'Lost Boys' up there," he said, citing Peter Pan's clan to characterize the oddball collection of Brazilians, Spaniards, Portuguese and others who have grown up high in the hills for decades.

Greacen first arrived in Humboldt nearly 30 years ago to participate in the fight over commercial logging in the Headwaters Forest, ancient and now protected. The demonstrations marked Humboldt as a hive of environmental activism.

But as marijuana cultivation grew exponentially in the "green rush" following Proposition 215, pot and environmental protection have come into conflict. The consequences of growing marijuana where it should not be grown have been devastating.

In California's dry summer months, which is the cannabis growing season, farms draw down the Eel and Mattole, along with their tributaries, to dangerously low levels. "You could walk this whole thing in the summer," Greacen said of the south fork.

The larger problem is the sediment that runs off the illegally graded farms and into the rivers.

Along the south fork of the Eel, it is easy to see the contrast. The kayaks loop around a bend and, where Bull Creek empties into it from a thick stand of forest, the water is as clear as vodka. As salmon run upstream, they must increasingly find these creeks, cold and clear, in place of the Eel itself to spawn successfully.

"Salmon Creek no longer has any salmon in it because there is so much dirt at the bottom," Greacen said. Regarding Coho salmon, Greacen said, "If we lose them in the south fork, then we lose them in the Eel, and if we lose them in the Eel, then we lose them in the region."

New state regulations seek to address water use, at least for those growers who decide to become legal. Runoff will be measured now, and growers fined sharply for violations.

Growers eventually will be required to build water tanks or ponds that will allow them to store water in the wet winter months and use it, rather than rivers, in the dry growing season.

"With water here, it's feast or famine," said Cris Carrigan, director of the Office of Enforcement at the State Water Resources Control Board. "The focus here is to help cultivators take advantage of the times of feast so they do not have to exercise their diversion rights in times of famine."

On the banks of Redwood Creek, which feeds the Eel's south fork, Jakubal has been preparing his nursery for legalization for several years.

Bald, wiry with a buzzing energy, Jakubal listed several pending projects that he said will make him more competitive in the legal economy.

In front of his property, the creek has been slowed by fallen trees and roots, intentionally placed with the assistance of an environmental consultant to form a natural pool. The slowed stream creates a salmon habitat and a water source from which Jakubal can draw in wet months.

He rarely needs to, and never in the summer. He built a 250,000-gallon catchment pool at the foot of his property, which he uses to fill several large storage tanks near his greenhouses at the top of it. But across the creek are two other farms, neither of which has made any water storage preparation.

Jakubal's business, Plant Humboldt, sells strains of young cannabis plants to growers, and the economics, even in this changing market, are good. There will be a retail side soon, with legalization allowing every adult to grow as many as six plants without a license.

Inside his greenhouses sit hundreds of inch-high plants in small plastic trays, which bear handwritten labels identifying strains such as "Pineapple MG" and "Dream Queen." With little overhead, apart from the $22 an hour he pays his small crew of workers, Jakubal sells thousands of plants each year for as much as $50 each.

Meeting the new state regulations and paying taxes will cut into that by a sizable chunk. But Jakubal said that in his niche market he could increase business fivefold as Humboldt's industry shifts from mass production to specialty items.

"We're providing an experience here, a place people can come and pick their own plants," he said. "There's a history here, a culture here, and an incredible knowledge base. People will come to Humboldt County to get Humboldt strains from Humboldt growers."

- - -

"It's important to acknowledge that this did not happen overnight," said Scott Davies over a plate of sashimi at one of two sushi restaurants this town of 18,000 people supports on its thriving, if still largely illegal, economy.

Davies is the face of modern Humboldt cannabis: close-cropped graying hair, stylish glasses, a grandfather pot farmer whose business already complies with environmental regulations. For years, he has been preparing for his thriving family business to be legal.

Yes, the new regulations, or any regulations at all, appear overwhelming to many of his colleagues. But surprise, including surprise from state officials that more growers are not complying, is no excuse for not being ready for what is unfolding.

"At every level in this process, the learning curve is at its steepest right now," said Davies, 50, who moved to southern Humboldt County three decades ago to farm marijuana.

Davies's main business is Winterbourne Farms, which spreads out along 40 acres next to the Mattole River. The operation produces as much as 1,500 pounds of cannabis a year and now employs his four children and son-in-law.

He has remade his business over the years. Where once he had to house and feed seasonal workers to harvest the crop, today he has turned manufacturing space in this city's designated "Cannabis Innovation Zone" into a distribution hub.

His marketing of Humboldt marijuana, which he described traditionally as a mix of "dude bro" and "reggae" messaging, is as polished as a product from an elite craft brewery. "Humboldt Legends" comes in logoed bags containing a small pack of five joints inside, sealed with the commercial stamp of a state-regulated product. The retail cost for the pack is $26.

What Davies fears is the resilience of the illegal marijuana trade. He said until the state licenses enough cannabis shops - and cracks down on those selling illegally - retailers will continue buying from the black market "because it's cheaper and because they can."

"I don't expect the black market to go away," Davies said. "But I do expect not to have to compete with it in the regulated retail channel. In a world where all trade is in the black market, my skills mean nothing."It might be the third largest smartphone manufacturer in the world, but 2018 isn't turning out to be Huaweis year for breaking into the US market. After partnership talks with AT&T and Verizon collapsed several weeks ago, Best Buy has now cut relations with the Chinese phone giant.

According to a CNET report citing people familiar with the matter, the largest electronics retailer in the US is no longer ordering new products from Huawei and will stop selling its products over the next few weeksa move that will further hinder its US expansion ambitions.

It's unclear whether the move was more to do with politics than profit. We dont comment on specific contracts with vendors, and we make decisions to change what we sell for a variety of reasons, said a Best Buy spokesperson.

A Huawei representative said: as a policy, we do not discuss the details of our partner relationships.

Best Buy was one of the few places in the US you could buy an unlocked Huawei phone. Carrier deals with AT&T and Verizon would have helped sales of its excellent Mate 10 Pro handset in the states, but both firms pulled out at the last minute due to suspected political pressure.

February brought more bad news for the firm. First, it was revealed that Huawei had asked people to write fake Mate 10 Pro reviews on Best Buys page for a chance to become beta testers. Things got worse a week later when US intelligence chiefs warned Americans not to use Huawei or ZTE devices. Six agencies, including the CIA, FBI, and NSA said using a telecoms device from one of the companies could put you at risk of having personal data accessed or stolena result of their close ties with the Chinese government. The warning echoed those found in a similar US House Intelligence Committee report from 2012.

US residents who want to buy a Huawei phone can still purchase them from online retailers such as Amazon, B&H, and Newegg.The Venezuelan President said that without a doubt, the Venezuelan people had received the solidarity, support and reason of the countries gathered at the 76th UN General Assembly in New... | Read MoreGradually we have been excluded from more and more PBM networks for specialtyand for no reason other than they wanted that market share, Komoto said.

It wasnt always this way. The specialty pharmacy business began to take off in the 1990s. In 1996, a Pittsburgh-area pharmacy landed an exclusive contract with Merck & Co. to distribute a breakthrough HIV drug then in short supply.

The pharmacy took a 37 percent markup, according to news reports at the time. Soon, specialty pharmacies were popping up everywhere, and big drug benefit managers gobbled up some of the most successful ones.

The markups are in the single digits now, Komoto said, but specialty pharmacies still get a spread on costly drugs, and may also get fees for their services or for selling data.

The three largest pharmacy benefit managers  CVS, Express Scripts and UnitedHealth  control more than 70 percent of the PBM market, according to data from Drug Channels Institute, an industry research firm. They now also control more than half the $138 billion market for specialty drug prescriptions, according to the institute.After breaking his silence on the Cambridge Analytica scandal on Thursday, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg gave an interview on US television saying he was "really sorry this happened".

Echoing his earlier Facebook post, and stopping short of apologising outright, Zuckerberg said he regretted that the company did not inform people of the data breach at the time.

Zuckerberg said the company was unaware of the data breach before Guardian journalists informed them in 2015, and only last week learnt through The Guardian, The New York Times and Britain's Channel 4 that Cambridge Analytica "may not have deleted this data as certified".

"Im used to, when people legally certify they're going to do something, that theyll do it, and that was a mistake," he said in the interview with CNN.Boardriders, which is backed by US private equity giant Oaktree Capital, has made a $1 a share bid for Billabong Australia with investors set to vote on Wednesday.

"The likely outcome if the bid is blocked is the collapse of the Billabong group," Mr Tanner told Fairfax Media from Spain. "There have been plenty of retail and apparel bankruptcies around the world and it means a lot of job losses and brands shut down or licensed down into a low tier."

Billabong will go under if Boardriders' bid for the iconic surf company is not accepted, says the chief executive of the Californian-based company, David Tanner.

The beleaguered surf company was once valued at $5 billion with stock trading at $14, and even as recently as late 2015 shares were $3.82, but last year Billabong lost $77 million after tax as comparable revenue declined.

The vote is tight and hinges on two shareholders, Ryder Capital and Adam Smith Asset Capital, which hold a combined 15.35 per cent of Billabong and to date have not indicated how they intend to vote.

"Voting against a transaction without an answer for how to deal with it is, in our view, irresponsible to shareholders and employees," Mr Tanner said. "Metaphorically, blood will be on their hands and they need to own that. They are putting a gun to their own heads, other investor's heads and employee's heads."

Oaktree is in a unique position because, along with other major shareholder Centrebridge Partners, it is also a creditor of Billabong.

Billabong has a $US202 million ($265.5 million) term loan from Oaktree and Centerbridge which is incurring interest at 11.9 per cent and costing the company more than $30 million a year.The multi award-winning artist, Ben Quilty, will speak out about the inequitable tax treatment of emerging writers and artists compared to young athletes at a summit called by the NSW Government to shape its blueprint for future investment in arts, screen and culture.

Tax is paid on the Archibald Portrait Prize, the Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship and all literary and film prizes but the education, training and winnings of athletes are largely tax-free, Quilty will tell 500 delegates gathered at Carriageworks Friday for the Arts 2025 Summit.

Artist Ben Quilty argues for tax breaks for all artists and writers. Credit: Simon Schluter

NSW Arts Minister, Don Harwin, has convened the summit to discuss the promotion of NSW as a global creative destination, as well as funding models, sustainable and diversified incomes streams for creatives and new ways to engage with arts organisations in western Sydney and regional NSW.

Leading panel discussions will be the president of the Art Gallery of NSW Trust David Gonski, MCA Board Chair and arts patron, Simon Mordant, television producer Rosemary Blight, opera and festival director Lindy Hume, and Sydney Festival director Wesley Enoch.It has only about 70 percent of the money it says is needed to cover pension obligations  and that assumes that its investments will return profits that many experts believe are unrealistic. CalPERS lost about $100 billion during the Great Recession a decade ago and has not fully recovered, while payouts to retirees grow due to demographic factors.

City officials have repeatedly appeared before the CalPERS board to seek relief, contending that some cities will be driven to insolvency. But for the most part, CalPERS officials have taken the attitude that making the fund actuarially healthy is their highest priority.

In February, the Santa Cruz City Council unanimously declared a fiscal emergency, preparatory to placing a quarter-cent sales tax increase on the June ballot.

Santa Cruz isnt alone on that approach either. Throughout California, cities have taken, or are planning, sales tax increases.

However, cities rarely cite pension costs as the specific reason for the tax increases, because doing so might generate more opposition. Typically, they just say the money is needed for police and fire services, which is a half-truth since police and fire pensions are the biggest drivers of rising retirement costs.Part of the Powerhouse Museum's main temporary gallery space has been leased out as a classroom for up to 400 university students in a move the state government denies is confirmation the museum is to be relocated.

A ''purpose-designed learning space'' for the university opens this month under the terms of a Memorandum of Understanding signed between the UTS and the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences (MAAS) in December.

At 1800 sqm, the hall is one of the largest exhibition spaces in Sydney and forms part of the Wran Building opened in 1988 and renovated at a cost of $25 million six years ago.

It was the location of the 2011 Harry Potter exhibition which drew 382,565 people, setting a new state record for a paid exhibition.VISUAL ART

LORNE SCULPTURE BIENNALE

Until April 2

I'm wary about the concept of sculpture by the sea, associating it with watered-down ideas and insipid art. The 6th Lorne Sculpture Biennale, which opened last weekend, refutes my prejudices in so many ways.

Shirin Abedinirad's Revision.

Curator Lara Nicholls (who grew up in Lorne and is also the National Gallery of Australia's curator of 19th century Australian art) has created an exhibition that balances artistic integrity with a lightness of spirit; that asks serious questions about humanity's exploitation and destruction of the environment, but never allows thematic considerations to overwhelm the art.

Not every piece in the biennale satisfies, but overall, Nicholls' thoughtful selection and location of works re-envisages the possibilities of public outdoor sculpture. She has organically positioned the work of 41 artists from across the globe; sea, sand, wind and sky act upon the art.Miranda solved the problem that confronted musical theatre composers since Sondheim's heyday. Their options seemed reduced to writing third-rate generic Broadway tunes (given they were not Sondheim, Rodgers or Kander), or rock songs that inherently conspired against narrative and character development.

When In the Heights opened on Broadway a decade ago, Lin-Manuel Miranda's blend of hip hop and salsa was revolutionary. It still feels not only hip, but smart.

When was the last time you saw a newish musical where the music was the main event? In most shows the music is either abysmal, forgettable, or, as with jukebox musicals, the songs are fair, but have been foisted on the story.

Miranda sliced open a new way forward, showing that rapping could actually function rather as recitative does in Mozartian opera, while also seamlessly transforming into more lyrical song as required.

His musical (with book by Quiara Alegria Hudes) is set in the Hispanic-dominated area of Washington Heights in Manhattan, and is largely about how a sense of community can flourish within the hostility of a metropolis.

Hudes' book is not as convincing, edgy or innovative as Miranda's music, but it does contribute to the creation of some genuinely interesting characters in a cast of 15.

Chief among them is Usvnavi, whose corner shop is a neighbourhood hub. Ryan Gonzalez is so compelling in the role that you doubt it could be done better. He infuses the character with likable warmth and a rare (for musicals) three-dimensionality, while carving up the singing, the dancing and especially the rapping.

Marty Alix also excels as Usnavi's wisecracking sidekick, Sonny, and other nods must got to Margi de Ferranti, Ana Maria Belo, Tim Omaji and Luisa Scrofani in a cast without weak links.MUSIC

MEASHA BRUEGGERGOSMAN 

With Ian Munro

Melbourne Recital Centre, March 21

Opera singer Measha Brueggergosman

Barefoot, with cropped platinum blonde hair and a sassy smile, from the moment Measha Brueggergosman walks on stage it is obvious she is not your usual opera diva. Alongside Australian pianist Ian Munro, the duo performed an intriguing programme of Ravel, Poulenc, Mahler, Montsalvatge and Bolcom songs  some so rare they are likely to have never been performed on the Melbourne Recital Centre stage before. As if her personality was bursting to break forth, Brueggergosman became more alive as the night grew long  ending with an unexpected piece which had the audience jump to an enthusiastic standing ovation.

The Canadian soprano has the ability to melt between styles and such a command of languages she seems equally at home whatever the repertoire. In Ravels Cinq melodies populaires grecques and his famous Scheherazade, she could move from smooth solemnity to bright and bold with ease. Her delicate pianissimo draws the audience in, while her top notes shine with a brilliancy that knocks them back in their seats. It is a truly multi-faceted voice. Munros accompaniment was sensitive and supportive; it appears to be a partnership thoroughly enjoyed by both parties.NSW Emergency Services Minister Troy Grant might like to think an independent inquiry into the devastating Tathra fires will put to bed any tensions between the urban and rural fire brigades so that "these questions will never get asked again".

On Wednesday volunteer and professional firefighters in the Tathra and Bega area dismissed any talk of tension between their services, describing their relationship as close and respectful.

But some of those questions - dismissed by some as union-driven politics - about a so-called turf war, are not new. And previous, exhaustive inquiries appear to have done little to settle the matter.

There were similar concerns about a so-called turf war raised in the aftermath of both the 2001 and 2003 bushfires in Canberra, hinting at a cultural divide that ran deep between the two organisations. Many argue no such cultural issues exist.Rod Wise, Surrey Hills Situation normal: MPs spending the public's money Who was The Age pandering to with its front-page puff piece on "Labor MP rorts"? All this contrived outrage over politicians doing what they always do with public funds. Surely this supposed clandestine campaign of seeking to persuade the electorate to vote a certain way ranks as trivial  almost irrelevant  in comparison to the outrageous conduct of the "cohort of Coalition cowards" and the many millions of taxpayer funds they squandered on the marriage-equality charade. I suggest The Age get some perspective. Or perhaps this is all in the good cause of political balance. Christopher Holdstock, Glenroy Premier, show me that you deserve my vote

I am a rusted on Labor voter. If Daniel Andrews wants my vote, he needs to establish an independent body which is able to investigate politicians "'without fear or favour" and with the teeth to enforce appropriate consequences. Robin Jensen, Castlemaine An elite who seek power, influence and money Politics has become a career for ambitious, ideology-free con men. At every turn, they work to maintain their snouts in the trough of our money and we are left impotent. So long as people vote for the continuation of the political duopoly, as they did in Batman last weekend, the corruption that eats at the little respect the community has for our leaders will continue. Victoria is run by an elite who seek power to enrich themselves and their families, just as happens in the tin pot dictatorships that we like to believe are inferior to us. Peter Robertson, Coburg

THE FORUM Guy: pot, kettle, black So Matthew Guy wants an upper house enquiry into Labor's misuse of election funds, immediately after a comprehensive report from the Ombudsman has been handed down. Was there ever a hint of an inquiry into his sordid land rezoning deal on Phillip Island (when he was planning minister), or into how much public money was wasted to placate the irate land owner who was denied her expected huge profits? Never mind Mr Guy's other "courageous" planning decisions, or his choice of lunch companions. Russell Brown, Great Western A crazy smart move?

The decision by the Labor Party to re-empower the Victorian Ombudsman after previous Liberal governments nobbled the office seems to have worked out quite well for the Liberals. Phillip Edwards, Churchill Let the students speak What a can of worms Australian National University law student Odette Shenfield has inadvertently exposed  "Student wiped from uni (marketing) booklet" (The Age, 21/3). How many more outstanding young students, believing that universities encourage critical thinking and speaking out on issues, will find themselves hobbled? Universities have had their budgets slashed; they depend increasingly on marketing departments. Government and the private sector have to be massaged for ongoing grants. Odette Shenfield  whose mother's family arrived in Australia as Jewish refugees, who has been awakened to Australia's inhumane refugee policies and wants to speak out  I hear you and I applaud you.

Pamela Jonas, Kew The high cost of giving I wanted to make a donation to the charity outside my local supermarket yesterday. I have a limited income but could afford $5. However, this was not accepted. I was told the minimum donation was $10. Five dollars is a lot  enough for milk and bread. Have we now entered a space where those who live in difficult circumstances, and who want to contribute to the wellbeing of others, are further excluded and marginalised? Despair. Marg Welsh, Abbotsford High cost of 'four-day' race

Getting around Albert Park Lake to and from work these last two months has varied between occasionally smoothish and frequently annoying. But the 10kilometre journey was infuriating yesterday morning, involving closed roads, chaotic traffic and a one-hour journey which will be repeated all next week, according to signage. To summarise: it takes three months to assemble and disassemble the infrastructure to run the four-day Grand Prix, which loses taxpayers' money and, from what I can see, is a significant windfall predominantly for big businesses. Yes, many people enjoy it but the sums do not add up. Or am I missing something? Rosie Elsass, Brighton Our precious marine life It is painful to consider a reduction in Australia's ocean sanctuaries. Our national network of sanctuaries has been the result of decades of science, work by all sides of politics, and overwhelming community support.

I was one of 80,000 Australians who made a submission to the Turnbull government's review last year, rejecting its proposed cuts and asking for more protection, not less. More than 16,000 recreational fishers also backed this submission. Our lawmakers are elected to guard our planet and the non-renewable marine life in its oceans. Are they listening? Julanne Sweeney, Eden Hills, SA Fundamental, deadly flaw The fatal accident in Arizona involving an Uber self-driving car (The Age, 21/3) highlights a well documented shortcoming. Relying on a human who is not actively involved in the task to monitor the operation of the system is flawed and will cost lives. Under these conditions, a human with no active task to perform will lose concentration and may not respond to a critical situation until it is too late to do anything useful. This is a small price to pay for progress, say the technical enthusiasts. However, this is not acceptable. These cars should not be allowed on our roads until this problem is solved.

Peter Shaw, Dromana Insist on 'no damage' As a travel consultant in the 1990s, I had more complaints about hire car companies than any other travel supplier. After reading your article about wrongful repair charges (Money, 21/3), I realise that my distrust is still justified. Now every car hired is photographed before and after. Once, when a staff member at Florence Airport refused to check our returned car, stating she was "too busy", I (a tourist at the time) raised merry hell until she signed our documents "no damage", just to get rid of me. I think onlookers were quite bemused, but perhaps they learnt from my outburst so as not to be taken for a ride themselves. Kathy Lang, Vermont South

No to monster trucks Peter Walsh says "A-double trucks should be limited to the inside lane of freeways (Letters, 21/3). I would add to this, "where they can wipe out vehicles attempting to merge". Alan Cooper, Ashburton Listen, don't humiliate Congratulations to the research team for shining an illuminating light on practices in the mental health sector  "Mentally ill 'not heard' on treatment" (The Age, 19/3). As detailed in the case study of John Myers, too often individuals are unnecessarily humiliated by the treatment they receive. A primary reason is that mental health professionals inadvertently continue to do things that treat their own anxieties about an individual's condition.

Rather, the focus of professionals should be on practices that empower people to achieve recovery. If, and when, this becomes the primary focus of service providers, we will create opportunities for a more hopeful range of outcomes for service users. Rick Mann, St Kilda Life, the greatest gift Michael Nolan (Letters, 19/3 ) is right to say relatives can and do oppose donation of organs at the time of a loved one's death. However, I believe that more and more people are realising what a wonderful legacy someone's very last act leaves. Only a very small percentage of people who die are actually able to donate their organs for medical and technical reasons, so to be one of the very few is quite exceptional. Then comes the lasting legacy. A donor does not just give a life, but a much improved and longer life to many recipients. To be a relative of an organ donor is to know that other families have benefited enormously by this thoughtful, generous act. That is special and something to be very proud of.

Marianne Dalton, Balnarring Easy money for Amazon Amazon could easily absorb the proposed $5 "security screening" fee (The Age, 22/3), if my experience is anything to go by. I purchased a $US60 item from Amazon which, on delivery, included an invoice for $US10 from the Indian supplier. John Lewis, Port Melbourne What would Lambie do?

So new Tasmanian senator Steve Martin will support the federal government's plan to cut the corporate tax rate from 30 to 25 per cent (The Age, 22/3). He is a senator only because Jacqui Lambie was found to be ineligible. I doubt she would have supported this bill. Michael Higgins, Erica Trickle up, not down Instead of cutting the company tax rate by 5per cent, why not cut personal tax? This would result in more disposable income for workers, which would increase demand, lead to more spending on goods and services, and stimulate the economy. Company profits would rise and shareholders would benefit. I call this the "trickle up" effect. Jon O'Neill, Waurn Ponds

But will we be happier? The happiest countries in the world are Finland, Norway and Denmark (The Age, 16/3), all of which have high tax rates but free health care and education. Will reducing our personal tax rates improve our quality of life and make us happier? Gretel Lamont, Aireys Inlet The evidence is clear Malcolm Turnbull's statement "you can't attribute any particular event whether flood or fire or drought...to climate change" (The Age, 21/3) is a cop out.

The evidence for climate change  endorsed in December 2017 by 15,364 scientists, including Nobel Prize winners  shows we are on a trajectory of rising carbon dioxide emissions, increasing global temperatures, human population expansion, increased deforestation, loss of terrestrial and freshwater resources, and extinction of species. This data was published under the heading "World Scientists' Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice". The first notice was published in 1992. Since then, little has changed. What more evidence does Mr Turnbull need to act on climate change? Leigh Ackland, Deepdene Pleasure from the birds With the dry weather we are experiencing, it is important to provide water for our birds. We have been rewarded with the sight of rainbow lorikeets, musk lorikeets, crested pigeons, butcher birds, magpies and even a currawong queuing up to use our bird bath. Please keep your bird bath topped up with fresh water and share the pleasure of keeping these beautiful birds in your area. Jo Prendergast, Sandringham

Tragic extinctions The world's last male northern white rhinoceros, Sudan, has died after "age-related complications" (World, 21/3). Another extinction (that we know of) slips past us into history. When will we realise that the human is the most feral animal on earth? Peter Monk, Woodend Red, ABC and podcasts On the positive side, during my morning commute I have been forced to discover the wonderful world of podcasts.

David Olive, Kensington AND ANOTHER THING Victoria Labor dips into the public purse to win the 2014 election, with no consequence. We too live in a guided democracy.

Linda Zibell, Mount Helen We're caught between the Lobster Cave and Dan's little election helpers. Oh, for an IBAC with teeth. John Gerrard, Haddon Daniel (whatever it takes) Andrews. Paul Custance, Highett

I'll take notice of Guy's comments about taxpayers' money when he explains how much he spent, as planning minister, to rezone land on Phillip Island. Bob Graham, Yarragon The government should be sacked and a caretaker government installed until the mess can be sorted out. Bill Dobell, Sebastopol We're in a dysfunctional state. A throw of the dice at the next election seems a good idea.

Alex Njoo, St Kilda Congratulations to Andrews and Labor for achieving the impossible - making Guy look electable. Graeme Campbell, Hawthorn Elect Labor. Elect the Coalition. There's only noise. Chris Poustie, Blackburn

If I cheat the Tax Office, can I get away without a penalty and let taxpayers pay any legal costs? Martin Siegrist, Boronia National The Greens have realised they can be as shabby and political as the rest of them. Labor says: "You ain't seen nothing". Peter Bear, Mitcham

Bhathal has lost seven elections. Perhaps the Greens should accept she is unacceptable to voters. Rod Smyrk, Sunbury Sally McManus for prime minister. Veronica Dingle, Brighton My concern is that casual workers will be sacked before six months is up  and then rehired as casuals.Three-and-a-half years after Bradley Dillon was ambushed and executed in an inner-west car park, his family filed into a Sydney courtroom on Thursday and stared down his killer.

Riot police were on standby in the court to separate Mr Dillon's family from that of his killer, Diego Carbone, as the 26-year-old was sentenced to at least 21 years in jail for the premeditated murder.

Carbone was found guilty by a NSW Supreme Court jury in October over the August 2014 murder, the verdict sparking a verbal confrontation between the two men's families outside the court.

Mr Dillon's family gasped, hugged each other, clapped and nodded as Carbone's sentence was read out.A cyclone that's formed off the Northern Territory coast could cross the Queensland coast as a severe category three storm, forecasters say.

Queensland's Disaster Management Committee will meet in Brisbane on Friday, with Nora expected to quickly gather strength as it tracks towards the coast in the Gulf of Carpentaria.

A cyclone formed off Queensland's north-west coast on Friday. Credit:EarthWindMap

Cyclone Nora is currently a category one system, and is about 255 kilometres north of Nhulunbuy, on the Gove Peninsula in the Northern Territory, and 640 kilometres west north-west of Weipa, near the tip of Queensland.

Nora is expected to intensify into a category two cyclone by Friday afternoon, and a severe category three by Saturday afternoon.EDITOR'S NOTE: The High Court overturned Cardinal George Pell's conviction for historic child sex offences in a judgment handed down April 7, 2020. In a unanimous decision all seven High Court judges found Victoria's Court of Appeal should not have upheld Pell's conviction It found the evidence could not support a guilty verdict.

It would have been impossible for then-archbishop George Pell to reveal his genitals after officiating at a Sunday Mass without somebody helping him to remove his clerical robes, a Catholic pastoral associate has told a Melbourne court.

Rodney Dearing, who was a choir member at St Patricks Cathedral in Melbourne during the late 1990s, told the Melbourne Magistrates Court on Thursday that Cardinal Pell would have required assistance to remove his robe after every Mass.Teachers who pose a risk to children's safety will be barred from working in Victorian schools under a state government overhaul of the teaching watchdog.

The changes follow revelations in The Age that the teaching regulator allowed a teacher who told incest stories and paid students for massages to continue working in schools.

In another controversial case, a teacher who pleaded guilty to a sex crime was given the green light to continue teaching.

A scathing independent review of the Victorian Institute of Teaching by former Department of Justice secretary Penny Armytage and KPMG said the regulator needed to be more focused on the wellbeing of children.

There is no object or function which mentions child safety and wellbeing, or that requires the VIT to take into account community expectations, it read.The state review said Sonoma County officials decided long before the fires not to trust the WEA system, even as they agreed to pay $14,500 for a private vendor to add WEA capability to the county's automated phone dialing system.

Without explicitly naming Helgren, the state report and Ghilarducci blamed Sonoma County emergency management for failing to keep up with technical improvements to the cellphone alert system and accused it of relying on private vendors for information on the alert system's capabilities.

"This was a misconception, I guess I would say, on the part of the policymakers and the leaders there, that it wasn't worth, from their opinion at the time, of investing in the effort to incorporate [the national alerts] into their system," Ghilarducci said.

However, he and other state officials were unable to cite the specific advancements to those systems. Requirements for increased message length and precise targeting of who gets those messages are not mandated to take place before 2019. Even then, coverage will be incomplete. Lobbyists for the cellphone carriers succeeded in persuading the Federal Communications Commission to relax the proposed rule to cover "100% of the target area" rather than 100% of the cell devices in that area, and to delay the rollout of Spanish-language alerts.UPDATE: Traffic on the Mitchell Freeway is beginning to move again, with one driver reporting he had been stuck in traffic for more than two hours so far.

Simon Etheridge, of 6PR, said he had seen a driver punch the roof of his car in frustration, and others using the emergency lanes in an effort to get off the freeway.

Southbound traffic is at a standstill near Ocean Reef Road on the Mitchell Freeway. Credit:Main Roads

The huge standstill comes after a bizarre car crash on the Mitchell Freeway in the middle of peak hour on Thursday morning.

The incident started just after 5.30am on the corner of Marmion Avenue and Karrinyup Road, when police attempted to pull over a black Mazda sedan near Karrinyup Shopping Centre.The Minister for Home Affairs, Peter Dutton, has gratuitously interfered in the internal affairs of South Africa. His comments on what he termed 'the horrific circumstances' relating to white South African farmers, at the urging of white right-wing extremists, has done harm to finely balanced race relations in South Africa and to the relationship between the two countries.

Had he sought a briefing from the Department of Foreign Affairs he would have discovered that the situation relating to the 'persecution' of white farmer's bears no resemblance to his ill-informed remarks. The Australian High Commission in Pretoria keeps DFAT well informed.

Protesters lay 'cross' symbols on the ground to protest against farmer murders in the country. Credit:Nadya Pretorius

I feel qualified to comment. As a young diplomat posted to South Africa at the height of Apartheid, 1976-79, I chose to assist those opposing the regime. There seemed little point in helping it to survive. Apartheid was not something to be observed, like the fundamental evil of Fascism, it had to be destroyed.

For me there was no other option. I sheltered people running from the police in my home, I delivered messages for people who were banned and could not use phones for fear of interception and police brutality and I took people to safety in neighbouring countries under the protection of my diplomatic immunity.The ACT Legislative Assembly will call on the federal government to review Australia's refugee resettlement sponsorship program, ahead of the Palm Sunday rally for refugees this weekend.

A packed public gallery applauded when Labor and the Liberals backed Greens leader Shane Rattenbury's motion, calling on the Assembly to advocate for a more affordable and "humane" visa fee structure for refugees being resettled in Australia.

People gather in Garema Place in Civic for the Palm Sunday refugee rally in 2015. Credit:Melissa Adams

Under the Commonwealth's Community Support Program, individuals, businesses and communities can sponsor potential applicants for humanitarian visas.

However there are only 1000 places and strict criteria for applying.A letter from big business to the Senate crossbench committing to invest more money if company tax cuts are reduced has been welcomed by Pauline Hanson but failed to win over independent Derryn Hinch.

But the key crossbench senator says he is still listening.

"I promised when I came here I would listen. I'll listen to you, I'll listen to the government, I'll listen to [Labor senator] Doug Cameron, who can do it in very colourful language at times," Senator Hinch told reporters in Canberra on Thursday morning.

The government needs support from nine of 11 Senate crossbenchers to extend its plan to cut company tax from 30 per cent to 25 per cent to all businesses.He said they needed help from a "civilised country" like Australia, prompting outrage from the South African government, which demanded he retract and summoned Australia's high commissioner for urgent talks.

Mr Dutton stoked controversy by arguing for "special attention" in Australia's refugee program for white South African farmers, reportedly being persecuted and murdered at the rate of one a week.

"They don't realise how completely dead they are to me": Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton on his media critics. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton has lashed out at his critics in the media, declaring the ABC and The Guardian are "dead to me" over their reporting of his views on South African refugees.

There was apparent division within the Turnbull government too, as Foreign Minister Julie Bishop talked down the idea of a special program for white South African farmers.

But Mr Dutton on Thursday said there was no conflict between himself and Ms Bishop, arguing it was actually confected outrage by "crazy lefties" at media outlets who were peddling "fake news".

"The ABC and others report these things how they want to report them and how they want to interpret them," he told 2GB radio.

"There's lots of outrage. Some of the crazy lefties at the ABC and on The Guardian, Huffington Post, express concern and draw mean cartoons about me and all the rest of it."

"They don't realise how completely dead they are to me. So we just get on with making the decisions that we need to."State MPs would be forced to appear before a fresh investigation into Labors rorting of almost $400,000 in taxpayer funds, under an Opposition plan to inflict maximum political pain on the government.

The Coalition will move next week to establish an upper house parliamentary inquiry with the power to subpoena some MPs, other individuals and documents.

Opposition Leader Matthew Guy said the Ombudsman had been stonewalled by many government MPs in her investigation into Labors rorting, so an upper house select committee inquiry was needed.

Matthew Guy in parliament in 2018. Credit:Justin McManus

They can hide from the Ombudsman but they cant run from the Parliament, Mr Guy said.Wylie, a Canadian citizen, moved to London in 2010 and started to work in 2013 for SCL Group, which he said conducted "information operations" around the world and also worked in campaigns, especially in African nations. As research director, Wylie helped that company give birth to Cambridge Analytica as "an American brand" that would focus on US politics with at least $US10 million from billionaire hedge fund manager Robert Mercer. The Cambridge Analytica office was in the posh Mayfair neighbourhood of London, and the dozens of young workers - many of them contractors, a number of whom were from Eastern Europe - buzzed about with Apple laptops. At the helm, said Wylie, was Mercer's daughter Rebekah, who was president, and conservative strategist Steve Bannon, who was vice president. Running day-to-day operations was a smooth-talking upper-crust Briton, Alexander Nix. Running the show: Steve Bannon and Alexander Nix. Credit:AP, Bloomberg Nix did not respond to requests for comment on Wednesday. Cambridge Analytica suspended Nix on Tuesday after a British television sting showed him on secret recordings talking about employing unethical tactics to win elections, including bribery and using sex workers for "honey pots." Wylie said he helped set up the television station's sting.

Wylie said that it was under Nix's direction - but with the knowledge of Bannon and Rebekah Mercer - that Cambridge Analytica began an ambitious data-gathering program that included tapping into the Facebook profiles of 50 million users through the use of a personality-testing app. The company did that with the help of a Russian American psychologist at Cambridge University, Aleksandr Kogan, who also made regular visits back to Russia, according to Wylie. Wylie said he and others at Cambridge Analytica were initially skeptical of the power of this tactic for gathering data. But when the company approved $US1000 for Kogan to experiment with his app, he produced data on 1000 people who downloaded it and roughly 160,000 of their friends - all in a matter of hours. Cambridge Analytica next approved $US10,000 for a second round of testing and was rewarded with nearly a million records, including names, home towns, dates of birth, religious affiliations, work and educational histories, and preferences, as expressed using the popular Facebook "like" button on many social media updates, news stories and other online posts. They soon married that data with voter lists and commercial data broker information and discovered they had a remarkably precise portrait of a large swath of the American electorate. Kogan's app, called "thisisyourdigitallife" and portrayed as being for research purposes, gathered data on the 270,000 people who downloaded it and tens of millions of their Facebook friends. It was this data and others that Wylie later worried might have ended up in Russian hands.

"I'm not saying that we put it on a drive and posted it to Vladimir Putin on Number 1 Red Square," Wylie said, referring to the Russian president's official residence. But he said that he and others affiliated with Cambridge Analytica briefed Lukoil, a Russian oil company, on its research into American voters. He said Kogan also made regular visits to Russia but acknowledged that he did not know what Kogan did there. Kogan has not replied to The Post's requests for comment. Kogan called the suggestions that he was a spy "just silly" in an email, seen by CNN, that he wrote to colleagues at Cambridge University. "If I am Russian spy, I am the world's dumbest spy." For Wylie, a data scientist with an avid interest in politics and culture, the collection of Facebook and other data did not initially trouble him. The social media platform made such data grabs easy for app developers - though it began severely restricting them in 2015 - and Wylie saw it as a powerful way to study an entire nation on a scale at once broad and precise. Combined with other data, Cambridge Analytica hoped to profile the entire American electorate - something it already had done in other countries - and determine what pitches would work best for each individual voter.

The project also appeared to excite its benefactors. One former Cambridge Analytica employee, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal corporate matters, described hearing Rebekah Mercer express over the phone excitement at the results of 2014 congressional midterms, when Republicans made significant gains to which Cambrige Analytica said it had contributed. But Wylie and others clashed with Nix, whom he called a "bully." Wylie also grew weary of the increasingly far-right tenor of the politics the researchers were helping to propel. They discovered and refined potent themes about keeping out immigrants, "draining the swamp" and restoring an earlier era of national greatness - as understood mainly to mean for white American men. When Wylie told Nix at a London coffee shop in 2014 that he was going to leave at the end of the year, he heard a boast that at the time sounded ridiculous but, in retrospect, haunted him. "Just you wait," Nix told Wylie, according to his recollection. "You're going to leave, but we're going to be in the White House." 'What did you do?'

But it was not clear to Wylie at that point who might lead such an eventual White House bid. In fact, Cambridge Analytica worked with Republican Senator Ted Cruz, during the presidential primary before signing on with the Trump campaign. Months after he and several other Cambridge Analytica employees quit the firm, they got a mysterious message from somebody purporting to represent the Trump Organisation. Wylie and others, unfamiliar with Trump's brewing political ambitions, thought they might find themselves somehow involved in Trump's Apprentice reality television show. Wylie said he ended up speaking with Corey Lewandowski, Trump's first campaign manager, in conference calls in which Lewandowski reportedly described a forthcoming Trump run for president. In this 2015 photo, Donald Trump walks with his then-campaign manager Corey Lewandowski after speaking at a news conference in Iowa. Credit:AP Lewandowski later met in person with several of Wylie's former Cambridge Analytica colleagues at Trump Tower in spring 2015, Wylie said in an account backed by one of those people who did attend. But the plan to work for the campaign doing voter analysis fizzled, in large part because the mostly liberal former Cambridge Analytica employees didn't want to wade back into conservative politics.

Lewandowski said the campaign had been pitched by Cambridge Analytica but never hired them and had no recollection of meeting with any former employees. "I've never heard of those guys," Lewandowski said of Wylie and the other former employees. "It didn't happen." But the brief flirtation did have a concrete consequence. SCL Group threatened legal action against Wylie for supposedly violating a "non-compete" clause he signed before quitting. Wylie was confused - he had no idea that the company considered Trump a client or potential client - and began to suspect that he had been set up. To resolve the legal dispute, he signed a nondisclosure agreement that would later complicate his efforts to speak out about the work he had done for Cambridge Analytica. You're going to leave, but we're going to be in the White House. Alexander Nix to Christopher Wylie Wylie's sense of uneasiness about that work began building when he heard Trump, in 2016, start using themes that Cambridge Analytica had developed in 2014 about building walls and draining the swamp. More than most, Wylie knew the science behind why they might be effective. His discomfort grew when Bannon formally joined the Trump campaign in August 2016. Election results on November 8, 2016, filled Wylie with a profound sense of dread. A friend who worked on the campaign of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and was familiar with Wylie's previous work sent him a message saying, "What did you do?"

"Manipulating an election in a small developing country doesn't have the same sort of ripple effect of electing Donald Trump into the White House," Wylie said. "It hit home at the inauguration." It is unclear how much Cambridge Analytica contributed to Trump's win. Facebook strikes back Soon after Trump's inauguration, Wylie began talking with Observer of London reporter Carole Cadwalladr, who had been working on stories about Cambridge Analytica. He also retained an attorney, Tamsin Allen, and began working directly with Britain's Information Commissioner's Office, which started an investigation into Cambridge Analytica. Zuckerberg has come under increasing pressure following the Cambridge Analytica revelations. Credit:AP Earlier this month, Wylie received a sharply worded letter from Facebook, which demanded access to his smartphone and computer. He refused, saying that he already had shared information with the British authorities and saw no reason to do so with a private company - especially one whose own activities might be called into question.

Wylie said he complied with that request, though he does not know if Kogan or Cambridge Analytica did. (Cambridge Analytica has issued several statements in recent days denying any wrongdoing.) Silicon Valley-based Facebook posted a blog Friday evening - early Saturday morning in London - announcing the suspension of Kogan, Wylie and the parent company of Cambridge Analytica. When he was awakened by a call around 3 am from a reporter, Wylie was furious at Facebook for acting unilaterally and accusing him of misdeeds when he had come forward to authorities.Days later, he still is. 'Facebook is not the government' Wylie's career as Facebook critic quickly moved to a new level. Lawmakers in the United States and Europe began demanding that Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg personally explain how the data of 50 million users reached a mysterious company with ties to Bannon, the Mercers and Trump. State attorneys general began investigating. So did the Federal Trade Commission over concerns that Facebook had violated a 2011 consent decree over privacy issues.

When told that Wylie thought he had been mistreated by Facebook, the social media company responded that Cambridge Analytica and Kogan had agreed to an audit of their servers and systems. "Mr. Wylie thus far has declined." Facebook on Wednesday said it would conduct audits of thousands of apps in response to the "breach of trust" caused by Cambridge Analytica. "Facebook is not the government. Facebook is not the state. I'm working with the legal authority," Wylie said, referring to the Information Commissioner's Office. "I'm not going to be bullied by Facebook." Loading As for the broader issues - the privacy intrusions of the data collection, the manipulation of voters, the possible role in electing Trump, the possibility that Cambridge Analytica's work might have reached Russians - Wylie feels remorse. Wylie says he wants to expose the machinations of data gathering for political purposes as fully as he's able. He dreams of resuming his work as a data scientist some day. For now, he is something like a full-time whistleblower.Isaac Emmanuel Roberts has most likely avoided the death penalty over drug charges in Bali. Credit:Amilia Rosa

Bali: An Australian accountant arrested in Bali on drug charges is set to avoid the death penalty, after prosecutors asked the court to find Isaac Emmanuel Roberts guilty of a lesser charge.

Prosecutor Suhadi told the Denpasar District Court that Mr Roberts should be charged with illegal use of a category 1 narcotic for personal consumption.

The prosecutor requested the defendant be sentenced to one year and three months in prison, less the three and a half months he has served, and fined Rp. 20,000,000 ($A1875). He would serve an extra six months if he cannot pay the fine.

At one stage it had appeared that Mr Roberts could be charged with the far more serious offence of importing drugs. Under article 113 of Indonesia's strict drug laws the maximum punishment for importing more than five grams of illegal narcotics into the country is the death penalty.Paris: Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy has been placed under formal investigation over allegations his winning 2007 election campaign received millions of euros from the regime of former Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi, a judicial source said.

Nicolas Sarkozy, centre, leaves the police station where he was held, in Nanterre, outside Paris, on Wednesday. Credit:AP

Sarkozy is facing potential charges including illegal campaign funding and receiving the proceeds of the embezzlement of Libyan public funds, the source said late on Wednesday.

Loading

The conservative former president, 63, who has repeatedly and vehemently denied the allegations, was released under judicial supervision after two days of questioning.London: British police said a suspicious package had been found near the London headquarters of Cambridge Analytica on Thursday, prompting police to close nearby roads and evacuate the building.

"The building has been evacuated as a precaution," police said. "No injuries have been reported."

The London-based political consultancy has been at the centre of a storm this week after a whistleblower said the company had paid an academic to harvest the data of 50 million Facebook users to build profiles of American voters before the 2016 US election.

ReutersJohn Anthony Family of Wines has acquired Church Vineyard, which it had been leasing in the Carneros wine region. Financial terms were not released.

The 10-acre parcel features four acres that are planted with sauvignon blanc vines. It also has a historic church built in 1886 in Pennsylvania and later reconstructed in 2003 by original owners Jerri McNair and Bob Frane.

"Church Vineyard is a unique property, both for the historic beauty of the church surrounded by vines, but also the terroir and micro-climate in Carneros, which produces exquisite, high-quality Sauvignon Blanc," said John Anthony Truchard, founder and CEO of John Anthony Family of Wines, in a statement. "The wine we make from this vineyard has consistently received some of the top scores for sauvignon blancs since its first vintage of 2005."

Church Vineyard is the first vineyard owned by the winery.

Geyser Peak appoints new winemaker

Geyser Peak winery of Healdsburg has appointed Randy Meyer as its new winemaker.Washington: Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster, the battle-tested Army officer tapped as President Donald Trump's national security adviser last year to stabilise a turbulent foreign policy operation, will resign and be replaced by John Bolton, a hard-line former US ambassador to the United Nations, White House officials said Thursday.

McMaster will retire from the military, the officials said. He has been discussing his departure with Trump for several weeks, they said, but decided to speed up his departure, in part because questions about his status were casting a shadow over his conversations with foreign officials.

The US officials also said that Trump wanted to fill out his national security team before his meeting with North Korea's leader, Kim Jong Un. He replaced Secretary of State Rex Tillerson with CIA director Mike Pompeo last week.

Officials emphasised that McMaster's departure was a mutual decision and amicable, with none of the recrimination that marked Tillerson's exit. They said it was not related to a leak on Tuesday of briefing materials for Trump's phone call with President Vladimir Putin of Russia.AUTO LAB Talk Radio - LIVE from NYC Saturday Morning 7-9 AM March 24, 2018







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This Weeks Show: Broadcast Date: March 24, 2018

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Auto Lab is a 28 year old interactive automotive-focused New York area radio call-in show hosted by Professor Harold Wolchok. Each week a cadre of experienced hands-on automotive experts are in-studio with advice for the New York area's 12 million people, providing listeners with honest, practical and street-smart car repair and buying advice.

Auto Lab is also about the automotive industry, its history, and its culture, presenting the ideas and advice of leading college faculty, authors, and automotive practitioners in a relaxed, conversational interactive format.

Listeners can hear the past 18 years of archived Auto Lab shows as simulcast on www.theautochannel.com.

Auto Lab Page includes Audio-on-Demand Archives, Auto Programs at Community College Database, Guests Pictures

This Weeks Show: March 24, 2018

IN STUDIO: Auto Lab's Real World Experts Answer Your Questions; Discuss: Repairs, Second Opinions, Regular Maintenance, How To's, Safety, Used and New Car Buying, Ombudsmen Suggestions

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Auto Lab Correspondents Remote Interviews: Featuring Auto Safety News, New Car Reviews, Technology and Latest Auto World Information That Will Effect You!

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LAGONDA - IT'S ALL IN THE VISION

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TOYOTA SIENNA

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EXTREME MILLENNIAL WANDERLUST IN 2018 AAA.DOCXAlyssa Milano. Photo: JB Lacroix/WireImage

Actress Alyssa Milano highlighted female farmworkers protest against Wendys while slamming the company for their response in a Facebook post on Wednesday.

Milano first called attention to the women who fasted for five days to demand that Wendys join the Coalition of Immokalee Workers Fair Food Program, which according to the programs site, is a unique partnership among farmers, farmworkers, and retail food companies that ensures humane wages and working conditions for the workers who pick fruits and vegetables on participating farms. In particular, according to a HuffPost article on the matter, Wendys has been buying tomatoes from Mexican growers in the winter  where rampant sexual abuse and forced labor have been recorded.

In the article, Wendys spokesperson Heidi Schauer is quoted as saying, Theres no new news here, aside from the CIW trying to exploit the positive momentum that has been generated by and for women in the #MeToo and Times Up movement to advance their interests.

Wendys, this is very simple: These women are the #MeToo movement, which is a grassroots movement of women from all corners of society exposing the painfully common experience of sexual harassment, misconduct and assault, Milano wrote in response. To suggest that farmworker women..are somehow unwelcome intruders in the fight for dignity and safety for women is downright absurd and unbelievably offensive.

Read her full post, below:A student in Mexico. Photo: HECTOR GUERRERO / Stringer/2012 AFP

Just days before student survivors of the shooting in Parkland, Florida, will lead a worldwide march for gun control, the school district has decided that they must wear clear backpacks to class.

Robert Runcie, superintendent of Broward County Public Schools, made the announcement last night. The rule will be enacted after spring break. If a student doesnt have a clear backpack, one will be provided to them.

The New York Times pointed out that since the shooting last month, two students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School have been charged with carrying knives on campus and the shooters brother was arrested for trespassing. Students will also be given an ID badge that they must have on them at all times, and the school district is exploring the idea of putting metal detectors at entrances.

Many students criticized the move on social media for being ineffective compared to gun-control laws.

s/o to America for making my school seem like jail now because legislators dont have common sense gun reform on their agendas https://t.co/MJZFeaeiSa  Kyra Parrow (@longlivekcx) March 21, 2018

Great. Because clear backpacks are gonna fix everything. I appreciate the attempt, but Id rather have common since gun laws than a clear backpack.



#NeverAgain #EnoughIsEnough https://t.co/1HRudeSOib  Lauren Hogg (@lauren_hoggs) March 21, 2018

Enforcing students to wear clear backpacks is simply like putting a band-aid on a broken bone  natasha  (@sighnatasha) March 22, 2018

The students are focused on changing the nations gun laws, and have planned the March for Our Lives this weekend. There are 270 events worldwide that will accompany the main march in D.C. Their goal is to spur concrete legislative action for stricter gun-control laws to prevent school shootings from happening.President Donald Trump gives a thumbs up as he departs Los Angeles on March 14, 2018. (Reuters/Kevin Lamarque)

5 Victories for Trump in Gaining Support for $1.3 Trillion Budget Bill

President Donald Trump secured five major victories in the $1.3 trillion budget bill that lawmakers finalized on Wednesday night, including a massive boost in military spending and initial funding for a border wall with Mexico.

The president indicated his support for the budget in a Thursday tweet, celebrating the victories and lamenting wasting money on giveaways to the Democrats.

Got $1.6 Billion to start Wall on Southern Border, rest will be forthcoming. Most importantly, got $700 Billion to rebuild our Military, $716 Billion next yearmost ever. Had to waste money on Dem giveaways in order to take care of military pay increase and new equipment.  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 22, 2018

Congress has until midnight on Friday to pass the bill to avoid a government shutdown. The bill is over 2,000 pages long. Below are five major wins for Trump within the hefty legislation.

1. Initial Funds for a Border Wall

The budget bill includes $1.6 billion in funding for a wall on the southern border. The amount is far short of the $33 billion required for the construction of the entire wall but is still a major victory because Democrats have until now unanimously opposed any funds for the barrier.

The $1.6 billion will be used to fund 90 miles of wall construction and related technology.

2. Major Boost in Military Spending

Throughout his presidential campaign and since attaining office, Trump has emphasized the need to properly fund the military. The new budget includes $700 billion in military spending and a further $716 billion for the next fiscal year.

Military spending declined overall during the Obama presidency.

3. Triple the Funds to Address Opioid Epidemic

Trump has made fighting the opioid epidemic one of his top priorities. The new budget provides $4.6 billion for the effort, a $3 billion increase.

Each day, more than 115 Americans die from opioid overdoses, according to the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

Trump has outlined a three-pillar plan for combating the epidemic, which includes programs for reducing demand and over-prescription, cutting off the supply of illegal drugs, and helping those struggling with addiction.

4. Funding for Infrastructure

The budget includes funding for Trumps wide-ranging infrastructure plan. The vast majority of American people and businesses support investing in the nations infrastructure. Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle agree on the measure.

5. Funds for Ensuring Election Integrity and Security

Trump has long highlighted that Americas elections are vulnerable to malicious interference and voter fraud.

The president created a commission to investigate the issue early in his term but eventually disbanded it due to resistance from mostly Democrat state election authorities in providing information.

The new budget includes $380 million in grants for election integrity and security, a major win for Trump and advocates of fair elections.

There have been at least 1,107 proven instances of voter fraud which led to 961 criminal convictions, according to a database maintained by The Heritage Foundation.

From NTD.tv

Recommended Video: President Donald Trumps Weekly AddressMarch 10, 2018Wild caribou roam the tundra in Nunavut in this file photo. (The Canadian Press/Nathan Denette)

Alberta Suspends Caribou Protection Plan, Seeks Assistance From Ottawa

EDMONTONAlberta is suspending portions of its draft plan to protect threatened woodland caribou, saying more research needs to be done and that Ottawa needs to help out.

Environment Minister Shannon Phillips told the house March 19 the province is acting on concerns about the economic impacts of the protection plan.

The federal Species at Risk Act is an extremely inflexible instrument that has already had negative economic consequences [in Alberta], said Phillips. We are going to do our best to make sure that we protect jobs on this.

She said she has sent that message in a letter to her federal counterpart, Catherine McKenna.

Phillips is urging the federal government to help Alberta come up with a workable solution rather than have Ottawa impose an environmental protection order.

A statement issued by McKennas office late March 19 said Ottawa is determined to support the protection and recovery of caribou.

Our government is committed to protecting and conserving species at risk by putting in place conservation measures based on science, collaboration, and robust recovery strategies, the email stated. Boreal caribou is an iconic species and a key indicator of a healthy boreal forest.

The statement added that Ottawa will continue to work with Alberta and others to ensure the conservation of the iconic species.

Albertas draft plan is in response to an October federal deadline under the Species at Risk Act and is designed to help threatened woodland caribou recover in 15 different ranges.

The province released its draft plan on Dec. 19 and then held a series of town hall meetings.

The public meetings were attended by thousands of Albertans who are concerned about the impact caribou range plans will have on their communities and on the industries that support those communities, stated Phillipss letter, which was co-signed by Energy Minister Marg McCuaig-Boyd.

The federal government has the option of imposing an environmental protection order if a province doesnt come up with a plan to protect the caribou. The order would halt any development, such as oil drilling, that could harm the animals.

The province plans to spend more than $85 million in the next five years to restore caribou habitat by eliminating seismic lines, building birthing pens, and bringing in other measures.

It has already invested $9.2 million and the estimated cost over the next 40 years is $1 billion.

Phillips said the feds need to step up on planning and consultation, and on the money side as well.

Caribou recovery cannot occur without an infusion of federal funds to restore habitat necessary to ensure population growth, she wrote.

While we need more time and partnership from the federal government on this matter, we also need your support in not prematurely implementing federal protection orders that will not have effective outcomes for Canadians and Albertans.

From The Canadian PressHussein Khavari , convicted of raping and killing a young woman in October 2016, sits in a court room prior to the expected proclamation of sentence at the regional court in Freiburg, southern Germany, on March 22, 2018.(THOMAS KIENZLE/AFP/Getty Images)

Asylum Seeker Who Lied He Was a Child Refugee Before Raping and Murdering Officials Daughter Is Given Sentence

A refugee who sought asylum in Germany was given a sentence on Thursday, March 22, after being convicted of raping and murdering a 19-year-old girl.

Hussein Khavari claimed he was 17 when he committed the crime in 2016 but testing in his teeth showed he was at least 22 years of age.

Khavari broke down and asked for forgiveness during the trial, reported The Daily Mail. Judge Kathrin Schenk told him that he will serve life in prison, condemning his lack of empathy.

The courtroom broke out in applause when the sentence was given.

However, under German law life in prison means only 15 years behind bars with no chance of parole. There is a possibility of security detentionafterward if officials believe the convict still poses a threat to society.

Germany opened its borders to the flood of refugees from Afghanistan, Syria, and other countries in recent years but has been facing an increasing backlash from some of its citizens due to crimes such as the ones Khavari committed.

Khavari told the court that he smoked hashish and drank copiously the night he encountered 19-year-old Maria Ladenburger, the daughter of a European Union official, in Freiberg, reported AFP.

He said he was kicked out of a bar before coming across the girl as she fell from her bicycle.

The refugee said he choked her with a scarf, although he denied raping her despite evidence that led to his conviction of that crime.

When I saw how pretty she was, I wanted to have sex with her, he said, adding that he dragged the girl into the river because he wanted to wash her blood from me.

The judge revealed that Khavari knew he was killing the girl.

He knew that she was still alive as he laid her in the Dreisam [River], that she would drown, that she had to drown, Schenk said, reported BBC.

Prosecutors disputed his account, saying the murder was premeditated. And a psychiatric expert said that Khavaris expressed remorse was fake, adding that in his analysis there was a high risk of Khavari committing another crime if freed.

The judge learned that Khavari was convicted of attempted murder in Greece in 2013 for pushing a woman off of a cliff but was let out of jail in 2015 due to jail overcrowding before traveling to Germany.

Though Khavari said he is from Afghanistan, he lied about being a child refugee. Officials said postings on Khavaris phone and social media accounts indicated that he lived in Iran before traveling through Europe.

The BBC reported that his father lives in Iran and told officials that Khavari is much older than his stated age, with some reports stating that Khavari is as old as 32.

From NTD.tv

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Texas Sheriff Talks About Why Sanctuaries Dont Help Public SafetyBeing involuntarily committed rightly put her on the prohibited persons list. The state acted on the change in her status by taking her guns. To do otherwise would render the law moot.

When on the defensive, as it surely is now, the NRA sometimes concedes a rhetorical point. But as its sustained attack on Californias APPS program shows, the NRA doesnt actually support state action to restrict access to guns by criminals or the mentally ill. An NRA spokeswoman, Jennifer Baker, told USA Today that none of the red flag laws adopted or under consideration meet its rigorous standards. None of the pieces of legislation that have been introduced have included adequate due process so weve opposed them, she said.

If it fails to prevent further red flag laws, the fallback for the NRA will be to lobby to make such laws less effective. Then the group will try to sabotage implementation. Thats what happened as background checks became the checkered law of the land. The private-sale loophole makes the law significantly less effective. Other dilutions, such as the three-day limit on reviews, put thousands of guns in the hands of people whom the law intended to restrict, including Dylann Roof, the white racist who in 2015 murdered nine black worshipers in a church in Charleston, South Carolina.

Yet the gun groups verbal nod to red flag laws is still significant, even if its most likely fraudulent. Anytime the NRA is forced to admit that the world is more complex than its cartoon offerings of good guys and evil criminals, its proof that the tide is rolling against it. Thats when progress is made. Keep it up, kids.

Francis Wilkinson writes editorials on politics and U.S. domestic policy for Bloomberg View. He was executive editor of the Week. He was previously a national affairs writer for Rolling Stone, a communications consultant and a political media strategist.Texas blast suspect Mark Anthony Conditt is seen in this undated handout photo released by Austin Community College in Austin, Texas, U.S. March 21, 2018. (Austin Community College/Handout via Reuters)

Austin Bomber Suspect Recorded 25-Minute Confession On His Phone, Police Say

Police said they have made a significant discovery in their investigations into the Austin bombing suspect Mark Anthony Conditt in a press conference on Wednesday, March 21.

In the investigation update, Austin Police Chief Brian Manley said Conditt had made a 25-minute recording on his cell phone  which has been classified as a confession. In the recording, the bombing suspect describes how the bombs were constructed and the differences between the bombs.

APD, local, state and federal partners provide update on Austin package bomb murder investigation. https://t.co/5w8F6lmijS  Austin Police Dept (@Austin_Police) March 21, 2018

On this recording, the suspect describes the six bombs that he constructed with a level of specificity that he identified the differences among those six bombs. Weve told you all along that they all had similarities, which they did as far as specific components, but there were also differences between them. And on this recording, he identified what those differences were, Manley said at the press conference.

Conditt, 23, has been identified by authorities as the suspect who is responsible for making six explosive devices  five of which detonated  killing two people and injuring five others over a period of three weeks this month in Austin and surrounding areas.

Police said earlier that the 23-year-old killed himself by detonating a bomb after law enforcement confronted him at around 3 a.m. on Wednesday, March 21.

Authorities were able to track Conditt down by investigating cell phone technology, security video, and store receipts. Law enforcement located Conditt in Round Rock, right before he began driving on Interstate 35, reported CBS.

In the recording, Conditt did not at all mention anything about terrorism nor anything about hate, according to police.

Instead, it was the outcry of a very challenged young man, talking about challenges in his personal life which led him to this point, Manley said.

However, police added the recording did not clarify a motive for the package bombings.

Were never going to put a ration behind these acts, Manley said.

Authorities also revealed the suspect had identified seven explosive devices  five of which detonated, one which was found unexploded at a FedEx facility and another which he detonated in his vehicle. In the recording, Manley confirmed all seven devices have been identified. However, authorities are still urging residents to continue to remain vigilant.

APD is asking the public to remain vigilant and report anything suspicious. If you come across ANYTHING that looks suspicious, DO NOT touch, handle or disturb it. Keep a safe distance and call 9-1-1 immediately. pic.twitter.com/C9OcG7Wx8g  Austin Police Dept (@Austin_Police) March 21, 2018

Police said the investigation is still ongoing. Earlier today, two of Conditts roommates were detained and questioned by authorities.

One roommate was detained, questioned and released. The other is currently being questioned. Their names will not be released because they are not under arrest at this time, police said.

Investigators have detained two roommates of the Austin bombing suspect. One roommate was detained, questioned and released. The other is currently being questioned. Their names will not be released because they are not under arrest at this time. APD PIO  Austin Police Dept (@Austin_Police) March 21, 2018

At the time of the bombings, Conditt was living with a couple of roommates in Pflugerville, a suburb of Austin.

Conditt attended Austin Community College from 2010 to 2012 but did not graduate, school spokeswoman Jessica Vess said in an email.

Neighbors said the Conditt family, who live in a neat white house with a blue picket fence around the front porch, was quiet.

They are a really nice, calm family, said retiree Jeff Reeb, who lives next door. They have always been extremely nice.

Reuters contributed to the report

From NTD.tv

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How Doctors in China Turn into MurderersBlast at Czech Chemical Plant Kills Six

PRAGUE Six people were killed in an explosion at a plant of Czech refinery and chemicals group Unipetrol on Thursday March 22, and others were seriously injured, a Czech Fire Rescue Service spokeswoman said.

An Unipetrol spokesman confirmed a blast occurred at its plant in Kralupy nad Vltavou, 31 kilometers (19 miles) north of the center of Prague, but provided no further details.

I can confirm that there has been an incident at our refinery in Kralupy nad Vltavou  A crisis management meeting is under way, spokesman Pavel Kaidl said in a telephone interview.

He had no other details on operations at the plant, whose refinery has an annual capacity of 3.2 million tonnes of oil. The company operates another plant in Litvinov, in the north of the country.

The cause of the explosion is still unclear.

Police said emergency services were responding to the explosion. A fire department spokesperson told Czech Television it was a blast at a storage tank and there was no risk of additional explosions.

Two people have been taken to hospital, the spokesperson added.

By Robert Muller and Jason Hovet

Recommended Video: President Trump Visits FranceFormer Marine Charged in Shooting, Hit-And-Run of Controversial Seth Rich Investigator

A former Marine, who claims to have worked as a special agent with the Department of Energy, has been charged with shooting and running over Republican lobbyist Jack Burkman, who conducted a controversial investigation of former DNC staffer Seth Richs murder.

Kevin Doherty, 46, was charged Monday with Use of a Firearm in the Commission of a Felony and two counts of Malicious Wounding, according to a press release from the Arlington, Va, Co. police department.

The Washington Post provided more details about the attack, which was the second to befall Burkman over the past several months. An unidentified assailant attacked Burkman with pepper spray at his home in January.

Burkman was shot and run over March 13 at a Rosslyn Marriott hotels parking garage. Burkman was there to retrieve what he thought were documents from an FBI whistleblower.

Doherty worked for Burkman on the Rich investigation until July 2017. Rich, a data analyst at the DNC, was murdered in Washington, D.C., on July 10, 2016, under mysterious circumstances. Doherty was an investigator on Burkmans Profiling Project, the group he formed to solve the Rich case.

Richs death was initially described as a robbery gone wrong, but conspiracy theorists speculated he was killed due to involvement in stealing DNC emails eventually released through WikiLeaks. There is no evidence Rich was involved in handling DNC emails.

Burkman began working pro bono for Richs family in late 2016. He has come under heavy criticism for circulating unfounded theories about Richs death, including the Russian government was behind the killing. Burkman later claimed evidence suggested a serial killer murdered Rich.

Richs family members have since distanced themselves from Burkman.

Burkman fired Doherty and sent him a cease and desist letter, he told The Post.

He became somewhat angry because he thought the Profiling Project belonged to him, Burkman explained to The Post.

I just figured the matter was closed, Burkman added. But what happened is, I guess, he was simmering and simmering and simmering.

Dohertys LinkedIn page lists him as a former Marine and former special agent with the Department of Energys Office of Special Operations. Until recently, he operated Virginia-based maritime security company Nexus Consulting. Numerous press articles quoted him as an expert in the field. Burkmans group touted Dohertys credentials in press releases about its Rich investigation.

Burkman moved away from the Rich investigation in recent months. His latest project involved a $25,000 reward for information from FBI whistleblowers about bureau officials handling of the Clinton email and Russia investigations.

It was for that project Burkman was visiting the Virginia parking garage. He believed he would be retrieving a Justice Department inspector generals report on former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, who was fired last Friday.

Burkman was told the papers were hidden under a cone in the garage, he said. But as The Post reports: Instead, when Burkman bent over to pull the papers out from under the cone, he was shot in the buttocks and thigh. As he ran out of the garage with his dachshund in his arms, he was hit by an SUV.

The driver backed up and tried to hit him again, Burkman said to The Post.

It looked like he was coming to kill me, he told The Post.

Burkman did not learn Doherty was involved until he was in the hospital, when police identified his attacker.

Doherty is being held without bond.

The Department of Energy did not return a request for more information about Dohertys work for the agency. The Arlington police department referred The Daily Caller News Foundation to the press release of Dohertys arrest.

By Chuck Ross

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The Origins of AntifaGrandmother Jailed for Killing Pedestrian After She Made Crucial Mistake While Driving

A grandmother in southern England was sentenced to prison after being convicted of slamming into a pedestrian and killing her.

Pertpall Sall, 68, ran into a crowd in the city of Reading and left Sonata Saulytyte, 44, dead and other people injured.

Prosecutors said that Sall made a critical mistakeshe pressed on the accelerator when she meant to press on the brake.

Prosecutor Alan Blake said in court that the defendant got out of her car after the crash and made a series of puzzling comments, including the assertion that Saulytytes body, which was left under rubble, was already there.

Blake said the grandmother also claimed she hadnt done anything wrong while also saying her brakes had failed.



She was taken to hospital for a checkup before she was taken to the station and here it is noted she was saying I lost my brakes. It was also noted that she wasnt wearing her prescription glasses that her license said she should, he said, reported Metro.

She eventually admitted her guilt.

Footage of the crash was caught on a dashcam, reported The Sun.

Among the others hit, a 20-year-old man was left with life-changing injuries to both his legs.

Judge Paul Dugdale said that the killing was not on purpose but nevertheless deserved jail time.

This is not the sort of dangerous driving where you deliberately made the decision to drive badly. Its a piece of driving where you made a serious mistake, which had tragic consequences, he said, reported the Mirror.

Sometimes we all need to remind ourselves when we get behind the wheel we have an enormous responsibility to others. If we fail in that we put the lives of others at risk.

Grandmother mounts pavement and kills pedestrian in horror crash is jailed for only 28 months https://t.co/xjtlDB4Kio  Marc Hoare (@020644) March 21, 2018

Salls five children traveled to the United Kingdom from Dubai for the hearing.

Dugdale said that it was clear the accident was the result of unintended acceleration, where the driver mistakenly stepped on the gas instead of the brake.

It was driving that created a significant risk of danger, notwithstanding anything deliberate. But we must take into account there was more than one victim and it went on for a prolonged six seconds, he said.

Dugdale sentenced Sall to 28 months in jail.

She will also be disqualified from driving for six years after she is released from prison.

From NTD.tv

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Firefighter Going Over 100 mph Before Deadly CrashHotel Clerk Helps Save 13-Year-Old Allegedly Lured There by Men She Met on Dating Website

A hotel clerk in Ohio called 911 after spotting a 13-year-old girl who the clerk believed was in an unsafe situation.

I have a guest thats in the room, and she is a minor. And she says shes feeling unsafe because theres two gentlemen that brought her here, and shes afraid, the worker told dispatch.

The girl had said she was 18 but the worker, a mother of 10, said she felt the girl was much younger.

Detectives with the Hamilton County Sheriffs Department rushed over to the Cincinnati Days Inn & Suites and soon arrested Tayseer Mustafa, 21, and Mohammed Jagameh, 29, both of Norwood.

Prosecutor Dave Wood said during a court appearance on Wednesday, March 21, that the two men lured the girl to the hotel room to have sex with her.

The allegations are the defendant [Jagameh] and his adult friend met the victim, a 13-year-old girl, online and provided that victim, who was a runaway from the city of Toledothey provided her with whiskey and then solicited her to engage in sex with them and touched her breast over, on the outside of her clothing, Wood said, reported WLWT.

Court records indicate that the girl declined the proposition and called 911, reported ABC 6.

Jagameh admitted to the allegations but said he believed the girl was 18 years old.

But the hotel worker disputed that account, saying the girl clearly looked younger.

Pair accused of luring teen to Hamilton Co. using Plenty of Fish dating site https://t.co/r27CIHZsZt pic.twitter.com/uuZCZiJxXZ  WLWT.com (@WLWT) March 21, 2018

Detectives said the man met the girl through Plenty of Fish, a dating website. PlentyOfFish is described as the leading free online dating site for singles.

After taking our Chemistry Test we match you with personalities that lead to long lasting stable relationships. We match you with online daters that will meet your emotional needs, the website states.

Discover. Your Relationship Needs. We will tell you what you need in a relationship, where you screwed up (without knowing it) in past relationships and a customized action plan to make your next relationship successful.

Dating website expert Steve Smith told WLWT that Plenty of Fish is very much like OKCupid or even Match.com.

He added, Those types of sites are certainly used for dating, but theyre also used often for pedophiles.

Bond for Mustafa and Jagameh was set at $80,000 and $70,000, reported Fox 19.

Their cases are set to go to a grand jury for possible indictments on March 30. Mustafa faces charges of importuning, interference with custody, and selling liquor to minors, as well as sexual imposition.

Jagameh faces charges of importuning, interference with custody, and selling liquor to minors.

From NTD.tv

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Kayaker Rescues Iguana Swimming Miles From ShoreIndustrial Warfare Comes to the United States and EU

News Analysis

President of the European Union Jean-Claude Juncker told an audience in Hamburg on March 2, We can do stupid as well. Juncker was referring to President Donald Trumps threat of imposing import tariffs on certain goods coming from the EU.

So now we will also impose import tariffs, Junker said. This is basically a stupid process, the fact that we have to do this. But we have to do it. We will now impose tariffs on motorcycles, Harley Davidson, on blue jeans, Levis, on bourbon.

In reality, however, the EU has already put disproportionately high taxes on U.S. imports. When America imports cars from the EU, the tariff is 2.5 percent. For a U.S.-made car going into the EU, the tariff is 10 percent.

That tariff ensures that Europeans drive European cars. We all know that there is a lot more to selling a car than just tariffs, but Trump wants America to export, and to do that, we need to have a level playing field, and this is Trumps main concern.

In response to Junckers statement, Trump indicated that the United States might start increasing taxes on imports of European cars such as Mercedes-Benz and BMW.

If one looks at the strategies employed in global industrial warfare, we have merely scratched the surface.

The complexities of industrial warfare go far beyond the trivial argumentative language. Industrial warfare is happening constantly, in all geographies and in all industries.

Even when there is peace between enemies and allies, a competitor will be looking to outsmart his rival, whether a nation-state, industry, supply chain, or product. The key is understanding how it takes place, and which blows to absorb, which ones to block, and how to engage the enemy.

Only around 10 percent of industrial warfare actually shows itself on the surface, in the form of actions such as tariffs, which can be seen as defense mechanisms. Ninety percent of the strategies, tactics, and operations involved in corporate attack and defense maneuvers are actually under the surface. These are far more discreet and much more damaging to the economy.

Underlying pressures dictate the direction of global battle.

The motivation for industrial warfare does not just rest upon Trumps shoulders. Every country in the world is involvedwhether on an international, national, regional, or local level. All competitors are competing and taking each others intellectual property. In the business world, this process is sometimes described as benchmarking.

With benchmarkingspying, in business termsquestions are asked and gap analysis is done. What is competitor A doing that we, competitor B, are not? Sometimes, visits to plants are even arranged to see the systems, take pictures, create videos, and buy products to take apart.

Thats the very first thing Lexus did when they started. They bought a BMW, a Mercedes, and a Rolls Royce and took them apart before creating the Lexus model range. Today, Lexus has taken a large chunk of the high-end luxury car market. No one complained when they did it. And Lexus never complained when their latest car was bought by their competitors BMW, Mercedes, and Audi. All of these competitors know that when we build a product, competitors will take it apart and find out what we have been doing.

Competitors are usually the first to buy the new product, before other customers can even get to it. This is common practice. The Chinese regime does it all the time. Its called the learning process, and it takes many forms in the art of industrial warfare.

The lesson here is very simple. The key is to learn about the process of industrial warfare, and be aware and informed about the strategies that competitors across the world will take.

The issue at hand isnt stupid tariffs, as Juncker described them, but instead the nature of an industrial war that has been ongoing for decades, and of which the EU has been just as much a part.

Amar Manzoor is the author of The Art of Industrial Warfare and the founder of the 7Tao Industrial Warfare combat system, which he teaches to students.Israel Unveils It Bombed Suspected Syrian Nuclear Reactor in 2007

JERUSALEMIsrael has revealed that it bombed a suspected Syrian nuclear reactor in 2007 and said on Wednesday the strike should be a warning to Iran that it would not be allowed to develop nuclear weapons.

The military released previously classified cockpit footage, photographs and intelligence documents about its Sept. 6, 2007, air strike on the Al-Kubar facility near Deir al-Zor in eastern Syria.

It said the reactor was being constructed with help from North Korea and had been months away from activation. Amos Yadlin, Israels military intelligence chief at the time, said on Israel Radio that even with a functioning reactor, it would have taken Syria years to build a nuclear weapon.

Reuters has been unable to immediately verify the Israeli material.

Israels decision to go public comes after repeated calls in recent months by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the United States and the international community to take tougher action on Iran, Syrias ally.

Israels intelligence minister, Israel Katz, said on Twitter: The (2007) operation and its success made clear that Israel will never allow nuclear weaponry to be in the hands of those who threaten its existence  Syria then, and Iran today.

Iran, which says its nuclear program has only peaceful aims, signed a 2015 deal under which it accepted curbs on its nuclear program in return for sanctions relief. U.S. President Donald Trump and Netanyahu have both been critical of the deal.

The Israeli military described in detail events leading up to the night of Sept 5-6, 2007, in which, it said, eight warplanes, F-16s and F-15s, carried out the mission after taking off from the Ramon and Hatzerim air bases.

They flew to Deir al-Zor region, 270 miles northwest of Damascus, and dropped 18 tonnes of munitions on the site, it said.

Yadlin said Israel decided at the time against acknowledging the raid on the reactor so as not to provoke Syrian President Bashar al-Assad into retaliating. No core. No war, Yadlin said about Israels goal.

Top Secret

The Israeli military on Wednesday declassified internal top secret intelligence reports, in Hebrew, some of them partly redacted.

One, dated March 30, 2007, said: Syria has set up, within its territory, a nuclear reactor for the production of plutonium, through North Korea, which according to an (initial) worst-case assessment is liable to be activated in approximately another year. To our assessment [REDACTED] secretive and orderly [REDACTED] for achieving a nuclear weapon.

Israeli intelligence predicted that the suspected reactor would turn operational by the end of 2007.

The mission to destroy the reactor started at 10.30 p.m. on Sept. 5 and ended with the return of the warplanes at 2.30 a.m. the next day, the Israeli military said.

The disclosure on Wednesday stemmed in part, Yadlin said, from years of pressure by the Israeli media on military censors to allow them to publish Israeli-sourced information about the raid and the release on Wednesday of memoirs by Ehud Olmert, the former prime minister who ordered the bombing.

The event was first made public by Syria, which, as reported by Reuters at the time, said in the early hours of Sept. 6 that its air defenses had repelled an incursion by Israeli warplanes.

Syria, a signatory of the 1970 nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), has always denied that the site was a reactor or that Damascus engaged in nuclear cooperation with North Korea.

In his 2010 memoir Decision Points, former U.S. President George W. Bush disclosed he discussed intelligence about the Syrian facility with Olmert before it was destroyed but did not give him the green light for the raid.

In 2008 the United States presented what it described as intelligence showing that North Korea had helped Syria with covert nuclear activities. At the time Syria dismissed the accusations as part of a campaign to discredit the Damascus government.

The Israeli release contains a black-and-white aerial photograph captioned before the attack and showing a box-like structure amid desert dunes with smaller outlying buildings.

A series of black-and-white videos, taken above the target, shows the structure in cross-hairs. A male voice is heard counting down three seconds, a cloud of black smoke rises from the structure as it explodes. Other footage appears to show the aftermath  a smoldering hole in the ground.

Arizona, one pilot radioed to military headquarters in Tel Aviv, giving the code word for a successful operation.

By Stephen Farrell

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The Origins of AntifaLawyer John Dowd (R) is met with reporters as he exits Manhattan Federal Court in New York on May 11, 2011. (Brendan McDermid/REUTERS)

John Dowd, Trumps Lead Attorney in Russia Probe, Resigns

John Dowd, President Donald Trumps lead outside counsel in the Russia probe, resigned on Thursday, the Wall Street Journal reported citing a spokesman.

Dowd led Trumps legal team handling the investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller of alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia and related matters.

I love the president and I wish him well, Dowd told Wall Street Journal in a written statement.

Dowd quit amid an internal disagreement with other lawyers on the team about whether Trump should agree to an interview with Mueller, Fox News reported. Dowd advised the president against doing so, while other lawyers on the team believe that an interview with Mueller, under the right conditions, is advisable.

With Dowd gone, Trumps outside team has three lawyers: Ty Cobb, Jay Sekulow, and Joseph diGenova. All three have defended the president in the media and gone after the FBI and DOJ for bias against Trump.

John Dowd is a friend and has been a valuable member of our legal team, Sekulow said in a statement to The Hill. We will continue our ongoing representation of the president and our cooperation with the office of the special counsel.

Dowd made national headlines over the weekend by calling on Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to end the Mueller investigation, saying that it was manufactured by now-fired FBI Director James Comey based on an unverified anti-Trump dossier.

Trump intensified his criticism of Mueller last week, calling the special counsel out by name in a string of Twitter messages.

The Mueller probe should never have been started in that there was no collusion and there was no crime, Trump wrote on March 18. It was based on fraudulent activities and a Fake Dossier paid for by Crooked Hillary and the DNC, and improperly used in FISA COURT for surveillance of my campaign. WITCH HUNT!

In a follow-up tweet the next day, the president asked why Muellers team is staffed with 13 hardened Democrats and no Republicans.

Another Dem recently addeddoes anyone think this is fair? Trump asked. And yet, there is NO COLLUSION!

Special Council is told to find crimes, whether a crime exists or not. I was opposed to the selection of Mueller to be Special Council. I am still opposed to it. I think President Trump was right when he said there never should have been a Special Council appointed because..  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 21, 2018

there was no probable cause for believing that there was any crime, collusion or otherwise, or obstruction of justice! So stated by Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz.  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 21, 2018

Some Republicans, notably Trey Gowdy, criticized the presidents approach. Asked about Gowdys comments, White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders said the president was venting frustration about the protracted investigation.

To pretend like going through this absurd process over a year would not bring frustration seems a little ridiculous, Sanders said.

I dont think any individual, including members of Congress, would like it if they had been accused of taking their seat in Congress by doing something nefarious when they hadnt, particularly if it went on for more than a year into their time in office, she added.

From NTD.tv

Recommended Video: President Donald Trumps Weekly AddressMarch 10, 2018Sun Qian, a Falun Dafa adherent who has been illegally detained in China, in an undated photo.

Lawyers Representing Canadian Citizen Detained in China Pressured to Drop Her Case

Sun Qian may now be assigned a lawyer by the state, which doesnt bode well for her chances

OTTAWATwo lawyers representing Sun Qian, a Canadian citizen detained in China, have withdrawn from the case due to pressure from the Chinese authorities, leaving Sun unrepresented since last week.

A Chinese-Canadian businesswoman from Vancouver who became a citizen in 2007, Sun was detained by the Chinese authorities in February 2017 for practising the traditional spiritual discipline Falun Gong, also called Falun Dafa.

As the founder and vice president of Beijing Leadman Biochemistry, Sun travelled regularly between her home in Vancouver and Beijing for work. While at her Beijing residence on Feb. 19, more than 20 plainclothes security agents barged in, ransacked her home, and took her away.

She has since been held at the Beijing First Detention Centres 414 Prison Room, a facility notorious for having particularly fierce guards, but is currently without legal representation.

Suns family was told to find another lawyer for her, otherwise the Justice Bureau would assign one to her case. But finding a lawyer to defend a Falun Gong practitioner is easier said than done, given the regimes ongoing persecution campaign against adherents.

One of the most dangerous things a lawyer can do is to take on a case on behalf of a Falun Gong practitioner, said China expert Clive Ansley, a B.C.-based lawyer who lived and practised in China for 14 years.

Ansley said most of the time, legal cases are not brought against Falun Gong practitioners in the first place.

In the great majority of cases, they dont bring cases against Falun Gong practitioners, they just send them directly to reform-through-forced-labour camps. Although theoretically forced labour camps have been eliminated, they are still there but under a new name.

Pressure from all sides

According to Suns sister, Sun Zan, lawyers Huang Hanzhong and Xiong Dongmei dropped Suns case after being pressured by their law firms respective superiorsthe justice bureaus at the municipal and provincial levels as well as the Ministry of National Security.

Sun Qians family learned that in August 2017, officials from various levels of the Justice Bureau had a talk with Huang and asked him not to create any incidents or trouble prior to the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, which was held in October 2017. They specifically asked him to submit reports to them regarding Sun Qians case and another sensitive case, which Huang refused to do.

He was again pressured in February around the Chinese New Year, when officials had multiple conversations with him, asking him not to agree to be interviewed by overseas media. They finally ordered him to withdraw from representing Sun Qian and other sensitive cases. Huang pulled out from that point on.

Suns family says Xiong experienced similar pressure.

Last August, the law firm Xiong worked at was inspected by the provincial Justice Bureau multiple times. This made the rest of the lawyers in the firm very nervous. Out of fear, the firms director opposed Xiongs filing of a criminal complaint for Sun Qian.

Around the beginning of this year, officials requested Xiongs brother, sister-in-law, and niece, who lived in another city, travel to Jinan where Xiong lives to talk her into abandoning Suns case. By this time, Xiong was becoming worried that the Justice Bureau would revoke her licence to practise law.

Then earlier this month, Suns sister said, a judge with last name Li at the Court of the Chaoyang District in Beijing called to inform her that Xiong no longer represents Sun Qian. Li asked the family to find another a lawyer for Sun; otherwise, the Justice Bureau would assign one to her case.

The judge said once a lawyer is found, the case could go to court within a month.

Huang and Xiong took on Suns case around June 2017, after her previous lawyer, Glen Gao, was also pressured to withdraw from her case after he made a verbal complaint to the prosecutor at the detention centre about Sun Qian having been tortured by the guards.

Soon after, Gao dropped the case under pressure from his local justice bureau.

The Epoch Times learned that Gao was told that the only way he could represent Sun was if he would become an informant for the authorities in relation to her case. Gao refused.

Behind the pressure

Aside from the Chinese communist regimes ongoing campaign of persecution of Falun Gong practitioners, Suns family thinks there are other reasons why the Justice Bureau got rid of her lawyers: The criminal complaint they filed resoundingly proves the illegal nature of the persecution.

In December 2017, prior to Prime Minister Justin Trudeaus Beijing visit, Suns lawyers wrote an open letter to Trudeau. The letter pointed out that the arrest and detention of Sun Qian and tens of thousands of other Falun Gong practitioners violate Chinese law and asked the Trudeau government for help in seeking Suns release.

In addition, earlier this year the lawyers filed a criminal complaint against the director of the Beijing Public Security Bureau and the prosecutor responsible for Suns case for wrongly using Chinese law in her arrest and detention.

Ansley points out that when the persecution campaign was launched back in 1999, the Chinese Communist Party created a gestapo-like, extra-judicial agency called the 610 Office to handle all matters related to Falun Gong.

The 610 Office completely replaced the court and the whole judicial process, and the courts themselves were ordered not to accept any lawsuits from Falun Gong practitioners, he said.

All lawyers in China were forbidden to take on the defence of Falun Gong.

According to Yiyang Xia, senior director of policy and research at the Human Rights Law Foundation, it is common for lawyers in China to be disbarred, threatened, and even tortured for attempting to defend Falun Gong practitioners.

Xia added that most lawyers assigned by the Justice Bureau will suggest that their Falun Gong clients plead guilty.

They are supposed to toe the Communist Party line on the Falun Gong issue. Therefore they will not argue the fundamental issuethat the persecution of Falun Gong is illegal and unconstitutional.

Yiyang Xia also notes that ultimately, court hearings to sentence Falun Gong practitioners are simply show trials, with the verdict and sentence having been decided before the hearing even takes place.Mr. James Hintons letter of March 8 was spot-on in his criticism of another Napa Valley College school bond tax ("NVC board needs to be more transparent").

Even though the tax is not planned to be on the ballot until the November election, I notice that people are already speaking out against it. He is among several other local citizens who have spoken out in opposition to this new tax at the last four college trustee meetings.

Since 1997 Napans have generously approved five separate school bond taxes: four for Napa Valley Unified school district and one for Napa Valley College. These taxes total nearly $700 million, probably enough to have rebuilt all of the schools and the college combined, but they still want more.

The schools and the college have no obligation to pay back the bond taxes; its all on local taxpayers and the taxes are there for 40 years.

Before 1997 there were no local school taxes, but a change in the law in the year 2000 reducing the majority vote approval to 55 percent has inundated us with school bond taxes. School bond taxes attach to all real estate including our houses, apartments, gas stations, grocery stores and doctors offices.Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale announces new firearms legislation on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on March 20, 2018. (The Canadian Press/Justin Tang)

Liberal Firearms Bill Criticized by Both Gun Owners and Shooting Victims

Government is not restoring a long-gun registry, Trudeau insists

OTTAWAThe federal government tabled a proposed new bill March 20 to tighten the sale and tracking of firearms, only to find itself under attack from both sides: gun owners wary of burdensome regulation and shooting victims who say the bill doesnt go far enough.

Gun retailers would be required to keep records of firearms inventory and sales for at least 20 years under the legislation introduced in the House of Commons. The proposed measure is intended to assist police in investigating gun trafficking and other crimes.

The legislation would also require the purchaser of a hunting rifle or shotgun to present a firearms licence, while the seller would have to ensure its validity.

Whats the point of having a licence if no one ever checks it out? said Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale. The process for doing so will be efficient and straightforward.

In addition, the bill would expand the scope of background checks on those who want to acquire a gun. Instead of just the five years immediately preceding a licence application, personal history questions would cover a persons entire lifetime.

While crime rates in Canada have generally been declining for more than two decades, offences involving firearms have become more prevalent, especially since 2013, the government noted. Gun-related homicides, domestic and gender-based violence involving guns, criminal gang activity, and gun thefts are all up significantly.

Goodale has already devoted more than $327 million over five years, with $100 million a year thereafter, to address criminal gun and gang activities.

The government says the new legislative proposals emphasize public safety and effective police work, while respecting law-abiding firearms owners.

The move to require commercial retailers to keep sales records would reinstate a measure that existed from the late 1970s until 1995, when a previous Liberal government ushered in universal registration of firearmsessentially replacing the store ledgers.

The Conservative government dismantled the controversial long-gun registry, which had come to symbolize wasteful inefficiency for many firearms owners.

The National Firearms Association accused the government of trying to revive the registry through the proposed record-keeping provisions. This is a return to universal registration, said association vice-president Blair Hagen.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau bristled at such a suggestion.

We committed to not restore a long-gun registry and were not restoring a long-gun registry. Its that simple, Trudeau said.

Federal officials pointed out that most retailers already keep sales records for liability and insurance purposes, and to inform customers of product recalls.

Their records would be private, not accessible to governments, but police would be able to gain access, given reasonable grounds and with judicial authorization as appropriate, Goodale said.

The bill would repeal some measures passed by the previous Conservative government.

For instance, it would roll back some automatic authorizations to transport restricted and prohibited firearms, such as handguns and assault weapons. Under the bill, owners would need a permit to transport such guns, except when taking them to a shooting range or home from a store.

The bill also proposes restoring the authority of RCMP experts to classify firearms without political influence, repealing cabinets authority to overrule Mountie determinations.

This is totally messed up

The Conservatives said the bill does nothing to fight gang and gun violence in places like Toronto and Surrey, B.C.

Liberals cannot be trusted when it comes to firearms legislation because they fail to tackle criminals who use guns to commit violent crime; meanwhile, they treat law-abiding firearms owners as criminals, Conservative House leader Candice Bergen and party public safety critic Pierre Paul-Hus said in a joint statement.

Conservatives will adamantly oppose any attempt by the Liberals to create a new long-gun registry.

Survivors and families of three mass shootings in Quebec said the bill includes the bare minimum to technically fulfill only some of the Liberal election promises on firearms.

Meaghan Hennegan, who survived a deadly shooting at Montreals Dawson College in 2006, said the group was especially disappointed with the failure to address the legal availability of assault rifles.

The weapon that was used to shoot me and many other of my classmates is more easily accessible today. This is totally messed up.

Coalition for Gun Control founder Wendy Cukier called the bill an important first step that responds to the desire of most Canadians for strict measures. While much of the focus has been on handguns, a rifle or a shotgun in the hands of angry or disturbed individuals can also have tragic consequences.

Goodale highlighted four additional ideas for further discussion:

Tougher after-hours storage rules for commercial outlets, after two dozen guns were stolen in Saskatchewan by snipping a cable

The appropriateness of manufacturers advertisements that glorify violence and simulate warfare

Whether provinces should consider requiring medical professionals to advise authorities of people with diagnosed conditions, including mental illnesses, that are likely to put the lives of others in danger

A possible means to identify large and unusual gun transactions that could point to gang activity or trafficking

Toronto Mayor John Tory welcomed the notion of further strengthening the rules to keep guns off our streets.

It is long past time to take bold action to fight domestic gun trafficking, he said.

From The Canadian PressSome of the newly-released Dapchi schoolgirls are pictured in Jumbam village, Yobe State, Nigeria March 21, 2018. (Reuters/Ola Lanre)

Militants Free Scores of Abducted Nigerian Schoolgirls After Month in Captivity

DAPCHI, NigeriaIslamist insurgents drove scores of kidnapped Nigerian schoolgirls back into the town where they had been captured a month ago and abruptly set them free on Wednesday.

The captors gave no reason for their release, but Nigeria denied that a ransom had been paid. Several of the girls said some of their friends had died in captivity and one was still being held.

The fighters from the Boko Haram group, some shouting God is greatest, drove the girls back into the northeast town of Dapchi in a line of trucks in the morning, dropped them off then left, witnesses told Reuters.

I dont know why they brought us back but they said because we are children of Muslims, one of the freed girls, Khadija Grema, told Reuters.

Aliyu Maina, reunited with his 13-year-old daughter, said the fighters stopped and blocked the road, they didnt talk to anybody, they didnt greet anybody.

They said people should make space for people to recognize their children and I got my child.

Boko Haram has waged a nine-year insurgency in northeast Nigeria and neighboring states that has seen tens of thousands of people killed, more than 2 million displaced and thousands abducted. A 2015 military campaign drove the group from most territory it controlled, but much of the area remains beyond government rule, and insurgents still stage attacks from strongholds near Lake Chad.

The kidnapping of 110 girls aged 11-19 on Feb. 19 from Dapchi was the biggest mass abduction since Boko Haram took more than 270 schoolgirls from the town of Chibok in 2014  a case that triggered international outrage.

Dapchi residents said more than 100 girls had returned on Wednesday.

One is still with them because she is a Christian, said Grema, the freed girl. About five are dead but it was not as if they killed them  it was because of the stress and trauma that made them tired and weak.

They didnt harm us, Grema added. They were giving us food, very good food. We didnt have any problem.

Muhammad Bursari said his niece Hadiza Muhammed, another of the freed girls, told him the remaining student was still in captivity because she had refused to convert to Islam.

No Ransom

Nigerias information minister, Lai Mohammed, told Reuters 76 released girls had been registered so far, while others went straight home to their parents, but they will come for documentation later.

No ransom was paid to them to effect this release. The only condition they gave us is not to release (the girls) to the military but release them in the town of Dapchi without the military presence.

Nigeria had secured the release through back-channel efforts and with the help of some friends of the country, Mohammed said in a separate statement.

For the release to work, the government had a clear understanding that violence and confrontation would not be the way out as it could endanger the lives of the girls, hence a non-violent approach was the preferred option, it said.

Boko Haram never explained why the girls were taken, but many Nigerians speculated that the goal was ransom. Boko Haram received millions of euros for the release of some of the Chibok girls last year.

The abduction piled pressure on President Muhammadu Buhari, who came to power in 2015 promising to crack down on the insurgency. He is expected to seek re-election next year.

Mohammed Dala said he had found his 12-year-old daughter in a crowd of the girls in the center of town.

Some motors painted in military color came with our girls, he told Reuters. They (the militants)  said we should not flee. They dropped the girls at the center of town, near Alis tea shop. I found my daughter and left.

Most of the other girls were taken to a hospital guarded by the military, witnesses said.

By Ola Lanre and Abraham Achirga

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President Trump Visits FranceHurontario Street in Mississauga. A suspect in the beating an autistic man at a bus terminal in Mississauga maintains his innocence, says his lawyer. (Transportfan70/Public Domain)

One of Three Suspects in Beating of Autistic Man in Ontario Not Guilty: Lawyer

MISSISSAUGA, Ont.A lawyer representing a suspect in the beating of an autistic man says his client is not guilty of the attack that drew outrage from across the country.

Jag Virk says 25-year-old Ronjot Singh Dhami, whose last known address was in Surrey, B.C., will turn himself in to police, but he maintains his innocence.

Peel Regional Police named Dhami as one of three suspects in the beating, which took place last week at a bus terminal in Mississauga, just west of Toronto.

Police identified the second suspect as Parmvir (Parm) Singh Chahil, a 21-year-old man of no fixed address.

The third person allegedly involved in the incident has not yet been positively identified, but police say he might go by the first name of Jason.

A video of the attack released by police on March 13 shows the unidentified victim sitting at the bottom of a stairwell putting on roller blades when three men approached from behind and began to punch and kick him.

Police say the man suffered a broken nose and facial cuts.

A Canada-wide arrest warrant for Chahil and Dhami has been issued on one count each of aggravated assault.

Police say all three suspects may still be in the Toronto area and are being encouraged to call a lawyer and turn themselves in.

Police say anyone who sees Chahil or Dhami should call police and not approach the men.

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A Mother Shares the Story of Her Sons Heroin OverdoseOregon Woman Accused of Killing Pet Chihuahua in Gruesome Manner

An Oregon woman has been arrested after allegedly killing her pet chihuahua.

Police officers said Noelle Georgia Moor, 28, killed the dog by cooking it to death in an oven.

Clatsop County court records obtained by Oregon Live showed that the 7-year-old dogs body was found on Tuesday, March 20, inside Moors oven.

The smell of burnt hair and flesh was still in the air, the officer wrote.

A person who knows Moor alerted police officers to the alleged crime.

Moor told officers that she placed the chihuahua inside the oven because she believed her ex-boyfriend was inside the oven, according to court records.

Moor was charged with first-degree animal abuse.

She was arrested at Columbia Memorial Hospital after the officer found the dog.

Oregon woman accused of cooking pet Chihuahua to death in her oven: Noelle Georgia Moore, 28, faces first-degree animal abuse charges in the 7-year-old dog's death, court records show. Mental health professional had been in contact with her in recent https://t.co/gLLicXGtqO  Breaking PDX News (@breakingPDXnews) March 22, 2018

A person claiming to be Moors sister commented on an article on The Daily Astorian, saying her sister is struggling with schizophrenia.

Please understand that she didnt know what she was doing. She had been asking professionals for help. She turned herself into the institution and they threw her out onto the street when she was in the middle of an episode and needed help, wrote Heather Lessard.

When she comes to and realizes what she did she is going to be heartbroken. Her dog was her best friend and I am disgusted by what she did, but she believed her abusive ex-boyfriend had possessed him and she was terrified. They never should have THROWN her out of the institution. She knew she needed help and now we are all suffering. Please keep her in your prayers.

The alleged sister added, Shes the sweetest women Ive ever met. When in her right mind she would never hurt a fly. My heart goes out to Bolt and my helping hand and compassion goes out to my beautiful sister.

According to the National Institutes of Health, schizophrenia is a chronic and severe mental disorder that affects how a person thinks, feels, and behaves.

The agency added, People with schizophrenia may seem like they have lost touch with reality. Although schizophrenia is not as common as other mental disorders, the symptoms can be very disabling.

People with the disorder often struggle with hallucinations, delusions, thought disorders, and/or movement disorders. People may lose touch with some aspects of reality.

From NTD.tv

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Wranglers Wrestle With Alligator to Remove Eggs From NestIf people can age with class, then Harlene Goodrich, 80, and Dorothy Kelly, 91, should be considered aging s rock stars.

These womentwo strangers from opposite ends of the country and the poles of politicsagree on the basics on how to age well:

 Form and reform circles of supportive friends

 Actively participate in political and non-political groups

 Find outlets for creative talents

 Keep physically active

Stay emotionally active in ways that inspire the mind and nurture the spirit

At a time when women increasingly live into their 90s and more men reach their 80s, the art of aging requires work, thought, planning and, yes, spontaneity.

Learning this art is crucial, as many Americans now have a realistic chance of living beyond 80, said Mark Williams, an attending physician at the New Hanover Regional Medical Center in Wilmington, N.C., and author of The Art and Science of Aging Well: A Physicians Guide to a Healthy Body, Mind and Spirit.

I dont think we give enough respect to what it takes to age welluntil it happens to you, said Anne Newman, 62, professor and chair of epidemiology in the Graduate School of Public Health at the University of Pittsburgh. Its a balance between fighting it and accepting it that requires a great deal of grace and courage.

And humor. Perhaps, humor most of all.

Goodrich, a former schoolteacher who lives in Seal Beach, California, still meets regularly with her friends who retired from teaching. When the group gathered recently for a holiday cookie exchange, Goodrichwho has had serious back surgery and knee surgery over the past decadeheard several of the women, ages 65 to 83, complaining about their aches and pains. She stopped the discussion and said they would go around the table and give each woman five minutes to complain about her aches and pains. Thats when everyone broke out laughing, recalled Goodrich.

Humor is an important thing when you reach the point in your life when every week contains at least one doctors appointment, she said.

Humor is no less important to Kelly, who turns 92 in October. Ive always preferred to look at the happy things in life, she says. Perhaps her longevity comes from her ability to laugh at the things so many others stress over. When I turn off the light at night, I turn off the world.

Never mind that the two women are polar opposites politically.

Goodrich jetted cross-country from her longtime California home just blocks from the beach to join the womens march in Washington, D.C., last year. Kelly, a retired pharmacist who lives in the Pittsburgh area, was the first female Republican elected to the town council in her Democratic districtat age 78then was re-elected at age 81. And she still helps with voter registration.

It doesnt matter what political party you supportwhat matters most is that you care enough to get involved, both women agree.

Both women say the key to aging well is to positively begin the process when you are still young by staying engaged with people and with stimulating activities.

Aging starts when youre younger and continues when youre older, said Kelly, who lives in a retirement village outside Pittsburgh.

For years, Kelly has been known for her cooking and parties. She invited eight family members over for Easter, Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners last year that she prepared in her apartment. She outdid herself one evening around the holidays hosting 20 people from her retirement village for a walnut torte baked from scratch. She still does her own shopping and drives herself to the grocery store.

Goodrich insists that reaching 80 has not felt limiting but, rather, inspiring. She recently celebrated with her two children and seven grandchildren at a bed-and-breakfast in Kentuckys horse country. During her 80th birthday dinner, her children surprised her with an Elvis impersonator who crooned Love Me Tender.

Goodrich, who at 50 returned to school to get her masters degree in professional writing from the University of Southern California, has since won several playwriting contests, and those plays were ultimately produced at three different festivals. She also self-published a childrens book at age 60.

No one suddenly gets old, Goodrich said. I think were all on the path of life. I may be old in years, but Im the same person whos been living the same life. The key is to participate in each stage along the way.

Sometimes that participation is painful. Both Goodrich and Kelly are widowed. Kelly lost her husband, George, just two weeks before what would have been their 50th wedding anniversary. They met as students in pharmacy school, got married, had two children and traveled the world together.

After George died, a grieving Kelly started writing daily letters to him for nearly two years, which helped her through the loss. I have a whole stack of letters, but Im not sure if anyone wants to see them, she said.

Goodrich lost her second husband, Michael, also a schoolteacher, after 33 years of marriage, but not before the two accomplished an incredible feat: walking the state of California. They did this over many years in bits and pieces starting in 1983, and finally completed the long journey from San Diego to the Oregon border in 2005, when Goodrich was 68.

But shes not done exploring. Shes not done setting goals. Shes not done growing. Goodrich took her family to Frances Loire Valley in 2016. She works with a personal trainer twice a week and walks daily, often to the beach. And she has recently taken up the ukulele, and attends a regular class.

Kelly, meanwhile, regularly lectures on historical figures from Benjamin Franklin to Betsy Ross, then donates her speaking fees for the protection of an 18th-century church that still stands not far from where she lives.

Neil Rosenthal, an author and counselor in the Denver area, has a simple term for what drives Kelly and Goodrich to continue accomplishing such great things in their 80s and 90s: a sense of wonder.

If you dont do these kinds of things, you will grow old; and if you do do these things, you will still grow oldbut much more slowly, said Rosenthal.

Aging well is something that must be learned, Rosenthal said.

Its all about separating out what matters from what doesnt.

In the end, its about that willingnessif not desire  to have fun, even into your 80s, 90s and, perhaps, beyond, he said.

Fun? Wait. Who equates aging with fun? Well, not long before her spinal surgery and knee replacement, Goodrich went zip-lining when she was 70.

Out of fearor a sense of too much comfortthe majority of older folks say no to many opportunities for new experiences, added Goodrich.

Not her.

I say yes, said Goodrich. I always say yes.

Bruce Horovitz is a writer for Kaiser Health News, which originally published this article. KHNs coverage of these topics is supported by John A. Hartford Foundation and Gordon and Betty Moore FoundationPresident Donald Trump said on March 13 that space has become a warfighting domain, and that to face this threat, the U.S. military may need a Space Force.

Trump, speaking with troops at the Marine Corps Air Station Miramar in San Diego, stated: My new national strategy for space recognizes that space is a warfighting domain, just like the land, air, and sea. We may even have a Space Force.

His statements echoed concerns that have been raised for decades in the military and defense community: that modern technology and U.S. military power are heavily dependent on vulnerable satellites, and that U.S. adversaries are pushing to dominate space militarily.

China wants to control the EarthMoon system. By doing so, it can impose a toll on the space economy ambitions of the West, said Richard Fisher, senior fellow with the International Assessment and Strategy Center.

It is actually quite fortunate that President Trump has emerged at this time with this broad understanding and a desire to position the United States and the democracies strategically so that China and Russia do not deny the future benefits of space to our people, he said.

Click on infographic to enlarge.

The coming space race has two facets, one military and one economic. And the push further into the domain of outer space could create new forms of technology in both fields, as was seen in the Moon race of the 1950s and 60s, which led to the silicon revolution and many of the technologies we know today.

Its a historical fact that the Moon race was the impetus for many commercial technical spinoffs that spurred new industries in the United States, Fisher said. However, the Trump administration is embracing a much larger goal with a Space Force.'

During a roundtable last June, Trump described the problem of the United States losing its lead in global technology and said his administration would aim to help change this situation.

Fifty years ago, our government drove the innovation that inspired the world and put Americans on the moon, Trump said, during a discussion with the American Technology Council. Today, many of our agencies rely on painfully outdated technology, and yet we have the greatest people in technology that the world has ever seen right here with us in this room.

Government needs to catch up with the technology revolution, he said. America should be the global leader in government technology, just as we are in every other aspect, and we are going to start our big edge again in technologysuch an important industry.

My administration is embracing a new spirit of innovation that will make life better for all Americans.

The New Space Race

According to Fisher, China is forcing the world into reviving a phase of the global arms race that petered out in the late 1950s, and this is leading to a new space race that could have major implications for innovation and defense.

During the last space race, Fisher said, the Soviets wanted to be able to militarily dominate low-Earth orbit, to attack American satellites, which were better than theirs. By dominating low-Earth orbit, they could dominate conflicts on Earth.

This is one of the ambitions that China has revived since the early 1990s when it began to develop its ground-based anti-satellite missile interceptors and its ground-based anti-satellite lasers, he said.

The real motivation is the Communist Partys desire to defend the existence of its political dictatorship by achieving global strategic dominanceachieving a power position both on Earth and in space that prevents any other power from threatening the power position of the Chinese Communist Party.

As the United States prepares to enter a new space race, there will be some key differences from before.

Unlike the space race of the past, the new programs for space travel and commercial programs will be spearheaded by private companies, and the U.S. military may also make a stronger push into space.

Fisher said that Trump is first and foremost, creating a new regulatory regime that allows new participants in the space sector to be able to seek their success, and added that its of enormous strategic significance for the United States and the rest of the world that these private companies have the legal foundations to be able to achieve their ambitions in space.

This new space race, if you will, is the race to create the space economy, Fisher said, adding that as the situation advances, the race to create the space economy will entail who can be the first to deliver real profits from activities in space.

He noted: The satellite sector has proven to be very profitable for terrestrial industries for decades and that will remain. But who will be the first to demonstrate that the Moon can be a source for profit? Who will be the first to demonstrate that a profit can be had from Mars?

The main challenger to the United States in this race is the Chinese regime, which is pushing an alternate model for space industries where there is only a thin line between private industry and state-run companies, and where the space businesses are tightly regulated to serve the interests of the state.

In China, Fisher said, every private sector space industry has at its core the Chinese Communist Party, and that through regulations and laws, any private-sector company has to examine their technology, whatever it is, and make some contribution to the defense of the Chinese Communist Party dictatorship.

The Chinese regime has announced plans to start mining operations on the Moon and has also floated concepts such as orbital solar panels that can beam energy to the Earths surface using laser technology. The plans have raised concerns in the security community that China may weaponize these operations, which could endanger U.S. strategic satellites and allow China to nationalize parts of the Moon.

The Chinese projection into space is, first and foremost, a military projection, Fisher said.

When China goes to the Moon, possibly in the early 2030s, it will not just be China going to the Moon. It will be the PLA [Peoples Liberation Army] going to the Moon. And it will seek dual-use exploitation of the Moon.

The Trump administration is using a different model, based on cutting red tape and clearing the way so that companies have room to innovate and develop.

In the United States, Fisher said, the new space race is being led by corporations seeking profit, and that is a much different set of conditions.

As the space race moves forward, Fisher said, it is conceivably possible for private sector corporations to create an infrastructure from the Earth to the Moon to Mars that makes it politically attractive for China and Russia to behave in outer space.This Weeks Fake News: Trumps Pick for CIA Chief Did Not Oversee Waterboarding at Black Site

Factual Error

Trumps Pick for CIA Chief Did Not Oversee Waterboarding at Black Site

Investigative website ProPublica retracted a story it published on Feb. 22, 2017, in which it reported that Gina Haspel oversaw a CIA black-site in Thailand where suspected al-Qaieda leader Abu Zubaydah was interrogated using waterboarding and other coercive interrogation methods.

The story had also claimed that Haspel mocked the prisoners suffering in a private conversation.

Neither of these assertions is correct and we retract them, said ProPublica in a retraction statement.

The article had become the source of hundreds of other news reports after Trump announced he had picked Haspel to become the first woman to lead the CIA as its director.

The Associated Press published a correction for a number of stories it published on Haspel that incorrectly stated she oversaw the CIA black site in Thailand and that she was connected to the interrogation of Zubaydah.

Neither of these assertions is correct and we retract them.  From a retraction statement by ProPublica

Many other media who repeated the false claims have not run corrections.

In general, retractions get limited notice, and so the potential damage of the misinformation in the original article is mostly unchecked.

Double Standard

Media Apply Double Standard in Evaluating Facebook Data Collection

The revelation that a privately held company, Cambridge Analytica, gathered data of Facebook users during the 2016 presidential election received fiercely negative coverage by many media organizations.

The company, which had been hired by the Trump campaign, had used a third-party company to conduct questionnaires for which users were requested to use their Facebook profile. Analysts were able to use the combined results to specifically target potential voters.

However, the same practice was described positively in 2012.

A Feb. 17, 2012, article published by The Guardian with the headline Obama, Facebook and the power of friendship: the 2012 data election said, Barack Obamas re-election team are building a vast digital data operation that for the first time combines a unified database on millions of Americans with the power of Facebook to target individual voters to a degree never achieved before.

The way the user data was obtained was very similar to the practices of Cambridge Analytica. People visiting the campaign website were asked to log on using their Facebook profile, providing the campaign with detailed user data.

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What You Need to Know About Earths Poles Shift 2018President Donald Trump signs trade sanctions against China in the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White House in Washington, DC, on March 22, 2018. The United States will impose tariffs up to $60 billion on Chinese goods to retaliate against the theft of American intellectual property, Trump said. (MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images)

Trump Hits China With Tariffs and Investment Restrictions

The punitive measures include $60 billion worth of annual tariffs on Chinese imports, said Trump

WASHINGTONPresident Donald Trump is taking measures against China to crack down on decades-long unfair trade practices that cost the U.S. economy billions of dollars.

Trump signed a Presidential Memorandum on March 22, directing the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) and the Department of Treasury to take actions based on the findings of the 301 investigation, which concluded that China had been unfairly acquiring U.S. intellectual property for decades.

Weve spoken to China and were in the midst of a very large negotiation. Well see where it takes us. But in the meantime were sending a Section 301 action, said Trump before signing the memorandum.

Trump orders the USTR to publish a proposed list of products and any intended tariff increases within 15 days of the signing of the memorandum. He also directs the Treasury Secretary to identify types of investment restrictions that will be imposed on Chinese companies investing in the United States.

The new tariffs on Chinese imports could be about $60 billion annually, according to Trump. And that is just a fraction of the problem, he said.

He pointed to the nations $375 billion trade deficit with China, adding: It is the largest deficit of any country in the history of our world. Its out of control.

We have a tremendous intellectual property theft situation going on, which likewise is hundreds of billions of dollars. And thats on a yearly basis, he said.

The tariffs wont be imposed immediately. U.S. industries will be given an opportunity to comment on the proposed tariffs. Their input will be taken into account before the final tariffs are put into place, according to the White House.

The value of tariffs has been calculated based on the harm caused in particular by the Chinese regimes practice of forced technology transfer, said Trumps senior trade adviser Peter Navarro, during a call with reporters.

What the United States is doing is simply strategically defending itself against this particular form of economic aggression, he said.

The restrictions on the Chinese investment in the United States will go beyond the mandate of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), which is an inter-agency committee that reviews the national security implications of foreign investments in the country.

The memorandum directs the Secretary of Treasury within 60 days to propose an executive branch action beyond those embedded within CFIUS to address concerns about unfair acquisitions or investments in the United States that is directed or facilitated by China in industries or technologies that are strategically important to the United States, said Everett Eissenstat, deputy director of the National Economic Council during the call with reporters.

The [USTR] report itself clearly demonstrates that there is an unfair practice by China particularly as it relates to their efforts to acquire U.S. technology and to favor Chinese companies over U.S. companies, he said.

In August last year, Trump signed a memorandum to tackle Chinas trade practices with regard to the theft and forced transfer of American intellectual property. The memorandum ordered U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer to examine Chinas trade practices.

As a result of this investigation, the Trump administration is now taking a tougher stance on the Chinese regimes protectionist policies.

Navarro said the punitive measures would mainly target 10 key industries of the future such as artificial intelligence, robotics, and quantum computing, which were identified in Beijings Made in China 2025 blueprint.

Technology is probably the most important part of our economy, said Lighthizer at the signing of the memorandum. There are 44 million people who work in high-technology areas. No country has as much technology-intensive industry as the United States.

Chinese Trade Policies and IP Theft

For decades, the Chinese regimes protectionist and trade-distorting policies have weakened the competitiveness of American companies.

According to the IP Commission report by the National Bureau of Asian Research, the annual cost of IP theft to the U.S. economy could be as high as $600 billion.

And China is the worlds top IP infringer, responsible for between 50 percent and 80 percent of all IP theft costs, according to the IP Commissions estimates.

China uses many tactics to steal information, such as forcing foreign companies to partner with domestic firms and hand over their technology and know-how to gain access to the Chinese market. Companies are also asked to relocate their production, research and development, and data storage to the country.

China has also gained illegal access to the computer networks of U.S. businesses and has often stolen their commercial information, according to the White House.

A previous Epoch Times investigative report revealed how the Chinese regime is stealing IP from American companies and universities, and selling the products made with the stolen innovations back to the United States at largely reduced prices.

Unilateral Action

The U.S. government could have resorted to using World Trade Organization (WTO) rules to deal with the issue. Instead, it has chosen unilateral action by invoking Section 301 of the U.S. Trade Act of 1974 to authorize the U.S. trade representative to begin an investigation of IP theft by China.

The White House is frustrated by the slow pace of the WTO, Scott Kennedy, deputy director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said in an interview last year.

Therefore, the U.S. government is resorting to unilateral action to move the process along more quickly and get results in time that are beneficial for American industry, he said.

The Trump administration thinks that other countries, mainly Japan and the European Union, will support U.S. efforts on tackling Chinese economic aggression.

We suspect there will be others who will find this action to be good in leading and showing that we can take action to drive necessary change for the world economy, a senior White House official said.

Were doing things for this country that should have been done for many many years. Weve had this abuse by many other countries and groups of countries that were put together in order to take advantage of the United States, Trump said.

Its probably one of the reasons I was elected, maybe one of the main reasons. But were not going to let that happen.They further reported, [W]e also found no association between recreational marijuana legalization and total crash rates when analyzing available state-reported non-fatal crash statistics.

Investigators also compared traffic safety trends in Colorado and Washington versus eight control states that had not altered their marijuana laws. They concluded, [C]hanges in motor vehicle crash fatality rates for Washington and Colorado were not statistically different from those in similar states without creational marijuana legalization.

Lets be clear  legalization neither creates nor normalizes the marijuana market. This market already exists, though in jurisdictions like Napa it remains largely underground and out of the publics eye.

The enactment of Proposition 64 is an opportunity for local lawmakers to bring these grey market marijuana-related activities above ground and to regulate them in a manner that is consistent with local values and in accordance with our commitment to public safety.

Paul Armentano is the Deputy Director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) and is the co-author of the book Marijuana Is Safer: So Why Are We Driving People to Drink (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2013).U.S. President Donald Trump holds his signed memorandum on intellectual property tariffs on high-tech goods from China, at the White House in Washington, U.S. on March 22, 2018. (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)

Trump Sets Into Motion $50 Billion in Tariffs on Chinese Goods. How Will China React?

President Donald Trump has just signed a memorandum to impose tariffs on Chinese imported goods worth about $50 to $60 billion annually as a penalty for Chinas theft of American intellectual property (IP).

The decision was made following the United States Trade Representatives (USTR) Section 301 investigation into Chinas trade practices involving the theft and forced transfer of American IP. A list of 1,300 targeted products will soon be released by the USTR office headed by Robert Lighthizer. He has previously said the tariffs will target Chinas high-tech sector.

The United States also plans to sue China at the World Trade Organization (WTO) for its trade violations regarding IP theft, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal.

For some numerical perspective, the annual cost of IP theft to the U.S. economy is estimated to be as high as $600 billion, according to the IP Commission, an independent group of experts who investigate the theft of American IP.

China is the worlds top IP infringer, responsible for 50 to 80 percent of all IP theft costs, the Commission estimated.

Meanwhile, the U.S. trade deficit with China has reached an all-time high of $375 billion.

The tariffs wont be imposed immediately. The public will have a chance to comment on the proposed tariffs before they are finalized.

Retaliation?

However, the news has already triggered fears of Chinese retaliation.

Chinas foreign ministry spokesperson, Hua Chunying, said on March 21 that while China does not intend to start a trade war, it is also not afraid, and will not hide from it, according to Voice of America.

Meanwhile, Beijings ambassador to the WTO, Zhang Xiangchen, told Reuters in an interview on March 22 that China was considering filing a WTO complaint against the newly-announced tariffs.

Some analysts have predicted that China may hit back with tariffs on Americas top exports, such as soybeans and pork products. Agricultural products make up most of U.S. exports to China, totaling $21 billion in 2016, according to the USTR office.

Others, however, believed China would show restraint. Hong Kong economist Andy Cheuk-Chiu Kwan told Radio Free Asia in a recent interview that China will not have an intense counter-attack, because if everyone did it, everyone would die together. He predicted that if tariff fights persisted, stock markets would suffer.

During Trumps announcement, he also expressed the possibility of a compromise. Weve spoken to China and were in the midst of a very large negotiation. Well see where it takes us, he said.

Former British Chambers of Commerce economic analyst Wu Kegang believed the real purpose behind the tariffs was to pressure Beijing into making policy changes regarding foreign firms operating in Chinafor instance, ending the demand that foreign firms transfer their technology to domestic joint-ventures in exchange for market access.

Forced technology transfers had been a point of frustration for many foreign businesses. In January 2017, the Chinese regime mandated that joint ventures demonstrate they have mastered all the technology for new energy vehicles before getting permission to produce the carsa policy that concerned many European auto manufacturers.

In an annual business climate survey conducted by the American Chamber of Commerce in China and published in January, 27 percent of American businesses cited lack of sufficient IP protection as a major barrier to increasing innovation. Another 15 percent answered IP localization requirements and/or technology transfer requirements.

Reuters contributed to this report.

Recommended Video: President Donald Trumps Weekly AddressMarch 10, 2018Communist China Uses Vatican to Legitimize Its Organ Transplant System

Ethics group condemns Vaticans support without evidence of reform in China

In a move condemned by a transplant ethics group, the Vatican has granted legitimacy to Chinas organ transplant system by inviting the head of the Chinese communist regimes official transplant registry to speak at a Vatican panel earlier this month.

For the past two decades, patients in desperate need of an organ transplant have traveled to China for surgery, where they report being able to procure a matching organ within days, weeks, or monthsfar shorter than the waiting periods in their home countries, where organs are obtained from donations.

Through extensive investigations conducted by human rights lawyer David Matas and former Canadian Secretary of State for Asia-Pacific David Kilgour, evidence has emerged that the Chinese regime is harvesting organs from prisoners of conscience. The investigators research indicates that most of the prisoners, who are killed in the process, are adherents of the spiritual practice Falun Gong, a meditation-based discipline that has been severely suppressed by the Chinese regime since 1999.

International condemnation prompted the Chinese regime to establish a national voluntary organ donation system, called the China Organ Transplant Response System (COTRS), in 2013, which the state claims is the only means by which it distributes donated organs. In 2015, the regime also announced that it no longer obtained organs from executed prisoners.

These claims of reform appeared to have appeased the Vatican enough for it to invite the head of the COTRS, Wang Haibo, to speak at a conference hosted by the Pontifical Academy of Sciences on March 12. The theme of the conference was Modern Slavery, Human Trafficking, and Access to Justice for the Poor and Vulnerable.

Reports of organ transplants performed in China without transparency regarding sourcingand with matching organs found for patients within only days and weeks continue to emerge.

However, the Chinese regime has yet to enact new regulations or laws expressly prohibiting the procurement of organs from prisoners. Meanwhile, reports of organ transplants performed in China without transparency regarding sourcingand with matching organs found for patients within only days and weekscontinue to emerge.

Chinas official organ donation data also lacks transparency, raising further concerns that the regimes claims of reforms are not credible, according to a letter drafted by members of the International Coalition to End Transplant Abuse in China, a group of medical professionals, academics, lawyers, and human rights advocates who seek to end the practice of forced organ harvesting in China.

In an open letter to the Vatican published on March 19, the coalition highlighted discrepancies and flaws in the Chinese regimes data reporting. They called on the Pontifical Academy, which organized a conference on organ trafficking in 2017, to reserve its judgement about claims of total reform of Chinas transplant system.

The coalition noted that the regime has 12 different official databases for transplant activity, none of which are accessible to the public. Meanwhile, the COTRS only provides a total number of donated organs and donors, without any breakdown by hospital, locality, or time periodmaking it impossible to confirm the veracity of the numbers, according to the letter.

Medical ethics requires public access to organ transplant databases, such as the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) in the United States, according to human rights expert and Coalition member Louisa Greve. The U.S. database provides data on every organ donation and transplant since Oct. 1, 1987, with medical data on organ donors, recipients, and candidates who are on the national waiting list, according to the UNOS website.

Without that kind of transparency in Chinas organ transplant data, its irresponsible for international organizations to accept reform claims by an authoritarian government with a completely opaque organ-procurement system, said Greve, in an email interview. She called on the Pontifical Academy, the World Health Organization (WHO), and the Transplantation Society to cease cooperating with the Chinese regime until it can provide such data.

The Chinese regime has continually refused to acknowledge the procurement of organs from prisoners of conscience, who are often sentenced outside of judicial proceedings.

In a March 14 interview with Italian newspaper La Stampa, Wang claimed that China allows for religious freedom and does not procure organs from political prisoners. There is no capital punishment for political prisoners, Wang said.

Despite the regimes 2015 claim that it stopped taking organs from executed prisoners, the medical community remains concerned about unethical organ transplant practices in China. In several medical journals, including the American Journal of Transplantation and the Journal of Medical Ethics, doctors have called for a ban on working with transplant doctors in China until reforms can be independently verified.

Recent reports have discussed an implausible discrepancy of officially reported steady annual transplant numbers and a steep expansion of the transplant infrastructure in China, read an August 2016 article in the American Journal of Transplantation. Until we have independent and objective evidence of a complete cessation of unethical organ procurement from prisoners, the medical community has a professional responsibility to maintain the academic embargo on Chinese transplant professionals.

The Congressional-Executive Commission on China, a U.S. governmental agency that monitors human rights in China, released its annual report in October 2017, where it noted that the medical community was troubled by reports that numerous organ transplants in China have used the organs of detained prisoners, including Falun Gong practitioners, and was skeptical of a Chinese health officials claims that organ procurement systems have been reformed in compliance with international standards.



Recommended Video:

How Doctors in China Turn into MurderersZuckerberg Apologizes for Facebook Data Breach

SAN FRANCISCOFacebook founder Mark Zuckerberg apologized on Wednesday March 22 for mistakes his company made in how it handled data belonging to 50 million of its users and promised tougher steps to restrict developers access to such information.

The worlds largest social media network is facing growing government scrutiny in Europe and the United States about a whistleblowers allegations that London-based political consultancy Cambridge Analytica improperly accessed user information to build profiles on American voters.

This was a major breach of trust. Im really sorry this happened. We have a basic responsibility to protect peoples data, Zuckerberg said in an interview with CNN, breaking a public silence since the scandal erupted at the weekend.

Zuckerberg said in a Facebook post the company made mistakes, theres more to do, and we need to step up and do it.

He said the social network planned to conduct an investigation of thousands of apps that have used Facebooks platform, restrict developer access to data, and give members a tool that lets them to disable access to their Facebook data more easily.

His plans did not represent a big reduction of advertisers ability to use Facebook data, which is the companys lifeblood.

Zuckerberg said he was open to additional government regulation and happy to testify before the U.S. Congress if he was the right person.

Im not sure we shouldnt be regulated, he told CNN. I actually think the question is more what is the right regulation rather than yes or no, should it be regulated?  People should know who is buying the ads that they see on Facebook.

Zuckerberg said Facebook was committed to stopping interference in the U.S. midterm election in November and elections in India and Brazil.

Investor Fears

Facebook shares pared gains on Wednesday after Zuckerbergs post, closing up 0.7 percent. The company has lost more than $45 billion of its stock market value over the past three days on investor fears that any failure by big tech firms to protect personal data could deter advertisers and users and invite tougher regulation.

Zuckerberg told the New York Times in an interview published on Wednesday he had not seen a meaningful number of people deleting their accounts over the scandal.

Facebook representatives, including Deputy Chief Privacy Officer Rob Sherman, met U.S. congressional staff for nearly two hours on Wednesday and planned to continue meetings on Capitol Hill on Thursday. Facebook was unable to answer many questions, two aides who attended the briefing said.

Zuckerberg told the website Recode that fixes to protect users data would cost many millions of dollars.

The whistleblower who launched the scandal, Christopher Wylie, formerly of Cambridge Analytica, said on Twitter he had accepted invitations to testify before U.S. and UK lawmakers.

The German government said Facebook must explain whether the personal data of the countrys 30 million users were protected from unlawful use by third parties, according to a report in the Funke group of German regional newspapers.

Scapegoat

Psychologist Aleksandr Kogan, who provided data to Cambridge Analytica by running a survey app on Facebook, said he was being made a scapegoat by Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. Both companies have blamed Kogan for alleged data misuse.

I think what Cambridge Analytica has tried to sell is magic, and theyve made claims that this is incredibly accurate and it tells you everything there is to tell about you. But I think the reality is its not that, Kogan, an academic at Cambridge University, told the BBC in an interview.

Only 300,000 Facebook users responded to Kogans quiz, but that gave the researcher access to those peoples Facebook friends as well, who had not agreed to share information, producing details on 50 million users.

Facebook has said it subsequently made changes that prevent people from sharing data about friends and maintains that no breach occurred because the original users gave permission. Critics say that it essentially was a breach because data of unsuspecting friends was taken.

Analysts have raised concerns that the incident will reduce user engagement with Facebook, potentially lessening its clout with advertisers. Three Wall Street brokerages cut their price targets.

Investors now have to consider whether or not the company will conclude that it has grown in a manner that has proven to be untenable, said Pivotal Research Group analyst Brian Wieser.

The company has risen more than 550 percent in value in the past five years.NORWALK  Parents of Students for a Dream (PS4D) celebrated its fourth benefit gala A Night in Hollywood at the South Norwalk Community Center on Saturday, March 10.

Special guests were Lucas Codognolla born in Brazil, and Tashi Sanchez-Llaury born in Peru. The audience was captivated, inspired, and moved by the these Dreamers stories. Young immigrants who arrived as children to the United States risking it all for a chance at their American dream. Young fighters that have achieved a professional career through their effort, dedication and hard work. Their messages to the undocumented youth were of encouragement stating that despite any challenges they will face with their lives, they should continue with their dreams and contribute to their communities.NORWALK  Darius Williams calls himself an advocate.

At Brien McMahon High School, he is an advocate for students with disabilities as the president of the Best Buddies chapter. In Norwalk and beyond, he is an advocate for the equality of rights of all people and the elimination of race-based discrimination as the current interim treasurer for the Connecticut NAACP Youth and College division and the former president of the Norwalk NAACP Youth Council.

And on Saturday, Williams will be an advocate once more. But this time for an issue he recently felt compelled to speak out about: a demand for the safety of students lives and the end of gun violence in schools and in communities.

As he did at Norwalks March for Gun Reform earlier this month, Williams will speak at the March for Our Lives in Stamford  one of more than 800 marches planned worldwide.

One life isnt more important than another and I think that we need to instill the value of life in one another, said Williams, a senior. I think thats whats missing.

Williams said his message will touch on several aspects he wants to re-emphasize in the national discourse on recent school shootings: the use of high grade weapons in recent killings, the mental health component of access to guns, and overall greater gun control.

But his overarching message will be for his fellow youth to get out and to make sure that their voices are heard.

Theres strength in numbers and theres strength in our voices, and I hope our movement will help people find their voices, find their own individuality because we cant all think the same way, Williams said. We all have to accept one anothers differences and opinions.

This is an issue that pertains to ones life. We cant play politics with this, he added.

Fifteen-year-old Charlotte Baekey of Norwalk will also be taking the spotlight at the March for Our Lives, though she will be at the Hartford rally. An organizer for the march reached out after seeing her audition in Connecticuts Got Talent and asked her if she could open the event by singing the national anthem.

To be perfectly honest, at first I was kind of skeptical and kind of worried, she said  not about performing in front of thousands of people (over 14,000 people have indicated their interest on the Facebook event), but because of the counter-protesters she knows will attend.

At these things, there are always people there to be intimidating you  like NRA guys who have assault rifles.

But she saw the march as a way to empower both her friends and people she didnt know very well. She was moved by the school walkouts on March 14 and believes it is important to continue to act. It was really powerful that so many students were getting involved because this is about them, she said. It made me feel really hopeful and empowered to know that Im not alone. And I also felt proud of my generation and what weve already done.

Xuan Kusek, a junior at Brien McMahon, also plans on attending the march in Stamford with other student members of the high schools Center for Youth Leadership, where the largest youth activism organization in Fairfield County is headquartered.

They will either freeze at one point in the march to signify how time stops when a school shooting happens, hold signs with phrases calling for more restrictions on guns, or drop in place at a specific time.

Kusek believes such acts of peaceful protest lead to change. And so, she is trying to get as many students and adults to join her on Saturday.

I wholeheartedly belive that students should be safe in school and, personally, I do not think that the answer is to provide weapons under any circumstances, Kusek said. I think weapons are part of the problem, and that we should not be afraid of someone coming in with an automatic weapon and killing multiple people.

Similarly, fellow Center for Youth Leadership member Valentina Zuleta feels the issues they are standing up for are bound to be resolved if they keep on marching.

I feel that that the government is so focused on other things and right now, with all these shootings happening in schools, its important to show that were the next generation and that this should not be happening at school," said Zuleta, a senior. Schools should be a safe environment for students to come and learn.WESTPORT  A student who allegedly threatened to shoot a teacher and had thoughts of executing a mass shooting at Staples High School has been charged with a misdemeanor.

Around 9 a.m. Feb. 27, Westport Police were contacted by Staples High School officials and advised a juvenile male student was overheard making threats to shoot a teacher, police said.

Due to his age, police said they will not reveal the identity of the suspect.

The student who overhead the threat reported it to school officials and when officers and detectives arrived at the high school, the suspect was being interviewed by school administration. Police said it was confirmed the student had thoughts of executing a mass shooting at the high school.

Safety concerns forced Staples High School to shelter in place before being dismissed early and the threat prompted a massive investigation involving multiple police departments.

Members of the detective and youth bureaus of the Westport Police ultimately obtained an arrest warrant for and order to detain the student.

In the early morning hours of March 20, the student turned himself in at police headquarters on the outstanding warrant. The juvenile was charged with second-degree threatening, a class A misdemeanor.

The witness and suspect were interviewed. We spoke to friends and family members and concluded that was the charge that fit the situation, Lt. Jillian Cabana said.

The Staples student was transported to the Juvenile Detention Center in Bridgeport March 20 and scheduled to appear in court later in the day, police said.

Cabana said she heard the suspect was held at the center only until his hearing and was released following the hearing.

Because the hearing was conducted in juvenile court, the court records related to the case are sealed.

Mark Sherman, a defense attorney with a practice in Stamford, was not involved in the case involving the Staples student, but has handled many juvenile cases throughout his 20-year career. He said the charge against the student seemed appropriate.

Its a very fair and measured charge by state prosecutors. It allows the court system to get involved and provide services for the defendant and at the same time, does not ruin his future of reputation, Sherman said. There was potential to charge someone with felonies and transfer to adult court but it appears they were very measured and fair to all sides.

Juvenile court is not about punishing teenagers, the defense attorney explained, but rather, in cases like the one involving the Staples student, about making the incident a teaching moment and offering services, such as anger management counseling and cognitive therapy to youth who may not be getting those services at home.

The juvenile court is really meant to rehabilitate kids, Sherman said.Over 2017, major media outlets published innumerable articles discussing the challenges that most cannabis businesses face when trying to raise money -- especially taking into account that traditional small business loans are not available for an industry that is still deemed illegal by the federal U.S. government. While the challenges remain very real, things are changing rapidly, with the pace of investments ramping up quickly and conditions for these marijuana businesses ameliorating consistently.

Let's take the Viridian Cannabis Deal Tracker, a unique database that tracks capital raises and M&A activity in the cannabis industry, as reference. As per Viridian Capital Advisors' data, the first five weeks of 2018 saw investments in marijuana companies exceed the $1.2 billion mark, matching deals for all of 2016. Furthermore, in the first 60 days of the year, the cannabis industry has gotten almost $2 billion in new funds -- year-to-date through March 2. This compares to $456.6 million in raises for the first nine weeks of 2017.

Now, the marked surge in investments coupled with a substantial rise in the size of the average raise (which went from $6.2 million in the first 60 days of 2017 to $15.5 million in the first 60 days of 2018), signal not only an increased interest in the cannabis industry, but also better conditions to raise money for cannabis companies, and thus, an larger desire to do so. The argument is pretty simple, though: More liquidity means more opportunity.

Interestingly, Viridian's president Scott Greiper told me that the larger players in the investment space are either funding public companies up in Canada or backing private companies in the U.S. -- but not a lot in public companies in the Land of the Free.

"Penny stocks, public over-the-counter stocks in the U.S. are dissuading the larger investors from putting money into public companies here," Greiper said.

Sophistication of a certain kind

One of the most interesting trends for entrepreneurs coming into the cannabis industry is the ability to raise money from people beyond their uncles, parents and friends. "Access to more sophisticated investors has improved materially over the last couple of years," Greiper agreed.

"That talks not only to the amount of capital coming in, but to the fact that investors are willing to place larger bets on earlier stage companies. So, the ability to get funded is better today than it was over the last three or four years."

In addition, investors are willing to take equity in companies, instead of just debt, like they used to. Let's take a look into what that means.

Equity raises on the rise

Beyond the fact that money going into U.S. cannabis companies is largely attracted by private companies, the other big underlying trend here is the transition from debt-backed raises to equity-backed raises. As the Tracker shows, roughly 85 percent of the raises completed over the first 60 days of the year used equity structures, up from 72.9 percent in the same period last year.

"This reflects a change in investor risk tolerance, i.e., the fact that investors are pursuing the financial upside as equity investors, rather than just trying to protect their downside risk as lenders," Greiper noted.

As Greiper explained in my Entrepreneur Press book, Start Your Own Cannabis Business, "Back in 2014, most companies were raising debt. No matter what kind of debt, the fact of the matter is that, for an emerging growth company without a lot of existing revenues, cash flow, or big backlog of forward revenues, you may be in a position where you can't either service the debt and keep it current, or pay off the debt when it comes due (...) And this is a real problem, because then someone else will own your company."

Take a look at the chart below, shared by Viridian:

In 2014, many companies could only get loans. Either straight loans or convertible loans, Viridians vice president Harrison Phillips added. Now, equity raises are much more common.

Learn all about funding a cannabis business in Start Your Own Cannabis Business, available for pre-order following this link.

Picture by Javier Hasse.

Related:

What Better Conditions to Raise Money for Cannabis Businesses Means for Marijuana Entrepreneurs

This Serial Entrepreneur Shows How His Business Plan Earned Him a Career in Cannabis

How This Former Marine Turned His PTSD Into a Multi-Million-Dollar Business in 60 Days



Copyright 2018 Entrepreneur.com Inc., All rights reserved



This article originally appeared on entrepreneur.com

From the small speaker in the phone I was being yelled at in concern of $1,000 and I better get my lower posterior body part down to the bar and explain myself. Okay?

I arrived and soon discovered through a large amount of discussion that after the band had packed up and left, an individual appeared in the bar claiming to be from a performance rights organization.

They further claimed to be a logger, someone who records the songs that are performed in the bar that are licensed with the performance rights organization he represents. Given that, the individual proceeded to read off the songs that my band had played that were licensed by his organization and performed the prior evening.

Further, after conclusion the individual demanded 10 percent of the gross proceeds out of the till from the bar owner for the music performance.

Of course the bar owner complained but not having any experience or knowledge in the music business, the bar owner paid in cash the money to the logger. Then complained some more and the logger replied that the bar owner should collect reimbursement from the musician, (thats me), for after all it was the band that performed the licensed music.1 hour ago

The Pandemic Induced Higher Divorce Rates. Here's What it Can Do to Your Finances

You've probably heard the oft-quoted "half of all marriages end in divorce" statistic. But in reality, on the whole, divorce is on the decline in the United States and has been since the 1980s.

Read ArticleThere is a saying in the wine business that it takes a lot of good beer to make great wine.

After a long day during harvest, many winemakers will agree that a refreshing, low-alcohol beer is exactly what is needed. So, what would happen if hops were added to wine? Would you get the best of both worlds? Well, that is what winemaker Karen Steinwachs did and wouldnt you know it, hop-infused wine is quite tasty.

Steinwachs has been making wine in the Santa Ynez Valley for more than a decade and is the winemaker at Buttonwood Farm Winery and Vineyard. In addition to making wine, Karen sits on the board of World of Pinot Noir and each year during the technical symposium that takes place prior to the festival, 60-70 winemakers get together to taste the current vintage of wine.

They also bring interesting wines from new vineyard wines to experimental wines, to share and discuss. In 2014, Scar of the Sea winemaker Mikey Giugni, who also makes cider, brought a hopped cider for everyone to try at the symposium and it was so delicious, it is what all of the winemakers drank at dinner that night, Karen recalled.

Karen kept thinking, if Mikey can add hops to cider made with apples, why couldnt she do it with wine? After all, like many winemakers, Karen loves beer and it might just be in her DNA.For Subscribers Noem's shift on curriculum highlights disconnect with education dept.

Lawmaker says revision process was highjacked by 'leftist bureaucrats' in South Dakota Department of Education.The Bank of Canadas senior deputy governor is calling for authorities to work toward a coherent set of globally aligned policies governing cryptocurrencies.

Carolyn Wilkins told a University of Toronto conference that such a strategy will need to cover risks in both cash and derivatives products, as well as the related ecosystems.

She referred to cryptocurrencies as crypto assets, rather than currencies because they do not perform any of the key functions of money. Her concern, she noted, was with the product and not the underlying digital ledger technology, which the central bank is testing.

She cautions that although activity involving cryptocurrencies might be too small to be systemic, at some point they could have financial stability implications.

Wilkins says that risk raises concerns about investor protection, market integrity and the use of crypto assets in illegal activities.

Her comments come after the central bank governor raised concerns earlier this year about cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin.

Read more:

U.S. bans use of Venezuela cryptocurrency, imposes new sanctions on senior officials

Cryptojacking hacker trend turns Canadian web surfers into cryptocurrency miners

Google to ban ads for cryptocurrencies, initial coin offerings in broad crackdown

Read more about:BEIJINGChina announced a list of U.S. goods including pork, apples and steel pipe it said Friday may be hit with higher import duties in response to U.S. President Donald Trumps tariff hike on steel and aluminum.

The Commerce Ministry called on Washington to negotiate a settlement as soon as possible but set no deadline.

A ministry statement said the higher U.S. tariffs seriously undermine the global trading system.

Read more:

Trump plans to slap China with $50 billion in new tariffs and investment restrictions on Thursday

The Chinese side urges the U.S. side to resolve the concerns of the Chinese side as soon as possible, the ministry said. It appealed for dialogue to avoid damage to overall Chinese-U.S. co-operation.

Goods targeted for possible higher Chinese tariffs include wine, apples and ethanol, which would hit agricultural areas where voters supported Trump in the 2016 presidential election.

The ministry said China bought about $1 billion worth of those goods last year. They would be hit with a 15 per cent tariff increase, mirroring the U.S. duty hike of 15 per cent on aluminum.

A second group of products targeted for a possible 25 per cent tariff, mirroring the higher American charge on steel, includes pork and aluminum scrap, according to the ministry.

On Thursday, Chinas ambassador to the U.S. warned Trump the Asian nation would return fire on tariffs the U.S. president announced, saying the American middle class would pay the price.

We dont want a trade war, Chinese ambassador Cui Tiankai said in a video posted to the embassys Facebook page. But we are not afraid of it.

The president instructed U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer to levy tariffs on at least $50 billion (U.S.) of Chinese imports, citing allegations China violates U.S. intellectual property. Trump signed an executive memo issuing the instructions on Thursday at the White House. Within 15 days, USTR will come up with a proposed list of products that will face higher tariffs.

Cui said accusations of intellectual property violations are groundless and his country will certainly fight back and retaliate. If people want to play tough, we will play tough with them and see who will last longer. 

Cui said Trumps trade sanctions against China make no economic sense because the escalating conflict will affect the daily life of American middle-class people, the balance sheet of American companies and the indexes of the financial market.

The Chinese embassy in Washington later echoed Cuis comments in a written statement, calling Trumps tariffs self-defeating.

China does not want a trade war with anyone. But China is not afraid of and will not recoil from a trade war, the embassy said in a statement sent to reporters. If a trade-war were initiated by the U.S., China would fight to the end to defend its own legitimate interests with all necessary measures.

With files from Bloomberg

Read more about:This is the story of a little gay bunny.

A little gay bunny who belongs to U.S. Vice President Mike Pence.

A little fictional gay bunny whose book is beating the memoir of James B. Comey, the former FBI director, on the Amazon best-seller list.

This is the story of Marlon Bundo, the Instagram star and real-life pet of the vice presidents family, who is also the subject of two dueling childrens books released this week.

The first, Marlon Bundos Day in the Life of the Vice President, is a picture book written by Pences daughter Charlotte that focuses on the bunnys observations of the vice president, with illustrations by his wife, Karen.

The other, Last Week Tonight With John Oliver Presents A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo, is a gay romance between two bunnies that was the brainchild of HBO comedy host John Oliver.

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver Presents a Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo is beating the official childrens book on the vice presidents bunny on the charts.







So far, that is the more popular of the two.

Oliver revealed the book, which was written by Jill Twiss and credits the titular bunny as a co-author, on his weekly late-night show on Sunday. He described it as a mocking rebuke of the vice presidents longtime opposition to gay and transgender rights.

Please buy it for your children, buy it for any child you know or buy it because you know it would annoy Mike Pence, Oliver told his viewers. Parody aside, he assured them, This is a real book for children.

And buy it they have. By Tuesday the book, which beat Charlotte Pences to Amazon by two days, had risen to the No. 1 spot on the websites best-seller list, knocking preordered copies of the upcoming memoir by James Comey down to No. 2. Oliver told Ellen DeGeneres during her show on Tuesday that the hardcover edition had sold out and is receiving a second printing. It is still available on Kindle and audiobook.

Pences book on Marlon Bundo had reached No. 4 on the list by Wednesday morning.

Comeys book, A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership, has been highly anticipated for potential insights it could provide into the tumultuous Trump White House and Comeys abrupt dismissal as director of the FBI last year.

Dueling tweets over the weekend between President Donald Trump and Comey appeared to have propelled enough advance orders to lift Comeys memoir to the top spot. The memoir, scheduled to be released April 17, has been advertised as a frank account of Comeys never-before-told experiences from some of the highest-stakes situations of his career.

Olivers book is very different from that.

In it, Marlon Bundo, a snappily dressed bunny with a penchant for bright bow ties, falls in love with a bespectacled boy bunny named Wesley. Things seem to be going pretty well for the two lovebirds (love bunnies?) until a powerful stink bug who bears a striking resemblance to Pence decrees that male bunnies cannot marry each other.

In the grand tradition of childrens literature, the story ends on a happy note. An image released by the books publisher, Chronicle Books, shows Marlon Bundo and Wesley standing in a field, wearing tuxedos, as a cat in clerical garb marries them.

The tale also comes in the form of an audiobook voiced by a string of celebrities including Jim Parsons as Marlon Bundo and John Lithgow as the stink bug, as well as Ellie Kemper, Jesse Tyler Ferguson and RuPaul. On Tuesday, it also beat Comeys audiobook to be the No. 1 best-seller on Audible.

Oliver played clips from a cartoon version of the audiobook on his show on Sunday. In it, Marlon Bundo introduces himself to Wesley as BOTUS.

Its short for Bunny of the United States, he says, with typical first-date awkwardness. Its a long story.

Charlotte Pences book is more sober childrens fare and it is not known if it identifies Marlon Bundos sexual orientation at all.

Charlotte Pence seemed to take the John Oliver parody in stride. His book is contributing to charities that I think we can all get behind, she said in an interview with Fox Business Network on Tuesday. We have two books giving to charities that are about bunnies, so Im all for it really.

Some of the proceeds from her book will be donated to A21, an organization that fights human trafficking. Oliver said all of his books profits would be donated to The Trevor Project, a charity for LGBT youth, and AIDS United.

That was a pointed jab at Mike Pence, who is a longtime opponent of LGBT rights, which he opposed as both governor of Indiana and a member of Congress.

Read more about:This year is the bicentennial of the founding of the University of Virginia, so its a good time to visit what some say Thomas Jefferson considered to be his proudest achievement.

Even for a college town with a sophisticated student population, Charlottesville seems to have a higher per capita ratio of foodies than other cities. There are enough restaurants that a local food writer creates the annual Charlottesville 29, and that list includes a diverse mix of farm-to-table, Mexican, Asian, new American and seafood restaurants. Perhaps thanks in part to Jeffersons own forays into winemaking and the climate of the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, the countryside around the city is home to a thriving wine scene, including the Monticello Wine Trail.

Start the day at the Corner, the neighbourhood that is C-Villes main centre of activity, just adjacent to the entrance to the grounds of the University of Virginia (which cognoscenti know is never called its campus).

A friendly, homey choice is the Pigeon Hole (the-pigeon-hole.site123.me, 11 Elliewood Ave., 434-984-0078), in a boxy, periwinkle house. Its front patio, wooden porch and inside rooms are set up for dining. Some satisfying breakfast items are the Pigeons in a Hole, two eggs cooked over easy inside holed-out toast ($7 U.S.); or the egg biscuits, eggs scrambled with cheese and tucked inside two fluffy biscuits ($8.50). Choose home fries, which are spicy enough that I had to ask the waitress what was in them. (I think cinnamon?) The coffee is an endless cup ($3) and the chocolate chip pancakes are dark with chips ($8.50). Since this is a small place, its a good idea to come early enough to beat out UVA students working off a night of partying, especially if a Cavaliers team won the day before.

Mels Cafe (719 W. Main St., 434-971-8819), in a 1960s-era building on the edge of what was Vinegar Hill, the African American neighbourhood razed in the 1960s in the name of urban development, is situated midway between Charlottesvilles downtown mall and the university. The walls are decorated with newspaper pictures from the inauguration of president Barack Obama, and some kind of sporting event is always playing on the TV above the counter. Mel Walker, the owner and chef, greets each customer whether they are regulars or out-of-towners who stumble upon the casual place. Students might be drawn by the prices, but the tender fried chicken will make you forever compare all other fried chicken to Mels. For less than $8, youll get a platter with two substantial pieces of chicken and two sides, including mashed potatoes with gravy and coleslaw. The burgers ($3.50 for a five-ounce burger and $4.70 for an eight-ouncer) are juicy and fresh, and the iced tea is very sweet. Nonetheless, we treated ourselves to a slice of sweet potato pie ($2.25) to top off the meal.

In a rustic building near the former C&O train station, the C&O Restaurant (candorestaurant.com, 515 E. Water St., 434-971-7044), has been in existence in some form since 1976. Today, in contrast to its rough-and-ready exterior and barn wood floors, the restaurant serves locally sourced, sophisticated new American cuisine. The upstairs room once served as a sleeping area for workers from the nearby railroad, but today is a cosy and intimate spot for a meal. Start with a Lone Tree, a smooth cocktail made with vermouth and gin, served with a lemon twist. Favourites were the very rich pear and pecorino ravioli appetizer ($15), and the braised lamb in a tomato sauce with ricotta gnocchi ($16). Also tasty: roasted Scottish salmon with puy lentils ($30) and seared scallops with whipped cauliflower and a golden-raisin caper sauce ($16). If you can save room, the sticky toffee pudding with mascarpone ($9) or the chocolate bread pudding with caramel sauce ($9) are luscious.VANCOUVERAlmost two months since an Iranian-Canadian professor died in a Tehran prison, his sons still havent had a moment to grieve.

Mehran Seyed-Emami says its too important to get his mother Maryam Mombeini safely to Canada and out of Iran to focus on anything else.

Her sons say Iranian authorities blocked Mombeini from boarding a Vancouver-bound plane with her sons in Tehran two weeks ago and confiscated her passport.

The longer we wait, the higher the risk of something potentially happening to her, he said in an interview. Me and my brother are trying to stay strong, trying to get my mom home as soon as possible. And then, we can grieve together.

He said hes grateful for the Canadian governments efforts to secure her release. Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland has spoken with Mombeini directly twice, he said.

But he also understands its capacity is limited, since Canada does not have an embassy in Iran and must depend on allies such as Italy to act as diplomatic conduits.

On Monday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tweeted: Iran must allow Maryam Mombeini to leave the country and travel to Canada to be with her family  and the regime must provide answers in the death of her husband, Kavous Seyed-Emami, in Evin prison.

Mehran Seyed-Emami described his father as a calm and balanced man, who taught sociology at Imam Sadeq University in Tehran for 27 years, before he was arrested on Jan. 24 and sent to the countrys notorious Evin prison.

He believes it was his fathers work as managing director of the Persian Wildlife Heritage Foundation that made him a potential target. The foundation largely worked to protect the endangered Asiatic cheetah, an animal Mehran Seyed-Emami described as a symbol of hope and strength for the Iranian people. The organization had support from the United Nations and other international organizations, he said.

In February, Tehran prosecutor Abbas Jafari Dolatabadi said authorities had arrested several unidentified people on suspicion of spying under the cover of scientific and environmental projects.

Theres a term: Youre afraid of what you dont understand. And I think this was one of those cases, because they were doing highly academic and scientific work ... They thought if someone from the UN or an international organization comes (to Iran), they must be spies, Mehran Seyed-Emami said.

Read more:

Iranian-Canadian professor dies in Tehran prison

Conservative senator calls out Liberals over response to Iranian-Canadian professors reported suicide in prison

Death of Iranian-Canadian professor in Tehran latest suspicious fatality in crackdown on dissent

The familys home was raided by dozens of people, who packed 10 suitcases worth of their belonging, including photo albums and the deed to the home, he said.

After two weeks of silence from the authorities, Mombeini was summoned to the prosecutors office on the pretense that she could see her husband and it would help his case. Instead, she was interrogated for four hours, before being shown her husbands body, Mehran Seyed-Emami said.

Iranian authorities have said Kavous Seyed-Emamis death was a suicide, but the family and others have questioned that finding. This is the kind of cruelty weve been dealing with, the kind of trauma that can scar you for life, the son said.

Mombeini and her sons planned to start a new life in Vancouver, where they had lived for eight years after getting Canadian citizenship in 1998. She insisted her sons go without her when she was blocked at the gate.

Since then, the brothers have remained in regular contact with their mother via digital chat apps, Mehran Seyed-Emami said.

Our home is probably bugged and there are probably microphones in our house, but we dont mind. Even when minister Freeland called, we put it on speakerphone. We want them to hear this, we want them to know the whole world is watching, the whole world is listening, he said.

Tuesday, which marked the Persian Norwuz celebration, was bittersweet for the family. They chatted digitally, with Mombeini in Iran, Mehran Seyed-Emami in Vancouver and his brother Ramin Seyed-Emami in New York.

But Mehran Seyed-Emami said they are motivated by the promise of being together once again.

Its the opposite of what any of us would have expected or anticipated if youd asked us a couple of months ago. Were in this chaotic predicament, which no one could have expected, he said.

Yet we have a sense of responsibility and duty  not just for us, not just for our family, but perhaps for other families to hopefully prevent these kinds of things from happening.

Read more about:OTTAWAThe head of Canadas cyberspy agency says new powers proposed by the Trudeau government would let her institution stop cyberattacks before they are launched  instead of having to sit back and wait for them to happen.

Communications Security Establishment chief Greta Bossenmaier made the comments to a parliamentary committee in which she revealed the agency has been working overtime to block attacks on federal networks.

The problem includes up to one billion attempts to compromise federal government information systems every day, which includes everything from poking to malware to dedicated hacking.

Have your say

Bossenmaier says Bill C-59 would help nip some of those attacks in the bud as well as target terrorist groups and support military missions by giving the CSE the power to launch its own offensive cyber operations.

The governments plan to let the CSE to launch cyberattacks has raised a variety of questions over the last year, including the process for authorizing such an operation and how the agency will ensure it doesnt target Canadians.

Defence Minister Harjit Sajjan and CSE officials told the committee that there were strict approval processes and oversight provisions within the legislation, and that the law forbids any action against Canadians or targets in Canada.

Read more:

Ottawas privacy watchdog wants limits on spies information collecting powers

Liberals pitch $500 million cybersecurity plan

Total information warfare a threat to democracy: CSIS reportThe joint ICEX-2018 exercise of the United States, the UK, Canada and Norway began in the Arctic in March 2018. Three nuclear submarines surfaced through the ice of the Beaufort Sea. The Izvestia daily writes about growing military activities of the regional countries.

BEAUFORT SEA (March 10, 2018) The Seawolf-class fast-attack submarine USS Connecticut (SSN 22) and the Los Angeles-class fast-attack submarine USS Hartford (SSN 768) break through the ice March 10, 2018 in support of Ice Exercise (ICEX) 2018. ICEX 2018 is a five-week exercise that allows the Navy to assess its operational readiness in the Arctic, increase experience in the region, advance understanding of the Arctic environment, and continue to develop relationships with other services, allies and partner organizations. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication 2nd Class Micheal H. Lee/Released)

The Skate polar station was set up in the surfacing area. The camp with a power generator, helipad and an ice airstrip ensured the work of 50 people. The personnel serviced the submarines and their arms and, in particular, ensured torpedo fire, search, surfacing, maintenance and recharging of torpedoes.



The exercise engaged two US submarines - the Los Angeles-class Hartfort SSN-768 and the Seawolf-class Connecticut SSN-22 - and the British Trafalgar-class Trenchant. They searched for a proper surfacing place through the ice, trained surface and underwater navigation in high latitudes, escape from icebergs, radio communications in the Arctic, as well as submarine search and torpedo fire.



Divers from the submarines submerged under the ice to inspect submarine hulls and equipment. Actually, the US Navy and its key allies from Arctic countries trained combat engagement of the submarines in high latitudes.



The biennial ICEX exercise has been regularly held since 2007. In 2011 and 2012 the maneuvers were held each year but returned to the biennial cycle after 2012 and are held in even-numbered years.

The aim is clear. The US and its allies eye Arctic resources in their economic zone and in neutral waters. The gradual melting of ice in the Arctic triggers interest in the resources and transit capabilities of the Arctic seas.



As dozens of years ago, the Arctic remains an area of Russian-US military standoff as the shortest airways from Russia to mainland United States go over the region.

BEAUFORT SEA (March 15, 2018) The Royal Navy hunter killer submarine HMS Trenchant (S 91) surfaces in the Beaufort Sea during Ice Exercise (ICEX) 2018. ICEX is a five-week exercise that allows the U.S. Navy to assess its operational readiness in the Arctic, increase experience in the region, advance understanding of the Arctic environment and continue to develop relationships with other services, allies and partner organizations. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication 2nd Class Micheal H. Lee/Released)

Both parties are mounting military activities in the region. The United States and allies became active in the Arctic in mid-2000s when the gradual decrease of the ice cover developed into a long-term trend.

Russia began restoring military presence in the Arctic in 2011-2012. In 2014 a new strategic command was set up on the basis of the Northern fleet to control forces in the European part of the Arctic. The military bases have, on the one hand, to ensure security in peacetime and, on the other hand, prevent a potential threat from the north in case of a war.



US submarines have been operating in the Arctic since 1947 and have been there permanently since late 1950s after nuclear submarines appeared. At present US U-boats in Polar seas can attack important industrial and military facilities in the region and deep in the country with cruise missiles. They regularly trace Russian SSBN for which the Arctic is a traditional and convenient positional area providing for a covert strike at the United States by ballistic missiles along a flat trajectory.

Artist impression of nuclear powered icebreaker "Arktika" (project 22220). Image: Atomflot

Both sides are mounting their capabilities in the region. Russia has an edge as it maintains the most developed Arctic infrastructure due to a rich Soviet legacy and current intensive effort, which however was launched later than the rivals did.



A bigger network of bases, the biggest icebreaker fleet in the world, including nuclear vessels, and the strongest Arctic military force in the form of the United strategic command on the basis of the Northern fleet provide control over Russian Polar waters and an opportunity to counter the adversary.



Control over air and sea movement is a key operational task of the deployed network of bases. The geographic location of Russian Arctic islands from Franz-Joseph Land to Wrangel Island creates overlapping control zones and decreases the risk of covert intrusion and surprise attack from coastal Arctic waters.



It is clear that the warming makes the Arctic more accessible and will boost economic activities in the region, as well as a possibility of various grave incidents. Greenpeace protests at Prirazlomnaya oil platform in 2012-2013 may look like simple kidding against them. The possibility of such incidents will grow because of resumed Cold War between Russia and NATO in which the rivals can fight by proxy.



It calls on Russia to create a system to prevent a potential military attack, as well as permanent security forces capable of preventing and investigating sabotage, attacks, subversions and terrorist acts at civilian facilities and infrastructure of the region.



Both sides are preparing for confrontation and incidents in the Arctic. Russia does not disclose the details of Arctic exercises but the available information speaks about regular drills of major naval, aviation, air defense and ground forces. The recognized non-verbal codes of conduct allow viewing the demonstrated military activity of major powers as their unwillingness to unleash a conflict in the region and gives hope the rival will comprehend the signal and refrain from further escalation.



However, the latest international relations show the West has fully lost the experience of military-political communications of the Cold War. The fear of a possible development of confrontation into hostilities has atrophied. In such conditions the growing military activity makes the parties suspect each other of aggressive intentions rather than of a demonstration of readiness to respond with force.



The Arctic has not been such a troublesome region for long. A hypothetical conflict can be triggered by developments which take place many thousand kilometers away from the Polar Circle, the Izvestia writes.

 Copyright 2018 TASS. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.A Hamilton cocaine dealer testified Thursday he was allowed to ply his illicit trade with impunity after paying $20,000 a month in protection money to a city police officer.

What were you getting in return for ... $20,000, Crown attorney John Pollard asked the dealer.

I would know when search warrants are happening, Id know who was, uh ... informing on me ... I was pretty much allowed to sell drugs, the dealer, who cannot be identified, told a Superior Court jury in Toronto.

He was testifying for a second day at the trial of Hamilton Police Service Det.-Const. Craig Ruthowsky, 44, who has pleaded not guilty to corruption-related offences and drug trafficking. He is suspended from the force.

The dealer said his cash-for-protection arrangement began in Aug. 2011 after members of the Hamilton police guns and gangs unit, which included Ruthowsky, raided his condo and seized nine ounces of cocaine, 10 pounds of marijuana and cash.

After his arrest on various charges  that were later stayed  the dealer says he struck a deal with Ruthowsky and another officer to trade in two handguns in return for his release without any restrictions.

Suspended Hamilton police officer Craig Ruthowsky, left, is accused of taking $20,000 a month from drug dealers in exchange for favours. He has pleaded not guilty to charges.





A few weeks later, the dealer said Ruthowsky called him saying he wanted to return some keys seized during the raid, something the dealer considered a friendly gesture.

The pair met in a Tim Hortons parking lot, where the dealer said he offered to pay Ruthowsky for secret police information that would keep him, and three of his associates, out of trouble.

The dealer testified he thought Ruthowsky would be receptive because a friend told him he had a similar arrangement with the officer. As well, he told court he had $30,000 in his apartment when it was raided but that only $11,000 was turned in.

Somebody stole the rest ... (so) I knew already I could do this, he told court.

Ruthowsky was open to the deal and said you know the price, next time I see you just bring it with you, and I said OK, the dealer testified.

They agreed on $5,000 for each person, the witness told court.

He said the first time he turned over $20,000 to Ruthowsky was again in a Tim Hortons parking lot. They were both alone, the dealer said, and he jumped into Ruthowskys pickup truck.

As soon as I got in, he pulled up his middle console ... and he told me just to put it in there, and I stuck the money in there, and um, he said OK cool ... just pretty much same thing at the end of every month and um, he said that we were good.

After making a couple of payments, Ruthowsky asked the dealer for some kind of cover for their relationship. The dealer said he agreed to give up a marijuana grow operation in which he had a stake with partners whom he believed were ripping him off.

Ruthowsky agreed to let me keep half the weed that was there, the dealer testified.

But after executing a search warrant at the grow-op on Green Mountain Rd. police found no plants ready for harvest. Ruthowsky asked the dealer to come see for himself, and suggested he wear a hoodie and baseball cap, the witness testified.

The pair toured the facility. An officer involved in the raid has testified it was odd to see a person used as a confidential informant at the crime scene while the investigation was going on.

The dealer also felt the situation strange.

Ive never heard or seen someone do it ...It was kind of like a movie to me, he testified.

The trial resumes Monday.Mayor John Tory is trumpeting a new rule that forces utility crews to do much of their work on downtown streets outside daylight hours.

The change, though, is not music to the ears of some downtown councillors, including Joe Cressy.

Were going to build places for people to sleep downtown but we wont actually let you sleep downtown, because of potential construction noise, thundered the Ward 20 Trinity-Spadina representative.

Tory announced Wednesday utility companies and their subcontractors are no longer allowed to do planned roadwork between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. on streets bounded by Dundas St. to the north, Lake Shore Blvd./Harbour St. to the south, Bathurst St. to the west and Jarvis St. to the east.

There is an exception  curb lanes where parking is allowed  but only between 9:30 a.m. and 3:30 p.m.

These are the kinds of common-sense approaches to traffic and congestion management that Toronto residents expect of city hall, Tory said. The days of hydro, telephone or cable trucks blocking lanes of traffic during the day for non-emergency work have come to an end. Its not fair to residents or businesses and its not something that should be happening in a major city.

After Cressy and neighbouring councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam protested that Tory was putting the needs of commuting drivers over those of downtowners trying to sleep, the mayor said Thursday there is absolutely no intention of pushing noisy work into overnight hours.

His office noted that a city bylaw prohibiting loud noise overnight will still apply to utility crews.

Cressy countered that an energy company crew will do round-the-clock work on Simcoe St., outside two condo buildings and a hotel, and the new restrictions were cited as the reason.

He also noted the downtown population is booming with 240,000 residents, including a growing number of children, and argued their councillors need to be fully consulted on such changes.

Either there is a complete breakdown in understanding what this policy is, or a misunderstanding into the hours it is going to be applied, Cressy said. Im going to work with Mayor Tory to make sure we fix this.

Not all downtown councillors disapprove. Lucy Troisi, appointed by council to replace the late Pam McConnell in Ward 28 Toronto Centre-Rosedale, tweeted her approval of the new rule, calling it a balanced approach necessary to keep the city moving.

Read more about:Ontario schools have their plates full of big issues like falling math scores, an evolving curriculum and crumbling buildings.

But nothing gets parents attention like the smaller daily challenges their children face. Such as unpalatable lunchrooms.

Following a Star story Wednesday which highlighted the bedlam served up during many school lunch hours, readers from Sudbury to London weighed in with their own tales and worries in emails and through social media.

Examples of overcrowded rooms and supervision ratios of one adult for up to 99 children struck a nerve among parents, educators and lunchroom supervisors alike. So did the image of a 6-year-old eating in the boys bathroom so he could escape the noise of a hundred other kids.

Share Your Thoughts!

When Toronto dad Tim Millan visited the dingy basement lunchroom at his sons east-end Toronto school a few years ago, he made a decision: no more lunches at school for his kid.

The room featured low ceilings, poor light and deafening noise, he recalls, along with a supervisor who constantly rang a hand bell in an attempt to restore order.

One minute in the din and he realized why his sons food often came home untouched.

We completely rearranged our lives so I could bring him home for lunch every day, says Millan, who teaches nearby and was lucky enough to be flexible at midday.

Many adults report feeling queasy over the high decibel counts, kids in snowsuits packed into rooms where they dont have enough time or peace to eat, and lack of staff or volunteers monitoring them.

One Toronto mother told of being hired last year as a lunchroom supervisor at her sons east-end school to manage 75 elementary kids crammed at tables inside, and then outdoors on the playground.

It was the hardest 15 bucks (an hour) I ever made, she said Wednesday. She only lasted a few shifts.

Fifteen kids want to go to the washroom, 20 want the water fountain and a bunch of kids are pushing each other, the mom told the Star. Its insane. Its not possible to be attentive and kind and make sure everyone is safe.

Many schools, especially older ones in Toronto, were built in an era when most kids went home at midday, so they arent physically equipped to deal with hundreds for lunch.

Managing the hordes is also a challenge, due to a scarcity of funds and collective agreements that limit teacher supervision time.

The reality is were way behind the times, said Toronto parent Trixie Doyle, co-chair of the Parent Involvement Advisory Committee for the Toronto District School Board.

Haphazard funding and supervision ratios are a recipe for chaos, says Doyle. The result is schools adopt patchwork solutions.

The Ministry of Education provides funding for lunchroom supervisors as part of an envelope for non-teaching support staff through the Grants for Student Needs, says spokesperson Heather Irwin.

But its up to school boards how to allocate those funds and to decide on supervision ratios, she said.

Hiring additional lunchroom supervisors means going without other staff.

Boards in turn leave it to principals to decide what they need based on their school populations and facilities.

The TDSB allocates roughly one supervisor for up to 99 elementary students, two for every 224 and a sliding scale of more kids per adult as the numbers increase.

The Ontario Principals Council proposed a set of standards for the provinces schools more than a decade ago, but they havent been endorsed or put in place.

Advocates like Krista Wylie, co-founder of the grassroots group Fix Our Schools, says the chaotic lunch situation is a gateway to understanding how the chronic underfunding is plaguing the public school system.

A child too overwhelmed to eat or at risk of being bullied or injured is a lot easier to grasp than a $16-billion repair backlog, she said.

To one reader, lunch hour should be treated with the same respect as any other subject.

Eating and sociability go hand in hand, he wrote in an email.

And besides, maybe this would help math scores.

Andrea Gordon can be reached at agordon@thestar.caThe Toronto police board voted unanimously to commission an external investigation into how the force conducts missing-persons probes, as members of the citys LGBTQ community detailed what they said is critically low trust in police.

The independent investigation, initiated by groups within the LGBTQ community and brought forward by Mayor John Tory, comes in the wake of escalating questions about police action  or inaction  in the disappearances of missing people from Torontos Gay Village, six of whom are now alleged to be among the victims of alleged serial killer Bruce McArthur.

But the review will not directly address police conduct connected to the ongoing McArthur investigation or any past police contacts with the accused killer, due to the ongoing investigation and future trial.

It doesnt mean that all the difficult questions dont get asked and answered, but it does speak to the question of when, Tory told the board, reiterating his past call for a provincial public inquiry into the handling of the McArthur case.

Stressing the importance of taking whatever action possible now, Torys motion called for an examination of past and current policies around investigations into missing persons, reviewing best practices at other services, and looking at issues of systemic bias. The next step is to form a working group that comprises one member of the board and three community members.

The request for an external review, supported by Toronto police Chief Mark Saunders, came at a meeting where members of the LGBTQ community voiced passionate concerns about police behaviour. Immediately before Thursdays meeting, a small group of protesters from the group Queers Crash The Beat called for Saunders resignation, saying they had no confidence in him.

In an impassioned speech to the police board, Becky McFarlane, with the Church-Wellesley neighbourhoods 519 Community Centre, urged the board to ensure the external review proposed concrete solutions that will lead to real change.

As it considers how to improve investigations into missing persons, particularly affecting the LGBTQ community, there are still people within that community who are too scared to report concerning activity to police, or feel they are not taken seriously when they do, McFarlane said.

Toronto police said on Feb. 8 they found the remains of a total of six people at a property where alleged serial killer Bruce McArthur worked. (The Canadian Press)

There is nothing that feels more imperative to me than figuring out a way to move through this quickly, she said.

Speaking to reporters after meeting, Saunders agreed that it was important to discuss improvements as soon as possible.

I think its very important that we dont wait for a very long period and if there are opportunities in which we can be better as an organization, if we can enhance relationships then we should definitely be focused on doing just that, Saunders said.

The urgency of action was also stressed at a news conference earlier Thursday, where a coalition of LGBTQ citizens called on Ontarios attorney general to immediately launch a public inquiry into Toronto polices handling of the McArthur investigation.

The time for that inquiry is now, said Douglas Elliott, a civil litigation lawyer with Toronto law firm Cambridge LLP. Our community is grieving. Our community is angry  . We want to know what went wrong. We deserve to know what went wrong.

Ontario Attorney General Yasir Naqvi said earlier this month that he will consider an inquiry but we have to be very mindful in terms of the criminal proceedings and the criminal investigation.

Elliott said there was no need to wait for the conclusion of McArthurs trial, which will be years away. Citing his involvement in previous public inquiries  including the examination into the 2012 mall collapse in Elliot Lake, and the Krever Inquiry into Canadas tainted blood scandal  Elliott said criminal probes can, and do, run parallel to public inquiries.

An inquiry is not going to stop or even impede the ongoing criminal investigation, Elliott said.

In a statement Thursday, the Alliance for South Asian AIDS Prevention (ASAAP) said it supported a provincial public inquiry, but stressed that Torys move for an external review of missing-persons cases could nonetheless examine some aspects of missing-persons cases now connected to McArthur.

Most notably, that could include Project Houston  the Toronto police investigation into three men who went missing between 2010 and 2012  Skandaraj Skanda Navaratnam, Abdulbasir Faizi, and Majeed Kayhan. That probe ended after 18 months when police could find no evidence to suggest criminal activity. McArthur is now accused in the deaths of Navaratnam and Kayhan.

The (Toronto police external) review could assess whether the community was effectively consulted during Project Houston, but any information related to the McArthur case would be excluded. We respect and understand that the scope of the review requires measured and careful delineation, said the ASAAP statement.

McArthur, 66, is facing six charges of first-degree murder in the deaths of Andrew Kinsman, 49; Selim Esen, 44; Dean Lisowick, 47; Soroush Mahmudi, 50; Kayhan, 59; and Navaratnam, 40.

Questions have been mounting in recent weeks about past interactions between McArthur and police, following revelations that police questioned McArthur in 2016 in connection to an alleged assault on another man. He was let go.

The following year, McArthur is alleged to have killed Kinsman and Esen; police allege he killed Lisowick between April 2016 and March 2017.

The 2016 interaction is the second time police spoke with McArthur in the years before he was charged with murder. McArthur was questioned around the time Toronto police launched Project Houston, sources have told the Star.

McArthur was also convicted of assault with a weapon (a metal pipe) and assault causing bodily harm after an attack on a man in his home in 2001. He pleaded guilty in 2003 and was temporarily barred from the Gay Village and associating with male sex workers. He later received a pardon.

An update on the external investigation is expected next month.

Wendy Gillis can be reached at wgillis@thestar.caOntarios hospitals are getting a pre-election cash infusion of $822 million, a 4.6-per-cent boost for the next year to ease overcrowding and reduce wait times for patients.

Premier Kathleen Wynne announced the money Thursday at North York General, saying it will fill gaps in services but would not guarantee an end to what opposition parties call hallway medicine.

What I can promise is people will get faster care in hospitals across the province, Wynne told reporters, noting North York hospitals share will be $10.8 million.

This is not a time to pull back. This is not a time to make big cuts in services, she said in a reference to rival new Progressive Conservative Leader Doug Fords promise to shrink the provincial budget by finding efficiencies.

The people of Ontario are tired of a government that treats taxpayers as an ATM. Under our PC government, the party with the taxpayers money will be over, Ford said in a statement.

Details of the increase in base funding  on top of a 3.2-per-cent hike announced a year ago  for all 143 hospitals across the province will be announced Friday as MPPs return to their ridings for the weekend as the June 7 provincial election approaches.

The money is one of several announcements from Wynne this week, including the expansion of pharmacare to seniors and more funding for mental health, that will be included in Finance Minister Charles Sousas spring budget next Wednesday, forming the basis for the Liberal governments re-election platform.

This is a last ditch effort for the Liberals to try to save their seats, said Progressive Conservative MPP Lisa MacLeod (Nepean-Carleton).

New Democrat Leader Andrea Horwath has been hammering the government on hospital overcrowding, particularly in fast-growing Brampton, and has promised  as has Ford  to bring an end to hallway medicine if elected premier.

The term refers to treatment of emergency and other patients in hospital hallways because beds cannot be found for them, due to a fast-growing population, surges in demand for care because of the flu, and about 4,500 patients, such as the frail elderly, waiting in hospitals for spots to open up in nursing homes.

When people are being treated in bathrooms and in shower rooms and when they have to share four or five people in what used to be a TV room of a patient lounge....it is degrading, said New Democrat MPP France Gelinas (Nickel Belt), her partys health critic.

The damage...has been done by years of underfunding.

Ontario Hospital Association president and chief executive Anthony Dale said the $822 million is welcome but agreed the money wont solve all the problems.

We are looking at it as a foundation piece toward the end of hallway medicine, the end of hospital overcrowding, Dale added, noting more nursing home beds and home care are also needed to achieve that goal.

But he called on the government  no matter who wins the June vote  to engage in long-term budget planning with the sector, which now gets $18 billion in taxpayer support.

Read more:

Kathleen Wynne announces $2.1 billion in new mental health funding over four years

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Only then will hospitals have a better shot at the advance planning needed to improve services and reduce wait times, Dale said. Right now, hospitals are given their allocations annually, leaving them guessing what will come in subsequent years.

So far he hasnt heard enough details from any party, despite opposition promises, to make him believe hallway medicine can be put to bed for good.

Not yet. And so were all looking forward to hearing ... from all three parties on their plans.

The NDP and PCs said they are not ready to release details of their health-care platforms.

The Ontario Health Coalition said a larger, 5.2 per cent increase was needed but called the extra money a move in the right direction and asked for assurances the payouts wont be pared back after the election.

At North York General, interim president and chief executive Karyn Popovich said the extra funding her hospital is getting will certainly help us.

Weve had a rough flu season this year, Popovich said, but noted the governments move to reopen closed beds at the old Humber Hospital site on Finch Ave. has helped ease overcrowding.

There will be peak times, but this money will definitely help us address some of our main concerns.

Read more about:FLINT, Mich.U.S. federal prosecutors have added a terrorism charge to the case of a Montreal man who is accused of stabbing a police officer at a Michigan airport in June.

Amor Ftouhi, a native of Tunisia, has been charged with stabbing an officer in the neck at Flints Bishop International Airport while yelling Allahu akbar, the Arabic phrase for God is great.

The U.S. government added a charge Wednesday of committing an act of terrorism transcending national boundaries. The maximum penalty is life in prison.

A message seeking comment was left for Ftouhis lawyer.

Officials say Ftouhi legally entered the U.S. at Champlain, N.Y., on June 16. Five days later, investigators say he arrived at the Flint airport by van and stabbed Lt. Jeff Neville, who survived.

In November, a judge agreed to extend important deadlines while federal investigators and defence lawyers collect and review evidence, especially in Montreal where Ftouhi lived.

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Officer stabbed in neck at Michigan airport out of hospitalWASHINGTONU.S. President Trump on Thursday plans to announce at least $50 billion worth of annual tariffs and other penalties on China for its theft of technology and trade secrets, which administration officials say has robbed American companies of billions of dollars in revenue and killed thousands of jobs.

The measures would mark Trumps most aggressive move yet against a fast-rising economic rival that he has accused of preying on the United States.

The measures will be targeted at imported Chinese goods in as many as 100 categories  hitting everything from shoes and clothing to consumer electronics  and will impose restrictions on Chinese investments in the United States, people briefed on the measures said.

Trump will instruct the Treasury Department to pursue restrictions on certain types of Chinese investments to counter Chinas ambitious industrial policy, which aims to dominate cutting-edge sectors like artificial intelligence and mobile technology, officials said.

For Trump, the steps fulfil a frequent campaign pledge to crack down on China, which he has characterized as an economic enemy that has taken advantage of us like nobody in history. But the actions will only ratchet up tensions with the Chinese government at a moment when Trump needs its support for his campaign to curb North Koreas nuclear program.

The announcement comes hard on the heels of Trumps tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, which are scheduled to go into effect on Friday and are aimed at combating a flood of cheap metals into the United States, including Chinese steel.

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Taken together, Trumps actions demonstrate his resolve to turn away from a decades-long move toward open markets and integrated world economies and toward a more starkly protectionist approach that erects barriers around a Fortress America. The moves risk further isolating the United States at a delicate geopolitical moment by inflaming key allies, as well as China.

The effect of the China tariffs would be larger and more concentrated than the steel and aluminum measures and would have a bigger impact on United States consumers, who are heavy purchasers of electronics, clothing and other Chinese imports. The steel and aluminum tariffs would affect imports of roughly $33 billion, excluding Canada and Mexico, which are expected to be exempt from the measures, said Joseph Parilla of the Brookings Institution. The China moves would affect at least $50 billion a year in imports, officials said.

Yet unlike the metal tariffs, which caused bitter divisions within the Trump administration and were opposed by many Republican lawmakers and business people, the technology moves against China are likely to be politically popular on Capitol Hill and throughout some industries.

The business community, which long defended China against accusations of theft of intellectual property, has grown more dissatisfied with adverse treatment in the Chinese economy. With the Chinese government and state-owned enterprises playing an ever-larger role in the market, the environment for American companies has steadily deteriorated.

Their theft costs us over $350 billion per year, so the bigger the better, said Daniel DiMicco, a steel executive and trade adviser to the Trump campaign, referring to the forced transfer of intellectual property and other unfair practices alleged by the administration.

The country, under the leadership of President Xi Jinping, has sought to build up businesses it considers critical for defending its national security interests and meeting its economic goals.

Beijing has been enlisting American companies in its effort. As it looks to create its own national champions, China has been forcing American stalwarts like Qualcomm, Advanced Micro Devices and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise to create joint ventures, hand over their technology or develop local expertise. If they do not, companies risk losing access to China, the worlds second-largest economy.

But Chinas national security interests are colliding with those of the United States. A worry is that companies are handing over critical technology that the United States needs for its military, defence or infrastructure. By transferring technology, they may also be giving an edge to Chinese rivals that one day may prove dominant.

This month, the United States government blocked Broadcoms hostile bid for Qualcomm, a chip maker, citing national security concerns. The fear was that the acquisition would weaken Qualcomm, allowing China an advantage in the race to build the next generation of wireless technology.

Last August, Trump ordered an investigation into four types of Chinese trade practices, including requiring companies to share trade secrets to gain access to the Chinese market, forcing them to license their technology in China at below-market rates and cyberintrusions to steal technology. China also uses state funds to buy American high-tech companies.

On Wednesday, a senior official at the United States trade representatives office said the investigation, which is now complete, found ample evidence of abuses in all these areas. The official said China had not changed its behaviour, despite years of negotiations in the World Trade Organization and economic dialogues with the last three administrations.

If anything, the administration said, its failure to honour the obligations it made when it joined the World Trade Organization has gotten worse. Chinas theft of intellectual property, officials said, contributed to its trade surplus of $375.2 billion with the United States last year. China has also introduced a plan to gain global leadership in advanced information technology, new energy vehicles and aerospace, among other industries.

Trump is expected to ask the United States trade representative to come up with a full list of products to retaliate against within 15 days, according to an official briefed on the plans.

Experts worry that the United States actions could ignite a trade war, noting that Chinese economic officials have a keen understanding of the American system and are good at designing targeted retaliatory measures against American agricultural products and other exports.

Trumps moves will also test the personal relationship he has cultivated with Xi, the Chinese president. Last year, Trump held off imposing tough trade measures against China because, he said, Xi was co-operating in his campaign to pressure the leader of North Korea, Kim Jong Un, over his nuclear and ballistic missile programs.

Two weeks ago, Trump agreed to meet Kim for talks, surprising Xi, whom he did not consult before making the decision. Now, Trump will be seeking the Chinese presidents support for his diplomacy at the same time that trade tensions between are on the rise.

Still, given their deep frustration, business executives may greet Trumps move with quiet satisfaction.

Theres now palpable frustration across a number of sectors of the American business community feeling increasingly squeezed by an ever-more-emboldened China, said Scott Mulhauser, a former chief of staff at the American Embassy in Beijing. While some are eager to continue seeking as much engagement with China as possible, others are openly using terms and invoking options they hadnt previously considered.

The United States chief trade representative, Robert Lighthizer, who testified before the House Ways and Means Committee on Wednesday, indicated that the administration was specifically concerned about Chinese policies that compel American companies to share technology when they make investments in China.

There are certain technology products that are under assault, Lighthizer said. You have to give consideration to whether or not you would put tariffs on those products.

But he noted that any tariffs would take into account the economic impact of raising the cost of consumer goods. You would create an algorithm that would maximize the pressure on China and minimize the pressure on U.S. consumers, he said.

Lighthizers testimony came a day after the Treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, was warned by global economic leaders at a meeting in Buenos Aires that the United States was risking a trade war by initiating the tariffs. President Trump declared earlier in the month that trade wars are good, and easy to win.

But Lighthizer struck a different note on Wednesday. Nobody wins from a trade war, he said. We certainly dont want a trade war. On the other hand, you have to ask yourself, can we go on with an $800  and growing  billion trade deficit?

Read more about:PARISFormer French President Nicolas Sarkozy defended himself Thursday against the mad allegations that he accepted millions of euros in illegal campaign funding from the late Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi.

Its an ignominious act, not (just) a lie, Sarkozy said during a live television interview on French station TF1. I owe the French people the truth: I never betrayed their trust.

The one-term ex-leader was handed preliminary charges Wednesday in an investigation of his successful 2007 campaign for the French presidency. The charges include illegally funding the campaign, passive corruption and receiving money from Libyan embezzlement.

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Im not above the law, but Im not below it either, Sarkozy, 63, said during the TF1 interview.

He was detained and questioned by anticorruption police before he was given the preliminary charges by judges leading the probe. Le Figaro newspaper reported Thursday that Sarkozy said in his statement to the investigating judges that I am accused without any physical evidence.

He said he was living the hell of this slander since 2011 and denounced the accusations as lies, according to a text of the statement published by the newspaper. The allegations were first made in 2011 by Gadhafis son, Saif al-Islam.

According to the text, the former president told investigators that the allegations even cost him a re-election bid in 2012 when they remerged during the campaign.

Sarkozys entourage did not immediately confirm the texts authenticity, but did not dispute it either. Sarkozys spokeswoman did not respond to requests for comment from The Associated Press. Sarkozys lawyer, Thierry Herzog, arrived at the former presidents home in Paris Thursday morning.

Investigators are examining allegations that Gadhafis regime secretly gave Sarkozy 50 million euros ($79.5 million) for his 2007 presidential election bid.

The former president was released on Wednesday night, but placed under judicial supervision. Details of the conditions he has been ordered to follow have not been revealed.

As Frances president from 2007 to 2012, Sarkozy put France in the forefront of the NATO-led airstrikes against Gadhafis troops that helped rebel fighters topple Gadhafis regime in 2011.

An investigation has been underway since 2013 into the case.

It got a boost when French-Lebanese businessman Ziad Takieddine told the online investigative site Mediapart in 2016 that he delivered suitcases from Libya containing 5 million euros in cash to Sarkozy and his former chief of staff, Claude Gueant.

Takieddine repeated his allegations during a live interview with Frances BFM TV on Wednesday night.

He claimed he personally handed a suitcase containing 2 million euros in cash to Sarkozy at the then-candidates apartment and another suitcase with 1.5 million euros to Sarkozy and a close aide at the French Interior Ministry. Sarkozy was interior minister at the time.

Takieddine alleged he gave a third suitcase with 1.5 million euros in cash to the aide alone.

He said the money was not meant to finance Sarkozys presidential campaign in 2007, but to honour contracts between France and Libya.

Mr. Takieddine lies, Sarkozy told the investigating judges, according to Le Figaro.

Read more about:When U.S. President Donald Trump issued his first executive order banning nationals from majority-Muslim countries from entering the United States, some Canadians reacted by vowing to boycott travelling south of the border.

Within days, Canadians of all stripes  academics, school board superintendents, thriller writers, even Girl Scouts  followed through with those pledges, abruptly cancelling trips to the United States.

Travel and tourism officials feared the ban would dent Americas image as a foreigner-friendly country and lead to a Trump slump, dealing a blow to an industry that had only just recovered from a $600 billion loss between Sept. 11, 2001, and 2010, according to the U.S. Travel Association.

There has been a slump. While international tourism arrivals worldwide increased 7 per cent in 2017  a seven-year high  the United States is missing out on that boom, according to the UN World Tourism Organization. Data from the U.S. Commerce Departments National Travel and Tourism Office show international arrivals to the United States fell 3.8 per cent during the first three quarters of 2017, compared with the same period in 2016.

Share your thoughts

Travel to the United States from every region of the world is declining, but one country is bucking the trend: Canada.

Despite the frantic calls for boycotts, overnight trips from Canada rose 4.8 per cent to 20.2 million in 2017, reversing a three-year decline, according to Statistics Canada.

Experts say the factor that has traditionally had the strongest influence on the travel habits of globe-trotting Canadians is the relative value of their currency, making it possible that the weakening U.S. dollar is providing an incentive for their cross-border travel.

But many remain puzzled because the U.S. dollar slumped against a number of currencies in 2017, such as the euro, and there has been no increase in travel to the United States from Europe.

It is difficult for us to pinpoint exactly why the Canadian arrival data has diverged from the rest of the world, said Seth Borko, a senior research analyst with Skift, a travel market research and industry intelligence company. Proximity and ease of travel between the two countries may also be driving the trend, he said.

Concern abounded in the wake of the entry ban that Canadians were cooling on U.S. destinations  so much so that some American tourism officials travelled to Canada multiple times in an unprecedented effort to combat the rhetoric coming from the White House.

Its rare that we go up to Canada and do two events in the same year, said Chris Heywood, the senior vice president of global communications with NYC & Company, New York Citys official tourism organization. But last year was one of those years.

Matt Noble, the president of EF Educational Tours Canada, a travel company that organizes trips for students, said that he expects annual growth in trips to U.S. destinations to hit double-digit percentages in 2019.

While we are definitely fielding more questions about how the experience of crossing the border might be changing with new regulations, we are not seeing any meaningful decline in demand for our U.S. itineraries, he said.

After the entry ban was announced, the Girl Guides  the Canadian counterparts of the Girl Scouts  called off all trips to the United States indefinitely, citing a commitment to inclusivity. A number of Canadian school boards, authors and academics did the same.

I refused to enter apartheid South Africa, too, Jen Marchbank, a professor at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia told a Toronto Star reporter in January 2017. I see little difference between the U.S. today and apartheid South Africa in terms of ethics and morals.

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The Girl Guides still prohibit U.S.-bound travel. Last month, the Toronto District School Board slightly eased restrictions on student travel to the United States to allow it for professional development and academic competitions, after students complained that they were missing out on events that would bolster their college applications.

Travel and tourism officials are careful not to lay the blame for the slump in travel to the United States on Trumps entry ban or on any of the policies his administration has advanced to toughen border security or immigration law. They point out that while the decline in international visits accelerated in 2017, it began in 2015, and note that the strength of the American dollar in the first half of 2017 made the country less affordable for some travellers.

Tourism is Americas second-largest export and a $1.54 trillion a year industry. The drop in international arrivals to U.S. destinations translated to $4.6 billion in lost spending and 40,000 jobs in November 2017, compared with the year before, according to research from the U.S. Travel Association.

It announced earlier this year that a collection of industry groups including the National Restaurant Association and U.S. Chamber of Commerce were banding together to form the Visit U.S. Coalition in an attempt to reverse the downward trend.

Read more about:BRATISLAVA, SlovakiaSlovakias president appointed a new government Thursday to replace the one that resigned amid a political crisis triggered by the slayings of an investigative journalist and his fiancee.

Prime Minister Robert Ficos three-party coalition stepped down last week following large street protests sparked by the Feb. 25 shooting deaths of Jan Kuciak and Martina Kusnirova.

Before he was slain, Kuciak was reporting on alleged Italian mafia ties to associates of Fico and corruption scandals linked to Ficos leftist Smer-Social Democracy party.

President Andrej Kiska swore in a Cabinet made up of ministers from the same three parties that made up Ficos government and led by Peter Pellegrini, who previously was the deputy prime minister.

Its your responsibility to fight to win public trust, Kiska told the government members.

Pellegrini pledged to renew the stability of Slovakia.

It is not clear if the shakeup will reduce tensions over the slayings. Anti-government rallies scheduled for Friday in the capital of Bratislava and elsewhere were cancelled, but organizers said some protests would proceed.

Pellegrini changed five of the 14 ministers in the previous government, but since he is also deputy chairman in the Smer-Social Democracy party, no significant policy changes are expected. His government is likely to continue Ficos strong anti-migrant policies. The coalition faces a confidence vote in Parliament, but its likely to win because it has 79 of the 150 seats.

Later Thursday, organizers of the anti-government protests said they will be closely watching the new government.

We havent finished yet, quite the contrary, they said in a statement. Were here and ready to take to the streets again.

Students in Bratislava said they would go ahead with their plan to march on Friday to honour Kuciak and Kusnirova. The protests also are expected to take place in some other cities and towns.

The protesters were demanding a thorough and independent investigation into the shooting deaths, with the participation of international investigators, and the creation of a credible government.

Tens of thousands of demonstrators have rallied repeatedly across Slovakia since the bodies of Kuciak and Kusnirova were found shot dead at home, the biggest anti-government protests since the 1989 anti-communist Velvet Revolution.

They dont trust Slovak police will be able to investigate the slayings properly.

Kiska expressed the same opinion, saying Thursday it will be necessary to replace the police leadership.

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The protesters were demanding a thorough and independent investigation into the shooting deaths, with the participation of international investigators, and the creation of a credible government.

Tens of thousands of demonstrators have rallied repeatedly across Slovakia since the bodies of Kuciak and Kusnirova were found shot dead at home, the biggest anti-government protests since the 1989 anti-communist Velvet Revolution.

They dont trust that the Slovak police will be able to investigate the slayings properly.

Kiska expressed the same opinion, saying Thursday it will be necessary to replace the police leadership.The Kolomna plant has repaired the faulty 10D49 propulsion diesel engine mounted on the Project 22350 lead frigate Admiral Gorshkov, a source close to the situation told the Flotprom online media organization. The engine broke down on December 23, 2017.

The Kolomna plant has repaired the faulty 10D49 propulsion diesel engine mounted on the Project 22350 lead frigate Admiral Gorshkov, a source close to the situation told the Flotprom online media organization. The engine broke down on December 23, 2017.

Project 22350 Admiral Gorshkov frigate

To repair the engine, the plant replaced the broken connecting rod. According to the source, plant workers disassembled the engine shaft and some parts of the diesel engine were brought to Kolomna for examination and replacement.

The engine was repaired in the frigates engine room. There were not any cuts in the frigates hull and the work was completed on time. The repair of the engine was completed in March, as planned.

The reason for the breakdown has not been found yet, the source said. The relevant document was planned to be prepared by mid-February. The press offices of the Kolomna Plant and the Transmashholding Group declined to comment on the repair of the diesel engine for the frigate Admiral Gorshkov.

According to the companies representatives, this issue is related to the state defense order and cannot be commented on.

The Kolomna Plant is a Transmashholding Group subsidiary.

Experts in the sphere of diesel engine manufacturing from the Zvezda Plant and the Zorya-Mashproekt Enterprise could not suggest the reason for the breakdown. According to them, connecting rods are damaged owing to production defects, low-quality materials or designer mistake. The experts called to wait for the official reason for the engine breakdown but doubted that it would be disclosed.

 Copyright 2018 TASS. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.PARKLAND, Fla.An attorney for the brother of Florida school shooting suspect Nikolas Cruz said in court papers Thursday that a $500,000 bond for trespassing at the school is excessive and that the brother should be released from jail.

Lawyer Joseph Kimok said in the documents that 18-year-old Zachary Cruz already paid the standard $25 bond for a misdemeanour and should not be kept in custody.

Zachary Cruz did not kill 17 people on a high school campus. He should not be treated as if he did, Kimok wrote. There is no justice where the government seeks to hang a man for the crimes of his brother.

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Zachary Cruz was arrested Monday while skateboarding on the campus of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where authorities say his brother killed 17 people and wounded 17 others in the Valentines Day massacre. Zachary Cruz had been warned not to visit the campus, but did so three times, authorities say.

Kimok also objected to several of the bond conditions imposed by a judge, including forcing Zachary Cruz to undergo a psychological evaluation, prohibiting him from visiting Broward County, putting him on house arrest with an ankle monitor if he is released, having the home he is living in searched for weapons and having no contact with Nikolas Cruz.

A judge has entered a plea of not guilty to all 34 charges against Nikolas Cruz who prosecutors say killed 17 at a Florida high school. Friends and family of the victims sat in the audience. (The Associated Press)

To take away that familial connection is inhumane, Kimok wrote.

Security at Stoneman Douglas High, already heightened, was bolstered Thursday with Gov. Rick Scott ordering eight highway patrol troopers to help secure the grounds. The move came after Zachary Cruz was arrested, two students were caught carrying knives and another made online threats.

Also, Stoneman Douglas students will be given transparent backpacks theyll be required to use when they return from spring break on April 2. Broward County school district Superintendent Robert Runcie told parents in a two-page letter that metal detectors also may be installed soon, and he outlined other security upgrades including student ID badges and a districtwide effort to require all school visitors to enter through a single door.

The troopers will be stationed at the school indefinitely, along with Broward County deputies, leaving an armed guard at every campus entrance point, Scott said in a statement. Before the shooting, the school was patrolled by one armed deputy and unarmed guards. An unspecified number of deputies, some armed with rifles, were added after the school reopened.

Parents, students and teachers have recently endured one of the worst tragedies in Florida history, Scott said. They must be assured that every necessary step is being taken to increase safety and ensure no unauthorized people are allowed on campus.

Zachary and Nikolas, 19, both attended Stoneman Douglas. They shared the same biological mother but had different fathers. Both were adopted at very young ages by Roger and Lynda Cruz. Lynda Cruz died in November and their father died some years earlier.

Nikolas Cruz will plead guilty to 17 counts of murder and 17 counts of attempted murder if prosecutors will waive the death penalty, his attorney has said. They have refused to do so.

Meanwhile, a judge rejected an attempt to remove Broward County prosecutors and its public defender from the Nikolas Cruz criminal case.

Circuit Judge Elizabeth Scherer said in an order dated Wednesday that attorney Alex Arreaza lacks legal standing to make such a motion. Arreaza represents 15-year-old Anthony Borges, who was shot five times in the Valentines Day massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School that killed 17 people.

Arreaza had claimed the two offices have a conflict because both signed a 2016 agreement along with county school and law enforcement officials aimed at handling school disciplinary issues without involving law enforcement.

Mollica separately imposed a $12,500 bail Wednesday on a Stoneman Douglas student who officials say pulled a small knife on a boy she accused of harassing her and a friend. The SunSentinel reports that her lawyer, Brian Reidy said everyone has hit the fear button and that he doesnt blame a kid for taking a weapon to school, quite frankly, these days.Congress for the first time in years is poised to vote on gun legislation that represents incremental but symbolically significant steps on an issue that long has divided the nation.

Final action on the measures, which are tucked inside a mammoth $1.3-trillion spending bill, likely will come Friday, just hours before thousands of people are set to march in Washington in support of tougher gun restrictions in response to last months deadly mass shooting at a Florida high school.

One of the provisions would bolster reporting to the federal background checks system for gun purchases. A separate proposal would authorize $75 million this year for school safety training, metal detectors and other infrastructure, and to create systems for anonymous reporting of threats. For further years, it would provide $100 million a year until 2028.

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Additionally, a legislative report accompanying the spending bill clarifies that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will have the authority to conduct research on the causes of gun violence  ending what has been in effect a 22-year ban on such research that has long been backed by the National Rifle Association.

Theyre small steps compared to the 1994 assault weapons ban that lapsed in 2004 or the proposals for comprehensive background checks that have been discussed and then shelved in recent years. Yet some of the Capitols biggest gun-control advocates marvelled at the first legislative response to a fatal mass shooting in years.

The politics around guns is changing fast and Republicans are scrambling to catch up, Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut said in a statement Thursday. He called the measures in the spending bill good news but added, lets be honest  the NRA still has veto power over the Republican-led Congress.

The decision to act within the must-pass spending measure could allow Congress to finish work in advance of Saturdays March for Our Lives event in Washington. That march, and about 800 related events nationwide, are being organized by a group led by students from the Parkland, Fla., high school where 17 students and faculty died at the hands of a former classmate.

A renewal of the debate on gun control and school safety in Congress immediately after that incident faltered. President Donald Trump sent mixed messages on the issue, suggesting in a bipartisan meeting last month that he would back a series of gun control policies, then backing away after a private dinner with the National Rifle Associations top lobbyist.

And while there was talk of Senate votes on gun-control measures, there was never agreement on how to proceed and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell showed little interest. Because of the NRAs ability to rally fervent gun-rights advocates, lawmakers in both parties said it would be nearly impossible to gather support for strict measures.

The background check provision was proposed by Texas GOP Sen. John Cornyn after a mass shooting at a church in his state last year. It provides incentives for federal and state authorities to comply with existing requirements to report criminal records to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System that would bar someone from buying a firearm.

The school violence measure would fund creation of anonymous reporting systems for threats of school violence and develop teacher and law enforcement training.

For the gun-rights lobby, the most controversial provision is the language effectively ending the 22-year restriction on CDC research into gun violence. That was put in place in 1996, when Republican Jay Dickey of Arkansas, a self- described NRA point person, successfully championed a ban on CDC funding for injury prevention and control that may be used to advocate or promote gun control. The amendment also removed the amount from the CDCs budget that had been spent on research related to guns the year before.

As a result of the amendment, firearms injury prevention funding from the Centers fell by 96 per cent, according to a report published by Mayors Against Illegal Guns. The report also found peer-reviewed research on gun violence fell 60 per cent between 1996 and 2010.

Michael R. Bloomberg, founder of Bloomberg LP, which operates Bloomberg News, is a founding member of the mayors group and serves as a member of the advisory board of Everytown for Gun Safety, which advocates for universal background checks and other gun control measures.

Groups advocating gun control, including the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, heralded the move to restore the CDCs ability to conduct such research. But Gun Owners of America blasted the decision, with Executive Director Erick Pratt calling such research nothing but a smokescreen to demonize firearms.

The expected congressional action this week is the first legislative response to a mass shooting in the U.S. since the 2007 Virginia Tech shootings, when a student suffering from mental illness killed 32 people and wounded 17 others. Congress passed a bill closing loopholes in the National Instant Criminal Background Check System that allowed the student to buy firearms even though a Virginia court had ruled him a danger to himself.

Other major attacks have been met with inaction, beginning with the 1999 attack at Colorados Columbine High School. And after shootings in Connecticut, California, Texas and elsewhere, proposals for tougher restrictions on assault weapons sales and better background checks also have fallen by the wayside.

While the decision to include the modest gun measures in the spending bill probably ensures this weekends march comes on the heels of some action, the lack of tougher measures means that gun control and gun rights will loom large in the fall midterm elections.

The growing importance of the issue was on display on the Senate floor Wednesday, when new Sen. Doug Jones  the Alabama Democrat who took office after his surprise special-election win in December  chose to speak on gun control in his first floor speech since taking office. Jones noted hes a gun owner but called for a series of changes, including expanded background checks, a legislative ban on bump stock devices, a three-day waiting period for gun purchases, and raising the purchasing age for semi-automatic weapons to 21 years old.

For too long, gridlock and partisanship have stood in the way of compromise, Jones said. But I didnt come here to do nothing, and I dont think any of you did, either.WASHINGTONU.S. prosecutors said Thursday they have dismissed all criminal charges against seven of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogans bodyguards stemming from a brawl in Washington last year in which protesters were beaten. The charges were dropped last month just a day ahead of a meeting between Erdogan and now-outgoing secretary of state Rex Tillerson, but the State Department said the timing was coincidental.

Prosecutors said they dropped the charges against the seven on Feb. 14 after dropping charges against four others in November. Assault charges are still pending against four other members of Erdogans security detail as well as two Canadian citizens accused in the May 2017 altercation outside the Turkish ambassadors Washington home during a visit by Erdogan. The incident sparked outrage in Washington and elsewhere and was condemned by the State Department and local officials.

Turkey has said the demonstrators were outlawed Kurdish militants and loudly complained when charges were announced against 19 people, including some of Erdogans bodyguards. Two Americans pleaded guilty in December to assault in the matter and are currently awaiting sentencing.

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The case badly damaged U.S.-Turkish relations and tensions between the NATO allies have increased further because of differences over military operations in Syria.

A day after the charges were dropped, Tillerson met with Erdogan in Ankara in a bid to ease the strained ties but the State Department said it was not involved in the decision.

The U.S. Attorneys office in Washington declined to comment on the reason for the dismissals.

The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the action, said Tillerson told Turkish officials that the cases was an example of how the U.S. had addressed Erdogans grievances.

However, State Department spokesperson Heather Nauert said Thursday that Tillerson had only mentioned the dismissals as an indication of the independence of the American judiciary.

He noted that the timing was coincidental, but he also noted it was a good example of how we have an independent judiciary in our country, and that the Department of Justice made those decisions, she told reporters. The secretary did not discuss this issue with President Erdogan as any type of a quid pro quo.

Tillersons discussion with Erdogan at which they agreed to try to improve relations raised some eyebrows at the time because he did not bring any other U.S. officials into the three-hour meeting. The only other person in the room was Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu, who translated for the two men.The medias trial of Jagmeet Singh for alleged extremism exposes an extreme double standard.

Former Prime Minister Stephen Harpers associations with extremism were routinely ignored: from his role in establishing the pro-apartheid Northern Foundation, whose speaker roster included neo-Nazi Paul Fromm, in 1988; to his inclusion of a representative from the Jewish Defence League, labelled a right-wing terrorist group by the FBI in 2001, on a taxpayer-funded trip to Israel in 2014.

During Harpers tenure as Prime Minister, a militant charismatic fringe [of Christian nationalists]  gained influence out of all proportion to its numerical heft, as former Macleans Washington bureau chief Marci McDonald documented in her book The Armageddon Factor.

Not only [did] it help to reshape foreign policy, the public service and the courts, noted McDonald, but it [threw] its weight behind a range of socially conservative policies that it regards as prerequisites to remaking Canada as a distinctly Christian nation  even while media failed to pick up the clues to its increasing influence.

Current Conservative Party leader Andrew Scheers connections to extreme right-wing Rebel Media  described as a global platform for an extreme anti-Muslim ideology by National Post journalist Richard Warnica  have similarly received shockingly inadequate scrutiny.

Scheers campaign manager for the 2019 election is former Rebel Media corporate director Hamish Marshall, who had previously steered Scheers party leadership campaign to victory while working from the Rebel offices in Toronto.

In an interview with Toronto Life last May, Scheer listed the Rebel as one of his go-to news sources. Twenty-five per cent of sitting Conservative MPs  including Scheer himself, as well as House Opposition Leader Candice Bergen and shadow cabinet members Maxime Bernier, Steven Blaney, and Pierre Poilievre  have made guest appearances on Rebel Media shows.

In August  after the Rebels pro-White supremacist coverage of the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville elicited widespread outrage (due to the killing of anti-fascism activist Heather Heyer)  Scheer announced he would temporarily suspend interviews with the outlet as long as the editorial direction of that particular institution remains as it is.

The fact that it took Scheer so long to distance himself even so meekly from the Rebel demonstrates a disturbing tolerance for its brand of hateful intolerance. The flagrant racism of Scheers go-to news source was not only apparent, but notorious, long before the neo-Nazi riots in Charlottesville.

For example, in March 2017, then-Rebel host Gavin McInnes  founder of the self-described Western chauvinist group the Proud Boys, whose militant arm has been characterized as an accelerant for violence at right-wing rallies by the Southern Poverty Law Center  published a video on the site entitled 10 Things I Hate About Jews, attracting international condemnation.

That same month, another Rebel host at the time, Faith Goldy, called for a crusade against Muslims in Bethlehem, invoking the white nationalist battle cry deus vult (God wills it).

The Rebels former U.K. correspondent, Tommy Robinson, started the English Defence League, which has been linked to bomb plots and mob violence directed against Muslims in the U.K.

And yet, Scheers enduring relationships with personalities involved in the development of Rebel Media, like Hamish Marshall, have garnered relatively scant media attention  in stark contrast to the hounding of Jagmeet Singh for speaking at a 2015 rally commemorating the 1984 Sikh massacre, and a 2016 event where one of Singhs co-panellists appeared to endorse violence in Sikh sovereignty activism.

Commentators have indicted Singh of extremism by association with Sikh separatists, while omitting crucial pieces of context: that the last fatality connected with Sikh insurgency occurred more than two decades ago; and that Sikhs themselves have been subjected to extreme violence by Indian security forces, which arbitrarily detained, tortured, executed, and disappeared tens of thousands of Sikhs in counter-insurgency operations with impunity, according to Human Rights Watch.

While Singh has been called to account for atrocities committed by his co-religionists when he was just a child, Scheer has been permitted to evade accountability for his connections with groups perpetrating violence in the present.

This is symptomatic of Canadian medias terrorism tunnel-vision, which seems to have trouble seeing extremism unless it comes with a turban and beard.

Azeezah Kanji is a legal analyst.

Read more about:How does Progressive Conservative leader Doug Fords oft-repeated promise that, if elected premier, he would repeal Ontarios carbon tax make no sense? Let us count the ways.

First, and fatally for Fords plan, Ontario does not actually have a carbon tax. The cap-and-trade system of pricing carbon that the Wynne government put in place in 2016 imposes a limit (cap) on industrial emissions and allows companies to buy (trade) credits that let them exceed that limit. The price is not paid directly by taxpayers and is therefore not a tax.

If what Ford means is that he will scrap the cap-and-trade system, a second level of incoherence emerges. Starting in 2019, the federal government, in recognition of the growing consensus that there can be no meaningful climate action without a price on carbon, will impose a carbon tax, beginning at $10 per tonne, on all provinces that have failed to implement their own comparable pricing scheme.

Ironically, by repealing Ontarios system of pricing carbon, Ford would be opening the door to exactly the sort of tax he says he wants to do away with.

There are legitimate reasons a conservative might prefer the federal carbon tax over Ontarios cap-and-trade system. While a carbon tax would no doubt hit most Ontarians harder than the existing system  and getting out from cap-and-trade would carry significant costs  revenues from the federal tax would be returned to the provinces to do with whatever they want. That is, Ford could give the money back to taxpayers. The current cap-and-trade system, on the other hand, requires that revenues be reinvested in green initiatives.

This is why Fords predecessor, Patrick Brown, wanted to replace the current system with the federal carbon tax  so he could give the money back. But if thats what Ford is up to, for the sake of accuracy and honesty he should stop saying hes going to repeal the carbon tax and start saying hes going to invite Ottawa to impose it.

If, however, what he means is that he intends to fight Ottawas carbon tax in court, then he should say so and defend that position. Thats what Jason Kenney seems to be doing in his bid to become premier of Alberta.

While this would have the merit at least of being a coherent plan, it is by no means a good one. The Trudeau government is unlikely to back off of its signature environmental initiative, particularly in the face of right-wing opposition in a minority of provinces.

Indeed, the federal Liberals just might relish the fight. Moreover, the feds almost certainly have the authority to impose the tax and if the provinces refuse to play nice, Ottawa has ways of making them pay.

Of course all of this leaves aside the most compelling arguments in favour of leaving in place some price on carbon. Every jurisdiction has a responsibility to do its part to tackle the existential threat of climate change. And, particularly as Ontarios debt mounts and its population ages, there is a pressing need for new revenues if we are to avoid a costly return to blind austerity.

By political necessity, the federal carbon tax is set at a level that most economists agree is too low to significantly change behaviour. The potential environmental benefits of such a tax, then, are twofold: it lays the groundwork for future, more significant price hikes; and it can raise revenues that can then be used to pay for important environmental programs.

Ford, with rhetoric and rebates, can sadly undermine these aims if he wins power. But he cannot repeal a carbon tax that doesnt exist or avoid putting a price on carbon. His pandering carbon-tax promise brazenly denies reality. If Ford refuses to be on the right side of history, he can at least tell Ontarians the truth about where he stands.

Read more about:Canadas Mali mission will emphasize deployment of female peacekeepers, March 18

Social justice quotas are nauseating and patronizing at the best of times, but when it comes to military matters of war and peacekeeping, things get downright dangerous.

Selecting soldiers for deployment to a war zone such as Mali is not the time to engage in virtue-signalling and social posturing. If we must engage in such missions (Id rather we didnt), then we need to deploy soldiers who can best carry out the mission and protect their comrades. If that happens to result in a deployment that is 15 per cent female, then thats great. And if it means only 1 per cent female, then thats fine too. Send the best, whoever they happen to be, or else lives are put at risk.

This needs to be treated as a matter of life and death, not another opportunity for Justin Trudeau to demonstrate his feminist credentials.

Jan Burton, Toronto

Any deployment of Canadian forces to Mali, either now or at any time in the foreseeable future, would not be a peacekeeping mission or even a peace support mission. It would be a mission devoted to active war-making on one side against the other(s) in an ongoing war.

Canada has no business taking sides in the ongoing war in Mali.

John F. Fagan, Toronto

Read more about:John Tory will call for external review of how police investigate disappearances after questions surrounding Bruce McArthur, March 18

A special investigation on how Toronto Police handles missing persons cases is needed to address the lack of communication between communities and the policing efforts that are involved in solving them.

The hope is to recognize the fundamental inadequacies that have been exposed in relations between not only the LGBTQ community, but all minority communities in Toronto, when it comes to missing persons.

Communities and police can improve relations as long as a fundamental trust can be built. Is this possible? For it to be so, animosity cannot rear its ugly head in any solution.

To perpetually vilify one side or the other does a disservice to all, and only adds to the deficit of trust already felt in many communities.

If there is anything positive that can come from this whole entire episode, let it be one that honours the victims and their memories as good citizens. Let any investigation begin the healing process by working together to ensure that no family has to suffer the indignity of not knowing what happened to their loved ones.

Troy J. Young, TorontoHalton students outraged over charity ban, March 21

I have no problem with Catholics being opposed to abortion: it is what they choose to believe in. I dont share that belief but that is my choice. This is what the Charter of Rights and Freedoms supports.

The issue becomes problematic when it involves public policy. We have had our debates about abortion policy and our society has determined that it is a womans right to choose. Some do and some dont  again, consistent with the charter.

But the Halton Catholic District School Board doesnt have that freedom, in that it receives public tax dollars. The purpose of those tax dollars is to fund education, not to promote a particular religions beliefs. This is compounded when these beliefs are also inconsistent with societys values.

The Halton boards recent actions call into question why tax dollars are being used to support the promotion of a religion. It is compounded by the fact that tax dollars support only one religion in Ontario and no other. That is inconsistent with the principle of division of state and religion.

It is time to have a broader public discussion about continuing this archaic policy of publicly funding Catholic school boards in a pluralist society. As Quebec and Newfoundland have shown, this policy is not written in Constitutional stone.

Alex Cullen, OttawaSchool lunch served with side order of chaos, March 21

I completely understand the concerns of parents voiced in this article. I have been a lunch assistant for many years in a different school board in the GTA. From experience, I can tell you it is an under-appreciated job that can be difficult at times.

It is challenging for schools to hire lunch assistants due to the job itself, as well as the one-hour, minimum-wage time commitment right in the middle of the day. This makes being a lunch assistant unrealistic for many families.

Therefore I also understand the understaffing situation that schools face when teachers are having their much-needed lunch break. If more parents were able or willing to work as lunch assistants, it might help to solve this issue.

Tracy Smith, Toronto

After reading about the chaotic school-meal zoo-time, it makes me think of a well-established solution. Finland has had the whole school-lunch issue solved since 1948, when free meals were made available for all students.

Teachers take turns monitoring the lunch period, having an opportunity to enjoy a very affordable, nutritious and balanced meal themselves. There are many goals set for the meals and meal-time: health, nutrition and manners are among the curricular goals.

Can we not apply this concept here? The costs, hassle and often nutritionally non-satisfying lunch we pack could possibly be changed to the peace of mind that our children are getting a nice hot meal contributing to their learning and a more-positive behaviour.

Never mind those who cannot afford a balanced lunch or not too much of a lunch at all for their children. Kids observe each others lunches, and the feeling being inferior should not be a factor in such a basic thing as eating at school.

This would be a publicly funded operation requiring careful planning. Some steps have already been taken in many school districts toward a healthier lunch and providing help for those who cannot afford lunches. Lets get this figured out here.

Nina Vanska, Mono, Ont.The social media giant faces investigations, calls from Congress and now a lawsuit filed by investors in light of a data misuse scandal involving Cambridge Analytica.

Investors and users are now suing Facebook Inc. (FB) - Get Facebook, Inc. Class A Report over reports that political data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica LLC harvested the user data of more than 50 million users without proper disclosures or permissions.

Shareholder Fan Yuan on Tuesday, March 20, filed a class action against the Menlo Park, Calif., company, CEO Mark Zuckerberg and CFO David Wehner in San Francisco federal court, alleging that Facebook "made materially false and misleading statements regarding the company's business, operational and compliance policies."

Another class action from site user Lauren Price in the same district court named Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, charging the social media company with failing to stop or actively avoiding discovery of the data mining firm's "improper data aggregation."

Over the past five days, Facebook stock has dropped 6.6%, though shares were up 2.3% to $172.01 on Wednesday afternoon.

"For investors, this really comes down to issues of transparency and accountability," said Natasha Lamb, managing partner at Arjuna Capital. "There has been a disregard for investors in general."

Last year, the fund issued a proposal urging Facebook to produce a report on the company's issues surrounding "fake news."

Zuckerberg and the company already have been in hot water with politicians and lawmakers alike thanks to this latest scandal. Here's a roundup of everyone else who has been holding Facebook's feet to the fire this week.

Widespread Investigations Begin

On Monday, European Parliament President Antonio Tajani announced an investigation of Facebook on Twitter (TWTR) - Get Twitter, Inc. Report .

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is reportedly investigating the company as well, and on Tuesday, Commissioner Terrell McSweeny

issued a statement

regarding the Cambridge Analytica news.

"The FTC takes the allegations that the data of millions of people were used without proper authorization very seriously," McSweeny wrote.

New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey also sent a demand letter to Facebook on Tuesday, kicking off a joint investigation of the company and the Cambridge Analytica data breach, Schneiderman announced in a press release.

TheStreet Podcast | Facebook: How to Protect Your Data

Lawmakers Call for Answers

On Twitter, members of Congress have called for Zuckerberg to appear before the Senate Judiciary in light of the reported misuse, including Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore.,

sent a letter

to Zuckerberg on Monday asking him to "detail the extent of misuse of its users' private info" by April 13.

"With little oversight -- and no meaningful intervention from Facebook -- Cambridge Analytica was able to use Facebook-developed and marketed tools to weaponize detailed psychological profiles against tens of millions of Americans," Wyden wrote.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., and Sen. John Kennedy, R-La., also sent a bipartisan letter asking for Zuckerberg and other social media executives to appear before Congress.

"This isn't the first time we've made this request, but now 50 million people who had their records stolen should add to our numbers!" Klobuchar wrote in a tweet.

When asked on Tuesday whether Zuckerberg should testify before Congress, White House Deputy Press Secretary Raj Shah told Fox News that President Donald Trump "believes Americans' privacy should be protected," and if legislators want to "look into the matter, we welcome that."

#DeleteFacebook Spreads on Twitter

The hashtag #DeleteFacebook also has gained traction with users on Twitter, including Brian Acton, co-founder of the Facebook-owned messaging app WhatsApp. Acton tweeted, "It is time. #deletefacebook," followed by a tweet promoting the encrypted messaging app Signal, into which Acton invested $50 million in February. Facebook acquired the app in October 2014 for $21.8 billion.

Facebook is a holding in Jim Cramer's Action Alerts PLUS Charitable Trust Portfolio. Want to be alerted before Cramer and the AAP team buy or sell FB? Learn more now.Jim Cramer says that when a stock surges on bad news, investors need to pay attention.

Did you miss "Mad Money" on CNBC? If so, here are some of Jim Cramer's top takeaways.

When a stock surges on bad news, investors need to pay attention, Cramer reminded viewers, as he took a fresh look at an old friend that fell out of favor last year, Ulta Beauty (ULTA) - Get Ulta Beauty Inc Report .

Ulta was beloved on Wall Street, surging 1,566% from $5 to $314 a share. That was until 2016, when the company's same-store sales slowed from 16.6% to just 10.3% by 2017. That, along with declining gross margins, was enough to send momentum investors heading for the hills.

But on Thursday, Ulta posted lighter-than-expected revenues with in-line same-store sales, and the stock surged from $206 to $221 a share. Cramer said that's a classic tell that the weak hands have left the stock and it's poised for a recovery.

Ulta is more than just a valuation story, however. The company continues to make operational improvements and just announced a well-timed $625 million share buyback, which equates to 5% of the company's market cap.

Over on Real Money, Cramer breaks down, in detail, the business dynamics of Facebook (FB) - Get Facebook, Inc. Class A Report Amazon (AMZN) - Get Amazon.com, Inc. Report , Apple (AAPL) - Get Apple Inc. (AAPL) Report , Netflix (NFLX) - Get Netflix, Inc. (NFLX) Report , NVIDIA (NVDA) - Get NVIDIA Corporation Report , and Alphabet (GOOGL) - Get Alphabet Inc. Class A Report . Get more of Cramer's insights with a free trial subscription to Real Money.

Cramer and the AAP team take a close look at the Fed's dot chart that provides clues into its sentiment on future rate hikes. Find out what they're telling their investment club members and get in on the conversation with a free trial subscription to Action Alerts PLUS.

Search Jim Cramer's "Mad Money" trading recommendations using our exclusive "Mad Money" Stock Screener.

To read a full recap of this episode of "Mad Money," click here.

To watch replays of Cramer's video segments, visit the Mad Money page on CNBC.

To sign up for Jim Cramer's free Booyah! newsletter with all of his latest articles and videos please click here.

At the time of publication, Cramer's Action Alerts PLUS had a position in FB, AMZN, GOOGL, AAPL, NVDA.Trump has uncorked tariffs on China, and now many U.S. companies may be feeling the heat.

Retaliation from China might not target the same sectors the U.S.-sanctioned tariffs do. U.S. trade representative Robert Lighthizer, who said he is still "gaming out what would happen" should the Chinese retaliate, noted in the Wednesday House Ways and Means Committee meeting that U.S. agriculture will almost inevitably be a target.

Lighthizer's admission came the same day as an editorial in China's Global Times stated the following: "The Trump administration has repeatedly accused China of violating international trade rules and threatened to impose higher tariffs on Chinese products. But the U.S. is actually the breaker of WTO rules, which can be seen clearly by how subsidized U.S. soybeans are dumped on China."

The tariffs are the latest in a series of protectionist trade policy moves from the Trump White House. But who could these tariffs hurt most?

China is the world's largest soybean purchaser, while the U.S. has recently become its biggest producer. A trade war with China might mean U.S. agriculture takes the brunt of this hit.

Companies such as food processor Archer-Daniels-Midland Co. (ADM) - Get Archer-Daniels-Midland Company Report , agribusiness food producer Bunge Ltd. (BG) - Get Bunge Limited Report and agrochemical firm Monsanto Co. (MON) might lose business in high-demand China markets.

Multinational chemical company and Action Alerts Plus holding DowDuPont Inc. undefined , crop nutrient miner Mosaic Co. (MOS) - Get Mosaic Company (MOS) Report and fertilizer distributor CF Industries Holdings Inc. (CF) - Get CF Industries Holdings, Inc. Report could as well.

There's also Boeing Co. (BA) - Get Boeing Company Report , which is the single-largest U.S. exporter and counts China as a crucial market. A trade war with the country could mean China would turn to other manufacturers, such as Airbus (EADSY) - Get Airbus SE Report .

The same could be said for other big-industry companies that manufacture durables used in agriculture, including Deere & Co. (DE) - Get Deere & Company Report , AGCO Corp. (AGCO) - Get AGCO Corporation Report , CNH Industrial NV (CNHI) - Get CNH Industrial NV Report , Lindsay Corp. (LNN) - Get Lindsay Corporation Report , Titan International Inc. (TWI) - Get Titan International, Inc. Report and Toro Co. (TTC) - Get Toro Company Report .

The market has already taken notice of the possibility of a trade war undermining U.S.-China business, too. The iShares China Large-Cap ETF (FXI) - Get iShares China Large-Cap ETF Report fell more than 2.4% in premarket trading on Thursday, while the Xtrackers Harvest CSI 300 China fund (ASHR) - Get Xtrackers Harvest CSI 300 China A-Shares ETF Report dipped about 1%.Despite lobbying hard for changes, the pharmaceutical industry is going to cover more costs regarding Medicare Part D in the $1.3 trillion budget that needs to pass by Friday.

Big Pharma was handed a rare loss as Congressional leaders moved to pass the $1.3 trillion omnibus budget.

But Seattle-based Omeros Corp. (OMER) - Get Omeros Corporation Report , a commercial stage biopharmaceutical company, came out fine. Its shares jumped 35% to $15.75 on Thursday after the company gained a victory in the budget process.

The budget also gave a glimpse of the ongoing finger pointing between the pharmaceutical industry and insurers over who bears the blame for higher drug prices.

Lobbyists for the pharmaceutical industry have been camped out on Capitol Hill this past month working legislators to change new policies tied to payment obligations attached to Medicare Part D, the so-called Donut Hole. The changes call for the financial liability covered by insurance carriers for prescription drugs not covered by Medicare to shrink, while that obligation rises for pharmaceutical companies. For drug makers, their share of discount rises from 50% to 70%. Lobbyists had been trying to push those numbers down to 60%.

PhRMA, the lobbying arm of the pharmaceutical industry, has been active in trying to reverse the changes, softening the ground up with this statement as soon as rough sketches of the budget began emerging. "Our industry has long supported efforts to make prescription drug coverage more affordable for Medicare Part D beneficiaries. Rather than prioritizing lowering seniors' out-of-pocket costs, this proposal provides a massive bailout for insurance companies and undermines their incentive to reduce Part D costs, an incentive that has worked well for more than a decade."

Instead PhRMA called for Congress to improve affordability and predictable price structures for seniors by adding an out-of-pocket limit and improving discount access for seniors at pharmacies, a lower cost alternative for the pharma industry.

Democrats are likely to make drug costs a campaign issue in the mid-term election in November, especially since the Trump administration has made a lot of noise about bringing costs down since taking office.

But an analysis from Pharmacy Benefit Consultants show that from January 2017 to this month, 20 drugs jumped 200% and another 39 drugs saw their price increase 100%. In all, 400 drugs had average wholesale price increases between 25% and 50%. Pfizer Inc. had a wealth of drugs increasing between 22% and 43%, according to the Pharmacy Benefit data. Pfizer's (PFE) - Get Pfizer Inc. Report Viagra erectile dysfunction drug increased 39.5%.

Omeros did well in the budget process. The company managed to get its cataract surgery drug Omidria and an extra two years of Medicare pass-through status, which will allow the company to recoup a higher reimbursement rate. The pass-through status expired last year and revenues in the first quarter reflected uncertainty in the market regarding Medicare payment. The company had been active in lobbying for the reinstatement.

The revenues derived from Omidria are critical for the company as it represents its sole commercial income. In 2016 revenues jumped by $28.2 million or 212.5% compared to 2015. Last year those revenues grew to $64.8 million from $41.4 million.

Omeros saw its shares respond as news of its pass-through status leaked out. The stock closed Wednesday at $11.64. On Thursday Omeros shares closed at $15.75.

Another winner in the budget battle were healthcare providers dealing with opioid abuse. The Trump administration has taken heat over its lack of action regarding opioid abuse. But the Department of Health and Human Services will see $3.6 billion of the $4.65 billion allocated to address the opioid epidemic, and the National Health Institutes for Health will receive $500 million for new research on opioid addiction as well as work on creating alternative non-opioid pain meds.ALTON  In response to threats made on multiple bathroom stalls, Alton High School was under restrictive movement Thursday.

According to a release sent home to parents by Alton High Principal Michael Bellm, the threats were discovered on Monday and Tuesday and one threat mentioned a specific date, March 22.

The school took precautionary measures Thursday to ensure the safety of its students. Police presence was increased around the school and the students were escorted to classes as well as the bathroom by staff members.

Our number one priority is to keep our students safe, said Kristi Baumgartner, assistant superintendent of the Alton School District, and thats exactly what we did today by taking some precautionary steps.

Baumgartner said the school did experience lower attendance today, but instruction as well as other school activities went on as planned and without incident. We certainly respect a parents right to keep their child at home any time they have a reasonable concern.

In a release sent home to parents Wednesday, Bellm noted that the Madison County Sheriffs Office, along with Alton High School administrators, are actively investigating the incidents. I have also asked for our law enforcement partners to increase their presence in our school, Bellm said in the release. This will assist our team in ensuring a safe environment at all times and for students and staff.

Threat concerns have been heightened in recent weeks after the Feb. 14 school shooting in Parkland, Florida, in which 17 people were killed, and one Tuesday in which two students at a high school in Great Mills, Maryland, were shot.

We are not unlike many other districts across the state and country right now, said Baumgartner. In that we have to take even misguided statements, joking and hoaxes as serious until we can determine if there is a credible concern.

Reach reporter Kelsey Schulz at 618-208-6452.EDWARDSVILLE  Voters will have a chance to decide in November whether to keep or eliminate the Madison County recorder position, after the County Board approved placing a referendum about the issue on the ballot.

The board voted 21-6 in favor of the resolution after considerable debate, and an appeal by Recorder Amy Meyer.

According to the resolution, the question reads Shall the office of the Madison County Recorder of Deeds be eliminated and all duties and responsibilities of the office of the Madison County Recorder of Deeds be transferred to, and assumed by, the Office of the Madison County Clerk by December 7, 2020?

Although discussed in the past, the issue has been seriously floating around since Board Member Chrissy Dutton, R-Bethalto, brought it up in December.

The resolution has gone through several committees, and Board Chairman Kurt Prenzler was criticized last month for not bringing it before the full board because he wanted it to go through the Government Relations Committee first.

Meyer spoke at the beginning of the meeting, noting the office has been in place since 1812.

That was before Madison County was a county, before Illinois was a state, she said.

She also appeared to take a verbal shot at Dutton. Meyer said the resolution was put forth by someone not even elected. Dutton was appointed in December 2016, and won a contested primary for the fall race for her County Board seat in Tuesdays election.

Meyer also accused the administration of trying to disassemble county government and said the county needed to keep an elected recorder to maintain the balance of power.

She also noted that there has been no plan or cost savings analysis.

We have a robust economy, she said. There is no need to do this to save money.

When the issue came up for a vote, Board Member Art Asadorian, D-Granite City, asked whether studies had been completed or if the issue had been discussed with other department heads.

If you have a valid study present it, he said. I dont see any direct advantage other than saving a persons salary.

Dutton then noted the position was not required by the Illinois Constitution, and that McHenry County had voted Tuesday to eliminate the position.

Other counties are doing it successfully, Dutton said.

According to the Northwest Herald, voters approved the measure with about 79 percent voting yes.

Several other board members weighed in on the discussion, including Michael Doc Holiday Sr., D-Alton, who questioned the lack of a study, saying, We havent seen any plans, weve just seen conjecture.

Phil Chapman, R-Highland, said he supported the measure and wanted to see robust public discussion on the issue before the November election.

Mick Madison, R-Bethalto, noted that the recently-passed budget provided the financial study and figures they needed, and that the referendum had been approved by the Finance, Government Relations and Tax Cycle committees.

Tom McRae, R-Bethalto, noted that the county could save $150,000 per year in salary and benefits, and other than the elected recorder, there should be no job losses.

Voting against the resolution were Holiday; Asadorian; Bruce Malone, D-Alton; Larry Trucano, D-Collinsville; Jack Minner, D-Edwardsville, and Robert Pollard, I-East Alton. Board Members Jim Dodd, D-Alton, and Ann Gorman, D-Edwardsville, were absent.

Reach reporter Scott Cousins at 618-208-6447.EDWARDSVILLE  The votes have been cast and unofficial tallies have been put online, but there are still a few things that need to be completed to put the 2018 primary election in the books.

That includes continuing to count mail-in ballots, tallying write-in candidate votes, and waiting to see if the U.S. Supreme Court will consider intervening in Hal Pattons bid for the Illinois Senate.

Madison County Clerk Debra Ming-Mendoza said the voter turnout for this years primary was slightly more than 25 percent, about 10 percentage points higher than the comparable 2014 primary.

According to the unofficial results a total of 43,821 voters cast ballots in 2018, compared to 26,131 in 2014.

That figure includes 5,945 early ballots and at least 1,431 absentee ballots. However, Ming-Mendoza said they are still receiving some mail-in ballots, and will continue counting those postmarked by March 20.

The final ballot certification, when election results become official, must occur by April 10.

Another issue is whether the U.S. Supreme Court will grant a stay and consider whether Edwardsville Mayor Hal Patton can stay on the Republican primary ballot for the 56th Legislative District Illinois Senate seat after signing a nominating petition for a Democratic candidate.

A Cook County Circuit Court ruled against Patton and struck him from the ballot. The case went to the Illinois Supreme Court, which handed it back to the First District Appellate Court in Chicago, which denied Pattons request.

Pattons attorneys have filed motions with the U.S. Supreme Court for a stay, but Ming-Mendoza said she has not heard anything.

If the court acts she said it will be a simple process to count those ballots.

She also noted that Carrie Patton, Hal Pattons wife who had filed to run as a write-in candidate for that position, had withdrawn on Monday, votes for her would not be counted.

Ming-Mendoza said they also have to finish counting other write-in votes.

We had 33 write-in candidates so I dont want to rush through that, she said.

Write-ins must reach a minimum vote count to be included in the November election.

She said Chris Miller, who is a Democratic write-in for Madison County Treasurer, appeared to have hit the minimum number of votes.

She was unsure about two other Democratic write-ins, Frederick Faust for the District 11 Madison County Board seat; and J. David Parker for the 108th Representative District,

The other write-ins were for precinct committeeman spots and had not been fully counted.

She said most of the write-in votes should be finished by Thursday.

Reach reporter Scott Cousins at 618-208-6446.SPRINGFIELD  Students in high schools across the state are earning college credit and saving money thanks to a push by the community college system to increase access to dual credit opportunities.

Over the last five years, enrollment in community college dual credit courses has increased over 16 percent. In the last year alone, over 57,000 high school student were enrolled in 11,000 dual credit courses.

Dual credit programs allow academically qualified high school students to explore various academic areas and experience the rigor of college-level coursework. Upon successful course completion, students earn both high school and college credit. In acknowledgment of this valuable educational opportunity, the Illinois Senate recently declared March 18 to 24 as Dual Credit Week.

The community college system has long been a leader in the development and expansion of dual credit programs. The steady rise in dual credit enrollment reflects an understanding among secondary and postsecondary educators that early college experience is an integral part of preparing students for college and career success, said Dr. Karen Hunter Anderson, executive director of the Illinois Community College Board (ICCB).

For students, dual credit programs mean savings on college tuition costs and a job start on college completion. I would recommend taking dual credit to anybody shared Tyler Behrends, a 2014 graduate of Sauk Valley Community College. It worked out great. After he graduated high school, Tyler was already done with his general education requirements and jumped right into classes at Sauk Valley.

Danelle Helton, a freshman at Lake Land College, took three dual credit classes in high school earning 13 credit hours. You usually would get a little intimidated to be taking a college class in high school, but since I was taking college courses with my peers, I knew my teachers and I was comfortable going to my teacher and asking questions. When I transitioned here to Lake Land, I found myself feeling just as comfortable with my teachers and I knew the curriculum and what to expect.

It was great to get some of my credits out of the way and allowed me to cut down on the hours I had to take this year so I could keep my jobs, said Helton, who in addition to school was working three jobs.

Over the past five years, the ICCB has provided nearly $1 million to community colleges through the Dual Credit Enhancement Grant to support the development, enhanced delivery, and articulation of local dual credit programs and to expand student access. These grant dollars have allowed colleges to implement new dual credit offerings and utilize innovative instructional models including distance learning and competency-based education.

The grants reflect the Boards commitment to strengthen the pathway for students from high school into college, said Anderson. As we look ahead to the future, the Board is focused on expanding dual credit opportunities especially in rural and other underserved areas of the state.

As the third largest community college system in the country and the leading public workforce development trainer in the state, Illinois community colleges serve over 600,000 residents each year in credit, noncredit, and continuing education courses. Illinois is home to 48 colleges in 39 community college districts which provide high quality, accessible, cost-effective educational opportunities to the entire state. The Illinois Community College Board is the state coordinating board for community colleges and has statutory responsibility for administering state and federal grants to community college districts and adult education providers and managing high school equivalency testing for Illinois.EDWARDSVILLE  A 37-year-old Edwardsville man pleaded guilty Thursday to two bank robberies, one in 2016 and one in 2017.

Marcus J. Thornton, 37, of Edwardsville, pleaded guilty in federal district court, in East St. Louis, to two counts of bank robbery, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of Illinois, Donald S. Boyce, announced Thursday. Thornton faces a prison term of up to 40 years, a fine of up to $500,000, a minimum of five years of supervised release after his prison term, and an amount of restitution that is yet to be determined.EDWARDSVILLE  The Madison County Board approved a labor agreement Wednesday night with the Teamsters Local Union No. 525 giving wage increases and separating the Highway and Animal Control departments.

Most of the changes in the three-year agreements had to do with language and standardizing terms to match other county employee contracts. But the major changes came down to the separation of the agreement between the two departments.

Historically, there has been one contract, but the decision to split the departments came down to a vote by the members, Chairman Kurt Prenzler said.

The agreement for the departments expired on Nov. 30, 2017 and employees continued to work under the old contract while county and union officials negotiated a new deal.

Prenzler said the agreement was a good deal for the county.

County Board member Tom McRae, Bethalto, who also chairs the Transportation Committee, agreed.

Im pleased the County arrived at a compromise that was fair to the employees and the taxpayers in Madison County, McRae said.

The vote for the labor agreement was 26 to 1, with Lisa Ciampoli voting no. Board members Ann Gorman and Jim Dodd were absent.

The labor agreement for the Highway Department included a $.50 cent per hour per year pay increase for its 28 employees. Hourly wages starting Dec. 1, 2017 range from $27.72 for a laborer; $28.66, Chauffeur; $29.72, operator; and $30.57 for a mechanic.

Animal Control received a 1 percent per year increase for its six officers, costing around $21,151 during the contract period.

Employees in both departments will no longer receive a higher wage for working part of a day in higher classification. Animal Control will no longer get a $1 per hour increase for working a special shift.

Other matters contained in the agreement include:

 Holiday leave to be changed to the same as American Federation of State, Federal and Municipal Employees employee contracts.

 The countys health insurance contribution rates lowered from $346.10 per week to

 2017/18  $316.90 (not to exceed)

 2018/19  $335.90

 2019/20  $369.50

 Decreased sick leave allotment for employees from 18 days to 16

 Increased personal days from three to four

 Highway Department work hours will continue to be on a flexible schedule, with a 24-hour notice to change

 Animal Control officers will receive on-call pay

Employees in both departments receive full family health care coverage through the Teamsters Central States Southeast Areas Health and Welfare Fund. The annual employee cost for benefits will be between $16,478 to $19,214 during the next three years.

Negotiations started in early December 2017 and the contract will be retroactive to Nov. 30, 2017.

Prenzler said currently employees with the Madison County Sheriffs Department are in negotiations as well.

The Sheriffs Department employs 165 people and of those there are 136 covered by the Policemens Benevolent and Protective Association Labor Committee agreement, which includes deputies, communications officers, sergeants, lieutenants and captains in both the administration/patrol division and jail. The remainder of the employees are covered by an AFSME agreementOn a shelf in Rosemary Magees office, amid beloved books, postcards commemorating childrens literature, and personal mementos, sits a curious photograph of a shabby white building covered in peeling paint. A sign above the doorway reads Annex B.

Gazing out the windows of the directors office of Emorys Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library, Magee can pinpoint where Annex B once stood, within a cluster of temporary barracks constructed on campus shortly after World War II.

Forty years later, those barracks had become temporary classrooms, part of a scattered network of spaces that housed Emorys art, theater and music programs.

For years, Emory had debated how to create a cohesive, centralized home for the arts befitting a top liberal arts university. By the mid-1990s, a campus committee had even offered a proposal, complete with blueprints. But amid conflicting visions, the project had stalled.

Yet within the effort, Magee saw possibilities.

A longtime arts enthusiast, she suggested to administrators that they revisit the process. We have to bring our groups together and we need to rethink this, said Magee, then a senior associate dean at Emory College.

With quiet diplomacy, unwavering resolve and a talent for building bridges among campus constituencies, she did just that  gathering a dream team to help spearhead a new design and the fundraising needed to breathe life into a project some thought impossible.

Not only were her instincts on target, they would help advance the construction of Emorys Donna and Marvin Schwartz Center for Performing Arts, a multidisciplinary teaching, practice and performance facility that opened in 2003 to offer the arts a visible, inclusive home.

Today, the Schwartz Center stands as a vital beacon to the arts. But Magee still keeps a photo of its humble predecessor  a reminder of the past, but also of what can emerge from the powerful alchemy of creative thinking, collaboration and hard work.

That philosophy has guided Magee throughout many roles at Emory  a journey fueled by her own curiosity, as well as a delight in observing the growth of the university and its people, seeing all that is good in Emory becoming something even better.

Call it the breathless promise of what if

A career immersed in Emory

Earlier this month, Magee stepped away from the Rose Library and her administrative roles after 40 years spent in an astonishing range of positions and capacities.

The coming months will bring a year of sabbatical before she retires. And with it, an opportunity to reflect on her service as a gentle diplomat and creative visionary who strove to help shape the institution that, she insists, actually shaped her.

By now, Magee knows Emory from nearly every possible angle  as a student, alumna and scholar; professor and researcher; senior associate dean responsible for resources and planning at Emory College; member of the presidents cabinet and vice president and secretary of the university; and library special collections director.

She arrived at Emory in 1977 to pursue a PhD in literature and religion at the Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts, while her husband, Ron Grapevine, earned a masters degree from Georgia Tech. She graduated in 1982, the year her daughter, Rebecca, was born.

Beyond her studies, Magee served as president of Emorys Graduate Student Council (GSC), where she quickly caught the attention of campus administrators.

When the university announced plans to close a graduate student dorm, the GSC gathered signatures to oppose it. I was a protester and presented our petition to the person who oversaw residence halls at the time, she recalls.

That was Joe Moon, now dean of campus life at Emorys Oxford College.

He was most receptive, Magee says. And we became good friends as well as colleagues.

Her level-headed activism made an impression. She was soon invited to serve on a search committee by the dean of the graduate school, giving her a deep glimpse into the inner workings of a university. And Magee liked what she saw.

There was a feeling that were up to something good here, she says. In Emory, I saw a place where individuals can grow and flourish, where there is an institutional commitment to talking about matter and meaning and purpose and aesthetics.

Following graduation, Magee taught in the English Department before joining Emory College of Arts and Sciences as assistant dean and director of summer programs, working closely with students; many still count her as a friend and mentor.

Later, she was appointed associate dean for resources and planning and then senior associate dean, charged with administering a $100 million operating budget and capital projects of more than $150 million.

For the Schwartz Center and related campus renovations, Magee would help spearhead a $40 million capital campaign. As executive director of The Arts Project, she also chaired a committee tasked with enhancing the arts at Emory.

At the time, I dont think people realized how strong our arts programs were at Emory, because they werent always visible, reflects Trustee Emerita Laura Hardman 67C, who worked with Magee on the Schwartz Center.

As someone who gets the big picture, but also understands that implementation is in the details, Rosemary knew how to bring all of it together, she says. She really helped the arts and creativity become a focus across the entire university and into the community.

Rosemary just has the ability to develop and implement and change things for the better, Hardman adds. Its like a ripple effect.

Drift and intention

Over the years, Magee learned to embrace opportunities as they arose.

I first knew Rosemary in the College deans office, where I came to admire her because she was just so effective, recalls former Emory President James T. Laney. She is one of the few people Ive known who is universally admired and also universally trusted.

Her expanding roles always brought out a different dimension of her capacities, Laney says. Throughout her career, shes handled such disparate offices with universal approbation.

Looking back, Magee reflects on a career guided by both drift and intention. There are moments when you are drifting along, not knowing where you will end up, but knowing that you need to go with it, she says. And then there are moments where you call upon yourself to be more intentional.

It is a way of life that she credits her son, Sean, along with her husband and daughter, for inspiring.

For Magee, helping revive plans for a campus arts center was to become wholly intentional. There were obstacles and setbacks, but working with a cadre of faculty, staff and volunteers, Magee forged ahead. By 1999, she and Randy Fullerton, from Emorys Theater Department, were among a delegation of Emory diplomats headed to New York to evaluate alumni interest in the idea.

Gathering in the home of Emory alumnus William Cohen, Steve Sanderson, dean of Emory College at the time, was preparing to speak, but unexpectedly turned to Magee and Fullerton and said, I think you should present this.

Somehow, everything shed learned about academic programs, teaching, budgeting and building seemed to crystallize.

It was a life-changing moment for me, Magee reflects.

And for Emory, too.

The next day, Marvin and Donna Schwartz 62C, an Emory alumna, pledged $8 million dollars towards construction of a new arts center.

The art of conversation

In 2005, Magee was asked to consider a new post  vice president and secretary of the university, working with the both the Emory Board of Trustees and the presidents cabinet.

Initially, she declined. Then came a phone call.

Chair of the Emory Board of Trustees, Ben F. Johnson III 65C was an accomplished lawyer whod been a champion debater at Emory. He figures you out, then he figures out whats important to you and helps you see why an opportunity would be well suited, Magee explains.

Johnson urged Magee to consider how she could make the position her own. I told her two people really needed her, a board chair and a very new president, and that the university wasnt going to reach its potential without someone coordinating the activities of the board and administration, Johnson recalls.

Ultimately, Magee was swayed by her daughter, who on a visit home from college challenged her to see the possibilities: You have no idea where it will take you, she urged.

It was an adjustment. Initially, Magee was the only woman at the table during gatherings of the presidents cabinet.

She brought so much to those meetings, enthuses former Emory President James W. Wagner. It was a place for all the cabinet-level university officers to speak about issues and opportunities, and Rosemary was a bold contributor to those conversations.

As university secretary, Magee championed the role of faculty governance and helped in developing a more diverse and national board of trustees, says Johnson.

To support her intellectual curiosity and passion for the arts, Magee was also charged with serving as a liaison to distinguished university professors, including author Salman Rushdie and Maestro Robert Spano.

From those relationships grew Emorys Creativity Conversations  one-on-one public talks Magee has hosted for over a decade with a range of scholars, writers, poets, artists and other intellectuals.

Last month, in her honor, the university announced the creation of an endowment to support and sustain the program, which has been renamed The Rosemary Magee Creativity Conversation Series, says Leslie Taylor, director of the Center for Creativity and the Arts.

The thing about Rosemary is that it was never about Rosemary, Johnson says. Nothing she did was motivated by anything other than what was best for Emory, its faculty and students and her love of education.

When you are able to present yourself without guile, as she has, it gives you a power most people dont understand.

Love of literature leads to the Rose Library

Over the years, there were other opportunities, but Magee chose to conclude her career at the university she cares for so deeply.

In 2012, Magee became director of Emorys Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library. In that role, she would lead the librarys extensive renovation and renaming in recognition of benefactor Stuart A. Rose 76BBA.

She also shepherded a series of high-profile acquisitions, from letters written by novelist Harper Lee and a college-aged Barack Obama to materials from civil rights journalist Eugene Patterson to activist Mari Evans, from beat-generation writer Jack Kerouac to the coveted archive of Flannery OConnor.

Many of these acquisitions were made possible by Magees gift for building enduring relationships, says University Librarian Yolanda Cooper, who praises her fierce advocacy and the access to hands-on learning promoted by Magee and her team.

The renovation of that space has more than tripled our capacity for teaching, Cooper notes.

Rosemary has truly helped extend a feeling of connectedness between the campus and the Rose Library, she adds. When she takes the reins, beautiful things happen.

Emory University Distinguished Professor Kevin Young, former curator of literary collections and the Rose Librarys Raymond Danowski Poetry Library, credits Magee with ushering in a new era for Emorys special collections, highlighting its international qualities and making the archive a welcoming center for inquiry.

She helped pilot the library in a time of transition even as it was establishing itself  that is no small feat, to make a library that can be so widely recognized, says Young, who now serves as director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem.

And she definitely brought her passion  not just for literature, but also for the arts, he says. I think the archives are an art and she very much understood that side of it.

So it was fitting that friends and colleagues, poets and writers, faculty and former university presidents gathered in the Rose Library earlier this month to bid her a fond farewell.

Her love of the arts was reflected in a live jazz ensemble and Emory dance students, who glided through the crowd with movements inspired by words describing Magee: Caring. Poetic. Savvy. Strategic. Creative. Leader

One by one, speakers described her impact, her professional finesse, her value as a trusted advisor, her ethos of caring.

Former Emory College Dean Bobby Paul, with whom Magee worked closely over the years, warmly recalled the many buildings on campus today that reflect her touch. These things that started out only as ideas, or even pipe dreams, often in her mind alone, have become realities, he said.

Emory historian Gary Hauk lauded her with a light-hearted poem written in Seussian rhyme. Former U.S. Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey, a former Emory English professor, encouraged Magee with her own writing. I look forward to the stories she will tell us, the wisdom and truth shell divine in her fiction, she said. Rosemary, we have yet more to learn from your gifts.

Stuart Rose, for whom the library is now named, praised Magees natural talent working with special collections, particularly an ability to straighten things out and make everything better.

In her honor, the central spine of the Rose Library, where visitors linger to view changing exhibits, will be named The Rosemary M. Magee Gallery.

For now, Magee will write and travel before beginning a fellowship at the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry, where she plans to shape a collection of short stories and pursue other writing projects over the coming academic year.

This moment does not end my time at Emory, she told the crowd, because I will continue to immerse myself in the riches of this community and enjoy the company of all wise hearts who seek knowledge as I dwell and study here.

For Magee, it has been a fulfilling journey.

And as a chorus of Tibetan monks chanted blessings for her long life and good health in haunting, full-throated song, she quietly listened, awaiting her next chapter.Gayatri Singh missed the times when people from different fields of art came together to create magic. So she thought of curating a show that would bring together creative minds, pushing boundaries. This was the genesis of 'Transitional Spaces', a unique show in Delhi that showcased creative collaborations between artists, architects, interior designers and product designers.

Said Singh, In any discipline, be it traditional buildings or any architecture, you will notice that art, design and architecture were once integrated. Today, they are very separate. 'Transitional Spaces' is my attempt to bring together people from different fields, on the same platform.

This got landscape architect Akshay Kaul excited. Kaul was actively involved in restoring environment by revitalising the water system. While working on one of his projects, he realised the impact of developmental activities on the ecosystem. So, with an objective to highlight the issue, he created a special installation titled 'Oneness', collaborating with ceramic sculptor Rahul Modak. Through the installation, he re-analysed his restoration objective and explained the ecological imbalance the rivers and water bodies faced owing to rising levels of pollution.

Exhibits from 'Transitional Spaces' art show at Bikaner House in Delhi | Aayush Goel

Kaul linked the theme to the architectural vocabulary. When we talk about water on earth, the space between sky, sea or the mountain is the one in which the transitional has happened. It's this space that makes my work suitable for this exhibition, he says.

Like Kaul, product designer Mukul Goyal too reinterpreted transitional space in his works by depicting transition of values, cultures and the evolving times. When society changes and it is in transition, values keep it in place. It is an anchor. But what if the values themselves change? My work is just a comment on this notion, explains Goyal.

Together, they joined several other artists, architects, interior designers and product designers, and worked on collaborative projects, to embark on a transitional journey, and showcased their works at Bikaner House.

Akshat Bhatt, an architect, has worked with artist Harsh Nambiar, highlighting the idea of self-introspection. He is showcasing a digital installation on how you can save yourself from yourself by mixing LED lights with sculptural art.Between the news coverage, reportage and statistics around the ongoing Syrian civil war and the battle against Islamic State the firsthand experiences of ordinary civilians on the frontlines are difficult to source and expose. Yet these are often the very stories that can often provide crucial wartime evidence, chronicle social and historic shifts, or unearth true narratives that can counter official ones. And these stories are increasingly found on our bookshelves rather than on the newsstands.

From testimonies to short stories, graphic novels to memoirs, female writers, journalists and survivors are currently fronting the literatures of war, conflict and exile. The past two years have seen a surge of books and memoirs authored by women that capture the far-reaching human consequences of the Syrian civil war. Amid the fatigued reportage on its increasingly more complex escalations  and the cynical moves of other nations vested in opposing outcomes  these are compelling testaments to what befalls ordinary people as a consequence of fanaticism and powerful interests.

Amazon

A remarkable example is Farida Khalafs 2016 memoir The Girl Who Beat ISIS. Khalaf and her family are Yazidis, members of a Kurdish-speaking minority who follow an ancient, pre-Islamic faith. The book recounts how Islamic State crossed the border into their mountainside village in northern Iraq, killing the men, recruiting the boys, and taking women and girls to slave markets in Raqqa.

Through testimonies of those such as Khalaf, the genocide against the Yazidis was officially recognised by the UN. Khalaf, in collaboration with German journalist Andrea C. Hoffmann, shaped their series of detailed interviews into a first-person narrative. Despite the indiscriminate violence visited on whole communities and towns, her memoir reminds that what women have suffered at the hands of IS, and what they continue to endure in refugee camps, is further devastating still.

Human consequences

Kate Evans graphic novel, Threads: From the Refugee Crisis, though different in perspective and style, tells the stories of equally vulnerable people. Volunteering in Calais in 2015-2016, Evans bore close witness to the situation of asylum seekers in the so-called Jungle. Accustomed as we are to seeing quick news segments, these drawings are slow documentation at its best.

Verso Books

Its detailed visualisation of ordinary life under extraordinary circumstances enables Threads to vividly capture life in temporary shelters, the direct human consequences of European leaders political manoeuvres and the remarkable hospitality of those who have lost everything. Unafraid of checking her privilege and keeping refugees stories in the foreground, Evans depicts what reportage on Calais did not  indeed perhaps could not  capture.

Vivid testimonies

Interviews are often less depersonalising, but even they can sometimes ventriloquise already vulnerable voices. We Crossed A Bridge And It Trembled avoids this imbalance by presenting the direct testimonies of more than 300 Syrians living across the Middle East and Europe. American scholar Wendy Pearlmans book gathers four years of firsthand narratives chronicling the Syrian rebellion, civil war and displacement.

The results unfold the extraordinary trajectory of the conflict in Syrians own words. The mens accounts paint a vivid picture of life under Bashar al-Assads authoritarian regime, the build up of revolutionary momentum, and the devastation that followed. The female voices here, however, often transport the reader directly into these experiences. One young woman describes her first anti-regime demonstration in electrifying words:

I started to whisper, Freedom. And then I started shouting, Freedom! I thought to myself, this is the first time I have ever heard my own voice.

For some, finding the stories themselves comes with the highest of stakes. Having left Syria with her daughter in 2011 when the regime pursued her, writer and journalist Samar Yazbek secretly returned in 2012 hoping to set up a civic institution for womens empowerment. The devastated homeland she found took shape into her latest book, The Crossing: My Journey to the Shattered Heart of Syria.

Amazon

Yazbeks account is a hauntingly good piece of literature  less than a decade ago, under vastly different circumstances, she was among Hay Festivals top young Arab writers. Yazbek, although a longtime dissident, is an Alawite like the Assad family  so to travel in rebel-held regions and speak to jihadis, as she recounts doing, seems an almost suicidal undertaking. The Crossing is unforgettable when it thus entwines the personal and the political, as well as in its powerful lament: for girls snatched from childhood, and a homeland that has become unrecognisable.

All sides of the conflict in the region have entrenched the abuse of women. Dangerous journeys to Europe  and that often only to the limbo of refugee camps, rarely promise a way out. It recently came to light that humanitarian workers in Syria had been demanding sex from refugee women for UN food aid.

The sad fact is that this is a body of literature that can only grow as the true costs of this war for women continue to mount. But these books are a vital start.

Sarah Jilani, PhD Student, Faculty of English, University of Cambridge

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.Decrying the destruction of Periyar statue in Tamil Nadu, musician T.M. Krishna teamed up with writer Perumal Murugan to compose a protest song. On Tuesday, a statue of Dravidian ideologue Periyar E.V. Ramasamy was found beheaded in Pudukkottai, marking a resurgence in the statue violence that gripped the country ever since a statue of Lenin was taken down in Tripura.

Videos of two Lenin statues being razed to the ground led to sporadic violence in Tripura. Statue vandalism soon spread to other states, with a Periyar statue was found attacked in tamil Nadu's Vellore. Similar incidents were also reported in West Bengal and Kerala.

"Statues are art," sings Krishna in the video.Union Minister Vijay Goel will meet key opposition leaders at their residences in an effort to break the logjam in Parliament, which has been paralysed for 14 days due to protests by various parties.

The government is willing for a discussion on no-confidence motions against it and enjoys a strong majority in the Lok Sabha, Goel, who is minister of state for parliamentary affairs, said on Thursday, wondering why the opposition leaders were debating on television and not in the House.

Goel said he will be visiting key leaders of opposition parties, including the Congress, AIADMK, TDP and TRS, to persuade them to call off their protests, which have resulted in a washout of Parliament's proceedings since March 5 when it met after a recess to continue the Budget Session.

At a press conference, Goel noted that over Rs 2.5 lakh is spent per minute in running Parliament, and asked opposition parties to raise their issues and debate them in the two Houses.

The second leg of the Budget Session is of 23 days and all 14 days so far have been wasted, Goel said.

"I have been meeting opposition leaders in Parliament and will now visit their homes to persuade them to call off their protests and start discussion on their issues" in the two Houses, he said.

On issues like the PNB scam, the government has more to tell the people than the opposition, he claimed and said the Modi government has been an honest dispensation, which has worked against corruption.

"Parliament is meant for debate. It is sad that opposition leaders can debate outside and on TV channels but not in Parliament. It is also strange for some of them to keep protesting in the well of the two Houses and then say that it is the government's job to run them," he said.

Arjun Ram Meghwal, who is also a junior minister for parliamentary affairs, said it is difficult for the speaker to take up notices for no-confidence motions as long as members are present in the well as she is required to do a head-count of members supporting the notices.

The Telugu Desam Party and the YSR Congress have given notices for no-confidence motion against the government following the Centre's stand that it cannot provide special category status to Andhra Pradesh.

Several parties have been protesting in the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha over various issues such as banking scam, Cauvery board, special status to Andhra Pradesh and quota hike, leading to daily adjournments.

A large number of bills, including on triple talaq, whistleblower protection and OBC Commission, are pending in Parliament. The Lok Sabha passed the crucial Finance Bill without any discussion. A couple of other bills have also been pushed in the two houses amid the din.Ram Navami, which had very little relevance three years ago in West Bengal, has become an important date in the Bengali calendar with Bharatiya Janata Party emerging as a political force in the state.

Last year, the occasion brought on talwar (sword) rallies across Bengal. This time, the BJP is planning to make it big on March 25, the day on which Ram Navami falls. Last year, West Bengal government had banned the procession, but the BJP went to court and was granted permission.

This time, however, the BJP would be joined by two more rallies. One, a chariot procession of the Trinamool Congress to mark Ram Navami for the first time. The other, a rally by CPI(M) which would call it Ram-Rahim rally to mark the festival. Communists say they would try to prevent any communal disharmony encouraged by Trinamool and BJP through their rallies.

But why is the West Bengal chief minister out to contest BJP on the religious front?

This is to keep in check the BJPs attempt to polarise the West Bengal election. In May, panchayat election will be held and Mamata is out to check the BJPs attempt at grabbing panchayats that would help them get Lok Sabha seats in 2019.

However, like last time as well, her government decided to ban any rally with swords and knives.

I am asking director general of police to stop any rally which would come out with weapons. Only those who traditionally do it will be allowed. Others would be checked, Mamata asked DG Surajit Purokayastha at a meeting in Birbhum last Wednesday.

Its a clear attempt by the BJP to create disturbance and polarise Bengali society in the name of religion, she added.

Hearing the direction of the chief minister, BJP West Bengal president Dilip Ghosh said, I suggest state government should not issue any fatwa against it (Ram Navami) warna Lanka kayand ho jayega (otherwise there would be war).

With both BJP and Trinamool Congress on a collision course, there is fear over Ram Navami celebrations in the state. In West Bengal, Ram Navami (birthday of Lord Ram) is mostly celebrated by the Vaishanavites, and Bengal usually does not see mass celebration on this occasion, forget celebrating with swords. Obviously, such a rally with swords will give BJP the chance to show its might ahead of Panchayat election. The saffron party could show people that it could take on Trinamool cadres during election battle. In light of the elections, the party is planning to bring out the biggest ever Ram Navami rally in Bengal so far.

But BJP believes Ram Navami could be celebrated with harmless weapons.

Its the ritual all over India and we would perform this in Bengal as well. We would like to see who prevents us, said Ghosh.

Ghosh would be in Midnapore district where the party would bring out the biggest rally. Similarly, other senior leaders have been sent to different parts of Bengal to challenge the might of Trinamool Congress by showing salute to lord Ram.Former Kannada movie actress Divya Spandana, also known as Ramya, has been largely credited with revitalising the digital strategy of the Congress since she took over as the head of its social media cell in 2017.

However, now, her mother has said she would be contesting the upcoming Karnataka Assembly elections as an independent candidate from Mandya.

Ranjitha, Spandana's mother, told reporters that she had not asked the Congress for a ticket, claiming it would be unfair and her contesting as an independent candidate didn't mean she was opposed to the party.

However, Ranjitha claimed her contributions as a grassroots worker of the Congress for many years hadn't been recognised. Ranjitha claimed she would take a decision on her candidature by next week.

Ranjitha had previously sought a 'better' position for Spandana, claiming her daughter's profile as head of the party's social media cell was not relevant to voters in Mandya. Ranjitha and Spandana were close to former chief minister S.M. Krishna, who left the Congress to join the BJP in 2017.

Spandana had made her political debut by winning a Lok Sabha bypoll from Mandya in 2013. However, she lost the seat in the 2014 general elections; supporters alleged that some party workers had worked to ensure her loss.Is Sikh militancy on a revival mode? This question seems to have been haunting the Union home ministry for quite some time now. The role of ISI in keeping Sikh militancy alive, and radicalisation of Sikh youth in other parts of the world, are something that have become part of the intelligence inputs it receives regularly, but is devoid of any actionable intelligence. So much so that when Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was in New Delhi last month, the intelligence agencies had no idea how convicted Khalistan separatist Jaspal Atwal landed at the dinner hosted in honor of Trudeau. An embarrassed home ministry then said his name had been struck off the black list as he was no longer perceived as a ''security threat'' which enabled him to travel to India.

The flip flop on revival of Sikh terror has been continuing over the years, with the home ministry receiving regular intelligence inputs saying Pakistan's ISI is trying to foment trouble in Punjab.

The latest are the findings of the home ministry this year which again points towards Sikh commanders based in Pakistan facing pressure from the ISI to carry out its terror plans not only in Punjab but also in other parts of the country.

Sikh youth are being trained in ISI facilities in Pakistan. Interdiction and interrogations have revealed use of jailed cadres, unemployed youth, criminals and smugglers by Pakistan based Sikh terror groups for facilitating terror attacks ,'' said the home ministry in its 28th report of Committee on Estimates titled 'Central Armed Police Forces and Internal Security Challenges' tabled in Lok Sabha on Wednesday.

But experts in the security establishment call it ''just a hype'' and feel that the warnings are only to keep the state government and security agencies on their toes.

The ISI will definitely want to tap Sikh extremist groups. But over the last one decade, there is no real threat of the revival of Sikh militancy,'' said Arun Choudhry, former special director in the Intelligence Bureau.

Choudhry said the kind of Sikh militancy that was there in the 1980s was a real threat and was part of the ISI's K2 plan to bring together Khalistani and Kashmiri terrorists. ''But that isn't happening now nor will the Sikh community allow it. That was a different time when the agrarian Sikhs were being targeted and tapped by the ISI as part of its strategy. But now this type of militancy isn't visible nor viable as there are no takers for it. So how so ever much the ISI may want to do it, it cannot,'' said Choudhry.

However, he agrees with the intelligence community that the security establishment must remain alert and vigilant.

Intelligence officials say that threat from Sikh militant groups remains alive given the role of ISI in tapping outfits like the Babbar Khalsa International (BKI), Khalistan Zindabad Force (KZF), International Sikh Youth Federation and collaborators in European and North American countries to revive Sikh militancy. A security official pointed towards the movement of some operatives from Uttar Pradesh to Nepal and their presence in Goa and Maharashtra which was observed some years back.

At one point in time, an intelligence warning even claimed that a Sikh militant, who was a Canadian national with roots in India, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, arrested and deported from Thailand in 2015, had been coordinating a plan to attack the Dera camps in Punjab and Haryana by ''suicide attackers'' using ''para gliders''. Nijjar was a close associate of Jagtar Singh Tara , chief of Khalistan Tiger Force.

But when Atwal's name was being removed from the blacklist by the government, he wasn't alone. In 2011, the home ministry officially removed names of 142 men, including the heads of various Sikh extremist groups, from its list of persons who had been blacklisted from travelling into the country and other parts. The persons whose names were deleted are believed to be based in countries like Pakistan, the US, Canada, Norway, France and Germany.

What's more, the same year the home ministry also removed names of three persons, who figured in the list of 50 ''most wanted'' persons  these included Lakhbit Singh alias Lakhbir Rode, leader of International Sikh Youth Federation (ISYF) and nephew of dreaded slain terrorist Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, Lakhbir Singh. The other names removed from the list were Ranjit Singh alias Manpreet Singh alias Neeta who was heading Khalistan Zindabad Force and Paramjit Singh Panjwar, chief of Khalistan Commando Force (KCF).

The home ministry's move came after the Delhi High Court asked government to review its list of 169 Sikhs who have been blacklisted after a petition claimed that it had led to "unnecessary harassment" to various individuals at different airports and embassies across the world. The move had resulted in the Sikh community thanking the previous UPA government for keeping its concerns in mind and building relations with Sikh NRIs in other countries.Kerala CM Pinarayi Vijayan on Thursday launched M-Kerala, a unified app for all government services at #FUTURE 2018, a first-of-its-kind digital tech summit in the state. Kerala also becomes the state with the largest public Wi-Fi deployment in the country. The state government has identified more than 1,000 public hotspots for Wi-Fi in Kerala.

Access to internet is a basic human right in Kerala, a state with mobile tele-density of more than 115 per cent in 2017. The state has also adopted a number of programmes to make the state e-literate. The internet penetration in the state is at 52 per cent. The state has a robust e-governance model with more than 3,000 paperless government offices.

#FUTURE is Kerala's first-ever Global Digital Summit and was inaugurated by Vijayan on Thursday in Kochi.

The summit will see participation from leaders, including Nandan Nilekani, Non-Executive Chairman, Infosys, Christoph Mueller, Chief Digital and Innovation Officer, Emirates Group, Roland Schuetz, Group CIO, Lufthansa Group, Alok Ohrie, President and MD, India Commercial, Dell EMC; and Byju Raveendran, founder and CEO, Byju's.

They are among nearly 30 global experts who will share their knowledge and experiences during discussions scheduled over two days,covering sectors from travel and transportation; big data and health and sustainability to education and skills; technology and banking, finance and retail.

#FUTURE is the brainchild of Kerala's High Power IT Committee (HPIC), headed by Infosys Co-Founder S D Shibulal.

One of the outcomes of the summit will be formation of a 150-member 'Digital Achievers Network of Kerala Origin', who will become the brand ambassadors of Kerala and champion the state's efforts to become a knowledge industry hub.

(With inputs from PTI)The Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) announced on Wednesday that China has sold Pakistan an advanced optical tracking system that could potentially be used to track missile tests and boost development of advanced weapons that could render India's proposed ballistic missile shield impotent.

The CAS claimed China was the first country to sell this advanced technology to Pakistan, a Hong Kong-based newspaper reported. A CAS official downplayed the sale as just providing Pakistan a pair of eyes.

The tracking system is believed to consist of advanced telescopes, cameras and laser-range finders in addition to other equipment that can precisely monitor a missile's trajectory from launch.

The announcement is significant as it comes two months after the US Defense Intelligence Agency revealed that Pakistan was working on multiple independently-targetable re-entry vehicles (MIRVs). MIRVs are ballistic missile systems that carry multiple nuclear warheads, which on re-entry into the atmosphere, are programmed to hit different targets, making interception by defence systems very difficult.

In simple words, a missile with 10 MIRVs could hit 10 different targets, say at a distance of a few 100km each.

The major military powers such as US, Russia and China have long had MIRVs, though Pakistan is regarded as the first nation in South Asia to openly aim at developing the capability on its 'Ababeel' missile.

The Ababeel missile | Twitter account of Inter-Services Public Relations, Pakistan

The Ababeel, which was first tested in January last year, has a range of over 2,000km. A MIRV capability on the missile would give Pakistan the ability to not only hit nearly all major targets in India, but give it a much higher chance of defeating India's planned ballistic missile defence system.

However, the Ababeel and its MIRV technology would still need more tests to validate and improve its accuracy, which is where the Chinese tracking system comes in handy. The multiple sensors on the tracking system allow engineers to monitor the missile's trajectory and engine performance at various altitudes and prepare corrective measures to improve accuracy.

The sale underscores Beijing's deep strategic investment in Pakistan. From being Islamabad's oldest strategic ally that helped develop its nuclear missile programme, China is effectively involved in virtually all major Pakistani defence programmes: the JF-17 fighter project, which is the Pakistan Air Force's main fighter; eight diesel-electric submarines that can carry cruise missiles and the Al-Khalid tank, which is a derivative of a Chinese tank.

(With agency inputs)Bechtle AG provides information technology services primarily in Europe. The company operates in two segments, IT System House & Managed Services, and IT E-Commerce. The IT System House & Managed Services segment offers IT strategy consulting, hardware and software selling, project planning and implementation, system integration, IT services, and training for IT operation. It provides applications for business intelligence, customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning, product life-cycle management, computer-aided design/computer-aided manufacturing, product data management, enterprise content management, document management systems, artificial intelligence, and collaboration; and modern workplace solutions. This segment also offers data center, networking, security, consulting, managed, professional, financial, and remarketing services. The IT E-Commerce segment provides hardware and software products, and peripherals with a multi-brand portfolio that comprises approximately 40,000 products through an online shop and telesales. This segment also offers e-procurement services. The company also provides design, development, and implementation of software services. It serves customers in the fields of industry, trade, finance, and the public sector. Bechtle AG was founded in 1983 and is headquartered in Neckarsulm, Germany.

Read MoreDeutsche Lufthansa AG operates as an aviation company in Germany and internationally. The company's Network Airlines segment offers passenger services through a route network of 273 destinations in 86 countries. Its Eurowings segment provides passenger services through a route network of more than 210 destinations in 60 countries. The company's Logistics Business segment offers transport services for various cargoes, including living animals, valuable cargo, post and dangerous goods, and temperature-sensitive goods serving approximately 300 destinations in 100 countries. Its Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul Services (MRO) segment provides maintenance, repair, and overhaul services for civilian commercial aircraft serving original equipment manufacturers and aircraft leasing companies, operators of VIP jets, and airlines, as well as develops and manufactures cabin and digital products. The company's Catering Business segment engages in-flight sales and entertainment, in-flight service equipment, and the associated logistics services, as well as consulting services; and operates airport lounges. As of December 31, 2020, it had a fleet of 757 aircraft. Deutsche Lufthansa AG was founded in 1926 and is headquartered in Cologne, Germany.

Read MoreFedEx Corp. is a holding company, which engages in the provision of a portfolio of transportation, e-commerce, and business services. It operates through the following segments: FedEx Express, FedEx Ground, FedEx Freight, FedEx Services, and Corporate, Other & Eliminations. The FedEx Express segment consists of domestic and international shipping services for delivery of packages and freight. The FedEx Ground segment focuses on small-package ground delivery services. The FedEx Freight segment offers less-than-truckload freight services across all lengths of haul. The FedEx Services segment provides sales, marketing, information technology, communications, customer service, technical support, billing and collection services, and certain back-office functions. The Corporate, Other & Eliminations segment includes corporate headquarters costs for executive officers and certain legal and finance functions, as well as certain other costs and credits not attributed to the firm's core business. The company was founded by Frederick Wallace Smith on June 18, 1971 and is headquartered in Memphis, TN.

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 2021 Market data provided is at least 10-minutes delayed and hosted by Barchart Solutions. Information is provided 'as-is' and solely for informational purposes, not for trading purposes or advice, and is delayed. To see all exchange delays and terms of use please see disclaimer. Fundamental company data provided by Zacks Investment Research.Acacia Mining plc, together with its subsidiaries, mines, processes, and sells gold in Africa. The company has three gold mines in north-west Tanzania, including Bulyanhulu, Buzwagi, and North Mara; and a portfolio of exploration projects at various stages of development in Tanzania, Kenya, Burkina Faso, and Mali. It also produces co-products, such as copper and silver. The company was formerly known as African Barrick Gold plc and changed its name to Acacia Mining plc in November 2014. The company was incorporated in 2010 and is headquartered in London, the United Kingdom. Acacia Mining plc is a subsidiary of Barrick Gold Corporation.

Read MoreAlbany

Adding medians or pedestrian refuge areas, reducing the width of the road and reconfiguring ramps were some of the solutions mentioned by people who attended a public meeting on the Washington Avenue-Patroon Creek corridor Wednesday.

McKownville resident Ellen Manning said she was concerned about the safety of pedestrians and cyclists traveling along the stretch.

Two years ago the speed limit on Washington Avenue between Jermain Street and I-90 exit 2 was lowered from 45 mph to 30 mph. But drivers still speed, she said.

"I avoid (Washington Avenue) when I can," Manning said. "There need to be solutions slowing things down."

The Capital District Transportation Committee, the city of Albany and the University at Albany are conducting a study to assess opportunities to improve Washington Avenue between I-90 Interchange 2 and Brevator Street. Wednesday's meeting was the first of two public meetings gathering residents' input on the corridor.

Officials noted the redevelopment along portions of the road, traffic and speeding.

"We want input from the public," said Michael Franchini, executive director of the Capital District Transportation Committee. "Now is the time to give us your ideas."

Attendees at the meeting, held at the SEFCU Arena at UAlbany, were invited to fill out a survey with information on how often they use the corridor, how safe or comfortable they feel traveling on foot, bike or car and what actions they would take to improve the stretch. They could also write down suggestions on notes and stick them on a map of the corridor.

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Jad Edlebi, a graduate student at UAlbany, said he walks across the road to get to class almost every day.

"A median refuge island or reducing the width of the road might help," he said.

People can submit comments for the study online at washingtonpatrooncorridor.weebly.com.

miszler@timesunion.com  518-454-5018  @madisoniszlerA Saratoga Springs man was indicted Wednesday for distributing fentanyl that resulted in someone overdosing and dying from the substance, the U.S. Attorney's Office said in a news release.

Authorities accuse Steven Boice, 28, of distributing furanyl fentanyl to someone with the initials B.L. on Feb. 3, 2017, who later died from ingesting fentanyl. Fentanyl is a synthetic opioid more powerful than morphine, and furanyl fentanyl is a derivative of fentanyl.It may not seem remarkable at first, but the 16 photographers in the latest Photo Regional at Opalka Gallery almost entirely take pictures of what is already in the actual world. They might manipulate or interpret that image afterwards, but their methods avoid the alternative mode of making or arranging their subjects and then photographing.

There are Mark Lyon's centered, ethereal views peering out from inside car washes at night, the weird streetlight glow on the ground bleeding into the bare concrete interiors. And Phyllis Galembo's vivid cross-cultural documents of Mexican celebrants in elaborate costumes, replete with little discoveries. And Justin Kimball's perceptive observations of telling details in recession-hit towns in the Northeast.

Even the images furthest afield  the computer-generated light flares by Chad Kleitsch  seem to come from an essence of the earliest photographers: look, consider, make picture. These, however, are the inventions of digitally derived programming that thinks like a camera without having to be one.

The show subtitle, "Effects That Aren't Special," says a lot about the sincerity that abounds and about the surprising minimum of artifice and bombast. Curator Tim Davis clearly understands one of photography's many pulsesa reexamining of the universe honestly, derived from a core observational urge.

No images say this more dramatically than the night views of Pete Mauney, who lives near the Bard College nexus of most of these artists, some 50 miles south of Albany. His skies swirl with aircraft light trails, and lawns and roadways are populated with firefly light. These are spectacular in a "Popular Photography" idiom that makes you want to get out your tripod.

Digging into the seen and "underseen" nuances around us, Tivoli-based Saskia Baden implores with conventional, silver-based black and white pictures that she says "memorialize the plague of impermanence." That is, they are about death, and about the necessary preciousness of all that precedes it. These are loving images, with a sensibility very much from another era.

A similar tenderness appears in Sharon Core's photographs of plant life and flowers, rather like many common images of beauty found in nature. There is an invisible novelty hereCore has created an interior biosphere in a geodesic dome near Kingston, and she photographs this big terrarium as if it were the real thing.

You might grouse that much of the work here is too 20th-century (though I imagine some visitors will be glad of that). This isn't how the show feels, however, as even the works rooted in straight photographic traditions have their edges oozing into new territory, either preservation of important contemporary phenomena (Galembo's Mexican subjects), or simple ways of noticing what we thought we already knew (Lyon's car washes).

And there are many pieces that do some stepping out. Two artists interfere with how the camera sees in the first place. Seth David Rubin's self-portraits shot through homemade lenses turn his face into cartoonish exaggerations that are fun and a little awkwardly disturbing. Julianne Swartz's portraits of families incorporate a mirror that partially blocks and partially augments our view, making complicated, colorful scenes emphasizing gestures and incomplete information.

Polly Apfelbaum and Parker Shipp wallow in an excess of small, common pictures. Apfelbaum's crudely printed sheets reference images pulled from Google searches for the words "haunted house," augmented by some of her own photos of the same. Shipp has a purely digital-era fascination with good old film, having shot and gathered nearly 300 rolls over the past decade and deciding recently to get them processed and contact printed. The deluge of tiny results cover one whole corner of the big gallery space.

And then there are works that truly test the boundaries of photography, like mixed-media pieces by two artists that are quite formally beautiful and the digitally based image degradations by a third that tease us with information continually slipping away. By this point we see how integrated the photographic eye is to contemporary art and to the process of being a photographer. The best of this large, packed exhibition is bracing stuff, plainly enhanced when seen together in this aggregating whole.

William Jaeger is a frequent contributor to the Times Union.As a kid, Jacob Fanto often attended concerts at Tanglewood. Even way back then, listening to the Boston Symphony Orchestra with his parents, he knew which instruments commanded the most attention  and they weren't the ones up front. They were the discreet but noisy section tucked in the rear, beating out the pulse.

"I was kind of drawn to percussion in general," said the composer, reflecting on his youth. "I always thought, even though they were in the back, they were always kind of the stars of the show."

Now the ripe old age of 14, Fanto is poised to premiere his own four-movement work on Monday evening with the Empire State Youth Percussion Orchestra at the University at Albany's Festival of Contemporary Music. Titled "Mythical Realms," the 20- to 25-minute piece conjures ancient Norse, Greek and Aztec myths, traveling from Asgard to Atlantis to Elysium to Aztlan in a fantastical musical expedition employing complex rhythms and multi-instrumentation.

The concert marks the public debut of his first major work for percussion ensemble, a milestone he's approaching with an understandable blend of fear and excitement. "It's with a group of people that are, like, my friends, and it's a friendly audience," said Fanto, a member of the most advanced ESYO percussion ensemble and principal timpanist with the Youth Orchestra proper. "I mean, it's not being judged or criticized or anything. But there's still some pressure there."

Fanto lives in Lenox, Mass., with his father, Clarence, and mother, Andrea Goodman  a conductor who heads the Saratoga Choral Festival and the Cantilena Chamber Choir in the Berkshires. A ninth-grader at Lenox Memorial Middle and High School, he plays in the band and is due to premiere another new work at a school concert in May. Mozart might have written his first symphony at age 8, but Fanto, at 14, is a teen composer in motion.

"He's young. He's eager. I'd say he's enthusiastic about what he does. He's creative," said Richard Albagli, Fanto's teacher and a conductor with the ESYO percussion orchestra.

The urge to compose  and the talent to do so  is a "considerably unusual" mix at such a young age, Albagli said. "The thing I'm most impressed with is his ability to hear sound combinations. ... The way he interweaves sounds and his use of percussion color is quite sophisticated."

"Mythical Realms" opens with "Asgard," a percussive account of a conflict among Norse gods  "like an argument," Fanto said. It's raucous. It bombards the listener with sound, much of it almost atonal. "It's a bombastic piece, but near the end it starts getting peaceful, and things start to settle down a bit."

By contrast, the second movement's trip to Atlantis is "very peaceful and melodic," he said. So it is. In a digital clip of the segment, the music unfolds like a sun shower  watery and bright, waves of sound cascading with fluid melodicism.

The third movement, evoking the mythical Greek afterlife of Elysium, "has no real rhythmic-like distinction  and is more just melody, and kind of almost like a lullaby at times," Fanto said. The piece includes some suspended cymbal, bass drum and other such instruments, but it's mostly mallets and melody. Expect vibraphone.

In the fourth and final movement, the Aztecs abide in their legendary home for a mixed-meter, Latin-tinged visit that darts with energy. "It's very rhythmic," Fanto said, "and features a lot of the battery sections"  roughly speaking, anything that pounds. "So all the drums kind of have these big parts now, and are depicting, basically, this mysterious jungle. So there's all of these sound effects that are going on, and marimbas are using all these different techniques to create this kind of jungle-ish sound." About half-way through, mallets and melody re-enter the scene, carrying through to the ending. "And it's a large ending."

For Fanto, his own crescendo began in fourth grade with percussion lessons under ESYO's John Antonio. Eventually, performing with the repertory orchestra, he found himself on timpani  those large, tuned, thundering instruments also known as kettle drums  for reasons that still escape him. Maybe it was his willingness. Maybe it was his ear. "I don't know how it exactly happened," he said, "but timpani parts started getting thrown at me."

On his own he decided to try his hand at writing music, experimenting with the same Sibelius notation program that his mom had used for arrangements. Last year he wrote a piece for school band. At some point, his interest and efforts at composition popped up in conversation with Albagli, who urged him to write something for the ESYO ensemble. "He said he'd love it if I could work on it, and then we could premiere it next year. And so I started working on it," Fanto recalled.

In a bit of serendipity, he said, he was reading one of Rick Riordan's "Percy Jackson" novels  the bestselling fantasy series tracking the exploits of a youthful demigod in search of Zeus' thunderbolt. "I was looking for influences and just happened to read that book," he said. "It was a lightbulb moment. And then it kind of went from there."

Fanto started writing with "Asgard," working on it through most of last summer. "Then the second and third movements kind of flew by a bit, and then the end of the year  the past few months  I finished the fourth movement." Each movement calls for around 10 players; each player switches between several different instruments. "So there's quite a few instruments in the entire thing  it's a fairly large set-up overall."

Right now he's not thinking about composing another piece, as schoolwork and practice eat up enough time. And he's not yet convinced he wants to write music as a living. "I mean, I'm not really sure. I know I want to do something musically in my future career. At this point in time I'm not sure that composing is all I want to do with my life," he said.

He definitely wants to write more works  "and hopefully premiere more things with the Empire Youth Orchestra"  although what and when remains to be heard. But he has time to figure that out. As Albagli observed: "Like all bright kids his age, he's probably interested in 16 other things, too. You never know which way he's gonna go. But this seems so much a part of him right now, it's hard to believe that he's not going to pursue it in some ways."

Among those 16 things: Reading. Writing stories. Acting. Getting outside to ski, bike and swim as the weather cooperates. This summer, he'll be playing in the pit for Berkshire Theatre Group's production of "Tarzan."

More Information If you go Festival of Contemporary Music Including the premiere of Jacob Fanto's "Mythical Realms," plus works by Lucas Foss, Chris Brooks, Tom Nazziola and Lynn Glassock. Where: Performing Arts Center, UAlbany, 1400 Washington Ave., Albany When: 7 p.m. Monday, March 26 Tickets: $6 for general public; $3 for students, seniors, and UAlbany faculty and staff Info: albany.edu/pac; 518-442-3997 See More Collapse

But for now, he's busy prepping for Monday's performance of "Mythical Realms." How does it feel, rehearsing the piece with ESYO?

"Pretty spectacular. Because I've been sitting at this desk working with MIDI sounds for the past few months, and suddenly these parts that I've been working on are in these players' hands," he said. "Suddenly. In that piece I've been working on. Speechless."

abiancolli@timesunion.comIt was 1996 when Lois Letchford got the news that her son, Nicholas, would probably never learn to read. He was 7 years old.

Diagnosed with a developmental learning disorderNicholas struggled with auditory processing, and still doesthe school guidance counselor told Letchford her son was the "worst child she had seen in 20 years of teaching."

Letchford was furious.

"Livid. That's what I am," Letchford writes in her new memoir, "Reversed," as she processes the implications of her young son's diagnosis. But this memoir isn't a story of accepting a teacher's label for her son. It's a story of how Letchford learned to help her son succeed. "Reversed" charts Nicholas's course through elementary, middle and high school as well as the family's moves from Australia (their home country) to England to the United States. You can hear Letchford read from "Reversed: A Memoir" at the Troy Public Library on Sunday, March 25.

If you go Lois Letchford reading from "Reversed: A Memoir" When: 2 to 4 p.m., Sunday, March 25 Where: Troy Public Library, 100 2nd St. More info: loisletchford.com See More Collapse

Labels are one of Letchford's primary concerns. "The problem was not the system as much as the label," Letchford tells me over coffee at Spill'n the Beans in Troy. When children are labeled with a disability, the players in the system lower their expectations. They don't invest as much into the education of the child. And that can be catastrophic for the student, she says.

"Nicholas's condition changed the way I teach and it changed the way I see children," Letchford continues. An educator herself  she started out as a P.E. teacher  Nicholas's experience led her to pursue a different track. Now, she specializes in teaching children who have struggled to learn to read. She speaks at conferences and conventions about the necessity of reading. "That kid who can't do it? I don't see him as a kid who can't do it. I see those kids as raw talent."

But a big part of teaching students to read is getting their buy-in, too. "We can teach children to read, but there's got to be a will to want to," she says. Her secret weapon for Nicholas? Audiobooks. All across their travels on three different continents, the Letchfords listened to audiobooks, and then Nicholas would go and read the physical text, synthesizing the words he read with the words he'd heard.

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"It's making an enjoyable experience of literacy and literature," Letchford says. "Read to kids, follow their curiosity. And when they can't read, read to them. Ask questions. Write their questions and answers down, however simple or complex they are. Read it back to them."

The book, Letchford's first, will be released this month. She says abundant support from her family helped with the challenge of writing it.

And if you're wondering what happened with Nicholas; well, he's working today as a postdoctoral fellow at Imperial College London. He's studying mathematical modeling of infectious diseases. While he still struggles to receive information the way neurotypical folks do, it's safe to say he's exceeded the expectations of his first-grade teachers.

Brianna Snyder is a frequent contributor to the Times Union and its magazines.ALBANY  The city police officer who twice within a year faced charges of leaving a crash scene pleaded guilty to DWI on Thursday, according to the county District Attorney's Office.

Shawn Dixon, 31, of Kingston, faces three years of probation for the misdemeanor after his car hit a utility transformer near Park Avenue and Eagle Street in Albany on Dec. 20 while he was off-duty, officials said.

The car ended up in a ravine in Lincoln Park, and Dixon was later found nearby.

He is scheduled to be sentenced on June 1, when he will resign from the police department.

Dixon was suspended from the Albany Police Department in December following the Lincoln Park incident. He was on unpaid leave for the first 30 days, per the police union's contract.

While Dixon's attorney earlier this month said his client was considering resigning from the department as the Albany Police seek his dismissal, the officer still remains on the force.

Acting police Chief Robert Sears said on March 7 that an internal investigation found enough evidence to move for Dixon's dismissal.

Even so, his status has not changed despite Thursday's guilty plea, confirmed Albany Police spokesman Steve Smith.

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At the time of the December crash, Dixon had been back on the job less than two months following a May incident in which he was accused of leaving the scene of a crash after slamming into another car near West Lawrence Street and Myrtle Avenue in the Pine Hills.

Dixon was charged with misdemeanor leaving the scene of a personal injury accident in May and later pleaded guilty. He agreed to pay $50 in restitution to the other driver involved.

In addition to resigning from the department upon sentencing, Dixon will be required to install and maintain an interlock ignition device in his vehicle for three years, pay restitution for the damage to the power transformer, attend a Victim Impact Panel and Impaired Driver Program, be subject to a revocation of his drivers license for a minimum of six months, and pay a $500 fine and mandatory court fees.





ALBANY  The Capital Region is an oasis of population growth in upstate New York since 2010, according to the most recent estimates released Thursday by the U.S. Census Bureau.

The high-tech, health care and higher education sectors are feeding the Capital Regions expansion, according to local experts.

The only area outside of New York City that has job growth is the Capital Region, said Mark Eagan, CEO of the Capital Region Chamber. "Our private sector job growth is above all the other metropolitan areas in the New York."

In the most recent 12-month period analyzed  from July 1, 2016, to June 30, 2017  this growth placed the Capital Region in the ranks of most counties across the nation that saw population growth, as foreign migration into our area offset the loss of those who moved elsewhere.

Most of the counties in the nation grew, with 57 percent gaining population in 2017 as compared to 52.7 percent in 2016, according to Molly Cromwell, a demographer for the Census Bureau. She said 52.9 percent of counties showed positive net migration, meaning more people moved into the county than out.

The fastest-growing counties in the nation are in the south and west, according to the Census Bureau. Their growth is fed by domestic migration.

The Capital Regions population expanded by 16,787 people from 2010 to 2017 to reach 854,672.

From 2016 to 2017, it was up by 3,434, according to the population estimates. Albany, Rensselaer, Saratoga and Schenectady counties all had more residents in 2017 than they did in 2010. Rensselaer County was the only one of the four to show a slight decline from 2016 to 2017 with its population down by 14 people.

New Yorks 2017 population was 19,849,399.

"What we are seeing are good dividends from decades-old investments made not only in our semiconductor industry with GlobalFoundries and SUNY Polytechnic Institute, but also with our emerging pharmaceutical manufacturing and fledgling game development industries," said Andrew Kennedy, president and CEO of the Center for Economic Growth, a Capital Region business development entity.

"The region's more rural counties continue to struggle, but investments in them  from those for craft beverage industry to Downtown Revitalization Initiatives in Glens Falls and Hudson  should go a ways in reversing population trends," said Kennedy, a former top official in Gov. Andrew Cuomo's administration.

Foreign immigration spurred by the regions universities, hospitals and expanding high-tech industries has helped keep the population expanding.

Samantha Friedman, an associate professor of sociology at the state University at Albany who studies immigration, said new arrivals are attracted to the region by the social networks that immigrants can tap into plus the availability of jobs requiring higher education and skills at Global Foundries in Malta and other high-tech companies across the region.

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Saratoga County remains an anomaly in the region: Over the seven-year span, it saw growth in both international migration (3,077 individuals) and domestic migration (3,975). The only other county statewide to see growth among both categories was Ontario County. Saratoga led the state with domestic migration from 2016 to 2017, attracting 1,701 people.

Denise Romeo, executive vice president of the Saratoga County Chamber of Commerce, said the countys economic engines were "Global Foundries ... and health care is booming."

Were starting to see diversity not only in the workplace, but in the schools, Romeo said.

What's formally known as the Albany-Schenectady-Troy Metropolitan Statistical Area remains the 64th most populous area in the country, growing to 886,188 residents in 2017 from 882,801 the previous year, according to the Census Bureau.

In 2010, the metro area had 870,720 residents.

The metro area includes Albany, Rensselaer, Saratoga, Schenectady and Schoharie counties.

Rural Schoharie County fit in with the counties surrounding the four core Capital Region counties: Its population shrank by 1,319 residents from 2010 to 2017.SCHENECTADY  At 16, Rotterdam's Anna Sherman is too young for GoFundMe to allow her to launch a campaign to raise the $3,200 to charter a bus to Washginton, D.C. She and 35 Mohonasen High School classmates wanted to participate in the March for Our Lives protest Saturday. Splitting the cost meant each student would pay $80, too much for most of them. She showed her mother how to set up the GoFundMe page. It raised the full amount from 87 individual donations.

The bus departs at midnight Friday.

"I did a lot of research about AR-15s, background checks, gun control," Anna said. "This so much more than a single march; this is a movement launched by teenagers. I'm proud that my generation is leading this movement."

Hundreds of Capital Region teenagers are either heading to D.C. for Saturday's March for Our Lives or marching in solidarity in downtown Albany. The movement was born from the Valentine's Day tragedy in Parkland, Fla. at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where a gunman used an AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle to kill 17 students and teachers.

Many student survivors of the slaughter publicly denounced politicians for offering "thoughts and prayers" rather than action on gun control. They announced a new movement and a march on Washington.

Schenectady High School senior Trevor Luciani will join other students Saturday before sunrise to take a charter bus provided by the League of Women Voters-Schenectady (with funding help from local churches) for the D.C. march.

"I have had hecklers nag at me or talk down to me since I have been so outspoken about stricter gun laws," said Luciani, who helped organize his school's walkout earlier this month that coincided with similar actions nationwide calling for an end to gun violence. "When people talk down to me, it motivates me even more to speak my mind and speak my voice. Lives of kids in school should be nonpartisan. Before we're Democrats or Republicans, we're Americans."

Schalmont High School's Kaelyn DiCocco, 17, is an organizer of Saturday's march in Albany.

DiCocco used a GoFundMe campaign to raise $1,170 for a sound system that speakers will use to address marchers. Students from Schalmont, Columbia, Shaker, Bethlehem and Albany told her they will join the march which starts at 10 a.m.

"We are the mass shooting generation with active shooter drills the way older generations did fire drills," DiCocco said.

She remembers being in the hall once between classes when suddenly there were shouts and people running. Everyone else froze, assuming a gunman was approaching. The noise proved to be a fistfight. But that moment now galvanizes her rather than making her feel powerless.

"When I heard (Parkland student) Emma Gonzalez, I realized that no teenager should feel like mass murder is just some normal risk of attending school," said DiCocco.

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Classmate Hamza Noor, is helping her with the Albany march. Noor's mother worried he might be attacked physically for his activism.

"But I've learned important lessons about discussing issues with individuals," Noor said, referring to a classmate who loves hunting and camping.

When Noor saw the young man mistreated by bullies, he befriended him. He learned that the student enjoyed hunting because it involves marksmanship skills plus love of wilderness. Hunting was a bond for him and his father, akin to dads and sons bonding over sports.

"He was smart and thoughtful. He loves our school and hates gun violence." Noor said. "I don't waste my time with online trolls or social media haters. They're cowards who hide. But I'm glad I talked face to face and made a friend who taught me gun owners are not one monolith."

He and DiCocco know that Americans fret that millennials are politically apathetic.

But they see themselves as a new generation.

"I turn 18 this year and I will vote in the midterms," DiCocco said. "I'm in the movement for the long haul."Washington

With government funding set to run out this weekend, congressional leaders agreed on a voluminous $1.3 trillion spending bill on Wednesday that would beef up domestic and military programs and keep the government open through September.

"We're feeling very good about this," Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, told reporters after a meeting of top congressional leaders at the Capitol, which buzzed with activity even as the falling snow shuttered much of Washington.

The House and Senate have until midnight Friday to pass the spending bill to avoid what would be the third government shutdown of the year. As part of the spending talks, congressional leaders worked in recent days to resolve disputes over issues like immigration, a wall on the southern border with Mexico, health care and a planned rail tunnel between New York and New Jersey that has drawn the ire of President Donald Trump.

As the negotiations wrapped up on Capitol Hill, the president himself emerged as a potential obstacle, waffling on Wednesday about whether he could support the final package in part because it lacked sufficient funding for his wall. To salvage the agreement, Speaker Paul Ryan went to the White House residence to meet with Trump, Vice President Mike Pence and Marc Short, the White House legislative affairs chief, with Sen. Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, joining by telephone.

A White House official said the group smoothed over differences on a number of items, including the wall and other border issues, as well as transportation and military funding.

Afterward, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, issued an upbeat statement making it clear that Trump had overcome his reservations, saying that he and the congressional leaders had "discussed their support for the bill."

The text of the spending bill, spanning 2,232 pages, was unveiled Wednesday night. To improve border security, the measure includes $1.6 billion for more than 90 miles of physical barriers along the border with Mexico as well as related technology, according to congressional aides.

But there are strings attached to what can be built, and the funding is far short of the total Trump would ultimately need to build his promised "big, beautiful wall." Some of the funding is for replacing existing barriers.

The spending bill does not resolve the uncertain fate of hundreds of thousands of young unauthorized immigrants who have been protected under an Obama-era program, known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, that Trump has moved to end.

An effort by some lawmakers to include in the spending bill a proposal to shore up insurance markets under the Affordable Care Act was unsuccessful, at least in part because of a dispute over abortion. But the bill includes a fix to the grain glitch, a flaw in the sweeping tax overhaul passed last year that stood to hurt certain agricultural businesses.

Another sticking point in recent days was funding for a series of rail infrastructure projects in the New York City area known as the Gateway program, including a new tunnel under the Hudson River.

Despite his New York roots, Trump zeroed in on Gateway and urged Republican leaders not to provide federal funds for it  an apparent rebuke to Schumer, whose caucus the president has repeatedly accused of obstructionism.

The spending bill does not include $900 million in funding for Gateway that had been included last year in House legislation. But according to a senior Senate Democratic aide, it includes hundreds of millions of dollars that could go toward the Gateway program, including funds that do not require the approval of Trump's Transportation Department.

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As November's midterm elections loom, the legislation also includes $380 million in grants to states for election technology.

And although Congress has shown little appetite for passing significant gun control legislation in response to the mass shooting last month in Parkland, Fla., the spending bill includes a modest measure to improve reporting to the national background check system for gun purchases. It also includes funds for school safety.

Congress approved a broad two-year budget deal last month that paved the way for this week's legislation. That deal set overall spending levels, raising strict limits on military and domestic spending by a total of about $140 billion this year. The spending bill this week allocates the allowed spending among a vast array of federal programs.

The bill is long overdue, coming almost halfway through the 2018 fiscal year, which began Oct. 1. Since then, Congress has needed five stopgap spending measures to keep the government open.

By snapping that streak of short-term patches, lawmakers would provide a dose of stability to federal agencies that have been left in limbo as Congress lurched from one stopgap measure to the next.

Even with the spending bill unveiled, there is still some risk of a brief shutdown this weekend, as any one senator can stop the Senate from speeding up consideration of the bill to meet Friday's deadline. Last month, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., did just that, causing an hourslong shutdown as he bemoaned the government's mounting debt.

This time around, with lawmakers expected to vote on a gigantic spending bill with little time to digest its contents, Paul is unhappy yet again.Washington

The FBI investigated Attorney General Jeff Sessions for possible perjury last year over congressional testimony in which he said he had no contacts with Russians, according to three people familiar with the case.

In fact, Sessions later acknowledged, he had personally met the Russian ambassador to the United States during the campaign and was aware that George Papadopoulos, a campaign adviser, had developed Russian ties, too. FBI agents were aware of both inaccuracies in real time. And last March, when Congress asked the FBI to investigate the attorney general, agents began doing so, two of the people said.

Andrew G. McCabe, the FBI's deputy director at the time, authorized the investigation, the two people said. McCabe himself was recently fired for showing "lack of candor" in an internal investigation. Sessions rejected McCabe's appeal and fired him hours before his retirement was to take effect, jeopardizing his pension.

The investigation into Sessions began before Robert Mueller was appointed special counsel to investigate Russia-related matters. Sessions' lawyer, Chuck Cooper, said no investigation is being conducted now.

"The special counsel's office has informed me that after interviewing the attorney general and conducting additional investigation, the attorney general is not under investigation for false statements or perjury in his confirmation hearing testimony and related written submissions to Congress," Cooper said in a statement.

The investigation was first reported by ABC News.

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Perjury investigations based on congressional referrals are common, and the FBI frequently investigates but seldom charges. But the fact that the attorney general himself was a focus of the Russia investigation, even if only peripherally and temporarily, shows how entangled the Trump administration has become in the case. Sessions is recused from any aspect of the investigation.

The investigation also adds a new layer to McCabe's firing. McCabe's lawyers have said he did not lie and acted quickly to fix any inaccuracies or misunderstandings. Sessions has offered a similar defense, saying he never intended to mislead Congress.

A spokeswoman for McCabe, Melissa Schwartz, had no comment.

A person close to Sessions said the attorney general was not aware of the investigation.A Jamaican man involved in the largest drug bust in Capital Region history will serve more than 15 years in federal prison.

Oniel McKenzie, 33, of Brooklyn, was found guilty in October after a three-day trial. Authorities said McKenzie had more than 132 pounds of cocaine and over 220 pounds of marijuana in North Greenbush apartment, a Rensselaer storage unit and his Jeep.ALBANY  A Schenectady man was arraigned on heroin and crack distribution charges Tuesday in federal court, prosecutors said.

William Hale, 44, is accused of selling heroin on July 14, 2016, and distributing more than 28 grams of crack on Nov. 18, 2016. Prosecutors said Hale uses the alias "Man."

Hale was arraigned Tuesday before United States Magistrate Judge Daniel J. Stewart, who ordered Hale detained Wednesday pending trial. He could face at least 10 years and up to life in prison, plus post-release supervision, if convicted.

The case was investigated by the FBI and will be prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Barnett.Thursday will bring slightly warmer temperatures to the Capital Region but winds will make it feel chillier.

Most of the the area will see clouds and temperatures in the upper 30's with winds between 10 and 15 mph. Overnight temperatures will fall in to the mid-20's.TROY -- A 32-year-old city man pleaded guilty Wednesday in Rensselaer County Court to shooting a man in the abdomen last summer, District Attorney Joel E. Abelove said.

Jamel T. DeWitt of 2209 Old Sixth Ave. pleaded guilty to a single felony count of first-degree criminal use of a firearm. DeWitt admitted to firing the weapon on Aug. 23, 2017 in an alley between Church and Ferry streets and striking an unintended victim in the abdomen, Abelove said. DeWitt was arrested by city police.Please allow ads as they help fund our trusted local news content.

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Support our mission and join our community now.Fianna Fail TD Jackie Cahill has said that the Government must set out a clear path to achieving pay equality for new teachers working in primary and secondary schools in the county.

Deputy Cahill made the comments following the publication of the report examining pay scales in the public sector.

Since 2011, those who enter teaching are on a reduced pay scale compared to their established colleagues.

This is wholly unfair and must be reversed by the Government, said the Tipperary TD.

Deputy Cahill said that the report on pay equalisation in the public sector was a key demand of Fianna Fail in its discussions surrounding the Confidence and Supply Arrangement.

This report had now published its findings and he expected to see a swift response from Government setting out how exactly it intended to achieve pay equality for new teachers.

Ongoing pay inequality for new entrants to the teaching profession has resulted in a recruitment and retention crisis for teachers and there are also major difficulties for schools in securing substitute teachers when required, said Deputy Cahill.

He said that morale within schools was continuing to fall as more and more young people were entering the teaching profession on reduced wages.

The Government has consistently cited that they were awaiting the publication of this report before making any substantive comments on the issue of pay equality for new teachers, he said.

This report had now been published, it was time for the Government to set out how and when it was going to respond to it and to outline and confirm how the lower entry pay anomaly was going to be corrected, said Deputy Cahill.The president of ICMSA said that the week had been very interesting in the way it showed how different sectors of Irish society were viewed and how their work was evaluated.

Pat McCormack said many will have been struck by the demands of some organisations that the work carried out by their members during Storm Emma must be rewarded over and above even normal overtime rates and tasks such as ensuring that public roads were kept clear and as safe as possible was worthy of extra payment outside all the normal arrangements.

Mr McCormack said the contrast this made with the farming community was both instructive and stark.

The States payment to hundreds and hundreds of farmers all over the country, who used their own machinery and their own time and fuel, to keep clear public roads during the snowstorm was a pat on the head and an assurance that they wont be held liable for any accidents on the public roads that they had cleared through their own efforts and at their own expense, he said.

And Mr McCormack pointed out that the response to all the extra work involved in milking their cows and trying to get the milk collected so it could be processed was a cut of up to 3cpl on their first decent milk cheque of 2018.

It tells you a great deal about the way our work as farmers is just taken for granted and Im determined that that attitude is going to be challenged, said Mr McCormack.

Horticulture sector

Meanwhile, IFA horticulture chairman Paul Brophy is calling on the government to provide support for horticulture producers whose businesses were severely impacted by Storm Emma.

He said many growers in the soft fruit and nursery stock sectors in particular, had experienced devastating damage due to the heavy snowfall.

Between collapsed growing structures and subsequent loss of plants, it is estimated that the final cost of the snow storm will exceed 5m, he said.

Mr Brophy said that the storm had come at the worst possible time while nurseries were at full capacity due to spring demand and strawberry tunnels were full of plants for the fruiting season starting in April.

The damage has been particularly acute in the eastern counties of Dublin, Kildare Wicklow and Wexford, with issues also in some southern counties, including Tipperary.

The snowfall in these areas was unprecedented. Many sites recorded some of the highest snow accumulations in a generation, said Mr Brophy.

He said that farmers had worked tirelessly through the storm to protect their businesses but they were overwhelmed by the extent of the snowfall.

Mr Brophy explained that although some of the businesses had insurance to cover some structural losses, in general most producers cannot currently obtain cover for items such as polytunnels, crops and glasshouses.

He reminded the Government that the cold spell demonstrated how reliant the country was on farmers to get fresh produce to supermarket shelves.

We cannot afford to take food production for granted. The government needs to stand up and support this sector, which provides more than 6,500 jobs in rural areas and is worth 400m to the national economy, he said.Sinn Fein TD Carol Nolan, who represents the party in the Lower Ormond part of the Tipperary / Offaly constituency, has been suspended by the party for three months after she voted against the holding of a referendum to repeal the Eight Amendment in the Dail this Wednesday.

Sinn Fein supports repealing the Eighth Amendment, and Deputy Nolan voted against the Referendum Bill, the only Sinn Fein TD to do so.

The party supports repealing the Eight Amendment, and adopted its position at its Ardfheis.

She was told of her suspension by Sinn Fein whip Aengus O Snodaigh.

In a statement party leader Mary Lou McDonald said: People across society have deep and sincerely held views on the Eighth Amendment. I recognise and respect that fact. Carol holds strong, personal convictions on this matter. At all stages, the party has acknowledged and respected her views and her right to articulate those views.



However, Sinn Fein elected representatives are expected to respect policy decisions taken by the Ardfheis and to vote in line with party policy. All Sinn Fein elected representatives, including members of the Oireachtas, are aware of this."

Ms McDonald described Deputy Nolan as a valued colleague and said she very much regretted this turn of events.

However, as legislators we have a responsibility to vote as we are mandated by long standing Sinn Fein policy, a policy which we strongly believe is in the best interests of women," said the SF leader.Air France has announced that it will extend its Cork to Paris Charles de Gaulle service for the winter 2018/2019 season, linking Irelands South to the French capital, while also offering onward connections to up to 180 destinations worldwide.

The Cork to Paris service is a new route on the Air France network, due to commence operation from 26 May 2018. The service, which was announced in January was originally scheduled to run through to the end of the summer season, finishing on 27 October. However, due to positive forward bookings, the route has now been extended to a yearly service.

Benedicte Duval, General Manager of Air France KLM UK & Ireland stated, We are delighted to be in a position to launch a year-round service rather than a seasonal service when operations commence in May. I am confident that the extra choice and connectivity this will bring, both outbound and inbound, will be well received by the local community. Our continued investment in the Irish market will result in stronger business links between Ireland and France and we are proud to be able to further support tourism and local businesses in the region.

Niall MacCarthy, Managing Director at Cork Airport said, Cork Airport welcomes this announcement which signals outstanding confidence in the metropolitan city region served by Cork Airport to sustain and grow new routes and services.

"We are delighted that Air France shares this confidence in the economy across the south of Ireland and in the growing number of French tourists that desire to visit this part of Ireland in 2018 and beyond. Cork Airport continually strives for consistent route growth and development and this decision by Air France is fully aligned with our growth strategy," he added.

Daragh Hanratty, Head of Aviation Marketing at Cork Airport said, The growth of this route before it takes off in May is testament to the popularity of Paris as a destination for Irish customers and to the popularity of Ireland for our French visitors. Air Frances decision to expand the service to a year round offering with outstanding hub connectivity to a global network via Paris Charles de Gaulle airport will facilitate growth in both the inbound and outbound markets here at Cork Airport."

All flights will be operated by Air France Hop! using Embraer 170 aircraft, carrying up to 76 passengers. Long-haul passengers will benefit from a recently improved range of Air France products and services, both on the ground and on board. This includes three cabins; Economy with ergonomically designed seats, Economy Comfort which provides passengers with additional legroom and extra seat recline and Business Class with a full lie flat bed.

For more information visit www.airfrance.ie or www.corkairport.comUpdated March 23 at 8:04 am ET with comment from Apple.

If you use a feature baked into iOS 11 that lets you hide messages, you might be disappointed to learn that Siri isn't so good at keeping that content hidden.

(Image credit: Tom's Guide)

The folks over at Brazilian website Mac Magazine have discovered a bug in Siri that will allow anyone to request the virtual personal assistant read hidden messages aloud. All someone needs to do is ask Siri to read a message and the virtual personal assistant will respond by reading it in the robotic voice you've come to know, according to the report, which was earlier discovered by 9to5Mac.

Update: In a statement to Macrumors on Thursday (March 22), Apple acknowledged the problem with Siri and said that it has become "aware of the issue." Apple promised to fix the problem "in an upcoming software update."

It's unclear, however, whether Apple will fix it in its iOS 11.3, which is currently in beta, or if it will deliver a minor update in iOS 11.2.7 to fix the problem.

In iOS 11, Apple created a setting that allows you to hide messages. When someone sends you a text message or any other type of content and the hide-messages feature is on, you'll only receive a notification that something has come in and won't be able to see the content of it from the lock screen. The idea is to improve privacy and keep pesky onlookers from seeing what your friends and family might be sending you.

MORE: 28 Hidden iOS 11 Features

While Mac Magazine was testing the feature, which is on by default in the iPhone X, it discovered that requesting Siri read aloud whatever message had just come in would reveal the content of that message in nearly every case. The only place it didn't work: in Apple's own Messages app. When the site tested the feature on Skype, Telegram, and WhatsApp, however, Siri delivered the message with ease.

Protect Yourself: To hide message content on the Lock screen, click Settings > Notifications, choose the app. Then select Previews and choose Never.

According to 9to5Mac, Mac Magazine was able to take advantage of the bug in iOS 11.2.6, the latest version of Apple's mobile operating system. The site also tried it out on iOS 11.3 and was again able to dupe Siri into reciting messages.

The bug is just the latest in a string of problems Apple has faced in iOS 11. The company has reportedly told its engineers to delay some of the bigger updates it was planning for iOS 12 and delay them to 2019. Instead, Apple has told its engineers that it wants to focus on performance and reliability improvements in this year's major operating system update, according to reports.

Given we're facing yet another iOS problem, that might be a good idea.



Update at 8:04 a.m. on March 23: In a statement to Macrumors on Thursday (March 22), Apple acknowledged the problem with Siri and said that it has become "aware of the issue." Apple promised to fix the problem "in an upcoming software update." It's unclear, however, whether Apple will fix it in its iOS 11.3, which is currently in beta, or if it will deliver a minor update in iOS 11.2.7 to fix the problem.Get the Note 9 if you want a big-screen phone with a pen and strong cameras. But you may want to splurge on the Note 10 for all the bells and whistles.

The Galaxy Note 10 is here, but last year's Note 9 is worth a look if you're looking for a powerful Android phone, especially when that are plenty of good Note 9 deals.

We expect to see huge savings on the Note 9 over the holidays, so check out our Samsung Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals to stay up-to-date on the latest prices.

The Galaxy Note 9 (starting at $899) has plenty of things going for it, including an S Pen that doubles as a remote control. After spending some time with Samsung's new flagship, most of the key highlights this time around feel more like refinements of a great phablet than bold steps forward, but this is still one of the best Android phones and best big-screen phones you can buy.

If you're not sure which Samsung phone to get, check out our Galaxy Note 9 vs. Galaxy Note 10 face-off and Galaxy Note 9 vs. Galaxy Note 20 comparison to see which of Samsung's most recent phablet generations is worth buying.



Cheat Sheet: What's new with the Note 9?

S Pen is a remote control: The stylus now has Bluetooth connectivity, so you can use it for taking selfies, giving presentations, skipping music tracks and more.

The stylus now has Bluetooth connectivity, so you can use it for taking selfies, giving presentations, skipping music tracks and more. Huge battery: The 4,000 mAh battery is the biggest ever in a Samsung handset, which is a big step up from the Note 8 and its 3,300 mAh power pack. However, our testing has produced only marginal improvements so far.

The 4,000 mAh battery is the biggest ever in a Samsung handset, which is a big step up from the Note 8 and its 3,300 mAh power pack. However, our testing has produced only marginal improvements so far. AI camera: The dual camera on the Note 9 can automatically recognize more than 20 different types of scenes (food, plants, etc.) and adjust the settings to get the best shot.

The dual camera on the Note 9 can automatically recognize more than 20 different types of scenes (food, plants, etc.) and adjust the settings to get the best shot. DeX without the dock. You only need an adapter and an HDMI cable to turn the Note 9 into a mini PC rather than a $69 accessory. The phone doubles as a touchpad.

You only need an adapter and an HDMI cable to turn the Note 9 into a mini PC rather than a $69 accessory. The phone doubles as a touchpad. Water cooled. The Note 9 uses a water carbon fiber cooling system to prevent overheating and deliver sustained high performance, though our testing didn't yield impressive results.

Pricing and availability

When it debuted in August 2018, the Note 9 cost $999 for the 6GB model with 128GB of storage. Several months after its initial release, though, it's not hard to find discounts on the Note 9. As of this writing, Samsung is offering $100 to $200 off the phone depending on which carrier you opt for; the unlocked version of the Note 9 is $100 off at Samsung, too.

The 512GB Galaxy Note 9 costs $1,249, with those same $100 to $200 discounts available at the moment.

AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, U.S. Cellular, Verizon Wireless and Xfinity carry the Galaxy Note 9. You can also get it through Amazon, Best Buy, Costco, Sams Club, Straight Talk Wireless, Target and Walmart, as well as Samsung.com.

MORE: Best Galaxy Note 9 Deals



Design: Mostly unchanged

The boldest thing about the Note 9's design is that it now comes in more vibrant hues. The deeper Lavender Purple model pops more than the Ocean Blue version. However, the Ocean Blue comes with a yellow S Pen, which writes in yellow on the display in Screen-Off memo mode, a nice, subtle touch.

Shortly after the phone's release last year, Samsung announced the availability of new Cloud Silver and Midnight Black versions of the Note 9. Cloud Silver is exclusively sold through Best Buy and Samsung's own website, while the Midnight Black variant will be carried at all retailers.

If you can tell the Note 8 and Note 9 apart at a glance, kudos to you: The differences between them are so slight as to be imperceptible.

The Note 9 and Note 8 have identical bodies  both are 6.4 inches long and 0.34 inches deep. The Note 9s display is a smidge larger at 6.4 inches to the Note 8s 6.3-inch panel, which makes it the largest screen Samsungs ever put in a Note device, but youd be forgiven for not noticing.

The new phone is a tiny bit heavier than the Note 8 (7.1 ounces versus 6.9 ounces), but I couldnt feel the difference when holding both devices.

The biggest change is the fingerprint sensor, which Samsung wisely moved from beside the dual-lens camera to beneath it. This makes it easier for those of us with small hands to easily unlock the phone without straining our stubby fingers. Just be aware that the back of the new phone smudges easily.

Galaxy Note 9 specs

Debut Price

$999 (128GB), $1,249 (512GB)

Display 6.4 inches Super AMOLED (2960 x 1440) OS

Android 8.1 Oreo CPU

Snapdragon 845 RAM

6GB, 8GB Storage

128GB, 512GB microSD

Up to 512GB Rear Camera

Dual 12 MP Cameras (f/1.5 and f/2.4) Front Camera

8 MP (f/1.7) Battery

4,000 mAH Battery Life (Hrs:Mins)

11:26

Size

6.3 x 3 x 0.34 inches Weight

7.1 ounces Colors

Lavender Purple, Ocean Blue, Cloud Silver, Midnight Black



Display: Another winner

If theres one thing Samsung excels at, its stunning smartphone screens. The same Super AMOLED panel with quad-HD resolution that you find in the Note 8 and Galaxy S9 is what you get with the Note 9, but then again, its pretty hard to improve upon perfection.

I havent had time to catch up on the second season of Jessica Jones, which I would prefer to watch on my 55-inch TV in the comfort of my living room. But the Note 9s screen is massive, and OLED lends itself to deep, rich colors (moreso than LED panels, which are brighter). Catching up on my favorite Marvel anti-hero series was fully immersive, though I still prefer a TV for my streaming needs.

MORE: Galaxy Note 9 Specs - What You Get

OLED panels are now rivaling LED screens when it comes to brightness, at least when in direct sunlight. Thats definitely true of the Note 9, which hit 604 nits on the light meter in our lab tests. That easily beats the Pixel 2 XLs 438 nits and the iPhone Xs 474 nits, though the S9+ edged out the Note 9 at 630 nits, and nothing really approaches the LG G7 ThinQ, which can clear 900 nits when you max out is brightness settings.

The Note 9 is also incredibly colorful: It reproduces 224 percent of the sRGB color gamut, which is better than the Note 8 (204.8 percent), the Galaxy S9 (220 percent), the Pixel 2 XL (120 percent) and the iPhone X (128.6 percent). But the S9+ proves it has the panel to beat, covering an eye-popping 231 percent of the color spectrum.

When it comes to the true-to-life nature of those hues, the Note 9 notched a 0.34 on the Delta-E rating (numbers closer to 0 are more accurate). The Note 8 scored a 0.5. The iPhone Xs OLED panel isnt quite as rich or colorful as the Note 9s, but its colors are more true to life with a Delta-E score of 0.27 (or 0.21 when the iPhones True Tone setting is toggled on).

Overall, the Note 9s display is one of the best around. At its size and price, it should be.



S Pen: More than a stylus

The Notes S Pen seems to get better with every new version of the Note, and the Note 9s iteration is the best yet. Samsung added Bluetooth connectivity so the new S Pen can be used as a remote control for your phone instead of just a simple stylus.

I was surprised at how much I liked using the S Pen remote button. The feature is endlessly customizable and should become even more so now that third-party app developers have access to an S Pen Remote SDK (though Samsung has done a lackluster job at promoting any third-party S Pen improvements that have come out since then). A long press of the stylus button can open any app you choose in the S Pen Remote settings, and then you can assign actions to a single click and double click of the button for any app thats compatible with the S Pen. There are few to start, but we expect a variety of apps to add support for S Pen actions in the future.

I found myself using the S Pen primarily as a camera remote, because pressing the shutter when taking a selfie is a constant struggle for me, especially on a phone as big as the Note 9. With the S Pen in hand, I could hold the Note at any angle and and capture a great photo without dropping the phone just by pressing the remote button.

I also never worried about the S Pens battery, because the pen is usually slotted into the bottom of the phone, which keeps it charged up. If it does die (which it didnt during my use), then sliding it back into the Note for 40 seconds juices it back up to 100 percent.

The Note 9s S Pen offers all the other great little features that the Note 8s version does, including the ability to write notes while the screen is off, translate languages by highlighting text and turn your notes into animated GIFs with the Live Message tool.

As soon as developers are on board with the S Pens remote feature, that might be the best reason to buy a Note 9.

Camera: AI makes photos pop

The Note 9s rear camera is essentially the same 12-megapixel dual-lens shooter Samsung put in the Galaxy S9+, which means you can capture portraits with blurred backgrounds. The camera also sports a dual aperture, which can automatically open at either f/1.5 to f/2.4 for brighter low-light images or crisper shots, depending on your shooting conditions.

But Samsung added artificial intelligence to the Note 9s camera software to set it apart from the other Galaxies. And it really makes a difference.

Samsung isnt the first company to make its camera smart  LG and Huawei flagships both have intelligence baked in for automatically configuring the camera settings depending on what youre shooting. The Note 9 recognizes 20 scenes, including snow, sunsets, beaches and backlit subjects, and adjusts the contrast, brightness, saturation, white balance and other settings youd normally have to manually configure in the cameras Pro mode. You can turn off Scene Optimizer if youd rather take photos without its intervention.

The good news: The Note 9s Scene Optimizer takes your photos to the next level compared to images shot without the feature turned on. In each photo we took, Scene Optimizer increased the contrast and saturation significantly, which made almost every photo look better.

For instance, a dimly lit shot of the gold clock in the center of Grand Central Station looked more vivid with the AI setting, which categorized the train station as nighttime. (An icon appears on-screen in the camera preview to tell you when the Note has recognized the scene type.) The gold clock gleamed in contrast to the window behind it, like a scene out of a Harry Potter film.

In a photo of foliage in Bryant Park, Scene Optimizer brought out the details in the leaves cascading over the planter. The pink petals were more sharply contrasted against the shrubbery in the AI-assisted image.

But sometimes the AI camera goes overboard, like in a photo of a cinnamon-filled pastry. The twisted dough appeared almost orange in the photo, which the camera recognized as food, and the image was overall flat. The pastrys sheen was more accurately captured in the non-optimized image, and you could see the rivers of cinnamon more clearly.

Now, the bad news: Even with AI, the Note 9s camera still falls short of not only Googles Pixel 3, but the previous-generation Pixel 2 as well. In a photo of backlit buildings in midtown Manhattan contrasted against a lawn filled with people relaxing after work, the Pixel 2 XL captured the shade variation in the sky and the light reflected in the building windows, and more accurately painted the deep green trees.

In a photo of me taken using Pixels Portrait mode and the Note 9s version of Portrait mode, called Live Focus, the Pixel picked up the freckles on my shoulders and the detail in my face moreso than the Note 9, which smoothed out my skin but made it look cooler than it is in real life.

The Note 9's camera shines when shooting at night, thanks to the Dual Aperture feature that automatically widens to allow more light in when shooting in dim settings. I took a photo of a rose in my garden at 8:30 p.m. using the Note 9, Pixel 2 XL and iPhone X, and the Note 9's result was the clear winner. The pink petals are saturated and bright, despite the lack of light, and contrast crisply against the green of the leaves. You can also see water droplets from the storm earlier that day. I took the same photo with the Note 9's Scene Optimizer turned on and off, and found the AI didn't improve the detail or saturation in the flower. This is noteworthy because the Galaxy S9+ has the same exact camera as the Note 9, but doesn't have the AI-assisted software in its camera. Turns out you don't need that to capture great nighttime shots.

Since the Note 9 released, Google has introduced a new flagship of its own, as well as a revolutionary new feature called Night Sight. This mode  which is reaching the Pixel 2 as well  improves low-light shooting to rival the Note 9s own capabilities in the dark, even with the AI Scene Optimizer switched on. In the Winter Village at New Yorks Bryant Park, Samsungs handset failed to properly illuminate the trees, the walkway and the side of the New York Public Library. The Pixel 3s Night Sight mode delivered a more impressive image overall, though it did blow out the lighting in some of the storefronts.



Here we see a comparison with Apples iPhone XS, where both devices employed 2x optical zoom to crop in on this picturesque winter scene on the banks of the Delaware River at New Jerseys Washington Crossing State Park. The Note 9s attempt is better exposed overall but cooler, while Apples handset opted for a warmer white balance and did a slightly better job with the highlights, as illustrated by the green traffic light. One notable difference is the way each handset dealt with the falling snow. The iPhone automatically adopted a faster shutter speed, suspending the snowflakes in midair. Meanwhile, the Note 9s slower-acting shutter blended everything together, making the precipitation more reminiscent of rain.



The Note 9 has one smart feature that other AI-assisted cams dont: Flaw Detection. This feature tells you as soon as you snap a pic if something is wrong with it. The camera recognizes if a subject is blinking, if theres too much blur, if your lens is smudged, or if the image is backlit, so you can quickly reshoot in the moment instead of cursing yourself afterward. This really worked  we were able to reshoot a blurry portrait that, at first glance, seemed perfectly fine.

Overall, the Note 9s camera is solid, but its not the best around, even with Scene Optimizer activated. However, being able to ditch AI and shoot in Pro mode when you want to is a nice touch for professional photogs who dont need a boost.

Performance: Fast, powerful, but not any cooler

Like all Android flagships these days, the Galaxy Note 9 packs a Snapdragon 845 processor, but Samsung ups the ante with 6GB of RAM on the standard configuration of the phone, which also offers 128GB of storage. If you want more memory and storage, you can order a Note 9 with 8GB of RAM and a whopping 512GB of storage. But that's not the most interesting part.

Samsung says it's employing a water/carbon fiber cooling so the Note 9 can deliver faster performance over extended periods without throttling, such as when you're playing games. There's a 3x bigger thermal spreader (or heat sink) than in the Note 8, which is designed for better cooling performance. We put that to the test  four tests, to be exact  to see how the addition of water/carbon fiber cooling performs in real life. The verdict: It doesn't. There was no noticeable temperature difference between the Note 9 and Note 8, which has a smaller thermal spreader and lacks water/carbon fiber cooling. We reached out to Samsung for comment on our results, and we'll update this review if they respond.



In terms of how that translates to performance, our test results prove the Note 9 is indeed a powerful phone, though not the fastest Android device around. We ran Geekbench 4, which measures a phone's general performance, on the 6GB version of the Galaxy Note 9 and came up with a multicore score of 8,876. That's a definite improvement over the Note 8 and its Snapdragon 835 processor, which produced a 6,564 score, and the Note 9 outperformed the Galaxy S9+ (8,295) as well.

But the Note 9 didn't match the OnePlus 6 model with 8GB of RAM remains the fastest Android device, with its 9,098 score. We haven't tested the 8GB model of the Note 9, which comes with 512GB of storage and costs $1,249, but it's possible the more expensive Note can rival the OnePlus 6.

As for the iPhone X, which runs on Apple's blazing-fast A11 Bionic CPU, it remains a no-contest. The iPhone X scores 10,357 on Geekbench 4. Its single-core result of 4,055 also tops the 2,452 single-core score turned in by the Note 9. Android phones continue to lag behind Apple's offerings in terms of performance, and the Note 9 doesn't change that.



When it comes to graphics performance, the Galaxy Note 9 pulled ahead of the Galaxy S9+ on 3DMark's Slingshot Extreme 3.1 benchmark with a score of 4,639 compared to 4,634. However, the Note 9 lagged behind the iPhone X (4,994) and the OnePlus 6 (5,124) with 8GB of RAM.



The Note 9 should offer some of the fastest LTE speeds around, as it sports a Cat 18 modem from Qualcomm. This is the same modem in the Galaxy S9 that ran circles around the iPhone X on downloads and uploads, but we'll put the Note 9 through its paces to see if it achieves the same speeds.





Battery: Good, but short of expectations

Samsung put a giant 4,000 mAh battery in the Galaxy Note 9, which means it should last much longer than the companys other phones.

But the Note 9 didnt turn in the best results on the Toms Guide Battery Test (continuous web-surfing over T-Mobiles LTE network until the phone dies) initially lasting 11 hours and 16 minutes. We turned off the phone's adaptive display feature, and retested: the Note 9 lasted an extra 10 minutes on the test.

Dont get me wrong, thats solid enough to land the device on our list of longest-lasting smartphones, where its best time of 11:26 lands it in the top 20. Its also 90 minutes better than the average smartphones battery life (9:48).

However, the Note 9 lasted just 15 minutes longer than the Note 8, which has a much smaller 3,300 mAh battery. The Pixel 2 XL lasted 12:09 on our test, more than a half-hour longer than the Note 9's best time (and Googles flagship has a better camera, to boot). The Galaxy S9+ hits 10:59.

Bixby: Can't rival Siri, let alone Alexa

Samsung is improving its Bixby voice assistant by integrating with more third-party apps and making it more aware of context.

But Bixby is still playing catch-up with rival assistants, such as Amazons Alexa, Google Assistant and even Apples Siri, which still balks at tasks like setting multiple timers. Bixbys new additions, which include the ability to make a restaurant reservation and call an Uber without installing those apps or pressing any buttons at all, are still buggy at this point.

Bixby couldnt understand my requests to book reservations at the popular new bistro Frenchette or an udon noodle shop in midtown. Specifically, Bixby didnt understand the name Frenchette, which it heard as French at or friendship, or the word udon, which it heard as wood-on  instead, it showed me nearby furniture stores. When I asked Bixby to make a reservation for lunch at 2 p.m. nearby, plenty of restaurants close to my office popped up, but most of them were fast-casual spots that dont take reservations.

I tried a different approach: Make a reservation tonight for French.

French restaurants in midtown Manhattan popped up. Bixby asked which one I wanted. At the top of the list was Per Se, so I said, Per Se. Bixby heard, Persei, and I still was no closer to making dinner plans.

Eventually, I mustve overwhelmed the assistant, because an error message popped up: Cant talk to Bixby right now.

Fine. I didnt want to talk to Bixby anyway.

MORE: Alexa vs. Google Assistant vs. Siri

Calling an Uber was much more seamless. After connecting my Uber account to Bixby, I had the assistant hail an UberX to JFK Airport with no issues, and I even knew how much it would cost in advance.

But there are still bugs to be worked out. Bixby doesnt respond quickly, and often mishears what you ask about (as in the restaurant kerfuffle above). If Bixby is going to be the foundation of Samsungs upcoming Galaxy Home speaker, its gonna need a whole lot of work to compete with Alexa.

Bottom line

Samsung has been an innovator with the Galaxy Note lineup, with past models setting the bar for productivity powerhouses with huge screens. But these days, nearly every flagship phone is now giant. Having a cutting-edge processor, pro-level camera and lengthy battery life is no longer special.

Where the Note 9 shines is as a high-performance phone. If your productivity depends on a device that has a giant display and the ability to get more work done with the powerful S Pen, Samsungs latest phone is the one for you. And its ability to connect to an external display with just a cable makes ideal for power users.

The Note 9 is an excellent phone, to be sure, but its not breaking any molds. The battery life is good, but not industry-leading. The camera is good, but Googles 10-month-old Pixel 2 XL is still better, and phones released after the Note 9 came out have raised the bar even higher. Bixby still needs serious work, though no one is buying a Samsung device for its assistant

So, unless you love the idea of using an S Pen, you may want to wait until this fall to compare all of the latest flagships before you buy-including the expected trio of new iPhones. But if you need a big-screen phone, the Note 9 should not disappoint.

Credit: Tom's Guide

How to use a VPN to unblock Google

vpn If you can't access Docs, Gmail, Search and more, you need to unblock Google and keep up to speed with the rest of the world.How to disable the new Twitter font

If you dont like Twitter's new Chirp font, heres how to get the old one back, and how to switch back if you change your mind.If you find yourselves in the Big Apple next week for the New York Auto Show, youll notice that Hyundais booth at the show will have a decidedly crossover and SUV feel to it. Thats the because the Korean automaker is preparing to showcase a number of crossovers and SUVs at the show. Among the models that have been confirmed include the new Santa Fe, a refreshed Tucson, and most importantly an electric version of the Kona crossover.

The future of Hyundai has crossovers and SUVs written all over it

While its true that some of these models already made their world debuts at the Geneva Motor Show, neither of them have been checked out by customers here in the U.S.

While its true that some of these models already made their world debuts at the Geneva Motor Show  the Santa Fe and the electric Kona, in particular  neither of them have been checked out by customers here in the U.S. Theyll get their chance to do that at the New York Auto Show in a weeks time.

Both the Santa Fe and the Kona have something different to offer, too. The five-passenger SUV takes the reigns from its predecessor, the Santa Fe Sport, and slots just below the Santa Fe XL. As it was shown in Geneva, the new model will be offered with a few engine options, including a 2.4-liter four-cylinder unit that has 185 horsepower on tap and a 2.0-liter turbocharged engine that can produce 232 horsepower. Hyundai is also offering a 2.2-liter turbodiesel unit that will be available exclusively on the XL version.

The Kona EV, on the other hand, will get all of its power from an electric motor that produces 132 horsepower and 291 pound-feet of torque with a 39.2-kWh-battery that comes with an impressive range of 186 miles. If that doesnt suit your fancy, the Korean automaker is also offering a higher-spec version of the Kona with an electric motor that produces 201 horsepower and 291 pound-feet of torque with a 64 kWh battery that can run on a single charge for a distance of 292 miles.

You might think that the Santa Fe and Kona are headed to New York as rehashed debutantes. Thats fair, considering where they were earlier this month. But, Hyundai is also throwing in a treat in the form a refreshed Tucson that will make its official debut in New York. Not much is known about this model, but previous spy shots have hinted at a major design change compared to its predecessor.

Hyundai is also throwing in a treat in the form a refreshed Tucson that will make its official debut in New York

So as we count down to the days that lead up to the New York Auto Show, keep a keen eye on for Hyundai and all the crossovers and SUVs its bringing to the dance.

References

Read our full review on the 2019 Hyundai Santa Fe.

Read our full review on the 2019 Hyundai Tucson.

Read our full review on the 2019 Hyundai Kona EV.

Read more Hyundai news.

Read more New York Auto Show news.Contrary to previous reports, Aston Martin has no plans of dropping an AMG-sourced inline six-cylinder engine into any of its new models. Those sentiments come straight from senior engineering executive Matt Becker, who admitted that his previous comments about the possibility of six-pots returning to Aston Martin models were phrased differently than he intended to. So if anyone out there is still excited about the prospects of a six-cylinder Aston Martin heading to market soon, heres a bucket of ice-cold water to douse those expectations.

Beckers explanation comes a few days after reports quoted him hinting that Aston Martin could use the inline-six cylinder engine

Matt Becker is taking the blame for this one. Aston Martins senior engineering exec admitted to Motoring that he might have inadvertently fed misinterpreted information on news about the British automaker sourcing AMG inline-six engines. I fear that may have come out of one of my answers [to a journalists question] at Geneva [motor show], Becker said. I was speaking in more general terms that we might have to one day look at downsizing engines.

Beckers explanation comes a few days after reports quoted him hinting that Aston Martin could use the inline-six cylinder engine that AMG developed for the Mercedes CLS 53 AMG. With emissions regulations going where theyre going and getting harder and harder, we have to consider all powertrain options, and we are considering six-cylinders for the future, Becker said. Previous Astons have had six cylinders  a long time ago  but I think with [the] CLS 53, the engine that [it] has is a very complicated and clever engine and its something that could fit with the brand in the future.

On some level, its easy to see where Beckers words may have led on more than they should. But its also clear that he didnt specifically confirm plans to use a fettled version of Mercedes 3.0-liter six-cylinder engine that was used on the CLS 53 AMG. Given the history between Aston Martin and AMG  the latter has supplied engines for the British automaker  reading between the lines of Beckers comments could have been interpreted as a sign that a new partnership between the two brands was in the works.

But alas, its not happening the way most of us thought it would. And if we bring in CEO Andy Palmers preference for using electrification to improve the efficiency of Aston Martins future models, it looks like the return of the inline-six cylinder on future Aston Martin models might still be wishful thinking on our part. Oh, well. At least we still have the DB7, the last Aston Martin to come with an inline-six engine, to remember.

References

Two-door body style 2+0 seating

Read our full review on the 2018 Aston Martin Vantage.

Read more Aston Martin news.

Source: MotoringThe idea of an X8 SUV didnt take long to manifest once we heard confirmation about an X7, but now that theres word that BMW is considering such a much, some of you have gone into hater mode hard. The worst part is that some of you are the same ones that went batshit crazy happy over the 8-Series Gran Coupe and the Mercedes-AMG GT 4-Door. The truth is that the X8 falls under the same category  there are always going to be customers with deep pockets that want more. That fact, if you remember correctly, is the exact reason why Mercedes decided to do the AMG GT 4-Door, as customers drove the C or E63 and wanted more. But, the need for an X8 goes much deeper than that because it always does, doesnt it?

Two Words: Flagship SUV

Sure, the X7 is going to fill up the large SUV niche that BMW is missing out on with the X6. Some are suggesting that the X8 would take on more of a slanted roof which might make a little more sense, but dont get it twisted  the X8 wont be an oversized, jacked up coupe. It will have a sportier, slanted roof, but its also there to represent the best of the best in the lineup. It will be the most expensive in the lineup, and it will be able to take on some serious contenders like the Land Rover Range Rover and the Bentley Bentayga and take things a step further.

Its Probably Not for you to Drive, Guy

The truth is, a vehicle like the X8 isnt one you buy to drive. No, if youre buying an X8, youre one of those guys with too much money (and hopefully responsibility) to focus on driving yourself. So, you get your Jeeves, Billy, of James to do the dirty work while you hang out in the back sipping on overpriced scotch, watching the money market and making calls like a boss, because thats your life. And, thats exactly what the X8s purpose will be.

The Interior Will be Fit for Kings, at Least in the Rear

The front of the cabin will probably be identical to that of the X7, for the most part, while the rear will be lush and packed to the brim with the finest materials matched to an incredible amount of passenger room. Itll have reclining seats, leg rests, big screen TVs, and four seats faced toward each other for those business meetings. BMW will pull out all the stops. Were talking about wine and champagne chillers, BMW-branded crystal glasses, fragrance dispensers, watch cubbies. Pretty much anything Bentley, Rolls-Royce, and Land Rover have ever offered on a whole new scale.

The LWB is for Luxury, the SWB Model Will Kill Land Rover and Bentley

So far, Ive been a little biased in assuming that the X8 will be built primarily for wealthy folk to ride around for a while, feeling special about their life. But, thats not the only purpose of the X8. Nope. That badge will also get thrown onto a short wheelbase that will be designed specifically to take on the Bentley Bentayga and Land Rover Range Rover, and Im talking about the range-topping models, too. In this form, itll probably get that massive 6.6-liter V-12 from the BMW 7 Series because f**k your emissions laws. Itll have at least 601 horsepower and 590 pound-feet of torque and could even be tuned to deliver a little more just to really stick it to the competition. AWD is pretty much a certainty while itll we get all of the latest goodies from M-sport as well.

Yeah, You Probably Cant Afford It Anyway

Remember when I said that it wasnt for you to drive? Well, even if you want the SWB version, youre probably not going to be able to afford it. This thing will command six figures right out of the gate and easily approach the $300,000 mark without batting an eye. Furthermore, it will be one of those models thats probably built to order and fully customizable. Oh yeah, and guess what, a lot of markets probably wont get it. China is a guaranteed market as folks over there, specifically businessmen, love to be hauled around. The U.S. and parts of Europe will have it available, but dont expect to walk onto a lot, sign off on a stack of paperwork, and drive away.

References

Read more BMW news.

Read our full review on the 2019 BMW X7.A stroll on a busy street in Vancouver, British Columbia, Nitrouz smelt something burning, and a gaze down made him see his baby literally on fire. Reacting quick, he parked it off the street only to see the bike engulfed in flames. Luckily, folks at North American Ducati came to his rescue quite immediately and offered him a new V4 and an extended warranty.

Nitrouz, a happy Canadian customer of Ducatis new fanboy flagship, the Panigale V4 , never must have thought even in his wildest dreams that his machine would go up in flames instead of burning asphalt.

In what will go down as the biggest paradigm shift for the company, Ducati launched its four-cylinder V4 Desmosedici Stradale Panigale back in November 2017. Similar to the one running on their Desmosedici GP bike and with 214 hp and 91.5 lb-ft of torque, this is the most powerful and the hottest bike in its class; quite literally now.

Ducatis are infamous for heating up more than usual, especially on a hot, dry day, with most of their current sportsbikes having the rear cylinders header pipe connecting the engine just under the seat making it a tad uncomfortable and irritating, to be honest. But this issue seems so farfetched for Nitrouz considering his situation of a burning V4.

Just like a lot of other Italians exotics (say Lambos and Ferraris), Ducati now seems to have joined the pack for having their machines go up in flames regardless of their flaring attitude toward quality control. Admittedly, Ducatis reaction has been unbeatable. Ducati North America immediately contacted Nitrouz and assured him that his motorcycle would be replaced at the earliest.

What we havent yet figured out is the cause of the V4 catching fire, and Im sure Ducati is doing everything in their powers to figure out the reason. We hope this is an isolated incident and does not affect every other Panigale V4s out there that might culminate in Ducati calling for a withdrawal. In any case, we have to say that neither Nitrouz nor any third party was injured.

Kudos to Ducati for taking responsibility for the situation and taking care of its customers. These things go a long way into brand PR 101.

Source: Motorcycle.com17:40

Can the BJP snatch a ninth seat or will the newfound bonhomie between former arch-rivals SP and BSP prevail is the question hanging in the air a day ahead of the crucial polls for 10 Uttar Pradesh Rajya Sabha seats.





The saffron party is assured of victory in eight of the ten seats going by its dominant numbers in the state Assembly along with its allies.





The four-MLA strong Suheldev Bharatiya Samaj Party (SBSP), after being placated by BJP chief Amit Shah, and the Apna Dal (Sonelal) with nine MLAs have decided to vote for BJP nominees.





"We are standing with the BJP. We had held a meeting of our MLAs and it was decided that we will strongly support the BJP," national president of Apna Dal (S) Ashish Patel told PTI today.





The declaration of support from the Apna Dal (S) comes days after SBSP chief Om Prakash Rajbhar, a Cabinet minister in UP government, declared his party's support for the BJP candidates. There are in all 11 candidates, including Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, in the fray for the 10 seats for which polling will take place tomorrow.





According to the Election Commission, voting will be held from 9 am to 4 pm. Counting of votes will be taken up at 5 pm tomorrow itself. The BJP and its allies have 324 MLAs in the 403-member Assembly after the death of its Noorpur MLA in a road accident recently. To secure a win in this Rajya Sabha election, a candidate needs 37 first preference votes.





Arithmetically, the BJP can easily win eight of the 10 seats and will be left with 28 surplus votes. "There will be contest on the ninth seat," a senior UP BJP leader said, exuding confidence that the saffron party would bag nine seats.





The SP and the BSP also appeared sure of win one seat each. The SP has fielded Jaya Bachchan and the BSP Bhimrao Ambedkar. With 19 MLAs, the BSP is short of 18 first preference votes and with Naresh Agarwal's son Nitin, who is still an SP MLA, likely to cross-vote for the BJP, the task will become difficult for the candidate of the Mayawati-led party.





BSP insiders said to be doubly sure of victory, Mayawati has sought a list of SP's loyal MLAs who will vote for her party candidate. She is also banking on some independent MLAs, who, though, are yet to reveal their cards, they said. Riding on the new bonhomie with the SP, Mayawati is banking on the 10 surplus votes of Akhilesh Yadav's party, besides seven votes of the Congress and one of RLD to reach the magic figure of 37 votes.





However, Nitin Agarwal can queer the BSPs pitch if he votes for the BJP. Naresh Agarwal, who recently quit the SP and joined the BJP, has said his son would vote for the saffron party in the Rajya Sabha polls.





The country's most populous state sends 31 MPs to the 245-member Rajya Sabha, and the BJP, which won a massive victory in the 2017 Assembly elections, is yet to get a lion's share of these.





Presently, the BJP has 58 Rajya Sabha MPs. The BJP candidates in the fray from UP are Union Finance Minister Jaitley, Ashok Bajpai, Vijay Pal Singh Tomar, Sakal Deep Rajbhar, Kanta Kardam, Anil Jain, Harnath Singh Yadav, GVL Narasimha Rao and Anil Kumar Agarwal. PTITreehugger and our third-party partners use cookies and process personal data like unique identifiers based on your consent to store and/or access information on a device, display personalized ads and for content measurement, audience insight, and product development. To change or withdraw your consent choices for Treehugger.com, including your right to object where legitimate interest is used, click below. At any time, you can update your settings through the "EU Privacy" link at the bottom of any page. These choices will be signaled globally to our partners and will not affect browsing data. List of Partners (vendors)SOURCE is a solar-powered and self-contained device capable of harvesting up to 10 liters of clean drinking water per day from the air.

By harvesting water vapor from the air and condensing it into liquid, atmospheric water generators can essentially pull water from the air, and these devices hold a lot of promise for providing an independent source of drinking water. And although drought-stricken regions and locations without safe or stable water sources are prime candidates for water production and purification devices such as those, residences and commercial buildings in the developed world could also benefit from their use, and they make a great fit for off-grid homes and emergency preparedness kits.

Some water generators, such as the WaterSeer, get a lot of hype (and a lot of skepticism) but haven't been able to deliver. Others, like the Ecoloblue devices, are a bit more costly and complex, but they actually exist and can be bought and put to work. Earlier this year, I wrote about Zero Mass Water's SOURCE device, which is a rooftop solar device that produces water instead of just electricity, but the pricing and availability weren't quite clear then. The company recently announced that SOURCE hydropanel arrays are now available in the US, where "It works in almost every climate, and almost every day of the year."

Creating Drinking Water

A standard SOURCE array is made up of two hydropanels, with additional panels added as needed for the water production or the local climate, and this self-contained unit is designed to be mounted onto the roof of a building, where it can then produce an average of 4-10 liters per day. An onboard 30-liter reservoir holds the collected water and mineralizes it with calcium and magnesium, and the outflow of the device can be plumbed right to a tap (or refrigerator or dispenser) inside the building for ease of use. No maintenance is said to be necessary other than annual filter changes and swapping out the mineral cartridge every five years, which a subscription program delivers when it's time.

A Practical Solution

According to Zero Mass Water, even those in low-humidity and arid regions can put SOURCE units to work to generate water, which is a question that many skeptics of the system bring up. "Our array on the Zero Mass Water headquarters in Scottsdale, Arizona makes water year-long despite low relative humidity. The Phoenix-Metro area can get below 5% relative humidity in the summer, and SOURCE still produces water in these incredibly dry conditions."

SOURCE water generators are costly, at least in terms of the initial investment. A standard array with two panels runs about $4000, plus another $500 for installation, and is said to be engineered to last at least 10 years. That brings the cost to about $1.23 per day, or between $0.12 and $0.30 per liter, when averaged out over the life of the unit.

At The Verge, Lauren Goode took a closer look at the SOURCE device:International tribunal prosecutor to present Lesar Lecture

by Pete Rosenbery

CARBONDALE, Ill.  The supervising prosecutor in the trial of former Bosnian Serb General Ratko Mladic will present the 2018 Hiram H. Lesar Distinguished Lecture next week at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.

Adam Weber, whose wide experience ranges from prosecuting street-level narcotics cases as an assistant states attorney in Cook County to mass atrocities involving ethnic cleansing campaigns, will present The Legacy of International Tribunals and the Mladic Case. The lecture is at 5 p.m., March 27, in the SIU School of Law Auditorium.

This is the 21st lecture in the series established in 1992 to honor founding Dean Hiram H. Lesar. The lecture is free and the public is welcome.

Media Advisory

Reporters, photographers and camera crews are welcome to attend the Lesar Distinguished Lecture with Adam Weber at 5 p.m., March 27, in the auditorium in the SIU School of Law. For more information or to arrange interviews contact Diane Regan, the law schools interim director of communication and alumni outreach, at 618/453-8768.

Headed a portion of the Mladic prosecution

From April 2008 until February 2018, Weber worked with the United Nations-backed International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague, Netherlands. Established in 1993, the international court was the first international criminal tribunal since Nuremburg following World War II.

The tribunal was established to try those responsible for war crimes committed in the Balkans and it concluded its work in December 2017.

Webers work over the last nine years of the ICTY included successful prosecution of senior political, police and military officials, including Milan Lukic, a senior paramilitary leader responsible for mass murders in Visegrad, Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Weber was the lead prosecutor for the Sarajevo component of the trial against Mladic, nicknamed the butcher of Bosnia. Mladic was convicted of committing genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity and sentenced to life in prison in November 2017. At Mladics trial, Weber oversaw presentation of evidence pertaining to the 44-month siege of Sarajevo and evidence relating to the Bosnian Serb ethnic cleansing campaign in Bosnia and Herzegovina and genocide committed in Srebrenica.

Criminal tribunals importance will be a focus of lecture

Weber will discuss the inner workings of the court, its challenges and successes, said Cindy Buys, professor, director of the law schools international law program, and acting associate dean for academic affairs.

The tribunal was in many ways, a grand experiment, Buys said.

It was an attempt to bring to justice persons who had committed some of the most heinous crimes: genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, Buys said. While it was subjected to criticism for its slow pace and for decisions that some believed to be biased, the ICTY accomplished incredibly important work, including the creation of a historical record and giving voice to thousands of victims.

Prosecuting career started in Cook County

From March 2001 through April 2008, Weber was an assistant states attorney in Cook County, where he successfully prosecuted more than 250 felony bench and jury trials. He also supervised the prosecution of felony cases, setting the direction of the case managing the personnel assigned to the prosecuting team.

Prior to working as a prosecutor, Weber was an associate attorney with Gould & Ratner in Chicago. He also taught trial advocacy at Chicago-Kent College of Law and Loyola University of Chicago School of Law. He earned his law degree from Chicago-Kent College of Law in 1999 and a bachelors degree in political science from the University of Iowa in 1995.

Lecture honors founding dean

Hiram H. Lesar was the first dean of the SIU School of Law, which was established in 1973. While he retired as dean in 1980, Lesar continued to teach at the law school. Lesar died in 1997. In 1999, he was posthumously awarded the Founders Medal by the School of Law, the highest honor awarded by the law school.One of the methanol plants owned by methanol holdings (trinidad) ltd, the sister company of the oman-based methanol holdings (international) ltd, that is to be monetised to reduce the debt to the government resulting from the 2009 collapse of the insurance company.Do you have a news tip?

Want to share good news story, or do you have information that should see the light of day? Then we want to hear from you.

More hereIs Gary Griffith the local version of Donald Trump? I get that impression since his ramblings are so similar to Donald Trump where, in this case, he seems to feel he owns the position of Commissioner of Police ...You asked if you were crazy and then when someone says you are you completely disagree with them. This question has nothing whatsoever to do with Amsterdam anyway apart from you picking up the car here.

For what it is worth I think this is a crazy idea also and I am Scottish and have regularly driven LHD & RHD cars. you just get used to it.

Please ask on a UK forum if you think this is a good idea and see what they say! You seem to have done this before so what is your concern?

>>Of course, this involves taking overnight ferries from Amsterdam to Newcastle as well as Dublin to Cherbourg.<<

Yes and that is not cheap. Also you will need a ferry from Scotland to Belfast. Are you 100% sure the renal company is happy for you to take cars to the UK and ROI on ferries?

Can you let us know when you will be doing this so I can warn my family in Scotland to steer clear of you please? I also have friends in Cork so I can warn them too.Re: One day trip to new york for anniversary

1. Re: One day trip to new york for anniversary

You've posted in the NY State forum. Your questions will get more attention if you repost in the New York City forum.

Regarding parking - where are you driving from before heading north?

There are crowds in all areas of interest to tourists here.It is good to take JR Haruka Limited Express from Kansai Airport(KIX) to Kyoto, if you directly go to Kyoto from the KIX.

There are many pass in Kansai Region as follows, but if you only visit central cites such as Kyoto, Osaka, Kobe, Nara, these passes do not pay off.

Just get a prepaid ICOCA card at any JR West stations. You need this card to take any local trains and subways without tickets: without this card, you have to buy tickets to your destination but sometimes it's not easy to understand tickets of how much you need buy.

If you use the above JR Haruka Limited Express from the KIX to Kyoto and from Kyoto to the KIX, buy Icoca & Haruka, as follows.

When people move from Kyoto to Osaka, most use either JR Kyoto Line Shin-Kaisoku (New Rapid), Hankyu Railway or Keihan Railway, as follows.

1) JR Kyoto Line Shin-Kaisoku (New Rapid).

It takes only @30 min. and 560 yen. from JR Kyoto to JR Osaka.

2) Hankyu Railway Kyoto Line.

It connects Kawaramachi Terminal in Central Kyoto and Umeda Terminal (next to JR Osaka Station) in 40 min. for 400 yen.

3) Keihan Railway

Limited Express train on the Keihan Main Line get you from Sanjo Station in Central Kyoto to

Yodoyabashi Station in Central Osaka in @50 min. for 410 yen.So it would appear Ive booked us into Vegas on Memorial Day weekend! How the hell could I not know that you ask? Im Australian & coming over in May & obviously didnt do my homework properly!

Ive also happened across a story on the huge pool parties etc over that weekend. Were staying at Tuscany Suits who say they dont host a pool party but its likely be pretty crowded.

Not too concerned about the pool, way too many wrinkles to show up there! But just how crowded & busy does it get along the strip, shops etc?

Are we talking shuffling room shoulder to shoulder? Or do you think most will be too hung over to venture out during the day.

Also considering Memorial Day is there special commemorative events like our Anzac Day were we honour our soldiers etc.The Great Cardboard Boat Regatta returns to Campus Lake in 2018

by Christi Mathis

CARBONDALE, Ill.  The 45th annual Great Cardboard Boat Regatta is returning to Campus Lake at Southern Illinois University Carbondale for 2018.

The event that has grown to be a worldwide phenomenon is set for April 28 with registration and inspection beginning at 10 a.m. The races start at 1 p.m. and everyone is welcome to enjoy the fun  either as a participant or a spectator.

What it takes to race

The rules are pretty simple. Create a boat using only corrugated cardboard of any thickness, held together by glue, caulk, tape, staples or other such materials.

Use your own cardboard, or buy 7 by 8 sheets for $3 each in the Chemistry Department at the Neckers Building on campus. It typically takes about four sheets to make a boat. Call Mary Kinsel at 618/453-6428 to arrange pickup.

Add one-part waterproofing to the finished watercraft and devise some way of making the boat move using assisted or non-assisted people-power. Essentially, thats either peddle-driven propellers/paddle wheel or canoe paddles/oars powered.

Participants can compete individually or in teams (of up to 10 people)

There are several different competition categories:

Class I  human-powered boats that move via paddles or similar means.

Class II  mechanically propelled boats that use paddle wheels, propellers or other such methods to move across the water.

Class III  instant boats, built at the event using kits available that day. The kits include one big cardboard sheet, a box knife, a plastic sheet, a nail and a role of duct tape.

Class IV  youth division, for children ages 13 and younger.

Race organizers will furnish kayak paddles, oars and life jackets. They welcome children, teens and adults of all ages to join in the fun and encourage families, youth groups, Scout organizations and others to enter.

Compete for prizes

Participants will vie for a number of prizes  and in this race, you dont even have to make it to the finish line to win. In fact, some of the most celebrated entries in years past have sunk in spectacular fashion.

There will be trophies for the winners of each division as well as prizes for the best use of cardboard, the best team boat, and the Titanic trophy will go to the boat that goes down in the most impressive showing. This year, there will even be a monetary award for the top finishers in Class I and Class II and for the watercraft judged to be the Most Creative Boat Design.

Family fun

Refreshments will be available for purchase from the Carbondale Parks District and the Carbondale Cyclones swim team on regatta day.

As an added fun bonus for children, the Student Programming Council will be having a bounce house prior to race time.

The venue

The family-friendly regatta will be the first big event for Campus Lakes new Becker Pavilion. A major renovation of the boat house and pavilion, constructed in 1959, has been underway thanks to a generous donation from 1955 alumnus Ralph E. Becker.

The regatta offers a chance to see the renovated and accessible structure.

Storied history

The regatta originated at SIU in 1974 as a freshman art and design class project for the late Richard Archers classes. It went on to become an annual event, replicated all around the world and viewed by an estimated half-million plus visitors.

For many years, Larry Skip Briggs and W. Larry Busch, both retired professors from the School of Art and Design, coordinated the race. Alpha Chi Sigma, the campus professional chemistry fraternity, and faculty adviser Mary Kinsel, stepped in in 2010 to keep the tradition going.

The last couple of years, the race moved to a new venue as renovations and improvements took place at Campus Lake. But now, its back where it all began.

Sign up now

Register for the 2018 regatta online. The cost is $15 if you register in advance or $20 the day of the event.

For additional details

For more information, visit the Great Cardboard Boat Regatta Facebook page or the registration website, email Rachel Bolerjack at racmbol@siu.edu or contact Mary Kinsel at 618/453-6428.32sophiedub, it isn't just New York that is heavily regulating apartment rentals for vacationers. San Francisco, Santa Monica, Barcelona, Berlin, Paris, Reykjavik, and other places around the world that have too few units of housing for locals are making these holiday rentals either illegal or very heavily regulated. It's very frustrating because the AirBnB, Vrbo, Homestay etc. corporate bigwigs do not give a hang if people list their apartments illegally; what they care about is making money. It would eat into their profits terrifically if they were forced to investigate each and every listing to make sure it were legal. They're making money hand over fist; why should they vet their listings when a loophole in the law allows them to get away with not doing so?

NYC has been in a housing "crisis" (defined by our government as less than 3% availability) for decades. Greedy landlords and enterprising others who flout their leases, co-op/condo agreements may cancel your booking at the last minute if theyre caught by authorities.

Illegal rentals have become part of the reason rents for locals are so outrageously high. Here's an article on what vacation apartment rentals have done to the housing market in NYC:

Since October 2016 it has been illegal to even advertise an illegal vacation rental. There are numerous horror stories linked to them. In addition to the Van Duren/Sacks story, here's another one about a bride.

Brides AirBnB nightmare:

If you post your dates and what type of bedding arrangement you need (are you traveling alone?) we can make suggestions for safe, legal accommodations at the lowest possible prices.I can see you've made a start, but I'll be brutally honest here.... it's more like grandma's itinerary (and a boring grandma at that!). Sorry... that's mean. Let's liven it up and reconsider some things that make it somewhat constrained.

On arrival day, where do you arrive at 2pm? The airport? Which one and how are you planning to travel to your hotel? This is important as there are bad ways and good ways. Tell us your plans.

You really should plan to do more than grocery shopping this afternoon and evening.

Day 1: This is an okay start but having the cruise smack in the middle of the day is limiting you. You have very little planned. What will you do between 2pm and dinner? I'm not saying you need every minute planned out but I have a feeling you will feel "stuck" this day unless you have more ideas in mind..

Time Square is best at night (the lights). Don't assume you'll want to spend 5 hours there before the show as it's just really crowded and touristy and a lot of people dislike being there once they've gawked at "the sights" and taken a few photos.. It's also not a good place to eat, but the Hell's Kitchen neighborhood is (west of Times Square, where many of the theaters are). So yes, include Times Square before theater, but not the whole afternoon and early evening.

Day 2: This is too many museums. We generally recommend doing either the AMNH or the Met in a day, but not both. People just don't want to spend that many consecutive hours in museums with museum type standing around and looking. It's mentally and physically fatiguing These are huge, world class museums. Adding the Guggenheim makes it even more difficult. Pick one (either the Met or AMNH). If you can't agree, split up. Note that MoMA (Museum of Modern Art in Midtown) generally has a broader appeal than Guggenheim, which tends to hold more eclectic exhibits with a narrower appeal. See what's showing at the Guggenheim before you decide that you want to prioritize it.

Think about evening activities. How about exploring a fun neighborhood to stroll. Bar hopping, cafe's, shopping (yes, some neighborhoods have late shopping), people watching, live music, picturesque streets with, quirky streets, eating...

Day 3: Church and a couple of Financial district sites that won't take all that much time (unless you intend to do the whole 911 memorial museum?), then calling it a day with dinner. You can do so much more. Plan to hit more neighborhoods in this area.

Day 4: The Greenwich Village Food Tour sounds like fun, but don't let that suffice for the time you spend in the whole Greenwich Village, West Village, Soho area. There is just so much to explore and love here. The food tour is going to cover just a taste of it, with a focus on the food they want to present.

In all, it's really not a bad start but it needs filling out and it needs fun and it needs more exploring. I'm going to suggest that you reconsider doing the Landmarks Cruise in the middle of the day on that day 1. You will have just arrived and want to be out IN the city experiencing things, not looking at it from the water. Plus if you eliminate that time commitment in the middle of the day, you have a whole glorious day to plan anything you want. You could even decide to do another one of the museums on this day, or cover a broader area.

If you want a cruise, consider doing one at day's end on a different day (not your theater day). Maybe a "sunset cruise" or "twilight cruise" type of thing. You could even do that on arrival day!

When is this trip?Not going to address the driving because others have done so already.

Re: Parking/Stone Street. There is VERY limited on street parking in the Financial District/Battery Park area. You have to put your car in a parking garage and there are plenty of them. If you get there early enough for early bird specials, they are less expensive. Otherwise, can be around $40/day or more. Parking on the Staten Island side would be cheaper, but I've never done it, you would have to google it. Depends where you're coming from to see what makes sense. There's a one way toll on the Verrazano Bridge into Staten Island of $17 (or $11.50 on EZPass), depending where you're coming from. I would imagine if you're coming from the other direction, you may have to take the Goethals Bridge ($14/$11.75) into Staten Island. The only way to avoid tolls into Manhattan is to take an east river crossing (59th St, Williamsburg, Manhattan or Brooklyn Bridges).

Stone Street is about a block long with a cobblestone street and restaurants and taverns along the way. In good weather, there is outdoor seating and it's a fun atmosphere. I don't think any of the restaurant options are the slightest bit memorable. (The pizza at Adrienne's is pretty good, the old fashioned, not the round ones). I would recommend going to Eataly instead and going to one of the restaurants there, next to the 9/11 Museum/Memorial (again, a downer if you're celebrating, although the Memorial is powerful on its own). You could get take out at Eataly and eat in Zuccotti or Battery Park if the weather is good (on benches at Zuccotti, it's a cement park).

You may want to figure out what your overall budget is for this trip and how best to allocate funds, is the Manhattan day worth it? Or go from Manhattan to the Hudson River Valley or Catskills region, a closer drive and certainly picturesque. (ok, sorry, I addressed the driving too....it's overwhelming.)The China tourism boom isn't over for Cairns, at least according to the tourism industry.

Last week economist Pete Faulkner questioned whether the rapid rise of Chinese visitors to TNQ had plateaued, based on the latest stats from the most recent International Visitor Survey.

But Cairns Airport figures for passenger numbers during Chinese New Year, which fell in February, showed there was a 21% increase in passengers through the international terminal, a total of 60,910 travellers. There was also a 9% rise in domestic numbers at the airport in February, which could also be boosted by Chinese New Year given the high percentage - over 80% - of international visitors to Cairns who travel on domestic flights.

TTNQ also appeared to reject suggestions the China boom was over, saying an increasing number of independent Chinese travellers were venturing out beyond Cairns.

Anyone who has been through Moi University, specifically the main campus that is located in the outskirts of Eldoret town in Kesses, can relate with the frustrating long queues and confusion of getting a hostel room on the first day of the semester. Everyone dreaded the opening date only because of having to struggle to get a room that they will sleep in for the specific academic year, but good news is that this no more! Moi university hostel booking is now more accessible courtesy of a collaborative effort made by the of the university. Students are set to use this new system for the first time in the upcoming semester. All hostel applications are expected to be complete before the opening date. The platform recently unveiled a strategy to curb inconveniences formerly experienced in student hostel placement which was often congested and inefficient.

Source: Moi University

READ ALSO: Moi University Courses Offered and Fee Structure

The system exclusively accepts applicants who are currently studying at Moi University, that means, continuing students and not new students. In addition, only the regular students can book the hostels inside the university. This vital system was recently launched and dedicated to easing bulk work at the Hostel Department.

Different hostels are now accessible for the student to claim depending on their preferences. The system is very comprehensive and responsive making it user-friendly and fast to navigate. The allocation platforms allocate rooms in close consideration with student fee payment status and room preferences.

Continuing students will be able to use the new system to book hostels at their convenience regardless of the location and time. First-year students, on the other hand, are expected to complete the registration process first before they can be able to use the online hostel booking system in the successive semesters. Moi University hostel booking for first years will start on 10th of August later this year after activating their accounts.

How the new student booking system works

1. Registration and creating account

Applicants are required to have an active student account at Moi University. If you do not have an account, visit the university portal to register and create an account. If your account is faulty, visit the administrator to help your resolve pertinent issues.

Registration requirements

Admission number also called registration number- found on Student Identity Card or even the admission letter.

Birth Certificate number or the National Identification number

A validated email address, i.e., @yahoo.com, @hotmail.com, or @gmail.com. The email chosen should be working for further communication with the varsity.

Disclaimer: Make sure you activate your student account before attempting to log in

2. Login to varsity portal

Applicants are expected to log in to their accounts to kick off the hostel application process. Students are advised to visit Moi University hostel booking portal to gain access to their profiles.

3. New student register

New students will receive a quick password link to provide their details. Be sure to choose the school and course accurately during this step. Provide your registration number, national Identity number, and legitimate email to receive an activation email. The system will also send you additional instructions to guide you through the entire process of preparing your account and later booking a hostel. Once completed with this process, log in to Moi University portal for booking hostels, otherwise contact the administrator to help you resolve your account issues.

While logged in, click on retain room or book a room. Follow the upcoming prompts to finish the entire exercise of booking a hostel. For most parts, it should be fast and easy. Once you are complete with the booking process, check your account inbox regularly for possible communication from the system administrator.

Additional services in the portal

Apart from Moi University hostel booking, there are several other services accessible through the website. Students can do one or more of the following in the varsity web.

Check their fee balance and financial statement for previous fiscal years

Check the history of payments made particularly for accommodation

Gain access to admission letter to the university

Access and download a copy of financial statement among other related services

It is advisable for you to place a reservation for a room ahead of the upcoming semester. Student portal at Moi University is committed to making sure you plan on securing a room before semester commencement. Visit www.moi university for more information.

Source: Moi University

READ ALSO: Egerton University Courses and Fee Structure: What You Need to Know

The procedure for fee payment

The Hostel booking system requires students to make prior fee payments before securing a room in the university. The varsity expects all students to make school fee and accommodation deposits using official deposit accounts provided. Payments should exhaust the account detail below;

All students are advised to indicate their registration name and number on the bank receipt when making cash deposits to the school account. After making payments, students should scan a copy of their deposit receipt to serve as proof of the amount. Payment made by the applicant must be equal to the charge rate for hostels chosen. Any wrongfully provided information will face charges as prescribed in the terms and conditions.

Privately sponsored students are obligated to deposit all their fees to the following understated Moi university bank accounts.

Source: Moi University

It is essential to note that students are not permitted to attend lecture before clearing their fees and any other possible arrears. Moi University is readily accessible on the internet and offers service faster. The system has helped to eradicate long queues at the hostel placement office on opening dates. Moi University campus hostel booking mostly favored students from Moi University environs. Students from remote locations often missed places in the varsity given long distances.

Moi university hostel booking portal is very much likely to enhance equity and fairness in hostel allocation process. The system is designed to make work easier while making sure students ready for studies. Moi university hostel booking log in is the landing page for this highly celebrated web.

The process of hostel placement is ongoing for continuing students. All students are required to make full fee deposits at any bank across the country.

Before initiating the booking process, it is recommended to clear the accommodation fee and obtain a receipt number. Access the portal and login to your account following the prompts accordingly and initiate the booking process. When required, enter the code of the receipt along with the amount of money deposited for hostel booking. Check your receipt for the number in case you forgot it. Proceed to select the hostel of your preference from the list provided before submitting the information.

It is vital to verify legibility of your gender when applying for hostels. Room label denoted the room of your choice. It is an excellent practice to counter-check the selection to avoid claiming a wrong hostel. Once the correct information is submitted, the system responds with a success message to alert the applicant that the information provided is ready for processing.

Students with an over-payment in their school fees may want to transfer their cash to cater for accommodation. The transfer is acceptable at Moi University and requires a student to present their claim to the administrator located in room 34 within the administration block at main campus.

It is reasonable to experience difficulties when trying to place hostel reservation. Some of the challenges facing students include financial issues, login issues, account validation, and application failure resulting from expired deadlines. If you experience one or more of this challenge, feel free to contact the portal administrator at +254 (0)53 43620 for prompt help.

Moi university hostel fee rates

Source: Moi University

A few challenges are facing Moi university hostel online booking system. A case in point is scanning and upload of payment receipt for various bank deposits as proof of the payment. Scanned copies are required to settle erroneous payments in case one arises.

Source: Magazine Reel

READ ALSO: Ranking of Kenyan Universities from the best to the worst

Moi University has progressively maintained a clean legacy when it comes to the academic and managerial system. As a pioneering Kenya higher learning institution, Moi university continues to excel in fulfilling its mission. Unleashing a smart hostel booking system for learners is a clear indication of the universitys capacity to deliver services up to its mandate, and ensuring that students settle easily in their hostel rooms and that they are in the perfect state of mind to receive quality education.

The new online-based hostel booking Moi university system came into being as a result of collaborative effort and functional relationship between the ICT and Hostel departments. Initially, students would manually present their school fees receipt together with their accommodation receipts on the opening day to the finance department and after verification directed to the respective hostel where they will be issued with the keys to their rooms. Due to the cumbersomeness of the process and the confusion associated with the manual procedure, the two principal departments, Hostels and ICT, liaised to develop what is now one of the most significant milestones the university prides. This recent system was launched in 2017 primarily to lower rampant cases of inconvenience and inefficiency. The university is set to unleash more related and powerful projects to eradicate paperwork and clear, imminent university cultural clogs. Finally, students who don not reside in the university premises are expected to comply with set rules governing the filling of Moi university non residential form.

Source: Tuko.co.keIt is the desire of every secondary school student to pursue a degree course in Kenya. But what happens when you don't reach the required cut-off grade? While this can be disheartening, you have another avenue for consideration  pursuing the most marketable diploma courses.

A stack of books, certificate and a graduation hat banner. Photo: @KUCCPS_Official

Source: Twitter

There are several diploma courses offered by higher education institutions in Kenya, which you can enrol in. However, not all of them are reliable, and you can end up wasting a lot of time and money with some. On the other hand, with the right course, you can gain in-demand skills to land a good job.

Most marketable diploma courses

Diploma courses are an excellent way for students who don't qualify for degree programs to venture into a lucrative career. Here is a list of some of the most marketable diploma courses in Kenya.

1. Diploma in Information Technology

This is one of the best diploma courses in Kenya. It is offered in several institutions, including:

KCA University

JKUAT

African Nazarene University

Mount Kenyan University

Zetech University

Kenyatta University

The course can equip you with a wide range of ICT, software, and technological skills. It is also a marketable course, given that the country is now in a digital era and the ICT industry is booming.

After graduating, you can land a job at a government office, private company/business, or NGO. You can also start your own IT business  offering ICT services and products.

2. Diploma in Human Resource Management

This is one of the top KUCCPS diploma courses offered in Kenya. It is available in several institutions such as:

Nairobi TTI

Thika TTI

Kisumu Polytechnic

Meru Polytechnic

Nyeri Polytechnic

Runyejes TVC

It is also offered by top universities and colleges (self-sponsored) such as:

University of Nairobi

Kenyatta University

Multimedia University

African Nazarene University

The course is highly marketable due to the rising number of private companies and businesses in the country. On top of that, more and more organizations realize the importance of human resource management in increasing productivity.

After completing the program, you can find a job at various private companies and businesses. Other opportunities include government offices and NGOs.

3. Diploma in Nursing

A group of nursing students in the lab. Photo:@Kmtc_official

Source: Twitter

If you are interested in a medical field, a Diploma in Nursing is a great course to consider. It is mainly offered at Kenya Medical Training Colleges around the country. In Kenya, there is a shortage of skills when it comes to nursing due to rising healthcare needs.

As a result, most hospitals, particularly government hospitals, are short-staffed and always looking for skilled employees. On top of government hospitals, you can land a job at a private hospital.

4. Diploma in Project Management and Evaluation

The Project Management program equips individuals with the skills needed to research, design, and execute projects. The course is offered at:

Kenya Institute of Management

JKUAT

Moi University

Kenyatta University

KCA University

Zetech University

Project management is a marketable career in Kenya, with skilled employees running various government and private sector projects. It is also lucrative, with starting salaries of about Ksh 50,000  90,000.

Most people who complete the course usually end up working for NGOs. However, there is also a high demand for private companies/businesses and government offices (primarily parastatals and county governments).

5. Diploma in Real Estate Management

A diploma in real estate management is an excellent option if you want to work in the real estate industry. Top institutions currently offering the course include the University of Nairobi, Pioneer University, and Gretsa University.

It is a highly marketable course due to the booming real estate industry in Kenya. After graduating, you can find a job at various real estate companies in the country. You can also become self-employed - and offer your services to individuals/companies looking to purchase, rent, or have their properties managed.

6. Diploma in Procurement and Supply Chain Management

Procurement and Supply Chain Management is one of the top diploma programs in the country. You can pursue the course at leading institutions such as KCA University, African Nazarene University, and Egerton University.

Procurement and supply chain is one of the fasted growing professions in the country. As a result, there is a high demand for skills in this field. Government departments and parastatals are usually the top employers. However, the profession is also in high demand in the private sector and by NGOs.

7. Diploma in Pharmaceutical Technology

A diploma in Pharmaceutical Technology is one of the top medical courses in the country. Top institutions offering the course include:

Mount Kenya University

Kenya Medical Training College

Kenya Methodist University

Nairobi Technical Training Institute

The program is one of Kenya's most marketable courses, with high salaries ranging from Ksh 75,000 to 100,000. There are also numerous job opportunities, such as private and government hospitals. You can also land a job at a pharmacy or even open your pharmacy.

8. Diploma in Mass Communication and Journalism

Mass communication and journalism students during a camera work course. Photo: @AEJMC_MCS

Source: Twitter

Do you want to work in the media industry? A Diploma in Mass Communication and Journalism is a perfect option. The course is available at top institutions such as:

KCA University

Maseno University

Gretsa University

Kenyatta University

Mount Kenya University

After completing the course, you can start a journalism career, one of the most marketable professions in the country. There are numerous opportunities, especially with the massive increase of TV stations following the switch from analogue to digital broadcasting.

Aside from TV, several radio stations and news publications hire journalists in the country. Furthermore, you can go into digital journalism  working at one of the digital publications or starting your online news platform.

9. Diploma in Sales and Marketing

Sales and Marketing is one of the most marketable diploma courses in Kenya. It is offered at several universities and colleges, including:

Nairobi Institute of Business Studies

Maseno University

Technical University of Mombasa

Sales and marketing are among the top careers in the country  no organization can survive without sales and marketing professionals. There is also a massive skill shortage in the country, with employers even hiring certificate holders and form four leavers.

With a diploma, you can land a lucrative position. The private sector (companies and businesses) is the best place to look for a job with a sales and marketing diploma.

10. Diploma in Quantity Surveying

Diploma in Quantity Surveying currently is one of the top programs in the country. You can find it at institutions such as the Nairobi Institute of Technology and other Technical and Vocational Education Training centres.

Completing the program opens up many opportunities, especially with the rising number of people building, buying, and sub-dividing land. You can land a job with a government agency, a private quantity surveying company or offer your services on a one-to-one basis to clients.

11. Diploma in Food & Beverage Production

A Diploma in Food and Beverage Production is an excellent course if your interests lie in the food and hospitality industry. The best institutions to pursue the course include Nairobi Institute of Business Studies and Thika Institute of Business Studies.

It is a marketable course with a thriving food and beverage industry that promises several job opportunities. After completing the course, you can land a job at a hotel, restaurant, bars, or any private or government organization operating food canteens. You can also start your food or hospitality business  hotel, and outside catering business.

12. Diploma in Electrical and Electronics Engineering

If you are interested in an engineering program, Diploma in Electrical and Electronics Engineering is a good choice. The course is offered by institutions such as:

Mount Kenya University

Machakos Training Institute

Nairobi Technical Training Institute

Muranga University of College

Diploma in Electrical and Electronic Engineering is one of the top engineering programs in the country. Graduates from the course are usually employed by leading companies such as Kenya Power and KenGen. You can also become self-employed, offering your services to individuals and companies in need of electrical services.

13. Diploma in Mechanical Engineering

A mechanical engineer working in space. Photo: @mechanical_engg

Source: Twitter

Mechanical engineering is another top diploma course in the engineering field. It is offered at the following colleges:

Muranga University College

Multimedia University

Machakos University

Technical University of Kenya

It is a great course to pursue due to the numerous job opportunities available. With the diploma, you can land a job at an automotive company, engineering companies, factories, and industrial plants. You can also start your own company geared towards repairing and maintain mechanical equipment and tools.

14. Post-graduate Diploma in Education

Post-graduate Diploma in Education is an excellent course if you wish to teach but have studied another degree course (not in the education field). It is offered at several colleges and universities such as:

KCA University

Mount Kenya University

African International University

Kenyatta University

The course is short-term (about one year) and is an excellent way of venturing into the teaching field instead of pursuing another three to a four-year program. After graduating, you can land a job at several educational institutions in the country  mainly primary, secondary, and early childhood education schools.

15. Diploma in Web and Graphic Design

Web and Graphic design are other top IT-related careers in Kenya. You can venture into the field by completing a Diploma in Web and Graphic design. Top institutions offering the program include Africa Digital Media Institute, Technical University of Mombasa, and Machakos Institute of Technology.

Graphic and web design is a lucrative career, with salaries ranging from Ksh. 60,000  200,000. Most of the graduates are self-employed  either on a freelance basis or outsourcing for various private companies, businesses, and government organizations.

The above are some of the most marketable diploma courses in Kenya, which can offer you a great start in your professional life. With these courses, you can be sure to land a great job or even start your own company. Whats more, with a diploma, you qualify for a degree program in your chosen or related field.

Tuko.co.ke compiled KUCCPS courses with codes to help potential students select their preferred programmes with ease. Using the list, students can minimise the chances of a wrongful placement.

KUCCPS courses are divided into degree, diploma, certificate, and artisan programmes. Each category has a special code and that is why confirmation is necessary to ensure you have selected the right course.

Source: Tuko.co.ke- The government has heightened the crackdown on illicit brew and drugs in Kiambu County

- Interior CS Matiang'i ordered the closure of all bars in the county as part of government measures to end the menace

- His order follows a similar one by governor Waititu after assenting to the Alcohol Control Bill

All bars in Kiambu County will remain closed as government intensified war on illicit liquor.

Interior Cabinet Secretary Fred Matiangi on Wednesday, March 21, ordered immediate closure of drinking joints as part of the ongoing crackdown on illicit brews and drugs.

Matiangi who visited Makwa village in Gatundu North constituency said the new directive will allow bar operators to apply for licences afresh from the county government.

He noted there were more bars and clubs in the county than both primary and secondary schools combined.

READ ALSO: Kiambu Governor orders all bars closed as new law takes effect

Chiefs destroy illicit liquor in Nairobi Eastleigh slums. Photo: The Star

READ ALSO: Kiambu man narrates how his wife beat him like a mburukenge and abandoned him and their four kids

"It is very sad to note that we have more bars and clubs in the county that both primary and secondary schools combined.Currently, the county has 777 primary and 369 secondary schools while it has 3,062 bars and clubs. This is unacceptable and must be checked, Matiangi was quoted by the Standard.

The cabinet secretary assured county government of his full commitment to fighting excessive drinking in the area.

We will support you. My team is firmly instructed to work with you. If there is a problem, we will solve it and move on. I urge you to however make sure you work with Kenya Bureau of Standard, Kenya Revenue Authority and National Authority for the Campaign Against Drug Abuse (NACADA), he said.

The order came after Kiambu Governor Ferdinand Waititu assented to a new law and demanded operators to apply for fresh licences.

READ ALSO: Mchimba kaburi akataa kutoka kaburini siku ya mazishi baada ya kukosa kulipwa

Police officers and locals destroy illicit brew during a past crackdown. Photo: Citizen TV

READ ALSO: Uhuru's crackdown on illicit brew successful, says legislator

The Kiambu County Alcoholic Drinks Control Act, 2017 seeks to regulate the manufacture, selling and consumption of alcohol in the Central Kenya region in a bid to reduce alcoholism that has plagued it for ages.

The law prohibits any person aged below 21 years from drinking alcohol or even gaining access to a bar.

"A person found by a police officer or an enforcement officer to be drunk and incapable or drunk and disorderly in or near a street, road, licensed premises, shop, hotel or other public place shall be arrested without warrant and brought without unreasonable delay before a Magistrate," a section of the law says.

As earlier reported by TUKO.co.ke, least 100 women pleaded with President Uhuru Kenyatta to save their marriages which they said were on the verge of collapse because their husbands are engaged in excessive drinking as.

READ ALSO: Used condoms and sanitary towels found in illicit brew in Meru

Police officers and locals destroy illicit brew during a past crackdown. Photo: The Star

The women from Kirangi and Kuri villages in Gatundu South held peaceful protests on Monday, March 5, over what they alleged was their husbands unproductive nature because of liquor.

The government in the past launched massive campaigns to end the menace in Central Kenya with impressive progress being made since president Kenyatta ascended to power in 2013.

Do you have a hot story or scandal you would like us to publish, please reach us through news@tuko.co.ke or WhatsApp: 0732482690 and Telegram: Tuko news.

Kenyan's defend disabled hawker arrested by police - on TUKO TV

Source: Tuko.co.ke- Sudan was pronounced dead on Monday, March 19, after suffering age related complications

- Doctors attending to him said his condition worsened and he was unable to stand up

- But as conservationists struggled to comfort him, one photographer managed to capture Sudan's last dying moments

- Sudan left behind a daughter and grand-daughter

The world woke up on Monday, March 19, to heartbreaking news that the last surviving male Northern White Rhino, Sudan had died at his Ol Pejeta Conservancy home.

But as wildlife conservationists struggled to come to terms with the untimely loss, one photographer managed to capture Sudan's last dying moments.

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READ ALSO: Kilichomla Wetangula katika Bunge la Seneti chafahamika, sio Raila Odinga

The touching images showed the 45-year-old rhino had part of her back covered in light pink cloth as keepers tried comfort him.

In another more emotional photo, a wildlife ranger is seen pressing his forehead affectionately on that of Sudan as another rubbed his ears as the curtain fell on one of the attractions of our generation.

A photographer managed to capture the last moment of Sudan. Photo: Ami Vitale/National Geographic

Doctors attending to him said he died of old-age related complications.

The vagaries of aging led to degenerative changes in muscles and bones which combined with extensive skin wounds.

READ ALSO: Last male Northern White Rhino, Sudan, is dead

A wildlife ranger had a memorablemoment with Sudan before he died. Photo: Ami Vitale/National Geographic

READ ALSO: Kenyan male Rhino joins dating site and Kenyans love it

His condition worsened significantly and he was unable to stand up even as keepers tried to make him comfortable.

Emotional photo of dying Sudan, Last male Northern White Rhino at Ol Pajeta conservancy. Photo: Ami Vitale/National Geographic

The veterinary team from the Dvur Kralove Zoo, Ol Pejeta and Kenya Wildlife Service made the decision to euthanize him.

READ ALSO: Looking for love! Kenya's last male northern white rhino, Sudan, joins dating application

Doctors attending to him managed to collect his genetic materials. Photo:Ami Vitale/National Geographic

We at Ol Pejeta are all saddened by Sudans death. He was a great ambassador for his species and will be remembered for the work he did to raise awareness globally of the plight facing not only rhinos but also the many thousands of other species facing extinction as a result of unsustainable human activity,"

"One day, his demise will hopefully be seen as a seminal moment for conservationists world wide, said Richard Vigne, Ol Pejetas CEO.

READ ALSO: What extinction looks like! Heartbreaking image shows world's last male northern white rhino

Sudan will be remembered for his unusually memorable life. Photo: Ami Vitale/National Geographic

In an effort to protect his species and find Sudan a mate, conservationists opened him an account on dating site Tinder with his complete profile.

The campaign which was launched on Tuesday April 25, was a partnership between Tinder and the Ol Pejeta Conservancy in Central Kenya to help raise KSh 90 million needed to protect the Northern White Rhino from extinction.

Sudan will be remembered for his unusually memorable life.

In the 1970s, he escaped extinction of his kind in the wild when he was moved to Dvur Kralove Zoo in the Czech Republic before coming to Kenya.

READ ALSO: Custom officials intercept over 100kg of rhino horns worth Ksh600 million smuggled from Kenya (photo)

Doctors attending to him managed to collect his genetic materials which they hope will enhance reproduction of the Northern White Rhinos through advanced cellular technology.

His death left only two of his kind on the planet, his daughter, Najin and grand-daughter, Fatu both of whom are surviving at Ol Pejeta.

Do you have a hot story or scandal you would like us to publish, please reach us through news@tuko.co.ke or WhatsApp: 0732482690 and Telegram: Tuko news.

Kenyan's defend disabled hawker arrested by police - on TUKO TV

Source: Tuko.co.ke- The government has heightened it's efforts to step up environmental conservation

- Officers from Kenya Defence Forces will plant three million trees in Kibiku and Ololua forests

- The announcement follows a government ban on tree harvesting for three months

Efforts to step up environmental conservation have gone a notch higher with Kenya Defence Forces (KDF) set to plant more than three million trees.

The trees which will be planted in Kibiku na Ololua forests are part of KDF's initiave to combat deforestation in the country.

The Ministry of Environment on Wednesday, March 21, welcomed the military officers' plan under the Environmental Soldier Program.

READ ALSO: Akothee's last born daughter declines lavish birthday party and expensive gifts as she turns 18

Environment Cabinet Secretary Keriako Tobiko graced the ceremony. Photo: KDF

The program has been undertaking key environmental conservation initiatives in various parts of the country.

The military personnel had earlier joined the world in marking International Day of Forests by planting over 4,000 tree seedlings at the Kibiku Forest in Ngong, Kajiado County.

The event was graced by Environment Cabinet Secretary Keriako Tobiko.

READ ALSO: Nairobi County lost KSh 21 billion under Kidero - new audit reveals

KDF planted over 4000 tree seedlings at the Kibiku Forest in Ngong, Kajiado County. Photo: KDF

READ ALSO: Kalonzo, Mudavadi, Wetangula should know Raila is not their equal - Johnson Sakaja

The announcement comes barely a month after the government banned countrywide tree harvesting following acute drought in the country.

The government on Saturday, February 24, banned logging in all public and community forests for the next three months.

Deputy President William Ruto said the move would allow reassessment and rationalisation of the entire forest sector in the country.

KDF has plans to plant over 3 million trees in the country. Photo: KDF

As reported by TUKO.co.ke, Ruto on Monday, March 5, launched a 10-member multi-sectoral taskforce that will review forestry management across the country.

Ruto emphasised the need to make sacrifices in order to recover forest cover.

But we want to make it absolutely clear that we are ready and willing to make tough sacrifices if the taskforce recommends tough measures to be taken to recover the lost forest areas, he said.

Recently, the government, through the Ministry of Environment announced plans to install CCTV cameras in all state-owned forests in efforts to tame logging.

READ ALSO: 17-Year-Old Kiambu boy whose hand was reattached at KNH in historic surgery detained over bill

The government has welcomed KDF initiative to battle deforestation. Photo: KDF

The plans were revealed by Permanent Secretary Charles Sunkuli in an interview with journalists at his Olesentu home in Narok County, on Sunday, March 18 2018.

''We want them to go high-tech in managing and conserving our forests with all the necessary equipment, he said.

''We hope that the CCTV cameras will provide useful information on a wide range of forest management issues, said Sunkuli.

The move came at a time when there were complaints that KFS was struggling with inadequate number of vehicles and surveillance equipment.

Do you have a hot story or scandal you would like us to publish? Please reach us through news@tuko.co.ke or WhatsApp: 0732482690 and Telegram: Tuko news

ALSO WATCH: Nairobi floods: Heavy rains rock Nairobi city (Kenya News) | on TUKO tv

Source: Tuko- Jubilee Party dropped a motion seeking to impeach Heath CS Sicily Kariuki

- Aden Duale said Jubilee Party MPs agreed to drop the motion after wide consultations

- The Majority Leader said they will resolve any issues that had emerged within the party

- The Motion was tabled in Parliament by Mandera North MP Bashir Abdullahi

- Abdullahi and other MPs wanted Kariuki sacked over suspension of KNH CEO Lily Koros

A Motion seeking to remove Health Cabinet Secretary Sicily Kariuki from office over the suspension of Kenyatta National Hospital (KNH) CEO Lily Koros was on Thursday, March 22, withdrawn.

TUKO.co.ke has learned the Motion's mover, Mandera North MP Bashir Abdullahi agreed to drop it after wide consultations with Jubilee Party's top leadership.

Send 'NEWS' to 40227 to receive all the important breaking news as it happens

READ ALSO: Kilichomla Wetangula katika Bunge la Seneti chafahamika, sio Raila Odinga

Health CS Sicily Kariuki survives the sack after Jubilee Party drops impeachment motion against her.Photo:Capital FM.

READ ALSO: It is pure rubbish - Aden Duale pours cold water on motion to impeach Health CS

While addressing the media on the new development, Majority Leader Aden Duale said Jubilee MPs had all agreed to resolve any issues that had been raised in the petition within the party.

The move to shelve the Motion comes a day after 170 MPs appended their signatures to it to commence the impeachment process.

READ ALSO: 170 MPs kick off process to oust Health CS Sicily Kariuki after she suspended Kenyatta National Hospital CEO

National Assembly Majority Leader Aden Duale disagrees with fellow MPs over motion to impeach Health CS Sicily Kariuki. Photo: The Star.

In the petition, the MPs argued Kariuki's decision to send Koros on compulsory leave was unlawful. They posited investigation should have been conducted before action.

Duale, however, sharply differed with the Jubilee MPs on the move to sack the Health CS.

In his view, the petition did not meet the required constitutional threshold.

Deputy President William Ruto had also opposed the move to impeach Kariuki.

Do you have a hot story or scandal you would like us to publish? Please reach us through news@tuko.co.ke or WhatsApp: 0732482690 and Telegram: Tuko news.

Uhuru Kenyatta and Raila Odinga - On Tuko TV

Source: Tuko NewspaperA mandate of the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine has been extended until March 31, 2019.

Ukrinform learnt this from the Permanent Mission of Ukraine to the International Organizations in Vienna.

"The OSCE SMMs mandate was extended until March 31, 2019. Ukraines delegation delivered an interpretive statement, noting that the SMM should have full and unhindered access to the entire territory of Ukraine, including Crimea and Sevastopol. All EU states, the U.S. and Canada supported this decision," the report reads.

Earlier, in February 2018, Principal Deputy Chief Monitor of the OSCE SMM to Ukraine Alexander Hug said that the OSCE SMM was determined to continue fulfilling its mandate and to promote the implementation of the Minsk agreements.

Since the beginning of the mission in 2014 its mandate had been extended several times on the basis of a consensus decision of all OSCE participating States.

ishISTIL Group owner Mohammad Zahoor has decided to sell Ukrainian English-language newspaper Kyiv Post to Odesa businessman and native of Syria Adnan Kivan.

According a report posted on the Kyiv Post's website, Zahoor said that Kivan would pay "much higher than" $3.5 million for the newspaper, but would not disclose the exact sales price.

Zahoor said he expects the sale to be finalized by April 1. He said that Kivan has already transferred a substantial down payment.

"To me, it's a done deal," Zahoor said.

Kivan could not be immediately reached.

Zahoor, a native of Pakistan and United Kingdom citizen who made his fortune in the steel industry, bought the Kyiv Post in 2009 from its original owner, American Jed Sunden, for $1.1 million.

The Kyiv Post is the first English-language newspaper in Ukraine. Sunden published the first edition of the Kyiv Post on October 18, 1995.

opThe economy of Ukraine has lost almost $100 billion as a result of the Russian occupation and annexation of Crimea in February-March 2014 and Russias military aggression in Donbas since April 2014.

Senior Fellow in the Eurasia Center at the Atlantic Council Anders Aslund said in his report.

"The simplest and broadest measure of the losses Ukraine has suffered is therefore to multiply the share of GDP that Ukraine lost by four. Donbas was the source of 10 percent of Ukraines GDP and Crimea 3.7 percent. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) assessed Ukraines GDP in the pre-crisis year of 2013 at $179.6 billion. Thus, the total asset value of Crimea and Donbas would amount to 13.7percent of $179.6 billion multiplied by four, or $98.4 billion. This roughly represents the value lost to Ukraine if it loses these territories forever," Aslund noted, using economist Thomas Pikettys methods for calculations.

The expert called the main material losses of Ukraine in Crimea. "Ukraines main material losses in Crimea are land, energy assets, banks with assets, enterprises, and housing. With the Russian annexation, Ukraine immediately lost all state property, which included Naftogaz holdings, infrastructure, buildings, land, and military assets," he said, adding that the biggest losses pertained to gas assets.

The economic and humanitarian situation in Donbas is awful and stands in sharp contrast to the situation in Crimea. First, the war in Donbas wrought substantial destruction from May to August 2014. Economic output declined by roughly two-thirds.

In this regard, it is difficult for Ukraine to reimburse losses caused by Russian aggression, despite the fact that Ukraine and Russia are battling in the legal arena, with cases before the Stockholm Arbitration Institute, the International Court of Arbitration in The Hague, the High Court of London, the ECHR in Strasbourg, the International Court of Justice.The comprehensive agenda will be presented at the annual international Ukraine Reform Conference in Copenhagen, and Kyiv hopes for an open dialogue with Western partners.

This was announced by Minister of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine Oleksandr Sayenko, who took part in discussion "Stability and Reforms in Ukraine" within the framework of the Ukrainian Week in Berlin, an Ukrinform correspondent reports.

"We prepare the reform agenda, we want to present concrete achievements and successes of Ukraine... There are problems and challenges, but we need a frank and mutually beneficial dialogue with the EU," Sayenko said.

He recalled that an open platform  Ukraine Reform Conference  was created in 2017. The first conference took place in London. The recent interim event was organized in Kyiv. On June 27, Copenhagen will host the next conference.

"We have deliberately created such a transparent instrument to hold an open, frank dialogue with the international partners, civil society and parliamentarians to avoid guesswork about the reforms in Ukraine," Sayenko said.

olIrish low-cost airline Ryanair launches routes from Kyiv and Lviv in October. If its activity is successful, the airline will open a representative office in Ukraine.

As Ukrinform learnt from a source close to the negotiation process, Ryanair will launch European routes from Kyiv and Lviv in October.

As noted, the new agreement gives the carrier the equal conditions to start to work at the Boryspil airport [the airline abandoned plans for Ukraine last year due to the failure of negotiations with the airport] and Ryanair will work in accordance with the new public offer.

"If the company works successfully, the opening of a representative office in Ukraine will be the next step," the source said.

olThe establishment of peace in Donbas and the restoration of Ukraines territorial integrity are among the main tasks of a new Federal Government of Germany in the international arena for the next four years.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel said this in a report in the Bundestag on Wednesday, an Ukrinform correspondent reported from Germany.

"The work on implementation of the Minsk agreements will be extended to ensure the restoration of Ukraine's sovereignty and to bring the relations with Russia to another level," the chancellor said.

She called the unlawful violation of internationally recognized borders by Russia as one of the great challenges of our time.

Merkel also stressed that the strength of Europe is in its unity.

ishThe Verkhovna Rada, Ukraine's parliament, has given its consent to the prosecution, detention and arrest of Ukrainian MP and former Russian captive Nadia Savchenko.

A total of 291 lawmakers voted for this decision on Thursday, Ukrinform reports.

A total of 277 MPs agreed to Savchenko's detention and 268 approved her arrest.

Earlier on Thursday, the Verkhovna Rada committee on rules of procedure and organization of work of parliament recognized as lawful, sufficient and substantiated all three motions from the Prosecutor General's Office against MP Savchenko regarding her prosecution, detention and arrest.

Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko said in parliament on March 15 that the investigation had irrefutable evidence that Savchenko personally plotted a terrorist attack in the Verkhovna Rada. On the same day, he sent a motion to parliament on the prosecution, detention and arrest of MP Savchenko.

opMinister for Europe and Foreign Affairs of France Jean-Yves Le Drian will make a working visit to Ukraine on March 22-23.

This is reported by the press service of the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry.

"On March 23, Foreign Minister of Ukraine Pavlo Klimkin will meet in Kyiv with Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs of France Jean-Yves Le Drian. The ministers will discuss bilateral cooperation between the two states, coordination of further efforts of Ukraine and France, including within the framework of the Normandy format to stop Russian aggression against Ukraine and to de-occupy Crimea and Donbas," the statement reads.

The parties will also discuss further activities to promote the release of hostages and political prisoners, who are illegally detained by the Kremlin and the Russian de facto authorities in Crimea and Donbas.

olPermanent Representative of Ukraine to the Council of Europe, Dmytro Kuleba, sat down with UNIAN to talk about the diplomatic war with Russia, unofficial talks in this regard on international platforms, effectiveness of foreign policy built on emotional bonds between nations, expected attempts by Russia to meddle in the election campaign in Ukraine, and the need for Ukraine to not use Venice Commission as an arbitrator so much.

Recently, the Venice Commission has approved recommendations to Ukraine to abolish the requirement for electronic declaration of assets for anti-corruption activists. What will happen if our parliament ignores the recommendations?

This will lead to international criticism of Ukraine's failure to comply with the recommendations of the Venice Commission. There are no legal instruments to force the parliament to act or somehow hold it responsible. But in any way, this is first of all about political responsibility. That is, the issue of our failure to comply with these recommendations will be voiced at every negotiation, heard in public statements, remaining on top international agenda. The Venice Commission enjoys a rather high authority. Besides, there is a general rule in Europe that, if the Venice Commission says something, this should be followed. In fact, in recent years, we have a very good experience of cooperation, so it would be great to remain on the list of diligent states and not drop in the overall rating.

However, in general, we need to restrain this practice of forwarding any issue for a review by the Venice Commission. It has turned into some kind of external arbitrator as it's from Ukraine that it constantly sees all kinds of issues being submitted. I believe that we need to learn to negotiate common and mutually acceptable rules of political life within the country.

By ignoring the VC recommendations on e-declaration of assets for anti-corruption activists, are we creating additional problems in Ukraine's relations with the western community - the European Union and the United States?

I don't think it will have any systemic impact on the general agenda of our relations with the European Union, key European capitals, and Washington. But, speaking a diplomatic language, the agenda of any conversation will see both positive and negative issues, and this question will be in the negative part. We'll constantly be reminded of that. But I don't believe that this single issue will take hostage all others in our dialogue and cooperation with our partners.

Let's talk about the Russia issue in Strasbourg. On March 16, a meeting of the ad-hoc committee, the working group was due to take place in Paris on the harmonization of the work of the PACE and the Council of Europe with Russia's participation. They were to discuss proposals for Russia's return to the Assembly ... How did the meeting go? Was there anything fundamentally important for us?

There's the same old song. The Russians are desperately gathering a coalition in their favor to have their delegation return. And, accordingly, we hold our ground along with our other partners, trying to halt these efforts. The situation generally remains at a standstill, it's 50/50. A sort of a diplomatic war, you know.

Here, again, it's about an emotional affiliation. Over the years of my diplomatic experience, I've noticed one important thing, and this is a well-known rule. Until something doesn't really influence you personally, you dont deal with this deeply. Once Britain saw a chemical attack carried out on its soil, its position has become tougher. This also applies to other countries that, for example, see cyberattacks launched in Russia or notice Moscow's propaganda influence. Once they do, they also immediately take a tougher stance on Russia.

But, surprisingly, some EU member states still believe that there is a need for a dialogue with Russia. As long as the rooster doesn't peck them on the head, as long as Russia is not a direct issue of concern to them, they maintain a loyal attitude and, in principle, act as Moscow's advocates. This is really sad. History should have taught us all that it is impossible to allow an aggressor to act without any restrictions.

Speaking of the latest news, I can report that PACE President Michele Nicoletti, who failed to be elected to the new Italian Parliament and was expected to leave his post in April, will remain on his post until June. There was about 10% probability that he would stick around, and it was this 10% that played its role. I have every reason to believe that the main purpose of his prolonged stay in office is to continue this process [it is Nicoletti who is a key figure in the PACE leadership responsible for the dialogue with the Russian Federation on the return of the Russian delegation to the Assembly]. That is, he does not want to give up on these efforts, seeking to retain control and move forward. Accordingly, the June session of the PACE will turn into a true Armageddon.

The head of the Council of Europe is in favor of lifting sanctions against the Russian delegation to the Assembly, the PACE President insisted on continuing the dialogue with the Russian parliament ... Do you think that, taking into account all these developments, the Council of Europe believes in a compromise with Russia and that Moscow will go for some concessions?

You know, there are two groups of countries and officials in the Council of Europe. The former occupies a romantic position, believing that after the presidential election, Russia will become softer and kinder. And the latter group is a pragmatic one, realizing that nothing will change. We also belong to the latter. Russia's behavior will only worsen, and this is the core of our position. So, yes, there is hope in the Council of Europe that Russia might go for some compromise. But we, Ukraine, believe more in the fact that Russia must be pushed toward compromise.

Russia goes for compromises only when it is being pushed from all sides, surrounded, and then, with their head up high, they "heroically" say: "Of course, we've always wanted to do what you're asking us." So we are working to create such a situation for Russia. We are not categorically opposed to Russia returning to the PACE. We say that Russia can return, but to this end, they need to comply with the requirements of the PACE resolution adopted in response to Russia's aggression against Ukraine. And if they return without implementing these resolutions, what kind of a precedent will this create? In this case, the Council of Europe will lose any levers on its member states.

Let's consider the worst option - Russia returning without implementing resolutions. In your opinion, should the Ukrainian delegation leave the PACE in this case?

Perhaps, it's the first time I'm going to say this... Last autumn we had a meeting in Kyiv on this subject, and this question was voiced then. I was the only one at the table who opposed the Ukrainian delegation leaving the Parliamentary Assembly in case of Russia's unconditional return. The key word here is "unconditional". But the current dynamics, that zeal and frank hypocrisy of Russia's supporters trying to have them back has had an impact on my point of view. If last autumn I was categorically against our withdrawal, now I don't rule this option.

I am aware that such discussions are ongoing within our parliamentary delegation. Moreover, I have already heard from some other member states that they also had such discussions. That is, if this Assembly becomes incapacitated, if it is incapable of influencing anything, if it falls on its knees before the most cynical violator of international law, democracy and human rights, why do we need such an Assembly?

This is a very dangerous process. Those who are now trying to desperately have Russia back, in essence, seek to solve one problem without thinking that they are creating a dozen of other problems. And this is a very dangerous thing not just for the Parliamentary Assembly, but for the Council of Europe in general and for the whole system of international relations in Europe.

Russia has many problems with the European Court of Human Rights. Can this be our trump card?

We definitely do use it as a trump card and we will continue to do so. The practice of the European Court of Human Rights as regards our relations with Russia as an occupier state is favorable to us. However, we harbor no illusions that when serious court rulings start emerging related to Crimea and Donbas greatly impacting Russia, they will simply refuse to comply with them.

But it's still very important that we have these rulings. That is, firstly, the law will be officially on our side. Secondly, court decisions have no time limits, therefore, sooner or later, the time when Russia is held responsible will inevitably come. And they are also perfectly aware of that. That is why they are now trying to attack the court from different sides. That is, in general, they question its legitimacy, as well as certain legal positions of the court and the possibility of application of its authority. All this is done for the future, to protect Russia from the legal responsibility that it will inevitably have to bear.

Vice-President of PACE, Volodymyr Ariev, announced on Facebook the decision of the PACE Bureau that the Assembly would draft a separate report and a resolution on "Racial Discrimination Against Crimean Tatars in Crimea by Russia". Could this resolution lead to new anti-Russian sanctions on the Crimean issue?

I would not expect the resolution itself to lead to further sanctions. But the situation with Crimea is generally a bit more complicated. A number of our partners don't want to deal with the Crimean problem on a daily basis. They believe that it is enough to confine themselves to the fact of not recognizing the annexation of Crimea and once a year confirm their position on the occasion of the anniversary of the annexation, and that's all. Of course, we're not OK with this. Therefore, it is crucial for us to continue this debate and adopt a resolution in order to keep the issue of Crimea on the international agenda. Because, if we hold on to our point, sooner or later it will come to concrete actions. And if there is no discussion, there will be no action.

And, believe me, the Russians are terribly annoyed over the fact that Crimea is still being discussed somewhere. They try to do everything they can to prevent this because for them, the best situation as regards Crimea is pure silence.

I'd like to quote you: "There are currently no conditions for the Baltic scenario be repeated for Crimea (a number of Western countries had not recognized the occupation of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania). There is every opportunity to create such combinations against Russia to stop the repression on the peninsula and move the issue of de-occupation forward." What opportunities and combinations were you talking about? After all, let's not forget that, for example, international observers still have no opportunity to even get to the peninsula...

Look, nobody believed that Ilmi Umerov and Akhtem Chiogoz would be released. Everyone said that it was impossible and that Putin would not let them go. But a diplomatic combination was found with the participation of President of Turkey, Mr. Erdogan, and Chiygoz and Umerov are free now.

You know, some of our partners who are quite friendly to us sometimes say: "We do not recognize the annexation, what else do you want from us?" But we need to acknowledge that when we show them what else can be done, they are ready to support certain steps. That is why it is Ukraine who has to moderate this process. That is why we are constantly coming up with initiatives, constantly offering something, looking into what we can be done.

The presence of international monitors in Crimea is a fundamentally important issue. But it will be a huge mistake if we get caught up solely on the issue of their access. We can't just sit here and wait until Russia allows the monitors to get there. We have to do something. First, we can and must monitor the situation remotely. Actually, other states and international organizations have found these niches. For example, the UN is monitoring the situation in Crimea remotely based on information they receive from the peninsula, including from human rights activists. Regular discussions are held in UNESCO and Human Rights Council in Geneva...

Secondly, we have to integrate the Crimea issue into the general agenda of relations with Russia. Conditionally speaking, here's some state presiding in the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe, and within the framework of its chairmanship, the meeting is held between this state's foreign minister and [Russian foreign minister Sergei] Lavrov. And at this meeting, the minister should raise issues of repression in Crimea, the issue of Ukrainian political prisoners in Crimea This should be like a "To Our Father" prayer. He has to be telling him that if you, Russians, need something from us, we will give it to you if you go for concessions on Crimea.

That's the kind of combinations I'm talking about. This is a normal diplomatic practice when one issue is linked to others. If it's only Ukraine who does this, then, of course, our efforts will have no sufficient effect, given the current nature of our relations with Russia. To put it in other words, we are at war so we need our partners so that we could do it together. Russia will go for concessions, it's not invulnerable after all. But if no one demands anything from Russia on Crimea, they won't do anything...

You previously reported that on February 26, a list of additional steps was submitted for the CoE consideration that the organization can do for Crimea. Is this about the combinations you've been talking about, or could you name something else?

Yes, it's about these combinations. Now this list is being considered by our partners. I have already discussed it with the Secretary-General of the Council of Europe and with several ambassadors, and I have other meetings scheduled. I won't disclose the whole list, because I don't want to violate any basic diplomatic rules, but I can name one more element. You probably know that from April 1, the new CoE Human Rights Commissioner, Dunja Mijatovich, steps in. We have certain hopes related to her appointment, so this list contains several steps directly regarding the future Commissioner. In particular, we will insist that the Commissioner present her assessment of the situation in Crimea as she has the mandate to do so.

Last year we adopted a decision unprecedented for the CoE Committee of Ministers, dedicated precisely to Crimea. That's when the Committee of Ministers clearly asked the Commissioner to submit such a report. Unfortunately, nothing has been done over this year, so we will insist that the new Commissioner will actually deal with the issue.

I hear the news that the Russian Commissioner for Human Rights, Tatyana Moskalkova, appealed to the UN, OSCE and CoE over Ukraine's blocking of voting in their presidential elections in diplomatic institutions. Later, she said that international organizations had not responded, "ignoring" her. Can this be considered our diplomatic victory?

Perhaps, as an Ambassador, I should be more diplomatic ... But even if international organizations react in some kind of a negative way to this decision of ours, we should treat such reaction philosophically. I believe that our actions are morally justified. The fact that Russia is now trying to set up a show out of it... They have staged their own "show" in Crimea, having held these fake elections. I think that, first of all, this is a diplomatic defeat for Russia. And this once again shows that the world is perfectly aware of cynicism of Moscow's actions.

My Russian colleagues, although they are very serious about Orthodox Christian faith there, have been breaching the rules set in the Bible. They believe that they can commit any crime, violate international law, human rights, but once someone else gets an inch beyond some procedural lines, they get hysterical and resort to accusations of all sorts right away. Recently, the British Defense Minister said a right thing: "Russia should go away and shut up." Specifically, when it comes to the Crimean issue, Russia should go away and shut up.

Should we hope that the illegal elections in Crimea, plus the fact of Russia's appeals being ignored by the international community, will somehow strengthen the negotiating position of the Ukrainian delegation?

Definitely so. See, it is fundamentally important that, four years after the annexation of Crimea, we still retain the Crimean issue on the international agenda. We do not allow Russia to ensure that the current status quo is recognized, if not de jure, at least de facto. And this is clearly a diplomatic victory for Ukraine.

I'd like to recall that, when Russia attacked Georgia in 2008, no sanctions were applied at all. And when the second Chechen war began, it was PACE who introduced sanctions for as "long" as six months. Today, Russia remains under sanctions for the fourth year in a row and, despite all their efforts to return to PACE, they just can't so far. The Crimea issue, which they constantly claim is "closed", remains open. And this is really due to Ukraine's efforts.

What are the moods today on the sidelines of the Council of Europe? As you say, they would prefer not to talk about Crimea and Donbas every day, but instead, would like to see a financial contribution from Russia...

I can't say that the support of Ukraine has weakened in the Council of Europe. It's just that the world isn't static, and other, more urgent problems start emerging. In fact, I am extremely grateful to a number of states that support us. And it's not only because they like Ukraine, but also because they understand that we are on the right side of history. We are trying to protect international law, democracy and human rights, and they share these values.

I would describe the general mood in the Council of Europe as fatigue from the confrontation with Russia. Russia is constantly creating problems requiring a certain reaction, and governments in a number of countries are not ready to react rigorously. But one needs to be more resolute in order to strike a response. It could be a diplomatic blow, but it should be precisely a blow. Russia respects force and it doesn't respect the weak.

The talk has been spinning that Russia will be meddling in our upcoming elections. I'd like to quote your comment on this: "Russia only has as much as two scenarios: either to bring people loyal to them to power [in Ukraine] or destroy our country. We can hinder both scenarios by means of three elements: strengthening the army, the strengthening state institutions, and strengthening social unity." You called social unity as a key factor. What do we have to do to strengthen social unity?

In the next two years, the communication front will remain the key one. That's because the first tactical goal, as you quoted me, is the election. Accordingly, now in the Ukrainian information space, we'll see total obscurantism, and even more oil will be added to this hellfire. Some will do this out of sincere reasons, because of their beliefs, but, to a large extent, it will be Russia who will be doing it through various channels. Therefore, I have emphasized social unity, because if there is none, you can neither build normal state institutions nor a normal army nor elect authorities.

Unfortunately, we are entering this period in a frankly weak position, because in recent years Ukraine has seen public consciousness being burdened by negative connotations. We perceive everything through terribly negative lenses as if everything is "in tatters". All of this is first of all the result of information influence on individuals. When the television and social networks bomb people every day with constant "negativity", people begin to perceive the world precisely this way. We live in a world where any reality can be easily constructed. Unfortunately, in recent years, the reality of an apocalypse has been constructed in Ukraine, which absolutely does not correspond to an actual reality. The reality is much better than the constructed one, so we have to do something about it. For Russia, on the contrary, this situation is beneficial. And they will try to work further toward making frustration and anger of Ukrainians intensify.

There is no universal recipe for how this could be stopped. Perhaps this sounds very naive, but there is one thing that everyone should realize. The authorities, opposition, civil sector, and media must realize it's the state that's at stake. Everyone needs to come to their senses just to save the state so that we had a place where we could continue our desperate struggle for everything good against everything evil.

At the last week's Paris Book Fair, Irena Karpa managed to convey to President Emmanuel Macron a book by Oleh Sentsov. Do you think this was of any diplomatic significance? What do you think in general about the potential of cultural diplomacy as an instrument for defending our interests in European structures?

I can't give an objective comment here because I have long been an advocate of cultural diplomacy. While working in Kyiv in 2014-2016, I believe I "raped" everyone in intellectual terms, promoting the need to develop cultural diplomacy and launch this process on a full scale.

We live in a world where emotional bonds become stronger than factual ones. And Ukraine should leave its mark in relations with our partners. Conceptually speaking, every capital city asks itself: "Why do we need this country?" There are security considerations, economic considerations, but there also are cultural considerations. And historically it has been proved that the strongest bond is established through the tools of culture. They cause empathy, real understanding, and they can become a base for building relationships. Take Russia, for example. If you come to France and ask what Russia is to the French, they will remember culture, Russian literature, composers There's this emotional connection, which then has an influence on politics.

But don't they name Putin?

Putin is a temporary phenomenon. He is now the leader of the Russian state. But Russia as a whole, as a country, will be associated in France, first of all, with cultural emotional factors.

The fact that over the 20 years of independence, Ukraine had not systemically and civilizationally engaged in the development of cultural diplomacy, was either a deliberate crime or a crime of negligence. You can't build an effective policy without having a strong emotional bond between countries and nations. And it's culture that creates these bonds.

I can state one example. Three weeks ago, there was a concert by [a Ukrainian band] Dakh Daughters in Strasbourg. The venue was full, and at the end of the show, the locals gave them a standing applause. And the girls from the band, having played the entire show in the classical cultural format, eventually raised the Ukrainian flag and shouted: "Glory to Ukraine!" With this single act, they actually did a great job, greater than I, as an Ambassador, would have done attending various events and saying "Glory to Ukraine!" Same is with the case where Irena [Karpa] was able to give Sentsov's book to Macron  this is just awesome. In such a short dialogue, you can achieve a much closer emotional bond than as a result of dozens of diplomatic meetings or distribution of documents.

On your Facebook page, you recently wrote about your visit to the Strasbourg library and turned to your friends for advice on which book you should contribute to the library fund. Have you already made up your mind?

I have collected all the comments that there were out there. Now there is someone in Kyiv who is gathering the books according to a list at my request. I think that by the end of the next week, they will be in Strasbourg and we will give them to the library. See, even Russia has a special program, where they give out grants to libraries across Europe to buy books in Russia. This is a systemic cultural diplomacy pursued for years...

We are now taking our first step in this regard, handing over our books to the Library of Strasbourg. However, we want to go further and set up contacts between this library and one of the leading Ukrainian libraries so that they could work professionally together. This will also contribute to cultural diplomacy. As for books, I personally prefer ones that explain modern Ukraine. I am a real history fan, but it is now very important to explain to our partners, friends and those who have not yet become our friends the processes Ukraine is undergoing today.

Can you name a few books that will be part of this gift?

I am really looking forward to seeing two of them, and also a series of books. The first one has been published by Arthuss, titled "25 Years of Presence  Contemporary Ukrainian Artists". That's an edition in English, a really cool project. They have collected interviews with and works by major Ukrainian artists who have been working for the past 25 years. This is a real cut of the Ukrainian cultural contribution to the world of art for the past quarter of a century. Another book is a product of Osnovy Publishing House, titled "Decommunized: Ukrainian Soviet Mosaics", also in English. The project stands at the junction of politics and art, showing how Ukraine has been transforming.

The third one is a collection of books by a historical project "Likbez". And although, as I said, I emphasize the present, I want to convey to the French the book with an unbiased look at the history of Ukraine.

The Foreign Ministry recently said people could apply for the post of the head of the "Ukrainian Institute", the heart of our cultural diplomacy, an institution that should engage in a comprehensive presentation of Ukraine worldwide. Do you have your own vision of who should hold this post?

I know a couple of people I would like to see head this institution. However, due to different circumstances, they will not even take part in the competition. But I rejoice over the two things. Firstly, a generation of cultural managers has been raised in Ukraine, among whom we can actually choose, who are able to compete for such a position. This is a very responsible area because you are becoming, in fact, a leader of cultural diplomacy, getting into the spotlight, with everyone starting criticizing you (because you move from the non-state sector to the category of authorities, which everyone likes to criticize).

Secondly, I spoke with Minister Pavlo Klimkin on this subject, as well as with my colleagues directly involved in the competition. I can assure you that the vision of both the minister personally and the whole ministerial team is very clear - to create an effective institution without any micro-management from above or any political influence. I think that at the junction of these factors, a strong figure could be selected. But in the end, we will need to rejoice over the first year of the new head's work rather than the very fact of their selection. That's when we'll have clearly understood the parameters of their work and they will have achieved certain results.

I would also like to discuss a bit the CoE's Action Plan for Ukraine for 2018-2021. The reports concerning this Plan tell us about an ambitious goal of implementing the best European standards in the field of human rights, rule of law, and democracy in Ukraine. This sounds great, but how shall we translate it into Ukrainian realities? I find it hard to imagine that some resolution can stop members of any radical group from trying to bully national minorities...

You know, the Action Plan is like Google Maps. You can make a route from point A to point B, and this application will show you the best option, but it does not guarantee that you will reach your destination exactly according to the parameters you've initially set. The same is with the Action Plan. In reality, Ukraine now has a very high demand for this Plan, and, in principle, there is a political will to work on it.

Now that you've mentioned radicalism, let me explain this to you with the following example. Here is a particular problem - nationalist groups that do not like national minorities (which, unfortunately, is the case for every European state). What do we need to do? We need the police not to turn a blind eye to these crimes, and to this end, the Action Plan provides for the assistance to police to strengthen their institutional capacity. Or, theoretically, we will need to update our legislation, and experts from the Council of Europe will help us draft it. Of course, we need the court to punish the offenders. To this end, our judicial reform is being supported. And to prevent these things from happening, we need an information campaign telling people that migrants are a good thing and national minorities are great because they enrich society. All these things can be done within the framework of the toolkit provided to us by the Action Plan. How much we will do and how effective we are will only depend on us.

Recently, there have emerged more reports about young radicals who interfere in various rallies. Has it ever stricken you that perhaps Ukraine in general, not a Facebook community in Kyiv, is just not yet ready for European values?

I don't know of any European society that can come out today and responsibly say: "We are 100% Europeans, we are all perfect." Perhaps this sounds weird, because when our people travel to the EU, they see order, wealth, and that everything is fine there. But if you dig at least a centimeter deeper into every society, there are some unpleasant things there, too. Being European, let's put it this way, is not a final destination but rather a continuous process, while Ukraine today is definitely in motion. However, the rise of the rightwing ideology in Ukraine, unfortunately, absolutely corresponds to the general trends across Europe. Therefore, there is nothing surprising here.

When I see these reports, they are upsetting me. The last thing we have to spill out our negative energy on today is national minorities. It's just a waste of resources. We have an external aggressor, so, please, everyone willing to fight is welcome to go fight off the external aggressor. We have internal aggressors, too, in the form of corrupt officials and adepts of the old ideology  they should be fought, too, but certainly not liberalism or diversity.

By the way, the problem with national minorities can have very dramatic consequences for us. There is a known trend of westward labor migration of Ukrainians, and everyone is crying about how we could stop it. But "going West" is a natural process, and you can't stop those who have made up their minds. In fact, we shouldn't brainstorm over how to stop migration, we should rather think about who will come to replace our migrants and where we will take labor force. If we keep being so radical about migrants and national minorities, then nobody will come here, we will have no sources to revitalize our job market, and the efficiency of society and the country as a whole will fall sharply.

On Ukraine's initiative, the Action Plan for the first time clearly states that it should contribute to the achievement of the objectives of the Ukraine-EU Association Agreement. Do you believe that the official Kyiv will work on its mistakes and not spoil the whole thing?

I, as our country's official representative in Strasbourg, assure you that we will not spoil anything. As far as I know, a non-paper on Ukraine was presented at the Council of EU Foreign Ministers in Brussels, on the EU policy toward Ukraine. And it is very well stated there that there are no simple decisions or ways, and that now it is necessary to protect Ukraine from the threat of internal populism, that's when some will be shouting "nothing has changed since 2014", "this is the end, shame to all of you, and get out!" Even our European partners realize it.

There have been plenty of changes, but even more changes are still needed. They can only be done if we realize that we are on the right path. If we start to make a U-turn again, suggesting that the path is wrong and that we have to do everything differently, we will go for yet another circle. Of course, somewhere there will be problems and somewhere the pace will be too slow, but somewhere it will be faster. But in general, this will be our movement in the right direction. That is why we wanted to link the Action Plan to the Ukraine-EU Association Agreement, so that all efforts  both external and internal - were made precisely to this end.

To say that "everything is in tatters" is the easiest thing to do. It's much more difficult to fix problems every day, so that "nothing is in tatters" and so that we could move forward. I am really grateful to those people in power, opposition, civil society, and the media who are set to move forward.

Iryna Shevchenko

Translated by Yevgeny Matyushenko

If you see a spelling error on our site, select it and press Ctrl+EnterThe Rada has already failed to vote for the bill seven times.

People's deputies on Wednesday refused to simplify the adoption of Ukrainian children by foreigners, failing to pass the bill on Ukraine's accession to the Convention on the Protection of Children and Cooperation in Respect of Intercountry Adoption.

The draft law saw only 166 votes in support of the required 226, according to Ukrayinska Pravda.

Passing the bill would have ensured that intercountry adoption was in the best interests of the child and carried out with full respect for their rights.

Read alsoJ.K. Rowling's Lumos to help Ukraine transform orphans care system in ZhytomyrThe document adopted in The Hague in 1993 stipulates that, if a foreigner seeks to adopt a child from another country, they first submit all paperwork to their home country's authorities. If they pass the vetting, their documents are forwarded to the country where they seek to adopt the child.

Agreements can even be reached that after a foreigner brings the adopted child to their country, there will be an opportunity to check for a certain period, whether the interests of the child in the foster family will not be taken into account, and if they are not - to remove the child and return them home.

It is also said that in the process of adoption, the competent authorities of the participating states shall act quickly. More than 100 states are parties to the Convention, including all EU member states.

The Rada has already failed to vote for the mentioned bill seven times.

According to 112 Ukraine TV Channel, during the latest vote, some deputies expressed concerns about the Convention, claiming that same-sex couples will be among those willing to adopt Ukrainian children, while accredited organizations might abuse their powers to traffick children in child slavery schemes.

Read alsoOrphans and adoption: Ukrainian deadlockAt the same time, representatives of the Rada's Foreign Affairs Committee and the Ministry of Justice said that the Convention gives priority to the legislation of the participating country and that adoption by same-sex couples is impossible.

They also read out the norms of the Convention stating Ukraine would be able to receive information about an adopted child and control the situation, while accredited organizations could only be non-profit ones. The arguments seems to have not convinced MPs, and the Parliament rejected the bill.

Now, according to the Family Code, the citizens of Ukraine have the priority right to adopt a child.

There are more than 106,000 living in orphanages across Ukraine, while only 8% of them can be adopted. Others formally have parents or guardians.The diplomat says that as long as the Fidesz party leader Victor Orban's government is in power in Budapest, Kyiv will still have to work with them.

Deputy Foreign Minister for European Integration Olena Zerkal believes Hungary is guided by the imperial mindset of the divided Austro-Hungarian Empire in its policy toward Ukraine.

Speaking on Pryamiy TV Channel, the diplomat said that Budapest's position on Ukraine depends not only on the internal parliamentary elections set to be held in April but also on their relations with Brussels.

"This is not just about elections, not just Ukraine, it's their relations with the European Union. It is also about migration policy issues. Even in the United Nations, they have now taken a position that is quite different from that of the EU on the development of a framework document on migration. Ukraine had nothing to do with it in this case. This is just the way they are now positioning themselves, and you can't do anything about it. As long as Orban's government is in power, we must work with what we have," Zerkal said.

Read alsoHungarian Foreign Minister: Hungary would return to support of Ukraine if Education Act amendedShe added that in her personal opinion, "Hungarians have already become a headache for the EU, but it's usually the Poles that give them headache, and this is frustrating to them" because these are the new countries that are supposed to follow the fundamental principles of the rule of law, but everything just does not go as planned.

At the same time, she noted that one of the reasons for Hungary's current stance toward Ukraine is the Trianon Agreements of 1920, which further divided the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

"But they retain an imperial mindset," Zerkal said.

Read alsoUkrainian MFA: Deployment of troops to Zakarpattia is Ukraine's sovereign matterAt the same time, the diplomat claims Hungary also has claims to Romania and Slovakia.

"And it's even worse with Slovakia: they insist that they also need an autonomy there and exclusively Hungarian language of instruction at schools," said Zerkal.

The deputy minister also believes that it is necessary to successfully complete a decentralization reform in Zakarpattia so that local communities can be united and take on the functions of self-government.

In her conviction, once decentralization is complete, "the Hungarian community alone won't be able to do everything separately". "They will need to communicate with the Ukrainians, and this will create another socium. They should be integrated into other communities, and this will once again remove all tension," said Zerkal.

Read alsoOrban's game pulls Hungary closer to Russia - mediaAs UNIAN reported earlier, on March 19, Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto said that his country demanded from Ukraine to amend the law on education and postpone its implementation until 2023. Otherwise, Szijjarto said Hungary would block Ukraine's efforts toward EU and NATO integration. Also, the minister voiced his opposition to the possible deployment of an up to 1,000-strong battalion of Ukrainian soldiers in Zakarpattia.Savchenko personally addressed such an offer to a number of officers from different units of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko has said Ukrainian MP Nadiia Savchenko appealed to the officers of the Armed Forces of Ukraine with a request to prepare terrorist attacks against the country's top leadership.

"In the summer and autumn of 2017, [Head of the Ukrainian "Officer Corps" prisoner exchange center Volodymyr] Ruban and MP Savchenko were in search of accomplices and executors of a terrorist act. Savchenko personally addressed such an offer to a number of officers from different units of the Armed Forces of Ukraine," Lutsenko told a Thursday meeting of the Parliament's regulatory committee, where the issue of bringing Savchenko to criminal responsibility is being discussed, 112 Ukraine reports.

Read alsoChief prosecutor says Savchenko plotted terrorist attack on parliament"In the summer of 2017, MP Savchenko appealed to the officers of the 8th Special Operations Regiment of the Armed Forces of Ukraine deployed in Kharkiv, who were in the ATO zone at the time of contact with the people's deputy. Several officers received personally from Savchenko an offer to commit terrorist acts in order to assassinate Ukraine's top leadership, seize administrative buildings, cause chaos, overthrow constitutional order, and seize power," he said.

As UNIAN reported earlier, Savchenko was on March 15 expelled from the parliament's national security and defense committee. On the same day, Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko tabled in parliament a motion for the criminal prosecution, detention, and arrest of MP Savchenko. Lutsenko also filed a 174-page report substantiating the request. He said that investigators had "irrefutable evidence" that Savchenko had plotted acts of terror in the parliamentary hall. The Ukrainian parliament is considering Lutsenko's motion today, on March 22.The statement came during a Thursday meeting of the Parliamentary Regulations Committee where the deputies consider the issue of allowing prosecutors to bring MP Nadiia Savchenko to criminal responsibility.

The Russian Federation provided weapons to be used in terrorist attacks against Ukraine's top leadership, Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko said.

"We have facts that prove participation of the Russian Federation, as an enemy of the Ukrainian state, in providing weapons to persons who plotted and were preparing to commit a terrorist act against the top leadership of the state and civilians in the capital city with the aim of overthrowing the constitutional order," he said, according to 112 Ukraine.

The statement came during a Thursday meeting of the Parliamentary Regulations Committee where the deputies considered the issue of allowing prosecutors to bring MP Nadiia Savchenko to criminal responsibility.

Read alsoPGO: Savchenko appealed to Ukrainian military to "prepare terrorist acts"As UNIAN reported earlier, Yuriy Lutsenko said Ukrainian MP Nadiia Savchenko had appealed to the officers of the Armed Forces of Ukraine with a request to prepare terrorist attacks against the country's top leadership.

Savchenko was on March 15 expelled from the parliament's national security and defense committee. On the same day, Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko tabled in parliament a motion for the criminal prosecution, detention, and arrest of MP Savchenko.

Read alsoSecurity measures upped in Ukraine's parliamentThe prosecutor general said that investigators had "irrefutable evidence" that Savchenko had plotted acts of terror in the parliamentary hall.The decision is unanimous.

On Thursday, March 22, the Rada's Regulatory Committee considered three motions submitted by Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko on bringing MP Nadiia Savchenko to criminal responsibility, detaining and arresting her as a suspect in a terrorism case.

The Committee first supported Lutsenko's motion to strip Savchenko of parliamentary immunity and then unanimously voted for her detention and arrest.

Following the Committee vote, the Verkhovna Rada is yet to endorse the PGO motion.

As UNIAN reported earlier, Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko said Ukrainian MP Nadiia Savchenko had appealed to the officers of the Armed Forces of Ukraine with a request to prepare terrorist attacks against the country's top leadership.Kholodnytsky says he does not intend to act as some wish he does.

Chief of Ukraine's Specialized Anti-corruption Prosecutor's Office (SAPO), Nazar Kholodnytsky, says a "balanced media campaign" was set up around the issue of his possible resignation.

He noted that he followed all developments on the internet.

"First, I saw that I was going to resign, then I was going on vacation by Easter and until late May I am now on a visit to Brussels. SAPO and NABU [the National Anti-corruption Bureau of Ukraine] are working together," Kholodnytsky told journalists in Brussels, answering the question from an UNIAN correspondent.

Read alsoUkraine's top anti-graft prosecutor mulling step-down  mediaHe admitted that he could be a headache to many. "But if it is so, then I'm doing something right. Forcing me to do something, like resign or else? They wish!"

As UNIAN reported earlier, on March 20 Ukrainian media reported on Kholodnytsky's alleged intentions to resign.

Read alsoTop anti-graft prosecutor confirms "bug" found in his officeLater, it was reported the National Anti-corruption Bureau had allegedly covertly recorded conversations at the SAPO chief's office."We need chaos. Chaos must be controlled," Ruban told Savchenko.

People's Deputy Nadiia Savchenko in a conversation with the former hostage swap negotiator, Volodymyr Ruban, proposed to carry out a coup in Ukraine to eliminate the country's leadership. Candid camera footage shot by the SBU within the probe showing the conversation was presented at the Verkhovna Rada session hall ahead of the vote to strip Savchenko of parliamentary immunity and allow her arrest, TSN reports.

"I propose a coup. That's because they have to be removed physically - all at once." This is the way. On one day, only inside [the Rada]. It can also be a couple of days, but a single date can be most successful. We'll have to wait for this day for about a year. Then we have to make them run. So I'm less interested in the government quarter, I'm more interested in their homes. I believe they'll start running when they have nowhere to return. Your further task is to maintain order... We have to make sure that chaos does not ensue," Savchenko said.

"In any case, if we fail to do this project now, by any means possible, then we shouldn't live at all..." the former Kremlin's prisoner-turned MP added.

Read alsoChief prosecutor says Savchenko plotted terrorist attack on parliamentVolodymyr Ruban is heard on a video responding to Savchenko that there is no need to be afraid of chaos.

"We need chaos. Chaos must be controlled," he said.

As UNIAN reported earlier, Savchenko was on March 15 expelled from the parliament's national security and defense committee. On the same day, Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko tabled in parliament a motion for the criminal prosecution, detention, and arrest of MP Savchenko.

Read alsoUkraine parliament committee greenlights putting motion on MP Savchenko's arrest to Rada voteLutsenko also filed a 174-page report substantiating the request. He said that investigators had "irrefutable evidence" that Savchenko had plotted acts of terror in the parliamentary hall.

On Thursday, March 22, in the Verkhovna Rada Regulations Committee unanimously supported all three motions submitted by the Prosecutor General and recommended that the Rada allow Savchenko's arrest.The meeting of the Ukrainian and French ministers will be held on March 23.

Ministers for Foreign Affairs of Ukraine and France, Pavlo Klimkin and Jean-Yves Le Drian, will discuss in Kyiv coordination of joint efforts within the Normandy Four.

The Minister of Europe and Foreign Affairs of France will be on a working visit to Ukraine on March 22-23, according to the Ukrainian foreign ministry's website.

Ukrainian and French ministers will meet March 23.

Read alsoThird party activity aimed at promoting Kremlin's "agenda" must be discouraged - Klimkin"The agenda of talks will include bilateral cooperation between the two countries, coordination of further efforts by Ukraine and France, including within the Normandy format, aimed at putting an end to Russian aggression against Ukraine and to de-occupying Crimea and Donbas," the report says.

"The parties will also discuss the need to continue their work on the release of hostages and political prisoners illegally held by the Kremlin and the Russian occupation administration in Crimea and Donbas," the ministry said.Investigators say they have "irrefutable evidence" confirming that the people's deputy personally planned and gave instructions for committing a terrorist attack in the Rada session hall.

The Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine gave consent to the lifting of parliamentary immunity, detention, and arrest of a non-faction People's Deputy Nadiia Savchenko.

As UNIAN reported earlier, Savchenko was on March 15 expelled from the parliament's national security and defense committee. On the same day, Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko tabled in parliament a motion for the criminal prosecution, detention, and arrest of MP Savchenko.

Read alsoRussia provided weapons for terrorist attacks against Ukraine's top leadership  Prosecutor GeneralLutsenko also filed a 174-page report substantiating the request. He said that investigators had "irrefutable evidence" that Savchenko had plotted acts of terror in the parliamentary hall.

Ahead of the decisive vote on March 22, the SBU's footage shot on candid camera within the criminal probe showed Nadiia Savchenko proposing a former hostage swap negotiator, Volodymyr Ruban, to carry out a coup in Ukraine to eliminate the country's leadership.Turchynov served as acting president of Ukraine from February 23 to June 7, 2014.

The so-called leader of the self-proclaimed "Donetsk People's Republic" ("DPR"), Alexander Zakharchenko, reportedly asked alleged coup plotters Ukrainian MP Nadiia Savchenko and Volodymyr Ruban, the former hostage swap negotiator, to "give him" Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council Oleksandr Turchynov following the overthrow of government in Kyiv.

"One more thing... They [pro-Russian militants] ask me to give them Turchynov. I told them: it would be simpler for us to deal with him. It was Zakharchenko's personal request, for the war in Donbas and everything else, for his orders..." Savchenko said in a conversation with one of the witnesses secretly recorded by the SBU Security Service, according to the Prosecutor General's Office, LB.ua reports.

Read alsoSavchenko to Ruban discussing terror plot: "I propose a coup. They need to be removed physically - all at once"The footage with said recordings was made public on Thursday ahead of the Verkhovna Rada vote to strip Nadiia Savchenko of parliamentary immunity and arrest her.

Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council (NSDC) of Ukraine, Oleksandr Turchynov, served as acting president of Ukraine from February 23 to June 7, 2014.Parliament has called on the international community to apply additional sanctions against Russia and personal restrictions against those involved in setting up polls.

Ukraine's parliament, the Verkhovna Rada, has adopted a resolution approving a statement confirming non-recognition of legitimacy of Russian presidential elections in the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine  Crimea and Sevastopol.

The Verkhovna Rada has called on the international community to apply additional sanctions against the Russian Federation and personal restrictions against those involved in organizing and conducting illegal voting in the presidential elections in the temporarily occupied Crimea and Sevastopol, as well as those involved in systemic violations of fundamental human rights and freedoms in the temporarily occupied territory of Ukraine, an UNIAN correspondent reports.

The statement says setting up presidential elections in Crimea by the Russian occupation administration was an illegal act.

Read alsoUkraine's Permanent Envoy to CoE Dmytro Kuleba: "Surprisingly, some EU member states still believe dialogue is needed with Russia""The outcome of this illegal vote is void and has no legal consequences. It can neither testify nor in any way be used as evidence of any change in the status of the temporarily occupied territories of Ukraine  the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol, as defined by the Constitution and laws of Ukraine," the statement says.

It is also reported that significant restrictions on the electoral rights of citizens during the electoral process, unequal conditions for candidates and the lack of real choice, as indicated in the preliminary conclusions of the OSCE ODIHR, and the illegal counting of over one million votes from temporarily occupied Crimea and Sevastopol significantly distort the results of the Russian presidential elections in general, thus questioning their legitimacy.The lawyers plan to file the objection on Friday, March 23.

Member of Parliament Nadiia Savchenko, who was detained on March 22, will stay at the SBU Security Service's building overnight; her lawyer Viktor Chevguz says the detention was unlawful.

"It should be noted that the detention of Savchenko was illegal because Clause 1 of Article 208 foresees that a person shall be detained if he or she was caught at the crime scene or immediately after crime. All of you know she was detained in the Verkhovna Rada's building and she had committed no crime there or after. Therefore, of course, my colleague and I immediately wrote that the detention was unlawful," the lawyer told journalists near the Kyiv-based SBU building, where Savchenko was interrogated on that day.

Read alsoRada strips MP Savchenko of parliamentary immunity, allows arrest

The defense will file objections to an arrest warrant. "They gave us 240 pages of materials attached to the warrant. We'll work with my colleague all night to file the objections tomorrow," Chevguz said.

The other lawyer, Dmytro Buhai, said that Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko handed the indictment over to Savchenko in person at about 14.30 Kyiv time on March 20. Asked how Savchenko felt at that moment, Buhai replied: "She keeps cool."

According to him, Savchenko will spend the night in the premises of the Security Service, where she was interrogated.

As UNIAN reported, the Verkhovna Rada on March 22 gave the greenlight to Savchenko's arrest. Savchenko is charged with committing a crime under Part 1 of Article 109 (actions aimed at the forcible change or overthrow of the constitutional order or seizure of state power); Part 1 of Article 14 (preparations for a crime), Part 2 of Article 28 (committing a crime by a group of persons, a group of persons by prior agreement, an organized group or a criminal organization), Article 112 (an attempted attack on the life of a public figure), Part 3 of Article 258 (an act of terror); Part 1 of Article 258-3 (creation of a terrorist group or organization) and Part 1 of Article 263 (illegal possession of weapons, ammunition or explosives) of the Criminal Code of Ukraine.

Lutsenko signed the indictment at the SBU's office in Kyiv and Kyiv region.

According to spokesman for the Prosecutor General's Office Andriy Lysenko, hearings on a preventive measure for Savchenko will most likely take place at Kyiv's Shevchenkivsky district court on March 23. They will begin at about 9:00 Kyiv time, Buhai said.

Lutsenko's press secretary Larysa Sargan said, in turn, that prosecutors would ask the court to remand Savchenko in custody for two months.

Savchenko was given a copy of the petition for the preventive measure of pretrial detention.The official notes he is not aware of who has planted the equipment.

Head of the Specialized Anti-corruption Prosecutor's Office (SAPO) Nazar Kholodnytsky states he has found in his office a device resembling a covert listening device.

"Yes, I found a device that looked like a bug," the prosecutor told journalists in Brussels, answering an UNIAN correspondent's question.

Asked whether he knew who owned the device, Kholodnytsky replied: "I don't know. I'm waiting for an official response from law enforcers. I will see it shortly."

Read alsoOffice of Ukraine's top anti-graft prosecutor bugged  mediaAccording to Kholodnytsky, he discovered the device on March 6, and now it is part of the evidence in criminal proceedings.

Commenting on UNIAN request the reports that the bug had allegedly been planted by the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU), Kholodnytsky said: "I'm not ready to comment. NABU and SAPO should be working together. I believe this is some kind of provocation."The Mission must have full and unhindered access throughout Ukraine including Crimea and Sevastopol, the Ukrainian delegation stresses.

The Permanent Council of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) has extended the mandate of the OSCE Special Monitoring Mission (SMM) to Ukraine until March 31, 2019.

"Mandate of OSCE_SMM has been extended till 31 March 2019. Delegation of Ukraine delivered its Interpretative statement, in which underlined that SMM must have full & unhindered access throughout Ukraine including Crimea & Sevastopol. Supported by all EU members, US & Canada," the Permanent Mission of Ukraine to the International Organizations in Vienna wrote on Twitter.

"Lives of civilians in areas of Ukraine occupied by Russia continue to be severely impacted by irresponsible behavior of Russian occupation administration. We urge Russia to deliver upon arrangements reached in TCG & enable opening of Zolote entry-exit checkpoint without delay," the mission quoted Ambassador Ihor Prokopchuk, the Permanent Representative of Ukraine to the International Organizations, as saying.

Read alsoIs there a need for OSCE Mission in Zakarpattia?"Russian armed formations in Donbas continue using announced recommitment to ceasefire for reinforcement of military positions. As registered by OSCE_SMM, newly established checkpoints of those formations were spotted in north-west, west & south of Luhansk city," Prokopchuk said.The Russian aircraft also flew along the coastline of Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey.

Ukraine's air defense forces have been put on alert after the Air Force of Ukraine on March 22 detected provocative actions by the air unit of the Russian Aerospace Forces along the eastern and southern airspace borders of Ukraine for the second time within a month.

Russian fighter and bomber aircraft carried out flights from the airfields of Shaykovka, Krymsk and Belbek and closely approached the state border of Ukraine, the administrative border between the mainland of Ukraine and Russian-occupied Crimea, Ukraine's Air Force Command reported on Facebook on March 22.

Read alsoRAF jets scrambled to intercept Russian bombers less than 35 miles from UK airspace - media

They also approached as close as 40 kilometers to the coastline of the Black Sea and further flew along the coastline of Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey.

"In addition, a group of long-range strategic Tu-22 strike bombers, fully equipped with ammunition, flew in the airspace of Crimea, the Sea of Azov and the Black Sea. They were accompanied by a couple of Su-30 fighters. The aircraft trained certain conditional targets for striking. Such an action of the Russian Federation's air unit is primarily a reaction to the next phase of the command and staff training conducted by the Air Force of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. The other goal of [the Russian air unit] was to train a conditional blockade of the Bosporus Strait," the report said.

Having identified the threat posed by the aggressor country, all involved air defense forces of Ukraine were put on alert to fight back in case the aerospace forces of the Russian Federation are engaged.

The Air Force of the Armed Forces of Ukraine is now on duty around the clock.

"The Air Force of the Armed Forces of Ukraine constantly fulfills certain tasks to protect the territorial integrity of the state jointly with other troops of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, counter armed aggression against Ukraine from the air and cover critical government facilities, troops from [possible] air strikes by the enemy," the Ukrainian Air Force Command added.The Ukrainian Air Force was ready to repel air attacks and hit air targets.

The regime of alert earlier introduced by Ukraine's Air Force Command because of provocations by Russian aircraft has been cancelled.

"The degree of military alert earlier announced has already been cancelled," speaker for Ukraine's Air Force Command Dmytro Strutynsky said, Hromadske Radio reported.

Read alsoRAF jets scrambled to intercept Russian bombers less than 35 miles from UK airspace - media

"The Air Force was put on alert and ready to repel [attacks by Russian aircraft] and hit air targets. But only in the event if they had crossed our country's state airspace border or there had been a direct threat to the integrity and inviolability of the state," he explained.

As UNIAN reported earlier, Ukraine's air defense forces were put on alert after the Air Force of Ukraine on March 22 detected provocative actions by the air unit of the Russian Aerospace Forces along the eastern and southern airspace borders of Ukraine for the second time within a month.

Russian fighter and bomber aircraft carried out flights from the airfields of Shaykovka, Krymsk and Belbek and closely approached the state border of Ukraine, the administrative border between the mainland of Ukraine and Russian-occupied Crimea, Ukraine's Air Force Command reported on Facebook on March 22.The data analytics firm that worked with Donald Trump's election team and the winning Brexit campaign harvested millions of Facebook profiles of U.S. voters.

Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg has been invited to the European Parliament (EP) to clarify whether personal data is being misused.

"We've invited Mark Zuckerberg to the European Parliament. Facebook needs to clarify before the representatives of 500 million Europeans that personal data is not being used to manipulate democracy," EP President Antonio Tajani wrote on Twitter.

Read alsoCambridge Analytica expose: key revelations of investigative journalistsAs UNIAN reported earlier, Cambridge Analytica whistleblower revealed how firm linked to former Trump adviser Steve Bannon compiled user data to target American voters.

The data analytics firm that worked with Donald Trump's election team and the winning Brexit campaign harvested millions of Facebook profiles of U.S. voters, in the tech giant's biggest ever data breach, and used them to build a powerful software program to predict and influence choices at the ballot box.(@ChaudhryMAli88)

According to a plethora of reports from the worlds multilateral development agencies and renowned NGOs Pakistan is suffering from water scarcity with repercussions for its growth and sustainable development

Lahore(UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 22nd Mar, 2018 ) According to a plethora of reports from the worlds multilateral development agencies and renowned NGOs Pakistan is suffering from water scarcity with repercussions for its growth and sustainable development.

Combined with growing urbanisation, industrialisation and growing populations, the stock of water capital is set to diminish rapidly over time unless immediate measures are taken to not only protect but enhance the stocks of water.

This is such a pressing issue that clean water and sanitation is number six in the UNs 17 Sustainable Development Goals.

Today on World Water Day, ACCA calls on businesses to adopt a serious and sustainable approach to water management. ACCA believes that where water is a material natural capital in an enterprises value creation model, it must be measured and managed. Businesses have a responsibility to preserve water to create value into the future.

The question of whether water is material to a business will largely depend upon professional judgement but as a starter one must look at 3 key areas and they are:

(i) the scope of issues that are material broadening to the environmental and social impacts of organisations, including those related to natural capital like water

(ii) the stakeholder groups to be included when assessing if an issue is material, extending to bodies such as NGOs and local communities that are concerned about natural capital (water) issues and

(iii) the time frame over which business impacts are considered material, incorporating previously unaccounted medium- and long-term impacts and effects on natural capital (water) issues.

Arif Masud Mirza, head of policy for ACCA MENASA speaking at the Lahore Chamber of Commerce and Industry hosted event being led by the Centre of Excellence and Responsible Business CERB of the Pakistan business Council said: ACCA is a strong advocate of integrated thinking and reporting. We call upon business leaders to consider the value of water to a business as well as the interconnectedness of water to other material capitals such as financial, human and social.

The current approach to Pakistans water supply is via reservoirs, river management and glacial melt but with the Indus Water Treaty suffering from poor regional relations and poor government investment in water management policies. Business models both agricultural and non-agriculturalwill have to be adapted to make them fit for the future.

ACCA considers the SDGs in this report The Sustainable Development Goals: redefining context, risk and opportunity(@FahadShabbir)

A new commercial wide-body passenger jet being jointly developed by China and Russia has entered the preliminary design stage, according to an announcement by the Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China (COMAC).

BEIJING, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 22nd Mar, 2018 ) :A new commercial wide-body passenger jet being jointly developed by China and Russia has entered the preliminary design stage, according to an announcement by the Commercial Aircraft Corporation of China (COMAC).

The state-owned COMAC set up a joint venture with its Russian partner United Aircraft Corp (UAC) in May last year to build the new jet, which was officially named the CR929 in September. According to earlier reports, China will design and build the plane's fuselage, and Russia will design the wings.

The two sides are expected to jointly develop the engines. The aircraft will have a design range of 12,000 kilometers. The CR929 project aims to break the duopoly of Boeing and Airbus in the wide-body passenger aircraft market.

It is also a strategic project for China and Russia to carry out practical cooperation in the development of advanced technology. Shi Jianzhong, vice manager of COMAC, says the 280-seat aircraft will be developed in accordance with international standards of airworthiness. It is expected to be completed by 2025.(@ChaudhryMAli88)

The Sri Lankan Tea Board launched on Wednesday a global marketing campaign for Ceylon Tea, a minister here said on Wednesday.

COLOMBO, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 21st Mar, 2018 ) :The Sri Lankan Tea board launched on Wednesday a global marketing campaign for Ceylon Tea, a minister here said on Wednesday. Addressing a function to mark the launch of the promotion campaign, Plantation Industries Minister Navin Dissanayake said the campaign aimed to re-establish the premium position of Ceylon Tea in 12 priority markets and reinforce its association with the Lion Logo, the symbol of premium quality.

"Ceylon Tea continues to attract a premium in the global market and is in the top five exports for Sri Lanka," Dissanayake said. To sustain and grow Ceylon Tea's market share, Sri Lanka needs to be more aggressive in the approach to attracting new consumer segments and standing out in the beverage market. Tea is grown mainly in the central hills of Sri Lanka.The Karachi Port Trust (KPT) issued the following shipping report for the last 24 hours, ending 0700 hours on Thursday.

KARACHI, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 22nd Mar, 2018 ) :The Karachi Port Trust (KPT) issued the following shipping report for the last 24 hours, ending 0700 hours on Thursday. ALONG SIDE (Bulk Oil Pier) OP-I Al Salam II D.

HSD Wilhelmsen 20/03/18 OP-II Rich Sino D. Palm Oil Alpine 20/03/18 OP-II FPMC 21 L. Naptha Alpine 22/03/18 ALONG SIDE (East Wharves): 1 Al Safa L. Naptha East Wind 22/03/18 2/3 Thorco Cygnus D.

Steel OC.World 22/03/18 4 Zoitsa Sigala D. Coal OC-Services 20/03/18 10/11 Dubai Galactic L. Wheat OC-Services 20/03/18 11/12 Sea Lion L. Wheat WMA Shipcare 20/03/18 ALONG SIDE(P.I.C.T): 6/7 KMTC Dubai D.

L. Cnt. U.M.A 22/03/18 ALONG SIDE(PDWCP): SAPT-4 Tolten D. L. Cnt. United Arab 19/03/18 Along Side(West Wharves) 24 Excellent Pescadores L Wheat East Wind 19/03/18 ALONG SIDE (K.I.C.T): 28/29 Ever Delight D.

L. Cnt. Green Pak 21/03/18 EXPECTED ARRIVALS: CONTAINER (GEARLESS) Mol Endowment MOL Pak 22/03/18 Not Sched 800 Cnt. 1000 Cnt. Ever Union Green pak 23/03/18 Not Sched 600 Cnt. Nil Kota Lagu P-Delta 25/03/18 Not Sched 1500 Cnt.

1500 Cnt. Kota Kasturi P-Delta 28/03/18 Not Sched 300 Cnt. 300 Cnt. Kota Layar COSCO 28/03/18 Not Sched 600 Cnt.

600 Cnt. MOL Explorer MOL Pak 28/03/18 Not Sched 700 Cnt. 1000 Cnt. Zante COSCO 30/03/18 Not Sched 600 Cnt.

600 Cnt. COSCO Durban COSCO 01/04/18 Not Sched 600 Cnt. 600 Cnt. GENERAL CARGO: Arife Portlink 22/04/18 Not Sched Nil 07 Cnt. Damas COSCO 22/03/18 Not Sched Nil 163 G.C Hermann-S GAC 22/03/18 Not Sched 30,974 Steel Nil Kobe Star GAC 22/03/18 Not Sched 28,716 G.C Nil Lada Universal22/03/18 Not SChed 67 G.C Nil Royal Jade GAC 22/03/18 Not Sched 14,349 Steel Nil Leopold Staff Sinotrans 23/03/18 Not Sched 1,942 GC Nil Athos Sea Hawks 24/03/18 Not Sched 19,140 Nil COAL: Alexandriet OC.Services 26/03/18 Not Sched 54,932 Nil Bulk Neptune OC.Services 27/03/18 Not Sched 53,523 Nil LOADER: Vinalines Brave WMA Shipcare 22/03/18 Not SChed Nil 52,000 Wheat OIL TANKER: Bw Danube Alpine 23/03/18 Not Sched 45,000 Mogas Nil SHIPS OFF PORT: Vessel Name Type Agent expected Berth No.

Arrival date Arrival Time Remarks BW Rhine Oil Tanker Alpine -- 08/03/18 10:00 - Nissos Christiana Oil Tanker Gac -- 11/03/18 23:48 - Lyric Camella Oil Tanker GAC -- 16/03/18 21:50 1 Celsius Miami Oil Tanker Alpine -- 20/03/18 14:24 - LEGEND: 1 Shifted from OP-II to O/A.US Consulate General in Lahore Elizabeth Kennedy Trudeau on Thursday applauded the commitment of Sialkot Chamber of Commerce and Industry (SCCI) to encourage women to capitalise on economic potential of Sialkot's dairy sector.

SIALKOT, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 22nd Mar, 2018 ) :US Consulate General in Lahore Elizabeth Kennedy Trudeau on Thursday applauded the commitment of Sialkot Chamber of Commerce and Industry (SCCI) to encourage women to capitalise on economic potential of Sialkot's dairy sector.

She expressed these views while addressing a Grant Agreement ceremony, held to launch Women Investment in Networks of Dairy Sector (WINDS) at the SCCI. She said that the initiative would not only empower women dairy farmers but also provide hygienic, fresh and affordable milk to consumers in Sialkot city.

SCCI President Zahid Latif Malik said on the occasion that the partenship with the USAID would help bring in investment in dairy sector of Sialkot. He said that the five-year project would improve business environment in livestock, dairy and agriculture sectors of Punjab.Nstitute of Management (IM) Sciences on Thursday hosted Spring Festival and Welcome Party for Afghan Students who are studying all over the Pakistan under Allama Muhamamd Iqbal Scholarship Programme of Higher Education Commission (HEC).

PESHAWAR, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 22nd Mar, 2018 ) :Institute of Management (IM) Sciences on Thursday hosted Spring Festival and Welcome Party for Afghan Students who are studying all over the Pakistan under Allama Muhamamd Iqbal Scholarship Programme of Higher education Commission (HEC).

The colourful event was attended by over 600 students who are pursuing studies in seven universities of Pakistan including University of Peshawar, Islamia College University Peshawar, University of Haripur, COMSATS Abbottabad and UET Taxila.

Representatives of HEC included Jehanzeb Khan, Malik Shafi-ur-Rehman Khattak and Sher Ahmad also attended the ceremony. The event officially started with the recitation from the Holy Quran by an Afghan student, Ismail from IM Sciences.

This was followed by the national anthems of both, Pakistan and Afghanistan. A cake cutting ceremony was held to welcome Afghan students. Dr.Mohsin, Director IM Sciences gave a warm address followed by Khalid, an Afghan student who shared his experience in Pakistan ever since he came here.National Assembly Standing Committee on Kashmir Affairs and Gilgit-Baltistan Thursday directed the authorities concerned to devise a comprehensive plan to the uplift of education sector.

ISLAMABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 22nd Mar, 2018 ) :National Assembly Standing Committee on Kashmir Affairs and Gilgit-Baltistan Thursday directed the authorities concerned to devise a comprehensive plan to the uplift of education sector.

Chairing the meeting the committee here, Malik Ibrar Ahmed MNA said the capacity building of common people should be enhanced for the improvement of living standards of the common people.  Secretary (Education), Government of Gilgit-Baltistan briefed about the challenges, development activities and reforms in the education sectors to the Committee.

During the meeting, the Members of the Committee asked several questions to understand the issues presented by the Secretary (Education), Government of Gilgit Baltistan.The meeting was attended by the members of the committee included Khalil George, Ch.

Abid Raza, Malik Abdul Ghaffar Dogar, Sardar Mumtaz Khan, Mian Imtiaz Ahmed, Mrs. Shamas-un-Nissa, Junaid Akbar, Syed Waseem Hussain, Molvi Agha Muhammad, MNAs and Senior Officers of the Ministry of KA&GB, Government and Gilgit Baltistan Government.(@ChaudhryMAli88)

A seminar was held at the Islamia University of Bahawalpur on the occasion of Pakistan Day to commemorate the Lahore Resolution of 1940.

BAHAWALPUR, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 22nd Mar, 2018 ) :A seminar was held at the Islamia University of Bahawalpur on the occasion of Pakistan Day to commemorate the Lahore Resolution of 1940.

According to the spokesman of the university Shahzad Ahmad, speakers highlighted the significance of Lahore resolution passed in the meeting of All India Muslim League demanding for a separate homeland for Muslims.

They said that 23rd March is the day of commitment as Muslims of India announced their determination to achieve a separate homeland and within seven years Pakistan appeared as a sovereign Muslim state on map of the world.

We proved that a nation starting without any resources survived successfully all types of challenges including foreign aggression and natural calamities. During the last few years we have proved ourselves a peaceful, dynamic and responsible state that emerged efficaciously after every challenge.

Today's Pakistan again demands the same passion and resilience from our people to ensure bright future of our generations in future.The Higher Education Commission(HEC) and Asian Institute of Technology (AIT) Thailand will sign a Document of Understanding on award of scholarships to Pakistani students.

ISLAMABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 22nd Mar, 2018 ) :The Higher Education Commission(HEC) and Asian Institute of Technology (AIT) Thailand will sign a Document of Understanding on award of scholarships to Pakistani students.

It was agreed in a meeting held here during the visit of delegation consisting educationists from Asian Institute of Technology (AIT), Thailand to the Higher Education Commission (HEC), a news release said on Thursday.

The delegation was received here by the Dr Mukhtar Ahmed, Chairman HEC and senior HEC management. Talking to the delegates, Dr Mukhtar Ahmed shared the initiative and achievements of HEC with regard to promotion of higher education in Pakistan.

He said Pakistan had only 59 universities before the inception of HEC in 2002, while only 800 research publications had surfaced. He maintained that the number of universities has now reached 188, while the number of research publications currently is 12000 annually.

He said HEC envisions 40 per cent of PhD faculty in the country's universities by 2025. The Chairman stressed the need for identifying potential areas in which HEC and AIT can collaborate. He said HEC gives great importance to joint research projects with foreign countries.

During the meeting, it was agreed that Pakistani faculty members will be given opportunities to go for a sabbatical. Besides, modalities for collaborative research especially in the fields of water resources, Engineering, solar energy, food security, structures and urban planning and environment will be finalised with mutual consultations.

The two sides will jointly conduct research and hold seminars apart from considering participation in non-academic activities. In order to materialise the meeting decisions, a trilateral working group consisting of two members from Pakistani academia and AIT each will be constituted.

The AIT will be represented by Dr Naveed Anwar, Executive Director, AIT Solutions and Mr Shawn P. Kelly, Director, Office of the External Relations, AIT, Thailand, while Mr Muhammad Raza Chohan, Director General, Academics will serve as HEC's focal person.

The AIT delegation was headed by Prof Worsak Kanok Nukulchai, President AIT while it comprised Prof Voratas Kachitvitchyanukul, Dean, school of Engineering and Technology, Prof Rajendra Shrestha, Dean, School of Environment Resources and Development, Dr Fiaz Shah, Head, Development Management and Director, Yunus Centre, Mr Shawn P.

Kelly, Director, Office of the External Relations, and Dr Navid Anwar, Executive Director, AIT Solutions. Speaking on the occasion, Prof Nukulchai said, "AIT is a neutral platform for regional engagements and it values international collaboration".

He stressed the need to revitalise partnership with Pakistan. He said research and development endeavours are a boon for the mankind, as they lead to sustainable development. He said AIT offers 30 academic programmes and has 2000 postgraduate students, adding that it has developed 200 academic partnerships.(@rukhshanmir)

A three-day 13th Pakistan Chest Society's (PCS) Biennial International Conference started here on Thursday to highlight the research work of medical practitioners and share experiences of respiratory professionals.

ISLAMABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 22nd Mar, 2018 ) :A three-day 13th Pakistan Chest Society's (PCS) Biennial International Conference started here on Thursday to highlight the research work of medical practitioners and share experiences of respiratory professionals.

This three days conference will be preceded with workshops on various topics to enhance the skills of budding pulmonologists and post graduate trainees. The conference will include interactive sessions, panel discussion with experts, live workshops, experienced sharing lectures and discussions, addressing current scenarios and clinical glitches, by national and international expert panels and professionals.

Addressing the inaugural session, President Pakistan Medical and Detail Council (PMDC) Justice (R) Mian Shakirullah Jan said that the council has been given a mission to establish uniform minimum standard of basic and higher qualifications in medicine and dentistry throughout Pakistan.

He said that the council was working for improving the standard of existing medical and dental colleges in the country besides continuous and vigilant monitoring of standard of the institutions.

He said that the effective regulation of medical education is being done by the PMDC while the council was also working on promotion of academic activities and guidance to institutions to improve quality of medical education in the country.

President Pakistan Chest Society Prof Arshad Javed said that the society celebrates various days like world TB day, No Tobacco Day, World Asthma Day, world environment day besides holding various seminars and briefings time to time.

He said that various experts from Pakistan Chest Society are disseminating knowledge on various aspects of chest diseases in media from time to time and public awareness meeting are held in different schools and institutions.

He expressed the hope that the society will continue its efforts in improving lungs health in Pakistan, fight against tobacco, eliminate tuberculosis, educate health care professionals and public for healthy breathing, and further propagate research in the field of chest medicine.

He said that this meeting will be a chance to interact with specialists from Pakistan and also with the international faculty and will serve as learning hub for all. General Secretary Pakistan Chest Society Dr Saadia Ashraf said that this even will serve as a platform to highlight doctors' personal work, researches and experiences and provide a chance to meet colleagues from all over the country.

The inaugural session of the conference was attended by respiratory professionals with outstanding scientific and educational programme designed to address the needs of researchers, clinicians, general practitioner and allied health professionals. The organizers have planned special sessions for post and under graduate medical students.The Institute of Dentistry, Liaquat University of Medical and Health Sciences, Jamshoro has organized a seminar to mark the "World Oral Health Day" here on Thursday at main campus Jamshoro.

HYDERABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 22nd Mar, 2018 ) :The Institute of Dentistry, Liaquat University of Medical and Health Sciences, Jamshoro has organized a seminar to mark the "World Oral Health Day" here on Thursday at main campus Jamshoro.

The Vice Chancellor Liaquat University of Medical and Health Sciences, Professor Dr. Bikha Ram, Prof. Feroze Ali Kalhoro and others were the keynote speakers of the event. The Vice Chancellor LUMHS, Professor Dr.

Bikha Ram Devrajani said that oral health contributes to self-esteem, self-confidence and a positive self-image, which are important qualities at every age and maintaining that a person's self-esteem is often elevated as orthodontic treatment brings teeth, lips and face into proportion.

The Vice Chancellor LUMHS further expressed that World Oral Health Day is an international event aimed to celebrate the benefits of a healthy mouth and to promote worldwide awareness of the issues around oral health and the importance of looking after oral hygiene because 90 percent of the world's population will suffer from oral diseases in their lifetime.

Prof. Bikha Ram Devrajani said that the women make half of world's population, and are more prone to oral diseases due to hormonal changes at different stages of their lives like puberty, pregnancy, using oral contraceptives and menopause and experience dental problems due to lack of education and care of the oral manifestations.

Prompt medical attention and education is required to maintain a healthy life style, he added.

"Regular dental check-ups are also essential in preventing dental problems," Prof. Bikha Ram Devrajani said while highlighting the importance of educating the public about dental problems and their causes, which can assist in preventing oral complications.

The Dean faculty of Dentistry Prof. Feroz Ali Kalhoro expressed that the World Oral Health Day offers the dental and oral health community a platform to take action and help reduce the global disease burden.

The Oral health is not only important to appearance and sense of well-being, but also to over all health. Prof. Kalhoro emphasized the need to educate our population to prevent oral diseases as the statistics show that only 20 percent of Pakistan's population have access to treatment of oral health.

Prof. Feroz further said that widespread problems like bad breathe, tooth decay, dental cavities and bleeding gums are not inevitable, but are to a large extent influenced by environmental, social and lifestyle-related factors.

Dental decay or cavities affect a major part of the population and is the single most important cause of loss of teeth, he added. He said that an estimated 60 to 90 per cent of school-going children around the globe have cavities, while tooth loss seem to affect 1 in 4 of the adult population.

For the elderly, poor oral health affects eating abilities, which then influence the food eaten and general health, Prof. Feroz Ali Kalhoro added.(@ChaudhryMAli88)

Islamabad police have arrested 16 outlaws from various areas of the city and recovered 1.020 kilogram hashish, 24 wine bottles, mobile phones and weapons from their possession, a police spokesman said.

ISLAMABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 21st Mar, 2018 ) :Islamabad police have arrested 16 outlaws from various areas of the city and recovered 1.020 kilogram hashish, 24 wine bottles, mobile phones and weapons from their possession, a police spokesman said.

A CIA team of Islamabad police including ASIs Zulfqar and Mohsin arrested five accused and recovered snatched mobile phones,1.020 kilogram hashish and 24 wine bottles from their possession. They have been identified as Qamer Fiaz, Fahid , Imran Mehmood, Nazeer and Shahid while further investigation is underway from them.

Moreover, ASI Abdul Malak from Bhar Khau police arrested Faizan Nasir involved in kidnapping of a female.

Sub-Inspector Azhar Mehmood arrested Shahzad Iqbal and recovered two wine bottles from him.

Sub-Inspector Ghulam Mustafa and ASI Muhammad Sabir from Tarnol police station arrested two accused Tajj Wali and Haider zaman for having two 30 bore pistols and ammunition. Sub-Inspector Ishfaq Ahmed and ASI Izkar Hussain arrested Antoshi Ashraf, Ilfaz and Shahariz and recovered five water pipes and flavors used in Sheesha smoking.

ASI Azkar Hussain along with police team arrested five accused involved in immoral activities who were identified as Sajid, Nadia, Ayesha, Rubi and Mumtaz. Cases have been registered against these nabbed persons and further investigation is underway from them.The Supreme Court (SC) on Thursday dismissed appeals, filed by Sindh government and others against Sindh High Court's (SHC) orders of permitting Allah Dino Khawaja to continue as inspector general of police Sindh, after holding that they lacked merit.

LAHORE, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 22nd Mar, 2018 ) :The Supreme Court (SC) on Thursday dismissed appeals, filed by Sindh government and others against Sindh High Court's (SHC) orders of permitting Allah Dino Khawaja to continue as inspector general of police Sindh, after holding that they lacked merit.

However, the court declared that the appellant (Sindh province) was entitled to make new laws conforming with modern needs and observations made in the impugned judgement. The court further declared that on account of appeals' dismissal, its interim restraining orders regarding AD Khawaja transfer would not remain in field.

The three member bench comprising Chief Justice Mian Saqib Nisar, Justice Umar Ata Bandial and Justice Ijaz ul Ahsan heard the appeals at Supreme Court Lahore Registry. As proceedings began, Sindh government's senior Lawyer Farooq H Naek assailing verdict submitted that the SHC verdict suffered from a grave error of law as the directions were contrary to the fundamental and well-settled principles of parliamentary sovereignty.

SHC directions were tantamount to powers of legislature which was unlawful, he added. He said that SHC's interference in the posting of the IGP was a violation of the 18th Amendment, which gave autonomy to the provincial governments in their administrative affairs.

He said barring the provincial government from passing laws or orders was against the sanctity and supremacy of the Parliament. The impugned orders were breach of provincial autonomy and it was against the spirit of 18th Amendment, he added.

He said that the impugned judgment was unsustainable in the eyes of the law and therefore liable to be set aside. However, respondents' counsel Faisal Siddique argued that the SHC verdict was in accordance with law and pleaded to set aside the appeals.(@FahadShabbir)

Despite creating hindrances and putting pressure by different forces, the Board of Secondary Education Karachi (BSEK) succeeds in re-structuring the examination system, which includes selection of the best located schools with better infrastructure and secured environment as examination centers for ninth and tenth classes annual examinations scheduled to begin on March 28.

KARACHI, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 22nd Mar, 2018 ) :Despite creating hindrances and putting pressure by different forces, the Board of Secondary education Karachi (BSEK) succeeds in re-structuring the examination system, which includes selection of the best located schools with better infrastructure and secured environment as examination centers for ninth and tenth classes annual examinations scheduled to begin on March 28.

The BSEK, in addition to its administrative and systematic changes, has got maximum support from the law enforcing agencies and the government departments concerned to stop the use of unfair means in the examinations and maintaining peaceful atmosphere during the exam hours.

This was informed by BSEK's Chairman Prof. Dr. Saeeduddin at a press conference on Thursday, here at the Board Office. He was flanked by the Board's Secretary and Controller Examinations Khalid Ehsan.

Chairman said that in response to his letter, Sindh Home Secretary had assured to provide full security at and around the examination centers. And, he continued, the Rangers had also guaranteed maximum patrolling around the centers.

This kind of support from the LEAs would help the board to conduct the exams in safe environment and in controlling all kind of cheating. He said that a large number of private schools used to be traditional examination centers were off-loaded from the board's list and only the best available private schools were included.

The priority had been given to government schools; of which those defamed for cheating were also dropped. He explained that the approach behind changing the time of conducting the exams to afternoon was utilization of the best available schools.

Many good institutions' management suggested for the change in timing so that their academic activities would not be disrupted. The number of centers for science students was 393 and for general group was 84.

The number of total candidates was 354131--38714 were of science and 45417 of general group. He said 77 centers had been identified as sensitive ones, which demanded more security cover. He advised the candidates that in case of any confusion, they could dial 85 and 83 number to confirm about their centers and their location.

To a question, Professor Dr. Saeeduddin said K-Electric had assured that there would be no load-shedding during the exams hours and that private schools selected for the centers had their own generators.

He sought cooperation and support from the media and the general public to eliminate the menace of copy culture and save the future of new generations. Controller Examinations Khalid Ehsan also responded to the reporters queries.

He also complained of different kinds of pressures and interventions from political parties and teachers' associations for getting the examination centers of their choice in the city.(@ChaudhryMAli88)

Minister of State for Finance Rana Muhammad Afzal on Thursday said that Chaudhry Nisar, was a mature politician of this country having long affiliation with Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz. Chaudhry Nisar had different style of perception in the current politics of the country and he could not think over damaging the party image, he said while talking to a private news channel.

ISLAMABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 22nd Mar, 2018 ) :`Minister of State for Finance Rana Muhammad Afzal on Thursday said that Chaudhry Nisar, was a mature politician of this country having long affiliation with Pakistan Muslim League Nawaz.

Chaudhry Nisar had different style of perception in the current politics of the country and he could not think over damaging the party image, he said while talking to a private news channel. Commenting on abrupt changes in the economy, he said that after the decision of disqualification of Nawaz Sharif, Pakistan had to face crunch on political and economic front.

He said that Nawaz Sharif had to leave the slot of premiership after the decision of the apex court on having "Iqama".

He, however said that the people will support the PML-N in the next general elections on the basis of performance.

To a question regarding Pervaiz Musharraf, the State Minister said that the present government took hard decision and register the case for trial of former president. He said Pervaiz Musharraf had got permission on the basis of medical ground for check up abroad.

Defending the position of former Finance Minister in a query, he said that Ishaq Dar went to Dubai after attending conference that held in Central Asian States. He said that Ishaq Dar had to leave Dubai for getting medical treatment in London.(@ChaudhryMAli88)

Collective efforts are needed to frustrate the designs of terrorists, who wanted to tear apart the fabric of entire society, Grand Mufti of Egypt Dr Shawki Ibrahim Abdel Karim Allam said Thursday.

ISLAMABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 22nd Mar, 2018 ) :Collective efforts are needed to frustrate the designs of terrorists, who wanted to tear apart the fabric of entire society, Grand Mufti of Egypt Dr Shawki Ibrahim Abdel Karim Allam said Thursday.

Addressing an International Conference titled "Promotion of Religious Tolerance in Light of the Teachings of the Holy Prophet (PBUH)," he urged Ulema, intellectuals, educationists and civil society to play their role for elimination of destructive concepts of terrorism and extremism.

He stressed the need to check the promotion of terrorism on social media, saying we should disseminate the message of islam through our character, education. He asked the world to make decisive action against terrorists.

Every Muslim should play his role in portraying a true picture of Islam as fake Islamic organizations, created by enemies to give bad name to Islam, have been involved in the mass massacre of people in the name of religion.

We should have to take measures to completely eliminate terrorism and extremism, he said. Egypt has sacrificed its brave sons in the war against terrorism, which will be remembered for long time and would be written in the golden words.

He said National decree of Pakistan namely, 'Paigham-e-Pakistan' would be translated into Arabic language and distributed among various segments of society in Egypt for their benefit. He said Islam teaches promoting peace, tolerance and harmony among each other.

The killings of innocent people is not allowed in any religion. Islam encourages cooperation in good deeds. On the occasion, Minister for Religious Affairs and Interfaith Harmony Sardar Muhammad Yousaf said the Seerat of last Holy Prophet Hazrat Muhammad (PBUH) teaches tolerance, harmony and peaceful coexistence.

The inking of Hudaibiya treaty by Hazrat Muhammad (PBUH) was a great example of Prophet's tolerance and compassion.

In an Islamic country minorities enjoy equal rights and religious freedom. No non-Muslim could be compelled to change his religion.

Highlighting Religious Ministry's efforts of promoting religious harmony, he said National Ulema and Mashaikh Council, National Commission for Minorities have been constituted to promote religious harmony besides National Seerat Conferences are being held annually for spreading the peace message of the Holy Prophet (PBUH).

He said Pakistan's National Decree Paigham-e-Pakistan has been endorsed by Egypt and Imam Kaaba. The need is to spread the message of peace among all for ensuring peace in the world. He said head of Al-Azhar University (Egypt) will be invited to Pakistan.

Meanwhile, State Minister for Religious Affairs and Interfaith Harmony Pir Ami-ul-Hasnat Shah said enemies were trying to promote hatred among various sects of Islam. Implementing National Decree or narrative Paigham-e-Pakistan with letter and spirit would make the country peaceful.

Dr Yasin Zaraf said society was facing multiple challenges. More concerted efforts are needed for promoting religious harmony. Allama Arif Wahidi said suicide bomb blasts are haram and only state is authorized to announce Jihad.

Kashmiris were struggling to win right to self determination and we shall raise voice against Indian atrocities. Hanif Jalandhri said Islam preaches self-respect and tolerance. Non-Muslims were enjoying equal rights in Pakistan.

Ulema are united against the menace of terrorism and extremism. Dr Atta-ur-Rehman said state terrorism should also be condemned besides criticizing individual terrorism. Kashmiris and Palestanians are being subjected to the worst state terrorism. Pandit Channa Lal said non Muslims are enjoying complete religious freedom in Pakistan. He urged for removing hate material from curriculam.Special Assistant to Prime Minister on Media Affairs, Senator Dr Musadik Malik Thursday said continuity of democratic system had always contributed to economic stability, development and prosperity of the country.

ISLAMABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 22nd Mar, 2018 ) :Special Assistant to Prime Minister on Media Affairs, Senator Dr Musadik Malik Thursday said continuity of democratic system had always contributed to economic stability, development and prosperity of the country.

Democratic system should not be stopped in the country as Pakistan had already faced three worst martial laws, he said while talking to a private news channel. He said the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) government was following one-point agenda to achieve milestone.

Former Prime Minister Muhammad Nawaz Sharif was ready to hold talks for supremacy of law and constitution which was demand of every person.

He urged leaders of political parties to talk under the limits of constitution and refrain from using unparliamentary language.

Musadik Malik said Nawaz Sharif always preferred the voice and narrative of public, who already held big public meetings in Peshawar, Mansehra, Sheikhupura, Faisalabad and other parts of the country to show his power. He said many people were courageously participating in public gatherings of Maryam Nawaz because of her vision and leadership qualities.Additional Assistant Commissioner Batkhela, Ali Raza Shah here Thursday visited Thana Bazar today to remove encroachments as well as to monitor traffic flow situation.

BATKHELA, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 22nd Mar, 2018 ) ::Additional Assistant Commissioner Batkhela, Ali Raza Shah here Thursday visited Thana Bazar today to remove encroachments as well as to monitor traffic flow situation.

Numerous temporary encroachments were removed with the help of TMA staff and levy personnel with strict direction to the violators not to occupy prohibited space failing which FIRs will be lodged against them. During this process he also listened to the complaints of general public on the scene.Federal Urdu University of Arts Science and Technology (FUUAST)'s Abdul Haq Campus is going to organise a seminar in connection with Pakistan Day on March 22 at 5 pm.

KARACHI, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 21st Mar, 2018 ) :Federal urdu University of Arts Science and Technology (FUUAST)'s Abdul Haq Campus is going to organise a seminar in connection with Pakistan Day on March 22 at 5 pm.

Vice Chancellor of University, Dr. Altaf Hussain will preside over the seminar, said a press release issued on Wednesday. The students will sing national songs, present tableaus and speeches.Inspector General of Police (IGP) Sindh, A.D. Khawaja has taken notice of some media reports regarding two sperate alleged firing incidents in the metropolis.

KARACHI, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 22nd Mar, 2018 ) :Inspector General of Police (IGP) Sindh, A.D. Khawaja has taken notice of some media reports regarding two sperate alleged firing incidents in the metropolis.

The IGP took notice of the reports that unknown motorcyclists opened fire on a car in the jurisdiction of Schal Police Station near New Rizweya Society.

He also sought a detailed report of the incident from SSP Malir and directed him to arrest those who are involved in the incident, said a statement here on Thursday.

The IG Sindh also took notice of another incident that a fire was opened on a NLC vehicle at Boat Basin area of the city and sought a detailed report from the SSP South.(@rukhshanmir)

To mark World Water Day 2018, WWF-Pakistan in collaboration with LUMS and Nestle, hosted a panel discussion on the issue of mismanagement of water resources of the country

Lahore (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 22nd Mar, 2018 ) To mark World Water Day 2018, WWF-Pakistan in collaboration with LUMS and Nestle, hosted a panel discussion on the issue of mismanagement of water resources of the country.

Muhammad Mahmood, Secretary, Punjab Agriculture Department; Hammad Naqi Khan, Director General, WWF-Pakistan; Dr Abid Suleri, Executive Director, Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI); Dr.

Abubakar Muhammad, Director, Centre for Water Informatics & Technology, LUMS; Dr. Yousaf Zafar, Chairman, Pakistan Agriculture Research Council; and Zamir Ahmed Somroo, Regional Director PCRWR were the panellists.

The aim of the panel discussion was to bring together stakeholders from different backgrounds together to discuss issues related to groundwater availability and quality in Pakistan. Alarmingly, the groundwater level is declining in Lahore with a depletion rate of approximately 2.5 to 3.0 feet per year for the district.

The water table depth in the central part of the city has fallen below 130 feet (40 metres) approximately and is projected to drop below 230 feet (70 metres) in most areas by 2025. If the present trend continues the situation will become even worse by 2040.

Therefore there is an urgent need to conserve groundwater and adopt strategies at the earliest. World Water Day is celebrated globally to highlight the importance of water related issues by raising awareness and encouraging policymakers to look into sustainable development initiatives in cities as a support to lessen stress on urban water systems.

This year, international World Water Day is being celebrated with the extended theme of Nature for Water. Environmental damage, together with climate change, is driving water-related crises seen around the world.

Floods, drought and water pollution are all made worse by degraded vegetation, soil, rivers and lakes. When ecosystems are neglected, it becomes harder to provide the public with water needed to survive and thrive.

Hammad Naqi Khan, Director General, WWF-Pakistan said, Pakistan is a water stressed country and is nearing the threshold of water scarcity.

Access to safe drinking water in rural and urban areas is declining and the provision of potable water is a key issue that people face. He noted that the implementation of laws pertaining to industrial effluents generated from the textile and leather industries are very weak.

Further, industrial waste from these industries contains heavy metals such as copper, chromium, and nickel. A large population of people living in the major cities of Pakistan do not have access to safe drinking water as freshwater resources are being contaminated due to multiple reasons.

Dr. Sohail H. Naqvi, Rector LUMS, said that the Indus water captures the path of a water droplet melting at glaciers and making its way through the complex domain. WWF-Pakistan in partnership with LUMS should extend its work on awareness campaigns with student, who are the future of the country.

Zamir Ahmed Somroo, Regional Director PCRWR said, The stress on safe drinking water is a basic right for humans but water is a fast depleting resource that is shared among all of us as individuals, farmers, industry, the environment and communities and therefore needs to be protected in public-private collaborations. WWF-Pakistan and the Faisalabad Chamber of Commerce and Industry (FCCI) also organized a seminar on World Water Day to promote water conservation and discuss solutions to cater to the issue of wastewater in the city, the situation of Pakistan and different methods to treat wastewater specifically for the city of Faisalabad.

Representatives of different institutions such as the Environmental Protection Department, Irrigation Department and National Institute for Biotechnology and Genetic Engineering (NIBGE) presented at the Faisalabad event while representatives of industries, universities and government departments participated. Shabir Hussain Chawala, President, FCCI, attended as guest of honour.Pakistan Thursday said there are no organized terrorist groups across the country and called upon Afghanistan "do more" to eliminate terrorists' sanctuaries in Afghanistan.

ISLAMABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 22nd Mar, 2018 ) :Pakistan Thursday said there are no organized terrorist groups across the country and called upon Afghanistan "do more" to eliminate terrorists' sanctuaries in Afghanistan.

During the weekly media briefing here, Foreign Office Spokesperson Dr Muhammad Faisal said Pakistan has repeatedly asked the US government to share intelligence for definite action against terrorists on our soil and Pakistan will take due action against them.

He said National Security Advisor Nasir Janjua's visit to Afghanistan took place on the invitation of his Afghan counterpart. "Afghan President Ashraf Ghani also invited the Prime Minister of Pakistan to Afghanistan which is being considered at the moment", he added.

Replying to a question He said on his visit to the US, Prime Minster Shahid Khaqan Abbasi met with US Vice President Mike Pence and discussed the bilateral relations, the regional situation and Afghanistan as a part of the regular interactions between the two countries.

"These conversations are important to build trust and cooperation and to strengthen bilateral relations, he added. Regarding the recent elections in China and Russia, the spokesperson said Pakistan enjoys cordial mutual relationships with both the countries and their visionary leaderships.

"Leadership of Pakistan looks forward to working closely with both the leaders to further strengthen cooperation in all fields of mutual interest", he added. Replying to another question he said Pakistan and Russia are enjoying active collaboration in the sphere of military relations and it is hoped that both the countries will play their due roles in the regional peace and stability.

He informed that Indian occupation forces martyred five more Kashmiris in Pulwama, Srinagar and Kupwara areas. Responding to a question about the statement of Indian army chief he said India is trying to politicize the issue of human rights violations in Indian occupied Kashmir (IoK).

"India has always tried to escalate the tension between Pakistan and India on diplomatic front by giving irresponsible statements to divert world's attention from the atrocities being carried out by its forces in IoK", he added.

He said Pakistan strongly condemns the reprehensible suicide attack close to Ali Abad hospital and Kabul University and express deepest sympathies and condolences to the bereaved families and people of Afghanistan.(@ChaudhryMAli88)

Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi, in a televised message released here by the Inter Services Public Relations for Pakistan Day falling on March 23, said Pakistanis were a great nation having an unwavering passion for peace and sacrifice for their homeland.

ISLAMABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 22nd Mar, 2018 ) :Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi, in a televised message released here by the Inter Services Public Relations for Pakistan Day falling on March 23, said Pakistanis were a great nation having an unwavering passion for peace and sacrifice for their homeland.

He said with mutual affinity and harmony, the Pakistani nation would be able to make this country a piece of haven. "This country is a dream of Iqbal and a gift of our forefathers. Its development and prosperity is our shared responsibility," he said.

Khaqan Abbasi, on this occasion, sang a verse of the official song, "Har ek Pakistani ne pukara, Hamara Pakistan - Amn ka nishan," which means every Pakistani speaks up, Pakistan is the symbol of peace.President of Sri Lanka Maithripala Sirisena will arrive on Thursday on a three-day (March 22-24) visit to Pakistan and to be the "Guest of Honor" on Pakistan Day parade.

ISLAMABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 21st Mar, 2018 ) :President of Sri Lanka Maithripala Sirisena will arrive on Thursday on a three-day (March 22-24) visit to Pakistan and to be the "Guest of Honor" on Pakistan Day parade.

The participation of President Sirisena in the parade was a demonstration of the very close ties between Pakistan and Sri Lanka and the respect in which the people and leadership of Pakistan held the President of Sri Lanka, a foreign office statement issued here on Wednesday said.

During the visit, the Sri Lankan President will meet President Mamnoon Hussain and Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi to review all matters of mutual importance.

Memoranda of Understanding (MoUs) on cooperation in the fields of training of civil servants, diplomats and youth development would also be signed during the visit.

Pakistan greatly values its relations with Sri Lanka. Relations between the two countries are based on mutual trust and understanding, the statement said, adding, the visit will provide renewed impetus to our bilateral relations and enhance the goodwill existing between the people of the two countries.(@rukhshanmir)

President of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka Maithripala Sirisena will visit Pakistan from March 22 to 24th. According to foreign office statement, he will be the "Guest of Honor" on Pakistan Day parade.

ISLAMABAD, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 22nd Mar, 2018 ) :President of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka Maithripala Sirisena will visit Pakistan from March 22 to 24th. According to foreign office statement, he will be the "Guest of Honor" on Pakistan Day parade.

The participation of President Sirisena in the parade is a demonstration of the very close ties between Pakistan and Sri Lanka and the respect in which the people and leadership of Pakistan hold the President of Sri Lanka.

During the visit, the Sri Lankan President will meet the President and the Prime Minister of Pakistan to review all matters of mutual importance.

MoUs on cooperation in the fields of training of civil servants, diplomats and youth development would also be signed during the visit, statement said.

Pakistan greatly values its relations with Sri Lanka both countries are based on mutual trust and understanding. The visit will provide renewed impetus to our bilateral relations and enhance the goodwill existing between the people of the two countries, it added.(@rukhshanmir)

The Sub-Divisional Magistrate Batkhela on Thursday issued a warrant of attachment in a case of dispute as to the possession of land of Graveyard of Hisar Baba Totakan.

PESHAWAR, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 22nd Mar, 2018 ) :The Sub-Divisional Magistrate Batkhela on Thursday issued a warrant of attachment in a case of dispute as to the possession of land of Graveyard of Hisar Baba Totakan.

He has further clarified that a dispute is likely to induce a breach of peace between the residents of Totakan regarding the graveyard of Hisar Baba and create law and order situation.Therefore,the Sub  Divisional Magistrate has authorized the Subedar Major, Malakand Levies Batkhela and required him to attach the said disputed graveyard by taking and keeping in possession thereof and to hold the same under attachment until the decree or order of a competent civil court determining the rights of the parties, or the claim to possession, shall have been obtained.

As per Section 146 Cr PC he has been appointed as receiver of the said property with the power of possession, custody and management of the said area subject to the control of Sub- Divisional Magistrate.

It merits mentioning here that a large portion of the graveyard has already been sold by some miscreants which have now become a residential area. The local population is finding it very hard to dig fresh graves for their dead relatives as there is no further space in the existing graveyard for graves.

Therefore the local people had appealed the government to protect the remaining part of the old graveyard from the clutches of land mafia and reconvert it to the Hisar Baba graveyard.China and Cameroon on Thursday agreed to give full play to their sound friendship and great potential for cooperation to further advance bilateral relationship.

BEIJING, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 22nd Mar, 2018 ) :China and Cameroon on Thursday agreed to give full play to their sound friendship and great potential for cooperation to further advance bilateral relationship. The statement came as Chinese President Xi Jinping held talks with his Cameroonian counterpart Paul Biya at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing.The United Nations strongly condemned Wednesday's deadly attack in Kabul near a major religious shrine where people had gathered to celebrate "Nowruz" the traditional New Year and the arrival of spring.

UNITED NATIONS, (APP - UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 22nd Mar, 2018 ) :The United Nations strongly condemned Wednesday's deadly attack in Kabul near a major religious shrine where people had gathered to celebrate "Nowruz" the traditional New Year and the arrival of spring.

In a statement attributable to his spokesperson, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres offered his condolences to the families of the victims and wished a speedy recovery to those injured. "Nowruz is a time of renewal and celebration, and should be a time for promoting the values of peace and solidarity," he said, reiterating that those organized the attack "must be brought to justice." The UN chief also expressed his solidarity with the Government and the people of Afghanistan in the aftermath of the violence.

According to the UN Assistance Mission in the country, UNAMA, initial reports indicate that at least 25 civilians were killed and many others injured. There are fears the numbers could rise. Media reports suggest a suicide blew himself up near the shrine.

In a separate statement, Tadamichi Yamamoto, the head of the UN Mission, echoed the Secretary-General's condemnation. "I reiterate that under no circumstances are such attacks justifiable, and I once again call on all parties to uphold their obligations under international humanitarian law, at all times."U.S. President Donald Trump signed a memorandum Thursday "targeting China's economic aggression" in a move that could escalate into a full-scale trade war between the world's two largest economies.

The U.S. trade actions come partly in response to the theft and improper transfer of American technology to Chinese companies.

The Chinese commerce ministry said ahead of the meeting that China opposes unilateral U.S. trade actions and hopes the two countries can find a mutually beneficial solution through dialogue.

WATCH: What are tariffs?



U.S. officials spoke to reporters Wednesday about their months-long investigation under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 of Beijings trade practices.

China has long been considered by many in the international community to have contravened fundamental principles of global trade, despite joining the World Trade Organization in 2001.

There have been a number of specific failings by China to live up to its WTO obligations, said an official of the U.S. Trade Representative in a Wednesday background briefing for reporters.

The briefing and other comments not for attribution by officials are seen as clear signals the administration, in response to an Aug. 14 memo by Trump, intends to use the Section 301 trade tool.

The last time it was wielded was by the Clinton administration against Japan to pry open that countrys automotive sector.

'Ripping off'

China has been ripping off the United States, Trump has emphasized numerous times in public remarks during which he has harshly criticized his predecessors for not doing anything about it.

According to published reports, Trump is expected to impose tariffs, valued at tens of billions of dollars, on a number of Chinese products. Sources say that in addition to tariffs, restrictions on Chinese investment in the United States are likely as a response to Beijing using state funds and enterprises under the governments control to purchase intellectual property here.

Trump in January hit the Chinese-dominated solar panel and cell industry with tariffs. Earlier this month, he launched global tariffs on steel and aluminum (from which Canada and Mexico were quickly given indefinite exemptions), a move Chinas commerce ministry said it strongly opposed.

U.S. Trade Representative officials on Wednesday declined to specify what new actions will be taken, but they did not disagree that an announcement is expected as soon as Thursday.

Were getting very close, said a USTR official speaking to reporters on condition of not being named. The president will have the final say.



Bracing for an anticipated harsh reaction from China, the official noted, We recognize the potential gravity of the situation here.

Depending on the severity of the measures taken by Trump, stock markets in Asia and elsewhere could be roiled, according to market analysts.

Trade groups representing American retail giants, such as Walmart, and tech companies, including Apple, warn that sweeping tariffs would raise prices for consumers in the United States and might not do much to reduce the trade deficit.North Korea is contending that its recent "dialogue peace offensive" with the United States and South Korea is the result of national strength, not pressure from international economic sanctions aimed at ending Pyongyang's nuclear and missile tests.

A state television commentary late Tuesday did not mention either of the pending summits with South Korea and the United States, including a prospective face-to-face meeting U.S. President Donald Trump agreed to hold with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un by the end of May. But the commentary was the first allusion to the thaw in diplomatic relations between Pyongyang and Washington and Seoul.

The woman reading the commentary said there has been a "dramatic atmosphere for reconciliation" with the South and "a sign of change" with the United States.

She said Pyongyang's overtures to Washington and Seoul came from a position of strength, not from weakness.

"The dialogue peace offensive" of the North Korean government, she said, "is an expression of self-confidence as it has acquired everything it desires."

The commentary attacked military opponents to the talks in the United States, South Korea and Japan for questioning whether the talks should be held.

"Such rubbish as 'result of sanctions and pressure' ... spread by hostile forces is just as meaningless as a dog barking at the moon," the government commentary said.

"It is really an expression of small-mindedness for the riff-raffs to spoil the atmosphere and say this or that even before the parties concerned are given a chance to study the inner thoughts of the other side and are seated at a negotiating table," North Korea said.

Summit in the offing?

Trump has repeatedly pushed for tough sanctions imposed by the United Nations against North Korea as Pyongyang carried out multiple nuclear and missile tests. He has repeatedly taunted Kim, calling him "Little Rocket Man," before unexpectedly agreeing earlier this month to talks with Kim after South Korean diplomats, in a White House meeting, presented Trump with a message from Pyongyang offering to hold a summit.

No date or venue for the summit has been announced, however.

In the United States, a new poll by Quinnipiac University said 65 percent of American voters believe the United States will be able to resolve its differences with North Korea diplomatically, while 16 percent believe the United States will have to use military force. The poll said voters, by a 66-24 margin, approve of Trump meeting with Kim, but by a similar result, 65-26, say that North Korea will not give up its nuclear weapons.

South Korea and the United States said Tuesday they plan to resume annual joint military exercises on April 1, although shortening its main drill by a month. The North has frequently complained about the South Korean-U.S. drills, but as part of the agreement for the planned summit with the United States has agreed to not publicly protest this year.

South Korean President Moon Jae-in said a three-way summit between the two Koreas and the United States is possible, depending on the success or failure of the meetings between the two Koreas and the U.S.-North Korean summit.

"We must completely resolve the issues of denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula and establishing peace," Moon said.As part of Vietnams 50th anniversary commemorations of the Tet Offensive, Americans who opposed the war, including military veterans, have met with those who fought on the other side of the battlefield.

The women and men gathered in Ho Chi Minh City Tuesday at the War Remnants Museum, which tells the story of the war from the viewpoint of the communist government.

The Vietnamese and Americans are uniting this week amid a bevy of war commemorations. It has been half a century since the Tet Offensive, a campaign of surprise attacks against military and civilian command and control centers throughout South Vietnam, and the My Lai Massacre, in which hundreds of civilians were killed by U.S. soldiers.

Many of the Americans in attendance had found diverse ways to register their opposition to the war, from refusing the draft, to going AWOL after they had shipped out to Vietnam. Decades later some of them came to the communist country for the first time since the war.

They are on what they call a peace tour, with a ceremonial stopover in the My Lai hamlet. Around Vietnam there have been street posters and book displays recalling the Tet Offensive, as well as a screening and filmmaker discussion of the The Whistle Blower of My Lai.

Struggles with war

Before sitting down for a lunch of Vietnamese crepes and hotpot, the U.S. visitors described their own struggles with the war.

Mike Southerland deployed to Vietnam but eventually defected to Sweden. Judy Olasov set up underground cafes for conscientious objectors, bringing together blacks and whites, soldiers and students. J.J. Johnson enlisted in the military but was jailed after refusing to go to Vietnam.

The courage and the leadership of the Vietnamese people inspired those of us inside and outside the military, said Johnson, who was also inspired by the war objections of Martin Luther King Jr. and Muhammad Ali. We felt if a relatively small nation without the technology, firepower and resources of the most powerful nation on the globe can overcome, perhaps we can, too.

Wounds fresh

The war ended 40 years ago, but the wounds of war are still bleeding, said Phan Thi Ngoc Tuoi, who was a colonel in the Vietnamese special forces.

She spoke about the pain of losing family members in the bloodshed, as well as about her conviction at the time that force was the only option to end the violence.

I love peace, so I took up arms to fight, she said at a morning roundtable before breaking bread with two dozen U.S. veterans over lunch.

The roundtable discussion kicked off an exhibit that will remain at the museum until April 15, titled Waging Peace: U.S. Soldiers and Veterans Who Opposed Americas War in Vietnam.

In the resistance war of Vietnamese people, it was all the more absurd that we had to fight against the professional war machine of America, said Dong Anh Kiet, a member of a local veterans association. But he acknowledged that both sides suffered, describing American mothers who could sympathize with the loss that Vietnamese mothers also underwent.

Chuck Searcy, a Hanoi-based leader of a local chapter of the Veterans For Peace group, co-organized the gathering with Ton Nu Thi Ninh, a former Vietnamese diplomat and the president of the Ho Chi Minh City Peace and Development Foundation.I brought tea for you  English tea, from Fortnum and Mason, the very best, chirped the financial adviser in the foyer of a plush Moscow hotel near the Kremlin. You have a package for me, I think, he added before scurrying off with his Russian client.

The adviser, like many of his British colleagues, has been making routine rounds to reassure clients since the poisoning of former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal in Britain, an attempted assassination Britain accuses the Kremlin of orchestrating.

British ministers and their Kremlin counterparts have been threatening further reprisals after retaliatory expulsions of diplomats in response to the Skripal attack.

With Anglo-Russian relations plunging to their lowest point since the Cold War, British financial advisers in Moscow had expected to encounter Russian clients anxious about Britain mounting a retaliatory financial crackdown on Russian money invested in London.

British Prime Minister Theresa May has promised to go after the financial assets in Britain of wealthy Russians connected to the Kremlin.

But it is business as usual in Moscow.

Advisers visiting the Russian capital say oligarchs and other super-wealthy businessmen appear unconcerned, having concluded May is all bark and no bite.

Part of the reason is Britain has been reluctant in the past to use existing legislation to probe too deeply into the origins of Russian money spent in Britain, fearing it might lead to an exodus of Russian cash from the country. Moscow investors also believe Brexit-mired Britain is going to need Russian money even more in the future and chasing it out risks frightening super-wealthy investors from other countries.

My clients dont see it as a threat, said the adviser who exchanged tea for a package of signed documents. He asked not to be identified. Neither do we. The new measures being drafted are just repeating legislation thats already available and will rest largely unused. What few investigations launched will take forever and then get bogged down in the courts, he said.

Britains past unwillingness to investigate Russian money, and the suspicion Britain isnt serious this time either, is not helping May persuade Britains European allies to do more than issue statements of solidarity over the Skripal poisoning.

Norbert Rottgen, chairman of Germanys parliamentary foreign affairs committee, has highlighted the need for Britain to examine its open stance toward Russian capital of dubious origin before it starts asking for concrete action by Britains allies.

In response to doubts about their determination, British officials say they are likely to ban secretive Scottish limited partnerships that have been used to hide the true ownership of some Russian-origin money. The Scottish-based shell companies have long been a target of transparency campaigners.

May briefed EU leaders Thursday in Brussels on the investigation into the March 4 nerve-agent poisoning of Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury. Both remain in serious condition and are under heavy sedation.

May warned her fellow EU leaders that Western democracy is under threat from Russia.

The challenge of Russia is one that will endure for years to come, she told them according to extracts released in advance by her office. As a European democracy, the United Kingdom will stand shoulder to shoulder with the European Union and with NATO to face these threats together. United we will succeed.

EU leaders strongly condemned the attack agreed it highly likely that Russia was responsible for the Salisbury nerve-agent attack. Following a working dinner at a Brussels summit, European Council President Donald Tusk revealed the blocs member states backed the British governments assessment there is no other plausible explanation than Moscows culpability. The EU has instructed its ambassador to Moscow to return to Brussels for consultation.

Fearful of pushback, the British government hasnt asked EU partners to agree to fresh sanctions on Russia in addition to the Ukraine-related ones already in effect. But British officials have urged European neighbors to expel undeclared spies among Russian diplomats based in their countries and at least five countries  France, Poland and the three Baltic states  say they could now follow Britains lead by expelling suspected Russian spies.

Several states, including Italy and Greece, appear eager to shield their ties with Russia and wanted to water down the assessment that Russia is highly likely to have been behind the attack. Officials from Greece and Italy worry the British accusation has not yet been proven.

They are not alone, even some Putin critics in Russia question whether the Kremlin ordered the attack.

Outspoken Putin opponent Gennady Gudkov, a former KGB counter-intelligence officer, says he believes Russian intelligence has carried out overseas assassinations in recent years, but he says he cant find rational explanations for the attack on Skripal.

After the so called umbrella assassination of Georgi Markov in London in the late 1970s, the KGB decided to stop all special [assassination] operations abroad.It seems to me that today the concept has changed and some of the special operations related to the elimination of political opponents has been done with the help of the intelligence, he told VOA.Long before its controversial roles in the 2016 Brexit vote and U.S. presidential election, Cambridge Analytica influenced elections in Africa.

The data mining company, under fire for its alleged use of 50 million Facebook accounts to shape campaign messages for then-candidate Donald Trump, also played a role in elections in Kenya and Nigeria, according to new reports.

The companys first involvement in Africa dates to the general election in South Africa in 1994. That election marked the end of the apartheid era and the ascent of Nelson Mandela to the presidency.

Widespread violence and deep-seated societal fractures had put the elections in jeopardy, Martin Plaut, a journalist and senior research fellow at the University of Londons Institute of Commonwealth Studies, told VOA.

The 1994 election in South Africa was on an absolute knifes edge. There was no reason to believe that it would go ahead without severe loss of life, Plaut said.

The Inkatha Freedom Party, which represented the Zulu population  South Africas largest ethnic group  had not reconciled with the African National Congress (ANC). Amid divisions that were stoked, in part, by the old apartheid regime, hundreds died ahead of the election, Plaut said.

A political party  unnamed, but most likely the ANC  hired Cambridge Analytica to mitigate election violence, according to the companys website. Their exact role in the election hasnt been independently verified, but the violence subsided during and after the historic vote for Mandela and the ANC.

Involvement in Kenya, Nigeria

More recently, Cambridge Analytica worked with Kenyas ruling Jubilee Party  not to build consensus, but rather to exploit divisions to re-elect President Uhuru Kenyatta.

The firm designed a campaign strategy based on interviews with nearly 50,000 potential voters gathered over three months. Their work with the Jubilee Party had been widely suspected but unconfirmed.

But in an undercover video broadcast this week on Britains Channel 4 News, Cambridge Analytica executive Mark Turnbull boasted that the company and its parent, SCL Group, ran the Kenyatta campaign.

We have rebranded the entire party twice, written the manifesto, done huge amounts of research, analysis, messaging. Then wed write all the speeches and stage the whole thing. So, just about every element of his campaign, Turnbull said.

Those elements included social media videos that played to the fears of the electorate, warning that a victory by opposition leader Raila Odinga would lead to disease, famine and terrorism.

Cambridge Analytica denied any involvement with the videos or negative campaigning in Kenya.

VOA reached out to both Cambridge Analytica in Washington and the SCL Group, but they did not respond to requests.

Similar allegations of malfeasance have emerged in Nigeria. The Guardian reported Wednesday that Israeli hackers provided Cambridge Analytica with President Muhammadu Buharis personal emails.

Buhari was running against incumbent Goodluck Jonathan, and a Nigerian billionaire paid Cambridge Analytica $2.8 million to dig up damaging information about Buhari as part of an attack campaign, The Guardian reported. The emails included information about Buharis health and medical records, a source told The Guardian.

Since assuming office, Buhari has taken extended medical leaves in London, because of an undisclosed illness.

Precise analysis

Data analysis companies such as Cambridge Analytica provide information to governments and political parties, Plaut said, to influence people in the middle  those with moderate views who can be persuaded to join a side through appeals to emotion.

These companies analyze precisely whom to target and craft messages that play on hopes and fears, not facts, according to Plaut.

Social media platforms such as Facebook and WhatsApp, which Facebook bought in 2014, provide an in-depth view into peoples likes and dislikes  from which psychological profiles can be built and exploited to change behavior through tailored messaging.

Julie Owono, executive director of Internet Without Borders, a group that advocates for online freedom and privacy, told VOAs French to Africa service that her organization has been warning about the dangers of letting companies like Facebook collect the personal data of billions of people around the world.

Since 2010, weve been saying that countries with low-to-nil data protection are testing ground for worst practices by companies and governments, Owono tweeted.

The ANC, South Africas ruling political party since the end of apartheid, has used similar techniques through its own data mining, according to Plaut. Through billboards along the highways of Johannesburg and fake social media posts, they have invested millions of dollars in messages that advance their agenda, regardless of truth.

Open to manipulation

African voters, Plaut said, are as open to manipulation as any voter in the world. Theyre a sophisticated electorate, Plaut said, that knows politicians craft and distort messages to suit their needs. But knowledge doesnt inoculate people against the effects of disinformation.

Everybody is open to manipulation, Plaut said.

In Kenya, political advertisements played to fears surrounding terrorist group Al-Shabab and disease outbreaks. Persuasive messages about safety and health influenced an unknown number of voters, but enough to make an impact, Plaut acknowledged.

African ties

The role of data mining in Africa hasnt been confined to elections.

The SCL Group has extensive ties across Africa, with past projects spanning from Libya to Rwanda, and from South Sudan and Somalia all the way to Ghana, according to their website.

SCL says its mission is to be the premier provider of data analytics and strategy for behavior change. The kinds of behaviors they seek to influence shift, depending on their clients and partners  of whom there are many.

In Rwanda, SCL partnered with World Vision, a global Christian aid organization, to conduct research on community attitudes about nutrition and sanitation. In South Sudan, SCL worked with the United Nations Development Group to conduct a survey on the Disarmament, Demobilization and Reintegration Program.

SCL partnered with the Ghanaian Ministry of Health, along with a major British construction company, to research the country's attitudes toward the health care system.

In Somalia, SCL researched the tenability of the nationwide Somtelcom telephone network. The group also interviewed nearly 3,000 Libyans to develop policy recommendations to help the government address instability countrywide.

VOA reached out to John Apea, who is listed on SCLs website as its special adviser for SCL Ghana. Apea said he no longer works with SCL and would not provide additional information about the offices operations in the country.

Safeguarding democracy

The growth of digital media across Africa will present new opportunities to engage in sophisticated campaigns to influence not just voters but also policymakers and governments.

The solution, according to Plaut, is international oversight.

The African Union should be much more robust in insisting on its observers going to see elections and spending a good deal of time there, not just five minutes before the vote takes place, Plaut said.

In-depth reports filed months in advance of elections will give the public the tools they need to combat propaganda with a transparent account of their governments efforts to ensure a free and fair process.

Plaut anticipates closer scrutiny of the democratic process will lead to pushback and complaints of interference. Nonetheless, the efforts are worth it, he said.

The African Union, as the guardian of democracy in the continent, has a duty to go out there and really push for democracy throughout the continent, Plaut said.At least 14 people were killed Thursday when a car packed with explosives blew up in Mogadishu, the Somali capital.

Somali authorities said the car exploded outside the Weheliye hotel, which is frequented by politicians and businessmen. It is located on the Maka al-Mukaramah, Mogadishu's busiest street.

A car loaded with explosives and parked outside a hotel on a busy road exploded. So far, we can confirm that 14 people were killed and five injured, said Abdiaziz Hildhiban, the spokesman for the security minister.

The car was parked on the other side of the road opposite to the hotel. It destroyed the nearby buildings and killed civilians, mostly pedestrians, a witness told VOA. I saw the dead bodies of at least 10 people.

Government officials said the target of the attack was not yet clear.



There has been no claim of responsibility, but the Islamist militant group al-Shabab has carried out many similar attacks in Mogadishu in the past.A widely read Chinese state-run newspaper said Thursday that China should prepare for military action over self-ruled Taiwan, and pressure Washington over cooperation on North Korea, after the United States passed a law to boost ties with Taiwan.

Beijing was infuriated after U.S. President Donald Trump signed legislation last week that encourages the United States to send senior officials to Taiwan to meet Taiwanese counterparts and vice versa.

U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Alex Wong said in Taipei on Wednesday the United States commitment to Taiwan has never been stronger and the island is an inspiration to the rest of the Indo-Pacific region.

US law

China claims Taiwan as its own and considers the self-ruled island a wayward province, which Chinese President Xi Jinping said Tuesday would face the punishment of history for any attempt at separatism.

The Global Times said in an editorial China had to strike back against the U.S. law.

China can pressure the U.S. in other areas of bilateral cooperation: for example, the Korean Peninsula issue and Iran nuclear issue. China can also set itself against the U.S. in international organizations such as the U.N., it said.

The mainland must also prepare itself for a direct military clash in the Taiwan Straits. It needs to make clear that escalation of U.S.-Taiwan official exchanges will bring serious consequences to Taiwan, said the paper, which is published by the ruling Communist Partys official Peoples Daily.

This newspaper has suggested that the mainland can send military planes and warships across the Taiwan Straits middle line. This can be implemented gradually depending on the cross-Straits situation, it said.

Island a flashpoint

The island is one of Chinas most sensitive issues and a potential military flashpoint. Underlining that threat, Taiwan sent ships and an aircraft earlier Wednesday to shadow a Chinese aircraft carrier group through the narrow Taiwan Strait, its defense ministry said.

The Global Times said it was a misunderstanding to think that peaceful unification would be a harmonious, happy process.

Sticks matter more than flowers on the path to peaceful reunification, it said.

Chinas hostility towards Taiwan has risen since the 2016 election of President Tsai Ing-wen, a member of the islands pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party. China suspects Tsai wants to push for formal independence, which would cross a red line for Communist Party leaders in Beijing, though Tsai has said she wants to maintain the status quo and is committed to ensuring peace.The wave of ethnic violence sweeping through northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo has forced tens of thousands of people from their homes. Nearly 50,000 have crossed into Uganda.



The waters of Lake Albert look beautiful and even inviting, but they can also be dangerous. The U.N. says several Congolese refugees have died this year making the five-hour crossing to Uganda in rickety boats.



More continue to arrive every day. They are fleeing communal violence in Congo's Ituri Province. Tam Daniel Rogers is the UNHCR field officer at Sebagoro landing site.

WATCH: Congolese Refugees Fleeing to Uganda Recount Horrors





"And some are even taking cattle, like goats, like chicken and like cows. So one of the boats that capsized was apparently carrying 27 cows. All the cows died, but the human beings were rescued," said Rogers.



Many of the refugees VOA saw arrive came with few belongings. Many are searching for lost children and loved ones. Duniasikwetu Sorongani has not seen his wife in a month.



He said when the attackers came, they came in the night and killed many youth who were in the neighborhood. I was inside the gate and heard cries outside. When I got out to check, I found all my neighbors had been killed with machetes. I was forced to run.

At Sebagoro landing site, volunteers call for the new arrivals to line up to board the bus.



There is pushing. The refugees say they are exhausted.



Tit-for-tat conflict between the Hema and Lendu communities in the Ituri province of DRC has simmered for decades, often over land.



Survivors say unlike in the past, they were given no warning of recent attacks. And women are not spared.



Refugee Shantal Love said they burned my house and all my belongings. So, we had to run empty-handed. Even the clothes I am wearing now were given to me by good Samaritans at the border.



She got away with her two children. Her parents and other family members were killed.

In the span of three days in mid-March, the U.N. refugee agency said 4,000 people from Ituri crossed into Uganda.



The new arrivals eventually make their way to the Kyangwali refugee settlement  many still coming to grips with the violence they fled.



Refugee Kaigwa Che said, "I've heard on the radio the Lendu saying they are our brothers. But why is it that when those people come and start cutting people with machetes, arrows, spears and axes? Why is it that the soldiers don't retaliate? Why? That surprises me. If it's politics, we don't know."



The reception center in Kagoma has grown overcrowded. Kyangwali authorities fear for another outbreak of cholera.

In February, more than 600 refugees were infected and 26 died. Now, the Uganda Red Cross is taking no chances.



But even with such reminders, Red Cross volunteers say they struggle to enforce hand washing rules.



Since 2016, Uganda has taken in more than one million refugees from South Sudan, seriously straining resources. Amid the steady influx this year from Congo, Ugandan authorities only know too well that they need urgent donor support.Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt's private security detail accompanied him on first-class flights, the agency confirmed on Wednesday to U.S. House Democrats, who requested details on his travels amid growing scrutiny of Cabinet members' spending.

Democrats on the House of Representatives Energy Committee  Frank Pallone, Diana DeGette and Paul Tonko  received confirmation in a letter from EPA Associate Administrator Troy Lyons that Pruitt's security team had accompanied him in premium airplane seats because of security threats.

The EPA was responding to a Feb. 20 letter from the Democratic lawmakers asking for details about the use by Pruitt and his staff of first-class air travel.

The agency's "Protective Service Detail has identified specific, ongoing threats associated with the Administrator's air travel and, therefore, shifted his class based on certain security protocols that require him to be near the front of the plane," Lyons wrote to the lawmakers in a letter they published on Wednesday.

The letter said that the agency's assistant inspector general determined Pruitt had "significantly more threats" directed against him than previous EPA administrators.

EPA spokesman Jahan Wilcox said the travel adhered to federal protocols applied to this and previous presidential administrations.

Security decisions are made by EPAs Protective Service Detail and are similar to security protocol across the federal government, he said in a statement.



The lawmakers said they were concerned about the price taxpayers were forced to pay to accommodate Pruitt and his guard's first-class travel, as reports emerge surrounding his travel records from last year.

On Tuesday, newly released documents revealed Pruitt's $80,000 trip to Italy last summer for the G-20 summit entailed$30,000 in spending on personal security.

Another batch of travel expenses requested by Republican House Oversight Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy and obtained by the Washington Post showed he spent $68,000 on hotel stays and air travel on first-class and domestic flights from August 2017 through February 2018.

What is clear is that while he makes extreme cuts to critical public health and environmental protection programs, the Administrator has taken a holiday from all fiscal responsibility when it comes to his own travel and personal convenience," the lawmakers said in a statement.

The Democrats plan to press Pruitt on his spending at an energy panel hearing next month.

Other Cabinet secretaries, including Ben Carson, secretary of the Housing and Urban Development agency, and Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke have faced scrutiny because of reports of lavish spending on office furniture, as well as the use of private jets.Two experts say video of a deadly crash involving a self-driving Uber vehicle shows the sport utility vehicle's laser and radar sensors should have spotted a pedestrian, and computers should have braked to avoid the crash.

Authorities investigating the crash in a Phoenix suburb released the video of Uber's Volvo striking a woman as she walked from a darkened area onto a street.

Experts who viewed the video told The Associated Press that the SUV's sensors should have seen the woman pushing a bicycle and braked before the impact.

Also, Uber's human backup driver appears on the video to be looking down before crash and appears startled about the time of the impact.

"The victim did not come out of nowhere. She's moving on a dark road, but it's an open road, so Lidar [laser] and radar should have detected and classified her" as a human, said Bryant Walker Smith, a University of South Carolina law professor who studies autonomous vehicles.

Sam Abuelsmaid, an analyst for Navigant Research who also follow autonomous vehicles, said laser and radar systems can see in the dark much better than humans or cameras and that the pedestrian was well within the system's range.

"It absolutely should have been able to pick her up," he said. "From what I see in the video it sure looks like the car is at fault, not the pedestrian."

The video could have a broad impact on autonomous vehicle research, which has been billed as the answer to cutting the 40,000 traffic deaths that occur annually in the U.S. in human-driven vehicles.

Proponents say that human error is responsible for 94 percent of crashes, and that self-driving vehicles would be better because they see more and don't get drunk, distracted or drowsy.

But the experts said it appears from the video that there was some sort of flaw in Uber's self-driving system.

The video, Smith said, may not show the complete picture, but "this is strongly suggestive of multiple failures of Uber and its system, its automated system, and its safety driver."

Tempe police, as well as the National Transportation Safety Board and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration are investigating the Sunday night crash, which occurred outside of a crosswalk on a darkened boulevard.

The crash was the first death involving a fully autonomous test vehicle. The Volvo was in self-driving mode traveling about 40 mph (64 kph) with a human backup driver at the wheel when it struck 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg, police said.

The lights on the SUV did not illuminate Herzberg until a second or two before impact, raising questions about whether the vehicle could have stopped in time.

Tempe Police Chief Sylvia Moir told the San Francisco Chronicle earlier this week that the SUV likely would not be found at fault.

But Smith said that from what he observed on the video, the Uber driver appears to be relying too much on the self-driving system by not looking up at the road.

"The safety driver is clearly relying on the fact that the car is driving itself. It's the old adage that if everyone is responsible no one is responsible," Smith said. "This is everything gone wrong that these systems, if responsibly implemented, are supposed to prevent."

The experts were unsure if the test vehicle was equipped with a video monitor that the backup driver may have been viewing.

Uber immediately suspended all road-testing of such autos in the Phoenix area, Pittsburgh, San Francisco and Toronto.

An Uber spokeswoman, reached Wednesday night by email, did not answer specific questions about the video or the expert observations.

"The video is disturbing and heartbreaking to watch, and our thoughts continue to be with Elaine's loved ones. Our cars remain grounded, and we're assisting local, state and federal authorities in any way we can," the company said in a statement.

Tempe police have identified the driver as 44-year-old Rafael Vasquez. Court records show someone with the same name and birthdate as Vasquez spent more than four years in prison for two felony convictions  for making false statements when obtaining unemployment benefits and attempted armed robbery  before starting work as an Uber driver.

Tempe police and the NTSB declined to say whether the Vasquez who was involved in the fatal crash is the same Vasquez with two criminal convictions.

Attempts by the AP to contact Vasquez through phone numbers and social media on Wednesday afternoon were not successful.

Local media have identified the driver as Rafaela Vasquez. Authorities declined to explain the discrepancy in the driver's first name.

The fatality has raised questions about whether Uber does enough to screen its drivers.

Uber said Vasquez met the company's vetting requirements.

The company bans drivers convicted of violent crimes or any felony within the past seven years. Records show Vasquez' offenses happened before the seven-year period, in 1999 and 2000.

The company's website lists its pre-screening policies for drivers that spell out what drivers can and cannot have on their record to work for Uber.



Their driving history cannot have any DUI or drug-related driving offenses within the past seven years, for instance. They also are prevented from having more than three non-fatal accidents or moving violations within the past three years.Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy was handed preliminary charges Wednesday over allegations he accepted millions of euros in illegal campaign funding from the late Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi.

A judicial official told The Associated Press that investigating judges overseeing the probe had charged the ex-president with illegally funding his successful 2007 campaign, passive corruption and receiving money from Libyan embezzlement.

The person was not authorized to speak publicly about the case.

The charges involving illegal campaign funding from a foreign dictator are the most serious faced by a former French president in recent history. They were presented after Sarkozy was questioned for two days by anti-corruption police at a station in Nanterre, northwest of the French capital.

Investigators are examining allegations that Gadhafi's regime secretly gave Sarkozy 50 million euros (about $62 million) overall for his presidential election bid.

The sum would be more than double the legal campaign funding limit at the time  21 million euros. In addition, the alleged payments would violate French rules barring foreign financing and requiring that the source of campaign funds be declared.

Innocence proclaimed

Sarkozy, 63, who was France's president from 2007 to 2012, has repeatedly and vehemently denied any wrongdoing. According to the same source, he again proclaimed his innocence during his questioning by police.

The former president was released Wednesday night but placed under judicial supervision. Details of the restrictions he was ordered to obey have not been revealed.

In the French judicial system, preliminary charges mean Sarkozy is personally under formal investigation in a criminal case. The judges will keep investigating the case in the next weeks and months.

At the end of their investigation, they can decide either to drop the preliminary charges or to send Sarkozy to trial on formal charges.

Sarkozy had a complex relationship with Gadhafi. Soon after winning the French presidency, he invited the Libyan leader for a state visit and welcomed him to France with high honors.

But Sarkozy then put France in the forefront of the NATO-led airstrikes against Gadhafi's troops that helped rebel fighters topple Gadhafi's regime in 2011.

Sarkozy has faced other campaign-related legal troubles in the past. In February 2017, he was ordered to stand trial after being handed preliminary charges for suspected illegal overspending on his failed 2012 re-election campaign. Sarkozy has appealed the decision.

In 2013, he was cleared of allegations that he illegally took donations from France's richest woman, L'Oreal heiress Liliane Bettencourt, on the way to his 2007 election victory.

His attorney, Thierry Herzog, did not respond to requests for comment from AP.

Former aide questioned

Sarkozy's former top aide, the ex-minister Brice Hortefeux, was also questioned Tuesday but was not detained. He said on Twitter that the details he gave investigators "should help put an end to a series of mistakes and lies."

The investigation got a boost when French-Lebanese businessman Ziad Takieddine told the online investigative site Mediapart in 2016 that he delivered suitcases from Libya containing 5 million euros ($6.2 million) in cash to Sarkozy and his former chief of staff, Claude Gueant.

Takieddine repeated his allegations during a live interview with France's BFM TV on Wednesday night.

He said he personally handed a suitcase containing 2 million euros (about $2.5 million) in cash to Sarkozy at the then-candidate's apartment and another suitcase with 1.5 million euros (about $1.9 million) to Sarkozy and a close aide at the French Interior Ministry. Sarkozy was interior minister at the time.

Takieddine alleged he gave a third suitcase with 1.5 million euros in cash to the aide alone. He said the money was not meant to finance Sarkozy's presidential campaign in 2007, but to honor contracts between France and Libya.Egyptians go to the polls next week in what is essentially a one-candidate election considered by critics to be a return of sorts to authoritarian rule, after a 2011 revolution that sparked loftier expectations for the region. But the bigger picture is that in the Middle East as a whole, democracy has largely failed to take hold.

From Morocco in the west to Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf emirates in the east, monarchies have proven more stable than places that experimented with government of the people.

Non-monarchies like Syria and Yemen, which before their wars did have functioning central governments, never made much of a pretense of democracy  not even in the half-hearted sense of communist East Germany calling itself a "Democratic Republic."

And today many argue that with so little democratic tradition and so much illiteracy  in the case of Egypt, at least a quarter of the population  some places are just not ready. That may sound like an excuse but it does borrow something from the Greek philosopher Plato, who contended that the masses needed help from experts to run complex affairs.

Countries that tried fairly free balloting  like Iraq and Libya after the fall of Moammar Gadhafi  tended to find the effort mired in tribal and sectarian voting. That largely predetermines the result and diminishes democracy into something of a census.

Such cases tend to be further undermined by a tyranny of the majority: it is rare to find respect for the rights of minorities, ideological or ethnic. That makes them desperate, disdainful of democracy, and likely to be tyrannical should political tides reverse. That's how the minority Sunnis of Iraq became vulnerable to the vicious appeal of the Islamic State group.

While the democratic record is dismal, the Middle East is hardly alone in what seems to be a global trend away from liberal democracy at a turbulent time.

Egypt's President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi is following a model perfected by Russia's Vladimir Putin, an equally illiberal leader who was re-elected this week after maneuvering his own chief opponent out of the running. El-Sissi has jailed opponents by the thousands  mostly Islamists  and, like Putin, placed security and the economy ahead of all else, delivering in those areas as best he can.

But el-Sissi insists that the real power rests with the people and boasts of an independent judiciary and parliament, claims disputed by rights groups. Under el-Sissi's rule women's representation in the acquiescent parliament and the Cabinet are at highs, Egypt has enacted important economic reforms, and he has also emerged as a strong global voice against Islamic militancy, advocating a moderate religious discourse.

Ironically, it is Egypt's continuing claims to be democratic that earn it the criticism that openly despotic countries in the Arab world seem more nimbly able to avoid.

Here's a look at some of those cases:

The Gulf

Freedom of assembly is prohibited throughout the Gulf states of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman and Kuwait, where kings, sheikhs, emirs and sultans inherit their posts. Criticism of the ruling system is a punishable crime and unfettered access to state institutions is rare. Local media is largely state-run or state-linked. In all six countries, which are U.S. allies and major U.S. weapons purchasers, government ministers are appointed by the ruler. In Saudi Arabia, where the only elections held have been for local council seats, dozens of activists, writers, intellectuals and moderate clerics are imprisoned for offenses such as "disobeying the ruler." Human rights experts have described the UAE's judiciary as under the "de facto control" of the country's executive branch  a common refrain throughout the Gulf. Bahrain, a small island-nation ruled by a Sunni monarchy, has crushed protests led by the country's majority Shiite population and cracked down on the media.

Lebanon

With a parliamentary system and regular presidential elections, Lebanon has trappings of a democracy, but politics are dominated by former warlords and family dynasties that have long used the country's sectarian-based power-sharing system to perpetuate corruption and nepotism, and the Hezbollah militia is very powerful. All senior government positions are allocated according to sect, including the head of state, who should be a Christian, the prime minister, a Sunni Muslim, and the parliament speaker, a Shiite. The formula is based on outdated demographic data and does not account for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who are denied citizenship and a vote. There hasn't been a parliament election since 2009, and lawmakers have unconstitutionally extended their terms. Lebanon has also been letting press freedoms slide, summoning talk show hosts to court and sentencing an analyst to jail for critical comments about the army.

Jordan

Power rests with King Abdullah II who has the final say on policy issues, appointing and frequently reshuffling the Cabinet as a means of deflecting public frustration. Gerrymandering and the absence of political parties have rendered elections for the toothless parliament largely meaningless. The only significant organized opposition group, the Muslim Brotherhood, has been sidelined in recent years. Pressure after the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011 to introduce democratic reforms has ebbed after the revolts turned violent in several countries, causing many to agree to fewer freedoms rather than risk a descent into chaos. Jordanian journalists are careful not to cross the royal family or security forces.

Iraq

Dysfunctional, dangerous and corrupt though it has been, Iraq is arguably more democratic than the regional norm. It has regular, competitive elections, but has been plagued by entrenched corruption and persistent instability that undermine its institutions. Iraq's constitution  drafted in 2005 with deep American involvement after the U.S.-led invasion toppled long-time leader Saddam Hussein in 2003  defines the country's government as democratic. But governments are deeply divided along sectarian lines, resulting in gridlock. Millions of Iraqis were allowed to gather for anti-corruption protests in 2015, but three years earlier, protests held in the country's Sunni heartland were brutally suppressed  and two years later, most of that area was taken over by Islamic State militants who ruled until their ouster last year. Iraq's constitution ensures freedom of the press, but Iraq remains one of the world's deadliest countries for journalists and many journalists self-censor, according to a study by Freedom House.

North Africa

The Arab Spring started in Tunisia with the ouster on Jan. 14, 2011, of the nation's long-time autocratic president, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who fled to Saudi Arabia. Tunisia now grapples with Islamist extremists  who have killed dozens of foreign tourists in two major attacks  as well as an economy on the rails. But it is at least a budding democracy, the only one in the Maghreb region, where joblessness, especially among youth, poses a major threat of unrest. Algeria, which has had the same president since 1999, managed to keep Arab Spring unrest at bay, in part because the population lived through a decade of deadly violence in the 1990s battling Islamist extremists. And the kingdom of Morocco, known for its stability, goes through the motions of a democracy, but the real ruler is the monarch, Mohammed VI, and the invisible royal coterie known as the Makhzen.

The wider region

The non-Arab nations of the region offer their own examples of flawed democracies. Turkey has free elections but an increasingly illiberal system whose politicized security apparatus and judiciary has put many thousands of opponents of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in jail. Iran has a supposedly free presidential vote  for the tiny number of candidates who are approved by unelected clerics whose heavy-handed rule is in fact supreme. Israel has an impressively functioning democracy, though not for the millions of Palestinians it has occupied for over 50 years  and the nationalist government of Benjamin Netanyahu has tried to crack down on human rights groups and has lately also been targeting the media, as well as law enforcement, as tools of enemy "elites."Instead of spring flowers, winter has returned to parts of the United States and Europe. Storm Toby, the fourth nor'easter this month, spans from the mid-Atlantic state of Virginia to southern Maine, and reached into the Ohio and Tennessee valleys. Heavy snow covered wide swaths of the US on Wednesday and is expected to continue through Thursday in some states. As VOA's Zlatica Hoke reports, the snow also returned to parts of Europe.A Kenyan appeals court has struck down the use of forced anal testing in homosexuality cases. Rights activists are hailing the verdict as a key victory that could have a ripple effect in the region.



The court of appeals in the coastal city of Mombasa ruled Thursday that the forced anal testing of suspected gay men is unlawful. The judges deemed the practice a violation of human rights.

Njeri Gateru, the acting director of Kenya's National Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission, which filed the case, describes her reaction.

Excited, happy, affirmed mostly," she said. "We just honestly think that its about time that the dignity of LGBT people is preserved as it should be, as enshrined in the constitution.

Homosexuality is illegal in Kenya, punishable by up to 14 years in prison. Authorities have routinely subjected men arrested under the law to anal examinations.

Thursday's verdict stems from a 2015 case. In 2015, Mombasa police obtained a court order to force two men to undergo anal exams and HIV testing at a local hospital. The two men had been arrested and charged with unnatural sex.

The National Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission challenged the court's decision on the grounds that anal exams are cruel, inhumane and degrading. The commission also argued that the exams were a breach of medical ethics, both in Kenya and internationally.

Neela Ghoshal is Senior Researcher in the LGBT Rights program at Human Rights Watch. She called Thursdays ruling historic.

The appeal has made it very clear that biases against someones sexual orientation cannot be a reason to subject them to this really quite medieval form of torture, and I think that there is a good chance that this ruling will serve as precedent in other countries as well," she said.

She says activists in Uganda plan to file a constitutional challenge against the use of anal exams, and predicts that activists will do the same in other African countries like where the exams have not been banned.

Homosexuality remains far from accepted in Kenya.

Dr. Ezekiel Mutua serves as the chief executive officer of the Kenya Film Classification Board. Hes more popularly known as the countrys morality cop.

Gay people are human beings, and therefore to the extent that someone could be subjected to anal tests, I think thats very wrong and that was a violation of their rights. I would actually support them in that regard, but that does not mean that homosexuality is right," he said.

In February, Kenyas High Court began hearing of arguments in a potentially landmark case that seeks to repeal Section 162 of the colonial-era penal code. The plaintiffs argue that the state cannot criminalize consensual same-sex relations between adults. It is the first time that a Kenyan court has considered such an argument.Proposed cuts in the 2019 foreign assistance budget could jeopardize U.S. security and democracy-building efforts abroad, U.S. lawmakers warned the director for the U.S. Agency for International Development at a hearing Wednesday.

"These proposed cuts would impact a number of U.S. priorities, including efforts to combat terrorists, combat poachers and human traffickers," House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce, a Republican from California, told fellow members in a hearing with USAID Director Mark Green.

"U.S. leadership was key to stopping Ebola in West Africa, and continued engagement is needed to address future health threats before those health threats could hit our shores," Royce continued.

He underscored that the cuts also could diminish U.S. support of democratic institutions worldwide.

Consideration of the 2019 foreign assistance budget comes as the State Department is set to change leadership, with CIA Director Mike Pompeo awaiting Senate confirmation to replace former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, whom President Donald Trump fired this month. USAID is an independent agency that works closely with the State Department abroad on U.S. government policy objectives.

Budget cuts

Lawmakers from both sides of the aisle expressed concern about the White House's proposed 33 percent cut that would bring USAID's yearly budget to $16.8 billion, a change they noted would make only a small fraction of a difference in federal spending.

"USAID accounts for roughly one-half of 1 percent of the total federal budget. So arguments that we cannot afford it just don't fly with me," said Representative Eliot Engel of New York, the ranking Democrat on the Foreign Affairs Committee. "I just want to ensure that any changes are done to modernize American development and make it work better and not simply start with a budget number and downsizing to fit it."

A former House member whom the panel warmly welcomed back to the chamber, Green defended the White House budget, saying, "The president is attempting to balance what he sees is needed for the security of our citizens, advancing American leadership and our commitment to efficiency and effectiveness."

Green told the committee that USAID's new mission statement includes "an explicit commitment to strengthening democratic governance abroad," pledging to continue the agency's long-standing work supporting electoral processes and democratic expression.

Executive branch budgets provide Congress with a suggestion of funding priorities. After making their way through the legislative process, agency budgets are often in significantly different form. Lawmakers also singled out bright spots in the White House budget they said would address needed organizational changes at USAID.

"The budget prioritizes funding for programs and promotes greater self-reliance, including helping countries mobilize their own resources for development. It emphasizes transparency, as well as accountability and programming for results," Royce said.

Greater accountability

The Trump White House has asked for greater accountability from international partners, suggesting the U.S. has shouldered too much of the burden for common defense and aid during past administrations. Some House Democrats argued the cost of international aid is a worthy investment, however, assuring U.S. national security and reaping longer-term benefits.

"I understand that our dollars are not unlimited and that we need to prioritize, but this budget does not seem to prioritize some of the most important assistance and development projects that the U.S. has invested in for years," Representative Ted Deutch, a Democrat from Florida, said. "Not because it helps people in countries around the world, but because it's in our own national security interests."

Green told the House panel he is working to use the resources he has available as much as possible.

"We are working very hard to encourage our partners around the world to do more, and I think many of them are," Green told the panel. "We're seeing increased contributions from Germany, France, particularly South Korea and Japan, also mobilizing domestic resource mobilization programs to help those countries where we're working better capture their own revenues and resources."

Myriad challenges

In his testimony, Green addressed a number of pressing development challenges worldwide, including anti-corruption efforts in Ukraine and the Syrian refugee crisis. Additionally, USAID is facing challenges from a potential rival in China, which announced this month it would be setting up its own international development agency to better coordinate foreign aid for President Xi Jinping's Belt and Road Initiative, promoting a new Silk Road in China and beyond.

Green addressed lawmaker concerns about China, saying the U.S. would take a different approach.

"There is the China choice, which is sweetener money up front, and then the fine print and the indebtedness," he said. "What we're trying to do with our assistance is to help countries build the ability to lead themselves. So what we want is self-reliance."Defense Secretary Jim Mattis is applauding Saudi Arabia for its humanitarian aid to war-torn Yemen.



Speaking at the start of a Pentagon meeting with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Mattis said the U.S. is committed to working with Saudis and the United Nations to accelerate a political solution to the civil war.



Mattis says the appointment last month of a new U.N. envoy to Yemen is an opportunity to speed up the push for a political resolution to the conflict, which has killed more than 10,000 civilians since it started in March 2015.



He called the Saudis "part of the solution," adding that "we are going to end this war" on terms that are positive for the people of Yemen and their neighbors on the Arabian Peninsula.







Ethiopia is appealing for $1.6 billion to provide emergency and long-term aid for 7.88 million people affected by drought, floods and conflict. U.N. officials presented their humanitarian and disaster resilience plan.

Ethiopia is emerging from three consecutive years of drought in a perilous state. Among those hardest-hit are some 2.4 million pastoralists who have lost 80 percent of their livestock.

U.N. resident and humanitarian coordinator in Ethiopia Ahunna Eziakonwa-Onochie tells VOA herders depend upon the meat and milk from their animals to feed their families.

So, we are estimating this year that we will see about 3.5 million children who suffer from moderate acute malnutrition and just over 300,000 who have to face severe acute malnutrition," said Eziakonwa-Onochie.

Eziakonwa-Onochie warns children who are severely acutely malnourished are at risk of dying if they do not urgently receive special nutritional feeding.

Time is of the essence. Unless we are able to catch them early, we end up having more kids crossing into that red zone of severe acute malnutrition," said Eziakonwa-Onochie. "That is what we are absolutely determined to avoid this year. And, that is why we are asking for these resources now because it is totally preventable.

Other vulnerable people include 1.7 million the United Nations says are displaced by drought and those displaced by conflict in the border areas of the Oromia and Somali regions. They will need to be relocated to areas where there is water so they can restock their animals or pursue other livelihood opportunities.

In parallel with the emergency needs, Eziakonwa-Onochie says the Ethiopian plan aims to build resilience so the nation can better deal with disasters before they strike. For example, she says the government and humanitarian partners are considering digging bore holes in the lowlands. This would make water available for people and their animals when rain is scarce and drought appears on the horizon.The latest nor'easter lost some punch as it rolled into New England on Thursday, as millions of people elsewhere in the Northeast dug out from the storm that dumped more than a foot of snow in some places, knocked out power to tens of thousands of customers and had many wishing for more spring-like weather.

"We're supposed to be getting ready for Easter, not a nor'easter," said 46-year-old Raeme Dempsey, as her 6-year-old daughter, Jadalynn, pulled her toward a Philadelphia park so they could see the trees blanketed in freshly fallen snow.

Long Island took a hard hit, with Bay Shore and Patchogue leading the way with 19 inches of snow. While some parts of Pennsylvania saw more than a foot of snow, major cities along Interstate 95 saw much less. New York City's Central Park recorded about 8 inches while downtown Philadelphia got 7.

The storm weakened a bit in the early hours of Thursday, and Boston expected to escape with just a few inches of snow before it tapered off Thursday afternoon. Along the Massachusetts coast, winds gusted to 40 mph (64 kph) and some towns dealt with flooding.

"It's time to move on to another season," said Pancho Ortega, who was clearing the sidewalk outside his soon-to-open restaurant in Philadelphia.

Airlines canceled more than 4,000 flights Wednesday, but they lumbered back into service throughout the Northeast on Thursday. On the ground, Amtrak scaled back service on the Northeast corridor between Washington and Boston, and continued a modified schedule Thursday. At least two traffic deaths were reported in New Jersey and on New York's Long Island.

In New Jersey, the state's major utilities reported slightly more than 76,000 customers without service Thursday. Officials also were trying to determine whether the storm caused more beach erosion at the Jersey shore.

The storm also unloaded snow on Virginia and West Virginia as it pushed into the Northeast. Virginia reported more 240 traffic accidents.In a village in northern Nigeria, teen wives gather on mats spread out in the dirt just outside the chief imams home. They talk about their initial reactions to getting married.

I had no interest in it at the time. I was just doing my own thing. Marriage was not on my mind until when God wished it was time, says 16-year-old Fadilah Bello. Shes the boldest of them, talking freely and coaxing on the others.

Well, of course you would be nervous or scared. You cry on your way to your new home because you are leaving your parents and you dont know where you will be taken to, said Sahura Misbahu. She got married three years ago. She thinks shes 15; she doesnt know her husbands age.

Had it been I had a choice, they should have given me a year to graduate from school but since this was what the parents wanted, I had no other choice, says the 15-year-old chief imams daughter, Aisha Ahmed.

Nigeria has the largest number of child brides in Africa, according to the U.N. Childrens Fund. The practice is most prevalent in the predominantly Muslim north where conservative Islamic groups staunchly resist efforts to criminalize child marriage. Most girls accept whether they want to or not, but times are changing.

We are seeing more and more girls running away from child marriages, says Hajia Rabi Salisu, the founder of Arrida Relief Foundation and owner of a childrens home in Kaduna.

She and other activists want states in the north to criminalize marriage before the age of 18. A prominent activist, Salisu says her advocacy has put her at loggerheads with Muslim groups and she regularly receives death threats.

I sleep in a different home almost every night because my life is at stake simply for trying to protect the lives of children, she told VOA.

Fellow runaways

Rahmatu Ibrahim and Najaatu Abdullahi, both 14, didnt know each other few months ago. But their similar circumstances brought them to Salisus childrens home.

"I was being forced into an arranged marriage," said Rahmatu. "That was why I ran away. I dont love him and I dont know him. I had never seen him before. A date was set and a day [before] the wedding, I ran away."

Najaatu, whose parents watched her leave, wants to focus on her education.

VOA met Sumayya Musa in another village in Kaduna State. A sprightly 18-year-old student, she has defied the expectations placed on her by the community.

My father wanted me to get married when I was 13, but my mother said no, because she was in support of my decision to further my education, she says. People here in this village laugh at me because I am not yet married. They gossip and sometimes I used to cry. But the moment I remember the advantage of my studies, I stop crying.

Nigerian lawmakers have been debating marriage customs for decades. The federal 2003 Child Rights Act mandates that both parties be at least 18 to marry, but its left for states to ratify the act and most of the states in northern Nigeria have not.

Muslim rights groups have been meeting with northern state lawmakers to express their concerns. Some activists propose a minimum age requirement of 15, but the idea offends Awwal Tesleem Shittu, a member of the Muslim Lawyers Association of Nigeria.

He says that according to Islam, a girls readiness for marriage cannot be determined by her age.

A girl of 13 years old, if she is not physically okay, maybe she doesn't have a sound mind, she could not comprehend, she could not differentiate between right and wrong, she is not fit for marriage. She is not ripe for marriage," he says. "A girl of nine years, if she is sound, she is physically okay, she can go in, because in Islam there is no barrier to that."

The Quran specifies that girls can marry once they reach maturity, which some conservative scholars define as puberty, while other Muslim communities and scholars accept 18 as the age of maturity.

Senator's bride triggered movement

The #ChildNotBride hashtag began trending in Nigeria in 2013 after a senator and former governor, Ahmad Sani Yerima, was accused of marrying a 13-year-old. Yerima denied the accusation but declined to reveal the age of the girl in question. Yerima also supported a legal amendment to consider any married girl, regardless of age, an adult before the law.

The 2014 case of a 14-year-old girl in Kano who admitted to killing her 35-year-old husband with rat poison again brought child marriage under scrutiny. Police said the girls father forced her to wed. The murder charges were eventually dropped.

Rights activists say it is poverty, not religion, that drives parents to marry off their young daughters.

"They just want to take these girls off their hands as fast as possible," said activist Mustapha Wakil, who notes that economically disadvantaged parents have been accepting unusually low dowries - as little as 3,000 naira, the equivalent of $8. Parents used to demand at least 40,000 naira, or $112.

Wakil is campaigning for his state of Yobe in northern Nigeria to pass the federal Child Rights Act because he says the current state statutes on marriage are confusing, in particular clauses differentiating betrothal and consummation.

In a village outside the Kaduna state capital, 14-year-old Basira Bello, is preparing for her wedding. Shes a shy one, but she managed to say that shes excited because all of her friends are already married.

Soon, shell marry Salihu Amiru, about 20 years her senior.

I do not want men to be looking at her and if I allow her to continue with school, men will be looking at her as she walks to school or even the men in the class. I cant allow that, he said.

He wants to have children as quickly as possible; hes hoping to have many daughters.

As for the runaways, Rahmatu and Najaatu, they just want to hold on to their childhoods a little while longer. They are attending school and hope their families will one day forgive them for running away.

This report was supported by Code for Africa, a data journalism initiative.The world's largest collection of ocean garbage floating in the Pacific Ocean, halfway between Hawaii and California, is now bigger than France, Germany and Spain combined.

The sprawling patch of detritus, known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, contains nearly 80,000 tons of plastic, a study released Thursday found.

Winds and converging ocean currents funnel the garbage into a central location, said the study's lead author, Laurent Lebreton of the Ocean Cleanup Foundation, a nonprofit organization that spearheaded the research.

Lebreton said the trash in the patch, discovered in the early 1990s, comes from countries around the Pacific Rim, including nations in Asia as well as North and South America.

The patch is not a solid mass of plastic. It includes 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic. The new figures are as much as 16 times higher than previous estimates.

While tiny fragments of plastic are the most numerous, nearly half of the weight of rubbish is composed of discarded fishing nets. Other items spotted in the stew of plastic include bottles, plates, buoys, ropes and even a toilet seat.

Caught by currents

Every year, millions of tons of plastic enter the ocean. Some of it drifts into large systems of circulating ocean currents, known as gyres. Once trapped in a gyre, the plastic will break down into microplastics, which may be ingested by sea life.

"I've been doing this research for a while, but it was depressing to see," Lebreton said.

The message of the study is clear, Lebreton said: "It goes back to how we use plastic."

"We're not going to get away from plastic  in my opinion, it's very useful, in medicine, transportation and construction. But I think we must divert the way we use plastic, particularly in terms of single-use plastic and those objects that have a very short service lifespan."

The study was based on a three-year mapping effort conducted by an international team of scientists affiliated with the Ocean Cleanup Foundation, six universities and an aerial sensor company.A court in Islamabad issued an arrest warrant this week for Khadim Hussain Rizvi, the founder of Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP), in connection with last year's protests that turned violent and disrupted public order in Islamabad for nearly three weeks.

The Anti-Terrorism Court in Islamabad is hearing three cases against Khadim Rizvi, his accomplices and the demonstrators, accusing them of terrorism, violence and attacks on security forces during the Islamabad sit-in last November.

Earlier this month, the court declared Rizvi a fugitive following his failure to appear before the court despite several summonses.

The court directed law enforcement authorities on Tuesday to arrest Rizvi and present him along with others accused during the next court hearing, scheduled for April 4.

Islamabad sit-in

Rizvi, along with thousands of his followers, staged a sit-in November 6, 2017, that paralyzed the capital for 20 days.

He and his followers demanded the federal government remove Law Minister Zahid Hamid, whom they accused of committing blasphemy over an omission in a parliamentary bill that introduced modification in the so-called "Khatm-I Nabuwwat" oath, which emphasizes that prophecy ends with Prophet Muhammad.

The Elections Act of 2017 attempted to change a phrase in the official oath of the country, from "I solemnly swear" to "I believe." The modification never materialized because of pressure from critics like Rizvi, who insisted that the oath ought to remain unchanged.

TLP members alleged that it was a deliberate effort by the government to favor Ahmadis, a religious minority in the country who call themselves Muslims but do not believe in the closure of prophecy. The government does not recognize this group as Muslims, and critics of the oath believe the phrase targets and singles out Ahmadis because when taking the oath of allegiance, they are pushed to disclose their faith by swearing the Muslim creed.

The government first refused Rizvi's demands but later compromised after the efforts to disperse protesters by security forces turned violent and led to a series of demonstrations in other Pakistan cities as well.

Pakistan's military mediated between the civilian government and the protesters at the time to reach an agreement.

"On the assurance of the chief of the army staff, we are calling off the sit-in," Rizvi told a crowd after the negotiations but before calling off the protest.

Party history

TLP is an Islamist party and was established last year in August. The party was inspired by the actions of Mumtaz Qadri, who assassinated Punjab Governor Salman Taseer in 2011 because Taseer had demanded changes to the country's controversial anti-blasphemy law and Qadri disagreed with his stance.

Qadri was serving as Taseer's bodyguard at the time of the assassination.

After being found guilty of murder, Qadri was sentenced to death and hanged in February 2017.

Qadri's grave has since turned into a shrine. Large numbers of people visit it regularly and pay tribute to him.

Now, TLP demands sharia be imposed as the law of Pakistan.

Founder's background

Rizvi, commonly known as Khadim Rizvi, is from Attock, in Punjab province. He is a Sunni Muslim and once worked as a religious cleric in a mosque in Lahore, where he used to deliver Friday sermons before prayers.

He also served as a government employee in the religious affairs department of Punjab, but was fired from his job after he continued to hail Qadri for killing Taseer.

Rizvi came into prominence after he launched Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan and vowed to continue the ideology and legacy of Qadri.

Since its start, the party has been a challenger in several by-elections in Pakistan and backed contestants who openly praised Qadri and vowed to defend his stance and legacy.

The party is registered with the Election Commission of Pakistan.A Palestinian teen who grabbed the worlds attention when she slapped and kicked Israeli soldiers, was sentenced to eight months in prison Wednesday by an Israeli military court.

Ahed Tamimi, 17, became an instant hero to Palestinians after the December assault that was posted on social media.

Under the terms of a plea bargain, Tamimi was also fined $1,400, and was given credit for the three months shed already served in jail, according to her lawyer. She had been facing 12 counts, including aggravated assault.

No justice under occupation! Tamimi shouted to reporters.

Amnesty International condemned the sentence as another alarming example of the Israeli authorities contempt for their obligations to protect the basic rights of Palestinians living under their occupation, especially children. Ahed Tamimi is a minor. Nothing she did warrants her continued imprisonment, and she must be released.

Israeli soldiers arrested the teen near her home in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh. Tamimi and other Palestinians were protesting against U.S. President Donald Trumps decision to recognize Jerusalem as the Israeli capital.

Her mother and cousin were also arrested.

Israeli army officials said at the time that the soldiers acted professionally and appropriately when they restrained themselves from taking harsher action.

But a number of right-wing Israelis said the soldiers let a young girl humiliate them and the state of Israel.He took office in 2016 as a political outsider boasting that his strong business credentials would buoy Peru's economy while sweeping away endemic corruption. But with his offer of resignation, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski joins a long list of recent Peruvian presidents undone by scandals that have destroyed voters' trust in their elected officials.

Kuczynski, flanked by his Cabinet, announced his decision to resign Wednesday in a nationally televised address, accusing opponents led by the daughter of former strongman Alberto Fujimori of plotting his overthrow for months and making it impossible to govern.

Shortly after, he exited the back door of the baroque presidential palace built by Spanish conquerors and was driven off, all alone, in an SUV.



Congress was expected to vote Thursday to accept his resignation, or if not, to impeach him.



It was an ignominious end to a presidency that started with the highest of expectations.



When Kuczynski, a former Wall Street investor, was elected in 2016, he was immediately thrust to the helm of a conservative revival in South America. Voters had grown tired of once-dominant leftist governments marred by corruption and blamed for squandering a decade-long commodities boom that had ended abruptly.



At home, he promised an investment windfall from old business buddies in the U.S., where he lived for decades and met his current and former American wives. He also surprised many by speaking out forcefully against Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro and leading a coalition of like-minded leaders to isolate the socialist leader for human rights abuses.



But the 79-year-old was hobbled almost immediately out of the gate. His self-tailored party, named for his own PPK initials, won just 18 seats in the 130-member congress. And instead of courting supporters on the left who pushed him to victory by a razor-thin margin over opponent Keiko Fujimori, he tried in vain to form an alliance with the former strongman's power-hungry, vindictive allies. Aides privately complained of stubbornness and political naivete.



"When Kuczynski came in, everyone hailed him as Peru's salvation," said Laura Sharkey, a Bogota-based analyst at Control Risks consultancy. "But he just completely underestimated the strength of the opposition."



Even on the economy, his strong suit, Kuczynski fell short, as growth has slowed and promised mining and infrastructure projects never got off the ground.



What most outraged voters, however, was his seeming dishonesty, something that has long dominated Peruvian politics and he had vowed to end.

For months, as three of his predecessors were probed and one even jailed for taking bribes from Brazilian construction firm Odebrecht, Kuczynski steadfastly denied having any business or political ties with the company at the heart of Latin America's biggest graft scandal.



Then, Fujimori's party produced confidential bank documents from Odebrecht showing $780,000 in decade-old payments to his consulting firm. Kuczynski said he had no knowledge of the payments that overlapped with his years as a government minister and said that in any case had paid taxes on all of his earnings.



To save his skin he cut the sort of closed-door deal that Peruvians have grown to abhor. A group of lawmakers led by Kenji Fujimori defied his sister's leadership of the Popular Force party to narrowly block Kuczynski's impeachment. Days later, Kuczynski pardoned the feuding siblings' father from a 25-year jail sentence for human rights abuses committed during his decade-long presidency.



Ultimately that alliance spelled his downfall. Popular Force this week revealed secretly shot videos of Kenji Fujimori and other presidential allies allegedly trying to buy the support of an opposition lawmaker with promises of state contracts.



Kuczynski denied any bribery attempt, but for Peruvians traumatized by the videos of Fujimori's longtime spy chief, Vladimiro Montesinos, handing out huge stacks of bills to politicians, military officers and media moguls, the damage was done.



To be sure, Keiko Fujimori seems unlikely to be able to fill the void. An Ipsos poll taken this month showed that while a dismal 19 percent of Peruvians approve of Kuczynski's presidency an even smaller number, 14 percent, have a favorable view of congress, where Fujimori's party is dominant. The poll had a margin of error of 2.8 percentage points.



In addition to the bitter feud with her brother, Fujimori herself is facing accusations that her own 2011 presidential campaign received never-declared contributions from Odebrecht, something she denies.



For many Peruvians, the clandestine videos that did Kuczynski in are a reminder of the corrupt, deceit-filled politics of the Fujimori era that they had hoped was behind them. In the coming days, as Peru works its way through a messy presidential succession, that widespread outrage is likely to fuel louder calls for early elections  for both congress and the presidency.



"The only public institution with moral authority left in Peru is the fire department," said Oscar Mendoza, a lawyer standing outside the presidential palace moments after Kuczynski waved goodbye to aides. "All the rest, when you touch them with your finger, pus comes out because they are fully corrupted by graft."

Philippine police said they killed 13 drug suspects and arrested more than 100 suspected dealers and criminals in 24 hours of raids in a province with a record of bloody crackdowns.

The suspects were killed in gunbattles with police in a city and eight towns in Bulacan province just north of Manila, said police Senior Superintendent Romeo Caramat Jr. More than 70 raids were launched in Bulacan on Wednesday, leading to the arrests of 109 people, including 92 suspected drug dealers and users, he said.



The latest violence raises the death toll in President Rodrigo Duterte's anti-drug crackdown to 4,239 since it was launched in July 2016, with more than 131,500 others arrested. Governments led by the United States and the EU have expressed alarm and called on the Philippines to take steps to halt the bloodshed.



Human rights groups have cited much higher death tolls and called for an independent investigation, including by the United Nations.



Duterte has lashed out at critics and declared last week that the Philippines was backing out of the International Criminal Court, where he's facing a possible complaint for the thousands of killings.



In the raids, police seized more than 250 small packets of methamphetamine, marijuana and 19 firearms, including a rifle and a shotgun, police said. A similar crackdown in the province in August left 32 alleged drug offenders dead in the highest single-day toll in the nearly two years of the crackdown.



Last month, Bulacan police killed 10 drug suspects in a 24-hour sweep.



"These operations are part of our stepped-up campaign against drugs and all other forms of criminality in the province," Caramat said. "Unfortunately, 13 of the suspects were killed when our officers fired in self-defense."'



In one of the firefights in San Jose del Monte city, three motorcycle-riding drug dealers were killed in a clash when they sensed that a drug buyer was an officer, Caramat said. Backup officers returned fire and killed the three but a fourth suspect escaped, Caramat said, adding three pistols were taken from the three.



Duterte has denied ordering police to carry out extrajudicial killings but has repeatedly threatened suspected drug lords and dealers with death in public speeches. He cites police casualties  at least 91 dead and 227 wounded  as proof of the danger law enforcers face.



Human rights groups, however, have said their investigations showed officers gunned down arrested suspects then set up crime scenes to make it appear the unarmed suspects opened fire first.Austin, Texas, Police Chief Brian Manley says suspected serial bomber Mark Conditt left behind a 25-minute cellphone video before killing himself as police moved in to arrest him.

Manley gave no details of what he considers to be Conditts confession.

He does not mention anything about terrorism, nor does he mention anything about hate. But instead it is the outcry of a very challenged young man, talking about challenges in his personal life, Manley said.

Authorities had warned there could still be bombs in the city, but by late Wednesday expressed confidence no more packages posed a threat to the public.

Police believe Conditt was behind the six bombs in and around Austin over the last three weeks, five of which exploded, killing two people and seriously wounding five others.

Conditt killed himself by setting off a seventh bomb in his car early Wednesday as police closed in to arrest him. One officer was knocked back from the car by the force of the blast.

Investigators were able to zero in on Conditt as their main suspect by monitoring store surveillance video, cellphone signals, and through witnesses who saw a strange-looking man wearing gloves and a blonde wig and carrying a box.

Congressman Michael McCaul, who represents the Austin area, said Conditts fatal mistake was visiting a Federal Express store to mail a package. It allowed authorities to obtain the surveillance video that showed him and his vehicle and its license plate.

Agents say they are certain bomb-making components found in Conditts house match those found in the bombs.

Fred Milanowski, an agent with the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, said what we do know is we believe the same person built each one of these devices, but it is hard to say if the suspect acted alone.

Investigators also say they want to find out how Conditt acquired the knowledge to successfully build such devices.

So far, they know little about the 23-year-old Conditt other than he was unemployed, a college dropout and had no criminal record. Federal prosecutors filed a criminal complaint before Conditt died charging him with one count of unlawful possession and transfer of a destructive device.

Neighbors say he was smart and polite and a deep thinker. But he condemned homosexuality on a social media blog and said gay marriage should be outlawed.

Conditts family issued a statement saying they are devastated and broken and offered prayers for those families who have lost loved ones ... and for the soul of our Mark.

Police have been investigating the bombings as possible hate crimes. The first three explosions killed two African-American men and left a 75-year-old Hispanic woman fighting for her life, although two white men were the victims in one of the last bombings.An Israeli zoo says an endangered primate known as a golden lion tamarin has been born in captivity.

The Jerusalem Biblical Zoo says the monkey was born two weeks ago to mom Bilbi and dad Zohar. The yet unnamed monkey was seen Thursday clinging to its mother's back.



Golden lion tamarins are among the rarest animals in the world, according to the World Wildlife Fund. It is listed as endangered according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature.



The Jerusalem zoo says the primate was under threat of extinction in the 1980s when less than 100 were found in its native Brazil. But a breeding program in zoos around the world halted its decline. Today, there are hundreds of golden lion tamarins in the wild and in zoos worldwide.Al-Zaatari is one of hundreds of camps where people forced from their homelands by armed conflicts and civil wars go, hoping that one day they will go back home.

Opened in 2012, near Jordan's border with Syria, the 5.2-square-kilometer settlement is now home to nearly 80,000 Syrian refugees.



Like many other refugee camps around the world, it ended up growing well beyond initial plans. Moving around the camp has become so challenging that the refugees wait for the water truck to pass by and then hop on it in order to get from one side of the camp to the other.



Life in the Camp



Today, there are more refugees and internally displaced people than at any point since the World War II - 65.6 million, according to the UN Commissioner for Refugees.



At the moment, says Brett Moore, Chief of the Shelter and Settlements Section at the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, its hard to define what a camp is.



You might just have a collection of displaced families or a community thats spontaneously self-settled, he explains. But at least those under some kind of formality - whether being designed and/or managed by UNHCR - is around 420 refugee camps globally, containing 3.2 million people.



Living conditions vary greatly from one camp to another.



Ive just returned from Bangladesh and the shocking situation there for the Rohingya refugees that fled persecution in Myanmar, Moore says. In the largest camp, Kutapalong, there are around 700,000 people living in very dense, very poor conditions. You have other situations, for example say, in Chad, Nigeria, Cameroon, we have displaced population that have been there for 20 years or more and they are still living something akin to emergency conditions.



Problems inside Refugee Camps



Social architecture designer Sama El Saket is one of the urban planners who have recently taken an increased interest in re-imagining refugee camps. Coming up with better designs, she says, can improve living conditions for the people there. It can also facilitate delivery of humanitarian services inside the camp and make it a safer place.



From an architectural perspective, El Saket says these camps often dont provide refugees with a comfortable or safe living environment.



Because the camp is laid out in a temporary manner and you end up running into problems, into security problems, she says. Other problems include dealing with sewage because no proper piping is introduced, no proper system of dealing with flooding. The camp fails in protecting its inhabitants from severe weather conditions, in winter and summer, because of the insufficient insulation. There are issues of sharing bathrooms between a large number of shelters.



Working for her doctorate in urban design at Harvard University, El Saket studied seven refugee camps in Africa and Asia, including Al-Zaatari.



She found they often face common challenges, like moving refugees from rural areas to urban environment or vice versa. That takes the people from the lifestyle theyre used to and makes it harder for them to find jobs.



Another problem in the Zaatari camp, and in other refugee camps around the world as well, is the facilities and services tend to be placed around the periphery of the camp, making it hard for refugees who are living in the center of the camp to reach these services.



Make it Permanent



In her study, El Saket suggests changes to benefit both the refugees and the host country. Her basic recommendation is to integrate the camp. When it becomes part of the neighboring city or rural area, the refugees have better access to services and live a more normal life. And, she points out, the government saves money.



Economically, its not sustainable to keep spending money on keeping up a temporary city whereas if they spend the money setting up a more permanent city, then the refugee can stay in it and if they go back to their country, then the locals in that host country can end up moving into that city and it becomes a useful infrastructure.



Locating the camp closer to cities or villages rather than the border gives the refugees an opportunity to connect to and boost the local economy.

Improving Existing Camps



To improve an existing refugee camp, El Saket recommends evaluating the location of the services, and moving the schools, hospitals and distribution centers to places in the camp that are more accessible to the refugees. Its also necessary to provide a means of transportation inside the camp and public spaces like plazas and theaters and mosques or other religious spaces for refugees to gather or just promote a more normal life.



The Zaatari as my focus study, refugees in it have managed to start a market, El Saket observes. Through the market theyre able to sell products. Theyre able to cook food and sell it and connect their services to the largest economic network in Jordan.



UNHCR's Brett Moore says the agency is encouraging architects and other private sector experts to consider the humanitarian issues.



I was really pleased with the work undertaken by Sama and a lot of other students looking at refugee housing issues, humanitarian issues. Even if we dont have the ability or the budgets to put in the significant work in the beginning, at least the initial planning process helps us create the kind of settlement that if resources do become available, it can be upgraded over time.



Re-imaging refugee camps can also raise awareness and the money needed to help refugees lead a more normal life during this challenging time.

A little more than 40 hours after leaving Moscows Yaroslavsky station, the Vorkuta Express pulled into its terminus after a 2,000-kilometer journey through the taiga forests and tundra of Russias far north. The city lies 150 kilometers inside the Arctic Circle, seemingly at the edge of human habitation.

Its monochrome extremes overwhelm the senses: vast Arctic ice fields punctured with the scars of creaking coal mines.

The city is dying. The fall of the Soviet Union left Vorkuta vulnerable to market forces. In the 1990s, eight of the 13 coal mines closed, and two-thirds of the residents have left in the past 30 years. In 2016, a series of explosions in one of the largest mines killed 36 people and dealt another blow to Vorkutas future.

Largely cut off from the rest of Russia, 70,000 people remain in the decaying city. Amid the decline, Nadezhda Kozhevnikova is trying to run a clothing store. She said Vorkuta has been forgotten.

As far as I understand, we have enough coal reserves for another 50 years. There is demand for coal. So, why are mines not being set up? None are being developed. Nothing is being done, Kozhevnikova said.

Politics havent helped

And yet, few Vorkuta residents voted for change. Seventy-three percent backed President Vladimir Putins United Russia Party in an election Sunday that international observers said was neither free nor fair.

As his students practiced on miniaturized drills and machinery, Victor Telnov wasnt interested in debating democracy. As director of the Vorkuta College of Mining and Economics, hes teaching the next generation the skills that will be vital to Vorkutas survival. He said Russians must put their faith in Putin.

As a well-known public figure recently said, Do not have any illusions. This time, we do not elect a president, but a commander-in-chief. This election is emblematic, for Russia and for the world community. We show how much we are united as Russians.

Built by Stalins gulag labor

Vorkuta rose from the ice-bound wastelands in the 1930s, built by the forced labor of Josef Stalins gulags. Up to 200,000 political prisoners are buried in the permafrost. Gulag prisoners also built the railway, Vorkutas only land link with the outside world. The small airport is often closed because of the weather.

Deep beneath the ice, Anatoly Vorobyov and his colleagues mine the same seams of coal that once powered the Soviet Union. He has a short wish list for Putin.

At the very least, I hope the current standards will be preserved  wage stability, a steady supply of workers who are given everything they need. I mean a social package and all that, Vorobyov said. As an improvement, we would certainly like a salary increase. And maybe a new highway to Vorkuta. That would be cool for all the residents.

A craving for stability, and yet a longing for a faster escape route from this decaying town.

In the 1990s, miners wages in Vorkuta went unpaid for 10 months. Memories of that trauma are frozen in the minds of many voters. Life in Vorkuta may seem bleak under Putins Russia, but the people here know it could get a lot worse.Time to check that mailbox.



Kensington Palace said Thursday that invitations for the wedding between Prince Harry and his American fiancee Meghan Markle have been dispatched.



Some 600 people have been invited to the May 19 nuptials at St. George's Chapel at Windsor Castle. All 600 have also been invited to a lunchtime reception given by Queen Elizabeth II at St George's Hall.



The invitations, which are beveled and gilded in gold along the edges, feature Prince Charles' three-feather badge. They were made by Barnard & Westwood, which has held the Royal Warrant for printing and bookbinding since 1985.



Harry and Markle will also celebrate with some 200 guests at a private evening reception given by Prince Charles.



The palace declined to comment as to who is on the list.In Thursday's farewell remarks to State Department staff, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson asked American diplomats and civil servants to be respectful to each other and to carry on the priorities of U.S. national security.

"I'd like to ask each of you undertake to ensure one act of kindness each day towards another person. This can be a very mean-spirited town," said Tillerson to laughs and applause from department employees. "But you don't have to choose to participate in that."

Tillerson did not mention President Donald Trump, who fired him unceremoniously last Tuesday just hours after the top diplomat returned to Washington from a five-nation tour of Africa.

Tillerson maintains the title of secretary of state until his commission terminates at midnight March 31.

"Treat each other with respect, regardless of the job title," he told the department staff. "Never lose sight of your most valuable asset: your personal integrity."

Employees gathered in the lobby of the building Thursday to hear Tillerson's farewell remarks.

Standing behind him were Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan, Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Tom Shannon, spokeswoman Heather Nauert and Ambassador-at-large for Counterterrorism Nathan Sales.

"I appreciate the secretary's highlighting the diplomatic work that State Department employees do every day, and the importance of accountability and respect in the workplace," one employee told VOA.

Another said, "I was encouraged by the secretary's references to the diligence and devotion career employees have to the State Department's mission, and to being guided by our values and integrity."

WATCH: Tillerson Urges Integrity, Good Deeds in Farewell Speech

Tillerson said he had compiled material and provided "updates of how tactics may need to adjust to current circumstances" for his nominated successor, CIA Director Mike Pompeo, in order to ensure a smooth transition.

Though "all the policies and the strategy should never change, we must constantly review how the tactics are delivering on the objectives," Tillerson said. "The country faces many challenges  in some instances, perplexing foreign affairs relationships, in another instance, serious national security threats."

Brief stays

Tillerson's departure barely 14 months into the Trump administration puts him on a short list of high-level government officials whose tenures have been incredibly brief.

Tom Price resigned as secretary of health and human services last September after allegedly chartering expensive planes at government expense.

"The firing of Tillerson continues a pattern of instability for department heads in Trump's administration," Eric Ostermeier, a fellow with the University of Minnesota's Center for the Study of Politics and Governance, told VOA on Thursday.

"Tillerson left office quicker than nearly every other president's first pick for secretary of state in history," Ostermeier said. "For historical perspective, the average tenure of a U.S. president serving alongside his first secretary of state is three years, four months, eight days."U.S. President Donald Trumps sudden decision to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, without first working out the framework of a nuclear deal, could produce a historic agreement, but it would come at the beginning of a long negotiation process.

Kims willingness to talk about ending his countrys nuclear weapons program was conveyed to South Korean national security chief Chung Eui-yong, who met recently with the North Korean leader in Pyongyang. Chung later told President Trump that Kim said he is committed to denuclearization, when he traveled to Washington to brief White House security officials.



Kims denuclearization commitment has become the basis for the expected summits between Kim and South Korean President Moon Jae-in to be held in April, and with U.S. President Donald Trump in May.

However the leadership in Pyongyang uses a term for denuclearization that has multiple meanings.

They translate shutdown, and freeze, and also suspension, and shielding, and also disabling into the same word in Korean, godon joongdan, said North Korea analyst Han Young-sup with the Korea National Defense University, during a conference in Seoul on Wednesday about the Norths nuclear program.

High risk

There is a significant risk that President Trumps unorthodox approach to diplomacy, in agreeing to a summit before any terms, progress or outcomes are set, could fail to produce a complete, verifiable and irreversible agreement to dismantle North Koreas nuclear weapons program.

Trump himself has said he may quickly walk away if there is no prospect for denuclearization progress, or he might sit down and make the greatest deal for the world.

Many suspect that Kim will only agree to freeze or marginally reduce his nuclear and missile arsenal for relief from harsh sanctions that have been imposed in response to the Norths continued testing of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles.

North Korea in the past also demanded the withdrawal of U.S. forces in Korea as a condition to give up its nuclear deterrent. The U.S. is not likely to agree to either scenario.

Pyongyangs efforts in the last year to develop a nuclear-armed missile that can strike the U.S. mainland had greatly intensified tensions the region.



The Trump administration led international efforts to ban billions of dollars of North Korean exports including coal, cheap clothing, and seafood, and warned that it would take military action, if needed, to end the nuclear threat.

Supreme mandate

North Korea created an opening for diplomacy by suspending further provocative tests, at least while talks are underway, agreeing to engage with Washington and Seoul, and by participating in the recent winter Olympics in the South.

While risky, Trumps sudden agreement to meet with Kim at this early stage could a produce a mandate from the highest levels that would drive the process forward.

The commitment to denuclearization from both sides, from top down, then opens up the path towards diplomacy and a path towards the negotiation of those details, said Jenny Town with the U.S. Korea Institute at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

North Korea is estimated to have approximately 30 nuclear weapons, hundreds of medium and long-range missiles, and is continuing to produce fissile material at both its nuclear reactor in Yongbyong and in hidden uranium enrichment facilities.

It would likely take years to negotiate verification details, access for international inspectors, and to complete the dismantlement process.

Concessions

Even though the U.S. insists there will be no concessions until concrete denuclearization measures are taken, North Korea will surely want something in return for its continued cooperation.

South Korea will try to facilitate a nuclear deal during its summit with the North, and could offer an economic incentive by seeking an exemption from sanctions to reopen the jointly run Kaesong Industrial Complex.

Sanctions or the loosening of sanctions is what we declare them to be. I mean its not a rigorous process where you have to go through a court system to decide that a sanction is no longer going to be imposed, said Bill McKinney, who is also an analyst with the U.S. Korea Institute at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

Officials in Seoul have consistently linked the prospect of increased inter-Korean economic cooperation with substantial denuclearization progress and with the close coordination of the international community.

Lee Yoon-jee in Seoul contributed to this report.THE WHITE HOUSE

Office of the Press Secretary

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

March 22, 2018

MEMORANDUM FOR THE SECRETARY OF THE TREASURY

THE UNITED STATES TRADE REPRESENTATIVE

THE SENIOR ADVISOR FOR POLICY

THE ASSISTANT TO THE PRESIDENT FOR ECONOMIC

POLICY

THE ASSISTANT TO THE PRESIDENT FOR NATIONAL

SECURITY AFFAIRS

THE ASSISTANT TO THE PRESIDENT FOR HOMELAND

SECURITY AND COUNTERTERRORISM



SUBJECT: Actions by the United States Related to the Section 301 Investigation of China's Laws, Policies, Practices, or Actions Related to Technology Transfer, Intellectual Property, and Innovation





On August 14, 2017, I directed the United States Trade Representative (Trade Representative) to determine whether to investigate China's laws, policies, practices, or actions that may be unreasonable or discriminatory and that may be harming American intellectual property rights, innovation, or technology development. On August 18, 2017, the Trade Representative initiated an investigation under section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, as amended (the "Act") (19 U.S.C. 2411).



During its investigation, the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) consulted with appropriate advisory committees and the interagency section 301 Committee. The Trade Representative also requested consultations with the Government of China, under section 303 of the Act (19 U.S.C. 2413). The USTR held a public hearing on October 10, 2017, and two rounds of public written comment periods. The USTR received approximately 70 written submissions from academics, think tanks, law firms, trade associations, and companies.



The Trade Representative has advised me that the investigation supports the following findings:



First, China uses foreign ownership restrictions, including joint venture requirements, equity limitations, and other investment restrictions, to require or pressure technology transfer from U.S. companies to Chinese entities. China also uses administrative review and licensing procedures to require or pressure technology transfer, which, inter alia, undermines the value of U.S. investments and technology and weakens the global competitiveness of U.S. firms.



Second, China imposes substantial restrictions on, and intervenes in, U.S. firms' investments and activities, including through restrictions on technology licensing terms. These restrictions deprive U.S. technology owners of the ability to bargain and set market-based terms for technology transfer. As a result, U.S. companies seeking to license technologies must do so on terms that unfairly favor Chinese recipients.



Third, China directs and facilitates the systematic investment in, and acquisition of, U.S. companies and assets by Chinese companies to obtain cutting-edge technologies and intellectual property and to generate large-scale technology transfer in industries deemed important by Chinese government industrial plans.



Fourth, China conducts and supports unauthorized intrusions into, and theft from, the computer networks of U.S. companies. These actions provide the Chinese government with unauthorized access to intellectual property, trade secrets, or confidential business information, including technical data, negotiating positions, and sensitive and proprietary internal business communications, and they also support China's strategic development goals, including its science and technology advancement, military modernization, and economic development.



It is hereby directed as follows:



Section 1. Tariffs. (a) The Trade Representative should take all appropriate action under section 301 of the Act (19 U.S.C. 2411) to address the acts, policies, and practices of China that are unreasonable or discriminatory and that burden or restrict U.S. commerce. The Trade Representative shall consider whether such action should include increased tariffs on goods from China.



(b) To advance the purposes of subsection (a) of this section, the Trade Representative shall publish a proposed list of products and any intended tariff increases within 15 days of the date of this memorandum. After a period of notice and comment in accordance with section 304(b) of the Act (19 U.S.C. 2414(b)), and after consultation with appropriate agencies and committees, the Trade Representative shall, as appropriate and consistent with law, publish a final list of products and tariff increases, if any, and implement any such tariffs.



Sec. 2. WTO Dispute Settlement. (a) The Trade Representative shall, as appropriate and consistent with law, pursue dispute settlement in the World Trade Organization (WTO) to address China's discriminatory licensing practices. Where appropriate and consistent with law, the Trade Representative should pursue this action in cooperation with other WTO members to address China's unfair trade practices.

(b) Within 60 days of the date of this memorandum, the Trade Representative shall report to me his progress under subsection (a) of this section.



Sec. 3. Investment Restrictions. (a) The Secretary of the Treasury (Secretary), in consultation with other senior executive branch officials the Secretary deems appropriate, shall propose executive branch action, as appropriate and consistent with law, and using any available statutory authority, to address concerns about investment in the United States directed or facilitated by China in industries or technologies deemed important to the United States.



(b) Within 60 days of the date of this memorandum, the Secretary shall report to me his progress under subsection (a) of this section.



Sec. 4. Publication. The Trade Representative is authorized and directed to publish this memorandum in the Federal Register.







DONALD J. TRUMPSaudi Arabian airstrikes are to blame for most civilian deaths and injuries in Yemen, says a report submitted to the United Nations Human Rights Council by the U.N. Secretary-General and High Commissioner for Human Rights.

Yemen is entering its fourth year of conflict, a conflict the United Nations says is getting worse, with no end in sight.

In late March 2015, Saudi Arabia began bombing Houthi rebels in support of the government.Since then, the U.N. Human Rights Office has verified 6,100 civilian deaths,more than one quarter of them children, and nearly 9,700 injuries.



U.N. Deputy High Commissioner Kate Gilmore, who presented the report to the U.N. Human Rights Council, says the actual number of casualties is likely to be far higher.



"The leading cause of civilian casualties are the airstrikes conducted by the Saudi-led coalition," she said. "These strikes are responsible for over 61 percent of all civilian casualties, with indiscriminate shelling and sniper fire in densely populated areas by the Houthis accounting for much of the remainder."



Gilmore says drone attacks by the United States, and other attacks by groups affiliated with al-Qaida and Islamic State have continued, mostly in Yemen's southern governorates.



The United Nations condemns the Saudi coalition's blockade of Yemen's sea and airports. It says the restrictions on imports and humanitarian assistance are compounding the already unbearable suffering of millions of people.



The United Nations says 22 million Yemenis are in need of humanitarian aid and eight million are at risk of famine.The U.N. refugee agency estimates more than two million people are internally displaced.



Human rights advocates point to one positive development. They welcome the appointment by the U.N. Human Rights Council of a group of experts to investigate abuses and violations committed by all parties in Yemen and, wherever possible, to identify the perpetrators of the crimes.Following the growing provocative incursions of the Polisario armed militiamen in the Guerguerat buffer zone, UN Security Council has denounced these hostile acts made by the Algeria-backed separatists, in a bid to undermine peace and stability in the region, making it clear that there should be no change in the status of the buffer zone.

The UN Security Council president Karel van Oosterom (Netherlands) said on Wednesday members of the Security Council are concerned about the situation in Guerguerat, and stress the need to uphold the status quo of the buffer strip and to fully respect UN resolution 2351 (April 2017).

This resolution hailed the autonomy plan in the Sahara under Moroccan sovereignty, and welcomed the serious and credible efforts made by Morocco to move the process forward towards resolution.

The Security Council, which convened Wednesday (March 21) to hear a briefing by UN Secretary Generals Personal Envoy for the Sahara Horst Kohler on his latest contacts and mediation process, showed a firm stand on this issue, warning the Polisario against any attempts to alter the status quo on the ground.

According to UN Security Council president Karel van Oosterom, the UN Chief remains deeply concerned about the continued presence of armed elements of the Polisario in this region.

In his report circulated to the members of the Security Council in April 2017, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres had demanded the complete and immediate withdrawal of the Polisario from the Guerguerat buffer strip.

Guterres warned that this situation could lead to the collapse of the ceasefire, threatening security and stability of the entire region.

Morocco, which remains committed to the UN-brokered 1991 cease-fire agreement, had strongly condemned the deployment of Polisario militiamen in the demilitarized border crossing with Mauritania, in Guerguerat, as a blatant violation of the UN brokered ceasefire agreement and a disregard for the calls made by the UN Secretary General for the withdrawal of all troops from the demilitarized buffer strip.

The UN repeatedly warned the Polisario against obstructing commercial traffic flow between Morocco and Mauritania and called on the separatists to pullout of the buffer strip in order to create an environment conducive to the resumption of dialogue under the auspices of the Personal Envoy Horst Kohler.

Ignoring the UN warnings, the Polisario announced Tuesday, on the eve of Kohlers briefing to the Security Council, the transfer of its so-called armed staff to Bir Lahlou locality, a part of the buffer zone under the 1991 agreement.

The new head of the MINURSO, Canadian Colin Stewart, who also briefed Wednesday the UN Security Council on the situation prevailing in the region, had refused to visit Bir Lahlou during a recent trip to Tindouf. The MINURSO chief has thus avoided falling in the trap set by the Polisario, which was attempting to make him endorse a change of the status quo.

Meanwhile, the Security Council has asked the UN personal envoy for the Sahara to continue talks to relaunch the negotiations aimed at settling the more than 40-year-old dispute created by Algeria.

The Security Council also expressed full support for the efforts of the former German president to revive the negotiation process through a new dynamic and a new spirit.

However, no date has been set for the resumption of talks under the auspices of the UN. The latest such talks date back to 2012.I wasnt the kind of guy youd want to meet in a dark alley.

Thats how U.S. Army veteran Michael Carroll, 39, from Spokane, Wash., described himself after coming home in 2004 after serving 18 months in Iraq.

He was diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and given an honorable discharge.

The transition from military to civilian life was definitely unpleasant, he said. I was extremely temperamental and hostile, and I lashed out a lot. Anything could trigger me  sounds to smells to seeing trash on the side of the road, a reminder of explosive devices used against coalition forces in the Iraq war.

Over the next few years, he underwent the standard treatment for PTSD  psychotherapy and medication  which he said did him more harm than good.

In 2009, while undergoing therapy at the Spokane Veterans Center, he heard about an outdoor recreational retreat for traumatized veterans, organized and funded by a group of Spokane Valley firefighters.

And thats where I encountered my first sweat lodge, Carroll said. It blew my mind. And it saved my life.

Bringing veterans home

Since ancient times, Native American and Alaskan Natives have held warriors in high esteem and have developed a wide variety of prayers, ceremonies and rituals to honor returning soldiers and ease them back into community life.

One of the most common is the sweat, a ritual steam bath believed to have originated among Plains Indians that is practiced today by many tribes, with variations according to individual tribal cultures and traditions.

The U.S. Veterans Administration has recognized the value of sweats to Native service members, and since the 1990s, has allowed them to conduct sweats at several VA medical centers across the country. It was only a matter of time before non-Native veterans began to take notice.

In college, I was a sociology major, and I learned about the importance of the sacred, the ritual and the ceremony, said Darrin Coldiron, a Spokane Valley firefighter and president of Veterans Community Response (VCR), an all-volunteer group that hosts several retreats a year. I learned that in so many societies, when you send a warrior off, theres a ceremony, and you bring them home with ceremony.

Craig Falcon, a member of the Blackfeet tribe who conducts ceremonies at VCR retreats, explained how the sweat has been used in his culture to help warriors readjust to civilian life.

You come back from war with things attached to you, he said. And some of those things may not be good. They could be memories. Or It could be somebody you killed, and that person attaches himself to you and comes home with you. Ceremonies help wash those things off, send them back to where they came from and get you back to who you are.

Roger Vielle, also Blackfeet, serves on VCRs board as cultural adviser. At first, he wasnt sure how non-Natives would handle the sweat.

Some of the stories they share afterward and some of the things that have happened to them during the sweat are like " He paused to find words.

"They say something happens there," he said. "Theyve gotten in touch with something. And I tell them, 'Im not the one doing it. Im just facilitating it. You did the work. You did the prayers.'

VCR retreats are funded entirely by donors and cost the participants nothing. Thats because no legitimate tribal healer would ever charge money for a ceremony.

Private and sacred

Carroll admitted to being skeptical  and a little fearful  of his first sweat.

But then you go inside the sweat lodge, and of course the herbs are dropped on the rocks, and the drum is starting to play, he said. Then you pray and you begin to feel the toxins pour out of your body. And a lot of time, theres a sense of another presence, something in that lodge besides you and the other people gathered there.

Vielle and Falcon were reluctant to share too many details about the ceremonies, which are sacred to their culture.

Non-Natives are really exploiting our way of life and our ceremonies, grabbing them and selling them, said Falcon, recalling the 2009 deaths of three people at an Arizona sweat ceremony conducted by non-Native, New Age guru James Arthur Ray.

Medical staff are on hand at every VCR retreat.

Sometimes, he said, veterans come out of sweats wanting to build sweat lodges in their own backyards.

I tell them, I cant stop you if you want to go and build one. But it wont be done in the right way,'' Falcon said. "And once I tell them that, they are very respectful and say, Ill build a sauna instead.

Editor's note: Originally, VOA published a photograph showing the interior of a sweat lodge. That photo has been removed at the request of Blackfeet Nation cultural advisers, who explained that such images violate the sacredness of the sweat lodge ceremony.A public apology by Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg failed Thursday to quell outrage over the hijacking of personal data from millions of people, as critics demanded that the social media giant go much further to protect user privacy.

Speaking out for the first time about the harvesting of Facebook user data by a British firm linked to Donald Trump's 2016 campaign, Zuckerberg admitted Wednesday to betraying the trust of its 2 billion users and promised to "step up."

Vowing to stop data leaking to outside developers and to give users more control over their information, Zuckerberg also said he was ready to testify before US lawmakers  which a powerful congressional committee promptly asked him to do.

With pressure ratcheting up on the 33-year-old CEO over a scandal that has wiped $60 billion off Facebook's value, the initial response suggested his promise of self-regulation had failed to convince critics he was serious about change.

"Frankly I don't think those changes go far enough," Matt Hancock, Britain's culture and digital minister, told the BBC.

"It shouldn't be for a company to decide what is the appropriate balance between privacy and innovation and use of data," he said. "The big tech companies need to abide by the law, and we are strengthening the law."

In Brussels, European leaders were sending the same message as they prepared to push for tougher safeguards on personal data online, while Israel became the latest country to launch an investigation into Facebook.

The data scandal erupted at the weekend when a whistle-blower revealed that British consultant Cambridge Analytica had created psychological profiles on 50 million Facebook users via a personality prediction app, developed by a researcher named Aleksandr Kogan.

The app, downloaded by 270,000 people, scooped up their friends' data without consent  as was possible under Facebook's rules at the time.

'Breach of trust'

Facebook said it discovered last week that Cambridge Analytica might not have deleted the data as it certified, although the British firm denied wrongdoing.

"This was a major breach of trust and I'm really sorry that this happened," Zuckerberg said in an interview with CNN, after publishing a blog post outlining his response to the scandal.

"Our responsibility now is to make sure this doesn't happen again."

With Facebook already under fire for allowing fake news to proliferate during the U.S. election, Zuckerberg also said "we need to make sure that we up our game" ahead of midterm congressional elections in November, in which American officials have warned Russia can be expected to meddle as it did two years ago.

Cambridge Analytica has maintained it did not use Facebook data in the Trump campaign, but its now-suspended CEO boasted in secret recordings that his company was deeply involved in the race.

WATCH: Facebook Under Fire for Data Misuse

And U.S. special counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating Russian interference in the 2016 presidential race, is reportedly looking into the consultant's role in the Trump effort.

'Abused and misused'

Zuckerberg's apology followed a dayslong stream of damaging accusations against the world's biggest social network, which now faces probes on both sides of the Atlantic.

In Washington on Thursday, leaders of the House Energy and Commerce Committee urged Zuckerberg to testify without delay, saying a briefing a day earlier by Facebook officials had left "many questions" unanswered.

"We believe, as CEO of Facebook, he is the right witness to provide answers to the American people," said a statement from the panel, calling for a hearing "in the near future."

America's Federal Trade Commission is reportedly investigating Facebook over the scandal, while Britain's information commissioner is seeking to determine whether it did enough to secure its data.

On Thursday, Israel's privacy protection agency said it had informed Facebook of a probe into the Cambridge Analytica revelations, and was looking into "the possibility of other infringements of the privacy law regarding Israelis."

Meanwhile, European Union leaders were due to press digital giants "to guarantee transparent practices and full protection of citizens' privacy and personal data," according to a draft summit statement obtained by AFP.

A movement to quit the social network has already gathered momentum  with the co-founder of the WhatsApp messaging service among those vowing to #deletefacebook  while a handful of lawsuits risk turning into class actions in a costly distraction for the company.

World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee described it as a "serious moment for the web's future."

"I can imagine Mark Zuckerberg is devastated that his creation has been abused and misused," tweeted the British scientist.

"I would say to him: You can fix it. It won't be easy but if companies work with governments, activists, academics and web users, we can make sure platforms serve humanity."The URL has been copied to your clipboard

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Conflict in the Kasai province of the Democratic Republic of Congo has displaced more than a million people. The U.N.'s humanitarian chief warned this week that 13 million Congolese need aid, including 2 million children with severe acute malnutrition.U.S. President Donald Trump has called for the death penalty for drug dealers saying it is the only way to curb the high death rates. According to the Center for Disease control, drugs killed 42,000 people in 2016. Trump unveiled his anti-opioid abuse plan, Monday, in Manchester, New Hampshire.Please enable cookies on your web browser in order to continue.

The new European data protection law requires us to inform you of the following before you use our website:

We use cookies and other technologies to customize your experience, perform analytics and deliver personalized advertising on our sites, apps and newsletters and across the Internet based on your interests. By clicking I agree below, you consent to the use by us and our third-party partners of cookies and data gathered from your use of our platforms. See our Privacy Policy and Third Party Partners to learn more about the use of data and your rights. You also agree to our Terms of Service.The resignation of Asma Lamrabet from the league of Moroccan Muslim scholars (Rabita Mohammedia) because of her support for equal inheritance rights between men and women sent shockwaves across the country, causing the debate over gender and inheritance in Morocco to resurface.

The current Moroccan inheritance law is based on traditional Islamic jurisprudence of Tasib, which grants women half of what it gives men in inheritance, while making men financially responsible for women.

Modernists within the official religious establishment such as Lamrabet have on multiple occasions called for revisiting the traditional texts and adapting current jurisdiction on inheritance to the social and economic changes that have taken place in the Moroccan society where women work and contribute to the creation of wealth on an equal footing with men. Hence the need for an equal distribution of inheritance instead of the current law deemed anachronistic.

Lamrabet resignation and the spate of criticism the scholar has received from ultra-conservative figures was the spark that drew the attention of civil society activists and women rights groups to put pressure on authorities to redress what women deem as an injustice in inheritance.

A petition was signed by 100 leading figures of the Moroccan civil society including artists, religious scholars, political leaders, writers and journalists who have called for establishing gender equality in inheritance and abolishing the Tasib rule.

The petitioners cited the multiple discriminatory aspects inflicted on women due to such an outdated rule, saying for instance that orphans without a male sibling are obliged to share inheritance with their grandparents and the relatives of the deceasedeven if they are unknown to them

Today, the Moroccan family has been reduced to the parents and their offspringsTasib rule has become more unfair than ever, added the signatories of the petition.

Due to the Tasib rule, some parents proceed to the registration of their property in the names of their daughters.

Ultra-conservatives, including salafists, will likely respond fiercely to such an attempt at changing the inheritance law by resorting to the same old rhetoric that the texts are sacred and should be applied literally, regardless of the social and economic changes that have affected every aspect of the Moroccan family and society.

In late 2015, Moroccos National Human Rights Council (CNDH) issued a report calling for a review of the family code to guarantee equality between men and women in inheritance.

In 2004, the North African country adopted a family code, which was commended by the international community and rights groups as a major stride in protecting womens rights.

Few years later, Morocco endorsed a new constitution guaranteeing gender equality.We drove there, to the tiny Hanover County seat, on a blustery afternoon and had lunch at the Hanover Tavern. Built in 1792, the current building is located at the site of the original Shelton Tavern. Looking out its front window, we saw a small but distinctive brick courthouse across the road with five imposing rounded arches at the front. When Henry worked at this site, his view was no different. Lawyers would dine at the tavern in his day; as he served them, he would listen to their stories. It inspired him to enter their profession.According to the indictment, Sarman, along with the guards whose charges were eventually dropped, assaulted and kicked a protester, as well as American law enforcement officers who were trying to intervene. He is also charged with pushing one protester to the ground and punching and kicking another protester.Perhaps for as long as the dead have been buried, societies have struggled to maintain graveyards. Across Belair Road from the Laurel Cemetery site, in the middle of Clifton Park, is the old site of St. Vincents Cemetery, which opened about the same time. It was bulldozed in the 1980s. A group that calls itself the Friends of St. Vincents Cemetery is working to landscape the area.A bill that would broaden Marylands 2012 Dream Act to allow in-state tuition for people who do not have DACA or temporary protected status recently passed the House of Delegates and is awaiting a vote in the state Senate. Maryland already allows undocumented immigrants who do not have DACA protection to get drivers licenses, a privilege not available in 37 other states, according to the National Council of State Legislatures.The cost savings help explain why the family planning program is popular among states. Even some of those most opposed to the expansion of Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act  including the entire Southeast  largely take part in the Medicaid family planning program. North Carolina, South Carolina, Alabama and Florida rank in the top five by enrollment, behind California, the Kaiser survey found. [protected-iframe id=6d1af8d520c367efa511dbd6bbca4c54-7618883-97277977 info=//datawrapper.dwcdn.net/cvH7e/7/ width=600 height=400 frameborder=0 scrolling=no] For two decades, states across the country, red, blue and purple, have expanded Medicaid eligibility for family planning services because doing so helps people to avoid unintended pregnancies and to plan and space wanted pregnancies, said Adam Sonfield, senior policy manager at the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health research organization that supports abortion rights. In the process, that has also been proven to save the state and federal governments many millions of dollars.Zimbabwe's Mnangagwa frees thousands from prison: Zimbabwe's new president is commuting death sentences for some prisoners and releasing thousands of people from prison, including most women and everyone under 18. President Emmerson Mnangagwa's announcement is an effort to ease prison crowding. He has said he is against the death penalty because he once survived hanging when the nation was still colonial Rhodesia. Nearly 100 people are on death row in the country of 13 million. Those on it for at least a decade will see their sentences commuted to life in prison. Robert Mugabe, ousted as president late last year, had said he was considering resuming executions.Being 21 years younger than Knight is another Hill advantage. In 2008, Barack Obama carried national voters under age 45 by 15 points. In Alabama in December, Jones carried that age cohort by around 20 points. Suburban women, of whom the 25th District has many, also are recoiling against Republicans. The Economist reports that, nationally, around 400 women, mostly Democrats, are planning to run for the House, at least 50 for the Senate and 79 for governor. . . . At state and local levels, the picture is the same. In 2015 and 2016, around 900 women consulted Emilys List [which supports women candidates] about standing for office; since Mr. Trumps election, over 26,000 have. One of them recently took a red-eye to get on Emilys List.Todays Headlines

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By signing up you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy PolicyFor a time, it seemed that the great states of Eurasia might be moving in the direction of modern, democratic succession. Now it appears that the legacy of communism, whose weakness was precisely the absence of a succession principle, is reasserting itself. In the 20th century, communist revolutionaries in Russia and China dodged the issue of state continuity by saying they were not leaders of a state, but the avant garde of a world revolution still to come and a social transformation to be achieved at home. Lenin, Stalin and Mao took power by claiming to see the future and held it by eliminating rivals whose views they defined as unorthodox. Once revolutionary energy in the Soviet Union dissipated and revolutionary prospects dimmed, Leonid Brezhnev held on to power by promising comrades not to kill them and trying himself not to die. This brought the Soviet Union to the era that Russians remember as stagnation, the time of Putins youth, and to its eventual collapse. Communist China seemed to have squared the circle by introducing term limits for its supreme leader, an experiment that looked successful  until now.A huge bone of contention between Trump and his team has been over testifying in front of Muellers team, these people said. Trump wants to do so, thinking he can talk his way out of it, while his lawyers are far more wary, these people said. Dowd and Marc Kasowitz, Trumps former lawyer whom he still occasionally consults, have told Trump he could damage himself by testifying. His chief White House counsel, Donald McGahn, also has chafed at Trump granting an interview and has criticized others on the team.Donald Trump. Photo: Kevin Dietsch-Pool/Getty Images

On Tuesday, in preparation for his phone call with Russian strongman Vladimir Putin, President Trump was given a briefing paper directing him to condemn Russias poisoning of a double agent on British soil and NOT to congratulate Putin on his rigged election. (DO NOT CONGRATULATE, read the all-caps, but apparently still too subtle, instructions.) Instead, Trump went the other way. He decided not to mention the awkward attempted murder and did congratulate Putin.

Republicans have responded to this episode with outrage. But their indignation is directed not at a president who has once again demonstrated his bizarre, deeply rooted affinity for Putin. Instead, they are angry that we know about this episode at all. I dont agree with congratulating #Putin but bigger outrage is this leak that could only come from someone in @POTUS inner circle, says Marco Rubio. Former Bush administration press secretary Ari Fleischer complains, Who leaks this stuff? This WH still is disloyal to the president and to each other. What a mess. White House chief of staff John Kelly is furious over the leak, reports Politico. A Republican aide gripes to Axios, It is a disservice to the president when every single thing and every single thought gets leaked out  I dont understand why people dont get that. Its not fair to the president, to his agenda, and to those who work hard every day to move the ball down the field.

It is obviously natural to want the White House to avoid leaking. Whats unnatural is the Republican belief that the leaking, rather than the subject of the leaks, is the underlying problem.

The predominant theory of the case in Republican circles, as I argued recently, is that Trump is an innocent man who acts guilty for no apparent reason. This explains their fixation with his tweeting, which is the safest and most common aspect of the Trump president for Republicans to question in public. Twitter is an open-access channel into his mind, into which Trump constantly feeds unfiltered confessions that defeat their efforts to spin on his behalf. Republicans are trying to make the case that, say, Andrew McCabe was fired for legitimate violations of FBI policy, and then Trump writes a tweet making it seem quite evident that he was fired because Trump personally hates and wants to discredit him.

Ed Rogers, the Republican lobbyist and Americas worst columnist, has a new column noting that Trump is doing more things that make him seem extremely guilty, like hiring lawyers who want to shut down the investigation and cozying up to Putin over and over. Trump constantly does things to make himself appear guilty, observes Rogers. Lets not even talk about his congratulatory message to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Why does Trump constantly say and do things that make him look guilty? Occams razor would offer one explanation. The Republicans have a different one.The former California governor and current Ohio governor embracing a vision of the GOP as it might but probably wont become. Photo: Damian Dovarganes/AP/REX//Shutterstock

Ill be back, Arnold Schwarzeneggers Terminator character famously said, again and again. And the former California governor was back this week at the debut of an organization calling itself New Way California thats aimed at pushing the Republican Party away from Trumpism and toward the political center. Headed up by Chad Mayes, a former GOP leader in the California Assembly who was purged for working with Democrats on a climate-change initiative, the group is fighting the prevailing winds in both the state and national parties.

As the New York Times reports, Schwarzenegger made it pretty plain where he laid the blame for the GOPs bad immediate prospects:

Mr. Schwarzenegger said the Republican Party had to be environmentally progressive, socially liberal and fiscally conservative in order to be competitive.

Our party is giving them Twitter fights instead of answers, Mr. Schwarzenegger said. And it is sinking us. It is time to return to the issues.

The politics of division and anger and resentment can drive a strong base to the polls, yes, he said. But it is tearing our country apart at the seams. And nothing is getting done.

Since the GOP is current environmentally reactionary, socially conservative, and fiscally profligate, thats quite the 180-degree turn Schwarzenegger is demanding. And his concerns arent exactly resonating even in California, where despite the partys parlous state (it could have a catastrophic midterm election this year, losing a number of congressional seats and not even looking competitive in most statewide races) the most notable leaders keep tacking to the right. The two Republican gubernatorial candidates, for example, are competing to see who can most slavishly pledge support for Trump.

But Schwarzenegger and Mayes had at least some star-power support for their protest about the future of the GOP: They were joined by none other than Ohio governor John Kasich, who offered some vague words of encouragement:

Look, we want this party to survive, but weve got to stop playing ideological games, and start thinking about the customers, Kasich said, referring to voters. And, help these folks. Help Chad. Its going to be lonely for a while.

Thats for sure. If Schwarzenegger and Mayes are naive for thinking the California GOP is going to spurn hard-core conservatism and the 45th president, Kasich is really dreaming if he thinks the national party is doing anything other than embracing Trump.

The self-congratulatory big-tent atmosphere of the New Way California event was brought back to reality by a remark from one attendee, as reported by Sacramentos Capital Public Radio:

Political consultant Cassandra Pye suggested organizers could still broaden their appeal.

Weve got to have more women in the room next time, Pye said.

That could be said of the entire GOP, regardless of faction.Trump is ready for Biden to bring it. Photo: Kevin Dietsch/Bloomberg via Getty Images

President Trump is often criticized for the time it takes him to publicly respond to tragedies around the world. But as he proved once against Thursday, he never lets a personal slight go unanswered for long.

On Tuesday, former Vice-President Joe Biden told a crowd of college students that if he were younger, he would beat the hell out of President Trump for the way he treats women. Thursday morning Trump responded, calling Biden crazy and both mentally and physically weak. The 71-year-old president then implied that hed make the 75-year-old Biden cry if they had a fistfight.

Crazy Joe Biden is trying to act like a tough guy. Actually, he is weak, both mentally and physically, and yet he threatens me, for the second time, with physical assault. He doesnt know me, but he would go down fast and hard, crying all the way. Dont threaten people Joe!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 22, 2018

The previous threat Trump is referring to came during the 2016 election. Biden, who was on the trail for Hillary Clinton, told a crowd that Trumps comments on the infamous Access Hollywood tape made him want to fight Trump behind the gym.All we are saying is give trade war a chance. Photo: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images

Last week, Donald Trumps top trade adviser presented him with a plan to make Beijing rue the day that it had decided to steal American intellectual property. The staunchly protectionist U.S. trade representative Robert Lighthizer advised the president to impose tariffs on $30 billion worth of Chinese imports.

Such an aggressive move was bound to provoke retaliation, if not full-blown trade war  as many congressional Republicans were eager to remind the White House. And so, after carefully weighing the pros and cons of the measure, the president told Lighthizer to toss his proposal  and come back with tariffs on $50 billion worth of Chinese imports, instead.

This has been long in the making, Trump said Thursday, at a news conference formally announcing the levies. Weve lost, over a fairly short period of time, 60,000 factories.

The president went on to lament the death of American manufacturing; condemn the anti-U.S. trade system propped up by the WTO and NAFTA; and inform the public that the leaders of Japan and the European Union smile sheepishly when he brings up their unfair trade practices, while (presumably) thinking to themselves, I cant believe weve been able to take advantage of the United States for so long.

None of this had anything whatsoever to do with the policy the president was there to announce.

The official purpose of the tariffs that Trump unveiled Thursday is not to protect American manufacturing against unfair Chinese competition  but rather, to protect the intellectual property of major U.S. businesses.

For the past seven months, Lighthizers office had been investigating allegations that the Chinese government violates American firms patent and copyright protections. That probe uncovered evidence that Beijing uses restrictions on foreign ownership of companies within China to coerce American corporations into transferring their technology to its own domestic enterprises. Lighthizers report also alleges that China steals trade secrets through cyberattacks, and directs its firms to invest in U.S. companies, so as to gain access to information about strategic technologies and then transfer it to the Chinese government.

The basic charge here  that the Chinese government does not respect other nations intellectual property laws  is not terribly controversial. A U.S. International Trade Commission investigation conducted during the Obama years found that IP theft cost American firms nearly $26 billion in 2009, while a study from the U.S. software industry put that figure as high as $60 billion in 2011.

But whether ordinary Americans actually have an interest in policing such theft is less clear. When China violates an American drug companys software patents, said companys profit margins (and thus, shareholders) may take a hit  but American consumers likely benefit from the lower prices on software. And the same holds for other patent-protected products like pharmaceuticals (which Trump has repeatedly argued are far too expensive in the United States).

It makes sense then, that Trump took pains to frame the move as one piece of a broader, protectionist agenda  and made no effort whatsoever to convey the substance of the former.

This is the first of many, Trump said as he signed the order. This is number one  but this is the first of many.

Specifically, the president promised to establish a reciprocal tariff policy  putting an equal and opposite levy on any country that imposes duties on American goods. We want reciprocal  mirror  some people call it a mirror tariff or a mirror tax, Trump explained. If they charge us, we charge them the same thing.

If we take the president at his word, then this statement augurs a radical transformation of American trade policy  and the beginning of massive, global trade war.

Fortunately, no one takes Trump at his word, least of all on this particular subject. Thus, rather than tanking global markets, Trumps remarks actually soothed them  apparently many traders had misinterpreted early reports about the tariffs, and thought that the president was proposing a somewhat more robust package than he actually did.

Nonetheless, the move comes with significant downside risks. On Thursday, Chinas Ministry of Commerce warned that it is firmly opposed to the U.S. sides unilateralism and trade protectionism, and will certainly take all necessary measures to resolutely defend its legitimate rights and interests.

Those measures will include retaliatory tariffs targeting industries in pro-Trump regions of the country, according to The Wall Street Journal.

If Chinas response is exactly proportionate  inflicting $50 billion of tariffs on U.S. goods  the macroeconomic impact would be significant but not massive. But matters would become more grave if the trade war escalated from there, as Bloomberg explains:

A simulation by Oxford Economics suggests a 25 percent U.S. tariff on $60 billion worth of Chinese exports, with comparable retaliation, would reduce Chinas growth by about 0.1 percentage point this year and a little less next year, chief Asia economist Louis Kuijs in Hong Kong said in a recent note. There would be a slightly smaller impact on the U.S. economy, he said.

The key risk is that it does not end with this modest baseline scenario, said Kuijs, who formerly worked for the World Bank in Beijing. More measures may follow, and tit-for-tat responses could lead to escalation. Collateral damage in other economies will be significant and could further complicate the trade friction.

There will now be a 30-day comment period before the tariffs take effect. That coming debate is likely to scramble partisan allegiances, as the Chamber of Commerce works to water down the tariffs, and Democrats exploit an opportunity to let their vulnerable incumbents align themselves with Trump  and against the Republican Party: On Thursday, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said of Trump, I want to give him a big pat on the back  Im very pleased that this administration is taking strong action to get a better deal on China.Spring is always a time of birth, rebirth and renewal at Connecticuts Beardsley Zoo in Bridgeport. This year, it also will be a time for several coming-out parties.

Just like debutantes at a spring ball, a number of the zoos new additions will soon be formally introduced to society.

Facility director Gregg Dancho said in a recent telephone chat that the states only zoo is bursting with activity this spring, the result of recent births (including three endangered maned wolf pups), the arrival of new residents from out-of-state and the construction of new exhibits.

Some newcomers have yet to be introduced to the public because they need time to acclimate to their living arrangements while becoming comfortable with other animals or significant others, he said.

Such is the case, said Dancho, with Hope the Sloth, from the John Ball Zoo in Grand Rapids, Mich., and Meri, a 4-year-old red panda, an arrival from the Brandywine Zoo in Wilmington, Del. Hope is in the process of getting to know the zoos male, Jabba the Sloth, while Meri is becoming acquainted with her male counterpart, Rochan.

Both sloths are of the two-toed variety (Choloepus didactylus), a species found in Central and South America, Dancho said. Largely nocturnal and solitary, sloths are arboreal, living in trees in rain forests and ... deciduous forests. The two-toed sloth is larger and (relatively) faster than its cousin, the three-toed sloth. They spend most of their lives snoozing in the rain forest treetop canopy, hidden from predators, but vulnerable to deforestation, according to the zoo.

When Hope is comfortable with her surroundings, she will join Jabba in the Rain Forest Building, Dancho said. Meri, the red panda, is named for Meriadoc Brandybuck, a character in J.R.R. Tolkeins The Lord of the Rings.

According to the zoo,Red pandas (Ailurus fulgens) are not true pandas, rather they are a unique species whose name panda is derived from a Nepalese word, ponya, meaning eater of bamboo. As with many of the zoo residents, the red panda is threatened in the wild by territory loss and fragmentation, resource depletion, and are frequently hunted for their beautiful fur.

Dancho said the zoo is building a spacious new home for Rochan and Meri that will feature a yard landscaped with bamboo, with plenty of treetop spots for sunbathing. Hailing from the Himalayas and the mountain ranges of southwest China, red pandas prefer colder climates. The new habitat will have cool spaces to enjoy in the summer, and outdoor space to explore in the winter, the zoo points out.

Dancho said Meris outgoing personality should make her a favorite with zoo visitors.

More Information Connecticut's Beardsley Zoo, 1875 Noble Ave., Bridgeport. Daily, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Open April 1, Easter Sunday. $15 age 12 and older; $12 age 3-11; $11 age 62 and older. BeardsleyZoo.org See More Collapse

Managed by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums Species Survival Plan, inter-regional transfers are arranged with careful attention to gene diversity in the hope that successful breeding will take place, the zoo said.

The zoos breeding program exists to bolster the dwindling number of animals still in the wild, Dancho said. Its a real testament to our zoos strong reputation for working to protect endangered species and to educate our guests about them. Its an important part of our mission and were justifiably proud of that.

Also of continuing interest to the public, noted Dancho, is the Nov. 25 birth of two Amur tiger cubs, Zeya and Reka. The two have been cared for since birth by zoo staff because they were rejected by their mother. (A webcam in the Amur tiger cubs nursery operates daily from 8:30 a.m. to 8 p.m. Visit beardsleyzoo.org/tiger-cam, made possible by zoo sponsor Blue Buffalo.)

They too will make their debut soon. To ensure continued expansion and funds for new exhibits, the zoo is appealing to the public, local corporations and foundations for donations, Dancho said.Just swing by Trump Tower sometime. We have a killer taco bowl. Photo: Jorge Silva/AFP/Getty Images

If any foreign leaders are itching for a summit with the U.S., they should just give President Trump a ring. Earlier this month, South Korean officials summoned to the Oval Office mentioned that Kim Jong-un would like to meet with the president (which has been North Koreas stance for years). Trump said yes immediately, stunning both South Korean and American officials, who thought he might want to discuss the matter with his advisers first.

Since then, it seems Trump has grown increasingly disinterested in his staffers advice (and maybe the written word in general). Though Trumps advisers reportedly wrote DO NOT CONGRATULATE in his briefing materials for his phone call with Vladimir Putin on Tuesday, he went ahead an commended the Russian president on his reelection (in a sham election). Trumps advisers were also taken aback when he told reporters that probably well be seeing President Putin in the not-too-distant future, as the two leaders are not scheduled to see each other again until November, when they are both expected to attend the Group of 20 summit in Argentina.

The Washington Post reports that prior to the call there was no discussion of a meeting with Putin, and senior White House officials have previously argued against holding a bilateral meeting with the Russian leader. It appears they tried to keep the invitation private, but both Trump and Moscow made that impossible:

Hours before the White House even acknowledged that Trump had spoken to Putin, the Kremlin put its own spin on the call, saying that Trump had called to congratulate Putin and that special attention was paid to making progress on the question of holding a possible meeting at the highest level.

The Russian statement forced the hand of the White House, where advisers had disagreed on whether to include Trumps congratulations in the official U.S. account, two people familiar with the conversation said. When the official White House readout of the call emerged several hours later, it said Trump had congratulated Putin but made no mention of a discussion of a meeting.

Its understood that Trump often extends meaningless invitations to foreign leaders, and senior administration officials told the paper that they havent been instructed to move ahead with plans to see Putin. White House officials may have to deal with a president who doesnt plan out what hes going to say, but at least they can bet that he doesnt mean what he says either.In Silicon Valley, they call companies that are worth more than $1 billion before they go public unicorns.

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 21/3/2018 (1281 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Opinion

In Silicon Valley, they call companies that are worth more than $1 billion before they go public unicorns.

Skip the Dishes was on its way to becoming Winnipegs first unicorn, but it was acquired by the U.K.-based public company Just Eat, so it might not technically qualify for the label.

Farmers Edge, the precision agriculture company that has raised much more than $100 million from venture capital investors and has customers around the world paying for its data-based precision agricultural services, is probably getting close to that mark.

In a discussion about the changing shape of governance for knowledge-based companies at a get-together of the Institute of Corporate Directors on Wednesday, Josh Simair, founder of Skip the Dishes and Wade Barnes, co-founder of Farmers Edge, had some biting commentary to share about the challenges they faced growing their companies in Winnipeg and the realities the province is facing in the increasingly digital economy.

Both of them would be considered fabulously successful by most accounts and many might think they ought not to have a care in the world.

But the two founders and CEOs (Simair recently resigned from Skip the Dishes)  who are both born-and-bred Prairie boys  want to see the landscape change so that others might have an easier go of it growing digital-era companies in a region that may be more wedded than most to traditional industry.

It may very well be the case that those two companies are the outliers and that enterprises of their size may not emerge out of Winnipeg again for another generation, but both were unimpressed enough with their own accomplishments to imagine how it might be easier for others to do it the next time.

They both believe they face significant challenges ahead for their companies to continue to grow and both rang alarm bells about the kind of structural changes the province ought to be considering.

"We need to stop thinking there is economic value in new factories," Barnes said. "That is not where the world is going. It is going digital. The world is changing. You are going to see a lot of really big companies get hit with a sledgehammer. Big-name companies so mighty and powerful. They are going to get a big shakeup."

Barnes, the CEO and founder of Farmers Edge, pointed out that with 1,400 employees and growing, Skip the Dishes now employs just about as many as the largest private-sector employers in the city  New Flyer Industries and Boeing Canada, which are both at around 1,500.

But their ability to keep growing is tied at least in part to their ability to continue to fill the positions that need filling. Simair said Skip the Dishes officials recently returned from Sao Paulo, Brazil, where they made job offers to 93 system developers.

"Between Farmers Edge and Skip, we are hiring more developers than the entire province is graduating," Simair said.

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His big thing is how hard it is to get immigration permits for skilled workers to be able to come and work here. They both urge government to make that process easier using the simple logic that there are jobs available here, no local candidates that qualify and future wealth generation for the province is at stake.

Those two companies eventually became as successful as any Manitoba company in recent history in accessing enough investment capital to grow their companies to the size they are at now.

But both of them also ran into extreme culture clashes with their Silicon Valley investors (who do not believe there could possibly be anyone smart enough in the Prairies to run the companies they started). Simair said he ran up $70,000 in credit-card debt as he boot-strapped his company into existence in the early years. That kind of self-reliance and economic reality was a stark contrast to the way the Silicon Valley venture capitalists throw around money.

Barness experience starting up Farmers Edge was also one where he had a team of dedicated partners who understood when they had to miss a paycheque every now and then. Their subsequent venture capital partners were not nearly as understanding.

Both of them said investors and board members were needed who understood the world of technology and also the particular cultural realities of Prairie companies. The fact that there is virtually no way for companies such as theirs to access capital locally to achieve the kind of success theyve achieved speaks once more to the need for more flexible and reliable pools of capital based in the region.

martin.cash@freepress.mb.caDisarray doesnt seem a strong enough word to capture the magnitude of the mess that enveloped Premier Brian Pallister and his government Wednesday morning.

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 22/3/2018 (1281 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Opinion

Disarray doesnt seem a strong enough word to capture the magnitude of the mess that enveloped Premier Brian Pallister and his government Wednesday morning.

With most Manitobans only an hour or so into their workday came word that Manitoba Hydro chairman Sandford Riley and eight other members of the Crown utilitys board had resigned.

A news release issued by Riley attributed the resignation to a number of factors, including a failure by Pallister to engage in "meaningful dialogue" on pressing issues facing the utility. The news release also said Pallister was preparing to "remove" Riley as chairman, suggesting Pallister had "lost faith in the board."

"Accordingly, we have determined it is necessary to resign," Riley stated in the release.

It was a pretty sticky situation for Pallister, the man who appointed Riley and the other dissident board members. However, when faced with an incendiary situation, the premier did what he does best: he added fuel to the fire.

In a scrum with reporters, Pallister said the real reason for the mass resignation was the Hydro boards decision to pay the Manitoba Metis Federation $70 million. In exchange, the federation would agree that no further environmental challenges would be undertaken to slow down completion of a transmission line to Minnesota. Pallister said cabinet decided to veto the payment, which "led to the decision you see here today."

Pallister did confirm that he was planning to reassign Riley to another Crown corporation board, part of a mid-term strategy to shuffle board appointments and bring more women into the mix. Given all that has happened since Riley took over the Hydro board, that seems like a pretty unbelievable excuse.

The fact is that with one news release and one media scrum, the Progressive Conservative government and its most valuable Crown corporation have been thrown into chaos. The timing could not be worse.

Pallister is still trying to build public support for the recently tabled provincial budget that has been criticized as deceptive and confusing by some of the governments staunchest supporters. Into that mayhem, you can now add a leadership vacuum at the top levels of Hydro that arrives just a few weeks before the Public Utilities Board makes a critically important decision on a general rate application.

It is hard to overstate the magnitude of the problem that the mass resignation creates for the premier. In fact, it has created several problems.

First, it creates instability at what is arguably Manitobas most important Crown corporation at a time when it is facing unprecedented challenges. Hydro is struggling to manage an expensive capital expansion program that includes a new generating station and new transmission infrastructure. Notwithstanding the reasons that Riley gave for stepping down, leaving the helm of the utility at this point in its history is irresponsible and selfish, at best.

However, the full effect of the resignations extends well beyond the financial stability of the utility.

The decision by Riley and his supporters on the board to abandon Hydro is tantamount to a public rebuke of the premier, something that could significantly weaken Pallisters position as leader of the PC party.

Riley is considered royalty within Manitobas Progressive Conservative constituency. For decades he has been a significant source of political and strategic advice, and financial support. Many within the party think he may very well be the best leader the party never had.

However, since taken charge at Hydro, he has had an uneasy relationship with the government that appointed him.

Rileys inflammatory warnings about impending financial doom at Hydro  a condition he believed would be brought on by the utilitys growing debt load  were a frequent and surprising source of concern for Pallister. Riley talked openly and often about Hydros debt-to-equity ratio, and how it could undermine the provinces credit rating. He suggested the province dig into general revenues to make an "equity investment" in the utility to stabilize finances.

At the PUB, Riley directed Hydro to seek a series of unprecedented rate hikes to lessen the effect of the growing debt. Unfortunately, almost no one outside the board agreed with Rileys view of the world in which Hydro operated. Last year, the PUB turned down Hydros first major rate increase and is expected to do the same next month when it rules on the 2018 general rate application.

Rileys continued assertions that Hydro needed more than double the rate increases being approved by the PUB was becoming a political liability for Pallister. As were suggestions from the Hydro board that the government lessen the PUBs influence over Hydro finances. Riley had become an uncontrollable rogue element, operating at cross purposes with the politicians who appointed him.

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In this context, Pallisters claim that he was preparing to shuffle Riley to another Crown corporation board to make more room for women seems unbelievable. The premier clearly needed to get Riley out of Hydro. His claim about the need to appoint more women, something that he really does need to do, was clearly a ruse designed to help his partisan brother avoid the indignity of being dumped.

Just as clear is the likelihood that Riley deduced the pointlessness of that farce and resigned before he could be effectively fired.

Where does this leave Pallister?

Pallisters government has lost support since being elected in 2016. He desperately needs the support of longtime, core Tories as he prepares for the 2020 election. And up against that challenge, he has found himself at war with one of the most famous and influential Tories of them all.

Thats not disarray. But it could spell disaster.

dan.lett@freepress.mb.caMandatory overtime has reached a crisis level for nurses at St. Boniface Hospital and workers in the program that cares for women and babies are bearing the brunt of it, the Manitoba Nurses Union says.

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 21/3/2018 (1281 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Mandatory overtime has reached a crisis level for nurses at St. Boniface Hospital and workers in the program that cares for women and babies are bearing the brunt of it, the Manitoba Nurses Union says.

There have been as many incidents of mandatory overtime at the Winnipeg facility reported so far this year  328  as there were in all of 2017, said union president Sandi Mowat.

Most of them  186  were reported by nurses working in labour, delivery, recovery and the postpartum unit.

"The woman and child program is a big issue," Mowat said Wednesday. "Theyre extremely short(-handed)."

Last weekend, four unit nurses reported they worked their eight-hour shift, then were told they had to work another eight-hour shift, making it a 16-hour day for them. Mowat said those are just the nurses who reported the mandatory overtime by filling out a form and submitting it to their union local.

"Its all self-reported," she said. "If that much is mandatory, how much voluntary? We know its more than that. It is extremely concerning.

"There are lots of studies that show that with excessive OT, youve got nurses getting sick and then you have to fill those shifts."

The Winnipeg Regional Health Authority and the province have been telling nurses that major changes introduced last October would help reduce overtime, but it appears the opposite is happening. Nurses are being pushed to compensate for poor planning, said the union president.

"Our government is aware of the staffing pressures at St. Boniface Hospital and have been in continuous contact with the WRHA on how to address this issue, as well as others relating to the transformation of our health-care system," Health Minister Kelvin Goertzen said Wednesday in a prepared statement.

"We will continue to monitor the situation, but anticipate some of these pressures will be alleviated as the flu season winds down and current nursing vacancies are filled," the health minister said.

"In the meantime, we thank the nurses at St. Boniface Hospital for their dedication in providing quality care for Manitobans."

Winnipeg Regional Heath Authority chief nursing officer Lori Lamont told reporters at a news conference responding to the MNUs call for action, flu season, plus "a spike in the volume of need for care for mothers and new babies  that has certainly challenged staff working in the labour and delivery area."

The hospital is in the process of hiring 33 nurses and seven positions have already been filled, Lamont said.

She said the WRHA does not track mandatory overtime, but overall overtime will be lower this fiscal year, thanks to the province-directed health-care system overhaul that is about halfway complete.

"From October until January, we saw a continual and steady improvement," Lamont said. "Weve been challenged in January and February," but high rates of overtime during those two months isnt unusual.

A hospital getting hit with a spike in flu patients in the winter shouldnt come as a surprise to health planners, Mowat said.

"The issue with the woman and child program has been going on for several years, as births have increased but the infrastructure where they give birth has not," the labour leader said.

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The province was expecting the new Womens Hospital to solve that problem, but the Winnipeg health centre is behind schedule, Mowat said.

It may not open until next year and questions are being raised about whether its big enough, she said. "Now were hearing there wont be enough infrastructure. It may already be too small."

The union leader said shes happy to see job postings for nurses in the woman and child program at St. Boniface, but it doesnt help in the short term.

"It takes a little bit to come up to speed," Mowat said, adding the MNU wants the region to bring in nurses from other departments who have experience and who could help out right away.

"We want to help solve this," Mowat said. "We cant go on in the same manner. There doesnt seem to be any recognition that theyre going to reach a point where its who is going to come to work?"

carol.sanders@freepress.mb.caThere were sighs of relief across North America recently when U.S. President Donald Trump announced an exemption for Canada and Mexico from new American tariffs of 25 per cent on imported steel and 10 per cent on imports of aluminum.

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 22/3/2018 (1281 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Opinion

There were sighs of relief across North America recently when U.S. President Donald Trump announced an exemption for Canada and Mexico from new American tariffs of 25 per cent on imported steel and 10 per cent on imports of aluminum.

American allies in Europe and Asia will have to bargain for similar exemptions separately in the weeks ahead. The Trump administration announced the tariffs pursuant to a 1962 law that allowed for the imposition of tariffs for national security reasons.

New policy, old practice

Its tempting to view the U.S. tariff exemptions for Canada in the context of "exemptionalism."

Canadian diplomatic historians R.D. Cuff and J.L. Granatstein coined this term in their 1975 book, Canadian-American Relations In Wartime: From the Great War to the Cold War and defined it this way: "The Canadian habit of seeking exemptions from American economic regulations in order to avoid the costs of national independence."

Cuff and Granatstein argued that U.S. president Richard Nixon effectively ended American exemptionalism with regard to Canada when he refused to exempt Canada from a 10 per cent import surcharge imposed by the United States in 1971. It was designed to address a balance-of-payments crisis.

Nixon believed U.S. allies and economic partners were benefiting from the American crisis and flooding the U.S. market with their exports while refusing to allow the American dollar to decline in value relative to their own currencies. Co-operation on this front would have made imports relatively more expensive than domestic products in the United States.

At the time, the United States was in a period of fiscal expansion due to the costs of the Cold War struggle with the Soviet Union and its ally China, as well as the Vietnam War, an enduring conflict in which the U.S. had few allies.

Nixon would not exempt Canada because it was seen as unco-operative, and a contributor to Americas woes. Canada did not support the Vietnam War. But more important to Nixon was Canadas economic policy toward the automotive industry.

At the urging of U.S. automakers, Nixons predecessor in the White House, Lyndon Johnson, had negotiated the Auto Pact of 1965 that helped Canada manage a balance-of-payments crisis of its own, one that had forced Canada to abandon its peg to the U.S. dollar under the Bretton Woods Agreements. The Auto Pact allowed Canada to stabilize its commodity-driven macro-economy with an expanded manufacturing sector.

Yet as Canadian economist Carl Beigie wrote in 1970, the government of Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson had negotiated separate "letters of undertaking" with Detroit automakers that committed the firms to increase their investments in Canada and maintain vehicle production at agreed levels.

Nixon proposed the cancellation of the Auto Pact, convinced that Canada had "cheated" and cost the United States both jobs and investment.

Sound familiar?

Trump echoes Nixon

Trumps charges that Canada is treating the U.S. unfairly and taking advantage of bad trade deals negotiated by a previous administration are an echo of Nixons views.

Almost a decade after Cuff and Granastein published their study of U.S.-Canadian relations, American scholar Charles F. Doran wrote an extremely insightful book on bilateral relations from a U.S. perspective. In Forgotten Partnership: Canada-U.S. Relations Today, Doran argued that the United States security partnership with Canada justified Congress and U.S. officials granting occasional exemptions for Canada from U.S. economic policies.

Reflecting upon the later U.S. shift away from exemptionalism for Canada, Doran observed:

Cancellation of exemptions for Canada, urged on the United States by its balance-of-payments problems, was considered comparatively cost-free because the interdependence of the two economies would ensure cooperation in trade and commercial matters. () Canada tended to neglect the possibility that efforts to extract greater benefits from foreign investment and efforts to reduce the U.S. share of Canadian trade might eventually impinge on the willingness of the United States to create an implicit exemption for Canada in terms of sharing the defense burden.

Doran argued that the United States granted exemptions based on an "implicit quid pro quo" that neither side would seek to exploit the other: The U.S. would not wield economic leverage against Canada and Canada would not attempt to take advantage of U.S. defence spending by underfunding its own military and national security.

The Trump administrations invocation of national security as a justification for its tariffs on steel and aluminum echoes this implicit quid pro quo.

"The countries that treat us the worst on trade and on military are our allies, as they like to call them," Trump said when he announced the new tariffs. He went on to add: "The workers who poured their souls into building this great nation were betrayed. But that betrayal is now over."

Trump made the link explicit when he noted that exemptions to the new tariffs might be granted to European and Asian allies if their contributions to allied defence improved.

The quid pro quo

Trumps foreign policy has not fulfilled the predictions of many who saw his "America First" slogan as a signal of a retreat from global leadership.

Indeed, during his first speech before the United Nations General Assembly last fall, he warned: "If the righteous many do not confront the wicked few, then evil will triumph. When decent people and nations become bystanders to history, the forces of destruction only gather power and strength." Accordingly, Trump has accused allies of under-spending on their militaries. In that same address, Trump said:

For too long, the American people were told that mammoth multinational trade deals, unaccountable international tribunals, and powerful global bureaucracies were the best way to promote their success. But as those promises flowed, millions of jobs vanished and thousands of factories disappeared. Others gamed the system and broke the rules. And our great middle class, once the bedrock of American prosperity, was forgotten and left behind, but they are forgotten no more and they will never be forgotten again.

In fact, Trump has repeatedly accused U.S. trading partners of taking advantage of U.S. economic openness to enrich themselves at the expense of American jobs.

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The Trump administration has also signalled publicly through its National Security Strategy and National Defense Strategy that it wants U.S. allies to share in the rising costs of responding to the re-emergence of great power rivalries as Russia and China challenge the U.S.-led economic and security order.

And now Trump has exempted Canada from new tariffs. Why?

Cuff, Granatstein and Doran all saw exemptions as something that the United States chose to do to support Canada as a partner during wartime, including during the Cold War.

For Trump, a Canadian increase in defence spending might be more important than changes to Canadas widely maligned supply management system in the dairy sector in getting U.S.-Canadian economic relations back on track.

Christopher Sands is a senior research professor and director of the Center for Canadian Studies at Johns Hopkins University.

This article was first published at The Conversation Canada: theconversation.com/ca.Today is World Water Day, an opportunity for citizens around the globe to reflect on the importance of water  and take action to protect it.

Hey there, time traveller!

This article was published 22/3/2018 (1281 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Opinion

Today is World Water Day, an opportunity for citizens around the globe to reflect on the importance of water  and take action to protect it.

Across Manitoba, a network of citizens, scientists and conservation professionals is doing just that. As the melting snow signals the start of spring, these volunteers are mobilizing as part of a regional community-based monitoring network, designed to generate new data to aid in the fight for Lake Winnipeg.

Water from across Lake Winnipegs watershed carries phosphorus to the lake. In excess, this phosphorus causes the chronic algae blooms with which Manitobans are all too familiar. Though Lake Winnipegs watershed is vast  stretching from the Rockies almost to Thunder Bay  not all this land is equal in terms of the phosphorus load it contributes to Lake Winnipeg. Some areas contribute more phosphorus than others, making them effective phosphorus hotspots.

Since 2016, the Lake Winnipeg Community-Based Monitoring Network (LWCBMN) has been collecting water samples across southern Manitoba in order to identify these hotspots. A joint project of the Lake Winnipeg Foundation (LWF) and Manitobas conservation districts, with support from government partners, LWCBMN leverages the professional expertise of LWFs science advisors, the networks and know-how of conservation district staff, and the commitment of grassroots citizen volunteers.

Because LWCBMN volunteers live, work or commute near their sampling stations, the network can mobilize quickly to collect samples at relatively little cost, at greater frequency, and at finer spatial scales than are possible through provincial and federal monitoring programs. Special care is taken to ensure samples are collected frequently during the spring melt and after summer storms, when large amounts of phosphorus are flushed off the landscape and into provincial waterways. This information is crucial; without it, we cant effectively confront phosphorus loading where and when it happens.

Collected samples are analyzed to generate robust phosphorus data compatible with that produced by Environment and Climate Change Canada and Manitoba Sustainable Development. Phosphorus data is then combined with flow data from the Water Survey of Canada in order to calculate localized phosphorus exports  the number of kilograms of phosphorus running off of each hectare of land in a given sub-watershed.

In 2017, in its second field season, LWCBMN staff and volunteers collected 800 water samples from 75 sites across southern Manitoba. Our data are clearly identifying phosphorus hotspots  and pointing the way to potential solutions for Lake Winnipeg.

So what are we learning?

Directly southeast of Winnipeg, the Manning Canal sub-watershed is a phosphorus hotspot. In 2016 and 2017, each hectare in this 481-square-kilometre sub-watershed exported 1.1 and 1.64 kg of phosphorus, respectively. By comparison, each hectare of land in the city of Winnipeg  itself also a phosphorus hotspot  exports 1.58 kg of phosphorus per year, as reported in 2011s State of Lake Winnipeg Report.

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The Manning Canal sub-watershed drains the growing city of Steinbach, and is also home to the most intensely developed hog industry in Manitoba, according to the Seine River Watershed Management Plan. Both human sewage and hog manure are sources of phosphorus.

Community-based monitoring data cant tell us exactly which of the many potential sources is responsible for the disproportionately high phosphorous exports from the Manning Canal sub-watershed. However, the data do enable us to focus our phosphorus-reduction efforts in specific geographic areas where were likely to have the largest impact. Our data is also prompting new research within these hotspots to help us better understand why these regions are exporting so much phosphorus.

With LWCBMN data in hand, we have a new tool to help us address the complex and chronic problem of Lake Winnipegs algae blooms. Together, partners are committed to expanding the network in the coming years, with the ultimate goal of generating multi-year community-based monitoring data for all of southern Manitoba. With new conservation district partners and citizen volunteers joining every year, the LWCBMN offers huge potential to leverage limited resources  and the passion of Manitobas citizens  to turn the tide for Lake Winnipeg.

We are, after all, a water province  from the rivers coursing through our towns and cities to the great inland seas that stretch north as far as the eye can see. Water has shaped us as Manitobans. In turn, we have an obligation to protect it  not only on World Water Day, but every day.

Alexis Kanu is the executive director of the Lake Winnipeg Foundation.

Explore the 2017 LWCBM data online at lakewinnipegfoundation.org/monitoring-our-waterways. To become a citizen scientist, email cbm@lakewinnipegfoundation.org or call 204-956-0436.Lou Dobbs went nuts about an immigration case and Trump agreed on Twitter without checking with his lawyers. Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images

One of those only-in-the-Trump-era sagas rolled out at 6:52 a.m. this morning when the president tweeted out a comment that undermined his administrations legal position in its death struggle with California over sanctuary cities. To understand it, though, some background is necessary.

On Monday the U.S. Supreme Court refused (without comment, which is normally the case) to hear the State of Arizonas appeal of a 9th Circuit decision invalidating its cancellation of drivers licenses for undocumented immigrants protected by DACA. The Justice Department did not join the petition for high-court review because the 2012 case had been overtaken by events, presumably meaning all the twists and turns in DACA policy since the suit was filed.

There the matter would have rested had not Lou Dobbs heard about the matter and freaked out.

After demonstrating his ignorance about how the Supreme Court works (guest Alan Dershowitz tried to educate him to no avail), Dobbs decided (with an assist from Dershowitz) to blame their refusal to hear the case on the Justice Department for not supporting Arizonas barnacle-encrusted appeal. And this came to the attention of the Fox News devotee in the White House:

Department of Justice should have urged the Supreme Court to at least hear the Drivers License case on illegal immigrants in Arizona. I agree with @LouDobbs. Should have sought review.  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 21, 2018

Trump didnt tweet that this inaction was being placed in the lengthy debit column of his assessment of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, though you can almost see the thought-bubble.

But as legal beagles everywhere immediately realized, POTUS had in fact thrown shade on the very strategy Sessions and company were pursuing in connection with the administrations war with California over immigration enforcement. Ian Millhiser explains:

Brewer [the decision SCOTUS refused to review] stands for the proposition that the federal government generally reigns supreme in matters of immigration policy. In the words of the law, Arizonas anti-immigrant policy is preempted by the web of federal immigration laws and policies determining which non-citizens are and are not permitted to live and work in the United States.

The Trump administrations suit against California, known as United States v. California, rests on a similar legal theory. California passed a handful of laws which effectively make it more difficult for federal immigration officials to crack down on undocumented immigrants.

Just as he did in the travel-ban case, Trumps loose lips are creating a world of trouble for his lawyers. As Millhiser concludes:

It is clear that Trump neither understands the legal arguments being made by his administration, nor cares to learn what those arguments are. That could make him Californias best friend in court.

Tempting as it might be for the Justice Department to maintain that the commander-in-chief doesnt set policy for the administration when hes ranting and raving on Twitter, theres no established Trump Twitter exception to the general proposition that the president speaks for everyone in his employ. Hes a lawyers worst nightmare.AIXTRON SE is a provider of deposition equipment to the semiconductor industry. The Company's technology solutions are used by a range of customers across the world to build components for electronic and opto-electronic applications based on compound, silicon or organic semiconductor materials. Such components are used in fiber optic communication systems, wireless and mobile telephony applications, optical and electronic storage devices, computing, signaling and lighting, displays, as well as a range of other technologies. The Company's business activities include developing, producing and installing equipment for the deposition of semiconductor and other complex materials, process engineering, consulting and training, including ongoing customer support and after-sales service. The Company supplies its customers with both production-scale material deposition systems and small scale systems for research and development (R&D) or small scale production.

Read MoreBest Buy Co., Inc. engages in the provision of consumer technology products and services. It operates through two business segments: Domestic and International. The Domestic segment comprises of the operations in all states, districts, and territories of the U.S., operating under various brand names, including Best Buy, Best Buy Mobile, Geek Squad, Magnolia Audio Video, Napster, and Pacific Sales. The International segment includes all operations outside the U.S. and its territories, which includes Canada, Europe, China, Mexico, and Turkey. It also markets its products under the brand names: Best Buy, bestbuy.com, Best Buy Direct, Best Buy Express, Best Buy Mobile, Geek Squad, GreatCall, Magnolia and Pacific Kitchen and Home. The company was founded by Richard M. Schulze in 1966 and is headquartered in Richfield, MN.

Read MoreJared Kushner in the Saudi Royal Court after President Trump received the Order of Abdulaziz al-Saud on May 20, 2017. Photo: MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images

Jared Kushners comically large to-do list has mostly proven to be a bust, but Trumps adviser-in-law has been quite successful in one area: strengthening ties between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia. Kushner accomplished this largely through his personal relationship with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, who ousted the heir to the throne last summer and later arrested dozens of business leaders and government officials in what was ostensibly a crackdown on corruption.

The Intercept reported on Wednesday that MBS, as the crown prince is known, bragged about his close relationship to Kushner, claiming he gave him the names of Saudis disloyal to him  information Kushner might have gleaned from the presidents daily brief. MBS reportedly remarked that Kushner was in his pocket.

That claim raises even more questions about Kushners handling of classified intelligence, but when MBS visited the White House on Tuesday, President Trump seemed pleased with how hes handled the U.S.-Saudi relationship. Heres a closer at how de facto secretary of State Jared Kushner operates.

Trump and his advisers, including Kushner, meet with Prince Mohammed on March 14, 2017. Photo: The Washington Post/The Washington Post/Getty Images

Kushner Befriends MBS

While theyd met previously, the Kushner-MBS friendship started one year ago during a long lunch at the White House. A snowstorm bumped German chancellor Angela Merkel from the White House schedule, giving the president and his advisers more time with the Saudis. The Washington Post reported that the two 30-something princes connected over being tasked with solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

As their countries chief negotiators on Israeli-Palestinian peace, Kushner and the Saudi prince were both seeking to prove their worth on the international stage. They consulted with one another frequently in private calls over the following months, according to people with knowledge of their communications.

Private Communications

Kushner reportedly riled top national-security officials by arranging private calls with MBS and other foreign leaders. The Intercept reported that Kushner even used WhatsApp to communicate directly with Prince Mohammed, though his attorneys have advised him to stop. While Peter Mirijanian, a spokesperson for Kushners attorney Abbe Lowell, told the Post that Kushner is in conformity with the Presidential Records Act and other rules, the paper reported that this was still an issue fairly recently:

Kushners unique role was evident a few weeks ago when White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly asked a question in an intelligence briefing about a sensitive policy matter related to Saudi Arabia in preparation for the crown princes visit.

In response, intelligence briefers told him that virtually all of the conversations that U.S. officials had with the Saudis on the matter had been between Kushner and Mohammed, according to several people familiar with the episode.

Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner at the Saudi Royal Court in Riyadh on May 20, 2017. Photo: MANDEL NGAN/AFP/Getty Images

Trumps Visit to Saudi Arabia

Kushner persuaded Trump to make Saudi Arabia the destination of his first foreign state trip in May 2017, though Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis were said to be opposed. According to the Post, Trump told his son-in-law that he would go to Riyadh if he could get the Saudis to purchase U.S. weapons and increase their counterterrorism efforts.

Trump considered the trip a great success, and touted the sale of $110 billion of weapons to the Saudis as his signature achievement  though the deal was comprised of letters of intent, not actual contracts, and they began under Obama.

Trump and Kushner Back Blockade of Qatar

Claiming that they were moved by Trumps call to crack down on terrorism, in June 2017 Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates organized a blockade of Qatar, setting off an ongoing crisis. In reality, the move was sparked by a deep regional rivalry.

An hour after Tillerson called on Arab nations to ease the blockade, Trump voiced his strong support for the Saudi-led action, first on Twitter:

So good to see the Saudi Arabia visit with the King and 50 countries already paying off. They said they would take a hard line on funding...  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 6, 2017

...extremism, and all reference was pointing to Qatar. Perhaps this will be the beginning of the end to the horror of terrorism!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 6, 2017

Then in the White House Rose Garden:

Pres. Trump says he decided along with Sec. of State Tillerson "the time had come to call on Qatar to end its funding" of terrorism. pic.twitter.com/RkBDn8o2Px  ABC News (@ABC) June 9, 2017

Kushner was reportedly one of the only advisers who agreed with Trumps stance. His reasoning is unknown, but we learned recently that just weeks earlier, Kushners father met with Qatars minister of finance in an effort to secure funding for the familys troubled 666 Fifth Avenue property  and was shot down.

Mirijanian, the spokesperson for Kushners attorney, said the idea that he considered his familys business interests in any foreign interaction is fantasy and part of a misinformation campaign.

However, Special Counsel Robert Mueller is looking into Kushners pursuit of foreign financing, and NBC News reported that Qatari officials considered turning over evidence that he plotted against them with their neighbors:

Separately, Qatari government officials visiting the U.S. in late January and early February considered turning over to Mueller what they believe is evidence of efforts by their countrys Persian Gulf neighbors in coordination with Kushner to hurt their country, four people familiar with the matter said. The Qatari officials decided against cooperating with Mueller for now out of fear it would further strain the countrys relations with the White House, these people said.

Kushner Takes Secret Trip to Saudi Arabia

Kushner took an unannounced trip to Riyadh in late October, and according to David Ignatius, he and Prince Mohammed are said to have stayed up until nearly 4 a.m. several nights, swapping stories and planning strategy.

Later the White House said the purpose of the trip was to discuss a Middle East peace plan, but declined to say who Kushner met with. Afterward, MBS reportedly bragged about Kushner tipping him off about disloyal Saudis. (Mirijanian denied this, saying: Some questions by the media are so obviously false and ridiculous that they merit no response. This is one.)

Kushner was said to be keenly interested in the presidents daily brief, which he lost access to when his security clearance was downgraded last month. Trump might have authorized him to share information with the Saudis, but passing on classified information without presidential authorization is a federal crime. As the Intercept notes, the crown prince probably didnt need Kushner to identify his critics, and its possible he made the story up to inflate his status.

Trump Backs Crown Princes Crackdown

Days after Kushner left Riyadh, MBS instituted his anti-corruption crackdown, arresting his rivals and many influential Saudis. Trump quickly tweeted out his support.

I have great confidence in King Salman and the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, they know exactly what they are doing....  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 6, 2017

....Some of those they are harshly treating have been milking their country for years!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 6, 2017

Earlier this month the New York Times reported that detainees were forced to hand over massive sums of money, real estate, and shares of their companies, and also suffered physical abuse:

During months of captivity, many were subject to coercion and physical abuse, witnesses said. In the early days of the crackdown, at least 17 detainees were hospitalized for physical abuse and one later died in custody with a neck that appeared twisted, a badly swollen body and other signs of abuse, according to a person who saw the body.

The Saudi government called these claims absolutely untrue.

President Trump meets with Mohammed bin Salman in the Oval Office on March 20, 2018. Photo: Kevin Dietsch/Bloomberg via Getty Images

MBS Gets Warm Reception in D.C.

The crown prince will spend the next two weeks traveling throughout the U.S. in an attempt to secure new business deals. Trumps meeting with Prince Mohammed at the White House on Tuesday featured plenty of mutual praise, but there were no major announcements.

While the prince was in D.C. the Senate rejected a resolution calling on the U.S. military to stop aiding its war in Yemen. While a senior official said the issue came up in private, Trump did not allude to it in his public remarks.

This is certainly not the first administration to put its relationship with a key partner in the Middle East ahead of condemning Saudi human-rights abuses. Some argue that Kushner cozying up to MBS was part of a cunning plan to cut a Middle East peace deal by getting the Saudis to bring the Palestinians to the table. If that was the strategy Trump seems to have derailed it by recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.

For whatever reason, Trump has made it clear that he intends to keep following Kushners lead, going much easier on the Saudis than his predecessors.

I would really have to say the relationship was, to put it mildly, very, very strained during the Obama administration, Trump said at his meeting with MBS. And the relationship now is probably as good as its really ever been and I think will probably only get better.BT Group plc provides communications services worldwide. Its Consumer segment sells telephones, baby monitors, and Wi-Fi extenders through high street retailers, online BT Shop, and Website BT.com; and offers home phone, copper and fiber broadband, TV, and mobile services in various packages. The company's EE segment offers 2G, 3G, and 4G mobile network services; broadband, fixed-voice, and TV services; and postpaid and prepaid plans, and emergency services network. This segment also sells 4G mobile phones, tablets, connected devices, and mobile broadband devices from various manufacturers. Its Business and Public Sector segment provides fixed voice, mobility, fiber and connectivity, and networked IT services to retailers, utilities, public sector, healthcare, sports, construction, finance, and educational sectors. The company's Global Services segment offers business communications and ICT services comprising BT Connect, BT Security, BT One, BT Contact, BT Compute, BT Advise, and BT for financial markets. This segment serves approximately 5,500 customers in 180 countries. Its Wholesale and Ventures segment enables communications providers and other organizations to provide fixed or mobile phone services. Its ventures provide mass-market services, such as directory enquiries and payphones; and enterprise services comprising BT Fleet and BT Redcare. This segment also provides broadband and Ethernet, voice, hosted communication, mobile virtual network operator, managed solutions, machine-to-machine, roaming, and media services. The company's Openreach segment engages in the provision of services over the local access network; and installation and maintenance of fiber and copper communications networks that connect homes and businesses. The company was formerly known as Newgate Telecommunications Limited and changed its name to BT Group plc in September 2001. BT Group plc was incorporated in 2001 and is headquartered in London, the United Kingdom.

Read MoreThe following companies are subsidiares of General Dynamics: 42SIX LLC, ARMA Global Corporation, Advanced Technical Products, Aeromil (Australia) Pty Ltd, Aeromil Aircraft Engineering Pty Ltd, Aeromil Aviation Services Pty Ltd, Aeromil IT Services Pty Ltd, Aeromil Marine Pty Ltd, Aeromil Pacific Pty Ltd, American Overseas Marine Company LLC, Anteon International Corporation, Applied Physical Sciences, Applied Physical Sciences Corp., Ascend Intelligence, Australian Avionics Pty Ltd, Autonomic Resources LLC, Avion Logistics Limited, Avjet Corporation, AxleTech International, Axsys, BATH IRON WORKS CORPORATION, BP-HP Pte Limited, Bath Iron Works, Bath Iron Works Australia Corporation, Bath Iron Works Canada LLC, Bluefin Robotics Corporation, Blueprint Technologies Inc., Braintree I Maritime Corp., Braintree II Maritime Corp., Braintree III Maritime Corp., Braintree IV Maritime Corp., Braintree V Maritime Corp., Buccaneer Computer Systems & Service Inc., CSC Computer Sciences Venezuela S.A., CSRA, CSRA (Costa Rica) S.A., CSRA (Guyana) Inc., CSRA (Middle East) LLC, CSRA Argentina S.R.L., CSRA BH d.o.o., CSRA Bahamas Limited, CSRA Bahrain S.P.C., CSRA Belgium SPRL, CSRA Bolivia S.R.L., CSRA Brazil Servicos de Tecnologia Ltda., CSRA Canada Inc., CSRA Caribbean Inc., CSRA Chile SpA, CSRA Colombia SAS, CSRA Commerce 2010 LLC, CSRA Consular Services Holding Company LLC, CSRA Consular Services Inc., CSRA France SARL, CSRA Guatemala Solutions Sociedad Anonima, CSRA Honduras Sociedad Anonima, CSRA Inc., CSRA Information Systems LLC, CSRA Information Technology Spain SL, CSRA Ireland Limited, CSRA Italy S.R.L, CSRA Kosovo L.L.C., CSRA LATAM LLC, CSRA LLC, CSRA Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., CSRA Netherlands B.V., CSRA Nicaragua Sociedad Anonima, CSRA Panama Inc., CSRA Peru S.R.L., CSRA Senegal SARL, CSRA South Africa (Pty) Ltd, CSRA State and Local Solutions LLC, CSRA Systems & Solutions LLC, CSRA Trinidad & Tobago Limited, CSRA Turkey Bilisim Teknolojileri Limited Sirketi, CSRA Uruguay S.R.L, CSRA Visa Services Israel Ltd., CSRAIT - Information Services Portugal Unipessoal LDA, Centauri Solutions LLC, Command System, Computing Devices International, Concord I Maritime Corporation, Concord II Maritime Corporation, Concord III Maritime Corporation, Concord IV Maritime Corporation, Concord V Maritime Corporation, Convair Aircraft Corporation, Convair Corporation, Creative Technology, Customer Services Ecuador CSRA S.A., Devcor, Diamond Fortress Technologies, DynPort Vaccine Company LLC, EB Groton Engineering Inc., EBV Explosives Environmental, ELCS-CZ s.r.o., Eagle Enterprise Inc., Earl Industries - Ship Repair and Coatings Division, Ebv Explosives Environmental Company, Electric Boat - Australia LLC, Electric Boat - UK LLC, Electric Boat Canada LLC, Electric Boat Corporation, Electric Boat France LLC, Electrocom Inc., Engineering Technology, Expro Finance Inc., FBD Fahrzeug und Bremsendienst GmbH, FC Business Systems, Fidelis Cybersecurity, Force Protection, Force Protection Europe Limited, Force Protection Inc., ForeSight Technology Services LLC, Freeman United Coal Mining Company LLC, GD Brazil Holdings LLC, GD European Land Systems - Steyr GmbH, GD European Land Systems Holding GmbH, GDOTS Services Corporation, GM GDLS Defense Group L.L.C., GPS Source Inc., GTE Government Systems, GWA-Datatrac FAST LLC, Galaxy Aerospace Company, Gayston Corporation - Defense Operations, General Dynamics - OTS (Global) Inc., General Dynamics AIS Australia Pty Ltd, General Dynamics Canadian Finance Inc., General Dynamics Canadian Holdings Inc., General Dynamics Commercial Cyber Services LLC, General Dynamics European Finance Limited, General Dynamics European Land Systems - Austria GmbH, General Dynamics European Land Systems - Bridge Systems GmbH, General Dynamics European Land Systems - Czech s.r.o., General Dynamics European Land Systems - Denmark ApS, General Dynamics European Land Systems - Deutschland GmbH, General Dynamics European Land Systems - FWW GmbH, General Dynamics European Land Systems - Mowag GmbH, General Dynamics European Land Systems Romania S.R.L., General Dynamics European Land Systems S.L., General Dynamics Global Force LLC, General Dynamics Global Holdings Limited, General Dynamics Global Imaging Technologies Inc., General Dynamics Government Satellite Services LLC, General Dynamics Government Systems Corporation, General Dynamics Government Systems Overseas Corporation, General Dynamics Information Technology Canada Limited, General Dynamics Information Technology Inc., General Dynamics Information Technology Limited, General Dynamics Installation Services LLC, General Dynamics International Corporation, General Dynamics Itronix LLC, General Dynamics Land Systems - Australia Pty. Ltd., General Dynamics Land Systems - Canada Corporation, General Dynamics Land Systems - Canada Services Inc., General Dynamics Land Systems - Canadian Services Limited, General Dynamics Land Systems - Force Protection Inc., General Dynamics Land Systems Customer Service & Support Company, General Dynamics Land Systems Inc., General Dynamics Limited, General Dynamics Marine Systems Inc., General Dynamics Mission Systems Inc., General Dynamics Mission Systems International Limited, General Dynamics Mission Systems Overseas Company LLC, General Dynamics Motion Control LLC, General Dynamics OTS (Aerospace) Inc., General Dynamics OTS (California) Inc., General Dynamics OTS (DRI) Inc., General Dynamics OTS (Niceville) Inc., General Dynamics OTS (Pennsylvania) Inc., General Dynamics One Source LLC, General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems - Canada Inc., General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems - Canada Valleyfield Inc., General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems - Simunition Operations Inc., General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems Inc., General Dynamics Overseas Systems and Services Corporation, General Dynamics Properties Inc., General Dynamics Robotic Systems Inc., General Dynamics SATCOM Technologies Inc., General Dynamics Satcom Technologies Asia Private Limited, General Dynamics Satellite Communication Services LLC, General Dynamics Saudi Holdings S.L., General Dynamics Shared Resources LLC, General Dynamics Support Services Company, General Dynamics Swiss Financial Management Limited, General Dynamics United Kingdom Limited, General Dynamics Worldwide Holdings Inc., General Dynamics-OTS Inc., General Motors Defense, Gulfstream 100 Holdings LLC, Gulfstream Aerospace, Gulfstream Aerospace Corporation (CA), Gulfstream Aerospace Corporation (DE), Gulfstream Aerospace Corporation (GA), Gulfstream Aerospace Corporation (OK), Gulfstream Aerospace Corporation of Texas, Gulfstream Aerospace Hong Kong Limited, Gulfstream Aerospace LLC, Gulfstream Aerospace LP, Gulfstream Aerospace Ltd., Gulfstream Aerospace Services Corporation, Gulfstream Aerospace Sociedad de Responssabilidad Limitada de CapitalVariable (S. de R.L. de C.V.), Gulfstream Do Brasil Servicos De Suporte E Manutencao A Aeronaves Ltda., Gulfstream International Corporation, Gulfstream Leasing LLC, Gulfstream Product Support Corporation, Gulfstream Services Corporation, Gulfstream Tennessee Corporation, Gulfstream-California Inc., Hawker Pacific (Malaysia) Sdn Bhd, Hawker Pacific Aircraft Management Pte Ltd, Hawker Pacific Airservices Limited, Hawker Pacific Airservices Pvt Ltd, Hawker Pacific Asia Holdings Pte Ltd, Hawker Pacific Asia Pte Ltd, Hawker Pacific Australia Pty Ltd, Hawker Pacific Aviation Services Pty Ltd, Hawker Pacific NZ Limited, Hawker Pacific Pty Ltd, IPWireless, IPWireless PTE. Limited, Information Services Consulting Limited, Interiores Aereos S.A. de C.V., International Manufacturing Technologies Inc., Itronix, Janteq Australia PTY Limited, Janteq Corp., Jet Aviation, Jet Aviation (Asia Pacific) Pte. Ltd., Jet Aviation (Bermuda) Ltd., Jet Aviation (Hong Kong) Ltd., Jet Aviation (Malaysia) SDN BHD, Jet Aviation 125 Services LLC, Jet Aviation AG, Jet Aviation Brazil Holdings Inc., Jet Aviation Business Jets (Hong Kong) Limited, Jet Aviation Business Jets AG, Jet Aviation Business Jets FZCO, Jet Aviation California LLC, Jet Aviation Dulles LLC, Jet Aviation Flight Services Inc., Jet Aviation France SAS, Jet Aviation Holding GmbH, Jet Aviation Holdings USA Inc., Jet Aviation Houston Inc., Jet Aviation International Inc., Jet Aviation Malaga SA, Jet Aviation Management AG, Jet Aviation Netherlands B.V., Jet Aviation Savannah Holding LLC, Jet Aviation Services GmbH, Jet Aviation St. Louis Inc., Jet Aviation Teterboro LP, Jet Aviation Texas Inc., Jet Aviation of America Inc., Jet Aviation/Palm Beach Inc., Jet Professionals LLC, Kylmar, Longreach Energy LLC, MAYA Viz, Maricom Systems Incorporated, Material Service Resources Company LLC, Matthews Land Company, Mediaware International, Mediaware International Pty Ltd, Metro Machine, Metro Machine co, Midwest Properties Sales LLC, NASSCO, NASSCO Holdings Incorporated, NES Associates LLC, National Steel and Shipbuilding Company, Network Connectivity Solutions Corp., Newberry Holdings LLC, OOO Jet Aviation Vnukovo, Open Kernel Labs, Page Europa Srl, Patriot I Shipping Corp., Patriot II Shipping Corp., Patriot IV Shipping Corp., Plane 79 LLC, Praxis Engineering Technologies LLC, PrimeX Technologies, Prodelin India Private Limited, Proyectos Prohumane Mexico S.A. de C.V., Quincy Maritime Corporation III, Raven Acquisitions LLC, SENTECH INC., SRA International Inc., Saco Defense, Santa Barbara Sistemas S.A., Savannah Air Center LLC, Signal Solutions LLC, Southern Illinois Recovery Inc., Spectrum Astro, St. Marks Powder Inc., Stabilo Pty Ltd, Steyr-Daimler-Puch Spezialfahrzeug AG & Co KG, Sydney Jet Charter Pty Ltd, Tadpole Computer, Tecnologias Internacionales de Manufactura S.A. de C.V., Tenacity Solutions Incorporated, The Depth of Ideas for General Trading LLC, TriPoint Global Communications, Vangent, Vangent Servicios de Mexico S.A. de C.V., Veridian, Vertex Antennentechnik GmbH, ViPS, Vulnerability Research Labs LLC, and Weco LLC.China Hydroelectric Corporation is a developer, owner and operator of small hydroelectric power projects in China. The projects are located in Zhejiang, Fujian, Yunnan and Sichuan. As of December 31, 2012, wholly owns 22 operating hydroelectric power projects and have controlling interests in three operating hydroelectric power projects. In March 2012, the Company sold 100% of the Yuanping hydroelectric power project. In April 2013, the Company sold the Yuheng hydroelectric power project, a 30 megawatt (MW) project located in Fujian province. In July 2014, the Company announced that it has completed the merger with CPT Wyndham Sub Ltd., a wholly-owned subsidiary of CPT Wyndham Holdings Ltd.

Read MorePhoto: Netflix

New York Media, publisher of influential brands including New York Magazine, Vulture, and the Cut, today announced that it has acquired Splitsider, the website about comedy and its creators, from the Awl Network. Since 2010, Splitsider has been a discerning voice covering a new generation of comedians, while creating an online community for comedy fans. Splitsider will be integrated into Vulture, as a destination for comedy coverage.

The addition of Splitsider will accelerate a major comedy push at Vulture, with written and video content, live events, podcasts, and brand partnerships, with an expected launch in May to coincide with the 2018 Vulture Festival in New York City.

Splitsider is a treasured, must-read site among comedians and comedy fans, says New York Media CEO Pam Wasserstein. Im thrilled to have it join Vulture, where the combination will create the leading source for all things comedy.

Im a longtime reader and admirer of New York Magazine and Vulture, so I couldnt be more excited for it to become the new home of Splitsider, says Splitsider founder Adam Frucci. Im confident that with their vision and resources it will be cemented as a beautiful comedic oasis in the desiccated husk of the internet Mark Zuckerberg has left us all with.

From Vultures defining piece on the current comedy boom to the ambitious 100 Jokes That Shaped Modern Comedy to the podcast Good One to sold-out comedy shows at Vulture Festival, Vulture has already established itself as a leading force in comedy. The site has long had comedians, including Chris Gethard, Julie Klausner, Lisa Lampanelli, Phoebe Robinson, and Paul F. Tompkins contribute and will further develop those collaborations as it expands comedy coverage. Splitsiders editor, Megh Wright, will join Vulture with the acquisition, forming the basis of a new comedy department with senior editor Jesse David Fox.

We long had designs on comedy becoming as important to Vulture as TV and movies are, says New York Media editor-in-chief Adam Moss. The acquisition of Splitsider helps us do it faster and roots our coverage in the beloved home for comedy fanatics.GEA Group Aktiengesellschaft engages in the development and production of systems and components for the food processing industry worldwide. It operates in five divisions, Separation and Flow Technologies, Liquid and Power Technologies, Food and Health Technologies, Farm Technologies, and Refrigeration Technologies. The company provides separators, decanters, valves, homogenizers, valves, pumps, and process related components and machineries; and process solutions for dairy, food, beverage, chemical, and other industries. It also offers solutions for food processing and pharmaceutical industries, which includes marinating, processing of meat, poultry, seafood, vegan products, pasta and confectionery, baking, slicing, packaging, frozen food processing, granulators, and tablet presses. In addition, the company provides integrated customer solutions for milk production and livestock farming, such as automatic milking, feeding systems, conventional milking solutions, manure handling, and digital herd management tools; and sustainable energy solutions in the field of industrial refrigeration and heating. It has a strategic partnership with SAP SE. The company was formerly known as mg technologies ag and changed its name to GEA Group Aktiengesellschaft in 2005. GEA Group Aktiengesellschaft was founded in 1881 and is headquartered in DAsseldorf, Germany.

Read MoreFortis Inc. operates as an electric and gas utility company in Canada, the United States, and the Caribbean countries. It generates, transmits, and distributes electricity to approximately 433,000 retail customers in southeastern Arizona; and 98,000 retail customers in Arizona's Mohave and Santa Cruz counties with an aggregate capacity of 3,233 megawatts (MW), including 59 MW of solar capacity. The company also sells wholesale electricity to other entities in the western United States; owns gas-fired and hydroelectric generating capacity totaling 65 MW; and distributes natural gas to approximately 1,048,000 residential, commercial, and industrial customers in British Columbia, Canada. In addition, it owns and operates the electricity distribution system that serves approximately 572,000 customers in southern and central Alberta; owns 4 hydroelectric generating facilities with a combined capacity of 225 MW; and provides operation, maintenance, and management services to five hydroelectric generating facilities. Further, the company distributes electricity in the island portion of Newfoundland and Labrador with an installed generating capacity of 143 MW; and on Prince Edward Island with a generating capacity of 130 MW. Additionally, it provides integrated electric utility service to approximately 67,000 customers in Ontario; approximately 270,000 customers in Newfoundland and Labrador; approximately 31,000 customers on Grand Cayman, Cayman Islands; and approximately 15,000 customers on certain islands in Turks and Caicos. The company also holds long-term contracted generation assets in Belize consisting of 3 hydroelectric generating facilities with a combined capacity of 51 MW; and the Aitken Creek natural gas storage facility. It also owns and operates approximately 91,000 circuit Kilometers (km) of distribution lines; and approximately 49,500 km of natural gas pipelines. Fortis Inc. was founded in 1885 and is headquartered in St. John's, Canada.

Read MoreThe Hong Kong and China Gas Company Limited, together with its subsidiaries, produces, distributes, and markets gas in Hong Kong and Mainland China. It is involved in the provision of liquefied natural gas, methanol, and coal and other chemicals; conversion and utilization of biomass, and industrial and agricultural waste; and operation of natural gas refilling stations, piped city-gas projects, upstream and midstream developments, water and wastewater treatment projects, energy exploration and utilization ventures, and aviation fuel facilities. The company supplies town gas to approximately 1.9 million customers. It also provides network connectivity, and data center and cloud computing services; and engages in the software development, solution implementation, and systems integration activities. In addition, the company offers consultancy and engineering contractor services, including utilities installation, infrastructure construction, and civil and building services engineering for public and private projects; and designs and manufactures gas meters and metering systems. Further, it is involved in water supply and wastewater treatment serving 2.4 million customers. Additionally, the company manufactures polyethylene piping and fittings; and engages in the customers center, cafA, restaurant, retail sale, automatic meter reading system development, laboratory testing, payment gateway and related, project management, landfill gas project, financing, logistics, oil, research and development, property development, and securities investment activities. The Hong Kong and China Gas Company Limited was founded in 1862 and is headquartered in North Point, Hong Kong.

Read MoreThe following companies are subsidiares of Danaher: AB SCIEX, AB Sciex Germany GmbH, AB Sciex LLC, AB Sciex LP, AB Sciex Pte Ltd., Accu-Sort Systems, Acme Cleveland Corporation, Advanced Vision Technology, American Precision Industries, Applied Biosystems, Applitek NV, Aquatic Infomatics ULC, Aquatic Informatics, Armstrong Tools, BC Distribution BV, Beckman Coulter, Beckman Coulter Australia Pty Ltd, Beckman Coulter Biotechnology (Suzhou) Co. Ltd., Beckman Coulter Biyomedikal Urunler Sanayi ve Ticaret Limited [irketi], Beckman Coulter Canada LP, Beckman Coulter Commercial Enterprise (China) Co. Ltd., Beckman Coulter France S.A.S., Beckman Coulter G.m.b.H., Beckman Coulter Genomics Inc., Beckman Coulter Hong Kong Limited, Beckman Coulter Inc., Beckman Coulter India Private Limited, Beckman Coulter International SA, Beckman Coulter International Shanghai Trading Co., Beckman Coulter Ireland Inc., Beckman Coulter K.K., Beckman Coulter Korea Ltd., Beckman Coulter Laboratory Systems (Suzhou) Co. Ltd., Beckman Coulter Limited Liability Company, Beckman Coulter Mishima KK, Beckman Coulter Nederland B.V., Beckman Coulter Nippon GK, Beckman Coulter S.L.U., Beckman Coulter Saudi Arabia Co.Ltd., Beckman Coulter Srl, Beckman Coulter Taiwan Inc., Beckman Coulter United Kingdom Limited, Beckman Coulter de Mexico S.A. de C.V., Beckman Coulter do Brasil Ltda., Beckman Finance ApS, Beckman Holdings Ltd., BioTector Analytical Systems Ltd, Biosafe S.A., Blue Software LLC, Cepheid, Cepheid AB, Cepheid Europe SAS, Cepheid GmbH, Cepheid HBDC SAS, Cepheid UK Ltd., ChemTreat, ChemTreat Inc., ChemTreat International Inc., Cispus Hong Kong Holding Limited, Cytiva, Cytiva BioProcess R&D AB, Cytiva Biotechnology (Guangzhou) Co. Ltd., Cytiva Biotechnology (Hang Zhou) Co. Ltd., Cytiva Europe GmbH, Cytiva Sweden AB, Cytiva Sweden Holding AB, DH Europe Finance II Sarl, DH Europe Finance Sarl, DH Holding Italia SRL, DH Japan Finance Sarl, DH Life Sciences LLC, DH Netherlands BV, DH Technologies Development Pte Ltd., DHKAB Company AB, DTIL Ireland Holdings Ltd., Danaher (Shanghai) Management Co. Ltd., Danaher Hong Kong Limited, Danaher Medical ApS, Delta Consolidated Industries, Devicore Medical Products Inc., Easco Hand Tools, Esko, Esko BV, Esko Finance BV, Esko Graphics BV, Esko Software BV, FHAB Company AB, Fluke, G. Lufft Mess- und Regeltechnik GmbH, GE Biopharma, Gelman Sciences Inc., Gendex, Genetix Group, Gilbarco Veeder Root, Gilzoni Ltd., Global Life Sciences Solutions Austria GmbH & Co. KG, Global Life Sciences Solutions Germany GmbH, Global Life Sciences Solutions Korea Ltd., Global Life Sciences Solutions Manufacturing UK Ltd, Global Life Sciences Solutions New Zealand, Global Life Sciences Solutions Operations UK Ltd, Global Life Sciences Solutions Singapore Pte Ltd, Global Life Sciences Solutions USA LLC, Global Life Sciences Technologies (Shanghai) Co Ltd., Global Life Sciences Technologies Japan KK, Hach Company, Hach Lange Finance GmbH, Hach Lange GmbH, Hach Lange Sarl, Hach Sales & Services Canada LP, Hach Ultra Japan KK, Hach Water Quality Analytical Instru. (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., HemoCue AB, HyClone Laboratories LLC, Hybritech Incorporated, Hyclone Life Sciences Solutions India Private Limited, IDBS Group, IRIS International, Imaging Sciences International, Immunotech SAS, Immunotech Sro, Intabio LLC, Integrated DNA Technologies, Integrated DNA Technologies BVBA, Integrated DNA Technologies Inc., Integrated DNA Technologies Pte. Ltd., Iris International Inc., Joslyn Holding Company LLC, KVHG GmbH, KaVo, KaVo Kerr, Kaltenbach & Voigt, Keithley Instruments, Kipp & Zonen BV, Kollmorgen, Labcyte Inc., Laetus, Leica Biosystems Imaging Inc., Leica Biosystems Melbourne Pty Ltd, Leica Biosystems Newcastle Limited, Leica Biosystems Nussloch GmbH, Leica Biosystems Richmond Inc., Leica Instruments (Singapore) Pte Limited, Leica Microsystems, Leica Microsystems (UK) Limited, Leica Microsystems CMS GmbH, Leica Microsystems Cambridge Limited, Leica Microsystems IR GmbH, Leica Microsystems Inc., Leica Microsystems Limited, Leica Microsystems Ltd. Shanghai, Leica Mikrosysteme Vertrieb GmbH, Life Sciences Holdings France SAS*, Lifschultz Industries, Linx Printing Technologies, Linx Printing Technologies Limited, MDS Analytical Technologies, Marconi Data Systems, McCrometer Inc., Microtest, Molecular Devices, Molecular Devices (Austria) GmbH, Molecular Devices LLC, Navman Wireless, Navman Wireless OEM Solutions, Nihon Pall Ltd., Nihon Pall Manufacturing Limited, Nobel Biocare, OTT Hydromet Corp, Pall, Pall (Canada) ULC, Pall (China) Co. Ltd., Pall (Schweiz) GmbH, Pall Aeropower Corporation, Pall Artelis BVBA, Pall Asia Holdings Inc., Pall Australia Pty. Ltd., Pall Austria Filter Ges.m.b.h, Pall Corporation, Pall Europe Limited, Pall Filtersystems GmbH, Pall Filtration Pte. Ltd., Pall Filtration and Separations Group Inc., Pall France SAS, Pall GmbH, Pall India Pvt. Ltd., Pall International Sarl, Pall Italia Srl, Pall Korea Ltd., Pall Life Sciences Belgium BV, Pall Life Sciences Puerto Rico LLC, Pall Manufacturing UK Limited, Pall Medistad BV, Pall Netherlands BV Irish Branch, Pall Technology UK Limited, PaloDEX, Pantone LLC, Pelton & Crane, Phenomenex, Phenomenex Inc., Precision NanoSystems, QHC Ireland Finance Limited, Radiometer, Radiometer Basel AG, Radiometer K.K., Radiometer Medical ApS, Radiometer Medical Equipment (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Radiometer Turku Oy, Raytek, Reytek Corporation, SH Switzerland Finance Sarl, Sea-Bird Electronics Inc., SenDx Medical Inc., Shanghai AB Sciex Analytical Instrument Trading Co. Ltd., Sutron, Sybron Dental Specialties, TCIL Ireland Finance Ltd., Tektronix, Thomson Industries, Tianjin Bonna-Agela Technologies Co. Ltd., Trojan Technologies, Trojan Technologies Group ULC, VSS Monitoring, Videojet Do Brasil Comercio de Equipamentos Para Codificacao Industrial Ltda., Videojet Technologies (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Videojet Technologies Europe B.V., Videojet Technologies Inc., Viridor Waste Management Limited, Vision Systems Limited, Willett International, X-Ray Optical Systems Inc., X-Rite, X-Rite Europe GmbH, X-Rite Incorporated, X-Rite Switzerland GmbH, XOS, Yukon Hong Kong Holding Limited, and Zhuhai S.E.Z. Videojet Electronics Ltd..Photo: CNN

In his first sit-down interview since news broke over the weekend that data on millions of users had been siphoned from Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg was apologetic. In an interview with CNNs Laurie Segall, Zuckerberg said, This was a major breach of trust and Im really sorry that this happened.

In the interview, which took place almost five days after Facebook first tried to get out in front of the Cambridge Analytica story, Zuckerberg continuously stumbled over his words and looked caught off guard (I think technology is increasingly a trend in the world, he observed). He named Cambridge Analytica and researcher Aleksandr Kogan by name and repeatedly, clearly aiming to cast this incident as an anomaly.

Zuckerberg tried to portray himself and his company as naive. Im used to when people legally certify, that theyre gonna do it, Zuckerberg said, referring to Cambridges certification that it had discarded Kogans data. Were not just gonna take peoples word for it when they give us a legal certification. (In Facebooks nascent days, Zuckerberg referred to users who trusted him with their data as dumb fucks.)

Were not going to make that mistake again, the CEO promised, noting that in order to inform potentially compromised users, We know what the apps were that had access to data, we know how many people were using those services.

Elsewhere, Zuckerberg spoke about regulation and potentially testifying before Congress. Regarding testifying, Zuckerberg said that we want to make sure we send whoever is best informed to do it. Contemporaneously, he told Wired, if it is ever the case that I am the most informed person at Facebook in the best position to testify, I will happily do that. (Zuckerberg obviously did a number of interviews this afternoon.) So, Mark Zuckerberg is the CEO of Facebook, but he is not well informed enough to talk about anything Facebook does.

On the question of regulation, Zuckerberg said, I actually am not sure we shouldnt be regulated. Thats sure to be a quote lawmakers return to as Facebook figures out how to reconcile its business model with its reputation going forward.Wall Street analysts have given Dream Global REIT a "N/A" rating, but there may be better buying opportunities in the stock market. Some of MarketBeat's past winning trading ideas have resulted in 5-15% weekly gains. MarketBeat just released five new stock ideas, but Dream Global REIT wasn't one of them. MarketBeat thinks these five companies may be even better buys.

View MarketBeat's top stock picks here.Wall Street analysts have given (CXS) a "N/A" rating, but there may be better buying opportunities in the stock market. Some of MarketBeat's past winning trading ideas have resulted in 5-15% weekly gains. MarketBeat just released five new stock ideas, but (CXS) wasn't one of them. MarketBeat thinks these five companies may be even better buys.

View MarketBeat's top stock picks here.International Hospital Kampala (IHK) has been recognized by the Council for Health Services Accreditation of Southern Africa (Cohsasa) for its high quality medicare services and practices.

South-Africa based Cohsasa monitors the quality of general healthcare services and grades healthcare facilities against internationally-accepted standards. IHK is the first and only Ugandan health facility so far accredited by Cohsasa and joins a list of more than 600 others across the African continent.

L-R Jackie Nabukeera IHK head of quality assurance, Jacqui Stewart CEO Cohsasa and Andre Ackerman CEO IMG address media

While announcing IHKs accreditation on Thursday, Cohsasa chief executive officer Jacqui Stewart said the facility impressed them for its proper documentation systems, tracking hospital-acquired infections and timely mitigations, among others.

In a bid to ensure quality services, Cohsasa officials conduct evaluations after every eight weeks in the enlisted facilities. According to their website, Cohsasa assists a range of healthcare facilities on the continent to meet and maintain quality standards.

The facilities include hospitals, clinics, general and family practitioners, rehabilitation centres, hospices and laundries. Standards are also being developed for individual services such as sedation units and home-based care.

There is a strong focus on building capacity to help healthcare professionals measure themselves against the standards. The Cohsasa approach teaches healthcare workers how to monitor improvements using quality improvement methods, internationally accredited standards and a web-based information system.

Nancy Akullo, the communications and marketing officer of the International Medical Group, which includes IHK, says the latest development should build public confidence in the facility.

Such periodical assessments keep us on toes to ensure standards are maintained for our patients to get quality services, Akullo said.

Founded by Dr Ian Clark in 2000, IHK has 100 beds and is one of the biggest private hospitals in the country.

nicholasbamulanzeki@gmail.comIG Group Holdings plc operates as a multi-platform trading company worldwide. It offers CFDs (contracts for difference), are derivative contracts that enable clients to take advantage of changes in an asset's price; and spread betting that allow clients to take advantage of changes in an asset's price without owning the asset itself, and to use the same range of risk-mitigation measures. The company also offers clients access to a range of risk-mitigation measures, including stops and limits and a limited risk account; and stock trading service, ISAs, and SIPPs. In addition, it provides a range of portfolios, which include commodities, equities, and fixed-income assets designed to match the degree of caution or aggression desired by the client; and exchange traded derivatives, as well as offers foreign exchange, market risk management, data distribution, nominee, finance, software development, publication, domains registry, foreign exchange trading, and translation services. The company was founded in 1974 and is headquartered in London, the United Kingdom.

Read MoreJPMorgan Chase & Co. is a financial holding company. It provides financial and investment banking services. The firm offers a range of investment banking products and services in all capital markets, including advising on corporate strategy and structure, capital raising in equity and debt markets, risk management, market making in cash securities and derivative instruments, and brokerage and research. It operates through the following segments: Consumer and Community Banking, Corporate and Investment Bank, Commercial Banking, and Asset and Wealth Management. The Consumer and Community Banking segment serves consumers and businesses through personal service at bank branches and through automated teller machine, online, mobile, and telephone banking. The Corporate and Investment Bank segment offers a suite of investment banking, market-making, prime brokerage, and treasury and securities products and services to a global client base of corporations, investors, financial institutions, government and municipal entities. The Commercial Banking segment delivers services to U.S. and its multinational clients, including corporations, municipalities, financial institutions, and non profit

Read MoreLegg Mason, Inc. is a publicly owned asset management holding company. Through its subsidiaries, the firm provides investment management and related services to company-sponsored mutual funds and other investment vehicles including pension funds, foundations, endowments, sovereign wealth funds, insurance companies, private banks, family offices, individuals, as well as to global, institutional, and retail clients. It launches and manages equity, fixed income, and multi-asset customized portfolios through its subsidiaries. The firm also launches and manages mutual funds and exchange traded funds for its clients through its subsidiaries. It invests in private and public equity, fixed income, and multi asset markets across the globe through its subsidiaries. Through its subsidiaries, the firm also invests in alternative markets. It also employs a combination of fundamental and quantitative research to make its investments through its subsidiaries. Legg Mason, Inc. was founded in 1899 and is based in Baltimore, Maryland.

Read MoreLast week I attempted to explain two contending perspectives on human nature.

The first one sees human beings as inherently good. The second looks at individuals in its entirety as predisposed to evil especially and particularly when left to their own devices.

There is one very important and specific aspect of universal human behavior that cuts across these two stylized views, favoritism, to which I return in a moment.

The point I sought to underline last week is that for good or bad, human beings have to be subjected to standard rules and norms. We more generally refer to rules and norms as institutions. They both constrain and shape our actions or inactions.

Rules and norms of managing public affairs and governing society must necessarily be impartial and impersonal. Impartial by not being discriminatory and impersonal by not being dependent on any one individual to be enforced or respected.

The political scientist Francis Fukuyama has pointed out that human sociability is characterized by two related phenomena: kin selection and reciprocal altruism. The former is genetic; the latter is socially produced. Kin selection means that animals tend to be close to and trust fellow animals with whom they share genes.

This has been scientifically observed in primates and obtains among human beings who, at their core, are social animals.

Human beings tend to favor other beings in a manner that is proportional to the number of genes that they share. More shared genes mean closer affection. This nepotistic tendency is a universal behavior observed in all societies across time and space.

Reciprocal altruism, on the other hand, occurs from repeated interaction and exchange of favors between individuals who are not related. Repeated exchange of favors builds up friendship and in due course individuals engage in crony relations of mutual exchange and benefit.

Both kin selection and reciprocal altruism are not learnt behavior. Rather, they occur somewhat spontaneously in the course of human interaction. The average human being behaves favorably towards family members who are genetic relatives and friends who are known to him or her through repeated exchange of favors.

Until the early modern period, with the exception of China and to some extent Prussia, monarchies and ruling groups around the world used to run public affairs through kin selection and reciprocal altruism.

Both the Quin state, the precursor to modern China and Prussia, the precursor to modern Germany, were forged out of hostile conditions of warfare that necessitated building meritocratic systems to prosecute war.

In the face of incessant external military threats, rulers did not have the luxury of managing public affairs on the basis of kin ties and crony relations. This is how China evolved the foremost and enduring merit-based civil service and a strong state bureaucracy.

It is, therefore, perfectly in order and fully normal that individuals relate favorably to their blood relatives and co-ethnics or that someone discriminates in favor of close friends and confidants. This is a natural inclination.

The real issue is how society designs methods of a level-playing field and a fair system that is impersonal and impartial. Because individuals are for the most part rational enough to respond to signals, a system that grants everyone equal chance will be embraced and respected when all actors expect that they will not be shortchanged by those in charge of either writing the rules or enforcing them.

Short of a merit system or in the event of a rigged one, individuals will revert to social institutions and practices that assure them access to certain opportunities and resources. This is why tribalism, nepotism, and cronyism is so prevalent and pervasive in a society like Uganda.

Easily the biggest failure of the NRM regime and its chief ruler, Mr Yoweri Museveni, has been the failure to overcome the allure of nepotism and cronyism, and to work ruggedly for writing and enforcing rules that guard against the natural inclinations of human beings.

The behavior of appointing the wife as a cabinet minister, the young brother as commander of the military, and the son as the commander of forces directly guarding the ruler is reminiscent of the predominant practices in the medieval times of monarchical rule. It is representative of personal rule and absolutism.

In a poor and socially underdeveloped society, the actions of rulers at the top very much shape behavior and conduct at lower levels.

Appointing relatives and friends, both overtly but especially in disguised covert methods, instead of rewarding merit and excellence, become the default modus operandi in governmental bodies and public agencies at all levels. The upshot is dysfunctional system.

Historically, state-builders leveraged coercive power to institute institutional forms that constitute the foundation for socioeconomic transformation.

A key aspect of this foundation is to discard the natural human inclination towards a system of favoritism and build a merit-based society. Its possible this can happen out of goodwill and idealism, but the more plausible route is one of being compelled by dire circumstances.

In the case of the NRA and Mr Museveni, it appears that they neither had the idealism nor faced the compelling conditions that would necessitate a rigorous adherence to meritocracy.

The author is an assistant professor of political science at North Carolina State University.CAE Inc., together with its subsidiaries, designs, manufactures, and supplies simulation equipment and training solutions to defense and security markets, commercial airlines, business aircraft operators, helicopter operators, aircraft manufacturers, and healthcare education and service providers worldwide. The company's Civil Aviation Training Solutions segment provides training solutions for flight, cabin, maintenance, and ground personnel in commercial, business, and helicopter aviation; flight simulation training devices; and ab initio pilot training and crew sourcing services, as well as end to end digitally-enabled crew management, training operations solutions, and optimization software. Its Defence and Security segment offers training and mission support solutions for defense forces across multi-domain operations, and for government organizations responsible for public safety. The company's Healthcare segment provides integrated education and training solutions, including surgical and imaging simulations, curriculum, audiovisual and centre management platforms, and patient simulators to healthcare students and clinical professionals. The company was formerly known as CAE Industries Ltd. and changed its name to CAE Inc. in June 1993. CAE Inc. was founded in 1947 and is headquartered in Saint-Laurent, Canada.

Read MorePhoenix Group Holdings plc engages in the long-term savings and retirement busines in Europe. The company operates through UK Heritage, UK Open, Europe, ReAssure, and Management Services segments. It engages in the management of insurance policies, which include active and closed life insurance products. The company also provides workplace pensions, and customer savings and investments products under the Standard Life brand. Its retirement solutions business includes vesting annuities and bulk purchase annuity business, where it acquires annuities and deliver the financial stability for secure pensions. The company also offers a range of financial products for the over 50s market under the SunLife brand, which cover life cover, equity release, funeral plans, and home insurance. Phoenix Group Holdings plc has a strategic partnership with Standard Life Aberdeen plc. The company was formerly known as Pearl Group and changed its name to Phoenix Group Holdings plc in March 2010. Phoenix Group Holdings plc was founded in 1782 and is based in London, the United Kingdom.

Read MorePine Cliff Energy Ltd. engages in the acquisition, exploration, development, and production of natural gas, crude oil, and natural gas liquids in the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin. The company primarily holds interests in natural gas assets in the Southern and Edson areas; and oil and natural gas assets in the Viking Kinsella and Ghost Pine area of Central Alberta. It also holds interests in natural gas liquids assets in the Sundance, Carstairs, Garrington, and Harmattan areas of Alberta; and natural gas assets in the Cadillac area of Southern Saskatchewan. As of December 31, 2020, its proved reserves consisted 42,899 thousand barrels of oil equivalent (MBOE) and proved plus probable reserves included 54,840.0 MBOE. The company also explores for gold, nickel, and copper deposits, as well as platinum group elements in Utah, Ontario, the Northwest Territories, and Nunavut. Pine Cliff Energy Ltd. was incorporated in 2004 and is headquartered in Calgary, Canada.

Read MoreSo the story goes, that a man told another in self-introduction: I am author of a book titled 150 Methods to Become Rich. The other asked him: Then why are you begging? And his response was, Because it is one of the best methods.

I agree, and I am inclined to suggest that we should be more honest with ourselves and give this source of livelihood for many of us the prominence and attention it deserves.

Before you contest my modest proposal, you may need to check the contribution of begging to our Gross National Income  the monies that come in through development grants, research funds, facilitation for civil society organisations, donations, gifts, etc.

To this list you may add income we get from kwanjula, last funeral rites, birthday, graduation, baby shower, bridal shower, and wedding meetings. Is that a source to be taken lightly in Uganda?

In her book, Dead Aid (2009), which is a widely revered well-researched attack on aid as a development tool, the Zambian economist, Dambisa Moyo, diagnoses Africa as addicted to aid.

She argues that most African governments are not responsive to their peoples needs because it is the needs and desires of the donors that matter most. The role of the African citizen, therefore, is reduced to allowing to be governed and to only gratefully take what they receive.

Is this a convincing argument against aid in particular and begging in general? Of course not! If those who extend us aid are not really bothered that most of it gets stolen, why should others shout over it? Is it your money?

Or you are tempted to think that you matter as much as the request proposals suggest? That is just standard practice  we have to show that you need it, but it is not really yours to yell about.

Persians say that a beggar will always be a beggar even if he is given the whole world as a gift. Well, crap! If we get addicted to begging in the process, what is wrong with it? People get addicted to drinking, smoking, social media, gambling, eating; and you dont make as much noise. What is wrong with being addicted to an income-generating habit?

I understand that most traditional African societies discouraged begging as a lifestyle. It was okay to ask for fire or salt (not sugar) from a neighbour when in lack, but not repeatedly. Otherwise, you would earn a bad reputation on the village (omukopi). Hence proverbs such as begged water does not quench thirst; a stick at your neighbours place does not chase a leopard.

But that was then. Times have changed. We have to embrace the new innocent status of begging in all its various forms. Let government beg from donors; civil society organisations beg for their sustenance and activities; MPs beg from the president; constituents beg from their MPs; schools beg from parents; preachers beg from their flock; and each of us beg from our friends for our functions. And we should feel free to live large on the proceeds; its our kill! Burn it in utmost extravagance. Begging is still legal.

What is wrong with going to a bar with empty pockets when thirsty? Simply tell a friend you find there: Now that I have met you here, my problems are solved. Invest in beggary vocabulary  flatter them with titles such as boss, master, Mr Paper, Oga Drink as much as what wont kill you. And since that works, why spend your own money?

You see, begging often starts from need. But because it pays with little or no sweat, it easily becomes a habit. Before you know it, you find it painful to earn from your sweat, knowing you can still successfully beg. Like the saying goes, he who dips his finger into honey does not dip once. And why dip once if the honey is still there?

That is why I think it is a good idea that we start teaching this livelihood strategy in all our schools and we stop pretending that beggars are only those on streets. Let us perfect the art, its politico-economy, psychology and idioms.

We detest the depiction of Africa as miserable in international media. The hungry children, war victims, women in rags, diseases, etc. Do we really need to fight off this image? Why kill the goose that lays golden eggs? Instead, teach our people to optimally utilise such narratives in their begging proposals.

Government needs the malaria, tuberculosis, poverty, and nodding disease realities and statistics to be able to beg effectively through appeal to donors emotions. Civil society needs them too (plus other human rights abuses) to justify its suggested activities.

If these maladies were significantly solved, you dont know how many people would lose their jobs. So, if you thrive on a particular problem, why solve it to render yourself irrelevant? Therefore, let us educate our people on how to magnify these problems.

We need special cross-cutting courses on misery photography, poverty exhibition, embellishment, donor psychology, and how to appeal to pity.

With the help of our visionary president, we have already diagnosed our problems to be partly caused by useless courses such as Development Studies, Peace and Conflict Studies, Psychology, and Political Science. Let us replace them with this job-creating science (and art).

Then we could have a Bachelor of Science in Wedding Meeting Launching; Master of Theology (Offertory and Tithe Extraction Major); PhD in Donor Management;

On such programmes, we could teach courses like pledge card design and administration, aid proposal writing, bulk SMS drafting, beggary grammar, and homiletics of begging (keenly studying verses in the Bible that psychologically prepare the flock to empty their pockets). Unemployment solved, prosperity for all!

Let me hear somebaare shout halleluiaaaah!

jsssentongo@gmail.com

The author heads the Centre for African Studies at Uganda Martyrs University, Nkozi.KapStone Paper and Packaging Corporation produces and sells a range of containerboards, corrugated products, and specialty paper products in the United States and internationally. The company operates in two segments, Paper and Packaging, and Distribution. The Paper and Packaging segment offers containerboards consisting of linerboard and corrugated medium to manufacture corrugated containers for packaging products; and corrugated products. It also offers specialty paper products, including kraft paper, such as multiwall paper used to produce bags for agricultural products, pet food, baking products, cement and chemicals; specialty products comprising shingle wraps, end caps, roll wraps, and dunnage bags; and lightweight paper. In addition, this segment provides saturating kraft paper under the Durasorb trade name for use in construction, electronics manufacturing, and furniture manufacturing industries; and unbleached folding carton board under the Kraftpak trade name to integrated and independent converters in the folding carton industry. The Distribution segment distributes corrugated and other specialty packaging products consisting of stretch films, void fills, carton sealing tapes, and other specialty tapes. KapStone Paper and Packaging Corporation was founded in 2005 and is headquartered in Northbrook, Illinois.

Read MoreAndeavor, through its subsidiaries, operates as an independent petroleum refining, logistics, and marketing company in the United States. The company operates in three segments: Marketing, Logistics, and Refining. The Marketing segment sells gasoline and diesel fuel through retail, branded, and unbranded channels. This segment operates a network of 3,255 retail stations under the ARCO, Shell, Mobil, and SUPERAMERICA brands. The Logistics segment gathers and transports crude oil by pipelines, as well as by trucks. It operates approximately 13 million barrels of crude oil, feedstock, blendstock, refined product, and asphalt storage tanks. The Refining segment buys and refines crude oil and other feed stocks into transportation fuels, such as gasoline and gasoline blend stocks, jet fuel, and diesel fuel, as well as other products, including heavy fuel oils, liquefied petroleum gas, petroleum coke, calcined coke, and asphalt. It also sells refined products in the bulk market principally to independent unbranded distributors, other refining and marketing companies, utilities, railroads, airlines, and marine and industrial end-users in the western United States. This segment owns and operates 10 petroleum refineries with a combined crude oil capacity of approximately 1,157 thousand barrels per day. The company was formerly known as Tesoro Corporation and changed its name to Andeavor in August 2017. Andeavor was founded in 1968 and is headquartered in San Antonio, Texas.

Read MoreThe following companies are subsidiares of Laboratory Co. of America: 1957285 Ontario Inc. dba Quality Underwriting Services, 2089729 Ontario Inc., 2248848 Ontario Inc., 3065619 Nova Scotia Company, 3257959 Nova Scotia Company, 896988 Ontario Limited, 9279-3280 Quebec Inc., Accupath Diagnostic Laboratories Inc., Alpha Medical Laboratory LLC, Assets of Pathology Inc, Beacon LBS IPA Inc., Beacon Laboratory Benefit Solutions Inc., CannAmm GP Inc., CannAmm Limited Partnership, Center for Disease Detection International, Center for Disease Detection LLC, Centrex Clinical Laboratories Inc., Clearstone Central Laboratories (U.S.) Inc., Clearstone Holdings (International) Ltd., Clipper Holdings Inc., Colorado Coagulation Consultants Inc., Colorado Laboratory Services LLC, Correlagen Diagnostics Inc., Covance Inc., Curalab Inc., Cytometry Associates Inc., Czura Thornton (Hong Kong) Limited, DCL Acquisition Inc., DCL Medical Laboratories LLC (DE), DCL Medical Laboratories LLC (FL), DCL Sub LLC, DIANON Systems Inc., DL Holdings Limited Partnership, Decision Diagnostics L.L.C. (aka DaVinici/Medicorp LLC), Diagnostic Services Inc., DynaLifeDX, Dynacare - Gamma Laboratory Partnership, Dynacare Company, Dynacare G.P. Inc., Dynacare Holdco LLC, Dynacare Laboratories Inc., Dynacare Laboratories Limited Partnership, Dynacare Northwest Inc., Dynacare Realty Inc., DynalifeDX Infrastructure Inc., Endocrine Sciences Inc., Esoterix Genetic Counseling LLC, Esoterix Genetic Laboratories LLC, Esoterix Inc., Execmed Health Services Inc., FirstSource Laboratory Solutions Inc., GDML Medical Laboratories Inc, Gamma Dynacare Central Medical Laboratories GP Inc., Gamma Dynacare Central Medical Laboratory Limited Partnership, HHLA Lab-In-An-Envelope LLC, Health Trans Services Inc., Home Healthcare Laboratory of America LLC, IDX Pathology Inc., Impact Genetics Corp, Impact Genetics Inc., Kaleida LabCorp LLC, Lab Delivery Service of New York City Inc., LabCorp BVBA, LabCorp Belgium Holdings Inc., LabCorp Central Laboratories (Canada) Inc., LabCorp Central Laboratories (China) Inc., LabCorp Central Laboratories (Singapore) Pte., LabCorp Development Company, LabCorp Employer Services Inc., LabCorp Health System Diagnostics LLC, LabCorp Indiana Inc., LabCorp Japan G.K., LabCorp Limited, LabCorp Michigan Inc., LabCorp Nebraska Inc., LabCorp Neon Ltd., LabCorp Neon Switzerland S.a.r.l., LabCorp Specialty Testing Billing Service Inc., LabCorp Specialty Testing Group Inc., LabCorp Staffing Solutions Inc., LabCorp Tennessee LLC, LabCorp UK Holdings Ltd., LabWest Inc., Laboratoire Bio-Medic Inc., Laboratory Corporation of America, Lifecodes Corporation, LipoScience Inc., Litholink Corporation, MEDTOX Scientific Inc., Medical Neurogenitics LLC, Medtox Diagnostics Inc., Medtox Laboratories Inc., Monogram Biosciences Inc., Monogram Biosciences UK Limited, NWT Inc., National Genetics Institute, New Brighton Business Center LLC, New Imaging Diagnostics LLC, New Molecular Diagnostics Ventures LLC, Orchid Cellmark Ltd., Orchid Cellmark ULC, PA Labs Inc., Path Lab Incorporated, Pathology Associates Medical Lab LLC, Pee Dee Pathology Associates Inc., Persys Technology Inc., Pixel by LabCorp, Princeton Diagnostic Laboratories of America Inc., Protedyne Corporation, ReliaGene Technologies Inc., SW/DL LLC, Saint Josephs-PAML LLC, Sequenom Biosciences (India) Pvt. Ltd., Sequenom Center for Molecular Medicine LLC, Sequenom Inc, Sequenom Inc., Southern Idaho Regional Laboratory, Tandem Labs Inc., The LabCorp Charitable Foundation, Tri-Cities Laboratory LLC, Viro-Med Laboratories Inc., and Yakima Medical Arts Inc..Cellcom Israel Ltd. operates and maintains a cellular mobile telephone system in Israel. It operates in two segments, Cellular and Fixed-line. The company offers cellular communications services, such as basic cellular telephony services comprising voice mail, cellular fax, call waiting, call forwarding, caller identification, and conference calling; text and multimedia messaging; and cellular content and data services. It also provides international roaming services; value-added services, such as short message and multimedia messaging; cloud backup; and content services, including Cellcom Volume music, Cellcom TV, and other applications. In addition, the company sells handsets, tablets, streamers, smart watches, and home security cameras, as well as offers repair services. Further, it provides internet infrastructure and connectivity services, over-the-top TV services, international long distance services, and landline telephony and transmission services; transmission and data services through fiber-optic infrastructure and complementary microwave links; IP switchboard services; and cloud services and data protection products, as well as operates and manages business telecommunication systems to selected business customers and telecommunications operators. As of December 31, 2019, the company had approximately 10.6 million cellular subscribers. Cellcom Israel Ltd. was founded in 1994 and is headquartered in Netanya, Israel.

Read MoreWall Street analysts have given Aberdeen Standard Gold ETF Trust a "N/A" rating, but there may be better buying opportunities in the stock market. Some of MarketBeat's past winning trading ideas have resulted in 5-15% weekly gains. MarketBeat just released five new stock ideas, but Aberdeen Standard Gold ETF Trust wasn't one of them. MarketBeat thinks these five companies may be even better buys.

View MarketBeat's top stock picks here.The Jinja Municipality East by-election was marketed not as a contest between FDCs Paul Mwiru and NRMs Nathan Igeme Nabeta, but as a referendum on Gen Yoweri Musevenis popularity.

Marketing it as such is what would entice the full deployment of the state. That is what Nabeta, one of the 317 MPs that voted to change the Constitution to allow Museveni contest the next general elections, wished for.

Some of the regime operatives who have made a fortune by exaggerating threats against Musevenis presidency looked at this election as a perfect business opportunity. That is why this by-election, with zero impact on the numerical strength of political parties in parliament, was profiled as a do-or-die affair.

Gen Museveni, it appears, still believes that he is a popular leader in whose name crimes such as his coronation as life president can be committed and perpetrators are not lynched!

Those who have committed political crimes like changing the Constitution must, therefore, be protected in order to keep the myth.

Dethroning one of the 317 MPs would mean that the big man has no capacity to offer political protection. Already, nearly each of these 317, now 316, MPs has been given police and/or military escorts. The Jinja Municipality East by-election, therefore, became important to each party for different reasons.

Most of the actions that you saw or watched on televisions were motivated by the above factors. For example, on March 13, the day we concluded campaigns, our (Mwirus) campaign headquarters were raided by the military and police and 51 of our agents were rrested.

The invaders wore the NRM candidates black T-shirts. It is these NRM youths who read out names of those meant to be arrested. In fact, even when nearly everybody had been picked and loaded on a police truck, they demanded that one Med, who was in charge of our vote protection team, be produced. When he emerged from our party office and was loaded on the truck, they jubilated and drove them away, first to Nalufenya and later to Kayunga.

A group of NRM MPs, headed by Peter Ogwang (Usuk) that Museveni himself sent to reinforce the team on the ground, ordered NRM youths to provoke the opposition into a fight in order to allow full military deployment and action. The NRM MPs were disappointed by Nabeta for failing to mobilise enough daring youths for this purpose.

After arresting our agents, the military started patrolling the whole constituency, but failed to carry out more arrests because the opposition had resisted provocation.

I am now told the commanders of military units that were supposed to do this job are all going to be transferred for neglect of duty! The story of the opposition stoning NRM buses is meant to facilitate this narrative.

In fact, Solomon Silwany, the deputy NRM chief whip in parliament, accused the military  in my presence at Aspire polling station  of being unhelpful. The military was supposed to have sealed off this polling station but, instead, allowed the opposition to make noise around it.

The vigilance that the opposition exhibited was supposed to have been dealt with by the military which, according to NRM, didnt happen. The media is also accused of siding with the opposition.

I know an NRM MP who called Museveni to report NBS TV for being biased. Why? The independent TV channel was broadcasting images of pre-ticked ballot papers in favour of the NRM candidate which we had seized at Old Iganga Road Junction polling station.

And when Kayunga NRM chairman Moses Karangwa ordered the arrest of all FDC polling agents, the military and police just arrested some.

These are the electoral offences which, I think, NRM secretary general Justine Kasule Lumumba may be talking about. Prevention of rigging, to her, is an electoral offence called intimidation; for her, chasing Karangwa from a polling station where he ordered arrest of our agents amounts to violence.

I think by threatening court action, NRM hopes that if another by-election is ordered, brutal force can be used to extract a win.

And brutal force is what has kept away many credible people from politics. Disappointed by the polling-day events, Paul Mwiru at one point asked me if it was worthwhile to participate in this dubious election. Of course as the chairman of his campaign and his friend, I counseled him; but he was visibly disappointed.

For me, that is the lesson to pick from Jinja. Our money, military and police will continue being deployed to settle political contests and the mafias in the ruling NRM will continue accusing the opposition of being weak.

Just imagine that protection of victory in a place as small as Jinja Municipality East with 47 polling stations required the presence of almost the entire opposition hierarchy.

I deployed MPs and senior leaders as polling agents because junior cadres had been intimidated and were being targeted. It was the first time for people such as Alice Alaso, Muwanga Kivumbi, Cecilia Ogwal, Kenneth Kakande, Dr Lulume Bayiga and Joseph Balikuddembe to sit at a polling station for a whole day.

That is what we went through. The emperor now feels disappointed that he failed to protect one of his 317 heroes that changed the Constitution. And those who ate his money must now account for it. Court, therefore, becomes the perfect excuse.

The author is Kira Municipality MP and opposition chief whip in parliament.American Electric Power Co., Inc. engages in the business of generation, transmission and distribution of electricity. It operates through the following segments: Vertically Integrated Utilities, Transmission & Distribution Utilities, AEP Transmission Holdco and Generation & Marketing. The Vertically Integrated Utilities segment engages in the generation, transmission and distribution of electricity for sale to retail and wholesale customers through assets owned and operated by its subsidiaries. The Transmission & Distribution Utilities segment engages in the business of transmission and distribution of electricity for sale to retail and wholesale customers through assets owned and operated by its subsidiaries. The AEP Transmission Holdco segment engages in the development, construction and operation of transmission facilities through investments in its wholly-owned transmission subsidiaries and joint ventures. The Generation & Marketing segment engages in non-regulated generation and marketing, risk management and retail activities. The company was founded on December 20, 1906 and is headquartered in Columbus, OH.

Read MoreSocial media - including Facebook - is abuzz with posts calling Facebook users to delete their accounts. Even the co-founder of popular messaging service WhatsApp has advised his followers on Twitter to shun the world's biggest social media network.

Interestingly, Brian Acton, the WhatsApp co-founder who has called on Facebook users to delete accounts made a fortune when Mark Zuckerberg's social media platform bought the company for $19 billion. "It is time," Acton wrote, adding the hashtag #deletefacebook.

Last week, Facebook found itself at the center of a data breach scandal when a UK-based data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica was accused of illegally harvesting data of 50 million Facebook users. The compromised data allegedly included sensitive details like users' preferences, friends etc.

But it's not just Facebook which has access to your personal account details. Mobile apps on your phone where you may have used Facebook sign-in will also have some access to your personal account data. Allowing Facebook access to apps may also make personal information vulnerable.

Facebook data breach has also raised questions regarding the use of big data to influence election outcomes. Incidentally, India leads the countries with highest number of Facebook users. The social networking giant recently witnessed an increase in the number of people visiting the platform at least once a month to 2.13 billion - way more than the current population of China at 1.41 billion.

Here are some precautions one can take to safeguard their social media account without deleting it:

1. Location Access

The simple way to ensure that your Facebook data is not compromised is to turn off your location access. The vital details about your travels and visits can be used by a third-party app or service which you have been using via Facebook credentials.

With your location data, Facebook has access to your location all the time. If you have installed apps on your phone which use Facebook API, then it is likely that such third-party services are using that data.

You can change the location permissions in the Settings option in your phone. On Facebook, you can open the Account Settings, tap Location in the drop down and then change access from on to off.

2. Remove suspicious apps using Facebook API

Most of us have unwittingly allowed third-party apps the access to our Facebook data. Just like Cambridge Analytica used an ostensibly unknown app called 'thisisyourdigitallife' to harvest data, you may find scores of apps which you may not even have heard of until now taking your personal data.

To check how many such apps are hoarding your data, you can click on the inverted triangle button when you open Facebook on your desktop. Then click on settings. On the left hand side, you will find Apps. Click through to find out which apps have access to your Facebook data. Here, you can remove the apps which you think are questionable.



3. Sharing Settings

Facebook lets you choose who can view your posts on the social networking site. You can choose to limit the audience for the posts you share. The feature also allows you to limit the reach of posts that you have already shared in the past.

Besides managing who can send you friend requests on Facebook, you can also see whether your personal details like email address and mobile numbers are being used to find you on Facebook. This option lets you control whether strangers or people you've shared your phone number with can find you.

In a section called 'How people can find and contact you', Facebook lets you choose whether you want to make your friend list public or not.

4. Avoid sharing personal details

In the 'About Me' section of Facebook, it's probably safer to divulge as little information as you can. If you don't remember which parts of your profile details are public. You can go through Facebook's Privacy Check-up by clicking on the question mark icon on the top right corner.

This feature lets you edit/delete everything you have shared on Facebook. It includes the basic information like the city you live in, your birthday, email address and phone numbers.

5. Ad preferences

If you want to say goodbye to targetted ads on Facebook, then this is where you go. Advertisers have access to the trail of data that you leave behind when you like pages, travel to places or attend events, participate in activities or eat in restaurants. Your Facebook ads are targetted using such information like your relationship status, job title, education, etc.

Luckily, you have an option to disable these preference for ads.Duck Creek Technologies, Inc. provides software-as-a-service core systems to the property and casualty insurance industry in North America. It offers Duck Creek Policy, a full lifecycle solution for the development of products and quoting, binding, and servicing of policies across various channels from agents and brokers to end-users; Duck Creek Billing that provides payment and invoicing capabilities, such as billing and collections, commission processing, disbursement management, and general ledger capabilities for insurance lines and bill types; and Duck Creek Claims that supports the entire claims lifecycle from first notice of loss through investigation, payments, negotiations, reporting, and closure. The company also provides Duck Creek Rating that allows carriers to develop new rates and models and deliver accurate quotes in real-time based on the complex rating algorithms; Duck Creek Insights, an insurance analytics solution that allows carriers to gather and analyze data from internal and external sources and facilitate rapid analysis and reporting on a single system; Duck Creek Digital Engagement that offer digital interactions between property and casualty insurers and their agents, brokers, and policyholders; and Duck Creek Distribution Management that automates sales channel activities for agents and brokers, including producer onboarding, compliance, and compensation management. In addition, it offers Duck Creek Reinsurance Management that automates critical financial and administrative functions; and Duck Creek Industry Content that provides pre-built content, including base business rules, product designs, rating algorithms, data capture screens, and workflows for insurance lines of business. The company serves insurance carriers and leaders. Duck Creek Technologies, Inc. was founded in 2016 and is headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts.

Read MoreTruist Financial Corp. operates as a financial holding company, which engages in the provision of banking services to individuals, businesses and municipalities. The firm offers a variety of loans and lease financing to individuals and entities, including insurance premium financing, permanent commercial real estate financing arrangements, loan servicing for third-party investors, direct consumer finance loans to individuals, credit card lending, automobile financing and equipment financing. It also markets a range of other services, including deposits, life insurance, property and casualty insurance, health Truist Financial Corp. operates as a financial holding company. It engages in the provision of banking services to individuals, businesses and municipalities. The company operates through the following segments: Consumer Banking and Wealth; Corporate and Commercial Banking; and Insurance Holdings. The firm offers a variety of loans and lease financing to individuals and entities, including insurance premium financing, permanent commercial real estate financing arrangements, loan servicing for third-party investors, direct consumer finance loans to individuals, credit card lending, automobile financing and equipment financing. It also markets a range of other services, including deposits, life insurance, property and casualty insurance, health insurance and commercial general liability insurance on an agency basis and through a wholesale insurance brokerage operation, merchant services, trust and retirement services, comprehensive wealth advisory services, asset management and capital markets services. The company was founded on December 6, 2019 and is headquartered in Charlotte, NC. insurance and commercial general liability insurance on an agency basis and through a wholesale insurance brokerage operation, merchant services, trust and retirement services, comprehensive wealth advisory services, asset management and capital markets services. The company was founded on December 6, 2019 and is headquartered in Charlotte, NC.

Read MoreChinese President Xi Jinping concluded this months National Peoples Congress with a speech on Tuesday emphasising the nationalist themes of his dream of Chinese rejuvenation and a central role in world politics. As he did last year, Xi declared that China was standing tall in the east with a brand new posture.

We must ride on the mighty east wind of the new era, charge forward with a full tank and steadily steer the wheel with full power, so that the giant ship of China carrying the great dream of more than 1.3 billion Chinese people will continue to cleave the waves and sail to victory with a promising tomorrow, Xi proclaimed.

The forthright nationalist character of Xis speech reflects his further elevation by the congress, which approved constitutional amendments removing the limit of two five-year terms on the president. Xis consolidation as Chinas political strongman, who can now hold office indefinitely, takes place amid growing US threats of trade war and war, as well as intense social tensions at home.

Xi and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) represent the interests of a tiny layer of multi-billionaires who have accumulated vast fortunes as a result of the CCPs restoration of capitalism over the past three decades. His nationalist fervour, which reflects the ambitions of the ultra-rich in China for a greater say in world affairs, is aimed at securing a base of support among the Chinese middle classes and sowing divisions in the working class.

Xi pointedly stressed Chinese unity just days after US President Donald Trump signed the Taiwan Travel Act authorising official visits between Taiwan and the US at all levels, a move that foreshadows stronger ties with Taiwan and undermines the US commitment to the One China policy. Washington broke diplomatic relations with Taipei in 1979 when it de facto recognised Beijing as the only government of all China, including Taiwan.

Safeguarding national sovereignty and territorial integrity and realising the complete reunification of the country are the common aspirations of all the sons and daughters of the Chinese nation, Xi said. All acts and tricks to split China are doomed to failure and will be condemned by the people and punished by history!

China regards Taiwan as a renegade province and has threatened to use military force if the government in Taipei formally declares independence from China. In another sign of the mounting tensions over Taiwan being stoked by the Trump administration, the Chinese aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, sailed into the Taiwan Strait yesterday. The Taiwanese military responded by dispatching warships and aircraft to shadow the vessel.

On the same day, US deputy assistant secretary of state Alex Wong told an audience of 700 business people and officials in Taipei that the US commitment to the Taiwan people, to their security, to their democracy, has never been stronger.

Washington, which backed a brutal military dictatorship in Taiwan for decades, has never been concerned with defending the democratic rights of the Taiwanese people. Rather, as it prepares for war with China, the Trump administration regards Taiwan as a crucial strategic stronghold. By strengthening ties with Taiwan, it is recklessly inflaming tensions in what has long been a dangerous flashpoint for conflict.

In his speech, Xi denied that China posed a threat to US global dominance, saying Beijing did not wish to displace any other country. In an implicit criticism of US aggression, he added: Only those who are accustomed to threatening others will see everyone as a threat.

The CCP bureaucracy has elevated Xi as a Bonapartist figure, both to defend Chinese interests against US threats and suppress mounting internal class tensions. Over the past five years, he has restructured the military and brought it more tightly under his control. At the same time, Xi has tightened censorship, cracked down on critics, and conducted an anti-corruption purge designed to eliminate and intimidate potential rivals and opposition.

The National Peoples Congress (NPC) approved further increases in the military and internal security budgets, as well as the establishment of a new anti-corruption body with greater powers and scope. Chinas spending on its internal police-state apparatus is greater than on the military, underscoring the CCPs fear of an eruption of class struggles in China.

Xis pivotal political role is reflected in the slavish official adulation that is now mandatory. After Xis speech, NPC Standing Committee chairman Li Zhanshu declared: Comrade Xi is the core of the Party, commander of the army and leader of the people, who is supported by the whole Party, loved and respected by the people. He declared that Xi was the national helmsman, recalling the term used to refer to Mao Zedong.

The NPC installed key political lieutenants of Xi in powerful positions. Wang Qishan was Xis right-hand man in the anti-corruption purge before he stood down from the Politburo Standing Committee at last years CCP Congress due to his age. He has been installed as vice-president and, as a result of the constitutional changes, can remain in that post indefinitely.

The NPC appointed Xis top economic adviser, Liu He, as one of four vice-premiers. He was in charge of one of the small leading groups, established and led by Xi to extend his grip over key areas of policy. Liu was effectively in charge of the Central Leading Group for Financial and Economic Affairs, which now has been elevated to the status of a commission.

Xi used this group and Liu to undermine the position of Premier Li Keqiang, who is nominally in charge of economic and financial matters. Significantly, Xi sent Liu to Washington in February for discussions on the Trump administrations trade war threats and to Davos in January to lead Chinas delegation to the World Economic Forum. Liu is likely to be put in charge of reining in Chinas massive debt, which threatens to destabilise its financial system.

This years NPC marks something of a turning point. Confronted with threats at home and abroad, the CCP apparatus has come together around a political strongman in the desperate hope that he can avert the crises ahead.A New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority track worker, St. Clair Richard Stephens, 23, fell about 20 feet landing on his head, early Tuesday morning after a wooden safety railing broke.

Stephens was standing on a niche between two columns when the wooden rail gave way sending him into empty space before landing on the tracks below him.

The accident took place when Stephens, on the job for only 6 months, was working with a crew involved in the removal of redundant rails and putting them on a work train in underground subway tracks.

Stephens was working alone when the rest of the crew heard him fall. In a news conference, MTA president Andy Byford stated that, The crew that was working with him heard a shout and saw him lying face down on the lower level.

He immediately suffered head trauma but was still alive when a Fire Department emergency crew pulled him onto the 125th street station platform. The EMS personnel worked frantically to save him including providing including CPR, but despite their best efforts, Stephens died an hour later. The other transit workers present removed their helmets and bowed their heads in silence for their fallen coworker.

There has been some attention paid to the fact that Stephens was 6 feet, 3 inches tall and weighed, 270 pounds, but at least one question is whether the wooden railing was designed to support anyone, irrespective of a persons size. In fact, MTA officials reported they did not know when the wooden rail was built or designed to support a persons weight.

Although a formal investigation has yet to begin, Stephens death is another tragic example of the deteriorating infrastructure of New York Citys transit system.

The latest statistics on the subway system for the month of January showed a mere 58.1 percent on time performance for weekday travel, and 64.7 percent for the weekends. This was even worse than January of last year when the on-time performance for weekday train travel was 64.1 percent, and 74.2 percent for the weekends. There were 76,287 delayed trains in January of this year during the weekdays, up from 60,455 in January of last year. In the weekends the number of delays rose from 14,182 last year to 18,932 this January of this year.

The MTA claimed that the slowdown was due to bad weather that damaged equipment and an increase in people on the tracks, including the homeless seeking shelter. Putting aside the lame excuse about the weather which, as is well known, does tend to be bad in January, their statement about increased homeless on the tracks exposes the growing housing crisis in the home of Wall Street.

There are similar numbers for the Long Island Rail Road, which is also controlled by the MTA, and had its worst on-time performance in 22 years in January. Customer satisfaction was only 77 percent before and that was before the winter.

This breakdown in service has taken place under conditions where ridership throughout the MTA has been declining.

Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo and MTA officials have spoken of emergency funding hundreds of millions of dollars to fix the problems. In reality, the usual MTA operating budget is itself about $15 billion a year, and the transit authority needs tens of billions of dollars more to save aged infrastructure, some of which is more than hundred years old, and replace its antiquated signal system.

New Yorks transit system was on the verge of complete collapse in the late 1970s and early 1980s when it was decided to pour billions of dollars into the system, but without adequate funding the agency has been saddled with an enormous debt which now approaching $40 billion.

As a result, S&P Global Ratings downgraded the MTA credit rating to A-plus from AA-minus citing a spike in operating expenses and growing debt service without a matching revenue growth. As it has in the past, the transit agency can be expected to deal with its financial crisis by working with the unions to enforce concessions contracts on transit workers and pushing through fare hikes for the riders. These efforts will only accelerate the crisis as both transit employees and passengers will suffer even lower living standards and an increasingly dangerous transportation system.On March 15 Unifor Local 199 officials distributed a joint union-management statement announcing the outsourcing of work for HFV6 crankshaft production at the General Motors powertrain engine plant in St. Catharines, Ontario. The announcement also outlined a special one-time hourly production retirement incentive that seeks applications to leave employment from 170 veteran workers who would be eligible for retirement by September of this year.

The move again demonstrates the role of Unifor as a junior partner to corporate management in their joint drive to continue slashing labour costs in the auto industry at the expense of the workforce.

Firstly, the call for 170 retirements is of a piece with the drive by GM and Unifor to cut the number of veteran workers who, due to their position on the first tier of contract provisions, earn as much as $14 (CDN) more in wages and in addition receive better benefits than more newly hired workers on the ten-year grow-in second tier.

Unifor president Jerry Dias said as much before the 2016 round of contract negotiations opened at GM plants in Oshawa and St. Catharines. Speaking like a cheap labour contractor, Dias bragged that about two-thirds of unionized workers at the Oshawa plants are eligible to retire under the provisions of the Unifor contract with GM. This will save General Motors billions.

Dias went on to excitedly explain, If those workers retire, they can be replaced by newly hired employees who start at $20.50 per hour and whose wages wont rise to the full seniority level of $34 an hour until they have been there for 10 years. For Unifor, what is paramount in their calculations is not the well-being of the members they claim to represent, but the maintenance of a lucrative dues base that funds their six-figure salaries, perks and expense accounts.

In last weeks announcement, veteran St. Catharines workers have been given until April 6 to apply for the one-time lump sum retirement payment of $30,000 (CDN)well below traditional standards. In addition, retiring workers will have the opportunity to make a non-guaranteed nomination of a family member or friend to be interviewed for a low-wage second-tier entry level position. It is not at all a foregone conclusion that GM-Unifor will entice 170 workers, who themselves are just coming off a ten-year wage freeze and who face ever dwindling retirement benefits, to take the meagre offer.

The third-party outsourcing of the HFV6 crankshaft production line will result in a further search for retirement-eligible workers to accept exit packages. In their joint March 15 statement GM-Unifor explained that obsolete equipment has caused potentially catastrophic operational instability that requires immediate measures be taken to permanently reassign the work to another yet-to-be-named supplier. As far as job losses are concerned, the Union and Company will work together to minimize the impact to the workforce through redeployment.

Workers at GM St. Catharineswho only narrowly voted to ratify the miserable 2016 Detroit Three pattern framework agreementwill no doubt recall the historic job-saving investment promises ($150 million for the powertrain facility) trumpeted by Jerry Dias. Yet less than 18 months later, the company and union agree that obsolete equipment will force an almost immediate permanent loss of a major production line.

In the fall of 2016 the World Socialist Web Site Autoworkers Newsletter warned that the framework agreements guaranteeing operational stability for the Canadian jobs footprint promoted by Dias and the rest of the Unifor officialdom were a fraud. It demanded that workers be given the whole 400-plus-page contract and time to discuss it before any vote. Thousands of autoworkers agreed. The percentages for ratification were the lowest in the history of the Canadian Autoworkers/Unifor. Indeed, the giant Ford Oakville complex rejected the deal outright.

At the St. Catharines facility, Unifor displayed a particularly egregious contempt for the membership. In the local plant settlement the union agreed to an almost wholesale amalgamation of classifications in the skilled trades. Fearing that this would encourage a rebellion amongst the membership, Unifor broke with longstanding precedent and in an effort to hide the details did not call a separate skilled trades ratification meeting before the vote.

More and more workers have come to realize that their unions are in reality arms of the corporations. The recent collective agreements make this clear. As the current 2016 St. Catharines local deal states: The parties discussed their desire and primary objectives, to allow employees, the Union and the Company, to work together in a spirit of cooperation and mutual trust. The parties, accordingly have come to recognize that each has the desire, the skills, and ability to develop and support the St. Catharines operation and work force, so that it will continue to grow and prosper in a world class competitive environment, to produce components at the lowest possible cost to the consumer.

The March 15 announcement is just the latest manifestation of the agreement between GM and the union to reduce wages and benefits to the lowest possible cost.With all votes counted in Tuesdays primary election in Illinois, for the first time in the states history, two billionairesone Democrat and one Republicanwill battle for the governors mansion. It speaks volumes about the plutocratic character of US politics that the contest for the top political office in a state with nearly 13 million people is reduced to the choice between two of the states two dozen billionaires.

Following in the footsteps of Trump, both billionaires, incumbent Republican Governor Bruce Rauner and Democrat J. B. Pritzker, are absurdly presenting themselves as average guys running against out-of-touch and elite opponents.

The falsity of these attempts to bridge the impassable gulf between the ruling class and the working people of the state was reflected in the low turnout, barely 20 percent of those eligible to vote. In a state with 9 million people of voting age, a few more than 1.2 million voted Democratic and just under 700,000 voted Republican. The turnout was low, although not as low as the 16 percent who turned out in 2014. Multiple reports noted that voter turnout among young people was especially poor.

Within the framework of the two-party system there was a distinct shift towards the Democrats, with 30 percent more voting in the Democratic primary compared to the last contested race, and 30 percent fewer voting in the Republican primary.

Pritzker, the winner of the Democratic primary for governor, thus seems likely to take both a majority of the vote in November, as well as a majority of the states billionaires, since his family members, all heirs to the Hyatt Hotel fortune, include eleven individuals with that obscene level of wealth, including his sister Penny, who was secretary of commerce in the Obama administration.

Republican incumbent Rauner, whose fortune has apparently fallen slightly since he took officehe was left off the Forbes magazine billionaires list for 2018has the support of the wealthiest of the group, Ken Griffin of the Citadel hedge fund group, worth more than $9 billion.

Pritzker, who is worth $3.5 billion, won the Democratic nomination easily with 550,000 votes, just under 50 percent of the total. His two main rivals each won about a quarter of the vote: multimillionaire Chris Kennedy, of the Kennedy political family and until recently the chairman of the board of trustees at the University of Illinois, and Daniel Biss, a North Shore state senator backed by the remnants of the Bernie Sanders 2016 campaign organization.

Rauner, an investment banker, took fewer than 350,000 votes in the Republican primary, barely surviving a challenge from a far-right, anti-immigrant state representative Jeanne Ives, who had been endorsed by National Review magazine and enjoyed the financial support of right-wing businessman and political activist Dick Uihlein, who had formerly supported Rauner.

In both primaries, it was money that talked. Pritzker spent $70 million to win the Democratic nomination, about $127 a vote, while Rauner poured $50 million into his campaign, about $143 per vote. He overwhelmed Ives on television advertising, spending $16.5 million to her $2.9 million, a better than five-to-one margin.

In other contests, Kwame Raoul, the choice of the Chicago Democratic machine, beat former Illinois governor Pat Quinn and seven other lesser-knowns in the race for state attorney general.

A Chicago Teachers Union activist, Brandon Johnson, was elected to the Cook County Board for the first district, running on the promise to oppose health care cuts and in support of Medicare for all.

Illinois is home to several closely watched races for the U.S. House of Representatives this year.

In the Third Congressional District, Marie Newman, backed by Bernie Sanders and abortion rights groups, fell short in a challenge to incumbent Democrat Dan Lipinski, a conservative Blue Dog who opposes abortion rights. Lipinski has served seven terms in the district after succeeding his father, a machine Democrat who held the seat for two decades. He had the support of most union officials as well as the Chamber of Commerce and right-wing anti-abortion groups, which spent heavily and flooded the district with paid canvassers and fliers. The Republican Party failed to field a candidate in its primary, allowing long-time white supremacist activist and Holocaust denier Arthur Jones to win the nomination unopposed.

In the Fourth District, former Cook County Commissioner and one-time mayoral candidate Jesus Chuy Garcia won easily in the majority Hispanic district. Garcia was tapped late last year to inherit this seat from retiring Representative Luis Gutierrez. A long-time Cook County machine politician, Garcia has been built up as a progressive in his challenge to Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuels reelection in 2015.

The Sixth District in the Chicago northwest suburbs, currently held by Republican Peter Roskam, featured the highest spending of any congressional contest in the state. The two leading Democratic hopefuls, environmental scientist Kelly Mazeski and green capitalist Sean Casten, each spent nearly a million dollars in a six-candidate race. Casten, a multi-millionaire, appeared to have won the nomination by a narrow margin.

Military-intelligence operatives seeking Democratic congressional nominations posted split results. In the the Twelfth District, in southwest Illinois, St. Clair County States Attorney and Navy veteran Brendan Kelly had the support of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which cleared the field for him and placed him in its highest priority red-to-blue program. Kelly, who served as an observer at Guantanamo show trials for the National District Attorneys Association, won the Democratic nomination without opposition, and will face Republican incumbent Mike Bost in November.

In the Thirteenth District, Jonathan Ebel, who served four years as a naval intelligence officer, including on the staff of the US European Command in Stuttgart, Germany during the invasion of Iraq in 2003, lost the Democratic nomination to Betsy Dirksen Londrigan, a former staffer for Illinois Senator Dick Durbin and a distant relative of the longtime Republican US senator from Illinois, Everett Dirksen. Londrigan will oppose Republican incumbent Rodney Davis in the downstate district.

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[24 October 2017]A school shooting in suburban Maryland Tuesday morning has prompted renewed calls by local officials for increased police presence at schools. At 7:55 a.m. Tuesday, 17-year-old Austin Wyatt Rollins pulled out a Glock semiautomatic handgun and opened fire at students at Great Mills High School as classes began. Days earlier, students at Great Mills had walked out of classes in opposition to the continued spate of school shootings.

The most recent school shooting, which injured two studentsone criticallycomes just days before Saturdays scheduled March for Our Lives protest in Washington, DC, just an hours drive north from Great Mills High School. The demonstration and nationally coordinated sister marches are expected to draw hundreds of thousands of youth from across the country to protest gun violence.

At the time of the shooting, school resource officer Blaine Gaskill, a member of the local SWAT team, confronted Rollins, ordering him to Put the gun down! before opening fire at him. Rollins reportedly had held his handgun to his head in the moment before shots were fired, suggesting that he may have shot himself. He died after being taken to a hospital.

Local officials responded to the latest shooting and Gaskills reaction by heaping praise upon the officer for his toughness in the face of danger. According to St. Marys County Sheriff Timothy K. Cameron, there was no question Gaskills quick action had defused the situation. Larry Hogan, the Republican governor of Maryland, declared of Gaskill: This is a tough guy who closed in quickly and took the right action, before promising to plow resources into expanding the school resource officer program in Maryland.

Having a trained, professional school resource officer made a difference ... armed school resource officers are available in our high schools and thats important, stated Democratic Senator for Maryland Benjamin L. Cardin to the Washington Post.

The shooting came exactly a month after school officials responded to a mysterious Snapchat post warning of a shooting at Great Mills High School. According to an announcement sent out by the school principal, Jake Heibel, the school resource officer had determined the threat was not substantiated.

According to the Post, Gaskill is only the second school officer in the past 20 years to have successfully thwarted a school shooting that was in progress, raising questions about the effectiveness of armed personnel in addressing mass shooter situations. In contrast, school resource officers have regularly engaged in unprovoked physical confrontations with students, mirroring the growth in police brutality throughout the United States in recent years.

In preparation for this weekends March for our Lives event, officials in Washington, DC have announced that federal agents as well as the entire US Capitol Police Force will be monitoring the demonstrators. As the young men and women from Parkland, Florida, have been preparing for Saturdays event, the District has been preparing to keep them safe here in Washington, declared DCs Democratic mayor, Muriel Bowser to the Post.Axis Bank's corporate banking head and deputy managing director have resigned, the Mint reported. The officials who resigned - though not confirmed by the Axis Bank as yet - are: Corporate Banking Head Sidharth Rath and Deputy Managing Director V Srinivasan.

Sidharth Rath joined the Axis Bank in 2001 and served the bank in various capacity such as senior vice-president, president-corporate banking, and president-transaction banking.

V Srinivasan, joined Axis Bank as the Executive Director - Corporate Banking in 2009 and was elevated as a Director on the Board of Axis Bank in October 2012. Before joining Axis Bank, Srinivasan was Managing Director and Head of Markets with J P Morgan India.

Axis Bank has been in news for the wrong reasons. First, the Reserve Bank slapped a penalty of Rs 3 crore on the bank for violation of NPA classification norms. The move came after, the RBI in its statutory inspection found that the Axis Bank had violated various regulations issued by it in the assessment of non-performing assets.

In another case, the Telecom Department ordered that no new bank guarantee from the Axis bank should be accepted as it had failed to honour a guarantee issued previously. It said: "Axis Bank has failed to invoke a Bank Guarantee issued by them on behalf of Aircel Group of Companies. This action by Axis Bank is a serious breach of trust and contract with Government of India."

Earlier this month, the Serious Fraud Investigation Office of the Ministry of Corporate Affairs summoned top executive of the bank for giving loan facility to Gitanjali Group. Axis Bank has an exposure of Rs 200 crore to Nirav Modi and Gitanjali Gems accounts.Google announced Wednesday that it is partnering with the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Financial Times and other major news outlets to reinforce their monopoly over news coverage by blocking independent news organizations.

The New York Times, whose stock price soared after the announcement, said Googles initiative was aimed at combatting the epidemic of false and unreliable information on the internet, by pledging to spend $300 million over the next three years to support authoritative journalism.

In reality, Googles action is the latest step in a protracted campaign on the part of the major technology companies, working with the Democratic Party and the US intelligence agencies, to censor the Internet.

The campaign for Internet censorship has been spearheaded by the major media outlets, including the Times and the Post, who have seen their subscription base eroded by the growth of oppositional news outlets and citizen journalism. By working with the technology giants and intelligence agencies to censor smaller news outlets, the media giants hope to regain the monopoly over the distribution of news they held before the rise of the Internet.

In April of last year, Google announced measures to promote authoritative content over alternative viewpoints, which led search traffic to left-wing, antiwar, and socialist web sites to plunge by over 50 percent.

After Googles announcement last year, other major technology companies followed suit in implementing their own measures to censor the Internet. This year, Facebooks CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that it would promote trusted news sources, such as the New York Times, over public postings by individuals and independent news agencies. At a congressional hearing this year, Facebook said it had hired some 10,000 content moderators, and would double that number by the end of the year.

But despite Facebooks moves to rapidly implement the demands of the intelligence agencies for Internet censorship, leading Democrats, including Senator Mark Warner, have called on them to do more to crack down on social opposition.

Amid a growing strike wave by workers all over the world, including struggles this month by teachers in West Virginia and Oklahoma, university lecturers in the United Kingdom, and Amazon warehouse workers in Spain, leading news outlets have repeatedly warned that Facebook was being used to mobilize social opposition outside of the framework of the trade union establishment.

Within this context, the major news outlets have, in pursuit of their own aims, seized upon revelations that the election data firm Cambridge Analytica harvested the personal information of some 50 million Facebook users without their knowledge in 2014. At the time, the firm was owned by Robert Mercer, a billionaire who would later back the Trump campaign, and was headed by Steve Bannon, who would later serve as Trumps campaign manager.

While the type of data harvesting conducted by Cambridge Analytica raises serious privacy concerns, the media firestorm that has followed the revelations is highly selective.

Cambridge Analytica had access to only a fraction of the data that Facebook itself collects and usesoften in secretfor political purposes. The companys actions, moreover, are par for the course for the conduct of bourgeois election campaigns, which have come more and more to rely on data analytics and artificial intelligence to assess and impact voters political views.

A recent report by Investors Business Daily noted In 2012, the Obama campaign encouraged supporters to download an Obama 2012 Facebook app that, when activated, let the campaign collect Facebook data both on users and their friends. According to the report, up to 190 million people may have had at least some of their Facebook data vacuumed up by the Obama campaign  without their knowledge or consent.

Commenting on the Obama campaigns data mining operation, former campaign director Carol Davidsen tweeted, Facebook was surprised we were able to suck out the whole social graph, but they didnt stop us once they realized that was what we were doing.

In leaked emails released by WikiLeaks in 2016, Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg told Clinton campaign officials that she badly wanted Clinton to win, and that she had met with the candidate and campaign officials on multiple occasions.

While the actions taken by Cambridge Analytica point to a substantial violation of users privacy, they pale in comparison to the massive surveillance and content harvesting operation carried out by Facebook itself, with the assistance of the leading US intelligence agencies and Democratic Party, which, in the name of fighting fake news and extremist content, aim to review and censor everything posted on the social media platform.

Even more importantly, the Democrats highly selective outrage over the Cambridge Analytica scandal is being used to hold Facebooks feet to the fire, with the aim of forcing it to more aggressively censor social opposition in the name of cracking down on Russian bots and trolls. Mark Warner, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee and a leading proponent of internet censorship, seized on the scandal to put further pressure on Facebook to declare that it was misused by the Russians in the 2016 election campaign.

Warner told ABC, Facebook, since the beginnings of this investigation, has been reluctant, to say the least, to be fully forthcoming. I think its time for the CEO, Mr. Zuckerberg, and other top officials, to come and testify, and not tell part of the story, but tell the whole story of their involvement, not only with the Trump campaign, but their ability to have their platform misused by the Russians.

In an op-ed entitled Facebook Doesnt Get It, New York Times columnist David Leonhardt claimed that, By spreading false news stories and giving a megaphone to Russian trolls, Facebook  a vastly larger social network than Twitter  played a meaningful role in the presidential campaign.

In fact, the massive data mining operations carried out by both the Democratic and Republican parties render absurd the argument that a few hundred thousand dollars of Facebook advertisements allegedly bought by Russians swayed the 2016 election. Both parties spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the type of data operations carried out by Cambridge Analytica, seeking to analyze, quantify, and affect the political viewpoints of hundreds of millions of people.

In fact, undercutting his own argument, Leonhardt called alleged Russian meddling a scapegoat for the election of Donald Trump and the electoral defeat of Hillary Clinton. Regardless, the scapegoat of Russian meddling is being used to fuel an even further crackdown on the Internet, in the name of blocking fake news and divisive content.

In just one example of the growing crackdown on freedom of expression on the Internet, over the past 48 hours, Facebook deleted a link published by the World Socialist Web Site to its recent review of the Ken Burns documentary on the Vietnam War, allegedly because the posting contained nudity. In fact, the article contained well-known images of Vietnamese civilians fleeing the atrocities of the United States and its proxy South Vietnamese forces; photos that have been published in dozens of leading newspapers all over the world.

With the class struggle heating up throughout the world, the US ruling elite is working with ever-greater speed to block the expression of social opposition on the Internet. We urge workers and young people seeking to defend the freedom of expression to contact the World Socialist Web Site and join its campaign against Internet censorship.US President Donald Trump welcomed Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to the Oval Office Tuesday, hailing the de facto autocratic ruler of Saudi Arabia as the number one purchaser of US arms and a key ally in Washingtons drive to war with Iran.

The meeting delivered to the Saudi regime what amounted to a carte blanche from the White House to continue its near-genocidal war against the people of Yemen, which has left over 13,000 dead and brought over 8.5 million to the brink of starvation.

The White House meeting marks the first stop in what is programmed as a two-and-a-half-week US tour by the Saudi prince. He went on to New York City on Wednesday for meetings aimed at reassuring the banks and finance houses, which were rattled by the purge initiated by bin Salman last November.

In what was dubbed an anti-corruption campaign, hundreds of princes, former ministers and prominent businessmen were rounded up, detained at Riyadhs Ritz Carlton hotel and, in many cases, subjected to beatings and torture until they agreed to turn over substantial assets to the Saudi regime. The shakedown reportedly netted the ruling faction over $105 billion.

Bin Salman is also set to meet CEOs in Silicon Valley and the oil industry executives in Houston and to visit Boston, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

In the White House meeting, Trump welcomed the Saudi ruler as a prized cash cow, bizarrely holding up cardboard posters in front of the prince bearing photographs and price tags for US weapons systems purchased by Riyadh. Pointing to one contract worth $525 million, the US president turned to the prince and declared, thats peanuts for you.

The relationship [with Riyadh] is probably as good as its really ever been, and I think will probably only get better, Trump told reporters before the meeting. We understand each other. Saudi Arabia is a very wealthy nation and theyre going to give the United States some of that wealth, hopefully, in the form of jobs, in the form of the purchase of the finest military equipment anywhere in the world, theres nobody even close.

Trump pointed to states where the weapons systems contracted by the Saudi regime are to be produced, clearly seeking to exploit the deals for political gain.

Bin Salman delivered perfunctory remarks about the 80-year-old US-Saudi alliance, in which the House of Saud has stood as the principal pillar of imperialist domination and political reaction in the Arab world. He played to Trumps money-grubbing approach, however, stating that while he and the US president had discussed some $200 billion in investments and arms sales when he was last in Washington, the Saudi monarchy was now contemplating $400 billion.

Whether any such sums materialize is an open question. The Saudi regime is wracked by crises, brought on by the collapse in oil prices and the outflow of foreign investment after last Novembers crackdown, as well as the costs incurred by its war in Yemen and the billions it has poured into the bloody war for regime change in Syria.

During the public remarks in the Oval Office, Trump was asked about Iran. He pointed to the May 12 deadline for the waiver of US sanctions required by the 2015 nuclear deal signed by Tehran and the major powers. The Iran deal is coming up and youre going to see what I do, he said. The reimposition of US nuclear sanctions would effectively upend the agreement and set Washington on a direct path to war with Iran.

Asked whether he believed Trump should abrogate the Iran agreement, bin Salman replied, Well, well talk about that today.

A White House readout of the closed-door meeting between Trump and bin Salman reported that the Saudi prince had thanked the President for American leadership in defeating ISIS and countering Irans destructive actions across the Middle East. It added that On Yemen, the President and the Crown Prince discussed the threat the Houthis pose to the region, assisted by the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.

The claim that Yemens Houthi rebels pose some kind of regional threat is preposterous and meant only as a justification for the continuation of the indispensable American support for Saudi Arabias savage bombing campaign against Yemen, which will enter its fourth year next week.

Washington has provided the bombs and missiles that have been used to attack Yemeni schools, hospitals and residential areas, as well as vital infrastructure ranging from power plants to water and sewage facilities and even agricultural production. The result is mass hunger, the worst cholera epidemic in human history and a deadly outbreak of diphtheria, creating what the United Nations has called the most severe humanitarian crisis on the planet.

In addition to providing weapons of mass destruction, the Pentagon has stationed intelligence officers at the headquarters of the Saudi air war in Riyadh to supply information used in selecting targets in Yemen. US Air Force refueling planes fly continuous missions to keep Saudi and allied bombers in the air over the battered country. And the US Navy provides forces to maintain the de facto blockade that has cut off critical supplies of food and medicine.

All of this US support for the one-sided war by the Arab worlds richest nations against the poorest one was initiated under the Democratic administration of President Barack Obama, in part to assuage Saudi displeasure over the Iran nuclear deal.

On the same day as bin Salmans visit, the US Senate voted to kill a resolution demanding the withdrawal of all US military personnel participating in the Saudi-led war against Yemen. Invoking the US Constitutions granting to Congress the sole power to declare war as well as the 1973 War Powers Resolution, the resolution was introduced by Senator Bernie Sanders as well as the right-wing Republican senator from Utah, Mike Lee.

In a 55-to-44 vote, the Senate tabled the resolution, preventing a vote on the measure. Democrats provided 10 votes to assure a comfortable margin for killing the bill.

Before the vote, the Pentagon had waged a public campaign against the resolution, with the US defense secretary, retired Gen. James Mattis, claiming in a letter to senators that a cutoff of US arms and aid, without which Riyadh could not continue the war, could increase civilian casualties, jeopardize cooperation with our partners on counter-terrorism, and reduce our influence with the Saudisall of which would further exacerbate the situation and humanitarian crisis.

Bin Salmans visit and Washingtons commitment to both continue supporting the criminal assault on Yemen and escalate the confrontation with Iran received relatively short shrift from the US corporate media.

Instead, focus was placed on the furor whipped up over Trumps call to congratulate President Vladimir Putin on his re-election. Politicians from both major parties criticized Trump for failing to use the call to condemn alleged fraud in the Russian vote or mention domestic repression in Russia, the allegations of Russian meddling in the 2016 US presidential election and the unsubstantiated claims that Moscow was responsible for the poisoning of the former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter earlier this month in the UK.

The same media and politicians, however, voiced no objections to Trumps welcoming to the White House the autocratic ruler of Saudi Arabia, where there are no elections, and critics of the regime are subject to execution by beheading.The Trump administration is set to announce tariff measures directed against China, possibly this afternoon, aimed at countering what it claims are malpractices on technology transfers and the state-subsidising of companies competing with hi-tech US firms.

US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer set out the plans broad outlines in testimony to the US Congress House Ways and Means Committee yesterday. Lighthizer will speak to the US Senate today. Then, according to the Wall Street Journal, the measures will be announced. The actual implementation will follow after consultation with US business groups.

The tariff measures have been the subject of a months-long discussion in the administration. Trump ordered an investigation into Chinese trade practices last year under Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act, which allows the president to take action against any harm inflicted on US businesses.

In his written statement, Lighthizer said action would be taken outside the framework of the global trade regulatory authority, the World Trade Organisation, because it has proven to be wholly inadequate to deal with Chinas version of a state-dominated economy that rejects market principles.

Our view is that we have a very serious problem of losing our intellectual property, which is really the biggest single advantage of the American economy, Lighthizer said. This advantage was being lost to China in a way that did not reflect economic fundamentals.

The administration claims that in requiring US companies in China to form joint ventures, Beijing pressures them to transfer important technology to their Chinese partners. It also maintains that the Chinese government subsidises firms looking to compete with US rivals in hi-tech products, including semi-conductors, artificial intelligence and robotics.

Lighthizers office has claimed that the damage to US companies from so-called forced technology transfers is $30 billion per year.

Mindful of the possible impact of tariffs on US companies and consumers in raising prices, Lighthizer said his office had developed an algorithm that would put maximum pressure on China and the minimum pressure on American consumers.

Citing the annual US trade deficit with China of $375 billion, he said: We think that it is perhaps the most important thing that will have been done in a long time in terms of rebalancing trade with China.

The US did not want a trade war but the reality is that if you are on a course that is unsustainable you have to do something to change.

US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin also articulated the increasingly aggressive mood in the White House earlier this week. He spoke at the close of a G20 finance ministers meeting in Argentina that was overshadowed by the proposed US tariffs on steel and aluminium and the impending moves against China.

The US actions were not about protectionism, Mnuchin asserted, but concerned unfair trade practices. We need to be prepared to act in US interests to defend free and fair trade and reciprocal trade. While there was a risk of retaliation, we are not afraid of getting into a trade war.

The steel and aluminium tariff measures are due to come into effect on Friday. The European Union has been scrambling to secure an exemption, with the senior EU trade negotiator, Cecilia Malmstrom holding talks with US officials in Washington this week.

The US is reported to have offered concessions, provided the EU supports its actions on overcapacity in steel, as well as measures against China over intellectual property rights.

In his remarks, Lighthizer offered a concession to the EU, indicating it would not face immediate tariffs on steel and aluminium while negotiations were taking place on possible exemptions. This is a clear sign that the administration is looking for support in its actions against China.

The EU will give its response at a leadership meeting in Brussels today after publishing a 10-page document listing possible tariffs on US exports if the steel and aluminium measures go ahead.

The depth of the conflict was indicated by one unnamed euro zone finance minister cited by the Financial Times. The minister said Trump knew what he was doing and wanted to put his finger in the wounds of Europe and we have to show we are strong  otherwise there is no reason for Europe anymore.

The response of Kevin Brady, the Republican chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, to the proposed measures on China reflected the views in broad sections of US business and political circles that they must be skillfully directed.

Brady warned against imposing indiscriminate tariffs against China and called for a public discussion before any measures are implemented. The challenge for any president in tariffs is to ensure that ultimately, you dont punish Americans for Chinas misbehaviour, he said. This was not about backing down, its about hitting the target.

China has taken a low-key approach to the steel and aluminium tariffs, largely because it is no longer a major exporter to the US. But Beijing has been preparing retaliatory action under measures imposed under Section 301.

These counter-measures will likely target US exports to China of soybeans, sorghum and live pigs. They could have significant effect. Around one third of the soybeans that the US produces go to the Chinese market.

According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, the Chinese Commerce Ministry set out the retaliatory measures at a meeting last month with importers of US farm products, and Chinese firms have been lining up alternative sources of supply.

China is reported to be offering some concessions to the US through easing restrictions on activities by US financial corporations. But the Chinese regime rejects the central US claims of malpractice with regard to technology and intellectual property.

China places a high priority on protecting intellectual-property rights and improving its business operating environment, a Commerce Ministry spokesperson told the Wall Street Journal.

While it is impossible to predict the outcome of the various manoeuvresmeasures and counter-measuresit is clear that the first stages of a global trade war have been set in motion.

While the Trump administration has provided the catalyst for this conflict, its actions are only the particular expression of deeper processesabove all, the long-term economic decline of the US.

In international trade, the US still carries considerable clout. It is the worlds largest importer and the second largest exporter, but its overall weight in the world economy has declined.

In 1960, the US accounted for around 40 percent of global gross domestic product. By 2016, its share had declined to about 25 percent. Faced with the loss of strength against its old rivals in Europe and confronting new ones in China and elsewhere, it is seeking to maintain its dominance. Trade war measures can only lead ultimately, as the bloody history of the 1930s shows, to military methods.Country

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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The SBI-led consortium of banks on Wednesday rejected the bids by Numetal and ArcelorMittal for Essar Steel as they were found to be ineligible under the provisions of the amended Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC).

Numetal and ArcelorMittal, the only two bidders for Essar Steel, were found to be ineligible under Section 29 A of the amended IBC which bars promoters of defaulting firms and also related parties from buying out stressed assets being put up for auction to recover bad loans of banks.

The decision to reject both the bids was taken at a meeting of the committee of creditors (CoC) of Essar Steel which has decided to allow a second round of bidding for the 10-million tonne-asset at Hazira in Gujarat.

Essar Steel has defaulted on the payment of a staggering Rs 45,000 crore in loans to the SBI led consortium of lenders. The two companies submitted their bids on February 12 but have since been slugging it out with each other over questions about their eligibility to participate in the auction.

Numetal's bid was rejected as one of the promoters of the special purpose vehicle is Rewant Ruia, the son of an Essar Group promoter Ravi Ruia, who is one of the original promoters of Essar Steel.

Even though the Luxembourgbased ArcelorMittal has teamed up with Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal Corp to bid for Essar Steel, it has been found ineligible as it has a joint venture with Uttam Galva, which has defaulted on loan payments and the case is pending with NCLT for resolution.

Bankers, however, said if these companies delinked their connection from the promoters or standardise their loans they can compete again in the second round of bidding.

The lenders have set an April 2 deadline for the second round of bidding for Essar Steel that owes over Rs 45,000 crore to over 30 banks and other creditors. However, the response to the bidding round has been tepid as big players such as Tata Steel, Sajjan Jindal-led JSW Steel and Anil Aggrawal-led Vedanta have kept away from bidding for Essar Steel.

The shareholders of the Mauritius-based Numetal, a special purpose vehicle that focuses on steel and infrastructure space along with manufacturing, are VTB Capital, the PE arm of the Russian stateowned lender VTB Bank and Aurora Trusts in which Rewant Ruia owns 25 per cent.

The other promoters include the Russian steel and engineering major TyazhPromExports (TPE) and Indo International, a Dubai-based metals trading firm promoted by an NRI. VTB Capital owns majority in Numetal.

Bids of these firms were evaluated by resolution professional Satish Kumar Gupta, along with risk advisory Grant Thornton and law firm Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas. The rejection comes a day after Numetal moved the Ahmedabad NCLT seeking to declare its eligibility, as it apprehended that the full facts it submitted to the RP were not assessed properly.

Numetal is now expected to ask Rewant Ruia to exit the firm. But he was quick to point out that Rewant did not have any say in the management of Numetal or enjoyed a board position. Both Numetal and Arcelor-Mittal had threatened to challenge NCLT and RP in higher courts if their bids were rejected.

The government, on its part, had recently hinted that it was amenable to make more changes to Section 29 of the IBC Act to redefine related parties.Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has finally broken his nearly week-long silence after the world's largest social media network landed in controversy over improper harvesting of data belonging to 50 million of its users by political consultancy Cambridge Analytica. In fact, he embarked on a media blitz, giving interviews to CNN, the New York Times, Recode, Wired and more, to apologise, explain what happened, and outline the company's next steps.

"This was a major breach of trust. I'm really sorry this happened. We have a basic responsibility to protect people's data," Zuckerberg said in an interview with CNN on Wednesday. The same day he wrote a detailed post in his Facebook account, where he outlined the steps that the company plans to take to protect user data. "The good news is that the most important actions to prevent this from happening again today we have already taken years ago," the founder said. As an example he cited that in 2013, Cambridge University researcher Aleksandr Kogan had created a personality quiz app that was installed by around 300,000 Facebook users. But given the way the social media platform worked at the time the researcher was able to access "tens of millions of their friends' data". So, the following year, he claimed that Facebook changed the "entire platform to dramatically limit the data apps could access". Apps could no longer ask for data about a person's friends unless their friends had also authorized the app. "We also required developers to get approval from us before they could request any sensitive data from people," he added.

Proceeding to defend Facebook, Zuckerberg wrote in his post that they learnt about Kogan sharing data from his app with Cambridge Analytica in 2015 from journalists. "It is against our policies for developers to share data without people's consent, so we immediately banned Kogan's app from our platform, and demanded that Kogan and Cambridge Analytica formally certify that they had deleted all improperly acquired data. They provided these certifications," wrote Zuckerberg, maintaining that his company was clueless about the London-based consultancy allegedly retaining the data till the scandal broke last week. "We immediately banned them from using any of our services. Cambridge Analytica claims they have already deleted the data and has agreed to a forensic audit by a firm we hired to confirm this. We're also working with regulators as they investigate what happened," he explained.

However, acknowledging that this was a "breach of trust between Facebook and the people who share their data with us and expect us to protect it" and that the company needed to do more, the founder also outlined a three-step action plan:

Facebook will investigate all apps that had access to large amount of data before the platform was changed in 2014, conduct thorough audits of any apps with suspicious activity and ban any developers found misusing personally identifiable information. Moreover, the company intends to "tell everyone affected by those apps", including people whose data Kogan had misused.

The social media platform will restrict developers' data access further, like barring access to data of users who don't use an app for 3 months and demanding minimal data - only name, profile photo, and email address - from users when they sign in. Moreover, developers will not only need to take user approval but also sign a contract in order to ask anyone for access to their posts or other data. "And we'll have more changes to share in the next few days," said Zuckerberg.

Prominently display a tool at the top of the users' News Feed with the apps being used and an easy way to revoke their permissions to access personal data.

"I believe these are the next steps we must take to continue to secure our platform," said Zuckerberg, adding, "I know it takes longer to fix all these issues than we'd like, but I promise you we'll work through this and build a better service over the long term."

Interestingly, his future plans do not represent a big reduction of advertisers' ability to use Facebook data, which is the company's lifeblood. In most of the interviews he gave, the biggest mistake he confessed to was opening Facebook's data trove broadly to third-party developers without proper monitoring. Followed by taking Cambridge Analytica at its word.

On being asked why Facebook took so long to tell the world what happened, Zuckerberg simply told CNN that he "regretted" not doing it earlier and that "I think we got that wrong". That's hardly satisfactory from a platform so popular that even the current #Delete Facebook campaign has apparently failed to make a significant dent.

Zuckerberg, however, told the channel that he was open to additional government regulation. "I actually am not sure we shouldn't be regulated. I think in general technology is an increasingly important trend in the world. I think the question is more what is the right regulation rather than 'yes or no should we be regulated?" he said. But he pertinently also pointed out that "With a community of 2 billion people, I can't promise we're going to find everything."

If he was hoping to gain some normalcy post these interviews, he's probably pretty disappointed right now. Because far from winding down, Facebook's problems have grown post a former employee telling a British parliamentary committee yesterday that data harvesting of member profiles by outside software developers was once routine.

"There was very little detection or enforcement," Sandy Parakilas, who was in charge of policing Facebook's data handling procedures in 2011 and 2012, reportedly said in his testimony. "During my 16 months (at Facebook), I don't remember a single physical audit of a developer" who was storing users' data from the social network." The Reuters report adds that Parakilas highlighted the vast potential abuses of a little-understood feature known as "friend permissions", which enabled software developers to connect their apps up to the friends of users, and even the friends of friends. Scarily, as the ex-operations manager points out, some of those apps had tens or hundreds of millions of users, so "there was a vast (amount) of data that passed out the door". Asked by a parliamentary committee member whether there were incidents where this data-sharing feature was misused, Parakilas replied "There may well have been. However, Facebook did not investigate deeply enough to determine exactly."

Meanwhile, Facebook representatives, including Deputy Chief Privacy Officer Rob Sherman, met U.S. congressional staff for nearly two hours on Wednesday. Two aides who attended the briefing told Reuters that Facebook was unable to answer many questions. That's not good news for a company that has already lost more than $45 billion of its stock market value over the past three days.

With Reuters inputsJaquar Group, known more as a bathroom solutions brand, is investing Rs 150 crore in a new lighting manufacturing facility. The factory would be 'composite' - that implies many of lighting components would be produced in-house. The company already manufacturers its own LED drivers.

Director and Promoter of Jaquar, Rajesh Mehra, told Business Today that ever since the company started manufacturing its own drivers, the failure rate of its lights fell to being negligible. Jaquar's capacity to make LED drivers is about 1.2 million a month. It currently produces around 750,000.

The company first invested into lighting 15 years back when it identified a vacuum in good quality lighting. Since then, it has focussed on designer lighting such as chandeliers. The company also manufacturers bulbs and tube lights - it has automated bulbs assembly at its factory in Manesar.

Mehra said the company found a synergy between its bath ware business and lighting. "There are two lifelines - water and electricity. The end consumers remain the same," he said. The group, meanwhile, expects to end 2017/18 with revenues of Rs 3,200 crore. It employs over 8,500 people and runs six manufacturing facilities, including one in South Korea.

Mehra said the company could touch a billion dollars in revenues over the next four years if its exports plan click. Jaquar has worked aggressively on design recently and hopes to open up the markets in Europe, Asia, and Africa soon. "We have a sales team of over 70 people abroad. Over the next four years, we are targeting $100 million in export turnover," he said.By Ali Kucukgocmen

ISTANBUL (Reuters) - Days after Turkish forces captured Afrin, hundreds of people gathered at a cinema in Istanbul this week for the premiere of a film about commandos battling militants in the Syrian town.

"Maroon Berets 2: Afrin" follows a Turkish commando unit trying to retrieve a warhead from militants in Syria, portraying the troops in a patriotic and flattering light in contrast to international criticism of Turkey's two-month campaign.

Echoing real Turkish concerns, in the film the warhead is sent to the Syrian Kurdish YPG militia in Afrin by the United States for the fight against Islamic State but ends up being used against Turkey.

Ankara has been angered by Washington's arming of the YPG, which it says is an extension of the Kurdish PKK waging a deadly insurgency inside Turkey since the 1980s, saying the weapons would eventually be turned on Turkey.

Turkey said on Monday that its troops had discovered caches of U.S. arms left behind by YPG fighters fleeing Afrin.

Director Erhan Baytimur said it was coincidence that Tuesday night's premiere fell so close to Sunday's capture of Afrin by Turkish troops. Filming, in Turkey's northwestern province of Bursa, started a few weeks before the military campaign on Afrin was launched in January, he said.

The film aims to portray what Baytimur said was the heroism of Turkish soldiers in Afrin.

"We need to stand in unity and solidarity and this is how it was during the Afrin operation," he said.

Tuesday's gala was attended by families with children - some in commando uniform - local politicians and members of Turkey's weapons and movie industries.

The film and script were approved by the Turkish Armed Forces and Defence Ministry, Baytimur said, and two local weapons companies contributed real pistols and rifles.

"Shooting the movie was quite hard. Because they were real weapons, and their weight was real too. We understood very well our soldiers there," actor Balamir Emren said.

(Editing by Dominic Evans and Peter Graff)Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg weighed in for the first time on reports that Cambridge Analytica, a data firm advising the Trump campaign, had gained unauthorized access to millions of users personal information.

Zuckerberg said the social media platform has an obligation to protect its users data and outlined the steps Facebook is taking to crack down on abuse of its platform.

We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we cant then we dont deserve to serve you. Ive been working to understand exactly what happened and how to make sure this doesnt happen again, Zuckerberg wrote in a Facebook post. The good news is that the most important actions to prevent this from happening again today we have already taken years ago. But we also made mistakes, theres more to do, and we need to step up and do it.

The Facebook co-founder outlined a plan to investigate all third-party apps with access to private information, restrict developers access to data to prevent future abuses and to make it easier for Facebook users to understand how apps are accessing their information.

Im serious about doing what it takes to protect our community, Zuckerberg said. While this specific issue involving Cambridge Analytica should no longer happen with new apps today, that doesnt change what happened in the past. We will learn from this experience to secure our platform further and make our community safer for everyone going forward.

The companys stock has been reeling since The New York Times bombshell report on Sunday that the firm, infused with a $15 million investment from Republican donor Robert Mercer, had harvested the private information from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users without their permission.

The scandal wiped out $50 billion in market capitalization this week before Facebooks stock began to recover today, rising as much as 5% before closing at $169.39, up a fraction. Meanwhile, there have been calls on Capitol Hill for an investigation.

Story continues

The silence from Zuckerberg and [COO] Sheryl [Sandberg] has put gasoline into the fire, and, I think, it just added to the noise coming out of the beltway, as well as the European Union, as the regulatory chatter continues to elevate, said Daniel Ives, BGH Insightss chief strategy officer and head of technology research.

Zuckerberg offered a chronology of events: noting that when Facebook launched, it envisioned apps as enabling social activity  that your calendar should show friends birthdays or a users address book would show their pictures. To do this, he said, Facebook enabled users to log into apps and share who their friends were and some information about them.

In 2013, Cambridge University researcher Aleksandr Kogan created a personality quiz app that some 300,000 people installed, sharing their data and information about their friends. Zuckerberg said that, because of the way the Facebook platform worked at that time, this gave Kogan access to tens of millions of their friends data.

Facebook changed the rules in 2014, to dramatically limit the data apps could access  in the interest of prevent abuse, Zuckerberg said. That meant apps like Kogans could no longer ask for data about a persons friends unless their friends had also authorized the app. It also required app developers to request approval before extracting sensitive data.

A journalist from The Guardian newspaper contacted Facebook in 2015 to report that Kogan had shared data from his app with Cambridge Analytica. That was a violation of Facebooks policies prohibiting developers from sharing data without peoples consent  so Kogans app was banned from the platform.

Facebook also demanded that Cambridge Analytica formally certify it had deleted all the data.

Last week, the social network learned from The New York Times, The Guardian and Channel 4 that this may not have happened  resulting in an immediate ban from the platform. Cambridge Analytica says the data has been deleted and agreed to a forensic audit by a firm Facebook hired to perform confirm this claim.

This was a breach of trust between Kogan, Cambridge Analytica and Facebook, Zuckerberg wrote. But it was also a breach of trust between Facebook and the people who share their data with us and expect us to protect it. We need to fix that.

To prevent bad actors from accessing people information in this way in the future, Zuckerberg said the Facebook will investigate apps that had access to large amounts of information before the company changed its policies in 2014 to reduce data access. It will audit any app with suspicious activity and ban any developer or platform that refuses to submit to this audit.

If we find developers that misused personally identifiable information, we will ban them and tell everyone affected by those apps, Zuckerberg said. That includes people whose data Kogan misused here as well.

Facebook will further restrict developers data access to prevent other kinds of abuse. It will reduce the data provided to an app when you sign in the users name, profile photo and email address. It also will require developers to get approval to ask for access to a users post or private data.

In the coming month, Zuckerberg said Facebook will make it easier for users to understand what data apps are accessing. A new tool, to appear at the top of the News Feed, will make it easy to remove an apps permission to access private data.

Wedbush Securities Analyst Michael Pachter said he felt Zuckerberg clearly explained what happened, articulated how Facebook would respond, and, more importantly, accepted responsibility.

I think he was an adult, Pachter said. I think he addressed it head on.

Pachter said the companys stock will rebound if Zuckerberg can successfully address concerns in Washington, D.C., and beyond, that Facebook is responding appropriately to the data leak. Investor concern  which has been reflected in the stock price  is that legislators will impose regulations that limit user engagement, and, by turn, Facebooks revenue.

Zuckerbergs response caused a rally, Pachter said. Maybe hell put some of the disgruntled legislators at ease that hes addressing it in a responsible manner.

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Amazon Passes Alphabet To Become The Second-Largest U.S. CompanyThe emergence of perhaps the greatest and most depressing meme of the Trump presidency so far, DO NOT CONGRATULATE, was late enough in the day on Tuesday that most late-night hosts didnt get to it until last night. Seth Meyers thought it was such great subject matter that he spent an entire A Closer Look segment to it on Wednesday.

So Trump congratulated Putin on winning an apparently fraudulent election just a week after our closest ally accused Russia of orchestrating a chemical attack on British soil. And Trump didnt even mention Putins meddling in the 2016 election, and if that wasnt bad enough, even Trumps own advisers warned him not to congratulate Putin on the call, Meyers said.

Meyers continued: The Washington Post reported yesterday that Trump ignored specific warnings from his national security advisers Tuesday when he congratulated Putin on his re-election including a section in his briefing materials in all capital letters stating, DO NOT CONGRATULATE. Man, they even put it in all caps. Thats Donald Trumps native tongue.

Also Read: Stephen Colbert Marvels At Multiple Donald Trumps Being Caught up in Simultaneous Sex Scandals (Video)

But whats amazing is not only did Trump ignore the advice, he went 180 degrees in the other direction. They told him not to congratulate Putin and instead he invited Putin to a get-together. Its like if your wife says, Your buddy Carl creeps me out. I dont want him hanging around here anymore. And you said, Okay, totally got it, get it, problem solved. Asked him to move in with us.'

Meyers had plenty of other zingers about Trumps call to Putin, including over the fact that he even called him in the first place when he didnt even need to. Earlier in the segment, Meyers said this:

Now with all the questions swirling around Trump right now, youd think hed be eager to distance himself from Russian President Vladimir Putin. Talking to Putin right now would be like cheating on your wife and then posing for a picture with the woman you cheated with. Oh, right, he did he that too. Forgot who we were talking about for a second, Meyers quipped.

Story continues

Also Read: Jimmy Kimmel on Trump Typos: 'He Won't Be Swayed by a Bunch of Left-Wing Liberal Dictionaries' (Video)

Now its worth remembering that then-president Obama congratulated Putin in 2012 on his election victory at the time, but given Russias election meddling and their recent chemical attack in the UK, you think now would be a bad time to cozy up to Putin. And yet after his White House specifically made a point of saying Trump had no intention of calling Putin to congratulate him, Trump told reporters yesterday that he had called Putin to congratulate him.

Late Night then played the clip of Trump telling everybody that he did the one thing he wasnt supposed to do, while also inviting Putin to a meeting to discuss the arms race, which is getting out of control.

Hey man, you cant say the arms race is getting out of control, when youre the one at the controls, Meyers said. Youre like if Sully had gotten on the PA and said, The engine is out of control. Maybe the birds will fix it. Im grabbing a parachute, peace.'

You can watch Wednesdays A Closer Look segment in its entirety in the video above.

Related stories from TheWrap:

Jimmy Kimmel: 'Trump Goes Through Cabinet Members Like He Goes Through Cheeseburgers and Aqua Net' (Video)

Stephen Colbert Marvels At Multiple Donald Trumps Being Caught up in Simultaneous Sex Scandals (Video)

Jimmy Kimmel on Trump Typos: 'He Won't Be Swayed by a Bunch of Left-Wing Liberal Dictionaries' (Video)The Netflix reboot of Queer Eye has made stars out of both the Fab Five expert panel and the contestants of the show (AKA the heroes). But the latest makeover subject is already famous  Saturday Night Live star Pete Davidson recently got the fashion-expert treatment from Tan France, and the video of their shopping trip is the best thing youll see today.

Can I say whatever I want and youre not going to get mad? France asked the 24-year-old comedian as they walked around a clothing store. Do you put this kind of stuff on for attention?

Davidson answered the reality stars question in stride, admitting that the last time he grew up, clothing-wise, was when he was 18. From there, he and France discussed underwear preferences, wearing pops of color, and upgrading Davidsons wardrobe to impress girlfriend Cazzies cool family. (Larry David is her dad.) Its so funny. I thought I was kind of dressing well, but its so nice to know Ive been dressing like sh*t, Davidson joked, before saying that Frances clothing choices made him feel like Timothee Chalamet.

The video, like the series itself, is heartfelt, warm, funny, but above all, deeply human. While the hit reboot hasnt yet been renewed, were hoping we get to see more from the Fab Five. Saturday Night Live, meanwhile, is currently on hiatus, and will return on April 7 with host Chadwick Boseman and musical guest Cardi B.

What do you think of Pete Davidsons makeover from Tan France? Let us know @BritandCo!

(photos via Greg Doherty/Getty Images + Alberto E. Rodriguez/Getty Images)

You Might Also LikeNew Details About the Texas Serial Bomber

A series of bombings has wreaked havoc in Texas over the last few weeks.

There have been five connected explosions since Mar. 2, most of which were disguised as packages.

Police were able to track down the suspect, Mark Anthony Conditt, who blew himself up when chased down by a SWAT team on the interstate.

RELATED: 13 New Details About Las Vegas Shooter Stephen Paddock, His Girlfriend And Why Police Are Now Saying He Had An Accomplice

Were just really relieved and just incredibly thankful for this army of law enforcement that has been in our community here for the last week or so, Mayor Steve Adler said Wednesday.

Here is everything you need to know about the recent string of bombings is Texas and the suspected bomber himself:

1. Two people died as a result of the bombings.

Getty Images

Anthony Stephan House, 39, was killed on Mar. 2 by a bomb hand-delivered to his home, CNN reports.

Draylen Mason, 17, died Mar. 12 when a bomb disguised as a package went off in his kitchen.

2. Six people were injured over the course of two weeks.

Getty Images

On Mar. 12, Masons 40-year-old mother was injured as a result of the explosion that killed her teenage son.

That same day, Esperanza Herrera, 75, was rushed to the hospital for injuries he sustained when a bomb went off just five miles south of Masons home, according to CNN.

Two white men in their twenties were injured when they set off a bomb connected to a near-invisible tripwire in southwest Austin on Mar. 18.

A package containing metal fragments exploded at a San Antonio FedEx facility Tuesday. One employee was badly injured while another only suffered minor injuries.

3. Police offered a $115,000 reward for information leading to the bomber.

Getty Images

Bill Jonkey, a former FBI bomb technician, told USA Today that police must have found some aspect of the bombings to be similar and have ruled them connected.

Police posted a $115,000 reward for anyone who provided information that led to the person behind the bombings that rocked Texas.

Story continues

RELATED: Awful New Details Revealed About Nikolas Cruz, The Florida School Shooter Who Murdered 17 People

4. Austin police have gotten over 1,200 suspicious package calls since the initial bombing.

APD responded to 420 suspicious package calls between 8 a.m. yesterday and 8 a.m. today bringing the total number to 1,257 calls since approximately 8 a.m. on March 12.  Austin Police Dept (@Austin_Police) March 20, 2018

USA Today reports that the Austin Police Department has gotten 1,257 suspicious package calls since Mar. 12 when four of the bombings occurred.

Around one third of the calls were made between 8 a.m. Monday and 8 a.m. Tuesday, just after the tripwire explosion that injured two on Mar. 18.

5. The suspected bomber blew himself up.

Police were able to use CCTV footage from the FedEx facility to track the bomber to a hotel 18 miles north of Austin.

"Police say that they used that (video) as the final piece to put all of this together, really in the past 24 hours," Tony Plohetski, an investigative reporter for the Austin American-Statesman, said.

A white male, later identified as 23-year-old Mark Anthony Conditt, was sitting in his vehicle when police located him on Interstate 35, police told the Associated Press.

When officers approached the vehicle a bomb detonated, killing the suspect.

6. Police urge residents to remain cautious of suspicious packages.

APD is asking the public to remain vigilant and report anything suspicious. If you come across ANYTHING that looks suspicious, DO NOT touch, handle or disturb it. Keep a safe distance and call 9-1-1 immediately. pic.twitter.com/Dk0uWVcJiP  Austin Police Dept (@Austin_Police) March 20, 2018

Authorities warn that because Conditts whereabouts during the 24 hours prior to his death are unknown, there may be bombs placed elsewhere on en route to their destination. Police also said it is possible he had an accomplice, but no leads on that theory have been found.

"We are concerned that there may be other packages that are still out there," FBI agent Chris Combs, head of the agency's San Antonio office, said.

Adler urges residents to be vigilant in reporting anything they think is suspicious, including unfamiliar packages or anything that seems out of place, KOLO reports.

"We don't know where this suspect has spent his last 24 hours, and therefore we still need to remain vigilant to ensure that no other packages or devices have been left throughout the community," Austin Police Chief Brian Manley said.

7. The latest bombing has been ruled unrelated.

"We do believe that these incidents are all related. That is because of the specific contents of these devices," Austin Police Chief Brian Manley tells #atxcouncil. #AustinBombings  John Bridges (@JohnBridges) March 20, 2018

A bomb detonated at a South Austin Goodwill store Tuesday and police confirm it is unrelated to the series of bombings by Conditt, the Texas Tribune reports.

"We do believe that these incidents are all related, Manley said, according to social media. That is because of the specific contents of these devices."

A copycat bomber was also ruled out by police, Austin Police Department Assistant Chief Ely Reyes said Tuesday at a press conference.

RELATED: Awful New Details About The Sister Of The Charleston Church Shooter Who Was Arrested For Threatening Students Doing A Gun Walkout

Keywords: crime, bomb

read moreRSS affiliate Bharatiya Mazdoor Sangh (BMS), the country's largest trade union, has criticised the government for ignoring the need to implement a comprehensive health policy and instead focusing on a health insurance scheme that is a 'glorified' version of existing Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana (RSBY).

"Tax payers' money is diverted to private insurance companies by way of premium. Health insurance is a big area for all foreign multinational players. Such schemes are pushed by the private sector," Saji Narayanan C K, President BMS, said.

The scheme Ayushman Bharat National Health Protection Mission (AB-NHPM), meant to provide health insurance cover of Rs 5 lakh per family per year to more than 10 crore poor and vulnerable families, was announced in Union Budget 2018-19. On March 21, Union Cabinet approved the launch of AB-NHPM that will subsume the on-going centrally sponsored schemes - RSBY and the Senior Citizen Health Insurance Scheme (SCHIS).

The beneficiaries will be allowed to avail benefits in both public and empanelled private facilities. "All public hospitals in the States implementing AB-NHPM, will be deemed empanelled for the scheme. Hospitals belonging to Employee State Insurance Corporation (ESIC) may also be empanelled based on the bed occupancy ratio parameter. As for private hospitals, they will be empanelled online based on defined criteria," a government release stated.

Since the state and central governments will share the premium burden on a pre-determined (60:40) ratio, the success of the schemes depends on the cooperation of the state governments. At least all BJP-ruled states are expected to fall in line in the initial phase. The scheme allows states to integrate AB-NHPM with its existing health insurance/protection schemes and expand AB-NHPM both horizontally and vertically.

"States will be free to choose the modalities for implementation. They can implement through insurance company or directly through Trust/ Society or a mixed model," the government clarifies.

The government has also decided to set up two agencies, Ayushman Bharat National Health Protection Mission Council (AB-NHPMC) at apex level Chaired by Union Health and Family Welfare Minister and Ayushman Bharat National Health Protection Mission Agency (AB-NHPMA) to manage the AB-NHPM at the operational level.

The government claims that AB-NHPM will have major impact on reduction of out of pocket (OOP) expenditure because of increased benefit cover to nearly 40 per cent of the population, (the poorest and the vulnerable), covering almost all secondary and many tertiary hospitalizations, (except a negative list) and a coverage of 5 lakh for each family, irrespective of its size.

However, BMS says the government's focus should have been on implementing a comprehensive health policy and benefits every citizen. "The government has announced a national health policy, but where is the matching budgetary allocation? There has to be continuity in policy decisions. Instead, the budget only talks about a glorified RSBY," Narayanan points out.

BMS says the government would have done a better job in ensuring social and health security to the poor by finalising and implementing a Social Security Code in the making.

"The government has prepared the draft. It is being circulated for stakeholder consultations. We believe that if the Code is enacted, every poor person will be entitled for not just health benefit, but about 14 other benefits that comprehensively ensures social security", Narayanan adds. According to him, welfare of rural India can happen only if all three pillars of growth are targeted simultaneously, education, health and minimum basic income.On Wednesday, the man suspected of planting bombs around Austin, TX  which killed two Black men, 39-year-old Anthony Stephan House and 17-year-old Draylen Mason, and injured several others  died in a standoff with police, detonating an explosive in his vehicle.

Authorities identified the suspect as 23-year-old Mark Anthony Conditt, a white man the Associated Press described as an unemployed college dropout. Other reports detailed how Conditt expressed conservative opinions online about same-sex marriage and abortion, and his thoughts about why the sex offender registry should be abolished. Details are still emerging about Conditt, with police suggesting that the bombings could have been racially motivated as they seemed to target prominent Black families.

Despite the fact that Conditt had been terrorizing the people of Austin for three weeks, leaving communities of color in particular on edge, The New York Times published a story describing him as a nerdy young man who came from a godly family.

The Austin bombing suspect was a quiet, nerdy young man who came from a tight-knit, godly family, said Donna Sebastian Harp, who had known the family for nearly 18 years https://t.co/psiAniAMuK  The New York Times (@nytimes) March 21, 2018

He was always kind of quiet, one woman quoted by the Times said. He was a nerd, always reading, devouring books and computers and things like that.

This is my friend Anthony Stephan House. He was killed by the first bomb on March 2. A beautiful soul whose life was ended too soon. Photos provided by & credited to his brother brother, Norrell Waynewood (wearing yellow shirt in last pic). #AustinBombings pic.twitter.com/98BfILuAe9  Space Force Captain Tiffany (@tiffanyclay) March 14, 2018

Draylen Mason was the 17 year old musician who was tragically killed this week from a package bomb on his doorstep in Austin, TX.



Rest in Power Draylen. #BlackLivesMatter pic.twitter.com/Scx03jvhSV  Black Lives Matter (@usblm) March 14, 2018

Another person quoted by the paper said he didnt know Conditt personally, only knowing that he was nice, young kid.

Story continues

Conditt, who murdered two men and very well could have killed many more, was given a sympathetic profile by the Times  something that rightfully angered many on social media.

But, this is not an unusual narrative for the Times  or any media outlet  to take.

PICTURED: Mark Anthony Conditt, 23, identified as suspected Austin bomber who blew himself up as police closed in on roadside https://t.co/WCQSREHPbI pic.twitter.com/Z9uvN7YlKW  New York Daily News (@NYDailyNews) March 21, 2018

It didnt stop there: After it was revealed that Conditt left behind a 25-minute confession video, Austins interim police Chief Brian Manley said at a press conference Wednesday, It is the outcry of a very challenged young man talking about challenges in his life that led him to this point. I know everybody is interested in a motive and understanding why. And we're never going to be able to put a (rationale) behind these acts. Manley went on to say that Conditt didnt mention anything about terrorism or hate in his confession.

That shouldnt matter.

Theres nothing wrong with law enforcement officials showing empathy for a suspect who may have been troubled. However, that same empathy is not usually granted to suspects  or even victims  of color. Remember how the Times referred to Michael Brown, who was unarmed when he was killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, as no angel? Or how the paper painted Trayvon Martin as a delinquent drug user?

The Austin Police Chief referred to the serial bomber as a challenged young man.



Murdering multiple people and being called challenged is the height of white privilege.  Kumail Nanjiani (@kumailn) March 22, 2018

Conditt committed a horrific crime, killing House, who was a father of a young daughter, successful professional, and graduate of Texas State University; and Mason, a college-bound talented musician. Why is the media so eager to paint him as a victim?

According to Jason Silva, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice with research specializing in media and crime, theres a clear difference in how the media covers crimes when it comes to race.

In general media and crime research, white victims receive more coverage, especially if the perpetrator is Black. However, 'Black on Black' crime is considered 'normalized' within the public social construction of criminality, and thus receives less coverage, Silva told Refinery29. A perfect example is the Central Park Five, whom Donald Trump suggested we sentence to death. Numerous other women were raped in NYC that night, however, none of them received much, if any, coverage. This is because the Black 'perpetrators'  I am sure you are aware they were completely innocent  and white female victim provided an excellent case for newsworthiness.

The media bias is apparent in cases of domestic and foreign terror, too.

Though Conditt was using explosives and bombs to carry out murder, the White House and law enforcement officials have not labeled him as a terrorist, a title rarely ascribed to white perpetrators of murder. While the word "terrorism" does have a criminal definition, its social and political meaning is less clear-cut, leaving many to wonder why it's only used when the perpetrator is Muslim.

In general, research finds that far-right terrorism incidents receive less coverage than jihadist-inspired incidents, despite being more common, Silva says. In addition to this, the framing of white terrorism perpetrators is more sympathetic than perpetrators of Arab descent.

As journalist Sulome Anderson noted on Twitter, radical Muslim terrorists are rarely humanized.

The New York Times: White serial bomber who targeted black people was quiet, nerdy, from a good family, loved books and his motive is still unclear



Also the New York Times: A Muslim terrorist did a good thing once in his life how is that even possible pic.twitter.com/4eRdvdbjqv  Sulome Anderson (@SulomeAnderson) March 21, 2018

So, how do we reverse course? It starts with us, the reporters. Its our job to do our due diligence when asking questions, when deciding who to interview, and deciding what quotes are worth running. The Times ran a quote from someone who stated they didn't even know Conditt, but that he was nice. Did the reporter push back on this? Why did they find the quote worthy of using?

Its even more important for us to confront our very own implicit biases.

It seems difficult for a reporter to address long-held bias and socially constructed views of criminality, Silva says. However, they can choose who to interview and what is worthy of reporting.

Read these stories next:

What We Know So Far About The Austin Bombings Suspect

Heather Heyer Died Because Of An Act Of Domestic Terrorism In Charlottesville

Are We Becoming Numb To Terrorism and Mass Violence?

Like what you see? How about some more R29 goodness, right here?

Why We Should Take Our Kids To The March For Our Lives

What To Know Ahead Of The March For Our Lives

The Teen Who Shot His Ex-Girlfriend In The Head At School Is Not "Lovesick"  He's AbusiveThe state of Utah has legalized a controversial childrearing method called free-range parenting.

On Friday, Gov. Gary Herbert signed bill SB65 that would allow kids the freedom to walk to and from school, wait in parked cars (while their parents run errands in a store, for example), and visit playgrounds solo, according to a story published Monday by the Associated Press. The bill, which doesnt specify an age limit for the above activities, will go into effect May 8.

I feel strongly about the issue because we have become so over-the-top when protecting children that we are refusing to let them learn the lessons of self-reliance and problem-solving that they will need to be successful as adults, Sen. Lincoln Fillmore, who sponsored the bill, tells Yahoo Lifestyle.

As outlined in the bill, the following situations would not qualify as neglect: traveling to and from school or recreational facilities by walking, running, or biking, playing outside, or sitting in a car unattended, provided the child is at least 9 years old and in reasonably safe conditions.

Free-range parenting allows children to grow up with limited parental supervision with the goal of instilling independence. It also utilizes a common sense approach to when kids should be left alone.

Utah has passed a law making it OK for families to practice free-range parenting. (Photo: Getty Images)

The phrase was popularized in 2008 when writer and mother of two Lenore Skenazy penned a story for the New York Sun about allowing her then 9-year-old son to ride the subway and bus alone after the boy begged for independence. The article went viral, with some readers labeling Skenzazy the Worlds Worst Mom and others becoming fans of her blog Free-Range Kids, a resource for like-minded parents.

Several families have faced serious legal consequences for practicing free-range parenting.

In 2015, the Meitiv family of Silver Spring, Md., faced two Child Protective Services investigations after police spotted their children, ages 10 and 6, walking home from the park unsupervised on two separate occasions. In both cases, the family was cleared of neglect.

Story continues

Florida mom Nicole Gainey was arrested for allowing her son to walk to a park alone. (Photo: GoFundMe)

Other high-profile cases involved Debra Harrell, a mother in South Carolina who was charged with unlawful conduct toward a child for allowing her 9-year-old to play alone at a park while she worked at a local McDonalds, and a Florida mother named Nicole Gainey who was arrested for child neglect after allowing her 7-year-old son to walk alone to a park.

Connor Boyack, president of the Libertas Institute of Utah, a think tank that proposed the law and advocated for its passage, tells Yahoo Lifestyle that its not explicitly unlawful for kids to play or walk alone outside; the bill, however, makes it harder to penalize parents for allowing their kids to do so.

What typically happens is that police or child service workers will allege that abuse or neglect is occurring under a broad, subjective umbrella, and our bill clarifies that certain situations do not apply, he says, adding that hearing from families that hesitated to give their children independence for fear of being arrested in part inspired the bill.

We live in a fear-infused culture in which weve lost perspective on safety, Skenazy tells Yahoo Lifestyle. Common activities like leaving a child in a car are often presented as though they pose enormous threats to our safety.

According to Skenazy, laws dont allow good-intentioned parents to make common-sense judgment calls, and the consequences for raising independent kids often carry harsh consequences. Unless there is real evidence of abuse, a simple decision like a parent leaving their kid in the car while they run into a store doesnt give a concerned citizen the right to start legal proceedings against a family, she says. Often the thinking is, its better to place a child in foster care than allow her parent to let her sleep in a car.

Adds Skenazy: Yes, anything can happen. But I hate the idea that imagination becomes the basis of law.

Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle:

Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter for nonstop inspiration delivered fresh to your feed, every day.



What was intended as a relaxing beauty appointment in the company of Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds has resulted in backlash for Ivanka Trump and one Des Moines hair salon.

Ivanka Trumps beauty appointment has caused some controversy. (Photo: Jamie Squire/Getty Images)

As WHO-13 reports, President Trumps eldest daughter joined the governor for a visit to Salon Spa W in the Iowa capital on March 19. The two women enjoyed unspecified services at the salon, which offers hair, nail, and waxing treatments, as well as makeup application and facials. (The Iowa trip included a scientist photo op, which was also lambasted.)

The Salon Spa W later posted a photo of Trump and Reynolds to social media, with a note that it loved supporting women in politics.

But owner China Wong hadnt expected the ladies patronage to spark outrage and a fierce political debate.

Many commenters lashed out at Trump and Reynolds, as well as the salon:

Why would Salon W support women who are against working women? one critic commented on Facebook. Probably just for money and 15 minutes of fame. Sad.

Just lost all my respect for this business and those who run it. You should know better.  Since when is she a politician? Shes not in politics. Seriously. Shes not a politician. She was appointed to a position she has no qualifications for by her father and she does nothing to check his worst impulses, which include ABUSING WOMEN. This is so ignorant. She is not a supporter of women. Shes not a woman in politics and shes done nothing to help women or even influence the debate or policies that affect women.

Then why dont you support women in politics? These two trolls are unqualified.  Has Ivanka been elected to anything? And Reynolds? She has a couple OWIs [Reynolds was arrested on drunk-driving charges in 1999 and 2000] and has torn our state down to shreds.

The criticism was countered by messages from Trump fans, including one poster who thanked Salon Spa W for their support of these two awesome ladies!

Story continues

Others argued that the salon is free to serve anyone it chooses, regardless of politics. Wong confirmed that in a follow-up statement addressing the uproar. Her clients come from all walks of life, she said, including former President Barack Obama.

We believe everyone matters and deserves our indiscriminate care and kindness. We were taken aback by the response to Posted by Salon Spa W on Tuesday, March 20, 2018

Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle:

Ashley Graham shuts down real woman responses to her latest swimsuit shoot

Britney Spears fans have a problem with her Kenzo campaign

Nia Long on #MeToo, Fenty Beauty, and strong black women

Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter for nonstop inspiration delivered fresh to your feed, every day.



With 160 school shootings across 38 states in the past three years (according to the nonprofit Everytown for Gun Safety), kids worries about guns in the classroom seem not only understandable but warranted. This terror is fueled by news stories like the recent 17-person massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, and heightened by real-life lockdown drills in schools.

These active-shooter drills, which mimic real events, offer students the chance to practice what they would do to stay safe should an individual open fire on their school. Experts say these precautions are important, offering crucial knowledge to kids that could help them make lifesaving decisions in the moments that matter most.

But while kids physical safety has been thoroughly studied, debated, and  as best as possibleprotected, there is less discussion about the mental toll that school shootings take on Americas children. That was the focus of a recent newsletter sent out by the Child Mind Institute (CMI), a nonprofit dedicated to advancing knowledge about mental health issues in children.

Titled Anxiety Over School Shootings, the newsletter explores the types of feelings that children may be experiencing in the wake of the Florida shooting, as well as tips for parents to help their kids cope. The CMI newsletter features an interview with Jamie Howard, director of the organizations Trauma and Resilience Service, who visited with kids from Sandy Hook Elementary in the aftermath of the shooting that killed 20 students and six adults in 2012.

Howard says the first step to quelling anxiety is recognizing that although school shootings are unusually prevalent in America, they are still rare. Because its so horrific and scary and important, it dominates the media and therefore our minds, and we think of it as a much bigger threat than it is, Howard says. The more you watch, the more it tricks your mind into thinking its an increased probability of occurring.

Story continues

Instead of dwelling on what if, Howard and CMI suggest being proactive. Here are five ways.

Kristi Gilroy (right), hugs a young woman last month at a police checkpoint near Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where 17 people were killed by a gunman. (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

1. Bring up the topic with your kids rather than avoiding it

Although this sounds simple, CMI suggests that its the most important way to relieve anxiety surrounding school shootings. Parents are sometimes afraid to bring up school shootings with their children, because they dont want to scare them. But children will have often heard about a school shooting that is getting a lot of attention in the media, and bringing it up can actually alleviate any anxiety they might be feeling, says CMI. Avoiding potentially scary topics can make them scarier to children.

2. Form a parent group at school to control your own anxiety

Inactivity is fuel for anxiety, so one way to use up some of that nervous energy is to start a group at school with other parents who are concerned about their kids too. This not only provides the opportunity to talk through the anxiety you are feeling, but also allots a time to brainstorm potential things that you, as adults, can do to keep your kids safe. Assessing what the school needs, getting involved in the planning process for drills, and having ongoing conversations about keeping the school safe can make worried parents feel better, says Howard.

3. Embrace active-shooter drills instead of shying away from them

Although active-shooter drills can seem intimidating to kids, and potentially scary, Howard suggests that the best method is embracing them as tool  a way to reinforce that there is a plan in place should something happen. When teachers (and parents) talk about the drills, they should do it with a lot of confidence, says Howard. They should make it clear that school shootings, just like fires, are unlikely, but [then say], We are going to be ready if it happens. This is what were going to do to stay safe.

4. Make it clear that unusual behavior should be mentioned

Howard suggests having a conversation with kids about how to react if or when they recognize a classmate is withdrawing. Howard suggests putting it this way: If a classmate of yours is struggling, we dont do nothing. We dont gossip about them. We tell a grown-up so they can get help, she says. Or if your child is a teenager, and another student says or writes something scary, the same advice holds: They should let an adult know. This not only protects kids from a classmate who may be dangerous, but also lets them know that people are there to protect them.

5. If youre feeling overwhelmed, step away from the screen

Making sure your kids are not consumed with anxiety is important, but taking care of yourself is too. Howard says to be cognizant of how much time youre spending reading the news and watching coverage of other shootings, and, if youre finding yourself consumed with worry, to take a break. If you feel that you are more anxious than you should be, a good first step is always to take a break from any media that might be focusing your attention in an unhealthy direction, says Howard. Some anxiety is warranted; debilitating anxiety is not.

Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle:

Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter for nonstop inspiration delivered fresh to your feed, every day.



Better keep a close watch on that mailbox  invitations to the royal wedding have been sent out.

Kensington Palace has announced that Meghan Markle and Prince Harry have issued (pronounced, one hopes, in the British style) their wedding invitations ahead of their May 19 nuptials.

In addition to the ceremony at St. Georges Chapel at Windsor Castle, guests are invited to a lunchtime reception at St. Georges Hall hosted by none other than Queen Elizabeth II, the grooms grandmother.

The party will carry on well into the evening, with Prince Charles hosting a second reception for 200 lucky guests at nearby Frogmore House that evening. No mention is made of his wife  Harrys stepmother  Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall.

Later that evening, around 200 guests are being invited to the reception at Frogmore House given by The Prince of Wales.  Kensington Palace (@KensingtonRoyal) March 22, 2018

The invitations themselves are steeped in tradition  no confetti here. Barnard & Westwood has been making the royal invitations since 1985. These were die-stamped on a machine, affectionately named Maude, that dates back to the 1930s. Theyve also been embossed with Prince Charless three-feathered badge.

The invitations follow many years of Royal tradition and have been made by @BarnardWestwood. They feature the Three-Feathered Badge of the Prince of Wales printed in gold ink. pic.twitter.com/cd7LBmRJxO  Kensington Palace (@KensingtonRoyal) March 22, 2018

Lottie Small, who recently completed her apprenticeship, printed all of the invitations in a process known as die stamping, on a machine from the 1930s that she affectionately nicknamed Maude. pic.twitter.com/kWs2RFx7nN  Kensington Palace (@KensingtonRoyal) March 22, 2018

But there is one new twist. In a nod to the brides background, the invitations feature American ink on English card stock.

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Using American ink on English card, the invitations are printed in gold and black, then burnished to bring out the shine, and gilded around the edge. pic.twitter.com/gQpC6tDot0  Kensington Palace (@KensingtonRoyal) March 22, 2018

Its unclear when exactly the invitations were sent out. Mel B, who is reportedly performing with the reunited Spice Girls for the occasion, claimed to have received her invitation last month.

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I'm a survivor of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.

During the last month, my classmates and I have been doubted; we've been trolled on Twitter; we've been called "crisis actors"; and weve been told by adults that we can't make a difference, to shut up and go back to class. All while were mourning the loss of 17 members of our Stoneman Douglas family.

But it's important to me that those who doubt understand what exactly happened to us: We went to school, like normal. It was February 14, Valentines Day. A day thats supposed to be about admiration, affection, and adoration. I had plans to meet up with my best friends that night. I was in drama class rehearsing for an upcoming musical. The fire alarm went off, which was strange because wed had a fire drill during second period already that day. Our drama class began to make our way outside, and not even halfway out the door, we heard what at first I thought were the sounds of a firecracker, or maybe even a bomb. These were actually shots firing from an AR-15 that was killing my friends and teachers.

Im not even 18 yet, I thought. I havent even lived, and now my life could be over in a matter of minutes. All 65 of us in the class ran into the drama storage closet. While we didnt know what would happen next, we spent two hours crying, shaking, and texting our parents goodbye. There was truly no way of knowing whether we were going to make it out alive. No kid, no person, should ever have to fear that at any second, a shooter could walk into their safe space and end their life. That day we lost 17 beautiful, innocent, smart, kind souls. Aaron, Chris, Scott, Jaime, Nick, Gina, Cara, Meadow, Carmen, Joaquin, Peter, Alyssa, Alaina, Alex, Luke, Helena, and Martin. We say their names, and now we fight for them.

The week before the shooting, we were worried about the SATs and buying a prom dress. Now were activists at the center of a roaring gun control debate, and its a lot of pressure.

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Days after the shooting, those of us who were strong enough began to speak out for those who couldnt. Im sure people are wondering how we hadand still havethe strength to do this, but its been our way to mourn. Weve had to use the media and political attention we are receiving while its still there. Weve done every interview we can, and set up meetings in our state's and nations capitals, and planned a nationwide march, the March for Our Lives, all in less than a month. Remember: We, the teens, are doing this. Not adults.

There are so many students that are deeply affected and horribly traumatized by the event at my high school, and Im still processing it all. The week before the shooting, we were worried about the SATs and buying a prom dress. Now were activists at the center of a roaring gun control debate, and its a lot of pressure.

Some adults are saying were over emotional and arent thinking logically because of our experience. That kind of doubt, especially coming from the older generations who we want to support us, is the last thing we need right now. Experiencing this kind of tragedy is exactly what makes us perfectly capable of fighting. We lived through one of the worst things a human can experience. Our motivation is rooted in never letting what happened to us happen to anyone ever again.

Still, a lot of adults are asking us: How can we help?

Heres what I have to say to them: First, stand behind us. We need the world to know that you trust us to take the lead. You can do this by simply believing that we are real people who lived through a tragedy. You can do this by listening. You can do this by supporting the movement with your financial power, and donating to causes like Everytown for Gun Safety and Giffords Courage to Fight Gun Violence that support gun reform.

We are teenagers with the weight of the country on our shoulders. We absolutely need your support.

Second, be open-minded. This is not a partisan issue, but an issue of lives. Bullets dont discriminate by party, religion, race, or class, and mass shootings happen anywhere and everywhere, even in Parkland (which, for the record, was voted the number one safest city in Florida last year).

Most of all, we need you vote in November. Vote for those of us that are still too young. Vote for politicians who support legitimate and substantial gun reform. Vote for politicians who understand that this is a multifaceted issue. Vote for politicians who do take into account the opinions of their constituents. Because your track record isnt strong: It seems that a lot of you vote along party lines without doing much research and continue to reelect unworthy incumbents and elect candidates who are not invested in making our future safer.

Although to some we may seem fully capable of running this revolution on our own, we need you. My generation is an agent of change, and were proud of that. But adults shouldnt feel excused from taking actionthe pressure were under is real. We are teenagers with the weight of the country on our shoulders. We absolutely need your support.

Senseless tragedies occur every day because the wrong person was able to obtain a weapon, sometimes a weapon of war, that should not even be able to be purchased in the first place. People die daily because of gun violence in neighborhoods all over the country; people whose names well never know. Its not right. There is so much that can and will be done, and it starts with us. All of us.

Were marching on Saturday and fighting because the friends and teachers we lost, and the many victims of gun violence, will never have the chance to. A deranged monster with a semi-automatic rifle took away my friends and teachers chance to change the world. We refuse to let this happen again.

Sofie Whitney, who turned 18 four days after the shooting, is a senior at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. She is a founding member of Never Again, a group working on gun reform run by survivors of the Stoneman Douglas shooting.A teen was banned from entering her dates prom for wearing a dress with mesh cutouts, and her mother claims she was mistreated.

Josie Reason, 16, of Central, Louisiana was thrilled to receive a promposal from her co-worker Christian  a pizza delivery with the words, I know this is cheesy but prom? written on the box  for his March 17 prom.

The next day, mom Rebecca Reason took her daughter dress shopping. Josie is pretty conservative, and since the prom was at a Christian school, she was concerned about looking appropriate, Rebecca tells Yahoo Lifestyle. In fact, as Josie tried on dresses, she vetoed several for being too tight, having a high slit, or showing too much chest.

Josie Reasons friend surprised her with a pizza-themed promposal. (Photo: Courtesy of Rebecca Reason)

My only rule was to find a dress that could easily pass at church, says Rebecca. The pair found the perfect look: a $400 gown with a black-and-white floral shirt and a fitted top with cutout panels covered by mesh.

I texted photos of the dress to Christians mom to make sure it was decent and we could coordinate about the corsage colors, says Rebecca. She agreed it was pretty.

On the night of the prom, held at Central Private, Josie and Christian headed off in a limo. However, shortly after the couple arrived, Rebecca received a phone call from her daughter.

I could tell Josie was trying not to cry, she says. She said, Mom, they wont let me in the prom because of my cutouts  I either have to wear Christians jacket all night or walk 40 minutes to Walmart and buy a belt.

Josie had pointed out that her cutouts were covered by mesh  therefore not exposing bare skin  but the teacher at the entrance said it was see-through.

Josie Reasons prom gown violated her dates schools dress code. (Photo: Courtesy of Rebecca Reason)

Christian wouldnt give Josie his jacket on principal. He said girls wearing more revealing dresses were allowed in and it wasnt fair, says Rebecca.

Ultimately, Christians mom picked up the couple and took them for a hibachi dinner and a movie. While the night was partially salvaged, Rebecca is bothered by what she says is discrimination. I feel they treated Josie unfairly because she doesnt attend Christians school. Central Private did not return Yahoo Lifestyles request for comment.

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Whats more, Rebecca says she later discovered that Christians mom had called the school prior to prom and confirmed that cutouts with mesh panels were appropriate as long as no bare skin showed.

Josie and Christian are still making the most of prom season  the couple will hit Josies prom at Central High School on Saturday.

This time, Rebecca is prepared. Im making Josie a prom care package with a needle and thread, a marker, scissors, a measuring tape, and a belt, she says, adding that the kit can be shared with girls who unknowingly violate the dress code. I dont want this to happen to anyone else.

Josie Reasons mom is sending her to prom with a dress-code care package. (Photo: Courtesy of Rebecca Reason)

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"Beauty matching" has couples getting plastic surgery in tandem  sometimes, even to look like each other. Here, plastic surgeons weigh in on the trend.

Date night could have a whole new meaning thanks to "beauty matching"  a plastic surgery trend that has couples stepping into the surgeon's office for double the procedures. "I have had couples come in prior to their wedding, after their kids went off to college, and at every stage in between," Julius Few, a board-certified plastic surgeon and clinical professor of plastic surgery at the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine, tells Allure.

Beauty matching has two different interpretations. Most of the time, surgeons say the trend is pretty much as Few describes  couples book cosmetic procedures together prior to a big event or just to share the experience with each other. Surgeons say it's surprisingly common. "Similar-minded people are together and have similar priorities," Haideh Hirmand, a board-certified plastic surgeon in New York City and clinical assistant professor of surgery at Weill-Cornell Medical College, tells Allure.

In some cases, one partner is inspired by the other's aesthetic change-up and books their own version, says Alan Matarasso, a board-certified plastic surgeon in New York City, and president-elect of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons. "Either they see the result in their spouse or they learn about what they can do and that prompts them. Meanwhile, as one person is learning about it they will discuss it with a spouse," he tells Allure. "It's often a mutual exchange of ideas."

The second interpretation of beauty matching is more literal  and a little concerning: Getting procedures in tandem so that couples can actually look like each other. Think of it as an extreme version of having your S.O.'s name tattooed on your body.

What types of procedures can be matched?

Beauty matching can apply to a whole range of cosmetic surgery procedures. "When we talk about couples, it's often aging procedures," says Matarasso. "People are often relatively similar in age so they may have similar complaints."

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The date night-meets-plastic surgery procedures often occur in tandem with big life events.

While you could technically get just about anything done together, Few says most couples come in for minor, non-invasive procedures, such as fillers, Botox, or CoolSculpting. The date night-meets-plastic surgery procedures often occur in tandem with big life events, says Matarasso. For example, a couple may want to get Botox before a wedding or liposuction before a milestone anniversary party. Life events prompting change is "human nature," he says, whether it's an individual or a pair that's making the change.

What to know before you book a beauty-matching appointment.

Beauty matching might raise some eyebrows  it's not a long stretch for the idea of getting plastic surgery with your significant other to trend towards the unhealthy. As such, cosmetic surgeons are watching for red flags that could signal an unhealthy relationship situation.

"I once had a couple who really seemed uncomfortable and almost as if they were trying to do a pressured alteration to save their relationship," Few says. "While the couple approach can be extremely rewarding and valuable, when one person really does not want any form of enhancement or treatment, it is a really bad thing and we typically will avoid treating  even if the spouse or significant other really wants it for their mate."

Beauty matching isn't about coercion or copycatting.

When beauty matching isn't about coercion or copycatting and is a mutual decision to share the experience, surgeons say getting procedures with your partner is totally normal  practical, even. Think of it this way: If you and your partner are both interested in liposuction, going through the process together will mean the chance to keep each other company during recovery.

"The ability to offer emotional support is a major advantage," explains Few. The simple act of having your partner in the room to help give you advice is also a big plus of getting procedures done together, he says. "Now more than ever, we have so many ways to treat a given issue  sometimes having another person in the room who really knows you is vital to make the best decision."

Before you suggest beauty matching as a date night activity

While it's one thing to want to share an experience with your S.O., there are two major things to weigh before you think about beauty matching. First, you should never, ever, feel pressured into a procedure (or pressure anyone else for that matter). "You don't want to feel pressured into something. You want to do it for your own reasons  not because your spouse wants you to do it. I can't emphasize that enough," says Matarasso.

You want to do it for your own reasons  not because your spouse wants you to do it.

And finally, taking beauty matching to the extreme end of the spectrum  aka getting procedures with the goal of looking like each other  is taking the trend a little too far. "Extreme approaches in plastic surgery often end very poorly," says Few. "It's not as easy to change back as it is to erase a tattoo of your ex's name from your body."

Before you beauty match, make sure you and your partner are totally on the same page about what each of you hopes to get from the experience. The plastic surgeon's office isn't the place for compromise or meeting your partner in the middle  whatever you want goes.

For more plastic surgery trends:

Now, watch as a dermatologist explains lip injections:

"Usually, the husbands pretend not to be into the idea at first but privately, they are beyond excited and often want to do more than they originally indicate," he says.Congress has cobbled together a massive spending bill to fund the government for the rest of 2018. President Donald Trump appears to be unhappy about it, but lawmakers are set to begin voting on Thursday.

The bill is 2,232 pages long and provides $1.3 trillion in government spending, surpassing the $1.15 trillion and $1.1 trillion spent in similar bills in 2016 and 2017.

Had to waste money on Dem giveaways in order to take care of military pay increase and new equipment, Trump wrote on Twitter late Wednesday, complaining about concessions that were made to reach a bipartisan agreement on the bill.

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02_22_BudgetLeaders

Joshua Roberts/Reuters

Got $1.6 Billion to start Wall on Southern Border, rest will be forthcoming, the president wrote, indicating he lost a battle to get $18 billion his administration had requested to start building a physical barrier on the U.S.-Mexico border.

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None of the money will go to new wall prototypes the administration has tested in California. Much of the money will go to repairs of existing barriers and with less than half going to new sections of wall.

Most importantly, got $700 Billion to rebuild our Military, $716 Billion next year...most ever, Trump wrote. The military spending increase is $61 billion more than was spent last year. Troops in the military will see a 2.4 percent pay raise and the money will go to buying new equipment, ships, and planes.

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I had to fight for Military and start of Wall, Trump wrote in another tweet, noting that lawmakers were not able to reach a deal to preserve DACA, a program that allows people who were brought to the U.S. illegally by their parents to continue living and working there.

At the last minute the White House tried to use preservation of the program, which was set to end early this month, in exchange for more funding for Trumps border wall.

The bill will also create a $20 billion wildfire disaster fund to fight the increasingly serious wildfires breaking out in the western U.S. and stop the Forest Service from dipping into its other funds to fight them over the next 10 years.

Gun control measures are also included in the bill. One will allow the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to conduct gun violence research and others increase money for school safety and offer more government grants to federal agencies and states so they comply with the U.S. background check system.

No bill of this size is perfect, said Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan. But this legislation addresses important priorities and makes us stronger at home and abroad.

This article was first written by Newsweek

More from NewsweekCentrally sponsored Ayushman Bharat - National Health Protection Mission (AB-NHPM) has been approved by the Cabinet but it faces enormous implementation and infrastructural hurdles even before it gets off the ground.

The first hurdle is in getting the state Cabinets to approve the AB-NHPM. But that's the least of the problems. With BJP/NDA combine ruling 21 of India's 29 states, at least those states should approve it sooner than later. Others are uncertain. Mamata Banerjee, for instance, has refused to implement Modicare in West Bengal.

The biggest hurdle at the state level will be in implementation on the ground. Even though health is a state subject under the Constitution of India, the Centre also spends on centrally-sponsored healthcare schemes such as National Health Mission, Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana (RSBY). AB-NHPM will subsume RSBY.

Also, the priorities at the state level aren't exactly in sync with the Centre's own priorities. The big challenge will be in integrating the Centre's scheme with the state's existing schemes. Many states have their own healthcare plans in operation where the disconnect is: who is the target group?

While the Centre has initially proposed covering only the 'deprived' beneficiaries (as per the Socio Economic Caste Census of 2011/12), many state schemes cover a wider range of beneficiaries. Some even cover the entire state population. Karnataka's health insurance scheme, for instance, covers every state resident. Gujarat and Rajasthan-both BJP-run states-also already cover a wider range of beneficiaries.

While the Central scheme provides a Rs 5 lakh cover to a family of five, the states typically have a Rs 1 lakh cover.

There are other major differences too. The Central Cabinet has approved 1,366 health packages that will be covered under secondary and tertiary care under AB-NHPM. Rajasthan, for instance, covers over 1400. Most other states cover between 1000 and 1200 illnesses.

Also, while the Centre provides insurance cover only for secondary and tertiary care, states at times provide cover even for primary care.

Centre and states may agree to continue with two parallel schemes. However, that would be a colossal waste of public money. It would be untenable for states to continue with their own schemes even as the Central scheme would require them to pay at least 40 per cent of the cost availed by state residents.

Especially, when the objective of merging the Central and state schemes should be to lower the cost of delivery, not raise it. Use of technology, cross-subsidisation and higher volumes through risk pooling are meant to lower the cost of providing insurance coverage substantially.

In case the schemes are to be merged, it would be politically unacceptable if the states discontinue insurance to sections of society or for certain illnesses that had been previously covered.

Also, let's not forget the massive infrastructural challenge of implementing the scheme for 10 crore families. Neither the Centre nor the states have the requisite infrastructure for effective implementation. It requires participation by the private sector. For that, the private sector must see financial viability in dealing with the government.

That's still to be proven and will take time to settle down. Even the insurance cover will need to be bid out for insurance companies to participate. That process itself will go through a significant period to settle down.

Hence, while the RSBY may have received a resounding 'Yes' from the Centre, the tussle between the Centre and the states is only now set to begin.Nearly a year before Attorney General Jeff Sessions sacked former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, for lack of candor, McCabe oversaw a federal criminal investigation into whether Sessions lacked candor when he testified about his contacts with Russian operatives, ABC News reports Wednesday.

Democratic lawmakers repeatedly had accused Sessions of misleading them in congressional testimony and called on federal authorities to investigate, ABC News noted. But McCabes decision to put AG Sessions under an FBI probe is news.

An attorney repping Sessions declined to confirm to ABC whether Sessions was aware he had been under investigation for lack of candor when he decided to fire McCabe last Friday. Sessions fired McCabe less than 48 hours before the former FBI deputy director was due to retire from government and obtain a full pension.

Last year, several top Republican and Democratic lawmakers had been informed of the probe. That during a closed-door briefing with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and McCabe, ABC News reported, citing unnamed sources.

McCabe authorized the criminal inquiry after Dem Sen. Patrick Leahy, who is on the Senate Judiciary Committee, and then Dem Sen. Al Franken, sent the FBI a letter in March of 17 urging the bureau to investigate all contacts Sessions may have had with Russians, and whether any laws were broken in the course of those contacts or in any subsequent discussion of whether they occurred.

During his confirmation in January 2017, Sessions told the Senate committee that he had not been in contact with anyone connected to the Russian government about the 2016 election. He also said he was not aware of anyone else affiliated with the Trump campaign communicating with the Russian government ahead of the election.

Two months later, Washington Post report disputed Sessions testimony. WaPo reported, and then AG Sessions acknowledged he had met Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak two times during the presidential campaign. This time Sessions insisted those interactions were not to discuss issues of the campaign.

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Sessions made no attempt to correct his misleading testimony until The Washington Post revealed that, in fact, he had at least two meetings with the Russian ambassador, Leahy and Franken said in a statement at the time. We know he would not tolerate dishonesty if he were in our shoes.

We are concerned by Attorney General Sessions lack of candor to the Committee and his failure thus far to accept responsibility for testimony that could be construed as perjury, Leahy and Franken said in their March 2017 letter to then-FBI director James Comey. President Donald Trump fired Comey two months later, ABC News noted.

McCabe was fired Friday after the Justice Departments inspector general concluded McCabe misled investigators looking into how DOJ and FBI officials handled issues pertaining to the 2016 presidential election.

In October 2016, hoping to push back on a series of news reports questioning whether he might be trying to protect Hillary Clinton, McCabe authorized two FBI officials to speak with a reporter about his efforts to boost the FBIs investigation of the Clinton Foundation. Sessions charged that McCabe lacked candor under oath on multiple occasions when questioned about that decision, adding our integrity is our brand.

McCabe, a lifelong Republican, insists he was being singled out and treated this way because of the role I played, the actions I took, and the events I witnessed in the aftermath of the firing of James Comey.

McCabe, via a rep, declined to comment for ABC News report.

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Attorney General Jeff Sessions Fires FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabeBERLIN (Reuters) - A German court on Thursday sentenced an Afghan migrant to life in prison for raping and murdering a university student, as the country wrestles with security and integration concerns after taking in over a million migrants since 2015. In December 2016 police detained the young Afghan man, who had arrived in the country at the height of the refugee crisis a year earlier. A test determined that his DNA matched that found near the site where a 19-year-old German female student had died in the southwestern city of Freiburg two months earlier. A police autopsy found she had been a victim of sexual crime and violence before she drowned in a river. In January, a government-sponsored study found that violent crime rose by about 10 percent in 2015 and 2016, and more than 90 percent of the rise was attributed to young male refugees, adding fuel to a political debate over the handling of the migrant crisis. Fears about security and the assimilation of migrants helped pave the way for the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) to win third place in an election last September, and it has now become the official opposition in parliament. The Afghan man, identified only as Hussein K. under reporting rules, was sentenced to life in prison and preventative detention thereafter, the court in Freiburg said, meaning he will never walk free in public. He had been convicted of attempted murder in Greece in 2013 and sentenced to 10 years in jail, but he was released in 2015 on parole and fled to Germany. The German court sentenced Hussein, who was allegedly 17 years-old when he committed the crime, as an adult, not as a minor, after it concluded with experts that he was an adult at the time of the offense. "After an overall assessment of the personality of the defendant and the environmental conditions, the Chamber has come to the conclusion that his mental and moral development is no longer equal to a young person," the court said. In January, a fatal stabbing of a 15-year-old German girl by a suspect identified by police as her former boyfriend, an Afghan migrant, fueled a debate about verifying the ages of unaccompanied minors seeking asylum in Germany. (Reporting by Riham Alkousaa; Editing by Hugh Lawson)DUBAI (Reuters) - An air strike by the Saudi-led coalition fighting in Yemen killed ten civilians, including women and children, in the northern province of Saada on Thursday, residents and medics said. Saudi Arabia's military alliance intervened in Yemen's war in 2015 against Iran-aligned Houthis who had ousted the internationally recognized government of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi. The alliance has conducted frequent air strikes targeting Houthi fighters and has often hit civilians, although it denies ever doing so intentionally. Saada province is the main stronghold of the Houthis, who control much of northern Yemen. Medics who saw the wreckage said an air strike had destroyed a house in Ouled Amer village. A spokesman for the Saudi-led coalition could not immediately be reached for comment. The war has killed more than 10,000 people, displaced more than 2 million and driven the country - already the poorest on the Arabian Peninsula - to the verge of famine. (Reporting By Dubai Newsroom; editing by John Stonestreet)Emily B. Landau, Yoel Guzansky

Security, Middle East

Supreme leader display seen at Baharestan Square in Tehran

Unless the JCPOA is strengthened, Saudi Arabia may find a way to get the bomb as a counter to Iran.

Can America Prevent Saudi Arabia from Going Nuclear?

Ahead of his visit to the United States, Saudi crown prince Mohammad bin Salman (MbS) clarified in an interview that while his country does not want nuclear weapons, without a doubt, if Iran developed a nuclear bomb, we will follow suit as soon as possible. Such a clear and public statement by the de facto leader of Saudi Arabia was obviously meant to grab attention. This is not exactly breaking news for anyone that has been following Saudi Arabia in recent years, but the reiteration of Saudi concern with Irans nuclear ambitions is significant for two reasons. First, the Iran nuclear deal (JCPOA)which Saudi Arabia has long believed is a flawed and will not stop Tehran from becoming a nuclear stateenables Iran to have an industrial nuclear program including uranium enrichment. Second, the statement reinforces the notion that Saudi Arabias demand to enrich uranium as part of a civilian nuclear deal with the United States is not detached from the kingdoms desire to keep its options open in the military realm as well. In both regards, the factor that is driving Saudi Arabia's statements and stepped up nuclear plans is the implications of Irans nuclear program, and the deal that was concluded with Iran in 2015.

While some have suggested that the crown princes message highlights the importance of keeping the JCPOA in place as insurance that Iran will remain non-nuclear, the Saudi concern is quite the opposite: namely, that the nuclear deal in its current format has created a more aggressive Iran, and will not ensure that Iran remains non-nuclear. At the Munich Security conference in February, Saudi foreign minister Adel Al-Jubeir could not have been clearer about how his country views the JCPOA, and Irans regional behavior:

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We are letting [the Europeans] know that the nuclear agreement that was signed with Iran is lacking. The sunset provision has to be amended, and the inspections have to broadened to include non-declared and military sites. We also believe the nuclear agreement itself does not resolve the issue of Iran's radical behaviour which has to do with the ballistic missile resolutions of the United Nations, exporting ballistic missiles that are used to target civilians.

He went on to criticize Iran's support for terrorism, and the revolutionary guards who are causing "mischief" within the region and the world.

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The recent Saudi messages are directed at the Trump administrations current efforts to garner European support to strengthen the JCPOA. This explains the foreign minister noting that Saudi Arabia's assessment of the deal and Iran's regional behavior has been relayed to the Europeans, who have so far not been forthcoming on improving the JCPOA. Riyadh is clear that if the JCPOA is not strengthened and Iran does goes nuclear, Saudi Arabia will be right behind Iran.

All of this comes on the heels of Saudi plans for a civilian nuclear program, including a demand to work on the fuel cyclenamely, uranium enrichment and reprocessing of plutonium. Discussions about Saudi Arabias desire to close deals for a civilian nuclear program have accelerated in recent weeks, and negotiations with the United States on the subject have been renewed. During the Obama administration, the president insisted on holding Saudi Arabia to the "gold standard" that it set for civilian nuclear cooperation, namely, that the state in question must renounce the right to work on the fuel cycledue to the potential proliferation dangers.

The background to the question of a state's supposed right to work on the fuel cycle is set by the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). According to one interpretation of Article IV, the NPT grants states the right not only to cooperate on developing a civilian nuclear program, but broadens that right to include independent production of fuel for its reactors (rather than buying the fuel on the open market). It became clear that this broad interpretation was not to be encouraged because uranium enrichment is dual-use technologyit can produce fuel for reactors, but if uranium is enriched to very high levels, the same centrifuges can produce the fissile material needed for a nuclear bomb. This was the rationale for creating the gold standard, and the first state in which it was implemented was the United Arab Emirates in 2009.

Does Saudi Arabia need an advanced nuclear program for civilian purposes? The kingdom claims that it needs nuclear energy to answer its growing energy needs, to reduce its dependence on oil and free up oil for exports. But Saudi Arabia has not hidden its additional strategic calculations towards Iran. Several years ago, so as not to fall behind Iran, Saudi Arabia announced its intent to build sixteen nuclear reactors over the next twenty years. Riyadh has received offers from the United States, China, Russia, France and South Korea for building the first two reactors. While insisting that the program is for peaceful purposes only, the Saudi demand to enrich uranium is a serious concern.

However, when the global powers negotiating the JCPOA agreed to legitimize Iran's uranium enrichment program, the gold standard for civilian nuclear programs was dangerously undermined. After years of sanctioning Iran's uranium-enrichment activitiesand well-aware of the dangers of this dual-use technologythe Obama administration nevertheless conceded to Iranian demands to treat it like any "normal" member of the NPT, and grant it its "rights," including uranium enrichment. After doing so, it is difficult to justify why Saudi Arabia cannot do the same; especially when the legitimacy was granted to a NPT violator, whereas Saudi Arabia is a member in good standing of the treaty.

At the end of the day, Saudi Arabia would probably be happier not to go down the nuclear route. The key to getting Riyadh to adhere to the gold standard for civilian nuclear programs, and more importantly, to back off from any ideas about becoming a nuclear state, is to ensure that Iran cannot acquire nuclear weapons. And the first step in that regard is to improve the Iran nuclear deal. The Saudis may be raising the issue to pressure the Europeans, helping to convince key European states that they need to work with the Americans to correct the JCPOAs most blatant flaws.

Meanwhile, in considering the Saudi bid, the United States needs to juggle additional considerations. First, if an agreement is not reachedand Saudi Arabia decides to cooperate with Russia or China on its civilian nuclear plansMoscow and Beijing could agree to more lax nonproliferation standards, and the United States would lose any control over how the program proceeds. As such, Washington has a clear interest in being the one to make the deal. As a member of the NPT, Saudi Arabia cannot simply start developing nuclear weapons. Riyadh would be under the same restrictions as any other NPT member state that decided to violate the terms of the treaty, like Iran. But the United States must insist on some additional guarantees for a civilian nuclear deal: adherence of Saudi Arabia to the additional protocol; full U.S. involvement in the program, including veto power over each step, on a case by case basis; and Saudi agreement to send the spent fuel from the nuclear reactors abroad.

The best route going forward is not to tie Saudi Arabia's civilian program to problematic JCPOA conditions and timelines (as some have proposed), but rather to strengthen or fix the JCPOA itself. The flaws in the JCPOAand enhanced Iranian regional aggression following conclusion of the dealis what is driving Saudi Arabia to go down the same route. The only way to reassure Riyadh is to directly address the kingdom's concerns that the nuclear deal has increased Iran's hegemonic ambitions while not ending its ability to become a nuclear state.

Emily Landau is a senior research fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) and head of its Arms Control and Regional Security Program. Yoel Guzansky is a senior research fellow specializing in Gulf Security and politics at INSS.

Image: Reuters

Read full articleKatelyn Ferguson, 20, gives an interview outside her home, up the street from where a woman was injured in a package bomb explosion in Austin, Texas, U.S., March 12, 2018. (Photo: Sergio Flores / Reuters)

AUSTIN, Texas  On Tuesday, this city was completely a different place.

It was less than 24 hours before Mark Anthony Conditt would be identified as the bomber whod been taunting and terrorizing locals with a string of explosive attacks, and Austin was in panic mode.

Austinites had woken up to the news that a package headed for their city exploded at a FedEx facility outside San Antonio, signaling that their bomber had changed his tactics yet again. There was no indication that police were even close to the killer, let alone ready to confront him.

For 64-year-old James Barnes, who walked his dog daily past the site where a tripwire bomb exploded and injured his neighbors, Tuesday was the day he decided that maybe help wasnt coming. If police were offering a reward, he said, the trail could be cold. Austin was under siege from an unknown assailant, and as he walked, Barnes couldnt help but think of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

When that happened, you felt like the U.S. is under attack, he told HuffPost. And I felt that way this morning. I felt like, wow, Austin is under attack. Its a sick feeling.

That feeling of helplessness had spread like a virus since the first bomb killed a man on March 2. Some locals took the investigation into their own hands. No rumor was too small, no pub gossip too wacky.

Hours after the FedEx explosion, we found 18-year-old Walker Weeden investigating the crime scene in his southwestern Austin neighborhood. The high schooler stood over a blast site, just four houses down from his own, pointing out the last bits of evidence available to him: a small patch of dirt and a hole in a nearby fence, scars of the tripwire bomb that detonated there two days prior, injuring two of his friends and sending shrapnel flying through the fence and outward toward his suburban neighborhood.

He, like everyone else in Austin that day, had his own ideas about the nature of the bombings. Tangible evidence and clues were hard to come by, so Weeden filled in the blanks himself.

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What a difference 24 hours did for a communitys psyche. On Tuesday, 18-year-old Walker Weeden was showing me the site where a tripwire bomb injured his friends in Austin. He was trying to figure out where the next bombing location would be. That night, the bomber was dead. pic.twitter.com/EfBKOgMwQL  Andy Campbell (@AndyBCampbell) March 22, 2018

He offered that bombs were being planted in a pattern, circling the city center, each attack hinting at the next bombs general location. The assailant struck in the north on March 2 and circled down in a clockwise manner with two more bombings, and then he hit the residential neighborhood where Weeden lives. If the bomber was planning to strike again using that pattern, Weeden said, hed probably choose a northwestern neighborhood as his next target.

Were thinking Northwest Hills, West Lake, or maybe even the Arboretum, Weeden said.

His hypothesis was one of many in a city that had no answers. Six bombing incidents left locals on high alert, each fully prepared for the next explosion and with nowhere to turn but their own anxiety. As of Tuesday, exhausted Austin police had fielded more than 1,200 reports of suspicious packages since March 2, and at that moment, there was no resolution in sight for the residents who had called them in. There were no suspects, no descriptions of the bomb-making material, no rhyme or reason for the attacks.

Some wondered whether the assailant was current or former military, given the sophistication of the devices; theyd soon learn that Conditt had no military service under his belt. Others pointed to dozens of white supremacist groups that have ties to the city, noting that the first three bombings hit areas where black and Hispanic residents live. Those neighborhoods are still on edge. Even after Conditt was confirmed to be dead, residents in a largely African-American community where 17-year-old Draylen Mason was killed by a bomb on March 12 said they were on the lookout for more explosives. They, too, had their theories.

I knew police were on [Conditts] trail because it got too quiet on Tuesday, said Clifton Bailey, a 40-year resident of Masons neighborhood who said he hugged the boy and congratulated him on his acceptance into college five days before he died.

Clifton Bailey, a neighbor of 17-year-old Draylen Mason, who was killed by a bomb. (Photo: Andy Campbell/HuffPost)

I think this young man was trying to get caught. He started in communities like this one, without any cameras, then he went to a FedEx with a big blond wig and dropped off a bomb, he said of Conditt.

When Bailey saw photos of Conditt circulate in the news on Wednesday, he saw anger.

When I saw his face, I thought about South Carolina, where a young white gentleman sat down in a church and then killed everyone inside. Theres anger there, Bailey said.  ... [Conditt] was homeschooled, he wasnt around other kids very much, he didnt have college, and here in my neighborhood is a successful boy who had college and a career ahead of him. People like him dont want to work hard to change, and they get angry at the world, and want to go out and do some harm.

Other residents said the neighborhood had changed  that locals were more reserved since the bombing, mostly out of fear that it would happen again. At the time they were less worried about why and more worried about what was coming next.

Beyond that neighborhood, though, gossip was as good as evidence. People were happy to disclose where they thought the next bomb would detonate, based on theories like Weedens.

Go talk to people in Tarrytown, a Northwest Hills resident told HuffPost on Tuesday. Thats the only logical place for the next attack, if there is one.

Over in Tarrytown, a bartender scoffed at the idea that this ritzy neighborhood would be targeted. He was, however, jarred by a bomb threat on Saturday that led to the cancellation of a Roots concert he attended at the South by Southwest festival.

I went down there, it was a complete shitshow, said the bartender, who declined to give his name. How could they let all those people gather in one space and then announce that it was canceled because of a bomb threat?

As locals suffered from a collective hysteria over the bombings, each new incident bred mayhem, whether or not it had a connection to Conditt.

On Tuesday night, a throng of police, reporters and residents raced to the scene of a reported explosion at a Goodwill on the citys south side. Jerry Davis, the CEO of Goodwill Central Texas, declared at the time, Someone donated a bomb to us today, telling HuffPost that one of the employees there had picked up a device that detonated in his hands. Minutes later, Austin police confirmed that an odd incendiary device had indeed injured the employee, but didnt bear any connection to Conditt and instead resembled some type of military ordinance or memento that caught fire.

Explosions, rumors, false alarms, anxiety. Tuesday felt like the new day in the life for Austin. Its residents were carrying on, but now they had to watch where they stepped.

James Barnes walks his dog toward the spot where, days earlier, a tripwire bomb detonated in his sleepy neighborhood in Austin. (Photo: Andy Campbell/HuffPost)

Then Wednesday morning happened. Just after 2 a.m., police confronted Conditt, who blew himself up in his car as SWAT personnel approached on Interstate 35 near Round Rock, north of Austin.

By the time the sun rose and news reports began detailing who Conditt was, locals werent interested in finding out whose armchair detective work had been correct the day prior. They were surprised and relieved that police had been closer than they thought, and that the madness of the past 24 hours had subsided.

The nightmare is finally over, Bailey said Wednesday.

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Related...

Package Bombings Reveal The Racist Underbelly Of Austin

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Also on HuffPost

This article originally appeared on HuffPost.SEOUL (Reuters) - South Korean former president Lee Myung-bak was detained early on Friday on charges of taking bribes when he was in office, becoming the country's fourth leader to end up behind bars. Lee was grilled by prosecutors earlier this month over nearly 20 charges that involve suspicions he took around 11 billion won ($10.28 million) unlawfully from a number of institutions and individuals He denies any wrongdoing. A South Korean judge issued the arrest warrant late on Thursday, saying Lee could destroy evidence. The former president was driven to a detention center in Seoul soon after midnight. Lee, in office from 2008 to 2013, says the investigation into the bribery allegations is politically motivated by prosecutors under the incumbent liberal administration. Last year, Lee's successor ex-president Park Geun-hye was ousted from office after an influence-peddling scandal and is standing trial on charges of bribery, abuse of power and coercion. South Korean prosecutors are seeking a 30-year jail term for Park and a Seoul court will deliver a verdict in early April. (Reporting by Christine Kim and Jane Chung; Editing by Andrew Heavens)The Austin bomber was involved in a teenage Christian survivalist group that discussed weapons and dangerous chemicals, according to a childhood friend.

Mark Anthony Conditt reportedly took part in a conservative outdoors club called Righteous Invasion of Truth (RIOT), in which home-schooled young people studied the Bible and were taught gun skills.

Police in Texas are hunting for clues about what drove the 23-year-old to embark on a bombing spree which killed two people and terrorised the state capital for weeks.

"He and and his family are as normal as Ive seen anybody," Jeff Reeb, a neighbour of the Conditt family in Pflugerville for approximately 17 years, told The Independent.

Another neighbour, Lee Roca, said he was shocked when he saw Conditt identified as the bombing suspect on the news. Mr Roca said he recognised Conditt from karaoke nights at a local bar called Red Rooster, and he may well have shaken his hand.

Officers found a 25-minute mobile phone recording that they said amounted to a confession after Conditt blew himself up as authorities closed in on him on Wednesday.

Austin police chief Brian Manley said officers had also found a target list of additional addresses we believe he was using for future targets, but nothing that gave any indication of a motive.

Conditt is reported to have used to alias Kelly Killmore on explosive packages he sent to victims.

Former friends remembered Conditt as a pretty normal kid who was home-schooled by his conservative, strictly religious family in Pflugerville.

Conditt attended RIOT events with his younger sister, said Cassia Schultz, who was also involved in the group.

A lot of us were very into science; we would discuss chemicals and how to mix them and which ones were dangerous, Ms Schultz told BuzzFeed News.

The 21-year-old added: We were into weapons and stuff. A lot of us did role-playing, and RPG [role-playing games]; wed have foam weapons and act out a battle.

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Ms Schultz said many young people involved in RIOT carried knives and learned to shoot firearms at gun ranges, but she did not recall bomb-making being a topic of discussion.

Mark Anthony Conditt (Facebook)

RIOT was set up and named by home-schooled children of high school age in Pflugerville and their families. The groups events, which also included archery and water balloon fights, included up to an hour of Bible study.

Ms Schulz said she had not seen Conditt for three or four years and was completely shocked to hear he was the bomber.

Nobody has mentioned him being violent or anything like that, she added.

Conditt is said to have used a fake name to mail five explosive packages to his targets, killing a 17-year-old boy and a 39-year-old man. Another bomb was left at the roadside attached to a tripwire.

Five people were injured in the blasts, two of them critically. The wounded included a FedEx employee at sorting office in the city of San Antonio, about 100 miles from Austin.

Conditt was captured by CCTV cameras wearing gloves and a wig as he dropped off two parcels at a FedEx delivery centre in Austin last week, and was also filmed shopping for bomb materials including batteries and nails at a Home Depot shop.

The vehicle that the Austin package bomber, Mark Anthony Conditt, was driving when he blew himself (Getty Images North America)

Conditt appeared to have only a modest social media presence and left few clues about his motive online. Aside from a few photos of him on his familys Facebook pages, his online presence includes little more than an online blog he created in 2012 as part of a government class project.

In the post titled Defining my Stance he gives his opinion on several issues, often in response to commentary by someone else. Conditt wrote that gay marriage should be illegal, argued in favour of the death penalty and gave his thoughts on why we might want to consider eliminating sex offender registries.

Of gay marriage, Conditt wrote: Homosexuality is not natural. Just look at the male and female bodies. They are obviously designed to couple.

In the about me section of the blog, Conditt wrote that he was not that politically inclined, saying he viewed himself as conservative but did not have enough information to defend my stance as well as it should be defended. He said he hoped the class would help him do that.

A friend of Conditt said he could be dominant and intimidating in conversation. Jeremiah Jensen, 24, told the Austin American-Statesman that he knewConditt through the home-schooled community in Pflugerville would go to his and home for lunch after church on Sundays. They also attended Bible study and other activities together.

When I met Mark, he was really rough around the edges, Mr Jensen said. He was a very assertive person and would... end up being kind of dominant and intimidating in conversation. A lot of people didnt understand him and where he was coming from.

He added: I have no idea what caused him to make those bombs.

Conditts family said in a statement they had no idea of the darkness that Mark must have been in. His grandmother said she was shocked to learn her grandson was being accused of the attacks, and called him a very kind and loving person. She told CNN that Conditt was a very quiet and a deep thinker.Family members of the suspected Austin bomberwho terrorized the city for nearly three weeks and killed two peopledescribed him as "low-key and peaceful," on Wednesday.

Mark Anthony Conditt, 23, died early Wednesday after detonating an explosive device in his car as a SWAT team descended on his vehicle, Austin Police Chief Brian Manley told reporters. Police tied him to a series of bombings that began March 2.

Mary Conditt, the suspect's grandmother, told CNN her grandson had never displayed any violent impulses before.

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"If anything he's low-key and peaceful," she said.

RTS1OMTU

REUTERS/Loren Elliott

She described her family as close-knit and said Mark was busy trying to sort out his life and stick close to his loved ones.

"He's from a family that is so tight, that works so hard to raise their children correctly," Conditt said. "It's just horrible."

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RELATED: How the Austin Bombing Suspect Was Tracked Down

Mark Conditt was "looking forward to figuring out what most kids arefiguring out his life and visiting his family and being close to them," she said.

Conditt's aunt, who lives in Colorado, also issued a statement on behalf of the family to news outlets.

"The family is devastated and broken at the news that our family could be involved in such an awful way. We had no idea the darkness that Mark must have been in," the statement read. "Our family is a normal family in every way. We love, we pray, we inspire and serve others.

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"So right now, our prayers are for the families that lost loved ones. Our prayers are for those impacted in any way. And our prayers are for the soul of our Mark," the statement continued. "We are grieving and we are in shock."

A woman who read that same statement to KDVR reporter Joe St. George and identified herself as a relative of Conditt's said he gave no indication of the mayhem he would allegedly perpetrate when he came over to celebrate Christmas with her.

"He was at my Christmas table. He was a bright kid. He was smart, he was loving, he was kind," she said. "I have no idea who this person is."

"It's just awful and I'm so sorry that everybody is dealing with this," she added. "I mean, it's a culture that we live in and it's just awful."

The motive remained a mystery Wednesday afternoon. Police urged the public to remain vigilant and alert law enforcement if they see any suspicious packages or bags. Investigators had not yet determined if Conditt acted alone or had accomplices.

This article was first written by Newsweek

More from NewsweekThe Payment of Gratuity (Amendment) Bill was passed in the Rajya Sabha on Thursday without any discussion. The Bill will enable the government to increase the ceiling of tax-free gratuity to Rs 20 lakh from Rs 10 lakh for employees under the Payment of Gratuity Act. The law is applicable to the employees who have completed at least five years of service in an entity that has 10 or more employees. The Bill will also empower the government to fix the maternity leave for female employees as deemed to be in continuous service in place of the existing 12 weeks with an executive order. The amended Bill will benefit lakhs of employees who work in the organised sector, especially women, Labour Minister Santosh Kumar Gangwar said.

Over the past fortnight, the Upper House of Parliament had not transacted any significant business due to protests by various parties. The Bill, moved by Gangwar, was passed by a voice vote, fulfilling the long-pending demands of the employees unions. The Lok Sabha had passed the Bill last week.

After the implementation of the seventh Central Pay Commission, the ceiling of gratuity amount for central government employees was increased from Rs 10 lakh to Rs 20 lakh. The bill also notifies the period of maternity leave as part of continuous service and proposes to empower the central government to notify the gratuity ceiling from time to time without amending the law. The amendment to the payment of gratuity law comes in the backdrop of Maternity

Benefit (Amendment) Act, 2017, enhancing the maximum maternity leave period to 26 weeks. At present, formal sector workers with five or more years of service are eligible for Rs 10 lakh tax-free gratuity after leaving job or at time of superannuation. A senior government official said that the government wants to provide tax-free gratuity of Rs 20 lakh to organised sector workers at par with the central government.

The Payment of Gratuity Act, 1972, was enacted to provide for gratuity payment to employees engaged in factories, mines, oilfields, plantations, ports, railway companies, shops or other establishments. The law is applicable to employees, who have completed at least five years of continuous service in an establishment that has 10 or more persons.

Here are some important things you need to know about gratuity.

So, what is gratuity?

Gratuity is a defined benefit plan governed by the Payment of Gratuity Act, 1972. It is mandatory for companies with more than 10 employees on their payrolls to give gratuity to an employee.

When can you get gratuity?

Gratuity is not just paid to the employee on his retirement as commonly perceived. In fact, the gratuity rules are lenient. Here are other instances of circumstances when gratuity is handed over to the employee

If he has tendered his resignation after serving the organisation for continuous service five years

On his death, even if the employee hasn't served the organization for five years

Or he becomes disabled due to accident or disease

What does continuous service mean?



It simply means no break by the employee from the date of joining to be eligible for the sum. Any leaves availed is not counted as a break.

How is gratuity calculated?

Gratuity is calculated as 15 days' salary for each completed year of service. The salary includes your last drawn basic salary and dearness allowance but excludes all other allowances. It is calculated by the formula: Last drawn salary (basic salary plus dearness allowance) X number of completed years of service X 15/26.

Is it taxable?



As of now tax rules differ for government employees and private employees and it is capped at Rs 10 lakh. However, if the Payment of Gratuity (Amendment) Bill 2017 is approved by the parliament the tax exemption will be to the tune of Rs 20 lakh.

In the present scenario, gratuity amount is fully exempt from tax for government employees. For private employees, it is least of the following

Rs 10 lakh

Actual gratuity received

15 days salary based on the last drawn salary for each completed year of service or part thereof in excess of six months.

*Salary includes basic salary received by the employee and the dearness allowance and commission received if any.

Are contractual employees also entitled for it?

No, this benefit is only for those on the company's regular payroll. There's no gratuity even after 5 years of service for contractual employees. However, some organizations offer all benefits to employees hired on contract subject to their renewal and completion of time frame.

With PTI inputs

(ROUND ROCK, Texas) The suspect in a series of bombing attacks in Austin blew himself up early Wednesday as authorities closed in, a dramatic end to a weekslong siege of the Texas capital, where two were killed and four injured in a series of blasts.

Authorities had zeroed in on the suspect in the last 24 to 36 hours and located his vehicle at a hotel on Interstate 35 in the suburb of Round Rock, Austin Police Chief Brian Manley said at a news conference. They were waiting for ballistic vehicles to arrive to move in for an arrest when his vehicle began to drive away, Manley said. Authorities followed the vehicle, which ran into a ditch on the side of the road, the police chief said.

When members of the SWAT team approached, the suspect detonated an explosive device inside the vehicle, the police chief said. The blast knocked back one officer, while a second officer fired his weapon, Manley said.

Authorities identified the suspect only as a 24-year-old white man and wouldnt say if he was from Austin.

Austin has been targeted by four package bombings since March 2 that killed two people and seriously wounded four others. A fifth parcel bomb detonated at a FedEx distribution center near San Antonio early Tuesday.

Manley said the suspect is believed to be responsible for all the major Austin bombings. Authorities also said they didnt know his motive.

Fred Milanowski, an agent with the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, said it was hard to say if the bombing suspect was acting alone.

What we do know is we believe the same person built each one of these devices, said Milanowski, the agent in charge of the Houston division of the ATF. We are not 100 percent convinced theres not other devices out there. We still want the public to be vigilant.

Asked if the suspect built bombs before the Austin attacks, Milanowski said: We know when he bought some of the components. Its hard to say whether he was building along the way

Story continues

Austin Mayor Steve Adler thanked law enforcement for their work in bringing down the suspect and urged residents to continue to report anything that appeared suspicious or out of place.

Were just really relieved and just incredibly thankful for this army of law enforcement that has been in our community here for the last week or so, he said on NBCs Today show.

Isaac Figueroa, 26, said he and his brother heard sirens and helicopters early Wednesday and drove toward them, then cut through nearby woods on foot after they hit a police roadblock.

Figueroa said they saw a silver or gray Jeep Cherokee that was pinned between black and white vehicles and looked like it had been rammed off the road. He said he saw police deploy a robot to go examine the Jeep.

President Donald Trump, who had earlier said whoever was responsible for the Austin bombings was obviously a very sick individual or individuals, tweeted, AUSTIN BOMBING SUSPECT IS DEAD. Great job by law enforcement and all concerned!

The suspects death followed a day of rapid-fire developments in the case.

On Tuesday, a bomb inside a package exploded around 1 a.m. as it passed along a conveyer belt at a FedEx shipping center in Schertz, northeast of San Antonio and about 60 miles (95 kilometers) southwest of Austin. One worker reported ringing in her ears and was treated at the scene.

Later in the morning, police sent a bomb squad to a FedEx facility outside the Austin airport to check on a suspicious package. Federal agencies and police later said that package had indeed contained an explosive that was successfully intercepted and that it, too, was tied to the other bombings.

Authorities also closed off an Austin-area FedEx store where they believe the bomb that exploded in Schertz was shipped. They roped off a large area around the shopping center in the enclave of Sunset Valley and were collecting evidence.

The Schertz blast came two days after a bombing wounded two men Sunday night in a quiet Austin neighborhood about 3 miles (5 kilometers) from the FedEx store. It was triggered by a nearly invisible tripwire, suggesting a higher level of sophistication than agents saw in three package bombs previously left on doorsteps, Milanowski said.

Authorities have not identified the two men who were hurt Sunday, saying only that they are in their 20s. But William Grote told The Associated Press that his grandson was one of them and that he had what appeared to be nails embedded in his knees.

Law enforcement had a scare Tuesday night at a Goodwill store in southern Austin, where someone had dropped off a device sometimes used in military training and it went off, injuring a worker. Authorities dont believe it was the work of the bomber or a copycat. They said such military items are occasionally donated to Goodwill instead of being properly disposed of.Caitlyn Jenner has urged her followers to protect their skin, after revealing she underwent a medical procedure to remove sun damage from her nose.

"I recently had to get some sun damage removed from my nose," Jenner wrote in the caption to an image on Instagram showing raw-looking, red skin on her face. "PSA-always wear your sunblock!" the 68-year-old added.

People reported that the former Olympic gold medalist had received treatment for basal cell carcinoma, the most common form of skin cancer according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

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Unlike melanoma, a highly aggressive form of skin cancer that can be fatal in left untreated, basal-cell cancer rarely spreads around the body or becomes life-threatening. However, it can cause disfigurements that worsen over time, according to the Skin Cancer Foundation.

GettyImages-623252018

VALERIE MACON/AFP/Getty Images

The procedure comes after Jenner confirmed to E! online in 2013 that she was diagnosed with basal-cell carcinoma.

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"I have been struggling with this for several years and appreciate all of the support and prayers while I continue to fight the battle against skin cancer," she said at the time.

"This has taught me to be extra vigilant when out in the sun and I encourage others to get regular checkups and always wear sunscreen," she added.

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What is basal-cell carcinoma?

Also known as BCC or a rodent ulcer, the condition is named after the cells from where the disease develops, according to Cancer Research UK.

Basal-cell carcinoma affects the deepest layer of the skin, generally in areas that come into the most contact with UV rays present in sunlight, tanning beds and sunlamps. When UV rays penetrate the skin, they can change skin cells and lead to skin cancer, according to CDC.

Story continues

Depending on the size and depth of the affected cells, treatment options including topical medications, cutting the cancer away during surgery or radiation therapy.

This article was first written by Newsweek

More from NewsweekCotonou (AFP) - Benin's President Patrice Talon has asked local firm Petrolin and French giant Bollore to "withdraw" from a major rail infrastructure project to make way for China, in the latest development of the controversial scheme.

In an interview published on Thursday in the French magazine Challenges, Talon asked the two companies to "withdraw amicably from the project", which links Benin to Niger to the north, promising they will be "compensated fairly".

"A private investor cannot finance the railway we want alone," the head of state was quoted as saying, describing Bollore's offer as "lower-end".

"China has the necessary financial means" to support work estimated to cost around $4 billion (3.3 billion euros), said Talon.

"China has demonstrated its technical know-how" to build infrastructure in Africa, added the president, who rarely speaks to the media.

Talon's remarks are the latest twist in a saga that has been going on for years.

In 2008, Benin and Niger launched a bid to manage the construction and management of a 740-kilometre (462-mile) railway network linking Cotonou and Niamey.

The bid was won by Petrolin, a company owned by Beninese businessman Samuel Dossou, but was handed over by the government in 2013 to the Bollore group through Benirail, a company representing a public-private partnership.

However last October, a Benin judge ruled that Petrolin should have had the contract and dismissed Bollore.

- Standstill -

After years in court and months of negotiations, the project remains at a standstill, strangling growth in the country of 10 million inhabitants whose economy depends on distribution of goods from its port.

Petrolin representatives said that despite Talon's statement they have not been given formal notice to withdraw.

"The withdrawal of Petrolin will be the result of negotiations between Benin and Niger," said Petrolin spokeswoman Claudine Affiavi Prudencio.

Story continues

"This option (the withdrawal of the project) is not yet formally notified to the Petrolin group" and "at this moment the group hasn't failed", said a source close to the Beninese businessman contacted by AFP.

But a source at the presidency said that the onus was now on the companies to show they can move forward on the project.

"Heads of state (Benin and Niger) have tried to bring them together (Petrolin and Bollore) without success," a presidency source told AFP.

"It would be up to them to show then that they can agree to carry a convincing project," he said.

There was no immediate comment from the Bollore group when contacted by AFP.A legally blind nine-year-old boy in Florida was expected to become Wednesday one of the first people in the country to successfully receive a cutting-edge gene therapy that could restore sight. The boy, who has a genetic form of blindness, received the treatment at the University of Miamis Bascom Palmer Eye Institute in Miami, Florida.

The boy, Creed Pettit, has a rare retinal disease called Leber congenital amaurosis. In December, the Food and Drug Administration approved Luxturna, often called the first true gene therapy, which can improve sight for people like Creed whose condition is caused by a specific genetic mutation.

The treatment is an injection of a virus delivered through a hair-thin needle underneath a patient's retina. The virus carries copies of a gene called RPE-65, which cells' machinery can use to create more of the protein that people with this condition are missing. Cells in a persons retina need this protein to survive and send signals to the brain. People who have a mutation in RPE-65 cant make this protein, so they have bad vision in low light and can go completely blind within a few decades.

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Creed will be receiving this injection in his right eye on Wednesday; the left eye will be treated next week. He's young enough that his disease hasn't advanced very far yet. The treatment could improve his sight, especially when he's somewhere that doesn't have a lot of light. Even so, Creed's vision won't be perfect after the treatment, said Dr. Byron Lam, the boy's longtime physician. "We don't expect to restore someone's vision completely," he said, but there are no other alternatives.

So little data exists about Luxturnas long-term effects that its impossible to say how long patients would see improved sight. Luxturna isnt a gene editing treatmentit doesn't permanently modify a cells DNA sequence. So if the cell eventually breaks down the spare copies of the gene that has been injected, then the effect of the treatment might not last. "I can't really say what's going to happen to him 15, 20, 30 years from now," Lam said. "That's unknown territory."

Story continues

Embracing the possibilities is the focus for Creeds mother, Sarah St. Pierre Pettit. Even as an infant, St. Pierre Pettit noticed that Creeds behavior was a little off. He always looked up and seemed to be looking for light. When hed eat, hed feel for his food instead of looking for it. Hed be happy outside in the sunlight, but the moment he was taken inside, hed have a fit, she said. At first, she thought her concern might be typical new-parent angst. But I kind of knew it my heart that something was wrong immediately, she told Newsweek.

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When Creed was about 2 years old, Lam diagnosed Creed at Bascom Palmer shortly before some of the last clinical trials began for Luxturna in 2012. St. Pierre Pettit and Creed went to see if he might qualify. But Creed, then about three years old, couldnt understand how to do the maze used during the trials to measure if people improved after the treatment, so he was unable to receive the experimental treatment. "He just was too young," St. Pierre Pettit said.

Treating two eyes with Luxturna costs $850,000, though St. Pierre Pettits insurance covers the procedure. She said the company that developed Luxturna, Spark Therapeutics, has also helped, including finding an AirBnB for the family to stay at during Creeds recovery.

Lam and St. Pierre Pettit should know how Creed has responded to the procedure in about a week, when his eye will have healed. If all goes well, Creeds other eye will be treated, too.

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St. Pierre Pettit said she hopes his sight will be much better after the procedure. I think its going to be big, she said. I think theres going to be a big change.

He is dying to see a real rainbow, she said.

Creed St. Pierre

Courtesy of Bascom Palmer Eye Institute

This article was first written by Newsweek

More from NewsweekBy Jake Spring CEILANDIA, Brazil (Reuters) - Diane Pereira had already used up half a large plastic water barrel by 9 a.m. as she cooked rice and beans for the coming lunch crowd as gospel music played quietly in her small, doorless restaurant in Ceilandia, a poor suburb of Brazil's capital. In the face of a government-instituted all-day water cutoff on Wednesday, Pereira said she was doing everything she could to economize, including using plastic cups instead of glass and using less water in the food. If her two barrels run dry, she will have to close up for the day. "It changes everything," the 28 year old said. "There's no water to wash your hands." While Pereira and others in her neighborhood will be waiting until midday on Thursday for the Federal District to turn on the water, taps will still be flowing freely in Brasilia at the World Water Forum, the world's largest water conference. Water for the area around the once-in-three-years gathering would normally be cut off on Thursday, but the place is exempt from regular rationing this week, because of logistical difficulties, according to Mauricio Luduvice, president of Federal District water authority Caesb. This week's conference, which ends on Friday, comes as Brazil is still dealing with prolonged droughts while panels such as "Water Crisis in Brazil" contend with the question of how people in the country richest in fresh water reserves could go thirsty. More than 900 of Brazil's 5,570 municipalities have water emergencies as a result of drought, according to the Ministry of National Integration. Much of the problem is getting the water where it needs to go, with government officials pointing to strides in delivering water in drought-stricken Brasilia, Sao Paulo and the northeast. Most notably, a canal carrying water hundreds of kilometers from the Sao Francisco River is now reaching 1 million people in Paraiba state who are experiencing the northeast's worst drought in a century. In the Federal District, the main reservoir level is up more than twelve fold thanks largely to new infrastructure and the rotating water rationing every six days will be eliminated this year, Luduvice said. Sao Paulo Governor Geraldo Alckmin said his state was an example of how to tackle such a crisis, listing several initiatives. Many say, however, the government needs to do more. NGOs such as SOS Mata Atlantica are planning to protest in front of Congress on Thursday morning over insufficient government water management. Beyond public projects to boost supply, said Henrique Chaves, a watershed management professor at University of Brasilia, Brazil needs to further rein in exploding water demand in cities to avoid more drought crises within the decade. Luduvice said after rationing ends, some reduction in demand will linger thanks to more conscientious usage. In Ceilandia, car wash owner Roberto Souza has rigged a system of gutters to the corrugated metal roof of his home to feed the 5,500 liter (1,500 gallon) cistern at his adjoining car wash, an improvisation after rationing began. "I'll continue this way (after rationing)," he said. "The day rationing comes again, I'll have this routine all in place." (Reporting by Jake Spring; Editing by Steve Orlofsky)BRASILIA (Reuters) - Brazil's Supreme Court on Thursday suspended its hearing of a plea from leftist former president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva that he not be sent to prison for a corruption conviction until he exhausts all possible appeals. The court said it would restart debate on Lula's case on April 4, its next session. The justices ruled that until they make a final judgment, Lula cannot be jailed. In January, an appeals court upheld Lula's conviction on taking bribes and money laundering and sentenced him to more than 12 years in prison. Next Monday, that same court is expected to rule on the final procedural appeals by Lula's legal team. If it rejects them, under Brazilian law Lula would then be eligible to begin serving his sentence, but that cannot happen until the Supreme Court finalizes its ruling in early April. Lula, Brazil's first working-class leader, remains the most popular politician in Latin America's biggest nation. He oversaw years of robust growth and falling inequality during a commodity boom last decade, and has said he wants to run again for the presidency in October. Lula leads all early polls. (Reporting by Ricardo Brito and Anthony Boadle; Editing by Matthew Lewis)Sao Paulo (AFP) - Brazil's ex-president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, better known as Lula, was on Sunday serving his first full day behind bars after receiving a 12-year prison sentence for corruption.

The 72-year-old arrived at the jail in the southern city of Curitiba late Saturday after days of political drama that gripped Brazil, becoming the country's first former leader to end up behind bars.

Here is a list of key dates in the life of one of the world's most popular politicians.

- October 27, 1945: Lula is born to a poor farming family in Brazil's northeast. His family moves when he is seven to the state of Sao Paulo to escape hunger.

- 1975: He becomes president of the metal workers' union, having worked in that sector since the age of 14.

- 1978-80: At the height of the military dictatorship, Lula leads major strikes in the industrial suburbs and is jailed for a month for his role.

- 1980: Lula co-founds the leftist Workers' Party (PT) and goes on to take part in the creation, in 1983, of the Unified Workers' Central (CUT), which becomes Brazil's largest trade union federation.

- 1986: He is elected to Congress.

- First leftist president -

- 2003: Lula becomes Brazil's first leftist president after winning election in the previous year. He is re-elected in 2006 for a term ending in 2010.

- 2016: The Supreme Court blocks his appointment as chief of staff to President Dilma Rousseff, his handpicked successor. She is then impeached in August after allegations of financial wrongdoing.

- July 2017: Lula is found guilty of receiving a bribe from a Brazilian construction company in return for contracts with state oil giant Petrobras. He is sentenced to nine and a half years behind bars.

- January 2018: He loses an appeal and his sentence is increased to 12 years and one month.

- April 5, 2018: After losing an appeal to delay the start of his sentence, Lula is ordered to turn himself in within 24 hours. He defies the order but later agrees to comply.

- April 7, 2018: Shortly before midnight, Lula becomes an inmate at the federal police headquarters in Curitiba.By Andrew Osborn and Maria Tsvetkova MOSCOW (Reuters) - Britain accused Moscow on Wednesday of running an assassination program to eliminate its enemies, while Russia said Britain may itself have orchestrated the poisoning of former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in England. In remarkable scenes at a Russian Foreign Ministry event in Moscow attended by dozens of foreign diplomats and broadcast on state TV, the two sides launched sharp allegations against each other over the nerve agent attack. The attack in Salisbury, England, has plunged ties between London and Moscow into their worst crisis since the Cold War. Britain has blamed Russia for the attack - something Moscow denies - and both have expelled diplomats in the standoff. Russia had organized Wednesday's event to explain its stance and lost little time in alleging that Britain itself had either directly or indirectly orchestrated the attack or had allowed "a terrorist attack" to take place on British soil. "Nobody understands what happened in Salisbury," Vladimir Yermakov, a diplomat who chaired the event, told foreign diplomats. "Let's investigate what really happened." His own view, he said, was that the poisoning had been a pre-planned action designed to harm Russia. Emma Nottingham, a British diplomat, countered that London had concluded it was "highly likely" that Moscow stood behind the attempted assassination of the Skripals for four reasons: "The identification of the chemical agent by our world leading scientists, our knowledge that Russia has previously produced this agent ... Russia's record in conducting state-sponsored assassinations ... and our assessment that Russia views defectors as legitimate targets." Many ambassadors including those of Britain, France, Germany and the United States, stayed away from the Moscow event, sending more junior officials instead. But key Western countries criticized Russia and offered Britain their support. Some others, including Sweden and the Czech Republic, publicly complained about Russian accusations that their countries might have been the origin of the nerve agent used in the Salisbury attack. Skripal, a former colonel in Russian GRU military intelligence who betrayed dozens of Russian agents to British intelligence, and his daughter Yulia have been critically ill since March 4, when they were found unconscious on a public bench in the English cathedral city. Skripal took refuge in England after being released by Moscow in a spy swap deal involving the exchange of some Russian spies held in the West. 'ISLAND MENTALITY' Britain says a military-grade nerve agent called Novichok, first developed by the Soviet Union, had been used in the attack. But Nottingham said Russia had failed to explain how the nerve agent used in the attack had got from Russia to England and why it was running an illegal chemical weapons program. "Instead, what we've seen is a barrage of distortion and disinformation ... and attempts to confuse the facts." Yermakov said Russia did not understand what was going in British officials' heads. Talk of the Novichok nerve agent was like something out of a British TV series, he said. "Aren't you ashamed of yourself ?," Yermakov asked Nottingham. "Pull yourselves away a little bit from your Russophobia and your island mentality." He said Moscow had nothing to do with the tragedy and wanted a wider investigation which, he said, meant London should share information and cooperate with Moscow. Speaking on a visit to Japan, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Russia wanted Britain to tell it where the Skripals were currently located. Lavrov said Moscow also wanted to know why the British government had accused Russia of responsibility when the police investigation into the Salisbury incident was incomplete. "Overall there is no doubt that the current British leadership has consciously taken a course to undermine Russian-British relations," Lavrov said at a news conference with his Japanese counterpart Taro Kono in Tokyo, according to a transcript on the Russian foreign ministry website. "If this will continue in the form of any tangible new anti-Russian actions then of course nobody has canceled the principle of reciprocity. It would be good for everyone and for (the British government) if they stopped getting agitated and calmed down." (Additional reporting by Denis Pinchuk; Editing by Richard Balmforth)Moscow (AFP) - Russia on Friday accused Britain of trying to force its allies to take "confrontational steps" after EU member states decided to recall the bloc's envoy from Moscow and mulled further diplomatic action over a nerve attack row.

Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov hit out at Britain for garnering EU support over the poisoning of a former double agent, suggesting that London's focus was now on making "the crisis with Russia as deep as possible".

Diplomatic pressure is growing on Moscow over its role in the nerve agent attack on Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in the English city of Salisbury in early March.

The European Union is recalling its ambassador to Moscow for consultations and a number of member states are considering whether to follow Britain's lead and expel Russian intelligence agents posing as diplomats.

"As for the decision taken, we regret in this context that again such decisions are taken using the wording 'highly likely'," President Vladimir Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov said.

"We don't agree with this and we repeat again that Russia absolutely definitely has nothing to do with the Skripal case."

Russia's top diplomat Lavrov accused Britain of "feverishly trying to force allies to take confrontational steps".

"We still do not see any facts," state news agency RIA Novosti quoted him as saying on a visit to Hanoi.

"The absence of which makes one think that all of this is a provocation, the investigation has not even been finished yet."

The Russian foreign ministry said it regretted "the European Union opted to take its cue from yet another anti-Russian campaign unleashed by London and its allies across the ocean."

In a televised address, Putin thanked Russians for giving him the "highest level of support in the history of our country" in Sunday's elections and urged the nation to come together amid the "difficult internal and external challenges we face."

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- 'Attack on EU sovereignty' -

French President Emmanuel Macron said in Brussels that "we see this attack as a serious challenge to our security and as an attack on European sovereignty."

He told a news conference with German Chancellor Angela Merkel that "it calls for a coordinated, determined response from the European Union and its member states."

Merkel said further steps were "necessary" to respond to the attack.

Latvia said it would expel "one or several" Russian diplomats while EU President Donald Tusk said more moves were expected as early as Monday

May briefed other EU leaders on the probe into the Salisbury attack over a summit dinner on Thursday.

She managed to overcome reluctance from countries such as Greece and Italy to jeopardise close Kremlin ties and persuaded them to back Britain's conclusion that Moscow was to blame.

Merkel said May had shared "certain findings" that left little doubt Moscow was behind the first offensive use of a nerve agent in Europe since World War II.

"We believe that the analyses are already very well-founded and this has not been questioned by anyone," Merkel said.

She backed further action from EU states, saying: "We agreed -- Germany and France at least -- that such reactions are still necessary in addition to recalling the ambassador."

European Commission chief Jean-Claude Juncker said the ambassador's recall was an "extraordinary measure" never before taken by the bloc.

But divisions remain over how far to go, with Austria already ruling out expelling diplomats.

Tusk said it was not clear how many countries would join the expulsions.

"More than one but I don't think that it will be the whole group," he said.

The leaders of the Czech Republic, Denmark and Ireland all said they were considering further unilateral steps, including expelling diplomats.

- Diplomats leave Moscow -

Britain expelled 23 Russian diplomats they said were spies, and Russia responded in kind, also halting the activities of the British Council cultural and educational organisation.

On Friday afternoon British diplomats left the Moscow mission in several minibuses as remaining diplomatic staff sent them off with a round of applause, Russian television showed.

The Kremlin has angrily rejected Britain's claims and Russian officials have offered numerous alternative explanations, including that London directed the attack itself or that Washington may have been involved.

The Skripals are both in a coma after being found collapsed on a park bench, although a policeman who was also contaminated was released from hospital on Thursday.ZARITSA (Bulgaria) (AFP) - What would you do if you came upon scores of distressed storks covered in ice lying in a snow-covered field? In Bulgaria, people have been taking them home.

A cold snap in the northeast of the country has stranded hundreds of the migrating birds this week, covering their wings in ice and grounding them.

"I found five frozen storks near the village road the day before yesterday," Safet Halil, 53, from the village of Zaritsa near the town of Dulovo told AFP on Wednesday.

"I took them home, lit a stove to warm them and fed them fish."

The road maintenance worker sparked a wave of support on social media on Monday and others in the region followed his example, with over 40 birds sheltered inside people's homes, garages or barns.

Experts said that freezing of their wings had forced the birds to spend the night on the ground instead of perched on trees as usual.

"It's the first time that we have seen so many storks in distress in Bulgaria," Hristina Klisurova from the Green Balkans wildlife rehabilitation centre in Stara Zagora said Wednesday.

She nevertheless appealed on public television for people to "avoid taking in just any stork" but only "those who are in a state of distress: injured or with frozen wings" and to also release any saved birds back into nature as soon as possible.

With the spell of high winds, sub-zero temperatures and snowstorms set to continue until the end of the week, Safet said he planned to keep his five companions in for several more days.

"It is minus three degrees Celsius (27 Fahrenheit) today and the weather is getting worse," he said.

Apart from that, the birds have recovered and were doing well.

"I already received two or three beak pinches on the arms," he smiled.

Bulgaria counted in 2016 almost 6,000 inhabited stork nests, around 1,000 more than the previous count 10 years before.

In neighbouring Romania, meanwhile, more than 200 small birds, most of them song thrushes, were found frozen to death this week, Ovidiu Bufnila from the Romanian ornithological society told AFP.

She advised people not to try to catch storks, saying that this would panic them and make them lose energy. Only those that approach need human help, she said.Indian Technomac Company Limited director Vinay Kumar Sharma was finally arrested on Wednesday after four years of investigation into an alleged Rs 6,000-crore fraud.

Sharma was produced before a local court, which remanded him to three-day police (CID) custody. The accused is the son of IAS officer ML Sharma, the former deputy Commissioner of Himachal Pradesh' Sirmour district.

The Paonta Sahib, Himachal Pradesh-based Indian Technomac had allegedly shut its manufacturing operations under suspicious circumstances in March 2014. The top management, too, fled the Jagatpur village campus without paying the dues, including wages or provident fund, to its employees.

The company had also not settled the payments for income tax, sales tax and electricity bills. The fraud was being probed by various state departments and agencies for the past four years.

Sharma was arrested after two FIRs were filed against him. The first one involved the payment of dues to the state electricity board through bank transfers using fake real-time gross settlement facility. The FIR also included tax evasion charges, Benami land purchases and violation of Section 118 of the Himachal Pradesh Tenancy and Land Reform Act, 1972.

Established in 2009, the RoC-registered company had availed benefits under central sales tax exemption norms by forging bank documents. It did not pay any sales tax till 2014 and subsequently shut shop without notice.

On March 12, the state Excise and Taxation Department filed an FIR with the Majra police station, against Indian Technomac managing director Rakesh Kumar Sharma and its three directors -- Vinay Sharma, Ranjan Mohan and Ashwani Saahu -- for cheating and forgery. All four have been booked under Sections 420, 467, 468, 471 and Section 34 of the Indian Penal Code.

Officials in the state Excise and Taxation Department said it had suffered losses of Rs 2,175.51 crore. Several banks were also duped of Rs 2,167 crore. The company owed Rs 750 crore to the Income Tax Department. Other departments, such as the state electricity board, EPF, labour department also suffered heavy losses.

The CID team has issued a look-out notice Rakesh Sharma, the main accused in the case, but suspects he may have fled the country. Pramod Chauhan, DSP, Paonta Sahib, said the investigation was underway.



With inputs from PTI

Abortion rights advocates and antiabortion supporters stand in front of the U.S. Supreme Court in 2016 after the court, in a 5-3 ruling in the case Whole Womans Health v. Hellerstedt, struck down a Texas abortion access law. (Photo: Getty Images)

As thousands of students participated in the March 14 national walkout against gun violence, a history teacher at Rocklin High School in California was busy posing a politically charged question to her class  one that would ultimately get her in trouble. If students [wanted] to walk out of school for 17 minutes and  protest abortion, would that be allowed by our administration? Julianne Benzel asked her class.

According to Benzel, the discussion that followed was fruitful  touching on where to draw the line when it comes to which topics can be protested. But when the news that she was questioning the politics of the walkout made it home to parents, the school reportedly decided to place Benzel on paid administrative leave.

In a statement to a local CBS affiliate KOVR, Rocklin Unified School District spokesperson said Benzel wasnt being penalized based on her viewpoints, but that the actions were being taken due to complaints from parents and students. Although shes now back in the classroom, and the event is behind her, Benzels words seem to have galvanized a new movement. Inspired by her words, one student is now planning a march around the very topic that she raised: abortion.

Brandon Gillespie, the main student from Rocklin High School behind the abortion march, told KOVR that its more than just a reaction to Benzels treatment. [Its] to honor all the lives of aborted babies pretty much, Gillespie said. All the millions of aborted babies every year. Gillespie told the news station that he plans to use the hashtag #life. Although an exact day for the abortion protest has not been chosen, Gillespie is reportedly meeting with the principal on Friday to discuss plans for the march.

Whether other students will join remains to be seen, but Gillespie isnt alone in his admiration for Benzels words. Nick Wade, another student, told KOVR that it was the discussion in Benzels class that convinced him not to participate in the walkout. I feel like if we were to go to school and say something like I want to walk out maybe for abortion rights, then you know they probably wouldnt let us because thats more of a conservative push, said Wade. But someone wants to say lets walk out for gun control then the schools going to go with it because its more of a popular view.

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As issues among teens go, a protest against legal abortions in America is radical. According to a 2003 Gallup Poll, 66 percent of kids ages 13-17 believe that abortion should be legal in some circumstances (and 21 percent of those believe it should be legal under any circumstances).

Not everyone agrees with Gillespie. One detractor, according to KOVR, is Naeirika Neev, a student who also edits the school paper. Neev stressed that everyone has First Amendment rights, but suggests that a protest surrounding abortion is missing the point. Abortions arent really anything that has to do with school or students here, she told KOVR.

In an opinion piece penned by Neev on her schools website, the Flash, she elaborates on her views about the abortion protest. The comparison of a protest against gun violence and that of an abortion is a logical fallacy  a false equivalence, Neev writes. When we, as the student body, have to step foot in school worried for our lives  it becomes an issue concerning the school.

Neev goes on to discuss Benzels administrative leave, as well as the walkout on March 14 (which two-thirds of the school participated in), before ending with a call to action. As the future of this nation, students across the country are making their voices heard, she writes. [We] will not back down until the lives of students holds more value than profits made off of weapons and outdated laws held together by lies and bribes.

As for Gillespie and the march hes planning, he told KOVR that he hopes the event will give students an opportunity to put the debate Benzel raised to the test. I would like to see if there really is a double standard and what will come of that, he said.

Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle:

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FILE PHOTO: Amor Ftouhi, arrested in connection with the stabbing of a police officer at Bishop International Airport in Flint, Michigan, is pictured in this undated handout photo obtained by Reuters June 29, 2017. FBI/Handout via REUTERS/File Photo

By Keith Coffman

(Reuters) - A U.S. grand jury has indicted a Canadian man accused of stabbing a police officer at a Michigan airport last year on an additional terrorism charge stemming from the attack, federal prosecutors said on Wednesday.

Amor Ftouhi, 50, is accused of "committing an act of terrorism transcending national boundaries" by traveling from Canada to the United States in an attempt to kill government officials, according to the indictment handed up in U.S. District Court in Flint, Michigan.

Ftouhi's court-appointed attorney did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Ftouhi, who is from Tunisia and holds dual Tunisian-Canadian citizenship, was originally charged last year with violence at an international airport for stabbing Jeff Neville, an officer at the Bishop International Airport in Flint, in the neck, authorities said.

Wednesday's additional charge, or superseding indictment, adds a terrorism count that carries a potential life sentence for Ftouhi if he is convicted.

"This additional terrorism charge against Mr. Ftouhi shows we will  to the fullest extent of the law  vigorously prosecute terrorists who seek to harm the people of Michigan," U.S. Attorney Matthew Schneider said in a statement.

According to the indictment, Ftouhi researched American gun laws from his home in Montreal, searching for the closest state where he could easily purchase a firearm.

He also withdrew funds from his bank account to buy a gun, and entered the United States by automobile at the Champlain, New York, port of entry five days before the attack.

"On or about June 18, 2017, Amor M. Ftouhi traveled to a gun

show in Mount Clemens, Michigan and, when he was unsuccessful in purchasing a firearm, purchased a knife instead," the indictment said.

Ftouhi then did online searches about the Flint airport, and went there to observe police and the facility's security, the indictment said.

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On June 21, Ftouhi approached Neville at the Flint airport and stabbed him, shouted "Allahu Akbar (God is greatest)," and referenced killings in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, federal prosecutors said in a statement.

"After his arrest, Mr. Ftouhi told law enforcement that he was a 'soldier of Allah' and subscribed to the ideology of al-Qaeda and Usama bin Laden," the statement said.

Ftouhi will be arraigned on the new charge at a later date, prosecutors said.

(Reporting by Keith Coffman in Denver; Editing by Andrew Hay and Peter Cooney)Barcelona (AFP) - Catalan separatist parties failed to elect a new regional president on Thursday after their most radical faction refused to back the proposed candidate in a vote of confidence.

Former Catalan government spokesman Jordi Turull obtained 64 votes in favour and 65 against, prolonging the political deadlock in the wealthy Spanish region.

There were four abstentions from the far-left CUP party.

The vote triggers a two month deadline for Catalonia to install a new regional government before fresh Catalan elections must be held.

Under parliamentary regulations a second round parliamentary vote must now take place within two days.

Turull, the only candidate, is not even guaranteed a win in a second round scheduled for Saturday, where he would require a simple majority from the 135-seat Catalan parliament to be elected.

As if this wasn't enough, it's uncertain whether the former Catalan government spokesman will even be able to attend the second session as he has been summoned before a Supreme Court judge on Friday along with five other separatist leaders.

The judge is due to notify them of the charges brought against them for their role in the Catalan independence drive, and may even remand some of them in custody pending a trial.

- 'So much indecision' -

With this in mind, Turull did not mention the word "independence" during his speech to the Catalan parliament even though the CUP demanded a greater commitment to the separatist cause if he wants their support.

Instead he appealed for dialogue with Spanish's central government.

"We ask to sit at the same table to resolve politically the problems we face," he said.

Just minutes before the parliamentary session kicked off to appoint Turull the CUP, which with its four lawmakers plays a kingmaker's role in the pro-independence camp, said it refused to back his bid arguing that his proposed programme did not press hard enough for independence.

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"The time has come to say no to so many calculations, to so much indecision, to so many delays," said the tiny party's parliamentary spokesman, Carles Riera.

Catalan parliament speaker Roger Torrent called the express parliamentary session on Thursday, faced with what he dubbed the "interference" of the Supreme Court.

Had Turull managed to be sworn in, he would have gone before the judge on Friday as Catalonia's new president-elect and jailing him would take on a greater gravity.

Turull is the third separatist candidate to be proposed following failed bids by Catalonia's ousted president Carles Puigdemont and jailed pro-independence activist Jordi Sanchez, who withdrew Wednesday.

As such, Spanish media have dubbed him the separatists' "plan C."

- 'Prolong chaos' -

The anti-independence, centrist Ciudadanos party slammed the express parliamentary session.

"You don't want to govern, you want to prolong the chaos," Ines Arrimadas, Ciudadanos's chief in Catalonia, said during the debate in parliament.

"You can't be part of the solution that we need in Catalonia because you are part of the problem."

Spain's Justice Minister Rafael Catala accused the separatists of seeking "a clash with the rule of law, with institutions."

Speaking on Spanish radio, Catala said that calling the session to appoint a candidate under investigation "shows there is no real desire to find solutions for the future, but only to continue muddying the playing field."

Separatist parties won regional elections in December called by Madrid after they attempted to secede, retaining their absolute majority in parliament.

But they have still not been able to form a government as their two previous candidates for the presidency proved problematic.

Puigdemont went into self-exile in Belgium after separatist lawmakers declared independence last October and Sanchez is in jail pending the probe into the secession drive.

As long has it does not have a government, Catalonia will remain under direct rule from Madrid, imposed after the independence declaration.Good Morning America

A mom who is in the final stage in herfight against ovarian cancer is sharing the details of her "gritty story" to help educate and inform women. Dr. Nadia Chaudhri, a 44-year-old neuroscientist and professor from Montreal, Canada, has been battling Stage 3 ovarian cancer for the past year, undergoing a hysterectomy and several rounds of chemotherapy. In May, Chaudhri, the mom of a 6-year-old son, was hospitalized again and learned the cancer had returned, forcing her to tell her son that her cancer was now terminal.Washington (AFP) - President Donald Trump's increasingly tough measures on trade, including Thursday's latest crackdown on China, demonstrate the rising influence of Peter Navarro, a Harvard-trained economist who has long railed against the threat from Beijing.

Trump announced tariffs on as much as $60 billion in Chinese imports to retaliate against the alleged theft of American intellectual property.

The move comes just two weeks after the White House slapped steep tariffs on imported steel and aluminum, actions also aimed at China which were crafted under Navarro's watch.

He has advised Trump since his upstart presidential campaign, when candidate Trump vowed to crack down on unfair trade practices he argued have destroyed American jobs and left once-mighty US cities a shadow of their former selves.

Navarro's works include the documentary film, "Death by China: how America lost its manufacturing base," connected to his 2011 book showing China as a serial trade cheater, subsidizing export-oriented industries and manipulating its currency.

The consequences, including a harsh deindustrialization of the United States, demand a tough response to China, or the "Dragon," Navarro argued.

"Unless all of us rise up together to confront the Dragon, the rest of our lives and the lives of our children will be far less prosperous -- and far more dangerous -- than the Golden Age in which many of us grew up," he wrote in the book's first chapter.

- Outside the mainstream -

The silver haired, polished Navarro, who will be 69 in July, looks the part of university lecturer, which he was for many years at the University of California at Irvine. But his views on trade are far from mainstream.

While most economists laud the North American Free Trade Agreement as a boon for the US economy, Navarro has been a constant critic of the accord and of international trade in general. In Trump, he found an eager acolyte.

Story continues

Trump threatened to pull out of NAFTA, but held off after ordering the 24-year-old treaty be renegotiated with partners Canada and Mexico.

That was after Trump signed an executive order formally ending US participation in the Trans-Pacific Partnership in one of his first official acts as president in January 2017.

Despite these early signs of trade hawkishness by the Trump administration, Navarro operated largely in the background for the first year in office.

Former White House economic advisor Gary Cohn took a leading role in trade policy, and Navarro was required to copy Cohn on all emails.

But Cohn, a former Goldman Sachs executive who backs free trade, was outmaneuvered on the steel and aluminum tariffs, and he announced on March 6 he would leave the Trump administration.

-'Visionary' -

With Cohn's departure, Navarro has become a frequent spokesman for the Trump administration on business news broadcasts.

He told CNBC last week that Trump planned to take punitive measures against Beijing over its "theft" of US intellectual property, the measures announced Thursday.

Navarro was named to Trump's team soon after the election and quickly labeled a "visionary" by the American president. But his appointment spurred immediate unease at Beijing and many observers have seen his standing within the Trump universe as a proxy for the administration's stance on trade.

Long affiliated with the Democratic party, which historically has been more protectionist of the two major parties, Navarro received a doctorate in economics from Harvard.

Born to a saxophonist father and secretary mother, he was raised by his mother after the two divorced in Bethesda, Maryland, an upscale suburb of the nation's capital.China must strike back against U.S. interference over Taiwan and prepare for a direct military clash, Beijing state media has said.

On Tuesday, Alex Wong, U.S. deputy assistant secretary at the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, became the first official to visit Taiwan after President Donald Trump signed the Taiwan Travel Act, which allows for and encourages high-level official visits between the two countries.

China strongly condemned the legislation as they have long considered the self-governed island to be a wayward province. During his speech at the National Peoples Congress on Tuesday, President Xi Jinping said any attempt at separatism is doomed to fail and those involved will face the punishment of history.

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RTX3D8CT (1)

Reuters

We must strike back against Washington's implementation of the Taiwan Travel Act, Global Times, the ruling Communist Partys official paper, said in an editorial on Thursday. The mainland must also prepare itself for a direct military clash in the Taiwan Straits. It needs to make clear that escalation of U.S.-Taiwan official exchanges will bring serious consequences to Taiwan."

It added: This newspaper has suggested that the mainland can send military planes and warships across the Taiwan Straits middle line. This can be implemented gradually depending on the cross-Straits situation.

Don't miss: Netflix and YouTube under Threat as Turkey Strengthens Blocks on Internet Broadcasts

The Taiwan Travel Act sparked concerns in the mainland that high-level visits may eventually lead to the U.S. recognizing Taiwan as a country, which would set a precedent for other nations to follow suit.

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The Chinese Embassy in Washington heavily criticized the legislation and said it severely violates the political foundation of the China-U.S. relationship. It also condemned America for ignoring One China, a policy in which the U.S. recognizes Beijing's idea that it has sovereignty over Taipei.

In 1949, Taiwan became a self-ruled island, although still officially the Republic of China. Since then, Chinese Communist leaders have wanted to regain the province and has never renounced the use of force to bring it back under Beijings control.

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Last December, Chinas military drills around Taiwan escalated. Taipei said they posed an "enormous threat" to the island's national security, despite Beijings claims that they were routine.

Taiwans first female president and leader of the independence-leaning Democratic Progressive Party, Tsai Ing-wen, said she wants to preserve peace but will defend Taiwans security and way of life if pushed to do so.

This article was first written by Newsweek

More from NewsweekChina tested unmanned tanks this week in hopes of eventually arming the vehicles with artificial intelligence, according to Chinese state-run newspaper Global Times on Wednesday.

Footage of the tests was shown on state television. It depicted converted unmanned versions of a Soviet-era Chinese tank driven by remote control. This was the first time the Chinese public has been shown testing of the unmanned version of the vehicle, according to Reuters. The original Type 59 first entered into service in Chinas Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) at the end of the 1950s.

A large number of due-to-retire Type 59 tanks can be converted into unmanned vehicles if equipped with artificial intelligence, said Liu Qingshan, editor of Tank and Armored Vehicle, to the state paper.

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Chinas recently re-elected president and party leader Xi Jinping announced an aggressive military modernization last year aiming to be a world-class military by 2049. In particular, China is spending big on artificial intelligence.

Last year, China's State Council announced plans to become the world's primary [artifical intelligence] innovation center, and its market is forecasted to be worth $150 billion by 2030. Military applications for artificial intelligence span far and wide. Last month, the PLAs newspaper announced the successful test of unmanned 22-foot-long patrol boats.

James Lewis, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank, told the Financial Times that Chinas spending in the sector far outweighs that of the U.S.

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The Chinese invest billions, [the U.S.] spends millions. Its hard to see how you wing it when you are being outspent a thousand to one. We are not going to win when we are outgunned to that extent; even if they are half as efficient its still 500:1, said Lewis.

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Some U.S. lawmakers are worried about the potential impacts of artificial intelligence on security. Representative Elise Stefanik, the chair of the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities, brought forth legislation Wednesday that would assemble a commission to study and analyze artificial intelligence as a threat and an asset to the U.S.

Artificial intelligence has already produced many things in use today, including web search, object recognition in photos or videos, prediction models, self-driving cars, and automated robotics, said Stefanik in a statement. It is critical to our national security but also to the development of our broader economy that the United States becomes the global leader in further developing this cutting-edge technology.

The congresswoman's communications director, Tom Flanagin, told Newsweek via email that the aim of the legislation was to ignite the conversation in U.S. defense policy to ensure the United States is not surpassed by China.

This article was first written by Newsweek

More from NewsweekBEIJING (Reuters) - China's central province of Hunan from April 1 will no longer set prices for natural gas used by vehicles, state-run Hunan Daily said, the latest region to fall in line with years-long Beijing-led reforms and start liberalizing its gas market. Hunan appears to be the first province to introduce such a scheme on a province-wide basis, although official statements show Datong city in Shanxi province and some cities in Inner Mongolia have launched similar programs in recent months. Taxi drivers in Hunan are worried about a surge in prices once the government frees them, the paper said. The regional government will still set prices for residential gas. The local government will also keep watch on the compressed natural gas (CNG) market to prevent major price swings, it said. (Reporting by Meng Meng and Josephine Mason; Editing by Clarence Fernandez and Tom Hogue)BEIRUT/DAMASCUS (Reuters) - Syrian rebels withdrew in busloads from a town in eastern Ghouta on Thursday and handed it over to the army, the first such surrender since one of the fiercest campaigns of the seven-year war began more than a month ago. The Ahrar al-Sham group's decision to accept the army's terms and abandon the town of Harasta puts the government on course for its biggest victory over rebels since the battle of Aleppo in 2016. And in another part of the same region, the controlling rebel group, Failaq al-Rahman, said a ceasefire had been agreed, to start within hours at midnight local time (2200 GMT), to allow a "final negotiating session" to take place. After dark fell on Thursday, around 30 buses carrying rebel fighters and their families left Harasta. Syrian state media said the buses carried 1,580 people, including 413 rebel fighters given safe passage to northwestern Syria. A military media unit run by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's ally Hezbollah said 1,500 fighters and 6,000 family members had agreed to leave. An army officer interviewed on state television said rebels who had not yet negotiated similar deals to evacuate from other towns in eastern Ghouta must quit or die. "Death is coming for you if you do not surrender," he said. The army's assault on eastern Ghouta, the last major rebel bastion near the capital, has been one of the most intense in Syria's seven-year-old war, killing more than 1,500 people in a relentless bombardment with warplanes, rockets and shells. Before boarding the buses out of Harasta, a small group were shown on television in the fading light kneeling in a line for Islam's sunset prayer - perhaps the last they would perform in their hometown. Children ran among the adults waiting to board. Between 18,000 and 20,000 people were expected to stay in Harasta under government rule, a military source said. PROVEN TACTICS The eastern Ghouta campaign has seen Syria and its Russian allies use the tactics that proved successful in other parts of the country since Moscow joined the war in 2015: lay siege to an area, bombard it, launch a ground assault and finally offer safe passage out to rebels who agree to leave with their families. The government's control of Harasta leaves eastern Ghouta's rebels in control only of the town of Douma -- under the control of Jaish al-Islam -- and another pocket that includes the towns of Jobar, Ein Terma, Arbin and Zamalka -- under the control of Failaq al-Rahman. State television reported that more than 6,000 people had fled Douma since Wednesday, crossing over into government-held territory. Government air strikes pummelled parts of the region on Thursday morning, striking Arbin and Zamalka and killing 19 people, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitoring group. Failaq al-Rahman's Istanbul-based spokesman Wael Alwan said it had contacted the United Nations to mediate a ceasefire with Russian forces "in order to negotiate with the Russian side about finding a solution to guarantee the safety of civilians and to guarantee that their suffering stops". State media said rebels fired rockets from eastern Ghouta into Damascus on Thursday, killing two people. Television showed burning projectile parts on streets and in parks. SURRENDER On Sunday, Assad drove himself to a newly captured battlefront in eastern Ghouta, a demonstration of his seemingly unassailable position in a war that has been going his way since Russia sent its air force to help him in 2015. The deal to surrender Harasta began on Thursday with a prisoner swap. In an interview with state television, a Syrian soldier freed by rebels wept and thanked God and the army for his release. The Russian Defence Ministry website showed what it said was live footage from the al-Wafideen crossing point from Douma into government areas. Over a period of several minutes, it showed dozens of people in small groups coming around a corner and trekking along the dirt road past armed soldiers. Some bore bundles of possessions, others carried small children or pushed prams. Douma is the most populous area in eastern Ghouta, and for more than a week it has been entirely surrounded by the government. Jaish al-Islam has said it is determined to fight on. However, the Observatory said people leaving the area were doing so under an agreement between the group and Russia. FEROCITY The Syrian government and Russia accuse rebels in eastern Ghouta of preventing civilians from leaving to use them as human shields, which the rebels deny. Moscow and Damascus say their campaign is needed to end rebel shelling of the capital and other nearby areas. On Tuesday, a rocket struck a marketplace in a government-held town, killing dozens. However, the ferocity of the Syrian army's offensive in eastern Ghouta has prompted Western condemnation and urgent pleas from United Nations humanitarian agencies for a ceasefire. Russia's Defence Ministry said that, since Russia began imposing "humanitarian pauses" almost a month ago, some 95,000 people had left eastern Ghouta for government territory. The Harasta rebels will be taken to Idlib province in the northwest, which has become the main sanctuary for insurgents who agree to quit territory under deals with the government. The northwestern province is the biggest remaining area under rebel control in Syria and its population has been doubled by refugees fleeing other areas. But it too is a target for forces loyal to Assad, who vows he will reassert control over the entire country. The Observatory said that, over the previous 48 hours, air strikes on Idlib had killed at least 63 people. (Reporting by Firas Makdesi and Kinda Makieh in Damascus; Ellen Francis, Angus McDowall and Lisa Barrington in Beirut.; Editing by Angus MacSwan/Tom Perry)CNN John Kings spent part of his Inside Politics broadcast on Wednesday railing against President Donald Trump for, among other things, consistent spelling errors in his tweets.

The pointed commentary came after Trump posted an early Wednesday morning tweet was rife with misspelled words, including wether instead of whether and council instead of counsel.

The tweet has since been deleted and replaced  but counsel is still misspelled.

Heres a screenshot of the original, in which Trump paraphrased comments Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz had made on Fox News about special counsel Robert Muellers probe of Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

(Photo: Twitter)

King felt compelled to call out Trump for his sloppiness.

Theres no staff around when the president watches the morning cable shows and lashes out, King said. And apparently no spell check or grammar police.

King then showed the tweets on the screen and schooled the president.

Thats a D or an F if this were a spelling or grammar quiz, he said.

King speculated that the misspellings occur partially because Trump is angry at his lawyers because theyve been unable to make Mueller disappear and because he doesnt like the questions the special counsel has outlined in negotiations over a possible presidential interview.

Still, thats no excuse for spelling errors, King said.

I hate to do this, hes the president of the United States, King said. Whether you agree or disagree, hes supposed to be an example to our children [and] for our country.

King called the errors horrible and explained why the president should aspire to better crafted tweets.

I assume he knows better. He says he went to the best schools. I assume he can spell. I assume he knows basic grammar, but that is just rage. Hes sitting there in what they jokingly call executive time in the morning watching cable television, nobody around.

King then wondered if the president is in need of supervision.

Story continues

Part 1 of the segment can be seen below.

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This article originally appeared on HuffPost.Even as the evaluating committee is in process of finalising bidding norms for the sale of the beleaguered Air India, the airline has managed to make history once again. The first Air India direct flight from New Delhi to Tel Aviv will take off today at 6.10 pm. Significantly, this will be the first time that Saudi Arabia allows an Israel-bound flight to enter its airspace, thus ending a seven decade old ban.

Many Arab and Islamic nations do not recognise Israel and, therefore, disallow airlines from using their airspace for flight services to and from the latter. Riyadh lifting the airspace ban reflects what appears to be thawing ties between Israel and the kingdom. Both countries are US allies with a shared concern over growing Iranian influence in the region, especially after the 2015 nuclear accord, which both governments strongly opposed.

"The response has been good so far and the inaugural flight has sold 50 per cent seats. The return flight has seen much better bookings with 80 per cent of the seats booked," claimed an Air India official. The return flight is scheduled for March 25, when the summer schedule comes into operation. With this the national carrier kicks off a thrice-a-week service between the two cities. It will be operating its 256-seater Boeing 787 Dreamliner on the route - with flights scheduled every Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday - and the introductory return fares start at Rs 35,500.

The Israeli Foreign Ministry reportedly said in a statement that Israel considers the new route important. He further noted that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu raised the matter of the route with his counterpart, Narendra Modi, when the two met in Israel last July and again in India two months back. The ministry added that the route would lower fares along with boosting investment and tourism from India.

The unprecedented clearance to fly over Saudi airspace is a big deal also because it opens up a shorter route between the two countries. The Air India flight will fly over Oman, Saudi Arabia and Jordan to reach Israel, covering the distance in a little over 7 hours. That's more than 2 hours less than the only alternative flight available currently - El Al's four weekly flights from Tel Aviv to Mumbai. Due to the airspace restrictions, Israel's flag carrier is forced to take a more circuitous route over the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, which makes for a longer flight. No wonder Air India's Chairman and Managing Director Pradeep Kharola anticipates traveller interest in the new service even from countries further to the east of India, such as Australia.

Recognising that El Al would now be at disadvantage, both in terms of cost and travel time, its CEO Gonen Usishkin reportedly penned a letter to the International Air Transport Association earlier this month seeking "equal overfly rights" to ensure a fair competition. "I am approaching you and kindly requesting IATA to intervene and to represent aviation industry's interest by advocating equal overfly rights for all carriers over the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and opposing any form of discrimination," he wrote in the letter, seen by Reuters, adding that he has also approached Netanyahu. Any such move, however, would mark a dramatic diplomatic shift between the Arab nation and what may soon come to be known as "the nation-state of the Jewish people" if Israel passes its controversial nation-state bill. So Air India is likely to retain its edge on this route for some time to come.

(With agency inputs)Paris (AFP) - A Libyan dictator, a drowned witness, an arms broker who says he delivered suitcases of cash: the corruption scandal engulfing French ex-president Nicolas Sarkozy involves a cast to rival that of a Hollywood thriller.

- The 'bling-bling' president -

Sarkozy, a combative rightwinger who served one term from 2007-2012, has furiously denied claims that his first election campaign was funded by millions in illicit donations from former Libyan dictator Moamer Kadhafi.

The 63-year-old was charged Wednesday with corruption, illegal campaign financing and concealment of Libyan public money.

In his court statement, he complained he had been in "living hell" since the allegations emerged in 2011 -- going so far as to blame them for his failure to win re-election in 2012.

Socialist rival Francois Hollande ended up beating him with 51.6 percent of the vote, with Sarkozy taking a hit from left-leaning voters who viewed him as a "president of the rich".

Nicknamed the "bling-bling" president, Sarkozy was known for his flashy displays of wealth.

He attempted a comeback in last year's presidential election but did not even manage to clinch his Republicans party's nomination.

His various legal woes, including the Libya scandal, played a major role in Francois Fillon securing the rightwing nomination instead.

- The Libyan dictator -

After ruling Libya with an iron fist for 41 years, Kadhafi met a bloody end in 2011 at the hands of rebel fighters.

His death came in the midst of a NATO military intervention -- led by Sarkozy's France.

It was a sharp turnaround from 2007 when Sarkozy raised eyebrows internationally by giving Kadhafi the red-carpet treatment during a state visit.

Critics denounced the trip, during which Kadhafi pitched his famous bedouin tent next to the Elysee Palace, as an attempt to rehabilitate a pariah long accused of human rights abuses.

Claims that Kadhafi fronted Sarkozy millions of euros would suggest the leader was keen to win a friend in Europe as he sought to come in from the cold.

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Sarkozy rejects allegations from Kadhafi-era officials that they funded his campaign as vindictive lies in retaliation for his role in ousting the dictator.

- The arms broker -

Franco-Lebanese businessman Ziad Takieddine claims he delivered three suitcases containing a total of five million euros ($6 million) to Sarkozy and his chief of staff in 2006 and 2007.

Sarkozy was interior minister at the time.

Takieddine, a controversial millionaire well-connected in French rightwing circles, has worked as a broker in international business deals, including in arms.

Takieddine has been charged over the Libya affair and is also being investigated in another case for which Sarkozy has been interviewed as a witness -- alleged kickbacks on a Pakistani arms deal.

Sarkozy has blasted Takieddine as "highly suspect", while the businessman has hit back: "I'm not the liar here."

- Sarkozy's men -

Claude Gueant, Sarkozy's former chief of staff at the Elysee Palace, is accused of receiving some of the cash.

He also received a 500,0000-euro bank transfer in 2008 from a Malaysian company which he said was from the sale of two paintings.

Investigators were not convinced, however, and he has been charged with tax fraud.

According to police documents seen by the investigative website Mediapart, he was found to have withdrawn only 800 euros in cash from his known bank accounts between 2003-2012 and also paid for a 720,000-euro Parisian apartment in cash.

He has denied any wrongdoing.

Former interior minister Brice Hortefeux has also been questioned over a document published by Mediapart purporting to show he met in 2006 with Kadhafi's intelligence chief and the head of Libya's sovereign wealth fund.

Meanwhile, the treasurer of Sarkozy's 2007 campaign, prominent rightwing MP Eric Woerth, has admitted the campaign received cash payments which he said were anonymous donations received by post.

Other witnesses have rejected this, including a staffer who said they never saw any envelopes of cash arriving.

- Libyans, shot and drowned -

Bashir Saleh, who ran Libya's sovereign wealth fund under Kadhafi, is wanted for questioning in France.

He initially sought refuge in France after Kadhafi's downfall but fled when Tripoli issued an international arrest warrant against him.

Now in exile, he was injured in a shooting in South Africa in February.

A second senior Kadhafi loyalist, former oil minister Shukri Ghanem, was found drowned in the Danube river in Vienna in 2012.

Documents belonging to Ghanem refer to three payments in 2007 to Sarkozy for at least 6.5 million euros.

- The 'villa-owner' -

Alexandre Djouhri, another controversial businessman, is suspected of having been the true owner of a villa on France's glitzy Cote d'Azur that was sold to a fund managed by Saleh in 2009.

The house was sold at a suspiciously high price, leading investigators to question if it could have been used to funnel illicit payments into France.

Djouhri is also accused of helping Saleh flee the country on a private jet.

He was arrested in London in January. He is currently in hospital with heart problems, and is due to learn in July if he will be extradited to France.Dave Majumdar

Security,

The Defense Department is looking at ways to prevent an enemy from being able to launch a weapon in the first place.

Could America Stop a Cruise Missile or Hypersonic Weapons Attack by Russia or China?

With Russia and China developing advanced cruise missiles and weapons such as hypersonic boost-glide vehicles, the United States is looking at ways to defeat threats other than incoming intercontinental ballistic missiles. Moreover, the Pentagon recognizes that it might not be able to stop an incoming missile before it launches, thus the Defense Department is looking at ways to prevent an enemy from being able to launch a weapon in the first place.

The Department is conducting a 2018 Missile Defense Review (MDR), Gen. John E. Hyten, commander of U.S. Strategic Command told the Senate Armed Services Committee on April 4 in his written testimony. The MDR is broader in scope than the 2010 Ballistic Missile Defense Review, addressing more than the ballistic missile threat, specifically hypersonic vehicles and cruise missiles.

Hytens reasoning was that adversaries are increasingly developing sophisticated weapons to counter Americas existing missiles defenses.

Missile proliferation and lethality continues to increase as more countries acquire greater numbers of missiles and are increasing their technical sophistication specifically to defeat U.S. missile defense systems, Hyten wrote. In the past year, we continue to see missile tests from North Korea and Iran as well as other nations that are introducing increasingly sophisticated missiles  all of which cause us and our allies deep concern.

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Hyten framed the development of adversary missile capabilities as a challenge to American power, which has until relatively recently gone largely unchallenged since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Story continues

Their efforts to advance missile technologies threaten global stability and seek to degrade our ability to project power, Hyten said.

In Hytens view, the danger from advanced missiles is so great that active attempts at interception are no longer enough.

We cannot be successful in this endeavor by investing solely in active missile defense capabilities  we must strengthen and integrate all pillars of missile defense including the capability to defeat adversary missiles before they launch, Hyten said. We are exploring efficiencies gained by fusing non-kinetic, cyber, electromagnetic, and kinetic capabilities to deny, defend, and defeat adversary threats.

But while engaging an enemy launch vehicle is one thing, the Pentagon needs to get better at finding an enemy missile in the first place.

Furthermore, we are requesting additional efforts invested in the Departments ability to find, fix, track, target, engage, and assess (F2T2EA) threats and the adoption of corresponding policy and organizational constructs, Hyten said. We continue to gain synergy through integrated missile defense planning, force management, and operations support ensuring global coordination of regional missile defense execution  thereby, matching the best interceptor with the best sensor.

The Pentagon also hopes to work with U.S. allies to help defend against incoming ballistic missiles. Some of the Pentagons efforts include hosting wargames.

We must strengthen our collaboration with our allies and explore further integration of our collective capabilities toward an effective mutual defense, Hyten said. We are investing in collaboration with our allies across multiple venues, including the USSTRATCOM-hosted NIMBLE TITAN wargame. We conduct this biennial wargame with key allies and in partnership with the Department of State and other combatant commands. We continually explore and experiment with potential collaboration and integration approaches with our allies to inform development of options for operations, policies, and investment.

It remains to be seen how Stratcom and the Missile Defense Agencys efforts pan out. Most of the Pentagons efforts to defeat intercontinental ballistic missiles have not performed as nearly well as advertised.

Dave Majumdar is the defense editor for The National Interest. You can follow him on Twitter: @davemajumdar.

Read full articlePresident Donald Trump has a true supporter in former Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke.

How else to explain a bizarre and homophobic joke Clarke made on Wednesday in an attempt to defend the president from former Vice President Joe Biden.

During a Tuesday night rally at the University of Miami, Biden called out Trump for the way he treats women.

A guy who ended up becoming our national leader said, I can grab a woman anywhere and she likes it. ... They asked me if Id like to debate this gentleman, and I said no, Biden told the crowd. I said, If we were in high school, Id take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him.



Ive been in a lot of locker rooms my whole life, he continued. Im a pretty damn good athlete. Any guy that talked that way was usually the fattest, ugliest SOB in the room.



Yes, Bidens comments were strange, but Clarke met them in kind when he tweeted this on Wednesday:

JOE BIDEN: IVE BEEN IN A LOT OF LOCKER ROOMS IN MY LIFE.

Really Joe? Please tell us why and what you were doing hanging around all those locker rooms, Joe? Taking in the sights? Did the soap keep falling out of your hands Joe? Huh? Tell us Joe. #MAGA. https://t.co/NbMVGH4qqB  David A. Clarke, Jr. (@SheriffClarke) March 21, 2018

Twitter users were quick to call out Clarke for the tacky, unfunny joke:

I saw him give a motivational talk in an NCAA locker room during March Madness. You dont seem like an athlete or a team player. The soap thing happens in prison I think, or jails where guys like you and Joe Arpaio cause peoples deaths.  Deena (@Dlstoke) March 21, 2018

I've been in a lot of locker rooms, too, Dave. Interesting that you think going into one immediately involves lots of gay sex.



I guess that ridiculous beard you sport is also metaphorical, huh?  Dane (@SeeDaneRun) March 21, 2018

Exactly. Assholes like this think about gay sex fantasies WAY MORE than actual gay people.  BBDeepStateBOO! (@AngryMidAgeMan) March 21, 2018

Changing clothes and taking a shower like the rest of us? Apparently you dont have a flair badge for common sense.  Richlow (@halo0801) March 21, 2018

You have odd ideas of what goes on in locker rooms, man.  poljunk (@poljunk) March 21, 2018

Clarke, who resigned his post in August, has been known for making incendiary tweets.

Story continues

In January, he was temporarily barred from posting on Twitter after people complained his tweets encouraged violence against the media.

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Go Deep, Governor! No, Further! Keep Going! ... Heh-Heh.

Vice President Joe Biden throws a football from the top of the stairs before boarding Air Force Two at Pittsburgh International Airport in Pittsburgh, PA, July 1, 2009.

Joe Biden: His Thumbs-Up Are Actual Rainbows

When we landed at Southwest Florida International Airport aboard Air Force Two, it was still raining, but by the time we taxied to our parking spot the rain had let up and a rainbow was starting to form in the sky. I tried to get into position to capture the rainbow and the Vice President de-planing, and Air Force Two. As he walked to the cars, he gave me a thumbs-up  and that was the photo. September 28, 2012.

At Ease, Men. 'Breaking Bad' Is On And Papa Biden's In A Hurry

Vice President Joe Biden salutes as he approaches Marine Two after landing at Joint Base Andrews aboard Air Force Two. June 6, 2012.

You're Gonna Miss These VP Guns -- Pew Pew!

U.S. Vice President Joe Biden gestures after disembarking from a plane upon landing at Ben Gurion International Airport in Lod, near Tel Aviv, Israel March 8, 2016.

Who Pulls Off A Bomber Jacket Anymore? Joe Biden, That's Who.

U.S. Vice President Joe Biden disembarks from the plane as he arrives in Baghdad, November 29, 2011. U.S. Vice President Biden arrived in Baghdad on Tuesday in a visit to mark the end of the U.S. war in Iraq as troops complete withdrawal by year-end.

Who's Coming To The Hotel Room To Party? Plenty Of Room In Here!

US Vice President Joe Biden waves upon his arrival at the Tokyo International Airport on December 1, 2013 on the first leg of his Asian tour. Biden will meet with Japanese leaders, with Tokyo hoping for some fulsome backing in its vicious territorial spat with China.

S**t, I'm Late I'm Late I'm Late I'm Late...

Vice President Joe Biden walks down the stairs of Air Force Two at New Castle County Airport. Wilmington, Delaware, Aug. 23, 2013.

I Said, "Beyonce, This Is Jay-Z. Jay-Z, Beyonce.'" Rest Is History.

US Democratic presidential candidate Illinois Senator Barack Obama and his running mate Joe Biden disembark from Obama's campaign plane at Detroit Metropolitan International airport in Detroit, Michigan, September 28, 2008.

Socks? Dammit, Man, I Don't Have Time For Socks.

U.S. Vice President Joe Biden arrives in Baghdad, August 30, 2010. Biden arrived in Iraq on Monday as U.S. troops prepared to end combat operations on Tuesday. Biden was expected to hold talks with Iraqi leaders during a period of political deadlock, almost six months after an inconclusive election in March, over forming the country's next government.

How's The Indian Food In New Delhi? Ahh, Just Messing With Ya.

Vice President Joe Biden and Dr. Jill Biden wave as they arrive at Indira Gandhi International Airport, in New Delhi, India. July 22, 2013.

Come On, Kid, You Just Got Off A Plane With Joe Biden, Try To Act Like It.

U.S. Vice President Joe Biden waves as he walks out of the plane upon his arrival for the inauguration of Guatemala's President-elect Jimmy Morales, at Aurora international airport in Guatemala City, Guatemala, January 14, 2016.

Rain Or Shine, Motherf**kers! That's How Joe Rolls!

U.S. Vice President Joe Biden waves upon his arrival in Wilmington, Delaware November 7, 2012. Biden will spend the night at his home here before returning to Washington.

Jill, We Saluting Or Waving? Saluti--? ... Ugh, I Keep Falling For This.

U.S. Vice President Joe Biden (L) and his wife Jill gesture before boarding a plane at Ben Gurion International airport near Tel Aviv March 11, 2010. Biden called on Thursday for Israeli-Palestinian peace talks to start without delay despite Palestinian insistence that Israel first cancel a settlement project condemned by Washington.

When He Gets On The Plane, You Pretend Like You Have To Show Him Something And Then I'll Jump Out And Scare Him

US Vice President Joe Biden (R) alights from the plane upon arrival at the Benito Juarez international airport in Mexico City, on September 19, 2013 for a one-day official visit.

No, I'm Serious, Jill. I've Got This Amazing Health Coverage But I'm Doing No Stunts At All. What A Waste!

Vice President of the United States Joe Biden and his wife Dr. Jill Biden arrive at the BrasAlia Air Base on Air Force Two and visit the U.S. Embassy of Brazil on Thursday, May 30, 2013.

You Want A Little Biden Magic, Too? Pew Pew, Comin' Atcha!

US Vice President Joe Biden arrives in Ankara, Turkey on August 24, 2016.

While Delivering A Speech In The Mediterranean, Joe Biden Spots A Man In The Crowd Who "Sure As S**t" Owes Him Money

US Vice President Joe Biden delivers a speech after arriving on May 21,2014 at Larnaca airport in the Cypriot southern port city. Biden is on a visit to Cyprus for talks on the divided Mediterranean island's peace process and its ties with Moscow given Russia's role in Ukraine.

Alright, Joe, Time For "Operation: Charm The Pants Off 'Em"

U.S. Vice President Joe Biden gets ready to step out of a plane after landing in Sarajevo early May 19, 2009. Biden arrived in Bosnia on Tuesday hoping to bolster a country still plagued by instability and ethnic division 14 years after the end of Europe's worst conflict since World War Two.

Anyone Touches My Granddaughter, They'll Be On The Next Unmanned Mission To Mars

Vice President Joe Biden arrives on Airforce 2 with his grand daughter at Sydney Airport on July 18, 2016 in Sydney, Australia. Biden is visiting Australia on a four day trip which includes a visit to Melbourne at the Victorian Comprehensive Cancer Centre to promote US-Australia cancer research and will host a round-table discussion with business leaders in Sydney.

Listen, I Just Want To Swing One Of The Swords For A Bit, Maybe Stage A Fight.

US Vice President Joe Biden (C,R) walks next to Romanian Foreign Minister Titus Corlatean (C,L) after arriving at the 'Henry Coanda' international Airport in Bucharest on May 20, 2014. US Vice President Joe Biden blasted Russia's annexation of Crimea, saying borders should not be changed at gunpoint, as he began a visit to Romania days before a crucial vote in Ukraine.

One More Trip Back Down And I've Got My Steps In For The Day

Welcome aboard: Vice President Joe Biden jogs up the stairs to Air Force Two at Lambert St. Louis International Airport, in St. Louis, Missouri, August 20, 2010.

Biden Hopes You Have A Sweet Tooth, Because He's Got A Lot Of Sugar To Give

US Vice President Joe Biden gestures after his plane landed at Kiev's airport, Boryspil, on July 20, 2009. Biden is on a working visit in Ukraine and then in Georgia amid concern in both nations that their relations with the United States could suffer as US-Russian relations improve.

(I Put The Pope Mobile Keys Back In Your Bag) -- Have A Safe Flight!

US Vice President Joe Biden bids farewell to Pope Francis before he boards his plane in Philadelphia on September 27, 2015 at the end of his six-day visit to the US.

This article originally appeared on HuffPost.Brasilia (AFP) - Brazil's top court on Thursday delayed until April 4 a decision on whether ex-president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva should go to jail if he loses an appeal next week.

The Federal Supreme Court decision is a shot in the arm for the 72-year-old leftist leader, the front-runner for October's presidential election, and means he cannot be jailed for at least two weeks.

The court, sitting in the capital Brasilia, was expected to decide whether losing an appeal next Monday at a lower court would automatically mean Lula's immediate arrest and incarceration, or if he would be given recourse to seek further legal remedies.

A court in Porto Alegre is to give its verdict on Monday on Lula's appeal against a 12-year jail sentence for money laundering and corruption.

The eventual ruling by the 11 judges, when they reconvene on April 4, will weigh heavily on Brazilian politics, seven months before the presidential elections, which Lula, despite his legal travails, is favored to win.

The court convened at 2:00 pm (1700 GMT) as around 150 supporters from his Workers' Party waved "Free Lula" posters outside the building. Around 30 anti-Lula protesters also held a demonstration.

The judges could grant a "habeas corpus" petition that would allow Lula to remain at liberty for as long as he has a legal chance of avoiding jail. That could be months or even years.

However, a decision against Lula means he could go to jail immediately, if he has, by that time, already lost his appeal in Porto Alegre's Regional Court No. 4.

A lower court, the Superior Court of Justice, has already ruled against Lula on the "habeas corpus" issue.

Lula was found guilty in July 2017 of receiving a luxury seaside apartment as a bribe from a Brazilian construction company in return for contracts with state oil giant Petrobras. He was sentenced to 9.5 years in jail, which, in a January appeal, was increased to 12 years and one month.

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The leftist leader, a two-term president from 2003-2010, insists he is innocent of the charges and that he is the victim of a campaign to prevent him from running for the presidency in October.

- 'Nobody more honest' -

Everything points to the court rejecting Lula's plea next Monday, and Lula could be arrested within hours.

Even if he remains free, analysts believe Lula will eventually be declared ineligible for the October presidential elections. That decision ultimately rests with the electoral authorities, which will decide in August.

Undeterred, the 72-year-old has continued with a tour of southern Brazil to rally his supporters, and is scheduled to be in Foz de Iguazu -- on the border with Argentina and Paraguay -- when the court in Porto Alegre passes its judgment.

Lula again denied the charges against him late Wednesday during his campaign tour.

"None of them is more honest than me. They turned out my house, even my mattress. They opened the air extractor and they did not have the courage to apologize and say that they did not find an illegal cent in my whole life," he said.

Seven months out from the election, Lula is still running at around 35 percent in the opinion polls, though he remains a divisive figure for Brazilians fed up with political corruption.

In an interview with AFP earlier this month, the former union leader admitted that he thinks "every day" about the possibility of going to jail, but was determined to fight to the end to prove his innocence.

Candidates have until August 15 to register for October's presidential election.WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Republican candidate in a close U.S. House of Representatives special election on March 13 in Pennsylvania conceded to his Democratic opponent on Wednesday, cementing a Democratic upset in a long-time Republican area that President Donald Trump handily won in 2016.

In an ominous sign for Trump's Republicans eight months before national midterm elections, moderate Democrat Conor Lamb led conservative Rick Saccone by a fraction of a percentage point in the race for the southwestern Pennsylvania seat.

Trump won the district by almost 20 points in the presidential election. He campaigned for Saccone, who started the race well ahead of Lamb.

"Just got off the phone with my opponent, @RickSaccone4PA, who congratulated me & graciously conceded last Tuesday's election," Lamb said on Twitter.

An official at Saccone's campaign confirmed the candidate had conceded.

The earliest the final election result could be certified is March 26, but the final tally could be unknown for weeks.

Lamb led Saccone by 627 votes unofficially, state returns showed last week; Lamb had 49.8 percent of the vote and Saccone 49.6 percent.

House Republicans had called the race unique, noting that Lamb, 33, a Marine Corps veteran, had distanced himself from his party's leaders and staked out positions to the right of many Democrats.

The patchwork of small towns, farms and Pittsburgh suburbs that make up Pennsylvania's 18th congressional district has been so staunchly Republican that Democrats did not field candidates in the previous two House elections.

Come November, the district will cease to exist because boundaries have been redrawn. Both Lamb and Saccone are expected to run again, though in different districts.

The election, held to replace a Republican who resigned amid a scandal last year, was the latest forceful electoral showing for Democrats, who also won a governor's race in Virginia and scored a U.S. Senate upset in conservative Alabama.

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Lamb's strong showing could buoy Democrats nationally as they seek to win control of the House from Republicans in the November elections. Democrats see 118 Republican-held districts in play. If they flip 24 seats, they could reclaim a House majority.

The Lamb win vindicates a strategy Democrats are using in some races to enlist candidates whose positions and ideologies are well suited to the district even while conflicting in significant ways with the positions of the Democratic leadership in Washington.

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(Reporting by Eric Walsh; additional reporting by David Morgan; editing by Toni Reinhold and Grant McCool)Stephen Herzog

Security, North America

Nuclear artillery being fired during a test

The Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty is back in the limelight as President Trump gears up to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. It's time for Trump to get it passed and signed.

Donald Trump: Get Congress to Pass (and Ratify) the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty

There seems to be little that Americans can agree on. Poll after poll shows bleak prospects for achieving unity in the United States. The vast majority of Democrats and Republicans even report having few friends with differing political views. But there are still some bright spots in this age of polarization. New survey data, which I collected with Jonathon Baron, indicates that Americans of all persuasions strongly support Senate approval of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). As Washington and its allies stare down an aggressive North Korea, the treaty offers a rare opportunity for a cross-cutting political win for President Trump. By ratifying the test ban, Trump could succeed where his predecessorsmost recently, President Obamaall failed.

At first glance, the CTBT may seem like old news on Capitol Hill. It has been almost twenty years since 1999, when the Senate voted against test ban ratification by a count of 5148. Since then, the situation has changed in Americas favor. A 337-facility International Monitoring System is nearly 90 percent complete and successfully detected all six of Pyongyangs provocative nuclear tests. The United States has also made massive investments in its national verification capabilities and Stockpile Stewardship Program to maintain its arsenal. The latter includes supercomputing simulations and laser physics experiments at the National Ignition Facility, popularly seen in Star Trek: Into Darkness.

Recommended: The 5 Biggest Nuclear Bomb Tests (From All 6 Nuclear Powers).

Recommended: How Israel Takes U.S. Weapons and Makes Them Better.

Recommended: North Koreas Most Lethal Weapon Isnt Nukes.

Story continues

These investments have paid off. Every year since 1997, the heads of the Department of Energys National Laboratories have certified to the sitting president that preserving Americas nuclear deterrent doesnt require explosive testing. A nonpartisan group of the nations top scientific experts also concluded that no country could carry out militarily significant cheating under the CTBT without getting caught. Absent testing, U.S. rivals will face limitations on their ability to develop new types of nuclear weapons. So long as there are nuclear-armed states around the globe, the ban effectively helps the United States to lock in its strategic superiority.

The Trump administrations new Nuclear Posture Review continues down this path. It reaffirms U.S. support for the International Monitoring System and Vienna-based CTBT Organization Preparatory Commission. Further, it indicates that the U.S. moratorium on nuclear testing since 1992 will continue and encourages all states not to conduct tests. But the Nuclear Posture Review also states that the administration will not pursue test-ban ratificationwith little explanation.

Despite this, the CTBT is back in the limelight as President Trump gears up to meet with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. North Korea is, of course, the only country to have tested nuclear weapons since 1998. Many arms control advocates are thus encouraging treaty ratification as a confidence-building measure between the two sides. Ratification would formalize the U.S. testing moratorium and strengthen the administrations credibility when dealing with Pyongyang. It would also apply pressure to other key test ban holdouts: China, Egypt, India, Iran, Israel and Pakistan.

President Trump could even use his leverage with Kim to create a joint U.S.-North Korea ratification process. This would improve global security by making permanent Kims recent pledge to freeze nuclear tests.

However, one element is clearly missing from any conversation about the CTBT: What do the American people think about it? My survey collaborator and I set out to find the answer to this question in late 2016 by working with YouGov, the international polling and research firm. Our new nationally representative survey of the U.S. population offers the first data in years on how Americans feel about the nuclear test ban. With the U.S.-North Korea standoff intensifying and many changes in international monitoring capabilities, it was important to collect new data. The full results of our study were published last month in the academic journal The Nonproliferation Review.

We found convincing majority support for the CTBT across the United States. Overall, 65 percent of Americans approved of the Senate giving its consent to ratification, with only 15.3 percent opposed (the remaining 19.7 percent of respondents were undecided). As expected, the CTBT had support from a strong majority (69.8 percent) of Democrats. Just 13.8 percent of Democrats opposed the treaty and 16.5 percent were undecided. Tallies from Independents showed 66.3 percent in support, 13.7 percent opposed, and 20 percent undecided. The most surprising data came from Republicans. A majority of Republicans (56.2 percent) supported the CTBT in contrast to a much smaller minority (23.9 percent) in opposition (19.9 percent of Republicans were undecided).

Such remarkable cross-cutting support did not just reach across political party linesit reached across all societal lines. The data shows majority support for the CTBT among women and men, the rich and poor, the young and the old, the educated and the less educated, and in every geographic region of the country.

In his election night victory speech, President Trump promised, I will be president for all Americans. Unfortunately, partisan divides have made it nearly impossible for the president to make everyone happy with his policies. But the CTBT is that rare unicorn. It is an issue that commands support from all segments of American society, including Trumps supporters and his critics alike. As the president moves toward his talks with the North Korean regime and the 2018 midterm elections, his administration should take a very close look at the nuclear test ban. Putting a permanent stop to both United States and North Korean nuclear testing might just be a task best suited for Americas most unconventional president.

Stephen Herzog is a Ph.D. candidate at Yale University and nonresident WSD-Handa Fellow with the Pacific Forum, Center for Strategic and International Studies. He previously worked on test ban issues for the U.S. Department of Energys National Nuclear Security Administration.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Read full articleDonald Trump, the US president - AP

Donald Trump was explicitly told to condemn the Salisbury spy poisoning in talking points for his call with Vladimir Putin but failed to do so, according to The Washington Post.

The US presidents briefing materials also had the words DO NOT CONGRATULATE in capital letters but Mr Trump instead did just that to Mr Putin over his election victory.

The revelations, which were also confirmed by The New York Times, call into question Mr Trumps willingness to join Britain in a tough stance over the Sergei Skripal poisoning.

US government officials said that Mr Trump talked to aides rather than read than briefing notes, according to media reports.

The leak was said to have infuriated the US president and triggered a search for the culprit, given only a limited number of people have access to the talking points.

Mr Putin recently won re-election with 76 per cent of the vote, amid claims of ballot stuffing, and will remain Russian president until 2024.

Mr Trump revealed details of his call with Mr Putin on Tuesday as he answered questions from reporters in the White House.

I had a call with President Putin and congratulated him on his electoral victory, Mr Trump said.

The White House later confirmed Mr Trump did not discuss the Salisbury poisoning with Mr Putin or bring up claims of ballot-stuffing in the Russian election.

Mr Trumps stance on Salisbury has been called into question in the last fortnight, when Britain has been on an intense lobbying drive to build international support against the Kremlin.

Last week when Theresa May publicly accused Russia over the attack in the House of Commons the White House declined to blame the country in a press briefing.

The following day Mr Trump said he would condemn Russia or whoever it may be for the poisoning - opening the door to another potential source of blame other than the Kremlin.

Donald Trump, right, and Vladimir Putin at the G-20 Summit on July 7, 2017, in Hamburg Credit: AP Photo/Evan Vucci

Eventually the US added its name to a joint statement with Britain, France and Germany blaming Russia, but Mr Trump has not spoken out as strongly as others in his administration.

Story continues

Mr Trump faced condemnation from Republicans and former intelligence officials for his congratulations to Mr Putin.

John Brennan, who stepped down as CIA director in January 2017, suggested the Russians may have something on Mr Trump as he addressed the failure to challenge Mr Putin.

He told MSNBC on Wednesday: I think he is afraid of the Russian president. They may have something on him personally.

John McCain, the Republican senator for Arizona, said: An American president does not lead the Free World by congratulating dictators on winning sham elections.

And by doing so with Vladimir Putin, President Trump insulted every Russian citizen who was denied the right to vote in a free and fair election.

Marco Rubio, the Republican senator for Florida who challenged Mr Trump for the presidency, criticised the presidents Russia comments but also condemned the leak.

I dont agree with congratulating Putin but bigger outrage is this leak that could only come from someone in [the Presidents] inner circle, he wrote.

If you dont like President resign, but this ongoing pattern of duplicity holds potential for serious damage to the nation.(Photo: Disney/Empire)

Even Elizabeth Olsen doesnt recognize herself on the cover of Empire magazine.

The actress, who plays Scarlet Witch in the Avengers movies, took to Instagram to post the new issue. In the caption, Does this look like me?

For reference, this is what she usually looks like:

(Credit: WENN)

Its like they accidentally started to make you look like Scarlet Johannson and then realized whoops and then they ran out of time or something, wrote one person in the comments. It looks like a Madame Tussauds replica, added another.

Other highlights included:

This is horrible, what were they thinking

You look weird man

Nope. They really did you wrong

I honestly would have thought it was a new character in the Avengers

Olsen isnt the first to call out a publication for excessive retouching. In the beginning of March, Riverdales Lili Reinhart took to Instagram stories to chastise Cosmo Philippines for making her and co-star Camila Mendess waistlines thinner. Its an everyday battle sometimes, Reinhart said of accepting her body. And to see our bodies become so distorted in an editing process is the perfect example of the obstacles we have yet to overcome. When Lena Dunhams figure was doctored for the cover of Spanish magazine Tentaciones she wrote of the cover image that she also found it charming and appealing. But in the same way I find Emily Blunt charming and appealing: shes not me.

While Photoshop is still widely used, there are brands that have made major statements by opting not to employ the tool. Missguideds body positive campaign highlights  instead of hides  cellulite, stretch marks, and other imperfections. Then theres CVS, which announced in January that it wont materially alter any images associated with beauty products in stores, online, and on social media.

Story continues

Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle:

Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter for nonstop inspiration delivered fresh to your feed, every day.Brussels (AFP) - EU leaders cautiously welcomed a US decision to grant Europe a last-minute exemption from punishing metals tariffs, but remained wary of potential conditions set by President Donald Trump.

In the US capital, US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer told a Senate panel that Trump had authorised a "pause" in the controversial tariffs while talks are under way to find a more permanent solution.

Trump shocked the world with his sudden announcement earlier this month of a 10-percent levy on aluminium and 25-percent tariff on steel, angering Washington's closest allies that swiftly called for an exemption.

Lighthizer said Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Mexico and South Korea will also be exempt from the penalties, along with the EU. Trump has already promised to spare both Canada and Mexico -- the United States' closest trade partners.

"The news we are hearing from Washington is rather positive, but we will have to wait for Trump's actual decision," said Luxembourg's Prime Minister Xavier Bettel on the sidelines of an EU summit in Brussels.

The US trade official made his announcement just hours before the tariffs were to kick in, raising tensions with the EU to a maximum and leaving doubts that the decision was properly backed by Trump.

"We have still not received what we consider to be the official confirmation of the exemption. This would have to be some sort of executive order signed by the President, that would replace the existing tariff order," an EU official said.

If confirmed, a major worry for Europeans was the conditions Trump was to link to the exemption, after repeated warnings by the US leader that Europe treated Washington unfairly.

"The question is whether this exemption is subject to conditionality," Belgian Prime Minister Charles Michel.

The apparent climbdown came as Trump announced new sanctions against China, for the "theft" of US intellectual property which Beijing has vowed to meet with tit-for-tat retaliation.

Story continues

China is seen by as the root cause for a massive oversupply of steel on the global market, and Europeans in recent days pressed that point with Washington

- Merkel says 'thanks' -

EU Trade Commissioner Malmstrom made the EU's case over two days this week in Washington, negotiating the carve-out with US Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, a strong backer of Trump's "America First" policies.

Arriving at the EU summit, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said "thanks" to Malmstrom "for holding intensive talks with the United States and we will see what the result is."

As a precaution, the commission has drawn up a list of potential counter-measures, including tariffs on peanut butter and Harley Davidson motorcycles, in case Trump follows through.

"We have made it clear that we do not want a trade war. Trade war is of no use to anyone," said Jean-Claude Juncker, chief of the European Commission, which handles trade talks for the 28 member states.

German Economy Minister Peter Altmaier stressed in Berlin that "fighting until the last minute is worth it", with Germany especially worried about its auto industry.

The close confidant of Merkel reported a "very positive impression" of US Commerce Secretary Ross, who he also met earlier this week in Washington for last-minute talks.

"We both know what the problem is," Altmaier said, pointing the finger instead at China.Brussels (AFP) - European leaders are on Thursday set to strongly condemn Turkey's "illegal actions" toward Greece and Cyprus in a blistering denunciation that could upend an EU-Turkish summit in Bulgaria next week.

The statement by the 28 European Union member states meeting in Brussels comes after Turkey's arrest of two Greek soldiers, and its promise to prevent the internationally-recognised Greek Cypriot government from exploring for oil and gas.

"The European Council strongly condemns Turkey's continued illegal actions in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Aegean Sea and underlines its full solidarity with Cyprus and Greece," the draft conclusions said.

The draft "calls on Turkey to cease these actions and respect the sovereign rights of Cyprus to explore and exploit its natural resources in accordance with EU and international law."

The statement shows firm support for Greece and Cyprus -- which have so far been among the EU countries most reluctant to endorse a separate EU summit condemnation of a nerve agent attack on a former Russian agent on English soil.

The draft urged Turkey to normalise relations with Cyprus, divided since 1974 when Turkish troops invaded and occupied the northern third of the island in response to a Greek military junta-sponsored coup.

A standoff over exploiting energy resources in the region risks further complicating stalled efforts to reunify Cyprus after UN-backed talks collapsed last year.

In recent weeks Turkish warships blocked an Italian drillship from exploring for gas in the east Mediterranean island's waters.

The leaders also expressed "grave concern over the continued detention of EU citizens in Turkey" and called for these issues to be resolved through dialogue with the EU member states.

- 'Difficult and sensitive' -

Two Greek soldiers were arrested on March 2 for entering a military zone in the northern Turkish province of Edirne and are waiting for their case to be heard.

Story continues

Ties between Athens and Ankara are strained by the Greek failure to extradite eight Turkish troops who escaped Turkey by helicopter on the night of the July 2016 attempted overthrow of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Turkish tensions with Greece and Cyprus are part of a wider plunge in relations since Brussels denounced Ankara over its post-coup crackdown.

Turkey has expressed increasing anger over its long-stalled bid to join the EU, mainly over human rights concerns.

It was not clear whether the summit denunciation could derail an EU-Turkey summit in the Bulgarian resort of Varna on Monday aimed at improving strained ties.

An EU diplomat appeared to suggest Wednesday that the summit would go ahead although it will be "difficult and sensitive" because of the many disputes.

The diplomat said on condition of anonymity that the goal would be to keep "pragmatic strategic cooperation."

The EU sees Turkey as a strategic partner in the fight against Islamic extremism and its efforts to stop Syrian and other asylum seekers from flooding into Europe and destabilising the bloc under a 2016 aid-for-cooperation deal.The CBI has registered a case of alleged fraud of Rs 824 crore against Chennai-based Kanishk Gold Pvt Ltd involving loans taken from an SBI-led consortium of 14 banks.

The CBI carried out searches at the official and residential premises of promoters of Kanishk Gold Pvt Ltd on Wednesday as it launched investigations in the Rs 824 crore loan fraud case, the officials said. The case has been registered by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) on a complaint from the SBI on behalf of the 14-bank consortium.

Kanishk Gold Pvt Ltd and its directors allegedly diverted the funds detrimental to the rights and interests of the bank, the complaint states. The SBI has requested the agency to register a case against Kanishk Gold Pvt Ltd, its promoter director Bhoopesh Kumar Jain and others. The company's account was declared fraud and non-performing asset (NPA) in 2017-18 by various lending banks, it alleged.

The company manufactures gold jewellery which was marketed under the brand name 'Krizz'. It marketed its products through distributors till 2014 but changed its business model to B2B (business-to-business) in 2015 when it switched to supplying to large retail jewellers, the SBI said in its complaint to the CBI.

The loan accounts of the company were taken over by the SBI from the ICICI in 2008. Its banking arrangement was converted into a multiple banking arrangement in March 2011, it said.

The SBI alleged that while the fraud is to the tune of Rs 824.15 crore, the security available with the it to cover the loss is only around Rs 156.65 crore. The CBI officials said they have received the complaint and were in touch with the bank because of certain loopholes in the complaint which were to be rectified by the bank.

The bank has alleged that the company had misrepresented and falsified the records and financial statements of the company to show to dress up its financial picture since 2009 in order to avail credit facilities from it. The new bank fraud in the jewellery sector has come to light when the Rs 13,600 crore PNB fraud committed by Nirav Modi and his uncle Mehul Choksi have already rocked the industry and turned bankers cautious.

Senior bank officials have themselves come under suspicion for collusion with fraudsters, especially in the case of large loans which should not have gone undetected. Some top PNB officials have been arrested in the Nirav Modi scam and even the CMD of the bank was questioned in connection with the case. These large bank frauds have wider repercussions for the banking system as well as the economy.

The country's economic growth can be hit as banks that run into financial trouble cannot extend loans to productive sectors. Investment bank Goldman Sachs downgraded its forecasts for India's economy on Tuesday in the wake of a more than $2 billion fraud at Punjab National Bank'' warning it could spark tighter regulation of the banking sector that would constrain credit growth.

In a note to clients'' Goldman Sachs lowered its real gross domestic product (GDP) forecast on India for the year to March 2019 to 7.6 percent from 8 percent earlier. Last month's disclosure of the fraud by PNB'' India's second-largest state-run lender has sent bank shares tumbling in the stock markets.Ankara (AFP) - Safa al-Hussein comes into the consultation room with her four-year-old daughter, Ahed, who has a leg injury she suffered during an attack on the northern Syrian city of Raqa.

She is treated by a doctor and nurse, who are both Syrian like her.

But this healthcare centre is hundreds of kilometres (miles) from their native country, in the heart of the Turkish capital, Ankara.

Turkey has taken in more than 3.5 million refugees from Syria since the conflict began in March 2011.

Since then, millions have fled the country or been forced into internal displacement.

The Ankara centre's medical team is partly made up of Syrian refugees.

After seven weeks of training, administered by the Turkish health ministry and the World Health Organization (WHO), they are authorised to work in the migrant health centre, returning to careers they had in Syria.

They take care of Arabic-speaking refugees in Ankara, the majority of whom are Syrian, in a setting that is as reassuring as it is functioning and safe.

- 'Extremely progressive' -

The Turkish government has drawn up "extremely progressive legislation for refugees", said Felix Leger, responsible for health matters in Turkey for the European Commission's humanitarian aid organisation, ECHO.

ECHO partly finances the training provided to the Syrian refugee doctors and nurses.

"A registered refugee has the same rights in terms of access to health and education as a Turkish citizen," Leger said.

But language and cultural barriers can be a major obstacle, so the idea emerged that refugee nurses and doctors could themselves help their compatriots overcome those issues, he added.

The training consists of a week of theory classes, followed by six weeks of practical courses in which the Syrian medical staff follow their Turkish counterparts during consultations.

It is a way of certifying the professional skills of those who often fled to Turkey without their diplomas.

Story continues

They can then work in one of 99 Turkish health centres available for migrants.

So far, more than 800 doctors have been recruited at the end of their course at one of seven training centres, set up since January 2017.

- 'Trust issues' -

Doctor Nidal Arap, who fled Aleppo in 2012, has been working in the Ankara centre since last June. He says around 600 patients pass through each day.

"Since (the patients) do not speak Turkish... they could not explain to the doctor what they had, what they wanted. But now they can come here, and get treatment in their language," he told AFP during a visit to the centre.

Eight of the health clinic's 10 doctors, and 10 of the 13 nurses, are Syrian.

Arap is following the case of Ahed in particular, with whom he formed an immediate bond. "Her father was also called Nidal," he says, smiling.

"The first time she came, she clung to me and did not want to let me go."

Ahed plays with balloons given to her by the centre's workers to help reassure her, as her mother tells AFP what happened to their family.

"We were at home when an air strike hit, killing my husband and my daughter, and injuring Ahed," Hussein said.

After the first operation, the hospital staff in Syria recommended taking Ahed abroad for her care.

Mother and daughter came to Turkey six months ago and heard about a centre where "good Syrian doctors worked".

The child has been coming for treatment ever since. "Now Ahed can walk," her mother says, smiling.

- Door-to-door -

The Syrian doctors also contribute to campaigns encouraging infant vaccinations organised by the health ministry and WHO.

"These campaigns in the past ran into problems of trust between medical teams and target populations, simple people who come from regions affected by conflict and were scared," said Mohammad Khattab, a doctor, who also came from Aleppo and arrived in Turkey in late 2015.

"The presence of Syrian doctors and nurses alongside our Turkish brothers has greatly contributed to the success of these" door-to-door campaigns, he added.

- 'Same tragedy' -

On the floor below is a "safe space" for women and young girls, providing psychological and social support for migrants.

Here too, trust is essential.

"It is not an easy thing to build trust between that community and us so we have staff called health mediators to provide a bridge," said Duygu Arig, humanitarian programme regional manager for the UN Population Fund (UNFPA).

The focus is on reproductive health and gender-based violence, subjects which can be difficult to tackle.

The mediators, selected from among people who have benefited from the health centre's services, undergo intensive training for five days, provided by UNFPA.

One of the five mediators at the Ankara centre, a mother of four originally from Aleppo who asked not to be identified, described how the women she approaches sometimes break down in tears as soon as she speaks to them.

"Women trust us and cooperate with us because we have the same experience, we have experienced the same tragedy," she said.LONDON (Reuters) - Twenty three expelled Russian diplomats and their families flew out of London on an Ilyushin-96 plane on Tuesday. The state-owned Russian plane, with "Rossiya" and the white, blue and red of Russia's flag emblazoned on its side, made a special flight from Moscow to London's Stansted airport to collect the diplomats. Prime Minister Theresa May blamed Russia for this month's attack on a Russian double-agent and his daughter - the first known offensive use of a nerve toxin in Europe since World War Two - and gave 23 Russians whom she said were spies working under diplomatic cover one week to leave London. (Reporting by Guy Faulconbridge; editing by Stephen Addison)Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said he is sure that foreign bodies will try to exploit his platform during the 2018 U.S. midterm elections in the same fashion as the presidential ballots two years ago: spreading propaganda and sowing division.

But he claimed to be confident about curbing future meddling by boosting Facebooks security teams and deploying machine-learning tech to help fend off any state-sponsored disruption during the November 6 political process.

The social networking giant was thrust into crisis this week following the Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal, forcing the founder of the California-based website to address the allegation that 50 million profiles were harvested back in 2014. Speaking to CNN, he apologized to users and pledged that changes would be made.

Trending: When Will the Golden State Warriors Have Their Stars Back From Injury?

I am sure someone is trying, he said when asked if he believed midterm election interference was a possibility. I am sure that there is version two of whatever the Russian effort was in 2016. I am sure they are working on that and there are going to be some new tactics that we need to make sure we observe and get in front of.

Mark Zuckerberg

David Ramos/Getty Images

Like Russian hackers and trolls, Cambridge Analytica has had firm ties to the period surrounding the 2016 presidential election campaign of Donald Trump. Zuckerberg, in his latest public statements, said he will try to cut down on all three. Still, he was forced to admit that security is always a work in progress.

He said there was already some sense of the covert tactics that would be used and claimed his company would be hiring thousands more people dedicated to security throughout 2018, bringing the total number to 20,000. This week, however, it emerged that the firms cybersecurity chief, Alex Stamos, will soon leave his position.

Story continues

Don't miss: Trump and Biden Never Went to Vietnam But Act Like Tough Guys Threatening Each Other, Jake Tapper Says

What we see are a lot of folks trying to sow division, that was a major tactic that we saw Russia try to use in the 2016 election, Zuckerberg noted. Much of what they did was not directlyabout the election but was more about just dividing people. They would run a group for pro-immigration reform, and then run a group against immigration reform and just try to put people against each other.

We could do a better job of chasing and using AI tools to scan what is going on, he continued, adding, I am confident that we are going to do a much better job.

In October last year, following an appearance at the U.S. Congress alongside Google and Twitter, Facebook confirmed in a blog post that millions of users in the U.S. had been served targeted advertising paid for by Russian accounts. Some originated from a group known as the Internet Research Agency.

Yet initially Zuckerberg himself played down the impact of Facebook propaganda. Of all the content on Facebook, more than 99% of what people see is authentic, he wrote in November 2016. Only a very small amount is fake news and hoaxes.

Most popular: Tel Aviv Diary: In hindsight, Iraq war only benefited Iran

Alexander Nix, CEO of Cambridge Analytica

REUTERS/Henry Nicholls

Two months later, the U.S. intelligence community officially confirmed it believed Moscow had orchestrated a widespread attackpartly using social media platforms to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process. It named the culprits as President Vladimir Putin and the Russian government.

Meddling in elections within the U.S., or any other nation for that matter, by another country is the new norm and will continue for as long as there is a chance of success, Lee Munson, security researcher at Comparitech, told Newsweek.

I believe that Facebook will again be used as a platform for politicking during the upcoming midterm elections, something that Zuckerberg himself has admitted will be highly likely," Munson added. "While previously used methods will probably not be as successful this time, the growing security team within Facebook will be faced with a large number of new types of attempted political influence. Whatever the result of Facebooks efforts, I suspect there will be much said after the event as winners celebrate and losers blame social media interference, irrespective of the truth.

This article was first written by Newsweek

More from NewsweekIn his first interview addressing a user privacy scandal that has besieged his company, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he would be willing to testify before Congress and apologised.

Im really sorry this happened, Mr Zuckerberg said, and Im happy to appear before Congress if its the right thing to do.

But the Facebook founder, whose company last year dispatched a top deputy rather than Mr Zuckerberg to testify before Congress on Russian actors seeking to influence the election via Facebook, hedged on the possibility.

The goal there is to get Congress all the information they need to do their extremely important job and we want to send whoever is best informed, Mr Zuckerberg said.

He also said Facebook was committed to stopping interference in the US midterm election in November and elections in India and Brazil, adding he was "sure someone's trying" to use the site to meddle.

"There are going to be some new tactics that we need to make sure that we observe and get in front of," he said.

For days Mr Zuckerberg made no public comment on the news that consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, which wielded sophisticated online targeting to shape the 2016 presidential race in the service of Donald Trumps campaign, had gathered data on some 50 million Facebook users. His absence amid the mounting fallout spurred widespread criticism.

Breaking that silence, Mr Zuckerberg, acknowledged earlier in the day that Facebook had known since 2015 that researcher Aleksandr Kogan shared user data he gathered from an app with Cambridge Analytica.

Both Cambridge Analytica and Mr Kogan certified they had destroyed the information, Mr Zuckerberg said, and Facebook only learned they may not have from news reports this week. In the interview with CNN, he said Facebook erred in accepting the assurances of Cambridge Analytica and Mr Kogan.

Im used to, when people legally certify that theyre going to do something, theyre going to do it. But I think this was a mistake in retrospect, Mr Zuckerberg said. We should not have trusted the certification they gave us, he added, and were not going to make that mistake again.

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In his post, Mr Zucckerberg said Facebook had instituted safeguards in 2014 to prevent apps from harvesting the amount of user data gleaned by Mr Kogans survey and pledged Facebook would roll out more stringent measures to limit data collection. He reiterated the pledge to better safeguard user data during the CNN interview, promising a sweeping review of existing apps.

We are doing a set of things to restrict the amount of access that developers get going forward, he said, adding that Were going to review thousands of apps.

While Mr Zuckerbergs statement hewed to the explanation already publicly offered by Facebook, it came after Mr Zuckerberg faced rising frustration from elected officials who wondered why the CEO had not publicly addressed the gathering crisis.

Members of Congress and Parliament have called on Mr Zuckerberg to testify, and his post did not quell their desire to hear from the Facebook founder himself.

The steps Facebook has laid out to protect its users are a start but Zuckerberg still needs to come testify, said Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat who has sought to more tightly regulate political speech on Facebook.

Similarly, Senator Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, responded to Mr Zuckerbergs post by writing You need to come to Congress and testify to this under oath.

I still want to know why it took Facebook so long to do anything about this, particularly when there are indications that this user data was exploited by Cambridge Analytica for years, said Senator Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat.Facebooks (FB) latest troubles with regulators may be the canary in the coal mine warning of the looming collapse of the tech bubble, say economists from BNP Paribas.

The company is facing, among other issues, a lawsuit filed on behalf of 50 million users, Congressional hearings, a probe by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and a $6.2 billion tax increase proposal by the European Union (EU).

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted a statement late Wednesday laying out a set of steps the company plans to take to secure users data. But for many it fell flat.

BNP chief market economist Paul Mortimer-Lee and senior economist Bricklin Dwyer said that this moment may well be the one market participants look back on as having signaled the end of the technology industrys long and substantial rise.

Theres a lot of similarities in this cycle to the dot com boom and then bust, Mortimer-Lee said. Is this the turning point that six months or a year down the line you say, We really misjudged how significant this was?'

Skirting government regulation and evading taxation

At issue is whether Facebook and tech companies such as Amazon (AMZN) and Alphabet (GOOG), which have managed to largely skirt government regulation and evade taxation, are now subject to greater oversights and much larger tax bills.

The EUs proposal to charge companies with significant digital revenues in Europe a 3% tax on various online services would be a change from current policy that allows the companies to domicile themselves in low-tax havens and retain much of their revenue.

If approved by EU states and lawmakers, the tax would apply to large firms with annual worldwide revenue above 750 million euros ($920.9 million) and annual taxable EU revenues above 50 million euros.

The digital revolution has overturned economies and it has profoundly affected the way businesses create value today, said Pierre Moscovici, the top EU economy and tax official, as he announced the proposal in Brussels.

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Your click triggers a whole chain of commercial transactions and therefore generates substantial profits that are not taxed by most countries, he said. This legal loophole is no longer acceptable.

Long-term trouble for the sector and the broader market

Dwyer and Mortimer-Lee argue that the change in sentiment towards companies like Facebook could bring about higher taxes and greater regulation that reduces the companies profits and leads to a fundamental repricing of the stocks and the overall tech sector in the market.

[The large tech companies] are the most mobile internationally and theyre the ones that have succeeded most spectacularly minimizing their tax burden, and I think people are after them now, Mortimer-Lee told Yahoo Finance at the banks midtown headquarters.

Facebooks legal troubles could be the beginnings of the next dot-com collapse, economists and fund managers say. PHOTO: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks. (AFP Photo/Josh Edelson)

Peter Kenny, senior market strategist at Global Markets Advisory Group, said he is expecting to see an utter and thorough re-examination of how governments deal with social media.

Theres no question that what were seeing evolve in the market in terms of the tech sector could spell long-term trouble for the sector and the broader market, Kenny said. Primarily because issues being brought to bear are so fundamental to the trust factor that is the underpinning the social contract with these companies.

Kenny said he reduced his holdings of the so-called FAANG stocks (Facebook, Apple (AAPL) , Amazon, Netflix (NFLX) and Google parent Alphabet) about nine months ago mainly because of the stocks lofty valuations and an expectation that small-cap companies were poised to outperform this year.

Maybe just a speed bump

But a number of investors see this latest round of negative headlines as a speed bump for Facebook and tech more broadly rather than a reckoning.

Facebooks (FB) stock has fallen 12% since its Feb. 1 high and is down almost 4% year-to-date. But the companys long-term growth has been stratospheric, rising 345% since its initial public offering in May 2012. The S&P 500 has risen 111% since then.

Nicholas Colas, co-founder of DataTrek Research, believes a dramatic tech selloff on the scale of the dot-com bubble burst is unlikely because the major tech companies now have robust business models and high levels of profitability. He argues the solution to much of the tech industrys problems will simply be hiring more people to deal with privacy issues rather than relying on algorithms. That may hurt profits initially, but will prove short-lived.

To see millions of people leave Facebook or Google or Amazon seems unlikely, Colas said.

For governments to act, lawmakers would be forced to take on the big tech companies and their massive lobbying and marketing arms, which could be quite an undertaking in an election year, said David Nelson, chief strategist of Belpointe Asset Management.

Additionally, Colas said, elected officials know how much they rely on Facebook for their campaigns, and they dont want to cut off that avenue for themselves.

Politics may be a bigger problem outside the United States, though, especially in the European Union. Lawmakers there are set to phase in the requirements of its General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which will govern data protection and privacy in the bloc.

Maybe this is going to make people re-look at tech and say, This is the start of a process, not the end of it, where regulation takes profits away, Mortimer-Lee said. Its clear that a number of countries are looking to raise more taxes. Theyre after [tech companies] anyway and the lack of social responsibility in guarding data means that people are going to be after them more.



Dion Rabouin is a markets reporter for Yahoo Finance. Follow him on Twitter: @DionRabouin.

Follow Yahoo Finance on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.Creteil (France) (AFP) - A woman who claimed 25,000 euros in compensation after posing as a victim of the 2015 Paris terror attacks was sentenced Thursday to four and a half years in prison.

The 49-year-old, who claimed to be at the Bataclan concert hall where Islamic State attackers killed 90 people, had already been found guilty of fraud on three different occasions.

Before her arrest in February she had also been holding a paid job at a charity for victims of the gun and bomb attacks in which jihadists murdered a total of 130 people.

In her claim to police in February 2016 the woman told of "bullets whistling past her ears" at the Bataclan, but investigators found she had faked a receipt for the concert ticket and other documents to build up her claim for compensation.

On top of the 25,000 euros ($31,000) she claimed from the state's FGTI compensation fund for terror victims, she received more than 13,000 euros from the French health service.

She is not the first person to be caught impersonating a victim of the carnage at the national stadium and Paris nightspots on November 13, 2015, France's worst attacks since World War II.

Two people have been found guilty of fraud and another 11 of attempting to swindle the FGTI out of compensation, according to the fund.

In December Cedric Rey, an ambulance driver, was sentenced to six months in jail for pretending to have been at the Bataclan when he was not even in Paris at the time of the attack.

He had described in vivid detail to the media how he escaped death when a pregnant woman "took the bullets meant for me" -- only for the story to be exposed as a lie.Miami (AFP) - Hundreds of Florida high school students headed for Washington on Thursday to take part in a weekend march for gun control organized by fellow teenagers after the massacre at a school in the southern US state.

Wearing their maroon school colors, students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where 14 students and three adults were killed on February 14, boarded a flight for Washington.

"The World is Changed With Your Actions, Not With Your Opinion," read a sign carried by a student at Fort Lauderdale airport.

Other Parkland students and teenagers from other south Florida high schools boarded buses for the long drive to the US capital.

The "March For Our Lives" is to be held on Saturday in Washington and other cities around the country.

Hundreds of thousands are expected for what it being predicted to be the largest-ever rally for gun control in the United States.

"This is going to be a real moment of change in this country," student David Allen told 7 News Miami. "I think a decision on gun control is going to be made."

Carlos Rodriguez, 17, a Stoneman Douglas student heading for the march, said he had mixed feelings.

"This march wouldn't be happening if the shooting hadn't happened at my school so it'll be difficult," Rodriguez told AFP.

"But I'll feel proud to be one of the students who started this movement and to have students from around the country taking part," he said.

The Broward County school superintendent announced meanwhile that students at Stoneman Douglas and other district schools would only be allowed to use clear backpacks when they return after spring break.

The see-through backpacks will be provided free of cost, superintendent Robert Runcie said in a letter to parents.

Runcie said students and staff will also have to wear ID badges at all times and the district is considering adding metal detectors at entrances to schools.

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The clear backpacks requirement drew a biting response from one Stoneman Douglas student.

"Great. Because clear backpacks are gonna fix everything," tweeted Lauren Hogg, who has emerged as a leader of the student movement along with her brother David.

"I appreciate the attempt, but I'd rather have common sense gun laws than a clear backpack," Hogg said.

Nikolas Cruz, a troubled 19-year-old former Stoneman Douglas student, was arrested after opening fire on his former classmates on Valentine's Day with an AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle.

Prosecutors have called for the death penalty.By Christine Muschi

MONTPELIER, Vt. (Reuters) - Vermont, a mostly rural New England state with a passion for hunting, has a reputation as a pro-gun stronghold, but the rising specter of school gun violence has shaken that longstanding political tradition.

The state is one of two dozen where efforts to curb gun violence have gained new momentum since the Feb. 14 shooting rampage that killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, gun control advocates say.

Governor Phil Scott, reacting to the Florida massacre, and the arrest days later of a teenager accused of threatening a similar attack in Vermont, said he was "jolted" into a new willingness to consider limiting access to guns "by those who shouldn't have them."

He has since embraced bills that would raise the legal age for all firearms purchases to 21, bolster background checks and make it easier for police to seize weapons from people deemed to pose an "extreme risk" of violence.

It was a remarkable turnabout for a Republican governor with a 93 percent approval rating from the National Rifle Association (NRA) gun rights advocacy group in an otherwise politically liberal state with some of America's most permissive gun laws.

Gun control advocates say the turnaround in Vermont and other states has been propelled in part by the groundswell of student-led lobbying efforts and protests calling for tighter firearms restrictions.

Nevertheless, it remains doubtful whether the flurry of gun-safety measures in statehouses will translate into new laws.

Politicians in many states remain adamantly opposed to any limits on gun sales. And legislative control held by the NRA-aligned Republican Party in 32 states clouds prospects for passing such measures.

"You still have an uphill battle in terms of a comprehensive approach to fix this problem in many states," said Kristin Brown, co-president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. Notably, proposals to ban assault-style weapons have continued to languish.

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Even so, Brown said she would be surprised if more than a few states failed to at least seriously consider some version of the so-called "extreme risk" legislation enacted in Florida earlier this month and now pending in Vermont.

Such measures, allowing police to petition a court to seize firearms of someone judged a danger to themselves or others, has garnered considerable bipartisan support, even in some states traditionally regarded as NRA strongholds, Brown said.

The changing climate at the state level, despite U.S. congressional paralysis on the issue, in part reflects a shift in growing public support for new gun restrictions.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll this month found that the proportion of adults who want to mandatory background checks on prospective buyers at gun shows and private sales climbed to 87 percent, up from 82 percent in a similar poll in March 2013.

'GUNSHINE STATE' SETS EXAMPLE

Gun control advocates hope some states will be more inclined to follow the example of Florida, whose firearms-friendly history earned it the label of "Gunshine State."

Spurred by an extraordinary lobbying campaign from survivors of the Parkland massacre, Florida's GOP-controlled legislature swiftly passed a bill signed into law by another Republican with strong NRA credentials - Governor Rick Scott.

Key provisions resemble measures that have gained traction in Vermont and other states.

They include the extreme-risk proposals; raising the legal minimum age to buy rifles and shotguns from 18 to 21 (as federal law already requires for purchasing handguns); and expanded background checks.

Extreme-risk bills are pending in about 24 states, five of them - Alabama, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Utah - where they were introduced after Parkland, Brown said.

About half a dozen states are considering background check bills, some to close loopholes for sales at gun shows, and 11 states have bills pending to ban "bump stocks," which enable semiautomatic weapons to be fired virtually as automatic machine-guns, Brown said.

Several states have taken a different tack, considering legislation to allow more guns in classrooms - an idea endorsed by the NRA and U.S. President Donald Trump.

A majority of Americans, including Republicans, Democrats and gun owners want stricter laws on gun ownership and armed guards in schools, according to a Reuters/Ipsos national poll taken in early March. [nL8N1R35PZ]

Florida's new gun law allows some school personnel to carry guns where individual school districts permit it but excludes most teachers from being armed.

At least six more states are weighing similar measures - Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Oklahoma and South Carolina, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

In Vermont, renowned for its maple syrup, covered bridges and Ben & Jerry's Ice Cream, the outcome of gun legislation remains uncertain, even though Democrats control both legislative bodies, with a smattering of independent and Progressive Party lawmakers.

"The governor's shift on this position changed the landscape," Evan Hughes, vice president of the NRA-affiliated Vermont Federation of Sportsmen's Clubs, told Reuters. "And I'm certain that he's hearing from our community that they're displeased."

(Reporting by Christine Muschi; Additional reporting by Bernie Woodall in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.; Writing and additional reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Frank McGurty and Grant McCool)By Cambridge Analytica's own admission, it uses a combination of predictive analytics, behavioural science and data-based advertising technologies to equip a company or a political party with insights on their target audience. Besides, they gather e-mail addresses, contacts and location of individuals.

They hire researchers, data scientists and even political operatives to then create campaigns that are hyper-targeted to these target groups.

For political campaigns, once the analysis has provided details of an individual's leanings, the campaign engages with the voter/voter group through direct mailers, social media push with specifically tailored visuals and language to alter the opinion. With help of behavioural psychology, it specifically targets those influencers who could alter the opinion of other voters as well. "...we will pinpoint the voters who will turn the tide in your favour, creatively engage with them, and drive them to the ballot box", Cambridge Analytica says on its website. Cambridge Analytica says it has worked on more than 200 elections across the world.

In some of the sting operations conducted in Europe, Cambridge Analytica executives have been caught claiming they make these campaigns unattributable and untrackable to avoid the links.

Such information, opinion 'infiltrates' the Internet without branding and without getting tracked to the political party. "We just put the information into the bloodstream of the internet and then watch it grow, give it a little push every now and again over time to watch it take shape," one of the executives said in a sting.

Here's how Cambridge Analytica says it worked on the Donald Trump campaign of 2016:

"Cambridge Analytica provided the Donald J. Trump for President campaign with the expertise and insights that helped win the White House.

Analyzing millions of data points, we consistently identified the most persuadable voters and the issues they cared about. We then sent targeted messages to them at key times in order to move them to action. All of this was achieved in a fraction of the time and at a much lower cost than was spent by our rivals.

...teams included PhD-caliber data scientists, seasoned strategists with experience of presidential primary, congressional, gubernatorial, and international election campaigns, expert researchers, digital marketing strategists, and content creators.

They worked together to identify audience segments and implement a marketing strategy for fundraising, persuasion and GOTV (Get Out the Vote) programs. Targeted adverts based on our data insights were heavily tested, then deployed to the most persuadable voters in key battleground states.

We polled voters in 17 states every day, monitoring the campaign's progress in real time. Cambridge Analytica delivered daily reports throughout the final months of the campaign, using fresh data to track the shifting perceptions of voters. We polled 1,500 people per week in each state, gaining valuable insights that informed marketing strategy. The research enabled us to assess state-by-state reactions to any political event and to understand any unexpected shifts in voting intention.

In total we polled 180,000 individuals across 17 battleground states, online and by telephone. This information allowed us to speak to voters in a way they would understand and respond strongly to.

Leveraging data science and predictive analytics expertise, we built 20 custom data models that could be used to forecast voter behavior.

Every time we polled an individual, we matched their information with existing data in our database. Analyzing everything from their voting history to the car they drive, we identified behaviors that were correlated with voting decisions. These models allowed us to predict the way individuals would vote - even if we didn't know about their political beliefs.

Using these insights, we could place voters into different categories and determine the best way to influence them through marketing. Crucially, we could also identify which voters were likely to support Donald Trump.

The digital marketing infrastructure had to support all aspects of the campaign, influencing voters where and when it counted.

Our digital marketing efforts led to a large-scale operation with eight-figure ad budgets. We met multiple needs across the campaign, including fundraising, persuasion, supporter activation, and Get Out the Vote initiatives.

Collaborating with 30+ ad tech partners, we used our data infrastructure to target voters who could be influenced in the most meaningful way. For example, if they cared about healthcare, targeted adverts directed them to websites explaining Trump's views on the matter.

The marketing operation utilized a number of platforms, including social media, search engine advertising, and YouTube. As well as influencing voter intention, it inspired people to take specific actions. Donations increased, event turnouts grew, and inactive voters who favoured Trump were motivated to get out and vote on election day.Police helicopter and body camera footage shows the moment two California cops killed Stephon Clark, an 22-year-old unarmed black man, in a hail of gunfire.

Two officers with the Sacramento Police Department shot at Clark 20 times on Sunday night after police received a call about car break-ins. Clark, a father of two young children, was armed only with a cellphone when he died, and was in his own backyard.

Stephon Clark, a 22-year-old father of two, was shot at 20 times in his own backyard. (Photo: Facebook)

Disturbing helicopter footage of the incident, released Wednesday, shows thermal images of Clark running through his neighborhood and hopping fences as two officers begin to close in on him. He stops at the home he shared with his grandparents and two sons. Seconds later, officers shoot him dead.

In body camera footage also released Wednesday, officers can be seen talking to neighbors before pursuing Clark in a foot chase.

Hey, show me your hands! an officer yells at Clark as they continue to chase him. As the two officers round the corner, one yells out, Gun!

Gun! Gun, gun, gun! he shouts. Both officers unleash a hail of gunfire on the unarmed man.

One of the officers says he is going to do a tactical reload.

Clarks aunt, Saquoia Durham, told the Sacramento Bee that after seeing the new videos, she believes Clark was never given a chance to surrender.

Clarks older brother, 25-year-old Stevante, told HuffPost that Clarks 3-year-old child has been asking where daddy is. Clark was also the father of a 1-year-old.

I want people to know all he cared about  more than anything else in life  was his children, Stevante said. His children meant most to him.

Stevante has started a GoFundMe page so his grandmother can pay for Clarks funeral.

Both officers involved in the shooting have been placed on paid leave pending an investigation.

Approximately six minutes into the video that shows Clarks killing, an officer can be heard saying mute. The audio then goes silent.

Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg warned people not to make any conclusions about Clarks shooting until the investigation is complete.

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The loss of life is always tragic, and I cannot imagine watching a loved ones final moments, let alone in such a public way, Steinberg said in a statement released Wednesday evening, hours after the footage was made public.

Based on the videos alone, I cannot second-guess the split-second decisions of our officers and Im not going to do that, the mayor added.

The investigation must be completed. We need more information in addition to the video before we can render any final conclusion.

Steinberg thanked Police Chief Daniel Hahn for leading the internal investigation into the fatal shooting, but said that more work needs to be done to build trust between the police department and the community.

Carla Herreria contributed to this report.

This story has been updated with a statement from Darrell Steinberg.

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This article originally appeared on HuffPost.Ouagadougou (AFP) - A former municipal councillor in Burkina Faso has been abducted in a northern zone bordering Mali which has been repeatedly targeted by jihadists, the security ministry said Thursday.

Troops were combing the area after the abduction in Lassa village, Soum province, by "five armed individuals on motorcycles" on Wednesday evening, a statement said.

His whereabouts were unknown, the ministry added.

A similar incident in April last year saw two civil servants abducted in Ina-Bao, also near the Mali border. Both were later released.

In 2015, the Ansar Dine group led by rebel leader Iyad Ag Ghaly kidnapped Australian Kenneth Elliot and his wife Jocelyn in Djibo, a town bordering Mali and Niger.

Jocelyn Elliot was released a year later but her husband is still in captivity.

Ansar Dine has since merged with other groups and its new variant, the Al-Qaeda-linked jihadist Group to Support Islam and Muslims (GSIM), claimed a March 2 attack in the Burkinabe capital Ouagadougou which left eight dead.

Another group kidnapped Romanian Iulian Ghergut in 2015 and he remains in captivity.

A total of 133 people have been killed in 80 jihadist attacks in the region in the past three years, according to an official toll.MOGADISHU (Reuters) - At least 14 people were killed in an explosion outside a busy hotel in Somalia's capital on Thursday that was followed by gunfire, police and rescue services said. Al Qaeda-linked al Shabaab militants claimed responsibility. The group carries out frequent bombings and other attacks in Mogadishu in a campaign to topple Somalia's Western-backed federal government. "The blast killed 14 people," Abdiasis Ali Ibrahim, the spokesman for the internal security minister told Radio Mogadishu, which is run by the state. Abdikadir Abdirahman, director of Amin ambulances, had earlier said 22 people were injured in the blast. Al Shabaab's military operations spokesman said his group had been "behind the blast", adding that the dead included soldiers and officers. Reuters TV footage showed civilians carrying the wounded on makeshift stretchers to vehicles from Amin, which is the city's sole ambulance service and is privately-run, as security forces stood around with guns. At least five three-wheel scooters that were passing on the road had been overturned by the blast. (Reporting by Abdi Sheikh and Feisal Omar; Writing by Duncan Miriri; Editing by Raissa Kasolowsky and David Stamp)By Alana Wise NEW YORK (Reuters) - Airlines canceled thousands of flights in the U.S. Northeast on Wednesday as a swirl of strong winds, snow, sleet and ice from the fourth major storm this month crippled the region. Airlines scrapped more than 4,400 flights within, to or from the United States, according to flight tracking website FlightAware, and more than 3,000 other U.S. flights were delayed as the latest "nor'easter" dumped snow and ice on New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Washington. The cancellations piled on to thousands more canceled flights due to an unrelenting series of late-winter storms. In addition to creating headaches for passengers, these storms can rack up millions of dollars in costs for airlines, as carriers reallocate aircraft and crew, and swallow the cost of passengers who don't re-book travel. "This has been a much harsher late winter than we've seen for quite some time. It does have an impact on carriers' bottom lines," CFRA Research analyst Jim Corridore said. While the full financial impact of the storms was not yet known, Corridore said accurate weather forecasts helped carriers quickly move planes and crew as well as plan for resuming normal operations. "There is a small silver lining in that it does help load factors and yields," he said, noting that passengers from canceled flights often help fill later flights that would have otherwise sat empty. U.S. carriers are offering change-fee waivers from flights in the affected regions, including from New York's three major airports, Philadelphia International and Boston Logan International. LaGuardia Airport in New York City said on Twitter on Wednesday afternoon that airlines had canceled all remaining flights at the facility for the rest of the day. (Additional reporting by Alex Dobuzinskis in Los Angeles and Bernie Woodall in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.; Editing by James Dalgleish and Sandra Maler)Colonel Ralph Peters: Screenshot/Fox News

Retired United States Army lieutenant colonel and longtime Fox News analyst Ralph Peters recently severed ties with the network, which he accused on Tuesday of wittingly harming our system of government for profit.

In a lengthy email to his colleagues first obtained by BuzzFeed, the foreign-policy hawk argued that the cable news network had been transformed from a legitimate and much-needed outlet for conservative voices into a propaganda machine for a destructive and ethically ruinous administration.

Four decades ago, I took an oath as a newly commissioned officer. I swore to support and defend the Constitution, and that oath did not expire when I took off my uniform, Peters wrote. Today, I feel that Fox News is assaulting our constitutional order and the rule of law, while fostering corrosive and unjustified paranoia among viewers.

Mr Peters, a former Russia analyst, warned that the networks hosts are advancing Russian President Vladimir Putins agenda by making light of Russian penetration of our elections and the Trump campaign.

But Mr Peters praised some of Foxs anchors and news reporters, who he said have bravely challenged the networks dogma.

Fox responded to Mr Peters claims in a statement: Ralph Peters is entitled to his opinion despite the fact that hes choosing to use it as a weapon in order to gain attention. We are extremely proud of our top-rated prime-time hosts and all of our opinion programming.

Mr Peters, who was highly critical of President Barack Obamas administration, was suspended from Fox for a short period in 2015 for calling Barack Obama a total pussy while on the Fox Business Network.

Read the full letter below:

On March 1st, I informed Fox that I would not renew my contract. The purpose of this message to all of you is twofold:

First, I must thank each of you for the cooperation and support youve shown me over the years. Those working off-camera, the bookers and producers, dont often get the recognition you deserve, but I want you to know that I have always appreciated the challenges you face and the skill with which you master them.

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Second, I feel compelled to explain why I have to leave. Four decades ago, I took an oath as a newly commissioned officer. I swore to support and defend the Constitution, and that oath did not expire when I took off my uniform. Today, I feel that Fox News is assaulting our constitutional order and the rule of law, while fostering corrosive and unjustified paranoia among viewers. Over my decade with Fox, I long was proud of the association. Now I am ashamed.

In my view, Fox has degenerated from providing a legitimate and much-needed outlet for conservative voices to a mere propaganda machine for a destructive and ethically ruinous administration. When prime-time hosts--who have never served our country in any capacity--dismiss facts and empirical reality to launch profoundly dishonest assaults on the FBI, the Justice Department, the courts, the intelligence community (in which I served) and, not least, a model public servant and genuine war hero such as Robert Mueller--all the while scaremongering with lurid warnings of deep-state machinations-- I cannot be part of the same organisation, even at a remove. To me, Fox News is now wittingly harming our system of government for profit.

As a Russia analyst for many years, it also has appalled me that hosts who made their reputations as super-patriots and who, justifiably, savaged President Obama for his duplicitous folly with Putin, now advance Putins agenda by making light of Russian penetration of our elections and the Trump campaign. Despite increasingly pathetic denials, it turns out that the nothing-burger has been covered with Russian dressing all along. And by the way: As an intelligence professional, I can tell you that the Steele dossier rings true--thats how the Russians do things. The result is that we have an American president who is terrified of his counterpart in Moscow.

I do not apply the above criticisms in full to Fox Business, where numerous hosts retain a respect for facts and maintain a measure of integrity (nor is every host at Fox News a propaganda mouthpiece--some have shown courage). I have enjoyed and valued my relationship with Fox Business, and I will miss a number of hosts and staff members. Youre the grown-ups.

Also, I deeply respect the hard-news reporters at Fox, who continue to do their best as talented professionals in a poisoned environment. These are some of the best men and women in the business..

So, to all of you: Thanks, and, as our presidents favourite world leader would say, Das vidanya.

Business InsiderLima (AFP) - Five centuries after brothers Atahualpa and Huascar engaged in a bloody battle for the Inca throne, a similar feud is tearing apart Peru's powerful Fujimori clan.

This time, it's siblings Keiko and Kenji -- the daughter and son of disgraced former president Alberto Fujimori.

The immediate effect of their open feud was to effectively remove Pedro Pablo Kuczynski's last fingerhold on power.

But analysts believe the feud will reverberate throughout Peruvian politics for some time to come.

The conflict publicly erupted in December but has simmered for years as the younger Kenji's political ambitions grew to potentially overshadow those of his sister, who lost the 2016 presidential election to Kuczynski by a whisker.

The siblings were on opposite sides when Congress moved to impeach Kuczynski for the first time in December, after evidence emerged that he had received millions of dollars from Brazilian developers Odebrecht.

PPK survived, thanks to Kenji's help -- which came at a price.

This week, video footage -- published by Keiko's main opposition Popular Force party -- was broadcast showing the 37-year-old Kenji trying to buy the vote of another lawmaker to ensure the impeachment vote was defeated.

Those videos seemed to prove what everyone already suspected - that Kenji engineered Kuczynski's survival in December, in return for a controversial presidential pardon -- just two days later -- for his father, who was serving a 25-year sentence for human rights abuses.

As soon as the bombshell videos were aired on Tuesday, brother and sister became embroiled in a very public spat.

"With deep disappointment and pain, Peru is once again witnessing negotiations for the buying off of congressmen," Keiko wrote on Twitter.

"And I regret even more that my own brother is involved in these practices that hurt us so much as Peruvians and as a family."

Her brother retorted, attacking "the baseness and criminal attitudes of the Popular Force and my sister Keiko" accusing them of "distorting information."

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- 'Pandora's box' -

The irony is that it was a similar video, showing government maneuvering to buy lawmakers' votes, that precipitated their father's political demise in 2000.

"What a paradox of fate," said analyst Luis Benavente.

On Wednesday, Congress launched a procedure to lift Kenji's parliamentary immunity from prosecution over the images.

"But all that will not improve the political situation for Popular Force," Benavente noted.

In the short term, analysts agree that Keiko appears to have scored a key victory over her brother.

"It's hard to see Kenji recovering from this," said historian and commentator Nelson Manrique. "It's a settling of scores....for now, Keiko looks like the winner, but I think they've opened up a Pandora's box," with fresh conflicts to come.

Keiko, 42, is herself embroiled in the Odebrecht scandal, amid an ongoing investigation over the Brazilian company's claims that it poured $1.2 million into her 2011 election campaign.

On March 1, Kenji left the Popular Force after the revelations, saying the party had "no longer has moral authority."

- Different paths -

Brother and sister had taken different paths into Peru's political maelstrom.

Keiko assumed the role of Peru's First Lady at the age of 19 after her parents divorced while her father was in office. Kenji, long seen in Peru as a spoiled brat, entered politics much later.

The older sister is surrounded by a new generation of politicians, more critical of the legacy left by her father, but her little brother relies on the old guard for his support.

Kenji remains his father's most fervent defender, while, according to analysts, Keiko never really courted her father's support because she feared forever being in his shadow.

Alberto Fujimori, whose bloody decade in charge from 1990-2000 was marked by human rights abuses, was pardoned in December. But the 79-year old now faces trial for ordering the killing of six farmers in 1992.

Until Tuesday's release of the compromising video, Kenji had the highest approval rating among Peru's politicians -- 48 percent -- but his immediate future now looks grim.

As for Keiko, she lost her absolute majority in Congress after Kenji left the Popular Force, taking his 13 seats with him.

"After nearly 500 years, we have a second fratricidal battle for power in Peru, the last was between Huascar and Atahualpa and left 200,000 dead," Benavente said.

"This time, it's more of a political battle, but I would say it's also pretty bloody."Nuseirat (Palestinian Territories) (AFP) - The man Hamas called the main suspect in a bomb attack against the Palestinian prime minister in Gaza was killed in an arrest raid on Thursday that also left two members of the Islamist movement's security forces dead.

One of chief suspect Anas Abu Koussa's alleged accomplices in last week's attack was also killed in the raid, according to Hamas.

The raid came after Hamas, which runs the Gaza Strip, launched a manhunt to search for the perpetrators of a roadside bomb that left prime minister Rami Hamdallah unhurt on March 13.

But Hamdallah's government, which has already accused Hamas of carrying out the bomb attack, immediately labelled the Islamist group's version of events illogical.

Hamas's interior ministry in Gaza earlier announced the deaths and said a third suspect was under arrest, but did not say what motivated Abu Koussa.

It named the two members of the security forced killed as Hammad Abu Swerah and Ziad al-Howajri.

They were killed when dozens of Hamas security force members raided the area of Nuseirat, south of Gaza City, early Thursday, to search for Abu Koussa.

A bloody firefight ensued, leaving the four men dead and a number of others wounded, officials said.

Dozens of new checkpoints were erected throughout the Palestinian enclave with armed security forces searching cars, while Hamas prevented all Palestinians from Gaza from crossing the border into Israel, AFP correspondents said.

A small number of Gazans are given permits to enter Israel, despite the Jewish states crippling blockade of the enclave.

Islamists Hamas rule Gaza but Hamdallah leads the rival Palestinian government based in the West Bank under president Mahmud Abbas.

The two have been at odds since Hamas violently seized control of Gaza in 2007 and Abbas on Monday accused Hamas of carrying out the attack.

The bomb occurred during a rare visit by Hamdallah to Gaza as the two sides discuss a faltering peace deal.

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Palestinian Authority intelligence chief Majid Faraj, who was accompanying Hamdallah, also escaped injury.

The bomb, believed to have weighed around 15 kilogrammes (33 pounds), exploded a few hundred metres (yards) from the border with Israel, shortly after Hamdallah's convoy entered the territory.

A second bomb failed to explode, officials said.

- Illogical? -

On Monday, Abbas accused Hamas of being behind the blast and said he would take new measures in response, without specifying details.

Abbas has previously taken a series of measures, including reducing electricity payments for Gaza's two million residents, in what analysts said was an attempt to punish Hamas.

Hamas fiercely denied the allegations and on Wednesday announced they had identified Abu Koussa as the chief suspect.

They did not say what motivated him, but a Hamas security source said Wednesday investigators had arrested and were questioning three people, including two members of the PA-run intelligence services.

Other potential suspects include small radical Salafist Muslim groups opposed to Hamas that operate in the strip.

On Thursday, Hamdallah's government said Hamas's version of the day's events "do not confirm to logic," casting doubt on the sudden announcement of the suspect and subsequent deadly raid.

The bombing appears to have brought to an end hopes for an already floundering Egyptian-brokered reconciliation deal signed in October between Hamas and Abbas's Fatah party, which dominates the PA.

While Hamas did hand over control of Gaza's borders to the PA, it maintains full control of the rest of the territory, with its police force and armed wing still operating throughout.

The future of that armed wing has proved one of the largest sticking points in implementing the reconciliation agreement.

Previous attempts at reconciliation have failed.

Hamas has fought three wars with Israel since 2008 and is blacklisted as a terrorist organisation by the European Union and the United States.

Many hoped reconciliation could ease worsening humanitarian conditions in the Palestinian enclave, which suffers from electricity shortages and a lack of other infrastructure, including clean water.A new report from Hotels.com found that Americans paid a bit more for hotel accommodations in 2017.

According to the sites Hotel Price Index, travelers paid 2% more globally for overnight accommodations last year, the biggest jump since 2014. One reason for the price increase is demand. Johan Svanstrom, the president of Hotels.com, stated that several markets had record visitor growth in 2017.

For example, Portugal welcomed a record 12.7 million people in 2017, up 12% from 2016. Domestically, New York City experienced record-breaking tourism with 62.8 million visitors, 2.3 million more than the previous year. Chicago welcomed 55.2 million, up from 48.3 million, while Los Angeles attracted 48.3 million, slightly more than 2016s figure of 47.3 million.

In the US, the rise in demand could be attributed to two factors, the first being a strong economy. Markets are stable, and Americans have more money to spend. The second factor is that more Americans actually have the correct paperwork to travel internationally. Back in 2010, only 33% of Americans had passports. Today, that number is up to 42%, the most in our nations history. In other words, more Americans are seeking new experiences abroad.

Where to find affordable hotels

Travelers paid more for hotel rooms in 2017

It sounds like a no-brainer, but the best way to get a cheaper hotel is to visit a destination with lower demand. In the US, that means skipping Las Vegas, which was the most popular domestic destination in 2017. Other popular US cities include New York City, Orlando, San Diego and Chicago.

Those wanting to get a good hotel deal might consider visiting Philadelphia, which saw a 4% price drop for overnight stays in 2017.

Internationally, Mexico is a top destination for Americans seeking sun and relaxation, but that R&R will cost you. The coastal resort town Playa del Carmen, which has an average nightly price of $247, saw an increase of 2% in 2016.

On the flipside, Americans definitely benefited from traveling to Europe last year. London was the most popular international destination for US travelers in 2016, and saw hotel room prices drop by 2%. Another affordable option is Spain, where the average room costs just $163 a night.

Story continues

The moral of the story is that even though hotel prices have increased overall, you can still find good deals with a little planning and research.

Brittany is reporter at Yahoo Finance. Follow her on Twitter @bjonescooper.

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5 ways to protect your money from credit card skimmersThe Great Pacific Garbage Patch (GPGP), a massive area of floating plastic debris that is more than twice the size of Texas, contains about 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic. This is between 4 and 16 times the mass of plastic that scientists previously estimated.

What's worse is that the amount of plastic within this area is growing "exponentially," according to a comprehensive three-year-long study using 30 vessels and a high-tech reconnaissance aircraft.

The study, published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports, provides a detailed analysis of the size and types of plastic caught up in the Garbage Patch, which occupies about 1.6 million square kilometers, or 617,763 square miles, between Hawaii and California.

SEE ALSO: A floating 'island of trash' has surfaced in the Caribbean

The GPGP is just one of five ocean garbage patches that have developed around the world as people use more and more plastic, which is not biodegradable and is used for everything from water bottles to shipping crates.

A fleet of 30 vessels, each dragging nets behind them to scoop up pieces of plastic, gathered 1.2 million samples. Scientists from The Ocean Cleanup Foundation in the Netherlands, as well as six universities and an aviation sensor company, used the samples they'd gathered to build a model of how plastic is transported in and out of the GPGP.

The study estimates that the approximately1.8 trillion pieces of plastic within the GPGP weighs about 80,000 metric tons. Another unexpected finding: Most of this mass  92 percent  is composed of large plastic debris, such as crates and bottles, while just 8 percent or so of the mass is made up of microplastics, pieces smaller than 5 millimeters in size.

Modeled mass concentration of plastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch

Image: THE OCEAN CLEANUP FOUNDATION/lebreton et. al. scientific reports.

"We were surprised by the amount of large plastic objects we encountered," said Julia Reisser, chief scientist of the expeditions, who works for The Ocean Cleanup Foundation, in a press release.

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At least 46 percent of the mass was composed of ghostnets, or fishing nets drifting at sea, unmoored from the ships that once towed them, the study found.

Theres a lot more plastic out there than thought, said Boyan Slat, a co-author of the study and founder of The Ocean Cleanup Foundation, in an interview.

Unlike earlier studies, which focused on collecting small pieces of plastic within a smaller area of the GPGP, this one attempted to capture the full range of debris floating in the GPGP. The armada of research ships used small nets to catch the small pieces, large ones to wrangle the medium-to-large pieces, and a C-130 Hercules aircraft equipped with LIDAR equipment in order to detect "these mega-pieces of larger than 1 meter, Slat said.

Using their transport model, the researchers pointed to Asia as a main source of plastic pollution for the GPGP, particularly Japan and China, though plastics from North America contribute to it as well. Plastics that get routed into the Garbage Patch by winds and ocean currents are likely to be permanently trapped there, in a zone of little wind and devoid of weather systems that would break up and disperse the debris. Eventually, some of the surface plastic does sink to the ocean bottom, where it can endanger marine life.

A styrofoam buoy collected during the 2015 ocean survey

Image: the ocean Cleanup Foundation.

The researchers used an "apples to apples" comparison of small plastic pieces, dating back to 1970, to analyze their mass estimates against previous studies, Slat said. The conclusion was inescapable: There is more and more plastic being added to the Garbage Patch each year, with far less plastic escaping, to the point where it's undergoing exponential growth.

This May, scientists and engineers affiliated with The Ocean Project plan to test out technology to clean up plastic from the sea, using a vessel off the California coast. The eventual plan is for the group to reduce plastic pollution by cleaning up the GPGP and similar areas of plastics around the world.

The nearly $40 million initiative relies on private funding; since 2013, they'd been raising funds using crowdfunding. Now, according to Slat, the group relies on a group of anonymous philanthropists, split about equally between Silicon Valley and Europe. One prominent investor is Marc Benioff, the founder and CEO of Salesforce, Slat said.

We need to understand how much plastic is out there so that we can clean it up, Slat said.

The goal is to have the first plastic from the Garbage Patch recovered and back in port before the end of this year, Slat said. On its website, the foundation says its goal is to clean up 50 percent of the GPGP recovered within five years of deployment.By Pete Schroeder WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A committee in the U.S. House of Representatives voted Wednesday to name the Federal Reserve as the primary regulator for the "Volcker Rule," which bars banks from speculative trading. The bill, which was approved by the House Financial Services Committee by a vote of 50 to 10, would name the Fed as the primary Volcker Rule regulator, with the goal of streamlining the rule which is currently enforced by five separate regulators. As 16 of the committee's Democrats joined with Republicans in supporting the bill, the degree of bipartisan support for the measure could suggest House lawmakers will endeavor to include it in a broader bill easing bank rules that previously passed the Senate. Large banks have aggressively lobbied Congress for relief from the Volcker Rule for months. The financial industry was quick to express its approval of the committee vote and argued the bill be considered as part of the broader effort to ease bank rules. "As Congress considers revisions to financial regulation, this bill will provide greater certainty to market participants to the benefit of investors, capital formation and economic growth," said Kenneth Bentsen, Jr., president and CEO of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, in a statement. The attempt to alter the rule through Congress comes as regulators have already embarked on the task of rewriting the rule themselves, under a process that requires all five regulators to agree on changes. The Volcker rule, finalized in 2013, following the Dodd Frank financial reform legislation passed in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, restricts U.S. banks from making certain kinds of speculative transactions on their own account and from investing in hedge funds. Bank executives have complained that the current rule is confusing and difficult to follow, chilling trading activity that otherwise would be permitted. Beyond giving the Fed sole authority to rewrite the rule, the legislation also would require the primary regulator for a particular financial firm to serve as the sole supervisor for Volcker rule compliance. Currently, all five regulators share supervision and enforcement authority, an arrangement banks have called unworkable. The bill must be passed by the full House, the Senate, and signed by President Donald Trump before it becomes law. The bill also would exempt banks with less than $10 billion in assets from the Volcker Rule altogether. Streamlining Volcker rule compliance has been a top priority for large banks which have pushed for it to be included in the Senate bill easing bank rules, which is pending in the House. However, Representative Jeb Hensarling, who heads up banking policy in the House, has insisted the Senate bill needs further changes, and is pushing for dozens of House bills that have received bipartisan support to be added to the measure. The Volcker bill also appears to fit that requirement. (Reporting by Pete Schroeder; editing by Clive McKeef)SSP Rao Anwar arrested

SSP Rao Anwar arrestedISLAMABAD: Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) Rao Anwar, wanted in the Naqeebullah Mehsud killing case, was arrested on Wednesday following his appearance before the Supreme Court.



Anwar was removed from his post after his suspected involvement in the murder of a 27-year-old native of Waziristan in a staged police encounter in Karachi on January 13. There had been no trace of the absconding officer despite the fact that the Supreme Court had given a deadline for his arrest and called upon intelligence agencies and the Federal Investigation Agency to help Sindh police nab him. He had last been seen at Islamabad airport trying to flee the country on a Dubai-bound flight on January 23 before he was stopped by the immigration officials.



Soon after Anwar appeared before the three-judge bench hearing the suo motu case against Mehsuds murder, Chief Justice Mian Saqib Nisar ordered police to arrest him. Take him into custody, the CJP said after rejecting his request for protective bail. The CJP expressed dismay at Anwars continuous absence in the case despite repeated summons and safety guarantees by the apex court.



The court ordered constitution of a five-member JIT to probe the case. Sindh Police AIG Aftab Pathan will preside over the team. Other members will be: Zulfiqar Larak, Dr Rizwan, Azad Khan and Waliullah  all police officials.



Raos counsel requested the bench to include intelligence agency officials in the JIT. The court declined his plea saying, We have constituted our own JIT. The bench directed the team to work independently.



The court also ordered Sindh IGP AD Khawaja to ensure Anwars safety in police custody. It is your duty to protect him, the court told Khawaja.



On Anwars request, the court ordered the authorities to unfreeze his bank accounts so that his children do not face financial difficulties. Anwars salary must also be released, the CJP said.



The court also undertook a sworn statement from Mehsuds family that they will not take the law into their own hands and harm Anwar.



The bench directed Sindh Police to escort Anwar to Karachi, adding that it needed no further clearance to escort him to Karachi. The court also ordered police to ensure safety of all the JIT members.



After the hearing ended, Anwar was taken away in an armoured personnel carrier and later handed over to Sindh police officials.



On the request of Anwars counsel, the court withdrew the contempt notice issued to the officer last month, but ruled that his name will remain on the exit control list until the probe is completed.



Anwar, seen wearing a surgical mask, reached court earlier in the morning in a white car. Security was beefed up at the court premises and police cordoned off the entrance.



You used to act brave. Where had you been all this time, the CJP asked him. You went into hiding. Dont you trust the courts? he asked. The former SSP replied that he was facing serious threats which he had also mentioned in the letter sent to the CJP. I am guiltless and am being framed in this case, he claimed.



His counsel, Shamim Rehman, informed the bench that Anwar had now surrendered. You arent doing anybody a favour by surrendering before the court, the CJP remarked. Your letter to the Supreme Court was not an appropriate move, he said. Prove your innocence before the [new] joint investigating team, he told Anwar, adding that he would be considered innocent till proven guilty in the eyes of the law.



When the bench went for recess, the CJP stressed this was not being done to obtain instructions as the courts functioned autonomously.



While talking to reporters outside the court, Naqeebullahs father thanked the people for standing by the family. He also expressed his gratitude to the judiciary.Seven-term incumbent Dan Lipinski faced first serious challenge from progressive Marie Newman, who has refused to concede

Daniel Lipinski had not previously faced a serious challenge in his seven terms in office. Photograph: Kamil Krzaczynski/Reuters

Incumbent Democrat Dan Lipinski won a narrow victory after a fierce challenge from progressive Marie Newman on Tuesday in Illinoiss third congressional district. With 95% of the vote reporting, Lipinski, one of the few remaining anti-abortion Democrats on Capitol Hill, edged out Newman by 51% to 49%.

A seven-term incumbent, Lipinski had not faced a serious challenge in a decade. However, in a district that backed Hillary Clinton by 15 points in 2016, he faced criticism not just for his views on abortion but his opposition to the Affordable Care Act and refusal to endorse Barack Obama in 2012.

The race drew national attention as Newman was backed by a number of major players in the Democratic party including Emilys List, the Human Rights Campaign and SEIU. She also received the support of national political figures including Kirsten Gillibrand and Bernie Sanders while touting her support for crucial progressive priorities such as Medicare for All and a $15 minimum wage.

In contrast, Lipinski relied on support from local labor unions as well as the remnants of the Democratic machine in Chicago. He also received last-minute help from Susan B Anthonys List, an anti-abortion group.

Newman refused to concede on election night, telling supporters she would like Mr Lipinski to have a very painful evening.

Before winning the seat in 2004, Lipinskis father had represented the district for 11 terms and ensured his son was his successor through complicated political machinations.

The district, which includes part of Chicago as well as its south-western suburbs and exurbs, split on geographic lines. Lipinski won inside Chicago city limits but trailed Newman outside the city.

In an interview with the Guardian, Ilyse Hogue, the head of the influential pro-choice group Naral, which backed Newman early on, said the group had made the race a top priority. She noted that it sent a message that it is neck and neck where you have someone who is virtual unknown against a sitting incumbent whose family has had the seat for 36 years.

Story continues

Newman echoed this message, telling the Guardian Lipinski was too conservative for the district: Hes to the right of most Republicans. She also criticized her opponent for living on the coattails of his father and claimed he doesnt work hard.

Marie Newman speaks at her election night rally in Chicago. Photograph: Kamil Krzaczynski/Reuters

Lipinski repeatedly painted his opponent as part of a Tea Party of the left who was trying to divide a party that should be focused on bread-and-butter issues.

The longtime incumbent also focused on his position as a senior Democrat on the House transportation and infrastructure committee to tout his efforts to bring federal money to the district.

Lipinski is virtually certain to win in November. The Republican candidate, who ran unopposed, is a neo-Nazi and a Holocaust denier.

Illinois featured other competitive races at the top of the ticket. In the Democratic primary for governor, billionaire JB Pritzker held off progressive Daniel Biss and political scion Chris Kennedy after spending $70m of his own money. With 95% of precincts reporting, Pritzker had 46% while Biss had 26% and Kennedy had 24%.

On the Republican side, incumbent Bruce Rauner held off an underdog challenge from state representative Jeanine Ives. Rauner, who was facing a tough re-election bid after barely winning in the Republican wave in 2014, had alienated conservatives by signing a bill to expand public funding for abortions in an attempt to woo social moderates. He had previously pledged to veto similar legislation.

Ives attacked Rauner as a sellout in a controversial ad that was condemned by the Illinois Republican party for rhetoric that attacks our fellow Illinoisans based on their race, gender or humanity. With 95% of precincts reporting, the incumbent eked out a win by 52% to 48%.Two Republican senators said Tuesday that they would support impeachment if President Donald Trump fires special counsel Robert Mueller while he investigates potential Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election. Yet, despite the dramatic ending of Trump's presidency being mooted by Republicans for the first time, there appears little prospect anytime soon of the threat gaining widespread acceptance within the president's party.

Trump ramped up his anti-Mueller rhetoric this week, prompting fears that the president was considering ousting the special counsel. The president tweeted Saturday that [T]he Mueller probe should never have been started in that there was no collusion and there was no crime. It was based on fraudulent activities and a Fake Dossier paid for by Crooked Hillary and the DNC, and improperly used in FISA COURT for surveillance of my campaign and called the investigation a WITCH HUNT!

Trending: Read Full Text: Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg Admits Breach of Trust in Cambridge Analytica Scandal

Republican senators Lindsey Graham and Jeff Flake, both of whom have leveled criticism against the president before, indicated that firing Mueller would be impeachable conduct. While neither senator represents the heart of the Republican establishment, their words send a message to the president that his party would not unanimously support him.

"Probably so, if he did it without cause, yeah," Graham told radio host Hugh Hewitt on Tuesday morning in response to a question about whether firing Mueller would constitute an impeachable offense.

I think what the president will have done is stopped an investigation in[to] whether or not his campaign colluded with the Russians, what effect the Russians had on the 2016 campaign. I cant see it being anything other than a corrupt purpose, Graham added. To stop investigation without cause, I think, would be a constitutional crisis.

Story continues

Later in the day, Flake compared a possible firing to President Richard Nixons Saturday Night Massacre, when the president fired independent special prosecutor Archibald Cox.

He left before impeachment came, but that was the remedy then and that would be the remedy now, he said. Flake later tweeted a pleading message to the president. We are begging the president not to fire the special counsel. Don't create a constitutional crisis. Congress cannot preempt such a firing, he wrote. Our only constitutional remedy is after the fact, through impeachment. No one wants that outcome. Mr. President, please don't go there.

Don't miss: Trump Conflict of Interest? 86 Percent of RNCs Venue, Catering Last Month Went to Presidents Properties

Still, Republican leaders are hesitant to openly criticize Trump over his handling of the probe, especially before the 2018 midterm elections.

The president is, as you knowyouve seen his numbers among the Republican baseits very strong. Its more than strong, its tribal in nature, Republican Senator Bob Corker told The Washington Examiner Tuesday. People who tell me, who are out on trail, say, look, people dont ask about issues anymore. They dont care about issues. They want to know if youre with Trump or not.

While Republican rank-and-file would prefer that the president allow Mueller to finish his investigation, they also recognize gamesmanship of Democrats and never-Trump Republicans by proposing impeachment, says Ford OConnell, a Republican strategist who worked on Senator John McCains presidential campaign.

Republicans are going to give Trump the leeway to try and discredit and turn public opinion against Mueller because they know that if Democrats win big in midterms, theyll file impeachment papers. Midterm elections tend to be base affairs, said OConnell, the folks who try to run from the president of either party wind up the ones that get slashed at the ballot.

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GettyImages-929258584

JIM WATSON/AFP/Getty Images

Polls suggest that there is little value to be had with the party's base if Republicans suggest providing the ultimate censure to Trump if he dismisses Mueller. A recent Wall Street Journal/NBC poll found that Republican sentiment on Mueller had hit a new low.

House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell both reiterated their support for Muellers investigation Tuesday but, notably, did not discuss any repercussions for a potential firing.

Ive received assurances his firing is not even under consideration, Ryan said during a Tuesday morning news conference. McConnell said that Bob Mueller should be allowed to finish the job and said he thought he was an excellent appointment.

Trump, meanwhile, took to Twitter Wednesday morning to quote an anti-Mueller opinion piece in The Hill by Alan Dershowitz, a professor emeritus at Harvard Law School.

Special Council is told to find crimes, whether a crime exists or not. I was opposed to the selection of Mueller to be Special Council. I am still opposed to it. I think President Trump was right when he said there never should have been a Special Council appointed because there was no probable cause for believing that there was any crime, collusion or otherwise, or obstruction of justice! So stated by Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz, he wrote. While Trump misquoted the op-ed, he did accurately summarize the piece.

For Republicans who continue to fear the repercussions of getting on the wrong side of the president's still powerful base, the hope is that Trump's bluster regarding Mueller remains just that.

This article was first written by Newsweek

More from NewsweekHARRISBURG, Pa. (AP)  An avalanche of would-be candidates filed to run for Congress in Pennsylvania ahead of Tuesday's deadline, taking advantage of more competitive districts and far surpassing candidate numbers in the three elections since Pennsylvania dropped to 18 U.S. House seats.

As of Tuesday evening's deadline, 94 people had submitted paperwork, according to postings by the state elections bureau, including 16 aiming for an open Philadelphia-area seat that is considered likely to flip from Republican to Democrat in this year's mid-term elections.

Candidates must submit at least 1,000 voter signatures to get on the May 15 primary ballot. Court challenges on the validity of the signatures could still thin the herd somewhat.

Interest in running for Congress is high, driven by Democrats' anti-Trump fervor. In addition, Pennsylvania has its most open seats in decades  five Republicans and one Democrat elected in 2016 aren't running again  and there are more competitive districts after the state Supreme Court redrew boundaries that it ruled had been unconstitutionally gerrymandered by Republicans in 2011.

The new court-ordered districts will be in play this year and Democrats hope that picking up several more Pennsylvania seats will provide a big boost toward their goal of capturing a U.S. House majority.

On Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Jake Corman, R-Centre, said he believed Republicans should end their efforts to block the court's redrawn districts from taking effect, one day after losing challenges in front of the U.S. Supreme Court and a separate panel of three federal judges.

"We appealed it, we lost and it's time to move on," Corman said, adding that he did not see "any reasonable further litigation."

Congressional primary ballots peaked at 48 candidates in the three elections since Pennsylvania dropped from 19 to 18 U.S. House seats in 2012. In 2016, 41 people were on primary ballots.

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Following the 2010 census, Republicans who controlled Harrisburg redrew the map to help Republicans get elected, churning out what became widely viewed as among the nation's most gerrymandered congressional districts.

It proved successful: Republicans have held a 13-5 edge in Pennsylvania's congressional delegation for all three elections in which it was used. Over the same period, Democrats held an edge in voter registration and won 18 of 24 statewide elections.

Now that he is not running again, Republican U.S. Rep. Pat Meehan's seat is expected to fall into Democratic hands. Of the candidates filing there, 14 of 16 are Democrats. Meehan's seat had perhaps the most tortured boundaries  it was nicknamed "Goofy Kicking Donald Duck"  and it underwent a dramatic redrawing to compress it.

Meehan is not running for re-election after it emerged that he had settled a former aide's sexual harassment complaint with taxpayer money.

Two-term Republican Rep. Ryan Costello, also of suburban Philadelphia, is expected to face a tough re-election battle. Democrat and first-time candidate Chrissy Houlahan filed to challenge him.

Three-term Republican Rep. Keith Rothfus, of suburban Pittsburgh, could see a stiff challenge from Democrat Conor Lamb in a much more competitive district, although Lamb is facing a three-way primary fight.

Lamb held a slim lead as vote counting continued Tuesday in last week's special election to fill the remaining 10 months in the term of former Republican Rep. Tim Murphy, who resigned last October amid a sex scandal. The Associated Press has not called the race. Lamb has declared victory while Republican Rick Saccone's campaign has said he has no plans to concede before vote counting wraps up.

Under the redrawn districts, Lamb and Rothfus now live in a significantly redrawn district west of Pittsburgh. Saccone is running in a new southwestern Pennsylvania district where there is no incumbent, but he is facing a primary challenge from a fellow Republican state lawmaker, Guy Reschenthaler. Four Democrats filed to run in the district, which is viewed as leaning solidly Republican.

In the southwestern Pennsylvania district of retiring Republican Rep. Bill Shuster, seven Republicans and one Democrat filed to succeed him. The district is viewed as solidly Republican. Meanwhile, six Democrats and two Republicans filed to succeed retiring Republican Rep. Charles Dent in a swing seat in eastern Pennsylvania's Allentown area.Sir Tim Berners-Lee has urged Facebook to act after the Cambridge Analytica scandal (Rex)

As the scandal over Cambridge Analytica threatens to seriously harm Facebooks reputation, the inventor of the World Wide Web has weighed in on the row.

In a series of tweets, Sir Tim Berners-Lee described the Cambridge Analytica (CA) scandal as a serious moment for the web, but reassured Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg he can fix it.

The British computer scientist said it was time for all Internet users to build a web that reflects our hopes and fulfils our dreams more than it magnifies our fears and deepens our divisions.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg apologised for a breach that led to 50 million users data being obtained (Rex)

He posted on Twitter after Mr Zuckerberg apologised for a 2015 breach that led to 50 million users data being obtained by CA.

The fallout of the scandal has seen a growing movement of people deleting their Facebook accounts.

Sir Tim wrote: This is a serious moment for the webs future. But I want us to remain hopeful.

MOST POPULAR TODAY ON YAHOO

The problems we see today are bugs in the system. Bugs can cause damage, but bugs are created by people, and can be fixed by people.

He went on: I can imagine Mark Zuckerberg is devastated that his creation has been abused and misused. (Some days I have the same feeling #justsaying)

I would say to him: You can fix it. It wont be easy but if companies work with governments, activists, academics and web users we can make sure platforms serve humanity.

This is a serious moment for the webs future. But I want us to remain hopeful. The problems we see today are bugs in the system. Bugs can cause damage, but bugs are created by people, and can be fixed by people. 1/9  Tim Berners-Lee (@timberners_lee) March 22, 2018

I can imagine Mark Zuckerberg is devastated that his creation has been abused and misused. (Some days I have the same feeling #justsaying) 2/9  Tim Berners-Lee (@timberners_lee) March 22, 2018

I would say to him: You can fix it. It wont be easy but if companies work with governments, activists, academics and web users we can make sure platforms serve humanity. 3/9  Tim Berners-Lee (@timberners_lee) March 22, 2018

The inventor proposed a set of general rules for web users to adhere to:

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Any data belonging to a person is theirs alone to control. If anyone is given the right to use the data for a purpose then they should use it for that purpose alone.

If researchers have access to data they must only use it for research purposes. Sir Tim said this is REALLY IMPORTANT as so much important science and medicine depends on that data.

People have been deleting their Facebook accounts as a result of the scandal (Rex)

In a plea to all web users, he added: My message to all web users today is this: I may have invented the web, but you make it what it is.

And its up to all of us to build a web that reflects our hopes and fulfils our dreams more than it magnifies our fears & deepens our divisions.Israel's military has confirmed it was behind an airstrike that destroyed what it believed to be a nuclear reactor in Syria in 2007.

Newly-declassified material showed the decision was made the strike should not be linked to Israel due to the possibility of war.

Instead, it was ordered to be kept secret until further notice.

The airstrike saw eight F-15 fighters bomb the reactor in the Deir el-Zour region, about 300 miles northwest of Damascus on 6 September.

It had been in development for years and was due to begin operations at the end of that year.

In a statement, Israel described the strike as having "successfully removed an emerging existential threat to Israel and to the entire region - Syrian nuclear capabilities".

Syria had denied it was building a nuclear reactor but the UN nuclear watchdog said the site was "very likely" to be a nuclear reactor and the North Koreans could have been helping to build it.

Also included in the material was footage of the strike, which caused "irreversible" damage, and pictures of secret army intelligence communiques regarding the target.

Israel's role had been widely suspected but it was not confirmed until now.

One reason could be the upcoming memoir of former prime minister Ehud Olmert, who ordered the strike.

Or it could also be a warning to Iran, Israel's bitter enemy which is increasingly active in Syria, where it is an ally of Syrian President Bashar al Assad.

Military chief Lieutenant General Gadi Eisenkot said in a statement: "The message from the 2007 attack on the reactor is that Israel will not tolerate construction that can pose an existential threat."

According to Air force commander Major General Amikam Norkin, the strike has been vindicated by the conflict and chaos in Syria, as the reactor was in an area that was later under the control of Islamic State.

"Imagine what situation we would be in today if there was a nuclear reactor in Syria," he said.

"In historic hindsight, I think Israel's decision to destroy the reactor is one of the most important decisions taken here in the last 70 years."

Israeli Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman said: "The motivation of our enemies has grown in recent years, but so too the might of the IDF (Israeli Defence Forces)."Jerusalem (AFP) - Israeli authorities said Thursday they had launched an investigation into Facebook's activities following a scandal over the hijacking of personal data from millions of the social network's users.

Israel's privacy protection agency "informed Facebook" of the probe after revelations over data transfers from the tech giant to consultant Cambridge Analytica, the agency said.

The agency was also looking into "the possibility of other infringements of the privacy law regarding Israelis", it said in a statement released by the justice ministry.

Britain's Guardian newspaper has reported that Israeli hackers offered material to Cambridge Analytica.

But an Israeli justice ministry spokeswoman said the probe did not involve hackers, focusing rather on whether Israeli users' rights were violated.

Under Israel's privacy law, personal data may only be used with consent and for the purpose for which it was handed over, the privacy protection agency said.

"Therefore, the authority will investigate whether personal data of Israeli citizens was illegally used in a way that infringes upon their right to privacy," it said.

Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg has vowed to "step up" to fix problems at the social media giant as it fights a snowballing scandal involving Cambridge Analytica, a British firm linked to US President Donald Trump's 2016 campaign.

The scandal erupted when a whistleblower revealed the British data consultant had created psychological profiles on 50 million Facebook users via a personality prediction app.(TEL AVIV, Israel)  The Israeli military confirmed Wednesday it carried out the 2007 airstrike in Syria that destroyed what was believed to be a nuclear reactor, lifting the veil of secrecy over one of its most daring and mysterious operations in recent memory.

Although Israel was widely believed to have been behind the Sept. 6, 2007, airstrike, it has never before commented publicly on it.

In a lengthy release, the military revealed that eight F-15 fighter jets carried out the top-secret airstrikes against the facility in the Deir el-Zour region, 450 kilometers (about 300 miles) northwest of Damascus, destroying a site that had been in development for years and was scheduled to go into operation at the end of that year.

Israels involvement has been one of its most closely held secrets, and it was not immediately clear why Israel decided to go public now. The military would not comment on its reasoning, but the move could be related to the upcoming memoir of former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who ordered the strike and has hinted about it for years, or it could be meant as a warning to archenemy Iran, which is active in Syria.

Israel and Syria have always been bitter enemies. Throughout Syrias seven-year civil war, Israel has carried out well over 100 airstrikes, most believed to have been aimed at suspected weapons shipments destined for the Iranian-backed Hezbollah militant group. Both Iran and Hezbollah are allied with Syrian President Bashar Assad.

At the time of the 2007 strike, Syria accused Israel of invading its airspace, but gave no further details about the target.

The pre-mission briefing, made public Wednesday, stated that the operation should not be attributed to Israel so as to minimize the potential for an all-out war. It was ordered to be kept secret until further notice.

The strike was reminiscent of an Israeli attack against a reactor that was under construction in Iraq in 1981. The strike was later credited with preventing Saddam Hussein from acquiring weapons of mass destruction that could have been used in the Gulf War a decade later.

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The message from the 2007 attack on the reactor is that Israel will not tolerate construction that can pose an existential threat, military chief Lt. Gen. Gadi Eisenkot said in Wednesdays statement. This was the message in 1981, this is the message in 2007 and this is the future message to our enemies.

Eisenkot, who at the time commanded Israels northern front along the Lebanese and Syrian borders, said it marked Israels most comprehensive attack in Syria since the 1973 Mideast war, and that everyone involved knew it could spark a new one. He said only a handful of top commanders were aware of the plans for Operation Outside The Box.

The military said the F-15s took off from two bases in southern Israel at 10:30 p.m. on Sept. 5 and returned four hours later. Wednesdays announcement also indicated the Syrian reactor was much closer to completion than previously reported.

From Israels perspective, the strike was an astounding success since it not only destroyed the site, but prevented further escalation and strengthened its deterrence in the region.

Air force commander Maj. Gen. Amikam Norkin said the current turmoil in Syria has further vindicated the strike, particularly since the reactor was in an area later captured by Islamic State militants.

Imagine what situation we would be in today if there was a nuclear reactor in Syria, Norkin said. In historic hindsight, I think Israels decision to destroy the reactor is one of the most important decisions taken here in the last 70 years.

Uzi Rabi, an expert on Iran at Tel Aviv University, said Israels surprising confirmation might be meant as a warning sign to Iran as it builds up its military presence in Syria. Israel has warned against the establishment of a permanent Iranian military presence in Syria, particularly areas close to Israel.

Last month, Israel shot down an Iranian drone that entered its airspace, triggering a clash in which an Israeli warplane crashed after being struck by Syrian anti-aircraft fire. Israel responded by bombing Syrian anti-aircraft batteries.

The military said it began obtaining information regarding foreign experts helping Syria develop the Deir el-Zour site in late 2004. Later it discovered that North Korea was helping Syria build a reactor to manufacture plutonium.

In his memoir, Decision Points, former President George W. Bush said the target was believed to be a Syrian nuclear reactor being built with North Korean assistance. He said Israel first asked the U.S. to bomb the site and then carried out an attack itself when Washington declined.

The strike came about a year after Israels inconclusive war against Hezbollah, in which Lebanese guerrillas battled Israels powerful army to a stalemate. The poor performance raised questions about Israels deterrent capabilities.

Prime Minister Olmerts execution of the strike made up for the confidence I had lost in the Israelis during the Lebanon war, Bush wrote, adding that the Israeli leader rejected a suggestion to go public with the operation.

Olmert told me he wanted total secrecy. He wanted to avoid anything that might back Syria into a corner and force Assad to retaliate. This was his operation, and I felt an obligation to respect his wishes, Bush wrote.

Olmert has skirted around the issue, and military censors, for years, repeatedly saying that according to foreign sources Israel had been involved. After Bushs account was published in 2010, Olmert said: I dont want (to), and I cant deny it.

Olmert, who was prime minister from 2006 until 2009 and was recently released from prison after serving time for corruption, is expected to delve more deeply into the issue in his upcoming book.Bnei Brak (Israel) (AFP) - Israeli police on Thursday said they arrested 30 ultra-Orthodox Jews who threw stones at officers and blocked a main artery near Tel Aviv, in protest against the military draft.

A police statement said that protesters cut off the north-south highway 4 in the predominantly ultra-Orthodox city of Bnei Brak in an "illegal demonstration", the latest of several spurred by arrests of young ultra-Orthodox men accused of dodging military service.

An AFP journalist saw demonstrators sitting down or laying in the middle of a neighbouring street and mounted officers riding among them to disperse the crowd while a water cannon sprayed the protesters.

"Four police officers were injured lightly after stones were thrown at them," police said.

Israeli law requires men to serve two years and eight months in the military on reaching the age of 18, while women must serve for two.

Ultra-Orthodox men are excused from military service if they are engaged in religious study, but must still report to the army to receive their exemption.

Some seminary students have refused even to do that.

There have been protests in Bnei Brak and Jerusalem since the beginning of March, after the arrest of a young ultra-Orthodox man who failed to show up to request an exemption after receiving a call-up notice.First, there was the meme of Ivanka Trumpconducting a science experiment. Now, theres the ever-popular Photoshop Battle.

Reddit users have been busy reimagining this photograph of PresidentDonald Trumpsdaughter and adviser, which was snapped during her tour ofa local education programin Iowa on Monday:

POTUS himself made several appearances in the reworked pictures. Russian PresidentVladimir Putinand North Korean leaderKim Jong Un also made cameo appearances.

Check out some of the best posts so far:

Related Coverage

Ivanka Trump Is Opening A New Store In Trump Tower, For Obvious Reasons

Ivanka Trump Linked To Fraudster In Trump Panama Resort Project

Ivanka Trump Is Still Collecting $1.5 Million A Year From Trump Organization

This article originally appeared on HuffPost.The White House isnt the only place where some people are outraged to see first daughter Ivanka Trump.

Related: Ivanka Trump Has Her Own Dog Doppelganger, According To Twitter

A hair salon in Des Moines, Iowa, attracted heat and fleeing customers after posting a photo on Facebook of Trumps visit with Governor Kim Reynolds.

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Our Monday kicked off with styling Ivanka Trump for her visit to Iowa! We (heart emoji) supporting women in politics, Salon Spa W wrote in accompaniment to the photo.

The post by the salon, which is a few blocks away from the state capitol and has served government officials including former President Barack Obama, had received more than 400 comments by Wednesday morning.

Many Facebook users disapproved, suggesting they would no longer frequent the business.

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You respect money over women, Danielle Lynn commented. Not just women, but humanity. These two featured in your photo are disgraceful.

This is devastating. I love Salon Spa W so much. Its my place of refuge, Jamie P. B. Elliot commented. As an incredibly loyal customer, I demand an apology before I book my next appointment, and will be canceling the appointments I have.

Another user, Emmanuel Smith, added: "Do you know how much money I spend at Salon Spa W? I get my nails and hair done there exclusively, and literally have my appointments booked till years end. THIS makes me not want to give you another penny, and makes me really REALLY angry for all your amazing LGBTQ staff whose lives these women threaten. Please take this down."

The backlash, though, soon received its own backlash, with a number of other users thanking the salon for serving the president's eldest daughter.

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Story continues

Styling someones hair doesnt mean you automatically agree with their political preferences, Evan Olson wrote on the thread. Sometimes a haircut is just a haircut.

The salons owner and president, China Wong, told local NBC affiliate WHOtv.com that people traveling with Trump reached out to her for the appointment.

She also addressed the criticism on Facebook.

We believe everyone matters and deserves our indiscriminate care and kindness, she wrote. "While we are not a partisan organization we do see it as part of our mission to welcome people to Des Moines and serve everyone. We share images of our clients, some that are recognizable public figures, to showcase our work."

Trump was in Iowa to talk to students of the Waukee School Districts Aspiring Professional Experience Program as part of her push to support the Trump administrations federal job training programs and infrastructure plan.

The first daughter has gotten backlash from previous visits to schools including Norwalk Early College Academy in Connecticut late last year. She has also faced consistent criticism about having a role in the White House, which recently saw her meet with South Korea's president, despite having no previous political or foreign policy experience.

This article was first written by Newsweek

More from NewsweekFrom Greg Swank, 12-4-2 You are about to read a list of 45 goals that found their way down the halls of our great Capitol back in 1963. As...Reese Witherspoon turns 42 today, and while shes gotten a lot of love from her celebrity friends, none compares to Jennifer Garners tribute.

The Love, Simon actress was a noted band geek growing up  she was born in Texas and raised in West Virginia  and she showed off that talent once again on Thursday in honor of Witherspoons big day. Garner posted an Instagram video of herself  in full marching band uniform (with shako!)  as she busted out her saxophone to play Happy Birthday to Witherspoon. Garner, 45, was committed  right down to the end, when she turned, military like, and marched off. Her smile made it clear that she was darned proud of herself, as she should be.

We have so many questions: Is this one of her old uniforms? If so, when was the last time she wore it? If not, where the heck did it come from? Does she do this often? Why did she do this specifically for Witherspoon?

What we do know is that Garner  who is old pals with Witherspoon, despite their never co-starring in any projects  has some lasting sax talent. In 2016, she showed it off during an interview with Vanity Fair. Well, when she stopped laughing.

That same year, she talked about playing Sally (that was the name of her sax, which she later lost) on Late Night With Seth Meyers. She described the importance of walking heel-toe and staying in formation. (Whoever taught her, taught her well.) She made it clear that its not easy being part of a marching band. (Weve watched the Macys Thanksgiving Day Parade enough times to know shes right.)

Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Garner (pictured in 2013) are old pals, so Garner pulled out all the stops for her friends 42nd birthday. (Photo: Jason Merritt/Getty Images for Childrens Defense Fund-California)

Witherspoon has been pulling in a slew of birthday wishes on social media today, but  sorry to the others  they just arent as good as Garners all-in present.

Witherspoons Big Little Lies co-star Nicole Kidman called her beautiful.

Her A Wrinkle in Time co-star Mindy Kaling dubbed her a kween.

Sarah Michelle Gellar gushed about her youthful looks.

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But after Garners serenade, were unimpressed in the best possible way. As for Witherspoon, shes just enjoying her day. How can any day that starts with birthday cake be bad?

Read more from Yahoo Entertainment:MADISON, Wis. (AP)  The Latest on lawsuit to force Gov. Scott Walker to call special elections (all times local):

12:55 p.m.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker isn't saying whether he will immediately call special elections for a pair of legislative vacancies as ordered by a judge.

Dane County Circuit Judge Josann Reynolds rejected all of Walker's arguments against calling the elections Thursday. She gave him until March 29 to issue an order calling the elections.

Wisconsin Department of Justice spokesman Johnny Koremenos says attorneys who defended Walker are consulting with him about next steps and had no further comment.

The lawsuit was brought by a Democratic group run by former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder. Attorney Elisabeth Frost says she hopes Walker will drop the legal fight and promptly comply with the judge's order.

The seats were both held by Republicans and have been vacant since Dec. 29.

___

12:30 p.m.

A Wisconsin judge has ordered Republican Gov. Scott Walker to call special elections for a pair of legislative vacancies, handing a victory to Democrats who have pushed for the elections to be held.

Dane County Circuit Judge Josann Reynolds on Thursday sided with voters represented by a national Democratic group led by Eric Holder, the U.S. attorney general under former President Barack Obama. They argued that Wisconsin law required Walker to call the special elections as soon as possible after the Dec. 29 resignations.

The state Senate and Assembly seats were held by Republicans who resigned to join Walker's administration. Democrats were emboldened they could win the seats after an upset Democratic victory in another state Senate seat two weeks before the resignations.

Attorneys from the state Department of Justice representing Walker are expected to appeal the ruling.

___

11:20 a.m.

An attorney arguing that Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has a legal duty to call special elections for a pair of legislative vacancies says the governor's arguments are "illogical."

Story continues

A judge heard arguments Thursday in the case brought by a national Democratic group led by Eric Holder, the U.S. attorney general under former President Barack Obama.

Attorney Elisabeth Frost says it's a "textbook" case of voter disenfranchisement. Two voters who live in the affected districts testified they are upset and insulted they don't have representatives.

But Assistant Attorney General Steve Kilpatrick argues that while it's unfortunate voters don't have representatives in those districts, the damage they're suffering doesn't meet the legal standard needed to force Walker to call elections.

The judge has not indicated when she will rule.

___

9:26 a.m.

A Wisconsin judge is considering whether to order Republican Gov. Scott Walker to call special elections for a pair of vacancies in the state Legislature.

The hearing Thursday comes in a lawsuit brought by a national Democratic group led by Eric Holder, the U.S. attorney general under former President Barack Obama.

Attorneys for Holder's group argue that Walker has an obligation under the law to call special elections as soon as possible to fill the vacancies that occurred on Dec. 29. The seats were held by Republicans.

Walker has refused, saying it would be a waste of money to call the elections ahead of the regularly scheduled election in November. Democrats say Walker is afraid Democrats will win the special elections.Prague (AFP) - At least six people died and two were injured in an explosion Thursday at a Czech chemical plant in the northern town of Kralupy-nad-Vltavou, firefighters said.

"Six bodies were found at the scene, and two people were injured," regional fire spokeswoman Vladimira Kerekova told AFP.

One of the people injured was hospitalised with "devastating facial injuries", while the other suffered 10 percent burns, emergency services spokeswoman Petra Effenbergerova said.

Owned by Czech chemicals group Unipetrol, the plant is part of a refinery complex.

"An explosion that was not followed by a fire took place in one of the reservoirs of the refinery," the company said on Twitter.

"The situation is now under control. There is no further risk."

Kerekova said the blast occurred while the reservoir was being cleaned.

"There is no risk to the health of Kralupy-nad-Vltavou residents," added Ales Levy, city hall spokesman for the industrial town of 19,000 people.

"We have launched an investigation to determine the circumstances and causes," police spokeswoman Marketa Johnova said.Tessalit (Mali) (AFP) - Mali's Prime Minister Soumeylou Boubeye Maiga made his first visit to the country's troubled north on Thursday, but delayed a trip to the restive city of Kidal due to bad weather.

Five French soldiers were wounded on Thursday in Kidal when their base was attacked, the French army said, and France's defence minister said the assault was likely linked to Maiga's planned stop.

Maiga was appointed in December charged with bolstering security as jihadists mount near-weekly attacks on security forces, raising fears for safety ahead of a presidential election due in July.

In the northern town of Tessalit, he met Malian soldiers, promising them "better conditions to face the common enemy, terrorism," and saying they were "not alone".

Bad weather meant the plane meant to fly the prime minister to Kidal could not take off, his entourage said, delaying his visit to Friday.

Around 4,000 French troops are deployed under Operation Barkhane alongside the UN's 12,000-strong MINUSMA peacekeeping operation in Mali.

Last month, French army chief Francois Lecointre warned parliament that it would take 10 to 15 years to resolve Mali's problems, according to a summary of his remarks published on Thursday.

Meanwhile, MINUSMA head Mahamat Saleh Annadif said the attack on the joint French-UN base was aimed at the "strong signal given for peace and reconciliation in Mali" that Maiga's visit would represent.

French Defence Minister Florence Parly told parliament there was "almost certainly a link between this attack and the submitted intention by the Malian prime minister to visit Kidal".

No Malian head of government has visited Kidal since 2014 when fighting broke out during a visit by then prime minister Moussa Mara which ended with the army suffering a heavy defeat.

The rebels, who rose up against the state in 2012 in a movement piggybacked by jihadists, signed a peace treaty in 2015 but have remained resistant to handing back full control to the government.

Maiga said on Tuesday he would visit "without arrogance, in order to listen, and understand the urgent needs of the population".

The prime minister is also due in Gao and Timbuktu, two other northern cities frequently rocked by unrest.A man who got his head stuck in a reclining movie seat has died as a result of his injuries.

Ateeq Rafiq, a 24-year-old father in Birmingham, England, was seeing a movie on March 9 when he bent down to retrieve a phone that had dropped between the reclining seats.

When Rafiq bent down, the footrest on the electrically-powered seat apparently clamped down on his head, according to the Birmingham Mail newspaper.

A source told the paper how the freak accident happened:

The Gold Class seats are electric reclining seats. He bent down to look for his phone. At this point the leg-rest was in an upright position. But as he stuck his head underneath to have a look, the footrest clamped down onto his head. He was stuck. His partner and staff tried to free him but couldnt. The chair leg-rest was eventually broken free and he managed to get out.

Rafiq was unconscious and reportedly suffered a cardiac attack during the incident, according to the Mirror. He was revived with CPR and taken to a nearby hospital where he died a week later on March 16.

After Rafiqs death was announced, Vue International, which owns the theater where the tragic accident occurred, released a statement:

A full investigation into the nature of the incident is ongoing. Our thoughts and condolences are with the family who have our full support and assistance.

His family is devastated by the loss, according to sister-in-law Fatima Arzo.

We are grieving and completely in shock. My sister is in pieces, she told the Mirror. We are grateful to everyone who tried to help him, and at the moment we are praying and trying to come to terms with the fact we lost a loved one.

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This article originally appeared on HuffPost.Many people took notice of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerbergs lack of an apology in his first public address Wednesday morning after news of the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke. In an interview with Laurie Segall on Anderson Cooper 360, Zuckerberg not only apologized, but said he regretted not being more forthcoming about the information breach. So this was a major breach of trust, and I'm really sorry that this happened. You know, we have a basic responsibility to protect people's data. And if we can't do that, then we don't deserve to have the opportunity to serve people, Zuckerberg said. Zuckerberg also gave some surprising answers. He said whomever at Facebook is the most qualified to do so, they would be the ones testifying in front of Congress on any given issue. But he also said hed do it himself, saying, So the short answer is, is I'm happy to if it's the right thing to do. More surprising was what he said in regard to Facebook being regulated. I actually am not sure we shouldn't be regulated, Zuckerberg said. You know, I think in general, technology is an increasingly important trend in the world, and I actually think the question is more what is the right regulation rather than yes or no, should it be regulated? Zuckerberg also admitted that Facebook was not prepared for the challenges the 2016 U.S. presidential election would bring. I think what's clear is that in 2016, we were not as on top of a number of issues as we should have, whether it was Russian interference or fake news, Zuckerberg said. Zuckerberg went on to talk about the 2017 French presidential election, and the special election in Alabama during which Facebook deployed A.I. tools to detect and weed out bad actors. But hes aware there will be more to deal with going forward. I'm sure that there's, you know, V2, version two of whatever the Russian effort was in 2016. I'm sure they're working on that, and there are going to be some new tactics we make sure we observe and get in front of, Zuckerberg said. Zuckerberg is also aware of the responsibility that Facebook bears and will continue to do whatever is necessary to ensure the integrity of elections going forward. Zuckerberg said,we have a responsibility to do this not only for the 2018 midterms in the U.S., which are going to be a huge deal this year, and that's just a huge focus of us, but there's a big election in India this year. There's a big election in Brazil. There are big elections around the world, and you can bet we are really committed to doing everything that we need to to make sure that the integrity of those elections on Facebook is secured.Many people took notice of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerbergs lack of an apology in his first public address Wednesday morning, after news of the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke. In an interview with Laurie Segall on Anderson Cooper 360, Zuckerberg not only apologized but said he regretted not being more forthcoming about the information breach. So this was a major breach of trust, and Im really sorry that this happened, Zuckerberg said. You know, we have a basic responsibility to protect peoples data. And if we cant do that, then we dont deserve to have the opportunity to serve people.

Zuckerberg to Congress?

Zuckerberg also gave some surprising answers. When asked if he would testify in front of Congress, he said, The short answer is, Im happy to if its the right thing to do. He added that it might be more appropriate for someone else to testify. What we try to do is send the person at Facebook who will have the most knowledge about what Congress is trying to learn, he said. If thats me, then I am happy to go.

Facebook Regulations

What was even more surprising was what the Facebook founder had to say about his social media site being regulated. I actually am not sure we shouldnt be regulated, Zuckerberg said. I think in general, technology is an increasingly important trend in the world, and I actually think the question is more what is the right regulation rather than yes or no, should it be regulated?

Zuckerberg opens up about Facebooks role in elections in America and around the world.

Facebooks Role In Elections

Zuckerberg also admitted that Facebook was not prepared for the challenges brought by the 2016 U.S. presidential election. I think whats clear is that in 2016 we were not as on top of a number of issues as we should have [been]  whether it was Russian interference or fake news, he said.

Zuckerberg went on to talk about the 2017 French presidential election and the special election in Alabama, during which Facebook deployed AI tools to detect and weed out bad actors. But hes aware there will be more to deal with going forward. Im sure that theres  version two of whatever the Russian effort was in 2016, Zuckerberg said. Im sure theyre working on that, and there are going to be some new tactics we make sure we observe and get in front of.

Story continues

Hes also aware of the responsibility that Facebook bears and insists the company will continue to do whatever is necessary to ensure the integrity of elections. We have a responsibility to do this not only for the 2018 midterms in the U.S., which are going to be a huge deal this year, and thats just a huge focus of us, but theres a big election in India this year, Zuckerberg said. Theres a big election in Brazil. There are big elections around the world, and you can bet we are really committed to doing everything that we need to to make sure that the integrity of those elections on Facebook is secured.

Anderson Cooper 360 airs weekdays at 8 p.m. on CNN.

Check out the South Park spoof on Mark Zuckerberg and fake news:

Read more from Yahoo Entertainment:

Tell us what you think! Hit us up on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram  or leave your comments below. And check out our host, Kylie Mar, on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.Facebook is no stranger to scandal, but the last few days have been a particular kind of rocky for the gargantuan social network. Following revelations that Facebook happily handed over the data of 50 million users to Cambridge Analytica, the companys stock price has tanked, investors have filed suit against the company, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been doing his best tumbleweed impression.

But Zuckerberg has recognized the seriousness of the crisis facing his company, and the hoodied figure has finally made a public post to address the issues. In a statement on his Facebook page (but of course), Zuckerberg gave an exhaustive timeline of events, said that mistakes were made, and promised that it would never happen again.

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We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we cant then we dont deserve to serve you, Zuckerberg said. Ive been working to understand exactly what happened and how to make sure this doesnt happen again. The good news is that the most important actions to prevent this from happening again today we have already taken years ago. But we also made mistakes, theres more to do, and we need to step up and do it.

The scandal emerged into the public eye late last week, when a whistleblower from data firm Cambridge Analytica revealed to The Guardian and the New York Times how the company harvested data from Facebook to fuel its political operations. Cambridge Analytica, best known for its work on President Trumps digital campaign, reportedly harvested private information from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users without their permission.

According to The Guardians report, Cambridge Analytica used a harmless-looking Facebook app to gather information not just on a few hundred thousand users, but also on their friends:

The data was collected through an app called thisisyourdigitallife, built by academic Aleksandr Kogan, separately from his work at Cambridge University. Through his company Global Science Research (GSR), in collaboration with Cambridge Analytica, hundreds of thousands of users were paid to take a personality test and agreed to have their data collected for academic use. However, the app also collected the information of the test-takers Facebook friends, leading to the accumulation of a data pool tens of millions-strong. Facebooks platform policy allowed only collection of friends data to improve user experience in the app and barred it being sold on or used for advertising.

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Initially, Facebooks reaction was one of outrage and finger-pointing. This was a scam  and a fraud, said Paul Grewal, Facebooks deputy general counsel, told the New York Times last Friday. We will take whatever steps are required to see that the data in question is deleted once and for all  and take action against all offending parties, Mr. Grewal continued, and indeed, Facebook immediately suspended Cambridge Analytica, and sent forensic auditors to its London offices.

But as more details emerged, it became increasingly clear that this wasnt a technical data security breach, but rather a baked-in problem for Facebook. Kogan gained access to this information in a legitimate way and through the proper channels that governed all developers on Facebook at that time, Facebook wrote in a statement Friday. The company contends that the data was misused after it was taken from Facebooks servers, but the question emerging is why Facebook let the data be harvested in the first place.

The company pointed out that since 2014, it has changed its security policies, and in theory, a similar data breach couldnt happen again. In the past five years, we have made significant improvements in our ability to detect and prevent violations by app developers, Facebook said in a statement. Now all apps requesting detailed user information go through our App Review process, which requires developers to justify the data theyre looking to collect and how theyre going to use it  before theyre allowed to even ask people for it.

In his statement, Zuckerberg said that the platform will go farther in its agreements with developers in the future. We will restrict developers data access even further to prevent other kinds of abuse, Zuckerberg said. For example, we will remove developers access to your data if you havent used their app in 3 months. We will reduce the data you give an app when you sign in  to only your name, profile photo, and email address. Well require developers to not only get approval but also sign a contract in order to ask anyone for access to their posts or other private data.

Since the initial reports emerged about Facebooks data leak, Cambridge Analytica has been rocked by a separate scandal. An investigative journalist for the UKs Channel 4 news secretly filmed meetings with Cambridge Analytica executives, in which they claimed to have used bribery, entrapment, and fake news campaigns to help control the outcomes of elections worldwide. The CEO, Alexander Nix, also claimed a much bigger role for Cambridge Analytica in the Trump presidential campaign than was previously realized.

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See the original version of this article on BGR.comBy Thu Thu Aung YANGON (Reuters) - Win Myint, the long-serving member of Myanmar's ruling party who is expected to become the country's next president within days, is described by colleagues as a skilled political operator with a crucial quality - loyalty to de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi. The job is vacant after another Suu Kyi loyalist, Htin Kyaw, resigned due to ill-health on Wednesday. Suu Kyi - who remains a national heroine in Myanmar despite growing international criticism over the Rohingya crisis in the northwest - is barred by the military-drafted constitution from assuming the top job because her sons have British citizenship. Still, she wields absolute authority in the ruling National League for Democracy (NLD) after vowing on the eve of her 2015 election victory to run the country from "above the president" - an arrangement that means the change is unlikely to distort the balance of power in a country where the army remains powerful. State media confirmed on Thursday the 66-year-old Win Myint was poised to take over when the country's parliament elects a new president, in a vote that must be held within seven days, after he resigned as lower house speaker on Wednesday. "U Win Myint, 66, is considered to be one of the candidates for the presidency, which was vacated by U Htin Kyaw for health reasons," said the state-run Global New Light of Myanmar daily. Suu Kyi is known for keeping her cards close to her chest and operating with a very narrow group of trusted advisors. Win Myint, who has been an NLD member from its humble beginnings almost three decades ago, is among the few to whom she has given serious responsibility since taking office almost two years ago. "If I have to describe him in one word, I would say: 'a good person, and loyal to Aung San Suu Kyi'," said Ye Htut, an upper house NLD lawmaker. Ye Htut said that when he was invited to Win Myint's daughter's wedding last year, he specifically asked guests not to bring any gifts to the ceremony. "It's obvious he's an honest man who's not seeking anything for his own benefit." Win Myint comes from Myanmar's southern agricultural heartland in the Ayeyarwady delta region. He worked as a senior lawyer in the 1980s and took part in the 1988 pro-democracy uprising, later serving three years in an internment camp. "He usually takes walks in early mornings and does mediation to improve his health and practice mindfulness," said Cho Cho Win, a lower house NLD lawmaker. CRITICS STIFLED Win Myint's critics, including some Yangon-based diplomats, say that while he is loyal and honest, the quality of debate during his tenure as speaker deteriorated as he silenced dissenting voices - including those from the NLD. Nyo Nyo Thin, a former Yangon region lawmaker, has criticized Win Myint's performance as the speaker, saying parliament, where the NLD enjoys a comfortable majority, was not robust enough in performing its check-and-balance role. "Parliament has responsibilities to control and watch over the government's activities for its actions and policies, but there is no remarkable activity in the parliament when he was in charge," said Nyo Nyo Thin. Reuters was unable to reach Win Myint for comment on the criticism. The president-to-be was among a few dozen NLD members, including Suu Kyi, elected to parliament in 2012 by-elections as the country began a dramatic transition from nearly 50 years of military rule. Before his appointment as lower house speaker in April 2016, he shared an austere one-room chamber with his wife in a compound for lawmakers in Myanmar's purpose-built capital Naypyitaw, living next to other leading NLD figures. "He is very conscious, self-aware and very clever. He takes time to do things in a steady way. He could remember and recite laws without reading because he studied the law in-depth," said a long-time NLD friend and a senior party member Han Tha Myint. According to the country's constitution, the more senior of two vice presidents will stand in as president until a new leader is elected by parliament. On Thursday, parliament elected a new lower house speaker and laid the ground for a presidential vote expected on Friday or Monday. (Reporting by Thu Thu Aung; Additional reporting and writing by Antoni Slodkowski; Editing by Alex Richardson)President Donald Trump is shaking up his legal team, again.

As negotiations continue with special counsel Robert Mueller on the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, the president has added a new lawyer and is considering making other changes.

The newest addition to the legal team has garnered attention for burnishing Trump on cable TV. Former federal prosecutor Joseph diGenova previously argued on Fox News that the Russia investigation was part of a brazen plot by FBI and Department of Justice staffers to frame Trump.

Trumps legal team also reached out in recent days to noted D.C. powerhouse Ted Olson, solicitor general under President George W. Bush, but he declined within hours of the news becoming public. Trump is also reportedly in discussions with Emmett Flood, a veteran D.C. lawyer who worked with Bill Clinton during the impeachment.

The news contradicts Trumps tweet on the subject earlier this month, in which he declared that he was not seeking to change his legal representation.

The Failing New York Times purposely wrote a false story stating that I am unhappy with my legal team on the Russia case and am going to add another lawyer to help out. Wrong. I am VERY happy with my lawyers, John Dowd, Ty Cobb and Jay Sekulow. They are doing a great job and.....  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 11, 2018

The Russia probe is not the only matter on which Trump is getting legal advice.

The presidents private lawyers are also currently working through separate lawsuits: They are suing porn star Stormy Daniels for violating a hush agreement about her alleged affair with the president, while also defending Trump in a defamation lawsuit for calling former Apprentice contestant Summer Zervos a liar after she accused Trump of sexual assault.

Former Playboy model Karen McDougal is also suing the parent company of the National Enquirer, whose chief executive is friendly with Trump, seeking to be released from a legal agreement that bars her from speaking about an alleged affair with the president as well. Trumps lawyers are not involved in that case.

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Heres a look at the lawyers representing Trump in the various matters.

Don McGahn

Attorney and United States Federal Election Commission member Don McGahn is seen in the lobby of Trump Tower in New York on Jan. 9, 2017. (Albin Lohr-JonesZuma Press)

McGahn is the current White House counsel, the top lawyer tasked with advising the president on legal issues about policies and legislation. But McGahn has been at the center of controversies over Trumps challenged travel ban, executive orders and the scandal surrounding former national security adviser Michael Flynns tenure in the White House, and Trump at one point handed off responsibility of Russia-related issues to his personal attorney. Before becoming White House counsel, McGahn was Trumps lawyer on the campaign, and he previously served as a commissioner with the Federal Election Commission. McGahn reportedly threatened to quit when Trump asked him in 2017 to fire Mueller, and the president backed down.

Read More: Inside Trumps Plan to Dramatically Reshape U.S. Courts

Ty Cobb

Corporate attorney Ty Cobb in the offices of his law firm, Hogan & Hartson, Jan. 16, 2004. (The Denver Post)

A former federal prosecutor and a white-collar defense lawyer at the law firm Hogan Lovells in Washington, D.C., Cobb was at one point in charge of overseeing the legal strategy and media response to investigations into the Trump campaigns alleged collusion with Russia. Trump has reportedly considered firing Cobb, who repeatedly said during 2017 that the Russia investigation would be finishing soon and encouraged the president to cooperate with Mueller. In September, Cobb was overheard by a reporter talking openly at a Washington restaurant about the investigation.

John Dowd

John Dowd enters federal court in New York, U.S., on Thursday, May 5, 2011. (Bloomberg)

A noted white collar defense attorney in Washington, Dowd joined Trumps legal team in June. He argued in December that a president cannot obstruct justice, a controversial legal theory that many experts disagree with. And in March, he told a reporter that he hopes Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein will shut down the Russia investigation, a break from Cobbs talk of cooperating with Mueller. The remark led to questions about whether the presidents legal strategy on the Russia investigation was moving to a more aggressive stance.

Michael Cohen

Michael Cohen, an attorney for Donald Trump, arrives in Trump Tower in New York on Dec. 16, 2016. (AP)

Cohen is a personal lawyer, spokesperson and close confidant of Trumps. Hes been working for Trump for years, closely enough that he has hired his own lawyer to help him with the Russia probe. Hes known as a particularly aggressive advocate on Trumps behalf, Trumps pit bull or consigliere, as ABC puts it, for threatening legal action against critics, yelling at reporters and vigorously defending his boss on Twitter.

Jay Sekulow

Jay Sekulow, Chief Counsel American Center for Law and Justice, testifies on Capitol Hill in Washington, on Feb. 6, 2014. (AP)

Sekulow is on Trumps personal legal team advising him on Russia issues, and one of the lawyers who often appears in television hits. On Sunday on ABC, Sekulow said of Donald Trump Jr.s Russian meeting, Well, I wonder why the Secret Service, if this was nefarious, why the Secret Service allowed these people in. The Secret Service responded and said it did not vet the meeting. Sekulow is Chief Counsel for the American Center for Law & Justice and hosts his own talk show, and before joining Trumps team he had spent his legal career representing conservative groups.

Joseph diGenova

Joseph diGenova discusses former president Bill Clinton's pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich on

Trump added Joseph diGenova, a Washington lawyer and former U.S. attorney, to his legal team in March. Two months earlier, diGenova had gone on Fox News and endorsed the conspiracy theory that the FBI and Justice Department framed Trump. There was a brazen plot to illegally exonerate Hillary Clinton and, if she didnt win the election, to then frame Donald Trump with a falsely created crime, he said. Make no mistake about it: A group of F.B.I. and D.O.J. people were trying to frame Donald Trump of a falsely created crime. It also emerged that during the investigation of President Bill Clinton in 1997, diGenova published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal arguing that sitting presidents can be indicted, a legal question that may take on new relevance under Muellers investigation.

Marc Kasowitz

Marc Kasowitz personal attorney of President Donald Trump makes a statement at the National Press Club, following the congressional testimony of former FBI Director James Comey in Washington, June 8, 2017. (AP)

Trumps personal attorney, Kasowitz has represented Trump for years, including in divorces, bankruptcy cases and the sexual misconduct allegations that surfaced during the presidential campaign. Hes known for a fiery temperin an email outburst published by ProPublica, Kasowitz told an unidentified person, Fk you And you dont know me, but I will know you. How dare you send me an email like that. Im on you now. You are fking with me now. Lets see who you are. Watch your back bh. Kasowitz then reportedly left Trumps legal team, but he has recently been working with Trump on the Zervos lawsuit.Despite all the assets at risk if Prince Harry and Meghan Markle were to ever get a divorce, the couple probably wont be signing a prenuptial agreement before they make that trip down the aisle in May, most likely because prenups arent generally practiced in the United Kingdom.

In fact, prenups cant even be legally enforced in British courts, according to BBC, but some judges will take them into account on a case-by-case basis "as long as certain precautionary steps were taken when the agreement was drawn up and signed."

As for the royal family, married members typically havent signed prenups before getting hitched. They are more popular in the United Statesits just not a British thing, Ingrid Seward, an author on the British royal family, told People magazine in an interview published on Tuesday.

Trending: Mark Zuckerberg Apologized on CNN for Cambridge Analytica Data Misuse  But Also Deflected Blame

Meghan Markle and Prince Harry Won't Have Prenup

KIRSTY WIGGLESWORTH/AFP/Getty Imagesd)

It would seem as though Harry and Markle would have a lot to lose if they did divorce. Markle, an American actress, gained substantial assets from her starring role on USA series, Suits, which she appeared on for seven seasons.

Meanwhile, Harry reportedly has large quantities of money set up in trusts left to him by his mother, the late Princess Diana, and from other members of the royal family like his grandmother, Queen Elizabeth II. Due to the extra level of protection issued on trust funds, there may be specific provisions preventing the money from being split between two parties.

When it comes to their living situation and which party would get the house in the instance of divorce, the answer is most likely neither. Harry and Markle live rent-free in Nottingham Cottage at Kensington Palace. And when they move into their own country home, it will likely be an estate already owned by the queen, similar to Prince William and Kate Middletons living arrangements at the queen's Sandringham estate in Norfolk. Although William and Middleton's home was technically a gift from the queen.

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This article was first written by Newsweek

More from NewsweekThe pair announced their engagement last November. (Photo: PA)

The date is set, the cake has been chosen, and the venue is most definitely sorted.

Which means theres just one essential ingredient of Prince Harry and Meghan Markles wedding yet to be revealed: the location of their honeymoon.

Shortly after their big day, the pair are rumored to visit Dublin for a 2-day stay, leading to speculation that they could be opting for a mini-moon.

Its an increasingly popular option among couples on a budget. But the couple arent exactly in need of a wallet-friendly option, and the visit to the Irish capital will probably be for business alone.

A source recently told the Irish Independent that the pair have a series of engagements scheduled in Dublin for two days shortly after they tie the knot.

The source said: It will possibly be the first foreign trip after their wedding.

The newlyweds are to visit the Irish capital in summer. (Photo: Flickr/Derek Winterburn)

The visit will apparently take place in June or July, and the pair will only stay in the Irish capital for one night.

So what about the actual honeymoon?

A strongly rumored destination is Botswana. Not only did the couple go glamping in the African country when their relationship was still on the down-low last summer, but its where the center diamond on Markles engagement ring is sourced from.

However, with the whole world as their oyster, would they really visit the same destination twice?

Thanks to Markles now-shuttered lifestyle blog The Tig, the public isnt lacking alternative destinations to speculate over.

Palawan in the Philippines was reportedly a favorite on the blogs Instagrams feed. A hidden paradise with jungle-covered mountains and blue waters, the secluded island could be the perfect hidden spot for the pair.

The couple visited Botswana early in their relationship. (Photo: Flickr/Tee La Rosa)

Or perhaps the couple  famed for doing things a little less conventionally than Kate Middleton and Prince William  will throw us another curve ball and have a pre-wedding honeymoon.

Thanks to one hotel bosss Facebook post, its believed that Prince Harry and Markle will visit the Greek island of Zakynthos ahead of the big day.

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He claimed that the couple are set to visit the island at the beginning of May, and have already booked a personal guide for their day trip.

According to Hello!, businessman Spiros Lougaris, owner of Hotel Castelli on the island, wrote on the platform: Good morning dear friends. We have just been informed that His Royal Highness Prince Henry of Wales (familiarly known and loved as Prince Harry) and Meghan Markle will be arriving in Zakynthos on a ONE DAY stopover [sic] of a trip in early May PRIOR to their wedding.

Prince Harry and Markle on Commonwealth Day. (Photo: PA)

It is an enormous pleasure and honor for the whole island and of course for our friend Maria Drogitis that will be their guide, the Municipality stakeholders, and all residents and visitors, that share the same enthusiasm for our beautiful island of Zakynthos!

A representative of the Caribbean island Nevis also caused a stir when he said he was confident that Markle and Prince Harry would be choosing the destination for their getaway.

As it is one of the most romantic islands in the world, we are quietly confident that Neviss guaranteed privacy will attract the royal newlyweds, Greg Phillip, CEO of the Nevis Tourism Authority, told the Daily Star:

Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle:

Kate Middletons new baby already has an official website

Meghan Markles designer friend might have just dropped a huge royal wedding hint

Kate Middletons mint green maternity look is the ultimate in spring style

Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter for nonstop inspiration delivered fresh to your feed, every day.



So much of what we do at Chasing Paper comes from a personal place, founder Elizabeth Rees said about her company, which she started five years ago in New York City. The brand's offeringsa versatile collection of well-priced removable wallpaper optionswere in fact the result of Elizabeths own tastes and circumstances. My home decor projects are always on a budget, and many times I want to try something I see in magazines but do not have thousands of dollars to execute, she says. Additionally, up until five months ago, I rented and could not change too much about the spaces I lived in. The brands latest, a peel-and-stick line of six prints that resemble intricate ceramic tiles, came about last year when Elizabeth and her brother were invited on a business trip to Barcelona. After that, the two headed to Portugal, where Elizabeth met her partner for a sailing adventure in Italy. At every stop, there were tiles that caught her eye.

It was impossible not to be inspired, she says of the trip. So, as soon as they returned home in the fall, she began working on ways to translate these shades and dimensions into removable recreations for her customers. We took so many pictures and then referenced prints and patterns we saw with the cement tiling trend in the States, she recalls. It was a perfect marriage of traditional and modern. Elizabeth launched the capsule this month, and its blue, black, and white hues speak as much to Chasing Papers longstanding city sensibilities as they do to the carefree views she saw abroad. Each print is made to order on two-by-four-foot panels that go for $40 each.

We felt that doing bold prints in a simple color palette was what our customers would gravitate toward, she says. Teal is a color that Im seeing everywhere and wanted in my home. The panels were made to be adaptable, so they work well as a temporary permanent solution anywhere from a kitchen and bedroom to a bathroom or hallway (staying away from solvents makes them last longer). But they don't just recommend this line for standard walls. Elizabeth also says that they can perk up office supplies, serving trays, the backs of medicine cabinets, even the front panels of old refrigerators. Just like her many sources of inspiration, the possibilities are boundless. But if you need more ideas, we asked Rees to give us a few examples of where to use these new prints in any home.

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Backsplash

Photo: Matt Haas

Mudroom

Photo: Matt Haas

Bathroom

Photo: Matt Haas

EntrywayDonald Trump recently insisted that he is happy with the way his legal team has been handling the Russia inquiry: Getty

A personal lawyer for Donald Trump has resigned from his position as the President shakes up his legal team and its approach to special counsel Robert Muellers Russia investigation.

The resignation of John Dowd, who was leading Mr Trumps legal team, follows reports of repeated clashes between him and the President in recent weeks, and Mr Dowd is said to have made his decision after determining that his advice was increasingly being ignored.

It has been reported that Mr Dowds departure was largely a mutual decision between him and Mr Trump, even if they disagreed over strategy. The President reportedly lost confidence in Mr Dowds ability to deal with Mr Muellers probe during the confrontations that have played out in recent weeks.

I love the President and wish him well, Mr Dowd said in a statement after his resignation.

John has been a valuable part of the team and a friend and we will continue to cooperate fully with the special counsel, Jay Sekulow, a spokesman for Mr Trumps legal team, told The Washington Post.

Mr Trump himself had recently insisted that he is happy with the way his legal team has been handling the Russia inquiry, naming Mr Dowd alongside Ty Cobb, and Mr Sekulow, and saying they are doing a great job.

Last week, Mr Dowd attracted criticism to the Trump team by calling on the Justice Department to shut down Mr Muellers investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, saying that the investigation was corrupted by political bias. Those calls were made just after former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe was fired, leading to a strong, bipartisan rebuke of the administration in Congress, where even some Republicans said that impeachment could be necessary if Mr Mueller is fired.

I pray that the Acting Attorney General Rod Rosenstein will follow the brilliant and courageous example of the FBI Office of Professional Responsibility and Attorney General Jeff Sessions and bring an end to alleged Russia collusion investigation manufactured by McCabes boss James Comey based upon a fraudulent and corrupt dossier, Mr Dowd said in a statement then.

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Mr Comey is the former head of the FBI who was fired by Mr Trumps Justice Department last year. The dossier in question refers to a contentious research file compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele.

The Trump legal team, in addition to that public speculation about firing Mr Mueller, has been negotiating with the special counsel over if, how, and when the President might be interviewed in the Russia probe.

Mr Trump has reportedly been privately saying that he thinks he should sit down with Mr Muellers team, even as he has begun to publicly attack Mr Mueller in a shift of tone that has been interpreted as the President becoming increasingly concerned that the Russia investigation is beginning to focus more explicitly on him.

Mr Dowd had insisted that meeting with the Mueller team would be a bad idea.

It is not clear who will take over as the lead on Mr Trumps team, but a veteran Washington lawyer, Joseph diGenova, was hired earlier this week. Mr diGenova has been expected to take up a more offensive role to fill what the President sees as a lack of people publicly defending him and challenging Mr Mueller.(Reuters) - A conservative Mississippi state official, Cindy Hyde-Smith, was named on Wednesday to serve as a U.S. senator until a special election in November to replace 80-year-old Thad Cochran, who is retiring because of ill health. Hyde-Smith will be the first woman to represent Mississippi in Congress. She was the first woman elected to statewide office in Mississippi in 2011 when she won the position of state agriculture and commerce commissioner. Mississippi Governor Phil Bryant announced the appointment, calling Hyde-Smith a "rock-solid conservative." He said the appointment would be effective April 2, the day after Cochran is to step down after 40 years in the U.S. Senate. Cochran welcomed the selection of Hyde-Smith, saying in a statement that she was "a very well-qualified person whose experiences and excellent character will benefit our state in Washington." Cochran's retirement put another Senate seat in play for November's mid-term elections. One-third of the seats in the Senate and all the seats in the U.S. House of Representatives will be decided. Both of Mississippi's U.S. Senate seats will now be up for election. Republican Senator Roger Wicker is running for re-election. Cochran's seat had not been scheduled for an election until his decision to retire. In announcing her acceptance of the Senate appointment, Hyde-Smith said she would be a candidate for the seat in the Nov. 6 special election and underscored her record, saying she had "been conservative all of my life" and had a "conservative voting record" for three terms as state senator. Tea Party state Senator Chris McDaniel, who gave Cochran a scare in a bitterly fought Republican primary in Mississippi four years ago, announced earlier this year that he would run against Wicker. He said Wicker, like Cochran, was part of the Republican establishment. But after Cochran's decision to retire, McDaniel announced he would run for Cochran's seat instead. If McDaniel does run, he and Hyde-Smith would contest a Republican primary. (Reporting by David Alexander; editing by Grant McCool)By Christine Kim SEOUL (Reuters) - North Korea's Supreme People's Assembly, the isolated state's rubber-stamp parliament, will hold a meeting on April 11, the North's state media said on Thursday, just weeks before an historic summit between North and South Korea. The decision to hold the rare meeting, which will be the first this year, was made by the assembly's presidium on March 15, the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) report said without elaborating. The North's parliament usually serves to approve decisions on issues such as governing structures and budgets that have been created by the state's powerful Workers' Party, members of which form the vast majority of the assembly. Next month's assembly will come against a backdrop of diplomatic activity taking place to engage North Korea and as South Korean officials prepare for the inter-Korean summit later in April. That summit will precede a possible meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un slated for the following month. "The April assemblies are regular meetings where North Korea makes decisions on key state projects," said Koh Yu-hwan, professor of North Korean studies at Dongguk University in Seoul. "This time, we're looking at inter-Korean summits and the U.S.-North Korea summit, so there may be some measures or speeches linked to those but we'll have to see," Koh said. Choi Dae-seok, professor of North Korean Studies at Ewha Womans University, said the North's parliament may address economic issues, as it usually does in the spring months, more than denuclearization or inter-Korean relations. Kim and Trump are due to meet in May after South Korean officials relayed a message from Pyongyang that the North Korean leader wished to speak to Trump about denuclearization. The detente with the North, which began in January, came after a year in which Pyongyang staged several missile launches and its biggest-ever nuclear test. That was accompanied by an exchange of insults and threats between Kim and Trump that fueled tensions even further. The Supreme People's Assembly convenes once or twice a year for day-long meetings. Its previous meeting was in April last year, when it announced the formation of a diplomatic commission aimed at improving international relations. It was not specified in Thursday's KCNA report whether Kim would attend the summit in April. (Reporting by Christine Kim; Additional reporting by Heekyong Yang; Editing by Raissa Kasolowsky and James Dalgleish)Long gone are the days of Taylor Swift and her squad  its all about Reese Witherspoon and Oprah Winfrey. The actress and the media mogul bonded while working on the movie A Wrinkle in Time. Theyve taken their on-set chemistry and built a true friendship (not just a Hollywood one). This year, Witherspoon presented Winfrey with the Cecil B. DeMille Award at the Golden Globes  an honor that usually goes to someone who knows and is close to the recipient. Her words are more potent and powerful every time, Witherspoon said about her friend. She wasnt alone. After hearing Winfreys speech, fans went wild and asked her to consider a 2020 presidential run. The warm feelings are mutual. Winfrey said about her new pal: She brings that mighty force of determination, will, creativity, and ambition to make everything better. Wow, thats a huge compliment from the big O. What does Winfrey bring to the friendship? Margaritas! According to Witherspoon, she makes the best margaritas. Her secret? Fresh lime juice. That tip is the kind of friendship perk only Oprahs BFFs will experience. Yes, were officially jealous!The deposits of more than 700,000 people in Ghana are under threat amid a crisis in the country's financial sector.



The Central Bank paints a grim picture of a financial sector in desperate need of help after it emerged microfinance institutions and the Rural and Community Banks owe the depositors more than $160m (113m).



More than 200 of the country's 566 licensed microfinance institutions - which provide loans to small businesses - have registered as being in distress or have collapsed.



In the banking sector, 37 out of 141 rural and community banks are facing the same fate.



Earlier this week the Central Bank stepped in to prevent the local uniBank from imminent collapse after it suffered persistent cash shortfalls and regularly fell below cash reserve requirements.



The Central Bank says it had to act to protect depositors and other creditors - and to rein in further risks to the country's wider financial system.



It revoked the licenses of two other local banks last year for similar reasons.



It is now making plans to prevent any further problems, announcing reforms to the microfinance sector hoping to improve their performance and safeguard the funds investors and depositors.

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Harare (AFP) - Wildlife authorities in Zimbabwe shot dead a large crocodile that strayed into the northern town of Hwange and blocked entry to a hospital, an official said Thursday.

The crocodile took up position outside the main gate to St Patrick's hospital and charged at anyone trying to enter or leave, creating panic among residents, local media reported.

Parks and wildlife authority spokesman Tinashe Farawo confirmed the incident, adding that crocodile attacks were on the rise in recent weeks due to heavy rain.

"We received a report on Tuesday from Hwange where a crocodile was seen in the residential area and we had to put it down because it had become a threat to human life," Farawo told AFP.

"Because of the rains we have been receiving, we have had several reports of people attacked by crocodiles."

The crocodile was outside the hospital in Hwange for about two hours on Tuesday evening, attracting a large crowd of onlookers, before it was shot.

The Bulawayo-based Chronicle newspaper reported that it was unclear how the animal came to be outside the hospital as the nearest water was about 10 kilometres (6 miles) away.

"In less than five minutes, I had received more than 10 phone calls from residents who were in serious panic mode," local official Themba Tshuma told the paper.

"At first I thought it was a prank because crocodiles are found around water bodies and not in the middle of a suburb."

In the capital Harare, a woman was fatally attacked by a crocodile on Thursday as she crossed a stream, while a boy escaped with injuries in another attack in the south-eastern district of Chiredzi.Secret video recordings link government to vote buying

Congress about to hold second impeachment vote on 79-year-old

Pedro Pablo Kuczynski has offered his resignation just 19 months into his five-year mandate. It has yet to be accepted by the congress. Photograph: Cris Bouroncle/AFP/Getty Images

Perus president Pedro Pablo Kuczynski has offered his resignation after secret video recordings entangled him in a new corruption scandal on the eve of an impeachment vote, plunging one of Latin Americas steadiest economies into a political crisis.



It was unclear if the opposition-controlled Congress would accept his resignation or proceed with a vote on Thursday to force him from office.



In a televised message to the nation Kuczynski said he would offer his resignation to avoid being an obstacle to the country but continued to deny any wrongdoing.

Just 19 months into his five-year mandate Kuczynski is the first sitting president in Latin America to be forced out due to links to the Brazilian construction giant Odebrecht, which has been at the centre of continents biggest corruption scandal.



Kuczynski resigned as lawmakers prepared to vote for the second time in three months whether to oust the 79-year-old leader from office for permanent moral unfitness in a plenary session of Congress. He is accused of repeatedly lying about decade-old business ties to the Brazilian firm.

But the release on Tuesday night of secretly-recorded videos allegedly showing the presidents supporters attempting to buy political support ended any possibility that Kuczysnki could survive the attempt to force him out.

The videos released by Perus biggest opposition party Fuerza Popular allegedly show key allies of the president offering lawmakers a share of public work projects in return for help in defeating a second impeachment vote against Kuczynski. He narrowly survived a previous impeachment motion in December 2017 .

The video clips shown in a news conference feature a government official explaining to a lawmaker how to make easy money from government projects for his region, while congressman Kenji Fujimori, assures him of government protection.

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In his address on Wednesday, Kuczynski blamed selectively tendentious edited recording for giving the impression of vote buying and said political confrontation had created a climate of ungovernability which did enormous damage to the country.

Government ministers have denied contracts were awarded in exchange for political support and announced they would fire the official. Kenji Fujimori also denied wrongdoing, saying the recordings were a reflection of typical negotiations to get infrastructure projects off the ground.

Although Kuczynski, known as PPK, was not directly implicated in the alleged vote buying, his increasingly battered credibility could not survive a further scandal.

The Oxford and Princeton-educated former banker who promised to modernise Peru is the first victim of a unfolding corruption scandal which has implicated most of the countrys main political players.

The parliamentary majority worked against PPK from day one, said Eduardo Dargent, a political scientist at Limas Catholic University.

But he too must take responsibility for his downfall. His business interests, his lack of transparency, his lack of political maneuvering to distance himself from the Odebrecht scandal.

In many ways, he dug his own grave.Philippine police said Thursday they had shot dead 13 drug suspects, just days after President Rodrigo Duterte moved to take the country out of the International Criminal Court over its inquiry into his deadly drug war.

The suspects were killed Wednesday in the northern province of Bulacan, an official statement said, an area where police have previously launched lethal crackdowns on illegal drugs.

"Bulacan police are continuously and relentlessly implementing their intensified campaign against illegal drugs," the statement said, adding there had been more than 100 arrests.

The war crimes tribunal, based in The Hague, last month launched a preliminary inquiry into Duterte's bloody crackdown on narcotics, amid allegations Philippine security forces may have committed crimes against humanity.

Philippine police have said they have killed roughly 4,100 suspects who fought back during arrest, but rights groups allege the actual number is three times higher and accuse the authorities of murder.

The tribunal opened in 2002 to try abuses in countries where national courts cannot or will not prosecute. Manila in 2011 ratified the Rome Statute that created the court.

Manila gave official notice to the United Nations last week that it would withdraw, days after Duterte announced his country would quit the court over alleged "baseless, unprecedented and outrageous attacks" against his government's rights record.

Foreign Secretary Alan Peter Cayetano said last Friday the Philippines was pushing back against "the well-orchestrated campaign to mislead the international community, to crucify President Duterte... by distorting the human rights situation in the country".

The tribunal has urged Manila to reconsider its decision, adding that officially quitting the court requires a year's notice and does not preclude its preliminary inquiry into the drug war killings, which have drawn international concern.

Duterte, who is buoyed by high popularity ratings at home, has fiercely defended the drug war as a battle to bring safety to the nation's 100 million people.

He has frequently urged authorities to kill drug suspects while promising to protect police from legal sanction.MANILA (Reuters) - The Philippines will start building a marine base next month on its northernmost uninhabited island, near Taiwan, to boost defense arrangements and discourage poachers from its fishing grounds, a military spokesman said on Thursday. The two nations' coast guard ships have confronted each other in the rich fishing waters where their exclusive economic zones overlap, and the neighbors nearly cut ties in 2013, after a Philippine vessel fired on a Taiwanese fishing boat, killing a fisherman. "We need to have a presence there," said Lieutenant-Colonel Isagani Nato, spokesman of the Northern Luzon Command of the Philippines, adding that building work on Mavulis island would start next month. "It's still uninhabited, that is why we are going to put up a facility to guard our maritime domain, and against poaching during the fishing period." Nato said a small marine unit would be stationed on the island, also known as Y'Ami, about 80 kilometers (50 miles) distant from Taiwan, to increase the military presence and improve information gathering. He did not give details of the size of the unit, but added that the structures on the island would also afford shelter to fishermen. The base will help monitor ships passing through the Balintang Channel, an international trade route in the northern Philippines used by vessels crossing from the busy waterway of the South China Sea to the Pacific Ocean. Taiwan and the Philippines also have overlapping claims in the South China Sea, along with Brunei, China, Malaysia and Vietnam. More than 20 years ago, Philippine defense officials said Taiwan had proposed to lease the uninhabited island as a gunnery range for its military, promising to donate a secondhand fighter as part of the deal. Nothing came of the agreement as Manila recognizes Beijing's one-China policy, although it has a de facto embassy in Taipei, where thousands of Filipinos work in homes and factories. (Reporting by Manuel Mogato; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)MAIDUGURI, Nigeria (Reuters) - A plane carrying scores of Nigerian schoolgirls freed by Islamist Boko Haram militants on Wednesday has taken off from Maiduguri for the capital Abuja, a Reuters witness reported. Information Minister Lai Mohammed, speaking in Maiduguri, said 105 people had been rescued so far, two of whom were not students. He said the government was still negotiating with Boko Haram to release the remaining Chibok schoolgirls, 100 of whom remain unaccounted for. "Not for one moment has there been a break in the negotiations with this armed insurgency," he said. (Reporting by Ahmed Kingimi; Editing by Mark Heinrich)By Pawel Sobczak and Marcin Goettig WARSAW (Reuters) - Poland's ruling party plans to change some of its judicial reforms in response to European Commission criticism that they threaten to undermine the rule of law, one of the party's lawmakers said on Thursday. Reacting to the lawmaker's comments, an EU official said there was a chance the two sides could reach a compromise. Poland's right-wing government and the Commission have been at loggerheads for two years over rule of law standards, with Warsaw for months declining to make any concessions to Brussels. The Commission has threatened to punish Poland, including by suspending Warsaw's vote at the EU, if it does not withdraw changes that Brussels said ultimately threatened democracy. It was not immediately clear if the planned concessions would be enough to satisfy the EU's demands, however. "This is a step in the direction to ease the concerns presented by the European Commission," Law and Justice (PiS) party Marek Ast told Reuters. "We hope that these steps will be positively received by the European Commision." Under the changes now planned by PiS, the justice minister would first have to seek the opinion of judges before deciding whether to dismiss a court president, Ast said. Under the original judicial overhaul, the justice minister was granted discretionary powers to replace court presidents without seeking any secondary opinion, without having to provide any justification and subject to no review. The European Commission has said this, along with several other changes introduced by PiS, has put at risk the independence of the judiciary and the separation of powers in Poland, the largest of the eastern economies in the EU. Asked if more concessions were possible, Ast said: "We are open to a dialogue with the European Commission. Surprises are possible." PiS's concessions come after the Commission dismissed Poland's latest defence of its court reforms on Tuesday. An EU official said Poland has informed the Commission of possible amendments to the judicial reforms, with a view to seeking a compromise before a debate on the bloc's next long-term budget from 2021 gets under way. "It looks like things are moving. There's a chance of a compromise," the official said on condition of anonymity. The second concession currently planned by PiS would equalise the compulsory retirement age of female and male judges at 65 years, Ast said. The initial judicial overhaul set the compulsory retirement age at 60 years for female judges and 65 for male judges, meaning almost 40 percent of Supreme Court judges would be forced into retirement. (Reporting by Pawel Sobczak and Marcin Goettig, additional reporting by Anna Koper and Gabriela Baczynska in Brussels; Writing by Marcin Goettig; Editing by Kevin Liffey and Hugh Lawson)By Marcin Goclowski and Lidia Kelly WARSAW (Reuters) - Technical problems will delay the completion of the Polish section of a U.S. defence shield by two years to 2020, Poland's defence ministry said on Thursday. The anti-missile site close to Poland's northern Baltic Sea coast is part of a NATO defensive umbrella that, when complete, will stretch from Greenland to the Azores. Poland's defence ministry said U.S. authorities had told it there had been construction delays at the Redzikowo site that were the responsibility of the contractor. The U.S. head of the U.S. Missile Defence Agency (MDA), Lieutenant General Samuel Greaves, acknowledged the delay at a U.S. Senate hearing on Thursday. The MDA, a unit of the U.S. Defence Department, is overseeing installation of the Lockheed Martin Co -made ground-based Aegis ballistic missile defence system. "While we have experienced delays in the military construction portion of the Aegis Ashore effort in Poland, we remain steadfastly committed to delivery of that capability," Greaves said. Officials from the U.S.-led NATO alliance, who took control of the umbrella in 2016, have said the whole system is supposed to defend against attacks by states such as Iran and groups such as al Qaeda. But the scheme has angered Russia, incensed by the show of force by its old Cold War rival in formerly communist Eastern Europe. Poland's former defence minister, Tomasz Siemoniak, from the opposition Civic Platform (PO) party, said the delay was meant as a political rebuke to the current government. "This is the price for the ... lack of trust in PiS (the ruling conservative Law and Justice party)," Siemoniak told Reuters. Washington sharply criticised a bill that Poland adopted in January that imposes jail terms for suggesting Poland was complicit in the Holocaust, saying it was concerned about the repercussions it could have "on Poland's strategic interests and relationships". Siemoniak said that "in the context of the (Holocaust bill), the lack of trust has deepened ... 'Technical reasons' are just a pretext to postpone it until the year 2020. I am convinced that the situation is a result of the deterioration of the allied relations." Bartosz Cichocki, a deputy foreign minister, told the PAP state news agency that there was no crisis in Polish-American relations and that the U.S. had informed Poland about the potential delay "weeks before" the Holocaust law was adopted. As part of the shield, the United States switched on an $800 million site in Romania in May 2016 and broke ground at the site in Poland later that year. The full shield also includes ships and radar installations across Europe, with command and control run from a U.S. air base in Germany. (Additional reporting by Mike Stone in Washington and Robin Emmott in Brussels; Writing by Lidia Kelly; Editing by Matthew Mpoke Bigg)Uber is trying to make amends one step at a time. As a follow-up to the ride-sharing company's new seat belt warning, its cellphone app now includes a direct method to allow riders to contact 911 at the press of a virtual button.

The Panic Button, as Uber calls it, is located in a "safety center" accessible via the home screen. The new menu also lists information about the screening process for drivers, insurance and community guidelines. The panic button is now live throughout the U.S. for riders and Uber says that drivers will get one on their screens soon, too.

To call 911, customers simply need to need to swipe up from the new safety center icon, tap 911 assistance and confirm the call is intentional to avoid accidental dials.

Uber also announced a pilot program in select cities that will send location and trip details directly to 911 dispatchers to help them receive more accurate readings from distress calls. The trial is set to run in Denver, Nashville, Charleston, South Carolina, Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Naples, Florida

Additions to the app are part of Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi's initiative to improve the company's safety record after a period of controversy and a corporate shakeup last year. One of the company's self-driving Volvo XC90 vehicles fatally struck a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona, in March and a federal investigation remains ongoing.Police officers in California fatally shot an unarmed man after mistakenly believing he was armed.

Responding to reports of a suspect in a black hoody breaking car windows, officers in Sacramento were directed to a backyard where a law enforcement helicopter had spotted the suspect picking up a toolbar and shattering a window, according to the Sacramento Police Department.

When the suspect started advancing towards the officers, the police department said, they believed the suspect was pointing a firearm at them and opened fire.

They were wrong.

After an exhaustive search, scene investigators did not locate any firearms. The only item found near the suspect was a cell phone, the department statement said, acknowledging the seriousness of this incident and the impact it has on our community.

The two officers have been placed on administrative leave, the department said, and video and audio footage from body cameras and the helicopter are set to be released.

The victim has been identified as 22-year-old Stephon Clark. He left behind two young sons, according to media reports.

The police shooting of yet another unarmed African-American man - the type of incident that fuelled the rise of the #BlackLivesMatter movement - swiftly set off outrage.

Being a Black man in a hooded sweatshirt should not be a death sentence, the American Civil Liberties Foundation of northern California said in a statement.

We see stories like Clarks again and again. Police for too long have used excessive force against communities of color, treating Black people as enemies. Racist policing is a systemic problem, not a series of isolated incidents.Former Attorney General Dr Yao Obed Asamoah has questioned why Ghana, which is part of a continent described as shithole by U.S. President Donald, opted to host an American military base.



Per a security agreement between the two countries, Ghana would, among others, provide unimpeded access to and use of agreed facilities and areas to United State forces, United States contractors, and others as mutually agreed. Such agreed facilities and area: or portions thereof, provided by Ghana shall be designated as either for exclusive use by Unite States forces or to be jointly used by United States forces and Ghana. Ghana shall also provide access to and use of a runway that meets the requirements of United States forces.



Defence Minister Dominic Nitiwul, has, however, denied the U.S. will be building a military base per the agreement.



The U.S. Embassy in Ghana has also denied same. In a statement, the Embassy said on Tuesday, 20 March 2018 that: The United States Embassy wishes to underscore that the United States has not requested, nor does it plan to establish a military base or bases in Ghana.



The current Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) between the United States of America and the Republic of Ghana, is approximately 20 years old. It does not cover the current range and volume of bilateral exercises and assistance.



This year, the United States of America is investing over $200million in training and equipment for the Ghanaian armed forces. Ghana is also once again preparing to train U.S Forces as it did in 2017.



Speaking on the issue, however, Dr Asamoah told Starr FM Wednesday, 21 March that if he had the opportunity, he will advise President Nana Akufo-Addo against signing such an agreement.



Ill tell him that he should take a second look at this; that it is not advisable to do this kind of thing, and then lets face it, the polarisation is beginning to become a matter of concern: the Russians on one side, the Chinese on another side, the Americans on the other side, the Western European countries on the other side. Now you cant even put the Americans and Western Europeans together. Donald Trump is really upsetting the apple cart. So, youve got to do things in such a way that you dont seem to have firmly put yourself in any particular camp. That is what I will tell him.



This kind of agreement will be putting us in the American camp and with President Donald Trump, you dont know what hes going to do, he can drag you into all kinds of dangerous situations, people question his sense of judgement. In any case, if you say Africans are shitholes, why should a shithole be providing a base, or the president didnt hear that? My friend, we have to be careful, the 82-year-old politician warned.

Source: classfmonline.com









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Featured VideoPolice on Wednesday said they had located a recorded confession on a cellphone found in the possession of the Austin, Texas, bomber.

At a news conference Wednesday evening, Austin Police Chief Brian Manley said authorities found the roughly 25-minute recording on a cellphone belonging to Mark Anthony Conditt. In the recording, Conditt described in detail the six bombs that detonated or were discovered this month. The explosions killed two people and injured at least five others.

I would classify this as a confession, Manley told reporters.

Conditt, who died in a confrontation with police early Wednesday morning, also described in the recording a seventh bomb, which detonated inside his car as officials approached the vehicle.

The police chief also addressed questions surrounding Conditts motive.

He does not at all mention anything about terrorism, nor does he mention anything about hate, Manley said. This is an outcry by a very challenged young man.

Authorities do not plan to release the recording, which was made Tuesday night, to the public at this time, Manley said.

Conditt was the primary suspect behind six bombing incidents in March  five in Austin and another at a FedEx center near San Antonio  that have terrorized the city for weeks.

The bombings began on March 2, with the first three attacks involving packages left at the front of residences. The parcels exploded when the victims handled them. A fourth attack occurred Sunday and injured two men who set off a tripwire on a sidewalk.

On Tuesday, a package exploded at a FedEx sorting facility in Schertz, Texas, near San Antonio, as it was moving along a conveyor belt. Later that day, police responded to another suspicious package found to contain an explosive in a FedEx facility near the Austin airport.

The explosives were an assortment of homemade pipe bombs with batteries and smokeless powder. They were created from materials that can be found in a hardware or sporting goods store, an unnamed law enforcement source told CNN.

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Manley on Wednesday said Conditts recording did not indicate why the individuals whose homes he targeted were selected.

Law enforcement officials said they filed a federal criminal complaint and arrest warrant for Conditt late Tuesday night before closing in on him at a hotel. The complaint charged him with one count of unlawful possession and transfer of a destructive device and remained sealed as of Wednesday.

Margaret Moore, district attorney for Travis County, in which Austin is located, told reporters that authorities had planned to seek capital murder charges against Conditt if he had been arrested.

This article has been updated with details about the bombings.

CORRECTION: A previous version of this article indicated Conditt described seven other previously undiscovered bombs. There were a total of seven bombs, the last of which detonated inside Conditts car as police approached.

Love HuffPost? Become a founding member of HuffPost Plus today.

This article originally appeared on HuffPost.(Reuters) - A 17-year-old Maryland high school student used his father's legally purchased handgun to shoot a female student with whom he had been in a recently ended relationship, police said on Wednesday.

Austin Rollins brought his father's Glock 9-millimeter pistol to Great Mills High School on Tuesday morning and shot the 16-year-old girl in a hallway, gravely injuring her, St. Mary's County Sheriff's Office said in a statement.

The shooting in Great Mills, located about 70 miles (113 km) south of Washington, came five weeks after a high school massacre in Florida and days before a student-led march in the U.S. capital for tougher gun laws.

"All indications suggest the shooting was not a random act of violence," the police statement said. "Rollins and the female victim had a prior relationship which recently ended."

Attempts to reach Rollins' family have not been successful.

School resource officer Blaine Gaskill confronted Rollins and fired one shot at him, as Rollins simultaneously fired a shot, according to police. Rollins died hours later at a hospital. The officer was not harmed.

A 14-year-old student who was shot in the leg during the incident, whom the sheriff's office identified as Desmond Barnes, was released from the hospital on Wednesday, a hospital spokesman said. The female victim, identified as Jaelynn Willey by her family, remains in critical condition, the sheriff's office said.

An autopsy is being carried out on Rollins to determine whether he was killed by a shot fired by the officer or from a self-inflicted gunshot. Investigators also remain uncertain over who fired the shot that hit Barnes, a spokeswoman for the sheriff's office said.

The investigation has not found any social media threats made by Rollins, the sheriff's office said.

Kai Davis, a former classmate of Rollins, pointed to his access to a gun.

"Some of us were friends with Austin before he did this. He wasn't alone, He wasn't bullied noticeably. He wasn't some kid everyone hated. He had a girlfriend. He had friends," tweeted Davis, who transferred to another school two months ago. "But he had access to a semi-automatic glock."

The school will remain closed for the remainder of the week as the investigation continues, principal Jake Heibel said in a statement. He did not respond to a request for further comment.

(Reporting by Andrew Hay and Sheila Dang; Editing by Leslie Adler)Russian President Vladimir Putin has worked to influence his American counterpart Donald Trump, not through money or by holding potentially embarrassing material over his head but rather through ego, former CIA Director Michael Hayden said Wednesday.

Related: Was Trump a Puppet? Cambridge Analytica Previously Tested Americans Views on Putin, Wall, Swamp: Report

There has been much talk of the pairs relationship and whether Putin holds anything over Trump since a phone call between the two leaders earlier this week. The U.S. president, against the apparent instructions of his advisers, congratulated Putin on winning Russias presidential and said nothing about the poisoning of a spy on British soil allegedly carried out by the Kremlin.

Trending: Trump and Biden Never Went to Vietnam But Act Like Tough Guys Threatening Each Other, Jake Tapper Says

Hayden suggested that Putin was seeking to manipulate Trump and that it was clear what strategy he was using.

We've got this little pneumonic that we use, MICE: Money, ideology, compromise and ego," Hayden told CNN, recalling his background in the intelligence community. And if I'm looking at those four approaches, if I'm the Russians looking at Donald Trump, I don't know that I would instinctively go to compromise."

He continued: "Its awfully hard to embarrass the president. He blew right through that Access Hollywood tape without blinking. If I was going to try to work to influence our president if I were a Russian, I think I'd go to ego. And we have seen, we have seen Putin go out of his way to praise President Trump.

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/3WpD8EVg4cg" frameborder="0" allow="autoplay; encrypted-media" allowfullscreen></iframe>

Putin has indeed regularly praised Trump, while often assigning fault for any U.S. policies he disagrees with to Congress or other officials. Earlier this month, in an interview with NBC, Putin praised Trumps strong leadership qualities, adding that he was a quick study.

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Don't miss: Tel Aviv Diary: In hindsight, Iraq war only benefited Iran

Hayden went onto describe the two men as kindred spirits, adding that there was a convergence in terms of how President Trump would like to govern and how President Putin does govern.

Trump, on Wednesday, sought to defend his congratulating of Putin, talking up the benefits of a positive relationship with Russia.

I called President Putin of Russia to congratulate him on his election victory (in past, Obama called him also), Trump wrote on Twitter. The Fake News Media is crazed because they wanted me to excoriate him. They are wrong! Getting along with Russia (and others) is a good thing, not a bad thing.

I called President Putin of Russia to congratulate him on his election victory (in past, Obama called him also). The Fake News Media is crazed because they wanted me to excoriate him. They are wrong! Getting along with Russia (and others) is a good thing, not a bad thing....... Most popular: 'Sea of Thieves' Servers Down? Planned Updates Include Bug Fixes and More  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 21, 2018

.....They can help solve problems with North Korea, Syria, Ukraine, ISIS, Iran and even the coming Arms Race. Bush tried to get along, but didnt have the smarts. Obama and Clinton tried, but didnt have the energy or chemistry (remember RESET). PEACE THROUGH STRENGTH!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 21, 2018

This article was first written by Newsweek

More from NewsweekSofia (AFP) - A media freedom group urged journalists Thursday to symbolically 'take' nearly 100 colleagues jailed in Turkey's post-coup crackdown to talks between EU leaders and Turkey in Bulgaria next week.

The Bulgarian branch of the Association of European Journalists (AEJ) printed out symbolic accreditations with the names, pictures and media affiliations of 95 detained journalists accused by the government of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of aiding a failed July 2016 coup.

The badges carried the hashtags #JournalistsNotTerrorists, #FreeThePress and #EUTakeAction.

The AEJ asked journalists to pick a badge and wear it at talks between Erdogan and EU leaders next Monday in Varna and to speak on behalf of their jailed colleagues.

"Even if you put critical journalists in jail, you will not stop hearing them -- others will raise their voices. We will speak with their voice," the AEJ said in a statement.

"The European Union must not remain silent on this issue and has to put the fate of the detained journalists as a condition for any rapprochement with Ankara," it said, calling for their immediate release.

AEJ's Ivan Radev told AFP that he recognised taking part in the action could be "quite risky" but nevertheless invited "everyone to come and talk to us... and decide if they can take a badge."

About 55,000 people have been detained and more than 140,000 sacked or suspended from their jobs in Turkey on accusations of links to Fethullah Gulen, a US-based preacher Erdogan blames for the attempted coup.

The number of arrested journalists varies according to different sources, with the P24 press freedom group putting them at 153 but other organisations speaking of more than 200.

The badges printed by the AEJ notably included the name of Mehmet Altan, an economics professor and journalist, who was handed a life sentence in February for his alleged Gulenist links.

On Tuesday The European Court of Human Rights ruled that Turkey had abused the rights to liberty, security and freedom of expression by detaining Altan and fellow journalist Sahin Alpay, who was released last week but banned from leaving Turkey.

It ordered the Turkish state to pay each of them 21,500 euros ($26,500).The annual 420 Toronto 2017 event is held at Yonge Dundas Square one last time in Toronto on April 20, 2017. (Steve Russell/Toronto Star via Getty Images)

When recreational cannabis is legalized in Canada later this year, the country is going to be facing a welcome problem.

We have a unique and welcome problem in this industry, says Allan Rewak, Acting Executive Director of the Cannabis Canada Association. We will not have enough cannabis to supply the industry post July.

In Sept. 2017, Mackie Research Capital Corp. issued a report estimating that Canada would require approximately 795,000 kg of marijuana in order to meet demand in 2018, The Financial Post reports, but estimated the capacity of producers at the end of 2017 to be at about 100,000 kg.

The amount of invested capacity today and that is expected to be built up for the foreseeable future, that will not catch up to demand for another two years, says Matei Olaru, CEO of Lift, an online platform that allows for medical marijuana users to share reviews about cannabis products, and educates consumers about their cannabis purchasing options.

Were expecting say until 2021, 2020, a healthy two years after July, during which demand will outstrip supply.

Olaru says that while the apparent arms race for producers and retailers to lock down supply chains appears to favour big companies like Canopy Growth, Aurora Cannabis and Aphria Inc., the demand will benefit everyone.

Its evident that the larger players are being rewarded because theyre the most stable, says Olaru. The government is saying they want to secure the largest players because they want to be prepared for this scenario they know nothing about.

Its important to understand that these [large producer agreements] are simply the beginning, says Rewak.

Just like Canadas $22.1 billion-alcohol industry, the recreational marijuana market is poised to be made up of larger producers that retailers can turn to for a stable supply of product, and smaller ones that will help cater to a niche, craft range of tastes and lifestyles. With the recreational marijuana market in Canada expected to be worth between $5 billion and $10 billion, theres a wide array of business opportunities for companies who seek them.

Story continues

Boutique bud

In February, Ontario held a supplier prep day in Toronto, open to all 90 currently-licensed producers from across the country. The event, hosted by the Liquor Control Board of Ontario and its marijuana subsidy the Ontario Cannabis Retail Corp., helped to show that there is space for companies of all sizes in Canadas upcoming recreational marijuana market.

The process for procuring cannabis supply for the OCRC will be open to all Canadian licensed producers, LCBO spokesperson Nicole Laoutaris told The Financial Post. The OCRC has not yet entered into any supplier agreements.

While Ontario, as well as Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, P.E.I., and Manitoba have opted for government-run liquor control board stores, other provinces including B.C., Newfoundland and Labrador, Alberta and Saskatchewan will sell through private licensed retailers.

The diversity of approaches has meant that startups like Canwe Growers, an Ontario marijuana producer that is in the process of getting their production license, will be able to find retail space for their product. Operated by New Maple Holdings, Canwe applied for a license last July, received their security clearance this past January, and are now in the final stages of the review process.

Co-founder of New Maple Karim Nehme says that smaller companies will be able to stand out against the big players just like in the booze industry.

If you look at beer, theres something like 1,500 beer companies, all the larger players and all the craft brews, says Nehme. But they all came along, they did something different, and managed to grow.

Were trying to focus on quality, no matter the size of the company, adds New Maple CEO Tegan Adams. To set ourselves apart, were focusing on the quality of the grow, and the quality of the team.

New Maple and Canwe are currently in the process of developing their product lines, but part of their strategy will be focusing on lines targeting women, and products that would appeal to a broad female audience as well.

Hiku Brands is also focusing on a niche customer experience, targeting the sophisticated and refined cannabis consumers.

Marijuana plants are seen in the DOJA growing facility. (Hiku Brands)

I think the high quality experience will win, says Allan Gertner, co-founder of Tokyo Smoke, which formed Hiku Brands alongside DOJA Cannabis in January. I think ultimately consumers pick their products based on brands.

The vertically-integrated Hiku produces its marijuana through DOJA in B.C.s Okanagan Valley, sells through its Tokyo Smoke stores (and holds one of four retail licenses in Manitoba through that brand), and operates the cannabis digest Van der Pop. Gertner says that offering tailored experiences to consumers is critical in these early days, as dedicated recreational brands and retail experiences begin to evolve.

Consumers are still searching for information and education, so the in-store experience will be critical in helping teach consumers, says Gertner.

Supplying the demand

While the dearth of cannabis growing capacity in Canada is good news for the companies trying to find their place in the market, its a source of worry for licensed producers who are trying to plan distribution for their limited supply.

The anxiety is will we have enough capacity to meet demand, not whether well be in the market, says Mike Gorenstein, CEO President and Chairman of Cronos.

Cronos, which was founded in 2012 ahead of the 2013 medical marijuana legalization in Canada, also grows cannabis in the Okanagan Valley, and operates under several brands, including the medical marijuana brand Peace Naturals. Gorenstein says that his biggest concern is making sure the medical users are taken care of ahead of the recreational ones.

If theres a limited amount of building material when youre building a new community, you should probably build a hospital before you build a bar, says Gorenstein.

What Im very cognizant of is what happens if we overcommit to recreational and suddenly our medical patients dont have access.

Gorenstein stresses that the strains produced for the medical market wont necessarily be the same ones produced for the recreational one, but theres still a finite amount of space in which to grow plants, regardless of the intended use.

Most of the announcements youve seen, these arent binding supply amounts, and theyre significantly lower than the anticipated demand, says Gorenstein.

There is a huge shortage, and the issue is getting the capacity.

There are a lot of well-funded producers that have been around since 2013, and theyre not producing that amount today, he adds. The idea were going to suddenly get to 100,000 kilos is a little farfetched.

Even with supply issues looming large, producers across the country are eager to be involved in the burgeoning industry.

This is our chance as a country to define an industry and a social movement that will take off around the world, says Gertner.

Im excited about the chance to be part of that. Its a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to change peoples lives.

Download the Yahoo Finance app, available for Apple and Android.



Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov urged the British government to

Russias foreign minister threatened on Wednesday to retaliate against Britain for "anti-Russian measures", with the two countries at loggerheads over the poisoning of a spy in southern England.

Speaking after a meeting with Japanese counterpart Taro Kono, Mr Lavrov said: "If the British government continues taking some anti-Russian measures, we will hit back under the principle of reciprocity."

Mr Lavrov urged the British government to "respond calmly" over the March 4 attack on former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia, who remain in critical condition.

Britain says only Russia had the capability, motive and intent to be behind the attack, which used the nerve agent Novichok reportedly developed by the former Soviet Union.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has dismissed this as "nonsense".

Britain reacted by expelling 23 Russian diplomats and their families  around 80 people in total  and has also cut off high-level contacts.

Russia | Theresa Mays retaliation measures

A spokesman for Theresa May said London was "actively considering" other measures.

On Tuesday, the head of the OPCW chemical watchdog said it would take two to three weeks to complete laboratory analysis of samples taken from the poisoning.

The affair has poisoned Russias already shaky relations with many Western countries.

The EU has expressed its solidarity with Britain and leaders at a summit later this week will agree to "coordinate on the consequences" for Russia, according to a draft statement seen by AFP.

Novichok

US Defence Secretary Jim Mattis suggested on Tuesday that Moscows suspected involvement shows Russia has "chosen to be a strategic competitor."

However, President Donald Trump skipped the issue when congratulating Putin on his re-election and proposed a summit in the "not-too-distant future."

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe voiced "outrage" over the attack in a call to Mrs May, according to her office.

Skripal, 66, a former Russian officer who sold secrets to Britain and moved there in a 2010 spy swap, remains in a coma along with his 33-year-old daughter after they were found unconscious on a bench in Salisbury.Venezuelas oil-backed cryptocurrency, the Petro, was the work of a joint collaboration between Venezuelan and Russian government officials with Putins personal approval, Time Magazine said Tuesday.

Citing anonymous sources close to the half-hidden joint venture between Venezuelan and Russian officials, Time Magazine is reporting that Russian president Vladimir Putin signed off on Kremlin aiding Venezuela in launching the Petro  the worlds first state cryptocurrency.

As reported previously, the Petro was first announced by Venezuelan president Maduro in December as a payment instrument to evade international economic sanctions and a blockade led by the United States. Maduro officially launched the pre-sale of the 82.4 million Petro tokens on February 20.

Specifically, todays report points to two key Russians involved as Maduros advisers on the Petro, with ties to major Russian banks and billionaires close to the Kremlin. Denis Druzhkov and Fyodor Bogorodsky were reportedly seated in the front row in the presidential palace during the much-publicized launch of the Petro last month. The two Russians were also thanked by the President for aiding his fight against American imperialism, the report added.

Of the two Russians who also signed agreements with the government to help develop the petro one, Denis Druzhkov, CEO of a company called Zeus Trading, was fined $31,000 and barred from trading for three years by the Chicago Mercantile Exchange for fraudulent trading in futures contracts, read an excerpt from a separate investigative report by the Associated Press. The other, Fedor Bogorodskiy, lives in Uruguay and was described by the government as director of a company, Aerotrading, whose website consists of a single home page with no company information.

According to an executive at a Russian state bank who deals with cryptocurrencies, senior advisers to the Kremlin have overseen the effort in Venezuela, and President Vladimir Putin signed off on it last year, the Time report added.

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The state bank executive reportedly added:

People close to Putin, they told him this is how to avoid the sanctions. This is how the whole thing started.

While the Kremlin did not respond to communication from the magazine, Moscows Finance Ministry insisted that none of Russias financial authorities were involved in developing or launching the Petro. The Venezuelan government did not respond to the magazine for comment either.

The revelations come within a day of US President Donald Trumps executive order banning American citizens and residents within the country from trading or acquiring the cryptocurrency.

Meanwhile, Maduro congratulated Putin on the latters recent re-election victory that confirms Putins continuing role as Russias President.

Gran victoria de Vladimir Putin! Felicitaciones a el y al Pueblo de Rusia por la inmensa votacion en las elecciones presidenciales. pic.twitter.com/lRFW1da7sr  Nicolas Maduro (@NicolasMaduro) March 19, 2018

Featured image from the Kremlin.



The post Russia Secretly Helped Venezuela Launch State Crypto Petro: Report appeared first on CCN.

London (AFP) - The Russian embassy in London said Thursday its consular services have been "seriously affected" by the expulsion of diplomats as part of an escalating crisis between the two countries.

"As a result of the irresponsible actions of the UK government, which led to an expulsion of 23 diplomats of the Russian embassy, including a number of consular section staff, the consular service for applicants has been seriously affected," the embassy wrote on Facebook.

Britain's decision to throw out the Russian diplomats followed a nerve agent attack on former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in the English city of Salisbury, which the UK government pinned on Moscow.

The move has led to reciprocal measures being taken against British diplomats in Russia against the backdrop of a growing war of words between the countries' top politicians.

Russia's London embassy announced visitor numbers to the diplomatic mission would be temporarily limited, while the visa application process will take longer.

Fast-track services will take up to three working days, while regular processing will increase to 20 days.

"The embassy is doing its best to re-establish the ordinary workflow for the best functioning of the consular section," the embassy said, again blaming Britain for the delays.

Britain has won the backing of the United States, France and Germany in naming Russia responsible for the March 4 attack, while Moscow has denied involvement and suggested London itself could have been behind the poisoning.

Skripal and his daughter meanwhile remain in a critical but stable condition in Salisbury, while a British police officer has recovered consciousness and is no longer in serious condition.A police officer is among six people, including a suspect and a juvenile, injured following at a shootout at a San Francisco barbershop in broad daylight.

San Francisco police officers were originally called to reports of man with a gun in 200 block of Amazon Avenue. During the investigation, officers went into the Amazon Barber Shop on the corner of Geneva Avenue and London Street, where shots were then exchanged around 4:30 p.m. local time.

Several pedestrians, including schoolchildren, were in the area as the late afternoon shooting broke out.

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San Francisco police

Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

One police officer was injured after being shot in the leg and was taken to Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital for treatment. He is currently in a stable condition. Two others injured during the shootout, including the suspect, are currently in critical condition after suffering life-threatening injuries.

Two others received non-life-threatening injuries during the shooting, police said.

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Ed Nasrah, owner of Daniels Pharmacy, which is adjacent to the barbershop, said he heard at least 20 to 25 shots being fired.

I couldnt believe what was happening, he told the San Francisco Gate. Ive never experienced something like this before, and Ive been here 30 years. We have had shootings before, but never in broad daylight or during business hours. It was scary."

Supervisor Ahsha Safai described the Amazon Barber Shop where the shooting occurred as a a great family-run business."

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He added: I want people to know the neighborhood is safe and that barbershop has never been a problem at all. A lot of my strongest constituents frequent that place.

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A statement from SFPD said: This is an active and ongoing investigation in the early stages. Investigations are being conducted by the San Francisco Police Departments Homicide Detail, the San Francisco District Attorney's Independent Investigations Bureau, the Department of Police Accountability and the SFPD Internal Affairs Division.

"Anyone with information is asked to call the SFPD 24 Hour Tip Line at (415) 575-4444 or Text-A-Tip to TIP411 and begin the text message with SFPD. You may remain anonymous.

"Additional information will be released as it becomes available. A town hall meeting regarding this officer involved shooting will be held within ten days."

This article was first written by Newsweek

More from NewsweekBy Angela Moore

NEWTOWN, Conn. (Reuters) - A grieving father whose child was killed in Connecticut's Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre, frustrated by five years of inaction by U.S. lawmakers on gun control, said survivors of a Florida high school shooting are powering a "sea change" in public sentiment.

Mark Barden, whose son Daniel was among 20 first graders and six educators killed by a gunman in December 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, said his family will join the student rally dubbed March For Our Lives in the nation's capitol on Saturday.

The event is spearheaded by students who survived the Feb. 14 mass shooting that killed 17 at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. There will also be sympathy marches across the United States.

MSD student activists have said they will work to vote lawmakers out of office if they fail to pass gun safety measures, a paralysis the students blame on fear of the powerful gun lobby.

"Don't forget, these kids are going to be voting soon. This is really a wave of sea change that we are witnessing," Barden said.

Barden said the surge of young new voters demanding change coincides with a new crop of gun-control candidates running for office, raising hopes an upcoming Congress will enact firearms safety laws. He is working with Sandy Hook Promise, a volunteer effort to prevent more shooting deaths.

While gun control advocates have called for restrictions on sales of assault-style rifles of the kind used in Parkland, gun-rights proponents argue that restrictions on law-abiding gun owners would not deter criminals. The right to bear arms is enshrined in the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

Barden wants to cheer on the students advocating gun safety but, at the same time, wants them to enjoy being kids and doing what kids do: go to the mall, concerts and school.

"They have to look over their shoulder now for a gunman to do those things," Barden said. "They have to advocate for their own safety just to do the simple things they want to do to be kids. Maybe that's the catalyst for realizing that this has to change."

(Writing by Barbara Goldberg; Editing by David Gregorio)The Minority in Parliament has blocked the laying before Parliament, the report of the Joint Committee on Defence and Interior and Constitutional, Legal and Parliamentary Affairs, on the agreement seeking to ratify the hosting of US military troops in Ghana.



In a brief protest between the two sides in Parliament today [Thursday], the leadership of the Majority said the report was ready to be laid before the House to allow for debate.



However, the Minority disagreed, insisting that the report wasnt ready.



Deputy Majority Leader, Adwoa Safo, said she had been informed by the Chairman of the Committee that the report is ready, but it is not being taken today, we are only laying it and the report will be taken tomorrow [Friday].



The Deputy Minority Leader, James Avedzi, disagreed and said: The indication I have from the ranking member of the committee says that the 5(C) is not ready so I dont know where the chairman is coming from. So the report for this agreement is not ready, he stated.



The Speaker subsequently ruled that the laying of the report should be skipped until the two sides can come to a consensus on it.



If the report is ready it is ready. If it is not ready, you negotiate and if there is a negotiation and there is understanding I [will] proceed. [But] it appears there is clearly no negotiation so no progress.



NDC MP walks out of Committee meeting



A Member of the Committee and member of the Minority in Parliament, Rockson Dafeamekpor, on Wednesday walked out of a meeting to consider an agreement with the United States of America for a defence cooperation arrangement that will allow them to have a camp in Ghana for its military forces.



Mr. Dafeamekpor, said the agreement which had been brought before the House for ratification had not been signed by government, hence his decision to leave the meeting.



As a Member of Parliament, I cannot be part of a process that will go and vary the terms of a memorandum that is yet to be signed. There is no signature on the memorandum. The memo accompanying the memorandum to Parliament says in paragraph three that Cabinet approved the memorandum and approved and recommended same for Parliament for ratification. So the exercise we are being called upon to engage in is to ratify. We are simply to look at it and by consensus or voting approve of the agreement, he said.



Nitiwul lays document in Parliament



The Minister of Denfense, Dominic Nitiwul, on Tuesday laid before Parliament the document seeking to ratify an agreement for space around the Kotoka International Airport, which will serve as a camp for some US military forces in Ghana.



The agreement will among other things, exempt the US government from paying taxes on equipment that is brought to Ghana.



They will also be given the chance to set their own telecommunication system, although they will be allowed to use Ghanas radio spectrum free of charge.



Although many Ghanaians have expressed resentment over the clauses of the agreement, the Defence Minister, Dominic Nitiwul, said the agreement is in the best interest of Ghana.



The United States Embassy in Ghana also denied reports that the US government is planning to establish a military base in Ghana.



It said it is only planning joint security exercises with Ghana, which will require that US military personnel are allowed access to Ghanas military facilities.



But the Minority had called on government to withdraw the agreement in its current form, saying it is not in the best interest of Ghana.



Ghanaians not ready to live with foreign troops  Rawlings

Former President Jerry John Rawlings, also waded into the controversy and said Ghanaians may love Americans but not to the extent of living with [the] foreign troops, he said.





Source: citifmonline.com









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

Featured VideoIf you pay any attention at all to the outer orbit of the Kardashian universe, youll come to find a handful of consistent collaborators on whom the family relies. Theres Hrush Achemyan, the stylist; Mario Dedivanovic, the makeup artist; Andrew Fitzsimons, the hair guru. And for photography, theres trusty Sasha Samsonova.

Official Kardashian shutterbug Sasha Samsonova (Photo: Instagram/Sasha Samsonova)

Even if you havent heard of 26-year-old Samsonova, youve likely seen her work. Shes directed music videos for P!nk, Tinashe, and Gallant; shot advertisements for the Kendall & Kylie clothing line and TopShop; and photographed covers for LOfficiel, Complex, and Paper magazines. Her shoots with Kylie and Kendall Jenner, and Khloe and Kourtney Kardashian, consistently make headlines.

The millennial photographer can thank Instagram for bringing her to collaborate with the Calabasas royal family. The story goes that Kylie saw Samsonovas work on the platform, and through Joyce Bonelli, a Kardashian friend and makeup artist, made contact with her. [Kylie and I] have this amazing chemistry when we work together, Samsonova told Hypebae last year.

Samsonova photographed one of Khloe Kardashians maternity shoots. (Photo: Instagram/Khloe Kardashian)

Born in Ukraine, Samsonova was first a dancer, and her breakout shoot came when she was only 17  not long after shed been toying with photography after Harpers Bazaar commissioned her. It would only take a few years for the Kardashian-Jenners to notice her, and for her to move to the United States and blow up.

And at a time when some of the most revered names in fashion photography are under scrutiny for allegations of sexual harassment  Mario Testino, Bruce Weber, Patrick Demarchelier  theres momentum for a changing of the guard, making way for younger talent, many of whom are women. Samsonova falls into that sphere, along with women like Petra Collins, the 25-year-old Canadian photographer and Gucci muse. Collins work is more ethereal (think: lots of pastel lightness that transports you to a hazy dreamworld where women rule.)

Kylie Jenner by Sasha Samsonova. (Photo: Instagram/Sasha Samsonova)

Meanwhile, Samsonovas portfolio has come to embody a harder-edged, moodier sensuality. In the #MeToo era, Samsonova hasnt shied away from sexualized concepts that are daring and confrontational  for example, the Veronicas naked save for glitter body paint, or Sophia Richie wrapping a python between her oiled-up legs.

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Ive always thought that we dont have enough female photographers. A woman sees another woman in a whole different perspective. We feel, see, and create sexuality in a way that is really different from a male point of view, Samsonova told Teen Vogue in 2016. I love being on an all-girl set, as it feels like a little family. When girls come together on set with an urge to create something great, theres nothing that can stop them.

Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle:

Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter for nonstop inspiration delivered fresh to your feed, every day.In terms of timing, Shakespeare said it best in Julius Caesar: There is a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. As America welcomes the young, dynamic and controversial Prince Muhammad Bin Salman Al Saud of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, we should remember that he believes his destiny lies in reshaping not only the Saudi nation, but also the Arab world and the broader Middle East. And I would not bet against him.

During a trip hosted and paid for by the Foreign Ministry with the aims of discussing diplomatic education, I was invited to speak with the Crown Prince. Our meeting was held in his large office in the Royal Palace on March 12, at 11 p.m., as the Royal Court milled about outside.

In ten years as a very senior U.S. military officer and five years in my current role as the Dean of a graduate school of international relations, I have met most of the major world leaders. I would put Prince Muhammad near the top of the list in terms of energy, ambition and vision. His youth means a long, long time in power when he becomes King. But the challenges are immense, and the detractors  both inside the Kingdom and globally  are formidable.

His list of titles is long, much like the other global Prince of the moment, his friend Jared Kushner. In addition to being selected as the Crown Prince, he serves as Deputy Prime Minister, President of the Council of Economic and Development Affairs, and Minister of Defense  the worlds youngest holder of the latter office at the time of his appointment a little more than three years ago. Each of these positions would be a full-time job for most people. For example, as Minister of Defense he manages the fourth-largest defense budget in the world, has Saudi troops in a significant regional war in Yemen, directs strikes against the Islamic State as part of the coalition led by the U.S. and recently fired much of the uniformed leadership. His duties in each of the other positions are equally significant.

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His energy and enthusiasm for the task ahead of him was apparent. He held forth with precision and passion on the threat posed by Iran, the challenge of finishing the task of destroying the Islamic State, the positive state of relations with the United States, anti-corruption measures and the need to reform both the Saudi economy and improve the situation for women in the Kingdom. Surrounded by stacks of documents, folders, binders and various computers and other electronic devices, he was clearly looking forward to a long trip to the United States, which would encompass both coasts and multiple locations.

There is a particular need driving his deep personal engagement with current U.S. leadership and the lengthy visit to America. With a relatively small population relative to Iran and reliance on hydrocarbons for a reliable revenue stream, the Saudis need a powerful partner  and only the United States can provide the full range of security guarantees. For the Kingdom, a U.S. withdrawal from the Middle East puts in place a far more dangerous landscape. This should also inform a Saudi approach that eases U.S. concerns about the war in Yemen, the relationship with the Qataris, and cooperation with Israel.

The Crown Princes reputation is not without controversy, of course. Confining members of the Royal family in a Ritz-Carlton in a crackdown on corruption has created a significant human rights backlash, particularly after a damning story in the New York Times appeared. Likewise, the Saudi military campaign in Yemen has helped create a significant humanitarian crisis, and accusations of loose collateral damage standards in terms of the air campaign continue to crop up. The isolation of Qatar is contributing to a high degree of tension in the Gulf Cooperation Council, traditionally led by the Saudis. And his reforms on behalf of women, from permission to drive to allowing custody of children after a divorce, are stirring up trouble in traditional sectors of Saudi society.

There will be additional major challenges ahead. The ambitious plan to reinvent the Saudi economy and wean it from oil revenues will be difficult, even with an infusion of cash from the planned sale of part of Saudi Aramco. If the Prince cannot succeed in generating jobs for young Saudis, encourage technology transfer and sensible direct investment, manage the sovereign wealth in a way that protects the post-hydrocarbon future, tap the human capital of women, reduce radicalization, strangle corruption, maintain the support of the majority of young Saudis and continue to connect the Kingdom to the global grid, then his path will be vastly harder. He cannot succeed by force of personality alone, something he knows well  he must follow through on the coherent plan he has laid out, adjusting course as necessary as events force changes.

Relations with Israel will be tricky, despite the increasingly obvious need for the Saudis to work with Israel in opposing Iranian influence throughout the region (as the Egyptians and Jordanians have for decades). Creating a sense of unity among the fractious Arab states will be hard, and there are other leaders in the Arab world to challenge the young Prince. And above it all looms the long shadow of Iran, who see themselves as inheritors of the Persian Empire and are striking out across the region, seeking to gain influence both north and south of the Kingdom, using Shiite militias, Revolutionary Guards, traditional troops, and an alliance with Russia, Syria and increasingly NATO member Turkey. In addition to traditional Arab states (to include solving the situation with Qatar), the Prince needs a quietly cooperative Israel, European help in ensuring the Iranian economy doesnt suddenly swing into high gear, U.S. influence both in the region and in Europe; possible cooperation with NATO (there is already a nascent level of such engagement) and direct investment from other parts of the world. The United States will be a central part of that coalition, and he will be a vital partner for our security efforts.

The Crown Prince is determined to seize this moment and sail on the flood tide. But he would do well to remember that the play from which that famous quotation comes tells the story of a leader who faces a brutal end. Id say the odds of his success are better than even, but there are rough seas ahead.Kano (Nigeria) (AFP) - Boarding schools have been shut indefinitely in the northeast Nigerian state most affected by Boko Haram violence, the government has said, in the latest blow to children's education.

"All boarding secondary schools in the state, with the exception of those in (the state capital) Maiduguri and (the town of) Biu, will close down with immediate effect until further notice," the Borno state government said.

Borno is the spiritual home of Boko Haram Islamists, whose name translates loosely from Hausa as "Western education is forbidden".

The high-profile abductions of more than 200 schoolgirls in Chibok, Borno state, in April 2014, and 110 others from Dapchi, Yobe state, in February this year also led to closures.

Schools that teach a so-called secular curriculum have been repeatedly targeted during the insurgency, which since 2009 has left at least 20,000 people dead.

According to the UN children's agency UNICEF, more than 2,296 teachers have been killed and some 1,400 schools destroyed in the wider northeast region.

Muhammad Bulama, the Borno commissioner for home affairs, information and culture, said on Wednesday the decision was taken last week after a Boko Haram attack in Rann on March 1.

Three aid workers and eight security personnel were killed in the attack on the remote town near the border with Cameroon, which led to the withdrawal of aid agencies.

Schools have previously been shut in the wake of deadly attacks in Buni Yadi, Yobe state, when more than 40 students at a boys' boarding school were killed in a Boko Haram attack.

Bulama said "urgent and immediate measures" were being taken to improve security but the closures are the latest disruption to schooling in an area already hit by low levels of education.

At the start of the new academic year in September last year, UNICEF said at least 57 percent of schools in Borno remained closed.

It warned the situation threatened to create "a lost generation of children, threatening their and the country's future".Freetown (AFP) - Sierra Leone's police on Thursday dismissed accusations by the election commission that officers were disrupting its activities ahead of a March 27 presidential run-off, bringing the force's impartiality into question.

Tensions are high ahead of the vote with a campaign marked by violent attacks and intimidation against politicians and supporters, along with an increase in inflammatory tribal rhetoric.

The National Electoral Commission (NEC) said in a statement late Wednesday the police had "unwarrantedly entered NEC premises, unannounced and at random, interrogated NEC staff; and obstructed them from performing their duties."

Their actions "served to intimidate some staff", it added.

The police responded on Thursday by pointing out it was investigating 200 election-related crimes nationwide, some involving NEC staff.

A spokesman said officers had to wait "hours on end" to question the executive secretary of the body on Wednesday, adding that the commission's declaration therefore came as a "surprise".

The force's role was to "remove from within its ranks" any NEC staff member likely to undermine Sierra Leone's electoral process, the spokesman added.

The commission's statement is likely to inflame opposition accusations that the police are in the pocket of the ruling All Peoples' Congress (APC), whose candidate came second in the first round of voting on March 7.

The home of opposition leader Julius Maada Bio was surrounded after polls closed that day, leading to a stand-off, though he was not arrested and police dispersed hours later.

Bio, from the Sierra Leone People's Party (SLPP), took 43.3 percent of votes, while Samura Kamara of the APC took 42.7 percent, propelling them into the run-off.

The APC and SLPP alike have complained that fraud marred the vote, which was declared fair and credible by international and domestic observers.

The Head of the United Nations Office for West Africa and the Sahel (UNOWAS), Mohamed Ibn Chambas, said Thursday the polling body was "working under exceptional challenges to discharge its constitutional responsibilities within tight time constraints".

He further demanded all sides "exercise restraint and not interfere with or compromise the independence and integrity of NEC".London (AFP) - Blood samples from former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia can be taken for testing by the OPCW world chemical weapons body, an English judge ruled Thursday.

The Skripals, victims of a nerve agent attack that Britain has blamed on Russia, are in a coma in a critical but stable condition in hospital in Salisbury, southwest England.

Britain has called in the OPCW, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, to verify their findings that the nerve agent was one developed by the Soviet Union and held by Russia.

Moscow denies all responsibility for the March 4 attack and the poisoning has plunged relations between Britain and Russia into severe crisis.

Judge David Williams ruled it was lawful for doctors "to take blood samples for provision to OPCW and to provide copies of medical notes to OPCW".

The High Court judge concluded that it was in the best interests of the Skripals, who are unconscious and therefore unable to give their consent.

He made the ruling following a private hearing earlier this week in the Court of Protection in London, where issues relating to people who lack the mental capacity to make decisions are considered.

The balance of judgement "falls very clearly in favour of the taking of the samples, their submission for analysis by OPCW and the disclosure of the medical notes to aid that process," Williams said.

"In so far as it is necessary it is also lawful and in their best interests that the existing samples are provided to OPCW for further testing."

- Details on health, OPCW probe -

The ruling, published online by the English judiciary, went into greater details about the Skripals' state of health, what the OPCW want to do and the evidence British officials put before the court.

"Both Mr and Ms Skripal remain in hospital under heavy sedation," Williams said.

"The precise effect of their exposure on their long term health remains unclear albeit medical tests indicate that their mental capacity might be compromised to an unknown and so far unascertained degree.

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"It is not inconceivable that their condition could rapidly deteriorate," he added.

"On the evidence currently available it is not possible to say whether the current lack of capacity", to give consent, "is temporary or permanent".

The ruling said it was the OPCW's wish to collect fresh blood samples, undertake their own analysis in relation to evidence of nerve agents, and conduct DNA analysis to confirm the samples originally tested in Britain's defence laboratories as being from the Skripals.

They also want to analyse their medical records and re-test the samples already analysed by the British labs.

The OPCW probe is "likely to produce the most robust, objective, independent and reliable material which will inform any determination of what happened.

"That might simply confirm the current conclusions, it might elaborate or clarify them, it might reach a different conclusion," the judge said.

- Blood already analysed -

Williams summarised witness evidence put before him, but ruled that their names could not be published.

The judge said a chemical and biological analyst from Britain's Porton Down military laboratory had told the court they had analysed blood samples from the Skripals.

"The findings indicated exposure to a nerve agent or related compound. The samples tested positive for the presence of a Novichok class nerve agent or closely related agent," the judge summarised.

A representative from the Foreign Office Arms Control told the court that Britain requested assistance from the OPCW to obtain independent, internationally recognised expert identification of the nerve agent used.

"Their report... will be of real importance for many reasons including in relation to the ongoing criminal process, detecting and deterring any further attacks, allaying false rumour and in supporting the international response," the judge said.

Furthermore, "If the OPCW results differ from UK tests the UK national authority will be able to share them with clinicians to inform medical treatment."

A treating consultant told the hearings that Skripal, 66, was unable to communicate at all, while his daughter, 33, could not communicate in any meaningful way.

Their condition is not expected to change in the immediate or near future.

They are both being treated on the basis that they would wish to be kept alive and to achieve optimal recovery, the consultant told the court.JUBA (Reuters) - U.S. sanctions on 15 South Sudanese oil operators will work against efforts to restore peace and stability in the nation, the government said on Thursday. The sanctions, which were announced on Wednesday, will require companies and government bodies to apply for special licenses to do business in the United States, an action designed to increase pressure on President Salva Kiir to end the conflict and humanitarian crisis in South Sudan. "These measures are viewed by the Ministry of Petroleum as counterproductive to the shared mission of the Republic of South Sudan's and the United States' governments to bring peace and stability to South Sudan," the ministry said in a statement. It pledged to work with the U.S. Department of Commerce "to remove these restrictions and resume normal relations with the U.S.". South Sudan has been torn by civil war since 2013 when fighting erupted between troops loyal to Kiir and those loyal to then-Vice President Riek Machar. The conflict has claimed tens of thousands of lives, slashed oil production and driven about a third of the population of 12 million from their homes. Earlier this month, activists accused the government of funneling cash from the state oil company to militias responsible for atrocities and attacks on civilians. Announcing the sanctions, the U.S. State Department also said the government and corrupt officials were using oil revenue to buy weapons and fund militias. Washington has already placed sanctions on South Sudanese military and political figures, and in January imposed an arms embargo to try to halt the flow of weapons into the country, signaling that it had lost patience with the warring factions for ignoring ceasefires. Last year, the government said it planned to more than double oil production to 290,000 barrels per day in fiscal 2017-2018. South Sudan is the most oil-dependent country in the world, with oil accounting for almost all its exports and around 60 percent of its gross domestic product, according to the World Bank. The government said on Thursday it will encourage more investments in the petroleum sector. Petroleum minister Ezekiel Lol Gatkuoth extended an exploration and production sharing agreement with Petronas of Malaysia [PETR.UL] for six years. The deal covers blocks 3 and 7 in Unity oilfield which have been shut down due to the conflict. The government said it had secured a commitment from Petronas to resume operations soon. "Bringing back production at Unity and other fields, and increasing production overall, are the priorities of this ministry," the minister said in a statement. (Writing by Duncan Miriri; editing by David Stamp)Following the latest explosion in Texas, many are speculating that the Lone Star State's "serial bomber" may have been inspired by the series Manhunt: Unabomber.

A 24-year-old suspect in the recent Texas explosions detonated a bomb inside his car as authorities closed in on him early Wednesday morning. He was killed in the blast, police say.

The show, which began streaming on Netflix in December after its original airing on the Discovery Channel, documents Ted Kaczynski's journey from brilliant Harvard scholar to serial bomber who terrorized the nation for 17 years, killing three people and injuring 23 others.

Kaczynski was arrested in 1996 after he was found living a hermit-like existence in a remote cabin in Montana. He explained his acts of terror in a bizarre manifesto that denounced modern technology.

Authorities say his manifesto was a break in the case and was published in The New York Times and The Washington Post at the request of Attorney General Janet Reno and the FBI.

After it was published, the manifesto got the attention of Kaczynskis brother, David, who alerted the FBI. The suspect known as the Unabomber was arrested in April 1996.

Former FBI agent Max Knoll worked on the case and told Inside Edition that he sees striking differences between Kaczynski and the Texas "serial bomber."

"I learned through the long investigation of [the] Unabomber, I am not to be surprised by anything," he said. "The [frequency] in which he is sending and placing his devices  that wasnt the case with the Unabomber. The Unabomber took periods of time off in between each series of bombs.

Kaczynski, a math prodigy, taught at the University of California at Berkeley before retreating to the Montana woods near Lincoln.

Meanwhile, the Texas bombing have brought back haunting memories for Gary Wright.

In 1987, a package bomb sent by the Unabomber blew up outside his computer company's office in Utah. More than 200 pieces of shrapnel tore into his body.

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The unknown component of it is always unsettling, he told Inside Edition of similarities between what happened to him and what is going on in Texas.

The similarities are kind of dramatic in a way if you think about it  is it an individual? Is it a group? What is the intent?

Wright adds that those affected by this will never live the same life they once had, but must find solace in other places.

"I will tell people this, 'Your life will never be the same.' The journey at times can be a lonely one but at the same time you can find things to replace it with and lead a life that is full and to the best of your ability," he said.

Kaczynski is still behind bars, serving a life sentence at a supermax prison often referred to as the "Alcatraz of the Rockies."

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Related Articles:Beirut (AFP) - The evacuation of hundreds of rebels and their families from Harasta, a bombed-out town in Syria's Eastern Ghouta, follows a string of similar operations in the seven-year war.

The regime is pushing "reconciliation" deals -- the evacuation of fighters, generally towards the northwestern province of Idlib -- in exchange for lifting bombardments and sieges.

Amnesty International, in a November 2017 report entitled "We Leave or We Die", labelled such forced displacements crimes against humanity.

Here are some of the major evacuations:

- 2014 onwards: Homs -

In May 2014, rebels leave their fiefdom in the Old City of Homs, previously known as the "capital of the revolution", after a two-year siege.

Bombardments and fighting have devastated the city's historic quarters.

This is the first regime-opposition deal to result in a rebel retreat since the war broke out in 2011.

Between March and May 2017, thousands of rebels and civilians leave Waer, the last rebel-held neighbourhood of Homs, allowing regime forces to fully retake control of Syria's third-largest city.

- 2016: Daraya, Moadimayet al-Sham -

In August 2016 the last rebels evacuate their ex-stronghold Daraya, a town in Damascus province, following a deal with the regime after a brutal four-year government siege and incessant bombardment.

The rebels and their families are taken to Idlib and the Syrian army retakes control of Daraya.

In September the army evacuates some 300 Daraya inhabitants from neighbouring rebel-held Moadimayet al-Sham, where they had taken refuge three years earlier.

UN Special Envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, criticises the "strategy" of forced displacement of the population and warns "after Daraya we may have other Darayas".

- 2016: Aleppo -

Following a suffocating siege and a blistering offensive with barrel bombs, rockets and shells, the Syrian army in December 2016 declares it is in full control of the country's second city, Aleppo.

Story continues

Thousands of rebels and civilians are evacuated under a deal sponsored by Iran, Russia and Turkey.

- 2017: Wadi Barada -

In January 2017 the army recaptures Wadi Barada, a flashpoint area that supplies water to Damascus, after rebels agree to withdraw in exchange for an end to a suffocating siege.

The regime, backed by Lebanon's pro-Iranian Shiite militia Hezbollah, had been trying to retake the area, just northwest of Damascus, since December 20, 2016.

The deal allows some 700 rebels and 1,400 civilians to leave Wadi Barada for Idlib province.

- 2017: Four towns -

In April 2017, under a deal sponsored by regime backer Iran and rebel supporter Qatar, nearly 11,000 fighters and civilians leave four besieged areas.

This multiple evacuation involves Fuaa and Kafraya, two Shiite areas in Idlib province that are surrounded by rebels. Meanwhile residents leave rebel-held Zabadani and Madaya, besieged by regime troops, which now move in to take control.

- 2017: Barzeh, Qabun, Tishrin -

In May 2017, the regime retakes the rebel-held areas Barzeh, Qabun and Tishrin in Damascus. Several thousand civilians and fighters leave the capital, headed for jihadist-held Idlib province.Beirut (AFP) - A hardline Syrian rebel faction said Wednesday it had agreed with the regime to evacuate a bombed-out town in the Eastern Ghouta enclave near Damascus.

It is the first deal reached in Ghouta for a mass exit of rebels and civilians since Syrian government troops launched an offensive on the enclave a month ago.

"The deal between the regime and rebels in Harasta sees rebels exiting the city with their weapons, and whichever civilians want to leave, to northern Syria with Russian guarantees," said Munzer Fares, spokesman for the Ahrar al-Sham group in Ghouta.

"The departure of families that want to leave to northern Syria will start at 7:00 am (0500 GMT) tomorrow," Fares told AFP.

Ahrar al-Sham holds most of Harasta, which lies in the western part of Ghouta, but regime troops maintained a presence in part of it.

Government forces have closed in on the town as part of their offensive on the broader Ghouta region, once the opposition's main bastion on the outskirts of the Syrian capital.

Syrian troops have recaptured 80 percent of Ghouta and have sought to oust rebels from the remaining pockets through a blend of military pressure and negotiations.

Syrian reconciliation minister Ali Haidar had earlier told AFP that negotiations on a withdrawal from Harasta were under way between Ahrar al-Sham and Russia, a key regime ally.

He said the Syrian government was not directly involved in the talks but would be "ready to implement" any agreement.

Last week, Ahrar al-Sham said it would be willing to hold direct talks with Russia on a ceasefire for Ghouta.Colombia Hoy



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LOS REVOLUCIONARIOS NO TOMAN CACA-COLA No se trata solamente de un capricho, sino de una sana actitud en todos los sentidos. Desde la solidaridad con el pueblo colombiano donde la empresa Caca-Cola ha cometido los mas grandes abusos contra sus trabajadores incluyendo el presunto secuestro y asesinato de los dirigentes del sindicato, hasta la proteccion de la salud de nuestros hijos, enviciados por ese jarabe de cola y azucar, que les produce obesidad prematura. Pensemos tambien los revolucionarios, que ese dinero que gastamos en los refrescos es utilizado por esas empresas para financiar el terrorismo en nuestro pais. Es cierto, no se trata solo de la Caca-Cola, sino tambien de la cerveza, de los cigarrillos y todos esos articulos innecesarios y mas que eso, daninos para nuestra salud. Podriamos incluso pensar en un dia de parada para cada uno de ellos. Es cuestion de irnos organizando. Pero para empezar, que tal si dejamos de comprar Caca-Cola y sus similares?



























Cuando lo extraordinario se vuelve cotidiano...



Discurso del Acto de Grado en Barinas en 12 de Febrero del 2005 Queridos Graduandos:



Mas que un discurso, quiero dirigirles algunas palabras que escribi anoche, despues de visitar en las clinicas, a los estudiantes heridos, a consecuencia de los enfrentamientos con la policia de hace apenas dos dias.



Me ha tocado por razones del destino, ser la persona que les otorgue el titulo que bien merecieron con sus estudios. Y me siento sumamente orgulloso de serlo. Me consta que la Universidad de Los Llanos Occidentales Ezequiel Zamora, a pesar de lo dicho por los enemigos de esta universidad, es una universidad de primera.



No tendremos la mejor planta fisica, en los salones hace calor. En el comedor hace calor. Pero no es en lo material que las cosas deben valorarse. El mayor capital es el ser humano. Y en eso, nuestra UNELLEZ, lo digo con conocimiento de causa, esta sobrada. Los llaneros venezolanos son nobles, valientes, de coraje.



En la UNELLEZ hacen vida, en este momento, aproximadamente 67000 personas. El 97% de ellas son estudiantes. Jovenes que, como Ustedes hasta el dia de hoy, buscan ese titulo, que constata los anos de dedicacion y de estudio.



Los jovenes son el rio de la vida, ustedes graduados deben ser los capitanes de esos barcos que naveguen por el rio de la vida.



Nuestra Patria atraviesa momentos muy dificiles porque decidio dejar de ser esa matrona de edad vetusta y complaciente, para ser joven, rebelde y altanera. Nuestra imagen ya no es la de una acaudalada ricachona mayamera. En nuestro rostro brilla ahora la sonrisa del Che Guevara, con su diente delantero torcido, su pelo largo y su boina con la estrella.



Entender esto, a mi me ha tomado practicamente toda la vida. Tengo 53 anos, y ya perdi mi oportunidad de derramar sangre joven a causa de un ideal.



Ustedes son jovenes, estan en la flor de la vida. No cometan por favor el error de renunciar a su instinto de rebelion. El Che Guevara fue Ministro de a Economia en Cuba. Los billetes y las monedas se adornaban con su rostro. Nada de eso le importo. Primero fue a Angola donde paso un penoso ano de combate. Despues se fue a Bolivia, donde encontro la muerte. El Che era el ultimo que comia, el que cargaba la mochila mas pesada. Siempre se sacrificaba por los demas en un estoicismo que mas parecia fervor religioso que ideologia marxista.



Si quieren un modelo de vida. Ahi lo tienen.



Dije hace unos momentos que el 97% de la poblacion de la UNELLEZ es estudiante. Se imaginan Ustedes la Universidad que podriamos tener si todos los estudiantes tuvieran la abnegacion, la combatividad del Che?



Los momentos que se avecinan van a requerir de una gran unidad del pueblo venezolano. La alternativa de continuar siendo libres o regresar a la pobreza se nos planteara en los proximos dias de forma enmascarada, o quizas peor, desenmascarada, vestida con uniforme de soldado del Imperio.



Por nuestra parte podemos esperar lo mejor. La macroeconomia no podria ir mejor, la justicia social ha mejorado notablemente. Las misiones ocupan un papel muy importante en el pago de dicha justicia social. Aqui en Barinas ya hemos cumplido con dos de las misiones, la mision Robinson y la mision Sucre. No hay analfabetismo y no hay exclusion en la educacion superior, en estas tierras de Zamora.



Pero ay malhaya! Son precisamente estos exitos los que nos hacen mas antipaticos al Imperio. Para ellos, somos inclusive un mal ejemplo que se esta contagiando al resto del continente y cuidado sino al resto del mundo.



Nunca venceremos al Imperio. Estara siempre ahi, acechando. Por lo menos hasta que el mismo no se autodestruya. Porque, sepanlo senores, el neoliberalismo es canibal. Cuando le ataque el hambre, se devorara a si mismo.



Ustedes, queridos graduandos, a partir de hoy pasan a conformar la elite profesional que debe sostener este pais en los proximos cuarenta o cincuenta anos. Anos decisivos para el logro de nuestra libertad y del rescate de nuestra Soberania.



No se dejen comprar. No se dejen corromper. No se dejen gritar. No se dejen pisar. Que nadie les diga que comer, o que vestirse, o que leer. Sean siempre autenticos, rebeldes, contestatarios. Pero eso si, profundamente patriotas, dignos de ser hijos de Bolivar.



Muchas gracias y que Dios los bendiga.





Alguna duda?



Medio siglo de Holocausto Palestino



Oscar Zanartu Nacio en Caracas en 1960. Ha realizado exposiciones individuales en las galerias Minotauro, Clave y San Francisco, y en salas de Coro, estado Falcon, y Puerto Ordaz, estado Bolivar. En Paris su obra ha sido exhibida en el Centro Cultural Tanagra, en la Exposicion Cite Internationale des Arts, en las galerias De Mars y Arver Space, al igual que en la Galeria Municipal Levallois, en Levallois Perret (Francia). En muestras colectivas, su obra se ha expuesto en Belgica, Francia, Estados Unidos y Venezuela; en Caracas intervino en la exposicion "Del genesis a la memoria", 1995, organizada por la Fundacion La Previsora. En 1982 obtuvo el Premio Nacional Critven y en 1990 la Mencion de Honor Jose Antonio Paez, en la Embajada de Venezuela en Paris. En 1991 se le concedio el primer premio de Pintura Itinerante, en Levallois Perret, Francia.



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OZ2



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OZ4



Homenaje a Jason Galarraga



La Victoria de Samotracia



Odalisca



Mas fotos de la nevada del pasado agosto 2008



























La Sierra Nevada de Merida



Nuestro precioso Churum Meru



Homenaje a Picasso



Autoretrato



Sabes lo que bebes en una Coca-Cola?

La formula de la Pepsi tiene una diferencia basica con la de la Coca-Cola y es intencional, para evitar el proceso judicial. La diferencia es a proposito, pero suficientemente parecida como para atraer a los consumidores de Coca-Cola que prefieren un gusto diferente con menos sal y azucar.

Mi profesion?

Tuve que aprender quimica, entender todo sobre componentes de gaseosas, conservantes, sales, acidos, cafeina, enlatado, produccion, permisos, aprobaciones y muchas otras cosas. Monte mi propio mini-laboratorio de analisis de productos.

Sal en la Coca Cola?

A patadas. El Cloruro de Sodio no solo refresca sino da mas sed, como para pedir otra gaseosa. Y no resulta desagradable porque la sal mata literalmente la sensibilidad al dulce... del que por cierto tambien tiene mucho: 39 gramos de azucar.

De los 350 gramos de producto liquido, mas del 10% es azucar, o sea que en una lata de Coca-Cola mas de un centimetro y medio es puro azucar en polvo. Aproximadamente tres cucharadas soperas llenas de azucar por lata!!La formula de la Coca Cola es muy sencilla:

Concentrado de azucar quemado caramelo- para dar color oscuro y gusto

Acido fosforito (para darle el sabor acido)

azucar (HFCS-jarabe de maiz de alta fructosa)

Extracto de hojas de la planta de Coca (Africa e India) y otros pocos aromatizantes naturales de otras plantas

Mucha Cafeina

Conservante que puede ser Benzoato de Sodio o Potasio

Dioxido de Carbono en cantidad para sentir freir la lengua cuando se bebe

Sal para dar la sensacion de refrigeracion

El uso del acido fosforito y no del acido citrico como en todas las demas gaseosas, es para dar la sensacion de dientes y boca limpia al beber. El acido fosforito literalmente frie todo y dana el esmalte de los dientes, cosa que el acido citrico lo hace en menor grado.Trate de comprar acido fosforito para ver las mil recomendaciones de seguridad que te dan para su manipulacion (quema el cristalino del ojo, quema la piel, etc...). Esta prohibido usar el acido fosforito en cualquier otra gaseosa; solo la Coca Cola tiene permiso. Porque claro, sin el acido fosforico, la Coca Cola sabria a jabon.El extracto de coca y otras hojas casi no cambia en nada el sabor. Es mas bien un efecto cosmetico. El extracto forma parte de la Coca-Cola porque legalmente tiene que ser asi. Pero sin el, no se nota ninguna diferencia en el gusto, que esta dado basicamente por las cantidades diferentes de azucar, azucar quemada, sales, acidos y conservantes.Sabor a que...? ja, ja, ja.

Aqui en Bartow, sur de Orlando, hay una empresa quimica que produce aromatizantes y esencias para zumos. Envian diariamente camionadas de sales concentradas y esencias para las fabricas de helados, gaseosas, jugos, enlatados y comida colorida y aromatizada.Cuando visite por primera vez la fabrica, pedi ver el deposito de concentrados de frutas, que deberia ser inmenso, especialmente los de naranja, pina, fresa y tantos otros. El encargado me miro, se rio y me llevo a visitar los depositos inmensos... pero de colorantes y componentes quimicos.

Las gaseosa de naranja no contiene naranja.

En los zumos dizque de fresa, hasta los puntitos que quedan en suspension estan hechos de goma (una liga quimica que envuelve un semi-polimero).

Pina, es un popurri de acidos y goma.

La esencia para helado de aguacate usa peroxido de hidrogeno (agua oxigenada) para dar la sensacion espumosa tipica del aguacate.

Bebidas Light?

Quieres saber la cantidad de basura que tiene un refresco 'light'? Yo ni siquiera los uso para destapar mi lavaplatos pues temo que danen los tubos de PVC. Los productos endulzantes 'ligth' tienen una vida media muy corta. Por ejemplo el

Despues de toda mi experiencia con la produccion de bebidas embasadas, puedo afirmar sin dudar un segundo: la mejor bebida es el agua, como tambien los jugos exprimidos de naranja o limon. Nada mas, cero azucar y cero sal.



Publicado por loretahur



En realidad, la formula secreta de la Coca-Cola se puede detallar en 18 segundos en cualquier espectrometro optico, y basicamente la conocen hasta los perros. Lo que ocurre es que no se puede fabricar igual, a no ser que uno disponga de unos cuantos millones de dolares para ganarle la demanda que te metera la Coca-Cola ante la justicia (ellos no perderian).La formula de la Pepsi tiene una diferencia basica con la de la Coca-Cola y es intencional, para evitar el proceso judicial. La diferencia es a proposito, pero suficientemente parecida como para atraer a los consumidores de Coca-Cola que prefieren un gusto diferente con menos sal y azucar.Tuve que aprender quimica, entender todo sobre componentes de gaseosas, conservantes, sales, acidos, cafeina, enlatado, produccion, permisos, aprobaciones y muchas otras cosas. Monte mi propio mini-laboratorio de analisis de productos.A patadas. El Cloruro de Sodio no solo refresca sino da mas sed, como para pedir otra gaseosa. Y no resulta desagradable porque la sal mata literalmente la sensibilidad al dulce... del que por cierto tambien tiene mucho: 39 gramos de azucar.De los 350 gramos de producto liquido, mas del 10% es azucar, o sea que en una lata de Coca-Cola mas de un centimetro y medio es puro azucar en polvo. Aproximadamente tres cucharadas soperas llenas de azucar por lata!!La formula de la Coca Cola es muy sencilla:Concentrado de azucar quemado caramelo- para dar color oscuro y gustoAcido fosforito (para darle el sabor acido)azucar (HFCS-jarabe de maiz de alta fructosa)Extracto de hojas de la planta de Coca (Africa e India) y otros pocos aromatizantes naturales de otras plantasMucha CafeinaConservante que puede ser Benzoato de Sodio o PotasioDioxido de Carbono en cantidad para sentir freir la lengua cuando se bebeSal para dar la sensacion de refrigeracionEl uso del acido fosforito y no del acido citrico como en todas las demas gaseosas, es para dar la sensacion de dientes y boca limpia al beber. El acido fosforito literalmente frie todo y dana el esmalte de los dientes, cosa que el acido citrico lo hace en menor grado.Trate de comprar acido fosforito para ver las mil recomendaciones de seguridad que te dan para su manipulacion (quema el cristalino del ojo, quema la piel, etc...). Esta prohibido usar el acido fosforito en cualquier otra gaseosa; solo la Coca Cola tiene permiso. Porque claro, sin el acido fosforico, la Coca Cola sabria a jabon.El extracto de coca y otras hojas casi no cambia en nada el sabor. Es mas bien un efecto cosmetico. El extracto forma parte de la Coca-Cola porque legalmente tiene que ser asi. Pero sin el, no se nota ninguna diferencia en el gusto, que esta dado basicamente por las cantidades diferentes de azucar, azucar quemada, sales, acidos y conservantes.Sabor a que...? ja, ja, ja.Aqui en Bartow, sur de Orlando, hay una empresa quimica que produce aromatizantes y esencias para zumos. Envian diariamente camionadas de sales concentradas y esencias para las fabricas de helados, gaseosas, jugos, enlatados y comida colorida y aromatizada.Cuando visite por primera vez la fabrica, pedi ver el deposito de concentrados de frutas, que deberia ser inmenso, especialmente los de naranja, pina, fresa y tantos otros. El encargado me miro, se rio y me llevo a visitar los depositos inmensos... pero de colorantes y componentes quimicos.Las gaseosa de naranja no contiene naranja.En los zumos dizque de fresa, hasta los puntitos que quedan en suspension estan hechos de goma (una liga quimica que envuelve un semi-polimero).Pina, es un popurri de acidos y goma.La esencia para helado de aguacate usa peroxido de hidrogeno (agua oxigenada) para dar la sensacion espumosa tipica del aguacate.Quieres saber la cantidad de basura que tiene un refresco 'light'? Yo ni siquiera los uso para destapar mi lavaplatos pues temo que danen los tubos de PVC. Los productos endulzantes 'ligth' tienen una vida media muy corta. Por ejemplo el aspartamo , despues de tres semanas mojado, pasa a tener gusto de trapo viejo sucio.Para evitar eso, se agregan una infinidad de otros productos quimicos, uno para alargar la vida del aspartamo, otro para neutralizar el color, otro para mantener el tercer quimico en suspension porque sino el fondo de la gaseosa quedaria oscuro, otro para evitar la cristalizacion del aspartamo, otro para realzar el sabor, dar mas intensidad al acido citrico o fosforito que perderia su sabor por el efecto de los cuatro productos quimicos iniciales... y asi sucesivamente.Un consejo final !!Despues de toda mi experiencia con la produccion de bebidas embasadas, puedo afirmar sin dudar un segundo: la mejor bebida es el agua, como tambien los jugos exprimidos de naranja o limon. Nada mas, cero azucar y cero sal.Publicado por loretahur

MARGARINA o MANTEQUILLA La margarina fue producida originalmente para engordar a los pavos; cuandolo que hizo en realidad fue matarlos.Las personas que habian puesto el dinero para la investigacion quisieronrecobrarlo asi que empezaron a pensar en una forma de hacerlo.Tenian una sustancia blanca, que no tenia ningun atractivo como comestible,asi que le anadieron el color amarillo, para venderselo a lagente en lugar de la mantequilla.Que tal esa?... Ahora han sacado algunos nuevos sabores para vender mas alos incautos como usted y yo.CONOCE USTED la diferencia entre la margarina y la mantequilla?Siga leyendo hasta el final... porque se pone bastante interesante!Comparacion entre mantequilla y margarina:

1.- Ambas tienen la misma cantidad de calorias.

2.- La mantequilla es ligeramente mas alta en grasas saturadas: 8 gramos,comparada con los 5 gramos que tiene la margarina.

3.- Comer margarina en vez de mantequilla puede aumentar en 53% el riesgo deenfermedades coronarias en las mujeres, de acuerdo con un estudiomedico reciente de la Universidad de Harvard.

4.- Comer mantequilla aumenta la absorcion de gran cantidad de nutrientesque se encuentran en otros alimentos.

5.- La mantequilla provee beneficios nutricionales propios mientras lamargarina tiene solo los que le hayan sido anadidos al fabricarla.

6.- La mantequilla sabe mucho mejor que la margarina y mejora el sabor deotros alimentos.7.- La mantequilla ha existido durante siglos mientras que la margarinatiene menos de 100 anos.

Ahora... sobre la margarina:

1.- Es muy alta en acidos grasos trans. (Si, esos que recien ahora loscientificos descubrieron que son malisimos y los gobiernoscomenzaron a prohibirlos) .

2.- Triple riesgo de enfermedades coronarias.

3.- Aumenta el colesterol total y el LDL (el colesterol malo) y disminuye elHDL (el colesterol bueno).

4.- Aumenta en cinco veces el riesgo de cancer.

5.- Disminuye la calidad de la leche materna.

6.- Disminuye la reaccion inmunologica del organismo.

7.- Disminuye la reaccion a la insulina.

Y he aqui el factor mas inquietante (AQUI ESTA LA PARTE MAS INTERESANTE! ):A la margarina le falta UNA MOLECULA para ser PLASTICO...!!Solo este hecho es suficiente para evitar el uso de la margarina de porvida, y de cualquier otra cosa que sea hidrogenada (esto significaque se le anade hidrogeno, lo cual cambia la estructura molecular de lassubstancias).Usted puede ensayar lo siguiente:Compre un poco de margarina y dejela en el garaje o en un sitio sombreado.Dentro de unos dias notara dos cosas:

* No habra moscas; ni siquiera esos molestos bichos se le acercaran (esto yale debe decir a usted algo).

* No se pudre ni huele mal o diferente porque no tiene valor nutritivo; nadacrece en ella. Ni siquiera los diminutos microorganismos puedencrecer en ella.Por que? Porque es casi plastico!!



No a la guerra, Si a la Paz



Misterios de la ciencia...



Los costos de la guerra



medicos y capitalismo...



Capitalismo...



medicos (2)



Quien educa a nuestros hijos?



Los Medios...



Sin Palabras...



Chistes feministas

- Cual es el problema, Eva?

- Se que me has creado, que me has dado este hermoso jardin, todos estos maravillosos animales y esa serpiente con la que me muero de risa... pero no soy del todo feliz...

- Como es eso, Eva? - replico Dios desde las alturas.

- Me encuentro sola, y ademas estoy harta de comer manzanas...

- Bueno Eva, en tal caso, tengo una solucion... creare un hombre para ti.

- Que es un hombre?

- Un hombre sera una criatura imperfecta, con muchas artimanas. Mentira, hara trampas, sera engreido... vamos, que te va a dar problemas... Pero, va a ser mas fuerte y rapido que tu y le gustara cazar y matar cosas... Tendra un aspecto simple, pero como te estas quejando, le creare de tal forma que satisfaga tus... eh... necesidades fisicas... Y tampoco sera muy listo, y destacara en cosas infantiles como pegarse o dar patadas a un balon... Necesitara tu consejo siempre para actuar cuerdamente.

- Suena bien - dijo Eva, mientras levantaba la ceja ironicamente.

- Cual es el truco?.

- Pues... que lo tendras con una condicion.

- Cual?

- Como te decia, sera chulo, arrogante y muy narcisista... asi que le tendras que hacer creer que le hice a el primero... recuerda... es nuestro secreto... de mujer a mujer.





Por que a los hombres no les puede dar la enfermedad de las vacas locas?  Porque todos son unos cerdos

Un dia, en el Paraiso, Eva llamo a Dios: Tengo un problema.- Cual es el problema, Eva?- Se que me has creado, que me has dado este hermoso jardin, todos estos maravillosos animales y esa serpiente con la que me muero de risa... pero no soy del todo feliz... - Como es eso, Eva? - replico Dios desde las alturas.- Me encuentro sola, y ademas estoy harta de comer manzanas...- Bueno Eva, en tal caso, tengo una solucion... creare un hombre para ti.- Que es un hombre?- Un hombre sera una criatura imperfecta, con muchas artimanas. Mentira, hara trampas, sera engreido... vamos, que te va a dar problemas... Pero, va a ser mas fuerte y rapido que tu y le gustara cazar y matar cosas... Tendra un aspecto simple, pero como te estas quejando, le creare de tal forma que satisfaga tus... eh... necesidades fisicas... Y tampoco sera muy listo, y destacara en cosas infantiles como pegarse o dar patadas a un balon... Necesitara tu consejo siempre para actuar cuerdamente.- Suena bien - dijo Eva, mientras levantaba la ceja ironicamente.- Cual es el truco?.- Pues... que lo tendras con una condicion.- Cual?- Como te decia, sera chulo, arrogante y muy narcisista... asi que le tendras que hacer creer que le hice a el primero... recuerda... es nuestro secreto... de mujer a mujer.Por que a los hombres no les puede dar la enfermedad de las vacas locas?  Porque todos son unos cerdos

Ellas...



Ellas (2)...



Tres venganzas femeninas VENGANZA NUMERO 1

Hoy mi hija cumple 21 anos y estoy muy contento porque es el ultimo pago de pension alimenticia que le doy, asi que llame a mi hijita para que viniera a mi casa y cuando llego le dije:

-Hijita, quiero que lleves este cheque a casa de tu mama y que le digas que: Este es el ultimo maldito cheque que va recibir de mi en todo lo que le queda de su puta vida!!! Quiero que me digas la expresion que pone en su rostro.

Asi que mi hija fue a entregar el cheque. Yo estaba ansioso por saber lo que la bruja tenia que decir y que cara pondria.

Cuando mi hijita entro, le pregunte inmediatamente: -Que fue lo que te dijo tu madre?

-Me dijo que justamente estaba esperando este dia para decirte que no eres mi papa!



VENGANZA NUMERO 2

Un hombre que siempre molestaba a su mujer, paso un dia por la casa de unos amigos para que lo acompanaran al aeropuerto a dejar a su esposa que viajaba a Paris.

A la salida de inmigracion, frente a todo el mundo, el le desea buen viaje y en tono burlon le grita:

- Amor, no te olvides de traerme una hermosa francesita Ja ja ja!!

Ella bajo la cabeza y se embarco muy molesta.

La mujer paso quince dias en Francia.

El marido otra vez pidio a sus amigos que lo acompanasen al aeropuerto a recibirla.

Al verla llegar, lo primero que le grita a toda voz es:

- Y amor me trajiste mi francesita??

- Hice todo lo posible, - contesta ella - ahora solo tenemos que rezar para que nazca nina.



VENGANZA NUMERO 3

El marido, en su lecho de muerte, llama a su mujer. Con voz ronca y ya debil, le dice: - Muy bien, llego mi hora, pero antes quiero hacerte una confesion.

- No, no, tranquilo, tu no debes hacer ningun esfuerzo.

- Pero, mujer, es preciso - insiste el marido - Es preciso morir en paz.

Te quiero confesar algo.

- Esta bien, esta bien. Habla!

- He tenido relaciones con tu hermana, tu mama y tu mejor amiga.

- Lo se, lo se Por eso te envenene, hijo de puta!!!



machismo y cibernetica



Chiste machista La NASA ha enviado al espacio una mision experimental tripulada por dos monos y una mujer.Apenas abandona la atmosfera, se establece comunicacion con Houston.

-Atencion, simio 1, verifique sistemas hidraulicos, controle adecuada presion de los propulsores de arranque. A 60.000 pies disminuya un 25% la velocidad.

El simio hace la sena de OK.

-Atencion, simio 2, nivele al cruzar la estratosfera y active sistemas anticongelantes. No olvide monitorear sistemas de comunicacion e indicadores de presion. Comprendido?.

El simio hace la sena de OK.

-Atencion, Houston llamando a mujer: no se olvide.

-Mujer: Si, si, ya se! -interrumpe enojada- que no me olvide darles de comer a estos monos de mierda y que no se me vaya a ocurrir tocar nada!.



.Spaghetti, Spaghetti, Spaghetti, Spaghetti, Spaghetti.

Un abogado mantiene un romance con su secretaria.Al poco tiempo, esta queda embarazada y el abogado, que no quiere que su esposa se entere, le da a la secretaria una buena suma de dinero y le pide que se vaya a parir a Italia.Esta pregunta: Y como voy a hacerte saber cuando nazca el bebe ? El abogado responde: Para que mi mujer no se entere, tan solo enviame una postal y escribe por detras: Spaghetti. Y no te preocupes mas, que yo me encargare de todos los gastos.

Pasan los meses y una manana la esposa del abogado lo llama al bufete, algo exaltada: Querido, acabo de recibir el correo y hay una postal muy extrana viene desde Italia. La verdad, no entiendo que significa.El abogado, tratando de ocultar sus nervios, contesta:Espera a que llegue a casa, a ver si yo entiendoCuando el hombre llega a casa y lee la postal, cae al suelo fulminado por un infarto.Llega una ambulancia y se lo lleva. Ya en el hospital, el jefe de cardiologia se queda consolando a la esposa y le pregunta cual ha sido el evento que precipito tan masivo ataque cardiaco.

Entonces la esposa saca la postal y se la muestra diciendole: No me explico, doctor; el solamente leyo esta postal. Vea usted mismo lo que trae escrito.Spaghetti, Spaghetti, Spaghetti, Spaghetti, Spaghetti."Tres con salchicha y albondigas y dos con almejas



Gol !!!!



Chistes de Borrachos Entra un borracho a su casa todo manchado con lapiz labial por todos lados hecho un desastre, y la mujer le pregunta:-Hombre que te paso?Y el borracho le responde:-No me vas a creer, me pelee con un payaso!



Este es un borracho que entra en un bar y le dice al camarero:-Me da cinco copas de whisky?Al rato:-Me da cuatro?Al rato:-Me da tres copas?Despues:-Me da dos copas?Luego le dice:-Me da una copa?Y le dice al camarero:-Ves? Cuanto menos bebo, mas borracho estoy!

Stockholm (AFP) - A prominent Syrian Kurdish leader on Thursday criticised Russia for giving a "green light" to Turkey to carry out an offensive in Syria's Afrin region, saying it wouldn't have happened without Moscow's approval.

Turkish troops and allied Syrian forces seized control of the northwestern city of Afrin from the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) militia on Sunday.

In an interview with AFP during a visit to Stockholm, Saleh Muslim, the former co-chair of the main Syrian Kurdish political movement, the Democratic Union Party (PYD) said Turkey wouldn't have succeeded without Russian backing.

"We are disappointed by the Russians because they had some obligations when they came to Syria... they promised that they were going to protect the Syrian territory," Muslim said.

"Russia didn't do anything (about the Turkish incursion), they gave the green light to Turkey and everybody is sure that if (Turkey) didn't have the green light from Russia then they wouldn't do it," he added.

Ankara began its offensive in January against the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) militia -- the military wing of the PYD -- which it says is allied with the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) waging an insurgency against Turkey since 1984.

The PKK is blacklisted as a terror organisation by Turkey and its Western allies.

- 'Stabbed in the back' -

But the YPG has been working closely with the United States against the Islamic State (IS) extremist group in Syria, much to NATO member Turkey's chagrin.

Asked whether Washington has turned away from the YPG in Syria, Muslim said: "If your partner (against IS) is being stabbed in the back, then you should do something (about it)."

Some 250,000 civilians fled the violence in Afrin and dozens of others were killed, as well as around 1,500 Kurdish fighters, according to the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Story continues

Three Turkish soldiers died Thursday clearing improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in the region.

"This means the war is continuing and Afrin is not finished yet," Muslim said.

Defying a Turkish arrest warrant, Muslim's visit to Stockholm comes nearly a month after he was briefly detained in Prague.

A Czech court later released him and the nation's prosecution later closed a preliminary extradition procedure.

Muslim is wanted by Turkey over a February 2016 bombing in Ankara that killed 29 people that the Turkish authorities blamed on Kurdish militants.

He has been charged in the case and faces 30 life sentences if found guilty.

Muslim vehemently denies the charges and says Turkey is trying "to silence him".Syrian children speak to a man from out the window of a vehicle during a civilian evacuation by the Syrian Red Crescent in the rebel-held Eastern Ghouta enclave - AFP

Syrian rebel fighters and their families began leaving a key Eastern Ghouta town on Thursday, after agreeing with the government to give up their fight for the opposition stronghold.

Around 1,600 fighters from the Ahrar al-Sham Islamist group and some 6,000 of their relatives were expected to have been evacuated by the end of the day, in the first such deal between the two sides of the conflict.

Buses transported the men, women and children out of the enclave through government territory and on to opposition-held Idlib province in the northwest of the country.

Idilb, close to the Turkish border, is the rebels largest remaining redoubt and where thousands of rebels have been sent by the regime under so-called reconciliation deals.

A child runs along a street in front of clouds of smoke billowing following a reported air strike on Douma, the main town of Syria's rebel enclave of Eastern Ghouta Credit: AFP

A spokesman for Ahrar al-Sham, which had controlled Harasta, told the Telegraph that the fighters were allowed to leave with their weapons and the roughly 20,000 civilians who wished to remain in the city were given guarantees of safety from the regime and Russia.

He said rebels and the government also exchanged 18 prisoners ahead of the evacuation.

The deal, brokered by government allies Russia and Lebanese militia Hizbollah, was agreed after pressure from civilians, who have spent weeks being bombarded by air strikes and chemical attacks.

Critics say it is a formula for displacement that legitimises the government's brutal siege tactics that have deprived hundreds of thousands of civilians of food and medicines and subjected them to a half-decade of violence.

Smoke rises from buildings following air strikes on Zamalka, one of the few remaining rebel-held pockets in Eastern Ghouta Credit: AFP

A blistering Russia-backed regime offensive on Eastern Ghouta since February 18 has retaken 80 percent of the last opposition bastion outside the capital.

The government's assault has sparked a tide of displacement in the Damascus suburbs as civilians try to escape the violence. Some have moved deeper into the rebel-held enclave, while some 50,000 others have crossed the front-lines, to government authorities.

The Ahrar al-Sham spokesman said some 30,000 of those who have fled Ghouta in recent weeks were being held in a camps around Damascus. Theyre almost like prisons because no one can move freely inside, he said. You also cant enter or leave the camps.

Story continues

There were also reports of some men of fighting age, particularly defectors from the Syrian army who joined the opposition, being conscripted to fight for the government.

The deal will put pressure on rebel groups in the two other besieged areas of Eastern Ghouta to follow suit.

The Jaish al-Islam rebel group that holds Douma, the biggest and most populated town still held by the rebels, has said it is determined to fight on.By Jon Herskovitz

PFLUGERVILLE, Texas (Reuters) - An unemployed 23-year-old man suspected of a three-week bombing campaign in Texas that killed two people and injured five others before blowing himself up on the side of a highway was identified by local media on Wednesday.

The suspect was identified as Mark Anthony Conditt, of Pflugerville, Texas, according to the local CBS television affiliate and Austin American-Statesman newspaper, citing unnamed law enforcement sources. Reuters could not immediately confirm the suspect's identity.

Public records showed Conditt's age as 23. Officials had said the suspect was 24.

Police tracked the suspect to a hotel about 20 miles (32 km) north of Austin, the state capital, and were following his vehicle when he pulled to the side of the road and detonated a device, killing himself, Austin Police Chief Brian Manley told reporters near the scene.

"The suspect is deceased and has significant injuries from a blast that occurred from detonating a bomb inside his vehicle," Manley told reporters. He declined to further identify the suspect, except to say he was white.

Investigators had tracked him for a couple of days before closing in at an unidentified hotel in Round Rock, Texas, not for from his home in Pflugerville, Governor Greg Abbott told Fox News on Wednesday.

"We've known for a couple of days who the suspect likely was," Abbott said. "Law enforcement is at his house in Pflugerville where we are learning whether or not that was the location he was making his bombs."

The governor added that the suspect is believed to have lived with two roommates, who are not currently considered suspects, Abbott said. The suspect was not a military veteran, Abbott said.

Related:

For more news videos visit Yahoo View.

Texas law enforcement officials blocked off the street where the suspect lived, not far from where the first bomb went off on March 2, killing one person.

Story continues

Jay Schulze, a 42-year-old network engineer, said on Wednesday he lived a few houses away from the bombing suspect and that the suspect and his friends would hang out late at night.

"They would be out in back playing music and partying pretty late," Schulze said.

While jogging on Tuesday night, Schulze noticed a heavy police presence in the area, with drones flying overhead. He said he was stopped briefly by a person who he thought was an FBI agent.

'DO NOT UNDERSTAND' MOTIVATION

Manley said the suspect was believed to be responsible for six bombs around Austin, all but one of which detonated. He said the motivation for the bombings or whether the suspect had help was not yet known.

Manley warned residents to be cautious since it was not clear whether any more bombs had been left around the city.

The bombings killed two people and injured at least five others, unnerving residents of Austin, a city of some 1 million people. The first bombings occurred as the city was hosting the annual South By Southwest music, film and technology festival.

While officers waited for reinforcements before they arrested him, the suspect left the hotel and police followed.

The suspect pulled off the city's main highway and two Austin police officers approached his vehicle when he set off the device. One officer fired at the vehicle and the other sustained a minor injury when the bomb went off, Manley said.

U.S. President Donald Trump congratulated authorities on Twitter: "Great job by law enforcement and all concerned!"

The first three devices were parcel bombs dropped off in front of homes in the Austin area. A fourth went off on Sunday night, apparently detonated with a trip wire also around Austin, and a fifth exploded inside a FedEx Corp facility near San Antonio on Tuesday.

The bombings bewildered authorities, who by Sunday had publicly called on the bomber to contact them and explain why he was carrying out the attacks.

The first two bombs killed black men, raising fears that they were part of a hate crime, but investigators said the blasts that came later and were more random made that less likely.

Manley said investigators have no clear idea of what prompted the suspect to carry out the bombing, saying, "We do not understand what motivated him to do what he did."

(Reporting by Jonathan Herskovitz; Additional reporting by Brendan O'Brien in Milwaukee and Jonathan Allen and Gina Cherelus in New York; Writing by Scott Malone; Editing by Larry King and Jeffrey Benkoe)Officials investigate the scene where a suspect in a series of bombing attacks in Austin blew himself up as authorities closed in (AP)

The Austin bombing suspect has been identified.

Mark Anthony Conditt, has been named as the perpetrator in the deadly bombings that terrorised Austin, Texas.

The unemployed 24-year-old, who bought bomb-making materials from Home Depot, blew himself up as authorities closed in on him.

Police have warned that more bombs could be out there and said Conditts motive remained a mystery.

It is not yet known if he acted alone in the five bombings in the Texas capital and suburban San Antonio that killed two people and wounded four others.

Police zeroed in on Conditt using store surveillance video, mobile phone signals and witness accounts of a strange-looking customer making purchases while wearing a disguise that included a blonde wig and gloves.

Officers located his vehicle at a hotel on Interstate 35 in the suburb of Round Rock.

Police believe Conditt was behind a series of bombings (AP)

They were waiting for armoured vehicles to arrive before moving in for an arrest when his vehicle began to drive away, Austin police chief Brian Manley said at a news conference.

Authorities followed the vehicle, which ran into a ditch on the side of the road, he said.

When members of the Swat team approached, the suspect detonated an explosive device inside the vehicle, the police chief said.

A law enforcement official provided the dead mans name and investigators released few details about Conditt, except his age and that he was white.

Online postings indicate he was home schooled.

He later attended Austin Community College from 2010 to 2012, according to a college spokeswoman, but he did not graduate.

The suspects motive has not been revealed by authorities (AP)

The mayor of Pflugerville, which is not far from the site of the first bombing, said the suspect lived in his city, just two streets from his house.

Pflugerville resident Jay Schulze said he was jogging on Tuesday night when he was stopped by police and asked about the bombings.

He said police flew drones over a home for about six hours between Tuesday evening and early Wednesday morning.

Mr Schulze described the home over which the drones were flying as a weird house with a lot of people coming and going and a bit rundown.

Story continues

A neighbour who watched Conditt grow up said he always seemed like he was smart and polite.

Jeff Reeb said he has lived next to Conditts parents for about 17 years and described them as good neighbours.

He said Conditt, who lived with roommates a few miles away, had visited his parents regularly.

Austin was hit with four package bombings starting on March 2.

A fifth parcel bomb went off early on Tuesday at a FedEx distribution centre near San Antonio.

Representative Michael McCaul, a Republican from Austin, said Conditts fatal mistake was walking into a FedEx store to post a package because that allowed authorities to obtain surveillance video that showed him and his vehicle, along with his number plate.

From there, Mr McCaul told Austin television station KXAN, investigators could identify the suspect and eventually track him using his mobile phone.

Police warned on Wednesday of the possibility that more bombs had yet to be found.Video of a school district board meeting in Katy, Texas, on March 19 has gone viral after a man accused the superintendent of bullying him 30 years ago in junior high.

Greg Barrett shared his story of being bullied as a student at West Memorial Junior High in the Houston suburb of Katy before accusing superintendent Lance Hindt of being the ringleader. Barretts account of being targeted for his original surname, Gay, went viral after a video of the meeting was published on YouTube. The clip was featured on the front page of Reddit on Tuesday evening.

Hindt has come under fire over the accusation and for appearing to laugh at Barretts comment that he came close to committing suicide over the bullying. Hindt recognized he attended junior high with Barrett but claimed the accusations were false in a comment released to KHOU. Credit: Katy ISD via StoryfulJAKARTA (Reuters) - An Indonesian volcano belched thick clouds of sulphuric gas on Wednesday, sending 30 people to hospital and prompting the closure of the popular tourist and mining site. Nearly 200 people living on the slopes of Mount Ijen in East Java province were forced to evacuate. "Because of this incident, the public - tourists or miners - are not allowed near the crater until further notice," said Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, spokesman for the national disaster mitigation agency. He added that many residents had experienced vomiting and difficulty in breathing. There was no increase in seismic activity, Nugroho said. The crater is a popular site for tourists and miners, who dig up hardening yellow sulfur to sell for use in everything from cosmetics to matchsticks. The volcano regularly puffs out small amounts of noxious gases but the site stays open to the public. Around five million of Indonesia's 250 million people live and work near volcanoes, according to authorities, largely because of the fertile farming soil. (This story has been refiled to correct typo in headline) (Reporting by Kanupriya Kapoor; Editing by Nick Macfie)A coalition of environmental and animal welfare groups has filed an amended lawsuit targeting a new Trump administration policy that allows African elephant hunting trophies to be imported to the United States on a case-by-case basis.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, reversing President Donald Trumps pledge to uphold a ban on importing elephant body parts, announced in a March 1 memo that it would immediately begin considering permit applications. The order ended an Obama-era ban on the import of such trophies from Zimbabwe and Zambia.

The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Washington, describes the new Fish and Wildlife Service guidelines as unlawful and violations of the Endangered Species Act. The suit was brought by four groups, including the Humane Society and the Center of Biological Diversity, and names Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke as a defendant.

Despite ample scientific and economic concerns and tremendous public outcry over trophy hunting, this administration seems determined to allow Safari Club International and other special interests to unduly influence federal wildlife policy decisions, Anna Frostic, an attorney for the Humane Society, said in a statement. Safari Club International is a trophy hunting lobbying group with close ties to Zinke.

Big-game trophy decision will be announced next week but will be very hard pressed to change my mind that this horror show in any way helps conservation of Elephants or any other animal.  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 19, 2017

Trump in November described big-game trophy hunting as a horror show, and in January pledged to uphold the ban on importing body parts.

The Fish and Wildlife Service memo undermined that vow, granting elephant trophy permits on an individual basis.

Elephants shouldnt be killed for cheap thrills, and the Trump administration shouldnt make crucial trophy hunting decisions behind closed doors, Tanya Sanerib, of the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement. Federal wildlife officials seem to be thumbing their nose at President Trump after he called for an end to the horror show of trophy hunting.

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The government memo also dismissed Endangered Species Act concerns for trophies taken from lions and bontebok, a species of antelope, hunted in several African countries.

The Fish and Wildlife Service said it changed the policy in response to a court ruling in December that faulted the Obama administrations implementation of the trophy restriction.

But the lawsuit says the agency went beyond the court ruling by wiping the slate clean of longstanding restrictions, and violated its statutory duty to promote the conservation of species threatened with extinction.

The suit adds that the government failed to rationally explain its 180 degree turn from determining that Zimbabwe is incapable of managing elephant hunting sustainably, to proclaiming open season on elephants and lions in Zimbabwe, a top destination for American trophy hunters due to lax regulations exacerbated by rampant corruption.

In #Zimbabwe, the country from which most elephant trophies imported to the United States originate, wildlife management is so poor that the country has lost six percent of its elephants since 2001.  https://t.co/7PJpxvjSfQ pic.twitter.com/4f1WmOL6O5  The Humane Society of the United States (@HumaneSociety) March 20, 2018

The Fish and Wildlife Service has yet to issue any permits to import elephant trophies under its new guidelines, according to The Associated Press. It issued 37 permits for lion trophies from Zimbabwe and Zambia after a similar ban was lifted last year. Zinke was sued by the same four environmental groups over that decision. This weeks complaint is an amendment to that ongoing case.

Zinke, a former Montana congressman, has a history of attacking endangered species.

He recently came under scrutiny for appointing an advisory board full of trophy hunters. His International Wildlife Conservation Council, which held its first meeting last week, includes celebrity hunting guides, representatives from rifle and bow manufacturers, and well-heeled trophy collectors, AP reported.

One board member, Peter Horn, is a co-owner of a private New York hunting preserve with Trumps two big-game hunting adult sons.

Zinke just formed a 16-member commission at @Interior to promote trophy hunting as a conservation tool.

It contains no biologists but does have a reality-TV guide who hunts elephants, several gun and tourism reps and a Florida vet who sells endangered species to roadside zoos. https://t.co/nOEi2wqKWJ  Bill Weir (@BillWeirCNN) March 20, 2018

Also on HuffPost

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This article originally appeared on HuffPost.Ms. L was sent to the Otay Mesa Detention Center after requesting asylum. Her child was sent to a detention center 2,000 miles away in Chicago without explanation. (Photo: Mike Blake / Reuters)

When the U.S. government removes a child from a mothers custody and puts the two in separate detention facilities, surely theres a good reason for it. The womans crime must have been so indefensible, so terrible, that the only recourse is to take her child away.

However, according to an ACLU lawsuit brought against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the only terrible thing one mother (listed in the lawsuit as Ms. L) did was flee the violence in her home country of the Democratic Republic of Congo to save her life.

When Ms. L and her daughter arrived in the United States by way of Mexico last December, the two presented themselves to immigration agents and requested asylum. After initially being detained together for four days, the mother was sent to the Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego, California, while her child was sent to a Chicago, Illinois, detention center 2,000 miles away without explanation. Reports say the 7-year-old child screamed and cried as she begged the guards to let her stay with her mother.

Refugees and asylum seekers around the world are already running for their lives. Now, the Trump administration has put into practice a 2017 Department of Homeland Security proposal to forcibly separate asylum-seeking families once they reach the U.S. An ACLU class action suit asserts that at least 429 cases of family separation have occurred in the past 15 or so months. Former Secretary of Homeland Security and current White House chief of staff John Kelly claims separating these loved ones will serve as a deterrent to future asylum seekers; in reality, such actions re-traumatize people who came to the U.S. seeking safety and refuge.

Any mother, father or guardian who has ever loved a child should already understand the cruelty of this practice. For four months, Ms. Ls child sat alone in a Chicago detention facility, frightened and traumatized, crying for her mother and not knowing when she [would] see her again. The two were only able to speak by phone a handful of times.

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This kind of forced separation is often especially harmful for individuals who have already experienced previous trauma or who have lived in fear of violence and oppression. A 2015 study of Texas family detention centers commissioned by the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee said such separation can cause parents to re-experience past traumas associated with the fear of not being able to protect their children. According to the study:

Forced separation between a parent and child for an indefinite period of time is, by its very nature, traumatic  For parents who experienced the very real possibility of kidnapping and murder of their children in their countries of origin, the potential for trauma and mental anguish is intensified.

The UUSC study also noted that surviving such horrors only to be detained in prison-like conditions can also re-traumatize parents and children:

For individuals who have been trapped and in hiding to avoid being killed by gang members, the sense of being trapped and confined in a detention center may also bring about flashbacks or a sense of reexperiencing the event.

Most asylum seekers already carry histories of trauma  including torture, gender-based violence and arbitrary imprisonment  with them when they arrive in the U.S. A 2004 study by The Center for Victims of Torture surveyed Oromo and Somali refugees living in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area of Minnesota and found 44 percent of respondents were torture survivors. A Fusion investigation in 2014 found that 80 percent of Central American women and girls who cross the Mexican border into the U.S. are raped during their journey. And in 2015, a study by the National Consortium of Torture Treatment Programs found that, of torture survivors seeking treatment, 69 percent meet the criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In the Democratic Republic of Congo, where Ms. L and her daughter lived, armed groups, including government security forces, regularly violate human rights with impunity.

Adding new trauma on top of past traumas has harmful effects on ones mental health  effects that differ from those of a singular traumatic event. Referred to as the dose effect of trauma, studies have demonstrated a positive correlation between the number of unique traumatic events experienced and the prevalence of PTSD among refugees.

Typically, even when entire families  potentially including older children, grandparents or other relatives  arrive together, only mothers and children are detained together. Of the approximately 2,900 family units available in the three DHS detention centers that have them, only 88 are designated for fathers and children. When four fathers arrived together at the U.S. border last December, all of their children  including a 1-year-old and a 3-year-old  were taken away from them based on a DHS policy that claims to address smuggling by separating fathers and children unless familial relationships can be verified.

Separating children from their parents, intentionally restricting contact and withholding information about a childs location are practices that only worsen an already inhumane situation. Refugees have described the U.S. Customs and Border Protections initial 12-hour holding cells as hieleras (freezers) and perreras (dog kennels). The 2015 study of Texas family detention centers uncovered myriad abuses and associated health impacts, including severe weight loss among detained children. In one case, a 3-year-old child lost 14 pounds because her mother wasnt permitted to enter the cafeteria without shoes.

In their statement opposing family separation in detention, the American Association of Pediatricians asserted, Pediatricians work to keep families together in times of strife because we know that in any time of anxiety and stress, children need to be with their parents, family members and caregivers.

Ms. L and her daughter were finally reunited in Chicago a few days ago. But their story is just one of hundreds, and the trauma caused by their separation cannot be easily erased. One doesnt need to be a physician or a psychologist to recognize that this practice is harmful to the mental and emotional well-being of asylum-seeking families. Parents who risk harrowing journeys to find safety in the U.S. deserve compassion, and ending family separation is a first step. But we must go further. To prevent re-traumatization of asylum seekers, the asylum process must be decriminalized, and we must develop humane, trauma-informed and less costly alternatives to detention.

Monika Parikh is co-founder and executive director of Partnerships for Trauma Recovery. Her professional career includes human rights program development in South Asia, West Africa and Latin America, and psychosocial care and community organizing for refugees and immigrants in the United States.

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This article originally appeared on HuffPost.Neither President Donald Trump nor former Vice President Joe Biden served during the Vietnam War, or in the military at all, but both are lobbing insults and threats like tough guys, CNNs Jake Tapper said Thursday morning.

Tapper pointed out that Trump and Biden received many deferments from serving, the former for bone spurs and the latter for asthma, during one of the countrys worst and deadliest wars.

Reminder that between the two of these tough guys are nine Vietnam deferments and claims they couldnt serve because of asthma and bone spurs, he tweeted.

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Tapper highlighted his father-in-laws service during the war and how he isnt running around talking about how tough he is.

You know whos a tough guy from that generation? My father in law, Sgt Tom Brown, enlisted in the US Air Force 1966, honorably discharged 1969. In country from 1968-1969, in the 12th Security Police Squadron Pacific Air Command. Isnt running around talking about how tough he is, Tapper wrote.

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Tapper was incorrect about the total number of deferments, though. Biden received five and Trump five as well, with each getting a Selective Service classification of 1-Y. The designation meant they would not have to serve unless there was a national emergency.

Democrat Biden, who could very well square off against Trump in 2020, claimed Tuesday during an anti-sexual assault rally that he would have beat the hell out of Trump if the Republican had said anything in front of him like the current president did in the infamous Access Hollywood tape.

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Story continues

Trump responded in kind Thursday morning by stating Crazy Joe Biden" should not threaten people but that if the pair of septuagenarians did square off Biden would go down fast and hard, crying all the way.

Crazy Joe Biden is trying to act like a tough guy. Actually, he is weak, both mentally and physically, and yet he threatens me, for the second time, with physical assault. He doesnt know me, but he would go down fast and hard, crying all the way. Dont threaten people Joe! , the president tweeted.

This article was first written by Newsweek

More from NewsweekBy Steve Holland WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump defended his congratulations to Vladimir Putin on the Russian president's disputed re-election victory on Wednesday, saying he wants Putin's help in solving crises from North Korea to Syria and beyond. Trump drew fire from Republicans and Democrats alike for telling reporters on Tuesday that he had congratulated Putin on his re-election and that the two leaders had made tentative plans to meet in the "not too distant future." The Washington Post reported that Trump, in his briefing papers to prepare for the phone call with Putin on Tuesday, was specifically warned "DO NOT CONGRATULATE" the Russian president. White House officials did not dispute the report, but said whoever leaked it could be subject to dismissal. A Trump confidant who asked not to be named said Trump was angry about the leak, and a White House official said John Kelly, Trump's chief of staff, was "frustrated and deeply disappointed." In a pair of tweets on his call with Putin, Trump said U.S. news organizations "wanted me to excoriate him. They are wrong! Getting along with Russia (and others) is a good thing, not a bad thing." "They can help solve problems with North Korea, Syria, Ukraine, ISIS, Iran and even the coming Arms Race," Trump said. Trump's congratulations to Putin, which came shortly after he joined Britain in blaming Russia for a poison nerve gas attack against a former Russian spy in southern England, has revived criticism that Trump has been too tolerant of the Russian leader. Trump is under investigation by U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller on whether he or his aides colluded with Russia during the 2016 presidential election that Trump won. Trump calls the probe a political witch hunt. Trumps overture to Putin has drawn heavy fire by critics who called Sunday's election rigged. Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell said there was a lack of credibility in tallying the result." Senator John McCain, a longtime Putin critic, was even blunter, saying: "An American president does not lead the Free World by congratulating dictators on winning sham elections. Administration officials said it was unclear if the president had seen the briefing memo that was leaked to the Post. "If this story is accurate, that means someone leaked the president's briefing papers. Leaking such information is a fireable offense and likely illegal," said a senior White House official, who requested anonymity. Republican Senator Marco Rubio said he did not like Trump's congratulations to Putin but thought the leak was worse. "If you don't like the guy, quit. But to be this duplicitous and continue to leak things out, it's dangerous," Rubio told reporters. White House officials have said that Trump is less trusting of Putin because of Russian activities in Ukraine, Syria and elsewhere. Last week, after initially equivocating about the chemical attack on the former Russian double agent in Salisbury, England, the White House joined a statement by the leaders of Britain, France and Germany in which they said they abhor the attack and blamed it on Moscow. Moscow has denied any involvement in the poisoning. The issue came up on Wednesday in a telephone call between Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron, who is scheduled to visit the White House in late April, according to a White House statement. "The presidents reiterated their solidarity with the United Kingdom in the wake of Russias use of chemical weapons against private citizens on British soil and agreed on the need to take action to hold Russia accountable," it said. But the poisoning incident did not appear to come up in Trump's call with Putin. "I don't believe that was discussed in today's call," White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders told reporters on Tuesday. The leak incident was likely to revive questions about whether Trump would embark on more turnover in his senior staff after the departure of Rex Tillerson as secretary of state. Trump's national security adviser, H.R. McMaster, is widely seen as likely to leave at some point, and Kelly himself is said by Trump confidants to have tested the nerves of the president. (Reporting by Steve Holland; Editing by Toni Reinhold and Leslie Adler)President Trump said Thursday that if he were to fight Joe Biden, the former vice president would go down fast and hard.

At an anti-sexual assault rally at the University of Miami earlier this week, Biden said that if he were in high school and heard Trump making lewd comments about women  like those captured on the infamous 2005 Access Hollywood tape  he would take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him.

Trump responded on Twitter, escalating the war of words between the two septuagenarians.

Crazy Joe Biden is trying to act like a tough guy, he wrote. Actually, he is weak, both mentally and physically, and yet he threatens me, for the second time, with physical assault. He doesnt know me, but he would go down fast and hard, crying all the way. Dont threaten people Joe!

Biden first expressed a desire for a fisticuffs with Trump at a rally for Hillary Clinton in October 2016, after Trumps hot-mic comments on Access Hollywood were made public.

The press always ask me, Dont I wish I were debating him? No, I wish we were in high school  I could take him behind the gym, Biden said. Thats what I wish.

Trump responded that he would love that.

Did you see where Biden wants to take me to the the back of the barn? Me. Id love that, the then-Republican nominee said at a rally in Tallahassee, Fla. Mr. Tough Guy. You know, hes Mr. Tough Guy. You know when hes Mr. Tough Guy? When hes standing behind a microphone by himself.

Trump added: Some things in life you could really love doing.

Despite Trumps admonishment to Biden about threatening people, the president himself has a history of doing just that while standing behind a microphone.

At a February 2016 rally in Las Vegas, Trump said he wanted to punch a protester in the face.

Theres a guy, totally disruptive, throwing punches  were not allowed to punch back anymore, Trump said. I love the old days. You know what they used to do to guys like that when they were in a place like this? Theyd be carried out on a stretcher.

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And in July 2016, Trump said he wanted to hit a number of speakers at the Democratic National Convention so hard, their heads would spin and theyd never recover.

I was going to hit one guy in particular, a very little guy, Trump said at a rally in Iowa, apparently referring to former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. I was going to hit this guy so hard his head would spin; he wouldnt know what the hell happened.

Though Trumps freewheeling Twitter insults have long broken presidential decorum, the Thursday morning tweet about fighting Biden was nonetheless striking.

Trump also has often railed against Democrats  including Biden and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.  who, its speculated, are considering running against him in 2020.

Read more from Yahoo News:WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman discussed the situation in war-torn Yemen during a meeting on Tuesday, including Houthi rebel and Iranian activity and the humanitarian crisis, the White House said. "On Yemen, the President and the Crown Prince discussed the threat the Houthis pose to the region, assisted by the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps," it said in a statement on Wednesday. "The leaders discussed additional steps to address the humanitarian situation and agreed that a political resolution to the conflict is ultimately necessary to meet the needs of the Yemeni people," the statement said. A Saudi-led coalition intervened in neighboring Yemen in 2015 against Iran-aligned Houthis, who had ousted the internationally recognized government of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi. The civil war has killed an estimated 10,000 people. On Tuesday, the U.S. Senate killed a resolution seeking to end Washington's support for Saudi Arabias military campaign in Yemen. Some of the lawmakers backing the resolution called the conflict a "humanitarian catastrophe," which they blamed on the Saudis. Last week, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis appealed to lawmakers not to adopt the measure and defended U.S. military support to Saudi Arabia. Mattis said the U.S. assistance, which includes limited intelligence support and refueling of coalition jets, was ultimately aimed at bringing Yemen's war toward a negotiated resolution. He warned that a withdrawal could increase civilian casualties and would embolden the Houthi rebels, who have fired missiles at Saudi Arabia and targeted ships off Yemens coast. On Wednesday evening, a small group of protesters opposed to the Saudi military campaign in Yemen demonstrated at an event in Washington for the Misk Art Institute, an organization established by Prince Mohammed's foundation. "Stop killing innocent children," one of the protesters shouted as she was removed by security guards at the event at the Kennedy Center. It was not clear whether Prince Mohammed attended the event. Protests over Saudi Arabia's role in Yemen also took place during Prince Mohammeds visit to London earlier this month. Prince Mohammed met on Wednesday with executives of Boeing Co, Raytheon Co, Lockheed Martin Corp and General Dynamics Corp, the Saudi Embassy in Washington said in a statement. "Discussion focused on the shared interests of both nations for developing technology and growing trade and business ties," the statement said. At the White House meeting on Tuesday, Trump credited U.S. military sales to Saudi Arabia with boosting American jobs. (Reporting by Doina Chiacu and Idrees Ali; Writing by Eric Beech; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)Donald Trump has hit out at former vice-president Joe Biden in an early morning tweet suggesting he could beat the 75-year-old in a fight.

After Mr Biden said he would have beat the hell out of Mr Trump if they were both in high school together the President said Mr Biden would go down fast and hard, crying all the way.

Mr Trump said the vice-president to Barack Obama was trying to act like a tough guy but argued he was in fact both mentally and physically weak.

Mr Trump said the Democrat did not know him and warned him not to threaten him.

Crazy Joe Biden is trying to act like a tough guy. Actually, he is weak, both mentally and physically, and yet he threatens me, for the second time, with physical assault, Mr Trump tweeted.

He doesnt know me, but he would go down fast and hard, crying all the way. Dont threaten people Joe!

Crazy Joe Biden is trying to act like a tough guy. Actually, he is weak, both mentally and physically, and yet he threatens me, for the second time, with physical assault. He doesnt know me, but he would go down fast and hard, crying all the way. Dont threaten people Joe!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 22, 2018

The row started on Tuesday when Mr Biden criticised the President over comments he has made about women.

A guy who ended up becoming our national leader said, I can grab a woman anywhere and she likes it, Mr Biden said at an anti-sexual assault rally at the University of Miami.

They asked me if Id like to debate this gentleman, and I said no. I said if we were in high school, Id take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him.

It is not certain what Mr Trump was alluding to when he said Mr Biden was weak but it could be a reference to times when the former Delaware senator has become emotional during public appearances.

Mr Biden burst into tears after Mr Obama awarded him with the highest civilian honour in the US during a surprise ceremony in January 2017.

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Mr Biden turned his back to the crowd to wipe away tears after the former president announced he was bestowing him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

The former vice-president has also spoken emotionally about his sons brain cancer diagnosis and subsequent death. He previously said his sons illness made him feel unable to run for president against Mr Trump.

No one should ever seek the presidency unless they are able to devote their whole heart and soul and passion into just doing that, Biden told ABC News in 2016. Beau was my soul. I just wasnt ready to be able to do that. My one regret is my Beaus not here. I dont have any other regrets.

The death of Beau, an Iraq War veteran who died in 2015, is not the only tragedy to have hit the family. Beau was just two when his mother, Neilia Hunter, was killed in a car crash in 1972, which also took the life of Mr Bidens one-year-old daughter.

Mr Biden, the first Roman Catholic vice-president, ruled out running for office in 2016 in a race that would have seen him pitted against Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. He has since said he would have been able to beat Mr Trump if he had been the Democratic candidate. Mr Biden previously pursued the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988 and in 2008 but dropped out of the race early on both occasions.

Mr Trumps stern warning to Mr Biden on Thursday is reminiscent of the time he implied he would be willing to fight Mr Biden behind a barn at a rally in Florida in 2016.

Referring to a fist fight between the pair, Mr Trump said: Id love that.

He branded Mr Biden Mr Tough Guy and said of beating him up: Some things in life you could really love doing.

The comments followed Mr Biden saying he wished he was in high school with Mr Trump and could take him behind the gym. He said: The press always asks me, dont I wish I was debating him? No, I wish we were in high school and I could take him behind the gym. Thats what I wish.

Mr Bidens comments referred to the leaked tape from 2005 which surfaced in October 2016 in which Mr Trump could be heard bragging about groping and making unwanted advances on women. He boasted that he was such a star he can grab women by the p***y.

Mr Biden sought to clarify his remarks at a rally just two days afterwards, saying that he would only fight Mr Trump if he were still in high school. He added: I want to make it clear I understand what assault is. Im not in high school.President Donald Trump says he would beat Obama Vice President Joe Biden in a fight if the two septuagenarians ever came to blows and Biden would go down crying.

Crazy Joe Biden is trying to act like a tough guy, the president tweeted early Thursday.

Actually, he is weak, both mentally and physically, and yet he threatens me, for the second time, with physical assault. He doesnt know me, but he would go down fast and hard, crying all the way. Dont threaten people Joe! Trump wrote on Twitter.

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03_22_BidenTrump

Lucy Nicholson/Reuters

Biden, 75, said early this week that he could beat Trump, 71, in a fight. The two have been trading insults for months. If we were in high school, Id take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him, said Bidenwho has not ruled out a presidential run in 2020 and has appeared to be testing the political waters for his candidacyat an sexual assault awareness event at the University of Miami Tuesday.

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Biden was echoing remarks he made after the infamous Access Hollywood tape emerged in October 2016 in which Trump described sexually assaulting women. At the time, Trump dismissed his own comments in the 2005 interview outtake as locker-room talk.

I've been in a lot of locker rooms my whole life, Biden said during the It's on Us rally against sexual assault on school campuses Tuesday. I'm a pretty damn good athlete. Any guy that talked that way was usually the fattest, ugliest S.O.B. in the room.

Read more: Joe Biden on Trump: I'd have beat the hell out of him in school over grab 'em by the pussy' comments

Story continues

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Biden has frequently taunted Trump over the past year. He's a joke, Biden told CNN's Chris Cuomo during an interview early this year after Trump suggested Democrats were treasonous for not clapping at his State of the Union address. Biden also needled the president for not being able to undo the legacy of his predecessor President Barack Obama.

Biden has also spoken out against Trumps skepticism about Russian interference in the 2016 election. In an interview last November, after Trump said he believed Russian President Vladimir Putins assurances that Moscow did not meddle in the election, Biden said there's no good reason to believe Putin in my view. Trump later said he believes the assessment by American intelligence agencies that Russia hacked U.S. political parties and ran a sustained misinformation campaign.

In February, Biden called Trumps presidency a tragedy and accussed it of shredding Americas core values and standing in the world.

This article was first written by Newsweek

More from NewsweekWith the Trump administration poised to slap China with tens of billions of dollars in across-the-board tariffs as soon as Thursday, is the get-tough approach finally forcing Beijing to clean up its act on trade?

On Tuesday, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang made all the right noises in a big speech at the end of the National Peoples Congress, seemingly tendering an olive branch to Washington by vowing to address some of the biggest U.S. concerns with Chinas economic practices.

Li said China doesnt want a trade war and wants a more balanced trade relationship with the United States. He also promised to open up the Chinese economy, especially the manufacturing sector. Finally, he vowed to stop forcing foreign companies to share their technology with Chinese firms, one of the biggest complaints international businesses have about doing business there.

U.S. business groups, while still skeptical of the pace of Beijings promised reforms, welcome what they hope is long-delayed progress to open up Chinas economy, apparently the result of the Trump administrations sticks-over-carrots approach.

The American Chamber of Commerce in China is pleased to hear that China says it will provide more market access to foreign business and do a better job of protecting intellectual property, says William Zarit, the groups chairman. The proposed trade remedies may not be perfect, but based on past talks, the U.S. probably feels that without pressure, little progress will be made.

But longtime China watchers are taking Lis promises with a grain of salt. Since even before President Donald Trump took office, Chinese officials led by President Xi Jinping have tried to seize the high ground in terms of supporting the global trade order with flowery rhetoric  but which seldom translates into concrete progress on the ground.

The Chinese are basically using this rhetoric to set up a contrast with Trumps protectionism, says Charles Boustany Jr., a former U.S. congressman who now directs the Center for Innovation, Trade, and Strategy at the National Bureau of Asian Research. As with Xis well-received speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last year, when he vowed to fill the leadership role the United States was abdicating, they set themselves up as the protector of free trade, he adds.

Story continues

China has been promising to open up its economy since at least the Third Plenum in 2013 but with little to show for it  and even Chinas much-touted announcement last year that it would open its financial sector to foreign firms offer less than meets the eye.

U.S. and European businesses operating in China still complain about being forced to hand over their technology as the cost of doing business, and nearly all are concerned about the theft of intellectual property. U.S. companies are growing less optimistic about the business climate there, one-fifth report having to hand over technology, and most have seen no real follow-through on the big reforms promised five years ago, according to the 2017 U.S.-China Business Council member survey.

The situation has gotten worse over time, with forced technology transfers, intellectual property theft  nothings changed, Boustany says. The rhetoric sounds good, but theres no action.

If Lis conciliatory speech Tuesday was meant to placate Washington and perhaps forestall a trade war, by Wednesday Chinese officials had replaced promises with threats. (Lis less inflammatory speech was at any rate overshadowed Tuesday by Xis fiery call to defend every inch of China, widely seen as a veiled warning to Taiwan.)

Vice Commerce Minister Wang Shouwen decried what he called unilateral protectionist measures from the United States and said China would safeguard its interests, Reuters reported.

Also on Wednesday, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying shot back at the threat of sweeping trade restrictions. She noted that tariffs on Chinese exports to the United States would most clearly hurt U.S. firms and consumers and struck a defiant tone at odds with Lis earlier speech.

We want no trade war with anyone, but if our hands our forced, we will not be scared nor hide, Hua said. If they day comes when the U.S. took measures to hurt our interests, we will definitely take firm and necessary countermeasures to safeguard our legitimate interests.

U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, testifying before the House of Representatives on Wednesday, said the administration is gaming out likely Chinese responses, noting that a preferred target is U.S. agricultural exports such as soybeans.

The Chinese warnings echo a growing chorus of pleas from U.S. business groups, from retailers to tech firms, which fear that across-the-board tariffs on a wide range of Chinese imports will hurt their bottom line and raise prices for consumers. The National Foreign Trade Council, a business association, wrote top lawmakers urging them to push the Trump administration to change course before launching the trade action.

Unilateral imposition of tariffs prior to any meaningful negotiations with China, the group wrote, will turn the focus from Chinas unjust behavior to the legitimacy of our own action and make it harder to rally international support to get Beijing to change its behavior.

Despite all the appeals, the Trump administration appears determined to forge ahead with the toughest suite of U.S. trade actions on Beijing in decades; the White House said Wednesday it would lay out Thursday the new measures to be taken against China to counter what it calls theft of U.S. technology and intellectual property. Politico noted the administrations rationale: Theres a recognition that you have to punch a bully in the face, an administration official told the outlet.

The specter of sweeping new unilateral tariffs comes on the heels of steel and aluminum tariffs that largely target imports from key U.S. allies, sparking threats of reprisals from Brussels to Brazil. Those trade actions make it that much harder for Washington rally a global coalition alongside the European Union and Japan that would be required to put meaningful pressure on China, Boustany says.

We need a concerted effort, to sing off the same sheet of music, to force the Chinese to truly change, he says.U.S. President Donald Trump tweeted on Wednesday about his decision to congratulate Russian President Vladimir Putin on his re-election. (Photo: Sputnik Photo Agency/Reuters)

President Donald Trump on Wednesday tweeted a bizarre and ominous defense of his widely criticized decision to congratulate Russian leader Vladimir Putin, who was re-elected on Sunday.

Despite an explicit, all-caps warning from his advisers to NOT CONGRATULATE Putin  likely because Trumps campaign aides are under investigation for alleged collusion with Moscow  Trump called him up and the pair had what he described as a very good call.

Getting along with Russia (and others) is a good thing, not a bad thing, Trump tweeted. They can help solve problems with North Korea, Syria, Ukraine, ISIS, Iran and even the coming Arms Race ... PEACE THROUGH STRENGTH!

Its not clear what coming arms race hes referring to  rising tensions between Washington and Pyongyang have started to simmer since Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un arranged a meeting to be held in May to negotiate the isolated nations denuclearization.

Meanwhile, Putin unveiled his countrys new, invincible nuclear weapons earlier this month and claimed they could reach anywhere in the world. He used visual presentations to show off their purported strength, including one that appeared to show missiles raining down over Florida. The U.S. State Department responded by saying the veiled threat did not represent the behavior of a responsible international player.

Its also unclear how, exactly, Trump expects Russia to help solve problems in Ukraine. Under Putins rule, Russia annexed Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, which sparked a violent political crisis. Putin visited Crimea this month to rally additional support ahead of his election, which Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko decried as a dangerous provocation.

And Trumps suggestion that Russia can help with Syria is equally puzzling. Moscow continues to back the Syrian regimes slaughter and besiegement of its own citizens. Russian airstrikes, including indiscriminate attacks on hospitals and school buildings, have demolished Syrian neighborhoods and killed thousands of civilians in the war-torn country with impunity. Experts say Russia avoided targeting areas controlled by the Islamic State group for much of its intervention in Syria, instead focusing on rebel-held areas in an effort to prop up Syrian President Bashar Assad.

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MSNBC national security analyst Clint Watts described Trumps assertion that Russia can help the U.S. as simply ridiculous.

[Trump] says they could help us? What were doing is helping [Putin], Watts said. The Russians are laughing at us that we are moving back from the world stage, and they are moving forward  taking whatever they want without any resistance.

Also on HuffPost

Russian President Vladimir Putin relaxes during a hunting and fishing trip on Aug. 1-3, 2017, in the republic of Tyva in southern Siberia, in this photo released by the Kremlin.

Putin carries a hunting rifle in Tyva on Aug. 15, 2007.

Putin (top) attends a judo training session at the Top Athletic School in St. Petersburg on Dec. 18, 2009.

Putin aims at a whale with an arbalest in order to take a piece of its skin for analysis on Aug. 25, 2010.

Putin swims in a lake in Tyva on Aug. 3, 2009.

Putin prepares for snorkeling during his August 2017 visit to Tyva.

Putin and Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev fit in a workout at the Bocharov Ruchei state residence in Sochi on Aug. 30, 2015.

Putin rides a horse in the Karatash foothills in Siberia on Feb. 25, 2010.

Putin and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu ride a boat in Tyva in August 2017.

Putin takes part in a judo training session at the Moscow sports complex in St. Petersburg on Dec. 22, 2010. He was given tips on pushing his hips forward and how to use his left hand by his longtime judo coach during a sparring session.

Putin plays badminton with Medvedev in the Gorky House outside Moscow on June 11, 2011.

Putin goes horse riding topless in southern Siberia on Aug. 3, 2009.

Putin does some gym work at the Bocharov Ruchei state residence in Sochi on Aug. 30, 2015.

Putin goes scuba diving at an underwater archaeological site in the Greek Black Sea on Aug. 10, 2011.

Putin fishes in the headwaters of the Yenisei River on the border of Mongolia on Aug. 13, 2007.

Putin takes aim with a model assault rifle at an electronic shooting range during his visit to a research facility of the national railway company in Moscow on April 26, 2012.

First Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov looks on as Putin bowls at a new sports complex in Kamchatka on Sept. 5, 2007.

Putin (right) and Medvedev play badminton at the Bocharov Ruchei state residence in Sochi on Aug. 14, 2009.

Putin holds a tranquilizer gun during a visit to the Ussuri reserve in Russia's far east on Aug. 31, 2008.

Putin scales a climbing wall during his visit to a summer camp run by the Nashi youth group at Lake Seliger in the central Tver region on Aug. 1, 2011.

Putin, wearing a helmet and the uniform of the Renault Formula One team, prepares to drive a F1 race car on a special track outside St. Petersburg on Nov. 7, 2010.

Putin plays a gala ice hockey match in the night hockey league in Sochi on May 10, 2017.

Putin holds a fish he caught during an August 2017 trip to Tyva in southern Siberia.

Putin visits a reserve for Przewalski's horses outside Orenburg on Oct. 3, 2016.

Putin visits a reserve for Przewalski's horses outside Orenburg on Oct. 3, 2016.

Putin and Medvedev visit the cave of Arctic Pilots Glacier in Alexandra Land in remote Arctic islands of Franz Josef Land on March 29, 2017.

Putin watches a display during the MAKS 2017 air show in Zhukovsky, outside Moscow, on July 18, 2017.

Vladimir Putin visits the cave of Arctic Pilots Glacier in Alexandra Land in the remote Arctic islands of Franz Josef Land on March 29, 2017.

Putin poses for a photo during a trip to Tyva in early August 2017.

Putin (left) waves onboard a Mir-2 mini-submersible in which he intended to dive into the depths of Lake Baikal on Aug. 1, 2009, descending 4,600 feet below the surface of the world's deepest lake to inspect valuable gas crystals.

Putin stands at the wheel of a motorboat in Tyva on Aug. 3, 2009.

Putin stands with a gun at a shooting gallery of the new GRU military intelligence headquarters building in Moscow on Nov. 8, 2006.

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This article originally appeared on HuffPost.Ankara (AFP) - Turkish lawmakers have passed a new law giving the communications watchdog the power to block internet broadcasts, raising fears of a new curb on freedom of expression.

The legislation passed late Wednesday expands the remit of Turkey's audiovisual authority RTUK, which regulates and supervises radio, television and on-demand broadcasts.

Online platforms must now apply to RTUK for licences to broadcast and the authority can give fines as well as block access to broadcasters.

Opponents say the law will mean that internet giants like Netflix and YouTube could be blocked in Turkey if complaints are made against some of their videos.

Garo Paylan, an MP of the pro-Kurdish Peoples' Democratic Party, said that if a platform like Netflix published a video in which there was, for example, criticism of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, they risked being blocked if the content was not removed.

"This can make Turkey become a completely closed country. We could fall into the same league as North Korea. We could become a country where Netflix, Wikipedia and YouTube are blocked," Paylan told AFP.

Wikipedia has been blocked in Turkey since April 2017 because Ankara says it failed to remove content that promoted terror and accused Turkey of cooperation with terror groups.

There have been blocks on YouTube in the past, but it is currently accessible in Turkey.

Opponents worried the government was tightening controls ahead of elections in 2019.

"As the local and general elections near, the government is tightening the screws," Baris Yarkadas of the opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) said on Twitter.

"The new regulation against websites is the most vile censorship," he added.

The RTUK watchdog says it is an autonomous regulator, with its nine members elected by lawmakers on the basis of the number of MPs of each political party.

A majority of lawmakers in Turkey's parliament are from Erdogan's ruling Justice and Development Party.

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When the law was first presented in February, Transport and Communication Minister Ahmet Arslan denied there was any censorship.

He said the authorities must take measures against TV and radio shows if there are "wrongs committed against national security or the country's ethical values".

But Paylan said the opposition was able to force a significant amendment through to ensure private individuals who post video online would not be affected by the new law.ANKARA (Reuters) - Turkey and the United States have reached an understanding, but not full agreement, about stabilizing the town of Manbij and other areas of Kurdish-controlled northern Syria, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said on Wednesday. Turkey, which on Sunday stormed the northern Syrian town of Afrin after a two-month offensive against the Syrian Kurdish YPG militia, has repeatedly threatened to push its operations further east to Manbij where U.S. troops are stationed. Expanding Turkey's military campaign into the much larger Kurdish-held territory further east, which President Tayyip Erdogan has vowed to do, would risk confrontation between the NATO allies who have been at loggerheads over the U.S. policy in Syria and other issues. Speaking at a news conference in Ankara, Cavusoglu denied media reports that Ankara and Washington had agreed a deal on the fate of Manbij, 100 km (60 miles) east of Afrin. "We said we reached an understanding, which is mainly that Syria's Manbij and the east of the Euphrates be stabilized. We said we reached an understanding, not an agreement," he said. Ankara was seeking an agreement with Washington over who will secure Manbij after the YPG, which Turkey considers a terrorist organization, withdraws from the area. Pulling out only from Manbij would not be enough, Cavusoglu said. "The YPG will withdraw from these areas, like Manbij for example. We will work together for the security of these areas. "Manbij is, of course, not enough. First, the YPG will leave and the people of Manbij will govern it. The security of the area will be ensured. We will apply the Manbij model to other areas controlled by the YPG as well," he said. Turkey considers the YPG to be an extension of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), which has waged a decades-long insurgency against the state, and has been infuriated by the support Washington has provided the Syrian Kurdish fighters. The issue caused a crisis between the NATO allies. Outgoing U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson had taken a leading role in recent weeks to resolve the dispute, promising to find a solution for Manbij during a visit to Turkey last month. However Turkey said U.S. President Donald Trump's announcement that he was removing Tillerson from office may delay a potential deal between Ankara and Washington. (Reporting by Tuvan Gumrukcu and Ece Toksabay; Editing by Dominic Evans)By Daren Butler DIYARBAKIR, Turkey (Reuters) - Tens of thousands of Turkish Kurds turned an annual cultural festival into a rare mass political protest on Wednesday against the government's two-month-old military campaign against a Kurdish militia in neighboring Syria. At a rally to mark the spring festival of Newroz in the southern city of Diyarbakir, demonstrators said Ankara risked provoking violence at home if it pressed on with its Syria offensive. The event was the first major public demonstration against the campaign in Syria, in which the Turkish army has battled a Kurdish militia, the YPG, which Turkey says is an extension of the banned PKK, or Kurdistan Workers Party. It fell just days after Turkish forces stormed the Syrian city of Afrin. In a city still scarred by fighting between the PKK and Turkish troops, young women and men linked hands and danced to traditional Kurdish music in the warm spring sunshine, chanting for Afrin and jailed PKK leader Abdullah Ocalan. "Long live the Afrin resistance," sang the crowd. Political rallies are heavily restricted in Turkey's state of emergency imposed in the wake of an attempted coup in 2016. Hundreds of people were arrested across Turkey in the runup to the Diyarbakir rally, accused of planning illegal protests. Celebrating Newroz, the Persian New Year which falls on the Spring Equinox, has long been a mark of national pride for Kurds, who make up around a fifth of the population of Turkey, mainly in the southeast. Demonstrations for the holiday frequently led to violence during the PKK's 40-year insurgency. Southeastern Turkey saw an escalation of violence after a ceasefire between the Turkish state and the PKK collapsed in 2015. Much of Diyarbakirs historic heart, the Sur district ringed by Roman-era walls, was left in ruins. Although fighting inside Turkey has subsided since then, the army's two-month-old cross border campaign against the YPG in Syria has again raised passion among Turkey's Kurds. President Tayyip Erdogan has vowed to extend the offensive beyond Afrin to other YPG-held areas. If that happens, said Ziya Pir, a parliamentarian from the pro-Kurdish opposition HDP party, "there will not just be an emotional rupture between Turkey and the Kurds here, it will go further and none of us want to see that". Many Turkish Kurds have close ties to the YPG and the conflict across the frontier. One woman at the demonstration said her daughter left university to join the YPG after being detained and tortured in Diyarbakir, and had fought Islamic State in Iraq and Syria where she was killed. A cousin of hers also went to Afrin, and her fate remains unknown, said the woman who declined to give her name. EVEN IF WE DIE "My surviving children and I will continue with this struggle even if we die," she told Reuters. Erdogan's government says its offensive targets militants who pose a direct threat to Turkey's security. The local head of his ruling AK Party in Diyarbakir, Serdar Budak, said Turkey's enemy was the YPG, not the Kurdish people. "If they have suffered harm, the wounds of all civilians will be bandaged," he told Reuters. Pir said there was "no concrete justification" for Turkey to send troops into northern Syria. The displacement of 200,000 people in Afrin and looting by Turkey's Free Syrian Army rebel allies showed that "what Turkey did is wrong, not just in a legal sense but also in a human sense." Another HDP politician, Berdan Ozturk, criticized the lack of international intervention to prevent what he said was Turkey's occupation of Afrin, a sentiment echoed by many in the crowd, where purple and green flags of the HDP were waving. "Afrin belongs to the Kurds but Turkey occupied it. Hundreds of thousands fled," said Tarik Dalkiran, a 52-year-old farmer from Bismil district of Diyarbakir province. "Britain, France, America, nobody did anything. I have lost faith in the West." (Editing by Dominic Evans and Peter Graff)By Paul Ingram

TUCSON, Arizona (Reuters) - A prosecutor said on Wednesday that a U.S. Border Patrol agent who fatally shot a Mexican teenager from U.S. territory in 2012 committed murder, while the defense attorney said the agent's actions were lawful and in response to a hail of rocks.

The trial, scheduled to last three weeks, is being held at a time when U.S. President Donald Trump is pushing to build a wall along the border with Mexico in an effort to keep out illegal immigrants and drugs.

Agent Lonnie Swartz "calmly and deliberately" walked up to the border fence and fired 16 shots in less than 34 seconds at 16-year-old Jose Antonio Elena Rodriguez on Oct. 10, 2012, hitting him 10 times including twice in the head, Assistant U.S. Attorney Mary Sue Feldmeier said in her opening statement.

Swartz, who was charged in 2015 and pleaded not guilty, even reloaded his pistol during the incident, Feldmeier said.

Elena Rodriguez was shot through a fence separating the cities of Nogales, Arizona - where Swartz was on patrol - and Nogales, Mexico - where the teen was walking.

"This is not an immigration case, this is not a drug case," Feldmeier said at the U.S. District Court in Tucson, Arizona. "This is a second-degree murder case."

She added that Swartz "cannot use his badge as a shield against a murder charge."

However, Swartz's attorney, Sean Chapman, said his client "did what he had to do" when he fired his weapon in response to a hail of rocks that hit a Nogales police dog and a fellow Border Patrol agent.

Swartz "did not celebrate" after the shooting, but rather vomited and cried, Chapman said.

Swartz's use of force was lawful and agents were not required to seek cover or move back when they were attacked with rocks, Chapman said. Instead, they were trained to "eliminate the threat," especially when others were at risk, he added.

Chapman also said that Elena Rodriguez was acting in concert with drug smugglers, and that the boy "made the conscious choice to put his own life at risk by attacking the agents with rocks."

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Swartz, who remains on indefinite suspension without pay, remained quiet throughout the opening statements, taking only a few notes on a legal pad.

Elena Rodriguez's mother, Araceli Rodriguez, and grandmother were in the courtroom. The mother left during Chapman's comments.

(Reporting by Paul Ingram in Tucson, Arizona; editing by Ben Klayman and Phil Berlowitz)WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Three U.S. Republican lawmakers said on Wednesday they want China's Confucius Institute cultural centers in the United States to register as foreign agents, and to require all U.S. universities to disclose major gifts from foreign sources. Senators Marco Rubio and Tom Cotton, and Representative Joe Wilson introduced the "Foreign Influence Transparency Act," which would require the institutes to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA. The measure, which comes amid increasing concern from some U.S. officials about Chinese influence in U.S. education, also would require universities to disclose donations, contracts or in-kind gifts valued at $50,000 or more from any foreign source. Run by the Chinese government, the Confucius Institutes offer language and cultural programs at more than 100 U.S. colleges and universities. They have been criticized as an attempt by Beijing to influence U.S. higher education. Many U.S. politicians have been pushing for the United States to take a harder line in its dealings with China, particularly President Donald Trump and his fellow Republicans but also many Democrats. Officials at the Confucius Institute U.S. Center in Washington could not immediately be reached for comment on Wednesday. (Reporting by Patricia Zengerle; Editing by David Gregorio)DAKAR (Reuters) - The United Nations closed its peacekeeping mission to Liberia on Thursday, 15 years after it was deployed in the aftermath of two civil wars that ended with the fall of then-president Charles Taylor. The mission had already withdrawn most of its 15,000 troops in mid-2016, signaling that the poor West African nation can meet its own security needs. Some 2,000 U.N. forces had remained in case of an emergency, but over time they have pulled out. "This mission contributed to the restoration of peace and stability in Liberia," President George Weah said in a joint address with visiting U.N. Deputy Secretary Amina Mohammed. "We salute the men and women in blue helmets who came from far and near, some of whom paid the ultimate price for peace". Weah was sworn in to cheering crowds in January, a testimony to how far Liberia has come since its civil wars left almost 250,000 people dead and turned children into killers. He replaced outgoing Africa's first woman president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf after a hotly contested but nonetheless peaceful election a month earlier. After being bogged down in quagmires such as Mali, Central African Republic and Congo, it was a welcome bit of good news for a U.N. peacekeeping mission to be able to leave a country in which peace is restored. "The results were over time but there were 100,000 combatants disarmed and reintegrated," Mohammed told Reuters in a telephone interview. "The youth are taking ownership as ... the custodians of peace." But she added that "there's a lot of consolidation that needs to be done." Founded by freed American slaves, Liberia is Africa's oldest modern republic. Though now peaceful, youths complain that little so far has been done to tackle widespread graft or lift Liberians out of dire poverty. (Reporting by Tim Cocks; Editing by Matthew Mpoke Bigg)The top generals of the U.S. and Russia spoke Wednesday, at least their second conversation this month and the first since Russian President Vladimir Putin scored a landslide victory Sunday.

The conversation between Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair Marine Corps General Joseph Dunford and his Russian counterpart Army General Valery Gerasimov revolved around "Syria and other issues of mutual concern," according to a statement by Joint Staff spokesman Air Force Colonel Patrick S. Ryder, who said "in accordance with past practice, both have agreed to keep the details of their conversation private."

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The discussion came as Gerasimov and the U.S.'s top general in Europe and NATO commander Army General Curtis Scaparrotti "exchanged their views on topical issues of international security" in a separate telephone call Wednesday, according to the Russian Ministry of Defenseand a day after Trump offered Putin his belated congratulations on the Russian leader's re-election in a telephone call.

RTX3M3VX (1)

Carlos Barria/Reuters

As tensions rose between the U.S. and Russia over conflicts in Europe and the Middle East, Trump defended his decision to call Putin from widespread criticism in Washington and various media outlets. The U.S. and Russia have collaborated to a limited degree against the Islamic State militant group (ISIS), but they still disagree over the political future of Syria. Bilateral relations have been especially rocky since Russia's annexation of the Crimean Peninsula from Ukraine in 2014 and allegations that the Kremlin played a hand in swaying the 2016 U.S. election.

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"I called President Putin of Russia to congratulate him on his election victory (in past, Obama called him also). The Fake News Media is crazed because they wanted me to excoriate him. They are wrong! Getting along with Russia (and others) is a good thing, not a bad thing.......," Trump tweeted Wednesday.

".....They can help solve problems with North Korea, Syria, Ukraine, ISIS, Iran and even the coming Arms Race. Bush tried to get along, but didnt have the 'smarts.' Obama and Clinton tried, but didnt have the energy or chemistry (remember RESET). PEACE THROUGH STRENGTH!," he added in a second tweet.

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Trump made improving relations with Moscow a leading electoral promise, following decades of rivalry only briefly interrupted by the collapse of the Soviet Union. Unlike his predecessor, former President Barack Obama, Trump expressed admiration for Putin before and after getting into U.S. politics. Differing views on international affairs and accusations that Trump collaborated with the Kremlin to secure his place at the White House have damaged their relationship, but the Republican leader has maintained a desire to mend ties between the world's leading military powers.

As Russia expands its political and military influence abroad, the West has accused Moscow of interfering with the sovereignty of other nations. In the latest instance, London has charged the Kremlin with being behind the poisoning of an ex-Russian spy caught working for the U.K. and later transferred there as part of a spy swap in 2010.

Moscow denied responsibility and the Russian Foreign Ministry said Wednesday that the U.S. or U.K. may have orchestrated the attack in order to blame Russia, as the state-run Tass Russian News Agency reported.

This article was first written by Newsweek

More from NewsweekNima Ahmed of Mocha, Yemen, is living with her children and grandchildren at the Markazi refugee camp in Djibouti. (Photo: United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees)

With a brutal cycle of violence gripping Yemen for the past three years, millions of helpless residents are looking for an escape from one of the worlds most dire humanitarian crises.

Just across the Red Sea, the African country of Djibouti has become an unlikely beacon of hope for its eastern neighbor. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, more than 38,000 Yemenis have fled to Djibouti since the civil war broke out in March 2015. Of those, only 4,000 stayed in Djibouti  most continue onward.

One such refugee is Nima Ahmed, from the port city of Mocha on Yemens west coast. This month, she decided she could no longer endure the ceaseless gunfire and bombings, devastated city streets and dwindling critical resources, so she left behind most of her family, friends and home to find safety.

Ahmed brought her daughter, son, and three grandsons aboard a boat destined for Obock, a port city in northern Djibouti. She said it was a long ride with no food or water, and she suffered from motion sickness.

We want to have normal lives and be at peace, Ahmed said.

On March 12, they arrived at Djiboutis Markazi refugee camp, where 1,695 people in need of food, shelter or other assistance have relocated. (The 2,264 others, who are more self-sufficient, live in Djibouti City, the nations capital.)

The Markazi refugee camp. (Photo: United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees)

Although they are living in a flimsy tent with inadequate protection from the elements, at least they do not have to worry about being hit by gunfire. Ahmed, whose husband died long ago, would like the rest of her children  still alive in Yemen  to join her in Djibouti eventually, but keeps in touch with them with a phone provided by the Red Cross and Red Crescent societies, international humanitarian organizations.

We are far from home, but we can still hear the bombs, she said.

Ahmed has been in Djibouti for only one week, so she could not address the challenges of assimilating into its culture, but she has no intention of going home. She said that Djibouti offers resources for them for their basic needs, such as food, water, health care, education and  most important  protection. Ahmeds daughter is considering taking up sewing so she can make clothes for a living. The familys hopes for the future are simple.

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Djibouti, which is slightly smaller than New Jersey, was ranked among the top 10 countries with the most refugees per capita in 2017. Yemenis make up roughly 14 percent (3,959) of Djiboutis 27,000 refugees, which is equivalent to roughly 3 percent of the nations population of just under 900,000.

Djiboutis location in the Horn of Africa puts it at the crossroads of Africa and the Middle East. The Bab el-Mandeb Strait, which connects the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden along Djiboutis eastern coast, is of tremendous economic and tactical importance in that it serves as a conduit for shipments between the Mediterranean Sea with East Asia.

For strategic and peacekeeping purposes, foreign military superpowers from Europe, Asia and the United States have established bases in Djibouti. As a result of Frances colonial history, Frances largest concentration of overseas military is stationed in Djibouti. The foreign military forces help make Djibouti a relatively safe nation among unstable neighbors: It is bordered by Eritrea in the north, Ethiopia in the west and south, and Somalia in the southeast.

The progressive international community has celebrated Djibouti for welcoming refugees despite facing its own problems at home, including high unemployment rates and significant poverty.

Vanessa J. Panaligan, an external relations officer for the refugee agency, said the agency is finalizing a livelihoods strategy that would help refugees develop skills to make them more competitive on the job market, which the Djibouti government opened to them last year.

For the majority of refugees, the chances of returning home or being resettled elsewhere are slim, Panaligan said. So, we advocate for local integration as a durable solution. Livelihoods is a key part of that. Yemenis are notoriously hardworking and have a strong work ethic.

The seed of the Yemeni civil war was the failed transition of executive power from Ali Abdullah Saleh to Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi in 2012, a political crisis that led to high unemployment, food shortages and a separatist movement in the countrys south. In March 2015, the violence escalated drastically. Houthi rebels, loyal to Saleh and supported by Iran, took up arms against the government  forcing Hadi to flee. An international alliance, led by Saudi Arabia, launched airstrikes to quell the rebellion and reinstall Hadis government, but has been unable to take control of the north, including the capital city of Sana. Capitalizing on the anarchy, ISIS and al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula have increased terrorist attacks in Yemen.

Many see the Yemen crisis as a proxy war between Iran and Saudi Arabia for greater influence throughout the Middle East. The Saudi bombing campaign in Houthi-controlled territory has killed thousands of civilians and damaged Hodeidahs port, which receives humanitarian relief. Although Yemen has not received as much media coverage as the conflicts in Syria or Iraq, the United States support for the Saudi campaign  including selling weapons and refueling bombers  has come under scrutiny.

Checking the damage in the aftermath of a reported airstrike on Sana by the Saudi-led coalition. (Photo: Mohammed Huwais/AFP/Getty Images)

Human Rights Watch has called upon the U.S. to stop rewarding Saudi war crimes with more weapons. On its website, the advocacy group said, Human Rights Watch has documented 81 apparently unlawful coalition attacks since the conflict started in March 2015. Saudi-led coalition airstrikes have bombed civilian areas, including markets, schools, and hospitals, and have killed thousands of civilians.

On March 20, the U.S. Senate voted 55-44 to reject a bipartisan resolution to withdraw U.S. support for Saudi Arabias actions in Yemen. A provision in the 1973 War Powers Act allows any senator to introduce legislation that would withdraw the U.S. military from an armed conflict that had not been authorized by Congress. It was a rare attempt by the Senate to limit the executive branchs powers over armed conflict. During the Capitol Hill debate, President Trump hosted Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in the Oval Office.

In a statement, Sen. Bernie Sanders, independent-Vt., who voted in favor of the resolution, accused Congress of yet again failing to ask hard questions as various administrations misled the U.S. into conflicts with awful results.

The Saudi-led intervention in Yemen, with U.S. support, has been a humanitarian disaster. Instead of supplying bombs and refueling capabilities, we should be doing everything possible to create a peaceful resolution to that civil war and provide humanitarian help, Sanders said.

Ahead of the Senate vote, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis defended the United States support for Saudi Arabia as intended to hasten the end of hostilities through a U.N. resolution.

New restrictions on this limited U.S. military support could increase civilian casualties, jeopardize cooperation with our partners on counter-terrorism and reduce our influence with the Saudis  all of which would further exacerbate the situation and humanitarian crisis, Mattis wrote in a letter to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on March 14.

A Yemeni child is checked for cholera in Hajjah province. (Photo: Stringer/AFP/Getty Images)

The consequences for Yemens civilian population have been devastating. Before the civil war, Yemen was already the poorest nation on the Arabian Peninsula. The violence has exacerbated longstanding problems stemming from years of poverty and poor governance.

The United Nations said an average of five children have been killed or injured each day since March 2015, and 11.3 million children  nearly every child in the country  need humanitarian assistance to survive. The relentless fighting led to the collapse of water and sanitation systems, creating an unprecedented cholera outbreak.

Altogether, more than 10,000 people are estimated to have died in the conflict and 3 million have been displaced.

With no end in sight to the conflict, the government of Djibouti is working with the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, other U.N. agencies and nongovernmental organizations to prepare for a potential emergency influx of refugees.

Read more from Yahoo News:By Dustin Volz WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A federal spending bill released late on Wednesday included bipartisan legislation that would amend a decades-old privacy law to clarify that a U.S. warrant seeking data stored overseas is valid in certain circumstances. The provision, known as the Cloud Act, seeks to resolve a long-running dispute between Microsoft Corp and other email providers and the U.S. Justice Department over whether a warrant can compel companies to hand over emails stored on foreign servers. If adopted, the measure could make a case argued before the U.S. Supreme Court last month moot that arose after Microsoft balked at handing over a criminal suspects emails stored in company servers in Ireland. Microsoft, which along with other tech firms increasingly offers cloud computing services in which data is stored remotely, won a victory before a federal appeals court in 2016. That ruling was appealed by President Donald Trump's administration to the Supreme Court, where several justices expressed reluctance to decide the case and instead urged Congress to pass a law updating the 1986 Stored Communications Act. Current agreements that allow law enforcement access to data stored overseas, known as mutual legal assistance treaties, involve a formal diplomatic request for data and require the host country to obtain a warrant on behalf of the requesting country. That can often take several months and are considered burdensome by law enforcement. The Cloud Act would allow a means to bypass the treaty process for U.S. authorities and approved partner countries that abide by certain customer privacy standards. It would let U.S. judges issue warrants while giving companies an avenue to object if the request conflicts with foreign law. It is supported by Microsoft, other major technology companies, the Trump administration and the British government, but opposed by civil liberties groups who say it lacks sufficient privacy protections. Republican Senator Orrin Hatch, the lead author of the Cloud Act, said in a statement on Wednesday that it would "create a clear, balanced framework for law enforcement to access data stored in other countries while at the same time encouraging our allies to strengthen their domestic privacy laws." The spending bill must be passed by both the House of Representatives and Senate by a Friday midnight deadline to avert the shutdown of many federal agencies and programs beginning this weekend, when existing funds expire. (Reporting by Dustin Volz; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)San Francisco (AFP) - Uber co-founder and ousted chief Travis Kalanick is shifting gears to take charge of a startup devoted to giving shops or parking lots new purpose as venues for internet-age businesses.

The first "big bet" made by Kalanick's freshly-launched investment fund called 10100 is $150 million investment to take a controlling interest in City Storage Systems, he said in a tweet from his verified account late Tuesday.

Kalanick described CSS as a holding company that buys distressed properties such as shops or parking lots and converts them into homes for internet-age businesses.

"There are over $10 trillion in these real estate assets that will need to be repurposed for the digital era in the coming years," Kalanick said, adding that he will become chief executive at the startup.

CSS has CloudKitchens and CloudRetail operations aimed at repurposing real estate for use by online restaurant or retail businesses.

Kalanick said on Tuesday that he would take over as chief at CSS after the deal closes, and even invited people to apply for jobs at the 15-person startup.

"Congrats to @travisk on his new venture -- the serial entrepreneur goes serial fast," Uber chief Dara Khosrowshahi said in a tweet to Kalanick.

Khosrowshahi noted that CloudKitchens is among partners in an UberEats service delivering food from restaurants.

Kalanick was reported to have sold more than a billion dollars worth of his stake in Uber to SoftBank early this year when the Japanese telecoms and tech titan bought into US ride-share firm.

Uber is seeking to move past a series of scandals and missteps and reform its board structure as it gears up for a 2019 public share offering.

Kalanick was ousted as CEO in June of last year, but retains a seat on Uber's board.London (AFP) - A British coroner on Thursday opened an inquest to establish the cause of death of Russian exile Nikolai Glushkov, who was found at his London home on March 12.

The inquest at West London Coroner's Court was told that a post-mortem discovered the 68-year-old businessman suffered from compression to the neck, suggesting he may have been strangled.

His family said Wednesday they were "devastated" by the death.

"We are devastated at the loss of Nikolai and are coming to terms with our grief," they said in a statement.

Scotland Yard opened a murder probe last week following the autopsy results.

Glushkov had received political asylum in Britain after being jailed in Russia for money laundering and fraud.

He was linked to late Kremlin opponent Boris Berezovsky, an oligarch and one-time supporter of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who was found hanged in his home outside London in 2013.

The Russian embassy in London said that it had asked British authorities for details of Glushkov's death.

The suspected murder is not believed to be linked to the nerve agent attack on former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury, southwest England, on March 4, which has caused a diplomatic row between the two countries.

In English law, inquests are held to examine violent, unnatural or unexplained deaths. They set out to determine the place and time of death as well as how the deceased came by their death, but do not apportion blame.

The inquest was adjourned.London (AFP) - Britain on Thursday marked the one year anniversary of the terror attack on Westminster Bridge, the first in a series of assaults in the UK in 2017 that killed dozens of people and left scores injured.

On March 22 last year, Khalid Masood, a 52-year-old British convert to Islam, drove a car at pedestrians on the bridge over the River Thames in the heart of the London, before fatally stabbing a policeman on guard outside parliament.

The attack left five people dead and around 50 injured, and only ended when police shot Masood dead.

The Islamic State group claimed responsibility, but investigators have said they found no evidence of an association.

The incident mirrored truck attacks in Europe, including the 2016 Bastille Day assault in Nice that killed 86 people, and a similar attack months later on a Christmas market in Berlin that claimed 12 lives.

Britain endured a tumultuous period following the March 22 rampage, with four further terror attacks, including three in the capital at London Bridge, Finsbury Park and Parsons Green tube station.

Mourners left flowers at the scene on Thursday, with one note reading; "Kurt, taken too soon, but never forgotten -- RIP Much love, Sandy", in tribute to US musician Kurt Cochran, who died in the attack.

"It's very moving," Mick Hodges, 67, who had travelled from the East Midlands to pay his respects, told AFP.

"Our thoughts are with the families and also the people that acted so bravely that day, trying to revive the people."

In the House of Commons on Wednesday, Prime Minister Theresa May praised the "exceptional bravery of our police and security services", while MPs on Thursday held a minute's silence.

With May in Brussels on Thursday, interior minister Amber Rudd and Leader of the House of Commons Andrea Leadsom attended a commemorative event in parliament's Westminster Hall.

- 'Horrific terror attacks' -

Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, has announced plans for the hashtag "LondonUnited" to be displayed at the locations targeted on the anniversaries of each attack, with the phrase projected onto the Houses of Parliament Thursday.

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A 3D installation of #LondonUnited will also be located at City Hall, home to Khan's devolved administration, where the public will be able to pay their respects and sign a "digital book of hope".

Khan said the commemoration was drawn up after consultation with 14 bereaved families, survivors, the emergency services and local councils.

"Londoners will never forget the horrific terror attacks on our city in 2017," the mayor added in a statement.

"These were not only attacks on our city and our country, but on the very heart of our democracy and the values we cherish most -- freedom, justice and tolerance."

Police officers and others observed a minute's silence at 9:33 am (0933 GMT), which corresponds to 933, the number of slain officer Keith Palmer.

"They are talking of naming the gates after the policeman which I think is a very nice tribute to him, let him be remembered forever," said well-wisher Christine Fernbank, 80.

- 'Close to death' -

Theresa May's government has called for people to remain vigilant, while Britain's threat level for international terrorism is set at severe, meaning an attack is "highly likely".

In 2017, British anti-terrorism officials received some 31,000 reports by telephone or internet, according to the authorities.

Just over a fifth of this information was used by the police in investigations, or added to their terrorism databases.

Last October Andrew Parker, head of MI5, Britain's domestic intelligence service, stressed that the pace and scale of terrorist activity had accelerated "dramatically".

He said the tempo of counter-terrorism operations was the highest he had seen in his 34-year career at MI5.

One year on from the March 22 attack, 27-year-old victim Francisco Lopes recalled being "close to death".

Since being hit by Masood in the attack, he has suffered from post-traumatic stress and had to stop working.

"I'm happy to be alive but it changed me," he told London's Evening Standard newspaper.

The attack has also prompted the authorities to strengthen London's security apparatus.

"This includes barriers at crowded locations, such as eight bridges in London," said spokesman for the Metropolitan Police.

Professor Jon Coaffee, of the University of Warwick's department of political and international studies, told AFP: "More public spaces and transport infrastructure have been protected by ad hoc concrete blocks or metal barriers."This blog will focus on political images I have found all around the Internet, though I will intersperse some commentary and quotes that I find interesting.Kiev (AFP) - A Ukrainian MP who was once hailed as a symbol of resistance against Russia but now stands accused of plotting a terrorist attack in Kiev was stripped of her immunity by parliament on Thursday.

Nadiya Savchenko planned "a large-scale terrorist act in the centre of the Ukrainian capital," general prosecutor Yuriy Lutsenko told lawmakers in parliament.

He claimed she had made a deal with leaders of Russian-backed separatist republics in the country's east to "obtain the weapons necessary for such an attack, in particular mortars of 120 mm caliber, small arms, sniper rifles, combat grenades".

Lutsenko said the planned attack would have brought a "sea of blood, chaos" to central Kiev.

He also showed lawmakers a 30-minute video of a woman who looked like Savchenko talking to two apparently Ukrainian officers about plans to attack parliament.

The parliament authorised the lifting of immunity and, in a separate vote, the arrest of Savchenko by 268 votes to 10, minutes after Lutsenko's speech.

In 2014, the 36-year-old former combat pilot was captured while fighting against Kremlin-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine and found guilty of involvement in the killing of two Russian journalists in the country's war-torn east.

She spent around two years in a Russian prison and became a symbol of Ukraine's resistance, launching several hunger strikes.

Savchenko returned to a hero's welcome to Kiev in May, 2016 as part of a prisoner swap with Russia.

But her political star has faded since her return to Kiev, where she became a lawmaker for former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko's political party.

She has regularly stirred controversy and contradicted President Petro Poroshenko's policies by supporting direct talks with pro-Kremlin separatists and visiting rebel-held territory.Monrovia (AFP) - A top UN official on Thursday urged Liberia to implement the recommendations of a truth commission, dating back to 2009, which included prosecuting eight ex-warlords for alleged crimes against humanity.

"Liberia is at a turning point", Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed told a conference in Monrovia, adding that a lasting peace "will only be possible if we ensure full and true reconciliation."

She said it was "critical to implement the recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and for the legislature to pass key bills that will support local inclusion and reconciliation."

She warned that peace would "remain fragile as long as people feel excluded from the economic and political life of the country, and as long as corruption undermines confidence in institutions".

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) set up by former president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf to probe war crimes and rights abuses linked to Liberia's 1989-2003 conflict has said a compensation scheme should be created alongside a dedicated war crimes court.

None of those measures, however, has yet been implemented.

Sirleaf earlier held a joint event with President George Weah on the eve of the final departure of a UN mission first deployed at the end of the war in 2003 to guarantee the safety of the population.

Mohammed told AFP she wanted Liberia to deal with the "unfinished business" of its long civil conflict, for which no one has ever been prosecuted for war crimes, ahead of the March 30 departure of all remaining peacekeepers.

Weah was accused of sidelining war victims when he chose Vice-President Jewel Howard Taylor, the ex-wife of former rebel leader and president Charles Taylor, as his running mate in last year's election.

Taylor is currently serving a 50-year sentence for war crimes in a British jail, although he was convicted of funding rebel groups in Sierra Leone, not the recruitment of child soldiers, killings, rape and pillaging of which he is accused at home.

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One of those recommended for prosecution by the truth commission was former warlord Prince Johnson, who backed Weah's bid for the presidency and now serves as a senator.

An estimated 250,000 people died in the back-to-back 1989-2003 conflicts.

The president has not made specific commitments to reconciliation since taking power in late January, but on Thursday said his government must ensure "that either we forget or justice is done to those justice needs to be done to".

He emphasised that perpetrators had to "face their victims", but did not elaborate on how.

Weah meanwhile said the UN had the government's "fullest commitment to the continued consolidation of peace in Liberia" and would "warmly welcome a continued partnership".KIDAL, Mali (Reuters) - A U.N. peacekeepers' camp near Kidal in Mali came under mortar fire on Thursday, the U.N. mission said, shortly before a scheduled visit by the prime minister, the first to the northern city by a top government official for four years. Soumeylou Boubeye Maiga and eight of his ministers were due in Kidal as part of a nine-stop national tour. The city and the province of the same name, the country's most rebellious, have been under Tuareg control since an uprising in 2012. The delegation first visited another northern town, Tessalit, where their plane landed in a sandstorm. The storm forced Maiga to remain there and postpone his arrival in Kidal to Friday, a spokesman for his office said. Mali's U.N. peacekeeping mission, MINUSMA, said its camp in Kidal came under fire early on Thursday morning. There were no casualties among U.N. staff there, though international forces had been wounded in the attack. The French army operates a separate anti-insurgent mission across West Africa's arid Sahel region, with much of its efforts focused on Mali's troubled north. Mali is due to hold a presidential election on July 29, but there are concerns that widespread security problems will prevent the vote from going ahead. Maiga's itinerary includes other locations in the north and center that have been affected by rebellion or Islamist insurgency, including Gao, Timbuktu and Mopti. During Moussa Mara's visit to Kidal city in 2014, the most recent by a serving prime minister, a gun battle between the Malian army and Tuareg separatists killed at least 50 soldiers and forced state governor Sidi Mohamed Ag Ichrach to flee. Ichrach was allowed to return to Kidal last year following a ceasefire deal signed between competing Tuareg clans, but it remains de facto under the control of separatists. Mali descended into turmoil when Islamist fighters and Tuareg-led rebels in 2012 seized control of the country's north. France poured in hundreds of troops to push back the insurgents in 2013, but attacks have been spreading further south, despite the U.N. peacekeeping mission. (Reporting by Adama Diarra and Tiemoko Diallo; Writing by Sofia Christensen and Joe Bavier; Editing by Tim Cocks and John Stonestreet)Washington (AFP) - The US Supreme Court strongly reaffirmed Wednesday that a destitute criminal has a right to funds needed to finance his defense, in a ruling that gave new hope to a Texas death row inmate.

In a unanimous ruling, the highest court in the land threw out an appellate court decision that restricted Honduran prisoner Carlos Manuel Ayestas's ability to put together evidence that could reduce his guilt in the eyes of the law.

The US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, in relying on a "more demanding" norm "did not apply the correct legal standard in affirming the denial of petitioner's funding request."

Ayestas was sentenced to death for having tied up and beaten to death a 67-year-woman whose home he robbed with two accomplices in 1995.

His defense team claims Ayestas has been an alcoholic since his adolescence, is a drug addict, a victim of traumatic brain injuries and suffers from severe psychological ailments.

He was sentenced in Harris County, Texas, which holds the record for the highest number of executions in the United States. That county alone has put more inmates to death than each of the other US states that still apply the death penalty.

Under the federal Criminal Justice Act, a defendant has the right to receive such funds for his defense when "reasonably necessary" to assemble evidence that could see him exonerated from the death penalty.

The Fifth Circuit court interpreted the law as meaning a defendant had to demonstrate there was a "substantial need" for such services.Washington (AFP) - The United States on Thursday imposed sanctions on a Frenchman it accuses of helping the Islamic State group deploy chemical weapons on the Syrian battlefield.

A statement from the State Department identified the suspect as Joe Asperman and said he had been listed as a "Specially Designated Global Terrorist."

"French national Joe Asperman is a senior chemical weapons expert for ISIS," the statement said.

"Asperman oversaw chemical operations production within Syria for ISIS and the deployment of these chemical weapons at the battlefront."

Although hundreds of French fighters are thought to have travelled to the Middle East to fight with jihadist groups like the Islamic State, Asperman's name has not previously been reported.

The US Treasury's list of sanctioned terrorists says he is believed to have been born in the Cannes region on France's southern, Mediterranean coast between 1986 and 1988.

Along with Bashar al-Assad's Damascus regime, the Islamic State group has also been accused of deploying chemical attacks in Syria, where it is one of the factions in the long-running civil war.

Along with Asperman, the State Department also designated the Katibat al-Imam al-Bukhari, an armed group it describes as an Al Qaeda ally and "the largest Uzbek fighting force in Syria."Moscow (AFP) - The deaths of several members of the so-called "Wagner Group" in Syria last month shone a light on Russian President Vladimir Putin's mysterious private army Moscow is using there.

Questions had already been raised on its role in the Syrian conflict and intensified when Washington said on February 7 it had killed at least 100 pro-regime troops in Deir ez-Zor.

After days of silence, Moscow acknowledged five Russian nationals were killed and "dozens" wounded in the attack, saying they all were in Syria "on their own initiative."

Various media outlets have reported up to 200 fatalities and the group of Russian investigative bloggers known as the Conflict Intelligence Team (CIT) has established the identities of dozens of them -- all members of the Wagner Group.

"Wagner can and should be regarded as Russia's shadow army in Syria, as it has been providing the vital frontline component to Russia's operations in Latakia and Eastern Syria," CIT's Kirill Mikhailov told AFP.

The group played an important role in the retaking of Palmyra from the Islamic State group which had controlled the city since March 2016, he added.

Pavel Baev, an associate research fellow at the French Institute of International Relations, said Russia's resort to "shadow armies... has the double benefit of ensuring deniability and discounting casualties."

But "the problem with assets like the Wagner Group is that they are never fully controllable and could become maverick," he said.

The group's "capabilities exceed any Western private military company by far," said Mikhailov.

- A photo with Putin -

Wagner was set up by former Russian military intelligence officer Dmitry Utkin, who was part of the first convoy of Russian mercenaries sent in autumn 2013 to Syria.

But their ill-equipped mission, which did not have the backing of the Russian authorities, ended in fiasco.

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They engaged in some combat with the IS but rapidly returned to Russia, where two backers of the scheme were jailed for three years for mercenary activities.

In June 2014 Utkin joined the ranks of pro-Russian separatist forces in eastern Ukraine -- the Wagner Group's birthplace -- according to official reports from Ukraine.

The Kremlin has continuously rejected accusations from Kiev and the West of its military presence in Eastern Ukraine, saying the Russians who are fighting there are "volunteers."

Utkin reappeared in Syria in autumn 2015, when Russia launched an intervention in support of Kremlin ally Bashar al-Assad's regime.

In December next year, the former intelligence officer showed up at a televised ceremony held in the Kremlin to honour "the Heroes of Fatherland" and was the same day photographed alongside Putin.

Various media reports in Russia and the United States said Wagner is being funded by one of Putin's allies Evgeny Prigozhin, a Saint Petersburg businessman who made a fortune in the catering business before signing lucrative contracts with Russia's military and the government.

He has been charged by a US court with setting up an Internet "troll factory" that attempted to influence the 2016 American presidential elections in favour of Donald Trump.

- Petrodollars -

The number of Wagner's fighters in Syria has been the subject of debate by analysts and media, with Republic.ru online magazine reporting the presence of 2,500 mercenaries in March 2016.

It said $350 million (285 million euros) had been spent on mercenaries since the operation began.

Wagner's mission "is essentially a failure," a former member of the group told Russian Sovershenno Sekretno weekly.

He said 40 percent of recruits had been jailed for serious crimes before they joined Wagner and would refer to each other as the "unlucky ones".

This "low-quality" of recruits, along with the idea that Wagner functioned as an autonomous army and accepted missions from non-Russian groups, led to rising tensions with officials both on the ground in Syria and in Moscow's corridors of power.

In early 2016 the group lost the trust of -- and financing from -- Russia's defence ministry, according to various reports.

This led "Prigozhin to seek other contracts, such as the one with Damascus whereby Wagner would liberate oil and gas fields and infrastructure in exchange for 25 percent of production," he added.

To this end, he established a company named Evro Polis, which signed the contract with Assad's government in December 2016 and is now responsible for paying Wagner mercenaries' salaries that vary from an estimated $3,500 to $5000 a month.

"Most probably, Prigozhin's companies provide a hub that channels the funding coming from other sources, including the Syrian government," said analyst Baev.Facebook knew this could happen.

In a February SEC filing, which includes an obligatory meditation on every conceivable risk to future profits, Facebook warned that unfavorable publicity regarding, for example, our privacy practices  [or] the actions of our developers whose products are integrated with our products could imperil the size, engagement, and loyalty of our user base.

True to form, the $500 billion social networking behemoths stock plummeted after news broke Mar. 16 that the data analysis firm Cambridge Analytica, which was hired by President Trumps campaign in the summer of 2016, acquired data from about 50 million Facebook users, often without their direct knowledge. The data was reportedly used to create psychological portraits of voters for strategic political purposes, though the firms efficacy remains unclear. Facebook has blamed the episode on a researcher who collected the information under the guise of academic research (downloading information on both the people who installed its app and their friends), then provided it to Cambridge Analytica.

The entire company is outraged we were deceived, read a statement from Facebook this week. We are committed to vigorously enforcing our policies to protect peoples information and will take whatever steps are required to see that this happens.

Facebooks foremost concern is not that many people will deactivate their accounts for more than a week in protest, which remains unlikely despite widespread dyspepsia over the matter. Instead, it is that a significant number of users will check in less often or air fewer details about themselves out of caution. Facebook, which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp, lives or dies by how well it can tailor ads to a persistent, ever-growing audience of people who meet each marketers detailed target demographic. Sure, you might be the product, not the customer. But you still pay for Facebook, just not in dollars. You pay in data.

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There is no guarantee that this business model can survive. Facebooks image has already taken a beating for its role in the spread of malicious disinformation from Russia, not to mention helping more run-of-the-mill inaccuracies spread from friend to friend. Still, people will always want to know what their sophomore roommate is up to in Reno or whatever happened their high school sweetheart. Going forward, they just might have to pay for that news with actual money. Absent a more palatable alternative, they will.

The future belongs to the first overtly privacy positive social network that, for a reasonable subscription rate, will default to a total lockdown in what any third party, including the platform itself, can see or use. There would still be advertising to keep subscription rates down, just as newspapers and magazines, this one included, still display ads to their subscribers. Users would simply be paying for the privilege of opting in to what they wanted advertisers to know, if anything.

Targeted advertising isnt going away any time soon. But it stands to reason that there are things were perfectly happy to tell a social network in order to get ads that actually appeal to us. While I do not want a marketer targeting my age, relationship status, travel schedule or political affiliationwhich Facebook guessed correctly, according to the ad preferences page, even though Im fairly sure I never filled in that fieldI genuinely want them to know that Im a Phillies fan who lives in Washington, D.C. so that Im shown ads for products I might actually want. Both of those precious factoids are easily gleaned from my Twitter feed. Or now this article. (To be sure, a less omniscient ad platform would not have nearly the precision that Facebook offers, so it would likely bring in less revenue. Though it occurs to me that theres some advantage to targeting only the people who actively want to be exposed to your content.)

So how much would this cost users? Facebook estimates that it pulled down $20.21 in revenue per active user worldwide last year, for a total of $40.65 billion. That sum amply covered the $20.45 billion the company paid in costs and expenses. After taxes, Facebook posted $15.92 billion in profits. That per-user revenue was considerably higher in the U.S. and Canada, where a more developed and monetized audience netted $84.41 per user. Thats still less than what you might pay for Netflix or HBO, though perhaps more than many of Facebooks 2 billion monthly users would be willing to shell out.

But even if subscriptions were prorated by market, and even if a privacy-positive network were to grow to Facebook-sized proportions, it would take less than $84.41 a month in the U.S. and Canada to turn a healthy profit. The trouble with relying on a lot of ads is that you need to store a lot of content. These days, that includes lots of video, with its lucrative pre-roll and mid-roll ads. To keep up with demand, Facebook has aggressively tried to get users and companies to post their content directly on the social network. When you get into the business of hosting large amounts of original content, however, your bill for storing and indexing rises quickly. Facebook doesnt disclose its exact obligation for running massive warehouses around the world, but its safe to assume its a fair portion of its $20 billion in expenses. Without the burden of being a major content platform or pouring money into sophisticated algorithms to serve ads based on rigorous analysis of a persons profile, we can estimate that $75 a year would cover the operating costs and generate a healthy profit.

Facebook is a black box that rarely leaks compared to, say, the federal government. So we do not know whether it has any sort of plan if it reaches a point where theres no longer a compromise on data sharing that appeases both users and advertisers. The best we can do is watch for the clearest possible sign of major turmoil in Menlo Park, Calif. Well know the end is near when Facebook lifts its prohibition on making a fake account for your dog.Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker had said the two vacant seats could be filled by the regularly scheduled election in November. (Photo: Mark Kauzlarich / Reuters)

A Wisconsin judge on Thursday ordered Gov. Scott Walker (R) to call the special elections for two legislative seats that he has refused to call since December, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Democrats sued Walker over his refusal to schedule quick elections and said he wouldnt do so because he was afraid of losing the contests to Democrats.

Dane County Circuit Court Judge Josann Reynolds, a Walker appointee, ordered the governor to call the elections within a week. An appeal of that order is expected.

Amy Hasenberg, a Walker spokeswoman, told HuffPost that the governor was consulting with the states attorneys to determine the next steps in this case.

The dispute involves two seats  one in the Wisconsin State Assembly and one in the Wisconsin Senate  that became vacant in December 2017 when the Republican incumbents resigned to take jobs in Walkers administration. Walker said he wouldnt hold a special election for the open seats, but would instead allow them to be filled by the regularly scheduled elections in November 2018. The winners of those elections wouldnt be seated until January 2019.

Walker insisted that he had no legal obligation to call the special election sooner and that he was saving the state money by not doing so. But Democrats argued that his decision was motivated by the fact that Republicans lost a special election this January in a Wisconsin district that President Donald Trump had carried by more than 20 points in 2016. Walker labeled that election a wake-up call.

Wisconsin law says that a special election must be held as promptly as possible for any vacancy in the state legislature that occurs before the second Tuesday in May in a regularly scheduled election year. Walkers team contended that he was not obligated to call a special election because the vacancies occurred in 2017, not the regularly scheduled election year of 2018, according to the Journal Sentinel.

In a bench ruling Thursday, Reynolds accused state Attorney General Brad Schimels office of reading the law in an absurd way and not following basic rules of grammar. She also accused his office of being hypocritical in advocating generally for a strict reading of laws while interpreting the relevant statute in this case in a way that undermined the most basic constitutional guarantee.

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Judge Reynolds: "I cannot reconcile the incongruity between Gov. Walker's administration's very vocal and consistent policy advocating for strict constructionism and the position taken by the attorney general in this case involving the most basic constitutional guarantee."  Shawn Johnson (@SJohnsonWPR) March 22, 2018

The judge alluded to the fact that Walkers decision had left 175,000 people without a voice in the state legislature. While Reynolds order came as that legislature ended its regular session, she noted that it was likely to be called back for a special session, in which voters in the two districts deserved to have their full voice.

She says not holding elections deprives voters of their rights.



"To state the obvious, if the plaintiffs have a right to vote for their representatives, they must have an election to do so."  Patrick Marley (@patrickdmarley) March 22, 2018

The lawsuit challenging the governors lack of action was brought by the National Redistricting Foundation, an affiliate of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee, a group led by former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder that is focused on state races this year.

This is an important victory for the impacted citizens of Wisconsin who have gone without representation because of Governor Walkers refusal to call special elections, Holder said in a statement after the judge made her order. One of our most basic rights as American citizens is that we get to vote and have representation in our legislatures. Governor Walkers actions have undermined that right and it never should have taken legal action to force him to do his job.

This story has been updated with comment from Eric Holder.

Related Coverage

Democrats Score Special Election Upset In Wisconsin GOP Stronghold

Democrats Sue Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker To Force Him To Call Special Elections

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This article originally appeared on HuffPost.A woman in Toronto is set to receive a lifesaving kidney transplant from a kind stranger and is paying it forward for other patients  all thanks to the power of social media. Jennen Johnson, 42, a mother of one in Toronto, is in renal kidney failure, the result of a decades-long battle with lupus, an autoimmune disease that attacks the bodys organs and causes chest pain, labored breathing, skin lesions, facial rashes, and joint stiffening. For the 1.5 million Americans who suffer from lupus, the condition is genetic and often triggered by sunlight, various infections, or medications.A woman who survived skin cancer is thanking her dog for detecting it and saving her life.

Lauren Gauthier, 42, an attorney from Amherst, N.Y., runs the animal rescue organization Magics Mission. When a hunter in South Carolina surrendered a Treeing Walker Coonhound with an infected eye that needed removal, Gauthier became smitten, naming the now 2-year-old Victoria.

In the spring of 2017, while hanging out at home, Victoria became fixated on Gauthiers face, zeroing in on her owners right nostril. I had what I thought was a pimple there and she was always fascinated by it, even touching it with her nose, Gauthier tells Yahoo Lifestyle. Even when the red dot faded away, Victoria would stare at the area. It weirded me out, says Gauthier.

When the dot returned three weeks later, Victoria again obsessively stared at it, so Gauthier decided to visit her doctor.

A post shared by LG (@lagchap) on Nov 23, 2016 at 2:22pm PST

A biopsy revealed the dot was basal cell carcinoma, a form of skin cancer that affects 4 million people per year, according to the Skin Cancer Foundation. Gauthiers doctor recommended Mohs surgery, a procedure that involves removing the infected skin layer by layer. In Gauthiers case, he would remove a flap of skin from the top portion of her nose and use it to cover the hole cancer had left behind.

After spending time on Instagram following basal cell carcinoma patients to mentally prep for surgery, Gauthier, who shared she frequented tanning beds when she was younger, went public with her own photos. Ive always believed you should try to make something positive out of your challenges so I wanted to discourage tanning bed use and help others undergoing Mohs surgery in their faces, she says.

Four months post-surgery, Gauthier is on the mend. My nostril looks a bit like its being lifted by a fish hook but if I want to fix that, I have to wait a year to fully heal, she says, adding that shes extra cautious in the sun due to her heightened risk for developing other skin cancers.

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Scientists have long theorized that dogs can detect cancer. In 2001, the Lancet medical journal published findings of several notable cases: a patient whose dog constantly sniffed a mole on her leg which was later diagnosed as malignant melanoma; a man who developed what he thought was eczema who attracted a pet Labrador that obsessively sniffed the area through his pants. The eczema was diagnosed as basal cell carcinoma. In both cases, after the cancer was treated, the dogs lost interest in the areas.

Scientists have determined that dogs have an extraordinary sense of smell. Lets suppose theyre just 10,000 times better, James Walker, former director of the Sensory Research Institute at Florida State University, said on the PBS science program Nova. If you make the analogy to vision, what you and I can see at a third of a mile, a dog could see more than 3,000 miles away and still see as well. Thats in part because dogs have 300 million olfactory receptors in their noses, compared to humans, who possess 6 million. And, according to the Nova program, dogs ability to analyze such smells is 40 times greater than that of people.

Lauren Gauthier developed a red dot on her nostril that was diagnosed as cancer. (Photo: Courtesy of Lauren Gauthier)

Sheryl Gabram-Mendola, a surgical oncologist at the Winship Cancer Institute of Emory University has her own theory about why dogs are attracted to cancer patients. In 2011, she told ABC News that people with cancer release organic compounds only noticeable to dogs. Gabram-Mendola developed a test to prove that canines can detect more than 300 molecules in the breath.

Our model predicted in over 75 percent of the time correctly which patients did have breast cancer and which ones did not, she said. As ABC noted, her work has been echoed in the scientific journal Gut, which published findings of a black Labrador that detected colorectal cancer in peoples breath with a 91 percent success rate.

Per the American Kennel Club, Treeing Walking Coonhounds like Victoria are skilled hunters originally bred to trap raccoons and bigger animals for hunters.

To Gauthier, theyre also lifesavers. Victoria and I always had a close bond  we like taking selfies on the couch  and shes been such a great support system, she says. Im super grateful to her, and love her to pieces.

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Follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter for nonstop inspiration delivered fresh to your feed, every day.Air India launched on Thursday the first scheduled service to Israel to be allowed to cross Saudi airspace, a sign of a behind-the-scenes improvement in ties between the Arab kingdom and the Jewish state.

Flight AI 139 landed at Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion airport about 30 minutes after its scheduled arrival time of 1945 GMT.

"This is a historic moment," Israeli Transport Minister Yisrael Katz told AFP on the tarmac as the Boeing Dreamliner rolled to a halt.

"It is the first time that there is an official connection between the state of Israel and Saudi Arabia," he said in Hebrew.

Tourism Minister Yariv Levin was also there to welcome the flight.

"A new era has begun," he said.

There will now be three flights weekly in each direction, ending a decades-long Saudi ban on the use of its airspace for commercial flights to Israel.

Israel's national carrier El Al currently operates an India service to Mumbai that takes a detour over the Red Sea to avoid flying over Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Saudi Arabia and Israel have no official diplomatic relations, like much of the Arab world. Egypt and Jordan are the only two Arab countries with peace treaties with Israel.

The flight approval comes after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described relations with the Arab world as the "best ever", with common concerns over Iran drawing them closer together.

Leaders of Arab countries have not publicly made similar comments, though that does not necessarily mean they dispute Netanyahu's claim.

They face sensitivities within their own countries, where the Jewish state is often viewed with intense hostility.

Israeli analyst Jonathan Spyer said that the Saudi concession showed that positive signals were being sent despite the lack of an Israeli-Palestinian peace treaty, long seen as a prerequisite for relations between the Jewish state and the Arab world.

- 'General rebranding' -

"I think that what this shows is even in the absence of that you can have small gestures that are of real meaning," Spyer, director of Israel's Rubin Centre for Research in International Affairs, told AFP.

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"That's what I think that this Saudi decision to allow the overflights consists of. It's small but significant," he said.

During a May 2017 Middle East tour, US President Donald Trump flew from Riyadh to Tel Aviv on Air Force One in what is believed to have been among the few direct flights from Saudi Arabia to Israel.

Trump says he is working on a plan for peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

Spyer said that his administration appears to see Riyadh as "crucial for much of what they want to do on the Israeli-Palestinian track".

Sunni-ruled Saudi Arabia and Israel have a common enemy in Shiite-dominated Iran, with both seeking to limit what they view as the Islamic republic's expanding influence in the Middle East.

Trump's first presidential foreign trip took in Riyadh and Israel, while his son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner has reportedly formed a bond with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Prince Mohammed, the kingdom's de facto political leader, is pursuing economic and social reforms long sought by the West.

The self-styled moderniser who has sought to project a liberal image of Saudi Arabia to investors has, however, also consolidated power to a level unseen by previous rulers.

The relaxation of the overflight ban, said Spyer, is part of "warming relations behind the scenes" with Israel.

"Presumably it fits in also with the more general rebranding that Mohammed Bin Salman is trying to achieve for the Saudis."Harare (AFP) - Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa, who succeeded ousted Robert Mugabe in November, has pardoned at least 3,000 prisoners to clear out overpopulated jails, officials said Thursday.

The pardon will see the release of all female prisoners except those serving life terms, as well as all disabled and juvenile prisoners.

Terminally-ill prisoners and those above the age of 60 who have served a third of their time will also be freed.

"The president in terms of the constitution of Zimbabwe has granted amnesty to prisoners," the Zimbabwe Prisons and Correctional Service (ZPCS) said in a statement.

"The exercise has... gone a long way in decongesting our prisons."

About 3,000 prisoners will be released, the ZPCS said, bringing the prison population down to 17,000.

The statement also announced that prisoners on death row for more than 10 years will not face the death penalty, but will spend life in jail.

The country last executed a prisoner in 2005, and Mnangagwa is a strong opponent of the death penalty.

Prisoners convicted of murder, treason, rape, carjacking, armed robbery and those serving a sentence imposed by a court martial were excluded from the amnesty.

Zimbabwe pardoned thousands of prisoners in recent years under Mugabe.

The cash-strapped government has battled to feed, provide clothing and adequate health care to inmates. In 2013 over 100 prisoners died in the country's jails.

In 2015, four inmates were killed after prisoners went on riot over poor living conditions.

Mugabe, 94, who ruled for 37 years, was forced to resign after a brief military takeover and the threat of impeachment by once loyal ZANU-PF lawmakers.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.Syria may have built an underground nuclear reactor, according to a report released Wednesday by the US-based Institute for Science and International Security.

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The institute has decided to revisit a January 2015 report in the German weekly magazine Der Spiegel, according to which Syria has built an underground nuclear reactor or uranium enrichment facility.

The institute determined the report cannot be confirmed based on commercial satellite imagery.

Syria's alleged underground nuclear facility

"While (the facility) could hold nuclear or nuclear-related materials and equipment, it could also serve other military purposes. A nuclear reactor located fully underground is not impossible, but it poses a huge engineering challenge and would likely require secret, on-going assistance from North Korea," the institute concluded.

The institute noted, however, that "some imagery observations are consistent with Der Spiegels reporting."

The institute called on the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to hold an inspection at the facility, located in Qusayr.

"Although we fully understand the limitations and risks of the following approach, we believe that this site warrants inspection by the IAEA, even though accomplishing such inspections may have to wait until the Syrian conflict ends," the institute wrote in its report.

Commenting on Israel's decision to confirm it had destroyed the Syrian nuclear reactor in Al Kibar , the insitute said that "Israel's action serves to highlight once again the lack of accounting for Syria's past nuclear weapons program and the location of any assets remaining from that program. This includes possibly tens of metric tons of uranium fuel, and other equipment or materials associated with nuclear fuel fabrication and plutonium separation, that likely existed as key elements of the Al Kibar reactor project."

The Institute for Science and International Security also raised concerns over the North Korean involvement in the Al Kibar reactor, which has been exposed by Israel in previously classified cockpit footage, photographs and intelligence documents it released about the strike.

The institute also called on the United States and its allies to bring up Pyongyang's involvement in the Syrian nuclear program during the planned talks between US President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

"The United States and its negotiating partners must keep in mind that any negotiation should include the achievement of verifiable commitments by North Korea not to undertake nuclear, chemical, or biological proliferation and not to spread the means to deliver them. It should also include longer term commitments by North Korea to explain and resolve the nature and extent of its nuclear cooperation with Syria and any other countries," the institute wrote.President Reuven Rivlin paid his respects Wednesday to the family of Adiel Kolman, who was murdered in a Jerusalem stabbing attack this week, and the families of Lieutenant Ziv Daus and Sergeant Netanel Kahalani, murdered in the ramming attack near Mevo Dotan this past weekend.

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Visiting the Daus residence, the president listened to stories about Ziv and his family. His father, Ronen, told Rivlin about his late son's military service in Home Front Command's search and rescue brigade, and said, "Ziv's loss is a loss to us as a family, but also a loss to the entire country."

President Rivlin said, "Our boys, all of our children, received brief training and in a moment become commanders we all look up to. Ziv's image will accompany all those who knew him. The unit he commanded is an immensely important facet in our defensive conception and its people serve as a source of pride for us."





President Rivlin (L) embracing Ziv Daus's mother (Photo: Mark Neiman/GPO)

The Daus family also shared the president with the warmth and support they have been receiving from Ziv's unit since the horrendous attack and asked to thank his commanders, who were always by them during the shivah (the seven-day Jewish period of mourning).

Rivlin replied, "Our children grow up and are tasked with our defense. When such a calamity befalls us, we look up to youto your ability to cope, your strength," and expressed his wish for days of joy rather than sorrow.

In his visit with the Kolman family, the president expressed much the same sentiment, saying, "Adiel was murdered in the midst of Jerusalem, in the heart of the country to which we returned after innumerable years in exile. Your strength allows us to go on."

President Rivlin (2nd left) at the Kolman residence (Photo: Mark Neiman/GPO)

"Beloved mother," he continued, "when I heard you saying you choose life, when I heard about the strength you found to tell the people of Israel about your special son, how encompassing his soul was, on the morning of his demise, my heart broke."

Adiel's mother then thanked the president and said she wished to congratulate both him and Israel's leadership in stewarding the people through this difficult period.

Adiel's wife Ayelet spoke about his job in Jerusalem's City of David and his love for both the place and the work he had done.

"I ask you to lend me your strength," Rivlin told her. "The strength to carry on for the children and for us all."

Adiel Kolman (center) and his family (Photo courtesy of the family)

Ayelet's father then promised the president that "Adiel's children will continue growing in strength. God will avenge the blood that was spilt thanks to our strength to carry on, raise children and grow stronger in our homeland."

The president also visited the family of Sergeant Netanel Kahalani, who was murdered in a car ramming attack this past weekend, in Eliakim. Netanel's father shared with the president the immense pain and his grievances with Israel's punitive and deterrence policy vis-a-vis terrorists.

President Rivlin (L) with Netanel Kahalani's family (Photo: Mark Neiman/GPO)

The fallen soldier's grandmother then spoke at length about her dedicated grandson and his infinite giving. "'I'll never leave you, grandma,' he told me. 'I'll take you wherever you want to go,'" she said.

Netanel's father said, "After his death I became aware of the kind of person he was. How he touched every man, how much he helped every man he encounteredboth in the unit and in our community."

(Photo: Mark Neiman/GPO)

President Rivlin responded to the bereaved father by saying, "We have been in our land for centuries. Oh, the state, industry and society we have built. The pain is immense, I know, and each family is a world entire. The Kahalani family is one which has positioned its sons on all our borders throughout the country's existence and has produced our finest soldiers."

Kahalani's elder brother Yonatan then said, "My brother Netanel was golden. He gave to us all without asking for anything in return. They say every man is a world entire but until that hits you like lightning, you don't realize the enormity of the loss. Fathers who bury their children fly against the laws of nature. Something has to change."Hamas's security apparatus is preventing civilians from reaching the vicinity of the Erez border crossing as part of a manhunt on the perpetrators of an assassination attempt on the life of Palestinian Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah.

Hamas operatives only allow humanitarian cases to reach the crossing, barring everyone else.

Wednesday night the terror group closed borders and Rafah smuggling tunnels to prevent the suspect from fleeing the strip.For eleven years, in a manner that perplexed and angered many in Israel, the Israeli Military Censor barred any publications ascribing Israeli responsibility for attacking the Syria nuclear reactor in 2007, despite the fact that mere days after the attack foreign media outlets did precisely that, rendering the Israeli prohibition somewhat absurd.

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The main reason for the censor's unequivocal ban was not the desire to mask the military action in and of itself, but rather the ramifications of going public. Indeed, Israeli officials feared the country taking official responsibility for the attack will corner President Bashar Assad and force him to retaliate , even years removed from the attack, in light of Israel's admission it bombed a strategic target deep within his sovereign territory.

The Military Censor authorized the publication of Israeli responsibility for the attack 11 years later (Photo: IDF Spokesperson's Unit)

In the past year, however, a change began taking shape. While two petitions submitted to the High Court were again rejected after the court accepted the censor's position, with time the court's decisiveness grew weaker.





The High Court's justices were willing to defer to the state's position that publicizing Israeli responsibility will endanger national security, but in their last decision from two years ago, a change in tone was noticeable, as the court hinted that the state should reconsider its position, even giving a six-month deadline to do so.

Four months ago, Israel almost allowed going public on the attack, but another turning point took place when Arab media outlets ascribed responsibility for the attack to Israel, causing security tensions to flare up vis-a-vis the surging Syrian army, which began regaining its confidence.

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Moreover, Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert, defense minister and prime minister at the time respectively, wished to divulge their experiences in Operation Outside the Box in their memoirs.

A special ministerial committee chaired by Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked was asked to greenlight the two books, and after convening in the past few weeks did just that. This effectively signaled the position of the current senior political ranks regarding publication of the affair.

Then PM Olmert (center) and defense minister Barak (R) sought permission from a special ministerial committee to include the attack in their memoirs

However, then another speed bump cropped up, in the form of two major exercises the IDF held last weeka General Staff nationwide exercise and the joint Juniper Cobra exercise with the US Army, both of which simulated a multi-pronged war partly in Syria.

The defense establishment did not want the affair to be made public coinciding with the two highly publicized drills, so as not to send Syria the wrong message.

Livni also weighed in on conflagrations between then-decision makers, saying, "It's just a shame that when an event truly important to Israel's security is made public, everyone still dabbles in small-time politics. Sad, and unnecessary."

Then foreign affairs minister Livni said it was a shame decision makers of the time battled for credit (Photo: Avi Moalem)

A security official told Ynet Wednesday morning that the current political ranks "were not involved in the decision to go public now, except for the ministerial committee that approved the two books."

"Political ranks were merely made aware of the decision to authorize publication, even though the easier route was to just keep blocking it," the official concluded.Major Emanuel Levy served as navigator on one of the fighter jets from the 119 "Bat" Squadron that participated in the Syrian reactor's bombing in 2007. Three years after returning safely from the high-risk mission, however, he was killed in a Ramon Crater training accident along with pilot Amichai Itkis.

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Not many knew that Levy, 30 at the time of his death, was the man tasked with charting the flight path of the eight planes participating in the reactor's bombing both to Syria and back to Israel.

Behind the scenes of Israel's strike on the Syrian reactor (Video: Yaron Sharom) (:   |   :   | :  )

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Interviews: Attila Somfalvi, Yoav Zitun, Ron Ben-Yishai; Content editor: Noam Gil; Director: Assaf Cuzin; Camera: Yaron Sharon, Ori Davidovitch, Yogev Attias; Script, video editing, animation: Tamar Avraham; Production: Adi Berman; Content management: Noa Glickstein Keren.

After Israel accepted official responsibility for the bombing Wednesday, and it became widely-known just how important the clandestine nature of the operation really was, Levy's prominent role in plotting the attack came into sharp focus.

"I remember the day immediately preceding the attack," Hezi Emanuel recounted Wednesday. Emanuel is Levy's brother, and changed his last name to honor his fallen sibling.

"We were living together in a Tel Aviv apartment at the time. We had a study in the apartment, and I remember he spent hours on end locked in there, with an especially focused, serious expression on his face," the navigator's brother continued.

Major Emanuel Levy, who charted course for IAF jets that bombed Syrian nuclear reactor, passed away in a training accident 3 years later

"We'd go out for beers a couple of times a week before that, but rarely did so during that period," he continued.

"When he returned after they landed back (in Israel), there was this enormous smile plastered all over his face. He asked me if I watched the news that day and I replied that I had, and immediately realized where my brother was that night.

"We never openly talked about it, however. Only three years later, during the shiva (Jewish seven-day period of mourning), did the air force tell us he took part in attacking the reactor. It was a great honor."

Wednesday, after news broke of the bombing, Hezi Emanuel was inundated with texts and phone calls from his brother's air force friends who contacted him to voice their appreciation.

"It's quite moving, to be honest," he said, "especially now, when everyone is making Passover preparations, but we're preparing for his yahrtzeit (the anniversary of a person's passing)."

"If my brother was alive today, I presume the bombing being made public would have ended with us drinking beer in some Tel Aviv pub. It would have been an occasion to celebrate," he concluded.Hamas security forces are in the midst of a firefight in the Gaza Strip's Nuseirat refugee camp as part of the manhunt after Anes Abu Husa, suspected of the attempt on the life of Palestinian Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah.

Sources are surrounding a home in the refugee camp in which Abu Husa is allegedly hiding.Col. (res.) Ze'ev Raz, who led the Israel Air Force's strike on Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor on June 7, 1981, has asserted that operation was far more difficult and complex than the 2007 attack on Syria's nuclear reactor in Deir ez-Zor, for which Israel officially claimed responsibility on Wednesday.

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For the operation in Iraq, the air force used F-16 fighter jets, which had to traverse a distance of 1,000 kmwith some flying over Saudi Arabiato reach the reactor, which was set to go live within a year.

"The distance in our case was much bigger," said Raz, 70. "In Syria, it was not an attack a great distance away."





(Photo: IDF Spokesperson's Unit)

"It was borderline as far as fuel was concerned, because only a year later in 1982 did the air force start aerial refueling. I remember we landed back with very little fuel left. We knew it was a risk, but it was decided to go for it. Because had we bombed a year later, it would've been a 'hot' reactor, and we would've done great damage to the environment from the radiation," he explained.

Raz pointed to other major differences between the two operations, asserting the attack he participated in was of a higher quality.

"We were forced to prepare for the Iraqi aerial defense at a time when the Iraqi military was at war with the Iranians, and it was supposed to be a hornet's nest. The fact they didn't identify us and didn't lock their radars on us was very surprising to me. We thoughts we'd be discovered 15 minutes before the bombing, or definitely on the way out," he said. "The guys who bombed in Syria attacked a structure with no defense around it, it didn't even have a fence so as to not draw attention to it."

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"The second thing is the differences between the bombs used in our attack and in theirs. They had smart bombs, we had normal bombs, which shows the accuracy of our pilots," he added.

Raz dismissed the celebrations in the media over the Syria attack, saying he preferred looking ahead. "The publication is a formal thing of something that is already over. But the real story is the facilities in Iran, and the reactor in Pakistan, where it's enough for the regime to change to a hostile one for it to become a problem. I'm very concerned by this," he said. "I think it's not for nothing that there is opposition to attacking the facilities in Iran, because the Iranians have proven in the past that they know how to retaliate violently to attacks of this nature, as they had done in Buenos Aires."

Brig. Gen. (res.) Israel Shafir, another pilot who participated in Operation Opera to destroy Saddam Hussein's nuclear reactor, was also the commander of the IAF's Flight Academy in 2007, and trained the pilot who led Operation Outside the Box in Syria.

But despite knowing it was his cadet who led the attack in Deir ez-Zor, the two never spoke about the matter, nor did they compare stories from Iraq and Syria. "I suppose it's because he's a shy guy, one who is very humble," he explained.

Shafir said there was great concern the Israeli jets would be shot down by Iraqi aerial defense, which increased tensions. "In the briefing before the operation we received dates from the IDF chief," Shafir recounted. "It was in case some of our planes are shot down and our men are taken captive. We even got Iraqi money so we could survive."

Despite the concerns, the pilots did their job well. "During the mission, you repress all of your feelings and concerns and focus on your work. But I remember that Ilan Ramon and I, who were in the last two planes, talked about how we might be going on a one-way flight. In the end, when everyone returned home, there was a great relief," Shafir added.

(Photo: IDF Spokesperson's Unit)

While today the F-16 is a commonly used fighter jet in the IAF, the attack in Iraq was the F-16's first operational flight. "We started the training (for the operation) upon our return from training in the US. We established two new squadrons and flew to Iraq with a plane that until that point had done no operational flights or taken part in any big operations," Shafir said. "The fact it was all a success was thanks to successful planning, and much like the Syrian operationit was also thanks to the pilots' abilities. Perhaps the most notable thing about our operation was that we flew far, to a facility we didn't have a lot of information on."

"The public may have only just learned the details about the operation, but it's just the tip of the iceberg," Shafir added. "The articles that were published showed the planning process, which is very similar to every air force operation, even in weekly operations. The public should know this, that every operation goes through a similar process. Of course, the level of alertness in this operation was far more significant because of the target."

Maj. Gen. (res.) Amos Yadlin, who was also among the pilots who bombed the Iraqi reactor, said that "Operation Opera was the first one. This is where the Begin Doctrine was established. I've been speaking about this operation for years and said the real hero of the operation was Prime Minister Menachem Begin, who made a decision against so many of his ministers and against the heads of the security and intelligence bodies. Operationally, this was a very difficult operation. However, it didn't hold the risk of war. The biggest risk of the operation in Syria was deteriorating into war."A 19-year-old Israeli was arrested and questioned Wednesday after being caught urinating in the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp while on tour there with a group of other tourists.

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During the tour, the group's guide noticed he was urinating and quickly alerted the police, who detained him for questioning.

File photo. Israelis in Auschwitz (Photo: AP)

In his interrogation, the Polish report said, he admitted to committing the act and said he would accept any punishment levied on him.

The Foreign Affairs Ministry added he was released after being questioned for several hours.

Comment provided by Auschwitz said, "Yesterday at the site of the former Auschwitz II-Birkenau site, a young person from Israel was indeed spotted urinating while standing on the monument that commemorates all victims of the camp.

"The monument is located between the ruins of the gas chambers and crematoria II and III. This extremely sad and disturbing incident was immediately noticed by our staff and other visitors. Our security intervened and police was called."Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman concluded work meetings in Tanzania, Zambia and Rwanda and took off for Israel.

At the conclusion of his visit, Defense Minister Lieberman said, "Israel has just what Africa needs in agriculture, medicine and defense. Each alliance we create with a country (here), will push out and isolate Iran."The two terror attacks in the past seven days in Mevo Dotan and Jerusalem's Old City, which claimed the lives of three Israelis in total, naturally put defense forces across the country on high alert ahead of the coming Passover holiday, but doubly so in the capital.

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In Jerusalem, this heightened level of alert is manifested in the increased deployment of Border Police and police forces in the Old City, where many Israelis as well as tourists will spend some of the upcoming Passover holiday.

"The defense establishment realizes that the cluster of events we are facing may be highly combustible. We're on the precipice of Passover, two memorial days and Independence Day, but before we even get there we're facing Land Day at the end of this month," said a senior police source.

File photo. Border Policemen in Jerusalem's Old City (Photo: Yuval Ozeri)

open the US Embassy on May 14. Then there's Nakba Day and the month of Ramadan and the call on Gaza civilians to march on the border. We know the Gaza Strip influences activity in the West Bank and east Jerusalem," the source added.

Last weekend, Lieutenant Ziv Daus and Sergeant Netanel Kahalani were murdered in a car-ramming attack in the West Bank's Mevo Dotan. Earlier this week, Adiel Kolman was murdered in a stabbing attack in Jerusalem.

Commander of the Israel Police's David Sub-District, Maj.-Gen. Haim Shmueli, said after the two attacks, "We held quite a few situation assessments at the Jerusalem District in anticipation of the holidays, and we are ruling nothing out. Unfortunately, there is a multitude of alerts and we are increasing deployment accordingly."

British student Hannah Bladon was murdered in a stabbing attack during Passover last year

A stabbing attack on Jerusalem's light rail, which claimed the life of Jewish student Hannah Bladon last year, served as testament to the combustible potential of Passover and its intermediate days.

Months before her arrival in Israel, Bladon uploaded a photo of al-Aqsa Mosque to her Facebook profile with the caption, "Security here is very tight, so there's nothing to worry about at the moment."

The senior police official stressed that the defense establishment was dealing with lone-wolf terrorism, which is exceedingly difficult to prevent. "The terrorist who carried out the Old City attack this week had no organizational affiliation," he said. "The terrorist who ran over the soldier and officer in Samaria also made a split second decision."

Lone-wolf attacks such as the one that killed 2 IDF soldiers this past weekend are exceedingly difficult to prevent, a police official said

"These two events at this point in time can cause more lone-wolves to go out and carry out attacks. There's also the fear of copycats that characterized similar such occurrences in the past," the police official said, adding that the high level of alert was expressed mostly in situation assessments and briefings.

"Other districts will be called in to provide security for Jerusalem during the holiday. The same instructions we receive then go out to forces in the field. It's being made clear to them how problematic this time period can be," he concluded.The police have arrested three Arab men from the Triangle area suspected of abducting another Arab man from the same area because they believed he was collaborating with Israeli security forces.

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The police investigation found that earlier this week, the victim was driving his car in the town he lives in, when the three suspects showed up and forcefully removed him from the vehicle.

They allegedly abducted him, tied him and beat him bloody. Several hours later, they released their injured victim.

File photo (Photo: Shaul Golan)

The victim arrived at the local police station with his father the next day to file a complaint.

The police launched an investigation, during which investigators were able to track down the three suspects.

In their interrogation, the three denied the abduction was nationalistically motivated, claiming the victim was trespassing on their property, which is why they decided to nab him.

The police reject the suspects' claims and are convinced the three carried out the violent abduction in an effort to dissuade the victim and his family from collaborating with Israeli security forces.

The Petah Tikva Magistrate's Court extended the three suspects' remand by six days on Wednesday. They are suspected of abduction for the purpose of aggravated battery, conspiring to commit a crime, assault and battery, and intimidation.The Haifa District Court sentenced a resident of Kafr Manda in the Galilee to two years in four months in prison, in addition to a suspended sentence of another year, for attempting to join the Islamic State in Sinai.

The Haifa District Attorney's office said the young man professed his intention of liberating Jerusalem and al-Aqsa Mosque from Israel, and was convicted as part of a plea agreement of contact with a foreign agent and attempted membership in a terror group.Deputy Finance Minister Yitzhak Cohen said his ministry will not allow senior citizens' benefitsinsured through long-standing pension funds that have entered deficitsto be cut.

Speaking to Ynet, Cohen said, "There will not be a situation in which anyone cuts pensioners' rights in order to solve the problem of raising the retirement age for women."

Cohen also noted he had spoken with Histadrut Labor Federation Chairman Avi Nissenkoren and clarified there was no call for protests.Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas attacked Hamas and said that the Gaza Strip has been abducted by the terror group.

In a press conference with Bulgarian President Rumen Radev, Abbas added, "We will take on full responsibility for the strip only if Hamas delivers security responsibility as well. If it does not, Hamas will bear culpability for the results of the failure of Egyptian efforts to achieve reconciliation."Security officials assured Thursday morning that no Israeli secrets were exposed as a result of its admission it attacked Syria's nuclear reactor in Deir ez-Zor in 2007.

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The officials told Ynet that most of the information about the Israeli attack on the Al Kibar reactor was already reported by foreign media over the past 11 years. The only new information to come to light was Israel's claim of responsibility for the strike and the photos, videos and unclassified documents the Military Censor has distributed to the media over the past few months

Many of the secrets surrounding the strike remain under wraps, and the security officials stressed that no classified information has leaked in the battle for credit that erupted between senior political and defense officials on Wednesday.

The former senior officialsincluding Ehud Olmert, Ehud Barak, Amos Yadlin and Tamir Pardowere briefed by the Military Censor ahead of the publication and have so far not exposed any secrets about Operation Outside the Box.

The Military Censor authorized the publication of Israeli responsibility for the attack 11 years later (Photo: IDF Spokesperson's Unit)

On Tuesday evening, mere hours before the story broke, a special situation assessment meeting was held with the relevant defense bodies. At the meeting, which featured mostly officials from the intelligence community, the participants discussed whether to give final authorization to go public with the information.

Over the past two years, since the High Court of Justice signaled to the Military Censor that it should reconsider clearing the story for publication, the Military Censor has been holding discussions on the matter. Much like in the years that immediately followed the strike, defense and intelligence bodies at first objected to lifting the gag order, but in discussions held over the past year, agreement has been reached that it is time to reveal Israel's role in the attack.

The details that were cleared for publication received the green light after it was determined that "it is not possible to prove certain damage to state security that would be caused as a result of allowing the publication."

The security officials told Ynet much of the information surrounding Operation Outside the Box remains confidential and is unlikely to come out in the foreseeable future.

Since the September 2007 strike, thousands of requests have been submitted to the Military Censor to lift the gag order over the Israeli role in the attack. Until this week, the majority of these requests have been rejectedincluding requests to report something that has already been reported on in the foreign media. The rejected requests were met with hundreds of appeals. Two of these cases reached the High Court of Justice, while two others were submitted to the "Committee of Three," which includes representatives from the IDF, the Editors' Committee and a representative of the public.

The petitions that were filed by the media were rejected. However, in a High Court rulings two years ago, the judges hinted that the matter of allowing its publication had to be reconsidered.

Security sources said Thursday that statements according to which the timing of the publication was synchronized with the publication of former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's book, which includes chapters on the attack, are nonsense.

According to the officials, Olmerts story was ready for publication for several months, and he was the one who waited for the approval of the consors before distributing to book stores.

The nuclear reactor attack story was published and shrouded in ambiguity in Israel in the last decade based on foreign media reports, and the main reason for which an official Israeli admission was rejected was to protect Assads space of denial option and that of the Israeli government.

The rationale was as follows: Israel attacks targets in Syria, for example, a nuclear reactor, and arms shipments to Hezbollah, and Syria doesnt respond due to the fact that Israel does not take responsibility for the acts.

Hundreds of military operations have been predicated on this doctrine, along with interwar campaigns for eliminating Hezbollah and Hamas capabilities, thereby weakening them and delaying the next round of fighting while strengthening Israels power of deterrence.

With the passage of the years, even though the High Court believed that the decision taken on the publication of the reactors destruction was not unnecessary, the space of denial took on different significance against Hezbollah and Hamas.

When the attack was launched, Israel did not know how Assad would respond, and later on development occurred and tensions mounted in the region that obligated the preservation of the space of denial.

Another consideration that was taken into account was the time that elapses since the operation. Sometimes, decades pass until Israel admits to something, or enables the publication of information on security-related incidents.

Security officials noted that the Israeli silence doesn't seem logical after the Americans officially reported about the Israeli attack but that there are still justifications related to strategic aspects in general and future operations in particular.

Sometimes you think, here we have a civil war in Syria, so its a good time to open up because they wont do anything, but the intelligence information may attest to precisely the opposite, that this will be used by the regime to divert attention," the officials say.WASHINGTON - The Trump administration is imposing sanctions on a French chemical weapons expert accused of making and using such munitions for the Islamic State group in Syria.

The State Department on Thursday identified Joe Asperman as a "specially designated global terrorist." The listing comes with penalties including the freezing of any assets he may have in US jurisdictions and bars Americans from any transactions with him.

The statement says the move aims to deny Asperman the resources he needs to plan and carry out further terrorist attacks.

It says Asperman is a senior chemical weapons expert who oversaw ISIS chemical operations production in Syria and deployed them at the battlefront.The Jerusalem Biblical Zoo said Thursday an endangered primate known as a golden lion tamarin has been born in captivity.

The monkey was born two weeks ago to mom Bilbi and dad Zohar. The yet unnamed monkey was seen Thursday clinging to its mother's back.

Golden lion tamarins are among the rarest animals in the world, according to the World Wildlife Fund. It is listed as endangered according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

The Jerusalem zoo said the primate was under threat of extinction in the 1980s when less than 100 were found in its native Brazil. But a breeding program in zoos around the world halted its decline. Today, there are hundreds of golden lion tamarins in the wild and in zoos worldwide.LONDON - British police said a suspicious package had been found near the London headquarters of Cambridge Analytica on Thursday, prompting police to close nearby roads and evacuate the building.

"The building has been evacuated as a precaution," police said. "No injuries have been reported."

The London-based political consultancy has been at the centre of a storm this week after a whistleblower said the company had paid an academic to harvest the data of 50 million Facebook users to build profiles of American voters before the 2016 US election.At least 30 members of the radical Jerusalem Faction of the Lithuanian ultra-Orthodox sect were arrested Thursday afternoon, during a rally in Bnei Brak in protest against IDF conscription and the extended arrest of a draft-dodger.

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The demonstrations against the IDF conscription law were reinvigorated amid demands for the release of a grandson of a prominent member of the radical faction from military prison.

Arrests were made when some of the sects members engaged in physical altercations with police, which were sent to the ultra-Orthodox city to prevent the protesters from making their way to Route 4 and blocking it during its busiest hour.

Assembling at Jabotinsky street and Aharonovich street, the protesters carried signs saying: I wont draft into the army of destruction and Enough with castrating the Torah world, while others hurled verbal insults at the police, calling them Nazis.

Protest by radical faction (:  )

X

The Committee to Save the Torah World, which organizes the factions protests, issued a statement promising that its resolve would not be diminished.

Any attempt to break our spirit will come up again and again against a stubborn wall of tens of thousands of heroic rabbis who will stand opposed and will cry out against the compromising tendencies at home and abroad, the statement said.

The judge, before the sentencing, explained that the punishment was intensified by the fact that refusal to report to the recruitment offices harms the integration of the ultra-Orthodox into the IDF. We will prove to anyone who needs proof that we will continue with full force to damage this terrible integration, as taught by the great sages of Israel throughout the generations, it continued.

The protests organizers also claimed that the police used excessive force to prevent other factions members from joining.

Later on in the evening, a group of Haredim from the sect made their way to Ramat Gan, where they caused damage to vehicles and threw rocks at police officers.

Hundreds of protesters arrive, threw rocks at officers, threw objects, sprayed the policemen with tear gas and caused damage to cars. The police arrested four more rioters, a statement by the police said.

(Photo: Benny Deri)

On Wednesday, the court of Appeals sentenced the draft dodger, who studies at the prestigious Kol Torah yeshiva in the Bayit Vegan neighborhood of the capital, to 45 days in prison.

The sentence came despite the Military Court in Jaffa ordering 24 hours earlier that he be released on Friday.

Police arrested the draft dodger during a routine check carried out by a traffic policeman. He is the grandson of one of the senior rabbis who teaches at the yeshiva.

In March, the faction renewed their protests, less than two weeks after their leader Rabbi Shmuel Auerbach passed away.British Prime Minister Theresa May urged European Union leaders on Thursday to unite and condemn Russia for not respecting international rules or borders, while Moscow slammed the UK as untrustworthy in its investigation of the poisoning of a former spy.

Amid heated words and frosty relations between London and Moscow, May accused Russia of staging "a brazen and reckless attack against the United Kingdom" by attacking Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia with a nerve agent March 4 in the English city of Salisbury.

She said "it is clear that the Russian threat doesn't respect borders, and indeed the incident in Salisbury was part of a pattern of Russian aggression against Europe and its near neighbors, from the western Balkans to the Middle East."

Britain blames Moscow for the attack with a military-grade nerve agent and has called Russia a growing threat to Western democracies. Russia has fiercely denied the accusations.President Donald Trump's lead lawyer in the US investigation of Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election said on Thursday he had resigned.

"I love the president and wish him well," Washington attorney John Dowd told Reuters in an email.

The resignation was first reported on Thursday by the New York Times, citing sources, including one who said Trump was increasingly ignoring Dowd's advice.

Dowd did not immediately comment on why he resigned.A commercial airline from India to Israel is scheduled to land in Tel Aviv Thursday evening after flying over, for the first time ever, Saudi airspace, ending a 70-year overflight ban.

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With Saudi Arabia granting permission for the first time for use of its airspace for a commercial flight en route to Israel, the Air India Boeing 787 will touch down in Ben Gurion Airport at 9:30pm.

Officially, Saudi Arabia has avoided confirming publicly that it sanctioned the use of its airspace for flights to Israel, but officials at the Indian airline have confirmed in the past that permission was given, enabling travelers to reduce the journey time to 7 hours and slash costs.

Air India has said its flight would be two hours shorter than El Al Israel Airlines' flight to Mumbai from Tel Aviv, which uses a route south towards Ethiopia and then east to India, avoiding Saudi airspace.

El Al has asked industry group IATA to help it access Saudi Arabia's airspace.

Saudi Arabia and Israel have no formal diplomatic ties. The decision by Saudi Arabia to allow the Indian carrier to fly through its airspace to Tel Aviv reflects what is widely believed to be a warming of behind-the-scenes ties between the two countries.

(Photo: Deepak kalappat)

Air India spokesman Pravin Bhatnagar said at the beginning of March that the airline will start flying the route three times a week from March 22.

The change came following a meeting between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi during the formers visit to India

(Photo: Deepak kalappat)

Despite the fact that Saudi Arabia remained mute on breakthrough, Netanyahu recently announced that the country had confirmed that Air India would be allowed to fly through its airspace to Israel.

The Indian airline was given by the Israel Ministry of Tourism 750,000 euros (NIS 3.2 million) to operate the direct flight, which reflects another stride in strengthening ties between Israel and India.

According to the Israeli Ministry of Tourism, the lump sum was given on condition that the airline operate at least three flights per week.

(Photo: Deepak Kaplappat)

Israels efforts with the Indian airline have precedence in direct flights that began operating by Chinese Hainan Airlines from Beijing to Israel , a move that doubled the number of Chinese tourists heading for Israel last year.

After the first announcement made by Air India on the flights, Saudi Arabias aviation authority denied in February giving its blessing, but more recently it declined to respond on the matter. The Indian airline also refused to deny or confirm the change.

The first flight tickets went on sale, starting at $367. The price of two round-trip tickets will rise by an average of $710 in the near future.

Earlier on Thursday, Israeli Tourism Minister Yariv Levin said Singapore Airlines and a Filipino airline were exploring the introduction of flights to and from Tel Aviv overflying Saudi Arabia. Singapore Airlines did not immediately comment.Buses carrying rebel fighters and their families began to leave the town of Harasta in Syria's eastern Ghouta region on Thursday.

The 30 or so buses were carrying around 1,500 people, some 400 of whom were rebel fighters, a military source told Reuters. A Reuters camera team saw more empty buses lined up for another batch to leave on another day.A pilot of a light aircraft was forced to perform an emergency landing on Thursday evening, leaving him in light condition.

The emergency landing was conducted in a sewage purification plant in Haifa, where the plane flipped upside down.

Paramedics and firefighters were called to the scene and extricated the 46-year-old pilot, who was taken to Rambam Medical Center in Haifa.The High Court of Justice rejected Thursday an appeal filed by the Salomon familywho lost three family members in a terror attack last yearwho sought permission to have the second floor of the terrorist's home destroyed.

Omar al-Abed stabbed to death three members of the Salomon family in their home in Halamish last July and was given four life sentences in February.

Demolishing a home is not meant to punish but to deter, said one of the victims widow, Michal Salomon. You dont need to be a Supreme Court justice to understand that if families receive a second floor and money from the Palestinian Authority, there is no deterrence, but rather gain from the blood that they spill.Eight people were killed and 11 wounded after gunmen burst into a social event in central Mexico.

The Guanajuato state prosecutors' office said Thursday the mass shooting took place a day prior in the town of Purisima del Rincon.

Prosecutors said gunmen pulled up in several vehicles, opened fire on those attending the event, and then fled toward the state of Jalisco.

There were no immediate details on the possible motive, but the region has recently seen violence.

Earlier this week, three film students disappeared on the outskirts of Guadalajara, the capital of Jalisco. On Thursday, hundreds of students marched to demand they be found.















Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov commented on the situation in Eastern Ghouta and the poisoning of Russian ex-spy Sergei Skripal. Russia has called on the United States to unconditionally abandon its plans for a strike against Syrian government forces and Damascus, Sergei Ryabkov stated, answering the journalist's question.





"We've warned and warned the US that these plans must be unconditionally refused. Any such unlawful use of force, similar to what happened almost a year ago at the Shairat air base, would be an act of aggression against a sovereign state, as defined by the relevant article of the UN Charter," he said.

















Sergei Ryabkov believes that if the situation in Syria and, in particular, Eastern Ghouta changes for the better, opponents to a peaceful resolution to the conflict could incite the international community by sabotaging this process, possibly by using chemical weapons.





"The situation in Eastern Ghouta has changed radically for the better," Sergei Ryabkov told reporters on Tuesday.





He drew attention to the fact that tens of thousands of people had already left the danger zone. "All this, of course, infuriates, in the truest sense of the word, the opponents of the government in Damascus; they are looking for new pretexts for attacks on us and on Syria," Ryabkov said.









"In this situation, of course, any provocations are possible, and we need to be prepared. Provocations could include staging the use of chemical weapons by government troops," Ryabkov said.













Staged 'chemical attacks' will continue in Syria as Syrian troops advance, he added. Earlier, US Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley said that the US was prepared to act on the use of chemical weapons in Syria. According to him, the United States struck at the Shairat airbase, after a chemical attack in Syria's Khan Sheikhoun on April 4, 2017, as the UN Security Council "was unable to take action."









London still refuses to cooperate with Moscow in the investigation of the poisoning of the former Russian double-agent Sergei Skripal, which Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov has described as a massive provocation.





"The British, acting with explicit malicious intent, have delivered some accusations. Once again, without backing them in any way with material evidence, with any kind of basis, rejecting cooperation, and, most outrageously, successively depriving us of consular access to Russian citizen Julia Skripal, who, as we understand, is in a critical state," Ryabkov told reporters.





"All this is nothing more than a large-scale, multi-layer provocation, which is being conducted via a whole series of unlawful methods," the deputy head of the Russian Foreign Ministry added.





Moscow once again declares that neither Russia nor the USSR had a program for the development and production of chemical weapons under the conventional name "Novichok," Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov stressed.























Hotel surveillance video from the days before the deadliest mass shooting in modern US history shows the gunman as an unremarkable Las Vegas hotel guest and casino patron.

Footage of Stephen Paddock made public Thursday by MGM Resorts International offers no indication that he would carry out the shooting last October 1 that killed 58 people.

Company spokeswoman Debra DeShong says Paddock's "interactions with staff and overall behavior were all normal."

Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo and Las Vegas police had no immediate comment.

The New York Times first obtained the video.

The 32 video clips show the 64-year-old Paddock checking in at the Mandalay Bay resort, gambling at video poker, buying snacks, riding elevators, driving into the valet area and accompanying hotel employees wheeling carts with his suitcases.Around 6,500 civilians who had fled fighting in Syria's Eastern Ghouta region have returned to the towns of Kafr Batna and Saqba as the situation is "being stabilised", the Russian military said on Thursday, according to TASS news agency.

Separately, Russian agencies cited the Defence Ministry as saying that since Russia began imposing "humanitarian pauses" in the fightingin which it is helping Syrian forces drive rebels out of their last stronghold near Damascusaround 95,000 people had left Eastern Ghouta, including 5,000 civilians evacuated on Thursday.An influential physician and a philosopher of early Western medicine, Galen of Pergamon was the doctor of emperors and gladiators. One of his many works, On the Mixtures and Powers of Simple Drugs, was an important pharmaceutical text that would help educate fellow Greek-Roman doctors.

The text was translated during the 6th century into Syriac, a language that served as a bridge between Greek and Arabic and helped spread Galens ideas into the ancient Islamic world. But despite the physicians fame, the most complete surviving version of the translated manuscript was erased and written over with hymns in the 11th century  a common practice at the time. These written-over documents are known as palimpsests.

An international team of researchers is getting a clear look at the hidden text of the Syriac Galen Palimpsest with an X-ray study at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL) at the Department of Energys SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.

Conservators at Stanford University Libraries removed the pages from the leather-bound cover of the book of hymns, and mounted each leaf in an individually fitted, archival mat. The individual mats were placed in an aluminum frame to secure the pages while examining the underlying text with X-rays at the Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource. (Farrin Abbott / SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory)

The early results reveal more of the original words in the underlying text, which runs perpendicular to the direction of the overlying text, enabling scholars to see more information from Galen.

Our hope was that there would be enough traces of ink there so that we would be able to decipher even a word or two, says Uwe Bergmann, a distinguished staff scientist at the Stanford PULSE Institute at SLAC, who led the X-ray imaging project. The distinct writing that we can now see marks a tremendous success.

Fresh Hints About Early Medicine

For nearly a decade, a multidisciplinary team of scientists and scholars has tried to uncover and study Galens original text with advanced imaging and digital processing techniques. Each leaf of the manuscript provides clues about the state of medical knowledge at that particular time in the Middle East.

If you want to understand medicine in the Middle East, you have to look at the translation and transmission of knowledge, says Peter E. Pormann, professor of classics and Graeco-Arabic studies at the University of Manchester. This is a huge chunk of history, and we hope this text will help us understand how they managed and treated disease historically in that part of the world.

The section of the manuscript being examined at SLAC first appeared in Germany in the early 1900s, and ongoing research indicates it was originally from St. Catherines Monastery on the Sinai Peninsula. All the pages being scanned at SSRL will be converted to high-resolution digital images that will be added to those made freely available online by Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries.

A few leaves of the original Syriac manuscript had been removed and ended up at libraries around Africa, Europe and the United States, including those at Harvard University, Paris, the Sinai Peninsula and the Vatican. These were imaged at each location with specialized cameras, and each institution agreed to have their images added to the online data set.

Our plan is to digitally reunite the book, says Michael Toth, president of R.B. Toth Associates, a private company specializing in cultural heritage research that has led the study of this palimpsest since 2009. This will provide public access to scholarship thats been hidden for centuries.

Preservation and Experimental Challenges

To recycle the limited material available for parchment, 11th-century scribes scrubbed and replaced the original text with layers of calcium, a rudimentary form of white-out, and then wrote a book of psalms on top of the original text. Earlier studies had revealed traces of the text beneath the hymns, but it was difficult to read the original translation of Galen  both texts were written in similar ink and the underlying text had been well-scrubbed.

Before starting the synchrotron work, the team feared that even with the powerful X-ray imaging techniques at SSRL, the text could still be illegible if the amount of iron in the remaining ink was too small or the ink was too smeared. Initial X-ray analysis of the inks in the bound book highlighted the difficulty of the task ahead, with only a faint response from the underlying text.

Because of the delicate nature of the old manuscript, the Stanford University Libraries Preservation Department carefully prepared the pages for X-ray imaging.

One of the most powerful parts of this type of analysis is that you dont have to interrupt the overlying text. You can see underneath the surface without any damage to the manuscript, says Kristen St. John, head of conservation services at Stanford University Libraries. You dont have to jeopardize one part of the document to learn about the other.

The Stanford conservators separated the leaves of the ancient leather-bound book, and mounted each page in a custom mat. The mats then fit precisely into an aluminum frame mounted on a computer-controlled stage for scanning at the synchrotron.

In order to safely image the manuscript here, we had to think of a special way to mount it, says Sam Webb, a staff scientist at SSRL. Usually, we just secure our samples with tape or screws. You cant exactly do that with a thousand-year-old manuscript.

Applying New Technology To Reveal Missing History

Prior to the manuscript arriving at Stanford and SLAC, the research team had attempted to see differences in the overlying and underlying inks with a technique called multispectral imaging. They illuminated the pages with visible, ultraviolet and infrared light to enhance different colors within the inks. While they could identify and read the underlying text on many pages, they still could not read it on others.

This latest study applied an updated verson of a complementary imaging technique, X-ray fluorescence (XRF), that the team had developed earlier to decipher hidden mathematical theories in a copy of a work by Archimedes that had also been written over, with forged paintings added on top of the text of four pages.

With the XRF technique, the synchrotron X-rays knock out electrons close to the nuclei of metal atoms, and these holes are filled with outer electrons resulting in characteristic X-ray fluorescence that can be picked up by a sensitive detector.

These fluorescent X-rays can penetrate through layers of text and calcium, and the hidden Galen text and the newer religious text fluoresce in slightly different ways because their inks contain different combinations of metals such as iron, zinc, mercury and copper.

Were also interested in the background composition of the parchment and the calcium that covers the original text, says Nicholas Edwards, a research associate at SSRL. That additional information may allow us to distinguish between the layers of the text.

Digitally Sifting Through Layers of Ink

For the Galen document, a scan takes about 10 hours for each of the 26 pages. The experiment has collected vast amounts of nuanced data from the X-ray scans, and the researchers are now applying data processing tools, including machine learning, to pull out the information they seek.

Hidden in all this data, theres information trying to get out, says William Sellers, an expert in data processing and the director of the University of Manchesters zoology department. And theres just too much data for humans alone to sift through.

Sellers developed algorithms that train a computer to recognize different parts of the manuscript. The data mining results in colorized images of the layers of text and parchment that scholars and conservators can examine.

As a conservator, this is an interesting opportunity to work with an entirely different array of analytical tools that we do not typically have access to in the day-to-day work of conservation, St. John says. It helps us learn whats possible in our field, as we better understand the materials we work with.

Once the scans are complete, the team will continue to analyze the words of Galen in these new views of the timeworn document.

SSRL is a DOE Office of Science user facility. The collaboration also includes researchers from Exeter University, Equipoise Imaging and University of Pennsylvania. Parts of this work were funded by the owner of the Syriac Galen Palimpsest. It also received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the University of Manchester Research Institute in the United Kingdom.

For questions or comments, contact the SLAC Office of Communications at communications@slac.stanford.edu.

SLAC is a multi-program laboratory exploring frontier questions in photon science, astrophysics, particle physics and accelerator research. Located in Menlo Park, Calif., SLAC is operated by Stanford University for the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science.- Mahama's administration has been blamed for the controversial Ghana-US military agreement

- The Defense Minister says the agreement was secretly signed by the NDC

- There are concerns the agreement could expose Ghana to terrorist attacks

The government has jabbed the minority NDC for criticising the US-Ghana "military base" deal.

The leakage of a memo written by the defense minister on how Ghana had signed an agreement for a military cooperation has left many citizens outraged by the issue..

READ ALSO: You can seize my hotel at Dubai - Mahama dares Nana Addo

The opposition NDC argued that not only is the agreement dangerous but also a sell-out of Ghana's sovereignty to the United States.

But in a fierce response to these claims and criticisms, the defense minister, Dominic Nitiwul revealed that past administrations under Mahama and Jerry Rawlings saw the controversial agreement passed.

According to the minister, the recent agreement signed by the government with the US is just a renewal of the same contract signed by the former minister of foreign affairs, Hanna Tetteh.

The NDC went to sign this thing in the dark but we said we will take it to Parliament before we will sign it. We havent sold Ghana, they are the people who sold Ghana, he revealed in a press conference.

There are fears that the deal between Ghana and the US to "establish a military base in the country" could spell doom for Ghana's security.

Security expert, Dr. Vladmir Antwi Danso, is warning that the decision by Ghana to host US troops could expose the country to terrorist attacks.

READ ALSO: EC commissioner reveals inside information about Charlotte Osei

So far, America remains the major country in the world very exposed to terrorist groups like ISIS. It is for this reason that almost all countries that openly declare their allegiance to America expose themselves to terrorist attacks from the enemy of America.

Meanwhile, the former minister for foreign affairs, Hanna Tetteh, is yet to respond to these claims and so it the case with the leadership of the NDC is yet to officially respond to these claims by the government.

Who is going to be Ghanas next top pastor? Check out YEN.com.gh's top picks:

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Source: Yen.com.ghArsenal star, Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang may be new to London but he has started off in style.

The former Borussia Dortmund striker has reportedly acquired a plush 16 million (almost GHC100m) mansion.

Aubameyang who joined Arsenal in the January transfer window had been leaving in a hotel since his signing.

The marble themed floors of Aubameyang's new house. Photo credit: Sun UK

According to The Sun UK, the six-bedroom house is located in an exclusive area somewhere in North London.

READ ALSO: Death of cancer-suffering teenage philanthropist breaks hearts of Ghanaians

The living room of Aubameyang's new London home. Photo credit: Sun UK

The stunning mansion, the report added, has an indoor pool, home cinema room and even a lift to move between two floors and his basement.

The home cinema

The 28-year-old Gabon striker has already moved his belongings into the building.

READ ALSO: 11 sad photos from the burial of Ebony's friend Franky Kuri that will break your heart today

Aubameyang has six of such spacious bedrooms. Photo credit: Sun UK

His partner, Alysha Behague, with whom he has two kids, will also be moving into the new building.

The building has a swimming pool inside. Photo credit: Sun UK

But there is a down side, the striker's new house has too little a garage for his fleet of cars.

READ ALSO: I've been 'chopped' by over 100 men - Pregnant lady confesses to Obinim in new viral video

The kitchen. Photo credit: Sun UK

Aubameyang made news headlines after importing his fleet of cars from Germany to be parked in front of the hotel he was lodging at.

The bathroom. Photo credit: Sun UK

It looks like the new acquisition could not solve that problem as his garage can only contain two of his cars.

READ ALSO: Ghanaian female celebrities who are virgins

The bathrooms have TVs fixed in the mirrors. Photo credit: Sun UK

But in everything, this is a very positive news for Arsenal fans because it means their 180,000-a-week striker sees a future in London.

Star Gist on YEN brings you an exclusive interview with upcoming music star Kobla Jnr:

Your stories and photos are always welcome.

Send us a message via our official Facebook or Instagram page to get it published on YEN.com.gh

Source: Yen- There have been photos of a male teacher drawing Internet Explorer on a blackboard for students circulating online

- The government still believes it hopes to make Ghana an ICT-driven country

YEN.com.gh has spotted another picture of an ICT teacher using a blackboard to teach students practical lessons in Information Communication Technology (ICT).

The photos, shared with YEN.com.gh by our reader, Nana Yaw Afriyie, shows the male teacher draw what is seen as Windows Internet Explorer.

READ ALSO: Obinim's congregants confess to the number of people they have slept with

When asked why he decided to draw the Internet explorer on the board, Richmond Owusu Boateng, who seems committed to his job and has the students at heart indicated that he has been resorting to the teaching of ICT on the board for a long time because there are no computers in the school and he cannot stop because he has passion for the job.

The teacher again said he will be happy if the government, NGO's, individuals or even Microsoft can come to their aid.

READ ALSO: 6 reasons why some single Ghanaian women hate marriage

This story follows an earlier picture of a young teacher struggling to teach a primary class the basic knowledge of Information Communication Technology (ICT) has emerged.

Despite massive efforts by the government to improve ICT education in Ghana, it is obvious that the deficit of infrastructure and non-availability of internet connectivity has left the subject minimized the impact of the subject to imaginary works on blackboards.

Earlier in January, Starr FM reported of how the Ghana Investment Fund for Electronic Communications (GIFEC), together with the ministry of communications, embarked on a program to extend ICT to rural and deprived communities across the country.

READ ALSO: Former COCOBOD boss, Stepehen Opuni Charged with causing financial loss to the state

Meanwhile, there are calls for the government to prioritize re-training of all ICT teachers especially those in the rural and peri-rural zones of the country.

Government is also being called upon to speed the construction of ICT laboratories across all rural communities in the country.

Who is going to be Ghanas next top pastor? Check out YEN.com.gh's top picks:

Know someone who is extremely talented and needs recognition? Your stories and photos are always welcome. Get interactive via our Facebook page.

Source: YenWelcome Guest! You Are Here:Turning the ship before it hits the icebergKathmandu, Nepal: Serious differences have surfaced between the government of Nepal and the European Union (EU) after EUs Election Observation Mission madecontroversial comments over the constitutional provisions regarding the quota system in Nepal.





The Government of Nepal has issued a press statement stating that its serious attention has been is drawn from the EUs controversial remarks made by European Unions Election Observation Mission (EUEOM) going against the constitutional provisions adopted by the country.





Making public its final report on the House of Representatives and State Assembly elections, the EU had stated that quota system should exclude groups that are already well-represented. The Report was made hinting to the arrangement made for the Khas/Aarya group to ensure that their representation is also equal to their population.





This is arguably in contravention of international standards on equality, as affirmative action measures are foreseen only as a means to promote equality, the EUEOM had stated in the report submitted to the Election Commission (EC) on Tuesday.





The EUEOM has directly challenged the provision of the Constitution of Nepal which was promulgated in line with the inclusive policy reflective of Nepali social structure by the sovereign decision of its people, the Nepal government has stated in the press release.



The EU

Google says the EU requires a notice of cookie use (by Google) and says they have posted a notice. I don't see it. If cookies bother you, go elsewhere. If the EU bothers you, emigrate. If you live outside the EU, don't go there.Full audio of the keynote address in Hindi at Festival 2018 (Wordcraft & Dept of English Ramjas College) by Indias prominent journalist and TV anchor Ravish Kumar on personal freedoms, right to love and democratic society. The talk was held at Ramjas college, University of Delhi on 15 March 2018. The first recording is that of Mukul Mangalik introducing Ravish Kumar to the audience. The second audio is the full talk by Ravish Kumar. [This recording by sacw.net audio archive is hosted here for public educational purposes]

Mukul Mangalik introducing Ravish Kumar to the audience 15 March 2018, Ramjas College, New DelhiThank you for reading!

Please log in, or sign up for a new account and purchase a subscription to continue reading.Education Reporter

Mathew Burciaga is a Santa Maria Times reporter who covers education, agriculture and public safety. Prior to joining the Times, Mathew ran a 114-year-old community newspaper in Wyoming. He owns more than 40 pairs of crazy socks from across the globe.Approximately $900 million sourced to deal with climate change issues

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The government has sourced approximately $900 million in grants and soft loans to deal with climate change issues, but there are delays in actually receiving the money.

aThe problem is this: the funding agencies have several requirements and there are some capacity issues in some of the critical Ministries and these are matters which we are dealing with to improve and increase the level of implementation,a Prime Minister Dr Ralph Gonsalves said on Tuesday, while speaking at the official opening of the reconstructed Cumberland Bridge project.

The Prime Minister said he met with the Caribbean Development Bank (CDB) last week to discuss some of the issues and plans are underway to solve the major problems.

aWe have to strengthen further the capacity to deal with the implementation and ask some of the agencies to alter some of the rules,a said Gonsalves, who added that in discussions with the CDB, they suggested a number of fixes, including ways to solve issues relating to the tendering process.

aaTo save the time, we can massage some the rules, because we canat keep the same old rules when climate change is unfamiliar. What is happening is unprecedented.a

Money sourced by the government includes approximately EC$400 million from the World Bank, with EC$180 million out of that amount targeted for slope stabilization around Dark View and designs for the piece of road in Coulls Hill, where several persons have gone over an embankment in vehicles.

Gonsalves also said a soft loan of EC$95 million is available to us from the OPEC Fund for International Development, while there is also approximately EC$90 million remaining from the three phases of the Natural Disaster Management Fund, through a loan programme of the CDB.

There is about EC$100 million allocated to build a port in Kingstown and EC$100 million for the geothermal project, which is connected to the issue of climate change.

aWe have monies from the Republic of China (ROC) from the European Union and from Japan from the Global Environmental Fund (GEF) and from the Climate Change Centre in Belize; monies have been loaned to them in relation to certain matters in St Vincent and the Grenadines,a revealed Gonsalves.

He said when adding those numbers together, they amount to approximately EC$900 million, but apart from having personnel issues, climate change problems are also creating issues as it relates to allocation of funds.

aSome of the monies we have from the CDB, we canat spend them. Why? Because the money allocated for projects are too small,a complained the PM.

Explaining the issue, Gonsalves said EC$2.5 million was estimated for addressing the sea defence problem in Sandy Bay, but because of more erosion over a period of time due to climate change events, the engineering estimate now is over EC$9 million.

aaAnd a compromise has been made that you can have a contractual sum in the region of EC$7.5 million, but EC$7.5 is a long way from EC$2.5, so we have a delegation coming down from CDB to address this question and get an additional loan for that purpose.a

The Prime Minister also spoke about another project in North Central Windward, where an estimate of approximately EC$800,000 was given, but further deterioration due to the weather has taken that initial figure to around EC$3.5 million.

aI want the public to be aware of how climate change alters the dynamic.a

He added that several roads earmarked for repair may have to be placed on the backburner, as other roads have deteriorated worse than the earmarked ones.

aThe money we are getting on Thursday, US$1 million, we had roads earmarked for that money, but people canat cross at the centre of Chateaubelair, so it would not make sense to put that money somewhere where people can cross, even though it is not in a good condition and not where people need relief.a

Back in February, a sales truck overturned in Chateaubelair because of a faulty bridge and the Prime Minister said a completely new bridge must be built and that was not budgeted for.

aIt is not wide, but deep. I want people to know that the problem of climate change is real and alters (things),a he reiterated.

In relation to the bridge at Cumberland, the Prime Minister thanked the Government of Mexico for making the bridge a reality.

aThis bridge has come about because of friendship and we call it the Mexico/SVG bridgea, commented Gonsalves, who added that Mexico and SVG have had strong relations for many years, dating back to before we became independent in 1979.

aPeople were saying that we canat build the bridge. They said I was a liar and I want them to go on radio and say Ralph spoke the truth and we have the longest and best bridge in SVG in Cumberlanda, said the Prime Minister.

The Cumberland Bridge Reconstruction Project improves the vehicular connection through the leeward side of the island and provides better transport infrastructure for residents of the area.

The project was designed and built with a focus on providing a resilient infrastructure and considering the mitigation against the impact of future heavy rainfall events through the protection of riverbanks, along with the renovation of the bridges.

The United Nations Office for Project Services (UNOPS) implemented the project on behalf of the Government, with funding from the Government of Mexico.

The major infrastructural components included the design and reconstruction of the main Cumberland Bridge and three small bridges and the repair of roads and culverts upstream of the main bridge that were damaged by the passage of a tropical weather system in 2013, as well as river embankment protection. The project activities took place between January 2016 and February 2018.(LC)Autism, how well do you know the signs?

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Written by Dr. Mishka Duncan Adams, Pediatric Neurologist

Submitted by the Ministry of Health, Wellness and the Environment

During the month of April, St Vincent and the Grenadines joins the rest of the world in celebrating Autism Awareness Month, with the 2nd of April being World Autism Awareness day. This is with the aim of raising public awareness with respect to this developmental disorder and in so doing, increase understanding and decrease stigmatization towards persons affected and their families. Below is a list of frequently asked question in relation to Autism.{{more}}

What is Autism/Autism spectrum disorder?

Autism forms part of the Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), which comprises, a group of complex developmental disorders of the brain. People with ASD often exhibit characteristics that include social deficits, difficulty communicating and interacting with others, repetitive behaviours and limited interests or activities. These symptoms hinder the individuals ability to function socially, at work, school, or others areas in life.

What is meant by Spectruma?

A spectrum refers to a condition that is not limited to a set of characteristics, but can have a broad range of signs and symptoms.

Persons with ASD may function at different levels of ability and disability. Some may have no functional speech, while others may have a rich vocabulary.

Some persons may be socially withdrawn, or they may be socially active, although in a way that may be considered different from the norm. Individuals may also have varying levels of intelligence, which may range from profound developmental delay (low functioning individuals), through the superior range on conventional IQ testing (high functioning).

How common is ASD?

Globally, ASD is estimated to affect more than 22 million people. It occurs four to five times more often in boys than girls.

At what is age ASD diagnosed?

ASD can be diagnosed at any age. However, most parents or doctors would identify ASD around the age of two years when behaviour patterns become more obvious. Not all people with ASD will show all of these behaviours, but many will have most.

What are the signs and symptoms of ASD?

Persons with ASD exhibit most if not all of the following signs or symptoms:

Social communication/interaction behaviours:

Children with ASD have deficits in their communication skills, whether verbal or non-verbal.

Most have delayed or lack language development. They make very little eye contact and are more withdrawn than the average child.

Persons with ASD tend to lack the social skills to hold a proper conversation. They fail to understand the facial expressions of others, often responding in an unusual manner when others show anger or affection.

Younger children do not appropriately engage in reciprocal play and avoid open affection. They prefer consistency and are easily upset if there is a slight change of routine; hence new environments can be overly stimulating and frustrating.

Restrictive/repetitive behaviours.

These include unusual repetitive behaviours that are not usually demonstrated in other persons of similar age. These include, but are not limited to, stacking or aligning of objects, hand flapping, rocking and self-injurious (head banging) behaviour. These are mostly seen in many low functioning children with ASD.

Children with ASD may have overly focused interests in a particular object or part of an object, or may demonstrate an intense interest in certain topics, such as numbers, details, or facts.

Other difficulties

Many may also experience sleep problems, digestion problems, and irritability, particularly to light and noise.

Despite these difficulties, it is, however, common for persons with ASD to have many strengths and talents. Abilities may include having above-average intelligence, the ability to learn things in detail and remember information for long periods of time. Many excel in math, science, music, or art.

What is the cause of this disorder?

The cause of ASD is not known. However, there are many risk factors that have been shown to play a role in the development of ASD. Risk factors include genetics, prenatal and perinatal factors (diabetes during pregnancy, maternal age over 30, maternal stress, deficient folic acid intake during pregnancy) and environmental factors (air pollution).

Some children may require early screening if he/she is at high risk for ASD. These risks include children who were born prematurely or at a low birth weight, who have a family member with ASD or who exhibit some ASD behaviours.

Can vaccines cause ASD?

There has been controversy as to whether vaccines cause ASD. However, after many investigations, there is no convincing scientific evidence that supports these claims.

Is there a cure for ASD?

ASD cannot be cured. If, however, diagnosed at an early age, the affected child may benefit from behavioural therapies, as early intervention may result in a better outcome.

What can I do if I have a child affected by ASD?

If you have a child or family member that you suspect may have ASD, please contact a health care provider in order for him/her to be screened. If your child is diagnosed with ASD, this can be quite difficult for family members and it is recommended that families join a support group, if one is available. For more information on Autism/ASD visit and like our Facebook page at www.facebook.com/autismawarenesssvg.Lewis Punnett Home receives help from JEMS, New York, again

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For the 5th year, the New York-based, non-profit humanitarian organization JEMS: Hope 4 Home, has donated health care and comfort supplies for use by citizens housed at the Lewis Punnett Home, here.

The group, headed by president Carol Simmons, who resides in Brooklyn, New York, says that they are indeed pleased that the group can help some of the most needy persons in St Vincent and the Grenadines (SVG). Simmons noted that the initiative began in 2011 and the group has, since then, made annual donations to several health facilities and communities across the country. aIt certainly is a blessing to give back to our country, especially in times of need,a Simmons said. The group is planning to continue to make donations home to support local efforts.

The Lewis Punnett Home has been on the receiving end of these donations since 2013. On the last two occasions the facility received pillows, sheets, disinfectant, lysol, Clorax, Clorax wipes, among other cleaning supplies, including paper towels, soap, toiletries, pampers and other disposable linen.

JEMSa general efforts have supported various communities in SVG over the years. These include donations, to communities in North Windward, North Leeward, Central Leeward, East, Central and West Kingstown, Marriaqua and Bequia, of general food packages for over 60 persons on each occasion.

In addition to these food packages, JEMS has provided medical supplies to community clinics in East and West St George, Union Island and East Kingstown, and school supplies in East St George.

This yearas presentation was made on Friday, March 16, by health planner and local co-ordinator David Latchman, who also thanked the group for their ongoing contributions and support.

Simmons says that the group wishes to thank the many supporters of their fund-raising and donation drives, who make all of this possible. The organization would also like to thank Standard Shippers and their team in Brooklyn, New York, for their support over the years, which has assisted in getting the items to SVG on each occasion, at a reduced cost.Mind benders banned from Facebook for alleged illegal activity

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A company that worked in St Vincent and the Grenadines (SVG) on at least three political campaigns has been suspended by Facebook for allegedly illegally accessing and sharing user data.

Strategic Communications Laboratories (SCL) and its offshoot Cambridge Analytica have been accused of using the personal data of millions of Facebook users to sway the outcome of the US 2016 presidential election and the UK Brexit referendum.

SCL and Cambridge Analytica have denied the allegations.

SCL, a London based communications company set up by former advertising executive Nigel Oakes, became a household name in SVG in the lead up to the 2009 Referendum on Constitution reform, which it managed on behalf of the New Democratic Party (NDP) and the aNo Votea campaign.

Oakes told SEARCHLIGHT in a 2009 interview that SCL had chosen to support the NDP because it is closely affiliated to Sir James Mitchell, founder of the NDP. He confirmed that Sir James is an advisor to his organization and he had developed atremendousa respect for Sir James.

Up to 2012, Sir James was listed on the SCL website as a member of the advisory board, but when SEARCHLIGHT spoke with him on Wednesday, the former prime minister said he had not been in contact with SCL, in relation to advice, in a while.

aThese people like to use your name to help them to get jobs. They worked for me and they assisted me, certainly,a he said.

SCL first worked for the James Mitchell led NDP on the 1998 general election campaign, which it narrowly won, beating the Vincent Beache led Unity Labour Party (ULP) eight seats to seven. The ULP, however, won the popular vote, taking 54.6 per cent of the vote.

SCL states that it has worked on over 25 election campaigns worldwide, and managed 18 of those in their entirety a and claim to have anever lost an election which [they] have managed.a Oakes is also alleged to have told a trade journal in 1992 that he used athe same techniques as Aristotle and Hitlera We appeal to people on an emotional level to get them to agree on a functional level.a

It has been widely claimed that leading up to the 2005 general elections, then NDP leader Arnhim Eustace refused to engage the SCL. The NDP was roundly whipped by the ULP in that election, managing to win only three of the 15 seats. The ULP won 55.4 per cent of the popular vote.

But by 2009, the SCL was back in the NDPas good graces and worked with the aVote Noa campaign to limit national support of the referendum on Constitution reform to a mere 43.13 per cent, far short of the required two-thirds threshold.

While on the campaign trail in September 2010, just three months before the 2010 general elections, Mitchell praised SCL for their work, both in the 1998 general elections and on the aVote Noa campaign.

aOne of the reasons why [Prime Minister Dr Ralph] Gonsalves so annoyed with them is because he thought he had the election in 1998; but we beat him and that is really hurting him, because these people really know dey stuff,a Sir James said.

He also credited SCL with designing the thumbs down symbol of the aVote Noa campaign. aLook at the beautiful design we had in the Referendum; that hands down thing we had kill them!a he declared.

In the wake of last weekas Facebook ban, Cambridge Analytica suspended its CEO, Alexander Nix, who was filmed as part of a British television stationas investigation giving examples of how the firm could swing elections around the world with underhand tactics, such as trying to tape its candidatesa opponents accepting purported bribes or sending asome girls around to the [opposing] candidateas house.a

Sir James, however, told SEARCHLIGHT on Wednesday that he has never witnessed and is not aware of SCL ever being involved in unethical behaviour.

Prime Minister Gonsalves has consistently expressed his antipathy towards the group, saying in February 2010 that SVG would be aan inhospitable territorya for SCL. He said if members of the group wanted to work here, they would have to apply for work permits.

aThey are coming to fight me on my territory, my terrain and I am not going to allow white colonialists to come to St Vincent and the Grenadines and seek to subvert the harmony in this country in the interest of their financiers. I will not allow it,a declared Gonsalves.

Later in 2010, the Prime Minister accused Scherzando Karasu, a journalist working with SCL of tracking him while on a visit to London. He said the journalist had accosted him in the lobby of the hotel where he was staying.

Gonsalves, who had called SCL and its staff amind benders,a said then that he wanted Vincentians to understand the extent of the intrusion that SCL is having in the local politics of SVG.

aIt has now gone past being campaign consultants. They are interfering with me and harassing me as I go about my legitimate business.a

Gonsalves in 2010 also tied SCLas work here to third parties interested in Citizen by Investment programmes in SVG, a policy advocated by the NDP, but this was vehemently denied by both the NDP and SCL.

Although the NDP did not win the 2010 elections, they made substantial ground, adding four additional seats, to bring their tally to seven seats, losing by a narrow one-seat margin to the ULP, who won 51.1 per cent of the popular vote.

Besides SVG, SCL also worked on political campaigns in Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, St Lucia, St Kitts and Nevis and Trinidad and Tobago.

According to a report by Bloomberg in March 2017, SCL has left a along trail of subterfuge, dubious dealing,a by using its apsychographic data modelsa to sway undecided voters, by targeting peopleas social media profiles and serving up messages and ads based on their perceived biases.

The report also said a close look at past practices of SCL, however, reveals a corporate DNA less predisposed to dazzling technologies to sway voters than to using old-fashioned tricks and political subterfuge.

Since this scandal broke, shares in Facebook have plummeted by almost US$50 billion, prompting some shareholders to sue the social media giant.Ministry seeking public assistance in protecting Petit Canouan Wildlife Reserve

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The Government of St Vincent and the Grenadines condemns all activities that result in the burning of natural vegetation on Petit Canouan. Petit Canouan is home to thousands of birds and for this reason was designated as a Wildlife Reserve. The unlawful practice of seasonally burning large areas of the landscape in order to provide greater access to the illegal harvesting of birdsa eggs will not be tolerated. This activity results in the reduction or elimination of critical seabird populations and habitats.

Persons who are engaged in illegal activities on Wildlife Reserves are asked to cease and desist. A strategic monitoring process will be established to ensure full compliance. All systems will be engaged to ensure the increased enforcement of the Wildlife Act. The Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, Fisheries, Rural Transformation, Industry and Labour is asking the public to work together to protect the birds of St Vincent and the Grenadines. aPassengers laud CALs direct flights from NY to SVG

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Ever since entertainer Shertz aProblem Childa James was a secondary school student, he wished that this country could have an international airport.

He also wished that if we were blessed with one, that he could be one of the first persons to travel on one of the historic flights.

And, on Wednesday, March 14, National Heroas Day, when Problem Child woke up in his adopted homeland of New York, he had no idea that he was going to be part of history.

On Wednesday, Problem Child, and over 100 other persons, arrived in St Vincent and the Grenadines (SVG) at the Argyle International Airport (AIA), sometime after 1 p.m. on board Caribbean Airline (CAL) flight BBW3.

The flight marked the historic first, regularly scheduled non-stop flight between the John F Kennedy International Airport in New York and the AIA in SVG.

aThis is euphoriaavery, very happy, very, very pleased, euphoric. This is progress,a Problem Child told SEARCHLIGHT on Wednesday, while standing outside the AIA arrival lounge.a

The entertainer said that the option of travelling direct is a great one and persons must think about how far we have come and be happy about the AIA. He said the pricing ais what it is,a but no one is forcing persons to take the option, but having the option is definitely a plus.

Prime Minister Dr Ralph Gonsalves was on hand to greet passengers and crew on Wednesday, before the flight moved on to Trinidad and Tobago (T&T).

aI am on cloud nine and itas a beautiful feeling,a Gonsalves told SEARCHLIGHT.

aWhen you see the vision of the leadership in communion with the people, when its actualized, it is wonderfula, said Gonsalves, who added that it is important to note that it took the AIA only a year to get regular flights from places like New York and Canada.

He said that before the end of the year the AIA will have flights from Miami, while the government is working to get the Buccament Bay Resort up and running, which will mean announcements in the not too distant future about flights from London.

Minister of Tourism Cecil McKie, who was on the historic flight from New York, said the scheduled flights are expected to see many people coming to this country.

He said from all indications, the flights coming in for the Easter celebrations are fully booked and there is also a very good response for Vincy Mas, with added flights by CAL on Saturdays.

He noted also that a number of travel agents will soon visit the destination and will be taken on familiarization tours to better understand and appreciate the value of the destination.

McKie also noted that while on the flight, he went to every passenger and had them sign two table mats and those will be placed at the AIA and at the Ministry of Tourism, so that Vincentians can reflect on the first scheduled flight from JFK.

Also on the flight was Jules Williams, owner of WE FM radio station.

aI smiled all the way down. It was great; the price was very reasonable, and it took me back to 35 years ago when I was flying on PAN AM for that same price,a said Williams, who noted that the landing was perfect, and he will use the service again once it is available.

Barbadian Lisa Regisford was also on the flight. She said she lives in New York and it is not her first time coming to St Vincent, so she was very happy that she was able to fly straight from New York.

aIt was good. It was reasonable priced for starters and hopefully it will continue to be that way. I was very comfortable.a

South Rivers resident Yvonne Nickie, who also took advantage of the non-stop flight, said that she travels back and forth between New York and SVG in three-month intervals.

aI feel excellent, two thumbs up. I would have been in Barbados sitting on a bench waiting on a flight, but I make my breakfast in New York and now I am making lunch in St Vincent on a Wednesday, the same day,a said Nickie.

Panist Rodney Small was also part of the historic travelling.

aIt was good, great. I left about 8:15, after a slight delay and it was really a good feeling flying straight. I would have been in Barbados waiting and I travel regularly, because Iam a performer,a said Small.

Chair of the Carnival Development Corporation Ricky Adams told SEARCHLIGHT that it was exciting coming out of New York and being able to fill out an immigration card that said destination St Vincent and the Grenadines.

aIt is an excellent opportunity for you to be able to come home. Sometimes you leave, it takes you a day to get here, a day to go back, so even if you coming on a five-day trip, you only getting three days in SVG; so, I would really encourage persons; it is an awesome opportunity,a Adams said.

Traveller Alicia Grant said that she comes back to her homeland at least once a year, but direct flights will see her coming more often.

aWe have been waiting a long time for it and this is a great improvement for the country as far as tourism and import and export; so it is a good addition to our economy.The pricing was perfect, and this is less hassle, especially for people who travel with kids,a said Grant.RSVGPF provides more training for officers

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The Royal St Vincent and the Grenadines Police Force (RSVGPF), continues its drive to fulfill its obligation to provide the requisite training to officers in various areas of law enforcement, and to ultimately improve the quality of service the organization provides to the people of St Vincent and the Grenadines.

The police force, in partnership with IMPACT Justice, began a three-day workshop on the March 19, at the Old Montrose Police Training School, on aLaws of evidence, report writing, interviewing and interrogation techniquesa. Thirty police officers attended the workshop, geared towards police investigators throughout the rank and file of the organization, and seeking to provide specialized training in specific areas.

Delivering remarks at the opening ceremony on behalf of the Commissioner of Police, Assistant Superintendent of Police (ASP) John Ballah described the workshop as vital and timely, due to the fact that the legal system is constantly changing. He further encouraged the officers, whom he acknowledged to be very knowledgeable in the field, to use their knowledge to contribute to the success of the workshop. The ASP also urged each participant to keep an open mind. He expressed his confidence in the workshop to better equip the officers to provide a higher level of service to the people of St. Vincent and the Grenadines.

IMPACT JUSTICE, the coordinators of the workshop, is a civil society justice sector project being funded by the Government of Canada and implemented within the Caribbean Law Institute at the University of the West Indies, UWI, Cave Hill Campus. IMPACT JUSTICE has in the past, trained educators, non-governmental organizations, social workers and probation officers from St Vincent and the Grenadines in restorative practices and mediation and has chosen to broaden their scope, towards training law enforcement personnel.

The workshop is facilitated by Bertie Hinds Consulting, led by former deputy commissioner of police in Barbados and more recently the deputy executive director of the Regional Security System Bertie Hinds. Hinds was assisted by Tyrone Sergeant, a former senior superintendent of police, also from Barbados.Spots up for grab at PCCU Board of Directors

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The St Vincent and the Grenadines Police Co-operative Credit Union Ltd will be holding its Annual General Meeting (AGM).

There will be four vacancies to be filled on the Board of Directors, two on the Credit Committee and three on the Supervisory and Compliance Committee.

The nominations committee is seeking nominations from members to fill these vacancies by submitting names no later than April 2, 2018, at 9 a.m. to the Credit Unionas office.

Nomination forms and information on the criteria for a nominee can be collected at the office.US Government supports reopening of LLBTC

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At-risk youth in St Vincent and the Grenadines are poised to benefit from improved services at the newly-renovated Liberty Lodge Boys Training Centre (LLBTC). With the support of the United States Government, the facility, which had been closed since 2015, re-opened on Thursday, March 1, offering services in the fully upgraded facilities.

On Monday, March 19, the Government of St Vincent and the Grenadines, under the aegis of Frederick Stephenson, Minister of National Mobilization, hosted a ceremony to commemorate the re-opening of the Green Hill facility. Christopher Cushing, Mission director of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Eastern and Southern Caribbean, lauded the Governmentas commitment to ongoing juvenile justice reform efforts under USAIDas Juvenile Justice Reform Project, being implemented in partnership with the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States.

aI salute both the Government and other stakeholders for your commitment and dedication to addressing the needs of children, particularly those who are in greatest need of assistance.a I applaud your work on the creation of a new Child Justice Bill, and your efforts to foster a new approach to juvenile justice that focuses on rehabilitation, restoration and reintegration.a It has been proven that this approach results in greater success,a said Cushing.

Cushing also reiterated the United States Governmentas commitment to partnering with regional Governments to support youth who are most vulnerable. aIt is our hope that the programmes offered at the newly-renovated Liberty Lodge Centre will help prepare young men to thrive, while contributing to their families and communities.aa He underlined this point, urging the youths to make the best use of their time at the rehabilitation facility.a aRemember that this is not the end, but it is just the beginning.a Be focused and determined to create your best lives, beginning today,a he advised.

The opening ceremony was attended by Government representatives, OECS officials, members of the legal fraternity, and representatives of justice organizations that serve and protect children.

USAIDas Juvenile Justice Reform Project (JJRP) provided support to the Ministry of National Mobilization to complete renovations to the Liberty Lodge Boys Training Centre.aJJRP support to St Vincent and the Grenadines also includes: the establishment of Diversion, Child Protection and Parenting Coordination Units; training for officers in mental health and risk assessment screening to foster tailored rehabilitation services; training for corrections officers to better understand adolescent development and elements of child justice reform; and the introduction of the Truant Students Rehabilitation Programme in secondary schools, to allow school aged youth to gain life skills.Vincentian resident awarded grant for airline pilot studies

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Many young people dream of learning to fly and becoming pilots, but St Vincent and the Grenadines (SVG) resident Rishi Prikrishna Ramsamooj has begun on the path to turn such dream into a reality.

Prikrishna, a graduate of St Vincent and the Grenadines Community College, enrolled this past year in the Epic Flight Academy in Florida and has been studying to earn his private pilotas licence.

He has now been awarded a Hunter Watson Memorial Fund Grant, locally known as the Friends of Hunter Watson Fund Grant, to assist him on his road to a full commercial pilotas licence.

Prikrishna views getting a commercial pilotas licence not just as a means for obtaining employment in his chosen field, but also as a way to give something back to his home country of SVG. His goal, once he has his commercial licence and sufficient experience, is to begin flying for an airline within SVG.

With the addition of the recently built international airport, there is increased opportunity and need for commercial pilots. He has also expressed an interest in working with and guiding young people who also have an interest in becoming pilots.

The grant award is being made by the Hunter Brooks Watson Memorial Fund, a non-profit fund established by friends and colleagues in memory of Hunter Watson, who died tragically as a passenger in an automobile accident in the summer of 2016.

Prikrishna is currently residing in Florida as he attends flight school, but graduated from St Vincent and the Grenadines Community College with majors in math, physics and computer science. He is also a graduate of St Vincent Boysa Grammar School. AG Jeff Sessions issues memo to "strongly encourage federal prosecutors ... when appropriate" to pursue "capital punishment in appropriate cases" | Main | "Measuring Change: From Rates of Recidivism to Markers of Desistance" 

This Marshall Project article, headlined "The DAs Who Want to Set the Guilty Free: Sentence review units would revisit harsh punishments from the past," spotlights ways prosecutors are now reconsidering past prosecutorial punitiveness. Here is an excerpt:

None of these conviction review units [created in DA offices] have undertaken the far more ambitious task of examining cases where the conviction might be sound but the punishment doesnt fit the crime. That would mean poking into the sentences sought by a previous generation of prosecutors whose reflexive stance, for decades, was often to seek maximum charges carrying hefty terms behind bars. It might open the floodgates to reviewing thousands of sentences, said Steven A. Drizin, a law professor at Northwestern University and an expert on wrongful convictions who said he supports sentence reviews.

Despite the daunting undertaking, the idea is gaining traction. In Philadelphia, where former civil-rights attorney and public defender Larry Krasner was recently sworn in as district attorney, staffers are making plans for a sentence review program, likely the first of its kind in the country. Nationally, nearly two dozen newly elected prosecutors are working with an advocacy organization called Fair and Just Prosecution to implement their own sentencing-review procedures in the coming year, said Miriam Krinsky, the groups executive director and a former longtime federal prosecutor.

Such a massive undertaking is, like many of the ambitions of this new breed of prosecutors, far easier said than done. Normally, courts allow a prosecutor to seek re-sentencing only in limited circumstances, such as when new evidence arises or when legislators pass a new sentencing law that needs to be applied retroactively. For example, Maryland in 2016 revised its mandatory minimum sentences, with a clause allowing judges to use those changes to reduce the time that then-current prisoners were serving. Sometimes, a prisoner can be rewarded with a reduced sentence for cooperating in a police investigation. The compassionate release process also lets corrections agencies and courts reduce sentences retroactively, usually when the prisoner is gravely ill. But there is no mechanism in many states for requesting a new sentence for a current inmate simply because a newly elected prosecutor says its in the best interest of justice....

In Philadelphia, Patricia Cummings, head of the conviction integrity unit, already has a workaround in mind. She said a group within the DA's office focused on sentencing  which she would likely direct but that still needs staff and funding  could start by looking into first- or second-degree murder cases the office prosecuted in the past. In Pennsylvania, a conviction on those charges automatically ends in a sentence of life in prison without parole. More than 5,000 of the states prisoners are currently serving these sentences, the second-highest number in the nation, and about half are from Philadelphia. If the unit identifies a case where they believe the facts did not warrant such a harsh sentence, it would ask the trial court to throw out the original conviction and accept a guilty plea on a lesser charge of third-degree murder or manslaughter. Those charges carry much lighter sentences. Were still kicking this around, said Cummings, who previously ran the conviction integrity unit in Dallas....

Another precedent can be found in Seattle, where prosecuting attorney Dan Satterberg has been giving people in prison second chances for the past decade. He and his staff review old cases in which defendants were banished to life in prison for relatively minor crimes, often under the states three-strikes-youre-out law. They then sign onto clemency petitions for some of those prisoners. Three of the 16 prisoners who were effectively re-sentenced this way have committed new crimes since getting released. But, Satterberg said, theres no way to avoid that other than to leave everyone in prison forever.

I think a prosecutor has a continuing obligation to justice, past the sentencing date, said Satterberg. We have to be willing to roll up our sleeves, look through the files of old cases, and really... compare them to our contemporary law and practice.

Most states dont have such a robust clemency system that prosecutors can use it as a kind of back-door re-sentencing program. In Pennsylvania, for example, only eight life sentences have been shortened through commutation since 1995. State law requires a pardons board to agree unanimously on any such decision. That means the mechanism will have to differ by state, said Krinsky, the head of the prosecutors group. It may even require lobbying efforts to pass new legislation granting DAs the power to file a special motion for amending a sentence. Interesting new US Sentencing Commission analysis of possible impact of Sentencing Reform and Corrections Act of 2017 | Main | Interesting (and important?) new polling data on the death penalty 

This new AP article, headlined "Judges, Ohio prison system at odds over bed reduction plan," reports on an interesting new difficulty within on-going Buckeye state efforts to reduce the prison population. Here are excerpts:

Judges and the state prison system are at odds over a new law meant to lower Ohio's inmate population by limiting the amount of time behind bars for low-level offenders who commit minor probation violations. At issue is a mandate capping the amount of time judges can send offenders to prison for violations like missing counseling appointments or committing misdemeanors. The law enacted last year is part of a broader effort to save money and reduce crime by lowering Ohio's inmate population. It affects inmates convicted of non-violent crimes such as drug possession, theft and fraud.

Under the law, judges can send inmates to prison for only 90 days for the least serious felony and 180 days for the next most serious. But some judges say the law is unclear and are sending offenders to prison for longer sentences, often a year or more, according to the Department of Rehabilitation and Correction. Judges also contend that the short sentencing caps lessen the incentive for repeat offenders to follow probation rules at all.

The state had counted on the law to decrease Ohio's inmate population by about 400 this year and as much as 1,100 next year, the prison system said. Cynthia Mausser, the prison system's managing director of courts and community, noted that the longer such low-level offenders are "sitting in prison not becoming better people," the more time they spend "away from those pro-social programs and relationships and connections" that could help them...

North Carolina put similar caps on certain probation violations in 2011 as part of changes to its sentencing laws. Colorado, Nevada and Tennessee have created stand-alone facilities for probation violators as alternatives to prison sentences, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Ohio's prison system sent about 300 letters to judges in recent months alerting them that they went over the caps. Prison officials don't have the authority to overrule judges, however, and so the longer sentences stayed in place.

In southern Ohio, Robert Chambers violated his probation for a 2017 drug possession conviction in multiple ways, including admitted drug use and refusal to enter drug treatment, according to court records. Chambers' attorney didn't return messages seeking comment. Adams County Judge Brett Spencer finally sentenced Chambers to a year in prison, and was then singled out by the prison system for surpassing the three-month cap. "For not trying to become productive citizens, we give them a 75 percent bonus," Spencer said of the sentencing caps.

Mahoning County Judge John "Jack" Durkin said judges know it's better to focus on offenders' substance abuse problems, help them find jobs and complete their education. But at some point, especially after several violations, prison must be an option "to protect the public and punish the defendant," Durkin said.According to Kenneth Bishop, Facebooks managing director for Southeast Asia, with over 60 million Facebook users in Vietnam every month, the company is investing heavily in resources and workforce to better support the community, including local businesses, partners and marketers. He said with her extensive experience, Christy Le would help businesses in Vietnam to develop and succeed.Born in 1980, Trang won a scholarship to the UKs University of Oxford and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the United States.After leaving MIT, Trang worked for strategic consulting firm McKinsey. Later, she and her husband, Sonny Vu, founded Misfit Wearables, a start-up specialising in healthwear and body-measuring equipment.In 2015, Misfit Wearables was acquired by Fossil Group for 260 million USD, but Trang continued as the CEO of Fossil Vietnam. She unexpectedly resigned on March 9 this year, following which she was offered the position of director of Facebook Vietnam.

VietnamplusAt a commemoration ceremony held by the Vietnamese Embassy in Russia on March 21, Vietnamese Ambassador Ngo Duc Manh recounted the life and career of the late PM, highlighting his enormous contributions to national development and protection.Manh wrote in the book of condolences that PM Phan Van Khai paid great attention to external affairs and greatly contributed to the countrys international integration.Expressing his condolences, Sergei Tolchenov, deputy director of the Third Asian Department of the Russian Foreign Ministry, wrote that in Russia, people remember Phan Van Khai as a person who devoted his entire life to national liberation and development and promoting Vietnams prestige.While holding high-ranking Party and State positions, he enhanced the two countries relations and helped to elevate bilateral ties to a strategic partnership, the official added.At the respect paying ceremony held by the Vietnamese Embassy in Chile, representatives of the Chilean Foreign Ministry and the Chile-Vietnam culture institute recalled the visit to the South American nation by then PM Phan Van Khai in October 2002. They said the trip was a new milestone in bilateral relations, and he will always be remembered as one of Vietnams great leaders.President of the Chamber of Deputies of Chile Maya Fernandez Allende, President of the Communist Party of Chile Guillermo Teillier del Valle and General Secretary of the Socialist Party of Chile Andres Santander Ortega sent messages of condolences to the Vietnamese Embassy.At similar ceremonies in Belgium, Argentina and France from March 20 to 22, Vietnamese people, officials and foreign diplomats in the countries also paid tribute to the late Government leader.Phan Van Khai was born in Cu Chi district, Ho Chi Minh City, on December 25, 1933. He served as the PM of Vietnam from September 1997 to June 2006.

VNSAccordingly, a ticket from Vietnam to Dubai will be from VND13,270,000 (US$577). Airfares on flights connecting Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City with Paris, London, New York, Boston, Los Angeles will be respectively VND 18,100,000; VND20,980,000; VND22,820,000; VND25,220,000 and VND25,740,000.



The promotion program will officially run from March 12-3 for passengers who plan to travel from now until November 30.

Emirates Airlines launched first daily direct flights between Ho Chi Minh City and Dubai in 2012 and daily non-stop flights from Hanoi to Dubai in 2017, using Boeing 777-300ER.

Emirates operates to 141 destinations in 75 countries across six continents from its hub in Dubai, including 39 destinations in Europe and 12 places in America.







By DIEU THAO  Translated by Kim KhanhForeign Ministry Spokesperson Hua Chunying's Regular Press Conference on March 22, 2018

2018/03/22

At the invitation of the government of the Republic of South Africa, President Xi Jinping's Special Representative and member of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee Yang Jiechi will pay an official visit to South Africa from March 23 to 24.

Q: Do you have more details about the purpose and schedule of Mr. Yang Jiechi's visit? What's China's expectation?

A: Member of the Political Bureau of the CPC Central Committee Yang Jiechi's upcoming official visit to South Africa as President Xi Jinping's Special Representative is an important visit to Africa by Chinese central leadership after the Two Sessions this year. With a view to following through on the policy of sincerity, real results, affinity and good faith and the principle of upholding justice while pursuing shared interests put forward by the report submitted to the 19th CPC National Congress, this visit will enable an in-depth interaction and policy synergy on bettering bilateral relations and across-the-board cooperation and development, so that China-South Africa cooperation will bring more benefits to the two countries and two peoples.

During the visit, Special Representative Yang Jiechi is expected to meet with leaders of South African political parties and government and they will exchange views on China-South Africa relations, the 2018 Forum on China Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) Summit in Beijing and the BRICS summit in Johannesburg, among others.

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic ties between China and South Africa. Over the past 20 years, with the concerted efforts of both sides, the bilateral relationship has developed in an in-depth manner and been elevated from partnership to strategic partnership and then comprehensive strategic partnership, demonstrating good momentum for development in political mutual trust, economic and trade cooperation, cultural and people-to-people exchange and strategic coordination.

China highly values its relations with South Africa. China stands ready to, taking the 20th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic ties as an opportunity, support the 2018 Forum on China Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) Summit in Beijing and the BRICS summit in Johannesburg, continuously deepen China-South Africa friendly cooperation across the board, and keep moving forward the China-South Africa comprehensive strategic partnership.

Q: A senior US diplomat gave a speech yesterday in Taipei, in which he said that "Taiwan-US relations" had never been stronger and he praised Taiwan as a "model" for the Indo-Pacific region. The Taiwan authorities announced today that another senior US official will be visiting this week from the Commerce Department. What is your response to the comments yesterday and this second visit in a week by a senior US official to Taiwan?

A: Yesterday I already made clear China's stance on the recent contacts between the US and Taiwan. I want to stress again that the Taiwan issue concerns China's core interests and is the most important and sensitive issue in China-US relations, and the one-China principle is the political foundation of China-US relations. We urge the US to adhere to the one-China policy and the three joint communiques, stop pursuing any official ties with Taiwan or elevating its current relations with Taiwan in any substantive way and handle Taiwan-related issues cautiously and properly so as to avoid causing any major damage to the China-US relations and cross-Straits peace and stability.

I would also like to remind those who want to play the "Taiwan card" or have any other attempt that they need to attentively read and study President Xi Jinping's important remarks delivered at the closing ceremony of the First Session of the 13th National People's Congress (NPC), in particular the part that involves China's attitude on upholding its sovereignty and territorial integrity. Not a single inch of our great motherland could be ceded from China. We hope relevant persons will speak and act with caution on the Taiwan issue.

Q: According to reports, the White House said that President Trump is going to sign a Presidential Memorandum concerning China's "economic aggression" on March 22 EST. What's your comment?

A: In response to recent reports that the US will shortly publish the results of Section 301 investigation and possibly impose restrictive measures on China, the official from the Department of Treaty and Law of the Ministry of Commerce has made a statement to clarify China's position again, that is, we firmly oppose the US' acts of unilateralism and trade protectionism. China will never sit idly and let its lawful rights and interests be undermined and will surely take all necessary measures to firmly safeguard its legitimate rights and interests. We hope that the US can be fully aware of the mutually beneficial and win-win nature of China-US economic and trade relations and refrain from moves that will hurt both itself and others.

We have also noted some reports accusing China of "economic aggression", a term we can never agree with or accept, because China could not be labeled as aggressive at all in any way.

Q: Three US Republican lawmakers have proposed that the Confucius Institutes operating in the United States should be registered as "foreign agents". I assume the Chinese government would be extremely unhappy to see this happening. Do you have comments on this?

A: The Confucius Institutes in the US are set up at the voluntary request of US universities by Confucius Institute Headquarters, Chinese universities and local universities with the principle of mutual respect, friendly consultation, equality and mutual benefit upon formal agreement. The purpose of Confucius Institutes is strengthening educational and cultural exchange and cooperation between China and other countries and enhancing mutual understanding and friendship between their peoples. In fact, we have seen that Confucius Institutes are warmly welcomed in many countries and they have played an important role in promoting the mutual understanding, friendship and cooperation between China and relevant countries.

I noted that recently certain American individuals have made noises from time to time, which actually comes down to the way they view the world and China's development or the question whether they are really able to discard the cold-war mentality, zero-sum game mindset and the outdated either-or concept and pursue mutually beneficial and win-win cooperation with other countries. Such noises always remind me of a saying from the Analects of Confucius, that is, "while a gentleman is open and poised, a petty man is unhappy and worried". China's commitment to the path of peaceful development has been enshrined in the reports delivered to the 17th, 18th, 19th CPC National Congress and the Party's Constitution. The amendments to China's Constitution adopted at the First Session of the 13th NPC add to the Preamble such new contents as "following a path of peaceful development and a win-win strategy of opening-up" and "building a community with a shared future for mankind". This constitutes the highest proclamation of China's foreign policies and philosophies in the form of law, demonstrating its firm resolve to blaze a development path different from that of traditional major countries, its sincere aspiration to work with other countries for common development and prosperity, its lofty goal to make greater contributions to world peace and development, and its global horizon, broad vision and sense of responsibility as a major country to integrate its own development into that of the world. It's only natural that certain individuals falling short of such vision and broad-mindedness will fail to apprehend it. We hope that they will abandon the obsolete ideas and truly think and act in a manner in keeping with the 21st century and look at the trend of the times and China's development in an objective and rational way.

Q: Japan's Liberal Democratic Party is now in a discussion for revising the Constitution. In particular, a principled plan may be put forward to revise Article 9. How does China view Japan's move to revise the Constitution?

A: In essence, the revision of Japan's constitution belongs to its internal affairs. But due to historical reasons and other reasons we all know, the issue of Japan revising the Pacifist Constitution has been all along followed by the international community and its Asian neighbors. Moreover, certain people in Japan have been seeking excuses for arms expansion by playing up this or that kind of so-called threats. We hope that Japan will adhere to a peaceful development path and win the trust of its Asian neighbors and the international community with concrete actions, and by doing so, create conditions for the improvement of its relations with its neighbors.

Q: Just return to this memorandum that is expected to be signed at the White House today. Has China made any efforts to head off the trade sanctions and investment restrictions that are expected to be announced? Have the two sides discussed this on any occasion?

A: China and the US maintain communication with each other on trade issues at various levels. The two sides have basic consensus in this respect which is to properly manage and constructively address trade disputes through communication and consultation based on mutual respect and win-win results to ensure the sound and steady development of China-US economic ties. I believe this is a consensus shared by the two heads of state which also marks out what the two countries should work for.

Some people in the US have recently talked about potential restrictive measures on China. I noticed that "fairness" or "reciprocity" has been the catchword for the US side these days. We said earlier that trade imbalance between China and the US is a result of many factors, one of which is the US policy restricting its exports to China. China's market receives the largest number of US planes and soybeans and the second largest number of US cars and cotton. The figure I saw is that 62% of US soybeans and 25% of its Boeing planes ended up in China. What we export to the US is mostly something they have no comparative advantage in making or do not make at all. Everyone knows that it is impractical and unreasonable to demand for absolute parity in the world of trade. Let's all think about this. The US is on the one hand urging China to buy what it wants to sell, while refusing to sell what China wants to buy. Is the US in the right position to criticize China on trade imbalance? Is it fair? How many toys do we have to sell to equal the value of one Boeing plane? To put it another way, is the US willing to buy the same number of C919 from China as we buy Boeing from the US? That is why we have been calling on the two sides to calm down and have constructive dialogue and consultation in the spirit of equality, mutual benefit and mutual respect to seek out a win-win solution. As the world's top two economies, China and the US shall play a leading and positive role in ensuring world economic stability. That also serves the common interests of the two countries.

Follow-up: You mentioned soybeans and Boeing there. Are those two areas where we could see possible retaliation if there are tariffs as we expect?

A: China's trade and economic departments will handle these specific issues properly. Like I said, official from Department of Treaty and Law of the Commerce Ministry already made it clear that China will not sit idly by while legitimate rights and interests are hurt, and we will take all necessary measures to firmly defend our rights.

Q: If the relevant parties asked China, would China be willing to host talks between the US and the DPRK?

A: China always believes that the Korean Peninsula issue shall be resolved through dialogue and consultation, and we support all efforts that could facilitate its political settlement. We will readily support all efforts that are conducive to resolving the issue in a political way through dialogue and consultation.The gravity of the existential threat we face from Islamic Jihad is truly of epic proportions. It is essentially a battle pitting free-civilized man against a totalitarian barbarian. What is at stake is the struggle for our very soul - namely who we are and what we represent. The lives that were sacrificed for individual rights and freedoms that we've come to cherish are being chiseled away from right under our noses by the stealth jihadists. And many of us are in denial and totally clueless.



The left's appeasement and pandering to evil is nothing new. What makes their utopian delusions so infuriating and unpardonable is that it is not only they who will have to pay the consequences, and deservedly, so, they are thwarting and undermining our best efforts at resistance and are thus dragging us down in the process as well.







By Peter Lancz,, the head of the Raoul Wallenberg World Campaign Against Racism.The Miami-Dade LGBTA Democratic Caucus and members of SAVE, a local LGBT rights group, met March 13 to discuss the religious exemption clause in Miami-Dade County's anti-discrimination ordinance. The meeting, which took place at the Hotel Gaythering, was a discussion and strategic planning session held in response to the recent news of a local lesbian Catholic school teacher being fired for marrying her longtime girlfriend.

First-grade teacher Jocelyn Morffi was terminated from Sts. Peter & Paul Catholic School after school officials learned she had married her partner, Natasha Hass, Feb. 3. Florida remains one of the few states where employers can still fire someone based on sexual orientation or gender identity.

It's frightening that in 2018 someone can be fired just because of who they love...and that's exactly what happened to Jocelyn, said Justin Klecha, deputy director of SAVE. She left work on a Friday, married her longtime partner, and then on Monday was fired. Employees should only be judged on their ability to do their jobs, but despite Jocelyn's excellent record and eight years of service she was fired.

Mary Ross Agosta, a spokesperson for the Archdiocese of Miami, told Politico Florida that Morffi was fired for violating her contract. She said Catholic school employees have to sign a contract pledging they will follow church policy, which includes a prohibition on same-sex marriage.

Klecha said the goal of last weeks meeting was to have a conversation about religious exemptions and to strategize a way to remove this harmful clause from Miami-Dade Countys Human Rights Ordinance.

Unfortunately, with the current composition of the Miami-Dade Board of County Commissioners, this isn't a viable option at the moment, Klecha said. Employers who are accepting of LGBT people help attract the best and the brightest, but I think that it's clear the Archdiocese in South Florida isn't interested in that, which is really alarming considering we're talking about educating children.

Walker Burttschell, president of the Miami-Dade LGBTA Democratic Caucus, said Morffis situation is heart-breaking and infuriating.

I think most Catholics, especially in South Florida, believe no one should be fired based on their sexual orientation or because they chose to marry the person they love. I say this as a former Catholic, Burttschell said. Change, in this case, has to come from within  a task better left to the students and parents of the school.

Burttschell said the Miami-Dade LGBTA Democratic Caucus, the Miami-Dade Democratic Party and other progressive organizations need to actively identify and groom viable candidates and work on getting pro-equality candidates elected to the Miami-Dade County Commission. But he added there is no short-term, immediate fix to this.

We as a caucus want to identify an open-LGBT person to run and reshape the commission, Burttschell said. We need to start thinking strategically and developing longterm plans to address this particular issue with religious exemption and the litany of other issues that affect us and the broader community.

Burttschell says progressives need to step up, adding the issue just makes it clear that progressives do not have much of an influence in this town, politically speaking.

Im not sure if a more progressive commission wouldve completely prevented [Jocelyn] from being fired, Burttschell said. However, a more progressive commission wouldve been able to have a conversation on this subject and re-examine the religious exemption clause, something the current commission will not do.

Klecha said SAVE is non-partisan and will continue to be, but for the LGBT community to achieve full equality, it needs to stop being a partisan issue.

Unfortunately, it's very unlikely the outcome of Jocelyn's case will change, Klecha said. However, we can make sure there isn't another case like Jocelyn's by removing the religious exemption in our Human Rights Ordinance or by passing comprehensive statewide protections.

Klecha said right now, our best shot at doing that is to identify and groom LGBT Democrats for office and work to get more pro-equality leaders elected.

What's most important to us when we work with a candidate is that they are the best person for the job and fully supportive of LGBT rights regardless of party affiliation, Klecha said. While we will continue to educate the [current] commission, our best bet is to make sure we are forward-thinking and start working to get more pro-equality commissioners elected in 2020.n President Donald Trumps back yard, Mar-a-Lago, hosting Palm Beach Pride is just as important as ever, said Julia Murphy, chief development officer for Compass Community Center.

This sends a message. Absolutely, Murphy said. Regardless of whats going on, we have a high amount of support.

Organized by Compass, the two-day festival will be held Saturday, March 24 and Sunday, March 25 from 12 to 6 p.m. at Bryant Park in Lake Worth.

Trump has supported various measures decried by LGBT advocates, including support of the

Conscience and Religious Freedom Division which allows healthcare workers to deny medical treatment to LGBT patients because of religious or moral beliefs.

This years theme is Rainbow Resistance. We cant be at the [March for Our Lives gun control protest in D.C.] on March 24, but well march in solidarity on March 25 [during the parade], Murphy said.

But even with Trump in the White House, Murphy said local authorities matter more.

What matters the most is your local politics and what happens to you on an everyday level. Murphy said the LGBT community here is lucky to have strong allies, such as the Palm Beach County Sherriffs Office and the City of Lake Worth.

We welcome everyone. I think our community is stronger together . . . Thats not everywhere though. In some places, they have to fight to get something like this, Murphy said. According to various news outlets, a permit for an LGBT parade in Starkville, Mississippi was initially denied. Earlier this month, the decision was reversed after organizers threatened a lawsuit.

Palm Beach Prides parade will start at 11:30 a.m. on March 25 at Lucerne Avenue and Lake Avenue.

Murphy said 100 groups have already signed-up to be in the parade, and she estimates the final number could be about 150.

As for the rest of the event, about 25,000 people are expected to attend both days.

Headlining this years festival is CeCe Peniston, the dance club artist famous for her 1991 hit Finally.

The cost is $8 in advance and $10 at the entrance. Murphy said Palm Beach Pride charges an entry fee because it incurs a lot of expenses, including paid staff workers. We close down the roads and we have to pay for the park. Typically, pride events are volunteer-based. Compass is a local non-profit. So, in order to produce [the event], we have to charge. Were not the biggest pride but we definitely represent the community in the best way we can.

Visit compassglcc.com/community-and-events/palm-beach-pride for more information.Le Collectif Cheikh Yassine a organise un certain nombre dactivites et de festivites pour les enfants de Gaza sous le theme  La joie des enfants de Gaza pour lAid . Ces activites ont commence le premier jour de lAid et continue jusquau 4eme jour de lAid dans la bande de Gaza.



Plusieurs activites, ont ete organisees parmi lesquelles : des competitions recompensees par des prix, des jeux, des animations et des chants presentes par un groupe ainsi que des distributions de cadeaux et daides financieres.



We can't seem to find the page you are looking for.

You may have typed the address incorrectly or you may have used an outdated link.The I Love Canadian Harness Racing Fan Club would like to congratulate Ed Bankes of Mossley, Ont., on winning the St. Patricks Day Online Handicapping Contest.

Ed topped the charts from over 300 entrants, banking $66.50 from a mythical $2 place and $2 win wager from the selected contest races at Flamboro Downs and Woodbine Racetrack this past Saturday, March 17.

For the past 60 years Ed has been a fan of harness racing, regularly attending Mohawk Racetrack and The Raceway at Western Fair District. He is a big fan of Canadas 2017 Driver of The Year, Doug McNair, who secured Eds victory with Fool Me Once, winning the $34,000 Preferred Pace in 1:52 at Woodbine Racetrack.

Congratulations to Ed who has won a Fan Club prize package and a $50 gift certificate to Mohawk Racetrack.

Here are the race results:

Race 3 at Flamboro Downs

1. Misty Mono ($7.00, $3.50)

2. Tables Big Secret ($4.20)

Eds Selection: Misty Mono

Race 6 at Flamboro Downs

1. McCovey Cove N ($2.30, $2.30)

2. Island Blue ($5.60)

Eds Selection: Island Blue

***For any players who selected #8 Open Skies, who was scratched, he would be replaced with McCovey Cove N since he was the post-time favourite.

Race 9 at Flamboro Downs

1. Drivingthedragon N ($5.70, $3.60)

2. On The Minute Mark ($4.40)

Eds Selection: War Filly

Race 1 at Woodbine Racetrack

1. Whistys Paradise ($12.50, $5.30)

2. Shezarealdeal ($3.40)

Eds Selection: Whistys Paradise

Race 4 at Woodbine Racetrack

1. Isitfridayyet ($5.00, $2.90)

2. Shades Of Bay ($3.20)

Eds Selection: Fancourt

Race 8 at Woodbine Racetrack

1. Fool Me Once ($22.10, $10.50)

2. Physicallyinclined ($15.20)

Eds Selection: Fool Me OnceWeather permitting, four Delaware Standardbred Breeders Fund (DSBF) three-year-old events bring preliminary rounds to a close as an outstanding 16-race program wraps up Dover Downs penultimate racing week on Thursday (March 22).

Major Uptrend, a 1:49.2 winner of last weeks $35,000 Preferred pace is back in the weeks top feature event, while a $22,000 sub-feature and two $25,000-$35,000 claiming handicap paces are on the standout program. Post time is 4:30 p.m.

A pair of non-wagering DSBF events precede the regular card. At 4:00 p.m., George Teagues Ibetyoucanwiggle (Montrell Teague) and Rich Lombardo, Brent Outten and Green Racings Go Sandy Go (Jason Green), separated by a nose in last weeks $20,000 sophomore filly pace, renew their competition. Pedal Power (Tim Tetrick), owned by Darrell and Leah Lewis, is the one to beat in the second contest.

The DSBF sophomore male pacers start the wagering card with the first of two $20,000 divisions. JoAnn Looney-Kings Evolution Tour (Tetrick) and George Teagues GWT (M. Teague) start the daily double. Slick Tony (Russell Foster), bred and owned by George Leager, will meet Joy and George Teagues Transitioning Joy (M. Teague) and Looney-Kings Burn Brighter (Tetrick) in the second DSBF section.

Since last mid-year, Niss Allen and Crissman Inc.s Major Uptrend (Tony Morgan) has been a major factor in the top race of the week, winning three times faster than 1:50 while Little Ben, racing for JoAnn Looney-King, has been one of the most consistent pacers in feature races. Tim Tetrick drove him to a strong second last week. Meanwhile, Soto, owned by Ken Wood, Bill Dittmar and Steve Iaquinta, has been a fixture in top races for several seasons.

The rest of the seven Preferred starters are Mike Hall and Dave Hamms steady Super Imposed N (Corey Callahan), the sharp JJ Flynn (Vic Kirby), and a pair of winners las time out: George & Tina Dennis Forty Five Red (Mike Cole) and Tom Lazzaros Never Say Never N (Jonathan Roberts)

The DSBF three-year-old division culminated with four $100,000 finals on the meet's closing day, Thursday, March 29.

(Dover Downs)Fiesta Hermosa will be back for Labor Day weekend, but with a new local look, slightly different nameFormer French President Nicolas Sarkozy was handed preliminary charges Wednesday over allegations he accepted millions of euros in illegal campaign funding from the late Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi.



A judicial official told The Associated Press that investigative judges overseeing the probe gave the ex-president charges of illegally funding his 2007 winning campaign, passive corruption and receiving money from Libyan embezzlement.



The person was not authorized to speak publicly about the case.



The charges came after Sarkozy was questioned for two days by anticorruption police at a station in Nanterre, northwest of the French capital. The investigation involving funding for his 2007 president campaign. Investigators are examining allegations that Gadhafis regime secretly gave the politician 50 million euros overall for his campaign.



The sum would be more than double the legal campaign funding limit at the time  21 million euros. In addition, the alleged payments would violate French rules against foreign financing and requiring that the source of campaign funds be declared.

France's former president has been put under investigation and charged with taking money from Libya's former autocrat for the French election campaign, exceeding the limit usually allowed:If this is so, it somehow doesn't surprise me he'd take money from a tyrant. Sarkozy did nothing to stop Islam when he was president, allowed jihadism to fester, demanded Israel surrender territory to the PLO, and even gave an award to anti-Israeli journalist Charles Enderlin , which I'm sure was no accident. He was even photographed putting his hand on a woman's breast , which is inappropriate behavior for a head of state. If Sarkozy ran for office today in the post-Harvey Weinstein era, the chances are much higher that could be used against him, and make him a far less appealing candidate than before.The least Sarkozy could do now is apologize for the hugest errors he made in his one term, but all the same, I think his political career at this point is over, and his associations with Gaddafi were wrong too. Naturally, if he played any part in Gaddafi's overthrow without ensuring there'd be a suitable replacement and democracy/sanity could reign in Libya, then that's another grave mistake he made. So, in retrospect, nobody needs to feel too sorry to see Sarkozy get charged with felonies.Update: here's more on the American Thinker

Labels: anti-semitism, dhimmitude, France, islam, Israel, jihad, libya, misogyny, Moonbattery, political corruption, terrorismThis Page

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Redirection provided by Blogger to WordPress Migration ServiceTrump meets Saudi Crown Prince, announces $12.5b arms sales

President Donald Trump meets with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in the Oval Office of the White House on Tuesday.

The Washington Post :

Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman kicked off his U.S. visit with talks and lunch at the White House, where President Trump displayed posters showing recent Saudi weapons purchases from the United States, saying that "we make the best equipment in the world."

The $12.5 billion the Saudis were paying for planes, tanks, ships and munitions shown in the posters was "peanuts" for the oil-rich kingdom, Trump joked before cameras in the Oval Office. "You should have increased it," he told Mohammed.

The poster's list of finalized sales fell far short of the $110 billion figure that Trump cited during his visit to Riyadh last May, and some were initiated and approved during the Obama administration. Additional deals might still come to fruition.

Earlier, the prince went to the Capitol to meet with top congressional leaders, many of whom raised concerns over the Saudi-led coalition's role in the war and massive humanitarian crisis in Yemen and the U.S. support role in the conflict.

"We talked about the importance of our relationship, no doubt," Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said in a floor statement after his own session with Mohammed. "But we strongly, strongly pushed back on what is happening right now in Yemen and asked them to take strong corrective actions."

Lawmakers have sharply criticized the war Saudi Arabia has waged with U.S. support over the past several years in Yemen, in which at least 1,000 civilians have been killed in bombing attacks. Sen. Robert Menendez (N.J.), the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, called for a political solution.

"We also talked about the enrichment that they're pursuing and some of the concerns that existed there," Corker said, touching on a disagreement over whether Saudi Arabia should insist on retaining its option to enrich domestic uranium resources under a nuclear cooperation agreement. The deadlock over an agreement has been an obstacle to the ability of firms using U.S. material or technology to bid on construction contracts for a pair of electricity-producing reactors the Saudis want to build.

In group meetings on Capitol Hill, Mohammed spent more than two hours in 20- to 30-minute sessions with the congressional leaders and heads of national security committees from both sides of the aisle.

Vice President Pence and H.R. McMaster, the president's national security adviser, planned dinners in Mohammed's honor, as did the Saudi ambassador to the United States, Khalid bin Salman, the crown prince's brother.



UN chief alarmed by chemical attacks in Syria

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres \"is alarmed at the persistent allegations of the use of chemical weapons in the Syrian Arab Republic,\" said a UN statement

AP, New York :

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres voiced alarm yesterday over allegations of chemical attacks in Syria and urged the Security Council to take action to address "such serious crimes."

The appeal came after Guterres met on Tuesday with the head of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), which has investigated more than 70 cases of toxic gas attacks in Syria since 2014. "The secretary-general is alarmed at the persistent allegations of the use of chemical weapons in the Syrian Arab Republic," said a UN statement.

While the use of chemical weapons is "unjustifiable and abhorrent," "equally unjustifiable is a lack of response to such use," said the statement. "Impunity cannot prevail with respect to such serious crimes."

Guterres renewed a call to the council "to demonstrate unity and resolve on this matter". OPCW chief Ahmet Uzumcu said there had been "several" recent allegations of chemical weapons use in Eastern Ghouta, where the Syrian government is battling to take control over the enclave near Damascus.

The Syrian Observatory of Human Rights has said that chlorine has been used as a toxic agent on villages during the government's offensive in Eastern Ghouta.

Uzumcu said the experts were looking into allegations of chlorine use that were attributed to the Syrian army and to rebel groups. The OPCW's fact-finding mission for Syria was established in April 2014 to determine whether toxic agents were used as a weapon, but it does not have the mandate to establish who is responsible for its use. The Security Council in 2015 set up a panel to determine who was behind the attacks, but that inquiry ended last year when Russia vetoed the extension of its mandate.

Russia maintained that the panel, known as the Joint Investigative Mechanism (JIM), was biased and unprofessional after it concluded in a report that Syrian forces had used sarin in an attack on the rebel-held town of Khan Sheikhun in April last year.

ussia has presented a draft resolution to the council that would set up a new panel - but the United States, Britain and France have rejected the proposal, which they see as a bid to weaken the inquiry.

The United States has circulated a rival draft resolution, but Russia has dismissed that proposal as a bid to revive the defunct JIM.



Message

Shahid Khaqan Abbasi Prime Minister of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan

Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi Thursday said that the Pakistan came into being consequent to a democratic struggle and its security, solidarity and prosperity was also linked with the democracy.

In his message to the nation on Pakistan Day annually observed on March 23, the prime minister urged his countrymen to follow the teachings of Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah and Allama Muhammad Iqbal as a lively and determined nation for the stability and supremacy of the homeland.

He said the Day (March 23) reminded the great moment of 78 years ago when the Muslims of the sub-continent had made a commitment to create an independent Muslim state by breaking the shackles of oppression.

He said on the very Day the Pakistan Muslim League had adopted a historic resolution in a meeting in Lahore chaired by Muhammad Ali Jinnah which was later named as the Resolution of Pakistan.

The prime minister opined that the resolution had created awareness among the Muslims about their destination and within seven years of the resolution, Pakistan came into being. This was the destination, what Allama Iqbal had dreamt of, he added.

He said while observing the Pakistan Day, the people should have a deep insight into our past besides pondering our past as well as the future. We will have to review our successes as well as the shortcomings, the prime minister added.Message

Today, we are celebrating the 78thanniversary of the adoption of the Pakistan Resolution of 23rd March, 1940, with traditional zeal and zest. On this historic day, the Muslims of the subcontinent gathered in Lahore under the inspiring leadership of the Quaid-i-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah. The resolution was presented by Sher e Bangal A.K. Fazlul Huq which changed the course of history.

On this day the Muslims of the subcontinent through their collective will expressed unshakeable resolve to carve out a separate homeland for themselves wherein they could fashion their lives in accordance with their own traditions, values, and culture.

Through their tireless struggle, unparalleled commitment and with the blessings of Allah Almighty, they achieved their objective within a short span of seven years.

Our national objectives include socio-economic development, maintaining cordial relations with other countries, based on mutual respect and promoting peace among nations. Pakistan is a proud Muslim country of over 200 million people. Pakistan is an ancient civilization and is at the same time, a modern country.

The land that constitutes Pakistan has been one of the oldest sites of human habitation. We are proud to be home to the Indus and Gandhara civilizations, spanning a period of 9,000 years.

Pakistan's economy is on the rise and is poised to become a regional economic power. The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) is the flagship project of "One Belt, One Road Initiative" of China.

CPEC has the potential to change the fate of the region in terms of socio-economic development. The mega flagship project will usher in prosperity and progress not only in Pakistan but also in the whole region. The ultimate objective is peace, prosperity, and well-being of the people of the whole the region.

The CPEC is not only a game-changer but also a fate-changer for the region and beyond.

Pakistan and Bangladesh enjoy a very special relationship that continues to deepen.

Our brotherly relations are based on common religion and shared aspirations for peace and economic development. Both the countries maintain a cooperative approach at the bilateral and multilateral levels.

The people-to-people contact continues with the exchange of visits. Our bilateral trade and investment have registered healthy growth.

Bangladesh in its own right is a natural hub between South Asia and East Asia.

Together, we can act as a bridge to bring this whole region into an integrated network of trade and energy corridors. Our close cooperation in OIC and other international fora provides a firm basis for this partnership.

Our bilateral trade is expected to reach almost one billion dollars in the next few years.

Partnerships in the areas of trade, commerce, health, education, and culture have prospered.

Pakistan wishes Bangladesh peace, prosperity and economic well-being.



(Acting High Commissioner of Pakistan to Dhaka H.E. Shah Faisal Kakar on the occasion of the Pakistan National Day 23rd March, 2018)Speaker leaves for Jeddah to perform Umrah

Jatiya Sangsad Speaker Dr Shirin Sharmin Chaudhury left here on Thursday for Jeddah to perform holy Umrah.

An EK-583 flight carrying the speaker left Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport at 9.55am, an official release said.

Shirin Sharmin Chaudhury sought doa from parliament members, countrymen and the people of her constituency as well.

Senior Secretary of the Jatiya Sangsad Secretariat Dr Md Abdur Rob Hawlader and concerned high officials were present at the airport to see Dr Shirin off.

She will also offer Ziarat at the Rawza Mubarak of Prophet Hazrat Muhammad (PBUH) in Madina.

The speaker is expected to return home on March 26.Trump set to announce China sanctions after IP probe

Beijing vows retaliation

AFP :

President Donald Trump was poised to unveil sanctions against China on Thursday for what he called the theft of US intellectual property, fueling fears of a trade war as Beijing vowed to retaliate.

White House spokesman Raj Shah told AFP that Trump will announce actions following an "investigation into China's state-led, market-distorting efforts to force, pressure, and steal US technologies and intellectual property."

According to his schedule, released by the White House on Wednesday evening, he will sign "a Presidential Memorandum targeting China's economic aggression."

The Chinese commerce ministry issued a pre-emptive warning, saying in a statement on Thursday that Beijing "will certainly take all necessary measures to resolutely defend its legitimate rights and interests".

It is just weeks since Trump short-circuited White House deliberations and announced a raft of sanctions on foreign-produced steel and aluminum off the cuff.

That move prompted the resignation of top economic advisor Gary Cohn, a global stock market selloff, legal disputes and threats of retaliatory measures.

On Wednesday, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell warned that the prospect of a trade war was a growing threat to the world's largest economy. Chinese Premier Li Keqiang urged Trump on Tuesday to not act "emotionally," but the impulsive president is showing no sign of backing down.

US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer recently put a separate proposed package of $30 billion in tariffs

on Chinese imports on the president's desk.

And Trump appears to have agreed to at least that amount, as he tries to fulfil campaign promises to get tough on "cheating" by US trade partners, which he says have destroyed American jobs.

The US trade deficit with China ran to a record $375 billion last year-but US exports to the country were also at a record. Washington has long accused Beijing of forcing US companies to turn over proprietary commercial information and intellectual property as a condition of operating in China.

Trump claims to have built up a generally good relationship with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping whom he has praised for his role in pressuring North Korea over its nuclear program.

However, the trade dispute threatens to cast a pall over those relations, especially given the recent warnings from Beijing.Saudi Crown Prince boasted Kushner was `in his pocket`

Al Jazeera News :

Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman boasted US President Donald Trump's senior adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner was "in his pocket", according to a report in The Intercept.

Citing three sources close to the Saudi and Emirati royal families, the news outlet said Kushner provided the heir to the Saudi throne details about Saudi princes who were not loyal to him.

According to a separate source, Mohammed bin Salman is said to have told the Abu Dhabi crown prince, Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, that Kushner was "in his pocket".

Kushner's lawyers have rejected the report as "false and ridiculous", adding that the allegations did not "merit response".

Dozens of Saudi princes, businessmen, and other senior officials were placed under arrest at the Ritz Carlton in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, in November, ostensibly over accusations of corruption.

Some were later released but only after paying huge sums back to the Saudi state.

The Intercept report comes just weeks after Kushner had his White House security clearance to access highly classified US intelligence revoked.

According to the Washington Post, officials from United Arab Emirates (UAE), China, Israel and Mexico, had "privately discussed ways they can manipulate Jared Kushner".

Kushner and the Saudi prince are said to have struck up a close relationship since Trump's inauguration and the two are believed to have talked into the early hours during a visit by Kushner to Saudi Arabia in October.

The 37-year-old has reported earned the ire of others in the Trump administration, including the White House chief of staff, John Kelly.Beneficiaries under ACC scan

The Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC) has launched a probe into Farmers Bank's large-scale fraud allegations involving Tk 400 crore.

The anti-graft watchdog has formed a three-member investigation team led by its Director Syed Iqbal Hossain, officials said.

They said the ACC investigators have already obtained the documents relating to processing and sanctioning of loans provided by the bank to various business firms and persons breaching credit norms.

"We're examining the documents to set the next course of action," an ACC official told The New Nation on Thursday, on condition of anonymity.

He said the ACC investigators have found various irregularities in sanctioning loans to a number of business firms and persons. "The bank's board extended lending facility to them without proper documentation conducting pre and post sanction inspections and without ascertaining the end use of the loan," he added.

The official said the head of the probe team is now out of the country. ACC will go for action against the perpetrators of the loan scandal after he returns home.

"The ACC team will unearth the beneficiaries of the loan fraud after verifying the antecedents. None will be spared if found guilty," he said.

When asked, he said, the ACC probe team is looking into whether the board members, including the bank's former chairman Dr Mohiuddin Khan Alamgir, were also involved in the scam. "The ACC will not bow down to any political pressure or influence from any quarter while carrying out the investigation," he said.

"Travel ban has already imposed against a number of the bank's former board members so that they cannot flee abroad to escape the ACC prosecution team. We will summon them after getting green signal from the ACC high-ups. They will face quizzing over the alleged loan scandal," he added.

The Farmers Bank began operations in June 2013 with Tk 400 crore capital. However, irregularities resurfaced within a year.

The bank had allegedly recruited manpower before receiving its license from the Central Bank.

Between September and November 2015, the Bangladesh Bank (BB) conducted special inspections at three Dhaka branches (Gulshan, Motijheel and Shyampur) of the bank and found gross violations of banking rules in disbursing loans worth around Tk 400 crore.

The BB found some directors, including chairman Dr Mohiuddin Khan Alamgir and Mahabubul Haque Chisty, of the bank allegedly involved in sanctioning these loans, violating the credit rules.

Chisty, a powerful director and also chairman of the bank's executive committee, got involved in loan scams worth Tk 50 crore within one year of the bank's operation.

When BB detected the anomalies, it asked the Farmers Bank in May 2015 to remove Chisty from the committee.

Challenging the BB decision, the bank went to court on January 11, 2016. After two days, the Central Bank appointed an observer in the bank to scrutinise operations of the bank and slapped a fine of Tk 10 lakh on charges of illegal payments and loan irregularities.

Irked by the BB's move, Mohiuddin, a ruling party lawmaker and chairman of a parliamentary committee on public accounts, summoned a scrutiny report conducted on the functioning of the Central Bank.

The parliamentary committee raised questions on the functions of the Central Bank.

Mohiuddin flexed his muscles asking the audit office to submit a special report on BB.

Later, Chisty replied to the show-cause notice issued by BB on March 26, 2016 confessing that he was responsible for the anomalies. But he said he violated the rules and regulations inadvertently in disbursing the loans.

He then resigned from his post in the executive committee, citing personal reasons. Then Mohiuddin, the bank's chairman, made Chisty chairman of the bank's audit committee, another vital committee that supervised the bank's activities.

Finally, Mohiuddin and Chisty succumbed to Central Bank's pressure and tendered their resignation on November 26 last year.

On December 19, the BB also removed Farmers Bank's Managing Director AKM Shameem for his failure to manage the bank efficiently and address its liquidity crunch.

People of BD can achieve anything: PM

Attributing the achievement of Bangladesh's graduation from the group of least developed countries (LDCs) to a developing one to the people of the country, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina on Thursday said they can achieve anything.

"This achievement is the achievement of the people of Bangladesh. I think country's people are the main source of all power. They can achieve anything," she said.

The Prime Minister was addressing a reception accorded to her at Bangabandhu International Conference Centre (BICC) for the government's historic achievement of making Bangladesh eligible for graduating from the LDC group.

The function was arranged as part of a five-day government programme to celebrate the graduation.

Sheikh Hasina said the achievement is for those who work unitedly and contribute to the country's development. "We've to maintain this pace of development. This march must not be stopped," she said.

She urged all to work for the country so that people can live keeping their heads high. "We want to live as a proud nation... we want to walk keeping our heads high. We liberated our country through a struggle and we've proved that we can stand on our own feet."

Giving all credit to people for the success, the Prime Minister said had they not stood by her and brought Awami League to power, it would not have been possible for her and the government to work for the country and attain this remarkable achievement. "To me, power is nothing but an opportunity to serve the country and its people. I never believed that power is for personal gain," she said.

Sheikh Hasina said, Bangladesh's graduation to a developing country from the LDC group has opened up the door of its potential to emerge as a developed and prosperous nation.

She, however, said acquiring this achievement was not as easy as speaking. The Prime Minister said assuming office in 1996 and later in 2009, her government undertook various people-oriented development programmes in a planned way, and such steps made it possible to achieve today's recognition as a developing country.

Due importance was attached to starting the process of development from the grassroots level and villages, she said, adding that such efforts helped ensure sustainable progress towards eliminating poverty.

On this very happy day, Hasina recalled with gratitude Father of the Nation Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, saying he had struggled throughout his life to change the fate of the common people.

Extending her heartiest congratulations to the people of the country, the Prime Minister said her government showed the way while all concerned, including government officials, private organisations and business community, made the impossible possible.

She also expressed gratitude to the development partners, international community and foreign friends who provided support to the government's development efforts and continue it.

Terming the Bangalees as a heroic nation, the Prime Minister said they do not want to live as a nation of beggars as they want to live keeping heads high and with dignity in the world.

Chaired by Finance Minister AMA Muhith, UN Under Secretary General Fekitamoeloa Katoa also spoke at the programme. A written statement of UNDP Administrator Achim Steiner was also read out.

At the programme, the Finance Minister handed over the UN certificate conveying the announcement on the country's graduation from the LCD group to a developing one to the Prime Minister.

The Prime Minister also unveiled a commemorative stamp and a commemorative note on the occasion.

The UN Secretary General, World Bank chief, ADB chief, USAID chief and JICA chief gave their speeches of appreciation through video messages.

Information Minister Hasanul Haq Inu, State Minister Tarana Halim and Information Secretary Abdul Malek handed over a photo album on "Ten Special Initiatives of Sheikh Hasina" to the Prime Minister.

The Prime Minister was greeted with bouquets on behalf of President Abdul Hamid, Speaker Dr Shirin Sharmin Chaudhury and Chief Justice Syed Mahmud Hossain. Officials from the respective offices handed over the bouquets.

On behalf of ruling Awami League, 14-party alliance and leaders of other political parties, flower bouquets were also presented to Sheikh Hasina while Leader of the Opposition in Parliament Begum Raushon Ershad greeted her by presenting a flower bouquet.Donald Trump can't be a friend of Muslims, Muslim countries must learn to act together

US President Donald Trump and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman have discussed military deals, investment in the US, and security cooperation, during the prince's first visit to the White House. Referring to the political shake-up that Saudi Arabia has witnessed in recent months, Trump on Tuesday praised the 32-year-old crown prince, popularly known as MBS, in his new role.



Trump held up charts to show the depth of Saudi purchases of US military hardware, ranging from ships to missiles, planes and fighting vehicles. For his part, MBS, who is 39 years younger than Trump, pointed to the history of the alliance between the two countries.



Last year, the two leaders agreed on a plan for $ 200bn worth of Saudi investments with the US, including large purchases of US military equipment. However, in Tuesday's meeting, Bin Salman said the plan exceeded expectations, doubling the amount of investments between Saudi Arabia and the US.



On the political level, the American President is trying to sell the crown prince to the American public, when Saudi Arabia's image is really bad he said. It's basically a show to sell the fact that Saudi Arabia is an ally of the US, at a time when most Americans tend to think of the Saudi monarchy as a wealthy supporter of terror. But at a more strategic level the visit has more to do with realigning Saudi Arabia and the US against Iran.



It is quite clear that President Trump does not care about the Muslim world in general--he is only interested in the money which Saudi Arabia can give to the US. The Saudi Prince is seen as rich and amenable to the suggestions of the US--and that is all that matters. The idea of a rich prince who will spend his oil money is what attracts Trump to him in the first place. But Mr Trump has nothing to offer to the rest of the Muslim world. He does not care about Yemen or the Rohingya as they have no oil to offer him or money to purchase US defence equipment.



Prince Salman, or MBS as he is often called, thinks he can buy his way into the hearts of the American people with his multi-billion dollar investments. Unfortunately this will not stop the negative publicity which his Kingdom is associated with. Saudi Arabia has so far committed to spending USD 12.5 billion only--far short of USD 200 billion. But the US and Mr Trump only think of him as a rich sheikh who is in the US for defence purchases. He should understand that he has no real influence over the US except what money can buy.



The different Muslim countries of Middle East must learn to act together. The Sheiks of the Middle East are known in the West as filthy rich to be used one against the other. The Muslim countries have to speak from the position of strength if they are to be seriously taken.



It is a shame that the Sheiks lavishly pour in money to please America but the present government in the United States under President Trump has no sympathy for the cause of Muslims especially for the sufferings of the Palestinians. The state of Israel is being tolerated as a nuclear power for punishing the Muslims. We must make a distinction between the American people and the government of Trump. We should have all the respect and good will for the great American people for their democratic virtues and human right values.Accused Hassan's wife testifies

Court Correspondent :

Tania Begum, wife of accused Hassan Mahmud of the murder case of DB Inspector Md Jalal Uddin, gave statement in connection with the incident, Under Section 164 of the Criminal Procedure Code.

Inspector Wahiduzzaman, Investigation Officer of the case, filed a petition with a Dhaka court on Thursday. Later, Magistrate Khurshid Alam of the Chief Metropolitan Magistrate (CMM)

Court recorded Tania's statement.

Tania said in her statement, "Hassan's friend Manik came home on the night, the incident took place. They were gossiping on the roof-top of the second floor. Around 11:30pm, I heard sound of two bullets. Then, I ran on to the roof and found firearms at the hands of my husband Hassan. Just after shooting, Hassan and his friend Manik fled the scene by the sunset of an adjacent building.

On March 19, Jalal was shot in the head when he went to raid a three-storey building (House No. 105/A/1) of Pirerbagh in the city near Alimuddin School where some criminals were reportedly hiding. He was taken to the Square Hospital of West Panthapath area, where the physicians declared him dead.

Earlier, the court fixed May 6 for submission of report in the case, after receiving the case statement on Thursday.



Many challenges need to overcome: Economists

Anisul Islam Noor :

Though a UN panel has announced Bangladesh's eligibility to graduate to a developing country category, it needs to overcome a number of domestic challenges, including unemployment, quality education, cent percent enrolment in primary schools, poor health service and corruption to finally become a developing one, said economists.

The Committee for Development Policy, a UN panel, on March 16 announced Bangladesh's eligibility for the developing country category as it has met the three prerequisite criteria in terms of National Income Per Capita, Human Assets Index and Economic Vulnerability Index.

Talking to The New Nation, an adviser of the former caretaker government AB Mirza Azizul Islam said that as a least developed country (LDC), Bangladesh enjoys duty-free access to the European Union and some other countries

Bangladesh's export sector will face tougher competition in the global market after losing duty-free market access and preferential trade benefits when it graduates from LDC status and officially joins the ranks of developing countries, he said.

Mirza Aziz said Bangladesh has to focus to overcome some challenges like increase of private investment, ensure proper development of human resources and reduction of poverty.

Despite progress in different sectors, 22 to 23 per cent people are living below internationally recognized poverty level, so poverty reduction initiatives should be given priority, he said.

Mirza Aziz said, quality education and enrolment of 100 per cent in the primary school should be ensured.

Bangladesh's position at 177th in the World Bank's business perform index and loan defaulter is a regular matter here that tendency should be removed to be a developing category country, he said.

Former governor of Bangladesh Bank Dr Salehuddin Ahmed said, the country gets the recognition based on some index where institutional transparency, right of expression, accountability and rules of law are not counted.

Without proper exercise of democracy in every decision making level and making discrimination in development Bangladesh cannot be achieved as developing country, he said.

Graduate people are not getting their desire jobs that called indirect unemployment, Dr Salehuddin said.

Professor Anu Muhammad said, "Bangladesh achieved it after 47 years where other south Asian countries like Maldives, Bhutan, even Nepal achieved ahead of us."

Talking with The New Nation he said, environmental pollution, corruption, capital flight, unemployment, discrimination in development, stability and quality of health service as well as education is not counted to announce the status.

Bangladesh primarily achieve it where Myanmar and Laos are in similar level in this region. The country will have to pass two more reviews in 2021 and 2024 to get rid of the least developed country (LDC) tag. Upon its promotion, Bangladesh will get three more years' grace period after which it will lose the trade facilities it enjoys as an LDC, he said.

After graduation, Bangladeshi exporters will have to pay an additional 6.7 per cent tariff, making competition against rivals, some of whom enjoy benefits under EU GSP Plus and preferential trade agreements, Professor Anu Muhammad opined.

Probable new tariffs for EU, non-EU, and Canada are 8.7 per cent, 3.9 per cent, and 7.3 per cent, respectively. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development estimated that Bangladesh may face an export decline between 5.5 per cent and 7.5 per cent, he said.

"Unless Bangladesh manages to renegotiate through bilateral agreements or as part of regional trade arrangements, it will face MFN (most favoured nation) tariff rates following the graduation or reduced preferential margins under standard GSP scheme in EU market," said Mustafizur Rahman, distinguished fellow of Centre for Policy Dialogue (CPD).

Preference erosion will likely have adverse implications for export competitiveness, and export earnings and consequently, for GDP, balance of payments, employment and poverty alleviation, the economist added.

Once Bangladesh loses duty-free market access, it will leave the country with different challenges regarding the tariff, Mustafiz warned.

He said Bangladesh would have to explore windows of opportunities through smart negotiations and engage proactively with international organizations for preferential treatment.

Govt celebrates on graduation from LDCs thru` different events

Staff Reporter :

People from all walks of life on Thursday joined a countrywide weeklong celebration marking Bangladesh's graduation from the group of Least Developed Countries (LDCs) to a developing nation.

The capital Dhaka as well as other parts of the country has been adorned with festoons, posters, banners and colourful flags to celebrate the country's success.

In Dhaka, huge processions were brought out from different places that merged at Bangabandhu National Stadium.

Government officials from different Ministries, Divisions, Departments and offices brought out processions in the city with banners and festoons. Different classes of people were also joined the processions with placards and banners highlighting development of the country.

They also chanted slogans on various success of the present government and economic progress of the country.

Artistes, players, eminent personalities and dignitaries have been seen joined the processions in different areas on their way to Bangabandhu National Stadium.

Many rallies under different banners with musical instruments were seen passing streets across the city.

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina inaugurated the celebration at the Bangabandhu International Conference Centre (BICC) in the morning.

Later, she was given a grand reception by the Economic Relations Division (ERD) under the Ministry of Finance.

At the reception, Finance Minister AMA Muhith handed over the UN's letter of recognition to the Prime Minister for the significant achievements of her government in attaining the prestigious status for the nation and the country.

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina in the evening joined a colourful cultural function along with her family members at the stadium.

An amazing laser show and firework also displayed at the function.



People of BD can achieve anything: PM

Fire works at Bangabandhu National Stadium on Thursday in connection with week-long celebration marking Bangladesh\'s graduation from LDCs to a developing nation.

Attributing the achievement of Bangladesh's graduation from the group of least developed countries (LDCs) to a developing one to the people of the country, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina on Thursday said they can achieve anything.

"This achievement is the achievement of the people of Bangladesh. I think country's people are the main source of all power. They can achieve anything," she said.

The Prime Minister was addressing a reception accorded to her at Bangabandhu International Conference Centre (BICC) for the government's historic achievement of making Bangladesh eligible for graduating from the LDC group.

The function was arranged as part of a five-day government programme to celebrate the graduation.

Sheikh Hasina said the achievement is for those who work unitedly and contribute to the country's development. "We've to maintain this pace of development. This march must not be stopped," she said.

She urged all to work for the country so that people can live keeping their heads high. "We want to live as a proud nation... we want to walk keeping our heads high. We liberated our country through a struggle and we've proved that we can stand on our own feet."

Giving all credit to people for the success, the Prime Minister said had they not stood by her and brought Awami League to power, it would not have been possible for her and the government to work for the country and attain this remarkable achievement. "To me, power is nothing but an opportunity to serve the country and its people. I never believed that power is for personal gain," she said.

Sheikh Hasina said, Bangladesh's graduation to a developing country from the LDC group has opened up the door of its potential to emerge as a developed and prosperous nation.

She, however, said acquiring this achievement was not as easy as speaking. The Prime Minister said assuming office in 1996 and later in 2009, her government undertook various people-oriented development programmes in a planned way, and such steps made it possible to achieve today's recognition as a developing country.

Due importance was attached to starting the process of development from the grassroots level and villages, she said, adding that such efforts helped ensure sustainable progress towards eliminating poverty. On this very happy day, Hasina recalled with gratitude Father of the Nation Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, saying he had struggled throughout his life to change the fate of the common people.

Extending her heartiest congratulations to the people of the country, the Prime Minister said her government showed the way while all concerned, including government officials, private organisations and business community, made the impossible possible.

She also expressed gratitude to the development partners, international community and foreign friends who provided support to the government's development efforts and continue it.

Terming the Bangalees as a heroic nation, the Prime Minister said they do not want to live as a nation of beggars as they want to live keeping heads high and with dignity in the world.

Chaired by Finance Minister AMA Muhith, UN Under Secretary General Fekitamoeloa Katoa also spoke at the programme. A written statement of UNDP Administrator Achim Steiner was also read out.

At the programme, the Finance Minister handed over the UN certificate conveying the announcement on the country's graduation from the LCD group to a developing one to the Prime Minister.

The Prime Minister also unveiled a commemorative stamp and a commemorative note on the occasion.

The UN Secretary General, World Bank chief, ADB chief, USAID chief and JICA chief gave their speeches of appreciation through video messages.

Information Minister Hasanul Haq Inu, State Minister Tarana Halim and Information Secretary Abdul Malek handed over a photo album on "Ten Special Initiatives of Sheikh Hasina" to the Prime Minister.

The Prime Minister was greeted with bouquets on behalf of President Abdul Hamid, Speaker Dr Shirin Sharmin Chaudhury and Chief Justice Syed Mahmud Hossain. Officials from the respective offices handed over the bouquets.

On behalf of ruling Awami League, 14-party alliance and leaders of other political parties, flower bouquets were also presented to Sheikh Hasina while Leader of the Opposition in Parliament Begum Raushon Ershad greeted her by presenting a flower bouquet.The Undead Archives

I have finally salvaged my pre-Blogger TDR archives and added them into Blogger. They are almost totally in the form of one giant post for each month. And the formatting strayed from the originals. Sorry. But historians everywhere can rejoice that this treasure trove of my thoughts is restored to the world.Yes, the decision belongs on the local level

No, no one should be able to dictate whether people wear masks

Vote

View ResultsThe best bang for your buck! This option enables you to purchase online 24/7 access and receive the Sunday, Tuesday & Thursday print edition at no additional cost * Print edition only available in our carrier delivery area. Allow up to 72 hours for delivery of your print edition to begin. Print edition not available for Day Pass option.Top human resources (HR) and IT leaders from leading organisations in the Middle East and North Africa (Mena) region along with global technology trendsetters will attend the HR Tech Mena Summit, next month in Dubai, UAE.



Dubai-based QnA International, a business-to-business (B2B) event specialist, revealed that the UAE Ministry of Human Resources and Emiratisation has endorsed the fourth edition of its premier summit, which will take place on May 7 and 8, at the Palazzo Versace.



This one of a kind initiative in the Mena region is focused on how technology developments affect human resources function across organisations in all the sectors, said a statement



Initiated in 2015 by QnA International and with three powerful editions in the past, the summit has evolved into a powerhouse of its own that brings together regional thought leaders and international experts to discuss the ongoing digital revolution in the workplace, it said.



Sidh N C, director, QnA International, said: The future of HR, and the organisation, will be a hodgepodge mix of people and technology such as artificial intelligence (AI), robotics, and IoT to name just a few of the revolutionary tech affecting the workplace.



To manage these new changes in the interaction between human workers and technology, and the technologies involved in managing human workers too, platforms such as the summit provide a great opportunity for learning and understanding, he continued.



The summit will tackle various subjects from AI, robotics, employee learning systems, the changes in traditional HR processes, systems, and products, gamification, the importance of social media, and the challenges in adapting to a SaaS delivery model, and cloud systems.



At this years edition, the summit has introduced a new format with the main conference on day one, and two parallel sessions focused on Talent Tech, and Learning and Development Tech on day two that will give delegates a choice between diving deeper into topics of their choice, and to explore networking opportunities, of which the organisers have planned over 15 hours, it stated.  TradeArabia News ServicePolypipe, one of Europe's largest manufacturers of piping systems, has taken a decision to close its Dubai factory, the company said in its 2017 annual report.

The company will pursue alternative manufacturing strategy in the Middle East, it said. The decision follows a decline in the unit's business due to the UAE and Saudi-led embargo on Qatar.

The companys overseas revenue was down 5.4 per cent due to the embargo, imposed in June last year, and also due to continuing Middle East project funding issues, Polypipe said in the report.

The factory was set up in the middle of 2016 in the Jebel Ali Free Zone, and went on to fulfil orders worth 3.8 million ($5.38 million) that year. But with 60 per cent of its output destined for Qatar, the embargo proved costly and Polypipe ceased operations last year, incurring a charge of 900,000, Global Construction Review said, quoting the annual report.

Whilst the Middle East still represents a significant opportunity for the group, we have decided to pursue an alternative manufacturing strategy in the region through use of sub-contractors and to close permanently our Dubai manufacturing facility, said chief executive Martin Payne, ShareCast News reports.

All equipment will be relocated back to our Horncastle plant where Polystorm is manufactured for the UK market, enabling us to remove the need for more expensive sub-contract manufacturing in the UK.The Culinary Company, a newly launched catering concept, hosted an exclusive launch event on March 19 and was attended by members of the media, social media and key individuals from the industry.



The idea behind The Culinary Company is to offer a new standard of catering in the by providing unique and creative solutions to all catering requirements from weddings to corporate events, said managing director of The Culinary Company, Fatima Fuad.



The food industry specifically, and the overall hospitality industry in Bahrain, has witnessed a great change both on the consumer level and supplier end. The requirements and demands are changing and it is vital that catering companies evolve to better suit the requirements of the customers by creating adaptable services, added Fatima.



The Culinary Company originated from a previous company called Foods Limited which started off as a corporate lunch box delivery service back in 2010. Backed by eight years of experience, the company has offered its services to a range of corporate and individual clients in Bahrain.



The Culinary Company specialises in catering and creating speciality culinary ventures aimed at redefining traditional catering in Bahrain. The company offers catering services for private, corporate and special events along with canteen management services. - TradeArabia News Service

Spanish-based Barcelo Hotel Group has announced plans to expand into the UAE with the opening of two new properties and seven more in the pipeline.



A family run business with over 85 years of history, Barcelo Hotel Group operates more than 230 hotels under four brands in 22 countries worldwide. The brands include Royal Hideaway Luxury Hotels & Resorts, Barcelo Hotels & Resorts, Occidental Hotels & Resorts and Allegro Hotels.



The group recently unveiled The Barcelo Residences Dubai Marina hotel, located on the south side of the Palm Jumeirah island in Dubai, and The Occidental Sharjah Grand Hotel, which was previously Sharjah Grand Hotel. The alcohol-free property recently completed renovation and was rebranded under the group's Occidental brand.



Jaime Buxo, chief development officer of Barcelo Hotel Group, said: "We are seeing that the Barcelo Hotel Group is being widely welcomed along with its hotel brands thanks to the groups values, which many Emirate businesses share, such as being a family-owned business with more than 80 years of history in the tourism industry, its solidity, and its flexible and personalised approach to the goals it sets."



"We are currently negotiating and looking forward to signing contracts for seven hotels in the Emirates between now and the end of 2018," he said.



The Barcelo Residences Dubai Marina caters to families, couples and friends, offering 220 modern, stylish apartments. The luxury hotel has facilities including an outdoor swimming, a hot tub, and a modern fitness centre. Located next to the Dubai Marina Mall, guests will have access to a number of popular locations in the emirate.



The family-friendly Occidental Sharjah Grand Hotel boasts a private beach and 217 guest rooms with private balconies. Facilities at the beachfront hotel include a fitness centre, wellness centre and massage parlour, a kids club, a waterslide, a sun terrace, meeting rooms and a business centre. Guests can enjoy international buffet dining and a la carte cuisine at the alcohol-free Al Meena restaurant. - TradeArabia News ServiceBahrain has been named the most welcoming country in the Middle East and the fifth-friendliest country for foreign residents in the world by the Expat Insider 2017 survey, which offers an in-depth analysis of life abroad.



Now in its fourth year, the annual study polled more than 12,500 respondents from 166 nationalities. The final ranking of the 65 destinations is based on how these countries were rated by their expat residents with factors analysed including the cost of living, safety and security, family life, personal finances and working abroad.



For the first time, Portugal stole the spotlight, climbing up nine places since 2016 to take the top position as the world's most welcoming country for foreigners. According to the survey, close to every expat living there (94 per cent) stated total satisfaction with the attitude of locals towards foreign residents.



In addition to Portugal, this years top 10 most welcoming countries for expats are Taiwan, Mexico, Cambodia, Bahrain, Costa Rica, Oman, Colombia, Vietnam and Canada, the survey revealed.



On the opposite end of the spectrum, Kuwait firmly stays in last place for the fourth year in a row. There is an increasing anti-expat sentiment from locals, according to an Indian expat living in the country. In fact, nearly half the expats living there (46 per cent) rate the attitude of the local population towards foreign residents negatively, which is nearly three times the global average (16 per cent).



Switzerland and Austria do not show an improved performance either: Austria even dropped five places, down to ranking second-last (64th), and Switzerland remains the third-unfriendliest country for the second consecutive year. An Italian expat considers Austrians to be uninterested in making new friends, while a Mexican expat describes local residents in Switzerland as closed and uneasy. However, with 35 per cent negative ratings in Austria and 30 per cent in Switzerland, they are still considerably friendlier than Kuwait, the survey showed. - TradeArabia News ServiceBy TwoCircles.net Staff Reporter

With Karnataka state elections around the corner, all eyes are focussed on whether Congress will retain power or if BJP will take over the reins in another state before the 2019 elections. However, amidst all the focus on parties and political campaigns, one issue that has got mostly side-lined is the issue of missing voters: people who are eligible to vote but find their names missing from the electoral list. This is where the Center for Research and Debates in Development Policy (CRDDP, New Delhi) is trying to step in by ensuring that over Muslims whose names are missing from the voter list are able to enrol as soon as possible.

CRDDP has developed an Android App and a website, which provides details of the exact home in a specified assembly-constituency with the missing voters ID. People can get the download link of app by giving a miss call to 8099683683

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Speaking with TwoCircles.net, Syed Khalid, COO, CRDDP, says, We have completed data analysis for three assembly constituencies namely, Shivaji Nagar (Bengaluru), Hubli East and Kolar and found about 18,800 Muslim households in Shivaji Nagar constituency. Khalid said that CRDDP has estimated that about 13-18 lakh Muslims have their names missing from the list in the state.

Talking about the methodology behind the project, Khalid explained, CRDDP in Shivaji Nagar constituency identified a total 18,453 Muslim households. Census 2011 data (Household seriesHH-01) suggests that only 4.3% of households have a household size of one voter. But our data extracts from Election Commission Electoral Rolls found that 8,795 households have only one registered voter, which was almost 43% of all registered Muslim voters. So, Khalid says, about four months ago, CRDDP started working on it full time. With the help of volunteers and a bare minimum support staff, we are trying to ensure that we reach all households which have more than one voter and get them registered. This is their fundamental right, Khalid adds.

Khalid says that one of the major misconceptions is that once the electoral roll is out, one cannot register as a voter. The truth is that till the last date of nomination, voters can register themselves. Ideally, what we are doing should have been done by the government, but regardless, we are trying to help everyone avail their fundamental right, he adds.

The way the system works is that each volunteer will be given access to Android App where s/he can take responsibility for servicing 10-20 households in their region. Volunteers during their visits update the contact numbers of the new applicants for the voter ID through the App. CRDDP support team is available on call for real-time support and clarifications. Interested volunteers, please register. This service from CRDDP is free to the registered volunteers. As on March 18, the app had been downloaded over 7,000 times while there are currently 5,000 people helping CRDDP identify people whose names are missing from the list, Khalid says.

The app and the methodology can be taken nation-wide and be applied to all communities, Khalid says. We chose Muslims because, given their names, it is easier to narrow the search parameters. But of course, with the right amount of backend support and proper funding, this project can be useful for every constituency and community, he adds.

Heres how you can help

The IT-based research and analysis that identifies missing Muslim voters in each constituency is time-consuming and must be undertaken by the professionals. You can help by either volunteering or support the organisation financially. It cost Rs 4,000 per constituency to generate data, analyse and feed it into the Android App. CRDDP urges the community leaders, politicians and philanthropists to support this cause to politically empower the Muslims of Karnataka. The sponsor and supporter of this cause will be acknowledged by mentioning her/his name/institution on the website and the Android App against the name of the constituency, says Khalid. Details of the bank for donation can be seen on the website and the app.New Delhi: The All India Muslim Majlis-e-Mushawarat, the apex body of Indian Muslims & Confederation of 18 prominent Muslim Organisations, has condemned the attempts being made to compromise the minority status of Jamia Millia Islamia after the Centre filed an affidavit in the Delhi High Court opposing the order of the National Commission for Minority Educational Institutions that had declared Jamia Millia Islamia a religious minority institution.

Such attempts not only totally negate but also exposed the hollowness of the avowed slogan of the Government led by PM Narendra Modi that there should be sab ka saath sab ka vikas, said Navaid Hamid, President, AIMMM.

What is more surprising, as is evident from the order dated 13.3.2018, that NO COUNSEL advocate appeared for and on behalf of the Jamia Millia Islamia to espouse the cause of its minority status resulting an adverse order being so passed. Such negligence, whether motivated or coincidental, is seriously culpable that an issue of paramount importance relating to a Muslim minority institution was dealt with so casually, he added.

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AIMMM has demanded an immediate explanation as to how the failure occurred on the part of the Jamia Millia Islamia officials including its Vice Chancellor and the registrar in failing to appear and pursue the matter.

It is a known fact that the vice chancellor of the Jamia is to retire within a period of one year, and he may be exploiting such opportunities to please the ruling party in power to secure future plump postings at the expense of the future of the Muslim community, AIMMM said.

Apprehending that the cause of Jamia Millia Islamia may be unceremoniously compromised by vested elements, AIMMM has decided to intervene in the matter for the larger good of the education of Muslims and also for safeguarding the minority character of Jamia Millia Islamia.

Importantly, the Attorney General of India, Mukul Rohatgi had advised the HRD Ministry, then under Smriti Irani, last year that it was entitled to change its view in court and revert to the stand that JMI is not a minority institution and respecting the ruling of NCMEI was not in accordance with the law.

According to the students in Jamia Millia Islamia, the withdrawal of minority status will have a potential backlash and students will take to the streets if the government tries to impinge upon the university minority character.

The BJP government is known for its anti-Muslim stand and time and again they have been targeting minority institutions. Jamia Millia Islamia is one of the only two higher learning seats for Muslims in Northern India (the other being Aligarh Muslim University) and snatching minority status will lead to downfall of the confidence of Muslim students and negatively impact the growth of Muslims, said Ateeb Maaz Khan, National Joint secretary, Muslim Student Federation and student at Jamia Millia Islamia.

He added that students would be forced to come on roads and protest if the government moves ahead with its plans of withdrawing the university minority status.

Another student activist, Khusbhu Khan from Jamia said, Tinkering with minority status is like robbing the community of its valuables and we wont stay silent on it. It is their attempt to Hindutva-ise the university, as any such attempt is not possible until it remains a Muslim-majority university.

It is the minority quota of Jamia which ensures that Muslim students get a chance to study in this prestigious university. Most of the students coming from our community either have done their basic schooling from Islamic seminaries or schools back in villages which reduces their chances of competing with students coming from relatively good schools and colleges, said Sameen Saifi, who is doing her degree from Department of Education, JMI.

Recognising Jamia Millia Islamia (JMI) as a minority institution, the university administration had in May 2011 issued a circular, implementing the 50% reservation to Muslim students for admissions in all courses of the university. Only 42% seats were open for the general category students. If the minority status of the university is withdrawn, the Muslim quota will automatically be discarded and reservation for SC/ST and OBC will be applied as followed in other central universities.By TwoCircles.net Staff Reporter

Shadab Ansari has been practising law for over a decade, but never before did he resort to leaving the court via the back gate after a days proceeding. As a lawyer in Ranchi, he had also travelled to Ramgarh located 50 km away numerous times on his bike and public transport, but never before did he resort to looking over his shoulder so often. Since July last year, he along with two other lawyersRaju Hembrom from Ranchi and Mumtaz Ansari from Dhanbadhave been watching over their back, double-checking everything around them and living partly in feat but all for a noble cause. Thanks to these three lawyers from the Human Rights Law Network, the family of Alimuddin Ansari, who was mercilessly lynched in Ramgarh last year over alleged charges of transporting beef, have got justice. On March 21, a fast-track court in Ramgarh awarded life sentences to 11 people most of whom belonged to Hindu right-wing organisations.

The 11 convicted include a district media cell in-charge of BJP, Nitayanand Mahto and at least three members of the local gau Raksha Samiti  Santosh Singh, Deepak Mishra and Chhotu Verma. The others are Sikander Ram, Vicky Saw, Raju Kumar, Vikram Prasad, Kapil Thakur and Uttam Kumar.

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On June 29, 2017, 45-year-old Alimuddin Ansari was attacked by a mob and his Maruti van set afire Bazartand village in Ramgarh. He was initially taken to Ramgarhs Sadar hospital by the local police and later shifted to Rajendra Institute of Medical Sciences (RIMS) in Ranchi, where he died within minutes of being admitted.

But beyond the rather seminal event of seeing 11 people being awarded life imprisonment, there are three crucial factors which ensured that for once, the family of a person lynched to death got justice: the fact that the trial was conducted in a fast-track court, the fact that three lawyers stood up against the right-wing forces and the most important fact: a police force that actually followed the constitution and stayed true to the case.

Always knew this case will be tough, but we never gave up

Shadab Ansari came to know about the brutal lynching of Alimuddin Ansari like the rest of the nation: newspaper articles and WhatsApp videos. On July 13, following strong agitation from locals and the heightened media scrutiny, the BJP government referred to the case to a fast-track court. This, according to Ansari, was the first sign that there was a chance the family of Alimuddin might get justice. We all know the stories of delays in the normal courts but when the matter came to a fast-track court, we knew that regardless of what the outcome will be, at least the case will move at a good pace, he told TwoCircles.net.

But even then, for the family of Alimuddin to have any chance against the right-wing machinery, there was a need for good, honest lawyers who were ready to take the risks, and this is where the Human Rights Law Network stepped in. Ansari says, We met the family who told us that there was no one to represent them and given what they had gone through, they did not have much money. But we at HRLN decided to fight the case regardless.

Soon, however, Ansari realised that the element of danger was almost inbuilt in a case like this. When I went to the court for the first time, I saw huge crowds supporting the accused while the family of Alimuddin was hopelessly outnumberedwe realised that we were not fighting just against the accused but an entire machinery, he recalls. A resident of Ranchi, he would often go on the bike to the court in Ramgarh. I and Rajiv Hembrom would always be told by our well-wishers: be safe and stay alert. We never knew when we might be attacked. Thankfully, no such thing happened but I can say that there was never a moment we could relax, says Ansari.

In cases like these when the accused are known to have the support of politicians, Ansari also says he was impressed with the role played by the police. Remember, there was video evidence in the case of Pahlu Khan also, but in that particular case, the Rajasthan Polices role was rightly questioned after it exonerated all the accused. As a lawyer, it is not uncommon to see how the police try to hijack a case or make it weak due to political pressurebut in this case, the police followed the constitution right from the start and remained resolutely unbiased, he says. Do not forget that the case was still of the policeas private lawyers, we could only assist but it was the Police that had to take the lead, says Ansari.

Three police officers who were also eyewitnesses to the case gave honest and exhaustive statements to both the Investigating Officer and while testifying in court, making the case against the accused extremely strong. Apart from that, the charge-sheets prepared by the Police were strong and the Superintendent of Police, Ramgarh, Kishore Kaushal (transferred in February 2018) was personally overseeing the case proceedings.

The accused can, of course, appeal against the judgement in High Court. Ansari says they will adopt a wait-and-watch policy for the time being. We are happy with the verdict, he adds.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.

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Registration Number: 130349 Registration Number: 130349Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has stated that the Kingdom could develop nuclear weapons if Iran also does so. See Saudi Arabia will develop nuclear weapons if Iran does. What would this mean for the Middle East and how would Israel and Egypt view such an arms race? Deutsche Welle reports in its article Could Saudi Arabia's nuclear ambitions shake up the Middle East? that Saudi Arabia and Iran cut off relations in 2016 after an attack on the Saudi Embassy in Tehran. Since then, the Saudis have been even more wary of Iran expanding its influence in the Middle East.

Riyadh expressed its nuclear ambitions in 2009 when a royal degree said that "the development of atomic energy is essential to meet the Kingdom's growing requirement for energy to generate electricity."

When asked how Israel would respond to Saudi Arabia ultimately developing nuclear weapons, Shlomo Brom, an Israeli senior research associate at the Institute for National Security Studies said: "The Israeli view would be very negative and they would do whatever is needed to prevent it." While the relationship between Israel and Saudi Arabia is reasonably stable right now, that could change in the future, he explained, making it risky for Israel should the Saudis pursue nuclear weapons. "If you are talking about mutual deterrence between two parties, that is a relatively simple situation," Brom said. "If you are talking about three parties, that is less stable and much more complicated."

Egypt, under President Abdel Fatah el-Sissi, has signed multiple military agreements with Saudi Arabia in an effort to deepen ties with the kingdom as a counterbalance to Iran. Adel Suleiman, the head of the Strategic Dialogue Forum for Defense Studies and Military Relations, said in an interview with DW that Egypt itself promotes nuclear energy, but only for peaceful purposes. The country is developing its own nuclear energy facilities on its Dabaa coast with Russian assistance.

Although Egypt is concerned for Saudi Arabia's security, Suleiman said the country deals with regional crises "rationally," noting that Cairo supported, but did not actually participate in Riyadh's ongoing military campaign against Houthi rebels in Yemen.

If Saudi Arabia does pursue a nuclear program, Israel would push for it to be purely civilianin nature, Brom said. He suggested the Saudis could emulate the United Arab Emirates nuclear program, one that Brom said is purely peaceful in nature, transparent and a "gold standard." The term "gold standard" was originally used by Barbara Judge, a former chairwoman of the UK Atomic Energy Authority, who called the UAE's nuclear energy program a "model for the rest of the world."

Ultimately, Saudi Arabia and Iran both weaponizing their nuclear programs could not only complicate the balance of power in the Middle East, but could prove detrimental to their respective security interests. "If both Iran and Saudi Arabia acquired nuclear weapons it would then raise the probability of either nation eventually using them," Brom said. "I don't think anybody wishes to see such a thing happening."North Korea has officially acknowledged a change in relations with the U.S., but rejected any notion that President Donald Trump's sanctions and international pressure played a role in advancing diplomatic talks. Newsweek reports in its article TRUMP HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH KOREA PEACE TALKS, SAYS NORTH KOREA that a commentary published by state-controlled news agency KCNA late Tuesday hit back at "dishonest forces in the U.S. and Japan," stating that North Korea's recent overture to talks with South Korea should be seen as "expression of self-confidence" since the country "has acquired everything it desires."

Without explicitly referring to the summit planned between North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in scheduled for late April, nor the invitation to meet with Trump by the end of May, the article referred to "the great change in the north-south relations" and a "sign of change also in the DPRK-U.S. relations."

"Such an event as today could be possible as the DPRK's dignity has remarkably risen and it has strong might," the commentary read, referring to the country by its official name Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK).

"Such rubbish as 'result of sanctions and pressure' ... spread by the hostile forces is just as meaningless as a dog barking at the moon," it added.

North Korea's deputy director general for North American affairs Choe Kang Il is currently in Finland, holding talks with South Korean and U.S. delegations for what the Finnish foreign minister Timo Soini described as a "1.5 track meeting with academics and officials with Finland only a facilitator." Denuclearization was not on the agenda, Soini said Tuesday, quoted in Reuters.

South Korea's Moon suggested on Wednesday that a three-way, high-level meeting between his country, North Korea and the U.S. was a possibility.

"Holding a North Korea-U.S. summit following a South-North Korea summit itself is a historical event. And depending on their outcomes, they may lead to a three-way summit of South, North and U.S.," Moon said at the presidential Blue House in Seoul, quoted by the Yonhap news agency. "We must completely resolve the issues of denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula and establishing peace through these upcoming talks and others that will follow," he added.The 11th Mstislav Rostropovich International Festival will start in Moscow on March 27 and will last until April 3. This year the largest part of the festival programme will take place in the Great Hall of the Conservatory, and on April 3 - in the State Kremlin Palace.

"This is a new site for us, we have never used it before. This is exciting because, acoustically, this is not a platform for classical music. But unfortunately we did not have a choice, because we are presenting a multimedia project 'Roman Trilogy' by Ottorino Respighi with 3D computer projections directed by the Spanish director Carlus Padrissa for the first time in Russia. The project 'Roman Trilogy' was created in co-production with El Palau de les Arts Reina Sofia, Valencia, and Teatro dell'Opera di Roma at the Terme di Caracalla. It was met with great success all over the world, but Russia will see it for the first time," the artistic director of the festival, president of the Mstislav Rostropovich Foundation for Cultural and Humanitarian Programs Olga Rostropovich said.

The festival will open on March 27, on this day Mstislav Rostropovich would have turned 91. The opening program is fully dedicated to Sergei Prokofiev - this year marks the 65th anniversary of his death. "Sergey Sergeevich was my father's teacher, my father's mentor, he used to idolize this man. They shared not just creative but also human friendship. My dad spent several years at Sergei Prokofiev's guest house. The symphony concert which will be performed at the opening of thefestival, was written with the direct participation of my father, who was the first and only performer of this symphony concert for many years. Sergei Sergeyevich wrote on the manuscript paper: "Goes out to an outstanding talent of Mstislav Rostropovich in memory of joint work on the concert," Olga Rostropovich said.

On March 29, the Great Hall of the Conservatory will host a concert of the Chamber Orchestra Vienna-Berlin with soloists of the Berlin Philharmonic and the Vienna Philharmonic. The orchestra was formed not so long ago, but has already won the recognition of music lovers around the world.

On April 1, a concert of the permanent participant and partner of the festival will be held - the Russian National Orchestra and its artistic director Mikhail Pletnev, who will perform Scriabin's piano concerto. The concert will be entirely devoted to Russian music. The program includes the Scheherazade Symphonic Suite, Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet and Scriabin's Piano Concerto in F-sharp minor, op. 20.

On April 2, the Orchestra KlangVerwaltung, Chorus KlangVerwaltung and Munich Boys Choir will perform in Russia for the first time. The audience will hear one of the most ambitious works in musical history - Bach's St Matthew Passion.

On April 3, the Galina Vishnevskaya Opera Singing Centre will host a private screening of Bruno Monsaingeon's new film, many know his film 'Richter: The Enigma'. Bruno made a documentary film 'Mstislav Rostropovich: The Indomitable Bow' timed to my father's last birthday, the premiere of which took place in November in Paris. In February, the film was shown at the documentary festival in New York, and recently was awarded at the Montreal International Documentary Festival as the year's best documentary."Yesterday, the Moscow House of Nationalities hosted a round table dubbed 'Novruz is effective tool to unite peoples'. "It's my 13th tome when I take part in Novruz celebrations and every time I am convinced that this holiday is celebrated mostly by families. I see a lot of children, a lot of young people there. Family traditions are an indispensable attribute of family happiness, Novruz emphasizes this once again. Ethnographer Rudolf Its noted that the history of the people is preserved not only in written data, but in its traditions, clothing, it is preserved in ancient monuments, legends, that is, in the whole complex of culture," the chairman of the Commission on Information Policy of the Council for Nationalities under the Government of Moscow, Jamil Sadykhbekov, said.

According to him, family values are the basis of any culture: "One of the traditions associated with Novruz is the mandatory participation of all family members in the festive dinner. It was believed that if a person is not at home on the day of the holiday, he will live without a home for seven years, can not celebrate it with a family. On this day you cannot sit at a table in a corner, because on this evening souls of the deceased are gathering over there."

Jamil Sadykhbekov called Novruz a holiday of family, cleanliness, kindness: "On Novruz day, the groom's family should send gifts to the bride's house, and the bride's family renders appropriate attention to the groom's house. On holidays, the front doors are not locked. It shows that the whole family is at home and happy to welcome guests. Children run from door to door asking for sweets. Another interesting practice is sticking a belt into a chimney. Now one can do it just outside the city. But before there were stone chimneys in all houses. On one of the festive days young guys who were in love stuck their belts into these chimneys. There was a handkerchief tied at the end of the belt. The girl and her parents understood the hint at once. If they agreed, the handkerchief was untied and tied on the girl's wrist. If they did not agree to engage, then the handkerchief was filled with sweets and dried fruits from the festive table, tied to the belt and returned back."

The mission of Norvuzm according to Sadikhbekov, is the transmission of family traditions, understanding of charity and kindness from generation to generation: "They provide selfless aid to sick, people with disabilities. Novruz is a holiday of peace and harmony, a holiday of harmony in every family. One should forget all his grievances on this holiday. Earlier, wars and quarrels ceased during these days, and peace and harmony were achieved in society."

Khursheda Khamrakulova, head of the Tajik Cultural Center, expressed the opinion that the issue of unity of the multinational people is acute in Russia: "The Russian people are the bearer of a unique civilization that absorbed the cultures of different peoples and fused it all into a large world civilization, which gives the world a sample of positive traditions of unity. For centuries our cultures have enriched each other. In a country where representatives of about 200 nationalities live, should have tools that unite the people. In Soviet times it was the ideology of construction, but the USSR collapsed, and I would not like to return to the situation of the 1990s. Although today we have a lot of "frenemies" who would like Russia to collapse. We must do everything to prevent it ... Our differences are not as important for representatives of all Russian peoples, as what we have in common. This idea was the basis of the Moscow city Novruz celebrations."A total of 86,000 people had left the besieged Damascus suburb of Eastern Ghouta since the introduction of daily humanitarian pauses, the head of the Russian Center for Syrian reconciliation, Maj. Gen. Yuri Yevtushenko, said.

He noted that 5178 people have left the Eastern Ghouta via the humanitarian corridor near Muhayam al-Wafedin.

"Since February 28, in total 8003 people have left the Eastern Ghouta via the above mentioned corridor," RIA Novosti cited Yevtushenko as saying.Alabama lawmakers voted to allow the use of nitrogen gas to execute death row inmates, a method that has so far not been used to carry out a death sentence.

A spokesman for Gov. Kay Ivey said the governor will review the bill before making a decision whether to sign it into law.

The bill would allow executions by asphyxiating inmates with nitrogen gas if lethal injection drugs are unavailable or lethal injection is ruled unconstitutional. Supporters argued the state needs another method of carrying out death sentences as drug companies become hesitant to supply chemicals for executions and lethal injection faces continued court challenges.

Opponents of the bill questioned how lawmakers could assert it would be painless since the method hasn't been tried, CBS News reported.

The Death Penalty Information Center said that no state has carried out an execution by nitrogen gas. According to center, two states - Oklahoma and Mississippi - have voted to authorize execution by nitrogen gas as a backup method of execution.

Oklahoma announced last week that it will begin using nitrogen for executions, when the state resumes death sentences, because of difficulty obtaining lethal injection drugs.Armenia's Armoil company will invest 16.8 billion drams (around $35 million) in the construction of an oil refinery in Yeghvard, the country's Minister of Economic Development and Investments Suren Karayan said at a government meeting.

He said the company was granted a set of import benefits and is planning to bring 31 pieces of equipment worth 523 million drams, which will raise its total investment in the refinery to 16.8 billion drams.

According to Karayan, the refinery will create 150 new jobs. The refinery will have a storage facility and a laboratory, ARKA reported.

At the initial stage the company will build the storage facility with the capacity to store 4 thousand tons of petroleum products. Then it will build the laboratory and then a small oil refinery.

Armoil was founded in 2013 and is engaged in import and wholesale and retail sale of petroleum products, petroleum raw materials, engine oils, diesel fuel, bitumen, etc.While the international community cherishes fundamental values of Novruz, Armenia continues to shatter the ceasefire intensively, Azerbaijani Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hikmat Hajiyev wrote on Twitter.

While the people of Azerbaijan are celebrating the Nowruz holiday in accord with its ancient traditions, Armenia continues to shatter the ceasefire intensively," the statement says.

He noted that Armenia continues with its habit of aggression despite the fact that the whole international community praises the fundamental values of the Nowruz holiday, such as peace, reconciliation, and understanding.

He added that Armenia violated the ceasefire 98 times on March 22 and 101 times on March 21.Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his U.S. counterpart Donald Trump discussed bilateral and regional issues over the phone, Presidential Spokesperson Ibrahim Kaln said Thursday, Daily Sabah reports.

The phone conversation marks the third time the two presidents speak since November 2017 and it has been two months since their last call.

Speaking in an interview with the official Anadolu Agency, Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu previously said Thursday that the two leaders will hold a phone call later in the day.

Cavusoglu also said that, if the U.S. and Turkey cannot agree on a path forward in Manbij, Turkey would move to clear PKK-backed People's Protection Units (YPG) from the northern Syrian city. "If this plan is not realized, the only option left will be clearing away terrorists. This is not just valid for Syria, but also for Iraq," he said.United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres has congratulated Russian President Vladimir Putin on his electoral victory in a phone call, the Kremlin said in a statement posted on its website.

The sides "touched on topical international issues". "While discussing the situation in Syria, [they] emphasized importance of the United Nations coordinating role in restoring peace and achieving a political solution in that state," the press service said. "The Russian side expressed readiness to continue assisting the UN-brokered Geneva process,"the statement says.

Antonio Guterres noted Russias particular contribution to global security and stability.

Besides, the invitation for Guterres to visit Russia was confirmed by Putin.The largest private airline operating in Kuwait, Jazeera Airways, is launching flights to Georgias capital of Tbilisi, United Airports of Georgia said.

Regular flights will be launched from June 2018, three times per week.

Kuwaits Jazeera Airways showed interest in the Georgian aviation market last year, when representatives of the company held an initial business meeting with the authorities of TAV Georgia at Tbilisi International Airport, Agenda.ge reported.

The authorities from Jazeera Airways do not exclude the possibility of increasing flight frequency in the future.The Kremlin counts on the elementary political logic and wisdom of European countries, if British Prime Minister Theresa May tries to persuade them to take measures against Russia over the so-called Skripal case.

"Anyway, we do count on the elementary political logic and wisdom of our counterparts in that case," Russian Presidential Spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters, TASS reports.

"We note the continuation of the hard-to-explain line of the British side. We continue to note Britains reluctance to actually interact to investigate this incident [involving former Russian military intelligence Colonel Sergei Skripal convicted of spying in Russia] to establish in reality who can be behind it," the Kremlin spokesman stressed. He also noted, "We continue to note Britains reluctance to provide at least some information and also take note that all statements made on that score are totally unsubstantiated, lack any evidence and are often devoid of elementary logic."

"We do hope, of course, that all these aspects will be taken into account by Britains partners, at the very least," Peskov said.

Speaking about Russia-EU relations, the Kremlin spokesman called them "rather complicated as they are."Space agencies of Kazakhstan, Russia and the United Arab Emirates have signed a protocol on expanding trilateral space cooperation at a meeting in Baikonur.

The protocol was signed by Kazakhstans Minister of Defense and Aerospace Industry Beibut Atamkulov, Director-General of the Roscosmos state space corporation Igor Komarov and the UAEs Minister of Higher Education Ahmad Abdullah Belhoul Al Falasi, who is Chairman of the Board of Directors of the UAE Space Agency.

The sides agreed on setting up a joint working group in April 2018 for considering potential projects at the Baikonur spaceport, the Kazinform agency reported.General of the Army Valery Gerasimov, the head of Russias General Staff, and Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff Joseph Dunford discussed Syria on the phone, Russia's Defense Ministry said.

"On March 21, Chief of the Russian Armed Forces General Staff, Deputy Defense Minister, General of the Army Valery Gerasimov had a phone conversation with Marine Corps General Joseph Dunford, chairman of the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff," TASS cited the defense ministry as saying.

The officials "discussed issues concerning the situation in the Syrian Arab Republic along with other pressing issues of mutual interest".

"Gerasimov and Dunford agreed to continue bilateral contacts," the ministry said.

US Air Force Col. Patrick Ryder, in turn, told CNN that in accordance with past practice, both have agreed to keep the details of their conversation private.Turkish President Recept Tayyip Erdogan is set to have a telephone conversation with his US counterpart Donald Trump today, Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said in a televised interview with the Anadolu Agency.

According to Cavusoglu, the presidents are expected to discuss the number off issues during their conversation, including the situation in the region.US President Donald Trump defended his congratulations to Vladimir Putin on the Russian presidents re-election victory, saying he wants Putins help in solving crises from North Korea to Syria and beyond.

Trump drew fire from Republicans and Democrats alike for telling reporters on Tuesday that he had congratulated Putin on his re-election and that the two leaders had made tentative plans to meet in the not too distant future, Reuters reported.

"I called President Putin of Russia to congratulate him on his election victory (in past, Obama called him also). The fake news media is crazed because they wanted me to excoriate him. They are wrong! Getting along with Russia (and others) is a good thing, not a bad thing," Trump said via Twitter.

"They can help solve problems with North Korea, Syria, Ukraine, ISIS, Iran and even the coming Arms Race," Trump added.U.S. President Donald Trump says he "would like to" testify before the special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation, CBC News reported.

When asked Thursday at the White House whether Mr. Trump would like to testify, he nodded and said, "Yes. I would like to." He made the remark while departing a signing ceremony for a memorandum directing the U.S. Trade Representative to impose an estimated $50 billion in tariffs on China.Turkeys Dogan Holding confirmed it had started talks with Demiroren Holding on the sale of its $890 million media arm, a deal seen as further cementing media support for the country's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Shares in both Dogan Holding (DOHOL.IS) and its newspaper arm Hurriyet Gazetecilik (HURGZ.IS) surged for a second day. On Wednesday an official from unlisted Demiroren, a company seen as backing Erdogan, said it would buy Dogans media arm, Reuters reported.

The deal would give Demiroren, which already owns two pro-government newspapers, control over several prominent media outlets including the respected Hurriyet newspaper and broadcaster CNN Turk.

The business has an operating value of $1.1 billion and an equity value of $890 million after debt, Dogan said in a statement to the Istanbul stock exchange.

Shares in Dogan and Hurriyet both jumped by the session limit of 19.5% at the start of trade, after rising a similar amount a day earlier.

Hurriyet subsequently trimmed its gains and was 8.1% higher at 1.33 lira at 0721 GMT, while Dogan was up 18.4% at 1.03 lira.

Dogan Holdings media arm and its octogenarian founder, Aydin Dogan, have long been seen as part of Turkeys secular establishment. Erdogan has repeatedly accused the company of bias against his Islamist-rooted AK Party, which the company has denied.

Dogan Media was fined $2.5 billion for unpaid taxes in 2009, in what government opponents saw as an attempt to crush media criticism of Erdogan. Following the tax bill, Aydin Dogan was forced to sell the groups Milliyet and Vatan newspapers - to Demiroren.During a dinner at the EU summit on March 22, UK Prime Minister Theresa May is expected to share secret intelligence data on the Skripal case with London's EU allies in a bid to prod them to tighten screws on Russia, Sputnik reports citing Bloomberg.

Bloomberg cited unnamed sources familiar with the matter as saying that May wants EU leaders to follow Britain's example by accusing Russia of Skripal's poisoning and taking action against Russia's intelligence agents.

"The challenge of Russia is one that will endure for years to come. As a European democracy, the UK will stand shoulder to shoulder with the EU and NATO to face these threats together. United, we will succeed," May will say during the Thursday summit, according to preliminary transcript of the speech released by her office.The Trump administration is imposing sanctions on a French chemical weapons expert accused of making and using such munitions for the Islamic State group in Syria, Miami Herald reports.

The State Department on Thursday identified Joe Asperman as a "specially designated global terrorist." The listing comes with penalties including the freezing of any assets he may have in U.S. jurisdictions and bars Americans from any transactions with him.

The designation applies to foreigners who have committed or pose a risk of committing terrorist acts that threaten U.S. national interests. The statement says the move aims to deny Asperman the resources he needs to plan and carry out further terrorist attacks.A young man was killed in the Armenian village in the Armavir province yesterday.

At around 9:50pm, police received a call from the Armavir town hospital that they had admitted a person with multiple stab wounds.

The police found out that this person, who died after midnight and without regaining consciousness, was Narek Poghosyan, 22, a resident of Aygavan village and there were seven traces of injury on his body.

A criminal case was filed on charge of murder, News.am reported.

Subsequently, Armavir village resident Vaghinak M., 19, surrendered and confessed to having committed this murder.HA NOI  Natural rubber prices have been falling since the second half of last year, making rubber enterprises pause for thought before making business plan for 2018.

Rubber prices now stand at about VN36 million per tonne (US$1,600), down 10 per cent compared with last year.

Some major rubber producers have also performed poorly in the first two months of the year.

ong Phu Rubber (DPR), a subsidiary of the Viet Nam Rubber Group (VRG), plans to sell rubber at an average of VN36.56 million per tonne, down 8.4 per cent compared to 2017. The company hopes to earn nearly VN732 billion in revenue and VN190 billion in gross profit, down 12.5 per cent and 25.3 per cent year-on-year, respectively.

DPRs average rubber selling price was VN36.6 million per tonne in the first two months of this year, down 25 per cent year-on-year, which led to a 2-per-cent drop in revenue to VN112 billion, and therefore bringing gross profit down from VN63 billion to VN47.4 billion.

Of the gross profit, profit from rubber production was VN9.2 billion, down nearly VN18 billion compared to the same period last year.

Similarly, in 2018, Phuoc Hoa Rubber Co (PHR) plans to sell rubber at an average price of VN37 million per tonne, significantly lower than 2017s price of VN40.39 million per tonne.

Nonetheless, thanks to revenue from other sources, PHRs 2018 business plan is expected to be equivalent to 2017, with VN1.6 trillion in revenue and VN400 billion in pre-tax profit.

The company also earns revenue from other sources, such as revenue of the hand-over of land for the operation of industrial parks, including the Viet Nam-Singapore Industrial Parks in the central province of Nghe An and the Nam Tan Uyen Industrial Zone in the southern province of Binh Duong.

It also leases land for the operation of Tan Binh industrial park in HCM City.

Another producer, Tay Ninh Rubber JSC (TRC), plans to sell rubber at an average price of VN36.5 million per tonne, VN1 million lower than last year. The company plans to achieve VN498 billion in revenue and VN113 billion in pre-tax profit, down 1 per cent and 31.5 per cent over the same period last year, respectively.

In addition, the company also lowered its target production output from VN9,800 tonnes to 8,700 tonnes, processed output from 14,800 tonnes to 12,700 tonnes and productivity from 2.14 tonnes per hectare per year to 1.96 tonnes per hectare per year.

Although business plans for 2018 have not been announced yet, the business results of Hoa Binh Rubber Co (HRC) in the first two months of this year showed a decline.

During the two months, the company exploited 368.13 tonnes of rubber, reaching 14.16 per cent of the yearly plan (2,600 tonnes).

It purchased 247.6 tonnes while selling 377.23 tonnes, earning revenue of VN12.95 billion.

HRC estimated that its first quarters revenue would reach VN18.3 billion and after-tax profit would be VN1.35 billion. Compared with the same period last year, revenue would increase slightly but after-tax profit would fall by 20.5 per cent.

In its strategy report of 2018, Viet Dragon Securities Co (VDSC) gave a negative assessment for the rubber cultivation industry in the short term but a positive one in the long-term.

Meanwhile, MayBank KimEng Securities Corps (MBKE) forecast that rubber prices may recover slightly due to some supportive information such as the Thai government announcing a price subsidy progamme of 20 billion baht since December 2014 and large rubber producers like Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia agreeing to cut rubber exports.

Recently, the Thai government plans to issue bonds to raise 30 million baht (US$1 billion) to cut excess rubber, driving prices up. Thai Agriculture Minister Grisada Boonrach plans to cut about 1-3.3 million tonnes of excess rubber by the end of this year.  VNSHA NOI  Two models of electric car and a small sedan from Ital Design have been voted the favourite by Vietnamese people in a contest organised by Vingroup.

Titled Choosing lovely car with VinFast-2, the contest was organised by VinFast Manufacturing and Trading Company Limited from March 8-18.

Nearly 300,000 people took part in the contest.

Electric car IDG EV A and small sedan IDG ICE A were the top models, with 22.8 per cent and 21 per cent votes, respectively, out of 36 models, thanks to their fashionable style. The overall design closely resembles the design of electric vehicles and small cars around the world, while some models incorporate subtle Oriental symbols, such as bird wings or flaming eyes with fire inside.

Both the winning models have the iconic V symbol flying up on the car head, denoting the pride of Viet Nam.

The IDG EV A emphasies the width with definitive lines, expressing its sporty and dynamic style. The design of IDG ICE A, on the other hand, highlights both simplicity and sophistication.

Nguyen Viet Quang, Vice President and CEO of Vingroup, said following the success of Choosing Love with VINFAST-1, the group decided to hold another contest, putting their trust in the consumers taste.

Our goal is not only to create modern, trendy and world-class VinFast cars but also to showcase the pride of the Vietnamese car brand, Quang said.

According to him, the contest achieved two criteria: choosing the right car designs in the shortest time. The process of determining the winners was public and transparent as everything was announced on the website, www.binhchonmauxe.vinfast.vn, in the presence of representatives of the Trade Promotion Agency under the Ministry of Industry and Trade.

The first prize was a voucher worth VN200 million to buy VinFast products and was won by Cu Hoang at, a resident of Tay Nguyen (Central Highlands) in the province of Gia Lai. Other lucky winners received valuable prizes such as two vouchers worth VN50 million each, 30 vouchers worth VN10 million each and 100 VINID GiftCards worth VN2 million each.

The award ceremony will be held on March 24 at the Almaz Food and Conference Centre in Ha Noi.

According to the companys plan, VinFast will launch its electric car and small car by the end of 2019, earlier by a year. The company will also launch two models of sedans and SUVs, which are being developed based on the design voted by consumers in the Choosing lovely car with VinFast-1 contest held at the Paris Motorshow in October 2018 and in Viet Nam in December 2018.

In just over four months, VinFast has announced 56 designs for four models: sedans, SUVs, small cars and electric cars, made by the worlds leading car design studios. At present, the company is focused on urgently completing other works, including construction of a factory in inh Vu-Cat Hai economic zone in northern Hai Phong City, collaboration with major partners in building factories and development and production of vehicles.  VNSHA NOI  Terminal T1 of Phu Bai International Airport in the central province of Thua Thien-Hue will be upgraded to serve five million passengers every year.

The move comes after a prediction of surge in passenger volume at this port of entry in the next several years.

At a working session with provincial leaders in Ha Noi on Wednesday, Minister of Transport Nguyen Van The agreed with the province on its proposal to upgrade the airport. The said his ministry had approved the business plan of the Airports Corporation of Viet Nam for 2018. The plan includes a project on building Terminal T1 with an annual capacity of five million passengers, along with upgrading the apron and synchronous infrastructure of the airport.

Nguyen Van Cao, chairman of the Thua Thien-Hue Peoples Committee, said the province wanted to soon upgrade and expand Phu Bai International Airport, particularly the international terminal, taxiway and apron.

Phu Bai International Airport is designed to serve 1.5 million passengers per year, but the passenger volume at this airport was already 1.75 million in 2017. The annual passenger growth rate averaged 15 per cent between 2014 and 2017. With a predicted growth of 13-17 per cent each year from 2016 to 2020, the number of passengers through the airport is estimated to reach three to 3.5 million by 2020 and 6.5 to seven million by 2025, Cao said.

Earlier, the Prime Minister approved the airport planning by 2020 with a vision to 2030.  VNSBRUSSELS  The European Commission is willing to cooperate with and support Vietnamese authorities in their reforms to fight illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing.

This was said by Karmenu Vella, Commissioner of the European Union for Environment, Maritime Affairs and Fisheries.



In an interview to the Vietnam News Agency in Brussels, Vella said the European Commission welcomed the high-level commitments of the Vietnamese authorities, notably the plan adopted by the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, to implement urgent measures to overcome the yellow card adopted in October 2017.

Minister of Agriculture and Rural Development Nguyen Xuan Cuong is currently on a working visit to the European Union from March 20-24 to promote the removal of yellow card measure for Viet Nam in IUU fishing.



Nonetheless, the European Commission reiterates its concerns as regards the translation of such commitments into tangible measures aimed at addressing the serious shortcomings that led the Commission to adopt the yellow card, Vella said.



According to him, the adoption of pre-identification (yellow card) of Viet Nam as a non-cooperating country in fighting IUU fishing in October 2017 is the formalisation of a dialogue in place since 2012. This step is just a warning and does not imply any kind of trade-related measures, he said.



The objective of the European Unions IUU policy is to enter into a cooperation with competent authorities in third-world countries to ensure they align their legal and administrative frameworks with international obligations to fight against IUU fishing and establish adequate control mechanisms, Vella said.



By April 2018, six months after the adoption of the yellow card, Vietnamese authorities are expected to provide a progress report addressing the implementation of the action plan, he said, adding the European Commission will evaluate, including by means of visits to the country, the content of the action plan in light of the shortcomings established in the Commissions decision of October 23, 2017.



Talking about the possibility of removing the yellow card for Viet Nam, Vella said any decision would follow a careful analysis of the actions undertaken by the authorities to remedy the deficiencies that led to the yellow card.



The revocation of the yellow card will only be possible if all the mentioned deficiencies are sufficiently addressed, he said.



In case the situation does not improve, the European Commission may proceed with the identification of the country as non-cooperating in fighting IUU fishing (red card) and submit the proposal to the Council of the European Union to list Viet Nam as non-cooperating in fighting IUU fishing, Vella said.  VNSHA NOI  Toyota Motor Viet Nam (TMV) will replace the front passenger airbag inflators and sensors for 20,490 cars in the Vietnamese market at no cost to customers.

According to the TMVs recalling campaign, which was launched on March 21, the firm recalled 16,964 Corolla cars manufactured and assembled domestically from January 4, 2010, to December 29, 2012, to inspect and replace the airbag inflators in the front passenger seat.

Toyota said the airbag inflator provided by Takata Company may be exposed to moisture. In case of an accident when the airbag system is activated, depending on the circumstances, the release of gases may increase the pressure inside the airbag, cracking the air inflator. If this happens, the metal pieces can splash out through the inflated airbags, leading to the risk of serious injury to the passengers.

Toyota will inspect and replace all the airbag inflators in the front passenger seat and airbag sensors for all the affected vehicles fee of cost. The recall campaign started from Thursday, with testing and replacement time expected to be one to three hours.

Airbags in the drivers seat, which were not provided by Takata Company, is not part of the project.

The remainder of more than 3,500 Toyota vehicles will be replaced the airbag sensors, including 2,043 Corolla units (locally manufactured from June 29, 2015, to December 16, 2015), 1,182 Hilux imported cars (produced from July 1, 2015, to November 30, 2015), 46 Lexus NX 200t imported units (made from May 25, 2015, to September 9, 2015) and 254 Lexus RX 350 imported cars (manufactured from May 25, 2015, to January 6, 2016).

Toyota said due to defects in the manufacturing line, the IC chip insulator located in the airbag sensors in these vehicles may be detonated after a period of use. The vehicles involved are equipped with an airbag system that uses multiple sensors to detect the impact in the event of a collision.

Due to two separate manufacturing issues, there is a possibility that the insulation layers of the IC chips could peel over time, creating an open circuit in the IC chip.

If this occurs, the airbag warning light will illuminate. Additionally, the side/curtain shield airbags and/or front airbags may become deactivated.

The firm will check and replace the damaged airbag sensor for all cars from March 22. The testing and replacement time is about 0.5 hours to 7 hours.  VNSHA NOI  Enterprises from the Republic of South Korea want to boost their co-operation with Vietnamese firms, especially ones working in the technology sector due to the huge potential in the Vietnamese market.

The statement was made by Kyu-Min Baek, director of global innovation at the Koreas Innobiz Association, at the Viet Nam  Korea small- and mediumsized enterprises (SMEs) technology matching conference held in Ha Noi on Thursday.

The seminar was organised in the framework of South Korean President Moon Jae-ins state visit to Viet Nam from March 22-24. The event is a chance for Vietnamese enterprises to access advanced South Korean products and technologies and promote opportunities for investment and business co-operation between enterprises from the two countries.

Through this event, Vietnamese businesses can meet and negotiate directly with Korean partners regarding the distribution of products and the transfer of Korean technology into Viet Nam and vice versa.

There are many advantages in the co-operation of the two countries, such as the cheap labour costs in Viet Nam and the similar culture, although we need lots of time to study the market as well as discover the current situation of the Vietnamese market, Ju-Yound Youn, president and CEO of Woosang Advanced Material Company told Viet Nam News.

At the first session of the business to business (B2B) conference on Thursday morning, a co-operation agreement was successfully signed between Viet Nams Vinh Phuc Investment Trading Company Limited and RoKs Jeonwoo Precision Company Limited.

It is the first time my company has taken part in this event. My company specialises in the supporting industry, therefore, one of our most difficult issues is technology and I think South Korean firms can help us deal with this, said Pham Van Quyet, deputy director of Vinh Phuc Investment Trading Company Limited.

Viet Nam has now emerged as the South Koreas fourth largest trading partner while the South Korea has become Viet Nams second biggest trading partner. Last year, the two countries saw bilateral trade reach US$63.9 billion, an increase of more than 40 per cent year-on-year.

In addition, South Korea is the largest investor in Viet Nam with an accumulated investment amount of $57.9 billion. Viet Nam is a crucial investment destination for the South Korea, which is evidenced by the fact that more than half of Korean businesses (some 5,500 out of about 8,600) operating in the ASEAN region have a presence in the country.

The event was organised by International Intellectual Property Agency (Investip) in accordance with South Koreas Innobiz Association. It drew the participation of 10 Korean firms and some 60 enterprises from Viet Nam.  VNSThis year marks a meaningful anniversary for Italy and Viet Nam : 45 years of diplomatic relations. Italian Ambassador Cecillia Piccioni sends Viet Nam News readers a message to celebrate the long-term friendship between two peoples.

Indeed, in 1973 Italy was one of the first countries of the European community to establish diplomatic relations with Viet Nam ; however, the ties that link our two countries have much older roots. They can be traced back to a past marked by friendship and solidarity during the countrys hardest times.

Nowadays the co-operation between our countries is thriving, making the bilateral relationship truly strategic. In all fields we are working together to achieve the ambitious targets established by our Strategic Partnership. Our relations are getting stronger and tighter at all levels: institutional, economic and cultural.

Institutionally, they are thriving, as illustrated by the many meetings among our leaders, including the State visit by Italian President Mattarella in 2015. That historic event has been followed by those of important Italian Ministers as well as by President Tran ai Quangs State visit to Italy in 2016.

These high-level visits enhanced our already outstanding partnership in the economic and commercial sector. Indeed, not only is Viet Nam one of our most promising trade partners, but it ranks first among the 10 ASEAN members. Our bilateral trade hit 4 billion euros in 2016 (up 7 per cent compared to 2015) and preliminary data for 2017 are very encouraging, confirming us as the second largest EU exporter to Viet Nam .

Moreover, Italy , whose entrepreneurial presence in Viet Nam is contributing to its industrialization, reaffirmed during the most recent Joint Economic Commission its commitment to sharing knowledge and technology to play a more active role in the new stages of the Vietnamese quest to reach higher standards of modernisation.

Finally, our cultural relations are thriving. To enhance mutual understanding and deeper knowledge of our two countries traditions and heritages weve tripled the number of cultural initiatives, reaching the public throughout the country and bridging the geographical distance between Italy and Viet Nam . We focus on the similarities between our peoples and spare no effort to enhance awareness of the many tangible and intangible heritages we share.

Against such a highly promising backdrop, the 45th anniversary of diplomatic relations marks a new milestone in our partnership.

In light of such a special occasion weve developed a program encompassing the various facets of our friendship and co-operation. A program that, highlighting and promoting reciprocal understanding as well as the richness of Italian culture, could enhance our mutual knowledge in areas ranging from cultural to economic promotion, from scientific and technological research, to fashion and industrial design.

The celebrations were launched last Friday at the Youth Theatre in Ha Noi with a special concert celebrating Italian-Vietnamese friendship: the IBLA Viet Nam Awards 2018, featuring 11 young and talented musicians from all over the world, performing some of the most iconic music with a special focus on Gioacchino Rossini, in the year of the 150th anniversary of his passing away.

The following weekend, the Italy-Viet Nam Fashion Council introduced to the Viet Namese public the Viet Nam-Italia Fashion Week 2018, with the special participation of the Italian designer Michele Gaudiomonte. As Italy is one of the leading fashion superpowers in the world and Viet Nam has always harbored a strong interest in the field, fashion has soon become an important area of cooperation between our countries.

We complemented the fashion show with an exclusive thematic exhibition: the "Silk Weaving Process". Held at Casa Italia, the initiative showcased the traditional silk manufacturing process presented by artisans from Ha Noi and Bao Loc. The exhibition has highlighted the value of craft and culture in the fashion industry as well the key relevance our two countries attach to sustainability.

Indeed, the preciousness and versatility of sustainable textiles such as silk, and the encounters between Italian and Vietnamese designers, proved the main sources of inspiration for many fashion collections for Autumn/Winter 2018. Indeed, sustainability is the golden thread that weve chosen to link the many events that will mark the 45th anniversary programme. Next month well organise a special event on geographical indications and scientific co-operation.

The extensive calendar of activities will unfold with many other initiatives in the upcoming months through gastronomy, music, cinema and much more.HA NOI  The Friends of Vietnam Heritage will present a screening of the Vietnamese movie oi Cat (Sandy Lives) tonight.

The film from the late 1990s by director Nguyen Thanh Van addresses the long-lasting effects of war on peoples lives in a seaside village.

A man named Canh returns to his village after a 20 years absence, after the countrys reunification. His wife, Thoa, has been faithfully awaiting his return. However, could her hope of reuniting with her husband and spend their days together come true? An unpleasant reality is that he has remarried and fathered a child during his absence. Will Canh stay with Thoa or will he continue his new life with his second wife, Tam?

Sandy Lives is full of subtleties and cultural insights, particularly for non-Vietnamese people. By reflecting on the intrinsic trauma of people, especially women in the aftermath of the war, Sandy Lives won the Golden Apricot trophy for best director, best actor and best actress in 2001. Earlier it won Asia Pacific International Festival in 2000 and a Special Mention at the Amiens Film Festival in France.

The 90-minute movie will be presented with English subtitles.

Another screening of the American movie The Whistleblower of My Lai by director Connie Field will be held on March 29.

The movie captures the artistic journey of the Kronos Quartet as they create an opera about the My Lai massacre, one of the darkest moments of the American War, with composer Jonathan Berger, tenor Rinde Eckert and Vietnamese musician Van Anh Vo.

It tells the story of Hugh Thompson, an army helicopter pilot who discovered and exposed the massacre. His refusal to remain silent about the massacre of 500 Vietnamese civilians by American troops forced the military to conduct an inquiry.

Both screenings will take place from 7.30pm to 9pm at the Viet Nam Feature Films Studio, 4 Thuy Khue Street, Tay Ho District., for a suggested donation of VN150,000. After the film, there will be a Q&A session with the directors Van and Field. Contact filmteam.fvh@gmail.com for more details.  VNSTrong Kien

Among the plethora of International Days that we observe, one whose contemporary relevance has increased exponentially is March 21, which envisages the elimination of racial discrimination. Advocated by the United Nations in 1966, the day marks the bloody massacre of protesters objecting to a highly racist piece of legislation passed by the Apartheid Government in South Africa, which would restrict the entry of black citizens into urban areas. While the most insidious forms of apartheid in that country were ended by the Mandela-led movement, with global support in the form of boycotts and other measures, it can be said very safely discrimination of all sorts are rampant in todays world, that racism is alive and well.

We, in Viet Nam, are not free from this blight, and it would behove us, as a member of the United Nations, to observe this International Day with some serious introspections and self-criticism.

On the surface, it is difficult to imagine that there is race-based discrimination in our largely homogenous country, both demographically and culturally. But the demographic statistics by themselves show the inequal scope, with the Kinh ethnicity representing a dominant 83 per cent of the population, and the remaining 17 per cent dispersed among 53 different ethnic groups, mostly montagnards  populating resource-rich but impoverished economically mountainous areas.

As the official Vietnamese language is that of the Kinh, everything, from administration to culture is dominated by the way of the Kinh people. In such a scenario, the marginalisation of minorities can be seen as an inevitable consequence, but it is true that the Party and the State, following the lead of President Ho Chi Minh, have consistently targeted an inclusive society, although both the rhetoric and actual policies are yet to produce the desired results.

One reason for this is that we have failed to examine certain privileges and assumptions we take for granted. For instance, if we were to ask if the Kinh people are racist, and actively seek to discriminate against other groups, many people might not just issue a robust and vehement denial, but actually take offence at such a suggestive question.

We can point to cultural promotions like ethnic minority festivals, policies to develop rural, remote areas, particularly those inhabited by ethnic minority people, efforts to educate ethnic minority children and increase their literacy levels, provide better healthcare, and so on. But all this notwithstanding, we cannot be really inclusive and equal if we do not acknowledge an unwitting assumption of superiority and condescension that has marked this relationship. A brief examination of our history can be an eye opener of sorts.

Down memory lane

The Kinh people started out originally in the northern river delta of current Viet Nam, but throughout history, expanded towards the south, incorporating vast tracts of land originally belonging to other peoples. This process, honestly, could not have been bloodless, but, at present, the reality is that different groups of people have been living with each other in relative harmony under the Vietnamese flag. In our history, feudal dynasties had married away their princesses to the tribes as a sign of goodwill to maintain peace, and President Ho Chi Minh paid extra attention to collaborating with border area ethnic minority groups in the wars against the French and the Americans under the banner of great national unity.

He had stressed how crucial the relationship and inclusion of ethnic minorities was for the country.

The river can run out of water, the mountain can be worn away, but national unity will never diminish The mountainous peoples must unite with each other tightly, and the minority groups must unite with the majority group, hed said.

This effort has continued to this day.

Programme 135, a poverty reduction programme of the Government of Vietnam on supporting the infrastructure investment and the production promotion for communes with extreme hardship and ethnic minority, by 2017, have saw support being given to 554,348 households in terms of seeds, fertiliser, and agricultural models; 2,500 infrastructure projects and maintenance of thousands of other health medical centres, water supply plants, or markets; 170 capacity-enhancing classes joined by 30,000 ethnic minority people (1,000 of which are local officials), 20,000 nomadic households having lands to settle down, and 85 per cent of the population gaining access to clean water and 100 per cent communes having their own schools.

Low-interest credit lines for production and business purposes as well as vocational training are also frequently on the spending list of the Government. Efforts have been made to bridge the healthcare gap between urban and remote areas and policies instituted to reward academic and other forms of excellence among ethnic minority groups.

It is telling that the highest, most powerful position in the country, has been held by Nong uc Manh, who belongs to the Tay ethnic group. He was the General Secretary of the Communist Party for two consecutive terms, achieving this position after nine years as head of the standing committee of the countrys legislative body. If this isnt the breaking of the ceiling, a potent counter-argument that the minority group is somehow inferior to the majority group.

No room for denial

Despite the obvious progress, we cannot say that discrimination has ceased and socio-economic parity has been achieved. On the contrary, we can say that the gap has widened in recent times. In socialist Viet Nam, there are four dollar billionaires whove made it to the Forbes list of the worlds richest people, but there remain communities of ethnic minority people without enough food, clothing and shelter. Despite the rapid growth of the national economy over the last several decades, the development gains have not been distributed with any measure of equality, but that is not in the least bit surprising for any opponent of trickle down economics. The minority groups still make up 60-70 per cent of the extremely impoverished households in the country. Twenty per cent of the richest household holds 5.22 times the wealth of the 20 per cent of the poorest ones in northern provinces and 10.9 times compared to the ones in Central highlands. The respective figures fail to improve 10 years later, reaching 6.8 times and 12.9 times in 2010, by now, one could venture that the numbers must have gotten worse.

Education has been identified as a critical tool to help the minority groups climb out of poverty, but due investment has seen little uptick in recent years. Families cant send their children to study when they themselves barely make ends meet. Some measures have been taken to ameliorate this problem, for example, by adding priority points for ethnic minority candidates in the national university entrance exams, but such efforts to level the playing field are crude and unlikely to go far.

Displacement is also a great concern. As the Government pushed for more small-scale hydropower projects in its national power strategy, a large number of people had been removed from their original living spaces. The Gia Rai ethnic minority in Krong Pa District of Gia Lai Province, for example, had to relinquish some 1,800ha of land for the Ba Ha hydropower project in 2007. From having a decent production area to maintain a stable livelihood, the meagre compensation they received, combined with lack of viable livelihood alternatives forced many to move up to the forests and set up farms there, violating several forest protection laws just to survive. Victims of development are then victimised again as law-breakers.

The notorious incidents in Central Highlands regarding the so-called Degar Government that sought to establish a self-governed administration right within Viet Nam was a rude wake-up call. While there were hostile forces behind this unrest, we have to ask why the local communities were so easily swayed by dubious promises of politically-motivated provocateurs.

This honesty requires us to confront the fact that the majority of Kinh people still engage in what anthropologists call cultural relativism. Although this might not be done consciously, research studies show that people in the flatlands typically consider upland people as artless  underdeveloped but honest and good. This is very problematic, on the lines of the noble savage fantasy, a very colonialist sentiment deeming indigenous peoples as biologically inferior and irrecoverably less advanced.

On the other hand, unhygienic, backward, drinking problems, ignorant of (modern) production and trade practices, superstitious, even lazy and overly dependent (on external support) were still some of the still-popular preconceived notions that the Kinh people reserve for ethnic groups, despite the phenomena may no longer be as popular or put out of the context of different cultural values. Official legislations also give off the sense that the Kinh people is the oldest brother in the family-country hierarchy, which confers him with the highest position, authority as well as responsibilities to help other younger siblings to be better  a very condescending point of view, one would say, similar to the feel-good white saviour complex so popular in Western media. No, Kinh people  lets for the sake of convenience, might be more familiar with how the world at large works  but they are not supposed to supplant the main role of ethnic leaders in caring for their own groups. What we do is striving our best to provide them with the experience and knowledge of a template we have at our disposal, so they can gather voices from the community to transform the standard-issue template into a customised model that fits the groups identity, value, and practical conditions.

In our policy-making processes, lets not make the voices of a few ethnic minority members in the legislature a statistical presence and impose a well-intentioned but ultimately arbitrary policies upon those who dont know any better.

For all the talk about leaving no one behind, our society will be the poorer, if we do not deal with our prejudices honestly and learn to respect other people for who they are, respect their knowledge systems instead of labelling them as backward, recognise that their cultural norms have the same validity as ours, that until we see them as us, we will, in some way, allow racism to survive.  VNSGeneral Secretary of the Communist Party of Viet Nam (CPV) Nguyen Phu Trong will make an official visit to France between March 25-27 and a State visit to Cuba from March 28-30.  VNA/VNS Photo

HA NOI  General Secretary of the Communist Party of Viet Nam (CPV) Nguyen Phu Trong will make an official visit to France between March 25-27 and a State visit to Cuba from March 28-30, the CPVs Commission for External Relations said yesterday.

The visits are paid at the invitation of the French President Emmanuel Macron and First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cubas Central Committee and President of the Councils of State and Ministers Raul Castro Ruz, respectively.  VNSRussian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrovs official visit to Viet Nam has been rescheduled for March 22-23. Photo VNA/THX

HA NOI  Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrovs official visit to Viet Nam has been rescheduled for March 22-23.

The official had been scheduled to arrive on Monday, but the trip was postponed for an undisclosed reason.

The visit will be made at the invitation of Vietnamese Foreign Minister Pham Binh Minh.



Viet Nam and Russia have enjoyed growing ties in all fields, especially economy.



Since the Viet Nam-Eurasian Economic Union Free Trade Agreement took effect on October 5, 2016, two-way trade between Viet Nam and Russia has grown rapidly, reaching US$3.56 billion in 2017, up 29 per cent from the previous year.



Russia has to date registered to invest almost $982.9 million in 117 projects in Viet Nam, ranking 22nd among countries and territories investing in the Southeast Asian country.



Meanwhile, Viet Nam has invested in18 projects in Russia worth a total $2.4 billion.  VNSIEN BIEN  It takes nearly seven hours to travel from Muong Lay District to the Muong Nhe District Medical Station, where doctor Nguyen Van Hieu examines and treats local children and other residents.

The journey is perilous, and many parts of the route have been blocked by landslides after flashfloods in recent months.

Doctor Hieu is well-known among locals. Leaving Ha Noi, Hieu volunteered to work in Muong Nhe District. His journey is like a beloved legend about medical ethics in real life. He was named one of 10 outstanding young people of Viet Nam 2017.

Taking about Hieu, an owner of a small restaurant in Muong Nhe District smiled and said, Hieu is specialised in paediatrics. He loves children, and he is a kind person. He buys new clothes for poor children who go to the clinic for health checks.

Visiting Hieu at work, people can easily see his thoughtful behaviour.

How is he? Does he breastfeed? Hieu asks a young couple from Na Co Sa Village in Nam Po District. Their 30-month-old child is suffering from diarrhoea.

Hieu check the childs heartbeat and breathing, and then makes careful recommendations to a nurse about how to take care of the child.

Another child checked by Hieu is Giang Thi Du Lam, 18 months old. Her father had brought her to the clinic by motorbike at 2am as she was suffering from diarrhoea and dehydration. Her temperature was worryingly low.

Hieu warms her with a heater and keeps her under observation.

Every day, dozens of boarding patients receive careful examination from Hieu. He also encourages the patients and their families.

Doctor Nguyen Van Hieu gives examination to 18-month-old Giang Thi Du Lam, from Nam Ke Commune, Muong Nhe District, the northern mountainous province of ien Bien.  Photo tienphong.vn

I can live where residents live

Lu Van Xam, 88, a member of the Khang ethnic minority in Muong Toong Commune, Muong Nhe District, has smoked for many years. He now suffers from chronic lung disease and heart failure.

Xam has to go to the medical station regularly when he has difficulty breathing and feels tightness in his chest. Xam receives personal care from Hieu and his colleagues.

Lu Thi Tien, Xams daughter, said, Hieu is a kind person. He is never furious with patients. Whenever my father feels pain, Hieu comes and examine him even when Hieu is sleeping.

When my father comes back home, Hieu advises that he should eat meat and vegetables, and avoid fish as it can cause coughing, said Tien.

Hieu graduated from Ha Noi Medical University in 2014, and then worked at the Thanh Nhan Hospital in Ha Noi.

When Hieu heard about the Ministry of Public Healths project bringing doctors to volunteer in poor districts, he was eager to sign up.

I volunteered to go anywhere across Viet Nam. Where residents can live, I also can live, he wrote in his application letter.

After two more years of training as a doctor specialised in paediatrics, Hieu went to Muong Nhe, the poorest district of the northern mountainous province of ien Bien.

Every three months, he returns to Ha Noi to visit his wife and two children, one 21 months old and the other four months old.

He faces a lot of difficulties, but Hieu does not forget the ethics of a doctor.

Hieu studies the ethnic minority language from his patients and their families. Now he can speak Mong language and can communicate with his patients. The ethnic Mong minority make up more than 65 per cent of the total population in ien Bien Province.

My biggest hope is that children recover quickly, and are healthy when they get discharged from the medical station, said Hieu.

On the night before Hieu went to Muong Nhe District, Hieu spoke with his wife.

We told each other that the journey was long and difficult, but we would strive to reach the destination and volunteer to contribute to a place that needs us, said Hieu.

Hieu also revealed a plan to move his family to ien Bien Province, to be closer to the land. Although they are poor, local people have grown to love the generous young doctor.  VNSTHUA THIEN- HUE  The central city of Hue is struggling to conserve relics located along the Huong (Perfume) River as development proliferates in the area.

Phan Thanh Hai, director of the local government body for managing relics built by the Nguyen Dynasty (1802-1945) in the city, said many dynastic buildings made use of the river as an axis for their locations.

Thus changes in the ecology of the river have a negative impact on the relics, Hai told a seminar on the conservation of the relics located along the river held in the former imperial capital city on Tuesday.

Hai listed power plants built on the upper area of the river as top creators of problems for the rivers ecology. The exploitation of stone and minerals on the upper riverbanks also affected the river in general and the relics in particular, he added.

We have to adapt to the changes as much as possible, Hai said, adding that several buildings are vulnerable to deterioration as they were built by Nguyen Lords (1558-1777) 300 years ago.

He added that some of the works that are intended to be excavated from the river basin, according to commitments local authorities made to UNESCO in 1993, remain at their locations, including Long Tho Cement Plant and Ga Loi Quarry.

Other impacts included deforestation of the upper forest, the spread of industrial tree plantations and the development of aquaculture in the rivers lower part. We made many efforts to give explanations to UNESCO for these developmental impacts, especially the construction of new bridges spanning the river, Hai said.

Associcate Professor ang Van Bai, deputy chairman of the countrys Cultural Heritage Committee, said local authorities should consider the river as the core of any development plans.

Local authorities should work to make Hue a museum of ecology, with harmony between ancient buildings and nature. I believe this will foster, not hinder, the future development of the city, he said.CAN THO  The construction of hydro-electric dams in several countries on the mainstream of the Mekong River has seriously impacted the lives of people living along it, a forum heard on Tuesday in Can Tho City.

Dams in China, Laos and Cambodia have witnessed a significant decline in fish stocks and even the disappearance of many species and depletion of alluvial soil and the vital nutrients it brings, experts said.

Since the hydroelectric dams have been built in the upper basin, many species of fauna and flora have never been seen again. Northern Thailand used to have 200 kinds of fishes but now only a third survive, Somkiat Khunsangsa, a local from Chiang Rai Province in Thailand, told the forum titled Mekong basin facing challenges in protecting local residents and ecosystem.

The number of fishing boats has fallen from 1,000 to only 300 because there are fewer fish.

Tonle Sap is the biggest lake in Cambodia and is closely linked with the Mekong River. In the past it was famous for having plenty of fish, which was the main source of income for locals.

Long Sochet, a Cambodian fisherman living along the lake, said: The situation has changed dramatically since dams were built. We realise that many fishes have disappeared and others have sharply declined.

Water levels in Tonle Sap are much lower than before, and it is hard to irrigate or fish in the dry season now, he said.

There is limited alluvial soil and vital nutrients are lacking, and local farmers must use fertilizers, which causes pollution.

There are around two million people depending on the lake, including my village with 40 households. We are really worried about the future of Tonle Sap due to the construction of the hydropower dams upstream.

SemVorn, a village head in Kratie Province, Cambodia, said in the past her village used to depend on farming and fishing, but now there is only half the fish and people have to leave the village to find jobs.

Nguyen Thanh Hai of Vinh Kim Commune, Chau Thanh District, Tien Giang Province, said: In the past Tien Giang Province had freshwater for the whole year, but now there is saline water very often. Landslides occur on a large scale.

Vinh Kim Commune used to be famous for its star apple. Now 80 per cent of the trees have died because of saltwater and no other trees can grow.

Maureen Harris, Southeast Asia programme director at International Rivers, said seven dams have been built in China and 11 further downstream in Cambodia and Laos.

In future droughts, saltwater intrusion and landslides are expected to increase greatly in the Mekong Delta.

Research by the Mekong Basin Management and Sustainable Development shows that by 2040 alluvial soil washed into the delta will fall to a mere 4 per cent of current levels and productivity would decline to 0.6  1 tonne per hectare.

Dr. Naruepon Sukumasvin of the Mekong River Commissions Secretariat said: Hydropower dams will increase landslides along the rivers banks, especially in Viet Nams Mekong Delta and from Vientiane in Laos to Stung Treng Province in Cambodia.

The dams will worsen poverty since around US$1.57 billion worth of fishes will be gone.

Dr Duong Van Ni of Can Tho Universitys environment faculty said the continuing construction of such dams poses a threat to water security in the region, especially the rice basket that is the delta.

We must adopt urgent solutions to protect the Mekong River, water resources and the eco-system to avoid a huge migration from the delta to other places because there will be no more livelihoods for 18 million people.

The forum was organised by the International Rivers and PanNature, a Vietnamese non- profit dedicated to protecting and conserving diversity and improving human well-being.  VNSHA NOI  Ha Nois Social Insurance has published a list of 500 businesses with long overdue social insurance premiums, lasting between six months and two years.

The total debt amounts to more than VN322 billion (US$14.1 million).

The delay in paying off debts by these enterprises have affected more than 16,500 workers in the city.

According to the list, the largest debt owner is VIT Garment Co. Ltd in Me Linh District, with a debt amount of over VN18.7 billion ($820,930) from more than 900 workers in 16 months.

Four other enterprises own a debt of more than VN10 billion ($439,000). These include Cienco 1 Bridge 12 Joint Stock Company in Long Bien District, Investment and Construction No. 4 Joint Stock Company in ong a District, Bridge 17-CIENCO 1 Enterprise in Ba inh District and Song Tich Irrigation Company Limited in Son Tay District.

These enterprises owe debts ranging from VN10.5 billion to VN11.8 billion between 10-24 months.

Some businesses only owe more than VN100 million ($4,390), but the debt duration is long, ranging from 23 to 24 months. Thus, employees of these businesses are derived of benefits such as social insurance, health insurance and unemployment insurance.

According to Ha Nois Social Insurance, some enterprises have long overdue debts because of difficulties in business, bankruptcy or temporary suspension of operations.

Social Insurance has informed these enterprises about the delay in paying the debts.

Under the current law, employers who ignore or fail to pay social insurance, health insurance and unemployment insurance for employees can be punished up to seven years in prison and be fined up to billions of ong.

Last December, authorities in Ha Noi had ordered the citys inspectors to inspect enterprises with long overdue social insurance premiums.

According to Social Insurance, more than VN2.8 trillion ($122 million) in premiums for social insurance, unemployment insurance and health insurance are overdue as of last November, making up 8.47 per cent of the collection plan.

Ha Noi is one of the localities with the highest social insurance, unemployment insurance and health insurance premium debts, directly affecting the legal benefits of nearly 760,000 labourers.  VNSHA NOI  The Health Ministry has not been involved in investigation, prosecution and trial of the case related to the death of eight persons after undergoing kidney dialysis at Hoa Binh Provinces General Hospital in June last year.

Nguyen Huy Quang, head of Health Ministrys Legal Affairs Department, told media on Wednesday that according to health minister Nguyen Thi Kim Tien, this was an extremely serious medical incident.

The investigative, prosecution and judicial agencies will work independently in the case in accordance with the law, he said, adding the Health Ministry expected these agencies to execute the defendants at the earliest.

The health minister ordered a transparent, open and unbiased investigation, prosecution and trial, following laws and considering the legitimate rights and benefits of the three defendants, including Hoang Cong Luong.

Luong, 32, worked as a doctor at the intensive rehabilitation ward of the artificial kidney department at the General Hospital.

The Health Ministry proposed the concerned agencies to consider Luongs crime through the courts arguments and indictment as well as by questioning his relatives to decide on the appropriate punishment, Quang said.

In response to reporters queries as to why the Peoples Court of Hoa Binh Province did not talk about the responsibility of the hospitals director, Quang said the indictment only mentioned the contract-signing process.Accordingly, Truong Quy Duong, director of the hospital, signed the contract for repair and maintenance of the Reverse Osmosis (RO) water purification system at the hospital with Thien Son Company. Thien Son then signed a contract with Bui Manh Quoc, director of Tram Anh Water Treatment Ltd Co.

Following the deaths, Duong was dismissed from his position.

Besides Luong, Quoc, 32, and Tran Van Son, 28, staff of the department of material and medical equipment at the General Hospital have been charged for unintentional killing and irresponsible behaviour causing serious consequences.

In a related move, Nguyen inh Anh, head of Emulation and Commendation Department under the Health Ministry, denied the information that the ministry had proposed the court to exonerate Luong from criminal charges. The information was released on the website, dan-nong.com.

According to the Authority of Broadcasting and Electronic Information under the Ministry of Information and Communications, dan-nong.com faked the licence of the Ministry of Information and Communications granted to news websites and is illegal.

The website uses an international domain name without reporting to the Viet Nam Internet Centre. It will be given suitable punishment.  VNSHA NOI  Ha Nois Peoples Committee has assigned the provincial authority and sector of Me Linh District to conduct a survey and suggest a location for the construction of a wholesale market.

The proposed market is expected to improve agricultural consumption in the province.

The request was made Thursday morning at the working meeting between the chairman of the committee, Nguyen uc Chung, and the districts authority to discuss measures to assist farmers who recently had to discard tens of tonnes of turnips because of low prices.

At the meeting, Tran Thi Phuong Lan, deputy director of the citys Department of Industry and Trade said the price of turnip had fallen significantly as farmers had no stable output.

Lan said 95 per cent of harvested white turnips had been purchased by traders and only five per cent had been consumed at supermarkets.

So far, as many as 2,000 tonnes of turnips have been harvested from 20 hectares of farmland. Many have ripened already.

Lan said, after the lunar New Year Festival, hundreds of households in Trang Viet Commune had to pull out their turnip crops as the vegetables prices had plunged drastically.

Even selling the vegetable at very cheap prices was not possible because it was a bumper crop.

Currently, good turnips are sold at VN3,000 per kilogramme at the farm and the overripe kind is VN1,500 per kilogramme.

In addressing the situation, Chung said the key issue was that the States management agencies should be responsible for assisting farmers in the consumption of goods.

He said the 2,000 tonnes of turnip were valued at VN1 billion ($44,200).

Chung has assigned the citys Departments of Industry and Trade and Agriculture and Rural Development to invite the retail systems and businesses to find ways to consume the agricultural products in the city.

The Department of Industry and Trade was asked to support farmers in building their own brand and tracking the origin of their vegetables.

In addition, according to Chung, farmers should diversify their products by processing them in a variety of ways apart from simply providing fresh produce.

He has assigned the Departments of Natural Resources and Environment and Planning and Architecture to select the location for a wholesale market in Me Linh District.

The city, together with the investors, will build a wholesale market for vegetables and flowers for the local people to bring their agricultural products for consumption, he said.  VNSPARIS  Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy was charged with corruption and illegal campaign financing on Wednesday over allegations that the late Libyan dictator Moamer Kadhafi helped fund his 2007 election campaign.

After five years of investigation and two days of questioning the rightwinger in police custody, judges looking into Frances most explosive political scandal decided they had enough evidence to charge the 63-year-old.

The combative one-term president, who served from 2007-12, was charged with corruption, illegal campaign financing and concealment of Libyan public money, the source added. He returned home Wednesday after being placed under court supervision.

Sarkozy denies the charges, which are the most serious out of the myriad investigations that have dogged him since he left office in 2012.

He will have six months to appeal the charges, which is he is likely to do, and the judges will have to make a further decision about whether they have sufficient proof to take the case to trial.

He was first taken into custody in the Nanterre suburb west of Paris on Tuesday morning before returning for another grilling on Wednesday morning.

Since 2013, investigators have been looking into claims by several figures in Kadhafis ousted regime, including his son Seif al-Islam, that Sarkozy was on the take in 2007 from the man he helped topple four years later.

He is already charged in two separate cases, one relating to a system of fake invoices devised to mask overspending on his failed 2012 election campaign and another for alleged influence peddling involving a judge.

His right-wing Republicans party has so far backed him publicly.

"Friendship and loyal support to Nicolas Sarkozy in this test," the treasurer of his 2007 campaign, Eric Woerth, tweeted.

One of the partys lawmakers in northern France, Sebastien Huyghe, told BFM television he believed Sarkozy was the victim of "vengeance" by ex-Libyan regime members and by the French judiciary, with which he had a fraught relationship as president.

But there have been signs of unease among some senior conservatives who fear being contaminated by the mounting allegations against him.

Brice Hortefeux, a Sarkozy ally who was a top minister during his presidency, was also questioned Tuesday.

"Mr Hortefeux again assured that there was no financing from Libya or any foreign country," his lawyer Jean-Yves Dupeux told AFP.

Suitcases of cash?

In 2011, as NATO-backed forces were driving Kadhafi out of power, Seif al-Islam told the Euronews network that "Sarkozy must first give back the money he took from Libya to finance his electoral campaign."

Sarkozy has dismissed the allegations as the rantings of vindictive Kadhafi loyalists who were furious over the French-led military intervention in Libya that helped end Kadhafis 41-year rule and ultimately led to his death.

The former French leader has also sued the investigative website Mediapart, which has led media coverage of the Libyan allegations since 2012 when it published a document allegedly signed by Libyas intelligence chief showing that Kadhafi had agreed to fund Sarkozy to the tune of 50 million euros ($62 million).

Le Monde newspaper reported Wednesday that several other Kadhafi regime members had come forward recently with more evidence.

The case drew heightened scrutiny in November 2016 when a Franco-Lebanese businessman admitted to having delivered three cash-stuffed suitcases from the Libyan leader in 2006 and 2007, when Sarkozy was preparing his first run for president.

The revelations came as Sarkozy was trying to make a comeback.

Ziad Takieddine claimed he provided 1.5 to two million euros in 200-euro and 500-euro notes each time and was given the money by Kadhafis military intelligence chief Abdallah Senussi.

The legal investigation is looking into these allegations, as well as a 500,000-euro foreign cash transfer to Sarkozys former interior minister Claude Gueant and the 2009 sale of a luxury villa in the south of France to a Libyan investment fund for a suspiciously high price.

Businessman Alexandre Djouhri, an associate of Sarkozys, sold the property for 10 million euros to a fund managed by Kadhafis ex-chief of staff Bashir Saleh.

In January, Djouhri was arrested off a flight at Heathrow airport and appeared in court in London on suspicion of fraud and money laundering linked to the French probe.  AFPThe Commemorative Air Force announced the 2018 tour schedule for their Boeing B-29 Superfortress known as FIFI. The 26 city tour kicks off in mid-May, with a visit to Millington, Tennessee, but will also include eight different airports in Canada; a first for FIFI. Tours of the aircraft, as well as flight experiences, will be available to the public (for a fee) at each of these stops. Several other aircraft from the CAF fleet will also join FIFI at most locations. Anyone interested in further details or wishing to buy rides in advance should check with AirPowerTour.org.

The Schedule:

Millington, TN  May 17-20 (Aircraft include B-29, P-51, C-45, T-6, PT-13, T-34)

Jackson, TN  May 21-23 (Aircraft include B-29, C-45, T-6, PT-13, T-34)

Huntsville, AL  May 24-27 (Aircraft include B-29, P-51, C-45, T-6, PT-13, T-34)

Roanoke, VA  May 29-30 (Aircraft include B-29, C-45, T-6, PT-13)

World War II Weekend, Reading, PA  June 1-3 (Aircraft include B-29, C-45, T-6, PT-13)

Johnstown, PA  June 4-6 (Aircraft include B-29, C-45, T-6)

Williamsport, PA  June 8-10 (Aircraft include B-29, C-45, T-6)

Wilkes-Barre/Scranton, PA  June 13-17 (Aircraft include B-29, C-45, T-6)

Westover ARB, MA  June 20-24 (Aircraft include B-29, C-45, T-6)

Farmingdale, NY  June 27-July 1 (Aircraft include B-29, C-45, T-6)

White Plains, NY  July 4-8 (Aircraft include B-29, C45, T-6)

Nashua, NH  July 9-16 (Aircraft include B-29, C-45, T-6)

Montreal, QC  July 18-22 (B-29 only)

Ottawa, ON/Gatineau, QC  July 25-30 (B-29 only)

Peterborough, ON  August 3-5 (B-29 only)

North Bay, ON  August 8-12 (B-29 only)

Kitchener, ON  August 13-15 (B-29 only)

London, ON  August 17-29 (B-29 only)

Windsor, ON  August 22-26 (B-29 only)

Hamilton, ON  August 30-September 2 (B-29 only)

Danville, IL  September 5-9 (Aircraft include B-29, P-51, C-45, T-6, PT-13)

Tulsa, OK  September 12-16 (Aircraft include B-29, P-51, C-45, T-6, PT-13)

Joplin, MO  September 24-26 (Aircraft include B-29, C-45, T-6, PT-13)

Great Bend, KS  September 28-30 (Aircraft include B-29, P-51, C-45, T-6, PT-13)

Air, Sea and Land Festival, New Orleans, LA  October 12-14

Wings Over Dallas, Dallas, TX  October 26-28Over the past couple of years, WarbirdsNews has brought our readers several stories about Brad Deckert, and his unique, dual-control TBM Avenger torpedo bomber Bu.85632, including a pilots report (HERE). As many of you will recall, Deckert is the driving force behind the TBM gatherings that have taken place annually since 2016 at his home field; Illinois Valley Regional Airport in Peru, Illinois. Deckert is continually striving to enhance his Avengers military authenticity, so each year he adds another detail to towards this goal. We thought our readers would enjoy an update written for us by Steve Kuehn describing the recent winter maintenance work and upgrades which Deckerts Avenger has enjoyed, along with a teaser for the upcoming Avenger gathering this May.

Deckert TBM Avenger T83 Ready for Duty

by Steve Kuehn

December 2017 brought Brad Deckerts TBM-3E into the hangar for a complete inspection, scheduled maintenance, system checks and a number of restoration and combat and weapons systems refits in anticipation of the 2018 Warbird season.

The maintenance team removed the engine cowlings in December and opened up the inspection ports, from bow to stern, for the Avengers annual. Kicking off the engine work; all 14 of the Wright Cyclones cylinders were compression-tested, with one showing itself to be out of speccalling for a cylinder rebuild. Fortunately a second test indicated that the glitch was an anomaly, and the engine passed with flying colors!

After other routine maintenance and replacement of all the valve cover gaskets and exterior engine seals, the Cyclone was buttoned back up for a successful test-run on February 10th. Cleaning, lubricating, cosmetic and repair tasks filled a long list and over the winter months, owner Brad Deckert and his team of volunteers tackled a number jobs and projects to get the aircraft prepared for this coming air show season.

The projects completed or currently underway include:

Engine compression testing and gasket/seal replacement

Left main landing gear strut replacement

Fabrication and restoration of the ventral observation position window

Installation of aircrafts aft crew cabin heater (all weather combat operations)

Stripping/repaint wheel wells

Repair flaps

Repair and refit of emergency bomb release system

Fabricate, finish and install dummy Mk 13 aerial torpedo

Repair/replace main and left fuel tanks

Cleaning and lubricating everything

Thats a partial list, but owner Deckert has brought the aircraft a long way since its last days as a commercial air tanker in Canada some 30 years ago. With the installation of the heater and the small 110-volt generator to power radar and other combat systems, Deckert is closer than ever to having the most complete, and technically correct combat-spec TBM-3E flying today.

Currently the aircraft is being prepped to fly down to Wings Over South Texas to fly with the Blue Angels over the weekend of March 24th/25th. Deckert will then be hosting the TBM Avenger Reunion, A Salute to Veterans at the Illinois Valley Regional Airport on May 19th, where his TBM will be joined by some 15 others, as well as two Corsairs, a brace of P-51s, a squad of T-6s and other historic aircraft from the Korean and Vietnam War eras, including a F-86 Sabre and a MiG-17 duking it out for air supremacy over Illinois.

WarbirdsNews wishes to thank Steve Kuehn for his article and photographs shared here today!Joe Anderson, chairman of Benovia Winery, is proud to announce that his vintage C-53 Skytrooper airplane, The Spirit of Benovia, will join dozens of World War II-era aircraft in a flight from the United States to Normandy next June to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Invasion of Normandy. The Spirit of Benovia will join other American aircraft as part of the D-Day Squadron, and will rendezvous with a group of British aircraft called Daks Over Normandy. Together, the two groups will fly in formation over Normandy on June 6, 2019. To mark the occasion, and to honor the lives of those who fought in World War II, Benovia winemaker Mike Sullivan has crafted a special Pinot Noir called Liberation.

A variant of the civilian DC-3 passenger planes, the C-53 Skytroopers were among the workhorses of World War II and played a key role in the Invasion of Normandy, known as D-Day, which occurred on June 6, 1944 when Allied forces stormed several beaches in the Normandy region of France, a turning point in the war which led to the liberation of Western Europe from the Nazis.

The Spirit of Benovia first flew in 1942 and had a colorful history in both military and civilian service. It flew over the Himalayas to support the Allied Forces against Japan during World War II. After World War II it was sold to the Civil Air Transport in Taiwan and helped transport Chinese Nationalists from China to Taiwan following the Communists takeover. The plane continued to fly covert missions against the Communists in Southeast Asia, as part of the CIAs Air America. Joe Anderson and Mary Dewane, co-founders of Benovia Winery, acquired the plane in 2008 and renamed it The Spirit of Benovia. Since then, they have taken World War II veterans and the families of those who served in the Civil Air Transport on commemorative, sentimental flights.

When you think of all the hands around the world that have touched this airplane, its amazing. We are so proud to fly The Spirit of Benovia in this special celebration, said Anderson. My father and two of my uncles served in combat in World War II and we are so blessed that they came home. Its important to us to honor everyone who fought for our freedom. This will be a poignant celebration as there are still surviving soldiers who will be able to join us.

Andersons pilot of 13 years, Chief Pilot Jeff Coffman, will fly The Spirit of Benovia to Normandy with Anderson aboard. The plane will make the significant journey in stages from Arizona, to Connecticut, Newfoundland, Greenland, Iceland, Scotland, England  and finally, to Normandy on June 6, 2019. The Spirit of Benovia will remain in Europe and two weeks after the D-Day celebration, the plane will also participate in a commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the Berlin Airlift. During the Berlin Airlift which began in 1948, Allied forces brought food and fuel to residents of West Berlin after the Soviet Union cut off all access to roads, trains and canals into the city. As Anderson and Coffman prepare the plane for these historic events, and throughout the trip, fans can follow the planes progress via social media and at www.benoviawinery.com. Before and after the journey, The Spirit of Benovia will be on display at air shows in the U.S. and Europe.

To mark the occasion, Benovia winemaker Mike Sullivan has crafted just 56 cases of a special Pinot Noir blend called Liberation, made from Benovias Tilton Hill estate vineyard, harvested in 2016. The wine will be $70 per bottle and a percentage of sales from Liberation will be donated to a D-Day Squadron charitable fund that is helping to transport veterans, students and the vintage American aircraft to the celebration in Normandy. A dramatic label was created for Liberation, designed by pilot and artist, Craig Kodera. The memorable scene captured on the label depicts an airborne D-Day squad, and the artwork on the nose of the featured plane was inspired by a B-29 that Joe Andersons uncle flew in World War II. The exclusive Pinot Noir can be purchased HERE.

Support the D-Day Squadron by purchasing the exclusive 2016 Liberation Pinot Noir  Click the image below.

For more information on The Spirit of Benovia and Liberation, or to set up an interview with Joe Anderson, please contact us at BenoviaPR@glodownead.com or 415-394-6500.Info Meeting on Qualifying for a Habitat for Humanity Home

Mar. 21, 2018

By Mar. 21, 2018

The Paducah-McCracken County Habitat for Humanity is pleased to announce their spring home build, and there will be a general meeting for anyone in the community to learn how they can qualify for a Habitat home.



The meeting will be at the Knights of Columbus Hall at 3028 Jefferson Street in Paducah on Tuesday, March 27 from 4  6 pm.



Prospective homeowners must show a need for adequate housing (financial and physical), agree to partner with Habitat, and show the ability to pay an interest free mortgage.



Qualifications for home ownership will be explained and applications will be available for those who meet the qualifications.



For more information about this event or, Paducah-McCracken Habitat for Humanity, Please contact Brenda Langlois, Executive Director, at 270-444-2060 or by email at brenda@paducahhabitat.org.Church Bazaar at St. Matthew By the Lake Lutheran Churchpast daily news Sep 13 (1) Sep 09 (15) Sep 06 (12) Sep 04 (10) Sep 03 (10) Aug 31 (17) Aug 29 (14) Aug 26 (13) Aug 22 (11) Aug 21 (12) Aug 19 (21) Aug 14 (6) Aug 13 (10) Aug 10 (10) Aug 08 (9) Aug 07 (10) Aug 06 (10) Aug 05 (8) Aug 03 (8) Aug 02 (7) Aug 01 (7) Jul 31 (14) Jul 29 (1) Jul 27 (7) Jul 25 (5) Jul 24 (10) Jul 22 (11) Jul 19 (16) Jul 17 (6) Jul 16 (10) Jul 15 (13) Jul 12 (7) Jul 11 (5) Jul 10 (8) Jul 08 (8) Jul 07 (3) Jul 06 (5) Jul 05 (8) Jul 04 (11) Jul 03 (8) Jul 02 (7) Jul 01 (5) Jun 30 (8) Jun 28 (7) Jun 27 (8) Jun 26 (7) Jun 25 (8) Jun 24 (6) Jun 23 (6) Jun 22 (9) Jun 20 (5) Jun 19 (9) Jun 18 (8) Jun 15 (9) Jun 13 (13) Jun 11 (11) Jun 09 (19) Jun 06 (10) Jun 04 (10) Jun 03 (8) Jun 01 (6) May 31 (5) May 30 (5) May 29 (6) May 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(19) Feb 04 (14) Feb 03 (16) Feb 02 (28) Feb 01 (37) Jan 31 (27) Jan 30 (31) Jan 29 (18) Jan 28 (14) Jan 27 (10) Jan 26 (18) Jan 25 (26) Jan 24 (34) Jan 23 (21) Jan 22 (21) Jan 21 (18) Jan 20 (18) Jan 19 (18) Jan 18 (26) Jan 17 (24) Jan 16 (23) Jan 15 (30) Jan 14 (20) Jan 13 (18) Jan 12 (24) Jan 11 (11) Jan 10 (23) Jan 09 (22) Jan 08 (17) Jan 07 (17) Jan 06 (9) Jan 05 (18) Jan 04 (15) Jan 03 (19) Jan 02 (14) Jan 01 (6) Dec 31 (12) Dec 30 (4) Dec 29 (15) Dec 28 (11) Dec 27 (7) Dec 26 (10) Dec 25 (16) Dec 24 (13) Dec 23 (16) Dec 22 (11) Dec 21 (26) Dec 20 (28) Dec 19 (14) Dec 18 (25) Dec 17 (23) Dec 16 (19) Dec 15 (22) Dec 14 (38) Dec 13 (26) Dec 12 (25) Dec 11 (27) Dec 10 (31) Dec 09 (15) Dec 08 (30) Dec 07 (31) Dec 06 (27) Dec 05 (38) Dec 04 (25) Dec 03 (27) Dec 02 (15) Dec 01 (36) Nov 30 (23) Nov 29 (17) Nov 28 (23) Nov 27 (13) Nov 26 (16) Nov 25 (14) Nov 24 (18) Nov 23 (21) Nov 22 (21) Nov 21 (24) Nov 20 (20) Nov 19 (23) Nov 18 (17) Nov 17 (17) Nov 16 (34) Nov 15 (25) Nov 14 (17) Nov 13 (21) Nov 12 (18) Nov 11 (9) Nov 10 (15) Nov 09 (9) Nov 08 (9) Nov 07 (12) Nov 06 (8) Nov 05 (4) Oct 29 (1) Oct 01 (1) Jul 29 (1) May 11 (1) Jul 11 (1)This spring, the U.S. Supreme Court will issue a historic decision in Gill v. Whitford  the most important legislative-redistricting case in recent years. However, by the time the Supreme Court issues its decision, Oregons leaders and redistricting experts already will have started to contemplate cutting-edge approaches to Oregons district-drawing process in a public, educational event in Willamette Universitys Mudd Building on April 19 from 9 a.m.12:30 p.m.

At the event, Secretary of State Dennis Richardson, former Secretary of State Phil Keisling and Oregons Solicitor General Benjamin Gutman will convene with legislative redistricting experts Jowei Chen of the University of Michigan and Paul Diller of Willamette University to discusses the past, present and future of legislative redistricting in Oregon.

Im proud to help Willamette University provide a forum both to educate the community about cutting-edge methods of redistricting and to debate the possibility of using those approaches here in Oregon, said Tim Johnson, director of Willamette Universitys Center for Governance and Public Policy Research, which is sponsoring this event.



Willamette is fortunate to have a long-term relationship with one of the worlds top redistricting experts, Jowei Chen, who is a faculty member at the University of Michigan and a research fellow in the Center for Governance and Public Policy Research, Johnson added. Jowei brings Oregon the opportunity to learn about ways to reduce partisan bias in the redistricting process so that we can avoid the costly and bitter legal challenges that often result from fights over gerrymandering.

The event also promises to highlight Oregons tradition of bipartisanship by including current and former Oregon Secretaries of State from both sides of the political aisle.

Secretary Richardson and former Secretary Keisling deserve credit for being willing to share the stage at this event, Johnson said. In many states, it would be hard to fathom a Republican and a Democratic joining together to discuss a topic as politically charged as redistricting, but Secretary Richardson and former Secretary Keisling will be doing just that. Their presence will be a physical symbol of Oregons bipartisan spirit.

Secretary Richardson reinforces that bipartisan ethos.

Oregonians want fair, nonpartisan redistricting that empowers the citizens, said Secretary Richardson. I thank Dr. Tim Johnson for his leadership in convening this important discussion and am excited to participate. Please join us.

The event, furthermore, will showcase Oregons local experts on redistricting.

Every time the Supreme Court hears a case, it accepts legal and scholarly analyses in the form of amicus curiae briefs, Johnson said. For the Gill v. Whitford case, the Supreme Court received briefs authored or co-authored by Solicitor General Benjamin Gutman, Paul Diller of Willamette Universitys College of Law, and Jowei Chen of the University of Michigan and Willamettes Center for Governance and Public Policy Research. All of these individuals will be at our April 19th event and they will be sharing their deep expertise of redistricting with the rest of us. It promises to be an exceptional event and I encourage all members of the community to join us.St PETERSBURG, March 22. /TASS/. A Russian Army officer did on a military base in the southwestern Belgorod region during a routine drill on Tuesday as he tried to protect a soldier from the explosion of a combat hand grenade, the press service of the Western Military District told reporters.

On March 20, an army officer died during a routine drill on a firing range during an exercise in grenade throwing from a trench, the press service said.

A grenade slipped from the conscript soldiers hands after he had pulled out the safety pin. The officer pushed the bewildered soldier aside and then shielded him with his own body.

As a result of the explosion, the officer received multiple wounds while the soldier remained unharmed, the press service indicated. Physicians fought for the officers life but didnt manage to save him.

It added that the commanders of the base had recommended the officer for a posthumous decoration for this display of heroism.

More:

http://tass.com/defense/995556Ecuadors President Lenin Moreno announced Monday the elimination of Ecuadors intelligence agency Senain. According to the president the decision is part of ongoing administrative austerity measures and a response to the citizens ethical clamor, but some fear this measure will give back the countrys intelligence to controversial state security institutions.

Former President Rafael Correa expressed his frustration via Twitter explaining why Senain was created in 2009. Remember the intelligence services before the Revolution: financed by the (United States) Embassy, without articulation, without civilian control That is why Senain was created, Correa said.

However, many have applauded Morenos announcement, charging the institution with spying on and persecuting Correas opposition, while others demanded investigations and sanctions.

Coronel Mario Pazmino, former director of military intelligence is among those calling for further action, including 1. an audit of all reserved spending, 2. delivery of all the equipments, and 3. investigation of all the special operatives against opposition members.

His support has raised concerns over the direction Ecuadorean intelligence will take now.

In 2008, after the Colombian attack of Angostura, in which the Colombian military bombed a FARC camp within Ecuadorean territory without coordination with Ecuadors government, Pazmino was removed from the military for withholding information on the attack from his superiors, including the president and top officials of the Armed Forces, and being a U.S. informant, a claim supported by Ecuadorean historian Jaime Galarza and former Joint Command Chief, Ernesto Gonzalez.

Before Senain was created, Ecuadorean intelligence was dependent on the military and the police, two institutions criticized for their role in human rights violations, especially during the late 1980s, when many activists and political opponents of former President Leon Febres-Cordero were kidnapped, tortured and killed.

One of the most well known cases is the disappearance of the Restrepo brothers, two teens who had no political affiliations and who went missing after being stopped by the Police.

In 2007, during Rafael Correas first year in power, Ecuador launched the Truth Commission to investigate all the cases of crimes against humanity and state terrorism, which was opposed by prominent military and police men, including Mario Pazmino.

Since 2003 Pazmino has been accused by prominent human rights groups like the Permanent Human Rights Assembly of being part of a group known as White Legion, involved in state crimes during Febres-Corderos government.

After he was fired from the military for collaborating with U.S. intelligence, Pazmino became a politician for the same party that sponsored Febres-Corderos presidency in the 1980s.Sorry!

This content is not available in your regionMar 22, 2018 | By Benedict

Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology have developed a 4D printer that can create hard and soft components at the same time and incorporate conductive wiring directly into shape-changing 3D printed structures.

Speaking at the 255th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society, H. Jerry Qi, Ph.D. yesterday told an audience of experts how a new 4D printera multi-technology 3D printer capable of printing shape-changing structurescould accelerate the use of 4D printing in aerospace, medicine, and other industries.

The unusual new 3D/4D printer can purportedly fabricate self-assembling structures that can change shape after being exposed to heat and other stimuli. The printer could be especially valuable as it is capable of printing multiple materials at once.

We are on the cusp of creating a new generation of devices that could vastly expand the practical applications for 3D and 4D printing, Qi said. Our prototype printer integrates many features that appear to simplify and expedite the processes used in traditional 3D printing.

In terms of useful applications for this printer, the Georgia Institute of Technology have set the bar high, saying items printed on the machine could transform many processes across a range of disciplines.

We can use a variety of materials to create hard and soft components at the same time, incorporate conductive wiring directly into shape-changing structures, and ultimately set the stage for the development of a host of 4D products that could reshape our world, Qi said.

We actually wrote about the early stages of this research last year, when Qi and colleagues began working with researchers at the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) and Xi'an Jiaotong University in China.

Their initial 4D printing research, which was published in Science Advances, demonstrated how a mechanical programming post-processing step could be directly incorporated into the 3D printing process, allowing the creation of 3D printed objects that can be transformed into new things by heating.

Today, that research has come a long way, and the researchers are now close to perfecting a workable 4D printer that combines a total of four unique 3D printing technologies in one machine.

Those technologies are aerosol, inkjet, direct ink write, and fused deposition modeling (FDM), and with these multiple 3D printing abilities, the 4D printer can process a vast range of materials, including stiff and elastic materials such as hydrogels, silver nanoparticle-based conductive inks, liquid crystal elastomers, and shape memory polymers, or SMPs.

These SMPs, the key ingredient to shapeshifting 4D printing processes, can be programmed to remember a shape and then transform into it when heated.

Additionally, this multifunctional 3D printer can project a range of white, gray, or black shades of light to form and cure a component into a solid. The researchers say this grayscale lighting triggers a crosslinking reaction that can alter a component's behavior.

A brighter light shade can, for example, create a part that is harder, while a darker shade produces a softer part. By combining curing settings, 3D printed objects can be made that bend or stretch differently than other parts of the structure.

To make these 4D printed objects even more functional, the 3D printer can even use its direct ink write print head to deposit electrical wiring within a part.

The team is currently working with Children's Healthcare of Atlanta to see if 4D printing could be used to print prosthetic hands for children born with malformed arms.

Only a small group of children have this condition, so there isn't a lot of commercial interest in it and most insurance does not cover the expense, Qi said. "But these children have a lot of challenges in their daily lives, and we hope our new 4D printer will help them overcome some of these difficulties.

We look forward to seeing how this 4D printing technology develops. See Qi's presentation in the video below.

Posted in 3D Printing Technology

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Mar 22, 2018 | By Benedict

Chris Annin, an automation engineer from Portland, Oregon, has launched a Kickstarter for the AR2, an open-source, 3D printable kit for a six-axis robot. The robot can be built with low-cost, off-the-shelf components, and can be 3D printed or purchased with aluminum parts.

Looking to bring the factory of the future to your bedroom or office? Youre going to need a six-axis robot for that, and what better place to find one than Kickstarter, home of many wallet-friendly DIY machines over the years.

Engineer Chris Annin recently launched a crowdfunding campaign for his highly affordable six-axis robot, the AR2, which is available as either a budget 3D printed version or a fully metal version made with aluminum structural components.

The AR2 robot is an open-source robot project where users can build and create their own six-axis robot, Annin explains. This robot can currently be 3D printed and built from low-cost off-the-shelf components from vendors such as Amazon, McMaster Carr, and Stepperonline.

Makers will surely be delighted that Annin has made the AR2 six-axis robot fully open source, though it may hinder his chances of meeting his $23,900 Kickstarter goal. All the 3D printing files, schematics, and part lists can be found at the projects GitHub repository, which means many tech-savvy engineers wont have to contribute a cent to the Kickstarter.

They will, however, have to pay for their own components and 3D printing materials, with the electrical components, bearings, and hardware totaling approximately $1,180 from third-party sellers. The robot is operated by an Arduino microcontroller.

Still, for those who would prefer the 3D printed covers and spacers pre-printed for them, there is the option of getting these 3D printed parts directly from Annin for $100, shipping anywhere in the world.

The most appealing paid option, however, is an aluminum parts kit, which comes with aluminum structural components for the AR2. This option is available to backers for $1,195, and is surely where Annin hopes to raise the funding for his cool project.

Of course, Annin will only be able to provide these high-quality aluminum parts if his campaign hits that $23,900 target, releasing the funding required for production. This project hopes to bring aluminum parts kits into production so that users have the opportunity to make their own aluminum version of the AR2 robot, the engineer says.

Even though Annin still has a way to go before meeting his target (he has currently raised just over $5,000), the ball is already rolling for getting the robot kits shipped off to backers.

Initial prototype production runs have already been made, Annin says. Prototype robots have been built and tested, [and] there is little risk moving to a full production scenario.

With desktop six-axis robots generally costing upward of $10,000, Annin thinks his DIY option is a great option for roboticists looking to make savings. The aluminum parts kit and the off-the-shelf components together equals around $2,375, making the AR2 a real budget option for a relatively complex machine.

Check out the campaign here.

Posted in 3D Printer

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Mereenie Plant Update

Brisbane, Mar 21, 2018 AEST (ABN Newswire) - Central Petroleum Limited ( ASX:CTP ) ( OTCMKTS:CPTLF ) ("Company" or "Central") advises that it has awarded contracts for two critical components of the Mereenie Plant Upgrade.The first contract for the new field compressor provides for it to be delivered to site by early October in sufficient time to be installed and commissioned by 1 December 2018, the anticipated date on which the Northern Gas Pipeline should be operational.A second contract is for the restaging of two existing compressors presently at site. The first of the two compressors is due to be re-staged and commissioned by mid-November, with the second by late November.All-in-all the critical long lead items of the separators and these two contracts have now been let to enable the joint venture to achieve its 1 December 2018 target date.About Central Petroleum Limited

Central Petroleum Limited ( ASX:CTP) is a well-established, and emerging ASX-listed Australian oil and gas producer. In our short history, Central has grown to become the largest onshore gas producer in the Northern Territory (NT), supplying industrial customers and senior gas distributors in NT and the wider Australian east coast market.

Central is positioned to become a significant domestic energy supplier, with exploration and development plans across 180,000 km2 of tenements in Queensland and the Northern Territory, including some of Australia's largest known onshore conventional gas prospects. Central has also completed an MoU with Australian Gas Infrastructure Group (AGIG) to progress the proposed Amadeus to Moomba Gas Pipeline to a Final Investment Decision.

We are also seeking to develop the Range gas project, a new gas field located among proven CSG fields in the Surat Basin, Queensland with 135 PJ (net to Central) of development-pending 2C contingent resource.Strategic review approves plan for trial mining at Caula; aim for early revenue from graphite and vanadium products



Graphite Vanadium Project on track first production mid 2019

Sydney, Mar 21, 2018 AEST (ABN Newswire) - Mustang Resources ( ASX:MUS ) ( OTCMKTS:GGPLF ) is pleased to announce that a strategic review led by new Managing Director Dr Bernard Olivier concludes the Company's Caula Graphite Project in Mozambique could achieve first production by the middle of next year. Dr Evan Kirby, who recently joined the Mustang Board of Directors as a Non-Executive Director and consultant with significant graphite and vanadium experience, assisted Dr Olivier in the review.The strategic review does not form part of the formal Scoping Study, which is set for completion in the June 2018 quarter. The Scoping Study will consider the merits of a full commercial-scale Graphite and Vanadium Project with production levels appropriate to an updated Mineral Resource Estimate, and full consideration of the modifying factors covered in the JORC Code, 2012 Edition.The key outcome of the review was the recommendation to the Board of Directors of the Company to establish trial mining and processing operations for completion during Q2 2019. The Board of Directors has accepted the recommendation. This recommendation is based on the following considerations:- Exploration activities have encountered wide intersections of mineralisation with potentially economic graphite and vanadium values.- Furthermore, the scale and configuration (general topography, width, dip, strike length, and surface outcrop) of the deposit are favourable to trial mining activities ahead of full economic scale exploitation.- Trial mining and processing will generate detailed technical information for use in formal feasibility studies of full-scale project development. It will also provide product samples for the evaluation by offtake partners, the evaluation of marketing arrangements and the generation of revenue from the sale of the graphite and vanadium products.- Cost considerations indicate that the Company could finance the establishment of trial mining and processing from its currently available finance facility and planned funding through the current rights issue.- Work completed to date has shown that Caula could deliver an exceptional combination of both high-grade (13% TGC) mineralisation and graphite products large flakes sizes (~55% large, jumbo and super jumbo) and acceptable purity levels (>95% TGC average in all graphite product flake sizes).- The vanadium content of the ore could contribute very significant additional value, especially given the structural shift in the vanadium market. First assay results from the recent drilling campaign on Caula returned an average vanadium grade of 0.42% V2O5 over 125m (from 17m to 143m) of the graphitic mineralised zone.- At the adjacent Montepuez Ruby Project, Mustang has an experienced team with proven capability to obtain exploration and mining permits and the ability to develop trial mining and processing operations. The team will be able to utilise the existing infrastructure and operations camp of the ruby project to assist with graphite project development.- The recent conversion of exploration licences to mining concessions on the Montepuez Ruby Project that borders the Caula Graphite Project (see Figure 2 in link below) is testimony to these abilities.- Furthermore, the 200 tph capacity of the processing plant for the Montepuez Ruby Project is ten times larger than contemplated for the trial mining phase of the graphite and vanadium project.- Completing all permitting, obtaining a mining licence and commencing trial mining operations will strongly differentiate the Caula Project from peer group members who have not progressed so far.Mustang considers that trial mining and processing operations at Caula could produce both graphite and vanadium concentrates. The vanadium concentrate would either be sold or stockpiled for further processing to high purity vanadium products as part of full-scale development. This expectation is based on reference to the 2014 Vanadium Feasibility Study of Syrah Resources' Balama Graphite Project.The trial mining development strategy is based on a robust, low-cost mining operation and construction of a processing plant capable of handling approximately 100,000tpa of ore. This scale of operations was decided after discussions with an equipment supplier, followed by preliminary considerations of costs and potential revenues.The plant will be designed to produce high-grade graphite concentrates as well as vanadium concentrate. In practice, concentrate production rates and qualities will depend on the ore grades fed to the plant, the processing characteristics of the ore, and on plant performance levels achieved. It is anticipated that sales of graphite and vanadium products produced from trial mining will help to secure binding off-take agreements and associated finance required for full-scale project development.The complex nature of graphite and vanadium extraction means that it is likely that virtually all of the equipment purchased for trial mining will be incorporated into full-scale operations.Full Scale Graphite and Vanadium Project Development StrategyDevelopment of a full-scale mining and processing operation will be considered by the Scoping Study. Conditional on a positive outcome of the Scoping Study, a Definitive Feasibility Study (DFS) will be undertaken to serve as a basis for project development and financing. Wherever possible, operational experience from trial mining and processing operations will be incorporated into the DFS.The throughput and production levels of the full-scale project will be defined by the DFS. In practice, the scale of operations decision will consider factors such as the availability of project finance, and the state of the product markets as well as project specific issues such as the ore reserve and projected operational costs and performance levels.BackgroundThe Caula Graphite Project represents a unique combination of both high grade and large flake size that distinguishes the project from its peers (see Figure 1 in link below). The Caula project has delivered a maiden JORC Inferred Resource of 5.4Mt at an average grade of 13% TGC (6% cut-off) for more than 700,000 tonnes of contained graphite. The exploration results included exceptionally high-grade intercepts of up to 26% TGC.The current Caula Mineral Resource estimate is based on five diamond drillholes totalling 484.72 metres and one reverse circulation (RC) drillhole totalling 99 metres. Drillholes were spaced approximately 130 metres apart along a 540 metre strike length. Mustang considers there is strong potential for additional graphite discoveries within the 18km long TEM anomaly.In addition, initial metallurgical test work has confirmed Caula could yield high percentages of Super Jumbo, Jumbo and Large flakes (~55% from the fresh ore) with carbon content up to 98% through simple flotation (average of 97% C across all size fractions).(see Note 1 below) Oxidised ore has also demonstrated excellent treatment characteristics.(see Note 2 below)On 16 March 2018 the Company announced the first assay results from its recently completed diamond drilling campaign(see Note 3 below). The assay results returned grades of up to 24.2% Total Graphitic Carbon (TGC) and 1.02% Vanadium (V2O5). Drillhole MODD014 on licence 6678L has an average of 14% TGC within a 125m (from 17m to 143m) mineralised graphitic zone (downhole width). Furthermore, the drill hole has an average vanadium pentoxide (V2O5) grade of 0.42% within a 125m (downhole width from 17m to 143m) mineralised zone (downhole width).Scoping Study UpdateAs announced on 5 February 2018(see Note 4 below), the Company has completed the 1,400m diamond drilling campaign on the Caula Graphite Project. The Scoping Study remains on track for completion in Q2 this year. Approximately 1.2 tonnes of diamond drill core, comprising 51 samples from the current drilling program, have been delivered to Nagrom Laboratories in Perth for graphite and vanadium recovery test work. The samples, representing oxide and fresh ore, will be tested both as composites and as individual samples to investigate orebody variability. Multielement analysis of the samples is being performed by SGS South Africa and full results are expected shortly.Vanadium Economical PotentialThe Caula ores are considered to be broadly similar to ore at the nearby Balama Project of Syrah Resources ( ASX:SYR ). In July 2014, Syrah published the results of its vanadium scoping study.(see Note 5 below) The outcome of the study was very positive and most of the conclusions drawn have relevance to the Caula Graphite Project. The following points were noted:- The vanadium in the ore did not report to the graphite concentrate and graphite concentrate samples were below the detection limit for vanadium analysis.- There was strong correlation between graphite and vanadium grades in the ore.- Vanadium could be recovered to a concentrate by a combination of froth flotation and wet high intensity magnetic separation (WHIMS). These are well established processing methods commonly applied in the mining and minerals industry.- A vanadium chemicals plant could be sourced from China where there is extensive experience with vanadium extraction from graphitic and carbonaceous ores. Furthermore, as noted by Syrah, it is likely that the plant would be able to produce high-purity vanadium products that will sell at a significant premium to the industry standard 98% vanadium pentoxide flake.Worldwide, the major use of vanadium is as an alloying agent in full alloy and high strength low alloy steels. China has recently increased the minimum specification for reinforcing steel used in buildings and as a result, domestic vanadium consumption is expected to increase by 10,000 tonnes per year (Metal Bulletin, August 2017). The vanadium market has already experienced a structural shift, changing China from being a net exporter of vanadium to becoming a net importer of vanadium. The use of vanadium in vanadium redox flow batteries (VRFB batteries), used for large scale energy storage is set to drive a further increase in demand. Consequently, vanadium supplies have tightened, and the price of vanadium has increased sharply over the last two years to current levels of ~US$30,500/tonne, making it the best performing battery metal of 2017(see Note 6 below).Notes:1 Refer to ASX Announcement dated 13 Dec 2017 "Caula Graphite Project Metallurgical Results Improved"2 Refer to ASX Announcement dated 01 December 2017 "Amendment Caula Graphite Project ASX Release of 6 Nov 20173 Refer to ASX Announcement dated 16 March 2018 "High Grade Drilling Intersects at Caula Project"4 Refer to ASX Announcement dated 5 February 2018 "Concept study drilling completed, intersects additional wide shallow zones of graphite at Caula" inclusive of all the JORC Tables listed in the Appendix.5 Refer to Syrah Resources' ASX Announcement dated 30 July 2014 "Vanadium Scoping Study Finalised".6 "Best performing battery metal of the year isn't cobalt", Mark Burton. Bloomberg. January 26, 2018.To view figures, please visit:About New Energy Minerals Ltd

New Energy Minerals Ltd (ASX:NXE) (FRA:GGY) is an ASX listed junior mining company, that recently announced the divestment of the Company's Caula vanadium - graphite project and the Montepuez Ruby project in Mozambique.

$4.5 million raised in oversubscribed placement

Brisbane, Mar 22, 2018 AEST (ABN Newswire) - Lithium exploration company Lake Resources N.L. ( ASX:LKE ) ("Lake" or "LKE") announces that it has secured commitments to raise $4.5 million (before costs) in an oversubscribed private placement by way of the issue of 33,333,335 new ordinary LKE shares (Offer Shares) at $0.135 per share (Placement) with an attached 1-for-2 option exercisable at $0.20 on or before 15 December 2018 (Attaching Option), to sophisticated and professional investors. The Placement is expected to complete on Monday 26 March 2018.- Lake completed oversubscribed private placement of $4.5 million- Offer was upscaled from $4 million due to significant demand from current shareholders- Patersons Securities Limited and Hunter Capital Advisors Pty Ltd were joint lead managersThe intention was to raise $4 million but due to significant demand from current shareholders, the offer was upsized. The Company has agreed to seek quotation of the Attaching Options subject to meeting the listing requirements under the ASX Listing Rules.The funds raised through the Placement will be used by Lake for further exploration at its Olaroz, Cauchari and Paso Lithium Brine Projects, and for ongoing drilling and initial scoping studies at the Kachi Lithium Brine Project. In addition, a portion of the funds will repay the outstanding notes and for working capital.Lake Resources' Managing Director Steve Promnitz, said: "Lake is grateful for the overwhelming interest to support exploration over the Olaroz and Cauchari areas as they are immediately adjacent to high grade lithium production or drill holes with high grades and flow rates."Lake's 100% owned flagship brine projects (covering over 170,000ha), Olaroz/Cauchari/Paso and Kachi, have similar settings to major world-class brine projects being developed in the highly prospective Lithium Triangle in Argentina. The Company's Olaroz/Cauchari Projects are located next to Orocobre's Olaroz lithium production project and SQM/Lithium Americas Cauchari development project. Lake recently signed a landmark agreement with the Jujuy Provincial Government, confirming tenure of its Olaroz/Cauchari/Paso Projects and allowing Lake to advance exploration efforts for the first time since their acquisition 2 years ago.The Company is currently drilling at its Kachi Lithium Brine Project (100% ownership - mining lease). The Kachi project covers 50,000 Ha over a salt lake south of FMC's lithium operation and near Albemarle's Antofalla Project. Results are expected from April/May onwards.To view figures, please visit:About Lake Resources NL

Lake Resources NL (ASX:LKE) (OTCMKTS:LLKKF) is a clean lithium developer utilising clean, direct extraction technology for the development of sustainable, high purity lithium from its flagship Kachi Project, as well as three other lithium brine projects in Argentina. The projects are in a prime location within the Lithium Triangle, where 40% of the world's lithium is produced at the lowest cost.



This method will enable Lake Resources to be an efficient, responsibly-sourced, environmentally friendly and cost competitive supplier of high-purity lithium, which is readily scalable, and in demand from Tier 1 electric vehicle makers and battery makers.

Appointment of New Chairman

Sydney, Mar 22, 2018 AEST (ABN Newswire) - Big Un Limited ( ASX:BIG ) (or 'the Company') is pleased to announce the appointment of Mr Nicholas Jordan as non-executive Chairman, effective immediately.Mr Nicholas JordanMr Jordan is a US investment banker with an extensive global financial background. He has held numerous senior management positions at a number of leading US and European Investment Banks and has been based in the US, UK and Russia. He began his career at the Bank of New York Management Training program, worked at the predecessor banks that ended up forming JP Morgan and finished as co CEO of Goldman Sachs, Russia and Confederation of Independent States (CIS). In between, Mr Jordan was Vice Chairman and member of the Global Advisory Committee at Deutsche Bank Global Banking Division and member of UBS European Management Committee.Nicholas Jordan has served on several Boards including the American Chamber of Commerce in Moscow, Russia and as Chairman of the Board of 4finance, a leading European on line fintech lending company.'I am extremely pleased to be joining Big Un Limited. This is a company with tremendous future prospects. Big Un Limited is a leader in a very exciting digital market segment with both the potential and capability to scale. The Company is well suited for global expansion. As we expand in the USA and the U.K. we are also ready to bolster our corporate governance structure in order to meet the governance and financial reporting requirements for a rapidly growing and maturing company. We will re- engage with the ASX and will look to build on our recent experiences and emerge as one of the exchange's best managed companies."Corporate Governance and ComplianceThe board welcomes the appointment of Nicholas Jordan along with the recent appointment of William Knowles as an independent, non-executive director of Big Un Limited and Mr Francis Farmakidis as Company Secretary. The Company is committed to building a best practice corporate governance framework and compliance with new ASX guidelines. BIG Un Limited has also engaged new, top tier, external accountants to advise on its December 2017 Half-Year Financial Reports and an international law firm to head and build a corporate governance committee for the company. Big Un Limited is also currently considering candidates for an additional Australian based board position.ASX GuidelinesNicholas Jordan said "With considerable debate in the Australian market about technology companies' transparency and reporting, we are taking a diligent approach to finalising our Half Yearly results FY18, having engaged new accountants to advise on this. The results will respond to the recent ASX guidelines on reporting as well as comply with a new accounting standard, AASB 15, which is aimed at clarifying revenue recognition for fast-growing companies".About Big Un Ltd

Big Un Ltd (ASX:BIG) is the parent company of Big Review TV Ltd. Big Review TV are innovative disruptors in the online video space delivering subscription based video technology products and services. The Company has operations across Australia and in New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States, Hong Kong, Singapore and Vancouver and was listed on the ASX in December 2014.Bill Murray thinks the students of Parkland, Florida have the capability to enact powerful change.

In a new op-ed for NBC News THINK, Murray compares the organizers of March for Our Lives to the young people who spoke out against the Vietnam War. As he sees it, it was students who began the end of the Vietnam War."

"It was the students who made all the news, and that noise started, and then the movement wouldn't stop," he said. "I think, maybe, this noise that those students in Florida are making -- here, today -- will do something of the same nature."

March for Our Lives is set to take place in Washington, D.C. on Saturday, with sister events taking place in more than 800 other locations around the globe, according to organizers.

The event was spearheaded by a group of students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, where a shooting last month left 17 people dead.

"The thing that's so powerful about students is that, when you haven't had your idealism broken yet,," Murray added, "you're able to speak from a place that has no confusion, where there is a clear set of values."

Murray is the latest celebrity to lend his voice to support March for Our Lives.

Jimmy Fallon on Wednesday night spoke about the event on his show. Broadway stars Lin-Manuel Miranda and Ben Platt recorded a charity song to benefit the cause. And a list of famous names, including Oprah Winfrey and George Clooney, have donated money to the GoFundMe campaign.

Jennifer Hudson, Ariana Grande, Demi Lovato and Common are also set to perform at the event.California lawmakers are considering two new guns bills.

The "School Gun Violence Prevention Act" would tax firearm and ammunition sales in order to fund more school counselors.

This bill would basically require a school counselor at every middle and junior high school in California, and their main responsibility would be to detect and report early warning signs of threats.

The firearms tax would also go toward a grant opportunity for law enforcement officers to fund a school resources officer's program at high schools.

In a time when gun violence is becoming more prevalent on school campuses, North State residents still have mixed feelings on what sounds like a "sin-tax'.

"Firearms are easily accessible and they should be taxed, they tax smokers in the same regard and have that money go back into our community, that would be a good idea," said Magalia resident Emilee Hushour.

"It's unfair because I'm not purchasing a gun to shoot up a school to hurt someone, I'm purchasing a gun to put meat in my fridge and feed my family," said Paradise resident Cammy Royal.

Assemblyman Jim Cooper who's behind the bill says this would fill in the holes from statewide budget cuts to counseling services.

There's still no plan for the exact percentage, but the bill will start making its way through committee hearings in the coming weeks.

This isn't the only move by lawmakers to prevent gun violence on school campuses; some leaders believe more guns will help keep students safe

California Assemblyman Jim Gallagher has introduced a bill that would arm school guards.

Gallagher says the Rancho Tehama Elemetary shooting really motivated this bill, and this week in Maryland, Gallagher points out that the school resources officer on campus actually stopped the shooter and likely prevented the loss of many lives.

Gallagher says because of the state law that bans anyone, including teachers, from conceal-carrying firearms, it unfortunately makes students a target.

He says this could be a preventative measure as well, and be used to address issues like bullying.

In terms of financing the program? it's not going to come from the schools' budgets.

The state of California would reimburse the districts for the cost of hiring an officer.

They'll discuss the potential costs of this as the bill moves through committee.NEW YORK (AP) - The Latest on the alleged use of Facebook data to influence the U.S. presidential election (all times local):

3:50 p.m.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is admitting mistakes and outlining steps to protect user data in light of privacy scandal involving a Trump-connected data-mining firm.

Zuckerberg is breaking more than four days of silence as he posts an update about the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Zuckerberg posted on his Facebook page Wednesday that Facebook has a "responsibility" to protect its users' data, and "if we can't then we don't deserve to serve you."

Zuckerberg and Facebook's No. 2 executive, Sheryl Sandberg, have been quiet since news broke Friday that Cambridge may have used data improperly obtained from roughly 50 million Facebook users to try to sway elections.

___

3 p.m.

Kenya's opposition says lawyers are poring through a British broadcaster's investigation to see whether legal action is possible against data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica over its role in the country's disputed presidential election last year.

Cambridge Analytica already is being investigated by British and U.S. authorities over allegations the firm stole data from 50 million Facebook users and used it to manipulate elections.

National Super Alliance Chief Executive Norman Magaya says a legal team will look into whether Cambridge Analytica was involved in what Kenya's opposition claims is a hack of the electoral commission and manipulation of results in favor of President Uhuru Kenyatta.

In the Channel 4 report this week based on undercover video, Cambridge Analytica took credit for stage-managing Kenyatta's campaign. It denied any involvement in inflammatory videos targeting Kenyatta's opponents. There was no discussion of mining Facebook data.

___

1:05 p.m.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg plans to speak sometime in the next day with a "focus on rebuilding trust."

That's according to a person familiar with the matter who was not authorized to speak publicly.

The person gave no further details on timing or where Zuckerberg will speak. But the person said the CEO's plan was "always to speak publicly" about Facebook's latest privacy scandal, which involves Trump campaign consultants who allegedly stole data on tens of millions of Facebook users in order to influence elections.

Criticism has been brewing as Zuckerberg and his No. 2 executive, Sheryl Sandberg, have been mum since the Cambridge Analytica story broke last Friday. Twitter users have been asking, using the "WhereIsZuck" hashtag.

__ Barbara Ortutay, New York

___

(previously from LONDON)

4:35 p.m.

The chairman of Romania's ruling party says his Social Democratic Party did not hire Cambridge Analytica for its successful 2016 electoral campaign. And Cambridge Analytica itself reportedly said it did not work on the campaign, despite being interested.

Liviu Dragnea told The Associated Press on Wednesday that he "categorically" did not hire Cambridge Analytica or its parent company SCL Group, a British strategic communications company.

His comment came after a British consultant, Rupert Wolfe Murray, who was based in Romania at the time, said he was contacted by Mark Turnbull, a senior official at Cambridge Analytica, in August 2016.

He said Turnbull had "offered to embed a two-person team" into the Social Democrats' campaign team. Wolfe Murray said he declined the offer because he does not work for political parties.

He says Turnbull later told him Cambridge Analytica did not work on the 2016 Romanian election.

The Social Democrats won about 46 percent of the vote and the Liberals came second with 20 percent.

Separately, investigative platform RISE project reported SCL Group set up an office in Romania in 2011, though it is not clear who they worked for.

___

3:15 p.m.

The co-founder of WhatsApp, which was acquired by Facebook four years ago for $19 billion, has joined the movement to delete Facebook.

Brian Acton tweeted: "It's time. #deletefacebook."

That hashtag has been trending since reports surfaced in recent days regarding the improper use of personal information on Facebook by Cambridge Analytica, a political research firm used by the Trump campaign before the election.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has remained silent as nearly $50 billion in market capitalization of his company has been wiped out with investors fearing new oversight by government regulators.

___

1:10 p.m.

British Prime Minister Theresa May says allegations that Facebook users' data was improperly used by political campaigns are "very concerning."

May says she expects Facebook and data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica to "comply fully" with British authorities investigating how personal information was obtained and used.

May told lawmakers in the House of Commons that "people need to have confidence in how their personal data is used."

Authorities in Britain and the United States are investigating the alleged improper use of data harvested from tens of millions of Facebook users by Cambridge Analytica, which worked on U.S. President Donald Trump's 2016 campaign.

May said that "as far as I'm aware" the British government has no contracts with Cambridge Analytica or its parent company, SCL.

___

12:30 p.m.

A British consultant says Cambridge Analytica approached him before Romania's 2016 parliamentary elections to work for the Social Democratic Party.

Rupert Wolfe Murray told The Associated Press on Wednesday that Mark Turnbull, a senior official at Cambridge Analytica, contacted him in August 2016.

He cited an email where Turnbull wrote: "What we have offered is to embed a two-person team into the current campaign team... to provide ongoing strategic advice and assistance across the campaign.... over the next 2-3 months."

Wolfe Murray said he declined the offer because he does not work for political parties. It was unclear whether Cambridge Analytica played a role in the Dec. 2016 elections, where the Social Democrats won about 46 percent of the vote. The Liberals came second with 20 percent.

Separately, investigative platform RISE project reported that SCL Group, a British strategic communication company affiliated to Cambridge Analytica, set up an office in Romania in 2011.

___

12:20 p.m.

A sell-off in Facebook shares is heading into the third consecutive day, with almost $50 billion in market capitalization evaporating since the start of the week.

The stock fell 1.5 percent before the opening bell Wednesday and, after falling 9 percent, it's one of the worst weeks in company history.

Governments on both sides of the Atlantic are calling for CEO Mark Zuckerberg to testify on the issue, but he has been silent since a story broke Friday about how a firm tied to the campaign of Donald Trump improperly lifted data on 50 million Facebook users.

That firm, Cambridge Analytica, suspended CEO Alexander Nix pending an investigation.

___

11:15 a.m.

Company filings show that Trump-affiliated data-mining firm Cambridge Analytica has a link to a Chinese security and logistics company run by Erik Prince, the former mercenary who founded private military company Blackwater.

British corporate records show that Alexander Nix, the suspended chief executive of Cambridge Analytica, is also director of a company called Emerdata Ltd. that was incorporated in August 2017.

Other Emerdata directors include people associated with Cambridge Analytica, along with Johnson Ko Chun Shun, who was appointed in January.

Ko is also deputy chairman of Hong Kong-based Frontier Services Group, whose chairman is Prince.

FSG has attracted attention because of concerns Prince plans to provide special forces veterans to assist Chinese companies investing in risky locations overseas.

China's biggest state-owned company, Citic, is a major FSG shareholder.

___

9:40 a.m.

The Cambridge University researcher who developed an app used by Cambridge Analytica to harvest data from millions of Facebook users claims he has been made a scapegoat.

Alexandr Kogan told BBC on Wednesday he believed all the information he provided was obtained legitimately. He said he was approached by Cambridge Analytica, which is being investigated by British and U.S. authorities for possible misuse of data.

He said: "They approached me. In terms of the usage of Facebook data they wrote the terms of service for the app, they provided the legal advice that this was all appropriate."

Kogan admitted he did not ask enough questions about the data use and did not have a lawyer review the agreement.

Cambridge Analytica has suspended its top executive as possible misuse of data is checked.

(Copyright 2018 The Associated Press.)



















A large billboard in the Philippines caused massive stir on Wednesday, March 21, when a pornographic video was shown on one of the digital billboards flagging the Executive Building Center in Makati Avenue, Makati City, around 2 p.m.



The video which showed a couple having sex was played on the billboard at a busy intersection for over half a minute Wednesday afternoon, causing a lot of fuss among the motorists on the highway.



Mayor of Makati, Abigail Binay, immediately ordered the shut down of the billboard after the clip of the couple having sex was shown. However, prior to making the command, pictures and videos of the incident had been captured by motorists and passersby on their mobile phones and were shared virally on social media.



The incident at the major financial hub in the Philippines, startled motorists on one of the busiest major highways in the city. Binay disclosed that she has launched an investigation to determine the cause of the unfortunate event.



Binay also said the billboard will remain closed pending the results of the investigation. The investigation will include the billboard's owner, Philippine company Globaltronics, and its employees, to determine whoever was responsible, a statement from her office said.



Currently, there has been wide speculation online as to the cause of the gaffe, citing that the billboard was hacked to display babes porn using TeamViewera software that allows people access computers remotely.



Globaltronics, the company who run the billboard, have said that the display of the video was a "malicious attack".



The spectacle was captured by a shocked citizen, Mulong Sermonia, who was inside a vehicle when he saw the video playing on the digital billboard.



By the time Sermonia realized what was happening, he took out his phone to record the display. In the video shared online, a man can be seen on top of his partner, humping away. However, his face was not quite visible thus making him anonymous.



Sermonia said that he and his companions were laughing when they saw the video on the billboard.



We were laughing when we saw it. Some who were riding motorbikes even stopped. A lady also stopped, and other drivers, including a driver of an L300 van, I think, he said in a report.



Another motorist who saw the footage being played while they were driving to work remarked that it was ''hard to believe what they were seeing''.



''Some of the people on the cars around us started noticing it too when we started taking video. It was funny, and surprising at the same time. It was over very quickly. But it was still a very embarrassing mistake," he said. "I have no idea who could do that.''



Pornography is currently illegal in the predominantly Catholic Philippines, which also takes very strict measures in regulating its television and movie content. However, amusingly, despite porn being banned, adult website Pornhub said last year the Philippines ranked 13th in the world for daily visitors.



In 2017, a global UNICEF report ranked the Philippines as a top global source of child pornography, with around 80% of Filipino kids at risk of either online sexual abuse or bullying.



The State of the World's Children report titled "Children in a Digital World", was focused on the opportunities and risk children face online.



Child pornography is a billion-dollar industry, and Filipino children are the ones being traded and exploited online. Children who are made to perform sex acts in front of a web camera will never get their childhood back. We must all work together to protect our children, UNICEF Country Representative Lotta Sylwander said.



In the case study, a 12-year-old Filipino girl was forced to livestream sexual acts from her neighbors house, and being paid about $3 for each "show."



To counter the threats of sexual abuse, UNICEF Philippines continues to engage with social media networks, remittance agencies and internet service providers to create various policies to protect children from the sex trade, and curb other forms of sexual abuse.Singapore Technologies Engineering (ST Engineering), Surbana Jurong and Changi Airport Planners and Engineers (CAPE) have signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) to form a consortium of Singapore-based companies to participate in overseas airport development projects.

The consortium plans to develop a comprehensive export strategy in regard to airport development, with a particular focus on Asia Pacific markets and cities with strong growth potential.

Building on the various strengths of the consortiums component companies, the group will deliver holistic, end-to-end solutions that can transform the global airport development industry, a statement from the consortium said.

With its experience and expertise in data analytics and artificial intelligence, ST Engineering expects to deliver cutting-edge, next-generation solutions that power global Smart Cities and transform airport operations.

Surbana Jurong is active in urbanisation, industrialisation and infrastructure planning, and it is to offer its suite of services that encompass airport master planning, large-scale infrastructure and services design, as well as building consultancy services for the aviation sector.

CAPE, the lead consultant for airfield engineering for Changi East Development  which takes in Singapore Changi Airports Terminal 5  will add its expertise in areas such as airport master planning, engineering, terminal planning and project management.

The MOU was signed by Vincent Chong, president and chief executive of ST Engineering, Wong Heang Fine, group CEO of Surbana Jurong, and Peter Lee, managing director of CAPE.

Chong commented: Airports of the future are a destination in themselves  less like transit hubs and more like mini Smart Cities.

This is where ST Engineering, with our strong capabilities in technology and engineering, in collaboration with our partners, Surbana Jurong and CAPE, can positively impact the air transport industry  bringing holistic solutions that leverage new technologies and processes to develop Smart Airports.

Fine observed: As one of the largest Asia-based urban and infrastructure consulting firms, Surbana Jurongs strengths lie in the ability to weave airports into the surrounding urban fabrics, creating vibrant aerotropoli that boost economic development of cities  the airport cities of the future.

Our teams aviation track record spans Singapore, Asia and the Middle East. With this collaboration with CAPE and ST Engineering, we are able to offer a complete integrated solution for aviation clients globally.

Lee added: Having worked on over 60 projects in more than 20 countries CAPE has extensive experience in a broad spectrum of services including master planning, airport engineering, terminal design and project management.

This partnership harnesses the strengths and experience of three well-established Singapore companies to offer bespoke and comprehensive engineering solutions to airports around the world.

In the coming months, the companies expect to develop the consortiums presence in target overseas markets, in a process that will include defining tender participation requirements, while developing best practices and a go-to-market approach recommended by a steering committee.

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Birmingham's National Commerce Corp., the parent company of National Bank of Commerce, is expanding into Florida with the acquisition of a Bradenton-based bank.

The two companies signed a merger agreement this week, according to an announcement.

The combined assets of the company total $3.4 billion.

Premier will continue to operate as Premier Community Bank of Florida, a division of National Bank of Commerce, with president and CEO James F. Kuhlman, in a leadership position.

NCC President and CEO Richard Murray IV said Premier's growing core deposit base, its community/homeowners' association deposit business and core banking business, will be "of great value to our company."

"We have known Jim Kuhlman and followed his career for several years, and we look forward to the opportunity to work with him and his team to build a great company together," Murray said.

The merger is subject to customary closing conditions. Keefe, Bruyette & Woods, Inc. acted as financial adviser to NCC, and Maynard, Cooper & Gale, P.C. acted as its legal adviser.James Earl Ray drove from Los Angeles on March 18, 1968 in the 1966 white Ford Mustang he purchased in Birmingham months earlier, leaving behind a television set on which he had admiringly watched George Wallace speak. On the back of the set Ray had carved: Martin Luther Coon.

The journey east toward Atlanta was the most recent on his cross-continent journey, which began with his escape from a Missouri prison in April 1967 and continued with him taking his Mustang with Alabama plates to cavort with Mexican prostitutes in Puerto Vallarta. He went to Chicago, Montreal and volunteered with Wallace's presidential campaign in California.

That same Mustang would soon carry Ray to Selma where he expected Martin Luther King Jr. to speak.

Charles Kelly

(King is shown in an April 3, 1968 file photo at the Mason Temple in Memphis as he made his last public appearance.)

After leaving Los Angeles, Ray drove the Mustang toward Atlanta, stopping in New Orleans and Selma, then going back to Birmingham. Ray had stayed briefly in the Magic City after his escape from the Missouri prison that caged him for seven years for robbing a grocery store.

It was while back in Birmingham that Ray purchased the rifle he used to end King's life on the balcony of a Memphis motel 17 days after he left L.A.

While in California, living under the name Eric Starvo Galt, Ray aided former Gov. Wallace's run for president, which brought many of his supporters from Alabama to the California campaign trail, author Hampton Sides wrote in "Hellhound on his Trail: The Electrifying Account of the Largest Manhunt in American History."

"To the core of his angry soul, Eric Galt identified with Wallace's rants against big government, his championing of the working man, his jeremiads on the spread of Communism," Sides wrote. "What Galt found most appealing about Wallace, though, was the governors stance as an unapologetic segregationist. Wallace's rhetoric powerfully articulated Galt's own smoldering prejudices."

Don't Edit

(AP Photo/File)

(Ray, handcuffed to a leather belt and wearing a bulletproof vest, is escorted to his jail cell by the Shelby County, Tenn. sheriff, in this July 18, 1968 file photo. )

As much as he admired Wallace. Ray loathed King. It was no coincidence Ray was bound for Atlanta, where King lived and preached.

"Ray's probable stalking of Dr. King continued with his trip to Selma, Alabama following his departure from Los Angeles," according to records in the National Archive of a Congressional committee hearing on the assassination.

"Dr. King was in the Selma area on March 21. Ray admitted being in Selma on March 22 (a motel registration card for his Galt alias confirms his stay there), but his explanation for being there was not convincing. He claimed that while driving from New Orleans to Birmingham .... he got lost and had to spend the night in Selma. The committee noted, however, that in 1968 there were two direct routes from New Orleans to Birmingham, and that Selma was on neither of them. It was situated in between the two routes, about 45 miles out of the way. The committee further determined that it would be difficult for Ray to have become lost between New Orleans and Birmingham."

Sides notes Ray saw news of King traveling to Selma but doubts he would try to kill MLK when he was only armed with a .38 handgun and not a rifle.

For that, Ray would travel to Birmingham.

Don't Edit

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Here is the last known address of Ray, under the name of Eric S. Galt, at 2608 Highland Avenue, pictured on April 12, 1968.

"The house has since been demolished, and a convenience store occupies the location today," journalist Stan Diel wrote for AL.com in 2010.

Ray first tried Long-Lewis hardware in Bessemer on March 29, 1968, Sides wrote, but did not think the guns there were powerful enough. He went from there to Aeromarine Supply Company, where he bought a Remington Gamemaster .243. He returned the rifle the next day for the more powerful .30-06 Remington Gamemaster 760.

"The store where he bought the gun was on property that now is part of Shuttlesworth International Airport, according to the book. The airport was named after civil rights icon the Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth in 2008," the 2010 article stated.

"When Ray bought the rifle, he identified himself as Harvey Lowmeyer and listed an address in the 1900 block of 11th Street South as his home."

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ASSOCIATED PRESS

(The Remington 30.06 rifle that killed King is shown by then Criminal Court property clerk Ben Holley in this 1992 file photo.)

"The biggest mystery from Ray's time in Birmingham is why he was here at all, Sides said," in a 2010 AL.com interview. "The only explanation found so far is his affinity for Wallace."

"He could have bought the gun at a gun store in Georgia. But he chose to go to Birmingham to buy the gun," Sides said. "I don't know why."

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Charles Kelly

(This April 3, 1968 file photo shows King walking across the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. It is here that King would lose his life the next day. )

Having stalked King's movements in Atlanta, Ray decided to travel to Memphis where King was leading a protest by the city's sanitation workers.

Signing in at the New Rebel Motel, Ray listed his name and address as "Eric S. Galt, 2608 Highland Avenue, Birmingham, Alabama," Sides wrote.

Ray would soon relocate to a nearby rooming house with a better view of King's motel.

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CHARLES E. KELLY

(King is seen here with the Rev. Jesse Jackson, left, just prior to his final public appearance.)

As storms battered the Mason Temple, King gave what turned out to be one of his most remembered speeches. It was his last.

"We aren't going to let any mace stop us. We are masters in our nonviolent movement in disarming police forces; they don't know what to do. I've seen them so often," King said.

"I remember in Birmingham, Alabama, when we were in that majestic struggle there, we would move out of the 16th Street Baptist Church day after day; by the hundreds we would move out. And Bull Connor would tell them to send the dogs forth, and they did come; but we just went before the dogs singing, "Ain't gonna let nobody turn me around....

"And we just went on before the dogs and we would look at them; and we'd go on before the water hoses and we would look at it, and we'd just go on singing "Over my head I see freedom in the air." And then we would be thrown in the paddy wagons, and sometimes we were stacked in there like sardines in a can. And they would throw us in, and old Bull would say, "Take 'em off," and they did; and we would just go in the paddy wagon singing, "We Shall Overcome."

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AP (Associated Press)

This is the window-view from the bathroom where the fatal shot was fired into King. In the background is the balcony of the Lorraine Motel where King was standing when he was shot. The view is from the rear of a rooming house where police say Ray stood in a bathtub to fire the shot.

The tragic deed done, Ray scooped up his belongings from the seedy flophouse and ran to the Birmingham-bought Mustang he had driven across America. He ditched his belongings, including the rifle he bought in Alabama, in the doorway of a nearby business.

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AP

"After the assassination Ray drove through Alabama, but didn't stay, as he had initially planned. Instead, he ditched camera equipment somewhere east of Florence, and drove on to Atlanta," Diel wrote in 2010.

Ray, historians have speculated, may have thought Wallace would pardon him for killing King -- assuming Wallace won the 1968 presidential election.

"He harbored a vague hope that George Wallace's Alabama ... would protect him, that the majority of citizens would praise him for his act and shield him from pursuers," Sides wrote. "It was a pitifully naive train of reasoning."

As this wanted poster states, however, Ray was charged in federal court in Birmingham on April 17, 1968, for shooting King.

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ASSOCIATED PRESS

Ray soon led authorities on a global manhunt. This is a 1968 artist's drawing based on the passport photo of Ray.

The Mustang he purchased here was found in Atlanta, still with its Alabama plates.

On June 8, 1968, Ray was arrested at London's Heathrow Airport.

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Former Birmingham Mayor Arthur Hanes, seen here packing up his desk at City Hall in this 1963 Birmingham News file photo, briefly represented Ray with his son, Art Hanes Jr., before a new legal team took over.

Hanes Sr. was a staunch segregationist, compared to his replacement as mayor, Albert Boutwell.

When riots broke out in Birmingham early on Mother's Day morning 1963, after the bombing of A.D. King's home and the Gaston Motel, Hanes Sr. told The New York Times:

"Martin Luther King is a revolutionary. The nigger King ought to be investigated by the Attorney General. This nigger has got the blessing of the Attorney General and the White House.''

The younger Hanes discussed the Ray case with AL.com in 2013:

"Hanes Jr. says Ray was "browbeat" by his new lawyer into making a confession.

"To this day, Hanes Jr. continues to say he believes Ray didn't fire the shot that killed King. What would have been Exhibit A of Hanes Jr.'s defense hangs on his office wall, an aerial photograph of the Lorraine Motel and its surroundings in Memphis.

"Ray wrote a book claiming a conspiracy and government cover-up. The King family joined Ray's relatives in 1997 in calling for a trial to discover the full truth about what happened in Memphis.

"For years, Hanes Jr. has said there was interesting information Ray provided him. Hanes Jr. still isn't saying what that may be.

"It's important in the sense that it accounts for what he was doing that day," Hanes Jr. says. "It's the explanation of how did your gun get there, how did this happen. It's just an interesting link to the puzzle. I'll share it some time."

Ray proclaimed his innocence until his death in prison in 1998.

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Don't EditAs Jacksonville continues to assess the damage from Monday night's tornado, city officials are moving on several fronts to clean up and rebuild the city.

Water

City officials says rumors of the storm damaging water quality are false. The city's water is good.

Schools

Superintendent Mark Peterson said it is still unclear when school will resume. "I seem to have more questions than answers," he said in a post on his Facebook page. "As soon as this decision is made, you will be notified."

It is our hope and prayer that our students and employees are OK. This is a tragic affair and we will overcome. I know... Posted by Mark Petersen on Thursday, March 22, 2018

Curfew

There is a mandatory 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. curfew north of Mountain St. until further notice, city officials said. There will be zero tolerance for sightseers, and violators will be arrested.

In a video message shared on social media this morning, Mayor Johnny L. Smith said two people were arrested last night for violations. "Please know we are not taking this lightly," Smith said.

Residents are being told not to move or drive around barricades. The road block locations are at the 11th St. and Church Ave. intersection, 7th St and Church Ave. intersection, and Second St. and Mountain St. intersection.

Jacksonville State University John Beehler yesterday announced that campus is closed until April 2. Only essential personnel are being allowed on campus at this time.

JSU Students

Students housed on campus are not being allowed back into damaged dormitories at this time. In some cases, there will be guided access allowed for students to retrieve belongings, or items will be retrieved, according to University spokeswoman Buffy Lockette.

University officials say the school will finish the semester. Experts from the University of Alabama and Auburn University are consulting with Jacksonville State University on recovery efforts, the school announced this afternoon.

More information is available through the school's disaster relief website.

Animals

Any questions or concerns about missing pets or stray animals should be communicated to Animal Control at (256) 435-3582.

Volunteers

Smith said volunteers are being asked to turn out Friday, beginning at 7 a.m. Those taking part are required to fill out a Disaster Volunteer Registration Form which can be found here. Volunteers should check in at the Jacksonville Community Center at 501A Alexandria Rd SW to receive proper credentials and an access pass. Access passes will change daily. Volunteers must be 19 years or older.

Contractors

Contractors are required to carry their city business licenses, applicable permits and zone access passes. Required documentation can be obtained at City Hall at 320 Church Ave SE. Access passes will change daily.

Debris

All debris must be placed off the roadways. Residents should not place debris in areas cleared for new or repaired power poles. All outside burning should be avoided.

Victim assistance

Starting today victim assistance will be available at the RV camp next to the JSU Meehan Hall. The recovery center will be open from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. through Sunday.

The recovery center will be staffed by personnel from the American Red Cross, United Way/211, and insurance companies.Formal charges have been filed following a robbery, and subsequent shooting, outside a Trussville fast-food restaurant.

Two men are charged in connection with the holdup, and a woman is charged for lying to police after the crime, said Trussville police Sgt. Michael Bruce. Those charged are Nicholas Stephen Freeman, 21, Cameron De'Juan Nix, 20, and Erica Lynese White, 42. All three are from Center Point.

Freeman is in custody. Nix and White remain at large.

It all began Wednesday morning when a woman met the two men in the parking lot of Burger King on North Chalkville Road to buy a phone in a deal brokered in an online marketplace.

Police said Nix set up the meeting with the victim and approached her vehicle to show her the phone. At that time, Freeman approached the victim's vehicle from the passenger side, opened the door and attempted to rob her at gunpoint.

Cameron De'Juan Nix

The victim then pulled her own gun and reportedly shot the suspect in the leg. The wounded man later showed up at Princeton Baptist Medical Center, and Birmingham police were alerted.

Freeman is charged with first-degree robbery, third-degree receiving stolen property, obstruction of justice and using a false identity. His bond is set at $30,000. Police said they gun he used for the robbery reported stolen out of Jefferson County and he gave a fake name to police when they interviewed him at the hospital.

He also has outstanding warrants in Jefferson County and Dallas, Texas for burglary.

Nix is charged with first-degree robbery. His bond is set at $20,000.

White is charged with obstruction of justice using and using a false Identity. Her bond is set at $5,000.

Bruce said White showed up at Princeton claiming to be Freeman's mother. She also gave a false identity to detectives when being questioned about Freeman's true identity. White showed to have outstanding warrants with the Homewood Police Department and Jefferson County.

Anybody with information on the whereabouts of Nix and White are asked to call Trussville police.Alabama's seven living former lieutenant governors said in interviews with AL.com that although the office is currently vacant, it's extremely important and its powers should not be diminished.

The lieutenant governor was once one of the most powerful offices in Alabama, with the privilege of presiding over the senate, appointing committee chairs and assigning bills to committees, which meant the power to essentially kill a bill. Many of its duties were stripped away after the 1998 election. An outgoing Democratic lieutenant governor who had been elected governor wanted to prevent his Republican successor from exercising the power to kill his programs.

Now the office of lieutenant governor has been vacant for nearly a year, and some legislators want to strip it of any remaining legislative power.

Senate Bill 88, introduced in the current legislative session by Sen. Gerald Dial, proposed stripping the office of its legislative role, which includes presiding over the senate. "This bill calls for an increased salary, but no assigned duties," said Gov. Kay Ivey, who was Lt. Gov. Ivey from 2011-17. "I don't think this is a good bill."

The bill was considered Tuesday but carried over and is not likely to be passed in this session. It would have left succeeding the governor if that office is vacated as the only major duty of a lieutenant governor. The lieutenant governor has become governor three times in the past 46 years, most recently last year when Ivey assumed the office.

When Gov. Wallace got shot

On May 15, 1972, Alabama Gov. George Wallace was shot five times while campaigning for president in Laurel, Md.

"The governor had been shot; I did not know it," recalled then-Lt. Gov. Jere Beasley, in office from 1971-79, who was at a convention in Florida. "I flew back. They said come to the capitol immediately. It was chaos. There were troopers all around. There were rumors. UPI put out an obituary by mistake. I was prepared to do it."

After 20 days Wallace was still recuperating in a Maryland hospital. Alabama's secretary of state sent a telegram to Beasley, notifying him that he was acting governor. "I called a cabinet meeting the next morning," Beasley said. "I stayed in the office upstairs. I made sure everybody knew nothing was going to change."

Beasley was acting governor from June 5 to July 7. Wallace got out of the hospital and flew back to Montgomery. He regained his title as governor upon arrival.

When Gov. Guy Hunt was convicted

When Gov. Guy Hunt was convicted in 1993 of ethics violations and forced from office, Lt. Gov. Jim Folsom Jr. took over. On his second day as governor, Folsom learned Alabama was on a list of 30 states being considered for the first U.S. Mercedes plant. He began actively pursuing it.

"By mid-summer we were down to seven states, a couple weeks later down to three states, by September the decision was made," Folsom said. "We felt if we broke the ice and convinced Mercedes to come to the state that would act as a springboard to bring other auto manufacturers to the state." Since then, Honda and Hyundai built Alabama plants and Toyota-Mazda has announced plans. "I don't think any of us working on that project at that time would think 23-24 years later it would have that kind of impact," Folsom said.

When Gov. Bentley resigned

On April 10, 2017, Gov. Robert Bentley resigned amid scandal and Lt. Gov. Kay Ivey was sworn in as the new governor.

"The office of lieutenant governor is truly an office in waiting," Ivey said in a recent interview with AL.com. "The office of lieutenant governor is designed to preside over the senate, and be elevated to office of governor if there's a vacancy. The lieutenant governor needs to be well-informed about what's going on in the legislature. The office makes many appointments to boards and commissions."

Beasley suggests that it might be better if governor and lieutenant run together on a slate like president and vice president. Ivey thinks it's better running separately.

"The people of Alabama ought to have the ability to elect whoever they want to become governor," she said. "When the vacancy occurs, people will want to have a say, rather than a handpicked somebody. You want somebody who has been elected statewide, who is knowledgeable about the process. The people of Alabama ought to have the ability to elect whoever they want to become governor."

Siegelman stripped power from Windom

Former Gov. Don Siegelman, who served as lieutenant governor from 1995-99, used his position as lieutenant governor to strip power from his successor, Steve Windom.

"I was Governor-elect," Siegelman said. "I was proposing an education lottery. Steve Windom was one of the adversaries opposing the lottery. I had no choice but to vest the important powers in the pro-tem if I had any hope of getting my proposals passed. I had to bypass Steve because he was adamantly opposed to what I ran on as governor."

Even though he was responsible for stripping them away, Siegelman would like to see the powers of the office restored. "I would like to see the powers revert back to the lieutenant governor," Siegelman said.

Windom said Siegelman liked the power when he was the Democratic lieutenant governor, but didn't want the incoming Republican lieutenant governor to have it.

"He was 100 percent responsible," said Windom, lieutenant governor from 1999-2003. "He had been lieutenant governor and had used the powers delegated to him. The Lieutenant Governor could appoint chairs of committees. It gave him power of life or death over any piece of legislation - maybe not to get something passed, but certainly to kill any piece of legislation. You could assign legislation to a committee where it would go nowhere. He used it to pursue his agenda. He knew we didn't see eye to eye so he took the power away. It passed by a vote of 18-17."

Although he did not get to make legislative appointments and assign bills to committees, Windom did have one power that is in the purview of the office.

"The lieutenant governor approves travel expenses for legislators to go on trips to conferences," Windom said.

Lt. Gov. Folsom served two separate terms

Folsom served two different terms as lieutenant governor, 1987-93, before the Siegelman-Windom dust-up, and after, from 2007-2011.

"There was a vast difference in the political power I wielded between the first and second terms," Folsom said. "When I came back, those powers had been stripped by the body as a whole."

Later lieutenant governors were never able to get the office back to the strength it had.

"If you look at the nation as a whole, the role of lieutenant governor in Alabama had been a very strong role in government, until Steve Windom," said former Lt. Gov. George McMillan, in office from 1979-83. "The state is better served to have a lieutenant governor who is elected independently, who presides over the senate, who makes committee assignments and assigns legislation to the appropriate committees. It was changed strictly because of political purposes."

Bill Baxley, who was lieutenant governor from 1983-87, said too much power has been stripped from the office.

"I think it's unfortunate that they changed it and took a lot of its power away," Baxley said. "That's turned out to be a serious mistake. I'm very apprehensive that mistake will be made worse."

Senate Bill 88 would "make the office not have anything to do with the senate," Baxley said. "I think that's a serious mistake."

Ivey also finds it alarming that there was an effort in the senate to strip power even further from the lieutenant governor's office as it lays dormant, and that powers taken from Windom were never fully reinstated.

"None of those powers have been restored," Gov. Ivey said. "They've neutered the position as much as they could. They're trying to take away the power of the lieutenant governor."

But as Ivey found out the day Bentley resigned, giving her three hours notice that she would be governor, the office still matters.

Alabama will get a new lieutenant governor this year. Three Republicans are vying for the office in the June 5 runoff. Public Service Commission President Twinkle Andress Cavanaugh speaks March 10, 2018, at the Mid-Alabama Republican Club Lieutenant Governor's candidates forum at Vestavia Hills Public Library. Behind her, seated, are State Rep. Will Ainsworth, left, and State Sen. Rusty Glover, right. Democrat Will Boyd is also running for the office.

"It's important when there's been some kind of emergency," Ivey said. "Anybody can have a heart attack, or have a wreck. I'd say it's pretty important. It's the heir apparent to becoming governor. If you don't know anything about the legislative process, and how it works, how are you supposed to be prepared to be governor?"

The Next Lt. Gov.

Alabama will get a new lieutenant governor this year. Three Republicans are vying for the office in the June 5 primary: Alabama Public Service Commission President Twinkle Andress Cavanaugh; State Sen. Rusty Glover and State Rep. Will Ainsworth. Democrat Will Boyd is also running for the office.A Georgia fugitive sought on child molestation charges was arrested in Alabama.

Cherokee County Sheriff Jeff Shaver said 26-year-old Damian C. Ingram, of Cedar Bluff, was wanted out of Floyd County on charges of child molestation and probation violation. Deputies arrested Ingram at a home in the Ferrell community on Wednesday.

A woman - 28-year-old Magan N. Knight - was also arrested at the home after sheriff's investigators found a large amount of methamphetamine, Shaver said. Both Knight and Ingram are charged with drug trafficking and unlawful possession of drug paraphernalia. Both are being held in the Cherokee County Detentions Center, but Ingram is expected to be extradited to Floyd County upon his release.

Magan Knight

Ingram is no stranger to Cherokee County lawmen. In 2013, Ingram was arrested after leading sheriff's deputies on a high-speed chase. In that case, drug investigators were out that night in anticipation of a drug deal near the Little River Canyon National Preserve.

When officers attempted to stop Ingram, his car struck struck an officer's vehicle, then continued onto Alabama 35 at "a high rate of speed" with officers pursuing. Ingram then turned onto County Road 15, attempting to flee on foot, before he was arrested. He was charged with fleeing and attempting to elude, second-degree marijuana possession, second-degree criminal mischief, possession of drug paraphernalia and conspiracy to commit a controlled substance crime.

He pleaded guilty to marijuana possession, court records show, and the rest of the charges were dismissed. He also has prior arrests in Georgia.Habitat for Humanity of Greater Birmingham and REV Birmingham were awarded a total of $100,000 from the Wells Fargo NeighborhoodLIFT program for their efforts to help the city's neighborhoods.

The grants were awarded to the two non-profit groups through Wells Fargo's NeighborhoodLIFT program, which was launched in April 2017 for Birmingham and Jefferson County homebuyers, with a $2.55 million commitment by Wells Fargo to boost local homeownership and revitalize neighborhoods.

Birmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin was among the attendees at a grant presentation on Wednesday.

So far, the NeighborhoodLIFT program has created 63 homeowners in the area by offering homebuyer education plus matching down payment assistance grants.

Habitat for Humanity's grant will support the construction of affordable housing in Cascade Parc, a 19-acre urban development in the heart of Birmingham's East Lake neighborhood. A total of 23 new homes have been built, and sold, to homebuyers in need of quality, affordable housing in Cascade Parc. The completed development is expected to include up to 40 new houses, plus green space to benefit residents and surrounding communities.

REV Birmingham Inc.'s grant will support entrepreneurs and small business owners as they move their business models from concept to sustainability. Through a pipeline of services, REV will help startups navigate the challenges of finding capital and discovering the right business location, while connecting them to communities of business owners and service providers. In addition, REV will lead a strategic effort to identify businesses that may be potential owners, and renters, for commercial spaces in REV's target districts. In these urban Birmingham communities, REV works to create vibrant commercial districts by growing sustainable businesses and filling vacant spaces.

"We're grateful to Birmingham's entrepreneurs for taking risks, and for allowing REV to help them grow their business and fill vacant spaces in the city," said REV CEO David Fleming. "We say at REV that we find passionate people and powerful projects, and we feed them. We thank Wells Fargo and Mayor Woodfin for empowering us to do the rewarding work we get to wake up every morning doing."

According to Wells Fargo, more than 190 down payment assistance grants of up to $7,500 are still available for homebuyers in the Birmingham and Jefferson County area. Interested homebuyers may contact NeighborWorks America's local network member, Neighborhood Housing Services of Birmingham, or Wells Fargo Home Mortgage in Birmingham for information about eligibility requirements.Authorities are searching for relatives of a woman and two men who died in Jefferson County in recent weeks.

Foul play was not involved in their deaths, but their bodies are ready to be released for burial and the Jefferson County Coroner's Office has not been able to locate next of kin.

Nancy Funderburg Price, a 58-year-old white female, died Saturday, March 10, in a fire at her Midfield home. Firefighters and police responded to Price's home just before 11:30 a.m. in the 1800 block of Stone Road. Once they extinguished the flames, the found her inside. She died from smoke inhalation.

Ronald Albert Johns

Authorities believe Price has a sibling in the Madison area.

Ronald Albert Johns, a 54-year-old white male, was found dead March 15 in his room at a Birmingham boarding. Johns' body was discovered by another resident about 7:30 p.m. at the Fulton Avenue S.W. facility.

Chief Deputy Coroner Bill Yates said they have been unable to determine whether Johns had any family.

Ellis H. Lawrence

Ellis H. Lawrence, a 67-year-old black male from Birmingham, was found unresponsive Monday, March 9, in the parking lot of Taco Bell on Center Point Parkway. Center Point Fire and Rescue responded about 2 p.m. to a report of a person down near the dumpster at the restaurant, which is undergoing renovation.

Lawrence was taken to UAB Hospital where he was pronounced dead at 2:36 p.m. They have not yet determined his cause of death, but believe it was a natural death. He listed an address in the 300 block of 85th Street South and was married at one point in his life.

Family members of Price, Johns and Lawrence are asked to the call the coroner's office at 205-930-3603.The University of Alabama at Birmingham Health System is preparing to launch a resource center that will provide support for nonprofit, rural, public hospitals in the state that are facing economic pressures.

The Alabama Legislature approved a bill, sponsored by Sen. Greg Reed, R-Jasper, and Rep. Randall Shedd, R-Cullman, that creates the Alabama Rural Hospital Resource Center. The center, which would be staffed and managed by the UAB Health System, will assist rural hospitals in purchasing and supply chain, strategic planning, insurance and cost reporting, coding, recruitment and compliance.

"I believe that increasing access to quality health care for Alabamians in rural areas is essential," Reed said. "The physicians and researchers at UAB are among the best in the world, and this new center will give Alabama's rural hospitals direct access to game-changing innovations in medicine and health care management."

"This is a concept that provides benefit to all parties involved, but most of all to the residents of rural Alabama who have seen their local hospital close or be forced to cut services," Shedd said. "This can help ensure that appropriate health care is available to all Alabamians where they live and work."

The plan would call for the UAB Health System to add staff to provide expertise, advice and resources to hospitals that request assistance.

"As the flagship health enterprise in the state, UAB has robust systems in place in the areas where a rural hospital might have needs -- areas including coding, supply chain or regulatory compliance," said Will Ferniany, CEO of the UAB Health System. "We can offer our knowledge, insights, and support as a means of helping rural hospitals across the state remain viable and open."

He said the Alabama Hospital Association has provided support for the bill, and thanked Reed and Shedd, along with House and Senate leadership, for making passage a priority.

The bill now goes to Gov. Kay Ivey for her signature, and the center will need approval from the University of Alabama System Board of Trustees.

"Many rural hospitals are in crisis," Ferniany said. "The resource center is designed to help keep those nonprofit, public hospitals operational so that Alabamians can get medical care close to home when appropriate. That helps ensure that a tertiary care facility like UAB Hospital will have available resources for the situations for which we are uniquely positioned to provide care -- including Level 1 trauma, transplantation, and advanced cancer care, for example."

He said the resource center is one part of a larger effort by the UAB Health System to help stabilize small, rural hospitals and improve access to needed medical care for all residents of Alabama. That effort gained steam following a 2016 law enabling universities with medical schools to create University Health Authorities.

Hospitals that are eligible to request assistance from the center would be located in areas that meet federal designations of rural areas or have a shortage of health care resources under federal guidelines. More than 30 public hospitals in Alabama meet those criteria.

While the bill was passed, it has not been funded yet. The UAB Health System will work to determine interim funding prior to the 2019 legislative session to start providing support to eligible hospitals.

Once it is funded, another component of the center will be the creation of two rural administrative residency positions through UAB's graduate program in health administration in the School of Health Professions to provide an incentive for graduates to consider administrative careers in rural areasMadison County's population, including most of the cities of Huntsville and Madison, grew by 4,700 people last year to reach 361,046, according to U.S. Census figures released today.

"This is what we've been working toward for the past 10 years," Huntsville Mayor Tommy Battle said in a Wednesday statement. "We've planned for this growth as we worked to attract 20,000 new jobs and, in parallel, worked to ensure our roads, infrastructure, education system and quality of life could meet the needs of our community. So, building growth ourselves is what Huntsville does best."

The new estimates show that, while most counties in Alabama are shrinking, Madison County grew 1.3 percent from 2016 to 2017, the fourth fastest growing county in Alabama.

Meanwhile, next-door neighbor Limestone County was the third fastest growing county in the state, adding 1,500 people from 2016 to 2017 to reach 94,402 residents.

The two counties combine to make up the official Huntsville metropolitan area of nearly 455,458 people. Huntsville metro passed Mobile in 2010 to become the second-largest metro in Alabama. Huntsville metro continues to be the only one of the four large metros in Alabama growing rapidly, as Huntsville metro grew 9 percent since 2010.

Population estimates for specific cities won't be released by the Census department until later this spring.

"We continue to build off the assets that are in place," Madison Mayor Paul Finley said of the latest county estimates. "Especially with Redstone (Arsenal) and the growth we're seeing in the different defense industries."

Managing that growth is the challenge now. The FBI is expanding its operations on Redstone Arsenal, and 4,000 new workers will be working and living in the area by 2021 when a new Toyota-Mazda plant opens in Limestone County.

Those new workers will add to the congestion already on Huntsville area roads during morning and evening rush hour and Saturday. Battle said his administration has been working on that, too.

"This growth is the reason we put together the $250 million Restore Our Roads plan for our major corridors, and the reason why we are further investing another $147 million in our internal road network to improve connectivity," Battle said. "We've invested $250 million in new schools, capital funds into new parks, museums, greenways - everything you see is part of our capital plan is to accommodate growth we knew was coming."

Finley's city of Madison, with 48,000 people as of 2016 estimates released last year, now expects more people as the area welcomes the auto plant and its suppliers. A key to the growth is Madison's high-rated schools, he said.

Finley said the city has formed a Madison Schools Growth Impact Committee to advise city and school leaders on future options as more people move to the city. The committee will report to the City Council and school board tonight at 7 in the school system's central office boardroom at 211 Celtic Drive.

Nationally, the growth spurt has made the Huntsville metro area America's 118st largest, just ahead of Corpus Christi, Texas, and just behind Asheville, N.C. In Alabama, the Birmingham metro area comes in at No. 50 on the national list with a population of about 1,489,807 and Mobile metro is No. 130 with a population of 413,955.

Madison County is Alabama's third largest county, behind Jefferson and Mobile. Limestone is now the 14th most populous county in Alabama, having grown past Lauderdale and St. Clair since 2010.

Only two spots are expanding more rapidly.

The new Census figures show Baldwin County remains the fastest-growing county in Alabama with a population of about 212,628. It grew by 5,000 people between 2016 and 2017. Lee County, home to Auburn, continues growing at the second fastest rate in Alabama.

Updated on March 22 at 8:40 am.A man wanted on a capital murder charge in connection with the robbery and killing of a Huntsville man has been booked into jail in Alabama.

Charles Anthony Mosby, 28, had been jailed in Louisiana for just over two weeks after being captured in New Orleans, police said. Mosby is charged in Huntsville with capital murder in the robbery and fatal shooting of Raemon Ross.

Ross, 34, was shot multiple times at Spring Branch Apartments on Binford Drive. He was pronounced dead at Huntsville Hospital following the Jan. 28 shooting.

Huntsville police Lt. Michael Johnson said investigators still are looking for a second suspect.

"As the investigation progressed, it was determined that two suspects had knocked on the victim's door with the intent of a home invasion robbery," police wrote in a prior news release. "Both suspects fled."

Mosby was booked into the Madison County Jail on Wednesday around 8:30 p.m. He was transferred from a jail in New Orleans, where he was held since his capture by U.S. Marshals on March 6.

Ross was one of five people killed by gunfire in Huntsville during the first month of 2018.The Wall That Heals, a replica of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, is coming to Huntsville in November.

Huntsville will be among the first to host this new, larger traveling exhibit that honors the more than 3 million Americans who served in the armed forces during the Vietnam War and bears the names of more than 58,000 men and women who died there.

The wall -- which at 375 feet in length and 7.5 feet high at its tallest point is a three-quarter scale model of the actual Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. -- will be at the John Hunt Park Fairgrounds Nov. 1-4. It will be open 24 hours a day and is free to the public.

With the new replica at this size, visitors will be able to experience the wall rising above them as they walk towards the apex, a key feature of the design of the wall in D.C. For the first time in the history of The Wall That Heals, visitors will be able to do name rubbings of individual service member's names.

"We are thrilled to share the new The Wall That Heals exhibit with the public this year," said Jim Knotts, president of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund. "Through The Wall That Heals, we are able to return the names home to communities across the country and allow Vietnam veterans and their family members who cannot make it to Washington, D.C. the opportunity to see The Wall. It gives communities a teaching moment for younger generations on why we should honor those who have served and sacrificed so much."

David Carney, a local veterans activist who helped organize the wall's visit to Huntsville, said Sen. Bill Holtzclaw, R-Madison, secured the initial funding to bring the wall to Huntsville, and the City of Huntsville prepared a site near the Madison County Veterans Museum to display it.

"They have worked many man hours preparing the site ... just north of the museum," Carney said at a news conference Thursday. "Huntsville, Madison, Madison County, and indeed the entire Tennessee Valley is known as one of the best communities in the nation for support of our military and our veterans."

During the press conference, Carney recognized Capt. Mike Rose of Huntsville, who recently was awarded the Medal of Honor by President Trump for his service in Vietnam.

"He, as much or possibly more, than anybody here, understands why we honor Vietnam Veterans," Carney said.

Carney also honored Theresa Schmitt and Teresa Netterville, local women whose fathers were declared missing in action in Vietnam.

John Perry, a retired Army command sergeant major from Huntsville who works on numerous veterans causes, organized the group of volunteers who lobbied for the wall to make one of its 30 annual stops in Huntsville.

"We want to invite all Vietnam Veterans and their families to visit the wall as part of the healing process," Perry said. "We want to invite all veterans and their families, students from all grades, and all the citizens in the North Alabama area to share in this great experience and visit the wall while it is here."

Carney said school field trips will be arranged with local schools, so today's students can learn about the sacrifices made by Vietnam veterans.

"They will not only experience The Wall, but also the living history of those Veterans in attendance who are willing to share their stories," Carney said.

Perry's committee will also continue to raise money to pay for the expense of bringing the wall to Huntsville.

The exhibit includes the wall replica and a mobile education center comprised of: digital photo displays of "Hometown Heroes" -- service members whose names are on the wall that list their home of record within the area of a visit; digital photo displays of Vietnam veterans from the local area honored through VVMF's In Memory program, which honors veterans who returned home from Vietnam and later died as a result of their service; video displays that teach about the history and impact of the wall and of the collection of items left at the wall in D.C.; educational exhibits told through items in the collection; a map of Vietnam and a chronological overview of the Vietnam War.

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial is one of the most visited memorials in Washington, D.C.,, with more than 5.2 million visitors each year. However, many Americans have not been able to visit what has become known to many as "The Wall." The Wall That Heals made its debut in 1996 and since then has been on display in nearly 600 U.S. communities in addition to an April 1999 tour of the Four Provinces of Ireland and a visit to Canada in 2005. In 2017 alone, more than 250,000 people visited The Wall That Heals.

The 2018 national The Wall That Heals tour is hauled through a partnership with the Truckload Carriers Association and the trucking industry and sponsored by USAA, FedEx and GEICO. Local sponsors and partners are Intuitive Research and Technology, Vietnam Veterans of America Chapter 1067, The City of Huntsville, and the Redstone-Huntsville Chapter of the Association of the United States Army.



Want more?

For more information on The Wall That Heals November visit, or to donate to the effort, go to http://twth-hsv.com/. For information on the display and its national tour, go to www.thewallthatheals.org.A proposal to allow Ten Commandments displays in public schools and state-owned buildings is on its way to voters and will be on the ballot in November.

The House of Representatives passed the proposed constitutional amendment by a vote of 66-19 today. The bill is by Sen. Gerald Dial, R-Lineville, who has sponsored similar measures for years.

It passed the House today after about 90 minutes of debate, with a number of Democrats questioning the purpose.

Rep. Marcel Black, D-Tuscumbia, said the bill was "an old trick" intended to help draw Republican voters to the polls. The bill says no public money will be spent to defend the law in court. But Black disputed that, saying school systems who put up displays will face lawsuits and have to pay attorneys' fees when they lose those cases.

Rep. Arnold Mooney, R-Birmingham, who sponsored the bill in the House, said private lawyers would defend the law in those cases.

Rep. Berry Forte, D-Eufaula, said it's not important to display the Ten Commandments, but to live by them.

"The devil can display the Ten Commandments," Forte said.

Republicans spoke in favor of it. Rep. Ed Henry, R-Hartselle, said more Ten Commandments displays will help serve as reminders of the nation's core values.

The bill says the Ten Commandments can be displayed as part of a larger display with other historical or education items. Unlike a regular bill, it does not require the governor's because it is a constitutional amendment.An Alabama woman has claimed the $8 million Florida Lotto Jackpot.

Cassandra Holmes, 57, from Ozark, claimed the winnings from a drawing held at the Florida Lottery headquarters in Tallahassee, Florida March 14, according to a statement from the Florida Lottery.

Holmes chose to receive the winnings as a one-time, lump-sum payment of $5,335,428.13.

Lottery officials said she bought the winning Quick Pick ticket from Fortune Liquors at 5878 Highway 231 in Campbellton. The retailer will receive a bonus commission of $50,000 for selling the jackpot-winning ticket.

Winning numbers are available on the Lottery website, at retailers statewide and by phone at (850) 921-PLAY.Alabama's environmental agency has proposed a set of state regulations for coal ash, but critics say the proposal is weaker than existing federal rules and contains too many "loopholes" that would allow groundwater pollution to go on indefinitely.

Several Alabama environmental groups pointed to provisions they say would allow utilities to suspend groundwater monitoring, delay compliance with the rules or avoid cleanup requirements under certain circumstances.

The Alabama Department of Environmental Management heard public comments for about 45 minutes Wednesday on the proposal.

"We're very concerned with the addition of some significant loopholes, or flexibilities as they're called often, in ADEM's proposed rule," Mobile Baykeeper's Cade Kistler said during the hearing. "These flexibilities are contrary to what we have existing at the federal level, the federal law.



"And, potentially more importantly, they're contrary to public interest based on the pollution that we've seen under that 2015 coal combustion residuals rule."

After reviewing public comments, ADEM will present a final rule to the Alabama Environmental Management Commission for approval. The item is on the EMC agenda for its next meeting, on April 20, though it's not clear whether a final version will be presented at that meeting.

The hearing took place less than one month after test results were published showed extensive groundwater contamination at coal ash sites across the country.

The day those results were published, ADEM fined Alabama utilities $1.5 million for groundwater pollution violations related to coal ash ponds.

Those groundwater tests were mandated under the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's 2015 coal ash rules and would not have been published without those rules.

Now, activists worry the current EPA leadership, under Administrator Scott Pruitt, is trying to weaken protections established in the 2015 rules by deferring to the states. The EPA in 2017 issued guidance encouraging states to set up their own coal ash programs, an initiative Pruitt has said could save utilities $100 million per year in compliance costs.

Maxine Lipeles, director of the Interdisciplinary Environmental Clinic at Washington University, said that approving more lenient state programs was easier for the EPA than changing an existing federal rule.

"(The EPA) can't change the regulations overnight, but they can approve weak state programs," Lipeles told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. "That's what this guidance sets up criteria for."

So far, Pruitt's home state of Oklahoma has been the only one to create a state coal ash program. Alabama is positioning itself to be the second.

And it appears, the utilities that would have to comply with the rules are not asking for the so-called flexibilities included in Alabama's proposal.

"We support adoption of the federal CCR rule," Alabama Power spokesman Michael Sznajderman said via email.

Legal arguments

The Southern Environmental Law Center filed a 26-page response (full document embedded below) to the proposed rules on behalf of the Alabama Rivers Alliance, Mobile Baykeeper, Black Warrior Riverkeeper, Coosa Riverkeeper, Sierra Club and itself.

Keith Johnston, managing attorney of the Birmingham office of the SELC, said during the public hearing ADEM's proposal did not meet legal thresholds established by federal environmental laws that state programs must be "at least as protective" as federal laws.

Johnston said the flexibilities included in the coal ash program were designed for municipal landfills, which he argued are drastically different from riverside coal ash ponds. He cited the groundwater monitoring data and ADEM's actions in fining state utilities over coal ash contamination.

"The evidence is irrefutable at this point," Johnston said. "Coal ash ponds contaminate groundwater and they contaminate surface water.

"Now is not the time for ADEM to establish a permit program that's going to walk back any sort of responsibility for responsible management of this waste stream. It's important that we think about where we're going with this."

Johnston also said coal ash ponds were situated in direct contact with groundwater in some cases.

"We cannot afford to create loopholes that allow coal ash to sit in groundwater and continue to contaminate our rivers and streams," he said. "Moving the coal ash to dry, lined storage and out of our groundwater is the only solution that we know works to stop this ongoing pollution, and ADEM must not allow loopholes that allow these ponds to continue leaking."

Mobile Baykeeper and Black Warrior Riverkeeper both urged members to voice their opinions and the groups said more than 500 letters from their members had been submitted to ADEM urging the department to design a strong coal ash rule.

What is coal ash?

Coal ash -- or coal combustion residuals -- is the material left after burning coal, primarily at electric power plants. Coal ash has been shown to contain harmful substances such as lead, arsenic, mercury and other heavy metals, which have been shown to infiltrate groundwater from the ash pits.

For decades, the material was flushed from power plants into ponds, typically alongside rivers. The large particulates would settle to the bottom, with water flowing over the top. These ponds, or impoundments, can be hundreds of acres in size and hold millions of tons of coal ash.

These ash ponds are usually unlined and the recently released groundwater testing data show significant contamination stemming from the ash.

Now utilities are facing difficult decisions on how to handle decades' worth of wet ash. Some utilities have elected to dewater the ash and move it to a lined landfill. Some have been compelled to excavate and remove coal ash by a judge or state government.

In Alabama, all utilities so far plan to dewater their ash ponds and close them in place, adding a top liner, dirt and plant cover to prevent rainwater from reaching the ash, but leaving it in place.

Watch the Alabama hearing, read the comments

A video of the Alabama hearing taken by the Alabama Rivers Alliance is embedded below, followed by the full response from SELC.The Baldwin boom continues and if anything is picking up speed, according to U.S. Census estimates released today. Meanwhile, Mobile remains the state's second most populated county despite a marginal decline in population.

Those are some of the quick takeaways from the latest Census projections, which provide estimated spring 2017 numbers for counties and metropolitan areas, but not for cities. The new estimates are compared to figures going as far back as April 2010.

From 2010 to 2017, Baldwin County added 30,363 people, growing 16.7 percent to 212,628. No other Alabama county has added more people or grown at a faster rate since 2010.

That leaves Baldwin as the state's sixth most populated county, but it appears likely to take fifth from Shelby County in 2019 and then leapfrog Montgomery County into fourth in 2021.

"It's not a matter of probably, but it will happen," said Chris Elliott, chairman of the Baldwin County Commission, after seeing the new numbers.

Just from 2016 to 2017, Baldwin County added 5,119 people for a one-year growth of 2.5 percent, making it the only Alabama county to show one-year growth of more than 1.6 percent. Madison County added 4,734 people, but due to its higher population (361,046), that only amounted to 1.3 percent growth.

"That is just something," said Elliott. The growth reflects the county's high quality of life, he said, though it does raises some challenges and creates a need for regional planning to maintain that appeal.

Census estimates show Mobile County losing 897 people from 2016 to 2017, for shrinkage of 0.2 percent. Over the long run from 2010 to 2017, Mobile County grew by the same 0.2 percent, adding 963 people for an estimated total of 413,929.

Mobile County Commission President Connie Hudson said she felt confident that Mobile County was doing the right things and they would eventually pay off. "We're still very actively focused on our long-term growth," she said.

Despite Mobile's slight loss of population in the short run, and its lack of substantial growth over seven years, it still ranked second behind Jefferson County's 659,197. Jefferson County was showing a smaller decline of 0.1 percent in both the long and short term. Madison is the third most populous, but would have to add more than 50,000 people to catch Mobile.

There also was a substantial gap from Madison to fourth-place Montgomery County, with 226,646. After that were Shelby (213,605), Baldwin (212,628) and Tuscaloosa (207,811), all three of which are growing.

Neither Mobile County's slight decline nor Baldwin County's explosive growth comes as a shock, as both trends have been established. In spring 2017, the Census released estimates for cities showing that Mobile had fallen to fourth place behind Huntsville as Daphne cracked the Top 20. The state's fastest-growing cities included four in Baldwin County: Daphne, Fairhope, Foley and Gulf Shores.

Elliott said that while it's true there are many people who work in Mobile County and reside in Baldwin County, Baldwin isn't just reaping the benefit of Mobile jobs. "We added over 4,000 jobs in a 10-month period" ending in October 2017, he said.

"What we're seeing with home construction is back at pre-recession levels," he said. And he said he expects the pattern to continue. There's plenty of land available for development. "The quality of life is great," he said. "We have great weather, great schools, and if we stay on top of infrastructure needs we don't have gridlock."

Elliott said that on Wednesday he'd attended a groundbreaking for one new school, and another for a new wing at a second school. RESTORE Act grants recently recommended for funding likely will bring tens of millions of dollars to road expansion projects, and Elliott said those grants are part of a bigger wave of $126 million being spent on state roads in the county.

Hudson too said RESTORE Act grants and other infrastructure work promises to bring positive change over the next few years, which in turn should make Mobile County a more attractive place to live. "In those terms, I think we're making great progress," she said.

Mobile Mayor Sandy Stimpson took a similar view.

"The population in Mobile has remained flat for the past 50 years, causing us to lag behind our peer cities. But we are changing that trend," he said. "As we improve the quality of life in Mobile, more families are choosing to live here and more businesses are choosing to locate here as well.

"Our goal is to speed up that momentum and fulfill our true potential as the safest, most business and family friendly city in America," said Stimpson, reiterating a theme from his election campaigns. "Transformational projects such as the Mobile Greenway, the redesign of Broad and Water streets, the revitalization of downtown Mobile and our citywide infrastructure improvement plan are putting us on a new trajectory going forward."

Meanwhile efforts to recruit new employers also continue, and Hudson said she'd gotten a first-hand reminder Wednesday that they often bear fruit. Earlier in the day, she said, Amazon had held a small, low-key reception for local officials at the sorting center it opened last fall.

"Of course we'd like to see a trajectory of growth every year, but that's just not feasible," she said.

Elliott said there are signs Baldwin's growth is spreading inland from the booming coastal communities, and that he thinks that also could accelerate -- particularly if economic development work eventually brings a big manufacturer to a site near Bay Minette.

"We're starting to see this growth not just be on the Eastern Shore," Elliott said. "Just wait until we land something at the Megasite."

Elliott speculated that because Baldwin has a number of relatively small, fast-growing cities rather than a dominant metropolis, it is spared some of the infrastructure challenges faced by big urban centers. But that also means planning can be more complicated.

"We can't just look at Spanish Fort and Daphne and Fairhope independently," he said. The communities have to cooperate on infrastructure and on efforts to manage sprawl. Job growth is great, Elliott said, but "the key there though is to make sure we have the right kind of jobs and the right kind of growth."

The data show contrasting patterns within Baldwin's growth and Mobile's decline. Some of Baldwin's growth comes from natural causes and some from international arrivals, but the bulk of it -- more than 27,000 people since 2010 -- consists of Americans moving in from other parts of the country.

Meanwhile, Mobile County is benefiting from a trend of more births than deaths. It also has been gaining about 500 people a year from other countries. But since 2010 it has had a net loss of more than 12,000 people making moves from one part of the United States to another.

Hudson said better infrastructure and other projects that promise better quality of life should eventually turn that tide.

"In those terms I think we're making great progress," she said.

AL.com Senior Managing Producer Challen Stephens contributed to this report.A Pensacola man that threw gasoline over a woman and set her on fire was convicted Wednesday of attempted second degree murder.

Tavares Antwan Lewis, 41, was found guilty by an Escambia County jury and will be sentenced in mid-April. The unnamed victim''s burns were so severe that she stayed in hospital for seven months. She was able to identify her attacker to police, while cell phone information linked Lewis to the time and place of the attack. While awaiting conviction, Lewis is alleged to have made incriminating calls to the victim.

Because Lewis is a a habitual reoffender, he will be subject to a harsher sentence. Prison Release Reoffenders carry a minimum mandatory sentence of 30 years, while being a Habitual Felony Offender means the judge could give the maximum of 60 years in state prison. The prosecution is seeking the maximum.The loss of Toys R Us is gain for bargain-hunting shoppers.

The toy retailer is in the process of closing 735 of its stores nationwide. Most stores are slated to close by June, though select locations could shut down earlier based on inventory.

Liquidation sales will start March 22, with items reduced roughly 25 percent per week until shutdown. Sales at higher-performing stores may start later, according to sources close to the matter. It will stop accepting gift cards April 19.

The shutdown details were part of a bankruptcy filings released today. More than four dozen toy manufacturers - including Mattel, Hasbro and Lego - are objecting to the plan, saying they are owed more than $450 million by Toys R Us, Fortune reported.

The Toys R Us shutdown comes after them retail chain failed to find a buyer or restructure its debt in the wake of its bankruptcy late last year. The New Jersey-based chain filed for bankruptcy in September, with disappointing holiday sales and concern among vendors adding to its financial issues.

The chain announced in January it was closing 180 locations, roughly 20 percent of its retail footprint.

Reports surfaced yesterday Amazon was considering purchasing some of the vacant Toys R Us storefronts as part of its plans to expand its brick-and-mortar presence.A lawyer for Attorney General Jeff Sessions said Wednesday that Sessions is not under investigation for lying to Congress, though he issued a statement appearing to confirm that was once an area of interest for the special counsel.

In a statement, Chuck Cooper, Sessions' personal attorney, said, "The Special Counsel's Office has informed me that after interviewing the Attorney General and conducting additional investigation, the Attorney General is not under investigation for false statements or perjury in his confirmation hearing testimony and related written submissions to Congress."

Cooper declined to comment beyond the statement. A spokesman for the special counsel's office declined to comment.

The statement came in response to an ABC News report that suggests former FBI official Andrew McCabe - whom Sessions fired from the bureau last week - had overseen a criminal investigation into whether Sessions lacked candor when testifying before Congress about his contacts with Russian operatives.

McCabe's firing, which came just 26 hours before he could retire and is likely to deny him significant retirement benefits, has ignited a political firestorm. The former FBI deputy director and interim director alleged he was terminated as part of a ploy to undermine the bureau and the special counsel's investigation. President Donald Trump has used the episode to take aim at that probe.

Sessions has said publicly the firing was recommended by the FBI's Office of Professional Responsibility, which concluded McCabe "had made an unauthorized disclosure to the news media and lacked candor - including under oath - on multiple occasions." The recommendation was based on findings from the Justice Department inspector general, who has been probing the FBI's handling of the investigation into former secretary of state Hillary Clinton's use of a private email server, including some of McCabe's actions in the course of that case.

The Washington Post could not immediately confirm McCabe's role in a probe of Sessions, though as a top FBI official, he probably would have had visibility into such an investigation. A person close to Sessions said the attorney general was "not aware of this investigation at the time McCabe was fired." Through a representative, McCabe declined to comment.

That the attorney general was of interest in some capacity to Special Counsel Robert Mueller beyond being a witness is significant - reinforcing how Mueller's probe has led him to the president's most senior advisers. Sessions has recused himself from supervising Mueller's probe because of his role in the Trump campaign, leaving that authority to Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

Mueller's team interviewed Sessions in January; his investigators also have interviewed Rosenstein. Mueller is investigating whether the Trump campaign coordinated with Russia to influence the 2016 election, and whether the president obstructed justice in his dealings with law enforcement, including in firing James Comey as the FBI director in May.

Sessions has long faced criticism for statements he made to Congress at his confirmation hearing when asked about campaign contacts with Russians. The exchange at issue came with then-Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., who had asked Sessions what he would do as attorney general if there was any evidence that anyone affiliated with the Trump campaign communicated with the Russian government.

Sessions responded: "Sen. Franken, I'm not aware of any of those activities. I have been called a surrogate at a time or two in that campaign and I didn't have - did not have communications with the Russians, and I'm unable to comment on it."

The Washington Post later revealed that Sessions had the year before spoken twice with Russia's ambassador to the United States. Sessions corrected his congressional testimony after that report to acknowledge the contacts, though even then he insisted his "answer was correct."

"I answered the question, which asked about a 'continuing exchange of information during the campaign between Trump's surrogates and intermediaries for the Russian government,' honestly," Sessions said. "I did not mention communications I had had with the Russian ambassador over the years because the question did not ask about them."

The apparent discrepancy prompted calls for an investigation into whether the attorney general had committed perjury. David Carle, a spokesman for Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., said Leahy and Franken asked that the FBI, then led by Comey and, later, by McCabe, "look into his testimony as well as his contacts with Russian officials." The FBI wrote back on May 31, saying it could neither confirm nor deny the existence of an ongoing investigation. By that time, McCabe was in charge of the bureau, and Mueller had been appointed as special counsel.

McCabe himself is now facing allegations from the Justice Department inspector general that he lacked candor in answering questions from investigators about a conversation he authorized two other FBI officials to have with a reporter.

McCabe disputes those allegations - the details of which remain murky, because the inspector general has yet to release a report on the matter. The inspector general's withholding of that report has fueled speculation on the Justice Department and on Capitol Hill that prosecutors might be mulling whether McCabe should face a criminal inquiry and thus that the document cannot be made public.It's been a busy week for Rouses Supermarkets: The company launched same-day grocery delivery from its five coastal Alabama stores and then announced it was taking over a Winn-Dixie recently slated for closing.

"We love the market," said Donny Rouse, the third-generation leader of the family-owned, Louisiana-based chain. "I love the market. We think it's a natural fit."

As a regular visitor to Lower Alabama -- and Rouse uses the term as naturally as a native -- he said he's particularly excited about the online ordering and same-day delivery. Anybody who's had to follow a tiring drive to the beach with a grocery run probably can relate.

"What I really like it for is when I go to Orange Beach, I can order my groceries and they show up at my condo an hour after I get there," Rouse said.

Rouses entered the L.A. market in 2013, taking ownership of five former Belle Foods stores in the region after that chain filed for bankruptcy. By early 2014, Rouses had remodeled and reopened stores located in Mobile's Spring Hill district, Theodore, Saraland, Spanish Fort and Gulf Shores.

A sixth is already on the way: Rouses announced in September that it was going into a spot formerly occupied by a Gander Mountain outdoors store, near the intersection of Airport Boulevard and Schillinger Road in west Mobile.

"We are shooting for the last week in April," Rouse said. "Everything in the store is coming really nicely together."

Word that the west Mobile market would include a kitchen classroom generated considerable interest. Rouse said that when grand opening plans are unveiled, they'll include a full slate of activities.

"We'll have our own chefs teaching classes, and some guest chefs," he said, as well as wine tastings and other special events.

The new Orange Beach site, which will be the chain's seventh Alabama store, brings a long search to a whirlwind conclusion.

"I've been looking around Orange Beach for a year and a half, probably two years now" for the right location, Rouse said. The Winn-Dixie had been a possibility, though the numbers hadn't been right. But earlier this month Winn-Dixie's parent company, Southeastern Grocers, filed for bankruptcy and announced it was closing dozens of stores. The Orange Beach Winn-Dixie was not among them, though one in Gulf Shores was (as were others in Daphne, Birmingham, Anniston, Dothan, west Mobile, Monroeville, Montgomery and Robertsdale). But the bankruptcy made it easier to put together a favorable deal.

Rouse said that toward the end of April, Rouse's will close the Orange Beach store for 30 days. During the break it'll restock and retrain employees, as well as hire some new ones. The plan is to be open by Memorial Day, run through the summer season, then do a major remodeling after business tapers down in the fall.

Rouse said patrons probably shouldn't hold their breath for any more new-store announcements in the near future. The company had plans to open five new stores in 2018, and the Winn-Dixie deal makes it six. "That's a lot of new stores for a company our size," he said.

The company says it is one of the largest independent grocers in the country. Its website lists 55 stores, 47 of which are in Louisiana. The total counts the five stores currently open in Alabama, plus three in coastal Mississippi.

While Rouses doesn't serve Alabama north of Saraland, its new same-day delivery feature gives it a Birmingham connection: One of its two delivery partners is Shipt, a Birmingham-based company that in recent months was bought by retail giant Target for $550 million in cash. The other delivery partner is Instacart.

"They are both great companies," said Rouse. "Personally I've been using it every other day, just to make sure it's working."

Rouse said it can take customers a little bit of experience to become comfortable with the process.

"For your hard goods in your grocery department, it's easy," he said, because people have gotten used to ordering so many things from Amazon or other online retailers. "Where you've got to gain the trust is when you start picking out meat and produce."

It helps if you make sure you have high quality meat and produce in the first place, he said. But the Rouses process is set up so that shoppers can send photos of meat and produce to online buyers, so they still can have some personal control. (Home delivery information can be found at www.rouses.com.)

Steps like that make it easier to build the trust of shoppers new to the process, Rouse said. That's important, given that what seems like a novelty today could soon be mainstream.

"It's not that big a part of the business but it may be in 5-10 years," he said.

Note: As originally published, this story incorrectly stated that the Orange Beach Winn-Dixie store was among those being closed. It was not.Organizers are expecting more than 1,500 people to participate in Saturday's 2 p.m. March for Our Lives in Railroad Park in Birmingham.

The Birmingham march is one of seven scheduled for Saturday in Alabama. More than 800 marches are being held across the world.

There is officially a march on every continent!  Sarah Chadwick (@Sarahchadwickk) March 17, 2018

The march has been spearheaded by the student survivors of the Feb. 14 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting where a 19-year-old former student used an AR-15 to shoot and kill 14 students and three faculty members.

Everytown for Gun Safety, a group formed after 26 students and faculty were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary in 2012 is helping to organize the march.

The survivors, who refer to themselves as the "mass-shooting generation," have been vocal in their demand for lawmakers to do something to end school shootings, using #NeverAgain and #ENOUGH as a rallying cry.

Emma Gonzalez, a Parkland survivor, said, "This is not a political rally. It's literally a march for our lives," in a letter posted on the national March for Our Lives website.

Gonzalez and other Parkland survivors will be in Washington, D.C., where they will join half a million people who will march down Pennsylvania Avenue to the U.S. Capitol building at noon Eastern time.

The map below is from the official March for Our Lives events page. Each marker indicates the location of a march.

This map, from the national March for Our Lives website, indicates where a march will be held.

Here's a look at the list of marches being held in Alabama according to the national March for Our Lives website. Click the link for more about each march.

Birmingham - The march starts at 2 p.m. in Railroad Park in Birmingham.

The Shoals (Florence) - The march starts at 2 p.m. at Wilson Park in Florence.

Jasper - The national website lists a march being held at Courthouse Square in Jasper.

Selma - The national website lists a march starting at 12 noon at the Edmond Pettus Bridge.

Montgomery - The march starts at 10 a.m. at the Alabama Capitol building in Montgomery.

Dothan - The March for Our Lives Wiregrass starts at 11 a.m. at Porter Park in Dothan.

Mobile - The march will start at 1 p.m. at Public Safety Memorial Park in Mobile.

Huntsville - The march in Huntsville will be held on Saturday, April 21, at 11 a.m. in Big Spring Park in Huntsville.Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, during an interview with The New York Times on Wednesday, said his social media company was able to eliminate a "significant number" of foreign fake news accounts ahead of the Dec. 12 Alabama special Senate election.

"In last year, in 2017 with the special election in Alabama, we deployed some new (artificial intelligence) tools to identify fake accounts and false news, and we found a significant number of Macedonian accounts that were trying to spread false news, and were able to eliminate those," Zuckerberg said during the interview with two reporters with The Times. "And that, actually, is something I haven't talked about publicly before, so you're the first people I'm telling about that."

Zuckerberg didn't provide additional details. AL.com has reached out to Facebook for more information.

Democrat Doug Jones defeated Republican Roy Moore to win the Senate seat long held by current U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions. He won the election by 20,715 votes.

Zuckerberg's statement came during an interview in which he discussed measures Facebook is planning to take to improve security of the social media site. The company has come under fire after news was revealed that the political consulting firm, Cambridge Analytica, improperly obtained and exploited personal data from 50 million Facebook users during the 2016 presidential campaign.

Zuckerberg, in the New York Times interview, admitted that Facebook did not have a good handle on foreign interference in the presidential election. Initially, after the election in 2016, he dismissed the notion of fake news on Facebook influencing the presidential election as a "crazy idea."

Also in the New York Times interview, Zuckerberg said that Facebook was able to disable tens of thousands of fake news accounts ahead of the 2017 French presidential election.

"The good news here is that these problems aren't necessarily rocket science," Zuckerberg told The Times. "They're hard, but they're things that if you invest and work on making it harder for adversaries to do what they're trying to do, you can really reduce the amount of false news, make it harder for foreign governments to interfere."

Facebook has come under fire in recent days, after the initial stories about Cambridge Analytica surfaced. A #DeleteFacebook movement has since surfaced, which Zuckerberg said represented a "major trust issue for people."

"I don't think we've seen a meaningful number of people act on that, but, you know, it's not good," Zuckerberg told The Times. "And whether people delete their app over it or just don't feel good about using Facebook, that's a big issue that I think we have a responsibility to rectify."A student at the University of Alabama was expelled after a video of the student using racist language was posted online.

"We have learned of an offensive video involving racist language by a student who is no longer enrolled. We hold our students to a much higher standard than this," University president Stuart Bell said in an email Wednesday afternoon.

"We are united in condemning this racist behavior and resolute in our commitment to ensure our students, faculty and staff know they are welcome, accepted and supported on our campus, and that discriminatory behavior will not be tolerated."

The University of Alabama's Twitter account responded to a tweet Tuesday morning and said, "It is regrettable this person has engaged in this behavior. It will be even more regrettable if she is determined to be a student at UA. This repulsive behavior will not and cannot be tolerated. Racism has no place at UA. It will be reported to the Office of Student Conduct."

The university has not revealed the student's name.Maybe y'all don't know Van Davis. You should.

He's just a professional prosecutor, a Republican DA in Blount and St. Clair counties for 18 years who was appointed acting attorney general to take on the thankless task of prosecuting former speaker of the house Mike Hubbard.

Just a guy who stood his ground against Alabama's most corrupt and corrupting influences, who never really got credit he deserved.

Davis got the opposite. Hubbard's defense came at him, and so did businesses mixed up in Hubbard's crimes. His family was threatened and his integrity challenged - for the first time in his career. The state's most powerful interests and officers warned him life would be simpler if he just let the thing go.

If he just let Hubbard go.

It had to be tempting. He was fighting cancer at the time - as he is now - but he didn't carry on about it.

Davis underwent forty-some-odd cancer treatments as he and members of the AG's special prosecutions unit proved Hubbard committed a dozen felonies.

It was hard for the whole team, he said Wednesday. Because prosecuting powerful people is hard even when you're hale and healthy.

"There are not many people who can stand up to that scrutiny and criticism," he said of his team. "It felt like we were out there by ourselves."

Boy, were they.

He thought it was over when the judge sentenced Hubbard to four years in prison. It wasn't. There was the appeal - which continues. And there is the aftermath.

And that -- in the form of HB317 -- is expected to come up in the Alabama Senate today. It frightens that tough old prosecutor enough that he's working the phones, calling senators to beg them to stand firm.

Because if the bill passes - it's being pushed by Commerce Secretary Greg Canfield, fast-tracked by Senate boss Del Marsh, spurred by Gov. Kay Ivey and greased by members of the Ethics Commission - the Hubbards of the world won't be prosecuted again, Davis said.

Prosecutor Van Davis.

Maybe you don't care about Davis. Alabama should.

The bill has gone through various incarnations, but "it's still a bad bill," Davis said.

"I can't understand who they are trying to appease. It's a bad deal and it's bad for our state."

Davis - among others -- is concerned that it:

A) Sets up an exemption allowing principals - those businesses and groups that pay lobbyists - to bypass the ethics law if they work as "less-than-full-time" economic developers. Which means half the principals in the Hubbard case could claim part-time status and get away with it.

B) Effectively ends the revolving door ban for legislators who want to go into economic development work.

"They could work on legislation with a business today and step down tomorrow and have an employment contract with them," Davis said. "It flies in the face of everything we tried to do."

He's convinced the same powers that sought to protect Hubbard are behind the bill.

"They're trying to use clout and power to change the law and do what they want," he said. "Why do they need to change the law except to benefit their friends? Why do you make changes to laws that were just used by prosecutors to convict a high-ranking public official? It dumbfounds me."

It ought to dumbfound everybody.

Alabama's top politicians - Ivey, Marsh, AG Steve Marshall, members of the Legislature - have done backflips trying to explain away the bill as harmless. After Ethics Commission Executive Director Tom Albritton blasted the bill, Marsh said they'd add language to appease him. But the problem wording remains.

The full senate is expected to consider it as early as today. Davis said he would call senators to try to "stop it in its tracks."

Because it will make the fat cats who bought Hubbard even more powerful, and it will make prosecuting them harder.

"We've had enough problems with public corruption for them to actually think of weakening the law," Davis said. "We ought to strengthen it."

Maybe they don't know Van Davis. They should.

John Archibald's column appears in The Birmingham News, the Huntsville Times, the Mobile Register and AL.com. Write him at jarchibald@al.com.

HB317-eng by John Archibald on ScribdApryl Marie Fogel

By Apryl Marie Fogel, founder of Conservatives for Better Leadership, to learn more visit alabamaleadership.org

The woeful state of Alabama's roads and bridges is impossible to ignore. We've all heard the statistics: Over 1,200 of our bridges are structurally deficient, and thousands of miles of roads are congested and unsafe. But most importantly, it's an issue that affects families across the state. There are 600 bridges in our state that school buses can't cross for safety reasons. This is deeply embarrassing, and we're counting on our leaders in Montgomery to fix it.

But simply throwing money at the problem is the wrong approach. Some interest groups in the state capitol are seizing on President Trump's call for nationwide infrastructure investment to call for a massive spending bill that would rely on gas tax increases to fix our roads and bridges. Missing from their agenda are important words like prioritization and accountability - words that have been missing in Montgomery for too long.

The dirty secret is that the biggest problem at Alabama Department of Transportation (ALDOT) is not lack of funding, but is spending our tax dollars in the wrong places, with no concept of prioritization or efficiency. Costs continue to spiral as ALDOT, led by Robert Bentley appointee John Cooper, quotes taxpayers one cost for a project only to see it balloon out of control. Yes, that's the same John Cooper who with Bentley threated to cut off road projects for members of the legislature who didn't vote for tax increases. Talk about prioritization of projects, in Cooper world it's "Coopers way or no highway."

The Northern Beltline project north of Birmingham was supposed to cost $4.7 billion, funded by the federal government. Now it's slated at $5.45 billion and construction has stopped as federal funding dried up. The question is what's next for the project? How long before Alabama taxpayers are on the hook for that too?

We're also set to fund a third bridge over the Intracoastal Waterway to the Gulf Coast, and ALDOT has only publicized the cost of a portion of the project, at $30 million. Who knows how large that number will grow, and what the final phases will cost taxpayers. Never mind the fact that we have two spans - State Route 59, and the privately owned Beach Express - that allow for an efficient traffic flow to the beach houses and vacation homes of Gulf Shores and Orange Beach. Mr. Cooper wants his third bridge, and he wants it now.

Meanwhile, our kids are taking the back roads to school because our leaders can't focus on fixing hundreds of deficient bridge. They're too busy proposing new projects and breaking promises about who will fund them. They can't control costs, but are content to stick taxpayers with the bill.

The interest groups supporting new taxes and big spending bills to build new roads and bridges must consider Montgomery's track record before rubber stamping a huge package that will almost certainly balloon in size and expect taxpayers to continue to foot the bill.

When President Trump called for a significant investment in rebuilding American infrastructure, he didn't ignore the details. He demanded significant private sector involvement, to leverage expertise and dollars and ensure long term sustainability. He understands that throwing tax dollars at the problem only leads to spiraling costs and a total lack of accountability. Montgomery needs to understand the same.

Gov. Kay Ivey is correct to push for infrastructure improvements. To this point, she has been a good steward of our tax dollars, and shepherded private sector-led economic growth and job creation. But she needs to consider the record of her deputies in state government, especially those appointed by our disgraced former Gov. Bentley, no stranger to spending state money with no regard for taxpayers.

ALDOT Director John Cooper isn't focused on our children's right to safe passage to school. He isn't concerned with our crumbling existing infrastructure. He wants to build vanity projects to the coast instead of working with the private sector to relieve congestion. He wants to promise slick new highways paid for by the federal government, only to change his tune when the bill comes due.

If we want safe, efficient roads and bridges in Alabama, we need accountable leadership, and we need a plan. Until ALDOT gets its act together we have neither, and calls for billions of dollars of new spending will fall on deaf ears.Edward Hiraldo was anxious about how his nappy hair would be received by a crowd of about 100 students Tuesday night.

Growing up with Dominican and Puerto Rican roots, it would be the talk of the night if his afro-hair was too puffy or poorly styled.

His hair stood out as his mark of also being black and a quality Hispanics may see as bad.

I am truly, in every sense of the word, a minority, and I see it in my face every day, the 21-year-old UF advertising senior said.

Hiraldo was one of five students who spoke about being Latino with African descent at UFs first Afro-Latinx panel. Titled I Am Enough: Afro-Latinx Panel, the event was held Tuesday night in Pugh Hall Ocora, said Diego Castillo, the 25-year-old vice president of the Latino Hispanic Organization of Graduate Students.

A crowd of about 100 students and faculty gathered to hear the discussions on identity, representation, navigating higher education as an underrepresented group and racism and colorism within and outside the Latinx community.

The Afro-Latino community has a unique experience where although they may identify as both black and Latino, they may not be accepted by either for various reasons, Castillo said.

Two UF professors were also a part of the panel: Tanya Saunders from the Center for Latin American Studies and Bryce Henson from the African American Studies program.

The panel was hosted by the Latino Hispanic Organization of Graduate Students, Multicultural and Diversity Affairs, Samuel Proctor Oral History Program, Shes the First UF, Hispanic Student Association at UF, UF Center for Latin American Studies, the UF African American Studies program and UF Hispanic-Latino Affairs, Castillo said.

The event cost about $300 to cover food and parking reservations, the UF information systems and operations management graduate student said. It was funded by Student Government and the co-sponsors.

It is important to open the door for dialogue and conversation, especially in this day and age where everything and everyone attacks each other instead of listening to each other, Castillo said.

Shania Stephens, one of the other student panelists, said in high school she was told she was too pretty to be black and was asked if she was mixed. People didnt understand that she could be both black and Latinx. Both of her parents are black and from San Andres Isla, Colombia, where she was born.

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She said Latinx people dont always look like whats portrayed in the media. They come in different shades and sizes.

I am proud. I am here, and I exist, the 21-year-old UF biology senior said.

Any Hughes, who graduated from UF in 2014 with a bachelors degree in applied physiology and kinesiology, said she attended the panel because she is Afro-Latina and wanted to see how the audience would react.

I learned that there are a lot of people that identify and have gone through the same experiences that I have gone through, the 26-year-old said.

Five UF students who spoke about being Latino with African descent at UFs first Afro-Latinx panel titled I Am Enough: Afro-Latinx Panel. The event was held Tuesday night in Pugh Hall Ocora.The Haskell Free Library and Opera House has two different addresses. If you are American, youll say the library is located at 93 Caswell Avenue, Derby Line, Vermont, and if you are Canadian, youll insist its located at 1 rue Church Street, Stanstead, Quebec. Both addresses are correct, and either one will take you to the same building. The only thing that matters is from which way you are approaching.

You see, the Haskell Free Library and Opera House is located astride the US-Canada border. One half of the building stands in Derby Line, which is an American town, and the other half stands in Stanstead, a Canadian town. Being border towns, Derby Line and Stanstead share many peculiaritieswhich we will come to shortly. But first, lets draw our attention to this singular building.

The Haskell Free Library & Opera House straddles the US-Canada border. The row of potted plants mark the international border. Photo credit: Jimmy Emerson/Flickr

The Haskell Free Library and Opera House is housed in an ornate, century-old, two-story stone building built in the Queen Anne Revival style, typical of public libraries of the time. The library and opera house was built by the American, Carlos Haskell, and his Canadian wife Martha Stewart Haskell, and donated to the residents of both countries. It was deliberately built over the border so that both Canadians and Americans can have equal access to the library. The library has only one entrance, on the American side, but Canadians are free to enter and use the library, as long as they return to their Canadian side once theyre done. There is, however, an emergency exit on the Canadian side of the building, but it stays closed.

Inside the building a thick black line runs across the floor of the library's reading room demarcating the CanadaUnited States border. Upstairs is the opera house, where the line cuts diagonally across the seats so that the stage and half the seats lie on the Canadian side while the rest of the seats on the US side. Similarly, in the library below, childrens books are in the US side, and the rest of the collection and the reading room is in Canada. Because of this, the Haskell Library is sometimes called the only library in the US with no books and the only opera house in the US with no stage.

Over the decades, the library has became a hub where residents from both countries meet and interact. The Haskell Library may be the only place where family members divided by the Canada-US border could see each other in person without legally crossing the border. But in recent years some have tried to exploit the borders relative porousness. In 2011, a Canadian man was arrested for allegedly smuggling a backpack filled with guns through the librarys restroom.

After the September 11 attacks, authorities began tightening the security on the porous border. Streets that once hosted traffic from both countries were closed off, and large potted plants were installed as a barrier on a stretch of the border near the library. A US Homeland Security vehicle sits outside the library, monitoring the entrance 24 hours a day.

The Haskell library is just one of six buildings that straddle the border line. Aside from these structures, Derby Line and Stanstead share some other curiosities as well, like Canusa Avenue, where the international border runs down the middle of the street. While the street itself is in Canada, the houses south of it are in the United States. So whenever Canusas American residents pull out of their driveways, they essentially leave the United States. Once there was a post office on Canusa Avenue serving both countriesthe world's only international post office. It had one postmaster, but two doors and two postal counters, each serving customers from a different country.

The US-Canada Border at Derby Line, Vermont, USA. Photo credit: Nekonomist/Flickr

Both Derby Line and Stanstead share the same water system. Drinking water is pumped from wells in Canada, stored in a reservoir in the United States and distributed through a system maintained by Canadians. Derby Line's sewage makes a cross-border trip for treatment.

In earlier times, Stanstead women drove to Vermont to have their babies delivered because of lack of government health care and a highway to Canadian hospitals. Much of the towns middle-aged or older population, thus, hold dual citizenship.

Although Derby Line and Stanstead have different telephone area codes, a telephone call between the two towns is local.

And lastly, the Haskell Free Library and Opera House is recognized as a historic site in both countries because of its unusual heritage value being located in both countries, its dual function and the sense of community and goodwill they symbolize.

Also see: Hotel Arbez Franco-Suisse, Located Half in Switzerland and Half in France

Photo credit: ladykaty24/Flickr

The Haskell Opera Houses stage is in Canada while most of the seats are in the US. Photo credit: Christian Science Monitor/Getty Images.

Photo credit: Stan Hieronymus/Flickr

Photo credit: Wikimedia

Sources: BBC / Wikipedia / Wikipedia / Canada's Historic Places / NY TimesPosted on: March 22, 2018 8:49 AM

The Primate of Southern Africa, the Archbishop of Cape Town, Thabo Makgoba, has written to the bishops of the province asking them to establish diocesan advisory teams to handle allegations of abuse. He is also urgently consulting more widely on how the Church can not only act more effectively, but be seen to act effectively in cases of sexual abuse, he said in a statement released today. Key to my efforts is to achieve holistic and sustainable healing. In his statement, Archbishop Thabo said that in recent weeks four individuals have either spoken out publicly or contacted my office privately to report experiences of sexual abuse in two dioceses dating back to the 1970s and 1980s.

One of those cases involved the South African writer Ishtiyaq Shukri. In an open letter at the end of last month, he said that he had been repeatedly and routinely sexually abused by Anglican priests at St Cyprians Cathedral in Kimberley from the age of 10 in 1978. The abuse was alienating and confusing, he wrote. I did not know what to do so I kept quiet knowing that I was not alone and that there were others too. That knowledge provided a distorted sense of comfort normalising the abnormal which after all is what life in apartheid South Africa trained us all to do.

He published his open letter in response to comments by Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu on the Oxfam abuse scandal. Archbishop Tutu had said that he was deeply disappointed by allegations of immorality and possible criminality involving humanitarian workers linked to the charity. His spokesman said that Tutu was saddened by the impact of the allegations on the many thousands of good people who have supported Oxfams righteous work.

In his open letter, Shukri said: Let me be unequivocal: I have great regard for the work Oxfam does having witnessed it first hand in several countries around the world. For that reason I separate the work of the organisation as a whole from those Oxfam employees who abused their authority and power. Oxfam has gone to great lengths to admit its failures regarding the sexual abuse and my admiration for the work that Oxfam does remains.

However I am left wondering whether Archbishop Tutu can unequivocally say the same for the Anglican Church of Southern Africa. He had far more direct authority over priests like the ones who abused me  priests who pledge obedience  priests who were appointed at leisure and all are still in robes today. Because of the conspiracy of silence in the Church men like me have felt it best to live our entire adult lives in silence with the trauma of what happened to us at St Cyprians Cathedral  even in the church building even during religious ceremonies.

In response to that letter, Archbishop Tutu said that he was mortified to hear of the suffering described by Shukri. Members of the clergy who break the law or behave immorally are as accountable for their actions  now, in the past and in the future  as any other member of Gods family.

And Archbishop Thabo said: Mr Shukri has been in touch with one of our bishops and I understand that he is unwilling to go into detail or name the person or persons who abused him. While respecting his wishes, we usually urge victims of abuse to lay charges with the police and with church authorities. The police are often better equipped to investigate cases than we are, especially in cases which go back many decades and may have occurred in dioceses whose former leaders have died.

He said that the Bishops of the province had learned of Shukris letter with shock and distress as they were meeting to discuss to Anglican Communions international Safe Church Network and Safe Church Commission, which has been established to develop a communion-wide approach to safeguarding.

Every human being deserves to have the dignity bestowed on them by God respected, Archbishop Thabo said. Anyone who demeans this through any form of abuse demeans themselves and God. Abusing others is unbiblical and cannot be condoned.

In todays statement, the Archbishop explained that the provincial Canons make provision for someone who holds a licence to minister in the Church, and who is accused of sexual assault or harassment, to be charged before a church tribunal within their diocese, and disciplined if found guilty. We have also advised complainants in the past to lay charges with the police.

However, it is clear from the experiences reported in the last few weeks that we are lagging behind in our care for victims of abuse.

In his own diocese, he had established a team to advise him on the handling of complaints. The team includes a psychologist, a lawyer, a priest and the head of an institution involved in a case. However, since that team does not have the capacity to advise bishops across Southern Africa I wrote to all our bishops last week advising them to establish similar advisory teams in their dioceses and in their local archdeaconries and parishes, Archbishop Thabo said..

I have asked that these teams be appointed to intervene when there are allegations of abuse in parishes or church schools. They should include a psychologist, social worker or counsellor; someone who is qualified to give legal advice; a community worker from outside the church; and the head of the affected entity within the church.

I am also urgently consulting more widely on how the Church can not only act more effectively, but be seen to act effectively in cases of sexual abuse. Key to my efforts is to achieve holistic and sustainable healing.

He will address the issue further at Easter, he said.

As I have said previously, I take responsibility for what has happened in the church in the past and where we have wronged or failed anyone, we beg their forgiveness.

Every human being deserves to have the dignity bestowed on them by God respected. Anyone who demeans this through any form of abuse demeans themselves and God.Posted on: March 22, 2018 9:25 AM

After months of pressure from students and staff, authorities at Sewanee: The University of the South, has revoked the honorary degree it had previously awarded to broadcast journalist Charlie Rose. The protests follow accusations from eight women who worked with Rose that they had sexually harassed them. The allegations were reported in the Washington Post and led to Rose being dropped by broadcasters PBS, Bloomberg and CBS.

Rose has apologised for his inappropriate behaviour and admitted that he had behaved insensitively at times, but said that he disputes the accuracy of some of the allegations.

Sewanee: The University of the South is co-owned by 28 dioceses of the US-based Episcopal Church. The honorary degree was awarded to Charlie Rose in May 2016 to recognise his achievements in journalism. Until the Charlie Rose furore arose in November last year, it had no procedure for dealing with the revocation of degrees. It has now developed a system which mirrors the process used to award them.

In the new four-step process, a written request for the revocation of an honorary degree was submitted to the vice-chancellor, who shared it with and received approval from the Joint Regent-Senate Committee on Honorary Degrees, the University Senate, and the Board of Regents, in that order, the university said in a statement.

In its 150-year history, the University had never revoked an honorary degree, nor, until very recently, did it have a process to do so. The Joint Regent-Senate Committee on Honorary Degrees developed a process this month for the orderly review of an honorary degree once awarded. This action followed requests to rescind Roses honorary degree from students, faculty, and members of the Board of Trustees, and recognised that it occasionally may be necessary for the University to consider the revocation of an honorary degree held by a still-living recipient.

Mirroring the process for the awarding of honorary degrees, proposed revocations will be considered by universitys Board of Regents, its Senate, and the Joint Regent-Senate Committee on Honorary Degrees. The Board of Regents has the final authority in the revocation of a degree.

In its statement, the university said that the Joint Regent-Senate Committee voted to recommend revocation of the honorary degree conferred upon Charlie Rose on 11 March. Later that week, the University voted to recommend revocation. The Board of Regents met on 20 March and also agreed with the revocation. Detailed voting figures have not been released, but the university says that each of the three bodies carried agreed with the revocation with the required two-thirds majority.

Last month, the vice-chancellor of Sewanee: The University of the South, John McCardell, moved to reassure students that it has steadfastly stood and continues to stand against sexual misconduct of any sort on the campus and in the workplace in light of on-campus protests.Posted on: March 22, 2018 12:45 PM

The Church of England did not unlawfully discriminate against a priest by refusing to grant a licence after he entered a same-sex marriage, Londons Court of Appeal said today. The Revd Jeremy Pemberton married his same-sex partner, Laurence Cunnington, in 2014, shortly after same-sex civil marriages were legalised in England and Wales. But the move was contrary to the C of Es doctrine of marriage and as a result, the acting bishop of Southwell and Nottingham, Richard Inwood, revoked his Permission to Officiate and denied a licence for him to take up a role as an Anglican hospital chaplain. Pemberton challenged the decision in the Employment Tribunal, the Employment Appeal Tribunal and finally the Court of Appeal. All three ruled that the bishop had acted lawfully.

The decision to withhold a licence under the Extra-Parochial Places Ministry Measure 1967, was taken by Bishop Richard on the grounds that by marrying his same-sex partner, Pemberton could not be considered to be in good standing because he had acted contrary to the House of Bishops pastoral guidance which had banned same-sex marriages among the clergy.

Mr Pemberton had argued that the Church of England should not be able to rely on exemptions in the UKs Equalities Act because as a hospital chaplain, his employer would have been a National Health Service (NHS) Trust, rather than the Church. But this argument was rejected by the Employment Tribunal, which ruled that although the NHS Trust would have been the employer, and had set the job description and conducted the interviews and made the appointment, it was an integral part of what the Trust wanted that the Claimant be able to minister as a Church of England priest and thus be licensed to do so. . .

There are the non-doctrinal aspects of the job not needing him to be held out as acting . . . as a Church of England authorised priest. But there are those elements of the role where that is essential. There are obvious examples: giving the last rites as requested by the dying or their family within the faith of the Church; conducting on occasion a baptism for a critically ill baby within the ceremony of the Church as desired by the parents; perhaps conducting a wedding ceremony, as requested as per the ceremonies of the Church, in the hospital chaplain. In each of those respects, if the patient (or the member of the public) so wanted, then it was essential that the service be conducted by the authorised minister of that religion.

The Tribunal also rejected attempts to consider whether the Churchs doctrine on marriage was something the courts could adjudicate on. If there is a clear doctrine relating to the nature of marriage and which excludes same sex marriage for the purposes of the Church, rather than the State, and that doctrine requires obedience from the Priest by way of the Canons, then that is the end of the matter for our purposes, the Employment Tribunal judgment said. It matters not what we think about the appropriateness of the doctrines to current times. It is not for us to reconstruct the Churchs doctrines. . . There is the distinction between the Church and State. The constitutional convention means that the State cannot impose same sex marriage upon the Church.

The Employment Appeal Tribunal upheld that decision in 2016. And today, the Court of Appeal also ruled in favour of Bishop Richard. Pemberton could have taken his case to the UKs Supreme Court, but in a statement today he said that he had reached a settlement with the C of E whereby he would not pursue his case any further, and the Church would not apply for costs against him.

The Church of England has established through this process that it can continue to discriminate legally against LGBT people in relation to their employment, even where that employment is not within the boundaries of the churchs jurisdiction, he said in his statement. This will seem to most people in the UK today an extraordinary result, and not one that will help commend the claims of Christ to the nation.

An official position that regards the loves and commitments of LGBT people, including clergy, as sinful is years overdue for thorough-going revision. The need for a revolution in attitudes and practices in the Church towards this minority is still acute  we continue to wait for real change.

Commenting on todays judgment, a Southwell and Nottingham diocesan spokesperson said: We are pleased that the court has upheld the decision made with regards to the employment tribunal. We recognise that this has been a long and difficult process for many of those concerned, and we hold them in our thoughts and prayers.

Giving the lead judgment, Lady Justice Asplin said that the Employment Tribunal had found that there had been lengthy discussions with the Bishop and others in relation to [Pembertons] intention to marry his same sex partner and their opposing positions were clear. Therefore, the consequences in relation to his standing cannot have been much of a surprise.Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has spoken on the Cambridge Analytica (CA) horror  CA company improperly harvested data on 50 million Facebook users without their consent. Zuckerberg has vowed to protect your data. To which the obvious response is: from you or from them? It was slack data policies that damaged Facebook, wiping tens of billions from its stock market valuation. The big worry is that Facebooks lax protocols and CAs conniving lead to a more regulated internet.

It also invites us to wonder if the data was worth the hassle? The idea is that CA gathered enough information to target individuals with messages geared to their prejudices. At voting time, this can give candidates an edge, so they claim, either by bigging up a candidate or disparaging rivals.

Does it work? Did Facebook win the US election for Donald Trump as it is helped Barack Obama in 2012? At what point does using data move from being cutting-edge and down with the kids to something sinister? Whatever the outcome, the narrative is the same: voters are perceived as fools, slack-jawed consumers devoid of circumspection and reason.

Zuckerberg made his thoughts known in a Facebook post, naturally.

I want to share an update on the Cambridge Analytica situation  including the steps weve already taken and our next steps to address this important issue.

We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we cant then we dont deserve to serve you. Ive been working to understand exactly what happened and how to make sure this doesnt happen again. The good news is that the most important actions to prevent this from happening again today we have already taken years ago. But we also made mistakes, theres more to do, and we need to step up and do it.

Heres a timeline of the events:

In 2007, we launched the Facebook Platform with the vision that more apps should be social. Your calendar should be able to show your friends birthdays, your maps should show where your friends live, and your address book should show their pictures. To do this, we enabled people to log into apps and share who their friends were and some information about them.

In 2013, a Cambridge University researcher named Aleksandr Kogan created a personality quiz app. It was installed by around 300,000 people who shared their data as well as some of their friends data. Given the way our platform worked at the time this meant Kogan was able to access tens of millions of their friends data.

In 2014, to prevent abusive apps, we announced that we were changing the entire platform to dramatically limit the data apps could access. Most importantly, apps like Kogans could no longer ask for data about a persons friends unless their friends had also authorized the app. We also required developers to get approval from us before they could request any sensitive data from people. These actions would prevent any app like Kogans from being able to access so much data today.

In 2015, we learned from journalists at The Guardian that Kogan had shared data from his app with Cambridge Analytica. It is against our policies for developers to share data without peoples consent, so we immediately banned Kogans app from our platform, and demanded that Kogan and Cambridge Analytica formally certify that they had deleted all improperly acquired data. They provided these certifications.

Last week, we learned from The Guardian, The New York Times and Channel 4 that Cambridge Analytica may not have deleted the data as they had certified. We immediately banned them from using any of our services. Cambridge Analytica claims they have already deleted the data and has agreed to a forensic audit by a firm we hired to confirm this. Were also working with regulators as they investigate what happened.

This was a breach of trust between Kogan, Cambridge Analytica and Facebook. But it was also a breach of trust between Facebook and the people who share their data with us and expect us to protect it. We need to fix that.

In this case, we already took the most important steps a few years ago in 2014 to prevent bad actors from accessing peoples information in this way. But theres more we need to do and Ill outline those steps here:

First, we will investigate all apps that had access to large amounts of information before we changed our platform to dramatically reduce data access in 2014, and we will conduct a full audit of any app with suspicious activity. We will ban any developer from our platform that does not agree to a thorough audit. And if we find developers that misused personally identifiable information, we will ban them and tell everyone affected by those apps. That includes people whose data Kogan misused here as well.

Second, we will restrict developers data access even further to prevent other kinds of abuse. For example, we will remove developers access to your data if you havent used their app in 3 months. We will reduce the data you give an app when you sign in  to only your name, profile photo, and email address. Well require developers to not only get approval but also sign a contract in order to ask anyone for access to their posts or other private data. And well have more changes to share in the next few days.

Third, we want to make sure you understand which apps youve allowed to access your data. In the next month, we will show everyone a tool at the top of your News Feed with the apps youve used and an easy way to revoke those apps permissions to your data. We already have a tool to do this in your privacy settings, and now we will put this tool at the top of your News Feed to make sure everyone sees it.

Beyond the steps we had already taken in 2014, I believe these are the next steps we must take to continue to secure our platform.

I started Facebook, and at the end of the day Im responsible for what happens on our platform. Im serious about doing what it takes to protect our community. While this specific issue involving Cambridge Analytica should no longer happen with new apps today, that doesnt change what happened in the past. We will learn from this experience to secure our platform further and make our community safer for everyone going forward.

I want to thank all of you who continue to believe in our mission and work to build this community together. I know it takes longer to fix all these issues than wed like, but I promise you well work through this and build a better service over the long term.Man disguised as a bull attempted to burn down ex-lovers home with pasta sauce

To Florida, where the Volusia County Sheriffs Office claims Derrick Irving and John Silva, who was dressed as a bull, broke into their ex-boyfriends house and tried to burn the place down with spaghetti sauce. Its alleged that Irving and Silva nicked several items and left pasta sauce boiling on the stove with a cloth close enough to catch light and start a fire. The alleged plot failed because the victims security system alerted him.

Police arrived at the peoperty in time to find Irving and Silva driving away. Silva was behind the wheel. Irving was in the passenger seat dressed as a bull. Police also noted in the car: a marijuana grinder, a vacuum, a window air conditioning unit, a flat-screen television, a heater in the back seat, and an empty jar of Ragu sauce.

Says the alleged victim: He was trying to make it look like I left the stove on but who gets up 2am and fixes skett. It started out as a relationship, that lasted about a week. Ive let him use my car for four months, maybe hes angry about that. Or maybe hes angry because I gave him $150 to fix his teeth.

Both men have been charged with unarmed burglary, grand theft and arson.

Karen Strike

Posted: 22nd, March 2018 | In: News, Strange But True Comment | TrackBack | Permalink(ANSA) - Rome, March 21 - Giovanni Legnini, the head of the judiciary's self-governing body the Supreme Council of Magistrates (CSM), on Wednesday said Genoa prosecutor Enrico Zucca had used "inappropriate" words in saying Italy could not expect Egypt to hand over the torturers and murderers of Giulio Regeni when its own torturers responsible for Genoa G8 brutality in 2001 headed up the national police force.

Meanwhile the prosecutor-general of the supreme court of Cassation opned a probe into Zucca's remarks. Legnini said Zucca's statement Tuesday "was a strong statement with some inappropriate words".

Legnini voiced "esteem and confidence in the heads of the police force".

Zucca said Tuesday, repeating previous similar remarks, that Rome cannot expect Egypt to hand over those who tortured and killed Giulio Regeni as long as its own torturers head up the Italian police, referring to brutality at the G8 summit in Genoa in 2001.

"Our torturers are at the top of the police, how can we ask Egypt to hand over their torturers?" said Zucca.

Zucca was among the judges who convicted Italian police of brutality in a night-time raid on an anti-globalist sleeping quarters in the Diaz school, an incident described by Amnesty International as the worst postwar suspension of democracy in Europe.

Zucca went on: "September 11 2001 and the G8 marked a rupture in safeguarding international rights.

"The effort we ask of a dictatorial country is an effort we have shown we ourselves cannot make for less dramatic affairs".

Regeni, 28, was tortured and murdered in Cairo early in 2016 in a case in which Egyptian security officials are suspected.

Egypt has always denied the involvement of its security apparatus, which is frequently accused of brutally repressing dissent.

Regeni was being followed by police because of his research for Cambridge University into Egyptian street-seller unions, a politically sensitive issue.

His main contact, the head of the Egyptian street-hawkers' union, had told police he was a spy.

Regeni's parents said Tuesday they felt "abandoned" by the government since an Italian ambassador was reappointed to Cairo last summer.

photo: Legnini (R) with Justice Minister Andrea OrlandoTUNIS - Tunisian President Beji Caid Essebsi inaugurated the Tunis City of Culture on the capital city's central Avenue Mohamed V on Wednesday, calling it a "project of life, progress and growth".



The vast complex is spread across an area of 9.2 hectares, 8.6 of which are indoors, including equipped multimedia rooms, workshops, two theatres, an 1,800-seat opera house, a contemporary art museum, three cinema halls, a media library and a digital library, making it the largest cultural centre in the Maghreb.



"This City of Culture will remain an asset for future generations because Tunisia believes in culture, in freedom and in creativity," Essebsi said.



"There's no creativity without freedom, and one of the achievements of the revolution has been precisely that: freedom of expression and creation," he said.



"All Tunisians should be proud of this great achievement, which was reached despite difficulties along the way," he said, highlighting the essential contribution culture makes in the fight against terrorism.



"Today, a great historical event and a great dream are taking place thanks to the sacrifices of the workers and employees of the Culture and Infrastructure Ministries," said Culture Minister Mohamed Zine El Abidine.



The City of Culture aims to be for all and open to all, to make Tunisia a preferred destination, including for foreign artists, as well as a useful tourist destination to encourage the return of tourists from around the world to Tunisia.



Tunisian-Italian actress Claudia Cardinale inaugurated the City of Culture's Tunisian film library.



The actress was born in the La Goulette district of Tunis to Italian parents of Sicilian origin, and she grew up in the Italian community of Tunis during the time of the French protectorate.



She calls herself a "daughter of the country" and emphasised that her film career began in Tunis.



In Cardinale's honour, the Tunisian film library will screen a series of films in which she starred, including Luchino Visconti's "The Leopard" and Valerio Zurlini's "Girl With a Suitcase", as well as an exhibition of film set photos and film posters, through March 25.

African countries sign largest free trade deal after WTO Creates market of 1.2 billion people, but Nigeria fails to sign

(ANSAmed) - CAIRO, MARCH 22 - Forty-four African nations have signed a free trade agreement considered the largest ever created since the birth of the World Trade Organisation, with the signatures approved during an extraordinary summit of the African Union (AU) in Kigali, Rwanda.



However, there are 55 nations in Africa and thus not all are part of the deal, with the continent's largest economy, Nigeria, failing to sign for fears of social repercussions of the planned trade liberalisation.



The signing completes a negotiation process that lasted three years, and is an important step in enacting a decision that was taken at an AU summit in 2012.



In January of that year in Addis Ababa, the AU decided to create a "Continental Free Trade Area" (CFTA) - a free trade area comprising 1.2 billion people from Cairo to Cape Town, Tunis to Djibouti - with a combined GDP of more than 3.4 trillion dollars (although some estimates put that figure at 2.6 trillion).



The accord, which must now be ratified by the individual countries, aims at increasing inter-African trade, which at the moment represents just 16% of total trade compared to 51% in internal trade between Asian countries and 70% internally between EU countries.



The goal is to have the agreement take effect by the end of 2018, therefore speeding up the creation of a customs union.



However, the BBC online recalled that the creation of the European Single Market took over half a century, so it remains to be seen how implementation of the free trade agreement will actually unfold.



The question of Nigeria's failure to sign the accord is also important, given that the country's GDP is Africa's second-highest, according to 2016 data from the World Bank.



Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari bowed to pressure from unions and did not attend the signing ceremony in Kigali.



Some of the strongest and fastest-growing African economies, such as Ethiopia and Ghana, however, did sign the accord, which should help the strongest countries economically by creating jobs but will also expose them to migration tension as jobs attract workers. (ANSAmed).



GAZA - Anas Abu Hussa, the man that Hamas has said was behind a March 13 attack on Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah, died on Thursday from wounds sustained during his capture.



Reports were from the Hamas interior ministry in Gaza, which issued a statement saying that two police officers and an accomplice of Hussa's were also killed during the operation by Hamas security services in the Nusseirat (Gaza) refugee camp. Another alleged accomplice was captured by security services.



The Palestinian Authority (PA) has meanwhile said that it was kept in the dark about the investigation in Gaza by Hamas on the case. In an interview with the Voice of Palestine, General Mohammad Mansur, an official from the interior ministry in Ramallah, denied that Hamas had sent information on the inquiry to his office. Hamdallah's government has accused Hamas - according to the WAFA news agency - of spreading ''contradictory and illusory scenarios that are not logical''. It added that it found the rapidity with which Hamas named a suspect and his capture on Thursday were suspicious. ''Hamas is involved in spreading rumors that have nothing to do with the truth,'' government spokesperson Yusuf al-Mahmud said. He added that the PA government considers Hamas to blame for the failed attack on Hamdallah and the head of intelligence, General Majed Faraj.BEIRUT - Amnesty International noted Thursday that after three years, the war in Yemen shows no sign of abating and all the parties involved are inflicting horrible suffering on the civilian population.



The organization added that the US, UK, France, Spain and Italy, as well as other countries, continue to transfer billions of dollars' worth of arms to the Saudi.-led coalition that is conducting bombings in the country, some of the victims of which are civilians. Lynn Maalouf, Middle East research chief for the organization, noted that this is against international arms treaties. Since the beginning of the conflict on March 25, 2015, Amnesty International said that it had found that 36 airstrikes by the coalition seems to have violated international humanitarian law, killing 513 civilians including 137 under age 18. The organization said that Shia Houthi rebels are also engaging in indiscriminate bombing of civilian residential areas, such as in January and February in the city of Taiz.



In the capital Sanaa and other regions under their control, Houthis and their allies are carrying out arbitrary arrests and dozens of men and women have fallen victim to forced disappearances, it said. The UN has said that almost 6,000 civilians have been killed in three years of war and that over 9,000 have been injured. The war has also caused an enormous humanitarian disaster, with an estimated over 22 million people now in need of assistance.



There are also over a million suspected cases of cholera. Al Qaeda and the Islamic State (ISIS) have strengthened their presence in Yemen by taking advantage of the civil war

During the official visit of Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko to Qatar, six documents on mutually beneficial cooperation, including a military one, were signed, the Ukrainian Defense Ministrys press service reports.



President Poroshenko while on official visit in Qatar for negotiation on cooperation (Picture source: president.gov.ua)

This document is similar to the one that has been recently signed by the Ukrainian delegation in Kuwait. For Qatar, Ukraine is a country with experience of combat actions. Doha is interested in the Ukrainian equipment, especially anti-tank armament, the Ukrainian Defense ministry claimed.

According to the ministry, this agreement provides an opportunity for Qatar to invest in Ukraine, "To jointly produce equipment, work for the defense of Qatar, but we are mostly interested in the defense of Ukraine. Therefore, this agreement will significantly raise the defense capabilities of our country," Defense Minister of Ukraine Stepan Poltorak said.The program will focus on promoting the luxury brand in Tier II and Tier III cities.

Mercedes-Benz has launched a Brand Tour to reach out to potential customers living in Tier II and Tier III cities across the country. This program is aimed at providing them the Brand Experience which they were void of earlier due to the absence of a Mercedes-Benz showroom in their city. The Brand Tour has already commenced in Aurangabad, Udaipur and Allahabad and will soon travel to 11 more cities including Haldwani, Ranchi, Shimla, Tirunelveli, Vizag and Gandhinagar, among others.

With this program, potential customers will have a chance to get a closer look at Mercedes entire portfolio for the Indian market, take test drives and even go off-roading in SUVs such as the GLC and GLE. Apart from this, they will even get a chance to experience the pre-safe features on Mercedes-Benz sedans such as the C-Class and the E-Class. During the tour, the German luxury brand will also present Mercedes-Benz Certified used cars, various customer service programmes, flexible financial services and on-the-spot bookings.

Speaking on the occasion, Roland Folger, managing director and CEO of Mercedes-Benz India, said, Indias growth has given a major economic boost to its Tier II and III markets and with this growing economy, we now have an expanded customer base and favourable wealth distribution in the country. Mercedes-Benz is known for its customer-centric approach, and Brand Tour is one such concept which helps us create a stronghold in the largely untapped Tier II and III emerging markets. With 'Brand Tour' we aim to unlock the market potential of smaller cities while providing customers easy access to the unique and renowned Mercedes-Benz experience. We are confident that the initiative will help the brand expand its footprint and penetrate deeper into the Indian market.

Recently, Mercedes-Benz launched the 2018 S-Class with the S 350 d and S 450 being priced at Rs 1.33 crore and Rs 1.37 crore (ex-showroom), respectively. The S 350d is the first made-in-India, BSVI-compliant car. However, it has been tuned to run on BSIV fuel until Indian oil companies upgrade to BSVI fuels in the year 2020.

Source: Zigwheels.comIn spite of her injury, the actress insists on continuing her shooting in Bulgaria.

So now we know who the super-hero is. Alia Bhatt has injured herself while shooting for Ayan Mukerjees super-hero film Brahmastra. But she refuses to take sick leave. The show, as they say, must go on. And if its Alia the show doesnt just go on  it hurls forward. In spite of her injury, the actress insists on continuing her shooting in Bulgaria.

Says Alias mother, actress-filmmaker, Soni Razdan, She has injured her shoulder in an action sequence in Bulgaria. Alia being Alia is taking it on the chin or on the shoulder as it were in this case. The early reports suggest some ligament damage and a haematoma, so she must rest the shoulder for some time now and not do any more action. Apart from this she is her usual smiling self.

The injury means no more action sequences for Alia for at least two years. Father figure and mentor Karan Johar was toying with the idea of doing an action film on the lines of Lara Croft with Alia, which will now have to wait.

Alia seems gung-ho about action. But there is another genre she is longing to explore. Doing action is fun as long as I dont get hurt. But what I really want to is a comedy  a full-on slapstick situational comedy.

Her next release, Meghna Gulzars Raazi, is anything but comic. Looks like the laughs will also have to wait.China is the first country to export such sensitive equipment to Pakistan, according to report.

The report attributed the sale of the equipment to Pakistan to India testing the most advanced nuclear-ready intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) Agni-V with a range long enough to hit Beijing or Shanghai. (Photo: AP/File)

New Delhi: In an unprecedented deal, China has sold Pakistan a powerful optical tracking and measurement system that could speed up the Pakistani militarys development of multi-warhead missiles, a media report said.

Zheng Mengwei, a researcher with the CAS Institute of Optics and Electronics in Chengdu, Sichuan province, confirmed to the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post that Pakistan had bought a highly sophisticated, large-scale optical tracking and measurement system from China.

The Pakistani military recently deployed the Chinese-made system "at a firing range" for use in testing and developing new missiles, he said.

According to a statement on the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) website, China is the first country to export such sensitive equipment to Pakistan.

The report attributed the sale of the equipment to Pakistan to India testing the most advanced nuclear-ready intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) Agni-V with a range long enough to hit Beijing or Shanghai.

Earlier in January, India successfully test-fired its nuclear capable surface-to-surface ballistic missile Agni-5 - the most advanced missile in the Agni series with a strike range of over 5000 kms, which brings the whole of Asia and China as well parts of Europe and Africa within its nuclear strike envelope.

Agni-5 is most advanced missile in the Agni series with new technologies incorporated in it in terms of navigation and guidance, warhead and engine.

Earlier on Thursday, the BrahMos supersonic cruise missile was successfully flight tested from Rajasthan's Pokhran test range.

Also Read: Supersonic cruise missile BrahMos successfully flight tested

The missile flies almost three times the speed of sound at Mach 2.8 and has a range of 290 km.

The range of the BrahMos missile, an Indo-Russia joint venture, can be extended up to 400 km as certain technical restrictions were lifted after India became a full member of the Missile Technology Control Regime or MTCR in 2016.

(With PTI inputs)TDP will hold demonstration and protest meetings in major junctions of all constituencies in Andhra Pradesh.

Amaravati: To strengthen their demand for special status for Andhra Pradesh and to support its MPs agitation in the Parliament, the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) is holding hold a statewide peaceful protest on Thursday.

In a teleconference with MPs, MLAs, MLCs, in-charges and other party leaders, TDP Andhra Pradesh unit president K Kala Venkatrao told them to sit on demonstration and protest meetings in major junctions of all constituencies.

Venkatrao said the agitation must be peaceful and should not cause any trouble to the layman.

Venkatrao said the YSRCP may cause destruction and violence during the protest, so the TDP should not join protests along with them but hold public agitation separately.

Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu on Wednesday said he is ready to make any sacrifice for the development of the state.

On the other hand, mass organisations affiliated to left parties on Thursday called for highway blockade, which all parties except the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) supported.

Chandrababu Naidu also announced support to the blockade and cited state interests as the reason.

Meanwhile, Naidu in a teleconference with MPs said the BJP had been suspecting the TDP for quite some time now and not believing the TDP chief's statement about his interest in national politics.

"They do not believe even after I clarified that I don't have any interest in national politics. For the same, though there was no need, the Centre ruling party took the support of YSRCP during the presidential election."

After the Andhra ruling party's pullout from the NDA, Wednesday's assembly session saw a confrontation between the TDP and BJP on various issuesThe Congress is supporting the BSP candidate with its seven MLAs.

The BJP will have 28 surplus votes after it allots the required 37 votes to each of its eight official candidates.

Lucknow: The Rajya Sabha arithmetic in Uttar Pradesh is getting increasingly complicated and the victory of the 10th candidate now depends on the ability of the BJP and the Opposition to ensure cross-voting in their favour.

The Samajwadi Party was in for a rude shock on Wednesday when it convened a meeting of its 47 MLAs, but only 40 showed up to discuss the Rajya Sabha biennial elections. Among the prominent absentees were Shivpal Yadav, who was in Etawah, Azam Khan, his son Abdullah Azam, Subhash Pasi and Kalpnath. Party sources said all the absentees had spoken to Mr Akhilesh Yadav over the phone.

Rebel SP MLA Nitin Agarwal did not attend the party meeting though later in the day he was seen attending a meeting of BJP MLAs at the chief ministers house. This means the SP has officially lost one MLA, which means it now has only nine surplus votes to offer to the Bahujan Samaj Party after ensuring the victory of its own candidate Jaya Bachchan.

The number of surplus SP votes for the BSP will come down to eight if jailed SP MLA Hariom Yadav is not allowed to come to Lucknow and cast his vote.

The BSP will also be left with 18 votes, instead of 19, because its MLA Mukhtar Ansari is also in jail. The Congress is supporting the BSP candidate with its seven MLAs.

BSP candidate Bhimrao Ambedkar, supported by the SP and Congress, is, therefore, on a sticky wicket with 34 votes  three less than the 37 votes needed to win.

In another development, Vijay Misra, the lone MLA from the Nishad Party (Nirbal Indian Shoshit Hamara Aam Dal), has formally announced that his vote will go to the BJP.

The Nishad Party, it may be recalled, is in alliance with the Samajwadi Party. SP candidate Pravin Nishad, who recently won the Gorakhpur Lok Sabha byelection, is the younger brother of Sanjay Nishad, president of the Nishad Party.

There is no party because I won the election on my own strength. I was not consulted when the Nishad Party tied up with the Samajwadi Party and I do not have to consult anyone about my vote now, Mr Misra told reporters.

Mr Misra will vote for Anil Agarwal, the Independent candidate backed by the BJP for the 10th seat in UP.

Meanwhile, the BJP, which has an effective strength of 324 MLAs in a House of 402, has fielded eight candidates and is backing the ninth candidate  Anil Agarwal, an Independent.

The BJP will have 28 surplus votes after it allots the required 37 votes to each of its eight official candidates. Three Independent members, Raghuraj Pratap Singh aka Raja Bhaiyya, Vinod Saroj and Aman Mani Tripathi, have announced their support to the BJP, in addition to Vijay Misra.

Raja Bhaiyya, incidentally, was a Cabinet minister in the Akhilesh Yadav government. Apart from this, SP MLA Nitin Agarwal, who is the son of BJP leader Naresh Agarwal, has declared that he will vote for the BJP. The lone RLD MLA is also likely to support the BJP too.

The BJP, therefore, has the support of 34 MLAs for the Independent candidate it is backing. It needs a total of 37 votes to ensure victory, which means that the BJP is still short of three votes.SC considered submission of ASG Aman Lekhi that CBI has not found any incriminating material against the RJD leader.

Supreme Court ordered closure of proceedings against Tej Pratap and gave the slain journalist's widow the liberty to get her plea revised if some incriminating material surfaces in the future. (Photo: File/PTI)

New Delhi: The Supreme Court on Wednesday closed proceedings against former Bihar minister Tej Pratap, son of jailed Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) supremo Lalu Prasad Yadav, in the murder case of a Siwan-based journalist.

The apex court had asked the CBI to investigate allegations relating to media reports featuring photographs and videos that showed Pratap, former Bihar health minister, along with two absconding accused, Mohd Kaif and Javed, who are presently in judicial custody in the Rajdeo Ranjan murder case.

Also read: Absconding Siwan murder accused appears in photo with Tej Pratap

A bench comprising Chief Justice Dipak Misra and Justices AM Khanwilkar and DY Chandrachud considered the submission of Additional Solicitor General (ASG) Aman Lekhi that CBI has not found any incriminating material against the RJD leader.

The bench ordered closure of proceedings against Tej Pratap and gave the slain journalist's widow the liberty to get her plea revised if some incriminating material surfaces in the future.At present the Election Commission has the power only to recognise a political party but not to de-recognise it for various reasons.

New Delhi: The Centre on Wednesday made it clear in the Supreme Court that there is no provision of law existing to debar convicted legislators or other persons from forming a political party and becoming its office-bearer.

The Centre made this assertion in response to the courts notice on a PIL seeking a ban on convicted persons from forming a political party and becoming its office-bearer. The court while issuing notice to the Centre said it would examine whether Election Commission could de-register political parties which are headed by convicted persons. At present the Election Commission has the power only to recognise a political party but not to de-recognise it for various reasons.

The petitioner, BJP advocate and leader Ashwini Kumar Upadhyaya, cited the instance of Lalu Prasad Yadav, O.P. Chautala and Sasikala who have been convicted for major scams but still holding highest political post. Similarly, charges have been framed by the Court in serious cases against Suresh Kalmadi, A. Raja, Jagan Mohan Reddy, Madhu Koda, Ashok Chavan, Akabaruddin Owaisi, Kanimozhi, Mayawati and many others who are holding top posts in the parties.

The Bench also said it would examine Section 29 (A) of the Representation of the People Act (RPA) as to whether the ECI is empowered to de-recognise the political party formed by a convicted person. It would also examine the issue to restrain the convicted person from becoming the office-bearer of the party.

Petitioner Ashwini Kumar had said convicted persons are disqualified for contesting election under and he/she also forfeits the right to vote under Section 62 of the RP Act.Furore over Cambridge Analytica links; Minister warns FB chief.

New Delhi: Hours after the Congress Manish Tewari said the Election Commission should investigate which party had or has links with disgraced firm Cambridge Analytica, the BJP on Wedensday fielded senior Union minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, who is in charge of both law and justice as well as information technology, who tried to drag the Opposition party into the controversy.

While the senior BJP leader accused the Congress of having links with the data analytics firm, the Congress claimed the BJP and JD(U) had used the services of Indian business partner of Cambridge Analytica  OBI (Ovelina Business Intelligence)  during the Delhi Assembly elections. It was further alleged that OBI was also involved in the partys Mission 272+ (BJPs slogan for the 2014 general election) as additional support in Haryana, Jharkhand, Maharashtra and Delhi.

The website of Cambridge Analyticas India chapter (https://capolitical.com/casestudies/casestudyindia), however, claimed it had provided services for the Nitish Kumar-led JD(U) in 2010. The India chapters website states: CA was contracted to undertake an in-depth electorate analysis for the Bihar Assembly election in 2010. The core challenge was to identify floating/swing voters for each of the parties and to measure their levels of electoral apathy, a result of the poor and unchanging condition of the state after 15 years of incumbent rule. Cambridge Analytica is in the eye of the storm after its CEO, Alexander Nix, in a sting operation, boasted about using sex workers, bribes and misinformation to help political candidates win votes.

This information also raised concerns about the London-based election consultancy using personal information from Facebook. It was alleged that Cambridge Analytica had used data mined from Facebook in the voter research it conducted, including for Donald Trump during the 2016 American presidential election campaign.

Mr Ravi Shankar Prasad posed three questions to the Congress: Will Congress depend on data manipulation and theft to woo voters? Does Congress endorse methods used by CA, namely sex, sleaze and fake news? What is CAs role in Rahul Gandhis social media profile? The BJP leader cited some media reports which suggested that the Congress will use the services of Cambridge Analytica for the 2019 Lok Sabha polls. Mr Prasad also cited reports which suggested that the rise in Congress president Rahul Gandhis Twitter profile could be due to bots, which is a software application.

The minister also asked Mr Gandhi to explain CAs role in his social media outreach, and noted that the Congress had recently appointed a former investment banker to its data analytics department.

Rebutting the charge, Congress communications chief Randeep Singh Surjewala said: Indian National Congress or the Congress president have never used or never hired the services of a company called Cambridge Analytica. It is a fake agenda and white lie being dished out by Mr Prasad.

Attacking the BJP, Mr Surjewala said: Cambridge Analyticas linked website shows that in 2010 its services were used by the BJP-JD(U). The firms Indian partner Ovlene Business Intelligence (OBI) is run by a BJP allied party MPs son. The OBI companys services were used by a senior BJP leader in 2009.

Mr Prasad also warned social media platforms like Facebook of stringent action if any attempt was made by them to influence the countrys electoral process through undesirable means. His comment came amid a probe by a US privacy watchdog and British legislators over a potential breach of user confidentiality by Facebook.

Let me make it very, very clear... we fully support freedom of the press, speech and expression; we fully support free exchange of ideas on social media. But any attempt, covert or overt, by the social media, including Facebook, of trying to influence Indias electoral process through undesirable means will neither be appreciated nor be tolerated, he said.

Stating that 20 crore Indians were using Facebook, that made it the companys largest market outside the United States, Mr Prasad cautioned the social media giant and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg of repercussions under Indias Information Technology Act in case any data breach came to light.

Mr Mark Zuckerberg, you better note the observation of the IT minister of India. We welcome the FB profile in India, but if any data theft of Indians is done through the collusion of the FB system, it shall not be tolerated. We have got stringent powers under the IT Act, we shall use it, including summoning you in India, the minister said.Parents of the 15-year-old girl demanded a CBI enquiry into the matter and arrest of the teachers and the principal.

Parents of the class 9 girl, accompanied by other parents, staged a protest outside the school in East Delhi's Mayur Vihar area. (Photo: Twitter/ANI)

New Delhi: The HRD Ministry has sought a report from Ahlcon Public School regarding the alleged suicide by a class 9 student whose parents are claiming that she was "sexually harassed" by two teachers.

Parents of the 15-year-old, accompanied by other parents staged a protest outside the school in East Delhi's Mayur Vihar area. They demanded a CBI enquiry into the matter and arrest of the teachers and the principal.

The protesting parents also blocked the Mayur Vihar main road affecting the traffic flow.

"We have asked for details," HRD Minister Prakash Javadekar said when asked about the incident on sidelines of an event.

A Class 9 student of the school allegedly committed suicide by hanging herself at her Noida residence on Tuesday.

Her family alleged that she was harassed by her two teachers including a woman and deliberately awarded poor marks.

Also read: Class 9 Delhi girl hangs self over low marks, harassment by teachers

The school, however, is denying the allegations.

Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia had on Wednesday ordered the Directorate of Education (DoE) to probe the issue. The Noida Police has registered a case against the principal and two teachers of the school.

The girl failed her exams and her family claimed that the teachers deliberately awarded poor marks, police officials said.

She was found hanging at her home by her family members on Wednesday. They rushed her to the Kailash Hospital where she was declared dead. No suicide note was found.

"It's an unfortunate incident. School has been following promotion policies of CBSE. Let me make it clear that she had not failed, a re-test was scheduled. We will cooperate with probe agencies. Such a thing (harassment) has never happened in our school," school principal Dharmedra Goyal said.Earlier, Pak Foreign Office had said that the high commissioner would stay back for an indefinite period.

Pakistan had asked Mahmood to return home for an unspecified time after Pakistan alleged that its diplomats in India were being 'harassed'. (Photo: Pakistan Embassy)

New Delhi: Days after Pakistan Foreign Office informed that its High Commissioner to India will not return anytime soon, Islamabad will send back its envoy Sohail Mahmood to India who will host 'Pakistan National Day' function at the High Commission in Delhi on Friday.

Earlier last week, Pakistan Foreign Office official had said that the high commissioner would stay back for an indefinite period.

Pakistan had asked Mahmood to return home for an unspecified time after Pakistan alleged that its diplomats in India were being "harassed". The move was downplayed by the Ministry of External Affairs as "routine".

Also Read: Won't send envoy back to India any time soon: Pak foreign office

Pakistan had also accused the Indian officials of intimidating the children of a senior diplomat while they were on their way to school.

The Pakistan high commission alleged that the children were harassed and blocked by Indian authorities while they were on their way to the British School.

Pakistan had also summoned India's Deputy High Commissioner JP Singh over the alleged harassment of officials and families of the Pakistan High Commission in New Delhi.

In reply to all the allegations, External Affairs Ministry Spokesperson Raveesh Kumar had said that the Indian High Commission in Islamabad was also facing a "litany of issues" which have not been resolved for several months by that country.Rahul Gandhi also recalled his grandmother Indira Gandhi's association with Chikkamagaluru from where she had won the LS bypolls in 1978.

On Chinese presence in Doklam, Congress president Rahul Gandhi charged Prime Minister Narendra Modi with being 'silent' on it and other key national issues. (Photo: Twitter/@INCIndia)

Chikkamagaluru: Congress president Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday asserted that the Modi government would not win the 2019 Lok Sabha polls as he charged the Prime Minister with not understanding the true meaning of 'Dharma.'

He also that the Congress would win the coming assembly polls in Karnataka "with a bang".

"Four years of Modi's rule has gone by and he had made big speeches. There is only a year left for his rule and I would like to tell party workers that the same kind of rule is going to continue and Modi is going to lose the next election," he said.

Addressing a public meeting in Karnatakas Chikkamagaluru, Gandhi continued to keep Modi as the focal point of his attack during the second day of his latest tour of poll-bound Karnataka, asserting Congress would win the assembly polls.

Attacking Modi, Gandhi said "when India looks at its Prime Minister, it wants to hear the truth and not speeches filled with hate.

"It wants to hear speech of love and brotherhood, as they know without truth this country cannot go forward, and this is the foundation of Dharma."

The Congress president visited Sharada Peetham at Sringeri in Chikkamagaluru district, one of the four seats established by Adi Guru Shankaracharya in the eighth century and met Jagadguru Shankaracharya, Sri Bharati Tirtha Swamiji.

During his interaction with students of Rajiv Gandhi Sanskrit University at Sringeri Mutt, he cited a 14-year-old boy's reply to his query on Dharma.

"Replying to my question on the foundation of Dharma, a 14-year-old child told me Dharma means truth, Satyameva Jayate. The same was repeated by all the children there."

"During the interaction I felt it is a strange world... a 14-year-old child can understand the meaning of Dharma, but the Prime Minister does not understand Dharma," he said.

He said a Prime Minister "becomes successful only when his heart is filled with love and empathy, without which the country cannot be run."

Reiterating that India is what it is today due to the efforts of its people, Gandhi said "our Prime Minister does not agree to this."

Attacking the Prime Minister, he sarcastically said "Everything was done by Narendra Modi...see in what sort of the world our PM lives."

Stating that he has seen several Prime Ministers like Vajpayee, Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi and Narasimha Rao, Gandhi said, "India's Prime Minister can be successful only when he has compassion in his heart."

He said when Vajpayee was leader of the Opposition, he respected the people of India.

Gandhi said Vajpayee never in his speeches (while he was Prime Minister) said that "before him nothing happened in India."

On Chinese presence in Doklam, Gandhi charged Modi with being 'silent' on it and other key national issues.

"You can see China is sitting in Doklam, they are making roads, helipads, and airport. Whole country knows about it, but our Prime Minister is not uttering a word about it," he said.

Gandhi asserted that Congress would win the coming Karnataka assembly polls with a 'bang.'

"I want to tell Congress workers and leaders who have stood behind us that the Congress will win the next Karnataka election with a bang. This I am telling because of the experience I had traversing parts of Karnataka," he said.

Gandhi also recalled his grandmother Indira Gandhi's association with Chikkamagaluru from where she had won the Lok Sabha bypolls in 1978.

"Whatever Indira Gandhi did for the poor and weaker sections of India was because of the strength you gave her," he said.

Stating that his thinking was like that of her, Gandhi said, "The strength that you will give me... I will use that strength to change the lives of India's poor and weaker sections."The BrahMos missile has been jointly developed with Russia and is named for the rivers Brahmaputra and Moskva.

The missile flies almost three times the speed of sound at Mach 2.8 and has a range of 290 km. (Photo: File)

New Delhi: The BrahMos supersonic cruise missile was successfully flight tested from Rajasthan's Pokhran test range on Thursday morning.

Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman congratulated the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) for a successful strike of the BrahMos missile which flew "in its designated trajectory and hit the target with pinpoint accuracy" and said it will further bolster the national security.

The missile flies almost three times the speed of sound at Mach 2.8 and has a range of 290 km.

The range of the BrahMos missile, an Indo-Russia joint venture, can be extended up to 400 km as certain technical restrictions were lifted after India became a full member of the Missile Technology Control Regime or MTCR in 2016.

The successful test comes on the backdrop of the recent milestone for BrahMos, the worlds fastest supersonic cruise missile, which was in November 2017, flight-tested first time from the Indian Air Forces (IAF) frontline fighter aircraft Sukhoi-30MKI against a sea-based target in the Bay of Bengal.

The BrahMos missile has been jointly developed with Russia and is named for the rivers Brahmaputra and Moskva.

The air-launched variant of the BrahMos, the world's fastest supersonic cruise missile, was successfully test fired from a Sukhoi-30 combat jet on November 22, marking a major milestone to enhance the precision strike capability of the air force.

The project is expected to be completed by 2020.

The fleet of 40 Sukhoi jets will undergo structural modifications at the state-run aerospace major Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd or HAL for integration of the missile on them.

BrahMos missile is the heaviest weapon to be deployed on India's Su-30 fighter aircraft.He said the House should debate the statement Swaraj made last year and what she stated on Tuesday.

New Delhi: For the 13th consecutive day, both Houses of Parliament failed to transact any business as parties like the main opposition Congress, Telugu Desam Party (TDP) and AIADMK continued with their noisy protests on various issues. With the House not being in order, the Lok Sabha could not take up the notices of no-confidence motion against the Government, moved by TDP and YSR Congress on Wednesday.

Lok Sabha functioned for a total of nine minutes while the Rajya Sabha was adjourned for the day within four minutes of the upper house assembling in the morning.

Rajya Sabha Chairman M Venkaiah Naidu adjourned the Rajya Sabha in four minutes after the start of proceedings as members of Andhra parties, including TDP, and K.V.P. Ramachandra Rao of the Congress trooped into the Well raising slogans seeking a special status for the state.

No sooner were the listed papers laid on the table, the members of Tamil Nadu parties  DMK and AIADMK  too walked into the Well demanding immediate constitution of the Cauvery Water Management Board for river water sharing between their state and Karnataka. Congress members too joined them in the Well shouting slogans against the government. Leader of the Opposition and senior Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad sought a discussion on the atrocities against the SCs and STs as well as on the statement of external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj on the killing of 39 abducted Indians in Iraq.

He said the House should debate the statement Swaraj made last year and what she stated on Tuesday.

Chairman M. Venkaiah Naidu asked him to give proper notice for the same and asked the members to allow the House to function. What is happening. Are we so helpless, he asked. Both the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha have not transacted any substantial business since the Budget Session of Parliament resumed on March 5, barring the passage of the budget by the Lower House without any debate.He also that the Congress would win the coming Assembly polls in Karnataka with a bang.

Congress president Rahul Gandhi interacts with Jagadguru Shankaracharya of Sringeri Mutt during his visit to Chikmagalur, Karnataka, on Wednesday. (Photo: PTI)

Chikkamagaluru: Congress president Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday asserted the Modi government would not win the 2019 Lok Sabha polls as he charged the Prime Minister with not understanding the true meaning of Dharma.

He also that the Congress would win the coming Assembly polls in Karnataka with a bang.

Four years of Modis rule has gone by and he had made big speeches. There is only a year left for his rule and I would like to tell party workers that the same kind of rule is going to continue and Modi is going to lose the next election, he said.

Addressing a public meeting here, Mr Gandhi continued to keep Modi as the focal point of his attack during the second day of his latest tour of poll-bound Karnataka, asserting Congress would win the assembly polls.

Attacking Mr Modi, Mr Gandhi said when India looks at its Prime Minister, it wants to hear the truth and not speeches filled with hate.Redfield, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore succeeds Dr. Brenda Fitzgerald.

CHICAGO: Longtime AIDS researcher Dr. Robert Redfield will be the new director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump announced on Wednesday.

Redfield, 66, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore and a co-founder of the Institute for Human Virology, succeeds Dr. Brenda Fitzgerald, a former commissioner of the Georgia Department of Public Health who resigned in January because of financial conflicts of interest. The position does not require Congressional approval.

In a statement announcing the appointment, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar noted Redfields long career in promoting public health, and his significant achievements in early work linking the HIV virus to AIDS. He also touted Redfields more recent work running a treatment network for HIV and hepatitis C patients in Baltimore. We are proud to welcome him as director of the worlds premier epidemiological agency, he said.

Azar praised Redfields two-decade stint at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, where he helped advance the understanding of HIV/AIDS and demonstrate how the virus is transmitted in heterosexuals. Redfield is the founding director of the Department of Retroviral Research within the U.S. Militarys HIV Research Program.

Dr. Robert Gallo, co-founder of the Institute of Human Virology with Redfield in 1996, said Redfield has served his country well, and demonstrates strong public health instincts that are grounded in science and clinical medicine.

Redfields appointment won praise from leading researchers and several U.S. lawmakers, including Democratic U.S. Representative Elijah Cummings. Although I seldom agree with the Trump administration, I am in complete agreement that Dr. Bob Redfield is the best choice to lead the CDC, Cummings said in a statement, noting Redfields public service, his scientific achievements and his work helping patients with HIV and hepatitis C.

Dr. Carlos del Rio, an infectious disease expert at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, praised Redfields efforts in early HIV research, his more recent efforts working to address the opioid crisis and his expertise in addressing global health issues. His work to save lives in Africa and Haiti gives him a deep understanding of CDCs global health mission, and it will serve him well as he works to address health issues nationally as well as around the globe as director of the CDC, del Rio said in a statement. Redfield takes over for acting CDC Director Dr. Anne Schuchat.It has the exclusive franchise in France for Eataly, the premium chain renowned for selling Italian truffles and wines around the world.

PARIS: Frances chic department store Galeries Lafayette is betting on an art foundation and an Italian gourmet food hall in Paris to help differentiate its brand from bricks-and-mortar rivals and e-commerce competitors.

The French capital is attracting a wave of investment into luxury stores and premium food halls as retailers seek to capitalize on a rebound in a tourism industry that was badly hurt by a wave of militant attacks in 2015 and 2016.

The foundation, Lafayette Anticipations, opened on March 10 and Galeries Lafayette plans to open its first Italian food emporium, Eataly, next February near the foundation and its BHV Marais lifestyle department store in the Marais district.

We are building an ecosystem around the BHV store, said Nicolas Houze, head of the family owned Galeries Lafayette group, which has revenue of 3.8 billion euros ($4.67 billion) and owns BHV Marais.

Galeries Lafayette is part of a club of French high-end retailers turning to gastronomy to lure more people through their doors. It already has a food court at its flagship Boulevard Haussmann store, where foreigners account for half of its clientele.

Le Printemps in January opened a food hall on the 7th and 8th floors of its Haussmann building dedicated to mens fashion and luxury group LVMH opened a second upmarket La Grande Epicerie store in Pariss posh 16th district last year.

With Eataly and the foundation we are creating a shopping destination. We are building an offer much larger than that of BHV, said Guillaume Pats, head of buying for BHV Marais.

Galeries Lafayette has the exclusive franchise in France for Eataly, the premium chain renowned for selling Italian truffles, wines and pastas around the world.

The three-storey food hall, now under construction, will spread over 3,500 square meters and include seven restaurants serving 2,500 meals a day, a courtyard fruit and vegetable market, cafes and a cellar with more than 800 Italian wines.

Pats said it would draw hip locals and tourists for whom Italian food is a safe haven abroad.

The art foundation, which has moving floors and includes an exhibition tower made of glass, metal and concrete, is located in a 19th-century industrial building and hosts art exhibits and performances. It has a working budget of 21 million euros for the next five years and cost 12 million euros to remodel.'The interests of student and teacher community have been damaged beyond repair,' JNU Registrar Pramod Kumar said.

New Delhi: Hit by a series of protests over various issues, the Jawaharlal Nehru University administration has appealed to students and professors to restore normalcy in the campus and allow the institution to function without interruptions.

"Centres such as the School of Art and Aesthetics, Centre for French and Francophone Studies and Centre for Historical Studies have been locked down or blockaded by some agitating students. As a result, holding of JNU Entrance Examinations-related viva-voce, M. Phil/ PhD viva voce, classes, mid-semester examinations are facing enormous difficulties," JNU Registrar Pramod Kumar said in a statement.

The interests of student and teacher community have been damaged beyond repair, he said while appealing the community to restore normalcy in the campus.

"The JNU Teachers' Association (JNUTA) and Jawaharlal Nehru University Students' Union (JNUSU) have combined their efforts by calling for total university strike that does not serve the interests of the JNU community and they are to be blamed for the prevailing chaos in the campus," the statement added.Accused Hariom Singh Jat, carrying a reward of Rs 1 lakh on his head, was nabbed on a tip-off by the police.

Jat, who was arrested and then released on bail in 2005, used his publishing work as a cover for his criminal activities, the DCP said. (Photo: Representational | File)

New Delhi: A 53-year-old man wanted for his alleged involvement in several killings in Delhi and Uttar Pradesh and on the run for over 13 years, has been arrested, police said on Wednesday.

Accused Hariom Singh Jat, carrying a reward of Rs 1 lakh on his head, was nabbed on a tip-off by the police at the Chaudhary Charan Singh Marg in east Delhi on Tuesday following a brief exchange of fire. While on the run, he had moved his base to Aligarh and Rajasthan and organised his criminal base there. The Special Cell of the Delhi Police intensified its efforts in Aligarh and Bhiwadi and conducted raids on several of his hideouts.

It was revealed that Jat had reorganised his contacts, procured weapon and was planning to visit Delhi to commit crime, said P S Kushwah, Deputy Commissioner of Police (Special Cell). When the team of Special Cell which intercepted him on Tuesday tried to overpower him, he opened fire at the team but was subsequently apprehended, the officer said.

A foreign-made pistol along with three live cartridges was recovered from him, he said.

Jat, who was arrested and then released on bail in 2005, used his publishing work as a cover for his criminal activities, the DCP said. In 2016, he attacked businessman Vinod Gupta of Shahdara, in New Delhi, following which a reward of Rs 1 lakh was declared on him.

Gupta was also involved in some criminal cases. Jat's brothers had attacked Gupta and were arrested in that case. Jat wanted to avenge the arrest and attacked Gupta. Jat's father was in Delhi Police, who took voluntary retirement after 10 years and started his publication business. He used to publish crime stories from the courts in books titled 'Surender Kahaniyan and Ajgar Bhoomi'.

Jat's neighbour Satpal alias Pappu Jat wanted him to marry his niece but he denied. Satpal developed a grudge against Jat and along with his associates killed Jat's brother in 1993. Jat's second brother was killed by Satpal in 2003. After his brother was killed in 1993, Jat took to crime and in the subsequent years, killed Satpal's associates, and some of his family members, including his mother, the police officer said.Violent extremism is certainly not acceptable but the mainstreaming of tamed jihadists is important under the perceived doctrine.

Myths are often woven around men in power. Now we hear about a Bajwa doctrine  a term used by some media circles and, indeed, by the Inter-Services Public Relations chief himself in an interview with a TV channel. Going by this so-called doctrine, it would seem that the Army Chief has a grand vision about everything  from critical political problems to the economy and foreign policy. Should we be surprised? Not really. Didnt we witness similar wisdom being attributed to previous Army chiefs?

But the virtues ascribed to Gen. Qamar Bajwa make him appear head and shoulder above his predecessors; a messiah the country has long been waiting for. If media circles are to be believed, the so-called doctrine promises to bring about a revolutionary change in foreign policy, making a clean break from the chauvinistic approach of the past 70 years.

According to this doctrine, the general envisions better relations with neighbouring countries and balance in dealing with world powers. Violent extremism is certainly not acceptable but the mainstreaming of tamed jihadists is important under the perceived doctrine.

While being portrayed as pro democracy and a staunch supporter of the rule of law, the general appears unhappy about the way Pakistans political system works, lamenting the 18th Amendment in the Constitution that, he believes, has turned the country into a confederation. His greatest concern appears to be economic policy mismanagement that is seen as having brought Pakistan to the brink of bankruptcy.

Indeed, in a recent interaction with a group of journalists, the Army Chief did articulate all that which is is now being hailed as a grand doctrine for change. The truth is that the general was reflecting the thinking of his institution  that must not be projected as his own vision. One may agree with his (or rather the Armys) identification of the problems Pakistanis face, but the solutions to critical political and economic issues are overly simplistic.

Successive military rulers seized power on the pretext of turning things around and fixing problems but they ended up leaving the country in the same mess if not worse. Similarly, while there may be little doubt regarding the expressed intentions, the views enunciated on the political situation, economy and other issues have exposed the widening cleavage between the elected civilian government and the security establishment that has strengthened multiple power centres.

While generals do not seek to take over power, some feel that is the easiest thing to do in a crisis situation. They do not want to give a free hand to elected civilians either. Distrust of politicians remains palpable, though there is no reason to doubt that the general elections will be held.

But if recent elections for Senate chairmanship are an indicator, theres no way Nawaz Sharif and his cohorts will be allowed space in the future political power structure. The long shadow of the military, in a nexus with the judiciary, will hover over the emerging political setup. It is apparent that most of the countrys law-enforcement and investigative agencies are already operating under the watch of the security establishment.

What is most alarming, however, is the militarys adverse view of the 18th Amendment. The landmark legislation that has lent greater autonomy to the provinces was passed unanimously by Parliament with all major political parties on board. Indeed, some provinces have experienced capacity problems in the discharge of their responsibilities. But that can be resolved in due process.

More importantly, the amendment has strengthened the federation and removed a perpetual source of friction between the Centre and provinces. The unitary form of government and concentration of power at the Centre had created serious anomalies particularly for the smaller provinces. Indeed, there is a need for a unified education system in the country and for streamlining provincial laws. But any attempt to strike down the amendment would be disastrous.

True, the economy is in bad shape, and former finance minister Ishaq Dar, now implicated in graft charges, was largely responsible for financial mismanagement. The crisis has been brewing for a while, made worse by the deterioration of foreign exchange reserves. And yet, the situation is not irreversible.

The so-called Bajwa doctrine cannot provide an instant solution to the crisis. The economy is critical to national security but equally important is the continuation of the democratic process, however flawed. Economic progress is also linked to political stability. And military rule, too, does not have any enviable economic record.

More must be done to bridge the gap between the civil and military leadership on key foreign policy issues rather than presenting an alternative doctrine on wide-ranging domestic and foreign policy issues. Unfortunately, we dont have a national narrative on anything. The so-called Bajwa doctrine then is more institutional thinking than one mans views.

By arrangement with DawnAfghanistan is no longer the glacis on which the war for India will be fought. Neither are Tibet and Xinjiang buffers against northern threats.

Much as we would like to exalt Jawaharlal Nehru as the founder of modern Indias foreign policy, like all other major countries our policy too derives its basis from one man, Frances Cardinal Richelieu, who enshrined national interest as the only guiding principle to conduct affairs with other nations. The French have an elegant phrase for it. Raison detat. Richelieu rejected the notion that policy should be based on values and sentimental considerations. He believed, as we all still do, that the State has permanent interests, the singular pursuit of which requires much intellectual and moral flexibility. He believed that the only challenge facing a policymaker is to decide what the national interest was and what it required? It was this singular pursuit that had Catholic France intervening in the Thirty Years War (1618-48) on the Protestant side to block the increasing power of the Pope. At Richelieus prompting, the philosopher Jean de Silhon defined the concept of reason of state as a mean between what conscience permits and affairs require.

How we see our national interest depends on how we see ourselves. Therein lies the rub. The rump Republic of India sees itself as the successor to the British Raj, which left these shores in 1947. For the two centuries that Britain was the paramount power in India, Indias national interests were synonymous with Britains. The paramount powers paramount interest, as far as India was concerned, was to keep the goose that laid the golden egg healthy and well. Lord Curzon of Kedlestone, who was Viceroy of India (1898-1905) and later Britains foreign secretary (1919-24), is still regarded by many of our foreign policy elite as the man who outlined Indias grand strategic vision and its focus on fixing borders. It is argued by them while the political context may have changed, geography has not. However, while physical geography may have not changed, political geography has changed drastically. Afghanistan is no longer the glacis on which the war for India will be fought. Neither are Tibet and Xinjiang buffers against northern threats. The threats are at the doorsteps now.

In the immediate period after 1947, Indias foreign policy was still conducted by the Western-educated elite who had imbibed their lessons in Cambridge and Oxford and believed they were legatees of the white mans burden, including the defence of India. Indias immediate neighbours, for their own reasons, still see Indias conduct towards them largely in terms of a continuation of the British legacy. It didnt help very much when the Oxbridge elite were followed by the St. Stephens elite, who were also mostly cast in about the same laat sahib mould.

Consequently, our diplomats have tended to be overbearing with our smaller non-hostile neighbours, often treating them like errant schoolboys. This is the constant lament heard in the neighbourhood, whether it is in Colombo or Kathmandu. Increasingly, such voices are heard in Thimphu as well. With Bangladesh too, we have rapidly descended from being the liberator to the neighbourhood bully. The dominant Indian discourse of the demographic aggression by Bangladeshi migrants has created a certain unhelpful mentality in both countries. What after all must a nation think when its larger neighbour thinks of it as an unending source of human vermin?

It is interesting that we dont nurture a similar attitude towards Nepal, whose unabated and facilitated migration in India possibly exceeds that from Bangladesh. But theres a crucial difference. The Bangladeshi migrant is usually a Muslim while the Nepali migrant is always a Hindu. Unfortunately, many of our leaders still see Muslims as invaders, while not seeing India as a nation of immigrants and forgetting that the vast majority of South Asias Muslims are converts who sought escape from the inequities of the Hindu order.

To add to our woes, we still seem to be wearing those Curzonian blinkers that have bequeathed us the Great Game mentality with its focus on highways, railway lines, sea lanes and ports as military threats. South Block still doesnt seem to have realised that modern military means and technology have made the theories of Mahan and Mackinder largely irrelevant. It is this infantilism that makes us see every Chinese investment in the cash-starved region as a threat to Indias hegemony, when even our worst fears about Hambantota or Gwadar actually make them juicy and easy targets.

While excoriating foreign secretary Earl Russell in the House of Lords on February 4, 1864, Edward Stanley, Earl of Derby, said: The foreign policy of the Earl may be summed up in two short homely but expressive words  meddle and muddle. But we are now no longer prepared to behave like Lord Curzon either. The tension between that Curzonian tendency to meddle and the passive spirit of Nehru to muddle still persists. We see this manifested in New Delhis policy responses to the current situations in Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh or the Maldives  with more muddle than meddle. The muddle in South Block is not due to the limited number of options. There is no Lembarrass des richesses, but a poverty of clarity.

The most significant development of this century so far has been the rise of China as an economic powerhouse, with its military not lagging far behind. Speaking to Singapores foreign minister Geo Yeo in July 2010, then Chinese foreign minister Yang Jeichi, responding to criticism about Chinas assertiveness, just said: China is a big country and other countries are small countries, and thats just a fact. Indeed it is, and at this point in time even India is much too small to be able to compete with it in its spree of chequebook diplomacy. Most of Indias regional neighbours are poor countries, and if their adversity forces them not to look at Chinese gift horses in the teeth, then we must understand it. In other circumstances, we too might have acted similarly.

But our inherited Curzonian vision and now a little bit of American induced notion of containment are pushing India into a confrontationist posture with China. India will do well to remind itself that of the Quadrilateral that is being increasingly talked about, only India has a long and contentious land border with China. The other three Quad players are hooked up to Chinas growth engine and are also most responsible for its rise  America with its trade profligacy, and Japan with its massive investments and transfer of technology. India must be wary about becoming their cats paw.

Delivering the valedictory address to a recently-held conference of South Asian scholars at the Unesco Madanjeet Singh Institute of South Asian Regional Cooperation and Coordination at Pondicherry University, my advice to fellow South Asians was that they would do well to take in all the Chinese financial assistance coming their way, and not be too worried about it. I recalled the dictum enunciated by Walter Wriston, the legendary Citibank chairman, who told my class at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy: Countries dont go under, they just roll over. Indian corporations are experts at rolling over debts, and that if the neighbours should need advice on how to do it they could just knock on our doors. Hence they should remember this song from the 1970 Manoj Kumar film Purab aur Paschim:

Koee jab tumhaaraa hriday tod de,/ Tadapataa huaa jab koee chhod de,/ Tab tum mere paas aanaa priye,/ Meraa dar khulaa hai,/ khulaa hee rahegaa, tumhaare liye.AI combined with Machine Learning algorithms can now be used in diagnosing Alzheimers.

Alzheimers, a progressive disease that demolishes brains memory and its regular functioning as well. There isn't any single test till date to diagnose this disease and brain scans alone cant determine whether the person is possessed by it.

Currently, the physician believes that a person is affected by Alzheimers by based the reports of the family members about the behavioural tendencies and observations of the past medical history. AI combined with Machine Learning algorithms might now be able to change this situation.

David Graham, a patient who is suspected to have an Alzheimers disease hasnt been diagnosed yet, the researchers at MIT have been monitoring him along with four other patients, who are been already diagnosed with the disease. Graham has an AI-powered rectangular box attached to his rooms wall, which is an assisted living facility in Marlborough, Massachusetts.

The AI-powered box on his wall tracks the moments of Graham, it knows when he gets out of his bed, gets dressed, goes to the bathroom or whenever he walks to his window. It can also track his sleeping habits of whether hes sleeping or has already fallen asleep. It does this by generating low-power signals to monitor/track his gait speed, sleep patterns, location, and even breathing patterns as well. All this tracked information will be stored in the cloud, where machine learning algorithms come into action to study is thousands of movements and patterns every day.

According to MIT, these rectangular boxes are part of an experimental process, through which researchers can find, track and understand the symptoms of Alzheimers. Researchers say that tracking symptoms in the early stages of this disease are highly unlikely, but, with the help of AI, it might be possible. This AI-based recognition can help identify the patients, who are at a risk of developing the most severe form of the Alzheimers disease.

Devices with such capabilities can be placed in any home and facilities where continuous monitoring of the patients is necessary for those at risk. These devices can also be used by drug manufacturers to collect data of the experimental drugs, which are being helpful on the patients in the course of the treatment.

According to the report, Dina Kabati, the director of the MIT Wireless Center and her team at MITs Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence laboratory had developed this instrument to monitor people without the need of a wearable tracking device. This is completely passive. A patient doesnt need to put sensors on their body or do anything specific, and its far less intrusive than a video camera, she says.

Vahia, a geriatric psychiatrist at McLean Hospital and Harvard Medical School, along with the technologys inventors at MIT are running a small pilot study of the device.

The device works based on a wireless signal, which when being sent reflects of everything in a 30-foot radius that includes human bodies as well. As they had this device equipped in Grahams room, they could track each and every moment of Graham including his breathing pattern (a signal reflects according to this pattern).

Katabi developed a machine learning algorithm to track and analyse all these minute reflections that include all the complex movements of Graham on a day-to-day basis. As you teach it more and more, the machine learns, and the next time it sees a pattern, even if its too complex for a human to abstract that pattern, the machine recognizes that pattern, Katabi says.

The AI on this device can pick out the patterns which signify things like depression, agitation and sleep disturbances. It can also pick up behavioural changes during the day which the patients tend to repeat. These all come under standard symptoms of Alzheimers disease. If you can catch these deviations early, you will be able to anticipate them and help manage them, Vahia says.

Marilyn Miller, who directs AI research in Alzheimers thinks that AI could be used to diagnose and predict Alzheimers in patients in as soon as five years from now. But she says large amounts of this reliable and accurate data needs to be collected to analyse these Machine Learning based algorithms.

(Source)The Cambridge Analytica controversy has made many users make the switch to other less-intrusive social platforms.

If you havent been living under the rock, you must have heard about Facebooks biggest controversy uncovered in the past few days. The improper use of around 50 million Facebook users data by Cambridge Analytica during the 2016 US elections have shaken the world, especially those who treated previous reports about data privacy. Despite Facebook officially issuing an apology, users have woken from the slumber and are made to reconsider whether they should continue their social media journey with Facebook. Some have even started making the shift, bidding the social network goodbye for once and all.

Popular entities on the Internet have started the change, which is reflected in the trending #DeleteFacebook hashtag on Twitter. An NYTimes report states that the #DeleteFacebook hashtag was mentioned approximately 40,398 times on Twitter.

Ex-WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton had taken it to Twitter to express his intentions about quitting from Facebook. It is time. #DeleteFacebook  thats what his tweet read.

However, it seems the common man has also had enough with Facebook. The same report by NYTimes states that several people are finally moving on from Facebook and on to rival social media services for good  one that values their data privacy over anything else. Richard H. Perry, a filmmaker from the US, told NYTimes that he had suspected this stuff was going on, but this is the first time its been plainly exposed. It seems so malicious, and Facebook seems so complicit all the way up and down like it doesnt care about its users. Now, hes ready to rely on Twitter and Instagram for all his social needs. Its not going to be the end of the world, he added.

Another retired navy veteran feels that Facebook is more obsolete than people would think. Dan Clark had two Facebook accounts, out of which one he used exclusively to stay in touch with his friends and the other one to keep a tab on his family members. There are just so many ways nowadays to stay in contact: phones, email, instant message, he added.

Alexandra Kleeman, a writer from Sweden, has also deleted her Facebook account. She states that she grew tired of fake news surrounding the 2016 US presidential elections and had been planning to move out of the old social media network. With the Cambridge Analytica scandal, she has finally got enough reasons to make the switch to some other platform. However, she says that Facebooks messaging platform will be staying on her phone for the time being.

Ben Greenzweig, an entrepreneur from New York, has also deleted his Facebook account. But I will definitely miss what the promise of Facebook used to be  a way to connect to the community in a very global and local context, he said after being a very active Facebook user. His final Facebook post read  See everyone in the real world.

After going through all their accounts, if you feel that its time to call quits on Facebook, then think again. Theres no doubt that Facebook clearly failed to protect its users privacy and should work hard to keep away malicious intentions away from its platform. However, earlier in the year, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated that he will be working to make Facebook more meaningful this year, by making it a place to connect with people rather than a place to dump advertisements and articles. Mark Zuckerberg said earlier that Facebook had "made mistakes, but there's more to do, and we need to step up and do it." Surely, they will be finding out ways to limit third-parties from accessing user data in a deceptive manner and achieve their visions for a meaningful Facebook this year. Therefore, it seems that things will be sorted out and Facebook will becomes safer, more secure over the coming months.

Till then, just hold on.

(source)The State Department on Thursday identified Joe Asperman as a 'specially designated global terrorist.'

The statement says the move aims to deny Asperman the resources he needs to plan and carry out further terrorist attacks. (Photo: Representational | AP)

Washington: The Trump administration is imposing sanctions on a French chemical weapons expert accused of making and using such munitions for the Islamic State group in Syria.

The State Department on Thursday identified Joe Asperman as a "specially designated global terrorist." The listing comes with penalties including the freezing of any assets he may have in US jurisdictions and bars Americans from any transactions with him.

The designation applies to foreigners who have committed or pose a risk of committing terrorist acts that threaten US national interests.

The statement says the move aims to deny Asperman the resources he needs to plan and carry out further terrorist attacks.

It says Asperman is a senior chemical weapons expert who oversaw IS chemical operations production in Syria and deployed them at the battlefront.Hamdallah and Palestinian Security Chief Majid Farajs convoy was attacked by a roadside bomb in Gaza on March 13. They were uninjured.

Hamas-run security forces in Gaza had earlier on Thursday detained the main suspect in last weeks assassination attempt against Palestinian Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah after a gunbattle in which two security officers were killed, a security official said. (Photo: AP)

Gaza: The main suspect in last weeks attempted assassination of Palestinian Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah died of his wounds after a gun battle on Thursday with Hamas-run security forces in the Gaza Strip, a security official said.

Another gunman and two security officers were also killed in the shootout, the official said.

Hamas-run security forces in Gaza had earlier in the day detained the main suspect in last weeks assassination attempt against Palestinian Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah after a gunbattle on Thursday in which two security officers were killed, a security official said.

The suspect, who was not immediately identified, was wounded in the shootout with security forces that surrounded his hideout in the central Gaza Strip, the official said.

Two other gunmen were also detained, the official added.

Hamdallah and Palestinian Security Chief Majid Farajs convoy was attacked by a roadside bomb in Gaza on March 13. They were uninjured.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Monday blamed Hamas for the explosion. His remarks threatened reconciliation efforts to end a decade-old rift between his Fatah faction and the Islamist Hamas group that is dominant in Gaza.

Hamas had declared a $5,000 reward for anyone giving information about the suspects whereabouts. It provided no immediate details on his alleged motive or of an affiliation to any militant group.

Abbas, who is based in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, has offered no evidence of the involvement of Hamas in the attempt against Hamdallahs life. But he said he did not trust Hamas to investigate the incident honestly and that there had been zero progress in the Egyptian-brokered reconciliation.

Hamas seized the Gaza Strip from forces loyal to Fatah in 2007.The former PM stressed that Imran Khan had himself declared Panama verdict as weak decision by Supreme Court.

Islamabad: Former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on Wednesday said that the decision against him was announced after consulting black law dictionary.

Speaking to reporters here after appearing before the accountability court, Mr Sharif said that cases are being registered against those who were hurling allegations against others. Awami Muslim League (AML) chief Sheikh Rashid Ahmed hid assets worth billions of rupees, he added.

He said that he respected state institutions but it was his and his partys right to express reservations against any verdict. The former PM stressed that Imran Khan had himself declared Panama verdict as weak decision by Supreme Court.

Now voices from inside and outside the court are being raised against Panama verdict as yesterday, the respected judge remarked that case was on Panama papers and decision was announced over Iqama (work permit), he said.

Mr Sharif said: I am not a person who disrespects institution but there can be discussion over weak verdicts.UK and its allies say Russia was behind the poisoning of Skripal and his daughter, who remain in a critical condition in Salisbury.

International pressure mounted on Vladimir Putin over the Cold-War style poisoning of a spy on British soil, as an ugly war of words took a stinging new turn with comparisons to Hitler in the 1930s. (Photo: File)

Moscow: International pressure mounted on Russia's Vladimir Putin over the Cold-War style poisoning of a spy on British soil, as an ugly war of words took a stinging new turn with comparisons to Hitler in the 1930s.

US President Donald Trump agreed with his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron "on the need to take action to hold Russia accountable" following the attempted murder of former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia.

Trump expressed "solidarity with the United Kingdom in the wake of Russia's use of chemical weapons against private citizens on British soil," the White House said on Wednesday after a phone call between the pair.

However the comments came a day after Trump called Putin to congratulate him on his re-election to the Russian presidency, drawing criticism for failing to condemn the poisoning or even mention the scandal.

Britain and its allies say Russia was behind the attack on Skripal and his daughter, who remain in a critical condition after being poisoned in the English town of Salisbury with what London says is a Soviet-designed nerve agent.

Also read: High likely Russia responsible for spy poisoning: Theresa May

But Moscow has angrily rejected the claims and on Wednesday hosted a televised briefing for foreign diplomats at which a senior official mocked Britain's "island mentality" and "Russophobia".

Foreign ministry official Vladimir Yermakov said London itself could have been behind the poisoning of Skripal, a former Russian officer who sold secrets to Britain and moved there in a 2010 spy swap.

"The British authorities are either unable to ensure protection from such a... terrorist attack on its territory, or they directly or indirectly -- I am not accusing anyone of anything here -- directed the attack on a Russian national," he said.

Also read: Putin dismisses UKs accusation over ex-spys poisoning, calls it nonsense

Yermakov -- the head of the ministry's non-proliferation and arms control department -- alternated between tough talk and quips and said in response to a question from a British official: "I am ashamed for you".

The diplomat rejected claims the chemical weapon "Novichok" was used in the attack, saying it would have killed people on the spot and suggested that Washington might have also had a hand in the incident.by Mathias Hariyadi

Two people, a 32-year-old plantation worker and a 34-year-old worker, have been killed. A special team is trying to capture the animal alive to move it to a nature reserve. The tiger has already escaped two attempts to capture it; it has also killed many domestic animals.

Jakarta (AsiaNews)  The authorities in Indragiri Hilir regency, Riau province, have set up special team to hunt down a female Sumatran tiger, who began killing last January. So far, two residents in the village of Tanjung Simpang (Pelangiran), have died.

The cat, nicknamed Bonita by the locals, attacked first on 3 January, killing Jumiati, a 32-year-old woman, a farmhand in a palm oil plantation. The tiger killed again on 10 March. The victim, Yusri Effendi, was a 34-year-old worker.

Over the past few months, Bonita has been sighted several times near the village, sparking fears in the local population.

The special unit set up by local authorities last week wants to capture animal alive in order to take it put back in its natural environment.

The team includes government officials, soldiers, police, forest rangers and activists, as well as villagers and representatives of the companies that own local plantations.

Before the group was created, two months of looking for the animal have proven fruitless. On one occasion, the trackers managed to hit Bonita with an anesthetising bullet, but the beast was able to escape and has continued to wander around Tanjung Simpang, attacking residents' domestic animals.

The last sighting was four days ago, when a CCTV camera of the Ministry of the Environment caught Bonita approaching a goat, used as bait to capture her. The cat did not fall for the trap and fled again.

The Indonesian government and NGOs dedicated to animal welfare have been involved in protecting the Sumatran tiger, whose scientific name is Panthera Tigris Sumatrae, because its numbers have been steadily dwindling for several years.

According to a 2004 WWF report, less than 400 Sumatran tigers were still found in the wild. By 2007, that number was down to 192, mainly in the Riau forests, where most palm oil plantations are located, and whose development has drastically reduced the species habitat.Eight years since the beginning of the war, at least 12 million people are living in conditions of extreme need. Victims are not numbers, but faces. A young man who lost his legs in the explosion of a missile can now walk again thanks to prostheses. A mother can buy powdered milk for her malnourished twins. A decent home and medicines for an elderly couple.

Damascus (AsiaNews) - Recently entering its eighth year, the Syrian conflict continues to reap innocent victims among the civilian population, including children. According to the latest data, at least 12 million people live in conditions of urgent and extreme need. An humanitarian crisis of unprecedented proportions since the Second World War, which the people in charge of local Caritas are trying to tackle, bringing aid and comfort to as many people as possible.

In the foreground there are medical and housing emergencies: about six million people have been forced to leave their homes and find shelters in one of the camps scattered around the country. Half of these are in areas that are difficult to reach. Among the same operators of the Catholic charitable organization there are several displaced persons.

With the help of Caritas experts and volunteers active in the field, AsiaNews presents some stories of people victims of the conflict, but who in the darkest moment have rediscovered the light of solidarity and mutual support.

Fifteen-year-old Rabee Zarife moved to Damascus with his family when violence broke out in their village on the capitals outskirts. His father was killed when a mortar shell struck the familys shop. Rabee managed to survive but lost his legs in the attack.

I was on the ground in great pain, not aware of what happened to me, he said. I heard the voice of my father: Rabee, dont die, hold on and live. My heart had stopped beating and they thought that I had died. A nurse covered my face but she noticed that I slightly moved my hand.They started to do the electric shocks again and I came back to life. I obeyed my father and I stayed alive.

A team from Caritas Syria met Rabee in the hospital in Damascus after the accident and started giving the family food, clothing, medication and psychological support, as well as medical equipment for Rabee (wheelchair, walker, walking sticks). Caritas also worked with other charities to help Rabee get prosthetic legs. Last year Rabee needed help with everything all the time, his mother recalled. He moved like a baby, crawling and following me around the apartment. My heart would break every time I looked at his missing legs, but now I cant describe the joy I feel when I see him standing with his prosthetics, trying to become independent again. It means the whole world to me.

Poverty rates in Syria are very high after seven years of war. Estimates suggest that approximately six in 10 Syrians live in extreme poverty and are unable to buy essential food items.

Nessrine lives in Hassakeh. She could not afford to buy powdered baby milk for her twin daughters. Since they were born she has been feeding them cows milk and this has affected their growth. Their health deteriorated and their mother was desperately concerned.

At the beginning, when they were crying from hunger, their screaming filled the whole neighborhood, Nessrine said. After using cows milk for feeding, they became very weak, and their crying could hardly be heard. When Nessrine approached Caritas, our Hassakeh team helped to refer her to a doctor who started providing her with nourishing baby milk on monthly basis.

Recently our team visited her to check on the childrens situation. They have gained weight and their health has greatly improved. Without the help of Caritas, I would have lost my children or we would be facing huge debts to be able to buy milk and get treatment. I thank you from the bottom of my heart for saving my childrens lives, she said.

Khaled, 45 years old, lives in a room in one of Lattakias poor neighborhoods fleeing Aleppo with his family.We were forced to leave Aleppo because the situation was very difficult there. We arrived to Lattakia in a very bad situation, psychologically, financially and with health problems, he said.We couldnt find a place to stay except this tiny room under the stairs of this building. Unfortunately, it doesnt have a window to give us some fresh air or light during the day.

The Caritas offered rent support which has enabled the family to look for a better apartment in a better area, where they can have some sunlight during the day. Caritas is the light that entered our lives again, Mr. Khaled said.

According to the World Health Organisation, 57 percent of Syrias public hospitals have been damaged, while 37 percent no longer function. The pharmaceutical industry has been decimated and health expenses have risen dramatically. Getting treatment and medication has become a luxury for many families.

Abu Malek, 75, is living in a tent with his wife. They struggle to get the medication they need.We are old and we need medicines every month, the most difficult thing is to find a way to buy that medication as we barely can eat every day, he said.

Caritas Homs registered Abu Malek and his wife in a medical project. Caritas offered him glasses and medication on a monthly basis. I dont know how I can thank them, he said. The end of the month was a big problem for us because it meant that our supply of medication would be almost finished. Now we dont have to worry any more about that.

The number of people devastated by the Syrian crisis continue to climb as the conflict wears on. But the statistics have faces. They are Rabee, learning how to walk again, Abu Malek, able to buy the medicine and Nessrine who can now offer her children the milk. (DS)The London-based company might have violated the sensitive data of more than 50 million Facebook users in an attempt to anticipate and influence voters choice. SCL India, which is part of the same parent company, has reported that it has both of Indias main parties as clients. The affair has touched Malaysia. Seven of the top ten countries for social media penetration are in Asia.

New Delhi (AsiaNews/Agencies)  Whilst in the West the controversy over the revelations concerning Cambridge Analytica is growing, political parties across Asia are openly disavowing any link between their election success and the London-based analysis group, which has been accused of one of the largest data violations in history.

Last week, an investigation by two British newspapers, The Guardian and The Observer, and the New York Times in the United States, brought to light the alleged involvement of Cambridge Analytica in operations aimed at influencing the 2016 US elections and the Brexit referendum.

Through an application called thisisyourdigitallife, the company allegedly violated the personal data of more than 50 million Facebook users in an attempt to anticipate and influence their electoral choices through personalised ads.

The outcry caused by the controversy has also affected Asian politics. In India, the authorities yesterday ordered the closure of the local Cambridge Analytica website.

SCL India, a joint venture between London-based SCL group (Cambridge Analyticas parent company) and Ovleno Business Intelligence, says that both of Indias main political parties are among its clients. However, both the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the opposition Congress party have denied using its services.

Yesterday, Indias Law and Justice Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, who also holds the Electronics and Information Technology portfolio, said that there were "numerous reports" about Congress involvement with Cambridge Analytica operations. Prasad invited Congress party leader Rahul Gandhi to "explain" the companys role in his social media outreach.

Congress hit back saying that it was Prime Minister Narendra Modi who used the firm, a claim apparently backed by SCL India vice president Himanshu Sharma, who says on his publicly available LinkedIn profile that the company has "successfully managed four election campaigns for the BJP" and, among them, names the 2014 general election which swept Prime Minister Narendra Modi to power.

The controversy has also touched Malaysian politics. Cambridge Analytica states on its website that it has supported Malaysias ruling Barisan Nasional (BN) in Kedah province resulting in the BN-led coalition wresting Kedah back from then opposition coalition Pakatan Rakyat in 2013.

Two days ago, the government of Prime Minister Najib Razak ruled out the possibility that the BN, the Prime Minister's office or any body in his administration had ever contracted the analysis company.

Instead, the Prime Ministers Office said that all services were provided personally to former BN leader turned opposition politician Mukhriz Mahathir.

Political analysts say they are worried about the "very likely" use of voter behaviour analysis services in the next general election in Thailand, where there is still no law to protect personal internet data.

Experts believe that the activities of companies like Cambridge Analytica in Asia may not be ethical, but they are also unlikely to break any law.

In many countries there are no restrictions on the use of data by politicians and data mining victims may find it hard to get compensation.

The growth of social media in Asia has been so rapid that regulators have had difficulty in keeping up.

According to Statista, an online statistics, market research and business intelligence portal, seven of the top ten countries with the highest penetration rates of social media are in Asia, namely South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Thailand and the United Arab Emirates.by Wang Zhicheng

The reform, wanted by the Partys Central Committee, was voted by the National Peoples Congress and made public yesterday. Some Christians see no change: the repression continues. A Protestant professor: It's an important change since the Mao era. What it reveals is the unlimited expansion of Party power. Doubts about the dialogue between China and the Vatican: The Catholic Church will become an instrument of support for the Party. The promotion of Xia Baolong, the destroyer of Zhejiang crosses.

Beijing (AsiaNews) - The State Administration for Religious Affairs (SARA), also known as the "Religious Affairs Bureau ", so far under the authority of the Council of State, has passed under the direct rule of the Communist Party. The move is among a detailed program of reforms on the Party and the state institutions released yesterday.

The decision to eliminate SARA was passed in the third plenary session of the 19th Communist Partys Central Committee in late February. Part of the program was reviewed in the recently concluded National Peoples Congress, Chinas parliament. Detail of the program was made public on March 21, with indication that the reform should be implemented by the end of 2018.

Among the reforms, religious affairs are now managed by the United Front Work Department (UFWD), an organ of the Communist Partys Central Committee, whose main function is to manage relations with the non-Communist elite, including individuals and organizations, such as religious groups. Also now under the management of the UFWD are the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office and the Ethnic Affairs Commission, both also originally under the State Council.

The structural change received mixed views among Chinese Christians and observers. There wont be big change to religious environment, neither loosen nor tighten. It is only a change on management structure and they will do the same thing, said Father Liu, a priest who serves in a Southern province.

The reform is to put all authority under the Party, no more sharing power with the State Council, said a Chinese observer who asked not to be named. However, he agreed that there is nothing to surprise as the UFWD has always been the supervising unit of the SARA, adding that the UFWD will still keep the signboard of the SARA as it needs an executive office to implement the work.

The move could unify different voices on the management of religions, the observer said, noting that religious management could involve a number of departments, such as national security, public security, buildings and education, etc.

But Eric Lai, a Catholic commentator, sees the move shows the Chinese Communist Party no more regards religion as a target to liaise but actively using it as a tool to maintain stability.

It is nothing new for an authoritarian government to use religion as a tool for stability. The Russian Orthodox Church actively safeguards the Putin regime is an example. In the future, if the Vatican and China sign an official accord, will the China Catholic Church follow the path of maintaining stability like the Russian Orthodox Church or have true religious autonomy to preach in the country? Under the current situation, no doubt the former is more likely, said Lai, a Hong Kong native.

Ying Fuk-tsang, director of the Chinese University of Hong Kongs Divinity School, also questioned on his Facebook if this is reform or moving backward?

Religion is a citizens basic rights endowed by the Constitution. If it is assigned as specialized duty of the Party, this is undoubtedly a major change in the religious work since the founding of the Communist-rule China. It reflects the unlimited expansion of the Partys power, interfering directly the basic rights of citizens. This kind of retrogression is definitely negative for the development of religious freedom in China, he said.

Following closely recent China-Vatican developments, the Protestant professor said he could not help but ask whether Vatican recognized these facts or still believe in wishful thinking that Chinas freedom of religion is stepping forward to the bright side and that the Chinese citizens religious freedom will be fully safeguard?

Or will the Holy See make another interpretation to justify the Party's leadership over religions, and believe that it could bring greater space for freedom of religion in China by its own efforts?

On the same day of the official announcement, SARA director Wang Zuoan held a meeting for all staff to relate the spirit of the deepened reforms. According to the SARAs website, he said the decision fully demonstrates the Partys central high priority for religious work and is more conducive to strengthening and improving the Partys leadership in religious work.

Wang added that it [the reform] will also benefit the implementation of the Partys central important decision and planning on religious work, he added while urging his staff to understand the urgency and importance of the reforms by taking a political and overall view.

According to media reports, the main duty of the UFWD after the adjustment is to implement the basic principles and policies of the Partys religious work, study and formulate policies and measures for religious work and supervise their implementation, coordinate religious works, mange religious administrative affairs according to the law, protect citizens freedom of religious belief, consolidate normal religious activities and develop a patriotic united front with the religious communities.

The reform comes as another surprise to Chinese Christians following the news of Xia Baolong, former Party secretary of the Cross-removal Zhejiang province, being elected vice chairman and secretary general of the 13th Chinese Peoples Political Consultative Conference on March 14. As the CPPCCs secretary general, 66-year-old Xia is regarded as powerful housekeeper of the top advisory body of Beijing.

The promotion of Xia surprised many because when he was transferred to the NPC from his Zhejiang post last April, with many regarded it was the end of his political path waiting for retirement. Furthermore, Xia was not even elected to the Partys Central Committee during the 19th Communist Partys National Congress last October.

Xia worked in Zhejiang since 2003, with four years overlapping when Chinese President Xi Jinping was party secretary of the province. Before reassigned to the National People's Congress as a vice chairman of the Environment and Resources Protection Committee last year, Xia was party secretary of Zhejiang from 2012 to April 2017, during which there were three years of Cross removal and Church demolition in the name of city planning.

During the campaign that began in late 2013 and gradually subsided around April 2016, about 1,500 Church Crosses were removed, mostly from Protestant Churches. A few dozens of pastors and laypeople who defended their Church crosses were detained, threatened or prosecuted. The authority also prosecuted lawyers who defended them.by Jose Gonzalez

Seminarians and deacons were consecrated yesterday across Japan: Sapporo, Saitama, Osaka, Hiroshima, and Fukuoka. The number of foreign priests is growing.

Tokyo (AsiaNews)  For some of Japans dioceses, celebrating the ordination of deacons and priests at this time of the year, before Holy Week, has become something of a tradition.

Yesterday, various dioceses celebrated the ordination of seminarians to the diaconate, and deacons to the presbyterate.

In Sapporo (picture 1), deacon Paul Miki Sakuma Chikara was consecrated priest and seminarian Buonaventura Minoshima Katsuya became a deacon.

In the Diocese of Saitama (picture 2), the ordination to the diaconate of Mexican seminarian Jorge Manuel Macias was celebrated.

In Osaka (pictures 3 and 4), two deacons, Erik Batista de Guzman from the Philippines, and Japanese-Sinhalese Patricio Ueda, were ordained priests.

Celebrations also took place in the Diocese of Hiroshima (picture 5), where deacon Onishi was consecrated as a priest and seminarian Kubo entered the order of the diaconate.

In Fukuoka, the deacon of Korean origin John Hanun Lee became a priest (picture 6).

The number of ordinations of seminarians and foreign deacons is a sign of the "mixture of cultures" that characterises the country, repeatedly underlined by the new archbishop of Tokyo, Mgr Tarcisio Isao Yama Kikuchi.

This foreign presence was quite visible during the prelates reception in the capital, where the celebrations for his installation had an "international" flavour.

In Japan, the South Korean (450,000) and Filipino (250,000) communities are the second and third largest respectively after the Chinese.

According to the latest statistics (2012) of the Catholic Bishops Conference of Japan (CBCJ), Japans Catholic Church has a total of 1,422 priests, 889 Japanese and 533 foreigners.An exclusive source talks to AsiaNews. As the conflict continues to reap innocent lives, the humanitarian situation remains "tragic", especially in health and education. Meetings in Oman are a starting point for a stable and lasting ceasefire, but an agreement between the parties requires patience and saving appearances.

Sana'a (AsiaNews)  The humanitarian situation in Yemen, a nation battered by more than three years of war and jihadi violence, remains "tragic, especially in some parts of the country but rumors of secret talks in Oman between the Saudis and the Houthi may be real, a diplomatic source, in Sanaa, anonymous for security reasons told AsiaNews.

If confirmed, they represent the right basis for a stable and lasting ceasefire, but for this to happen, "It is necessary to put the parties together for a journey that requires patience and good will from everyone."

So far, the war has caused over 10,000 victims, mostly civilians, and tens of thousands of wounded and injured.

The conflict has also left up to 20 million people in need of assistance and humanitarian aid to survive, this out of a population of 28 million inhabitants. They include three million internally displaced people, one million cases of cholera last year, plus 400,000 children under five suffering from acute malnutrition.

Since January 2015, the Arab country has been the scene of a brutal conflict opposing the Sunni-led government of former President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, supported by Riyadh, to Houthi Shia rebels, close to Iran and Hezbollah.

In March of the same year, a Saudi-led coalition began air strikes against the rebels, which the United Nations slammed for causing civilian casualties, including children.

The apostolic vicar, Mgr Paul Hinder, has repeatedly spoken out against the ongoing disaster. Christians too have become embroiled in the conflict as well, like in the attack against the Missionaries of Charity in Aden.

Today the Houthi occupy about 30 per cent of the country, especially in the north, where most of the population is concentrated.

In the pro-Saudi, government-controlled south, a new battle line has emerged with the arrival on the scene of pro-United Arab Emirate separatists, further complicating the situation.

Yemen, which was united as country in 1990, appears to be increasingly at risk of implosion, caught in the crossfire of a battle for regional supremacy.

In a context of wars and divisions, Riyadh has also imposed a blockade last November in response to Houthi rocket attacks. In turn, this has exacerbated the food and emergency medicine.

"In Yemen in general, there is a situation of extreme need, the diplomatic source said. There is a general confusion that does not help the situation and hinders those few actions that can be done to aid the population."

The main challenges are " health and education. In many areas children cannot go to schools due to lack of security because of bombing and shelling.

Recently, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman was in Washington where he met US President Donald Trump. The war in Yemen was one of the items on their agenda.

Some channels of communications might be opening. "There are possible contacts between Saudis and Houthi, the diplomatic source explained, but no one knows what may come of them.

The Sultanate of Oman is a good venue for talks between two sides because it has good relations with both." However, "the journey will long and difficult.

A solution will require patience and good will. We must arrive at a final consensus in which no one loses face, appearances are saved, and both sides can claim a partial victory."The video of her slapping an Israeli soldier has made her symbol of resistance. The sentence comes with a plea agreement. B'tselem denounces the violation of the rights of minors, forced to accept agreements to return to their normal lives.

Jerusalem (AsiaNews / Agencies) - Ahed Tamimi, the 17-year-old Palestinian, who became famous following an online video of her slapping a soldier, has been sentenced to eight months in prison.

Ahed, who is also accused of previous crimes, has been in prison since December 19, where she has been detained awaiting trial at the Ofer military court, which began on February 13 and ended yesterday.

During the closed door trial, the girl plea bargained and agreed to plead guilty to four of the 12 charges against her, including assault, incitement and two obstructions of soldiers in carrying out their duty. In addition to the prison sentence that will last until the summer - including the prison term already discounted  she will have to pay a fine of 5 thousand shekels (almost 1200 euros).

The young woman has become a symbol of resistance to the Israeli occupation for Palestinians. For Israel, she is a violent provocateur in search of publicity. Her case has attracted the attention of the media and social networks around the world.

The Israeli NGO B'tselem has denounced the case of Ahed as representative of the role of juvenile military courts and the system that every year subjects "hundreds of Palestinian children to the same scenario", in violation of the rights of minors.

In a report published two days ago, activists claim that young people, facing an almost certain conviction and forced to prison for the entire trial period, agree to plead guilty and sign a plea bargain just "to return to their normal lives as soon as possible".In Gaza, 80 per cent of children under three years suffer from diarrhoea. Various countries and agencies discussed plans in Brussels. Israel promised not to hinder the project, which will cost around 563 million euros. For Israeli NGO, the plan is welcome, but not enough. Israels blockade must stop.

Jerusalem (AsiaNews)  The European Union hosted a conference in Brussels on Tuesday dedicated to Gazas water situation. In the Palestinian territory, most water is polluted.

The meeting successfully got support for 456 million (US$ 560 million) to build a new desalination plant in the Palestinian territory.

A study released today notes that 97 per cent of water in the Gaza Strip is polluted, falling far short of the standards set by the World Health Organisation. In Israel, a government source said that 95 per cent of Gaza water supplies are not potable.

For several weeks, raw sewage has been pouring into the Mediterranean Sea, worsening the local health situation.

According to Al Mezan Centre for Human Rights, about 80 per cent of all children under three in Gaza suffer from diarrhoea.

This is why a group of countries and agencies want to invest half a billion euros to build a new desalination plant at an estimated cost of almost 563 million, of which 77.1 million from the EU alone with the rest coming from agencies and other countries, including Turkey.

The project will include the construction of a large desalination facility and the refurbishment of the necessary pipelines and water storage as well as solar energy for the plant.

Israel has backed the initiative, sending two representatives to the conference to convey Israels commitment not to create any problems for the project and to allow the necessary equipment and materials into the Strip.

AsiaNews spoke to an Israeli NGO, Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, for their thoughts about the initiative. The group operates a mobile clinic in the Gaza Strip.

"Every initiative to build infrastructure in Gaza is welcome, it said, but we must remember that this is only one of a long list of steps needed to resolve the acute humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip. The ongoing Israeli blockade of Gaza harms the health and quality of life of its residents.

In fact, The right to water is one of many social determinates that define health, and therefore the new desalinization plant is not enough, but must be accompanied by an immediate and complete end to the Israeli blockade to ensure the proper movement of patients, medical teams, medical equipment and medicines to and from Gaza.

This also calls for the full commitment from the international community to rehab Gaza."Finally! I am so grateful for the very great and exciting news I received last Monday.



DOL: June 7, 2017

Medical done: 2nd week of June 2017

Additional requirements requested: September 2017, which we were able to supply 2 weeks after

Visa granted: March 19, 2018



Goodluck to everyone who are still waiting... W.B. Mason has taken delivery of four Workhorse E-Gen hybrid-electric vehicles through Ryder. (Photo courtesy of Ryder.)

W.B. Mason, the nations second-largest privately owned office products dealer, has taken delivery of several Workhorse E-Gen electrified, range-extended step vans on leases from Ryder System, Inc., the company announced.

Ryder is proud to be working with W.B. Mason to bring long-term environmental and cost-saving benefits of electric vehicles to its business and we look forward to expanding the partnership in the years to come, said Dennis Cooke, Ryder's president of global fleet management solutions. When companies outsource to Ryder, they get the value of our extensive experience operating and maintaining advanced vehicle technology fleets, so they can reduce risk, increase uptime, and speed return on investment.

Workhorses E-Gen step van demonstrates a 40 MPGe fuel efficiency in on-the-road applications, which reduces vehicle emissions by 75% and is six times more efficient than conventional step vans. The E-Gen model provides an average range of 120 miles on a single charge with 60 electric miles enabled by Panasonic lithium-ion battery packs, and an additional 60 miles using the integrated BMW range extender.

In 2017, W.B. Mason announced its plans to lease Workhorse E-Gen hybrid-electric vehicles through Ryder and is taking delivery of four electric vehicles from Ryder this year.

Ryder collaborated with Workhorse to develop the electrified vehicle chassis and Morgan Olson to configure a customized truck specification that meets the delivery requirements of W.B. Mason. The vehicles will be supported by ChargePoint, the worlds leading electric vehicle charging network, as the primary charging infrastructure provider.A Reddit user captured and posted dash cam footage of rental car driver speeding and passing a vehicle unsafely on a tight corner near Queenstown, New Zealand, TVNZ reports.

The video, posted by the Otago Daily Times, shows the rental driver in a 2016 Snap Rentals Toyota Corolla passing the Reddit user's vehicle on a corner, going about 91 km/h (51 mph). The Toyota rental barley misses an oncoming Jucy rental vehicle, narrowly avoiding a head-on collision.

Snap Rentals National Operations Manager Jono Bennet told the newsoutlet it is following up on complaints against the driver, but that it's likely the driver has already left the country.

James Dalglish, managing director of New Zeland-based Go Rentals, said in an email that this situation shows just how valuable road safety training is for all rental car customers, especially renters from overseas who are not familiar with New Zealand's traffic laws.

In a perfect world all NZ operators would be [Rental Vehicle Association] members and also signed up to the Code of Practice in place for best educating our overseas guests," he said. "The RVA are continuing to work with operators and stakeholders alike to make NZ's road as safe as they can be.

Police are also investigating the incidient, as New Zealand law requires drivers to have 100 meters of clear road ahead once they have passed a vehicle.The final list of candidates Kern County voters will be able to choose from in this Junes p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.Some Puerto Ricans are still without power more than six months after Hurricane Maria devastated the island.

Puerto Rican students thank Bay area students for supplies

Morgan Fitzgerald Middle sent supplies to a school on the island

PR students send a thank you video back to Morgan Fitzgerald

Many people in the Bay area continue to send support, and its not going unnoticed.

After the storm hit, staff and students from Morgan Fitzgerald Middle Schools Multicultural Advisory Committee started collecting supplies and donations.

Morgan Fitzgeralds bilingual assistant Cindy Velazquez was born on the island. Much of her family still lives there. She remembers the fear she felt not being able to reach her loved ones after the hurricane hit.

"It took me about two weeks before I was able to reach and talk to my family, so it was really hard for me," Velazquez said.

Velazquezs aunt works with special needs children at a school in Puerto Rico. The Multicultural Advisory Committee sent their donations straight to the students.

"Batteries and flashlights and sunscreen, water, all of the things we take for granted here every day," teacher Jacqueline Martin said.

"Young kids are very sweet and innocent, so just to see their love that they have is just amazing," teacher Ruth Malberg said.

The school in Puerto Rico was overwhelmed with appreciation and sent the Morgan Fitzgerald family heart shaped cards and a thank you video. It is a token of appreciation that Principal Anthony Francois said they will never forget.

"I got close to tearing up when I saw the video, it was just an amazing outpouring of gratitude and we saw that we were able to bring some comfort to a number of students," Francois said.

The school is currently collecting donations to send another shipment to Puerto Rico. If youd like to help, contact Principal Francois at: FrancoisA@pcsb.orgOregon Coast Comic Con Brings Star Wars, Ninja Turtles, Walking Dead to Tillamook

Published 03/21/2018 at 7:35 PM PDT

By Oregon Coast Beach Connection Staff





(Tillamook, Oregon)  Get ready for the Oregon coast's only real foray into gleeful nerddom. The Second Oregon Coast Comic Com is the sequel to last year's NW Comic Con, held in Tillamook. March 24 and 25 sees the return of the festival of fun and fantasy to the Tillamook Air Museum, inside the largest, free span wooden structure in the world, surrounded by historical planes, trains and automobiles.

More than just comic books are featured here. You'll find artists, actors, stuntmen, cosplay groups and food vendors, including a healthy dose of those from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle movies, The Walking Dead, Stargate, True Blood and the show Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.

Look for over 75 vendor and exhibitor spaces.

For actors, one of the big highlights of the event is Sandi Sellner, who played the role of Alpha 5 on the 94-'95 Fox Network show Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. She's also been an extra on several television shows.

Another headliner is Vincent Ward, who comes from The Walking Dead Season 3, Death House and Everybody Hates Chris. He also played Hollis on True Blood.

Ernie Reyes Jr. also appears. He's been in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Red Sonja, Surf Ninja, The Last Dragon and the Rundown.

Stunt performer Nick Palma has been involved in no less than three parts of the Stargate franchise: the three movies Stargate: Continuum, Stargate: the Ark of Truth and the original in 1994. He's also been featured in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and The Rundown.

Vincent Ward in The Walking Dead

Kenn Scott from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Shootfighter shows up as well.

From the anime world comes voice actor Eric Vale. He is also an ADR director, script writer, and head writer at Funimation, and he's provided voices for a number of English versions of Japanese anime series. He is known for voicing Trunks in Dragon Ball series, Yuki Sohma in Fruits Basket, Sanji in One Piece and Loke in Fairy Tail.

Several cosplay events happen, including the group Star Wars Oregon. Cloud City Garrison (of the 501st Legion) and Kashyyyk Base (of the Rebel Legion) are teaming up to provide attendees with awesome Star Wars costuming appearances and fundraising and volunteer activities.

Artists appearing at the events include: Arthur Suydam (Marvel Zombies, Walking Dead and Army of Darkness); Mike DeCarlo (Batman, Green Lantern, Scooby Doo, Animaniacs, Ghost Rider and more); Freddie E Williams II (Batman/TMNT 1 & 2 and He-Man/Thundercats), and Jeremy Colwell (Batman/TMNT 1 & 2 colorist, He-Man/Thundercats colorist).

Weekend passes are only $25. You can purchase a Saturday pass for $20 or a Sunday pass for $15. Kids under 3 are free, and 4 - 12 are just $5 for the entire weekend. Active military personnel receive free admission with Military ID.

Doors open on Saturday at 10 a.m. and it goes until 6 p.m. Cosplay Karaoke kicks at 6 p.m. on the main stage. Sunday times are 10  5 p.m. Tickets and more information available at www.OregonCoastComicCon.com. Oregon Coast Lodgings for this event - Where to eat - Maps - Virtual Tours





Nick Palma

Below: more of the Tillamook area





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All Content, unless otherwise attributed, copyright BeachConnection.net Unauthorized use or publication is not permittedFor Immediate Release, March 22, 2018 Contacts: Jean Su, Center for Biological Diversity, (415) 770-3187, jsu@biologicaldiversity.org

Kevin Bixby, Southwest Environmental Center, (575) 649.7260, kevin@wildmesquite.org

Natalia Lima, Animal Legal Defense Fund, (201) 679-7088, nlima@aldf.org

Rebecca Bullis, Defenders of Wildlife, (202) 772-0295, rbullis@defenders.org Lawsuit Challenges Trump Administration's New Mexico Border Wall Waiver

Wildlife Migration, Air, Water at Risk to Speed Wall Construction WASHINGTON Conservation groups sued the Trump administration today to challenge its waiver ignoring 25 laws to speed construction of 20 miles of border wall in eastern New Mexico, an area thats home to rare wildlife in one of the worlds most biodiverse deserts. Todays filing in U.S. District Court says the Department of Homeland Security does not have authority to waive laws that protect clean air, clean water, public lands and wildlife in the borderlands. Homeland wants to convert vehicle barriers into bollard walls along the border west of El Paso, Texas, at the Santa Teresa Land Port of Entry. The Trump administration is casting aside bedrock environmental protections to fulfill a hateful campaign promise, said Jean Su, an attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity. This waiver has expired, and Trumps sweeping delegation of authority to Homeland Security is unconstitutional. Its also an enormous waste of money, since border walls dont stop illegal drug or human smuggling. But they do irreparable harm to communities and wildlife. Bollard-style walls obstruct the natural migration of wildlife, including birds and insects. Dozens of rare wildlife species, including the Aplomado falcon and Mexican gray wolf, make their homes in this region of New Mexico, as do kit foxes, bighorn sheep and ringtail cats. The area is also within historic jaguar habitat. By waiving these laws in the name of bringing law and order to the region, DHS is literally making the border lawless, said Kevin Bixby, executive director of the Southwest Environmental Center. Our wildlife and communities deserve the same legal protections as every other community in America. Construction of the border wall would cause permanent and irreparable damage to over a hundred endangered and threatened species that call the border area their home, said Stephen Wells, executive director of the Animal Legal Defense Fund. The wall would literally divide animal families, interfere with breeding and migratory patterns and ultimately may result in the extinction of many of these species. These are the very irreparable harms meant to be prevented by the environmental laws the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security has unilaterally waived. Our nation's environmental laws protect both people and wildlife from bad decisions. Waiving these safeguards to rush construction of President Trump's ill-conceived border wall will no doubt adversely impact the communities and wildlife along the border, said Jason Rylander, senior attorney at Defenders of Wildlife The lawsuit states that the waiver authority, granted in 2006, is no longer valid and is an unconstitutional delegation of power to the department. The waiver authority applied to border wall construction under the 2006 Secure Fence Act, which required Homeland to build 700 miles of border barriers. That mandate was met several years ago, using the REAL ID authority five times to waive more than 35 laws on 625 miles of border wall and barrier construction. Beyond jeopardizing wildlife, endangered species and public lands, the U.S.-Mexico border wall is part of a larger strategy of ongoing border militarization that damages human rights, civil liberties, native lands, local businesses and international relations. The border wall impedes the natural migrations of people and wildlife that are essential to healthy diversity.For Immediate Release, March 22, 2018 Contact: Andrea Santarsiere, (303) 854-7748, asantarsiere@biologicaldiversity.org Idaho Proposes Cruel Trophy Hunt for Yellowstone's Grizzly Bears Trump Administration's Premature Removal of Endangered Species Protection Allowed Destructive Hunt VICTOR, Idaho Less than a year after the Trump administration stripped Yellowstone's famed grizzly bears of Endangered Species Act protection, Idaho now joins Wyoming as the second state to move toward trophy hunting of grizzly bears for the first time in more than 40 years. Idahos Fish and Game Commission today decided to move forward to take public comment on a proposal to kill one grizzly bear through a hunt this fall. Bears that step outside the boundaries of Yellowstone National Park could be legally shot. The prospect of trophy hunting is one of many reasons Yellowstones grizzly bears should never have lost endangered species protection, said Andrea Santarsiere, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. Im sickened that someone would want to kill one of these magnificent, imperiled animals just to hang a head on their wall. The proposal also risks violating a memorandum of agreement that Idaho signed with Wyoming and Montana, which divvies up hunting numbers based on the amount of grizzly bear habitat each state has. Under the agreement, in 2018 Idaho can allow the hunting of one male bear within the Demographic Monitoring Area  grizzly bear habitat within which the bear estimate is counted and mortality limits are applied  but Idaho cannot allow the hunting of any female bears. Because it is nearly impossible for hunters to tell the difference between an adult male and adult female grizzly bear, Idaho risks going beyond the limits it agreed upon with Wyoming and Montana. It is extremely irresponsible to risk the killing of a female bear in Idaho through proposing an unnecessary hunt, said Santarsiere. Wyoming and Montana should be concerned that Idaho is not standing behind promises it made to those states. Grizzly bear numbers in the Greater Yellowstone area increased after endangered species protections were granted in 1975. But the bears continue to be threatened by isolation from other grizzly populations, loss of key food sources and human-caused mortalities, now including hunting. Overall, grizzly bears occupy less than 4 percent of their historic U.S. range. Yellowstones bears have long been isolated from other bear populations, forcing the government to keep them on permanent life support by trucking bears in to avoid inbreeding. This fact further highlights the need for recovering grizzly bears in more places. Idaho contains crucial habitat corridors that could help connect Yellowstones bears to other bear populations in northern Idaho, said Santarsiere. Killing bears that enter these lands will keep Yellowstones grizzlies isolated and could have long-term impacts on the population. This decision comes on the heels of a hunting season proposal by Wyoming two weeks ago. Wyoming is proposing to allow hunters to kill up to 24 bears, including permitting baiting techniques in some areas of the state. Montanas state game agency took the opposite approach, recommending no grizzly bear hunt this year. The Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks Commission adopted the recommendation Feb. 15. Montana made the right decision to not allow grizzly bear hunting this year and hopefully in future years, said Santarsiere. Idahos failure to follow suit is deeply disappointing. The proposal to allow hunting comes as key grizzly bear food sources in the heart of the Yellowstone ecosystem have been collapsing and grizzly mortality rates have been increasing. The dramatic decline of whitebark pine and Yellowstone cutthroat trout has prompted bears to eat more meat, such as big-game gut piles and livestock, resulting in increased grizzly bear mortality. Drought and climate change are likely to worsen these problems.For Immediate Release, March 22, 2018 Contacts: David Miller, Ohio Environmental Council, (614) 487-7506, DMiller@theOEC.org

Heather Cantino, Athens County Fracking Action Network, (740) 591-6632, heather.cantino@gmail.com

Becca Pollard, Keep Wayne Wild, (503) 756-2598, keepwaynewild@gmail.com

Jen Miller, Sierra Club Ohio Chapter, (614) 461-0734 x 300, jen.miller@sierraclub.org

Roxanne Groff, Buckeye Environmental Network, roxannegroff1227@gmail.com

Wendy Park, Center for Biological Diversity, (510) 844-7138, wpark@biologicaldiversity.org Feds Auction Fracking Leases That Threaten Ohio's Only National Forest COLUMBUS, Ohio The U.S. Bureau of Land Management today will auction 345 acres of Ohios only national forest, the Wayne National Forest, for oil and gas fracking despite a recently filed protest showing fracking could endanger drinking water and wildlife. The leases would lock in dangerous fracking in the Wayne. Despite known threats from fracking pointed out by the conservation groups protest, the BLM planned the auction using only a cursory review that avoids site-specific analysis of potential harm. That means the public will have no information about pollution risks to streams, eradication of endangered species habitat and harm to nearby communities, which is required under the National Environmental Policy Act. The Bureau of Land Management is unlawfully cutting corners in its push to develop the Wayne. Our protest filing is intended to rein in the agency, said Nathan Johnson, attorney for the Ohio Environmental Council. The Wayne is one of Ohio's finest natural treasures, plain and simple. It deserves to be protected from heavy industrial development. The auction comes after the U.S. Forest Service announced plans to revise its 2006 forest plan governing land management in the Wayne. Conservation groups last year sued the Forest Service and the BLM, which oversees drilling and fracking of federal oil and gas. The lawsuit says federal officials relied on the outdated plan and failed to analyze threats to public health, water, endangered species and the climate before opening 40,000 acres of the Wayne to fracking. This wild forest is being sacrificed for fracking based on a dangerously outdated plan that ignores major risks to public health and wildlife, said Wendy Park, an attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. The lack of transparency in this process is disturbing. The Forest Service needs to listen to the public and spare Ohios only national forest from fracking industrialization and contamination. When well pads are blowing up in Ohio, earthquakes are increasing in number, toxic radioactive frack waste is injected into holes in the ground all over our Appalachian counties, and pipelines are destroying our landscape and polluting our wetlands and streams, we are saying it is time to stop, said Roxanne Groff with Buckeye Environmental Network. The Forest Service has dismissed us for far too long and we are not going to stand for them to waste our finest natural resource any longer. Clear-cutting for well pads, roads and other infrastructure would reverse decades of forest and watershed recovery in the Wayne and destroy habitat for endangered Indiana bats and threatened northern long-eared bats. The bats are already imperiled by forest fragmentation, white-nose syndrome and climate change. Pollution from fracking operations, explosions and spills would damage water supplies that provide drinking water for millions of people. There are very few vestiges of wilderness left in Ohio for wildlife habitat and outdoor recreation. Ohio's only national forest should be preserved, not plundered for private industry profits, said Jen Miller, director of Ohio Sierra Club. We call for the stop of all fracking and pipeline activities, and for a robust, transparent process to revise the forest management plan in a way that maximizes wildlife protections and recreational opportunities for generations to come. Since 2016 the BLM has auctioned off more than 2,300 acres of Wayne National Forest. Three lease sales have used determinations of NEPA adequacy, or DNAs, which avoid any analysis of site-specific environmental harm before leasing public lands to industry. Conservation groups have mounted administrative or legal challenges to these lease sales. In a time of accelerating climate change, biodiversity loss, and air and water pollution crises, this action by the supposed stewards of our natural resources is unconscionable, said Heather Cantino of Athens County Fracking Action Network. Wayne and BLMs justifications for this action are not based on science or the public interest, which by law they must be. Todays protest stands up for the law and the rights of the American people. The Trump administration recently issued a directive calling for expanded use of DNAs for fracking leases on public lands across the country. That directive effectively excludes the public from the public-lands leasing process, shortens protest periods to just 10 days from 30 days, and restricts BLM staff from postponing lease sales to protect sensitive resources. Its extremely disappointing that, after all of the climate disasters of 2017, the Bureau of Land Management is still choosing to sacrifice our National Forest for fossil fuel industrialization, said Becca Pollard of Keep Wayne Wild. BLM should instead focus on the forests natural ability to absorb greenhouse gases while providing habitat for wildlife and wild places for people to visit.ABUJA, Nigeria - Former Microsoft founder Bill Gates, whose foundation the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, has invested more than $9 billion in Africa since 2001, will be visiting Nigeria to check on the progress of developmental projects there.

Bill Gates

Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, is visiting Nigeria to see first-hand the progress the country is making on primary healthcare provision, polio eradication, nutrition and financial inclusion. He will be asking partners to prioritise supporting Nigeria's poorest people to ensure a sustainable and inclusive economic future, and allow the county to meet its ambitious growth and development agenda.Gates, whose foundation has invested more than $1.6billion in Nigeria to date, is meeting with government officials, and civil society and private sector stakeholders in Abuja and Lagos. Top of his agenda will be discussions around what can be done to accelerate Nigeria's progress, and how the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation can continue to partner in health, agriculture and financial inclusion to support Nigeria's goals.Alhaji Aliko Dangote, chairman of the Dangote Foundation, is accompanying Bill Gates on this visit as their two foundations continue to collaborate in Nigeria.The Gates Foundation works with partners in more than 45 African countries to reduce poverty and improve health. Some of the major areas of investment include agriculture, maternal and child health, nutrition, family planning, and financial services for the poor.Between 2001 and 2016, the foundation invested more than $9 billion in Africa. Guided by the belief that every life has equal value, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation works to help all people lead healthy, productive lives.In developing countries, it focuses on improving people's health and giving them the chance to lift themselves out of hunger and extreme poverty.In the United States, it seeks to ensure that all people-especially those with the fewest resources-have access to the opportunities they need to succeed in school and life. Based in Seattle, Washington, the foundation is led by CEO Dr Susan Desmond-Hellmann and co-chair William H. Gates Sr, under the direction of Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett.Source: African Media Agency (AMA).Bon Hotels has bolstered its Nigerian portfolio with Bon Hotel Sunshine Enugu, located just 12 minutes from the airport and in close proximity to the city centre. The opening brings the numbers of properties managed by Bon Hotels to 25 hotels across 14 cities.

Image Supplied

The decor is stylish and understated in line with international trends and features 92 spacious rooms, a modern gym, business centre, two restaurants, a sky lounge and bar as well as a poolside bar. Wi-Fi is complimentary throughout the hotel.The conference centre provides spacious, innovative facilities and comprises three meeting rooms seating up to 300 delegates.Director of BON Hotels International West Africa, Bernard Cassar said that the group is excited to welcome BON Hotel Sunshine into the fold. The hotel is a great fit for us and in line with our vision for establishing a trade route circuit and central hub linking important centres and communities across the region. He added that the hotel is to be positioned as an affordable, four-star, international, boutique-style, full-service hotel.The group remain confident in the potential of the region and steadfast in their expansion plans, providing ongoing support to local tourism and the hospitality industry, their guests, staff, suppliers and the local community. Developing Africa by Africans remains front and centre of their growth strategy and commitment to Africa.SYDNEY, Australia - Six Australian media companies seeking to join the battle against a record Aus$4.5 million (US$3.5 million) defamation payout to Hollywood star Rebel Wilson had their case knocked back on Thursday.

The "Pitch Perfect" star was awarded the damages against magazine publisher Bauer last September over articles claiming she lied about her age and background to further her career.The allegations were made in Woman's Day, Australian Women's Weekly and OK Magazine in 2015, which Wilson said damaged her reputation. She won the case and vowed to give the payout to charity.Last month newspaper publishers News Corp. and Fairfax, radio station owner Macquarie and television broadcasters ABC, Seven and Nine joined forces to back Bauer's appeal against the country's largest defamation payout.They argued the size of the damages could stifle public-interest journalism.But Justice Pamela Tate of the Supreme Court of Victoria on Thursday rejected their bid to intervene, agreeing with Wilson's defence that the arguments of the six firms did not differ enough from those of the Bauer appeal.Wilson took to social media afterwards, saying the firms should be "embarrassed" for colluding with Bauer."I obviously don't hold any negative feelings towards Ch 7, Ch 9, ABC, Fairfax, News Corp & Macquarie Media - I was actually just watching the finale of Married At First Sight online - but guys, please stick to reporting the truth & entertaining Australia!" she tweeted.Bauer's parent company, Bauer Media Group, is a worldwide publishing house based in Hamburg with magazine titles in 15 countries including Britain, the US, China and Russia, as well as various television and radio assets.The African Continental Free Trade Area Agreement (CFTA ) could enter into effect by the end of this year following signing by 44 countries yesterday at the 10th extraordinary African Union Summit.

The New Times President Paul Kagame. Image credit: Village Urugwiro via

Besides the agreement, which could make Africa the world's largest free trade zone, 43 nations signed the Kigali Declaration, while 27 countries agreed to ease mobility of people across the continent by signing the protocol on movement of people across Africa.A total of nineteen presidents were present at the signing while other nations delegated top government officials such as Prime Ministers, Vice Presidents and Ministers of Foreign Affairs of their respective countries.Rwandan President Paul Kagame said that the milestone is proof of what is possible when the African states work together. "Today's milestone is an indication of how much is possible when we work together. Let's use the momentum we have gained to push forward with the Agenda 2063 flagship projects that we have committed ourselves to in the first Ten-Year Implementation Plan," he said.He said that the development was not the end but the starting of a new phase which, if successfully implemented around can turn the continent's fortunes.Following the signatures, African states will have to ratify the agreement in their respective legislatures to put it into effect. "The task now is to ratify the African Continental Free Trade Area and the Protocol on the Free Movement of Persons, so that they may come into effect as soon as possible," he said.When the agreement takes effect, Kagame said, it would have impact on the wellbeing of Africans as well as improve the quality of ties with the rest of the world.The agreement envisions a continental market of 1.2 billion people, with a combined Gross Domestic Product of more than $3.4 trillion. The agreement will also boost the level of intra-Africa trade from the current 14% to over 52% by 2022.President Mahamadou Issoufou of Niger, who has been spearheading the agreement adoption process, said that the deal presents a historic turning point with better days in sight. "As we launch the African Continental Free Trade Area, our belief is that Africa is stronger when Africans work together; rather than in a divided and isolated way. This is a strategy that we must pursue vigorously," Issoufou, who was also the first Head of State to sign the agreement, said.He noted that it would also make the continent an ideal international investment destination as well as serve to strengthen political, economic and commercial commitments with various international partners.The Chairperson of the Commission of the African Union, Moussa Faki Mahamat, urged African leaders to get on with the consequent steps to its implementation, saying citizens and businesses were eager for a stronger continent. "Our peoples, our business community and our youth, in particular, cannot wait any longer to see the lifting of the barriers that divide our continent, hinder its economic takeoff and perpetuate misery, even though Africa is abundantly endowed with wealth," Mahamat said.The African private sector seems eager on the agreement's implementation and has moved to speed up ratification and implementation.Speaking on behalf of African Business community, Ali Mufuruki, a Tanzanian billionaire and founder of Infotech Investment Group, said that the private sector is pledging $1 million to raise awareness about the agreement and its importance.According to Mercer's 2018 Quality of Living Survey, Port Louis is the best city in Africa, ranking 83rd globally. The Mauritian city is followed by Durban (89), Cape Town (94) and Johannesburg (95).

Port Louis, Mauritius  byvalet  123RF.com

South Africas top three cities

Global ranking

Carl van Heerden, principal at Mercer and global mobility leader for Africa, commented: A citys place in the rankings is dependent on local living conditions, which are analysed according to a wide variety of factors which reflect their importance to expatriates. Appropriate infrastructure, health facilities, safety and security are some of the important aspects that make a city attractive to both talent and businesses.The Mercer Quality of Living survey, which was first published in 1994, is conducted annually to enable multinational companies and other organisations to compensate employees fairly when placing them on international assignments.Durban, Cape Town and Johannesburg still feature in the top 100 cities, according to our quality of living ranking, making South Africa attractive to expatriates and multinationals. Quality of living is amongst the important factors that companies weigh when they prepare a long-term strategy around where they should expand and locate global staff, said Van Heerden.Vienna tops the ranking for the ninth year running and is followed by Zurich (2), Auckland and Munich in joint 3rd place. In 5th place, Vancouver completes the top five and is the highest ranking city in North America. Singapore (25), Dubai (74) and Montevideo (77), are the highest ranking cities in Asia, Middle East and Latin America, respectively.This year, Mercer provides a separate ranking on city sanitation, which analyses cities waste removal and sewage infrastructure, levels of infectious disease, air pollution, water availability and quality, which are equally important to those who choose to work and live in these cities.Victoria (58th) ranks highest on the African continent for city sanitation, followed by Durban (73) and Port Louis (80). Johannesburg is in 81st place, while Cape Town is at 84 on the city sanitation list.Honolulu tops the city sanitation ranking, followed by Helsinki and Ottawa in joint second.Mercer produces individual cost of living and rental accommodation cost reports for each city surveyed. For more information on city rankings, click hereSuspended SA Revenue Service commissioner Tom Moyane racked up a dubious list of "achievements" as head of the nation's tax collection authority, says investigative journalist Jacques Pauw.

Stopped the tax investigation into Jacob Zuma

Stopped the tax investigation into Edward Zuma

Stopped the tax investigation into Khulubuse Zuma

Stopped the tax and money laundering investigation into the Guptas

Disbanded all five investigations units at SARS, leaving the service toothless

Drove a host of dedicated and skilled civil servants from Sars

Failed to collect at least R1-billion in taxes from a Chinese criminal

Failed to collect R288-million in taxes from a Cape gangster

Failed to collect R600-million in taxes from a smuggler

Overseen Sarsrecord a R50-billion shortfall in the last tax year

Failed to investigate his number two, Jonas Makwakwa, for alleged money laundering

Laid criminal charges against me (Pauw) for revealing his dirty linen in The President's Keepers and brought a High Court application against me

and brought a High Court application against me Has gone a long way in breaking South Africa's most crucial public institution

At the top of that list, were his efforts to halt an investigation into the tax affairs of former president Jacob Zuma.Moyane was suspended with immediate effect on Monday after refusing to step down when asked to by President Cyril Ramaphosa.Pauw, who revealed sensational allegations about Zuma's tax affairs in his book, compiled a list of Moyane's "achievements" while in office.Moyane had, he alleged in a post on Facebook:Pauw alleged that Moyane was corrupt, had no tax knowledge and was "arguably Zuma's worst appointment ever".The presidency, in reaction to claims in the book about Zuma having failed to submit tax returns for his first four years in office, said he was tax compliant. "The tax matters of the president are in order," said the presidency.Ramaphosa said in a sharply worded letter, informing Moyane about his suspension on Monday: "You have" failed in your role as an accounting officer for Sars. As a result, the Sars has been fundamentally jeopardised and has lost the confidence of taxpayers."Moyane said in a letter to Ramaphosa that he would challenge his removal in court, adding: "It was glaring that you have already made a decision to dismiss me."With the launch of the Agri-Teen Symposium in Pretoria - the brainchild of journalist and media personality Ayanda Allie Paine working in conjunction with Land Bank - youth involvement in agriculture is set to get a boost as 300 grade 10-12 learners from schools in the greater Soweto area are brought together to learn about various learning and vocational opportunities across the agricultural value chain.

The future is bright. Some of the youngsters who attended the inaugural Agri Teen Symposium in Pretoria today. #AgriTeen2018 #PlantTheRightSeed #HumanRightsDay2018 pic.twitter.com/Sx7BoFS61b  Agri Teen (@AgriTeen) March 21, 2018

The youth challenge

The Expo at the Agri Teen Symposium is a call to action! Teens interacting with produce, institutions, departments etc. This helps to ensure that the event is not just a talk shop, cards must be exchanged, relationships built etc #AgriTeen2018 #PlantTheRightSeed #HumanRightsDay pic.twitter.com/9mZYGhf39Q  Ayanda-Allie Paine (@AyandaAllieP) March 21, 2018

Getting our youth to tap into agriculture

The symposium aims to establish a practical network of mentors for South African youth to tap into enhanced programmes that not only encourage greater youth participation in the sector but also facilitate this in a sustainable manner.The National Development Plan (NDP) provides a clear and overarching policy approach to agriculture that is being implemented across government and within the agricultural sector. As one of the primary economic activities, agriculture has the potential to create close to one million jobs by 2030. However, the implementation of activities that will encourage and support more youth entering the agricultural sector hinges on the ability of sector players to fully understand their challenges and how best to respond to them.Through the Agri-Teen Symposium, we will be working with sector specialists to unlock the untapped potential within the sector for our youth, finding solutions to some of the current barriers to participation in the process, says Paine.During 2017, Land Bank concluded a survey to understand the perceptions, attitudes and challenges faced by young people participating in the agricultural sector. The main findings raised a number of areas to be addressed: The data suggests that young peoples perception of, and attitude towards the agricultural sector, is largely influenced by a lack of information and exposure to the industry. It is concerning that several of the respondents noted that they did not know what agriculture was or what it entailed; Others only associated agriculture with subsistence farming, manual labour and being poor; and Respondents also had little knowledge of opportunities in the sector, and the variety of careers that feed into agriculture. Thus, a majority of the respondents preferred a career in one of the tertiary sectors, over a career in agriculture.This is in addition to existing challenges for new entrants including a lack of access to arable land, a lack of funding and poor access to industry information and statistics.For Land Bank CEO, TP Nchocho, these insights play a crucial role in guiding the bank in fulfiling its transformational mandate by customising programmes focussed on supporting young people in agriculture: The Agri-Teen Symposium represents an important part of Land Banks broader response to the youth challenge facing the agricultural sector. We will be working closely with stakeholders across the sector to impart the knowledge, skills and time to ensure that South African youth are exposed to the best opportunities to tap into the agricultural value chain.Learners at the launch event this year will benefit from a wide range of inputs, including first-hand experience from emerging black farmers who are creating their own agribusinesses as well as established players on both the production and operational side and educational institutions offering agri-focussed courses.Following its launch in Gauteng, there are plans to host the event annually, to extend the reach of the initiative to benefit learners nationally as well as to establish connectivity to existing support programmes for youth in the agricultural sector.The Conversation Africa is an independent source of news and views from the academic and research community. Its aim is to promote better understanding of current affairs and complex issues, and allow for a better quality of public discourse and conversation.Go to: https://theconversation.com/africaMOSCOW, Russia - Russia's Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled the popular Telegram messenger app must provide the country's security services with encryption keys to read users' messaging data, agencies reported.

 Marcel de Grijs  123RF.com

Media watchdog Roskomnadzor instructed Telegram to "provide the FSB with the necessary information to decode electronic messages received, transmitted, or being sent" within 15 days, it said on its website.Telegram had appealed against an earlier ruling that it must share this information, but this appeal was rejected on Tuesday.If it does not provide the keys it could be blocked in Russia.The free instant messaging app, which lets people exchange messages, photos and videos in groups of up to 5,000 people, has attracted more than 100 million users since its launch in 2013.Telegram's self-exiled Russian founder Pavel Durov said in September 2017 the FSB had demanded backdoor access.When Telegram did not provide the encryption keys, the FSB launched a formal complaint.Durov wrote last year that the FSB's demands are "technically impossible to carry out" and violate the Russian Constitution which entitles citizens to privacy of correspondence.Tuesday's ruling is the latest move in a dispute between Telegram and the Russian authorities as Moscow pushes to increase surveillance of internet activities.Last June, Russia's state communications watchdog threatened to ban the app for failing to provide registration documents. Although Telegram later registered, it stopped short of agreeing to its data storage demands.Companies on the register must provide the FSB with information on user interactions.From this year they must also store all the data of Russian users inside the country, according to controversial anti-terror legislation passed in 2016 which was decried by internet companies and the opposition.Airports Company of SA (Acsa) employees are campaigning to remove Bongani Maseko, the CEO of the state-owned company, based on forensic reports recommending disciplinary action against him and three senior managers over alleged violations of the Public Finance Management Act.

The managers - Percy Sithole (procurement), Jabulani Khambule (regional airports) and legal counsel Bongani Machobane - were found guilty at an internal disciplinary hearing on corruption charges and of wasteful and fruitless expenditure. They were suspended on full pay. Acsa's board also resolved to act against Maseko, but it had not done so.The group of "concerned employees" has provided copies of e-mailed letters (dated January 2018) to the Presidency, the transport and finance departments and the public protector, in which it appeals for action against personnel named in two forensic reports. The first was a 2015 report by Deloitte and a second by Dr VS Mncube Consulting in 2016.In its letters, the author said: "We ask that the honourable president of SA [and ministers] take action to deal with the corruption allegations against our Acsa CEO without waiting for another high court decision that will force them to [act]."Presidency spokeswoman Khusela Diko said it was not aware of any such letter.The group demands that Maseko be disciplined before his term as CEO finishes at the end of March 2018. "[The] government cannot extend the Acsa CEO's term beyond March 2018 as he has corruption charges and has a criminal case reported by the Acsa board that he has to answer to."Acsa's board was expected to implement the recommendations for dismissal by the end of February 2018, but this had not transpired, according to the group's letter.The forensic investigations arose from several charges of gross misconduct related to, among other accusations, the unlawful eviction of an Acsa tenant, the improper dismissal of a staff member, obstruction of an investigation instituted by a service provider and failure to prevent irregular and wasteful expenditure.An Acsa spokesman confirmed that Transport Minister Blade Nzimande had communicated with the board on the matter, but said that the details could not be disclosed.In a related development earlier in March, Acsa group legal counsel Bonginkosi Mfusi obtained a court order compelling Acsa to provide reasons for not having suspended and disciplined Maseko. The order was subsequently rescinded over a procedural error.Mfusi said the process was on track to continue at a later court date.Vega, a brand of the Independent Institute of Education (The IIE), will host a National Open Day on Saturday, 24 March 2018.

Vega invites parents, scholars and prospective students to attend its next open day for the year, taking place at Vega campuses nationwide on 24 March 2018. The open day will give prospective students and their parents a first-hand glimpse into a day in the life of a Vega student.Open days at Vega are structured to allow parents and students to meet with its campus navigators and gain insight into what each course is really all about.The school prides itself on being a highly interactive environment, providing our students with real-world, on-the-ground experience, says Nicky Stanley, national marketing manager at Vega School.These open days allow prospective students to experience the best our campuses have to offer, providing context of The IIE qualifications available to study at Vega, and allowing them to engage with lecturers at Vega on a first-hand basis.#2  Were the thought leaders and trailblazers in brand, design, and business.#21 - We dont do left or right brains  we believe in whole brains.#40 - 123 Loeries and counting.#59 - We believe that brands can change the world.#66 - We have fun being serious and are serious about having fun.For anyone interested in this and other upcoming Vega events, like Vega on Facebook page or visit their website:Date: 24 March 2018Time: 9am - 1pmVenue: Vega Campuses nationwideCost: FreeVega is an educational brand of The Independent Institute of Education (The IIE). The IIE is South Africas leading and largest private higher education institution and is internationally accredited by the British Accreditation Council (BAC).Vegas teaching philosophy is built on the mantra of wisdomwithmagic, creating an academic environment that is based on experiential learning where creatives are trained in strategy and strategists in design-thinking. As South Africas only brand focused school, Vega aims to inspire a new breed of thinkers with the expertise to generate meaningful brand ideas that link business profit to adding value to peoples lives.The IIE Vega students graduate at a work-ready level, with 95% of 2016 graduates employed within 6 months of completing their qualification, including part-time and freelance positions. Vega was also ranked first in the national Loerie Awards Top Educational Institutions in 2017, maintaining its reputation as a leader in the South African higher education arena.Students can enrol for undergraduate and post graduate degrees, diplomas, higher certificates and short courses in design, brand communication and brand management, at IIE Vega campuses across South Africa.The Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa) has released its report on the South African mobile operators' tariff notifications submitted. The report is an analysis of the submitted tariff notifications that highlight the different tariff plans - prices and product offerings - which were filed and/or existed in the market during the period of 1 July-31 December 2017.The communications authority conducted the report to ensure that there is retail tariff transparency, which could potentially encourage competition as it is likely to minimise pricing and product information asymmetries in the sector. Icasa also conducted a benchmarking study of data prices within the Southern African Development Communities (SADC) and BRICS countries to compare billing on various packages offered.Read the report here.This job expired on 7 May 2018.

BRAHMOS missile being test fired in this file photo.

NEW DELHI/POKHRAN (PTI): India on Thursday successfully test fired the BRAHMOS supersonic cruise missile with an indigenous seeker at Pokhran test range in Rajasthan.



Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said the missile hit the target with "pin-point" accuracy and the success will further bolster India's national security.



The test firing comes three months after the BRAHMOS cruise missile was successfully test fired for the first time from the Indian Air Force's frontline Sukhoi-30 MKI combat jet.



"Formidable Supersonic Cruise Missile #BrahMos was successfully flight tested at 8:42 AM today at Pokhran test range, Rajasthan. The precision strike weapon with Indian-made seeker flew in its designated trajectory and hit the target with pin-point accuracy," Sitharaman tweeted.



The range of the missile, an Indo-Russia joint venture, can be extended up to 400 km as certain technical restrictions were lifted after India became a full member of the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) last year.



BRAHMOS is a joint venture between DRDO of India and NPO Mashinostroyenia (NPOM) of Russia.



The Defence Minister congratulated the DRDO following Thursdays successful test firing.



BRAHMOS missile is the heaviest weapon to be deployed on India's Su-30 fighter aircraft.



Work has already begun to integrate BRAHMOS on 40 Sukhoi combat aircraft which is expected to fulfil the critical needs of the Indian Air Force (IAF) in the wake of evolving security dynamics in the region.





NEW DELHI (PTI): The Indian Space Research Organisation is experimenting with potential structures for lunar habitation, the government has told the Lok Sabha.



In a written response to a question in the Lok Sabha on Wednesday, Jitendra Singh, Minister of State in the Prime Minister's Office that looks after the Department of Space, said: "The ISRO, along with academic institutions, is doing experimentation on potential structures for lunar habitation," he said.



The minister was responding to a question on whether the ISRO has started working on building igloo-like habitats on the lunar surface for potential future missions.



An igloo is a shelter, a place for people to stay warm and dry made from blocks of snow placed on top of each other.



"Various options are being studied about the requirements and complexities of habitats. The study is more towards futuristic developments," Singh said.



ISRO had first launched its Moon mission Chandrayaan-1 in 2008. In its second mission - the Chandrayaan-2 - a rover will be made to land on the moon's yet-unexplored south pole.



The rover will send high-quality pictures that will help in better understanding the moon.

The Builders Merchants Federation is building on its successful first two years at UK Construction Week and once again hosting its own pavilion at this years exhibition.

This year's BMF pavilion will be bigger and will have a hub for visitors.

It will be in the Build Show area of UK Construction Week, which takes place at Birmingham's NEC from 9 to 11 October. The event features nine separate shows, including Grand Designs Live.

BMF members can exhibit within the pavilion at a special rate.

John Newcomb, BMF Chief Executive, said: For the last two years the BMF pavilion has proved an excellent platform for merchants to meet and do business with potential customers and suppliers. In 2017 UK Construction Week attracted 33,697 construction professionals (a rise of 11% on 2016), demonstrating the industrys appetite for a major annual event that combines exhibitor space with education seminars, workshops and relaxed networking opportunities.

BMF member EasyTrim had great success launching a new product at the show, as Rachel Gibson, the companys Marketing Manager, explained: We decided to launch our product at the Build Show because the show attracts such a broad demographic of visitors. We had a fantastic week at our stand and garnered a lot of high-quality leads.

Members exhibiting in the BMF pavilion last year included EasyTrim, Rawlplug, ClicBox, Glen Castings, Sales-i, Werner, Wykamol and Intact Software.

This year, with BMF members benefitting from a 20% discount, the Federation is confident that the number will be even higher. Intact has already booked its stand and other BMF members at the 2018 show include ClicBox, Easy-Trim, Marsh Industries, Aggregate Industries, Danosa, Fibo, Ibstock (Forterra), Soudal, Velux, Marley Plumbing & Drainage, Rockwool, Kingspan Environmental (Klargester) and Quinn Building Products.

For further information about the BMF pavilion, visit www.bmf.org.uk/events. To reserve exhibition space, contact Christine Harding at cv.harding@btopenworld.com or Dale Nicholson, Sales Manager at Media 10, at dale.nicholson@media-ten.com.Dear Reader,

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Digital EditorIpca Laboratories' stock is an outperformer in the pharmaceutical sector, gaining over 60 per cent in the last six months. The street's confidence in the stock has increased because its plant remediation process, which began in the 2015, is coming to an end.

The company has also been reinstated as a supplier for the Africa tender business. The firm, whose annual revenue has stagnated at Rs 30 billion over the last three years, after the US Food and Drug Administration (US FDA) ban in 2015, is expected to witness a revival of its top line. Signs of improvement were visible in ...carrier Air India's maiden flight to Tel Aviv took off from New Delhi at 6 pm today, heralding a new chapter in the India-Israel ties and ending a decades-old overfly ban by Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia's decision to permit to use its airspace has enabled the airline to take a shorter route.

It will cover the distance in 7.25 hours, 2.10 hours less than the time taken by the only other airline that flies between the two countries -- Israel's carrier El Al.

Many Arab and Islamic nations do not recognise Israel and, therefore, disallow airlines from using their airspace for flight services to that country.

The Delhi-Tel Aviv direct flight is expected to boost tourism in both the countries, besides taking the diplomatic relations to a new level.

The flight will operate every Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. While the inaugural flight AI 139 left at 6 pm today, the schedule departure will be 4.50 pm from March 25 when the summer schedule comes into operation.

The state-run carrier will be operating its 256-seater Boeing 787 Dreamliner on this route.

Air India's Chairman and Managing Director (CMD) Pradeep Kharola and Israel Ministry of Tourism's Director Hassan Madah cut a symbolic cake to mark the start of the direct flight to Israel.

Kharola had earlier said the airline anticipates interest from travellers from countries further to the east of India such as Australia.

The flight will fly over Oman, Saudi Arabia and Jordan to reach Israel.

The permission to fly over Saudi Arabia will save almost 2 hours and 10 minutes compared to the longer route taken by Israel's carrier El Al, which has direct flights between Tel Aviv and Mumbai.

El Al takes a circuitous route over the Red Sea, the Gulf of Aden and then enters India and avoids countries that are on the direct flight path such as Saudi Arabia, UAE, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan.The BCCI on Thursday cleared India speedster Mohammed Shami's central contract after its Anti-Corruption Unit (ACU) exonerated him of corruption charges levelled by his wife Hasin Jahan.

Shami has been given a Grade 'B' annual contract, which will make him richer by Rs 30 million. He will also be free to play in the Indian Premier League for his franchise the Delhi Daredevils, starting April 7.

The BCCI had decided to withhold Shami's contract after Jahan made a series of allegations, including adultery and domestic violence, and lodged a police complaint against him. Shami has denied all the allegations.

The Committee of Administrators (CoA) specifically asked its ACU chief Neeraj Kumar to investigate charges that the bowler accepted money from one Mohammed Bhai through a Pakistani woman named Alishba.

"The Hon'ble Supreme Court of India appointed Committee of Administrators (CoA) had requested Mr Neeraj Kumar, former Police Commissioner of Delhi and Head of BCCI Anti-Corruption Unit, to investigate the allegations against Mohd.

Shami in so far as they pertain to the provisions of the BCCI Anti-Corruption Code," COA stated in a media release.

"Mr Neeraj Kumar has submitted his confidential report to the CoA. Based on the conclusions in the said report, the CoA is of the view that no further actions/proceedings under the BCCI anti-corruption code are warranted in the matter.

"For this reason, the BCCI shall proceed with offering a Grade B' annual retainership contract to Mohd. Shami," the release further stated.The Delhi High Court is expected to pronounce, on Friday, its decision on the bail plea of Karti Chidambaram, son of senior Congress leader P Chidamabaram, in the INX Media corruption case.

The order is likely to be delivered by Justice S P Garg who had reserved his verdict on March 16 after hearing arguments on behalf of Karti and the CBI which had opposed grant of the relief to him.

The agency had contended that he should not be granted bail as he has already destroyed evidence in the case and was an "influential" person.

Karti's counsel had argued that no case under the Prevention of Corruption Act was made out against him since the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) had neither questioned any public servant, nor made them an accused in the matter.

Karti's lawyers had denied allegations of tampering with evidence and added that when the CBI had not sought his further custodial interrogation, why should he be kept in judicial custody.

They had also said that no one else has been arrested in the case and what the CBI has done is to put Karti behind bars.

Karti's lawyers had further claimed that CBI was trying to connect him with a private company, Advantage Strategic Consulting Pvt Ltd, which had received an alleged bribe amount of Rs 1 million, when he was in no way related to it.

Karti was arrested from Chennai on February 28 by the CBI on his return from the United Kingdom in connection with an FIR lodged on May 15 last year, alleging irregularities in a Foreign Investment Promotion Board clearance given to INX Media for receiving funds of about Rs 3.05 billion from overseas in 2007 when his father was the Union finance minister.

The CBI had initially alleged that Karti received Rs 1 million as a bribe for facilitating the FIPB clearance to INX Media. It had later revised the figure to $1 million (about Rs 65 million at the current exchange rate and Rs 45 million in 2007).

The fresh evidence in the case, which triggered Karti's arrest, was based on a statement of Indrani Mukerjea, former director of INX Media (P) Ltd, who recorded it under Section 164 of the CrPC before a magistrate on February 17. Indrani is currently lodged in a Mumbai prison in connection with the case of murder of her daughter Sheena Bora.

The high court had on March 9 directed the Enforcement Directorate not to arrest or take any coercive action against Karti in the money laundering case lodged by the agency. The protection was later extended by the court till March 22. Subsequently, the Supreme Court had transferred the ED case to it.Union minister Vijay Goel will meet key opposition leaders at their residence in an effort to break the logjam in Parliament, which has been paralysed for 14 days due to protests by various parties.

The government is willing for a discussion on no-confidence motions against it and enjoys a strong majority in the Lok Sabha, Goel, who is Minister of State for Parliamentary Affairs, said on Thursday, wondering why the opposition leaders were debating on television and not in the House.

Goel said he will be visiting key leaders of opposition parties, including the Congress, AIADMK, TDP and TRS, to persuade them to call of their protests, which have resulted in a washout of Parliament's proceedings since March 5 when it met after a recess to continue the Budget session.

At a press conference, Goel noted that over Rs 250,000 is spent per minute in running Parliament, and asked opposition parties to raise their issues and debate them in the two Houses.

The second leg of the Budget Session is of 23 days and all 14 days so far have been wasted, Goel said.

"I have been meeting opposition leaders in Parliament and will now visit their homes to persuade them to call off their protests and start discussion on their issues" in the two Houses, he said.

On issues like the PNB scam, the government has more to tell the people than the opposition, he claimed and said the Modi government has been an honest dispensation which has worked against corruption.

"Parliament is meant for debate. It is sad that opposition leaders can debate outside and on TV channels but not in Parliament. It is also strange for some of them to keep protesting in the Well of the two Houses and then say that it is the government's job to run them," he said.

Arjun Ram Meghwal, who is also a junior minister for parliamentary affairs, said it is difficult for the Speaker to take up notices for no-confidence motions as long as members are present in the Well as she is required to do a head-count of members supporting the notices.

The Telugu Desam Party (TDP) and the YSR Congress have given notices for no confidence motion against the government following the Centre's stand that it cannot provide special category status to Andhra Pradesh.

Several parties have been protesting in the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha over various of issues such as banking scam, Cauvery board, special status to Andhra Pradesh and quota hike, leading to daily adjournments.

A large number of bills, including on triple talaq, whistleblower protection and OBC Commission, are pending in Parliament. The Lok Sabha passed the crucial Finance Bill without any discussion. A couple of other bills have also been pushed in the two houses amid the din.With the Union Cabinet approving the Ayushman Bharat health insurance scheme, the plan is to get into testing by July to assess the systems in place. Health Minister J P Nadda said it would be launched pan-India at one go. The prime minister is expected, though there is no official word, to announce the launch in his August 15 speech.

By April, operational guidelines for the scheme will be finalised and shared with states. Nadda said the Centres share will be Rs 100 billion for two years. The allocation will include premium payment for the coverage and logistics such as ...Congress president Rahul Gandhi today termed Janata Dal (Secular) as "B team" of BJP and said his party would win the coming Karnataka assembly polls 2018. "JDS people, they have only one work do, (they are) BJP's B team. They have decided, let whatever happens, let whatever needs to be done...make BJP win," Gandhi said.

Addressing a rally here in the Lok Sabha constituency of former prime minister and JDS supremo H D Deve Gowda, he said "they (JDS) are supporting BJP from behind. They feel that people of Karnataka will not come to know and they can't understand." Gandhi was on his third round of election campaign in poll bound Karnataka.

The Congress president said "In Karnataka only one party is going to win, its name is Congress party. " "Let RSS' A team, B team, C team, D team, E team join hands, it makes no difference, Congress is going to win," he added.

Assembly elections 2018 are expected to be held in Karnataka in April/May.

JDS and BJP had earlier joined hands to form a coalition government in Karnataka in 2006, with Deve Gowda's son H D Kumaraswamy as Chief Minister and current state BJP chief B S Yeddyurappa as his deputy.

The congress president claimed that his party believes in taking together the poor, dalits, advasis, backward communities and downtrodden.

"On the other side, there are other parties that want to give away entire money of Karnataka to the rich," he said.

He also asked the people to choose between the party that has given transparent government in Karnataka for the last five years and parties that are involved in corruption.

(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.)Now with less than two months to go for the assembly elections, Bengaluru and Karnataka are truly in campaign and election mode. The state has already seen multiple tours by PM Modi, Rahul Gandhi, Amit Shah and other bigwigs from all across the political spectrum. JD(S) has already declared their first list of candidates with 126 names.

Congress and the BJP are expected to release their first list shortly, by end of March or in the first week of April. Hectic lobbying to secure a party ticket in underway in all camps. It is widely expected that all the parties will give tickets to younger and ...Karnataka Water Resources Minister M B Patil today claimed the phones used by him and his family members are being tapped and feared there would be Income Tax raids against him before the model code of conduct for the Karnataka assembly polls 2018 comes into force.

"My phone is being tapped. Not only mine, also that of my son, mywife, people around me, my organizations. The phones of 10 to 12 people around me were tapped" Patil claimed.

He told reporters at Vijayapura in North Karnataka that he received this information yesterday and this morning.

"Anytime before the model code of conduct comes into force, there will be an IT raid againstme within eight to 10 days," he claimed.

He added that he had information on the IT raidfrom "very reliable" officials.

"Preparations areon for an IT raid on me. Let them do it," he said.

Patil had made similar claims following IT raids on properties linked to Karnataka Power Minister D K Shivakumar last year.

Karnataka Home Minister Ramalinga Reddy had in January accused the BJP-led government at the Centre oftapping the phones of Congress leaders 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 Union Cabinet, chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, on Wednesday approved the inclusion of the communities 'Parivara' and 'Talawara' in the list of Scheduled Tribes (STs) in Karnataka.

"This will fulfil the long term demand of 'Parivara' and Talawara' communities for granting Scheduled Tribes status in Karnataka," said an official statement, adding that members of these communities will now be eligible to get the ST certificate from the state and be eligible for all benefits meant for the ST in the state.

For Karnataka assembly elections 2018, the Karnataka government had recommended the two's inclusion as synonyms of 'Nayaka' appearing at SI. No. 38 in the list of Scheduled Tribes 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.)Criticising the Congress for changing its stand on granting religious status to Veerashaiva-Lingayats, former prime minister H D Deve Gowda today said the party can go to any extent to win elections.

"We do not know if the move would be fruitful or not. But the previous Congress government was opposed to the demand of Lingayats. Now they have accepted it. They can go to any extent to win elections," the Janata Dal (Secular) president said, adding that his party has maintained a neutral stand on the issue.

On the BSP-JD(S) alliance, he said both the parties would benefit from joining hands in the upcoming Karnataka polls 2018.

When asked if his party will support the no-confidence motion notices by two Andhra Pradesh parties, he said "let it come for discussion and then we shall take a stand... . It should be done by major parties having good strength in Parliament."



The JD(S) has two members in the Lok Sabha.

(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.)Bengaluru: People belongs to Veershaiva Community protesting against the Separate Lingayat religion, which was approved by Karnataka Government in Kalburgi. Flie Photo: PTI

Karnataka BJP chief B S Yeddyurappa today said the state government's move to grant religious minority status to the Veerashaiva-Lingayat community was a "election gimmick" and accused Chief Minister Siddaramaiah of dividing people on emotional issues.

Yeddyurappa is a Lingayat strongman and BJP's chief ministerial candidate for the coming Karnataka Assembly polls 2018.

He also sought to know the need to rake up the issue of minority tag when the UPA government had rejected the separate religious status to Lingayats.

"Siddaramaiah is dividing society on emotional issues. There is not just one Lingayat-Veerashaiva...The move to give religion tag to Lingayats is an election gimmick. It is an attempt to mislead people," Yeddyurappa told reporters here.

The state BJP chief clarified his party's stand on thecontentious issue, saying the decision taken by the AkhilBharat Veerashaiva Mahasabha would be binding on it.

Seeking to know whether Siddaramaiah can fulfil the demands of various communities, Yeddyurappa asked what his objectives were.

"Many communities have various demands. Can we fulfil all of them? What is your objective? What else other than sowing the seed of hatred between various castes? If you were really concerned, you could have said that we will stick to the decision taken by Veerashaiva Mahasabha," he asked



"Siddaramaiah is an example of how low one can stoop just for political gains," Yeddyurappa said.

In a move with major electoral ramifications ahead of the Assembly elections, the Karnataka Cabinet on Monday decided to recommend to the Centre grant of religious minority tag to Lingayat and Veerashaiva Lingayat community, who follow the philosophy of 12th century social reformer Basaveshwara.

On Congress president Rahul Gandhi's ongoing public rallies in different parts of Karnataka, Yeddyurappa said he has a track record of losing an election wherever he goes.

Yeddyurappa exuded confidence that BJP would garner more than 140 of the 224 seats in the Assembly, in the coming polls.

(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.)Big internet companies and small software developers alike are likely to face scrutiny over how they share customer information in the wake of the scandal involving Facebook Inc and the British election consulting firm Cambridge Analytica. Lawmakers in the United States and the EU have called for probes into how Facebook allowed Cambridge Analytica to access data on 50 million users and use it to help the election campaign of President Donald Trump. Facebook shares have fallen 8.5 percent this week as investors fear the incident will lead to new regulation. The scrutiny and the ...British consumer goods group Reckitt Benckiser has pulled out of talks to buy Pfizers consumer healthcare business, strengthening rival bidder GlaxoSmithKlines hand. Reckitt dropped out on Wednesday as the US drug company was fielding binding offers for the unit. Sources familiar with the matter said British drugmaker GSK was working on an offer. Reckitt said its proposal had only been for part of the Pfizer business, without giving further details. One person familiar with the matter said the company had been most interested in the painkiller Advil. It is ...The Delhi High Court on Thursday received a letter petition containing a CD, which is stated to be Congress leader Sajjan Kumar's confession about accepting his role in instigating the anti-Sikh riots in 1984.

The court issued a notice to the Kumar, asking him to file a reply to the same.

The petitioner Delhi Sikh Gurudwara Management Committee had written to the Delhi HC, where they stated that Kumar had accepted his role in the 1984-anti Sikh riots, in an interview.

The court also issued a notice to the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) in this regard.

The matter will be heard on April 12.

Earlier on February 15, the Delhi Sikh Gurudwara Management Committee submitted two CDs against Congress leader Jagdish Tytler, another accused in the case.

According to official records, about 2,800 Sikhs were killed across India, including 2,100 in Delhi, during the pogrom that broke out after the then prime minister Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Indian Air Force (IAF) chief Birender Singh Dhanoa asserted on Thursday that the IAF was on a "strong wicket" vis-a-vis China.

The air chief marshal's statement comes days after Indian Army chief voiced concerns about China's military buildup in the Doklam region, where the troops of the two nations were engaged in a stand-off for over two months last year.

"The air force is on a strong wicket against China. Whatever requirements are there from the budget, have been sent to the government," Dhanoa said while addressing a press conference here.

Recently, Chinese President Xi Jinping, while addressing the 13th People's Congress, had said that China would not cede a "single inch of land".

He also heaped praises on the Chinese military forces, saying that they were the 'stepping stones' in building a strong China.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)In what can be seen as a boost to India-Israel ties, the state-run carrier airline, Air India on Thursday inaugurated its direct flight service between New Delhi and Tel Aviv.

Air India Chairman Pradeep Singh Kharola and the Director of Israel Ministry of Tourism (IMOT) Hassan Madah began this new chapter by cutting a cake at the inauguration ceremony.

The move is said to boost Israel's tourism industry.

The inaugural Tel Aviv-bound flight AI139 took off at 6:00 p.m. The return flight will depart from Tel Aviv at 11:15 p.m. and reach the capital at 10:00 a.m. the next day. However, from April 1, AI139 will depart from Delhi at 4:50 p.m. and reach Tel Aviv at 9:45 p.m., while the return flight will leave Tel Aviv at 11:15 p.m. to reach Delhi at 9:00 a.m. the next day (Indian Standard Time).

This is also the first flight that will fly over Saudi Arabia covering a shorter route that will save three hours, to complete the journey in mere seven hours.

It may be noted that Israel's carrier, El Al, operates direct flights between Tel Aviv and Mumbai.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)At least 27 militants have been killed and ten others wounded in the airstrikes carried out by the Afghan Air Force in northern Faryab province of Afghanistan.

Tolo News quoted the 209th Shaheen Corps of the Afghan Military as saying that the airstrikes were conducted in the vicinities of Pashtun Kot and Andkhoi districts.

The Shaheen Corps further said that several weapons, ammunition, and explosives were also destroyed in the airstrikes.

No insurgent group has commented on the incident so far.

This comes as the Afghan armed forces are busy conducting counter-terrorism operations in certain northern provinces as the militant and terrorist groups are attempting to expand their insurgency activities in the north.

Earlier this week, at least 13 militants belonging to the Taliban insurgent group were killed in an airstrike carried out by the United States in Southern Kandahar province of Afghanistan.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Supreme Court will on Friday continue to hear the final arguments in the Babri Masjid-Ram Janmabhoomi case.

The court will hear 13 appeals filed against the 2010 judgment of the Allahabad High Court in four civil suits. The petitions challenge the high court verdict that mandated a three-way division of the disputed 2.77-acre site in Ayodhya.

The court earlier dismissed all 32 intervention petitions, including applications of Shyam Benegal, Aparna Sen and Teesta Setalvad, in the dispute case.

A Bench comprising Chief Justice Dipak Misra and Justices Ashok Bhushan and Abdul Nazeer had also directed the registry not to entertain any intervention application in the Ayodhya case.

The Supreme Court also rejected the intervention plea of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Subramanian Swamy in the dispute, a century-old point of the tussle between Hindus and Muslims.

The Babri Masjid, built by Mughal emperor Babur in Ayodhya in 1528, was on December 6, 1992, demolished by Hindu Karsevaks in Ayodhya, following which 2000 people were killed in massive riots in Uttar Pradesh.

The Hindus, however, claim that a Ram temple that originally stood there was demolished to construct the mosque.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A hospital in the Chinese capital of Beijing will be soon using Artificial Intelligence (AI), in an effort to address the shortage of doctors and to make their workload more manageable.

The hospital will start running all its lung scans through an algorithm that can help to speed up the screening process from next month.

The software can quickly spot nodules and other early signs of lung diseases. It was developed by a Beijing-based startup called PereDoc.

The Beijing hospital that will start feeding its lung scans to PereDoc's software from April will treat about 10,000 outpatients every single day. This will effectively help to manage the heavy workload of the doctors.

AI is already used in the field of medicine as it helps to examine medical scans and spot signs of diabetes seamlessly without any human interference.

According to MIT's (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) review, China has been beefing up its healthcare facilities with AI tools as part of its nationwide AI push, to address the shortage of doctors in its hospitals.

There are only 1.5 doctors for every 1,000 people in the country, compared with 2.5 for every thousand in the United States. A recent IDC (International Data Corporation) report underlined that China's health market for AI healthcare services could be as big as USD 930 million by 2022, according to Engadget.

Chinese researchers are already developing various AI tools for medicine, including one that can design dentures and another that can analyze ultrasound data to detect blood clots caused by lymphoma treatment.

PereDoc has developed its software with help from 180 hospitals in China that serve as its research collaborators.

It has already installed its software in 20 hospitals in China. However, if most hospitals face a situation as compared to the Beijing hospital, then it will probably make its way to more in the future.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Chinese President Xi Jinping's statement that Beijing is ready to fight the bloody battle against its enemies for its position in the shows the country is present in Pakistan to loot resources, a Baloch activist said.

Baloch political activist Munir Mengal said it was clear from Xi's remarks while addressing the National People's Congress (NPC) that Chinese only believed in manipulating people.

The Baloch Voice Association President said the people of China were not ready to give anything to anyone but wanted to loot, subjugate and dominate other countries.

The Chinese President had in a speech after becoming the President of the country without any term limit said China was not ready to give an inch of its territory to anyone.

The activist said Pakistan was a victim of Chinese expansion in the name of China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) from Gilgit Baltistan to Gwadar Port.

Mengal said the country had military designs and not economic ones. "It is very clear that they are going to build a naval base there. The Chinese military is in Pakistan in the name of security of the country's people."

The activist said the day was not far when China would threaten even the West as it dominates Pakistan.

The activist said the Chinese people were trying to give a message that it had not come for infrastructure development of Pakistan, but will many other dangerous aims.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Telugu Desam Party (TDP) parliamentarian Shiva Prasad on Thursday dressed as a Swachh Bharat worker with a wiper in his hands and protested against denial of special category status to Andhra Pradesh, here at the Parliament premises.

Prasad and some of his party members called the Centre's treatment of Andhra Pradesh and its chief minister Chandrababu Naidu "wrong and unfair".

He has been protesting in various costumes outside the parliament in connection with the same matter.

On Monday, the MP was seen dressed as a woman in a yellow sari and accused Narendra Modi of cheating the women of Andhra.

Last week, Prasad wore shorts and carried a ruler with a notebook and said PM Modi has been the "bad student of the class".

A doctor by profession, Shiva Prasad has acted in movies too. He became a lawmaker in 1999 and has served in Chandrababu Naidu's cabinet as a minister.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)At least 9,50,452 drought-hit farmers will get compensation in a special programme initiated by Chhattisgarh Chief Minister Raman Singh, a statement said on Wednesday.

Compensation of as much as Rs 609.70 crore will be provided to farmers from 21 out of 27 districts in the state after the Chief Minister directed district collectors to remunerate those affected, the statement said.

The Chief Minister instructed the concerned officials to make sure that no drought-hit farmer is left without compensation.

An official said as many as Rs 16,30,00,000 has been given in compensation to 20, 943 farmers in Raipur.

Last year, after 96 sub-divisions were hit by drought in the state, the Raman Singh-led government had sanctioned a sum of Rs 546 crore to compensate farmers.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Ministry of Defence on Thursday issued an order that educational concession will continue without the cap of Rs. 10,000 per month for the children of armed forces officers, Personnel Below Officer Rank (PBORs) who are missing, disabled or killed in action.

This move comes as a major relief to the families of soldiers after Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman today took to Twitter by coming out in support of armed forces officers.

Sitharaman posted a statement stating that, "The educational concession will be admissible only for undertaking studies in government/government-aided schools/educational institutes/military /Sainik schools and other schools or colleges recognised by the central or state governments, including autonomous organisations financed entirely by the central/state governments". (sic)

According to media reports, the concession will also include clothes, books and other supplies apart from the tuition fees.

In February, the defence ministry had requested the finance ministry to remove the cap of Rs 10,000 per month on educational assistance.

On July 1, 2017, the government issued an order saying the assistance under the scheme cannot exceed Rs 10,000 per month, triggering widespread discontent among all the three services.

The educational concession came into force after the 1971 Bangladesh liberation war. It was later extended to children of officers and soldiers killed or disabled in Operation Meghdoot (Siachen-Saltoro Ridge) and Operation Pawan (IPKF in Sri Lanka) as well as in counter-insurgency operations.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy has been released from police custody, after two days of questioning over allegations that he received millions of euros in illegal election campaign funding from late Libyan leader Col Muammar Gaddafi.

"Nicolas Sarkozy is no longer in custody," local media reported quoting a source close to the case.

The source, however, did not say whether the 63-year-old ex-president had been cleared of suspicion or still faced possible charges.

Sarkozy, who was France's right-wing president from 2007 to 2012, was questioned by prosecutors specialising in corruption, money laundering and tax evasion at their office in the Parisian suburb of Nanterre.

He is said to have accepted 50m from Muammar Gaddafi's regime, claims which have been repeated by the late Libyan dictator's son and French businessman Ziad Takieddine, according to Sky News.

Sarkozy and his campaign manager have repeatedly denied accepting money from Libya.

According to Le Monde, this is the first time Sarkozy has been questioned in relation to this investigation, which was opened in April 2013.

Sarkozy has already been ordered to stand trial in a separate case, concerning the financing of his 2012 re-election campaign, when he lost to Francois Hollande.

He attempted to stage a comeback for the 2017 election, but failed to convince the voters in his own party to support him and had to concede to Francois Fillon and Alain Juppe.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Following External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj informed that 39 Indians, abducted in 2014 in Iraq's Mosul city were killed, France on Thursday offers its condolences to victims' families and to Indian authorities.

Swaraj on Tuesday told Parliament in New Delhi that the 39 Indians kidnapped in 2014 by the Islamic State (ISIS) terrorists in Mosul city were killed.

In a statement, France said, "France pays tribute to the investigation carried out with Iraqi authorities that made it possible to establish the truth about the fate of these victims of terrorism".

"We stand with its Indian and Iraqi partners in the fight against terrorism and for peace and stability," the statement added.

Further talking over India and France strategic partnership, the statement added that President Emmanuel Macron's visit to India has strengthened their relationship.

"France President Emmanuel Macron's visit to India on March 9 to 12 helped strengthen our strategic partnership with India to meet the challenges of collective security and to reaffirm the importance of bilateral cooperation in the fight against terrorism.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Google Doodle, on Thursday, honoured Japanese scientist Katsuko Saruhashi on what would have been her 98th birthday.

Born in Tokyo in 1920, Dr Saruhashi is renowned for her groundbreaking research as a geochemist.

She pursued a hugely successful career in geochemistry at a time when women rarely made headlines in the field.

"There are many women who have the ability to become great scientists. I would like to see the day when women can contribute to & technology on an equal footing with men," she once said.

Saruhashi developed methodology to accurately determine the carbonic acid substances in natural waters based on water temperature, pH level and chlorinity. The measurements could be made with the help of "Saruhashi's Table," which served oceanographers for three decades before being replaced by computers.

"Today on her 98th birthday, we pay tribute to Dr Katsuko Saruhashi for her incredible contributions to science, and for inspiring young scientists everywhere to succeed," wrote Google in its blog.

"A young Katsuko Saruhashi sat in primary school watching raindrops slide down a window and wondered what made it rain. Her journey for answers led her to become the first woman to earn a doctorate in chemistry from the University of Tokyo in 1957," it added.

Saruhashi passed away on September 29, 2007, at the age of 87 of pneumonia at her home in Tokyo.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Congress president Rahul Gandhi said on Thursday that the Bharatiya Janata Party-led central government was trying to invent a story by linking Congress with data theft to divert people's attention from the Indians killed by Islamic State in Iraq.

"Problem: 39 Indians dead; Govt on the mat, caught lying.

Solution: Invent story on Congress & Data Theft.

Result: Media networks bite bait; 39 Indians vanish from radar.

Problem solved." Gandhi wrote on Twitter.

Gandhi's stern message comes after Union Minister of Information Technology Ravi Shankar Prasad on Wednesday accused the Congress of having links with data analytics firm, Cambridge Analytica (CA).

Britain's Channel 4 has alleged that New York-based data analytics firm CA had harvested private data of Facebook users to influence elections in several countries in 2014, the year India went to the polls.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Prime Minister Modi spoke to President Xi Jinping on Tuesday over telephone. Both leaders agreed that as two major powers growing rapidly, bilateral relations between India and China are vital for the realisation of 21st Century as the 'Asian Century'. They also agreed to continue their close consultations on regional and international issues of mutual interest.

China's Parliament re-elected Jinping as country's president and also chairman of Central Military Commission of the People's Republic of China on Saturday, making way for his second term in the office.

Khrimey urged New Delhi to press the Chinese leadership to resume dialogue with the 14th Dalai Lama and arrive at a respective solution to the Tibet issue.

"The IT age has turned the world into a global village to facilitate any community to grow," he said, adding "close ties between New Delhi and Beijing would not only justify 'United we stand and divided we fall' adage true, but also ensure that both nations would benefit from bilateral trade, tourism and cultural ties. Unity and amity between India and China, both super powers in South East Asia, could change the face of the world, he said with conviction."

The CGTC, the apex body of Tibet support groups in India, had begun a 11-day relay foot march from Chuthangmo to Tezpur on March 17 to pray for the long life of the Dalai Lama to allow him to continue to spread his message of peace and prosperity as symbol of peace across the world, as also to commemorate the 60th anniversary year of his journey from Tibet to India in March 1959. The objective of the march was to send a message that communal harmony is the only panacea to facilitate peace to rule in today's strife-torn world.

By Pradeep Kumar

.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The makers of Punjabi film, 'Subedar Joginder Singh' has taken to an interesting marketing initiative - they are going to launch a new song for the flick at the Times Square, New York.

Scheduled on March 24, the song is titled 'Ishq Da Tara' and is expected to show glimpses of 50-year older era in Punjab.

Taran Adarsh, a trade analyst and an Indian film critic, tweeted, "Fantastic marketing initiative... Makers of Punjabi film #SubedarJoginderSingh will launch the new track from the film - #IshqDaTara - at Times Square, New York on 24 March 2018... Stars Gippy Grewal... 6 April 2018 release".

The regional film stars Gippy Grewal and is produced by Seven Colours Motion Picture. It is slated to hit the theaters on April 6.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Students of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) staged a protest against professors Mahendra P Lama, and Rajesh Kharat leveling allegations of sexual harassment against them. The students demanded that they should be arrested.

Recently, JNU's another professor Atul Johri was arrested in a sexual harassment case and was later granted bail.

A student of JNU filed a case against Lama and Kharat, who work in the Centre of South Asian Studies of JNU. The professors allegedly took the student to China for work and tried to harass her sexually.

She asked the Internal Complaint Committee of JNU to suspend the professor. However, no step been taken against him as yet.

Both the professors were arrested by the Police on the basis of the complaint registered by the victim but were later granted bail. The varsity authority has not taken an action against them since then.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Lieutenant governor of Puducherry Kiran Bedi hailed the Madras High Court's decision of accepting the appointment of three members of the Puducherry legislative assembly.

"It strengthens democracy, it strengthens and increases the presence in the Legislative Assembly. It also encourages more debate", Kiran Bedi said.

The Madras High Court on Thursday upheld the appointment of three MLA, declaring the nominations to be valid.

The first bench of the High Court had passed a ruling saying as per Section 14(3) of the Union Territories Act the jurisdiction of a Union Territory lies with the Central Government and even the public does not have the right to stand against them.

3 MLAs- namely V. Saminathan, President of the Puducherry BJP unit, party Treasurer K.G. Shankar and educationist S. Selva Ganapathy- were nominated by the Lt. Governor of Puducherry Kiran Bedi in 2017.

The nominations were later challenged in the High Court by MLA Dhanalakshmi Narayan on the grounds that the appointments were done without consulting the Chief Minister of Puducherry.

As per advocate Ravichandran, who represented MLA Dhanalakshmi Narayan, the nominations were challenged to be invalid as no consultative process was followed by the Council of Ministers as per Section 44 of the Union Territories Act.

"My client who is a public under-secretary filed a requisition in the public interest. In accordance with the Union Territories 1963 Act (the), Central government has to read as the representative of India. She filed that the appointing authorities only represent India with respect to Union Territory as the Govt. of India and the public does not have the right to stand against them." Ravichandran told ANI.

On the other hand Lawyer, V Venkatesh who represented the Union Government, said that as per the ruling by the High Court the Lieutenant Governor of a Union Territory has the right to nominate the MLAs in their state.

"In the matter, I stand for the Ministry of Home Affairs. Two requisitions were filed by MLA Lakshmi Narayan and another woman. They were dismissed and the nominations have been declared as invalid by the Chief Justice and Justice MN Sundaram as per Govt. of Union Territories Act 1963 239 and 239 (a) Sec 333. The acts say the administrator or the Lieutenant Governor has the power to nominate and also administer the oath", Venkatesh told ANI.

Earlier in 2017, Lieutenant Governor Kiran Bedi had defended herself by saying that the three MLAs were nominated and administered the oath as per the law and blamed Puducherry Chief Minister V Narayanasamy for launching a misleading campaign over it.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Kodavas don't want to be a part of Karnataka, said Codava Council President N.U. Nachappa said on Thursday.

He also said the Kodava community does not want separate religion, but linguistic minority and tribal status.

Talking to ANI, Nachappa said on Thursday, "We don't want separate religion or to go out of India. We will be with Indian union and abide by our Constitution. We respect sovereignty and integrity of our nation, but we don't want to be a part of Karnataka."

He said that senior Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader Subramanian Swamy has also favoured autonomous status to Kodagu.

"As per his promise on the Kodava Day, Senior economist Subramanian Swamy has already moved a private member bill in the Parliament in this regard. Congress leader B.K. Hariprasad also moved and debated a private member bill in the Parliament regarding the inclusion of Kodava language in the eighth schedule of the Constitution," Nachappa said.

He exhorted Prime Minister Narendra Modi to bypass Karnataka government and declare Kodavas as tribes.

Madikeri Kodava Samaja President Mathanda M. Chengappa said, "There is little difference between Lingayats and Kodavas. Kodavas are a separate caste. Most of the Kodavas have embraced Hinduism from time immemorial. Our history is thousands and thousands year old. We are the locals of this place. We want separate linguistic minority status."

A linguistic minority is a group or class of people, whose mother tongue is different from the majority of the people in the state or part of the state.

He added that other than being a linguistic minority, Kodava is a race by itself therefore we want a tribal status for ourselves.

"It is our birthright to put forward these demands and it is the duty of the government and the concerned communities to fulfill it. There is a special mention of the Kodava community in the British Gazetteer, wherein the Kodava community has been given a special status to carry a gun without a license," Chengappa said.

Chinnappa Devaiah, a member of the Codava Council, said Kodavas belong to a tribal community, which is being suppressed.

"We are suppressed by the government as well as the major communities, be it in the field of education, employment. We are not being given any reservation or special category and status, even though we are entitled to," Devaiah said.

He demanded the government to grant the community tribal status and some sort of reservation.

Another Kodava Movement Member, KS Devaiah told ANI, "We are demanding a linguistic minority status, which is very essential for our community's survival and our political rights".

Saraswati, a Kodava Movement Member, told ANI, "We Kodavas belong to a particular race. Actually we are living in high latitude and called tribes. We belong to Hinduism and don't have a separate religion. We want linguistic reservation."

The Kodavas are a martial race from the small, coffee growing district of Kodagu in southern part of Karnataka. Their total population is less than 1.5 lakh and they speak 'Kodava Thak' language.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Bollywood actor, Kriti Sanon, who has been basking in the success of her last release, 'Bareilly Ki Barf'i, will now be seen in 'Housefull 4'.

'Housefull 4' marks lot of firsts for Kriti, be it by making her debut in the genre of pure comedy or a maiden role in a franchise.

With the flick, she will be reuniting with her mentor Sajid Nadiadwala for the second time, after her debut film 'Heropanti'.

While talking about the film, the 27-year-old star shared, "Joining the cast of Housefull 4 is like coming back home. My journey started with Sajid sir in Heropanti. Since then, he has always been there for me and has guided me. I can't wait to work with him again and that too, in the super-successful Housefull franchise!"

Starring Akshay Kumar, Bobby Deol and Riteish Deshmukh, the team is gearing up to make Diwali 2019 a bumper celebration.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A farmer in Aurangabad city of Maharashtra on Wednesday got Rs 1 lakh in compensation after he destroyed his crop for not getting good revenue of his product in the market.

Prem Singh Chouhan received financial assistance from Shiv Sena chief Uddhav Thackeray in Mumbai.

This comes after the recent march by farmers from Nashik to Mumbai as the state government did not fulfil their demands, including loan waiver and appropriate rates for their crops in the market.

The Shiv Sena had assured to fulfil all their demands.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)One after the other, the countries around India are falling prey to China's predatory economics.

After Pakistan and Sri Lanka, Maldives has become the latest victim of it, according to US-based think tank Atlantic Council's analysts.

India has always enjoyed a special relationship with the island country. Both got freedom from The Great Britain and the former helped the latter in rebuilding its economy.

But this is now changing, as China is ferociously diminishing India's sphere of influence in the Maldives.

The red dragon with its economic might is using debt-trap to create dependent states in the Indian Ocean region.

In the Maldives, where China did not even have an embassy until 2012, is now receiving large-scale investments from the Asian giant, Robert A. Manning and Bharath Gopalaswamy write in the Foreign Policy.

To begin with, Xi Jinping's regime is upgrading an airport in the client country at a cost of $830 million. The project also includes a 1.3-mile bridge to link the airport island with the capital and this alone costs $400 million.

The Chinese are also building a 25-storey apartment complex and a hospital.

According to the opposition parties, with such investment projects, the tiny nation of just over 4 lakh people now has accumulated a huge debt and has to pay $92 million a year in payments to China, roughly 10 percent of the entire budget.

The Maldives archipelago has also "leased the uninhabited island Feydhoo Finolhu for tourism use for 50 years," according to the Asia Times.

It is by using this debt-for-leverage model, China is finishing India's influence in the Maldives.

"Debt-for-leverage model is based on providing Chinese financial support for infrastructure projects in exchange for access to the natural resources of the beneficiary nation," the two analysts quoted Brahma Chellaney, a professor at the New Delhi-based Centre for Policy Research, as saying.

The two further opines that "Maldives is on the verge of conceding its sovereignty to Beijing as a direct consequence of Chinese business taking advantage of the economic opportunities."

To back their observation, they have highlighted President Abdulla Yameen's, who has declared emergency in the country, Chinese connection.

Opposition leaders have accused the president of allowing Chinese to grab 16 islands and inflating the costs for personal gains.

"In addition, during a meeting in early December with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Yameen signed a free trade agreement, which he rammed through parliament, allowing legislators only one day to approve it," the two analysts write in the article.

And, it is this connection that led to protests against Yameen, who declared a state of emergency last month and ordered arrest of Supreme Court judges after they ruled for the release of opposition politicians.

Yameen has also caught U.S. attention after Maldivian tankers, according to Japan, have been found secretly transferring goods to North Korean-flagged ships, in grotesque violation of U.N. Security Council sanctions.

Concluding by pointing out that the recent internal crisis has stifled the tourist-dependent Maldivian economy, the two analysts write that with China using its debt dependency model has initiated a Great Game, the only difference is, it is now being played in the Indo-Pacific region, as opposed to in the Central Asia.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)As part of its enhanced public diplomacy outreach and commitment to take the objectives of India's foreign policy to the people at the grass-root level, the External Publicity and Public Diplomacy Division of the Ministry of External Affairs on Thursday launched an initiative titled 'Videsh Aaya Pradesh ke Dwaar' in Hyderabad.

The initiative involves MEA's engagement with the regional media based in different cities across India who have carved their own space and have a unique and wide readership profile.

Through the direct interaction with the local media, the Ministry desires to communicate India's foreign policy priorities in simple terms, highlight the benefits accruing to the common people through its diplomatic efforts and bring the domain of foreign policy closer to the people.

It is also intended to create a pool of media professionals interested in foreign policy and guide them in connecting with the MEA.

The initiative was launched in Hyderabad, a key center for Telugu and Urdu media, by Raveesh Kumar, Official Spokesperson and Joint Secretary (External Publicity) of the Ministry of External Affairs.

To bring a topic of interest to the local media, Nagendra Prasad, Joint Secretary (Gulf) in MEA and a native Telugu speaker, gave a brief presentation about India's relations with the Gulf. A general presentation about the functioning of the MEA was also made.

The event was attended by around 40 Editors and representatives from the main media organisations based in Hyderabad.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Former senior superintendent of police (SSP) of Malir's district in Pakistan Rao Anwar, who is accused in the extrajudicial killing of Naqeebullah Mehsud, was arrested on Thursday when he appeared before the Supreme Court.

According to the Dawn, Anwar, who was eluding law enforcement agencies for over a month, appeared before the court today.

His appearance came after the court had warned on Monday that stringent action would be taken against those providing shelter to Anwar.

Yesterday, a three-judge bench hearing the suo motu case against Mehsud's murder, Chief Justice Mian Saqib Nisar ordered police to arrest Anwar.

"Take Rao Anwar into custody," Nisar said after rejecting his request for protective bail.

Earlier on February 1, Nisar had questioned Sindh Inspector General of Police (IGP) A.D. Khowaja for not being able to arrest Anwar.

An inquiry committee found Anwar guilty of committing the crime.

The team, in its report, cited eyewitness' accounts and said Naqeebullah was 'picked up', along with two others on the suspicion of their linkage with terrorist groups on January 3 by security personnel and taken to the Sachal Police Post before being moved to another location.

Rao Anwar and other officers are in the dock for killing at least four men, during what they claimed was a raid on a suspected Taliban hideout in Karachi.

Relatives of Naqeebullah from South Waziristan tribal district rejected claims of him having militant links and maintained that he was an aspiring model who had been a resident of Karachi since 2008.

They added that Naqeebullah was looking for a job and had been running a shop in the city.

His killing evoked a national outcry and triggered protest rallies in several cities.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Underlining its exponential growth in the fintech space Qbera, a leading digital lending platform on Thursday announced disbursing loans amount worth Rs. 30 crore to over 2,000 customers, till date.

With an average ticket size of Rs. 1.6 lakh, Qbera currently disburses Rs. 4 crore worth of credit each month, registering revenue of Rs. 1 crore in the previous year.

The company aims to breach the Rs. 200-crore mark by the end of the 2018-19 financial year.

"We are delighted about having originated more than Rs. 30 crores of loans through our partner financial institutions - an achievement that further consolidates our position as one of the emerging and fast-growing consumer digital lending players in India. Moreover, it also drives us to reach out to more consumers across various segments and geographies who have traditionally been excluded from the financial system and are in need of credit - predominantly salaried individuals working for over 7,00,000 employers with middle-incomes," said founder and CEO Qbera, Aditya Kumar.

What sets Qbera aside from other players is also the quality of the portfolio, with an aggregate delinquency rate of less than 0.5 percent to date. It is for this reason that Qbera is able to forge selective, best-in-class partnerships with leading financial institutions and create fast, frictionless and fair financial products for delivery to this large, underserved-yet-creditworthy segment.

"By expanding our reach, we aim to provide relief to this neglected and under-served section of salaried individuals in the country, leveraging our cutting-edge technology to provide them access to a gamut of financial services that they need in partnership with leading financial institutions," added Kumar.

Qbera currently operates in cities such as Bangalore, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Delhi/NCR, and Chennai, with over 1 lakh applications processed so far.

In addition, it plans to expand its presence across tier II cities such as Ahmadabad, Jaipur, Coimbatore, Indore, Lucknow and Surat over the next few months.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Union minister for electronics and IT Ravi Shankar Prasad on Thursday upped the ante against the Congress over its alleged links with the British data analytics company Cambridge Analytica, which is under fire over data breach storm.

Addressing a press briefing here Prasad said that the Congress party has maintained conspicuous silence on their ties with Cambridge Analytica.

"The Congress has maintained conspicuous silence (on their ties with Cambridge Analytica)," he said.

He also alleged that Congress president Rahul Gandhi's social media campaign has also been managed with the help of Cambridge Analytica.

"Rahul Gandhi's entire social media campaign has been managed with the help of Cambridge Analytica and they have had meetings also," he added.

The Union Minister's remark comes after Britain's Channel 4 alleged that the London-based data analytics firm harvested private data of Facebook users to influence elections in several countries including US presidential elections.

Soon after the controversy over Cambridge Analytica's association with Indian political parties broke-out, BJP and Congress accused each other of availing of its services for electoral campaigns.

However, Congress has been refuting the charges, saying that neither the party nor Rahul used the services of Cambridge Analytica.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Yoga Guru Baba Ramdev on Thursday said the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) will never do anything against the country.

He made this remark in response to Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan's statement that the RSS was involved in anti-law activities.

Talking to ANI, Baba Ramdev said, "I have seen the leaders of RSS closely. RSS is not a terrorist or a Naxal organisation. It is a nationalist organisation and it would never do anything against the country."

While speaking in the Kerala Assembly on Wednesday, Vijayan said outfits like RSS and Popular Front of India (PFI) were carrying out illegal drills and arms training.

"PFI and RSS are conducting arms training and such drills are against the laws of the land. We have information that some organisations are carrying out training with sticks even in Devaswom temples," Vijayan said during the question hour in the state assembly.

He informed the Assembly that the government, if needed, would bring in a law to ban drills and arms training being conducted in public and in places of worship.

On the other hand, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has been highlighting murders of BJP and RSS workers in Kerala, which is ruled by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) led Left Democratic Front coalition.

On October 6 last year, BJP president Amit Shah sharply criticised Chief Minister Vijayan for failing to protect Sangh Parivar workers in the state.

"As many as 120 BJP-RSS workers have been murdered in Kerala so far," Shah told the party's Janraksha Yatra, or people's protection march in Kannur district.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Supreme Court on Thursday closed proceedings against Tej Pratap, son of Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) leader Lalu Prasad, in connection with the journalist Rajdeo Ranjan's murder case.

The decision came after Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) gave a clean chit to Pratap, former state cabinet minister, who had figured in the case as one of the accused.

Ranjan, the Siwan bureau chief of Hindi daily Hindustan, was shot dead in May last year. He was gunned down by motorbike-borne criminals near the busy Station Road at Siwan in north Bihar.

Ranjan's widow Asha Ranjan had sought direction for the registration of FIR against RJD leader Shahabuddin and Pratap for "conspiracy and harbouring and sheltering the proclaimed offenders" in the murder case.

The CBI, last year, took custody of Mohammad Shahabuddin, whose name had cropped up as an accused in the investigation.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The YSR Congress Party (YSRCP) and other opposition parties on Thursday called a statewide 'bandh' in Andhra Pradesh demanding special category status for the state.

The protestors also staged highways blockade in the state.

Earlier, Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu also announced to support the blockade citing state interests as the reason.

The Opposition party in Andhra Pradesh has been protesting against the Centre over the non-issuance of special category status to the state.

The ruling TDP, too, reached a deadlock with its ally BJP over this issue and ultimately quit the Democratic Alliance (NDA) coalition on March 16.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The United Kashmir People's National Party (UKPNP) on Thursday extended its condolences to the family of late Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) activist Naheem Bhutt, who died in an incident of Pak-initiated police firing in Kashmir.

UKPNP exiled Chairman Sardar Shaukat Ali Kashmiri extended his support to Late Naheem Bhutt, while demanding to establish peace in Kashmir.

"I extend my support to the grieved family of late Naheem Bhutt and pray her to go to heaven. She spoke against the on-going conflict at Kashmir. She supported the demand for peace in Kashmir. She said that the people of Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (PoK) do not want freedom but are adamant to fight."

He further extended support for the supporters of Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF).

"(Elected Prime Minister of PoK) Naheem Raja Faarooq Haider said, fight for your right, why are you raising the flags for peace. He had a hatred towards peace. I support people who support the demand for peace.I support the JKLF supporters".

Kashmiri, along with former spokesman UKPNP Jamil Maqsood and various other members of the organisation, extended their condolences to Bhutt's family.

They condemned the March 16 incident and the atrocities committed by the Pakistan security forces.

They further demanded the matter to be brought to the notice of Inspector General Police from Pakistan and said to consult the international institutions to expose the role of Pakistan and its Lent officers.

Six people were injured in the March 16 firing, which was carried out on the peace march in Poonch. The march was taken out against the Pakistan-initiated cross-border firings.

Naeem Butt was also injured in the firing and was admitted to an Islamabad hospital.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) on Thursday said that the Nigerian authorities have a duty to ensure the safety of school children especially girls who have been targeted in Boko Haram multiple abductions in the country.

This comes a day after the terrorist organisation Boko Haram freed most of the 110 schoolgirls kidnapped last month in Nigeria.

Anadolu Agency quoted UNICEF spokesperson Eva Hinds as saying in a statement that "We are pleased to see that the girls are back in the safe environment of their families."

Hinds further said that the agency would work with local NGOs to offer medical treatments and psychosocial support for the girls and their families.

"UNICEF reiterates that schools should be safe spaces, and protected at all times. Since the start of the insurgency in 2009, over 2,295 teachers have been killed and 19,000 displaced, and almost 1,400 schools destroyed," it said.

Last month, more than 100 girls went missing after Boko Haram militants attacked their school in northeastern Nigeria.

Boko Haram militants kidnapped nearly 300 girls from a school in Chibok in April 2014, setting off global outrage. Many of the Chibok girls were freed after negotiations, but more than 100 remain in captivity, their whereabouts unknown.

The Boko Haram insurgency began in 2009 when the militants staged an armed rebellion against the government of Nigeria.

Suicide attacks, carried out by the dreaded insurgent group, have claimed more than 20,000 lives and displaced at least two million people, according to Nigerian vice-president Yemi Osinbajo.

The group is also active in the neighbouring countries of Cameroon, Chad, and Niger.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)India's Vice President M. Venkaiah Naidu has wished Nepali Vice President Nanda Bahadur Pun on his re-election and wished to work together to advance Indo-Nepal partnership.

The Indian Mission to Nepal took to Twitter to convey the congratulatory message from Indian Vice President to his Nepali counterpart.

"Vice President of India Shri M. Venkaiah Naidu sends a congratulatory letter to Rt. Hon'ble Mr. Nanda Bahadur Pun felicitatating on his appointment as Vice President of Nepal. Expresses his wish to work together to advance India-Nepal partnership for mutual benefit of the people," the Indian Mission to Nepal tweeted.

Nanda Bahadur Pun retained the post for the second term as the election commission of Nepal announced him as the Vice President of Nepal after no candidacy was filed in against him.

Nepal on October, 2017 endorsed new electoral law for the President and Vice President's election, which had barred anyone out of the parliament or any state assemblies to stand in fray for the post also has erased the provision of security deposit of Nepali Rupees 1,00,000 and 75,000 for the candidates of President and Vice President with filing of nomination free of cost but making five supporters and five proposers mandatory to stand in the fray.

The newly endorsed bill also has the age limitation of not less than 45 years and naturalised Nepali citizenship to stand for the election. Also, it has prohibited the people accused and jailed for more than 20 years in corruption, human trafficking, property purification, drug trafficking, foreclosure charges to stand for the post.

But the people indulged in organised crimes and other similar cases can contest for the post after six years of their release if they have completed the prison sentence for less than 20 years. The blacklisted ones also can contest the election after getting their name removed from the list.

Also, the law has made the separate allocation of elections for the President and Vice President as it is not possible as the bill has the compulsory provision of having the candidate of different sects and genders to contest for the Post of President and Vice President. The bill does not allow the same gender or same ethnic community to stand for the post of state head.

Nepal last week only had elected Bidhya Devi Bhandari as First President of Federal Nepal.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Around 600 guests will soon be handed out official invitations for the May 19 wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, the Kensington Palace confirmed the news on Thursday.

The invitations, made using American ink on English card and printed by Barnard and Westwood, also reveal the dress code for guests attending the wedding ceremony - uniform, morning coat or lounge suit, or day dress with a hat.

Prince Harry, who was a former soldier in the British army and is now the Captain General of Royal Marines, will likely don a uniform for the ceremony.

The Kensington Palace shared some moments of the printing process of the wedding cards by using a machine from the 1930s on Twitter.

The invites feature a three-feathered badge of Prince Harry's late father Prince Charles in gold ink, with the rest of the words printed in black.

The cards are "burnished to bring out the shine, and gilded around the edge".

"Invitations to the wedding of Prince Harry and Ms. Meghan Markle have been issued in the name of His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales," the palace said in a statement.

Barnard and Westwood's managing director Austen Kopley said he was thrilled and honoured to be making the soon-to-be royal couple's wedding cards.

According to Sky News, The opportunity to print the invites was given to Lottie Small, who had recently finished her apprenticeship with the printers. She used the machine, which she nicknamed 'Maude', to print every invitation.

The invitations read, "His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales KG KT requests the pleasure of the company of....... at the marriage of His Royal Highness Prince Henry of Wales with Ms Meghan Markle at St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle on Saturday 19th May, 2018 at 12 Noon followed by a reception at Windsor Castle."

The Kensington Palace confirmed that the royal wedding service would be held at St George's Chapel in Windsor Castle in Windsor, UK.

A further 200 guests will join Prince Harry and Meghan Markle at an evening reception at Frogmore House, about half a mile south of Windsor Castle.

Frogmore House has been a Royal residence since 1792. This is the venue where Prince Harry and Markle posed for their official engagement photos in November last year.

The wedding service will be conducted by The Dean of Windsor, The Rt Revd David Conner. The Archbishop of Canterbury, The Most Revd and Rt Hon. Justin Welby will officiate the couple to make their marriage vows.

"At 1 pm, immediately after the service, Prince Harry and Ms Markle, who will receive new titles reflecting their married status on the day, will leave Windsor Castle by carriage, via Castle Hill, along the High Street and through Windsor Town before returning along the Long Walk for their reception," a spokesperson said.

"They hope this short journey will provide an opportunity for more people to come together around Windsor and to enjoy the atmosphere of this special day," he added.

On Tuesday, Markle and Prince Harry opted for "a lemon elderflower cake that will incorporate the bright flavours of spring," and "will be covered with buttercream and decorated with fresh flowers," according to Marie Claire, a UK magazine, instead of the traditional British fruitcake. They also picked Claire Ptak as their royal wedding cake chef.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A leading global IT solution provider, Z-Com in association with Institute of Informatics and Communication, University of Delhi launches their collaborative project of design, development, and manufacturing of Carrier Grade Wi-Fi devices in India under the Make in India Campaign.

At present, the project will unveil two of its products including outdoor access points and indoor access points for Wi-Fi. His Excellency, Chung Kwang Tien, Ambassador of Taiwan was the chief guest of the event with some other dignitaries from the technology, IT, and education sectors were also present there amongst the noticeable people.

Both the indoor and outdoor WI-Fi access points launched at the event are programmed and processed with software that is being handled and managed by the research and development cell of Delhi University. This is the one-of-its-kind collaborative project between industry and academia wherein the aim is also to promote Prime Minister of India's 'Make in India' initiative and develop India as the manufacturing hub of the entire worldwide. To ensure easy accessibility of products all through the nation, Z-Com has teamed up with local manufacturing giants, Cloudatix and Frontline.

Rajesh Kapoor - MD for Z-COM India explained that, "the Indian Wi-Fi hotspot market is segmented based on offerings, end user and industry vertical. Based on offerings, it is divided into component, software, and services. As per component, the market is classified into wireless hotspot gateways, wireless hotspot controllers, and mobile hotspot devices. Based on software, the Wi-Fi hotspot market is analyzed across centralized hotspot management, Wi-Fi security software, Wi-Fi hotspot billing software, and cloud-based hotspot management. As per services, the market is categorized into professional service, installation and integration services, consulting services, and managed services. Based on end users, the market is segmented into communication service provider and network operators, enterprises, and government. Based on industry vertical, the global Wi-Fi hotspot market is segmented across telecom and IT, financial services, education, healthcare, hospitality, transportation, retail, and others. The collaborative project with IIC - University of Delhi is a strategic alliance to not only to make the current range of Wi-Fi components, software and services for make in India but also include the joint research and development of next generation products and solutions for the Wi-Fi hotspot market".

"Z -COM Inc has formed a Joint Venture with the leading technology company Cloudatix and a large Telecom Infrastructure Solution Provider - Frontline Group to manufacture the W-Fi devices in India under the "make in India" program," as quoted by Ms Catherine - Vice President Z-COM Inc.

According to Sanjay Sharma - Managing Director of Cloudatix, "the global Wi-Fi hotspot market was valued at $1,766 million in 2017, and is expected to reach $5,198 million by 2023, growing at a CAGR of 16.9% from 2017 to 2023. The MD of Cloudtaix quoted that India needs over 80 lakh hotspots as against the availability of about 31,000 hotspots with a view to reach the global level of one Wi-Fi hotspot penetration for every 150 people. The major factors that will drive the market growth are increase in use of cell phones and smart devices, growth in adoption of Wi-Fi hotspots by Gram Panchayats, e-Governance, hospitality, retail, and education sector, and adoption of carrier Wi-Fi by the network operators for data traffic offload and community Wi-Fi".

According to Dr Sanjay Sinha - Chairman Frontline Group, "the role of Wi-Fi has increasingly become the emphasis for unlocking and accelerating knowledge and technology based economies, as well as for enabling additional GDP growth. HonourablePrime Minister - NarendraModi launched the Make in India initiative, with the primary goal of making India a global manufacturing hub, by encouraging both multinational as well as domestic companies to manufacture their products within the country. 'Zero defect zero effect' is a key phrase which has come to be associated with the Make in India campaign. In the words of DrSinha, "We plan to make our product which has 'zero defect'. and 'zero effect' so that the manufacturing does not have an adverse effect on our environment".

"Institute of Informatics & Communication (IIC), UDSC is a premier institution of University of Delhi at South Campus. IIC has been conducting research based industry oriented teaching and research programs with a perfect blend of electronics, Information technology, physics and telecommunications skills for work on the cutting-edge technologies in the wireless telecommunications industry. Under the aegis of Ministry of IT and Electronics, Electropreneur Park with the alliance of Delhi University is already contributing to the ESDM growth story of India. This is being achieved through creation of a holistic eco-system for encouraging R&D, innovation, Entrepreneurship in the ESDM sector in India. We emphasize on development of product and IP creation in the ESDM sector for mass consumption electronics products" explained Dr. Sanjeev Singh. "The Collaborative project with Z-COM and IIC is meant to create the entire eco-system and support processes of manufacturing for the Wi-Fi range of products meant the Wi-FI Hotspot market", asserted Dean of Delhi University - Professor P K Burma.

"Z-COM, Inc., established in Science-Based Industrial Park of Hsinchu, Taiwan, is a leading solution provider and since its inception in 1995, has dedicated to research, design, development, and manufacturing of wireless data solutions for broadband wireless Internet access as well as various mobile data applications. As the continuous development of high-speed Internet, smart mobile devices and cloud application popularity, Z-COM, with its own core technology will provide wide range of wireless communications products under "make in India" program to meet the needs for public and community Wi-Fi in India" assured John Shey, Chairman of Z-COM, Inc.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Axis Bank was down 0.45% to Rs 523 at 9:19 IST on BSE after the bank issued a clarification to media reports referring to a bank guarantee issued by the bank to certain telecom companies.

The announcement was made after market hours yesterday, 21 March 2018.

Meanwhile, the S&P BSE Sensex was down 11.74 points or 0.04% at 33,124.44.

On the BSE, 13,000 shares were traded on the counter so far as against the average daily volumes of 4.24 lakh shares in the past one quarter. The stock had hit a high of Rs 524.90 and a low of Rs 521.70 so far during the day. The stock had hit a 52-week high of Rs 627.50 on 23 January 2018 and a 52-week low of Rs 447.80 on 23 October 2017.

The large-cap bank has equity capital of Rs 513.26 crore. Face value per share is Rs 2.

Axis Bank said that the bank guarantee has been issued by the bank on behalf of Bharti Airtel. Telecom Disputes Settlement and Appellate Tribunal (TDSAT), vide its order dated 9 January 2018 has required the bank guarantee to be returned. Axis Bank has been informed that the TDSAT order is operative. The bank is seeking clarification from TDSAT on the matter, and will comply with all directions.

Axis Bank clarified that the bank has non-fund based exposure of Rs 9222 crore to the telecom sector as of 31 December 2017, of which approximately 97% is to clients rated AA or better. The bank also informed that it has no exposure to Aircel.

Axis Bank's net profit rose 25.3% to Rs 726.44 crore on 1.3% decline in total income to Rs 14314.63 crore in Q3 December 2017 over Q3 December 2016.

Axis Bank is one of the biggest private sector banks in India.

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Union Cabinet chaired by the Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi today has approved the launch of a new Centrally Sponsored Ayushman Bharat -National Health Protection Mission (AB-NHPM) having central sector component under Ayushman Bharat Mission anchored in the MoHFW. The scheme has the benefit cover of Rs. 5 lakh per family per year. The target beneficiaries of the proposed scheme will be more than 10 crore families belonging to poor and vulnerable population based on SECC database. AB-NHPM will subsume the on-going centrally sponsored schemes -RashtriyaSwasthyaBimaYojana (RSBY) and the Senior Citizen Health Insurance Scheme (SCHIS).

Salient Features:

1. AB-NHPM will have a defined benefit cover of Rs. 5 lakh per family per year.

This cover will take care of almost all secondary care and most of tertiary care procedures. To ensure that nobody is left out (especially women, children and elderly) there will be no cap on family size and age in the scheme. The benefit cover will also include pre and post-hospitalisation expenses. All pre-existing conditions will be covered from day one of the policy. A defined transport allowance per hospitalization will also be paid to the beneficiary.

2. Benefits of the scheme are portable across the country and a beneficiary covered under the scheme will be allowed to take cashless benefits from any public/private empanelled hospitals across the country.

3. AB-NHPM will be an entitlement based scheme with entitlement decided on the basis of deprivation criteria in the SECC database, The different categories in rural area include families having only one room with kucha walls and kucharoof; families having no adult member between age 16 to 59; female headed households with no adult male member between age 16 to 59; disabled member and no able bodied adult member in the family; SC/ST households; and landless households deriving major part of their income from manual casual labour, Also, automatically included families in rural areas having any one of the following: households without shelter, destitute, living on alms, manual scavenger families, primitive tribal groups, legally released bonded labour. For urban areas, 11 defined occupational categories are entitled under the scheme.

4. The beneficiaries can avail benefits in both public and empanelled private facilities. All public hospitals in the States implementing AB-NHPM, will be deemed empanelled for the Scheme. Hospitals belonging to Employee State Insurance Corporation (ESIC) may also be empanelled based on the bed occupancy ratio parameter. As for private hospitals, they will be empanelled online based on defined criteria.

5. To control costs, the payments for treatment will be done on package rate (to be defined by the Government in advance) basis. The package rates will include all the costs associated with treatment. For beneficiaries, it will be a cashless, paper less transaction. Keeping in view the State specific requirements, States/ UTs will have the flexibility to modify these rates within a limited bandwidth.

6. One of the core principles of AB-NHPM is to co-operative federalism and flexibility to states. There is provision to partner the States through co-alliance. This will ensure appropriate integration with the existing health insurance/ protection schemes of various Central Ministries/Departments and State Governments (at their own cost), State Governments will be allowed to expand AB-NHPM both horizontally and vertically. States will be free to choose the modalities for implementation. They can implement through insurance company or directly through Trust/ Society or a mixed model.

7. For giving policy directions and fostering coordination between Centre and States, it is proposed to set up Ayushman Bharat National Health Protection Mission Council (AB-NHPMC) at apex level Chaired by Union Health and Family Welfare Minister. It is proposed to have an Ayushman Bharat National Health Protection Mission Governing Board (AB-NHPMGB) which will be jointly chaired by Secretary (HFW) and Member (Health), NITI Aayog with Financial Advisor, MoHFW, Additional Secretary & Mission Director, Ayushman Bharat National Health Protection Mission, MoHFW (AB-NHPM) and Joint Secretary (AB-NHPM), MoHFW as members.

CEO, Ayushman Bharat - National Health Protection Mission will be the Member Secretary, State Secretaries of Health Department may also be members as per the requirement. It is proposed to establish an Ayushman Bharat - National Health Protection Mission Agency (AB-NHPMA) to manage the AB-NHPM at the operational level in the form of a Society. AB-NHPMA will be headed by a full time CEO of the level of Secretary/ Additional Secretary to the Government of India.

8. States would need to have State Health Agency (SHA) to implement the scheme States will have the option to use an existing Trust / Society / Not for Profit Company/ State Nodal Agency or set up a new Trust / Society / Not for Profit Company/ State Health Agency to implement the scheme and act as SHA. At the district level also, a structure for implementation of the scheme will need to be set up.

9. To ensure that the funds reach SHA on time, the transfer of funds from Central Government through AB-NHPMA to State Health Agencies may be done through an escrow account directly. The State has to contribute its matching share of grants within defined time frame.

10. In partnership with NITI Aayog, a robust, modular, scalable and interoperable IT platform will be made operational which will entail a paperless, cashless transaction. This will also help in prevention / detection of any potential misuse / fraud / abuse cases. This will be backed by a well-defined Grievance Redressal Mechanism. In addition, pre-Authorisation of treatments with moral hazards (Potential of misuse) will be made mandatory.

11. In order to ensure that the scheme reaches the intended beneficiaries and other stakeholders, a comprehensive media and outreach strategy will be developed, which will, inter alia, include print media, electronic media, social media platforms, traditional media, IEC materials and outdoor activities.

Implementation Strategy:

At the national level to manage, an Ayushman Bharat National Health Protection Mission Agency (AB-NHPMA) would be put in place. States/ UTs would be advised to implement the scheme by a dedicated entity called State Health Agency (SHA). They can either use an existing Trust/ Society/ Not for Profit Company/ State Nodal Agency (SNA) or set up a new entity to implement the scheme. States/ UTs can decide to implement the scheme through an insurance company or directly through the Trust/ Society or use an integrated model.

Major Impact:

In-patient hospitalization expenditure in India has increased nearly 300% during last ten years. (NSSO 2015). More than 80% of the expenditure are met by out of pocket (OOP). Rural households primarily depended on their 'household income / savings' (68%) and on 'borrowings' (25%), the urban households relied much more on their 'income / saving' (75%) for financing expenditure on hospitalizations, and on '(18%) borrowings. (NSSO 2015). Out of pocket (OOP) expenditure in India is over 60% which leads to nearly 6 million families getting into poverty due to catastrophic health expenditures. AB-NHPM will have major impact on reduction of Out Of Pocket (OOP) expenditure on ground of:

1. i) Increased benefit cover to nearly 40% of the population, (the poorest & the vulnerable)

2. ii) Covering almost all secondary and many tertiary hospitalizations. (except a negative list)

iii) Coverage of 5 lakh for each family, (no restriction of family size)

This will lead to increased access to quality health and medication. In addition, the unmet needs of the population which remained hidden due to lack of financial resources will be catered to. This will lead to timely treatments, improvements in health outcomes, patient satisfaction, improvement in productivity and efficiency, job creation thus leading to improvement in quality of life.

Expenditure involved:

The expenditure incurred in premium payment will be shared between Central and State Governments in specified ratio as per Ministry of Finance guidelines in vogue. The total expenditure will depend on actual market determined premium paid in States/ UTs where AB-NHPM will be implemented through insurance companies. In States/ UTs where the scheme will be implemented in Trust/ Society mode, the central share of funds will be provided based on actual expenditure or premium ceiling (whichever is lower) in the pre-determined ratio.

Number of Beneficiaries:

AB-NHPM will target about 10.74 crore poor, deprived rural families and identified occupational category of urban workers' families as per the latest Socio-Economic Caste Census (SECC) data covering both rural and urban. The scheme is designed to be dynamic and aspirational and it would take into account any future changes in the exclusion/ inclusion/ deprivation/ occupational criteria in the SECC data.

States/Districts covered:

AB-NHPM will be rolled out across all States/UTs in all districts with an objective to cover all the targeted beneficiaries.

Background:

RSBY was launched in the year 2008 by the Ministry of Labour and Employment and provides cashless health insurance scheme with benefit coverage of Rs. 30.000/- per annum on a family floater basis [for 5 members], for Below Poverty Line (BPL) families, and 11 other defined categories of unorganised workers. To integrate RSBY into the health system and make it a part of the comprehensive health care vision of Government of India, RSBY was transferred to the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW) w.e.f 01.04.2015. During 2016-2017, 3.63 crore families were covered under RSBY in 278 districts of the country and they could avail medical treatment across the network of 8,697 empanelled hospitals. The NHPS comes in the backdrop of the fact that various Central Ministries and State/UT Governments have launched health insurance/ protection schemes for their own defined set of beneficiaries. There is a critical need to converge these schemes, so as to achieve improved efficiency, reach and coverage.

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs chaired by the Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi, has given its approval for Central Sector Scheme "Integrated Scheme for Development of Silk Industry" for the next three years from 2017-18 to 2019-20.

The Scheme has four components -

i. Research & Development (R&D), Training, Transfer of Technology and IT Initiatives

ii. Seed Organizations and farmers extension centres

iii. Coordination and Market Development for seed, yarn and silk products and

iv. Quality Certification System (QCS) by creating amongst others a chain of Silk Testing facilities, Farm based & post-cocoon Technology Up-gradation, and Export Brand Promotion.

Financial Outlay:

A total allocation of Rs.2161.68 Crore has been approved for the implementation of the Scheme for three years from 2017-18 to 2019-20. The scheme will be implemented by the Ministry through Central Silk Board (CSB).

Impact:

The scheme is expected to increase the silk production from the level of 30348 MTs during 2016-17 to 38500 MTs by end of 2019-20 with the following interventions:

Production of import substitute bivoltine silk to the tune of 8500 MTs per annum by 2020.

Research & Development to improve productivity from the present level of 100 Kgs to 111 kgs of silk per ha. of plantation by the end of 2019-20.

Large scale propagation of improved reeling machines (Automatic Reeling Machine for mulberry; improved reeling/spinning machineries and Buniyad reeling machines for Vanya silk) under Make in India programme to produce quality silk to cater to the market demand.

The scheme will promote Women Empowerment and livelihood opportunities to SC/ST and other weaker sections of the society. The scheme will help to increase productive employment from 85 lakhs to 1 crore persons by 2020.

Improvement over the earlier scheme:

The scheme has following improvement over the earlier scheme:

(i) The scheme aims to achieve self-sufficiency in silk production by 2022. To achieve this, production of high grade silk in India will reach 20,650 MTs by 2022 from the current level of 11,326 MTs thereby reducing imports to Zero.

(ii) For the first time, there is clear focus on improving production of highest grade quality of silk. It is proposed to increase 4A grade silk from the current level of 15% to 25 % of mulberry production by 2020.

(iii) The implementation strategy is clearly based on convergence at the State level with the schemes of other Ministers like MGNREGS of Rural Development, RKVY & PMKSY of Ministry of Agriculture, for maximizing benefits to the sericulturists.

(iv) The R&D projects pertaining to disease resistant silkworm, host plant improvements, productivity enhancing tools and implements for reeling and waving etc. will be done in cooperation with Ministries i.e.

Science and Technology, Agriculture and Human Resource Development (HRD).

Details:

The core objective of the scheme is to improve the productivity and quality of silk through R&D intervention. The focus of R&D intervention is to promote improved crossbreed silk and the import substitute Bivoltine silk so that Bivotine silk production in India enhances to such a level that raw silk imports become nil by 2022 thereby making India self-sufficient in silk.

R&D interventions will include race improvement through development of improved host plant varieties and improved disease resistant silkworm breeds by having collaborative research with reputed National Research organizations like IITs, CSIR, IISc and international research institutes on Sericulture in Japan, China, Bulgaria etc.; Technological advancements with respect to pre coccon and post cocoon sectors. Thrust will be given on technology upgradation and making mechanization affordable.

Use of silkworm by-products (pupa) for poultry feed, sericin for cosmetic applications and product diversification into non-woven fabrics, silk denim, silk knit etc. will be given thrust for added value realisation.

Under Seed Sector, Seed Production Units will be equipped and strengthened to bring in quality standards in production network, besides increasing the production capacity to cater to the increased silk production target. Support would be provided for adopted seed rearers to generate quality seed cocoons, private graineurs to produce quality seed and Chawki Rearing Centres (CRCs) with incubation facilities to produce and supply chawki worms. Other efforts will include setting up new Cold storage, providing mobile disinfection units and equipment support for mechanization.

Registration process under Seed Act and reporting by seed production centres, basic seed farms and extension centres will be automated by developing web based software. All the beneficiaries under the scheme from silk farmers, seed producers and chawkirearers will be brought on a DBT mode with Aadhaar linkage. A Helpline will be set up for timely redressal of grievances and all outreach programmes.

Brand Promotion of Indian silk will be encouraged through quality certification by Silk Mark not only in the domestic market but in the Export market as well. High quality standards in silkworm seed, cocoon and raw silk will be promoted by setting up Cocoon Testing Centres & Silk Testing Centres. Efforts will be strengthened for collaborating with NIFT and NID for support on design and product development.

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Union Cabinet chaired by Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi has given its approval for revision of the Agreement between India and Qatar for the avoidance of double taxation and for the prevention of fiscal evasion with respect to taxes on income.

The existing Double Taxation Avoidance Agreement (DTAA) with Qatar was signed on 7thApril, 1999 and came into force on 15thJanuary, 2000.

The revised DTAA updates the provisions for exchange of information to latest standard, includes Limitation of Benefits provision to prevent treaty shopping and aligns other provisions with India's recent treaties. The revised DTAA meets the minimum standards on treaty abuse under Action 6 and Mutual Agreement Procedure under Action 14 of G-20 OECD Base Erosion & Profit Shifting (BEPS) Project, in which India participated on an equal footing.

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Union Cabinet chaired by Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi has approved the second and final extension of the term of the Commission constituted to examine the issue of Sub-categorization of Other Backward Classes in the Central List, beyond 27 March 2018 for a period of twelve weeks i.e. upto 20 June 2018.

Background:

The Commission was constituted under article 340 of the Constitution with the approval of President on 2 October 2017. The Commission, headed by Justice (Retd.) Smt.

G. Rohini commenced functioning on 11 October 2017 and has since interacted with all the States/UTs which have subcategorized OBCs and the State Backward Classes Commissions. The Commission has requisitioned data from Higher Education Institutions regarding admission of OBCs to higher education courses as well as data regarding recruitment of OBC persons in Government jobs in Government Departments, Public Sector Banks and Financial Institutions as well as in the CPSEs, with a view to assess the magnitude of inequitable distribution of benefits of reservation among the castes/communities included in the Centre List of Other Backward Classes.

Keeping in view the voluminous data obtained by the Commission from all quarters and the time required for a scientific analysis of the data to prepare a comprehensive report, the Commission has sought extension of its term by twelve weeks, i.e. upto 20 June 2018.

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Burke/Triole Productions/ThinkstockThe 12th Annual ACM Honors returns to Nashville's historic Ryman Auditorium for the ninth year in a row, on Wednesday, August 22.

Sony Music Nashville and Christian publisher Thomas Nelson are partnering to place copies of Dolly Parton's children's album, I Believe in You, alongside the devotional Jesus Calling product line in select Kroger stores.

If you missed Blake Shelton doing "I'll Name the Dogs" Tuesday on Late Night with Seth Meyers, you can catch up online.

Copyright  2018, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.For new merged entity

Idea Cellular and Vodafone Group Plc announced the proposed leadership team of the combined business, which will come into effect after the merger has been completed. This is in line with the original merger announcement of 20 March 2017, which said that the management team of the combined business would be confirmed prior to closing.

Kumar Mangalam Birla would be the Non Executive Chairman of the Board of the merged company.

CEO - Balesh Sharma (currently COO of Vodafone India)

The following positions will report to the CEO -

CFO - Akshaya Moondra (currently CFO at Idea)

COO- Ambrish Jain (currently Deputy MD at Idea)

Nick Gliddon, currently Director - Vodafone Business Services at Vodafone India will be responsible for the Enterprise Business.

Manish Dawar, currently CFO of Vodafone India, will have overall responsibility for integration planning, governance and execution.

Shashi Shankar, currently Chief Marketing Officer at Idea, will be responsible for the Marketing and the Brand Strategy for the consumer business.

Vishant Vora, currently CTO of Vodafone India, will be responsible for networks and overall technology strategy.

Prakash Paranjape will be responsible for company's IT operations.

Suvamoy Roy Choudhary will be responsible for HR function.

Kavita Nair will lead digital transformation across all functions.

Navanit Narayan will be in-charge of strategy.

P Balaji will be responsible for corporate and external affairs.

Kumar Das will lead the legal function.

Rajesh Srivastava will hold charge of procurement function.

Anil Tandon and Rajat Mukherjee will be full time advisors to the merged business, working closely with Vishant and Balaji.

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Efforts within the global steel industry to transition away from high carbon emitting processes pose varied credit risks to issuers given varying steelmaking routes and an uneven regulatory landscape across the sector, Moody's Investors Service says in a new report.

"Decarbonizing the global economy is likely to bring greater scrutiny on the energy and carbon intensity of the steel sector, which is responsible for 6% - 7% of global emissions," says John Thieroff, a Vice President with Moody's Investors Service. "The challenge to the steel industry will be to lower carbon intensity at a time of strong demand growth."

A key risk for steelmakers is that regulations for their emissions will vary by locale. Moody's sees the biggest challenge for emissions reduction to be in developing markets with a strong commitment to reduce emissions such as China. In contrast most developed countries already have strong policies in place to which steelmakers have adapted. However, future tightening of these policies would be challenging, particularly for companies not using modern technologies and processes.

While there remain numerous regulatory uncertainties regarding emissions reduction efforts across jurisdictions, it is clear that some operators will have an easier time adjusting than others. For example, weak profitability in the industry will weigh on the ability of many steelmakers to spend on clean technologies and processes.

Weak profitability is reflected in the ratings skew towards high yield among the companies rated by Moody's (25 of 36 steel companies as of February 2018), highlighting the challenge ahead for companies to invest in emissions efficiency efforts.

Differences in production routes will also help determine winners and losers in the global steel industry's carbon transition. Blast furnace operators will bear much of the risk, while steelmakers using electric arc furnaces may have an easier time meeting goals.

Steelmakers' product mix will also be an important factor to consider. Companies with a high proportion of non-transport end markets particularly construction, which comprises half the global steel market are better protected from substitution. Automakers seeking to reduce weight to offset heavy batteries as they electrify will amplify steelmakers' already considerable substitution risk from lightweight materials such as aluminum and carbon fiber.

The report notes that there is no near-term large scale technological solution for the sector's carbon emissions. Carol Cowan, a Senior Vice President with Moody's Investors Service says, "New steelmaking technologies that would result in substantially reduced carbon intensity are in early phases of development, lack either commercial or technical viability, and are unlikely to gain widespread adoption in the next 10 years."

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Reliance Infrastructure has filed an application in the Hon'ble Commercial Court, North Goa, at Panaji, Goa seeking the Court's direction for the payment of the Arbitration Award it has won recently against Goa Government.

In its Application filed under section 9 of the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996, Reliance Infrastructure Limited has sought the Court's direction to Goa Government to pay an amount of Rs. 278.29 crore with interest totaling to Rs. 292 crore, which was awarded by the Arbitration Tribunal in its Award on 16 February 2018.

The Tribunal had ordered payment of interest at 15% P.

A. on the total award amount if Government of Goa fails to pay the entire award amount by 15 April 2018.

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Sun Pharmaceutical Industries (Sun Pharma) announced that the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved ILUMYA (tildrakizumab-asmn) for the treatment of adults with moderate-to-severe plaque psoriasis who are candidates for systemic therapy or phototherapy. The announcement was made after market hours yesterday, 21 March 2018.

Majesco announced that an India health insurer, part of a leading diversified financial services group in India, implemented Majesco Distribution Management (MDM) as the foundation of their distribution transformation. MDM is a standalone, modern solution that enables insurance carriers to manage the entire distribution landscape with comprehensive business capabilities. The announcement was made after market hours yesterday, 21 March 2018.

Axis Bank issued a clarification after market hours yesterday, 21 March 2018 to media reports referring to a bank guarantee issued by the bank to certain telecom companies. Axis Bank said that the bank guarantee has been issued by the bank on behalf of Bharti Airtel. Telecom Disputes Settlement and Appellate Tribunal (TDSAT), vide its order dated 9 January 2018 has required the bank guarantee to be returned. Axis Bank has been informed that the TDSAT order is operative. The bank is seeking clarification from TDSAT on the matter, and will comply with all directions.

Axis Bank clarified that the bank has non-fund based exposure of Rs 9222 crore to the telecom sector as of 31 December 2017, of which approximately 97% is to clients rated AA or better. The bank also informed that it has no exposure to Aircel.

Dilip Buildcon has been declared L-1 bidder by the National Highways Authority of India for a new EPC project valued at Rs 677.07 crore in Uttar Pradesh. The announcement was made after market hours yesterday, 21 March 2018.

Shriram Transport Finance Company said that its allotment committee allotted 1,850 non-convertible debentures (NCDs) aggregating to Rs 185 crore on private placement basis. The announcement was made after market hours yesterday, 21 March 2018.

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Irked by a social media user who asked him if Shia and Sunni were different religions, veteran writer-lyricist Javed Akhtar on Thursday said all kinds of religious people were "equally unreasonable".

He made the comment as part of a chain of tweets after the social media user asked Akhtar: "Is Shia and Sunni different religions Javed Akhtar? #JustAsking."

The celebrated writer, who is quite vocal about his views on socio-political issues, said: "Your question about Shia and Sunni reminds me of a very famous dialogue from a film 'Gone With The Wind'. And it was, 'Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn'."

Journalist Arnab Goswami joined the conversation by questioning Akhtar: "But where is the answer!"

Akhtar wrote: "It is for them to decide whether they are from the same religion or not. Doesn't interest me. So what if they are and so what if they are not. I believe all kind of religious people are equally unreasonable. Is that clear enough Arnabji or the nation still wants to know some thing."

On that, Goswami hit out at Akhtar saying: "Easiest way to escape (run away) from question that don't suit you. Otherwise you are badly known for unwanted advice, decision and conclusions. And yes, the nation still wants to know many things but that you would not like to face for sure."

Akhtar also got engaged in a Twitter argument with another user who raised a question on the feasibility of having "Aamir Khan, a Muslim, play (a part) in most ancient and sacred of Hindu epics, the Mahabharata".

Akhtar abused the user, asking him "which foreign agency is paying you to spread this kind of perverse and poisonous thoughts in our country".

--IANS

rb/hs

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A day before the biennial polls for the ten seats of the Rajya Sabha, the Allahabad High Court on Thursday barred Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) legislator Mukhtar Ansari from voting, an official said.

The high court, staying the earlier order of the Ghazipur court which had allowed the mafia don-turned-politician to vote in polls on Friday, issued notice to Ansari, who is lodged in the Banda jail on charges of attempt to murder and conspiracy.

Justice Rajul Bhargava issued the order on a petition filed by the Uttar Pradesh government, challenging the March 20 order of the Ghazipur court. Ansari, through the prison authorities, had written a letter to the special judge in Ghazipur requesting that he be allowed to cast his vote in the Rajya Sabha elections.

State's counsel A.K. Sound and Vikas Sahay had pleaded before the HC that the Ghazipur court had taken a one-sided view on the matter without even considering the Representation of the People Act's section 62 (5).

The HC in its order, citing the Anukul Chandra Pradhan case heard by the Supreme Court, observed that the Rajya Sabha polls are also associated with this section of the electoral law and hence Ansari cannot ask for the right to vote as it was not a Fundamental Right.

This is set to be setback to the BSP, which is trying hard to get its candidate Bhim Rao Ambedkar elected to the Upper House of Parliament. For the party, each vote is crucial and despite the support by Samajwadi Party, and others, the candidate is falling short of the magical number.

The Election Commission had earlier in the day allowed Ansari to vote after which he and jailed Samajwadi Party legislator Hari Om Yadav withdrew their petition before the Allahabad HC seeking directions to the state government to allow them to cast their votes in the Rajya Sabha polls.

--IANS

md/vd

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Bengaluru airport won an international award for being the best in India and Central Asia under the regional category, said its operator on Thursday.

"The Kempegowda international airport was given the Skytrax award for being voted as the best regional airport in India and Central Asia by air travellers at the World Airport Awards at Stockholm in Sweden on Wednesday," said Bangalore International Airport Ltd (BIAL) in a statement here.

As the country's third busiest airport after Mumbai and Delhi, the airport at Devanahalli on the city's northern outskirts won the award for the second consecutive year and two times in 2015 and 2011.

"The award reaffirms our commitment to provide a world-class experience for travellers at the airport," said BIAL Chief Executive Hari Marar on the occasion.

The Skytrax awards is the largest passenger satisfaction assessment and prestigious among surveys measuring airport service excellence and quality.

The winners were declared based on 13.73 million questionnaires from 500 airports worldwide, surveyed between August 2017 and February 2018.

A key directive of the survey is for passengers to make their choices as to which airport they consider the best.

'Regional Airports' refers to those operating short international and domestic flights, than having a vast intercontinental network.

About 250 lakh passengers used the decade-old airport in calendar year 2017, up 13 per cent from 2016.

Nearly 45 Indian and international airlines operate services, connecting 62 cities across the country and overseas.

BIAL is a consortium of public and private investors, including the central and state governments.

--IANS

fb/sku/

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday greeted the people of Bihar on the occasion of 'Bihar Diwas', saying that the state's contribution towards the country's progress was "exemplary and invaluable".

"Greetings to my sisters and brothers of Bihar on 'Bihar Diwas'. Right from historical times, Bihar's contribution towards the nation's progress is exemplary and invaluable," Modi tweeted.

Bihar Diwas marks the day the state of Bihar was carved out of the Bengal Presidency by the British in 1912.

--IANS

aks/ksk

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The political slugfest over links with the controversial data consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica (CA) escalated on Thursday with the BJP claiming that the firm was involved in Rahul Gandhi's social media campaign and Congress rubbishing the charge and asking if the government will lodge an FIR against the company and its India partner Oveleno Business Intelligence (OBI).

Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, who had stirred a political firestorm on Wednesday with his allegations that the Congress was using the services of the London-based political data analytics firm, fired fresh salvos at the Congress on Thursday claiming that the firm was involved in Congress President Rahul Gandhi's social media campaign and there had been meetings too in this regard.

Congress leader Randeep Singh Surjewala termed Prasad as a "minister of lies", and asked the BJP if "Cambridge Analytica was involved in stealing data, then why did it take its services" and "whether an FIR would be registered against CA and OBI".

He said that Information and Broadcasting Minister Smriti Irani "follows" Cambridge Analtytics on Twitter and BJP's former Information Technology head, who now runs Indian government's biggest portal (mygov.in), Arvind Gupta had termed CA a "pwerful tool".

Rahul Gandhi accused the Modi government of seeking to divert attention from its past "lies" about 39 Indians killed in Iraq by inventing story of data theft on Congress.

"Problem: 39 Indians dead; Government on the mat, caught lying. Solution: Invent story on Congress and data theft. Result: Media networks bite bait; 39 Indians vanish from radar. Problem solved," Gandhi said in a tweet.

CA's India partner Oveleno Business Intelligence (OBI) lists the BJP, the Congress and the JD-U as its clients. The India partner is Amrish Tyagi, son of senior JD-U leader K.C. Tyagi.

K.C. Tyagi said on Thursday that the company had only "professional links" with the CA and that the government could investigate these links.

Prasad questioned the "silence" of Congress President for more than five months over media reports that claimed his party had roped in CA as 'Brahmastra (ultimate weapon)' to counter Prime Minister Narendra Narendra Modi in 2019.

"The report in this regard was first published on October 9, 2017 and the party maintained silence until I raised the issue on Wednesday. They denied the allegations when they found themselves in trouble after the issue was brought to the fore," Prasad said at a press conference.

"The Congress cannot run away from this fact. If the Congress maintains a conspicuous silence on such an important news of the involvement of a dubious social media company and does not counter it, then I am sorry. They don't have any right to run the country," he said.

Prasad also claimed that that the Congress took the services of CA in Gujarat Assembly polls.

"They used CA in Gujarat and it was clear from the Congress's pattern of contesting the election," he said.

He refuted Gandhi's allegation that by raking up CA issue, Modi government was trying to divert public attention from its "lie about the fate of 39 Indians killed in Iraq".

"We expect that Rahul Gandhi would not indulge in over deaths. He should respond to the allegations which are of serious nature," he said.

He alleged that the firm had been found involved in data manipulation and warned that any attempt to misuse social media to influence India's electoral process would not be tolerated.

Prasad said the analytics firm was accused of using bribes and sex workers to entrap politicians and stealing data from Facebook.

Surjewala said the BJP government has "become a manufacturer of fake news and an epitome of post-truth."

"The business alliance between BJP-JD-U and Cambridge Analytics has now been exposed," he said, adding that "new fake agenda" is being used to stop the proceedings in Parliament" and Prasad should be named a "lie minister" instead of law minister.

"BJP and Modi should repond. Didn't they take the services of OBI and CA for Mission 272+? This company was used. Didn't you know they were involved in stealing data?" Surjewala asked.

"Didn't BJP use the services of CA's Indian arm OBI during its election campaign in four states--Jharkhand, Haryana, Maharashta and Delhi."

The party also asked if it was true that in 2010, during Bihar elections, BJP and JD-U used the services of CA and OBI.

The party reiterated that it neither had any connection with Cambridge Analytica nor took its services.

Tyagi said JD-U has no links with his s'n Amrish Tyagi's firm or with Cambrid"e Analytic'. "Neither CA's directors have ever met (JD-U President) Nitish Kumar nor Nitish Kumar ever m"t CA's bosses," Tyagi said.

Tyagi, however, admitted that Amrish was 'verseeing JD-U's social media campaign during the last Bihar assembly elections.

--IANS

ps-vsc/vm

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Attacking the ruling BJP on the issue of data theft, Senior Congress leader Abhishek Manu Singhvi on Thursday said the Narendra Modi government should take action against it while accusing the BJP of being more familiar with fake websites.

"Law Minister is the right authority to speak on it. Nobody can be more familiar with the fake websites than the BJP," Singhvi said when asked about chagres made by Union Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad on fake websites.

"The BJP has perfected this to an art. You know the kind of trash which has been circulated over decades against Rajiv Gandhi, when he was alive, and now against Sonia and Rahul Gandhi. Paid garbage was posted on the internet by the goons of the BJP," he said.

Prasad had alleged the opposition parties were using dtat manipulation and theft to influence voters.

The BJP and the Congress had accused each other of using the services of embattled data consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica (CA) that along with Facebook is at the centre of a global row over the alleged unauthorized use of personal data from the social media giant.

Amid allegations of misuse of personal data for political purposes by social media giant Facebook, the BJP on Wednesday hit out at Congress accusing it of compromising national security by reportedly roping in political data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica (CA) to run its 2019 election campaign.

Singhvi said the party spokesman Randeep Surjewala had refuted the allegations of misuse of social media by the Congress and instead alleged that it was the BJP which has misused the platform to spread canard against Congress leaders.

Asked about the coordination outside the floor of the Parliament, Singhvi, the Trinamool Congress supported Congress candidate from West Bengal for the Rajya Sabha elections, said what is the need of the hour is prevention of vote division so that kind of illegality and bad governance can be put to a stop.

--IANS

bdc/vd

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Actor Rajpal Yadav, who plays the role of a 'selfie don' in new film "Shaadi Teri Bajayenge Hum Band", has penned an open letter urging people to be responsible while indulging in the fast growing 'selfie' culture.

"Don't we all love taking selfies of ourselves at home, at college, at public spaces, at outing points? We don't miss a spot - we click selfies by the edge of seashores and on mountain cliffs. Who cares if the very next second a massive sea wave sweeps us away to death or we make the hugest fall of our life into death. Selfie is the most important thing to us.

"Self-love is the most common idea of love and each one of us should love yourself. But, not at the cost of losing our very life," Rajpal has said in the letter, posted on his Facebook page.

Describing his role as a 'selfie don', the actor said: "I will be playing the role of one of those people who are obsessed with taking selfies. While I enact someone who is crazy about taking selfies, I feel it is my duty as a responsible adult to let all my viewers know that keep up your love for self but, not at the expense of your own life."

He says people must continue going to cliff points, beaches and valleys, but has urged them to "be safe while you're capturing the special moments of life".

"We have heard several stories in the news about people losing lives while taking selfies. News always brings to us stories about people carelessly taking selfies that ultimately cost them their lives.

"Watch out for yourselves while you take memorable selfies."

--IANS

rb/bg

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)India on Thursday successfully test fired a BrahMos missile from a fighter aircraft using an indigenous seeker for the first time.

The test was carried out at the Pokhran test range.

Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman congratulated the DRDO, the armed forces and the defence industry for the success of the test.

--IANS

ao/mr

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Reiterating its allegations of Congress's links to political data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica (CA), the BJP on Thursday claimed that the firm was involved in Rahul Gandhi's social media campaign and there had been meetings too in this regard.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) also questioned the silence of the Congress President for more than five months over media reports that claimed his party had roped in CA as 'Brahmashtra' to counter Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2019.

"The report in this regard was first published on October 9, 2017 and the party maintained silence until I raised the issue on Wednesday. They denied the allegations when they found themselves in trouble after the issue was brought to the fore," Union Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said at a press conference.

The minister, accepting full responsibility, said that CA had been managing the social media campaign for Rahul Gandhi and there had been meetings also in this connection.

"The Congress cannot run away from this fact. If the Congress maintains a conspicuous silence on such an important news of the involvement of a dubious social media company and does not counter it, then I am sorry. They don't have any right to run the country," he said.

The Congress on Wednesday denied links to CA that has been accused of stealing data to allegedly influence the electoral process.

Prasad also claimed that that the Congress took services of CA in Gujarat Assembly polls.

"They used CA in Gujarat and it was clear from the Congress's pattern of contesting the election," he said.

He also refuted Gandhi's allegation that by raking up CA issue, Modi government was trying to divert public attention from its "lie about the fate of 39 Indians killed in Iraq".

"We expect that Rahul Gandhi would not indulge in over deaths. He should respond to the allegations which are of serious nature," he said.

Gandhi's remarks came a day after Information and Technology Minister accused the Congress of compromising national security by roping in Cambridge Analytica to run its 2019 election campaign.

He alleged that the firm had been found involved in data manipulation and warned that any attempt to misuse social media to influence India's electoral process would not be tolerated.

Prasad said that the analytics firm was accused of using bribes and sex workers to entrap politicians and stealing data from Facebook.

--IANS

bns/qd/vm

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The CBI has arrested Bhopal's L.N. Medical College Chairman J.N. Chouksey in connection with admission irregularities pertaining to the Pre-Medical Test 2012 conducted by the Madhya Pradesh Professional Examination Board or Vyapam, an official said on Thursday.

Chouksey, who was on the run after being chargesheeted, was arrested on Wednesday from his house here. He was produced before a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) court here which sent him to judicial custody till Saturday.

The CBI move comes after a trial court issued a non-bailable arrest warrant against Chouksey, whose application for anticipatory bail was rejected by Supreme Court on March 6.

On March 8, the Madhya Pradesh High Court granted bail to Ajay Goenka, Managing Director of Chirayu Health and Medicare Pvt Ltd and four others who were chargesheeted in the same scam.

The CBI had filed a supplementary chargesheet in November.

In its chargesheet, the CBI alleged that L.N. Medical College conspired with Chouksey and other co-accused and provided wrong information to the Director of Medical Education (DME) in Bhopal regarding the admission of a co-accused candidate whereas he was already a student of MBBS 2011 batch in Patna.

The medical college had reported to DME about only five vacant seats for second round of counselling whereas more than 40 seats were vacant.

"It was further alleged that the medical college took more than 40 admissions on September 30, 2012 when the process of counselling was already over. The college, in connivance with DME officials, forwarded the list of admitted students to DME, which was different from the allotment list of DME," a CBI official said.

The CBI took over the investigation of the case from police in July 2015 on a Supreme Court order.

--IANS

rak/him/mr

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)China has sold a highly-sensitive tracking system to Pakistan, which could boost Islamabads ability to develop multi-war heads.

According to the South China Morning Post, an influential Chinese think tank says that China is the first country to have given such sensitive equipment to Pakistan.

China is the biggest arms supplier to Pakistan, India's arch-rival.

Zheng Mengwei, a researcher with the China Academy of Sciences (CAS) Institute of Optics and Electronics in Chengdu, Sichuan province, told the Post that Pakistan's military recently deployed the Chinese-made system "at a firing range" for use in testing and developing its new missiles.

The statement from the CAS said the Chinese team enjoyed VIP treatment during the nearly three months it spent in Pakistan assembling and calibrating the tracking system and training technical staff on how to use it.

"The system's performance surpassed the user's expectations," it said.

The amount paid by Islamabad was not known.

An optical system is crucial in missile testing. It usually comes with a pair of high-performance telescopes equipped with a laser ranger, high-speed camera, infrared detector and a centralized computer system that captures and follows moving targets, the Post said.

The device records high-resolution images of a missile's departure from its launcher, stage separation, tail flame and, after the missile re-enters the atmosphere, the trajectory of the warheads it releases.

The uniqueness of the Chinese-made system lay in its use of four telescope units, "more than normally required", Zheng said.

Each telescope, with a detection range of several hundred km, is positioned in a different location, with their timing synchronized precisely with atomic clocks.

Together, the telescopes provide visual information of unprecedented detail and accuracy, which missile developers can use to improve designs and engine performance.

Using more telescopes allows the system to track more warheads simultaneously from different angles, reducing the risk of losing a target.

"We simply gave them a pair of eyes. They can use them to look at whatever they want to see, even the Moon," he said.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)China on Thursday strongly opposed new trade restrictions and warned of strong action if US President Donald Trump approved new tariffs and sanctions against the country.

Trump, who recently announced controversial tariffs on aluminium and steel imports, is expected to announce new tariffs and fines worth $50 billion against China later in the day to counterbalance the trade deficit with the country.

"China has indicated its position many times, we are strongly against the unilateral and protectionist conduct of the US," the Chinese Commerce Ministry said in a statement cited by Efe news.

The Ministry said these restrictions on foreign trade were also being opposed by at least 45 US trade associations.

"We hope the US can clearly see that trade and economic relations between China and the US are mutually beneficial and does not take steps that harm others or itself," the statement added.

Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying said that both countries had addressed trade disputes many times amicably and stressed that absolute reciprocity was impossible in trade.

New taxes on 100 categories of imported products from China, ranging from shoes and ropes to electronic gadgets, were set to be signed at 12.30 p.m. in the White House, the US media had reported earlier.

If approved, these would be the harshest trade restrictions imposed by Trump on another country and would go far beyond the global tariffs worth $33 billion imposed on aluminium and steel, which also affect Beijing.

Tensions between the two biggest economies in the world have been steadily rising and on Wednesday White House officials had accused Beijing of violating World Trade Organization agreements on intellectual property and technology transfers.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)In a step towards a cleaner environment, the number of coal-based fired power plants under development have seen a steep decline, especially in India and China, a report said on Thursday.

The report, however, warns that despite a global coal phase-out trend in new coal plants, emissions from operational plants will still keep the 2015 Paris climate agreement goals at bay.

The landmark Paris climate agreement aims at reducing global warming by 1.5 degrees Celsius.

In India, the economic pressure and retreat from coal financing by private capital are hailed as reasons that about 16 GW of India's operating coal plants currently lack a power purchase agreement, the report said.

"At 17 sites, the coal plant construction in India is frozen primarily due to a lack of financing," said the report "Boom and Bust 2018: Tracking The Global Coal Plant Pipeline", released on Thursday by Greenpeace, the Sierra Club and CoalSwarm.

For China, the world's second largest emitter, the report credits tightening restrictions on new coal plant projects by Chinese central authorities as the reason for the continued decline in coal expansion.

Currently, India has an installed power capacity of 334.44 GW, of which 214.91 GW is from coal, 62.8 GW from renewable (solar, wind and small hydro), 44 GW from major hydro projects and 25 GW from gas-based power plants. However, the power generation is much less than the installed capacity.

In 2017, India's peak power demand was 167 GW.

According to the report, as on January 2018, India has about 87.73 GW of coal-fired power plants under planning and about 43.62 GW under construction. Of this, about 82.35 GW has been stalled.

Referring to the report, senior Greenpeace India campaigner Sunil Dahiya advocates the replacement of expensive and polluting coal-fired power plants in India with cheaper renewable energy.

"It's now widely accepted that the new coal power plants are not financially competitive with new renewables in India. Our analysis shows that significant cost savings can accrue to the country and cash-strapped discoms through a planned phase-out of the most expensive coal power plants already in operation and their replacement with cheaper renewable energy," said Dahiya.

In 2017, only seven countries initiated new coal power construction at more than one location, of which India is one.

"From a climate and health perspective, the trend towards a declining coal power fleet is encouraging, but not happening fast enough," said Ted Nace, Director of CoalSwarm.

In 2017, the Ministry of Power reported that 89 per cent of the existing coal plant capacity, or 166 GW, was not following sulphur dioxide emission norms. Over 300 coal plants nationwide have missed their December 7, 2017, deadline to install pollution controls.

India's ambition to achieve 275 GW of total renewable energy by 2027, the report points out, shows that prospects for future coal power are also dimming, with no coal plants needed beyond those under construction.

Speaking of phasing-out coal-power, the report named the UK, the USA and China.

In the UK, the electricity provided by coal dropped from 45 per cent of overall generation in 2012 to just 2 per cent in 2017, the report pointed out.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A special court on Thursday granted a conditional bail to Karnataka Energy Minister D.K. Shivakumar for allegedly destroying evidence in three income tax evasion cases.

Economic Offences Wing Court judge Justice M.S. Alva granted conditional bail to Shivakumar on Rs 1 lakh personal bond and Rs 25,000 sureties by two persons, Additional Solicitor General P. Navalgadi told reporters here.

The investigation wing of the Karnataka-Goa region's Income Tax Department found evidence of the senior minister destroying evidence during a raid by its sleuths at a private resort in August first week last year.

Arguing against granting the bail, Navalgadi told the court that the minister had admitted to have torn a paper in which details of money trail were noted while investigation into tax evasion was in progress.

Shivakumar's counsel M.V. Seshachala, however, said the sum of the amount noted in the paper was not the same as in the money trail being investigated.

"As the cases of economic offences were bailable and the allegation of destroying evidence are taken up during the trail, we have requested the court to grant bail to Shivakumar," he told reporters.

The IT Department directed the 55-year-old Congress lawmaker to appear before the special court in connection with the illegal properties seized during the searches at his residences in Bengaluru, Kanakapura and Mysuru and New Delhi from August 2-5, 2017.

Shivakumar is the legislator from the Kanakapura in Ramanagara district. As per the declaration in the nomination to the Election Commission for the 2013 assembly election, Shivakumar was then the second richest politician in the state, with assets valued at Rs 251 crore.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Congress won't succeed with another UPA experiment as it has lost all credibility and the best way to defeat the BJP in the next Lok Sabha election will be to pool in all anti-BJP votes statewise, the CPI-M has said.

"The Congress hopes to build an extended UPA style alliance to counter the BJP," said an editorial in the CPI-M journal "People's Democracy" following the Bharatiya Janata Party's defeat in two Lok Sabha by-elections in Uttar Pradesh.

"However, this will not succeed. The Congress has no credibility to lead such an alliance in terms of an alternative programme.

"There are many regional parties like the BJD in Odisha, the TRS in Telangana and the TDP in Andhra Pradesh who will not accept to be a partner in an alliance with the Congress," it said.

"There are other parties who are chary of accepting the Congress as the leader of the alliance," the CPI-M added, naming itself as one of them.

Similarly, any effort to build a non-BJP, non-Congress "Federal Front" mooted by Telangana Chief Minister K.C. Rao was also bound to fail, the editorial warned.

"Some regional parties like DMK and RJD are with Congress in their respective states. Further, there are many contradictions amongst the regional parties in terms of policies and regional interests which will prevent all the regional parties (from) coming together.

"So, the most effective electoral tactics to defeat the BJP in the Lok Sabha election will be to ensure pooling of anti-BJP votes state-wise. This is what happened in the UP by-elections."

The CPI-M said the BJP's defeat in the Gorakhpur and Phulpur Lok Sabha by-elections would have significant implications for the future.

"The UP by-election provides important lessons for the future in terms of election tactics to defeat the BJP. If the BJP loses the bulk of the seats in UP, it cannot come anywhere near a majority in the Lok Sabha."

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Meghalaya Chief Minister Conrad Sangma on Thursday called on Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley and briefed him about the poor fiscal health of the state especially in terms of block crunch as well as the issue of the Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan.

Sangma, who also has the Finance portfolio, discussed wide range of issues such as early sanction of funds to ensure smooth implementation of government policies and programmes.

Jaitley, who expressed concerned about the state's financial situation, assured the Chief Minister of all possible help and personally spoke to Union Secretary Expenditure Ajay Narayan Jha in this connection. Later Sangma also met Jha.

The meeting came a day before Sangma will present the State's budget in the assembly on Friday.

The Chief Minister also met Nriprendra Mishra, the Principal Secretary to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, sought support to meet the state government's dream of ensuring socio-economic development.

Mishra assured that he will look into the matter.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Delhi government on Thursday allocated Rs 6,729 crore for the health sector in its 2018-19 budget, which is 12.7 per cent of the total.

The allocation is up from 12 per cent in 2017-18, Finance Minister and Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia told the Assembly.

He said Rs 403 crore had been allocated for Mohalla Clinics and Polyclinics. Also, mobile van clinics were to be established with Rs 15 crore, he said.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Maldivian President Abdulla Yameen on Thursday lifted the state of Emergency after 45 days, inviting fresh criticism that he had used it to boost his own power and illegally arrest hundreds.

The government lifted the Emergency imposed in February following a Supreme Court ruling that had ordered the retrial and release of nine opposition leaders, including former President and now opposition leader Mohamed Nasheed.

"Upon the advice of the security services and in an effort to promote normalcy, the President has decided to lift the state of Emergency," Yameen's office said in a statement.

Following the announcement, Nasheed of the opposition Maldives Democratic Party said: "President Yameen lifts Emergency because he now has no need for it. He has overrun the judiciary and legislature, arrested hundreds unlawfully."

Nasheed said Yameen was setting a "new normal" in the Maldives: an authoritarian rule seeking to turn the country into a "puppet state" controlled by China, Efe news reported.

Nasheed, the country's first democratically elected leader, was forced to resign in 2012 and later jailed for ordering the allegedly illegal arrest of a judge.

Maldives has been mired in a political and institutional crisis following a Supreme Court ruling on February 1 which ordered the retrial and immediate release of nine opposition leaders as well as the reinstatement of 12 opposition lawmakers.

Yameen decided to reject the ruling and declared Emergency for 15 days on February 5 and claimed the government had thwarted an attempted coup by former dictator Maumoon Abdul Gayoom and Chief Justice Abdulla Saeed.

He came under international attack due to the Emergency, including from the US and neighbouring India.

On February 20, hours before the state of Emergency expired, the government extended it for another 30 days without the required approval of 43 lawmakers.

During the 45-day state of Emergency, the government said day-to-day activities of the citizens had not been affected and tourists were free to visit the island nation.

Meanwhile, several members of Nasheed's Maldivian Democratic Party (MDP) detained under Emergency powers were released without charge, the Maldives Independent reported.

According to the opposition, some 60 people were arrested since the declaration of Emergency.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The European Union (EU) and the US will talk about trade, including the looming metal tariffs from the US, according to an official statement on Wednesday.

EU Commissioner for Trade Cecilia Malmstrom met US Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross in Washington to seek an exemption from tariffs on steel and aluminum exports to the US, which are expected to kick in starting on March 23, reports Xinhua.

"We have agreed to launch immediately a process of discussion with President Trump and the Trump Administration on trade issues of common concern, including steel and aluminum, with a view to identifying mutually acceptable outcomes as rapidly as possible," the statement said.

Trump on March 8 signed proclamations to impose a 25 per cent tariff on imported steel and a 10 per cent tariff on aluminum, causing mounting dissent among business groups and trading partners around the world.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)India's Test wicketkeeper-batsman Wriddhiman Saha, who was roped in by Sunrisers Hyderabad (SRH) this Indian Premier League (IPL) season, said he's ready to bat anywhere and the team has star openers like David Warner and Shikhar Dhawan to give them a solid start.

"I prefer batting at the top but I have kept rotating in terms of my batting position. With SRH, I will probably bat in the lower middle order," Saha told reporters at the Mohun Bagan club ground where he will play the J.C Mukherjee Trophy.

"We have great openers (Shikhar Dhawan and David Warner) so they will do well. I am ready to bat anywhere for the team."

Saha was bought by former champions SRH for Rs 5 crore.

"I was playing in Mohali (for Kings XI Punjab) and I know the wicket there. Now I will be playing for Hyderabad, so I will have to adjust to the wicket. As far as gelling with the players is concerned, it won't be a problem. Everybody is familiar at this level," Saha added.

Saha picked up a back injury and had to return midway from India's tour to South Africa after playing only the first Test in Cape Town.

"I am fit now and have started playing a few office matches," Saha said.

Asked about keeping to Afghanistan spinner Rashid Khan, he said: "I will practice with him at the nets. I have played his bowling and got out too."

On the toughest opponents, he said: "I would like my team to win but Chennai have a good team and have bench strength."

Talking about the England tour later this year, Saha admitted wicket-keeping would be difficult on swinging conditions expected there.

"England will be tough. We have to play well. It will help if we can go there early. In England first is T20 and one-dayers. We are ready to go one month in advance as well for the Tests.

"I have never played in England for India. I have played with the India A team there. It is challenging to keep wickets there as the ball moves quite a lot. There is dampness also," he added.

India will play five Tests in England from August 1, preceded by the T20Is and ODIs.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)France has condoled the killing of 39 Indians in Iraq.

"France offers its condolences to the victims' families and loved ones and to the Indian authorities," the French Foreign Ministry said in a statement on Wednesday.

"We pay tribute to the investigation carried out with the Iraqi authorities that made it possible to establish the truth about the fate of these victims of terrorism," it stated.

"France stands with its Indian and Iraqi partners in the fight against terrorism and for peace and stability."

The 39 Indian workers had gone missing in the Iraqi city of Mosul after it was overrun by the Islamic State in June 2014.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)As Parliament remained paralyzed for the 14th consecutive day, the government on Thursday decided to reach out to the opposition parties to ensure smooth functioning so that the pending bills get passed in both the Houses.

Minister of State for Parliamentary Affairs Vijay Goel, who has been assigned the task to talking to opposition leaders, met Leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad for a brief discussion. He will again meet him to discuss the issues in detail.

The Minister said he would also meet leaders of the TDP, AIADMK, TRS and other parties.

Ever since the second phase of Parliament's Budget session began on March 5, disruptions have crippled both the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha on a number of issues including demand for special status to Andhra Pradesh, Punjab National Bank fraud case and setting up of Cauvery Management Board.

The Congress, the Trinamool and some other opposition parties have been protesting against the banking fraud blamed on absconding jeweller Nirav Modi and his associates, while the TDP and the YSR Congress have been demonstrating for special status to Andhra Pradesh.

The AIADMK wants a board for the management of the disputed Cauvery river water. The TRS is demanding an increase in the reservation quota for jobs in Telangana.

"Only nine working days are left now after 14 wasted days. I request the opposition parties to ensure passage of important bills in both Houses. I am hopeful the opposition will cooperate," Goel said.

"The government is in regular touch with the opposition leaders and I will meet them personally to ensure the smooth functioning of the Parliament," he told reporters.

The Minister said the government was ready to discuss each and every issue concerning the political parties including no-confidence motion against the government.

"In fact the opposition is running away from discussion. We are ready to discuss even the no-confidence motion. We have adequate numbers in the House."

Earlier, Rajya Sabha Chairman M. Venkaiah Naidu met the leaders of different parties in his chamber and sought their support to get The Payment of Gratuity (Amendment) Bill passed.

The Bill was passed by the Upper House before being adjourned for the day, however, without discussion and despite order in the House.

The Lok Sabha was also adjourned for the day, amid protests as opposition members trooped near the Speaker's podium, raising slogans and displaying placards.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)India on Thursday welcomed the revocation of emergency in the Maldives but with noted that a number of concerns expressed by the international community still remain to be addressed.

"We welcome the revocation of the State of Emergency in the Maldives.

"While this is one step towards addressing the issues related to the prevailing political situation in that country, a number of concerns expressed by the international community still remain to be addressed," the External Affairs Ministry said in a statement.

"We, therefore, call upon the government of the Maldives to restore all Articles of the Constitution, to allow the Supreme Court and other branches of the judiciary to operate in full independence, to promote and support the free and proper functioning of Parliament, to implement the Supreme Court's full bench order of February 1, 2018, and to support a genuine political dialogue with all opposition parties."

Maldivian President Abdulla Yameen on Thursday lifted the state of emergency after 45 days, inviting fresh criticism that he had used it to boost his own power and illegally arrest hundreds.

The emergency was imposed in February following a Supreme Court ruling that had ordered the retrial and release of nine opposition leaders, including former President and now opposition leader Mohamed Nasheed.

Soon after the imposition of emergency last month, Nasheed, who is living in exile, sought India's intervention to end the crisis in the country.

In its statement, the External Affairs Ministry said that it is important for the Maldives government to ensure "credible restoration of the political process, as well as the rule of law, before the elections are announced this year".

"As a neighbour whose security is closely intertwined with that of the Maldives, India wishes to see a stable, peaceful and prosperous Maldives that meets the aspiration of its citizens," it said.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Bowing to intense opposition to invoking the stringent Maharashtra Essential Services Maintenance Act (MESMA) on aanganwadi workers, Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis on Thursday stayed the proposal.

Making an announcement in the Assembly, Fadnavis said that in view the sentiments of the House, MESMA would not be imposed on aanganwadi workers.

First announced by Women and Child Development Minister Pankaja Munde on March 15, the move led to political uproar, with even the ruling ally Shiv Sena joining the opposition ranks and clamouring for withdrawal of MESMA on aanganwadi workers.

The Bharatiya Janata Party was virtually isolated after Sena President Uddhav Thackeray termed it as "a draconian law" and assured aanganwadi workers that his party would not allow the government to invoke it.

Demanding its immediate revocation, the opposition parties termed the government's decision as moving towards 'dictatorship' and disrupted the functioning of the legislature.

Munde's decision effectively banned strikes by the state's estimated 207,000 aanganwadi workers who help implement crucial policies like the Centre's Integrated Child Development Scheme to battle malnutrition among infants, pregnant women and lactating mothers.

Maharashtra State Aanganwadi Workers Action Committee chief M.A. Patil pointed out that the aanganwadi workers are not given the status of government employees and work on paltry honorarium, with a majority having no other sources of income.

The 2.07 lakh aanganwadi workers working in some 97,000 aanganwadis across the state serving around six million children below the age of six have been on a warpath since the past few weeks for various demands including a hike in their honorarium.

Last year, they went on a 26-day strike after which some demands were conceded by the state government. But aanganwadi workers, who comprise mostly poor, destitute women or widows, say the promises remain unimplemented.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Jagson International Ltd will take legal action against those levelling false allegations against it or its officials, a senior company official said on Thursday.

"We are looking at legal options to protect our image and brand. We are involved in offshore drilling for oil and gas exploration which are critical activities," Pradeep Gupta, Executive Director, told IANS over phone from New Delhi.

He said the London-based reinsurance broker Atkins Special Risks Ltd along with its Indian associate is indulging in a smear campaign to damage the name and reputation of Jagson and its Chairman with false and untruthful statements.

His cause of complaint finds its root in Atkins' complaint to the Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India (IRDAI) and the recent decision of the Securities and Appellate Tribunal (SAT).

In a complaint to IRDAI, Atkins said that between 2002 to 2012, it provided international reinsurance cover to Jagson. From 2010 onwards Jagson's Gupta started demanding, through e-mails, a cut in Atkins commission.

In 2012, Jagson's reinsurance business was given to Marsh.

Atkins hired a private investigation firm to find out any payment of kick-backs by Marsh to Gupta.

As per the SAT's order, the investigation firm had confirmed kick-backs to Gupta for diverting the reinsurance business to Marsh from Atkins.

Atkins alleged that during the telephonic conversation, Gupta had said that Marsh had agreed to pay him $4,00,000 in order to obtain Jagson's business.

The SAT, in its order, said Atkins had relied on documentary evidence in support of the contention that Gupta had sought a bribe and was bribed by the officers of Marsh for diverting the reinsurance business from the appellant to Marsh.

Setting aside the IRDAI's order, the SAT directed the insurance regulator for fresh orders on Atkins complaint on merits.

Gupta told IANS that Marsh is no more the company's reinsurance broker.

"We go with people who offer best rates for insuring our assets," he said.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)After his son's name cropped up in connection with the controversial British firm Cambridge Analytica (CA), JD-U secretary general K.C. Tyagi on Thursday said his son's company has only "professional links" with the CA and that the government can investigate the links.

The London-based elections consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica, which engages in data mining and analysis for electoral processes, has been accused of harvesting and using the Facebook data of millions of users.

Concerns are being raised over the possibility of such data being used to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential elections.

Amrish Tyagi's firm Ovleno Business Intelligence (OBI) is the India partner of CA and lists the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Congress and the Janata Dal-United (JD-U) among its clients.

"The JD-U has no links with my son Amrish Tyagi's firm or with Cambridge Analytica. Neither CA's directors have ever met (JD-U President) Nitish Kumar nor Nitish Kumar ever met CA's bosses," Tyagi said.

He said that the JD-U "being a socialist party does not go into tactics like data mining, etc", though he admitted that Amrish oversaw the party's social media campaign during the last Bihar Assembly elections.

"Although there have been no complaints or information of data breach in India, I would request the government of India and particularly my friend Law and IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, to investigate if any data breach or misuse happened in the country as well. Also, I would like them to probe the links between my son's firm and CA," he said.

He said that Amrish campaigned for President Donald Trump for over a month in the United States.

"Although as a socialist he did not like this, as a professional he (Amrish) is free to make his work decisions. He is a grown up man of 40," Tyagi said.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Medical devices maker Johnson & Johnson Medical India on Thursday launched a specialised bus to travel across the country and provide hands on surgery training to around 25,000 healthcare professionals in the next five years.

Named "Johnson & Johnson Institute on Wheels", this mobile training centre would enhance "the surgical skills of doctors, nurses, and para medical staff to address the demands of today's health care delivery system and provide better outcomes to patients of India," the company said in a statement.

"With the launch of the Johnson & Johnson Institute on Wheels, we hope to train 25,000 surgeons across 400 towns in the next five years," said Sushobhan Dasgupta, Managing Director, Johnson and Johnson Medical India.

It will travel to various medical colleges and teaching hospitals across the country to train budding and practicing surgeons and para medical staff.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Kerala is all set to become a knowledge-based society for which the government will put in place all infrastructure and policy framework, Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan said here on Thursday.

"We have a wide range of highly qualified and skilled human resources and the world class physical and digital infrastructure that can attract the emerging knowledge companies to Kerala," said Vijayan, while inaugurating Kerala's first-ever Global Digital Summit, #FUTURE..

Stressing the inherent strength of Kerala to rise up to the fast-paced changes happening around the world, he said that the ongoing, two-day conclave is a key step in showcasing the state as a global digital and information technology destination.

"Through #FUTURE, we hope to connect and collaborate so as to enable a digital lifestyle for all in the state. That is why we have this confluence of thought leaders, knowledge champions and leading industrialists, IT professionals and experts here," he added.

The summit would also provide a rare opportunity to the start-ups and the vast pool of skilled youth to meet and interact with the top figures who have come.

On the occasion, Vijayan also launched M-Kerala, a unified app for all government services.

Kerala is the state with the largest public Wi-Fi deployment in the country, with state government already having set up 1,000 public hotspots in the state and plans to ramp this up by 1,000 every year.

S.D. Shibulal, chairman of Kerala's High Power Committee on IT (HPIC), while welcoming the gathering, said that over 30 business leaders who have made a name in the global arena are attending the summit.

"It is significant that such an event is being held at a time when the world is on the threshold of a massive change impacting entire spectrum of activities. The aim of #FUTURE is to think about the future of Kerala and India and the summit is the first step in that direction," the Infosys co-founder added.

V.K. Mathews, HPIC member and convener of #FUTURE, noted that amid all the disruptions taking place globally, the scenario also offered a lot of opportunities and challenges.

Among the speakers include Nandan Nilekani, Christoph Mueller, Chief Digital and Innovation Officer, Emirates Group, Roland Schuetz, Group CIO, Lufthansa Group, Alok Ohrie, President and MD, India Commercial, Dell EMC, Byju Raveendran, founder and CEO, Byju's, Natesh Manikoth, Chief Data Officer, Federal Aviation Administration, U. Dinu John Parel, Global CIO, Dover Corporation, among others.

The 30 invitees are divided into six panels and the topics of discussion would include 'The digital future of travel & transportation'; 'Data: Oil of the digital future'; 'The digital future of health & sustainability'; 'The digital future of education & skills'; 'Technology disruption and inclusion'; and 'The digital future of banking finance and retail'.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A Maoist commander carrying a Rs 25 lakh reward was arrested along with his wife in Jharkhand on Thursday while they were undergoing medical procedure to have a child, police said.

Dhanbad Senior Superintendent of Police Manoj Ratan Chouthe said that Prabhakar Tudu alias Rajesh Tudu alias Santhal alias Harish was arrested with his wife Mogli Murmu from an IVF centre in Dhanbad city.

Both were childless and were undergoing treatment.

Tudu was one of the top Maoists who had established the Maoist movement in the Saranda jungles of Jharkhand. He was wanted for 22 incidents and had been associated with the Maoist movement for the past 25 years.

The Odisha government had also declared an award of Rs 10 lakh on his arrest.

Also, another leader of the banned Communist Party of India-Maoist (CPI-Maoist), Deo Kumar Singh alias Arvindji, 53, has reportedly died of heart attack, police sources said.

Arvindji was wanted in nine states. Suffering from diabetes, he is said to have succumbed to a heart attack this week, the sources said. But the police have not found his body.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Two tribal children were killed after an outbreak of measles in Manipur, said K. Rajo, Director of Health Services, on Thursday. Over 50 other children have also been affected by this disease.

Officials said that the disease had affected the children at Phoklong village in Tamenglong district of the state. The Director added that a 12-member medical team, along with medicines, has already reached the village.

"The unaffected children will be vaccinated against this disease. Besides, the children already affected by the disease will be taken care of," Rajo said.

Villagers complained that no preventive vaccines were given in advance to the tribal children by the health officials in the district.

The Director said that all the preventive measures will be taken in other parts of the state. Health officials and paramedics have been mobilised for doing the needful.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Wednesday called for unity in the European Union (EU) in the future, especially in defence and foreign affairs.

"In the coalition agreement (with Social Democrats), we are committed to the goals of the Alliance," Xinhua quoted Merkel as saying who referred to NATO when delivering the first government statement before the Bundestag in her fourth term.

"There is not a single country in NATO and the EU that believes that Germany spends too much on its defence; nowhere are there fears of over-militarization in Germany," said the chancellor.

"The EU is not only a currency but also an economic union. There is still a long way to go before the EU," said Merkel, who added Europe's economic importance has been marginalised by the rise of other regions.

Merkel therefore sees a future only as a united Europe, saying only together can prosperity and peace be achieved permanently.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Ayushman Bharat National Health Protection Mission (NHPM), hailed as the world's largest public funded health insurance scheme, would be ready for launch by July end, informed Union Health and Family Welfare Minister J.P. Nadda said on Thursday.

"All activities related to launching of Ayushman Bharat will be done by the end of July," he told reporters a day after the Union Cabinet chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi approved the health programme will cover 40 per cent of India's population.

About the timeline, Nadda said the operational guidelines being drafted by the seven working groups will be shared with the states along with the model of the tender and the contract in April. Preparation of 1,347 packages that lists down diseases and related procedures is in the final stage. Registration and operationalization of national health agency led by an independent CEO will be done in April.

An important aspect of the paperless, cashless, portable and IT-based health insurance scheme is the validation of the target audience who can avail the benefit. The scheme aims to provide Rs 5 lakh per family per year medical coverage to 10 crore poor and vulnerable households.

On April 14, the Health Ministry would join the Gram Swaraj Abhiyan of the Rural Development Ministry to carry out an exhaustive exercise of updating and validating the data of Socio Economic and Caste Census (SECC) with all gram panchayats in every state. The 10.74 crore eligible families have been identified from various deprivation categories based on SECC data.

Nadda, along with his two Ministers of State Ashwini Kumar Choubey and Anupriya Singh Patel, would hold zonal meetings with the states to fine-tune the system. Design of IT system along with NITI Ayog would be done by May 30 and testing of IT systems and finalization will be done in June.

State and district officials would complete their training and award of tenders by the states would happen in June.

"By June end, hospital empanellment and all testing would be done so that the system is robust and reaches the last man," said Nadda.

While the Central government has kept Rs 10,000 crore for the programme, shared by the Centre and the states in the ratio of 60:40, for 2017-18 and 2018-19, the Health Minister said that there is no lack of funds and their only concern was to ensure the entitled person gets the benefit in time.

Considered as "a major step towards Universal Health Coverage", the NHPM will lead to increased access to quality health and medication. In addition, the unmet needs of the population which remained hidden due to lack of financial resources will be catered to, said the minister.

"This will lead to timely treatments, improvements in health outcomes, patient satisfaction, improvement in productivity and efficiency, job creation thus leading to improvement in quality of life," Nadda added.

--IANS

mgu/vd

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)New Zealand's Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and former US President Barack Obama met in Auckland on Thursday and discussed a range of issues, including climate change and the social media.

Obama, who is on a private trip to New Zealand, also gave Ardern, who is expecting her first child, tips on parenthood during the meeting.

"We talked about pressing issues like climate change and a little bit about our agenda here in New Zealand," Ardern said after meeting Obama, Efe news reported.

Ardern said she also asked Obama for "his views on different elements of leadership and also parenthood", adding that he gave her tips that she will "probably long remember".

Obama arrived in New Zealand on Tuesday night and was received at the Government House on Thursday with a traditional Maori welcome.

The former US President began his trip in Singapore and will visit Australia on Friday and Japan over the weekend.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Pakistani and Russian counter-terrorism officials expressed grave concern over the rising threat posed by the Islamic State in the region, officials said on Thursday.

The Pakistan-Russia Joint Working Group (JWG) on Counter-Terrorism on Wednesday discussed a wide-ranging agenda covering the counter-terrorism situation at the regional and global level, action taken by both countries to tackle the menace of terrorism as well as bilateral cooperation on the issue.

The two sides reaffirmed the commitment for promoting bilateral cooperation for countering terrorism and agreed to cooperate at the United Nations and other international fora for combating terrorism, a foreign ministry statement said.

"There was broad agreement on the fact that terrorism was a common global threat which required cooperative efforts of the international community for effectively eradicating it," the statement said.

"While major successes had been achieved in the fight against the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, the returning IS fighters from the conflict zones to countries of origin or third countries constituted a major security threat to various parts of the world, including this region. It was important for countries of the region to cooperate to counter this threat," the statement said.

The Pakistani side was led by Foreign Ministry Counter-Terrorism Director General Ahmad Farooq, while the Russian side was led by Director of the Department for New Challenges of the Russian Foreign Ministry Ilya Rogachev. Both delegations included officials from departments dealing with counter-terrorism.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Rajya Sabha was adjourned for the day shortly after the House met on Thursday amid an unending Parliament deadlock on the 14th consecutive day of the second half of the budget session.

However, the government managed to pass a key legislation that empowers it to fix the period of maternity leave and the tax-free gratuity amount of employees with an executive order.

The bill was passed by voice vote amid a din by opposition parties including the Congress, AIADMK and TDP who were protesting over their various demands.

Soon after the House met, Chairman M. Venkaiah Naidu greeted the members and the country on World Water Day and urged all to protect the eco-system and support the conservation of water for the future generations.

Naidu sought the cooperation of the members for the passage of the Payment of Gratuity (Amendment) Bill moved by Labour Minister Santosh Kumar Gangwar. It was passed by the Lok Sabha on March 15 amid a ruckus.

Soon after the bill was passed, members belonging to the AIADMK, the TDP and the Congress gathered near the Chairman's podium and began shouting slogans.

Naidu urged them to return to their seats but they did not relent. Amid the din, he adjourned the House for the day.

The Congress, the Trinamool and some other opposition members have been protesting against the banking fraud allegedly committed by absconding jeweller Nirav Modi and his associates, while the TDP and the YSR Congress have been demonstrating for special status to Andhra Pradesh.

The AIADMK has been demanding the setting up of a board for the management of the disputed Cauvery river water.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Parliament failed to transact any business on Thursday for the 14th consecutive day and both Houses had to be adjourned amid pandemonium by various parties over different issues, leaving the no-confidence motion in a limbo.

Meanwhile, the government tried to reach out to the floor leaders of different parties to break the logjam that has bedevilled the second part of the budget session.

The Lok Sabha was adjourned for the day on Thursday, amid protests as opposition members trooped near the Speaker's podium, raising slogans and displaying placards.

Speaker Sumitra Mahajan first adjourned the House till 12 p.m., minutes after the House met for the day.

Members from the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) and the AIADMK trooped near the Speaker's podium as soon as the House assembled.

Parliamentary Affairs Minister Ananth Kumar said the government was ready to debate all issues including the no-confidence motion.

"I again appeal to you to go to your place and let the House run. We are ready for debate on any issues... on banking irregularities and also the no-confidence motion. If the House runs, all issues can be discussed," he said.

Mahajan said she could not take up the motion amid protests as she was not able to count the 50 members.

The Rajya Sabha witnessed similar scenes and was adjourned for the day shortly after it met in the morning.

However, the government managed to pass a key legislation in the upper House that empowers it to fix the period of maternity leave and the tax-free gratuity amount of employees with an executive order.

The AIADMK, the TDP and the opposition members came near the Chair's podium as usual, flaunting placards and shouting slogans.

Chairman M. Venkaiah Naidu asked the agitating members to return to their seats, saying he could not understand why they were creating "ugly scenes" through their conduct.

"People are saying as to why the Chairman is adjourning the House. I want to tell them that I don't want these ugly scenes to be seen by the people. That is why I have been adjourning," he said amid the chaos.

Meanwhile, Minister of State for Parliamentary Affairs Vijay Goel said that it was everyone's responsibility to run the House.

"The way this bill (Gratuity bill) has been passed, the other bills should also be passed. There is a long list of business, the other bills need to be passed too. The government is ready for discussion on every issue," he said amid pandemonium.

At one point, both Naidu and Goel were speaking simultaneously over the din being created by the sloganeering members.

When the agitating MPs refused to relent, Naidu adjourned the House for the day.

Earlier, the Upper House unanimously passed the Payment of Gratuity (Amendment) Bill, moved by Labour Minister Santosh Kumar Gangwar, by voice vote without any discussion. Gangwar had requested the members to pass the "important" Bill quickly as the House was not in order to hold any discussion on the legislation.

But as soon as the Bill was passed, members belonging to the AIADMK, the TDP and the Congress gathered near the Chairman's podium and began shouting slogans.

The Congress, Trinamool and other opposition parties members have been protesting against the rejection of their notices by the Chair for discussion on the Punjab National Bank fraud under an adjournment motion. They are also demanding extradition of diamondtaire Nirav Modi who is at the centre of the fraud.

The TDP and the YSR Congress have been demonstrating for special status to Andhra Pradesh. The AIADMK has been demanding the setting up of a board for the management of the disputed Cauvery river water.

Later in the day, Goel, who has been assigned the task to talking to opposition leaders, met Leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad for a brief discussion. He said he would again meet Azad to discuss the issues in detail and also meet leaders of the TDP, AIADMK, TRS and other parties.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Peruvian President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski has submitted his letter of resignation ahead of a scheduled impeachment him.

In a nationally televised address on Wednesday, Kuczynski said he was unable to govern effectively due to the persistent allegations of corruption that have dogged him since his first months in office, reports Xinhua news agency.

"Faced with this difficult situation that unfairly makes me appear guilty of actions in which I did not take part, I think it is best for the country that I resign as president of the republic," said Kuczynski.

"I do not want to be an obstacle to the unity and harmony the nation needs so badly," he said, adding his resignation ensures "an orderly constitutional transition."

His resignation follows widely circulated videos of the President's political allies appearing to be buying the votes of lawmakers in the lead-up to Thursday's congressional impeachment hearing.

The businessman-turned-politician took office in July 2016, but was soon engulfed by accusations that he profited from a multinational bribery scheme operated by Brazilian construction giant Odebrecht to win lucrative government public work contracts back in the early 2000s.

The Congress first held an impeachment vote in December 2017, but the opposition-backed initiative failed to garner sufficient votes.

The initiative alleged that Kuczynski's Florida-based company Westfield Capital provided consulting services to Odebrecht while he was minister of economy and finance, and chief of staff, during the administration of former President Alejandro Toledo.

Peru has requested Toledo's extradition so he can stand trial for allegedly accepting millions in bribes from Odebrecht.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A former head of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), John O. Brennan, has said that he thinks Russia might have some kind of compromising information on President Donald Trump.

His remark on Wednesday on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" set off furious speculation about whether the former spy chief was basing that assertion on inside information.

Brennan, who served as CIA director from 2013 to 2017, speculated that Russians "may have something on him personally" when he was asked if he thought Trump was afraid of Russian President Vladimir Putin, the New York Times reported.

"The Russians, I think, have had long experience with Trump and may have things that they could expose," he said.

Brennan was heading the agency when a dossier surfaced in 2016 claiming the Russians had compromising information on Trump.

His comments came the day after Trump congratulated Putin in a phone call for his re-election that raised new questions about the President's relationship with Russia.

Brennan also said that his comments were speculation based on Trump's words and deeds as well as how Putin's government operated at home and abroad -- and not on any inside knowledge.

"I do not know if the Russians have something on Donald Trump that they could use as blackmail," he told the New York Times.

"When asked the question, I have pointed out the perplexing submissiveness of Trump towards Putin -- despite continued evidence of malign Russian activities," Brennan said.

"I do not know why he refuses to call out Russia; that is a question that can only be answered by Trump."

--IANS

soni/mr

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Rajya Sabha was adjourned for the day on Thursday shortly after the House met amid an unending Parliament deadlock on the 14th consecutive day of the second half of the budget session.

However, the government managed to pass a key legislation that empowers it to fix the period of maternity leave and the tax-free gratuity amount of employees with an executive order.

The AIADMK, the TDP and the opposition members came near the Chair's podium as usual, flaunting placards and shouting slogans.

Chairman M. Venkaiah Naidu asked the agitating members to return to their seats, saying he could not understand why they were creating "ugly scenes" through their conduct.

"People are saying as to why the Chairman is adjourning the House. I want to tell them that I don't want these ugly scenes to be seen by the people. That is why I have been adjourning," Naidu said over the chaos.

"Today some people (from the opposition) said that they want the House to run, but some people have come into the podium. One day, one party does it, other day some other party does it. What can I do?"

Meanwhile, Minister of State for Parliamentary Affairs Vijay Goel said that it was everyone's responsibility to run the House.

"The way this bill (Gratuity bill) has been passed, the other bills should also be passed. There is a long list of business, the other bills need to be passed too. The government is ready for discussion on every issue," Goel said amid the pandemonium.

At one point, both Naidu and Goel were speaking simultaneously over the din being created by the sloganeering members.

When the agitating MPs refused to relent, Naidu adjourned the House for the day.

Earlier, the Upper House unanimously passed the Payment of Gratuity (Amendment) Bill, moved by junior Labour Minister Santosh Kumar Gangwar, by voice vote without any discussion. Gangwar had requested the members to pass the "important" Bill quickly as the House was not in order to hold any discussion on the legislation.

Naidu had sought the cooperation of the members for the passage of the Bill. It had been passed by the Lok Sabha on March 15.

But as soon as the Bill was passed, members belonging to the AIADMK, the TDP and the Congress gathered near the Chairman's podium and began shouting slogans.

The Congress, Trinamool and other opposition parties members have been protesting against the rejection of their notices by the Chair for discussion on the multi-thousand crore Punjab National Bank fraud under an adjournment motion. They are also demanding extradition of diamondtaire Nirav Modi who is at the centre of the PNB fraud.

The TDP and the YSR Congress have been demonstrating for special status to Andhra Pradesh. The AIADMK has been demanding the setting up of a board for the management of the disputed Cauvery river water.

However, the opposition has accused the government of using "friendly parties" like the AIADMK and the TDP to scuttle the proceedings of the Rajya Sabha to avoid discussion on the PNB fraud and other issues.

Earlier, as the House assembled for the day, Chairman Naidu greeted the members and the country on World Water Day and urged all to protect the eco-system and support the conservation of water for the future generations.

--IANS

mak/ksk/bg

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Reliance Infrastructure Ltd (RInfra) on Thursday said it has filed an application in a North Goa commercial court seeking direction for the payment of the Rs 292 crore arbitration award it has won recently against the state government.

"In its application filed under section 9 of the Arbitration and Conciliation Act, 1996, Reliance Infrastructure Limited has sought the Court's direction to Goa Government to pay an amount of Rs 278.29 crore with interest totaling to Rs 292 crore, which was awarded by the Arbitration Tribunal in its award on February 16, 2018," RInfra said in a statement.

According to the company statement, the Tribunal had ordered payment of interest at 15 per cent per annum on the total award amount if the Government of Goa fails to pay the entire award amount by April 15, 2018.

The development followed RInfra's winning a Rs 292 crore arbitration award in a case against the Goa government heard by a Joint Electricity Regulatory Commission-constituted tribunal in February.

The company had said in a statement earlier: "The need for arbitration arose due to prolonged non-payment of dues by the Goa government towards supply of electricity by Reliance Infrastructure from its 48 MW Goa power plant in Sancoale."

"The total outstanding dues along with interest as on October 31, 2017, amount to Rs 278 crore. The Tribunal has also awarded Reliance Infrastructure interest from October 2017 till the date of the award, which amounts to Rs 14 crore," the statement said.

It said the tribunal had upheld the company's contention that the rate of energy for the period from June 2013 to August 2014 was based on the varying prices of fuel and dollar exchange rate as was agreed to by the Goa government.

"The contention of the Goa government that the rated capacity of the plant was to be downrated, right from the second year of operation, for calculation of fixed charges since the parties had already agreed against downrating in 2007, was rejected by the Tribunal," the statement had said.

RInfra is one of India's largest infrastructure companies, having developed projects in several high growth sectors such as power, roads and Metro Rail, and is also a leading power utility.

The statement noted that the company has also forayed into the defence sector.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Minister of State for External Affairs M.J. Akbar on Thursday said that shared prosperity is the key to peace in the Indo-Pacific region, which has emerged as the most prominent source of prosperity in the world.

Delivering the keynote address at a workshop on "Strategic Stability in the Indo-Pacific" organised by the Institute of Defence Studies and Analyses think tank and the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, Akbar said that today's world is very different from what it was a hundred years ago.

"In the political spaces that occupies the globe, a hundred years ago in 1919 there were only about 60 to 65 political spaces, you can call them nations or you can call them kingdoms or whatever you want," he said.

"Today, there are around 195 countries. So it is a very different world and a very different phenomenon that we are facing."

Akbar said that this phenomenon has to be recognised by governments and "recognised and corrected by ambitions of governance".

In this, he said different regions in the world will be involved including the Indo-Pacific "which is going to become, which has already become the most prominent source of prosperity in the world".

"We have to understand that in order to protect prosperity, we can only do it by sharing it, both the prospects as well as the process through which we ensure peace," he stated.

In this context, he stressed on the importance of the Indian concept of SAGAR ( Security and Growth for All in the Region) the subtext of which he said is the concept of seas of freedom and prosperity.

Akbar said that cooperation is quite possible within the abilities of the Indo-Pacific region because the rights of sovereignty are enshrined as a global commitment.

"So, in order to look for prosperity, you don't have to conquer anyone," he said. "You merely have to discuss, you have to get rid of the notion that there are powers and super powers. You have to get rid of the notion that there are big nations and small nations."

Speaking about regional geopolitics, he said to India's immediate west is "the wall" of Pakistan that blocks trade and countries with governments that did not have full control of their territories because of active militias.

However, in the east, Akbar said, all countries have understood that the need in the 21st century is to meet the rising economic aspirations of the people.

"Today, it is not about sun never sets in the British empire, it is about the sun should not set without food at home," he said.

Though man is a land-centric animal, that land is being replaced by the seas, skies, space and technology, Akbar said.

"When we talk about blue economy, we should not restrict ourselves to the seas. The sky is also blue."

Akbar described Asia-Pacific as an old term that was basically a definition for war zones and was important for the US to assert control in terms of Japan, Taiwan and South Korea.

"But war zones had to give way to trade," he said. "Today, India's fastest growing economic relationship is with the Asean (Association of Southeast Asian Nations), China and Japan."

The minister said unlike in the past when India looked at the US from the lens of Europe and Britain, today India looks at the US through the east.

In this context, he said that Australia has become important and and referred to the recently revived quad of India, the US, Japan and Australia that seeks to work for peace and prosperity in the Indo-Pacific region.

Stating that India's interest today is increasing towards the east, Akbar said: "Security is important for freedom, not for control, but for freedom of passage."

This assumes significance given China's belligerence in the South China Sea and attempts to increase its footprint in the Indo-Pacific region.

Akbar also stressed that the answer to conflict lies in the three Cs - competition, connectivity and cooperation.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A woman had acid thrown at a former friend after their lesbian relationship soured, injuring six people in an autorickshaw here. The guilty woman and four men have been arrested for the horrific crime, police said on Thursday.

Senior Superintendent of Police Vaibhav Krishna said that on Tuesday acid was flung at the woman in Mohan Nagar when she was travelling in an autorickshaw along with others.

The injured were identified as the woman, aged 23, and five othes: Jai Chand, Kamla, Anil Tyagi, Anshu and Rahul.

Krishna said that at the heart of the saga were two women: one who lived in Lajpat Nagar in Ghaziabad and other in Kondli in Delhi.

Both worked in a private company in Noida. Last year, they became lovers. But after some time one of the women drifted away and found a boyfriend.

Initially, the guilty woman, after failing to persuade her friend to return to her, tried to throw acid on her with the help of two autorickshaw drivers but failed.

The next day, the two drivers, identified as Ravi and Salman, sought the help of two others, Lalu and Arjun, who finally carried out the attack from a motorcycle.

But a plastic bag containing acid they threw at the woman travelling in the autorickshaw ended up injuring six people in all, the ex-lover included.

Officer Krishna said Ravi, Salman, Lalu, Arjun and the mastermind, Anju Gupta, had been arrested for the crime.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)John Dowd, US President Donald Trump's lead lawyer who was handling the response to the special counsel investigation into alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia meddling in the 2016 presidential election, resigned on Thursday.

Dowd had considered leaving several times in recent months and concluded that Trump was increasingly ignoring his advice, The New York Times reported.

Trump's lawyers had advised the president to cooperate with special counsel Robert Mueller, who is also looking into whether Trump obstructed the inquiry, reports Xinhua.

Dowd's departure comes after Trump began publicly attacking Mueller and his team. In a tweet last weekend, Trump said that the Mueller probe "should never been started."

Following Trump's remarks, Dowd called for an end to the investigation. He originally claimed to be speaking on Trump's behalf but backtracked later by saying that he was only speaking for himself.

Trump's lawyers are also in the midst of negotiations with the special counsel's team over a potential interview involving the President.

On Thursday, Trump said that he was willing to talk to Mueller, an idea that Dowd has reportedly opposed to.

Dowd is also leaving three days after Joseph diGenova, a former federal prosecutor, was added to the Trump' s legal team for Mueller's probe.

DiGenova, in an interview with Fox News two months ago, alleged that FBI officials were involved in a "brazen plot" to exonerate Hillary Clinton in the email investigation and to "frame" Trump for nonexistent crimes.

--IANS

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(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)US President Donald Trump on Thursday threatened former Vice President Joe Biden with violence, describing him as "weak, both mentally and physically".

The President tweeted that his Democrat rival would "go down fast and hard".

It follows comments from Biden, who said he would "beat the hell" out of the President if they were in high school together.

Tweeting his response, Trump wrote that "crazy" Joe Biden was "trying to act like a tough guy."

He added: "Actually, he is weak, both mentally and physically, and yet he threatens me, for the second time, with physical assault.

"He doesn't know me, but he would go down fast and hard, crying all the way. Don't threaten people Joe!"

Biden made the comments at an anti-sexual assault rally at the University of Miami on Tuesday.

The man who supported Barack Obama through two terms at the White House commented: "A guy who ended up becoming our national leader said: 'I can grab a woman anywhere and she likes it.'

"If we were in high school, I'd take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him."

Biden added that any man who disrespected women was "usually the fattest, ugliest S.O.B. in the room".

He was referring to comments Trump made in a 2005 tape about groping women.

--IANS

ahm/bg

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The US Congress has unveiled a massive bipartisan $1.3 trillion spending package that will keep the government funded until the end of September and has President Donald Trump's support, the media reported.

But it was not immediately clear whether the proposal will pass Congress in time to avert a government shutdown on Friday at midnight, reports CNN.

Lawmakers on Wednesday night agreed on funding levels for every corner of the government with $700 billion budgeted for defence and $591 billion slated for non-defence spending, but the legislation also include policy riders like a bill that incentivizes state and federal authorities to report more data to the country's gun background check system called "Fix NICS".

The rush now was to move the legislation as quickly as possible.

Lawmakers have until Friday at midnight to pass the bill before the government runs out of money.

The House is expected to vote on the plan later this week but the main obstacle will be whether the Senate can move fast enough to avert a shutdown given its rules.

If one lawmaker objects, it could force Senate leaders to run out the clock and even face a temporary shutdown into the weekend, reports CNN.

House Speaker Paul Ryan said that while "no bill this size is perfect", this one strengthens the country.

"No bill of this size is perfect... And we must reform our broken budget process to return to a regular appropriations process. But this legislation addresses important priorities and makes us stronger at home and abroad," Ryan said early Thursday morning.

The spending package includes additional money that could be used to fund a controversial New York and New Jersey infrastructure project.

It also contains the Taylor Force Act, which would cut off US aid to the Palestinian Authority until the government there ceases payments to families of terrorists.

--IANS

ksk

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Actor-comedian Varun Thakur says if given a chance, he would like to legalise marijuana in India.

Asked what would he do if he had inside access to parliament currently, Varun said: "I would legalise marijuana."

Varun, who will be seen getting candid in an upcoming episode of "Vh1 Inside Access", also spoke about feminism.

He feels the concept is "relatively new in mainstream Bollywood".

"It's not pseudo feminism, it is feminism because feminism just means equal opportunities for both men and women. It's just a realisation that now men need to have, which is, what you do - women can do it as well, if not better.

"And, it's just equal opportunities for all," he said, adding that it would take some time before it impacts the way the industry functions.

The creator of the Amazon exclusive show "Shaitaan Haveli" added that if he had inside access to Hrithik Roshan and Kangana Ranaut's email accounts, he would delete all the mails "so (that) we can move on from the controversy".

"I don't know why it is making so many headlines. Just let it be," he added.

--IANS

sug/rb/bg

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A campaign to create awareness of Sikhism and its followers in the US and fight prejudice has won a top award for excellence in public relations programming to promote public causes.

The "We Are Sikhs" campaign received the top 2018 PRWeek US award in the category of Public Cause.

The campaign launched last year on Baisakhi by the National Sikh Campaign (NSC) and executed by FP1 Strategies, won the award for effectively projecting the Sikhs as neighbours and everyday Americans who face discrimination due to ignorance of their faith.

The PRWeek US awards are nicknamed the "Oscars of the Public Relations Industry".

"It is indeed a great victory for the Sikh community across the US," NSC co-founder Rajwant Singh said.

"Countless Sikhs have had to face bullying, discrimination, and hate crimes due to the lack of understanding of our faith and our values. Our community decided that we needed to communicate effectively with our fellow Americans."

The judges commented that the "provocative campaign that really broke through" and "put a face on one distinct minority group" and noted "the real humanity in the execution", PRWeek magazine said.

The $1.3 million for the campaign was raised mostly by Sikhs, with some Hindus also making notable contributions.

The campaign told the stories of Sikhs through online and TV advertising and amplifying them via emails to journalists and community events nationwide.

The TV ads showed Sikhs as American neighbours going about their daily lives, professing patriotism and national values, but also a sharing a love for the TV series "Game of Thrones" and the children's show "Sponge Bob Square Pants" - to counteract the mistaken negative perceptions because of their turbans and beards.

"The campaign drove online conversation that reached more than 5.5 million voters and gained the attention of many of Washington's most influential organisations.

"A post-campaign poll proved the group moved the needle, with significant increases in the percentage of people who knew more about Sikhs and said the group had 'generally American values,' believed in 'equality and respect for all' and were 'patriotic'," PRWeek said.

(Arul Louis can be reached at arul.l@ians.in)

--IANS

al/ksk

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Rajya Sabha, which has transacted little business in the second half of the Budget session, saw rare bonhomie among the Members of Parliament on Thursday. Telugu Desam Party and All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam members withdrew their protests briefly for the government to get the Payment of Gratuity Bill passed without discussion.

However, as soon as the Bill was passed, MPs were all in the Well of the House to disrupt the proceedings. People are asking why I was adjourning the House. I have been adjourning because I don't want these ugly scenes to be seen by the ...Hindu-Muslim riots broke out in Mumbai in 1992 after the demolition of the Babri Masjid and many politicians from the Shiv Sena and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) had to be given police protection. One such was Prakash Javadekar, Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) activist and former officer in the Bank of Maharashtra.

Although he had no direct involvement in the riots, protection was given to him because of his background. In those days, Javadekar had a Bajaj scooter. What do you do with an armed guard when you have only a scooter? So he followed the only ...The Maharashtra government today conceded in the Legislative Council that 1,432 bullet proof jackets out of the 4,614 such vests procured by Mumbai Police in the wake of the 26/11 attacks have failed to withstand bullets of certain guns and would be replaced.

Replying to a written question by Congress MLC Anant Gadgil, Minister of State for Home Ranjit Patil said the 1,432 jackets would be replaced in the next three months.

Gadgil stated that out of the 5,000 bullet-proof vests required for the Mumbai Police post the terror strikes, a total of 4,614 jackets were made available.

However, 1,432 bullet-proof jackets out of the 4,614 failed the durability test.

"A bullet proof jacket should withstand bullets of all kinds of guns. However the 1,432 jackets failed to withstand bullets fired from SLR/MP5/INSA 505 guns," stated Gadgil.

"Are terrorists going to inform us about the guns they would be carrying during the attacks?" Gadgil asked.

Additional DGP (Procurement and Coordination) V V Laxminarayana told PTI in February that Maharashtra Police had returned a total of 1,430 bullet-proof jackets out of the 4,600 received by them to their Kanpur-based manufacturer as they failed the AK-47 bullet test during trials.

"We have sent back more than 1400 bulletproof jackets to their manufacturer as they did not pass our the test with AK-47 bullets," he had said.

The jackets returned were from three different batches.

A major controversy had erupted on the quality of the bulletproof jackets after the death of ATS chief Hemant Karkare in the 2008 terror attacks. Karkare was seen putting on a bulletproof vest in the last visuals, before the jeep he was travelling in was attacked in south Mumbai.

The row was one of the main reasons that no company was willing to supply the jackets in multiple tenders floated by Maharashtra Police since the 2008 attacks.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Fifteen Naxals, two of them carrying cash rewards, were arrested from two places in Chhattisgarh's Maoist hotbed Sukma district, police said today.

The arrests were significant as they came almost eight days after nine personnel of the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) were killed in an IED blast, when suspected Maoists blew up their mine-protected vehicle in Sukma, a senior police official said.

However, the arrested Naxals were not involved in the last week's attack on the CRPF, but were involved in the attack on police team in which two personnel were killed in February, police said.

During a search operation, 14 ultras, including two women, were arrested from a forest in Bhejji area and another cadre was caught from the district's Pushpal area yesterday, Deputy Inspector General of Police (south Bastar range) Sundarraj P told PTI.

A joint team of the Special Task Force (STF), the District Reserve Guard (DRG), the District Force (DF) and the CRPF was involved in the operation carried out in Bhejji to nab the 14 ultras.

Besides, a combined squad of the Chhattisgarh Armed Force (CAF) and DF nabbed the rebel in Pushpal area, he said.

All the 14 cadres arrested from Bhejji were allegedly involved in the attack on a police team in Elarmadgu forest in the area on February 18 this year, in which two personnel were killed and six others were injured, he said.

They were also involved in another incident on the same day in the area, in which a labourer was killed and 10 construction-related equipment and vehicles engaged in road laying work were torched, the DIG said.

Of the arrested Naxals, Sodhi Pojja (42), who was active as the head of Dandakaranya Adivasi Kisan Majdoor Sangthan - a frontal wing of Maoists in the area - was carrying a reward of Rs 1 lakh on his head, he said.

The two women cadres - Rawa Kosi (22) and Hemla Hungi (32) - were working as members of the local guerilla squad (LGS) in Kistaram and the medical team of Maoists, respectively, he said.

The other arrested cadres were lower rung members of the outlawed Communist Party of India (Maoist), he added.

Besides, the Naxal arrested from Pushpal area, Madkam Somaru (25), was active as a LGS member in Machkot area and was carrying a cash reward of Rs 100, 000 on his head.

He was allegedly involved in at least 10 Naxal-related incidents, including attacks on policemen, killings, torching vehicles used in road construction works and planting improvised explosive devices (IEDs) to harm the security personnel at separate places in Sukma, the DIG said.

On March 13, nine CRPF personnel were killed after Maoists blasted their mine protected vehicle using over 50 kgs of explosives in Sukma, which is a hotbed of the ultras in Chhattisgarh.

On March 11 last year, 12 personnel of the force were killed in the Bhejji area and their arms looted, when Naxals ambushed their patrol party.

A few days later on April 24 last year, 25 personnel of the paramilitary were killed in a similar ambush in Sukma.Nearly 177 students graduating from the IIM-Udaipur, tomorrow will be the second batch of IIM graduates after Bangalore to receive MBA degrees instead of diplomas, an official said today.

Indian Institute of Management-Udaipur will be the second institute after IIM-Bangalore to confer degrees on students completing its flagship two-year Post Graduate Programme (PGP) in Management at a convocation tomorrow, IIM-U Director Janat Shah told PTI.

He said a meeting was held with the Union HRD minister last week after which a decision was taken to confer degrees on 177 students of the PGP course this year.

However, diplomas would be awarded to students of the PGPX programme, Shah added.

Sunil Munjal of the Hero Group would be the chief guest of the IIM-U convocation, he said.

While, IIM-Bangalore awarded degrees to its students this year, IIM-Lucknow conferred diplomas and IIM-Indore was also likely to award degrees this year, he added.

The IIM-U director said formalities to award degrees for other programmes would take time as special approval might be required due to the nomenclature of the course.

The decision to award degrees was taken by the IIM-U after the Indian Institute of Management Bill,2017 was passed in the Parliament in December last year.

"We had decided to award degrees after the bill was passed, but then, due to a circular on regulatory framework for degree granting issued by the MHRD, the decision was kept on hold and later in a meeting, things were sorted out and it was decided to go ahead with awarding degrees for the PGP course," Shah said.

Being societies, IIMs were earlier not authorised to award degrees and, hence, they were awarding post-graduate diplomas and fellowships in management, he said, adding that while these awards were treated as equivalent to MBAs and PhDs respectively, the equivalence was not universally acceptable.

With greater autonomy now, IIMs would now be able to award degrees, besides having more say in administration, recruitment and daily functioning,he added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Nearly 700 personnel of the Central Armed Police Forces committed suicide in the last six years, more than those killed in action, the Union Home Ministry has told a parliamentary panel.

The reasons include "lack of stability, loneliness and domestic strife", senior officials of the ministry, led by the Union home secretary, told the Parliament's Committee on Estimates, headed by senior BJP leader Murli Manohar Joshi.

"During the last six years, approximately 700 personnel of the Central Armed Police Forces have committed suicide and the rate of voluntary retirement is approximately 9,000 personnel per year," the ministry said.

This was in response to the committee's concerns on the large number of paramilitary personnel committing suicide or taking voluntary retirement.

Elaborating on its findings, the home ministry did not give figures for an exact six-year period but cited varying years -- 2001 for the BSF, 2012 for the CRPF, 2006 for the ITBP, 2013 for the CISF and SSB and 2014 for the Assam Rifles.

According to the home ministry, 189 Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) personnel committed suicide since 2012, while 175 were killed in action in the same period.

In the Border Security Force, there were 529 suicides since 2001 while the force lost 491 jawans in action.

The ministry also said that 62 Indo Tibetan Border Police personnel committed suicide since 2006 while just 16 were killed in action during the same period.

In the Central Industrial Security Force, 63 personnel ended their lives since since 2013 and just one jawan of the force died in action.

The number of suicides in the Sashastra Seema Bal since 2013 is 32 with the number of those killed in action is four.

In the case of the Assam Rifles, 27 personnel committed suicide since 2014 and 33 personnel were killed in action.

The suicides and killed in action ratio is highest in SSB (1:8), followed by CISF (1:63) and ITBP (1:4), the ministry said.

The home secretary told the committee: "We have discussed the matter of suicides which you mentioned internally within the Ministry of Home Affairs. As per our feedback, it is mainly due to lack of stability, loneliness and domestic strife. People stay away from their homes from 10-11 months which obviously leads to marital discord and there will be suspicions and counter-suspicions and allegations. That also leads to suicide."



The forces under the home ministry are heavily overloaded with the work and personnel don't get leave, the ministry told the committee. Forces like the CRPF and even the BSF and ITBP are instructed to move from Assam to Kerala and Kerala to Kashmir.

"Thus they could not stay at one location and they do not stay at one location and do not have any headquarters at a fixed location. Perhaps, this disturbance is also a contributing factor in incidents of suicides," the home secretary told the committee.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The AAP government today presented its fourth budget that focused on the environment, health and education sectors.

The government claimed it is India's first "Green" budget as it announced "health insurance for all" and a slew of measures to tackle air pollution.

The dispensation said that it followed "Trickle Up" economics to benefit the poor, even as the opposition termed it "jugglery of statistics".

Deputy Chief Minister Mansh Sisodia presented a Rs 53,000 crore budget for 2018-19 in the assembly.

He asserted that Delhi's economy continuous to be on the path of sustainable growth despite the "negative" impact of demonetisation and disruption caused due to the implementation of GST.

In the next financial year, the government said it expects to get Rs 23,400 crore from the Goods and Service Tax (GST) which is 60 per cent more than Rs 14,600 crore mopped up in the current fiscal, even as it lambasted the Centre for introducing the new tax regime.

It said the fiscal deficit dropped to about one-third of the original estimate for the current financial year after it carried forward Rs 1,969 crore of the budgetary shortfall to 2018-19.

For the first time, the government said, it has defined definite timelines for various projects for their timely implementation.

Sisodia announced that the government would install CCTV cameras at schools, impart self-defence training to girl students, and allocate Rs 100 crore for free Wi-Fi, which was a major pre-poll promise of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP).

Also, it would install 1.2 lakh CCTV cameras in the city by June next year.

Terming it a "splendid" budget, Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal said the government will take development to every home in the national capital.

The budget aims at benefiting all sections of society, including the middle class, the poor, women and students, he added



Kejriwal, however, did not fail to take a dig at Lt Governor Anil Baijal, saying, "There is a proverb, 'Man proposes God disposes', but here 'Delhi government proposes, L-G disposes'."



Sisodia said that if there is one word that most accurately captures the AAP government's economic vision and the policies that have emanated from it in the last the years -- it is "Trickle Up" economics that is aimed at benefiting the poor and middle classes.

The AAP government believed in the "Trickle Up" model of economics rather than "Trickle Down" model, he said.

The government announced a slew of measures to reduce air pollution, including incentives to switch over to clean fuels.

Sisodia also assured to carry out a comprehensive city-wide inventory of greenhouse gas emissions and provide a dedicated information system to show current levels of pollution by installing 1,000 indoor display panels at government buildings.

Noting that the "green budget" was being presented with 26 schemes or projects, Sisodia, who is also the Delhi finance minister, promised to start a pilot agriculture-cum-solar farm scheme.

Launching of a "health insurance for all" scheme, doubling hospital beds to 20,000 and expanding mohalla clinics were also the highlights for the health sector in the Delhi Budget.

The outlay for the health sector of over Rs 6,700 crore, about 13 per cent of the total budget of Rs 53,000 crore for the financial year 2018-19, is 17 per cent more compared to the last fiscal.

The government would impart self-defence training to girls, install CCTV cameras at all government schools, and set up 13 language academies and 25 world class skill development centres in the national capital.

The AAP government continued its trend of allocating the biggest share of the budget to the education sector, earmarking Rs 13,9997 crore, which is 26 per cent of the total budget, for it.

In the budget for 2017-2018, 23.5 per cent of the total budget amount was given to the education sector.

About 1.2 lakh CCTV cameras will be installed at all government schools, for which an outlay of Rs 175 crore has been proposed in the budget estimates 2018-19. Self-defence classes for girl students will be started, Sisodia said in his budget speech.

The Delhi BJP termed the AAP government's budget "jugglery of statistics" and said it announced schemes without constitutional approval.

Reacting to it, Union minister Harsh Vardhan tweeted: "#DelhiBudget - Delhi Budget is non-serious; falls short of target in setting up classroom libraries; development of every house is too ambitious to implement. Blaming Lt Governor is nothing but seeking excuses for non-performance."



The Delhi Congress also attacked the AAP government for failing to utilize the funds allocated for schemes last year and termed the budget "hollow" and "manipulated statistics" that fall short of fulfilling the aspirations of the people.

Industry bodies, however, lauded the Delhi government's budget, saying the focus on the environment will lay a strong foundation in making the national capital more habitable.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh today promised adequate compensation by the state government for the families of the Iraq victims but reiterated his demand that the Centre also compensate them since the tragedy occurred overseas.

The chief minister, on compassionate grounds, also ordered immediate release of Rs 20,000 as monthly pension to each of the bereaved families for February and March 2018, waiving the condition of quarterly payouts.

The concerned deputy commissioners have been asked to disburse the pension amount immediately, he added.

Dismissing as false the allegation made by Akali leader Bikram Singh Majithia that the families of the victims had not been paid compensation by the state government for the past six months, the chief minister said payment had been made till January 31, 2018, as of yesterday.

With release of the next two months' pension, the payment was now completely up to date, he added.

Talking to media persons at the state Assembly, he clarified that the state government had been paying the monthly pension to 24 families, of which it so far had information.

The CM had earlier informed the House that, as per the information received from the Ministry of External Affairs, there are 27 victims from Punjab, of whom 11 hailed from Majha region and 11 from Doaba, with the remaining from other parts of the state.

Intervening in a discussion on extending adequate financial assistance to the next of the kin of the bereaved families, the chief minister told the Vidhan Sabha that all criteria for compensation in such matters would be duly followed by his government.

He further said that his government would not indulge in any politics or arguments with the Centre on grant of compensation, but stressed that it was the central government's responsibility also to provide financial assistance since the killings took place outside the country.

In response to questions from members, he said the mortal remains of the victims would take some time to reach India as there were some legal issues, which the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) was trying to sort out with the authorities in Mosul.

Amarinder told the members that he was in constant touch with the External Affairs Minister in this regard and had been told that the bodies of the ill-fated Punjabis would land at Amritsar Airport once the requisite formalities are completed by the Mosul authorities in Iraq.

He further said that the coffins with the remains of the deceased would be received at the airport by the state government, with full respect and honour, before being handed over to the respective families for the last rites.

Meanwhile, expressing gratitude to Amarinder Singh for showing "magnanimity" on this emotive issue, Leader of Opposition Sukhpal Singh Khaira said that the state government should extend maximum financial assistance to the families, besides mounting pressure on the Union government for additional compensation for them.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The two-day 46th All India Police Science Congress organised by the Himachal Pradesh Police Department and The Bureau of Police Research and Development began here today with a clarion call to the police by Chief Minister Jai Ram Thakur to stay ahead of criminals by using technology to prevent and detect crime.

"Technology is a double-edged weapon, accessible to both the police and the criminals and as such, it is imperative that the investigating agencies must beat the criminals and draw up proper and effective strategy to maintain law and order and ensuring safety of citizens, especially the women," Thakur said.

Asking the police to draw up its future strategy with circumspection to frustrate the designs of criminals by optimal use of technology and social media, he said the importance of social media is well known and it should be used to bridge the gap between the police and the people.

Thakur said in order to ensure safety of women, Gudiya Helpline and Shakti Button App have been launched and the main object of these initiatives was to provide immediate assistance to women at the time of distress.

Thakur also cautioned the police against misuse of crypto currency or virtual currency and said law enforcing agencies must be fully conversant with all aspects of this new phenomena and evolve a strategy to check these frauds.

"Adequate knowledge and application of information technology was required to solve different types of crimes and such conferences help in upgrading the skills of police and also go a long way in providing efficient services to general public," the chief minister added.

Speaking on the occasion, Director General Bureau of Police Research and Development A P Maheshwari underlined the need for integration of scholars and the police.

He said that fora was created for integration of scholars of IIT, IIM and the police, keeping in view the threat posed by criminals in the virtual world.

"Use of modern technology in investigation is the need of the hour as it improves the quality of investigations and provides scientific evidence, which has more validity and reliability in the eyes of law," DGP S R Mardi said, adding that the resolutions adopted in the All India Police Science Congress would serve as a road map for all the police forces in the country.

The Police Science Congress would also provide an opportunity to interact, learn and understand the best practices followed in other states and union territories besides sharing of knowledge which could contribute towards increasing conviction rates, he added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Social activist Anna Hazare is set to go on an indefinite hunger strike against the Centre in Delhi tomorrow, nearly seven years after his anti-corruption movement caught the imagination of millions of Indians and shook the then UPA government.

The venue of his protest will be the same iconic Ram Lila Maidan, where he had sat on a hunger strike in 2011 demanding that the then government set up a Lokpal to investigate cases of corruption.

This time, however, his target is expected to be the Narendra Modi-led BJP government.

Hazare has been pressing for setting up of the Lokpal at the Centre and Lokayuktas in the states, besides implementation of the Swaminathan Commission report, which has suggested ways to address the agrarian distress.

Hazare previously has accused the Union government of not appointing the Lokpal to investigate the cases of corruption, despite having a law in place.

"Anna will first visit the Rajghat and then come to the Ram Lila Maidan, where he will go an indefinite strike," said an aide of Hazare.

The day, March 23, has been chosen on purpose as Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev were hanged to death on this day by the British, the aide said.

A core committee meeting of Hazare's trusted aides and representatives of farmers' organisations took place at the New Maharashtra Sadan today.

Earlier today, Hazare took a round of the Ram Lila Maidan, where the organisers claimed that thousands of people will attend the protest that will begin tomorrow.

The 2011 anti-graft agitation by Hazare, which aimed at the increasing corruption cases that had surfaced during the UPA rule, had received the support of millions of people across the country.

Some of the main organisers behind that anti-corruption movement later formed the Aam Aadmi Party, which now governs Delhi. Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal was one of Hazare's key aides.

The Delhi Traffic Police has issued an advisory warning commuters to avoid taking routes towards Aruna Asaf Ali Road, Delhi Gate, Darya Ganj, New Delhi Railway Station, Ajmeri Gate, Paharganj, ITO, Rajghat, Minto Road, Vivekanand Marg, and JLN Marg.

Hazare and his supporters will first visit the Rajghat and then they will march to Shaheedi Park and then to Ram Lila Maidan.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The proceedings of Lok Sabha became a casualty of noisy protests by the AIADMK and TRS members yet again today as the House was adjourned for the day without transacting any business.

The two notices of no confidence motion against the council of ministers were not taken up for the fourth day as Speaker Sumitra Mahajan said she could not proceed forward unless the House was in order.

The Question Hour was washed out in the morning due to protests by AIADMK and TRS members over Cauvery and quota issues respectively. As soon as the House met again, the ministers laid the listed papers even as the protests resumed.

The AIADMK is pressing for immediate setting up of the Cauvery river management board. The TRS, whose members held placards saying 'One Nation One Law', is demanding that the states be given the right to determine the proportion of reservations.

While AIADMK and TRS members were seen in the Werll holding placards and raising slogans, members from the Congress and Left were heard asking the Speaker to bring order so that the notices of no confidence motion could be taken up.

Parliamentary Affairs minister Ananth Kumar said the government was ready to answer on all issues, including banking scam and no confidence motion, provided they are taken up.

He, like in the past, urged the agitating members to return to their seats so that the Lok Sabha can function smoothly.

When Mahajan took up the notices of no trust vote, the protesting AIADMK members raised their pitch.

As several Congress, Left and Trinamool Congress members demanded that the Chair bring order in the House, Mahajan said she can't see anything from her seat (apparently due to placards being held by AIADMK and TRS members) and can't count the 50 members required to support the no trust move.

Leader of the Congress party in Lok Sabha Mallikarjun Kharge was seen repeatedly urging the Speaker to take up the motion.

Members from the Left raised their hands in support of the notices of no trust



when Mahajan said she can't see members in favour of the move due to the ruckus.

TDP's Thotha Narsimhan, who has moved one of the notices, was seen holding the paper and asking the Speaker to go ahead with the issue.

She then adjourned the House for the day, saying she cannot proceed with the notices amid disruptions.

Earlier, Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad was seen awaiting the Speaker's nod to introduce bills on commercial courts and amendment to the arbitration law. But the bills could not be introduced due to disruptions.

The House has been witnessing disruptions every day since March 5 when Parliament re-assembled for the Budget session after recess.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)An asylum seeker claiming to be from Afghanistan was today sentenced to life in jail in Germany for the rape and murder of a student that stoked a public backlash against a mass influx of migrants.

Hussein Khavari, of uncertain age and origin, was found guilty of the deadly night-time attack on medical student Maria Ladenburger, 19, in October 2016 in the university town of Freiburg.

Khavari pushed her off her bicycle as she was riding home alone from a party, then bit, choked and repeatedly raped her and left her on the bank of a river where she drowned.

Presiding judge Kathrin Schenk condemned the extreme "lack of empathy" of Khavari, who was handcuffed and wearing a black hooded jumper, before reading out the verdict and sentence, which were greeted with applause in the courtroom.

She handed down the maximum sentence of life in prison, which under German law means 15 years behind bars, with no chance of parole and the possibility of "security detention" afterwards if the convict is still deemed to pose a threat to society.

Schenk said she saw almost no chance of rehabilitation, telling Khavari that "you would have to become an entirely different human being".

Khavari had been arrested seven weeks after the murder, following a huge manhunt in the town near the French border.

Police had found a black hair partially dyed blond at the scene, then spotted Khavari by his hairstyle on security camera footage and linked him to the crime using his DNA.

As the crime sparked public anger and revulsion, social media users posted sarcastic "thank you" messages to Chancellor Angela Merkel over her liberal policy that brought more than one million refugees and migrants to the country.

During the trial, prosecutor Eckart Berger had reminded the two jurors sitting alongside three judges that "on trial is a criminal offender and not Germany's refugee policy".

Khavari arrived in Germany, without identity papers, in November 2015, near the peak of the refugee influx, as an unaccompanied minor claiming to be 16 or 17 years old and hailing from Afghanistan.

A police officer told the court that Khavari's cellphone and social media accounts suggested he had lived in Iran.

Khavari was sent to live with a German host family in the picturesque town on the edge of the Black Forest, went to a local school, learnt German and received state benefits.

It emerged only after his arrest that he had already committed a violent crime in May 2013 in Greece, where he pushed a woman off a cliff on the island of Corfu, leaving her badly injured.

He was sentenced there in February 2014 to 10 years jail for attempted murder but was granted a conditional release from Greece's overcrowded jails in October 2015.

He fled to Germany, where authorities knew nothing of his criminal past because Greece had only issued a nationwide warrant, and because no match was detected in an EU-wide fingerprint data base for asylum seekers.

Khavari was initially tried as a juvenile offender, but the court accepted expert opinions, based on X-rays and dental analysis, that he is now aged between 22 and 29.

The defendant had admitted to the crime, but claimed diminished culpability because he was under the influence of alcohol and drugs -- a position which his defence said it would argue again in an appeal.

Khavari had also claimed that his father died long ago in a battle against Afghanistan's Taliban.

Judge Schenk in December dialled a number on Khavari's cellphone and reached his father, who told her through an interpreter that he was living in Iran.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)At least six people died and several others were seriously injured in an explosion today at a Czech chemical plant in the northern town of Kralupy-nad-Vltavou, fire fighters said.

"We have received information about six dead and several others seriously injured," regional fire fighter spokeswoman Vladimira Kerekova said, quoted by the CTK agency.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A bar owner, in his 30s, died after accidentally shooting himself in the head while dancing with a pistol in hand inside his bar here, police said today.

The incident occurred last night at the 'Onn Lounge and Bar' in northwest Delhi's Shalimar Bagh area, they said, adding that the deceased was identified as Nasir.

According to an eyewitness, Nasir was partying with three of his friends with a pistol in his hand, officials said.

He was dancing with the pistol held close to his head when it went he ended up accidentally shooting himself, they said.

There was no evidence of any foul play in the CCTV footage obtained from the bar, police said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Telecom operators Vodafone India and Idea Cellular today announced the leadership team for their soon-to-be-merged entity, with Kumar Mangalam Birla as the non-executive Chairman and Balesh Sharma as the new CEO.

The merger - slated to create India's largest telecom operator in terms of customer base and revenue market share - is expected to be completed by June this year, subject to statutory approvals.

Sharma, currently the Chief Operating Officer of Vodafone India, in his new role as the CEO of the combined entity will be responsible for driving the business' strategy and its execution.

He will also oversee the integration of the merged entity that is slated to be worth over USD 23 billion with a 35 per cent market share.

The leadership announcement comes a year after the two companies had said they will join forces to operate in the hyper-competitive Indian mobile telephony market.

The merger -- which is set to dislodge the numero uno player Bharti Airtel -- was imminent as the incumbent operators have been bruised by aggressive tariffs from newcomer Reliance Jio, which triggered a price war in the industry.

The existing leadership teams of Idea Cellular and Vodafone India will continue to manage their separate businesses until the merger become effective, Idea said in the regulatory filing.

"Mr Kumar Mangalam Birla would be the non executive chairman of the Board of Directors of the merged company," the statement said announcing the composition of the new team that includes over a dozen key executives from the two telecom giants.

It is only upon completion that the two businesses will cease to operate as distinct and competing entities, the statement added.

The changes will come into effect up to merger of Vodafone's Indian telecom entities with Idea Cellular and be subject to all requisite approvals, it added.

Idea Cellular's CFO Akshaya Moondra will head the financial operations of the new entity as its CFO.

Ambrish Jain (currently the deputy MD at Idea Cellular) is set to become the new COO.

"The Aditya Birla Group intends to nominate Himanshu Kapania (currently Idea Cellular MD) as non executive Board member of the merged entity...with a significant assignment in the Group post merger," the filing said.

Sunil Sood (Vodafone India CEO) will join the Vodafone Group AMAP (Africa, Middle East and Asia Pacific) Leadership team and also help governance through Board memberships, Idea filing said.

Manish Dawar, who was recently roped in as the CFO of Vodafone India, will get the overall responsibility for integration planning, governance and execution at the merged entity.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)BJP ally and Union minister Upendra Kushwaha today asked the Bihar government to take stringent action against those trying to "vitiate atmosphere" in the state.

Though the Rashtriya Lok Samata Party (RLSP) chief did not take names, his statement appeared to be aimed at a section of BJP leaders who have claimed that a man was killed by a mob in Darbhanga last week because he had named a roundabout after Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Union minister and BJP leader Giriraj Singh was among those who made the allegation after visiting the area, despite the claims of the state government, in which the BJP is a partner, that the murder was a fallout of a land dispute and it had nothing to do with the roundabout's name.

"Some people are constantly trying to vitiate atmosphere in Bihar," Kushwaha said, according to a party's statement in which he asked Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar to take stringent action against such people.

His remarks follow the unease expressed by another BJP ally from Bihar and Union minister Ram Vilas Paswan. He had advised the party to take along all sections of society.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The political row over a scandal involving Cambridge Analytica intensified today with the Congress and the BJP accusing each other of hiring the services of the controversial firm accused of data theft.

The Congress stepped up its attack on the BJP alleging that the party hired the company's services in various state polls like in Bihar and then in Maharashtra, Haryana, Jharkhand and Delhi, besides for its 'Mission272+' in 2014 general elections.

Congress communications in-charge Randeep Surjewala posed several questions to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad over hiring of the British firm in previous state polls.

He also asked why Union minister Smriti Irani and BJP's former IT cell chief Arvind Gupta lauded CA's services.

Leading the BJP charge was Union minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, who outrightly rejected the Congress' allegation that his party had hired the services of CA or its arms.

Surjewala accused the government of inventing a story on data theft to divert attention from key issues and compared the law minister to Hitler's propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.

In a multi-pronged attack on the government, Congress chief Rahul Gandhi and Surjewala alleged that it was managing headlines to deflect attention from issues such as the death of 39 Indians in captivity in Iraq.

While Gandhi accused the government of baiting the media, Surjewala said Prasad, the law minister, was spreading "lies and falsehood" so it could avoid giving answers in Parliament and also dubbed him the "lawless" minister.

Asked about the Congress' attack against him, Prasad said the opposition party was pained because he was hitting out at their key leaders, including Gandhi and P Chidambaram.

"I understand their pain. But I maintain certain standards and will not fall to their level to respond to them," he said.

Prasad also accused Gandhi of playing on bodies of the 39 Indians killed in Iraq after he criticised the government over the issue.

"Problem: 39 Indians dead; Government on the mat, caught lying. Solution: Invent story on Congress and data theft. Result: Media networks bite bait; 39 Indians vanish from radar. Problem solved," Gandhi tweeted.

The Congress and the BJP have been engaged in a war of words over Cambridge Analytica (CA) and its Indians arms being engaged in past elections. The company is under a cloud after social media firm Facebook accused it of data theft.

While the Congress is accusing the BJP of using the services of the company, the BJP has hit back alleging that it is the Congress and its chief that have hired the services of the company.

CA's Indian arm Ovelina Business Intelligence (OBI) is run by JD(U) leader K C Tyagi's son Amrish Tyagi.

Seeking to corner the government, Surjewala posed a series of questions, asking for details on its links with the company.

He denied that the Congress or its chief had hired the services of the company and used the phrase "chor machaye shor" (pot calling the kettle black) to say that the BJP had no right to make accusations against the party.

Addressing a press conference, Prasad said it was the Congress which had disrupted proceedings in the Lok Sabha when External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj had sought to make a statement on the deaths of Indians.

"All I will tell Rahul Gandhi (is that) he should not do on bodies of Indians who lost their lives in very unfortunate circumstances," he told reporters.

Prasad insisted that the Congress has used the services of CA, which has been accused of harvesting people's data from platforms like Facebook unlawfully to influence elections in different countries.

He alleged that imprints of the controversial British firm were "visible" in the Congress' campaign in Gujarat. It ran a "poisonous and divisive campaign" in the state, he claimed.

On questions about reports that an Indian company, which was Cambridge Analytica's partner, might have worked for the BJP and its allies as well, Prasad insisted that his party never had any ties with the foreign company.

He said there was no authentic confirmation of any Indian partner of the company working for the BJP or its allies. Prasad, however, sought to make a distinction between CA and its partner, saying the former was accused of honey trapping and data theft.

Sujewala alleged, "The truth is that the government is denigrating and disrespecting the institution of Parliament. The truth is that it is running from accountability to Parliament."



He said no confidence motions were pending but instead of considering them, Parliament was being adjourned as the government was scared of replying to the questions being raised by people of the country.

The BJP government, he added, has become a "manufacturer of fake and an epitome of post truth".

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Senior Congress leader Abhishek Manu Singhvi today said that the BJP should take action on its allegation that his party indulged in data theft to influence the outcome of elections, instead of holding press conferences.

Alleging that the BJP has dished out fake for long, Singhvi said spreading of false information has been its forte.

"BJP is the party in power. Rather than holding press conferences, why doesn't it take action?" he said about Union Law and Information Technology Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad's charge yesterday that the opposition party was using data manipulation and theft to woo voters.

"The BJP has misused the company many times and is now casting aspersions on us out of fear," he said.

"The BJP has been spreading false information since the days of Rajiv Gandhi ... Dishing out fake is its forte," he added.

Any attempt by social media sites, including Facebook, to influence India's electoral process through undesirable means will not be tolerated, Prasad told reporters in Delhi yesterday.

Stating that party spokesman Randeep Surjewala has refuted the allegations of misuse of social media by the Congress, Singhvi alleged that it was the BJP which has misused the platform to spread canards against his party and its leaders.

"Paid garbage is posted by goons of the BJP," Singhvi alleged.

The BJP and the Congress yesterday traded charges over a Facebook data scandal involving private firm Cambridge Analytica, with the ruling party accusing its rival of "data theft" to woo voters ahead of 2019 Lok Sabha polls, a claim the opposition party rejected.

Prasad had cited several media reports which said the company would work for Congress chief Rahul Gandhi ahead of the next Lok Sabha polls.

Cambridge Analytica is accused of illegally harvesting personal information from Facebook to influence polls in several countries.

The Congress also hit back alleging that the "BJP's factory of fake has produced one more fake product", and accused it of hiring the firm's services in several elections, including in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Canadian firm BlackBerry and Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) today announced a multi-year agreement to collaborate and develop technology for the automotive manufacturer's next-generation vehicles.

As part of the agreement, BlackBerry will license its QNX and Certicom technology to JLR, as well as assign a team of engineers to support in the development of new Electronic Control Unit (ECU) modules, a statement said.

The first ECU project will be a next-generation infotainment system, it added.

No financial details of the deal were disclosed.

UK-based JLR was bought by Tata Group in 2008.

"Working with BlackBerry will enable us to develop the safe and secure next-generation connected car our customers want," JLR Vehicle Engineering Director Dave Nesbitt said.

Together with BlackBerry engineers, JLR will be able to access the most dynamic and up-to-date software to ensure the highest security required for its connected vehicles, he added.

"We are at a pivotal moment, where innovative automakers, such as JLR, are realising they need to take an active role in defining the software architecture for their vehicles," BlackBerry QNX SVP and GM John Wall said.

Stating that connected and autonomous vehicles will react and drive based on rich data, Blackberry's platforms help process data efficiently and keep it secure and trusted, he added.

BlackBerry provides OEMs with technology to protect and mitigate hardware, software, applications and end-to-end systems from cyberattacks.

It has recently seen automotive design wins from Baidu, Delphi, Denso, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, Visteon, and others.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The body of a 28-year-old man with a bullet wound was found today in northeast Delhi's Khajuri Khas, police said.

The police said that they are investigating all angles, including that of personal enmity. The valuables of the deceased were found intact, which indicate that it might not be a case of robbery cum killing.

The deceased, identified as Arun Kumar, lived in a rented accommodation in Karawal Nagar. He belonged to Baha village in Agra. He worked as a labourer here.

The police were informed today by some autorickshaw drivers about a man lying in a pool of blood at Khajuri Chowk. He was rushed to a hospital where he was declared brought dead.

He had a bullet injury in his leg and died to excessive blood loss, the police said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)In a 'Make in India' achievement, India on Thursday successfully test fired the Brahmos supersonic cruise missile with an indigenous seeker at Pokhran test range in Rajasthan.

Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said the missile hit the target with "pin-point" accuracy and the success will further bolster India's security.



Here are the key highlights of the Brahmos cruise missile test:



The Brahmos cruise missile test today was conducted with a made in India indigenous seeker.

2) The test firing comes three months after the Brahmos cruise missile was successfully test fired for the first time from the Indian Air Force's frontline Sukhoi-30 MKI combat jet.

3) "Formidable Supersonic Cruise Missile #BrahMos was successfully flight tested at 8:42 AM today at Pokhran test range, Rajasthan. The precision strike weapon with Indian-made seeker flew in its designated trajectory and hit the target with pin-point accuracy," Sitharaman tweeted.



Formidable Supersonic Cruise Missile #BrahMos was successfully flight tested at 8:42 AM today at Pokhran test range, Rajasthan.

The precision strike weapon with Indian-made seeker flew in its designated trajectory and hit the target with pin-point accuracy.@PIB_India @MIB_India  Raksha Mantri (@DefenceMinIndia) March 22, 2018

The range of the missile, an Indo-Russia joint venture, can be extended up to 400 km as certain technical restrictions were lifted after India became a full member of the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) last year.

5) Brahmos is a joint venture between DRDO of India and NPO Mashinostroyenia (NPOM) of Russia.

6) The Defence Minister congratulated the DRDO today for the successful test firing.

7) is the heaviest weapon to be deployed on India's Su-30 fighter aircraft.

8) Work has already begun to integrate the Brahmos supersonic cruise missile on 40 Sukhoi combat aircraft which is expected to fulfil the critical needs of the Indian Air Force in the wake of evolving security dynamics in the region.

(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 today successfully test fired the BrahMos supersonic cruise missile with an indigenous 'seeker' at Rajasthan's Pokhran test range, enhancing the country's capability to hit enemy targets at a range of up to 400 km.

Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said the missile hit the target with "pin-point" accuracy and the success will further bolster India's national security.

It was for the first time that the missile, capable of travelling at speeds of up to Mach 3.0, or three times the speed of sound, was tested with indigenously developed 'seeker' technology. The seeker - developed by the DRDO - determines the accuracy of a missile by guiding it to the target, officials said.

"Formidable Supersonic Cruise Missile #BrahMos was successfully flight tested at 8:42 AM today at Pokhran test range, Rajasthan. The precision strike weapon with Indian-made seeker flew in its designated trajectory and hit the target with pin-point accuracy," Sitharaman tweeted.

The range of the missile, an Indo-Russia joint venture, can be extended to up to 400 km as certain technical restrictions were lifted after India became a full member of the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) last year.

BrahMos is a joint venture between the Defence Research and Development Organisation of India and the NPO Mashinostroyenia of Russia.

The name BrahMos is formed from the names of two rivers: the Brahmaputra of India and the Moskva of Russia.

The defence minister congratulated the DRDO for the successful test of the missile, saying it will further enhance India's national security.

The test firing comes three months after the BrahMos cruise missile was successfully test fired from the Indian Air Force's front-line Sukhoi-30 MKI combat jet.

In a statement, the Defence Ministry said the flight test was conducted by the scientists of DRDO and BrahMos along with the Indian Army.

A high-level team led by DRDO chairman Dr S Christopher was present during the flight trial, which included Director General (Missiles & Strategic Systems) and Scientific Adviser to Defence Minister G Satheesh Reddy and Director General BrahMos Sudhir Mishra.

Senior IAF officials also witnessed the successful launch of the tactical weapon.

BrahMos missile is the heaviest weapon to be deployed on India's Su-30 fighter aircraft.

Work has already begun to integrate the BrahMos supersonic cruise missile on 40 Sukhoi combat aircraft which is expected to fulfil the critical needs of the Indian Air Force in the wake of evolving security dynamics in the region.

The Army and the Navy have already inducted the missile.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)BSP MLA Mukhtar Ansari and SP MLA Hari Om Yadav today withdrew their petitions seeking permission to allow them to cast votes in the ongoing Rajya Sabha election in UP.

Allowing the withdrawal, the Lucknow bench of the Allahabad High Court dismissed the petitions of both the MLAs.

The two MLAs had filed the petitions yesterday and special permission of the court was obtained for hearing the matter due to urgency.

A bench of Justice Prashant Kumar and Justice Rajan Roy had yesterday heard the matter in brief and directed that the petitions would be heard on Thursday, permitting the state government to get details of the issue.

However, just as the judges came into the court room at 10.30 AM, senior advocate SC Mishra appearing for both the MLAs mentioned the matter and requested the court to allow him to withdraw both the petitions.

Mishra did not state any reason as to why and under which circumstances, the MLAs were desirous to withdraw the petitions filed a day before showing utter urgency in the matter.

Advocate general Raghvendra Singh who was present in the court to place the stand of the state government did not oppose withdrawal of the petitions. The bench accordingly dismissed the petitions as withdrawn.

Since both the MLAs withdrew petition from the high court, there are least chances they would be able to cast their votes in the Rajya Sabha elections tomorrow.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A day after it reprimanded a senior Rajasthan official for not wearing "proper dress", the Supreme Court today said that bureaucrats should wear "sober and decent" dress while appearing in the courts.

Additional Chief Secretary of Urban Development and Housing Department of the state government Manjit Singh, who appeared before the top court in neatly dressed royal blue suit, apologised unconditionally to the bench for the dress - shirt and trouser, he wore yesterday.

"Irrespective of whether there are rules or no rules, bureaucrats are always expected to wear sober and decent dress, while appearing in courts. It does not matter whether there are administrative instructions or not but there should be a certain level of decency," a bench of Justice J Chelameswar and Sanjay Kishan Kaul said.

The apex court observed that the "dress worn by officials in courts is nothing but a symbolic of certain things".

Additional Solicitor General ANS Nadkarni, appearing for the Rajasthan government along with advocate Aishwarya Bhati, said there are no specific set of rules or dress code to be followed by bureaucrats but there are some rules in Himachal Pradesh and even there is a high court judgement in this regard.

He said the concerned official has tendered an unconditional apology for the dress he inadvertently wore during his appearance in court.

The bench was hearing an appeal against the verdict of Rajasthan High Court of May 13, 2015, quashing a government notification of September 18, 2009 withdrawing declaration of the village Napasar in Bikaner district as Nagar Palika (municipality).

Nadkarni apprised the court about the two notification and said that some relevant documents needs to be translated into english and needs some time.

The bench, granted two weeks time to the state government to file all the translated copies and dispensed the Additional Chief Secretary from personal appearance.

Yesterday, the top court had taken strong objection to the dress worn by the senior official and had directed him to check up the rules of the dress code worn by bureaucrats.

"What dress are you wearing? There is a dress code for the bureaucrats. Have you gone through the rules? If you don't know the rules and understand what dress an official should wear while appearing in court, then you don't deserve to be an additional chief secretary," the bench had said.

"Do you allow a person wearing slippers, dhoti or casual dress in your office," the court had asked official, who was wearing a formal shirt and trouser.

The top court had passed couple of orders in February asking the state government to produce the notification and later withdrawing the status.

Annoyed over the state government not producing the relevant document despite repeated orders, the apex court had on March 13 said, "We note with anguish the lack of assistance to this Court from the state of Rajasthan".

The bench said, "We are informed that an officer of the OSD level unfortunately passed away in February and that is being touted as an excuse not to produce the relevant notification despite the lapse for almost a month".

The top court had then summoned the secretary of the state government and asked him to remain personally present in the Court with the notification on the next date of hearing which was today.

Sarpanch of Napasar panchayat, Champa Lal had challenged the order of High Court quashing the notification of withdrawal of status saying that the order was passed mechanically without appreciating the fact that petitioner there had no locus.

He had said that notification for Nagar Palika status was correctly withdrawn by the state government as the Gram Panchayat of Napasar had a paltry population of 22,893 with 1878 family living below the poverty line and over 90 per cent of them dependent on agriculture. Hence, it was not competent to function with the imposition of municipal taxes, Lal had said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Neeraj Bawana is a "hardcore criminal" who cannot be shifted from the high security ward and cannot be given a TV set due to his misconduct in the prison, the Tihar Jail authorities told a Delhi court today.

The jail superintendent made the submission in a report filed after a court order on the plea of the gangster, who went on hunger strike demanding a TV set and other facilities in jail or be shifted to other ward, saying he was filing such petitions before various courts to put "undue pressure upon the jail administration for ulterior motives".

The report, filed before Chief Metropolitan Magistrate Deepak Sherawat, also said that the jail authorities have not violated any law by keeping him in a high security ward.

"It is submitted that all basic human needs and facilities like food, water, medicines etc are provided to prisoner (Neeraj) as provided to other prisoners. However, his request to provide TV in his cell has not been considered at this stage by the Director General (DG), Prisons, in view of his past bad jail conduct," the report said.

Neeraj went on hunger strike on March 19 and filed an application in the court through advocate M S Khan seeking a direction to the jail authorities to provide him facilities including proper food, medicines, TV set or else be shifted from his cell in the high risk ward of the jail. The court had sought a report from the jail authorities on the same.

In its report, the jail superintendent said "the prisoner is a hardcore criminal /gangster who is operating gang with his several aides inside and outside jail. It was very much required to break his nexus with his associates for maintaining peace and discipline in jail. Hence, his lodging in high security ward of this jail was obligatory.

"He has threatened and shaken the conscience of the public or world outside and the prisoners inside by committing double murder in a jail van, thus, his name became a threat to the public as recorded by the police authorities also. Several cases of extortion and murder are registered against him during judicial custody."



He is involved in total 15 heinous criminal cases for commission of offences in Delhi and other states which speak volumes of his criminal past and present, the report said.

It also termed him "a dangerous criminal" and said in order to maintain peace and discipline in jail, he has been kept in high security ward of the jail which has an independent security system.

"He is a habitual jail offender, has committed jail offences and punished for possessing prohibited articles including mobile phones," the report said.

The gangster had written a letter in this regard to the Chief Justice of India, the Chief Justice of Delhi High Court and the Director General, Prisons. He had also in October last moved a city court, seeking directions to the Tihar Jail authorities to provide better hygienic conditions to the inmates.

He has been charge sheeted in various cases including the offences under the Maharashtra Control of Organised Crime Act (MCOCA).

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Bombay High Court today said the state-run planning agency MMRDA can not "throw out" residents from their homes just because their land needs to be acquired for the Mumbai Metro.

A bench of Justices A S Oka and R I Chagla made the observation while hearing a petition filed by occupants of a housing society at Andheri Link Road.

According to the petitioners, the housing society had applied for permission for repairs and redevelopment earlier this year when it was informed that some part of the society might be affected by the metro project.

The Mumbai Metropolitan Regional Development Authority (MMRDA) subsequently informed the residents that around 1,062 sq metres of the land that cuts through the buildings in the society will be acquired for the project.

The MMRDA is the nodal agency for development of the metro network in the megapolis.

The said acquisition will affect around 42 residential and commercial units within the society.

The petitioners told the HC that while they were willing to cooperate with the government and give up their land, they were entitled to receive land or residences at an alternate spot in lieu of the same.

However, when they wrote to the MMRDA asking for an alternate accommodation, the latter asked them to prove their bona fide, and to submit all documents related to the construction, occupancy and ownership of their homes and shops.

If they failed to do so, the residents would lose out on the alternate accommodation, the state-run agency said.

The petitioners told the HC they were not illegal encroachers, and that the society was not an illegal slum that the MMRDA was threatening to throw them out and acquire their land without following proper procedure.

This prompted the bench to observe that the MMRDA could not render them homeless and acquire their land without following due process of law.

"Just because you are the metro project, doesn't mean that you can take over any land without following the due process of law.

"The MMRDA can't throw people out of their homes just because it needs their land for the metro. They have rights over their private properties," the bench noted.

The bench, thus, restrained the MMRDA from taking any coercive action against the petitioners until further orders from the court.

It directed the MMRDA to consider and expeditiously decide upon the petitioners' request for the alternate accommodation in accordance with the law.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The CBI on Thursday issued a look out circular against promoters and directors of Kanishk Gold Pvt Ltd, accused in an alleged loan fraud of Rs 8.24 billion, to prevent them from leaving the country, officials said.

They said the agency also questioned Bhoopesh Jain and Neeta Jain, the directors of the company, in connection with the fraud at the agency's office in Bengaluru.

The CBI has registered a case of an alleged loan fraud of Rs 8.24 billion on a consortium of 14 banks led by the State Bank of India and carried out searches on Wednesday, officials said.

The agency has booked the company -- Kanishk Gold Pvt Ltd, its promoter Director Bhoopesh Kumar Jain, Director Neeta Jain, Tejraj Achha, Ajay Kumar Jain and Sumit Kedia besides unidentified public servants.

The CBI carried out searches at the official and residential premises of the promoters of Kanishk Gold Pvt Ltd on Wednesday as it launched a probe in the loan fraud case, the officials said.

The company engaged in manufacturing gold jewellery which was marketed under the brand name 'Krizz' which were sold through distributors till 2014. But in 2015 it changed its business model to B2B (business-to-business) and started supplying to large retail jewellers, the SBI said in a complaint to the CBI.

The loan accounts of the company were taken over by the SBI from the ICICI in 2008, while its banking arrangement was converted into a multiple banking system in March 2011, it said.

The SBI alleged that the "fraud" is to the tune of Rs 8.24 billion, but the security available with it to cover the "loss" is only around Rs 1.56 billion.A high-level Chinese delegation held talks with Nepal's business leaders and discussed investment opportunities in the country under the One Belt One Road initiative.

The 20-member delegation led by Shu Ya, founder of One Belt One Road (OBOR) International Platform of China held talks with the Nepalese business community on Monday on attracting Chinese investment in Nepal under the framework of the OBOR, according to sources close to OBOR-Nepal Chapter.

The OBOR International Trade and Investment Platform is a mutual exchange platform of global purchasers and suppliers established to promote Chinese President Xi Jinping's ambitious OBOR initiative.

Last year, Nepal inked a major deal with China to join the OBOR initiative to link Asia with Europe.

During the meeting, the representatives of Nepalese business community asked the OBOR delegation to increase investment in Nepal's energy and infrastructure sector as well as tourism and agriculture.

Bhawani Rana, Chairperson of Federation of Nepal Chamber of Commerce and Industries (FNCCI), asked the delegation to contribute for Nepal's economic prosperity through increasing investment under the OBOR framework as the investment climate has improved significantly with the establishment of new communist government in Nepal.

Also, a Memorandum of Understanding was signed between by the OBOR Platform Federation of Handicraft Association of Nepal with a view to promote Nepali handicraft products to China under the banner of OBOR Platform.

The Platform has earlier signed MoU with various trade related bodies to promote Nepal's Pashmina, wild honey, a Nepali wine and Himalayan Nettle.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Actor Chris Pratt has revealed that "Avengers" star Robert Downey Jr. had called him to congratulate on his casting for the "Guardians of the Galaxy".

Pratt played the role of Peter Quill aka Star Lord in the James Gunn-directed "Guardians of the Galaxy" and later followed it up with "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2". He is reprising his role in "Avengers: Infinity War", which has a gigantic cast of actors playing superheroes.

"When I first arrived in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Downey was the first to call and tell me, Hey man, welcome. If there's anything you need I will help. There are so few people on the planet who are going through what you're going through right now. I have, so I'm here. I'll always answer the phone,'" Pratt told Empire magazine.

"I feel completely empowered to pay it forward with Tom (Holland) or Chadwick (Boseman) Now I just really feel compelled to offer them, even if it's a fraction of what Downey was able to offer me, and just say, 'Anything you need, you let me know.'" he added.

The 38-year-old actor also shed a light on Downey Jr's never seen before side where he would offer help to his co-actors in the times of need.

Recalling a particular incident, Pratt said, "He came up to me and said, 'You doing all right?' I said 'Yeah, I've got a sore throat'. Within 10 minutes there was a person here giving me all these herbs and taking care of me."



"He offered the use of his trailer where I could sit down and use some of his hi-tech healing gadgets. It was amazing. I'm living my best life," Pratt added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Upping its attack on the BJP, the Congress today accused the government of inventing a story on data theft to divert attention from key issues and likened Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad to Hitler's propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.

In a multi-pronged attack on the government, Congress president Rahul Gandhi and communications in-charge Randeep Surjewala alleged that it was managing headlines to deflect attention from issues such as the death of 39 Indians in captivity in Iraq.

While Gandhi accused the government of baiting the media, Surjewala said Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad was spreading "lies and falsehood" so it could avoid giving answers in Parliament.

"Problem: 39 Indians dead; Government on the mat, caught lying. Solution: Invent story on Congress and Data Theft. Result: Media networks bite bait; 39 Indians vanish from radar. Problem solved," Gandhi said on Twitter.

"Hitler had a commander named Goebbels and now Narendra Modi has a minister named Ravi Shankar Prasad," Surjewala said, sharply escalating the verbal duel between the Congress and the BJP.

The Congress and the BJP have been engaged in a war of words over British data firm Cambridge Analytica (CA) and its Indians arms being engaged during past elections. The company is under a cloud after social media firm Facebook accused it of data theft.

While the Congress is accusing the BJP of using the services of the company, the BJP has hit back alleging that it is the Congress and its chief that have hired the services of the company.

CA's Indian arm Ovelina Business Intelligence (OBI) is run by JD-U leader K C Tyagi's son Amrish Tyagi.

Seeking to corner the government, Surjewala posed a series of questions, asking for details on its links with the company.

He denied that the Congress or its president Rahul Gandhi had hired the services of the company and used the colloquial phrase "chor machaye shor" to say that the BJP had no right to fling allegations against the party.

Union minister Smriti Irani follows CA on Twitter and the BJP's former IT cell head Arvind Gupta had lauded work done by it on the microblogging site, Surjewala said at a press conference.

"The truth is that Modi government is denigrating and disrespecting the institution of Parliament. The truth is that the Modi government is running from accountability to Parliament.

"The truth is that Modi government is scared of replying to the relevant questions being raised by people of the country in front of Parliament and people," he said.

He said 'no confidence motions' were pending against the government but instead of considering them, Parliament was being adjourned.

Bringing up the PNB scam and the deaths of 39 kidnapped Indians in Iraq, he said 132 crore people want to know how Nirav Modi and Mehul Choksi ran away with the country's Rs 33,000 crore. The government, he added, misled the country on those kidnapped in Iraq for four years.

Surjewala also referred to agrarian distress, unemployment and the SSC paper leak scam.

"The Modi government does not want to answer these questions, that is why Parliament is not allowed to function... Instead, advice is being given to opposition parties and everyday new 'fake agenda' is prepared," he alleged.

The BJP government, he added, has become a "manufacturer of fake and an epitome of post truth".

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Congress today gave a notice to move a privilege motion against External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj in the Rajya Sabha for "misleading" the House about the death of the 39 Indians, who were abducted from Iraq's Mosul town in 2014.

Congress MPs Ambika Soni, Pratap Bajwa and Shamsher Singh Dullo gave the notice for moving a motion against Swaraj in the Upper House after compiling documents and information on the issue.

In the notice given under Rule 188 of Rules of Procedure and Conduct of Business in the Rajya Sabha, they intended to move the motion on the issue of Breach of Parliamentary Privilege.

According to the motion, Swaraj, along with her colleague Minister of State for External Affairs Gen. V K Singh (retd), "deliberately misled" the families of the 39 Indians killed in Mosul, on the floor of Parliament and outside.

Between June 2014 and March 2018, the minister continued to state as a matter of fact that the individuals were not only alive but that the government was undertaking steps for their release, it read.

"On March 18, 2018, the Minister confirmed on the floor of Parliament that the individuals in question had been slain, thereby demonstrating beyond all doubts that the Government had lied to Parliament and nation on a consistent basis.

"This is a serious breach of Parliamentary privilege and stringent action must be taken against the members for their gross acts of negligence and dereliction of public duty," the motion read.

Soni, Bajwa and Dullo accused Swaraj of misleading the House for four years and dared her to make public the sources who formed the basis of her claims that the 39 Indians abducted by ISIS were alive.

"Our sources have proved right and her confidential sources have proved wrong," Soni told reporters earlier.

She said they were definitely going to bring a privilege motion against the external affairs minister of India for misguiding Parliament and her insensitivity in "playing" with the lives of 39 Indian citizens.

"Whose fault is it, who tried to mislead and keep the issue in deep freeze for four years. It is of the external affairs minister. It is her responsibility," Soni alleged.

Accusing the central government of trying to suppress the Mosul tragedy, she said it did not talk about it despite several efforts to raise the issue.

"We have continuously tried to raise the issue, but Swaraj always said she cannot share the sources nor any document and always claimed that they are alive. The government's efforts to put a cover on the issue led to misconceptions among the families of the deceased," Soni said, adding, "We have come to know from Iraq that they died at least a year ago, but our government has been so insensitive."



Asserting that the government should have gradually prepared the families for their loss, the Congress general secretary brought up the issue of compensation and said, "This government is only of the few and the rest will suffer the same way as had happened to 39 Indians in Iraq," she said.

Her colleague Bajwa also accused the government for its "clumsy" handling of the issue and said those killed in Iraq were poor people involved in manual labour.

"Today, Harjit Masih's statement has proved right. I want to ask Sushma Swaraj that what are your sources. The entire country wants to know. Why did you play with the sentiments of these people," he said, referring to the lone survivor who had managed to flee the ISIS following his abduction along with the 39 other Indians, and had claimed that the others were killed.

The Rajya Sabha MP said if there is a sensitive policy matter then informed first if it is in session, but when someone dies or is martyred, the family of the deceased are informed first.

"What stopped her from dong this? Even her attitude of dealing with the situation two days ago was to score brownie points. There has been insensitive and clumsy handling of the issue," Bajwa said.

"We want to ask Modi ji and Sushma ji that you have not even announced any compensation to their families. We have demanded Rs 1 crore compensation and a government job to each of the families. The onus of giving job and Rs one crore is on the Centre," he said.

Whenever the government is in the dock, they try to sidetrack the issue. Parliament is not running as allies of the ruling BJP are in the well, Bajwa claimed.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The stage is set for Rajya Sabha polls tomorrow for the remaining 25 seats in six states including Uttar Pradesh where BJP is virtually assured of 8 of the 10 seats amid suspense whether it can snatch an extra seat in the light of the newfound bonhomie between former arch rivals SP and BSP.

For the 58 Rajya Sabha seats to be filled, 33 candidates from 10 states were declared elected unopposed on March 15. Seven union ministers including Ravi Shankar Prasad and Prakash Javadekar were among them.

Besides UP where Finance Minister Arun Jaitley is in the fray and who is certain to win, West Bengal, Karnataka, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Telangana will also feature in the polls.

Counting of ballots will be taken up at 5 pm, an hour after the end of voting.

A bypoll will also be held for one seat in Kerala where M P Veerendra Kumar, the Left-backed candidate of Sharad Yadav faction of the JD(U), is pitted against Babu Prasad of the Congress.

Arithmetically, the ruling BJP can easily win eight out of the 10 seats in Uttar Pradesh.

The four-MLA strong Suheldev Bharatiya Samaj Party (SBSP), after being placated by BJP chief Amit Shah, and the Apna Dal (Sonelal) with nine MLAs have decided to vote for BJP nominees.

"We are standing with the BJP. We had held a meeting of our MLAs and it was decided that we will strongly support the BJP," national president of Apna Dal (S) Ashish Patel told PTI in Lucknow.

In all there are 11 candidates in the fray for the 10 seats.

The BJP and its allies have 324 MLAs in the 403-member Assembly after the death of its Noorpur MLA in a road accident recently.

To secure a win,, a candidate needs 37 first preference votes. Arithmetically, the BJP can easily win eight of the 10 seats and will be left with 28 surplus votes.

"There will be contest on the ninth seat," a senior UP BJP leader said, exuding confidence that the saffron party would bag nine seats.

The SP and the BSP also appeared sure of win one seat each.

The SP has fielded Jaya Bachchan and the BSP Bhimrao Ambedkar. With 19 MLAs, the BSP is short of 18 first preference votes and with Naresh Agarwal's son Nitin, who is still an SP MLA, likely to cross-vote for the BJP, the task will become difficult for the candidate of the Mayawati-led party.

BSP insiders said to be doubly sure of victory, Mayawati has sought a list of SP's loyal MLAs who will vote for her party candidate. She is also banking on some independent MLAs, who, though, are yet to reveal their cards, they said.

Riding on the new bonhomie with the SP, Mayawati is banking on the 10 surplus votes of Akhilesh Yadav's party, besides seven votes of the Congress and one of RLD to reach the magic figure of 37 votes.

However, Nitin Agarwal can queer the BSPs pitch if he votes for the BJP. Naresh Agarwal, who recently quit the SP and joined the BJP, has said his son would vote for the saffron party in the Rajya Sabha polls.

The country's most populous state sends 31 MPs to the 245-member Rajya Sabha, and the BJP, which won a massive victory in the 2017 Assembly elections, is yet to get a lion's share of these. Presently, the BJP has 58 Rajya Sabha MPs.

Besides Jaitley, the others in the fray are Ashok Bajpai, Vijay Pal Singh Tomar, Sakal Deep Rajbhar, Kanta Kardam, Anil Jain, Harnath Singh Yadav, GVL Narasimha Rao and Anil Kumar Agarwal.

Altogether six candidates, including Congress nominee Abhisek Manu Singhvi, are in the fray for the five Rajya Sabha seats from West Bengal. The state's ruling TMC has decided to back the eminent lawyer.

Five candidates are in the electoral arena in Karnataka for four seats. The state's ruling Congress has fielded three nominees, while there are one each of the BJP and JD(S).

Elections will also be held for two seats in Jharkhand where three candidates are in the fray, including two of the state's ruling BJP and one of the Congress.

One candidate each of the ruling BJP and main opposition Congress will cross swords for the lone Rajya Sabha seat from Chhattisgarh.

Four candidates will try their luck from Telangana where polling will be held for three seats.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Central Administrative Tribunal (CAT) has sought the response of the Centre and the Delhi Police on a plea challenging government's decision to abolish Family Planning Allowance for those of its employees who have themselves or their spouses opted for sterilisation.

A bench headed by member K N Shrivastava sought their stand on the petition by a constable, who had undergone vasectomy in 2011 and was granted the Family Planning Allowance of Rs 210 per month till June last year, and posted the matter for further hearing on May 21.

The Centre had in 1979 introduced the incentive to promote small family norms saying central government employees who undergo sterilisation after having two or three surviving children may be granted a special increment in the form of personal pay.

However, it decided to abolish the scheme from July 1, 2017, on the 7th Pay Commission's recommendation that there was no need for an allowance for population control as the level of awareness regarding small family had gone up.

"The abolition has not just put an end to the scheme for future but also stopped the Family Planning Allowance to Central Government employees who had already complied with the terms of the scheme for being entitled to the incentive for the entire period of service," the plea, filed through advocate Gyanant Singh, has said.

Constable Babu Lal Mitharwal, who underwent permanent vasectomy, has said in his plea that the decision violated his fundamental rights under the Constitution.

In his petition he has contended that the discontinuance of the allowance after an employee had already undergone sterilisation, bringing about an irreversible change in his body/life, is in gross disregard to the fundamental rights of the beneficiaries of the scheme.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Travel firm Cox & Kings today said it has sold 11.58 per cent stake in Prometheon Holdings UK to SSG Capital for Rs 450 crore, after transaction expense and tax.

The company's wholly-owned subsidiary, Prometheon Enterprises has sold 11.58 per cent stake in Prometheon Holdings (UK) to an investee company of SSG Capital Management, Cox & Kings said in a statement.

Prometheon Enterprises (PEL) earlier held 65.58 per cent stake in Prometheon Holdings UK (PHUK), which houses the education and hybrid hotels businesses, it added.

The company will receive Rs 450 crore after transaction expense and tax, for the 11.58 per cent stake sale in PHUK, company said.

Cox & Kings Group CEO Peter Kerkar said, "In continuation of our efforts to unlock value across businesses, we have divested 11.58 per cent stake in PHUK to SSG Capital."



The company considers SSG as a strong partner and looks forward to leveraging its position and working together to enhance value of education and hybrid hotel businesses, he added.

After the stake sale, the company will hold 54 per cent of Prometheon Holdings UK through PEL, while SSG Capital will hold 46 per cent, Cox & Kings said.

Shares of Cox & Kings were today trading at Rs 244.25 per scrip in the afternoon trade on BSE, up 0.47 per cent from its previous close.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Members of a criminal gang, involved in extortion, today opened fire on Delhi Crime Branch personnel after they were intercepted near Ekant Marg, police said.

However, the five criminals of the gang, which is active in south Delhi, managed to escape after the shoot out, they said.

Police said that information was received that the gang's members were proceeding towards Kosi Kalan, Mathura, for procuring a large cache of arms.

Following the tip-off a trap was laid at the Ekant Marg near Karni Singh Shooting Range and a team of Crime Branch was deployed for nabbing them, they said.

The Crime Branch personnel signalled a vehcile to stop but the driver rammed the car into the barricade and tried to run over a police man.

The car's occupants, five in number, opened fire. The police team fired in retaliation. However, the accused continued to drive the vehicle with a flat tyre.

Police said that the car crashed into another vehicle. The criminals managed to escape, they said. PTI SLB.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)An instrument to measure traces of uranium in water has been developed by a unit of the Department of Atomic Energy (DAE), an official said today.

The instrument, "Fluorimeter", has been developed by the Raja Ramanna Centre for Advanced Technology (RRCAT), an Indore-based unit of the DAE.

The device, costing Rs 1 lakh, would help in detecting traces of uranium in water. It will be especially helpful in areas like Punjab where uranium traces in water sources have been found to be at dangerous levels, said RRCAT director P A Naik.

"Basically, this instrument was developed to find out uranium deposits in the country, but after getting reports that uranium traces were found in water sources in Punjab, we developed a more advanced version of it in the interest of people's health," Naik told PTI.

He said, "It can be easily taken anywhere and water can be taken from any source for testing. The instrument can instantly reveal if uranium traces are present in water."



For mass production of Fluorimeter, the DAE has transferred its technology to its other unit, Electronics Corporation of India Ltd (ECIL), Naik informed.

RRCAT scientist Sendhil Raja S, who played a major role in developing the instrument, said, "In 1996, it was being imported from Canada at a cost of Rs 19 lakh per unit.

"With our continuous research we were able to develop an advanced Fluorimeter costing just Rs one lakh. In the event of mass production, it's cost will further reduce."



The instrument is capable of examining traces of uranium in a sample of water from 0.1 PPB (Parts-per-billion) unit to 100 PPB, Raja said.

Notably, the Atomic Energy Regulatory Board has fixed the permissible radiological limit to 60 PPB of uranium concentration for drinking water.

Experts have said people should avoid using water from sources where uranium traces are more than the limit set by the AERB.

Drinking water with high levels of uranium traces increase radiological and chemical risks to human health, they said.

"Uranium is a radioactive element. If in any source of water it's quantity is more than the permissible limit, then use of such water may cause thyroid cancer, blood cancer, depression and other serious ailments.

"Even kids face the threat of cancer (if they consume uranium-laced water for long)," said Digpal Dharkar of the Indian Institute of Head and Neck Oncology.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Actors Dakota Johnson and Zazie Beetz have boarded the cast of Annapurna Pictures' new thriller.

The two actors join "Call Me By Your Name" star Armie Hammer in the film, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Hammer will play a New Orleans bartender whose life begins to unravel after he picks up a phone left behind at his bar.

The untitled film will be written and directed by Iranian filmmaker Babak Anvari while Lucan Toh of Two & Two Pictures, and Christopher Kopp of AZA Films will co-produced it.

The film has the release date of March 29, 2019.

Beetz, 26, had a breakout role in "Atlanta", which also starred Donald Glover and Paul Simms. She will next be seen in "Deadpool 2", where she is playing the role of mutant Domino.

Johnson, 28, recently reprised her role of Anastasia Steele in "Fifty Shades Freed".

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Supreme Court's verdict diluting stringent provisions mandating immediate arrest under the SC/ST Prevention of Atrocities (POA) Act has drawn criticism from a Dalit organisation which said it would lead to "great miscarriage of justice".

Expressing its concern over the top court's March 20 verdict, the National Executive Committee of the Dalit Shoshan Mukti Manch(DSMM) has urged the Centre to file a review petition so that the Act remained effective.

"The dilution in the stringency of the Act will lead to great miscarriage of justice. It must be remembered that in many cases the accused are government servants and officials.

"Government offices and departments are sites of discrimination and injustice to SCs and STs (schedule castes and schedule tribes). The police also has a record of committing grave crimes against these sections of society," it said.

"We, therefore, appeal to the Government of India to file a review petition to nullify the changes sought to be made by the apex court. The central and state governments must make all efforts to strictly implement the provisions of the Act.

"We also request all progressive and democratic minded people and law makes and intellectuals to oppose the dilution of the provisions of this Act," DSMM said.

It said that the Supreme Court has most unfortunately modified Section 18 of the Act in the name of "misuse".

"The truth is that in cases of atrocities against SCs and STs not only is the conviction rate very low but there is delay at every stage from filing charge sheets to proceeding with the matters in court," the organisation said.

The apex court had on March 20 taken note of the rampant misuse of the stringent Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act against government servants and held that there shall be no immediate arrest on any complaint filed under the law.

It had passed a slew of directions and said a public servant can be arrested in cases lodged under the SC/ST Act only after prior approval by the competent authority.

The statement released by DSMM general secretary and former MP Ramchandra Dom said that delays in arrests of the accused will be used to browbeat the victims and force them to withdraw cases.

"This is already being done because of the disproportionate access to power and influence between the victims who are socially and economically weak and the accused. can not change the law.

"In fact there is a great need to see that cases of atrocities are registered and pursued stringently and without unnecessary delay. If the fear of being arrested is removed from the minds of the perpetrators then we will see an even greater increase in attacks and violence against the SCs and STs," the DSMM said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Delhi government today proposed Rs 3,106 crore for housing and urban development in its 2018-19 Budget.

The Budget was presented by Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia in the Delhi Assembly.

According to the budget, the allocation for both housing and urban development is 6 per cent of the total budget of Rs 53,000 crore, which the AAP government projected as "green budget".

For the housing sector, the AAP government has set aside Rs 165.44 crore, as against Rs 271 crore in 2017-18.

However, government has increased fund for urban development with allocation of around Rs 2,782 crore, which was Rs 2,396 crore in the 2017-18 financial year.

With an increase of Rs 386 crore, it means the city administration will carry out more urban development works in comparison to last year.

For development works in unauthorised colonies, Rs 1,500 crore has also been earmarked.

Lauding the budget proposals, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal put emphasis on improving environment, health, education, water, sewer and road infrastructure in the city.

He said this is the first "green budget", under which 26 specific actionable points have been mentioned to reduce pollution levels in the national capital, and the government has also fixed a time-line for every project the progress of which will be reviewed by the chief secretary every week.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Delhi's economy is on the path of growth despite the negative impact of demonetisation and disruption due to the GST's implementation, Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia today said.

In the next fiscal, the Delhi government expects to get Rs 23,400 crore from the Goods and Service Tax (GST), 60 per cent more than Rs 14,600 crore it mopped up in the current financial year, even as Sisodia lambasted the Centre for introducing the new tax regime.

The government also hopes to get Rs 5,200 crore from state excise in the 2018-19 financial year and Rs 2,500 crore from the taxes on vehicles.

The annual average real growth in GSDP of Delhi has been 9.1 per cent during 2015-16 to 2017-18, as compared to 7.3 per cent growth observed in GDP at the national level during the same period, he said.

Presenting the 2018-19 Budget in the Delhi Assembly, Sisodia said that if there is one word that most accurately captures the AAP government's economic vision and the policies that have emanated from it in the last three years, it is "Trickle Up" economics that is aimed at benefitting the poor and the middle classes.

"Our country has followed the Trickle Down' approach to economic policy. It emphasises giving massive tax breaks, subsidies and interest-free loans to big corporate groups and foreign investors in the hope that they will invest and grow the overall economy, which will benefit everyone.

"It's a fair argument except that beyond a point, it doesn't work for the 'aam aadmi' (common man)," Sisodia said.

He said for the last three years in Delhi, the AAP government has reposed its faith in the "Trickle Up" model of economics rather than "Trickle Down".

"In simple words, the 'Trickle Up' model is one where economic policies of the government directly benefit the poor and middle-class citizens leading to better education, health and a rise in their income levels," the deputy chief minister said.

"The economy of Delhi continues to be on the path of sustainable growth despite the negative impact of demonetisation and disruption caused due to implementation of GST," he said.

The AAP government today presented a Rs 53,000 crore budget for financial year 2018-19.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Delhi High Court today sought a response from the Centre on a plea by BJP MLAs seeking to remove AAP legislator Kailash Gahlot, who was disqualified for holding office of profit, as the city's transport minister.

Justice Rekha Palli issued notice to the office of the Delhi Assembly Speaker and Gahlot, seeking their response on his continuation as a minster and attending ongoing House proceedings.

The court, however, refrained from restraining the disqualified transport minister from attending the assembly.

"Prima facie, I am inclined to restrain minister from attending the house proceedings, but I am not doing so. I need to get your (Centre, Speaker's office and Gahlot) response before passing any order," the judge said.

It directed them to file their response in 10 days and fixed the matter for further hearing on April 6.

Senior counsel Sanjay Jain and advocates Balendu Shekhar and Neeraj Kumar, appearing for the three BJP MLAs--Vijender Gupta, O P Sharma and Jagdish Pradhan-- sought a direction for appropriate steps to remove Gahlot as minister of Delhi.

Senior advocate Rajiv Nair, appearing for Gahlot, opposed the plea of the BJP MLAs. He said they yesterday withdrew their plea from a bench which was scheduled to hear the case and are engaged in bench hunting.

The budget session of the Delhi Assembly started on March 16 and will continue till March 28.

The Election Commission had recommended the disqualification of 20 AAP MLAs for holding office of profit on January 19. The president had accepted the poll panel's opinion the very next day.

The MLAs have challenged their disqualification order in the high court, which is yet to pronounce the judgment.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The ED today searched the premises of its ex-Deputy Director and others in connection with the money laundering probe in a Rs 600 crore alleged ponzi scam case.

The ED officials said the house of its former officer Gurnam Singh, advocate Puneet Shrma and an another person in Chandigarh and Mohali are being raided since morning, under provisions of the Prevention of the Money Laundering Act (PMLA).

Singh has been the investigating officer of the said ponzi case and was relieved from the central probe agency by the Enforcement Directorate (ED) headquarter in Delhi last year in January.

Officials claimed that the ex-Deputy Director of the ED's Chandigarh zone was allegedly taking bribes, to the tune of about 4-6 crore, in purported connivance with Sharma in this case.

The raids have been launched to gather more evidence in this context, they said.

ED Director Karnal Singh had issued stern directives in the agency that instances of corruption in the organisation will be prosecuted even if it is their own staffers.

The agency had conducted multiple searches in this case last year and it had also arrested the absconding agent of the alleged chit fund firm under scanner-- Kamal K Bakshi-- under the anti-money laundering law.

The case, the ED had said, pertains to thousands of investors who were "systematically lured and cheated to the tune of more than Rs 600 crore by floating ponzi or pyramid schemes assuring exorbitant returns".

It had said that the alleged "mastermind" of the scheme is a Malaysian identified as Mugundhan Gangam who floated two firms -- Ms Unipay 2U Marketing Private Limited and Unigateway2U Trading Private Limited -- in India.

Describing the modus operandi of the alleged cheating in this case, the agency said the early investors of the ponzi schemes floated by the firm were paid exorbitant returns in order to win over their confidence.

"When thousands of people across the country invested crores of rupees in the said ponzi schemes, the companies stopped the payouts or monthly returns (since October, 2010) and gradually siphoned off crores of rupees of investors," it had said.

"The company manipulated by using a web of bank accounts and layering of money through a plethora of such accounts," the ED alleged.

The agency had registered a criminal FIR in the case, based on an earlier complaint of other central investigative agencies.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Egypt today expressed deep condolences over the death of 39 Indian citizens who were abducted and killed by the ISIS in Iraq.

"Egypt strongly denounced such heinous crime against Indian nationals and stressed its support to the Indian government and people in this crisis," Egypt's Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

The Ministry also expressed deep and sincere condolences to the families of the victims.

The Indian government said on Tuesday that the 39 Indians abducted in 2014 by the Islamic State (ISIS) terrorists in Mosul city were dead and their bodies had been recovered.

The statement also said that such hateful crime is added to the criminal record of the terrorist group against unarmed civilians over the past years.

It also confirms the credibility of Egypt's vision of the importance of exerting international efforts to dry up the sources of funding of this terrorist group and denying them any safe haven.

Egypt has witnessed a number of terror attacks, claimed by the ISIS, leading to death of many people, including security personnel.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Delhi government today announced that the construction of the elevated road over Barapullah Nallah (PhaseII) is likely to be completed by March end.

In the Budget presented today in the Delhi Assembly, Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia said the move would decongest the ring road, besides reducing travel time by 15 to 20 minutes.

He said that a Rs 5,145 crore has been allocated for public transport, including road infrastructure in 2018-19.

Construction of the elevated road of Barapullah PhaseIII from Sarai Kale Khan to Mayur Vihar will be completed by December 2018 at a cost of Rs 1,260 crore, the move would reduce travel time to 10 to 12 minutes from the existing 30 minutes.

Other constructions set to begin in 2018-19 include the Kalindi Bypass road, an elevated road from Signature Bridge to Kalindi Kunj Bypass and an elevated road over Najafgarh Drain from Kakrola More to Wazirabad.

"Construction of flyover at Karawal Nagar, Bhajanpura Junction and flyover at Gagan Cinema, Nand Nagri T-Junction and an underpass at Loni Road on Mangal Pandey Marg of 6.5 Kms length will be started," he said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Environmental issues are "moral" issues and people should make a collective effort to protect flora and fauna, Union Minister Harsh Vardhan has said.

The minister laid the foundation stone for redevelopment and upgradation of the Okhla Bird Sanctuary to mark International Day of Forest at Noida yesterday.

"Environmental issues are not technical issues, but moral issues," the minister said and urged people to make a collective effort to protect flora and fauna.

He recalled Prime Minister Narendra Modi's vision of delivering a New India by 2022 where there is dense forest, and clean water and air.

Minister of State for Mahesh Sharma said that under the project, the Okhla Bird sanctuary will get a "watch tower of international standards, a re-laid cycle track for tourists, CCTV network for improved security and electric vehicles for mobility".

The Okhla Bird Sanctuary is located close to New Delhi and is one of the 467 Important Bird Areas (IBA) in the country.

It is home to a large number of resident as well as migratory birds, including grey-headed fish eagle, Baikal teal, Baer's pochard and Sarus crane.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The ruling AIADMK in Tamil Nadu today said it was exerting adequate pressure on the Centre over the Cauvery issue and cited the persistent protests by party MPs in Parliament to drive home its point.

Deputy Chief Minister O Panneerselvam informed the state Assembly that the government was firm on its stand that the Centre must constitute the Cauvery Water Management Board (CWMB) and the Cauvery Water Regulation Committee (CWRC).

He was responding to DMK working president and Leader of Opposition MK Stalin, who raised the issue, and sought to know if AIADMK will move a no-confidence motion against the BJP government like the N Chandrababu Naidu-led TDP had done.

Telugu Desam Party had recently ended its alliance with BJP over the issue of Special category status for Andhra Pradesh and moved the no-trust motion.

Responding to Stalin, Panneerselvam recalled the final verdict of the Supreme Court on the Cauvery issue on February 16 and pointed out Tamil Nadu was steadfast on its demand for setting up CMB and CWRC.

"Our determined stand is that CWMB and CWRC should be constituted," he said.

Further, the AIADMK was exerting adequate pressure on the Centre over the issue, he said, and cited the persistent protests by party MPs in Parliament on the matter.

"Our MPs are exerting so much pressure that parliament has remained stalled," he said, even as the stalemate entered the second week today in Delhi.

Proceedings in both Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha were disrupted for the 14th straight day today on the second leg of the budget session due to unabated protests by opposition parties and those from some southern states, including AIADMK.

Panneerselvam said there was time till the end of the month for constituting CWMB and CWRC and hinted that the government will formulate its move thereafter based on the Centre's move on constituting them.

The government could also involve the opposition to chalk out a strategy, he added.

The AIADMK government had earlier convened a meeting of all political parties and farmers' representatives on the Cauvery issue, where it was decided that an all-party delegation would meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi to urge him to constitute the Cauvery panels.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Mark Zuckerberg has said Facebook is enhancing its security features to ensure the integrity of upcoming key elections in countries like India on its platform, as the social media giant faced flak over a major data breach scandal by a British firm linked to Donald Trump's presidential campaign.

Zuckerberg, in an interview with The New York Times, referred to the artificial intelligence (AI) tools deployed by Facebook to detect fake accounts trying to manipulate and influence the elections.

Such a tool was deployed for the first time in the French elections in 2017.

"The new A.I. tools we built after the 2016 elections found, I think, more than 30,000 fake accounts that we believe were linked to Russian sources who were trying to do the same kind of tactics they did in the US in the 2016 election. We were able to disable them and prevent that from happening on a large scale in France, he said.

"Last year in 2017 with the special election in Alabama, we deployed some new A.I. tools to identify fake accounts and false news, and we found a significant number of Macedonian accounts that were trying to spread false news, and were able to eliminate those, Zuckerberg said.

This is for the first time that Zuckerberg has publicly talked about Facebook being allegedly used for influencing polls.

"I feel a lot better about the systems now. At the same time, I think Russia and other governments are going to get more sophisticated in what they do, too. So we need to make sure that we up our game, he said.

"This is a massive focus for us to make sure we're dialed in for not only the 2018 elections in the US, but the Indian elections, the Brazilian elections, and a number of other elections that are going on this year that are really important," Zuckerberg said.

Responding to a question, he said there is a lot of hard work that the Facebook needs to do to make it harder for countries like Russia to do election interference, to make it so that trolls and other folks can't spread fake

"But we can get in front of this, and we have a responsibility to do this not only for the 2018 midterms in the US, which are going to be a huge deal this year, and that's just a huge focus of us. But there's a big election in India this year.

"There's a big election in Brazil. There are big elections around the world, and you can bet that we are really committed to doing everything that we need to, to make sure that the integrity of those elections on Facebook is secured, Zuckerberg said.

India yesterday warned Facebook of "stringent" action for any attempt to influence polls by allowing data theft and even threatened to summon Zuckerberg if needed.

The warning came as the BJP yesterday attacked Congress, questioning the party's relations with Cambridge Analytica, accused of harvesting personal data from 50 million Facebook users without their knowledge.

Congress, however, asserted that the services of the London-based company have never been hired by his party or its chief Rahul Gandhi.

Zuckerberg also told CNN that he is sure that someone is trying to meddle the 2018 mid term elections in the US.

"I'm sure someone's trying," he said when asked about the possibility of meddling happening right now. I'm sure that there's v2, version two, of whatever the Russian effort was in 2016, I'm sure they're working on that," he said.

"And there are going to be some new tactics that we need to make sure that we observe and get in front of, he added.

Noting that Facebook officials "have some sense of the different things that we need to get in front of," Zuckerberg said the company staffers are "building technology" and hiring human reviewers to stamp out propaganda and other attacks.

"One of the big commitments that we've made this year is to double the number of people working on security at the company. We're going to have 20,000 people working on security and content review in this company by the end of this year," said the Facebook founder and CEO.

Responding to a question, Zuckerberg said he is not sure if Facebook should be regulated.

"I actually am not sure we shouldn't be regulated. You know, I think in general, technology is an increasingly important trend in the world, and I actually think the question is more what is the right regulation rather than yes or no, should it be regulated? he asked.

Zuckerberg has apologised for a "major breach of trust" with Facebook users and vowed to take steps to protect user data. He admitted of making "mistakes" and said he was "happy" to answer questions about the scandal before US Congress.

He said Facebook has already taken important steps to prevent such a situation from happening again. He said the site would be reviewing thousands of apps in an "intensive process.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)In the midst of revelations of a major data breach, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg today admitted that his company made mistakes on user data secrecy and vowed to take steps to prevent the misuse or breach of personal data of users by developers or business partners.

Zuckerberg, 33, through a lengthy Facebook post, broke his silence over the alleged privacy scandal that hit the social media giant.

"I started Facebook, and at the end of the day, I'm responsible for what happens on our platform. I'm serious about doing what it takes to protect our community," Zuckerberg said.

Reports alleged that personal data from as many as 50 million people might have been used improperly in Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign by Cambridge Analytica, a UK-based political research firm.

Zuckerberg said Facebook has a "responsibility" to protect its users' data and if it fails, "we don't deserve to serve you."



He acknowledged that there is more the company needs to do.

"...But we also made mistakes, there's more to do, and we need to step up and do it," he said.

Over the past several days, Facebook has been facing an investigation by the Federal Trade Commission and calls for legislative testimonies in the US and Europe.

India's IT and Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad has warned social media companies such as Facebook of stringent actions if there was any attempt to influence the electoral process of any country.

Amidst a global outrage against Facebook, the Silicon Valley-based company, which currently has 2 billion monthly active users, has suffered a loss of USD 50 billion in market value.

In a damage control mode, Zuckerberg announced a slew of measures aimed to "secure our platform further and make our community safer for everyone going forward".

For this, the Facebook founder said, his company will take three steps to prevent the data misuse.

"We will investigate all apps that had access to large amounts of information before we changed our platform to dramatically reduce data access in 2014, and we will conduct a full audit of any app with suspicious activity," he said.

"We will ban any developer from our platform that does not agree to a thorough audit. And if we find developers that misused personally identifiable information, we will ban them and tell everyone affected by those apps," he added.

Zuckerberg said that the second step is to restrict developers' data access even further to prevent other kinds of abuse.

He cited an example for this: "It (Facebook) will remove developers' access to one's data if the app hasn't been used by the person in three months."



"We will reduce the data you give an app when you sign in -- to only your name, profile photo, and email address. We'll require developers to not only get approval but also sign a contract in order to ask anyone for access to their posts or other private data. And we'll have more changes to share in the next few days," Zuckerberg said.

In the last of the three steps, he said in the next month Facebook will show everyone a tool at the top of their Feed with the apps they have used and an easy way to revoke those apps' permissions to their data.

"We already have a tool to do this in your privacy settings, and now we will put this tool at the top of your Feed to make sure everyone sees it, Zuckerberg said.

Zuckerberg said that his company had already taken a series of steps in 2014.

Giving a timeline of the events, Zuckerberg said in 2013, a Cambridge University researcher named Aleksandr Kogan created a personality quiz app. It was installed by around 300,000 people who shared their data as well as some of their friends' data.

Given the way Facebook platform worked at the time, this meant Kogan was able to access tens of millions of their friends' data, he said.

Zuckerberg said in order to prevent the "abusive apps", a series of measures were taken in 2014 to dramatically limit the data apps could access.

In 2015, Facebook learned from journalists at The Guardian that Kogan had shared data from his app with Cambridge Analytica. It is against Facebook's policies for developers to share data without people's consent, he said, adding that he immediately banned Kogan's app from Facebook, and demanded that Kogan and Cambridge Analytica formally certify that they had deleted all improperly acquired data. They provided these certifications.

Zuckerberg cited some media reports that suggested Cambridge may not have deleted the data as they had certified.

This, according to him, was not only a breach of trust between Kogan, Cambridge and Facebook but also between his company and its users.

"But it was also a breach of trust between Facebook and the people who share their data with us and expect us to protect it. We need to fix that," he said.

"In this case, we already took the most important steps a few years ago in 2014 to prevent bad actors from accessing people's information in this way. But there's more we need to do," Zuckerberg said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Following are the business highlights till 2000 hrs today:



DEL25 PAR-LD GRATUITY BILL



New Delhi: Parliament today passed Payment of Gratuity (Amendment) Bill 2017 paving the way for doubling the limit of tax free gratuity to Rs 20 lakh and empowering the government to fix the ceiling of the retirement benefit through an executive order.

DEL23 BIZ-LD STOCKS



Mumbai: The benchmark BSE Sensex fell by 130 points today due to profit booking in realty, capital goods, teck, auto and banking stocks due to renewed global trade war fears and losses in European markets.

DEL21 BIZ-FACEBOOK-LOG IN



New Delhi: Amid global uproar over data breach from its platform, social networking giant Facebook is tweaking its usage policy for third party apps, including login process, to ensure that they have only limited access to user information.

DEL41 BIZ-RSQ-PNB-LOUS



New Delhi: Scam-hit Punjab National Bank had issued as many as 41,178 Letters of Undertaking (LoUs) since 2011, of which 1,590 were given to Nirav Modi, Mehul Choksi and their associates, the finance ministry has said.

DEL37 BIZ-RSQ-JAITLEY-NOTE BAN



New Delhi: Finance Minister Arun Jaitley has said that demonetisation of high value currency notes in November 2016 "succeeded" in unearthing black money and preventing corruption.

DEL31 BIZ-RUPEE-CLOSE



Mumbai: The rupee today rose by 10 paise to close at 65.11 against the US currency on foreign fund inflows amid the Federal Reserve sticking to its outlook of three rate hikes this year.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Delhi High Court today took up the issue of denial of bail and proper phone call facility to foreign women inmates arrested in drug cases and lodged in the Tihar Jail after they wrote a letter to the court about their plight.

A bench of Acting Chief Justice Gita Mittal and Justice C Hari Shankar sought response of the Delhi government and the prison authorities on two letters sent by the foreign women who have claimed that their Indian counterparts, arrested in similar crimes, are granted bail.

The court made advocate Ajay Verma, who has also raised the issue, an amicus curiae to assist it.

The foreign women inmates in their letter to the high court have alleged that they were not being granted bail by the trial courts on the sole ground that they being foreigners would abscond or go abroad if the relief is granted to them.

They are also aggrieved by the few minutes they are allotted twice every month to call their family and that too by using a calling card.

The women have claimed that while they get two phone calls of five minutes every month, their Indian counterparts get to make a phone call of five minutes every day.

They have sought that they be allowed one phone call per week.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier will hold talks with Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Saturday to explore ways to further broad base ties between the two countries in a range of areas including trade and investment.

Steinmeier, accompanied by his wife Elke Budenbender, arrived here today on his first visit to India as German president.

He was received at the airport by Minister of State for Drinking Water and Sanitation S S Ahluwalia.

The German president began his five-day trip with a visit to Varanasi where he took a tour of the Sarnath museum and the archaeological site.

He also visited the Mulgandha-Kuti temple where he was welcomed with a traditional ceremony.

"The visit is significant as it will be the President's first visit after the new German government was sworn in yesterday," Spokesperson, External Affairs Ministry, Raveesh Kumar had said last week.

On Saturday, Modi and Steinmeier are expected to review the state of bilateral relationship and explore ways to further deepen it.

The meeting will take place at the renovated Sunder Nursery, a 90-acre heritage park in central Delhi.

Steinmeier will also meet his Indian counterpart Ram Nath Kovind, Vice President Venkaiah Naidu and External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj.

Tomorrow, the German president will visit Jama Masjid, address a group of students at the Delhi University and speak at a business round table.

On Sunday, he will travel to Chennai. His engagements there includes a visit to the IIT, Madras, and addressing a group of business leaders.

The next day, he will visit the Shore temple in Mahabalipuram.

Steinmeier had visited India several times in his former capacity as the foreign minister and vice chancellor of Germany.

The last German president to visit India was Joachim Gauck in February 2014.

Germany is India's largest trading partner in Europe and the sixth largest trading partner in the world. India was ranked 24th in Germany's global trade.

In 2016-17, the bilateral trade turnover was USD 18.76 billion. In 2016-17, India exported goods worth USD 7.18 billion to Germany and imported goods worth USD 11.58 billion.

Germany is the 7th largest foreign direct investor in India and the cumulative German FDI in India from April 2000 to December 2017 is USD 10.71 billion or 2.91 per cent of total FDI, according to official figures.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Gold worth over Rs 42.7 lakh was seized from five passengers, including two women, arrived from Dubai at Kozhikode international airport today, a top official said here today.

Acting on a tip off that some carriers have hidden gold in compound form in their body,officers of Air Intelligence Unit kept surveillance on passengers, Customs Commissioner Sumit Kumar said.

He said the officers intercepted the five passengers and a personalsearch resulted in the recovery of gold weighing over 1.3 kg from them.

He said the Customs sleuths in Kozhikode Airport made the seizure a day after they effected seizure of over 1.5 kg gold worth 47.3 lakh from four passengers arrived from the Gulf countries.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The fear of facing a vote in the Maharashtra Assembly forced the state government to stay the invocation of the Maharashtra Essential Services Maintenance Act (MESMA) against 'anganwadi' workers, the Congress claimed today.

Leader of Opposition in the Assembly Radhakrishna Vikhe Patil said the BJP's ally Shiv Sena had also voiced its objection to invoking the stringent Act against the anganwadi workers, and this too put pressure on the government.

The senior Congress MLA's remarks came after Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis today stayed the invocation of MESMA against the anganwadi workers.

The government had last week invoked the MESMA to stop workers of anganwadis (the state-run women and child care centres) from going on a strike.

"Considering the sentiments of the august house, the government has decided to stay the MESMA against anganwadi workers," Fadnavis said in the Lower House.

Notably, the Shiv Sena, an ally of the BJP, and the opposition Congress and NCP were yesterday in their demand for withdrawal of MESMA, which was enforced last week on the anganwadi workers.

Vikhe Patil saidthe opposition parties had given an adjournment notice regarding the government's decision to invoke MESMA against the anganwadi workerson March 19.

"The Shiv Sena was quiet that time. However, suddenly the party became active after getting a message from 'Matoshree' (Sena chief Uddhar Thackeray's residence)," he alleged.

"Since the Shiv Sena also opposed MESMA on anganwadi workers yesterday, the opposition Congress and NCP had plannedto seek a vote on the issue today. The government got a whiff of our plan and decided to back-track," Vikhe Patil alleged.

He criticised the women and child welfare Minister, Pankaja Munde, for sayingthat 125 children had died during the strike by anganwadi workers late last year.

"If the anganwadi workers are to be blamed, who is responsible for the death of malnourished children when anganwadi workers are in service?" the LoP asked.

Members of the Shiv Sena, the Congress and the NCP yesterday created ruckus in the Assembly, seeking withdrawal of the MESMA invoked against anganwadi workers.

Munde had urged the members to consider the children's situation if the anganwadi workers go on strike.

"During their strike, 125 malnourished children died. Who is responsible? Don't fall prey to the of the anganwadi workers' associations," she had said.

The MESMA empowers authorities to take strong action, like detention, against the workers of services covered under the legislation, if they go on strike. All offences covered under the Act are non-bailable, according to its provisions.

Notably, the Anganwadi Kruti Samiti had gone on strike from September 11 to October 8 last year.

Earlier this month, the anganwadi workers sat on a dharna at the Azad Maidan in Mumbai and threatened to go on strike in support of their demands to raise their honorarium and retain their retirement age at 65 years (from 60).

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Bharip Bahujan Mahasangh president Prakash Ambedkar today said the BJP-led Maharashtra government lacks the political will to arrest pro-Hindutva leader Sambhaji Bhide, accused of instigating violence at Bhima-Koregaon near Pune on January 1.

"Before any action could be initiated against Bhide, a photo of him with Prime Minister Narendra Modi was circulated on social media. It was a message to the authorities not to take any action against him. The riot was orchestrated by Bhide and Milind Ekbote, But only Ekbote was arrested," Ambedkar said.

"If the charge sheet (filed by Pune police) mentions names of both Bhide and Ekbote, how come only Ekbote is arrested? When I announced that I will organise a protest rally on March 26 over the home department's failure to take action, I learnt that police are going to meet Bhide in Sangli for inquiry.

"Normally it is police who call a suspect to the police station for inquiry," the former MP said.

Talking about his meeting with Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis over the issue, Ambedkar said, "Fadnavis told me that if there is enough evidence against him, he (Bhide) will be arrested. I think the state has enough evidence against Bhide, but no arrest is being made."



Dalits visiting a war memorial at Bhima-Koregaon on January 1 came under attack. Earlier, some pro-Hindutva outfits had opposed commemoration of the 1818 battle of Bhima Koregaon, in which East India Company forces, consisting of Dalit Mahar soldiers, defeated the Brahmin Peshwa's Army.

On the Supreme Court's directive on the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, Ambedkar said, "The SC could have restricted itself to the petition filed by Dr Subhash Mahajan and one more person.

"The decision appears to be diluting the provisions in the act," said Ambedkar, who is the grandson of Dalit icon Dr B R Ambedkar.

The Supreme Court yesterday diluted stringent provisions mandating immediate arrest under the act, in a bid to protect honest public servants from being blackmailed with false cases.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Gujarat Legislative Assembly admitted the no-confidence motion moved today by the opposition Congress against Speaker Rajendra Trivedi for "acting in a biased manner in favour of the ruling BJP".

As per the Gujarat Assembly rules, the motion has to be put to vote within seven days of its admission.

All the Congress MLAs supported the motion when it was read out in the House for admission. It was decided that the business advisory committee will fix the final date for discussion and voting on the motion.

The first item on the agenda of the House after the Question Hour was admission of the no-confidence motion. When it was read out, over 60 Congress MLAs, who were present in the House, stood up in its support as against the requirement of the support of 17 MLAs.

The speaker announced that the motion has been admitted and will be put to vote as per the decision of the business advisory committee.

Congress leader Sailesh Parmar had filed the no-confidence motion application on February 28 with the assembly secretariat.

As per the Rule 103 of the legislative assembly, once the application for no-confidence motion is filed, it has to be admitted in the House after 14 working days and once it is admitted, it has to be taken up for discussion and voting within seven days.

Talking to reporters later, Leader of Opposition Paresh Dhanani said the motion was moved by his party as the speaker showed "complete bias in his decisions in favour of the ruling BJP".

On February 28, Trivedi had suspended 15 Congress MLAs for a day, and another MLA Asha Patel for two days, for rushing to the Well of the House and raising slogans.

On March 14, the speaker had suspended three Congress MLAs, two --Amrish Der and Pratap Dudhat-- for three years and another one Baldevji Thakor for a year, after they indulged in violence in the house.

The BJP has a majority in the house with 99 MLAs while the Congress has 77 members. So, if the motion is taken for voting, the speaker is unlikely to face any trouble.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Monkeys will continue to procreate every day and not wait for official meetings.

Stating this, the Delhi High Court today ticked off the Centre for being unable to give a clear answer on whether it was willing to import vaccines to sterilise the simians to check their growing population in the national capital and other parts of the country, which has been adversely affecting the people.

A bench of Acting Chief Justice Gita Mittal and Justice C Hari Shankar said the PIL before it to deal with the monkey menace was filed way back in 2001 but despite passage of 17 years, the Centre was yet to take a decision on which ministry was responsible for tackling the issue.

"We want action, not discussions and meetings. The monkeys are not going to wait for your meetings. They are procreating each day. It is an hour to hour problem and brooks no delay. People are vacating whole colonies near the Asola sanctuary where they were relocated.

"The discussions and meetings should have been over by now. If you proceed like this, the matter will go on for another 18 years," the court said, adding it was "hopelessly failing in making the government do its job."



The strong remarks by the bench came after Additional Solicitor General Maninder Acharya told the court that she needed more time to take instructions from the government on the issue of import of vaccine as it cannot be decided "overnight".

The court, in response, said it would not be overnight for the government as the issue was being considered and pushed by the bench for the last six months.

Observing that the monkey menace has reached a magnitude where the government has to intervene, it said the Agriculture Ministry should have taken up the issue of importing vaccine to sterilise monkeys as a project long back as cultivation in hilly states, like Himachal Pradesh, has been suffering because of them.

The bench also asked the Centre why a vaccine to control simian population cannot be imported when some African nations have been doing so. This point has been raised several times by the court in the past but the central government is yet to take a decision on it.

The court had earlier called for expediting the process of developing a vaccine, if it cannot be imported, for immuno-contraception - which would use an animal's immune response to prevent pregnancy.

It said the failure to control the monkey population has a human cost - the money spent on treatment of a person who has been bitten by a simian and the psychological impact on such an individual.

Apart from the human cost, the simians also pays a price as they have to survive in pathetic conditions foraging for food from rubbish bins and garbage dumps, it said.

The government was more focused on spending money to protect electric poles and buildings by surrounding them with spikes and cages that injured the monkeys, but appeared less concerned with protecting people from the simians, the court said.

The court was hearing a PIL, filed through advocate Meera Bhatia, seeking directions to the authorities to take steps to deal with the menace of monkeys and dogs here.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Delhi High Court on Friday is likely to pronounce its verdict on the plea of 20 Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) MLAs challenging their disqualification for holding office-of-profit when they were appointed parliamentary secretaries.

A bench of justices Sanjiv Khanna and Chander Shekhar kept its decision pending since February 28, when it had reserved the judgement after the legislators, Election Commission of India (EC) and other parties had concluded their arguments.

During the arguments, the MLAs had told the court that EC's order disqualifying them for allegedly holding office-of-profit was passed in "complete violation of natural justice" as they were not given an opportunity to explain their stand before the poll panel.

The bench was also requested by the legislators to remand their case back to the poll panel with a direction to hear the matter afresh. They had approached the high court challenging their disqualification after President Ram Nath Kovind gave his assent to the EC's recommendation.

Backing its recommendation to the President for MLAs' disqualification, the poll panel had submitted that the legislators cannot claim that they were not holding office-of-profit. It had also claimed that these MLAs' pleas were not maintainable and were liable to be dismissed.

The MLAs are accused of holding offices of profit, as they were appointed parliamentary secretaries to ministers in the Delhi government in March 2015. This was soon after they were elected to the Delhi Assembly. In September 2016, the Delhi High Court had ruled against their appointment as parliamentary secretaries, after hearing their pleas on a daily basis since February 7.

The high court had on January 24 refused to stay the Centre's notification disqualifying them, but had restrained the poll panel from taking any "precipitate measures" such as announcing dates for by polls to fill the vacancies.

The EC had on January 19 recommended the disqualification of 20 MLAs - Alka Lamba, Adarsh Shastri, Sanjeev Jha, Rajesh Gupta, Kailash Gahlot, Vijendra Garg, Praveen Kumar, Sharad Kumar, Madan Lal, Shiv Charan Goyal, Sarita Singh, Naresh Yadav, Rajesh Rishi, Anil Kumar, Som Dutt, Avtar Singh, Sukhvir Singh Dala, Manoj Kumar, Nitin Tyagi and Jarnail Singh.

The president had accepted the EC's opinion the next day.Shares of Hindustan Construction Company slumped over 17 per cent today amid reports that its subsidiary Lavasa Corp is headed for bankruptcy, which the company has denied as misleading and without any basis.

The stock plummeted 17.30 per cent to close at Rs 23.90 on BSE. Intra-day, it plunged 19.20 per cent to Rs 23.35.

On NSE, shares of the company slumped 17 per cent to end at Rs 23.90.

The company's market valuation went down by Rs 507 crore to Rs 2,426.96 crore.

In terms of equity volume, 103.06 lakh shares of the company were traded on BSE and over 9 crore shares changed hands on NSE during the day.

Earlier in the day, BSE had sought clarification from the company on the media reports.

Later, the company in a filing to BSE said, "In the said connection, we wish to clarify that the said item in a section of media is misleading and without any basis."



"Please note that Lavasa Corporation has been working jointly with the consortium of lenders for a financial solution for Lavasa. Due to RBI's recent notification on IBC, the process has been slowed down till further clarity on the finer nuances of the revised framework emerge," it said.

Lavasa is hopeful of a comprehensive solution for its debt recast once the revised framework is deliberated to the satisfaction of all involved. Lavasa's top priority is to safeguard the interests of all stakeholders, including the home buyers, who have believed in and supported the project, the filing added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Retail-focused private sector lender HDFC Bank has roped in a Citibank veteran Rahul Shukla to head its corporate and business banking business.

Shukla joins the second largest private sector lender after spending over 25 years with Citibank where he was heading the corporate banking vertical for South Asia.

Shukla will report to Kaizad Bharucha, executive director, who heads the wholesale banking business, which contributes about 45 per cent to HDFC Bank's loan portfolio. ********************* NPCI ties up with Big Bazaar to offer discounts on RuPay cards *



The National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) has tied up with retailer Big Bazaar to offer up to 10 per cent discount on RuPay debit and credit card transactions.

The offer, valid from March 23 to April 30, is applicable on all purchases made at Big Bazaar, Food Bazaar, eZone and fbb, for Rs 1,500 or above, with a maximum discount of Rs 250.

RuPay is the first-of-its-kind domestic debit and credit card payment network from the RBI-promoted NPCI. There are over 440 million RuPay debit and credit card holders in the country.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The health ministry has come out with a 30-second Public Service Announcement (PSA), as a part of a national campaign to sensitise people about the harms of exposure to second-hand tobacco smoke.

"Clinical", the 30-second PSA, reveals how exposure to second-hand smoke causes stroke and heart disease among non-smokers and encourages smokers to protect others by quitting smoking.

It is the first national tobacco control mass media campaign to promote a "quit smoking" helpline, said Vital Strategies which provided technical assistance for this campaign.

The PSA will be broadcast in 17 languages over a period of three weeks on the channels of public service broadcasters Doordarshan and All India Radio for pan-India reach.

The campaign will also run on major digital media platforms including YouTube, Facebook, Hotstar and Voot, it said.

According to the Global Adult Tobacco Survey (GATS), India, 2017, there has been a reduction in exposure to SHS in India since 2009-2010 (the time of the last GATS India report), but a large proportion of adults and children are still exposed to this invisible killer.

Exposure to SHS in public spaces reduced from 29 per cent to 23 per cent and exposure at home reduced from 52 per cent to 39 per cent, but exposure in the workplace rose marginally from 29.9 percent to 30.2 percent, the survey said.

Fully comprehensive smoke-free laws, with no exemptions, are more effective in protecting smokers and non-smokers, it said.

"There is no safe level of exposure to second-hand smoke, but many people don't know about this invisible killer,' said Dr Nandita Murukutla, Vice President, Global Policy and Research, Vital Strategies.

"We expect the campaign will be highly effective in changing knowledge and behaviors around the health risks of second-hand smoke," he said.

"It will increase support for strong enforcement of India's smoke free laws, increase traffic to the national quitline and Cessation website at the National Health Portal, and help to discourage people from consuming tobacco in any form," Murukutla said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Unidentified persons today attacked the house of a former CPI-M worker, spearheading a protest against the LDF government over acquisition of paddy land for national highway at Keezhattur near here, police said.

None was injured in the attack when miscreants pelted stones at the house of Suresh Keezhattur, a leader of 'Vayalkkilikal' (Paddy Birds) outfit, staging the protest for protection of paddy fields at Keezhattur, they said.

The incident comes a week after after a group of persons stated to be CPI-M activists set fire to a temporary shed of the protesters, who have been holding the agitation for the past three months.

Opposition Congress termed the attack on the house of Suresh as an "act of fascism".

Window panes of the house were damaged in the stone pelting, police said adding a case had been registered and investigation was on to find out the culprits.

Suresh Keezhattur along with eleven others were recently expelled from CPI-M for taking part in the agitation opposing utilising paddy land for highway development.

Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan had said in the state assembly recently that the government would not backtrack from the land acquisition for development purpose and termed the agitation as "anti-democratic and anti-development".

Suresh Keezhattur alleged that the CPI-M was trying to divert the paddy field protection stir and demanded that the government take action against those involved.

Leader of the Opposition in the assembly Ramesh Chennithala of Congress condemned the attack, terming it as an "act of fascism".

He alleged that CPI-M leaders were threatening the agitators by their speeches.

The Marxist leaders, including the party's Kannur District Secretary P Jayarajan, had 'insulted' the agitators by calling then as 'terrorists', he said.

The attack on the house of Suresh was a fallout of that, he alleged.

Another senior Congress leader V M Sudheeran also condemned the attack.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Indian Air Force (IAF) is ready to meet all challenges, including in the Indian Ocean region, Air Chief Marshal B S Dhanoa said today.

The Chief of Air Staff was talking to media persons at the Halwara Airport of the IAF, about 20 km from here, after giving a send off to President Ram Nath Kovind.

He said it was wrong to say that China's J-20 fighter aircraft could not be traced by Indian radars, and added that the IAF was better placed on the Indo-China border as compared to its counterparts.

The Chief of Air Staff said the IAF had upgraded itself over the last couple of years with the inclusion of latest aircraft and other equipments.

Asked about civilian aviation players being granted permission to use the IAF's runways, Dhanoa said the move would not result in any security concerns.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Delhi High Court has sought the AAP government's response on two IAS officers' plea against an interim report tabled before the Delhi Assembly by one of its panels recommending "criminal proceedings" against them in connection with alleged irregularities in a cooperative bank.

Justice Rajiv Shakdher also sought to know the stands of the Centre and the Speaker of the Delhi Legislative Assembly on the officers' petitions which challenges the adoption of the report by the House.

The Committee of Petitions (CoP) of the Delhi Assembly in its report of January 15 this year has recommended criminal proceedings against the two officers for providing "help and aid to the corrupt" in connection with alleged irregularities in Delhi Nagrik Sehkari Bank Ltd, a cooperative bank.

The report was adopted by the Assembly after passing of a resolution on January 17.

The petitioners, former Registrar of Cooperative Societies (RCS) J B Singh and serving Registrar and CEO of the Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Board Shurbir Singh, have challenged the interim report of January 15 of the CoP and its adoption by the Assembly on January 17.

The CoP in its report had said there were complaints about various irregularities in enrolment of members in the bank, payment of membership fee to the tune of several lakhs from the accounts of bank employees, submission of fake ITRs among others.

It had also said that a large number of illegal voters had elected the directors of the bank as out of its 67,000 members only around 14,000 were found to be real.

In their separate petitions filed though advocate Vivek Chib, the two bureaucrats have claimed that the issue of alleged irregularities in the cooperative bank was already before the high court and therefore, the Speaker could not have referred it to the CoP which in turn ought not to have gone into it.

The officers' petitions, which is expected to be heard next on April 11, claim that the entire process starting from referring of the issue to the House panel, its report and the adoption by the Assembly was "tainted with procedural illegality and merits to be set aside or quashed by the court".

The two officers had recently challenged in the high court the notice issued to them by the Question and Reference (Q&R) Committee for not appearing before it in relation to the cooperative bank issue.

The court on March 9 had directed the panel to not take any coercive steps against them and listed the matter for further hearing on April 11.

Earlier, Chief Secretary Anshu Prakash also had moved the court against the notice issued to him by the Q&R panel in the same matter. He was also protected by the court against any coercive action.

The chief secretary and the other two officers were called for the meeting by the Q&R Committee to examine the issues relating to the bank and in which reply from the Department of Cooperative Society was found to be uncomplete and unsatisfactory.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Air India launched yesterday the first scheduled service to Israel to be allowed to cross Saudi airspace, a sign of a behind-the-scenes improvement in ties between the Arab kingdom and the Jewish state.

Flight AI 139 landed at Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion airport about 30 minutes after its scheduled arrival time of 1:15 am IST.

"This is a historic moment," Israeli Transport Minister Yisrael Katz told AFP on the tarmac as the Boeing Dreamliner rolled to a halt.

"It is the first time that there is an official connection between the state of Israel and Saudi Arabia," he said in Hebrew.

Tourism Minister Yariv Levin was also there to welcome the flight.

"A new era has begun," he said.

There will now be three flights weekly in each direction, ending a decades-long Saudi ban on the use of its airspace for commercial flights to Israel.

Israel's national carrier El Al currently operates an India service to Mumbai that takes a detour over the Red Sea to avoid flying over Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Saudi Arabia and Israel have no official diplomatic relations, like much of the Arab world. Egypt and Jordan are the only two Arab countries with peace treaties with Israel.

The flight approval comes after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described relations with the Arab world as the "best ever", with common concerns over Iran drawing them closer together.

Leaders of Arab countries have not publicly made similar comments, though that does not necessarily mean they dispute Netanyahu's claim.

They face sensitivities within their own countries, where the Jewish state is often viewed with intense hostility.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)India and Egypt share "relentless commitment" to combat terrorism and have convergence of views to deal with the menace, Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry said today, and noted that the two countries have a robust defence cooperation.

Shoukry said India - with its principled position on the Palestine issue and the "stature of Prime Minister Narendra Modi" - can play an active role in resolving the Middle East crisis.

"There is a very obvious convergence on world views between our two great countries. The relentless commitment in combating terrorism and the shared belief in multilateralism and the rules-based order are the illuminating examples (of this)," Shoukry said.

The Egyptian foreign minister was delivering a lecture on 'Regional Developments and Prospects of India-Egypt Relations', organised by Vivekananda International Foundation.

Responding to a question on military ties between the two countries, Shoukry said: "Defence is an important area of cooperation, whether it is enhancing coordination between the security services or our common fight against terrorism."



Egypt was one of the first nations India developed diplomatic ties with after its independence.

Shoukry will meet his Indian counterpart Sushma Swaraj tomorrow.

He said the two sides will discuss "with great attention the bilateral relationship to enhance it in all fields, be it political, economic, cultural and military sector", besides exchanging views on the regional issues.

Asked what role can India play to resolve the Palestine issue, he said India has taken positions supportive of stability and security of the region.

"As for Prime Minister Modi's potential role...certainly India has a very vibrant relationship with all the states of the region. As a principle position related to the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people, and its weight in the international arena.

"It is very important and (it can play a role of an) active interlocutor of what is internationally recognised as end of the conflict through a two-state solution," he said.

The Egyptian foreign minister also noted Modi has "a special ability to be able to move the process forward".

On the Syrian crisis, he said Egypt is of the view that the national unity and territorial integrity of the Syrian state should be preserved and any collapse of its institutions must be prevented.

He added that resolving the crisis is necessary to support the aspirations of the Syrian people through an acceptable political solution. Syria has been witnessing a bloody civil war since 2011.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)In yet another diplomatic note, India today asked Pakistan to ensure safety and security of its officials working at the Indian mission in Islamabad, saying they continue to face "harassment" and "intimidation", official sources said.

In its 16th 'Note Verbale' to the Pakistan Foreign Ministry, the Indian High Commission specifically mentioned three incidents of harassment of senior officials, they said.

India has conveyed to Islamabad that safety and security of the Indian High Commission, its officers, staff members and their families is the responsibility of the Pakistan government, the sources said.

On the incidents mentioned in the 'Note Verbale', they said the vehicle of the deputy high commissioner, while going to an embassy within the diplomatic enclave for a meeting, was aggressively followed by two people in a car.

They said the Naval Attache of the Mission was also "aggressively followed" by a person on a motorbike while going to Serena Hotel for a meeting.

The second secretary (political) of the mission was also aggressively followed and harassed by a person at the Street-1 Cafe within the diplomatic enclave. He had gone there for an official meeting with a diplomat, they said.

The sources said the website of the High Commission of India continues to be intermittently blocked, adding it is causing inconvenience and has affected normal functioning of the mission.

"Such incidents of harassment, intimidation and threats to physical security of diplomats and officials are in violation of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations of 1961, and a threat to the security and safety of the personnel of the High Commission of India," said a source.

The sources said India has asked the Pakistan Foreign Ministry to immediately investigate all the incidents and direct the relevant authorities to ensure that such incidents do not recur.

Pakistan has also been accusing India of harassing its diplomats and releasing videos of alleged intimidation of its officials. However, the veracity of these videos could not be ascertained.

Islamabad has also called its High Commissioner to India back home for consultations on the issue.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A 48-year-old Indian-origin man has been killed in a knife attack in the city's Southall suburb,



police said today, amidst a rise in street crimes in the British capital.

Scotland Yard has identified the victim as Balbir Johal, a logistics planner and a resident of Slough, who was attacked on Monday but he succumbed to injuries in a hospital a short while later.

Detectives from the Metropolitan Police Homicide and Major Crime Command launched a murder investigation and have charged two people.

Hassan Mohammed, 23, and Yassin Yussuf, 21, appeared before the Ealing Magistrates Court charged with murder.

Next of kin have been informed. While formal identification awaits, the deceased can be named as Balbir Johal from Slough. A post-mortem examination is scheduled to take place, a Met Police statement said.

A 32-year-old man, arrested as part of the manhunt, has been released under investigation.

The attack on Johal marks a spike in violent attacks on the streets of the city. Since March 14, five people have been stabbed to death, one victim stabbed and shot, and another fatally shot. All the victims are men and half of them are aged 23 or younger.

Since January this year, London has seen double the number of fatal shootings and stabbings compared with the same period last year.

Official figures reveal that a total of 26 people have been fatally stabbed or shot since the start of 2018.

Earlier this week, Mayor of London Sadiq Khan outlined a pledge of 1.4 million pounds for anti-knife crime projects for the city.

He announced nine community and anti-knife initiatives across London which will receive a share from the money to help prevent people getting involved with violence and to beat the scourge of knife crime.

Knife crime is rising across the UK, not just here in London this is a national problem that requires national solutions. Londoners need the governments help if we are to beat it, he said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)An Indian-origin man has been sentenced to 10 months behind bars for beating up his wife during arguments at their home in north-west England.

Gurmit Dosanjh had pleaded guilty to two charges of "occasioning actual bodily harm" on wife Sadiya and was sentenced at a hearing at Minshull Street Crown Court in Manchester this week.

The court was told that in the second instance the 46-year-old businessman had used a crutch being carried by his 37-year-old wife as a result of the first assault by him.

Judge John Edwards told the accused that he was set to sentence him to 18 months in prison but had been moved to reduce it to 10 following positive character references presented about him.

"This was a violation of trust that existed between you and your wife, and the security which she had in her own home. Your behaviour was demeaning it involved kicking and the use on the second occasion of her own crutch which she had courtesy of the first incident. That is why the custodial sentence has to be an immediate one," he said.

The court was told that the couple, who run a kitchen company together, had a good relationship over their 10-year marriage but the wife encountered difficulties when her husband had been drinking, Daily Mirror' reports.

The court was also told that Gurmit Dosanjh had first assaulted his wife during a petty row over where the couple should take their children for a meal.

''He picked up a pole and hit it against her legs and her groin. She left the house with their three children and they spent some time apart," prosecutor Lisa Boocock said.

Sadiya, who scored top prize in a popular television cooking show Come Dine With Me' a few years ago, was then beaten up again at the couple's luxury farmhouse in Milnrow, near Rochdale, Greater Manchester, last year.

She was treated for serious bruising following the second incident and took the decision to end her marriage.

"These were sustained assaults on the complainant. On both occasions, he used a weapon, first assaulting with the pole, and then her crutches," Boocock said.

Sadiya has since decided the couple should maintain a business relationship in an attempt to keep the family unit together for the sake of their three young children aged between four and eight.

''He has identified drink issues that he had and says there was a lack of bereavement counselling after the death of his father They were in a relationship for 10 years. He is a hard working and industrious man," said his lawyer Max Staffman.

Gurmit Dosanjh gave no comment during police interviews and had initially denied assault, but later pleaded guilty.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Industry bodies today lauded the Delhi government's budget, saying the focus on the will lay a strong foundation in making the national capital more habitable, while a green body said although it is ambitious, it needs proper implementation to go beyond the rhetoric.

The AAP government today presented a Rs 53,000-crore budget, laying a major thrust on "green" initiatives for pollution reduction. Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia said this was the government's first "green budget" to effectively curb pollution.

Apex industry body ASSOCHAM congratulated the Delhi government for presenting a forward-looking budget for 2018-19 fiscal.

"Special focus on further sprucing up education and health infrastructure together with tackling Delhi's air pollution crisis is laudable and lays strong foundation for making the national capital more habitable thereby providing a green, clean and safe living to Delhiites," said its secretary general D S Rawat.

He said at ASSOCHAM, we are confident that these policy announcements if implemented timely and effectively will help make Delhi a world-class city.

"The Delhi government through its policy initiatives has shown it means business and is committed to improve lives of its inhabitants, added the ASSOCHAM secretary general.

CII Delhi state welcomed the "green budget" and said it was a comprehensive effort in addressing issues of citizens and industry and meeting their expectations.

The members also appreciated the AAP government for incorporating many of recommendations and suggestions submitted by CII in its pre-budget memorandum.

"For the first time anywhere in the country, a green budget was presented. This has been a very positive budget that has kept the needs of the common man in focus. It is heartening to see the government's clear focus on areas like education, environment, infrastructure and healthcare.

"I am sure the 26-point plan to clean the will certainly improve the quality of life of Delhi's citizens in the short to medium term. The announcement of the government to conduct energy and water audits is highly appreciated," said Nikhil Sawhney, chairman-Delhi state, CII.

He said that this will help the authorities in finding leakages in their supply lines. He pointed out that the decision to put a water meter for the state is also good.

"I must congratulate the deputy chief minister for also announcing the timelines under which all these projects would be completed," he said.

He said real-time monitoring of pollution in different areas was needed and the data collected from this should help us prepare ourselves better for curbing pollution in Delhi.

Sunil Dahiya, senior campaigner, Greenpeace India, said the budget looks like a "mixed bag".

It shows promises to strengthen the public transport system by adding 3,000 (1,000 each for CNG, electric and cluster) new buses to the fleet along with creating associated enabling infrastructure, he said.

"The push towards electric vehicles both in public transportation and their intent to shift large two-wheelers base to EV shows promise that we have started thinking about reducing our oil dependence.

"Publicly sharing the pollution levels data on screens and forecasting system along with real-time source apportionment to be completed in the coming FY year is a good move," he said.

He said it is promising to see such emphasis on air pollution in the budget.

"But what remains is the implementation of these announcements along with some more concrete focus on changing our energy consumption and mobility behaviour which are not fuelled by polluting fuels of past, that is coal and oil and we move towards technology of future which is renewable energy at all levels," he said.

Pujarini Sen, campaigner, Climate and Energy, Greenpeace India said that where the budget is weak is on renewable energy.

"The proposed budget is rehashing old promises like net metering and generation based incentives. In both these aspects there have been little progress in the past years.

"There is only a year left for the earmarked period for generation based incentives, yet the Government has not done enough to promote the policy or solar. A strong promotional push is required from their side urgently," Sen said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)For the first time, an inter-Ministerial panel will be constituted, with a fund of Rs 1,000 crore, to boost R&D and technology transfer in the silk sector, as the government aims to make India self-sufficient in silk production, Union Textiles Minister Smriti Irani said today.

The panel, comprising representatives from related ministries, will be set up under the textile ministry. It will disburse Rs 1,000 crore for boosting R&D activities.

The minister said India will be self reliant in the production of silk by 2020.

"I would like to share with you that for technology transfer alone, around 50,000 people will be trained. To ensure that R&D is not limited to the textile ministry, for the first time an inter-ministerial committee is being set up chaired by the Textile Secretary in which close to Rs 1,000 crore is being provided especially for R&D, technology transfer with the support of other ministries," Irani told reporters at a press conference here.

Besides, the minister informed that an individual-oriented initiative is being introduced under the scheme, whereby 50 per cent cost of infrastructure development related to sericulture will be borne by the Centre.

"If the beneficiary belongs to SC/ST community, 65 per cent cost will be borne, whereas if the beneficiary is from the North-East, Jammu & Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Jharkhand or Chhattisgarh, the Centre will bear 80 per cent of the cost for infrastructure development, while the individual and state government will bear 10 per cent each," Irani said.

However, she pointed out that out of 27 states, which consume and produce silk, only 17 states till now have a dedicated silk department or directorate.

As a part of this Cabinet decision, the government will also make efforts to strengthen the coordination with states, said the minister.

The Union Cabinet yesterday approved "Integrated Scheme for Development of Silk Industry" for sericulture sector with an outlay of Rs 2,161.68 crore for three years ending March 31, 2020.

The scheme is expected to increase the silk production from the level of 30,348 MTs during 2016-17 to 38,500 MTs by end of 2019-20, and will help to increase productive employment from 85 lakhs to 1 crore persons by 2020.

Briefing the media about the details of the scheme, Irani said the decision is a historic step towards taking the silk sector forward through an integrated approach and making India self reliant in silk.

The efforts will be dovetailed by the Centre through the Central Silk Board, the minister said, adding that an outcome of the scheme will be 62 per cent rise in the production of bivoltine silk by 2020.

Besides, under a collaborative mechanism, Department of Textile will join hands with Departments of Agriculture and Rural Development to provide farm extension service among farmers with the help of Krishi Vigyan Kendras and expand the scope of its work, Irani said.

She noted that production of high-grade silk in India is expected to rise 66 per cent by 2022 because of initiatives being taken under the scheme.

The minister said the government also endeavours to design a web-based solution for boosting seed production, registration process and farm extension service so that the Prime Minister's dream of a Digital India empowers farmers as well. The subsidy entailed in the scheme will be routed to silk farmers and producers via Direct Benefit Transfer mode.

Moreover, a helpline will be set up to address the challenges faced by farmer or the silk sector in a timely manner.

The minister observed that special emphasis is being accorded to silk testing facilities towards market development for the yarn and silk sector. Towards this objective, 21 new cocoon testing centres, 8 silk testing centres will be set up so that the quality of product improves.

Irani highlighted that in the Budget, import duty was hiked to 20 per cent to protect the domestic industry and prevent flooding in the country's market.

The customs duty on silk fabrics was doubled from 10 per cent to 20 per cent in the Budget 2018-19.

Textiles Secretary Anant Kumar Singh said India's imports of raw silk, which were to the tune of 8,000 metric tonne in 2007-08, have reduced to 3,800 MT in 2016-17, adding that the government's endeavour through the scheme is to bring down the imports of silk to 400 MT in three years and become self-reliant by 2022.

"The basic function of this particular Cabinet decision is to make us self-reliant in terms of production of silk and one of our biggest challenges is that local weavers or other industry affiliates for the silk sector have to depend a lot on imported silk. We are trying to engage the industry in ensuring that we protect them from the onslaught as to dumping of silk," Irani said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Iranian regime is aggressively destabilising the Middle East and present a range of threats to peace and security in the region, the US said today.

"When you look at Iran's foreign and domestic policies, it's impossible to argue that they are behaving constructively or with greater moderation in the last two years.

"In fact, quite the reverse. They are aggressively destabilising the Middle East and present a range of threats to peace and security," said Brian Hook, the State Department Director for Policy Planning.

In a telephonic briefing with reporters on the latest quarterly meeting of the Joint Commission of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), Hook said he also requested a meeting with the Iranian delegation to demand the release of the American citizens that they have arbitrarily and unjustly detained.

Joint Commission is part of the JCPOA and it oversees the implementation of the Plan of Action that was reached in 2015 with the previous administration, and it meets on a regular basis to review Iran's compliance with the JCPOA and to address concerns raised by member states.

"They were productive meetings and we fulfilled what we set out to do. We are meeting our commitments under the JCPOA, and we continue to hold Iran strictly accountable for its commitments," he said.

"One of the things they did in the meeting was to take stock of one of the key provisions of the JCPOA, which is that the Iran deal will positively contribute to regional and international peace and security. That is mentioned in the deal, and since it took over two years to negotiate and every word was weighed carefully," he said.

"We take all of these provisions seriously, he added.

Responding to questions, Hook said the Iranians had a number of complaints about licenses, especially around civil aviation licenses to Iran Air and other airlines.

"And what I said to them was: You use your commercial airlines to move terrorists and weapons around the Middle East, including to Syria, and we will not issue licenses at the expense of our national security.

And so I encouraged them to make the kind of reforms to their civil aviation and to their economy that would then put us in a better position.

But we are not going to be issuing licenses at the expense of our national security or at the expense of our allies," he said.

Hook said that US President Donald Trump has set forth a plan wherein he wants to give the Congress a role to address the range of threats that Iran presents.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The body of a 28 year-old Army jawan was recovered from near a railway track here this morning, police said.

The body of Balwant Singh of Kumaon Regiment, posted in Srinagar, was recovered from near the Fatehganj west gate on the Lucknow-Delhi railway line near Bareilly, Senior Superintendent of Police Joginder Kumar said.

Singh, resident of Champawat in Uttarakhand, was returning to duty yesterday night after a leave, Kumar said, adding that the jawan may have fallen from the train under mysterious circumstances.

The body was sent for postmortem, the SSP said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) today condemned the killing of one of its activist in police firing in Pakistan occupied Kashmir.

"Instead of using foul language against freedom lovers, Government of Azad Kashmir (PoK) should call for an impartial judicial probe into firing on peaceful protest at Madarpor near Line of Control (LoC) and take action against the culprits who killed Naeem Butt with impunity," JKLF chief Muhammad Yasin Malik said at a condolence meeting here.

He said on March 16, JKLF had called for a peaceful march during which Naeem Butt along with many others received bullets fired by the PoK police on their bodies.

"Naeem succumbed to his wounds yesterday," Malik said.

He claimed bullets were showered on peaceful protesters adding that the killers of Naeem Butt deserved exemplary punishment.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Seeking to woo emerging knowledge companies to Kerala, Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan today said the state was all set to become a knowledge-based society for which the government will put in place all infrastructure and policy framework.

"We have a wide range of highly qualified and skilled professionals and world class physical and digital infrastructure that can attract the emerging knowledge companies to Kerala," the Chief Minister said, in his inaugural address at the Global Digital Summit - #FUTURE.

Spelling out steps taken by the government to create digital infrastructure in the state, the Chief Minister, said his dispensation was committed to provide free Wi-Fi in at least a 1,000 public spots every year.

To ensure that the requisite infrastructural facilities were available in the state, the government had already taken up the ambitious goal of increasing the floor area of its IT parks by 10 million square feet, he said.

"It is not just the physical infrastructure that we are focusing on. We are preparing the much required digital infrastructure as well," he said addressing top business leaders and influencers from across the world.

The government has declared internet as a right to the citizens and committed to provide free Wi-Fi in at least 1,000 public spots every year, including parks and libraries.

"We are connecting our offices and homes with a high speed optical fibre network," he said.

Recalling the inherent strengths of Kerala to rise up to the fast-paced changes happening around the world, he said the ongoing conclave is a key step in showcasing the state as a global digital and information technology destination.

"Through #FUTURE, we hope to connect and collaborate so as to enable a digital lifestyle for all in the state. That is why we have this confluence of thought leaders, knowledge champions and leading industrialists, IT professionals and experts here," he observed.

The summit is attended by nearly 30 global experts, who will share their knowledge and experiences during discussions scheduled over two days covering sectors from travel and transportation, big data and health and sustainability to education and skills, technology and banking, finance and retail.

He said the interactions with leading lights in the knowledge domain would certainly help share a comprehensive picture of the vast investment potential of the state.

"We are moving towards ensuring that 'last mile connectivity' is a reality in Kerala, by linking even our rural and coastal areas," Vijayan said.

Highlighting the scope of business opportunities in Kerala, the Chief Minister said the state presents a phenomenal business ecosystem.

Kerala showcased a 35 million strong population. With superior human development indices and an abundantly varied topographical landscape, the state presented the rich blend of a phenomenally beautiful natural living environment and a highly literate population presenting a rich pool of knowledge and digitally adept workforce, he said.

Vijayan said the state has always embraced various cultures and talents from other cities and even all over the world would find Kerala their natural home.

The government recognises the potential of the information and digital technologies in transforming the socio-economic landscape of the state, he said.

"Through this summit we look forward to equip our industries, education system, healthcare and thegovernment services so as to make the best useof emerging technologies," he said.

The summit would also provide a rare opportunity to start-ups and the vast pool of skilled youth to meet and interact with the top figures who have assembled for the event.

"We are promoting startupslike never before with both technical and financial support. We are also investing in skill development platforms, apart from ensuring the last mile connectivity," he said.

Vijayan further said the summit is the best opportunity for students to learn from eminent academicians and leading industry professionals.

On the occasion, the Chief Minister also launched M-Kerala, a unified app for all government services.

S D Shibulal, Chairman of Kerala's High Power Committee on IT (HPIC), said over 30 business leaders who have made a name in the global arena are attending the summit.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Gold worth Rs 18 lakh was recovered here from a Kerala native by a team of Sashastra Seema Bal (SSB), a senior official said today.

Mohammad Nazir was arrested yesterday from the 'No Man's Land' as he arrived in a bus, an SSB release said here.

Nazir was coming from Nepal and 557 gram of gold was seized from him, it added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) today accused leader of opposition and AAP MLA Sukhpal Khaira of "surrendering" before Congress to "save himself in a cross-border drug trafficking case".

SAD leader Bikram Singh Majithia also charged him with becoming the "B" team of the Congress party.

Addressing a press conference in the Vidhan Sabha press gallery, former minister Bikram Singh Majithia alleged the manner in which Sukhpal Khaira rose to support the Congress government in the Assembly today when the issue of giving compensation to families of Punjabi youth killed in Iraq was raised by him had exposed the "unholy nexus" between the Congress party and the leader of opposition party.

Majithia said yesterday Congress legislator Rana Gurmeet Sodhi had demanded that the Union government give Rs one crore compensation to family members of each of the 27 Punjabis killed in Iraq.

"I took this issue forward because five of those killed belong to my constituency and requested the state should give a matching grant as well as jobs to relatives of the deceased. Instead of speaking up for the aggrieved families, Khaira rose up to thank chief minister Amarinder Singh for his magnanimity," he claimed.

Alleging there was a "wider conspiracy", the former minister said Khaira allegedly tried to break the AAP state unit first to form a separate party.

"The idea was to join the Congress along with all the legislators of the new party. Khaira wanted a trigger to take the new group to the Congress. However the AAP MLAs saw through his game plan. Now Khaira will join the Congress. It is only a matter of few months", he claimed.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Finland's government has said that delegates from North Korea, South Korea and the United States concluded "constructive" unofficial diplomatic talks in the Nordic country that were widely believed to be laying the groundwork for an upcoming meeting between the Koreas and a planned US-North Korea summit.

The Finnish foreign ministry said in a brief statement yesterday that the tripartite talks were held in a positive atmosphere and were aimed at "building confidence and reducing tensions on the Korean Peninsula."



Many observers believe the Finland meeting was geared toward preparing an upcoming summit between the leaders of the Koreas and a planned meeting between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.

Eighteen delegates, six from each country, plus observers from the United Nations and Europe attended the secretive two-day talks at a 19th-century manor house just outside Helsinki.

The gathering kicked off Monday evening with a joint-dinner at a Helsinki restaurant where the delegations were seen arriving.

Media were largely kept in the dark about the identities of the delegates and issues on the table, apart from Finnish Foreign Minister Timo Soini saying on Tuesday that denuclearization wasn't on the agenda.

What is known, however, is that senior North Korean diplomat Choe Kang Il, who handles North American affairs for his government, was among delegates from Pyongyang, while the US delegation is believed to have included Kathleen Stephens, the former US ambassador to South Korea.

It was the first in a series of planned meetings between the Koreas and the US involving unofficial talks between current and former officials, and academics. The meetings are likely to be important for establishing summit expectations and possibly even agenda items.

The Helsinki talks took place just a few days after North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho concluded separate diplomatic talks in neighbouring Sweden on Saturday.

Finnish President Sauli Niinisto said Monday that his country, which has a long history of hosting international summits, received a request to host the meeting "through middlemen."



"We're happy to host it and hope that discussions can bring issues forward," he told reporters before the talks. Senior South Korean officials who recently visited North Korea's capital said that Kim agreed to hold talks with South Korean President Moon Jae-in in late April. They said Kim also proposed meeting with Trump.

Trump then agreed to meet Kim by the end of May. North Korea has yet to confirm talks with the US, but its official media on Tuesday carried a commentary saying there "has been a sign of change" in US-North Korean relations.

The developments have raised hopes for a potential breakthrough in the North Korean nuclear crisis. But many experts say tensions could flare again if the summits fail to make progress, leaving the nuclear issue with few diplomatic options.

The South Korean officials who travelled to North Korea said that Kim is willing to discuss the North's nuclear weapons program.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Army today paid tributes to three jawans who laid down their lives during an encounter in Kupwara district of Jammu and Kashmir.

General Officer Commanding (GoC) of Chinar Corps Lt Gen A K Bhatt led all ranks in paying homage to the slain soldiers on behalf of the nation, an army official said.

"Army paid befitting tributes to three of its comrades who attained martyrdom during counter terrorist operations yesterday in Kupwara district in which five militants were eliminated," the official said.

In a show of solidarity, representatives from other security agencies also joined in paying their last respects, he said.

Havildar Jorabar Singh, Naik Ranjeet Khalkho and Naik Mohammad Ashraf Rather sustained bullet injuries during the operation in Halmatpora area of Kupwara district.

"They were provided immediate first aid and evacuated to hospital but unfortunately succumbed to their injuries," the official said.

The mortal remains of the martyrs were flown for last rites to their native places, where they would be laid to rest with full military honours, the official said, adding the Army stands in solidarity with the bereaved families and remains committed to their dignity and well being.

Jorabar Singh (45) had joined Army in 1993 and hailed from village Rait in Kangra area of Himachal Pradesh. He is survived by his wife and three children.

Khalkho (33) hailed from village Dudhakhuti in Ranchi (Jharkhand) had joined Army in 2001. He is survived by his parents, a brother and three sisters.

Rather (35) had joined the Army in 2004 and belonged to village Reshigund of Kralpora in Jammu and Kashmir. He is survived by his wife and a daughter.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Sri Lankan President Maithripala Sirisena today arrived in Karachi as part of his three-day official visit to Pakistan, during which he will hold talks with his counterpart and attend the 'Pakistan Day' parade tomorrow as the "Guest of Honour".

He is visiting Pakistan on the invitation of Pakistan's President Mamnoon Hussain.

During his visit, the Sri Lankan president will meet President Hussain and Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi and hold discussions on issues of mutual importance, officials said.

Sirisena will also sign four Memorandums of Understanding (MoUs) pertaining to youth development as well as cooperation in the training of civil servants and diplomats, they said.

Pakistan's Foreign Office said that President Sirisena arrived in Karachi, where he was welcomed by the Governor of Sindh province, Muhammad Zubair.

He will later depart for Islamabad as part of the visit.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A law student was today arrested near here for allegedly extorting money from several girls by using morphed nude photos, police said.

Samireddi Srinivasarao of Uppada Kottapalli near here, a student of Rajiv Gandhi Law College, used to develop contacts with girl students of professional colleges through the social media and lured them with the offer of marriage, Kakinada DSP Ravi Varma told reporters.

He later morphed their photos and black-mailed them by threatening to upload the pictures on internet if they failed to pay the money and jewels demanded by him.

A few of his victims confessed that they had been cheated of cash and gold ornaments, the official added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Maharashtra government today said that Rs 5 crore have been allocated to the Fisheries Department to clear the dues of the private guards deployed to secure the state's coastline.

Animal Husbandry, Dairy Development and Fisheries Minister Mahadev Jankar, who made the announcement in the state Legislative Council, also said that the dues of the guards will be cleared next month.

An official had yesterday said that the private security guards deployed in the coastal districts - Mumbai, Mumbai suburban, Thane, Palghar, Raigad, Ratnagiri and Sindhudurg - have notbeen paid salaries for the last six months (from September 2017).

Raising a query during the Question Hour, NCP member Narendra Patil sought to know why the guards were not paid their salaries.

He saidafter the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks, the fisheries department was asked to rope in security guards at sensitive spots along the coastline.

Minister of State for Fisheries Arjun Khotkar said based onthe recommendations made by the Coastal Security Committee formed under the then chief secretary, the department had hired 296 guards, including 23 supervisors.

"525 landing spots were identified, of which 91 were found to be sensitive. Therefore, private security guards were deployed by the department as suggested by the committee," Khotkar said.

Shiv Sena legislator Anil Parab said guarding the coastline was the responsibility of the Navy, Coast Guard and police and the fisheries department did not have the expertise in combating terror attacks.

"These guards neither have the required training, nor the necessary equipments to guard the coastline. They say once they go out for patrolling, they have no guarantee of their return. Then how can they ensure safety of the citizens?" he asked.

The responsibility of providing security should be left to the Home Department, he added.

In his reply, Khotkar said the guards are trained for five days in Khandala before being sent on the field.

PWP member Jayant Patil said the guards have not been paid for the last six months and that the finance minister has assured him they would be paid in April.

In response, Jankar said, "The finance department has allocated Rs 5 crore to the fisheries department for the payment of these guards. All the pending dues will be cleared by April."



He also said that a meeting with the chief minister will be held on the issue.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Bowing to pressure from the ally ShivSena and the opposition Congress and NCP, the BJP-led Maharashtra government has stayed the invocation of a stringent Act against 'anganwadi' workers.

The government had last week invoked the Maharashtra Essential Services Maintenance Act (MESMA) to stop workers of anganwadis (the state-run women and child care centres) from going on a strike.

The Act empowers authorities to take strong action, like detention, against the workers of services covered under the legislation, if they go on strike. All offences covered under the Act are non-bailable, according to its provisions.

Members of the Shiv Sena and the opposition Congress and NCP had yesterday created ruckus in the Legislative Assembly, seeking withdrawal of the MESMA.

Making a statement on the issue in the Lower House today, Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis said, "Considering the sentiments of the august house, the government has decided to stay the MESMA against anganwadi workers."



Notably, the Anganwadi Kruti Samiti had gone on strike from September 11 to October 8 last year.

Earlier this month, the anganwadi workers sat on a dharna at the Azad Maidan in Mumbai and threatened to go on strike in support of their demands to raise their honorarium and retain their retirement age at 65 years (from 60).

Yesterday, the Assembly witnessed eight adjournments before the presidingofficer, Yogesh Sagar,put the budgetary demands to vote amid noisy scenes and finally adjourned the House for the day.

Vijay Auti (of the Shiv Sena) yesterday said the government has announced a hike in the anganwadi sevika's honorarium from Rs 4,500 to Rs 6,500, but it is yet to issue a Government Resolution (GR).

"We appoint widows, poor and destitute women as anganwadi sevikas. Yet, you bring these women under the MESMA," he said demanding that the MESMA be withdrawn against the anganwadi workers.

The issue had figured in the Lower House earlier this week also, during a debate on the budgetary demands of the women and child welfare department.

The women and child welfareminister, Pankaja Munde, earlier said in the Assemblythat the state governmentwas justified in invoking theMESMA against a proposed strike by the anganwadi workers.

Munde had urged the members to consider the children's situation if the anganwadi workers go on strike.

"During their strike, 125 malnourished children died. Who is responsible? Don't fall prey to the politics of the anganwadi workers' associations," she had said.

The minister said that thestate governmenthad given an affidavit in theBombay High Courtabout bringing such services under the ambit of MESMA.

"Hence, it was not possible for the government to revoke the decision," she had said.

Munde also said that the honorarium of anganwadi workers had already been raised, and the decision to reduce the retirement age to 60 years had been revoked.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Maharashtra government today assuring complete supportto cultivators, and said it would take steps for the procurement of all their farm produce.

State co-operation minister Subhash Deshmukh said in the Legislative Assembly that 12.69 lakh tonne 'tur', 54,000 tonne 'moong' and 5.86 lakh tonne 'udid' (all varieties of pulses grown by farmers) have been procured by the government so far in the financial year 2017-18.

He admitted that the price of soyabean was more in the market than the minimum support price (MSP), so there was less procurement of the legume - about 2.62 lakh tonne - by the government during this financial year.

"The government will stand by farmers and ensure that all their farm produce is procured," he said in reply to questions raised by the opposition members.

Deshmukh also said that instructions have been issued to the authorities concerned to take action against traders who procure the farm produce at a price less than the MSP.

Earlier, the issueof procurement of gram, tur and soyabean was raised by Leader of OppositionRadhakrishna Vikhe Patil after the Question Hour.

He saidfarmers were facing hardships since the government had not completed the procurement of farm produce.

Vikhe Patil said the state government has not started the procurement centres.

The procurement of farm produce was being done through the National Agricultural Cooperative Marketing Federation of India Ltd (NAFED), he pointed out.

"The NAFED is telling farmers that it has been asked by the state government to procure only 27 per cent tur (of the total produce). The actual procurement of tur is only about 4 to 5per cent, and the gram procurement (target) is 3 lakh tonne. The government should ensure that purchase centres are set up to complete the procurement process," he said.

Jayant Patil (NCP) said the import of peas, lentils and beans should be stopped.

He said the procurement of tur was less than the target of4 to 5 lakh tonne, out of the total 11.5 lakh tonne produced during the current financial year.

"The tur worth Rs 600 crore has been procured, but farmers have got only Rs 10 crore," Patil claimed.

He also said that the gram production was 11.8 lakh tonne and the procurement target was three lakh tonne.

But, the actual procurement was only 218 tonne, he said.

"Why is the government machinery so lethargic when it shouldbe giving relief to farmers?" he asked.

Prithviraj Chavan (Congress)claimed that the central government had signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Mozambique (a southern African country) for the import of tur.

"The MoU was signed when Prime Minister Narendra Modi visitedthat country in 2016. The tur is imported from the other country (referring to Mozambique) when our cultivators are waiting for the procurement of their farm produce," he said.

"We demand that the MoU for the import of tur be scrapped," Chavan added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Goa Water Resources Minister Vinod Palyekar today said the judges of the Mahadayi Water Dispute Tribunal, hearing an old dispute between Goa and Karnataka over sharing of water, have a "soft corner towards Goa".

The hearing on the issue is reportedly in the final stages.

"I pray to God that we get justice in our fight towards stopping diversion of the Mahadayi river water by Karnataka. God will give us success in this case because even the judges on the tribunal know what the truth is and they have a soft corner towards Goa," said Palyekar, a leader of the Goa Forward Party (GFP), an ally of the ruling BJP in Goa.

Palyekar was addressing an event to mark the International Water Day, organised here by his department.

"Judges know that Goa and its ecology are entirely dependent on the Mahadayi river (which originates in Karnataka and meets the Arbian Sea in Goa)," he said.

The minister said the next world war would be on the issue of water.

"If you see, fights are going on everywhere on water and tribunals are being set up to resolve them," he said.

The minister, who had opposed Chief Minister Manohar Parrikar's move to allow holding of the bilateral talks with Karnataka on the issue, claimed that in the last few days, he must have received maximum curse) from Karnataka.

"I feel that in last few days I have received maximum curses from Karnataka. I don't want to say anything. We have some of the engineers who are originally from Karnataka working in our department," he said.

On the occasion, the minister appealed to the engineers, who hail from Karnataka, "to convince the neighbouring government against diversion of the water".

The issue of sharing the river water between Karnataka and Goa--two out of three riparian states of the Mahadayi, came to the fore again after Parrikar wrote a letter to Karnataka BJP president B S Yeddyurappa in December last stating that he would allow sharing of the river water for drinking purposes only.

Maharashtra is the other riparian state.

Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah had dismissed Parrikar's letter as an "electoral gambit" as the southern state is going to polls this year.

Goa has been accusing Karnataka of trying to divert the river water for the purpose of irrigation.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Maldives President Abdulla Yameen lifted a 45-day state of emergency today, a day after senior political opponents were locked up indefinitely for allegedly trying to topple him last month.

Yameen chose not to extend the draconian laws he had invoked on February 5 following a Supreme Court ruling that threatened to lead to his impeachment.

"Though there still exists a diminished threat to national security... in an effort to promote normalcy, the president has decided to lift the state of emergency," Yameen's office said in a statement.

He initially declared the state of emergency for 15 days after the country's top court ordered him to free high-profile dissidents from jail.

It was later extended for another 30 days, deepening the political crisis in the Indian Ocean archipelago of 340,000 Sunni Muslims.

The dissidents' release would have paved the way for former leader Mohamed Nasheed to return from self-imposed exile in London and contest presidential elections later this year.

Yameen refused to carry out the court order and instead invoked the emergency which curtailed the powers of the judiciary and the legislature.

He also arrested the chief justice and another Supreme Court judge.

The remaining judges revoked an earlier decision to reinstate 12 MPs who had been sacked for defecting to the opposition while Yameen also stripped parliament of its power to impeach him.

Today's statement defended the emergency measures, saying they had been precipitated by a "constitutional crisis" created by the two judges.

It added that they had "conspired with political actors... (to) overthrow a lawful government, and whose actions constituted an imminent threat to national security".

Yameen had been widely expected to let the tough laws lapse on Thursday after authorities charged former president Maumoon Abdul Gayoom and several senior judges with "terrorism" this week.

Nasheed said that Yameen had allowed the emergency to end because he no longer had any need for it.

"He has overrun the judiciary and legislature, arrested hundreds unlawfully and introduced a 'new normal' in the #Maldives - full dictatorship," Nasheed said on Twitter.

"We will not give up, we will fight and we will overcome."



In a statement later, he criticised other nations for not intervening to end the political crisis.

"It is sad that the international community has still not got their act together," Nasheed said, accusing the Maldives regime of being a "puppet state controlled by China".

Gayoom, Yameen's estranged half brother, ruled the country for 30 straight years before losing to Nasheed in the nation's first democratic elections in 2008.

The 80-year-old former strongman was arrested earlier last month accused of trying to topple Yameen.

The Prosecutor General's office said Wednesday that Gayoom had been charged with attempting an "act of terrorism and obstruction of justice".

He was charged alongside 10 others, including the sacked chief justice Abdulla Saeed, and Gayoom's legislator son Faris Maumoon.

The Maldives criminal court ordered Gayoom to be remanded in custody until the conclusion of his trial, although it was not immediately clear when the case would commence.

Yameen came to power following a controversial election run-off in November 2013 when he narrowly defeated Nasheed.

His crackdown has dented the nation's image as a popular tourist destination, which remains vital to its economy.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A Maoist couple carrying a total reward of Rs 40 lakh on their heads were arrested here, police said today.

Jharkhand government had declared rewards of Rs 25 lakh and Rs 15 lakh on the heads of Sonua Tudu and his wife Mugli Murmu respectively.

Senior superintendent of police Manoj Ratan Chothe said the couple were arrested when they were at a fertility clinic here two days ago.

Mugli Murmu is two months pregnant.

The couple was wanted in seven states -- Jharkhand, West Bengal, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Odisha, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, the SSP said.

The two were residents of Maniyadih area of Dhanbad district but they had played major roles in setting up the Maoist organization and violence in Saranda area of Chaibasa and West Singhbhum and Bundu area of Ranchi.

There are 22 cases against Sonua Tudu and 3 cases against his wife in different police stations, Chothe said.

"Since both of them were involved in several incidents in Chaibasa, Dhanbad police hand over them to Chaibasa police," he said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A leader of the banned CPI(Maoist) in Telangana was arrested and explosives allegedly in his possession seized, police said today.

On a tip off, a police team arrested 21-year-old Sodi Ungaiah alias Suresh after intercepting his motor bike near Kaliveru in Kothagudem district last evening.

Police said they seized 20 detonators and eight gelatin sticks from his possession, while he was allegedly on the way to supply them to the ultras.

He was the Deputy Commander of the outfit, Superintendent of Police, Bhadradri-Kothagudem district, Ambar Kishor Jha told PTI over phone.

He had joined the outfit about three years ago was made the Deputy Commander four months back, the official said.

He was allegedly involved in a murder, blasting of a dam and a cell tower, planting of land mines and extortion, Jha said.

He had also been involved in exchange of fire with police in Cherla mandal of the district, police said.

Meanwhile, four members of the CPI (Maoist), including two women, surrendered before the Superintendent of Police of Bhadradri-Kothagudem district today and they have been sanctioned monetary benefit under rehabilitation scheme, Jha said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)On the eve of martyrdom day of Shaheed Bhagat Singh, SAD MP Prem Singh Chandumajra today urged the Lok Sabha Speaker to reserve two chairs in the House's Visitor's gallery from where the freedom fighter had thrown a bomb and declare March 23 a holiday.

The Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) leader also said that the spot were the bomb exploded should be marked.

He along with his party colleagues today met Speaker Sumitra Mahajan and requested her to declare March 23 as a holiday in Parliament.

The SAD leader also urged the speaker to advice all MPs to visit Khatkal Kalan, the native village of the freedom fighter.

"I request you that the two seats or the area, from where they threw bombs in the House should be earmarked for posterity and a placard placed there.

"The spot in the House where the bomb was dropped should also be earmarked," Chandumajra said in a letter to Mahajan.

He said these initiatives would keep on reminding the young generations and law makers about the struggle of freedom fighters against the Colonial rule.

"This tribute was overdue," he said,adding that he had raised this issue in the House also.

On April 8, 1929, Bhagat Singh along with Batukeshwar Dutt, exploded two bombs in the then Central Legislative Assembly, the present Parliament House.

They had done so to protest against the policies of the British government in the country.

Singh along with Sukhdev and Rajguru were hanged on March 23, 1931.

On the bravery of Singh, Chandumajra said that the bombs were thrown by the freedom fighter with the intention to make his voice heard and not to hurt anyone.

"It is easy to kill individuals but you cannot kill ideas. It takes a loud voice to make the deaf hear," he said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Ministry of Corporate Affairs has initiated strong action against D S Kulkarni Developers Ltd and individuals for illegal fund diversions in the garb of "related party transactions".

On a petition moved by the ministry, the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) has barred the company as well as various individuals, including key managerial personnel, from mortgaging their properties besides freezing of securities, among other directions.

A senior ministry official said the NCLT order would serve as a strong deterrent against entities indulging in fraudulent activities and the strong message is that "don't take law lightly".

Against the backdrop of instances of corporate frauds, the ministry has invoked certain rarely used provisions in the Companies Act with regard to Pune-based D S Kulkarni Developers case, according to officials.

The ministry, which is implementing the Act, has invoked various sections including 241 and 242. These pertain to seeking relief from the tribunal in cases where a company's affairs are being conducted in a manner prejudicial to public interest.

The petition was filed by Serious Fraud Investigation Office (SFIO) on behalf of the ministry against the company and 15 individuals.

It was submitted by the ministry that the company defaulted in repayments of term loans, fixed deposits and statutory dues as well as perpetrating fraud against the public at large by siphoning funds through related party transactions.

Sufficient material is available on record to show that the respondents in the management of the company "fraudulently collected Rs 1,246 crore in the form of deposits from the public and loans from the financial institutions as against the land bank worth of Rs 27 crore", the order said.

The money has gone to related parties in the name of advances and loans, the order said, adding that the affairs of the company are being conducted in a manner prejudicial to public interest.

By way of an ex-parte order, dated March 13, the NCLT has restrained 11 individuals from "mortgaging or creating charge or lien or third party interest or in any way alienating, the immovable and moveable properties by them".

Besides, they have been directed to disclose details about their moveable and immoveable properties, including bank accounts, owned by them in India or overseas.

Among others, Central Depository Services Ltd (CDSL) and National Securities Depository Ltd (NSDL) have been directed to freeze securities owned by these individuals.

Following the NCLT order, leading exchanges BSE and NSE have suspended trading in the shares of D S Kulkarni Developers.

The case came to the notice of the ministry after a complaint was forwarded by Sebi and subsequently Registrar of Companies (RoC) carried out an inspection of the company. The inspection found various fraudulent activities and in January, an SFIO probe was ordered by the ministry.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Multi Commodity Exchange of India (MCX) on Monday launched futures trading in brass for the first time globally, which will facilitate brass stakeholders to hedge their price risk.

The countrys largest commodity exchange will commence futures trading in brass on March 26 and will offer three contracts ending in April, May and June for trading, with a lot size of one tonne.

Brass futures will not only provide its stakeholders with a more organised and robust price discovery platform, but will also help them to use a national level benchmark price as a ready reference to enable them to mitigate their price risk, the exchange said in a release.

Significantly, Brass futures is the first non-ferrous contract with compulsory delivery option.

The price is quoted ex-warehouse Jamnagar (delivery centre) inclusive of taxes and duties, excluding GST.

"The contract will lead to best price discovery for brass, which is of key relevance to its stakeholders including importers, exporters, manufacturers, refiners, and processors among others in the country, who are looking to hedge their price exposure," said Mrugank Paranjape, managing director and chief executive officer,

Brass is an alloy, which primarily contains around 55-60 per cent copper and the rest is zinc, with small amounts of lead and iron. It is used in industries like electrical appliance, marine engines, pump parts, switch gears, sanitary ware, automobiles and defence.

Jamnagar Factory Owners Association president Tulsibhai Gajera said almost the entire scrap for making brass gets imported into India, but the importers are not sure on the price until the brass shipments lands in the country.

" would provide a price discovery platform to the physical market participants and thus the brass value chain would get a single price to benchmark and hedge their risk exposure," he added.

The estimated annual production of brass in India is approximately between 100,000-150,000 tonne, which includes production through primary metal and recycled brass.

India imports huge quantities of brass scrap from the US, the Middle East, Africa and Europe which is then separated and recycled to make brass. It is the largest exporter of finished brass products.

Out of the 5,000 small and medium units producing brass in the country, about 3,000 are located at Jamnagar, accounting for 80 per cent of the brass produced in India. The rest of the companies are spread across Moradabad in Uttar Pradesh and Jagadhari in Haryana.

(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 External Publicity and Public Diplomacy Division of the External Affairs ministry today launched an initiative, 'Videsh Aaya Pradesh ke Dwaar', here.

The initiative is part of the enhanced public diplomacy outreach to take the objectives of the foreign policy to the common people.

The initiative involves MEA's engagement with the regional media based in different cities across India who have carved their own space and have a unique and wide readership profile, an official release said.

"Through direct interaction with the local media, the ministry desires to communicate foreign policy priorities in simple terms, highlight the benefits accruing to the common people through diplomatic efforts and bring the domain of foreign policy closer to the people," it said.

It also intends to create a pool of media professionals interested in foreign policy and guide them on connecting with the MEA.

The initiative was launched in Hyderabad, a key centre for Telugu and Urdu media, by Raveesh Kumar, official spokesperson and Joint Secretary (External Publicity) of the Ministry of External Affairs, the release added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Proposed merger of three state-owned general insurers - National Insurance, United India Insurance and Oriental India Insurance - will help in effective use of infrastructure and improve solvency margins, Finance Ministry said in Rajya Sabha.

The three companies together had a market share of 34.73 per cent in 2016-17. While United India Insurance and Oriental Insurance reported loss during the year, the third company posted decline in profit.

In a written reply to Rajya Sabha on March 20, Minister of State for Finance Shiv Pratap Shukla said the three companies will be merged into a single insurance entity and subsequently listed.

"The merger is expected to lead to effective utilisation of infrastructure and improved solvency margin," he said.

The replies to questions in Rajya Sabha on Tuesday were released today.

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley had announced about the merger of the three insurers in his Budget speech on February 1.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Microplastics, one of the carriers of pollution to the marine environment, have been found moreon the beaches of Karnataka and Maharashtra as compared to Goa, according to a scientific study.

The microplastics are extremely small pieces of plastic debris in the environment, resulting from the disposal and breakdown of consumer products and industrial waste.

During a study conducted on different beaches along the coast of Maharashtra, Karnataka and Goa, the researchers found significant variations in the distribution pattern of plastic contaminants on various locations in the three states.

They claimed to have found a high abundance of microplastics - like films, fibres, fragments and pellets - on the beaches of Maharashtra and Karanataka.

"However, comparatively fewer microplastic pellets were found along the coast of Goa," says the research paper of scientists of the Goa-based National Institute of Oceanography (NIO), one of the constituent laboratories of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR).

The NIO scientists presented the paper, detailing the research on microplastics on the beaches in the three states, during the sixth International Conference on Ecotoxicology and Environmental Science held in New Delhi last month.

"During a comprehensive study on the identification and ecotoxicological impact of microplastics in the coastal Arabian Sea, we observed 5,095 pieces of plastic pollutants in total, ranging from 3 to 100 mm in size, on 10 beaches along the west coast of India during 2016-17," the scientists said in the research paper.

The microplastic pellets, generally of less than 3 mm in size, tend to accumulate persistent organic pollutants (POPs), and easily get transported and enter the marine food chain, they said.

"The microplastic pellets of variable colours were abundant on all the beaches of Maharashtra while a moderate amount were observed along the Karnataka coast and the lowest abundance was found along the coast of Goa," said the paper.

The researchers said these microplastic pelletswere made of polyethylene and polypropylene, and a few of them were unidentified polymers.

"Due to the long residence time of microplastics in the sea water and on beaches, specially in polluted marine environments, they tend to adsorb various pollutants, and may act as vector transferring toxic chemicals from the to the marine organisms," the paper said.

The researchers claimed that these findings may enhance the understanding about the deleterious impact of microplastics and associated POPs on the marine ecosystem.

This may provide crucial information on the complex chemico-biological interplay and give early warnings of the impending invisible threat, said the study, conducted by NIO's senior scientist Mahua Saha and her team comprising Dusmant Maharana, Chaynika Rathore and R A Sreepada.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Special counsel Robert Mueller is scrutinising the connections between President Donald Trump's campaign and the data mining firm Cambridge Analytica, which has come under fierce criticism over reports that it swiped the data of more than 50 million Facebook users to sway elections.

Mueller's investigators have asked former campaign officials about the Trump campaign's data operations, particularly about how it collected and utilised voter data in battleground states, according to a person with direct knowledge of the line of inquiry but not authorised to discuss it publicly.

The investigators have also asked some of Trump's data team, which included analysts at the Republican National Committee, about its relationship with Cambridge Analytica, according to two former campaign officials. The campaign paid the firm just under $6 million for its work in 2016, according to federal records.

Authorities in Britain and the United States are investigating whether Cambridge Analytica may have used data improperly obtained from Facebook to try to influence elections, including the 2016 White House race.

Mueller is leading a criminal probe into whether Trump's Republican presidential campaign had ties to Russia and whether he may have obstructed justice.

The Trump campaign has distanced itself from the data mining firm, which had been financed by major Republican donors and, for a time, employed Steve Bannon, the conservative provocateur who later became Trump's campaign chief executive.

Trump turned to Twitter yesterday to boast about his campaign's social media efforts compared with those of his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, but it was not clear what prompted the declaration.

"Remember when they were saying, during the campaign, that Donald Trump is giving great speeches and drawing big crowds, but he is spending much less money and not using social media as well as Crooked Hillary's large and highly sophisticated staff. Well, not saying that anymore!" Trump wrote.

A request for an explanation from the White House was not returned.

The exact role that Cambridge Analytica played for the Trump campaign has remained murky.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Hitting out at the Opposition for demanding a CBI probe into the alleged financial irregularities in an irrigation scheme, Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N Chandrababu Naidu today said his life was an open book and he has done no wrong.

The chief minister also charged the YSR Congress and the BJP with hatching a 'conspiracy' against him.

Naidu made the remarks to Finance Minister Yanamala Ramakrishnudu, who, during a teleconference this morning with the CM, had referred to YSRC's demand for a CBI probe against Naidu, said an official release.

Ramakrishnudu also referred to BJP's demand in the state Assembly yesterday for a CBI probe into the "financial irregularities" in the Pattisam lift irrigation scheme.

"YSRC MP V Vijayasai Reddy said he would continue to meet the Prime Minister till he dragged me to the court. This itself reveals their conspiracy against me," the press release said quoting the TDP chief.

"My life is an open book. I have committed no mistake," Naidu was quoted as telling his finance minister.

Lashing out at the opposition, he said they were not concerned about the people's right but rather bent upon taking revenge against him.

In his teleconference with the CM, the finance minister also feared that a conspiracy may be on to block the execution of Polavaram project also.

To this, Naidu responded saying that he would tolerate no anti-farmer design by anyone.

The farmers themselves would revolt against any such act, he said, adding "We will not tolerate if anything detrimental to farmers' interest happens."



The chief minister called for a "Japanese style" protest of doing more work to carry the state forward on the development path.

"Everyone should work daily for two hours extra and protest for an hour. While fighting with the Centre (on demand for special status to the state), we must ensure that the state's development too is not hampered," he added.

The BJP had yesterday demanded an inquiry either by a sitting judge or the CBI into "the large-scale financial misappropriation" in execution of the Pattisam lift irrigation scheme on the Godavari river.

Citing a report by the Comptroller and Auditor General, BJP floor leader P Vishnu Kumar Raju had said over Rs 371 crore was allegedly misappropriated in the execution of the scheme.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)North Korea's rubber-stamp parliament will hold an annual session next month, state media said today, with all eyes on whether it will move to bolster a diplomatic thaw with the US and South Korea.

A rapid rapprochement that kicked off during last month's Winter Olympics has seen US President Donald Trump agree to hold a summit with the North's leader Kim Jong Un.

The hermit state's legislative body meets only once or twice a year, mostly for day-long sessions to approve budgets and other routine business of the ruling Workers' Party.

However, it occasionally announces major news: a session in 2012 approved a revision of the constitution to formally declare the country a nuclear state.

"The sixth session of the 13th Supreme People's Assembly of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea will be convened in Pyongyang on April 11," the official KCNA agency said.

It gave no other details, including the session's agenda.

But Cheong Seong-Chang from the Sejong Institute think tank said the session may involve a reshuffle of top officials as Kim steps up a push to ease the nuclear-armed regime's international isolation.

Kim Yong Nam, the nation's ceremonial head of state who made a rare visit to the South last month to attend the Winter Games, may be one of the senior cadres to step aside, Cheong said.

"At this time when Kim Jong Un comes forward himself to hold summits with the South and the US... the North's leadership may think that the presidium president needs to take more proactive role in diplomacy," he said.

The frail 90-year-old head of state may be replaced by the current foreign minister Ri Yong Ho, who has played an active role in the current flurry of diplomacy including talks in Sweden last weekend, Cheong said.

"The latest session will further accelerate generational changes in the leadership of the North's government and strengthen Kim's grip on power."



Kim Jong Un's recent proposals to hold two summits -- North-South talks followed by a face-to-face meet with Trump -- were relayed by Seoul's envoys who met with the North's leader this month.

But other than a commentary in state media earlier this week in which it denied sanctions were pushing it to the negotiating table, Pyongyang has made no public pronouncements on the apparent rapprochement, raising concern over its intentions.

To prepare for the planned inter-Korea summit, Seoul has proposed high-level talks with the North at the border truce village of Panmunjom on March 29.

Seoul is also sending a troupe of K-pop performers to Pyongyang for a four-day visit, officials have said, to stage the first performances by South Korean acts in the North since 2007.

And the South and the US have announced a plan to resume annual joint military exercises on April 1, with its main drill shortened by a month -- in an apparent conciliatory gesture over an event that infuriates the North.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Nepal's Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli is expected to travel to India on a three-day official visit in the first week of April, his maiden foreign trip after assuming office last month, a media report said today.

However, no official announcement has so far been made regarding Oli's proposed visit to India, the Kathmandu Post reported.

Citing sources at the Nepali Embassy in New Delhi and officials at India's External Affairs Ministry, the paper said that dates of Prime Minister Oli's India visit have been "under active consideration" since he assumed office more than a month ago.

The formal announcement will be made once the Nepali side gives its concurrence to the proposed date-April 6-8, according to a senior official in Kathmandu.

A source at the Indian Embassy in Nepal also hinted towards a likely visit by Oli in the first week of April.

While congratulating Oli over phone upon his appointment to the top executive post, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had extended an invitation to him for a visit to India.

External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj had visited Nepal before Oli took office to congratulate him for the historic victory of the Left Alliance in the Parliamentary and Provincial elections.

Swaraj was the first senior Indian minister to visit Nepal after the conclusion of elections to local bodies, provincial assemblies and federal Parliament.

Oli, widely regarded as pro-China, last month said he wants to "update" relations with India "in keeping with the times" and favours a review of all special provisions of the Indo-Nepal relations, including the long-established practice of Nepalese soldiers serving India's armed forces.

It is natural for Prime Minister Oli to visit India first as it signifies that the Left Alliance government accords top priority to Nepal's relations with the southern neighbour, a senior leader of ruling CPN-Maoist Centre told PTI.

The formal announcement will be made once both sides work out the detailed itinerary of the proposed visit, the sources said.

Foreign Minister Pradip Gyawali is likely to visit New Delhi ahead of Oli's official trip to prepare ground for the visit.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A 42-year-old Nigerian was arrested last night for allegedly duping a man of over Rs 4 lakh by promising him a hefty commission on selling herbal seeds, police said today.

The accused, identified as Daniel Chukwuanu, made the victim believe that he would be paid a premium for buying the seed from a particular vendor in the city, an official said.

The said vendor turned out to be a member of the gang, he said.

"The victim bought the seed for Rs 4,12,000 and sent it to the address mentioned by the accused, but never got any money in return," the official said.

Based on the complaint, police launched a probe and nabbed the accused from Mira Bhyander in neighbouring Thane district last night, the official said.

Police suspect that Chukwuanu is part of a huge racket that has duped over 100 people using the same modus operandi.

He has been booked under section 420 (cheating) 406 (criminal breach of trust) of the IPC, the official said, adding that efforts were on to nab other members of the gang.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)North Korea's rubber-stamp parliament will hold a rare session next month, state media said today, as a dramatic diplomatic thaw with South Korea and the US gains pace.

The hermit state's legislative body meets only once or twice a year, mostly for day-long sessions to approve budgets or other decisions deemed necessary by the ruling Workers' Party.

"The sixth session of the 13th Supreme People's Assembly of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea will be convened in Pyongyang on April 11," the official KCNA agency said.

It gave no other details, including the session's agenda. Such meetings are carefully monitored by observers for any changes to economic policy or a reshuffle of high-ranking officials.

The announcement comes after a rapid rapprochement on the Korean peninsula kicked off with the recent Winter Olympics.

Pyongyang has not confirmed or even directly mentioned two proposed summits -- North-South talks followed by a face-to-face meet between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un -- with its silence raising concerns over its intentions.

But on Tuesday the North acknowledged the "dramatic atmosphere for reconciliation" while denying suggestions it was forced to the negotiating table by sanctions following its missile and nuclear tests.

The South has proposed high-level talks next week between the neighbours to discuss details of an inter-Korean summit in late April, including the meeting's date and agenda.

Seoul is also sending a troupe of K-pop performers to Pyongyang for a four-day visit, officials have said, to stage the first performances by South Korean acts in the North since 2007.

The South and the US have announced a plan to resume annual joint military exercises on April 1, with its main drill shortened by a month -- in an apparent conciliatory gesture over an event that infuriates the North.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Odisha government today approved three investment proposals worth Rs 255 crore, which will create direct employment opportunities for about 430 people, officials said.

The proposals got the nod at the State Level Single Window Clearance Authority Meeting held under the Chairmanship of Chief Secretary A P Padhi.

The SLSWCA accorded approval to M B Limited to set up a fruit-based beverage manufacturing unit at an investment of Rs 140 crore. The unit has been proposed in Khurda district and envisages creation of employment for 150 people.

The project proposal of wires and cables maker A C Pvt Ltd to set up a greenfield aluminium conductors and cables manufacturing unit at the Angul Aluminium Park, with a capacity of 30,000 ton per annum, was also approved.

The investment outlay was Rs 52 crore with employment potential for 180 persons, the officials said.

ITC Ltd's food processing unit coming up at Khurda also received approval to expand the product line. The construction work of the unit is currently in progress.

The expansion of the project would entail additional investment of Rs 63 crore and create employment for 100 people.

Vedanta Aluminium Ltd's proposal to ramp up capacity of its aluminium smelter unit at Jharsuguda from 1.6 million metric tonnes per annum (MMTPA) to 1.8 MMTPA was, however, recommended to the High Level Clearance Authority for final approval, they said.

The company has proposed investment of Rs 1,240 crore and create additional jobs for 800 people.

According to Odisha Industries Secretary Sanjeev Chopra, 124 investment intents were received during the investors' meets organised in 2016 at Mumbai and Bengaluru, and in the Make in Odisha Conclave 2016.

Out of this, the state has already converted 76 intentions to concrete project proposals, and all these proposals envisaging investment of Rs 2.02 lakh crore have been approved in SLSWCA, Chopra said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Punjab opposition had a run-in today with the ruling Congress in state assembly over their demand of Rs 1 crore compensation for the families of 27 state natives killed in Iraq by IS after their abduction with other Indians there in 2014.

The run-in took place despite Chief Minister Amarinder Singh announcing a compensation to the victim families earlier as per the state policy and even agreeing to examine the policy to ascertain the feasibility of enhancing the compensation.

Immediately after the question hour on the third day of the ongoing budget session in Punjab Vidhan Sabha here, the Leader of Opposition and AAP MLA Sukhpal Singh Khaira raised the issue of compensation to the families of 27 state natives out of 39 Indians killed in Iraq.

He urged Singh to announce a compensation of Rs one crore and a government job to one member each of the victims' families on humanitarian ground.

Describing the death of Indians in Iraq as "tragic," Singh said as far as the compensation in the matter is concerned, there a "standard procedure" for it.

"We will certainly look into our policy and compensate," CM announced on the floor of the House.

The chief minister said the bodies of Indians killed in Iraq were expected to reach Amritsar within a week.

"I was told by the Union minister that there was a problem in the release of bodies because of some legal aspect in Mosul," he further said.

Speaking on the matter, Siromani Akali Dal leader Bikram Singh Majithia described the issue of compensation as a "serious and sensitive" matter and sought maximum compensation from the Punjab government.

"It is the responsibility of the Punjab government towards people of the state," he said adding "these families were very poor."



Majithia accused the state government of not providing monthly compensation of Rs 20,000 to the families of those killed in Iraq for the last six months.

He also raised the inconvenience caused to the families of two Balachaur youths over arrival of bodies as a result of goof up by district administration of Nawanshahr on the issue.

"Families should not face any problem in getting the bodies," demanded Majithia.

Taking on Akalis, senior Congress leader Rana Gurmit Sodhi said it was the responsibility of the BJP-led Union government to provide compensation of Rs one crore each and a government job for the kin of those killed in Iraq.

"We are even ready to go with them (Akalis) if they take up this issue with the Centre for compensation," said Sodhi, triggering heated exchanges between the treasury and the Akali members.

Lashing out at Akalis, another Congress MLA Kushaldeep Dhillon asked the members of the House not to politicise this matter. "There should be no over this matter," he said.

External Affairs minister Sushma Swaraj had informed the Parliament on March 20 that all the 39 Indians, who were abducted by ISIS in Iraq nearly three years ago, were killed and their bodies had been recovered.

As many as 39 Indians, who had gone to Iraq to earn their livelihood, had been missing since 2014 and 27 of them belonged to Punjab. They were from several places including Amritsar, Gurdaspur, Hoshiarpur, Kapurthala and Jalandhar.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Opposition parties today staged road rokos on national highways in Andhra Pradesh demanding special category status for the state even as the ruling TDP extended support to the protest which passed off peacefully.

The ruling Telugu Desam party, which quit the BJP-led NDA government over the issue recently, extended full support to the agitation.

Deputy Chief Minister (Home) N China Rajappa, who monitored the two-hour agitation programme, said it ended peacefully.

Traffic came to a standstill on the Chennai-Kolkata National Highway-16 as the protesters staged the blockade at different points from Tada in SPS Nellore district, bordering Tamil Nadu, to Itchapuram in Srikakulam district, bordering Odisha.

Traffic on Machilipatnam-Hyderabad National Highway-65 was also affected with protesters staging a road roko at Nandigama and other key places, police said.

In Anantapuramu district, traffic on the Hyderabad-Bengaluru stretch of the National Highway was hit.

Opposition parties--YSR Congress, Congress, Left and Jana Sena-- gave a call for the road blockade programme.

The ruling party organised human chains and sit-in protests on its own in Tirupati, Visakhapatnam and other towns.

The BJP stayed away from the agitation.

All the parties demanded that Centre fully implement the provisions of the AP Reorganisation Act, 2014 and also the promises made in Rajya Sabha to the state.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)More than 400 people were taken ill after eating 'bhog prasad' of a religious ceremony at Kakrai village in Howrah district, a health official said today.

About 125 affected people were admitted to two hospitals at Debipur and Jangalpara, Chief Medical Officer (Health) Bhabani Das said.

About 300 others have been affected and they are being treated at their residences, she said.

All of them complained of vomiting, lose motion and stomach pain after they ate the 'bhog prasad' on Tuesday.

The affected people are getting well soon, Das said.

A sample of the water used in cooking the 'bhog prasad' was sent to the School of Tropical Medicine, Kolkata for test, an official said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A Pakistani anti-corruption court today rejected a plea of the embattled family of Nawaz Sharif for a week-long exemption to go to London where the deposed premier's wife is being treated for cancer.

The court conceded with the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) argument that the trial was at a concluding stage hence Sharif's family should not be allowed to leave the country, Dawn newspaper reported.

The bureau had already requested accountability court to place their names on Exit Control List (ECL).

Sharif and his family are facing investigations since July, when the Supreme Court disqualified the three-time prime minister from office as well as from heading the ruling Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz party over undisclosed assets.

The application was filed by defence counsels Khawaja Haris and Amjad Pervaiz with a medical report of Kulsoom Nawaz during the hearing of the Avenfield case filed by the NAB against former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, his daughter Maryam Nawaz and son-in-law Captain (retd) Mohammad Safdar.

In the request, they informed the court that they will be travelling to the United Kingdom to make decisions regarding Kulsoom's treatment plan for throat cancer.

The application states that despite six cycles of chemotherapy, there was a relapse.

Following the submission, the NAB prosecutor asked whether it was mandatory for the entire family to be present at the hospital as Kulsoom's two sons, Hassan and Hussain, were already with her.

The NAB prosecutor's question hurt Maryam, speaking to the media during a break in court proceedings she said she was not expecting an insensitive statement at a difficult time.

Taking to Twitter, Maryam said: "When we requested court to grant us a week-long exemption to visit mother, NAB asked whether is was necessary for the entire family to be present there?"



Maryam later tweeted about a conversation with her mother where Kulsoom asked if the court had granted them exemption. After Maryam informed her in the negative, Kulsoom said it was okay, "God is with us.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Pakistan said today it will continue its fight against terrorism and support every effort for bringing peace in the war-torn Afghanistan.

Foreign Office spokesman Mohammad Faisal said at a weekly briefing that Pakistan was carrying out successful intelligence-based operation against terrorists whenever needed on its side of the border.

He, however, asked the US and Afghan forces do more in Afghanistan to root out the presence of terrorists and their sanctuaries.

"We have also repeatedly requested the US government to share intelligence, for us to take definitive action on our side. The Afghan government and the Resolute Support Mission need to do more within Afghanistan to eliminate all safe havens and terrorist sanctuaries, he said.

Faisal said Pakistan had always maintained that there was no presence of organised terrorist groups within its territory and has continuously highlighted concerns over the presence of the Tehrekk-e-Taliban sanctuaries inside Afghanistan.

"We are pleased that this issue is now being addressed by the US side, but more needs to be done," he said.

He said Pakistan's unflinching resolve to fight terrorism had been recognised and it would continue to support efforts for bringing peace in Afghanistan.

Faisal also confirmed that Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi during a private visit to the US last week had met Mike Pence, his second interaction with the US Vice President since the unveiling of the US policy on South Asia in August 2017.

"The meeting provided an opportunity to exchange views on bilateral relations, the regional situation and Afghanistan and is part of the regular interactions between the two countries. These conversations are important to build trust & cooperation and to strengthen bilateral relations," he said.

Faisal said Pakistan had extended the stay of Afghan refugees until 30th June, but urged donor countries and aid agencies to make efforts for the resettlement of these returnees by building houses and initiating livelihood projects in Afghanistan.

He also said that Foreign Minister Khawaja Muhammad Asif will lead Pakistan's delegation to upcoming Afghanistan Conference in Tashkent scheduled to be held from March 26 to 28.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A week after he was called back for consultations amid raging row between India and Pakistan over harassment of diplomats, Pakistan High Commissioner to India Sohail Mahmood will return from Islamabad tonight, Pakistani government sources said today.

According to sources, Mahmood will host a series of events tomorrow to mark the 'Pakistan National Day' at the country's mission in New Delhi, including a dinner reception.

In the morning, the Pakistani envoy will also hoist the flag and deliver a speech, they said.

Mahmood was called back to Islamabad for consultations after alleged incidents of "harassment" of its diplomatic staff in New Delhi with Pakistan Foreign Office spokesman Muhammad Faisal claiming that the Indian government failed to take notice of the increasing incidents of intimidation of Pakistani diplomats, their families and staffers by its intelligence agencies.

India and Pakistan have accused each other of harassing diplomats in Islamabad and New Delhi respectively.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)In an unprecedented deal, China has sold Pakistan a powerful tracking system which could speed up the development of multi-warhead missiles by its all-weather ally, the state-run Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) said.

Zheng Mengwei, a researcher with the CAS Institute of Optics and Electronics in Chengdu, Sichuan province, confirmed to the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post that Pakistan had bought a highly sophisticated, large-scale optical tracking and measurement system from China.

"We simply gave them a pair of eyes. They can use them to look at whatever they want to see, even the Moon," he said.

Zheng said he could not elaborate on the technology nor where in Pakistan it was being used as it involved the country's defence interests.

He, however, said that the Pakistani military recently deployed the Chinese-made system "at a firing range" for use in testing and developing new missiles.

China was the first country to export such sensitive equipment to Pakistan, the CAS said.

The Post report attributed the sale of the equipment to Pakistan to India testing the most advanced nuclear-ready intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) Agni-V with a range long enough to hit Beijing or Shanghai.

Chinese authorities declassified information about the sale of the tracking system yesterday.

While India's single-warhead missiles are bigger and cover longer distances, Pakistan has focused its efforts on developing multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles (MIRVs), a type of missile carrying several nuclear warheads that can be directed towards different targets, the report said.

The US Defence Intelligence Agency officially confirmed in March that Pakistan conducted the first test launch of its nuclear-capable Ababeel missile in January 2017, "demonstrating South Asia's first MIRV payload", it said.

But outside Pakistan, military experts believe that it will take much more time before the Ababeel missile is ready for use in battle. It is thought to be still at an early stage of development, with plenty of room for improvement.

China has been the biggest supplier of arms to Pakistan which included ships, submarines and fighter jets.

The Chinese team which took the tracking system to Pakistan enjoyed VIP treatment during the nearly three months stay to assemble and calibrate it and training technical staff, the CAS statement said.

"The system's performance surpassed the user's expectations," it said, adding that it was considerably more complex than Pakistan's home-made systems.

The report did not reveal how much Pakistan paid for the system.

An optical system is a critical component in missile testing. It usually comes with a pair of high-performance telescopes equipped with a laser ranger, high-speed camera, infrared detector and a centralised computer system that automatically captures and follows moving targets.

The device records high-resolution images of a missile's departure from its launcher, stage separation, tail flame and, after the missile re-enters atmosphere, the trajectory of the warheads it releases.

"The uniqueness of the Chinese-made system lay in its use of four telescope units, more than normally required," Zheng said.

Each telescope, with a detection range of several hundred kms is positioned in a different location, with their timing synchronised precisely with atomic clocks. Together, the telescopes provide visual information of unprecedented detail and accuracy, which missile developers can use to improve designs and engine performance, the CAS said.

Using more telescopes allows the system to track war heads simultaneously from different angles, reducing the risk of losing a target.

High-quality optics are essential in missile development, especially MIRVs, said Rong Jili, deputy director at the Beijing Institute of Technology's School of Aerospace Engineering.

Other types of tracking devices, such as radar, can collect more precise data at longer distances, but the Chinese-made optical system provided the intuitive, close-up look at real-life action that missile developers craved, he said.

Unlike the US, which accounts for one-third of exports and supplies to at least 100 countries, China delivered major arms to 44 countries, mostly in Asia and Africa.

More than 60 per cent of China's military exports went to Pakistan, Bangladesh and Myanmar and another 22 per cent went to Africa, according to a recent study report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Pakistan's security forces today foiled a suicide attack and killed the would-be bomber in the restive south-western province of Balochistan, officials said.

An official of the Balochistan government said that a Frontier Corps vehicle was passing near a checkpoint in Kuch Mor area of Quetta, the provincial capital, when the attacker first opened fire on them and then tried to detonate himself.

"But before he could detonate and cause casualties and damage, the alert security forces managed to gun him down," the official said.

He said the security forces had found a suicide vest with explosives on the body of the attacker.

Another official said that the experts of bomb disposal squad removed the suicide vest from the body of slain militant.

Nobody took responsibility of the botched attack but the Taliban militants are active in the province and often carry out such attacks.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The probe into the explosion of a 'parcel bomb' at Ahmednagar, in which three employees of a courier firm were injured, was today handed over to the Anti Terrorism Squad (ATS) of Maharashtra police.

Additional District Superintendent of Police Ghanshyam Patil said here that inspector N M Waghmode of the Nashik unit of the ATS has been appointed as in-charge of the investigation.

Three persons were injured when a parcel, meant to be delivered to the chief of a Pune-based NGO, exploded in a courier company's office here on March 20.

The blast occurred around 10 pm when the staff at the private company's office in Maliwada area was handling the parcel.

Three staffers of the courier company were injured in the blast.

Patil said the parcel had been sent by "Nagma Shaikh" from Tarakpur area here, as per the sender's details. However, police could not find any person of this name in the area, the officer said.

The parcel was meant for Sanjay Nahar, president of Pune-based NGO "Sarhad", which works in the border areas of the country. It runs a college in Pune which provides education to over 150 Kashmiri students.

Meanwhile, investigation has revealed that the explosive substance in the parcel bomb didn't explode fully.

Some of the white powder, suspected to be the explosive material, was found intact in a pipe used in the bomb, a police officer said. It was sent to the forensic laboratory for analysis.

There were no CCTV cameras inside the courier firm's office, but there were some CCTV cameras in the area. "We are checking those cameras for leads," he said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)To ensure ease of doing business, the Central Drugs Standard Control Organization (CDSCO) has waived the provision of procuring "no-objection" certificate (NOC) by pharmaceutical companies for exporting drugs, medical devices and cosmetics across ports in the country.

Previously, licensed manufacturers of drugs and medical devices could export them only to the US, Canada, Japan, Australia and the European Union.

In a notice issued yesterday, the CDSCO said the NOC for licensed manufacturers will be waived if "shipping bills" submitted by the manufacturer include a copy of its "valid licence".

"This is being done to bring ease in drug regulatory practices in India relating to export of drugs, medical devices and cosmetics. All the stakeholders are, however, required to comply with the regulatory requirements of the importing countries as per their specific needs," the notice read.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Interpol has sought additional information from the ED about diamond traders Nirav Modi and Mehul Choksi in connection with the over Rs 120 billion PNB scam, as part of the process to issue a Red Corner Notice (RCN) against them.

Official sources said the global police body asked the central probe agency why it wanted an arrest warrant against the duo.

They said the agency replied to the international police that the two are required for taking forward the criminal probe launched by it against them on money laundering charges, and not for a court trial.

While the agency had furnished these details in its application to the Interpol some time ago, the global body still had some queries, they said.

The agency had sought an Interpol warrant against the two diamond traders based on a Mumbai court-issued non-bailable warrants against them in a case registered under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA).

A Red Corner Notice (RCN) is issued to seek the location and arrest of wanted persons for extradition or similar lawful action in a criminal case probe.

Once an RCN is issued, the Interpol seeks to arrest the person concerned in any part of the world and notifies that country to take his or her custody for further action at their end.

A special court in Mumbai had issued non-bailable warrants early this month on the request of the Enforcement Directorate.

The ED had earlier issued summonses to Modi and Choksi -- the key accused in the scam -- asking them to appear before it in Mumbai.

However, both of them expressed their inability to depose citing business engagements and that their passports were revoked by the government.

Both are accused of money laundering (under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act) in alleged connivance with some employees of the Punjab Bank (PNB) and have been stated by the probe agencies to have left India before criminal charges were pressed against them.A proclaimed offender was today arrested in a 24 year old murder case in which eight members of two families were killed over a land dispute.

SSP Ferozepur Pritam Singh said a case was registered in connection with the killing of eight members of two families including Sukhwant Singh, his wife Piar Kaur, daughters Gurjit Kaur and Gogi and Bhupinder Singh, his wife Joginder Kaur and sons Harjinder Singh and Bhupinder Singh in which Malook alongwith two others was awarded death sentence which was later converted into life sentence by Supreme Court in 2001.

The SSP said that Malook was released on parole in 2009 however he did not returned back and resumed his criminal activities.

He said that Malook along with his accomplices robbed Rs 12.45 lakh from a bank following which a case was registered at Zira police station on May 20, 2011.

However, the police could not track down Malook all these years and he was eventually declared Proclaimed Offender (PO).

"Malook was eluding police for the last several years, however we have finally arrested him yesterday" said the SSP.

He said besides these two cases, Malook was involved in several other criminal cases in Dharamkot and Makhu police stations.

"He was also declared PO in two other cases lodged in Gurdaspur and Amritsar (Rural) districts" said SSP alleging the accused's his brother was associated with extremist organizations.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A police constable's 35-year-old brother was allegedly killed by naxals in Narayanpur district in Chhattisgarh, police said today.

The victim, identified as Ramsai Dhruv, was abducted and killed by naxals after holding a jan adalat (kangaroo court) near Jharawahi village in Abhujmad area on March 9, Narayanpur Superintendent of Police Jitendra Shukla told PTI.

"However, the incident came to light yesterday when the victim's family lodged a complaint in this connection with Kurusnar police station," he added.

As per the report, a group of armed naxals had abducted Dhruv from his village Jharawahi, located around 350 kms away from the capital, on March 9 this year, he said.

"Subsequently, the ultras held a jan adalat, where they brutally hacked him to death after thrashing him badly in front of villagers," he said.

A case has been registered in this connection, the SP said adding that further probe into the case is on.

Naxal violence in Bastar division, which comprises seven districts, has seen a rise this monthwith several killings by ultras reported at several places.

Last night, a villager was axed to death in Sukma district of the state.

On the night of March 9, two villagers were beaten to death by naxals in Aadnar village of the state's Kondagaon district.

In the wee hours on the same day, the naxals killed a road contractor and torched four machines engaged in road construction work in Bijapur district.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The BJP today accused Rahul Gandhi of doing on dead bodies, after the Congress chief criticised the government over the killing of 39 Indians in Iraq.

Union minister Ravi Shankar Prasad also rejected the Congress' claim that it had never used the services of Cambridge Analytica, and insisted that the opposition party and Gandhi did do it.

Addressing a press conference, Prasad said it was the Congress which had disrupted proceedings in the Lok Sabha when External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj had sought to make a statement on the deaths of these Indians.

"All I will tell Rahul Gandhi he should not do on dead bodies of Indians who lost their lives in very unfortunate circumstances," he told reporters.

His response came after Gandhi suggested that the government had "invented" a story about the Congress' alleged links with a controversial data firm to divert the media attention from these deaths as it was caught "lying" on the issue.

Prasad insisted that the Congress has used the services of Cambridge Analytica, which has been accused of harvesting people's data from platforms like Facebook unlawfully to influence elections in different countries.

He said several media reports about the opposition party using the services of the firm had appeared in October and November last year and it never denied those stories till the BJP raised the issue yesterday.

Prasad alleged that imprints of Cambridge Analytica were "visible" in the Congress' campaign in Gujarat. It ran a "poisonous and divisive campaign" in the state, he claimed.

The opposition party maintained a conspicuous silence on the role of a dubious company, he said, adding that it prompts him to question whether it has an ability to run this country.

On questions about reports that an Indian company, which was Cambridge Analytica's partner, might have worked for the BJP and its allies as well, Prasad insisted that his party never had any ties with the foreign company.

There is no authentic confirmation of any Indian partner of the company working for the BJP or its allies, he said.

He, however, sought to make a distinction between Cambridge Analytica and its partner, saying the former has been accused of using honey trap and data theft.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Even as its ambitious programme to redevelop stations on a large scale is yet to take shape, the Railways today came out with a list of 68 stations which would be given a facelift through its own resources within a time-bound period.

The redevelopment will be closely monitored by the general managers of the respective zones and the divisional railway manager (DRMs).

Railway Board Chairman Ashwini Lohani had suggested that the redevelopment should come with a visible change on the station premises without unnecessary construction all over.

The Old Delhi station in the national capital and some of the busiest stations in the country, including Howrah, Patna, Allahabad, Vijayawada, Chennai Egmore and Mughalsarai, are among the 68 stations which would be taken up for an overhaul.

The station facade, the passenger flow and other amities would be looked into as the redevelopment is taken up.

According to a source, the redevelopment work is slated to be completed before the country goes for the general election.

The DRMs are expected to submit a master plan to the Railway Board by March 31 for the redevelopment of the station. The board is expected to engage officials to closely monitor the redevelopment plan along with the DRMs.

The development comes as the Railways is yet to give a final shape to the redevelopment of the 600 stations as spelled out in the Union Budget this year.

The Indian Railway Station Development Corporation would pilot the ambitious programme. The Railway Ministry is expected to approach the Cabinet with a policy proposal.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Buses waited outside a bombed-out town in Syria's Eastern Ghouta today after a deal was announced to evacuate rebels and civilians following weeks of regime bombardment.

The deal, announced on Wednesday and brokered by regime ally Russia, could mark a major step forward in government efforts to secure the nearby capital Damascus.

The evacuations from Harasta had been scheduled to start at 0500 GMT, but an AFP correspondent at a government checkpoint on the edge of the town said they were running late.

A spokesman for hardline Islamist rebel group Ahrar al-Sham, which controls the town, said they would go ahead nonetheless.

A member of a committee involved in the negotiations said 1,600 fighters and thousands of members of their families were expected to leave.

Eastern Ghouta has faced a blistering assault by the army and allied militia since February 18 that has taken back most of the enclave and sliced what remains into three pockets held by different rebel groups.

The evacuation agreement for Harasta could increase pressure on the rebel groups that control the other two pockets to follow suit.

Ahrar al-Sham spokesman Munzer Fares said yesterday that the deal would see the rebels head to northern Syria with their weapons.

The AFP correspondent saw Syrian and Russian soldiers waiting on a dusty square near the town, as ambulances were stationed nearby.

A dozen white buses were parked by the side of the road into the enclave.

The rebels and their families will be transported to the northwestern province of Idlib, which is held by a myriad of jihadist, Islamist and secular groups.

The government's offensive on Ghouta has killed more than 1,500 civilians since February 18, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Famed Iranian philosopher Dariush Shayegan, who challenged Western domination of philosophical thought and wrote the book "Cultural Schizophrenia" on the Muslim world and modernity, died today. He was 83.

Shayegan's ideas on how civilizations communicate with each other, equally embraced by former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami, earned the intellectual the 2009 Global Dialogue Prize in Denmark.

Despite having fled Iran following its 1979 Islamic Revolution, Shayegan had returned in recent years to live out his final days at home. Yet he never shied away from offering his opinions on a changing society within Iran.

"I think that Persian society, on the whole, is in a post-Islamic situation already," Shayegan told London's Financial Times newspaper in 2015. "The young generation has accepted the reality of plural identities. When I talk to them, they say, 'We are Western and we are Persian."



The state-run IRNA agency said on Thursday that Shayegan spent nearly two months at a Tehran hospital after suffering a stroke in January.

Born to a Georgian mother and Iranian merchant father in 1935, Shayegan received his doctorate from Sorbonne University in Paris in the 1960s. He once worked as a philosophy professor focused on Indian religions and Sanskrit.

He began studying how civilizations and cultures interact with each other while Iran remained under the rule of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

After the 1979 revolution, Shayegan fled to Paris, where he wrote a number of books in French.

He won the French ADELF award presented by the Association of French Authors in 2004 for his French novel "Land of Mirage." "I am not a philosopher, I am a free thinker," Shayegan notably described himself in 2016.

Shayegan's ideas about cross-civilization communication appeared to be embraced by Iran's Khatami, a reformist who served as president from 1997 to 2005.

Both challenged American political scientist Samuel P. Huntington's idea that cultural and religious identities would lead to a "clash of civilizations." However, the intellectual Shayegan maintained a sense of humor and grace.

He also told the Financial Times: "Tolerance is accepting the other and taming your ego." He is survived by his son Rahim Shayegan, a Harvard-educated professor of history at UCLA.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Senior BJP leader and former Maharashtra minister Eknath Khadse today demanded inquiry into the way a contract to kill rats in Mantralaya (the state secretariat) was executed.

How could the company which was given the contract to kill 3,19,400 rats in Mantralaya could accomplish the task in a mere seven days, he asked, speaking in the Legislative Assembly here.

The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) had taken two years to kill six lakh rats in the city, he said during a discussion on Budgetary demands.

"A survey found that there were 3,19,400 rats in Mantralaya. A work order was issued by the General Administration Department. The company was given six months. But it claimed to have killed them in just seven days," Khadse said.

"It means it killed45,628.57 rats a day. Those 0.57 must be the new-born ones," he said, evoking a laughter in the House.

"It also means the company killed 31.68 ratsevery minute. Their weight was around 9,125.71 kg and every day one truck was required to take dead rats out of Mantralaya. But it is not known where they were disposed of," he said.

The government could have deployed ten cats to do the job instead of hiring a private firm, the former revenue minister said in a lighter vein.

Dharma Patil, a farmer who committed suicide in February, consumed poison from the stock kept by the company on the premises of Mantralaya, he said.

Patil, alleging injustice in award of compensation for land acquisition, consumed poison at Mantralaya and died a few days later.

"There is no information on whether the company had the permission to use the poison. Also, was it permitted to keep the poison stock in Mantralaya?" Khadse asked.

"It is very surprising that this company killed over three lakh rats in just seven days while the BMC took two years to kill six lakh rats. There is a discrepancy in the claim made by the company," he said, demanding an inquiry.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Top Russian media have launched a rare boycott of a senior lawmaker after a parliamentary commission cleared him of sexual harassment despite claims from several journalists.

Several reporters including one of the BBC Russian Service have accused Leonid Slutsky, head of the foreign affairs committee in parliament's lower house, the State Duma, of making lewd sexual comments and groping.

But yesterday a parliamentary ethics commission said it had not found any violations in the behaviour of the 50-year-old lawmaker from the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party.

The commission questioned the journalists' motives, saying their claims had appeared in the runup to a presidential election.

The boycott is a rare campaign of solidarity in a country where all major television channels are state-controlled and toe the Kremlin line.

RBC media holding said Wednesday evening its journalists would no longer work in the State Duma, while Kommersant publishing house said it would no longer quote Slutsky.

Echo of Moscow liberal radio, Dozhd (Rain) TV independent station and RTVi, a New York-based international Russian-language television network, also joined the boycott.

"Echo of Moscow now considers the State Duma an unsafe workplace for journalists of both sexes," chief editor Alexei Venediktov wrote today.

Dozhd quoted its chief editor Alexandra Perepolova as saying that after the meeting of the commission "it had become clear that it's simply dangerous for women to work in the State Duma."



RTVi chief editor Alexei Pivovarov said his channel would also have nothing to do with the Duma while Slutsky remained there.

Kremlin-friendly online portal Lenta said it would from now on ignore Slutsky's existence and would delete "all materials about him" except those covering the sexual harassment claims against him.

The women journalists broke the silence on a subject that remains largely taboo in Russia as the "#MeToo" movement swept across the globe.

Slutsky was widely supported by his colleagues, including his party's leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who accused the women of "receiving orders from the West".

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Supreme Court today closed the proceedings against former Bihar health minister Tej Pratap Yadav, son of jailed RJD supremo Lalu Prasad Yadav, in the murder case of a Siwan-based journalist.

The apex court had asked the CBI to investigate allegations relating to media reports featuring photographs and videos that showed Yadav, a former Bihar minister, along with two absconding accused, Mohd Kaif and Javed, who are currently in judicial custody in the Rajdeo Ranjan murder case.

A bench comprising Chief Justice Dipak Misra and Justices A M Khanwilkar and D Y Chandrachud considered the submission of Additional Solicitor General (ASG) Aman Lekhi that CBI has not found any incriminating material against the RJD leader.

The bench ordered closure of the proceedings against Tej Pratap and gave the slain journalist's widow the liberty to get her plea revised if some incriminating material surfaces in the future.

"It is the stand of the CBI that they have not been able to link him with any criminal activity in so far as the photograph and the transcript are concerned. In view of the aforesaid, we do not intend to keep this writ petition pending.

"However, liberty is granted to the petitioner to approach the appropriate court in case there is any kind of deviation by the respondent no. 4 (Yadav), which would fall within the concept of criminality," the court said in its order.

The ASG told the court that the CBI is probing the matter with regard to the involvement of Mohammad Kaif and Mohammad Javed, who are already in custody.

He said a charge sheet has been filed in the case and the accused, including Kaif and Javed, are in jail now.

The apex court had in November last year sought the CBI's response on its probe relating to reports on photographs and videos showing the former Bihar minister along with the then absconding accused of killing scribe Rajdev Ranjan.

The CBI had said that it has already filed a charge sheet in the scribe murder case on August 22 before a special CBI court.

The apex court had directed the CBI to file a status report on the investigation conducted into the allegations of harbouring and sheltering the then absconding accused in the murder case and the reports that purportedly showed them in the company of Yadav and Mohd Shahabuddin, a jailed RJD strongman and a co-accused in the sensational murder case.

The top court had earlier issued notices to Shahabuddin, Yadav and the Bihar government on the plea of Ranjan's wife seeking transfer of the case from Siwan in Bihar to Delhi. It Supreme Court had directed the CBI to proceed with the probe and ordered police protection to the scribe's wife Asha Ranjan and their family.

Asha had moved the Supreme Court seeking transfer of probe and trial in the case to Delhi alleging that media reports had shown two absconding killers of her husband in the company of Shahabuddin and Yadav.

She had sought relief, including a direction to the CBI, to take up the investigation forthwith in view of the fact that the then proclaimed offenders, Mohd Kaif and Mohd Javed, were spotted with Shahabuddin and the then state Health Minister, where several cops were also present.

Kaif had surrendered in the Siwan district court on September 21 last year.

The scribe, working with a vernacular daily, was shot dead on the evening of May 13 in Siwan town by some sharp-shooters allegedly at the instance of then jailed RJD leader Shahabuddin, the plea alleged.

Despite being named by the family of the journalist, the Siwan police did not name Shahabuddin in the FIR as a key conspirator, it alleged. It had also alleged that the RJD leader was irked over some reports by the slain journalist on the issue of murder of three sons of Chandrakeshwar Prasad. Shahabuddin was awarded life term in one of the cases.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Supreme Court today initiated contempt proceedings against a woman lawyer for using "derogatory remarks against the court" despite warnings.

The top court said that despite being warned of her conduct, "she persisted and dared the court to take action against her".

The heated arguments took place when a bench of Justices Adarsh Goel, U U Lalit and R F Nariman, which was hearing a service matter, was informed by senior advocate A K Sanghi, appearing for Union of India, that the matter will take some time.

The bench told advocate Nisha Priya Bhatia, appearing for the respondents, that the matter cannot be taken up today as composition of the bench was only for today and some part-heard matters had to be given preference.

Bhatia then raised her voice and used "derogatory remarks against the court".

To this, Justice Nariman warned her saying she was crossing her limit.

But Bhatia persisted, kept shouting and dared the bench to take contempt action against her. She left the court shouting at the bench.

Justice Nariman said this was the second time before his bench that she had shouted.

"This is the second time she has done such a thing and this time we cannot allow her to get away like this," the bench said.

"In our view, her conduct amounts to contempt in the face of the court. However, instead of straightway punishing her for contempt, we deem it appropriate to issue notice. Ordered accordingly," the bench noted in its order along with the sequence of events.

It asked Bhatia to file a detailed affidavit explaining her conduct within two weeks from the date of receipt of notice.

The bench also recused from hearing the case as well as the contempt petition and directed that it be listed before any other bench as per the order of Chief Justice of India.

The bench appointed former attorney general Mukul Rohatgi and solicitor general Ranjit Kumar as amicus curiae to assist in the matter, saying they should tell the other bench what had happened in this court.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)An Indian-origin computer scientist based at the University of Glasgow in Scotland marked World Water Day today by highlighting how residents of a remote Indian village benefited from a social robot named 'Husky' helping with their daily chores.

Dr Amol Deshmukh, a research associate at the university's School of Computing Science, had completed the project recently with partners from Amrita University to explore how a water-carrying robot would affect the lives of villagers in Ayyampathy in southern India.

The research team visited the village in November last to use a four-wheeled device from Clearpath Robotics to help 11 volunteers from Ayyampathy's 200 residents carry water to their houses from the local well.

The robot could carry three 20-litre bottles at a time, and communicate using a synthetic male voice. The robot's motion and speech were both controlled by the researchers via remote control. The researchers were keen to see not just how much labour could be saved by offering villagers the use of the Husky, but also how people who had never seen a robot for themselves before would interact with it.

"Most of the research carried out to date on human-robot interactions are carried out in lab environments in urban settings, with people who have developed some conception of what robots are and how they work by seeing depictions of them in TV and film. We wanted to see how people from considerably more remote rural populations would view robots, which have a lot of labour-saving potential," said Deshmukh.

The robot communicated with the volunteers, 10 of whom were women and one of whom was a man and who ranged in age between 15 and 70, to encourage them to place the water jugs on top of it and to show it the way to their homes.

Once the volunteers decanted the water into their storage containers at home, the robot thanked them and reminded them to wash their hands before their next meal.

"Another thing that is unique about this study is it is making an effort to understand the challenges of introducing robotic solutions in a real life rural setting. This is an essential step towards informing design decisions for robotic products that seek to address the populations at the bottom of the economic pyramid," said Akshay Nagarajan from Amrita University.

After several days of using the Husky, the team surveyed each of the participants about their perceptions of the robot and how helpful they found it. Every one of them said the robot made their lives easier, and they unanimously reported that they enjoyed working with the robot. Interestingly, they were also unanimous on the robot being alive', despite being aware that it was being controlled remotely.

Deshmukh added: "We also asked if they thought the robot had a gender. More than a third of participants perceived it as female' although it communicated with a male-sounding voice and had no other gender-coded features, primarily because water-carrying is done mainly by women in their village.

"It's clear that labour-saving devices like these bring real benefits to remote communities, and we're keen to do more work in the future with our partners in India to explore these issues in more depth."



The research team comprised of Deshmukh from University of Glasgow and Sooraj Krishna, Nagarajan Akshay, Vennila Vilvanathan, Sivaprasad J V, and Rao R Bhavani from Amrita University, Kerala.

The study was funded by Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance (SICSA) and Amrita University.

The researchers believe robot helpers are ideally-placed to help achieve the UN's sustainable development goals of bridging the digital divide and opening up beneficial technology to people around the world.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Pakistan's prominent lawmaker Sherry Rehman made history today by becoming the first woman Leader of the Opposition in the Senate, the upper house of parliament.

Rehman, 57, belongs to the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP). She has served as Pakistan's Ambassador to the US from 2011 to 2013 and was elected to the Senate in 2015.

Her candidacy was approved by PPP the Chairman Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, who earlier said that "PPP (is) ready to make history again".

His slain mother and former two time prime minister Benazir Bhutto had served twice as Leader of the Opposition in the National Assembly, the lower house, in 1990s.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The issues pertaining to shortage of doctors in the government hospitals and high incidence of cancer in the Malwa region came up during discussion on a resolution moved by Congress MLA Randeep Singh Nabha in Punjab Assembly here today.

Nabha sought cheaper health services and government shops in civil hospitals in order to provide medicines particularly generic medicines at low prices.

He also demanded biometric attendance of doctors in the government hospitals in order to get better output from them.

Participating in the discussion, Congress MLA Kuljit Singh Nagra raised the issue of shortage of doctors and said chief medical officers (CMOs) should be asked to attend patients in OPDs and not just sit in offices to sign on files.

Another ruling party MLA Kuldeep Singh Vaid said incidence of cancer had gone up in the Malwa region and the 'Budha Nullah' was to be blamed for the problem.

He demanded the health budget for the state be enhanced.

AAP's Sunam MLA Aman Arora suggested the Congress government to open 'Mohalla clinics' on the lines of Delhi so as to provide cheaper health services to poor people living in rural and urban areas.

Meanwhile, listing the various initiatives taken, Punjab Chief Minister Amarinder Singh reiterated his government's commitment to the welfare of the freedom fighters in the state.

In response to a question by Budhlada MLA Budh Ram regarding bus travel facility for freedom fighters during the Zero Hour, the chief minister informed the House that the state government was already providing free bus travel facility to the freedom fighters in Punjab Government buses.

Facility of free bus travel in AC and Non-AC buses run by the state government was being provided to the freedom fighters and also to widows of deceased freedom fighters.

After the death of his widow, a deceased freedom fighter's unmarried unemployed daughter was eligible to get this facility, he said, adding that even attendants of freedom fighters were allowed free travel facility in state government buses while accompanying them.

The Congress government, said Amarinder Singh, was also giving one out-of-turn tubewell connection each to the freedom fighters, besides exempting them from payment of toll taxes on the State Highways.

He said the state government had decided to provide 300 units of free electricity to freedom fighters.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Mark Zuckerberg says he is "sure someone's trying" to use Facebook to meddle with the US mid-term polls in November, amidst allegation of Russian interference in the 2016 election that rattled Americans and spawned government inquiries.

"I'm sure someone's trying," the Facebook CEO told CNN when asked about the possibility of meddling happening right now.

"I'm sure that there's v2, version two, of whatever the Russian effort was in 2016, I'm sure they're working on that," he said. "And there are going to be some new tactics that we need to make sure that we observe and get in front of."



His comments came amidst the Cambridge Analytica scandal in which the British data firm, which has ties to President Donald Trump's campaign, reportedly accessed information from about 50 million Facebook users without their knowledge.

Zuckerberg said Facebook executives "have some sense of the different things that we need to get in front of."



He said staffers are "building technology" and hiring human reviewers to stamp out propaganda and other attacks.

"One of the big commitments that we've made this year is to double the number of people working on security at the company. We're going to have 20,000 people working on security and content review in this company by the end of this year," he said.

Zuckerberg added: "Now the reality is, with a community of two billion people, I can't promise that we're going to find everything. But what I can commit to is that we're going to make it as hard as possible for these adversaries to do that and I think that we're going to do a much better job."



He also indicated that he was willing to testifying before Congress.

Politicians on both sides of the Atlantic have called for Zuckerberg to testify before their legislative bodies in the five days since the Cambridge Analytica scandal erupted.

"The short answer is I'm happy to if it's the right thing to do," he said.

"What we try to do is send the person at Facebook who will have the most knowledge," Zuckerberg said. "If that's me, then I am happy to go."



When asked about the looming midterms, and the potential for viral misinformation, Facebook head of product Alex Hardiman said earlier this month that "we've got our work cut out for us," but "we're making good progress.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Tamil Nadu Chief Minister K Palaniswami today said stern action would be taken against anyone attempting to disturb "religious peace" in the state.

Palaniswami was responding to the opposition DMK and Congress members who raised the issue of some Christian prayer homes being attacked in Madurai, in the state Assembly.

Referring to the incidents on March 11, Palaniswami said four cases had been filed in two police stations in connection with the attacks with three persons, including a local functionary of a Hindu outfit, being arrested.

He said some persons raised objections to the prayers being held in different localities in Madurai, with miscreants entering into a scuffle with those holding prayers.

They also allegedly abused them and damaged a copy of the Bible, he said.

Following complaints, Alanganallur police arrested Dinesh and Sathish Babu while Hindu Munnani activist Aravindan was picked up by Koodal Puthur police, he said.

The local Hindu Munnani unit also filed a complaint with police stating that the prayer houses were functioning without permission and wanted action against them, the chief minister said.

Subsequently, police put in adequate preventive measures in the areas concerned, he said.

"The government will take stringent action against anyone trying to disturb religious peace," he added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Mizoram Excise and Narcotics Minister R Lalzirliana today said the study and evaluation report of the State Prohibition Council would be examined before making decisions on the continuation or scrapping of the Mizoram Liquor Prohibition and Control Act, 2014.

In a written reply to a query from opposition Mizo National Front (MNF) members - Vanlalzawma and Lalruatkima - Lalzirliana said that the State Prohibition Council had submitted its study report to the government on March five last.

The terms of reference of the Council was to study the impact of the Mizoram Liquor Prohibition and Control Act, 2014 on economical and social aspects, health aspects and also review of the implementation of the act and rules.

He expressed opinion that the implementation of the act was a success as liquor drinkers could now find healthier liquor at a cheaper rate and it would end the smuggling of spurious spirits from Myanmar.

The MLPC Act, 2014 came into force in January 2015.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav today said JD(U) president Nitish Kumar had a lot to answer as his party leader K C Tyagi's son was reportedly associated with controversial data mining firm Cambridge Analytica.

The BJP, the JD(U)'s ally in Bihar, and the Congress have been trading charges over hiring the services Cambridge Analytica.

Last week, Facebook had admitted that the British firm used data collected from 50 million users without their consent, an act of breach of privacy.

"Bihar CM Nitish's close confidant and one instrumental in JD(U)'s reunion with BJP K C Tyagi's son Amresh Tyagi worked for #CambridgeAnalytica and helped it work for BJP as report confirms! Nitish and PM Modi have a lot to answer," Yadav, a former deputy chief minister, said in a tweet.

"Nitish Kumar & PM Modi are only politicians in the country who take help of PR agencies like #CambridgeAnalytica to create hype around their non existent work! Both are answerable to the country for their Party's links with the agency!" he said in another tweet.

On Union Law and Justice Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad's warning to Facebook owner Mark Zuckerberg yesterday, Yadav alleged that BJP leaders were preparing the ground for throttling social media.

"They are warning Facebook owner that even he can be summoned. The government should tell us if it has the power, why is it not acting against fugitives like Nirav Modi, Lalit Modi and Vijay Mallya," he said.

Talking to a channel, the RJD leader claimed that he had got a whiff of the activities of Tyagi's son during the 2015 Assembly polls, when "I had not even heard the name of the firm (Cambridge Analytica)".

"I was accompanied by K C Tyagi to a rally in Champaran and he told me that his son was in the PR business and was associated with election management of Donald Trump who was then preparing for the US Presidential polls," Yadav claimed.

The RJD heir apparently also said "Why is K C Tyagi not coming out with explanations himself and not allowing his son, who is an adult, to clear the air. And why is not the NDA government at the Centre not conducting a thorough probe which could settle the matter once and for all".

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Actor Tessa Thompson has joined the cast of "Men in Black" spinoff.

The "Westworld" actor joins her "Thor: Ragnarok" co-star Chris Hemsworth in the film, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

"The Fate of the Furious" director F Gary Gray is in negotiations to helm the project, while the script has been penned by Matt Holloway and Art Marcum.

Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones are not expected to return in the film, which is meant to launch a new franchise with fresh talent involved.

Sony had originally planned to combine the "Men and Black" and "21 Jump Street" franchises, but have since shelved that idea.

Walter F Parkes and Laurie MacDonald are producing with Steven Spielberg executive producing. David Beaubaire is overseeing the project for Sony.

The original movie followed Smith and Jones, who played agents of a secret organisation, known as the Men in Black, and protected Earth from intergalactic bad guys.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Texas Governor Greg Abbott is leading a high-level delegation to India as part of his efforts to boost trade, economic and cultural ties between resource-rich Texas and India.

Governor Abbott, who would be reaching India today, will be visiting the cities of Mumbai, Bengaluru, Agra and New Delhi and will return back on March 30.

"Nowhere else in the United States will you find a better business environment or a more talented workforce than Texas," he said in a statement.

"The Lone Star State continues to be a premier destination for foreign direct investment, and this trip will be an opportunity to further highlight and share Texas' economic success story," he said.

"I look forward to bringing more jobs and investment to our state and continuing to build upon Texas' already strong economic and cultural relationship with India."



During his week-long trip, the Governor is scheduled to meet with CEOs, company executives and officials from the Indian government to promote business development and encourage investment in Texas.

The mission will focus on increasing trade and investment between Texas and India in a range of sectors.

Houston and India are bound by extensive business, trade and cultural ties. It is home to over 100,000 Indo Americans and has more than 700 companies that do business with India.

Last year, Texas ranked second among US states in exports to India.

It shipped oil, petrochemicals, civilian aircraft engines and other goods valued at nearly $3.8 billion to India, according to the Texas Economic Development Corporation, a nonprofit organisation spearheaded by the governor that solicits and uses corporate donations to promote business in Texas.

India's 20-year deal on import of natural gas from the US is major "milestone" in bilateral ties and goes a long way in strengthening and reinforcing trade relations between the two countries.

Texas also imports great number of products from India, including foodstuffs, crustaceans and jewelry.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Tata Global Beverages Ltd (TGBL) today said it has re-appointed L Krishnakumar as Executive Director for five years with effect from April 1, 2018.

The appointment is subject to shareholders approval, TGBL said in a regulatory filing.

Krishnakumar was appointed as Executive Director of the company from April 2013 to March 2018.

According to the company website, KrishnaKumar joined Tata Group in 2000 as Vice President, Finance, in the Hotels business, and was then promoted as Head of Finance of Tata Tea in India in 2004.

His last role before joining Tata Group, was with L&T as General Manager, Finance, in their corporate office.

TGBL stock closed 1.84 per cent lower at Rs 258.50 on BSE.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)An organisation of Tibet support groups in India has urged the Centre to pursue the Chinese leadership to resume dialogue with spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, for arriving at a solution to the Tibet issue.

"The IT age has turned the world into a global village to facilitate any community to grow," said R K Khrimey, national convener of the Core Group for Tibetan Cause (CGTC).

Unity and amity between India and China could change the face of the world, he said.

The CGTC, in association with the people of Tawang and West Kameng districts of Arunachal Pradesh, had begun a 11-day 'padayatra' (foot march) from the state to Assam on March 17, to commemorate the Dalai Lama's 60 years of journey from Tibet to India.

"The padayatra is aimed at sending a message that communal harmony is the only panacea to facilitate peace to rule in today's strife-torn world," Khrimey added.

The foot march would conclude on March 27.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Tamil Nadu government today said revenue deficit could be reduced by implementating the recommendations of the Staff Rationalisation Committee, set up to identify non-essential posts for reducing expenditure.

The committee, headed by retired IAS official S Audiseshaiah, was set up last month, Deputy Chief Minister O Panneerselvam told the state assembly.

"Once the recommendations are implemented, it will lead to reduction in revenue deficit and ways and means would open up for the state to revert to revenue surplus," he added.

The panel is mandated to identify non-essential posts in government departments to reduce expenditure and submit a report within six months.

Winding up the four-day discussion on the 2018-19 budget, which was presented on March 15, Panneerselvam, holding the finance portfolio, said the state had surplus revenue in 2011-12 and 2012-13.

In 2013-14, slowdown in economy affected the state like the rest of the country and the tax revenue fell.

Factors like economic sluggishnes, inadequate tax revenue and cut in devolution of funds to the tune of Rs 6,000 crore by the Centre for Tamil Nadu in 2015-16 led to revenue deficit, he said citing the 14th Finance Commission report.

Since expenditure increased to 13.71 per cent in 2017-18 owing to hike in salary for government staff, revenue was pegged at Rs 18,370 crore in 2017-18 as per revised estimates, he added.

"Now that there is growth in the economy, it is estimated that tax revenue in 2018-19 will be about 14.11 per cent," the Deputy Chief Minister said.

On March 15, the state government presented a revenue deficit budget of Rs 17,490.58 crore.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A controversial Pakistani police officer allegedly involved in several extra-judicial killings was sent on a 30-day physical remand by an anti-terrorism court here today, a day after the fugitive cop surrendered before the Supreme Court.

Former Senior Superintendent of Police Malir in Karachi Rao Anwar was produced in an anti-terrorism court in a case related to the extra-judicial killing of Naqeebullah Mehsud.

Anwar, who is known for his close contacts with politicians and former President Asif Zardari, is accused of staging the extra-judicial killing of four persons including Mehsud on the outskirts of Karachi on January 13 this year.

Anwar claimed Mehsud was a member of the Tehreek-e-Taliban (TTP) hailing from South Waziristan, but a later statement reportedly issued by a spokesperson for TTP's South Waziristan had termed the claim "baseless", clarifying that the deceased had no links with the banned militant outfit.

Mehsud's family had also disputed Anwar's claim, saying that the 27-year-old had no links with any militant organisation and was a shop owner fond of modeling.

The Sindh police formed a Joint Investigation Team (JIT) which charged 25 police officers including Anwar of staging the extra-judicial killings, but the former top cop first attempted to flee the country from Islamabad airport and then went into hiding for over a month.

Anwar finally turned up at the Supreme Court yesterday where the bench ordered his arrest and rejected his plea for a bail.

The apex court also formed a new JIT to probe the extra-judicial killings. It has also placed Anwar's name on the Exit Control List.

"Everyone in Sindh police was aware of what Anwar was doing but every time any senior official tried to act against him he was pushed back by the corridor of power, a senior police official said.

Chief Justice Mian Saqib Nisar had earlier issued repeated orders to the Sindh police chief for the fugitive officer's arrest in a case pertaining to the killing of Mehsud but he had eluded them.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)AIMIM chief Asaduddin Owaisi today said Uttar Pradesh Law Minister Brijesh Pathak's comment that the state government may withdraw "politically motivated" riot cases, was "travesty" of justice and a "cruel joke" on victims of the violent incidents.

The Hyderabad MP alleged that the minister's comment shows that the BJP indulges in "appeasement" of Hindus and the Yogi Adityanath government does not believe in the rule of law.

He also accused the BJP government in Uttar Pradesh of "rewarding" those who are facing prosecution for heinous crimes.

"It is a travesty of justice. It is a cruel joke that is being played on all those who were murdered, raped, and 50,000 people were made homeless and refugees in their own country. This clearly shows the BJP indulges in appeasement of Hindutva," Owaisi told new channel outside Parliament.

The All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) chief also accused the Adityanath government of abdicating its constitutional duty, which warranted it to ensure that anyone charged for any offence is gets convicted.

Earlier in the day, Pathak said the state government may withdraw riot cases if they are "politically motivated" as he replied to a specific question by a mediaperson on the cases related to Muzaffarnagar and other riots in the state.

"Riot cases are also registered under the IPC. If these are politically motivated, we will surely consider their withdrawal," the minister said.

Pathak, however, made it clear that only those cases were being withdrawn which smacked of political vendetta.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)US President Donald Trump today imposed USD 60 billion of tariffs on Chinese imports to punish the country for its "unfair" seizure of American intellectual property, a move that could escalate the already tense trade relations between the world's two biggest economies.

Trump directed the US trade representative to level tariffs on about USD 60 billion worth of Chinese imports after a seven-month investigation into the intellectual property theft, which has been a longstanding point of contention in US-China trade relations.

"We have a tremendous intellectual property theft problem. It's going to make us a much stronger, much richer nation," Trump said.

"This has been long in the making," Trump told reporters in the White House at the ceremony while signing his memorandums targeting China's economic actions.

Trump's action comes a day after US Trade Representative (USTR) concluded its Special 301 investigation against China and presented its report to him.

The USTR report concluded that China uses foreign ownership restrictions, including joint venture requirements, equity limitations and other investment restrictions to require or pressure technology transfer from US companies to Chinese entities.

"This requires taking effective action to confront China over its state-led efforts to force, strong-arm, and even steal US technology and intellectual property," said US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer.

"Years of talking about these problems with China has not worked. The US is committed to using all available tools to respond to China's unfair, market-distorting behaviour. China's unprecedented and unfair trade practices are a serious challenge not just to the United States, but to our allies and partners around the world," Lighthizer said.

Trump said his Section 301 trade action could be about USD 60 billion.

He instructed USTR to publish a proposed list of products and any tariff increases within 15 days and to pursue dispute settlement in the World Trade Organization (WTO) to address China's discriminatory technology licensing practices.

He also has directed the Treasury Secretary to address concerns about investment in the US directed or facilitated by China in industries or technologies deemed important to the country.

Trump said America's trade deficit with China was a whopping USD 504 billion per annum.

"According to some estimates it is USD 375 billion. But anyway you look at it, it is the largest deficit of any country in the history of our world. It's out of control," he said.

"But that's really just a fraction of what we're talking about," he said, adding that he has asked China to reduce the trade deficit immediately by USD 100 billion.

"It's a lot. That would be anywhere from 25 per cent, depending on the way you figure, to maybe something even more than that. But we have to do that," he said.

Reiterating his use of word "reciprocal", Trump said it was not good when they charge 25 per cent for a car to go in, and the US charges two per cent for their car to come into the US.

"That's how China rebuilt itself. The tremendous money that we've paid since the founding of the World Trade Organization, which has actually been a disaster for us. It's been very unfair to us. The arbitrations are very unfair. The judging has been very unfair. And knowingly, we always have a minority, and it's not fair," he said.

Trump alleged that China had been indulging in tremendous intellectual property theft worth hundreds of billions of dollars on a yearly basis.

"I've spoken to the president. I've spoken to representatives of China. We've been dealing with it very seriously," he said.

"As you know, we're renegotiating NAFTA. We'll see how that turns out. Many countries are calling to negotiate better trade deals, because they don't want to have to pay the steel and aluminum tariffs, and we are negotiating with various countries," he added.

As per the USTR report, China imposes substantial restrictions on, and intervenes in US firms' investments and activities, including through restrictions on technology licensing term.

These restrictions deprive US technology owners of the ability to bargain and set market-based terms for technology transfer.

As a result, US companies seeking to license technologies must do so on terms that unfairly favor Chinese recipients.

"China conducts and supports unauthorised intrusions into and theft from the computer networks of US companies.

"These actions provide the Chinese government with unauthorised access to intellectual property, trade secrets, or confidential business information, including technical data, negotiating positions, and sensitive and proprietary internal business communications, and they also support China's strategic development goals, including its science and technology advancement, military modernisation and economic development," USTR report concluded.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The UK government today vowed to crackdown on recruiters of terrorism, saying all forms of terror need to be stamped out as Britain marked the first anniversary of an ISIS-inspired terror attack on Westminster Bridge, near Parliament.

Last year on March 22, a 52-year-old UK-born Muslim convert Khalid Masood drove a car into pedestrians on the Bridge, over the River Thames in the heart of the London, before fatally stabbing a police officer on guard at New Palace Yard gates of the Palace of Westminster.

Four people were killed and nearly 50 injured in the rampage. Masood was shot dead by armed police at the scene. It was followed by two other terror attacks in the British capital, at London Bridge and Finsbury Park mosque in June 2017, taking the death toll to 14 in the attacks.

UK home secretary Amber Rudd, who attended a special service in memory of the five victims of the attack last year at the St Mary Undercroft Chapel in Parliament, said that all forms of terror needed to be stamped out.

Islamists and far-right terrorists share one thing in common - they are united through their adherence to hate. We need to respond by stamping out those recruiters in the first place, she said.

British MPs observed a minute of silence in the House of Commons at midday (local time), as the service of commemoration took place in Westminster Hall in the Palace of Westminster complex.

British Prime Minister Theresa May laid a wreath of white lilies and roses at Parliament Square, accompanied by a signed note reading:In memory of those who were lost and in defiance of those who would seek to silence our democracy.

Mayor of London Sadiq Khan marked the anniversary with the launch of a London United campaign, which will involve #LondonUnited projected on locations of last years terrorist attacks on the city as an act of solidarity.

Londoners will never forget the horrific terror attacks on our city in 2017. We will never forget the bravery of our emergency services and first responders who ran towards danger while urging the rest of us to run to safety, he said.

The Mayor's office has also organised a digital book of condolence that the public can send messages of solidarity to. The Book of Hope will become part of a 3D installation in City Hall that will be open to the public until June 19 the anniversary of the Finsbury Park attack.

Meanwhile, colleagues and family members paid tribute to the victims of the Westminster attack. A colleague of Police Constable Keith Palmer, the officer who was stabbed when he confronted Masood, said he was a "loyal friend", "always happy" and dedicated to his job, his daughter and his wife.

"I do recall the silence. It was very eerie. Not a single movement of traffic, not a horn, not anybody speaking, no shouts, nothing whatsoever... I was then left there with a couple of the original policeman, who by this time were very, very upset because it was their colleague," recalled UK defence minister Tobias Ellwood, who gave mouth-to-mouth to Palmer after the stabbing in an attempt to save his life.

It is believed the barriers outside the Parliament building saved around 25 to 30 lives on the day of the attack, as they forced Masood's car off the pavement and onto the road. At the end of the barriers he cut back into the pavement and crashed in into the side of Parliament building before stepping out with a knife.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)UN chief Antonio Guterres said today that effective management of water was critical to meet the increasing challenges of its scarcity on the planet as he cited cooperation on water issues between India and Pakistan.

General Guterres was speaking at the launch of 'International Decade for Action on Water' for sustainable development.

Launched on the occasion of World Water Day, the decade which will run from 2018-2028 calls for a greater focus on the sustainable development and integrated management of water resources for the achievement of social, economic and environmental objectives.

It also calls on the implementation and promotion of related programmes and projects, as well as on the furtherance of cooperation and partnership at all levels in order to help achieve internationally agreed water-related goals and targets, including those contained in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

"With demand for freshwater projected to grow by more than 40 per cent by the middle of the century, and with climate change having a growing impact, water scarcity is an enormous concern. By 2050 at least one in four people will live in a country where the lack of fresh water will be chronic or recurrent, Guterres said.

"We cannot continue to take water for granted and expect to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. Today, I am using the launch of the Water Action Decade to make a global call to action for water, sanitation and hygiene or WASH - in all health care facilities, he said.

The UN Chief said without effective management of the planet's water resources, nations risk intensified disputes between communities and sectors and even increased tensions among nations.

Growing demands for water, coupled with poor water management, have increased water stress in many parts of the world, he said.

He, however, expressed satisfaction that so far, water has historically proven to be a catalyst for cooperation not for conflict.

"From my own experience, the Albufeira Convention, agreed during my time as Prime Minister of Portugal, continues to promote good relations on water management between Spain and Portugal. And, there are many more examples of cooperation on water between India and Pakistan, Bolivia and Peru, and several others," he said.

India and Pakistan, nuclear-armed arch rivals in south Asia, signed the Indus Waters Treaty in 1960 after nine years of negotiations, with the World Bank also being a signatory.

The Treaty sets out a mechanism for cooperation and information exchange between the two countries regarding their use of the rivers.

However, there have been disagreements and differences between India and Pakistan over the treaty.

While the World Bank has said India is allowed to construct hydroelectric power facilities on tributaries of the Jhelum and Chenab rivers with certain restrictions under the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty, Pakistan opposes the construction of the Kishanganga (330 megawatts) and Ratle (850 megawatts) hydroelectric power plants being built by India.

The water decade was launched by Guterres, President of the General Assembly Miroslav Lajcak, President of Tajikistan Emomali Rahmon and water experts and practitioners.

Guterres said nations cannot take peace or their precious and fragile water resources - for granted.

"Quite simply, water is a matter of life and death. Our bodies are 60 per cent water. Our cities, our industries and our agriculture all depend on it," he said.

Underlining how dire the problem of water scarcity can be for the planet, Guterres said 40 per cent of the world's people were affected by water scarcity, 80 per cent of waste water is discharged untreated into the and more than 90 per cent of disasters are water-related.

More than two billion people lack access to safe water, and more than 4.5 billion people lack adequate sanitation services.

"What these numbers mean is a harsh daily reality for people in rural communities and urban slums in all regions of the world. Many of the most serious diseases in the developing world are directly related to unsafe drinking water, poor sanitation, and insufficient hygiene practices," he said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The UN Security Council urged rival leaders in Libya today to engage in talks and put an end to the political crisis in the oil-rich country.

Council members condemned the continuing violence in Libya and said there can be no military solution in the North African nation. They urged rival leaders to agree on elections, expected this year, and a political transition.

The council statement followed a briefing by UN envoy for Libya Ghassan Salame who stressed that "the political process must progress, as the status quo is untenable."



Salame said that while there is "reason for optimism" in the political process, there is also cause for concern. He pointed to continued violence and localised conflicts in the country, as well as the presence of extremists including the Islamic State group and al-Qaida.

"Armed groups, including those integrated into the state structures, continue to operate outside of the law, perpetrating human rights abuses," he said. "Bodies bearing signs of torture have turned up in many locations."



Salame said kidnappings of children and adults for profit have also increased, even in the capital Tripoli, and "shadowy security forces" arbitrarily arrest Libyans who are "held and abused in unofficial, or quasi-official detention prisons."Libya plunged into chaos following a 2011 uprising that toppled and later killed longtime dictator Moammar Gadhafi. Since 2014, the country has been split between rival governments and parliaments based in the western and eastern regions, each backed by different militias and tribes.

The Security Council "underlined the importance of unifying Libya's armed forces under civilian oversight."



A UN-brokered deal in December 2015 to create a unity government failed, though talks had taken place to form an administration to lead the country ahead of elections.

Salame proposed amendments to the 2015 peace agreement, which both sides agree is the only way to end the stalemate.

He told the council that tomorrow he will start "a new and final attempt to realise the amendments."



Salame briefed the council from Tripoli, where he now lives, and said the UN hopes to reopen its office in Benghazi, the eastern city which is the base for the government's rival self-styled Libyan National Army led by Field Marshal Khalifa Hifter. Eventually, he said, the UN will also seek to open an office in southern Libya.

Salame said that at the heart of Libya's problems is "an economic system of predation" which serves the interests of the powerful and degrades life for ordinary people.

Oil revenues are high now, but he warned that the money is "vulnerable to under-investment or sabotage," government expenditures are bloated and increasing, and greater spending isn't benefiting most Libyans.

Salame said the "great demographic fluidity" that Libya was once known for has been constrained, "if not strangled," since 2011 and "ideological or identity cleavages have led to widespread ostracism."



"A discourse of hatred has replaced peaceful interaction," Salame lamented, telling the council the UN is committed "to reversing the mutual exclusion and sterile seclusion."



"Unless Libyans from all stripes and segments can come together to speak, they will be unable to agree," he warned. "And unless they agree, the political process cannot progress.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The UN Human Rights Council has expressed doubt that whether Sri Lanka would be able to fully implement the United Nation's prescribed transitional justice agenda before March 2019.

The UNHRC Deputy High Commissioner Kate Gilmore yesterday presented an update on progress in promoting reconciliation, accountability and human rights in Sri Lanka (A/HRC/37/23) between March, 2017 and January, 2018 at the 37th session of the UNHRC in Geneva.

Sri Lanka was last year granted 18 months by a UNHRC resolution in October 2015 to initiate a credible investigation into the nearly three-decades long civil war with the LTTE.

Gilmore said that it was much regrettable that progress in establishing transitional justice mechanisms were slow.

"In the absence of concrete results or publicly available drafts of legislation, it seems doubtful that the transitional justice agenda committed to by the (Sri Lankan) government under this Council's resolution could be fully implemented before our next report in March 2019," Gilmore said.

The UNHRC Deputy Commissioner also said that there has been insufficient progress in returning land occupied by the military.

"Trust will not be rebuilt, if land grabbing continues, nor without independent mechanisms established to determine fair compensations for land reserved for security reasons.

"Furthermore, the authorities have yet to demonstrate with willingness or the capacity to address impunity for gross violations of international human rights and international humanitarian law," she said.

Gilmore also stressed on establishment of a specialised court to deal with serious crimes, supported by international practitioners.

"We are also seriously concerned about multiple incidents of inter-communal violence, attacks and hate speech against minorities observed last year a worry further exacerbated by recent developments that have occurred since the drafting of the report, including violence against Muslims in Kandy district that led to the proclamation of state of emergency for 12 days," the Deputy Commissioner said.

Allegations of use of torture and continued reports of harassment or surveillance of human rights defenders are more than worrying, she added.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Juvenile Justice Board (JJB) has granted regular bail to an 11-year-old girl, accused of stabbing her junior in a school here as she wanted a holiday in the event of a schoolmate's death.

She was taken into custody on January 18, two days after the incident took place, and was granted interim bail the next day. Since then the girl was on interim bail, which was extended time and again.

Allowing her regular bail yesterday, the JJB took into consideration the report of the District Probation Officer. The board directed the parents of the girl to file two sureties of Rs 20,000 each as condition of bail by March 24.

While the victim, a boy studying in class 1, was stated to be out of danger, the school's principal was arrested on January 18.

Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath had visited the trauma centre here, where the six-year-old Ritik was admitted after being attacked in the toilet of the school, in a chilling reminder to a similar incident in a Gurgaon school last year. The girl was studying in class seven.

District Magistrate Kaushal Raj Sharma had said prima facie it appeared that someone might have told the girl that a holiday could be announced by the school authorities only if there was death of any student.

"For getting the school closed, the girl attacked Ritik," the police had said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)US Ambassador to India Kenneth Juster and Consul General in Kolkata Craig L Hall today paid homage to coal martyrs, who laid their lives for meeting the energy requirement of the country, an official release said.

"The US Ambassador to India Kenneth Juster and US Consul General in Kolkata Craig L Hall paid homage to coal martyrs at Saheed Smarak, who laid their lives for meeting the energy requirement of the nation, at Central Coalfields Ltd (CCL), Ranchi on Thursday," CCL, subsidiary of Coal India Ltd, said in a statement.

Juster, L Hall and other dignitaries visited CCL headquarter at Ranchi, it said.

The ambassador and the consul general were briefed about the diversified activities and achievements of CCL in past few years, the statement said.

The ambassador and his team were also informed about the various ongoing CSR activities and how it has helped the company to reduce trust deficit with the stakeholders.

The ambassador and the consul general appreciated the various social welfare programmes CCL has undertaken for community service.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The US Ambassador Kenneth Juster today met Jharkhand Chief Minister Raghubar Das, who told him that the state is one of the fastest growing in the country and expected American assistance in its development.

"Jharkhand is the fastest growing state in the country. Developing is happening here in every sector," Das said during the meeting.

He said Jharkhand is a prosperous state and 40 per cent of the mineral resources of the country are found in it. Besides it is also rich in forest produce, an official release said.

Its people are simple and hardworking and the state government is working towards making them prosperous, Das said adding Jharkhand expected American assistance in the development of the state.

The release said Juster said that Indias economy is fast growing and the country India has created a separate identity in the last four years under the leadership of Narendra Modi.

He said Jharkhand is important in the development of India and the USA is ready to become a partner in the development Jharkhand, it added.

Chief Secretary Sudhir Tripathi, Principal Secretary (Home) S K G Rahate and other senior officials were present during the meeting, the release said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)US prosecutors said today they have dismissed all criminal charges against seven of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's bodyguards stemming from a brawl in Washington last year in which protesters were beaten.

The charges were dropped last month just a day ahead of a meeting between Erdogan and now-outgoing Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, but the State Department said the timing was coincidental.

Prosecutors said they dropped the charges against the seven on February 14 after dropping charges against four others in November. Assault charges are still pending against four other members of Erdogan's security detail as well as two Canadian citizens accused in the May 2017 altercation outside the Turkish ambassador's Washington home during a visit by Erdogan.

The incident sparked outrage in Washington and elsewhere and was condemned by the State Department and local officials.

Turkey has said the demonstrators were outlawed Kurdish militants and loudly complained when charges were announced against 19 people, including some of Erdogan's bodyguards. Two Americans pleaded guilty in December to assault in the matter and are currently awaiting sentencing.

The case badly damaged US-Turkish relations and tensions between the NATO allies have increased further because of differences over military operations in Syria.

A day after the charges were dropped, Tillerson met with Erdogan in Ankara in a bid to ease the strained ties but the State Department said it was not involved in the decision.

The US Attorney's office in Washington declined to comment on the reason for the dismissals.

The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the action, said Tillerson told Turkish officials that the cases was an example of how the US had addressed Erdogan's grievances.

However, State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said today that Tillerson had only mentioned the dismissals as an indication of the independence of the American judiciary.

"He noted that the timing was coincidental, but he also noted it was a good example of how we have an independent judiciary in our country, and that the Department of Justice made those decisions," she told reporters. "The secretary did not discuss this issue with President Erdogan as any type of a quid pro quo."



Tillerson's discussion with Erdogan at which they agreed to try to improve relations raised some eyebrows at the time because he did not bring any other US officials into the three-hour meeting. The only other person in the room was Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu, who translated for the two men.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A 50-year-old US marine commando was arrested by the SSB from the Indo-Nepal border in Bihar after he was allegedly found roaming in the area in a suspicious manner.

David Doohyun Kyung, a United States (US) Marine Corps commando, was apprehended on March 19 night and is being questioned by the sleuths of the Intelligence Bureau (IB), external intelligence agency RAW and local police, an SSB spokesperson said.

USD 1,919, a compass and an ID card were seized from Kyung after he was intercepted by Sashastra Seema Bal (SSB) troops near the Khouna border post in Jainagar of Madhubani district.

Kyung has been handed over to the local police, he said.

During preliminary questioning, Kyung said that he was a US citizen and produced a tourist visa for Nepal that will expire on April 12, the spokesperson said.

"On detailed questioning by security agencies, including the IB, the RAW (Research and Analysis Wing) and the police, it was found that he had visited India on October 26, 2017, and was asked to leave the country on January 17.

"His visa was cancelled and he was deported on January 26," he said.

It was not immediately clear as to why Kyung was deported then.

The spokesperson said Kyung hails from South Korea, but he migrated to the US in 1998.

Kyung claimed that from Delhi he went to South Korea and on March 12, he left that country to visit Nepal, the spokesperson said.

"His statements were found contradictory as he had the tickets and boarding pass, but there was no such entry in his passport.

"According to him after reaching Nepal he visited the country and he was apprehended by the SSB while he came to visit Janakpur (Nepal) and its nearby village area," the spokesperson said.

Security officials said the fact that he was trying to enter into the Indian side late at night, after being deported once from the country, was a "worrying development" and his credentials and motives are now being probed further.

The police and intelligence agencies are in the process of obtaining further details about him from the US Embassy in Delhi, they said.

US marines are tasked to conduct amphibious operations with the United States Navy.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The freeze on security aid to Pakistan, announced by the Donald Trump Administration early this year, has been incorporated in the $1.3 trillion spending bill which will fund the federal government for the remainder of fiscal 2018.

Congressional leaders, after weeks of negotiations, last night reached a deal on federal spending till September 30, two days before a deadline to fund the government or risk a shutdown.

The 2,232-page draft bill provides the largest funding increase for the US military in 15 years and makes significant investments in national priorities like infrastructure and border security.

In January, the US had suspended about $2 billion in security aid to Pakistan for failing to clamp down on the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani Network terror groups and dismantle their safe havens.

According to the legislation, any assistance to Pakistan under the "Foreign Military Financing Programme" may be made available only to support counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency capabilities in Pakistan.

The bill withholds $33 million in financial assistance to Pakistan unless the Secretary of State informs the Congress that Dr Shakil Afridi is released from jail and cleared of all charges relating to the assistance provided to the US in locating Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden.

In 30 days of the enactment of the Act, the Secretary of State would consult with the Committees on Appropriations on the funds that is anticipated to be subject to the January 2018 policy decision of the Trump Administration to suspend security assistance for Pakistan.

The Congress expects the Secretary of State to promptly inform it in the case of any changes to its current policy along with its justification.

For the civilian assistance to Pakistan, the omnibus spending bill asks the Secretary of State to provide a report on the amount of financing and other support, if any, provided by the Pakistan government to schools supported by, affiliated with, or run by the Taliban or any domestic or foreign terrorist organisation in that country.

The Congress would also seek certification from the Defense Secretary and the Secretary of State on issues, including that the Pakistan government was cooperating with the US in counter-terrorism efforts against the Haqqani Network, the Quetta Shura Taliban, the Lashkar e-Tayyiba, the Jaish-e-Mohammed, the Al Qaeda and other domestic and foreign terrorist organisations.

Also, that they were taking steps to end support for such groups and prevent them from basing and operating in Pakistan and carrying out cross border attacks into neighboring countries.

They also need to certify that Pakistan is not supporting terrorist activities against the US or coalition forces in Afghanistan, and Pakistan's military and intelligence agencies are not intervening extra-judicially into political and judicial processes.

The Defense Secretary and the Secretary of State also need to certify that Pakistan is dismantling improvised explosive device (IED) networks and interdicting precursor chemicals used in the manufacture of IEDs; preventing the proliferation of nuclear-related material and expertise; and implementing policies to protect judicial independence and due process of law.

However, as is in all such cases, there is provision of national interest waiver; but this needs to be on a case-by-case basis with proper explanation to the Congress, the bill says.

Republican leaders had said that the House of Representatives plans to vote today, which would soon be followed by the Senate.

The White House had yesterday said that the President has agreed to the bill.US congressional budget negotiators said today they had reached a deal on federal spending for the remainder of fiscal 2018, two days before a deadline to fund the government or risk a shutdown.

The USD 1.3 trillion spending bill was hailed by House Speaker Paul Ryan, Congress's top Republican, as marking "the beginning of a new era for the United States military," while Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said it would fulfil Democratic goals.

"This critical funding bill fulfils our pledge to rebuild the nation's military," Ryan said.

"It also addresses many of our national priorities, such as school safety, infrastructure, and fighting the opioid epidemic."



The monster measure, backed by President Donald Trump thanks in part to a last-minute sales pitch by Ryan at the White House Wednesday, was introduced with precious little time to act.

Government funding expires at midnight Friday night, and the House of Representatives and Senate will need to scramble if both chambers are to pass the bill and get it signed by Trump by the deadline.

The deal signals an end -- or at least a pause -- to the deeply partisan feuding over funding that has roiled Congress for months.

Five times since October, lawmakers have had to pass stopgap funding legislation to keep the government's lights on. Twice this year the government was allowed to slip into shutdown.

A third lapse would be deeply embarrassing for a Republican-controlled Congress facing mid-term elections in November.

The bill sets defence spending levels, including a 2.4 per cent raise for troops, at USD 700 billion for the year -- an increase of USD 61 billion over the 2017 cap.

Non-defence domestic spending will reach USD 591 billion, an increase of about 10 per cent.

Among the sensitive issues addressed in the bill is gun safety, which has been the focus of prominent national attention in the aftermath of deadly school shootings.

Lawmakers said it includes a provision to strengthen compliance with background checks for firearm sales, and one that reverses what has essentially served as a ban on federal research on gun violence.

Eleventh-hour snags on multiple issues, including immigration enforcement, border security and health care payments nearly ground negotiations to a halt.

The bill includes nearly USD 1.6 billion for construction of almost 160 kilometres of physical barriers and fencing along the US-Mexico border, part of Trump's promised wall.

But it fails to address protections against deportation for more than a million immigrants who arrived in the country illegally as children, an outcome likely to cause a clutch of Democrats to oppose passage.

"I will not vote for funding that continues Trump's war on immigrants," House Democrat Luis Gutierrez said.

Another casualty of the last-minute haggling was a bipartisan effort to fund health care subsidies granted to insurance companies serving low-income patients.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Kerala government today made it clear that it would not accept the arguments of Adani Ports Limited over the extension of contract period for the completion of Rs 7525 crore Vizhinjam International Transshipment Deepwater Multipurpose Seaport near here.

Minister for Ports, Ramachandran Kadannappally, made the statement in the assembly while replying to a notice for an adjournment motion moved by Congress-led UDF opposition alleging that both the government and the Adani group were "hand-in-glove" to delay the project.

Rejecting the charges, the Minister admitted that the government had received a letter from the private group seeking extension by six months for the completion of the project.

"The government will not accept the arguments of the company for extension. We will take steps to levy fine on Adani as per the contract if the project is delayed beyond the stipulated period," he said.

The damage caused to the company's two dredgers in the Ockhi cyclone, that hit the state coast on November last, and the shortage of granite for the work were the reasons cited by Adani for seeking extension of the period, he pointed out.

The agreement for the project was signed with M/S Adani Vizhinjam Port Limited during the previous UDF rule and the company started construction on December 5, 2015.

As per the contract agreement, the port is scheduled to be completed by December 4, 2019.

Kadannappally said the infrastructure work such as rail connectivity and road, to be carried out by the government, was progressing.

Nearly 92 per cent of the land required for the project had been acquired and handed over to the company, he said.

The problem with regard to the shortage of granite also would be sorted out soon, he stated.

"The government will take all steps to complete the project on time," he added.

Seeking notice for the motion, M Vincent (Cong) alleged that both the government and the company were "hand-in glove" to evade the fine of Rs 57 crore to be paid by the company for the extension period.

Even 25 per cent of the work of the breakwater had not been completed so far, he alleged and said the construction of the berth can be taken up only after that.

He claimed that no rehabilitation schemes for the local people had been initiated and the plan for the development of the Port city envisaged as part of the project was not yet ready.

"Both the government and the Adani group have committed serious dereliction of duty in completing the project on time," the MLA alleged.

On the matter, Leader of Opposition Ramesh Chennithala said even before the company submitted the letter seeking extension, the Ports Minister had said in the floor of the house that the project could be delayed due to the damage caused to the equipment on work site and shortage of granite.

Kadannapally had virtually given a reason for the company to seek extension, he said and asked "Is it not an adjustment?"



Later, UDF members staged a walkout alleging that the government was not taking interest in completing the much-hyped project, started by the previous UDF government.

The Vizhinjam seaport project, designed primarily to cater to container trans-shipment besides multi-purpose and break bulk cargo, is being developed by Kerala government in collaboration with the Adani Group.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The CBI has arrested chairman of Bhopal-based LN Medical College J N Chouksey in connection with a Vyapam related case pertaining to Madhya Pradesh Pre-Medical Test-2012, officials said here today.

The agency had filed a supplementary chargesheet in the case on November 23, 2017 in a special court in Bhopal.

The court had issued non-bailable arrest warrants against the absconding chargesheeted persons.

"In pursuance to such arrest warrants, the CBI arrested the accused from his residence at Bhopal. The arrested accused was produced before the court and remanded to judicial custody upto March 24, 2018," CBI spokesperson said here.

It was alleged in the chargesheet that the LN medical college, as part to the criminal conspiracy, dishonestly provided wrong information to the Director of Medical Education, Bhopal (DME) regarding the admission of a co-accused candidate who was already a student of MBBS 2011 batch in Patna.

"The medical college had reported to DME only 5 vacant seats for second round of counselling whereas more than 40 seats were vacant.

"It was further alleged that the medical college took more than 40 admissions on September 30, 2012 when the process of counselling was already over," the spokesperson said.

He said the college, in connivance with the DME officials, forwarded the list of admitted students to DME, which was different from the allotment list of the directorate.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Distraught with the of her husband's death in Mosul, Dipali Tikadar now harbours just one wish: a meeting with West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee to seek a government job.

Dipali's husband Samar Tikadar was kidnapped along with 38 other Indians in Iraq in 2014 by Islamic State. External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj announced in Parliament on Tuesday that all 39 men were dead.

"I will tell the CM when I meet her about my poor financial condition, and appeal for a government job. I think she will understand my situation," Tikadar, a mother of two, said.

Over the past four years, she had been toiling hard to make ends meet for her two children with a hope that her husband's return will change their life for better.

"I thought after Samar returns, our days of hardship would be over. But now, I don't know what to expect from life," Dipali Tikadar told PTI.

She is staring at an uncertain future with little means to provide for her children. Her son Sudip is making preparations for Class X board exams and daughter Sharmistha is a student of Class 4.

"I want a government job so that I can arrange for the education of my children," the 35-year-old woman said.

The tin shed over her mud house in Nadia district, along the Indo-Bangladesh border, is also in need of immediate repair, but Tikadar says she has no money.

"I get Rs 4,800 as an Integrated Child Development Service worker. It is not enough to run a family. Please arrange to take me to Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee," she pleaded.

Samar Tikadar had left for Iraq in 2011, much like Khakon Tikadar - both residents of Chapra Mahakhola area of Nadia district, close to India-Bangladesh border. Their families last heard from them early 2014 before the abduction by IS militants.

Minister of State for External Affairs VK Singh has said that it would take the government eight to 10 days to bring back the remains of the 39 workers.

Dipali Tikadar, however, is not keen on visiting Kolkata airport to receive her husband's remains.

"Even if I get scope to go to the airport to receive the remains of my husband, I won't go. I am too depressed to handle the situation," she said, adding that the Nadia administration has collected blood samples from Samar's siblings for a DNA test.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The tempest over President Donald Trump's congratulatory phone call to Vladimir Putin quickly grew into an uproar over White House leaks, sparking an internal investigation and speculation over who might be the next person Trump forces out of the West Wing.

The White House, which has suffered frequent leaks at times of notable severity said in a statement yesterday it would be a "fireable offense and likely illegal" to leak Trump's briefing papers to the press, after word emerged that the president had been warned in briefing materials not to congratulate the Russian president on his re-election.

Trump did so anyway, and yesterday he defended the call, saying George W. Bush did not have the "smarts" to work with Putin, and that Barack Obama and his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton "didn't have the energy or chemistry" with the Russian leader.

Aides had included guidance in Trump's talking points for the call to Putin stating: "DO NOT CONGRATULATE," a senior administration official said Wednesday, speaking to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because the official had not been authorized to discuss internal matters.

The document had been accessible only to a select group of staffers, two officials said, and had been drafted by aides to National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster. They also said there now is an internal probe of the leak but provided no other details.

The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal deliberations. The White House is not formally acknowledging the veracity of the presidential guidance first reported by The Washington Post.

Trump defended his decision to congratulate Putin in his Wednesday tweets, saying Obama did the same in 2012. "Getting along with Russia (and others) is a good thing, not a bad thing," Trump said, adding that Russia can "help solve problems" from North Korea to "the coming Arms Race."



The White House statement yesterday about a possible firing was an unusual threat and an indication of the seriousness with which the administration is treating the latest breach. Trump and Chief of Staff John Kelly are both angry over the disclosure, officials said, especially because of the small circle of distribution.

Trump has told confidants that be believes the leak was meant to embarrass and undermine him, said White House officials and outside advisers familiar with the president's thinking but not authorized to publicly discuss private conversations.

The president has suggested it was done by "the deep state," they said. That's the catchall phrase for career officials and the Washington establishment who, Trump believes, have tried to protect their own grasp on power by sabotaging him.

Trump has insisted that maintaining a strong personal relationship with Putin is the United States' best chance of improving ties with Russia and has signaled to allies that he trusts his own instincts in dealing with the Russian president.

Other leaks of classified material including partial transcripts of Trump's calls with foreign leaders have not garnered specific warnings of termination or criminal action. It was not clear whether this week's document was classified, but it was included with other classified papers.

It also was unclear whether Trump, who prefers oral briefings, had read the talking points prepared by his national security team before Tuesday's call. McMaster briefed the president by phone before the conversation while Trump was in the White House residence.

The leak further cast doubt on McMaster's longevity in the top foreign policy post. Trump has been moving toward replacing McMaster on the advice of Kelly and Secretary of Defense James Mattis, but has not settled on timing or a successor.

Trump's call of congratulations to Putin drew bruising criticism from members of his own party even before the revelation that he was advised against it.

"An American president does not lead the free world by congratulating dictators on winning sham elections," said Sen.

John McCain, R-Ariz., who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee and has pressed the Trump administration to respond aggressively to Russia's interference in the US presidential election.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)A Congress delegation today met Madhya Pradesh Governor Anandiben Patel and demanded registration of a case against state PWD Minister Rampal Singh and his family members in connection with a woman's alleged suicide.

Preeti Raghuvanshi (28) allegedly committed suicide at her parents' house at Udaipura in Raisen district on March 16. Her family members alleged that she was married to the minister's son Girjesh, who was planning to marry a second time.

The delegation, led by Leader of Opposition in the Assembly Ajay Singh and state Congress chief Arun Yadav, also demanded that the minister be removed from the state cabinet.

In a memorandum handed over to the governor, the opposition party said the woman's father, in his complaint to police, has blamed Rampal Singh, his wife, their son Girjesh and another son for her death.

"So a First Information Report should be registered against them immediately," the memorandum said.

The family members of the minister should also be charged for criminal conspiracy under the IPC as they got Girjesh Singh engaged to another woman despite knowing that he was married to Preeti, it said.

Had the minister accepted her as his daughter-in-law, she would not have taken the extreme step, it claimed.

Earlier, Congress leaders staged a silent protest at Roshanpura Crossing before heading for the Raj Bhawan.

According to the Congress' memorandum, Girjesh and Preeti got married in an Arya Samaj Temple on June 20, 2017.

Due to a ruckus created by Congress MLAs demanding a debate in the Madhya Pradesh Assembly on the alleged suicide, the Budget session of the House was adjourned sine die yesterday, a week ahead of its scheduled culmination.

A day before that, Girjesh Singh participated in rituals held after the last rites of the woman, under pressure from the members of her community.

The minister later told reporters that he was aware that his son participated in the rituals, adding that if his son had accepted the woman as his (late) wife, he too accepted her as his daughter-in-law.

Jagat Singh Rajput, Superintendent of Police, Raisen, said that police have registered a case of unnatural death under the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC), and were recording the statements of people who lived in the woman's neighbourhood.

No suicide case has been registered yet.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The BJP's Karnataka unit president B SYeddyurappa today alleged irregularities to the tune of Rs 158 crore in a company under the Water Resource Department and demanded a CBI probe into it.

Yeddyurappa also wanted Chief Minister Siddaramaiah to immediately ask Water Resource minister M B Patil to step down.

He alleged that the scam took place in January this year when the company, Visvesvaraya Jala Nigam Limited, invited tenders for construction of 2.9 km Chitradurga branch canal at an estimated cost of Rs 157.94 crore.

Two companies, National Project Construction Corporation Limited and Amma Constructions India Private Limited, bid for the work. However, the National Project ConstructionCorporation bagged the contract.

He said both companies had submitted the work done certificate.

National Project submitted the work donecertificate issued by Irrigation and Flood Control Department of Manipur government while Amma Constructions produced the certificate issued by Hindustan Steel Works Construction Limited of Tripura government, he said.

"What is shocking is that the executive engineer who signed on the work done certificate is the same person.The chief engineers of the departments concerned in Tripura and Manipur denied even having the post, let alone signing the document," Yeddyurappa said.

BJP Bengaluru district unit spokesperson N R Ramesh said the departments in the two north-eastern states have initiated criminal proceedings against those who forged their letter.

Yeddyurappa said Siddaramaiah had objected to the corruption charges levelled by prime minister Narendra Modi against him.

"We have information that Patil and his close associates have received a kickback of Rs 25 crore.There is no doubt about it," Yeddyurappa said.

"Prime Minister had called the Siddaramaiah government as 10 per cent commission government but this case reveals that it is 30 per cent kickback government.I want to ask how much commissionSiddaramaiah has received," he said.

"So many scams have taken place in this government that we may have to hold press conferences once in every three days."



Reacting to Yeddyurappa's allegation, Patil rubbished the charge, saying there is no room for any kickback as the tender was cancelled the day it was learnt that the fake certificates were submitted at the time of scrutiny of the documents.

"Not only the tender was cancelled and a decision taken to call for tenders again, but also the contractor has beenblacklisted. Yeddyurappa has a tendency of making baseless charges," Patil said.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)The Congress today accused Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath of withdrawing cases of heinous crimes such as rioting in Muzaffarnagar on religious lines.

Congress communications in-charge Randeep Surjewala alleged that Adityanath was emulating the British by ruling through the policy of "divide and rule".

"Can cases be withdrawn because I am a Muslim, I am a Sikh, I am a Buddhist, I am a Jain, I am a Hindu, I am a Parsi? Can cases be withdrawn based on which religion do you belong to?" he asked.

"Can cases under heinous offences, can cases of promoting enmity on communal ground, can cases of denigrating each others' religion and consequent riots be withdrawn as political cases is an important question that CM needs to answer," he alleged.

BJP leaders met CM Adityanath on February 5, 2018 and demanded withdrawal of 179 of the 503 cases.

Surjewala said that if Adityanath wanted to review all the cases of riots based on truth, then why only 179 out of 503.

"Why are you selectively picking up only those which are being stated or represented by BJP workers and leaders?" he asked.

Surjewala asked if Adityanath was "scared" that after the Supreme Court ordered fast tracking all criminal cases against political leaders.

"Are they scared that if the cases are put in fast track court, then it will be adversarial for BJP leaders, MLAs and MPs and that is why a quick and hurried decision is being taken, although the CM has only moved and a final call is yet to be taken," he said.

The Congress leader urged Adityanath to learn from the defeat in the Gorakhpur Lok Sabha bypolls, saying he is no longer a BJP leader, but a defender and protector of the Constitution and the law.

"We want to remind him that he has taken oath of India's Constitution that he will protect and uphold the Constitution and the law. Will he do so, is a question that he must answer," he said.

"Divide and rule is the policy being followed by the BJP for they have emulated the British for far too long. Divide and rule and somehow come to power divide on the basis of religion and retain or attain power, divide on the basis of caste and attain power and make everyone fight with each other," Surjewala said.

He claimed that in western Uttar Pradesh, there have been no riots since 1857 and even during the partition of the country.

There were no riots in this area as Hindus, Muslim, Sikhs, Buddhists and others all stood together in unison to remain in the Indian Union, he said.

They did not want to go with Pakistan, they did not subscribe to the theory of a religion-based country and they rejected it in toto, he said.

Surjewala said it was only in September 2013, that there were riots for the first time in this area after over 100 years in which 62 people died and 503 cases were registered.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Mark Zuckerberg today apologised for a "major breach of trust" with two billion users of Facebook and vowed to take steps to protect user data, as the social media giant was rocked by a data breach scandal.

In his first public comments on the uproar over harvesting of data of 50 million users by a British firm linked to Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, the Facebook CEO admitted of making "mistakes" and said he was "happy" to answer questions about the scandal before US Congress.

"This was a major breach of trust and I'm really sorry that this happened," he told CNN.

"Our responsibility now is to make sure this doesn't happen again," he said.

He said Facebook has already taken important steps to prevent such a situation from happening again.

He said the site would be reviewing thousands of apps in an "intensive process".

The data scandal erupted after a whistleblower revealed that Cambridge Analytica, a data firm with ties to Trump's 2016 campaign, accessed personal data from 50 million Facebook users without their knowledge, and might have kept that data even after Facebook told the company to delete it.

Cambridge Analytica (CA) had created psychological profiles on 50 million Facebook users via a personality prediction app, created by a researcher named Aleksandr Kogan.

Earlier, Zuckerberg, 33, through a lengthy Facebook post, addressed the privacy scandal. He wrote that the company made "mistakes" and outlined how it has changed its policies to make sure that user data is protected.

"I started Facebook, and at the end of the day, I'm responsible for what happens on our platform. I'm serious about doing what it takes to protect our community," he said.

Zuckerberg said Facebook has a "responsibility" to protect its users' data and if it fails, "we don't deserve to serve you."



He acknowledged that there is more the company needs to do.

"...But we also made mistakes, there's more to do, and we need to step up and do it," he said.

Zuckerberg said Facebook plans to alert everyone whose data was accessed by Cambridge Analytica. But he added that he wishes the company had not waited so long to tell people what happened.

"That's definitely something that, looking back on this, I regret that we didn't do at the time," he told CNN. "I think we got that wrong."



And he said he's made other mistakes along the way.

"I started this when I was so young and inexperienced," Zuckerberg said. "I made technical errors and business errors. I hired the wrong people. I trusted the wrong people," he said.

He said the company will "investigate every app that has access to a large amount of information from before we locked down our platform, and if we detect any suspicious activity, we're going to do a full forensic audit."



"We're going to review thousands of apps," he said.

Facebook said it discovered last week that CA may not have deleted the data as it certified.

"We should not have trusted Cambridge Analytica's certification, and we are not going to make that mistake again," Zuckerberg said.

"This was a breach of trust between Kogan, Cambridge Analytica and Facebook," Zuckerberg wrote in the post. "But it was also a breach of trust between Facebook and the people who share their data with us and expect us to protect it."



In a damage control mode, Zuckerberg announced a slew of measures aimed to secure the platform further.

For this, the Facebook founder said, his company will take three steps to prevent the data misuse.

"We will investigate all apps that had access to large amounts of information before we changed our platform to dramatically reduce data access in 2014, and we will conduct a full audit of any app with suspicious activity," he said.

"We will ban any developer from our platform that does not agree to a thorough audit. And if we find developers that misused personally identifiable information, we will ban them and tell everyone affected by those apps," he added.

Zuckerberg said that the second step is to restrict developers' data access even further to prevent other kinds of abuse.

He cited an example for this: "It (Facebook) will remove developers' access to one's data if the app hasn't been used by the person in three months."



"We will reduce the data you give an app when you sign in -- to only your name, profile photo, and email address. We'll require developers to not only get approval but also sign a contract in order to ask anyone for access to their posts or other private data. And we'll have more changes to share in the next few days," Zuckerberg said.

He said next month Facebook will show everyone a tool at the top of their Feed with the apps they have used and an easy way to revoke those apps' permissions to their data.

"We already have a tool to do this in your privacy settings, and now we will put this tool at the top of your Feed to make sure everyone sees it, Zuckerberg said.

Over the past several days, Facebook has been facing an investigation by the Federal Trade Commission and calls for legislative testimonies in the US and Europe.

India's IT and Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad has warned social media companies such as Facebook of stringent actions if there was any attempt to influence the electoral process of any country.

Amidst a global outrage against Facebook, the Silicon Valley-based company, which currently has 2 billion monthly active users, has suffered a loss of USD 50 billion in market value.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg today apologised for a "major breach of trust" with its users and vowed to take steps to protect their data, as the social media giant faced heat by a massive scandal over data siphoned by a data mining firm with ties to the 2016 Trump campaign.

Seeking to quell the global uproar over harvesting of data of 50 million Facebook users by Cambridge Analytica, a British firm linked to Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, Zuckerberg admitted making "mistakes."



"I started Facebook, and at the end of the day, I'm responsible for what happens on our platform. I'm serious about doing what it takes to protect our community," he said in his first public comments since the scandal broke out.

"We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can't then we don't deserve to serve you," Zuckerberg, 33, said in a Facebook post.

He promised to make it far harder for apps to "harvest" user information.

Later, he told CNN in an interview that he was "really sorry" that this happened.

"This was a major breach of trust and I'm really sorry that this happened," he said, adding that it was the company's responsibility now is to make sure this does not happen again.

CA's chief executive, Alexander Nix - who was suspended on Tuesday - was secretly recorded in a Channel 4 investigation saying the London-based company ran Donald Trump's digital campaign during the 2016 US election.

Zuckerberg said Facebook would be reviewing thousands of apps in an "intensive process".

The data scandal erupted after a whistleblower revealed that Cambridge Analytica, a data firm with ties to Trump's presidential campaign, accessed personal data from 50 million Facebook users without their knowledge, and might have kept that data even after Facebook told the company to delete it.

Cambridge Analytica (CA) had created psychological profiles on 50 million Facebook users via a personality prediction app, created by a researcher named Aleksandr Kogan.

Zuckerberg acknowledged that there is more the company needs to do.

He said Facebook plans to alert everyone whose data was accessed by CA. But he added that he wishes the company had not waited so long to tell people what happened.

"That's definitely something that, looking back on this, I regret that we didn't do at the time," he said. "I think we got that wrong."



He said he has made other mistakes along the way.

"I started this when I was so young and inexperienced," Zuckerberg said. "I made technical errors and business errors. I hired the wrong people. I trusted the wrong people," he acknowledged.

He said the company will "investigate every app that has access to a large amount of information from before we locked down our platform, and if we detect any suspicious activity, we're going to do a full forensic audit."



"We're going to review thousands of apps," he said.

Facebook said it discovered last week that CA may not have deleted the data as it certified.

"We should not have trusted Cambridge Analytica's certification, and we are not going to make that mistake again," Zuckerberg said.

"This was a breach of trust between Kogan, Cambridge Analytica and Facebook," Zuckerberg wrote in the post. "But it was also a breach of trust between Facebook and the people who share their data with us and expect us to protect it."



In a damage control mode, Zuckerberg announced a slew of measures aimed to secure the platform further.

For this, the Facebook founder said, his company will take three steps to prevent the data misuse.

"We will investigate all apps that had access to large amounts of information before we changed our platform to dramatically reduce data access in 2014, and we will conduct a full audit of any app with suspicious activity," he said.

"We will ban any developer from our platform that does not agree to a thorough audit. And if we find developers that misused personally identifiable information, we will ban them and tell everyone affected by those apps," he added.

Zuckerberg said that the second step is to restrict developers' data access even further to prevent other kinds of abuse.

"We will reduce the data you give an app when you sign in -- to only your name, profile photo, and email address. We'll require developers to not only get approval but also sign a contract in order to ask anyone for access to their posts or other private data. And we'll have more changes to share in the next few days," Zuckerberg said.

He said next month Facebook will show everyone a tool at the top of their Feed with the apps they have used and an easy way to revoke those apps' permissions to their data.

Over the past several days, Facebook has been facing an investigation by the Federal Trade Commission and calls for legislative testimonies in the US and Europe.

India's IT and Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad has warned social media companies such as Facebook of stringent actions if there was any attempt to influence the electoral process of the country.

Amidst a global outrage against Facebook, the Silicon Valley-based company, which currently has 2 billion monthly active users, has suffered a loss of USD 50 billion in market value.

(This story has not been edited by Business Standard staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)By David LjunggrenOTTAWA (Reuters) - Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on Wednesday for the first time that a deal to renegotiate NAFTA was likely, amid signs negotiators may be closer to settling one of the regional trade pact's most contentious issues."We remain very confident that a win-win-win deal is not only possible, but likely," Trudeau told a Toronto business audience.The head of Canada's Unifor union - who has close ties to Ottawa's negotiators - said the United States had dropped its insistence that all autos made in NAFTA countries have 50 percent U.S. content. The ...By Ben Blanchard and Brenda GohBEIJING/SHANGHAI (Reuters) - China blamed U.S. export restrictions for its record trade surplus with the United States, but expressed hope that a solution can be found to settle trade issues between the world's two biggest economies as U.S. tariffs loom. Beijing was bracing on Thursday for an announcement from U.S. President Donald Trump of tariffs of as much as $60 billion on Chinese imports, raising fears that the two countries could be sliding towards a trade war. The tariffs will be imposed under Section 301 of the 1974 U.S. Trade Act, focusing on Chinese ...MUMBAI (Reuters) - India will offer incentives for chickpea exports for three months, the government said on Thursday, as prices have plunged in the past six months on expectations of a record production this year.Exporters will get a 7 percent incentive of the value of the shipment, the government said in its order.Chickpea prices have fallen 38 percent in the past six months to a three-year low in the world's biggest producer and consumer of the pulse, also known as chana.On Thursday, chickpea futures provisionally closed at 3,673 rupees ($56.42) per 100 kg, compared with the ...NEW DELHI (Reuters) - India's top court on Thursday deferred a decision to lift a ban on the sale of assets by embattled telecoms firm Reliance Communications Ltd (RCom), saying it will hear the case again in two weeks.The Supreme Court ruling marks a setback for RCom, which is trying to reduce its debt load of $6.8 billion as of last March. The company in December agreed to sell most of its wireless assets to Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd and had been expecting to close the deal by March.RCom shares closed 5.9 percent lower, having fallen as much as 7.1 percent after the court order.The company ...WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump will sign a presidential memorandum on Thursday to potentially slap tariffs on $50 billion in Chinese imports over forced transfer of intellectual property, a senior White House official said.Trump will sign the memorandum at 12:30 p.m. EDT (1630 GMT) at the White House. The directive will open a consultation period by the U.S. Trade Representative's office to look at a list of Chinese products that could be targeted, Everett Eissenstat, deputy director of the National Economic Council, told reporters. In addition, Trump will also direct the ...By Richard Cowan and Amanda BeckerWASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump, in talks with congressional leaders on Wednesday, backed a $1.3 trillion spending bill meant to avert a U.S. government shutdown, even though it is expected to exclude some of his specific immigration-related funding requests.The bill has not been formally unveiled, but aides said it will be released soon, with lawmakers hurrying to approve it and send it to Trump for enactment before a midnight Friday shutdown deadline, the latest in a series of such scrambles in 2017-2018.The White House said in a statement ...BERLIN (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump's decision to impose tariffs on steel and aluminium imports heighten the risk of protectionist trade policies by other countries, which could harm German exports, the economy ministry said in its monthly report."It remains to be seen how the latest developments in U.S. tariff policy will impact German trade and the outlook for exports," the ministry said on Thursday."Uncertainty linked to possible protectionist measures and countermeasures at present constitute a risk for trade," it added.U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer said on ...LOGAN  A 30-year-old Logan woman suspected of multiple burglaries and thefts made her first formal appearance before a judge.

Karli J. Estrada appeared in 1st District Court Tuesday morning. She cried while standing beside her attorney, Greg Skordas. She has been in jail on $15,000 bail, since being arrested on March 8.

Later, Logan City Police Chief Gary Jensen said officers started investigating Estrada, after her employer began suspecting that she was stealing from the company.

The business she was working at had some incentive gift cards and she was caught taking some of those inappropriately, Jensen said.

As the investigation into Estrada continued, officers uncovered evidence that she was allegedly taking valuables from homes and then selling them.

It appeared that she had been pawning things from homes that she had been helping clean, jewelry and those kind of things that we were able to identify, had been taken out of a burglary.

State attorneys have charged Estrada with six counts of burglary and four counts of various thefts, all second-degree felonies, and a charge of misdemeanor theft. The crimes allegedly occurred from August 2017 to earlier this month.

During Tuesdays court appearance, Skordas said he is working on a possible plea agreement with state attorneys. Details of the deal were not disclosed. He also explained that Estradas family is trying to get her into a treatment facility.

Judge Brian Cannell lowered Estradas bail to $5,000, after attorneys for both sides agreed that it would help the suspect receive treatment. He ordered her to appear again in court May 1.The agreement was signed yesterday March 21, in Kigali, Rwanda, establishing the African Continental Free Trade Area. It was signed during the 10th Extraordinary Session of the Assembly of African Union Heads of State and Government report CT.

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Aforty-year-long process of African unity has finally materialised with the signing of an agreement establishing the African Continental Free Trade Area (ACFTA) by 44 countries on the continent. The agreement was signed Wednesday March 21 in an Extraordinary Session of the Assembly of African Union Heads of State and Government, hosted in Kigali, Rwanda by the countrys President Paul Kagame who doubles as Chairperson of the AU. Cameroons Minister of Finance, Louis Paul Motaze represented President Paul Biya at the gathering. The adoption of the agreement establishing the ACFTA was followed by the signing of a Protocol on the Free Movement of Persons, and the Kigali Declaration; three pacts which President Kagame described as an expression of African nations unity in moving the continent forward. The Continental Free Trade Area is the culmination of a vision set forth nearly 40 years ago in the Lagos Plan of Action, adopted by Heads of State in 1980. That undertaking led directly to the Abuja Treaty establishing the African Economic Community in 1991. he said. The signing of the agreement gives birth to the worlds largest free trade area. President Kagame said the promise of a free trade and free movement is prosperity for all Africans, because we are prioritizing the production of value-added goods and services that are Made in Africa. The advantages we gain by creating one African market will also benefit our trading partners around the world, and that is a good thing.



The Chairperson of the African Union Commission, Moussa Faki Mahamat, for his part, enumerated regional trade accords in Europe and Asia, noting; for Africa, after decades of independence, marked by persistent under-development and a marginal place in the international system, the terms of the debate are laid down in almost Manichean terms: Unite or Perish, as Kwame Nkrumah said at the Addis Ababa founding Summit. He said it was vital to lift barriers that divide the continent, hinder its economic take-off and perpetuate misery. The creation of a single continental market for goods and services, with free movement of business persons and investments according to the ACFTA, comes along with the founding of the Continental Customs Union and the African Customs Union. Africa trades far less with itself than it does with the rest of the world. Recent statistics show Intra-Africa trade stands at about 16%, compared with 19% intra-regional trade in Latin America, 51% in Asia, 54% in North America and 70% in Europe. Going by a United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) estimation, the AfCFTA has the potential to boost intra-Africa trade by 53% by eliminating import duties and non-tariff barriers. UNECA says the agreement could create an African market of over 1.2 billion people with a Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of $2.5 trillion.



MBOM Sixtus| BY Lynchy |

Sydney based digital shop Holler Australia has recruited two digital natives, Fergus Cahill and Nikola Spadina as the agencys new creative leads.

Cahill and Spadina first began collaborating together over four-years ago. Both individually, and combined, the two have forged a growing reputation for innovative, adventurous and avant-garde thinking.

Cahill founded creative collective Manual in 2009, and has worked in a diverse range of capacities since then. In 2013 Cahill was selected as one of Australian Creatives Power Top 20 and is regarded by his peers as someone who navigates the interstitial space between traditional and digital media.

Says Cahill: Ive been a fan of Hollers for some time. The vision and empowerment management have offered Nik and I is extremely encouraging and Im looking forward to helping create beautiful work.

Spadina brings to Holler unparalleled uniqueness. Whether it be living with hippies in Mexico; creating cinema pieces for Yoko Ono with the MCA; lecturing at UTS whilst studying post-graduate Psychology.

Says Spadina: Hollers shown us what the outliers are capable of, and Im looking forward to pushing the boundaries even further with brave thinking.| BY Ricki Green |

AirAsia has uncovered the breadth and beauty of 130 destinations found within its network as part of a new brand campaign via Publicis Brisbane, specifically targeted at Australians.

The campaign, which will roll out across digital, social, cinema and out of home channels invites Australians to unlock the millions of travel possibilities by enjoying the warmth and welcoming hospitality of Asia.

Says Rudy Khaw, group head of branding, AirAsia: The campaign ticks its way through the best of AirAsias destinations  from the azure waters of Thailand to the ancient temples of Angkor Wat.

Consumer research undertaken in Australia told us that while travellers knew about the AirAsia brand and our products and services, they did not have full visibility of our network.

We have one of the most extensive networks across Asia-Pacific, and by bringing 130 of our destinations to life, we hope to be able to entice even more Australians to fly with us.

Since its first-ever flight to the Gold Coast in 2009, AirAsia has carried more than 6.1 million Australians on its network and has been named the Worlds Best Low-Cost Airline by Skytrax for nine consecutive years.

AirAsia recently announced a number of new initiatives in the Australian market including its move from Melbourne Tullamarine to Melbourne Avalon Airport later in the year, an Australian cabin crew recruitment drive and a new partnership with Surfing Australia, state bodies and the World Surfing Leagues Australian professional series.

Client: AirAsia

Agency: Publicis Brisbane| BY Ricki Green |

Ancestry has announced the launch of a new TV brand campaign via its local creative agency, which showcases the personal impact that unlocking family history can have on identity, self-discovery and understanding who you are.

The campaign videos, which follow the brands Life Stages online series (launched in February), follow the journeys of three Australians  surfboard shaper James Cheal, Chilli Surfboards, travel and lifestyle blogger, and creator of The Vista, Julia Ashwood, and winemaker Glen Robert of Bent Road Wine  as they uncover their pasts, deepening their self-understanding, and inspiring their futures.

As part of Ancestrys commitment to local content, the brand campaign was conceived from data-led consumer insights, which helped identify the real-life stories Australians would most relate to.

Says Nigel Seeto, marketing director at Ancestry: Our latest brand campaign explores the significant impact that unlocking your past can have on your future. Witnessing first-hand the transformative power that discovering their roots had on these three individuals has been a real privilege, and were hoping to inspire more Australians to take this journey.

Working in partnership with Workshop to produce the campaign, the spots follow the Ancestry and AncestryDNA stories of Chilli, Julia, and Glen, as they uncover heritage they never knew they had.

Chilli discovers his lifes work is mirrored in his ancestors seafaring origins; new mum Julias nomadic background matches her spirit for adventure and inspires her next travels; and winemaker Glen finds comfort in his diverse roots and connections to the land by tracing his ancestors journey to Australia.

Says Jamie Kwong, creative director, Workshop: Realising the positive difference Ancestry and AncestryDNA can make to peoples present lives by connecting them to their past has been really satisfying for us. It was a privilege to work with wonderfully appreciative people like James, Julia and Glen and through discoveries made via Ancestry, help them understand more, and feel good about the paths theyve chosen. Whether those paths be shaping surfboards, making wine or creating travel guides.

The TV brand campaign content can also be viewed on Ancestrys YouTube channel.

Creative Agency: Workshop

Creative Director: Jamie Kwong

Creative Team: Jamie Kwong & Nick Bonney

Director: Jif Morrison

Producer: Stef Puskar of Brightworks Films

DOP: Mitch Ayers

Editor: Max Thornill & Karl Pearson

Photographer: Art Weber

Senior Business Director: Zoie Bache

Business Manager: Hannah Pullan

Client: Ancestry

Country Manager: Kelly Godfrey

Senior Director, Programming: Brad Argent

Marketing Director: Nigel Seeto

Marketing Manager: Amy Pike

Senior Manager, Communications: Bryony Partridge| BY Ricki Green |

Last night, Goose Island via The Taboo Group successfully hosted a world-first Facebook live auction, selling off its last 12 bottles of Bourbon County Stout in Australia.

Bringing the beer community together, the innovative and unconventional auction saw eager beer enthusiasts bid from all ends of Australia with over $2,128 raised to Pink Boots Society, an organisation empowering women in the brewing industry.

Hosted at Melbournes Beermash and through Goose Islands Facebook page, the hour long auction saw hundreds of bids fly in with winning bids starting from upwards of $100. A reserve price for each bottle was set at $20, however the bidding moved quickly over each 60 second individual auction with an average sale price of $151.25 per bottle and the highest bid of the night coming in at $240 on the final bottle.

With bids and banter coming in at a furious pace, the enthusiasm of the crowd saw hosts cut down a Goose Island roundel sign off the wall and put up for auction as per requests, fetching $301 from a die-hard fan.

Tif Waldron, board member at Pink Boots Society, said the live auction surpassed her expectations.

Says Waldron: We had a great time last night and it was great to see everyone get on board for a good cause. Pink Boots Society is absolutely thrilled with the generous donations by bidders all across the country.

Wed love to give a huge thanks to the Goose Island team and everyone who tuned into and participated in the auction. The money will help fund scholarships provided by the organisation.| BY Ricki Green |

Emerging independent media agency Kaimera has won the media account for real estate business Knight Frank.

Founded in London in 1896, Knight Frank has a strong commercial real estate business in Australia with a growing residential offering. The business has 26 offices across the country and employs more than 1,000 people.

The media account was contested by a four-way pitch with Kaimera selected to handle all brand and service line campaign media including strategy, consulting, planning and buying.

Says Kara May, group marketing director for Knight Frank: When we met with Kaimera, the agency demonstrated great strategic insights and chemistry wise, they really are the best fit for us. Were very much looking forward to working with them as we drive continued growth in the Australian market.| BY Lynchy |

Geometry Global Malaysia has appointed Michael Fillon as Executive Creative Director. He will be based in Kuala Lumpur, reporting to the agencys CEO Kenny Loh.

Fillon (pictured) joins Geometry Malaysia with the objective of fulfilling Geometrys goal of turning brand equity into action, while aiming to introduce game-changing ideas that would help steer the agency into a direction best poised to tackle todays challenges in experiential commerce and shopper technology.

I am indeed excited to have Michael join the Geometry Malaysia family, said Loh. His arrival couldnt have been timelier. As an agency we are on the cusp of some amazing change and evolution. With Michaels passion for creativity and his diverse experience across a myriad of businesses hes perfectly suited to lead Geometry Malaysia into its next phase of growth. Ill admit we searched high and low for this critical position and the wait has been worth it. Michaels energy is infectious, his talent undeniable. Im looking forward to some really great work coming out of Geometry Malaysia.

Fillon commented, To help Geometry stretch the imagination for whats possible in experiential commerce. A feat we aim to achieve by understanding retail and communications tech, by digging up genuine insights from the culture, and by developing work that is unmistakably made by and made for this unique country. In an age where clients are becoming even more result-oriented, our work will present intelligent ways to get our audiences to act  to join movements, to engage in conversations, to try new things, and ultimately, to shop well. | BY Lynchy |

TCP-TBWA\Group Indonesia has appointed Paul Sidharta to the role of executive creative director, overseeing the creative duties of the agency group. Sidharta joins from JWT Singapore, where he held the role of creative director working on the global LUX portfolio.

Saumyajit Banerjee, chief executive director said, TCP-TBWA\Indonesia We work with some of Indonesias most innovative brands and our focus is to develop disruptive solutions for our clients helping them move and shape culture. Paul will help us achieve this, his multi market experience and deep knowledge of the Indonesia market, will amplify our capabilities and ensure we continue to challenge the status quo. Were thrilled Paul has joined the collective.

Sidharta will be responsible for driving integration across TBWA\Group disciplines and help identify and develop the agencies creative pirates.

Originally from Indonesia, Sidharta began his career at Lintas, before moving to InterAdmark Dentsu, then onto Leo Burnett Kreasindo where he helped developed highly impactful communications for their clients. In 2005, Sidharta moved with his wife to Bangkok, joining JWT to manage Unilevers regional Sunsilk portfolio, later picking up the global LUX portfolio. In 2008, Paul moved to Singapore with JWT when Unilever relocated its RHQ to the market.

Sidharta said, TBWA is a hugely respected agency and I am honored to join them. At the same time, I am so excited to see the potential of TCP-TBWA\Indonesia, as one of the most respected agencies in town.Notice for the Postmedia Network

This website uses cookies to personalize your content (including ads), and allows us to analyze our traffic. Read more about cookies here. By continuing to use our site, you agree to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.Thursday, March 22, 2018 at 1:04PM

Todays technologies can be used to amplify human ingenuity.-Microsoft Canadas VP of Marketing and Operations Emma Da SilvaBy Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

Artificial Intelligence (AI), Big Data, Machine Learning, Cloud Computing. These were once all theoretical buzzwords bordering on science fiction and pertaining to the ideals of a far off future. These concepts, however, are very much in practice today and at an exponential rate which will not only change the way businesses operate, but will also transform society, jobs and the workplace as well as various industries.

Microsoft Canada took to the historic Carlu events venue to discuss the Future Now with various experts in applied sciences, AI and other related fields to shed clarity, insight and understanding in these emerging technologies.

AI has demonstrated to be a game changing innovation. Easily as important as the discovery of electricity or the Internet in years past. Machines can now learn at staggering rates without much human intervention. Infineon used AI and a robot to solve the Rubik's Cube puzzle in under one second. AI in various applications is expected to add $16 Trillion to the global economy in the next 20 years. It can drive innovation, reach more people at exponential rates.

Todays technologies can be used to amplify human ingenuity. said Microsoft Canadas VP of Marketing Emma Da Silva. Microsoft, whose Azure cloud services are the backbone of various A.I. and machine learning technologies, has taken on the role of advocate as well as steward for AI. The company believes that the resulting Digital transformation helps us to be more productive and we can create more value, do more in less time. Microsoft's big push, however, is that we should proceed responsibly.

There are many implications stemming from AI in the workplace. What jobs or functions will become fully automated and, as a result, will no longer need human workers. How will businesses and government present the opportunities and the challenges to people. Will AI create new jobs? What will be considered transferable skills towards this new future and how can the technology be implemented free of bias.news, latest-news

The ACT Legislative Assembly will call on the federal government to review Australia's refugee resettlement sponsorship program, ahead of the Palm Sunday rally for refugees this weekend. A packed public gallery applauded when Labor and the Liberals backed Greens leader Shane Rattenbury's motion, calling on the Assembly to advocate for a more affordable and "humane" visa fee structure for refugees being resettled in Australia. Under the Commonwealth's Community Support Program, individuals, businesses and communities can sponsor potential applicants for humanitarian visas. However there are only 1000 places and strict criteria for applying. Applicants must be aged between 18 and 50, have a job offer or be on a pathway to securing a job, and be willing to live and work in regional Australia. The cost of the sponsorship can also be eyewatering, with an initial visa application charge of $2680, without any guarantee of success. If the application is approved, the applicant must pay an extra $16,444, plus $2680 per family member, before the visa is granted. The Refugee Council estimated for a family of five to enter Australia under the program, it would cost upwards of $50,000. Mr Rattenbury's motion expressed concerns about changes to Newstart eligibility that had left refugee families in an awkward position, with community groups like Canberra Refugee Support left to plug the gaps. The ACT parliament resolved to write to their federal counterparts to advocate for an overhaul of the scheme. Canberra is one of 149 refugee welcome zones across Australia. More than 2000 refugees have been resettled in Canberra in the past decade. The motion comes as hundreds of pro-refugee activists prepare to assemble in Garema Place this weekend for their annual Palm Sunday rally. The rally will call on the federal government to resettle refugees trapped on Manus Island and Nauru.

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Canberra Airport managing director Stephen Byron has raised concerns about the falling number of flights from the capital to Sydney. Airport statistics show the combined number of Qantas and QantasLink flights on the route dropped almost 15 per cent in January, compared to the same month last year. Qantas said schedule changes had resulted in fewer flights on the route, although larger aircraft were being used to "minimise" the impact on the number of available seats. Mr Byron said it was common to hear travellers complaining of their struggles to get a seat on a Canberra to Sydney flight. "I am concerned as to whether there are enough flights between Canberra and Sydney," he said. "Certainly there were quite a lot of stories throughout January of people struggling to get flights." The Canberra to Sydney route has recently had some of the worst cancellation rates in the country. Although the cancellation rate had noticeably improved in January, Mr Byron said this was not all positive news. "The figures speak for themselves," he said. "What they show is that, as pleasing as a reduction in the cancellation rate is, it seems to have been achieved by not scheduling a whole bunch of flights for the month that would probably normally be scheduled." Qantas said it had re-arranged its schedule to use larger aircraft but fewer flights, so that total capacity remained similar but demands on crew and aircraft were reduced. "We had a spike in cancellations in some markets late last year, including Canberra and some regional ports, due to a mix of engineering issues and pilot availability," a spokeswoman said. "[These] mostly impacted our 717 and turboprop fleets. "As we announced at the time, we made some adjustments to our schedules that saw us reduce the overall number of flights but put on larger aircraft to minimise the impact on the number of seats availability." In January 2017 Qantas and QantasLink flew 321 times from Canberra to Sydney, a figure that dropped 13 per cent to 279 flights in January 2018. By comparison, in January 2017 Virgin flew the route 166 times, a figure that dropped 2 per cent to 162 flights in January 2018. Cancellation rates dropped to 2 per cent on the Canberra to Sydney route in January, and fell to 1.8 per cent for the return route. After reaching as high as 8.1 per cent in September, Canberra to Sydney cancellations have fallen every month since then but remain above the 1.5 per cent national average. Labor Canberra MP Gai Brodtmann raised the matter in parliament last month and urged the Coalition government to act. "According to the minister, he is 'monitoring the situation' - monitoring the situation that goes from bad to worse," she said. A spokeswoman for then-Infrastructure Minister Barnaby Joyce said disruptions due to cancellations were regrettable, and that the government would monitor the route, however it did not have a direct role in such matters.

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The University of Canberra has given the green light for an Australian-first pill testing trial at next month's Groovin the Moo music festival. The decision brings the pilot one step closer to reality, after a proposal for last year's Spilt Milk festival was cancelled by the promoter just weeks before the event. Rumours of federal sabotage swirled around the trial, which had been planned on Commonwealth land by the STA-SAFE consortium with the backing of ACT police and health authorities. Groovin the Moo, an all-ages event, will come to Canberra in late April at the university, which controls the land under a lease. On Thursday, a spokeswoman for the university said it was "open to supporting" the trial, providing "the main stakeholders and relevant authorities are all in agreement". Gino Vumbaca, of the consortium, said all that remained for the trial to go ahead was the approval of the festival promoter, Cattleyard, and "official permission" from the ACT government. "We're still in talks with the promoter about this, but we've learnt our lesson from last time, we've got all our paperwork in order, we've met every requirement, so we're confident." A spokeswoman for ACT Health Minister Meegan Fitzharris confirmed the government was considering a new proposal put to them by the consortium earlier this year to hold the trial at Groovin the Moo. "The ACT Government supports a controlled trial of pill testing, conducted by an independent consortium, as was proposed for the Spilt Milk Festival last year," she said. "[We are] committed to minimising the harms associated with recreational and illicit drug use and will continue to pursue harm reduction measures." Emergency doctor and consortium member David Caldicott said the only substantial difference to the trial this time around would be the venue. "I think that says a lot about the real reasons the Spilt Milk [proposal] was rejected last year," he said. A spokeswoman for Cattleyard Promotions said the company was still "participating in consultation with all stakeholders". Mr Vumbaca said the trial was widely supported by the community, "especially parents", and did not endorse drug use. "We're living in the real world, we know some people going to festivals will experiment with drugs and we need to make sure they are safe. "Only last week, there were [a number] of suspected overdoses at [a rave] in Fyshwick...No one wants that four am call from the emergency department." Dr Caldicott said pill testing had been shown to save lives overseas and Canberrans should feel proud they could soon be on "the very cutting edge" of drugs policy in Australia. The trial has been more than two years in the making, he said, after long consultation with the ACT government eventually saw the territory change its stance on drug testing. "They really deserve kudos for being open to the science on this and allowing themselves to be persuaded by it," Dr Calidcott said. "But I think the politics over the next month will be fascinating." If approved, volunteer chemists and peer support workers will run a tent at the festival to test drugs for free, alongside the support of authorities. "They'll be able to not just identify the drug but put it in context, they can say 'this will do this to you'," Dr Calidcott said. Volunteers will also conduct a survey of drug users, allowing for data collection on a "largely invisible" consumer group, while an evaluation of the pilot will be conducted by an independent researcher. In October, just days after the Spilt Milk trial won ACT government approval, Canberra Liberal Jeremy Hanson wrote to his federal counterparts urging them to intervene by "giving directions" to the National Capital Authority, which controls the land on which the festival was held. While the NCA denied any political intervention at the time, ACT Greens Minister Shane Rattenbury accused Mr Hanson of sabotaging the trial by "calling up his mates on the hill". Federal health minister Greg Hunt has previously said the Commonwealth did not support pill testing on principle, but the trial was a matter for the territory.

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Gold Coast City Council has dumped its plan to mine data from users of free wi-fi during the Commonwealth Games. The council backtracked on its wi-fi plans on Thursday and lifestyle chair Hermann Vorster said the requirement for users of free wi-fi to log in through their Facebook would be amended. "Only today, the Facebook CEO has confirmed that he is investigating privacy issues to do with Facebook and how it manages people's privacy, Cr Vorster said. So if Facebook cannot guarantee the security of its users, it is best council takes a cautionary approach and removes this feature from our free wi-fi. That is what we are doing right now. "The change to our wi-fi log in page will be sorted in the next few days, meaning people will be able to access free council wi-fi in our chosen precincts, without having to log in via Facebook.'' The council announced the Facebook log as a requirement to access fast wi-fi on Tuesday and the plan was then savaged on Wednesday by civil libertarians. By Thursday, the council scrapped the Facebook requirement after executives of the social media giant confirmed they had privacy issues with their site. Visitors will now be able to access the wi-fi without logging in through their Facebook account. Griffith University adjunct professor and cyber security expert William Caelli welcomed the councils backtracking and said the councils original plan was a "mistake". The mistake made by the Gold Coast Council is saying you have to log in using your Facebook and also went further than that in that they were going to harvest the public data from your Facebook account, he said. I would not have done it and Im surprised they did and I think it turned out to be wrong. Mr Caelli said he thought the council had not understood the implications of what it was doing. They didnt realise people are hypersensitive about their data, he said. Data is the worlds biggest traded commodity and people are starting to realise that. The good news is, I congratulate them on changing their mind. Mr Caelli said the Cambridge Analytics report had produced a good discussion about the problem of personal privacy in the age of social media. We have a problem on our hands, he said. The problem is that governments have taken no interest at all in regulating the social media. Whats happening is governments are starting to realise that essentially the internet and cyber security is now of national security significance. Mr Caelli said Facebook and various social networks were not going to go away, but the only way to protect yourself from data mining was to delete all accounts. If theyre concerned... delete Facebook ... call your friend on the phone," he said.

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Bali: An Australian accountant arrested in Bali on drug charges is set to avoid the death penalty, after prosecutors asked the court to find Isaac Emmanuel Roberts guilty of a lesser charge. Prosecutor Suhadi told the Denpasar District Court that Mr Roberts should be charged with illegal use of a category 1 narcotic for personal consumption. The prosecutor requested the defendant be sentenced to one year and three months in prison, less the three and a half months he has served, and fined Rp. 20,000,000 ($A1875). He would serve an extra six months if he cannot pay the fine. At one stage it had appeared that Mr Roberts could be charged with the far more serious offence of importing drugs. Under article 113 of Indonesia's strict drug laws the maximum punishment for importing more than five grams of illegal narcotics into the country is the death penalty. Customs officials at Denpasar airport had allegedly found 20.54 grams of the drug ice and 14 ecstasy tablets in Mr Roberts' luggage on December 4 last year. Mr Suhadi said Mr Roberts had "contradicted the Indonesian government's program to eradicate narcotics and illegal drugs" and his actions had "ruined his own health". But the mitigating factors in Mr Roberts' case, Mr Suhadi said, included the fact that he was "honest and admitted fully what he did during the trial". "The defendant has never been convicted and has promised to undergo therapy for his narcotics addiction," Mr Suhadi said. In addition, assessments by Indonesian and Australian doctors found Mr Roberts was an addict and that he had been a user of multiple narcotics, including ice, methamphetamine, cocaine, ecstasy and marijuana since the year 2000. When admitted to Bhayangkara hospital, he had been diagnosed with mental health and behavioral issues due to the methamphetamines, as well as depression and anxiety disorders. Mr Roberts sat emotionless during the proceedings in the court on Thursday and did not speak afterwards. In February, Mr Roberts said that he was in rehabilitation and that he had been clean for 10 weeks. "Given that I am in rehabilitation and I have the support of the authorities, I suspect [the death penalty] is not likely," he told reporters at the time. His legal team has emphasised his history as a drug user with a history of depression, past trauma and suicidal tendencies. Chief judge I.G.N.Putra Atmaja adjourned the trial to April 4, when lawyers for Mr Roberts will present their defence.

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BEIJING (Reuters) - China has named Guo Shuqing as the head of the newly formed regulator for the banking and insurance sectors, financial publication Caixin reported on Wednesday without citing a direct source.

Guo had been the head of the China Banking Regulatory Commission, which was merged with the China Insurance Regulatory Commission as part of a broader government reshuffle approved by parliament last week.

Guo, 61, is not only highly regarded as one of China's most experienced financial services professionals, but he also stands out from Chinese bureaucrats as a reform-minded policymaker who is willing to take aggressive steps.

The merger of the China Banking Regulatory Commission (CBRC) and China Insurance Regulatory Commission (CIRC) is aimed at resolving existing problems such as unclear responsibilities and cross-regulation, according to a document released during China's annual parliament meeting, which ended on Tuesday.

The move, along with others approved by parliament, will give authorities more clout as the government begins the second year of a crackdown on risks in the financial system such as riskier types of financing and shadow banking.

The new merged entity will report directly to the State Council, although the function of making important laws and regulations of the CBRC and CIRC have been transferred to the People's Bank of China (PBOC) as the central bank takes on a bigger role.

All the seven existing vice chairmen from both the CBRC and CIRC will remain in their posts, according to Caixin.

Guo, a philosophy major and once a visiting scholar at Oxford University, previously also served as a deputy central bank governor, the top foreign exchange regulator and a deputy governor of Guizhou province.

He steered China Construction Bank Corp. to a successful public listing in Hong Kong in 2005 - the first among Chinese banks - and then in late 2007 on the Shanghai bourse.

In February last year, Guo stepped down as governor of Shandong province to take control of China's banking regulator.

During his first month as CBRC chairman, he started what was widely dubbed a "regulatory windstorm", implementing a flurry of new measures to tackle the banking industry's most complex problems from shadow banking and regulatory arbitrage to hidden bad debt.

(Reporting by Beijing Monitoring Desk; Editing by Kim Coghill)The Bailey-Matthews National Shell Museum is embarking on ground-breaking research on the mollusks that inhabit Sanibel and Captivas most beloved and elusive shell  the junonia.

On March 14, the museum revealed to a private gathering of about four dozen people that in-house marine biologist Rebecca Mensch had returned from a recent research cruise with three live junonias. The mollusks will not be on display for the public as they are on loan strictly for research purposes.

Its a big deal because its a major step forward for us as we work to understand more about our local species, Dorrie Hipschman, Bailey-Matthews National Shell Museums executive director, said.

Our goal, eventually, is to have live ones in the museum, she added.

On Feb. 22-26, Mensch joined museum Board Member Dr. Gregory Hebert and his team aboard a research vessel. Funded by the Florida Institute of Oceanography and the University of South Floridas School of Geosciences, he has been mapping the molluscan communities of the west Florida shelf.

Mensch noted that Hebert has been conducting the research for about 10 years. The goal is better inform the scientific community and policymakers about Floridas conservation needs and priorities.

She helped to supervise samplings of various sites, which involved working 24 hours a day doing approximately 30 dredges of the shelf floor in waters anywhere from 65 feet to 110 feet deep.

Sometimes theres a lot, sometimes theres a little, Mensch said. Every dredge is different.

As Hebert collects samples, he preserves them for his research. For the trip, he agreed to postpone preserving any live junonias so Mensch could bring them back to the museum and study them. Only on loan to the museum, the three will be returned to Herbert once Mensch has completed her research.

Were so grateful to have the opportunity, Hipschman said.

Mensch will study the life history of the junonias, including feeding patterns, substrate and lighting preferences, behavior and growth, perhaps even mating, with the goal to better understand them.

This is the preliminary research, so we can have them on display one day, she said.

Already Mensch has dived into learning about them. In a short presentation for those gathered, she explained that they have a little tiny siphon and a foot smaller than she would have imagined for the size of their shell. The foot has a unique texture to it, which Mensch described as similar to a callus.

The species has two eyes and a split face, which gives it two mustache-like tentacles.

Ive never seen a mollusk with a snout that looked like that, she said.

Mensch has also discovered that junonias bury themselves in the sand, which could prove to be a problem when trying to display them for public viewing in the future. Another reason to study them.

So we can do so without stressing them out, she said.

So little is known of the species, Mensch only found one research paper from the 1970s that theorized they eat lettered olives. Only two photos of live junonias have been found  and not on the Internet.

Googling pulls up a lot of junonia shells, but nothing of the live mollusks once living in them.

People Googling it cant find it, she said. Our guests (at the museum) arent going to see it.

Hipschman explained that it is the connection between the shells and the living inhabitants that help children and adults grow an appreciation and understanding, which can lead to increased conservation. She added that lectures and traditional displays do not provide that connection that live exhibits can.

You have to experience the live animal yourself, she said.

A point easily made when those gathered rushed forward to see the three for themselves.

They (mollusks) are becoming extinct faster than we can name them, Hipschman said.

As part of the reveal, the museum launched a link on its website under the Research tab dedicated solely to Menschs junonia work. Photos, video and information will be uploaded as it is available.

Well be adding more on there, Mensch said.

For more information, visit www.ShellMuseum.org or call 239-395-2233.

The Bailey-Matthews National Shell Museum is at 3075 Sanibel Captiva Road, Sanibel.To the editor:

The 81st Annual Sanibel Shell Festival co-hosted by the Sanibel-Captiva Shell Club and the Sanibel Community Association was a great success, and the two organizations wish to express their appreciation to everyone who supported and attended the event.

The following generously provided donations to the Sanibel Community Association raffle: sailors Valentine, designed and created in the traditional style by artist Constance Marshall Miller; Sanibel-Captiva Beach Resorts, one week vacation; shell box covered with shells from around the world, designed by award-winning artist Susan Lloyd; solid brass desk clock by Chelsea Clocks from its Embassy collection, donated by Lily & Company Jewelry Gallery; large specimen shell, donated by Larry Strange of Sanibel Seashell Industries, in a lucite case donated by Ann Arnoff, Charles Lister and Bill Schecker; shelligram calligraphy with Sanibel shells designed by Sanibel artists David and Jo Stark.

The Sanibel-Captiva Shell Club would like to extend a special thank you to our scientific judges, John Slapcinsky and Gary Schmelz, and our artistic judges, Phyllis Gray and Shannon Webster; to Dorrie Hipschman and her staff for the use of the Bailey-Matthews National Shell Museum for our judges awards reception and for giving free admission to everyone who gave the $5 donation to enter the shell show; and to nature photographer Melanie Moraga for allowing us to use her photography without charge for the shell show awards and the shell show booklet.

The club would like to thank the following businesses for making major financial contributions to the shell show. There are two Angel Wing sponsors, the Island Inn and The Fields Family; and The Heart Cockle level sponsors include: The Island Sun, Three Crafty Ladies, Baileys, Karl Kotasek and She Sells Sea Shell. Congress Jewelers presents a special pin that is awarded to the winner of the shows Anne Joffe Sanibel Superstar Award. We thank them for their support.

Besides the major sponsors, the following businesses and individuals sponsored the trophies and the awards that were given to the winners of the scientific division and artistic division competitions of the show.

The Kings Crown level sponsors include the Sanibel Community Association and the Shell Crafters, the Weinstein family, Bonnie Ford, Shalimar Cottages & Motel, the Edinburg family, the McGowan family, the Lesinski family, the Clifford family, Goz Gosselin, Sanibel Seashell Industries, Bank of the Islands, West Wind Inn, Sanibel Captiva Community Bank, the Neujahr family, Congress Jewelers, Jerrys Foods, Delaware Museum of Natural History, Conchologists of America, The Bailey-Matthews National Shell Museum, Joyce Matthys, Norm Zeiglers Fly Shop, the Sexauer family, Gene Everson, Eugene C. Spencer, Casa Ybel Resort, Mary Burton, Matzaluna and The Timbers Restaurant, and Doug and Kathy Kapp.

In addition to the many items provided by our members, the club also thanks Publix, Jerrys Foods, Costco, Great White Grill, The Sanibel Deli and Coffee Factory, Subway, Bank of The Islands, and Jim and Sharon Ellen. Those who worked the whole day at the show greatly appreciated your donations.

The club thanks its members and those who prepared the thank you bags given at the show entrance. We thank the authors who participated in book signings at the Authors Table. And a big thank you to all the volunteers who gave so tirelessly of their time and efforts, and the exhibitors whose incredible scientific or artistic exhibits continue to make the show the largest and most prestigious in the country.

Thank you to the Island Sun, The Islander/Island Reporter, and the Santiva Chronicle newspapers for providing great coverage with stories and photos before and during the festival. The Island Suns show booklet was beautifully done and mailed to all the households on the island. A special thank you to the following local TV stations that provided live coverage of our event: WINK TV, Fox4 and NBC2.

A special thank you goes to the Sanibel Community Association Executive Director Teresa Riska-Hall and her staff for the many tasks they performed for the club and Shell Crafters throughout the festival.

A huge thank you to the hundreds of volunteers who tirelessly worked to make the festival such a great success: the Sanibel Community Association Shell Crafters, who create the lovely artistic and whimsical items with shells throughout the year; the Shelling Bees, who sort and prepare the shells to sell at the Shell Tent; the Kiwanis, Lions and Rotary members, who daily help with parking.

Thank you to the city of Sanibel and the Sanibel-Captiva Chamber of Commerce for their assistance and support. Appreciation is directed to the island businesses that promoted the festival. And most importantly, a huge thank you is extended to the community of Sanibel-Captiva for helping to make the 81st Annual Shell Festival a success, and to you, the attendees for your interest and patronage.

Planning is already underway for next years festival. The dates are March 7-9 at The Community House. Plan to come and again be amazed!

Mary Burton

Joyce Matthys

Sue Schoenherr

Sanibel-Captiva Shell ClubAuthor Charles Sobczak will discuss how escaped and introduced species have impacted Floridas indigenous flora, fauna and sea life at a presentation put on by the Captiva Memorial Library.

He will present The Great Florida Invasion: From pepper to pythons on March 28 at 2 p.m.

If youre interested in Florida wildlife and the chaos that these other animals have wreaked on our ecosystems, this is a lecture you really want to attend, Sobczak said.

The program will take place in the Civic Center room, adjacent to the main library.

It is free and open to the public; no reservations are required.

The presentation will take a look at the invasive species that have arrived in Florida throughout recorded history. From the medieval swine abandoned in 1521, to the recent introduction of Burmese pythons into the Everglades, it will cover the environmental and financial costs of these exotics.

The program encompasses mammals, birds, insects and fish, as well as plants.

I talk about how each one has impact us and how many actually make it, Sobczak said.

He added that only about 1 percent to 2 percent of invasives survive.

In the present times, one of the nonnative species found on Captiva are the green iguana. Sobczak reported that the species originally came from Central America or Mexico and lives in burrows.

They tend to burrow under sidewalks and foundation, he said.

Known for eating ornamentals and native plants, green iguanas may carry diseases.

But, its not as bad as the black spiny-tailed iguana, Sobczak said.

Found on Boca Grande, black spiny-tailed iguanas eat turtle and bird eggs, as well as plants.

They just dont belong here is what it boils down to, he said.

In terms of fauna, one invasive that can be found on the island is the Australian pine.

Its the one thats prone to blowing down in hurricanes, Sobczak said. They have shallow root systems.

He noted that Sanibel lost an estimated 10,000 of the trees in Hurricane Charley.

Their biggest negative impact is their propensity to blow over during storms, Sobczak said, noting that they can cause damage to homes and property.

On Sanibel, the cane toad can be found. Brought over by cane farmers to help control the insect populations in the sugar cane fields, he explained that the species got away from the fields.

They can grow to six pounds, Sobczak said. Theyre the largest toad in the world.

Cane toads are known to eat native amphibians and lizards, like frogs and the anoles.

For fauna, Sanibel is faced with the Brazilian pepper.

We spend at least $1 million alone on Sanibel trying to eradicate Brazilian peppers, he said.

Established plants create a canopy and monoculture, where nothing can grow under it.

One painful, and potentially deadly, non-native is the fire ant.

More than 80 people have been killed by fire ants since their arrival, Sobczak said.

He explained that they came via Mobile, Alabama, in 1931, and have spread all the way to Oregon.

Theyre terribly good at killing anoles. If they can, theyll kill snakes, Sobczak said. Theyll kill anything they can inject their venom in.

During the presentation, attendees are directed to resources where they can find specific information on how to keep invasives in check. One cited is the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.

There are so many, and theres so many nuances to each one, he said.

However, all exotics seem to have one thing in common.

One of the most important things is, at the end, I focus on us as being the catalyst for all of them, no matter how they got here, Sobczak said. We basically brought them here one way or another.

He added that he aims to keep his programs educational but entertaining.

The problem with some of them (other lectures), especially the science ones, they get really bogged down in graphs and charts and projections, Sobczak said.

He explained that he uses those tools, but also relies on animation, video and humor.

Its humorous at times, Sobczak said of his presentations. It captures audiences much better than that dry formal approach.

Following the program, there will be a question-and-answer session.

Sobczak will have copies of two of his books available, Living Sanibel: A Nature Guide to Sanibel & Captiva Islands for $30 and The Living Gulf Coast: A Nature Guide to Southwest Florida for $20.

A Sanibel resident, Sobczak has appeared on National Book TV and has lectured on various nature topics to the Road Scholar organization, Audubon and Sierra Club groups. In 2017, he was a featured speaker on the Celebrity Equinox. His book, The Living Gulf Coast, won the gold medal Presidents Award in 2011 in the category of adult non-fiction from the Florida Publishers Association.

For more information, call 239-533-4890.

The Captiva Memorial Library is at 11560 Chapin Lane.The Sanibel-Captiva Rotary Club recently donated $3,000 to the Sanibel Historical Museum and Village. The funds are meant to mitigate the cost of the museums free admission for children under 18 years old. Ty Symroski, Rotarys sponsor for the venue, explained that the club is a service organization that puts service above self and the museum provides a great service to the community. Over 1,000 youth visit the facility every year. The Sanibel Historical Museum and Village is at 950 Dunlop Road, Sanibel. It is open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday. Admission is $10 for ages 18 and older; youth and members are free. Docent-guided tours are at 10:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m., based upon docent availability. For information, call 239-472-4648 or visit www.sanibelmuseum.org/.Photo: City of Kelowna

Developers want to build a five-building complex of apartments along Highway 33 in the Rutland Urban Centre.

According to an application submitted to the City of Kelowna, the development will contain 152 units of housing, split between five buildings stretching between four to six storeys high.

Located on the corner of Highway 33 and Bryden Road, the developers are looking to consolidate three properties to make their project happen.

For more on the several variances the developers are asking for to make the project happen, check out the full story on Castanet's sister website, Okanagan Edge.Photo: The Canadian Press A teen is shown kicking a woman down a flight of stairs in this image taken from surveillance video.

Edmonton police have laid 460 charges against 34 teens following a wave of violent crimes at transit stations, malls and recreation centres.

In one case, police released video images of a teen kicking a woman down a flight of stairs who suffered severe internal injuries.

Investigators say in another case, some teens used social media to create a flash mob in a swarming attack on two teen boys.

The 34 accused range in age from 13 to 18 and the alleged crimes go back to January 2017.

The charges include aggravated assault, assault, robbery, weapons offences, theft under $5,000, possession of stolen property and other offences.

Supt. Tom Pallas says the suspects have left a path of victims across the city.

"Officers have responded to close to 90 criminal events involving 66 complainants, some of whom are now dealing with very serious internal and facial injuries," he said Wednesday in a release.

He said investigators believe 12 of the 34 suspects were involved in most of the crimes.

"Many of these individuals have been arrested, gone through the court system and rearrested by our officers, after being released on bail, in some cases within hours."

None of the accused can be named because they are either under 18 or were under 18 when the alleged crimes were committed.Photo: The Canadian Press

A small Newfoundland community has become fixated on the plight of six dolphins trapped by ice in its harbour.

Wayne Ledwell of the Whale Release and Strandings Group said heavy ice off Heart's Delight has cut off the exit route for the white-beaked dolphins, leaving them stranded in a pool of open water.

"They won't go through the ice. They're staying well clear of it and they know exactly where it is and exactly what danger it is to them," said Ledwell in an interview Wednesday.

"These are small animals of 300 or 400 pounds and they can't navigate that ice. It will kill them if they get out into it."

Ledwell said the pool had grown smaller overnight Monday as temperatures dropped and the water froze over, but a local resident helped break the ice with a speedboat.

He said dozens of residents have been flocking to the harbour this week, eager to check on the dolphins, which have been stuck since Sunday.

"These dolphins belong to this community now," said Ledwell.

"People really want to get those dolphins out. They really want something to be done about it, and unfortunately we really can't do anything right now."

Wanda Worthman, who lives in the area, said the community of 650 people is worried about the dolphins' well-being, considering they will remain trapped unless the winds shift and move the pack ice out of the harbour.

"It's beautiful to watch them. They're so graceful. It's sad ... and everyone here in the town is feeling the same thing," said Worthman, who said she visits the dolphins two or three times a day.

"My husband, he leaves work every afternoon and goes and checks on them and every morning before he goes to work he goes down again."

Worthman said the dolphins were making noises and appeared to be in good condition Wednesday. She said people have also been feeding them.

"My brother-in-law went out and got some shrimp and brought it over," she said.

But, Ledwell said dolphins typically will only eat live food they caught themselves. He said they can last awhile without food, and there may be something to eat in the harbour.

"They're not like us. They don't have a regular breakfast, dinner and supper," he said, noting that he's seen dolphins trapped in a smaller pool for more than two weeks.

Ledwell said there's a possibility that if the winds don't change, the dolphins could be pushed further to shore and then they could attempt to catch them in stretchers and bring them by truck to a nearby community's harbour that's free of ice.Photo: Contributed

A handful of homes on Black Mountain have had water seeping into them rapidly for the past two days.

Two Castanet readers have reached out saying their basements are filling with water. The flooding on Black Mountain comes the same week that two homes on Verde Vista Road are also experiencing flooding.

One resident lives on Large Avenue and another on Duncan Drive.

A picture shows one homeowner standing in the basement with water surrounding her.

Homes around our place on the other side of Highway 33 are experiencing similar issues with flooding as well, said a resident.

Castanet will update this story as more information becomes available.Alanna Kelly

Crews have a hold on the flooding situation on Kirschner Mountain for the time being and are hoping a large rainfall will hold off on Thursday.

Residents Donna Greer and Karen Bernath found water seeping into their basement and running into their backyard from the top of Kischner Mountain last Thursday.

Since then, landowner Al Kirschner and the City of Kelowna have deployed teams to assist the homeowners and also tried to get melting snow off the top of the mountain.

We have it under control, we are pumping water out of here, hauling water out of here, we are getting water out of here every which way we can right at the present time

Kirschner said his employees have been putting in long days since they were notified about the flooding on Sunday night.

I was a little surprised, I didnt think we would have that much of a problem but we got an awful lot of snow, weve never had a problem with it but it is a late year and we got more snow than normal.

Residents said they are hopeful the work crews will be successful in holding off rain expected Thursday, but admit they are nervous.

When a ground gets saturated you run the risk of mudslides and that hill coming down against the back of our house doesnt really stand a chance, said Bernath.

Kirschner said confidently the mountain is not going anywhere.

The mountain isnt going to slide away, we know that, he said. Its all been structurally engineered, its broken bed rock and some of it is glacial till.

It is not going anywhere.

Crews were working late Wednesday draining water through the yard of homes and onto Verde Vista Road.

The City of Kelowna says there are no storm sewers nearby.

If we dont get much rain tomorrow we will be just fine, said Kirschner. It is the big rain the boys are worried about right now.

He added they will keeping doing what they are doing and are hopeful they can stop more water running into homes.Photo: The Canadian Press

Alberta's 2018 budget includes more spending, an $8.8-billion deficit and a five-year plan to balance the books that's tied to the ups and downs of oil prices and the vagaries of pipeline politics.

"This budget continues to support the vital programs and services Albertans need," Finance Minister Joe Ceci said Thursday.

"It continues to work on the diversification of our economy and we need that vitally because of the wild swings in our revenues."

The budget, as in past years, increases funding for core programs in education, health and community services.

There is also money for previously announced incentive programs to diversify the energy-based economy and deliver more high-tech spots in post-secondary schools.

The downside is a debtload of $54.2 billion this year in a province that was effectively debt free 14 years ago. The debt is expected to hit $96 billion by 2024.

"That's what it will take to make sure we don't do without the important services and programs Albertans have come to rely on," Ceci said.

Interest payments on the debt will be $1.9 billion this year, more than all royalty payments expected from bitumen.

This is expected to be the last full budget cycle before the spring election in 2019.

When Premier Rachel Notley's NDP won power in 2015, she inherited an economy that was bottoming out as oil prices crashed and erased billions from Albertas coffers.

Rather than ratchet back spending, the NDP poured money into infrastructure and avoided cuts to front-line services.

The numbers show jobs are coming back  including 38,000 in the last three months of 2017  and the GDP is on the rise. But Notleys government has been hit with multiple credit downgrades and warnings over the years.

The plan to get back to balance relies on revenue from two pipeline projects approved by the federal government: improvements to Enbridges Line 3 into Wisconsin and an expansion of Kinder Morgan's Trans Mountain line to the West Coast.

While construction on Line 3 has begun in Alberta, Trans Mountain has faced delays in British Columbia.

Premier John Horgan is going to court to see if his province has authority to stop any increased oil shipments from Alberta while B.C. reviews oil-spill safety and cleanup.

That move has put the economic future of Trans Mountain up in the air, and Notley is threatening to reduce oil flows to B.C. in retaliation.

"The pipelines will get built," said Ceci. "They are federally approved. They are in the interest of national infrastructure."

Non-renewable resource revenue, which includes oil and gas, bitumen and conventional oil royalties, is expected to fetch $3.8 billion this year. But $10.4 billion is expected when the two pipelines kick in and the budget is balanced in 2024.

Ceci has said steps are being taken to keep the debt and deficit figures manageable.

Alberta has negotiated wage freezes with nurses and teachers, and is keeping the size of the civil service flat.

It will take in $47.9 billion in total revenue this year against $56.2 billion in expenses. There is also a $500-million contingency fund to cover unexpected shortfalls.

Health remains the big ticket department. Its budget rises three per cent to $22.1 billion, representing 40 per cent of total expenses.

The government plans to spend $30 billion over four years on roads and schools, the Calgary Cancer Centre and a new hospital in Edmonton.

For the first time, cannabis revenue is being factored in. Recreational marijuana use becomes legal this year and Alberta expects to take in $26 million in taxes.Photo: The Canadian Press

Schools are closing across the Maritime provinces as a spring snow storm tracks toward the region.

Environment Canada says between 15 and 25 centimetres of snow is expected in P.E.I., northern Nova Scotia and eastern New Brunswick by Thursday evening.

Meanwhile, southern and eastern parts of Nova Scotia can expect the snow to become mixed with rain and ice pellets.

A slew of schools have been cancelled in P.E.I., Nova Scotia and New Brunswick ahead of the low pressure system's arrival.

The Confederation Bridge is also warning of possible travel disruptions due to high winds.

Environment Canada is calling for up to 30 centimetres of snow in parts of Newfoundland.Photo: CTV

Many Canadians are pledging to delete their Facebook accounts as part of an online campaign encouraging people to permanently log off the site amid mounting concerns that the social media giant is inappropriately sharing users' information beyond their circle of friends.

Privacy experts say numerous Canadians are taking to other social media platforms to join in on the #DeleteFacebook hashtag in the wake of recent revelations about the potential for their personal information to be mined for political gain.

Canadian data scientist Christopher Wylie has accused a voter-profiling company of improperly obtaining private Facebook data from some 50 million users in an effort to tip the scales in the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign and the U.K.'s Brexit referendum.

Former Ontario privacy commissioner Ann Cavoukian said a data leak of that scale was an "unthinkable proposition" for many Canadians who have long harboured frustrations about Facebook's apparent lack of safeguards to protect user data from being shared with dubious actors.

"People are very concerned and they feel they've lost control, and this just confirms that," said Cavoukian, who is an expert-in-residence at Ryerson University's Privacy by Design Centre in Toronto.

"You just reach the point where you say, 'Enough is enough. I'm out of here.'"

She said the exposure of the data-harvesting technique has been a wake-up call for citizens who fear similar tactics could be used to influence Canada's 2019 federal election, and now feel compelled to stand up for their country's democratic institutions.

"No one wants to be under that kind of dark influence," Cavoukian said. "You have no idea what ... massive shifts are happening as a result of this. You're being manipulated."

University of Toronto marketing professor David Soberman said there has been increasing awareness about the risk of political operatives using social media tactics to sway elections.

Soberman said he thinks the Facebook data leak has resonated not only because it punctured public confidence in the social media company's privacy protocols, but because it had a tangible effect in the election of U.S. President Donald Trump, whose campaign has been linked to the data analytics firm allegedly behind the data-harvesting technique.

In an increasingly interconnected world, he said, what happens in one jurisdiction can signal what will happen in another, so all Canadians have to do is look to their southern neighbours to understand that social media meddling can have sweeping political consequences.

"Facebook is moving from the world of a novelty to becoming what I would almost call a public utility," he said. "Facebook provides a lot of value to a lot of people ... but when you've got a really, really valuable company and you're under threat, you've got to figure out actions you can do to protect that value."

Mike Smit, an associate professor at Dalhousie University's School of Information Management, said most people are aware of the privacy risks involved in sharing their personal information with Facebook, but their reservations are outweighed by the immediate rewards of online connection.

But as the potential loopholes in Facebook's privacy measures become harder to ignore, those seemingly abstract privacy concerns have come to feel more concrete for many social media users, Smit said.

"It changes the whole calculus (of the) decision-making process when we thought there were all these protections in place, but instead, they're not," he said. "Our safety blanket has been ripped away from us and we're feeling vulnerable."

Smit said the social media company's initial cagey response to the revelations did little to restore consumers confidence that their private information was in safe hands.

Days after the data leak was first reported by The Guardian newspaper and the New York Times, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Wednesday that the company is taking steps to protect people's private information, including banning developers who don't comply with audits and limiting access to user data.

"We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can't then we don't deserve to serve you," Zuckerberg said in a statement. "I've been working to understand exactly what happened and how to make sure this doesn't happen again."

Facebook has denied the data collection was a breach because people knowingly provided their information. The company has said a University of Cambridge psychology professor accessed the information after he requested it from users who gave their consent when they chose to sign up for his test via a Facebook app.

The newspaper reports said Facebook first learned of the leak more than two years ago, but didn't disclose it until now.

 With files from The Associated PressPhoto: The Canadian Press

The United States has confirmed a breakthrough in the NAFTA negotiations unlocking a major irritant involving automobiles, while stressing that a few remaining disagreements need to be settled before a deal is concluded.

A sense of optimism that the unofficial No. 1 issue in the NAFTA talks might be close to resolution lifted the Canadian dollar more than a cent Wednesday, while the U.S. trade czar confirmed the positive developments on autos.

"We're finally starting to converge," Robert Lighthizer said, while delivering a progress report to the U.S. Congress.

"I think we're in a pretty good place."

The U.S. is pushing for a deal within weeks. Otherwise, the process risks being punted into 2019. By mid-spring, it will be too late to complete the legal steps that would allow a ratification vote in the U.S. before midterm elections usher in a new Congress.

Lighthizer summarized the state of the talks this way: "I believe that we have made a great deal of progress  but we still have a ways to go. I have urged our trading partners to recognize that time is short if we are to complete a deal in time for consideration by this Congress."

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Wednesday he believes that a deal is "eminently possible."

"There seems to be a certain momentum around the table now that I certainly take as positive," he said at a Toronto news conference.

That said, serious irritants remain.

The blunt-spoken Lighthizer minced no words while listing several of them  he referred specifically to Canadian policies on dairy, culture, wine, and intellectual property. Dispute settlement rules and Buy American issues are also sticking points.

 Of Canada's intellectual-property rules, Lighthizer said: "Canada has Third World intellectual property protection. Getting them to accept First World is not easy." In its annual report on the topic, the U.S. lists its main concerns as Canada's enforcement of counterfeit crimes, and its looser rules for educational exemptions.

 On cultural protections: A lawmaker complained that Canada has abused the exemption on cultural products. He referred to Canada's blocking the QVC shopping network on cultural grounds. Lighthizer replied: "There's a legitimate case for some cultural exceptions. But it's not for this kind of thing. ... The cultural exemption is very often just cultural protectionism." Trudeau, though, tied culture to bilingualism, "which highlights just how incredibly important it is for us to protect our culture, our languages, our creative sectors, our artists."

 Online shopping: The U.S. wants more online purchases of American goods. Lighthizer ridiculed the disparity between what the U.S. allows citizens to import duty-free versus what Canada allows  US$800, versus $20 in Canada: "(That's) just ridiculous... There's no one that can argue that."

 On wine sales, the U.S. is already fighting Canada at the WTO for discriminatory rules on store shelves. Lighthizer said: "It's just rank protectionism at the provincial level in Canada."

 Dairy remains a major problem. Lawmaker Devin Nunes, a third-generation dairy farmer, lamented Canada's limits on imports under supply management. "Canada has been getting away with murder in their dairy industry," he said. "It's causing tremendous problems for farmers here in the United States."

Lighthizer concurred. He said it's also a problem in other supply-managed sectors, poultry and eggs. He expressed some sympathy for Canada's challenges in dismantling the system, but he said he hopes to negotiate reforms.

Trudeau suggested that will mean a fight: "We're going to continue to defend supply management, because it works."

Lighthizer predicted how the final hours of bargaining will unfold: he said the last issues to be sorted out will include sensitive agricultural areas, such as dairy and wine, as well as intellectual property.

But he said he envisions a new NAFTA with 33 chapters  up from the current 22  that benefits every country.Photo: The Canadian Press Prime Minister Justin Trudeau addresses the UPS Conference in Toronto on Wednesday March 21, 2018.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says Canada needs to be vigilant about protecting the integrity of its electoral systems from foreign interference.

He offered that assessment in a Toronto press conference in response to questions about the influence of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who was re-elected this week to six more years in power.

In some of his sharpest criticism yet of the Russian leader, Trudeau says Putin needs to start playing a more positive role in the world on a variety of fronts  from Ukraine, to Syria as well as answering for Russia's role in the nerve gas attack in Britain two weeks ago.

Trudeau said Wednesday the heavy use of social media and interference by foreign actors are the new reality in elections.

Trudeau's remarks come after several recent warnings about possible Russian interference in Canada's 2019 federal election, including from eastern European diplomats in Ottawa, as well as a top NATO researcher.

Trudeau reiterated how he has tasked Democratic Institutions Minister Karina Gould with shoring up Canada's electoral system against foreign meddling.

"We have been very much focused over the past years on strengthening our democratic institutions," he said, " to recognize the new environment in which we will now be holding democratic elections, which often involves heavy use of social media, possible foreign interference.

"We need to make sure that they are kept up to date in holding off foreign meddling and interference."

Relations between Canada and Russia are strained with the Canadian Forces commanding a NATO battle group in Latvia  part of the alliance's anti-Moscow deterrent in Eastern Europe following the Kremlin's annexation of Ukraine's Crimean Peninsula in 2014, and the ongoing turmoil in eastern Ukraine.

Russia has threatened unspecified retaliation against Canada for its passage of anti-corruption legislation. It has also placed Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland on a list of people banned from travelling to the country because of her past writing about Putin during her former career as a journalist.

Trudeau said Putin needs to change his behaviour.

"President Putin needs to start showing by his actions that he wants to play a positive role in the international community," the prime minister said during a Toronto press conference.

"Whether it's pulling back of his engagement in the Donbass or leaving Crimea, whether it's taking responsibility for the questions  the important questions that the U.K. has asked after the terrible poisoning incident a few weeks ago in Salisbury, whether it's questions around NATO, questions around Syria, questions around the Arctic."

The House of Commons unanimously adopted a motion this week that blames Russia for what it calls a despicable nerve gas attack in Britain.

Freeland put forward the motion, saying Russia has shown a total disregard for the rules of the international order.

Former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were found unconscious on a bench in the city of Salisbury two weeks ago. The British government says they were the victims of a Russian nerve agent.Photo: The Canadian Press Families, Children and Social Development Minister Jean-Yves Duclos rises in the House of Commons in Ottawa on Friday, May 6, 2016.

Canadian activists praised Service Canada's decision to ask its employees to adopt gender-neutral language when interacting with the public as a step toward greater inclusivity, while members of the political opposition mocked the policy mercilessly.

Families Minister Jean-Yves Duclos defended the federal institution's internal directive Wednesday, saying it was a matter of respect and an effort "to adapt to the reality of 21st-century families."

According to the directive issued to managers and team leaders in January, Service Canada employees are asked to use gender-neutral or gender-inclusive language to avoid "portraying a perceived bias toward a particular sex or gender."

Workers are instructed to use a client's full name or ask how they would prefer to be addressed instead of using honorifics such as Mr., Mrs. or Ms., which "can be seen as gender specific by a client," reads the memo, which was first obtained by Radio-Canada.

They are also being asked to eschew the terms "father" and "mother" in favour of "parent."

Some members of the opposition were quick to criticize the directive, including Conservative Leader Andrew Scheer, who described it as "ridiculous."

Rheal Fortin, the former Bloc Quebecois MP who now sits as an Independent, concurred, saying, "it's bordering on harebrained."

"I almost want to say I'm glad they don't have any bigger problems than that at Service Canada," he joked.

But Duclos told reporters that Service Canada's policies are a matter of respect.

He specified in a tweet the government department is not eliminating the use of Mr. or Ms.

"Let us be clear, @ServiceCanada_E will continue to use Mr/Ms when interacting with Canadians," he wrote on social media.Photo: RCMP

RCMP in Southern Alberta have arrested a suspected thief following a chase that included a helicopter, snowmobiles, a police dog team and the suspect's Labrador retriever.

Vulcan, Alta., RCMP say an officer responded to reports of a stolen snowmobile and stopped a truck towing the machine on a highway.

Police say the two got into a fight and the suspect fled in the truck, almost hitting the Mountie.

RCMP from nearby detachments rushed to help their comrade and chased the truck until it became stuck in snow.

The suspect then took off on the snowmobile with his Labrador as Mounties on snowmobiles followed in pursuit.

The Calgary police helicopter then located the suspect and Mounties, including an RCMP dog team, made the arrest.

"This incident highlights the unpredictability of offenders" Sgt. Troy Dobson said Wednesday in a release.

"The collaboration with Calgary Police Service was also instrumental in the positive outcome."

RCMP said charges were pending including assaulting a police officer, flight from police, dangerous driving and other offences.

Police said the 34-year-old suspect was taken to hospital for injuries he suffered when the snowmobile he was driving hit a tree.

At the time of his arrest, he was wanted on 29 outstanding warrants.

The Mountie who scuffled with the suspect and the Labrador were not hurt.Photo: Tess Richey

A man accused of killing a young woman in Toronto's gay village last year has seen his charge upgraded to first-degree murder.

Police initially charged Kalen Schlatter, 21, with second-degree murder last month in the death of Tess Richey, who investigators say died of "neck compression."

Richey, 22, was reported missing in November after a night out with a friend.

Her mother, who travelled from her home in North Bay to search for her, found Richey's body four days later in a stairwell at the back of an alley, just steps from where she was last seen alive.

Investigators have said that Richey met Schlatter on the street after she and her friend left a bar the night she disappeared. Surveillance video released by police appears to show Schlatter and Richey together near the alley.

Toronto police declined Wednesday to comment on the upgraded charge against Schlatter.

There are certain circumstances in the Criminal Code that can lead to a charge of first-degree murder, including the allegation that a killing was planned and deliberate, or that it took place while the accused committed or attempted to commit a sexual assault or a kidnapping.

Richey's death and the disappearances of several men with links to the gay village prompted complaints from the community that police were not doing enough to protect them.

Chief Mark Saunders announced in December that the force would review its handling of missing persons cases.

Self-employed landscaper Bruce McArthur, 66, has since been charged with six counts of first-degree murder in connection with the deaths and disappearances of several men, most of them with ties to the area.

Police say the Richey case is not related to the accusations against McArthur.

Schlatter is to appear in court today.Photo: The Canadian Press

U.S. President Donald Trump and former vice-president Joe Biden are in a rhetorical smackdown over who could clean the other's clock in a brawl.

Trump, reacting to comments Biden made about him earlier in the week at an anti-sexual assault rally, tweeted Thursday: "Crazy Joe Biden is trying to act like a tough guy. Actually, he is weak, both mentally and physically, and yet he threatens me, for the second time, with physical assault. He doesn't know me, but he would go down fast and hard, crying all the way. Don't threaten people Joe!"

At the University of Miami on Tuesday, Biden cited lewd comments the Republican president made in a 2005 "Access Hollywood" tape about grabbing women without their permission.

"If we were in high school, I'd take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him," said Biden, a Democrat. He also said any man who disrespected women was "usually the fattest, ugliest S.O.B. in the room."

Biden, 75, made similar comments in the closing days of the 2016 campaign. He has kept open the possibility of a 2020 bid for president and is gearing up to play a big role campaigning for Democrats running in this year's midterm elections.

Trump, 71, dismissed the prospect of a Biden run recently at the annual Gridiron Dinner with Washington journalists, calling him "Sleepy Joe" and saying he could "kick his ass." Trump also attacked Biden on Twitter in 2016, calling him "Our not very bright Vice-President."Photo: The Canadian Press Die stamping of royal wedding invites at Barnard and Westwood workshop in London.

Time to check that mailbox.

Kensington Palace said Thursday that invitations for the wedding between Prince Harry and his American fiancee Meghan Markle have been dispatched.

Some 600 people have been invited to the May 19 nuptials at St. George's Chapel at Windsor Castle. All 600 have also been invited to a lunchtime reception given by Queen Elizabeth II at St George's Hall.

The invitations, which are beveled and gilded in gold along the edges, feature Prince Charles' three-feather badge. They were made by Barnard & Westwood, which has held the Royal Warrant for printing and bookbinding since 1985.

Harry and Markle will also celebrate with some 200 guests at a private evening reception given by Prince Charles.

The palace declined to comment as to who is on the list.Photo: The Canadian Press

The Senate has given approval in principle to the Trudeau government's bill to legalize recreational marijuana.

Bill C-45 passed at second reading this evening by a vote of 44-29.

The approval comes after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau reminded the senators that his government was elected on a promise to legalize recreational marijuana.

That was seen as a subtle warning that they should not attempt to thwart the will of Canadians or the government they elected.

The uncertainty was triggered by Conservative senators, who were hoping to deliver a double-barrelled embarrassment to Trudeau: upending one of his signature election promises, while demonstrating the folly of his efforts to reform the Senate into a less partisan, more independent chamber.

Earlier in the day, Trudeau said the criminal cannabis regime has not protected Canadian children, who are among the highest under-age users of marijuana in developed countries, and has put up to $7 billion every year in the pockets of organized crime.

Ordinarily, a second reading vote is not a big hurdle and is dispensed with on the basis of a quick voice vote  after which the bill is sent to committee for closer scrutiny, witness testimony and any proposed amendments before returning to the Senate for a final debate and vote.

But in the case of Bill C-45, the 33 Conservative senators had vowed to vote en masse against it at second reading.Photo: The Canadian Press Senate Minority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer of N.Y.

The House easily approved a bipartisan $1.3 trillion spending bill Thursday that pours huge sums into Pentagon programs and domestic initiatives ranging from building roads to combatting the nation's opioid abuse crisis, but left Congress in stalemate over shielding young Dreamer immigrants from deportation and curbing surging health insurance premiums.

The vote was 256-167, a one-sided tally that underscored the popularity of a budget deal among party leaders that provided enough money to address many of both sides' priorities. Further highlighting how eager lawmakers were to claim victories, the House approved the 2,232-page package  which stood around a foot tall on some legislators' desks  less than 17 hours after negotiators released it publicly.

The next step was Senate passage, which was assured.

But it was possible some Republican senators critical of the bill's spending could delay its approval until after midnight Friday night. If that occurred, that would prompt the year's third federal shutdown, an event that was sure to be brief but would still embarrass a GOP that controls the White House and Congress.

The White House said President Donald Trump supported the legislation, even though he tweeted Wednesday that he "had to waste money on Dem giveaways" on domestic programs to win increases for the military.

Congressional Republicans focused on the bill's defence increases.

"Vote yes for our military. Vote yes for the safety and the security of this country," said House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis.

Democrats touted spending boosts on biomedical research, child care and infrastructure projects. And Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., attributed part of the House's hasty work on the measure to GOP fears of being stuck in Washington on Saturday, when huge throngs of students and others are expected to demonstrate in support of gun curbs.

"They just don't want to be around when the young people come to town," Pelosi said.

Some Republicans were opposing the measure because of what they considered excessive spending. Some Democrats were opposed because it lacked language renewing the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA. Trump has ended DACA, which temporarily lets some young immigrants brought to the U.S. illegally as children stay in the U.S.

The bill would deprive Trump of some of his border wall money and take only incremental steps to address gun violence. It also would substantially increase the federal deficit.

Also missing was a renewal of federal subsidies to insurers aimed at curbing the relentless growth of premiums. Trump ended some of those payments as part of his effort to scuttle President Barack Obama's health care law. A bipartisan effort to restore them and add additional help for carriers foundered over several disagreements including how tight abortion restrictions on using the money should be.

On guns, leaders agreed to tuck in bipartisan provisions to bolster school safety funds and improve compliance with the criminal background check system for firearm purchases. The bill states that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention can do research on gun violence, though not advocacy, an idea Democrats pushed.

Democrats temporarily shut down the government earlier this year as they fought for protecting the Dreamers. But the issue only rose to a discussion item when Trump made a late-hour push for a deal in exchange for $25 billion in border wall funds.

Instead, Trump is now poised to win $1.6 billion for barriers along the border, but none of it for the new prototypes he recently visited in California. Less than half the nearly 95 miles of border construction, including levees along the Rio Grande in Texas, would be for new barriers, with the rest for repair of existing segments.Photo: The Canadian Press

A Florida man has been reunited with a cat he lost 14 years ago.

TCPalm.com reports Perry Martin of Fort Pierce said he had assumed his orange tabby named Thomas Jr., or T2 for short, had died in traffic.

Martin moved in with a friend after Hurricane Jeanne clobbered the state in 2004. A few days later, T2 escaped the home and never returned.

Martin had T2 implanted with a microchip in 2002. He never had news of his missing pet until a Martin County Animal Services officer called him March 9 to tell him T2 was in a shelter in Palm City.

Martin said he initially thought the call was "too crazy to believe."

The pair reunited last week at the Humane Society of the Treasure Coast.By Pam Hersh In honor of Valentines Day, I declare my love for something that has sustained and inspired me during the darkest days of...Ongoing Rise is collecting donations of backpacks and school supplies for local students of all ages from elementary school to high school that will be handed out before the new school year begins. Students can come in to the Rise Thrift...The Tennessee Department of Education released today a framework for supporting and empowering districts to more effectively serve their students who are English Learners.

"This new resource is designed to support administrators, educators and advocates as a reference guide and a tool as they meet the unique needs of this group of students," officials said."The department developed the framework to help districts implement new requirements of the Every Student Succeeds Act, which is part of the departments Tennessee Succeeds plan.

ESSA has a heightened focus on ensuring English learners are learning and growing. The tool released today helps all teachers  not just those who teach English as a second language (ESL) programs  understand the needs of English learners and the best instructional practices to support their classroom success."Alongside the departments English as a Second Language Manual, these resources will inform decisions on planning, assist teachers in differentiating supports for students, and ensure that ESL programs are implemented with fidelity and in the best interest of students."Our vision is that all students are equipped with the knowledge and skills to successfully embark upon their chosen path in life, and this includes students who are learning English, Commissioner Candice McQueen said. We are committed to ensuring that English Learners have the same opportunities for success with access to rigorous coursework, early postsecondary opportunities, and highly effective teachers on every step of their educational journey as we further the work for equity and excellence in public education."As the English Learner population has steadily grown across the country, Tennessees EL population has more than doubled in the past ten years. In the 2016-17 school year, 132 Tennessee districts and 1,451 schools served ELs, with 17 districts serving a population of ELs exceeding 6 percent of their student body. As a result, districts and educators have been tasked with supporting ELs in both language acquisition and content knowledge by providing instruction tailored to the needs of this group of students. To support this work, the department has developed the new framework that outlines supports for ELs and provided the ESL Manual to offer guidance for teachers and administrators who are working to improve outcomes for ELs. These complement a policy update from the State Board of Education that requires general education teachers who engage with ELs to be trained on the WIDA development standards, which the department is offering in April."In Tennessee, schools are expected to meet the needs of all students, and those who are furthest behind and have been historically underserved must be prioritized, as demonstrated by the departments commitment to All Means All in Tennessee Succeeds, the departments strategic plan. Further, Tennessees Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) Plan, which is a continuation of Tennessee Succeeds, outlines supports for ELs as they are developing English language acquisition skills and academic skills. Tennessees ESSA state plan is grounded in equity, which includes access, opportunity, and supports for all students with an increased emphasis on both the proficiency and achievement of ELs. With the new guidelines and accountability, district and school leaders are called to review and to make data-driven decisions to benefit all students, especially for historically underserved student groups."Additionally, divisions across the state department are working to provide dynamic and coordinated professional development focused on supporting ELs for general education teachers through a series of workshops and work sessions provided within professional learning across Tennessee. Districts are further empowered through increased learning around ESL program designs and provided continuous support as they select the design that best fits their EL population and local needs. The state is actively developing even more programs and resources that districts can use to create an individualized learning plan and a growth trajectory for English language acquisition for each EL in grades K-12," officials said.The complete framework for supporting English Learners is available online here . For more information about the departments English Learner resources, contact Jan Lanier, director of English Learner, immigrant and migrant programs, at Jan.Lanier@tn.gov.Physician members of the Tennessee Medical Association are praising a new law that will ease the mandatory requirements for doctors to maintain specialty board certification. The Tennessee General Assembly unanimously approved the measure after a two-year effort by TMA to persuade state lawmakers to take action on what has become a hot button issue for physicians across the U.S., said officials.

The Tennessee Senate on Monday passed the bill (SB1824) by a vote of 33-0 after the House unanimously passed the companion bill (HB1927) last week. The bill is en route to Governor Bill Haslam to sign to become law.

Senator Richard Briggs, MD (R-Knoxville) sponsored the Senate bill while House Republican Caucus Chairman Ryan Williams (R-Cookeville) led the effort in the larger chamber.

Senator Briggs and Rep. Williams worked with TMA in 2017 to pass another law that prevents MOC from being required for state licensure. That same bill created a task force to study MOC as it relates to hospital hiring practices, admitting privileges and insurance networks. Legislators who served on the task force returned to session in 2018 ready to give Tennessee physicians some relief and ensure the arbitrary MOC process no longer interferes with Tennesseans access to care.

TMAs goal, after years of complaints from our member physicians about MOC testing requirements, was simply to give doctors options for maintaining and improving their professional competency," said Nita W. Shumaker, MD, TMA president 2017-2018. "Doctors should not be forced by hospitals or insurance companies to participate in an arbitrary certification process that has not been shown to improve quality of care. This bill gives much-needed relief for doctors who may choose Continuing Medical Education or other forms of ongoing learning. Thanks to Senator Briggs, Rep. Williams and the other members of our state legislature, Tennessee is now one of few states developing real solutions to this national issue.

The new law carries two provisions for doctors who have asked for relief from the MOC requirements levied by the American Board of Medical Specialties, insurance companies, hospitals and health systems.

It prohibits health insurance companies from excluding physicians from health plan networks based solely on a physicians MOC status.

It allows the medical staff at each hospital to determine whether to require MOC or accept other forms of competency measures (such as Continuing Medical Education) for credentialing and/or admitting privileges. Hospitals requiring MOC must adopt bylaws making it a stipulation for work or network participation.

TMA expects the states new MOC laws, coupled with a favorable medical liability climate and other qualities that help Tennessee rank among the best states in which to practice medicine, will improve the states efforts to recruit and retain the best physicians, said officials.Human intervention is critical in any final analysis because the software itself is far from perfect. Requests for proposals from law enforcement agencies around the country typically require false positive rates of 2 percent or less for fingerprint systems but will accept 20 percent false-positive rates for facial recognition, according to court papers filed in New York by the Center for Privacy and Technology. The problem is that humans are hardly perfect, either. A 2016 study by the University of York found that people are not nearly as good at identifying people by their faces as they think they are. Training would likely improve their ability to choose the right person from the search results, but no one knows what it means to be an expert. There are no standards for how face recognition systems work, Garvie said.The Department of Streets and Sanitations Graffiti Blasters crews have been more active citywide recently. Compared with last year, there was a roughly 25 percent increase in graffiti removals across Chicago during the month ending March 21. But that is a tiny increase in comparison with the tenfold spike in the areas around the five sites shown to Amazon.Where and what psychiatrists end up practicing after their four-year residency ends matters most in addressing the shortage, said Dr. Sidney Weissman, clinical professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Northwestern Universitys Feinberg School of Medicine. Many decide it is in their financial interest to go directly into private practice rather than continue collecting a resident stipend for a fifth year as they train in a subspecialty where the need is most dire, such as geriatric or child and adolescent psychiatry, Weissman said. He advocates letting psychiatrists train in a subspecialty in their fourth year of residency to make it more economically viable.The married couple, who have spent decades on Chicagos TV and radio airwaves, were last seen co-hosting a late-morning radio show on WLS-AM before signing off several months ago. Prior to that, Sirott, 68, and Murciano, 60, had hosted middays on WGN-AM from 2013 until 2015 and first were paired together as the anchor partners on Fox Thing in the Morning at WFLD-Ch. 32 from 1994 until 2000.3) Dog Haus, the LA-based chain that made the ballsy (not to mention incorrect) claim last week that it was bringing Chicago its first gourmet hot dog concept, seems to be trying to make amends. On Saturday, in celebration of its grand opening, the chain is offering free hot dogs to locals 11 a.m. to midnight. Seven varieties will be available, like the Sooo Cali, made with arugula, avocado, crispy onions and spicy basil aioli and served on a Kings Hawaiian roll. Free, 11 a.m. to midnight Saturday, 2462 N. Lincoln Ave., doghaus.com.There are allegedly three different colors of candy gems that reveal your fortune: blue for adventure, purple for magic and green for luck, according to the official Frappuccino Facebook page. But on our taste test visit to the Starbucks across the street from the Tribune Tower, our barista only had purple gems, which meant we and all in the neighborhood must have magic in our futures.When we were brought over  and Im talking about we, meaning people of color, from boats  we were ingrained with we were supposed to adopt this religion with these figures who were white, and so then we have these images were still popularizing today of this white God, Rosales told the Tribune. Its kind of manipulating us mentally from the very beginning. Churches and everything, thats all you see.She was watching the finale live, and I guess she was rooting for Adrienne, but there was a really funny video of her being like, Joe Flamm? Are you kidding me? Flamm said. Emmy Rossum saying my name was like overwhelming, even if she wasnt rooting for me.The comic show is part of that, as has been a reorganization of the LHOF board and all sorts of planned events and activities such as The Great Chicago Books Club, the next meeting of which will feature Edna Ferbers 1912 collection of stories titled Buttered Side Down and takes place 6 to 8 p.m. Sunday (more at chicagoliteraryhof.org). In May there will be a refreshed website and, Evans says, Theres always the matter of raising money, and I have not given up on a permanent space for the Hall of Fame.The British Army C Company stationed in Northern France in early 1918 has already fought four years in a war they were originally promised would be "over by Christmas." Thus it feels incongruous for them to receive a spanking new recruit fresh out of basic training, let alone one so naive as Raleigh ( Asa Butterfield ), who's so baby-faced he recalls famously infantile silent comedian Harry Langdon. Actually, Raleigh has been placed here by request: There's nothing he'd like more than to be reunited with his former school head-boy and prospective brother-in-law Captain Stanhope (Sam Claflin), widely regarded as "the best commander of the lot."For anyone who works for a beleaguered professional news organization  over which the revenue-sucking, content-stealing Facebook has reigned of late with a palpable glee  there was major schadenfreude to be had on Thursday. Facebook's CEO and COO, Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, respectively, both of whom have positioned themselves as where-the-puck-is-going predictors and guardians of the culture, initially had disappeared in the face of a sudden crisis of trust threatening their own wealth. This is what overcautious executives are wont to do, of course, unless they finally listen to someone telling them that they are falling behind the story, that their brand is headed straight for the toilet and that an honest, personal response is the only solution.Also at the city level, 91 percent of voters said yes to banning the sale of bump stocks, which allows guns to fire more rapidly like an automatic weapon and multiplied the number of victims in the Las Vegas shooting in October.Im the first out of her kids to graduate, he said. I really did it because Ive got a little brother and two little sisters behind me. I did it for them, so they can have somebody to look up to.Im inspired, and a little amazed, at the kids who look around at the world theyll inherit and decide to go ahead and start changing it now  not when theyre paying taxes or raising kids or feeling unfulfilled at work. They dont need the trappings of adulthood to wake them up to inequality and need. They look around and see plenty of both, and then they look around for ways to solve them."Just another example of how the cruise ship industry does little to benefit us locally, and instead continues to make the visitor experience more insular to the cruise ship islands," she said. Among her main concerns was that the private island will funnel visitation and excursion revenues away from Nassau-which relies heavily on the cruise tourism economy. "We cannot give away any more of our beautiful Bahamas to these bottomless pits," she wrote. (Carey did not respond to requests for comment as of press time.)It was never meant to be in private hands  its public art, said Irving Zucker, the 71-year-old retired teacher who brought Haring to Chicago to paint the mural with hundreds of high school students, and who has tried, with mixed success, to locate missing panels of the mural. It was Keiths gift to the city, to our kids. He worked for free, and he wanted it to go to Chicago schools.After former Vice President Joe Biden said he would beat the hell out of President Donald Trump if they were in high school, Trump wrote in a tweet Thursday that Biden would go down fast and hard, crying all the way, if they ever came to blows. That exchange took some people aback, but lots of politicians  including a Chicago mayor  have talked about punching people. Some examples:"Our main thing is to let kids know that us adults are there for them," Fernandez said. "We want to (listen to) what their concerns are for gun violence and safety."Everybody shouldn't get one raise straight across the board. Maybe you've been there for 20 years and another person's been there for two years and another person's been there for 90 days. The longer you're there, the more money you should make. All pay raises should be equal to however number of years you've been there, not politics to give this person a $5,000 raise and give another person a $200 raise.Prosecutors said the woman was on her way to school, walking on the ramp to the platform at 720 S. Cicero Ave. in the Lawndale neighborhood around 8:20 a.m. on Dec. 6 when Winford followed her and began cat calling her. She tried to ignore him and quickened her pace, but he caught up to her and grabbed her from behind and sexually assaulted her, police said.-- A 37-year-old man was shot during a robbery about 6 p.m. in the 7300 block of South Drexel Avenue in the Grand Crossing neighborhood on the South Side, police said. The man was walking when a gunman confronted him and demanded his property. The assailant fired and hit him in the buttocks, then took the 37-year-olds cellphone, police said. He was taken to Advocate Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn where he was in good condition.Detectives later determined Gresham also robbed two stores in the 300 block of North Michigan Avenue: One shortly after 11 p.m. on March 5, and the other shortly before midnight on March 7. Police had released a picture of the suspect after those robberies.Cassidy and Sen. Heather Steans, both Chicago Democrats, have introduced a bill to allow the sale of marijuana for recreational use over the age of 21. They claim it would raise $350 million to $700 million in annual tax revenue and eliminate discriminatory and futile policing efforts, while undercutting existing illegal markets and hurting cartels and dealers who prey on young users and try to sell them harder drugs.The couple had rushed from their apartment with their pets when an extra-alarm fire broke out in the building next door in the 1600 block of West 87th Street in the Gresham neighborhood around 3:30 a.m. Thursday.He has little in the way of campaign cash, loathes the idea of fundraising and, unlike other high-profile Illinois Democrats of late, does not have his own money to pour into a run. He also lacks experience working on issues outside of crime and will have to address the Laquan McDonald police shooting scandal that occurred on his watch. Plus, his entree into politics will be for one of the toughest public jobs in America against one of the country's most seasoned politicians.After a long and complicated challenge to her nominating petitions, Railas legitimacy as a candidate was restored by an appellate court just six days before the election. By then, more than 100,000 absentee, mail-in and overseas voters had been informed a vote for her would not count. And on election day, some city election judges who had received conflicting instructions posted notices to voters erroneously stating her votes would not be counted.Hampton attorney Shelly Kulwin said the thrust of the retaliation is that she was not allowed to work on a Democratic campaign in a district where she had a proven track record. Hampton had worked on the House campaign of Juliana Stratton, who won and is now the running mate of J.B. Pritzker, the Democratic nominee for governor."I really like the idea of having more referendums on issues that involve jobs and ethics in government and advancing workers' rights and so on," said Quinn, 69. "So, I'll probably focus a little more on petition and referendum. I've been doing that for quite a while, and I plan to keep on doing that until I don't have any breath."The Wednesday night decision came at the end of a two-day period of questioning over an affair that Sarkozy has long dismissed as "grotesque." Although the proceedings could still be dropped, the distinction of formal investigation means that French authorities now believe there is sufficient evidence that the former president might have committed a crime.SAGINAW, MICH.  Police in Michigan have raided three properties of the Catholic Diocese of Saginaw following the recent arrest of a priest accused of committing sex crimes.



Saginaw County Assistant Prosecutor Mark Gaertner says the warrants were executed Thursday after the diocese didn't cooperate with authorities. Gaertner says he couldn't disclose what officers were searching for. The searches were conducted at the diocesan offices, the home of Bishop Joseph Cistone and the rectory at the Cathedral of Mary of the Assumption in Saginaw.



The Rev. Robert DeLand of Freeland was charged Feb. 26 with criminal sexual conduct for allegedly assaulting two males, ages 21 and 17. The 71-year-old DeLand has pleaded not guilty. The diocese has suspended him and a second priest who hasn't been charged.



Messages seeking comment were left for a diocesan representative."Let's iron out the problem so that people are not coming to the polls and denied the right to vote," Barrett said during a news conference. "For some people it's easy to re-register. Others it may not be so easy and we don't want to discourage people from voting."McMaster had briefed Trump before the Putin call  and his team drafted all-caps instructions telling Trump not to congratulate the Russian leader on his re-election victory. Trump did it anyway.



An internal investigation into the leak is underway, said a White House official who  like others interviewed about the announcement and the White House shakeup  demanded anonymity to discuss internal matters.



In a statement released by the White House, McMaster said he would be requesting retirement from the U.S. Army effective this summer, adding that afterward he "will leave public service."



McMaster had told confidants he would leave the post if at any point he lost credibility on the international stage, according to three White House officials. The feverish speculation about an impending exit sped up the decision for him to depart, the officials said, in part because McMaster believed foreign partners were beginning to doubt his influence.



Chief of Staff John Kelly and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis had been pushing Trump to get rid of McMaster and had been escalating their campaign in recent weeks. It had appeared McMaster's departure was imminent last week  but White House officials insisted the speculation was false.



"Just spoke to @POTUS and Gen. H.R. McMaster  contrary to reports they have a good working relationship and there are no changes at the NSC," White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders tweeted late last Thursday night.



McMaster never developed a personal rapport with Trump, who chafed at his long-winded briefing style, according to a White House official and a person close to the president. His influence in high-level decision-making had waned in recent months, as Trump has increasingly relied on the direct counsel of Kelly and Mattis.



Yet officials said the president still has genuine respect for McMaster. He had been under consideration for a fourth star, and White House officials hoped it would provide a graceful exit from the West Wing for the longtime soldier. No suitable postings had been identified, leaving McMaster  long an iconoclast among the top brass  with no choice but retirement.



Bolton, probably the most divisive foreign policy expert ever to serve as U.N. ambassador, has been a force in Republican foreign policy circles for decades. He has served in the Republican administrations of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, and served as a Bush lawyer during the 2000 Florida recount.



A strong supporter of the Iraq war and an advocate for aggressive use of American power, Bolton was unable to win Senate confirmation after his nomination to the U.N. post alienated many Democrats and even some Republicans. He resigned after serving 17 months as a Bush "recess appointment," which allowed him to hold the job on a temporary basis without Senate confirmation.



The role of national security adviser does not require Senate confirmation.



Bolton met with Trump and Kelly in early March to discuss North Korea and Iran. He was spotted entering the West Wing earlier Thursday.



Tension between Trump and McMaster had grown increasingly public. Last month, Trump took issue with McMaster's characterization of Russian meddling in the 2016 election after the national security adviser told the Munich Security Summit that interference was beyond dispute.



"General McMaster forgot to say that the results of the 2016 election were not impacted or changed by the Russians and that the only Collusion was between Russia and Crooked H, the DNC and the Dems," Trump tweeted Feb. 17, alluding to frequent GOP allegations of impropriety by Democrats and Hillary Clinton.



Tillerson's exit also forecast trouble for McMaster, who had aligned himself with the embattled secretary of state in seeking to soften some of Trump's most dramatic foreign policy impulses.



McMaster told The New York Times last year that Trump's unorthodox approach "has moved a lot of us out of our comfort zone, me included."



The military strategist, who joined the administration in February 2017, has struggled to navigate a tumultuous White House. Last summer, he was the target of a far-right attack campaign, as conservative groups and a website tied to former Trump adviser Steve Bannon targeted him as insufficiently supportive of Israel and not tough enough on Iran.



McMaster was brought in after Trump's first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, was dismissed after less than a month in office. White House officials said he was ousted because he did not tell top advisers, including Vice President Mike Pence, about the full extent of his contacts with Russian officials.



Associated Press writer Jill Colvin contributed to this report.Ishaan Tharoor writes about foreign affairs for The Washington Post. He previously was a senior editor and correspondent at Time magazine, based first in Hong Kong and later in New York.The openness of true friends is warranted because, as Aristotle pointed out, with friends in the truest sense you get the feeling that he or she would never wrong me. But the fact that Facebook allowed the personal data of so many trusting users to get into the hands of a political data firm whose CEO offered to entrap rival politicians in order to sway an election does not leave me confident that the company would never harm me.The answer is no way, underlined and in bold. Yet these were expenses charged to township credit cards at the Algonquin Township highway commissioners office, when it was led by Robert Miller, the Tribunes Robert McCoppin reports. Those and other expenses paid for with taxpayer money under Millers watch are now the subject of a lawsuit filed by the current highway commissioner, Andrew Gasser, who is challenging their validity.This purchase had the effect of deceiving readers about the size of Stantis following on Twitter. The Tribune Code of Editorial Principles states that we must provide readers with journalism that is trustworthy, relevant and valuable. If they have reason to doubt the credibility of our work, quality wont matter  they will go elsewhere. Our editorial code is available to read at chicagotribune.com/accuracy."In this day and age, there are so many efficient ways to run an election," Gryder said. "I spoke with (Cunningham) and Kendall County Clerk Debbie Gillette and they both said they could pick up it up and save taxpayers some money and be more efficient in how the services are handled for the public.""Let's be straight on this: Someone who is 18, and in high school, can vape all they want, and nobody can do anything about it," Mayor Richard Irvin said.The local meeting was more low-key, with the officials calling for a multi-pronged approach that stresses treatment in partnership with law enforcement. Sanguinetti singled out a county program that allows users to turn over drug paraphernalia, no questions asked, in return for the user getting treatment.FBI data is the best available record of U.S. gun sales. Since 1999, the first full year for which the FBI collected data, gun sales have risen annually. In 1999, 9,183,123 sales were recorded. Last year, the figure reached 39,695,315  up from 28,369,750 in 2019. In addition, gun sales through the first eight months of 2021 totaled 27,841,219, compared to 26,756,487 in the same period last year. Keep reading to find out which state had the highest gun sales in 2021. For similar lists visit 24/7 Wall St."If the (Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee) fought Republicans half as hard as their own party, I'd be worried for 2018," spokesman Matt Gorman said. "As long as Democrats train their fire on their own, we'll continue to work to win elections. It's a lesson that the DCCC apparently has yet to learn.""So there are things we could have done with that Dominick's had Retail Strategies assisted us with that. If we use them again this year, what are we going to miss out on again?" she said. "The more I'm seeing our (store) fronts empty the more I see Algonquin and Huntley building off of that. Seeing the growth we missed this past year I don't know if it's a good idea."The sales may occur three times a year but it is a continual process for the volunteers, Wick said. There is only one day between when one sale concludes before everyone starts working on the next one. Despite the workload, Wick says that after her personal 12 years of involvement, her energy remains high.But like Sam Malone and Cheers, you always come back to your first love. Pettorelli was initially lured back to the area with an offer to be a chef that turned out to be too good to be true. This prompted him to consider opening another restaurant of his own with thoughts of perhaps building up a nest egg that would allow a return to Colorado.Instead, the city is now working with area taxing bodies to abate 90 percent of the real estate taxes to be paid on the property through 2031, which is when the TIF would have expired, Barrera said. That means the parcel's taxing bodies would still receive the other 10 percent of the taxes.A. I did a lot of theater. We did a parody of a Shakespeare play my senior year and I remember lying on the floor, forgetting my line and just making up everything as I went. It was super fun.A: I have tons of worldwide maps and a couple of Atlases, websites and app games. The app games are quizzes with not just questions about locations of places, but what foods a certain culture may eat or clothes it wears, the climate, wind patterns and cultural histories. I'm also on my school's scholastic bowl team, and we get questions on geography, math, music and literature and other topics.Mayor Steve Chirico said having tech incubator on the site where so much technology was developed continues a long tradition. He said the U.S. patent office at one time had an office on that site to process new advancements.Frum was quoted as saying she was unaware of the company and the bump stocks being sold from the business. The company has been in the village for 18 years, is a member of the Northbrook Chamber of Commerce and has been recognized as a leading e-commerce company in multiple publications, Telisman said.Meeting with members of the public prior to her hiring, Smith said she would relish the challenge of working to expand the library's programs and offerings while dealing with limited resources  something she has experienced at the Waukegan Library. She also pledged to work closely with the Park Ridge Park District, school districts and city officials to ensure all resources are being used efficiently and effectively."For being volunteers, they're very professional in their overall approach to organizing concerts and offer a very eclectic array of different types of music for their audiences. They should be commended for that because it's not as easy as it looks to be able to present a wide variety.""To solve the problem, I created two cashier's checks that appeared to be issued from JP Morgan Chase Bank; one for $20,000 and the other for $49,000. JP Morgan Chase did not issue either check," Dunlap said in court documents. "I provided the counterfeit checks to GHA on or about Sept. 3, 2013. When I tendered the checks, I knew I was deceiving GHA for the purpose of obtaining and retaining the contract with GHA."As part of a July 31 agreement, Rajcinoski relinquished all but four of the dogs to the state and agreed to pay $2,700 a month for boarding and medical care to have those animals returned to him if he were found not guilty. During an Aug. 31 hearing, Rajcinoski agreed to relinquish control of the remaining four dogs after he failed to make the first $2,700 payment.The Lake County Board of Commissioners gave a Fox television crew permission to use the third floor of the Superior Court in Gary to shoot the "Untitled David Elliot and Danny Strong Pilot," which was described to the commissioners as following "the law practice of a young female attorney fighting for the wrongfully convicted."Four seniors from Kouts High School and two teachers serving as chaperones on a trip to Washington, D.C. were injured late Tuesday when the charter bus they were in on their return trip was struck head-on by another vehicle traveling the wrong way on the Pennsylvania Turnpike."The Lake County Council believes that our Indiana lawmakers have a responsibility to make our community safer by making all firearm purchases subject to background checks at the point of sale, so that felons, convicted domestic abuses, and those with severe mental illness are barred from possessing guns," the resolution said. "The Lake County Council believes that our senators and congressmen should consider a bipartisan bill to close the gun show and internet sales loopholes in the federal government background check system as implemented in Indiana."In the hours leading up to Terry's death, his family said he was in a mental health crisis and called Sioux Falls area police and Merrillville police to try to assist him. He broke into a car dealership in South Dakota and was the subject of a welfare check at a Walmart in Hobart before he was shot, according to his family and police.The student-led march, one of many marches being held across the country to raise awareness about gun control after the Feb. 14 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., where 14 students and three staff members were killed, will meet around 10:45 a.m. Saturday outside the LaPorte Avenue entrance to Valparaiso University and leave there at 11 a.m. for City Hall.That afternoon, she continued her birthday of thoughtful gestures with her 10-year-old twins. They picked up litter, dropped off gifts, delivered smiles to strangers. She even gave me two lottery tickets to give to strangers. (I did so later that day at the Gary Area Career Center.)Hunts LinkedIn profile describes him as a labor lawyer, and as of late he represented two employees of the Vernon Township Assessors Office who were named in a harassment accusation. He later represented Assessor Gary Raupp in a lawsuit against Vernon Township for allegedly violating the Illinois Open Meetings Act.Pueblo's election is Nov. 2, here's everything you need to knowThe authorities in Shanghai announced that they plan to increase the statutory minimum wage in the commercial capital from April 1, 2018.

Following the increase on April 1, wages for full time workers will be raised from RMB 2,300 (US$363.70) to RMB 2,420 (US$382.67) per month, while wages for part time workers will be raised from RMB 20 (US$3.16) to RMB 21 (US$3.32) per hour.

The five percent increase is identical to Shanghais 2017 minimum wage adjustment, but lower than in previous years. Shanghai currently has the highest minimum wage in China, followed by Shenzhen and Beijing.

In 2017, Shanghais GDP grew by 6.9 percent, surpassing the RMB 3 trillion (US$467 billion) mark and mirroring the national growth rate. Earlier this year, Shanghai mayor Ying Yong set the citys GDP growth target at around 6.5 percent for the next five years.

Zolzaya Erdenebileg, Business Intelligence Senior Associate at Dezan Shira & Associates in Shanghai, commented, Its no secret that wages in emerging Asia are rising quickly. Foreign companies have to make sure that theyre on top of these changes in order to compete in the labor market.

In China, regional government set minimum wages according to local conditions. This year, several other regions in China have already updated their minimum wages this year, including Guangxi, Jiangxi, Liaoning, Sichuan, and Tibet.

International Payroll & HR Solutions from Dezan Shira & Associates

Employers should expect more regional governments to revise their minimum wage in 2018. Although regional governments typically revise their minimum wage in the first part of the year, last year many were slow to announce reforms and its possible this may have a knock-on effect in 2018.

Employers should further note that minimum wage revisions can be linked to social insurance or other forms of compensation in some areas of the country. HR and payroll professionals should therefore monitor local announcements carefully and prepare to adapt accordingly.Every culture has its uniqueness. The challenge for the British Museum to be an encyclopedic one is to showcase not only the exclusiveness of cultures but the coherent inter-connectivity among them, said British Museum Director Hartwig Fischer.



"What we are looking at is the incredible diversity ... And at the same time we look at that common ground, the shared humanity, and these two things need to be brought into light and have to be made accessible," Fischer told Xinhua in a recent interview.

The British Museum has unveiled a 10-year and beyond transformation plan which includes bringing back its Reading Room and major refurbishment of galleries in a bid to take the museum to "the next level."

"I think each culture has a possibility to see the world in a very specific way and one is not necessarily better than the other. It's different," Fischer said.

"What we have to do is rethink the display of our collection, to stress how cultures have grown into what they are ... The China gallery is the first big step," he said.

NEVER ENOUGH TO PRESENT CHINA



The China and South Asia Gallery is described by Fischer as the "most imposing room" in the British Museum. Built by King Edward VII in the early 20th century, the gallery distinguishes itself with its bold and noble features with gilding, strong pillars and plaster decorations.

As part of the Museum's renovation project, the China gallery fully reopened to the public last December after a two-year refurbishment.

The museum has upgraded the floor, light and exhibition structure of the China gallery in a bid to better visibility and understanding for the museum's 7 million annual visitors.

In addition to the iconic Ming dynasty blue-and-white porcelain and exquisite Tang dynasty tomb figurines, the gallery has also incorporated various rotating light-sensitive objects such as paintings, prints, and textiles to present Chinese history from 5,000 BC.

Notably, some of the modern artworks are on display for the first time in this gallery as the museum seeks to present a glimpse of present China.

"Nobody has ever enough to present the history of China. That is impossible. It is too vast, too varied. It's too layered. So what we can do in such a place is to offer routes of access and confront you with the most stunning achievements," Fischer said.

The China gallery, together with a separate gallery of Chinese ceramics, offers visitors many ways of engaging with China's history and cultures, he said.

"And in that sense I think it is extremely rich," he said.

The museum director said the efforts to incorporate modern art works into the historic display is to demonstrate "a huge and rich phenomena" in which present-day China relates to its past.

"Looking at the way present China relates to its past, you understand that culture is actually at the heart of resilience, the possibility to survive and to develop and to thrive," he said.

H EXPLORE WITH CHINESE PARTNERS

The museum director described the museum world in China as "extremely dynamic," as "it is looking not only on the great past but also the great future."

The British Museum is working closely with the Chinese counterparts on joint projects and on the long-term basis in both Britain and China for study and exhibitions, said Fischer.

"The key is people meeting and people working together. There is always space to do more, to explore our collections, to explore history, to explore through the exhibition, through research projects," he said.

The British Museum is "very keen" to share its exhibitions and collections with the Chinese audience, who are the biggest single foreign group visitors to the museum, said the director.

"It is our shared place. There are no 'foreigners' in this place. As soon as you cross the threshold, you're a citizen of the world, you shared the same big one country."

The British Museum has been working closely with Chinese colleagues for dual-exhibitions in China, said Fischer, noting that The History of the World in 100 Objects in Beijing and Shanghai attracted more than 700,000 visitors, and a major four-month exhibition in Hong Kong last year featuring mummies drew about 850,000 visitors -- an all-time record for any touring exhibition of the British Museum.

"Behind it (the exhibition), there is in-depth, long-term cooperation in research, in skill sharing, in thinking about digital," he said.

The director said there is much more to do in the future to intensify the exchanges. "I think that we have all profited very much on both sides from working together, from discussing, from sharing knowledge, from sharing skills."

A FUTURE MUSEUM WITH DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY



Talking about digital technology, Fischer said the British Museum is fully bracing it to serve a global audience, especially those who cannot be online.

"The museum itself is a technology," said Fischer. "And it has developed as it has to if it wants to survive."

"I think the museum should use new means, those that are being developed to tell stories in a more pertinent way, in a richer way."

The British Museum remains one of the leading visitor attractions in Britain, and an increasing number of people from around the world are engaging with the museum's online collections.

"The British Museum has been very active in developing digital offers for its global audiences ... we have 40 to 50 million people using our website and using online collection to engage with objects from the British Museum, so that gives you an idea of where we are heading," he said.

The director said digital technology opens up a "fantastic new dimension" for the museum's ambition to allow people around the world to engage with its collections and the history of humankind.

"It helps us to make our visitors understand that behind each of every object in this space, the human beings, the human feelings, and ambitions and hopes for spiritual enlightenment. And that is what this new technique allows us to do."

Meanwhile, digital technology will also impact how people engage with the objects on site, said Fischer, noting that the museum is cooperating with tech companies like Google to explore new formats and methods and develop extra texts, explanations and images that help on-site visitors understand the objects.

Despite the advancement of technologies, the dialogue with the objects on site is always the best experience, said Fischer.

"That is a fantastic moment of self-assertion, freedom, respect, exploration, and discovery," he said.U.S. film studio The Weinstein Company, whose co-founder Harvey Weinstein has been accused of sexual harassment and assault, said Monday it has filed for voluntary bankruptcy and will sell its assets to a private equity firm.

The company also announced that it is ending all non-disclosure agreements that prevented victims of alleged sexual misconduct by the disgraced director and producer from talking about their experiences.

"Today, the Company also takes an important step toward justice for any victims who have been silenced by Harvey Weinstein," the statement said. According to reports, Weinstein had used non-disclosure agreements to silence his accusers.

The Weinstein Company will enter into an agreement with an affiliate of Lantern Capital Partners based in Dallas city in the state of Texas.

Earlier this month, an effort by a group of investors to buy the troubled company fell through after rounds of tough negotiations. The consortium was led by Maria Contreras-Sweet, head of the Small Business Administration in Barack Obama's government, and U.S. billionaire Ron Burkle.

If the deal had been reached, the new company would include a compensation fund for Weinstein's accusers worth up to 90 million dollars and hire a new board of directors, the majority of whom would be women.

The Weinstein Company, one of the most successful independent film studios in the United States, has produced Oscar-winning movies like "The King's Speech," "Django Unchained" and "The Reader."

But it began struggling financially since Harvey Weinstein was accused of sexual harassment and assault by dozens of women in 2017.China is building the world's fastest wind tunnel, which is capable of testing aircraft traveling at up to 25 times the speed of sound.

The new tunnel, with a length of 265 meters and a diameter of 2.5 meters, is targeting flight simulations from Mach 10 to 25 (12,250 to 30,625 kp/h), 10 to 25 times the speed of sound, as Han Guilai, a researcher with China's State Key Laboratory of High Temperature Gas Dynamics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), told China Central Television.

Dubbed "the cradle of aircrafts," wind tunnels can test how air will pass over a solid object, and they are commonly used by spacecraft engineers to test spacecraft designs.

China's current wind tunnels could simulate flights ranging from Mach 5 to 9, and researchers from the Beijing-based CAS have successfully tested one hypersonic plane in a wind tunnel at such speeds.

The research was published in the journal "Science China: Physics, Mechanics & Astronomy" in February. It unveiled the "I Plane" model, which is capable of transporting passengers and payloads from Beijing to New York City within two hours, much faster than any commercial airline flight could.

The facility under development, however, is expected to cover China's test scales ranging from Mach 5 to 25, thus help the country to take a globally leading role in the field, though competition from other countries is still fierce, according to Han.

"The new tunnel will aid the engineering application of hypersonic technology by duplicating the environment of extreme hypersonic flights. Once issues are discovered during these ground tests, they will be ironed out before test flights begin," said the researcher.



 Flash

Vietnam's northern Quang Ninh province has allowed cars driven by Chinese tourists to enter Ha Long city, home to the world heritage site of Ha Long Bay, through the Mong Cai border gate.





The entry of Chinese cars will be allowed on a trial basis until Dec. 31 this year, Vietnam News Agency quoted Vu Van Hop, chief of the Secretariat of the provincial People's Committee, as saying on Wednesday.





Since Jan. 1, 2017, Quang Ninh has allowed cars with less than nine seats owned by Chinese nationals and enterprises to enter only Mong Cai city and vice versa during a trial period of one year.





Chinese tourists are not allowed to stay beyond three days per entrance. In case of accidents or broken-down cars, the stay is extended by another day.





In 2017, 93 cars ferried 256 Chinese tourists to Mong Cai city and 38 cars with 110 tourists from Vietnam to Dongxing city in China.





Cars entering Vietnam through the Mong Cai border gate are permitted to travel around Mong Cai city. Meanwhile, tourists from Vietnam could visit Dongxing city.





Vietnam welcomed 901,800 Chinese visitors in the first two months of this year, or 31.5 percent of the total international arrivals, up 38.5 percent against the same period last year, the General Statistics Office said.



 Flash

The World Trade Organization (WTO) on Wednesday announced in a panel report that revised countervailing measures imposed by the United States on imports of certain products from China were inconsistent with WTO laws.

The panel also found that the American recourse to third country prices for assessing the benefit granted to Chinese exporters was inconsistent with WTO rules.

In 2016, China requested consultations with the U.S. to challenge the full compliance of Washington with a 2014 WTO ruling against its countervailing measures on 22 products from China.

These had come about after China had gone to the WTO in 2012 to contest U.S. anti-subsidy tariffs on Chinese exports including several metal products, steel wheels, solar panels, wind towers, steel cylinders and aluminum extrusions.

China challenged various aspects of certain countervailing duty investigations and the preliminary and final determinations that led to the imposition of countervailing duties.

Among the findings, the WTO panel found that China had demonstrated that the American revised determinations were inconsistent with the subsidies and countervailing measures (SCM) agreement.

The panel found that the United States had not complied with the requirement to "take account of the length of time during which the subsidy program has been in operation" and failed to adequately explain its conclusions regarding the existence of the relevant subsidy program. Flash

Nigerians have welcomed the release of over 100 abducted Dapchi school girls in the restive northeastern Yobe State.

The Nigerian government on Wednesday announced the release of girls who were abducted by the Boko Haram insurgents at Government Science and Technical School in the northeastern town of Dapchi on Feb. 19.

According to the latest update by the government, the number of school girls released Wednesday by terror group Boko Haram after their abduction last month has increased to 101. A total of 110 schoolgirls from the school were abducted.

Minister of Information and Culture Lai Mohammed gave the update in a statement, saying the number could still increase as security agencies had commenced the profiling of the freed schoolgirls.

Authorities said no ransom was paid to secure the release of school girls. The girls released were dropped off in Dapchi town at 3 a.m. on Wednesday, and not handed over to anyone.

The release of the schoolgirls was the outcome of the directive by President Muhammadu Buhari to all security agencies to do everything possible to secure the release of the schoolgirls, the government said.

Nigerians interviewed by Xinhua expressed on Wednesday their happiness over the development and urged the government to take more concrete steps to avoid further abduction.

Aisha Wakil, a human rights activist, expressed joy over the release of the Dapchi school girls from Boko Haram captivity.

Wakil, who is also known as Mama Boko Haram, was a member of the Dialogue and Peaceful Resolution of Security Challenges Committee in the northern region.

Early this month, the human rights activist claimed a Boko Haram faction had contacted her to confirm it has the girls.

The activist said the Barnawi faction of Boko Haram contacted and confirmed to her that the girls were safe, healthy and in good condition.

She had called on the abductors to release the girls to enable them to be reunited with their families.

She commended the government and other parties who contributed to the development, and expressed hope that the remaining girls as well as Chibok girls would also be released soon.

Also, Bashir Manzo, Chairman of the Parents Association of Dapchi Abducted Girls, said they were happy over the development.

Manzo disclosed that they were currently taking head count of the girls, adding most of them had returned to their homes.

Similarly, Maina Musa and Ayuba Alamson, parents of abducted Chibok school girls, expressed joy over the development.

They, however, tasked the government to secure the release of the remaining school girls in insurgents' captivity.

Muhammad Ibrahim, a spokesperson for the Arewa Consultative Forum, described the release of the abducted Dapchi school girls as a reassuring development and commended the government for the effort.

He called on the military and other security agencies to sustain the synergy and fast track the search and rescue of the remaining Chibok school girls kidnapped four years ago.

President Muhammadu Buhari has ordered four ministers to proceed to Dapchi in Yobe for update on the release of the female students abducted in February. Flash

Some 44 African countries on Wednesday signed an agreement establishing the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) in Kigali, capital city of Rwanda.

The signing took place during the 10th Extraordinary Session of the Assembly of the African Union (AU) on the AfCFTA. According the AU, 19 African heads of state and government attended the summit.

The signed legal instruments was handed over to Chairperson of AU Commission Moussa Faki Mahamat after the signing.

The agreement will be submitted for ratification by state parties of the agreement in accordance with their domestic laws.

The decision to form the AfCFTA was adopted in January 2012 during the 18th Ordinary Session of the Assembly of Heads of State and Government of the AU while AfCFTA negotiations were launched by the AU in 2015.

The AfCFTA is aimed at creating a single continental market for goods and services with free movement of businesses and investments. This, according to the AU, will pave the way for accelerating the establishment of the Continental Customs Union and the African Customs Union.

The AfCFTA will make Africa the largest free trade area created in terms of the number of participating countries since the formation of the World Trade Organization, according to the AU. The AfCFTA could create an African market of over 1.2 billion people with a GDP of US$2.5 trillion, the pan-African bloc said.

The AfCFTA will progressively eliminate tariffs on intra-African trade, making it easier for African businesses to trade within the continent and cater to and benefit from the growing African market, said the AU.

The UN Economic Commission for Africa estimates that the AfCFTA has the potential both to boost intra-African trade by 53.2 percent by eliminating import duties, and to double this trade if non-tariff barriers are also reduced.

Together with the signing of the agreement on the AfCFTA, 27 African countries also signed the Protocol to the Treaty establishing the African Economic Community on Wednesday relating to free movement of persons, right of residence and right of establishment.You are here: World

 Flash

U.S. Congress Wednesday unveiled a bipartisan spending package worth 1.3 trillion U.S. dollars that would keep government agencies operating through September.







The measure, coming after congressional leaders met earlier in the day, will prevent the third government shutdown this year if it's passed and signed into law by the Friday night deadline.





The bill allows big spending increases for defense and domestic programs, while adding money for infrastructure projects, veterans and measures to combat the opioid crisis.





However, it gives President Donald Trump only about 1.6 billion dollars for construction of a border wall with Mexico and other border security measures, far short of the 25 billion dollars in long-term funding that the administration sought.



By Jamie Freed, Reuters | Mar. 21, 2018

China Southern Airlines Co Ltd said on Wednesday it had placed an order for 30 Boeing Co 737 MAX narrowbodies for its Xiamen Airlines subsidiary in a deal the plane maker said was worth more than US$3.6 billion at list prices.

The order, including 20 737 MAX 8s and 10 737 MAX 10s for delivery between 2019 and 2022 will be used to increase efficiency and capacity, China Southern said in a filing to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

Xiamen Airlines in July had signed a provisional deal during the 2017 Paris Airshow to join the group of launch customers for the 737 MAX 10, the largest version of the Boeing narrowbody family.

Boeing said the firm order for 30 jets for Xiamen Airlines had been booked in 2017 and attributed to an unidentified customer at the time. The U.S. plane maker last year received 912 net orders after cancellations, while rival Airbus SE received 1,109.

Xiamen Airlines operates an all-Boeing fleet of more than 160 jets and the new airplanes will be used with subsidiaries including Hebei Airlines and Jiangxi Airlines, Boeing said in a statement.By Bella Genga, Bloomberg News | Mar. 21, 2018

Kenya Airways Plc plans to add as many as 20 new destinations in Africa, Europe and Asia in the next five years, Chief Executive Officer Sebastian Mikosz said.

The route-network expansion will help sub-Saharan Africa's third-biggest carrier, in the midst of a turnaround program after a record loss in 2016, return to profit. On Wednesday, the airline reported a 6.1 billion-shilling (US$60.3 million) loss for the nine months through December.

KQ, as the company is known, will seek board approval for the new-route plan in April, Mikosz said in an interview in the capital, Nairobi. It's also preparing to take back five aircraft it sub-leased to other carriers, to build capacity and cater for additional passengers, he said.

"We are looking at at least one European route and one Asian route on top of the African network," Mikosz said. "In 2018, we might announce maybe two, three new routes to be operated in 2019."

The carrier is exploring partnerships and joint ventures with other airlines and has began discussions with South African Airways. Kenya Airways is considering collaborating on aircraft repairs and route joint ventures with the state-owned South African carrier, Chairman Michael Joseph said in the same interview.

Sharing Routes

"We've discussed issues of mutual concern," Joseph said. "We fly to similar destinations in Africa. They fly to Uganda, we fly to Uganda, among other routes, so there's a possibility we could probably share those routes."

Kenya Airways will this year take back two Boeing Dreamliners and three Boeing 777-300 aircraft sub-leased to Oman Air and Turkish Airlines respectively between September this year and December 2019. One of those aircraft will be used to operate the new New York route that will be launched in October, which should fuel revenue growth in 2019, Mikosz said.

KQ in November completed a reorganization that resulted in Kenya's government increasing its stake to 48.9 percent from 29.8 percent, and domestic lenders owning 38.1 percent after a debt-for-equity swap. Air France-KLM's stake shrank to 7.8 percent from 26.7 percent after the financial restructuring.

"2018 is a year of consolidation, of finalizing all the cost-reduction measures we have put in place, making sure we have the systems in place in terms of a revenue point of view," Joseph said. "If everything goes according to plan, I think the path we are on is a good one."

KQ shares fell as much as 12 percent, the largest decline since 2009, after the results announcement. The stock closed 7.5 percent lower at 10.5 shillings.China opposes the "Taiwan Travel Act" and urges the United States to adhere to the one-China policy and stop any official ties with Taiwan, the Foreign Ministry spokeswoman said on Wednesday.

Hua Chunying made the remark in response to a planned visit by a US diplomat to the island. Media reports say that Alex Wong, deputy assistant secretary in the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs at the US Department of State, will visit Taiwan from March 20 to 22.

It would be the first official visit since US President Donald Trump signed the act on Friday. It encourages visits between the United States and Taiwan at all levels.In 2020, we were the church on our heels. A global pandemic shut down much of our world. But the church has been on the move since it was birthed; it will continue to be on the move until God makes all things new.This Sunday marks the Feast of the Annunciation, when the angel Gabriel came to Mary with an outrageous announcement: that she would carry a human child who would also be the child of God. For many Christians, Annunciation Daywhich lands exactly nine months before Christmas Daymarks the moment when Christ became incarnate and entered Marys womb.

Mary has been a controversial figure throughout the centuries and not just in Protestant circles. For some feminists, she represents the subservience of women in the Christian faith. More recently, however, she has come to represent the opposite: the liberation of the oppressed. Marys Magnificat, otherwise known as the Song of the Theotokos, stands for resistance. A poor, obscure woman spoke for those on the margins when she said, He has brought down rulers from their thrones but has lifted up the humble. He has filled the hungry with good things but has sent the rich away empty (Luke 1:4655).

Marys traditional title of Theotokos, or God-bearer, may feel awkward for many Protestants, but it was affirmed by the third ecumenical Council of Ephesus in A.D. 431 (That council also reaffirmed the Nicene Creed, a decision that Protestants support.) Theologically, the title underscores what Scripture tells usthat Jesus was both a holy being and also a human baby of Marys womb, the divine one who had her DNA and blood running through his veins. This great mystery encourages us to ponder what it means for a woman to bear God.

Bearing God is a task not just for women who can carry children but for everyone who will undertake itso the church has taught for centuries. We, like Mary, are asked to take Jesus within ourselves and be the vessel of Gods goodness to the world.

The medieval Christians who were deeply immersed in the life of prayeroften referred to as mysticshave helped me better understand Mary as a God-bearer. Throughout church history, men and women have experienced profound and sometimes terrifying encounters with God that left them changed. (Some of these encounters were experientially similar to evangelical conversions.)

Francis of Assisi, whose encounter with God led him to give up his wealth, was devoted to Mary and saw her as an example of how to live faithfully even in the midst of confusion, uncertainty, and suffering. A later mystic-activist of the 20th century, Dorothy Day, felt such a deep connection to the mother of God that her own experience of motherhood was what finally brought me into the Church. Day, who like Assisi offered hospitality to the most marginalized in society, understood what Mary faced when she became the mother of Jesus.

When Mary says yes to bearing Christ, she is intruded upon by God, deeply wounded by the Holy Spirit, and brought into the deepest poverty by the preposterous words of an angel. She braves the harshness of pregnancy and an arduous trip to Bethlehem; she gives birth far from home and without the company of the women who usually surround her; she endures a terrifying flight to Egypt to escape those who hunt her son. Although he survives, she watches him grow in wisdom, knowing the terrifying truth she has treasured in her heart all these years: that he will soon die on a cross.

In other words, Marys choice to bear God required a great deal of suffering on her part.

Arguably, Jesus learned much of his bold, risk-taking faith not only because he was Gods child but also because he watched and learned from his mother. The Savior of the world was, at times, meek and mild (as his mother has been described), but he was also brave and wholehearted like her.

Over the past decade, as Ive watched my father battle cancer, as Ive moved states, witnessed the death of a community, and birthed my four children, I have been drawn to Mary and the suffering of bearing God. As the poet Scott Cairns writes, When we say that she [Mary] bears him, we apprehend that she is both the one who suffers unprecedented, appalling, and unmediated contact with his Holy Presence, and the one who carries his Holy Presence to us.

In short: Her bold decision to bear Jesus points us beyond her to God.

When we become God-bearers, allowing his Word to enter us, we also participate in suffering with others. Not only do we suffer with those on the marginsthe vulnerable, the young, the elderly, minorities, refugees, the homeless, the sick, and the broken-hearted but we also learn from them what it means to bear God in the world.

What the mystics longed for is what Maryyoung, poor, and humblehad from the beginning: a deep, intimate encounter with God that changed her forever. She carried God first in her very body and brought him forth into the world to transform us.

Thats something to celebrate.

Christiana N. Peterson is a regular contributor at Good Letters and author of the forthcoming book, Mystics and Misfits: Meeting God Through St. Francis and Other Unlikely Saints. Sections of this piece were excerpted from Mystics and Misfits (Herald Press, 2018). All rights reserved. Used with permission. www.HeraldPress.com.The magic returns; the strains of our music will once more ring forth. Consortium Aurora Borealis is back in action after the silence imposed on so many arts organizations by COVID-19.We attempted to send a notification to your email address but we were unable to verify that you provided a valid email address. Please click here to update your email address if you wish to receive notifications. Otherwise, you may click here to disable notifications and hide this message.AKRON, Ohio -- Authorities are searching for an Akron man who is charged in a Thursday shooting in the city's Goodyear Heights neighborhood.

Anthony D. Lamb, 44, is charged with felonious assault in the shooting on Marks Avenue near Brittain Road, police said.

Lamb is not in custody but a warrant was issued for his arrest, police said.

Lamb is accused of shooting a 44-year-old man in the left thigh about 7:30 a.m. , according to a police report.

Investigators have not offered a motive for the shooting.

Akron Fire Department paramedics took the victim to Summa Akron City Hospital for treatment. An update on his condition was not immediately available.

Anyone with information about Lamb's whereabouts is asked to call Akron detectives at at 330-375-2490, U.S. Marshals at 1-866-4-WANTED, or Summit County Crime Stoppers at 330-434-COPS. Tipsters can also text TIPSCO and the tip to 274637.

To comment on this story, visit Thursday's crime and courts comments page.AKRON, Ohio - Four emerging Akron leaders have been chosen as 2018 fellows by the League of Creative Interventionists to create projects that connect people in their neighborhoods.

This is the second year of the Knight Foundation-funded program. A $74,000 Knight grant will enable the League of Creative Interventionists to work with the fellows to help them develop their ideas and learn to clearly communicate them to potential partners and the media, said Anne Koller, the league's interim executive director.

To be selected as fellows, Akronites submitted applications outlining their ideas. The ideas needed to be executable in about a year's time, but not fully developed. The league also looked for applicants who weren't receiving funding or support from other organizations, Koller said.

Akron fellows include:

SeKoria Finney

Tyron Dior Hoisten

Diane Lewis

Shani Richards

Each Akron fellow will receive a $10,000 stipend, which will also help pay for materials. Each will be paired with an Akron community leader, based on the project's genre, who can help drive the initiative forward. Part of their work will be to encourage neighborhood engagement as the projects progress.

The mentorship component is important to the project, said League of Creative Interventionists founder and Artistic Director Hunter Franks.

"One of biggest intentions is to create a pipeline of leaders in the communities," he said. " We created mentorships for the fellows to elevate and discover their leadership, and to brings folks along from their neighborhoods."

The league works to empower upcoming leaders, and better connect people with their own communities through interactive public art installations, storytelling and projects.

Franks has worked extensively with the Summit Lake community to reinvigorate the neighborhood. He also staged 500 plates, a community meal for members of each Akron neighborhood, which took place on the Akron Innerbelt Highway in 2015.

"This is to help emerging leaders make Akron a better place," said Knight's Akron Program Director, Kyle Kutuchief. "Being tapped to help improve your neighborhood is an important thing."

The Akron fellows will meet in Charlotte, North Carolina in April for a kick-off meeting with the league and other fellows chosen from other cities.

Want more Akron news? Sign up for cleveland.com's Rubber City Daily, an email newsletter delivered at 5:30 a.m. Monday through Friday.BEACHWOOD, Ohio -- OVI, Interstate 271: At 1:55 a.m. March 17, police discovered an abandoned auto on the I-271 northbound exit ramp at Chagrin Boulevard. The car appeared to have been involved in a crash.

A short time later, officers spotted a woman walking on the I-271 southbound entrance ramp. The woman, 24, of Lyndhurst, who is the owner of the abandoned car, was intoxicated.

She was charged with OVI, disorderly conduct, failure to maintain reasonable control, prohibited blood-alcohol content, and hit-skip.

OVI, I-271: At 2:40 a.m. March 14, police stopped a car that was speeding on I-271 southbound. It was subsequently discovered that the driver, a Cleveland man, 26, was intoxicated.

The man was charged with OVI, as well as speeding, following too closely, not driving within marked lanes, prohibited blood-alcohol content, and for not displaying a driver's license.

Found property, North Woodland Road: At 11:25 a.m. March 14, a woman brought to the police station a gun she found in her daughter's former bedroom. Police learned that the daughter found the gun while in college six or seven years ago and brought it home. She left it in her room upon leaving her mother's residence.

It was also learned that the gun, when originally found, had been stolen from someone in Milwaukee.

Warrant arrest, Park East Drive: At 7:50 p.m. March 14, police received a call about a disturbance taking place at Residence Inn, 3628 Park East Drive. Officers walked in on a family argument occurring on the second floor. One of the arguing people, a Cleveland Heights man, 18, was found to be wanted on a South Euclid police warrant.

The man was arrested and turned over to the South Euclid Police Department.

Marijuana possession, Cedar Road: At 6 p.m. March 14, a Cleveland man, 21, was cited at Beachwood Place mall, 26300 Cedar Road, for marijuana and marijuana paraphernalia possession, as well as having an open container of alcohol in a motor vehicle.

Drug trafficking, Cedar Road: At 5:05 p.m. March 15, police arrested two men at Beachwood Place for drug trafficking. Arrested were two 18-year-olds, one from Euclid and the other from Fairborn, Ohio.

OVI, Chagrin Boulevard: At 1:10 p.m. March 16, police received calls from motorists about a vehicle being driven erratically. Officers were soon able to locate the GMC Yukon and made a traffic stop.

The driver, a Cleveland man, 31, was found to be intoxicated. The man was charged with OVI, weaving, speeding, marijuana possession, making an improper turn, and driving with a suspended license.

Resisting arrest, Cedar Road: At 4:10 a.m. March 17, police arrested a Beachwood man, 48, for failure to maintain physical control while under the influence of alcohol.

OVI, George Zeiger Drive: At 2:30 a.m. March 18, police arrested an Akron man, 39, for driving while intoxicated and with a suspended license, prohibited blood-alcohol content, and failure to maintain marked lanes.

If you would like to discuss the police blotter, please visit our crime and courts comments page.EUCLID, Ohio - The Lincoln Electric Co. is counting on its new $30 million Welding Technology & Training Center to assist in closing the skills gap in that industry.

"We believe that we can be a catalyst," said Christopher L. Mapes, the company's chairman, president and chief executive officer, of its effort to help in alleviate the mismatch between qualified welders and the many openings that are going unfilled. "We believe that we can be viewed as a thought leader relative to the success in addressing that issue."

The company held a ribbon cutting Wednesday for the 130,000-square-foot, two-story facility, with expansive windows, that opened in January at its St. Clair Avenue campus. Doing something about the dearth of welders was a recurring theme at the event that included speeches by officials and tours of the state-of-the art facility.

The industry needs about 30,000 new welders annually to replace those retiring as well as to fill newly created positions. The average salary is more than $82,000, the company said citing data including that from the American Welding Society.

Erik Folan and Andy Haritonovich, are learning to become welders in Lincoln Electric's 20-week comprehensive training program, which both value because they say they are getting much hands-on experience.

Folan said he learned about welding when he worked in the oil and gas industry in Texas. Had wish he had been exposed to the career while he was still in high school.

Haritonovich said he saw welding as the best option of breaking the cycle of working a series of low-paying jobs.

"I was working a bunch of restaurant, landscaping, hardwood flooring jobs," he said. "I came here to get into a trade so that I could have some job security, good pay and benefits."

The Lincoln Electric Weld School opened in 1917, making it the oldest continually operating weld school in the world, according to the company, which designs, develops and manufacturers arc welding products and robotic arc welding systems.

"Quite frankly our welding school was overbooked," he said addressing the crowd. "We didn't think that we could share with the world that we were the welding experts if we asked you to wait six months to get in our classes. That is what drove us to this investment."

Lincoln Electric went from 66 welding cells, or booths, at its old facility to potentially more than 220 at the new center, said Jason Scales, business manager, education.

"We know where the welding industry is going," he said. "We want to impart that knowledge to help create that workforce that can meet that need."

The school will continue with its core mission of training welding educators, including those at community colleges throughout the country. Mapes said since a welding instructor typically teaches 180 students during about a four-month period, Lincoln Electric's focus on "training the trainer" creates an "amplification so that we are touching every individual that is going through" a program.

Sales Training Manager Alex Monico instructs students Wednesday at Lincoln Electric's new $30 million Welding Technology & Training Center.

The company will also maintain its tradition of training new welders as well as providing specialized training, including to its global clients. (The company has a network of distributors and sales office covering more than 160 countries.) Mapes said upgrading welders' skills is a must in an industry that is increasingly becoming high tech.

"Many people see welding and they think of the billowing smoke and the helmet ... or the historical perspectives of welding," he said. "Today welding is really software engineering, metallurgy and robotic automation. So, the continued advancements of the technology also create challenges associated with the skills gap."

During a tour of the new building, Sales Training Manager Alex Monico pointed to a cavernous space with training equipment, and explained how the design aided in customizing training.

"The flexible training space allows us to handle multiple different sizes of parts, multiple different types of machines and a varying number of students," he said.

In another part of the building, Monico showed how technology was helping students learn the trade.

"I see you," said the feminine voice coming from the REALWELD(r) Trainer as he approached the machine.

Monico then began working its controls. The machine responded, "Make a left."

He explained, ''It's like another instructor. She'll tell me how to change my angle to make the ideal weld."CLEVELAND, Ohio - More than two years ago, Jon Kozesky filed a public records request to learn the name of a Cleveland police officer who issued him a traffic ticket.

As part of his request, Kozesky included the officer's badge number, the time of the traffic stop and the police district he was traveling through.

Then he waited.

And he waited.

On Wednesday, 764 days after he filed his request, he spoke for the first time with someone at the city about his request. The person told him this: It could take more time to dig up the information he sought.

Kozesky is the latest victim of the city of Cleveland's notorious failure to provide public records in a timely manner, as required by state law.

Attorney David Marburger, an expert on Ohio's public records law who co-authored a book on the subject in 2011, described the way the city handled Kozesky's request as "outrageous."

"What do they have, like 30 officers who all have the same badge number," Marburger said in an interview. "That's laughable. It's just too funny."

Law Director Barbara Langhenry, whose department handles requests for public records, was not immediately available for comment.

Ohio law requires that public records be "promptly prepared and made available for inspection to any person at all reasonable times during regular business hours." Copies must be provided "within a reasonable period of time."

Kozesky, the founder of JonThomas Consulting, a government strategy firm in Cleveland, provided cleveland.com with a copy of his records request, which he had emailed to Langhenry and her public records team on Feb. 16, 2016.

"This notice is to serve as an official public records request for the identification of the Cleveland Patrolman with the badge number 621, serving second shift on Feb. 16, 2016, in Cleveland's third police district," his note read.

He filed his request an hour or so after being pulled over on West Sixth Street for making an illegal U-turn. He said he sought the officer's name because he didn't like the officer's tone.

"He didn't cross any lines, or anything like that," Kozesky said in a telephone interview. "This officer was just very rude and abrasive."

Two weeks ago, someone from the city left him a message about his request. He missed a second call last week but made contact on Wednesday. That's when the person said that determining the name of the officer could take some time, Kozesky said.

"This is something that should have been tracked down pretty quickly," he said.

A coalition of news organizations, including cleveland.com, has contemplated suing the city, contending that it is violating state law with its slow response to records requests.

Mayor Frank Jackson, in turn, publicly pledged last fall to improve the way his administration deals with records requests.

As part of that pledge, the city launched a records-management system. The system, GovQA, made accessible last November through the city's website, allows records requests to be filed through an online portal. People making requests can track the city's progress toward providing public documents and receive updates via email.

But that online system also has sparked criticism about slow responses.

Marburger said he, too, has found the city slow to respond at times.

"They've always been a little difficult," he said. "Sometimes inept. Sometimes irrational."CLEVELAND, Ohio -- The City of East Cleveland is prepared to go to trial in the case against five Cleveland police supervisors charged with misdemeanor dereliction of duty in a deadly 2012 chase and shooting that ended in East Cleveland.

The city prosecutor's office on Thursday filed a motion asking Judge William Dawson to set a trial date in a case that has dragged on for more than half a decade.

The filing provided to cleveland.com Thursday afternoon suggested that Dawson pick from four date ranges beginning in June and stretching through December of this year.

The filing comes after East Cleveland Law Director Willa Hemmons offered to drop the charges if each supervisor paid $5,000, Kevin Spellacy, a lawyer representing one of the supervisors charged, told cleveland.com. WJW Channel 8 was first to report the offer.

Michael Donegan, 44 of Cleveland, Patricia Coleman, 50 of Brooklyn, Randolph Dailey, 46 of North Ridgeville, Jason Edens, 44 of Avon, and Paul Wilson, 51 of Cleveland all pleaded not guilty to the charges.

Their case ended up in East Cleveland Municipal Court in 2015, when then-Cuyahoga County Prosecutor Timothy J. McGinty's office dropped felony charges in Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Court in an arrangement that saw city prosecutors then file misdemeanor charges.

The officers appealed the move all the way to the Ohio Supreme Court, which ruled in April that trial could be held in East Cleveland.

The five oversaw the Nov. 29, 2012, chase which began at the Justice Center in downtown Cleveland and ended in the parking lot of Heritage Middle School in East Cleveland with 13 officers firing 137 shots, killing Timothy Russell and Malissa Williams.

None of the five supervisors fired their gun, but they were among the nearly 100 officers who participated in the chase, an investigation by the Ohio Attorney General's Office concluded. All of the supervisors arrived at the scene either during or shortly after the shooting.

Michael Brelo was the only of the 13 officers who fired shots to be charged in the case. He was eventually acquitted in May 2015 of voluntary manslaughter charges.

The supervisors were called to testify during Brelo's trial, but they all invoked their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

The move to East Cleveland court following Brelo's acquittal sparked criticism from the men's lawyers, who accused McGinty of shopping for a more favorable jury pool. McGinty maintained that because the chase culminated in the shooting at an East Cleveland school's parking lot, the suburb is an appropriate place to try the case.

To comment on this story, please visit Thursday's crime and courts comments page.CLEVELAND, Ohio - Cuyahoga County officials kicked off the campaign Thursday to renew a health and human services tax.

The tax will appear on the May 8 ballot as Issue 9.

Residents have long supported the tax and the county is not seeking a tax increase. But this campaign coincides with a public-corruption investigation involving county administrators and concerns following the death of a 4-year-old girl after county workers determined she should not be removed from her home.

Cuyahoga County Executive Armond Budish was joined by Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson, MetroHealth President and CEO Dr. Akram Boutros and County Council members at MetroHealth's main campus.

The tax funds health and human services, including foster care, services at the MetroHealth System, support services for those suffering from mental illness and programs for senior citizens.

"Every year, hundreds of thousands of children, families and seniors are helped by these lifesaving services," Budish said in a press release. "We must ensure that these vital programs are available for our county's most vulnerable citizens by voting for Issue 9."

Council President Dan Brady emphasized that the issue is not a tax increase.

"Any one of us - our children, our parents, our families, our friends - may one day need help," he said.

What is the proposed tax?

Officials said Issue 9 would fund critical services and programs throughout Cuyahoga County, including:

Protecting children from abuse and neglect

Ensuring home-health care, meals and support services for seniors

Securing counseling and treatment programs for children and adults living with mental illness, and drug and alcohol addiction

Providing early childhood and pre-school education so kids enter school ready to learn

Maintaining emergency services such as the Level One Trauma and Burn Care Center, Life Flight, and Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at MetroHealth Medical Center

Keeping crisis services available for most vulnerable citizens, whenever the need arises.

The tax is one of two that fund health and human services. A 4.8-mill tax, renewed by voters in 2016 for eight years, expires in 2024.

The 3.9-mill tax was last approved by voters in November 2013 for five years. It generates $104 million a year and costs the owner of a $100,000 home $136.50 per year.

If voters approve the two-year renewal, they will be asked in 2020 to renew or increase the tax for eight years, which would place a human services tax before voters every four years, officials said.

Officials said an eight-year cycle would decrease the number of times the county would have a human services tax before voters and reduce the chances the tax would be competing with other countywide tax issues.

Why could the tax renewal be in jeopardy?

Brady, a co-chair of the renewal campaign, said he and others are concerned about of the impact the corruption investigation might have on the campaign.

Prosecutors have subpoenaed Budish's administration for records involving top officials in the department of information services and contracts involving Westlake-based Hyland Software. They also have sought records related to Sharon Sobol Jordan, who until this month served as Budish's chief of staff.

Brady spoke of his concerns March 13 during an endorsement interview at cleveland.com for his re-election to council.

He said a campaign poll shows no problem related to the investigation. "We will do a second poll as the election gets closer," he said. "If there is slippage, we will adjust our campaign."

The county's Department of Children and Family Services also is under scrutiny following the death of 4-year-old Aniya Day-Garrett on March 11. She died of a stroke triggered by what investigators say was blunt force trauma delivered to her emaciated and scarred head while in the care of her mother, Sierra Day, and her boyfriend, Deonte Lewis.

Children and Family Services investigated three reports of alleged abuse against Aniya in 2017, but the agency did not find cause to remove her from Day's home, county spokeswoman Mary Louise Madigan told cleveland.com after the girl's death.

Aniya's father led about two dozen activists in chants and marches in front of the department's Euclid Avenue building on March 19 to call for an investigation into the agency.BEREA, Ohio - Registered voters in Ohio - both Democrats and Republicans, and men and women - support a wide range of new gun regulations, according to results released Thursday of a statewide poll conducted by Baldwin Wallace University.

The school's Community Research Institute polled 1,011 registered voters from Feb. 28 through March 9 and found:

91 percent support banning gun sales to people convicted of violent crimes. (There are

75 percent support raising the minimum age to buy semiautomatic rifles from 18 to 21.

74 percent support a mandatory waiting period on all gun purchases.

68 percent support banning equipment such as bump stocks that can make semiautomatic guns work more like automatic guns.

62 percent support a ban of high-capacity or extended ammunition magazines that allow some guns to shoot more than 10 bullets before they need to be reloaded.

61 percent support a ban on high-powered rifles capable of semiautomatic fire, such as the AR-15.

Each of these ideas was supported widely by both men and women polled, though moreso by women.

About two-thirds of Ohioans are concerned about the potential of a mass shooting in their area and/or in their child's school, the poll found.

The poll has a margin of error of three percentage points. Quotas and weighting were applied to reflect Ohio's makeup for political affiliation, age, gender, race, education and income.

Republicans and Democrats agree



"There was almost no partisan difference on a mandatory waiting period for gun purchases," noted Michael Brown, one of the students who worked on the faculty-mentored polling project by the institute, which has been conducting scientific polls for years.

A mandatory waiting period was supported by 77 percent of the independents polled, 72 percent of the Democrats and 69 percent of the Republicans.

Also winning support by similar shares among Republicans (92 percent) and Democrats (94 percent) was the idea of banning gun sales to people convicted of violent crimes.

Solid numbers from both parties - Democrats (90 percent) and Republicans (68 percent) supported raising the gun-purchasing age to 21.

The lowest support among Republicans was for banning high capacity or extended ammunition magazines (52 percent), and banning rifles such as the AR-15 (51 percent). Both ideas were favored more widely among Democrats. Yet, in each area, a majority of both Democrats and Republicans voiced support.

A change in the political climate?

"It makes you wonder if this is an issue where Republicans and Democrats can come together to enact policy change," Lydia Maendel, another student involved in the polling project, said in a news release announcing the results.

That would reverse a trend in Ohio politics, where even the last Democratic governor, Ted Strickland, was supported by the National Rifle Association.

Republican John Kasich replaced Strickland in 2011 and went on to sign bills:

Allowing guns in bars and restaurants.

Lifting the ban on guns in parking garages below the Ohio Statehouse.

Reducing the hours of training required for a concealed handgun license.

Shielding public and media access to lists of concealed handgun licensees.

Permitting concealed handguns in public airport areas, child care centers that choose not to prohibit them, and on college campuses if school leaders allow it.

But Kasich in early March announced his support for a series of six gun violence recommendations made by a bipartisan panel he assembled.

Among those ideas are banning the purchase of firearms for third parties, and allowing friends or family members to seek court orders to remove firearms from people who post a threat to them.

Decisions are now in the hands of state lawmakers, because the state in 2006 passed legislation banning cities from enacting gun legislation more restrictive than state law. The bill to take away local control on the issue was vetoed by Republican Gov. Bob Taft, but his veto was overridden by the legislature.

Rich Exner, data analysis editor for cleveland.com, writes about numbers on a variety of topics. Follow on Twitter @RichExner.LAKEWOOD, Ohio -- The Lakewood City School District is expected to name a replacement for Superintendent Jeff Patterson before the April 9 Board of Education meeting.

Patterson is retiring at the end of the school year.

"Where we're at right now is in the final stages of a conversation with a candidate," Board of Education member Linda Beebe said. "We plan to make a decision soon."

Assisting the district's superintendent search is the Ohio School Boards Association. Originally, 31 candidates applied for the superintendent position. There were eight initial interviews before the list was cut in half. Currently, two candidates remain.

Overall, Beebe said the entire search has been positive for the district.

"If you look at some of the neighboring districts, they have a huge turnover," Beebe said. "I've been on the board 34 years. In that time, we've really only had four superintendents, and one of them went away and came back. So it's really been a very positive experience.

"Also, all of the candidates told us Lakewood is a plum job because of the size of the district, the diversity of the population and the fact that we've carved a niche as being a comprehensive school that's truly comprehensive. That's why we've drawn good candidates: people who want a bit of a challenge, but want to be in a community also that supports education," Beebe said.

Playing a role in the superintendent search was a Burges & Burges Strategists online survey of Lakewood residents taken between Jan. 24 and Feb. 2 that included more than 800 completed responses.

Beebe said the results helped the Board of Education formulate candidate interview questions.

The survey reported: "Respondents specified they want a superintendent with charisma and energy, who is inspiring, innovative, approachable, transparent and both a good listener and communicator.

"They expressed that the next superintendent should appreciate and foster more parent involvement and community partnerships. They seek a person who respects Lakewood's traditions, especially its tradition of educating the whole child, and every child."

Regarding the latter, Beebe said the public's message is simple: They want a district that has exceptional music, arts, vocational and college prep curriculum, but also helps those students who don't fit into the regular school experience.

"The other thing was that they wanted the new superintendent to be somebody who was collaborative and would consult with both the staff and the community," Beebe said.

While she acknowledged that the superintendent search may have taken longer than expected, Beebe said the Board of Education followed protocol.

"The thing is, we've tried to honor the process, to go step by step," Beebe said. "The beauty with Superintendent Patterson in the district through August, we've been able to take our time. There's been no need to rush."AMHERST, Ohio -- The walking dead did their part for the living at Marion L. Steele High School on Wednesday as students joined the nationwide Kick Butts Day organized by the nonprofit Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids.

Students dressed as "tobacco zombies," wore T-shirts with statistics about tobacco-related cancer deaths, made gravestones telling the stories of cancer victims and signed a pledge to help create the first tobacco-free generation.

Also part of the program was a dramatic display that showed the lung of a healthy pig next to a cancer-riddled pig's lung. The daylong event was led by teacher Kim Haney's Medical Health Technology program, which includes students planning on health-related careers.COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Ohio lawmakers' latest attempt to shut down red light and speed cameras passed the Ohio House on Wednesday and now heads to the Senate for consideration.

Unlike previous attempts to shutter the controversial technology, House Bill 410 doesn't put restrictions on the cameras. Instead, it makes cities lose money by moving camera-initiated violations to municipal court and deducting money from state appropriations in the amount cities and villages generate from camera tickets.

The bill passed the House in a 65-19 vote, sending it to the Ohio Senate.

Rep. Bill Seitz, a Cincinnati Republican, said the bill was a response to the Ohio Supreme Court's ruling last year that determined the legislature could not restrict local governments' use of the cameras. Seitz said the bill will test local governments' claims that the camera programs are intended to increase safety and not just revenues.

"This is an issue of social justice. This is an issue of common fairness. This is an issue of due process," Seitz said.

What would the bill do?

The bill would hit local governments with camera programs in two ways:

Municipalities would receive less money from the state local government fund in the amount it takes in from traffic camera violations.

All civil traffic violations would be filed in municipal courts instead of mayor's courts or with an administrative hearing officer employed by the local government.

Local governments would lose money from both changes. They would likely continue paying third-party camera companies to operate cameras and lose all revenue. And local governments would pay the nonrefundable municipal court filing fee, not the defendant.

What did opponents say?

Most lawmakers who spoke against the bill said it unfairly punishes cash-strapped cities looking for revenue streams after a bevy of state funding cuts to local governments.

Rep. Mike Duffey, a Worthington Republican, said the bill would force police to patrol traffic instead of addressing other crimes. Duffey said he supports measures that prohibit ticketing drivers twice for the same offense or addressing concerns about due process, but House Bill 410 doesn't do either.

"It does not make sense for us to stop technology to stop people from breaking the law," Duffey said.CLEVELAND, Ohio - Christopher Knight is resigning as superintendent of schools for the Cleveland Catholic Diocese after less than two years to return to the Toledo area.

Knight, 58, will join St. John's Jesuit High School & Academy in Toledo as its vice president and chief operating officer next month.

A graduate of the school, Knight had also served as superintendent for the 81 schools of the Toledo diocese from 2010 to 2016, before he was hired to run the 114 diocesan schools -- now 109 -- here in Cleveland.

"St. John's Jesuit has been a major influence in my life since I first walked through its doors as a high school student," Knight said in a press release from the school. "I am excited to have the opportunity to return to the SJJ community and contribute to the transformative work of providing a Jesuit education to young men throughout northwest Ohio."

He thanked leaders of the Cleveland diocese, adding, " I have enjoyed my time serving the people of God in the Diocese of Cleveland, but, now, it's time to come home---Go Titans!"

Frank W. O'Linn, associate superintendent for secondary schools, will serve as interim superintendent while the diocese seeks a permanent replacement.

Knight's stay in Cleveland was a short one - much shorter tenure than his six years running schools for the Toledo diocese and the 13 years his predecessor ran schools here. His departure also comes mid-year on short notice, so a search will have less time than when his predecessor announced her retirement in January.

In a press release from the diocese, Bishop Nelson Perez wished Knight well.

"I am grateful to Chris for his service to the diocese and I offer my best wishes in his future endeavors," he said.CLEVELAND, Ohio -- A dead body was found Thursday inside a garbage can in Cleveland's Fairfax neighborhood, police said.

The discovery was made sometime before 2 p.m. Thursday at an abandoned home in the 7300 block of Chamberlain Avenue, between East 71st and East 74th streets, according to police.

Homicide detectives are investigating. Police have not released any other information regarding the case, including if the body had signs of trauma.

The home was being boarded up while a police officer sat outside the home.

A neighborhood resident, Allison Tate, said drug activity and gunfire is common at the abandoned home.

"There's a lot of empty buildings in the neighborhood," Tate said. "It gets crazy around here."

To comment on this story, visit Thursday's crime and courts comments page.CLEVELAND, Ohio-- A dead body was found inside a truck car at a Collinwood car repair shop, police said.

Police said the body was that of a female's, but did not give an age.

The body was found at Northcoast Auto on Lakeshore Boulevard, near Brazil Avenue.

Police said the woman appeared to have suffered a fatal overdose.

Investigators with the Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner were at the scene, along with Cleveland police.

Prior to that body being found, Cleveland police said they found a dead body in a garbage can in Cleveland's Fairfax neighborhood.

Little information was given about both cases, including if they believe the cases are related.

To comment on this story, visit Thursday's crime and courts comments page.COLUMBUS, Ohio -- A man will spend the rest of his life in prison with no chance of parole after being convicted last week of the rape and murder of Ohio State student Reagan Tokes.

Brian Golsby, 30, could have been sentenced to death, but Common Pleas Court Judge Mark Serrott credited Golsby's lawyers with saving his life, according to the Columbus Dispatch.

"I hope you don't waste their efforts ... you're standing here alive because of your lawyers," Serrott said. "I hope you know that."

The Blade reports the jury deadlocked, 8-4, on whether Golsby should be sentenced to death. It then made a unanimous recommendation that Golsby be sentenced to life with no chance of parole.

Serrott sentenced Golsby to three life sentences.

Juror Courtney Rose tells 10tv.com that deliberations on the sentencing were emotional and tense.

"It tore me up every night," Rose says.

Golsby kept his head down and showed no emotion during the sentencing, reports say. When asked by the judge if he wanted to comment, the Blade reports he said, "No, your honor. Thank you."

Tokes' family called the verdict a partial victory, the Dispatch reports.

"It doesn't change anything for us," Tokes' mother, Lisa McCrary-Tokes, tells the Blade. "We still walk away from here a family that has lost a daughter, a sister, a cousin, a niece, a grandchild. What it does give us today is closure from this portion. We can walk away knowing this is not looming over our heads."

Franklin County Prosecutor Ron O'Brien tells the Dispatch he's satisfied with the sentence despite his push for the death penalty.

"I don't think we would have done, nor could have done, anything different than what we did do in this case," he said.

Golsby killed Tokes, of Maumee, Ohio, a suburb of Toledo, on Feb. 8, 2017. Police say he abducted Tokes at about 9:45 p.m., shortly after she left her work shift at a Columbus bar.

He reportedly forced her to withdraw $60 from an ATM, then made her drive them in her car to Scioto Grove Metro Park in Grove City.

Golsby then raped Tokes before shooting her twice in the head, killing her, police say. Tokes' body was found the next day in the park.

Defense lawyer Diane Menashe says the jury's decision to spare Golsby's life "showed me that there's humanity out there."

"For the first time in his life, in particular the last three days, Brian has seen two individuals fight for him like no one's ever fought for him before," Menashe tells The Blade. "And I see a change in him... Each one of us needs someone in this world to stand up and fight for them."

To comment on this story, please visit Wednesday's crime and courts comments page.CLEVELAND, Ohio - The Ohio Senate voted Wednesday to drastically change how test scores are used to rate teachers -- a shift that teachers applaud but which is drawing some complaints from Cleveland, the school district that uses the ratings the most.

Senate Bill 216 is still far from becoming law, since it also needs approval from the Ohio House. But it's a major step toward moving Ohio's teacher rating system to a new method proposed last spring by State Superintendent Paolo DeMaria and a panel of educators.

The bill calls for eliminating use of test scores as a percentage -- 35 to 50 percent -- of a teacher's rating each year.

Instead, test scores and how teachers use them to guide their lessons will be integrated into other parts of the rating.

"It allows local school districts to choose among various data assessment processes for their teachers, rather than having one dictated," State Sen. Matt Huffman, a Lima Republican, told the full Senate before the vote.

Teachers nationwide have objected to using test scores in ratings. Though states and cities created the ratings to weed out the worst teachers and sometimes reward the strongest, research has differed on how well they work.

They also do not have much tangible impact in Ohio, other than in Cleveland, where a special improvement plan for the Cleveland schools allows the district to fire teachers for low ratings and use ratings to determine raises.

That has made Cleveland the center of much of the debate about this bill, with some wanting to exclude Cleveland from the changes and let Cleveland keep the percentages in place. But the bill, as passed, has no exemption for Cleveland.

District CEO Eric Gordon isn't happy about the change and still wants to use test scores as a major part of teacher ratings. He looks at student scores -- particular the "value added" measure of how much students learn in a year -- as an important part of gauging whether teachers are doing well or not.

"I'm disappointed that any requirements of the Cleveland Plan and our unique evaluations...was completely removed," he said in the days before the vote.

He added: "I am opposed to making dramatic changes to an evaluation system that is connected to lots of employment decisions."

Gordon and Mayor Frank Jackson even made a push last week for a provision allowing the district and Cleveland Teachers Union to negotiate an evaluation plan separate from the state one.

"If CMSD and the Cleveland Teachers Union are unable to arrive at a compromise, then it is our belief that the current evaluation system should remain intact," they wrote.

See the full letter below.

The Cleveland Teachers Union and the Ohio Federation of Teachers, however, have pressed the last few months to be treated like any other district. CTU President David Quolke said student test scores will be used in evaluations, just in other ways, and that percentages were largely pushed on the district by the state.

"We don't believe that including Cleveland in this compromises the Cleveland Plan," added Ohio Federation of Teachers President Melissa Cropper. "If it's not fair and accurate for all, it's not fair and accurate for Cleveland."

Backing the bill were State Sen. Peggy Lehner, a Kettering Republican, and State Sen. Sandra Williams, a Cleveland Democrat, who were among the four sponsors of the Cleveland Plan in 2012. Both spoke on behalf of the bill before the vote. The bill started as a separate bill, proposed by Lehner, which was wrapped into the larger SB216.

Williams said she spoke with Gordon and Quolke shortly before the vote, and both are committed to trying to seek some compromise before the bill passes in the House.

"Hopefully by the time we come back from spring break, they will have reached an agreement," Williams said.WASHINGTON - A $1.3 trillion spending bill to fund the federal government through the end of 2018 would provide $300 million for Great Lakes Restoration Initiative cleanup programs, Ohio members of Congress said Wednesday night.

Appropriations Committee members who devised the bill said it would also provide significant investments in national defense, boost funds to address the opioid epidemic by $3 billion over 2017 levels, as well as provide money for school safety and mental health services intended to thwart future school shootings.

The House of Representatives passed the measure on Thursday afternoon by a 256-167 margin, with backing from all Ohioans except for Republicans Jim Renacci of Wadsworth, Bob Latta of Bowling Green and Freedom Caucus members Jim Jordan of Champaign County and Warren Davidson of Miami County. Congress must adopt a spending bill before midnight on Friday to avoid a government shutdown.

Proud to know the $300 Million requested for the Great Lakes for Fiscal Year 2018 will be secured in the budget deal. Still more work will need to be done to protect the future of our Great Lakes.  Dave Joyce (@RepDaveJoyce) March 22, 2018

While Democratic congressional leaders like the Senate's Chuck Schumer and the House's Nancy Pelosi praised the bill for including their party's priorities, Pelosi said she was disappointed that it didn't resolve the plight of non-citizen "Dreamer" immigrants who were brought to United States as children and fear expulsion.

Freedom Caucus members including Jordan and Davidson said they opposed the bill for reasons that include its full funding of grants to Planned Parenthood and failure to fund the wall along Mexico's border that President Donald Trump promised to build.

Every bill takes compromise & there was plenty here, but at the end of the day Dems feel very good; so many of our priorities for the middle class are included. From opioid funding to rural broadband, from student loans to child care, this bill puts workers & families first.  Chuck Schumer (@SenSchumer) March 22, 2018

"This is not what we told the American people we would accomplish," Jordan told reporters on Wednesday.

Davidson said it would be difficult for members of Congress to read the 2,232-page bill bill before the vote.

"It is not compassionate to bankrupt the United States," said Davidson.

.@Jim_Jordan: "Sure we don't want a shutdown. But more importantly we shouldn't be spending this kind of money. Particularly on some of the things in the bill like money for planned parenthood, money for ObamaCare, money to take away people's 2nd Amendment liberties." pic.twitter.com/km6MkPBevv  FOX Business (@FoxBusiness) March 22, 2018

Renacci - who is currently a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate - said on Twitter that he opposed the bill because he disliked having such short notice to review it. Critics responded to Renacci's Tweet by observing that he backed a Republican package of tax changes in December that also was unveiled shortly before voting.

Republican appropriators said the measure increases funding to further strengthen border security, dedicating $1.6 billion toward physical barriers on the southern border, in addition to funding for immigration enforcement. They also said the agreement provides the biggest year-over-year increase in defense funding in 15 years - providing a $61 billion increase for the Defense Department over 2017 spending, including a 2.4 percent pay increase for troops.

As a businessman, I wouldnt sign a 100-page contract in a 24-hour window, let alone vote for a 2,000+ page bill in a 15-hour window. I cant support this process. pic.twitter.com/08moHhjkoR  Rep. Jim Renacci (@RepJimRenacci) March 22, 2018

I supported this imperfect legislation because, through its flaws, it moved the needle forward on a number of critical priorities for Ohios 13th Congressional District, and the nation as a whole.



My full statement on the government funding bill here:https://t.co/DziBYZvh3M  Congressman Tim Ryan (@RepTimRyan) March 22, 2018

They said it would allocate more than $4.65 billion to fight the opioid epidemic through a variety of government programs, directing money toward prevention, treatment and law enforcement initiatives.

Additional domestic investments in the bill include a $2.37 billion increase for the Child Care and Development Block Grant (CCDBG) program, which will help expand access to affordable child care to more working families, as well as $380 million in election technology grants for states to secure their election systems and voting infrastructure from Russian hackers seeking to influence our elections.

"I supported this imperfect legislation because, through its flaws, it moved the needle forward on a number of critical priorities," said a statement from Niles Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan."

In statements on Twitter after the bill's release, Trump indicated support for many of its provisions. He indicated he believes the rest of the money for his promised border wall will "be forthcoming," and said he "had to waste money on Dem giveaways in order to take care of military pay increase and new equipment."

Got $1.6 Billion to start Wall on Southern Border, rest will be forthcoming. Most importantly, got $700 Billion to rebuild our Military, $716 Billion next year...most ever. Had to waste money on Dem giveaways in order to take care of military pay increase and new equipment.  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 22, 2018

Statements from Ohio Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown praised the bill's inclusion of $15 million in funding for Toledo's 180th Fighter Wing, $400 million for waste cleanup at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in Piketon, and $1.8 billion to support upgrades and modifications of the Abrams Tank and Stryker Vehicle built in Lima, Ohio.

Brown and Ohio's Republican U.S. Sen Rob Portman also said the bill includes language to block the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers from dumping toxic material dredged from the Cuyahoga River shipping channel into Lake Erie without the approval from the State of Ohio.

Noting that a Trump administration budget proposal had suggested slashing the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative by 90 percent from the $300 million level it got in 2017, Brown said the Trump administration's efforts "were met again with fierce opposition from all the Ohioans who rely on Lake Erie for a job, a source of water or a place to be outside with their families."

"The Great Lakes are an invaluable resource to Ohio, and the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative has been a successful public-private partnership that helps protect both our environment and our economy," said a statement from Ohio GOP Sen. Rob Portman. "I am pleased that the final bipartisan funding agreement fully funds this critical program."AKRON, Ohio - University of Akron President Matthew Wilson has decided to step down and rejoin UA's School of Law, effective July 31.

"After four years of intense commitment and with the confidence that UA is on the right track, I have decided to shift from my role as President to join the full-time faculty, effective July 31, 2018," Wilson wrote in a letter to the campus community Thursday. "This decision came after much thought and consideration and is based on a host of personal and family considerations. Pursuant to my agreement with UA, I intend at this time to return to my faculty position with Akron Law at a substantially reduced salary, in recognition of ongoing financial challenges for the University."

Wilson, who arrived at Akron in 2014 as dean of the law school, was appointed interim president in July 2016 for a term of 18 months. He replaced Scott Scarborough, who resigned as president in May 2016 after a tumultuous tenure.

Three months later, trustees named Wilson permanent president. Last fall trustees extended Wilson's contract through June 30, 2023. His contract allowed him to leave with a 120-day notice.

During his tenure, Wilson has engaged with constituencies, helped increase enrollment and stabilized a budget that had significant deficits, officials said.

It came as surprise to the faculty, staff, alumni and the campus community in February when it was learned Wilson had applied for the presidency of the University of Central Florida. He made it to the final four but was not chosen for the position.

"Over the past few weeks, there have been many conversations about what my inclusion as a finalist in the University of Central Florida presidential search might mean," Wilson wrote in his letter. "My sincerest apologies for any concern that this may have caused. With the search now complete, I want to address these conversations and talk about the future."

Wilson wrote that he was interested in the UCF presidency due "to our roots in the Orlando area and the opportunities associated with this once-in-a lifetime chance at the largest university in the country."

He wrote that in his four years at the university "it truly has been an honor to dedicate my heart, strength, soul, and mind to serving the institution in an effort to assist students, stabilize matters, overcome challenges, generate new opportunities, and lead UA to even greater heights."

He and his family "have tirelessly committed ourselves to UA and its success. Of course, the road has been very demanding, especially as we concurrently helped our youngest son successfully fight through a battle with an aggressive pediatric cancer."

Wilson, who has said he worked 20 hours a day and only needs four hours of sleep, often attended several UA events each night and has traveled extensively to meet with alumni and high school students.

The university had named Christopher J. (C.J.) Peters, the associate dean for faculty scholarship and a professor of law at the University of Baltimore School of Law, as dean of the law school last year.

Wilson told the board he wil voluntarily reduce his compensation when he returns to the faculty, the unviersity said. He currently earns $450,000 a year and his contract established an annual faculty salary of 65 percent of that - or $292,500. He asked for 65 percent of the $370,000 salary when he was initially named president, so he wil earn $240,500 a year.

"The board very much appreciates the time, energy and leadership President Wilson has provided to the university, as we have made significant progress on many different fronts to address the challenges we faced," trustee chairman Roland Bauer said in a statement. "He has put in place a number of initiatives that help distinguish UA and have moved us in the right direction. We respect his decision and wish him and his family well in this next chapter of their lives."

Bauer said that the four month notice will enable the board to work closely with university leadership to ensure a smooth transition.

"In the very near future, we will meet with representatives of key University constituencies to gain input on the appointment of an interim president," he said.

Akron Mayor Dan Horrigan issued a statement thanking Wilson.

"The University of Akron is a very important stakeholder in the economic, academic, and social well-being of this community and the region, and this is a critical time in its history," Horrigan said. "The success of our city is inextricably intertwined with the success of the University. Matt Wilson saw the importance of engaging and listening to University of Akron students. I applaud him for his efforts and wish him the best in his future endeavors. Now, it's time that our university invest in a national search to recruit the best possible candidate, one that can strategically align the university's priorities to focus on their core strengths and fiscal stability."SANDUSKY, Ohio - The last thing Jim Cundari had on his mind while fighting Japanese in the Philippine mountains during World War II was gathering a few battlefield souvenirs.

Combat, for soldiers of the 161st Infantry Regiment in 1945 was costly and fierce, and as Cundari, 99, recently recalled, "I would not pick up a souvenir on the battlefield because you had to lug it with you, and my life was more important than souvenirs."

However, he would later obtain a little something that worked out quite well for his honeymoon.

The long road to that modest pay-off started when the New Jersey native was drafted in 1943. He had previously been turned down twice for military service because of his vision, but Cundari said the standards were later eased due to increasing needs for manpower.

He was more than ready to join the fight.

Getting drafted "was a relief, because there I was, an apparent very healthy young fellow, no apparent reason to be out of the service, all my friends were gone, and there I was in town walking around," he said. "So I sort-of felt a tinge of remorse that I wasn't in the service. So I was sort of happy to get in."

Cundari was part of the Army's invasion of the Philippines in late 1944 and early 1945, and his unit was thrown into 165 days of continuous combat.

He served on a machine-gun squad, advancing uphill into mountains where the Japanese had created defenses in caves and interconnecting tunnels.

"Our advance was slow, deadly and tedious," he would later write in his book, "A Soldier's Story."

From the high ground, the Japanese could see every move the GIs made, and fired artillery from protected positions in caves. "Any time we were in position, if you made a move above the ground, a shell would come lobbing at you," he said.

"You could hear the crack as the shell left the artillery piece and you knew a shell was coming," Cundari wrote in his book. "The shell had a very distinctive sound, like a fluttering sound, as it came towards your position. Then, when the shell hit the ground, you heard the explosion.

"Needless to say, it was very unnerving to live under these conditions, knowing they could spot our positions all the time," he added.

Cundari said one of the fiercest battles was an attack on the village of San Manuel, defended by more than 1,000 Japanese troops supported by 40 tanks.

"We thought it was going to be a quiet affair, but it turned out to be a four- to five-day engagement," he remembered. "We lost our company commander. He got killed, and the entire regiment suffered about 25 percent casualties.

"The way the Japanese had done it, they had dug holes for the tanks [with] just the turret exposed," he added. "So they waited until our rifle platoon got into the open field, and they practically wiped it out."

Nights were just as bad, when GIs took turns sleeping while listening for sounds of Japanese infiltrators.

He remembered sharing a foxhole one night with a battle-hardened sergeant who asked Cundari to sneak a peek over a stone wall where they had taken shelter.

"I look out and see one of our, like an armored vehicle. I saw these three figures approaching it, and all of a sudden the vehicle blew up," Cundari recalled.

"It was what was called a lunge mine -- a mine on the end of stick -- and they would go right up to the tank and plant it against it and blow it up.

"That's what I described to him [the sergeant]. But I was shaking at the time . . . and so was the sergeant."

Cundari noted, "Ammunition was in short supply because the war in Europe was still going on. We were told not to fire unless we definitely had a target."

There were times when they hit a stalemate with the Japanese, so they waited a few days, accumulating all the bullets and shells they could, then concentrated their fire in an overwhelming barrage on a single position.

"We called it 'giving the hill a close haircut,'" Cundari wrote in his book.

At one point 90mm antiaircraft guns were hauled up the hillsides so they could fire straight into Japanese caves.

As replacements took the place of mounting casualties, the new soldiers would ask what it was like being in combat.

"It is hard to describe, and unless you go through it, there is no description that will convey what actual combat and being under fire actually is," Cundari wrote.

The strain was evident, however. "It was a case of, we recognized that any day might be our last day," Cundari said.

Eventually you got numb to the horrors and losses, according to Cundari.

"In a way you did, yeah. I remember seeing, especially the rifle companies, they took the most beating. Their bodies being wrapped in body bags and stacked up like firewood, and then put on the back of a truck and they take them back down the mountain . . . You get used to it. Yeah. You just had to deal with it."

The day came when they were pulled off the line and started training for an invasion of Japan that never happened.

After Japan surrendered, Cundari joined occupation forces in collecting the remaining Japanese armaments for disposal. He sent two swords back home; his first war souvenirs.

The GIs could see the devastation caused by widespread firebombing of Japanese cities and knew about the atomic bombs that had ended the war.

"We were very glad they dropped the atom bomb," Cundari said. "The thought was when we heard of the protests of the people back home [objecting to use of the bombs], let them come over here and do the fighting. We'll change places with them."

In his spare time, Cundari took photos of his fellow GIs, selling them packets of 20 for $1 and shipping them to their families back home.

The 1940 graduate of Manhattan College, with a degree in business administration and accounting, also taught the GIs basic bookkeeping and accounting for possible use in a job back home.

When Cundari was shipped back to the U.S., heartbreak awaited.

"When I got home, I had been in a relationship with a girl, but something happened," he said. "I could sense when I got home that things weren't just right, and she broke off the engagement.

"I didn't want to leave, go into the service, get wounded or killed and leave a widow or someone to take care of me, so we never got married," he added. "It was sort-of very devastating to go home and find that everything I'd dreamed of was gone."

But in 1950, Cundari married Johanna Amato, bringing another war souvenir into play.

He'd sent a silk parachute home from Japan and asked a cousin if she could re-make it into a negligee.

"Which she did, with a lot of beautiful lace trimming," he said. "I gave it to my future wife, at that time, and she took it on her honeymoon."

Together they raised four children and were married for 65 years before she died in 2015.

"After she passed away, we found it in the drawer, so I told my daughter to take it and save it for her daughter if she wants to use it later on when she gets married," Cundari said.

After the war, Cundari worked as an accountant for General Motors and was transferred to Sandusky in 1965. He retired in 1982.

Cundari will be 100 years old this December 21, "if I make it," he said with a chuckle.

In looking back on his military service, he concluded, "It was an experience I would not want to repeat, but I'm happy that I was in.

"I was one of, I guess 16 million service people, so I did nothing extraordinary," he added. "I was just an average soldier."STRONGSVILLE, Ohio -- Disturbance, Howe Road: On March 15, police were dispatched to a Howe Road residence after a mother discovered that her daughter had a male friend over.

The juvenile, 17, ran out of the house when the mother arrived home. The arriving officer talked to the mother, who said her daughter was under house arrest and wasn't allowed to have guests.

The daughter told the officer she didn't invite her boyfriend over. The police were going to talk to the boyfriend about leaving her alone.

Speeding, Interstate 71: On March 15, police pulled over a Ford for speeding on I-71. The officer suspected the driver had something illegal, so the police dog was called out.

The canine indicated that something was in the Ford; however, during a search of the vehicle, nothing turned up. The driver was cited for speeding.

Suspicious person, Prospect Road: On March 15, police were dispatched to a Prospect Road business after a man said he was going to come back and shoot everyone.

An arriving officer talked to employees, who didn't believe this was a legitimate threat.

Suspicious situation, Royalton Road: On March 15, police were dispatched to a Royalton Road business after a store owner found a handwritten note put on her car about the parking spot.

The woman told the officer she had been parking in the same spot for 18 years. The officer said the note, which was written on cardboard, detailed how the car was parked in the spot.

Shoplifting, SouthPark Center: On March 15, police were dispatched to the mall after a store employee caught a woman stealing. The arriving officer arrested the woman, who it turned out had multiple warrants.

She was held for transport. Also, the woman was cited for shoplifting.

Theft from auto, Whitney Road: On March 15, police were dispatched to a Whitney Road home after a resident discovered that someone had entered her unlocked car the night before and stolen $10.

There were also things all over her seat and car. The woman requested the home receive special attention. There are no suspects.

If you would like to discuss the police blotter, please visit our crime and courts comments page.UNIVERSITY HEIGHTS, Ohio -- Grand theft, South Taylor Road: At 8:55 p.m. March 16, a woman reported that two men, about 18 to 20 years old, stole her car at gunpoint from the lot of Remi Hair and Beauty Supply, 2187 S. Taylor Road. At the time of the robbery, the woman's mother, 63, was inside the auto. The mother got out of the car before it was driven away.

The car was spotted by Parma police at 3 a.m. March 17. Three males were inside the car. When Parma police conducted a traffic stop, two of the males ran and escaped. A Cleveland Heights boy, 17, was arrested.

The University Heights Police Department and Parma police are jointly investigating.

Bomb threat, Miramar Boulevard: At 11:55 a.m. March 12, police were called to Heights Middle School, 2181 Miramar Blvd., in regards to a bomb threat written on a bathroom wall at the school. No bomb was found on the property.

Police are investigating the matter.

Theft, Cedar Road: At 4:20 p.m. March 13, loss prevention at Target, 14070 Cedar Road, informed police that a Cleveland man, 43, stole $709 worth of merchandise and fled. Police located the man on Warrensville Center Road and arrested him for theft.

On the same day, the suspect was cited for criminal trespass, as he had been warned to stay away from Macy's, 2201 Warrensville Center Road, due to a previous incident.

Domestic violence, Cedar Road: At 1:20 p.m. March 14, a boy, 15, and his sister reported a domestic violence incident that involved their mother and took place the day before.

Police gathered information to present to the city's prosecutor.

Marijuana possession, Cedar Road: At 10:35 p.m. March 14, police came across a suspicious parked car at Cedar and Milton roads. The car's occupant, a University Heights man, 28, was found to be in possession of marijuana and drug paraphernalia.

Inducing panic, Miramar Boulevard: At 12:40 p.m. March 15, the security supervisor at Heights Middle School contacted police about a bomb threat written on an outlet cover. No bomb was found on the property.

Police are investigating.

Disturbance, Fairmount Boulevard: At 2:30 p.m. March 15, police were called to Bellefaire JCB, 22001 Fairmount Blvd., where a teen client was threatening Portage County Child Service employees and not allowing them to leave the building.

When officers arrived, the situation had de-escalated and the client had allowed the employees to leave without further incident. Police are investigating.

Obstructing official business, Warrensville Center Road: At 3:55 p.m. March 15, police were called to the vicinity of Macy's, where a shoplifter was running from loss prevention.

Police spotted the suspect on the street but, when commanded to stop, he kept running. The suspect, a South Euclid man, 19, was eventually apprehended and charged with theft.

He stole $263 worth of Macy's merchandise.

Warrant arrest, Kerwin Road: At 11 p.m. March 15, police found a suspicious occupied parked car. It was discovered that the man in the car, 25, of South Euclid, was wanted on a Hunting Valley police warrant.

The man was arrested and turned over to the Hunting Valley Police Department.

OVI, Cedar Road: At 1:15 a.m. March 16, police stopped a car driven by a Willoughby man, 28. The driver was found to be intoxicated and was arrested on a charge of OVI.

Grand theft, Raymont Boulevard: At 11:50 a.m. March 16, a woman reported that her 2009 car was stolen from her driveway sometime between the hours of 8 p.m. March 15 and midnight March 16. The woman had left the key inside the car.

Euclid police recovered the car on March 17.

Theft, Warrensville Center Road: At 7:40 p.m. March 12, loss prevention at Macy's took into custody a Cleveland woman, 21, who stole $20 worth of merchandise. Police charged the woman with theft.

Fraud, Charney Road: At 9:25 a.m. March 17, a woman reported that she allowed remote access to her computer and bank account to a person she believed was going to fix the computer. The woman lost $4,000.

Underage possession of alcohol, Traymore Road: At 11:25 a.m. March 17, officers saw a group of students in the back yard of a Traymore Road home. One of the students, 18, of Bridgeville, Pa., was found to be in possession of alcohol and a false identification card and was cited for both offenses.

Open container of alcohol in a public place, Warrensville Center Road: At 3:15 p.m. March 17, two women were seen walking on the sidewalk with open containers of alcohol. The women are both 21. One is a Westlake resident, and the other is from Columbia Station.

Both were cited for being in possession of an open container of alcohol.

If you would like to discuss the police blotter, please visit our crime and courts comments page.March 21, 2018

 The 50th anniversary of the first mission to fly humans to the moon has inspired the design of a new timepiece from the watchmaker that made the chronographs worn by the crew.



NASA's Apollo 8 astronauts, Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders, were the first to view the far side, or colloquially, "dark side" of Earth's natural satellite while orbiting the moon in December 1968. Half a century later, Omega has brought into view the Speedmaster "Dark Side of the Moon" Apollo 8 chronograph.



"Omega has released a Speedmaster that truly brings the lunar surface to life," the watchmaker wrote. "The Apollo 8 crew became the first humans to ever see the dark side of the moon. Omega has produced this incredible chronograph in tribute to that mission."



Omega debuted the Apollo 8 commemorative watch on Wednesday (March 21), a day ahead of the start of the Baselworld watch show in Basel, Switzerland. The $9,750 watch will be available from Omega's boutiques beginning in August.



'Dark Side'



As the Apollo 8 crew could attest, the moon does not have a literal "dark side."



Both the near and far sides of the moon  the sides that face towards and away from Earth, respectively  see equal amounts of sunlight. Figuratively though, the far side is sometimes referred to as the "dark side," referencing it being unseen  at least to everyone but the astronauts who traveled there.



In 2013, Omega introduced the first "Dark Side of the Moon" Speedmaster, which drew inspiration from the Apollo 8 mission by reimagining the watch first worn by moon-bound astronauts with a black ceramic dial. The new 2018 "Dark Side of the Moon" Apollo 8 model continues the all ceramic construction while integrating the look of the moon itself.







Dark Side of the Moon "Apollo 8" Click to enlarge and view in a new window. (OMEGA)Americans from every corner of the nation are descending on Washington for the March for Our Lives to advocate reforming the nations gun laws in the wake of the latest tragic shooting in Parkland, Florida. The protestors face a powerful, entrenched, and well-funded Washington special interest in the National Rifle Association (NRA) who will fight any proposed reforms every step of the way. Today, Common Cause is releasing a new report  Power Shift: How People Can Take on the NRA- that examines the NRA and how it wields power in Washington and in state capitals around the nation. The report goes on to propose basic democratic reforms that can be undertaken to allow everyday citizens a chance to have their voices heard in the public square dominated by deep-pocketed special interests like the gun lobby.

Americans expect and deserve a voice in Washington and in elected government bodies across the nation. With common sense changes to the way we elect our representatives and fund their campaigns, we can amplify the voice of every citizen, said Common Cause President Karen Hobert Flynn. In a democracy, overwhelming public support for policies should be enough to enact them but too often that isnt the case when special interests oppose them  but with simple reforms we can help restore government to one of the people, by the people and for the people. Working together, we can solve the underlying governance challenges so that our Congress and state legislatures are responsive to constituents, not the gun lobby.

Campaign contributions to the NRAs preferred candidates are only a drop in the bucket of its election spending, said Stephen Spaulding, Common Cause Chief of Strategy and External Affairs. Empowered by Citizens United, the NRA uses its outside spending  and the threat of outside spending  to write the rules and shutdown debate about solutions to the gun violence crisis. Thats not how a democracy where voters come first is supposed to work.

The NRA relies heavily on political spending, paid lobbying and a sophisticated organizing operation with a grassroots base. Some of the key findings in the report outline how the NRA maintains its influence:

In 2015 alone, the NRA paid more than $20 million to a single vendor that focuses on building the NRAs membershi

The NRA has increased its federal lobbying spending dramatically in recent years, from $1,815,000 in 2007 to $5,122,000 in 2017.

The gun industry relies on the NRAs lobbying power as a de facto trade association. Independent estimates show that corporate partners of the NRA have contributed between $19.3 million and $60.2 million to the organization.

The NRA also uses the American Legislative Exchange Council [ALEC] to push its pro-gun laws at the state level.

NRAs employees and PAC have contributed $23 million directly to federal candidates and parties since 1989, and about $17 million to state candidates and committees since 1990. These totals eclipse contributions from interests favoring tighter gun laws.

Most of the NRAs spending does not flow directly to candidates but is spent independently of them. The NRA reported spending at least $54 million on independent expenditures during the 2016 federal election cycle alone, nearly double the $27 million it spent during the 2014 midterms and more than double the $19 million it spent during the 2012 presidential election.

About $34 million of the $54 million it spent on independent expenditures in federal elections in 2016  more than 60% of its spending  flowed through the NRAs Institute for Legislative Action, an arm of the NRA that is not required to disclose its donors.

In addition to its gun-related legislation, the NRA has lobbied against efforts to shine a light on secret spending in politics, including the DISCLOSE Act.

As the report details, surveys show that nearly 75% of NRA members support universal criminal background checks for all gun sales  a policy that the NRA vehemently opposes. Still, it provides other benefits to its members that grow its base.

The NRA wields enormous power in Washington and in states on behalf of the gun industry. It does so with a sophisticated strategy to cultivate a membership of motivated voters, said Jesse Littlewood, Common Causes National Campaigns and Digital Director. One of those tools is its significant grassroots presence which it manages to maintain despite the fact that it supports a number of policies that its membership overwhelmingly opposes.

The new Common Cause report does not recommend specific policies to reduce gun violence, but it proposes solutions to enhance the political power of every American, including the overwhelming majority that supports significant changes to gun laws in the wake of firearm massacres like the Parkland tragedy. The solutions outlined in the report include:

Making voting more fair and accessible, including automatic voter registration, pre-registration for 16- and 17-year-olds, and early voting

Ending the undemocratic practice of gerrymandering to ensure that voters choose politicians to represent them, rather than the other way around

Changing the way we fund political campaigns in order to empower all Americans, not just the very richest

Shining a light on secret spending in politics through enhanced disclosure

The report was written by Stephen Spaulding and Jesse Littlewood of Common Cause.

To read the report, click here.Questo comunicato e stato pubblicato piu di 1 anno fa. Le informazioni su questa pagina potrebbero non essere attendibili.

The Latin America Healthcare Information Technology Services Market: By Type (Payer Solutions, Clinical Solutions, Healthcare IT Outsourcing, Non Clinical Solutions), By Services (Revenue Cycle Management Services, Accountable Care Organization Services, Business and Regulatory Support Services, Point of Care Decision Support Services, Homecare and Hospice Support Services, Document Management Services, Evidence Based Decision Support Services, Others), By Delivery (Cloud Computing, On-Premises, Web Based Services), By End users (Hospitals, Pharmacies, Laboratories, Home Healthcare Agencies, Others) By Country (Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Venezuela, Rest of Latin America)  Market Estimation, Dynamics, Regional Share, Trends, Competitor Analysis 2012 to 2016 and Forecast 2017 to 2023

Market Introduction: Latin America Healthcare Information Technology Services Market

Health information technology is a congregation of various tools of technology which are widely used by health administrators, physicians, insurance companies, patients, nurses and others to systemize, preserve, analyse and share information related to healthcare sector. Healthcare IT comprises of medical information which is specific to individual patients, encourages direct communication between patients and healthcare providers in order to evaluate properly and advise.

A sample of this report is available upon request @

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Market dynamics: Latin America Healthcare Information Technology Services Market

Drivers of Latin America Healthcare Information Technology Services Market

 Growing technological advancements

 Increase in investments by healthcare IT players

 Growing prevalence of chronic diseases

 Growing demand for better healthcare facilities

Restraints of Latin America Healthcare Information Technology Services Market

 Lack of skilled professionals

 High costs associated with maintenance

 Slow adoption and lack of awareness about the IT.

Market Scope: Latin America Healthcare Information Technology Services Market

The Latin America Healthcare Information Technology Services Market is classified on the basis of type, services, delivery, end users and regions

Based on Type, Latin America Healthcare Information Technology Services Market is segmented as

 Payer Solutions

 Clinical Solutions

 Healthcare IT Outsourcing

 Non Clinical Solutions

Based on Services, Latin America Healthcare Information Technology Services Market is segmented as

 Revenue Cycle Management Services

 Accountable Care Organization Services

 Business and Regulatory Support Services

 Point of Care Decision Support Services

 Homecare and hospice support services

 Document Management Services

 Evidence Based Decision Support Services

 Others

Based on Delivery, Latin America Healthcare Information Technology Services Market is segmented as

 Cloud Computing

 On-Premises

 Web Based Services

Based on End users, Latin America Healthcare Information Technology Services Market is segmented as

 Hospitals

 Pharmacies

 Laboratories

 Home Healthcare Agencies

 Others

Based on Country, Latin America Healthcare Information Technology Services Market is segmented as

 Brazil

 Mexico

 Argentina

 Venezuela

 Rest of Latin America

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Competition Assessment: Latin America Healthcare Information Technology Services Market

Some of the players in Latin America Healthcare Information Technology Services Market are

 Meditech (U.S.)

 United Healthcare Group(U.S.)

 Cerner Corporation (U.S.)

 Athenahealth, Inc. (U.S.)

 Mckesson Corporation (U.S.)

 Epic Systems Corporation (U.S.)

 GE Healthcare (U.S.)

 Siemens Healthcare (Germany)

 Oracle Corporation (U.S.)

 Epic Systems (U.S)

 Koninklijke Philips N.V. (The Netherlands)

 Allscripts (U.S.)

 Infor, Inc. (U.S.)

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Key Features of the Report:

 The report provides granular level information about the market size, regional market share, historic market (2012 to 2016) and forecast (2017 to 2023)

 The report covers in-detail insights about the competitors overview, company share analysis, key market developments, and their key strategies

 The report outlines drivers, restraints, unmet needs, and trends that are currently affecting the market

 The report tracks recent innovations, key developments and startups details that are actively working in the market

 The report provides plethora of information about market entry strategies, regulatory framework and reimbursement scenario

 The report analyses the impact of socio-political environment through PESTLE Analysis and competition through Porters Five Force Analysis in addition to recent technology advancements and innovations in the market

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Website @ https://www.precisionbusinessinsights.comOne in Five Global Business Travellers Skip Leisure Additions to Business Trips Due to Employer Perception LONDON, March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --A EgenciaA, a leading global travel management company, today announced findings from the Egencia 2018 Bleisure Trends study uncovers the trends, behaviours and motivators behind bleisure travel - tacking on leisure portions to business trips. Polling 9,000 Egencia users across North America, Asia Pacific and Europe, the study illustrates that while bleisure travel is on the rise, employer perception, destination and proximity to the weekend all play into the bleisure decision-making process. Perception and policy matter in business travel, with high attention paid to the optics of the practice. Twenty percent of business travellers have foregone adding leisure portions to their trips because of how it may look to their employer. Business travellers in Asia are the most conscious of this at 32 percent, with North America and Europe following at 20 percent and 15 percent, respectively. "The insight that many business travellers have skipped bleisure trips due to employer perception reveals an opportunity for differentiation in the race for top talent," said Wendy White, vice president of marketing at Egencia. "With more companies today prioritising work-life balance, it may be time to start including bleisure in your travel program to invest in employees and encourage them to make every trip count." A Proximity to the weekend may minimise that perception, with nearly one-quarter of respondents saying this impacts their decision. Of those who take the bleisure dive, less than two percent globally have billed back bleisure expenses to their companies. Additional findings include: a majority (55 percent) of Egencia global business travellers take less than six business trips per year on average, and 68 percent take at least one bleisure trip per year. When it comes to activities, the destination and sight-seeing are top of mind: Destination location is by far the biggest factor in determining whether or not to take a bleisure trip, with 30 percent of North America business travellers prioritising location, compared to 25 percent in the EU and Asia .

business travellers prioritising location, compared to 25 percent in the EU and . Proximity to the weekend and proximity to friends and family came in a close second and third for global respondents, at 23 percent and 16 percent respectively.

Sight-seeing is the most popular bleisure activity for business travellers across all regions. Bleisure is Well-Planned: Seventy-four percent of North American business travellers are either planning or considering a bleisure trip in the next 6 months, compared to 87 percent in Asia and 68 percent in Europe .

and 68 percent in . Half of Asia business travellers are planning a bleisure trip this year, compared to 41 percent of North Americans and 32 percent or Europeans.

business travellers are planning a bleisure trip this year, compared to 41 percent of North Americans and 32 percent or Europeans. Bleisure trips are a big 2018 resolution: 37 percent of Asia business travellers, 25 percent of Europeans and 20 percent of North Americans made it one of theirs. To help you make the most out of your next bleisure trip, check out the city guides from our Top 100 Preferred Corporate Hotel awards program. About Egencia Egencia makes every business trip count for travellers and travel managers. The travel management company's industry-leading technology platform simplifies the process of planning, booking and managing business travel. Relying on timely, data-driven insights from Egencia, businesses stay one step ahead by making choices that align with traveller preference and corporate policy. A dedicated team of travel consultants is ready to assist every step of the way, whenever and wherever needed. Egencia serves small, mid-cap and multi-national companies in more than 65 countries. To connect with Egencia, visit egencia.com or find us @EgenciaUK and LinkedIn. Follow along on our blog. A 2018 Egencia LLC. A All rights reserved. A Egencia, and the Egencia logo are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Expedia, Inc. in the U.S. and/or other countries. A All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/149261/egencia__an_expedia__inc__company.jpg AConvinced of the need for her native Trinidad to diversify its economy, Laura Superville was keen to set up a business based on local produce. The result is a range of wines based on the aroma and taste of tropical fruits, which has opened up a new career path for this young agripreneur, as well as job opportunities for other members of the community.

Laura Superville has long been interested in exploring opportunities for economic diversification in her native Trinidad, especially options that promote her countrys landscape and local products. So when she began investigating the market for a new business venture, after finishing a degree in environmental management, it was no coincidence that she opted to open a boutique winery based on home-grown tropical fruits.

Supervilles agribusiness is called 11DegN, a shortened version of 11 Degrees North, which is the geographic position of Trinidad and Tobago. The name of her company reflects the strong importance Superville attributes to its place of origin. The wines she produces are made from five top quality fruits sourced from local estates  sorrel, pommerac, five finger, cashew and jamun.

Trinidad and Tobago has a unique environment and wealth of natural resources for producing fruits, flowers and spices used in wine production, explains the 34-year-old agripreneur. The brand name 11DegN demonstrates that the sensory evaluation, richness, texture, complexity and vibrancy of wines are due to the inputs from this location.

Scaling up local traditions

Ironically, it was a spell outside her home country that gave Superville the idea for her wine-making business. She had spent two years in London, and noticed that there was a good market for fruit wines. This observation set the budding businesswomen thinking about her own country, where traditionally families made wine from sorrel in the run-up to Christmas. I started asking myself, how come no one in Trinidad had taken local fruit wine production to the next level? says Superville. Then I remembered an aunt of mine who was good at making fruit wines.

On her return to Trinidad, Superville lost no time in asking her aunts advice and, armed with a number of books and recipes, she began experimenting in the family kitchen. Her first attempt was, in Supervilles own words, a disaster. Attempting to make wine from pommerac, she added too much yeast and during the fermentation stage the concoction poured all over the kitchen floor. Her second attempt was more successful, and with every test batch she sought her fathers opinion as to the quality of the product. She began attending wine-making courses and took study tours to award winning wine producing regions.

Long before she made the decision that was to change her career path, Superville had attended a CTA supported workshop in Jamaica to examine how to add value to local foods. That experience helped to shape my ideas about my future wine business, including the science and nutrition side of it, she reflects.

Finding the right bottles at a price she could afford posed a significant hurdle, but determined not to be defeated, Superville sourced a Chinese manufacturer and arranged the shipping. At last, the product was ready for market, and Superville teamed up with a business partner to go into production. Continuing her strategy of tapping the skills of family members, she enlisted the help of her sister, who has a background in sales. The 11DegN wines are now available in local wine bars, restaurants and specialty stores, as well as at dinners organised by the food and drink company Moving Tables, which are held on a monthly basis to promote local products. Superville also makes use of social media, especially Facebook, to market her wines.

In 2017, the company sold 1,500 bottles with a turnover of 15,000 (TTD120,000.)This is still not sufficient to enable Superville to give up her day job as a planning engineer for an oil and gas company, but she is targeting exports to other Caribbean countries and extending her range of products as the next phase of her business plan. Her ultimate goal is to run the business full-time and to move into related products such as sangria, wine vinegar, jams and jellies, all based on local crops.

Jobs and incomes

Currently employing five staff on a seasonal basis, Superville is anxious to develop her company, to create jobs and income earning opportunities for others in the community. Id very much like my business to grow, so that I can give other young people a job, and several who are thinking of starting their own business have already asked me for advice, she says.

The Caribbean businesswoman is also planning to plant her own fruit trees, so that she can have greater control over the product quality, though this will require gaining access to land and taking out a loan, both of which pose a sizeable challenge. At present, Superville is forced to rely on fruit grown by local producers. She has built up a detailed database and drawn up agreements with suppliers, but believes this will be insufficient once production increases. Climate change has already started affecting cropping patterns and quality, with excessive rainfall damaging fruit and affecting flavour  making the taste less intense.

Whatever the hurdles that may lie ahead, Superville is convinced that entrepreneurship will be critical to the future of the upcoming generation in Trinidad, who can no longer rely on the sectors that have provided jobs and livelihoods until now. In Trinidad our economy is mainly based on oil and gas, and now that oil prices are much lower, Ive been looking at how that is going to affect people, and investigating business ideas, she said. There is a greater need now than ever to diversify, and see what other opportunities there are for young people. Oil and gas wont be around forever, so we need to think about what will be our next steps, and how we are going to feed ourselves in the future.The attack in Salisbury was the first offensive use of a nerve agent on Nato soil since the alliance was created back in 1949.

It involved one of the most toxic substances ever developed. And displayed total disrespect for human lives.

I was appalled when I heard about the attack in this small cathedral city, as people were going innocently about their daily lives.

All Nato allies stand in solidarity with the British people. And I discussed our response with Boris Johnson at Nato HQ in Brussels on Monday.

All Nato allies stand in solidarity with the British people against Russia after the Salisbury attack. And I discussed our response with Boris Johnson at Nato HQ in Brussels on Monday, writes Jens Stoltenberg, Nato Secretary General

Nato allies have offered support to the investigation. We have called on Russia to address the UK's questions, and to provide full disclosure of the Novichok programme to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons.

Any use of chemical weapons is a threat to international peace and security  an unacceptable breach of international norms and rules, which has no place in a civilised world.

Sadly, the attack in Salisbury comes against the backdrop of a reckless pattern of Russian behaviour over many years.

The illegal annexation of Crimea. Support to separatists in eastern Ukraine. Unwelcome Russian troops in Moldova and Georgia. Meddling in the domestic affairs of countries such as Montenegro.

I was appalled when I heard about the attack in this small cathedral city, as people were going innocently about their daily lives, writes Stoltenberg. Pictured: Inspectors in protective clothing in Salisbury city centre after the attack on Sergei and Yulia Skripal

Attempts to undermine our democratic elections and institutions.

Cyber-attacks and disinformation. And Russia has also been investing in new weapons, some of which can carry nuclear warheads. Nato has responded. Our defences are now stronger than at any point since the Cold War.

We have tripled the size of our multinational Nato response force to 40,000 troops  with a 5,000-strong spearhead force ready to deploy within 72 hours. We have stepped up air patrols over the Baltic and Black seas.

And we have deployed four battle groups to Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, with contributions from across the alliance  a clear demonstration that we stand together, all for one and one for all. Britain leads our battle group in Estonia.

I've met those troops myself. They're not just keeping that country safe, they're protecting the whole of Europe.

Whenever I meet the men and women of Britain's Armed Forces  be it in Estonia, Afghanistan or elsewhere  I'm always impressed by their professionalism and commitment.

Nato allies have offered support to the investigation (pictured in Salisbury yesterday)

They do an outstanding job, day-in and day-out. When it comes to Russia, Nato's approach remains firm, defensive, and proportionate.

We won't mirror Russia tank for tank, missile for missile, or soldier for soldier. And we'll continue to combine strong deterrence and defence with the search for meaningful political dialogue.

When tensions run high, it's important to talk to each other, to avoid misunderstandings and miscalculations.

Nato does not want a new Cold War. And we do not want to be dragged into a new arms race. An arms race has no winners. It is expensive, risky, and in nobody's interest.

Russia will continue to seek to divide us. But Nato allies stand united. Twenty-nine countries  representing half the world's military and economic might.

That is why Britain does not stand alone.Two boxes of haddock, four days dead and distinctly whiffy from 20ft, stared dolefully from the decks of a Ramsgate fishing boat called Holladays R8.

Like thousands of fish which have to be discarded owing to European Union rules, those haddock were about to be chucked overboard.

Unlike their fishy friends, they were going to be ditched in the Thames, a few yards from the Houses of Parliament.

Nigel Farage is joined by Jacob Rees-Mogg on the Holladaus R8 as it sails up the Thames as part of the Fishing for Leave campaign

One on top of the pile was a ringer, I swear, for Jean-Claude Juncker. Same rheumy eyes. But maybe not quite so thirsty.

You can hurl fish into the sea as much as you like, wasting perfectly good food, and the authorities will not complain.

Indeed, they will be pleased because you are following EU rules, and if there is one thing the clerical class approves of, it is obedience to rules, no matter how daft.

But if you drop a few glum haddock corpses into the river outside the Commons terrace, you soon come up against the powers-that-be.

Yesterday's event, held at lowish tide on a bonny March day, was a protest against the Government's transition deal with the EU.

Our fishing boats are going to remain bound by Brussels rules for a further 21 months after our official departure from the EU.

Yesterday's event, held at lowish tide on a bonny March day, was a protest against the Government's transition deal with the EU, writes Quentin Letts

Some in the fishing industry think there will be a further betrayal in the final departure agreements.

Whitehall has almost nothing in common with fishing types. They are the sort of people who write facetious remarks on bureaucratic questionnaires. They are  dread word  individuals.

The good tub Holladays (skipper Christopher Attenborough, from Whitstable) chugged under Tower Bridge at breakfast time and was soon preparing to moor at Embankment pier, not far from the Ministry of Defence. 'You can't moor here!' yelled the piermaster. 'Health and safety!'

Nothing to do with him having been told by political bosses to try to stop this protest, then.

Various Conservative MPs had been expected to give a press conference about the haddock-dumping stunt.

That was before the Tory Whips started fretting. In the event we had to make do, on the bobbing pier, with Jacob Rees-Mogg (NE Somerset), Craig Mackinlay (S Thanet) and Anne-Marie Trevelyan (Berwick-upon- Tweed).

The good tub Holladays (skipper Christopher Attenborough, from Whitstable) chugged under Tower Bridge at breakfast time and was soon preparing to moor at Embankment pier, not far from the Ministry of Defence. 'You can't moor here!' yelled the piermaster. 'Health and safety!'

Good on Mrs Trevelyan. She is a ministerial aide and will have done her immediate career no good by supporting the fishermen.

The trio no doubt said fantastically quotable things. Alas, my hearing is not what it was and the wind and traffic noise and the fact that I was at the rear of the media scrum made them inaudible.

Mr Rees-Mogg had a neatly folded copy of the Financial Times in his hand. He looked more like a man off to his City office than a politician partaking in a spot of populist trouble-making. The pinstriped Poujadiste.

Another Tory MP, Ross Thomson (Aberdeen S), had earlier boarded the Holladays to say that the transition deal was 'unacceptable' on fishing.

'We want out and we want out now,' said young, sparky Mr Thomson. But he later left the boat and none of his Tory colleagues stepped aboard. The Whips must have been insistent.

Various Conservative MPs had been expected to give a press conference about the haddock-dumping stunt. That was before the Tory Whips started fretting. So we had to make do, on the bobbing pier, with Jacob Rees-Mogg (centre), Craig Mackinlay (left) and Anne-Marie Trevelyan (right)

Cue the 'Jaws' music. Enter former Ukip leader Nigel Farage. By now we had moved 200 yards up the Embankment to a pier just beside Parliament.

Capt Farage, in his usual bookie's coat and impish grin, came sauntering down the gangway, coughed up a few ruderies about the EU, and hopped aboard Holladays like a doge leaping into his personal gondola.

The fishing boat, which was by now being shadowed by a police launch, made its way upstream until level with the Commons terrace. Mr Farage and Scots trawlerman Aaron Brown duly threw the haddock overboard, posing for TV cameras as they did so.

At PMQs an hour or so later, Mrs Trevelyan boldly confronted Theresa May on the transition deal, conveying 'the real concern' of her fishing constituents.

What did Philip Hammond do? He laughed.How easy it is to forget that David Cameron was prime minister of a Tory government for a mere 14 months, between the general election of 2015 and the Brexit referendum.

Off the top of my head, I can remember only two things  other than the referendum  about the second Cameron ministry, as historians are already calling it.

One was Cameron and George Osbornes calamitous Project Fear. The other was one of the most mean-spirited U-turns in British political history.

Just three months after taking office, the Tories tore up their manifesto promise to cap charges for residential social care at 72,000 from April 2016, a promise they had made so that no one has to sell their home . . . giving everyone the peace of mind that they will receive the care they need.

'How easy it is to forget that David Cameron was prime minister of a Tory government for a mere 14 months, between the general election of 2015 and the Brexit referendum,' writes Damian Thompson

Principle

The Government suddenly told pensioners and their families: Sorry, but we cant afford your peace of mind now. And yet, in the previous 12 months, they had waved through a foreign aid package that handed 1.3billion to the worlds 20 most corrupt states.

At the time, my 92-year-old mother was in a care home that she could afford only because she had sold her house.

I was livid, not least because it should be a central tenet of Conservative philosophy that those who work hard and pay taxes all their lives are, in turn, cared for by the state in their old age.

It should also be a matter of principle for the Tories that those whove raised children in a family home should be able to pass that home down the generations without it being torn from them to pay for their own care.

Thats why today, to my surprise, Im quietly impressed by another Tory U-turn  by Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt. Speaking to social workers on Monday, he announced that the costs of families care bills will now be capped after all.

'Im quietly impressed by another Tory U-turn  by Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt,' says Damian Thompson of the Conservative's care bills cap

The way that our current charging system operates is far from fair, he said, and it is causing a great deal of distress. Well be given the full details of how he plans to deal with this in an ambitious Green Paper this summer.

Note that it was Cabinet minister Mr Hunt who made the announcement. Back in 2016, it was Alistair Burt, then junior minister in charge of care, who tossed that manifesto pledge into the wastepaper basket.

So, what has changed? For a start, Mr Hunts job title. He is now Secretary of State for Health and Social Care.

Theresa May added this huge responsibility to his remit when she reshuffled the Cabinet in January. It was a long-overdue recognition that successive governments have patronised and ignored Britains fast-growing population of frail, old people.

Until now, the unspoken message from ministers has been: Drink your tea, dear, have another biscuit and try to keep the noise down  and this at the very moment when the exploding cost of caring for the elderly threatens to bring public and private finances crashing down.

So, placing social care at the top of the Health Secretarys agenda was a smart move. And the credit for that should go to Mr Hunt.

Is he a glutton for punishment? Managing the NHS is a nightmare; why add to it?

The answer is that, to his credit, he realises we can no longer separate health and social care. As he said this week, pensioners are too often seen as tasks on a to-do list by a rotating cast of helpers.

Last year, dementia overtook cardiovascular disease as Britains number one cause of death. Around 850,000 people suffer from it. My mother  happily still with us at 94  is one of them.

I say happily because, to the huge relief of my dear sister and me, she is happy. Shes also a very private lady, so youll understand if I dont discuss her symptoms, which  inevitably  have become more severe since the Tories betrayal of people like her nearly two years ago.

Obviously, there is a lot more to Britains social care crisis than treating dementia. But its the most frightening and disorientating aspect of it.

On Monday afternoon, I was sitting in the lounge of my mothers residential home, guiltily wolfing down the delicious sponge cake she showed no interest in eating.

Two things struck me. First, all the ghastly manifestations of dementia that were on display.

Sitting next to me was a handsome gentleman in his mid-60s, at a guess, who kept interrupting us with amiable, but noisy, non sequiturs. When are you driving me home? Its in that other city. Have you fixed it yet? What does your father say?

A nonagenarian resident was also running through the details of her fathers travel itinerary, eight or ten times.

Second, the incredible pressure on the staff. They have to tailor their responses to the performance, as it were, of every resident. That requires diplomatic skills that would frazzle a Brexit negotiator.

Plus, they have to take people to the loo. Thats a diplomatic challenge, too, since the old lady who tells you she has to go now may only just have returned from a visit that required two staff and a mechanised toilet hoist.

Cruel

None of this comes cheap. My mothers care costs more than 1,000 a week. If her mind were unaffected by dementia, the bills would be lower.

Does the Government realise what a cruel choice dementia sufferers and their families face? Paying ruinously expensive costs  or you risk ending up in one of the large granny farms, as theyre known, whose callous and lazy treatment of old folk was exposed by the Mail last year.

Jeremy Hunt has 'woken up' to the problems faced by dementia sufferers and their families, writes Damian Thompson

The good news from this week is that, at last, a Health Secretary has woken up the problem.

As Mr Hunt said: If you develop dementia and require long-term residential care, you are likely to have to use a significant chunk of your savings and the equity in your home to pay for that care. But if you require long-term treatment for cancer, you wont find anything like the same cost.

Did that mean that the Government would pay for everything above its cap on the care home bills? His reply was an unequivocal yes.

Hijacked

He didnt tell us at what level the cap will be set  and, therefore, we dont know how much it will cost the taxpayer. Well find out this summer in that Green Paper.

The only thing we know for sure is that the sums of money involved will be eye-watering.

So, we need to start thinking about where to find the cash.

I mentioned foreign aid. Im serious about diverting it so that we can look after our elderly in this country.

Alas, its not practical to explain the options to my mother. She is the most compassionate person I have ever met, who spent her long widowhood visiting the sick in hospital. But I know her views on handing over piles of aid money that is too often wasted on projects that dont work or trousered by corrupt despots in faraway countries.

Obviously, cutting foreign aid waste wont be enough. Which means, perhaps, the social care crisis will finally force Britain to dismantle the overmanned, public sector bureaucracy that siphons away money from the needy.

Its not sufficient for us to just wait for the Green Paper. The debate must begin immediately and it mustnt be hijacked by lobbyists.

This time round, the Government must not be allowed to kick the issue into the long grass. If they try, theyll be out of office at the next election.

In which case, the fate of old people will lie with a Corbynite government under which care homes will be run for the benefit of heavily unionised staff.

That doesnt bear thinking about. I just hope that my beloved mother isnt around to see it.A teenage mum believed to be the youngest Australian to give birth to a baby with Down Syndrome celebrated her year 12 formal in hospital at her son's bedside.

Brodee Hampton, from Wollongong, NSW, found out she was pregnant one month after her 17th birthday.

At first she was in denial, completely unsure of what to do.

'Oh I was very shocked believe me, I cried every night for the first two weeks until I finally had my first ultrasound,' she tells Daily Mail Australia.

At 17 Brodee Hampton is believed to be the youngest mum in Australia to give birth to a child with Down Syndrome

The determined teenager was told by doctors to terminate the pregnancy but was committed to having baby Elijah

Not wanting to celebrate her year 12 formal without him her mum, Jodie, set up a surprise formal in their hospital ward

'Being so young, I, in a way didn't want to believe it. But then seeing him on the screen made me so happy!'

Brodee was committed to raising her son, and even splitting with Elijah's dad shortly after she found out she was pregnant, didn't shake her resolve.

At 25 weeks, as her bump was showing and she was preparing for the birth, Brodee was given some shocking news.

Doctors told her that her son would be born with Down Syndrome.

They advised her to terminate the pregnancy but she refused, determined to raise her boy in a loving home.

'At first they asked me if I wanted to hear how the procedure was done which I quickly refused. But then he sat in silence and began to tell me anyways.'

When she found out she was pregnant Brodee says she cried for over two weeks but after seeing his heart beat on the screen made her so happy

'I stared at the floor listening as I felt so sick! He was asking me to give birth to my dead son. He wanted me to kill my baby.'

'Mind you I was 25 weeks pregnant. I started to shake uncontrollably and burst into tears to the point I was near vomiting.'

The determined teenager gave birth to Elijah on October 31 last year. She is the youngest mum in the country to have a baby with Down Syndrome.

Baby Elijah was born after 38 weeks. Just after being born he needed surgery for 'duodenal atresia' - a blockage in the bowel - and the pair spent an extra 22 days in hospital.

While she was pregnant Brodee showed how determined she can be and finished her year 12 studies

On November 11 Brodee was meant to join her friends and classmates at her year 12 formal, a rite of passage for young adults entering the world.

In a moving show of support her mum, Jodie, organised her formal to be held in the hospital ward so they could all be together.

'I refused to go to my formal because I couldn't bare the thought of Elijah being in hospital by himself,' she told the Daily Mail Australia.

'So my mum had the idea of surprising me with Elijah dressed up in a tuxedo and chocolate rose.'

Brodee looked stunning as she posed for photos with the nurses in her floor length gown. Dressed in an adorable tux it was little Elijah who stole the show for the special occasion.

'His tuxedo was a bit big so mum tucked it a bit.'

'I was a mixture of emotions, mainly happy though! I mean I got to party with my little best friend.'

After being born Elijah needed surgery for 'duodenal atresia' - a blockage in the bowel - and the pair spent an extra 22 days in hospital.

Before she gave birth Brodee was dealing with judgments from her peers, doctors and preparing to enter motherhood without a supportive father by her side. On top of all this the teenager also manager to finish her final year of school.

'I'm glad I pushed through and was able to graduate.'

'They actually used my half yearly marks for my HSC which I sat when I was about 20 weeks pregnant. Which I'm very grateful for.'

Elijah's father visited the hospital for a few minutes after the surgery but generally keeps a distance.

'I haven't seen or heard from him since,' Brodee says.

The young mum has also lost a lot of friendships. Unlike other teenagers who are going out partying and spending weekends at each others houses, Brodee concentrates on raising her boy.

'I have a lot of support. I've lost nearly all my friends as they go out and party but I'm okay with that.'

After his surgery Elijah's father visited the hospital for a few minutes but other than that he makes no contact with the pair

Brodee has a message for Australia about the stigma surrounding Down Syndrome

'I have the fabulous t21 mum army behind Elijah and I who I'm so thankful for and my family adore Elijah and are real supportive.'

Brodee says people need to step away form the stigma associated with Down Syndrome and understand the condition more.

'Elijah has Down syndrome. He himself isn't Down syndrome,' she says.

'I want everyone to know that there's nothing down about Down syndrome. They're just like you and I and have such beautiful personalities.'

'Society makes them out to be ugly and have no quality of life but really they love life and everything around them and live it to there fullest.'Living with a debilitating migraine everyday was a nightmare for Mara Kroyer.

The yoga instructor, from Perth, said her excruciating headaches became so severe, she was confined to her home vomiting.

But now, the sufferer has claimed she found a relief through a simple, drug-free treatment - known as a daith piercing, which passes through the innermost piece of cartilage fold, close to the ear canal.

Now she swears by the piercing after her migraines completely disappeared since having the metal bar inserted earlier this year.

Scroll down for video

Living with a debilitating migraine everyday was a nightmare for Mara Kroyer (pictured)

The yoga instructor swears by the procedure - known as daith piercing - after her migraines completely disappeared since having the metal bar inserted earlier this year

As the woman endured the agony of headaches everyday, nothing could ease her discomfort.

'Can't remember not having them on a regular basis,' she told Today Today.

'When it gets really bad, it would get to the nausea, very rarely I would get to the vomiting and I'm in bed for the day type scenario.'

After trying everything imaginable to rid of her headaches, she turned to the unusual procedure in a desperate attempt.

As the woman endured the agony of headaches everyday, nothing could ease her discomfort

Kroyer said she no longer has pain in her head, which was almost constant before

'One particular day I had a really bad migraine, I just thought "I'm just going to give it a go",' she said.

She admitted the piercing in her inner ear was painful.

'Basically, the head I had went away straight away but I think it's because my ear hurt so much, it took away the pain from my head,' she said.

'But that was the last headache I've had since then.'

Two months ago, Ms Kroyer said she no longer has pain in her head, which was almost constant before.

'It has absolutely changed my life for the better,' she said.A new wave of men have been turning to Botox - playfully dubbed 'brotox' - in a bid to remain youthful.

Tim O'Reilly, a 32-year-old building inspector from Kirribilli, New South Wales, has been getting 'brotox' regularly for the past two years, and he doesn't have any plans to stop.

Mr O'Reilly told FEMAIL said he doesn't shy away from telling those around him that he has the treatment, despite getting 'stick' from his mates.

'There are very few people that I tell that don't try and have a bit of a laugh about it and say that's such a "girl" thing to do,' he said.

Tim O'Reilly, a 32-year-old building inspector from Kirribilli, New South Wales, has been getting 'brotox' regularly for the past two years, and he doesn't have any plans to stop

'There's a definite stigma to it but at the same time, it doesn't look too over the top, it's just made me look that little bit healthier and less tired.'

Mr O'Reilly is not alone, with more men than ever proudly undergoing the treatment.

Earlier this week Telv Williams from Married At First Sight received his first treatment, and according to his Instagram page, he is now 'converted'.

Mr O'Reilly said he has a wedding coming up in June, and like anyone preparing for such an event, he wants to look his best.

'There are very few people that I tell that don't try and have a bit of a laugh about it and say that's such a "girl" thing to do,' he said

And while the building inspector plans on having a 'refresher' before the big day, he revealed he has been having treatments twice a year for the past two years.

He explained he has the treatment to help relax lines on his forehead and 'just a little bit around the eyes'.

'I have some pretty decent wrinkles on my forehead which are quite deep and it [Botox] gets rid of them completely.'

Mr O'Reilly said he became interested in Botox after visiting the Double Bay clinic with his fiancee, who also has regular treatments.

'I used to think that the only people who had Botox done were people on TV or old ladies and it looked like it stretched your face out and made it look quite scary,' he said.

He explained he the treatment to help relax lines on his forehead and 'just a little bit around the eyes'

He said he changed his mind after seeing some photos showing more realistic results, and initially chose to have only a small amount injected.

'I really wanted to make sure I still had some movement in my face so I only got a small dose the first time because I wanted it to look natural.'

Mr O'Reilly said following his treatment people around him commented on how great he looked, telling him he looked refreshed, well rested and healthy.

Speaking to Daily Mail Australia, Dr Joseph Akaja of Cosmos Clinic said in the past five years there had been a significant increase in male clients requesting appointments for Botox.

He said he changed his mind after seeing some photos showing more realistic results, and initially chose to have only a small amount injected

He said he'd noticed a huge shift away from previously held attitudes that the cosmetic procedure was only for women.

'Men seeking out anti-wrinkle injectable treatments aren't looking to beautify themselves as such, more they want to look less tired and fatigued,' Dr Ajaka said.

Botox treatment for men is used to temporarily relax upper facial lines, frown lines in the forehead, and crow's feet.

While men and women use the same product, there can be a variation in amounts used during a procedure.

Dr Ajaka explained that because men have stronger facial muscles they need more product to smooth these out.

Botox treatment for men is used to temporarily relax upper facial lines, frown lines in the forehead, and crow's feet

The cosmetic surgeon also said men were often introduced to the treatment through their partners which helped to demystify the process.

Although Mr O'Reilly said he doesn't have a problem in telling others he has had Botox, he thinks there still might be a way to go before it loses its stigma entirely.

'I am pretty open about having had it,' he said.

'I really don't have a problem with who knows but I do get a lot of stick from my mates.'

'They give me a fairly hard time over it but I think that's because there's a stigma.

'I think it makes me look a bit fresher and healthier and no one can deny how positive the effects have been.'Armancay's bedtime routine consists of drinking rose petal or camomile tea or a shower

For years, Louise Cartwright burned the candle at both ends  and probably a bit in the middle, too. As a result, everything from her sleep to her sex life had suffered immeasurably.

Night after night, she'd fall into bed between midnight and 2am, exhausted from running her own financial consultancy business, and the family home.

Louise was usually far too frazzled to think about even a cuddle with her husband before her head hit the pillow. And the one or two glasses of wine she habitually drank before bed, wrongly believing they'd help her relax, did quite the opposite. Her sleep was disturbed and unsatisfying.

When her alarm went off at 6.30am, she used to pull the pillow over her head and nearly weep with despair at the thought of the day ahead.

'My sleep patterns were all over the place and it impacted on every area of my life,' recalls Louise, 42, a mother of two from Kent. 'My energy levels were non-existent.

'During the day I felt anxious, tired, cranky and unproductive, longing for bed, but knowing I wouldn't feel any better the next day.'

Her eureka moment came in late 2016 when, prompted by a series of family bereavements and her father being diagnosed with bowel cancer, she decided to overhaul her lifestyle.

At the crux of it was her decision to impose a strict sleep curfew. It's the latest healthy lifestyle trend and is based on prioritising getting between eight and ten hours of good quality sleep at the same time every night.

Fifteen months later, Louise is almost evangelical about the benefits the curfew has brought to her life. Lights out for Louise is now 8.30pm at the latest, to clock up nine hours' sleep, more if her schedule allows. She declines most social invitations, has left dinner parties before the main course and will go out for a meal with her husband Gary no later than 6pm.

Fifteen months after starting curfews, Louise is almost evangelical about the benefits it has brought to her life. Lights out for Louise is now 8.30pm, clocking up nine hours' sleep a night

But the early bed time has done wonders for her sex life with Gary, 49, who is a health and safety director. 'We enjoy wonderful early morning sex because I'm rested, refreshed and naturally awake  not wrenched from sleep by the alarm.' (Her daughters aged 16 and 17 board at a local college.)

'We've been married ten years and it's easy to let romance drift because you're busy and tired. My sleep curfew has revived our relationship.'

Certainly there's a strong scientific argument for Louise's sleep regime. Sleep plays a powerful role in determining everything from appetite to energy levels.

Weight gain, mood swings, irritability, depression and anxiety have all been linked to lack of sleep because of its effect on our hormones.

Throw in factors such as young children, the menopause, stress and a social life, and even seven hours a night is unattainable.

According to Professor Kevin Morgan, who leads the clinical sleep research unit at Loughborough University, imposing a strict sleep curfew is beyond most people's reach, but some of its principles are valuable.

'What we are sure of from a scientific perspective is that regularity is the guardian of good sleep,' he says. 'So maintaining a regular routine is positive. The problem is it simply isn't attainable for many people.'

Still, Louise insists the tranAsition to the sleep patterns she last enjoyed as a small child was very easy. Her pre-bedtime routine starts at 7pm, when most adults her age are sitting down to dinner or cracking open the wine.

Amancay says people think she's younger than she is, which she puts down to being well-rested. But, her militant sleep routine has caused her partner to move out for the sake of their relationship

'I start by writing down three things I've been grateful for that day, have a herbal tea, and an Epsom salts bath or a 20-minute yoga session. I don't have bright lights on, only candles or fairy lights in preparation for putting myself into that sleepy state.

'Apart from our relationship, the biggest difference is an increase in my motivation for work. And my skin looks better.'

A sleep curfew brings inevitable sacrifices, but Louise says she was never much of a social animal, preferring to spend time with family.

'Friends still find it odd that I won't stay out late on the rare occasions I do go out, but I won't budge because I know I'll feel awful in the morning.' Yet a sleep curfew hasn't worked so well for creative director Amancay Tapia's home life in West Hampstead, London.

Her partner  the father of their 15-month-old daughter  has rented an apartment nearby, so frustrated was he by her militant sleep routine.

'I go to bed at 8.45pm in winter and 9pm in summer and I won't change that for anyone,' says Amancay, 37, who is also a filmmaker. Luckily, her daughter also sleeps soundly.

'My friends think it's weird that I don't want to go out and have fun, and my boyfriend and I argued because he'd disturb me by watching movies, working on his computer or just making noise in our two-bedroom home.

'He moved out a few months ago for the sake of our relationship and we're looking for a three-bedroom property so he can use the spare room if he wants to stay up late. If I don't get nine or ten hours' sleep I feel exhausted, I look awful, I'm not as productive and all I can think about is sleep.'

Dawn Murray wishes she didn't sleep so much, but ten hours a night has long been her habit

Amancay rises at 7.30am and says people think she's younger than she is, which she puts down, in part, to being well-rested.

She says: 'My bedtime routine consists of drinking rose petal or camomile tea, a shower and putting my phone away before I go to bed.

'Friends tell me I'll have plenty of time to sleep when I'm dead, but my response is that they'll probably die sooner without getting enough.'

Though said in jest, it's a point Professor Morgan picks up on.

'What we know from studies is those who sleep for five hours or less, and particularly those who sleep nine to ten hours or more, are more likely to die before they are 65.

'It seems that six to eight hours is the optimum.' Dawn Murray wishes she didn't sleep so much, but ten hours a night has long been her habit.

'Even at university I'd go for one early drink with friends, then head home to bed while they went clubbing,' says Dawn, 40, a married primary teacher from Poole, Dorset.

She has two children aged two and four, so also has to be asleep by 8pm as they can wake at 5.30am. 'Sometimes I even go to bed at 7pm when I've tucked them up. I panic that if I don't get enough sleep, I won't be able to function.

'But I feel I miss out. Friends with little ones go out, have fun and accept they'll be tired the next day. I'd love to go out, let my hair down and not worry about getting home to bed, but psychologically I just can't do it.'

Dawn says her husband has been understanding of her sleep regime since they met eight years ago: 'In the past I'd be anxious about him coming home late from a night out and if he disturbed my sleep, I'd go nuts. But I'm working on that.

According to the clinical sleep research unit at Loughborough University, imposing a strict sleep curfew is beyond most people's reach, but some of its principles are valuable

'If we're invited to weddings or parties the children are a good excuse  I tell the hosts, ''They're tired, we need to go home now!''

'It's an ongoing joke with my friends that I either won't go out at all, or I'll leave super early.

'The great irony is that I'm worried about being tired and yet finding my obsession with sleeping increasingly tiresome.

'I do feel my life would be more fun if I could be more relaxed about the amount of sleep I get.'

Indeed, we all need good quality sleep and a life, says Professor Morgan, but sleeping in the extreme may not be the way to achieve that combination.

'Regularity, not duration, is more important,' he says. 'Six hours of sleep would still sit in harmony with some people's circadian rhythm  which tells our bodies when to eat, sleep and rise. Some people will biologically be able to sleep for long periods, others won't.

'Far better to focus on factors that increase your chances of getting to sleep such as a comfortable bed and the right environment rather than obsessing over how many hours you'll get.'It's the most tantalising of questions: is there life after death?

After we featured a thought-provoking piece by a Cambridge academic who is convinced there is, many of you wrote in to agree.

Here, we share some of your most compelling experiences...

After we featured a thought-provoking piece by a Cambridge academic who is convinced there is, many of you wrote in to agree

Dad's energy was there as my son was born

Mother Jane Dawson, from North Ayrshire, says she was overwhelmed by the presence of her late father when she gave birth to her youngest son

Jane Dawson, 49, from Largs, North Ayrshire, is married with three children, 31, 29 and 16. She says:

I had a very profound other-worldly experience during the traumatic birth of my youngest son that completely changed the course of my life.

My father, Jim, who'd died of lung cancer three months before at 69, 'showed up' during the final moments of labour. It was all the more powerful for the fact that the last time I saw him, two hours before he passed away, I told him I was having a boy and said: 'Please always look after my son.'

The labour had been dragging on for hours and I was reaching what they call 'transition', just before the pushing stage of childbirth. All of a sudden my dad's energy filled the room. It's hard to explain but I recognised his spirit, if you like, his essence; I just knew he was there with me. I gasped: 'Oh my God, my dad's here!' The midwives looked around as if I meant he'd walked into the room.

A Cambridge academic said she had proof there was an afterlife in a piece for Femail

Moments later, my son was born. It made me think that my dad must have 'heard' my deathbed request to him on some level, despite having been unconscious. He had chosen to respond by supporting us through my baby's most difficult journey  that of entering the world.

Back home, a medium told me my dad was still there with us. I noticed signs that he was there: coins kept appearing in my shoes. On one occasion I was alone in the house with my baby when I put him in his car seat on the table, went into the kitchen to get something and came back to see the seat had been turned round, as if someone had wanted to take a look. I knew straight away it was Dad.

These experiences totally changed my belief system. I went from never having thought about it to suddenly believing some form of existence continues after you die.

Messages from my mother-in-law

Barbara Wharfe, 72, from Bolton, says her husband George's mother was present at her own funeral

Barbara Wharfe, 72, lives in Bolton with her husband, George, 74. They have two daughters, 47 and 42. She says:

My mother-in-law, Edith, always used to say that if there was anything 'on the other side' she'd tell us when she got there. She was a very straight, no-nonsense type of person so it was entirely in character, though my husband and I didn't take much notice at the time.

She died of a heart attack at 68. After the funeral in August 1964, friends and family returned to Edith's home. Everyone was chatting away and I was handing out sandwiches.

At one point I was walking towards my husband when I felt an ice-cold draught. Suddenly the small picture on the wall opposite me 'leapt' a metre or so and fell at my feet.

The look on my sceptical husband's face said it all: 'My mother!' he gasped. The three-inch nail used to hold the picture on the wall was still very much in place and had been put in at an upward angle to prevent a picture slipping  let alone jumping  off the wall. Coincidence? We think not.

The lamp that switched on by itself

Sonia Mackett, 64, from Gorleston, Norfolk, has a 30-year-old daughter and 29-year-old son. She is a part-time adult education tutor. She says:

My late husband, Tony, didn't believe in life after death, but he always jokingly said if he died before me he would let me know whether there was.

We'd been married for 37 years when he was diagnosed with a terminal brain tumour. It was very difficult for both of us. He became afraid of the shadows in our bedroom and I bought him a touch control bedside light, which he was absurdly pleased with  it was his safety lamp.

Sonia Mackett's husband, Tony, (pictured together) died in December 2010 and some months later when she was lying in bed, his lamp flicked on

He died in December 2010 and some months later, I was lying in bed and his lamp flicked on. You had to touch it three times to achieve full illumination but it had come on full without anyone touching it at all.

I said aloud: 'OK, I know what you are trying to tell me but I'm a bit frightened now.' It never malfunctioned again.

If I'd been asked to name one way that he would contact me, it would've been through this light that made him so secure. He wanted me to know he was still here and to feel safe too.

A ticking off  from beyond the grave

Lynda Sullivan, from the Isle of Man, is convinced she received a scolding from her late mother from beyond the grave

Lynda Sullivan, 51, from Braddan, Isle of Man, is a divorced psychiatric nurse with three daughters, 28, 25, and 20. She says:

I have believed there's life after death since I was a child. My mum often spoke of spirits and when I was eight, feeling cocky, I said to 'them upstairs': 'OK, if you're real, show yourselves.' All of a sudden, a hazy mist appeared and from it the image of a young man. I pulled the covers over my head and shouted: 'Go away, go away!'

Afterwards, I realised the mysterious face looked similar to my older brother. I was aware my mother had given birth to a stillborn son before we'd been born  was this his spirit I'd seen?

Perhaps a more persuasive example was when I was in hospital, having given birth to my youngest daughter. My blood pressure was sky-high and I'd haemorrhaged badly. I asked the nurse whether I was going to die and she ran out of the room (very reassuring!). All hell broke loose with emergency bells going off, but just before I fell unconscious I saw an orb in the top left hand corner of the room and my dead mum's voice said: 'It's not your time.'

My mum appeared again after my marriage broke down. I had sunk into a deep depression and was barely eating or sleeping. At my lowest ebb, I felt a breeze at my left ear and my late mother's voice screamed at me in the exact tone she'd reserve for telling me off as a child. She said: 'Come on now, you've had long enough to weep: get out of bed and be a mother!' It was enough to turn me around, to get help, and get my life back on track.

Beam of sunlight from my son

Patricia Copsey, from Cambridgeshire, lost her son to suicide 17 years ago. He was just 25

Patricia Copsey, 74, a retired personal secretary from Cambridgeshire, is married to retired engineer Terry, 73. They've had four sons. She says:

Seventeen years ago my third son took his own life aged 25. He'd made numerous attempts beforehand, having battled depression on and off since being bullied at school. When an industrial accident stopped him from doing the forestry job he loved, he sank down into the darkness again.

We were very close and I'd done everything I could to stop him committing suicide. I pleaded with him and eventually he told me that one day I would regain my happiness and that if there was any way he could get in touch with me after his death he would.

Patricia says words 'cannot express the devastation' over the loss of her beloved son

Words cannot express my devastation at his loss. He left me with instructions to place his ashes on Table Mountain in South Africa, where he had been born. We had lived there until he was 13 before moving back to the UK.

My husband and I respected his wishes and eventually took him back two years later. After three years we returned along with his younger brother.

That particular day the mountain was shrouded in thick mist and we were advised not to go up in the cable car as there was no view. We had not travelled 7,000 miles for the view, so went up anyway. The three of us wandered around the pathways until we thought we were close to the place where we'd scattered his ashes. We just stood looking in silence.

Suddenly the mist cleared and a shaft of brilliant sunshine beamed down on to the exact spot.

The three of us just looked at each other open-mouthed, and my son remarked that if you didn't believe, you had to believe now. The sun remained for a couple of minutes before the clouds closed over once more. From that moment we were at peace.

My husband saw his own funeral

Liz Daniel, from Bath, lost her husband of 40 years Jack last year. He was 96-years-old

Liz Daniel, 77, from Bath, Somerset, is a property developer whose husband, Jack Daniel, died last year, aged 96. She says:

I felt very alone when my husband died last September. We'd been happily married for 40 years, a second marriage for us both so we didn't have any children together. Everyone rallied around but one lady in particular took me under her wing and persuaded me to go to the Spiritualist Church in Bath with a view to making contact with my husband.

I must admit I went along thinking it was all a con. But the medium gave me a shock when he pointed to me and said: 'Now we must come to Mary.'

I'd never told anyone I'd been christened Mary  I always used my middle name, Elizabeth. On that particular occasion he only told me general things but, intrigued, I returned the following month.

This time a medium said she had my husband with her. She described him accurately and told me he'd attended his own funeral.

She then proceeded to describe the music (the fact his grandson Edward had played the violin so well they'd forgotten to play the naval march when we processed out), the flowers (a white cross with a single red rose from me) and the fact it had been held in Bath Abbey.

She told me my husband wanted to apologise for passing so quickly, saying one minute he was with me and the next he was there watching me calling for help. He was sorry that I'd been in a state of shock and had to deal with everything.

He said I must be careful going up the stairs  very specifically up not down. At the time I'd been having to carry sacks of linen from my rental properties up to the attic for storage and twice I'd lost my balance going up, nearly falling down the stairs.

He then told me, via the medium, I had something wrong with my right ear. I had being having earache for almost two weeks but hadn't told anyone. He thought I might go deaf so insisted I went to sort it.

The next day I went to Boots for an examination and yes, I did have a problem and they gave me a letter for my doctor. I was given drops and had to return for treatment.

Perhaps some will dismiss these as mere coincidence but it was enough for me to believe. Now I attend the church weekly and take great comfort from the thought my husband is looking out for me.

Our goldfish Cecil - still blowing bubbles

Sid and Nancy Wheeler still religiously feed Cecil three years after he died - and every day he blows bubbles of appreciation - the couple say they're not sure through which orifice

Cecil the goldfish meant everything to Sid and Nancy Wheeler from Neasden. They won him at a fair - when it was still lawful to take home such prizes.

'We adored Cecil and I think it's fair to say he liked us,' said Nancy. 'Every night when it was feeding time he would swim in our direction and wag his tail - or perhaps I should say rear fin - appreciatively.

'I know it sounds odd, but Sid and I kind of developed a routine for Cecil. Each evening at six pm without fail we would feed him and every night Cecil would blow bubbles - I'm not sure through which orifice - as if to say thank-you.

'And then suddenly - just as quickly as he came into our lives - Cecil died in April 2014.

'We think he may have caught pneumonia because it was an especially cold night.

'Sid and I were devastated. We were so heart-broken after burying him that we couldn't bring ourselves to throw the water away from his bowl.

'On the night after Cecil died Sid and I couldn't stop ourselves from carrying on with the feeding routine even though we knew he had gone to the giant goldfish bowl in the sky.

'The amazing thing was that as Sid threw the food granules into the water, they disappeared in exactly the same way they would have done when Cecil was alive and eating them.

'And this is the amazing part. After they disappeared some bubbles amazingly appeared in the water in exactly the same way they did when Cecil used to express his thanks - as I said, we were never that certain through which orifice.

'So we think Cecil is still with us - and to this day we still religiously feed him at six pm even though he died three years ago.

'There is not a day that has gone by when bubbles of appreciation have not been blown. It proves to us that there is definitely an after-life.'

Alfie - a house rabbit in more ways than one

'Alfie was a house rabbit in more ways than one. Sure, he hated the outdoors, but he really shared my love of electronic music,' said Mo Dalton, 29, from Queen's Park.

'House, deep house, tropical house, acid house, minimal house, techno - whenever I'd turn my speakers up to 11 he'd start bunny hopping around with me vibing out.

'He was a Dutch rabbit breed, which may have explained things,' the pet owner said.

'I was devastated when he finally went to the rave in the sky. Now whenever I'm in a club - or I see a house - I think of him and remember all the good times we shared.'A 29-year-old mother has proudly shared a candid glimpse of the realities of her post-partum body after giving birth to her baby boy.

Tahlia Aubusson, who blogs under Housewife Style, welcomed her second child - little baby son Arlington earlier this year.

Taking to Instagram, the Australian mother-of-two spoke out about how becoming a parent has positively changed her mindset about the body for the better.

She offered a look at two pictures of her body six weeks after the birth of her son.

'At the moment I still look about 20 weeks pregnant and as you can see my skin is like a dimpled babies bottom just not as cute,' she said, laughing.

'I don't know if it has the ability to tone up the way it once did, I guess I'll have to wait and see but if this is what I am left with, so be it, I'm totally okay with that.'

Tahlia Aubusson offered a look at two pictures of her body six weeks after the birth of her son

The mother - who also has daughter Ambria - gave birth to son Arlington (right) in January

Before starting a family of her own, Tahlia admitted she was curious about what her body would like look after pregnancy.

'There was a time I had a six pack and perfect skin and if I could've shown myself this photo then I would've been depressed knowing what was in store for me,' she said.

But after the birth of little Arlington, Tahlia - who also has a toddler daughter named Ambria - overcame her insecurities after she learned to love herself.

'After having Ambria my body changed forever, I knew I had to find acceptance especially if I was going to have more children,' she said.

'Something shifts in you when you become a Mum, it's odd because for me vanity and the obsessive need to always improve my appearance just became almost non existent.

'And because of that I found the ability to be able to finally love myself or at least be at peace with myself, totally ironic.'

Before starting a family of her own, Tahlia admitted she was curious about what her body would like look after pregnancy

Tahlia said her mission now was to lead a healthy lifestyle.

'Of course I wanted to loose the baby weight but my focus was more to feel healthy not to look a certain way,' she said.

She also reflected on how different her two pregnancies were.

'About nine months after having Ambie, to my surprise my tummy did actually go back to normal, despite a few stretch marks on my hips that eventually faded to some extent,' she said.

'This time I don't know if my body will be as forgiving as last time. Both pregnancies were a total gain of 20 kgs, my tummy and breasts were stretched to breaking point both times.'

She spoke out about how becoming a parent has positively changed her mind for the better

But despite highlighting her flaws, the 29-year-old mum said she was thankful for her children

But despite highlighting her flaws, Tahlia said she was thankful for her children.

'How could I ever be left disappointed in myself when I have two incredibly amazing children who give me more joy, purpose, reward and pride than a perfect physique could ever give,' she said.

She decided to show her husband progression photographs she'd taken from one week postpartum to now.

'He replied with this: 'You are always beautiful to me no matter what shape, all I care about is if you are happy',' she said.

'It's because of him and my gorgeous kids, that I am happy because they remind me what beauty really is.'A woman who was the victim of 'upskirting' has now amassed more than 83,000 signatures on a petition to make it illegal - and has received the backing of Holly Willoughby.

Upskirting sees perpetrators taking photographs or videos of a victims groin area from under their clothing, and more often than not without that person's knowledge or permission.

Gina Martin, 25, appeared on This Morning on Thursday where she explained how she was left humiliated after she became a victim of 'upskirting' during a festival.

The London-based writer spotted an image of a womans thighs and underwear on a man's phone while at the BST Festival in Hyde Park last summer, and realised the image was of her.

She reported it to the police but was told they could not punish the man because he had 'done nothing illegal', and so she launched a campaign to get upskirting added to the Sexual Offences Act 2003.

Gina Martin, 25, launched a campaign last year to call for upskirting to be made illegal as part of the Sexual Offences Act 2003

This Morning's Holly Willoughby fervently backed Gina's petition praising her for taking a stand

Gina, who began her campaign in 2017, explained that it wasn't just her who had been a victim of upskirting.

She claimed that children as young as 10 and 13 had messaged her privately to share how scared they were to go to school because it had also happened there.

During the daytime TV appearance, Gina spoke about the plans for her campaign and received strong support from host Holly who earlier this year lamented the issue on her Instagram page.

Both hosts Holly Willoughby and Philip Schofield backed the campaign.

Holly passionately praised Gina: 'Well done you for being brave enough and getting up and making a stand and taking this to parliament.

'I am right behind you I hope it makes a change finally.

Holly herself, had blasted paparazzi after the Brit Awards in February posting a series of snaps showing her and fellow female celebrities exiting cars after the ceremony, and said photographers had held their cameras low to get revealing shots.

She had captioned the montage: 'At the beginning of the night we held white roses and walked down a red carpet full of the hope and pride that comes with the #timesupcampaign

Gina started her petition which is now set to be debated by parliament on May 11, and called for everyone to get behind it

This Morning asked viewers whether they agreed upskirting should be made a sexual offence with over 90 per cent agreeing in an online poll

'At the end of the night, cameras were held low to get a photo up our skirts times apparently up on #timesup.'

Holly referred back to her own experince during Gina's appearance saying: 'They go really low and then say I'd grapple with my assets, but that isnt wasnt happening I was trying to hide my modesty and protect myself.'

As of February 2018, the Government has said the law around upskirting is 'under review' amid fresh calls to make the cruel craze a specific criminal offence.

The first official figures on the practice show complainants as young as 10, with only one-third of police forces in England and Wales having any data on the prevalence of upskirting.

Campaigners say existing laws for voyeurism, public decency and public order to not provide enough scope for a conviction, with many victims concerned about access to justice.

The legal debate will go in front of parliament on May 11, and Gina added: 'Everyone should be behind it.'

Holly fervently responded: 'If theyre not then its just crazy.'

Gina said that that her petition was now being backed by Conservative, Labour and Lib Dem MPs, police high commissioners, as well as some of the countries best academics and also global law firm Gibson Dunn & Crutcher LLP.

This Morning airs weekdays on ITV from 10.30amHe may live in Argyll in West Scotland, but Thor Hercules' name is straight out of Greek mythology.

Proud parents Cathy and John Williamson took inspiration from not one but two ancient myths when deciding what to call their baby boy - opting for Thor, after the Norse god of strength, and Hercules - the son of Zeus in Greek mythology - whose principle power was his own superhuman strength.

And Cathy and John aren't the only parents in the country skimming over the likes of Ewan or Duncan in favour of more creative names for their adored offspring.

Data released by the National Records of Scotland revealed a number of unique names registered in 2017 - including girls called Bella-Caledonia, Arabesque, Balsam, Indie-Star, Nirvana-Raine, Obsidian, Queen Johannah, Rebbl, Starlette, Tuppence, and Ultra-Violet.

Quirky boys' names included Amazon, Benedykt, Boston-Blu, Daemon, Findhorn, Fox, Jaxn, Ka, Md, Nimbus, Ransom, Sheriff and Tiger.

But not all families are avoiding the traditional route - data released by the Office of National Statistics at the end of last year revealed Oliver and Olivia were the most popular baby names in England and Wales.

Olivia also topped the charts in Scotland for a second year running according to the NRS stats, but Jack pipped Oliver to the post for boys north of the border.

A gift from the gods! Meet baby Thor Hercules, who lives in Lochgilphead, in Argyll, Scotland

Proud parents John and Cathy Williamson, seen with baby Thor, chose a name inspired by not one, but two Greek gods

Thor Hercules Williamson, now five months old, was welcomed by delighted parents John and Cathy in October last year.

The couple said their unusual choice was inspired by the Hollywood blockbuster of the same name starring Chris Hemsworth, also the favourite character of Thors eldest brother John-James, 12.

He joins a brood of seven siblings in Lochgilphead, who themselves have an array of noteworthy names, including five-year-old Shakira and two-year-old Valencia.

Mrs Williamson, 30, who has lupus, said: It was Johns idea and I was a little hesitant at first but now I cant imagine him being called anything else, it fits him perfectly.

And I have to admit when he was first born it was little strange saying the word Thor all the time.

But his mother is convinced he will 'grow into it'.

What are the most unusual baby names in Scotland? Quirky baby names registered in Scotland in 2017 include... For girls Bella-Caledonia Arabesque Balsam Obsidian Queen Johannah Rebbl Tuppence Ultra Violet For boys Amazon Findhorn Jaxn Ka Md Nimbus Ransom Advertisement

Hes such a lovely little guy and I think hell grow into it. Thor as a character is strong and dependable.

According to the National Records of Scotland data, Thor was the only child to be born with that name in 2017.

And figures show that he is only the 12th Thor to be recorded in Scotland since records began in 1975, though experts believe previous namesakes have been inspired by explorer and television personality Thor Heyerdahl, who was popular in the 1970s and 80s for his exotic treks across the globe.

While the ONS data proved classic children's names are still very much in favour in England and Wales, it also revealed a similar surge in interest in pop culture inspired monikers.

There were four girls called Daenerys, presumably in honour of the dragon queen from the hit series.

Another 69 were dubbed Khaleesi - the Dothraki word for queen used for Daenerys Targaryen.

Some 302 sets of parents went for Arya, the youngest daughter of the Stark clan in George R.R. Martin's best-selling epic.

Another five were named after her older sister Sansa, while three were called Brienne - in apparent tribute to female knight Brienne of Tarth.

Eleven boys were called Tyrion, after the dwarf character from the House of Lannister.

Quite the role model: Chris Hemsworth as Thor, the ancient beefcake baby Thor was named for

Big shoes to fill! The adorable tot's unique name means both 'thunder', and 'glorious gift'

The new NRS records show the series is influencing Scottish fans too - with four children named Khaleesi and one each called Khaleese, Khaleesi-Destiny, and Khaleesi-Grace.

In total 486 babies registered in Scotland in 2017 were named Jack and 512 were called Olivia.

Oliva knocked Emily off the top spot in 2015 while Jack has been number one since 2008.

The second most popular boys' name in 2017 was Oliver, followed by James, Lewis, Logan, Noah, Harris, Alexander, Leo and Harry.

For girls the rest of the top 10 is Emily, Isla, Sophie, Amelia, Jessica, Ava, Ella, Charlotte and Aria.

Cathy and John aren't the only parents in Scotland to veer away from traditional baby names

Cabinet Secretary for Culture, Tourism and External Affairs Fiona Hyslop said: 'Picking a name for your baby is one of the first, and most important, decisions new parents make.

'Once again this year has seen some of the most popular names from recent years remain in the top ten, with Jack and Olivia holding on to the top spot for another year.

'I am extremely pleased to see that overall there continues to be a great variety in baby names across Scotland, reflecting our unique and diverse society and culture.'They are still busy making preparations for their upcoming nuptials in May.

But there could soon be more reason to celebrate with bookies predicting Prince Harry and Meghan Markle will announce news of their first pregnancy this year.

While the Duchess of Cambridge is just weeks away from welcoming her third child, there could soon be another royal baby on the way according to Ladbrokes.

The bookmakers now make it just a 2/1 shot the happy couple announce that they are expecting a baby before the year is out.

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Another royal baby? There could soon be more reason to celebrate with bookies predicting Harry and Meghan will announce news of their first pregnancy this year

Alex Apati of Ladbrokes said: 'As if one Royal Wedding and one Royal Baby wasn't enough, it's looking increasingly likely there'll be even more good news coming from Buckingham Palace later this year.'

The couple, who currently live together at Nottingham Cottage in Kensington Palace, will tie the knot in St. George's Chapel, Windsor Castle, on 19th May - just five months before Harry's cousin Eugenie weds Jack Brooksbank at the same venue.

The news comes just days after the bride-to-be's former sister-in-law claimed Meghan is 'desperate for kids' and is likely to try for a baby on her honeymoon.

Happy news: The bookmakers now make it just a 2/1 shot the happy couple announce that they are expecting a baby before the year is out

Erin Specht claimed the US actress 'will get pregnant in her first year of marriage'.

If the couple are indeed planning to welcome their first child in the next year, it will contradict their comments on starting a family during their televised engagement interview in November.

When asked if children were on the cards, Harry replied: 'Not currently, no. No, of course, you know, I think one step at a time, and hopefully we'll start a family in the near future.'Sir Trevor McDonald has come face to face with a former Ku Klux Klan member who told the 78-year-old broadcaster he would once have been a 'target'.

The ITV presenter visited Memphis, Tennessee to mark the 50th anniversary of the assassination of the Martin Luther King, where he met with former white supremacist Scott Shepherd.

The Ku Klux Klan used racist violence and murder in the American south to suppress the civil rights movement spearheaded by Dr King, and Shepherd admitted to having a deep hatred for the activist at the time, who he felt was a 'threat to the white way of life'.

Grilling Mr Shepherd, who calls himself a 'reformed racist', on his one-time beliefs, Sir Trevor said: 'We are sitting here talking, but at another time... I would be a target of yours, because of the colour of my skin?'

'Sure,' Mr Shepherd replied. 'Basically for one reason - the colour of your skin.'

Former Klan Member Scott Shepherd told Sir Trevor McDonald that in a different life the broadcaster would have been a target for him

Sir Trevor McDonald stands outside Martin Luther King's house in Montgomery Alabama during the ITV documentary to commemorate the 50th anniversary of his death

Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., was an American Baptist minister, activist, humanitarian, and leader in the African-American Civil Rights Movement at Atlanta University, United States

At the height of the Civil Rights movement, King was calling for an end to racial segregation in the south.

His message of non-violence rallied thousands of supporters at a time when Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat on a city bus in Montgomery, and lynchings were still taking place.

Mr Shepherd said in his meeting with Sir Trevor: 'I had a hatred for Martin Luther King too. He had a following, he was building an organisation for black rights and this was a threat to white Americans and white supremacists.

'King was a very hated gentleman among the white supremacist group. They felt he was a threat to the white way of life.'

On the anniversary of his death, the documentary follows Sir Trevor as he travels to America's deep south to try and feel closer to a man who meant so much to him and so many others.

'Were he alive today, he would probably be on the march again. This time against inequality and injustice, the twin evils that still scar millions of black American lives,' Sir Trevor says on the show.

Mr Shepherd had witnessed racist violence and cross burnings as a Klan member in the deep south and explained that he had a deep hatred for the civil rights leader at the time

Trevor McDonald with Willie Pearl Mackey King, Martin Luther King's secretary who helped type up his momentous 'I Have A Dream' speech

The broadcaster visits King's first married home, and the motel in Memphis, Tennessee where he was assassinated by James Earl Ray as he stood on his balcony.

Sir Trevor is also told something he admits he hadn't known by Mr Shepherd, that King's killer was not a member of the Klan.

'I had talked with him on the phone, he had family here in Memphis that I would visit.

'I dont think James Earl Ray was a member of the Klan but I do know his brother Gerry Ray was. He was involved with white supremacist groups,' Mr Shepherd explained.

In the 1960s, America was busy putting a man into space, while back on earth the issue of race was tearing its people apart.

Sir Trevor learned how King became a civil rights leader almost by accident, starting with his historic 'I have a dream' speech, delivered from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial during the march on Washington, which would capture the imaginations of 250,000 supporters listening as well as generations to come.

He visited Alabama and the cities of Montgomery, Birmingham and Selma, where King was met with the ugly face of bigotry and violence.

King waves to supporters 28 August 1963 on the Mall in Washington DC (Washington Monument in background) during the "March on Washington"

Sir Trevor also spoke with King's assistant Willie Pearl Mackey King, who typed up the address that turned into his momentous speech.

Ms Mackey appeared irked that the speech the pair had 'stayed up all night' writing was scrapped for King's off the cuff comments, words which reverberated around the world and went down in history as a turning point in the civil rights movement.

'When I saw him delivering the speech, I was like "that's not the speech!"

'You know, "Martin tell them about the dream", that's not what was prepared, that's not what we stayed up at night typing.'

Martin Luther King by Sir Trevor McDonald airs tonight on ITV at 9pmThe Duchess of Cornwall showed off her handiwork today as she ushered in spring by making a jaunty Easter bonnet.

Camilla, 70, tried her hand at some arts and crafts during her visit to the Fair Close Centre in Berkshire to help mark its 51st anniversary.

The Duchess wore a vibrant blue plaid jacket and matching skirt which she stepped out in just last month during a visit to the Royal Academy of Dance in London.

And when she popped into its on-site shop, one enthusiastic trader, Mary Childs, couldn't resist the opportunity to try and sell the royal visitor a coat for her husband, Prince Charles.

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Camilla's got skills! The Duchess, 70, made her very own Easter bonnet during her visit to the Fair Close Centre in Berkshire on Thursday to help mark its 51st anniversary

She also met staff, volunteers and visitors including head cook Sue Hayes, who baked her a delicious-looking Victoria sponge, while touring the centre for senior citizens in the historic market town of Newbury.

The centre, which celebrated its 50th anniversary last year, is described as a 'friendly place for the senior citizens of West Berkshire to meet, eat and relax'.

Run by Age Concern Newbury & District, it serves lunches to people aged 60-plus, puts on activities and provides local transport services.

It was first opened in 1976 by Camilla's mother-in-law, Queen Elizabeth.

Today, Camilla was greeted by centre patron Harry Henderson, and his sister and centre chairwoman Josie Reed.

When Camilla popped into its on-site shop, one enthusiastic trader, Mary Childs, couldn't resist the opportunity to try and sell the royal visitor a coat for her husband, Prince Charles

Deja vu? The Duchess wore a vibrant blue plaid jacket and matching skirt which she stepped out in just last month during a visit to the Royal Academy of Dance in London

Heart of the community: Run by Age Concern Newbury & District, the Fair Close Centre serves lunches to people aged 60-plus, puts on activities and provides local transport services

Important cause: The centre, which celebrated its 50th anniversary last year, is described as a 'friendly place for the senior citizens of West Berkshire to meet, eat and relax'

Camilla met staff, volunteers and visitors including head cook Sue Hayes, who baked her a delicious-looking Victoria sponge (pictured), while touring the centre for senior citizens

In what is shaping up to be a busy week for the Duchess, she last night attended a glittering reception in London to mark the National Literary Trust's 25th anniversary.

Camilla spent her evening rubbing shoulders with literary luminaries such as Jilly Cooper, Prue Leith, Victoria Hislop, Joanna Trollope and Joanne Harris at London's Plaisterers' Hall.

Looking elegant in a black embroidered Anna Valentine top and pleated skirt, Camilla, a voracious reader and advocate of installing a love of it in the young, chatted with the writers who she called my heroes.

The Duchess of Cornwall has been the Trust's Patron since 2010 and is also Patron of a number of other charities which promote literacy, including Beanstalk, BookTrust, First Story and The Wicked Young Writers Award.The Duchess of Cambridge took part in her final engagement ahead of her maternity leave on Thursday - and royal watchers believe this indicates her due date.

Fans believe that Kate, 36, could give birth to her third child over the weekend of the April 28-29.

If they are correct the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge will be toasting not only their new arrival but also celebrating their seventh wedding anniversary.

Royal watchers predict that the Duchess of Cambridge, who goes on maternity leave today, will deliver her third child on April 28 or 29 based on her previous maternity leaves

The prediction is based on the Duchess' previous maternity leaves with Prince George and Princess Charlotte.

Hello! points out that both siblings were born the same amount of time after their mother went on maternity leave.

When pregnant with George in 2013, Kate began her maternity leave on June 16 having attended her final engagement in the form of Trooping of the Colour a day earlier.

Her firstborn arrived 38 days later on July 22, just over five weeks after her maternity leave began.

Prince William and Kate welcomed their first child Prince George on July 22, 38 days after she began her maternity leave

Similarly Princess Charlotte was born 37 days after her mother began her paternity leave, arriving on May 2

If the couple's third child follows the same pattern, we can expect it to be born on either April 28 or 29 - the same weekend as William and Kate's seventh wedding anniversary

Similarly Princess Charlotte's arrival in 2015 followed almost exactly the same pattern, having been born just over five weeks after her mother's final engagement.

Kate and William visited the Stephen Lawrence Centre in London on 27 March and 37 days later Charlotte was born on May 2.

If the couple's third child follows the same pattern we can expect our newest member of the royal family on either April 28 or 29.

The Duchess' due date has previously been speculated as St George's Day which falls on April 23 however if the baby is late it could arrive closer to Charlotte's birthday.

The Duchess began her first maternity leave after attending Trooping of the Colour in 2013 (left) and her final engagement before Charlotte's birth was a trip to the Stephen Lawrence Centre in London (right)

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge visited St Lukes Community Centre in London today - Kate's last official engagement before maternity leave

The palace have remained tight lipped though it is thought that the Cambridges' baby is expected after the Queen's birthday, April 21 and well before Harry and Meghan's wedding on May 19.

This morning a Kensington Palace spokesperson confirmed: 'Today's public engagements by the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge will be Her Royal Highness's last before starting her maternity leave.'

She and William visited St Lukes Community Centre in London where they donned aprons to prepare a community lunch.

She may appear at some family occasions during the summer but is not expected to return to official duties until the autumn, according to aides, and even then her 'primary focus' will be her children.Animal rights campaigners are 'delighted' at the decision by DKNY and Donna Karan to ban fur from their collections.

The fashion giants, owned by parent company G-III, are expected to go fur-free in 2019, hot on the heels of luxury labels Versace and Gucci who have made similar moves in recent months.

The news was announced by Morris Goldfarb, CEO of G-III, on Thursday morning, and the company's decision has been welcomed by animal rights activists.

Campaign group Respect for Animals tweeted: '@DKNY are going #FurFree! The morally bankrupt fur industry is having a torrid time at the moment..so please make it worse and spread this great news.'

A model walks the runway in a fur tippet at a DKNY runway show. The label's parent company announced today it plans to go fur-free as of 2019, following on from Gucci and Versace

Models parade down the DKNY catwalk wearing fur designs. G-III's landmark decision comes just months after animal rights campaigners hailed a 'game-changing' decision by Gucci

Meanwhile, Humane Society International's director of international media Wendy Higgins added: 'HSI is delighted that since Gucci declared fur to be "outdated" designers have been racing to prove their relevance by dropping the archaic material.

'In the latest designer declaration, this morning brands DKNY and Donna Karan pledged to ban fur cruelty from their collections, following hot on the heels of Versace and the city of San Francisco, marking the end of a fantastic week for fur-bearing animals.

'With each new fur-free announcement, designers like Fendi and Burberry that are still putting cruelty on the catwalk fall further out of fashion.'

DKNY have in the past sent countless models down the runway wearing fur-trimmed designs, and are known for their popular rabbit fur coats.

G-III's landmark decision comes just months after animal rights campaigners hailed a 'game-changing' decision by Gucci to stop using fur.

The Italian fashion house announced in October it will make the changes from its spring-summer 2018 collection and auction off all of its remaining animal fur items.

It means Gucci will no longer use mink, coyote, raccoon dog, fox, rabbit and all other species specially bred or caught.

Gucci has sent models down the catwalk draped in fur coats, pictured in 2004, left, and 2006

The luxury brand even applied fur to some of its shoes, including this striking pair in 2015

Gucci has previously sent models down the catwalk draped in fur coats and sporting striking fur shoes.

Chief executive Marco Bizzarri told a London College of Fashion event: 'Being socially responsible is one of Gucci's core values, and we will continue to strive to do better for the environment and animals.'

Humane Society International welcomed the 'compassionate decision'.

President Kitty Block said: 'Gucci going fur-free is a huge game-changer. For this Italian powerhouse to end the use of fur because of the cruelty involved will have a huge ripple effect throughout the world of fashion.'

Models Stella Tennant, left in 1997, and Sasha Pivovarova on the catwalk in Milian in 2007

But the International Fur Federation said the 'environmental reasons make no sense'.

It added: 'Fur is the most natural fashion item. It comes from nature and lasts for decades.

In June, Yoox Net-A-Porter, a multi-brand online luxury retailer, adopted a fur-free policy on accessories and clothing sold on the site.

Italy's Giorgio Armani last year committed to stop using fur, saying technological progress meant there was no longer any justification for cruelty to animals. Calvin Klein took the plunge in 1994.Ivanka Trump appeared to channel her inner Charlie's Angel on Thursday afternoon as she spoke during a panel for millennials at the White House.

The first daughter, 36, discussed the tax reform as well as the country's economy during the event on Thursday afternoon. She sat onstage donning a green jumpsuit by Gabriella Hearst, which retails for $1,995, paired with a black turtleneck underneath.

While she was trying to appeal to a younger crowd during the millennial-focused event, Ivanka seemed to have been inspired by a classic from another era when it came to her wardrobe choices, kicking it back to the seventies.

Event: Ivanka Trump spoke during a panel for millennials at the White House on Thursday, donning a green jumpsuit by Gabriella Hearst, which retails for $1995

Outfit: The first daughter, 36, paired the jumpsuit with a black turtleneck worn underneath it

From head to toes: Ivanka completed her outfit with a pair of laced black boots with a high heel, and opted for a wavy blowout

Inspiration? The first daughter's choice to pair the jumpsuit with a turtleneck echoed looks worn by Jaclyn Smith (left) and Kate Jackson (center) in Charlie's Angels

The jumpsuit and turtleneck pairing was reminiscent of outfits worn by Jaclyn Smith and Kate Jackson in some frames of Charlie's Angels, and echoed the vintage atmosphere of the ABC show, which aired from 1976 to 1981.

Ivanka completed her outfit with a pair of laced black boots with a high heel, and while she didn't go the complete Farrah Fawcett route with her hair, she still opted for a voluminous, wavy blowout.

Many of the attendees likely hadn't been born yet when Charlie's Angels became a pop culture reference and might have missed the throwback, focusing instead on asking questions to Ivanka throughout the event.

The president's daughter and senior White House adviser spent approximately one hour answering questions from the Trump-friendly crowd.

She promoted the Trump administration's tax reform and discussed topics such as employment and the increases in college tuition fees.

The panel, which was meant to address issues that are especially relevant to millennials, saw young people such as conservative student activist Lauren Cooley, a vocal Trump supporter, address the first daughter to raise specific issues.

Panel: Ivanka (pictured sitting down for the talk) spent approximately one hour answering questions from the Trump-friendly crowd

Talk: Before the event, Ivanka took to Instagram Stories to share a photo of herself giving 'a quick interview' to The Daily Signal, a conservative news and opinion platform

Themes: During the panel, she promoted the Trump administration's tax reform and discussing topics such as employment and the increases in college tuition fees

Family: After Ivanka was done answering questions, her father also made an appearance

Before: The first daughter was pictured waiting for her father to speak during the event

Past: This isn't the first time Ivanka has worn the green jumpsuit during an official function. She was pictured in it back in July 2017 during the G20 in Hamburg, Germany

Before the event, Ivanka took to Instagram Stories to share a photo of herself giving 'a quick interview' to The Daily Signal, a conservative news and opinion platform.

'Ready to welcome millennials to the White House!' she wrote, later telling her followers to 'tune in to the conversation'.

This isn't the first time Ivanka has worn the green jumpsuit during an official function.

She wore it in July last year during the G20, this time going bare arms while attending the summit in Hamburg, Germany.

On that occasion, she paired the wide-legged jumpsuit with a pair of black stilettos and a matching clutch, and was photographed in the outfit holding her husband Jared Kushner's arm in between sessions.

After Ivanka was done answering attendees' questions, her father also made an appearance, shortly after signing a presidential memorandum that could impose tariffs on up to $60 billion of imports from China.

When Donald Trump was asked what advice he would give his 25-year-old self, he replied: 'Don't run for president.'Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden showed off her green credentials as she dazzled in an emerald frock at a WaterAid event.

The Scandi princess, who has been patron of the charity since 2011, donned a vibrant patterned frock as she stepped out in Stockholm to attend a seminar on the importance of clean water at the Teater Pero on Thursday evening.

Victoria, 40, scraped her hair into a smart chignon and paired her eye-catching gown with a matching leather clutch bag and vertiginous nude heels for the charity event.

The mother-of-two, who is first in line to the throne after her father Carl XVI Gustaf, was all smiles as she posed for photographs with WaterAid president Tobias Krantz before entering the theatre.

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Scandi style: Victoria donned a vibrant patterned frock as she stepped out in Stockholm to attend a seminar on the importance of clean water at the Teater Pero in the city centre

The mother-of-two, who is first in line to the throne after her father Carl XVI Gustaf, was all smiles as she posed for photographs outside the theatre on Thursday evening

She added a pop of colour to her outfit with a simple green belt and a multi-coloured brooch.

Tonight's seminar is billed as a 'vital conversation' focusing on how clean water is a prerequisite for combating poverty, strengthening women's rights and giving children the opportunity to go to school.

Speakers will include Jan Eliasson, former deputy secretary general of the UN and ambassador of WaterAid; Bethlehem Mengistu, Head of WaterAid Ethiopia; and actress and WaterAid ambassador Sofia Helin.

The Scandi princess poses for a photograph with WaterAid president Tobias Krantz inside the Teater Pero before sitting down to listen to tonight's seminar

Victoria poses for a photo with a WaterAid worker and Tobias Krantz. Tonight's talk will be led by Cecilia Chatterjee-Martinsen, Secretary General WaterAid Sweden

Royal romance: Mother-of-two Victoria married her former personal trainer, Daniel Westling, in 2010 and the couple are parents to Princess Estelle, six and Prince Oscar, two

Details: Victoria added a pop of colour to her outfit with a simple green belt and a multi-coloured brooch

The talk will be led by Cecilia Chatterjee-Martinsen, Secretary General WaterAid Sweden.

Mother-of-two Victoria married her former personal trainer, Daniel Westling, in 2010 and the couple are parents to Princess Estelle, six and Prince Oscar, two.

The royals recently hosted the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge on their tour of Scandinavia, treating them to a gala dinner, a talk on mental health and a trip to a local shopping centre.Flu makes people six times more likely to suffer a heart attack or stroke in the three days following an infection, new research suggests.

The virus substantially increases sufferers risk of a heart attack for up to a week and stroke for up to one month after they become infected, the research adds.

Suffering from a respiratory infection, which can also include pneumonia, causes inflammation, which can lead to blood clots and subsequent cardiovascular events, a study found today.

To put the findings into context, lead researcher Dr Charlotte Warren-Gash, from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, said: 'In Scotland, among those aged 75 years and above, around two in 10,000 people have a heart attack each week.

'Our analysis found this figure rose to 10 in 10,000 in the week after having a respiratory infection.'

Researchers believe their findings highlight the importance of being vaccinated against flu and pneumonia, particularly among vulnerable people, such as the elderly or those with pre-existing heart problems.

The life-threatening Aussie flu epidemic earlier this year contributed to NHS bosses making the unprecedented decision to cancel 55,000 operations to cope with the so-called winter crisis.

Flu makes people six times more likely to suffer a heart attack or stroke (stroke)

WHAT FLU STRAINS ARE IN THE UK IN 2018? There are many different types of flu circulating around the world, but four main types are being seen in Britain this winter. H3N2 - Dubbed Aussie flu after it struck Australia hard last winter, this strain is more likely to affect the elderly, who do not respond well to the current vaccine. This is one of the most common strains seen so far this winter, with at least 63 confirmed cases seen in official laboratories. H1N1 - This strain  known as swine flu - is generally more likely to hit children, who respond well to vaccination. This has been seen nearly as often as H3N2 so far this year, with at least 50 cases confirmed in labs. In the past it was commonly caught from pigs, but that changed in 2009 when it started spreading rapidly among humans in a major global pandemic. B / Yamagata - This is known as 'Japanese flu'. Only people who received the four strain vaccine - which is being slowly rolled out after it was introduced for the first time last winter - are protected against the Yamagata strain. Those who received the normal three strain vaccine are not protected. This strain has been seen in at least 63 lab cases so far this winter. B / Victoria - This strain is vaccinated against in the normal three strain vaccine, but has hardly appeared so far this winter, with just around four confirmed cases. Advertisement

Understanding who is at risk may lead to interventions

Dr Warren-Gash said: 'Heart disease, strokes and lower respiratory infections have been the three leading causes of death globally for over 15 years, and are important public health problems that affect large numbers of people worldwide.

'As people age, having more than one medical condition becomes more common, so it is even more important to understand the links between different diseases.

'If we can understand who is at risk of these cardiovascular complications after respiratory infections, we can potentially intervene to prevent them, with methods such as vaccines.'

Results further suggest the cardiovascular risks of respiratory infections are greatest in those over 65.

Dr Warren-Gash added: 'For most young, healthy people, the risk of heart attacks and strokes occurring after a respiratory infection is low.

'This research is particularly relevant for those over the age of 65, as well as people with pre-existing heart diseases, as these groups are at higher risk of heart attacks and strokes.'

The findings were published in the European Respiratory Journal.

Highlights the importance of vaccinations

The study did not assess less common respiratory infections or how they specifically affect people of different ages.

Dr Warren-Gash said: 'Our research highlights the importance of ongoing work into which doses of vaccine are best to protect people from heart attacks and strokes.

'Although flu and pneumonia seem to have the biggest impact, this research also shows that a group of other respiratory viruses had some triggering effects.

'We don't currently have vaccines for these viruses so further research is needed.'

Suffering from a respiratory infection, which can also include pneumonia, causes inflammation, which can lead to blood clots and subsequent cardiovascular events (stock)

How the research was carried out

The researchers analysed national infection surveillance data from the Scottish Morbidity Record.

They identified 1,227 adults who had suffered their first heart attack and 762 who had one stroke, as well as a respiratory bacterial or viral infection, between 2004 and 2014.

The rate of cardiovascular events in the stages immediately after a respiratory infection were compared against those that occurred at other times.Charlotte Strecker stunned doctors by beating five bouts of an incredibly rare tumor - but it was the horrific treatment side effects, 100lb weight gain, depression, and battle to survive Hurricane Katrina that changed her life.

The 46-year-old, of Tyler, Texas, was first diagnosed with stage 3 adrenal carcinoma - a rare disease of the gland located on top of the kidney - in January 1999 after experiencing symptoms, such as high blood pressure, nausea and vomiting, and pain on the right side of her back.

The then-27-year-old thought she was out of the woods after undergoing surgery to remove the tumor, she had no idea she'd be dealing this disease for the next decade - as well as living through one of the worst hurricanes to ever hit US soil.

Despite adrenal cancer being rare with a very poor prognosis, Charlotte's doctors were more concerned with the side effects of her cancer treatment - which caused her to gain 100 pounds.

Charlotte, who beat the cancer in May 2005, explains what it felt like to battle her weight gain and cancer at the same time.

Charlotte Strecker, who gained 100 pounds during her cancer treatment, dropped all of the weight by April 2011 after her cancer went into remission six years prior

Charlotte (far left) weighed nearly 200 pounds when she attended her brother's wedding in January 2004

Adrenal cancer is rare impacting an estimated 200 people in the US each year, according to American Cancer Society. The five-year survival rate for someone diagnosed with stage 3 cancer, meaning that the tumor has grown into nearby tissue or has spread to nearby lymph nodes, is 44 percent.

Signs and symptoms of the disease are usually caused by the hormones - estrogen, androgen, aldosterone or cortisol - made by the tumor. They include excess production of facial and body hair, muscle cramps, high blood pressure, fat deposits behind the neck and shoulders, and irregularities in menstruation.

Charlotte was in her last year of pharmacy school when she began experiencing symptoms like high blood pressure, nausea and pain that radiated to the right side of her back in August 1998.

'It felt like I wasn't getting enough oxygen or air to my kidneys,' she said. 'That's the best way I can describe the pain.'

She went to urgent care three times to deal with the sharp pain, but doctors would only prescribe her pills to treat abdominal spasms.

However, she wasn't too worried until she went to her obstetrician-gynecologist in December who expressed a lot of concern over her blood pressure reading which was 160/110.

Her doctor said her level was too high for someone her age, and indicated that she was at risk of a heart attack and stroke.

Charlotte got a second opinion from her step-grandfather, who was a physician. After confirming that her blood pressure was abnormally high, he referred her to one of his colleagues who was an oncologist.

'I think it's funny that he referred me to an oncologist,' said Charlotte, adding that her step-grandfather's colleague would eventually diagnose her with cancer. 'Maybe he had an idea what it was, but just didn't tell me.'

They set up an appointment with the oncologist in early January who ordered an ultrasound on Charlotte's abdomen that revealed she had a tumor the size of a cabbage ball sitting on her kidney. They discovered that the tumor was malignant.

'It was really weird,' Charlotte said. 'I was basically like "OK, let's do what we have to do so I could get back on with my life."'

She didn't realize this ordeal would span more than a decade in which she would gain 100 pounds due to cancer treatment, endure one of the most disastrous hurricanes of all time, and be left unable to have children.

Charlotte underwent surgery on January 17, 1999 to remove the tumor. She thought she was out of the woods and 'everything was fine' as subsequent scans showed no cancer cells over the the next 18 months.

However, in March 2000 she started experiencing nausea.

She wasn't sure it was cancer though, because her routine CAT scans showed no recurrence.

But in July 2000, the scans revealed that the cancer came back and this time it was the shape and size of a hot dog.

'That was a jaw dropping moment,' she explained.'That made me realize that this wasn't going to go away easily.'

Charlotte was diagnosed with adrenal carcinoma a year before she graduated from pharmacy school in December 1999

Charlotte, who lived in Louisiana at the time, opted to go to the world-class MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas for treatment. She underwent a second surgery two-and-a-half weeks after her recurrence to remove the adrenal gland tumor.

Once again, Charlotte thought she was in the clear until a routine scan in October, three months later, revealed the cancer came back a third time.

She said that although surgery was the only way to cure this form of cancer, chemotherapy was the next option since surgery didn't seem to be effective.

'I was excited to start chemo because I thought "well, surgery didn't work yet, maybe this will do the trick,"' Charlotte explained.

She tried to remain optimistic throughout the ordeal, but felt at some point that the cancer just 'won't go away.'

As to why the cancer kept recurring, doctors suggested that Charlotte, who's a self-proclaimed 'worry wart', manage her stress better, since they believed that may be contributing to its recurrence since adrenal glands are involved in the production of cortisol - which helps the body respond to stress.

Charlotte was prescribed oral chemotherapy and steroids to treat the third recurrence of the adrenal carcinoma.

She took a medical leave from her pharmaceutical job in Walmart and moved back to New Orleans from Texas three months after starting chemotherapy treatment.

[When I was first diagnosed], I was basically like 'let's do what we have to do so I could get back on with my life' Charlotte Strecker

Although she went into remission in May 2001, just months after starting treatment, she remained on the drugs.

The cancer was gone, but Charlotte was physically weak and constantly sick due to treatment.

'I could only eat a little thing of mashed potatoes per day,' she said. 'The smell of certain things triggered nausea... even brushing my teeth.'

By the end of 2001, Charlotte, who weighed 150 pounds when she started treatment, was barely 100 pounds.

'I was very frail, I couldn't keep anything down... I spent all day nauseated and vomiting,' she explained.

After seeing how thin she was becoming, doctors decided to increase her steroid dosage in an effort to improve her appetite - these drugs are used in a number of ways in cancer treatment including destroy cancer cells, reduce an allergic reaction to certain drugs and to curb nausea and vomiting.

Charlotte was eating more due to the steroids. She frequently woke up in the middle of the night for sugary snacks. In addition to this, Charlotte was also drinking whey protein shakes.

She put on 100 pounds within a year.

Charlotte (pictured with her fiancee Russ and his son Anthony in Aruba) weighs 135 pounds

'I didn't notice the weight gain,' she said. 'It wasn't until December 2002 that my then-husband took a picture of me for a Christmas card. I looked at it and I was like "oh my God that can't be me." I was floored.'

The steroids definitely played a part in the weight gain, but so did her depression.

'I was emotionally drained and exhausted from the recurrences,' she says. 'I felt like there was no end in sight.'

Charlotte, who got married in July 2003, spent the following months distressed about her weight gain, but she was even more heartbroken when the cancer came back a fourth time in August 2003 while she was still receiving chemotherapy treatments.

[My doctor] said 'you're not going to die from cancer, but you are going to die from a heart attack' Charlotte Strecker

'Emotionally and physically... I was just spent,' said Charlotte. 'I was trying to move on with my life and I had just gotten married... I didn't expect to deal with this again.'

The cancer went away shortly after doctors increased her chemo dosage.

However, when it returned two years later in May 2005, the doctors opted to surgically remove the tumor.

Despite this being Charlotte's fifth time being diagnosed with a rare tumor with a very poor prognosis, her doctors were more worried that she was still 200 pounds.

'[My doctor] said "you're not going to die from cancer but you are going to die from a heart attack,"' Charlotte recalled. 'The weight bothered him more than the cancer.'

Although she wasn't suffering from any weight-related health issues at the time, her doctors were worried it would become an problem later on.

At the time, her doctor was fairly confident that they would get rid of the cancer since it was the smaller than the tip of a pin - smallest it the tumor had ever been - and they could 'see its blood source' or what was feeding it.

The 46-year-old, who has been cancer free for 13 years, said that she was emotionally drained and exhausted from the disease recurrences

'They were sure that they would be able to sever it once and for all,' she explained.

A week before her third surgery to remove the tumor in May 2005, she was taken off steroids and her oral chemotherapy medication.

Charlotte, whose husband at the time was on disability, was struggling financially, but she went to the doctor the following month for her routine scan which came up clear.

'A negative CT scan is like winning the lottery for a period of time,' she said.

As soon as she stopped taking steroids the weight began to fall off, and Charlotte started to regain her confidence.

However, she was worried the financial stress, as well as the anxiety she had while evacuation her home near the ocean to flee Hurricane Katrina would contribute to another recurrence.

A [clear] CT scan is like winning the lottery for a period of time Charlotte Strecker

But scans following the hurricane in August 2005 revealed she was clear.

Her monthly scans turned to yearly then bi-yearly scans. And those also revealed no signs of recurrence.

By 2011, she had dropped 65 pounds, weighing just 135 pounds.

In May 2015, her doctors said her chance of developing the cancer again was 'out of the woods' and her chance of developing the disease again was very slim.

'That was a big milestone for me,' said Charlotte, who, at some point, didn't think the disease will ever go away.

Charlotte, who moved back to Texas and is newly engaged after divorcing her first husband in July 2007, is sharing her story to inspire others.

'It was not an easy journey, but it was actually a blessing in disguise,' she added.A woman has told of her heartbreak at discovering she had been born without a vagina, cervix or uterus when she was 18 years old.

Growing up, Rebekah Knight, now 25, from Ballymoney, Northern Ireland, thought she would start her period in her early teens like the rest of her friends.

But when she turned 17 and was still waiting, she began to worry that something wasn't right.

Recalling how, after a string of tests, doctors told her she had a rare condition called Mayer Rokitansky Kuster Hauser (MRKH) syndrome, meaning she was born without vagina, cervix and uterus, events steward Ms. Knight said: 'As you can imagine, I was very heartbroken and shocked. I couldn't believe this was happening to me.

Then, in 2013, she had vaginal construction surgery in order for that part of her body to function normally.

A woman describes her pain at finding out she has no vagina, cervix or uterus at 18

'Devastated'

'I was especially devastated when I was told I wouldn't be able to carry children. There are no words to describe it.

'But there are still options like surrogacy or adoption. This won't stop me from becoming a mother.'

Throughout her teenage years, Ms Knight assumed she would develop like her friends and peers. Reaching 17 without her periods arriving, she initially thought she may just be a 'late starter' - but after sharing her fears with her mother Debbie, 52, she decided to go to the GP for some advice.

There, she was referred to Royal Victoria hospital, Belfast for a variety of tests until eventually, an MRI scan revealed she had the condition, which affects one in 5000 women worldwide.

As her ovaries still function normally, Ms Knight, who lives with mother Debbie, dad Benny, 56, and siblings Thomas Knight, 23 and Matthew Knight, 15, is able to have children that are biologically hers.

'I was especially devastated when I was told I wouldn't be able to carry children,' she said

In summer 2013, Ms Knight underwent two surgical procedures to reconstruct a vagina

But, without a uterus, she cannot carry them herself, so hopes to try surrogacy or adoption instead.

Vaginal reconstruction

Following her diagnosis, Ms Knight was also told that she only had one kidney and would need surgery to reconstruct her vagina because it was so small.

'They said I needed to improve that part of the body, and to have it working normally,' she said, adding that they would monitor her kidney function.

'I was always a bit terrified of hospitals, but I knew it was going to benefit me in the long run.'

So, in summer 2013, Ms Knight underwent two procedures at the Royal Victoria hospital.

Firstly, surgeons stretched the tissue on the outside of her vagina before using that tissue to reconstruct the area, expanding the previously small opening into a normal-sized one.

Though she healed well and thankfully did not suffer any infections, Ms Knight still spent 12 days confined to a hospital bed whilst she recovered.

She also spent a month undergoing tough physiotherapy to enable her to walk again before she was finally discharged.

Boosted by her faith

She said: 'There were times when I questioned everything and whether it was worth it and it was a lot of hard work.

Determined to help others with the condition, Rebekah Knight has written a book about her experiences, called 'The Girl With No...' , which is currently available on Amazon

'My faith plays a big role in helping me, as there were always people from church praying for me. I believe that God got me through this and pulled me to the other side,' she said

'My faith plays a big role in helping me, as there were always people from church praying for me. I believe that God got me through this and pulled me to the other side.

'When I had my lonely nights, I just knew he was with me the whole time.' Though she is currently single, she hopes to one day meet someone who can look past her condition.

She said: 'I don't worry too much about relationships, as I believe the right person will stick by you for you for who you are. Dating people can be difficult as it's always hard to tell them about this - especially that I can't carry children.

'This is part of myself, but I have just learnt to live with it. Everybody has their own battle, this is just mine.'

Once she left hospital, Ms Knight started to think about charting her journey to help other people in a similar position.

Throughout everything, she has been helped by support groups on Facebook and she noticed newly-diagnosed women would join the pages, confused and frightened about what was happening.

Ms. Knight with her friend Emma. 'Everybody has their own battle, this is just mine,' she said

Determined to help, she has now written a book about her experiences called 'The Girl With No...' , which is available on Amazon.

She explained: 'I started writing the book in 2015, a couple years after I was in hospital.

'I just felt it naturally in my heart to do this, as it is a very unique condition to have, and I wanted to help other women who also had MRKH - but also women in general, so they could learn about it.

'After I was diagnosed, for so long I didn't talk to anybody about it, was very secretive and private. I just spoke to my family because I didn't want anyone else to know.

'But now I'm not embarrassed by my condition and speaking out was therapeutic.A mother-of-six has released harrowing photographs of her teenage son 'at death's door' to highlight the devestating effects of meningitis.

Ben Taylor, 18, was fighting for his life just days after he complained of a sore throat - unaware he had actually contracted bacterial meningitis.

Mr Taylor, from the Isle of Wight, is still in a critical condition after being rushed to St Marys Hospital on Saturday evening.

His mother, Rikki, 37, has released images of him in hospital to show other families just how quickly the illness can take hold of a healthy person.

She is now desperately trying to raise awareness of the dangers of meningitis while her son fights for his life.

Ben Taylor, 18, was fighting for his life just days after he complained of a sore throat - but he actually contracted bacterial meningitis

Ms Taylor said: 'Ben deteriorated so quickly - initially he was complaining that he had a sore throat, and then three days later he's fighting for his life with meningitis.

'I called for an ambulance on Saturday night because Ben was unresponsive, and then hours later he was put into an induced coma.

'I decided to take these photographs to show people that meningitis isn't always just a rash, and doesn't just occur in young children.

'He looked dead in these photos, he was in a coma, he was grey and he was hooked up to so many wires that were just keeping him alive.

'I had to share them because it's the reality behind meningitis.'

She added: 'If these photographs can encourage people to understand the signs and symptoms of the illness it's worth it.'

Mr Taylor, from the Isle of Wight, is still in a critical condition after being rushed to hospital on Saturday evening

His mother, Rikki, 37, has released images of him in hospital to show other families just how quickly the illness can take hold of a healthy person (pictured before)

Bacterial meningitis is much more dangerous - it can kill within four hours - and is triggered by meningococcal, pneumococcal and Group B streptococcal bacteria.

One in ten will die and three in ten will be left with significant, life-changing disabilities.

Every year around 3,200 people in Britain get bacterial meningitis - the viral form is more common, but the true number of cases is difficult to estimate because the symptoms are often comparatively mild and so are mistaken for flu.

When did he become ill?

Mr Taylor initially complained of feeling ill on Wednesday, March 14, when he told his mother he had a sore throat and suspected he may have tonsillitis.

But just days later he became unresponsive in his bed and was rushed to hospital in an ambulance and diagnosed with meningitis.

Ms Taylor said: 'On Wednesday evening he complained that his throat was hurting, so we booked a doctor's appointment for the next morning.

'At the appointment we were told he was fine, so we went back home and he got a lot of rest, vitamins and fluids.

'But then he started deteriorating and by Saturday night he was in the hospital being hooked up to life support.

'Initially, because he went to the pub the night before, I thought maybe his drink was spiked - but hearing it was meningitis was even more of a shock to me.'

His mother is now desperately trying to raise awareness of the dangers of meningitis while her son fights for his life

Ms Taylor said: 'Ben deteriorated so quickly - initially he was complaining that he had a sore throat, and then three days later he's fighting for his life with meningitis

She added: 'I always thought that having meningitis meant you have a rash, but Ben has proved that wrong.

'On the run up to being hospitalised Ben was vomiting, constantly tired, had a sore throat and felt cold a lot.

'I want as many people as possible to know the symptoms of meningitis, and that it's not just a rash, so that this doesn't happen to anyone else's son.'

Fighting for his life

Mr Taylor still remains in hospital fighting for his life and it is unclear whether, if he survives, there will be any long-term damage.

Ms Taylor has set up a fundraising page to raise money for him, so that he has something to look forward to once he leaves hospital.

To donate, visit here.

Mr Taylor initially complained of feeling ill on Wednesday, March 14, when he told his mother he had a sore throat and suspected he may have tonsillitis

Mr Taylor still remains in hospital fighting for his life and it is unclear whether, if he survives, there will be any long-term damage. Ms Taylor has set up a fundraising pageIllegal drugs are so common that 13 per cent of people have traces of cocaine on their fingers even though they dont take drugs, a new study has revealed.

The most common drug found was cocaine, but one per cent had come into contact with heroin, according to University of Surrey researchers.

Dr Melanie Bailey, Lecturer in Forensic Analysis at the University, said: Believe it or not, cocaine is a very common environmental contaminant.

It is well known that it is present on many bank notes. Even so, we were surprised that it was detected in so many of our fingerprint samples.

Illegal drugs are so common that 13 per cent of people have traces of cocaine on their fingers

Contaminated banknotes

The team tested the fingerprints of 50 drug free volunteers and 15 drug users in the UK who testified to taking either cocaine or heroin in the previous 24 hours.

The results showed that the unwashed hands of the drug-free volunteers still found traces of class A drugs.

Around 13 per cent of fingerprints were found to contain cocaine and one per cent contained a metabolite of heroin.

To test the possibility of transferring drugs through a handshake, drug free volunteers were asked to shake hands with a drug user.

Fingerprints were then collected from the drug free volunteers after contact.

Although cocaine and heroin can be transferred by shaking hands with a drug user, the cut-off level established allowed researchers to distinguish between drug use and secondary transfer.

Even after washing their hands, they were able to tell who had come into contact with environmental contaminants and those who were genuine drug users.

Dr Bailey added: By establishing a threshold for significance on a fingerprint test, we can give those tested the piece-of-mind of knowing that whatever the result of the test may be, it was not affected by their everyday activities or shaking hands with someone that had taken drugs.

Lead author of the paper published in Clinical Chemistry, Mahado Ismail, said: Its clear that fingerprint testing is the future of drug-testing.

There are many factors that set fingerprint testing apart - its non-invasive, easy to collect and you have the ability to identify the donor by using the sample.

Our study will help to add another robust layer to fingerprint drug testing. The study was co-funded by Intelligent Fingerprinting, developers of the worlds first commercially-available portable drug test that works by analysing the sweat from a fingerprint sample.

Forensic analyst Dr Melanie Bailey said: It is well known that it is present on many bank notes'

According to Intelligent Fingerprintings CEO, Dr Jerry Walker: This important study confirms the University of Surreys position as one of the worlds foremost academic research groups when it comes to fingerprint diagnostics using mass spectrometry.

Critically, it also helps to establish a quantifiable high threshold for environmental drug traces, further establishing the validity of our commercial fingerprint-based drug test for cocaine, opiates, cannabis and amphetamines.

'Silver snorters'

Cocaine is deemed the world's second favourite illegal drug, after cannabis, and has an older user base - dubbed 'silver snorters'.

It is estimated almost 750,000 adults in England and Wales use cocaine each year.

One in ten Britons have tried cocaine at least once, despite it being deemed a Class A substance and in the same bracket at heroin.

In 2014, there were an estimated 1.5 million current users of the drug in the US - where the drug is in the second-most dangerous class.

It comes after worrying research last May suggested just a single snort of cocaine could be enough to get addicted.

The findings, made by scientists at McGill University, bolstered the growing evidence about cocaine's damaging long term effects.

Ian Hamilton, a drug and mental health researcher from York University, told MailOnline that cocaine is 'cheaper and purer than ever' in the UK and is to blame for a spike in people seeking help on a cash-strapped NHS.One in four people die from heart disease - but finding out you have it is difficult.

However, there are some unusual signs you can easily spot that may point to heart disease.

In an article for The Conversation, Adam Taylor, director of the Clinical Anatomy Learning Centre and senior lecturer at Lancaster University, describes six of these unusual signs of heart disease.

A phenomenon known as digital clubbing may also be a sign that all is not well with your heart

Six unusual signs that you may have heart disease

The heart, so integral to life, sits in its protective cage in the chest, going about its work without any external sign to the owner bar its regular beating.

In the West, where one in four people die of cardiovascular disease, the importance of keeping the heart in good working order is hard to overstate.

Sadly, the first sign many people have that their heart isn't in good working order is when they have a heart attack.

Although you can't see your heart beating in your chest  not without specialist imaging technology, at least  there are visible, external signs that can indicate if something is wrong with your heart, before you suffer from a life-changing  or ending  'cardiovascular event'.

WHAT IS CORONARY HEART DISEASE? Coronary heart disease (CHD) is a major cause of death both in the UK and worldwide. CHD is sometimes called ischaemic heart disease. The main symptoms of CHD are: angina (chest pain), heart attacks, heart failure. However, not everyone has the same symptoms and some people may not have any before CHD is diagnosed. Coronary heart disease is the term that describes what happens when your heart's blood supply is blocked or interrupted by a build-up of fatty substances in the coronary arteries. Over time, the walls of your arteries can become furred up with fatty deposits. This process is known as atherosclerosis and the fatty deposits are called atheroma. You can reduce your risk of getting CHD by making some simple lifestyle changes. These include: eating a healthy, balanced diet

being physically active

giving up smoking

controlling blood cholesterol and sugar levels Source: NHS Advertisement

1. Creased earlobes

One such external indicator is diagonal creases on the earlobes  known as Frank's sign, named after Sanders Frank, an American doctor who first described the sign.

Studies have shown that there is an association with the visible external crease on the earlobe and increased risk of atherosclerosis, a disease where plaque builds up inside your arteries.

Over 40 studies have demonstrated an association between this feature of the ear and an increased risk of atherosclerosis.

It is not clear what the cause of the association is, but some have postulated that it is to do with a shared embryological origin.

Most recently, it has been seen that these creases are also implicated in cerebrovascular disease  disease of the blood vessels in the brain.

2. Fatty bumps

Another external indicator of heart issues is yellow, fatty bumps  known clinically as 'xanthomas'  that can appear on the elbows, knees, buttocks or eyelids.

The bumps themselves are harmless, but they can be a sign of bigger problems.

Xanthomas are most commonly seen in people with a genetic disease called familial hypercholesterolemia.

People with this condition have exceptionally high levels of low-density lipoprotein cholesterol  so-called 'bad cholesterol'.

The levels of this cholesterol are so high they become deposited in the skin. Unfortunately, these fatty deposits are also laid down in arteries that supply the heart.

The mechanism that causes these fatty deposits in tissues is understood and it holds an iconic place in medicine as it led to the development of one of the blockbuster group of drugs that reduce cholesterol: statins.

3. Clubbed fingernails

A phenomenon known as digital clubbing may also be a sign that all is not well with your heart.

This is where the fingernails change shape, becoming thicker and wider, due to more tissue being produced. The change is usually painless and happens on both hands.

The reason this change indicates heart issues is because oxygenated blood is not reaching the fingers properly and so the cells produce a 'factor' that promotes growth to try and rectify the issue.

Clubbing of the fingers is the oldest known medical symptom. It was first described by Hippocrates in the fifth-century BC. This is why clubbed fingers are sometimes known as Hippocratic fingers.

Fat deposits around the eye, which look like a notably grey ring, may indicate heart disease

4. Halo around the iris

Fat deposits may also be seen in the eye, as a grey ring around the outside of the iris, the coloured part of the eye.

This so-called 'arcus senilis', starts at the top and bottom of the iris before progressing to form a complete ring. It doesn't interfere with vision.

About 45 per cent of people over the age of 40 have this fatty halo around their iris, rising to about 70% per cent of people over the age of 60.

The presence of this fatty ring has been shown to be associated with some of the risk factors for coronary heart disease.

5. Rotten gums and loose teeth

The state of your oral health can also be a good predictor of the state of your cardiovascular health.

The mouth is full of bacteria, both good and bad. The 'bad' bacteria can enter the bloodstream from the mouth and cause inflammation in the blood vessels, which can lead to cardiovascular disease.

Studies have shown that tooth loss and inflammed gums (periodontitis) are markers of heart disease.

6. Blue lips

Another health indicator from the mouth is the colour of your lips.

The lips are usually red, but they can take on a bluish colour (cyanosis) in people with heart problems, due to the failure of the cardiovascular system to deliver oxygenated blood to tissues.

Of course, people also get blue lips if they are extremely cold or have been at a high altitude. In this case, blue lips are probably just due to a temporary lack of oxygen and will resolve quite quickly.

In fact, the other five symptoms  mentioned above  can also have a benign cause. But if you are worried or in doubt, you should contact your GP or other healthcare professional for an expert opinion.Updating smear tests, which are currently used to detect just cervical cancer, to also assess ovarian and endometrial forms of the disease could save thousands of women's lives, new research suggests.

Routine cervical screening, which reveals potentially cancerous cells on the entrance to the uterus, also accurately detects 81 per cent of endometrial and 33 per cent of ovarian cancers, a study found.

The findings come as people are taking to Twitter, on the ninth anniversary of Jade Goody's death from cervical cancer, urging women to continue having life-saving smear tests. The former Big Brother star lost her battle to the disease in 2009.

Study author Dr Amanda Fader, from Johns Hopkins University, said: 'If we could detect the cancers earlier or at a pre-cancerous state, there's a potential to not only achieve more cures, but to preserve more fertility in many women.'

Although Jade Goody's death was said to lead to an extra 400,000 women undergoing smear tests between 2008 and 2009, just 70-to-73 per cent of eligible women currently attend screenings.

Around 3,000 women are diagnosed with cervical cancer every year in the UK.

Updating smear tests could save thousands of women's lives by detecting ovarian and endometrial cancers, as well as cervical, new research suggests (stock)

On the anniversary of Jade Goody's death, Twitter users are urging women to have smear tests

WHAT IS A SMEAR TEST? A smear test detects abnormal cells on the cervix, which is the entrance to the uterus from the vagina. Removing these cells can prevent cervical cancer. Most test results come back clear, however, one in 20 women show abnormal changes to the cells of their cervix. In some cases, these need to be removed or can become cancerous. Cervical cancer most commonly affects sexually-active women aged between 30 and 45. In the UK, the NHS Cervical Screening Programme invites women aged 25-to-49 for a smear every three years, those aged 50 to 64 every five years, and women over 65 if they have not been screened since 50 or have previously had abnormal results. Women must be registered with a GP to be invited for a test. In the US, tests start when women turn 21 and are carried out every three years until they reach 65. Changes in cervical cells are often caused by the human papilloma virus (HPV), which can be transmitted during sex. Advertisement

'There's still a long way to go'

Results further suggest that when a so-called Tao brush, which resembles a pipe cleaner and reaches higher in a woman's uterus, is used, endometrial cancer detection accuracy increases to 93 per cent and ovarian to 45 per cent.

Analysing DNA in patients' blood for such tumours also improves ovarian cancer diagnosis by 63 per cent.

The researchers hope to conduct studies to further assess the new screening method, but warn it will likely at least two-to-three years before such a test is available.

Debbie Saslow, senior director of human papillomavirus (HPV)-related and women's cancers for the American Cancer Society, who was not involved in the study, said: 'This is a really early preliminary set of results that looks promising.

'But there's still a long way to go to know if this would actually be helpful.

'I'm not saying it's not promising. I'm just saying it'll take a lot more work.'

How the research was carried out

The researchers analysed cervical fluid samples to assess 18 genes that are often mutated in endometrial or ovarian cancers.

Samples were collected from 656 women with such tumours, as well as 1,002 healthy women.

The findings were published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

Men's cancer charity Balls to Cancer is encouraging women not to let Jade's death be in vain

Another Twitter user claimed smear tests can be 'crap' but urged women to go regardless

Jade's cancer battle

Jade Goody, who died in the early hours of March 22 2009, was diagnosed with cervical cancer in August 2008.

This came after four cancer scares, which saw Jade collapse and produce abnormal results in smear tests.

That September, Jade was given a 65 per cent chance of survival and underwent a radical hysterectomy, followed by chemotherapy.

By February the cancer had spread to her liver, bowel and groin, with treatment, including emergency surgery to remove some of the tumours, focusing on prolonging her life.

Later that month, Jade's publicist Max Clifford announced her cancer was terminal.

Off the back of this news, medical authorities in the UK reported a surge in requests from women for cervical-cancer screening.A man was left with a bulging lump on his hand and a deadly heart infection after a simple trip to the dentist, doctors claim.

The 27-year-old, from Canada, was diagnosed with endocarditis - which can trigger heart failure and is caused when bacteria reaches the heart.

Medics in Vancouver believe that the killer bug triggered the bulging blood vessel, or aneurysm, in his hand.

They claim that the endocarditis may have been caused by a recent dental trip that dislodged harmful bacteria in his mouth that reached his heart.

The 27-year-old, from Canada, was diagnosed with endocarditis - which can trigger heart failure and is caused when bacteria reaches the heart

Experts at the University of British Columbia yesterday published the case in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine.

The man initially complained of a red patch on his hand - but within two weeks it transformed into a bulging, blue lump.

He sought medical help at a local hospital after he became concerned about the constant pain he experienced in his abdomen.

Doctors then quizzed the patient and discovered he suffered fevers, a decreased appetite and night sweats for six weeks.

WHAT IS ENDOCARDITIS? Endocarditis is an infection of the heart's inner lining and valves. If untreated, it can lead to life-threatening heart failure. Endocarditis affects around one in every 30,000 people every year in the UK and four in 100,000 in the US. Symptoms often develop slowly over several weeks and can include: Flu-like symptoms - tiredness, headache, chills, cough, sore throat

Unexplained weight loss

Pale skin

Aching muscles and joints Endocarditis is usually caused by bacteria, which may enter the bloodstream and travel to the heart. It is more common in people who have had heart-valve surgery, suffer from heart disease, are an IV drug user or have poor dental hygiene. Treatment starts with IV antibiotics. Surgery may be required to repair heart damage. Source: British Heart Foundation Advertisement

Dr Bashaar Alibrahim and Dr George Wharmby revealed in the journal that he had lost 1st 12lbs (12kg) during his illness.

Tests noted small areas of dead tissue in his spleen and left kidney

And it was revealed there was an infected mass on his aortic valve, which regulates blood flow from the heart into the main artery.

Cultures of his blood samples came back positive for Streptococcus salivarius - found mainly in the mouth.

Medics then diagnosed the man with bacterial endocarditis - which strikes one in 30,000 people every year in the UK and US.

The spread of the infection then damaged the vessels supplying blood to his hand - leading to the raise, pulsating lump.

Writing in the journal, they claimed that his infection was 'possibly related to poor oral hygiene and a recent dental procedure'.

The potentially fatal heart infection can often be caused when bacteria from the mouth get into the bloodstream.

This can happen from bleeding or inflammation in the gums, or when bugs are dislodged during routine dental treatment.

Antibiotics cleared up the man's infection with two days. But he needed surgery to repair his aneurysm and replace his aortic valve.A two-year-old boy was admitted to the hospital earlier this month with pneumonia symptoms, but scans revealed he had a rare disease that is making his bones disappear.

Leonardo Aguillon, of Zeeland, Michigan, was taken to the hospital on March 9 after his father Antonio, 40, noticed he was having coughing fits.

Doctors diagnosed him with pneumonia but when they performed a routine chest X-ray and a CT scan they discovered something only seen in 300 other people in the world.

Leonardo's sternum and half of his left rib cage was missing. After some research, his doctors realized that little Leonardo also had Gorham-Stout disease, a crippling condition that was eating up his bones.

Doctors don't know what Leonardo's prognosis is, but they are worried that if the disease spreads to his spine or severely impact his lungs, it could paralyze or kill him.

Speaking with Daily Mail Online, Antonio said he is desperate to raise awareness of the disease to bolster funding for research, and ultimately find a cure.

Leonardo Aguillon, 2, was diagnosed with a vanishing bone condition called Gorham-Stout disease. Pictured: Leonardo (left) in the hospital this week battling the rare disease and Leonardo (right) in August 2017 on his second birthday, before being diagnosed with the rare condition

'[We had] a reaction of fear and uncertainty,' said Antonio, who's an IT specialist at a local college. 'We had never hear of this disease so we had no idea what were dealing with... it was extremely alarming.'

Gorham-Stout disease is a regional disease in most cases, meaning it only impacts one area of the body. However, there are cases where the illness can affect multiple bones, according to researchers at Boston Children's Hospital.

In Leonardo's case, the disease is currently only affecting his rib cage.

The signs and symptoms of Gorham-Stout can vary widely by patient, but an early sign in many patients involve pain and swelling at the affected area.

When this condition occurs in the ribs, symptoms usually include breathing difficulty, chest pain, weight loss, and chylothorax, a condition where a lymphatic fluid leaks into and accumulates in the chest, leading to infection or respiratory distress.

According to Antonio, Leonardo was a happy and lively boy who enjoyed playing with his step-siblings Lisette Aguillon, 12, and Fernando Medina, 13, there was no indication he was suffering from a serious illness.

'There were no symptoms,' he said. 'Except whenever he got sick he would breath a little heavier, but that's normal for any kid.'

But Antonio knew something was wrong on March 9 when Leonardo, after experiencing coughing fits, began to show signs of pneumonia.

Leonardo, who enjoyed reading Dr Seuss books, was taken to the hospital that night where he was diagnosed with the infection. Antonio would later refer to this moment as 'the good news.'

After doctors did an X-ray and CT scan, they discovered that his sternum and half of his left rib cage had been dissolved.

Soon after Leonardo was admitted to the hospital, his pneumonia got worse and he developed a cold.

He had to be sedated and doctors were able to stabilize him on March 12.

Leonardo, second to left, pictured with his cousins on March 3, six days before being admitted to the hospital for pneumonia and being diagnosed with the rare bone disease

Antonio (pictured with Leonardo) said his son had no symptoms of the disappearing bone condition

Leonardo was a very playful child who enjoyed playing with his cousins and family members

After speaking with doctors, Antonio said it seems unlikely that the vanishing bone disease brought on the pneumonia, but it may be responsible for making his son's infection worse due to a condition associated with the disease that causes fluid to accumulate in the chest.

Doctors don't really know how to treat the condition, since there is little research on it, but they have put Leonardo on medications in an effort to stop his bones from dissolving and to prevent the disease from spreading to other areas of his body, like his spine.

Dr Caleb Bupp, a geneticist at Spectrum Health who isn't treating Leonardo, told WZZM-TV that the condition is a disease of the lymphatic system.

'What seems like happens those lymphatic ducts that are in certain bones overactivated and sort of degrade the bone,' said Dr Bupp, adding that this causes the bones to get absorbed into the body and disappear.

'One of the thoughts and theories is that if you can stop the body from absorbing bone with medications that sort of addresses that,' he added.

Antonio, who has been by Leonardo's bedside every day, said he hopes he'll be able to take his son home soon.

Leonardo's family have to wait three weeks before they know if the medication is slowing down the destruction of his bones.

'I'm definitely hopeful that he's going to stabilize and be able to cope with the disease,' Antonio said. 'But it's not easy to keep positive without more information.'

His family has set up a GoFundMe account to help pay for his medical expenses.In 1942, 18-year-old Iris Lopez, a Mexican-American woman, started working at the Calship Yards in Los Angeles.

Working on the home front building Victory Ships not only added to the war effort, but allowed Iris to support her family.

Iris' participation in the World War II effort made her part of a celebrated time in U.S. history, when economic opportunities opened up for women and youth of color.

However, before joining the shipyards, Iris was entangled in another lesser-known history.

At the age of 16, Iris was committed to a California institution and sterilized.

Iris wasn't alone.

In the first half of the 20th century, approximately 60,000 people were sterilized under U.S. eugenics programs. Eugenic laws in 32 states empowered government officials in public health, social work and state institutions to render people they deemed 'unfit' infertile.

California led the nation in this effort at social engineering. Between the early 1920s and the 1950s, Iris and approximately 20,000 other people  one-third of the national total  were sterilized in California state institutions for the mentally ill and disabled.

Data reveal 20,000 people, were sterilized under state eugenics laws. New research from the Universities of Iowa and Illinois shows Latinas were disproportionately targeted

To better understand the nation's most aggressive eugenic sterilization program, our research team tracked sterilization requests of over 20,000 people.

We wanted to know about the role patients' race played in sterilization decisions. What made young women like Iris a target? How and why was she cast as 'unfit'?

Racial biases affected Iris' life and the lives of thousands of others. Their experiences serve as an important historical backdrop to ongoing issues in the U.S. today.

'Race science' and sterilization

Eugenics was seen as a 'science' in the early 20th century, and its ideas remained popular into the midcentury. Advocating for the 'science of better breeding,' eugenicists endorsed sterilizing people considered unfit to reproduce.

Under California's eugenic law, first passed in 1909, anyone committed to a state institution could be sterilized.

Many of those committed were sent by a court order. Others were committed by family members who wouldn't or couldn't care for them. Once a patient was admitted, medical superintendents held the legal power to recommend and authorize the operation.

Eugenics policies were shaped by entrenched hierarchies of race, class, gender and ability. Working-class youth, especially youth of color, were targeted for commitment and sterilization during the peak years.

Eugenic thinking was also used to support racist policies like anti-miscegenation laws and the Immigration Act of 1924.

Anti-Mexican sentiment in particular was spurred by theories that Mexican immigrants and Mexican-Americans were at a 'lower racial level.'

Contemporary politicians and state officials often described Mexicans as inherently less intelligent, immoral, 'hyperfertile' and criminally inclined.

These stereotypes appeared in reports written by state authorities. Mexicans and their descendants were described as 'immigrants of an undesirable type.' If their existence in the U.S. was undesirable, then so was their reproduction.

Targeting Latinos and Latinas

In a study published March 22, we looked at the California program's disproportionately high impact on the Latino population, primarily women and men from Mexico.

Previous research examined racial bias in California's sterilization program. But the extent of anti-Latino bias hadn't been formally quantified. Latinas like Iris were certainly targeted for sterilization, but to what extent?

We used sterilization forms found by historian Alexandra Minna Stern to build a data set on over 20,000 people recommended for sterilization in California between 1919 and 1953.

The racial categories used to classify Californians of Mexican origin were in flux during this time period, so we used Spanish surname criteria as a proxy. In 1950, 88 percent of Californians with a Spanish surname were of Mexican descent.

We compared patients recommended for sterilization to the patient population of each institution, which we reconstructed with data from census forms.

We then measured sterilization rates between Latino and non-Latino patients, adjusting for age. (Both Latino patients and people recommended for sterilization tended to be younger.)

Latino men were 23 percent more likely to be sterilized than non-Latino men. The difference was even greater among women, with Latinas sterilized at 59 percent higher rates than non-Latinas.

In their records, doctors repeatedly cast young Latino men as biologically prone to crime, while young Latinas like Iris were described as 'sex delinquents.' Their sterilizations were described as necessary to protect the state from increased crime, poverty and racial degeneracy.

Lasting impact

This is an example of a sterilization form handed to a 15-year-old girl in California

The legacy of these infringements on reproductive rights is still visible today.

Recent incidents in Tennessee, California and Oklahoma echo this past. In each case, people in contact with the criminal justice system  often people of color  were sterilized under coercive pressure from the state.

Contemporary justifications for this practice rely on core tenets of eugenics. Proponents argued that preventing the reproduction of some will help solve larger social issues like poverty.

The doctor who sterilized incarcerated women in California without proper consent stated that doing so would save the state money in future welfare costs for 'unwanted children.'

The eugenics era also echoes in the broader cultural and political landscape of the US today.

Latina women's reproduction is repeatedly portrayed as a threat to the nation. Latina immigrants in particular are seen as hyperfertile.

Their children are sometimes derogatorily referred to as 'anchor babies' and described as a burden on the nation.

Reproductive justice

This history  and other histories of sterilization abuse of black, Native, Mexican immigrantand Puerto Rican women  inform the modern reproductive justice movement.

This movement, as defined by the advocacy group SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective is committed to 'the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities.'

As the fight for contemporary reproductive justice continues, it's important to acknowledge the wrongs of the past.

The nonprofit California Latinas for Reproductive Justice has co-sponsored a forthcoming bill that offers financial redress to living survivors of California's eugenic sterilization program.

'As reproductive justice advocates, we recognize the insidious impact state-sponsored policies have on the dignity and rights of poor women of color who are often stripped of their ability to form the families they want,' CLRJ Executive Director Laura Jimenez said in a statement.

This bill was introduced on Feb. 15 by Sen. Nancy Skinner, along with Assemblymember Monique Limon and Sen. Jim Beall.

If this bill passes, California would follow in the footsteps of North Carolina and Virginia, which began sterilization redress programs in 2013 and 2015.

In the words of Jimenez, 'This bill is a step in the right direction in remedying the violence inflicted on these survivors.'

In our view, financial compensation will never make up for the violation of survivors' fundamental human rights. But it's an opportunity to reaffirm the dignity and self-determination of all people.BOOK OF THE WEEK

OUR UNINVITED GUESTS: THE SECRET LIVES OF BRITAIN'S COUNTRY HOUSES 1939-45

by Julie Summers (Simon & Schuster 20)

We shall fight them from our country houses may lack the heroic ring of Winston Churchill, but it was arguably how we won the war.

Bletchley Park was the place where our best brains were deployed to undermine the Germans. Yet Bletchley, in Buckinghamshire, was just one of countless country homes across Britain that were used to combat the Nazi threat.

As conflict loomed, country houses were requisitioned in their thousands and turned into hospitals, schools, maternity units and command headquarters.

By 1941, more than two million troops were stationed here and accommodated across Britain. No wonder the secretive Special Operations Executive was nicknamed Stately Omes of England.

Julie Summers's new book looks at 12 country homes requisitioned during the Second World War. Pictured are troops outside Wentworth Woodhouse in South Yorkshire

Julie Summerss survey of 12 rural retreats shows how bricks and mortar were pulled into service to join the war effort. The Rothschilds had to vacate Waddesdon Manor with four days notice and hurriedly stashed their Gainsboroughs in the cellar.

Lord Sherborne had just finished refurbishing Hinton Ampner in Hampshire when he received a telegram informing him that the Portsmouth Day School for Girls would be arriving in 48 hours.

It was pot luck who you ended up with. A girls school was the most coveted occupant, while the Army ranked bottom. There were stories of van Dycks being used as dartboards and staircases chopped up for firewood.

The owners of Melford Hall in Suffolk returned to it after the war and discovered the wine cellar had been raided. The soldiers had drunk all the wine and refilled the bottles with water, replacing the corks to look as if nothing had happened.

Country houses across the UK were turned into hospitals, schools, maternity units and command headquarters. Pictured are students from Malvern School at their new temporary site at Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire

It was not only the owners who suffered distress. At Coleshill House in Wiltshire the owners dogs were so traumatised by the explosions let off by trainee saboteurs that the pooches had to be given aspirin and brandy on a regular basis.

More than 600,000 family pets were put down in September 1939  many of them healthy  because their owners could not face an uncertain future for them. Brocket Hall in Hertfordshire, once owned by Victorian Prime Minister Lord Melbourne, became home to the London Maternity Hospital (famous Brocket Babies include director Mike Leigh).

A shocking apartheid prevailed whereby unmarried pregnant women had to wait on married pregnant women and clean and scrub the floors in brown dresses.

One of the delivery rooms was known as the Ribbentrop Bedroom, after the German ambassador to London who was a close personal friend of Nazi sympathiser Lord Brocket.

As the author wryly remarks: There can have been few more unusual juxtapositions during the Second World War than a Cockney mother giving birth in Lord Melbournes bedroom suite in a grand house in Hertfordshire.

Summers also examines in detail the rich cast of characters that populated these houses. The most magnificent misfit in this story is Edvard Benes, the Czech president-in-exile (pictured)

Another unusual juxtaposition was to see Blenheim Palace, in Oxfordshire  the birthplace of Winston Churchill  play host to a school, in this case the displaced pupils of Malvern College in Worcestershire. But their stay was brief.

In 1940, Blenheim was taken over by MI5. Although supposedly top-secret, the identity of the palaces new occupants soon became common knowledge, with the conductors on local buses calling out Anyone for MI5? when they reached Blenheims gates.

Summers ignores Bletchley Park in favour of less well-known establishments. Homes of every shape and size played their part. The assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in Prague was masterminded from the Czech intelligence HQ at Addington House in the Vale of Aylesbury. The French Resistance was flown to and from the continent via Bignor Manor in West Sussex.

Summers examines in detail the rich cast of characters that populated these houses. Perhaps none are as alluring as the instructors at Arisaig House, HQ of the secret Special Operations Executive in Scotland.

OUR UNINVITED GUESTS by Julie Summers

Eric Bill Sykes had the appearance and voice of a bishop, but was endowed with enormous hands with which he taught students how to throttle people. He devised the F-S knife  the Spitfire of the knife world  which enabled silent assassination by a thrust to the carotid artery in the neck.

Another instructor was Gavin Maxwell, who went on to write Ring Of Bright Water. Described by a local doctor as a creative psychopath, he taught extreme survival techniques, including how to relieve yourself in the open: No toilet paper please. Dangle from the branch of a tree and use a smooth pebble dipped in water like the Arabs do.

The most magnificent misfit in this story is Edvard Benes. When accosted while walking his dog in the Vale of Aylesbury, he would reply: I am the president of Czechoslovakia. The diminutive Czech president-in-exile disliked having anyone over 6ft in his retinue and had the croquet hoops on his lawn widened at the base to make it easier to play.

If only Summerss book was so easy-going. In the absence of an overarching thesis, her narrative becomes tiresomely repetitive.

Successive chapters serve up yet another potted history followed by a convoluted family genealogy before we get to any action.

As with most diligent tour guides, you become increasingly enervated by the overload of superfluous information. How I yearned for more glimpses out of the window of Mr Benes playing croquet.Blinkered: Stockbroker Andy Stewart lost 10k at Cheltenham

Bramley-cheeked stockbroker Andy Stewart is kicking himself after a 10,000 bet on his horse, Saphir Du Rheu, to win last week's Cheltenham Gold Cup failed to come off.

Stewart, 66, worth 80million, hoped to donate the 1million winnings to his charitable foundation.

If he'd put the money on his nag which won the next race, Pacha du Polder, he'd have won 250,000.

He shrugs: 'As I have a stake in the bookmaker, Paddy Power Betfair, my loss will go to the shareholders, so all's not all lost.'

A beard has appeared across the milky chops of ex-Treasury mandarin Sir Nicholas Macpherson, who we must hope is not having some sort of late life crisis.

Fusty Old Etonian Sir Nick, 58, has grown an aggressive silver thing, which makes him look like IRA capo Gerry Adams.

Love to know how it's gone down in the oak-panelled corridors of C Hoare & Co, Britain's oldest bank, of which Macpherson is chairman, and is so refined liveried doorman greet visitors at the entrance.

Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg is hardly going to agree to MPs' demands that he answer their questions on the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Zuckerberg, 33, barely even gives interviews.

He had a seven-minute pow-wow with Newsnight's Emily Maitlis in 2011, but proved immune to her flirty charms and behaved like an automaton.

Speaking of Newsnight, I loved Senator John Kennedy's remark to Evan Davis this week that Zuckerberg and Facebook's behaviour 'is getting into the foothills of creepy'.

Hermes credits its record 4.8billion jump in sales to the popularity of Birkin bags, the vastly expensive must-have item named in honour of chanteuse Jane Birkin.

The jolie laide siren, 71, helped design it while on a flight with Hermes' then chief, Jean-Louis Dumas, in the early 80s.

She scribbled the bag's famous silhouette on the back of an Air France sickbag.

The US Federal Reserve's cadaverous new chairman Jerome Powell, 65, has reportedly dazzled staff with his impressive ability to repeat something they've told him backwards.

Might multi-millionaire Powell's talents be wasted crunching numbers at the Fed?M&S boss Steve Rowe says the food business has lots to do and needs 'to change fast'

Desperate circumstances require desperate remedies and Marks & Spencer has hit the alarm button again.

We shouldnt be surprised that, in choosing a new boss for food, the group opted for Stuart Machin, a veteran of the Asda school of M&S chairman Archie Norman.

Machin has had his bumps. He hurriedly left Wesfarmers in Australia after a Tesco-style inflated profits problem, joining Steinhoff in the UK at the very moment the groups South African/German parent became engulfed in an accounting swindle.

No one should be over-excited about the Asda pedigree of incomer given the record of another former insider Andy Hornby, who all but broke the bank at HBOS and was tipped unceremoniously out of Boots.

The most fascinating aspect of the M&S switch is the tone of chief executive Steve Rowe. His assertion that the food business has lots to do and needs to change fast is unusually blunt.

So is the unvarnished departure of Andy Adcock, the director of food who leaves within six weeks.

M&S connoisseurs will find all of this bizarre given the increased emphasis on food made by Rowe when he first took over with promises of Simply Food openings and giving over some clothing space to food.

Since then same-store food sales have disappointed, expansion scaled back and store closures speeded up.

The lacuna for M&S in food is the lack of fresh produce delivery capacity when challengers are going great guns.

It is impossible to navigate middle-class suburbs without being stuck behind the Ocado or Tesco vans annoyingly causing obstruction.

M&S experimented in four centres with fresh food delivery and discovered the shopping basket is bigger than it thought, making an online offering possible.

Certainly, Amazon logistics bolstered by Whole Foods suppliers are enough to frighten anyone into submission.

It is not clear that is what Machin is being asked to do. M&S has been able to charge premium prices for better products but that bit of edge is being eaten away by Waitrose but as seriously by Lidl, the cheap retailer which sells faux premium goods and is able to hide its profitability (or lack of it) behind secretive German private ownership.

The challenge in retail is keeping up with savvy consumers who have become extraordinarily mercurial.

Bringing in outside talent may be just what is needed to support Rowe as keeper of the flame of Britains favourite store chain. But with every lurch one fears the mantle slips a little further.

With a market value of 4.3billion Marks is worth less than online clothing maker Asos, food groups Sainsburys and Morrisons, and little more than under-achiever Ocado.

Not good.

Health risk

Life might have been a little easier for Emma Walmsley if Reckitt Benckiser had remained in the auction for Pfizer consumer healthcare which include Advil painkillers, Centrum vitamins and Robitussin cough mixtures.

She could have then walked away claiming the price was too high.

Now the 14.3billion package must look very tempting for a GlaxoSmithKline chief who climbed to the top with consumer brands.

As a one-off deal Walmsley could probably make the case, arguing that the discarded Pfizer brands will enhance earnings from day one.

It is not quite as easy as that. Glaxo is lumbered with the legacy of predecessor Sir Andrew Wittys asset swaps with Novartis.

If the Swiss firm were to exercise its option to sell Glaxo its 36.5 per cent in a joint consumer healthcare enterprise then Walmsley would have to spend another 8.6billion.

That would send borrowing sky high and raise questions as to whether Glaxo could invest sufficiently in a narrower range of new medicines to keep its place among world leaders in pharma and vaccinations.

It might even make the case for Neil Woodfords proposed splits.

Pass me the Corsodyl mouthwash.

Melrose breaches

A big fuss at Crest Nicholsons annual meeting, where 28 per cent of shareholders objected to chief executive Stephen Stone moving up to be executive chair for a year, in breach of governance codes.

Curious how investors are so tolerant of governance anarchy at GKN predators Melrose where Chris Miller is executive chairman, David Roper executive vice-chairman, and remuneration is off the scale.

Sheer hypocrisy.Concerns: Corporate raider Edward Bramson holds a 5.2% stake in Barclays

Barclays underestimates corporate raider Edward Bramson at its peril, a boss once ousted by the predator has warned.

Rodger Booth was pushed out his job as chairman of 4imprint in 2003 by Bramson, an activist shareholder who has recently built up a 1.9billion stake in Barclays.

Booth, 74, said that Bramson never engaged with his business or set out demands but got his way by winning support from other investors.

The retired boss, who lives in Yorkshire, said: On a personal level hes one of the most unpleasant people Ive ever met  but having said that, hes obviously a very clever businessman and very effective.

He does his research well and my view would be not to underestimate him at all. You could put me down as an admirer but not a lover.

Speculation is raging over Bramsons intentions after his 5.2 per cent holding in Barclays was revealed this week.

The predators financial firepower comes from a fund whose stated aim is to invest in a single target company, get a new chairman or executive directors appointed to the board, and boost profits.

It has triggered speculation he could try to sell the lenders investment bank, which would set up a vicious clash with chairman John McFarlane and could force for the Bank of England to step in and protect financial stability.

Yesterday, Aviva, major backers of Bramsons fund, rejected the idea that Bramson would push for a break-up of the bank but that has done little to allay fears he could cause disruption.

A seller of promotional products to businesses such as pens and mugs with a company logo on, 4imprint was targeted by Bramson 15 years ago after falls in its share price.

Booth recalled how the New Yorker mounted his raid from an office with barely any furniture in London, rented solely for the purpose.

It led to a vote of shareholders at which Booth was kicked out and then replaced by Bramson, who appointed new managers and drew up a new strategy.

The firm is now worth more than 21 times what it was then. Bramsons staff met Barclays investor relations team after its annual results and asked questions about the business.

But the raider has not sat down with chief executive Jes Staley despite an offer of a meeting, and the lender does not know what his intentions are.

Booth said: [Bramson] did nothing improper but he didnt want to sit down and discuss anything.

Gregg Hammann, who was pushed out as boss of US home fitness firm Nautilus in 2007 as it fought off a raid by Bramsons company Sherborne Investors said: I never heard a word from him.Marks & Spencer has parachuted in chairman Archie Norman's former protege to stop the rot at its food business.

The High Street stalwart named former Bensons for Beds and Harveys chief executive Stuart Machin managing director for food  a new role created as the company fights the onslaught from rivals.

Announcing the appointment, chief executive Steve Rowe also outlined plans to cut food prices and overhaul its offer in a bid to win back customers.

New M&S food boss Stuart Machin poses with Australian pop star Dannii Minogue

The retailer has admitted its food range is too complex, availability too low and food waste too high.

Rowe said: 'We face challenges in our food business and we have lots to do to change, fast. Stuart is an excellent addition to our team.

'He gets food retailing and he has first-class experience of driving change in big food retailers.

'At M&S we need to sharpen our prices, improve our products, drive profitability and grow market share. Stuart is the right leader to get on and deliver these changes.'

Protege who fought back from scandal When Stuart Machin was picked to be Sainsbury's youngest store director at 27, a rapid rise to the top began. Educated at all-boys' Howard School in Kent, he went on to jobs at Tesco and Asda, where he was singled out by boss Archie Norman as a star of the future. Sure enough, Machin was poached to run Australian supermarket Coles and then Target in 2013. He became well-known Down Under, regularly being snapped at celebrity events. But last year his career almost ended when Target's owner was alleged to have mis-stated accounts. Machin, 49, quit, despite protesting his innocence. Within weeks he back in the UK running Harveys and Bensons for Beds. Norman, now M&S chairman, must have spotted an opportunity to woo back his protege.

Machin's appointment comes as M&S undergoes a radical transformation which has so far seen it shut stores, slash hundreds of jobs and bring in new people to revive the brand.

M&S has also sold its 27 stores in Hong Kong and Macau to a franchise partner as it focuses its efforts on the UK.

It is the latest move in an aggressive push by M&S to fight the growing threat of discounter rivals like Aldi and Lidl.

While it has struggled to keep up with the changing tastes in fashion, M&S's food business has been a star performer.

Much of this was credited to Rowe who ran the food division before taking over as chief executive.

However, in the past year even M&S food has fallen behind competitors.

Big Four supermarkets Tesco, Sainsbury's, Asda and Morrisons are also implementing strategies to lure customers.

Morrisons' plans are paying off after strong sales and profits last year saw it reward investors with a 238million dividend payment.

This week Sainsbury's upped the ante and cut prices on hundreds of products including toiletries, veg, meat and ready meals.

Machin, who is highly respected in the retail industry, has held top roles at Sainsbury's, Tesco and Asda and spent time heading two of Australia's biggest retail names  supermarket Coles and department store chain Target.

During his time as operations director at Asda, Machin was mentored by chairman at the time Archie Norman, who now oversees M&S.

Former Asda chief executive Andy Clarke described him as 'undoubtedly a talented retailer and probably one of the best operations guys that I've worked with'.

Machin will join M&S in late April, replacing Andy Adcock, the director of food.Tyrant: Colonel Gaddafi died in 2011

A fund manager has been accused of pocketing 11.5million in secret fees from Gaddafis Libyan regime in an elaborate fraud.

Frederic Marino is locked in a courtroom battle with FM Capital Partners (FMCP), which he founded, over claims he was paid hidden commissions by Libya.

It is alleged the 51-year-old also blew company cash on clothes, restaurant bills and a helicopter ride  and even ran up a 165,000 bill at the five-star Lanesborough Hotel in London, including 42,000 spent on parking.

FMCP, which was based in Knightsbridge, won a deal to manage 441million for a sovereign wealth fund, the Libya Africa Investment Portfolio, in Colonel Gaddafis Libyan regime in 2009.

Described as a mild-mannered Frenchman, Marino quickly became a kingpin in Tripoli and led a team of young Libyan dealers from his west London trading floor.

But the business now claims that Marino and associate Yoshiki Ohmura, a banker, pocketed commissions rather than handing them to FMCP.

Nathan Pillow, representing FMCP in the High Court, said trades were only done so the pair could line their own pockets.

The firm said in court documents that the duos alleged deals were motivated by and resulted in their personal enrichment on a grand scale.

Both men deny the claims and say they were motivated by the commercial benefits of the investments. FMCP was launched in 2009 after a meeting between Marino and Libyan official Abdulfatah Sharif.

Over the next two years, it is alleged that Marino and Ohmura took secret commissions.

Five-star: The Lanesborough Hotel in London where Marino stayed racking up a 165,000 bill

Marino allegedly filtered the cash through two offshore firms, Ironfly and Leopard, while Ohmura is said to have pumped cash into a business called Conquest.

After the 2011 revolution in Libya, the nations investment firm investigated FMCP and complained about its actions.

Marino was suspended by September 2014 after questions were raised about a 2.5million payment into his ex-wifes bank account in Norway. He claims this was his own money, not the firms.

165K HOTEL BILL Frederic Marino allegedly blew 165,000 on bills at the five-star Lanesborough Hotel

This included 42,000 for parking charges

He allegedly also paid for clothes, restaurant meals and a helicopter ride on a company credit card

Questions have been raised about a 2.5million payment into his exwifes bank account in Norway

It is claimed the fund manager pocketed 11.5m in secret commission payments which should have gone to his business instead

But Marino claims that he was entitled to the money, for work that was not linked to the business

A month later, acting on advice from his former lawyers, the fund manager sent a whistleblowing letter to the Financial Conduct Authority listing seven payments said to have been undeclared.

FMCP claims this is an admission of guilt but Marinos current lawyers say he was being treated for severe mental illness in a Norwegian hospital at the time.

They suggest his former legal representatives based it on misunderstandings and Marino was not fit to correct their errors.

He struggles to describe what happened in the run-up to the report being sent, the lawyers claim, adding he has decided not to testify in court after struggling with a difficult decision.

Marinos lawyers say that the hotel bill and parking fees were for a visiting delegation which came from Libya for an extended period.

They add that he was entitled to the extra commission payments for a separate contract not linked to FMCP.

Marino claims he is being wrongly treated like a criminal, and his barrister James Couser said: Its shocking how greedy FMCP is, trying to rewrite history to get to Marinos money.

Lawyers for Ohmura said: The transactions that gave rise to the fees were carried out on the basis of work performed by highly-skilled individuals working in a complex and competitive field. The case continues.Elaine Herzberg, 49 (pictured), who was hit and killed by a self-driving Uber SUV on Sunday in Arizona was widely known and liked throughout the homeless community of Tempe, a suburb of Phoenix

The Arizona pedestrian killed by an Uber self-driving vehicle was a homeless woman close to getting off the streets, her friends said, describing her as a fighter who took care of those around her.

Elaine Herzberg, 49, known fondly as 'Elle' and 'Ms Elle', was widely known and liked throughout the homeless community of Tempe, a suburb of Phoenix.

'She was like everyone's aunt,' said Benjamin Jeffrey, a friend of Herzberg and also homeless, who spoke to Reuters from an encampment near the scene of Sunday's accident.

'She didn't need to be on the streets and yet she did it with style and with couth and with originality,' Jeffrey said.

Police said Herzberg was killed while walking her bike across a four-lane road outside the crosswalk when she was struck by an Uber self-driving SUV traveling at about 40 miles per hour.

SCROLL DOWN FOR VIDEO

On Wednesday, authorities released the dash cam footage showing the moments leading up to the fatal collision

The video, released by Tempe police, shows the car traveling at about 40mph in a 45mph zone along a relatively empty roadway on Sunday night

A woman walking while rolling her bicycle suddenly appears in the headlights, with the footage cutting out a split second before impact

On Wednesday, authorities released the dash cam footage showing the moments leading up to the fatal collision.

The video, released by Tempe police, shows the car traveling at about 40mph in a 45mph zone along a relatively empty roadway on Sunday night.

A woman walking while rolling her bicycle suddenly appears in the headlights, with the footage cutting out a split second before impact.

The car does not appear to slow down before the crash, and police told the Phoenix New Times that neither the car nor the driver braked 'significantly' before impact.

In another frame, the driver, Rafaela Vasquez, 44, is seen behind the wheel as the car rides on its own.

Seconds leading up to collision, Vasquez is seen looking down and to the side

Moments later, Vasquez grows alarmed when she realizes the car is about to hit the pedestrian.

The footage appears to back up Vasquez's claims that she was alert during the ride and nothing she could have done would have prevented the fatal collision.

She was traveling at 40mph at the time, well within the 45mph speed limit, and insisted that she was alert but that nothing could have been done to stop the crash.

Further details are unknown and a police investigation is ongoing.

In the homeless encampment (pictured) near the scene of the accident, residents told reporters that Hezberg was known as 'Elle' and 'Ms Elle' and that she 'was like everyone's aunt'

One camp resident said the homeless community considered Herzberg one of their caretakers (pictured, the homeless encampment)

In the seconds leading up to the collision, Rafaela Vasquez, 44, the safety driver who must take control of the car if there are any problems, is seen looking down and to the side

Seconds later, Vasquez grows alarmed when she realizes the car is about to hit the pedestrian. The footage appears to back up her claims that she was alert during the ride and nothing she could have done would have prevented the fatal collision

Uber suspended its self-driving program in North America in the wake of the incident.

Jeffrey said he knew Herzberg before he himself became homeless and took her in. She later repaid the favor.

'She took care of me when nobody else cared,' he said. 'Against insurmountable odds she maintained her composure.'

Another camp resident, Kriss Kidd, said the homeless community considered Herzberg one of their caretakers.

Herzberg was taken to hospital but died of her injuries. She is shown (left) in a social media photograph and (right) in a mugshot

Vasquez was traveling at 40mph at the time, well within the 45mph speed limit, and insisted that she was alert but that nothing could have been done to stop the crash (scene above)

The bicycle was laden down with shopping bags which contained Herzberg's belongings

'She has such a big heart, she had to help anyone she could,' said Kidd, 51. 'She definitely made an impact on people's lives - she made you want to have hope.'

She was also fiercely loyal.

'She could be a fighter,' Kidd said. 'You mess with her, that's it.'

Those who knew her said Herzberg, who struggled with family and financial troubles, was close to getting off the streets, working with a local organization to secure a roommate and an apartment.

'She didn't want to be out here anymore,' Kidd said. 'The longer you're out here, the streets just eat you up.'

Herzberg's death marked a very real collision between the world of high-tech and the underbelly of society. For Jeffrey, there was an element of irony - he had formerly been an Uber driver in Tempe for the company's traditional ride service.

Jeffrey said local residents respected Uber, 'but we also respect the pedestrian right of way.'

'I never would have imagined that Ms Elle and this Uber thing...would collide.'Hundreds of Florida International University students held a vigil Wednesday to remember the six victims who died in a pedestrian bridge collapse near campus.

The names of the victims were displayed on a screen inside a ballroom at the Miami-area school.

Loud gasps and crying could be heard from the crowd when the name of FIU student Alexa Duran appeared on the screen.

'No one will be able to understand how I feel. Alexa was my world and my life,' the student's mother, Gina Duran, told The Associated Press.

'Nothing will ever be the same.'

Florida International University President Mark B. Rosenberg (center) leads a procession of friends, family, Florida International faculty and students as they mourn together during a vigil for victims of last week's pedestrian bridge collapse in Miami on Wednesday

Hundreds of Florida International University students held a vigil Wednesday to remember the six victims who died in a pedestrian bridge collapse near campus

The names of the victims were displayed on a screen inside a ballroom at the Miami-area school

Construction of the bridge was behind schedule and millions over budget, in part because of a key change in the design and placement of one of its support towers

Construction of the bridge was behind schedule and millions over budget, in part because of a key change in the design and placement of one of its support towers, according to documents obtained by AP through a public-records request.

The documents show the Florida Department of Transportation told FIU and its contractors in October 2016 to move one of the bridge's main support structures 11 feet north to the edge of a canal, widening the gap between the crossing's end supports and requiring some new structural design.

Videos of Thursday's collapse show that the concrete, prefabricated segment of the bridge started crumbling on the same end of the span where the tower redesign occurred, two days after an engineer on the project reported cracks in the same location.

The segment that failed had been placed atop the pylon's footing; the taller tower section was to be installed later.

The National Transportation Safety Board confirmed that workers were adjusting a tension rod on that end of the bridge when it collapsed, and investigators were collecting bridge components for further testing.

Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao has ordered her department's inspector general to conduct an audit of the bridge.

The agency awarded millions of dollars to the project, which was intended to connect the campus with Sweetwater, a neighboring municipality.

Sweetwater Mayor Orlando Lopez said the bridge had been cause for celebration when it was installed March 10.

This video taken from a car as it approached the bridge at Florida International University shows a worker on top of the structure

As the structure collapsed from the left, where the man was working, he collapsed into a cloud of dust

Stunned motorists began getting out of their cars immediately to go and help the victims

There was a rush of bystanders to help before first emergency responders got there

'Less than a week later, the bridge meant to save lives took six lives and injured many more,' Lopez said.

It is still unclear if the design change contributed to the failure.

But emails between the school, contractors, Sweetwater city officials and permitting agencies show a project that was behind schedule, which had officials worried that further delays could jeopardize the federal funding.

When the bridge collapsed, the project was already running about $2.6million over its $9.4million initial budget, cost-tracking documents from February show.

Originally scheduled to be completed in July, the finish date had been pushed back to January 2019.

Munilla Construction Management, or MCM, and FIGG Bridge Design collaborated on the bridge project.

Representatives for both companies and the city of Sweetwater declined comment, pending an investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board.

FIU spokeswoman Maydel Santana said Tuesday that the bridge was expected to be completed early in 2019, and its grant would run out on Sept. 30, 2019.

Multiple engineers who reviewed the documents obtained by the AP, as well as images of the collapse, said moving the tower after the bridge's initial design invited errors.

Navaro Brown was working on the bridge when it collapsed. It is not clear if he is the man in the video or if others were also there but survived

But they also said more analysis was warranted before it could be known whether this played a role in the collapse.

On Wednesday, mourners laid flowers and other items honoring the victims at a roadside memorial near the site where the bridge fell.

FIU President Mark Rosenberg said the school remained in deep shock over the collapse Thursday of the 950-ton structure onto a busy roadway.

'Families are shattered,' he said.

'We will carry the memory of the victims. We will carry them forever.'

A video taken on the dashcam of a car as it approached the bridge seconds before it collapsed captured the moment it fell down on traffic, revealing that there was a worker on top of it at the time.

The footage shows the man working on the top left corner of the bridge as cars passed beneath it.

When it suddenly collapsed, the man was thrown into the air then fell among the rubble.

It is not clear if the man is Navarro Brown, a 37-year-old employee of Structural Technologies VSL, who was working at the site and was among the six killed, or if others were there and walked away injured.Advertisement

A 79-year-old man who shunned society to live alone on an Italian island has earned a legion of social media fans after documenting his solitary life on social media.

Mauro Morandi has called the stunning Isle of Budelli, which lies between Corsica and Sardinia in Italy's Maddalena archipelago, home since 1989.

He arrived when his catamaran's crippled engine forced him towards the island's shores, where he learned Budelli's caretaker was retiring.

Disillusioned with modern society, Mr Morandi sold his catamaran, inherited the caretaker's shack and never went back to his old life in mainland Italy.

For 29 years, he's lived alone near a rose-coloured sandy beach called La Spiaggia Rosa and woken up to beautiful sunrises.

Mauro Morandi (pictured) has called the stunning Isle of Budelli, which lies between Corsica and Sardinia, home since 1989

For 29 years, he's lived alone on a rose-coloured sandy beach called La Spiaggia Rosa and woken up to beautiful sunrises

He had been enjoying these incredible views by himself, but in recent years, he decided to share his life on social media.

Mr Morandi told MailOnline he started taking more pictures after he broke up with his partner two or three years ago.

They had been in a long-distance relationship, with his girlfriend visiting the island for only 15 days a year.

Now, in the quiet winter months, he spends his time editing his pictures and uploading them onto his Instagram, Facebook and Twitter pages.

'The pictures represents my mood and state of mind,' he told MailOnline.

But while the colder months can be lonely, he draws more than 1,300 tourists to the island in the summer.

He had been enjoying these incredible views by himself, but in recent years, he decided to share his life on social media

Mr Morandi told MailOnline he started taking more pictures after he broke up with his partner two or three years ago

In the winter months, he spends his time editing pictures and uploading them on his Instagram, Facebook and Twitter pages

While the colder months can be lonely, he draws more than 1,300 tourists to the island with the rose-coloured beach in the summer

Mr Morandi said at first, he'd been standoffish with visitors but mellowed over the years and now gives tours

'I'm really happy because they want to know this crazy man that lives on the island by himself,' Mr Morandi said

'I'm really happy because they want to know this crazy man that lives on the island by himself,' he added.

Mr Morandi said at first, he'd been standoffish with visitors but mellowed over the years and now gives tours.

He added that he lives on the island because he 'respects nature' and laughs at the question of ever returning to the mainland.

'If I had to go, maybe I would go to Sardinia and I would live by the sea but I wouldn't go back to a big city I wouldn't make it,' he said.

'I don't even have a car here to go and get food.'

He does, however, travel to Modena to see his two daughters a few times a year.

The 79-year-old lives on the La Spiaggia Rosa on the Isle of Budelli, which lies between Corsica and Sardinia in Italy's Maddalena archipelago

Mr Morandi said he started taking more pictures after his relationship with his partner ended a few years ago

He added that he lives on the island because he 'respects nature' and laughs at the question of ever returning to the mainland

'If I had to go, maybe I would go to Sardinia and I would live by the sea but I wouldn't go back to a big city I wouldn't make it,' he said

But while Mr Morandi would like to remain on the island for the rest of his life, the decision is out of his hands.

In 2016, the government took over the island and made it part of La Maddalena National Park.

Although that meant Mr Morandi had access to the Wi-Fi that was installed for visitors, it also meant his right to remain on the island was challenged.

A protest challenging the decision garnered more than 18,000 signatures - but he remains in limbo.

Since 2016, Budelli has been a government-owned national park, rendering Morandi's role obsolete.

'The island has been acquired by the state and I am here until the new president of the park decides what to do with me,' he told CNN.

Mor Morandi starts his day early by waking up in time to take pictures of the sunrise then feeds his two cats (pictured)

Mr Morandi is fiercely protective of La Spiagga Rosa, which has been cordoned off since the 1990s due to erosion from frequent tourism

As well as pictures of sunrises and sunsets, Mr Morandi captures stormy skies over the island and the tide lapping over the sand

While Mr Morandi's would like to remain on the island for the rest of his lie, the decision may not be up to him

Authorities made the island of Budelli part of La Maddalena National Park in 2016 and installed Wi-Fi for visitors

While the government interference means Mr Morandi may have to leave, he's pleased he can now access the Internet

Mr Morandi has 5,000 Facebook friends and believes his images have been viewed by almost 600,000 people on Google Maps

Two years ago, Mr Morandi's right to live on the island was challenged and a petition protesting this decision attracted more than 18,000 signatures

These days, he remains in limbo and doesn't know when he may have to leave the island he has lived on for almost 30 years

'The island has been acquired by the state and I am here until the new president of the park decides what to do with me,' he told CNN

The Lumix camera that the 79-year-old uses to take the stunning images he shares with his followers on social media

A book of Mr Morandi's photos from the island - which he stumbled across by chance in 1989 - is now available to buy



A teenager thought to be at the centre of a Minecraft gamers feud has been arrested after a mass bomb hoax closed hundreds of schools and colleges across the UK.

The 19-year-old was arrested by Hertfordshire police after some 24,000 threatening emails were sent to schools warning of an impending bomb attack unless cash was handed over.

The emails were spoofed to look as if they had been sent by a gaming network called VeltPvP. VeltPvP is a Minecraft player-versus-player server, of the type that businesses use to sell products to gamers.

A teenager thought to be at the centre of a Minecraft gamers feud has been arrested after a mass bomb hoax closed hundreds of schools across the UK. The 19-year-old was arrested by Hertfordshire police after 24,000 emails were sent to schools warning of an impending attack

The emails were intended to cause the domain to be suspended for abuse - and are thought to have been sent by a group aiming to discredit VeltPvP.

The National Crime Agency (NCA) said there was 'no credible threat to the emails' received this week.

They said in a statement: 'We understand parents' and teachers' concerns but stress there was no credible threat to the emails schools received.

'However we are taking the communications extremely seriously. As this is a live investigation we are unable to comment further.'

Signs were put up outside Cardinal Road School in Feltham following the bomb hoax emails

Those involved in the feud claimed opponents had engaged in illegal activities in order to hinder one another's business.

'It is horrible, it's not the nicest thing,' one of hoaxers involved said when asked whether he regretted the effect the letters had had on school children forced to evacuated.

Placing the blame on VeltPvP, the hoaxer said the network had enaged in a campaign of Direct Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks - which he alleges were used to try and shut down other rival Minecraft servers.

Parents were asked to collect their children following the bomb hoax threat email

In a statement, VeltPvP said: 'We've been being harassed by a group of cybercriminals that are trying to harass us in any way possible.

'We're extremely sorry for anyone who had to deal with this, but just know it's fake.'

More than 400 schools and colleges across the country received the email which claimed a bomb had been planted and would be detonated if cash wasn't handed over.

Cardinal Road School in Feltham, west London, was among the schools sent the hoax email

Police forces in London, Bristol, Liverpool, Bedfordshire and the the North East were among those investigating.

Parents at some schools asked to be able to pick their children up amid fears over the emails.

While six schools across Hertfordshire were also among those affected: Abbots Hill in Hemel Hempstead, Valley School in Stevenage, The Sele School in Hertford, Duncombe School in Hertford, Stanborough School in Watford and St Albans High School.Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg was humbled on US TV last night as he said sorry for the 'major breach of trust' after 50million members had their personal data harvested without their knowledge.

The billionaire, 33, also announced a crackdown on apps used to hijack details from users after the Cambridge Analytica scandal slashed the social network's value by $50billion (35m) and his own fortune by $5billion (3.5m).

Speaking for the first time last night, five days after the data breach emerged, he said: 'This was a major breach of trust and I'm really sorry that this happened. Our responsibility now is to make sure this doesn't happen again'.

And in a contrite message to victims and those planning to delete their profiles he said: 'We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can't then we don't deserve to serve you'.

He added: 'We need to make sure there are no other Cambridge Analyticas out there'.

Mr Zuckerberg, who said he open to stricter government regulation of his website, admitted he had failed to get to grips with 'adversaries' like the Russians trying to interfere in the 2016 US presidential race using fake Facebook accounts and campaign groups.

He also revealed he is 'sure someone's trying' to meddle with the upcoming US midterm elections.

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has apologized for the massive data breach that compromised information of tens of millions of users

'I really just care about building something that my girls are going to grow up and be proud of me for. That's what is kind of my guiding philosophy at this point.' Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says fatherhood has changed him and the way he works. https://t.co/s8imiO57TX pic.twitter.com/aPIZznNIbL  CNN (@CNN) March 22, 2018

Mr Zuckerberg finally broke his silence five days after the data crisis started and admitted in an extraordinary interview:

He is 'sorry' for the 'breach of trust' that saw 50m users have detailed mined.

Billionaire wants to tell all victims their data was taken - but is still not sure how many there are;

Thousands of apps will now have to be checked to see if they are also mining user data;

Facebook failed to cope with Russian election meddling and he believes they will try a 'version two' to interfere in the crucial US midterms as well as polls in India and Brazil this year;

Fake accounts spreading 'false news' and 'sowing division' almost always spring up in Macedonia;

Zuckerberg is open to extra government regulation - especially on advertising - and would face the US Congress if he was the 'right person' to represent the company. But no mention of facing the British parliament;

He blames Cambridge academic Dr Aleksandr Kogan for 'improperly' using Facebook's data and could sue Cambridge Analytica;

Zuckerberg opens his heart on data scandal, Russian meddling and life as a father On what went wrong: 'This was a major breach of trust and I'm really sorry that this happened. You know we have a basic responsibility to protect people's data and if we can't do that then we don't deserve to have the opportunity to serve people' On how he's putting it right: 'We're going to review thousands of apps. So, this is gonna be an intensive process, but this is important. I mean this is something that in retrospect we clearly should have done, upfront. I mean this is our responsibility to our community, is to make sure that we secure the data that they're sharing with us' On his regrets: 'I think what we've learned over time very clearly is that the most important thing always is making sure that people's data is locked down. And that's a mistake that we fixed a few years back and I don't expect us to make again' On selling data: We don't sell any data to anyone and that's actually a really key part of the model. So we don't want data to be able to get out. When that happens, that's not good for people in our community, that's not good for our business. So, that's not actually how ads work on the service and it actually has never been. An advertiser can come to us and say, 'Hey, I'd like to reach women within this age range' and if we understand who is in that then we can show that ad but none of that information goes to the advertiser' On election meddling: 'I think what's clear is that in 2016, we were not as on top of a number of issues as we should have [been] whether it was Russian interference or fake news. But what we have seen since then is, a number of months later there was a major French election, and there we deployed some AI tools that did a much better job of identifying Russian bots and basically Russian potential interference and weeding that out of the platform ahead of the election. There's a big election in India this year, there's a big election in Brazil, there are big elections around the world, and you can bet that we are really committed to doing everything that we need to to make sure that the integrity of those elections on Facebook is secured. On testifying in front of Congress: 'I'm happy to, if it's the right thing to do. What we try to do is send the person at Facebook who will have the most knowledge about what Congress is trying to learn. So if that's me, then I am happy to go' On his mistakes: 'I mean, there are so many mistakes that I've made. I started this company when I was 19. I was a kid. I think a pretty common question is 'What mistake do you wish you'd not made?' but the reality is you can make a ton of mistakes in your life, no matter what you do and you know, I've made, I've made every kind of mistake that you can make. I made technical errors and business errors. I hired the wrong people. I trusted the wrong people. I've probably launched more products that have failed than most people will in their lifetime' On being married and being a father: I think, having kids changes a lot. I used to think that the most important thing to me by far was, you know my having the greatest positive impact across the world that I can and, now I really just care about building something that my girls are gonna grow up and be proud of me for. I work on a lot of hard things during the day and I go home and just ask will my girls be proud of what I did today?' SOURCE: CNN Advertisement

Facebook's billionaire founder has admitted he failed to 'lock down' user data and stop Russian election meddling.

He said: 'What's clear is that in 2016, we were not as on top of a number of issues as we should have, whether it was Russian interference or fake news.

'I'm sure there is a 'version 2' of whatever the Russian effort was in 2016. I'm they'll be working on that.

'There are going to be some new tactics that we need to make sure that we observe and get in front of'.

When asked about interference in the upcoming midterms he said: 'I'm sure someone's trying.

He added: 'What we see is a lots of folks trying to sow division. That's a major tactic that we saw Russia try to do. Most of what they did was not about the election it was mostly about dividing people.

'They'd run a group for pro-immigration reform and they'd run another group against immigration reform to just try to pit people against each other.

'And a lot of this was done with fake accounts that we could do a better job of tracing and using AI tools to be able to scan and observe a lot of what is going on and I'm confident that we're going to do a much better job.

'Now the reality is with a community of two billion people, I can't promise that we're going to find everything. But what I can commit to is that we're going to make it as hard as possible for these adversaries to do that and I think that we're going to do a much better job'.

Zuckerberg said on Wednesday that his company made mistakes in how it handled data belonging to 50 million of its users and promised tougher steps to restrict developers' access to such information.

He said: 'I wish we'd taken those steps earlier. That is probably the biggest mistake that we made here'.

He also admitted it was 'clearly a mistake' to trust Cambridge Analytica (CA) when Facebook asked the British data firm to delete tens of millions of users' data.

He also said they would now notify 'anyone whose data might have been affected'.

Zuckerberg said measures had been in place since 2014 to prevent the sort of abuse revealed over the weekend but the social network needed to 'step up' to do more.

The Facebook founder said CA had provided formal assurances that data harvested from 50 million profiles had been destroyed after the breach was revealed in 2015.

'I don't know about you, but I'm used to when people legally certify that they are going to do something, that they do it. But I think this was clearly a mistake in retrospect,' Mr Zuckerberg told CNN.

The billionaire, who has been called on to give evidence to MPs in person over the scandal, said he would be happy to appear before US Congress 'if it's the right thing to do'. But he did not say he was willing to face the British parliament to answer questions.

Facebook's revenues soared to billions of pounds after it started giving away users' details, it emerged today.

The social media giant practically doubled its takings every year after opening up profiles to 'tens of thousands' of app developers.

Facebook users were yesterday waking up to how much private information has been handed out. During the data gold-rush  which lasted from 2009 to 2015  it appears almost anyone who described themselves as a 'developer' could freely mine Facebook's database.

In this period, the technology firm's revenues rose sharply, from 500million in 2009 to nearly 13billion by 2015.

Mr Zuckerberg also admitted he had failed to get to grips with Russian meddling

Earlier on Wednesday, Zuckerberg broke his silence over the Cambridge Analytica scandal on Wednesday in a lengthy Facebook post shared at 3.50pm

It comes as today advertisers threatened to abandon the social media giant, and British Culture Secretary Matt Hancock told MPs that the 'Wild West free-for-all' of internet companies has got to come to an end in light of the CA scandal.

WHAT IS FACEBOOK DOING TO FIX ITS DATA MINING PROBLEM? Mark Zuckerberg finally broke his silence on the misuse of 51 million users data Wednesday evening, outlining three steps the firm plans to take to prevent something like this from happening again. This includes: 1. Investigate apps which used old system to get user information Apps can no longer access the same amount of information that Kogan did through quizzes thanks to a 2014 change in Facebook policy however it remains unclear how many took advantage of the old rules before they changed. On Wednesday, Zuckerberg said Facebook's first step was to go back and look at what they still know. 2. Make the rules even tighter for app developers If a person has not engaged with an app for three months, Facebook will remove their access to you. They will also restrict what information they do get in the first place to only your name, profile photo, and email address. If they want more, they will have to sign a contract and get approval. 3. Introduce tool to show what companies already know about you The tool will appear in the next month or so on users' news feeds. Advertisement

The ISBA, a group of leading British consumer goods companies, has demanded answers from the social media giant, according to the Times. It was claimed that around 3,000 firms including Unilever and Procter & Gamble did not want to associate with Facebook if it was shown that users' data had been acquired without permission.

M&C Saatchi boss David Kershaw said 'Some advertisers will say enough is enough to Facebook, but the truth is that advertising is an oligopoly, with 60 per cent of all spending going to Facebook and Google'.

Banking giant Nordea said it had put some Facebook investments in 'quarantine' as it monitored the scandal.

Mr Hancock, who made the comments during culture questions in the Commons, went on to say that the incident represented a 'turning point' in the debate.

Cambridge Analytica, along with Facebook, is under scrutiny following claims by whistleblower Christopher Wylie that the firm harvested large amounts of data without consent.

Mr Hancock, in response to a question from Labour MP Chi Onwurah who called for the introduction of a 'digital bill of rights', said: 'It is increasingly clear that we need a new settlement with these big tech companies.'

He later added: 'We have shown and made the case over the last year that this Wild West free-for-all of the internet companies has got to come to an end. I think this is a turning point.'

The scale of the breach has grown dramatically since it emerged at the weekend that 50million Facebook profiles were harvested by Aleksandr Kogan, a psychology researcher at Cambridge University, who designed a 'personality quiz' app as a research project.

He passed the data to Cambridge Analytica, whose boss Alexander Nix was suspended on Tuesday after Channel 4 broadcast footage of him bragging about the firm's role in Donald Trump's presidential campaign.

The company says Mr Nix's comments 'do not represent the values or operations of the firm'.

Dr Kogan claimed 'tens of thousands' of other apps may be mining social media for personal data to be sold on in the same way. Other experts said it was possible virtually the entire Facebook database from 2015 could be in unknown hands.

Until it tightened privacy settings in April that year, Facebook was effectively giving away masses of personal data to third-party developers for free, to encourage them to create more apps and grow the platform, say experts.

In 2012, there were some nine million Facebook apps  all of whose developers were apparently able to access users' personal details. It is unclear what checks were made on someone applying to Facebook to become a 'developer'  for example whether they might be a company, a spy agency or even a mafia gang  before personal details were made available.

Dutch academic Bernhard Rieder, who created a similar Facebook app in 2009 before deleting it, said: 'Before 2015, you could get troves of data. I should have stored all the data [and then sold it to] get that Lamborghini.'

Social media users have also raised fears about how others  including Amazon, music service Spotify and dating app Tinder  could be using their data. UK Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham said she was examining whether Facebook could have broken laws under the Data Protection Act.

Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix has been suspended in the wake of the scandal. Facebook has pointed the finger at them and academic Dr Aleksandr Kogan, who designed the app used to harvest data

Footage emerged of a meeting in which Mr Nix appears to suggest that CA could compromise politicians by sending 'beautiful' Ukrainian women to candidates' house

Storage crates have been removed from Cambridge Analytica's London headquarters (pictured) before Britain's data watchdog was allowed access

On Wednesday, the generally reclusive Zuckerberg sat for an interview on CNN and gave another to the publication Wired, addressing reports that Cambridge Analytica purloined the data of more than 50 million Facebook users in order to sway elections.

Timeline: How the Facebook data crisis has unfolded March 18 - Facebook suspends Donald Trumps data operations team for misusing peoples personal information as Cambridge Analytica story breaks. CA's use of Facebook data branded a grossly unethical experiment by social media giant who said their policies had been breached; March 19 - US markets open and Facebook shares plunge over its handling of personal data. Facebook also hires its own forensics team to investigate Cambridge Analytica and they start searching CA's offices in London. But CA refuse to allow Britain's Information Commissioner's team in and force her to go to court for a warrant. March 20 - Facebook l hold an emergency meeting to let employees ask questions about Cambridge Analytica as their share prices plunges. But Mark Zuckerberg fails to show up and is yet to speak about the crisis that has seen billions wiped off the value of his company. The billionaire is also asked to appear before Parliament to answer allegations his company has lied about how it handles data. March 21 - Architect of app that helped harvest data for Cambridge Analytica says tens of thousands of other apps might be doing the same job. Advertisement

The Trump campaign paid the firm $6million during the 2016 election, although it has since distanced itself from Cambridge.

Zuckerberg apologized for a 'major breach of trust,' admitted mistakes and outlined steps to protect users following Cambridge's data grab.

His mea culpa on cable television came a few hours after he acknowledged his company's mistakes in a Facebook post , but without saying he was sorry.

Zuckerberg and Facebook's No. 2 executive, Sheryl Sandberg, had been quiet since news broke Friday that Cambridge may have used data improperly obtained from roughly 50 million Facebook users to try to sway elections.

They also failed to show up for a crisis meeting at the company on Tuesday, leading to accusations of weak management.

CA's clients included Donald Trump's campaign.

Facebook shares have dropped some 8 percent, lopping about $46 billion off the company's market value, since the revelations were first published.

The world's largest social media network is facing growing government scrutiny in Europe and the United States about a whistleblower's allegations that London-based political consultancy Cambridge Analytica improperly accessed user information to build profiles on American voters which were later used to help elect President Donald Trump in 2016.

Zuckerberg, in his first public comments since the scandal erupted at the weekend, said in a post on Facebook that the company 'made mistakes, there's more to do, and we need to step up and do it.'

He did not elaborate on what the mistakes were, but he said the social network plans to conduct an investigation of apps on its platform, restrict developer access to data, and give members a tool that lets them more easily disable access to their Facebook data.

His plans did not represent a big reduction of advertisers' ability to use Facebook data, which is the company's lifeblood.

Zuckerberg said he was open to additional government regulation and happy to testify before the US Congress if he was the right person.

'I'm not sure we shouldn't be regulated,' he said.

'I actually think the question is more what is the right regulation rather than yes or no, should it be regulated? ... People should know who is buying the ads that they see on Facebook.'

Facebook shares pared gains on Wednesday after Zuckerberg's post, closing up 0.7 per cent.

The company has lost more than $45billion of its stock market value over the past three days on investor fears that any failure by big tech firms to protect personal data could deter advertisers and users and invite tougher regulation.

Facebook representatives including Deputy Chief Privacy Officer Rob Sherman met US congressional staff for nearly two hours on Wednesday and planned to continue meetings on Capitol Hill on Thursday.

Facebook was unable to answer many questions, two aides who attended the briefing said.

The announcement sent Facebook's struggling stock back up after a treacherous few days

Internet inventor urges Zuckerberg to 'fix' damaging data harvesting World Wide Web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee has described the Cambridge Analytica (CA) scandal as a 'serious moment' for the web, but reassured Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg he can 'fix it'. The British computer scientist said it was time for all internet users to 'build a web that reflects our hopes & fulfils our dreams more than it magnifies our fears & deepens our divisions'. Sir Tim posted on Twitter after Mr Zuckerberg apologised for a 2015 breach that led to 50 million users' data being obtained by CA. 'This is a serious moment for the web's future. But I want us to remain hopeful. The problems we see today are bugs in the system. Bugs can cause damage, but bugs are created by people, and can be fixed by people,' Sir Tim said. 'I can imagine Mark Zuckerberg is devastated that his creation has been abused and misused. (Some days I have the same feeling justsaying) 'I would say to him: You can fix it. It won't be easy but if companies work with governments, activists, academics and web users we can make sure platforms serve humanity.' The inventor proposed a set of 'general rules' for web users to adhere to: - Any data belonging to a person is theirs alone to control. If anyone is given the right to use the data for a purpose then they should use it for that purpose alone. - If researchers have access to data they must only use it for research purposes. Sir Tim said this is 'REALLY IMPORTANT' as 'so much important science and medicine depends on that data'. In a plea to all web users, he said:'My message to all web users today is this: I may have invented the web, but you make it what it is. And it's up to all of us to build a web that reflects our hopes & fulfils our dreams more than it magnifies our fears & deepens our divisions.' Advertisement

Zuckerberg told the website Recode that fixes to protect users' data would cost 'many millions of dollars.'

The whistleblower who launched the scandal, Christopher Wylie, formerly of Cambridge Analytica, said in a tweet that he had accepted invitations to testify before US and UK lawmakers.

The German government said Facebook must explain whether the personal data of the country's 30 million users were protected from unlawful use by third parties, according to a report in the Funke group of German regional newspapers.

On Tuesday, the board of Cambridge Analytica suspended its Chief Executive Alexander Nix, who was caught in a secret recording boasting that his company played a decisive role in Trump's victory.

But the academic who provided the data disputed that on Wednesday.

'I think what Cambridge Analytica has tried to sell is magic, and they've made claims that this is incredibly accurate and it tells you everything there is to tell about you. But I think the reality is it's not that,' psychologist Aleksandr Kogan, an academic at Cambridge University, told the BBC in an interview broadcast on Wednesday.

Kogan, who gathered the data by running a survey app on Facebook, also said that he was being made a scapegoat by Facebook and Cambridge Analytica.

Both companies have blamed Kogan for alleged data misuse.

Only 300,000 Facebook users responded to Kogan's quiz, but that gave the researcher access to those peoples Facebook friends as well, who had not agreed to share information, producing details on 50 million users.

Facebook has said it subsequently made changes that prevent people from sharing data about friends, and maintains that no data breach occurred because the original users gave permission.

Critics say that it essentially was a breach because data of unsuspecting friends was taken.

Facebook banned Cambridge Analytica from using any of Facebook's services on Friday.

Zuckerberg said the company 'will restrict developers' data access even further to prevent other kinds of abuse' and that the company is working with regulators as they investigate what happened.

MARK ZUCKERBERG'S STATEMENT ON CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA I want to share an update on the Cambridge Analytica situation -- including the steps we've already taken and our next steps to address this important issue. We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can't then we don't deserve to serve you. I've been working to understand exactly what happened and how to make sure this doesn't happen again. The good news is that the most important actions to prevent this from happening again today we have already taken years ago. But we also made mistakes, there's more to do, and we need to step up and do it. Here's a timeline of the events: In 2007, we launched the Facebook Platform with the vision that more apps should be social. Your calendar should be able to show your friends' birthdays, your maps should show where your friends live, and your address book should show their pictures. To do this, we enabled people to log into apps and share who their friends were and some information about them. In 2013, a Cambridge University researcher named Aleksandr Kogan created a personality quiz app. It was installed by around 300,000 people who shared their data as well as some of their friends' data. Given the way our platform worked at the time this meant Kogan was able to access tens of millions of their friends' data. In 2014, to prevent abusive apps, we announced that we were changing the entire platform to dramatically limit the data apps could access. Most importantly, apps like Kogan's could no longer ask for data about a person's friends unless their friends had also authorized the app. We also required developers to get approval from us before they could request any sensitive data from people. These actions would prevent any app like Kogan's from being able to access so much data today. In 2015, we learned from journalists at The Guardian that Kogan had shared data from his app with Cambridge Analytica. It is against our policies for developers to share data without people's consent, so we immediately banned Kogan's app from our platform, and demanded that Kogan and Cambridge Analytica formally certify that they had deleted all improperly acquired data. They provided these certifications. Last week, we learned from The Guardian, The New York Times and Channel 4 that Cambridge Analytica may not have deleted the data as they had certified. We immediately banned them from using any of our services. Cambridge Analytica claims they have already deleted the data and has agreed to a forensic audit by a firm we hired to confirm this. We're also working with regulators as they investigate what happened. This was a breach of trust between Kogan, Cambridge Analytica and Facebook. But it was also a breach of trust between Facebook and the people who share their data with us and expect us to protect it. We need to fix that. In this case, we already took the most important steps a few years ago in 2014 to prevent bad actors from accessing people's information in this way. But there's more we need to do and I'll outline those steps here: First, we will investigate all apps that had access to large amounts of information before we changed our platform to dramatically reduce data access in 2014, and we will conduct a full audit of any app with suspicious activity. We will ban any developer from our platform that does not agree to a thorough audit. And if we find developers that misused personally identifiable information, we will ban them and tell everyone affected by those apps. That includes people whose data Kogan misused here as well. Second, we will restrict developers' data access even further to prevent other kinds of abuse. For example, we will remove developers' access to your data if you haven't used their app in 3 months. We will reduce the data you give an app when you sign in -- to only your name, profile photo, and email address. We'll require developers to not only get approval but also sign a contract in order to ask anyone for access to their posts or other private data. And we'll have more changes to share in the next few days. Third, we want to make sure you understand which apps you've allowed to access your data. In the next month, we will show everyone a tool at the top of your News Feed with the apps you've used and an easy way to revoke those apps' permissions to your data. We already have a tool to do this in your privacy settings, and now we will put this tool at the top of your News Feed to make sure everyone sees it. Beyond the steps we had already taken in 2014, I believe these are the next steps we must take to continue to secure our platform. I started Facebook, and at the end of the day I'm responsible for what happens on our platform. I'm serious about doing what it takes to protect our community. While this specific issue involving Cambridge Analytica should no longer happen with new apps today, that doesn't change what happened in the past. We will learn from this experience to secure our platform further and make our community safer for everyone going forward. I want to thank all of you who continue to believe in our mission and work to build this community together. I know it takes longer to fix all these issues than we'd like, but I promise you we'll work through this and build a better service over the long term. Advertisement

Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook's COO, said she 'deeply regrets' the breach of trust but did not apologize either

Many analysts have now raised concerns that the incident will have a negative impact on user engagement with Facebook, potentially reducing its clout with advertisers.

Three Wall Street brokerages cut their price targets.

'Investors now have to consider whether or not the company will conclude that it has grown in a manner that has proven to be untenable or whether it needs to significantly improve how it is managed,' said Pivotal Research Group analyst Brian Wieser.

Facebook shares are down more than 8 percent since Friday.

The company has risen more than 550 percent in value in the past five years.

Christopher Wylie, (pictured) who describes himself as one of the company's co-founders turned whistleblowers, has revealed how Cambridge Analytica paid $1million for the data of 51 million Facebook usersEntrepreneur Elon Musk's investment in Australian energy is set to expand, with two huge batteries due to be connected to the power grid in Victoria in time for summer next year.

The lithium-ion batteries will be built near Ballarat and Kerang in Victoria's west and will store solar and wind-generated energy, The Age reported.

They will have a combined generation capacity of 55MW, giving them more than half the power of the 100MW Tesla battery already in South Australia.

Entrepreneur Elon Musk's involvement in Australian energy is set to expand, with two huge batteries due to be connected to the power grid in Victoria in time for summer next year

The lithium-ion batteries will be built near Ballarat and Kerang in Victoria's west and will store solar and wind-generated energy (Adelaide battery pictured)

Western Victoria has been identified as having a 'vulnerable' power network.

The federal and state governments have agreed to share the total $50million cost of the project.

Federal Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg said the batteries will lead to lower power bills and greater reliability.

'They will not only allow currently unused renewable energy to be stored instead of wasted, but also inject electricity into the grid at times of peak demand in an area known for transmission congestion,' Mr Frydenberg said.

'Together, they will help lower power prices and stabilise the grid.'

Musk's company Tesla will supply the battery in Tesla which whill be connected to Victoria's largest solar farm in Gannawarra, while another battery in Ballarat will be supplied by energy company Fluence.

The batteries are set to be ready in time for the Victorian summer in 2019

One of the batteries will be big enough to power 20,000 homes for an hour during peak periods.

Australian Renewable Energy Agency chief executive Ivor Frischknecht said the batteries will allow for a smoother transition to renewable energy.

Victoria has set renewable energy targets of 25 per cent by 2020.

Batteries can store renewable energy and then use it when required - meaning solar power can be dispatched at night and wind energy can be delivered when there is no wind.A registered sex offender convicted of kidnapping, raping and killing an Ohio State University student has been sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

A judge sentenced 30-year-old Brian Golsby in Columbus on Wednesday for the February 8, 2017 murder of 21-year-old Reagan Tokes.

Jurors found Golsby guilty on nine charges related to Tokes' murder last week, and spent seven hours over two days this week deliberating whether to recommend the death penatly.

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Brian Golsby, 30, was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole on Wednesday

The registered sex offender was found guilty last week of kidnapping, raping and murdering 21-year-old Reagan Tokes in February 2017

In the end, the 12-person jury couldn't come to a unanimous decision on the death penalty, so they instead recommended life in prison. The judge took their recommendation.

Tokes (pictured) was leaving work the night of February 8, 2017 when she was attacked by Golsby

Prosecutors say Golsby kidnapped the Ohio State University psychology major as she left her restaurant job. He then proceeded to rape her and then shoot her.

His attorneys said he didn't plan to shoot Tokes, but panicked. Her nude body was found in a park in Grove City near Columbus.

In court on Wednesday, Tokes' mother gave an emotional speech, supported by her husband. Both wore ribbons of Tiffany blue - their daughter's favorite color.

'Regardless of the outcome of todays verdict, it doesnt bring our daughter back,' Lisa McCrary-Tokes said. 'It doesnt erase the night of terror that Reagan had to endure.'

She added: 'Most importantly, it doesnt change that she wasnt granted her last wish and to quote our daughter, her last words, "I just want to live."'

The victim's mother, Lisa McCrary-Tokes, left, spoke in court on Wednesday, supported by her husband Toby Tokes, right

'He doesnt exist to us,' Toby Tokes said outside of court. 'We give him no thought, no energy. Hes gone forever. Hell have to live with what he did.'

At the time she was killed, Reagan was just three months from receiving her degree in psychology from Ohio State University. She is pictured far left with her family

'He doesnt exist to us,' Tokes' father Toby said of Golsby outside court. 'We give him no thought, no energy. Hes gone forever. Hell have to live with what he did.'

Judge Mark Serrott praised the couple for working to address the way Ohio monitors convicts on probation, like Golsby.

'Had he been monitored, this may never have happened,' Serrott said.

At the time of Tokes' death, Golsby was wearing an ankle monitor because of a prior conviction. The ankle monitors don't track criminals in real time, but the data stored on the device helped investigators connect Golsby to the crime after Tokes' body was found.

Judge Serrott (pictured) told Golsby to make the most of his life in prison, and to be thankful his lawyers helped spare him from the death penalty.

Judge Serrott told Golsby to make the most of his life in prison, and to be thankful his lawyers helped spare him from the death penalty.

Golsby declined the opportunity to speak in court on Wednesday

'I believe theres something redeeming in you, Mr. Golsby,' Serrott said.

'I hope you dont waste their efforts ... youre standing here alive because of your lawyers. I hope you know that,' he added.

Golsby was given the opportunity to speak on Wednesday, but declined.

Earlier in the trial, he apologized, asking jurors for mercy. His lawyers argued his traumatic childhood - including being raped at the age of 12 or 13 - shaped his actions and urged sparing his life.

'The jury just showed me that theres humanity out there,' one of Golsby's attorneys, Diane Menashe, said. 'The system worked today. Someone fought for him (Golsby). Nobody had ever done that ... I think he feels how I feel, without the tears.'

The prosecutor says he's satisfied Golsby no longer threatens society.

'I dont think we would have done, nor could have done, anything different than what we did do in this case,' Franklin County Prosecutor Ron OBrien said.A Canadian drug mule who attempted to smuggle $21 million worth of cocaine into Australia on a luxury cruise ship says she did it to fund her social media obsession.

Melina Roberge last month pleaded guilty on the eve of her trial for importing 30kg of the drug on board the Sea Princess, which docked in Sydney in August 2016.

The 24-year-old, who was one of three people arrested over the 95kg haul - the largest ever drug seizure on a cruise ship landing in Australia - said she was motivated by her addiction to Instagram.

In an affidavit tendered to court, Roberge wrote that at the time she was 'a stupid young woman who was governed by a superficial desire to take pictures of myself in exotic locations and post them on Instagram to receive likes and attention'.

Melina Roberge (pictured), who attempted to smuggle $21 million worth of cocaine into Australia on a luxury cruise ship, says she did it to fund her social media obsession

Roberge last month pleaded guilty on the eve of her trial for importing 30kg of the drug on board the Sea Princess

Roberge (left) and her travelling partner, former porn star Isabelle Lagace (right), and a third accomplice attempted to smuggle 95kg of cocaine into Australia

'I have devastated so many people in the process,' she said.

Roberge told the NSW District Court at her sentencing hearing on Wednesday that she initially refused when her 'sugar daddy' asked her to carry drugs on the cruise.

She later agreed when told she could enjoy a free holiday in helping the group, after learning that another person had dropped out.

'I was meant to just be there and look like I was on holiday and look like a cover for everyone else. Other people would be there to look after the drugs,' she said.

In an affidavit tendered to court, Roberge wrote that at the time she was 'a stupid young woman who was governed by a superficial desire to take pictures of myself in exotic locations'

Roberge said she initially refused when her 'sugar daddy' asked her to carry drugs on the cruise

Roberge and Lagace were caught attempting to smuggle the drugs on board the Sea Princess cruise ship (pictured)

The statement of facts says Roberge met her 'sugar daddy' in 2015, and they began an intimate relationship while she worked as an escort for him.

He invited her on a trip to Morocco in May 2016 where she worked as an escort, and it was on this trip that he first asked her to be involved in the drug-smuggling trip.

She claimed she made the decision without thinking about the consequences, and said she had since met people in jail who struggle with drug addictions.

'I do not want to be part of that. I want to be able to help them,' she said.

Roberge met her 'sugar daddy' in 2015, and they began an intimate relationship while she worked as an escort for him, according to the statement of facts

Roberge (pictured with her mother) said she had since met people in jail who struggle with drug addictions

The drugs (some pictured) were found on the cruise ship, which docked in Sydney in August 2016

She declined to name her 'sugar daddy' in court, citing fear for her family and friends in Canada.

Crown prosecutor Tom Muir said Roberge was aware of what she was doing, and she was aware the drugs were in her cabin.

'She was not doing it for debt. It's for the lifestyle she wants to enjoy,' he told the court.

Her barrister Avni Djemal said she played no part in dealing with the drugs and had been young and naive.

Roberge claimed she made the decision to smuggle the drugs without thinking about the consequences

The Canadians' social media accounts reveal a love of travel and an active lifestyle

The haul, found on the Sea Princess (pictured), is the largest ever drug seizure on a cruise ship landing in Australia

Mr Djemal said she was 'one of the most co-operative prisoners in the system' with a high chance of rehabilitation.

People close to Roberge have previously told Daily Mail she had always set her sights on having the best that life can bring and was 'all about money, money, money'.

A former boyfriend said: 'She was a flirt and moreover she was just a superficial young woman. Melina was lovely and attractive, but she wanted money and people who had money.

'It was all about money with her and she was dating older men too because they had the cars and the power to give her the lifestyle she wanted badly.

Roberge and Lagace documented their luxury cruise on social media before attempting to import the drugs

Lagace worked in a bar in the Canadian city of Longueuil and took off suddenly on her trip, telling few about her plans

'That meant the best restaurants and having nicely done hair and the finest clothes.'

He said he had kept in touch with her through Facebook and raised an eyebrow at her lifestyle, which included travelling to the best holiday spots in the world.

'It was money that drove her, and if she did that smuggling it just shows that money can't buy you happiness,' he added.

Roberge will return to the NSW District Court next Wednesday when a date for her sentencing will be determined.

Lagace (pictured) admitted she tried to smuggle the drugs to clear a $20,000 debt

In an online post, Lagace said: 'If I offend you, cry me a river. I'll bring snacks and a raft. I will literally float down your tears; eating chips and working on my tan'

People close to Roberge have previously said she was 'all about money, money, money'. Some of the drugs seized in 2016 are pictured

Her cabin mate, Canadian former porn star Isabelle Lagace, was sentenced to at least four-and-a-half years in jail in November after admitting she tried to smuggle the drugs to clear a $20,000 debt.

Lagace worked in a bar in the Canadian city of Longueuil and took off suddenly on her trip, telling few about her plans.

In an online post, she gave a clue to her carefree lifestyle when she said: 'If I offend you, cry me a river. I'll bring snacks and a raft. I will literally float down your tears; eating chips and working on my tan.'

It has also been revealed Lagace posed for a series of nude photographs which appeared to be taken when she was aged nineteen.

It has also been revealed Lagace posed for a series of nude photographs which appeared to be taken when she was aged nineteen

Lagace was sentenced to at least four-and-a-half years in jail in November for her role in the attempted drug importation

She was handed a sentence of seven years and six months, but after the non-parole period was backdated to her arrest date, she will likely be released in 2021.

Lagace previously said she was angry to have been involved with the 'dirty, filthy drug trade'.

'This will haunt me for the rest of my life... I have embarrassed my family, my friends, myself,' she said.

Andre Tamine, 64, has also pleaded guilty and is due to be sentenced later this year.

Roberge's cabin mate, Canadian former porn star Isabelle Lagace, was sentenced to at least four-and-a-half years in jail in NovemberAdvertisement

If you've always been the type to take the road less traveled, now you can do it with directions.

A GPS tracking company combed through data from the US Department of Transportation to come up with an interactive map showing off the view from the driver seat along the country's least-driven roads.

Geotab, the company behind the breakdown of remote routes, also enlisted the aid of landscape photographer, James Q. Martin, to pick out the most beautiful ones.

DailyMail.com spoke to Martin, to get more insight into how he chose the top ten most scenic of the quietest routes in America.

A GPS tracking company combed through data from the US Department of Transportation to come up with an interactive map showing off the view from the driver seat along the country's least-driven roads, and named Alaska's Dalton Highway as the most beautiful

The GPS tracking company combed through data from the US Department of Transportation to come up with an interactive map showing off the view from the driver seat along the country's least-driven roads

Martin, who has found creative inspiration in the solitude he experiences behind the wheel, said that there's not much he enjoys more than a quiet, scenic road.

His top choice as the most beautiful view to take in from Geotab's list was an easy one, he said, selecting Alaska's Dalton Highway as his favorite.

'The road reaches the top of the continent, and is literally a gateway that would allow you to see a polar bear in the right circumstances,' he said.

'The road reaches the top of the continent, and is literally a gateway that would allow you to see a Polar Bear in the right circumstances,' landscape photographer James Q Martin said; he's the man who ranked the top ten most beautiful routes from Geotab's data analysis

It was the rocks that got him in the Beehive State, coming in at number two.; Martin said: 'The geology along US Route 50 in Utah allows you to travel back through time'

'Route 50s path cuts across the corner of Utah, passing by the Canyonlands National Park, the Arches National Park and through the vast emptiness of the Great Salt Lake Desert,' Geotab wrote; Spotted Wolf Canyon is seen here

Coming in third for its views was Maine, which Geotab said is best to travel during the Fall

Photographer James Q Martin ranks beauty of least-driven roads in US 1. Alaska's State Route 11 2. Utah's US Route 50 3. Maine US Route 201 4. Arizona's US Route 160 5. California's State Route 139 6. Virginia's State Route 90003 7. Louisiana's US Route 65 8. Wyoming's US Route 212 9. New Hampshire's US Route 2 10. Pennsylvania's State Route 32 Sources: Geotab and James Q Martin Advertisement

Alaska's quietest roadway, and Martin's pick for most lovely to look at it, is also the least-traveled route in the entire country, according to Geotab's data analysis.

It was the rocks that got him in the Beehive State, coming in at number two.

'The geology along US Route 50 in Utah allows you to travel back through time,' Martin said.

Geotab said this portion of 'America's Loneliest Road' extends for 335 miles, from the Nevada state line (east of Baker) to the Colorado state line, west of Fruita.

'Route 50s path cuts across the corner of Utah, passing by the Canyonlands National Park, the Arches National Park and through the vast emptiness of the Great Salt Lake Desert,' Geotab wrote.

Coming in third for its views was Maine, which Geotab said is best to travel during the Fall.

'Who wouldn't want to go through Maine's Old Canadian byway where human history unfolds around every bend?' he asked, rhetorically.

The 157-mile route starts in Brunswick in Cumberland County and runs all the way to Sandy Bay at the Canadian border.

'Who wouldn't want to go through Maine's Old Canadian byway where human history unfolds around every bend?' Martin asked, rhetorically

The 157-mile route starts in Brunswick in Cumberland County and runs all the way to Sandy Bay at the Canadian border

In Arizona, US Route 160 was ranked fourth in appearances by Martin

In Arizona, US Route 160 was ranked fourth in appearances.

Over 256 miles, travelers can catch a glimpse of its dinosaur tracks at Tuba City, the Navajo National Monument and Elephants Feet rock.

'These "empty" stretches of highway are surrounded by sandy brush land, wind-worn sandstone canyons, an ancient Pueblo cliff village and unusual rock formations like the Elephants Feet, making this an incredibly scenic drive,' Geotab wrote.

Over 256 miles, travelers can catch a glimpse of its Dinosaur tracks at Tuba City, the Navajo National Monument and Elephants Feet rock

The Golden State's Route 139 ranked fifth for Martin, lined in parts by lush greenery and with easy access to California hikes with stunning views

The Golden State's Route 139 ranked fifth for Martin, lined in parts by lush greenery and with easy access to hikes with stunning views.

The route starts in Susanville, California and runs for 143 miles, right up to the Oregon state line.

'This remote route skirts around the beautiful blue Eagle Lake, before cutting through the Modoc National Forest. Its a great starting point for hikes around the rugged volcanic landscape of north eastern California,' Geotab wrote.

The route starts in Susanville, California and runs for 143 miles, right up to the Oregon state line

Sixth place honors go to Virginia's State Route 90003, covering just 23 miles from Yorktown to Jamestown in a short stretch that's not short on beauty

Sixth place honors go to Virginia's State Route 90003.

Covering just 23 miles from Yorktown to Jamestown, the short stretch is not short on beauty.

'Better known as the Colonial Parkway, this nationally historic, scenic byway is bordered by trees and dotted with colonial-style red brick bridges and tunnels,' Geotab wrote. 'Make a stop at the James River and York River at each end for the panoramic views, especially in the fall.'

'Better known as the Colonial Parkway, this nationally historic, scenic byway is bordered by trees and dotted with colonial-style red brick bridges and tunnels,' Geotab wrote

At seventh, Martin named all 101 miles of Louisiana's US Route 65

At seventh, Martin named all 101 miles of Louisiana's US Route 65.

'This stretch of highway is part of the Great River Road,' Geotab wrote. 'The Louisiana section of this scenic, state-crossing drive, tracks alongside the Mississippi River, into Arkansas and beyond; passing the strikingly clear waters of Lake Bruin along the way.'

The splendor starts in Clayton, in Louisian's Concordia Parish and continues through to the Arkansas state line, north of Gassoway.

'This stretch of highway is part of the Great River Road. The Louisiana section of this scenic, state-crossing drive, tracks alongside the Mississippi River, into Arkansas and beyond; passing the strikingly clear waters of Lake Bruin along the way,' Geotab wrote

Wyoming's US Route 212 shows up in Martin's number eight slot as another quick but beautiful drive, at just 35 miles, and covering the Montana-Wyoming state line

Wyoming's US Route 212 shows up in Martin's number eight slot.

It's another quick drive, at just 35 miles, and covers the Montana-Wyoming state line.

'The Beartooth Highway leads into Yellowstone National Park, and has incredible views of jagged mountains, pine forests, rocky peaks and alpine lakes,' Geotab wrote, noting its the highest elevation drive in Wyoming. 'During the winter, the road is closed due to heavy snow, but usually opens back up by Memorial Day weekend.'

At night, Martin slotted New Hampshire's US Route 2, another 35 mile jaunt

The drive 'winds alongside the Androscoggin River into the picturesque mountain ranges of New Hampshire,' Geotab wrote

At night, Martin slotted New Hampshire's US Route 2, another 35 mile jaunt.

The route starts at the Maine state border and ends up in Coos County, at the Vermont state border.

The drive 'winds alongside the Androscoggin River into the picturesque mountain ranges of New Hampshire,' Geotab wrote. 'A detour takes you into the White Mountains National Forest and passes by the prominent Mount Washington.'

Finally, rounding out Martin's list of the top ten most beautiful of the quietest drives in the coutnry, the number ten spot goes to Pennsylvania's State Route 32

And finally, rounding out Martin's list of the top ten most beautiful of the quietest drives in the country, the number ten spot goes to Pennsylvania's State Route 32.

'Known as the River Road, this scenic drive follows the Delaware River as it runs alongside the New Jersey border,' Geotab wrote. 'Historic stops along the way include the Washington River Crossing and the arts and crafts town of New Hope.'

It covers a 41-mile stretch of road from Falls Township to Kintnersville in Nockamixon.

Quiet roadways that didn't make Martin's list included the 81-mile stretch of New York's State Route 812, the Queen Ka'ahumanu Highway spanning 100 miles in Waimea, Hawaii, and Ohio's State Route 571 through Arcanum, which starts at the Indiana border in Union City and extends 50 miles to Bethel Township in Clarke County.

'Known as the River Road, this scenic drive follows the Delaware River as it runs alongside the New Jersey border,' Geotab wrote

One quiet roadway that didn't make Martin's list included the 81-mile stretch of New York's State Route 812

The Queen Ka'ahumanu Highway spanning 100 miles in Waimea, Hawaii, seems to be less of a sight to see than the rest of the islands' attractions

Although Martin said ranking the number one most beautiful route was easy, he added that he struggled with the rest of the countdown, as each street offers up so much value in such unique ways.

'Ultimately for me, I want to travel the most remote roads, where human interaction is limited to getting me another tank of gas and a tasty snack, as I continue to unwind on the scenic stretches,' Martin said.

Thanks to Geotab, Martin and the rest of us now have a list of at least 50 drives to take, when the urge to try to "Get out of Dodge" strikes.

Though pretty and peaceful looking, Ohio's State Route 571 through Arcanum was also left off of Martin's top ten listThe hunt for a man who opened fire on a car in broad daylight following a road rage incident has entered its second day.

Police continue to search for the gunman after he fired multiple shots at the driver on The Golden Way, in Golden Grove, Adelaide's north-east.

His victim said 'angels were above him' after he made a getaway in his bullet-riddled Holden Commodore about 3.15pm on Wednesday, 7 News reported.

The hunt for a man who opened fire on a car in broad daylight following a road rage incident in Adelaide's north-east entered its second day on Thursday

Police continue to search for the gunman after he fired multiple shots at the driver on The Golden Way, in Golden Grove, about 3.15pm Wednesday

The man said three shots were fired at his car as he was following the gunman's BMW in an attempt to report him to police for a road rage incident.

One gunshot pierced through his car's wheel arch and travelled into the back of a passenger seat.

The driver of the Commodore claimed a minor dispute between the pair escalated when the driver of the BMW pulled out a knife.

'[There was] one shot, I take off - two more cracks and it hit my car,' he said.

His victim (pictured) said 'angels were above him' after he made a getaway in his bullet-riddled Holden Commodore

One gunshot (pictured) pierced through his car's wheel arch and travelled into the back of a passenger seat

'I took off, and normally my car f***s up when I put the gas down. Angels were above us, mate.'

The gunman's car was found by police at a home in nearby Wynn Vale shortly after the shooting.

Police confirmed to Daily Mail Australia on Thursday morning that the gunman remains at large.

He is believed to be now travelling in a 2001 black Ford utility.

Police have urged anyone who may have seen the incident or who have witnessed suspicious activity to come forward.A New Zealand father who viciously bashed his nine-month-old son because he was frustrated by the teething infant's fussing will not serve any jail time.

The 20-year-old man from Waikato, south of Auckland, pleaded guilty on Monday to attacking the young boy in February last year and was sentenced to nine months home detention, according to the NZ Herald.

The infant's maternal grandfather has since lashed out at Judge Denise Clark's decision to overlook the prosecution's calls for a prison sentence of at least three years.

A New Zealand father who pleaded guilty to severely bashing his nine-month-old son at their home in February last year was sentenced to nine months home detention on Monday (stock image)

'If my daughter hadn't stopped him, he could have killed my grandson,' he said, referring to the 20-year-old man, who cannot be named.

'Home detention - this is a joke, a huge joke.

'There has been no justice for my grandson whatsoever - it's a slap on the hand, they might as well have given him a cup of tea and a big piece of cake as well.'

The infant's father attacked his son as his partner, and the mother of his children, was in the kitchen making breakfast, according to the NZ Herald.

He struck the baby on the head and face before shoving an object in his mouth, causing part of his tongue to tear.

The infant's mother said she heard the 20-year-old angrily telling his son to 'shut up' and tried to stop the attack.

The 20-year-old man from Waikato, south of Auckland, pleaded guilty to attacking the young boy at the Hamilton District Court (pictured) on Monday

The man then turned his attention to his partner and shoved her to the ground before kicking her, the publication reported.

The nine-month-old was rushed to the hospital with cheekbone fractures and welts and cuts to his head after family members arrived at the home and called for help.

The 20-year-old told the relatives a door had fallen on the boy.

During his hearing on Monday, the man also pleaded guilty to also assaulting the infant's mother, including when she was pregnant.

The court heard the man had attacked the woman on at least three occasions and tried to jam his thumbs into her sister's eyes when she tried to intervene, according to the NZ Herald.

Judge Clark said she took into consideration the 20-year-old's remorse when handing down his sentence, which includes 160 hours of community service.Calvin Buari, 47, spent 22 years in jail for a double murder he says he didn't commit

Prosecutors have dropped charges against a New York man who spent 22 years in prison for a double murder he says he didn't commit - and that someone else had confessed to.

A judge had already overturned Calvin Buari's conviction and freed him in May, after newfound witnesses said he wasn't the man who shot two men in a parked car on a Bronx corner in 1992.

But the Bronx district attorney's office initially pledged to appeal and retry the case if necessary, so Buari had remained under indictment until prosecutors abandoned the case on Wednesday, saying they couldn't prove his involvement.

'That was the best news I could ever hear,' Buari, 47, said by phone. 'I can finally now put that behind me. ... Now I can just move forward with my life.'

Meanwhile, a podcast about his case is scheduled for release on March 28.

Brothers Elijah and Salhaddin Harris, 24 and 25, were shot to death as they ate a takeout dinner in their car on September 10, 1992.

Calvin Buari was released from prison last May after a judge overturned his murder conviction for the 1992 killings of two brothers in the Bronx. He's pictured with his brother after his release

After pledging to retry Buari, prosecutors abandoned the case on Wednesday, admitting they had no evidence. He's pictured embracing his lawyer Oscar Michelen following his release

Buari was a crack cocaine distributor in the area and has said he was 'very immature' at the time. Authorities blamed him for a spasm of bloodshed there, with then-DA Robert Johnson saying residents 'had every reason to fear for their safety as long as he was free.'

He denied involvement in the Harrises' deaths and says he was framed by drug-world rivals, but was convicted in 1995 and sentenced to 50 years to life in prison.

He was 24.

As reported by Buzzfeed, a member of Buari's former drug-dealing crew, Dwight Robinson, had confessed to the murders in a an affidavit in 2003 but recanted his statements in 2004.

Robinson said he recanted his confession after speaking with two detectives but stands by his claim that Bauri's innocent.

'[The detectives] told me that if I helped him, Id never go home. They wanted me to take back my confession to keep him locked up,' Robinson told Buzzfeed in 2015, adding that they also promised him money and an easier life in prison in exchange of his cooperation.

After Buari's lawyers and family publicized his exoneration effort in recent years, new witnesses came forward

Another former drug dealer, Dwight Robinson, confessed to the killings in 2003 but later recanted, saying detectives convinced him to stay quiet. (Buari is pictured)

More than 10 years passed after Robinson's confession before Buari was released from jail in May 2017.

After his lawyers and family publicized his exoneration effort in recent years, new witnesses came forward.

Two of them told a court last year they saw another man commit the shooting. A third said Buari was chatting with her down the block when the gunfire rang out.

'Each of these witnesses testified with sincerity, and remorse, at what they perceived to be a miscarriage of justice,' Bronx state Supreme Court Justice Eugene Oliver wrote in overturning Buari's conviction last year and ordering a new trial.

Robinson has never been charged in the Harris brothers' deaths but would be fair game for Buari to discuss at a retrial, the judge wrote.

Buari was a crack cocaine distributor in the area and has said he was 'very immature' at the time of the murders he was convicted for at age 24

Buari has started a business transporting inmates' relatives to prison for visits

DA spokeswoman Patrice O'Shaughnessy said prosecutors ultimately determined they would be 'unable to meet our burden of proof at trial.'

Buari's lawyer, Oscar Michelen, called the decision 'long, long overdue.'

The podcast , 'Empire on Blood,' follows the case through the lens of journalist Steve Fishman, known for his interviews with imprisoned fraudster Bernard Madoff.

Since Buari's release, he has started a business transporting inmates' relatives to prison for visits. He also has been working with an auto detailing shop and aims to open a restaurant, he said.

'I've just been focusing on putting my best foot forward,' he said.This is the shocking moment police officers refuse to give their badge numbers after tasering a driver 'for no good reason' and arresting him.

The driver and his wife were heading to dinner with a friend at Fremantle, south of Perth, when his Jeep was stopped and served with a defect notice.

After being tasered, as he tried to drive off, the motorist's friend turned on his camera phone and repeatedly demanded the three officers give him their badge numbers.

This is the shocking moment police officers refuse to give their badge numbers after tasering a driver for no good reason and arresting him

The driver and his wife were heading to dinner with a friend at Fremantle, south of Perth, when his Jeep was stopped while a female officer told their friend he had 'no right' to police numbers

To make matters worse the female officer, Senior Constable Arnold, repeatedly put a hat over her face as the driver's friend filmed the encounter in March 2017.

'You are not the person being spoken to,' she said.

When the driver's friend asked her again, explaining it didn't matter that he wasn't the one being arrested, she doubled down on her refusal to comply with the law.

'You're not the person that we're dealing with. You have no right.'

Earlier in the four-minute video footage, released on Wednesday by Western Australia's Corruption and Crime Commission, a male officer Constable Keenan repeatedly told the driver to 'get out of the car' before holding the taser pointed towards him.

Earlier in the four-minute video footage, a male officer Constable Keenan repeatedly told the driver to 'get out of the car' before holding the taser pointed towards him

The state watchdog blasted the officers for using 'unreasonable and oppressive force'.

'The incident involved a driver, his wife and friend who were heading to a Fremantle restaurant for dinner  but ended up with the driver being tasered in his vehicle for no good reason, arrested and locked up,' it said.

When the man was told by police to turn around to be cuffed, Constable Keenan then used force to twist his arms behind his back and press him against his four-wheel drive.

'I'm not resisting, mate,' the man told the officer.

'You were under no threat when you tasered him,' the friend behind the camera added.

He was then placed under arrest for disobeying the directive of a police officer.

An internal police review cleared Constable Keenan of any wrongdoing, however the Crime and Corruption Commission found his actions 'unlawful, unreasonable and oppressive'

The female officer, Senior Constable Arnold, was criticised by the CCC for preventing the filming and has since been charged

A subsequent internal police review cleared Constable Keenan of any wrongdoing, however the Crime and Corruption Commission has found his actions 'unlawful, unreasonable and oppressive.'

Constable Keenan has not been charged with any wrongdoing but has been stood aside, one year after the incident.

The female officer, Senior Constable Arnold, was criticised by the CCC for preventing the filming and has since been charged.

Police Minister Michelle Roberts said the police would be brought to justice.

'Police officers in this instance have done the wrong thing, they have been found out, and they will need to cop the consequences,' she said.

Ms Roberts said officers should be kept accountable with the use of body cameras, and WA traffic police could be trialling the devices by the end of 2018.An Australian woman has died after falling 100m from a waterfall in New Zealand.

Verena Jantje Kuhl was canyoning with her husband at Twin Creek Falls in Arthur's Pass National Park on New Zealand's South Island on Sunday afternoon when she tragically fell and died, Stuff reported.

West Coast New Zealand Christchurch Coast Rescue Helicopter manager Angus Taylor confirmed Ms Kuhl had died at the waterfall.

Verena Jantje Kuhl was canyoning with her husband at Twin Creek Falls in Arthur's Pass National Park on New Zealand's South Island on Sunday afternoon

West Coast New Zealand Christchurch Coast Rescue Helicopter manager Angus Taylor confirmed Ms Kuhl had died at the waterfall

A personal beacon was activated after the fall just before 4pm.

The couple were from Germany originally but were on holiday in New Zealand and lived in Australia.

Ms Kuhl, aged in her 30s, worked as a paramedic in Bundaberg, Queensland.

A rescue operation recovered Ms Kuhl's body from the canyon about 6.30pm, Yahoo7 reported.

Ms Kuhl, aged in her 30s, worked as a paramedic in Bundaberg, Queensland

A New Zealand Police spokeswoman said the couple had canyoning experience.

Mr Taylor said the accident was 'unfortunate'.

'There's always a risk in outdoor activities, if you want a bit of adventure, a bit of spark in your life.'

Ms Kuhl worked as an advanced care and flight paramedic in Bundaberg since 2014 after moving to Australia from Germany.

Arthur's Pass was supposed to be the last stop for the couple before they returned home to Queensland, the Bundaberg News-Mail reported.

The 150-metre high waterfall is one of five inside Arthur's Pass National Park.

Ms Kuhl's death has been referred to the coroner.Facebook revenues soared to billions of pounds after it started giving away users' details.

The social media giant practically doubled its takings every year after opening up profiles to 'tens of thousands' of app developers.

Facebook users were yesterday waking up to how much private information has been handed out.

During the data gold-rush  which lasted from 2009 to 2015  it appears almost anyone who described themselves as a 'developer' could freely mine Facebook's database.

Facebook revenues soared to billions of pounds after it started giving away users' details

In this period, the technology firm's revenues rose sharply, from 500million in 2009 to nearly 13billion by 2015.

The company is now facing probes from law enforcement agencies around the world, including in Britain.

Some 39billion has been wiped from the social network's value this week  although it rallied slightly yesterday  and shareholders have begun legal action, accusing the firm of making 'misleading statements' about its policies.

Last night Facebook's billionaire founder Mark Zuckerberg finally broke his silence, admitting his site 'made mistakes'. In a post on the social network he added: 'At the end of the day I'm responsible for what happens on our platform.'

Last night it was reported that advertisers threatened to end their relationship with Facebook.

A group of leading British consumer goods companies, has demanded answers from the social media giant, according to the Times. It was claimed that around 3,000 firms including Unilever and Procter & Gamble did not want to associate with Facebook if it was shown that users' data had been acquired without permission.

Banking giant Nordea said it had put some Facebook investments in 'quarantine' as it monitored the scandal. The scale of the breach has grown dramatically since it emerged at the weekend that 50million Facebook profiles were harvested by Aleksandr Kogan, a psychology researcher at Cambridge University, who designed a 'personality quiz' app as a research project.

Last night it was reported that advertisers threatened to end their relationship with Facebook

He passed the data to Cambridge Analytica, whose boss Alexander Nix was suspended on Tuesday after Channel 4 broadcast footage of him bragging about the firm's role in Donald Trump's presidential campaign. The company says Mr Nix's comments 'do not represent the values or operations of the firm'.

Dr Kogan claimed 'tens of thousands' of other apps may be mining social media for personal data to be sold on in the same way. Other experts said it was possible virtually the entire Facebook database from 2015 could be in unknown hands.

Until it tightened privacy settings in April that year, Facebook was effectively giving away masses of personal data to third-party developers for free, to encourage them to create more apps and grow the platform, say experts.

In 2012, there were some nine million Facebook apps  all of whose developers were apparently able to access users' personal details. It is unclear what checks were made on someone applying to Facebook to become a 'developer'  for example whether they might be a company, a spy agency or even a mafia gang  before personal details were made available.

Last night Facebook's billionaire founder Mark Zuckerberg finally broke his silence, admitting his site 'made mistakes'

Dutch academic Bernhard Rieder, who created a similar Facebook app in 2009 before deleting it, said: 'Before 2015, you could get troves of data. I should have stored all the data [and then sold it to] get that Lamborghini.'

Social media users have also raised fears about how others  including Amazon, music service Spotify and dating app Tinder  could be using their data. UK Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham said she was examining whether Facebook could have broken laws under the Data Protection Act.

Whistleblower Sandy Parakilas, a data protection manager for Facebook in 2011 and 2012, told the Commons' digital committee yesterday the firm had adopted a 'Wild West' approach to guarding data. As the backlash grew, Brian Acton, the co-founder of messaging service WhatsApp, suggested it was 'time' for users to 'delete Facebook'. Meanwhile a poll by Sky News of more than 1,000 people found 65 per cent said they trusted Facebook less than they did a week ago.

Expert Frederike Kaltheuner, from campaign group Privacy International, said 'this is really just the tip of the iceberg', adding that ten years' worth of someone's personal details could have been spirited away before the privacy rules were tightened. Last night Cambridge Analytica faced fresh questions after The Guardian reported the firm had been offered material from Israeli hackers, who had accessed emails of politicians who are now heads of state in Nigeria and St Kitts.

SCL Group, Cambridge Analytica's parent company, denied taking possession of stolen information for any purpose in either campaign. Facebook executives have insisted they never sell or give away users' data. Simon Milner, the site's UK policy director, has told MPs that Cambridge Analytica 'may have lots of data, but it will not be Facebook user data'.Middle class families who use private tutors to help get their child into a grammar school should pay extra tax, a report suggests.

The measure would help break the stranglehold wealthy parents have over selective schools, experts said.

Academics at the UCL Institute of Education said children from better-off homes were much more likely to get into a grammar than pupils from poorer backgrounds.

Academics at the UCL Institute of Education said children from better-off homes were much more likely to get into a grammar than pupils from poorer backgrounds

This can partly be explained by the fact richer parents pay for private tuition to prepare their children for entrance exams.

The researchers said a tax on private tutoring could be used to pay for deprived children to have the same extra lessons.

However, attempts to inflate the price of private tutoring could prove controversial, seeming to punish middle-income families which work hard so they can afford to send their children to private tutors.

The study examined the backgrounds of more than 1,800 children living in areas of England and Northern Ireland that have grammar schools. Just under three quarters of those children in England who were tutored gained a grammar school place, compared with 14 per cent of those that were not tutored, the report concluded.

In England, children from families in the bottom quarter of household incomes had less than a 10 per cent chance of attending a grammar school, compared with a 40 per cent chance among those from families in the top quarter of household incomes.

The study comes after Theresa May proposed overturning a ban on new selective schools imposed by Labour in 1998.

The study comes after Theresa May proposed overturning a ban on new selective schools imposed by Labour in 1998

She had said more grammar schools could boost social mobility for deprived youngsters. Her plan was dropped when she lost her Commons majority, but she still wants the remaining 163 to expand.

Study author Professor John Jerrim said: The Government claims expanding grammars will boost social mobility.

But our research shows private tuition used by high-income families gives them a big advantage.

The Government needs to explain how they are going to level the playing field between different income groups. He suggested one option may be an extra VAT-style tax on tutoring which could then subsidise lessons for poorer children.Germaine Greer heard a close friend being raped  but did nothing to stop it and suggested she shouldnt report it.

The outspoken feminist said people take punishment in relationships and that reporting a domestic attack could break up families.

Her comments come just a day after she warned that accusers of movie mogul Harvey Weinstein could become career rapees.

Speaking at a debate about the MeToo movement, the 79-year-old said people were completely confused by what sexual assault is, and gave her unnamed friend as an example.

The outspoken feminist (pictured on Good Morning Britain earlier this month) said reporting a domestic attack could break up families

She explained she had been staying at the couples home in Kent after a party, and heard her friend protesting against her husbands advances from the bedroom.

She told the audience in London: I was woken up by shouts. Get off! Leave me alone! No, no! And I thought, what do I do? And of course, like most house guests, I did nothing.

The writer claimed she later discussed the incident with her friend, who told her it happened fairly often.

She said, was that rape? And I said, well, I dont know. It might have been, she explained.

And then I said to her, why would you send your husband away for years  which is the tariff for rape  because he overrode your unwillingness on such and such an occasion?

The Australian writer also criticised the way rape is presented in films and television as a bloody violent crime.

She instead said it was a domestic thing that happens when a couple dont understand each other terribly well.

Sex is a blood sport, she said. People take punishment. They get over it. The relationship survives, or it doesnt.

Miss Greer provoked anger this week by implying that some alleged victims of Weinstein have had extraordinary exposure.

She also accused A-list supporters of the MeToo movement of putting on a staged performance.

Greer's comments came after she said the accusers of disgraced media mogul Harvey Weinstein (pictured) could become 'career rapees'

The Hollywood-driven campaign began after more than 80 women accused Weinstein of rape, assault and harassment. He denied all allegations of wrongdoing.

In her latest controversial remarks, Miss Greer bemoaned women who do not stand up for themselves during an assault, saying they simply cry for help and dont take charge.

Why have we all become so timid? she said. Someone puts their hand inside our clothes and we ask for help. Help, help! The holy ghost is not coming.

She also expressed concern about those who want to lower the burden of proof in rape cases to increase the chances of prosecution.

She said it would risk leaving young men in particular with damaged life prospects.

If it was your son, would you be happy to discover that the burden of proof had been lightened?, she asked. If you look over the whole world spectrum of what is sexual offence, its completely confusing.Children as young as six are being targeted by ice dealers who are setting up shop outside schools and offering children sample packs of the drug.

'It's out there and it's out there by force,' Andrea Simmons, a former addict and current founder of Australian Anti Ice Campaign, told Daily Mail Australia.

Children are being confused and tricked into taking strong drugs 'like it's no big deal' and girls as young as six years old are being offered 'lolly forms' of the drug, Ms Simmons said.

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Methamphetamine is being aimed at Australia's most vulnerable as former addicts and reports say dealers are preying outside schools and offering children sample of packs of the drug

Children are being confused and tricked into taking strong drugs 'like it's no big deal,' Ms Simmons said. A pipe (pictured) which was used to get a 'hit' of the drug

'Kids don't understand how it's [ice] made, what's in it or the consequences of taking it'.

'A 16-year-old student I know went online and figured out how to make it [ice]. I know other kids who can order ice online.'

Anecdotal reports of increasing ice usage among Australian children is starting to match up with the research.

Australia's National Ice Taskforce indicated the number of children between 14 and 19 years of age who are dependent on ice has tripled over the space of five years.

The number of regular or dependent users aged 15 to 24 years old more than doubled from 21,000 users to 59,000 over the past five years.

That's an average of 27 new young ice users every single day over that time, a figure the task-force says is likely to be understated.

'It's out there and it's out there by force,' Andrea Simmons (pictured), a former addict and current founder of Australian Anti Ice Campaign , told Daily Mail Australia

'We continue to be reactive to the problem but we need a proactive approach,' Ms Simmons said.

She founded the Australian Anti Ice Campaign in order to educate the more vulnerable segments of the population and visits schools across the country to spread awareness of rising drug dependency in Australia's youth.

It's a program Ms Simmons says is modeled off The Meth Project, a U.S. program which successfully decreased the number of methamphetamine users by employing reformed addicts to educate young people.

'We need to warn our youth that ice is like no other drug, and that they should never touch it,' Glenn Ivers of Australian Anti-Ice Campaign told Daily Mail Australia.

'These are our kids. The cost to society is huge'.

'A Canadian study, Drug Free Kids Canada, found it costs the Canadian government $450,000 per drug addicted youth,' Mr Ivers said.

Ice use in Australia is at its highest levels and is increasing, particularly among Australia's youngest population where the damage can be felt hardest.

The Queensland high school students said they had no idea what was in the drug ice. 'I didn't know there even was so much stuff put into one piece of rock,' one said

Ice use in Australia is at its highest levels and is increasing, particularly among Australia's youngest population where the damage can be worst

University of South Australia senior lecturer in neuroscience Gabrielle Todd said scans of young ice users' brains revealed the damage was irreparable.

'This scan that we do has been done in tens of thousands of people all across the world and there's been no report of that abnormality ever returning to normal in anyone,' he told The Courier Mail.

Ms Simmons is also concerned about the long term consequences of children using ice.

'We don't have any research on it's long-term breakdown in the brain,' she said. 'What's it going to be like in 30 years time?'

Ms Simmons is concerned about the long term consequences of children using ice. 'We don't have any research on it's long-term breakdown in the brain,' she said

Murray Bridge, located about an hour south-east of Adelaide, has been destroyed by a scourge of methamphetamines, with children in primary school addicted to ice.

'Murray Bridge has a significant issue with drugs, particularly methamphetamine,' Superintendent James Blandford told Nine News.

'People who aren't even in their teenage years, 11, 12 years old are becoming addicted.'

Murray Bridge, located about an hour south-east of Adelaide , has been destroyed by a scourge of methamphetamines, with children in primary school addicted to ice

St George, a tiny farming area in Queensland with a population of just 3,000, is home to an ice epidemic of epic proportions, with the drug ravaging the youngest members of the community.

Children as young as 10 are addicted to the drug, teenagers are being force-fed meth and drug dens forging the deadly substance are operating out of family homes.

One 14-year-old girl was medicated with ice because she complained she was too tired at school each day as her parents' constant drug-fuelled benders were keeping her up at night.

St George, a tiny farming area in Queensland (pictured) with a population of just 3,000, is home to an ice epidemic with the drug ravaging the youngest in the community

The spread of addiction is often hereditary, with ice infiltrating lives from birth.

'There are young children who are experimenting with ice because they are in homes where it is readily available and they're conditioned to the fact that using it is normal,' Margaret Gordon from Ice Breakers in Albany told Daily Mail Australia.

'The youngest person I know who uses it is 11 but I am aware of children starting younger,' she said.

'There are over 400 unborn babies addicted to methamphetamine in Queensland,' Ms Simmons said.

That has meant the Queensland government employed more safety workers on the front line of working with children who are either born addicted to meth or have a significantly higher chance of developing a drug dependency.

Alarmingly, the purity of ice is increasing. In 2013-14, every state in Australia reported an increase in the annual median purity of methamphetamine, Australia's National Household Drug Survey reported.A pregnant mother-of-four accused of masterminding the brazen daylight execution of a criminal lawyer allegedly spied on him having coffee at a Sydney cafe on the afternoon he was shot dead in front of horrified customers.

Police allege Analosa Ah Keni, 35, paid a hitman to murder Ho Ledinh, 65, and was there to oversee the killer being handed a green jacket and a water bottle - which were crucial clues in the investigation that led to her arrest.

She allegedly drove past the Happy Cup cafe in Bankstown, southwest Sydney, to conduct surveillance on Mr Ledinh less than an hour before he was shot three times from point blank range on January 23.

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Pregnant mother-of-four Analosa Ah Keni, 35, is accused of spying on Ho Ledinh (pictured with wife Ngo Thu Huong and two of their three children) moments before his murder, which she allegedly masterminded

Police allege she paid a hitman to murder Mr Ledinh, 65, and was there to oversee the killer (pictured) being handed a green jacket and a water bottle - which were crucial clues in the investigation that led to her arrest

She allegedly drove past the Happy Cup cafe in Bankstown, southwest Sydney, to conduct surveillance on Mr Ledinh less than an hour before he was shot three times from point blank range on January 23 (scene pictured)

Ms Ah Keni was arrested on the Hume Highway in Marulan, New South Wales, on March 8 and charged with murder.

Court documents revealed on Wednesday allege that she waited in a Bankstown shop while father-of-five Mr Ledinh was executed with a handgun in broad daylight, Nine News reported.

The documents state she received a phone call shortly after the deed was done, before jumping into her van, which she supplied as a getaway vehicle for the gunman.

Pictures of a black pistol - similar to the gun used in the murder, which hasn't been recovered - were found on her phone, police alleged in the court documents.

Ms Ah Keni was arrested on the Hume Highway in Marulan, New South Wales, on March 8 and charged with Mr Ledinh's (pictured) murder

Court documents revealed on Wednesday allege that she waited in a Bankstown shop while father-of-five Mr Ledinh was executed with a handgun in broad daylight (scene pictured)

The documents state she received a phone call shortly after the deed was done, before jumping into her van, which she supplied as a getaway vehicle for the gunman (scene pictured)

Detectives wearing forensic gloves picked up numerous water bottles and sorted them into brown paper bags after the shooting in January

In CCTV footage handed to investigators, the mystery gunman could be seen taking a swig out of a water bottle prior to the brazen shooting

The photos of the pistol were allegedly sent to another person before the murder.

Ms Ah Keni told officers after her arrest that she had no recollection of what she was doing when Mr Ledinh was murdered, the documents state.

Court documents also revealed Ms Ah Keni is four months pregnant and has been 'experiencing difficulties' in a prison clinic since her arrest.

Mr Ledinh, a father to two young children, staggered to the floor and died in front of horrified witnesses after he was shot by a gunman wearing a hi-vis top.

A squad of detectives baging up drink bottles in January during murder investigations

Ms Ah Keni told officers after her arrest that she had no recollection of what she was doing when Mr Ledinh (pictured with his wife and children) was murdered, the documents state

Mr Ledinh (pictured with wife Ngo Thu Huong), a father to two young children, staggered to the floor and died in front of horrified witnesses after he was shot by a gunman wearing a hi-vis top

Despite their best efforts, paramedics and his close friend Huu - crying 'say something, please!' - could not revive him.

Ms Ah Keni's arrest comes three weeks after police arrested the alleged gunman, Arthur Kelekolio, 38.

The Sydney man was arrested at Sydney International Airport last month over the alleged murder, as he attempted to board a flight to Bali.

His lawyer, Adam Houda, didn't apply for bail on behalf of Kelekolio and it was formally refused by magistrate Les Mabbutt, and the matter was adjourned to April 11.

Ms Ah Keni's arrest comes three weeks after police arrested the alleged gunman, Arthur Kelekolio (pictured), 38

Police will allege Kelekolio (pictured) was the man who shot Mr Ledinh and fled the scene at Happy Cup cafe

Friends of Mr Ledinh said he was a good lawyer but a bad businessman, and records showed he was owing significant sums of money.

His wife Ngo Thu Huong, 30, was in Vietnam with the couple's two young children at the time of his death.

Following the targeted attack, officers said they would be looking into Mr Ledinh's organised crime clients as part of their investigation, with the Homicide Squad setting up Strike Force Eugene to investigate the shooting.

The father-of-five was one of the solicitors who represented Philip Nguyen, the man jailed over the killing of Sydney police constable Bill Crews in 2010.A kidnapped Queensland man has been tortured at a Brisbane unit and forced to demand a ransom from a family member.

Police say Nicholas Seabrook and Jaiden Simpson trapped the 40-year-old at a Mount Gravatt unit complex for several hours until the relative he contacted called police, who rescued the man and arrested the pair on Wednesday afternoon.

Police also found firearms, ammunition and drugs at the unit, and that the man was assaulted physically throughout the day on Tuesday.

The man was allegedly held against his will in a Broadwater Road unit, where he was hit with a gun and forced to organise a bank transfer with a relative

The man was allegedly held against his will in a Broadwater Road unit, where he was hit with a gun and forced to organise a bank transfer with a relative.

After the relative was contacted, police were alerted to the alleged kidnapping and were 'able to carry out investigations' to find the man, according to a Queensland Police statement.

A Queensland Police spokeswoman told Daily Mail Australia the ransom was paid.

The victim suffered cuts and bruising during the alleged kidnapping, but did not require medical attention.

It is alleged weapons, ammunition and drugs were found by police during a search of the unit.

A 36-year-old man from Mount Gravatt and a 21-year-old from Manly were due to appear in Beenleigh Magistrates Court on Thursday.

Seabrook had his matter adjourned until April 26 and there was no application for bail, news.com.au reported.

Co-accused Jaiden Simpson was yet to appear in court.

They have been charged with one count each of kidnapping for ransom, two counts each of assault occasioning bodily harm and torture and other offences.Boris Johnson has challenged Theresa Mays record on law and order by blaming her policies for a spike in violent crime including knife attacks in London.

At the weekly Cabinet meeting on Tuesday he criticised her decision to dramatically reduce the use of stop-and-search while she was Home Secretary.

The Foreign Secretary told the Prime Minister that more stop-and-search was needed to deal with the recent increase in crime, saying the policy had helped keep offending down when he was London mayor.

Boris Johnson has challenged Theresa Mays record on law and order by blaming her policies for a spike in violent crime including knife attacks in London

The pointed exchange over crime policy was reported in The Spectator. A former Home Office civil servant told the magazine there was little evidence to back up Mrs Mays claims that black men were more likely to be targeted by police for stop-and-search. Alasdair Palmer said the departments own research showed this not to be the case, once it had adjusted for who was present on the streets when the police were stopping and searching.

Damningly, he said that Mrs Mays aides deliberately ignored this point and went ahead with the restrictions anyway.

As Home Secretary, Mrs May toughened rules around the polices use of stop-and-search, saying in 2014 that the system was unfair, especially for young black men.

The number of stops has gone down from 1.2million in 2009 to 300,000 last year.

But Mr Johnson is worried about figures released in January which showed a 14 per cent increase in police-recorded crime. Knife crime is up by even more  21 per cent  while gun crime is up 20 per cent.

Burglary and car crime are also on the rise. In London alone, seven people have been killed in stabbings or shootings in the past week.

One Cabinet minister told The Spectator that the exchange showed the PM and her Foreign Secretary do not get on. They irritate each other, the minister said.

Damningly, he said that Mrs Mays aides deliberately ignored this point and went ahead with the restrictions anyway

Another person at the meeting told The Spectator: Boris thinks stop-and-search is the answer; she thinks she stopped a national scandal.

Mr Johnson argued that stop-and-search was one of the main reasons why London had had a falling knife crime and murder rate at a time when the capitals population was growing.

Mrs May told the Cabinet that the police have all the powers they need when it comes to stop-and-search, and the problem had been that it was being used illegally.The effects of global warming can be seen and touched in Louisiana, where officials have begun buying higher ground to relocate an entire town in a bayou being swallowed by higher seas.

The Louisiana Office of Community Development announced on Tuesday that it will spend $11.7 million on a 515-acre tract of land to relocate about 80 residents from the Isle de Jean Charles.

The island has lost 98 percent of its land area since 1955 as sea levels have risen due to climate change.

Most of the sinking area's residents are Native Americans, as members of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Indians and the United Houma Nation.

Groundbreaking is expected next year at the resettlement project near Schriever in the northern part of the Terrebonne Parish.

The Louisiana Office of Community Development announced on Tuesday that it will spend $11.7 million on a 515-acre tract of land to relocate about 80 residents from the Isle de Jean Charles; This aerial view of Island Road leading to Isle De Jean Charles in Terrebonne Parish, Louisiana was taken on October 24, 2015

 Slide me  These satellite images of Isle de Jean Charles were captured on April 9, 1985 and April 1, 2017; Pay attention to the blue colored areas, which represent water between brown areas of land

The groundbreaking will mark the culmination of many years of planning for people who long survived in isolation along Lousiana's swampy coast.

Some in Isle de Jean Charles are concerned that 2019 may be too long a wait for homes to be built at the location, however.

'We're going to have to go through another hurricane season, maybe two,' said Albert Naquin, chief of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Indians. 'That makes us very, very edgy,' he told The Times-Picayune in December

Isle de Jean Charles has been the full-time home to the band of the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw tribe for more than 170 years, since Native Americans were uprooted from better lands across the young United States during what became known as the Trail of Tears.

Barred by law from buying land elsewhere, these families found swampland that the state considered uninhabitable and made it their home.

In 2016, Isle de Jean Charles became the first community in the US to receive federal assistance for a large-scale retreat from the effects of climate change.

About $48 million was allotted to purchase land, build homes and move the island's remaining people.

Pat Forbes, who directs the state's community development agency, said in a statement that a majority of the island's residents prefer the Terrebonne Parish site for what will become their new home.

'This is not to say that they want to leave the island, but the island is, in effect, leaving them,' Forbes said.

This satellite image of Isle de Jean Charles was captured on February 5, 1963

This satellite image of Isle de Jean Charles was captured on April 1, 2017

The proposed resettlement is closer to stores, schools and health care and is less flood-prone than the island, which has been continually battered by hurricanes and tropical storms.

'Unfortunately, coastal Louisiana is experiencing subsidence, relative sea level rise and coastal land loss faster than anywhere in the country,' Forbes said.

'Fortunately, we're also on the leading edge of resilience-building approaches to adaptation, drawing on innovative science and technology right here in Louisiana.'

Louisiana hopes the resettlement will serve as a model for other coastal communities facing these same risks, while acknowledging the culture of the Native Americans being relocated must remain at the forefront of everyone's minds.

'We also know success depends on due consideration of the island's history, as well as the needs of the residents,' said Mat Sanders, the department's resilience policy and program administrator.

The state agency hosted four community meetings for current and former residents of Isle de Jean Charles to collaborate on the new community's design.

The discussions included site preferences, budget considerations and off-island housing where residents can stay during the transition.

A steering committee of residents and other stakeholders meets with the planning team each month to review the resettlement's progress.

Naquin did not immediately respond on Wednesday to a request for comment.

Messages left for tribal council members of the United Houma Nation, which also is affected by the project, were not immediately returned.For stay-at-home mothers, pensions and students it can be a very easy - and expensive - trap to fall into.

Drivers who categorise themselves as unemployed when they apply for car insurance will pay up to 680 more for their annual policy, according to a report.

Those who are retired who describe themselves as jobless will pay almost 100 more on average.

If they say they are retired they will pay an average of 265.66 for their annual car insurance.

Pensioners who describe themselves as jobless will be charged almost 100 extra on average  taking their bill to 364. Stay-at-home mothers face paying 709 instead of 563, according to an analysis by Moneysupermarket.com

But they will pay 363.95 if they put down that they are unemployed in their application form.

The difference can be more dramatic for students who say they are jobless.

They will pay an average of 677.21 - or 51 per cent more. This equates to an annual premium of 2,005.08, instead of 1,327.87, according to the analysis from comparison website Moneysupermarket.

Housewives who says they are unemployed - rather than describing themselves as a housewife - will pay an average premium of 709.43 instead of 563.04.

This equates to a 146.39 or 26 per cent increase.

The huge hikes might seem deeply unfair but insurers view unemployed drivers as higher risk for a number of reasons.

Car insurance companies look at how often a motorist will be using their vehicle, and view those who are out of work as likely to use their car more frequently to travel in search of work.

Given that the more you drive, the higher the likelihood of you being involved in an accident, car insurance premiums will be higher.

Insurers are also worried unemployed drivers may be more distracted because of their circumstances, so may drive less carefully.

Insurers view unemployed drivers as a higher risk because they may be using their car more to look for work, travel in unfamiliar areas for interviews or not have the cash to maintain their vehicle

Or they may also be driving along roads that they are not familiar with, and trying to find new addresses to attend job interviews.

Unemployed drivers may also be viewed by insurers as less likely to maintain their vehicles, as they will have less spare cash to spend on their car.

 Insurers say the long-term unemployed are also more likely to consider making fraudulent claims.

With car insurance premiums hitting a record high off 574 at the end of last year, motorists are already feeling the squeeze.

 Kevin Pratt, consumer affairs expert at Moneysupermarket said: ' 'It's worth taking your time and exploring your options at each stage of the online journey. For example, if you describe yourself as 'unemployed' when in fact you're a student, you're retired or you stay at home to look after the home and family, you could end up paying up to 50 per cent more for your cover than you need to.'A global manhunt is underway for an 11-year-old boy who was allegedly kidnapped by his mother.

Lauren Smith, from Tirau, New Zealand, fled the country with her son Nicholas Way on 9 February, detectives believe.

Interpol and overseas agencies have joined the desperate search as New Zealand police refuse to comment on reports the pair boarded a plane to Zimbabwe.

An international manhunt is underway for a mother who allegedly kidnapped her 11-year-old son (both pictured)

Ms Smith has been charged with unlawfully taking her son and leaving New Zealand with intent to deprive a parent having the lawful care or charge of a person.

The 40-year-old failed to show up at Hamilton District Court today to face the charge which carries a maximum sentence of seven years.

The boy's father, James Way, declined to comment when contacted by The New Zealand Herald.

It is understood Ms Smith changed her surname back from Way to Smith in 2014 and updated her address to Warwick in the United Kingdom at the same time.

'Police believe Ms Way left the country with her 11-year-old son and we are working with Interpol and overseas law enforcement to locate them,' said Detective Sergeant Terri Wilson of the Hamilton Child Protection Team.

'This is obviously a stressful time for the family and Police are appealing to Ms Smith and anyone close to her to make contact with New Zealand Police in order to ensure that her son is safe and to resolve this matter as soon as possible.

'Ultimately we would like Ms Smith to return back to New Zealand immediately with her son or to contact local law enforcement where she is staying, so that we can facilitate the safe return of her son back to New Zealand.'

Anyone with information on Ms Smith and her son's whereabouts is asked to contact Hamilton Police on (07) 858 6200 or they can report anonymously via Crimestoppers on 0800 555 111.A Muslim journalist has slammed Australia as racist for wanting to rescue white South African farmers who he says 'aren't being persecuted'.

Tabish Talib, a senior producer and presenter with the Qatar-government owned Al Jazeera network, fronted a five-minute editorial video condemning Immigration Minister Peter Dutton.

Despite South Africa's parliament voting last month to seize the land of white farmers without compensation, the New York-based journalist claimed they weren't being targeted.

'What about the "persecuted" white farmers of South Africa that Australia is so desperate to welcome?,' he said.

'Well, the South African government says theyre not being persecuted.'

Talib, whose state-owned employer is based in a Muslim nation with Sharia law, compared Mr Dutton's plan to bring white South African farmers to Australia as refugees with the plight of asylum seekers on Christmas Island and Nauru.

'So why the double standard? What makes white South Africans more deserving of Australias attention?,' he said.

A Muslim journalist has slammed Australia as racist for wanting to rescue white South African farmers who he says 'aren't being persecuted'

Tabish Talib, a senior producer with the Qatar-government owned Al Jazeera network, claimed white South African farmers weren't being persecuted

'The only thing that seems to separate the people trapped in these detention centres from South African farmers is their skin colour.'

His video also featured an asylum seeker at Christmas Island, who fled Afghanistan two years ago, describing Australia as racist for wanting to help South African farmers.

'This is about white supremacy,' he said.

While the video argued white South African farmers were less likely to be murdered than black men, it made no mention of radical Marxist MP Julius Malema who said he wanted to 'cut the throat of whiteness'.

The New York-based journalist claimed white farmers were killed at a small rate (crosses at Ysterberg near Langebaan marking the deaths of white farmers)

His video also featured an asylum seeker at Christmas Island, who fled Afghanistan two years ago, describing Australia as racist for wanting to help South African farmers

The Al Jazeera made no mention of radical Marxist MP Julius Malema who said he wanted to 'cut the throat of whiteness'

The Economic Freedom Fighters firebrand last month moved a motion in South Africa's national parliament in Cape Town to seize land from white farmers, which passed 241 votes to 83.

The policy had the support of the ruling African National Congress, led by new president Cyril Ramaphosa, but it was opposed by the Opposition Democratic Alliance.

Immigration Minister Peter Dutton said the South African farmers were the sorts of migrants he wanted to 'bring into our country'.

'They work hard. They integrate well into Australian society,' he said earlier this month.

Talib was active in the Muslim Student Association at Rutgers University in New Jersey before he graduated in 2012 and joined Al Jazeera at Doha three years later.Early retirement is becoming a fantasy for millions of workers, experts warn.

Higher life expectancy, the demise of final salary pensions and a rising state pension age mean the number of people retiring before 65 has fallen by a quarter in just seven years.

Pensions experts are predicting the death of early retirement as all but a lucky few work into their 70s. In a bleak assessment, savings giant Aviva said that by 2035, almost no-one will give up work before the age of 65.

The Department for Work and Pensions has said hundreds of thousands of over-50s may have to go back to work

Tom Selby, a senior analyst at investments firm A J Bell, said last night: This will be a brutal reality check. The idea of stopping work early is fast becoming a fantasy. The warnings came as:

A senior official at the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) said hundreds of thousands of over-50s may need to return to work because they will not have enough to live off in retirement;

Employment minister Alok Sharma revealed the Government wants employees to be offered mid-life MOTs to tell them how long they have to stay in work to have a comfortable retirement;

MPs were told of plans for a National Retraining Scheme to ensure older workers adapt their skills.

Office for National Statistics figures yesterday showed the number of under-65s in retirement has fallen by 433,000 in the past seven years, from a peak of nearly 1.6 million in 2011 to under 1.2 million today.

The report also showed a record 10.1 million over-50s are in work, including 1.2 million who are over 65. There were fewer than 700,000 over-65s in work ten years ago and just 434,000 in 1998.

Former pensions minister Sir Steve Webb blamed the demise of final salary pension schemes that offered workers a decent income in retirement.

He said: Final salary pensions were very often the means that someone could take income enough to live on at 55, but fewer and fewer people are now reaching that age with such a pension.

It is also thought some parents are unable to retire because they are still supporting their families  particularly children who need the help of the Bank of Mum and Dad to get on the housing ladder.

The state pension age for women is rising to match men at 65 and will increase to 66 for everyone by 2020 before rising further. Government actuaries believe it will reach 70 in the 2050s and 71 in the 2060s.

MPs in Westminster were told of a national retraining plan to keep elderly workers' skills topped up

Alistair McQueen, head of savings and retirement at Aviva, said that by 2035 there may be almost no one giving up work before the age of 65. That would mean nearly everyone born after 1970 will work beyond their 65th birthday.

Duncan Gilchrist, deputy director of fuller working lives at the DWP, said there was a need to raise the financial awareness of people in middle age.

He said the Government wanted to work at getting people fit enough to work for longer  and to allow people to work more flexibly as they get older.

The National Retraining Scheme would be a mechanism to try to make sure that of our skills base the people who dont have current relevant skills are able to go to sectors where there current relevant skills, he added.

Mr Sharma said the DWP will bring out more details on proposed mid-life MOTs later in the year.This is the first time Star Wars fans get to see Prince William and Harry transform into stormtroopers alongside Tom Hardy.

Star John Boyega previously revealed the princes appeared in a scene with him as he is reprimanded while sneaking on to a First Order ship alongside Benicio del Toro, who plays DJ, and Kelly Marie, who plays Rose.

Star Wars fans were left disappointed when the scene failed to make it into the film which was released in December last year.

But now the scene has been uncovered lurking among DVD extras.

Prince William and brother Harry are believed to be behind the stormtrooper masks to the left and right of John Boyega after the British actor confirmed they appeared in a scene with him. Also in the same scene is Tom Hardy, who is believed to be on the far right of this frame

Former Take That singer Gary Barlow was also rumored to be behind one of the stormtrooper masks, though a friend of his later said he appeared in a battle scene toward the end of the film

The scene shows Boyega, who plays Finn, disguised as a First Order captain standing in an elevator with Rose and DJ when a group of stormtroopers enter.

It is believed Prince William and Harry are standing to the left of the frame, since those two troopers are unusually tall.

Actors playing stormtroopers are typically requested to be 5ft 11in so they are a uniform height, but Prince Harry stands at 6ft 1in and William at 6ft 2in.

Boyega also confirmed last year that fellow British actor Tom Hardy appears in the same scene, and fans have pointed out that the stormtrooper who speaks sounds a lot like him.

Meanwhile sources told The Hollywood Reporter that behind another of the white masks in none other than Gary Barlow.

The former Take That singer stands at 5ft 7ins, meaning he could be the stormtrooper on the far right, who appears a little shorter than the others.

However, Gareth Edwards, who directed the Star Wars anthology spin-off Rogue One, told NME that Barlow appeared in a battle scene towards the end of the film.

The scene shows Finn, who used to be a stormtrooper, and his accomplices trying to sneak past the First Order unnoticed when a former colleague recognises him.

Prince William and Harry were pictured at Pinewood studios alongside the Star Wars cast in April 2016 as they filmed The Last Jedi

The brothers couldn't resist having a duel with some lightsabers as they were shown around

Clarence House posted this image on its Instagram with the caption 'Harry made a friend'

Finn asks 'Is there a a problem soldier?', to which the other stormtrooper, believed to be Hardy, replies: 'FN-2187? You don't remember me? I remember you.'

Finn is desperate to keep his plan under wraps and begs the stormtrooper '926 please don't do this'.

But Hardy jokes 'Look at you captain! and gives him an unexpected slap on the bottom.

Meanwhile the Princes' characters stay silent in the background.

Speaking in December 2017 a Star Wars insider told the Mail on Sunday: 'Stormtroopers have to be exactly 5ft 11in. At the time we shot it I think the feeling was that the scene would make the final movie.

'Everyone feels bad that William and Harry lost out on their big moment. However, the scene just didn't work for the final cut so it was left out.'

Anthony Daniels, who plays C-3PO in the Star Wars films, told the newspaper the Princes were great company when they arrived at the studios.

Speaking at the Services To Film gala dinner in London last week, he said: 'I was very enchanted by them  they are absolutely charismatic.'

The Princes were first told they were not in the film at its premiere at the Royal Albert Hall in December, but a source said they were 'still gracious and fun all night'.Sir James Munby (pictured) has called for an overhaul of marriage law and said people would one day laugh at divorce law

Britain's most senior family judge called for an overhaul of marriage law yesterday, saying people would one day laugh at the idea that a man had to support his ex-wife for life.

Sir James Munby called for equality for divorcees when maintenance payments are settled by the courts, highlighting absurd divorce settlements that are unfairly biased against men.

Sir James, who is president of the family division of the High Court, also said cohabitees should have the same status as married couples, and fault-free divorces should be introduced.

He said it had taken too long to rid the law of the Victorian notion that men were in charge in a marriage, and the law was marked by hypocrisy and lack of intellectual honesty.

Sweeping reforms were necessary and inevitable, he claimed, and the lack of a law governing the rights of couples who live together left women condemned to injustice.

But marriage campaigners said the head of the family courts was trying to abolish marriage.

Sir James, who is 69 and due to retire this summer, was also accused of meddling in politics and was urged to quit now.

In a speech to lawyers in Edinburgh, he referred to Victorian judges who regarded women as the weaker sex, adding: Past judicial utterances we now find almost absurd should serve as a terrible warning of how history will, in due course, come to judge the present generation.

Sir James said the changes of the Sixties, including the Pill, legalised abortion and the decriminalisation of homosexuality, had changed the world.

Family life has been transformed, he added, by the rise of multiculturalism and immigration, respect for same-sex unions, and IVF.

He said there had also been a conscious rejection of marriage as an institution.

Sir James added: A vital concern of family law has to be to ensure the extension to transgendered people of the equal protection of the law.

But lawyer Jill Kirby, the former head of the Centre for Policy Studies think-tank, said the reforms were an agenda for the abolition of marriage.

She added: Sir James is saying anyone who supports marriage law is bigoted, intolerant and stuck in the past. He backs the usual politically correct ideas.

Cohabitees would be given the privileges of marriage without showing the commitment of married couples.

Sir James said the changes of the Sixties, including the Pill, had changed the world and highlighted 'absurd' divorce cases biased against men

'He wants to remove fault from marriage break-up, which is unfair to a faithful partner. This is a highly political speech. He should step down.

Harry Benson, of the Marriage Foundation think-tank, said: Change in the law is the responsibility of Parliament, not judges.

Sir James also called for family courts to be opened to public scrutiny and routine reporting to rid ourselves of the relentless and damaging charge that we operate a system of private  some say secret  justice.

Family courts deal with divorce, family break-up and child custody disputes, as well as cases in which children are taken from their parents, and those in which parents harm their children.

While some judgments are made public, judges can stop journalists reporting hearings.President Donald Trump has once again slammed Democrats for refusing to take care of DACA while touting new funds to start his promised wall along the border with Mexico.

Got $1.6 Billion to start Wall on Southern Border, rest will be forthcoming, the president tweeted late Wednesday.

Most importantly, got $700 Billion to rebuild our Military, $716 Billion next year...most ever.

Had to waste money on Dem giveaways in order to take care of military pay increase and new equipment.

Trump tweeted again minutes later: Democrats refused to take care of DACA. Would have been so easy, but they just didnt care. I had to fight for Military and start of Wall.

President Donald Trump has once again slammed Democrats for refusing to take care of DACA while touting new funds to start his promised wall along the border with Mexico

Trump tweeted again minutes later: Democrats refused to take care of DACA. Would have been so easy, but they just didnt care. I had to fight for Military and start of Wall

Trump's tweets about the budget may have been an attempt to shine a spotlight on good news in the midst of stories about the president's alleged affairs with porn stars and his refusal to say anything negative about Russian President Vladimir Putin

Trump's tweets about the budget may have been an attempt to shine a spotlight on good news in the midst of stories about the president's alleged affairs with porn stars and his refusal to say anything negative about Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Stormy Daniels, the adult film star whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, will appear on 60 Minutes this Sunday, CBS announced.

Daniels, through her attorney, alleges that she and Trump had an extramarital affair over 10 years ago.

Earlier on Wednesday, the president also defended his congratulations to Putin on the Russian presidents disputed re-election victory on Wednesday, saying he wants Putin's help in solving crises from North Korea to Syria and beyond.

Trump drew fire from Republicans and Democrats alike for telling reporters on Tuesday that he had congratulated Putin on his re-election and that the two leaders had made tentative plans to meet in the 'not too distant future.'

During his presidential campaign, Trump promised to build a wall along the border with Mexico. The image above shows a section of the new border fence between Mexico and the US under construction in Mexicali

The Washington Post reported that Trump, in his briefing papers to prepare for the phone call with Putin on Tuesday, was specifically warned 'DO NOT CONGRATULATE' the Russian president.

White House officials did not dispute the report, but said whoever leaked it could be subject to dismissal.

Despite the turmoil, Trump could savor the budget agreement, which he is expected to sign.

US congressional budget negotiators said Wednesday they had reached a deal on federal spending for the remainder of fiscal 2018, two days before a deadline to fund the government or risk a shutdown.

The $1.3trillion spending bill was hailed by House Speaker Paul Ryan, Congress's top Republican, as marking 'the beginning of a new era for the United States military,' while Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said it would fulfill Democratic priorities.

It was introduced with precious little time to act.

Government funding expires at midnight Friday night, and the House of Representatives and Senate will need to scramble if both chambers are to pass the measure and get it signed by Trump by the deadline.

The White House later said Trump supported the deal.

It signals an end - or at least a pause - to the deeply partisan feuding over funding that has roiled Congress for months.

Five times lawmakers have had to pass stopgap funding legislation to keep the government's lights on, and twice this year the government was allowed to slip into shutdown.

The $1.3trillion spending bill was hailed by House Speaker Paul Ryan (above), Congress's top Republican, as marking 'the beginning of a new era for the United States military'

A third lapse would be deeply embarrassing for a Republican-controlled Congress facing mid-term elections in November.

The bill sets defense spending levels, including a 2.4 percent raise for troops, at $700billion for the year, an increase of $61billion over the 2017 level.

Trump and other Republicans have repeatedly raised the alarm about the country's military and how it has been severely depleted from budgetary constraints.

Non-defense domestic spending will reach $591billion, an increase of about 10 percent.

Eleventh-hour snags on multiple issues, including immigration enforcement, border security, infrastructure and health care payments, had bogged down the release of the monster measure.

The bill includes nearly $1.6billion for construction of almost 100 miles (160 kilometers) of physical barriers and fencing along the US-Mexico border.

And while it does not include any provisions that defund so-called sanctuary cities, where authorities do not take action against undocumented immigrants who don't commit crimes, it fails to address protections for more than a million immigrants who arrived in the country illegally as children.

Democrats can meanwhile claim increased domestic spending on issues like infrastructure, education and battling the opioid crisis.A Missouri family shared a video of the heartbreaking moment they gathered around the bedside of their loved one to say their goodbyes after he was diagnosed with stage IV cancer.

Mark Foster, of Holden, Missouri, was diagnosed with small cell lung cancer in August 2017, his sister-in-law Kristina Foster said.

'The cancer was so aggressive there was nothing the doctors could do to beat it. ... The family rallied behind him every step of the way,' she posted.

Kristina Foster said Mark was transferred from the hospital to his home in Holden on September 1 of last year so he could spend his final days with his five brothers, his sister and other loved ones.

A Missouri family shared a video of the moment they gathered around the bedside of their loved one to say goodbye

Mark Foster, 51, died in September 2017 from stage IV small cell lung cancer

Mark died at the age of 51 on September 2, 2017.

Kristina Foster said the night before Mark passed the family gathered together to sing Genesis' 'Follow You Follow Me'. Mark loved the song so much that he dedicated it to his twin brother when they were 12 years old.

Kristina Foster captured the moment the family sweetly serenaded Mark on video and posted it to YouTube.

'This was such a beautiful moment and truly shows how important family is and just how fiercely this family loves each other,' she wrote in the caption. 'We may be missing a piece of our heart but this family will always and forever be #fosterstrong.'

Mark, who worked at Rent-A-Center for 19 years, is survived by his wife of nine years and their five children.

This is what family is all about: Kristina Foster, Mark's sister-in-law said the family was by Mark's side every step of the way. Mark is pictured above in the center surrounded by family membersA second man who was trapped in a trench that collapsed at a Victorian building site has died.

Jack Brownlee, 20, died at the Royal Melbourne Hospital on Thursday morning, the day after he was rescued from the collapsed trench at Ballarat, west of Melbourne.

Another man also trapped in the incident died at the scene on Wednesday morning.

The two men were working in a hole at a building site in the city of Ballarat when tragedy struck at around 11am.

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Jack Brownlee (pictured), 20, died at the Royal Melbourne Hospital on Thursday morning, the day after he was trapped in a trench that collapsed at a Victorian building site

Another man also trapped in the incident died at the scene on Wednesday morning (pictured)

A witness told 3AW Radio rescue crews had been working to free Mr Brownlee, who was trapped in the trench.

'There's a new housing estate being built, they're putting in new pipes and he's been trapped,' he said.

'There's a lot of emergency services, some were in the hole with him, they have an excavator there trying to dig in the hole.'

An Ambulance Victoria spokesman said Mr Brownlee was trapped for a 'significant period of time'.

'An Air Ambulance Helicopter will fly the man to the Royal Melbourne Hospital. He has lower body injuries and is in a serious condition,' they said.

WorkSafe attended the scene and will investigate the incident.This is the moment a man's BMW slipped into shark-infested waters when he tried to grab his jet ski at low tide.

The owner of the 5-series sedan had left on the handbrake, only for his luxury car and its trailer to slip down the boat ramp into the Brisbane River on Tuesday night.

Senior Constable Gene Hill from Queensland Police said the BMW then floated away before sinking, after the man had tried to retrieve his jet ski to his trailer at Colmslie Reserve, in Murarrie east of central Brisbane.

The owner of the 5-series sedan had left on the handbrake, only for his luxury car and its trailer to slip down the boat ramp into the Brisbane River on Tuesday night

'Despite gallant and frantic attempts by the owner to jump into the BMW and drive it out at this time, he could not stop the embarrassing inevitable,' he said in a blog post.

'The BMW floated off before swinging around and sinking to the muddy bottom.'

The Brisbane Water Police and Dive Squad were called for help shortly after 7.30pm on Tuesday when it was already dark.

They managed to recover the late-1990s BMW and tow it back to the boat ramp in 'difficult sharky conditions'.

Senior Constable Gene Hill from Queensland Police said the BMW then floated away before sinking, after the man had tried to retrieve his jet ski to his trailer at Colmslie Reserve

Police managed to recover the late-1990s BMW (similar to this 5-series pictured) and tow it back to the boat ramp in 'difficult sharky conditions'.

'This was to the interest and amusement of the crowd of spectators that had gathered to watch the goings on,' Senior Constable Hill said.

He urged boat owners to be careful at low tide.

'Not only could you slip over and hurt yourself, you may also loose your wheels in embarrassing fashion,' the senior constable said.

'The good news is that despite a bruised ego, the owner was not injured and the incident was ruled an unfortunate accident by investigating police.'

The jet ski escaped damage.Tuesday's school shooting in southern Maryland that left the shooter dead and two students wounded increasingly appears to be the action of a lovesick teenager.

Authorities on Wednesday released a few additional details into the shooting at Great Mills High School in St. Mary's County.

Austin Rollins, 17, was killed after shooting a schoolmate, 16-year-old Jaelynn Willey. A school resource officer got there within a minute and fired a shot at Willey, but it's not yet clear whether Rollins was killed by the officer's bullet or took his own life.

A 14-year-old boy, Desmond Barnes, who was shot in the thigh during the encounter was released Wednesday from a hospital. A YouCaring fund has raised more than $16,000 for his medical bills so far.

Police said Wednesday that the female victim in Tuesday's Maryland high school shooting, 16-year-old Jaelynn Willey (right), had recently broken up with the shooter, 17-year-old Austin Rollins (left)

The St. Mary's County Sheriff's Office said Wednesday that Rollins and the girl had been in a relationship that recently ended. Authorities had previously only said that the two had had a relationship of some sort.

The other student injured in the Tuesday shooting was 14-year-old Desmond Barnes (pictured). Barnes has already been discharged from the hospital

'All indications suggest the shooting was not a random act of violence,' police said in a statement.

St. Mary's County Sheriff Tim Cameron said earlier that a precise determination of Rollins' motive may be impossible now that he is dead.

The girl, Jaelynn Willey, was still fighting for her life at the University of Maryland Prince George's Hospital Center. A fundraising page to help Willey's family has raised more than $57,000.

Hospital spokesman Michael Schwartzberg said in an email Wednesday night that she remained in critical condition.

Attempts to reach Rollins' family were unsuccessful.

A day after the eruption of gun violence in one of the sleepy community's schools, the few residents who ventured out amid a snowstorm blanketing the East Coast praised the school resource officer who responded, Deputy First Class Blaine Gaskill.

'He did a very, very good job,' said Sharon Eglinton, manager of a cafe in nearby Leonardtown.

The shooting happened shortly before classes started at the school of 1,600 on Tuesday

Eglinton, herself a Great Mills alumna, noted that Rollins, was by all accounts a good student who had not shown any warning signs. She said she thinks the best way to prevent future school shootings is to install metal detectors at schools.

School resource officer Blaine Gaskill, pictured, has been credited with bringing the shooting to an end in under a minute

'I have no problem paying for it,' she said. 'If you can protect people getting on a plane with metal detectors, you can protect people in schools.'

While investigators are still determining whether Rollins took his own life or was killed by the officer's bullet, Cameron credited Gaskill with preventing any more loss of life.

Cameron said Gaskill, a six-year veteran with SWAT team training, responded within a minute and fired his weapon simultaneously with a final shot fired by Rollins. The officer was unharmed.

Gaskill was praised a couple of years ago for his handling of a confrontation with an armed suspect.

A Maryland man was charged in 2016 after he was accused of confronting Gaskill with a gun at an apartment in an incident captured on body camera video. Gaskill can be heard in the video giving several commands to drop the gun before the man eventually complies.

A student from Great Mills High School is comforted by a guardian after being picked up from nearby Leonardtown High School on Tuesday

The Enterprise, a local newspaper, reports Cameron said at the time that Gaskill had 'used exemplary judgment.'

On Wednesday, authorities said the Glock handgun used in the shooting was legally owned by Rollins' father. In Maryland it is illegal for anyone under age 21 to possess a handgun unless it is required for their employment.

People who knew Rollins were trying to make some kind of sense of Tuesday's hometown horror.

'Never in a million years could I have imagined he would do something like this,' said Adlai Traver, 18, who attended Great Mills and knew all three kids involved in the shooting. He recalled playing cards with Rollins during band class when the fellow percussionists had a little down time during class. 'I was in the car when I heard it was him. I pulled over and almost puked.'The anticipated Stormy Daniels interview with 60 Minutes will air this Sunday, CBS has announced.

Daniels, the porn star whose lawyer says she had a sexual affair with Donald Trump, will break her silence in a sit-down with CNN's Anderson Cooper, who is a contributor to the CBS news magazine.

Trump has denied having an affair with Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford.

In a 10-second teaser video released by CBS, Cooper is seen greeting Daniels as she enters the interview room.

'Nice to meet you. Have a seat,' Cooper tells her.

The anticipated Stormy Daniels interview with 60 Minutes will air this Sunday, CBS has announced

Daniels, the porn star whose lawyer says she had a sexual affair with Donald Trump , will break her silence in a sit-down with CNN's Anderson Cooper (right)

The popular news anchor is then seen asking Daniels a question. She doesn't respond.

The planned interview was first announced earlier this month after her lawyer, Michael Avenatti, tweeted a photo of himself, Daniels, and Cooper.

The tweet included four Twitter account addresses: @mavenatti, @StormyDaniels, @andersoncooper, and @60Minutes.

'Daniels talks to Anderson Cooper about the relationship she says she had with Mr. Trump in 2006 and 2007, revealing details that bring her story up to the present,' CBS said in a promo for the interview released on Wednesday.

'It is the first and only television interview in which she speaks about the alleged relationship.'

Although the interview was apparently recorded two weeks ago, there had been speculation as to why CBS waited until this Sunday to put the interview on air.

Some believed that the network was wrestling with potential legal obstacles to the airing of the interview.

TICK TOCK: Stormy Daniels' lawyer, Michael Avenatti, tweeted out an image of his client flanked by himself and Anderson Cooper earlier this month

60 Minutes, which is known for its deep investigative pieces, is digging into the situation that this week brought the alleged 'hush' payoff to a porn star who says she had an affair with the president into the White House briefing room.

Cooper interviewed Avenatti on his CNN program last Wednesday evening.

It was not immediately known how the interview might intersect with a gag order ordered by an arbitrator.

It was revealed this week that Trump's personal attorney, Michael Cohen, obtained a secret restraining order in a private arbitration proceeding barring Daniels from disclosing 'confidential information' related to a nondisclosure agreement she signed in October 2016.

Her lawyer, Avenatti, revealed the text of the NDA when he filed a lawsuit in California arguing that the agreement was no longer operative because Trump never signed it and because, he argued, Cohen violated it by confirming its existence.

In this Feb. 11, 2007 file photo, Stormy Daniels arrives for the 49th Annual Grammy Awards in Los Angeles

CNN's Anderson Cooper also reports for 60 Minutes under his contract

On social media, Daniels appeared to acknowledge an alleged affair with Trump.

She tweeted on Tuesday that the future president 'lied' and 'broke the law' to cover up their affair.

An online critic wrote that Daniels should 'disappear' because '[n]o one cares you were a slut and slept with POTUS 12 yrs ago.'

She responded: 'Technically I didn't sleep with the POTUS 12 years ago. There was no sleeping (hehe) and he was just a goofy reality TV star.'

'But I digress...People DO care that he lied about it, had me bullied, broke laws to cover it up, etc.,' she added.

'And PS...I am NOT going anywhere. xoxoxo.'

On social media, Daniels appeared to acknowledge an alleged affair with Trump. She continued her weeks-long needling of Trump, saying that she's 'NOT going anywhere'

Clifford's lawyer claimed earlier in the day that she had passed a polygraph exam in May 2011 on the subject of whether she had bedded Trump.

Polygraphs, commonly called 'lie detector' tests, don't measure the truth of what a subject says. Instead they track changes in heartbeat, breathing, perspiration, blood pressure and other indicators that proponents describe as evidence of deception.

NBC News reported Tuesday that Clifford was asked by 'Life & Style' magazine to submit to the test seven years ago when she offered to sell an exclusive story of her torrid affair with the future president.

The examiner who performed the test concluded that there was a 99 per cent chance she was telling the truth about having unprotected sex with the real estate tycoon.

The White House has said Trump denies every allegation of sexual misconduct against the president, including those lodged by Clifford.

Avenatti has argued that the NDA should be considered 'null and void,' and has blasted Cohen for 'threats' and intimidation of his client.

Trump and Daniels aka Stephanie Clifford pose together in 2006; the White House says he already won a case in arbitration against her and that he's denied the accusations of an affairA woman prescribed an 'miracle acne cure' drug with a host of dangerous side effects was hospitalised after the chemical concoction left her suffering acute pancreatitis.

Stephanie Spencer, a Queensland university student, developed the severe condition just six weeks after being prescribed Roaccutane, a drug linked with five suicides in the last five years in Australia, Nine News reported.

The 21-year-old started her course in November following a recommendation from her dermatologist, who said her acne would disappear after six months on the drug.

Stephanie Spencer (pictured) was prescribed Roaccutane for her acne, but ended up being rushed to hospital with acute pancreatitis

Ms Spencer was warned she might experience some depression, be more prone to sunburn and have dry skin, but said she wasn't told she could develop pancreatitis.

A month and a half into her prescription, the student returned blood test results with high levels of sugar and C-Reactive protein (CRP), indicating inflammation.

Despite the abnormality, Ms Spencer said her dosage was not altered, instead, she was told to sign up for the gym because she was at risk of a heart attack.

'The doctor said I was at risk of having a heart attack or a stroke and he recommended I join a gym to lose weight, even though I only weigh 60kg,' she said.

Ms Spencer developed severe stomach pain over night, but when she went to her GP the next day, she was told to take Panadeine Forte for her 'period pain'.

Ms Spencer said her dosage was not altered after returning abnormal blood test results, and she was instead told to sign up for the gym because she was at risk of a heart attack

But when the painkillers wore off, she knew something was seriously wrong.

'I was in so much pain that I couldn't move and I started vomiting up blood,' she said.

Soon after, she was rushed to Ipswich Hospital where she was told she had pancreatitis because of Roaccutane.

'They put me on a drip when I was at the hospital and I wasn't allowed to eat for 3-4 days.'

Ms Spencer said had she of known she could develop the potentially fatal condition, she would never have decided to start taking it.

An extensive list of side effects (pictured) are noted on the product's website, including depression, suicidal thoughts and vomitting

She also claimed her dermatologist gave her inadequate information, having not mentioned the potential severity of the drug's side effects.

An extensive list of side effects are noted on the product's website, including depression, suicidal thoughts and vomitting.

Patients 'experiencing abdominal pain, rectal bleeding or severe (hemorrhagic) diarrhea should discontinue Roaccutane immediately,' part of it states.

Ms Spencer's mother said she was angry her daughter had been prescribed the 'last resort drug' at her first appointment without trying any wipes or creams first.The House passed a massive $1.3 trillion budget bill on Thursday, moving a bill that would avert a shutdown and keep the government running until the end of September.

The House easily approved the 2,232 page bill that was unveiled only Wednesday night.

It pours huge sums into Pentagon programs and domestic initiatives ranging from building roads to combatting the nation's opioid abuse crisis, but left Congress in stalemate over shielding young Dreamer immigrants from deportation and curbing surging health insurance premiums.

The vote was 256-167, a one-sided tally that underscored the popularity of a budget deal among party leaders that provided enough money to address many of both sides' priorities.

Further highlighting how eager lawmakers were to claim victories, the House approved the 2,232-page package - which stood around a foot tall on some legislators' desks - less than 17 hours after negotiators released it publicly.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Ky., left, speaks with House Speaker Paul Ryan of Wis., right, behind closed doors following a Congressional Gold Medal Ceremony honoring the Office of Strategic Services in Emancipation Hall on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, March 21, 2018

The next step was Senate passage, which was assured  although there was a chance opposition could still delay passage past the deadline.

Republican congressional leaders are rushing to advance 2,2322-page bill before government funding is set to expire at midnight Friday, which would cause yet another government shutdown.

The House passed a rule to take up the bill late Thursday morning on a vote of 211-209. There were howls in the chamber after the chair gaveled down the vote after time had expired, with some lawmakers still apparently waiting to vote.

Many House GOP conservatives blasted the compromise. Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio called it 'The worst bill I have seen in my ten years in Congress.'

The narrow margin reflected the opposition from some House GOP conservatives, who risked voting against leadership on the procedural issue due to their concerns with the bill.

The White House conveyed President Trump's support for the deal in a statement Wednesday, though Trump griped about it on Twitter. The deal contains $1.6 billion for 'physical borders and technology,' but not all of that can be used on his border wall.

MAYBE TRY DOUBLE-SIDED? Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky said it took his staff two hours to print the bill. If he doesn't agree to waive Senate procedures Friday, it could force a shutdown

'Had to waste money on Dem giveaways in order to take care of military pay increase and new equipment.'

Trump had initially demanded $25 billion for the border wall.

Republican Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky  who helped bring about a brief government shutdown in February  could cause the plan to blow up if he decides to filibuster passage beyond the deadline.

Paul was dismissive about the deal on Twitter. ''It's a good thing we have Republican control of Congress or the Democrats might bust the budget caps, fund planned parenthood and Obamacare, and sneak gun control without due process into an Omni ... wait, what?' Paul tweeted.

He kept up the criticism Thursday morning.

'FYI- The 2200+ page, budget-busting Omnibus has been printing for two hours in my office and still isnt done,' Paul wrote.

'Shame, shame. A pox on both Houses - and parties. $1.3 trillion. Busts budget caps. 2200 pages, with just hours to try to read it,' he wrote in another post.

Another tweet featured Paul with a long face holding the entire bill in printed form.

Republicans will need Democratic support to get the deal through the Senate.

Further complicating matters is the funeral of the late Rep. Louise Slaughter, who was the top House Democrat on the Rules Committee. She died at 88. House members will be attending her funeral, creating a window when votes can't occur if there is a snafu.

RISE AND SHINE: Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (C) walks through Statuary Hall prior to gaveling open the House in the US Capitol in Washington, DC, USA, 22 March 2018. The house is planning to vote on the 1.3 trillion USD, 2,232-page 'omnibus' spending bill today so the Senate can take it up before the looming government shutdown on Friday

MEET THE NEW BOSS: Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., is met by reporters in the Capitol. He mocked the process that brought the massive bill toward a vote with barely any time to read it

Conservatives were already venting about the process, having taken control of Congress after attacking the way Democrats jammed through massive bills like Obamacare.

This process looks really bad; it looks swampy, Dan Holler, a spokesman for the conservative group Heritage Action, the Hill reported.

Congressional leaders have finalized a sweeping $1.3 trillion budget bill that substantially boosts military and domestic spending but leaves behind young immigrant 'Dreamers,' Trump some of his border wall money and takes only incremental steps to address gun violence.

As negotiators stumbled toward an end-of-the-week deadline to fund the government or face a federal shutdown, House Speaker Paul Ryan dashed to the White House amid concerns Trump's support was wavering. Although some conservative Republicans balked at the size of the spending increases and the rush to pass the bill, the White House said the president backed the legislation.

Trump himself sounded less than enthused, tweeting late Wednesday: 'Had to waste money on Dem giveaways in order to take care of military pay increase and new equipment.'

SPEED READ: The bill came in at 2,232 pages

THIS COULD BE A BARRIER: The deal provides $1.6 billion for 'physical barriers and technology' but only $641 million for Trump's border wall

Talks had stretched into Wednesday evening before the 2,232-page text was finally released.

'No bill of this size is perfect,' Ryan said. 'But this legislation addresses important priorities and makes us stronger at home and abroad.'

Leaders hoped to start voting as soon as Thursday. A stopgap measure may be needed to ensure federal offices aren't hit with a partial shutdown at midnight Friday when funding for the government expires.

Negotiators have been working for days - and nights - on details of the bill, which is widely viewed as the last major piece of legislation likely to move through Congress in this election year. Lawmakers in both parties sought to attach their top priorities.

Two of the biggest remaining issues had been border wall funds and a legislative response to gun violence after the clamor for action following recent school shootings, including the one in Parkland, Florida.

On guns, leaders agreed to tuck in bipartisan provisions to bolster school safety funds and improve compliance with the criminal background check system for firearm purchases. The bill states that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention can do research on gun violence, though not advocacy, an idea Democrats pushed.

House Speaker Ryan met with the president this afternoon to discuss the emerging funding bill. 'They had a good conversation about the wins delivered for the president, and he is supportive of the bill,' said Ryan's office

But there was no resolution for Dreamers, the young immigrants who have been living in the United States illegally since childhood but whose deportation protections are being challenged in court after Trump tried to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA.

Democrats temporarily shut down the government earlier this year as they fought for that protection. But the issue only rose to a discussion item when Trump made a late-hour push for a deal in exchange for $25 billion in border wall funds.

Instead, Trump is now poised to win $1.6 billion for barriers along the border, but none of it for the new prototypes he recently visited in California. Less than half the nearly 95 miles of border construction, including levees along the Rio Grande in Texas, would be for new barriers, with the rest for repair of existing segments.

In one win for immigrant advocates, negotiators rejected Trump's plans to hire hundreds of new Border Patrol and immigration enforcement agents.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell also discussed the deal with Trump Wednesday

'We are disappointed that we did not reach agreement on Dreamer protections that were worthy of these patriotic young people,' said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.

The emerging plan removes a much-debated earmark protecting money for a rail tunnel under the Hudson River. The item was a top priority of Trump's most powerful Democratic rival, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, but Trump vowed to veto the bill over the earmark. Under the legislation, the project would remain eligible for funding, however, and a Schumer aide said it was likely to win well more than half of the $900 million sought for the project this year.

The core purpose of the bill is to increase spending for military and domestic programs that have been sharply squeezed under a 2011 agreement that was supposed to cap spending. It gives Trump a huge budget increase for the military, while Democrats scored wins on infrastructure and other domestic programs that they failed to get under President Barack Obama.

That largesse has drawn opposition from some fiscal conservatives and could make passage a potentially tricky process.

Last month, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul triggered a brief government shutdown over his objections to the deficit spending. On Wednesday, he tweeted his opposition to the emerging legislation, known as an 'omnibus.'

'It's a good thing we have Republican control of Congress or the Democrats might bust the budget caps, fund planned parenthood and Obamacare, and sneak gun control without due process into an Omni ... wait, what?' Paul tweeted.

Most essential was support from Trump, who has been known to threaten to veto legislation even when his team is involved in the negotiations.

Word of Trump's discontent sent Ryan to the White House, where he was invited to a face-to-face with the president, with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on the phone.

White House aides said the president's support was never in doubt, but one senior White House official said the president was concerned that details of the package weren't being presented as well as they could be, both to members of Congress and the public.

The group discussed how they could better sell the package, said the official, who was granted anonymity to discuss the private conversation.

The Capitol is seen before dawn Wednesday after a night of negotiating on the government spending bill, in Washington, March 21, 2018. Talks over a $1.3 trillion omnibus bill are almost complete as the White House and Capitol Hill Democrats ironed out deals on a first round of funding for President Donald Trump's U.S.-Mexico border wall. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

Senate Minority Leader Sen. Chuck Schumer of N.Y., center, walks with Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., right, as they leave a news conference with Democratic leaders, Tuesday, March 20, 2018, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

'The president and the leaders discussed their support for the bill,' said White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, adding that it would fund Trump priorities such as wall construction, add money to combat the opioid crisis and provide new infrastructure spending.

Both parties touted $4.6 billion in total funding to fight the nation's opioid addiction epidemic, a $3 billion increase. More than $2 billion would go to strengthen school safety through grants for training, security measures and treatment for the mentally ill. Medical research at the National Institutes of Health, a longstanding bipartisan priority, would receive a record $3 billion increase to $37 billion. Funding was also included for election security ahead of the 2018 midterms.

Child care and development block grants would receive a huge $2.4 billion increase to $5.2 billion. And an Obama-era transportation grant program known as TIGER would see its budget tripled to $1.5 billion. Head Start for preschoolers would get a $610 million boost, while an additional $2.4 billion would go for child care grants.A Turnbull Government MP has broken ranks with Immigration Minister Peter Dutton and warned South Africans will starve if white farmers are allowed into Australia as refugees.

Nationals backbacker Andrew Broad, a former Victorian Farmers Federation president, said there would be a 'humanitarian crisis' of food shortages without European agricultural expertise.

'If we take away the farmers from South Africa, we rob them of the capacity to farm that ground and ultimately feed the population,' he told the ABC on Wednesday.

A Turnbull Government MP has broken ranks with Immigration Minister Peter Dutton and warned South Africans will starve if white farmers are allowed into Australia as refugees (protesters in Cape Town highlighting farm murders)

'So we'd be better to be working with the South African Government to make them value those white farmers, rather than trying to help them flee.'

The 42-year-old former sheep and wheat farmer, who has visited South Africa, said black South Africans lacked farming skills.

He compared the situation to that in neighbouring Zimbabwe after former dictator Robert Mugabe's henchmen seized white-owned land in 2000.

'The great lesson from Zimbabwe is when you value your farmers, you have food on the supermarket shelves,' Mr Broad said.

Nationals backbacker Andrew Broad said there would be a 'humanitarian crisis' of food shortages without European agricultural expertise

Liberal Democrats senator David Leyonhjelm said Australia needed to pressure the South African government to crack down on thugs assaulting white farmers

'The black South African farmers certainly have not proved themselves.

'They need the skillset of the white south African farmers if they're going to have any chance of feeding the population they've got.'

Liberal Democrats senator David Leyonhjelm said Australia needed to pressure the South African government to crack down on thugs assaulting white farmers.

'Lock them up and tell everyone we need our farmers, all farmers black or white,' he told Sky News on Thursday.

'Because if we don't have farmers, we don't have farmers we don't eat.'

Immigration Minister Peter Dutton is doubling down on his call for white South African farmers to be brought to Australia under humanitarian visas, in the face left-wing criticism

Immigration Minister Peter Dutton is doubling down on his call for white South African farmers to be brought to Australia under humanitarian visas, in the face left-wing criticism.

'Some of the crazy lefties at the ABC, and on The Guardian, HuffingtonPost, can express concern and draw mean cartoons about me and all the rest of it,' he told Sydney radio 2GB presenter Ray Hadley on Thursday.

'They dont realise how completely dead they are to me.

'All the criticism over the last week has meant nothing to me.'A teenage girl is fighting a rare condition that makes her bones grow to four times the normal size and may soon close off her airways.

Tori Punch, from Bundaberg, Queensland, has proteus syndrome which causes overgrowth of bones, skin and other tissues.

The 15-year-old's life is under threat as her neck bones continue to expand, gradually narrowing her windpipe.

The teenager is one of only 200 in the world to be diagnosed with the condition, which is said to affect one in 1million people.

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Battle: A 15-year-old girl is fighting a rare condition that makes her bones grow to four times the size they should be and may soon close off her airways

Her mother Wendy Punch Savill told Daily Mail Australia Tori was first diagnosed when she was 14-months-old but in the last 12 months the condition has progressively worsened.

'Within the last 12 month period, we had testing done and everything was fine,' she said.

'Doctors were concerned about her airways but not like they are now.

'A month ago we had more scans and X-rays done and the X-rays came back showing the bones in the back of her neck are four times the size of what they should be, restricting her airway to the size of a baby's.'

Ms Savill said when she was three-months pregnant with Tori, scans showed there was fluid on her brain but by the time she was 14-months-old, her legs began to bow.

Tori Punch (pictured), from Bundaberg, Queensland, has Proteus Syndrome which causes overgrowth of bones, skin and other tissues

The teenager (pictured with her mother) is one of only 200 in the world to be diagnosed with the condition, which is said to affect one in 1million people

Tori is currently living at home but has to have regular tests in hospital which involve her mother driving her to Brisbane

Tori, who has the brain of a seven-year-old, has had two operations in recent months to attempt to fix her legs.

'Doctors tried to straighten her bones but they grew abnormally again within two months,' she said.

'She's wheelchair bound and can't walk.'

Affecting very few people, the mother said Tori has one of the worst cases of the syndrome in the world.

'At the moment she's pretty close to being at the worse end of the scale,' Ms Savill said.

'We have spoken to a doctor in the UK ... because most doctors (here) don't know much about it.'

Life expectancy for the disease is anywhere from nine months to 29 years.

Ms Savill and her husband, who have five other children, have become full time carers for their daughter and say Tori doesn't understand much of what is happening.

While Tori can do some things alone like reading and learning to write, her mother has to change her nappies and bathe her 'precious angel'.

'She's just like her normal self but gets exhausted easily,' Ms Savill told Daily Mail Australia.

Wendy Punch Savill said Tori (pictured when younger) was first diagnosed when she was 14-months-old but in the last 12 months the condition has progressively worsened.

Tori, who has the brain of a seven-year-old, has had two operations in recent months to attempt to fix her legs

'Doctors tried to straighten her bones but they grew abnormally again within two months,' her mother said

Ms Savill (left) and her husband, who have five other children, have become full time carers for their daughter and say Tori (right) doesn't understand much about the sydrome

'We've been advised to notice if there's any difference in her breathing and to advise paramedics not to try and put breathing tubes down her throat because her airways are too narrow.'

The family are travelling more than 300km to Brisbane on Monday so the 15-year-old can take part in a sleep study as well as have more scans done.

Ms Savill started a fundraising page to help pay for the youngster's medical costs.

While they don't know how much money is needed, a wheelchair accessible van is one of the things they will need to buy.

Tori is currently living at home but has to have regular tests in hospital which involve long drives to Brisbane.

Ms Savill said she finds it hard to tell when her daughter is in pain because she has a high threshold - but said that she's normally upbeat.

'Tori is usually a pretty happy kid and she's been loving school,' she told News Corp.

Ms Savill has set up a Facebook page called Prayers for Tori to keep friends and family updated.

You can donate here.A former police officer who shot dead an unarmed Australian yoga teacher has been granted bail.

Mohamed Noor, 32, appeared in court after being charged with murder and manslaughter over the killing of Justine Damond, 40, on July 15 last year.

The former Minneapolis police officer left Hennepin Country Public Safety Facility with his attorney Thomas Plunkett after posting $400,000 bail on Wednesday night in Prior Lake, Minnesota.

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Mohamed Noor, 32, made a court appearance after being charged with murder and manslaughter over the killing of Justine Damond, 40, on July 15 last year

The former Minneapolis police officer left Hennepin Country Public Safety Facility with his attorney Thomas Plunkett after posting $400,000 bail on Wednesday night

Many of Noor's supporters attended his hearing, and one said afterwards the police officer has been treated unfairly and was 'just doing what he was trained to do'

Many of Noor's supporters attended his hearing, and one said afterwards the police officer has been treated unfairly and was 'just doing what he was trained to do'.

'Mohamed Noor is an immigrant, African American Muslim, he's got so many strikes,' supporter and community activist Kiman Ugas said outside court.

'He killed a white woman, that's why he's there today. The system failed him.'

Unarmed Australian yoga teacher Justine Damond died after she was shot by Noor

Noor left court with his lawyer after posting $400,000 bail

One of Noor's bail conditions was to surrender his passport, as he is considered a flight risk

Noor's attorneys argued he had no intention of travelling anywhere after posting bail

Mohamed Noor (pictured) shot Justine in the stomach when she approached his squad car minutes after she called police to report a possible sexual assault in the alley behind her home

A supporter of Noor's (pictured) said after the hearing the Somali-American officer has been treated unfairly and was 'just doing what he was trained to do'

Noor (pictured in a courtroom sketch), who appeared in a black t-shirt under orange scrubs, was ordered to surrender his passport, as prosecutors argued he was a flight risk due to being unemployed

Bail was cut to US$400,000, with conditions preventing Noor from contacting his former partner and witness to the shooting Officer Matthew Harrity.

Noor, who appeared in a black t-shirt under orange scrubs, was ordered to surrender his passport, as prosecutors argued he was a flight risk due to being unemployed.

Defense attorney Tom Plunkett told Judge Kathryn Quaintance Noor was not a flight risk, had a young family and no connections to other places.

'He has no connections to any place other than his birth,' Mr Plunkett said.

Prosecutor Amy Sweasy disagreed, saying as Noor no longer worked for the Minneapolis Police Department there was no job to keep him in Minnesota.

Police officer Mohamed Noor was charged with murder and manslaughter over the shooting of Justine Damond (pictured)

State prosecutor and head of the County Attorney's office, Mike Freeman, said that there was 'no evidence' that Noor was threatened by Justine (pictured, right with her fiance Don)

Noor shot Justine when she approached his squad car, leaving her grabbing a bullet wound in her stomach while saying 'I'm dead' or 'I'm dying'.

The police officers attempted CPR immediately after the shooting but Justine died at the scene.

State prosecutor and head of the County Attorney's office, Mike Freeman, said on Tuesday there was 'no evidence' Noor was threatened by Justine.

Officer Mohamed Noor (left) turned himself in Tuesday morning and is held on murder and manslaughter charges for shooting 40-year-old life coach Justine Ruszczyk Damond (right)

Justine (pictured, left, with her fiance Don) was unarmed and had called 911 to alert police to what she believed may have been a rape taking place in the alley behind her home

Hennepin County attorney Mike Freeman speaks at a news conference to announce charges of third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter against Minneapolis police officer Mohamed Noor

'In the short time between when Ms Damond-Ruszczyk approached the squad car and the time Officer Noor fired the fatal shot, there is no evidence that officer Noor encountered a threat, appreciated a threat, investigated a threat or confirmed a threat that justified his decision to use deadly force,' he said.

'Instead, Officer Noor recklessly and intentionally fired his handgun from the passenger seat in disregard for human life. Such actions violate the criminal law.'

Justine's family said in a written statement they were pleased Mr Freeman decided to bring charges of third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter.

They said they hoped a strong case will be presented and Noor will be convicted, calling the charges 'one step toward justice for this iniquitous act'.

'No charges can bring our Justine back,' Justine's father John Ruszcyzk and Mr Damond said in the joint statement.

Justine Damond (pictured) called 911 to report a possible rape and was shot by Mohamed Noor

JUSTINE DAMOND SHOOTING - A TIMELINE OF EVENTS July 15 - 11.27pm - Justine Damond calls 911 to report hearing sounds of distress from a girl or woman behind her house. She says it may be a rape. A dispatcher says officers should arrive soon. 11.35pm. - Justine calls 911 again to ask why police haven't arrived yet. She gives the dispatcher the address again. 11.41pm. - Officers Matthew Harrity and Mohamed Noor arrive and drive south down the alley behind Justine's house. Harrity, who is driving, is startled by a loud noise near his squad car. Justine approaches the driver's side window immediately afterward, and Noor allegedly fires his gun past Harrity, striking Justine through that window of the vehicle, according to Harrity in an interview with state investigators. 11.42pm - Radio report of one person down, starting CPR. 11.50pm - Radio report of police doing CPR for 'last four minutes'. 11.51pm - Justine is pronounced dead in the alley at the south end of her block. A medical examiner later says Justine was shot once in the abdomen. July 16 - Hundreds gather in Justine's southwest Minneapolis neighborhood to mourn her death. Mayor Betsy Hodges visits scene, says she is 'heartsick' and 'deeply disturbed' by shooting. State investigators say the officers involved in the shooting had not turned on their body cameras and squad car video didn't capture the shooting. July 17 - An autopsy shows Justine died of a single gunshot wound to the abdomen. Her fiance Don Damond says the family has been given no information about how the shooting happened. The officer who allegedly shot Justine is identified as Mohamed Noor, a Somali-American with less than two years of experience who became an officer after working in property management. In a statement from his attorney, Noor offers condolences to Justine's family. July 18 - State investigators say Noor declined to be interviewed. They say his partner, Matthew Harrity, told them Harrity was startled by a loud noise right before Justine approached the officers' SUV, and that Noor - in the passenger seat - shot her through the driver's-side window. July 20 - Police Chief Janee Harteau makes first remarks on shooting, says it 'should not have happened' but defends Noor's training. Harteau also says the city is reviewing its policy on body cameras and wants them to be used more often. July 21 - Harteau resigns at Hodges' request after the mayor says she no longer has confidence in the chief. Hodges names Assistant Chief Medaria Arradondo to take over. At a news conference to discuss the change, Hodges is shouted down by protesters who say she should resign, too. August 11 - Justine's family holds a public memorial service in Minneapolis. August 28 - Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman says he expects to decide on charges by year's end. September 12 - Authorities announce that the state Bureau of Criminal Investigation has handed the case over to Freeman's office. November 18 - Council Member Jacob Frey defeats Hodges in the mayor's race. Much of the campaign focused on police-community relations. December 13 - Freeman is caught on video saying he doesn't have enough evidence to charge Noor and blaming investigators 'who haven't done their job'. December 28 - Freeman says he'll miss his self-imposed deadline of deciding on charges by year's end because he needs more time. January 24, 2018 - Attorneys say Freeman convened a grand jury and subpoenaed other officers to compel them to tell what they know. Freeman says he still intends to make his own decision on charges. March 20 - Noor turns himself in to the Hennepin County Jail on charges of third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. Bail is set at $500,000. March 21 - Noor appears in court where bail is cut to $400,000 conditional on Noor surrendering his passport and not having contact with Harrity Source: AP Advertisement

'However, justice demands accountability for those responsible for recklessly killing the fellow citizens they are sworn to protect, and today's actions reflect that.'

The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA), which is investigating the shooting, said in a statement that he had declined to be interviewed and that his attorney had not said if or when an interview would take place.

However, many of the key parts of Noor's narrative gel with the version of events released by the BCA, who had interviewed his partner, Matthew Harrity.

Officer Harrity told investigators that he was startled by a loud noise right before Justine approached the driver's- side window of their police vehicle.

Harrity, who was driving, said Noor then fired his weapon from the passenger seat. Justine died of a gunshot wound to the abdomen.

'No charges can bring our Justine back,' Justine's father John Ruszcyzk (pictured) and Mr Damond said in the joint statement

'Thrown under the bus': Mohamed Noor (pictured, right) says his fellow officers are not backing him

The criminal complaint said Harrity heard a voice and a thump and caught a glimpse of a person's head and shoulders outside his window

It said Harrity then heard a sound like a lightbulb breaking, saw a flash and looked to his right to see Noor with his arm extended.

He then looked out his window and saw Justine with a gunshot wound. Justine put her hands on the wound and said 'I'm dying' or 'I'm dead.'

'We both got spooked,' Harrity told his sergeant, according to the complaint.

The officers did not turn on their body cameras until after the shooting. There was no squad camera video.

Johanna Morrow plays the didgeridoo during a memorial service for Damond at Lake Harriet in Minneapolis on August 11

Justine was unarmed and had called 911 to alert police to what she believed may have been a rape taking place behind her home.

Noor told friends he was not sure what the person was carrying and momentarily opened fire through his driver-partner's open window.

It was confirmed that Justine's cell phone was found alongside her during the tragedy.

Noor told associates it was dark and the situation was already tense as the caller had been 'panicking' when making the 911 call reporting an assault in the alley beyond where Justine lived with her fiance and his son.

The Australian women (pictured) was due to marry her fiance when she was shot dead last July

WHAT NOOR SAID IN PUBLIC THROUGH HIS ATTORNEY 'Officer Noor extends his condolences to the family and anyone else who has been touched by this event. He takes their loss seriously and keeps them in his daily thoughts and prayers. He came to the United States at a young age and is thankful to have had so many opportunities. He takes these events very seriously because, for him, being a police officer is a calling. He joined the police force to serve the community and to protect the people he serves. Officer Noor is a caring person with a family he loves and he empathizes with the loss others are experiencing. The current environment for police is difficult, but Officer Noor accepts this as part of his calling. We would like to say more, and will in the future. At this time, however, there are several investigations ongoing and Officer Noor wants to respect the privacy to the family and asks the same in return during this difficult period.' Advertisement

The squad car, driven by Harrity traveled hastily down the unlit alley between Washburn and Xerxes avenues south from West 50th Street toward West 51st Street.

Crucially, the vehicle did not have its lights on and this may have been so as not to give any suspect notice that police had arrived and buy precious time to apprehend the target.

That the car was unlit was disclosed by Harrity to the BCA, and both Noor and the BCA's version of events agree on the car's lights being off.

According to Noor's version when they reached the end of the alley, they came across a waiting, panicking figure.

It was dark, and the figure was moving around and approached their vehicle.

Mourners attend a march in honour of at Beard's Plaissance Park in Minneapolis last July

Noor said he did not know whether the figure who rushed towards their vehicle was the 911 caller or even if it was a man or woman.

He fired his weapon through Harrity's open driver's window hitting his victim once in the abdomen.

Both he and Harrity gave CPR to the victim before help and back-up arrived, but she was pronounced dead at the scene.

The charge of third-degree murder carries a maximum of of 25 years in prison, although the presumptive sentence is 12 years.

The second-degree manslaughter charge carries a maximum of 10 years in prison, and the presumptive sentence is four years.

John Ruszczyk, father of Justine Damond, holds a press conference with his family in Sydney after the shootingA salon owner has fought back against thieves who broke into his store, using a bollard to chase them before smashing the back of their getaway car.

Sean Nevo, 33, lives above his salon in Mount Waverley, Melbourne, and he was stirred out of his sleep by thieves smashing the front of his shop about 4.45am on Thursday.

Mr Nevo told Nine News one of the thieves took a swing at him and there was a short scuffle before they fled the scene.

A salon owner has fought back against thieves who broke into his store, using a bollard to chase them before smashing the back of their getaway car

Sean Nevo, 33, lives above his salon in Mount Waverley, Melbourne, and he was stirred out of his sleep by thieves smashing the front of his shop about 4.45am on Thursday

Mr Nevo told Nine News one of the thieves took a swing at him and there was a short scuffle before they fled the scene

'I quickly ran downstairs and I was confronted by one of the guys, one of the crooks,' he said.

He then picked up a bollard and struck the back of their Mitsubishi station wagon.

'They tried to reverse at me, I moved over and to the passenger side and smashed the side... and then they just drove off.'

CCTV footage showed one of the thieves throwing a rock at the salon window in order to break in.

He then picked up a bollard and struck the back of their Mitsubishi station wagon

CCTV footage showed one of the thieves throwing a rock at the salon window in order to break in

The three men escaped with hair straighteners worth more than $1200, according to police.

Another hair salon in nearby Rowville was burgled an hour later. Hair straighteners were also stolen from the shop.

Police have arrested three men in relation to the two burglaries, aged 24, 28 and 38.

They are being interviewed by Victoria Police detectives.A standoff between two cars resulted in a verbal altercation in Melbourne when drivers came head-to-head in an affluent suburb.

In footage captured on a dashcam, both motorists refused to back down and let the other pass through the narrow Toorak street.

After turning into a street lined with trees, a male driver comes face-to-face with a woman in active wear heading in the opposite direction.

A standoff between two cars resulted in a verbal altercation in Melbourne

Dashcam footage shows the pair yelling at each other and refusing to move before the female driver (pictured) gets out of the car to talk to him

They both come to a stop, both expecting the other to give way. The male driver can be heard saying, 'What the f**k', as the cars come to a standstill.

As the seconds drag on you can hear the man's frustrations grow.

'What am I going to do? Move back!' he yells at the other car.

He can then be heard blasting his car horn and the footage shows him driving forward so the two cars are only a metre apart. Again he slams his car horn.

'Move out of the way!' he yells.

He repeats these actions for several seconds while the woman in the other car can be seen gesturing for him to move back.

After a minute the stalemate comes to and end.

The female driver gets out of her car, approaches the man and shakes her hand at the male driver.

The female driver gets out of her car, approaches the man and shakes her hand at the male driver

'I came in the street first so you give way to me!', she yells at him.

In response the male driver tells her that she is holding up the whole street.

'You are a bully and a nasty typical man! I have the right of way,' she says.

The male driver tells her about the dashcam and that what she's saying is being recorded.

'I couldn't care less I'm not saying anything that isn't true,' she says.

The verbal altercation continues before the woman can be seen walking back into frame and getting back in her car.

The verbal altercation continues before the woman can be seen walking back into frame and getting back in her car

She moves her car as the male driver yells, 'All on camera, all recorded right there.'

The standoff created a huge debate online after it was shared by the Facebook page Dashcam Owners Australia.

'Cam driver is a bit of a d**k. All he had to do was move back 5 metres to let her in the bay directly next to him,' one user wrote.

'Dash cam driver is a complete f******d, he sped up when he saw the other car coming, he had plenty of room to move over and allow the other car past,' another one wrote.

'She had the room to be in correct lane at this point, cam was already locked mid lane. So she should give way. But both should just grow up beyond that point,' said another.Actresses Alyssa Milano and Amy Schumer are standing behind the Wendy's boycott as female workers fight to end sexual harassment and demand better working conditions.

Milano posted a lengthy statement on Facebook Wednesday slamming the company for it's 'shocking' response to female farmworkers telling the Huffington Post that conditions in the fields are brutal and inhumane.

Former farmworker Antonio Martinez told the outlet that female workers are often asked to do sexual favors and are fired it they refuse or complain. Martinez said she worked for 15 years picking tomatoes in Florida that were then used in Wendy's restaurants.

Alyssa Milano (left) and Amy Schumer (right) are supporting female farmworkers boycotting Wendy's

Milano posted a lengthy statement slamming Wendy's for suggesting that the farmworkers who boycotted in New York City last week were trying to 'exploit' the #MeToo movement after they accused the company of ignoring sexual harassment and abuse

Schumer applauded Milano's statement telling her 'thank you'

Heidi Schauer, a spokesperson for the company brushed off the claims telling the Huffington Post that the farmworkers boycotting are 'trying to exploit the positive momentum that has been generated by and for women in the #MeToo and Timess Up movement to advance their interest'.

Milano said Wendy's response was 'offensive'.

'Wendy's, this is very simple: These women are the #MeToo movement. The Time's Up movement was created in part to "lift up the voices, power, and strength of women working in low-wage industries". To suggest that farmworker women ... are somehow unwelcome intruders in the fight for dignity and safety for women is downright absurd and unbelievably offensive,' she said in a Facebook post.

'I stand with our sisters in the fields, and applaud their efforts to expand the new protections guaranteed in the Fair Food Program to the millions more women who are seeking change.

'And a final word of advice, Wendy's: If you really want to get on the wrong side of the Time's Up movement, keep using our name to attack and belittle farmworker women who are fighting to keep themselves and their sisters safe from rape in the fields.'

Schumer applauded Milano's response sharing a screenshot of the actress' statement on her Instagram Story and writing 'thank you'.

Farmworkers have said that conditions in the field are brutal and some women have been sexually harassed

On March 15, farmworkers and their supporters marched in the streets of New York City

They are demanding Wendy's join the Fair Foods Program, which would protect farmworkers

During the march, the farmworkers and their supporters fasted for five days outside the offices of Wendys board chairman and hedge fund investor Nelson Peltz

On March 15, female farmworkers and their supporters peacefully protested in the streets of New York City demanding Wendy's join other fast-food chains in implementing the Coalition of Immokalee Workers Fair Food Program.

Workers at the march told the Huffington Post that the program would ensure farmworkers could take breaks and vacations without the fear of being fired.

It will also protect women from sexual harassment and abuse.

McDonald's, Walmart, KFC, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut have already joined the Fair Food Program.

Wendy's refuses to join the program, according to the Coalition of Immokalee Workers.

During the march, the farmworkers and their supporters fasted for five days outside the offices of Wendys board chairman and hedge fund investor Nelson Peltz, demanding the company join the program.Travelling to Europe is about to get more complicated for Australians.

Starting in 2020, Australian passport holders will need to apply for a special visa and prove they are not a terrorist before they can visit Europe.

Unless travellers have this visa, which will likely only cost $10, they cannot board any flight, train, ferry or cruise ship to the continent.

In 2020 the EU plans to start a new entry system designed to reduce illegal immigration and tighten security on terrorism (Stock image of St Paul's Cathedral in London)

Unless travellers have this visa, which will likely only cost $10, they cannot board any flight, train, ferry or cruise ship to the continent (Stock image)

The strict visa requirement is part of a new anti-terrorism measure which will see hopeful travellers grilled about their holiday plans.

It will be known as the European Travel Information and Authorisation System (ETIAS) and it will come into effect for Australian tourists in less than two years.

Only adults will require the visa and under-18 passport holders can pass through freely without it.

The ETIAS form will have a number of security questions to determine if you are a terrorist or not.

The visa will last three years, or until your passport expires.

The European Travel Information and Authorisation System (ETIAS) will affect the way Australians to and from, and around Europe (Stock image)

Hopeful travellers will be asked security questions and are required to provide details of your travel plans as part of the counter-terrorism move (Stock image)

WHAT DOES THE NEW VISA MEAN? Australian travellers heading to the EU for business or leisure reasons will be obligated to apply for an European Travel Information and Authorisation System once the program is fully implemented in 2020. The new security system is being implemented to reduce illegal immigration and to better protect against terrorist threats. To apply for an ETIAS visa, Australians need to fill out the online application. Applicants will answer basic security questions and give details about their travel plans, in a registration process similar to the ESTA program in the United States. Most passengers should receive their approved ETIAS visa via email within 24 hours after filling out their application and paying the ETIAS visa fee. Source: etiasvisa.com Advertisement

With the visa Australians can travel freely within the Schengen Area, which covers most of Europe, excluding Britai, Bulgaria, Ireland, Romania and the countries that once made up Yugoslavia.

Travellers will be able to stay in the zone and travel freely for up to 90 days in any 180-day period.

Previously, travellers intending to spend 90 days within a 180 day period in the 'Schengen area' for business or tourism purposes did not need a visa.

However a visa waiver agreement has existed since the 1950s between Australians and some European countries.

For example, there is a visa waiver agreement between Germany and Australia which allows Australians to spend up to three months in Germany without a visa.

As many Australian residents also hold British nationality, once Britain leaves the EU Brits will be regarded as 'third country nationals', and will also be required to apply for ETIAS clearance.

After filling out the online ETIAS application and paying the $10 fee, travellers should expect their approved visa within 24 hours.

Then Australians are free to board their flights to enjoy a Parisian holiday or jaunt in Barcelona - but not for longer than 90 days.A body has been found on the edge of the track at a London Tube station causing rush hour chaos today.

Police sealed off Brixton Underground Station at around 3.30am and are investigating how long the body has been there and whether the person was hit by a train or fell to their death.

Detectives are also reviewing CCTV and carrying out a forensic search but they currently believe the incident is not suspicious.

Commuters have described 'carnage' in South London this morning because of the police investigation.

Police sealed off Brixton Station at around 3.30am today after a body was found on the tracks

Commuters say there has been chaos at the busy South London Tube station this morning

There are severe delays on the Victoria Line and one platform remains closed this morning.

A British Transport Police spokesman said: 'We were called to Brixton underground station at 3.28am this morning after a body was found close to the tracks at Platform 1.

'Officers attended the station and conducted a full forensic recovery, as well as reviewing CCTV from the platform. The death is not believed to be suspicious at this time.

'We are now working to identify the person and inform their next of kin. A file will be prepared for the coroner'.A primary school on the Gold Coast had a visitor while doing events for a mini Commonwealth Games.

The children watched on in fascination as a thick snake wrapped itself around an animal and began to devour it.

The school was holding an event that encouraged kids to bring in food from around the world and compete in sporting events ahead of the Commonwealth Games.

Students at a Gold Coast primary school were 'fascinated' with watching a snake devour an animal

The Springbrook State school kids were 'fascinated', according to a Facebook post from the school

'We had a wonderful visitor during our Mini Commonwealth Games. Everyone was very fascinated,' the school posted on Facebook.

The brown-coloured snake with lighter stripes and patches wrapped itself around a fluffy brown and orange animal as the school prepared for sporting events.

Some social media users were worried it was a family pet while others speculated that it was a possum.

However Daily Mail Australia has since confirmed it was a ring-tail possum.A cannibal has been arrested in Russia after killing a mother-of-two - then cooking and eating her heart, police have revealed.

Alexey Yastrebov, 35, was held in the Russian city of Krasnoyarsk accused of stabbing Ekaterina Nikiforova, 27, in the neck and cutting out her Adam's apple with a kitchen knife.

Then he gouged out her heart and left lung, and cooked them on the stove in his cramped rented flat, according to local law enforcement.

He phoned the owner of the flat Zhanna Avdeeva, 31, and told her: 'Call the police and ambulance. I'm lying in the blood, next to me is a corpse.'

When paramedics arrived he told them: 'There's a heart cooking on the stove.'

A cannibal has been arrested in Russia after killing mother-of-two Ekaterina Nikiforova (pictured) - then cooking and eating her heart, police have revealed

Alexey Yastrebov, 35, was held in the Russian city of Krasnoyarsk after stabbing Ekaterina Nikiforova, 27, in the neck and cutting out her Adam's apple with a kitchen knife. A police photo shows a knife found at the scene

Police say he gouged out her heart and left lung, and cooked them on the stove in his cramped rented flat, according to local law enforcement. Nikiforova is pictured with her two daughters

He confessed to police: 'I told her I would eat her heart. So I did.'

Before calling Avdeeva, he had tried to kill himself by plunging scissors into his neck, but failed, said police.

He is now under police guard in the intensive care ward of a hospital.

'This poor woman was lying in the same room,' said the flat owner.

Yastrebov phoned the owner of the flat (pictured), Zhanna Avdeeva, 31, and told her: 'Call the police and ambulance. I'm lying in the blood, next to me is a corpse.'

Before calling Avdeeva, he had tried to kill himself by plunging scissors into his neck, but failed, said police. Pictured: Inside the building where the alleged killing took place

The victim, single mother Ekaterina Nikiforova (pictured), had two daughters aged seven and three

The man accused of killing Ekaterina Nikiforova (pictured) is now under police guard in the intensive care ward of a hospital

'As well as her chest cut open, her neck was slashed. He had cut out her Adam's apple. I couldn't look at all this.'

The victim, a single mother, had two daughters aged seven and three.

Evgeny Avdeev, 31, Zhanna's brother, said the alleged cannibal was his close friend, and he could never imaging he could do something so 'evil'.

Before calling Avdeeva (pictured), he had tried to kill himself by plunging scissors into his neck, but failed, said police

Evgeny Avdeev (pictured), 31, Zhanna's brother, said the alleged cannibal was his close friend, and he could never imaging he could do something so 'evil'

'My hair is standing on end,' he said. 'I think they must have been drinking and some conflict happened.'

Police are also checking if drugs were used. Avdeeva said she would call a priest to 'cleanse' the flat after the evil killing.

'It's such a shock to me, in my apartment, ' she said. 'It's like a nightmare.

'Everyone will know about this, all the neighbours. How will I go on?'

She said: 'I will invite a priest to say prayers here after the discovery of this corpse.'Diners and workers at a popular restaurant in Melbourne have been issued a warning after a food handler was diagnosed with hepatitis A.

The man who works at Cumulus Inc. notified the restaurant and proceeded to inform the Department of Health Victoria, sparking fears food may have been contaminated with the disease.

The Department issued a warning to professionals and the general public who were in the restaurant between 26 February and 19 March, who ate the food, come in contact with the food, or worked at the restaurant.

Diners and workers at popular restaurant Cumulus Inc. (pictured) have been issued with a warning of hepatitis A

The man who works at Cumulus Inc. notified the restaurant and proceeded to inform the Department of Health Victoria

The Department issued a warning to professionals and the general public who were in the restaurant between 26 February and 19 March

Cumulus Inc., which is owned by Andrew McConnell, has received a chefs hat award for three years in a row.

According The Age, it is unclear how the staffer contracted the virus and investigations are ongoing.

Workers and diners are encouraged to go to their GP for a free hepatitis A vaccine.

The Department of Health has indicated an extensive clean-up of the restaurant is currently underway.

Daily Mail Australia has contacted Cumulus Inc. for comment.

Cumulus Inc., which is owned by Andrew McConnell (pictured), has received a chefs hat award for three years in a row

The Department of Health has indicated an extensive clean-up of the restaurant is currently underway

Hepatitis A virus is found in the faeces of an infected person and can be transmitted when traces of the virus are ingested, usually via contaminated food, beverages, hands, water, and other objects.

People who are infected with the virus may not show symptoms right away which means people people may infect others with the virus before they even appear to be unwell.

According to the Department of Health, some symptoms include fever, anorexia, vomiting, and may be followed by dark urine and jaundice.Hysterical scenes took place at the grand opening of a new Kmart, with hundreds of customers storming the retailer to be the first inside.

The budget department store debuted its new location in the Coffs Harbour CBD on the NSW mid-north coast to a fanfare of eager shoppers on Thursday.

Crowds of people flooded the store at Coffs Central Shopping Centre before the roller doors had even fully opened, as lines for the checkouts began to snake around the store within minutes.

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The budget department store debuted its new location in the Coffs Harbour CBD on the NSW mid-north coast to a fanfare of eager shoppers on Thursday

Crowds of people flooded the retailer at Coffs Central Shopping Centre (pictured) before the roller doors had even fully opened, as lines for the checkouts began to snake around the store within minutes

Some customers even ran into the Kmart with the hopes of getting their hands on a budget ottoman or cheap kitchen utensils.

The grand opening was a long time coming for the beach-side town, which has suffered an economic downturn in recent times.

Coffs Harbour locals were thrilled with the new addition to the CBD shopping strip and said it was a 'new beginning' for the area.

'This is the light at the end of the tunnel, this is the beginning of a new era for business in the CBD,' George Cecato from the Coffs Harbour Chamber of Commerce told Nine News.

Some customers even ran into the Kmart with the hopes of getting their hands on a budget ottoman or cheap kitchen utensils

'They've been struggling for the last 18 months and this is the beginning.'

The new Kmart has opened in the same site as the old Big W store, which closed last year.

Around 150 people have been employed at the Coffs Harbour Kmart, with some 20 of those staff previously employed at the Big W.Two American tourists have died in a tragic helicopter crash, in what would have been a trip of a lifetime over the Great Barrier Reef.

Another three people survived the crash on Wednesday afternoon, including the local Australian pilot, 35, and two tourists from Colorado.

Witnesses risked their lives to pluck the three people from the wreckage of the helicopter as it sunk, including a 33-year-old woman and 34-year-old man who survived.

The helicopter pilot pulled the 65-year-old woman from the helicopter but desperate CPR attempts failed. The 79-year-old man also died at the scene.

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Two Hawaiian tourists died in a horrible Whitsundays helicopter crash in what would have been a trip of a life time (pictured)

Another three people survived the crash (pictured) on Wednesday afternoon, including the pilot and two tourists - a man, 34, and woman, 33, from Colorado

The crash is the second incident in four months for the helicopter company after it failed to land on the platoon (pictured) near the Whitsunday Islands

Queensland Police District Inspector Ian Haughton (pictured) confirmed the deaths of the two American tourists on Thursday who died after the crash off Hardy Reef Pontoon

The helicopter was on its final approach towards a landing pontoon some 65km north-east of Whitsunday Islands.

It is not known exactly what caused the accident, but moments later the helicopter and all on board plunged into the water just meters away from its target.

Queensland Police District Inspector Ian Haughton confirmed the deaths of the two American tourists on Thursday following the crash off Hardy Reef Pontoon who were known to the two survivors.

'It was a normal flight ... on this occasion, something went wrong and the consequences are tragic,' Insp Haughton told media.

'This is a traumatic experience for any involved in the situation.'

The crash is the second incident in four months for the helicopter company, ABC News reported.

In November last year, Hamilton Island Air - a registered business of Whitsunday Air Services - was involved in a crash off Hamilton Island.

The three passengers survived but the helicopter sank and has not been recovered.

Witnesses performed CPR on the Hawaiian couple, but with emergency services more than an hour away, the victims died (pictured are police at the scene)

Onlookers tried to save the passengers at the Whitsundays crash site while listening to instructions in a phone call with paramedics just after 4pm Wednesday

Police and other emergency service vessels were en route to Hardy Reef (map pictured) with the crash site about 65km northeast of the Whitsundays

Onlookers tried to save the passengers at the Whitsundays crash site while listening to instructions in a phone call with paramedics just after 4pm Wednesday.

The older couple were pronounced dead at the scene after they were recovered from the helicopter.

The three survivors were transported by sea for medical attention and treated for non-life threatening injuries.

The helicopter reportedly crashed into the water 250 metres from the Hardy Reef pontoon.

Whitsunday Air Services confirmed the fatalities in a statement on Wednesday night.

'Whitsunday Air Services can confirm that a tragic accident involving a Whitsunday Air Services helicopter carrying four passengers and one crew member has occurred at Hardy Reef today,' the statement said.

In November last year, the Hamilton Island Air - a registered business of Whitsunday Air Services - was involved in a crash off Hamilton Island (stock image)

'The accident occurred while the helicopter was on final approach for a landing at it's Hardy Reef Heliport and resulted in two fatalities and two passengers sustaining minor injuries.

'We are extremely saddened by this incident and our deepest condolences are with the families of all of the passengers. Whitsunday Air Services is continuing to work with the Queensland Police, the ATSB and CASA to assist with their investigations.

'Whitsunday Air Services will be suspending all operations while a full review process is undertaken. Further information will be released in due course.'

The helicopter was reportedly fully submerged in water.

Queensland Ambulance Service paramedics rushed to the scene via emergency helicopter about 6pm.

Whitsunday Mayor Andrew Wilcox told ABC radio the community was devastated by the accident.

'It will be a sombre day for us in the Whitsundays. My thoughts and prayers at this stage are with the families affected by this,' he said.

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk told parliament on Thursday the families involved should know 'how deeply (they) feel their loss'.

The Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) told Daily Mail Australia a team of investigators would travel to the accident location to collect evidence on Thursday morning.

Investigators will interview witnesses, examine available recorded data, review operational records and technical documentation.This buffalo shows just how fierce a mother's love can be - as she fought off 14 lions who were devouring her calf.

The distraught parent had to watch as the lions brought down her baby, but rather than turning to run, she charged back to see them off in Kruger National Park, South Africa.

As the hungry predators repeatedly tried to reach their kill, the mother drove them back again and again.

This buffalo shows just how fierce a mother's love can be - as she fought off 14 lions who were devouring her calf

She was then joined by four members of her heard to mourn the calf by licking and cleaning it.

Only after nearly an hour did the buffalo finish her goodbyes to her baby, plodding sadly away as the lions closed in.

The touching scene was captured on camera by South African retail store manager Paul Charnley from Krugersdorp, Gauteng.

The distraught parent had to watch as the lions brought down her baby, but rather than turning to run, she charged back to see them off in Kruger National Park, South Africa

As the hungry predators repeatedly tried to reach their kill, the mother drove them back again and again

Paul, 46, said: 'I was with a good friend of mine, Derrick Robb, and we watched this go on for a good 45 minutes.

'The lions took down the baby buffalo but its mother refused to give up on her baby.

'She chased the lions away multiple times and then was joined by four others to say goodbye to her calf while the lions circled.

'Eventually the mum gave up and the 14 lions had their feast.'

She was then joined by four members of her heard to mourn the calf by licking and cleaning itA man accused of supplying a shotgun to a Melbourne terrorist is also charged over an imitation firearm, which is actually a cigarette lighter belonging to his father, a court has been told.

Burak Diler, 26, is one of four men charged with supplying a sawn-off shotgun to Yacqub Khayre, who killed a receptionist at a Brighton apartment building in June 2017.

'My client is also charged with being in possession of an imitation firearm, found in a vase,' Diler's lawyer James McQuillan told Melbourne Magistrates Court during a pre-trial hearing on Thursday.

George Matte-Hado, 37, is one of the four men charged with supplying the shotgun

'It looks like a sawn-off shotgun. It is in fact a cigarette lighter.

'It is his father's cigarette lighter.'

Khayre killed receptionist Kai Hao, 36, took a female escort hostage and injured three police officers during the siege at Brighton on June 5.

The gunman, who died in a hail of return fire, was being monitored by a GPS anklet at the time, having previously been charged and acquitted of terrorism offences.

Prosecutors allege anklet data placed him at a housing estate car park in suburban Greenvale for seven minutes on May 19 last year, when the gun deal took place.

It's alleged George Matte-Hado, 37, sold the double-barrelled shotgun for $2000 and Diler acted as the middleman, facilitating the sale to Khayre.

A phone and a laptop computer were seized after the Brighton siege, and other phones were analysed following counter-terror raids and arrests.

The prosecution case relies heavily on SMS messages sent between the different people involved, some of which were coded texts.

Diler is also accused of dealing a Beretta 9mm handgun, a charge that is based on texts he sent.

But Mr McQuillan said there is no direct evidence of Diler handling any guns, and he queried the reliability of the text messages.

George Matte-Hado departs the Melbourne Magistrate Court on March 22 (pictured on right with lawyer)

'He might be a liar. He might be making things up,' Mr McQuillan said of Diler.

'I'm asking, is there any other evidence?'

Diler, Matte-Hado, 37, Corey Moore, 48, and Kane Dalrymple, 31, are all facing multiple charges over the alleged gun dealing.

The quartet faced committal hearings together on Thursday to decide whether there is enough evidence to send their cases to trial.

But the hearings were adjourned part-heard and will return on May 14 with a DNA expert due to give evidence.

Matte-Hado is on bail and the others are in custody but they indicated they will seek bail when the case returns.



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Police stood shoulder to shoulder as they honoured their colleague Keith Palmer as the Prime Minister led tributes to the five people who lost their lives in the Westminster Bridge attack.

Officers fell silent near to the spot where PC Palmer was murdered as they lay flowers and wiped away tears at a special vigil for the victims.

Theresa May pledged to remember them and stand 'in defiance of those who would seek to silence our democracy.'

MPs observed a minute's silence in the House of Commons this morning before Theresa May laid flowers near the site where Pc Keith Palmer and four innocent pedestrians were killed.

Police officers bow their heads as they pay tribute to their colleague Keith Palmer during a vigil today

Theresa May today laid flowers in Parliament Square in memory of those killed in the attack

Tobias Ellwood - who attempted to save courageous Pc Palmer after the Westminster attack - was pictured looking grief-stricken today

A Met Police officer lays a bouquet at the scene as the force remembered PC Palmer

An officer comforts a tearful collague as tributes were paid to the victims of the attack

One police officer wiped away a tear as Westminster fell silent today (left) and another paid a personal tribute to the victims (right)

Speaker John Bercow asked members in the House of Commons chamber to pause 'in respectful memory' of those who died on March 22 last year.

With heads bowed, MPs from different parties stood side-by-side along the green benches to pay their respects ahead of digital, culture, media and sport questions.

Five people died, including Pc Keith Palmer, and dozens more were injured when 52-year-old Khalid Masood launched a car and knife attack on Westminster Bridge and the Palace of Westminster before he was shot dead.

Tearful members of the public watch on and one grief-stricken man covers his face with his hands

The Prime Minister, who was whisked out of Parliament on the day of the attack, pictured today

Victims of the Westminster terror attack have been remembered at a special vigil. The ceremony in Westminster Hall was held to mark the first anniversary of the attack and was attended by politicians, senior police officers and people involved in the incident. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, told the gathering in Westminster Hall: 'A year ago, darkness struck across Westminster Bridge and in this palace. It spread across the bridge like a snake, driving to left and right, killing and harming'

Khalid Masood (right) launched his sickening attack on March 22, 2017, mowing down and killing four pedestrians before stabbing unarmed Pc Palmer (left) as he stood guard

Culture Secretary Matt Hancock said: 'I'm sure the whole House will want to associate ourselves to mark the memory of those who passed away a year ago, as we have just noted in the one minute's silence, and to thank once more the emergency services who keep us safe and, especially on this day, those who put others' safety ahead of their own.

'We remember those who have lost their lives defending democracy. They will not be forgotten.'

Labour's Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) said: 'While thinking of the victims of the terrorist outrage last year, I think all of us on the benches hope that the families of those people who were tragically killed have been looked after.'

Sports minister Tracey Crouch, in her reply, said: 'Pc Keith Palmer was an avid Charlton Athletic fan and it was only right that the club actually respected him by turning his usual red seat in The Valley white with his number written on it, so his memory will always live on at the football club.'

MP Tobias Ellwood broke down on television today as he recalled the moment he comforted his young son after he had tried in vain to save the life of Pc Palmer in the Palace of Westminster.

Mr Ellwood was in Parliament when terrorist Khalid Masood launched his sickening attack, mowing down and killing four pedestrians before stabbing unarmed Pc Palmer as he stood guard.

In an emotionally-charged interview one year on, the politician fought back tears as he recounted the conversation he had with his son in the wake of the atrocity.

Defence minister Tobias Ellwood pictured at the scene as he desperately tried to save PC Palmer

MPs observed a minute's silence in memory of those killed in the 2017 Westminster terror attack in the House of Commons this morning

MEMORIALS TO HONOUR OFFICERS AND TERROR VICTIMS Pc Palmer's name will be one of 1,400 inscribed on a new UK Police Memorial commemorating officers killed on duty. Another 4,000 of those who died on duty will be remembered inside the memorial in Staffordshire. Plans have also been revealed for a memorial for victims and survivors of the four terrorist atrocities that took place in the city last year - at Westminster Bridge, London Bridge, Finsbury Park and Parsons Green. Well-wishers will be able to leave messages in a digital book of hope at City Hall from today. Members of the public will be able to send messages to the installation - which will remain open until June - using #LondonUnited on social media, and their words will be projected on to a map of the capital. The phrase #LondonUnited will be projected on to the Houses of Parliament, London Bridge, Finsbury Park Mosque and Parsons Green Tube station on the anniversaries of the attacks. Five innocent people were killed in Masood's rampage - 48-year-old Pc Palmer, US tourist Kurt Cochran, Romanian tourist Andreea Cristea, 31, and Britons Aysha Frade, 44, and 75-year-old Leslie Rhodes, who were mown down on the bridge. Advertisement



Mr Ellwood told the BBC: 'The other reflection and vivid image I have is returning home after what had happened and finding my son on the top of the stairs.

'He was in tears and he was just on his own. I sat next to him and he just asked 'why'?

'He couldn't understand why I had stepped forward, why someone had been killed, why someone was yielding a knife in a place that he had visited so many times.

'And all I could offer him was that there are some bad people in the world but there are good people and it is the good people who win.'

Pc Palmer's friend has also paid tribute, saying he was 'a proud and courageous police officer who did his job and never wanted any fuss.'

In a statement released through Scotland Yard, Pc Shaun Cartwright said: 'Keith loved being a police officer, he just wanted to help people and do his best.

'Keith was always happy, always the first to help anyone out, first in to work and the last one out.

'He was a proud and courageous police officer who did his job and never wanted any fuss or to be the centre of attention. Keith was a true and loyal friend, utterly reliable.

'Most of all I will remember him as a family man who idolised his wife, daughter and his family; they're the important ones that I think about a year on from the Westminster attack.'

Mr Ellwood, a former Army officer whose brother Jonathan was killed in the 2002 Bali terror atrocity, has paid tribute to the police for their work in a country 'that seems to be getting more dangerous and more volatile'.

The Defence Minister said the threats faced by the UK were not going away and involved not just terrorism but 'resurgent nations challenging the world order'.

He also recounted the moment of the attack on ITV's Lorraine.

This harrowing picture of Mr Ellwood as he and members of the emergency services desperately tried to save Pc Palmer's life became one of the defining images of the attack

Pc Palmer (pictured posing for a photo at the Palace of Westminster), was 'a proud and courageous police officer who did his job and never wanted any fuss', his friend has said

MET POLICE PAY TRIBUTE TO VICTIMS The Metropolitan Police posted a message from Commissioner Cressida Dick today. It read: '22nd March 2017 is a day that remains vivid in many of our minds. Our thoughts are also with all those who died that day or whose lives were turned upside down.' 'Aysha Frade; Keith Palmer; Kurt Cochran; Leslie Rhodes and Andreea Cristea. All of whom remain much loved and missed by their families and loved ones. Today it is only natural for many of us to stop and pause and remember in our own way. 'The horror of that day was marked by acts of astonishing compassion and bravery as those who responded rushed to help the injured; to comfort those in distress and to bring calm to chaos.' 'I know that today we will remember, those taken from us, those who were injured and all those that day has had a lasting impact on. We owe it to them to carry on with courage, professionalism and determination; to do our very best to prevent future attacks and keep people safe.' Advertisement

Mr Ellwood told the host today: 'Huge respect to all police officers, because they don't know how their day is going to unfold and they just go to work and get on with it.

'I saw PC Keith Palmer lying there and could see he had lost a lot of blood and that's when I stepped forward to try and help.

'I just recall how professional the police were in moving into a situation where they were taking control and command of everything up to the silence of what is usually a busy place, until there was no-one around except for police.

'Our thoughts and prayers are with PC Palmer's friends and family. He did what he loved doing. He applied to stay on and do this work and loved every minute of it.

'We know these police officers well. They are part of the fabric of the community, so it is one of ours - it felt.

'But there was this feeling that we will not be cowed by this. We will not let this affect us. Life goes on. The next day, Parliament did sit - we weren't going to stop.

'Likewise, these terrorist activities try to rip us apart but they do they do the opposite. It makes us more determined that we are going to stand up to this.'

He added: 'When we go back to when I first became aware of terrorism was the loss of my brother in 2002 (in the Bali bombings).

'Fifteen years ago and today these attacks are still taking place. We are going through a very dangerous and volatile period.

'We are at a pivotal moment and ask 'do we just look after ourselves?' Or do we see where things are going wrong. Al Shabab or Boko Haram or Al Qaeda - all these flourish where there isn't any governance.

'Not only that, the religion of Islam itself is being used - a peaceful religion - these terrorists have scant understanding of it and think they are going to paradise for what they do and that's the work that we need to embark on.

'There is a determination that we will not be defeated. And we walk by that location every day - it's right by the main entrance so all MPs are very conscious. Let's not forget Jo Cox was killed by an extremist too and her plaque is inside the chamber itself which we all look at.

'We live in a very dangerous world and it's up to us to work out the strategy we're going to hold in order to stand up to our values which we've spent decades, millennia, developing.

'That's what we need to remember. We will not be defeated by these terrorist. We will move forward and be positive - and that's the message that I told my son.'

Mayor of London Sadiq Khan remembered the victims of the attack at City Hall today

This horrifying picture captured the moment Masood crashed his car on Westminster BridgeA drunk air passenger who broke a fellow traveller's finger has avoided jail for the incident in which he was carried on to the plane because he was struggling to walk due to drinking too much vodka.

In a drunken episode, Andrzej Bielicz, 63, forced other passengers to endure his shouting on a two hour flight to Glasgow from Poland in September of 2016.

The Polish national was seen drinking straight from a bottle of vodka at Warsaw Chopin Airport and was so intoxicated he couldn't walk on his own, with Wizz Air cabin crew attendants having to help him board the plane.

At one point Bielicz, who moved to Scotland seven years ago, became violent and attacked fellow traveller Samuel Wojenski, who was trying to calm him down, breaking his finger and sending him to hospital.

Bielicz avoided jail time when he was sentenced at Paisley Sheriff Court on Tuesday, and instead received a community payback order, ordered to undergo alcohol counselling and complete 220 hours of community service.

Andrzej Bielicz, 63, a Polish national, avoided jail time when sentenced at Paisley Sheriff Court on Tuesday. He broke a fellow passenger's finger during a drunken episode on a Wizz Air flight to Glasgow in 2016

Bielicz was seen drinking straight from a bottle of vodka at Warsaw Chopin Airport and was so intoxicated he couldn't walk on his own, with Wizz Air cabin crew attendants having to help him board the plane. Pictured: File photo of Wizz Air plane

Bielicz had earlier pleaded guilty to assault charges and behaving in an abusive or threatening way, according to the BBC.

The incident began when fellow passengers spotted Bielicz, who lives in Airdrie, North Lanarkshire, guzzling vodka at the airport.

Mail Online has reached out to Wizz Air for comment and did not receive a response by the time of publication.

Bielicz was so drunk that he struggled to walk and had to be helped onto the plane by Wizz Air crew members.

Procurator Fiscal Depute Margaret McCallum said: 'He was seen by witnesses within Chopin Airport drinking from an open bottle of vodka and struggling to walk, swaying from side to side.'

The incident began when fellow passengers spotted Bielicz, who lives in Airdrie, North Lanarkshire, guzzling vodka at the airport. Pictured: Paisley Sheriff Court

WHAT ARE THE RULES ABOUT DRINKING ALCOHOL WHILE FLYING ON WIZZ AIR? Although many travellers look forward to a drink while flying, it is illegal to be drunk while on a plane. If cabin members feel that a passenger is too intoxicated, they can report the passenger. If a severely drunk flyer causes problems by being disruptive during the flight, they are likely to be met by police when the aircraft lands. Airlines can also refuse drunk passengers from boarding if they believe they are too intoxicated and will be disruptive. Offenders can receive a maximum sentence of two years' imprisonment, according to the Civil Aviation Authority. They also can be slapped with a maximum fine of 5,000. According to a Wizz Air safety information card from 2014, the airline has a 'zero-tolerance policy with regard to passengers who are verbally or physically disruptive towards any other person on board the aircraft. 'In all cases of disruptive or abusive behaviour by passengers, the crew will always put the safety of the aircraft, crew and other passengers first. 'They will follow related safety procedures and notify the authorities.' Advertisement

McCallum continued: 'At around 18:30 the flight boarded and the witnesses saw the accused boarding the flight in an extremely intoxicated state, being assisted by members of the cabin crew.

'The accused started shouting loudly.'

Defence solicitor Tony Callahan said of Bielicz: 'He has very little recollection of this incident and accepts he was heavily intoxicated.

'It is somewhat surprising he was even permitted to board the aircraft.'

Bielicz was disruptive and shouting on the plane so another passenger asked him to be quiet.

This enraged Bielicz and he tried to face off against the passenger, but was so drunk he couldn't stand.

Mr Wojenski tried to calm and restrain Bielicz as he began wildly kicking and thrashing his arms around.

Mr Wojenski was injured when Bielicz grabbed his middle finger and pulled it violently, breaking the finger.

Sheriff James Spy said: 'This type of behaviour on an aircraft is very serious.

'Why you were permitted to drink from an open bottle of vodka at Chipon airport, I do not know.'

He continued: 'I don't know why you were allowed to board while drunk.

'The air crew seemed to be playing little part in this disturbance and it seems there was little effort made to contain the behaviour by them.

'It's quite beyond my comprehension that police at Glasgow airport were not alerted to a potentially very dangerous situation on board the flight.

'The decision not to advise the police in advance [of the flight landing] must have been down to a decision made by the flight crew.

'I have taken all these matters in to account. If you don't cooperate [with the -Kind Regards Payback] Order, you can go to jail.'A three-month-old baby found dying by her parents may have suffocated whilst sleeping face down in her cot, an inquest heard.

Lucy Barlow had gone to sleep with her head tilted to the side but was found a few hours later 'grey and unresponsive'.

She was rushed to Blackpool Victoria Hospital but pronounced dead the same day, despite paramedics best efforts to revive her.

Lucy's mother, Lorraine Barlow, from Blackpool, Lancs, broke down in tears as she told the court of the series of events that led to the death of her baby at the home she shared with her husband George, 54, in April 3 last year.

She described Lucy as a 'little princess' who had never previously been poorly, but that she was not feeding well and the doctor had prescribed Gaviscon.

Lucy Barlow a baby found dying by her parents and may have accidentally suffocated whilst sleeping face down in her cot

The 40-year-old said: 'That day we stayed in the living room with Lucy who was a bit grumpy but normal throughout the day. I put her down that night in her room in her mosses basket.

'She was a bit restless but eventually fell asleep on her front with her head to the side. We went to bed about 2am and George checked her the following morning and she was moving her head from side to side. He said it looked like she was trying to get comfy.

'I did mention about waking her but George said to let her sleep as she might be grumpy if we woke her. When I went back to check on her about 11am I went to pick her up and she was not moving or breathing - she was grey.

'It was horrible. I just started screaming: "No, no, no." My husband thought I had hurt myself. When he saw me he asked what was going on.

'I put her down on the floor and started trying to resuscitate her but nothing was happening so I shouted for George to phone an ambulance. I couldn't believe she could be perfectly fine one minute and then go to not breathing.'

Tests could not establish how Lucy (pictured) died but a pathologist said she showed signs of asphyxia which may have been due to her sleeping position

Lorraine Barlow (pictured) wept in court as she revealed her heartbreak at the death of her daughter Lucy

Tests could not establish how Lucy died but a pathologist said she showed signs of asphyxia which may have been due to her sleeping position.

Det Insp Alisa Wilson of Lancashire Police said there were no suspicious circumstances surrounding the death of the baby.

She said: 'I visited the scene and viewed some CCTV footage which showed George taking a bin bag out of the property at 12.03pm. At 12.05pm Lorraine was seen at the door flagging down the ambulance.

'George said the bin bag contained a bottle of vodka and cider which changed in his interview to a bottle of cider and a bottle of lager. He said he was concerned about how it would look if there was alcohol in the flat.

'At the hospital both parents volunteered themselves for a drink and drug test which came back negative for both. The flat where the three were living appeared exceptionally clean and tidy.'

At the time of Lucy's death Mrs Barlow told her local newspaper: 'My wonderful gorgeous baby girl Lucy was a bright little lady and had her whole life in front of her - or so we thought. She wasn't poorly, she never had a cold in her three short months with us - but for some reason she passed away our world has fallen apart.'An Afghan asylum seeker who raped and murdered the daughter of a top EU official has been sentenced to life in jail in Germany today.

Hussein Khavari, of uncertain age and origin, was found guilty of the deadly night-time attack on medical student Maria Ladenburger, 19, in October 2016 in the university town of Freiburg.

At the time of the murder, Khavari claimed to be 17, but testing on his teeth showed him to be between 22 and 29 years old. His own father later claimed he is 34.

Sentenced: Afghan migrant Hussein Khavari, pictured during his trial last year, has been sentenced to life in prison for the murder of Maria Ladenburger

Khavari, pictured in court today, broke down and asked for forgiveness during the hearings (his image was blurred by German media)

Khavari's full identity is still banned from being revealed in Germany because of the country's strict privacy laws, so media there blur images of him.

Presiding judge Kathrin Schenk condemned Khavari's extreme 'lack of empathy' as she handed down the maximum sentence of life in prison, which under German law means 15 years behind bars.

Once the 15 years are up, Khavari, who was handcuffed and wearing a black hooded jumper in court today, may be ordered to remain in 'security detention' if he is still deemed to pose a threat to society.

Schenk said she saw almost no chance of rehabilitation, telling Khavari that 'you would have to become an entirely different human being'.

Ms Ladenburger's murder stoked a public backlash against a mass influx of migrants and Angela Merkel's refugee policy.

Social media users posted sarcastic 'thank you' messages to Chancellor Merkel over her liberal policy that brought more than one million refugees and migrants to the country in 2015.

During the trial, prosecutor Eckart Berger had reminded the two jurors sitting alongside three judges that 'on trial is a criminal offender and not Germany's refugee policy'.

Khavari, pictured today, initially claimed to be 17 years old but he was convicted as an adult after age tests on his teeth showed him to be at least 22

Speaking in court during his trial, Khavari recalled how he had smoked hashish the night he ambushed the 19-year-old in October 2016, raped her and drowned her in the knee-deep water of a nearby river.

He said the night of the killing he was so drunk he was ejected from a bar and left alone by his friends in town.

He claims he accidentally came across Ms Ladenburger, who shouted out as she fell from her bicycle. He said he pressed her mouth shut then choked her with a scarf and put her unconscious into the water.

'When I saw how pretty she was, I wanted to have sex with her,' he said, but claims he was too drunk.

He broke down in court and added: 'I want to apologize to the family of Maria'.

Reading from a statement he went on: 'I beg your pardon. I want to apologise to the family of Maria. I wish I could undo it. What I have done, I am sad for from the bottom of my heart.'

He said he dreams of what he did every day as he wiped tears from his face.

'I live with the agony of what I did and this torment destroys my life by and by,' he added. He claims he dragged her into the river 'because I wanted to wash her blood from me.'

Prosecutors dispute his account of the murder and say he planned it beforehand. And a psychiatric expert said his remorse was fake.

The expert warned of a 'high risk' of him re-offfending, said he has a 'great and persistent readiness for violence, an interest in aggressive sexual practices and a hostile attitude towards women. Moreover, he does not show remorse and compassion to the suffering of other people.'

It was learned after his arrest that he had been arrested and sentenced to ten years for attempted murder in Corfu in 2013 before coming to Germany seeking refuge in 2015. It remains unclear why Greece let him out of jail so quickly.

Khavari has admitted to raping and murdering 19-year-old medical student Maria Ladenburger in Freiberg, Germany, in October 2016

German authorities knew nothing of his past and so let him into the country as a registered asylum seeker.

Ironically his victim, whose father is a senior legal adviser to the European Commission in Brussels, worked in her spare time in the ancient university city of Freiburg helping out migrants in various shelters and homes.

Khavari arrived in Germany, without identity papers, in November 2015, near the peak of the refugee influx, as an unaccompanied minor claiming to be 16 or 17 years old and hailing from Afghanistan.

A police officer told the court that Khavari's cellphone and social media accounts suggested he had lived in Iran.

Khavari was sent to live with a German host family in the picturesque town on the edge of the Black Forest, went to a local school, learnt German and received state benefits.

It emerged only after his arrest that he had already committed a violent crime in May 2013 in Greece, where he pushed a woman off a cliff on the island of Corfu, leaving her badly injured.

He was sentenced there in February 2014 to 10 years jail for attempted murder but was granted a conditional release from Greece's overcrowded jails in October 2015.

He fled to Germany, where authorities knew nothing of his criminal past because Greece had only issued a nationwide warrant, and because no match was detected in an EU-wide fingerprint data base for asylum seekers.

Khavari was initially tried as a juvenile offender, but the court accepted expert opinions, based on X-rays and dental analysis, that he is now aged between 22 and 29.

The defendant had admitted to the crime, but claimed diminished culpability because he was under the influence of alcohol and drugs - a position which his defence said it would argue again in an appeal.

Khavari had also claimed that his father died long ago in a battle against Afghanistan's Taliban.

Judge Schenk in December dialled a number on Khavari's cellphone and reached his father, who told her through an interpreter that he was living in Iran.Former prostitute Gabi Grecko is imminently expected to provide details in court of alleged 'sexcapades' she performed on behalf a major donor to New York Mayor Bill de Blasio.

Prosecutors say that Grecko - a reality star and former wife of billionaire Geoffrey Edelsten - traveled to Las Vegas on a private flight in early 2013 with Jeremy Reichberg and Jona Rechnitz, who were both major contributors to de Blasio's mayoral campaign.

Grecko is expected to say that Brooklyn businessman Reichberg 'watched and directed her perform sexcapades with cops'.

Grecko, the ex-wife of billionaire Geoffrey Edelsten, claimed she was hired by New York businessman Reichberg to dress as a scantily-clad air hostess - this picture was taken about the same time as the 2013 incident

Grecko traveled to Las Vegas on a private flight in early 2013 with Jeremy Reichberg and Jona Rechnitz

The former prostitute has said her experiences on the flight were so sordid she gave up working as a call girl

Grecko is expected to say that Brooklyn businessman Reichberg 'watched and directed her perform sexcapades with cops'

During the private flight to Sin City, Grecko wore 'a skimpy flight attendant outfit' to perform 'services' for the duo's guests, including retired NYPD Deputy Inspector James Grant, the Manhattan U.S. Attorney's Office has charged.

'He wasn't really part of the action,' she told the New York Post in 2016. 'He was just like setting it up and watching.

'He got serviced for part of the time, but he was mostly just egging it on and saying nasty comments, instructing me what to do sexually.

'He'd call me a dirty slut while smacking my ass,' she said.

Reichberg is accused of hiring Grecko as part of a bribery scheme involving Grant and Reichberg's friend, fellow de Blasio donor Rechnitz, who has pleaded guilty and is co-operating with police.

Reichberg and Grant are scheduled to stand trial starting April 30 on charges including conspiracy and honest-services fraud.

Reichberg is accused of hiring Grecko as part of a bribery scheme involving retired NYPD Deputy Inspector James Grant (center)

Prosecutors are fighting to keep Grecko's alleged romp with Reichberg (photoed) admissible in court

Brooklyn businessman Jeremy Reichberg, right, is facing corruption charges

Gabi Grecko is the former wife of billionaire Geoffrey Edelsten - the coupe are seen here in Melbourne in May 2014

Grecko's lawyers say she will testify truthfully about events that occurred on the plane and in Las Vegas

Grecko has said that what happened on the private flight was a dark thing but she would not allow it to define her

Reichberg's lawyers have pushed to block prosecutors from bringing up 'any evidence' Grecko and Reichberg had 'a sordid tryst mid-air', claiming that would have 'the potential for unfair prejudice', nydailynews.com reported.

The lawyers previously claimed 'we do not believe that there is evidence that Reichberg had any sexual contact with the prostitute' during this trip.

But prosecutors are fighting to keep Grecko's alleged romp with Reichberg admissible in court  claiming it's 'necessary to complete the witnesses' story'.

Grecko said the Vegas trip convinced her to quit as a call girl.

'I just want people to know that because [of] the way I was treated, I stopped doing it,' she said. 'It's a dark thing that happened to me, but I don't think it defines me.'

Lawyer Robert Baum, of the Federal Defenders of New York, confirmed to the New York Post that he was representing Grecko as a potential witness against Grant and Reichberg.

'If called upon as a witness, she will testify truthfully about events that occurred on the plane and in Las Vegas,' he said.

Grant's lawyer, John Meringolo, has described Grecko's claims as 'an assassination of my client's character'.

'The evidence will show it has nothing to do with the alleged quid pro quo.'

Rechnitz's attorney, Marc S. Harris, called Grecko's allegations were 'false and unfounded.'

Reichberg's lawyer declined to comment, as did a spokesman for Manhattan US Attorney Preet Bharara.



Advertisement

Mass protests against the government of French president Emmanuel Macron descended into violence today as water cannons and teargas were used against demonstrators.

Police baton charges also helped to restore order in major cities including Paris as banks and parked cars were attacked, and shop windows put in.

'The situation is very fraught,' said an officer close to Bastille square in the centre of the French capital. 'Police and property are being attacked by armed thugs.'

Demonstrators attend a protest against French government's string of reforms in Paris today

Riot police cover themselves behind their shields as smoke bombs explode during clashes on the side lines of a nation-wide action day in France

Masked demonstrators launch missiles at riot police on the streets of Paris

Rioters take cover from the police's water cannon in Nantes today. The masked demonstrators are protesting against proposed economic reforms

Protesters dressed in black clash with police today. Officers used teargas against crowds on the streets of Paris

Demonstrators protect themselves from a water cannon on the streets of Paris. France has been crippled by travel chaos as unions took to the street to protest against the government

Protests against proposed economic reforms in France descended into violence today. These masked protesters were pictures smashing a window with a hammer

Anarchists wearing black balaclavas caused the worst of the damage, throwing stones at police before running back into the crowds.

There were similar scenes in the western city of Nantes, where police made seven arrests in the late morning.

France was also plunged into travel chaos as thousands expressed their opposition to Mr Macron's employment reforms.

High-speed Eurostar train services between London and Paris were among those cancelled as the head of state faced up to a major challenge to his policies.

Trade used the 50th anniversary of the start of the legendary 1968 civil unrest to call for change.

Strikes affected all transport, from planes to underground trains, as well as public services including hospitals and schools.

A youth holds up a sign reading 'Macron killed me' during demonstrations in France today (left). Thousands have taken to the streets to protest against President Macron's economic reforms

Rioters smashed the windows of a bank in Paris today, during a demonstration by rail workers protesting against proposed economic reforms

Mass protests against the French government descended into violence today as water cannons and teargas were used against demonstrators. Protesters were pictured throwing bricks at windows in Paris

Police arrest protesters in Nantes today. Anarchists wearing black balaclavas were seen throwing stones at police before running back into the crowds

There were ugly scenes in the western city of Nantes as masked demonstrators clashed with police. Seven arrests were made, officials said

Riot police use a water canon to disperse rioters during clashes in France. President Macron is trying to make it easier for bosses to fire workers

Demonstrators hold up placards and flares in Paris today. Around 30,000 demonstrators met up at the Bastille monument in the centre of the city

As Eurostar announced cancellations 'due to industrial action in France', budget airline Ryanair released a statement calling on 'the French government and European Commission to take immediate action to prevent the skies over Europe being closed yet again.'

Philippe Martinez, leader of the hard-Left CGT union said: 'Thousands will be involved in the action. If we do nothing, the government will not back down.'

It is the first day of three months of planned strikes that will see workers walk out for two out of every five days.

Mr Martinez is furious at the way Mr Macron is making it easier for bosses to fire workers, while also attacking hard-won work conditions and pension rights.

Riot police charge demonstrators in Nantes today during protests against the government

A protester is detained by police in Paris today

Youths scuffle with riot police. France was also plunged into travel chaos as thousands expressed their opposition to Mr Macron's employment reforms

French railway workers demonstrating today. The country's transport network was in chaos after unions took to the streets

A protester holds a sign reading 'Make the public service great again' during a demonstration during a nation-wide strike day affecting public services

In turn, the president believes France urgently needs to modernise, saying: 'We are going to continue reforming France in depth, with the certitude that our country needs this transformation to make up for the ground lost in previous decades.'

The biggest protest was at the Bastille monument in central Paris, where up to 30,000 demonstrators met up.

It was on March 22 1968 that students occupied a university building in Nanterre, the Paris suburb.

The so-called 'March 22 Movement' mobilised massive support, including from trade unions, and their protests led directly to the May 1968 disturbances that made headlines around the world.

The government of President Charles de Gaulle was threatened, as his ministers feared civil war and economic collapse.

De Gaulle fled to Germany at one stage, before parliamentary elections in June 1968 saw the protests fizzle out.Advertisement

Drug cheat cyclist Lance Armstrong has put his Texas mansion on the market a second time for $750,000 less than it was touted for just two years ago.

The five-bedroom, seven-bathroom property located in the Old West Austin Historic District was listed for $7.5million on March 19, according to online records.

The mansion was originally built in 1924 but is state-of-the-art and includes seven living areas, a climate-controlled wine cellar, an outdoor pool and poolhouse complete with its own bathroom and kitchenette.

Lance Armstrong has listed his Austin mansion for $7.5million two years after it was first offered for $8.25million in a word-of-mouth sale, then withdrawn because he decided not to part with it

The 8,000sq-ft home features seven downstairs living areas, including this grand hallway with sweeping staircase

The property, located in the Old West Austin Historic District, is decorated with striking artwork throughout. In this large living room is GOAT, which stands for Greatest Of All Time, a tribute book to Muhammad Ali

The home was first constructed in 1924 but given a full update in 2007 to include a pool and other modern amenities. There is plenty of space for entertaining, including in this dining room on the first floor

Armstrong currently lives in the property with fiance Anna Hansen and his five children, but the family are now looking to downsize to something more modest

This large kitchen which overlooks the garden opens on to a breakfast nook complete with a television screen

Armstrong bought this home in 2013 after selling two other homes in Austion following his admission that he used banned substances throughout his cycling career

Agent Laura Gottesman said the property was first offered in 2016 but it was never officially listed. However, Armstrong is now determined to get rid of it and has listed it at a lower price

The master bedroom features its own seating area (right) and also has adjoining his and hers bathrooms

Downstairs is a huge climate-controlled wine cellar which is also kitted out with a full dining table for entertaining guests

Armstrong first tried to sell the property in January 2016 with an asking price of $8.25million, but agent Laura Gottesman told BizJournal that it was never officially listed and was withdrawn after he decided not to part with it.

Now the athlete is determined to get rid of the property, where he lives with his fiance Anna Hansen and his five children, as they search for something more modest.

Gottesman said: '$8.2 was more of a "make me an offer" price. $7.5million is really where we can justify the valuation and it's more appropriate for today's market.'

The shamed athlete purchased the home in 2013 for an undisclosed sum having been forced to sell his previous Austin mansion following his admission that he used banned substances throughout his career.

He had asked $10million for his old home, which featured an upstairs media room decorated with his seven Tour de France jerseys before they were revoked, but buyer Al Koehler told the Austin American-Statesman that he 'didn't pay anything close to' that price.

Amrstrong pictured in December 2016 with his now-fiance Anna Hansen and children Luke (left), twins Isabelle and Grace, (right), Max (front center) and Olivia (front right)

The garden features stunning oak trees which overhang the pool and a lounging area where the new owners can sunbathe

At the other end of the garden is a covered seating area for guests, and to the right is a poolhouse with its own bathroom

The seating area features a gas grill for barbecues on hot evenings. The home also has a sprinkler system in order to keep the garden looking green

Armstrong bought this house after selling his previous 1.7acre Austin property for far less than the $10million asking price. He is now downsizing again, according to the letting agent

Next to the pool is an outbuilding which features a kitchenette and separate bathroom. On the wall is what appears to be a picture of a Tour de France yellow jersey. Armstrong won seven during his career, but was later disqualified for cheating

The main house features a total of five bathrooms, including his and hers suites that are located off the master bedroom

The Mediterranean-style home has a high-tech alarm system, air conditioning throughout and a surround sound system

Public records show Koehler took out a loan of $3.1million for the property, though it is not clear if this was the final purchase price.

Armstrong also sold his house on Lake Austin in 2013 to race car driver Bret Curtis for an undisclosed amount, according to public records.

His current home was built in a Mediterranean style and updated in 2007 with a pool, spa and attached garage.

The mansion has a master suite with a private sitting area and his-and-hers bathrooms, a high-tech alarm system, gated entry, central air conditioning, a sprinkler system and surround sound.

In addition to the pool, the backyard features an outdoor dining area and a pool house equipped with a full bathroom and kitchenette.

The historic home also has a wood-burning fireplace and an underground wine cellar with enough space for entertaining.A British holidaymaker had his right leg amputated and is fighting for his life after a horror motorbike crash in Thailand.

Harry Buster, 29, a bartender from London, collided with lorry and was dragged under the vehicles for nearly 50 feet, suffering serious injuries.

Mr Buster has lost his leg from the knee down and medics in Kancahanaburi, west Thailand, are now preparing to remove everything below the hip due to the severe damage.

Injured: Harry Buster, 29, from London, has lost his leg after he collided with lorry in Kancahanaburi, west Thailand, and was dragged under the vehicle for nearly 50 feet

He also suffered a shattered pelvis, broken ribs, internal bleeding on his liver, kidneys and lungs and currently has a 50 per cent chance of survival

Mr Buster's friend James Bailey, 43, has launched a funding campaign to pay for his medical bills, which - as Mr Buster did not have travel insurance - are estimated to more than 23,000.

Mr Bailey said: 'He was dragged and his right leg has been totally gloved above the knee. It was almost ripped off leaving the muscle and bone exposed.

'There's nothing worse that could have happened.

'I went to the hospital where I watched Harry being wheeled into intensive care with a stump after his leg had been amputated above the knee.

Accident: Mr Buster lost two litres of blood at the scene of the accident on Monday

No insurance: Mr Buster did not have travel insurance and his friends are now fundraising to help pay for his 23,000 medical bills

Mr Buster suffered a shattered pelvis, broken ribs, internal bleeding on his liver, kidneys and lungs and currently has a 50 per cent chance of survival

'It was horrific - bone marrow has been exposed so there is fear of infection which could kill him.

'He currently has a 50/50 chance of survival considering how serious the other injuries are too - but infection alone could kill him.

Mr Buster arrived in Thailand in October and had been travelling to an immigration office in Kancahanaburi to extend his visa when he was hit at around 10am on Monday.

It is understood he collided with the lorry, which was travelling in the opposite direction, when it made a right turn into a side road.

He survived the crash thanks to wearing a helmet and protective jacket, but in addition to his injuries he lost two litres of blood at the scene.

Mr Bailey, a graphic designer, is hoping any money raised will also allow Harry to be moved to a different hospital where surgeons could save the rest of his leg by repairing the joint.

'Because they can't put the leg back in the pelvis socket they are saying they may have to amputate it at the hip

Mr Buster is currently in hospital after having had his leg amputated from the knee-down, and is now likely to have it removed from the hip

Happier times: Mr Buster, pictured with his girlfriend, had been living in Thailand since October last year

'I will be letting that happen over my dead body. We've got a big chance to save him but we need immediate funding.'

Mr Bailey describes having to call Mr Buster's parents in the UK to tell them about the accident.

'His mum wouldn't stop screaming. I kept saying 'He's alive and that has to be the main focus'. 'They flew out straight away.'A Russian model has been thrown in a Dubai detention prison despite giving harrowing new details of her claim that she was fought off 'a knife-wielding rapist' - saying she jumped 'naked' six floors to save her life.

Supporters of Ekaterina Stetsyuk, 22, who suffered serious back injuries requiring surgery, say she has been locked up because the man made a counter claim that she attacked him.

After two operations on her back, the woman has been moved to a detention centre, say her family.

Her alleged attacker - who she says was a 39-year-old Pakistani businessman not American as earlier reported - had invited her to discuss a future cosmetics business deal, say her family.

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Russian model Ekaterina Stetsyuk (pictured) has broken her back after jumping from the sixth floor of a Dubai hotel 'to escape from a US businessman who tried to rape and kill her'

Stetsyuk claimed that he drank wine 'and became violent', threatening her with a knife, and demanding that she undress.

'She was scared and obeyed', said one report.

Her mother Inga said: 'He grabbed a large knife from a coffee table, and held her neck.

'He held her neck, pushed her against the wall, and began to wave the knife next to her head, threatening her.'

She managed to grab the knife but he 'jumped on her and pulled her hair, then pushed her down on the floor,' reported Life news website in Moscow.

Ekaterina Stetsyuk, 22, from the city of Irkutsk in eastern Siberia, has been left with serious injuries in hospital (pictured) after the fall

The 22-year-old (pictured) refused to have sex with the man who allegedly held a knife against a throat, she told friends and relatives

She clung onto the knife and wounded him, giving her time to run to the balcony and jumped 'in fear of her life'.

Her unnamed attacker then fled to the airport where he was detained.

He told Dubai police that she had attacked him - and that in the process of defending himself, he accidentally pushed her out of a window.

The model had two operations and it was reported earlier this week she could not move.

Now, she has been deemed well enough to be transferred to a cell.

The unnamed man has reportedly made a counter claim that Ekaterina (pictured) attacked him and the model is now 'in custody' in her hospital bed

The model's mother said Ekaterina (pictured) had been held with a knife at her throat by an American man before trying to save her life by leaping from the sixth floor of the building, which has not been identified

Contrary to earlier reports, she did not break her spine but suffered serious injuries in the fall from what has been reported as a hotel or residential building.

Ivan Gubanov, Russian vice-consul, said she 'expected the worst' and was in an 'emotional state'.

He refused to say the reasons she originally came to Dubai, amid reports she had a month-long contract to work as an escort.

She was due to be paid 5,000, the Russian media has reported.

Ekaterina's mother, Inge, was set to fly from Russia to Dubai to be by her daughter's side

The man whose nationality has not been confirmed was detained at the airport seeking to flee Dubai, Ekaterina (pictured) was told

Ekaterina's friend Irina Grossman said the model had jumped from the sixth floor 'to save her life and dignity'

The model's mother has claimed Ekaterina had been held with a knife at her throat by an American man

'It is better to show compassion. This is about a young girl, our compatriot, who really fell from the 6th floor, miraculously survived, having injured her spine and internal organs.'

Her mother who is travelling to Dubai complained that in jail, the model - from Irkutsk in Siberia - had been deprived of her mobile phone and had been 'isolated'.

The vice-consul said that she will be required to remain in Dubai for the duration of the investigation.

It is believed she may face prosecution for being alone with a man.

Her friend Irina Grossman said 'She survived by a miracle.'

Her spinal cord was 'intact' and 'several vertebras were crushed'

Ekaterina's friend Irina Grossman said the model (pictured) 'cannot walk or move by herself' after the incident

The model's friend and mother are raising money by crowdfunding to cover initial 11,000 medical costs in Dubai

Russian channel NTV reported that Ekaterina 'was followed by a rich foreigner' before leaping from the sixth floor of the buildingPervert Monir Fahmedine (pictured), 33, flashed women on trains around Newcastle from December to January 2018. He was fined 240 after admitting to six counts of indecent exposure

A French flasher who exposed his genitals to teenage girls on six separate occasions claimed he did it because 'he missed his family back home in France.'

University graduate Monir Fahmedine, 33, flashed at teenage girls and women on Metro trains around Newcastle from December to January 2018.

North Tyneside Magistrates' Court heard that two of the 33-year-old's victims were only 14 and 16.

The serial flasher was finally identified by police and interviewed, where his explanation for his depraved behaviour was because he was homesick.

Now, Fahmedine, who is from France but has been living in Heaton, a popular student suburb in the city, for just over a year, has been fined a total of 240 after he pleaded guilty to six counts of indecent exposure.

Sue Baker, prosecuting, said the offences happened between December 9, 2017 and January 13, 2018.

'All occurred on the Metro system while the defendant was on the Metro,' Ms Baker told the court.

'The defendant exposed his penis to women on each occasion. There were three offences on December 9, two on January 8 and one on January 13.

'Two of the victims were youths, aged 14 and 16. Two of the ladies indicated that the defendant's penis was erect and four indicated that it was not.'

Fahmedine, who has no past convictions and is a graduate in international commerce, was finally identified after his last offence on January 13.

The prosecutor added: 'When interviewed, the defendant made full admissions to the police and the only explanation he could give was because he was missing his family in France.'

University graduate Fahmedine flashed at teenage girls and women on Metro trains around Newcastle from December to January 2018. When he was finally arrested he claimed he did it because 'he missed his family back home in France'

The court was told Fahmedine had come to Newcastle in February last year to work for a French energy company based in the city.

However, magistrates heard, because of the language barrier, he became isolated and missed his family and friends back in his home country.

Adrian Ions, defending, said: 'It's quite clear that, during this period, he suffered from depression. The offences are bizarre and completely out of character.

'He's genuinely contrite and remorseful and he's acutely embarrassed.'

As well as the fine, Fahmedine was ordered to pay 85 costs and a 30 victim surcharge.

The court was also told that he would be returning to France to live next week.Facebook could be abandoned by advertisers willing to pull their 'hard money' after deciding 'enough is enough' after their data disaster.

Up to 3,000 big businesses are demanding answers from Mark Zuckerberg about users' personal information being harvested without permission.

The IBSA, which represents leading UK advertisers, will meet with Facebook tomorrow to understand the scope of the inquiry Zuckerberg announced yesterday.

They are asking for reassurances, on behalf of their members, that Facebook will get to the bottom of any implications of data misuse.

ISBA have said that what they are hearing is that advertisers are concerned and they want to understand the extent of the data misuse.

Banks have also said they will stop buying shares in the under fire social network with some investors ready to sue over 'false statements' made about the protection members' data.

It comes as Culture Secretary Matt Hancock also told MPs that the 'Wild West free-for-all' of internet companies has got to come to an end in light of the Cambridge Analaytica scandal.

Cambridge Analytica, along with Facebook, is under scrutiny following claims by whistleblower Christopher Wylie that the firm harvested large amounts of data without consent.

Facebook could face an advertising boycott unless it gets its house in order after 50m accounts were harvested for data

Mr Hancock, who made the comments during culture questions in the Commons, went on to say that the incident represented a 'turning point' in the debate.

Mr Hancock, in response to a question from Labour MP Chi Onwurah who called for the introduction of a 'digital bill of rights', said: 'It is increasingly clear that we need a new settlement with these big tech companies.'

He later added: 'We have shown and made the case over the last year that this Wild West free-for-all of the internet companies has got to come to an end. I think this is a turning point.'

M&C Saatchi boss David Kershaw said: 'Some advertisers will say enough is enough to Facebook, but the truth is that advertising is an oligopoly, with 60 per cent of all spending going to Facebook and Google'.

He admitted that advertisers threatening to boycott will probably force a change.

'It is much more likely to be hard money from advertisers rather than consumers running hashtags on Twitter', he said.

'From the consumers' point of view, you have these extraordinary services you get from your social media and there's an exchange, you're giving your data.

'I think that most consumers accept that deal unless it comes to where we are now where that data is abused.'

M&C Saatchi boss David Kershaw believes business pulling support will have more of an impact than

The ISBA, a group of leading British consumer goods companies, has demanded a response from the social media giant, according to the Times.

It was claimed that around 3,000 firms including Unilever and Procter & Gamble did not want to associate with Facebook if it was shown that users' data had been acquired without permission.

Big business has already threatened Facebook over the availability over illegal or extremist content on the website.

Banking giant Nordea said it had put some Facebook investments in 'quarantine' as it monitored the scandal.

Electronics firm Sonos is suspending advertising with the social network in response to the scandal.

Facebook's revenues soared to billions of pounds after it started giving away users' details, it emerged today.

The social media giant practically doubled its takings every year after opening up profiles to 'tens of thousands' of app developers.

Facebook users were yesterday waking up to how much private information has been handed out. During the data gold-rush  which lasted from 2009 to 2015  it appears almost anyone who described themselves as a 'developer' could freely mine Facebook's database.

The offices of Cambridge Analytica in central London, which could be raided by Britain's data watchdog and appears to have been already searched by Facebook

In this period, the technology firm's revenues rose sharply, from 500million in 2009 to nearly 13billion by 2015.

The scale of the breach has grown dramatically since it emerged at the weekend that 50million Facebook profiles were harvested by Aleksandr Kogan, a psychology researcher at Cambridge University, who designed a 'personality quiz' app as a research project.

He passed the data to Cambridge Analytica, whose boss Alexander Nix was suspended on Tuesday after Channel 4 broadcast footage of him bragging about the firm's role in Donald Trump's presidential campaign.

The company says Mr Nix's comments 'do not represent the values or operations of the firm'.

Dr Kogan claimed 'tens of thousands' of other apps may be mining social media for personal data to be sold on in the same way. Other experts said it was possible virtually the entire Facebook database from 2015 could be in unknown hands.

Until it tightened privacy settings in April that year, Facebook was effectively giving away masses of personal data to third-party developers for free, to encourage them to create more apps and grow the platform, say experts.

In 2012, there were some nine million Facebook apps  all of whose developers were apparently able to access users' personal details. It is unclear what checks were made on someone applying to Facebook to become a 'developer'  for example whether they might be a company, a spy agency or even a mafia gang  before personal details were made available.

Dutch academic Bernhard Rieder, who created a similar Facebook app in 2009 before deleting it, said: 'Before 2015, you could get troves of data. I should have stored all the data [and then sold it to] get that Lamborghini.'A campus at the University of Wisconsin is planning to ditch 13 majors including English, philosophy and history.

The Stevens Point campus is understood to be shifting its focus towards programs with 'clear career pathways'.

With the more traditional subjects seemingly on their way out, they will make way for the likes of marketing, management and computer information systems.

The University of Wisconsin's Stevens Point campus (pictured) is understood to be shifting its focus towards programs with 'clear career pathways'

The school said these subjects 'have demonstrated value and demand in the region', according to The Washinton Post.

It has spawned from the University of Wisconsin's multimillion-dollar deficit, the paper reported.

The move, which will have to be approved by the campus' governance committee as well as the chancellor and board of regents, has been met with staunch opposition by students.

They are said to be planning a sit-in this week to demonstrate against the change.

In a statement to The Washington Post, the school said: 'To fund this future investment, resources would be shifted from programs with lower enrollment, primarily in the traditional humanities and social sciences.

'Although some majors are proposed to be eliminated, courses would continue to be taught in these fields, and minors or certificates will be offered.'Nic Lane claims her daughter Paris was told to dye her hair by a teacher because 'orange is not a natural colour'

A teacher allegedly told a ginger pupil to dye her hair because 'orange is not a natural colour'.

Paris Lane, 12, attends Kearsley Academy, near Bolton, Greater Manchester, and was allegedly told to change her hair colour during a uniform crackdown labelled excessive by some parents.

Her furious mother, Nic, 31, has now complained about the comment.

Paris from Farnworth, Lancashire, says she had been walking down a corridor near to the maths department when a teacher made the comment.

She said: 'I was walking around school and heard somebody say "oi", I turned around and said "me?" I didn't really see him.

'He went "you need to dye your hair back", he said "orange isn't a natural colour". I left and walked off.'

Mrs Lane said: 'I had actually bought her a brown hair dye because she's getting bullied.

Paris attends Kearsley Academy, near Bolton, Greater Manchester, and was allegedly told to change her hair colour during a uniform crackdown labelled excessive by some parents

'She was already upset. She's emotional anyway as she's gets called all these ginger names.'

Paris added: 'They should concentrate on our learning rather than what we look like.'

On the school's website under the uniform policy, it says: 'No extreme hair colours/ styles (the decision as to what is extreme rests with the principal).'

Mrs Lane rang the school after Paris told her what happened and a member of staff called her back to discuss the hair issue, the school's new policy about wearing formal-style shoes and a number of problems Paris had been having.

She said: 'I told (the staff member) about Paris' hair and she giggled and said, "that's nothing to worry about, we know ginger is her natural colour", but it's not funny to someone who's already conscious of their hair colour.'

Mrs Lane then had a face-to-face meeting with a teacher about her complaints and about Paris being told to dye her hair.

Kearsley Academy's uniform policy for girls Plain black Academy Blazer with Academy logo Plain black knee-length pleated Academy skirt with Academy logo or Plain black Academy Trousers with Academy logo Academy tie (tied to the correct length so it covers all buttons on the front of the shirt) Plain white formal shirt (ticked in) Plain black shoes (no trainers, no boots. For the avoidance of doubt shoes must be of a polishable material) No extreme hair colours/ styles (the decision as to what is extreme rests with the principal) Minimal hair dressage (plain bobbles and slides only, no additional hair accessories Advertisement

Mrs Lane said: 'He said "I will write that down. Can I speak to Paris about this?" I gave him permission and he's still not spoken to her.

'Nothing ever seems to get done. Before I used to get a letter home explaining what action had been taken.

'You're left guessing and you don't actually know now.'

Mrs Lane says she has now sent her complaints, including the teacher's comments about Paris' hair, to Ofsted.

A spokesman for Kearsley Academy said: 'It is our policy not to comment about any individual student at our academy.

'We always aim to develop a positive relationship with all parents and encourage those who have any specific concerns to speak with the academy.'

An Ofsted spokesman said: 'While we do not comment on individual schools, we consider all complaints thoroughly.

'Any complaints received about a school are reviewed and when appropriate assessed to see if any actions are required.'Edward Swarthye's story suggests black immigrants in England were seen as equals. Pictured: Portrait of an African man, circa 1530

The case of a black servant whipping a white one forms part of a growing body of evidence that Africans were treated equally in Tudor England.

Edward Swarthye's dealings with the Elizabethan court is one of 350 examples of black people whose stories have been compiled in the book, Black Tudors.

The book is the first detailed study of early black immigrants and explores Swarthye's coming to England on a ship under the command of Sir Francis Drake.

According to Miranda Kaufmann, senior research fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London, Swarthye had a higher rank than that of fellow servant, John Guy, who would go onto become mayor of Bristol and a colonial governor of Newfoundland.

'The whipping is a shock today because when we think of whipping we usually think of a white man whipping a black man,' Dr Kaufmann told the Oxford Literary Festival.

'It utterly inverts everything we thought we knew about the Tudors.'

Black Tudors explores how Swarthye became a porter of Edward Wynter, a knight who joined Drake on a voyage to the Caribbean.

The book explores how Swarthye became a porter of Edward Wynter, who joined Sir Francis Drake (right) on a voyage to the Caribbean. Left: An African male bust featured on the Drake Jewel, which is believed to have been gifted to the naval hero from Queen Elizabeth I

Dr Kauffman said the whipping of John Guy by an African man 'tterly inverts everything we thought we knew about the Tudors'. Pictured: Sir Walter Raleigh laying his cloak across a puddle so Queen Elizabeth I would not get wet

Swarthye it thought to have been recruited to fight alongside the English during a raid on the Spanish port of Catergena, which is now Columbia.

He then returned back to England with Wynter, it is believed.

Swarthye, who was given his English name for his dark skin, is mentioned in a court case in 1567.

The proceedings heard from John Guy, who complained over Wynter's order for Swarthye to beat him as an example.

In Swarthye's deposition, which is held at the National Archives, he admitted to whipping Guy on the order of his employer in the halls of Wynter's house in Lydney, Gloucestershire.

Although he was never on trial, the African's fate was never recorded.

As an experienced diver, Francis was employed to salvage guns from Henry VIII's flagship the Mary Rose. Pictured: The warship's remains at the Mary Rose Museum, Porstmouth

Dr Kaufmann added: 'John Guy went on to become the mayor of Bristol and an MP.

'It's quite something to consider that in his youth he had been whipped by an African man.

Dr Kauffman speculated that Guy's experience may have influenced him to be more open with the Beothuk people of Newfoundland.

Black Tudors also explores the tale of Jaques Francis, a native of Arguin Island off Mauritania.

As an experienced diver, Francis was employed to salvage guns from Henry VIII's flagship the Mary Rose.

The warship sank near Portsmouth in 1545 after serving 33 years in numerous wars against France, Scotland and Brittany.

Francis appeared as a witness during the trial of his employer, Piero Paulo Corsi, who was accused of stealing items during the salvaging operation, according to court documents from 1548.

The court also ruled that Francis was fit to stand trial, despite other witnesses claiming Francis was not due to his status as a slave.

The ruling meant that Francis was the first known African to give evidence in an English court of law.

But Corsi, who won the case, would later be locked up in the Tower of London for abandoning the Mary Rose operation for another commission.

Dr Kaufman said there was a multitude of evidence to suggest black immigrants were free and that their status as salves was undone when they landed on English soil.

Slavery in Britain did no become widespread until the mid-17th century and was made illegal in Britain in 1838.Jeremy Corbyn urged voters to punish the Tories at the local elections today but launched his campaign amid signs his soft stance on Russia has hit support.

A series of polls since the Salisbury attack have seen Theresa May's party edge into a narrow lead.

The latest survey by ICM showed the Tories up one on 44 per cent and Labour down one on 41 per cent.

Most polls since last year's general election have seen the two parties tied or Labour slightly ahead.

Mr Corbyn has been widely criticised for appearing hesitant to blame the Kremlin for the attack when even many on his own side have accepted the evidence pointing to Russia and firmly endorsed Mrs May's hardline stance.

Jeremy Corbyn (pictured launching his campaign today) urges voters to punish the Tories at the local elections today but launches the campaign amid signs his soft stance on Russia has hit support

Mr Corbyn is in Trafford to launch Labour's campaign for the local elections today (pictured)

The latest survey by ICM (pictured) showed the Tories up one on 44 per cent and Labour down one on 41 per cent

The Conservative Party is expected to have a torrid night on May 3 and could lose a series of flagship councils in London, including places like Wandsworth, Westminster and Barnet that have long been seen as fortresses for the party.

In his campaign launch today, Mr Corbyn highlighted increases of almost 6 per cent in council tax bills across the country.

He accused Conservatives of demanding voters 'pay more for less', as bills soar while local services are cut.

And he said that a vote for Labour on May 3 represents a vote to 'change direction'.

'On May 3, people across England will have the chance to send an unmistakable message to this Government that enough is enough,' the Labour leader said.

'Enough of cuts to vital services that hurt local communities; enough of cuts to schools, hospitals and local policing; enough of library and youth centres closures, enough of leaving elderly and disabled people without essential care; and enough of failed privatisations that suck funds out of public services so a few can make a profit.

'Austerity is a political choice. So when your children's school is losing teachers and sending begging letters, or their youth centre is closed, that's because the Conservative priority is tax breaks for big business.

'And when your elderly relatives are neglected because of a lack of social care, that's because the Conservatives want another tax giveaway for a few people at the top.'

A series of polls since the Salisbury attack have seen Theresa May's party edge into a narrow lead

Mr Corbyn said that not only families but also local businesses are facing an increased tax burden, with business rates rising by more than 3,000.

'The message from Theresa May's Government could not be clearer,' he said. 'Pay more for less under the Conservatives.

'After eight years of Conservative cuts, failed privatisations and falling living standards, it's time for real change. Labour will give dignity and support to those in need, rebuild our communities and transform our country for the many, not the few.'

Elections are taking place in 32 London boroughs and 119 other councils around England on May 3, alongside mayoral ballots in Hackney, Lewisham, Newham, Tower Hamlets, Watford and the Sheffield City Region.A farmer who killed his sheepdog because he didn't round up his flock of sheep properly has been jailed for 18 weeks.

Graham Thomas, 55, attached a piece of 20ft rope around Prince's neck and hanged him from a large tree on his farm in South Wales.

Witnesses described seeing Thomas shouting and swearing at the Welsh border collie in the moments before he was killed.

A vet told jurors at Newport Magistrates' Court this week the hanging would have caused the animal 'great fear, distress and clear unnecessary suffering.'

Cruel: Farmer Graham Thomas, 55, denied killing Prince, pictured above, and insisted the animal had managed to climb the tree and twist the rope around his neck

Thomas pleaded not guilty and claimed the black and white hound had managed to climb up the sapling himself while twisting the rope around his neck in the process.

He claimed Prince was dead by the time he tried to help at the farm in Rhymney, South Wales.

The bench at Newport Magistrates' Court did not fall for his story however, finding him guilty following a trial this week.

Newport Magistrates Court heard that the RSPCA spoke to an expert vet who said that Thomas' story didn't add up.

Thomas, of Tredegar, Blaenau Gwent, South Wales, denied the offence under the Animal Welfare Act, but was found guilty after trial.

Guilty: The bench didn't believe Graham Thomas's story and found him guilty of causing 'unnecessary suffering' to the sheepdog, pictured deceased above

Witnesses saw Thomas shouting and swearing at the Welsh border collie Prince shortly before he was killed

The court heard that it was one of the 'clearest' acts of cruelty that had been encountered and was so serious that only custody could be justified.

He was jailed for 18 weeks for causing unnecessary suffering.

He was banned from keeping dogs and sheep for life.

RSPCA inspector Emma Smith said: 'This is such an unusual and disturbing case where a sheepdog was killed by his owner allegedly because he wouldn't round up his sheep properly.

'Prince would have suffered immensely which resulted sadly in his death. This deliberate cruelty is just so horrific to fathom. Following the incident his body was then removed by the defendant and burnt.

'It must have been extremely distressing for the witnesses to have seen this. We are very grateful to them for reporting it to us and assisting with our investigations.'Harrowing footage of police fatally shooting a knife-wielding mentally-ill woman only 41 seconds after arriving has been seen for the first time.

Officers shot dead Courtney Topic in 2015 as she stood outside a Hungry Jack's in Hoxton Park, Western Sydney while brandishing a 30-cm long kitchen knife.

It took less than a minute after arriving on the scene for police to gun down the 22-year-old, who lunged at officers with the blade following desperate pleas for her to 'put the knife down'.

Scroll down for video

Officers fatally shot Courtney Topic (pictured) in 2015 as she stood outside a Hungry Jack's in Hoxton Park, Western Sydney while brandishing a 30-cm long kitchen knife

It took less then a minute after arriving on the scene for police to gun down the 22-year-old, (pictured) who lunged at officers with the blade following desperate pleas for her to 'put the knife down'

The shocking vision of the shooting was played at the coronial inquest into Topic's death, which found officers charged a defective taser and attempted to subdue the woman with capsicum spray before opening fire, the Daily Telegraph reports.

Shaky bodycam footage shows Topic standing on a grassy hill outside the Hungry Jack's, holding the knife in her right hand and a soft-drink cup in her left hand.

Probationary Constable Angela Tyson can be heard repeatedly asking Topic to put the knife down.

'Put the knife on the ground for me. Put it on the ground,' she said.

Topic refuses to put down her weapon and instead takes several steps to her left while menacingly swinging her knife.

The shocking vision (pictured) of the shooting was played at the coronial inquest into Topic's death, which found officers charged a defective taser and attempted to subdue the woman with capsicum spray before opening fire

Shaky bodycam footage shows Topic standing on a grassy hill outside the Hungry Jack's, holding the knife in her right hand and a soft-drink cup in her left hand

Probationary Constable Angela Tyson can be heard repeatedly asking Topic to put the knife down (Hungry Jack's pictured)

Senior Constable Darren Jones then appears to try and use his capsicum spray to stop her and Constable Tyson tried to use the defective taser.

Surrounded by three officers, Topic then moved towards Senior Constable Tesoriero and then the fatal shot was fired.

'She turned immediately to her right and looked at Senior Constable Tesoriero, she raised the knife in her left hand and extended her left arm and ran towards Tesoriero,' Sergeant Glenn Sadler told the inquest.

An inquest is examining Topic's death and the adequacy of police training for responding to people with mental health problems.

It will also examine whether 'non-lethal force' could have been used to respond to the incident.

Shaky bodycam footage shows Topic standing on a grassy hill outside the Hungry Jack's, holding the knife in her right hand and a soft-drink cup in her left hand

An inquest is examining Topic's (pictured) death and the adequacy of police training for responding to people with mental health problems

In a statement to court, Topic's family described her death as 'sudden, unexpected and violent'

The court heard Topic was in the middle of a days-long psychosis when she took the kitchen knife and walked to Hungry Jack's on February 15 2015.

She had also been diagnosed as suffering from ADHD, Asperger's and symptoms of autism.

Constable Sanja Djuric said Senior Constable Tesoriero 'seemed to be in shock' after firing the fatal shot.

In a statement to court, Topic's family described her death as 'sudden, unexpected and violent'.

The inquest into Topic's death continues.Advertisement

With its white sandy beaches, turquoise seas and lush, verdant interior, the island of Providence looks like most people's idea of a Caribbean paradise.

But beyond its tropical beauty, lies a troubled and turbulent history. The tiny island off Nicaragua was settled in 1631 by English Puritans intent on founding a colony to compete with the colony of Plymouth which had been founded a decade before. Instead, Providence took a turn for the worse with crop failure, a slave revolt and a Spanish invasion.

Though its violent past may have been consigned to the history books, today the island of 5,000 is blighted by drug trafficking and struggles to survive because many young islanders have abandoned the fishing and traditional trades of their forebears to seek wealth elsewhere.

The fascinating past of Providence, or Providencia, as it known in Colombia which owns the island, has been examined in detail in the book 'The Island that Disappeared' by British author Tom Feiling, who found some aspects of life there still mirror the incredible complexities of its past.

With its white sandy beaches, turquoise sea and lush, verdant interior, the island of Providence (pictured) off Nicaragua looks like most people's idea of a Caribbean paradise

Behind the tropical beauty of Providence (pictured) lies a troubled and turbulent history of puritan settlers, Spanish invaders, slavery, pirates and haunted buried treasure

Providence, or Providencia, as it is known in Colombia which owns the island, is largely overlooked in Britain but was one of England's first colonies. It became the victim of an international tug of war involving religious groups, tobacco traders, ruthless buccaneers and slave traders. Pictured is an abandoned church at Smoothwater Bay from an era when religion and education were key to overcoming the island's poverty and isolation

The Pilgrims aboard the Mayflower landed in the New World in 1620 and soon became a success, despite the rampant diseases and harsh winters of New England. The colony kept law and order by signing and following the Mayflower Compact, which ensured all colonists worked together for their survival - something the colonists in Providence did not do. Plymouth Rock, which marks where the Pilgrims landed in New England, is pictured

In 1630, a group of English Puritans set sail on the Seaflower  the sister ship to the Mayflower, which famously transported the first Pilgrims from Plymouth, England, to the New World in 1620. The group aboard the Seaflower intended to build a peaceful and orderly Christian community away from persecution, but before long bitter divisions broke out among the Puritans, soldiers and slave owners creating turmoil on the five-mile-long island.

Meanwhile, Plymouth had already become a success, despite the diseases and harsh winters of New England. Though more than half the original settlers died during their first winter, the colonys population grew as more settlers joined them from England and had a relatively self-sufficient economy within its first five years.

The early signing of the Mayflower Compact is what kept order in the colony among the Pilgrims and other settlers who had travelled with them. The document ensured that all colonists would work together to create a society together. The colonists also made peace treaties with Native American tribes nearby.

By 1641, just 11 years after it had started, the Providence experiment was over when the Spanish invaded the island and drove the English out. The Caribbean island colony would never reach the success of its New England counterpart.

Providence is a tiny island more than 100 miles off Nicaragua and 500 miles from Colombia. It is so small it does not feature on many maps

The Providence colony was intended to compete with the Pilgrim colony of Plymouth which had been founded a decade before in New England and is now located in Massachusetts (pictured)

The island's fascinating past has been examined in detail in a new book, 'The Island that Disappeared' by author Tom Feiling. The highest point on Providence, which began as an underwater volcano, is known as the Peak (pictured)

Though completely forgotten by the British, Providence was one of England's first colonies. The Providence Island Company's experiment began in 1630, when puritans aboard the Seaflower landed with hopes of establishing a refuge from persecution. But rows between puritans and soldiers kept the colony in uproar. Pictured right: The Providence Island Company's journal

Even today, the flag of Providence makes reference to the treasure said to have been buried on the island by pirates and privateers

The Spaniards stationed what turned out to be an ineffective garrison in Providence and over the decades that followed it was occupied by pirates, including Henry Morgan.

Mr Feiling, 49, said: 'Sir Henry Morgan had this idea that this may be a pirate republic where all the pirate brethren could meet and raid Spanish ships whenever they wanted.'

The author said it was 'perfectly possible' hidden treasure remained buried on the island or in shipwrecks off the coast with 'unimaginable amounts' stolen from Spanish ships in the area.

Henry Morgan himself was rumoured to have buried some of his spoils in the hills of Providence after one particularly large haul from a raid in Panama.

But some superstitious islanders believe anything hidden there is now guarded by the supernatural - legend has it that pirates cursed their treasure by slaughtering people at their secret burial spots.

Even today, the flag of Providence makes reference to the treasure said to have been buried on the island while parts of the island are still named after Morgan.

As farming went into decline over the years, many islanders left Providence to work abroad and not all of them came back. Pictured is an abandoned wooden house in the hills

Pictured is an old Texaco station at Bailey on the island. These days, there is just one petrol station to service the island, which also has a landing strip, electricity generating plant, two cash points and a number of hotels

Many young islanders have abandoned the fishing and traditional trades of their forebears to seek wealth elsewhere but lemon, orange, fig and tamarind trees still grow wild in the hills

The Buccaneer King: Who was Sir Henry Morgan? Sir Henry Morgan (pictured) became known for his swashbuckling raids in the Caribbean Henry Morgan was born in the small village of Llanrumney in south Wales in 1635 and went on to become legendary buccaneer who battled the Spanish for control of the Caribbean. It is not known how he made his way to the West Indies, or how he began his career as a privateer. But while he is often described as a pirate, he was actually working for the English Commonwealth to secure trade routes to the New World. After diplomatic relations between England and Spain worsened in 1667, he was given a licence to attack and seize Spanish vessels. He became known for his daring raids, plundering cities, destroying Spanish squadrons and making lucrative seizures. But after one raid on Panama City, and after Spain and England had signed a peace treaty, he was arrested and sent back to London. There, he was treated like a returning hero by the public, the government and King Charles II. By 1674, he had been appointed a Knight Bachelor and returned to Jamaica to serve as the territory's Lieutenant Governor. In Jamaica he became a planter and respected member of the ruling class before he fell ill and died in 1688. His life was romanticised after his death and he became the inspiration for pirate-themed works of fiction across a range of genres. In Panama, the legend of the swashbuckling buccaneer has lived on and he has become one of the best known pirates in the region. Advertisement

The island was abandoned altogether in around 1685. It was deserted for the next 100 years until, in 1789, a handful of white settlers and their slaves arrived from Jamaica and resettled the island.

At first, Mr Feiling said, it was a 'completely lawless place' before American Philip Livingston brought Baptism to the island in the 1840s. With him came peace and stability and, eventually, a successful trade in coconuts, fish, fruit, coffee and sugar.

'(Livingston) realised the vision that the puritans had failed to realise,' Mr Feiling said, adding that this era set the foundations for peaceful, law-abiding island life for years to come.

'I spoke to a lot of people who remember that it was still like that in to the 1980s - electricity did not arrive until the 1960s and 1970s, people were going around with lanterns and there were no bank accounts. But the young people now are not interested in fishing and farming.'

In more recent times, the looming menace of Colombia's drugs trade has had an inevitable influence on island life - even if people live peacefully together.

Mr Feiling said he had been told that on one occasion, a drug-running 'fast boat' dropped its cargo near the island resulting in black bales of cocaine bobbing around off the coast.

A church service was rudely interrupted when word got out and, before long, members of the congregation were wading out to sea to bring in the parcels, he said.

'Providence is 500 miles from Colombia and that is a tank of fuel for a fast boat - so they stop off at Providence and refuel the boat,' Mr Feiling explained.

The island was abandoned altogether in around 1685. It was deserted for the next 100 years until in 1789 a handful of white settlers and their slaves arrived from Jamaica and resettled the island

In more recent times, the looming menace of Colombia's drugs trade has had an inevitable influence on island life - even if people live peacefully together

The famous Welsh pirate Sir Henry Morgan was rumoured to have buried some of his spoils in the hills of Providence after one particularly large haul from a raid in Panama

Inevitably, some younger islanders have found themselves lured away by the promise of quick cash from drug-running - and some have ended up in jail as a result.

But usually, if people do make money from the passing traffickers, Mr Feiling said, they might spend the money on modest improvements to their lives rather than splashing it on a life of luxury.

Was he disheartened by what he found while visiting the island to research his book?

'It's not a depressing place to be, it's a great place to be. But the backdrop is that that it's not a fishing and farming place any more. Young people want to leave and go to cities and everyone has iPhones - it's like their eyes have been opened.

'There are a lot of people who miss how it used to be. There is a real generation gap between the young and old.'

Some superstitious islanders believe anything hidden in the hills is now guarded by the supernatural - legend has it that pirates cursed their buried treasure by slaughtering people at the same spot

Mr Feiling said that while most people there were aware of the area's English heritage, Britain underplays its links to the island

The English returned to the island in 1789, long after the original colony fell in 1641. Pictured: One of the few remaining ironwood trees on the island.

He said that while most people there were aware of the area's English heritage, Britain underplays its links to the island. But insists there can be a bright future for the island.

'I don't think people will abandon it but the old Baptist English culture is getting weaker,' he said.

'The place needs tourism and for people to go there and spend money and learn its history because it is a completely overlooked part of British history.'

Tom Feiling's book is available in two editions. One for the UK - The Island that Disappeared: Old Providence and the Making of the Western World (Explore Books) 2017 - and one for the US - The Island that Disappeared: The Lost History of the Mayflower's Sister Ship and Its Rival Puritan Colony (Melville House) 2018.A teacher at a prestigious Catholic girls' school who tried to blackmail her married ex-lover into paying $20,000 for sex toys and lingerie has spoken out.

Sarah Jane Hahn, also known as Sarah Heathcote, threatened to send explicit videos and pictures of their trysts to the victim's wife if he didn't leave the cash in her letterbox.

Heathcote pleaded guilty to two charges on Tuesday including demand with menace $20,000 and threaten to distribute intimate images without consent.

Sarah Jane Hahn, also known as Sarah Heathcote, (pictured) threatened to send explicit videos and pictures of their trysts to the victim's wife if he didn't leave the cash in her letterbox

Speaking out on Thursday, Heathcote said the married man had her 'under a spell' and led her to believe he would leave his wife for her.

She said he proposed to her twice, even promising Heathcote's mother he would marry her.

Heathcote said she lost control when he 'broke his promises' and ended the relationship.

'We planned a wedding and he lied all year, he was promising, promising that we would be married,' she told News.com.au.

She said he sent her constant text messages saying he wanted to be with her and couldn't wait to start a life together.

Heathcote said money only became an issue when he refused to leave his wife.

'I kept paying for the things during our relationship and we were going to be married, but if not he was going to pay back the money he owed me. That was all it was, it wasn't out of nowhere,' she said.

Heathcote (pictured) said she lost control when the married man 'broke his promises' and ended the relationship with her

Heathcote asked the man for $20,000 to cover the cost of sex toys and lingerie she bought while they were dating, according to court documents.

She claimed she didn't 'demand' the money, instead it was money the pair previously agreed on.

On February 10 this year, Heathcote emailed the man telling him he had nine days to transfer the money.

'Heathcote stated if the money wasn't deposited into her account, she would send the sex toys, lingerie, USB containing photographs and videos of their sexual activities and their email correspondence to the victim's wife at her workplace,' the police said.

The former teacher at St Mary's Star of the Sea College (picutred) in Woollongong reportedly got a male friend to threaten the man to pay her $20,000

The former teacher at St Mary's Star of the Sea College in Woollongong then reportedly got a male friend to threaten the man to pay up.

The man immediately went to the police and three days later, Heathcote was arrested while teaching at the private school.

Heathcote said her mother and sister both died from cancer in 2017 and she placed all her self-worth on her relationship with the married man.

'He had a hold over me. I was vulnerable, everyone around me was dying. My dad only died a few years ago, then my sister and my mum dying. I believed everything he said,' she said.

Heathcote's lawyer said in court (pictured) that she was admitted to the psychiatric ward at Wollongong Hospital two weeks ago

Heathcote, who is currently on leave from her teaching job, was admitted to the psychiatric ward at Wollongong Hospital two weeks ago, her lawyer said.

He entered guilty pleas on her behalf for demanding with menaces with intent to gain a financial advantage and threatening to distribute intimate images without consent, the Illawarra Mercury reported.

Heathcote will be sentenced on May 2. Daily Mail Australia has contacted the school for comment.Advertisement

A stunning beach house that has 180-degree sea views and has counted Kate Winslet and Kenneth Branagh as its visitors has gone on the market for 995,000.

Selsey Beach House has been run as a successful holiday let for the last five years.

The white clapboard home in the small seaside town of Selsey, West Sussex, is for sale through holiday letting company Unique Home Stays.

It could yield the new owner up to 100,000 a year if they carried it on as a business.

Selsey Beach House in the small seaside town of Selsey, West Sussex, has 180-degree sea views and has counted Kate Winslet and Kenneth Branagh as its visitors. It has gone on the market for 995,000

The stunning views available from the deck of Selsey Beach House in West Sussex. It has been run as a successful holiday let for the last five years and is now for sale

Selsey is at the foot of the Manhood Peninsula, surrounded by sea on three sides and a river on the other, giving the feel of an island

The house was built in the 1930s as a chalet and extended in the 1970s. The house has a large L-shaped living area (pictured), three large double bedrooms and a family room that sleeps three

One of the bedrooms at Selsey Beach House. The home is owned Terry Fenner-Leitao, a financial consultant, and his wife Elizabeth, an international buyer for a shoe company. They are selling up after 11 years

Selsey is at the foot of the Manhood Peninsula, surrounded by sea on three sides and a river on the other, giving the feel of an island.

This property sits right by the two mile stretch of West Beach.

The house was built in the 1930s as a chalet and extended in the 1970s.

Owners Terry Fenner-Leitao, a financial consultant, and his wife Elizabeth, an international buyer for a shoe company, bought the house in 2007 and refurbished it, splitting their time between Selsey and London.

More recently they have rented the property out - both to holiday makers and as a photoshoot location.

Actor Kenneth Branagh stayed in the property for several months in 2012 and Kate Winslet did a nautical-themed photoshoot for Violet magazine there.

The house has a large L-shaped living area, three large double bedrooms and a family room that sleeps three.

Mr Fenner-Leitao, 50, said: 'At the time my wife had given birth to our second child, we also had a two-year-old and we were looking to do things outside London at weekends.

Selsey Beach House in West Sussex, which has gone on the market for 995,000

Views from the home's bedroom. Actor Kenneth Branagh stayed in the property for several months in 2012 and Kate Winslet did a nautical-themed photoshoot for Violet magazine there

A bedroom of the property. The house's views have been described as 'mesmerising'

The garden of Selsey Beach House (left) boasts incredible views of the sea. Parts of the interior boast a suitably nautical theme (right)

'We were initially looking in the Cotswolds and saw an advert for this house by chance. We went to look at it and just fell in love with it.

'It's so dramatically different and you couldn't be closer to the water.

'I'm not sure there are many other places on the south coast where you would get 180-degree uninterrupted sea view.

'We've cultivated the place, it's got a fantastic feel to it.

'It's on a peninsula and you can directly access the beach.

'The coastguard station is right behind the house, it's unmanned but they have slipways into the sea right in front of our house.

'I call it the British Riviera. It's positioned looking west so we get all the sunsets. Sat on the deck you feel almost as if you are on some paradise island.

The house has a large L-shaped living area, three large double bedrooms and a family room that sleeps three

The living area of Selsey House, which is on the market for just under 1million

A spokesman for Unique Home Stays said: 'You can't live much closer to the coast than at this stunning beach house in Selsey'

'The views are mesmerising and never the same. When you walk in through the front door you can see the sea straight away through the windows.

'Once you're in you are captivated and you won't want to leave. It has a wonderful tranquillity. All you hear is the sea.

'It's an amazing place for entertaining, we've used it for lots of family events.'

A spokesman for Unique Home Stays said: 'You can't live much closer to the coast than at this stunning beach house in Selsey.

'It occupies a prime seafront position.

'As well as being a welcoming family home it has been a successful self-catering holiday let and photoshoot location. With this in mind, buyers in the market for a second home can also look forward to making a lucrative investment.'The husband of Christie Whelan-Browne has defended her after she received abuse for coming forward with sexual harassment claims about Craig McLachlan.

Rohan Browne believes his wife has been the target of cruel and unfair name-calling by people who don't know her personally after she spoke out against McLachlan following the 2014 stage production of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the Herald Sun reported.

'Just a reminder: In the past 6 weeks Christie has been called a Sexual Deviant, Foul Mouthed, Vile, a Liar, a Hypocrite,' Mr Browne wrote on Facebook.

Rohan Browne, (right) the husband of Christie Whelan-Browne (left), has defended his wife

Mr Browne believes Whelan-Browne (left) is being publicly shamed and humiliated after speaking out against McLachlan (right)

'Someone, who has never met her, publicly announced how she really felt about what she went through in 2014.



'She is being publicly shamed and humiliated  dragged through a slow and painful court case  because she spoke up about being sexually harassed at work.'

The Gold Logie winning actor has filed defamation proceedings against Fairfax Media and the ABC after they reported on allegations he sexually harassed several former colleagues during production.

Former co-star Whelan-Browne, is also named in the defamation suit.

McLachlan is accused by three women of sexual assault and bullying during the 2014 run of the Rocky Horror Picture Show

McLachlan's statement of claim was lodged in the NSW Supreme Court and principally targets Browne.

The claim states Whelan-Browne was 'herself a notoriously foul-mouthed person who publicly distributed offensive matter and had expressed interest in deviant sexual practices'.

Ms Whelan-Browne's barrister told a Sydney court that his defence borders on victim blaming.

The matter will be heard again on June 22.Advertisement

These 150-year-old mugshots reveal the faces of female convicts locked up in a Victorian jail for crimes as petty as stealing a piece of cheese - including one who bares an uncanny resemblance to Gogglebox star Scarlett Moffatt.

The black and white photographs, captured at Wandsworth Prison in London between 1872 and 1873, were taken in the early years of the camera - the first partially successful photograph was only shot in 1816.

One of those pictured, Fanny Ann Browning, 30, who resembles reality television star Scarlett, was given three months hard labour for stealing two pairs of stockings, in April 1873. She was a servant from Margate.

Other mugshots reveal that some of those incarcerated were as young as 16, while others were seasoned criminals in their sixties - and that the offences they were jailed for were often petty.

One of the mugshots is of 16-year-old Elizabeth Clarke who was given six months hard labour for stealing a muff, while another shows washerwoman Cecilia Rowland, 49, who was jailed for four months for robbing an umbrella. Other images show 17-year-old Keziah Grey who was given two months hard labour for stealing two plants and Isabella Durant, also 17, who was given nine months hard labour for stealing a jacket.

Meanwhile friends Mary Ann Randall, 32, and Julia Keith, 42 - both cleaners - were incarcerated for three months for stealing 18 pairs of kids gloves. The collection also includes colourful female lawbreakers like Mary Peirce, 37, was given one-year hard labour at Wandsworth Prison for the mysterious charge of 'cheating'.

Wandsworth prison opened in November 1851, and was originally named The Surrey House of Correction. Like Pentonville prison it was built loosely based on the Panopticon design, as proposed by philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham, which allows all of the inmates to be observed at any one time by a single watchman.

The main part of the prison, having four wings radiating from the centre, was for male prisoners with a smaller separate building for females. In total, 135 prisoners were to be put to death there between 1878 and 1961, 134 men and one woman.

Today Wandsworth Prison is a Category B men's prison and is the largest prison in the UK.

Fanny Ann Browning, 30, (right) who resembles Gogglebox star Scarlett Moffatt (left), was given three months hard labour at Wandsworth Prison for stealing two pairs of stockings, in April 1873. She was a servant from Margate

Emily Watson, 23, (left) was given six months hard labour at Wandswroth Prison for stealing a purse and 30 shillings in December 1872. She had no occupation and was from Edinburgh. Eliza Cork, 29, (right) was given three months hard labour at Wandsworth Prison for stealing a bottle of gin in February 1873. She was a servant from London

Elizabeth Woodford, 40, (left) who was given six weeks hard labour at Wandsworth Prison for stealing a shoulder of mutton and a fowl, in April 1873. She was a washerwoman and from Sussex. Harriet Solhurst, 29, (right) was imprisoned for two months in Wandsworth Prison for stealing a bed sheet, in March 1873. She had no occupation and was from Surrey

Annie Jane Gibson, 24, (left) was given 21 days hard labour at Wandsworth Prison for stealing a petticoat and nightdresses, in 1873. She was a dressmaker from Brighton, but lived in Croydon. Elizabeth Clarke, 16, (right) was given six months hard labour at Wandsworth Prison for stealing a muff, in December 1872. She was a servant from Surrey

Keziah Grey, 17, (left) was given two months hard labour at Wandsworth Prison for stealing two plants in June 1873. She was a field-worker from Surrey. Cecilia Rowland, 49, (right) was given four months hard labour at Wandsworth Prison for stealing an umbrella in April 1873. She was a washerwoman from Ireland

Julia Keith, 42, (left) was given three months hard labour at Wandsworth Prison for stealing 18 pairs of kid gloves along with her friend Mary Ann Randall, in May 1873. She was a cleaner from London. Eliza Bowens, 33, (right) was given six weeks hard labour at Wandsworth Prison for stealing a piece of meat in April 1873. She had no occupation and was from London

Elizabeth Irvine, 20, (left) was given six months hard labour at Wandsworth Prison for stealing a dress, a shaul and a pair of boots worth 24 shillings and six pence in December 1872. She worked as a servant at the Golden Lion in Caterham, Surrey. Cecilia Manton, 21, (right) was given two months hard labour at Wandsworth Prison for stealing a gold locket from her master, in June 1873. She was a servant from London

Mary Campbell, 40, (left) was given 21 days hard labour at Wandsworth Prison for stealing a piece of cheese in April 1873. She was a nurse from Scotland. Eliza Baker, 17, (right) was given one month hard labour at Wandsworth Prison for stealing a veil from her master, in July 1873. She was a servant from Surrey

Julia Lynch, 69, (left) who was given six months hard labour at Wandsworth Prison for stealing a shawl in November 1872. She was a washerwoman and from Ireland. Ann Marsh, 36, (right) was given six weeks hard labour at Wandsworth Prison for stealing a purse from a person, in May 1873. She was a tailor from Chester

Sarah Mansell, 48, (left) who was imprisoned one year for assault occasioning actual bodily harm at Wandsworth Prison in May 1872. She was a shoemaker and from Essex. Ann Hayes, 44, (right) was given ten days hard labour at Wandsworth Prison for stealing a smock, in June 1873. She was from London

Margaret Smith, 38, (left) who was imprisoned for one year at Wandsworth Prison for stealing two chairs, in May 1872. She was a shoemaker from Wales and had previously been jailed for stealing a carpet. Mary Ann Newbury, 58, (right) was given nine months hard labour at Wandsworth Prison for stealing a chisel, in October 1872. She was a washerwoman from Surrey

Mary Peirce, 37, (left) was given one year hard labour at Wandsworth Prison for cheating, in July 1872. She was from Dublin. Isabella Durant, 17, (right) was given nine months hard labour at Wandsworth Prison for stealing a pelisse (a jacket) in September 1872. She had no occupation and was from Hackney

Francis Cullen, 62, (left) was given one month hard labour at Wandsworth Prison for stealing a gown worth two pounds and a night dress worth one pounds, in April 1873. She was a laundress from Ramsgate. Jane Taylor, 24, (right) was given four months hard labour at Wandsworth Prison for stealing a gold watch and a chain from her master, in February 1873. She was a servant from Glasgow

Marry Ann Edwards, 20, (left) was given one year hard labour at Wandsworth Prison for stealing two pounds from her master, in June 1872. She was a servant from Surrey. Sarah Hudson, 23, (right) was given six months hard labour at Wandsworth Prison for stealing her masteris watch, in December 1872. She was a machinist from BermondseyThe Isle of Wight Festival will be the festivals 50th year this year. And it will celebrate its Golden Jubilee with a sensational line-up that includes the likes of The Killers, Manic Street Preachers, Camila Cabello and Liam Gallagher.

The Isle of Wight festival started back in 1968, on August 31 in Ford Farm and iconic acts such as Jefferson Airplane, T-Rex and The Pretty Things graced the stage in its inaugural year.

Ten thousand people came in its first year to watch musicians perform on a stage made up of two trailers.

Brandon Flower's The Killers will be one of the Isle of Wight Festival 2018 headline acts

The following year Bob Dylan headlined and other acts included Joe Cocker and Free, and subsequent years saw rock n roll legends such as Jimi Hendrix, The Who and The Doors grace the Isle of Wight festival stage.

Here is all the information on the Isle of Wight Festival 2018 including the line-up, how to get tickets and festival dates.

When is the Isle of Wight Festival 2018?

Isle of Wight Festival 2018 is taking place between June 21-24 2018 at Seaclose Park in Newport.

Isle of Wight Festival 2018 lineup

Kasabian, Depeche Mode, Liam Gallagher and The Killers headline Isle of Wight Festival 2018.

The Killers will be coming into the festival having celebrated 200 weeks of their hit-single Mr Brightside being in the UK top 100. It is the most-streamed song of any track since the start of this decade.

Rita Ora continues her musical comeback with a performance at the festival on Friday, June 22. She will be joined on the day by Nile Rodgers & Chic, The Script, Chase and Status, Feeder and others.

The #IOW50 full line-up for Main Stage and Big TopGet your tickets today! See you in June!https://t.co/UXNbKL3t5Q pic.twitter.com/2VquyfVR9P  Isle of Wight Fest (@IsleOfWightFest) March 21, 2018

James Bay, Jessie J and Kodaline join the Saturday headliners, Depeche Mode and Liam Gallagher.

On Sunday, June 24, the Manic Street Preachers, Van Morrison, Camila Cabello, Sigrid and Travis take to the stage, as do Sheryl Crow and Hurts.

2018 Isle of Wight Festival tickets

Isle of Wight Festival 2018 tickets start at 209 for the full weekend, 145 for Isle of Wight residents, 65-75 for day tickets and 175 for students. Children go free.

Tickets can be purchased on the Isle of Wight Festival ticket page.

VIP tickets are also available through the Isle of Wight Festival partner, Mark Butler Associates.

How to get to Isle of Wight Festival

To get to Isle of Wight Festival, you need to get to one of the four mainland ferry ports at Southampton, Portsmouth, Lymington or Southsea.

Travel options can be viewed on the Isle of Wight Festival 2018 travel page.A 40ft sperm whale has died after it was washed up on a beach despite a huge rescue mission being launched to save its life.

The giant mammal was spotted by a dog walker after it became stranded o a stretch of shoreline near Monifieth in Scotland.

The British Divers Marine Life Rescue team was scrambled to the area when the sighting was made at 3pm yesterday, but by the time they arrived the whale had died.

Drone footage of the whale showed its body lying on its side in in shallow water off the beach on the north bank of the Firth of Tay on the east coast.

Scroll down for video:

The huge 40ft giant was spotted by a dog walker after it became stranded on a stretch of beach

Rescue workers were scrambled to the site but when they arrived they found the whale had died

Visitors have been warned to avoid the area between Monifieth and Barry Buddon, Angus, because it is now classed as a biohazard.

Experts said it was unusual to see sperm whales of this size - it is the average for an adult - come so close to shore.

They said normally they would pass by in deeper waters and avoid shallower depths. It is unclear how the whale ended up so close to shore.

Teams were out in pitch darkness last night to try and secure the site, warning members of the public to stay away for their own safety.

The rescue operation has now turned into recovery as they try and remove the huge body

A close up image of the carcass taken by a drone shows deep red scratch marks to its underbelly

Paul Smith, the BDMLR's local coordinator, revealed that an initial sighting was made by a dog walker around 3pm.

He said: 'It wasn't notified until later on but we've obviously responded with our team and we've found it subsequently dead.

'We're just doing a search at the minute of the beach to see if it is just the one animal.

'We're keeping an open mind but at the minute it's confirmed as one.'

Whales are regularly spotted in the waters off the east coast, but Mr Smith admitted it was not a usual occurrence to spot a whale of this size in the Tay.

'We get a lot of animals and there are a lot of whales traversing all these waters and migration routes,' he added.

'But it is uncommon to get big whales visiting the Tay like this - they'll pass by certainly but it's not very often they come in.

A team from British Divers Marine Life Rescue team were sent to the site

They began the rescue operation in darkness but when crews arrived, the sperm whale had died

'The problem with sperm whales is that it's the wrong species in the wrong area.

'They don't do well on the east coast.

'They should be on the west coast and there's nothing out there for them to eat, so it's more than likely it has suffered dehydration or starvation and has succumbed. It could also be ill, but we don't know until we do a postmortem.'

Mr Smith warned people to stay away.

'We don't want anybody down there because this is now a biohazard,' he said.

'It's going to start deteriorating - you can get a lot of nasty diseases from these animals so we don't want anybody down there.'The Sunshine Coast in Queensland could be under attack from caterpillars, according to photos on social media.

Social media posts show a long procession of bugs crawling around Noosaville.

Some even appeared to be gathered at a front door.

Social media posts show a long procession of bugs crawling around Noosaville

Scientific Pest Management owner Brett Johnstone told the Sunshine Coast Daily based on the images he couldn't confirm the insects were pine processionary caterpillars.

However he did say that if these animals were processionary caterpillars that 'wet weather coupled with the heat and humidity may have sent them through another life cycle and drawn them out earlier'.

Processionary caterpillars, which turn into the bag-shelter moth, can be extremely harmful to wildlife.

If ingested they can cause miscarriages in mares, so people need to be wary of them around their properties.

Some live in the base of a wattle or gumtree while others crawl around front-to-end.

The toxins their hairs are covered in are also poisonous to dogs.

Humans can experience skin irritations such as itching, dermatisis and swelling from these insects, conjunctivitis and breathing problems.

These animals have poisonous hairs as their pattern of movement is noticeable to hungry birds and lizards, according to Australian Geographic.A 20-year-old man who only arrived in Britain two months ago died in his best friend's arms after being chased and stabbed by a gang in a busy shopping centre.

Romanian Beniamin Pieknyi, 20, is believed to have jumped in to the fight in a bid to save his friend during the altercation at the Stratford Centre in east London.

The takeaway shop employee had only arrived in the UK from Romania two months ago.

Romanian Beniamin Pieknyi, 20, (pictured) is believed to have jumped in to the fight in a bid to save his friend during the altercation at the Stratford Centre in east London

The London Evening Standard reports he had been living with his brother in Milton Keynes and had recently celebrated his 20th birthday.

Ion Robert told the newspaper: 'He was really kind, and always trying to help everybody. He gave his life to save his friend He died in the arms of his best friend.

'These guys were trying to attack his friend and he intervened  he was trying to save his friend's life. He was really happy with his job, he was a good guy.'

A Met Police spokesman said: 'Police were called on Tuesday March 20 at 9.30pm to reports of a disturbance in Stratford Centre.

The takeaway shop employee, pictured with a friend, only arrived in the UK from Romania two months ago

'Officers attended along with the London Ambulance Service and found a man, believed to be in his early 20s, suffering from stab injuries.

'Despite the efforts of the emergency services he was pronounced dead at the scene. His next of kin have now been informed. Formal identification awaits and a post mortem examination will be held in due course.'

So far no arrests have been made.

The attack comes amid a wave of knife and gun crime to have swept the capital this year, with eight killings in London since Wednesday last week.

Russell Jones, 23, was ambushed outside shops near Ponders End station, Enfield, at 12.40am on Saturday.

The Hertfordshire University student was shot and stabbed to death in an unprovoked attack, while a second man was taken to hospital with severe injuries.

Met Police officers monitor the area now cordoned off following Mr Pieknyi's brutal stabbing

Of the other seven victims, Lyndon Davis, 18, is the youngest to have been named.

He was found suffering from a single stab wound in Chadwell Heath, east London on March 14.

Joseph Williams-Torres, 20, was killed the same evening as he sat in a stationary car in Essex Close, Walthamstow.

Forensic investigators were spotted gathering evidence from the scene following his death

Meanwhile a trans woman was stabbed to death in a hotel room near Heathrow Airport.

Hersi Hersi, who lived as a trans woman called Naomi, was pronounced dead at the scene after being found with knife injuries at Heathrow Palace in Haslemere Avenue, Hounslow, at 10.50am on Sunday.

The attacks come as charity campaigners warn London has reached a 'crisis point'.

Victims: Russell Jones (left), 23, ambushed outside shops near Ponders End station, Enfield, at 12.40am on Saturday. While Lyndon Davis (right), 18, is the youngest to have been named. He was found suffering from a single stab wound in Chadwell Heath, east London on March 14

Patrick Green, chief executive of knife-crime awareness charity the Ben Kinsella Trust, said authorities had not done enough to educate young people on the dangers of carrying knives, despite a 'steady increase' in violent attacks.

He said: 'We are at crisis point.

'We are seeing a steady increase in violent crime, and I think things may well get worse before they get better.

Hersi Hersi, who lived as a trans woman called Naomi (left), was pronounced dead at the scene after being found with knife injuries in Hounslow, at 10.50am on Sunday. Joseph Williams-Torres, 20, was shot to death as he sat in a stationary car in Walthamstow on March 14

'I think what we are seeing now is that we haven't done enough to help educate young people not to carry knives in the first place, or to turn away from violence and I think until we do we are not really going to solve this problem.'

Mr Green added that long-term solutions to the 'crisis' would take time before they became effective, and said it would not be possible to 'arrest our way out' of the problem.

He added: 'It's not like flicking a switch. We can't just turn this around really quickly.

'We have an over-stretched police force doing the best that it can in terms of enforcement, but we haven't invested enough in helping young people understand carrying a knife won't protect them, it won't solve conflicts, and we need to do far more around that approach to tackle this issue.'Advertisement

Britain is facing arctic conditions in April as two more 'Beasts from the East' are predicted to hit the country.

Easter weekend is forecast to see the next bout of wintry conditions, with extremely low temperatures of -9C predicted in places.

The second hit of cold weather is expected to strike during mid-April, according to weather forecasting models.

The south coastal resort of Dartmouth, known usually for its above average climate, pictured covered in snow on Monday

Heavy snow overnight on Sunday left snow drifts six foot high. Above, vehicles stranded near Ilfracombe, north Devon on Monday

This month has seen the country grapple with blizzards, snow and icy conditions as ten people tragically died during one of the coldest Marches on record

Pictured: A dog walker wrapped up in a coat, gloves and scarf takes her pet for a stroll on Brighton's beach today as temperatures hover around 6C

Pictured: People brave the cold March weather to enjoy a break on the beach

Meteorologists are warning Easter weekend is predicted to be unseasonably chilly, with extreme lows of -9C in places

This comes after Britons have experienced treacherous conditions during one of the coldest Marches on record which claimed the lives of ten people.

A weatherman for the BBC said: 'Some computer models are suggesting that we are going to have a blast of cold Arctic air with wind coming in from the north.

'In this situation we do tend to get snow across northern Britain and there could even be wintry showers further south as well.

'That's one suggestion. Today some of the computer models were showing that actually some of the cold air could be coming in from Scandinavia and parts of Russia which is almost a Beast from the East, not quite, let's call it a Beast from the North East.

'Now this could still wobble a little bit but one thing we are getting increasingly confident about it that the air is not going to be coming from the south so get ready for a potentially chilly Easter.'

Pictured: Farmers in their tractors help to clear the snow from a blocked road on Exmoor, Somerset

A farmer in a tractor helps to clear the snow from a blocked road heading out of Simonsbath in Exmoor National park, as the icy conditions brought by the 'Mini Beast from the East'

'White Easter': The Weather Channel UK tweeted a word of warning to followers this morning

'When will it end?': Long-range forecasts suggest two more spells of cold are on their way

This will be caused by two cold fronts moving from across the Atlantic to the West and Siberia to the East

Forecaster Amy Hodgson, of The Weather Channel, told The Mirror the chilly outlook is still in response to the sudden stratospheric warming event and polar vortex split which took place back in February.

She added that the extended cold period is caused by high pressure blocking warmer air from sweeping across the country from the south-west.

She said: 'For April, we expect temperatures to remain below normal across northern Europe.

'This is still in response to the sudden stratospheric warming event (SSWE) and polar vortex split which occurred back in February.'

While research by Dr Todd Crawford, chief meteorologist at The Weather Channel, told the paper these events can lead to prolonged cold weather and a negative North Atlantic Oscillation 30 to 60 days after the initial split.

Bitterly cold winds from the east and north-east normally dominate during a negative North Atlantic Oscillation phase.

This could mean one more 'Beast from the East' could occur before May as dry and cold conditions take charge under high pressure throughout much of April.

He said: 'As we head into April, most computer forecast models suggest we will get at least one more big cold spell before the blocking pattern fades, with warmer and wetter weather confined to parts of southern Europe.'Authorities have issued an arrest warrant for a female psychologist who is accused of taking a mentally ill patient from a hospital without permission.

Michelle Messer, 41, is accused of taking the patient, 46-year-old Cory Chapin, from Arkansas State Hospital on Tuesday.

Messer is wanted on a misdemeanor charge of aiding an unauthorized departure after she allegedly used the hospital's forensic unit to walk Chapin out of the Little Rock facility.

An arrest warrant has been issued for psychologist Michelle Messer, 41 (right), who is accused of taking a patient, 46-year-old Cory Chapin (left), from Arkansas State Hospital without permission on Tuesday

Messer (pictured) is wanted on a misdemeanor charge of aiding an unauthorized departure after she allegedly used the hospital's forensic unit to walk Chapin out of the Little Rock facility. They drove away around 8.20am in Messer's blue Mazda 3S Grand Touring

Courtesy of KARK

According to hospital police, the pair drove away at around 8.20am in a blue Mazda 3S Grand Touring car with Arkansas plates 502RBD, which is Messer's personal car.

No reports have indicated whether the two are romantically involved, but Messer does have a female partner, Judith Lewis. The two share a home in the neighborhood of Sherwood.

In 2014, Chapin faced several charges, including kidnapping and drug possession. Allegedly, he claimed that God had instructed him to kidnap and rape a woman who had cut his hair, reported the Lovely County Citizen.

He was found not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect in 2015. A doctor said that Chapin has bipolar disorder and needed treatment, otherwise he would pose a 'moderate risk' for violence.

This is not the first time that Chapin has escaped. While on a 48-hour leave from Arkansas State to visit his father in February 2016, he fled. He was found in October 2017 in Las Vegas and extradited back to the hospital.

The state Department of Human Services says Messer will be fired once she is found.

The DHS website says the hospital's 24-bed forensic service area assesses and treats patients with mental illnesses who are accused of a crime.

The site also says that all people in the unit have been court-ordered to undergo evaluation or treatment.

In 2014, Chapin (pictured) faced several charges, including kidnapping and drug possession. Allegedly, he claimed that God had instructed him to kidnap and rape a woman who had cut his hair. He was found not guilty by reason of mental disease or defect in 2015

This is not the first time that Chapin has escaped. While on a 48-hour leave from Arkansas State (pictured) to visit his father in February 2016, he fled. He was found in October 2017 in Las Vegas and extradited back to the hospital

Messer specializes in cognitive behavioral therapy and has 13 years of experience providing treatment to intellectually disabled clients with psychiatric disorders, according to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

Authorities described Messer as about 5'2" tall and weighing approximately 130 pound with brown hair and hazel eyes. Chapin is about 5'6" tall and weighs about 187 pounds with brown hair and brown eyes.

Anyone with information on the whereabouts of Messer and Chapin is asked to call the Arkansas State Hospital Police Department at 501-686-9212.Donald Trump jumped 16 months backward in time on Thursday, boasting on Twitter that his ragtag presidential campaign defeated Hillary Clinton's better organized, better funded and more experienced organization.

'Remember when they were saying, during the campaign, that Donald Trump is giving great speeches and drawing big crowds, but he is spending much less money and not using social media as well as Crooked Hillarys large and highly sophisticated staff,' he recalled in a tweet.

'Well, [they're] not saying that anymore!'

It's unclear what made Trump return to his campaign fighting form, but one possibility is the coming publication date of a look-back book written by Clinton's campaign communications director.

President Donald Trump returned to bashing Hillary Clinton and her campaign on Thursday, painting himself as an underdog whose fundraising and social media strategies were thought to be behind the curve in 2016

People who said his campaign team was outplayed are'not saying that anymore,' the president tweeted

Hillary Clinton had a massive money advantage over Trump but lost in a stunner

Time magazine published on excerpt from Jennifer Palmieri's 'Dear Madam President: An Open Letter to the Women Who Will Run the World' on Wednesday,

In it, Palmieri argues that deep-seated 'gender bias'  a sexist disdain for a powerful woman as she climbed the selectively greased ladder of American politics  was a major contributing factor to Trump's 2016 victory.

Only when Clinton relaxed and conceded the race, she writes, did American misogynists warm up to her.

Palmieri excitedly proclaims in the same essay that other '[w]omen arent just running for office in record numbers, they are winning in record numbers, too.'

Trump's emphasis Thursday morning on social media was unusual in light of the scandal involving Facebook and the data analysis firm Cambridge Analytica.

Trump's boasts about his social media prowess in 2016 came Thursday despite a scandal involving data analysis firm Cambridge Analytica's improper use of Facebook data to profile and impact voters

Facebook has suspended Cambridge Analytica's account and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg apologized after news reports revealed the company had failed to delete data on 50 million users

Onetime campaign CEO and White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon was Cambridge Analytica's vice president until the summer of 2017

Despite growing evidence that the company improperly kept and used information harvested from more than 50 million Facebook users, the president doubled down Thursday and suggested he's quieted the partisans who though Clinton's team outplayed him.

The president is known to regularly boast that the combined total of his social media followers is well over 100 million.

He hasn't stopped despite internal White House concerns over the fast-developing Facebook saga.

Trump's 2016 presidential campaign hired Cambridge Analytica, which stole information from 50 million Facebook users' profiles to help it design software predicting and influencing Americans' Election Day choices.

Onetime campaign CEO and White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon was the company's vice president until the summer of 2017.

Jennifer Palmieri wrote in a forthcoming book about the Hillary Clinton campaign that sexism, not Trump's superior connection with voters, doomed the Democrat's White House aspirations

Hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, a major Republican donor and a close Bannon confidant, invested $15 million in the company.

Facebook suspended Cambridge Analytica's account last weekend after The Observer and The New York Times revealed  in the teeth of legal threats from Mark Zuckerberg's company  that it broke a promise that after the election season was over it would delete all the data it harvested.

With that blockbuster discovery, Facebook  and the 24 million users who follow him there  suddenly became a potential liability for Trump instead of a reliable asset.

His Twitter feed, however, still has an audience of more than 49 million.Stormy Daniels' attorney Michael Avenatti made an argument for why Americans should care about his client's story, as the porn star's interview with 60 Minutes is slated to air Sunday night.

'I think this is about engaging in thuggish behavior, threats, intimidation and hiding the money trail,' Avenatti said Thursday morning on CNN.

Daniels was paid $130,000 in 2016, just weeks before the presidential election, to keep quiet about an alleged decade-old affair with now President Donald Trump.

Stormy Daniels' attorney Michael Avenatti said on CNN Thursday that his client 'wants a platform to speak to the American people,' which is why she's potentially willing to face legal punishment for detailing an alleged affair with President Trump

CNN's Chris Cuomo (left) asked what 'seed' the American people should take from the 60 Minutes interview. 'I think this is about engaging in thuggish behavior, threats, intimidation and hiding the money trail,' Michael Avenatti (right) explained

Michael Avenatti (right) also told CNN's Chris Cuomo (left) that the 'act of intimidation, the threats, putting her under their thumb continues to this very day,' he said referencing the way Stormy Daniels has been treated by President Trump's associates

She and her legal team have been maneuvering to get the adult film actress out of the non-disclosure agreement. Meanwhile, Trump's team has tried to keep her mouth shut.

'The act of intimidation, the threats, putting her under their thumb continues to this very day,' Avenatti said.

'Now we have a sitting U.S. president, Chris, who is threatening to sue a private citizen for over $20 million for talking about their relationship,' Avenatti said to CNN's Chris Cuomo.

'I don't think it's ever occurred in the history of the United States,' Daniels' lawyer said.

Daniels looks to be going public anyway.

60 Minutes has put out a 10-second clip, showing Daniels sitting down across from Anderson Cooper, the CNN host who also does work for the CBS News magazine.

'I guess I'm not 100 per cent sure why you're doing this,' Cooper then said.

Avenatti explained that Daniels 'wants a platform to speak to the American people' and tell her side of the story.

He also encouraged Trump and Trump's personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, who personally made the payment to Daniels, to come forward and speak publicly too, instead of making all their moves in court.

'And let the American people decide who's telling the truth and who's not telling the truth,' Avenatti said.

The lawyer, who has been doing the television circuit for days in advance of the 60 Minutes interview, said the Q&A with Cooper would cover both details of the alleged affair and discuss the cover-up.

'I think ultimately, Chris, that's what this is going to get to, and ultimately we're going to ensure that the facts are known to the American people,' Avenatti said.

As for what the fall-out would be, Avenatti suggested that would be up to the people in power to decide.

'And individuals who are far more powerful than me, far more powerful than my client, will ultimately determine whether those facts lead to something else, period,' the lawyer said.Internet company Mozilla Corp said on Wednesday it was suspending advertising on Facebook Inc's social media platform over concerns of data privacy.

The decision follows allegations that Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy, gained inappropriate access to data on 50 million Facebook users to build profiles on American voters that were later used to help elect U.S. President Donald Trump in 2016.

'This news caused us to take a closer look at Facebooks current default privacy settings given that we support the platform with our advertising dollars. While we believe there is still more to learn, we found that its current default settings leave access open to a lot of data  particularly with respect to settings for third party apps,' the company said in a blog post on Wednesday.

Software company Mozilla Corp said Wednesday that it is suspending their ads on Facebook. The company's logo pictured above

Late Wednesday, Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg apologized for the company's handling of a row over user privacy, while promising tougher steps to restrict developers' access to such information.

Mozilla said it would consider returning to Facebook if the company strengthens its default privacy settings for third party apps.

'We are encouraged that Mark Zuckerberg has promised to improve the privacy settings and make them more protective. When Facebook takes stronger action in how it shares customer data, specifically strengthening its default privacy settings for third party apps, well consider returning,' the company said.

Mozilla is a free software company perhaps best known for their web browser, Firefox.

British advertising group ISBA on Wednesday threatened to pull out ads for big brands if investigations show user data has been misused, The Times reported, adding that ISBA will meet Facebook executives this week.A newlywed couple from Hawaii were on the honeymoon of their dreams when they died after a helicopter plummeted into the ocean near the Great Barrier Reef.

Pete, 79, and Sue Hansel, 65, married in December and planned a 'trip of a lifetime' when they were killed in the tragic helicopter crash over the Whitsunday Islands,The Courier Mail reported.

Two people from Colorado, believed to be Ms Hansel's daughter, 33, and her partner, 34, survived the crash along with the 35-year-old local Australian pilot.

Heroic witnesses risked their lives to pluck the passengers from the wreckage of the helicopter as it sunk.

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Pete, 79, (left) and Sue Hansel, 65, (right) married in December and were on their 'trip of a lifetime' when they were killed in the tragic helicopter crash over the Great Barrier Reef

The Hawaiian tourists died in a horrible Whitsundays helicopter crash Wednesday afternoon (pictured)

Another three people survived the crash (pictured) including the pilot and two American tourists - a man, 34, and a woman, 33, believed to be Ms Hansel's daughter, from Colorado

The pair (pictured) were described by friends as having a 'beautiful story' and were 'so happy' to have found each other

The helicopter pilot pulled Ms Hansel from her seat in the Airbus H120 but more than an hour of desperate CPR attempts failed to save her. Mr Hansel also died at the scene.

The pair, who had been single 'forever', shared a 'beautiful story' and were 'so happy' when they found each other, Vern Ungerecht - Pete's lifelong friend - told the publication.

'We used to have drinks with them at the bar almost every day. Pete doesn't say much, but Sue, she was always chatting and smiling,' Mr Ungerecht said.

'For them to go doing something they had looked forward to for so long, we can take some pleasure in that.'

Ms Hansel worked for a bookkeeping service while her new husband was retired.

Friends of the happy couple said their faces were always seen at the local Kona Elks Lodge and they would miss having them around.

'They were so happy, and a really sweet couple ... they will certainly be missed,' one friend wrote.

The helicopter was on its final approach towards a landing pontoon some 65km north-east of Whitsunday Islands.

'We used to have drinks with them at the bar almost every day. Pete doesn't say much, but Sue, she was always chatting and smiling,' Pete's lifelong friend Vern Ungerecht said

Witnesses performed CPR on the Hawaiian couple, but with emergency services more than an hour away, the victims died at the scene (pictured are police at the scene)

Queensland Police District Inspector Ian Haughton (pictured) confirmed the deaths of the two American tourists on Thursday who died after the crash off Hardy Reef Pontoon

The crash is the second incident in four months for the helicopter company after it failed to land on the platoon (pictured) near the Whitsunday Islands

It is not known exactly what caused the accident, but moments later the helicopter and all on board plunged into the water just meters away from its target.

Queensland Police District Inspector Ian Haughton confirmed the deaths of the two American tourists on Thursday following the crash off Hardy Reef Pontoon.

'It was a normal flight ... on this occasion, something went wrong and the consequences are tragic,' Insp Haughton told media.

'This is a traumatic experience for any involved in the situation.'

The crash is the second incident in four months for the helicopter company, ABC News reported.

In November last year, Hamilton Island Air - a registered business of Whitsunday Air Services - was involved in a crash off Hamilton Island.

The three passengers survived but the helicopter sank and has not been recovered.

'It was a normal flight ... on this occasion, something went wrong and the consequences are tragic,' Insp Haughton told media (pictured the crash scene)

Heroic onlookers tried to save the passengers at the Whitsundays crash site while listening to instructions during a phone call with paramedics for more than an hour

Police and other emergency service vessels were en route to Hardy Reef (map pictured) with the crash site about 65km northeast of the Whitsunday Islands

Onlookers tried to save the passengers at the Whitsundays crash site while listening to instructions during a phone call with paramedics just after 4pm Wednesday.

The older couple were pronounced dead at the scene after they were recovered from the helicopter.

The three survivors were transported by sea for medical attention and treated for non-life threatening injuries.

The helicopter reportedly crashed into the water 250 metres from the Hardy Reef pontoon.

Whitsunday Air Services confirmed the fatalities in a statement on Wednesday night.

'Whitsunday Air Services can confirm that a tragic accident involving a Whitsunday Air Services helicopter carrying four passengers and one crew member has occurred at Hardy Reef today,' the statement said.

In November last year, the Hamilton Island Air - a registered business of Whitsunday Air Services - was involved in a crash off Hamilton Island (stock image)

'The accident occurred while the helicopter was on final approach for a landing at it's Hardy Reef Heliport and resulted in two fatalities and two passengers sustaining minor injuries.

'We are extremely saddened by this incident and our deepest condolences are with the families of all of the passengers. Whitsunday Air Services is continuing to work with the Queensland Police, the ATSB and CASA to assist with their investigations.

'Whitsunday Air Services will be suspending all operations while a full review process is undertaken. Further information will be released in due course.'

Queensland Ambulance Service paramedics rushed to the scene via emergency helicopter about 6pm.

Whitsunday Mayor Andrew Wilcox told ABC radio the community was devastated by the accident.

'It will be a sombre day for us in the Whitsundays. My thoughts and prayers at this stage are with the families affected by this,' he said.

Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk told parliament on Thursday the families involved should know 'how deeply (they) feel their loss'.

The Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) told Daily Mail Australia a team of investigators would travel to the accident location to collect evidence on Thursday morning.

Investigators will interview witnesses, examine available recorded data, review operational records and technical documentation.Nearly 500,000 smoke detectors that might not be able to detect smoke are being recalled by a company based in North Carolina.

The company Kidde has issued a recall for models PI2010 and PI9010 due to a manufacturer defect, The News & Observer reports.

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission announced the recall on Wednesday.

North Carolina company Kidde is recalling nearly half a million of their PI2010 (pictured) and PI9010 models due to a manufacturer defect

The issue stems from a yellow cap that was possibly left on the devices during manufacturing and covers one of two sensors

These models were sold nationwide and online from September 2016 through this January for $20 to $40. Model numbers can be found on the back of the units.

About 40,000 smoke detectors sold in Canada may also be defective.

The issue stems from a yellow cap that was possibly left on the devices during manufacturing and covers one of two sensors, compromising the smoke alarm's ability to detect smoke.

'If no yellow cap is present, consumers should reinstall the smoke alarm and no further action is needed,' the Consumer Product Safety Commission said.

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission announced the recall on Wednesday

No reports of incidents or injuries as a result of a yellow cap being present have been reported.

Kidde also recalled 38 million fire extinguishers last year. They had a design flaw that could have prevented them from working and parts of the extinguisher could detach with enough force to pose an impact hazard.

Those with affected smoke alarms can register for replacements by calling 833-551-7739 or visiting kidde-smoke-alarm-recallusen.expertinquiry.com.Advertisement

Police have found the remains of at least 240 people thought to have been killed by a single hitman who used acid to dissolve his victims in barrels before dumping them in mass graves.

The method gave the suspected murderer the nickname of The Soup Maker, and investigators believe there could be as many as 650 victims buried in the spot in Tijuana used by the killer.

Authorities believe the area was used by Santiago Meza Lopez, known as El Pozolero, who is alleged to have worked for the Sinaloa Drug Cartel in Mexico.

Bone fragments were found among the stones and rocks in the area in Tijuana, in the Mexican state of Baja California

Authorities believe the area was used by hitman Santiago Meza Lopez (center), known as 'El Pozolero', who is alleged to have worked for the Sinaloa Drug Cartel in Mexico

Police have found the remains of at least 240 people killed by a single hitman who used acid and buried the remains in pits with copy saying there could be as many as 650 victims there in total

Hitman Lopez was arrested in 2009 and has been attributed with the murder of at least 300 people by a prosecutor, but is still awaiting sentencing.

Lopez is alleged to have put their bodies in barrels of acid before pouring the remains and the acid into the pits to dissolve the flesh and bone underground.

Workers have so far found 16,500 litres of organic material and between 170 and 200 kilograms of human bones at the alleged killing grounds.

Authorities have estimated there could be up to 650 people buried at the site.

The human remains were found in an area known as The Chicken Coop in Tijuana, in the Mexican state of Baja California.

Bone fragments are laid out on a blue cover which sits inside an archaeological dig case. Workers have so far found 16,500 litres of organic material and between 170 and 200 kilograms of human bones at the alleged killing grounds

These are the areas where El Pozolero is alleged to have hidden the bodies of his many victims in the Mexican state of Baja California

Investigators pile their way through the soil which contains the remains of those thought to have been killed by the hitman. Lopez is alleged to have put their bodies in barrels of acid before pouring the remains and the acid into the pits to dissolve the flesh and bone underground

Bone fragments are pulled from the soil, brushed down and placed in a pile on some blue fabric in Tijuana in the

Workers found 16,500 litres of organic material and between 170 and 200 kilograms of human bones at the alleged killing grounds, and authorities think there could be up to 650 people buried on the site

The President of the United for the Disappeared of Baja California association, Fernando Ocegueda Flores, told reporters: 'These are those bodies we bagged on the last occasion. There are almost complete bodies.

'Of the 16,500 litres of organic material, the Federal Attorney General's Office said that there could be up to 650 bodies.'

Digging at the site has been ongoing since the start of the decade after Lopez was put into custody pending his trial.

Bone fragments can be seen inside a marked brown paper bag

In 2011, prosecutors unearthed fat, skin and bones at properties in the Mexican border city of Tijuana once used by The Soup Maker, who confessed to dissolving the bodies of drug cartel victims.

Anti-crime activist Fernando Ocegueda said seven years ago there was reason to believe the remains belong to victims of cartel body-handler Santiago Meza Lopez.

In January 2009 Mexican police arrested Meza Lopez on suspicion of helping a drug kingpin dispose of hundreds of victims.

The victims are believed to be rivals of Teodoro Garcia Simental, an alleged former lieutenant of the Tijuana-based Arellano Felix drug cartel, authorities said.

After his arrest Meza Lopez told how he allegedly disposed of the bodies and that he was paid 440 a week for his work.

Meza Lopez told police his busiest period was in December 2007 when he claimed to have disposed of 32 bodies.

The Sinaloa Cartelis an international drug trafficking, money laundering, and organized crime syndicate.

Established during the mid-1980s, the Sinaloa Cartel is based primarily in the city of Culiacan, Sinaloa, with operations in the Mexican states of Baja California, Durango, Sonora, and Chihuahua.The Danish inventor accused of murdering Swedish journalist Kim Wall on his submarine in Copenhagen has claimed he was forced to stab her torso and genitals in order to aid dumping her body.

Peter Madsen, who denies murder, claims he stabbed Miss Wall's remains in order to let out gases that had accumulated inside her decomposing body, so it would sink to the seabed.

However, this was rubbished by a coroner in a Copenhagen court today, as post-mortem examination found that the wounds were not deep enough to release any such gases.

Lies: Peter Madsen's claim that he had stabbed Kim Wall's body to release gases was rubbished in by a coroner, who said the stab wounds to the torso were not deep enough

Killed: Peter Madsen claims journalist Kim Wall, 30, died as a result of a gas leak on his submarine last August, and that he then dismembered her and 'buried her at sea'

Coroner Christina Jacobsen testified Thursday about numerous lesions found on Wall's torso and head, with much of the questioning focused on the more-than two dozen stab wounds to her genital area.

Yesterday, Madsen claimed that he had to stab the body to make the parts easier to 'bury at sea', saying 'there is nothing sexual in the stabs hitting her vagina'.

But Ms Jacobsen said today that his explanation for the stab wounds do not hold up, saying; 'as the stabs are superficial, gases would not have been able to get in or out'.

Ms Jacobsen also told the court that some of the cuts to the torso would have to have been inflicted before the moment of death.

The court heard that there was no conclusive evidence to prove the cause of death beyond doubt, but that coroners believe the 30-year-old had her airways 'cut off'.

Ms Jacobsen said this would be 'due to either strangulation, throat cutting or drowning,' she said.

Trial: Peter Madsen, famous in Denmark for his home-built rockets and submarine, has denied murdering Miss Wall but has admitted to mutilating her body and 'burying her at sea'

The court also heard that Miss Wall had several lesions on her neck and jaw which would have been inflicted while she was still alive.

Ms Jacobsen told the court that the head may have been restrained, strapped down or that Miss Wall was 'gagged'.

Miss Wall's boyfriend Ole Stobbe Nielsen also testified on Thursday, and told the court that the journalist had been 'afraid' to be on the submarine, but had decided to go anyway.

Madsen, 47, is charged with murder, dismemberment and indecent handling of a corpse for the way he disposed of Miss Wall's body.

Prosecutor Jakob Buch-Jepsen claims Madsen tied up and tortured Miss Wall before killing her, either by cutting her throat or strangling her. The murder has been called premeditated because he had brought along tools he normally would not take with him on the submarine.

A psychiatric assessment described him as a 'perverted polymorph, and highly sexual deviant'.

'He has narcissistic and psychopathic traits, and is manipulative, with a severe lack of empathy and remorse,' said Butch-Jepsen.

The press and hearers line up in front of the courthouse where the trial of Danish inventor Peter Madsen, charged with murdering and dismembering Swedish journalist Kim Wall aboard his homemade submarine, opens in Copenhagen, Denmark

Yesterday, the court were show animated videos of naked women being impaled spikes and being decapitated by men, which had been found on Madsen's computer.

A post-mortem examination of Miss Wall found 14 interior and exterior stab wounds to the journalist's genitals.

Just hours before Madsen met Miss Wall, he searched the internet for 'beheaded girl agony', and watched a video of a girl having her throat slit.

During cross-examination in court on Wednesday, Madsen admitted to having an interest in Dracula and the fictional vampire's real-life inspiration - Vlad The Impaler; a Romanian prince whose favorite method of execution was impalement.

Madsen has continued to deny causing the death of Miss Wall throughout the investigation and trial, although he has changed his story of how she died several times.

At first he claimed that she died after she was hit over the head when the hatch door slammed shut unexpectedly.

Now, he claims Miss Wall was inside the vessel when a vacuum effect meant that he was unable to open the hatch door to get to her as exhaust fumes filled the craft.

Today, the medical examiner said it was an unlikely scenario as 'the air seems not to have been able to leave the lungs, which is not the case with lack of oxygen or inhalation of gases.'

Police technicians board Peter Madsen's submarine UC3 Nautilus on a pier in Copenhagen three days after Kim Wall's disappearance

Miss Wall had been trying to get Madsen to agree to an interview for months before her death, and so when the opportunity arose, she left her own goodbye party.

She and he boyfriend were moving to China, and she kept in touch with her partner over the evening.

Her boyfriend received several text messages from her which were read out in court earlier this month.

'I'm still alive btw (by the way),' one of her last messages read, adding 'But going down now! I love you!!!!!!' A minute later, she added: 'He brought coffee and cookies tho.'

Her partner called police after the messages suddenly stopped coming, and authorities launched a search for the submarine, which did not have a satellite tracking system.

The 33-ton submarine sank south of Copenhagen shortly after being spotted afloat the following day and Madsen was picked up unharmed. Initially, he told police he had let Wall off on Refshale island several hours into the trip.

Investigators found dried blood inside the submarine and on Madsen's face and clothes, and divers eventually found Miss Wall's body parts in plastic bags held down on the Baltic Sea bed by metal pieces.

Kim Wall grew up in southern Sweden, and studied at Paris' Sorbonne university, the London School of Economics and Columbia University in New York, from where she graduated with a master's degree in journalism in 2013.

She wrote for The New York Times, The Guardian and other publications, reporting on topics such as tourism in post-earthquake Haiti and nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands.A flight attendant was busted at JFK airport with nine pounds of cocaine worth $160,000 strapped to his legs.

Hugh Hall, 42, of Fly Jamaica Airways, arrived in New York on March 17 after a flight from Montego Bay and was taken aside to a private room to be searched.

Customs and border protection (CBP) officials found four packages taped up underneath his pants containing a white powder, which tested positive for cocaine.

Hugh Hall, of Fly Jamaica Airways, is pictured on March 17 at JFK airport in New York with cocaine taped to his legs. He is seen in his flight attendant uniform

Hall, a citizen of Jamaica, was arrested on suspicion of importing a controlled substance and passed over to Homeland Security Investigations.

'This seizure is another example of our CBP officers being ever vigilant in protecting the United States from the distribution of illicit drugs,' said Leon Hayward, Acting Director of CBP's New York Field Operations.

Hall faces federal narcotics smuggling charges and will be prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney's Office in the U.S. Eastern District Court of New York.

If he is found guilty of deliberately smuggling drugs into the U.S. he could face up to 20 years in prison.

Fly Jamaica told DailyMail.com: 'The individual, Mr. Hugh Hall, was a flight attendant for Fly Jamaica Airways. The airline condemns his actions.

'Drugs are a scourge on society. Drug smuggling and smugglers are a bane to the aviation industry.

'We have no additional information to add to what the USCBP has already released. The case is now in the hands of the US Attorney's Office.'A court has been shown staged photographs of a man pretending to be dead and a woman pretending to be kidnapped that they posed for with police's advice to catch their partners who had hired a hitman to kill them both.

The images show Meghan Verikas, 33, and Mack McDaniel, 51,posing for detectives who were trying to snare their former partners, Leon Jacob, 39, and Valerie McDaniel, 48.

The McDaniels were divorced at the time and Verikas had ended her relationship with Jacob but Valerie still owed her ex-husband $1.25million from the settling of their estates and Jacob was the subject of a protection order stopping him from contacting his ex, who he had been stalking.

Prosecutors say he wanted her dead so that she could not testify against him in the stalking case.

They pair are accused of offering a hitman $20,000 and two Cartier watches to do the job. They were unaware that the hitman was in fact an undercover police officer.

Once they had made the offer, police contacted Meghan and Mack and asked them to go along with it to ensure their partners' would be caught, which they did.

After their arrests last year, Valerie committed suicide while out on bail and awaiting her next court date.

In these staged photographs that were set up by police, Meghan Verikas poses as if she has been kidnapped. The image was sent to her ex-boyfriend Leon Jacob who, it is alleged, hired a hitman to have her killed

Mack McDaniel, the ex-husband of Houston veterinarian Valerie McDaniel, posed for a similar photograph. He pretended he was dead and had been shot in the head in a car jacking. Police used fake blood and had him close his eyes

Leon is now on trial in Houston, Texas. On Wednesday, his ex-girlfriend testified about the photographs she posed for.

'I sat in a chair in a warehouse and they zip-tied my hands and my feet and put duct tape around my mouth to make me look as though I had been kidnapped.

'I had sat in that parking lot for an extended period of time so I was crying and really upset,' she said, according to Click 2 Houston which attended the trial.

Mack also testified and described the whole ordeal as 'beyond imaginable'. Police made him look as though he had been shot in the head in a carjacking.

He became emotional on the stand as he spoke of his daughter who was just eight at the time of the plot.

Valerie McDaniel and Leon Jacob allegedly hatched the plot to kill their exes together. The pair were dating at the time. Valerie still owed her ex-husband $1.25million from their divorce and Jacob was the subject of a protective order telling him not to contact her

Verikas said she was told to act as though she was upset and in fear of her life. The photographs were sent to Jacob who, police said, made no attempt to have her saved

In another image that was shown to the court, McDaniel appears still in the car with sunglasses on

Verikas, 33, testified on Wednesday at her ex-boyfriend's trial in Houston, Texas

Mack McDaniel also testified on Wednesday about how he was asked to pose for police and agreed. He called it 'beyond imaginable'

'If they would have been successful, Natalie would have not had any parents,' he said.

On Tuesday, a bail bondsman testified about how Jacob tried to have his girlfriend killed after he'd been arrested for stalking her to ensure she could not testify against him.

That man said Jacob told him to kill her with potassium chloride 'to the heart'.

'He's always been on the track of actually killing Meghan if it doesn't go his way. Yes, he did actually propose the way to kill her.

'Potassium chloride to the heart. It was untraceable, those were his words,' he said.

Jacob denies the charges and insists he wanted to spend the rest of his life with Meghan.

Jacob (pictured in court on Tuesday) denies his role in the plot and says he was trying to win Verikas back at the time

He claims they had broken up not long before the plot and that he was trying to win her back.

On Tuesday, during opening arguments, one of his attorneys told the court: 'He wanted to get back with Meghan, but his pleas of love went unanswered. She ignored him.

'She refused to take him back.'

Valerie's husband feared that she would take her own life once she was released on A $50,000 bail in March last year.

In March last year, McDaniel and Jacob were arrested. She was granted bail, he was not. She killed herself three weeks later, a day before she was due to appear in court

McDaniel and Jacob are seen above after their arrest before she was released last year

'She has nothing to lose,' he said at the time.

On March 27, Valerie leaped to her death from her seventh floor condo a day before she was due for her first appearance in court. She had left two suicide notes.

An investigation by DailyMail.com last year unearthed details about Jacob's life.

Unlike McDaniel, a successful veterinarian with a blemishless record, he has a criminal history and background rife with debt and chaos.

They met when his mother filed the paperwork for McDaniel's divorce from Mack.

She cited his infidelity as the reason for it and asked for full custody of their daughter.

The trial continues.A daring Ohio couple was caught having sex next to an elementary school playground where children were playing and stopped to watch the shocking display.

With an audience of 11 children and several adults Jacoby Schmidt, 23, and Ashley Carrelli, 22, of Canton, Ohio had intercourse on the back lawn of Walker Elementary School.

The couple continued their antics even when police approached them around 4:45pm on Sunday, after alarm was raised.

Caught! Jacoby Schmidt, 23, (left) and Ashley Carrelli, 22, (right) of Canton, Ohio were arrested after they had sex next to Walker Elementary School's playground where 11 children were playing

Carrelli was completely naked but wrapped in a blanket and repeatedly exposed her breasts to witnesses, according to the NY Post.

One witness reported that she yelled at the couple to stop. Carrelli responded by deliberately exposing herself, according to Fox8.

Schmidt, who runs his own landscaping business, was nude from the waist down.

They were found with Bud Light cans littered around them and they admitted they drank on the site.

Schmidt, above, was found naked from the waist down. Carrelli was completely naked and wrapped in a blanket and exposed herself multiple times

The couple even deliberately exposed themselves when allegedly told to stop, as they had intercourse 65 feet away from the school playground above

The two were both charged with public indecency and disorderly conduct and taken to Stark County Jail.

Schmidt and Carrelli claimed they were unaware that they were not allowed to have sex at the school site.

They added they did not realize people were nearby.

However, police reports say that children were playing on a playground just 65 feet from the couple.The body of a farmer who disappeared two years ago is to believed to have been found in a Tasmanian dam.

Trevor Foster, 81, went missing from his home in a Ouse, a small town in Tasmania, after he went out to check his livestock.

Mr Foster was then swept away by rising and fast-moving floodwaters during the 6 June 2016 floods, the ABC reported.

The body of Trevor Foster (pictured) who disappeared two years ago is to believed to have been found in a Tasmanian dam

Mr Foster was then swept away by rising and fast-moving floodwaters during the 6 June 2016 floods

Tasmania Police confirmed the body of a deceased man was found in a dam at Ellendale on Wednesday night.

Police report the items found along with the body indicate that it may be Mr Foster.

The ABC reported the body was found 20 kilometres from where Mr Foster went missing.

Police have informed the family but a formal identification process will be conducted and a report for the Coroner is being prepared.State Rep. Beverly Boswell is accused of misidentifying herself as a nurse

A North Carolina legislator has been warned to stop falsely claiming she is a registered nurse.

Republican state Rep. Beverly Boswell had to be asked at least twice by the state Board of Nursing to stop misidentifying herself on her Facebook page.

Her page claimed that she had 'worked her way up from struggling single mother to registered nurse and Dare County Commissioner,' and 'rejects the liberal notions of victim-hood and government dependency,' says The News & Observer.

Boswell claimed she was a nurse on her Facebook and campaign website until this month, when the North Carolina Board of Nursing asked her to stop after receiving a complaint.

'Rep. Boswell is not a licensed nurse nor has she ever been a licensed nurse,' Board of Nursing spokesman David Kalbacker told the local paper on Tuesday.

In reality, Boswell is a medical assistant and phlebotomist, meaning she's trained to draw blood - something that doesn't require a licence in North Carolina.

In contrast, nurses in the state must complete a two-year associates degree in the field and then pass a test to earn a nursing licence.

Boswell is a medical assistant and phlebotomist, meaning she's trained to draw blood - something that doesn't require a degree or licence

Boswell claimed she was a nurse on her Facebook and campaign website until this month, when the North Carolina Board of Nursing asked her to stop after receiving a complaint

The false claim was removed from her campaign website shortly after Boswell spoke to Kalbacker last week, but it remained on her Facebook until Tuesday, when she was contacted by the board again about the matter.

Boswell, who has represented District six in the state House of Representatives since her election on 2016, told the Observer that she didn't realize the mistake until she was informed of it by the nursing board, and that it was the result of a campaign volunteer who misunderstood her job title.

'Anytime you put on a uniform and go in a doctor's office people assume you're a nurse or doctor and you have to correct and correct and correct,' Boswell said, labeling the false claim a 'non-story' and 'non-issue.'

The lawmaker said she didn't realize the mistake until she was informed of it by the nursing board, and that it was the result of a campaign volunteer who misunderstood her job title

Boswell is a member of the House's health committee and has advocated for many health-related issues such as allowing chiropractors to conduct medical exams

When asked why the false claim wasn't removed from her Facebook page after the Board first contacted her, Boswell said 'it fell through the cracks'.

The legislator is not new to controversy. Just this week she caused a stir she referred to students campaigning for gun reform as 'Tide pod eaters'.

Boswell is a member of the House's health committee and has proposed several health bills such as one to allow chiropractors to conduct physical examinations and to define life as beginning at conception.A dog owner says she is 'devastated' after her five month old labradoodle was found dead after going missing from a dog day care centre.

Andrea Pothier's puppy Ghost was discovered lying at the side of a busy road, just yards from the company's enclosure.

Some 100 people had joined in the hunt for the dog and spent 10 days around the City Paws Club site near Chessington, Greater London.

But despite the extensive search, and a social media campaign that won support from around the world, Ghost's body was spotted by a motorist on the A3.

Andrea Pothier with her five and a half month old labradoodle Ghost (left and right)

Ms Pothier, 36, of Fulham, south London, told Mailonline that she is now seeking to take legal action against the company.

She said: 'I was completely and utterly devastated.

'It was really emotional. Someone else lost my dog and for 10 days I was devoting myself to finding him. For it to end like that was heartbreaking.

'I think for a while, I have been too upset to be angry, Now I am angry.

'We had 100 people helping with the search, I have 2000 messages of condolences on his page from all over the world. Everyone is angry and upset.

'It is completely unforgivable. He was like my child.'

Andrea and her partner Ivor O'Toole, 45, left Ghost with City Paws Club for a trial day on March 6.

Despite an extensive search, and a huge Facebook campaign, Ghosts body was found by the side of the A3.

Some 100 people joined in the search for ghost, (left) and Ms Pothier (right) said she was 'overwhelmed' by the support she received

But hours after he had been picked up, Andrea received a call from the firm saying Ghost had disappeared.

She claims that staff had left two gates open, and as they tried to move him back inside, he jumped over another fence, and ran off.

'The fence is nowhere near high enough. My biggest regret is not checking out the site before he was sent there.

'He shouldn't have been off his lead.'

She claims that he vanished at 2pm, but they didn't tell her and her partner that he was missing for two and a half hours.

'They called us after 4pm. By the time we got there it only left us an hour of daylight to search.

Ghost was a five month old Labradoodle. He went missing on March 6

She also claims that they only had two members of staff looking for him.

She said: 'Everyone else had gone home. We looked until 10.30pm that evening.

'And we continued with the search for the following 10 days. We would either drive back to Fulham or sleep the night in a van.

'We were literally there from 5am until 10pm at night.

'We managed to get a huge social media following, attracting support from around the world. The local community also helped. They were amazing.

'The reason it touched so many people, was because Ghost meant everything to me.

'We were then contacted by a motorist who had seen the campaign on Facebook and the posters, and told us that he had seen a black object on the side of the A3 for a number of days.

'He finally stopped and took a picture, and it was confirmed it was Ghost.' The puppy had been hit by a car.

Another dog owner said her German shepherd mix dog Trooper went missing in March 2015 after escaping from City Paws Clubs van. He was found alive several days later.

Matt Boyce, who started the company, which is based in Wandsworth, south London, in 2012, apologised in an an email to Ms Pothier and Mr O'Toole and said that they were 'revisiting all procedures and taking more safety measures.'

He said: 'On this occasion we let you all down, we had safety measures in place for new dogs in our daycare that were not followed through on.

The City Paws Club are based in Wandsworth and have an enclosure in Chessington,Greater London

'Whilst we did not expect Ghost to react the way he did, preventable measures should have been taken to ensure he was not able to exit over our perimeter fence.

'The normal procedure would be to put Ghost on a lead. Due to the difficulty our team experienced in the main enclosure, they tried to encourage him out of the gate door, but Ghost was too quick for our team member to react.

'This led to Ghost moving to the car parking area, becoming nervous and then jumping over a fence and running away. We had not seen this happen before as all dogs normally come to us at the car park ready to go home.

He added: 'As the business owner of City Paws Club, I pride myself on transparency and will be conducting a full investigation into the event which led to Ghost escaping our daycare with a full report being made available to you both.'

A Elmbridge council spokesman said it received one complaint last year about the company and confirmed there were no other investigations.

In a statement to Mailonline Mr Boyce said: 'We have looked after approximately 50,000 dogs over a 6 year period with only a few incidents having occurred during that time.

'We are all very sad about the news of Ghost and we take no incident lightly and are very responsive to fix anything we encounter.

'We have doubled our efforts to ensure staff have received additional training and a car park area with 1.2m fencing has been increased to 1.9m.

'The remainder of the day care centre has a 1.9m fence throughout.'A large crocodile has been shot dead after it blocked a hospital entrance in Zimbabwe and attacked anyone who tried to enter or leave.

The massive reptile took up position outside the main gate to St Patrick's hospital in the northern town of Hwange and charged visitors, creating panic among residents, local media reported.

Parks and wildlife authority spokesman Tinashe Farawo confirmed the incident, adding that crocodile attacks were on the rise in recent weeks due to heavy rain.

A large crocodile has been shot dead after it blocked a hospital entrance in Zimbabwe and attacked anyone who tried to enter or leave (file photo)

'We received a report on Tuesday from Hwange where a crocodile was seen in the residential area and we had to put it down because it had become a threat to human life,' Farawo told AFP.

'Because of the rains we have been receiving, we have had several reports of people attacked by crocodiles.'

The crocodile was outside the hospital in Hwange for about two hours on Tuesday evening, attracting a large crowd of onlookers, before it was shot.

The Bulawayo-based Chronicle newspaper reported that it was unclear how the animal came to be outside the hospital as the nearest water was about 10 kilometres (six miles) away.

'In less than five minutes, I had received more than 10 phone calls from residents who were in serious panic mode,' local official Themba Tshuma told the paper.

'At first I thought it was a prank because crocodiles are found around water bodies and not in the middle of a suburb.'

In the capital Harare, a woman was fatally attacked by a crocodile on Thursday as she crossed a stream, while a boy escaped with injuries in another attack in the south-eastern district of Chiredzi.A Florida woman reportedly huffed several bottles of compressed air until she puked on herself while sitting in her car outside a Walgreens.

Police in Nassau County found Tammy Irvin, 34, gripping the bottle in her hand with vomit covering her body Tuesday in the parking lot of the Callahan drug store.

The officer who arrested Irvin said there were three other bottles lying inside the truck, according to Fox 30 Jacksonville.

When the deputy went in the Walgreens to question employees, they informed him that Irvin had been hanging around at the store all day.

Florida woman Tammy Irvin, 34, was found covered in vomit in her car after huffing canned air for at least six hours

She reportedly first entered the pharmacy around 10:20am when she purchased the first bottle of canned air.

She returned again shortly after noon, again around 1:40pm and once more just before 4am, employees said.

The deputy noticed she had been sitting idle in her Ford F-150 when he approached the truck and found the ill woman inside with the heat cranked all the way up.

Irvin informed police she was going to hang out in her truck 'and not go anywhere,' the news station reports.

Irvin was found slouched over in her truck at the Callahan, Florida Walgreens after huffing the canned air

The middle-aged woman has been arrested on charges for dangerous chemical inhalation.

Canned air bottles are commonly used for a variety of cleaning purposes, such as dusting electronic devices.

Recreational use of the aerosolized cleaning bottles have otherwise been referred to as 'dusting'.

The 'products are made of a gas that is compressed into a liquid and canned' and are can present a variety of dangers that may be fatal, according to Safety and Health Magazine.

A few short-term side effects of huffing canned air are as follows: chest pain, drowsiness, trouble breathing, nausea, vomiting, disorientation, asphyxiation and seizures, American Addiction Centers says.The death sentence was reinstated on Tuesday for Lisa Jo Chamberlin, 45 (pictured), the only woman on Mississippi's death row

The death sentence has been reinstated for the only woman on Mississippi's death row.

The 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals issued the ruling on Tuesday three years after a federal court ruling granted a new trial for Lisa Jo Chamberlin.

Chamberlin claimed that prosecutors intentionally struck black potential jurors from her capital murder trial, reported the Clarion Ledger. She claimed that as a white woman, her rights were violated.

The 45-year-old was convicted of a double homicide committed in 2004.

In 2015, federal District Judge Carlton Reeves ordered a new trial for Chamberlin within four months.

Prosecutors had argued that the black potential jurors were rejected for 'nonracial neutral reasons'.

However, the 5th Circuit panel ruled nine-to-five that allegations of racial bias in jury selection were insufficient and should not have led to Chamberlain's sentence being reversed.

'The prosecution in Chamberlin's case did what it was supposed to do: It rejected some black prospective jurors and accepted others, accepted some white prospective jurors and rejected others,' according to the majority opinion.

'When asked why it struck individual black prospective jurors, it gave specific race-neutral reasons for the strikes.'

The five judges who opposed reinstating the conviction claimed that the prosecution struck more black jurors than accepted - eight strikes and five accepted - and accepted more white jurors than they struck - five strikes and 23 accepted.

Chamberlin (pictured, August 2006) claimed that prosecutors intentionally struck black potential jurors from her capital murder trial. She claimed that as a white woman, her rights were violated. In 2015, a new trial was ordered for Chamberlin and her sentences was reversed

The 5th Circuit panel ruled nine-to-five on Tuesday that allegations of racial bias in jury selection were insufficient and should not have led to Chamberlain's sentence being reversed (Pictured, Chamberlin in August 2004

The dissent also said 62 percent of the strikes exercised were on black jurors, 'despite black jurors making up only 31 percent of qualified prospective jurors'.

Chamberlin was convicted of murdering 37-year-old Linda Heintzelman and Heintzelman's boyfriend, 34-year-old Vernon Hulett, in Hattiesburg in 2004.

Evidence showed the victims were killed after they argued with Chamberlin and her then-boyfriend, Roger Gillett, at a home the four of them shared.

Hulett was hit in the head with a hammer and his throat was slashed. Heintzelman was abandoned after being strangled and stabbed. When her assailants returned to find she was still breathing, she was suffocated with plastic bags. Hulett was decapitated.

Chamberlin (left) and then-boyfriend Roger Gillett (right) were convicted of murdering Linda Heintzelman, 37, and Heintzelman's boyfriend Vernon Hulett, 34, in Hattiesburg in 2004. The pair was arrested after the bodies were found stuffed in a freezer in Kansas in an abandoned farmhouse owned by Gillett's father

In a taped confession played at trial, Chamberlin said the victims were killed because they would not open a safe in Hulett's home, reported the Clarion Ledger

The bodies were stuffed in a freezer and taken to Kansas, where Gillett and Chamberlin were arrested after state agents raided an abandoned farmhouse that Gillett's father owned near the city of Russell.

In a taped confession played at trial, Chamberlin said the victims were killed because they wouldn't open a safe in Hulett's home, reported the Clarion Ledger.

Gillett and Chamberlin were convicted in separate trials of two counts of capital murder.

Chamberlin was sentenced to death row in 2006, and Gillett was sentenced in 2007.Walter Leroy Moody Jr. of Rex, Georgia, is scheduled to die by lethal injection next month at the Holman Correctional Facility in Alabama. He is pictured in a prison mug shot taken in March 2017

Alabama will execute its oldest death row inmate, a convicted serial bomber aged 82 who killed a judge and a civil rights attorney with pipe bombs hidden inside mail packages.

Walter Leroy Moody Jr. of Rex, Georgia, is scheduled to die by lethal injection next month at the Holman Correctional Facility in Alabama, where he has been on death row since 1997 after receiving seven life terms plus 400 years.

Judge Robert S. Vance opened a package sent by Moody on December 16, 1989, killing him instantly and severely injuring his wife as they sat at their kitchen table.

Two days later, a similar device killed Robert E. Robinson, a black civil rights attorney from Savannah, Georgia, in a murder meant to cast suspicion on the Ku Klux Klan and provoke racial tensions.

Two other mail bombs were later intercepted and defused, one at a federal courthouse in Atlanta and the other at an NAACP office in Jacksonville, Florida.

The bombings, which happened 30 years ago, terrorized the South and bore disturbing echoes to the recent spate of bombings in Austin, which ended Wednesday when the suspect blew himself up after killing two people.

Judge Robert S. Vance (pictured left at a Democratic Party convention in Chicago on August 26, 1968) opened a package sent by Moody on December 16, 1989, killing him instantly. Two days later, a similar device killed Robert E. Robinson, a black civil rights attorney from Savannah, Georgia, who is pictured right in a 1964 Savannah High School senior class photo

Moody, who has always maintained his innocence, was arrested on July 1990 after what officers called one of the largest and most complex federal investigations ever.

Robert S. Vance was a member of the Atlanta-based 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, and prosecutors alleged Moody targeted him out of anger at the 11th Circuit's refusal to overturn a conviction that blocked Moody, who had attended law school, from ever practicing law.

By reconstructing the two bombs that killed Vance and Robinson and disarming the two others, investigators determined they were wrapped in nearly identical packages and mailed using the same kind of stamps.

There were also similarities between the materials used in the bombs, including improvised detonators and wiring methods.

Moody speaks to the press on May 2, 1990, one year before he was convicted and sentenced to seven life terms plus 400 years

After Vance's death, officials retrieved an intact bomb from the courthouse that housed 11th Circuit judges in Atlanta.

Forensic chemist Lloyd Erwin recognized a unique element of its construction from a previous case: The ends of the pipe bomb were made of flat, welded pieces of metal rather than the screw caps most commonly used.

That tidbit led investigators to Moody, who had been convicted in a 1972 case involving a bomb with flat, welded end pieces.

Moody's former wife testified that she purchased bomb-making materials at his direction, and evidence linked Moody to a manual typewriter with a misplaced 'a' that experts said had been used to write a letter claiming responsibility for the bombs.

One letter talked about a 'declaration of war' against the judiciary and complained about the 11th Circuit's 'callous disregard for justice,' court documents show.

A prosecution team led by Louis Freeh, who later became FBI director, convinced a federal jury that Moody was to blame for the bombing wave, and a judge sentenced him to seven life sentences plus 400 years in August 1991.

Moody was convicted on a state capital murder charge in 1996 in Vance's killing.

Moody is shackled and under tight security, as he is led into the Federal Courthouse for the 2nd day in a row, during a bond hearing on charges stemming from a 1972 bombing incident

The Alabama Supreme Court has set Moody's lethal injection for April 19, but Moody has sent a letter to Vance's son and others claiming he is the innocent victim of a government conspiracy.

A federal defender has asked a federal court to block the execution, arguing the state can't execute Moody because he's technically in federal custody. A judge has not yet ruled.

Vance said he feels peace 'that justice has been done' in his father's case, and he doesn't plan to witness Moody's execution. But every new bombing, like the string of blasts in Texas, dredges up old feelings.

'Usually these days I get up and don't really think about what happened 30 years ago,' Vance said. 'But when you see that in the media, you go back to December 1989.'

'I've been in the place of the families down in the Austin area going through this. It's just so frustrating because you don't know who is responsible or why,' he said.

Moody speaks to a person in the courtroom before his capital murder trial begins in Birmingham, Alabama, on Tuesday, October 15, 1996

Tom Thurman, who retired from the FBI's crime laboratory after handling cases including the Vance assassination, said bombings are 'more complicated in many aspects' than other crimes.

On the investigative side it's so different from other crimes that involve personal contact,' he said.

'An individual is there to stab, hit or shoot somebody ... and a lot of times law enforcement is fortune to have someone who was there.

In most bombing cases, the person who sets the device or sends it is not there. They've got some anonymity.'The first non-stop link between Australia and Europe will take off on Saturday, with the aid of break-through technology.

Qantas launches its 17-hour long-haul flight from Perth to London on Saturday, covering a staggering 14,498km without stopping.

The return flight will break the record for the longest non-stop scheduled passenger flight from a UK airport.

Qantas launches its 17-hour long-haul flight from Perth to London on Saturday, covering a staggering 14,498km without stopping

The Australian airline said it introduced new technologies to ensure the wellness and comfort of its passengers maintained a priority.

'We've given passengers more space in every class, including an extra inch of legroom in economy and more personal storage,' International chief executive Alison Webster told The Australian.

She said the Boeing Dreamliner had just 236 seats fitted, which was far fewer than the 300 fitted in competitor aircraft. And each passenger will have their own 12-inch high-definition touch screen.

Ms Webster said the aircraft also adjusted the cabin pressure so passengers would feel less fatigued during the flight.

The return flight will break the record for the longest non-stop scheduled passenger flight from a UK airport

Ms Webster said the aircraft also adjusted the cabin pressure so passengers would feel less fatigued during the flight - and be fresh when they land in London (pictured)

She said the plane would also simulate a sunrise so passengers were not jolted awake.

Charles Perkins Centre Sydney University Professor of Sleep Medicine Peter Cistulli said the long-haul flight was the result of ongoing studies and simulations.

'[We're] pushing back this dark period where we offer people the opportunity to sleep, that's going to happen about four or five hours into the flight,' he said.

Professor Cistulli said lighting was just one of many changes to be implemented on the Perth to London flight.

He said the type of food served and the temperature of the cabin would also be adjusted.

The professor said the flight was also the beginning of new studies for the centre, in an ongoing effort to improve comfort for people travelling on long-haul flights.

Professor Cistulli said some passengers would be fitted with devices to measure their sleep and wellness on the flight.

The results will be collected and assessed to make future trips even more bearable.

Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce has described both the route and aircraft as 'game-changing'

The type of food served and the temperature of the cabin will also be adjusted on the long-haul flight

Passengers taking advantage of the new link will save around three hours compared with the quickest existing routes, which involve stopping to change planes or refuel in the Middle East.

It will also enable quicker journeys to Sydney and Melbourne than flying via Dubai.

Qantas will use Boeing 787-9 Dreamliners for the non-stop route, with 42 business class flat-bed seats, 28 premium economy seats and 166 economy seats.

Aviation consultant John Strickland said the launch of the flights is a significant moment for the airline industry.

He told the Press Association: 'It will be a further test of how successful airlines can be with ultra long haul flying and whether this delivers sufficient profitability to justify the investment in aircraft.

'Qantas will certainly be hoping to attract a higher proportion of premium customers due to the speed advantage combined with the 787's better cabin atmosphere.'

'We expect many travellers from Europe will start their time in Australia with a visit to Perth (airport pictured) before going on to see other parts of the county,' Mr Joyce said

Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce has described both the route and aircraft as 'game-changing'.

He said: 'A direct flight makes travelling to Australia a much more attractive proposition to millions of people.

'We expect many travellers from Europe will start their time in Australia with a visit to Perth before going on to see other parts of the country.'Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey (pictured), who was rushed to hospital following the incident, has now been discharged

The hero police officer who was left in critical condition after the Salisbury poisoning has said his life will never be the same again after he was discharged from hospital today.

Speaking about the incident for the first time, Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey, 38, said he has been 'overwhelmed' by events since he was rushed into care following his exposure to the nerve agent Novichok on March 4.

DS Bailey had rushed to provide assistance to Sergei Skripal, 66, and his daughter Yulia, 33 in Salisbury.

According to The Times, it is claimed Yulia briefly regained consciousness after being rushed into hospital along with her father.

Upon DS Bailey's release from hospital, Chief Constable of Wiltshire Police Keir Pritchard described the experience of his officer as 'completely surreal'.

Reading a statement on behalf of DS Bailey, Mr Pritchard said: 'I recognise that "normal" life for me will probably never be the same - and Sarah and I now need to focus on finding a new normal for us and for our children.'

It comes as doctors were granted permission to take blood samples from the unconscious Sergei Skripal and daughter Yulia, who a judge said may never regain full mental capacity.

In his statement, DS Bailey went on: 'People ask me how I am feeling - but there are really no words to explain how I feel right now.'

He added: 'I have spent all my time since the incident really focusing on trying to get better and trying not to think about anything else.

'But as I have begun to feel better, I have become aware of the widespread and enormous attention this whole incident has attracted.

'I find this really overwhelming - I am just a normal person with a normal life, and I don't want my wife, children, family or I to be part of that attention. I do hope the public can understand that.'

In a separate statement, DS Bailey's wife Sarah said that her 'hero' husband's poisoning had been 'the most traumatic event of our life'.

A judge has given doctors the go-ahead to take blood samples from Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia for testing by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons

In a statement read by Wiltshire Police Chief Constable Kier Pritchard (left) today, DS Bailey (right) explained that the experience of his poisoning had been 'completely surreal'

Chief executive of Salisbury NHS Foundation Trust Cara Charles-Barks (left, centre) said that for reasons of patient confidentiality there would be no discussion of DS Bailey's condition. The Skripals (right), however, are still in critical condition, she said

She added: 'It feels like our world has been turned upside down in a really short space of time.

'I am so grateful for the support from our immediate family and friends and the police family liaison officers through this last few weeks - I really don't know how I would have coped without them.

'Nick doesn't like the term hero, but he has always been a hero to me and our children.'

Chief executive of Salisbury NHS Foundation Trust Cara Charles-Barks, who also spoke at the press conference outside Salisbury District Hospital today, said that for reasons of patient confidentiality there would be no further discussion of DS Bailey's condition. She also said the Skripals remained in a critical but stable condition.

DS Bailey, a father of two, had spent almost three weeks in hospital after coming into contact with the Novichok nerve agent used to try to kill former double agent Sergei and his daughter Yulia.

While being looked after his home was sealed off by forensic teams in Hazmat suits searching for more traces of the deadly nerve agent. His car was also taken away for examination at the Porton Down facility.

'I have been so very overwhelmed by the support, cards and messages I have received - everyone has been so incredible,' DS Bailey added.

Salisbury NHS Trust chief Ms Charles-Barks also said 48 other people sought advice from the hospital after the nerve agent attack and have been assessed and given advice.

It came after senior judge Mr Justice Williams made a key ruling in the Court of Protection allowing medics to take blood samples from the Skripals without consent, but also added that the duo may never regain their full mental capacity.

Giving his ruling, Mr Justice Williams said an unidentified consultant who is treating the Skripals said they were both heavily sedated, unable to communicate and that it was not possible to say when or to what extent either may regain mental capacity.

Investigators work in the garden of Sergei Skripal's house in Salisbury. A taped checklist can be seen on the back of one of the workers

Investigators in breathing apparatus were seen in Mr Skripal's back garden today

The military and anti-terror experts are scouring the property for traces of the nerve agent

They were both in a physically stable condition and were being treated 'on the basis they would wish to be kept alive', the consultant said, according to Williams' ruling at the London's Court of Protection, which makes decision over the welfare of people who are unable to do so themselves.

'The precise effect of their exposure on their long term health remains unclear albeit medical tests indicate that their mental capacity might be compromised to an unknown and so far unascertained degree,' Williams said in his judgement.

Mr Justice Williams, who is based in the Family Division of the High Court in London, announced his decision today after analysing the case at a private hearing earlier this week.

He said doctors at Salisbury NHS Foundation Trust could provide blood samples to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).

He also said trust bosses could also provide copies of medical notes to the OPCW.

The judge said he had concluded that such moves were in the best interests of Mr and Ms Skripal.

During the later press conference outside Salisbury District Hospital today, meanwhile, Wiltshire Police Chief Constable Kier Pritchard read a short statement from DS Bailey.

Police in gas masks start to remove their protective overalls at Ashley Wood Recovery in Salisbury where the car belonging to former Russian spy Sergei Skripal

The officer said: 'Some days we've had about 300 messages from officers, the wider police family and the public.

'The level of support has been unbelievable and I've tried to respond to what I can, but I want to say I have really appreciated every single message.'

He added: 'All the stories of community spirit - from the local businesses providing food and hot drinks to the officers standing for endless hours on the cordons, to the members of the public just showing their support for our work - have been quite simply overwhelming to hear about.

'I want to pay tribute and give my absolute and heartfelt thanks to the staff of Salisbury District Hospital. The care I have received from the medical staff has been simply outstanding from day one - from the man that cleans the floor to the doctors giving the treatment - they have all been absolutely phenomenal.

'Thank you just doesn't seem enough and just doesn't convey the gratitude I feel for what they have done for me.'

He added: 'I want people to focus on the investigation - not the police officer who was unfortunate enough to be caught up in it.'

The ruling came as it emerged a second police officer who was investigating the Salisbury nerve agent attack is being treated in hospital for suspected poisoning.

The uniformed PC is understood to have developed minor symptoms, including skin irritation, and is receiving treatment as an outpatient.

He is said to have come into contact with an object that possibly had 'secondary contamination'.

Police in protective suits at The Maltings shopping centre, where former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were found poisoned (left) and in Alderholt, British military personnel are seen carrying plastic drums as the investigation continues (right)

A source told MailOnline: 'The second officer is showing potential signs of poisoning but they are very minor and not at all on the same scale as DS Bailey and the Skripals.

'At this stage it is unclear how he became ill but it is possible that he came into contact accidentally with an object that could have had some secondary contamination.

'He is receiving treatment at Salisbury General Hospital as an outpatient as his symptoms are not serious enough to warrant him being kept in.'

Skripal, 66 and his 33-year-old daughter were found slumped on a bench in Salisbury, Wilsthire on March 4 after they had gone out for a drink and a meal at an Italian restaurant.

EU unites behind May over Russia: 'No plausible explanation' other than Kremlin was responsible for 'grave' Salisbury nerve agent attack Theresa May and EU leaders today agreed to stand together against Russia in the wake of the 'reckless' Salisbury nerve agent outrage, which they said represented a 'grave challenge to our shared security'. The decision came after Mrs May gave EU leaders at the European Council summit in Brussels a detailed account of the evidence which led the UK to point the finger of blame at Moscow. European Council president Donald Tusk wrote on Twitter: 'European Council agrees with UK government that highly likely Russia is responsible for Salisbury attack and that there is no other plausible explanation.' The announcement came as reports suggested that as many as five EU countries - France, Poland and the three Baltic states - are considering following Britain's lead by expelling suspected Russian spies. Prime Minister Theresa May has met with French president Emmanuel Macron and German chancellor Angela Merkel to update them on the Salisbury poisoning Leaders of the 28 EU states agreed with the UK that it is 'highly likely' Russia is responsible for the Salisbury nerve agent attack, European Council president Donald Tusk (pictured) has said Theresa May chatted with French President Emmanuel Macron as she arrived at the EU summit where leaders are expected to rubber stamp the Brexit deal Foreign ministers of the 28-nation bloc issued a statement on Monday voicing 'unqualified solidarity' with the UK, but stopping short of pointing the finger of blame at Moscow for the March 4 attack on ex-spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia. Mrs May had earlier spoken separately with French president Emmanuel Macron and German chancellor Angela Merkel at the summit in Brussels, where the trio agreed there was 'no plausible explanation other than that the Russian state was responsible' for the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal. At a press conference in Brussels, European Council president Donald Tusk and Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker dodged a question of whether they shared Britain's assessment that Russia is now 'a strategic enemy, not a strategic partner', saying only that the Salisbury attack would be discussed later. But several EU leaders, including Angela Merkel, voiced solidarity with the UK. Theresa May also chatted with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who she is pressing to take a tough stand on Russia in the wake of the Salisbury poison case Lithuania's president Dalia Grybauskaite said she was considering following Britain's lead by expelling Russian spies from her country. Resistance to a firmer line with Moscow was apparently coming from Greece, whose prime minister Alexis Tsipras said: 'We have to express solidarity to the British people for the Salisbury case, but we also need to be responsible on that issue.' Arriving at the summit, Mrs May said she would tell fellow leaders that she sees the attack on Mr Skripal as part of a pattern of Russian aggression which threatens the continent's democracies and requires a united response. Wearing a white ribbon in commemoration of terror attacks in Westminster and Brussels, the Prime Minister said: 'Russia staged a brazen and reckless attack against the United Kingdom when it attempted the murder of two people in the streets of Salisbury. The text of a statement on the Salisbury attack agreed by the leaders of the EU's 28 member states at the European Council summit in Brussels read: 'The European Council condemns in the strongest possible terms the recent attack in Salisbury, expresses its deepest sympathies to all whose lives have been threatened and lends its support to the ongoing investigation. 'It agrees with the United Kingdom Government's assessment that it is highly likely that the Russian Federation is responsible and that there is no plausible alternative explanation. We stand in unqualified solidarity with the United Kingdom in the face of this grave challenge to our shared security. 'The use of chemical weapons, including the use of any toxic chemicals as weapons under any circumstances, is completely unacceptable, must be systematically and rigorously condemned and constitutes a security threat to us all.' Advertisement

They had been exposed to a powerful nerve agent developed in Russia called Novichok. The Russian government has been blamed for the attack.

Intelligence officials in the US believe they were possibly exposed to the nerve agent though Skripal's car ventilation system.

However, counter-terror officers from the Metropolitan Police, who are leading the investigation, are working on one strong line of inquiry that Yulia unwittingly brought over a contaminated item from Moscow.

They believe that item could have been opened at Skripal's home.

The huge police operation is to continue in Salisbury for several months as officers comb through various sites across the city.

It has been reported that the vast scale of the investigation has meant that biochemical suits worn by terror officers are running low because they have to be removed every three hours and destroyed.

However, MailOnline understands that police are to appeal for a higher grade of suite that affords greater protection because of the presence of novichok.

The source said: 'The suits worn by police at the moment are fine for the investigations they are used to like raiding drug laboratories or handling more basic chemicals used by suspected terrorists.

'Novichoc, however, is a level up from what they are used to. This is a seriously dangerous nerve agent most likely made in a state-run laboratory somewhere in Russia.

'As a result police chiefs are going to request a higher spec of biochemical suit, more like the ones used by the military, to be given to those officers in Salisbury to give them greater protection.'

Counter-terror officers from the Metropolitan Police, who are leading the probe, are working on one line of inquiry that Yulia unwittingly brought over a contaminated item from Moscow

The clean-up in Salisbury will also take several months because novichok was designed specifically to avoid detection by chemical weapons inspectors.

It cannot be identified via hand-held chemical detection equipment or spray solutions normally used by the police to check if a toxic chemical is present.

Forensic teams will have to instead painstakingly swab every surface in areas of potential contamination before the public are allowed back.

Several cordons have sprung up across the city of Salisbury in Wiltshire after Skripal and Yulia were poisoned on March 4.

Sites of interest include The Mill pub, a branch of Italian chain restaurant Zizzi, Skripal's home and the cemetery where his wife and son have been buried.

Forensic teams will have to instead painstakingly swab every surface in areas of potential contamination before the public are allowed back

The clean-up in Salisbury will also take several months because novichok was designed specifically to avoid detection by chemical weapons inspectors

There are also fears that stocks of bio-chemical suits used by the police are getting low and they may have to call upon the military for help.

The source added: 'Novichok was developed by scientists especially to evade detection from weapons inspectors.

'That means that detectors carried by police to protect them from chemical and industrial toxic agents in drug and terror operations will be useless in this case.

'So too is the spray solution officers use which changes colour to indicate the presence of a harmful chemical.

'The only way the police can make sure an area of potential contamination does not pose a residual risk to the public is by swabbing every surface.

'Given the extent of this operation, the number of potentially contaminated sites that have been sealed off, it is likely to be a very thorough process that could take several months.

'Clearly senior officers will be aware of the impact this will have on business and commerce in Salisbury as well as the disruption to shoppers and they will work to prioritise sites.

'The problem is that Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear (CBRN) incidents are typically used to one site which takes a few days to assess.

It is claimed that the scale of the investigation has meant that biochemical suits worn by terror officers are running low because they have to be removed every three hours and destroyed

'On this occasion there are several sites which are taking many days to investigate, so much so that stocks of bio-chemical suits used by the police are in danger of running low.

'In that incidence, either the military will have to take over or the police forensics teams will have to use their suits.'

Traders in Salisbury have reported significant losses because shoppers are too scared to come into the city centre.

Daniel Styles, who runs a popular flower stall, told Spire FM how he had been left 9,000 down over the Mother's Day weekend.

He told the local radio station: 'It's normally one of the biggest weekends of the year for us, we make quite a large amount of money that carries us through the year.

'We normally make around 12,000 and we only made 2-3,000.'Raymond Frank Christie was charged with animal cruelty on Monday after a five month investigation led authorities to the malnourished and dead livestock strewn across his California ranch

A California rancher has been arrested after police raids at his properties uncovered hundreds of dead cows, some of which had been heaped into pile 10 feet high.

Raymond Frank Christie was charged with animal cruelty on Monday after a five month investigation led authorities to the malnourished and dead livestock strewn across the rancher's four properties.

The Humboldt County sheriff's office found roughly 250 to 300 dead cattle on Christie's ranch located in Arcata.

Christie had heaped some of them into large piles about 10 feet high near an excavator, while others were found laying in or near waterways.

Much of the cattle that was still alive was found to be malnourished and a large number had been confined to small areas.

Investigators also found a number of dogs being kept in unsanitary conditions.

The Humboldt County sheriff's office found roughly 250 to 300 dead cattle on Christie's ranch located in Arcata. The cattle that was still alive was found to be very malnourished

Authorities found malnourished and dead livestock strewn across the rancher's California properties during a massive raid on Monday

During the raid, authorities had also found that Christie had disposed of multiple carcasses within 150 feet of a state waterway and had improperly disposed of solid waste.

Multiple people in the community had complained to authorities about Christie's treatment of his livestock, Kiem TV reports.

'Your voices are heard. We take these sorts of complaints very seriously. We have several agencies here investigating the consequences of whats going on here,' Samantha Karges of the Humboldt County sheriff's office said.

'Weve received numerous complaints and its been an ongoing issue for years.'

Christie was arrested on four charges including animal cruelty.

He was booked into the Humboldt County Correctional Facility on $25,000 bail.

Multiple people in the community had complained to authorities about Christie's treatment of his livestock, which prompted the five-month investigationTheresa May today hailed the 'considerable progress' made in the Brexit talks as she arrived in Brussels for a summit where the transition deal is set to be approved.

The Prime Minister said she is looking forward to having the European Council approve the deal thrashed out between David Davis and Michel Barnier.

And she received a boost head of the two-day summit when EU Council President Donald Tusk gave the deal his seal of approval.

The Prime Minister is set to hold talks with her Irish counterpart Leo Varadkar amid reports she has been given a three-month deadline to solve the Irish border issue.

And she will also hold tripartite talks with French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, with the trio due to discuss Russia and the Salisbury poisoning and Brexit.

Arriving at the summit today, the PM said: 'I'm looking forward to talking about Brexit.'

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Theresa May (pictured today at Brussels) hailed the 'considerable progress' made in the Brexit talks as she arrived in Brussels for a summit where the transition deal is set to be approved.

Theresa May chatted with French President Emmanuel Macron as she arrived at the EU summit where leaders are expected to rubber stamp the Brexit deal

Theresa May also chatted with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who she is pressing to take a tough stand on Russia in the wake of the Salisbury poison case

EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker embraced Theresa May today - despite breaking ranks with most of Europe to congratulate Vladimir Putin on his reelection despite the Salisbury poison outrage

Theresa May hugged European Council President Donald Tusk today at the EU summit after he recommended that leaders sign up to the Brexit transition deal

She added: 'We made considerable progress through the agreement on the implementation period, which will bring certainty to businesses and people.

What are the key points agreed in the Brexit transition deal? Brexit Secretary David Davis and EU chief negotiator Michel Barnier were all smiles as they unveiled the Brexit transition deal Rights of EU nationals Britain has agreed that EU nationals arriving in the country during the transition period will have the same rights as Europeans living in the UK now. Free trade deals Britain will be able to negotiate and sign free trade deals around the world during the transition period. However, they will only come into force after the transition period has ended. The transition period The transition period will end on 31 December 2021 - meaning Britain will have a 21 month implementation phase. The Irish border Britain and the EU promised to keep a soft Irish border. Britain says it hopes to use technology to come up with plans to have an invisible border as part of the free trade deal. If nothing is agreed then a 'backstop' agreement will come into force meaning the UK would agree to align closely enough with EU rules to avoid a hard border. Divorce Bill: Britain signed up to the Brexit divorce bill, which is around 40billion. Advertisement

'I look forward to the European Council endorsing that agreement and moving on swiftly to talk about the future partnership that we all want to build together.'

Last night Mr Tusk said: 'I have some good news for Prime Minister Theresa May. I have just recommended to our leaders that we welcome, in principle, the agreement on transition.'

Leaders form the EU states are expected to rubber stamp the deal thrashed out between the British Government and the EU's chief negotiator Michel Barnier.

The two men unveiled the deal, which they said was a 'decisive step' in the negotiations, earlier this week.

Under the terms, the transition period will end in December 2020, while the UK has also given ground on free movement rights and fishing quota rules.

However, Britain will be free to negotiate and sign trade agreements after the formal exit date next March. Gibraltar was also explicitly included in the scope of the deal.

The hard-fought package is expected to be signed off by EU leaders at tomorrow's summit.

Mr Varadkar said: 'On Friday we will meet in Article 50 format to discuss the Brexit negotiations.

'This is an important moment in the Article 50 negotiations and it is hoped that we can agree guidelines on the future relationship between the EU and the UK.

'I am pleased that the UK has now agreed that a backstop solution to avoid a hard border proposed in December, will form part of the legal text, and that all the issues identified by the EU side in the draft will be addressed, to deliver a legally sound solution to avoid a hard border on our island.

'Prime Minister May confirmed this in a letter to (European Council) President (Donald) Tusk on Monday.'

But the while the agreement has been a long time coming the summit looks set to be dominated not by Brexit but the Salisbury poison outrage.

The Prime Minister said she is looking forward to having the European Council approve the deal thrashed out between David Davis and Michel Barnier

Theresa May addressed the press at the summit at Jean Claude Juncker tapped her on the back

Leaders from across the EU - including Theresa May, Emmanuel Macron, Angela Merkel and the Greek PM Alexis Tspiras (all pictured) - will discuss Russia and Brexit today

Mrs May has urged EU leaders to stand together against Russia in the wake of the Salisbury nerve agent outrage.

The Prime Minister said Vladimir Putin's 'brazen and reckless' flouting of international law represents a threat democracies across the continent.

She made clear she will be pushing for strong condemnation from member states amid calls for Moscow to be seen as a 'strategic enemy'.

British pressure for other countries to join reprisals against the Kremlin appears to be gaining traction today, with Lithuanias president Dalia Grybauskaite revealing she is considering expelling Russian diplomats.

The UK is thought to have been sharing intelligence with allies on Russia's espionage network.A refugee who fled war-torn Syria and arrived in Britain in the back of a frozen chip van has been awarded a coveted scholarship to Oxford University.

Sulaiman Waihba fled Syria with his mother, an engineer, and endured a five-hour sea crossing to Europe in a dangerously overcrowded boat.

Surviving on dates, the 20-year-old and his mother broke into refrigerated lorry at Calais and arrived as stowaways wearing just the clothes on their bodies.

Just three years later he had been awarded the prestigious Balliol Students' Scholarship for a refugee student.

His story is reminiscent of Malala Yousafzai, who was shot in the head by the Taliban but went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize and study at Oxford.

Sulaiman, a refugee who fled war-torn Syria and arrived in Britain in the back of a frozen chip van, has been awarded a coveted scholarship to Oxford University

The 20-year-old endured a tortuous five-hour sea crossing to Europe in a dangerously overcrowded boat with his mother

The scholarship was established by students to help young people who saw their opportunities of going onto higher education snatched from them due to their status as refugees.

The scholarship will cover all of Sulaiman's tuition fees and living costs and enable him to take up a place at Balliol College to study mathematics.

Leah Mitchell, president of the JCR, the college's student body, said: 'Those affected by the refugee crisis currently face significant barriers to higher education. This scholarship recognises this, seeking to combat some of these barriers by providing some support to a talented student who, despite the obstacles facing him, has worked hard to pursue his education.

'It provides a further small step towards making the college accessible to all capable students, regardless of background or circumstance. Now that the award has been made, we are very excited to welcome Sulaiman into Balliol's student community.'

Sulaiman fled Syria in 2015 and took a hazardous route to safety from Syria to Lebanon, through Lebanon, Turkey, Greece, Macedonia, Serbia, Hungary, Austria then France.

He landed on the south coast within a fortnight he had enrolled at a local school and with the help of a lawyer at a charity he launched his bid for asylum.

Sulaiman, pictured here with his two brothers in Syria, fled Syria in 2015 and took a hazardous route to safety from Syria to Lebanon, through Lebanon, Turkey, Greece, Macedonia, Serbia, Hungary, Austria then France

Sulaiman in Syria aged four. He has been joined in Hove by his mother, father and two brothers

As a way of keeping busy Sulaiman began teaching Arabic to refugees through the charity which rented out a room at the prestigious Brighton College.

The headmaster at the 23,000-a-year school, Richard Cairns, heard about his selfless work and offered him a 110% scholarship to the school - which meant he got all his fees paid including associated costs such as equipment and uniforms.

Balliol Students' Scholarship The Balliol Students' Scholarship is available to any student with current refugee status or a pending claim to asylum, whether in the UK, Europe or elsewhere. It covers full tuition, College fees and living costs, and aims to provide a talented student with the opportunity to study for a degree without disruption. The scholarship was established by the Balliol JCR and MCR, which both unanimously passed motions to create an opt-out levy of 4.00 a term per person to raise money for it Advertisement

Sulaiman knuckled down and rewarded the faith of the headtmaster with four A* grades in further maths, maths, physics and chemistry.

Other family members arrived from Syria last year under the Dubs Amendment - a regulation that means refugees have a right to go to join family members if they are legally in another country.

Now Sulaiman, his mother, father and two brothers are all settled into life in Hove, with Sulaiman revealing a previously undiscovered passion for rugby.

Balliol's Tutor for Undergraduate Admissions, Sebastian Shimeld, says: 'We are delighted to have been able to make this award, which reflects Balliol's commitment to working to draw students of exceptional potential to Balliol, whatever school, country or culture they come from.

'We are looking forward to welcoming Sulaiman with all the other Freshers who will be starting their studies at Balliol in October.'A former Penthouse Pet model who refused to provide a blood sample to police who believed she was driving under the influence of ice has walked away with a good behaviour bond.

Burnetta Leila Hampson, 34, a former actress who has appeared in Underbelly: The Golden Mile, was pulled over on September 4, 2017, in Sydney's Kings Cross.

After failing a breath test Hampson was arrested and was also charged for possessing ice after she was caught trying to throw away a bag of the drug.

Burnetta Leila Hampson (pictured) , 34, has walked away with a good behaviour bond after she refused to give police a blood and urine test

Hampson, a former model and actress, is believed to have been driving under the influence when she was stopped by police

Hampson appeared in Sydney's Downing Centre Local Court on Wednesday pleading guilty to possessing the drug ice and two charges of refusing to provide a blood and urine sample to police.

The Daily Telegraph reported Magistrate Jennifer Atkinson handed down a two year good behaviour bond and slammed Hampson for the dangerous and erratic driving she was doing in a highly populated area.

'From all accounts it was very erratic driving in the Potts Point area, it is quite a built-up area and there is a danger to the public,' Ms Atkinson said.

Hampson was also handed down a 12-month good behaviour bond for possessing a prohibited drug, and she was disqualified from driving for four years.

Her lawyer Daniel Kradolfer told the court that Hampson's life spun out of control because of her drug addiction.

He told the court she is checking herself into rehab on Thursday at Concord Hospital to get better.

She was given a two year good behaviour bond and a 12-month good behaviour bond for possessing a prohibited drug and disqualified from driving for four years

Hampson lost custody of her 18-month-old son and the only way to see him is if she gets clean and goes to rehab

The court also heard Hampson had lost custody of her 18-month-old son and the only way to see him is if she gets clean and goes to rehab.

'In the last few months she has been doing something about her situation,' Mr Kradolfer told the court.

Hampson was initially charged with driving under the influence of drugs but this was dropped because of her refusal to give blood and urine tests which concluded the evidence as insufficient.

'In the last few months she has been doing something about her situation,' Mr Kradolfer told the court

Hampson was initially charged with driving under the influence of drugs but this was dropped because of her refusal to give blood and urine tests which concluded the evidence as insufficient



A cordon thrown up around the London headquarters of scandal-hit firm Cambridge Analytica following the discovery of a suspicious package has been lifted.

The London-based political consultancy has been at the centre of a storm this week after a whistleblower said the company had paid an academic to harvest the data of 50million Facebook users to build profiles of American voters before the 2016 U.S. election.

Police and rescue crews sealed off the usually-busy stretch of New Oxford Street after the package was found early this afternoon.

Fire crews and police flooded central London today after a suspicious package was found at the headquarters of scandal-hit consultancy Cambridge Analytica

Police sealed off New Oxford Street after the building was evacuated amid the bomb scare

Fire crews unfurled hoses as police investigating the suspicious package near the offices

But the cordon around the building was later lifted after police experts assessed the package did not pose a risk.

A Scotland Yard spokesman said: 'Police responded to reports of a suspicious package at a building in New Oxford Street at 13:26hrs today. Officers attended.

'The package was assessed. It was deemed not to be suspicious. Police cordons have now been removed. The public are thanked for their cooperation.'

The building is at the centre of the probe after the Information Commissioner ordered that Facebook's auditors cease their work there ahead of an investigation.

Elizabeth Dunham, the Information Commissioner, ordered the workers to 'stand down' after men were seen wheeling crates from the building earlier this week.

Police later tweeted this message saying the package did not pose a risk

Police have said the area has been evacuated as a precaution and no one is injured

The closure of the road had an impact on the many transport routes going along the street

Facebook has seen billions of US dollars wiped off its market value following the row involving CA, which is accused of using the data to help Donald Trump's US presidential campaign target political ads on the platform.

The company has denied using Facebook data in its work on the campaign.

The scandal has prompted calls from politicians on both sides of the Atlantic for Mr Zuckerberg to answer to them in person for the breach.

The billionaire told CNN he would be happy to appear before US Congress 'if it's the right thing to do'.

'This was a major breach of trust, and I'm really sorry that this happened,' he told CNN.Dame Olivia de Havilland's lawyer has told a giggling courtroom that there is a significant difference between calling someone a 'dragon lady' and a 'b***h' as the actress sues FX over their portrayal of her in docudrama Feud.

Dame Olivia launched the lawsuit after discovering that her character uses the word twice in the series, including once to describe her sister, which she considers a smear on her reputation.

The 101-year-old Oscar winner's lawyers say there is no evidence she ever used the word in public, though FX point to a time she branded her sister a 'dragon lady', saying the terms are essentially the same.

'Is there a substantial difference between calling someone a b***h and calling her a dragon lady?,' Judge Halim Dhanidina asked De Havilland's lawyer, drawing laughter at the California Court of Appeal on Tuesday.

Dame Olivia de Havilland (left in 2011 and right in 1940) is suing FX over their portrayal of her in docudrama Feud, saying she is being unfairly depicted as a foul-mouthed gossip

De Havilland (pictured being played by Catherine Zeta-Jones) is particularly incensed at the use of the word 'b***h' which her character uses twice, including once to describe her sister. Her lawyers say there is no evidence that she ever used the word

'Yes, there is, your honor,' the lawyer shot back, according to Variety. 'In my household, if you say the word "b***h," you get your mouth washed out.'

The British-born actress is suing Ryan Murphy and FX for unfairly portraying her as a foul-mouthed gossip throughout the series.

'The creators of Feud used my identity without my consent and put false words in my mouth, including having me publicly calling my sister, Joan Fontaine, a 'b***h,' the Gone With the Wind actress said previously.

While the show primarily focuses on the life-long feud between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford, Dame Olivia claims that the characterization of her by Catherine Zeta-Jones misses the mark and paints her as a gossip.

Feud's producers note in court papers that Dame Olivia dubbed her sister 'Dragon Lady' but they considered 'b***h' would be 'better understood by a modern audience'.

Murphy insists he portrayed Dame Olivia positively  'as a wise, respectful friend and counselor to Bette Davis and a Hollywood icon'.

FX producers say De Havilland did call her sister a 'dragon lady' and said they chose to use 'b***h' instead because it was more relatable. De Havilland's legal team say the words are not equivalent (pictured, De Havilland's character alongside Susan Sarandon as Bette Davis

Murphy insists he portrayed Dame Olivia positively  'as a wise, respectful friend and counsellor to Bette Davis and a Hollywood icon.' Davis and Dame Olivia in a film still for 'In This Our Life'

But Dame Olivia feels the portrayal comes across very differently.

'The show was designed to make it look as if I said these things and acted this way. I feel strongly about it because when one person's rights can be trampled on this way, the rights of others who are more vulnerable can be abused as well,' she added.

FX is arguing that their script is protected under freedom of speech laws and that the case should be thrown out.

The two time Oscar winner had her own very public sibling rivalry with sister, Joan Fontaine

But in August last year a state superior court judge rejected that request, leading FX to lodge a case at the Court of Appeals.

De Havilland's lawyers say the ruling would not have any impact on freedom of speech, because scripts that do not portray events in an 'intentionally false' light would be protected.

No ruling was handed down in the case on Tuesday.

The two-time Oscar winner did have a very public sibling rivalry with her sister, Joan Fontaine.

Fontaine was also a legendary actress who was younger than her sister and was often pitted against Dame Olivia by their mother.

Dame Olivia was the catalyst for the so-called 'De Havilland Law', a landmark 1944 ruling that ended the tight grip studios had on contract actors and was widely seen as the beginning of the end for the old Hollywood studio system.

It came after Dame Olivia sued Warner Brothers in 1943 when the studio extended her seven-year contract, to account for time she had spent on 'suspension' for rejecting roles that executives wanted her to play.

For her suit almost eight decades later, the California Court of Appeals is scheduled to rule on if the lawsuit will proceed, later this month.

Fontaine was also a legendary actress who was younger than her sister and was often pitted against Dame Olivia by their mother

But critics fear it could create a dangerous precedent, stopping film and TV producers from depicting living people without their consent.

Stories based on true events could be in jeopardy as they would require permission, creating 'a fundamental threat to public discourse, history, art, and even to democracy as public figures could censor disagreeable portraits,' claims Jennifer Rothman, a professor at Loyola University.

But the 'queen of radiant calm' feels differently, adding that the sentiment 'mischaracterises her case' and takes away from the responsibility of the studios that put forth these projects.

'I have spent a good portion of my life defending the film industry,' she said.

'However, studios, which choose to chronicle the lives of real people, have a legal and moral responsibility to do so with integrity. They have a duty not to steal the value of an actor's identity for profit.

'I am fortunate to be able to be the standard bearer for other celebrities, who may not be in a position to speak out for themselves under similar circumstances.'Trade commissioner Celia Malmstrom said she 'expected' the US to leave the EU out of the protectionist measures (file picture)

The EU could be exempted from Donald Trump's steel tariff hikes, the bloc's trade commissioner said today.

Celia Malmstrom said she 'expected' the US to leave the EU out of the protectionist measures, which are due to come into effect tonight.

Fears of a trade war were raised over recent weeks when Mr Trump laid out plans to impose tariffs on steel and other goods heading for America.

The threat sparked a series of bad-tempered exchanges with Britain and the EU, as the bloc vowed to hit back by slapping higher charges on imports including jeans, motorcycles and bourbon.

There has been strong resistance in the US to the steel tariffs. Mr Trump's top economics adviser, Gary Cohn, quit in protest at the protectionist steps.

But there are signs that frantic diplomatic activity might have eased the tensions.

The US president has already indicated that countries including Australia, Canada and Mexico will escape the tariffs.

Ms Malmstrom met senior American officials including commerce secretary Wilbur Ross for talks this week.

'I hope that he (Mr Ross) will recommend the exclusion of the EU as a whole to the president,' she told a European Parliament committee today.

'President Trump will make an announcement on possible exclusions. We expect that we are on that list.

'It is the president who decides this... but we expect that Secretary Ross will recommend that the EU is excluded as a whole.'

Asked if the Prime Minister has a message for UK steel workers about the potential tariffs, the spokesman said: 'We have been clear that tariffs are not the right way to address the global problem of over-capacity, which requires a multi-lateral solution.

Fears of a trade war were raised when Donald Trump (pictured in Washington this week) laid out plans to impose tariffs on steel and other goods heading for the US

Theresa May (pictured in Brussels today) has urged Mr Trump to drop the tariff plans

'We are continuing to work with EU partners to make the case for exemptions, including an EU-wide exemption and we are working with all the sectors involved to robustly defend our industries and demonstrate the importance of their high quality products.'

At a press conference earlier this month, Mr Trump said: 'The European Union has been particularly tough on the United States. They make it almost impossible to do business with them, and yet they send their cars and everything else back into the United States.

'They can do whatever they like but if they do that, then we put a big tax of 25 per cent on their cars and believe me, they won't be doing it very long.'

He went on: 'The European Union has not treated us well and it's been a very, very unfair trade situation.

'One of the reasons I was elected is I'm protecting our workers, I'm protecting our companies, and I'm not going to let that happen.'A small commuter plane carrying four dozen passengers traveling from Vancouver to the nearby city of Nanaimo on Tuesday afternoon had to be evacuated after the cabin filled with thick smoke.

The incident was captured on a GoPro camera that was on-board WestJet Encore Flight 3161.

The two-minute video shows the interior of the Bombardier Q400 twin turboprop plane with 56 passengers and two crew members on board becoming hazy with grey smoke.

Eventful flight: WestJet Encore Flight 3161 was traveling from Vancouver to Nanaimo, British Columbia, when in the final minutes of the 17-minute flight the cabin filled with smoke

A GoPro camera that was on-board the aircraft captured the smoke inside the cabin

The pilot decalred an emergency and landed the Bombardier Q400 twin turboprop plane

The incident occurred at around 12.30pm as the plane traveling from the Vancouver International Airport was about to land at the Nanaimo Airport on Vancouver Island - a flight that typically takes about 10-15 minutes.

The footage shot inside the aircraft shows a flight attendant walking down the aisle and instructing passengers, 'leave everything,' as an alarm is heard blaring in the background.

Travelers then get up to leave, but a voice over the intercom reassures them that 'the boys have everything in control' and promises to let the passengers know if an emergency evacuation will be required.

One of the 56 passengers is being helped off the plane with a small dog in her arms

Passengers and crew are seen walking on the tarmac, away from the disabled plane

Safe distance: The video shows the group making their way to a field at the Nanaimo Airport and milling about on the grass

A short time later, a voice comes over the PA system again and says, 'evacuate, evacuate, evacuate.'

Passengers then proceed to the exits and hop off the plane one by one onto the tarmac.

The video shows the group, including a woman with a small dog in her arms, making their way to a field at the Nanaimo Airport and milling about on the grass.

One man pauses directly in front of the evacuated plane to snap a picture with his camera.

Passenger Robin Thacker told CBC that in the final four-five minutes of the short flight, the smoke became so thick that those sitting in the back could not see the front row.

The Transportation Safety Board of Canada stated that it is deploying a team of investigators at the Nanaimo Airport to get to the bottom of this

'No masks dropped down and they just told us to breathe through our clothes, he said, adding that crew members appeared worried.

A spokesperson for WestJet said the pilot declared an emergency and landed the plane safely, reported The Globe and Mail. Everyone left the plane within minutes and no injuries were reported.

After landing in Nanaimo, the flight was supposed to continue on to Comox before returning to Vancouver, but the plane remained grounded.

The Transportation Safety Board of Canada stated that it is deploying a team of investigators at the Nanaimo Airport to gather information and look into the incident involving Flight 3161.Married life can be as mysterious as the deep blue sea, but one Texas couple have proved they're not afraid to take the plunge - even when it comes with sharks.

Alan Paul and Mandy Thompson, of Houston, are huge shark fans and have been diving together since 2006.

So it was only natural that Paul would propose to Thompson, his girlfriend of 20 years, as they were surrounded by sharks in the Bahamas.

Alan Paul proposed to his girlfriend Mandy Thompson in the shark-infested waters of the Bahamas

Thompson happily said yes and took off her scuba mask so she could share a kiss with Paul

The Houston couple, who have been together for 20 years, are huge shark fans and have been diving since 2006

Paul decided to hide the ring in a toy treasure chest as he and Thompson put on their scuba gear and dived right into the water at their favorite vacation spot.

The top of the chest read 'Will you' and inside, right behind the glittering ring, were the words 'Marry me?'

As the sharks swam around them, Paul asked for Thompson's hand in marriage.

Paul decided to hide the ring in a toy treasure chest that read 'Will You' on the front and 'Marry Me?' inside, right behind the glittering ring

The couple happily posed for pictures after Thompson said yes under the deep blue sea

They also did a happy dance together to celebrate their engagement, fearless of the sharks that surrounded them

Thompson showed off her ring for the camera in the couple's sweet proposal video

She immediately said yes and they took off their scuba masks to share a sweet underwater kiss.

Thompson then happily showed off her new ring to the fish and the cameras.

The newly engaged couple snapped a few more pictures with their guides and did a happy dance to celebrate.

After they came up for air, Thompson and Paul shared another kiss in the azure waters before snapping photos at the beach and around their resort.

It was a happy ending for the couple in the Bahamas, which is their favorite vacation spotCambridge Analytica promised politicians its 'extra secret sauce' of harvested Facebook data would win them elections but it was 'never very useful', a presidential campaign chief said today.

Ted Cruz was favourite to win the Republican nomination and his team handed $6million to CA to help him find voters to target with online adverts during his battle to reach the White House.

The London-based company handed him 'psychographic' profiles based on 50million Facebook accounts and said it would help Senator Cruz target them individually on social media.

But in the end he was crushed by Donald Trump in the presidential primaries - losing by 7million votes - and Mr Cruz's campaign spin doctor Rick Tyler has said today it is proof CA 'didn't deliver'.

It backs claims by the scientist that gathered the Facebook data that CA had 'tried to sell magic'.

Ted Cruz was favourite to win the Republican nomination and handed $6million to Cambrudge Analytica to help him find voters to target with online adverts only to be thrashed by Donald Trump in the primary

Mr Cruz's campaign spin doctor Rick Tyler (pictured) has said today CA 'didn't deliver' on what they promised

'Cambridge came in, and they had this whole idea that was very interesting to us with this psychographic data and how it could be used', Mr Tyler told Business Insider.

'As a data company that promised that extra-secret-sauce data was going to be a breakthrough, they didn't really provide that'.

He added: 'I'm still not unconvinced that it could be used, but it was definitely not perfected. So they end up being a competent data company, but that extra thing they were promising they really didn't deliver on'.

Ted Cruz has faced criticism about his decision to use the company.

Dr Aleksandr Kogan claims he had no idea his work in 2014 would be used to help Donald Trump's presidential campaign but says the power of the data has been exagerrated

He told the Texas Tribune: 'Cambridge Analytica represented to the campaign that all data in their possession were legally obtained and that they were in compliance with all applicable laws and regulations, and the campaign relied on those representations.'

Despite the failure to win Mr Cruz the nomination Donald Trump's presidential campaigns brought in CA to help and paid them another $6million.

They believed Facebook data would help them target voters in swing states.

After Trump won the White House in 2016, in part with the firm's help, Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix went to more clients to pitch his services.

The company boasted it could develop psychological profiles of consumers and voters which was a 'secret sauce' it used to sway them more effectively than traditional advertising could.

Rival consultants and campaign aides, though, expressed doubts about the company's claims.

Brad Parscale, who ran Trump's digital operations in 2016, said the campaign did not use Cambridge Analytica's data, relying instead on voter data from a Republican National Committee operation.

He tweeted on Tuesday as the data crisis deepened: 'Another day of people taking credit for @realDonaldTrump's victory. So incredibly false and ridiculous. Let them say that under oath. Just an overblown sales pitch'.

Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix is reported to have taken credit for Donald Trump's shock presidential win

CA is also said to have worked on the Leave.EU campaign during the 2016 referendum and is believed to have helped candidates in at least 40 elections around the world.

The company worked with Cambridge University professor Aleksandr Kogan via his firm Global Science Research after he developed an app that could help predict and influence voters.

The app combined the quiz results with the user's Facebook details to build an algorithm that could identify likely political persuasions and personality traits. After beginning the research in early 2014, Dr Kogan and CA amassed a database of millions of US voters.

The algorithm trawled through what each user 'liked' on Facebook and could use this information to target them with personalised political adverts.

The academic, who joined Cambridge's psychology department as a lecturer in 2012, also said the accuracy of the data had been 'extremely exaggerated'. He added: 'What Cambridge Analytica has tried to sell is magic.'

He said: 'It made claims that this data is incredibly accurate and it tells you everything there is to tell about you. But the reality is it's not that. If you look at the data carefully those claims quickly fall apart'.

Cambridge Analytica 'strongly denies' allegations of data misuse.Brazilian national Jaici Rocha, 37, (pictured) became jealous and paranoid that Karina Batista, 40, was cheating on him with his brother-in-law.

A man who viciously murdered his wife by stabbing her in the eye and heart before slitting her throat after wrongly accusing her of having an affair has been jailed for life.

Brazilian national Jaici Rocha, 37, became jealous and paranoid that Karina Batista, 40, was cheating on him with his brother-in-law.

The couple had moved to the UK from Brazil in 2016, but Rocha, who had been suffering mental health problems, used a 'chef-type' knife in a 'frenzied' attack on Miss Batista in the flat they shared in Kensington Park in Bristol.

She suffered 27 different stab wounds and nearly had her back severed during the horrific attack. He had brought the kitchen knife and had taken it to the flat to scare her into confessing the affair.

After returning home from church together, Rocha, who had been suffering from mental health problems, killed his wife.

He was jailed for life with a minimum of 20 years at Bristol Crown Court for his attack on February 13, 2017.

Judge Dingemans said: 'It is not clear if he was delusional or simply wrong.

'But I am sure Mr Rocha purchased a chef-type knife and had held it to Batista's throat, demanding a confession of an affair not taking place.

'Mr Rocha has resolutely refused to acknowledge what he has done.'

He added: 'The frenzied nature of the attack and the targeting of the face, neck and heart, and 27 wounds were inflicted, are matters that must be reflected in the sentence,' he said.

'There is some evidence of mental disorder and having some minor role in the commission of the offence.'

The couple had come from Brazil to the UK in 2016, where Miss Batista had a sister

Speaking after the case, Detective Chief Inspector Gary Haskins, who led the inquiry, said: 'Karina had only been in Bristol for a year having moved with Rocha to make a better life for herself and to be closer to her family.

'Tragically, her partner's unfounded jealousy meant her chance to enjoy this new chapter of her life was ended in the most horrific way possible.

'Hopefully her family can finally get a sense of closure now that justice has been served.'First lady Melania Trump is standing by her man  literally  tweeting a picture Thursday of the first couple cuddled up together on the Truman Balcony.

'Greetings from @WhiteHouse,' FLOTUS wrote, as she stood smiling beside a beaming president, showing off the enchantingly snowy South Lawn  a message the president later retweeted.

While Washington, D.C., got a blast of bad weather on Wednesday, it's Sunday's 60 Minutes interview with porn star Stormy Daniels that the White House is bracing for.

First lady Melania Trump posted a photo where she's smiling alongside President Donald Trump, showing off a snowy South Lawn. It's a notable show of solidarity as the president's alleged ex-mistress, Stormy Daniels, is about to go public with details of their affair

Stormy Daniels sat down with Anderson Cooper for a 60 Minutes interview that will air Sunday night. So far, the show has only aired a clip of her sitting down, with Cooper saying, 'I guess I'm not 100 per cent sure why you're doing this'

Stormy Daniels' lawyer Michael Avenatti previewed the 60 Minutes interview Thursday morning on CNN, arguing that it will show that the president and his associates were involved in 'thuggish behavior, threats, intimidation and hiding the money trail'

Prior to the first lady dashing off her tweet, Daniels' attorney Michael Avenatti was on CNN explaining why Americans should care about his client's story.

CNN's Chris Cuomo had pointed out that Trump's womanizing behavior was already baked-in when it came to public perception of the president, so why should Americans care about details of an alleged affair?

'I think this is about engaging in thuggish behavior, threats, intimidation and hiding the money trail,' Avenatti answered.

Daniels received $130,000 from Trump's personal attorney in October 2016, during the waning days of the presidential election, in exchange for her signature on a non-disclosure agreement that would bar her from talking about her alleged relationship with the now-president.

Trump's team of lawyers wants Daniels to continue to abide by the agreement.

'The act of intimidation and threats, putting her under their thumb continues to this very day,' Avenatti alleged. 'Now we have a sitting U.S. president, Chris, who is threatening to sue a private citizen for over $20 million for talking about their relationship.'

'I don't think it's ever occurred in the history of the United States,' the lawyer added.

Daniels has gone ahead and taped an interview with 60 Minutes anyway, with preview footage showing her greeting journalist Anderson Cooper.

She doesn't say anything in the clip, while Cooper says, 'I guess I'm not 100 per cent sure why you're doing this.'

With the contents of the interview still under wraps, it's notable that the first lady is making a show of solidarity.

When the Daniels' story first broke in January, with the Wall Street Journal reporting details about the hush money payment, the first lady canceled a planned trip to Switzerland to appear alongside her husband at the World Economic Forum.

She, instead, took a quick trip to Mar-a-Lago where she used the Trump property's spa.

She also raised eyebrows when she took a separate motorcade to the State of the Union address.

The president was also noticeably absent from Melania Trump's social media accounts.

More recently, however, the couple has been seen embracing  such as when they walked together to Marine One on Monday and both spoke in Manchester, New Hampshire about the nation's opioid crisis.

Melania Trump also conducted her first cyber-bullying initiative on Tuesday, sprinkling her speech with a dash of self-awareness.

'I am aware that people are skeptical of me discussing this topic,' she said. 'I have been criticized for my commitment to tackling this issue, and I know that will continue, but it will not stop me from doing what I know is right.'

The first lady's photo was posted after the president had gone on Twitter and told the world he would beat former Vice President Joe Biden in a fight.

'He doesnt know me, but he would go down fast and hard, crying all the way,' the president wrote. 'Dont threaten people Joe!'The zoo in the Iraqi city of Mosul has re-opened four years after the Islamic State declared the formation of its caliphate in the city.

Zoo owner Shaban Mohammed fled the city in 2014 when IS took control, leaving a park full of animals, on the banks of the Tigris, locked in their cages.

The battle to retake Mosul saw much of the zoo destroyed and many of the animals were killed or taken by the jihadists.

Critics say the zoo deserves praise for re-opening so soon after the end of hostilities even if some of the animals are living is sub-standard conditions

The zoo's owner said that he is working hard to improve it by getting more animals and bigger pens

The zoo is still quiet following the trauma of the war, but it is hoped that it will rapidly regain its former status

The zoo's re-emergence is especially significant given that it is seen by many as a beacon of hope for Mosul

The park, which also features colourful children's rides, sits in the eastern half of the city that was retaken by Iraqi forces last year

Mr Mohammed returned after ISIS were defeated and is now looking to rebuild his business, thenational.ae reported with up-to-date video of animals again on view at the zoo.

Renovations of the zoo - in al-Murur park, an eastern area of Mosul - have now begun.

The zoo was recently liberated from ISIS terrorists and new animals have been purchased, among them a lion and a cub that were smuggled from Africa via Turkey.

While the squalid conditions for the animals are still below international standards - with small cages and animals in poor health - commentators say the zoo deserves plaudits for re-establishing some degree of peace and normality out of the chaos of the fighting.

The zoo's re-emergence is especially significant given that it is seen by many as a beacon of hope for Mosul.

Mr Mohammed claims he will build better facilities once his finances and his business improves.

Last month shocking photos revealed the suffering of Mosul zoo animals after they were left to starve to death by IS thugs.

An emaciated lioness was found cowering in a squalid cage and lying on exposed cables at Al-Murur public park after the area was liberated from the terror group.

Another heartbreaking image shows a bear looking mournfully through the rusting bars of its enclosure.

A lion in its cage looks at a dead lioness in a grave at Mosul's zoo, where animals were left to starve to death in photos that emerged in February 2017

The photos from February 2017 revealed the suffering of Mosul zoo animals, including an emaciated lioness (left) and a caged bear (right) after they were left to starve to death by cruel ISIS thugs

Separate pictures showed the filthy, ramshackle cages where animals were neglected during the terrorists' reign.

Like much of the city, the once-peaceful animal park has been destroyed by months of fighting between Iraqi forces and Islamic State militants.

When the military advanced into Mosul, Nour Park, which had been home to a range of animals from monkeys to horses, was transformed into an ISIS staging ground for attacks on Iraqi troops.

Like much of the city, the once-peaceful animal park has been destroyed by months of fighting

A starving bear peeks his mouth and nose through the bars of his cage at Mosul Zoo (February 2017)

Children peer through the bear's enclosure at Mosul Zoo. Local residents have been doing their best to keep the animals alive (February 2017)

'Neighbours had been feeding the animals, but when the fighting became too fierce, they could not leave their homes. Some of the animals starved to death. Others escaped or were killed in the fighting.

Anti-ISIS group Mosul Eye uploaded the pictures in a desperate plea for help from animal charities. They later revealed that the lioness had died.

However, it is understood that an animal expert from Kurdistan has stepped in to offer assistance.

Saif al-Bassef, a volunteer sent by the Kurdistan Organisation for Animal Rights, brought the first substantial food for a month. 'It's shameful to watch the animals struggle, they need help. They are not connected to the war,' he said.

The zoo is located in the eastern part of the city that has recently been recaptured by Iraqi forces

Separate pictures show the filthy, ramshackle cages where animals were neglected during the terrorists' reign (February 2017)

A sign outside the now-abandoned zoo, which was once a popular attraction for families, reads 'Nour Park' in Arabic (February 2017)

A starving lion is seen in its cage, one of several animals which was cruelly abandoned by Islamic State brutes (February 2017)

Mosul Eye wrote: 'When you learn to care for the animal and be kind to them, then you will know the value of human life, in this life.

'Everything is connected. There's no part that is worthless. Thanks to Dr. Sulaiman who calledand agreed quickly to save them.'

The zoo is located in the eastern part of the city that has recently been recaptured by Iraqi forces.

'The monkeys were jumping on the houses, scaring the children and stealing the fruit. Ducks and other animals were running around, the whole neighborhood had to run around trying to catch them,' said Faten Amar, who lives across the road.

Some of the animals starved to death, while others escaped or were killed in the fighting (February 2017)

A volunteer feeds a lion at Nour Park in Mosul's zoo. Of the four lions in the park, only two of the animals had survived by February 2017

The park, which also features colourful children's rides, sits in the eastern half of the city (February 2017)

People living around the park told Reuters they had been bringing their left-over food to the animals. But it was nowhere near enough in a city where human beings can barely survive, let alone zoo animals.

There used to be four lions. When the first two died, the surviving lions ate their remains amid the chaos.

A shell hit one of the cages and the monkeys escaped, causing havoc for nearby residents.

Another resident showed Reuters his son's hand, red and scarred from a monkey scratch when he was attacked by one three weeks ago.

The park, which also features colourful children's rides, sits in the eastern half of the city that has recently been retaken by Iraqi forces just over a year ago.

A man stands next to a hole caused by mortar shell at Nour Park. One shell hit animal cages, causing the moneys to escape (February 2017)

Groups of children jump around in the ruins of the playground inside the animal park (February 2017)A Wisconsin man was captured on video taking a chomp at a police K-9 during his arrest earlier this week.

Leland O'Malley, 44, resisted the arrest late Monday evening and then challenged the security dog when it snapped at him for failing to follow orders.

In body cam footage, released by the Racine County Sheriff's Office Wednesday, the officer and K-9 are seen approaching O'Malley outside a Dover home located on LaFollette Street.

Police arrived at the scene after receiving a report about a stranger at the location that night.

The Racine County Sheriff's Office released body camera video showing the moment a suspect bit his K-9

Wisconsin man Leland O'Malley, 44, was in the midst of getting arrested by police who received a report about a stranger in Dover

'Step out, right now!,' the officer is heard ordering O'Malley, while the K-9 barks loudly at him.

O'Malley steps forward after the officer repeats himself. The officer then adds, 'just don't rush at me.'

O'Malley, pictured in his mugshot, has been charged with striking a police animal, resisting arrest and disorderly conduct

He warns the suspect: 'The dog will bite you if you come after me and too close.'

Part of the exchange seemed friendly: 'Just come out here a little more, you're doing good. You're doing great. Stay right there, stay right there,' the officer went on, as the man stumbles his way, appearing disoriented.

O'Malley then keeps wobbling toward the officer, who starts yelling out at him again, 'stay right there, stay right there! Stay back! Stay back! Stay back!'

The K-9 at that moment is seen jumping up on the man to defend the officer while the official continues shouting orders louder.

It seems O'Malley is pushed to the ground by the K-9. The suspect is then seen biting him.

The officer warned the suspect during the Monday incident: 'The dog will bite you if you come after me and too close'

The K-9is seen jumping up on the man to defend the officer while the official continues shouting orders louder

'Don't bite my dog!,' the officer screams in frustration. 'Don't bite my dog!'

The officer, later identified as Christopher Schmaling, told Fox 6 O'Malley did not appear to be in the 'right state of mind' at the time.

'You can see on this video, he was clearly told this was going to happen. But he kept, kept advancing,' Schmaling said.

O'Malley has been charged with striking a police animal, resisting arrest and disorderly conduct.A former Miss Kentucky has escaped jail and been given a probation sentence for smuggling marijuana into her ex-boyfriend on numerous occasions when she visited him in prison.

Kia Hampton, 28, was sentenced to two years probation on Wednesday in an Ohio courtroom.

She was caught trying to bring a balloon containing three grams of marijuana into the Allen Oakwood Correctional Institute in Lima, Ohio, to give to Jeremy Kelly, her boyfriend at the time.

Kelly is serving a four year sentence for drug trafficking.

Former Miss Kentucky Kia Hampton, 28, was sentenced to two years probation on Wednesday for smuggling drugs into the prison where her ex-boyfriend was an inmate last year

Video courtesy Your News Now

Hampton, who won her beauty pageant title in 2010, had successfully smuggled the drug into Kelly three previous times.

She was caught last May when prison guards performed a body search on her.

Prosecutors wanted to see her jailed but a judge ignored their pleas and sentenced her to just two days in county jail which she has already served.

In addition to the two years probation she was given, Hampton was ordered to pay a $2,500 fine and serve 80 hours of community service.

Kia pleaded with the judge not to jail her and said she wanted to turn her life around

Hampton was crowned Miss Kentucky in 2010. She is competing the following year

The Louisville beauty was just 21 when she won the beauty pageant title in 2010 (pictured left). She is seen (right) in her mugshot from last year

Prosecutors said she showed no remorse for her actions but the former beauty queen suggested otherwise.

She told the court that she wanted to 'get back up, dust myself off and grow the person I know I am.'

'I just want a fresh start,' she added.

She said she was targeted by Kelly and that she fell into his world of drugs out of 'foolishness'.

The pair are no longer dating.Russell Jones, 23, became the eighth person in a week to be killed in London when he was ambushed outside shops near Ponders End station, Enfield on Saturday

Tributes have poured in for the university student who was shot and stabbed to death in an unprovoked attack outside a train station in north London.

Russell Jones, 23, became the eighth person in a week to be killed in London when he was ambushed outside shops near Ponders End station, in Enfield on Saturday.

A friend described how Mr Jones was in 'the wrong place and the wrong time' when the unidentified attackers inflicted fatal knife injuries and a suspected gunshot wound.

'Russell was a kind, loving guy and very humble in school,' said Jordon Welsh, who attended Lea Valley High School along with Mr Jones he added.

'He was in the wrong place at the wrong time,' he told the Evening Standard.

Mr Jones, who is understood to have been in the last two weeks at the University of Hertfordshire was with a friend, also 23, when four hooded men launched a brutal attack.

His friend was also stabbed and taken to hospital but is not in a serious condition.

Detectives from the Met's Homicide and Major Crime Command are investigating.

Police have yet to make any arrests.

Detective Chief Inspector Andy Partridge, who is leading the investigation, said: 'This was a totally unprovoked attack on the victims and their group, with the level of violence used being utterly deplorable.

A friend described how Mr Jones was in 'the wrong place and the wrong time' when the unidentified attack inflicted fatal knife injuries and a suspected gunshot wound

'The suspects arrived together coming from the direction of Curlew House. They fled together along an alleyway to the side of the Oasis Academy, heading towards Sandhurst Road, passing the allotments and industrial estate.

'Whilst the attack itself only took minutes to carry out, I want to hear from members of the public who may have seen them in the area before the attack or afterwards when they fled towards Sandhurst Road.

'Any fragment of information could assist the investigation. Please do not assume that we already have your information.'

Mr Jones, who is understood to have been in the last two weeks at the University of Hertfordshire was with a friend, also 23, when four hooded men launched a brutal attack

The attack comes amid a murder epidemic sweeping the capital that claimed eight lives in a week from last Wednesday.

Lyndon Davis, 18, the youngest to have been named, was found suffering from a single stab wound in Chadwell Heath, east London on March 14.

Joseph Williams-Torres, 20, was killed the same evening as he sat in a stationary car in Essex Close, Walthamstow.

Father-of-two Tyrone Silcott, 42, died from knife wounds on Sunday morning after a St Patricks Day party.

Detectives from the Met's Homicide and Major Crime Command are investigating. Police have yet to make any arrests (pictured with a friend)

It is alleged the car mechanic got into a row over two girls at a party in Homerton and was attacked.

Hersi Hersi, who lived as a trans woman called Naomi, was pronounced dead at the scene after being found with knife injuries at Heathrow Palace in Haslemere Avenue, Hounslow, at 10.50am on Sunday.

Romanian Beniamin Pieknyi, 20, is believed to have jumped in to the fight in a bid to save his friend during the altercation at the Stratford Centre in east London.

The 20-year-old, who only arrived in Britain two months ago, died in his best friend's arms after being chased and stabbed by a gang in the busy shopping centre.The U.S. House Intelligence Committee voted on Thursday to release a Republican report on the panel's Russia probe, the leader of the investigation said, a decision that formally ends the panel's examination of Russia and the 2016 U.S. election.

The Republican report found no evidence of collusion between President Donald Trump's campaign and Russian interference in the election. Committee Democrats strongly disputed that finding, and said they will continue to investigate and, eventually, release their own report.

The committee's vote to release the report was along party lines.

Representative Adam Schiff, the panel's top Democrat, told reporters that Republicans had declined every motion offered by Democrats, including requests to subpoena witnesses who refused to answer questions and to charge former Trump adviser Steve Bannon with contempt.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes led his Republican colleagues in a party-line vote Thursday to shutter their probe into allegations of Trump campaign collusion with Russia

Rep. Adam Schiff, the committee's ranking Democrat, said his party's members will still issue their own minority report  a document that's likely to tear the Republicans down for letting the White House off the hook

President Donald Trump has repeatedly said the Russia investigations  two in Congress and one overseen by a special counsel  are 'witchhunts'

'The (Republican) majority was not interested in conducting any further investigation, even when the flaws in what we have done so far have become so apparent in the course of the last week,' Schiff said.

The committee's chairman, Devin Nunes, said the report was based on more than 70 witness interviews and the collection of more than 300,000 documents, and makes recommendations about improving election security. He said in a statement it 'will include minority views if the minority submits them.'

Reports have emerged from a whistleblower this week that British political consultancy Cambridge Analytica improperly accessed Facebook Inc users' information to build profiles on American voters later used to help elect Trump in 2016.

Hidden camera footage released by British television showed a company official criticizing how the House committee conducted its interview.

The Intelligence Committee shuttered its investigation despite pending motions from Democrats to hold former Trump campaign CEO Steve Bannon (pictured) in contempt for refusing to answer questions

A summary of report findings concluded Russia conducted cyber attacks on U.S. political institutions, using social media to undermine the electoral process.

It acknowledged contacts between Trump associates and representatives of the Russian governments, including Russian efforts to set up a 'back channel' to communicate with Trump's team after his election, but said it had not found evidence of collusion.

Trump's fellow Republicans have Senate and House majorities, controlling every congressional committee.

The House panel's investigation of how Russia might have sought to influence the 2016 U.S. election, and whether Trump associates colluded with Moscow has been marked by partisan disagreements for months.

The doors to a secure area where the House Intelligence Committee meets were shut Thursday as the GOP majority prepared to shut down the panel's Russia investigation

Russian President Vladimir Putin has insisted that his government didn't try to meddle in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, despite a raft of evidence to the contrary

Earlier this year, Intelligence Republicans and Democrats released dueling memos about the investigation.

Nunes removed himself from the probe for several months after a late-night visit to the White House raised questions about improper communications with Trump associates.

The Senate Intelligence Committee released bipartisan recommendations on how to improve U.S. election security this week and is continuing its investigation, as is Department of Justice Special Counsel Robert Mueller.

The probes have shadowed the first part of Trump's presidency, and the president has repeatedly denounced them, and Mueller, leading to concerns he might fire the special counsel.

Moscow denies meddling in the 2016 U.S. campaign.Police have arrested a man suspected of being a serial robber dubbed the 'Ginger Bandit' who raided three banks in 20 minutes by handing a note to staff claiming he had a gun or bomb.

Patrick Brian Day, 42, was on parole for an unstated offence when he allegedly targeted the branches in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, on March 5.

Day, who has an 'extensive' history of offences 'for narcotics violations and violent crimes, is said to have then fled with the stolen money before he was caught after a tip-off.

Patrick Brian Day, 42, is accused of being the Ginger Bandit, pictured in these CCTV stills released by police on March 21

An image of the suspect released by the Los Angeles Police Department on March 21 showed a man with reddish brown hair and a beard, gaining him his nickname.

Day is accused of first targeting a bank on the 21800 block of Sherman Way, between Topanga Canyon Boulevard and Canoga Avenue at 2.20pm.

The next bank, on the 22800 block of Victory Boulevard, near Platt Avenue, was raided at 2.30pm

The third branch, on 22000 block of Ventura Boulevard near Topanga Canyon Boulevard, was hit at 2.40pm.

LAPD worked with the FBI and the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitations fugitive apprehension team to catch Day.

He is being held without bail at the Van Nuys Jail.

The playboy sons of a notorious drug kingpin have been busted by cops who found a loaded gun and $93,000 in cash in their mansion.

Lee Dean Spizzirri, 39, and his brother Kris Spizzirri, 35, from New Farm, Queesnland, were raided by officers at their $3.2million home.

A large sum of cash was found in the mansion and the handgun was found under the floorboards with the brothers claiming they needed it for protection for their building company.

The pair are the sons of infamous former bikie Dino Spizzirri - once known as the Godfather of the Glitter Strip - who was sentenced to six years prison over a crystal meth ring in 2014.

Kris Spizzirri is seen leaving the Brisbane Watchhouse in Brisbane, Thursday, March 22, 2018

Lee Dean Spizzirri (left), 39, and his brother Kris Spizzirri (right), 35, from New Farm, Queesnland, were raided by officers at their $3.2million home

They appeared at Brisbane Magistrates Court yesterday to face charges concerning the gun.

Christopher Wilson, representing the brothers, told the court the cash and the gun belonged to Lee Spizzirri, who he said made a habit of keeping huge wads of cash in the house.

The Spizzirri empire 'turns over many millions of dollars a year', the lawyer said, the gun was 'protection because of the business and the nature of the business'.

'He had it for no sinister purpose such as committing a crime,' he told the court, according to the Courier Mail.

Kris had his previous convictions read out in court, which included the large-scale production of the drug labelled ice.

Kris Spizzirri was granted bail, with the magistrate conceding his brother Lee's guilty plea had taken the 'sting' out of his own charges, including possession of a category H firearm

The magistrate questioned the need for so much cash to be held in person 'in this day and age' and said: 'The taxman might be interested in that too.'

When police seized the weapon, both men denied any knowledge of it or the ammunition.

But yesterday, Lee Spizzirri pleaded guilty to possession of a revolver.

He also admitted four other charges including possession of the injectable tanning drug Melanotan II, sedative Diazepam and glass pipes used to smoke drugs.

The court slapped him with a $16,000 fine, but no conviction was recorded.

His brother Kris was granted bail, with the magistrate conceding Lee's guilty plea had taken the 'sting' out of his own charges, including possession of a category H firearm.President Donald Trump said Thursday that he still wants to formally testify in Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia probe, just hours after the resignation of the attorney who had tried to persuade him not to.

'Yes. I would like to,' the president told reporters in response to a question about whether he wants to offer testimony.

Mueller is looking into contacts between Trump's 2016 campaign staff and Russian agents, and probing Russian meddling in the presidential election.

The lead attorney representing Trump in the sprawling investigation resigned Thursday morning, leaving his interests in the hands of a pair of conservative lawyers known for making political arguments more than legal ones.

President Donald Trump told reporters Thursday, after signing a memorandum imposing tariffs and investment restrictions on China, that would like to offer testimony to Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia probe

Attorney John Dowd quit Trump's legal team Thursday morning, costing the president his lead personal lawyer in the sprawling investigation  and the loudest voice counseling him not to bait Mueller into a confrontation

Robert Mueller, a special counsel appointed by the Department of Justice, is looking into contacts between Trump's 2016 campaign staff and Russian agents, and probing Russian meddling in the presidential election

John Dowd had become increasingly frustrated with Trump's reliance on other legal minds, and with his baiting Mueller on Twitter.

Dowd had consistently pressed the case in the West Wing that a face-to-face with Mueller would be against the president's interests, even as Trump has confidently argued that he could handle it.

Two White House officials confirmed Dowd's departure, which was first reported by The New York Times.

'I love the president and wish him well,' he told CNN on Thursday.

In Dowd's place, the president will work principally with Jay Sekulow and Joseph diGenova, both of them right-wing partisans.

DiGenova in particular has raised eyebrows for his claims on the Fox News Channel that the Justice Department and the FBI framed Trump with manufactured evidence in an effort to help Hillary Clinton in 2016.

For now, Dowd's departure leaves Trump's personal legal interests largely in the hands of Joseph diGenova, a conservative who has argued publicly that the DOJ manufactured evidence to frame the president

'There was a brazen plot to illegally exonerate Hillary Clinton and, if she didn't win the election, to then frame Donald Trump with a falsely created crime,' he said in January on the cable channel.

'Make no mistake about it: A group of FBI and DOJ people were trying to frame Donald Trump of a falsely created crime.'

Ty Cobb, who represents the White House in the Russia matters, will remain at his post.

Cobb has urged Trump and his top aides to cooperate with Mueller in the hope that it would bring his investigation to a quicker conclusion.

Mueller's probe concerns unproven allegations that Trump's campaign colluded with Russians to impact the outcome of the 2016 presidential election.

Trump attorney Jay Sekulow may continue in his role as the spokesman for his legal team

The president has called it 'a total witchhunt.'

Sekulow said Thursday in a statement that Dowd 'has been a valuable member of our legal team and we will continue our ongoing cooperation with the office of special counsel regarding this inquiry.'

Sekulow's role had been public communications on behalf of the Trump legal team. It's unclear how that team might be reorganized in the coming days.The superyacht of an Indian beer tycoon has been impounded after his crew weren't paid for months.

Vijay Mallya - dubbed 'King of Good Times' in India - is known as the man behind Kingfisher beer and airlines and for his stake in the Formula One team Force India.

But the multi-millionaire is currently embroiled in an extradition wrangle in the UK and is facing fraud charges in India after his struggling airline collapsed with around 1billion of debts.

The 61-year-old now faces a fresh setback as his 67million superyacht, The Indian Empress, is held in Malta after crew went unpaid.

Beer tycoon Vijay Mallya, who is fighting extradition to India, has had his yacht seized

The Indian Empress was impounded in Malta after staff went months without being paid

The maritime union Nautilus International arranged for the ship to be impounded after the crew reportedly went unpaid from September, after the case against him was launched in India.

The union said the crew owed around 800,000. It was secured four months wages for them worth around 450,000 and is now making attempts to recoup the rest.

Charles Boyle, the union's legal services director, said: 'The superyacht sector is seen as one of glamour and glitz, but the sad reality is that crew members can experience exploitation and abuse and that is why Nautilus has become increasingly involved in such justice cases.'

Mallya faces fraud charges in India

Mallya, who is known as the King of Good Times, faces conspiracy to commit fraud charges in relation to the hefty loans.

He allegedly laundered money through a variety of banks across Europe and diverted funds to tax havens.

A Mumbai court issued a warrant for his arrest and sent Metropolitan Police an extradition request in February.

The businessman was arrested last year and paid a 650,000 security to secure his release on conditional bail.

Indian authorities claim that between December 31 2008 and November 28 2009 he conspired together with A.Raghunathan, Yogesh Agarwal and B.K.Batra to defraud IDBI Bank by dishonestly causing or permitting IDBA Bank to loan 9,000million (104million) Rupees to Kingfisher Airlines Limited.

He is further charged with money laundering. The extradition hearing is expected to last for a fortnight.

Westminster Chief Magistrate Arbuthnot is expected to rule on whether Mallya should be extradited in by May this year. However, it is likely the case will then go before the Court of Appeal.A school deputy has been suspended from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School after he was found sleeping on the job in his patrol car.

Deputy Moises Carotti has been suspended with pay after a student spotted him asleep at the Parkland, Florida school where 17 people were killed last month.

He was sleeping at the same time that Nikolas Cruz's brother Zachary, 18, was arrested for trespassing on school grounds.

Zachary Cruz, 18, appeared in court on Tuesday after he was arrested at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida and charged with trespassing on school grounds

Nikolas Cruz, 19, has been charged with 17 counts of premeditated murder for the Valentine's Day massacre.

A student reported Carotti to a sergeant who was patrolling inside the high school around 5pm on Monday.

Carotti, who was in a marked patrol car, was woken up and replaced with another deputy, according to a statement from the Broward County Sheriff's Office.

Zachary Cruz (pictured), the brother of Nikolas Cruz, was arrested for trespassing on school grounds. His brother was charged with 17 counts of premeditated murder for the February attack

He will remain suspended during the internal affairs investigation.

Florida Sen Marco Rubio said the incident was 'impossible to believe'.

'Of all the schools in America, you think this would be the safest one right now,' he said in a statement.

'This is so outrageous it's almost impossible to believe.'

Cruz was arrested just half an hour before the student spotted Carotti.

Prosecutors said it was the third time Cruz was seen on campus, even though school officials had warned him to stay away.

Cruz told police he wanted to skateboard through the campus to 'reflect on the school shooting and to soak it in'.

He has been charged with trespassing on school grounds and is being held on a $500,000 bond at the same Ft Lauderdale jail where his brother is.

Prosecutors argued that Cruz had expressed admiration for the fame his brother's actions had garnered in the wake of the deadly massacre.

His bond was set at an unusually high $500,000 when he faced court via a videolink on Tuesday. He is now being held in the same Fort Lauderdale jail where his gunman brother is

'Probably most concerning is his contact that he has had with his brother in the jail since his incarceration,' Assistant State Attorney Sarahnell Murphy said at Tuesday's hearing.

'He has been heard and observed discussing how popular his brother is now, that his face is everywhere and his name is national.

Murphy said that just weeks after his brother had 'murdered, injured and terrorized' at the school, Zachary had gone back.

'Many (parents) kept their children home today. They have again been terrorized,' she added.

Florida Gov Rick Scott has requested that an armed police officer be stationed at every entrance of the high school after a string of arrests on campus.

'Recent events at the school have demonstrated the need for additional security measures to be implemented,' he said in a letter to Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel and Superintendent Robert Runci.

17 students and staff members were killed at the school on February 14 when former student Nikolas Cruz opened fire with an AK-47

'I am requesting that immediate action be taken to require an armed law enforcement officer to secure every point of entry at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School while students are on campus.'

'Every student in Florida deserves to know that their school is safe, and every parent deserves to know that their children are being protected.'

All students at the school will also be required to carry see-through backpacks, Superintendent Robert Runcie revealed this week.

18-year-old Jordan Salter, a student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, was arrested for bringing a knife to school

Runcie said any student without a clear backpack would be provided one at no cost after spring break, which takes place next week.

Three students were arrested at the high school this week, including a sophomore who posted threatening messages on Snapchat that pictured a gun.

In one image, the teen was seen with a weapon tucked into the waistband of his pants. The second photo was of bullets, the department said.

Detectives said both photos had threatening messages, and one was directed at someone named 'Josh'.

The teen told detectives that the weapon was a BB gun and that he bullets belonged to his father, according to the Sun Sentinel.

An arrest report stated that the student allegedly used the moniker 'NickCruz' for an online game he played.

The Broward County Sheriff's Office said the teen's actions interfered with school function and disturbed the peace.

Two other students at the Parkland high school were arrested. One for bringing a knife to school and the other for making threats on Snapchat

The student, who was not identified, faces a misdemeanor charge for making a threat on social media.

He was hospitalized under the Baker Act for being a threat to himself and will be transferred to the Juvenile Assessment Center once he's medically cleared, the sheriff's office said in a statement.

Police also arrested 18-year-old Jordan Salter on Tuesday.

Salter allegedly pulled a two-inch knife out of her bra during an incident involving another student in the cafeteria. It's not clear if she will face any charges.

In a separate incident Monday, 16-year-old Gavin Stricker was arrested for brandishing a knife on the bus.

Police said when school officials searched the teen's backpack they found he was carrying a 9-inch blade.

The school has been on high alert ever since the devastating incident

The boy's mother, Amanda Stricker, said he brought the weapon to school for protection. She told detectives that her daughter was in one of the classrooms that Cruz shot up. The girl survived the rampage.

'I think he was as scared as the rest of us were,' she said about her son. 'We thought he was doing okay, and I think he wasn't doing as well as we thought he was.'

Last month Broward County Sheriff's Deputy Scot Peterson was placed on restricted assignment after security camera footage showed him lingering outside the school while Cruz roamed the corridors firing at students.

Peterson was branded a coward by President Trump and slammed by surviving students, but claimed he believed the shooter was outside the school.

The 54-year-old chose to resign and retire rather than face an internal affairs investigation.

Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel told reporters that Peterson should have 'went in, address the killer, kill the killer,' saying the apparent inaction left him 'Devastated. Sick to my stomach. There are no words.'President Donald Trump signed a memorandum Thursday slapping new tariffs on China  sending financial markets into immediate turmoil, with the Dow plunging 700 points.

Trump announced the new tariffs, which he said could hit $60 billion, at a White House ceremony where he failed against trading partners he accused of ripping off the U.S.

The Dow's subsequent drop was 2.93 per cent of its value.

It was the worst single-day tanking since February, when the market index dropped 1,033 points amid inflation fears.

The market dropped Thursday, with the Dow losing nearly 3% of its value

'This is the first of many,' Trump said, as he inked a document allowing for the tariffs. 'This is Number One but this is the first of many,' he repeated.

Trump announced the first $50 billion in tariffs, but then said it could hit $60 billion.

But his move sent the markets plunging on fears of a trade war even before he signed it, followed by the Dow losing 560 points in the minutes afterward, only to recover and plunge again.

Shares had already been down over fears about Facebook in the wake of its data-harvesting revelations.

Trump blasted the large U.S. trade deficit with China as he spoke at the White House  while also criticizing a series of trade deals the U.S. is a party to as well as the World Trade Organization.

'It could be about $60 billion,' Trump said of the tariffs. 'But that's really just a fraction of what we're talking about,' he said.

'This is the first of many,' Trump said, as he inked a document allowing for new tariffs on China

Trump singled out the trade deficit with China, noting he had asked China's president to trim it by $100 billion, even as Americans continue to snap up made-in-China products.

The broader S&P 500 was down 2.5 per cent.

China warned it would retaliate, saying it would 'certainly take all necessary measures to resolutely defend,' CNN Money reported. U.S. soybeans could be in its cross-hairs.

Trump railed against the U.S. trade deficit with China in his remarks.

'Any way you look at it, it is the largest deficit in any country in the history of our world. Its out of control,' Trump said at the White House, surrounded by his trade advisors and Vice President Mike Pence.

'We have a tremendous intellectual property theft sit going on which likewise is hundreds of billions of dollars. And thats on a yearly basis,' Trump complained.

The Dow Jones Industrial average took a 500 dive about an hour before the tariffs were formally announced. By the time Trump took to a White House podium, the Dow was down 367 points, and it was lower  down 380 points  after he finished his tough trade talk, and remained down afterward.

Trump went after a bilateral South Korea trade deal, calling it a 'very one sided deal. It's a deal that has to be changed.'

And he said the World Trade Organization, which mediates international trade disputes: 'has actually been a disaster for us. It's been very unfair to us.'

The tariffs are meant to combat Chinese intellectual property theft. He was flanked at the announcement by Lockheed Martin CEO Marillyn Hewson,V ice President Pence, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross and U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer

'The judging has been very unfair,' Trump said.

China and other nations warned against the move, warning it could set off a trade war.

But Trump defended it on fairness grounds.

'It's going to make us a much stronger much richer nation,' he said.

He called it a 'reciprocal' tariff, explaining: 'If they charge us, we charge them the same thing.'

The president singled out Japan's prime minister Shinzo Abe, considered a close Trump ally as among leaders taking advantage of the U.S..

'There'll be a little smile on their face. And the smile is: "I can't believe we've been able to take advantage of the United States for so long." So those days are over,' Trump said.

The directive will open a consultation period by the U.S. Trade Representative's office to look at a list of Chinese products that could be targeted, Everett Eissenstat, deputy director of the National Economic Council, told reporters.

In addition, Trump will also direct the U.S. Treasury to propose measures that could restrict Chinese investments in the United States, Eissenstat said.

The tariffs and investment restrictions will be imposed under the U.S. Trade Representative's "Section 301" investigation into alleged misappropriation of U.S. intellectual property by China.

JUST YOU WAIT: President Trump is preparing to sign tariffs totaling up to $50 billion on China to counter what he says is intellectual property theft

OMB Director Mick Mulvaney punted on a question about the tariffs at a White House briefing shortly before Trump was to speak.

'Let him speak for himself on that one,' said Mulvaney.

The Washington Post earlier this week reported that Trump doubled a senior staff recommendation of $30 billion in tariffs.

But China had urged caution, and even signaling it will make concessions, albeit on its own time frame.

"What we hope is for us to act rationally rather than being led by emotions," said China's premier, Li Keqiang. "We don't want to see a trade war,' he said at a Tuesday press conference.

"If there is one thing that will be different from the past, that will be that China will open even wider," said Li, in one of several lines signaling flexibility.

He said Beijing plans to "further bring down overall tariffs," including removing tariffs on 'much-needed anti-cancer drugs.'

'There is still broad room for us to further open up,' said Li.

This photo taken on December 6, 2017 shows a loaded cargo ship at the Yangshan Deep-Water Port, an automated cargo wharf, in Shanghai

LOOKS FAMILIAR: Sculpture in the shape of a giant oil bubble, built near the first drilling well of the Karamay oil field, is the landmark of the city. Some people say it is a copy of Chicago's famous Cloud Gate

Trump defended his decision in a tweet sent out after his announcement. 'As a candidate, I pledged that if elected I would use every lawful tool to combat unfair trade, protect American workers, and defend our national security. Today, we took another critical step to fulfill that commitment,' Trump wrote.A husband and wife who came to the United States legally from Lebanon ran an export business out of their Massachusetts home which did business with a Syrian company that made bombs used against US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, the federal government has alleged.

The couple, who fled the country while negotiating a plea agreement, and a Syrian national were indicted Wednesday on charges of violating US exports laws and obstruction of justice.

Anni Beurklian, 49, and her husband, Antoine Ajaka, 50, operated their company Top Tech US Inc. out of their Waltham home, the US attorney's office in Boston said.

Between 2012 and 2018, the business exported electronics, computer equipment and other items to customers in Lebanon and Syria, according to the indictment.

Anni Beurklian, 49, and her husband, Antoine Ajaka, 50, operated their company Top Tech US Inc. out of their Waltham home, the US attorney's office in Boston said

The couple, who fled the country while negotiating a plea agreement, and a Syrian national were indicted Wednesday on charges of violating US exports laws and obstruction of justice

The US government alleges the couple did business with a Syrian company that made bombs used against US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. Anni Beurklian is seen in the images above

One customer was Syria-based EKT Electronics, which the US government alleges developed improvised explosive devices.

EKT was involved in activities related to the acquisition, attempted acquisition, and/or development of improvised explosive devices, which were being used against US and coalition troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to authorities.

As a result, the US Commerce Department requires anyone doing business with EKT to obtain an export license, which authorities say Top Tech did not do.

EKT's manager was also named in the indictment.

Anni Beurklian is seen in front of her house in Waltham, Massachusetts in this undated photo. The federal government alleges the couple ran a tech company from their home

The couple was engaged in plea negotiations when they fled the country in January to avoid prosecution, federal authorities said.

Both are originally from Lebanon.

Anni Beurklian, who also goes by the name Anni Ajaka, is a naturalized US citizen.

Antoine Ajaka, who also goes by Tony Ajaka, is a legal permanent resident of the US.

They are charged with conspiracy to violate US export laws and regulations, conspiracy to defraud the United States, smuggling goods out of the United States, conspiracy to obstruct justice, and obstruction of justice.

I am aware of the indictments and am in the process of reviewing and digesting the charges, which are serious, their Boston-based attorney, Brad Bailey, said before declining further comment.A Florida high school student has been charged as an adult after he allegedly appeared in an Instagram video with a gun outside his school, threatening to shoot the principal.

Anthony Roberson, of Riviera Beach, was booked into the Palm Beach County Jail on Tuesday on counts of possession of a gun on school property, using a communication device to assist in a crime and making a false report to a law-enforcement officer.

His bond was set at $115,000.

High schooler charged: Anthony Roberson (left and right), 17, has been arrested for allegedly bringing a gun to his Florida high school and threatening to shoot the principal

Roberson was said to have bragged in an Instagram Live video that he brings a gun to Willaim T. Dwyer High School every day

The investigation into Roberson was launched in early March after a tip came in accusing the student of posting photos of his Instagram account, @Hittman_Ant, showing him brandishing a gun in the parking lot of William T. Dwyer High School.

On March 6, deputies watched a live online video in which a gun-toting Roberson appeared with a young woman who told him, 'I'm going to tell the teachers and the school you got a gun.'

The suspect said in response that he brings it with him every day, as Palm Beach Post first reported.

Roberson also allegedly threatened to shoot 'Mr D,' likely meaning Principal Joe DePasquale (left). The teen later claimed he was only kidding

When the girl tells Roberson that she and her 'white friends' are scared, he reassures her that she needs not worry, adding 'I'm going to shoot Mr D first,' which authorities inferred to be a threat against Principal Joe DePasquale.

The next day, a SWAT team arrived at Roberson's apartment on Avenue J to execute a search warrant and found a gun stashed under the water heater in the kitchen.

The firearm had been reported stolen in Cocoa Beach.

When questioned about the threat against the school principal, Roberson said he 'was only kidding.' He allegedly confessed that the gun recovered from his home was the same firearm seen in the video.

If Roberson is able to post bond, he will remain under house arrest after his release.Ohio Gov. John Kasich said Wednesday that he was open to a variety of paths to the presidency, should he decide to run in 2020.

'All of my options are on the table,' Kasich told reporters at an event he appeared at alongside former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger in Los Angeles, according to Politico.

Kasich, a Republican who formerly competed in the 2016 GOP primary, noted how 'the Republican Party is my vehicle. It's never been my master.'

Ohio Gov. John Kasich told reporters Wednesday that 'all my options are on the table' for the 2020 cycle, which suggests he'd take on President Trump in a Republican primary, or consider running as an independent

Ohio Gov. John Kasich (right) was appearing at a Los Angeles event alongside former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (left). Neither politician has re-aligned themselves with President Trump

Ohio Gov. John Kasich (left) and former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (right) both believe the GOP would be better if it became more moderated and Republicans compromised more with Democrats

Both he and Schwarzenegger, who supported Kasich's presidential bid, have been among the handful of Republicans never to re-align themselves with Trump.

They were attended the New Way California Summit, hosted by a group trying to remake California's GOP.

At the event, Kasich said it was his 'job to lead the party.'

The governor was asked then if he had ruled out running as an independent. He replied that he hadn't.

'But I'm a Republican, I'm a conservative, and I just want to add to the public debate and do a good job,' Kasich said.

'I'm not ruling anything in or out,' the governor added.

Kasich could also run against Trump  who's already announced his re-election bid, even hiring a campaign manger  as a Republican in the next set of primaries.

Sen. Jeff Flake, a retiring Arizona Republican who has also played the role of thorn-in-Trump's-side, said on Sunday he hoped that some Republican would challenge the sitting president in the primary.

On CNN's State of the Union Flake said there was a 'crying need out there for some Republicans to stand up and say, this is not normal, this is not right.'

Flake believed that it would be 'extremely difficult to defeat the president right now if the election were held in a Republican primary.'

He added, however, that a bruising midterm in 2018 might do the trick.

'This is the Trump party right now. I just am not sure that it will be two years from now,' Flake said.

Compared to Kasich's answer about running, Flake seemed a lot less inclined.

'I'm not ruling it out, but I certainly am  I think the odds are long that I would do it,' the Arizona senator said.

He added that, 'People want to remember the Republican Party as a decent party. And it is not right now.'

Kasich and Schwarzenegger believed the pathway to that was a GOP that was more compromising and moderate.

In Los Angeles, Kasick looked back on the presidency of former California Gov. Ronald Reagan, who was considered a conservative in his time, but now looks moderate in comparison.

Reagan, Kasich argued 'compromised with [Democratic Speaker] Tip O'Neill on saving Social Security.'

And unlike Trump he was 'very welcoming of immigrants,' Kasich said.A solicitor has been cleared of using female genital mutilation as a punishment against his daughter.

The defendant, of west African origin, was accused of beating his children and organising for his nine-year-old girl to undergo FGM.

At his Old Bailey trial, he denied all the accusations saying he had never threatened to have her cut.

The solicitor claimed he could not be capable of such a horrific crime because he is Catholic.

At his Old Bailey trial, he denied all the accusations saying he had never threatened to have her cut

The 50-year-old man, who cannot be named to protect the identity of the child, was cleared of two charges of FGM, alternative charges of wounding with intent and child cruelty.

The case is only the third FGM prosecution brought to court in Britain, both of which led to acquittals. The maximum sentence is 14 years in prison.

The defendant had been accused of twice arranging for someone to go to the family's home in south London to cut the young girl with a razor as she lay on a mat in the hallway.

The girl said she cried in pain and begged for it to stop but her father just encouraged the cutter, jurors were told.

The child could not recall the identity of the person who allegedly subjected her to the ordeal twice between 2009 and 2013.

The prosecution said it did not happen for cultural or family reasons, but as a punishment.

The allegations came to light after the girl told a friend, whose mother contacted Childline.

Trial of Uber driver accused of allowing his daughter, six, to undergo female genital mutilation collapses as judge says there is no conclusive evidence she even had the procedure Judge Julian Lambert (pictured) directed a jury to find the 29-year-old not guilty of child cruelty The trial of a father accused of causing or allowing his six-year-old daughter to undergo female genital mutilation has collapsed after a judge ruled there was no case to answer. Judge Julian Lambert directed a jury to find the 29-year-old taxi driver, from inner-city Bristol, not guilty of child cruelty following a three-day trial at Bristol Crown Court. He described the prosecution case against the Somali father as 'deeply troubling' and called the account of their key witness - an anti-FGM campaigner - 'inconsistent'. The driver had been charged with cruelty to a child under the age of 16 years, and having responsibility for a child under that age willfully assaulting / ill-treating / abandoning a child or young person to cause unnecessary suffering or injury. But the judge said medical evidence on whether the girl had undergone FGM was 'wholly inconclusive at its highest', adding that she had always denied being harmed. No cases of FGM have been successfully prosecuted in the UK, despite the practice being illegal for 30 years. Following the ruling, Detective Chief Inspector Leanne Pook, Avon and Somerset Polices lead for FGM, said: 'Our priority from the outset of this investigation has been to safeguard any vulnerable children and protect them from harm. 'We carried out a challenging two-year investigation, supported by professionals from a range of partner agencies, which resulted in evidence being passed to the Crown Prosecution Service and a charge being authorised for a child cruelty offence. 'We accept the findings of the court and will continue, as always, to work closely with our communities to protect those at risk of FGM, and our wider network of partner agencies and inspiring charities to raise awareness of and develop our responses to this important issue. 'FGM remains a deeply entrenched practice and we know these harmful procedures are happening in this country right now.' She said the force would continue to 'thoroughly investigate all potential offences of FGM' as well as focusing on preventing it from taking place. A spokeswoman for the Crown Prosecution Service described the prosecution against the father for child cruelty in relation to FGM as 'unprecedented'. 'The CPS considered this case in accordance with the Code for Crown Prosecutors and decided it met the Full Code Test - that there was sufficient evidence to prosecute for an offence of child cruelty and it was in the public interest,' she said. 'The judge at Bristol Crown Court had the opportunity to hear the evidence live and challenged. 'He then made a decision to stop the case yesterday. We respect the judges decision and will not be appealing. 'This was an unusual and unprecedented case for the prosecution. 'Where we feel there is sufficient evidence, and it is in the public interest to pursue, it is right that we put cases before the court so that a decision can be made by judge or jury.' Lisa Zimmerman, director of Integrate UK, described the judges decision to stop the trial as 'very disappointing'. 'It is shameful that there has still never been a successful prosecution of this crime in the UK despite the fact that so many girls have been abused in this way across the country,' she said. 'The CPS and safeguarding services must protect young girls by taking urgent and serious action to ensure that perpetrators feel the full force of the law. 'Where there is evidence of genital mutilation the case must be prosecuted under the FGM Act.' Advertisement

But Kate Bex QC, defending, suggested FGM was 'predominantly perpetrated by female cutters on women' for reasons including 'purification, honour and social acceptance'.

Ms Bex told jurors the father has no previous convictions, is a devout Christian and has job.

After the breakdown of the parents' marriage, the children had been 'susceptible to their mother's influence at the expense of their relationship with their father and have, whether consciously or not, rewritten their history', she said.

What is female genital mutilation? Razor blades are among the tools used to mutilate the genitals of women and girls The harmful religious and traditional practice involves partial or total removal of the female genitalia. Not only is it illegal in the UK, it is also illegal to take a female abroad for FGM. The maximum jail term for carrying out or enabling FGM is 14 years. Since April 2014, the NHS has been required to collect data on female genital mutilation (FGM) from women attending hospitals, GP surgeries and mental health centres. Tools used to mutilate women's and girls' genitals include blades, razors and even fingernails, sometimes without anaesthesia. One form of FGM involves removing the clitoris and the fold of skin above it, as well as the labia. The most severe form means the removal of the inner and outer labia as well as the vagina's opening being closed, with a small hole left for passing urine and menstrual blood. Sometimes the vagina is then cut open for sex or childbirth. Women sometimes bleed to death or can be left with horrifying health effects, such as infections, chronic pain, cysts, infertility and problems giving birth. According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), FGM is carried out for social and religious reasons and is an 'extreme form of discrimination against women'. FGM is estimated to lead to an extra one or two baby deaths per 100 deliveries worldwide. Women with FGM also have increased risk of stillbirth, infants that need resuscitation and low birth weight babies. Advertisement

Giving evidence, the defendant told jurors he loved all his children equally.

He said: 'I have never used any implement on any of my children. I have never used my hand to hit them.'

The jury deliberated for more than six hours to find the defendant not guilty of all the charges against him.Advertisement

If you ever wonder how popular glass-bottomed bridges are in China, take a look at these pictures.

A recently opened walkway has welcomed as many as 20,000 tourists a day who hope to enjoy thrilling scenery at 755 feet high.

A set of pictures taken on March 20 show the popular tourist attraction situated in Hebei Province was so busy that one could barely see the sheer drop below.

Not for the faint hearted: The world's longest glass-bottomed bridge is loaded with tourists who've come to enjoy the view

Traffic jam at 755 feet high: The 1,601ft long walkway in Hebei, China, is so busy one could barely see the sheer drop below

Spectacular: The bridge, weighing 70 tonnes, is suspended between to cliff faces and paved with 1,077 glass panels

The 1,601-foot-long bridge in the Hongyagu Scenic Area opened to the public in December.

It is the longest glass bridge in the world and is designed to 'sway a little' when tourists walk on it, according to precious reports on Chinese state media.

A spokesperson of the scenic area told MailOnline that bridge is 'very safe', adding that more and more people are visiting the attraction now that the weather is getting warm.

The spokesperson said the bridge could support a maximum of 1,000 people.

However, to ensure safety the management would only allow 600 tourists to stand on it at any one time.

Don't look down! The 1,601-foot-long glass-bottomed bridge opened on December 24 in the Hongyagu Scenic Area in China

Daredevils: Tourists jump on the transparent suspension bridge which has been designed to sway 755 feet above the ground

On the day the pictures were taken, between 7,000 and 8,000 people crossed the bridge, according to the spokesperson. During the Lunar Chinese New Year last month, up to 20,000 people flocked to the attraction a day.

The transparent footpath is 191 feet longer than the previous record holder, which is also in China.

The 6.5-foot-wide walkway hangs 755 feet above the ground between two cliffs, roughly the height of a 66-storey building.

Record-breaking: The spectacular footpath is the longest glass bridge in the world, breaking the previous record by 191 feet

Smile, you're on camera: Tourists pose for photos on the see-through walkway suspended over a beautiful canyon

The spectacular tourist attraction is paved with 1,077 glass panels, reported People's Daily Online, citing China Daily. Each of the panels is 1.5 inches thick and the whole bridge weighs 70 tonnes.

The most thrilling feature of the bridge could be its 'swaying sensation'.

Hebei Bailu Group, the company that built the bridge, told local reporters that they hoped the swinging motion could entertain the visitors as they take in the breath-taking scenery on the vertigo-inducing path.

Previously, the world's longest glass bridge measured 1,410 feet long and is situated in the Zhangjiajie Grand Canyon in Hunan Province, southern China.

After its grand opening in August, 2016, the glass-bottomed bridge was forced to close just 13 days after because of an overwhelming number of tourists. Apparently, thousands of people had flocked to stand on the 984-foot-high structure every day, causing safety concerns.

Previously, the world's longest glass bridge (pictured) measured 1,410ft long and is situated in the Zhangjiajie, ChinaSpyros Ntounis, 35, received a 20-month jail sentence suspended for 18 months at Kingston Crown Court for attempting to groom a 14-year-old passenger

An Uber driver who told a 14-year-old passenger she looked hot and had nice lips has been spared jail.

Spyros Ntounis, 35, slowed his car down to 5mph so he could have more time with the teenage passenger after she used the app to book a journey home from a night out at a friends home.

After her boyfriend helped her into the cab, Ntounis asked who he was and how old he was.

Allister Walker, prosecuting, said the driver told the girl she looked hot and had nice lips while driving her from Barnes to Kingston-upon-Thames in southwest London.

Ntounis then gave the girl some chewing gum, before giving her his mobile number after she told him she did not have an Uber app.

Towards the end of the journey, last April, he slowed the vehicle down and when she asked why he was doing so, he said it was he could spend more time with her.

The next morning Ntounis started sending WhatsApp messages to the schoolgirl asking if she was okay and offered to give her lessons in anything she wanted.

Ntounis then sent her further messages asking when they could next meet up, before questioning whether he had passed the age test, jurors at Kingston Crown Court heard.

The teenager showed her parents, who urged her to block him on WhatsAapp and contact the police.

The driver had faced three complaints from previous female passengers.

A woman contacted Uber after Ntounis told her he felt horny on October 8, 2016.

Another complaint was lodged in November 2016 after Ntounis started talking to a passenger about inappropriate things.

He also stared at her for long periods and slowed down during the journey.

The third complaint was made on April 21, just hours before Ntounis targeted the 14-year-old girl.

The passenger said Ntounis asked her if he could satisfy her needs.

Ntounis private hire licence was suspended as a result of the allegations.

He was convicted of attempting to meet a girl under 16 years of age following grooming after a trial at Kingston Crown Court last month.

The court was told the drivers face has been plastered over 17 Greek television stations and newspapers following his conviction.

Ntounis, pictured, was also ordered to take part in a 60-day sexual rehabilitation programme and was made subject to a sexual harm prevention order by the judge until further notice

Judge Timothy Lamb QC told him: You stand before this court having been convicted by a jury of what is without any doubt an extremely serious offence..

It is said the pre-sentence report makes depressing reading and so it does.. Normally, one would expect the defendant between the trial and the conviction to show some remorse.

What I get from the report is you have clearly lack insight to how unlawful and unacceptable your actions were.

Normally, you would be sentenced for two years but in principle you would serve one and be realised.

The defence counsel have made very good points. What I am imposing is a sentence of 20 months suspended for 18 months. This means you will have a sentence of 20 months hanging over your head.

The victims mother told the court before Ntounis was sentenced: This has hung over her. She had her mock GCSEs at the time of the trial which did not go ahead because Mr Ntounis was not in the country.

It has been a stress on her and she would like to get on with her life.

Ntounis has one precious conviction of dishonesty from October 2014, for which he was handed a 12 month suspended sentence for 24 months.

Ntounis, from West Ealing, denied but was convicted of attempting to meet a girl under 16 years of age following grooming.

He was given a 20 months jail sentence suspended for 18 months and placed on the sex offenders register for ten years.

Ntounis was ordered to take part in a 60 day sexual rehabilitation programme and a sexual harm prevention order was made by the judge until further notice.

An Uber spokesman said: 'This was a shocking incident and we welcome the conviction of this driver. Every driver who uses Uber in the UK has been licensed for private hire by a local authority, which includes going through an enhanced background check. Any previous offences would appear in those background checks as part of the licensing process and are only shown to the licensing authority.

'Every trip on our app is tracked by GPS and we have supported the police in helping to bring this licensed driver to justice. We recognise we need to go further to enhance safety, which is why we now pass directly to the Metropolitan Police information about any serious incident reported to us.'

A TfL spokesman said as soon as they were made aware of the allegation against Ntounis, they suspended his licence.

However, the former Uber driver failed to tell regulators about his earlier conviction in October 2014 for dishonesty.

'Had we been made aware of this, then it would have affected the decision to issue a licence. His application would have been refused.'This is the hilarious moment a German shepherd cleverly unlocks a cage to rescue his friend before mounting the other dog.

The clip, filmed in China, shows the dog desperately opening the latch on the cage while seemingly trying to rescue its trapped friend.

But in a surprising twist, the Germans shepherd instead begins to mount his mate vigorously.

The video has more than five million views and was filmed by the dog's owner who can be heard excitedly calling over his friend to watch.

The man films the desperate German shepherd trying to get into the cage, before walking over and recording the moment that the dog mounts his mate.

The video has reportedly made headlines in China and shows the desperate ingenuity of the German shepherd.

The hilarious video shows the moment a German shepherd mounts his mate while its excited owner watches on proudly

At the start, the dog gnaws at the lock, showing incredible persistence until he manages to turn it over.

He can be heard barking in excitement as it opens, before bursting through the cage door.

His seeming proud owner repeatedly says 'watch this, watch this'.

They look on as the German shepherd desperately mount his mate.

At the start of the clip, the dog can be seen cleverly and frantically opening the lock of the cage that his mate is trapped in

The owner says at the end of the video: 'This tramp is smart.'

The video was unsurprsingly a hit on social media.

User 'Simazixiaoxiao' commented: 'The things men do for love.'

While 'Henburongyibeidadong' added: 'The man watching on like a proud father.'Newly released surveillance video shows Vegas shoot Stephen Paddock's eerily mundane steps in the week before he killed 58 people

Chilling surveillance video shows Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock's movements at the Mandalay Bay over the course of a week, in which he brings 21 suitcases to his room, carrying the arsenal for his attack.

What makes his movements so disturbing is he is completely unassuming, going about his business, gambling, eating alone and getting snacks at the gift shop, in the video obtained by the New York Times.

Paddock, 64, is also seen frequently tipping the bellhops who are helping him with the luggage that he brings in over the course of several trips. They are completely unaware of the stockpile inside the bags they are assisting him with.

He also tips valets who assist him in getting his car for his trips into and out of the hotel.

Sometimes he brings luggage out of the hotel with him as well.

He seems polite and unhurried during the course of his stay. In the video it appears that this trip is simply a solo vacation for the 6'4 VIP gambler.

As he moves about the hotel, he interacts seemingly exclusively with the Mandalay Bay staff. Here Paddock appears to be joking with a bellhop who has helped him with his luggage, as he brings in 21 suitcases over the week filled with his arsenal to carry out his attack

During his stay he has a big win for $1,000 on the high stakes slot machines- he is pictured interacting with the casino staff

As Paddock moves about the resort, he seemingly doesn't interact directly with other guests, although glances are exchanged

During the course of his stay he is seen bringing in 21 pieces of luggage plus a laptop bag and a white box

Trip after trip, Paddock stockpiles his room with his arsenal, with bellhops and valets assisting

During the trips- he requests not to be separated from his luggage, with MGM Resorts says is a normal request

Two people walk right past Paddock, carrying inflatable inner-tubes for a relaxing day at the pool

At one point in the video he is seen smiling at a woman walking nearby his high stakes slot perch.

Paddock leaves the Mandalay Bay several times in the video. Cell phone records obtained by the Times indicate that his trips include returning to his home in Mesquite.

During his trip to Mesquite on Wednesday, he first stops at the Ogden Hotel six miles away from Mandalay Bay before heading home.

Mesquite is about 90 mibnute drive from the casino.

He stays over night at his home and on Thursday he heads to a gun shop where he buys a 308 bolt action rifle, and heads to a nearby gun range, before heading back to the Mandalay Bay.

He uses the valet to bring up a white container and three other suitcases to his room.

Paddock smiles as he watches a bellhop push his luggage filled with only a smattering of his deadly arsenal

As the bellhops helps him carry more arsenal to his room, we get a clear picture of his face and expression

During his stay, Paddock appears to keep to himself with the exception of the Mandalay Bay staff

He is seen at one of the customer assistance counters inside the resort, lurching forward

Here, Paddock speaks with the VIP check in host on September 25- the day he checked in

He gambles throughout his week long stay, and interacts with the casino floor staff

Paddock appears alone in the surveillance video, riding elevators and gambling solo

He rents the adjoining room next to his under his girlfriend's name.

Friday, Paddock tells room service to leave his room service carts where he later sets up surveillance cameras.

During the early morning hours of Saturday he makes another brief trip to Mesquite and returns with more luggage.

After noon on Saturday he places Do Not Disturb signs on the doors.

He makes one more final trip to Mesquite, returning around 3am and gambles in the high limits slot area, and returns to his room at 7:37am.

It is now October 1, and in 10 hours he will start his rampage on the Route 91 Harvest Festival, shortly after the headliner Jason Aldean takes the stage.

He stays in his room, and locks and unlocks the doors to both rooms repeatedly.

At 9:36pm he deadbolts the door to his room, four minutes later, Aldean comes on.

Paddock opened fire on the crowd at 10:05pm, and unleashed a barrage of bullets on concert goers that lasted approximately 10 minutes.

Perched in his 32 floor room, using it as a sniper's nest, Paddock killed 58 people, before he shot himself dead.

Inside the room were 23 guns, some with scopes, multiple magazines, and a camera system that was in part trained on the hallway.

The video seemingly offers no further clues as to Paddock's motive for carrying out the largest mass shooting in modern American history.

Paddock pictured dead of a self inflicted gunshot would to the head in his room at the Mandalay Bay hotel on the 32 floor

Bullet casings, broken glass and a hammer are scattered around the windows of the room from where Paddock opened fire on the crowd at the country music festival

In the week leading up to the carnage Paddock played high stakes slot machines, and ambled about the Mandalay Bay as a VIP gambler seemingly on a solo vacation

Two people take cover at the Route 91 Harvest country music festival after apparent gun fire was heard on October 1

Police cordon off the crime scene area where Paddock unleashed a barrage of bullets

MGM Resorts released a statement to FOX5 Vegas regarding releasing the footage:

'In the interest of providing greater context around Stephen Paddock's actions in the days leading up to October 1, MGM Resorts has released these security videos and images.'

'As the security footage demonstrates, Stephen Paddock gave no indication of what he planned to do and his interactions with staff and overall behavior were all normal.'

'MGM and Mandalay Bay could not reasonably foresee that a long-time guest with no known history of threats or violence and behaving in a manner that appeared outwardly normal, would carry out such an inexplicably evil, violent and deadly act.'

Our focus continues to be on supporting victims and their families, our guests and employees, and cooperating with law enforcement with their ongoing investigation.'The UK could lose one of surrealist artist Salvador Dali's white lobster telephones unless a buyer meets the 850,000 price tag.

A temporary export bar has been put on the artwork by Arts Minister Michael Ellis to give buyers a chance to keep the piece of art in the country.

Lobster Telephone (White Aphrodisiac) was created by Salvador Dali and commissioned by Edward James.

It is one of eleven lobster telephones commissioned in 1938 by James, Dali's patron and an English poet known for his promotion of the surrealist movement.

One of surrealist artist Salvador Dali's white lobster telephones could leave the UK unless a buyer is found to pay the 850,000 price tag

Dali and James were sat eating lobsters in 1936 when one of the discarded shells landed on a telephone and inspiration struck.

Each of the telephones, six of which were hand-painted white and five painted red, is slightly different and therefore unique.

James, a passionate supporter of surrealism, owned a private collection of the work, including both versions of the lobster telephone, at Monkton, his country house in West Sussex.

Dali created six off-white lobster telephones as well as five red ones (pictured)

Today most of the white versions are in museums abroad, including in public collections in Rotterdam, Florida, Johannesburg, Minneapolis and Lisbon.

Mr Ellis said: 'Salvador Dali was one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. This iconic work was created in the UK, and I want it to remain here.

'It is important that we keep world-class art in this country and I hope a buyer can be found to save it for the nation.'

A recommendation by the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art and Objects of Cultural Interest (RCEWA) to issue a temportary export bar was administered by The Arts Council.

Salvador Dali was a surrealist artist who created a collection of eleven lobsters, six off-white and five colour

RCEWA member Richard Calvocoressi said the importance of the piece could not be overestimated.

He said: 'With its suggestion of both eroticism and menace, pleasure and pain, Lobster Telephone (White Aphrodisiac) is a classic surrealist conceit, recalling the 'trap' sculptures of Giacometti's surrealist phase.

'It also anticipates by half a century the confrontational but also playful sculptures made of manufactured and natural found objects by artists such as Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst.'

A decision on issuing an export licence has been deferred until June 21, with the possibility of extending the deadline until September 21 if a serious intention is made to buy the artwork at the recommended price of 853,047 (plus VAT of 29,000).Nicanor Ochisor, 65, killed himself on Friday after working as a cab driver for 29 years

A man who worked as a yellow cab driver for 29 years has committed suicide after his declining business drove him to despair - and he blames his death on hail-ride applications like Uber and Lyft.

Nicanor Ochisor, 65, hung himself in the garage of his home in Maspeth, Queens.

His body was discovered by his adult son Friday, according to the NY Post.

Ochisor's death is the fourth cab driver death associated with dwindling business.

His passing, however, did not come as a shock for some, who say he had long-talked about suicide to his friends.

The Romanian immigrant felt overwhelmed with the waning taxi business and the plummet in value of the taxi medallion he owned.

'He could no longer bear the strain of the impending loss of everything he had worked for in his life in America,' the Taxi Medallion Owner and Driver Association said in a statement according to NY Daily News.

His friend and fellow driver Nino Hervias, 59, said Oschisor had talked to him about killing himself.

'He said, "Im old, Im tired, and Im not going to make it,"' Hervias said to the Post.

'He talked to me about it [suicide] and said thats the way hes going to end. I told him to wait and it will get better,' another friend and medallion owner Dan Nitescu, 65, said.

He was discovered by his adult son. His abandoned taxi car is pictured above in his driveway in Maspeth, Queens

Oschisor's death is the fourth New York cab driver death in the past couple of months. Douglas Schifter, left, killed himself last month and Danilo Castillo, right, took his own life in December

Ochisor received his medallion in 1989, according to the Taxi and Limousine Commission and operated his business with his wife. He took night shifts and she drove during the day.

The couple worked together for over two decades.

'They were working like that for about 25 years to raise family and save for college,' a grieving friend said.

Although the taxi career was never easy, his family had confidence in the value of their taxi medallion, which he planned to lease for $3,000 to finance his retirement.

$3,000 was a good leasing price five years ago.

According to Nitescu, today a leasing price would sit around $1,400.

The value of taxi medallions used to sit at $1million but has declined to $180,000 in just five years.

'He was only making $200 a day working 10 to 12 hours. He was devastated,' Hervias said.

'It used to be that you knew that even if you werent making it on a day-to-day basis, the equity in your medallion was going up,' Hervias added.

'Now we have no backup. The psychological effect is terrible,' he said.

The couple also used the medallion as collateral on their home mortgage. The medallion covered what they owed to the bank as well.

Many taxi drivers say hail-ride applications are to blame.

He was the first medallion owner to end his life of the waning taxi business, according to Richard Lipsky of the Taxi Medallion Owners and Drivers Association.

In light of Ochisor's death the NY Taxi Worker's Alliance organized a rally for March 28

Schifter, pictured above with a black cab, took to Facebook to reveal his suicide would be his manner of public protest against politicians and app-ride services

He took to Facebook saying 'I have been financially ruined because three politicians destroyed my industry and livelihood and Corporate NY stole my services at rates far below fair levels'

On February 5 livery driver Douglas Schifter shot himself in the head outside of New York City Hall.

Beforehand he vented on Facebook that politician and ride-sharing services ruined his financial life.

'I have been financially ruined because three politicians destroyed my industry and livelihood and Corporate NY stole my services at rates far below fair levels,' Schifter wrote in a lengthy post.

Taxi driver Danilo Castillo took his own life on December 20 by leaping out of his Manhattan apartment window.

He left a suicide note where he blamed the taxi industry.

A fourth driver killed himself in February but his name was not released.

The NY Taxi Workers Alliance took to Facebook to organize a rally on Wednesday March 28 to remember the lives of the lost drivers as well as protest against businesses stealing their rides.

'We are calling on the Mayor and on the City Council to hold an emergency session to intervene in this growing crisis,' The NY Taxi Worker's Alliance wrote on Facebook.

'We must stop treating the devastation of people's lives as inevitable. Our city has the power to act. And we demand that they act now by capping the number of vehicles on our streets and by making the regulated yellow and green cab fare the minimum fare for all for-hire vehicles,' the post added.

'We cannot allow Uber to continue to destroy lives for a business model that hasn't even been proven sustainable. We must come together now and demand protections for ALL drivers and for rational regulations that level the playing field,' the post said.

Bronx Councilman Reuben Diaz Sr. has proposed a bill that seeks to level the taxi industry play field by required app based companies like Uber and Lyft the same fees that taxi drivers pay.A Canadian mother was forced to stop breastfeeding her daughter during a 'parent and tot' class at a gym on Sunday.

Nursing mom, Monica Makey, took her daughter, Vayda, nearly two, to her first session at Dynamo Gymnastics in Hespeler, Ontario, where the toddler said she wanted to be fed.

Makey stopped participating in the activity and quietly sat down near the mats to nurse her daughter.

That's when a supervisor walked toward the two and ordered Makey to stop feeding due to the gym's strict food and drink rules. The supervisor claimed the reasoning was because 'breast milk could stain the mats'.

Nursing mom, Monica Makey, (pictured right) took her daughter, Vayda, (left) almost two, to her first session at Dynamo Gymnastics in Hespeler, Ontario, where the toddler asked to be fed

A supervisor told Makey she was not allowed to breastfeed and claimed the reasoning was because 'breast milk could stain the mats'

However when the mother asked to move to another area in the gym, she was again told she could not breastfeed

Makey then requested she and her baby relocate to another area inside the gym, where visitors kept their water bottles and belongings. The supervisor again refused.

Later on, Makey took the matter up with the owner, stating her freedoms under the Ontario Human Rights Code, which says mothers have the 'right to breastfeed a child in a public area' and should not be asked to 'cover up' or 'move to a more 'discreet area'.

The Cambridge woman took to her Facebook page following the incident to share details as way to highlight mothers' rights as well as help others understand that breastfeeding is vital.

'I am genuinely happy to see that the gym is taking measures to ensure they are now following the OHRC laws surrounding breastfeeding and that this doesnt happen to another mother in the future,' Makey wrote to Facebook later Sunday.

The Cambridge woman took to her Facebook page following to share a message

Dynamo Gymnastics also posted a message to their social media page, and apologized to Makey

Gym co-owner Lisa Rutledge (pictured) told CTV News Canada the incident was 'unfortunate' and the supervisor was 'misinformed' about their policy

Dynamo also took to their Facebook page to issue a public apology over the matter.

'Ive accepted their apology... my focus is on the fact that people are STILL uneducated about breastfeeding laws,' Makey's post read in part.

'I also want to highlight the importance of and normalizing breastfeeding a toddler and educating others on the nursing relationship. Its more than just food or drink, its comfort, love and security.'

Makey received a refund for the gymnastics session. Gym co-owner, Lisa Rutledge, told CTV News Canada the incident was 'unfortunate' and the supervisor was 'misinformed' about their policy.

Rutledge furthermore said that a breastfeeding specialist will be visiting Dynamo to re-train staff members.

'Regardless of the situation and anybody's views, it's a mothers complete right under the Human Rights Code to breastfed wherever and whenever she likes,' Rutledge added.

Toddler Vayda, almost two, was at her first session at Dynamo Gymnastics in Hespeler, Ontario at the timeA Texas TV station employee has been fired after a crude audio recording was played in the middle of a live newscast.

Viewers of KRIS were in for a shocking surprise on Monday when a report on a new harbor bridge was interrupted by the vulgar clip.

The screen suddenly went to black and a man could be heard uttering the words 'F**k it, lick it, smell it' on the 9pm news report.

Viewers of local Texas station KRIS were in for a surprise on Monday when a live newscast was interrupted by a vulgar clip where someone is heard saying 'F**k it, lick it, smell it'

KRIS, a local station in Corpus Christi, has since revealed that the voice belonged to a reporter at the station.

'We do apologize for that, we just had some incident there,' evening anchor Stephania Jimenez told viewers after the audio aired.

KRIS Communications News Director Paul Alexander also apologized to viewers for the error.

Alexander said the station 'immediately began an investigation' into the audio and how it was able to play on-air.

The vulgar audio came during a news report about a new harbor bridge being built in the city

'We do apologize for that, we just had some incident there,' evening anchor Stephania Jimenez told viewers after the audio aired

'We learned that a series of technical and human errors lead to the mistake,' he said.

'We have taken swift and appropriate action with the employees who were involved in the broadcast in accordance with our company policies.'

Alexander said one employee was fired and another was suspended. There were also unspecified 'reprimands'.

'We have also modified our editing workflow and procedures to ensure that mistakes like this cannot happen again,' he added.

The names of the employees who were punished have not been released.

One viewer who caught the newscast posted it on Facebook, where it has since been viewed more than 32,000 times.Queen Elizabeth II today attended a ceremony at which the Duke of York officially became Colonel of the Grenadier Guards.

Prince Andrew took over from the Duke of Edinburgh and his appointment at Windsor Castle, Berkshire, was marked by a parade.

The monarch was pictured inspecting the red-coated regiment of the British Army in the landmark's St George's Hall.

Queen Elizabeth II met with and inspected the red-coated Grenadier Guards today as the Duke of York became the unit's colonel

The queen gave her royal approval to the nomination in December last year after her husband gave up the title he'd held since 1975.

Prince Andrew joined the Royal Navy in 1979, passing out of Britannia Royal Naval College in Dartmouth, Devon, the following year.

The monarch greets a guard wearing the iconic bearskin cap, which honours the Battle of Waterloo victory

He first joined on short-service commission as a seaman officer and sub-specialising as a pilot.

After his time at the college, the prince completed fixed-wing and helicopter flight training at RAF Leeming in North Yorkshire.

He also attended the Royal Naval Air Station Culdrose and was presented with his Wings and the best pilot award by Prince Phillip.

King Charles II formed the Grenadier Guards at Flanders in 1656, making them his 'Royal Regiment of Foot Guards'.

The Duke of York is pictured speaking to the Grenadier Guards after he was appointed colonel of the outfit

The unit is now officially called The First or Grenadier Regiment of Foot Guards to honour their 1815 victory over the French Imperial Guard at the Battle of Waterloo.

Their iconic bearskin caps - which are worn for ceremonial duty - are also sported to recognise that victory.

Guards have won 78 Battle Honours, 14 Victoria Crosses and a George Cross after serving with distinction in campaigns including the Napoleonic, Crimean, Boer, First and Second World Wars.

As well as the soft power they bring to the world stage, Grenadier Guards were deployed for ground combat in Afghanistan.Renowned jockey Jose Flores, 56, was pronounced dead at the Aria Frankford Torresdale Hospital in Philadelphia on Thursday at 12.42pm after a racing accident

A renowned jockey has died just days after suffering horrific injuries in a racing accident.

Jose Flores was pronounced dead at the Aria Frankford Torresdale Hospital in Philadelphia on Thursday at 12.42pm.

The 56-year-old had been on life support for three days after suffering major cranial damage and spinal injuries in the accident earlier this week.

Flores, was among the best jockeys in Pennsylvania history, was kept alive until his parents could arrive from Florida.

The jockey was racing on Monday at Parx Racing, a track in the Philadelphia suburb of Bensalem, when his horse Love Rules went down and he was thrown off.

He hit the ground headfirst and the initial shock is believed to have caused the brain damage.

Flores won 4,650 races in a career that spanned more than three decades.

He was the top career earner at Parx Racing, which was formerly known as Philadelphia Park.

The jockey was racing on Monday at Parx Racing, a track in the Philadelphia suburb of Bensalem, when his horse Love Rules went down and he was thrown off

The Equibase thoroughbred database said Flores's mounts earned $64 million in nearly 29,000 career starts.

'It's unbelievable, just sickening,' trainer Scott Lake, who has known Flores for close to 30 years, told Philly.com.

'He was just tremendous, a nice guy, always a professional.'

Parx Racing called Flores an 'outstanding jockey' and expressed condolences to his family.

The US Jockeys' Guild said Flores was the 157th rider to die from race-related injuries since they began keeping statistics in 1940.Jared Fogle has been heard telling a prison phone buddy about his sexual fetishes which include 'big boobs and butt play'.

The 40-year-old former Subway pitchman pedophile was on the phone with a woman who has been corresponding with him while he is imprisoned at the Federal Correctional Institution in Englewood, Colorado.

Fogle is serving a 15 year sentence for crimes involving his sex with underage girls, some of which he paid for.

He was jailed in 2015 following an FBI investigation which stunned the world including his unsuspecting wife Katie McLaughlin and their children.

In the phone call, which was obtained by Radar Online on Thursday, Fogle is heard telling the woman, who was not named, how he wanted her to send him photographs of herself.

Scroll down for audio

Jared Fogle, the pedophile and former Subway spokesman, was caught on tape telling someone on the phone about his sexual preferences. Fogle, 40, is seen above in November 2015, when he was jailed after pleading guilty to child porn offences and having sex with underage girls

'You can't show boobs or p***y or anything like that but other than that it's pretty much, whatever.

'The mail room can always reject stuff if they want to. It's just sort of hit or miss,' he said.

The pair then moved on to talk about what he 'likes'.

'I like everything, I mean I don't know. I like big boobs. Yeah I like that. I like, I don't like super skinny or anything like that,' he said.

The pair then discussed the woman's friend who she said she would pose for pictures with.

When she said that friend did not enjoy 'butt play', Fogle was shocked and told how much he enjoyed it.

'She needs to, she needs to get into that. Holy s**t. Itd be real nice. SoDid she do it?

'Was she, was she, uh, was she masturbating today?' he said.

Fogle has been trying to get out of prison since he was put in custody 26 months ago.

He claims he was illegally prosecuted for traveling across state lines to pay for sex with underage girls.

Fogle famously lost 200lbs by eating Subway sandwiches. He went on to become its pitchman

Fogle is pictured with his ex-wife Katie McLaughlin. She has since explained that he lived a double life while on the road promoting Subway where he had sex with underage girls without her knowledge. She filed for divorce after his 2015 arrest

Fogle is serving s 15 year sentence at the Englewood Federal Prison in Colorado

He also claims that the judge dealing with his case is biased because he has two daughters.

Fogel pleaded guilty to child pornography charges and having sex with minors in 2015.

He is now trying to take back the plea.

Fogle became a recognizable face and multi-millionaire through his work promoting the sandwich chain which helped him shed 200lbs by only eating its sandwiches.

He served as a spokesman for them for 15 years and traveled the country to give motivational speeches and promote the brand.

It was during some of those trips, his former wife claims, that he solicited sex from underage girls.Two 14-year-old boys have been jailed for murdering a teenager after a 'simmering dispute' between them.

The youngsters and a third boy aged 15, who cannot be named for legal reasons, were involved in a fight with Saif Abdul Majid, who was 18, in Neasden Lane, Neasden, north-west London, on October 5.

That incident left him with a facial injury, Metropolitan Police said.

Two 14-year-old boys have been jailed for murdering Saif Abdul Majid (pictured), 18, after a 'simmering dispute' between them. He was stabbed several times and suffered a fatal neck injury at Clifford Court, Neasden, north-west London, the Old Bailey heard

The following day, Saif went back to the scene of the fight at around 3.40pm - and the three boys were also there.

Police said there was a brief discussion before all four teenagers walked to Clifford Court where Saif was 'set upon'.

He was stabbed several times and suffered a fatal neck injury, the Old Bailey heard.

The 14-year-olds fled, 'leaving Saif dying on the pavement' as police and paramedics were called to the scene.

A post-mortem examination gave the cause of death as a stab injury to the neck, while Saif had also suffered a fractured nose 'most likely caused from the assault the previous day to the murder'.

Three suspects, who were identified from witness accounts and CCTV, were subsequently arrested and charged with murder.

Saif was stabbed several times and suffered a fatal neck injury on October 5. The day before, he'd had a fight in Neasden Lane (file picture) with the two boys and a third, aged 15, who cannot be named for legal reasons

A five-week trial took place at the Old Bailey and the two 14-year-olds were found guilty of murder on Friday, March 14.

Jurors failed to return a verdict on the 15-year-old defendant.

The two young killers were sentenced on Wednesday - one of them to 14 years' imprisonment and the other to 14-and-a-half.

Following the sentencing, Detective Inspector Justin Howick said: 'The level of violence directed at Saif on that fateful day was shocking.

'This is another sorry example of the tragic outcomes that can occur when individuals arm themselves on the streets.

'Two young men will now spend a significant amount of time behind bars as a result of their actions, while Saif's family will be left to mourn his needless death.'Police in Maine were called on to find a peeping Tom who had run off, but their prime suspect was no chicken - in fact, he was a turkey.

The suspect may have been small but he was powerful, crashing through a bedroom window of the home in Bangor.

Homeowner Melissa Borden said her daughter was at the house by herself when she heard the shattering glass, she told Bangor Daily News.

Melissa Borden said her daughter was home by herself when she heard the shattering glass and saw that a turkey had broken in through the window of their Bangor, Maine home

Her daughter was shocked to find the turkey standing on the bed, calmly admiring itself in a mirror that was hanging on the wall.

Borden's daughter took pictures of the turkey, who had also managed to crash through the screen behind the window as well.

The floor was covered with shards of broken glass as well as items that had been on the girl's nightstand below the double-paned window.

Borden said she was shocked that the turkey, who fled the house, was unharmed despite crashing through the glass.

The Kennebunk Police Department posted on Facebook to ask the public for help in catching the wild turkey, and decided to have some fun with it.

Borden's daughter took pictures of the turkey, who was calmly staring at himself in the mirror hanging above the bed

The Kennebunk Police Department posted on Facebook to ask the public for help in catching the wild turkey, and decided to have some fun with an 'artistic rendering' of the suspect

Along with the two photos of the turkey in the girl's bedroom, they posted a generic cartoon turkey.

'This morning, officers responded to a suspicious incident in town. This peeping "Tom" took it one step further and forcibly entered the house,' the Facebook post reads.

'We have attached an artist rendering of the suspect based on pictures from the crime scene. Please be on the lookout for this "Tom"'.

Police have since captured the turkey and returned it to the wild.Toys 'R' Us Charles Lazarus passed away on Thursday at 94, the company said

Toys 'R' Us founder Charles Lazarus has passed away - the same day the company he built was scheduled to begin its liquidation sales after going bankrupt.

Lazarus' died at 94 years old on Thursday, the struggling company announced, as hopeful shoppers all around the country took to social media to express disappointment over the postponement of the liquidation sale.

The retailer had announced it would begin its going-out-of-business sale on Thursday, but customers who showed up looking for good deals instead found signs informing them the sale was postponed 'due to circumstances beyond our control.'

It's unclear if those circumstances are related to Lazarus' passing.

A company spokesperson told CNNMoney that there had been a delay and the sale will now begin on Friday.

The company tweeted on Thursday: 'There have been many sad moments for Toys "R" Us in recent weeks, and none more heartbreaking than today's news about the passing of our beloved founder, Charles Lazarus. Our thoughts and prayers are with Charles' family and loved ones. '

Lazarus founded Toys 'R' Us in 1948 when he was 25. He served as CEO until 1994 but had no ownership over the company at the time of his death

The company announced last week it was headed toward shuttering or selling all 735 of its U.S. stores, jeopardizing the jobs of some 30,000 employees

The company announced last week it was headed toward shuttering or selling all 735 of its U.S. stores, jeopardizing the jobs of some 30,000 employees while spelling the end for a chain known to generations of children and parents for its sprawling stores and Geoffrey the giraffe mascot.

The retailer has already started shuttering its business in the United Kingdom. That would leave it with stores in Canada, central Europe and Asia, where it could find buyers for those assets.

It is an unfortunate ending for an iconic business that saw plenty of success during its 70-year-run.

Inspired by his World War II friends who said they had plans of starting a family when they returned home, Lazarus was 25-years-old when he founded the beloved toy company in 1948.

Lazarus modeled his business after the self-service supermarkets that were becoming popular in the 1950s, stacking merchandise high to give shoppers the feeling it had an infinite number of toys. The stores created a magical feeling for children roaming aisles filled with Barbies, bikes and other toys laid out in front of them.

The chain has its roots in Children's Bargain Town, the baby furniture store that Lazarus opened in his hometown of Washington, D.C., after returning from World War II. He began selling toys after a couple of years when customers began asking for them, and he quickly concluded that, in the baby-boom years, toys were a more lucrative business than furniture.

He opened his first store dedicated to selling only toys in 1957, calling it Toys R Us with the 'R' spelled backward to give the impression that a child wrote it. Shopping carts stood ready for customers to grab and fill up themselves, supermarket-style.

In 1965, Geoffrey the giraffe became the company's mascot, appearing in his first TV commercial in 1973. By the 1980s and early 90s, Toys R Us dominated the toy-store business and its jingle, 'I'm a Toys R Us kid' became an anthem for children across the country.

Lazarus, who was born on October 4, 1923, was inducted into the Toy Industry Association's Hall of Fame in 1990.

Hopeful shoppers all around the country took to social media to express disappointment over the postponement of the liquidation sale

Toys 'R' Us had dominated the toy store business in the 1980s and early 1990s. Former president George H.W. Bush is pictured with Lazarus in 1992

In 1987, he earned more than $60 million and received the title of the number one highest paid executive in the nation, according to Forbes. In 2013, Lazarus made headlines after he sold his Manhattan duplex for $21 million.

He was worth an estimated $100million, according to Inquisitr. However, it's unknown how much money he received from the sell of Toys 'R' Us, so an exact figure isn't possible.

The Washington D.C. native served as CEO until 1994 and left the company 20 years ago. He no longer held any ownership over it at the time of his death.

He leaves behind two daughters - Ruth and Diane - from his first marriage, as well as his third wife, Joan Regenbogen, according to New York Magazine.

Veteran toy journalist Jim Silver said the only regrets Lazarus and Chief Executive Michael Goldstein had 'are the employees now losing their jobs, suppliers losing their best customer and the children who will miss ToysRUs.'

When the chain filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last fall, saddled with $5billion in debt that hurt its attempts to compete as shoppers moved to Amazon and huge chains like Walmart, it pledged to stay open.

But CEO David Brandon told employees last week that sales performance during the holiday season was 'devastating,' as nervous customers and vendors shied away.

Toys R Us was one of the first of the 'category killers'- a store totally devoted to one thing. Its scale gave it leverage with toy sellers and it disrupted general merchandise stores and mom-and-pop shops. Children sang along with commercials about 'the biggest toy store there is.'

But the company lost ground to discounters like Target and Walmart, and then to Amazon, as even nostalgic parents sought deals elsewhere.

GlobalData Retail estimates that nearly 14 per cent of toy sales were made online in 2016, more than double the level five years ago.North Dakota Rep Kevin Cramer's son has died at a Minnesota hospital after suffering from failing liver and kidneys.

The congressman had said his 35-year-old son, Isaac Cramer, was being evaluated by a 'transplant team'.

Spokesman Tim Rasmussen says he died early Thursday at the Mayo Clinic. He wouldn't confirm the cause of death.

'Kris and I are grateful we were both able to be with our son Isaac Cramer at the Mayo Clinic Methodist Hospital in Rochester this morning as he went to be with Jesus.

North Dakota Rep Kevin Cramer's (right) 35-year-old son, Isaac Cramer (left), has died at a Minnesota hospital after suffering from failing liver and kidneys

Spokesman Tim Rasmussen says Isaac (left) died early Thursday at the Mayo Clinic. He wouldn't confirm the cause of death. Rep Kevin Cramer has four other children with his wife, Kris. Their family also includes four grandchildren

Isaac Cramer (pictured in the hospital with his little brother Abel and nephew Beau) was hospitalized in intensive care in Bismarck last month with liver and kidney failure due to alcoholism

'Now Isaac feels no anxiety or urging for alcohol. He feels no pain and will never be depressed again,' Cramer wrote on Facebook announcing his son's death

'We were listening to @jeremycamp singing "You're Worthy of My Praise", holding hands, when Ike looked at me and took his last breath on Earth,'

'Now Isaac feels no anxiety or urging for alcohol. He feels no pain and will never be depressed again. Today is our youngest son Abel's 11th birthday. Ike introduced Abel to us on his 25th birthday over 10 years ago. Now Isaac and Abel share the same birthday. God is good!'

Isaac Cramer was hospitalized in intensive care in Bismarck last month with liver and kidney failure due to alcoholism, according to The Bismarck Tribune.

He was transferred to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota earlier this month. The couple hasn't publicly disclosed the cause of Isaac Cramer's illness, but the congressman said his son now 'feels no anxiety or urging for alcohol'.

His father has missed congressional votes to be with their family during his hospitalization.

Rep Kevin Cramer has four other children with his wife, Kris. Their family also includes four grandchildren.

Cramer launched his campaign for US Senate last month. He's hoping to unseat Democratic Sen Heidi Heitkamp, who offered her thoughts and prayers to Cramer's family

Isaac was transferred to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota earlier this month. The couple hasn't publicly disclosed the cause of Isaac Cramer's illness, but the congressman said his son now 'feels no anxiety or urging for alcohol'

'My heart goes out to @RepKevinCramer, Kris, and his entire family. No parent should have to bury a child,' Heitkamp tweeted Thursday afternoon

Senator John Hoeven also tweeted condolences

Cramer launched his campaign for US Senate last month. He's hoping to unseat Democratic Sen Heidi Heitkamp, who offered her thoughts and prayers to Cramer's family.

'My heart goes out to @RepKevinCramer, Kris, and his entire family. No parent should have to bury a child,' Heitkamp tweeted Thursday afternoon.

'The support of those throughout our state and the grace of God will help lift them up during this difficult time. My thoughts and prayers are with them,' Heitkamp added.

Senator John Hoeven also tweeted condolences.

'We are truly saddened to hear of the passing of @RepKevinCramer's son Isaac Cramer. Mikey and I extend our deepest condolences & sympathies to Kevin, his wife Kris & their entire family.'

'Our hearts are with Rep. Cramer, Kris and the rest of the Cramer family as they mourn the loss of their son Isaac. Please join Kathryn and I in keeping the family in your thoughts and prayers during this difficult time,' North Dakota Gov Doug Burgum tweeted.Prime Minister Theresa May has met with French president Emmanuel Macron and German chancellor Angela Merkel to update them on the Salisbury poisoning.

A spokesman for Number 10 said the trio met 'on the fringes' of the European Council in Brussels today.

The two leaders were told that scientists at Porton Down laboratories had identified the chemical used in the 'reckless' attack as part of the Russian-made Novichok group of nerve agents.

France and Germany then reaffirmed with Mrs May that there was 'no plausible explanation other than that the Russian state was responsible'.

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The two leaders were told by Mrs May that scientists at Porton Down laboratories had identified the chemical used in the 'reckless' attack as part of the Russian-made Novichok group of nerve agents

Theresa May chatted with French President Emmanuel Macron and Chancellor Merkel as she arrived at the EU summit where leaders are expected to rubber stamp the Brexit deal

She told her colleagues at the summit the attack on Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia (pictured) in the city of Salisbury showed the Russian menace 'doesn't respect borders'

Prime Minister Theresa May has met with French president Emmanuel Macron and German chancellor Angela Merkel to update them on the Salisbury poisoning

Theresa May also chatted with German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who she is pressing to take a tough stand on Russia in the wake of the Salisbury poison case

The spokesman added: 'The Prime Minister also outlined our knowledge that Russia has previously produced this agent; Russia's record of conducting state-sponsored assassinations; and our assessment that Russia views some defectors as legitimate targets for assassinations.'

They then agreed on the importance of sending a strong message to Russia over the attack.

They also discussed the Iran nuclear deal, reaffirming their commitment and agreeing to discuss it again in April.

Mrs May earlier warned EU leaders that Russia posed a threat to the whole bloc as she sought united backing against Moscow after the poisoning.

She told her colleagues at the summit the attack on Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in the city of Salisbury showed the Russian menace 'doesn't respect borders'.

Her warning came as a British police officer who was also contaminated in the March 4 attack was released from hospital.

A judge has given doctors the go-ahead to take blood samples from Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia for testing by the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons

Investigators in breathing apparatus were seen in Mr Skripal's back garden today

The military and anti-terror experts are scouring the property for traces of the nerve agent

While the US, France and Germany have swung behind London, saying they accept the UK assessment that the Russian state is the only plausible culprit, other EU countries keen to protect their Kremlin ties - notably Greece and Italy - want a softer line.

'It is clear that the Russian threat doesn't respect borders and indeed the incident in Salisbury was part of a pattern of Russian aggression against Europe and its near neighbours,' Mrs May told reporters as she arrived in Brussels.

She is expected to tell them over dinner that the threat from the east will continue 'for years to come', and long after Britain leaves the bloc in 2019.Christopher Barlow, 21, of Duxbury, Massachusetts, is also said to have installed a hidden camera in a bathroom at the EMS headquarters in Easton, Connecticut. He is pictured in an undated police mug shot

A volunteer with Emergency Medical Services has been accused of taking inappropriate photos of patients inside his ambulance alongside a string of other offences.

Christopher Barlow, 21, of Duxbury, Massachusetts, is also said to have installed a hidden camera in a bathroom at the EMS headquarters in Easton, Connecticut.

In addition, Barlow faces earlier charges of forging documents to pose as a Homeland Security agent, providing a false statement to obtain a long rifle and stealing two guns from an EMS colleague.

Police began investigating Barlow in the summer of 2017, when he was accused of amassing a collection of guns, ammunition, explosives and stolen medical equipment.

The defendant was released on bail on those charges on February 16 despite a prosecutor requesting he be held for dangerousness, reported CBS.

He remained on bail despite breaking a judge's order not to leave his family home.

Barlow was arrested on Wednesday and charged with two counts of voyeurism.

He will also answer to two counts of stealing a firearm, one count of providing a false statement and one count of illegal alteration of records.

Barlow is due in court on April 15 and his bail is set at $25,000,A daring animal rights activist lay in a pile of manure outside of a San Francisco Trader Joe's to protest the chains alleged egg farms conditions.

Cassie King, a student at UC Berkeley, worked with animal rights group Direct Action Everywhere for the stint that turned heads Wednesday morning.

The organization led an investigation that allegedly found chickens living in heinous conditions in wire cages covered in their own waste at a farm in Michigan, according to SFGate.

Cassie King, pictured above, lay on the ground and was covered in heaps of animal manure in a dramatic protest Wednesday morning against Trader Joe's egg farms

The protest with Direct Action Everywhere was the result of an investigation of a Michigan farm that sources Trader Joe's eggs and found allegedly horrid conditions where hens and eggs sat in their own waste

She woke a tank top and shorts and was covered from head to two with heaps of animal dung

The lie-out demonstration was used to raise awareness to the dire conditions.

King lay on the ground in a load of animal manure, typically used for fertilizer, wearing skin-baring clothing.

The manure was piled on top of her body, even her face.

The protest took place at the front door of the Trader Joe's located in San Francisco's SoMa neighborhood.

'The supposedly 'humane' eggs sold at Trader Joe's come from birds who lived their entire lives in piles of waste,' King said to SFGate.

The protest took place outside of a San Francisco Trader Joe's where protesters held signs and images of the alarming egg farm conditions they found

The protest drew crowds and to the scene that saw Cassie covered in animal waste surrounded with empty egg cartons splashed with red paint

Protesters piled on more and more animal manure on the UC Berkeley student throughout the day

While protesters used gloves to handle the dung, Cassie was covered completely, even exposing her bare skin to the animal waste

The Direct Action Everywhere members used pictured to explain their cause on the San Francisco streets

Her face was half smothered into the manure for the protest. She said : 'A lot of people are getting that message today'

Crowds gathered around the spectacle - and the strong smell - to learn about the cause

She added that the labels 'mislead consumers into paying for cruelty.'

She lay there for at least an hour for the protest that drew curious crowds.

'Cassie is currently lying down in a pile of real manure to demonstrate what happens to animals in the animal agriculture industry and to show solidarity with the animals that are forced to lay in these conditions for days without any food or water,' a speaker at the protest said in a live video posted to Facebook.

Crowds gathered with their phones to film the protest. Activists stood by with images of the hens on the farm to show their squalor conditions.

King said she was compelled to do lie-in in animal waste after learning about the investigation's findings.

'I could not imagine living like this and having someone call this is natural to live my life this way,' King said.

'Well I saw the conditions from the investigation that we see the other animals were living in and I want the public to realize thats a lie thats being sold to them and a lot of people are getting that message today, she added with a somber face close to tears.

The activists argued that the grocery chain labelled their eggs as all-natural, but the say that 'there's nothing natural about this' given the birds' living conditions.

Trader Joe's is yet to comment on the protest.Angel Crews, 27, pleaded guilty to attempted second-degree murder of her husband, Tyler Connelly outside a Tractor Supply Co in Madison Heights, Virginia last November.

A woman who claims her husband was cheating her pleaded guilty to trying to murder him by running him over with a minivan.

Angel Crews pleaded guilty in Amherst County Circuit Court to attempted second-degree murder of her husband, Tyler Connelly.

The 26-year-old now faces a maximum of 36 years in prison, and will be sentenced on May 9.

She struck and mowed down the 23-year-old with her minivan in a shopping center parking lot in Madison Heights, Virginia, on November 16.

It is not clear how much time she faces or when she will be charged.

The mother-of-three then waited inside her car, parked outside of the Tractor Supply Co, until a trooper arrived, according to The News & Advance.

Several people, including Crews' three young children, were in the van at the time, Deputy Commonwealth's Attorney Stephen Eubank said.

She struck and mowed down the 23-year-old with her minivan in a shopping center parking lot then waited inside her car until a trooper arrived

Several people, including Crews' three young children, were in the van at the time, Deputy Commonwealth's Attorney Stephen Eubank said

Connelly suffered multiple injuries and was taken to Lynchberg General Hospital and then airlifted to the hospital at the University of Virginia.

Eubank said Crews told witnesses at the scene that she hit her husband with the van because she believed he had cheated on her.

The family had a history of domestic violence and abuse, according to ABC 13. Since January 2017 emergency services deputies have been called to their house 50 times.

'It really just upset me, the fact that she would put her children in danger like that,' one of the kids' cousins ABC 13.

'This isn't the first time that she has attempted to hit him or run him over.'

The cousin explained that in 2016 Crews was charged with felony hit and run and malicious wounding after an incident that year in which Connelly was clipped, but not seriously injured.

She pleaded guilty at the time to misdemeanor hit and run.A Dallas airport worker was killed Wednesday morning after he was struck by a Skylink train.

An airport spokesman said 54-year-old Kenneth Wade, a maintenance worker, was struck by the train while on the guideway at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport in Texas. The incident happened around 1am on Wednesday.

Wade, of Hutchins, Texas, was taken to Baylor Scott & White Medical Center Grapevine for emergency surgery but died, NBC 5 reports.

Kenneth Wade, a maintenance worker at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, was killed on Wednesday

Officials said Wade, 54, was on the guidway when he was struck by a Skylink train. The Skylink trains connect all five terminals at the airport

'DFW Airport extends its deepest condolences to the family and colleagues of a Bombardier employee who died after he was struck by a Skylink train car,' airport spokesman David Magana said in a statement to the Dallas Morning News.

Bombardier is the company which built and maintains Skylink, free light rail trains that connects all five terminals at DFW Airport.

'We are deeply saddened by this accident,' Bombardier spokeswoman Maryanne Roberts said. 'Our thoughts are with Mr Wade's family and with our employees at the DFW site.'

The train system was taken out of service for two hours on Wednesday, according to the Dallas News.

Airport police said they were investigating the tragic incident. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration is also expected to conduct a review.A woman has been arrested for killing her pet chihuahua in an oven because she thought 'her ex-boyfriend was inside the dog', police say.

Noelle Moor, 28, from Warrenton, Oregon, faces first-degree animal abuse charges for killing her seven-year-old male dog.

Someone reported to the police that Moor put her dog in the oven and cooked him.

When police arrived to her residence on Tuesday, they found the body of the dog on the burner of the oven.

Noelle Moor, 28, was arrested after she allegedly cooked her dog alive in her oven because she 'believed her ex-boyfriend was inside him'

The woman from Warrenton, Oregon, has been charged with first-degree animal abuse after she killed her seven-year-old Chihuahua

'The smell of burnt hair and flesh was still in the air,' a probable cause affidavit read, The Oregonian reported.

Moor was detained at Columbia Memorial Hospital in Astoria, Oregon, by police.

She told them that she burned her dog because she believed her ex-boyfriend was inside him.

Moor was arrested on Tuesday and faced the courts on Wednesday where she was arraigned on one count of animal abuse.

The 28-year-old has been reportedly seeing doctors about mental health issues for the past month, according to The Daily Astorian newspaper.

One woman commented on the article claiming she was Moor's sister and said she suffers from schizophrenia.

Police have yet to confirm if this allegation about Moor's mental state is true.

She is expected in court again on March 28.

Police found the dog's body on the burner of the oven on Tuesday. They said the home still smelled of burnt hair and fleshRetired Army four-star general Barry McCaffrey is firing at the prominent foreign policy role being played by Jared Kushner after the Saudi crown prince reportedly boasted about having influence over the president's son in law.

McCaffrey, who is also an NBC commentator, called Kushner's special Middle East role 'outrageous' and unprecedented, after a report Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman claimed he had Kushner 'in his pocket.'

'Putting Jared Kushner, a 30-something person with no foreign policy experience or defense policy experience, as a leading representative of the United States is simply outrageous,' McCaffrey said.

'The officers of our government, under the Constitution, have to be confirmed by the Senate whether they are ambassadors, generals or senior officials of the government,' McCaffrey said on MSNBC.

'Putting Jared Kushner, a 30-something person with no foreign policy experience or defense policy experience, as a leading representative of the United States is simply outrageous,' said retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey

'So reading out the State Department and having one-on-one contact with Jared Kushner, by phone and in person, is a huge threat to a rational policy making process,' McCaffrey said.

'It just has no precedent, in my view, in American government in modern times. This is the personalization of a family business dealing with U.S. policy,' he vented.

McCaffrey spoke following a report in the Intercept about Kushner's mysterious trip to Riyadh in October, where he met with Salman.

A source told the publication that Prince Salman spoke about the discussion with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed of the United Arab Emirates.

Prince Salman 'bragged to the Emirati crown prince and others that Kushner was 'in his pocket,' according to the report.

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is seen during a meeting with President Donald Trump in the Oval Office at the White House on March 20, 2018

White House Advisor Jared Kushner, watches alongside a member of the Saudi Delegation during a meeting between President Donald Trump and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in the Oval Office at the White House on March 20, 2018 in Washington, D.C.

President Donald Trump welcomes Abu Dhabi's Crown Prince Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan to the White House in Washington, Monday, May 15, 2017

On Friday, retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey sent out this tweet, dubbing President Trump 'a serious threat to U.S. national security' for refusing to protect the United States from the Russia threat

McCaffrey compared the Kushner contact to the ways of a 'third world country.'

'The other thing is, on foreign policy contacts, if you're in Saudi Arabia, you never see a senior official without the U.S. ambassador present. You always want a notetaker there,' McCaffrey said. 'This kind of secretive, one-on-one, the son-in-law It sounds like some third-world country,' he said.

The broadside against Kushner came days after McCaffrey went after Trump following news that he congratulated Russian President Vladimir Putin on his suspicious election victory to a fourth term.

'Reluctantly I have concluded that President Trump is a serious threat to US national security. He is refusing to protect vital US interests from active Russian attacks,' McCaffrey wrote on Twitter Friday.

'It is apparent that he is for some unknown reason under the sway of Mr. Putin,' McCaffrey wrote.

General Barry McCaffrey (left), a retired four-star Army general, told MSNBC's Joy Reid that the 'situation is simply astonishing' that President Trump won't do more to criticize Russian President Vladimir Putin

The Intercept report notes that Crown Prince Mohammed claimed he and Kushner discussed the names of Saudis who were disloyal. Kushner, who recently had his security clearance downgraded, has previously had access to the president's daily brief.

A week after Kushner returned form his trip the Saudi Royal family imprisoned dozens of wealthy family members in the Riyadh Ritz-Carlton, in a move that consolidated power and reportedly resulted in billions of payments to the Saudi government in what it described as an anti-corruption campaign.These photos show how a moped gang, dressed in all black, brazenly blocked rush hour traffic in an attempt to steal a BBC camera that had been set up to broadcast the Oxford Cambridge Boat Race.

Dozens of stunned onlookers can be seen watching the six-man moped gang who don't appear to be fazed by the number of witnesses to their attempted crime on Putney Bridge.

Wearing full-face crash helmets, the thugs attempted to cut down an unguarded, fixed-position broadcast camera with an angle-grinder.

However, they left empty-handed after being confronted by an off-duty policeman just after 5pm on Thursday.

A brazen moped gang stopped traffic on Putney Bridge in an attempt to steal BBC cameras set-up to record the Oxford Cambridge boat race

They were trying to steal BBC cameras worth 250,000 set up along the Thames to film the boat race.

They spent around a minute trying to prise the cameras from the bridge before an off-duty policeman helped to stop their brazen attempt.

Having failed to cut the TV equipment free from the frame, they later managed to get away with another camera from Barnes Bridge further down-stream.

The gang were unsuccessful and they quickly gave up after being confronted by an off-duty policeman

The stolen camera was one of 30 being set up along the 4.2 mile route for the BBC's coverage of the annual race on Saturday and fronted by presenter Clare Balding.

Shocked commuters looked on in horror as the six-strong gang launched their brazen attempt to steal the fixed broadcasting camera on Putney Bridge, the start of the iconic boat race - at the height of the afternoon rush hour.

One witness told MailOnline: There were three scooters with two people on each. One blocked the bus lane while the other two bumped up on to the pavement.

At first I thought it would be a robbery  stealing from people stuck in the traffic.

The shocking photos show the gang trying to remove the camera in the middle of rush hour while stunned motorists watch on

But then I saw them take the angle-grinder to a metal object fixed to the bridge and I realized they were trying to steal the camera that had been set up there to cover the boat race.

However they couldnt get it off and rode off.

The one holding the angle grinder was the last to leave and I was worried that he was going to attack someone with it.

He added: I did not see any security guards on Putney Bridge or anyone else guarding the camera equipment.

The gang reportedly later stole a 250,000 BBC camera from Barnes with the corporation saying their staff had been outnumbered

Another witness, 41, told Mail Online that he thought 'it was going to be another attack'.

He said: 'I thought "What on Earth are they doing?" They were trying to cut something off it looked like. I thought it was going to be another attack.

'I saw the angle grinder. I was worried they'd chop my hand off or something when they saw the camera.'

The Met Police have launched an investigation into the theft of the BBC camera from Barnes Bridge and the attempted theft of TV equipment from Putney Bridge.

Last night the BBC claimed they had put adequate security in place to protect the broadcast equipment but that staff and security had been out-numbered by the thieves.

The gang used three mopeds, with six members wearing helmets and dressed in all black for the attempt

A spokeswoman said: We always ensure there is adequate security in place to protect our staff and equipment.

On this occasion, staff and security were outnumbered by the thieves who stole a camera.

Our priority is the safety and welfare of our staff and nobody was hurt in this incident. This is now a matter for the police.

The BBC said the theft is not expected to hinder coverage of the annual Boat Race between crews from Oxford and Cambridge universities.

However, they fled the scene after realising that the camera couldn't be cut down, with the incident lasting barely a minute

Held on the Thames from Putney to Mortlake, it is broadcast live by the Corporation.

The annual race, which starts at Putney Bridge and passes under Hammersmith Bridge and Barnes Railway Bridge before finishes just before Chiswick Bridge, will be umpired by former Oxford rower and four-time Olympic gold medal winner Matthew Pinsent.

A Met Police spokesman said: 'Police received a number of calls at around 1706hrs on Thursday, 22 March reporting that a group of approximately five males on three mopeds were attempting to remove a camera using an angle grinder on Putney Bridge.

'The suspects left the scene prior to police arrival. Attempts to remove the camera were unsuccessful.

'Officers from Wandsworth Police are investigating. No arrests; enquiries are ongoing.'Childcare workers are set to strike for the third time in less than a year - leaving parents scrambling to find people to look after their children.

Workers are set to strike on Tuesday for better pay in New South Wales, causing an 'unprecedented' amount of centres to close, the Daily Telegraph reported.

Federal Education Minister Simon Birmingham said the mostly female employees were being 'used' by the union.

Childcare workers are set to strike for the third time in less than a year - leaving parents scrambling to find people to look after their children (stock image)

Mr Birmingham said the union was giving workers 'bad advice'.

'I have enormous respect for early learning and childcare workers and the work they do, but they're being used by their unions and given bad advice,' he said.

Employees are demanding a 30 per cent wage increase after losing a Fair Work Commission test case in which they sought similar pay to male-dominated industries.

In their submission, childcare workers said their jobs were 'noisy, dangerous and stressful' and bear similar dangers and responsibilities to the work of engineers.

United Voice has asked parents to support the strike - promoted as 'Keep Your Children Home Day' - and refused to disclose how many of the state's 5000 centres.

It is the third time in less than a year childcare workers have gone on strike.

Union leader Helen Gibbons said it will be the 'biggest day of action in history'.

Federal Education Minister Simon Birmingham said the mostly female employees were being 'used' by the union

United Voice said parents who will be affected by the strike have been notified.

About 91 per cent of childcare staff nenvers are women.

In the Fair Work Commission test case, unions argued that children's services had changed over time from simply child minding to early child development and education, and that they deserved more pay as a result.A Queensland man dubbed the 'night stalker' who raped four women in their homes stopped after he started caring for a disabled man.

Jason Juan Burr pleaded guilty to multiple charges - including 10 counts of rape - and was sent to prison for 20 years on Thursday

But the court heard he only ended his horrific campaign of abuse after he started looking after a man in a wheelchair.

Jason Juan Burr - dubbed the 'night stalker' - pleaded guilty to multiple charges including 10 rapes

Lawyers representing the the 51-year-old, who managed to evade police for nearly a decade, told Southport District Court he was trying to give back to the community after realising 'he had done wrong'.

Defending, Wayne Tolton said in the hearing his client 'felt he had done wrong' adding he only had 'flashbacks' of the attacks, the Cairns Post reports.

Mr Tolton said Burr had felt like a loner as one of the only Aboriginal members in a largely white community.

He told the court Burr had gained aged care certification and answered a newspaper advert in early 2016 to give assistance to a man named Paul and started to feel good about himself.

The court heard Burr had only stopped because he had started caring for a man in a wheelchair

The last of his rapes came on Valentine's Day in 2016.

But later in the year when he was charged for sexually assaulting a 13-year-old girl, the court was told.

After his arrest police took a DNA sample and was cross-checked with unknown samples collected from two rapes reported between 2008 and 2016.

'The system lit up like a Christmas tree', prosecutor Clayton Wallis said in court.

Police finally caught Burr after nearly a decade when a DNA test found his samples linked to two rapes between 2008 and 2016

The court heard Burr had been expelled from school in Brisbane in year 9 after allegations were made about sexual abuse and had a history of alcohol and drug abuse.

Under Queensland law, Burr must serve 80 per cent of his sentence, making him eligible to apply for parole in January 2033.

The court heard Burr broke into the women's homes at night, while the victims slept, and raped them after watching them from outside their home to ensure they were alone, the Cairns Post reported.

Judge Julie Dick (pictured) said Jason Juan Burr, 51, has subjected his victims to 'every woman's worst nightmare' when sentencing him

None of the victims knew Burr, the court was told.

In handing down her sentence Judge Julie Dick said Burr subjected his victims to 'every woman's worst nightmare' branding the attacks 'brazen and abhorent'.

Mr Wallis said Burr had shown no signs of genuine remorse or rehabilitation and his actions were deliberate and targeted.

Southport District Court heard the case which was told Burr broke into the women's homes at night

The attack on the young girl which led to him being caught for the rapes lasted for around '10-15 seconds' while she sat in her mother's living room, the court heard.

Mr Tolton told the court his client was the son of a man who raped his mother and he'd never met his father.

Mr Tolton added Burr had claimed to have been molested at school and faced constant racial abuse throughout his childhood.

'He always felt on the outside and never felt part of the group,' Mr Tolton said.Drugs gangs from Albania have fuelled a tripling in the number of criminals from the country in British prisons.

Ministry of Justice figures reveal there were 726 offenders from the Balkan state behind bars last year  up from 267 in 2013.

Many have been convicted of murder, drug dealing, sex offences, money laundering, people smuggling and death threats.

Albanians now make up the third largest foreign group jailed in England and Wales, behind Irish and Polish criminals  at a cost of around 53million to the taxpayer.

Drugs gangs from Albania have helped triple the number of criminals from the country in British jails as the dealers from the country have a huge influence on the UK's cocaine market

Some 321 inmates are there for drug offences, far outweighing the next highest foreign group, Jamaicans (122) and Poles (85).

The National Crime Agency (NCA) has warned that gangs of Albanian drug dealers are now a significant threat, using increasingly ruthless tactics to protect their business.

Organised crime groups from the country, which has a population of just 2.9million, now have huge influence on supplying cocaine around the UK.

Labour MP David Hanson, a member of the Commons justice select committee, said it was a measure of success that Albanian gangsters were being caught and jailed.

But he added: It is important that the Government finds a mechanism to ensure they serve their sentences back in Albania.

At a time of overcrowding in British prisons it is imperative that they are removed quickly.

Major players include Khalad Uddin, 35, who was jailed for 16 years last June. He was described as the kingpin in an elaborate drug dealing network that spread from his homeland to the Midlands, Bristol and London.

Before he was snared by the police, Uddin lived in a plush apartment in Oxford and had a fleet of seven cars including a Range Rover and a BMW 7 Series.

Kingpin Khalad Uddin, 35, who was jailed for 16 years last June, lived in a plush apartment in Oxford

His extravagant lifestyle led police officers to raid his home where they found about 460,000 in cash bundles, 70 pairs of designer jeans valued at up to 700 each and expensive jewellery.

Violent criminal Vital Dapi, who murdered two pensioners, used a stolen identity to claim asylum and live in Britain illegally for nearly two decades.

He was given a life sentence in March last year for the attack on grandparents Peter Stuart, 75, and his wife Sylvia, 69, in Weybread, Suffolk.

Last year, the Mail told how police were facing an Albanian crime wave with 50 thugs arrested each week amid a rise in drug-related gang warfare.

In 2016, police arrested Albanians 2,781 times  up 8 per cent on 2015. It suggests about one in 11 of the 32,000 Albanian-born residents in England and Wales were detained, although some may have been taken into custody more than once.

But thousands of Albanians allowed into the UK are suspected of adopting bogus identities from neighbouring Kosovo, claiming persecution during the regional conflict 18 years ago. Imposters are suspected to be fronting drugs and prostitution rings.

A Home Office spokesman said: Foreign nationals who abuse our hospitality by committing crimes in the UK should be in no doubt of our determination to deport them.

We have removed more than 40,000 foreign offenders since 2010, including 6,346 in 2016-17  the highest number on record.OJ prosecutor Marcia Clark claims Casey Anthony would have been convicted of murder if the jury knew she did an internet search for 'fool proof suffocation' before her toddler's death.

Anthony was acquitted of killing her two-year-old daughter Caylee in 2011.

But Clark, who famously watched O.J. Simpson walk free from his murder trial after she was the lead prosecutor on the case, believes that if Anthony was tried again today, she'd be found guilty.

OJ prosecutor Marcia Clark claims Casey Anthony would have been convicted of murder if the jury knew she did an internet search for 'fool proof suffocation' before her toddler's death

During an appearance on the Dr Oz show, she revealed that Anthony had deleted an internet search for 'fool proof suffocation' from her computer after she was contacted by police

During an appearance on the Dr Oz show, she revealed that Anthony had deleted an internet search for 'fool proof suffocation' from her computer after she was contacted by police - something that wasn't disclosed to the court at the time.

Clark added that, at the time, many people weren't aware that simply deleting your history on your browser, didn't mean the results weren't still recoverable.

'What was later discovered by the defense expert who looked at that particular browser, was that a search had been conducted for foolproof suffocation,' she told Dr Oz on Thursday.

She added that the time stamp of the search, 2pm, showed that the search was carried out when Anthony was home alone.

Clark added that, at the time, many people weren't aware that simply deleting your history on your browser, didn't mean the results weren't still recoverable

She added that the time stamp of the search, 2pm, showed that the search was carried out when Clark was home alone

'And so the person who conducted the search is the only one who would know to delete the search, which is what happened after Casey was contacted by the police and before they get...they got back to her at 9:30 the next day,' she explained.

Dr Oz asked what Clark believes would have happened if the jury, and prosecution, had known about the search during the trial.

'I think if the jury had known that...that the person that a person searched for foolproof suffocation and that the only person who could have done it was Casey Anthony and that was before the baby disappeared, they would be forced to conclude that she was looking for ways to kill her child because, in fact, the evidence showed that Caylee probably was suffocated,' she said.

Anthony was branded the most hated mom in America during her six-week trial in 2011.

Her daughter was reported missing in July 2008, and her skeletal remains were discovered in a wooded area near the Anthony family's home in Florida that December.

Anthony poses for a portrait next to a photo of her daughter, Caylee, in her West Palm Beach, Florida bedroom in this February 13 2017 photo

Casey Anthony stares at a photo of herself holding baby Caylee in her Florida apartment

Casey has staunchly maintained she has no idea how the toddler died, telling the Associated Press that she does not 'give a s***' what people think of her and that she 'sleeps pretty good at night.'

She has since admitted lying to the police, but described herself as 'one of the unfortunate idiots who admitted they lied'.

At the trial, lead defense attorney Jose Baez suggested that the little girl drowned and that Casey Anthony's father, George, helped cover that up - and sexually abused his daughter. Her father has vehemently denied the accusations.

Meanwhile, Clark, who was the lead prosecutor on one of the most famous murder cases in US history, revealed she still feels 'horrible' that OJ walked free.

Clark admitted the verdict still pained her 'terribly', adding 'it was horrible.'

'It was very, it was a devastating thing. I mean, I really believed in justice. I believed in our system. I believed in the truth and presenting the truth. And, you know, the fight that went on in that courtroom everyday...that was, and it was a courtroom that was out of control...it became a circus very quickly.

'It was very painful because I saw the truth getting trampled on a daily basis.'

'So to go in and have to fight and fight and fight every single day was extremely painful, depressing, and frustrating thing. It was a tragedy really.'

She added that even when OJ was sent to prison, on another charge, she didn't feel like she'd gotten 'justice' for her case.An astronomer announced a 'ground breaking' discovery of a bright light in the night's sky - only to find out he was looking at Mars.

The cosmologist published his unfortunate mistake on the Astronomers Telegram, which allows experts to share their discoveries, only forty minutes later to realise he'd made a blunder.

Unfortunately for this expert, the object in question had been observed through a telescope by Galileo more than 400 years ago.

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Peter Dunsby (pictured), a cosmology professor from the University of Cape Town, made the 'discovery' of Mars earlier this week

An astronomer announced a 'ground breaking' discovery of a bright light in the night's sky - only to find out he was looking at Mars

Peter Dunsby, a cosmology professor from the University of Cape Town, made the 'discovery' of Mars earlier this week.

He published a report in the Astronomer's Telegram, describing a 'Very bright optical transient [visible moving object] near the Trifid and Lagoon Nebulae'.

'The object was visible throughout the full duration of the observations and not seen when this field was observed previously,' his report read.

'The optical transient is the brightest star in the field. Further observations are strongly encouraged to establish the nature of this very bright optical transient.'

Dr Dunsby issued a follow-up alert just 40 minutes later after realising his unfortunate mistake.

'The object reported in ATel 11448 has been identified as Mars', he wrote.

'Our sincere apologies for the earlier report and inconvenience caused.'

Despite detailed maps of the night sky, planets move around a lot, writes Science Alert.

The cosmologist published his unfortunate mistake on the Astronomers Telegram - which allows experts to share their discoveries - only forty minutes later to realise he'd made a blunder

Unfortunately for Dr Dunsby he was beaten by astronomer Galileo Galilei (1564 - 1642) who observed Mars through a primitive telescope in 1609

This means objects millions of miles away can look deceptively like exciting new discoveries.

The Astronomer's Telegram Twitter made fun of the mistake and issued a certificate to mark Dr Dunsby's discovery.

'A journey of astronomical discovery in two acts', tweeted Bryan Gaensler, an astronomer from the University of Toronto.

Lots of people tweeted their support of Dr Dunsby.

'Well yeah, but how many people can say they discovered a planet?' tweeted PhD student from public policy research organisation RAND.

'Congratulations Peter, the new Emperor of Mars!' joked twitter user @The_Thracian.

The Astronomer's Telegram Twitter made fun of the mistake and issued a certificate to mark Dr Dunsby's discovery

He tweeted; 'Lesson for today. Check, Check, Triple Check and then Check some more.'

Dr Dunsby tweeted; 'Lesson for today. Check, Check, Triple Check and then Check some more.'

The astronomer is the founding director of the South African National Astrophysics and Space Science Programme (NASSP) from 2003-2013.

He has also been the recipient of the S2A3 British Association Medal for research.

Unfortunately for Dr Dunsby he was beaten by astronomer Galileo Galilei (1564 - 1642) who observed Mars through a primitive telescope in 1609.

'A journey of astronomical discovery in two acts', tweeted Bryan Gaensler, an astronomer from the University of Toronto

Lots of people tweeted their support of Dr Dunsby. 'Well yeah, but how many people can say they discovered a planet?' tweeted PhD student from public policy research organisation RAND

'Congratulations Peter, the new Emperor of Mars!' joked twitter user @The_Thracian

In 1659, a Dutch astronomer Christian Huygens (1629 - 1695) drew Mars with the help of an advanced telescope.

He noticed dark spots on the red planet that were probably Syrtis Major, which is located in the boundary between the northern lowlands and southern highlands.

In 1672, Huygens noticed a white spot at the south pole, which was probably the southern polar cap.

In 1698, he published Cosmotheros, which looks at what is required to support life.

He speculated for the first time that the red planet could be home to extraterrestrials.Nasa could use paint to defend our planet from a doomsday asteroid that may wipe out life on Earth, according to one of the agency's top engineers.

It was recently revealed that the rogue space rock 101955 Bennu, which is larger than the Empire State Building, could collide with our planet in 2135.

Dr Michael Moreau, a scientist for Nasa's OSIRIS-REx mission, which is sending a probe to study the rock, said a spacecraft could be sent to paint Bennu to divert it.

Changing the colour of part of the asteroid would expose it to solar radiation, which could heat the object up enough to change its orbit and miss our planet.

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Nasa could use paint to defend our planet from a doomsday asteroid that may wipe out life on Earth. It was recently revealed that the rogue space rock 101955 Bennu (right), which is larger than the Empire State Building, could collide with our planet in 2135

Speaking to Gizmodo, Dr Moreau said: 'Even just painting the surface a different colour on one half would change the thermal properties and change its orbit.'

Bennu is a potentially hazardous object discovered in 1999 that measures a staggering 492 metres (1,614 feet) in diameter according to Nasa estimates.

There is a small chance, around 1 in 2,700 odds, that Bennu will strike Earth in 2135 based on its current orbital path, and some scientists have suggested hitting it with a nuclear weapon to avoid a devastating collision.

According to Dr Moreau, a mission to paint the asteroid presents a far simpler solution should Bennu pose a threat to our planet in 120 years' time.

The sun constantly pelts objects in the solar system with tiny particles of solar radiation, each exerting a small amount of pressure.

Because Bennu is small compared to a planet or star, weighing around 13 times the mass of the Great Pyramid of Giza, these particles can gradually alter its orbit.

Dr Michael Moreau, a scientist for Nasa's OSIRIS-REx mission, which is sending a probe (artist's impression) to study the rock, said a spacecraft could be sent to paint Bennu to divert it. Changing the colour of part of the asteroid would expose it to solar radiation

Astronomers are hunting for asteroids larger than 450ft as they can cause 'catastrophic damage' Researchers have discovered most of the asteroids that are about a kilometers in size, but are now on the hunt for those that are about 459ft (140m) - as they could cause catastrophic damage. Although nobody knows when the next big impact will occur, scientists have found themselves under pressure to predict - and intercept - its arrival. Artist's impression pictured 'Sooner or later we will get... a minor or major impact,' said Rolf Densing, who heads the European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt It may not happen in our lifetime, he said, but 'the risk that Earth will get hit in a devastating event one day is very high.' 'For now, there is little we can do.' Source: AFP Advertisement

If scientists could make part of the rock more susceptible to solar radiation by painting it a dark colour, that may alter its path enough to avoid hitting Earth.

Scientists first need to better study its composition and orbit around the sun to determine the best course of action.

Nasa's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft will study Bennu further when it reaches the rock in December, with the probe set to return to Earth with samples in 2023.

Dr Moreau manages the craft's Flight Dynamics division.

A number of proposals on how scientists may stop Bennu have been put forward since its discovery in 1999, but a study published last week suggested it may be impossible to stop the space rock.

If scientists could make part of Bennu more susceptible to solar radiation by painting it a dark colour, that may alter its path enough to avoid hitting Earth (stock)

Scientists revealed that even the most advanced technology would prove 'inadequate' for deflecting the huge asteroid.

While it could be possible to divert a near-Earth object (NEO) by slamming into it with a so-called impactor, experts say a nuclear explosion may be the best bet when time is running out.

In a new paper, scientists from Nasa and the National Nuclear Security Administration laid out a plan for the Hypervelocity Asteroid Mitigation Mission for Emergency Response (HAMMER).

The 8.8-ton HAMMER spacecraft could be used to steer itself directly into a small asteroid, or blow the space rock up using a nuclear device, according to BuzzFeed.

The team devised a proposal around a potential impact with the 1,600-foot-wide asteroid Bennu.

Nasa's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft (green line shows orbit) will study Bennu (blue) further when it reaches the rock in December, with the probe set to return to Earth with samples in 2023

'The two realistic responses considered are the use of a spacecraft functioning as either a kinetic impactor or a nuclear explosive carrier to deflect the approaching NEO,' the authors wrote in the study, published to the journal Acta Astronautica.

But, there are several factors that would determine the best approach.

The asteroid's size and mass must be taken into consideration, along with the amount of time available before it hits Earth.

Plus, there are always 'various uncertainties.'

WHAT IS NASA'S HAMMER ASTEROID DEFLECTING VEHICLE? NASA is working on a Hypervelocity Asteroid Mitigation Mission for Emergency Response vehicle, dubbed HAMMER. The nine metre (30 ft) tall, 8.8-ton spacecraft features a modular design that would enable it to serve as a kinetic impactor, essentially a battering ram. It could also be used as a transport vehicle for a nuclear device. Its possible mission is to deflect 101955 Bennu, a massive asteroid around 500 metres (1,640 ft), more than five football fields, in diameter. It weighs around 79 billion kilograms (174 bn lbs), which makes it 1,664 times as heavy as the Titanic, and is circling the sun at around 63,000 mph (102,000 kph). Based on observational data, Bennu has a 1 in 2,700-chance of striking Earth on Sept. 25, 2135. It is estimated that the kinetic energy of this impact would be equivalent to 1,200 megatons, around 80,000 times the energy of the Hiroshima bomb. The preferred approach to mitigating an asteroid threat would be to deflect it by ramming a kinetic impactor into it, delivering a gentle nudge large enough to slow it down, but not so large that the object breaks apart. However, recent studies have suggested that the nuclear option may be required with larger objects like Bennu. Advertisement

'Whenever practical, the kinetic impactor is the preferred approach, but various factors, such as large uncertainties or short available response time, reduce the kinetic impactor's suitability and, ultimately, eliminate its sufficiency,' the authors wrote.

By driving multiple spacecraft into the asteroid's path, it could be possible to slow the object down and throw it off course to avoid a collision with Earth.

If the conditions aren't right to use the kinetic impactor, however, nuking it might be the only option.

'If the asteroid is small enough, and we detect it early enough, we can do it with the impactor,' physicist David Dearborn of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory told BuzzFeed News.

'The impactor is not as flexible as the nuclear option when we really want to change the speed of the body in a hurry.'Advertisement

An out-of-control Chinese space station carrying 'highly toxic' chemicals could crash into Earth between March 30 and April 6.

Now, an interactive map from SatView allows you to track its fiery demise in real-time.

There are two maps available; the largest one shows the past path and the predicted path as a series of dots, whilst the smaller inset map shows the space station's exact location above Earth at any given moment.

According to experts tracking the space station, it has the highest chance of crashing into cities along a narrow strip around latitudes of 43 degrees north and south.

This includes a number of highly populated cities including New York, Barcelona, Beijing, Chicago, Istanbul, Rome and Toronto.

At the time of writing, SatView predicts that Tiangong-1 should reenter the atmosphere at 07:37 GMT on the 3rd April over New Zealand.

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Satview provides people with the ability to track a wide variety of satellites in space. Tiangong-1, Hubble telescope and the ISS are all options but the site also shows all recent reentries to the atmosphere. It is currently unknown when the Chinese space station will crash to Earth but the site predicts it will be at 00:24am (GMT) on the 3rd April

The Satview map shows several different satellites in orbit, including the Hubble telescope and the International Space Station.

The larger map which shows the dots revealing the satellite's route is produced by Satview.

The second map is powered by USstratcom (United States Strategic Command) and then overlaid on to Google Maps.

As more information is garnered as to when the reentry will take place, the site updates with the most likely landing spot for the space station.

The website, based in Brazil, collates data from a variety of US government databases.

This includes the United States Geological Survey (USGS) and the JPL (Nasa Jet Propulsion Laboratory).

Users can track the Tiangong-1 on the site, and by clicking on 'More Satellites' can see a variety of categories that list all satellites in their database.

To view the satellites next believed to be reentering the atmosphere, the 'Near reentry' option will bring up a table with estimated times of reentry for the next satellites.

A TO Z LIST OF ALL THE CITIES IN THE MORE LIKELY TO HIT REGION Name of city Country Name of city Country Barcelona Spain Milwaukee USA Beijing China Monaco Monaco Bilbao Spain Naples Italy Boise USA New York USA Boston USA Nice France Boulder USA Philadelphia USA Buffalo USA Pittsburgh USA Cannes France Punta Arenas Chile Chicago USA Rochester USA Christchurch New Zealand Rome Italy Cleveland USA Salt Lake City Spain Concord USA San Sebastian Spain Des Moines USA Sapporo Japan Detroit USA Sioux Falls USA Florence Italy Sochi Russia Istanbul Turkey Stanley Falkland Islands Kushiro Japan Toronto Canada Madrid Spain Trelew Argentina Marseilles France Valladolid Spain

Tracking website SatView allows users to follow the exact movements of a range of different satellites, the Chinese Tiangong-1 is one of them. It shows a predicted time of reentry to the atmosphere as well as information on where it has been and where it is going

Experts believe most of the Chinese space station will be destroyed upon reentry.

However, there is a chance parts of it containing hazardous hydrazine could plummet into a highly-populated.

Hydrazine is a chemical which is included in rocket fuel that is a colourless, oily liquid or sometimes white crystalline compound with a very highly reactive base.

It is classified as a Group B2, a probable human carcinogen by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Agencies around the world who have monitored an out-of-control Chinese space station's fall to Earth believe it has a higher chance of hitting parts of the US, Europe, Australia and New Zealand. Cities at higher risk include Barcelona, Beijing, Chicago, Istanbul, Rome and Toronto.

It has been known to cause irritation of the eyes, nose, and throat, dizziness and even lead to the growth of cancerous tumours.

Previous research from Aerospace, a research institution that advises governments on space flight, has found that shrapnel from the Chinese space station could hit a number of major world cities, including New York.

It is most likely to hit in the regions around 43 degrees north and south as a result of it travelling parallel to the equator at the most northern and southern points of its orbit.

From our perspective on Earth it appears to be travelling more slowly above these regions, thanks to its geometry relative to the Earth, although its speed actually remains constant.

Because it takes longer to cross the surface of the Earth at these latitudes it has a higher risk of coming down here.

The Tiangong-1 space station (artist's impression) is hurtling towards Earth carrying a 'highly toxic chemical'. The doomed 8.5-tonne craft is believed to contain dangerous hydrazine

The doomed 8.5-tonne craft, which has been hurtling towards Earth since control was lost in 2016, is believed to contain the dangerous hydrazine.

Scientists will only know the precise date it will impact and exactly where debris will fall during the finals weeks of its decline.

Explaining why this is so Dr Hugh Lewis, senior lecturer in Aerospace Engineering at the University of Southampton, compared the geometrical processes at work to crossing the road.

Speaking to MailOnline, he said: 'The spacecraft is travelling around a more or less circular orbit, which is tipped with respect to the equator at 43.

'If you plot this path on a map of the Earth, it produces a sine wave pattern, with the slower curve of the wave in northern and southern latitudes and the faster straighter sections running from east to west.

'If you imagine the green low risk area on the map is the part of the road we're trying to walk across, the quickest way is to go at 90 degrees  straight across.

'When the spacecraft crosses the equator, it's crossing the road at this point, and it does so really fast.

'When it goes across the red bands further north and south, it's crossing at a steeper angle - almost parallel to the road.

'It takes longer to cross at these latitudes, which is why it has a higher risk of coming down here.'

Predictions of Tiangong-1's most likely point of impact come from Aerospace, a US research organisation based in El Segundo, California, that advises government and private enterprise on space flight.

Agencies around the world have been monitoring the doomed craft's descent. Experts from the European Space Agency give a current estimate of between March 30 and April 6 for re-entry (pictured)

The new estimate (pictured) narrows down from the ESA's previous estimate of March 29 and April 9

Estimates from Aerospace say the space station will enter the Earth's atmosphere on April 4, give or take a week, and debris will fall no further north than 42.7 N latitude or south of 42.7 S latitude.

These zero probability areas, marked safe as Tiangong-1 does not fly over them, constitute about a third of the Earth's total surface area.

At particular risk in the northern hemisphere are northern parts of the US, including Boston, Des Moines, Detroit, Milwaukee, Philadelphia and Salt Lake City.

Florence, Italy, Monaco City and Sochi, Russia, are also in the higher risk region.

In the southern hemisphere, other cities which might be affected include Trelew, Argentina and Christchurch, New Zealand.

Experts from the European Space Agency (ESA), based in Paris, are among those tracking Tiangong-1, which means 'heavenly palace'.

Aerospace Corp, a US non-profit corporation which provides technical guidance and advice on all aspects of space missions, says Tiangong-1 will re-enter the planet's atmosphere on April 4, give or take a week

Aerospace Corp has also issued its own forecast over the likelihood of being hit by falling debris - about one million times smaller than the odds of winning the Powerball jackpot. On this re-entry prediction graph, dotted lines indicate dates of probable orbital manoeuvres

Their Space Debris Office in Darmstadt, Germany, made a revised re-entry prediction date of March 30 and April 6 in recent days.

This narrows down from their previous estimate of March 29 and April 9.

Exactly where it will hit is slightly harder to predict.

Speaking to MailOnline, Dr Lewis added: 'We can't say precisely where as we don't know which orbit it will come in on. At this point in time it's very difficult to say.

'If you take how far in advance you make your prediction, the rule of thumb for error is around 10 per cent.

'At the moment, that's roughly 10 days, or 160 possible orbits.

'If we were to predict again with a week to go, this would narrow to less than one day, or 16 possible orbits.

'My expectation is that what little of the craft survives the atmosphere will impact the ocean.'

In recent months, the spacecraft has been speeding up and it is now falling by more than 6km (3.7 miles) a week. In October it was falling at 1.5km (0.9 miles) a week.

WHAT IS THE 'HIGHLY TOXIC' CHEMICAL ONBOARD CHINA'S TIANGONG-1 SPACE STATION? A 'highly-toxic' corrosive chemical could land on Earth when parts of an out-of-control Chinese space station crash into our planet. The chemical, called hydrazine, is used in rocket fuel and long-term exposure is believed to cause cancer in humans. It is being carried aboard the Tiangong-1 space station which is hurtling towards Earth. The warning over exposure to the chemical came from Aerospace Corp, a non-profit corporation based in El Segundo, California, which provides technical guidance and advice on all aspects of space missions. Hydrazine is a colourless, oily liquid or sometimes white crystalline compound with a very highly reactive base. A 'highly-toxic' corrosive chemical could be spread over the planet when a Chinese space station crashes to Earth, experts have warned. The substance, called hydrazine, is used in rocket fuel and is believed to cause cancer in humans (stock image) It has a number of industrial, agricultural and military uses, including in rocket fuel. Symptoms of short-term exposure to high levels of hydrazine include irritation of the eyes, nose, and throat, dizziness, headache, nausea, pulmonary edema, seizures, and coma, according to the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Long-term exposure can also damage the liver, kidneys, and central nervous system in humans. The liquid is corrosive and may produce dermatitis from skin contact in humans and animals. Increased incidences of lung, nasal cavity, and liver tumours have been observed in rodents exposed to hydrazine. The EPA has classified hydrazine as a Group B2, a probable human carcinogen. Advertisement

'Every couple of years something like this happens, but Tiangong-1 is big and dense so we need to keep an eye on it', Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist from Harvard University told the Guardian.

'It is only in the final week or so that we are going to be able to start speaking about it with more confidence.

'I would guess that a few pieces will survive re-entry. But we will only know where they are going to land after after the fact.'

Website Satflare, which provides online 3D tracking of more than 15,000 satellites, has calculated what it thinks are the chances of the space station entering the atmosphere during the next three months.

According to its analysis of orbital elements gathered during the last months, the re-entry may occur in March (20 per cent), in April (60 per cent) or in May 2018 (20 per cent).

Website Satflare has calculated odds of re-entry in March (20 per cent), in April (60 per cent) and in May 2018 (20 per cent)

These predictions may also change as new orbital measurements become available.

Aerospace Corp has also issued its own forecast over the likelihood of being hit by falling debris.

In a written statement, a company spokesman said: 'When considering the worst-case locations, the probability that a specific person will be struck by Tiangong-1 debris is about one million times smaller than the odds of winning the Powerball jackpot.

'In the history of spaceflight, no known person has ever been harmed by reentering space debris.

'Only one person has ever been recorded as being hit by a piece of space debris and, fortunately, she was not injured.'

WHAT IS THE TIANGONG-1 SPACE STATION? The vehicle is 10.4 metres long and has a main diameter of 3.35 metres. It has a liftoff mass of 8,506 kilograms and provides 15 cubic metres of pressurised volume Tiangong-1 is China's first Space Station Module. The vehicle was the nation's first step towards its ultimate goal of developing, building, and operating a large Space Station as a permanent human presence in Low Earth Orbit. The module was launched on September 29, 2012. Tiangong-1 features flight-proven components of Chinese Shenzhou Spacecraft as well as new technology. The module consists of three sections: the aft service module, a transition section and the habitable orbital module. The vehicle is 10.4 metres long and has a main diameter of 3.35 metres. It has a liftoff mass of 8,506 kilograms and provides 15 cubic metres of pressurized volume. Advertisement

On September 14, 2016, China made an official statement predicting Tiangong-1 would reenter the atmosphere in the latter half of 2017.

The Tiangong-1 spacecraft launched in 2011, with the aim of using the craft to set up a larger space station.

The craft is now at an altitude of less than 300 kilometres (186 miles) in an orbit that is decaying, forcing it to make an uncontrolled re-entry.

The Chinese space agency has been tracking the space station (pictured before it was launched in 2011), and vowed to issue warnings if there are any potential collisions imminent. But not everyone is convinced by this

The vehicle is 10.4 metres long and has a main diameter of 3.35 metres. It has a liftoff mass of 8,506 kilograms and provides 15 cubic metres of pressurised volume

Holger Krag, head of ESA's Space Debris Office, said: 'The date, time and geographic footprint of the re-entry can only be predicted with large uncertainties.

'Even shortly before re-entry, only a very large time and geographical window can be estimated.'

The next piece of space debris due to return to Earth is the controversial satellite named the Humanity Star.

After drifting through space for mere months after being launched in January, the Humanity Star is expected to plunge back down to Earth in a fiery descent.

It will reenter the atmosphere at around 6:39 pm GMT this evening , according to Satview.

The glittering satellite, referred to by some as a 'beacon for all humanity,' was launched into orbit in January and slated to orbit the Earth for about nine months.

Satview also keeps tabs on all objects due to reenter the atmosphere. The next satellite due to reenter the atmosphere of the Earth is the Humanity Star, a controversial and well-known man-made satellite that is due to burn up around 6:39pm GMT

The satellite is a 3-foot-tall, 23-pound geodesic sphere made from carbon-fibre with 65 reflective panels and is designed to spin rapidly and reflect the sun's light to Earth.

To many, it looked like a giant space disco ball.

'In the coming days, the Humanity Star will begin its final descent into the Earth's atmosphere where it will burn up on re-entry, leaving no trace,' said Rocket Lab founder Peter Beck in a statement.

Whilst the Humanity star may not survive reentry into the fiery atmosphere, it is possible a substantial amount of Tiangong-1 will as it is much larger.The largest accumulation of ocean plastic in the world, known as the 'great Pacific garbage patch', is now three times the size of France, new research has found.

Aerial images reveal 79,000 tonnes of plastic in the huge ocean accumulation zone west of California, a figure 16 times higher than previous estimates.

The results suggest that there is far more plastic in the area than scientists thought, and that microplastics are rapidly accumulating in the region, researchers at the Ocean Cleanup Project found.

The tiny toxic particles get into our food supply when they are eaten by fish and can penetrate our internal organs and carry toxic chemicals into the body.

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The authors caution that more research is needed to quantify sources of ocean plastics in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and to better assess how long plastics stay in this area

The largest accumulation of ocean plastic in the world, known as the 'great Pacific garbage patch', is now three times the size of France, new research has found. Pictured is a modelled mass concentration of plastic in the area

Study coauthor and Ocean Cleanup scientist Dr Laurent Lebreton told MailOnline: 'The great Pacific garbage patch (GPGP) is located half way between Hawaii and California.

'It is formed by converging currents at the sea surface and accumulates floating plastic waste.

'Plastic waste may decompose into small fragments, often referred as microplastics that may be harmful to marine life.'

Dr Lebreton and his team at the Ocean Cleanup Foundation, based in Delft, the Netherlands, have conducted the most extensive analysis ever of the GPGP.

The authors found that plastics made up 99.9 per cent of all debris in this part of the ocean.

At least 46 per cent of plastic consisted of fishing nets, and over three quarters of the plastic in this zone was debris larger than 5cm (2 inches), including hard plastics, plastic sheets and film.

Microplastics accounted for eight per cent of the total mass of plastic but 94 per cent of the estimated 1.8 trillion pieces floating in the area.

Aerial images (pictured) reveal 79,000 tonnes of plastic in the huge ocean accumulation zone west of California, a figure 16 times higher than previous estimates

The results suggest that there is far more plastic in the area than scientists thought, and that microplastics are rapidly accumulating in the region, researchers at the Ocean Cleanup Project found in a new study. Pictured are a range of large plastuc objects spotted by the team

Researchers at the Ocean Cleanup Foundation, based in Delft, the Netherlands, have conducted the most extensive analysis ever of the GPGP. They used an aircraft to take images (left and right) of plastic spread across the region

Although most large items had broken down into fragments, the researchers were able to identify a small number of objects, including containers, bottles, lids, packaging straps, ropes, and fishing nets.

Dr Lebreton told MailOnline: 'We estimate around 80,000 tonnes of plastic is currently floating inside an area of 1.6 million km2 [620,000 square miles].

'By comparing our results with previous studies we find that plastic pollution has been increasing exponentially since the 1970s when first measurements where reported.'

The authors assessed aerial images alongside data from 652 plastic-collecting net tows carried out by 18 vessels.

The great Pacific garbage patch (GPGP) is located half way between Hawaii and California. The authors assessed aerial images (blue) alongside data from 652 plastic-collecting net tows carried out by 18 vessels (black and grey)

WHAT ARE MICROPLASTICS AND HOW DO THEY GET INTO OUR WATERWAYS? Microplastics are plastic particles measuring less than five millimetres (0.2 inches). They have hit the headlines over recent years, as improper disposal has resulted in tonnes of waste making its way into the ocean. Each year, tonnes of plastic waste fails to get recycled and dealt with correctly, which can mean they end up in marine ecosystems. Although it's unclear exactly how they end up in the water, microplastics may enter through simple everyday wear and tear of clothing and carpets. Tumble dryers may also be a source, particularly if they have a vent to the open air. Plastics don't break down for thousands of years and it is estimated that there are already millions of items of plastic waste in the oceans. This number is expected to rise. Studies have also revealed 700,000 plastic fibres could be released into the atmosphere with every washing machine cycle. Current water systems are unable to effectively filter out all microplastic contamination, due to the varying size of particles. The amount of plastic rubbish in the world's oceans will outweigh fish by 2050 unless the world takes drastic action to further recycle, a report released in 2016 revealed. More than 80 per cent of the world's tap water is contaminated with plastic, research published in September 2017 revealed. The US has the highest contamination rate at 93 per cent, followed by Lebanon and India, experts from the University of Minnesota found. France, Germany and the UK have the lowest levels, however, they still come in at 72 per cent. Overall, 83 per cent of water samples from dozens of nations around the world contain microplastics. Scientists warn microplastics are so small they could penetrate organs. Bottled water may not be a safer alternative, as scientists have found contaminated samples. Creatures of all shapes and sizes have been found to have consumed the plastics, whether directly or indirectly. Previous research has also revealed microplastics absorb toxic chemicals, which are then released in the gut of animals. Advertisement

Although most large items had broken down into fragments, the researchers were able to identify a small number of objects, including containers, bottles, lids, packaging straps, ropes, and fishing nets. Pictured is plastic picked up by the team's net-dragging boats

At least 46 per cent of plastic consisted of fishing nets, and over three quarters of the plastic in this zone was debris larger than 5cm (2 inches), including hard plastics, plastic sheets and film

The aerial imaging allowed for a more accurate count and measurement of larger debris than previous studies that used only vessel-based visual surveys.

This could partly explain why their estimates are higher than those made by other researchers.

The differences between estimates could also be attributed to increasing levels of ocean plastic pollution in the area in the time since the previous studies were carried out, particularly following the 2011 Tohoku tsunami.

The authors caution that more research is needed to quantify sources of ocean plastics in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and to better assess how long plastics stay in this area.

Microplastics accounted for eight per cent of the total mass of plastic but 94 per cent of the estimated 1.8 trillion pieces floating in the area. Some of the plastic clumps were so large they had to be dragged from the water by a trawler (pictured)The origins of a 6-inch skeleton that was once thought to be the remains of an alien have been uncovered by scientists.

A new DNA study of the bones shows the remains are in fact human and belonged to a baby girl who had dwarfism.

Nicknamed 'Ata', the incredible find made in 2003 in Atacama, Chile, has a long cone-like skull and just ten ribs.

The skeleton found its way to a collector in Spain who speculated that it was an extra-terrestrial  judging from its bizarre appeareance  and it appeared in a documentary, Sirus, which suggested it was evidence of alien life.

After five years of deep genomic analysis scientists have pinpointed the mutations responsible for the bizarre specimen.

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Scientists have tested the DNA of a bizarre human skeleton, once rumored to have extraterrestrial origins. The skeleton, nicknamed Ata, was discovered more than a decade ago in an abandoned town in the Atacama Desert of Chile

The skeleton, found in a leather pouch, was sold to a private collector in Spain soon after it was discovered. Scientists in California recently extracted DNA from the mummy's bones to uncover its origin

Genetic tests at the University of California, San Francisco and Stanford University have proven beyond contention that the bones were that of a human female that died 40 years ago.

It was initially thought to be a child around 6 to 8 years old, but scientists now believe it was a fetus, or a child that died shortly after birth.

The researchers found mutations in not one but several genes known to govern bone development, some of which have never been described before.

DNA analysis reveals that her appearance can be explained by a series of genetic mutations that are linked to dwarfism and other bone and growth disorders.

The skeleton is most likely from a premature baby, or from one soon after birth.

DNA analysis reveals that her appearance can be explained by a series of genetic mutations that are linked to dwarfism and other bone and growth disorders

The latest study revealed four new SNVs -a type of genetic mutation at the individual level - in genes that were known to cause bone diseases, like scoliosis or dislocations, as well as two more SNVs in genes involved in producing collagen

Sanchita Bhattacharya, a researcher at UCSF said she found 64 gene variants in 'Ata's DNA that seemed likely to be damaging.

She found that, incredibly, 10 of the variations were linked to skeletal problems including 'short stature' and '11 pairs of ribs'.

Other gene variations include problems with producing collagen  used in cartilage  and genes linked to curvature of the spine known as scoliosis.

Beyond her skeletal malformations, Ata may have had a genetic condition known as congenital diaphragmatic hernia

Beyond her skeletal malformations, Ata may have had a genetic condition known as congenital diaphragmatic hernia.

This is a relatively common life-threatening birth defect in which the diaphragm does not develop properly.

Garry Nolan, a professor of microbiology and immunology at the Stanford University School of Medicine, began the scientific exploration of Ata in 2012, when a friend called saying he might have found an 'alien.'

Dr Nolan said that research on Ata may one day benefit patients.

WHAT IS DWARFISM? Restricted growth, sometimes known as dwarfism, is a condition characterised by short stature. There are two main types of restricted growth: Proportionate short stature (PSS)  a general lack of growth, where the length of the trunk and limbs are in proportion

Disproportionate short stature (DSS)  where the limbs are shorter or out of proportion with other parts of the body As well as having short stature, some people with restricted growth also have other physical problems, such as bowed legs or an unusually curved spine. However, most people don't have any other serious problems. They can often live a relatively normal life and have a normal life expectancy. Source: NHS Choices Advertisement

He said: 'Maybe there's a way to accelerate bone growth in people who need it, people who have bad breaks.

'Nothing like this had been seen before. Certainly, nobody had looked into the genetics of it.'

He said her genes are similar to those of Chilean Chilote Indians, and that the remains suggest she lived no more than 40 years ago.

Speaking to the Guardian, he said: 'She was so badly malformed as to be unable to feed. In her condition, she would have ended up in the neonatal ICU, but given where the specimen was found, such things were simply not available.'

The skeleton, nicknamed Ata, was discovered more than a decade ago in an abandoned town in the Atacama Desert of Chile. The unusual appearance is explained by a handful of rare genetic mutations, some already known, others newly discovered

The researchers speculate that the skeleton's deformities and the fact it was found near an abandoned nitrate mine in Chile may have resulted from DNA damage caused by exposure to nitrates

'While this started as a story about aliens, and went international, it's really a story of a human tragedy.

'A woman had a malformed baby, it was preserved in a manner and then "hocked" or sold as a strange artefact. May she rest in peace.'

He added he hoped Ata is given a proper burial. 'We now know that it's a child, and probably either a pre- or post-term birth and death.

'I think it should be returned to the country of origin and buried according to the customs of the local people.'

The researchers speculate that the skeleton's deformities may have resulted from DNA damage caused by exposure to nitrates.

The remains were found near an abandoned nitrate mine in Chile.

This was the skeleton of a human female, likely a fetus, that had suffered severe genetic mutations

DNA analysis reveals that her appearance can be explained by a series of genetic mutations that are linked to dwarfism and other bone and growth disorders

The girl's cone-shaped skull remains a mystery even after the genetic analysis.

It has previously been suggested that the unusual shape could have been caused by a condition known as oxcephaly, or turricephaly.

This condition can cause a premature closure of the sutures which separate the different bones in the cranium.

DNA analysis reveals that her appearance can be explained by a series of genetic mutations that are linked to dwarfism and other bone and growth disorders

Ata has the DNA of a modern human female with the mix of Native American and European ancestral markers one would expect from someone who lived near the place where she was found

When this happens, the development of the brain and the rest of the skull follows an unusual pattern and can lead to a towered appearance of the skull.

There are many different types of craniosynostoses, conditions which can cause a malformed skull, but this is considered the most severe.

The condition is linked to impaired mental capacity and decreased neurological function.

WHO HOLDS THE RECORD FOR THE SMALLEST PERSON IN THE WORLD? The shortest person recorded by the Guinness World Records is the subject of much debate depending on accreditation. Dwarfism is a genetic anomaly that results in a shortness of stature. It can range in severity with some people developing a mild affliction and others being stunted to less that two feet tall in the most severe cases. Chandra Bahadur Dangi, from Nepal, is regarded as the shortest man to ever live and measured 21.5 inches tall (54.6 centimetres). The man was measured at 72 years old and also weighed around 31 pounds (14.5 kilograms). Not only did he take the crown as the shortest person alive, he is believed to have been the shortest person to have ever lived. He died in 2015 after a brief battle with pneumonia. As for women, the shortest woman to have ever lived is believed to have been living in the Netherlands during the 19th Century. Pauline Musters was 21.5 inches (55 centimetres) tall at the age of nine and weighed only 3 pounds 5 ounces (1.5 kg). That is about the average weight of a normal-sized person's heart. The country with the shortest average height, according to World Atlas, is Bolivia. Here, in this small South American country, the average height is just four feet and 11.5 inches (151.13 cm). Whilst poor nutrition is believed to be a major factor, genetics also contributes to the shortness of the native people. On the flip side, the tallest country in the world is believed to be the Netherlands. Here, the average height is over 6 foot (1.838 metres). Advertisement

It is not known whether the skeleton reached eight years  or whether Ata had a genetic mutation that made her bones grow in an accelerated way in the wombFacebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has at least one person in his corner amid the company's massive data row.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, expressed sympathy for the Facebook boss, but believes Zuckerberg can still fix things.

In a series of tweets, Berners-Lee said he believes Zuckerberg is likely 'devastated that his creation has been abused and misused.'

The comments come just hours after Zuckerberg appeared on US television to discuss Facebook's ongoing privacy scandal, which led to 50 million members' data being harvested without their knowledge.

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In a series of tweets, web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee (pictured) spoke out about Facebook's data scandal, which led to 50 million members' data being harvested without their knowledge

Zuckerberg apologized for the 'major breach of trust' and outlined several steps Facebook would take to make sure it doesn't happen again.

Berners-Lee expressed his own ideas for what needs to be done to make the internet safer, while also acknowledging the gravity of the situation.

'This is a serious moment for the web's future,' Berners-Lee said.

'But I want us to remain hopeful.'

'The problems we see today are bugs in the system. Bugs can cause damage, but bugs are created by people and can be fixed by people,' he explained.

To prevent future misuses of data, Berners-Lee said it will require more responsibility on the behalf of tech giants, researchers, governments and other parties.

At the same time, he said web users must become empowered and advocate for the internet they wish to see.

The famed computer scientist also said users should speak to their local representatives and inform them that their data matters.

In the wake of Facebook's data harvesting scandal, the public discourse has zeroed in on the possibility of regulating big tech and how it manages user data, as well as the lack of transparency around online advertising.

Zuckerberg suggested in his televised interview that he'd be open to some kind of regulation.

'I am actually not sure we shouldn't be regulated,' the Facebook boss explained.

'I think in general technology is an increasingly important trend in the world'

'I think the question is more what is the right regulation rather than 'yes or no should we be regulated?,' he added.

Berners-Lee suggested that users reclaim some control over their own data.

'General rules for all: any data about me, wherever it is, is mine and mine alone to control,' he said.

'If you are given the right to use data for one purpose, use it for that purpose alone'

He went to say that if researchers are given access to certain user data, it is 'really important' to use it solely for research purposes.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg (pictured) appeared on US television on Wednesday night to discuss his company's massive data scandal, saying he was 'really sorry' for what happened

Earlier on Wednesday, Zuckerberg published a lengthy post on his personal Facebook describing the timeline of events that led to the 'massive breach of trust'

The comment seemed to be an apparent reference to the actions of Aleksandr Kogan, a psychology researcher at Cambridge University, who designed a 'personality quiz' app as a research project.

He passed the data to Cambridge Analytica, a British data firm, whose boss Alexander Nix was suspended on Tuesday after Channel 4 broadcast footage of him bragging about the firm's role in Donald Trump's campaign.

Kogan, who gathered the data by running a survey app on Facebook, also said that he was being made a scapegoat by Facebook and Cambridge Analytica.

In response to the scandal, Facebook has said it will crack down on 'abusive apps,' like the one Kogan created.

Zuckerberg said the firm will conduct an investigation of apps that had greater access to information prior to the more recent limitations, which were rolled out in 2014.

Berners-Lee noted in an interview on Channel 4 that Facebook and other tech firms need to be more cognizant of 'what people are building' on the internet.

In response to the scandal, Facebook has said it will crack down on 'abusive apps' that brazenly share users private information without their knowledge

WHAT IS THE CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA SCANDAL? Communications firm Cambridge Analytica has offices in London, New York, Washington, as well as Brazil and Malaysia. The company boasts it can 'find your voters and move them to action' through data-driven campaigns and a team that includes data scientists and behavioural psychologists. 'Within the United States alone, we have played a pivotal role in winning presidential races as well as congressional and state elections,' with data on more than 230 million American voters, Cambridge Analytica claims on its website. The company profited from a feature that meant apps could ask for permission to access your own data as well as the data of all your Facebook friends. The data firm suspended its chief executive, Alexander Nix (pictured), after recordings emerged of him making a series of controversial claims, including boasts that Cambridge Analytica had a pivotal role in the election of Donald Trump This meant the company was able to mine the information of 87 million Facebook users even though just 270,000 people gave them permission to do so. This was designed to help them create software that can predict and influence voters' choices at the ballot box. The data firm suspended its chief executive, Alexander Nix, after recordings emerged of him making a series of controversial claims, including boasts that Cambridge Analytica had a pivotal role in the election of Donald Trump. This information is said to have been used to help the Brexit campaign in the UK. Advertisement

He said: 'Look at the systems people are using, like the social networks, and look at are they actually helping humanity?'

'Are they constructive or are they being destructive?'

When asked whether we can still reign in Silicon Valley giants given how big they've gotten, he said he still thinks it's possible.

'To a certain extent the genie is out of the bottle,' Berners-Lee explained.

'It's a question of putting toothpaste back in the tube -- and actually, it is possible. You can put the toothpaste back in the tube if you try hard enough.'

However, Berners-Lee believes there need to be some limitations over how people handle users' personal information in the future.

'You, as my friend can't give away my data,' Berners-Lee said on Channel 4.

'That, in this situation, would have made a big difference,' he added.A mysterious celestial object known as Tabbys Star has baffled astronomers for years since it was first observed.

Every so often, the star experiences dramatic dips in brightness  but, its unclear what exactly is causing the phenomenon.

It has sparked countless possible explanations, from claims of an alien megastructure to the more mundane hypothesis that now leads the discussion, which says its light is simply being blocked by dust.

Now, a team monitoring Tabbys Star says it has dimmed to the lowest levels seen since in five years, offering a new opportunity for scientists to observe the bizarre behaviour.

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While the stars of most exoplanet systems are seen to dim by a few per cent, KIC 8462852 (artist's impression) dimmed by more than 20 per cent over periods of months. The mysterious celestial object known as Tabbys Star has baffled astronomers for years. (artist's impression)

Tabetha Boyajian, the astrophysicist for whom the star is nicknamed, said the most recent dipping event began last Friday.

Here we go again! Yippee!! the expert tweeted this week.

In a blog post about the activity, Boyajian explains this is the most dramatic fluctuation seen in years.

On Friday (2018 March 16) we noted the last data taken were significantly down compared to normal, the researcher wrote.

Due to poor weather conditions at all 3 sites we werent able to observe the star again until last night.

This is the deepest dip we have observed since the Kepler Mission in 2013! WOW!!!

In an update yesterday, Boyajian revealed the star is still not quite back up to normal brightness.

Tabby's Star, known officially as KIC 8462852 but named for Tabetha Boyajian who first discovered it in 2015, has baffled experts for years.

While the stars of most exoplanet systems are seen to dim by a few per cent, KIC 8462852 dimmed by more than 20 per cent over periods of months.

But, scientists may finally be closer to solving the mystery.

Tabetha Boyajian, the astrophysicist for whom the star is nicknamed, said the most recent dipping event began last Friday. In a blog post about the activity, Boyajian explains this is the most dramatic fluctuation seen in years. It is plotted above, compared to past events

WHAT IS TABBY'S STAR? Tabby's Star, known officially as KIC 8462852 but named for Tabetha Boyajian who first discovered it in 2015, has baffled experts ever since. Observations revealed its light dimmed regularly, as do distant stars when their planets pass in front of them. But while the stars of most exoplanet systems are seen to dim by a few per cent, KIC 8462852 dimmed by more than 20 per cent over periods of months. Previous studies have claimed the strange dimming could be evidence of a Dyson Sphere (artist's impression pictured) Some have claimed this dimming could be evidence of a Dyson Sphere  a hypothetical structure which could be used by an advanced alien race to harness the energy of a star. But now, scientists say the real cause of the dimming seen at Tabbys Star may be far more mundane. Experts believe dust is why it appears to dim and brighten as different colours of light are blocked by different intensities. Advertisement

Previous studies have claimed the strange dimming could be evidence of a Dyson Sphere  a hypothetical structure which could be used by an advanced alien race to harness the energy of a star.

The mystery of Tabby's Star is so compelling that more than 1,700 people donated over $100,000 (73,800) through a Kickstarter campaign in support of dedicated ground-based telescope with the aim of observing and gathering more data on the star.

As a result, a new body of data has been collected by Dr Boyajia and colleagues from the Lousisiana State University Department of Physics & Astronomy in partnership with the Las Cumbres Observatory.

'Dust is most likely the reason why the star's light appears to dim and brighten', said Dr Boyajian.

Scientists closely observed the star through the Las Cumbres Observatory from March 2016 to December 2017 (artist's impression)

The new data show that different colours of light are being blocked at different intensities', she said.

'Therefore, whatever is passing between us and the star is not opaque, as would be expected from a planet or alien megastructure,' Dr Boyajian said.

Scientists closely observed the star through the Las Cumbres Observatory from March 2016 to December 2017.

Beginning in May 2017 there were four distinct episodes when the star's light dipped.

Supporters from the crowdfunding campaign nominated and voted to name these episodes.

The first two dips were named Elsie and Celeste. The last two were named after ancient lost cities - Scotland's Scara Brae and Cambodia's Angkor.

It has baffled astronomers since it was first discovered in 2015, but now experts believe they may be one step closer to solving the mystery of Tabby's star (artist's impression pictured)

The authors write that in many ways what is happening with the star is like these lost cities.

'They're ancient; we are watching things that happened more than 1,000 years ago', the authors wrote in the paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

'They're almost certainly caused by something ordinary, at least on a cosmic scale.

'And yet that makes them more interesting, not less,' the authors wrote. 'But most of all, they're mysterious.'

WHAT IS A DYSON SPHERE? An artist's impression of a Dyson Sphere is shown A suggested method for harnessing the power of an entire star is known as a Dyson sphere. First proposed by theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson in 1960, this would be a swarm of satellites that surrounds a star. They could be an enclosed shell, or spacecraft spread out to gather its energy - known as a Dyson swarm. If such structures do exist, they would emit huge amounts of noticeable infrared radiation back on Earth. But as of yet, such a structure has not been detected. Source: All About Space magazine Advertisement

Another team of researchers from the University of Arizona, Tuscan, found similar results in a study released in October.

Researchers collected observational data of Tabby's star from two Nasa telescopes  Swift, which takes X-ray and UV measurements, and Spitzer, which measures objects in infrared.

They found that from UV, throughout the visible spectrum to IR, the star is dimming at every wavelength.

The researchers also discovered that the dimming rate of Tabby's star differed between UV and infrared.

The team suggested that 'micro-sized dust screens' are to blame for this irregular dimming, and not an alien megastructure.In the darkness of the deep sea, there are all sorts of strange activities that have never before been seen by human eyes.

With a lifeless gaze, a dangling bioluminescent protrusion that juts from their face, and a gaping mouth filled with razor-sharp teeth, anglerfish may be among the best representations of the peculiarities thousands of feet beneath the surface.

And, their mating habits are fittingly bizarre.

Anglerfish engage in whats known as sexual parasitism; the male latches onto the female and slowly fuses with her body until the two have formed a permanent pair, with the male supplying sperm to his mate while simultaneously receiving nutrients.

Now, in whats said to be a rare and important discovery, scientists have captured footage of live anglerfish mating for the first time, according to an exclusive report in Science Magazine.

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In the stunning video captured at a depth of 800 meters off Portugals Sao Jorge Island, the fist-sized female completely dwarfs the male that is fused to her underside (seen as the tiny object just beneath her belly).

Until now, anglerfish mating pairs have only been observed in dead specimens caught in nets, according to Science.

Female anglerfish are much larger than their partners; in the stunning video captured at a depth of 800 meters off Portugals Sao Jorge Island, the fist-sized female completely dwarfs the male that is fused to her underside.

The remarkable scene was spotted by husband and wife deep-sea explorers Kirsten and Joachim Jakobsen using a remotely operated vehicle.

There are more than 160 known species of anglerfish. This particular pair has been identified as fanfin anglerfish (Caulophryne jordani), according to Science.

The eerie footage shows the females glowing filaments extending all around her body, as the tiny male clings beneath.

Like the creatures head-mounted bait, these filaments may too be bioluminescent, Ted Pietsch, of the University of Washington in Seattle, told Science.

But, its also possible that theyre reflecting light from the ROV.

The researchers observed the mating pair for 25 minutes after spotting it in 2016, carefully moving the underwater craft to view the fish without disturbing them.

According to Pietsch, the long filaments act much like whiskers  and, brushing against them would trigger a swift predatory response.

WHAT IS SEXUAL PARASITISM? A female fanfin seadevil anglerfish is shown Many species of deep-sea anglerfish are known to engage in a type of reproduction known as sexual parasitism. While they arent the only creatures to mate in this way, the behaviour has largely come to be associated with these fish, among which more than 20 species are known to do it, according to Brittanica. Female anglerfish are much larger than the males. When its time to mate, a male will bite onto the massive female and in some cases even fuse to her body, joining their tissues and circulatory systems. The male becomes dependent on the female for nutrients  and, he turns into her permanent sperm supply. Advertisement

Given their inhospitable habitat and elusive nature, anglerfish are rarely seen alive.

And, that makes the most recent discovery all the more remarkable.

Ive been studying these [animals] for most of my life and Ive never seen anything like it, Pietsch told Science.

While the video was captured nearly two years ago, its never been released to the public until now.The shortest person recorded by the Guinness World Records is the subject of much debate depending on accreditation.

Dwarfism is a genetic anomaly that results in a shortness of stature.

It can range in severity with some people developing a mild affliction and others being stunted to less that two feet tall in the most severe cases.

Chandra Bahadur Dangi, from Nepal, is regarded as the shortest man to ever live and measured 21.5 inches tall (54.6 centimetres).

The man was measured at 72 years old and also weighed around 31 pounds (14.5 kilograms).

Not only did he take the crown as the shortest person alive, he is believed to have been the shortest person to have ever lived.

He died in 2015 after a brief battle with pneumonia.

As for women, the shortest woman to have ever lived is believed to have been living in the Netherlands during the 19th Century.

Pauline Musters was 21.5 inches (55 centimetres) tall at the age of nine and weighed only 3 pounds 5 ounces (1.5 kg).

That is about the average weight of a normal-sized person's heart.

The country with the shortest average height, according to World Atlas, is Bolivia.

Here, in this small South American country, the average height is just four feet and 11.5 inches (151.13 cm).

Whilst poor nutrition is believed to be a major factor, genetics also contributes to the shortness of the native people.

On the flip side, the tallest country in the world is believed to be the Netherlands.

Here, the average height is over 6 foot (1.838 metres).Advertisement

A new cutting-edge superyacht boasts a silent mode in a bid to offer guests the ultimate luxury - peace and quiet.

The 164ft-long aluminium-constructed Home, built by Dutch shipyard Heesen, is decked out with a hybrid diesel electric propulsion system, which minimizes noise pollution and fuel consumption without sacrificing speed.

London-based professor Barry Smith, who founded the Centre for the Study of the Senses, helped guide the boat's development and he said that Home runs at 'a sound of around 46 decibels - the level of softly falling rain'.

The 164ft-long aluminium-constructed Home, built by Dutch shipyard Heesen, is decked out with a hybrid diesel electric propulsion system, which minimizes noise pollution and fuel consumption without sacrificing speed

London-based professor Barry Smith, who founded the Centre for the Study of the Senses, helped guide the boat's development and he said that Home runs at 'a sound of around 46 decibels - the level of softly falling rain'. Above, one of the yacht's luxurious bedrooms

Along with space for sunbathing, the yacht's top deck features a slick bar and lounge area for entertaining

Professor Smith says this unique feature will help high-flying passengers get greater enjoyment from the yacht's on-board amenities - especially when it comes to food.

He explains: Our research has shown that the brains processing of taste is affected by noise, which reduces the tongues ability to detect salt, sweet and sour.

'The beauty of Home is that it enables those on board to enjoy food and drink to the full with no diminution of taste.'

Heesen designers said they found many of the activities at sea involve enjoying good food and wine, so they wanted to cut out any distractions.

Home's hybrid and mechanical power sources can be used simultaneously or independently.

In silent cruise mode, her fuel consumption reduces to a staggering 45 litres per hour - an astonishing feat for a yacht displacing 295 tons and a gross tonnage of 499.

At night time the yacht comes alive, thanks to dozens of spotlights on the outside decks

The yacht has an aerodynamic design, allowing it to cut through the water at speed (left) and there is plenty of space on the outside decks to entertain or enjoy the sea air (right)

Home was sold to a passionate yacht enthusiast in July 2016 but there is no word on who the purchaser was or how much the vessel went for

Thanks to floor-to-ceiling windows, guests can enjoy sweeping ocean views from the comfort of their room

The yacht's kitchen is decked out with top-of-the-range appliances, so decadent feasts can be rustled up by the in-house chef

The yacht can accommodate up to 12 guests and the bedrooms feature en-suite bathrooms and ample wardrobe space

In this setting, the yacht can reach up to nine knots, while in normal mode it can hit a top speed of 16.3 knots.

On the design front, Frank Laupman of Omega Architects, was responsible for crafting Home's exteriors.

He opted for a vertical bow, with other striking features including a swimming platform and floor-to-ceiling glass windows.

Inside, the yacht's two-tone palette with jewel-like burgundy details, was the vision of Italian interior designer Cristiano Gatto.

The yacht can sleep up to 12 guests and the owners apartment includes a private study, large bathroom and spacious bedroom.

There is a spacious sundeck on the yacht, so guests can sit back and soak up the sun

On the lower deck there are five luxurious staterooms, with two doubles, two twins and one VIP suite.

Other rooms around the watercraft include two lounges, a dining room, gym, spa area and lobby.

The main outdoor deck centres around the theme of 'relaxed living', with sun loungers dotted around and a sweeping open-air bar.

At night, the yacht takes on a different guise, with spotlights and coloured lighting transforming its appearance.

Home was sold to a passionate yacht enthusiast in July 2016 but there is no word on who the purchaser was and how much the vessel went for, though it is known that her sister ship, Project Electra, currently under construction, would cost approximately 33.8 million euros.

Home's finished design was unveiled in 2017 and this January it won Best Naval Architecture Displacement and Best Ecological Design & Operation Innovation at the Boat International Design & Innovation Awards in Kitzbuhel.

Judges praised Home's designers for addressing ways to reduce environmental impact.

The yacht's two-tone palette with jewel-like burgundy details was the vision of Italian interior designer Cristiano Gatto

The bar on the yacht lights up, creating quite the party atmosphere

Guests on the yacht can keep in shape while at sea thanks to a small gym areaAdvertisement

The American road trip is one of the quintessential bucket list getaways - and here's how to do it without being surrounded by honking horns.

Thanks to Geotab, a company specializing in GPS and vehicle tracking services, the quietest roads in the U.S have been revealed.

Using the latest traffic count data available from the Highway Performance Monitoring System, its analysts went about pinpointing the least travelled highways, with Alaska's Route 11 coming out as the route where you're least likely to encounter traffic. It has just 196 vehicles using it per day.

Scroll down for the top ten destinations you should steer towards for a slice of peace and quiet...

1. Alaska - State Route 11

The Dalton Highway in Alaska is America's quietest road, with 240 miles separating service stations

The Dalton Highway is one of America's harshest and most remote routes.

It involves driving 240 miles between service stations and there are only a handful of small towns along the way.

It's mostly the 'ice road truckers' who make the difficult journey along this gravel highway, travelling through Alaskas boreal forests, across its vast mountain ranges, over the Yukon River and ending up at the Arctic Ocean.

2. Utah - US Route 50

Utah's US Route 50 cuts across the corner of Utah, passing by national parks and through the vast emptiness of the Great Salt Lake Desert

Utah's US Route 50 is dubbed 'Americas Loneliest Road', with not much other than magnificent rock formations and desert dust along the entire 3,000 mile route.

The tarmac road cuts across the corner of Utah, passing by the Canyonlands National Park, the Arches National Park and through the vast emptiness of the Great Salt Lake Desert.

3. Maine - US Route 201

Maine's US Route 201 is best driven in the autumn when trees lining the road take on beautiful orange and red hues

Maine's US Route 201, nicknamed the 'Old Canada Road', is a rural, tree-lined route following the Kennebec River through historic towns like Bingham, passing Wyman Lake and going all the way up to the Quebec border.

Its at its colorful best during the autumn.

4. Arizona - US Route 160

Arizona's US Route 160 is surrounded by sandy brush land, wind-worn sandstone canyon and unusual rock formations

Arizona's isolated US Route 160 route runs through the deserted Navajo Nation.

These 'empty' stretches of highway are surrounded by sandy brush land, wind-worn sandstone canyons, an ancient Pueblo cliff village and unusual rock formations like the Elephants Feet, making this an incredibly scenic drive.

5. California - State Route 139

The remote State Route 139 in California is a great starting point for hikes around the rugged volcanic landscape

The remote State Route 139 in California skirts around the beautiful blue Eagle Lake, before cutting through the Modoc National Forest.

Its a great starting point for hikes around the rugged volcanic landscape of north-eastern California.

6. Virginia - State Route 90003

While travelling along Virginia's State Route 90003 stop at the James River and York River for top panoramic views

Better known as the Colonial Parkway, Virginia's State Route 90003 is a nationally historic, scenic byway that is bordered by trees and dotted with colonial-style red brick bridges and tunnels.

Make a stop at the James River and York River at each end for the panoramic views, especially in the fall.

7. Louisiana - US Route 65

Louisiana's US Route 65 passes the strikingly clear waters of Lake Bruin along the way

Louisiana's US Route 65 is part of the Great River Road.

The Louisiana section of this scenic, state-crossing drive, tracks alongside the Mississippi River, into Arkansas and beyond, passing the strikingly clear waters of Lake Bruin along the way.

8. Wyoming - US Route 212

US Route 212 in Wyoming is usually closed during the winter due to heavy snow

US Route 212, also known as the Beartooth Highway, is Wyoming's highest route.

It leads into Yellowstone National Park, and affords drivers incredible views of jagged mountains, pine forests, rocky peaks and alpine lakes.

During the winter, the road is closed due to heavy snow, but usually opens back up by Memorial Day weekend.

9. New Hampshire - US Route 2

A detour on New Hampshire's US Route 2 takes you into the White Mountains National Forest and past Mount Washington

The long version of the US Route 2 drive passes through several states.

Here it winds alongside the Androscoggin River into the picturesque mountain ranges of New Hampshire.

A detour takes you into the White Mountains National Forest and passes by the prominent Mount Washington.

10. Pennsylvania State Route 32

Historic stops along Pennsylvania's State Route 32 include the Washington River Crossing and the town of New Hope

Known as the River Road, Pennsylvania's State Route 32 follows the Delaware River as it runs alongside the New Jersey border.

Historic stops along the way include the Washington River Crossing and the arts and crafts town of New Hope.Its tempting to imagine that British tourism to Majorca started with the birth of the package holiday at the beginning of the 1950s.

In fact, by the time the first charter flight arrived, the Spanish Balearic island was already firmly established as an upmarket holiday place.

When in the 1930s Agatha Christie broke her journey on the way back from the Middle East (her husband Max Mallowan was an eminent archaeologist and an expert on Mesopotamia) to stay in Palma, she was surprised to find that the place was so popular that the three best hotels were full.

Quiet beauty: The Cala Mesquida is a beautiful, white sand beach and quiet resort village on Majorcas north east coast

She decided to head to the Formentor hotel instead, located on the Cap de Formentor at the northwestern point of the island (while she liked the sound of the hotel, apparently she was less thrilled by its pricey daily rate).

When the taxi passed the Hotel Illa dOr in Puerto Pollensa, she immediately liked the look of it (and its more affordable rates, presumably). She checked herself in and found the hotel and the resort so much to her taste that she included it in her short story Problems At Pollensa Bay.

In the story, sleuth Parker Pyne is approached by a fellow British guest looking for assistance in saving her son from an unsuitable marriage. Puerto Pollensa has changed since Christies day, but the Hotel Illa dOr is still in business.

In its A La Carte programme of luxury hotels from around the world, TUI brings together the classic style of the grand hotel with the affordability and ease of a package holiday, featuring the Hotel Illa dOr as one of its premier Majorcan properties.

Fame and fashion: According to TUI, the village of Alaro is little more than a handful of sand-coloured brick buildings, which give way to a sleepy square, called Plaza del Ayuntamiento

While the island is probably better known for resorts such as Palma Nova and Magaluf, archetypal modern resorts with high-rise hotels, the vast majority of the island has altered very little.

This helps explain why Majorca continues to remain a popular holiday place with the rich and famous including Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones, Claudia Schiffer, Pierce Brosnan and many more.

Back in the day it would have taken Christie a few hours to drive from Palma to Puerto Pollensa (the roads were dreadful). Now, thanks to new highways, the journey takes about 50 minutes and not much longer to Cala dOr on the east coast.

Its worth drilling down into tour operator websites to discover hidden gems: unspoilt places with family-run hotels and characterful places to eat.

Any time spent on research will be amply rewarded with a holiday that should be enjoyed by everybody. Destinations that appealed to me include Alaro.

According to TUI, the village is little more than a handful of sand-coloured brick buildings, which give way to a sleepy square, called Plaza del Ayuntamiento.

Majorca continues to remain a popular holiday place with the rich and famous, including Pierce Brosnan (left, with family) and Claudia Schiffer (right)

This is the lifeblood of the place, and the few bakeries and cafes that line its perimeters hum with locals chatting over coffee and churros. Crowning the hill that overlooks Alaro is a ruined 15th Century fortress. Make the two-hour trek to the summit for views of the countryside.

Recommended places to eat include Es Verger, popular for its roast lamb.The hotel that is featured in the TUI programme, one of its range of Small and Friendly properties, is the 25-room Hotel SOlivaret, which has a peaceful countryside setting in a sun-drenched valley of the Tramuntana Mountains.

Two hundred years ago, the hotel began life as a traditional finca: It has held on to its old-world character  exposed stone walls, wood-beamed ceilings, and cobbled courtyards.

For a quieter seaside break, TUI recommends Cala Mesquida on Majorcas east coast, a place which has a peaceful atmosphere, countryside views, and a postcard-worthy beach. It is perched on the north-eastern coastline, where turquoise waters and powder-fine sands are in good supply. Most people are drawn by the white-sand beach and traditional cuisine.

The beach is an unusual strip of porcelain-coloured sand, backed by a blanket of dunes.Her return has been shrouded in mystery.

But that doesn't mean EastEnders' Kat Slater is going to arrive quietly, as she makes her sensational return to Albert Square in the middle of her own wake.

Clad in her signature leopard print and red lipstick, Kat (Jessie Wallace) will enter the Queen Vic pub in scenes set to air on Thursday.

She's back! Kat Slater will make an explosive return to EastEnders this Thursday, as she arrives at the Queen Vic in the middle of a tribute night after residents are told she is dead

Kat's return to the BBC soap has been shrouded in secrecy for several months, with many Albert Square residents led to believe that she had died in Ireland.

Mo Harris (Laila Morse) arrived back in Albert Square last week to inform Kat's family she was dead, although cousin Stacey (Lacey Turner) smelled a rat when she struggled to explain the finer details behind her passing.

To add to the confusion felt by fans, Stacey's mum Jean Slater (Gillian Wright) also made a return to Walford on Monday night, revealing that Kat was in fact not dead.

Explosive: Kat (Jessie Wallace) will arrive in Walford clad in her signature leopard print and pink lipstick unaware that Mo Harris has told everyone that she died in Ireland

This doesn't seem to stop the residents thought, who host a lavish tribute night to raise money for Kat's burial.

As they dress in various leopard-print looks the punters will be shell-shocked to see Kat arrive in the pub, before angrily accusing her of trying to con them out of some quick cash.

But it appears Kat had no idea that Mo was trying to fake her death, as she is furious to hear about her 'passing' and immediately goes out of the way to smooth things over.

Mystery: It will be hard to miss Kat once she arrives back on EastEnders on Thursday, as she leaves fans wondering why she's returned to Walford without her husband Alfie

Actress Jessie told The Daily Mirror: 'She turns up in a cab and sees a leaflet on the floor saying 'Kat Slater' about her own wake.

'So she's got to clear up all the damage a certain person has caused by saying Kat's dead.'

Fans will have to wait and see why Kat has decided to return to Walford, why Mo lied about her death, and most importantly, why she is without her children or husband Alfie Moon.

EastEnders airs Kat's return on Thursday March 22 at 9pm on BBC One.Simon Cowell is among a number of showbiz allies remaining silent in the face of colleague Ant McPartlin's drink-drive arrest scandal.

The X Factor mogul, 58, who is the brains behind Ant and Dec-fronted Britain's Got Talent, has sparked questions over his position in the face of the drama.

Ant, 42, was seen for the first time on Tuesday since his drink drive arrest as he was arriving at Kingston Police station with what appeared to be his legal team.

Tough: Simon Cowell is among a number of showbiz allies remaining silent in the face of colleague Ant McPartlin's drink-drive arrest

Simon has been filming in the US for Americas Got Talent so has been away from the ongoing drama surrounding the embattled TV favourite.

The TV and music mogul has remained silent in the face of the news and not shown his stance for his pal.

Saturday Night Takeaway sponsors Suzuki have so far publicly stuck by Ant and remain in dialogue with ITV.

The 20million deal with the car giant sees Ant and Dec front adverts where they give cars to the public.

Sad times: Simon has been filming in the US for Americas Got Talent so has been away from the ongoing drama surrounding the embattled TV favourite

Tough: Saturday Night Takeaway sponsors Suzuki have so far publicly stuck by Ant and remain in dialogue with ITV. The 20million deal with the car giant sees Ant and Dec front adverts where they give cars to the public

MailOnline has contacted representatives for Simon and Ant for comment.

Ant has been receiving treatment for alcohol addiction and is in lockdown at his 1.6million pad in Richmond, south west London.

The star is living with his mum Christine, who was also in the car crash on Sunday afternoon.

Troubles: It also emerged the presenter's 26,000 black Mini was searched by police for drugs after he was involved in a crash with two other cars and injured a three-year-old girl

It also emerged the presenter's 26,000 black Mini was searched by police for drugs after he was involved in a crash with two other cars and injured a three-year-old girl.

None were found but he failed a breathalyser test. Whilst he has been receiving treatment at home, it is believed he will seek professional help at a long-term retreat and possibly abroad.

Friends have said Ants upcoming 60million divorce from wife Lisa Armstrong was a major factor in his falling off the wagon.It was the Married At First Sight twist that shocked audiences.

And Troy Delmege has revealed more details about the racy texts Tracey Jewel sent Dean Wells after the pair had broken up and the brunette beauty had moved on with Sean Thomsen.

Speaking to the Kyle and Jackie O Show on Thursday, Troy said he had 'seen a sample of them' and it was the 'stuff you would expect'.

'I've seen a sample of them': Married At First Sight's Troy Delmege confirms he has seen the racy texts Tracey Jewel sent to Dean Wells after they broke up

At first appearing hesitant to reveal details, Troy explained how he had been shown the messages by Dean.

'I've seen a sample of them,' Troy said. 'Tracey is a great girl, I can't defy that confidence. It's the stuff you would expect.'

'Was it just undies and bra or was there a little woo hoo,' Kyle Sandilands inquired.

'No comment,' Troy answered.

Didn't want to kiss and tell: At first appearing hesitant to reveal details, Troy explained how he had been shown the messages by Dean

'It's the stuff you would expect': Troy claimed the texts were the typical kind sent

'So in my mind, she has pulled the undies to the side now, because I don't know,' Kyle replied.

Trying to explain himself, Troy argued that it was normal for men to share the racy texts they had received.

'Look it was off the record, Dean did show it to me ... guys do share those sorts of things,' he said.

Confirming he and Carly did send racy messages, Troy said they were 'nothing filthy' and were 'classy photos'.

Didn't deny Dean's claims: Instead Tracey tried to deflect and explain herself, but her explanation wasn't convincing

During Wednesday night's finale episode, Dean revealed that he had received racy messages in return to the texts he had sent Tracey.

'You don't know the full story,' Dean said to Sean, before turning his attention to Tracey.

'You sent me very inappropriate messages. You sent me pictures of you in your underwear!'

New romance: Since dumping Dean, Tracey has started a new relationship with Sean

'You sent me photos of you, in your bedroom, going ''Sean's gonna love this outfit",' he continued as the rest of the contestants looked on in shock.

Not denying his claims, Tracey tried to deflect and explain herself, but her explanation wasn't convincing.

'It wasn't my intention to bring it up in front of everyone and it's making me very uncomfortable,' she said awkwardly.She's best known for her roles on The Flying Doctors and Packed To The Rafters.

And Rebecca Gibney has opened up about struggling with self-esteem issues throughout her high-profile years of her television career.

The 53-year-old, who is the cover star of Who magazine's 'Most Beautiful People' issue, relished going 'makeup free' on the cover and admitted to 'occasionally' using Botox.

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Positive: Rebecca Gibney, who is the cover star of Who magazine's 'Most Beautiful People' issue, relished going 'makeup free' and admitted to 'occasionally' using Botox

The veteran actress revealed she didn't feel beautiful 'for so long' and appearing in the publication with her natural face was 'liberating'.

'Most of my adult life I thought I wasn't attractive unless I had a full face of makeup,' she acknowledged.

The New Zealand-born beauty went on to explain how being '53 rocks' and how she ultimately embraced her physical appearance as she matured.

'Most of my adult life I thought I wasn't attractive unless I had a full face of makeup,' she acknowledged

'Even the most beautiful people have ugly days. I just don't think we all need to look like the Kardashians,' she offered.

The mother of one admitted to using Botox 'occasionally' and said she has 'no problem' with it.

'Occasionally I'll go, "Oh yeah, I'll go in and get a bit of that",' she professed.

'Even the most beautiful people have ugly days. I just don't think we all need to look like the Kardashians,' she offered

The Logie Award winner has taken to social media recently to showcase her natural beauty and enthused about her Who magazine cover on Thursday.

'When I was young I would never walk out the door without makeup because I thought I was too ordinary without it,' she stated.

'But ordinary can be beautiful too. Its about being your authentic self. Embracing who you are. And Im finally at that place,' she continued.She was photographed working in Paris on Tuesday.

But by Wednesday, reality-star-turned-supermodel Kendall Jenner was glimpsed arriving back in her hometown of Los Angeles.

The 22-year-old, looking rather pallid, wrapped a thick black coat around her petite frame as she emerged from LAX and hit the sidewalk.

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Stateside again: By Wednesday, reality-star-turned-supermodel Kendall Jenner was glimpsed arriving back in her hometown of Los Angeles from Paris

Kendall slicked her hair back and wound it into a bun, shielding her face from the California rays with a large pair of shades.

The model, who was at the center of an infamous Pepsi ad scandal, showed off her taut gams in a pair of kneel-length black leggings.

She slid on a pair of charcoal sneakers, pulled on a white top and added a splash of color by carrying a camouflage Louis Vuitton passport case.

The previous day, Kendall, the new face of the French leather goods brand Longchamp, was seen filming an advert for them in the City Of Light.

Homecoming queen: The 22-year-old, looking rather pallid, wrapped a thick black coat around her petite frame as she emerged from LAX and hit the sidewalk

That shoot took Kendall - who recently denied lesbian rumors in Vogue - to the Bibliotheque Francois-Mitterrand in the 13th arrondissement.

Kendall and her little sister Kylie are Kris' daughters by Caitlyn Jenner, the transgender ex-Olympian.

Kris also has four children by her first ex-husband, the late O.J. Simpson lawyer Robert Kardashian - Kourtney, 38, Kim, 37, Khloe, 33, and Rob, 31, Kardashian.

Only the best: She slid on a pair of charcoal sneakers, pulled on a white top and added a splash of color by carrying a camouflage Louis Vuitton passport case

Khloe is currently pregnant by Cleveland Cavalier Tristan Thompson, and once she gives birth, Kendall will be the only one of Kris' children not to be a parent herself.

Kim and her third husband Kanye West, a couple affectionately dubbed 'Kimye,' welcomed their daughter Chicago via surrogacy in January.

Kim and Kanye, who married in 2014 a year after her previous divorce was finalized, also share four-year-old daughter North and two-year-old son Saint.

On the go: Kendall slicked her hair back and wound it into a bun, shielding her face from the California rays with a large pair of shades

Lady in black: The top model arrived at LAX in an all-black ensemble

Reality star: The Keeping Up With The Kardashians star was back home after modeling work in France

Meanwhile, Kourtney has three children by her raffishly handsome on-off flame Scott Disick - Mason, eight, Penelope, five, and Reign, three.

Rob, who has recently trimmed down, has a one-year-old daughter called Dream by his ex-fiancee, the erstwhile stripper Blac Chyna.

Kylie, who is only 20 but has multiple houses, welcomed a daughter called Stormi last month with her 25-year-old rapper boyfriend Travis Scott.They both juggle successful acting careers.

But on Wednesday brothers Liam, 28, and Luke Hemsworth, 37, found time for a surfing session, hitting the waves in Malibu.

Meeting up without brother Chris, 34, the genetically-blessed siblings ignored the downpour as they headed into the ocean.

There's no raining on their parade! Liam and Luke Hemsworth ignore the downpour as they go surfing in Malibu

Both Luke and Liam appeared not bothered by the rain as they parked by the beach and unloaded their surfboards.

Donning wetsuits in preparation of the chilly weather, Liam was seen walking down to the beach, surfboard under one arm.

But the rain didn't dampen his spirits, the Hunger Games star hitting the waves and surfing.

Keeping warm: Liam donned a full length wetsuit for the surfing day

No dampening their spirits: Both Luke and Liam appeared not bothered by the rain as they parked by the beach and unloaded their surfboards

Hitting the waves: Liam was seen walking down to the beach, surfboard under one arm

The Hemsworth brothers make frequent reference of their close bond, catching up frequently in between acting projects.

Luke, who stars in Westworld, told Page Six in May 2017 the brothers used to get very physical when they were playing as kids.

'We were never really intentionally hurting each other but our games would be physical and usually involve swords and pieces of wood,' Luke said.

Surveying the ocean: Liam did a quick scan of the waves before heading into the water

Surfs up! Clearly an experienced surfer, Liam was at home on the waves

Favourite spot: The Hunger Games star is frequently spotted surfing in Malibu

Famous sibling: Liam is the youngest brother of Luke and Chris Hemsworth

'Inevitably someones fingers or face would get hit.'

Despite their fame, the Hemsworth brothers aren't above mocking each other on social media.

In August, Liam shared a hilarious happy 34th birthday message for Chris on Instagram.

Engaged or married? The actor is in a relationship with Miley Cyrus, the couple rumoured to have exchanged vows in Byron Bay over the new year

All done: After taking on several waves Liam made his way out of the water

Horseplay: Luke, who stars in Westworld, told Page Six in May 2017 the brothers used to get very physical when they were playing as kids

The Hunger Games star shared a shirtless photo of Chris, writing in the caption: 'Love you ya massive jerk!'

The photo on Instagram was of his older brother playing the Norse god superhero in a scene from one of the Thor or Avengers films.

The snap showed a shirtless Chris enjoying a dip in the water, however, Liam has photoshopped in a rubber duck and sponge on his head.

'We were never really intentionally hurting each other but our games would be physical and usually involve swords and pieces of wood': Luke revealed he, Chris and Liam would play active games

Hollywood hunk: Liam met Miley on the set of romance movie The Last Song in 2010

Slew of credits: Liam has also starred in the Hunger Games franchise, Independence Day: Resurgence and The Dressmaker

'Happy birthday Chrisso! Love u ya massive jerk ;) xox,' Liam captioned the cheeky photo, also adding the hashtags #bathtime and #rubberducky.

Liam is currently in a relationship with Miley Cyrus, with rumours the couple may have secretly tied the knot during their Byron Bay holiday over Christmas and New Year.

The young couple stayed in the celebrity hotspot at the home of Chris and his wife Elsa Pataky.

Cameo: Liam also had a brief appearance in the Dundee Super Bowl ad alongside his brother ChrisShe finalized her protracted divorce from Stephen Belafonte in December.

And by this Wednesday, onetime Spice Girl Mel B looked fit as a fiddle, flinging her arms wide during a rainy day in Los Angeles.

The Leeds-born 42-year-old made her way on leopard-print boots to the Pasadena auditions for America's Got Talent, a show she helps judge.

Out and about: By this Wednesday, onetime Spice Girl Mel B looked fit as a fiddle, flinging her arms wide during a rainy day in Los Angeles

Mel's hair was in a perfect coiff, and she concealed her enviably taut figure beneath a loose-fitting olive green shirt-dress that fell to about mid-thigh.

At the back, her outfit featured four large black patches, each of them scrawled with white text reading: 'THERE ARE NO RULES'.

A gentleman behind her could be seen holding up an umbrella, and Mel took shelter underneath it, shielding her hairdo from the downpour.

That day, she uploaded a video of herself during a bit of downtime from the auditions, dancing with her co-judge Heidi Klum.

Making her way: The Leeds-born 42-year-old made her way on leopard-print boots to the Pasadena auditions for America's Got Talent, a show she helps judge

Hello, gorgeous: Mel's hair was in a perfect coiff, and she concealed her enviably taut figure beneath a loose-fitting olive green shirt-dress that fell to about mid-thigh

Both of them were glammed up - Heidi in red sequins and Mel in baby blue - as they rapped along to Salt N Pepa's Grammy-winning 1994 single None Of Your Business.

Mel's 'THERE ARE NO RULES' top could be seen hanging on the wall behind them.

The pop act was married to dancer Jimmy Gulzar from 1998 to 2000, and then in 2007 had a clandestine Las Vegas wedding to Stephen, her second husband.

Credo: At the back, her outfit featured four large black patches, each of them scrawled with white text reading: 'THERE ARE NO RULES'

Gallantry: A gentleman behind her could be seen holding up an umbrella, and Mel took shelter underneath it, shielding her hairdo from the downpour

Though Mel filed for divorce last March, it took until December 15 for the publicly messy breakup to finally get the finishing legal touches.

That day, Stephen cheerfully told DailyMail.com outside the courthouse: 'This is the most beautiful present I could wish for. I'm newly single and ready to mingle.'

During the months of divorce proceedings, Mel claimed that Stephen and the family's nanny Lorraine Gilles connived to make sex tapes of the singing star.

A free woman: She finalized her protracted divorce from Stephen Belafonte in December

Backdrop: The pop act was married to dancer Jimmy Gulzar from 1998 to 2000, and then in 2007 had a clandestine Las Vegas wedding to Stephen, her second husband

Scary Spice, as she was once known, took out domestic violence restraining orders against Stephen and Lorraine, though those were ultimately dropped.

The German nanny insisted she'd had menages a trois with Mel and Stephen.

Mel later admitted in court that she had a relationship with Gilles.

Mel B has three daughters - one by each ex-husband and another by Eddie Murphy, who publicly confessed he was the father only after a court-ordered paternity test.

Having a ball: That day, she uploaded a video of herself during a bit of downtime from the auditions, dancing with her co-judge Heidi Klum

Classic: Both of them were glammed up - Heidi in red sequins and Mel in baby blue - as they rapped along to Salt N Pepa's Grammy-winning 1994 single None Of Your BusinessAfter speculation over whether he will or won't return to BBC soap EastEnders, Shane Richie will indeed grace the streets of Walford again as Alfie Moon.

The actor, 54, is set to reprise his role on set within a matter of weeks, to shoot new scenes, according to The Sun.

This will be the first time the former Queen Vic landlord will be back on the stalwart soap in over two years.

Back for more? After speculation over whether he will or won't return to BBC soap EastEnders, Shane Richie will indeed grace the streets of Walford again as Alfie Moon

It's perhaps not shocking news to some fans of the show, who have been hoping for a return for Alfie after his on-screen wife Kat, played by Jessie Wallace, made her comeback on Wednesday night's edition.

A source told the publication: 'The writers knew viewers would ask when Alfie would be back too, so theyve managed to convince Shane to return.

'It wont be long-term but hell play a role in a number of storylines in the coming months.'

Despite not being on EastEnders for quite some time, Shane and Jessie, 46, respired their roles for a Kat and Alfie spin-off called Redwater.

She's back again: It's perhaps not shocking news to some fans of the show, who have been hoping for a return for Alfie after his on-screen wife Kat, played by Jessie Wallace, made her comeback on Wednesday

Set in Ireland, the show aired last year on the BBC.

The show will remain as canon in the EastEnders universe, with Kat's apparent death at the end of it being addressed when Kat turns up at her own funeral.

Confusingly, Shane appeared on ITVs Lorraine this week and declared that he wasn't planning on returning to EastEnders any time soon.

MailOnline has approached the BBC for comment.

This week, fans will see Kat furious to discover Mo Harris (Laila Morse) has lied about her death, with residents also furious their fundraising efforts were all for nothing.

Look who's back in town! Shortly before her outing, new images appeared to show her character Kat Slater making an extremely loud return to EastEnders , as she left residents shell-shocked by turning up to her own wake

Burying the hatchet! Wearing her signature leopard print and red lipstick, Kat will make an entrance into the Queen Vic pub, though her reason for returning remains shrouded in secrecy

The reason for returning remains shrouded in secrecy.

Mo told Kat's cousin Stacey (Lacey Turner) and the rest of her family that she had died in Ireland, leading the entire Square to come together to raise money for her funeral.

In Friday's show Mo told Stacey: 'She was on a boat... and then she fell off. It was at night weren't it. They could hear her, but they couldn't find her.

What's she doing here? Kat's return to Albert Square will be shrouded in secrecy, as she arrives back from Ireland furious to find out Big Mo has lied about her death

Reunited: Following Stacey's devastation at Kat's 'death' she will be left reeling to see her cousin is very much alive

'They was looking for her then all of a sudden they spotted her. It was too late.

'Alfie wasn't there, him and Kat had a bust up, he went off with the kids and no one's seen them since.'

Following Kat's return, the entire Slater family will face a backlash from the Square as they drummed up the cash to pay for her funeral, leaving the feisty beauty to try and smooth things over.

Tension: Kat will be furious to discover that Mo has lied about her death, along with Stacey's mum Jean (far left played by Gillian Wright) who will also return to the Square

Family reunion: EastEnders bosses are tight-lipped about the Slater family's dramatic new story line, so fans will have to wait and see

Actress Jessie Wallace told The Daily Mirror: 'She turns up in a cab and sees a leaflet on the floor saying 'Kat Slater' about her own wake.

'So she's got to clear up all the damage a certain person has caused by saying Kat's dead.'

Fans will have to wait and see why Kat has decided to return to Walford, why Mo lied about her death, and most importantly, why she is without her children or husband Alfie.He rubbed shoulders with newly-single supermodel Gigi Hadid while filming a recent campaign for Tommy Hilfiger.

And Lewis Hamilton attracted female attention once again on Thursday, as he was mobbed by a throng of adoring female fans at Albert Park inMelbourne.

The Formula One ace, 33, smiled and happily snapped selfies as he cosied up to a glamorous blonde woman ahead of the Australian Formula One Grand Prix.

Life in the fast lane! Lewis Hamilton snapped selfies with a glamorous blonde as he was mobbed by fans in Melbourne ahead of Australian Grand Prix on Thursday

Lewis, who prides himself on his quirky sartorial displays, stayed true to his fashion roots for the casual outing.

The Brit donned a longline striped sweatshirt, which he teamed with a chain necklace and round-eye aviator sunglasses.

The racing pro seemed to be in great spirits as he stopped and signed autographs for the crowds of fans gathered to see him.

His Melbourne outing comes after he collaborated with newly-single Gigi Hadid for a playful Tommy Hilfiger video, leaving her terrified as he zipped around a race course at 120mph.

Say it in stripes: Lewis, who prides himself on his quirky sartorial displays, stayed true to his wacky fashion roots for the casual outing

Looking good: The Brit donned a longline striped sweatshirt, which he teamed with a chain necklace and round-eye aviator sunglasses

The 21-year-old supermodel was clad in the fashion giant's latest racing themed collection while new ambassador Lewis, 33, was kitted out in the range while she sped around before handing the wheel back to the expert.

In the clip, Lewis is seen standing on a racecourse and hitchhiking before Gigi pulls up and asks: 'Need a ride?' after which he hops in for the spin.

The pair began the journey around the race track, not before Lewis praised Gigi on the car and she asked what he did for a living - to which he responded: 'I do driving'.

Man of the people: The racing pro stopped and signed autographs for the crowds of fans gathered to see him

Having a whale of a time: The racing professional seemed to be in great spirits on the day

All eyes on Hamilton: Lewis seemed to be enjoying the attention as he greeted fans

When she asked if he likes going fast - the newly-single stunner put her foot to the floor however became scared midway through and asked if he wants to take over.

Gigi was left terrified as Lewis took over and applied his expertise by spinning around the race course and performing wheel spins - leading to her saying: 'Oh s**t!'

Lewis also showed off his muscled physique as he posed in skintight boxers for the new Hilfiger campaign.

Agh! His Melbourne outing comes after he collaborated with newly-single Gigi Hadid for a playful Tommy Hilfiger video, leaving her terrified as he zipped around a race course at 120mph

Tommy himself spoke of Lewis' collaboration, saying: 'I have always admired Lewis incredible endurance during the race, as well as his unique style off the track, which speak to the new generation of Tommy Guys.

'He has built his incredible career as a racing driver with passion, dedication and extremely hard work  values that I embraced when founding my brand.

'We have a history with Formula One, and this partnership builds on our heritage of collaborations within the world of motor sport.'

Woo! When she asked if he likes going fast - the newly-single stunner put her foot to the floor however became scared midway through and asked if he wants to take overParis Hilton recently supported her sister Nicky for the launch of her clothing line.

And both Hilton siblings stood by their mother's side as Kathy Hilton celebrated her 59th birthday on Wednesday.

Paris, 37, and Nicky, 34, were all smiles as they arrived for lunch in Beverly Hills with their youthful mother.

We are family: Both Hilton sisters stood by their mother's side as Kathy Hilton celebrated her 59th birthday on Wednesday

Paris wore a floral print dress with a deep plunging neckline that displayed plenty of the heiress' cleavage.

The blonde beauty shielded her eyes with oversize cats eye sunglasses and wore a pair of simple black pumps on her feet.

Sister Nicky meanwhile went with simple blue jeans and black top for the festivities - however she added a quirky touch to the outfit with cat-shaped buttons.

Famous festivities: Paris Jackson, 19, posed with the Hiltons in a social media snap

Good kids: Paris Hilton, 37, and Nicky Hilton, 34, were all smiles as they arrived for lunch in Beverly Hills with their youthful mother

The girls' evergreen mother, Kathy, also went with tight denim on her shapely gams, paired with a white top for her birthday.

She braced herself against the chilly day with a blue blazer.

On her feet the mother-of-four, whose actual birthday is March 13, wore pink high heels and she wore her wavy blonde tresses loose for the afternoon.

Taking the plunge: Paris wore a floral print dress with a deep plunging neckline that displayed plenty of the heiress' cleavage

Future's so bright: The blonde beauty shielded her eyes with oversize cats eye sunglasses and wore a pair of simple black pumps on her feet

Not exactly strugging: Paris alone has an estimated fortune of $300million, according to International Business Times

Also in attendance was another Paris from a world-famous family - the Jackson variety.

The daughter of Michael Jackson went colorfully incognito for the afternoon, entering The Palm Restaurant in a brightly colored hemp fabric hoodie.

The 19-year-old wore black leggings and Ugg boots for the rainy afternoon.

Dressed down: Sister Nicky meanwhile went with simple blue jeans and black top for the festivities - however she added a quirky touch to the outfit with cat-shaped buttons

Celebrity skin: Paris left little to the imagination with her garment

Sealed with a kiss: The reality TV star kisses her mom goodbye

From Paris with love: Also in attendance was another Paris from a world-famous family - the Jackson variety

Casual: The 19-year-old wore black leggings and Ugg boots for the rainy afternoon

On Saturday, Paris Hilton showed her support for sister Nicky, at the Kitson Kitross launch of her clothing collaboration line, Nicky Hilton X Tolani.

The Mommy And Me capsule collection was modeled by social media sensations, Mila and Emma Stauffer.

Paris alone has an estimated fortune of $300million, according to International Business Times.The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills alum Yolanda Hadid bundled up in a $253 Alpha Industries 'MA-1 VF NASA' flight jacket to brave the 30F-degree winter storm in Manhattan on Wednesday.

The snowfall marked the fourth nor'easter in three weeks, which canceled flights and closed schools throughout New York and greater New England.

The 54-year-old mother-of-three paired her grey bomber featuring patriotic patches and orange lining with a matching scarf, ripped blue skinny jeans, and b&w sneakers.

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Nor'easter! The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills alum Yolanda Hadid bundled up in a $253 Alpha Industries 'MA-1 VF NASA' flight jacket to brave the 30F-degree winter storm in Manhattan on Wednesday

The Making a Model host reportedly bought a few potted succulents at a local nursery for her heartbroken daughter Gigi, who's redecorating following her March 13 split from Zayn Malik.

'He's a beautiful human being from Bradford, England,' Hadid (born van den Herik) told MailOnline back in February of Zayn.

'He's from the same background that I'm from, him and I get along great and he's like a son to me. It's all good.'

Meanwhile, the newly-single IMG Model - turning 23 next month - was also spotted Wednesday heading inside a Maybelline shoot with help from her own umbrella handler.

Snow day: The 54-year-old mother-of-three paired her grey bomber featuring patriotic patches and orange lining with a matching scarf, ripped blue skinny jeans, and b&w sneakers

Shopping for plants: The Making a Model host reportedly bought a few potted succulents at a local nursery for her heartbroken daughter Gigi, who's redecorating following her March 13 split from Zayn Malik

Hadid (born van den Herik) told MailOnline back in February of Zayn: 'He's a beautiful human being...Him and I get along great and he's like a son to me'

The 25-year-old ex-1D boybander first met Gigi (born Jelena) at a friend's birthday party in 2014, and he later enlisted her to star in his Pillowtalk music video in 2016.

'The only way that we can live, is if we grow,' Yolanda - who boasts 4.1M followers - cryptically posted the day her daughter announced the break-up.

'The only way that we can grow is if we change. The only way that we can change is if we learn. The only way we can learn is if we are exposed. And the only way that we can become exposed is if we throw ourselves out into the open. And so it is... #Life.'

Turning 23 next month: Meanwhile, the newly-single IMG Model was also spotted Wednesday heading inside a Maybelline shoot with help from her own umbrella handler

It's over: The 25-year-old ex-1D boybander first met Gigi (born Jelena) at a friend's birthday party in 2014, and he later enlisted her to star in his Pillowtalk music video in 2016

Yolanda cryptically posted the day her daughter announced the break-up: 'The only way that we can live, is if we grow. The only way that we can grow is if we change'

Hours later, newly-blond Malik unfollowed both the half-Jordanian, half-Dutch beauty as well as her mother on Instagram.

The Believe Me author first found fame working as a Ford Model for 15 years, and she frequently shares retro snaps like the beach shot Friday taken in the eighties by Marc & Paula Kayne.

The Dutch-born blonde - who divorced David Foster last May - also has a 21-year-old daughter Bella and 18-year-old son Anwar from her six-year marriage to ex-husband #2 Mohamed Hadid.

'#NoAgeAttached': The Believe Me author first found fame working as a Ford Model for 15 years, and she frequently shares retro snaps like the beach shot Friday taken in the eighties by Marc & Paula KayneShe's a doting mom who just welcomed a baby daughter into her family.

And Kim Kardashian continued to prioritize her children as she headed to a children's store in Los Angeles on Thursday, ready to lavish her little ones with even more presents.

The reality star, 37, had the Keeping Up With The Kardashians camera crew in tow as she made a stop at Sap and Honey.

All eyes on her! Kim Kardashian filmed Keeping Up With The Kardashians around Los Angeles on Wednesday, and even made a stop at a children's store at one point during her day

Kim had clearly dressed in preparation for the rainy day ahead, bundling up in a soft bright blue sweater and loose teal jacket to protect from the chilly temperatures.

But the rainy day didn't stop Kim from dressing to turn every head her way.

The star showcased her gym-honed physique in a pair of clingy black leggings from 2XU Calabasas, a company which has teamed up with her husband Kanye West's line, Yeezy.

Kim made a quick entrance to the store, looking casual yet cool with her brunette tresses cascading down in soft waves.

Can't rain on her parade! The rainy day didn't stop Kim from dressing to turn every head her way

Legs get going! The star showcased her gym-honed physique in a pair of clingy black leggings from 2XU Calabasas, a company which has teamed up with her husband Kanye West's line, Yeezy, as she arrived to Sap and Honey

Bundled up in blue! Kim had clearly dressed in preparation for the rainy day ahead, bundling up in a soft bright blue sweater and loose teal jacket to protect from the chilly temperatures

She brought out her gorgeous complexion with a coat of makeup, including a shade of smoky eye shadow to inject an edgy touch to her glammed up look.

The star was also spotted out at a second location on Thursday as she continued filming her show.

Though one of her stops was at a children's store, Kim appeared to be without her little ones.

The businesswoman has daughters North, four, Chicago, two months, and son Saint, two, with Kanye.

Simply stunning: She brought out her gorgeous complexion with a coat of makeup, including a shade of smoky eye shadow to inject an edgy touch to her glammed up look

Doting mom! The businesswoman has daughters North, four, Chicago, two months, and son Saint, two, with Kanye

Kim recently opened up about how her busy schedule has impacted her beauty routine, admitting she's scheduled last-minute facials for 10PM after putting her children to bed.

'Like last night at 10:00 P.M., I went to get a facial,' she told Glamour. 'I was like, OK, I've put all the kids to bedI have to take care of myself. I really needed this facial, and I'll go to bed at midnight tonight.'

She added: 'My schedule is really intense, but I feel like it's still a priority to me to pamper myself and take care of myself for my own sanity.'Kanye West is known around the world by his nickname Yeezy.

But the Chinese firm Fujian Baby Network Technology Co. has apparently filed to trademark the moniker, TMZ reports citing court documents.

Though West's company obtained the copyright on 'Yeezy' to sell shoes in 2013, they relinquished it for all other clothes last year.

Trouble ahead?: Kanye West is known by his nickname Yeezy, but the Chinese firm Fujian Baby Network Technology Co. has apparently filed to trademark the moniker, TMZ reports

After Fujian Baby Network Technology Co. filed to trademark 'Yeezy' for clothes, West's company sprang into action to do the same.

Unfortunately for the rapper, because Fujian Baby Network Technology Co. filed first, the trademark office has given preference to the Chinese company, which wants to use it for the term Yeezy Boost.

Should West want to use the Yeezy name for anything other than shoes, he may face a potential legal battle, adds TMZ.

West is not the first member of his family to run into a problem of this kind.

Kanye's kicks: Though West's company obtained the copyright on 'Yeezy' to sell shoes in 2013, they relinquished it for all other clothes last year

His half-sister-in-law Kylie Jenner, 20, sells globally famous lip kits under her own first name, and recently attempted to copyright: 'KYLIE.'

She was legally opposed by Australian pop icon Kylie Minogue, but the opposition was pulled in January, leading to speculation of a settlement.

Minogue, 49, told Rolling Stone that 'it was nothing personal at all,' and described the conflict as 'wrapped up' without needing 'to go to court.'

She insisted: 'I've never met Kylie Jenner. I've never met any member of the family - actually, I've met Kendall just in passing at a fashion event - but I honestly don't know them.'

Getting a move on: After Fujian Baby Network Technology Co. filed to trademark 'Yeezy' for clothes, West's company sprang into action to do the same

West and Jenner have another similarity - each of them has welcomed a baby daughter into the world this year.

On February 1, Jenner gave birth to a little girl named Stormi Webster, whose father is 25-year-old rapper Travis Scott (real name Jacques Webster).

Meanwhile, West and his wife Kim Kardashian used a surrogate to bring their third child, a daughter named Chicago, into the world this January.She's the Married At First Sight contestant who quickly became a breakout star thanks to her dramatic storyline.

And while Tracey Jewel has received tremendous support from fans across Australia, the single mum has also been bombarded with harsh criticism about her parenting.

Speaking exclusively to Daily Mail Australia on Wednesday, the 35-year-old, who is a mother to an eight-year-old daughter, revealed she was blindsided the overwhelming responses and often felt bullied.

Harsh criticism: While Tracey Jewel has received tremendous support from fans across Australia, the single mum has also been bombarded with harsh criticism about her parenting

'There's been a lot of Instagram comments about being a bad mum and like, 'What type of role model are you?' said Tracey.

'I'm not the type of person to fight back, but if I did.

She continued: 'I'd be saying, 'What type of role model are you bullying someone? What type of example does that set you bullying me in front of our children?''

Hitting back: 'I'm not the type of person to fight back, but if I did, I'd be saying, 'What type of role model are you bullying someone? What type of example does that set you bullying me in front of our children?',' said Tracey

It's not the first time the Perth-native has expressed her concerns over the backlash.

Writing a blog post for Kidspot on Thursday, Tracey expressed her frustration with negative responses from viewers.

'What shocked me being thrown well and truly into the public eye was the cyber-bullying and nasty comments - about my looks, my 'marriages', my books, my role as a mother,' she wrote.

Shocked: 'What shocked me being thrown well and truly into the public eye was the cyber-bullying and nasty comments - about my looks, my 'marriages', my books, my role as a mother,' she wrote

'I've always been an advocate of a girl code that I've discussed at length and one thing I do stand for as a role model for other women and for my daughter is not to hate on other women!'

She said her daughter from a previous marriage was not affected in any way by her stint on the show and the primary school student has already met Tracey's new boyfriend Sean Thomsen.

'She's been fine with this whole thing. I've been open and honest with her not to be filmed or part of it, but I certainly kept her in the loop about what's been happening,' she shared.She's been making appearances around the country promoting a new documentary about her late ex-husband Elvis Presley.

And on Wednesday, Priscilla Presley was in New York for a special media luncheon to publicize the HBO film.

It followed her trips to South x Southwest in Austin, Texas, and to Nashville, Tennessee, where she participated in panel discussions about the project and screenings.

Preserving his legacy: On Wednesday, Priscilla Presley was in New York for a special media luncheon to publicize the HBO documentary about her late ex-husband Elvis

On Wednesday, Priscilla, 72, looked incredibly stylish in an ankle-length black dress with long sleeves.

She added a dark red scarf wrapped around her neck and matching dark red boots.

Her red hair was styled in loose curls and she wore black eye liner and mascara and red lip color.

Priscilla serves as an executive producer on the documentary directed by Thom Zimny and which will premiere on HBO on April 14.

Had a hand in the project: Priscilla serves as an executive producer on the documentary directed by Thom Zimny and which will premiere on HBO on April 14

Elvis's ex: The 72-year-old looked incredibly stylish in an ankle-length black dress with long sleeves. She added a dark red scarf wrapped around her neck and wore her hair is loose curls

Priscilla has spent a lifetime preserving and protecting the legacy of her ex-husband.

The documentary features archive photos and footage from private collections as well as insights from music industry stars including Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, Stax Records' David Porter and Sun Records' Sam Phillips.

Porter has also been on the publicity tour with Priscilla.

Answered questions: She was joined for the media event by Memphis native and Stax Records songwriter David Porter, 76, who is featured in the documentary

The team: On hand, too, was director Thom Zimny, left with Priscilla, and close Elvis friend and the film's executive producer Jerry Schilling, 76, right with Porter

The documentary explores Elvis's ties to Memphis and the influence the city and its community of artists had on him.

'He always came back to Memphis because Hollywood didn't get him,' Priscilla told the audience at SXSW, as reported by BigCountryHomepage.com. 'And he didn't like Hollywood. He needed to come back to where things felt real.'

'So that's why I say it takes you on a journey,' she added.

Elvis died age 42 at his Memphis estate Graceland in 1977.

He and Priscilla had married in 1967 and they welcomed their daughter Lisa Marie the following year.

They divorced in 1973 but Priscilla remained the rock and roll star's beneficiary when he died and as the head of Elvis Presley Enterprises, she turned Graceland into one of the top tourist atrractions in America.

Famous romance: Elvis and Priscilla married in 1967 and welcomed their daughter Lisa Marie the following year. They divorced in 1973

Legend: Elvis, pictured at Graceland in 1957, died age 42 at his Memphis estate in 1977. 'He needed to come back to where things felt real,' Priscilla explainedShe fell deeply for Jarrod Woodgate on Bachelor In Paradise.

But Keira Maguire has admitted it wasn't exactly love at first sight when they met on-set of the Channel Ten dating show.

Speaking to OK! magazine on Thursday, the 32-year-old said she was reluctant to get involved with the Bachelorette runner-up because he had just split from Sophie Monk.

'I didn't want to break his heart': Keira Maguire has admitted it wasn't love at first sight when she met boyfriend Jarrod Woodgate on Bachelor In Paradise

'I was surprised he was there. He'd just broken up with Sophie. I was like 'I'm not going there,'' she said.

'Imagine being the girl who breaks his heart for the second time on TV? But I got to know him better.

She added: 'When I [arrived], I thought Luke [McLeod] was hot and then Sam [Cochrane] and I connected. He was the only one I could see myself going further with... There was an instant connection.'

Over: Speaking to OK! magazine on Thursday, the 32-year-old said she was reluctant to get involved with the Bachelorette runner-up because he had just split from Sophie Monk

The pair have been seemingly inseparable since finding love on the show and have been pictured on more than one occasion packing on the PDA.

In an interview with TV Week recently, Jarrod revealed: 'I've never felt so good  I'm in such a good place right now.'

The show is set to air this Sunday.

Reluctant: 'I was surprised he was there. He'd just broken up with Sophie. I was like 'I'm not going there,'' she said. 'Imagine being the girl who breaks his heart for the second time on TV? But I got to know him better'

In a recent trailer, Keira is seen erupting into tears as she shares her struggle to find 'the one.'

The busty blonde breaks down when speaking to camera, saying: 'I just want someone to love me for me.'

She adds: 'I'm kind of thinking, what's wrong with me, like?'

The former Bachelor star is also seen on another day, walking off and crying.

Keira is also seen at the start of the trailer, walking in in a blue dress, with the voiceover saying: 'Wherever Keira goes, drama follows.'

'I just want someone to love me for me': In a recent trailer, Keira is seen erupting into tears as she shares her struggle to find 'the one'

Emotional: She adds: 'I'm kind of thinking, what's wrong with me, like?'

Then, in a series of quick-fire scenes, Keira is shown yelling: 'Do not f**k with me!'

She adds, 'You're f**king with the wrong person. You will lose,' before storming out of the room.

'I'm not someone you want to mess with right now.'

Keira is believed to have found true love with Jarrod Woodgate on the show.

He's rumoured to have proposed during their time on the dating series.

Fiery: Then, in a series of quick-fire scenes, Keira is shown yelling: 'Do not f**k with me!' She adds, 'You're f**king with the wrong person. You will lose,' before storming out of the room

New man? She's believed to have found love with Jarrod Woodgate on Bachelor in Paradise

NW reported this month that the 'engaged' pair are living together in Melbourne, with Keira moving into his home.

'Sources tell us Keira's already packed her bags and moved to Jarrod's hometown of Melbourne,' reported the publication.

The blonde's alleged relocation from Sydney to Melbourne comes after a recent show promo revealed a man, thought to be Jarrod, getting down on one knee to propose.

Speaking to TV Week earlier in the month, the vineyard manager said he was in a great place in his life.

'I've never felt so good - I'm in such a good place right now,' said Jarrod.

He also added that he would definitely be interested in marriage, but was just waiting for the right girl.Florence Alexandra has revealed she was caught up in a love triangle on Bachelor In Paradise with her ex Jake Ellis and new admirer Davey Lloyd.

The 28-year-old Dutch model confessed on Thursday that she briefly dated Jake before the show, but the hunk was keen to 'rekindle' things when they landed in Fiji.

She added that things became strained when Davey also made a beeline for her - joking that 'the entire camp' wanted to romance her at one point.

Cheeky: Florence Alexandra has revealed she was caught up in a love triangle on Bachelor In Paradise with her ex Jake Ellis and new admirer Davey Lloyd

Florence, who failed to win Matty 'J' Johnson's heart on last year's The Bachelor, had no trouble attracting male admirers on The Bachelor In Paradise - which debuts this Sunday.

She admitted she had a fling with Jake, 31, but it was never 'super intense' and it 'fizzled out' after a couple of dates.

'But then he rocked up in Paradise and was pretty aggressive in pursuing me, even though I was getting to know Davey. I didn't know he was still interested' she told OK! magazine.

Interesting: She said she dated Jake (left) briefly before the show, but he wanted to rekindle things when they got to Fiji. Things became strained when Davey (right) made a beeline for her

Hot totty: Florence said her co-star and good friend Tara Pavlovic perfectly described her love dilemma

Florence said her co-star and good friend Tara Pavlovic perfectly described her love dilemma.

'I went back to our bungalow and she was like, "How does it feel that the entire camp wants to root you?" It was flattering, but a bit stressful, too!' she confessed.

Discussing her romance with Jake further with WHO magazine, she hinted that the hunk's efforts to woo her were successful.

Loving the attention? 'I went back to our bungalow and she was like, "How does it feel that the entire camp wants to root you?" It was flattering, but a bit stressful, too!' she confessed

'I knew either we would rekindle or we would both go our own way and he decided to put a lot of effort to get me back. That was cool with me!' she confided.

But confusing matters once again, she added of Davey: 'I hadn't met him before but I'm very excited he's going to be there.'

Davey was Sam Frost's failed suitor in 2015, while Jake came up short while pursuing Georgia Love on The Bachelorette.Wednesday night's grand finale episode of Married At First Sight was not short of drama.

And Australia couldn't get enough, with more than 1.753 million metro viewers tuning in.

The explosive installment - which saw Nasser Sultan blasting 'villain' Davina Rankin for her immature ways - saw Channel Nine rise to the top of the ratings.

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Australia vowed to watch! Married At First Sight enjoyed a MASSIVE ratings win on Wednesday, as more than 1.7 million tuned in for the grand finale episode

Married At First Sight attracted 1,753,000 million metro viewers across the five capital cities, landing top spot in the ratings.

Seven News and Today Tonight came in second with 951,000 metro viewers, while My Kitchen Rules took home the fourth spot at 936,000.

Channel Ten's The Project fell down to fifteenth spot with 442,000.

Top spot: Married At First Sight attracted 1,753,000 million metro viewers across the five capital cities, while Seven's My Kitchen Rules came in at fourth spot with 936,000

Married At First Sight provided plenty of captivating moments on Wednesday night's episode.

Who could forget when Nasser Sultan quickly brought busty bikini model and co-star Davina Rankin back down to earth.

As footage of Dean Wells and Davina's TV 'affair' was shown on camera, Davina, 26, failed to take any responsibility, stating: 'I'm confused. What did I do [wrong]?'

Drama: Wednesday night's episode saw Nasser Sultan quickly bring co-star Davina Rankin [pictured] back down to earth. As footage of Dean Wells and Davina's TV 'affair' was shown on camera, Davina, 26, failed to take any responsibility, stating: 'I'm confused. What did I do [wrong]?'

Vocal: Nasser [pictured], 50, lashed out, saying: 'You're old enough and smart enough to understand consequences. Darling, you have to grow up. 'It's not all hashtag, Davina, hashtag, coconut oil'

The brunette's lack of remorse caused her co-star and Dean's ex 'TV wife' Tracey Jewel to say that she had 'no morals.'

However it was Nasser's major diss and one-liner that had fans applauding the 50-year-old.

The well-moisturised Egyptian lashed out, saying: 'You're old enough and smart enough to understand consequences. Darling, you have to grow up.

'It's not all hashtag, Davina, hashtag, coconut oil,' Nasser continued.

Emotional: Tracey Jewel [pictured], 34, was left fuming after footage saw her ex 'TV husband' Dean Wells asking the boys on a night out, who wanted to 'bang' her. 'I found it disrespectful how he just offered me up to everyone. Like, wow!,' Tracey said after seeing the playback

Nasser was not the only one to have exploded, with Tracey, 34, left fuming after footage saw Dean asking the boys on a night out, who wanted to 'bang' her.

'I found it disrespectful how he just offered me up to everyone. Like, wow!,' Tracey said after seeing the playback.

Dean tried to defend himself and said he wasn't 'offering' her up.

'You instigated, you kept saying, "Who would nail Tracey?" Who talks like that? Where's the respect?,' Tracey said.

Dean hit back, saying it was just 'a bit of a joke.'She is the beloved AFL WAG who is a TV and radio presenter, in-demand model and fitness guru, all while juggling four young children.

And now Bec Judd can add the title of parenting author to her list of trades with the highly anticipated release of her first book, aptly titled The Baby Bible.

The 35-year-old surprised her legions of Instagram followers on Friday by sharing a snap of herself with a copy of her book.

Its the modern womans guide to motherhood!' Bec Judd can add the title of acclaimed parenting author to her list of trades with the highly anticipated release of her first book, aptly titled The Baby Bible

'Guess what? My new baby arrived today - The Baby Bible to be exact- my first book! Its the modern womans guide to having a baby,' she declared to her fans.

The brunette beauty explained that her soon-to-be released book will cover all the ups and downs from pregnancy to their first year.

The Baby Bible is broken in up into nine chapters of each month of a pregnancy, along with five additional chapters about postnatal care for mum and bub.

It's here! The 35-year-old surprised her legions of Instagram followers on Friday. 'My baby arrived today - The Baby Bible to be exact- my first book! Its the modern womans guide to having a baby,' she declared to her fans

Advice and wisdom: The Baby Bible is broken in up into nine chapters of each month of a pregnancy, along with five additional chapters about postnatal care for mum and bub

Bec's book is set to be filled with plenty of insightful anecdotes of her experiences shared with her former Carlton star husband Chris Judd and their kids Oscar, Billie, and one-year-old twin sons Tom and Darcy.

'Ive covered EVERYTHING - the good, the gross and everything in between,' she explained.

Bec also spriuked limited signed copies available for her devotees: 'First in best dressed. Its the perfect gift for new mums or mummas to be.'

The author took to her Instagram story to urge her fans to pre-order their copy before it sells out on the Booktopia website.

Motherhood: Bec's book is set to be filled with plenty of insightful anecdotes of her experiences shared with her former Carlton star husband Chris Judd and their kids Oscar, Billie, and one-year-old twins Tom and Darcy

Fans of the media identity congratulated her on new venture: 'I am sure its filled with lots of great info.'

'The gospel according to Juddy,' an avid fan of the parenting author commented.

While someone else added: 'Clearly we need to read Bec's words of wisdom!'

The Baby Bible is set for release on April 24.She debuted her new relationship with Sean Thomsen, 34, on Tuesday night's episode of Married At First Sight.

And despite being run off her feet with a whirlwind press tour, on Thursday, Tracey Jewel found a moment to log onto her Facebook account to update her relationship status.

Taking to the social media site, the 35-year-old made it 'official', ensuring all her friends knew how much she 'loved' her railway technician beau.

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Look away Dean! On Thursday, MAFS' Tracey Jewel took to social media to make her relationship with Sean Thomsen Facebook official

'So much love for this man,' captioned Tracey.

Claiming the start of the relationship was on Wednesday, the beauty managed to rack up nearly 40 likes within the first hour of the exciting announcement.

And it wasn't the only social media update Tracey made, also changing her profile picture.

It's Facebook official! Claiming the start of the relationship was on Wednesday, the beauty managed to rack up nearly 40 likes within the first hour of the exciting announcement

He's made history! Uploading one with Sean, the photo marks the first time Tracey's posed alongside a boyfriend in her profile picture

Uploading one with Sean, the photo marks the first time Tracey's posed alongside a boyfriend in her profile picture.

And really getting on board with the new beginning, the author also changed her cover photo to one alongside all her female co-stars in the social experiment show.

Finding some down time after a hectic media schedule, Thursday afternoon saw Tracey and Sean arrive at Sydney airport to head back to Perth.

Friends for life! And really getting on board a new beginning, the author also changed her cover photo to one alongside all her female co-stars in the social experiment show

Loved up: Tracey declared her love for Sean in a heartfelt Instagram post on Wednesday

Dressed in an oversized grey sweater, she flaunted her trim pins and donned a pale and downcast complexion.

Speaking to Daily Mail Australia on Wednesday, the mother-of-one revealed she had been ill with the flu and exhaustion while Sean had been struck with a bout of gastro.

The happy couple debuted their new relationship on Tuesday night after it was revealed on the hit Network Nine show.She's a breakfast radio host and shares three children with partner Chris Saville.

And Chrissie Swan revealed that she sleeps in her own bed, in a different room in the family home, once every two weeks.

'I hide away in here,' the 44-year-old in an Instagram post on Thursday.

'I hide away there': Chrissie Swan, 44, revealed to Instagram on Thursday, why she sleeps in her own bed in a different room, in the family home, every TWO WEEKS. Pictured with partner Chris Saville

'Remember when you were growing up and you had your own room with all your own stuff in it and then you partner up and you have to share everything and it's lovely and all you ever wanted,' Chrissie began.

'But you look back at having your own room as a child and young adult and you wonder why you took it for granted? Yep. Well, solution: This is 'my room'. I hide away in here about once a fortnight when I am bone tired from years of 4.30am alarms.

'And I just need ONE BIG BLOCK OF SLEEP SWEET SLEEP OMG PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT'S GOOD AND HOLY,' the comedian continued.

Early starts: The breakfast radio host revealed to her fans that she sleeps in a separate bed and room when she's 'bone tired': 'I hide away in here about once a fortnight when I am bone tired from years of 4.30am alarms'

Chrissie wrote the caption alongside an image of her bed that featured white Egyptian cotton sheets with a geometric print, textured beige pillows, a pink velvet headboard, next to a square wooden side table and stylish lamp.

Fans were quick to take to the comments section offering their thoughts, with one writing: 'Yes this is the best idea!'

And another with: 'This is my dream, well this and a decent sleep of a night. Enjoy!'

The comedian continued: 'And I just need ONE BIG BLOCK OF SLEEP SWEET SLEEP OMG PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT'S GOOD AND HOLY'

Chrissie shares three children with partner Chris Saville, sons Kit and Leo, and daughter Peggy.

While the couple are content on remaining unmarried, Chrissie admitted back in December 2016, that her then seven-year-old son Leo voiced his desire for them to wed.

She told Today Extra at the time of their son's reasoning: 'Because he goes to a school where all the parents are married. But me and my fella never got around to it.'British brand Boohoo hosted a Block Party at Los Angeles' The Highlight Room on Wednesday night to offer a sneak peek of their Zendaya Edit line.

So naturally, Zendaya herself was a showstopper at the star-studded party, showing off her svelte frame in a pearl grey jumpsuit.

The 21-year-old's outfit featured a plunging neckline, and it was cinched around her enviably trim waistline with a matching sash.

The lady herself: British brand Boohoo hosted a Block Party at Los Angeles' The Highlight Room on Wednesday night to offer a sneak peek of their Zendaya Edit line

She gathered her hair severely into a high, elaborate bun, garnishing her ensemble with a pair of dazzlingly shiny hoop earrings.

The Spider-Man: Homecoming actress accentuated her movie star features with a flattering makeup job, sticking her hands in her pockets.

Her jumpsuit featured trouser legs hemmed just above the ankle, offering a full view of the sleek black stilettos she had opted for that evening.

Star power: So naturally, Zendaya herself was a showstopper at the star-studded party, showing off her svelte frame in a pearl grey jumpsuit

Radiant: The 21-year-old's outfit featured a plunging neckline, and it was cinched around her enviably trim waistline with a matching sash

Nick Viall, who was The Bachelor right before the greying Arie Luyendyk Jr., was there with his old Bachelor In Paradise castmate Ashley Iaconetti.

Ashley draped her enviably slim figure into a black and dress with sheer sleeves and a white stripe sliding down each side.

Sweeping her hair into a high ponytail, she clashed the black of her dress against a pristine pair of white platform sneakers.

Reunited: Nick Viall, who was The Bachelor right before the greying Arie Luyendyk Jr., was there with his old Bachelor In Paradise castmate Ashley Iaconetti

Tres chic: Ashley draped her enviably slim figure into a black and dress with sheer sleeves and a white stripe sliding down each side

Meanwhile, Nick threw a faded denim jacket over a black and white hoodie, which he complemented with torn black jeans and black shoes.

Nick chose Vanessa Grimaldi to be his fiancee at the end of his season of The Bachelor, but by last August it emerged their relationship had collapsed.

Paris Hilton was a sight to see at the event, showcasing her chiseled midriff beneath a black bralette that also offered a generous view of her cleavage.

Reality TV icon: Sweeping her hair into a high ponytail, she clashed the black of her dress against a pristine pair of white platform sneakers

Bombshell: Meanwhile, Nick threw a faded denim jacket over a black and white hoodie, which he complemented with torn black jeans and black shoes

History: Nick chose Vanessa Grimaldi to be his fiancee at the end of his season of The Bachelor, but by last August it emerged their relationship had collapsed

Black straps ran down either side of her stomach, and were connected to one that ran up her chest to a lacy black choker encircling her neck.

Placing her hands at her slender waistline, she posed up a storm in a red, orange blue, black and white striped coat that fell nearly to the ankle.

Her wavy blonde hair fell free, cropped to her shoulders, and the sex tape icon had caked her face in a heavily applied dose of makeup.

When you got it: Paris Hilton was a sight to see at the event, showcasing her chiseled midriff beneath a black bralette that also offered a generous view of her cleavage

Slinky: Black straps ran down either side of her stomach, and were connected to one that ran up her chest to a lacy black choker encircling her neck

Paris is engaged to marry the dashingly square-jawed actor Chris Zylka, and was recently celebrating with her mother Kathy, whose 59th birthday was last week.

Sistine and Sophia Stallone, two of Sylvester Stallone's daughters by his latest wife Jennifer Flavin, had also turned up to the starry event.

Sophia, 21, flaunted her decolletage in a striped crop top, holding a black clutch to her side and slipping into high-waisted black slacks.

Aglow: Placing her hands at her slender waistline, she posed up a storm in a red, orange blue, black and white striped coat that fell nearly to the ankle

Family matters: Paris is engaged to marry the dashingly square-jawed actor Chris Zylka, and was recently celebrating with her mother Kathy, whose 59th birthday was last week

Meanwhile, 19-year-old Sistine wore a half-turtlenecked crop top that had a white background with a red, white and orange striped stripe running round it.

She slid on a pair of bell-bottoms that had vertical black, orange, white and powder pink stripes running from waistline to hemline.

Shameless star Emma Kenney, 18, put on a sheeny miniskirt that was half powder pink on one side and half a darker pink at the other.

Sister act: Sistine (left) and Sophia Stallone (right), two of Sylvester Stallone's daughters by his latest wife Jennifer Flavin, had also turned up to the starry event

Such glamour: Sophia, 21, flaunted her decolletage in a striped crop top, holding a black clutch to her side and slipping into high-waisted black slacks

Legging it: Meanwhile, 19-year-old Sistine wore a half-turtlenecked crop top that had a white background with a red, white and orange striped stripe running round it

Retro chic: She slid on a pair of bell-bottoms that had vertical black, orange, white and powder pink stripes running from waistline to hemline

She complemented that skirt with an elegant top that was splattered with pink, red, white, charcoal and purple patterning.

Ashley Greene offered quite the view of her cleavage in an off-the-shoulder dress that sported a black and white floral motif on a scarlet field.

Tightened-in around the waistline, the outfit fell to just above the ankle, and she balanced on an open-toed pair of ankle-strap heels.

Lady in red: Ashley Greene offered quite the view of her cleavage in an off-the-shoulder dress that sported a black and white floral motif on a scarlet field

Celeb scion: Kevin Smith's 18-year-old daughter Harley Quinn Smith bared her taut tummy in a short-sleeved black crop top that matched her own ankle-strap stilettos

Hollywood legacy: Her top went elegantly with a pair of ankle-length black and neon-pink trousers that featured slits running up to around mid-thigh

Kevin Smith's 18-year-old daughter Harley Quinn Smith bared her taut tummy in a short-sleeved black crop top that matched her own ankle-strap stilettos.

Her top went elegantly with a pair of ankle-length black and neon-pink trousers that featured slits running up to around mid-thigh.

Kelsey Grammer's 26-year-old daughter Greer flashed quite a lot of cleavage herself, pulling on a black, red and white dress that was elaborately floral.

Starry family: Kelsey Grammer's 26-year-old daughter Greer flashed quite a lot of cleavage herself, pulling on a black, red and white dress that was elaborately floral

Coordinated: Smiling radiantly through bright red lipstick and letting her blonde hair down, she matched a black leather jacket with black low-top boots

New film star: Storm Reid, a 14-year-old star of the new Ava DuVernay film A Wrinkle In Time based on Madeleine L'Engle's novel, was also one of the guests

Smiling radiantly through bright red lipstick and letting her blonde hair down, she matched a black leather jacket with black low-top boots.

Storm Reid, a 14-year-old star of the new Ava DuVernay film A Wrinkle In Time based on Madeleine L'Engle's novel, was also one of the guests.

Another child actress there was 15-year-old Jenna Ortega, who has appeared on Jane The Virgin and done voice work for Disney Channel's Stuck In The Middle.

Up-and-comers: Another child actress there was 15-year-old Jenna Ortega, who has appeared on Jane The Virgin and done voice work for Disney Channel's Stuck In The Middle

Flaunting her assets: Gigi Gorgeous pulled a see-through fishnet turltenecked mini-dress over a solid black bodysuit, pulling on thigh-high high-heeled boots

Slinky: She had slathered her face in a heavy layer of makeup, allowing her luxuriously wavy black hair to tumble down over her shoulders

That winning smile: The Canadian 25-year-old posed up a storm on the black carpet, placing a hand at her waist as she beamed for the cameras at the Wednesday night fete

Gigi Gorgeous pulled a see-through fishnet turltenecked mini-dress over a solid black bodysuit, pulling on thigh-high high-heeled boots.

She had slathered her face in a heavy layer of makeup, allowing her luxuriously wavy black hair to tumble down over her shoulders.

The Canadian 25-year-old posed up a storm on the black carpet, placing a hand at her waist as she beamed for the cameras at the Wednesday night fete.

Hand at the hip: Jordyn Woods, who is famous for being friends with Kylie Jenner, teamed a navy V-neck dress hemmed at mid-thigh with a pair of white boots

Swanky watch: Accessorizing with gleaming hoop earrings, the 20-year-old gave the camera a smoldering model stare and modeled a print fanny pack

Showtime showwoman: Shameless star Emma Kenney, 18, put on a sheeny miniskirt that was half powder pink on one side and half a darker pink at the other

Jordyn Woods, who is famous for being friends with Kylie Jenner, teamed a navy V-neck dress hemmed at mid-thigh with a pair of white boots.

Accessorizing with gleaming hoop earrings, the 20-year-old gave the camera a smoldering model stare and modeled a print fanny pack.

The 22-year-old actress Kelli Berglund had arrived to the Boohoo party as well, throwing a denim jacket over a slightly sheer pink mini-dress.

Lottie Moss, a London-born 20-year-old, teamed a pale yellow miniskirt with a matching coat, clashing them against a white top and white shoes.

Swanky: The 22-year-old actress Kelli Berglund had arrived to the Boohoo party as well, throwing a denim jacket over a slightly sheer pink mini-dressThe most controversial Married At First Sight season concluded on Wednesday night, with an explosive two-part finale.

Over the eight-week run, Nine's ratings juggernaut took viewers through a journey of love, lust and heartbreak, dramatic fights and scandalous affairs.

There were 22 stars on the series and here Daily Mail Australia looks back at the BIGGEST characters to grace our screens.

Scroll down for video

From the series' worst villain EVER to the contestant who was hardest done by in their marriage: A look at Married At First Sight's biggest characters this season ... so do YOU agree?

Biggest Villain  Davina Rankin

The Instagram model was a force to be reckoned on MAFS and was also the instigator for the show's most controversial 'affair' in its five-season history.

Davina Rankin embarked on a secret relationship with fellow contestant Dean Wells behind her 'husband' Ryan Gallagher's back, which had viewers label her a 'villain'.

Biggest Villain! The Instagram model was a force to be reckoned on MAFS, and was the instigator for the show's most controversial 'affair' in its five-season history

Shock! Davina Rankin embarked on a secret relationship with fellow contestant Dean Wells behind her 'husband' Ryan Gallagher's back, which had viewers label her a 'villain'

She shocked fans when she revealed she had no regrets over her failed husband-stealing conquest, which also involved the exchange of private text messages.

When Deans TV 'wife' slammed Davina for making a move on her partner, she played dumb, asking 'what did I do?' before later adding: 'I'm so confused right now.'

A less-than-impressed Tracey hit back: 'Are you the type of woman who's happy to steal another woman's man?'

Keeping eerily calm, Davina replied: 'What? I thought your boyfriend was hot. But he didn't want to be with you.'

Most Loved - Jo 'Foxy JoJo' McPharlin

Most loved! Jo 'Foxy JoJo' McPharlin quickly became one of Married At First Sight's most lovable brides after her happy-go-lucky personality shone through, despite her 'husband' Sean Donnelly rejecting her from day one

She debuted on our screens as the bubbly blonde bride who strutted down the aisle in diamante encrusted thongs in hopes of wedding her special person.

And Jo 'Foxy JoJo' McPharlin quickly became one of Married At First Sight's most lovable brides after her happy-go-lucky personality shone through.

Fans were quick to support Jo when her 'husband' Sean Donnelly was distant from her from day one, as she attempted to make the relationship work.

In tears at their first commitment ceremony, she begged to leave after being rejected by Sean, who confessed they had 'no spark'.

The single mother, 39, returned for the reunion dinner with a glamorous makeover and an impressive 40.4k devoted followers on Instagram.

Most Bizarre - Troy Delmege

Most Bizare! Goofy groom Troy Delmege intrigued viewers with his unique cackle and raised eyebrows for his vigorous tooth brushing, pre-breakfast push-ups and overly affectionate behaviour with 'wife' Ashley and new girlfriend Carly

Goofy groom Troy Delmege certainly didn't fly under the radar this season.

In his debut episode he intrigued viewers with his unique cackle and raised eyebrows for his vigorous tooth brushing.

On his honeymoon with 'ex-wife' Ashley Irvin he cuddled up to a crocodile and demanded Ashley wait for him to do push-ups before they had breakfast.

Troy was also known for being very affectionate towards Ashley, with his PDA now focused on his romance with new girlfriend Carly Bowyer.

Biggest Diva -Nasser Sultan

Biggest Diva! Nasser Sultan, who runs a fitness group for over-50s, stole the show by boasting about his ageless complexion and youthful looks

Well-groomed! The Egyptian also had a high expectation of cleanliness and admitted to having an 'OCD' side where he 'can't stand dirt'

Nasser Sultan, who runs a fitness group for over-50s, stole the show by boasting about his ageless complexion and youthful looks.

Paired with model and alopecia-sufferer Gabrielle Bartlett on the series, Nasser claimed he moisturised as part of a 45-minute daily beauty routine.

While being well-groomed, the Egyptian also had a high expectation of cleanliness and admitted to having an 'OCD' side where he 'can't stand dirt'.

Chatterbox! Nasser was always up for gossip on the show, claiming he loved it during the dinner parties

During home stays he frantically cleaned his abode in his underwear, with NW Magazine claiming he 'refused to step foot' in his TV wife's home because he 'didn't think it was tidy enough'.

Nasser was always up for gossip on the show, claiming he loved it during the dinner parties.

Most Outspoken - Charlene Perera

Most Outspoken! Sassy bride Charlene Perera was known letting thought be known and publicly shamed the disrespectful 'wife swap' chat the grooms engaged in during their boozy boys' night

She stood up for all the Married At First Sight brides, publicly shaming the disrespectful 'wife swap' chat the grooms engaged in during their boozy boys' night.

And Charlene Perera had no regrets about confronting her male co-stars at the dinner party, including her fiery take-down of 'alpha male' Dean Wells.

The 33-year-old appeared on A Current Affair earlier this month, where she revealed: 'I just let them have it. Let them know what I thought.'

'I'm a strong woman and I think that was surprising to a lot of people': Charlene had no regrets about confronting her male co-stars at the dinner party, including her fiery take-down of 'alpha male' Dean

A furious Charlene unleashed on the males, in particular Dean, Troy and Justin, and their push-back only angered her more.

'I just think that it blew up as much as it did because I'm a strong woman and I think that was surprising to a lot of people at that table, that as a woman, I would be the one to call them out on their cr**!' she said.

Biggest Loser - Dean Wells

Biggest Loser: Dean Wells entered as the confident and controversial 'alpha male', but left as a heartbroken, loveless and shamed man

He entered as the confident and controversial 'alpha male', but left as a heartbroken, loveless and shamed man.

Dean Wells, 40, soon found himself in hot water after engaging in a secret relationship with Davina and speaking disrespectfully about 'wife' Tracey during a boozy boys' night.

The aspiring rapper named 'Visionz' skateboarded his way back into Tracey's heart, but was left heartbroken when she rejected him at the finale vows.

He broke down in tears after Tracey didn't respond in the way he had hoped to his declaration of love.

At the reunion, he was also left exposed when full details of his 'affair' and boys' night banter was revealed - which contradicted his prior retelling.

Most Normal - John Robertson and Melissa Walsh

Most Normal - John Robertson and Melissa Walsh appeared to rise above the drama and focus on nurturing their own relationship

They were the oldest couple within Married At First Sights most controversial series to date this year.

But John Robertson and Melissa Walsh appeared to rise above the drama and focus on nurturing their own relationship.

Making it all the way to the end of the experiment, the couple vowed to stay together after the show, but feared long-distance could make their journey difficult.

Hardest Done By - Ashley Irvin

Hardest Done By? Brisbane flight attendant bride Ashley Irvin often complained about her goofy groom Troy during the series, and was later blindsided by his new relationship with her friend Carly Bowyer at the reunion

Brisbane flight attendant Ashley Irvin often complained about her goofy groom Troy during the series, putting up with his bizarre behaviour and overly affectionate displays.

During the series Troy gushed about how attractive her mother was during the famous boys night and later told Ashley he loved her.

However, after the pair split during their renewal vows, Troy began a new relationship with Ashleys friend Carly unbeknownst to her.

Ashley was furious at the reunion, claiming she was blindsided by the pairs betrayal.

Married At First Sight has previously received complaints over its matchmaking process, which has produced few long-term couples.She's pregnant with her fourth child.

But on Wednesday, Hilaria Baldwin spent some quality time with her eldest daughter Carmen in New York City.

The 34-year-old yoga instructor and her four-year-old went to a West Village salon to get their nails done.

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Bonding time: On Wednesday, Hilaria Baldwin, 34, spent some quality time with her eldest daughter Carmen in New York City

The doting mom watched on as her daughter got her nails done by the manicurist.

The wellness expert looked comfortable in white sweatpants emblazoned with the words 'NEW YORK' and a colorful, baggy sweater.

Her wavy brunette tresses cascaded down her shoulders as she watched Carmen being pampered.

After their appointment, mom and daughter rugged up to walk back home, with Carmen adorably catching snowflakes on her tongue.

Chilly walk: After their appointment, mom and daughter rugged up to walk back home, with four-year-old Carmen adorably catching snowflakes on her tongue

A post shared by Hilaria Thomas Baldwin (@hilariabaldwin) on Mar 21, 2018 at 3:50pm PDT

Dad Alec, meanwhile, caught up with friends for lunch.

The 59-year-old actor braved the snowy east coast winter to grab a bite to eat in a nearby eatery while wearing a black jacket.

The Saturday Night Live funnyman was clean shaven for the excursion and his tresses showed more salt than pepper.

Daddy break time: Alec, meanwhile, caught up with friends for lunch

Also on Wednesday, Hilaria took to Instagram to show off some stretches for painful heels.

As she attempted to demonstrate the routine, she was assailed by her sons Leonardo and Rafael.

'One second. Fortunately this is only a sixty second video, you can handle it,' the busy mom patiently told two-year-old Rafael as he demanded her full attention.

Work it! Also on Wednesday, Hilaria took to Instagram to show off some stretches for painful heels.

Cuteness overload: As she attempted to demonstrate the routine, she was assailed by her sons Leonardo and RafaelShe recently starred on I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here.

And Simone Holtznagel cut a downcast figure in Kings Cross on Thursday as she appeared to exit a hotel with her luggage.

The 24-year-old failed to crack a smile while on the phone and later catching up with her Australia's Next Top Model co-star Maddy Huett-Auld and husband Dave Auld.

Stressful call? Simone Holtznagel cut a downcast figure in Kings Cross on Thursday as she appeared to exit a hotel with her luggage

The striking blonde donned a casual ensemble of a white graphic t-shirt, cuffed jeans and beige flats as she stood in the inner city street engrossed in conversation.

She wore her long tresses up in a topknot and attempted to remain low-key with a fresh-faced look and dark sunglasses.

The Wollongong-born reality star appeared to check out from her hotel stay and was spotted piling her pink suitcase into the boot of a waiting taxi.

Downcast: The 24-year-old failed to crack a smile while on the phone and later catching up with her Australia's Next Top Model co-star Maddy Huett-Auld and husband Dave Auld

Casual: She wore her long tresses up in a topknot and attempted to remain low-key with a fresh-faced look and dark sunglasses

She later joined by longtime friend Maddy at a nearby cafe, embracing her while still holding her mobile phone in her hand.

She also greeted Maddy's husband, nightclub owner Dave Auld, with a kiss as she walked into the eatery.

Simone returned home to Australia earlier in the month after spending weeks in the South African jungle competing on I'm A Celebrity.

Controversy: Simone was at the centre of a recent media storm when comedian Mick Molloy dubbed her a 'plus size model' as the Triple M radio host compared her to 'baby elephant'

Hands on: The Wollongong-born reality star appeared to check out from her hotel stay and was spotted piling her pink suitcase into the boot of a waiting taxi

She was at the centre of a recent media storm when comedian Mick Molloy dubbed her a 'plus size model' as the Triple M radio host compared her to 'baby elephant'.

'Being a model, people talk about the way I look all the time, but sit down Mick Molloy,' she told News Corp.

'I know who I am and I dont feel the need to make comments like that about other people,' she continued.

Catching up: She later joined by longtime friend Maddy at a nearby cafe, embracing her while still holding her mobile phone in her hand

Friendly: She also greeted Maddy's husband, nightclub owner Dave Auld, with a kiss as she walked into the eateryFamous names flocked on Wednesday to The Highlight Room atop the Dream Hollywood, where UK fashion brand Boohoo threw a bash for its Zendaya Edit line.

One of the scene-stealers at the Los Angeles event was YouTube star glamour model Gigi Gorgeous, whose legal name is Giselle Loren Lazzarato.

The Montreal-born 25-year-old pulled a see-through fishnet black dress over a solid black bodysuit, posing up a storm on the matching black carpet.

The woman in black: Gigi Gorgeous arrived Wednesday at The Highlight Room atop the Dream Hollywood, where UK fashion brand Boohoo threw a bash for its Zendaya Edit line

Though she was a blonde until quite recently, the transgender web star had a luxurious wavy black hairdo by the time of the Boohoo Block Party.

She caked her face in a heavy dose of flattering makeup, including a slick of deep purple lipstick and some liberally applied eyeliner.

Gigi, who had slid her legs into a pair of thigh-high black stiletto boots, shot a radiant smile at the camera and posed with a hand at her waist.

When you got it: The Montreal-born 25-year-old pulled a see-through fishnet black dress over a solid black bodysuit, posing up a storm on the matching black carpet

The Los Angeles resident, who in 2016 was detained for hours in Dubai under a law forbidding the 'imitation of women by men,' is newly engaged.

Oil mogul J. Paul Getty's great-granddaughter Nats proposed to Gigi in France on the first of this month, as Gigi revealed on her Instagram page.

She was not the only affianced blonde to turn up to Wednesday night's event, which also welcomed heiress, businesswoman and sex tape icon Paris Hilton.

Though she was a blonde until quite recently (left), the transgender web star had a luxurious wavy black hairdo by the time of the Boohoo Block Party (right)

Paris, whose younger sister Nicky is married to a Rothschild, is currently engaged to the dashingly square-jawed actor Chris Zylka.

Though Paris is about to nab her first spouse, Nicky is on her second, having annulled a months-long 2004 Las Vegas marriage to her old pal Todd Meister.

Zendaya herself was a radiant presence at the Boohoo party, posing up a storm in a pearl grey jumpsuit cinched at the waistline with a matching sash.

Blonde bombshell: She was not the only affianced celeb to turn up to Wednesday night's event, which also welcomed heiress, businesswoman and sex tape icon Paris HiltonHe's the hunky Sydney tradie who was caught up in the reality cheating scandal of the year on Married At First Sight.

And as the show wrapped up another season, Ryan Gallagher has revealed he bears no ill will toward his errant 'bride' Davina Rankin and admitted that he believes the best revenge is living well.

Appearing on Talking Married, the 29-year-old confessed that while making the show he had to bite his tongue as Davina would often throw insults at him.

Higher ground: With Married At First Sight wrapping up for another season, Ryan Gallagher has revealed he bears no ill will toward his errant ''bride' Davina Rankin admitting the best revenge was living well.

The 25-year-old brunette also made him sleep on the couch.

He said that he realised it was important to take the higher ground and had to hold himself back from 'firing up'.

'You don't win people like that by doing that,' he said. 'If you fire up, they're going to win.'

A philosophical Ryan added that he planned not to dwell on the failed relationship with the Gold Coast beauty.

Counting to ten: 'You don't win people like that by doing that,' he told Talking Married of the way he was treated by ''bride' Davina Rankin. 'If you fire up, they're going to win.'

'The best thing you can do is move on and be with someone else - that'll show them why they're still lonely.'

After confronting Davina over her dalliance with Dean Wells on the shows finale on Wednesday, Ryan added that he bore no ill will toward Davina, but still questioned her integrity.

'That's [hate] is a very strong word, it's just not in me,' Ryan said. 'You just can't be sorry for something if you don't regret it.'

Onward and upoward: 'The best thing you can do is move on and be with someone else - that'll show them why they're still lonely,' he added

No ill will: 'That's [hate] is a very strong word, it's just not in me,' Ryan added. 'You just can't be sorry for something if you don't regret it.'

While there was certainly no love lost when it came to Dean, Ryan added he had gained some respect for the burgeoning rapper as he appeared 'genuinely sorry' for his actions on the show while Davina said she had no regrets.

While he may've left the experiment a singleton, Ryan has certainly proved a hit on social media after he shook Dean''s hand during the final dinner party on Tuesday.

'All class Ryan. First one to shake Dean's hand,' an Instagram user wrote.

Ryan also appeared to court a lot of potentially romantic attention with one fan asking: 'My next question ... When do I get to marry Ryan?' while another suggested he was: '...a national bloody treasure.'She has been partying up a storm in the States with pal Sofia Richie.

And Lottie Moss made a bold fashion choice by rocking yellow denim co-ords as she attended the Boohoo block party at Dream Hollywood's Highlight Room in Los Angeles on Wednesday night.

The model, 20, put on a leggy display in the matching banana-coloured jacket and skirt as she attended the launch of Zendaya's new range with the British-based online clothing brand.

Hello, yellow! Lottie Moss made a bold fashion choice in yellow denim co-ords at the Boohoo block party at Dream Hollywood's Highlight Room in Los Angeles on Wednesday night

The cover girl showed off her trim physique in the tiny skirt, which she teamed with a white cropped vest.

Lottie kept the look comfortable with matching leather loafers for her night out on the town at the Hollywood hotspot.

The half-sister of fashion legend Kate Moss teamed her comfy footwear with a white chain-strap bag, adding another hint of sparkle with gold hoop earrings.

Showing off her flawless model features, Lottie kept her bouncy new fringe on full display with her tresses un-styled.

Girl about town: The model, 20, put on a leggy display in the matching banana-coloured jacket and skirt as she attended the launch of Zendaya's new range with the online clothing brand

Model moment: The cover girl showed off her trim physique in the tiny skirt, which she teamed with a white cropped vest

Little Miss Sunshine: Lottie kept the look comfortable with matching leather loafers for her night out on the town at the Hollywood hotspot

Lottie kept makeup to a minimum to highlight her glowing complexion.

The rising fashion star joined a star-studded line-up - including Paris Hilton, and the model daughters of acting legend Sylvester Stallone, Sistine and Sophia - to celebrate the launch of Zendaya's collaboration with the brand.

Lottie has been enjoying some time in the States with fellow fashion star Sofia Richie, and the pair were last spotted enjoying a spot of retail therapy in Los Angeles on Monday.

She has also been accompanied by her mother, Inger, on her trip.

LA nights: The half-sister of fashion legend Kate Moss teamed her comfy footwear with a white chain-strap bag, adding another hint of sparkle with gold hoop earrings

Pretty as a picture: Showing off her flawless model features, Lottie kept her bouncy new fringe on full display with her tresses un-styled

Chic: Lottie kept makeup to a minimum to highlight her glowing complexion

Lottie's latest appearance comes after she went completely naked in a revealing selfie shared while she took a bath during her current stay at The London West Hollywood.

With strategically placed foam and two playful star emojis protecting her modesty, the young model was an engaging sight in two snaps shared with her Instagram followers.

Captioning the images with an accompanying link to a luxury beauty treatment brand, she wrote: Saturday nights have changed. Had lots of questions about my skin recently so wanted to let you all in on one of my many skin secrets!

Lottie recently launched her own clothing line Moss x PacSun collection, a capsule range inspired by Brigitte Bardot comprising festival pieces such as sun dresses, play suits, vests and skimpy hot pants.

The model is following in the star-studded footsteps of her supermodel half-sister Kate as she worked on her own eponymous range for Topshop since 2007.

LA girl: The stunning model also shared a snap of her fun party look on Instagram, as she headed to the star-studded launch of Zendaya's range with BoohooShe's been travelling the world since bowing out of Made In Chelsea earlier this year following her painful split from Sam Thompson.

And Tiffany Watson looked like she was having the time of her life as she soaked up the sun while relaxing at the idyllic Kata Rocks luxury villas in Phuket, Thailand, in a snap posted to her Instagram on Wednesday.

The reality star, 24, showcased her toned curves and eye-popping cleavage in a bedazzled lilac bikini as she posed on the edge of her personal infinity pool.

Bikini babe: Tiffany Watson slipped into a lilac two-piece while posing by an infinity pool at Kata Rocks luxury villas in Phuket, Thailand, on Wednesday

Looking every inch the vixen, the TV personality showcased her radiant complexion as she topped up her tan on her fourth lavish holiday of the year.

The blonde ensured attention remained on her impressively toned figure as she went make-up free while throwing a peace sign in the air.

Tiffany wore her platinum tresses poker straight as she playfully stuck her tongue out for the sizzling snap.

The former Made In Chelsea star was enjoying a girls' break with her friend Lily Ludovici, before jetting back to London for just 48 hours and heading off again to Miami, Florida.

Fun in the sun: The reality star, 24, has been been travelling the world since bowing out of Made In Chelsea earlier this year following her painful split from Sam Thompson

Fun in the sun: The former Made In Chelsea star was enjoying a girls' break with her friend Lily Ludovici, before jetting back to London for just 48 hours and heading off to Miami, Florida

Asking her followers for recommendations, she wrote alongside the fun snap: 'Feels about exploring a new city tomorrow. If anyone has any recommendations for Miami then please comment below!'

She later added: 'Less then 48 hours in London and Im ready for lychee martinis poolside again.'

Tiffany has been making the most of her newfound freedom since bowing out of Made In Chelsea earlier this year.

In 2018 alone, she has already enjoyed trips to Australia, Mexico, Hong Kong and Thailand, and will jet off to Miami later on Thursday.

Wild thing: In 2018 alone, she has already enjoyed trips to Australia, Mexico, Hong Kong and Thailand, and will jet off to Miami later on Thursday

The reality star recently spilled the beans on the inner-workings of Made In Chelsea and discussed how she felt being forced into sharing every part of her life.

Tiffany left behind a rocky year on the show which saw the demise of her romance with Sam Thompson, 25 - whom she dated for three years.

The blonde reflected on having to share her private life with Sam on the series and admitted everything boiled over between the two in 2016 during a trip to the Maldives when she had to tell him she had slept with someone else.

Speaking to The Sun on Sunday, the reality star revealed she found it 'stressful' to play out that part of her relationship on TV after she was faced with having another cast member reveal her lie to Sam when she wanted to protect him.

Breaking free: The reality star recently spilled the beans on the inner-workings of Made In Chelsea and discussed how she felt being forced into sharing every part of her life

She told the publication: 'I said we just kissed when actually we slept together. I had told one of the other cast members and she was going to tell him, so I had no choice but to admit what happened.

'I flew back to London sitting next to Sam and he wouldnt talk to me for the whole 22-hour flight. They didnt film that part but the whole thing was very stressful.

'I was in love with Sam, we even discussed getting married, and being on TV put pressure on the relationship. There were some things I didnt want to film because I wanted to protect him, but I knew I had to.'

At the end of season 13, Tiffany and Sam decided to go on a Ross and Rachel-style 'break', and agreed to see other people which appeared to be the beginning of the end.

Despite them being 'allowed' to do this, things turned nasty when Sam had a fling with fellow MIC cast member Mimi Bouchard.

The ex factor: Tiffany left behind a rocky year on the show which saw the demise of her romance with Sam Thompson, 25 - whom she dated for three years (pictured March 2017)

While Mimi was never Tiff's 'friend' this caused much drama, and there were many tears when the pair reunited in Ibiza and back in London for season 14.

In February, Tiff - who is a fitness enthusiast and a vegan activist on the side - confirmed she had left the London-based show via a spokesperson to MailOnline, but suggested it's more of an open-exit.

'Tiff has taken a break for now to concentrate on a number of exciting projects including TV as well as the opening of her vegan restaurant with her sister and her lifestyle/stationary business 365 which she launched a few months ago,' the spokesperson said.

'She also has a number of trips coming up for work and leisure as well as her best friend's wedding where she is her maid of honour so its a busy few months and seemed the right time to step back and work on all the exciting things she has coming up and give them her all,' they added.They have both enjoyed high-profile romances and later dramatic splits.

So TOWIE beauty Amber Turner undoubtedly had plenty to talk about with Love Island 2016 contestant Scott Thomas as they put on a cosy display while departing Wednesday night's OK! Magazine anniversary bash in London.

The 24-year-old stunner, who was left heartbroken after a fling with co-star Dan Edgar, looked sensational in a deeply plunging red jumpsuit while Scott, who split from Kady McDermott last year, looked slick in a checked suit jacket.

Cosy: TOWIE beauty Amber Turner undoubtedly had plenty to talk about with Love Island 2016 contestant Scott Thomas as they put on a cosy display while departing Wednesday night's OK! Magazine anniversary bash in London

Amber looked sensational at the party, which occured just days before the launch of TOWIE's 22nd season, on which her former flame Dan will introduce his new girlfriend Clelia Theodouru, much to her reported heartbreak.

Elsewhere, Scott was in an on-off romance with Love Island co-star Kady, which first ended after he was arrested for a boozy bust-up in June, before a brief reunion which ended in tears in December - leaving the star single and ready to mingle.

It was plain to see why Scott may have approached Amber before their departure together, as she looked incredible in her plunging red jumpsuit which displayed the results of her recent boob job as she went braless underneath.

She wore her blonde tresses in huge bouncy waves, while her make-up was lavishly applied to provide the perfect red carpet look for the star-studded bash.

Hot stuff! The 24-year-old stunner, who was left heartbroken after a fling with co-star Dan Edgar, looked sensational in a deeply plunging red jumpsuit while Scott, who split from Kady McDermott last year, looked slick in a checked suit jacket

Stunner: It was plain to see why Scott may have approached Amber and their departure together, as she looked incredible in her plunging red jumpsuit which displayed the results of her recent boob job as she went braless underneath

Blonde beauty: She wore her blonde tresses in huge bouncy waves, while her make-up was lavishly applied to provide the perfect red carpet look for the star-studded bash

Off we go! Scott, who has christened himself Scotty Special, was certainly dressed to impress as he sported tight black jeans with a black shirt while upping the sophistication with his checked blazer and complementary pocket square

Loved-up: Amber looked sensational at the party, which occured just days before the launch of TOWIE's 22nd season, on which her former flame Dan will introduce his new girlfriend Clelia Theodouru, much to her reported heartbreak

Stunner: Scott was in a relationship with Kady before their final split in December

Scott, who has christened himself Scotty Special, was certainly dressed to impress as he sported tight black jeans with a black shirt while upping the sophistication with his checked blazer and complementary pocket square.

The couple looked extremely cosy, as Scott scooped down to look at Amber's phone before they both sat in the cab with matching grins on their faces.

MailOnline has contacted Amber and Scott's representatives for comment.

Taxi for two! The duo appeared perfectly at ease together as they headed into the night

Just good friends? The stunner was smouldering in all red as she headed off with the dashing Mancunian

Getting your own back? It's been claimed Amber hit back at Dan for 'lying and stringing her along' when she joined co-stars including Chloe Lewis for filming in Barcelona

It's been claimed Amber hit back at Dan for 'lying and stringing her along' when she joined co-stars including Chloe Lewis for filming in Barcelona.

It was alleged the Essex native had 'a huge meltdown' on set after discovering 27-year-old Dan was seeing new girl Clelia.

Amber dumped her boyfriend of four years, Jamie Reed, to be with Dan in 2016. But the pair called it quits back in October when the blonde reportedly discovered he had bedded a mystery woman behind her back during a lads' trip to Ireland.

Meanwhile, in June last year a fiery bust-up with Kady left fans in shock when Scott was arrested on suspicion of assault.

Over it: Amber dumped her boyfriend of four years, Jamie Reed, to be with Dan in 2016. But the pair called it quits back in October when the blonde reportedly discovered he had bedded a mystery woman behind her back during a lads' trip to Ireland

Got it going on: The pair were perfectly matched as they hit the red carpet in their stylish ensembles

At the time, a spokesperson for Greater Manchester Police said: 'Shortly after 4:35am on Saturday 24 June 2017, police were called to reports of a domestic incident at an address in Stockport.

'Officers attended and arrested a 28-year-old man on suspicion of assault. He was later released without charge and no further action will be taken.'

After the row, sources told The Sun: 'Kady was furious when Scott came into the house drunk. They had a huge row and it got out of hand with some pushing.

Kady called the police and Scott spent the rest of the night in a cell. It was blown out of proportion and they were both really embarrassed the next day.'

Moving on: Meanwhile, in June last year a fiery bust-up with Kady left fans in shock when Scott was arrested on suspicion of assaultHe is returning to the cobbles this week, after 13 years away.

And Coronation Street star Sean Wilson has hinted that he would be interested in a full-time return to the soap, after reprising his role for a handful of episodes as part of the David Platt male rape story line.

The 52-year-old actor told Lorraine Kelly on Thursday that his character Martin Platt could make a permanent return to the cobbles, revealing that coming back to the soap was like 'putting on an old jumper.'

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Back for more: Coronation Street star Sean Wilson, 52, has hinted that he wouldn't say no to permanently reprising his role on the cobbles, as he chatted to Lorraine Kelly on Thursday

Sean remained tight-lipped on what fans could expect from his return scenes, adding that he would jump at the chance to come back to Corrie on a more permanent basis.

He told Lorraine: 'I've made it clear if the character has enough links between the show there's quite a bit to go at!'

Fans will get to see Martin Platt back on their screens again on Thursday night when his on-screen son David (Jack P Shepherd) goes for a visit in Liverpool.

Emotional: Sean is set to reprise his role as Martin Platt tonight (March 22) after 13 years away from the soap, in a short stint as part of David Platt's horrific male rape story line

Since leaving Weatherfield, Martin has been living with his partner Robyn and their three children, but he will be pushed to come back when he sees something is not right with David.

Fans know that David was raped by Josh Tucker last week, as has been struggling to cope after bottling up his emotions against friends, family and his girlfriend Shona.

Speaking about his return to the soap, Sean told Lorraine it felt as if he had never left, and wasn't even fazed by the idea of coming back after such a long time away.

Old hand: The actor added that returning to the ITV soap was like 'putting on an old jumper' and it felt as if nothing had changed since he left the soap in 2005

Relaxed: Sean put on a casual display with a simple jeans and waistcoat combo, teaming the ensemble with brown boots and a grey shirt

He said: 'I went to the butchers the day before filming and he said, ''How are you gonna feel? Are you nervous?'' and I said, ''I don't know'', but everyone kept asking me and making me nervous!'

'I walked into the building and when I arrived it was all the same people on the set.

'The first scene is with Jack [P Shepherd], and the first on-set take they said ''Thank you very much,'' it was like rolling back the years.

'It felt like just putting on an old jumper. Everybody made me feel really welcome, I make it sound easy-going but it was really nice.'

Dramatic: Remaining tight-lipped on what fans can expect from his return, Sean hinted that there could be drama when Martin reunites with his ex-wife Gail

Former flame: Martin and Gail were one of the mainstay families on the soap, and Sean revealed that fans will get to see them meet again!

Explosive return: Sean will make a sensational return to Corrie after originally playing Martin Platt from 1985 to 2005

Sean added that old-school Corrie fans will get to see Martin and his ex-wife Gail reunite, though he kept mum on the explosive drama the meeting could create.

Since leaving Corrie in 2005, Sean has had several other acting roles in Casualty and Waterloo Road, but has also made a name for himself in the cheese-making business.

'We have 46 international and national cheese awards since 2009. Anybody that knows me knows I'm a big cook,' he said.

'I became really interested in the science of foods back in the 80s when it wasn't fashionable, and then in 2005 I went to work at a Michelin star restaurant after leaving Coronation Street.'He got the boot from The Bachelorette after failing to fall hard for journalist Georgia Love.

But Courtney Dober, 31, seems to be have no such issues with being affectionate after striking up a romance with Kiwi reality star Lily McManus, 21, after meeting on The Bachelor Winter Games.

The couple continued to share a series of loved-up posts on their Instagram accounts this week, with Lily poking fun at the pair's 10-year age gap.

'Keep your man's skin looking fresh so people don't think he's your dad': Lily McManus, 21, pokes fun at the age of her much older Bachelorette boyfriend Courtney Dober, 31

Alongside a snap of the duo on the couch in matching mud masks, Lily joked about her boyfriend: 'Prepping for 32. Ladies, keep your mans skin looking fresh so people dont think hes your dad.'

In the image, Lily could be seen flashing a toothy smile as she gripped her beau's face, while Courtney looked less than impressed.

However, Courtney was happy share the details of the pampering session, uploading a video to his Instagram Story of the activity.

Pampering! The couple shared footage of themselves with matching mud masks

The light-hearted ribbing appears to be a feature of their relationship, with Courtney taking a few humorous swipes at Lily in the caption of another couple photo.

'Did a trip to San Fran with the kid who wears denim lanterns for pants,' Courtney joked about Lily's clothing choice.

He added: 'Her idea of a practical joke was undoing my middle button to make me look stupid. Hilarious. You got me.'

'Did a trip to San Fran with the kid who wears denim lanterns for pants,' In another snap, Courtney joked about Lily's clothing choice

Loved-up and living it up! Courtney and Lily have been enjoying a cross-country road trip in the US recently

Courtney and Lily, who fell in love while filming US reality show The Bachelor: Winter Games, have put on quite the amorous display recently while embarking on a road trip from New York to Los Angeles.

The social media sensations have documented their loved-up journey for their YouTube travel V-log.

Courtney first shot to fame vying for Georgia Love's heart on season two of The Bachelorette, while Lily tried to win the affection of The Bachelor New Zealand's Zac Franich.Last week, she said she loves male company and doesn't want to be alone forever.

And Debbie McGee, who lost her beloved husband Paul Daniels in 2016, was accompanied by dashing The One Show producer Michael Armitt in London, following her appearance on his programme, last Friday.

The former magician's assistant, 59, looked elegant in a polka dot suit as she left Sergio's Italian restaurant after a three-hour dinner.

Dinner date? Debbie McGee found yourself enjoying male company on Friday night at Sergio's in London, after saying she didn't want to be alone forever

The blonde was perfectly coiffed, with her hair styled into a signature up-do with strands framing her youthful features.

Michael, dressed in a business-like blazer and smart shoes, carried a briefcase, while Debbie had a shopping bag in hand.

While it's not known if Debbie's dinner reservations were for business or pleasure, she recently said that she'd love to be asked out by someone.

However, a source told MailOnline that there's nothing romantic going on between the pair, and that they simply dined together after she appeared on his show.

Male company: Debbie has been candid about her love of male company and her desire to be asked out on a date

In an interview with Hello magazine she said: 'I don't want to be on my own for the rest of my life. If someone asked me out I would consider it.

'I love male company, am full of energy and don't want to be stuck at home alone.

'Although I have male friends that take me out for lunches and dinners, I wouldn't describe them as dates. Nobody has actually asked me out yet, but when they do, I'll go.'

Debbie's late husband Paul, with whom she spent 28 years of her life, passed away in March 2016 from a brain tumour.

Sad: Her beloved husband of 30 years, Paul Daniels (pictured) passed away in March 2016 following a brain tumour

Two years on, she also said she can't bear the thought of being alone forever and felt ready to find love again.

Appearing at the TRIC Awards at Grosvenor House in London last Tuesday, the beautiful blonde said: 'I hope I won't be on my own for the rest of my life.

'I don't think you should go looking for love. In the future I hope I find someone.'

Debbie emerged from a prolonged period of grieving in late 2017, when she decided to get back out there and compete in Strictly Come Dancing.

'Strictly made me really love life,' she explained. 'And to make the most of every day.

'I had so much celebrity support. Joan Collins sent a lovely message and I was so touched. I didn't know her before.'She's no stranger to dazzling on camera and at high-profile events.

But Ashley Greene proved she is very much a kid at heart as she put on an animated display at the POPSUGAR x Freeform Mermaid Museum VIP Night in Los Angeles' Goya Studios on Wednesday evening.

The Twilight actress looked typically radiant in a pleated midi-dress by Self Portrait, which was tied in with monochrome floral prints.

Elegant: Ashley Greene looked radiant in a pleated midi frock as she attended the POPSUGAR x Freeform Mermaid Museum VIP Night in Los Angeles on Wednesday

The garment's plunging neckline put the screen star's cleavage on show, while its medium length worked well with her elegant party look.

The Staten Island Summer star added to her height in a pair of pointed suede stilettos.

Ashley styled her blonde locks into loose curls and accentuated her dewy complexion with natural make-up.

Strike a pose! The Twilight actress, 31, proved she is very much a kid at heart as she put on an animated display at the event

Chic: The Self Portrait garment's plunging neckline put the screen star's cleavage on show as she worked her magic in front of the cameras

Ashley was joined by British actor Gregg Sulkin, who looked dapper in a monochrome blazer.

The former Disney star teamed his outfit with a pair of tan chinos, and added a touch of pizzazz to his look with circular framed glasses.

The pop-up event - which featured a digital mermaid theme - was held as part of Freeforms Campaign for the network's upcoming drama series Siren.

Industry pals: The award-winning starlet was joined by British actor Gregg Sulkin, who looked dapper in a monochrome blazer

Fancy a treat? Ashley and fashion blogger Sydne Summer appeared in high spirits as they posed with blue doughnuts

In shock: The blonde looked surprised as she watched the new mermaid exhibition

Ashley's appearance comes after she rang in her 31st birthday in Los Angeles last month.

The blonde beauty took to Instagram to thank her loved-ones for sharing the special day with her.

She penned: 'Thank you @rokusunset and @blinddragonla for hosting an amazing birthday celebration. A girl couldnt ask for better food, fun, friends or family.'

In the snap, Ashley posed arm-in-arm with her fiance and voice actor Paul Khoury.

Star-studded: The former Disney star (left) looked sharp as he was joined by TV personality Lauren Bushnell (right)

Smitten: The blonde looked in the throes of love as she attended the event with her partner Devin Antin

The Australian TV personality popped the question to Ashley in December 2016 after they hiked to the top of Bridal Veil Falls on New Zealand's North Island.

In an interview with People last year, the Florida native admitted she's not in a rush to get married: 'Were at the age where a lot of our friends are getting married, and many of them are stressed out.

'Thats just not how I want to enter into our union. So, for us, were enjoying the honeymoon engagement stage,' quipping, 'but my mother is already planning.'

Under the sea! The pop-up event - which featured a digital mermaid theme - was held as part of Freeforms Campaign for the network's upcoming drama series SirenShe knows how to best display her assets thanks to her high-flying career as a model and a television presenter.

And Ksenija Lukich, 28, put her pins on parade when she wowed the office with her Jessica Rabbit-inspired ensemble on Thursday.

The Australian born beauty gave a good look at her bronze stems thanks to the pleated high low hem of her sexy pinstripe skirt.

Leggy lady: Ksenija Lukich paraded her lengthy legs in her sexy pinstripe skirt as she showed off her Jessica Rabbit-inspired office ensemble on Thursday

For a flirty look, she showed off some serious skin in her backless one-shoulder blouse which featured a pleated neckline.

The Australian sensation showcased her incredibly tiny waistline thanks to her cinched skirt and form-fitting top combination.

To polish off her look, the brunette added to her height in sky-scraper pointed heels.

For the frill of it! For a flirty look, she showed off some serious skin in her backless one-shoulder blouse which featured a pleated neckline

The television personality claimed she was inspired by racy flame-haired cartoon Jessica Rabbit to pick out her office attire.

Ksenija captioned the picture, 'This morning I asked myself what If Jessica Rabbit worked in an office?...then I put this on.' (sic)

The presenter has been happier than ever in the arms of her lover of 10 years and husband Dan Bragg.

If you've got it, flaunt it! The married star flaunted her eye-popping diamond ring, an item of jewellery which she claims to be one of her favourites

She told Daily Mail Australia in 2017: 'My wedding band is my favourite piece of jewellery. I got married almost a year ago now.

'We've been together almost 10 years. The commitment was always there. It was really nice to spend that time with our loved ones and celebrate what's been a long relationship.

'Marriage feels really comfortable. It feels really lovely. The first year has been great. We have a few life goals...day by day, year by year and decade by decade.'Megan Fox has been on and off with husband Brian Austin Green for over a decade.

In 2016 the actors split but then got back together when the Hollywood A-lister found out she was pregnant with his third child.

The two have yet to discuss what the status of their relationship is these days, but when the Transformers star met with Henry Tyler of Hollywood Medium this week, she did admit that she needed to 'heal' herself 'emotionally.'

Not perfect: Megan Fox hinted she needed to 'heal' from 2016 split with Brian Austin Green as she talked to Tyler Henry on Hollywood Medium

Her love: Fox (L) and Green (R) attend Ferrari's 60th Anniversary In The USA Gala at the Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts in 2014

Tyler began: 'I'm seeing green, green, green. Does that mean anything to you at all?'

The New Girl star said, 'That's my husband's last name.'

'For some reason they're having me talk about you,' added the medium.

'They're having me talk about the past two years,' he shared.

'There is almost a recovery kind of feeling behind this. Recovering and picking up the pieces.'

Up in the air? The two have yet to discuss what the status of their relationship is these days, but she did admit she wants to 'reconnect' to herself

Fox did not give a firm update on what is going on with Green.

It is known that they are living in the same house in Los Angeles as they raise their three kids, Noah, Bodhi and Journey.

And they have been seen together during lunch outings with the kids.

But if they have a thriving marriage is not known.

Cryptic: All Megan would say after her reading was: 'What I took away from that was this is a time for me to really focus on healing myself emotionally and not unlike my mom, connecting to myself'

All Megan would say after her reading was: 'What I took away from that was this is a time for me to really focus on healing myself emotionally and not unlike my mom, connecting to myself.'

'Prioritizing my kids and making sure they're okay, and at some point in the future, love will be revealed,' said Megan.

Earlier Henry had told her that her mother would be going through a big change and would become more independent.

The fam: Megan with her mother as well as one of her three children on Instagram

Fox gets a message from the other side about her mother, Gloria, who is very much still alive.

Flashback of her parents when they were younger

'Weird. For some reason they're having me refer to your mom,' Henry said.

'This is weird...it feels like transitional. They're putting this like over the course of...for some reason like the next month. They're having me like acknowledge like transition, movement, change.'

Fox is thrown off. At one point it appears as if her bottom lip is quivering and she's about to cry.

'I wasn't anticipating him picking up so much from my mom.

'And that is a situation that literally just happened - I think it was two days ago, she started transitioning out of a relationship,' the actress remarked.

Fox added her mother is 'really relationship-based,' but she needs to get on with her life by herself.

Face to face: The star was seen with Henry in a home by the beach

A challenge lays ahead: Henry told her that her mother would be going through a change

He nailed it: The gifted star said, 'This is weird...it feels like transitional. They're putting this like over the course of...for some reason like the next month. They're having me like acknowledge like transition, movement, change'

The actress said her mother now lives in Florida but she might come west.

'I wouldn't be surprised if she maybe moved out this way. My mom has always been relationship based her whole life.

'Maybe because of her age, she's in her 60, she may worry about that transition. My sister and I are always saying to each other that's what we want for our mom. But we can't tell her, she won't listen to us. Maybe she'll listen to Tyler.'

Mommy issues: Fox added her mother is 'really relationship-based,' but she needs to get on with her life by herself

Come to LA mom! The actress said her mother now lives in Florida but she might come west. 'I wouldn't be surprised if she maybe moved out this way. My mom has always been relationship based her whole life'

Henry then says: 'They are having me acknowledge her, reminding her of her independence. And it's coming from her side of family,' Henry said.

'It's like, 'Don't forget your ability to be independent, you can do things on your own, you don't have to stay in a situation because of another person or other people.'

'It's basically saying like feel free to make this move and that she needs to know this and have like that confidence.'

Hollywood Medium with Tyler Henry airs Wednesdays on E!

Airs Tuesdays at 9pm on E! UK & stream Thursdays on hayuShe's sophistication from head to toe.

Emma Roberts kept it classy as she exited a party in West Hollywood's elegant Chateau Marmont.

The 27-year-old actress was spotted solo in a pretty pink and floral number in Los Angeles on Wednesday night.

Pretty In Pink: Emma Roberts is spotted in West Hollywood leaving a party on Wednesday night

She wore a tiered floral dress that fell nearly down to her ankles with a bright pink trench coat.

The Parisian-inspired look was paired with a set of sheer black tights and low black suede pumps.

Her beauty was kept to a minimum with her blonde hair slightly tucked back into a low bun and barely any makeup. Emma only wore a slight amount of gilded eye shadow across her eyelids.

Stepping Out: Actress Emma made a statement at the Chateau Marmont in a pink coat

Emma ditched her signature red hair back in August and has been enjoying life as a blonde ever since.

She was spotted without her on and off again fiance Evan Peters, who she was last seen with at the star-studded Vanity Fair Oscars bash.

The couple also attended the 2018 Critics Choice Awards together where Evan was nominated for Best Movie/Mini Actor for his portrayal of Kai on AHS: Cult.

Flying Solo: Emma was spotted in a chic floral gown and black pumps paired with sheer tights

After working on several seasons of Ryan Murphy's American Horror Story franchise and Scream Queens, Emma laid low from acting for quite a bit.

Earlier this month it was reported that the star had signed on to appear in Dan Mazer's haunted cave comedy Anya's Ghost, according to Deadline.

The film is based on a book written by screenwriter and author Patrick Ness that was originally published in 2011.

It follows the story of Anya, an unpopular 16-year-old, who gets trapped in a cave and rescues Emily, Roberts' character.

Emma will take on the role as a ghost of a teenage girl who died a century ago.A five hour flight from New York City to Los Angeles might call for a comfy wardrobe.

But Kate Bosworth isn't one to be unstylish. The actress arrived at LAX on Wednesday, looking the epitome of chic as she stepped out of the airport.

The 35-year-old beauty paired a beige teddy bear coat with large white buttons over a fun white sweater adorned with red and pink stripes.

Flying fashion: Kate Bosworth looked effortlessly chic in an Emory Bee coat as she arrived at LAX on Wednesday wearing a beige teddy bear coat and skinny jeans

The star effortlessly pulled her outfit together wearing dark skinny jeans with an asymmetrical hem that subtly showed off her enviable figure.

Not showing any signs of jet lag, the style queen put her best foot forward in black heeled booties and kept dark cat-eye Zanzan sunglasses over her eyes.

Showing off her flawless skin, Kate wore some rosy blush on her cheeks and kept her newly-dyed red tresses down in a natural style.

The on-screen beauty was making her way back from New York, where she was spotted at a fashion event with Kate Mara and Victoria Justice on Tuesday.

Touched down: The actress was travelling to Los Angeles from New York, where she was spotted at a fashion event with fellow starlets Kate Mara and Victoria Justice

Clutching on to her tan Chloe handbag, the Los Angeles native made her way out of the American Airlines terminal.

The Blue Crush star's husband Michael Polish was not pictured with the Hollywood star, but the loved-up couple packed on the PDA on Friday at the Sun Valley Film Festival in Idaho.

Kate was honored with the Pioneer Award at the big-screen bash for her work producing and starring in her director husband's sex trafficking drama Nona - the couple's sixth film collaboration together.

Making her way down.. the stairs: Kate recently announced that she will portray Sharon Tate in the upcoming biopic of the late 26-year-old

The couple's outing comes after the actress announced on social media that she will once again work with Michael - this time starring as Sharon Tate.

The project will center on the last day of the heavily pregnant 26-year-old's life, before she was stabbed 16 times by members of the Manson family in 1969.

In a post, Kate shared: 'This picture will celebrate her life. We will not violate or exploit her death. It's her time.'

Sharon's younger sister Debra - who was 16 at the time - has authorized the biopic and will serve as producer on the film.She recently flew to Marbella to sculpt her derriere with the help of a Brazilian bum lift.

But Chloe Sims kept her perky posterior under wraps in a sophisticated satin suit as she filmed scenes for TOWIE's Easter party at Essex hotspot Sugar Hot on Thursday afternoon.

The TV personality, 35, was joined by co-star and close pal Lauren Pope, who flaunted her toned midsection in a racy black bralet and high-waisted trousers.

Commanding attention: Chloe Sims (left) ensured all eyes were on her in an all-white ensemble with Lauren Pope (right) as they filmed scenes for TOWIE's Easter party on Thursday

The mother-of-one preserved her typically sexy appearance with her blazer's plunging neckline, which flashed a glimpse of her eye-popping cleavage.

Injecting a hint of humour to her look, the reality star donned an elaborate bunny mask in celebration of the upcoming Easter holiday.

The salon owner swept her blonde tresses into a slick ponytail, which gave the floor to her fierce smokey eye look.

Chloe added a pop of colour to her number with her coral red nails, and teamed her look with a pair of oversized hooped earrings.

Racy: The mother-of-one, 35, preserved her typically sexy appearance through her blazer's plunging neckline, which flashed a glimpse of her eye-popping cleavage

Chic: The salon owner swept her blonde tresses into a slick ponytail, which gave the floor to her fierce smokey eye look

Chloe underwent a Brazilian bum lift last year, after she felt incredibly insecure about her 'flat granny bum'.

A source told MailOnline: 'She had it done last month and is delighted with the results.

'She chose the Serene Cosmetics clinic in Marbella because she's was happy and comfortable to be there for the recovery time.'

Funny: Injecting a hint of humour to her look, the reality star donned an elaborate bunny mask in celebration of the upcoming Easter holiday

Improvements: Chloe underwent a Brazilian bum lift last year, after she felt incredibly insecure about her 'flat granny bum'

Lauren, 35, looked equally chic in her all-black outfit, which she tied in with a loose-fitting shirt and suede stiletto boots.

The dark colour scheme continued through her accessories, which featured a studded black handbag and a pair of statement gem earrings.

The blonde wore her tresses in subtle waves and opted for her trademark sultry makeup look.

Ab-tastic! Lauren, 35, looked equally chic in her all-black outfit, which she tied in with a loose-fitting shirt and suede stiletto boots

All black everything! The dark colour scheme continued through her accessories, which featured a studded handbag and a pair of statement gem earrings

Amber Turner, 24, turned heads in her form-fitting white dress, which she topped with a pair of lace bunny ears.

The star was joined by on/off friend Chloe Meadows, 25, who also commanded attention in a light pink frock, which was embellished with a frilly dipped hem.

Putting on a playful display, the former barmaid - who recently split up from her boyfriend Taylor Barnett - looked stunning as she also donned rabbit ears.

The pair's tumultuous relationship was played out in recent series of the reality show, which saw the pair fall out following Amber's split from her ex Jamie Reed.

Wow-factor! Amber Turner (left) , turned heads in her form-fitting white dress, as she was joined by on/off pal Chloe Meadows (right) - both were spotting sporting bunny ears

Best of pals: The friends recently patched things up after a shocking argument in 2017, which saw the pair fall out following Amber's split from her ex Jamie Reed

However, the friends appeared to patch things up in the series 21 of the show, as they spoke about their differences during an intimate chat.

Amber showcased her recent breast enhancement in her garment, after feeling 'insecure and uncomfortable' for years as a B-cup.

In an interview with The Sun, the make-up enthusiast gushed that she feels '100 times more confident' with her new 34D cleavage.

'I love them, I'm so happy with them,' she said at the National Television Awards in January.

'I got them for me, not anyone else, and I feel more 100 times more confident. They've changed my life.'

Before: The blonde beauties were spotted heading to the event shortly before they showcased their figure-hugging numbers

Chloe's beaming appearance comes just days after she split from her boyfriend Taylor, after revealing her hesitations at living out a romance on screen.

An insider told The Sun: 'It hasnt been a straightforward split for them both.'

'Taylor works for Chloes dad and shes finding that uncomfortable  not to mention the fact hes close pals with Myles and they still havent seen eye to eye since their fall out last series.

Brave face: Chloe's beaming appearance comes just days after she split from her boyfriend Taylor, after revealing her hesitations at living out a romance on screen

'Chloe has tried her best to remain on good terms with Taylor but its never easy when you share the same friendship group.'

It has been claimed that as a result, Taylor - who began featuring on TOWIE last year - will no longer appear on the series.

MailOnline has contacted a TOWIE representative for comment.

Sultry: Looking every inch the vixen, Georgia Kousoulou gave the cameras a smouldering gaze as she showcasing her envy-inducing frame in her daring mini dress

Making their way! TOWIE newbies Shelby Tribble and Clelia Theodorou were also dolled up to the nines in white dresses, which they covered in stone coloured coats

Cream of the crop: Clelia and Shelby whipped off their coats to reveal short white dresses

Posing up a storm: Clelia flaunted her tanned and toned pins in a short cream bandeau dress as she posed for snappers with her leg thrown up coquettishly in the air

Loving life: Clelia and Shelby looked in high spirits as they posed with one another outside

Looking every inch the vixen, Georgia Kousoulou gave the cameras a smouldering gaze as she showcasing her envy-inducing frame in her daring mini dress.

The plunging frock stood out from the crowd with its bold choker, which was connected to an eccentric netted sleeve.

TOWIE newbies Shelby Tribble and Clelia Theodorou were also dolled up to the nines in white dresses, which they covered in stone coloured coats.

A number of familiar faces weren't seen filming as seven regulars, including Amber Dowding and Chris Clark, have been axed.

Va-va-voom! Chloe Lewis' voluminous tresses made a show-stopping entrance all on their own

All eyes on him: Bobby Norris looked sharp as he donned a patterned blazer with a crisp white shirt

Suave: Jon Clark (left) and Pete Wicks (right) put on dapper displays as they upped the ante in their tailored pieces

The pair - who recently broke up - left the show alongside Mike Hassini, Jack Rigden, Jordan Brook, Maddie Hooper and Ruby Lacey last month, following claims that 'boring' characters have been chopped out of the line-up.

The shock shake-up, confirmed by the channel earlier this month, also comes amid a format reshuffle which will see the ITVBe series aired just once a week instead of twice.

A TOWIE spokesperson told MailOnline: 'There are a number of cast who have mutually agreed their time on the show has come to a natural end for now.

'We wish them well and look forward to another exciting year ahead for TOWIE.'

Casual: Courtney Green hid her garment from the cameras with a white padded jacketShe is enjoying all the rewards of a budding romance with The Bachelor 2013 co-star Tim Robards.

But Anna Heinrich blossomed in her own company when she made a very lovely appearance at the Night of Fashion, in Hunter on Wednesday.

Shared on Instagram on Thursday, the 26-year-old reality star cut a ladylike figure in her slinky jumpsuit which was very flattering of her gorgeous figure.

Blossoming beauty! The Bachelor babe Anna Heinrich looked blooming lovely in a flattering jumpsuit as she posed against floral wall at glitzy event on Wednesday

The Bachelor personality showcased her incredibly petite waistline thanks to the tie detailing which brought the garment in at the waist.

Complemented by the floral budding backdrop at the occasion, the fashionista enhanced her stunning beauty with deftly touches of make-up.

The golden-haired beauty framed her face with her crimped locks which were worn in bouncy waves.

She wrote on social media, 'What a night and honour to host @stocklandgreenhills Night of Fashion. Make sure you come check out the Centre along with the first new format @davidjonesstore in the Hunter! #StocklandGreenHills #ABrighterNowGH Wearing: @davidjonesstore.' (sic)

Some-ring to show off! The Bachelor babe displayed her cleavage as she went braless in a plunging cold shoulder dress, shared on Instagram on Thursday

Anna was flying solo at the glitzy occasion without the charming company of her lovely fiance Tom Robards.

They are getting ready to walk down the aisle after finding love on the first series of the Aussie series The Bachelor.

The Tim and Anna love story began on the debut season of The Bachelor in 2013 when she batted out the other women competing for his affections.

True love! They are getting ready to walk down the aisle after finding love on the first series of the Aussie series The Bachelor

They went onto get engaged in May last year when Tim got down on one knee while the pair were enjoying a boat trip.

Every inch the excited groom, Tim couldn't resist spilling some of the intimate details of their wedding plans when he appeared on Today Extra in early February.

He told the TV hosts: 'It's going to be near a beach.' Pressed on whether it would be Sydney's Bondi Beach, he coyly responded: 'Could be.'

Must be love: The Tim and Anna love story began on the debut season of The Bachelor in 2013 when she batted out the other women competing for his affections

Tim elaborated on their wedding plans: 'I think we'll do our own vows rather than I do...I think we'll write our own.

'I can't wait. And it is going to be this year. I can't wait. I've got all the people who are important to us that are going to be there.'

Anna previously told Daily Mail Australia the wedding plans were well and truly underway back in November 2017.

She told us: 'The wedding plans are going good. We haven't got everything, but most of it. We've got the location and I've got my dress.'She juggles her high-flying acting career and modelling stints with being the doting mother to her three beautiful children.

And Elsa Pataky got to work on her latest project when she leaped off a steep diving board as she took time away from mummy duties on Thursday.

Chris Hemsworth's wife, 41, ensured all eyes were well and truly on her amazing figure in her scanty swimsuit as she plunged off the 10 meter drop fearlessly.

On the move! Chris Hemsworth's wife Elsa Pataky, 41, fearlessly plunged off a VERY high diving board in her swimsuit on Thursday as she took time away from mummy duties

The working mum was the picture of confidence when she dived from the great height with poise.

Elsa teased her fans when she kept pretty tight-lipped on her 'amazing project' as she declared it was a 'secret'.

She penned on Instagram: 'Training for an amazing project coming soon! 10 meters jump  #workingmama #secrets entrenando para un proyecto que sabreis pronto, salto de 10 metros #adrenalinaatope #comonoentrebienduele.' (sic)

'When you have no energy left': Chris Hemsworth's wife laughed at how she's 'lucky' to have brother Cristian Prieto, as he carried her twins, three, in a sweet snap shared to Instagram

Look good, feel good: The Spanish born beauty ensured all eyes were well and truly on her amazing figure in her scanty swimsuit as she plunged off the 10 meter drop fearlessly

Elsa is happily married to the Thor actor Chris and the pair share three beautiful children: India Rose, aged five, as well as three-year-old twins Tristan and Sasha.

As well as relying on her husband, Elsa also gets a helping hand from her brother Cristan Prietro who is always happy to look after her kids when she has 'no energy'.

Shared to Instagram, the model's hunky half-brother can be seen tossing Chris and Elsa's three-year-old twins Tristan and Sasha over his shoulder in the family snap.

What a woman! The working mum was the picture of confidence when she dived from the great height with poise

Happy together: Elsa is happily married to the Thor actor and the pair share three beautiful children: India Rose, aged five, as well as three-year-old twins Tristan and Sasha

The Chris and Elsa love story begins in early 2010 when they started dating and the couple went on to tie the knot over the festive season at Christmas.

They have gone from strength to strength ever since, welcoming their three children into the world during their seven-year marriage.

Meanwhile the couple only worked on their first movie together in 2016. The dad-of-three revealed it was like a holiday away from their parenting duties back at their home.

'It was great, it was like a little holiday away from the kids,' Chris told Good Morning America in January. We left the kids with their grandparents and went off for a few weeks and shot together.

Must be love: The Chris and Elsa love story begins in early 2010 when they started dating and the couple went on to tie the knot over the festive season at Christmas

'We've been rehearsing that relationship and that on-screen chemistry for seven years so if we didn't have chemistry, we would've been in trouble.'

12 Strong tells the story of the first Special Forces team that's deployed to Afghanistan following the events of 9/11.

In the film, Chris plays the role of Captain Mitch Nelson, who has the task of leading his team of 12 soldiers to take down the Taliban.

Elsa plays the part of the captain's dutiful wife, who looks after their daughter while he is at war.Jennifer Garner was one of the first celebrities to wish pal Reese Witherspoon a happy 42nd birthday on Thursday.

And the Miracles From Heaven actress did so in a big way as she strapped on a saxophone and a proper band suit to play Happy Birthday for the Legally Blonde beauty.

The mother-of-three captioned her image: 'Hey, @reesewitherspoon! I don't know why you're on my mind today.....#happybirthdayfriend.'

Cool move: Jennifer Garner was one of the first celebrities to wish pal Reese Witherspoon a happy 42nd birthday on Thursday

Staying on top of the game: The Tennessee native said she was having 'cake for breakfast' with her son

Garner looked cute in her white and black suit that hit her incredibly toned body.

She also donned a band camp hat with a white ball of fur on top and white gloves.

The ex of Ben Affleck was seen in the back yard of her large Pacific Palisades, California home.

The two have a lot in common: they both live in the same Los Angeles neighborhood, they both at one time were married to big Hollywood stars (Reese was with Ryan Phillippe and Jennifer was with Ben Affleck), and they both have three kids.

A longtime pal: Nicole Kidman posted this photo to Instagram early on Thursday adding the petite powerhouse is a 'friend, partner, leader and inspiration'

Reese then took to Instagram to share a photo with her son Tennessee and her birthday cake.

She said she was having 'cake for breakfast' and that she was feeling so much love from her friends.

The Wild star managed to add in a plug for her line Draper James, saying the company made her the dress for the day.

Another famous friend: Another star who wishes Reese well was Mindy Kalling. They worked together on the new fantasy film Wrinkle In Time. She shared a photo from the set with the caption, 'Happy birthday kween, You make life so fun!'

Nicole Kidman posted a photo of the two to Instagram early on Thursday.

The leggy ex of Tom Cruise wrote in her caption that the petite powerhouse is a 'friend, partner, leader and inspiration.'

Kidman added that she 'loved' the Draper James designer.

Another star who wishes Reese well was Mindy Kalling.

They worked together on the new fantasy film Wrinkle In Time. She shared a photo from the set with the caption, 'Happy birthday kween, You make life so fun!'

A shout out: Zoe Saldana also turned to social media to help celebrate Witherspoon. 'Happy Birthday Reese! Hope today is as magical as you are,' said the Avatar star. She added emojis for a gift, cone, balloon and cake

Cuteness overload: Saldana also shared this photo where the Friends vet was holding a slice of cake and a gift

So nautical: The Draper James website shared this image of a cake with a note for the star

Zoe Saldana also turned to social media to help celebrate Witherspoon.

'Happy Birthday Reese! Hope today is as magical as you are,' said the Avatar star. She added emojis for a gift, cone, balloon and cake.

The Oscar winner has already been shooting season two of the Emmy winning Big Little Lies, which also stars Laura Dern and Nicole Kidman. Meryl Streep will also join the series.Thursday is World Water Day.

And Beyonce is doing her best to improve things for others.

Her BeyGood4Burundi initiative with UNICEF has partnered with Gucci and its Chime For Change Foundation to bring clean water to the children of Burundi in East Africa and prevent water-borne diseases.

Concerned star: Beyonce, seen at an event in New York in October, is doing her best to improve things for others on Thursday, World Water Day

The 36-year-old hitmaker launched her initiative with UNICEF in 2017 to support programs improving access to clean water and sanitation in the landlocked country.

In 2017 alone, 35 wells were constructed for the people of Burundi to use, according to Vogue UK on Thursday.

Turning on the tap: Gucci has joined the 36-year-old's BeyGood4Burundi initiative with UNICEF to bring clean water to the children of the land-locked East African country of Burundi

Now Guccis $1 million commitment to the project will help support UNICEFs goal to build 80 more wells and give 120,000 more people access to clean water.

It also means girls will be able to go to school rather than risk attack walking hours to collect water for their families

Bey, whose estimated worth was over $350 million in 2017 according to Forbes, aims to reach 475,000 children and families through her BeyGood4Burundi by 2020.

Shining star: The 36-year-old hitmaker, seen with huband Jay-Z at the Grammys in LA last year launched her initiative with UNICEF in 2017 to improving access to clean water in Africa

She shares daughter Blue, six, and eight-month-old twins Rumi and Sir, with rapper-entrepreneur Jay-Z, 48.

Meanwhile, the whole family will be hitting the road for Beyonce and Jay-Z's On The Run II tour, which she announced last week on her website.

Kicking off on June 6 in Cardiff, Wales, the tour will stop in 15 cities across the U.K. and Europe, before visiting another 21 cities in North America, starting in Cleveland.They have kept fans guessing over their relationship status.

Yet Katie Price's widely-discussed reunion with her husband Kieran Hayler appeared to be all but confirmed by his mother, who took to her Instagram account in January to post a shot of the duo before making a cake for his 31st birthday on Thursday.

In August last year, Katie announced she had split from third husband Kieran, after his affair with the family nanny emerged, yet their romance has been constantly questioned ever since - with a recent 'like' on his snap acting as a hint.

No Likey! Katie Price's widely-discussed reunion with her husband Kieran Hayler appeared to be all but confirmed by his mother, who took to her Instagram account in January to post a shot of the duo before making a cake for his 31st birthday on Thursday

Fans have been left intrigued by their romance - which has long been fraught following his various infidelities - yet more lately tongues have truly been wagging over their union, with his birthday acting as a heavy hint.

As he shared the image of his incredible birthday cake, made by his mum Wendy, in the shape of a giant Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, Katie swiftly liked the image.

Wendy's Instagram meanwhile was equally telling as she shared a snap of the couple in January to ring in their fifth wedding anniversary, following their nuptials in Barbados in 2013 - before being hit by infidelity claims.

MailOnline has contacted representatives for Katie and Kieran for comment.

Birthday blues? Fans have been left intrigued by their romance - which has long been fraught following his various infidelities - yet more lately tongues have truly been wagging over their union, with his birthday acting as a heavy hint

Happier times: Wendy's Instagram meanwhile was equally telling as she shared a snap of the couple in January to ring in their fifth wedding anniversary, following their nuptials in Barbados in 2013 - before being hit by infidelity claims

Earlier this month, Kieran shared a MailOnline story on his Instagram story last week, which documented his day out at Cheltenham with Katie circling the headline in which he was referred to as her ex.

He wrote the word: 'Hilarious' implying that he is in fact not her ex. His post came as Katie insisted that she will divorce the love rat, who has cheated on his wife before, with two of her best friends.

The Sunday People claims Katie is ready to officially end their marriage 'amicably' and has been in touch with divorce lawyers.

A source said: 'She has had it with Kieran and wants to move on. Its pretty sad because she really tried, they both did. But at the end of it all she cant get over all the lies.'

Busty: In August last year, Katie announced she had split from third husband Kieran, after his affair with the family nanny emerged, yet their romance has been constantly questioned ever since - however a recent 'like' on his snap could be a hint

A hint? He took to Instagram stories, where he shared a snap of Katie posing against a wall in her glamorous gown ahead of the NTAs, writing: 'Stunning'

It's not the first time Kieran has given the impression that things are back on between them, despite Katie's rep stating it's not the case. The couple live together so that they can share the childcare and get along as friends.

Katie and Kieran share two children together; son Jett, four and daughter Bunny, three. Katie is also mum to Harvey, 15, from her previous relationship with Dwight Yorke.

She is also mother to Junior, 12, and daughter Princess, 10, with ex husband Peter Andre, 45. A source told MailOnline in January that Kieran was keen to reconcile with Katie and shared a gushing social media post in a bid to show his devotion.

Cheers! She is also mother to Junior, 12, and daughter Princess, 10, with ex husband Peter Andre, 45. A source told MailOnline in January that Kieran was keen to reconcile with Katie and shared a gushing social media post in a bid to show his devotion

He took to Instagram stories, where he shared a snap of Katie posing against a wall in her glamorous gown ahead of the NTAs, writing: 'Stunning.'

But a source said at the time: 'The feelings are all one-sided. Katie still feels like the relationship is over - but obviously she doesn't have a nanny now so Kieran lives with her and he takes care of the children.

'Katie has a lot on her plate right now with her mother being ill, so that and her children are her main focus.'

The post came just a week after Kieran paid tribute to their fifth wedding anniversary, which seemed odd given they claim to have split.Filming has already commenced for Judy, a biopic based on the Hollywood icon's incredible life.

And Renee Zellweger transformed into the iconic actress, as she filmed further scenes with her co-star Finn Wittrock - who plays her fifth husband Mickey Deans in the movie - in London on Thursday.

The American actress, 48, looked virtually unrecognisable in a well-coiffed brown wig with a large bouffant characteristic of Garland's image as she filmed scenes reminiscent of the sixties.

Late icon: Renee Zellweger, 48, transformed into Judy Garland, as she filmed scenes with her co-star Finn Wittrock - who plays her fifth husband in the biopic Judy - in London on Thursday

Plot: In particular the biopic will focus on her romance with musician Mickey Deans (Finn), who Garland married several months before her death in June 1969 aged 47

Renee is set to portray the Hollywood icon in the true story about her final concerts in London, nearly 30 years after Garland starred as Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz.

In particular it will focus on her romance with musician Mickey Deans (Finn) who Garland married several months before her death in June 1969 aged 47.

And the actress certainly looked like the right fit for the job as she swapped out her trademark blonde locks for the short brunette wig.

She added to the lavish movie-star feel with an opulent furry dark brown jacket, which was belted in the middle to show off her trim midriff.

Striking: Renee is set to portray the Hollywood icon in the true story about her final concerts in London, nearly 30 years after Garland (R) starred as Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz

Stepping back in time: The actress looked virtually unrecognisable in a well-coiffed brown wig with a large bouffant characteristic of Garland's image as she filmed scenes reminiscent of the sixties with her love interest co-star

Uncanny: The actress certainly looked like the right fit for the job as she swapped out her trademark blonde locks for the short brunette wig

A-list: She added to the lavish movie-star feel with an opulent furry dark brown jacket, which was belted in the middle to show off her trim midriff

Wow! A first-look image of Renee Zellweger portraying Judy Garland was released on Monday, showing impeccable attention to detail for the coveted role

Renee's era-defining look was complete with a pair of camel-coloured straight-leg trousers and she added a tiny boost to her frame with black kitten court heels.

The star toted all of her essentials in a quilted black handbag, which was effortlessly draped off her shoulder and accessorised with a pair of gold hoop earrings.

She opted for a simple slick of make-up, taking into account Judy's striking, natural features by focusing on blusher on her cheeks and outlined eyes.

Renee was joined by handsome actor Finn, who effortlessly took on the role of Mickey, in a long brown coat, maroon-coloured trousers and a matching scarf.

Back in time: Renee's era-defining look was complete with a pair of camel-coloured straight-leg trousers and she added a tiny boost to her frame with black kitten court heels

Timeless glamour: The star toted all of her essentials in a quilted black handbag, which was effortlessly draped off her shoulder

Eternal: She opted for a simple slick of make-up, taking into account Judy's striking, natural features by focusing on blusher on her cheeks and outlined eyes

Era-defining: Renee was joined by handsome actor Finn, who effortlessly took on the role of Mickey, in a long brown coat, maroon-coloured trousers and a matching scarf

Finn, a Massachusetts native, is a talented actor in his own right and began his career in Broadway as Happy in Death of a Salesman.

The Juilliard trained actor's on-screen credits includes the likes of All My Children, Criminal Minds, La La Land and most noticeably American Horror Story.

In the biopic, Renee and Finn will star alongside Harry Potter actor Sir Michael Gambon and War And Peace actress Jessie Buckley.

The project will be in good hands and is being directed by double Olivier Award-winner Rupert Goold.

Acclaimed: Finn, a Massachusetts native, is a talented actor in his own right and began his career in Broadway as Happy in Death of a Salesman

Stardom: The Juilliard trained actor's on-screen credits includes the likes of All My Children, Criminal Minds, La La Land and most noticeably American Horror Story

Line-up: In the biopic, Renee and Finn will star alongside Harry Potter actor Sir Michael Gambon and War And Peace actress Jessie Buckley

Good eye: The project will be in good hands and is being directed by double Olivier Award-winner Rupert Goold

Icon: The film shows the charismatic yet fragile stars battle with management while dealing with the struggle of spending her whole life in the spotlight and her yearning to be at home with her children; seen in 1948

Storyline: Judy is set in 1968 and tells the story of Garland arriving in London to perform in a sell-out run at The Talk of the Town nightclub

Later life: The movie follows 30 years after her rise to fame in The Wizard Of Oz

In her impressive career span, Judy starred in classic films including The Wizard of Oz, A Star Is Born and Meet Me in St. Louis.

Not only was she a leading actress in many movies, Garland also lent her voice across hundreds of notable soundtracks.

Judy is set in 1968 and tells the story of Garland arriving in London to perform in a sell-out run at The Talk of the Town nightclub, 30 years after her rise to fame in The Wizard Of Oz.

The film shows the charismatic yet fragile stars battle with management while dealing with the struggle of spending her whole life in the spotlight and her yearning to be at home with her children.

Judy, a joint venture between Pathe, BBC Films and Ingenious Media, will include some of Garlands best-loved tunes, including her signature song Over The Rainbow.

Legend: Not only was she a leading actress in many movies, Garland also lent her voice across hundreds of notable soundtracks; seen on set of A Star Is Born in 1954She has been having a long-distance romance with her boyfriend Ryan Thomas, after he relocated to Australia for a part in iconic soap Neighbours.

And Lucy Mecklenburgh looked happy as she reunited with her beau over a romantic lunch in Manchester on Thursday.

Testament to her loved-up status, the former TOWIE star, 26, cut a chic figure as she stepped out for the low-key lunch date, clad in a L'Amour Paris t-shirt and black ripped jeans which showcased her gym-honed frame.

Chic: Lucy Mecklenburgh looked happy as she reunited with her beau Ryan Thomas over a romantic lunch in Manchester on Thursday

Cute couple: The pair have been having a long-distance romance after Ryan relocated to Australia for a part in iconic soap Neighbours

Layering up in the cold weather she slipped a black leather jacket over her stylish ensemble and forwent the heels in favour of red, green and white trainers.

Her brunette bob was styled sleek and straight while her pretty features were enhanced with radiant dusting of make-up.

Her hunky former Coronation Street beau, 33, also kept it casual for the pair's lunch, wearing a cream hoodie and jeans, teamed with slate grey trainers.

The smitten pair looked delighted to be spending time together, and enjoyed a leisurely chat and a hot drink inside the restaurant.

Love: Testament to her loved-up status, the former TOWIE star, 26, cut a chic figure as she stepped out for the low-key lunch date, clad in a L'Amour Paris t-shirt and black ripped jeans which showcased her gym-honed frame

Lucy and Ryan's long-distance romance has seen the brunette beauty enjoy an extended break Down Under to support her beau, with the couple also jetting off on a sunshine break to Dubai recently.

It was claimed earlier this month, Ryan had reportedly purchased an expensive diamond ring for Lucy, with a source telling The Sun that Ryan spent thousands on the ring to show his commitment to Lucy as their romance heats up.

MailOnline contacted representatives for Ryan and Lucy.

The couple first met on Bear Grylls' Celebrity Island, where they were in the midst of water shortages, extreme hunger and tropical storms.

Reunion: The smitten pair looked delighted to be spending time together, and enjoyed a leisurely chat and a hot drink inside the restaurant

Toned: Layering up in the cold weather she slipped a black leather jacket over her stylish ensemble and forwent the heels in favour of red, green and white trainers

After developing a strong bond on the survival show, the pair continued their romance on home turf.

They first set tongues wagging when they were seen sharing holiday photographs from the same location on Instagram, despite denying claims they were dating.

They were later pictured kissing at London City Airport, and marked their first public outing as a couple at the Wimbledon men's semi-finals earlier in July.

Lucy was even seen spending New Year's Eve with Ryan and his family, and was introduced to his eight-year-old daughter Scarlet, whom he shares with former flame Tina O'Brien, earlier this year.

Back in Blighty: Her hunky former Coronation Street beau, 33, also kept it casual for the pair's lunch, wearing a cream hoodie and jeans, teamed with slate grey trainers

Radiant: Her brunette bob was styled sleek and straight while her pretty features were enhanced with radiant dusting of make-up

Glamorous: The star looked radiant as she made her way inside the restaurant

Ryan made his long-awaited Neighbours debut in an hour-long late-night special episode as English tourist Rafael Humphreys, a loner with dark secrets and a score to settle.

Recently fans showered Ryan with praise after his portrayal of a 'raw and heartfelt' gay sex scene on Neighbours.

The actor's character Rafael was seen enjoying an emotional tryst with David, played by Takaya Honda - which fans branded both 'beautiful' and 'refreshing' on Twitter.She's enjoying a girls' getaway with her mother in Hawaii.

And Lea Michele shared more envy-inducing holiday snaps on Thursday as she showed off her beach body as well as the amazing views in Maui.

'Hello I live here now' Lea captioned a snap of her wearing a neon green swimsuit.

Booty-ful: Lea Michele looked fantastic as she posed in a neon swimsuit during her Hawaiian vacation on Thursday

The one-piece was cut high on her hips to reveal a tattoo on her booty as she posed seductively on a veranda.

In other snaps the former Glee star sat cross-legged on a hammock looking super content.

She wrote on Instagram 'And I'm never leaving...' while also describing her vacation as 'heaven'.

The brunette beauty also showed off a pretty white Ramy Brook cover up with some reflective aviators as she posed with her hair up in a bun.

'Heaven': The actress looked completely relaxed as she sat on a hammock with the sea view behind her

Sunny days: The 31-year-old posed up a storm in a stylish white cover-up

Lea is currently dating Zandy Reich, who is president of the women's fashion brand AYR (All Year Round), so no wonder she has an endless supply of stylish outfits.

Lea and Zandy were first seen together in July; they stepped out holding hands in the Big Apple.

According to People, the duo were friends before they became romantic; the magazine's source said they've been pals for 'a few years.'

Lea's show Scream Queens was scuttled last year after its second season.

She also starred on ABC's sitcom The Mayor, which premiered this past October but was cut in the middle of its first season in January.

Sitting pretty: The star also shared this image where she wore a wrap while in a hammockHe unveiled a dramatic new look after shaving off his eyebrows, locks and facial hair for his new role as Pablo Picasso in the second series of Genius.

And Antonio Banderas, 57, proudly paraded his new look as he arrived to the World Premiere of Genius: Picasso with girlfriend Nicole Kempel, 37, in Spain on Thursday.

The handsome actor was suited and booted to perfection as he cosied up to his stunning other half, as well as her twin sister.

Antonio Banderas, 57, proudly paraded his new look as he arrived to the World Premiere of Genius: Picasso with girlfriend Nicole Kempel, 37, in Spain on Thursday

Antonio, who began dating Nicole in since 2014, shortly after his 19-year marriage to Melanie Griffith ended, put on a seriously slick display in the black blazer which boasted a snazzy velvet lining.

He teamed the look with a black tie, matching trousers and shiny black shoes, as well as a pair of shades which complemented his shaved do.

Antonio was joined by stunning Nicole, who wowed in a grey blazer style number which showed off her endless pins.

On Wednesday afternoon, the star displayed the results of his blade work when he attended a photocall for the show in Madrid, Spain.

Handsome: Antonio, who began dating Nicole in since 2014, shortly after his marriage to Melanie Griffith ended, put on a slick display in the black blazer which boasted a velvet lining

Ladies' man: The handsome actor was suited and booted to perfection as he cosied up to his stunning other half, as well as her twin sister

Looking good: He teamed the look with a slick black tie, matching trousers and shiny black shoes, as well as a pair of shades which complemented his shaved do

Beauty: Antonio was joined by stunning Nicole, who wowed in a grey blazer style number which showed off her endless pins

Happy: Antonio looked delighted with his new look as he mingled with his co-star

Revealing shaved eyebrows and facial hair to match his shiny pate, the 57-year-old Spanish actor looked far removed from his usual dark and brooding appearance as he posed for gathered photographers at the capital city's Westin Palace hotel.

The star looked effortlessly cool for his appearance at the daytime event, sporting a black V-neck sweater, which he teamed with matching trousers and sneakers.

Accessorising with a beaded bracelet and eye-catching watch, the actor gamely posed in front of a large poster of his paint-covered face as the titular character of National Geographic's anthology series.

Moments after the photocall ended, Antonio took to his Twitter account to share a shot of himself posing for photographers, alongside the caption: 'Greetings from The Westin Palace, Madrid. Today we present Genius: Picasso to the press.'

Loving life: Antonio was clearly in a good mood as he put on an animated display at the premiere

In his element: Antonio looked thrilled as he posed away

Hair he goes: On Wednesday, Antonio stepped out sporting a shaved head and eyebrows as he attended a photocall for Genius Picasso at the Westin Palace in Madrid, Spain

Dare to bare: All of the 57-year-old actor's facial hair had also been removed for his TV role

Antonio's latest outing comes after revealed that he had three stents implanted to widen the narrowed arteries in his heart after the scare in January.

The star also admitted he had suffered heart rhythm problems before being rushed to hospital near his Surrey home while exercising.

The Desperado star confirmed: 'I suffered a heart attack on January 26. It was a benign attack, it hasn't caused any permanent damage and now I'm in a recovery period.

Stark contrast: He looked a far cry from his normally more hirsute appearance during the event

Casually cool: The Spanish hunk looked effortlessly cool for his appearance at the press event

Black: He wore a black V-neck sweater, which he teamed with matching trousers and sneakers

Jovial: He appeared to be in jovial spirits as he stepped out on his round of promotional duties

'It's something that happens every day to a lot of people. I didn't hide it, but I didn't want it to receive more importance than those suffered by other people.'

In a recently unveiled clip of the upcoming second season of the show, Antonio is seen sporting a silver coif while demonstrating unshakeable confidence as he takes on the role of the Guernica painter from his 40s onwards.



Alex Rich plays the artist - who lived until he was 91 - during his younger years. Both Antonio and Alex are seen in several sultry moments throughout the preview.

Let's face it: The actor gamely posed in front of a large poster of his paint-covered face as the titular character of National Geographic's anthology series

Social media: After the photocall, he took to Twitter to share a shot of himself at the unveiling

The trailer flashes through moments of Picasso's multiple marriages and numerous affairs, along with dramatisations of his groundbreaking impact on art and culture.

Young Picasso is seen struggling during his formal training where he's told: 'You have talent, but no discipline' by a mentor.

But the free-spirited Cubism co-founder treads his own path as he learns to break the rules in both life and art.



'I want to paint you' he coos to more than one woman before pitting a pair of mistresses against each other in a literal fight for his heart.

Strike a pose: The screen heartthrob struck a series of poses for photographers at the event

Famed artist: Actor Antonio plays famed artist Pablo Picasso throughout his 40s in the show

Director: He cosied up to director Kenneth Biller as the pair posed for gathered photographers

Another eye-popping scenes shows several ladies au naturale, appearing to pose for the artist's famous Les Demoiselles d'Avignon painting.

The 10-part series is set to premiere April 24 on National Geographic.

Picasso follows in the footsteps of Genius season one, which starred Geoffrey Rush as Nobel Prize winning scientist Albert Einstein.

The show garnered rave reviews and 10 Emmy nominations, and has also earned the channel's best ratings ever, with 45million viewers tuning in globally.

Simply genius! Picasso follows in the footsteps of Genius season one, which starred Geoffrey Rush as Nobel Prize winning scientist Albert EinsteinHe is the eldest of the Beckham brood and the first to fly the nest to pursue a photography course at New York's Parsons School of Design.

But Brooklyn Beckham, who recently spent some time home in London, appeared to struggle with being apart from his mum Victoria, 43, as he uploaded a snap of the former Spice Girl.

'Miss you @victoriabeckham', the 19-year-old captioned the image which saw Victoria in plunging swimwear as she cooled off in the water.

'Miss you: Brooklyn Beckham, who recently spent some time home in London, appeared to struggle with being apart from his mum Victoria, 43, as he uploaded a swimwear snap of her

Holding a beverage in one hand, Victoria is seen looking over her shoulder as she poses for the camera.

With her locks piled into a casual bun and her signature black shades shielding her features, the fashion designer appeared to enjoy some well deserved time off.

Brooklyn, who is in a relationship with actress Chloe Moretz, was back in London earlier this month and to spend Mother's Day with Victoria.

In perhaps the greatest Mother's Day gift of all, the teenager paid tribute to Victoria by having a heart emblazoned with the word 'Mum' tattooed on his bicep last month.

Independent: Brooklyn is the eldest of the Beckham brood and the first to fly the nest to pursue a photography course at New York's Parsons School of Design

Family: Brooklyn was back in London earlier this month and to spend Mother's Day with Victoria

He also utilised the time back home in the UK to spend quality time with his little sister Harper, 6, and the pair enjoyed a walk in the countryside.

The aspiring photographer was seen holding hands with Harper as she beamed with glee.

Brooklyn was rocking a Barbour jacket and distressed jeans for his stroll, with his younger sister sporting a navy number.

The pair donned matching wellies and gloves as they wrapped up warm for their outdoor adventures.

Love: In perhaps the greatest Mother's Day gift of all, the teenager paid tribute to Victoria by having a heart emblazoned with the word 'Mum' tattooed on his bicep last month

Siblings: He also utilised the time back home in the UK to spend quality time with his little sister Harper, 6, and the pair enjoyed a walk in the countryside

Meanwhile Brooklyn looked more besotted than ever with girlfriend Chloe as they packed on the PDA in New York City ahead of his trip home to London.

The teen was seen drawing in the blonde beauty, 21, for a passionate kiss on the street as they bade each other farewell, after their romantic day out.

Chloe and Brooklyn first met in 2014, and they went on to date in summer 2016 before the distance proved too much - with the actress based in LA.

However, the duo rekindled their romance in September 2017, when Brooklyn moved to the Big Apple to study photography at Parsons School of Design.Jet set model Bella Hadid looked a picture of confidence as she jetted home to New York on Thursday after revealing she was riddled with insecurities during her early teens.

The 21-year-old was back in the Big Apple after a trip to Shanghai where she attended a glamorous Dior party as part of her role as the brand's ambassador.

Home sweet home: Bella Hadid jetted back to New York on Thursday after a trip to China

She was spotted at JFK airport wearing a 90s inspired look that included high-waisted jeans, a sweatshirt and chunky Dior necklace.

Last week Bella admitted to only 'recently' feeling comfortable with her appearance after her weight and thin eyebrows left her feeling insecure when she was a teenager.

Speaking to Cosmopolitan.com, the brunette beauty confessed: 'I think I had more beauty insecurities growing up than probably anybody.

Cute smile: The top model later flashed her cute smile while heading out dinner

Swagger: The model rocked a 90s inspired look upon arrival at the airport

Casual chic: Bella kept her cool and funky look going in the West Village

Busy star: The top model just returned from a trip to Shanghai

Runway ready: Bella looked runway ready as she strolled down the sidewalk

'Growing up, I was always self-conscious about my brows but I never knew that you could do something about it. I've always had really thin brows, I got them from my dad.

'I was also kind of chubbier growing up until I was 15, so there were a lot of things I had to grow into - I definitely had to grow into my face a lot. I wasn't very secure with myself until recently.'

Bella of the ball: The 21-year-old attended a Dior event in Shanghai earlier this week

However, Bella is now a fan of her striking features and only chooses to enhance her brows by filling them in with a pencil.

She said: 'Fake it till you make it, I guess. Brows are such a beautiful part of a woman and a man's face, so to be able to enhance them now is revolutionary for me.'

And the Victoria's Secret model also likes using a subtle contour to add a bit of definition to her face, applying her favourite Dior contour product to help her look 'healthier' after she was diagnosed with Lymes disease in 2012.

'Insecure': Bella, seen here with her mother and former step-father David Foster in 2010, recently said she wasn't confident during her teenage years

 Slide me  My how she's changed: Bella said she had to 'grow into her face'

She explained: 'I don't contour every day, but it's life-changing for sure. I mean, contouring your nose and jawline. Whew!

'I like the Dior Contour. They're amazing because they blend really well; they just look like part of your skin. And blush, when I was really sick over the past couple of years, blush helped me look and feel healthier, which makes your confidence go up. It was that and growing older, which just makes you feel more confident.'Its Wednesday finale episode scored more than 1.75 million viewers.

But according to Bachelor 'villain' Keira Maguire, TV fans will soon forget Married At First Sight.

The blonde beauty boasted to the Kyle and Jackie O Show on Friday that Bachelor in Paradise would be bigger and better than the Nine reality show.

'You're not going to remember Married At First Sight!' Keira Maguire boasts that Bachelor in Paradise will be more explosive than the Channel Nine reality TV series

Keira told hosts Kyle Sandilands and Jackie 'O' Henderson the new show was 'Bachelor and Bachelorette combined, but on steroids'.

'It's really romantic but there is still drama,' she teased.

'Let's just say you're not going to even remember Married At First Sight when you're watching it.'

Move over Davina! Keira told hosts Kyle Sandilands and Jackie 'O' Henderson the new show was 'Bachelor and Bachelorette combined, but on steroids'

A preview for the series, which premieres on Sunday, shows a very different side to Keira.

In the short clip, Keira is seen breaking down in tears as she revealed her struggle to find love.

'I just want someone to love me for me,' she sobs. 'I'm kind of thinking, what's wrong with me, like?'

Upset: In the short clip, Keira is seen breaking down in tears as she revealed her struggle to find love

Crying: 'I just want someone to love me for me,' she sobs. 'I'm kind of thinking, what's wrong with me, like?'

Fortunately for Keira she eventually found love with a contestant while filming in Fiji.

Keira is currently in a relationship with Jarrod Woodgate, the couple hooking up on Bachelor in Paradise.

According to NW magazine, the beauty is moving down to Melbourne to be with her new beau.

Taking things to the next level! According to NW magazine, the beauty is moving down to Melbourne to be with her new beau

He's smitten! Jarrod is widely thought to be the male suitor who proposes in the final episode of Bachelor in Paradise

Meanwhile Jarrod is widely thought to be the male suitor who proposes in the final episode of Bachelor in Paradise.

'I've never felt so good - I'm in such a good place right now,' Jarrod told TV Week earlier this month.

He also added that he would definitely be interested in marriage, but was just waiting for the right girl.They appeared on the 2016 edition of Love Island together.

And Kady McDermott was enjoying a catch up with her former co-star Cally Jane Beech at Megaro in London's King's Cross on Thursday, rubbing shoulders at the launch of the hotel's new lobby bar, Minimix.

The reality star put on a brave face following the news that her ex-boyfriend Scott Thomas had been spotted getting cosy with TOWIE's Amber Turner.

Joining forces: Kady McDermott was enjoying a catch up with her former co-star Call Jane Beech at Megaro in London's King's Cross on Thursday, rubbing shoulders at the launch of the hotel's new lobby bar, Minimix

Kady showed off her slender waist in a white crop top and a pair of checked trousers.

The petite beauty accessorised with clear heels and a beige clutch bag, posing alongside pal Cally.

Mother-of-one Cally - who raises daughter Vienna with her Love Island lover Luis Morrison - looked super chic in a striped top and suede trousers.

Also putting in a glamorous appearance at the event was ex-TOWIE star Amber Dowding, who stood out from the crowd in a citrus-hued knit.

Pocket rocket: Kady showed off her slender waist in a white crop top and a pair of checked trousers

Glamorous: Mother-of-one Cally - who raises daughter Vienna with her Love Island lover Luis Morrison - looked super chic in a striped top and suede trousers

Eye-catching: Also putting in a glamorous appearance at the event was ex-TOWIE star Amber Dowding, who stood out from the crowd in a citrus-hued knit

Cheers! The reality stars were catching up over drinks inside the bash

The newly-brunette star had been axed from the ITVBe show alongside boyfriend Chris Clark as it was reportedly deemed their happy love life didn't make for interesting storylines.

Also in attendance at the bar launch was ex-TOWIE star Fran Parman, who put on a very daring display in a navy blazer.

Forgoing a T-shirt underneath the number, Diags' ex accidentally showed off more than she bargained for.

Putting on a brave face: Kady's outing comes after her ex Scott Thomas was spotted with TOWIE's Amber Turner

Daring to bare: Former TOWIE star Fran Parman chose not to wear a top underneath her navy blazer

Flashing the flesh: The braless star joined forces with scantily-clad Georgia Harrison

Lara Croft take note! The star flashed her underwear in her military co-ords

Georgia Harrison - who has briefly graced our screens on both TOWIE and Love Island - joined her gal pal, sporting a daring, Tomb Raider inspired outfit.

This comes after Amber Turner was spotted putting on a cosy outing with Kady's ex Scott while departing Wednesday night's OK! Magazine anniversary bash the night before.

The 24-year-old stunner, who was left heartbroken after a fling with co-star Dan Edgar, looked sensational in a deeply plunging red jumpsuit while Scott, who split from Kady McDermott last year, looked slick in a checked suit jacket.

Putting in an appearance: Lizzie Cundy was showing off her figure in a sheer top

Cosying up: Lizzie and Cally caught up in style inside the venue

Amber looked sensational at the party, which occured just days before the launch of TOWIE's 22nd season, on which her former flame Dan will introduce his new girlfriend Clelia Theodouru, much to her reported heartbreak.

Elsewhere, Scott was in an on-off romance with Love Island co-star Kady, which first ended after he was arrested for a boozy bust-up in June, before a brief reunion which ended in tears in December - leaving the star single and ready to mingle.

It was plain to see why Scott may have approached Amber before their departure together, as she looked incredible in her plunging red jumpsuit which displayed the results of her recent boob job as she went braless underneath.

She wore her blonde tresses in huge bouncy waves, while her make-up was lavishly applied to provide the perfect red carpet look for the star-studded bash.

Cosy: Kady's outing comes after TOWIE beauty Amber Turner was spotted leaving the OK! Magazine party with her ex Scott Thomas

Loved-up: Amber looked sensational at the party, which occured just days before the launch of TOWIE's 22nd season, on which her former flame Dan will introduce his new girlfriend Clelia Theodouru, much to her reported heartbreak

Stunner: Scott was in a relationship with Kady before their final split in December

Scott, who has christened himself Scotty Special, was certainly dressed to impress as he sported tight black jeans with a black shirt while upping the sophistication with his checked blazer and complementary pocket square.

The couple looked extremely cosy, as Scott scooped down to look at Amber's phone before they both sat in the cab with matching grins on their faces.

MailOnline has contacted Amber and Scott's representatives for comment.

Just good friends? The stunner was smouldering in all red as she headed off with the dashing Mancunian

It's been claimed Amber hit back at Dan for 'lying and stringing her along' when she joined co-stars including Chloe Lewis for filming in Barcelona.

It was alleged the Essex native had 'a huge meltdown' on set after discovering 27-year-old Dan was seeing new girl Clelia.

Amber dumped her boyfriend of four years, Jamie Reed, to be with Dan in 2016. But the pair called it quits back in October when the blonde reportedly discovered he had bedded a mystery woman behind her back during a lads' trip to Ireland.

Meanwhile, in June last year a fiery bust-up with Kady left fans in shock when Scott was arrested on suspicion of assault.

Over it: Amber dumped her boyfriend of four years, Jamie Reed, to be with Dan in 2016. But the pair called it quits back in October when the blonde reportedly discovered he had bedded a mystery woman behind her back during a lads' trip to Ireland

At the time, a spokesperson for Greater Manchester Police said: 'Shortly after 4:35am on Saturday 24 June 2017, police were called to reports of a domestic incident at an address in Stockport.

'Officers attended and arrested a 28-year-old man on suspicion of assault. He was later released without charge and no further action will be taken.'

After the row, sources told The Sun: 'Kady was furious when Scott came into the house drunk. They had a huge row and it got out of hand with some pushing.

Kady called the police and Scott spent the rest of the night in a cell. It was blown out of proportion and they were both really embarrassed the next day.'Zac Efron got his friends to 'spiritually cleanse' him after filming his scenes as serial killer Ted Bundy.

The 30-year-old actor stars as the notorious figure, who confessed to having committed 30 homicides before his execution in 1989, in new movie Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, and in order to regain his calmness, he got his pals to waft burning sage around him.

Asked how he coped with such an intense role, he said: 'I went and had some friends sage me. You know, do a little spiritual cleansing.'

Serial killer: Zac Efron just finished filming Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile and says he asked to be 'spiritually cleansed' after playing Ted Bundy

The Baywatch star says that it was 'fun' to act out a real-life person, but says it's more of an 'experiment' than a page-by-page account of Bundy's life.

He said: 'It doesn't really glorify Ted Bundy. He wasn't a person to be glorified.

'It simply tells a story and sort of how the world was able to be charmed over by this guy who was notoriously evil and the vexing position that so many people were put in, the world was put in.

'It was fun to go and experiment in that realm of reality.'

On the run: The actor stars as Ted Bundy in the upcoming film. He is seen in a still from the movie that he shared to Instagram

Efron stars alongside Big Bang Theory star Jim Parsons as Larry Simpson, the lead prosecutor in the 1979 Miami trial that convicted Bundy of his crimes.

Other cast members include Lily Collins, who was cast as Bundy's girlfriend Elizabeth Kloepfer, and Kaya Scodelario as his ex-wife Carole Ann Boone, with whom he had a lasting relationship with up until the trial which saw him sentenced.

John Malkovich stars as Judge Edward Cowart, who presided over the 1979 trial, and Angela Sarafyan and Grace Victoria Cox are also in the movie.

Buttoned up: The 30-year-old star was a hit on the Golden Globes red carpet on January 7

The film - directed by Paradise Lost: The Child of Murders at Robin Hood Hills filmmaker Joe Berlinger - will tell the shocking true story of Bundy, who raped and murdered numerous young women during a killing spree in the 1970s that shocked America and the world.

Bundy chose to represent himself at the trial, which was broadcast on national television, and appeared to develop something of a rapport with the judge.

The script has been written by Michael Werwie and is thought to explore the crimes of the killer through the eyes of Bundy's girlfriend.The star of the recent Oscars ceremony cuts an anonymous figure as she drags her suitcase up the stairs of the Young Vic cafe in Central London.

Rachel Shenton, previously best known for playing a wannabe-Wag in the teen soap Hollyoaks, captured the hearts of the world earlier this month when she appealed for more help for deaf people as she accepted an award for the short film she wrote and starred in.

Since that unexpected triumph, her life has been manic.

Star of The Silent Child Rachel Shenton (right) and her fiance Chris Overton (left), who directed the film, have barely had a second to fully savour the fact they have won an Oscar. The couple are pictured with its star Maisie Sly, five

The 30-year-old and her fiance Chris Overton, who directed the film, have barely had a second to fully savour their achievement.

They are fresh off the train back to London when we meet, and have dozens of phone calls to make.

Everyone wants to talk to them now: charity leaders, schools, the media, producers.

The bosses of Strictly Come Dancing are even said to have suggested Rachel might take part in the show.

'But I'd be way too terrified,' she says. 'Anyway, there's too much else to do.'

'Surreal' is Rachel's favourite word to sum up her experience of making The Silent Child, which will be aired on BBC1 on Good Friday.

The poignant 20-minute film, which won an Academy Award for Best Live Action Short, is about a young deaf girl who can't communicate with her family, who can all hear.

But her life changes  briefly  when a caring social worker, played by Rachel, teaches her sign language.

The film was Rachel's first script and the first film Chris had ever directed.

The 30-year-old actress (pictured with director fiance Chris Overton) was previously known for her role in Channel 4 soap Hollyoaks

Their star was Maisie Sly, a profoundly deaf five-year-old who was barely old enough to read the script; Chris had to learn sign language to direct her.

They spent more than a year trying to fund the project. 'We were excited just to get it into a few festivals,' recalls Chris.

'And then it was long-listed for an Oscar. Then it was shortlisted. And then . . .' He shakes his head and grins.

Their statuettes  they were each given one  now sit on the bookcase in their flat.

The highlights of their Hollywood trip included a lunch at which they met Steven Spielberg  who promised to watch their film.

On the night itself they followed Salma Hayek up the red carpet, but were too busy looking after Maisie to really concentrate.

'She was relaxed and that helped us,' says Rachel. 'She was mainly concerned about when she'd get to eat. The rest of it is a blur.'

While Rachel's sign language acceptance speech made it the talking-point of the Oscars, it wasn't calculated.

But it was her father Geoff's (pictured second right with Rachel centre) cancer and subsequent deafness that made her want to tackle the issue in her work

'Every time we thought about preparing one, we felt weird in case it didn't go our way,' says Rachel.

'But I promised Maisie I'd do it in sign language if we won  and as Chris and I were going to be up on stage, I wanted her to be looking at us, not her interpreter.'

Since they returned home, friends and family members have each had a turn at holding the Oscar statuettes  but their main focus has been using the win to continue their campaign.

Admittedly, helping the deaf is not the sexiest of causes. No one is going to start wearing black or attaching a ribbon to their outfit to help deaf children gain better access to education. But it's a subject very close to the couple's hearts.

They want to turn The Silent Child into a feature-length film which will, again, star Maisie.

Rachel is halfway through writing the first draft, which follows her young deaf girl as she becomes a woman.

Rachel, born in Stoke-on-Trent, has a deeply personal reason for espousing this particular good cause.

Rachel (pictured on ITV's This Mornign) was 12 when her father, Geoff, contracted throat cancer. The chemotherapy he received affected his ears and he slowly went deaf

She was 12 when her father, Geoff, contracted throat cancer. The chemotherapy he received affected his ears and he slowly went deaf.

Although he died two years later, when Rachel was 14, by then she was learning sign language and it became a refuge for her as she mourned.

'It was the first time I'd ever seen my dad vulnerable,' she says. 'You couldn't just shout to him from another room. Going out for dinner became impossible for him because of all the competing voices.

'He could speak, so he'd say, 'I don't know what you're saying' and we would gather around him as a family so he could see our lips. But it was hard for him to adjust.

'He was just getting around to the idea of using sign language when he died.'

By then Rachel had made friends at her sign language classes  and even when she started working as an actress, first in Holby City and then in Hollyoaks, she volunteered for deaf charities in her spare time and became increasingly frustrated at the way deaf people, and children in particular, were treated.

'Being deaf is not a learning difficulty, but 58 per cent of deaf children fail to get five A-C grades at GCSE,' she says. 'With the right support, they should be able to do everything a hearing child can do.'

In her short film, the middle-class parents of young deaf girl Libby don't know how to handle her deafness.

'Ninety per cent of deaf children are born to hearing parents and it is common not to know what to do,' says Rachel. 'There isn't the education there for parents.'

Although he died two years later, when Rachel (pictured with fiance Chris) was 14, by then she was learning sign language and it became a refuge for her as she mourned. She says he is the reason she won her Oscar

Rachel's character tries to persuade the parents to use sign language with their daughter, but they refuse, thinking it is better for her simply to read lips.

'They're not bad people, they just don't understand,' says Rachel.

'That's why it is important that we have these conversations and I am so proud that winning on the world's biggest stage means people are now talking about it.'

Rachel was living in LA and starring in a teen drama in which one of the leading actresses is deaf when she began thinking of the story for The Silent Child.

The show even had an entire episode in sign language  but Rachel had to learn a new version, as U.S sign language is not the same as British.

She became romantically involved with Chris, a former Hollyoaks co-star looking for work in LA, and he encouraged her to write the drama. When he saw the script, he knew he wanted to direct it.

Raising the 10,000 needed to make the film became a family affair.

Chris's parents, who used to run a bakery, made hundreds of cupcakes which Rachel's mum sold. They also created a roadshow, 'Deaf not Stupid', to take to schools and workplaces.

It has taken two years from start to finish  but now their publicity aims have been achieved. The issue was even discussed in the House of Commons, with Theresa May singling out the drama and its young star for praise.

'Thanks to my dad, my eyes were opened to this world,' says Rachel. 'He is always on my mind and I feel incredibly proud that I have done this because of him.'She admitted this week she's been inundated with 'd**k pics' after appearing on Married At First Sight.

And Davina Rankin sent pulses racing again by sharing a very raunchy bikini snap on Thursday.

Taken during her recent trip to Byron Bay, the buxom beauty was seen busty out of a tiny strapless top.

Hello boys! Davina Rankin shows off her ample cleavage in a VERY small bikini top after revealing she gets sent 'a lot of d**k pics'

'I get a lot of d**k pics': On Friday, Davina said that her stint on the controversial reality 'experiment' hadn't endeared her to Australia's eligible bachelors

Putting her sensational curves on display, she paired the top with tangerine crochet bottoms.

She captioned the snap: 'Just what the doctor ordered'.

On Friday, Davina said that her stint on the controversial reality 'experiment' hadn't endeared her to Australia's eligible bachelors.

'I get a lot of d**k pics but no one wants to date me,'the Gold Coast bombshell told the publication.

Appearing to lament how she purported herself on air, Davina added: 'No one was watching how I acted on that show going 'I want to date her.'

While the cream of the single crop haven't been clambering to get Davina's number she remained philosophical.

'I get a lot of d**k pics but no one wants to date me,' the Gold Coast bombshell told the Daily Telegraph

'I don't want to date someone who judges me anyway, so it's filtering out the bad ones,' she said.

Davina, who was partnered with Ryan Gallagher on the show, shocked fans when she attempted to lure cast mate Dean Wells away from his 'bride' Tracey Jewel.

It was revealed by Tracey that it was Davina who instigated the attempted dalliance with a series of explicit texts.

Holding out for Mr Right: While the cream of the single crop haven't been clambering to get Davina's number she remained philosophical: 'I don't want to date someone who judges me anyway, so it's filtering out the bad ones,' she said

However, speaking on 97.3FM's Bianca, Terry and Bob show on Thursday, Davina justified her actions, saying she did it all for love.

'I thought in my mind that it was worth stepping on a few toes to find love,' she said.

During Wednesday's finale Tracey confronted Davina over her affair with Dean, telling the busty brunette that if it wasn't for her she and Dean would still be together.

Strong words: During Wednesday's finale Tracey confronted Davina over her affair with Dean, telling the busty brunette that if it wasn't for her she and Dean would still be together

Unrepentant: Davina remained defiant,telling Tracey: ''I feel like we're wasting time' before explaining she had no regrets about her behaviour.

'I'm really happy with Sean but I want you to know that one of the main reasons Dean and I didn't work was because of what you did,' Tracey told Davina bluntly.

However, Davina remained defiant,telling Tracey: ''I feel like we're wasting time' before explaining she had no regrets about her behaviour.

Appearing on Talking Married this week, Ryan revealed he realised it was important to take the higher ground with Davina and had to hold himself back from 'firing up'.

'You don't win people like that by doing that,' he said. 'If you fire up, they're going to win.'

He added: 'The best thing you can do is move on and be with someone else - that'll show them why they're still lonely.'Reese Witherspoon started her birthday morning with birthday cake courtesy of her five-year-old son Tennessee Toth.

But she still had an appetite as she went on to head to a birthday lunch in Hollywood.

The blonde star, who turned 42 on Thursday, smiled happily as she arrived at the restaurant wearing a coordinated blue ensemble.

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Birthday girl: Reese Witherspoon, who turned 42 on Thursday, smiled happily as she arrived for lunch in Hollywood wearing a coordinated blue ensemble

Reese stepped out in a pretty dark blue dress patterned with colorful floral motifs.

She added a coat in a matching shade of blue that was the same length as her frock and also matching heeled ankle boots.

And to make it complete, she sported large owl-shaped sunglasses and a shoulder purse also in the same blue color.

Coordinated look: The blonde star wore a dark blue dress patterned with floral motifs, a coat in a matching shade of blue the same length as her frock and also matching heeled ankle boots

Spring-like: She added a pair of large owl-shaped sunglasses also in the same color as well as a shoulder purse

Reese started the day in party mood, sharing to Instagram to a photo with her son Tennessee and her birthday cake.

She said she was having 'cake for breakfast' and that she was feeling so much love from her friends.

The Wild star managed to add in a plug for her line Draper James, saying the company made her the dress for the day.

Staying on top of the game: The Tennessee native said she was having 'cake for breakfast' with her son Tennessee

Meanwhile, Jennifer Garner was one of the first celebrities to wish Reese a happy 42nd birthday on Thursday.

And the Miracles From Heaven actress did so in a big way as she strapped on a saxophone and a proper band suit to play Happy Birthday for the Legally Blonde beauty.

The mother-of-three captioned her image: 'Hey, @reesewitherspoon! I don't know why you're on my mind today.....#happybirthdayfriend.'

Cool move: Jennifer Garner was one of the first celebrities to wish Reese a happy 42nd birthday on Thursday

Garner looked cute in her white and black suit that hit her incredibly toned body.

She also donned a band camp hat with a white ball of fur on top and white gloves.

The ex of Ben Affleck was seen in the back yard of her large Pacific Palisades, California home.

The two have a lot in common: they both live in the same Los Angeles neighborhood, they both at one time were married to big Hollywood stars (Reese was with Ryan Phillippe and Jennifer was with Ben Affleck), and they both have three kids.

A longtime pal: Nicole Kidman posted this photo to Instagram early on Thursday adding the petite powerhouse is a 'friend, partner, leader and inspiration'

Another famous friend: Another star who wishes Reese well was Mindy Kalling. They worked together on the new fantasy film Wrinkle In Time. She shared a photo from the set with the caption, 'Happy birthday kween, You make life so fun!'

Nicole Kidman posted a photo of the two to Instagram early on Thursday.

The leggy ex of Tom Cruise wrote in her caption that the petite powerhouse is a 'friend, partner, leader and inspiration.'

Kidman added that she 'loved' the Draper James designer.

Another star who wishes Reese well was Mindy Kalling.

They worked together on the new fantasy film Wrinkle In Time. She shared a photo from the set with the caption, 'Happy birthday kween, You make life so fun!'

A shout out: Zoe Saldana also turned to social media to help celebrate Witherspoon. 'Happy Birthday Reese! Hope today is as magical as you are,' said the Avatar star. She added emojis for a gift, cone, balloon and cake

Cuteness overload: Saldana also shared this photo where the Friends vet was holding a slice of cake and a gift

So nautical: The Draper James website shared this image of a cake with a note for the star

Zoe Saldana also turned to social media to help celebrate Witherspoon.

'Happy Birthday Reese! Hope today is as magical as you are,' said the Avatar star. She added emojis for a gift, cone, balloon and cake.

The Oscar winner has already been shooting season two of the Emmy winning Big Little Lies, which also stars Laura Dern and Nicole Kidman. Meryl Streep will also join the series.She's been at the centre of a nasty family spat in recent weeks.

And Pamela Anderson was putting on a brave face when she attended the Global Gift Foundation charity gala, held at the Thyssen-Bornemisza museum in downtown Madrid, Spain on Thursday night.

The A-list star, 50, showed off her curves in a clingy silk gown when she graced the red carpet at the event, which aims to help needed children around the world.

Glamorous as ever: Pamela Anderson wowed at the Global Gift Foundation charity gala, held at the Thyssen-Bornemisza museum in downtown Madrid, Spain on Thursday night

Pamela looked incredible in the strapless taupe dress, which she set off with a pair of black stilettos.

The Hollywood star wore her golden locks cascading gown in tumbling curls and kept her make-up light and natural.

This marked Pamela's second public appearance since news of the family fight broke earlier this month, after her 21-year-old son Brandon hit his father (and her ex-husband) Tommy Lee.

Stepping out in style: The Hollywood beauty displayed her incredible physique in the dress

Clingy: The A-list star showed off her curves in a clingy silk gown when she graced the red carpet at the event, which aims to help needed children around the world

The incident with the Motley Crue drummer made the news after the 55-year-old rocker took to social media with a selfie of the busted, bloody lip he suffered after his son struck him amid an argument spurred by a social media post in which he spoke out against Pamela.

'My heart is broken,' wrote Lee, who's also father to a 20-year-old with the one-time Playboy Playmate named Dylan Jagger Lee. 'You can give your kids everything they could ever want in their entire lives and they can still turn against you. Good job Brandon! Great son!'

Brandon went on to claim that he gave a drunken Lee the fat lip in self-defense, telling People, 'I'm devastated at the events of the last several days that have been a result of my father's alcoholism.'

Finishing touches: The star set off her look with a simple pair of pointed stilettos

Timeless beauty: The 50-year-old star displayed her youthful visage

Fan favourite: Pamela proved popular with the locals outside the glitzy gala

Pamela posted a blog on her website in which she said that her son hit Lee 'in the nose for all of us who he has hurt.'

'Now Tommy feels humiliated - and is attempting to destroy his own son,' she said of Lee, who was convicted of felony spousal batter on her in 1998. 'This is the Devil - This is the disease of alcoholism.'

She wrote that the Dr. Feelgood drummer positions himself 'consistently [as] the center of sadness, drama and confusion,' has been 'jealous of his [sons'] talent and beauty from the day they were born,' and is the walking 'definition of narcissist/sociopath.'

Blonde bombshell: The Hollywood star wore her golden locks cascading gown in tumbling curls and kept her make-up light and natural as she was joined by Global Gift Foundation Founder Maria Bravo (centre)

Strike a pose: The former Baywatch star joined forces with her fellow guests

Family squabble: Lee took to social media last week to show off his wounds after his run-in with his son Brandon

Lee said that he would follow through with authorities to prosecute his son over the assault, according to TMZ.

A source close to Lee told TMZ of his thinking: 'You encourage what you tolerate, and he's not going to tolerate what Brandon did and that's why he wants the criminal case to keep moving along ... at least for now.'

The mother-of-two was asked about the incident between her son and ex at the event but did not respond, according to TMZ.

The Canadian beauty had appeared in Sin City for a convention in which she spoke out against the business model of ride-share services such as Uber and Lyft, the outlet reported.

Anderson said that the business model is flawed for both sides in terms of the riders and drivers, who she said are exploited.The 'real' Married At First Sight reunion took place on Friday's The Kyle and Jackie O Show, with former cast members sharing jaw-dropping behind-the-scenes secrets.

During the breakfast show, Dean Wells was asked by Kyle Sandilands and Jackie 'O' Henderson about his rumoured 'hook-up' with Davina Rankin in Byron Bay recently.

It was speculated that the 40-year-old creative director had flown to the NSW tourist hotspot to meet with his former fling, who was celebrating her 27th birthday there.

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Please explain! On Friday, Dean Wells (left) was asked by Kyle Sandilands and Jackie 'O' Henderson about his rumoured 'hookup' with Davina Rankin in Byron Bay recently

'You were spotted in Byron Bay where Davina was and everyone is saying you guys are hooking up again,' said Jackie.

Kyle added hopefully: 'Going up there for a little bit of filth?'

But while the KIIS FM presenters were looking for a juicy exclusive, Dean quickly shut down the rumours.

Back together? It was speculated that Dean had flown to Byron Bay for Davina's 27th birthday

Scandal: Dean and Davina previously made headlines for their 'affair' on Married At First Sight

'No, no, no. Definitely not,' said the Manly-based hip hop artist. 'I didn't even know she was up there. I didn't hang out with her.

'Nothing happened. I was up there for a completely different reason,' he added, failing to mention why he was at Ballina Airport on Wednesday.

But Jackie wasn't satisfied, demanding to know the reason he was flying out of Byron Bay while Davina was celebrating her birthday there.

'Nothing happened. I was up there for a completely different reason': While the KIIS FM hosts were looking for a juicy exclusive, Dean quickly shut down the rumours

'Tell us her name!' added Kyle, who was convinced Dean must have been seeing a woman while he was there.

Dean explained he was just 'hanging out', adding: 'I love Byron'.

'Hanging out of who?' responded Kyle cheekily, prompting the other MAFS stars in the KIIS studio to burst into laughter.

Bombshells! The 'real' Married At First Sight reunion took place on Friday's The Kyle and Jackie O Show, with the former cast members sharing jaw-dropping backstage secrets

Dean and Davina made headlines for planning an 'affair' behind their partners' backs on Married At First Sight.

However their illicit romance ended in tears when it was exposed during a tense commitment ceremony.

Married At First Sight returns to Channel Nine next yearPrison guards across NSW will soon be taught to spot radical extremists trying to influence other inmates behind bars.

Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton said there were already roughly 30 people in prison for terror-related offences and scores more before the courts, including three juveniles.

"We're worried about people radicalising in the jail setting," Mr Dutton told 2GB radio on Thursday.

He said the threat posed by Australia's small but increasing population of convicted terrorists did not necessarily end with locking them up.

"We don't want them spreading their evil message in jail," Mr Dutton said.

Roughly 5000 corrections and juvenile justice staff will be trained through the national "radicalisation and extremism awareness" program, which already operates across other states and territories.

"If people think we're dealing with petty criminals - even the description of juveniles is misleading when you've got somebody that wants to go out there and kill Australians in big numbers," Mr Dutton said.

"We need to be realistic about the threat and that's why we're supporting the NSW government."

NSW Corrections Minister David Elliot said the program would complement the state government's investments in upgrading its Supermax prison and creating a new high-security unit for high-risk inmates.

"The highest priority of any government is to keep our community safe from those who would do us harm," he said in a statement.For almost 100 years, an Australian order of nuns has prayed for its co-founder Eileen O'Connor to be made a saint and it seems their wish may be closer to being granted.

Archbishop of Sydney Anthony Fisher has begun a formal process for the beatification of Ms O'Connor, the Catholic Archdiocese of Sydney confirmed in a statement on Thursday, an important step towards canonisation.

Ms O'Connor founded the religious order Our Lady's Nurses of the Poor - also known as the 'Brown Nuns' because of their distinctive brown cloaks and bonnets - with priest Father Edward McGrath, while living in the inner-city Sydney suburb of Waterloo in 1913.

The order was committed to caring for the sick and dying poor in their homes, inspired by Ms O'Connor's own family's financial struggles after her father's death.

Born in Victoria's Richmond in 1892, Ms O'Connor was the eldest of four children to Irish-born parents, and moved to Sydney with her family aged 10.

While not actually a nun herself, Ms O'Connor contributed to the order's work, despite experiencing constant nerve pain after suffering a break in her spine at age three.

She died aged 28 in 1921.

Sister Margaret Mary Birgin, one of 11 religious sisters currently serving in the order, says they have been praying for sainthood for Ms O'Connor since then.

"We welcome this joyful news with great gratitude to God," she said in a statement.

Rome-based priest Father Anthony Robbie has been appointed postulator - the person who guides the cause for beatification or canonisation through the Church's rigorous processes for recognising a saint - for Ms O'Connor.

The Catholic Church posthumously confers beatification, and later sainthood, on people considered so holy during their lives that they are now believed to be with God and can intercede with him to perform miracles.

Mary Mackillop became Australia's first saint in 2010.No other CVs for candidates backed by the Electrical Trades Union were sent to Queensland minister Mark Bailey's private email account, Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk says.

The premier was asked about her promise earlier this week to ask Mr Bailey about the issue, after the resume of an ETU-backed candidate was passed on by the former energy minister, and they were appointed to the board of Energy Queensland.

"The minister has advised my office there were no other CVs for board positions sent by the ETU to the minister's private email account," she told parliament on Thursday.In his spare time, billionaire Andrew Forrest has been undertaking a PhD in marine ecology and he's visibly annoyed by how long it's taken.

The impatient and self-described "hard-edged entrepreneur" told a room full of Australian and American cancer experts he was passionate about not wasting time.

"I can't stand the fact that my PhD in marine ecology has taken four years. I'll never get that back," he told the audience at the US embassy in Canberra on Thursday.

The mining magnate and philanthropist was imploring the researchers and bureaucrats to help change the shocking - and he acknowledged, unfair - reputation the cancer industry has for collaboration.

While there is social collaboration, structural collaboration is rare - especially given concerns about intellectual property - but sadly, that's where solutions are found.

The chairman of Minderoo urged other countries, such as the US and China, to step up and do more and called on the UK to match Australia's $100 million commitment to brain cancer.

Mr Forrest say's he's disappointed how long it takes to get clinical trials off the ground and the bureaucratic hoops that need to be jumped, especially around ethics.

"If we were that dying patient, if we were looking down at ourselves at that potential and closing last breath, would we really be giving a damn that we've got to put this off through the governmental health departments," he argued.

He cited the example of GBM Agile, a new clinical trial program for brain cancer therapies, which he says has taken too long to get started.

"I nearly threw up when I got told that for the $185 million we're not going to see a patient out of the new GBM Agile program maybe until the end of next year."

"I said 'you're all fired if I don't get a different result very fast'," he told those gathered.

Similarly, he said he's been told getting the collaborative approach of his Eliminate Cancer Initiative going in the US will take a minimum two years.

"I'm not going to get violent about it, but inside I will be because so many cancer patients are going to die while we work out how to do this," he said.

Mr Forrest said the private sector and patients need to take a lot more control through a new patient-driven data collection service.

He's already had discussions with the Governor of Texas and next month's Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in London will see Baroness Tessa Jowell, a former Labour minister diagnosed with brain cancer, become the first signatory to give over her data.

Mr Forrest said he comes at cancer research from a personal perspective, with many in his family lost to cancer in every generation.

Last year he handed over the single biggest philanthropic donation in Australia's history, including $75 million for cancer research.The Liberal National Party wants the Queensland government to publicly release a report into a fraud investigation carried out at a Brisbane school while Labor Member for Mansfield Corrine McMillan was principal.

A Right to Information request by the opposition into any fraud at Cavendish Road State High School has been refused on the grounds it would not be in the public interest to release the documents.

The Opposition called on the government to intervene, but Education Minister Grace Grace labelled the call "grubby" in state parliament on Thursday and refused to get involved in the process.A Queensland man dubbed the "'night stalker" who raped four women in their homes over an eight-year period has been jailed for 20 years.

Jason Juan Burr, 51, pleaded guilty to multiple charges in Southport District Court on Thursday including 10 counts of rape.

Under Queensland law, Burr must serve 80 per cent of his sentence, making him eligible to apply for parole in January 2033.

The court heard Burr broke into the women's homes at night, while the victims slept, and raped them.

None of the victims knew Burr, the court was told.

In handing down her sentence Judge Julie Dick said Burr subjected his victims to "every woman's worst nightmare".

Prosecutor Clayton Wallis said Burr had shown no signs of genuine remorse or rehabilitation and his actions were deliberate and targeted.

Mr Wallis said a police-ordered DNA test after Burr was charged with indecently touching a young girl late in 2016 had linked him to the more serious crimes.

When Burr's DNA was checked against samples gained from the rapes the system "lit up like a Christmas tree," according to Mr Wallis.

Defence barrister Wayne Tolton told the court his client was the son of a man who raped his mother and he'd never met his father.

Mr Tolton added Burr had claimed to have been molested at school and faced constant racial abuse throughout his childhood.

"He always felt on the outside and never felt part of the group," Mr Tolton said.Eleven people have been arrested and large stashes of cannabis, ice, MDMA and meth have been seized during a series of raids across regional NSW.

Six properties were stormed at Parkes, Forbes and Bogan Gate, in the state's central west, while another seven were raided in the Lake Illawarra district on Thursday morning.

Detectives seized 180 kilograms of cannabis, about 550 grams of meth, 145 grams of MDMA, 83 grams of cocaine, cash and several firearms across both operations and are interviewing the suspects.Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull insists Australia must protect its soldiers with the best steel in the world.

Rheinmetall earlier this month was awarded the $5 billion federal government contract to build a new fleet of super tanks.

The 211 Boxer tanks will be manufactured initially in Germany and then in Ipswich, Queensland.

Mr Turnbull on Thursday visited Bisalloy in Wollongong, which will supply steel to the project.

"This is where the safety of our soldiers will begin, with the best steel in the world," he told reporters.

The company has also supplied steel for the Bushmaster armoured vehicles made by Thales in Bendigo.

Queensland pipped a rival bid by Victoria to build the new tanks, which are the Army's biggest ever single commissioned contract.Ask Tuan Andrew Nguyen why he's living in the city his parents fled four decades ago and he'll tell you he gets to be on the vanguard of an art scene he describes as a "ticking time bomb".

The artist was a toddler when he and his parents escaped Saigon three years after the city fell to communist rule in 1978.

Some 30 years after the Vietnam War ended and he built a new life in the United States, Nguyen returned to Ho Chi Minh City and says the ideological battles still playing out on its streets today are a constant source of inspiration.

Hammer and sickle flags and Communist propaganda dot this urban jungle, clashing against the slick advertising billboards that symbolise capitalism's most enduring legacy.

It makes you wonder who won the war, and it's this living political paradox that continues to drive The Propeller Group, an artist collective co-founded by Nguyen and Phunam Thuc Ha, later joined by Matt Lucero and operating under revolving membership.

That tension is behind one of their earliest works, a polished parody commercial giving Communism a rebrand that doubles as a sly commentary on the remaining post-Cold War regimes around the globe.

It has also influenced their next big project in the pipeline, a film about the first Asian astronaut in space - a north Vietnamese war hero who's an ambassador in the marketing campaign of international deodorant giant Axe's Apollo range.

It's no wonder The Propeller Group started out as a fake advertising company in order to get their messages out in Vietnam's tightly-controlled public arena.

All three members have roots in the decades-long war that mauled the Southeast Asian nation until 1975.

Ha's father was a local cameraman for an American war correspondent who escaped with his family in the final days of fighting, while Californian-born Lucero's dad was a US Army helicopter gunman.

Nguyen's father was a former South Vietnamese army draftee who, facing a brutal re-education labour camp in the war's aftermath, also got his family out.

"Anybody who had fought with the Americans were deemed as traitors to the country," he says.

Instead, they joined thousands of other Vietnamese refugees who made the dangerous journey in fishing boats to Malaysia's tiny Bidong Island in the 1970s, before settling in Oklahoma.

The 41-year-old is known as a Viet Kieu, an overseas Vietnamese, and his parents thought he was crazy to go back.

Migration is central to The Propeller Group's work. Nguyen's currently in the US with his infant daughter to help dedicate a mural of Sophie Cruz, the little girl who's become one of the youngest and strongest advocates for the immigration reform movement.

In 2015 the six-year-old delivered a letter to Pope Francis in Washington, calling on him to stop her undocumented Mexican immigrant parents from being deported.

Sophie Holding the World Together, a collaboration between The Propeller Group and LA-based street artist El Mac, will be dedicated on Saturday to the city of San Jose, which has one of the largest Vietnamese communities in America.

"We wanted to challenge the majority's ideas on national identity and border politics," Nguyen said.

The Propeller Group's work has toured the world, but they rarely exhibit in Vietnam, where all public shows need government approval and artists can't touch controversial topics such as politics, violence, sex, religion and even superstition.

"Being censored is always on our mind," Nguyen says.

"It forces artists to be tactical... these days they integrate concerns and ideas into their work that isn't so obvious or didactic."

San Art, a centre Nguyen co-founded a decade ago has been put under significant government pressure, forcing him to abandon a key program providing an exhibition platform to aspiring artists.

Reminders of the nation's turbulent history can be found in every corner of Saigon, and it resurfaces in the work of The Propeller Group like oil on water.

One of the many works that would "never ever" see the light of day in a Ho Chi Minh City gallery is their 2015 Venice Biennale project.

It shows the impact of bullets fired from a Soviet-designed AK-47 and an American-made M16 - the two most widely used guns during the Vietnam War - which collided inside a ballistics gel block designed to simulate the density of human flesh.

Nguyen says the Vietnam War was a civil conflict, but he had aimed to re-enact a moment in military history from another struggle that raged a century prior.

"They found two bullets that collided and fused on one of the bloodiest battles of the American civil war - statisticians say that was almost impossible, but it happened," he said.

"Two opposing sides negated themselves and created this object that was beautiful. We were interested in what that could symbolise, the weight that could carry."

IF YOU GO

GETTING THERE: Ho Chi Minh City is a nine-hour flight from Sydney, nine hours from Melbourne and about 12 hours from Brisbane.

Webjet Exclusives offers a nine-day Vietnam tour with Air Asia flights costing $999 per person from Sydney and Melbourne (surcharges apply from other states). For more, go to exclusives.webjet.com.au

STAYING THERE: Asian Ruby Select offers boutique accommodation in central Ho Chi Minh City, within a 20-minute walk from Ben Thanh Market and Tao Dan Park. Prices start at AUD$52 per night (including breakfast) For more, visit asianrubyselecthotel.com.

PLAYING THERE: The Cu Chi Tunnels and the War Remnant Museum offer an insight into Vietnam's violent history, or take a boat ride along the Mekong Delta to visit the CaiBe Floating Market and bike ride through neighbouring villages.

The writer travelled as a guest of Webjet Exclusives.A TAXING DEBATE: SENATORS TRADE BARBS OVER CUTS

"They're either frauds or they're fools. Possibly both." - Greens' Sarah Hanson-Young on One Nation's softening on blocking the tax cuts.

"I ask the crossbench to ignore the Greens in this debate - their grasp on economics is almost as thin as their grasp on reality." - Liberal Senator Jane Hume

"(Sally McManus) will be puppet-master-in-chief. She and the CFMEU thugs will run you over there - you will be puppets in their war against Australians" - Government minister Concetta Fierravanti-Wells hits out at the ACTU secretary and Labor.

"I don't believe they go far enough or are being implemented fast enough," - independent Fraser Anning wants Australia to follow Donald Trump's lead.

"It's the reverse Robin Hood - they want to steal from the poor and they want to give to the rich." - Tasmanian Green Nick McKim.

"If only we reworded the tax cut we are debating today as a tax cut for 'collectives' we might even get the support of our comrades in the Greens" - Liberal Democrats' David Leyonhjelm after running through synonyms for "company".

"We don't have any Labor speakers on the list at the moment - Senator Farrell, do they have anything to say?" - Liberal senator Slade Brockman quizzes Labor's Don Farrell across the chamber.Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull says Russia is denying justice to the families of those killed in the downing of Malaysian Airlines flight MH17.

Mr Turnbull insists his government is doing everything it can to deliver justice for the 38 Australians killed in the the 2014 attack over eastern Ukraine.

He said he knew one of the Australians killed: "A beautiful nun, actually, who taught my daughter."

"They have not got justice yet and we're doing everything we can to deliver it, but the justice is being denied by the Russian government, that's the reality," Mr Turnbull told 2GB radio on Thursday.

"We have imposed sanctions (on Russia) and we are supporting the investigation to identify the people that were responsible and then bring them to justice."

Mr Turnbull said Australia was working closely with Dutch investigators examining how the plane was shot down, killing 298 people on board.

"That prosecution will investigate and bring to trial the people that they allege that are found to have been responsible," he said.

"And then of course those people will have to be very, very careful about where they go."

Last week, Tony Abbott took aim at Foreign Minister Julie Bishop's "disappointing" comments about the downing of MH17.

The former prime minister said it was "not good enough" for Ms Bishop to argue people should wait for an investigation to conclude before forming views on the evidence.

Mr Abbott said it was "absolutely clear" Russia was behind the deadly attack.Australians may be accustomed to living their lives online but experts say the Facebook data-mining scandal shows we need to be more cautious about targeted political content based on psychological profiling.

Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday apologised for a major breach of trust after claims political consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica improperly accessed the data of 50 million users.

The data mining then helped build detailed profiles on American voters for Donald Trump's US presidential campaign in 2016 and Australia's cyber security chief says it's likely Australian users were also implicated.

Professor Moira Paterson from Monash University says despite a level of awareness about privacy settings, Australians can be "a little bit naive" when it comes to online content.

"Using different forms of social media has become a way of life, but I think people need to exercise some caution and be very aware," the privacy and surveillance researcher told AAP on Thursday.

"When you receive political messaging, or messaging that's relevant to some political issue close to an election, you may be receiving particular messages based on your profiling."

Prof Paterson likens the exercise to online retailers using data mining to target advertising to social media users.

However, she says applying the technique to influence voting crosses a line.

"It really starts to go the heart of our democratic processes," she says.

University of Sydney Associate Professor Timothy Dwyer also believes social media users should more actively question whether the content they see is attempting to manipulate their vote.

"One interpretation of these developments is that basically political content on social media is just another form of advertising in the sense that you might assume you're being manipulated by some political group," he told AAP.

"But it's also just a concern that personal information disclosed on social media platforms can make its way into places that people have no knowledge of, or of its subsequent uses."

Both the government and opposition have this week distanced themselves from Cambridge Analytical.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull on Thursday said he "wasn't aware" of the company doing any work for the Liberal party and Opposition Leader Bill Shorten has said Labor would have "nothing to do with the company or the practices".

Will Easton, the head of Facebook in Australia and New Zealand, hasn't been able to say whether Australians' data was involved in the data mining. He told Fairfax Media on Thursday the company was co-operating with the Australian government.

ACCC chairman Rod Sims has said the incident will be part of an upcoming inquiry.

Prof Paterson believes it's time legislators consider regulatory controls, including current exemptions for politicians from any requirements of the Privacy Act.

"I think it would be timely for that to come back on the agenda," she said.A newly elected Queensland MP has opened up about his struggles with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after serving with the Australian Defence Force in Afghanistan.

Brent Mickelberg won the Sunshine Coast seat of Buderim for the Liberal National Party at the November election, taking it back from One Nation defector Steve Dickson.

Mr Mickelberg said he was left shattered by his Afghanistan experience, but his family helped him through a dark time and given him a renewed motivation to make the state a better place.An extra $40 million will flow to drug addiction services after a minor party struck a deal with the federal government over welfare reform.

The Nick Xenophon Team backed the package headlined by a demerit-point system which could see people who fail to meet job-seeking obligations having their dole payments docked.

The legislation effectively passed the Senate on Thursday, with NXT's support coming in return for $20 million for methamphetamine rehabilitation facilities in South Australia.

They secured the same amount for doctors and allied health professionals in regional and remote areas to access professional development and specialist skills in addiction.

"There are only about 100 full-time equivalent addiction specialists in Australia and few GPs, especially doctors in regional and remote areas, that have the knowledge to effectively support Centrelink recipients with addiction issues," NXT MP Rebekah Sharkie said.

The government dumped a controversial plan to drug test welfare recipients, which was a stumbling block in the Senate.

"We believe the government should be spending extra money to help people overcome their addictions, not testing people for drugs," Ms Sharkie said.New Zealand have batted cautiously after bowling England out for 58 on the first day of their day-night Test in Auckland.

Scoring slowly in reply, the Black Caps had reached 1-88 by Thursday's dinner break, after destroying the English batting line-up.

Losing the toss at Eden Park, England were dismissed for their sixth-lowest Test total, carved up by Kiwi quicks Trent Boult and Tim Southee.

The pair required just 20.4 overs to snare all 10 wickets - including Joe Root, Moeen Ali, Jonny Bairstow and the returning Ben Stokes - all for ducks.

With the new pink ball swinging, Boult was unplayable.

The left-arm paceman had England at sixes and sevens and secured career-best figures of 6-32, while Southee finished with 4-25.

If not for Craig Overton's unbeaten 33 and a 31-run 10th-wicket stand with James Anderson, England had been in danger of recording the lowest Test total in history - an honour belonging to New Zealand, skittled in 1955 by England for 26.

In response, the Black Caps took their time.

Opener Jeet Raval edged an Anderson ball to Bairstow for just two, before Tom Latham and captain Kane Williamson stuck it out at the crease until dinner.

Williamson reached his half-century just before the break, unbeaten on 59 from 91 balls, while Latham blocked his way to 26 from 108 deliveries.

The pair have built an 80-run second-wicket stand, with Williamson finding particular joy with shots to deep extra cover and long on.A father-of-two has been shot dead inside a quiet accounting firm by a man believed to have been one of his long-term clients.

The 49-year-old business partner was killed shortly after mid day Thursday at Geraldton's Douglas Cross and Chamberlain, in West Australia's north west.

Police launched a man hunt for the suspected gunman, 48-year-old Rodney Peter Vlahov, who they believe opened fire at the Flores Street business, in Webberton, about 12.30.

Police launched a man hunt for suspected gunman, 48-year-old Rodney Peter Vlahov (pictured), following a fatal shooting at an accounting firm in Geraldton Thursday

In a video uploaded to Facebook Thursday, police revealed the shooter was still on the run after fleeing in a 4WD following the fatal event.

'Police are seeking the whereabouts of Rodney Peter Vlahov. He was last seeing driving a land cruiser with registration 1BBO 343,' a policeman reported.

Mr Vlahov was described as fair skinned, approximately 175cm tall, of medium build and with brown hair and blue eyes.

The public have been urged not to approach Mr Vlahov, but instead call 131 444 immediately.

The 49-year-old business partner was killed shortly after mid day Thursday at Geraldton's Douglas Cross and Chamberlain, in West Australia's north west

Police said a firearm was recovered at the scene but 'we cannot discount that Mr Vlahov may have access to other firearms'.

Friend and business partner, Stephen Cross, described the victim as 'one of the quietest, nicest people' he'd ever met.

'I honestly believed we operated in an industry that was very safe. There is a lot of industries around where there is danger and that, but not in an accounting industry,' he told Nine News.

'(He was) a very very good friend. I mean, I'm devastated.'

WA Regional Commander Jo McCabe revealed Mr Vlahov and his family were well-known to the Geraldton community.

'Police are seeking the whereabouts of Rodney Peter Vlahov. He was last seeing driving a land cruiser with registration 1BBO 343,' a policeman revealed

'Every resource available has been deployed to Geraldton and we will give it out upmost priorities,' she said in a video.

The father of Mr Vlahov and his two brothers and sister, died last year, ABC News reported.

The three male siblings were all farmers in Chapman Valley, about 70 kilometres north-east of Geraldton.

Early reports suggested Mr Vlahov could have been driving towards the rural farming area.NSW is at risk of long-term blackouts unless energy company AGL firms up its commitment to replace the Liddell coal-fired power station, the federal government has been advised.

The Australian Energy Market Operator said in a report released on Friday an extra 850MWs of power are needed to ensure reliability in NSW following the closure of Liddell.

It noted that if all three stages of AGL's proposed post-Liddell plan are delivered "the resource gap will be eliminated".

However, given that at this stage AGL has only firmly committed to installing 100MW of additional generation "unless AGL or others invest in sufficient replacement resource capability to serve NSW, there remains a significant resource gap of 850MW".

In December last year, AGL outlined plans - at the request of the prime minister - to address a predicted 1000MW gap in electricity capacity following the closure of the 1970s-era power station in 2022.

The plan would be delivered over three stages and includes the 100MW Bayswater upgrade, and a mix of solar, wind, pumped hydro and battery storage, as well as gas peaking plants.

AGL says this will cost $1.36 billion and provide electricity at $83/MWh for up to 30 years.

By contrast, keeping Liddell open for just five years would cost $920 million and provide electricity for $106/MWh.

AEMO chief Audrey Zibelman said in her review of the plan, if only the first stage of AGL's proposal was delivered there would still be a gap of 590MW "exposing the power system to a high risk of involuntary load shedding".

"AEMO can only include those resources for which there is a clear commitment to construct," she wrote.

She said the solution lay in the federal, state and territory governments reaching an agreement on the national energy guarantee by the end of 2018.

However if the national agreement could be not reached a specific market mechanism should be put in place, in consultation with the NSW government, to find enough generation to replace Liddell via other projects.

Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg said it would be preferable for AGL to commit as soon as possible to stages two and three of its plan.

"The existence of a major shortfall in dispatchable power following Liddell's closure would clearly present an unacceptable situation undermining the stability of the system," Mr Frydenberg said.

The situation made it all the more important for the national energy guarantee to be endorsed by all governments, he said.

Energy ministers will meet in April to discuss the NEG.Home might not be among the gum trees for Australia's koalas if temperatures keep rising, so people are being urged to play their part and switch off lights for Earth Hour.

More than six million Aussies are expected to turn off the power on Saturday for an hour from 8:30pm as part of a global movement to bring attention to climate change.

The World Wildlife Fund's initiative in 2018 aims to shed light on declining global biodiversity.

Half the bird and reptile species, two-thirds of mammals, nearly 80 per cent of amphibians and 60 per cent of plants may disappear in Australia by the next generation with the current pledged levels of emissions, a new WWF report has found.

"Even if the global mean temperature rise is constrained to 2C, southwest Australia is projected to become unsuitable for 30 to 60 per cent of species across all groups," the Wildlife in a Warming World report states.

Major public buildings including Melbourne's Arts Centre and Federation Square will be switching off the lights for the hour.Former health minister Peter Malinauskas looks set to replace Jay Weatherill as leader of the South Australian Labor Party, but a formal appointment will take more than two weeks.

The Labor caucus will meet to make a decision on April 9 - more than two weeks after the LNP government's new cabinet was sworn in.

Mr Malinauskas nominated for the position on Thursday and said he will spend the coming days in discussions with parliamentary colleagues.

"Despite the obvious disappointment of losing government, the future for our party and movement is bright," he said in a statement.

The 37-year-old is widely tipped to win the support of the party after former treasurer Tom Koutsantonis, another frontrunner, ruled himself out of contention earlier in the week.

He would take over from Mr Weatherill, the former premier, who announced he would step down from the leadership following Labor's defeat at the state election.

Mr Malinauskas, a former shop assistants' union chief, moved from the upper house to the safe western Adelaide seat of Croydon at the election.

His deputy would likely be Susan Close, who nominated herself for the role on Thursday and said she supported Mr Malinauskas in his bid for the leadership.Queensland youngsters will be vaccinated against the flu for free for the first time to try to prevent a repeat of last year's prolonged influenza outbreak.

The state government is funding flu vaccines for all children under five while also continuing to provide free shots for pregnant women, seniors, and indigenous people over 15.

In 2017 more than 56,000 cases of influenza were confirmed in Queensland, making it one of the state's worst seasons on record.

Queensland's chief health officer, Dr Jeannette Young, says it's important all children over six months be vaccinated this season and at the right time, from the end of April.

"For most people, the vaccine has its highest degree of coverage for four to five months, and it takes around 10 days to two weeks to develop immunity," she said.

Dr Young said much of last year's flu problems were due to a less effective vaccine, which did not cover the main strain circulating in the community.

In addition to a change of vaccine this year, Queensland Health has also rolled out 15 new point-of-care testing machines throughout the state's largest hospitals.

"The most important thing is if you're sick with the flu, stay home," Dr Young said.After sailing the high seas, Australia's largest warship is making a pitstop in Melbourne.

The Landing Helicopter Dock, HMAS Adelaide, will return to the city for the first time since she was assembled in Williamstown, docking in Port Melbourne on Friday morning.

More than 100 ground vehicles, up to 18 helicopters and 1000-plus troops can be transported on board.

The 230m long vessel will resupply and will get the Tickford Racing's "Team Navy" V8 supercar on the ship to reinforce the Navy's and Tickford's professional outplacement program partnership.

While the public won't be able aboard, she can be waved off on Sunday as she heads to the east coast of Australia for training exercises.Melburnians get your dancing shoes on, the city is about to shake it off.

More than 300 international students will bring their best moves in a bid to break the Guinness World Record of most nationalities at a dance party at Testing Grounds, Southbank from 3pm on Friday.

But the call-out is open for more people to attend the Study Melbourne Welcome Party - even if you have two left feet - and dance for 15 minutes to make history.

It's all part of a state government initiative to provide support and information to international students.Labor has launched a blistering attack on Pauline Hanson for edging closer to striking a deal with the government on company tax cuts.

One Nation secured funding for 1000 apprenticeships across the country, but has not yet committed to voting for the government's tax bill.

The apprenticeships deal infuriated opposition frontbencher Doug Cameron, who described it as the worst capitulation he had seen.

"Senator Hanson is the biggest fraud that has ever come into this place," Senator Cameron told parliament on Thursday night.

"She stands up and argues she's looking after the battlers and yet she capitulates to the government every opportunity she can take."

If One Nation's three senators support the legislation, the government is just two votes shy of securing support for the $65 billion cuts.

Independent Derryn Hinch flew out of Canberra on Thursday taking with him lingering doubts about the merits of the tax cuts.

Fellow independent Tim Storer has not declared which way he will vote, and the government needs both of their votes and One Nation's three senators to get the bill through the upper house.

Senator Cameron said the One Nation deal was an outrageous proposition given unions were banned from negotiating with companies to increase apprenticeships.

"It's about One Nation using the apprenticeship system as a smokescreen to capitulate to the government, something that Senator Hanson and One Nation do all the time," he said.

But Senator Hanson is hopeful the scheme will see more apprentices in rural and regional areas.

"Instead of having a lot of these kids on Newstart that are actually out there with no future for them whatsoever or on drugs, I think it's a big benefit to them. You're going to get them working," she told News Corp.Investigators will try to recover the wreckage of a helicopter that crashed into waters near Queensland's Whitsunday Islands, causing the deaths of two Americans.

A 65-year-old woman and a 79-year-old man, from Hawaii, died when the Eurocopter 120 went down near a Great Barrier Reef pontoon on Wednesday afternoon while a younger couple from Colorado escaped with minor injuries.

It's believed they knew each other.

Four investigators - two from Brisbane and two from Canberra - are on their way to the scene at Hardy Reef, Australian Transport Safety Bureau chief commissioner Greg Hood said on Thursday.

They will recover and examine the wreckage, interview witnesses, and examine flight data and training and maintenance logs.

The 35-year-old pilot also escaped serious injury and pulled the 65-year-old woman from the helicopter, while others performed CPR on both victims under instruction by phone from emergency services officers.

"It's absolutely essential in this type of accident that we get as many perspectives we possibly can from any witnesses," Mr Hood said as he asked for anyone who had seen anything to come forward.

A preliminary report will be published in late April.

Operator Whitsunday Air Services has suspended all operations and will work with authorities to determine the cause of the crash.

The crash happened a day after the ATSB released its findings into a November incident involving the company, in which no one was injured.South Australian voters would be less likely to vote for independent Senator Tim Storer if he supported company tax cuts, polling commissioned by GetUp! shows.

The former Nick Xenophon Team senator-turned-independent is looming as a key swing vote as the government tries to get its corporate tax cut through the upper house.

The Reachtel poll of 1024 South Australians was taken on Wednesday night and asked voters whether companies should pay "their fair share" of tax or get a $65 billion tax cut.

The poll found 82 per cent of voters wanted big corporations to pay their "fair share" of tax, and 72 per cent believed companies weren't paying enough.

It also found 63 per cent of voters would be less likely to vote for senators who supported tax cuts for large corporations, while 20 per cent were more likely to vote for them.

Senator Storer is one of two votes the government needs if it is to reduce the company tax rate to 25 per cent.

GetUp is campaigning against the cuts and commissioned the polling in a bid to put pressure on Senator Storer to vote against them.The NRL has asked Todd Carney to prove he is reformed and rehabilitated as it ponders rubber-stamping his return.

Carney has been absent from the NRL for almost four years and is seeking a shot at redemption after being offered a one-year deal with North Queensland.

The Dally M and premiership winner this week met the NRL integrity unit in a bid to receive clearance.

Like Brisbane prop Matt Lodge, before he is given the green light to return, Carney has been asked to provide documentation of his rehabilitation.

Carney was sacked by Cronulla in 2014 over the infamous "bubbler" incident and the NRL is wary of his risk of reoffending, due to his lengthy rap sheet which includes serious drink-driving incidents.

"He came in with his agent and met with representatives of the integrity unit," NRL CEO Todd Greenberg said.

"The integrity unit outlined the process, they had asked him to comply with a number of pieces of information and I understand he will do that over the course of this week and next and then he'll come back in."

Should Carney and his management be able to provide examples of what he had done to address his issues, he will be asked back for a face-to-face meeting with Greenberg, who will decide his fate.

"Ultimately, it will get to a discussion with me," Greenberg said.

"But I think there's a number of pieces of information that we've asked for prior to that even happening.

"First and foremost, before I meet with him, I want to be satisfied with the work he's completed over a period of time and I want to see that undertaking. I haven't seen that yet."Environment Minister Josh Frydenberg has savaged Labor claims that new boundaries for marine park reserves will put the Great Barrier Reef at risk.

The federal government this week introduced changes to the regulation of 44 Australian marine parks, reducing green conservation areas around the reef from 50 to 25 per cent.

Labor is warning the changes will remove more areas from conservation than any other government in the world.

"It's disingenuous in the extreme for the Labor Party to talk about cutting protections," Mr Frydenberg told ABC radio on Friday.

"They introduced draft management plans back in 2012 that due to their chaotic approach never got implemented."

The minister said there would be an additional 200,000 square kilometres of protection for the sea floor under his plans.NRL boss Todd Greenberg has hit back at those criticising referees for the increase in penalties, saying match officials are only following his orders.

Rugby league legend Andrew Johns lashed out at the referees after 19 penalties were blown in Friday night's round-three match between Melbourne and North Queensland.

"If people want to come out over this weekend and start ripping into the referees, I've got some advice for them: they better start ripping into me first because all the referees are doing is following instruction," Greenberg told Triple M radio on Friday.Up to 500 rural properties on the NSW mid-north coast may be cut-off by flood waters as heavy rain continues to drench the region.

The weather bureau has issued heavy rain warnings for the area, with minor flood warnings for several rivers including the Bellinger River at Thora, Macleay River at Kempsey and Nambucca River at Bowraville.

The NSW SES is tracking more than 900 calls for help statewide since the wet-weather trough hit the Hunter region two days ago and moved north.

More than 250 SES volunteers will continue helping residents, with the focus around the mid-north coast on Friday.

Most of the jobs in Hunter region around Dungog have been cleared, with the focus now on the region west of Port Macquarie, SES spokesman Phil Campbell said.

Heavy and persistent rain on the NSW mid-north coast has prompted flash flooding warnings, with some areas receiving more than 300 millimetres since the drenching began.

West of Kempsey, Boonanghi has had 301mm since 9am Thursday, while residents in nearby Turners Flat have copped 247mm.

Up to 150 rural properties are already isolated around the Taree region and hundreds more may flood around Bellingen, with farmers advised to move livestock to higher ground.

Rain is set to persist for the next six to 12 hours.Just 16 extra drivers are behind the controls of Queensland Rail's commuter trains a year after an inquiry found 200 more were needed to fix the southeast's rail crisis.

Transport Minister Mark Bailey this week said 69 new drivers had been added to Queensland Rail's staffing pool since the driver crisis began in October 2016.

On Friday, Queensland Rail boss Nick Easy said the net gain in qualified drivers was just 33, when resignations and retirements were taken into account, and only 16 of those are actively manning commuter trains.Two teenage boys and two men are behind bars after a cannabis crop valued at nearly $2 million was discovered in bushland northwest of Bathurst.

Camouflaged officers from the state's drug squad stormed a property at Mt Rankin on Thursday morning and discovered more than 800 cannabis plants and 130 harvested plants which produced 60kg of cannabis head.

Two teenage boys and two men, aged 41 and 72, were all refused bail and are due to face Lithgow courts on Friday.

The men, one an Italian national, are facing various drug supply charges following an extensive inquiry.Syrians cry as wounded relatives are treated at a hospital in Damascus after a rocket hit a busy shopping area in the Jaramana area

The death toll in a barrage of rebel rocket fire on a popular shopping district of Syria's capital Damascus has risen to 44 civilians, state media said on Wednesday.

The attack on edges of the Jaramana district in eastern Damascus took place on Tuesday night, and state media had reported 35 dead at the time.

"Nine more civilians lost their lives after sustaining critical wounds," state news agency SANA reported Wednesday, citing a police source.

"A number of wounded are still in the intensive care units of the hospitals in Damascus," SANA said.

The toll is the highest in rebel shelling on Damascus since Syria's conflict erupted in 2011.

Medical facilities in the capital were overwhelmed on Tuesday, with pools of blood on the floor and families searching desperately for loved ones.

An AFP correspondent at the main Damascus hospital said there were so many dead, they could not fit in the mortuary.

Outside, women wailed and hugged each other as they waited to hear whether their loved ones had survived.

The rain of rockets hit a popular market known for its inexpensive prices. It was packed with people shopping on the eve of Mother's Day in Syria, celebrated on March 21.

The district lies south of Ain Terma, a rebel-controlled town that falls in the opposition's bastion of Eastern Ghouta.

Ghouta-based rebels have for years lobbed rockets and mortar shells at Damascus.

Syrian troops have been waging a fierce month-long air and ground assault to oust rebels from the enclave that has left more than 1,400 dead.US President Donald Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan are under pressure to craft a $1.3 trillion spending bill with Democrats by a midnight March 23, 2018 deadline or risk a government shutdown

US lawmakers lurched toward finishing a crucial spending deal Wednesday, although the massive legislation that will touch every aspect of American life had yet to be filed barely 48 hours before a looming government shutdown.

Eleventh-hour snags on multiple issues, including immigration enforcement, border security, infrastructure and health care payments, have apparently bogged down the release of a $1.3 trillion spending bill, despite claims of optimism by leaders in both parties that an agreement will be reached in time.

The measure that funds federal operations for the remainder of fiscal year 2018, which ends September 30, must pass the House of Representatives and Senate and receive President Donald Trump's signature by the congressionally-imposed midnight Friday deadline in order to keep the government open.

Failure to do so could lead to the third government shutdown of the year, an embarrassing mark on a Republican-controlled Congress facing mid-term elections in November.

The monster measure follows the outlines of a 2018-2019 budget deal reached last month that substantially boosts both military and domestic spending.

Funding for the military, which Trump has repeatedly called depleted from budgetary constraints, could soar to some $700 billion in the measure, including a 2.4-percent pay raise for troops.

Democrats can meanwhile claim increased domestic spending on issues like infrastructure, education and battling the opioid crisis.

"We feel really good about where things are," House Speaker Paul Ryan told reporters.

Top Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer expressed similar confidence.

The bill is said to include nearly $1.6 billion for construction of nearly 100 miles (160 kilometers) of physical barriers and fencing along the US-Mexico border.

- Trump 'supportive' -

But with Friday's deadline looming, and reports that Trump was having misgivings about supporting the measure because it lacked enough funding for his promised wall, Ryan headed to the White House to sell the plan.

"They had a good conversation about the wins delivered for the president, and he is supportive of the bill," Ryan spokeswoman AshLee Strong said in a statement.

Among the sensitive issues addressed in the bill is gun violence. Lawmakers said it is expected to include a provision to strengthen compliance with background checks for firearm sales, and one that reverses what has essentially served as a ban on federal research on gun violence.

But last-minute haggling remained. It was unclear whether or not the measure would include a bipartisan effort to fund health care subsidies granted to insurance companies serving low-income patients.

While the catchall bill, known as an "omnibus," boosts border security, lawmakers say it leaves out any protections for young immigrants who came to the country illegally as children.

Protecting those who had been shielded from deportation under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which Trump ended on March 5, has been a Democratic priority.

But leaving DACA provisions out of the omnibus will likely lead to several Democrats opposing the bill.

"I will not vote for funding that continues Trump's war on immigrants," House Democrat Luis Gutierrez said.

The concern about the bill's lack of forward progress Wednesday swelled to the point that lawmakers began openly criticizing the process.

"Siri, where is the omnibus?" tweeted House Democrat John Garamendi.

An exasperated conservative House Republican Jim Jordan slammed the bill as "a bad piece of legislation," but also blasted congressional leaders at the secretive process.

"A $1.3 trillion spending bill that they're talking about. We still haven't seen the details of the legislation, and we're supposed to vote on it tomorrow?" Jordan posed to Fox News.

"That's probably not the way the American people want us to do business."

House leaders have expressed hope of voting on the bill on Thursday, then sending it to the Senate. But the upper chamber's rules allow any senator to slow down the legislative process, putting the timing of passage into question.UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres "is alarmed at the persistent allegations of the use of chemical weapons in the Syrian Arab Republic," said a UN statement

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres voiced alarm on Wednesday over allegations of chemical attacks in Syria and urged the Security Council to take action to address "such serious crimes."

The appeal came after Guterres met on Tuesday with the head of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), which has investigated more than 70 cases of toxic gas attacks in Syria since 2014.

"The secretary-general is alarmed at the persistent allegations of the use of chemical weapons in the Syrian Arab Republic," said a UN statement.

While the use of chemical weapons is "unjustifiable and abhorrent," "equally unjustifiable is a lack of response to such use," said the statement.

"Impunity cannot prevail with respect to such serious crimes."

Guterres renewed a call to the council "to demonstrate unity and resolve on this matter".

OPCW chief Ahmet Uzumcu said there had been "several" recent allegations of chemical weapons use in Eastern Ghouta, where the Syrian government is battling to take control over the enclave near Damascus.

The Syrian Observatory of Human Rights has said that chlorine has been used as a toxic agent on villages during the government's offensive in Eastern Ghouta.

Uzumcu said the experts were looking into allegations of chlorine use that were attributed to the Syrian army and to rebel groups.

The OPCW's fact-finding mission for Syria was established in April 2014 to determine whether toxic agents were used as a weapon, but it does not have the mandate to establish who is responsible for its use.

The Security Council in 2015 set up a panel to determine who was behind the attacks, but that inquiry ended last year when Russia vetoed the extension of its mandate.

Russia maintained that the panel, known as the Joint Investigative Mechanism (JIM), was biased and unprofessional after it concluded in a report that Syrian forces had used sarin in an attack on the rebel-held town of Khan Sheikhun in April last year.

Russia has presented a draft resolution to the council that would set up a new panel -- but the United States, Britain and France have rejected the proposal, which they see as a bid to weaken the inquiry.

The United States has circulated a rival draft resolution, but Russia has dismissed that proposal as a bid to revive the defunct JIM.

UN diplomats are pessimistic about prospects for a compromise after several rounds of negotiations failed to achieve progress.This picture taken on April 12, 2020 and released by North Korea's official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) the following day shows the most recent session of the 14th Supreme People's Assembly (SPA) in Pyongyang

North Korea's rubber-stamp parliament will hold its next session in late January, state media said Saturday -- likely meaning it will convene shortly after US President-elect Joe Biden takes office.

The hermit state's legislative body meets only once or twice a year, mostly for day-long sessions to approve budgets or other decisions deemed necessary by the ruling Workers' Party.

"The 4th Session of the 14th Supreme People's Assembly (SPA) of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea will be convened in Pyongyang late in January," the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) said.

It gave no other details, including the session's agenda. Such meetings are carefully monitored by observers for any changes to economic policy or a reshuffle of high-ranking officials.

At the last meeting of the Supreme People's Assembly in April of this year, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un carried out a major reshuffle of his State Affairs Commission.

Under Kim, the North has made rapid progress on its nuclear arsenal, launching missiles capable of reaching the whole of the US mainland, and has been subject to increasingly stringent UN Security Council sanctions as a result.

Talks with the US have been largely deadlocked since the collapse of last year's summit in Hanoi between Kim and US President Donald Trump over sanctions relief and what the North would be willing to give up in exchange.

Biden has characterised Kim -- whose summits with Trump yielded few tangible results -- as a "thug", so analysts are not expecting any quick breakthroughs under the veteran Democrat.

Biden is set to take office on January 20, 2021.Australia's Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton sparked uproar saying white South African farmers' need to flee "horrific circumstances" for a "civilised country" and he is examining whether they deserve acceptance on refugee or humanitarian grounds

A senior minister vowed Thursday to press on with a plan to bring white South African farmers to Australia, hitting out at criticism from "crazy lefties" who he said were "dead to me".

Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton sparked uproar last week by singling out the farmers' need to flee "horrific circumstances" for a "civilised country".

He is examining whether they deserve "special attention" for acceptance on refugee or humanitarian grounds, which led to South Africa hauling in Australia's envoy to Pretoria for a dressing down and a demand that he retract the comments.

It also set off claims at home that Dutton was a racist amid fears that it signalled a return to the "White Australia" policy, referring to laws in place for seven decades from 1901 that prevented non-white immigrants settling Down Under.

Dutton, who has drawn criticism in the past for cracking down on asylum-seekers from Asia and the Middle East, is unfazed.

He insisted he was blind to skin colour and would bring in migrants based on national interest.

"It concerns me that people are being persecuted at the moment -- that's the reality -- the numbers of people dying or being savagely attacked in South Africa is a reality," he told 2GB commercial radio.

Australia's Immigration and Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton says the backlash over his comments on white South African farmers facing persecution "meant nothing to me", while attacking several media outlets for their coverage

"We're looking at ways we can help people to migrate to Australia if they're finding themselves in that situation."

He said the backlash "meant nothing to me", while attacking several media outlets for their coverage.

"Some of the crazy lefties at the ABC, and on The Guardian, Huffington Post, can express concern and draw mean cartoons about me and all the rest of it," he said.

"They don't realise how completely dead they are to me."

According to police, 74 farmers were murdered between 2016 and 2017 in South Africa, which has one of the world's highest crime rates.

Dutton made his initial offer in response to Pretoria's vow to enact land "expropriation without compensation" to redress land confiscations of the colonial and apartheid era.

He said he had been inundated with messages of support since.

"If people think I'm going to cower or take a backward step because of their nonsense, fabricated, fake news criticism, then they've got another thing coming," he added.

Up to 500,000 white South Africans have left the country in the past 30 years, according to official statistics, with Australia ranking as the top destination.The measure, backed by President Donald Trump thanks in part to a last-minute sales pitch by Ryan at the White House, was introduced with precious little time to act

US congressional budget negotiators said Wednesday they had reached a deal on federal spending for the remainder of fiscal 2018, two days before a deadline to fund the government or risk a shutdown.

The $1.3 trillion spending bill was hailed by House Speaker Paul Ryan, Congress's top Republican, as marking "the beginning of a new era for the United States military," while Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said it would fulfill Democratic goals.

"This critical funding bill fulfills our pledge to rebuild the nation's military," Ryan said.

"It also addresses many of our national priorities, such as school safety, infrastructure, and fighting the opioid epidemic."

US President Donald Trump, meanwhile, lamented having to "waste money" on "Dem giveaways" to secure the military funding.

"Got $1.6 Billion to start Wall on Southern Border, rest will be forthcoming," he wrote on Twitter late Wednesday.

"Most importantly, got $700 Billion to rebuild our Military, $716 Billion next year...most ever. Had to waste money on Dem giveaways in order to take care of military pay increase and new equipment."

The monster measure, backed by Trump thanks in part to a last-minute sales pitch by Ryan at the White House Wednesday, was introduced with precious little time to act.

Government funding expires at midnight Friday night, and the House of Representatives and Senate will need to scramble if both chambers are to pass the bill and get it signed by Trump by the deadline.

The deal signals an end -- or at least a pause -- to the deeply partisan feuding over funding that has roiled Congress for months.

Five times since October, lawmakers have had to pass stopgap funding legislation to keep the government's lights on. Twice this year the government was allowed to slip into shutdown.

A third lapse would be deeply embarrassing for a Republican-controlled Congress facing mid-term elections in November.

The bill sets defense spending levels, including a 2.4 percent raise for troops, at $700 billion for the year -- an increase of $61 billion over the 2017 cap.

Non-defense domestic spending will reach $591 billion, an increase of about 10 percent.

Among the sensitive issues addressed in the bill is gun safety, which has been the focus of prominent national attention in the aftermath of deadly school shootings.

Lawmakers said it includes a provision to strengthen compliance with background checks for firearm sales, and one that reverses what has essentially served as a ban on federal research on gun violence.

- Wall in, Obamacare funding out -

Eleventh-hour snags on multiple issues, including immigration enforcement, border security and health care payments nearly caused negotiations to grind to a halt.

The bill includes nearly $1.6 billion for construction of almost 100 miles (160 kilometers) of physical barriers and fencing along the US-Mexico border, part of Trump's promised wall.

But it fails to address protections against deportation for more than a million immigrants who arrived in the country illegally as children, an outcome likely to cause a clutch of Democrats to oppose passage.

House Democrat Luis Gutierrez said he would "not vote for funding that continues Trump's war on immigrants."

"Democrats refused to take care of DACA. Would have been so easy, but they just didn't care. I had to fight for Military and start of Wall," Trump wrote later on Twitter.

Another casualty of the last-minute haggling was a bipartisan effort to fund health care subsidies granted to insurance companies serving low-income patients.

That all but ensures that the fiery debate over Obamacare will continue into the November elections.

Moderate Republican Senator Susan Collins said it was "extremely disappointing" that the provision was left out of the bill.

"This proposal -- which would lower health insurance premiums by up to 40 percent -- should have been included because the stakes are so high for millions of Americans whose insurance rates will skyrocket if Congress fails to act," she said.

Several lawmakers began expressing alarm that such sweeping legislation which will touch every aspect of American life had yet to be filed by mid-day Wednesday.

Exasperated conservative House Republican Jim Jordan slammed the bill as "a bad piece of legislation" in part because it will increase the federal deficit.

But he also blasted congressional leaders for the secretive process.

"We still haven't seen the details of the legislation, and we're supposed to vote on it tomorrow?" Jordan posed to Fox News.

"That's probably not the way the American people want us to do business."

Democrats applauded increased domestic spending on infrastructure, student grants and public housing funding. The bill also maintained full funding of the Environmental Protection Agency, ignoring Trump's request to slash its budget.

Meanwhile, the bill provides $380 million to help states secure their election systems, and an additional $307 million to the FBI's budget for counter-intelligence efforts to fight Russian cyberattacks.

The House aims to vote on the bill Thursday or early Friday, then send it to the Senate. But the upper chamber's rules allow any senator to slow down the legislative process, putting the timing of passage into question.Japanese automaker Toyota says it is suspending tests of its self-driving cars so staff could "emotionally process" after an autonomous Uber car killed a pedestrian in an accident

Japanese automaker Toyota said Thursday it was suspending tests of its self-driving cars so staff could "emotionally process" after an autonomous Uber car killed a pedestrian in an accident.

Ride-sharing giant Uber has already suspended use of self-driving cars after one of its vehicles struck and killed a pedestrian Sunday in the US state of Arizona.

"We cannot speculate on the cause of the incident or what it may mean to the automated driving industry going forward," Toyota said in a statement issued via the US company that conducts its autonomous vehicle research TRI.

"TRI is pausing Chauffeur mode testing to let its drivers emotionally process this tragedy. We're monitoring the situation and plan to resume testing at an appropriate time," the statement said.

"This pause is meant to give them time to settle their feelings and come to a sense of balance."

Toyota said it would continue its tests of semi-autonomous cars on closed circuits.

But all testing of autonomous cars on public roads, which was previously being conducted in Japan and the US states of California and Michigan, is on hold.

Toyota, like Uber, has safety drivers behind the wheel of its autonomous cars during testing, though the drivers are not typically expected to operate the vehicles.

The Uber accident was the first fatal self-driving car crash involving a pedestrian and has raised fresh concern about the safety of autonomous vehicles.

German automaker BMW said Wednesday expressed sympathies over the incident but said it would not affect its self-driving car project, while Nissan has made no comment.The reclusive pangolin, also known as the scaly anteater, has become the most trafficked mammal on earth due to soaring demand in China and Vietnam

On a winding Hong Kong street where shops keep a dizzying array of dried produce, one highly valued ingredient is still being sold despite being subject to an international ban: deep-fried scales of endangered pangolins.

The reclusive pangolin, also known as the scaly anteater, has become the most trafficked mammal on earth due to soaring demand in China and Vietnam.

While its scales are prized for their supposed medicinal properties in treating everything from acne to liver disease and cancer, its flesh is considered a delicacy.

Trade in the animals was banned in 2016 to protect remaining populations, but AFP found traditional Chinese medicine shops in Hong Kong still selling bags of pangolin scales, stashed away out of sight.

A traditional Chinese medicine recipe listing pangolin scales, herbs and roots

"If you need it for health reasons, I will look to see if I have some," one elderly shopkeeper said, before stepping on a ladder to reach a package hidden behind stacks of boxes.

He brought down a sack of deep-fried scales and named his price: 500 Hong Kong dollars ($65) for a mere 40 grams.

Then he flipped through a ledger of traditional Chinese medicine recipes, showing a type of tea that calls for ground pangolin scales mixed with herbs and roots.

Hong Kong has an unenviable reputation for trading in several controversial, banned or endangered commodities including ivory, shark fin, rhino horn and tiger parts and critics routinely accuse the territory of failing to do enough to stamp out such practices.

The shopkeeper even refuted the need for conservation: "There are still many pangolins in Asia. They're only saying that they are endangered."

An estimated one million of the animals have been plucked from Asian and African forests over the past decade, shunting them onto the list of species at the highest risk of extinction.

A woman walks past a shop on a street popular for dried foods used in traditional Chinese medicine and dishes in Hong Kong

Another shop on the same street had an even bigger stash of deep-fried scales, also concealed behind stacks of boxes and on sale for $82 per 40 grams.

"Pangolin can rid the body of toxins. This is really good quality and worth the price," the saleswoman said.

Campaigners say there is no evidence to support any of the medicinal claims attributed to pangolin.

A third shopkeeper did not have scales on display but said they were available on "special order".

- High-speed boat chase -

About the size of a small dog, pangolins are almost defenceless in the wild, curling up into a ball when they are scared, allowing poachers to easily scoop them up.

Commercial breeding is unfeasible because pangolins are picky eaters, prone to disease and easily stressed. Their average survival rate in captivity is less than five years compared to 20 years in the wild.

Deep fried pangolin scales next to a bag containing shredded pangolin scales at a traditional Chinese medicine store in Hong Kong

Hong Kong is a top destination for illegal pangolin shipments because there is demand from local residents, and the semi-autonomous city also functions as a first stop for onward smuggling to southern mainland China.

In September 2016, all 182 member nations of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) agreed to move pangolins into the highest protection category banning all trade.

Previously, CITES allowed for trade in pangolins but under strict conditions.

"If Hong Kong was following CITES guidelines and implementing the policy decisions made in 2016, then this would no longer be happening in 2018," said Astrid Andersson, founder of Hong Kong for Pangolins.

Updated sentencing guidelines taking effect in May will increase the maximum jail term for trafficking and possession of endangered species from two to 10 years but the law is rarely enforced and the city has come under fire for some relatively lax penalties for CITES violations in the past.

Endangered pangolins

"A slap-on-the-wrist fine from Hong Kong authorities is not uncommon for smugglers, who generally avoid trafficking their illegal wildlife products straight into mainland China because of much heavier sentences there," said Alex Hofford, wildlife campaigner for WildAid.

Hong Kong's Customs and Excise Department told AFP they are committed to combating smuggling activities and conducts checks on "passengers, cargoes, postal packets and conveyances at various control points and sea boundaries".

The amount of pangolin scales recovered in Hong Kong increased in 2017 after the CITES protection upgrade -- a total of 7.7 tonnes from 21 seizures compared to 1.4 tonnes in 2016 from 24 seizures.

The countries of origin in the shipments were all African, according to government data.

In December, customs officers pursued a gang of smugglers for two hours on speedboats in Hong Kong waters after two vessels were detected trying to enter mainland China.

The gang members jumped into the sea and swam ashore to escape, but officers recovered pangolin scales and arrested one Hong Kong resident in connection with the case.

- China crackdown -

In Guangzhou, the capital of China's southern Guangdong province where pangolin shipments have arrived from Hong Kong in the past, shopkeepers were much more on edge.

At the Qingping Market complex, some traditional medicine merchants walked away when AFP asked about pangolin.

The amount of pangolin scales recovered in Hong Kong increased in 2017 after the CITES protection upgrade -- a total of 7.7 tonnes from 21 seizures compared to 1.4 tonnes in 2016 from 24 seizures

"I've never heard of such a thing!" one saleswoman said, after a neighbouring stall owner referred to her shop as one selling scales.

Another explained: "It is illegal and very hard to get now. No one will sell it to you unless you're already a trusted client."

Hofford said such difficulties in buying scales showed how mainland China is leading Hong Kong on the protection of endangered species.

"The Chinese enforcement authorities have been doing a great job lately smashing smuggling and trafficking rings and raising awareness on protecting these amazing animals," he said.Namal Rajapakse, the son of former president Mahinda Rajapakse, has been charged with money-laundering

A controversial Sri Lankan opposition legislator Thursday said US authorities prevented him from taking a flight to Texas from Moscow where he was an observer for the Russian presidential election.

Namal Rajapakse, son of former strongman president Mahinda Rajapakse, said the airline had been instructed not to allow him to board the flight to Houston.

Rajapakse said on Twitter that he had been informed by Emirates Air "I won't make my Houston Flight as #US Officials instruct them to not let me board.

"Sure it has nothing to do with my name, being part of #lka opposition or my travel from #Russia."

The 31-year-old was invited by the Russian government to be a monitor of the presidential election won by Vladimir Putin.

US authorities do not comment on individual cases, but official sources said his name was likely on a travel watch list as a result of money laundering charges he faces at home.

Namal Rajapakse and a sibling have been charged with money-laundering. Other family members face corruption allegations.

Sri Lanka has announced it will set up special courts to investigate billions of dollars of corruption under former president Rajapakse who was defeated in 2015 elections.

His successor Maithripala Sirisena has said as many as half of all public procurement contracts under the Rajapakse administration were corrupt.

Former president Rajapakse is not under investigation and denies wrongdoing.A Syrian soldier sits in an armoured vehicle at a government checkpoint on the edge of the rebel-held town of Harasta on March 22, 2018, waiting for fighters and their families to begin leaving under an evacuation deal

Buses waited outside a bombed-out town in Syria's Eastern Ghouta on Thursday after a deal was announced to evacuate rebels and civilians following weeks of regime bombardment.

The deal, announced on Wednesday and brokered by regime ally Russia, could mark a major step forward in government efforts to secure the nearby capital Damascus.

The evacuations from Harasta had been scheduled to start at 0500 GMT, but an AFP correspondent at a government checkpoint on the edge of the town said they were running late.

A spokesman for hardline Islamist rebel group Ahrar al-Sham, which controls the town, said they would go ahead nonetheless.

A member of a committee involved in the negotiations said 1,600 fighters and thousands of members of their families were expected to leave.

Eastern Ghouta has faced a blistering assault by the army and allied militia since February 18 that has taken back most of the enclave and sliced what remains into three pockets held by different rebel groups.

The evacuation agreement for Harasta could increase pressure on the rebel groups that control the other two pockets to follow suit.

Ahrar al-Sham spokesman Munzer Fares said on Wednesday that the deal would see the rebels head to northern Syria with their weapons.

The AFP correspondent saw Syrian and Russian soldiers waiting on a dusty square near the town, as ambulances were stationed nearby.

A dozen white buses were parked by the side of the road into the enclave.

The rebels and their families will be transported to the northwestern province of Idlib, which is held by a myriad of jihadist, Islamist and secular groups.

The government's offensive on Ghouta has killed more than 1,500 civilians since February 18, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.US President Donald Trump (L) claims to have built up a generally good relationship with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping, whom he has praised for his role in pressuring North Korea over its nuclear program

President Donald Trump is poised to unveil sanctions against China on Thursday for the "theft" of US intellectual property, fueling fears of a trade war as Beijing vowed to retaliate.

White House spokesman Raj Shah told AFP that Trump will announce actions following an "investigation into China's state-led, market-distorting efforts to force, pressure, and steal US technologies and intellectual property."

According to his schedule, released by the White House on Wednesday evening, he will sign "a Presidential Memorandum targeting China's economic aggression."

The Chinese commerce ministry issued a pre-emptive warning, saying in a statement on Thursday that Beijing "will certainly take all necessary measures to resolutely defend its legitimate rights and interests".

It is just weeks since Trump short-circuited White House deliberations and announced a raft of sanctions on foreign-produced steel and aluminum off the cuff.

That move prompted the resignation of top economic advisor Gary Cohn, a global stock market selloff, legal disputes and threats of retaliatory measures.

On Wednesday, Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell warned that the prospect of a trade war was a growing threat to the world's largest economy.

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang urged Trump on Tuesday to not act "emotionally," but the impulsive president is showing no sign of backing down.

US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer recently put a separate proposed package of $30 billion in tariffs on Chinese imports on the president's desk.

And Trump appears to have agreed to at least that amount, as he tries to fulfil campaign promises to get tough on "cheating" by US trade partners, which he says have destroyed American jobs.

The US trade deficit with China ran to a record $375 billion last year -- but US exports to the country were also at a record.

Washington has long accused Beijing of forcing US companies to turn over proprietary commercial information and intellectual property as a condition of operating in China.

Trump claims to have built up a generally good relationship with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping whom he has praised for his role in pressuring North Korea over its nuclear program.

However, the trade dispute threatens to cast a pall over those relations, especially given the recent warnings from Beijing.

- A laundry list of grievances -

A senior official in Lighthizer's office said Wednesday that the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations had attempted over the decades to coax China into respecting market economics and trade liberalization, but had all failed.

The Trump administration opened an investigation last August, acting on a series of allegations against China, including that as a condition of doing business, Beijing forces US companies to enter joint ventures and transfer technology and trade secrets to domestic partners, and that American firms are not able to license intellectual property in China as freely as Chinese companies.

US officials also allege China has hacked US networks and conducted industrial espionage to steal US intellectual property.

Xi sent his top economic advisor Liu He to Washington this month to discuss trade tensions, but the US official said that at no point had the Chinese made a constructive proposal.

"Certainly by November, the background was such that officials in China had reason to know about the concerns we've raised... At least, as of today the administration has not been satisfied with the types of responses we've been getting from China," the senior official in Lighthizer's office said, speaking on condition of anonymity in a briefing to reporters.

"Obviously the president will have the final say in terms of what we end up doing here."

"As a general matter, we do have very strong evidence that China uses foreign ownership restrictions such as joint venture requirements and foreign equity limitations to require or pressure technology transfer from US companies to Chinese entities," he added.

- Tariffs talks -

Along with the announcement of that offensive, Washington also held out the possibility of a detente with regards to the European Union, which reacted furiously to the news of steel and aluminum tariffs.

In a joint statement, US Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross and EU Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom said they had agreed to immediately begin "a process of discussion" on the tariffs and other matters "with a view to identifying mutually acceptable outcomes as rapidly as possible."

Malmstrom had called for Europe to be exempted as a whole. Speaking to reporters in Brussels on Wednesday, European Council President Donald Tusk said he harbored "cautious optimism" on the prospects for a resolution.

The White House already said Canada and Mexico, which are major producers of the metals, will temporarily be exempt from the tariffs during talks to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement.Lu Chun-yi was carrying hand-written notes threatening to "behead" Taiwan's President Tsai Ing-wen

A man who used a stolen samurai sword to attack a guard outside Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen's office last year -- carrying notes threatening to behead her -- was sentenced Thursday to seven years in prison for attempted murder.

Carrying the flag of China, Lu Chun-yi slashed the military police guard, who was trying to prevent him from entering the complex, in the neck, face, and hands with the sword before being arrested.

Lu -- in detention since the August 18 attack -- has said he wanted to fly the Chinese flag in the presidential office, and was carrying hand-written notes threatening to "behead" Tsai.

In the notes, prosecutors said, Lu also expressed the hope that Beijing will make Taiwan a part of China again.

Beijing still sees self-ruled Taiwan as part of its territory awaiting reunification even though they split in 1949 after a civil war.

The island's relations with China have deteriorated since Tsai took power in 2016 as she has refused to agree to Beijing's stance that Taiwan is part of "one China".

"The defendant was aware that slashing another person in the neck with a samurai sword could cause death but intentionally did it... and inflicted physical and emotional injuries," the Taipei district court said in the verdict.

Prosecutors said Lu "tried to portray himself as a martyr", and showed no remorse for the attack.

Responding to the attempted murder charge, however, Lu denied that he was trying to kill the guard.

Lu, 51, was also convicted of five lesser charges including theft, as he stole the samurai sword from a military history museum by smashing a display case with a hammer. He can appeal the ruling.

The sword is carved with the phrase "Nanjing battle, (this sword) killed 107 people" and is believed to have been used by Japanese soldiers during the Nanjing massacre in 1937.

The presidential office complex and its surroundings in the centre of the capital Taipei have been the target of attacks before.

In 2014, a driver tried to smash his vehicle into the front door of the nearby presidential residence, several months after a man rammed a huge truck through a bullet-proof screen and into the main gate of the presidential office.

No one was injured in either incident, except one of the drivers.Maldives President Abdulla Yameen's crackdown and imposition of the state of emergency has dented the nation's image as a popular tourist destination, which remains vital to its economy

Maldives President Abdulla Yameen lifted a 45-day state of emergency on Thursday, a day after senior political opponents were locked up indefinitely for allegedly trying to topple him last month.

Yameen chose not to extend the draconian laws he had invoked on February 5 following a Supreme Court ruling that threatened to lead to his impeachment.

"Though there still exists a diminished threat to national security... in an effort to promote normalcy, the president has decided to lift the state of emergency," Yameen's office said in a statement.

The country's united opposition said lifting the emergency made no practical difference because "Yameen no longer abides by laws and the constitution".

The opposition urged foreign intervention in the Muslim Indian Ocean archipelago of 340,000.

"The opposition calls on the international community for swift action on the Maldives, including the imposition of targeted sanctions against regime officials," they said in a statement.

Yameen initially declared the state of emergency for 15 days after the country's top court ordered him to free high-profile dissidents from jail.

It was later extended for another 30 days, deepening the political crisis in the country which straddles strategic international shipping lanes.

The dissidents' release would have paved the way for former leader Mohamed Nasheed to return from self-imposed exile in London and contest presidential elections later this year.

Yameen refused to carry out the court order and instead invoked the emergency which curtailed the powers of the judiciary and the legislature.

Former President of the Maldives Mohamed Nasheed accused President Abdulla Yameen of setting up a "dictatorship"

He also arrested the chief justice and another Supreme Court judge.

The remaining judges revoked an earlier decision to reinstate 12 MPs who had been sacked for defecting to the opposition while Yameen also stripped parliament of its power to impeach him.

Yameen's statement Thursday defended the emergency measures, saying they had been precipitated by a "constitutional crisis" created by the two judges.

It added that they had "conspired with political actors... (to) overthrow a lawful government, and whose actions constituted an imminent threat to national security".

Yameen had been widely expected to let the tough laws lapse on Thursday after authorities charged former president Maumoon Abdul Gayoom and several senior judges with "terrorism" this week.

- 'Full dictatorship' -

Nasheed said that Yameen had allowed the emergency to end because he no longer had any need for it.

"He has overrun the judiciary and legislature, arrested hundreds unlawfully and introduced a 'new normal' in the #Maldives - full dictatorship," Nasheed said on Twitter.

"We will not give up, we will fight and we will overcome."

In a statement later, he criticised other nations for not intervening to end the political crisis.

"It is sad that the international community has still not got their act together," Nasheed said, accusing the Maldives regime of being a "puppet state controlled by China".

Gayoom, Yameen's estranged half brother, ruled the country for 30 years before losing to Nasheed in the nation's first democratic elections in 2008.

The 80-year-old former strongman was arrested earlier last month accused of trying to topple Yameen.

The Prosecutor General's office said Wednesday that Gayoom had been charged with attempting an "act of terrorism and obstruction of justice".

Gayoom, together with his legislator son Faris Maumoon and sacked chief justice Abdulla Saeed, have been remanded in custody. In total 11 people have been charged.

The Maldives criminal court ordered Gayoom to be remanded until the conclusion of his trial, although it was not immediately clear when the case would commence.

Yameen came to power following a controversial election run-off in November 2013 when he narrowly defeated Nasheed.

His crackdown has dented the nation's image as a popular tourist destination, which remains vital to its economy.Executives from Facebook, Google and Twitter appeared before a Singapore committee as the country examines options to rein in fake news

Internet giants Facebook and Google on Thursday testified before a parliamentary committee in Singapore as they warned the city-state against introducing new laws to combat "fake news", saying that existing legislation is adequate to address the problem.

Their warnings were made to a parliamentary committee which is examining possible measures, including legislation, to tackle false online information which the government says could threaten national security.

Executives from Facebook, Google and Twitter appeared before the committee Thursday, and are among scores of experts, academics and activists called to testify over eight days.

The financial hub is among several countries looking at legislation to rein in fake news but critics have cautioned this could be used to curb free speech. The Singapore government has denied it is trying to restrict free speech.

In a submission given to the committee before testifying, Alvin Tan, Facebook's head of public policy in Southeast Asia, said: "We do not believe that legislation is the best approach to addressing the issue.

"Singapore already has a variety of existing laws and regulations which address hate speech, defamation and the spreading of false news."

His comments came as Facebook is embroiled in a privacy scandal following revelations that British data analysis firm Cambridge Analytica exploited the personal data of millions of users of the social network.

Facebook's Asia-Pacific vice president for public policy Simon Milner admitted during the hearing that the social media giant could have told users earlier that their data had been breached by Cambridge Analytica between 2014 and 2015.

"That's one of the lessons for us, as to why we're now going to audit all other apps and not just going to take their affirmation... that they have deleted data and not passed it on," he said.

Google also raised concerns about a fake news law, saying in a written submission that "an effective way of combating misinformation is through educating citizens on how to distinguish reliable from unreliable information".

Instead of legislation, it called for "promoting quality journalism to ensure that there is a robust network of fact-checking organisations providing reliable information and debunking falsehoods".

Wrapping up a nearly three-hour exchange with Milner that got heated at times, committee member and law and home affairs minister K. Shanmugam said the government saw the tech giants as "partners".

"We see you as partners, but we do not accept some characterisations of what you think you can do... some areas of concern we need to explore very carefully," he said.

The committee has received views from 164 people on combating fake news. After the hearings, which are scheduled to end next week, it will make recommendations to MPs within months.

Legislation is among the options under examination by the committee, and no details about any possible law have been made public.

"Given the alarming legislative precedents in the city-state, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) shares the deep concern that Singaporean defenders of the freedom to inform have expressed about this proposed law, which they suspect will be yet another tool for censoring dissent," said Daniel Bastard, the head of RSF's Asia-Pacific desk.

Domestic media is tightly controlled in Singapore, and the country is ranked 151 out of 180 in the World Press Freedom Index by RSF. A number one ranking is the best.Zimbabwe's President Emmerson Mnangagwa is a strong opponent of the death penalty

Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa, who succeeded ousted Robert Mugabe in November, has pardoned at least 3,000 prisoners to clear out overpopulated jails, officials said Thursday.

The pardon will see the release of all female prisoners except those serving life terms, as well as all disabled and juvenile prisoners.

Terminally-ill prisoners and those above the age of 60 who have served a third of their time will also be freed.

"The president in terms of the constitution of Zimbabwe has granted amnesty to prisoners," the Zimbabwe Prisons and Correctional Service (ZPCS) said in a statement.

"The exercise has... gone a long way in decongesting our prisons."

About 3,000 prisoners will be released, the ZPCS said, bringing the prison population down to 17,000.

The statement also announced that prisoners on death row for more than 10 years will not face the death penalty, but will spend life in jail.

The country last executed a prisoner in 2005, and Mnangagwa is a strong opponent of the death penalty.

Prisoners convicted of murder, treason, rape, carjacking, armed robbery and those serving a sentence imposed by a court martial were excluded from the amnesty.

Zimbabwe pardoned thousands of prisoners in recent years under Mugabe.

The cash-strapped government has battled to feed, provide clothing and adequate health care to inmates. In 2013 over 100 prisoners died in the country's jails.

In 2015, four inmates were killed after prisoners went on riot over poor living conditions.

Mugabe, 94, who ruled for 37 years, was forced to resign after a brief military takeover and the threat of impeachment by once loyal ZANU-PF lawmakers.A Syrian rides his bicycle past a destroyed building in the Eastern Ghouta rebel-held enclave of Douma

The deaths of several members of the so-called "Wagner Group" in Syria last month shone a light on Russian President Vladimir Putin's mysterious private army Moscow is using there.

Questions had already been raised on its role in the Syrian conflict and intensified when Washington said on February 7 it had killed at least 100 pro-regime troops in Deir ez-Zor.

After days of silence, Moscow acknowledged five Russian nationals were killed and "dozens" wounded in the attack, saying they all were in Syria "on their own initiative."

Various media outlets have reported up to 200 fatalities and the group of Russian investigative bloggers known as the Conflict Intelligence Team (CIT) has established the identities of dozens of them -- all members of the Wagner Group.

"Wagner can and should be regarded as Russia's shadow army in Syria, as it has been providing the vital frontline component to Russia's operations in Latakia and Eastern Syria," CIT's Kirill Mikhailov told AFP.

The group played an important role in the retaking of Palmyra from the Islamic State group which had controlled the city since March 2016, he added.

Pavel Baev, an associate research fellow at the French Institute of International Relations, said Russia's resort to "shadow armies... has the double benefit of ensuring deniability and discounting casualties."

But "the problem with assets like the Wagner Group is that they are never fully controllable and could become maverick," he said.

The group's "capabilities exceed any Western private military company by far," said Mikhailov.

- A photo with Putin -

Wagner was set up by former Russian military intelligence officer Dmitry Utkin, who was part of the first convoy of Russian mercenaries sent in autumn 2013 to Syria.

But their ill-equipped mission, which did not have the backing of the Russian authorities, ended in fiasco.

They engaged in some combat with the IS but rapidly returned to Russia, where two backers of the scheme were jailed for three years for mercenary activities.

In June 2014 Utkin joined the ranks of pro-Russian separatist forces in eastern Ukraine -- the Wagner Group's birthplace -- according to official reports from Ukraine.

The Kremlin has continuously rejected accusations from Kiev and the West of its military presence in Eastern Ukraine, saying the Russians who are fighting there are "volunteers."

Utkin reappeared in Syria in autumn 2015, when Russia launched an intervention in support of Kremlin ally Bashar al-Assad's regime.

In December next year, the former intelligence officer showed up at a televised ceremony held in the Kremlin to honour "the Heroes of Fatherland" and was the same day photographed alongside Putin.

Portraits of Putin and Assad and Lebanese Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah at a jewellery shop in Aleppo

Various media reports in Russia and the United States said Wagner is being funded by one of Putin's allies Evgeny Prigozhin, a Saint Petersburg businessman who made a fortune in the catering business before signing lucrative contracts with Russia's military and the government.

He has been charged by a US court with setting up an Internet "troll factory" that attempted to influence the 2016 American presidential elections in favour of Donald Trump.

- Petrodollars -

The number of Wagner's fighters in Syria has been the subject of debate by analysts and media, with Republic.ru online magazine reporting the presence of 2,500 mercenaries in March 2016.

It said $350 million (285 million euros) had been spent on mercenaries since the operation began.

Wagner's mission "is essentially a failure," a former member of the group told Russian Sovershenno Sekretno weekly.

He said 40 percent of recruits had been jailed for serious crimes before they joined Wagner and would refer to each other as the "unlucky ones".

This "low-quality" of recruits, along with the idea that Wagner functioned as an autonomous army and accepted missions from non-Russian groups, led to rising tensions with officials both on the ground in Syria and in Moscow's corridors of power.

Putin, Assad and Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu inspect a military parade during their visit to the Russian air base in Hmeimim in the northwestern Syrian province of Latakia

In early 2016 the group lost the trust of -- and financing from -- Russia's defence ministry, according to various reports.

This led "Prigozhin to seek other contracts, such as the one with Damascus whereby Wagner would liberate oil and gas fields and infrastructure in exchange for 25 percent of production," he added.

To this end, he established a company named Evro Polis, which signed the contract with Assad's government in December 2016 and is now responsible for paying Wagner mercenaries' salaries that vary from an estimated $3,500 to $5000 a month.

"Most probably, Prigozhin's companies provide a hub that channels the funding coming from other sources, including the Syrian government," said analyst Baev.Civilians fleeing Afrin where Kurdish fighters were ousted by a Turkish offensive

A Turkish regional governor who declared while wielding a double-bladed scimitar above his head that Turkey's forces would soon march into Mosul and Jerusalem has gone into retirement, reports said on Thursday.

Necati Senturk, the government-appointed governor of the Kirsehir province, raised eyebrows with a speech from the balcony of the governor's office at the weekend as Turkish troops were poised to take the Syrian city of Afrin from Kurdish militia.

"God willing, we will take Afrin. We will take Manbij," he said in videos posted on Turkish news websites, referring to another Kurdish-held city in Syria.

Waving a sword known as a zulfiqar above his head with one hand and holding a megaphone in another, he added: "We will also go to Mosul, and we will go to Jerusalem!... God is Greatest!"

The Turkish sultans controlled both the Iraqi city of Mosul and the holy city of Jerusalem for long periods during the Ottoman Empire.

The zulfiqar is a double bladed scimitar of the kind used by Islamic warriors in the early conquests. Such a sword is said to have been given by the prophet Mohammed to his son-in-law the prophet Ali.

It was not immediately clear to what extent Senturk's retirement on age grounds had been pre-planned or forced by his incendiary speech.

But Senturk, Kirsehir governor for the last three and a half years, said he was unrepentant.

"In terms of fatherland and language, I have no fear," he was quoted as saying by the Dogan news agency.

"All good things must come to an end. When a person is at the top, they must know how to step down.

"And going out at the peak is most auspicious."Hamas security force members carry out a raid in the Gaza Strip that results in the arrest of a suspect in a recent bomb attack against the Palestinian prime minister but leaves two of their colleagues dead

Two Hamas security force members were killed Thursday as they carried out a raid that resulted in the arrest of a suspect in a recent bomb attack in Gaza against the Palestinian prime minister, officials said.

Senior Hamas official Salah al Bardawil issued a statement announcing the arrest of the suspect and two accomplices as well as the deaths of members of the security forces during the raid.

An AFP correspondent saw the bodies of two security force members at the hospital and a senior police officer at the scene also confirmed the deaths on condition of anonymity.

A clash had erupted earlier in the day in Nuseirat, south of Gaza City, as security forces from Hamas, the Islamist movement that runs the Gaza Strip, engaged in a manhunt for the suspect.

Dozens of new checkpoints were erected throughout the Palestinian enclave and armed security forces were searching cars, an AFP correspondent said.

Palestinian prime minister Rami Hamdallah was unhurt by the roadside bomb that struck his convoy on March 13, in what Palestinian officials have called an assassination attempt as he entered Gaza on a rare visit.

Palestinian Authority intelligence chief Majid Faraj, who was accompanying Hamdallah, also escaped injury.

A Hamas policeman takes position in Nuseirat, south of Gaza City, on March 22, 2018, as security forces carry out a raid that resulted in the arrest of a suspect in a recent bomb attack against the Palestinian prime minister

The roadside bomb, believed to have weighed around 15 kilogrammes (33 pounds), exploded a few hundred metres (yards) from the border with Israel, shortly after Hamdallah's convoy entered the territory. A second bomb failed to explode, officials said.

- Failed reconciliation -

Hamas did not give a possible motive for the attack on Hamdallah, head of government in president Mahmud Abbas's Palestinian Authority.

On Wednesday, a Hamas security source said investigators had arrested and were questioning three people, including two members of the PA-run intelligence services.

Another security source said he believed radical Salafist Muslims had planted the bomb, which lightly wounded six people.

On Monday, Abbas accused Hamas of being behind the blast and said he would take new measures in response, without specifying details.

Abbas has previously taken a series of measures, including reducing electricity payments for Gaza's two million residents, in what analysts said was an attempt to punish Hamas.

Hamas and the West Bank-based PA have been bitter rivals for a decade since the Islamists seized control of Gaza.

Hamas security force members inspect the crater left by a bomb that targeted the convoy of Palestinian prime minister Rami Hamdallah on a rare visit to the Gaza Strip on March 13, 2018

The bombing appears to have brought to an end hopes for an already floundering reconciliation deal signed in October between Hamas and Abbas's Fatah party, which dominates the PA.

While Hamas did hand over control of Gaza's borders to the PA, it maintains full control of the rest of the territory, with its police force and armed wing still operating throughout.

The future of that armed wing has proved one of the largest sticking points in implementing the reconciliation agreement.

Previous attempts at reconciliation have failed.

Hamas has fought three wars with Israel since 2008 and is blacklisted as a terrorist organisation by the European Union and the United States.

Many hoped reconciliation could ease worsening humanitarian conditions in the Palestinian enclave, which suffers from electricity shortages and a lack of infrastructure, including clean water.Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates meets Premier Li Keqiang in Beijing last year. Li has pledged China will "strictly protect" intellectual property rights, but the US technology firm has won only paltry compensation from Chinese courts

It took a crucial piece of evidence for Microsoft to win one of its numerous anti-piracy lawsuits in China: A computer seller telling an investigator that he could install a Windows 7 knock-off for free.

But the US software giant's victory was marred by the paltry compensation ordered by the court, illustrating both progress and challenges for foreign firms defending their intellectual property in China.

Premier Li Keqiang pledged this week that China will "strictly protect" intellectual property rights, and special IP courts have been created to hear such cases.

But US President Donald Trump has already made up his mind, and was preparing to unveil on Thursday tariffs on a wide-range of Chinese imports for what the White House called "state-led" efforts to steal US technologies.

Alibaba's Taobao e-commerce website remains on a list of "notorious markets" put out by the United States Trade Representative. As does the Silk Market in the heart of Beijing, where fake Ralph Lauren polo shirts fly off the shelves.

Washington has also long accused Beijing of forcing US companies to turn over proprietary commercial information and intellectual property as a condition of operating in China.

- 'Mirror copy' -

A survey of US businesses by the American Chamber of Commerce shows IP infringement continues to be a top challenge for some in China, citing inadequate laws and the difficulty of prosecuting cases as the most vexing IP issues.

In Microsoft's case in the southern province of Guangdong, the company's lawyers focused on a large computer maker bundling its hardware with a pirated version of Microsoft's operating system in sales on Taobao.

Microsoft argued its case in a civil court, but the country set up special courts in 2014 to handle IP cases in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou

Using the name "Bob Jovi", its investigator purchased a computer from MSI's flagship online store in 2015, asking customer service if the machine came with an operating system.

According to the court documents, the customer service representative wrote back that he could help install Windows 7: "It's a mirror copy of Microsoft's official operating system, just like the real thing, no fee."

After receiving the computer with pirated software, the investigator made two more purchases over the following months to show the bundling was "commonplace" and "sustained", Microsoft argued.

While the court ruled in Microsoft's favour, it set damages at $32,000 after finding the total cost of the infringement undeterminable as Microsoft only demonstrated three instances of piracy. Nor did it award Microsoft all of its legal fees.

In December, after a two-year process, Microsoft lost its appeal for a larger settlement, leaving the software giant paying out more than it was awarded, the court documents show.

"Most important is that the defendant will stop infringing and purchase genuine software," said a lawyer who has represented Microsoft in IP cases, who asked his name not be used. Microsoft declined to comment.

The lawyer said it was not cost efficient to sue all infringers but the cases deterred others.

- 'Whack a mole' -

Microsoft argued its case in a civil court, but China set up special courts in 2014 to handle IP cases in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. A dozen other lower-level IP tribunals were opened.

From 2013 to 2017 the number of IP-related court cases doubled, breaking the 200,000 mark last year, said Tai Kaiyuan, a justice of the Supreme People's Court, noting China now has sufficient IP-related legislation.

"We've worked hard to implement them and build the justice system," Tai said, according to state media.

In Microsoft's case in the southern province of Guangdong, the company's lawyers focused on a large computer maker bundling its hardware with a pirated version of Microsoft's operating system in sales on Taobao

Scott Palmer, an IP lawyer who represents US and European companies at Sheppard Mullin Richter & Hampton in Beijing, said China has made "incredible" progress.

"There are still problems. There is still infringement, sure, but anyone who watches China and speaks honestly about what they see has to admit it has come a long way," Palmer told AFP.

The main area of infringement in China has moved to online platforms like Taobao, where brands face a frustrating game of "whack a mole" to get a range of knock-off products taken down, he said.

Laura Wen-yu Young, a lawyer at the IP law firm Wang & Wang, said the IP courts are a "huge improvement" from the past when judges had no relevant training.

A trademark case can now take just over a year on average to be decided, compared to having to wait up to four years in the past, she said, though there are still "a lot of improvements needed".Sarkozy has dismissed the allegations as the rantings of vindictive Libyan regime members who were furious over France's military intervention in Libya

Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy vowed to clear his name on Thursday after being charged for financing his 2007 election campaign with money from late Libyan dictator Moamer Kadhafi, but admitted he was "finished" in politics.

"It might take me one, two, 10 years but I'll smash this group (of accusers) and will restore my honour," he said during an emotion-charged prime-time television interview on Friday evening. "I don't plan to give an inch!"

Having already stepped back from a front-line public role in 2016 after he failed with a bid to run again for president, Sarkozy told his interviewer on the TF1 channel that for himself "politics is finished".

In an defiant half-hour performance that saw him shake with indignation at times, Sarkozy frequently referred to his accusers from Kadhafi's regime as "sinister", "liars" and a "group of killers".

"If you had told me that I would have problems because of Kadhafi, I would have said: 'What are you smoking?'" Sarkozy said at one point, claiming that investigators had not found a single piece of evidence against him.

The 63-year-old, who served as French leader from 2007 to 2012, was charged with corruption, illegal campaign financing and concealment of Libyan public money on Thursday evening after two days of questioning in police custody.

Under the French system, charging a suspect means that investigators believe they have strong and corroborated evidence against them, but the defendant can appeal and the case can still be dropped before a trial.

The allegations that Sarkozy took money from Kadhafi -- whom he welcomed to Paris in 2007 but then helped to topple in 2011 -- are the most serious out of several investigations that have dogged him since he left office.

"I am hurt deeply as a person, not for me, for my country," Sarkozy said in his concluding remarks on the TF1 channel. "You can't drag people into the mud because some killers wanted to do it. I can't let them get away with it."

French judges decided they had enough evidence to charge Sarkozy after five years of investigation and two days of questioning in police custody in the Paris suburb of Nanterre

Earlier in a statement released to Le Figaro newspaper, Sarkozy said he had been "living the hell of this slander since March 11, 2011," when the first allegations against him emerged via Kadhafi's son, Seif al-Islam.

He went as far as to blame "the controversy launched by Kadhafi and his henchmen" for his failure to win re-election in 2012, when Francois Hollande, a Socialist, took the presidency.

- Suitcases of cash? -

Since 2013, investigators have been looking into claims by several figures in Kadhafi's ousted regime that Sarkozy's campaign received cash from the dictator.

Profile of former French president Nicolas Sarkozy

In 2011, as NATO-backed forces were preparing to drive Kadhafi out of power, Seif al-Islam told the Euronews network that Sarkozy must "give back the money he took from Libya to finance his electoral campaign".

Sarkozy has dismissed the allegations as the rantings of vindictive Kadhafi loyalists who were furious over the French-led military intervention that helped end Kadhafi's 41-year rule and ultimately led to his death.

He has also unsuccessfully sued the investigative website Mediapart for publishing a document allegedly signed by Libya's intelligence chief showing that Kadhafi agreed to give Sarkozy up to 50 million euros ($62 million). The courts have ruled it can be used as evidence.

Franco-Lebanese businessman Ziad Takieddine also claims to have delivered three suitcases stuffed with a total of five million euros ($6.15 million) to Sarkozy and his chief of staff in 2006 and 2007.

Sarkozy lashed out at the arms broker in his television interview and in his statement, arguing his account contained inconsistencies and accusing him of having "highly suspect characteristics and a questionable past".

The allegations that Sarkozy took money from Kadhafi are the most serious out of myriad investigations dogging him since he left office in 2012

The legal investigation is also looking into a 500,000-euro foreign cash transfer to Sarkozy's former chief of staff Claude Gueant and the 2009 sale of a luxury villa to a Libyan investment fund.

Le Monde newspaper further reported that other former regime officials have stepped forward alleging illicit financing.

- First ex-president in custody -

In 2014, Sarkozy became the first former French president to be taken into police custody, over a separate inquiry into claims he tried to interfere in another legal investigation against him.

But he is not the first ex-president to be charged with corruption -- his predecessor Jacques Chirac was given a two-year suspended sentence in 2011 for embezzlement and misuse of public funds during his time as mayor of Paris.

Sarkozy is already charged in two separate cases, one relating to fake invoices devised to mask overspending on his failed 2012 campaign and another for alleged influence peddling.Buses prepare to enter a bombed-out town in Syria's Eastern Ghouta after an agreement to evacuate hundreds of rebels and their families following weeks of regime bombardment

Syrian rebels began leaving Eastern Ghouta on Thursday, state media said, under the first such evacuation deal from the battered opposition enclave outside Damascus.

State television announced the "departure of 547 people from Harasta so far, including 88 fighters".

A military source told AFP the rebels and accompanying civilians had boarded buses and were waiting in a buffer zone to cross over into regime-controlled territory.

In total, around 1,500 fighters and thousands of family members are expected to leave the town of Harasta, state news agency SANA said.

The deal between the regime and the Ahrar al-Sham rebel group, which controls Harasta, was brokered by Russia and announced on Wednesday.

A blistering Russia-backed regime offensive on Eastern Ghouta since February 18 has retaken 80 percent of the last opposition bastion outside the capital.

It has divided the remaining territory into three isolated pockets each held by different rebel groups.

It has killed more than 1,500 civilians and caused thousands to flee, the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights says.Around 4,000 French troops are deployed under Operation Barkhane alongside the United Nations 12,000-strong MINUSMA peacekeeping operation in Mali

Mali's Prime Minister Soumeylou Boubeye Maiga made his first visit to the country's troubled north on Thursday, but delayed a trip to the restive city of Kidal due to bad weather.

Five French soldiers were wounded on Thursday in Kidal when their base was attacked, the French army said, and France's defence minister said the assault was likely linked to Maiga's planned stop.

Maiga was appointed in December charged with bolstering security as jihadists mount near-weekly attacks on security forces, raising fears for safety ahead of a presidential election due in July.

In the northern town of Tessalit, he met Malian soldiers, promising them "better conditions to face the common enemy, terrorism," and saying they were "not alone".

Bad weather meant the plane meant to fly the prime minister to Kidal could not take off, his entourage said, delaying his visit to Friday.

Around 4,000 French troops are deployed under Operation Barkhane alongside the UN's 12,000-strong MINUSMA peacekeeping operation in Mali.

Last month, French army chief Francois Lecointre warned parliament that it would take 10 to 15 years to resolve Mali's problems, according to a summary of his remarks published on Thursday.

Meanwhile, MINUSMA head Mahamat Saleh Annadif said the attack on the joint French-UN base was aimed at the "strong signal given for peace and reconciliation in Mali" that Maiga's visit would represent.

French Defence Minister Florence Parly told parliament there was "almost certainly a link between this attack and the submitted intention by the Malian prime minister to visit Kidal".

No Malian head of government has visited Kidal since 2014 when fighting broke out during a visit by then prime minister Moussa Mara which ended with the army suffering a heavy defeat.

The rebels, who rose up against the state in 2012 in a movement piggybacked by jihadists, signed a peace treaty in 2015 but have remained resistant to handing back full control to the government.

Maiga is the first head of government to visit the restive north since 2014

Maiga said on Tuesday he would visit "without arrogance, in order to listen, and understand the urgent needs of the population".

The prime minister is also due in Gao and Timbuktu, two other northern cities frequently rocked by unrest.Syrian regime forces stand near buses waiting at the entrance of Harasta in Eastern Ghouta, near Damascus, on March 22, 2018, after a deal with the rebels to evacuate the town

The evacuation of hundreds of rebels and their families from Harasta, a bombed-out town in Syria's Eastern Ghouta, follows a string of similar operations in the seven-year war.

The regime is pushing "reconciliation" deals -- the evacuation of fighters, generally towards the northwestern province of Idlib -- in exchange for lifting bombardments and sieges.

Amnesty International, in a November 2017 report entitled "We Leave or We Die", labelled such forced displacements crimes against humanity.

Here are some of the major evacuations:

- 2014 onwards: Homs -

Syrian rebel fighters arrive at a regime checkpoint ahead of their evacuation from Waer, the last opposition-held district of Homs city, on May 21, 2017

In May 2014, rebels leave their fiefdom in the Old City of Homs, previously known as the "capital of the revolution", after a two-year siege.

Bombardments and fighting have devastated the city's historic quarters.

This is the first regime-opposition deal to result in a rebel retreat since the war broke out in 2011.

Between March and May 2017, thousands of rebels and civilians leave Waer, the last rebel-held neighbourhood of Homs, allowing regime forces to fully retake control of Syria's third-largest city.

- 2016: Daraya, Moadimayet al-Sham -

In August 2016 the last rebels evacuate their ex-stronghold Daraya, a town in Damascus province, following a deal with the regime after a brutal four-year government siege and incessant bombardment.

Syrian civilians originally from Daraya town are evacuated from the rebel-held town of Moadamiyet al-Sham on September 8, 2016, to be taken to a shelter in regime-held areas

The rebels and their families are taken to Idlib and the Syrian army retakes control of Daraya.

In September the army evacuates some 300 Daraya inhabitants from neighbouring rebel-held Moadimayet al-Sham, where they had taken refuge three years earlier.

UN Special Envoy for Syria, Staffan de Mistura, criticises the "strategy" of forced displacement of the population and warns "after Daraya we may have other Darayas".

- 2016: Aleppo -

Following a suffocating siege and a blistering offensive with barrel bombs, rockets and shells, the Syrian army in December 2016 declares it is in full control of the country's second city, Aleppo.

Thousands of rebels and civilians are evacuated under a deal sponsored by Iran, Russia and Turkey.

- 2017: Wadi Barada -

In January 2017 the army recaptures Wadi Barada, a flashpoint area that supplies water to Damascus, after rebels agree to withdraw in exchange for an end to a suffocating siege.

The regime, backed by Lebanon's pro-Iranian Shiite militia Hezbollah, had been trying to retake the area, just northwest of Damascus, since December 20, 2016.

The deal allows some 700 rebels and 1,400 civilians to leave Wadi Barada for Idlib province.

- 2017: Four towns -

Syrian mourners attend a funeral near Damascus on April 26, 2017, for victims of a bombing that targeted buses carrying evacuees from the besieged government-held towns of Fuaa and Kafraya, killing at 126 people

In April 2017, under a deal sponsored by regime backer Iran and rebel supporter Qatar, nearly 11,000 fighters and civilians leave four besieged areas.

This multiple evacuation involves Fuaa and Kafraya, two Shiite areas in Idlib province that are surrounded by rebels. Meanwhile residents leave rebel-held Zabadani and Madaya, besieged by regime troops, which now move in to take control.

- 2017: Barzeh, Qabun, Tishrin -

In May 2017, the regime retakes the rebel-held areas Barzeh, Qabun and Tishrin in Damascus. Several thousand civilians and fighters leave the capital, headed for jihadist-held Idlib province.A girl walks through the site where the Nigerian air force mistakenly bombed the Rann Internally Displaced Peoples' (IDP) camp

The UN said Thursday it has resumed operations in the town of Rann in northeast Nigeria, just over three weeks after a Boko Haram attack killed three aid workers.

"The authorisation by the United Nations for flights to resume to Rann for aid workers was taken on Monday. The first flights went on Tuesday," said UN spokeswoman in Abuja Samantha Newport.

"UN aid workers are not authorised to overnight (in Rann) and daily operations are expected to continue until the security conditions are met," she told AFP.

Heavily armed Boko Haram fighters attacked a military base in the remote Borno state town next to a camp housing some 55,000 people displaced by the Islamist insurgency.

Eight security personnel were killed with three Nigerian aid workers employed by the UN children's agency Unicef and the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

Humanitarian operations, including food distribution, provision of shelter, emergency medical care, clean water and sanitation programmes, were suspended because of security concerns.

The UN said at the time that there would be minimal impact on people at the camp and some 25,000 others in the town who also rely on aid agencies.

The medical charity Doctors Without Borders (MSF) also pulled out. It is understood that MSF teams have also been making daily trips to Rann by helicopter.

The IOM, which tracks movements of internally displaced people and refugees from the conflict, said 100 households from Rann had arrived in the Ngala area in the past three weeks.

Boko Haram's attack in Rann underscored continued concerns about the jihadists' strength, despite government and military claims the group is on the verge of defeat.

Abuja maintains Boko Haram no longer holds territory but aid agencies say two areas of Borno -- the district of Marte next to Rann and Abadam, near Lake Chad -- remain inaccessible.Police dispersed tear gas and arrested around a dozen demonstrators who were heading towards the rally in the economic centre Abidjan

Riot police in Ivory Coast on Thursday arrested protestors and fired teargas to prevent an opposition demonstration from going ahead, AFP journalists said.

The opposition coalition Together for Democracy and Sovereignty (EDS) called the march to protest against the electoral commission which it accuses of political bias.

It comes ahead of senatorial elections on Saturday, with municipal and regional polls due later in 2018 ahead of presidential elections in 2020.

Police used tear gas and arrested around a dozen demonstrators who were heading towards the starting point of Thursday's rally in the economic centre Abidjan.

After three hours of trying to evade police, the EDS cancelled the rally.

EDS spokesman Jean-Gervais Tcheide was arrested while he was being interviewed by reporters, an AFP journalist said.

EDS president Georges Armand Ouegnin said he felt "scandalised by the serious violation of freedom of expression".

The protest was banned by authorities on Wednesday evening over a disagreement about the course of the protest, according to the opposition

"In a democratic country we have the right to protest, to express our unhappiness by way of a peaceful and democratic march," he told AFP by telephone.

He said the protest was banned by authorities on Wednesday evening over a disagreement about the route.

The police and the government could not be immediately reached for comment.

The opposition coalition is calling for a change in the composition of the electoral commission, which is made up of eight members from the ruling party and four from the opposition.

About 3,000 people died when rival supporters clashed on the streets of Abidjan following the disputed 2010 presidential elections.

Former president Laurent Gbagbo is currently on trial in The Hague accused of inciting the post-electoral violence after losing to bitter rival and current leader Alassane Ouattara.Sierra Leone's election commission has alleged police are disrupting its activities ahead of a March 27 presidential run-off as a top polling official was summoned for questioning

Sierra Leone's police on Thursday dismissed accusations by the election commission that officers were disrupting its activities ahead of a March 27 presidential run-off, bringing the force's impartiality into question.

Tensions are high ahead of the vote with a campaign marked by violent attacks and intimidation against politicians and supporters, along with an increase in inflammatory tribal rhetoric.

The National Electoral Commission (NEC) said in a statement late Wednesday the police had "unwarrantedly entered NEC premises, unannounced and at random, interrogated NEC staff; and obstructed them from performing their duties."

Their actions "served to intimidate some staff", it added.

The police responded on Thursday by pointing out it was investigating 200 election-related crimes nationwide, some involving NEC staff.

A spokesman said officers had to wait "hours on end" to question the executive secretary of the body on Wednesday, adding that the commission's declaration therefore came as a "surprise".

The force's role was to "remove from within its ranks" any NEC staff member likely to undermine Sierra Leone's electoral process, the spokesman added.

The commission's statement is likely to inflame opposition accusations that the police are in the pocket of the ruling All Peoples' Congress (APC), whose candidate came second in the first round of voting on March 7.

The home of opposition leader Julius Maada Bio was surrounded after polls closed that day, leading to a stand-off, though he was not arrested and police dispersed hours later.

Bio, from the Sierra Leone People's Party (SLPP), took 43.3 percent of votes, while Samura Kamara of the APC took 42.7 percent, propelling them into the run-off.

The APC and SLPP alike have complained that fraud marred the vote, which was declared fair and credible by international and domestic observers.

The Head of the United Nations Office for West Africa and the Sahel (UNOWAS), Mohamed Ibn Chambas, said Thursday the polling body was "working under exceptional challenges to discharge its constitutional responsibilities within tight time constraints".

He further demanded all sides "exercise restraint and not interfere with or compromise the independence and integrity of NEC".Atta Mohammad Noor agreed to step down as governor of Balkh province, ending a political crisis many had feared would turn violent

Afghanistan's "King of the North" handed the reins to his hand-picked successor on Thursday, ending a three-month political crisis that many had feared would turn violent.

Atta Mohammad Noor, who sees himself as a potential presidential contender, agreed to step down from the governorship of Balkh province after his Jamiat-e-Islami party struck a deal with President Ashraf Ghani's US-backed government.

Ghani sacked Noor on December 18 but the strongman refused to leave the position he had held since 2004, triggering a standoff that threw up a challenge to the president's authority.

Noor will be replaced by one of his chosen successors, Mohammad Ishaq Rahguzar, who also belongs to the Jamiat party and is a member of the Balkh parliament.

"I say goodbye today but I will still be here and always with my people," Noor said at a ceremony in the provincial capital Mazar-i-Sharif as he introduced his successor.

"Big political games are ahead, including the elections, and we will be major players."

The decision to oust Noor backfired badly on Ghani, who was criticised for his poor timing and clumsy handling of the issue.

Instead of weakening a rival ahead of the presidential election in 2019, Ghani thrust the more charismatic Noor onto the national stage where he capitalised on his newfound fame.

The political crisis came at a bad time for the president, with his government facing a deteriorating security situation as the Taliban and the Islamic State group continue to carry out deadly attacks across the country.

Rahguzar served as the first governor of Balkh in the post-Taliban era before he was replaced by Noor.

"They are very close," an Afghan analyst told AFP on the condition of anonymity.

The two men were part of the US-funded mujahideen who fought to expel the Soviets from Afghanistan in the 1980s.

"He's acceptable to Atta -- not Ghani's first choice, but face-saving," a Western diplomat told AFP.

In his address for Nawrooz, the traditional Persian new year holiday, on Wednesday, Noor welcomed the deal with Ghani.

Another Western official told AFP that Noor's demands to Ghani, that included selecting people for key posts such as the police chief, had been met but Jamiat was still locked in negotiations over some issues including electoral law reform.

Mohammad Daud, who had been Ghani's choice to replace Noor and was forced to work in Kabul during the crisis, would likely be appointed governor of "another province", a senior Afghan official said.Three Turkish soldiers died Thursday clearing improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in the Syrian region of Afrin after the capture of Afrin city at the weekend, Prime Minister Binali Yildirim said.

"We have three martyrs today. They were martyred while clearing IEDs," Yildirim said in a televised speech in Ankara.

Three more soldiers were injured after an IED exploded, the army said in a statement, confirming the death toll.

Turkish troops and allied Syrian forces seized control of Afrin city from the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) militia on Sunday.

Ankara began its offensive in January against the YPG, which it says is allied with the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) waging an insurgency against Turkey since 1984.

The PKK is blacklisted as a terror organisation by Turkey and its Western allies.

But the YPG has been working closely with the United States against the Islamic State extremist group in Syria, much to Turkey's chagrin.

Some 250,000 civilians fled the violence in Afrin and dozens of others were killed, as well as around 1,500 Kurdish fighters, according to the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Prior to the latest deaths, 46 Turkish military personnel had been killed during the operation dubbed "Olive Branch".

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has vowed to extend the operation to other YPG-controlled areas in northern Syria including the towns of Manbij and Kobane.Buses wait at the entrance of Harasta in Eastern Ghouta, on the outskirts of Damascus, on March 22, 2018, after a deal was struck with rebels in the area to evacuate the town

A Syrian rebel group in Eastern Ghouta announced a ceasefire from midnight Friday, a spokesman said, after fighters and their families left under a Russian-brokered evacuation deal that is the first for the shrinking opposition enclave outside Damascus.

The evacuees were bussed out in the direction of the northwestern province of Idlib, after hours of waiting in a buffer zone for a green light to enter regime-held territory.

In Idlib -- the last province in Syria beyond government control -- an air raid on a market killed 28 civilians, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

The evacuation agreement, announced on Wednesday and brokered by regime ally Russia, could empty one of three rebel-held pockets in Ghouta as government troops seek to secure the nearby capital.

It could also further isolate the rebel groups that control the remaining two pockets of Ghouta and piles pressure on them to accept similar deals.

It came as a spokesman for the Faylaq al-Rahman rebel group in the southern rebel pocket of Ghouta announced that "agreement has been reached for a ceasefire, through the auspices of the United Nations".

The truce will permit "a final round of negotiations" between rebels and Russia, he added.

The announcement was made after air raids targeted the part of southern Ghouta under the control of the Faylaq al-Rahman, leaving at least 38 people dead, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

Syrian advance in Eastern Ghouta

After hours of waiting in a buffer zone, more than 1,580 people including 413 fighters left the Ghouta town of Harasta on 30 buses, state news agency SANA said, crossing over into regime-held territory.

State television announced the "departure of buses carrying fighters from Harasta to Idlib".

An AFP correspondent saw the buses exit the battered rebel bastion, in the first such deal since a blistering regime assault on the enclave started on February 18.

Before leaving, fighters performed the evening prayer by the buses, he said.

Women and children walked nearby or sat by the side of the road.

- Rebels cut off -

Munzer Fares, a spokesman for the Ahrar al-Sham rebel group controlling Harasta, said the evacuations could last several days.

The regime's offensive on Ghouta has killed more than 1,500 civilians since February 18, the Observatory says, and sliced the shrinking enclave into three isolated pockets.

Central Damascus lies within mortar range of Ghouta, and the evacuation deal came after the deadliest rebel rocket attack on the capital in months killed 44 civilians on Tuesday.

Rebel fire on Thursday killed four people in Damascus, state television said.

A smashed sign stands by a road at the entrance of Harasta in Eastern Ghouta near Damascus on March 22, 2018, as buses wait to evacuate rebels from the town following a deal brokered by Syrian regime ally Russia

The rebels and their families will be transported to the northwestern province of Idlib, which is held by a myriad of jihadist, Islamist and secular groups, many with links to Turkey.

In Idlib, air strikes killed 28 civilians -- including 11 children -- in Harem, an area controlled by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a group led by Syria's former Al-Qaeda affiliate, the Observatory said.

It came a day after an air raid on a different part of Idlib, the town of Kafr Batikh, killed 20 civilians -- including 16 children -- near a school.

The evacuation from Harasta will further isolate the rebel groups that control the remaining two pockets of Ghouta and pile pressure on them to accept similar deals.

Syrian Reconciliation Minister Ali Haidar told AFP that Ahrar al-Sham had negotiated with the Russian Centre for Reconciliation and that Damascus was not directly involved.

- 'Tragic' conditions -

Nawar Oliver, an analyst at the Turkey-based Omran Centre, said fighters in Harasta "were not able to impose a single one of their conditions".

Opposition figures in Ghouta said talks were under way for a deal to evacuate rebels from the enclave's main town, Douma.

A member of Syrian regime forces sits in an armed vehicle at the entrance of Harasta in Eastern Ghouta, near Damascus, on March 22, 2018, after a deal was struck with rebels to evacuate the town

Douma is controlled by the Jaish al-Islam group, while a pocket of territory closer to the capital is held by Faylaq al-Rahman with a small jihadist presence.

Air strikes on Zamalka killed 16 civilians on Thursday, the Observatory said.

An AFP reporter in Douma said hundreds of civilians were fleeing the town.

Similar evacuation deals have seen the government retake a string of former rebel bastions.

A May 2014 deal saw rebels pull out of third city Homs, once labelled the "capital of the revolution" that sparked Syria's seven-year civil war.

In December 2016, the army retook the whole of second city Aleppo as rebels withdrew in one of their worst defeats of the war.

Smoke rises over the Eastern Ghouta town of Zamalka, held by Faylaq al-Rahman, the only rebel group yet to enter negotiations for an evacuation deal, following bombardment on March 21, 2018

Those agreements also followed devastating bombardments that took a heavy toll on trapped civilians.

The assault on Ghouta has sparked a mass exodus of civilians from the enclave.

Some 50,000 people have reached shelters in government-controlled territory in the past week, the United Nations says.

On Wednesday, the UN's humanitarian coordinator in Syria said those displaced were living in "tragic" conditions.

"People may have escaped fighting, fear and insecurity but they find themselves in a place without anywhere to wash themselves," Ali al-Zaatari said.

mam-bur-ah-aph/mtpBurkinabe soldiers stand at the coffins of their comrades killed near the Mali border

A former municipal councillor in Burkina Faso has been abducted in a northern zone bordering Mali which has been repeatedly targeted by jihadists, the security ministry said Thursday.

Troops were combing the area after the abduction in Lassa village, Soum province, by "five armed individuals on motorcycles" on Wednesday evening, a statement said.

His whereabouts were unknown, the ministry added.

A similar incident in April last year saw two civil servants abducted in Ina-Bao, also near the Mali border. Both were later released.

In 2015, the Ansar Dine group led by rebel leader Iyad Ag Ghaly kidnapped Australian Kenneth Elliot and his wife Jocelyn in Djibo, a town bordering Mali and Niger.

Jocelyn Elliot was released a year later but her husband is still in captivity.

Ansar Dine has since merged with other groups and its new variant, the Al-Qaeda-linked jihadist Group to Support Islam and Muslims (GSIM), claimed a March 2 attack in the Burkinabe capital Ouagadougou which left eight dead.

Another group kidnapped Romanian Iulian Ghergut in 2015 and he remains in captivity.

A total of 133 people have been killed in 80 jihadist attacks in the region in the past three years, according to an official toll.Jordan's Prince Rashid bin Hassan (2nd L), commander of the Kingdom's police special forces, attends the opening ceremony of a new regional counterterrorism training facility in Suwaqah on March 22, 2018

Jordan and the United States unveiled a counterterrorism training centre south of Amman on Thursday aimed at boosting the capacity of local forces in a region beset by conflict.

The centre connected to the Jordanian Police Academy was opened in Suwaqah, 70 kilometres (43 miles) from the Jordanian capital.

It aims to prepare security forces to cope with crisis management, hostage-taking, cyberterrorism and the detection of explosives.

"The anti-terrorism assistance programme for Jordan is ongoing and very important to us," Michael T. Evanoff, the US deputy secretary of state for diplomatic security, told reporters at the opening ceremony.

"The training saves lives and helps build the capacity of the host country. I am very happy to open this centre, and I look forward to its expansion and use as a central hub," he said.

It is the second centre of its kind to be launched by the US and Jordan, one of the strongest allies of the United States in the Middle East.

They previously opened the King Abdullah II training centre for special operations in Zarqa, east of Amman, in 2009.

Last month, the United States pledged $1.2 billion (810 million euros) in annual aid to Jordan from 2018 to 2022.

It was the first such agreement between the two countries since US President Donald Trump took office last year.

Under the memorandum, the US will provide at least $750 million (609 million euros) a year in economic assistance and $350 million (284 million euros) in military aid.

Jordan hosts hundreds of thousands of refugees from neighbouring Syria and Iraq, placing a heavy strain the country's economy.

According to the UN High Committee for Refugees (UNHCR), about 650,000 Syrians have taken refuge in Jordan since the outbreak of the Syrian conflict in 2011.

Jordanian authorities say they host 1.3 million Syrian refugees and estimate that the war has cost the kingdom $10 billion (8.1 billion euros).Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis tells Crown Prince Of Saudi Arabia Mohammad Bin Salman Mattis that Saudi Arabia is 'part of the solution' to ending Yemen's conflict

Saudi Arabia and the United States must pursue "urgent efforts" to bring a peaceful end to Yemen's war, US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis told Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on Thursday.

The two defense ministers also discussed ways Saudi Arabia might be able to offer or facilitate some sort of a "safe haven" to more moderate Taliban members who are prepared to negotiate for peace in Afghanistan, an official said.

Mattis and Prince Mohammed met at the Pentagon as part of Prince Mohammed's tour of the United States, which began this week with a White House visit.

"As you discussed with President (Donald) Trump on Tuesday, we must also reinvigorate urgent efforts to seek a peaceful resolution to the civil war in Yemen and we support you in this regard," Mattis told Prince Mohammed.

Mattis said he believes Saudi Arabia is "part of the solution."

"They have stood by the United Nations-recognized government and we are going to end this war, that is the bottom line. And we are going to end it on positive terms for the people of Yemen, but also security for the nations in the peninsula," Mattis added.

Saudi Arabia leads a coalition in Yemen fighting the Iran-backed Huthi rebels.

The devastating three-year-old conflict was an early proving ground for the prince, who is also the minister of defense, but it has been beset by allegations of atrocities against civilians, and strategic drift.

Just hours after the prince left the White House on Tuesday, the US Senate rejected a bipartisan bid designed to curtail US support for the war, which includes air-to-air refueling of Saudi jets as well as target and intelligence sharing.

Mattis had lobbied Congress to reject the bill, warning that restrictions could increase civilian casualties, jeopardize counterterrorism cooperation, and "reduce our influence with the Saudis."

Speaking through a translator, Prince Mohammed told Mattis that cooperation between the Pentagon and the kingdom has "improved tremendously" of late.

- Taliban 'safe haven'? -

More than 9,200 people have been killed and tens of thousands wounded in Yemen's war, which is seen as both a civil conflict and a proxy war between regional titans Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Mattis welcomes Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia Mohammad Bin Salman at the Pentagon

Pentagon spokeswoman Dana White said after the meeting that Mattis and Prince Mohammed did not discuss civilian casualties except when it had been brought up by a reporter.

Separately, on Afghanistan, White said Mattis and the prince discussed the issue of what to do with Taliban members open to peace talks.

During a visit to the war-torn country last week, Mattis and other US officials claimed some Taliban elements are open to talking with the Afghan government, after Afghan President Ashraf Ghani unveiled a plan to open peace talks with the insurgents.

"Ensuring that there is a safe haven for those who would want to negotiate a political solution is what they generally talked about," White told reporters.

The prince "was supportive of finding ways to help the reconciliation," she added.

"Not necessarily specifically safe haven but talking about (looking) at ways to help facilitate a political reconciliation for those Taliban members who are willing to talk."

Saudi Arabia nurtured the Taliban's rise in the 1990s and was one of only three countries, along with the United Arab Emirates and Pakistan, to recognize the Taliban government.

White added that Saudi Arabia expressed an interest in doing greater training with US forces, and noted that Trump had been hastening military sales to the kingdom.

Later on Thursday, Washington formally approved defense contracts totalling more than $1 billion with Saudi Arabia.

The State Department confirmed it had green-lighted a $670 million deal for anti-tank missiles, a $106 million contract for helicopter maintenance and $300 million for ground vehicle parts.A former Zambian minister and a leading critic of President Edgar Lungu was arrested in Lusaka on Thursday over allegations of making profits from criminal activity.

Chishimba Kambwili has emerged as one of the most prominent voices speaking out against Lungu, who is accused of increasingly authoritarian rule and of cracking down on dissent.

"He has been charged with 37 counts of being in possession of properties suspected to be proceeds of crime and two counts of obtaining pecuniary advantage," Kambwili's lawyer Keith Mweemba told AFP.

Mweemba said that Kambwili was detained by police and would appear in court on Friday.

Kambwili, a lawmaker from the governing Patriotic Front party, is a former foreign minister and also served as Lungu's information minister.

He has since fallen out with Lungu and repeatedly accused the president and government of being corrupt.

Lungu has denied accusations that he is creating a dictatorship in Zambia and has accused rivals of trying to overturn the 2016 election result.Philippine police have said they have killed roughly 4,100 suspects who fought back during arrest, but rights groups allege the actual number is three times higher and accuse the authorities of murder

Philippine police said Thursday they had shot dead 13 drug suspects, just days after President Rodrigo Duterte moved to take the country out of the International Criminal Court over its inquiry into his deadly drug war.

The suspects were killed Wednesday in the northern province of Bulacan, an official statement said, an area where police have previously launched lethal crackdowns on illegal drugs.

"Bulacan police are continuously and relentlessly implementing their intensified campaign against illegal drugs," the statement said, adding there had been more than 100 arrests.

The war crimes tribunal, based in The Hague, last month launched a preliminary inquiry into Duterte's bloody crackdown on narcotics, amid allegations Philippine security forces may have committed crimes against humanity.

Philippine police have said they have killed roughly 4,100 suspects who fought back during arrest, but rights groups allege the actual number is three times higher and accuse the authorities of murder.

The tribunal opened in 2002 to try abuses in countries where national courts cannot or will not prosecute. Manila in 2011 ratified the Rome Statute that created the court.

Manila gave official notice to the United Nations last week that it would withdraw, days after Duterte announced his country would quit the court over alleged "baseless, unprecedented and outrageous attacks" against his government's rights record.

Foreign Secretary Alan Peter Cayetano said last Friday the Philippines was pushing back against "the well-orchestrated campaign to mislead the international community, to crucify President Duterte... by distorting the human rights situation in the country".

The tribunal has urged Manila to reconsider its decision, adding that officially quitting the court requires a year's notice and does not preclude its preliminary inquiry into the drug war killings, which have drawn international concern.

Duterte, who is buoyed by high popularity ratings at home, has fiercely defended the drug war as a battle to bring safety to the nation's 100 million people.

He has frequently urged authorities to kill drug suspects while promising to protect police from legal sanction.US trade representative Robert Lighthizer announces temporary exemptions on metals tariffs for the EU and six other economies

The European Union and six other economies will be exempt at least temporarily from the harsh steel and aluminum tariffs President Donald Trump has imposed, a top US trade official said Thursday.

US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer told a Senate committee that Trump authorized a "pause" in the imposition of the tariffs, which take effect Friday, while talks are underway to find a more permanent solution.

Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Mexico and South Korea will also be exempt from the penalties of 25 percent on steel imports and 10 percent on aluminum, along with the EU, he said.

Washington already had announced that major metals exporters Canada and Mexico would be exempt as talks continue to revamp the North American Free Trade Agreement.

And this week EU and US officials issued a joint statement saying they were working towards a solution to avoid tariffs on the trading bloc.

"The idea that the president has is that, based ona certain set of criteria, that some countries should get out," Lighthizer said in testimony before the Senate Finance Committee.

"There are countries with whom we're negotiating" and there will be "a pause in imposition of tariffs with respect to those countries," he said.

Many countries, including the EU, have warned the White House that they will retaliate forcefully if they are face with tariffs on metals products.

The Trump administration has stressed that the primary target is China, which has long had massive overproduction that has impacted the global market for steel and aluminum, which poses a national security threat to the US economy.An Indian man walk past a billboard announcing the new Delhi-Tel Aviv direct flight outside the Air India headquarters in Mumbai on March 20, 2018 that will be allowed to cross Saudi Arabian airspace, ending a decades-long ban

Air India launched on Thursday the first scheduled service to Israel to be allowed to cross Saudi airspace, a sign of a behind-the-scenes improvement in ties between the Arab kingdom and the Jewish state.

Flight AI 139 landed at Tel Aviv's Ben Gurion airport about 30 minutes after its scheduled arrival time of 1945 GMT.

"This is a historic moment," Israeli Transport Minister Yisrael Katz told AFP on the tarmac as the Boeing Dreamliner rolled to a halt.

"It is the first time that there is an official connection between the state of Israel and Saudi Arabia," he said in Hebrew.

Tourism Minister Yariv Levin was also there to welcome the flight.

"A new era has begun," he said.

There will now be three flights weekly in each direction, ending a decades-long Saudi ban on the use of its airspace for commercial flights to Israel.

Israel's national carrier El Al currently operates an India service to Mumbai that takes a detour over the Red Sea to avoid flying over Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Saudi Arabia and Israel have no official diplomatic relations, like much of the Arab world. Egypt and Jordan are the only two Arab countries with peace treaties with Israel.

The flight approval comes after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described relations with the Arab world as the "best ever", with common concerns over Iran drawing them closer together.

Leaders of Arab countries have not publicly made similar comments, though that does not necessarily mean they dispute Netanyahu's claim.

They face sensitivities within their own countries, where the Jewish state is often viewed with intense hostility.

Israeli analyst Jonathan Spyer said that the Saudi concession showed that positive signals were being sent despite the lack of an Israeli-Palestinian peace treaty, long seen as a prerequisite for relations between the Jewish state and the Arab world.

- 'General rebranding' -

"I think that what this shows is even in the absence of that you can have small gestures that are of real meaning," Spyer, director of Israel's Rubin Centre for Research in International Affairs, told AFP.

"That's what I think that this Saudi decision to allow the overflights consists of. It's small but significant," he said.

During a May 2017 Middle East tour, US President Donald Trump flew from Riyadh to Tel Aviv on Air Force One in what is believed to have been among the few direct flights from Saudi Arabia to Israel.

Trump says he is working on a plan for peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

Spyer said that his administration appears to see Riyadh as "crucial for much of what they want to do on the Israeli-Palestinian track".

Sunni-ruled Saudi Arabia and Israel have a common enemy in Shiite-dominated Iran, with both seeking to limit what they view as the Islamic republic's expanding influence in the Middle East.

Trump's first presidential foreign trip took in Riyadh and Israel, while his son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner has reportedly formed a bond with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Prince Mohammed, the kingdom's de facto political leader, is pursuing economic and social reforms long sought by the West.

The self-styled moderniser who has sought to project a liberal image of Saudi Arabia to investors has, however, also consolidated power to a level unseen by previous rulers.

The relaxation of the overflight ban, said Spyer, is part of "warming relations behind the scenes" with Israel.

"Presumably it fits in also with the more general rebranding that Mohammed Bin Salman is trying to achieve for the Saudis."A total of 104 of the 110 students seized from a school in Dapchi on February 19 were released

More than 100 schoolgirls kidnapped by Boko Haram were in Nigeria's capital on Thursday, a day after their surprise release that fuelled rumours about how their freedom was won.

A total of 104 of the 110 students seized from the school in Dapchi, in the northeastern state of Yobe, on February 19 were dropped off by the Islamist militants on Wednesday morning.

The girls -- many of them dressed in matching fawn-coloured long hijabs -- boarded a Nigerian military transport plane from the Borno state capital Maiduguri to Abuja on Wednesday night.

In the capital, they were expected to meet President Muhammadu Buhari as well as undergo medical checks and counselling similar to other former captives released by the group.

Five girls are said to have died in the initial stages of the kidnapping, while one girl -- the only Christian -- is still being held until she converts to Islam.

The Dapchi kidnapping revived painful memories in Nigeria of the April 2014 abduction of 219 schoolgirls from the Borno town of Chibok, which caused global outrage.

Their unexpected release -- and the fact the jihadists were able to come and go unchallenged -- dominated newspapers on Thursday, with many questioning whether a deal was done.

But Nigeria's Information Minister Lai Mohammed said: "It is not true that we paid (a) ransom... neither was there a prisoner swap to secure their release.

"What happened was that the abduction itself was a breach of the ceasefire talks between the insurgents and the government, hence it became a moral burden on the abductors.

"Any report that we paid ransom or engaged in prisoner swap is false."

- Schools shut -

The Dapchi kidnapping revived painful memories in Nigeria of the April 2014 abduction of 219 schoolgirls from the Borno town of Chibok, which caused global outrage

Security analysts have suggested previous ransom payments from the government as part of prisoner swap deals for some of the Chibok hostages may have been the motive for Dapchi.

But Boko Haram's ability to again seize so many students put security at schools in the restive region under the spotlight, after promises of improvements after Chibok.

The jihadists have repeatedly targeted schools teaching a so-called Western education in the mainly Muslim region as part of their insurgency that has killed at least 20,000 since 2009.

According to the UN children's agency UNICEF, more than 2,296 teachers have been killed and some 1,400 schools destroyed in the wider northeast.

On Wednesday, the Borno state government announced that all boarding secondary schools outside Maiduguri and the town of Biu would be closed indefinitely with immediate effect.

Muhammad Bulama, the Borno commissioner for home affairs, information and culture, said on Wednesday the decision was taken last week after a Boko Haram attack in Rann on March 1.

Three aid workers and eight security personnel were killed in the attack on the remote town near the border with Cameroon, which led to the withdrawal of aid agencies.

Schools have previously been shut in the wake of deadly attacks in Buni Yadi, Yobe state, when more than 40 students at a boys' boarding school were killed in a Boko Haram attack on March 1.

- Aid resumes -

Bulama said "urgent and immediate measures" were being taken to improve security but the closures are the latest disruption to schooling in an area already hit by low levels of education.

At the start of the new academic year in September last year, UNICEF said at least 57 percent of schools in Borno remained closed.

It warned the situation threatened to create "a lost generation of children, threatening their and the country's future".

Meanwhile, the United Nations said it had resumed humanitarian operations in Rann after a three-week suspension, although overnight stays remain banned until security improves.

"The authorisation by the United Nations for flights to resume to Rann for aid workers was taken on Monday. The first flights went on Tuesday," said UN spokeswoman in Abuja Samantha Newport.

UN agencies, and others including Doctors Without Borders, provide life-saving food distribution, medical care, shelter and sanitation programmes to some 80,000 people in Rann.The major infrastructure project will upgrade Benin's railways and link the country to Niger

Benin's President Patrice Talon has asked local firm Petrolin and French giant Bollore to "withdraw" from a major rail infrastructure project to make way for China, in the latest development of the controversial scheme.

In an interview published on Thursday in the French magazine Challenges, Talon asked the two companies to "withdraw amicably from the project", which links Benin to Niger to the north, promising they will be "compensated fairly".

"A private investor cannot finance the railway we want alone," the head of state was quoted as saying, describing Bollore's offer as "lower-end".

"China has the necessary financial means" to support work estimated to cost around $4 billion (3.3 billion euros), said Talon.

"China has demonstrated its technical know-how" to build infrastructure in Africa, added the president, who rarely speaks to the media.

Talon's remarks are the latest twist in a saga that has been going on for years.

In 2008, Benin and Niger launched a bid to manage the construction and management of a 740-kilometre (462-mile) railway network linking Cotonou and Niamey.

The bid was won by Petrolin, a company owned by Beninese businessman Samuel Dossou, but was handed over by the government in 2013 to the Bollore group through Benirail, a company representing a public-private partnership.

However last October, a Benin judge ruled that Petrolin should have had the contract and dismissed Bollore.

- Standstill -

After years in court and months of negotiations, the project remains at a standstill, strangling growth in the country of 10 million inhabitants whose economy depends on distribution of goods from its port.

Petrolin representatives said that despite Talon's statement they have not been given formal notice to withdraw.

"The withdrawal of Petrolin will be the result of negotiations between Benin and Niger," said Petrolin spokeswoman Claudine Affiavi Prudencio.

"This option (the withdrawal of the project) is not yet formally notified to the Petrolin group" and "at this moment the group hasn't failed", said a source close to the Beninese businessman contacted by AFP.

But a source at the presidency said that the onus was now on the companies to show they can move forward on the project.

"Heads of state (Benin and Niger) have tried to bring them together (Petrolin and Bollore) without success," a presidency source told AFP.

"It would be up to them to show then that they can agree to carry a convincing project," he said.

There was no immediate comment from the Bollore group when contacted by AFP.MGM Resorts(LAS VEGAS) -- Surveillance footage from Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino shows how Las Vegas shooter Stephen Paddock spent his days at the hotel and casino before opening fire on a music festival and killing 58 people.



In the videos, released today by MGM Resorts, Paddock, 64, of Mesquite, Nevada, can be seen gambling in the casino, walking around, buying snacks, eating in a restaurant and even chatting with the casino's staff.



Over a number of days after he checks into the hotel, he can also be seen coming and going at the hotel, bringing in luggage and bags.



According to a preliminary investigative report released in January, Paddock checked into the Mandalay Bay hotel on Sept. 25, 2017.



On Oct. 1, Paddock opened fire on the music festival crowd from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel, killing 58 people.



A total of 851 people suffered injuries directly related to the shooting and its aftermath, and 422 of them specifically suffered from some kind of gunfire injury, Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo said in January.



"In the interest of providing greater context around Stephen Paddock's actions in the days leading up to October 1, MGM Resorts has released these security videos and images," MGM Resorts in a statement. "As the security footage demonstrates, Stephen Paddock gave no indication of what he planned to do and his interactions with staff and overall behavior were all normal.



"MGM and Mandalay Bay could not reasonably foresee that a long-time guest with no known history of threats or violence and behaving in a manner that appeared outwardly normal, would carry out such an inexplicably evil, violent and deadly act," the statement continued. "Our focus continues to be on supporting victims and their families, our guests and employees, and cooperating with law enforcement with their ongoing investigation."



Authorities found Paddock dead inside his hotel suite. The Clark County Coroner's Office later ruled Paddock's manner of death a suicide. No suicide note or manifesto was found stating Paddock's intentions, according to the report.



The only handwritten document found in either of Paddock's connecting hotel rooms was a small note indicating measurements and distances related to the use of rifles.



Although a motive remains unknown, the report says investigators have determined Paddock acted alone and was self-funded through his gambling and past real estate transactions.



There was no evidence of radicalization or ideology, according to the report released in January.

Copyright  2018, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.Syrian Kurdish leader Saleh Muslim (C), pictured in February 2018, said Turkey wouldn't have succeeded in Afrin without Russian backing

A prominent Syrian Kurdish leader on Thursday criticised Russia for giving a "green light" to Turkey to carry out an offensive in Syria's Afrin region, saying it wouldn't have happened without Moscow's approval.

Turkish troops and allied Syrian forces seized control of the northwestern city of Afrin from the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) militia on Sunday.

In an interview with AFP during a visit to Stockholm, Saleh Muslim, the former co-chair of the main Syrian Kurdish political movement, the Democratic Union Party (PYD) said Turkey wouldn't have succeeded without Russian backing.

"We are disappointed by the Russians because they had some obligations when they came to Syria... they promised that they were going to protect the Syrian territory," Muslim said.

"Russia didn't do anything (about the Turkish incursion), they gave the green light to Turkey and everybody is sure that if (Turkey) didn't have the green light from Russia then they wouldn't do it," he added.

Ankara began its offensive in January against the Kurdish People's Protection Units (YPG) militia -- the military wing of the PYD -- which it says is allied with the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) waging an insurgency against Turkey since 1984.

The PKK is blacklisted as a terror organisation by Turkey and its Western allies.

- 'Stabbed in the back' -

But the YPG has been working closely with the United States against the Islamic State (IS) extremist group in Syria, much to NATO member Turkey's chagrin.

Asked whether Washington has turned away from the YPG in Syria, Muslim said: "If your partner (against IS) is being stabbed in the back, then you should do something (about it)."

Some 250,000 civilians fled the violence in Afrin and dozens of others were killed, as well as around 1,500 Kurdish fighters, according to the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Three Turkish soldiers died Thursday clearing improvised explosive devices (IEDs) in the region.

"This means the war is continuing and Afrin is not finished yet," Muslim said.

Defying a Turkish arrest warrant, Muslim's visit to Stockholm comes nearly a month after he was briefly detained in Prague.

A Czech court later released him and the nation's prosecution later closed a preliminary extradition procedure.

Muslim is wanted by Turkey over a February 2016 bombing in Ankara that killed 29 people that the Turkish authorities blamed on Kurdish militants.

He has been charged in the case and faces 30 life sentences if found guilty.

Muslim vehemently denies the charges and says Turkey is trying "to silence him".A UN mission was first deployed to Liberia at the end of the war in 2003 to guarantee the safety of the population

A top UN official on Thursday urged Liberia to implement the recommendations of a truth commission, dating back to 2009, which included prosecuting eight ex-warlords for alleged crimes against humanity.

"Liberia is at a turning point", Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed told a conference in Monrovia, adding that a lasting peace "will only be possible if we ensure full and true reconciliation."

She said it was "critical to implement the recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and for the legislature to pass key bills that will support local inclusion and reconciliation."

She warned that peace would "remain fragile as long as people feel excluded from the economic and political life of the country, and as long as corruption undermines confidence in institutions".

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) set up by former president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf to probe war crimes and rights abuses linked to Liberia's 1989-2003 conflict has said a compensation scheme should be created alongside a dedicated war crimes court.

None of those measures, however, has yet been implemented.

Sirleaf earlier held a joint event with President George Weah on the eve of the final departure of a UN mission first deployed at the end of the war in 2003 to guarantee the safety of the population.

Mohammed told AFP she wanted Liberia to deal with the "unfinished business" of its long civil conflict, for which no one has ever been prosecuted for war crimes, ahead of the March 30 departure of all remaining peacekeepers.

Weah was accused of sidelining war victims when he chose Vice-President Jewel Howard Taylor, the ex-wife of former rebel leader and president Charles Taylor, as his running mate in last year's election.

Taylor is currently serving a 50-year sentence for war crimes in a British jail, although he was convicted of funding rebel groups in Sierra Leone, not the recruitment of child soldiers, killings, rape and pillaging of which he is accused at home.

One of those recommended for prosecution by the truth commission was former warlord Prince Johnson, who backed Weah's bid for the presidency and now serves as a senator.

An estimated 250,000 people died in the back-to-back 1989-2003 conflicts.

The president has not made specific commitments to reconciliation since taking power in late January, but on Thursday said his government must ensure "that either we forget or justice is done to those justice needs to be done to".

He emphasised that perpetrators had to "face their victims", but did not elaborate on how.

Weah meanwhile said the UN had the government's "fullest commitment to the continued consolidation of peace in Liberia" and would "warmly welcome a continued partnership".US President Donald Trump supports the $1.3 trillion federal spending bill, which must pass Congress and which he must sign before 12:01 am March 24, 2018 to avoid a government shutdown

US lawmakers advanced a critical $1.3 trillion federal spending bill Thursday, as Congress sprints to avoid a another embarrassing government shutdown ahead of a rapidly approaching funding deadline.

President Donald Trump has given his blessing to the bipartisan deal that negotiators clinched the previous evening, even though the White House acknowledged it did not fulfill all of their wishes.

With a Friday midnight deadline looming, the catchall bill, known as an "omnibus," comfortably passed the House of Representatives on a 256-167 vote.

"The House just voted to rebuild our military, secure our borders, and give our service members their largest pay raise in eight years," House Speaker Paul Ryan said after the vote.

The bill now heads to the Senate for debate and final passage. It was introduced late Wednesday after weeks of haggling, leaving lawmakers mere hours to peruse and vote on a 2,232-page bill that will touch every aspect of American life.

"Is the president going to sign the bill? The answer is yes," Mick Mulvaney, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, told reporters.

"Is it perfect? No. Is it exactly what we asked for? No."

It sets defense spending levels at $700 billion for the year, an increase of $61 billion over the 2017 cap, while non-defense domestic spending will reach $591 billion, an increase of about 10 percent.

It provides $1.6 billion -- far less than Trump wanted -- for border security and funds to construct or fix nearly 100 miles (160 kilometers) of border fencing and barriers, boosts infrastructure spending, and increases funds for school safety and student grants.

It leaves intact funding for women's health provider Planned Parenthood, a target of relentless criticsm from pro-life Republicans.

- 'Poor way to legislate' -

But in a major blow to Democrats, it fails to include protections for immigrants who arrived in the country illegally as children, or language that would help prevent the president from firing Robert Mueller, the special counsel heading the investigation of Russia's meddling in the 2016 elections.

And it leaves out a long-sought provision to stabilize the insurance market by funding subsidies that could lower insurance rates for low-income families by about 40 percent.

That health care negotiation apparently broke down over disputes over abortion-related language in the bill.

"I'm extremely disappointed," the provision's co-author, Senate Republican Susan Collins, told reporters.

Among the sensitive issues addressed in the bill is gun safety, which has been the focus of national attention in the aftermath of deadly school shootings.

Lawmakers said it includes a provision to strengthen compliance with background checks for firearm sales, and one that reverses what has essentially served as a ban on federal research on gun violence.

Even while professing his support, Trump lamented having to "waste money" on "Dem giveaways" to secure the military funding.

Timing over the next 36 hours is critical.

The Senate is now set to consider the measure, but any senator can slow down the process if he or she does not want to speed the bill through, dragging debate beyond the Friday deadline.

"Clearly it's a concern," Republican Senator Roger Wicker told AFP about the short timing. "And it's a very poor way to legislate."Jacob Zuma resigned as president last month under pressure from his ruling African National Congress party in the wake of a slew of corruption scandals

South Africa's government was facing growing questions on Thursday over who should foot the legal bills of former president Jacob Zuma as he fights numerous allegations of corruption.

His successor President Cyril Ramaphosa appeared to endorse underwriting the mounting legal court costs of his erstwhile political master.

"The acts on the basis of which it is alleged that the former President committed criminal offences took place during his tenure as a government official both at provincial and later at national level," wrote Ramaphosa in a letter to the main opposition Democratic Alliance (DA) party.

Ramaphosa added that the government had forced Zuma to agree to pay back the legal aid if he was found to have "acted in his personal capacity and own interest in the commission of the alleged offences".

Zuma resigned as president last month under pressure from his ruling African National Congress party in the wake of a slew of corruption scandals.

Last week it was announced that he would face prosecution on charges of corruption, fraud and money laundering for allegedly taking bribes over a multi-billion rand arms deal signed in the 1990s.

Opposition parties have noisily opposed Ramaphosa's agreement to bankroll Zuma's defence, accusing the former head of state of being a "thief" and a "criminal".

In a second letter to the opposition published on Thursday, Ramaphosa insisted that he had no choice but to indemnify Zuma's legal costs arguing he was bound by a deal struck between Zuma and former president Thabo Mbeki inked in 2006.

The opposition DA said it would take the government to court to force it to back down.

"Zuma should not be entitled to a single cent of the people's money and the DA will now fight to ensure this," said DA federal chairman James Selfe.

According to Selfe, Zuma has already spent 15.3 million rand ($1.3 million) defending himself against corruption allegations linked to the arms deal affair.Mounted members of the Israeli security forces try to disperse ultra-Orthodox Jews who are blocking a road during a demonstration against Israeli army conscription in the Israeli city of Bnei Brak near Tel Aviv on March 22, 2018

Israeli police on Thursday said they arrested 30 ultra-Orthodox Jews who threw stones at officers and blocked a main artery near Tel Aviv, in protest against the military draft.

A police statement said that protesters cut off the north-south highway 4 in the predominantly ultra-Orthodox city of Bnei Brak in an "illegal demonstration", the latest of several spurred by arrests of young ultra-Orthodox men accused of dodging military service.

An AFP journalist saw demonstrators sitting down or laying in the middle of a neighbouring street and mounted officers riding among them to disperse the crowd while a water cannon sprayed the protesters.

"Four police officers were injured lightly after stones were thrown at them," police said.

Israeli law requires men to serve two years and eight months in the military on reaching the age of 18, while women must serve for two.

Ultra-Orthodox men are excused from military service if they are engaged in religious study, but must still report to the army to receive their exemption.

Israeli law requires men to serve two years and eight months in the military on reaching the age of 18 but ultra-Orthodox men are excused from military service if they are engaged in religious study

Some seminary students have refused even to do that.

There have been protests in Bnei Brak and Jerusalem since the beginning of March, after the arrest of a young ultra-Orthodox man who failed to show up to request an exemption after receiving a call-up notice.Although hundreds of French men are believed to have joined jihadist groups like the Islamic State -- whose flag flies over the ruins of the onetime IS de facto capital Raqa in Syria -- Joe Asperman's name has not previously been reported

The United States on Thursday identified a Frenchman it says provided chemical weapons to the Islamic State group and whose name, previously unreported, came as a surprise to French experts.

US officials described Joe Asperman as being born in the Cannes region of southern France between 1986 and 1988 and as "a senior chemical weapons expert" for the IS group in Syria.

He has now been listed as a "Specially Designated Global Terrorist," placing him under US sanctions with notorious militants that Washington believes pose a threat outside their immediate battlefield.

But they provided few details and French officials and experts alike said they had never heard the name of a suspect who does not appear to have attracted the attention of Paris authorities.

"Asperman oversaw chemical operations production within Syria for ISIS and the deployment of these chemical weapons at the battlefront," the US State Department said, announcing the designation.

Along with Bashar al-Assad's Damascus regime, the Islamic State group has also been accused of deploying chemical attacks in Syria, where it is one of the factions in the long-running civil war.

Although hundreds of French fighters are known to have travelled to the Middle East to fight with jihadist groups -- and Cannes has been a French recruiting ground -- Asperman's name was not widely known.

Several French experts, including Jean-Charles Brisard of the Center for the Analysis of Terrorism, confirmed to AFP the name had not previously been known as a suspect.

And on Twitter, former French intelligence officer Claude Moniquet, now of the European Strategic Intelligence and Security Center," said it had "never, until today, circulated publicly."

Several other French suspects have been placed on the US "global terrorist" list, including bomb-maker Ahmad Alkhald, jihadist recruiter Omar Diaby and alleged IS executioner Maxime Hauchard.

US citizens and residents are forbidden from doing business with SDGTs, and any assets they hold in areas under US jurisdiction are forfeit.

The designation also serves as a warning to law enforcement worldwide to be on the look-out for the suspects, and is a sign that US intelligence deems the individual or group an important target.

"This designation seeks to deny Asperman the resources he needs to plan and carry out further terrorist attacks," the statement said.

But US officials told AFP that they could reveal no more information about the mysterious Asperman, and it was not clear whether the designation would have any immediate impact on his operations.

In addition to Asperman, the State Department also designated the Katibat al-Imam al-Bukhari, an armed group it describes as an Al Qaeda ally and "the largest Uzbek fighting force in Syria."Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's security detail attacked peaceful protestors in Washington on May 16, 2017

The United States has quietly dropped assault charges against 11 bodyguards of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan who were accused of attacking protesters in Washington last year.

The Superior Court in Washington confirmed Thursday that charges against four were dropped last November and another seven on February 14.

No reasons were given for government prosecutors' decision to seek dismissal of the cases.

But an official with close knowledge of the case said: "the decision was made for evidentiary reasons," suggesting there were questions over the identification of those involved in the May 16, 2017 melee.

Nineteen members of Erdogan's security detail were indicted over the daylight attack in front of the Turkish ambassador's residence, which took place while Erdogan was in Washington to meet President Donald Trump.

Two of them were US citizens, who pleaded guilty in December to assault charges. Two were Canadians, who were charged but have not been arrested.

Fifteen others were Turkish citizens who were a part of Erdogan's entourage and took part in the attack, which saw peaceful protesters kicked and beaten by the Turkish security team.

Several were sent to hospital for serious injuries.

Much of the assault was filmed by bystanders, and police identified the suspects in part by the video recordings.

The indictments raised the temperature of already heated relations between the two countries, with Erdogan calling the case a "scandalous demonstration of how American justice works."

The US meanwhile froze a deal to sell $1.2 million of small arms to the Turkish president's bodyguard unit.

According to the Washington court, charges were dropped against eleven of the 15 Turkish bodyguards, while four others remain under indictment.

The first batch of dismissed cases came on the eve of the visit to Washington of Turkish Prime Minister Binali Yildirim last November.

The second batch took place a day before Secretary of State Rex Tillerson met Erdogan in Ankara.

State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said Thursday that the department "had no role in the decision to drop those charges."

"That was entirely coming out of the Department of Justice," she said.

She said Tillerson knew of the decision before he met Erdogan, but "the timing was coincidental."Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School students at a memorial for slain classmates

Hundreds of Florida high school students headed for Washington on Thursday to take part in a weekend march for gun control organized by fellow teenagers after the massacre at a school in the southern US state.

Wearing their maroon school colors, students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where 14 students and three adults were killed on February 14, boarded a flight for Washington.

"The World is Changed With Your Actions, Not With Your Opinion," read a sign carried by a student at Fort Lauderdale airport.

Other Parkland students and teenagers from other south Florida high schools boarded buses for the long drive to the US capital.

The "March For Our Lives" is to be held on Saturday in Washington and other cities around the country.

Hundreds of thousands are expected for what it being predicted to be the largest-ever rally for gun control in the United States.

"This is going to be a real moment of change in this country," student David Allen told 7 News Miami. "I think a decision on gun control is going to be made."

Carlos Rodriguez, 17, a Stoneman Douglas student heading for the march, said he had mixed feelings.

"This march wouldn't be happening if the shooting hadn't happened at my school so it'll be difficult," Rodriguez told AFP.

"But I'll feel proud to be one of the students who started this movement and to have students from around the country taking part," he said.

The Broward County school superintendent announced meanwhile that students at Stoneman Douglas and other district schools would only be allowed to use clear backpacks when they return after spring break.

The see-through backpacks will be provided free of cost, superintendent Robert Runcie said in a letter to parents.

Runcie said students and staff will also have to wear ID badges at all times and the district is considering adding metal detectors at entrances to schools.

The clear backpacks requirement drew a biting response from one Stoneman Douglas student.

"Great. Because clear backpacks are gonna fix everything," tweeted Lauren Hogg, who has emerged as a leader of the student movement along with her brother David.

"I appreciate the attempt, but I'd rather have common sense gun laws than a clear backpack," Hogg said.

Nikolas Cruz, a troubled 19-year-old former Stoneman Douglas student, was arrested after opening fire on his former classmates on Valentine's Day with an AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle.

Prosecutors have called for the death penalty.MIAMI (AP) - Immigrant rights attorneys are urging a major bus company to stop letting federal agents on board to conduct immigration sweeps.

The American Civil Liberties Union's affiliates in 10 states sent a letter Wednesday to officials for the Greyhound bus company asking them to deny agents permission to board without a warrant or on the U.S. border.

The lawyers say U.S. Customs and Border Protection has been searching buses more often to check the immigration status of travelers, singling out people based on race or their appearance. Border Patrol has the power to operate immigration checkpoints and conduct other activities within 100 miles (160 kilometers) of a U.S. land or coastal border according to a federal law. But the letter says the statutes cannot override the Fourth Amendment, which protects people and businesses against illegal search and seizures.

The advocates say the checks have taken place in at least seven states including California, Florida and Vermont. Last month, advocates in Florida warned immigrants about the checks when traveling to the state.

Greyhound spokeswoman Lanesha Gipson said in a statement the company cooperates with law enforcement agencies.PARIS (AP) - French trains, flights, schools and other public services are set to be disrupted Thursday by nationwide strikes to protest against President Emmanuel Macron's economic measures.

National railway company SNCF says only 40 percent of high-speed trains and half of regional trains will be running.

Airport authorities say 30 percent of flights to and from Paris are to be canceled. Air France plans to maintain its long-haul flights but warns of disruptions on European and domestic flights.

The Paris Metro is expected to run normally but suburban trains will be affected.

Some schools and children's nurseries will be closed.

Public servants are protesting against planned changes they say will worsen working conditions.

SNCF workers reject a government plan aimed at adapting the company ahead of opening the service to competition.WASHINGTON (AP) - U.S. sales of existing homes rebounded in February after declining for the previous two months, a sign that many Americans are still looking to buy despite rising prices and a shrinking number of homes available on the market.

The National Association of Realtors said Wednesday that sales rose 3 percent last month to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 5.54 million. This increase after declining sales in January and December suggests that competition will be heated during the traditional spring home-buying season.

The shortage of properties for sale is creating a challenge for would-be homebuyers. As sales listings have steadily declined, prices have been climbing at the same time as a stronger job market has elevated demand - and, also, competition - for purchasing homes. Higher mortgage rates this year might also cause even fewer people to list their homes for sale, which would make the current supply squeeze worse.

FILE- In this Feb. 23, 2018, file photo a for sale sign stands in front of a house in Walpole, Mass. On Wednesday, March 21, the National Association of Realtors reports on February sales of existing homes. (AP Photo/Steven Senne, File)

The median home sales price was $241,700 in February, a 5.9 percent increase over the past year.

Prices are climbing, in part, because the number of sales listings has dropped. The supply of homes for sale declined 8.1 percent from a year ago to 1.59 million.

In February, sales climbed in the South and West but fell in the Northeast and Midwest.

First-time buyers appear to face the greatest obstacles from the decline in listings, according to an analysis by the real estate company Trulia. Starter homes have seen the steepest price increases as well as sharp drops in inventory - and a greater proportion of them are fixer-uppers that require additional investment from buyers.

Mortgage rates have been rising after President Donald Trump signed tax cuts into law toward the end of last year. The average 30-year mortgage rate was 4.44 percent last week, up from an average as low as 3.78 percent in early September, according to mortgage buyer Freddie Mac.

Real estate experts warn that higher rates could prompt more existing homeowners to keep their properties off the market, since selling their homes would require them to then buy a new home and pay more in mortgage interest.NEW YORK (AP) - Breaking five days of silence, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg apologized for a "major breach of trust," admitted mistakes and outlined steps to protect user data in light of a privacy scandal involving a Trump-connected data-mining firm.

"I am really sorry that happened," Zuckerberg said of the scandal involving data mining firm Cambridge Analytica. Facebook has a "responsibility" to protect its users' data, he said in a Wednesday interview on CNN. If it fails, he said, "we don't deserve to have the opportunity to serve people."

His mea culpa on cable television came a few hours after he acknowledged his company's mistakes in a Facebook post , but without saying he was sorry.

FILE- In this Feb. 21, 2016, file photo, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks during the Samsung Galaxy Unpacked 2016 event in Barcelona, Spain. Breaking more than four days of silence, Zuckerberg admitted mistakes and outlined steps to protect user data in light of a privacy scandal involving a Trump-connected data-mining firm. Zuckerberg posted on his Facebook page Wednesday, March 21, 2018, that Facebook has a "responsibility" to protect its users' data. (AP Photo/Manu Fernadez, File)

Zuckerberg and Facebook's No. 2 executive, Sheryl Sandberg, had been quiet since news broke Friday that Cambridge may have used data improperly obtained from roughly 50 million Facebook users to try to sway elections. Cambridge's clients included Donald Trump's general-election campaign.

Facebook shares have dropped some 8 percent, lopping about $46 billion off the company's market value, since the revelations were first published.

In the CNN interview, Zuckerberg offered equivocal and carefully hedged answers to two other questions. He said, for instance, that he would be "happy" to testify before Congress, but only if it was "the right thing to do." He went on to note that many other Facebook officials might be more appropriate witnesses depending on what Congress wanted to know.

Similarly, the Facebook chief seemed at one point to favor regulation for Facebook and other internet giants - at least the "right" kind of rules, he said, such as ones that require online political ads to disclose who paid for them. In almost the next breath, however, Zuckerberg steered clear of endorsing a bill that would write such rules into federal law, and instead talked up Facebook's own voluntary efforts on that front.

Even before the scandal broke, Facebook has already taken the most important steps to prevent a recurrence, Zuckerberg said. For example, in 2014, it reduced access outside apps had to user data. However, some of the measures didn't take effect until a year later, allowing Cambridge to access the data in the intervening months.

Zuckerberg acknowledged that there is more to do.

In his Facebook post, Zuckerberg said it will ban developers who don't agree to an audit. An app's developer will no longer have access to data from people who haven't used that app in three months. Data will also be generally limited to user names, profile photos and email, unless the developer signs a contract with Facebook and gets user approval.

In a separate post, Facebook said it will inform people whose data was misused by apps. Facebook first learned of this breach of privacy more than two years ago, but hadn't mentioned it publicly until Friday.

The company said it was "building a way" for people to know if their data was accessed by "This Is Your Digital Life," the psychological-profiling quiz app that researcher Aleksandr Kogan created and paid about 270,000 people to take part in. Cambridge Analytica later obtained information from the app for about 50 million Facebook users, as the app also vacuumed up data on people's friends - including those who never downloaded the app or gave explicit consent.

Chris Wylie, a Cambridge co-founder who left in 2014, has said one of the firm's goals was to influence people's perceptions by injecting content, some misleading or false, all around them. It's not clear whether Facebook would be able to tell users whether they had seen such content.

Cambridge has shifted the blame to Kogan, which the firm described as a contractor. Kogan described himself as a scapegoat.

Kogan, a psychology researcher at Cambridge University, told the BBC that both Facebook and Cambridge Analytica have tried to place the blame on him, even though the firm ensured him that everything he did was legal.

"One of the great mistakes I did here was I just didn't ask enough questions," he said. "I had never done a commercial project. I didn't really have any reason to doubt their sincerity. That's certainly something I strongly regret now."

He said the firm paid some $800,000 for the work, but it went to participants in the survey.

"My motivation was to get a dataset I could do research on," he said. "I have never profited from this in any way personally."

Authorities in Britain and the United States are investigating.

David Carroll, a professor at Parsons School of Design in New York who sued Cambridge Analytica in the U.K., said he was not satisfied with Zuckerberg's response, but acknowledged that "this is just the beginning."

He said it was "insane" that Facebook had yet to take legal action against Cambridge parent SCL Group over the inappropriate data use. Carroll himself sued Cambridge Friday to recover data on him that the firm had obtained.

Sandy Parakilas, who worked in data protection for Facebook in 2011 and 2012, told a U.K. parliamentary committee Wednesday that the company was vigilant about its network security but lax when it came to protecting users' data.

He said personal data including email addresses and in some cases private messages was allowed to leave Facebook servers with no real controls on how the data was used after that.

"The real challenge here is that Facebook was allowing developers to access the data of people who hadn't explicitly authorized that," he said, adding that the company had "lost sight" of what developers did with the data.

___

Danica Kirka and Gregory Katz reported from London. AP Technology Writer Mae Anderson in New York contributed to this story.

FILE - In this March 15, 2013, file photo, a Facebook employee walks past a sign at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. The San Jose Mercury News reports Saturday, March 17, 2018 that building permits compiled by Buildzoom show Facebook plans to erect the 465,000 square-foot (43,200 square-meter) building at its campus in Menlo Park, Calif. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu, File)

Chief Executive of Cambridge Analytica (CA) Alexander Nix, leaves the offices in central London, Tuesday March 20, 2018. Cambridge Analytica, has been accused of improperly using information from more than 50 million Facebook accounts. It denies wrongdoing. (Dominic Lipinski/PA via AP)

The offices of Cambridge Analytica (CA) in central London, after it was announced that Britain's information commissioner Elizabeth Denham is pursuing a warrant to search Cambridge Analytica's computer servers, Tuesday March 20, 2018. Denham said Tuesday that she is using all her legal powers to investigate Facebook and political campaign consultants Cambridge Analytica over the alleged misuse of millions of people's data. Cambridge Analytica said it is committed to helping the U.K. investigation. (Kirsty O'Connor/PA via AP)PARKLAND, Fla. (AP) - An attorney for the brother of Florida school shooting suspect Nikolas Cruz said in court papers Thursday that a $500,000 bond for trespassing at the school is excessive and that the brother should be released from jail.

Lawyer Joseph Kimok said in the documents that 18-year-old Zachary Cruz already paid the standard $25 bond for a misdemeanor and should not be kept in custody.

"Zachary Cruz did not kill 17 people on a high school campus. He should not be treated as if he did," Kimok wrote. "There is no justice where the government seeks to hang a man for the crimes of his brother."

This undated photo released by the Broward Sheriff's Office shows Zachary Cruz. Cruz, the brother of Nikolas Cruz charged with killing 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, was arrested Monday, March 19, 2018 and charged for trespassing at the same school, authorities said. (Broward Sheriff's Office via AP)

Zachary Cruz was arrested Monday while skateboarding on the campus of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where authorities say his brother killed 17 people and wounded 17 others in the Valentine's Day massacre. Zachary Cruz had been warned not to visit the campus, but did so three times, authorities say.

Kimok also objected to several of the bond conditions imposed by a judge, including forcing Zachary Cruz to undergo a psychological evaluation, prohibiting him from visiting Broward County, putting him on house arrest with an ankle monitor if he is released, having the home he is living in searched for weapons and having no contact with Nikolas Cruz.

"To take away that familial connection is inhumane," Kimok wrote.

Security at Stoneman Douglas High, already heightened, was bolstered Thursday with Gov. Rick Scott ordering eight highway patrol troopers to help secure the grounds. The move came after Zachary Cruz was arrested, two students were caught carrying knives and another made online threats.

Also, Stoneman Douglas students will be given transparent backpacks they'll be required to use when they return from spring break on April 2. Broward County school district Superintendent Robert Runcie told parents in a two-page letter that metal detectors also may be installed soon, and he outlined other security upgrades including student ID badges and a district-wide effort to require all school visitors to enter through a single door.

The troopers will be stationed at the school indefinitely, along with Broward County deputies, leaving an armed guard at every campus entrance point, Scott said in a statement. Before the shooting, the school was patrolled by one armed deputy and unarmed guards. An unspecified number of deputies, some armed with rifles, were added after the school reopened.

"Parents, students and teachers have recently endured one of the worst tragedies in Florida history," Scott said. "They must be assured that every necessary step is being taken to increase safety and ensure no unauthorized people are allowed on campus."

Zachary and Nikolas, 19, both attended Stoneman Douglas. They shared the same biological mother but had different fathers. Both were adopted at very young ages by Roger and Lynda Cruz. Lynda Cruz died in November and their father died some years earlier.

Nikolas Cruz will plead guilty to 17 counts of murder and 17 counts of attempted murder if prosecutors will waive the death penalty, his attorney has said. They have refused to do so.

Meanwhile, a judge rejected an attempt to remove Broward County prosecutors and its public defender from the Nikolas Cruz criminal case.

Circuit Judge Elizabeth Scherer said in an order dated Wednesday that attorney Alex Arreaza lacks legal standing to make such a motion. Arreaza represents 15-year-old Anthony Borges, who was shot five times in the Valentine's Day massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School that killed 17 people.

Arreaza had claimed the two offices have a conflict because both signed a 2016 agreement along with county school and law enforcement officials aimed at handling school disciplinary issues without involving law enforcement.

Mollica separately imposed a $12,500 bail Wednesday on a Stoneman Douglas student who officials say pulled a small knife on a boy she accused of harassing her and a friend. The SunSentinel reports that her lawyer, Brian Reidy said everyone has "hit the fear button" and that he doesn't "blame a kid for taking a weapon to school, quite frankly, these days."

___

Associated Press writer Gary Fineout in Tallahassee contributed to this report.

___

Follow Curt Anderson on Twitter: http://twitter.com/MiamicurtLIMA, Peru (AP) - He took office in 2016 as a political outsider boasting that his strong business credentials would buoy Peru's economy while sweeping away endemic corruption. But with his offer of resignation, Pedro Pablo Kuczynski joins a long list of recent Peruvian presidents undone by scandals that have destroyed voters' trust in their elected officials.

Kuczynski, flanked by his cabinet, announced his decision to resign Wednesday in a nationally televised address, accusing opponents led by the daughter of former strongman Alberto Fujimori of plotting his overthrow for months and making it impossible to govern.

Shortly after, he exited the back door of the baroque presidential palace built by Spanish conquerors and was driven off, all alone, in an SUV.

In this handout photo provided by the Peruvian Presidential Press Office, President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski poses with his cabinet before addressing the nation and announcing his resignation from office, Wednesday, March 21, 2018. The embattled Peruvian leader offered his resignation to Congress ahead of a scheduled vote on whether to impeach the former Wall Street investor, according to a presidential aide. (Juanca Guzman Negrini/Presidencia de Peru via AP)

Congress was expected to vote Thursday to accept his resignation, or if not, to impeach him.

It was an ignominious end to a presidency that started with the highest of expectations.

When Kuczynski, a former Wall Street investor, was elected in 2016, he was immediately thrust to the helm of a conservative revival in South America. Voters had grown tired of once-dominant leftist governments marred by corruption and blamed for squandering a decade-long commodities boom that had ended abruptly.

At home, he promised an investment windfall from old business buddies in the U.S., where he lived for decades and met his current and former American wives. He also surprised many by speaking out forcefully against Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro and leading a coalition of like-minded leaders to isolate the socialist leader for human rights abuses.

But the 79-year-old was hobbled almost immediately out of the gate. His self-tailored party, named for his own PPK initials, won just 18 seats in the 130-member congress. And instead of courting supporters on the left who pushed him to victory by a razor-thin margin over opponent Keiko Fujimori, he tried in vain to form an alliance with the former strongman's power-hungry, vindictive allies. Aides privately complained of stubbornness and political naivete.

"When Kuczynski came in, everyone hailed him as Peru's salvation," said Laura Sharkey, a Bogota-based analyst at Control Risks consultancy. "But he just completely underestimated the strength of the opposition."

Even on the economy, his strong suit, Kuczynski fell short, as growth has slowed and promised mining and infrastructure projects never got off the ground.

What most outraged voters, however, was his seeming dishonesty, something that has long dominated Peruvian politics and he had vowed to end.

For months, as three of his predecessors were probed and one even jailed for taking bribes from Brazilian construction firm Odebrecht, Kuczynski steadfastly denied having any business or political ties with the company at the heart of Latin America's biggest graft scandal.

Then, Fujimori's party produced confidential bank documents from Odebrecht showing $780,000 in decade-old payments to his consulting firm. Kuczynski said he had no knowledge of the payments that overlapped with his years as a government minister and said that in any case had paid taxes on all of his earnings.

To save his skin he cut the sort of closed-door deal that Peruvians have grown to abhor. A group of lawmakers led by Kenji Fujimori defied his sister's leadership of the Popular Force party to narrowly block Kuczynski's impeachment. Days later, Kuczynski pardoned the feuding siblings' father from a 25-year jail sentence for human rights abuses committed during his decade-long presidency.

Ultimately that alliance spelled his downfall. Popular Force this week revealed secretly shot videos of Kenji Fujimori and other presidential allies allegedly trying to buy the support of an opposition lawmaker with promises of state contracts.

Kuczynski denied any bribery attempt, but for Peruvians traumatized by the videos of Fujimori's longtime spy chief, Vladimiro Montesinos, handing out huge stacks of bills to politicians, military officers and media moguls, the damage was done.

To be sure, Keiko Fujimori seems unlikely to be able to fill the void. An Ipsos poll taken this month showed that while a dismal 19 percent of Peruvians approve of Kuczynski's presidency an even smaller number, 14 percent, have a favorable view of congress, where Fujimori's party is dominant. The poll had a margin of error of 2.8 percentage points.

In addition to the bitter feud with her brother, Fujimori herself is facing accusations that her own 2011 presidential campaign received never-declared contributions from Odebrecht, something she denies.

For many Peruvians, the clandestine videos that did Kuczynski in are a reminder of the corrupt, deceit-filled politics of the Fujimori era that they had hoped was behind them. In the coming days, as Peru works its way through a messy presidential succession, that widespread outrage is likely to fuel louder calls for early elections - for both congress and the presidency.

"The only public institution with moral authority left in Peru is the fire department," said Oscar Mendoza, a lawyer standing outside the presidential palace moments after Kuczynski waved goodbye to aides. "All the rest, when you touch them with your finger, pus comes out because they are fully corrupted by graft."

___

Goodman reported from Bogota, Colombia. AP Writers Manuel Rueda and Christine Armario in Bogota contributed to this report.SYDNEY (AP) - The National Rugby League has ordered Brisbane Broncos player Matt Lodge to begin paying back the victims of his New York City assault or risk having his contract terminated.

Lodge forced himself into a Manhattan apartment in October 2015 and assaulted a man while his wife and 9-year-old child hid. He said in a television interview two weeks ago that he was on sleeping pills and had drunk alcohol at the time, and he apologized to the victims.

But Lodge still owes more than $1 million in damages in the case, for which he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor reckless assault charge.

He avoided a 12-month jail term in the U.S. with the plea deal to compensate the victims, Ruth Fowler and Joseph Cartright. But Fowler and Cartright say they have not received any of the money.

On Thursday, NRL chief executive Todd Greenberg said Lodge, who is on a minimum NRL wage of 100,000 Australian dollars ($77,400) a year, had been told his approval to continue playing in the league was contingent on him repaying his victims.

"We're in dialogue with his agent and with his club and there is a strong desire to come up with a payment plan," Greenberg said.TEHRAN, Iran (AP) - Iran's semi-official ILNA news agency has reported that Turkmenistan border guards opened fire, killing two Iranian fishermen and detaining another two for trespassing.

Wednesday's report says the incident happened on Tuesday night when the four young fishermen were sailing near the edge of Iranian territorial waters in the Caspian Sea.

The report did not identify the fishermen but said they ignored frequent warnings by Iranian authorities to observe the borderline.

Incidents of Turkmen border guards opening fire and shooting at Iranian boats have been frequent over the past years. Fishing boats in the area often report poor visibility and technical failures.

Iran, Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Russia share the Caspian Sea, an inland sea that is a lucrative source of caviar, gas and oil.BRUSSELS (AP) - European Union leaders are set to condemn Turkey's efforts to stop natural gas exploration off Cyprus ahead of a meeting next week between top EU officials and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

In a draft statement, seen by The Associated Press, they call on Turkey "to cease these actions and respect the sovereign rights of Cyprus to explore and exploit its natural resources in accordance with EU and international law."

Last month, Turkish warships blocked a rig from reaching an area southeast of Cyprus where Italian company Eni was scheduled to drill.

European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, center, walks with from left, Latvian Prime Minister Maris Kucinskis, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki and Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite prior to a meeting at EU headquarters in Brussels, Thursday, March 22, 2018. (AP Photo/Geert Vanden Wijngaert)

Ankara said it would prevent any further drilling off Cyprus without the direct involvement of the ethnically divided island's breakaway Turkish Cypriots.

The EU leaders, meeting in Brussels Thursday, urged Turkey to normalize ties with Cyprus.GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) - A man wanted for a bombing that targeted the Palestinian premier's convoy as he visited Gaza last week was killed in a firefight Thursday with Hamas forces, the militant Islamic group that rules the territory said.

The Interior Ministry in Gaza said the suspect, Anas Abu Khousa, 26, refused to surrender when Hamas surrounded his hideout. It said Abu Khousa was killed in the exchange of fire along with two Hamas policemen. Another suspect later died of his wounds at a hospital, it said.

Last week, a roadside bomb struck a convoy carrying Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah after he crossed into Gaza. Hamdallah was unharmed but the explosion wounded some of his bodyguards.

Palestinian members of the Hamas security forces patrol during an operation to arrest suspects wanted for a roadside bombing that targeted the visiting Palestinian premier's convoy in Gaza last week, in the town of Nuseirat, central Gaza Strip, Thursday, March 22, 2018. Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah was unharmed but the explosion wounded some of his bodyguards. (AP Photo/ Khalil Hamra)

Palestinians have been split since Hamas seized Gaza in 2007, ousting forces of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas who now governs just parts of the West Bank. Repeated reconciliation attempts failed.

Abbas has blamed Hamas for the bombing, a charge that Hamas denies.

A relative of Abu Khoussa said he was not affiliated with any group, though he embraced "a very radical interpretation of Islam." He spoke on condition of anonymity because he did not want to be known to other family members.

A Palestinian member of the Hamas security forces patrols during an operation to arrest suspects wanted for a roadside bombing that targeted the visiting Palestinian premier's convoy in Gaza last week, in the town of Nuseirat, central Gaza Strip, Thursday, March 22, 2018. Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah was unharmed but the explosion wounded some of his bodyguards. (AP Photo/ Khalil Hamra)

Palestinian members of the Hamas security forces patrol an area during an operation to arrest suspects wanted for a bombing that targeted the visiting Palestinian premier's convoy in Gaza last week, in the town of Nuseirat, central Gaza Strip, Thursday, March 22, 2018. (AP Photo/ Khalil Hamra)

Palestinians check bullet holes in a wall following an exchange of gunfire between Palestinian Hamas security forces and suspects wanted for a bombing that targeted the visiting Palestinian premier's convoy last week in Gaza, in the town of Nuseirat, central Gaza Strip, Thursday, March 22, 2018. (AP Photo/ Khalil Hamra)ANKARA, Turkey (AP) - Turkey's state-run news agency says Turkish jets have attacked suspected Kurdish rebel camps across the border in northern Iraq, in an operation that reportedly "neutralized" nine militants.

Anadolu Agency said the attack occurred early Thursday after drones detected a group of militants allegedly preparing to launch an attack against Turkey.

Turkey regularly targets the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party, or PKK, in northern Iraq, where they maintain bases. Anadolu said some 50 PKK rebels were killed or wounded in such operations since March 10.

Turkey said this week that its military may mount an offensive against the PKK in Iraq's Sinjar region if the Iraqi government doesn't act against the group, which is considered a terrorist organization by Turkey and its allies.

Turkey says Sinjar has turned into a PKK headquarters.NEW YORK (AP) - Federal authorities say a flight crew member arrived at New York's Kennedy Airport from Jamaica with four packages of cocaine taped to his legs.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection said Fly Jamaica Airways crew member Hugh Hall was arrested on Saturday and they seized about 9 pounds of cocaine, with a street value of about $160,000.

Hall was detained after a court appearance on Monday.

His attorney and the airline did not immediately respond to requests seeking comment on Thursday.PARKLAND, Fla. (AP) - The Latest on the aftermath of the school shooting in Parkland, Florida (all times local):

3:30 p.m.

The brother of Florida school shooting suspect Nikolas Cruz says in court documents that the $500,000 bond set for his trespassing charge is far too high.

Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School students, front the left, Emma Gonzalez, Alex Wind, and Matt Deitsch participate in a panel discussion about guns, Tuesday, March 20, 2018, at Harvard Kennedy School's Institute of Politics, in Cambridge, Mass. The Feb. 14, 2018 attack in Florida killed 17 people, 14 of them students. The students have become vocal advocates for stricter gun laws. (AP Photo/Steven Senne)

The attorney for 18-year-old Zachary Cruz said in documents Thursday there's no justification for such a high bond amount for a misdemeanor. The documents point out that Zachary Cruz already posted the standard $25 bond and should be released.

Zachary Cruz was arrested Monday after deputies spotted him riding a skateboard at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School despite being warned not to visit the campus. A judge imposed the high bond amount and many other restrictions.

The motion says Zachary Cruz had no weapons and did not resist arrest.

Nikolas Cruz faces a 34-count indictment for the Feb. 14 shooting at the school that killed 17 people.

___

10:55 a.m.

The Parkland teens spearheading Saturday's March For Our Lives rally in Washington are being hailed on the cover of Time magazine.

The cover features Marjory Stoneman Douglas students Jaclyn Corin, Alex Wind, Emma Gonzalez, Cameron Kasky and David Hogg, representing a much larger group that is driving a movement against gun violence. The students are also holding a gun-reform rally Thursday at a charter school in Washington where two students were killed with guns this year.

Back in Miami, the organization Sandy Hook Promise honored Miami-Dade County Public Schools on Wednesday for its efforts to train students on how to identify and help at-risk students before violence happens. More than 3 million students have been trained across the US. The group says it has helped avert multiple school shooting plots, several teen suicides, and other acts of violence.

___

10:30 a.m.

A Florida judge has rejected an attempt to remove Broward County prosecutors and its public defender from the Nikolas Cruz criminal case.

Circuit Judge Elizabeth Scherer said in an order dated Wednesday that attorney Alex Arreaza lacks legal standing to make such a motion.

Arreaza represents 15-year-old Anthony Borges, who was shot five times in the Valentine's Day massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School that killed 17 people.

Arreaza had claimed the two offices have a conflict because both signed a 2016 agreement along with county school and law enforcement officials aimed at handling school disciplinary issues without involving law enforcement.

Arreaza claimed the 2016 agreement could come into play in the murder and attempted murder case against 19-year-old Cruz because it may have affected how his actions and behavior were handled.

___

8 a.m.

When students return from spring break to Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, they'll be required to use clear backpacks and wear identification badges at all times.

Broward Schools Superintendent Robert Runcie told parents about the security changes in a two-page letter. It says the backpacks will be provided to students at no cost when they return to school on April 2. Runcie also said metal detectors may soon be installed at the high school in Parkland, Florida, where a teenager who carried an assault weapon in a large bag killed 17 people on Valentine's Day.

Also, schools across the district will see reinforced safety protocols. They include locking all classroom doors, upgrading surveillance systems and expediting measures to require visitors to enter through a single point of entry.

___

11 p.m.

Eight highway patrol troopers are scheduled to bolster security at the Florida high school where last month's shooting rampage occurred.

Gov. Rick Scott ordered the troopers to begin assisting sheriff's deputies in patrolling Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High on Thursday. This comes days after the suspect's brother was arrested there, two other students were caught carrying knives and another made online threats.

The troopers will be stationed at the school indefinitely along with Broward County deputies, which will allow an armed guard at every campus entrance point.

Before the shooting, the school was patrolled by one armed deputy and unarmed guards. An unspecified number of deputies, some armed with rifles, were added after the school reopened.

Noah King, 9, of Belmont, Mass., center, steps on stage to greet Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School students, from the left, Emma Gonzalez, David Hogg, Cameron Kasky, Alex Wind, and Matt Deitsch, during a panel discussion about guns, Tuesday, March 20, 2018, at Harvard Kennedy School's Institute of Politics, in Cambridge, Mass. The Feb. 14, 2018 attack in Florida killed 17 people, 14 of them students. The students have become vocal advocates for stricter gun laws. (AP Photo/Steven Senne)

Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School students Cameron Kasky, center, reaches out to clasp hands with Jaclyn Corin, below left, while David Hogg, top left, and Alex Wind, right, applaud at the conclusion of a panel discussion about guns, Tuesday, March 20, 2018, at Harvard Kennedy School's Institute of Politics, in Cambridge, Mass. The Feb. 14, 2018 school shooting in Florida killed 17 people, 14 of them students. The students have become vocal advocates for stricter gun laws. (AP Photo/Steven Senne)

High school senior Brianna Remeika, 18, holds a sign that reads "#ENOUGH: Gun Control Now" following an assembly on school safety at Lewiston High School on Wednesday, March 21, 2018. Students held a classroom walkout in response to last month's shooting in Parkland, Fla. Remeika is involved in the school's new Youth Action Club. Members plan to lobby legislators in Augusta, Maine, to support more gun control measures. (Daryn Slover/Sun Journal via AP)

High School freshman Kaylee Bouchard, 14, and Bryona Pelletier, right, hold a sign that reads, "One child is worth more than all the guns in the world" while joining arms with hundreds of students at Lewiston High School on Wednesday, March 21, 2018. Students held a classroom walkout in response to last month's shooting in Parkland, Florida. (Daryn Slover/Sun Journal via AP)A house with a fabulous view can be hard for a homebuyer to resist. But seeing the mountains, water or city lights from the comfort of home comes at a price. The hazy part is figuring out what that added cost is - and whether it's worth it .

That's where real estate appraisers and analysts who study home values can help, even though they recognize there's no simple answer.

"Views are actually really difficult to quantify," says Andy Krause, principal data scientist at Greenfield Advisors, a real estate research company. "It's somewhat subjective. What makes a better water view? Do you want it to be wider? Do you want more of the water from a taller angle? You know, some of that is in the eye of the beholder."

FILE- In this Sept. 27, 2010, file photo, prospective buyer looks at the view from The Blue condominium in Miami. A house with a fabulous view can be hard for a homebuyer to resist. But seeing the mountains, water or city lights from the comfort of home comes at a price. (AP Photo/Lynne Sladky, File)

Assigning a dollar value can also be difficult because not all views are equal or valuable, and a view that's sought-after in one location may not be in another.

In Manhattan, a place that overlooks a green space will cost you a lot extra. In the countryside? Not as much, says Mauricio Rodriguez, a real estate expert who chairs the finance department at Texas Christian University's Neeley School of Business.

___

PUTTING A PRICE ON IT

So how do you put a price on a variety of views? Krause, who builds automated valuation models that analyze home data, produced these estimates for what five different types of views might add to a home's price in Seattle:

- 5 PERCENT TO 10 PERCENT: For a home on flat ground with an unobstructed view of an open space or a park, a seller could add 5 percent to 10 percent. In other words, if an identical home without a view is worth $500,000 elsewhere in Seattle, this view could boost the price to $525,000 or $550,000.

- 10 PERCENT TO 30 PERCENT: A home partway up a hill with a partially obstructed water view over neighbors' rooftops could increase the overall price by 10 percent to 30 percent. It depends on how much of your field of vision the view fills, both vertically and horizontally, Krause says. In this example, a home otherwise worth $500,000 might fetch $550,000 to $650,000.

- 30 PERCENT TO 50 PERCENT: This time Krause considered the same home as above, in the same location, but with an unobstructed view. "You still have the neighbors above looking down into your house, but you have a nice water view," he says. With this clearer view, the $500,000 home could sell for $650,000 to $750,000.

- 50 PERCENT TO 75 PERCENT: Next, envision a home atop a hill with an unobstructed cityscape or open-space vista. To buy the $500,000 home in this location, a buyer might have to pay $725,000 to $875,000.

- 75 PERCENT TO 100 PERCENT OR MORE: Finally, imagine a house with a stunning, unobstructed view of a big lake or the ocean. This type of prized view can boost the value of a home worth $500,000 in an ordinary location to $1 million or more, Krause says.

___

HOW TO SHOP FOR A HOME WITH A VIEW

If having a view is a must, here are a couple of tips from the experts:

- FIND OUT IF THE VIEW IS PROTECTED: Frank Lucco, a residential real estate appraiser and consultant in Houston, once had clients with an expensive home who sued after a high-rise office tower went up across the street. The building disrupted their view and gave office workers a view of their formerly private backyard and pool. The lawsuit was dismissed, Lucco says, and a bit of detective work could have told them that commercial development was allowed.

To avoid a similar outcome, Lucco advises that before you place a bid on a home, ask planning authorities what the zoning allows and if high-impact developments are planned nearby.

- LOOK FOR DIAMONDS IN THE ROUGH: Bargain-hunters can occasionally find views for cheap because poor design - walls where a big window or a deck might go, for instance - blocks what should be a nice view.

"It may cost you $15,000 to $30,000 to do a very limited remodel that gives you a better angle, or higher vantage point, or a rooftop deck," Krause says. But that could be a deal compared with buying a home that already takes full advantage of its view. Lucco suggests inspecting the home's deed for any restrictions limiting additions to the height. Pay careful attention to homeowner association rules, too.

A view can be one of the most attractive aspects of a home. Knowing that you paid the right price for it can make the scenery that much more enjoyable.

This article was provided to The Associated Press by the personal finance website NerdWallet. Marilyn Lewis is a writer at NerdWallet. Email: mlewis@nerdwallet.com.

RELATED LINK:

NerdWallet: How to determine home value and why it matters

https://nerd.me/2pgYBbK

FILE- This July 5, 2016, file photo shows a view of Brooklyn's Gowanus Canal and the the rooftop lounge of the new 365 Bond Street apartments, right, a new development from Lightstone, in New York. A house with a fabulous view can be hard for a homebuyer to resist. But seeing the mountains, water or city lights from the comfort of home comes at a price. (AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews, File)

FILE- This May 18, 2015, file photo shows the view of Lake Huron in Port Austin, Mich., a 1,800 square foot lake front home. A view can be one of the most attractive aspects of a home. Knowing that you paid the right price for it can make the scenery that much more enjoyable. (Jessica J. Trevino/Detroit Free Press via AP, File)MADRID (AP) - The Latest on Catalonia's bid to secede from Spain(all times local):

10:15 p.m.

The separatist majority in Catalonia's parliament has failed to elect a regional president, starting a two-month countdown that could end with another regional election in the restive corner of Spain.

Jordi Turull, the former chief of staff and spokesman for the ousted Catalan government, walks to intervene at a parliamentary session at the Parliament of Catalonia in Barcelona, Spain, on Thursday, March. 22, 2018. Catalonia's parliament is holding a session to elect, as the Spanish region's next president, a former separatist minister who could be indicted on rebellion charges the next day. Jordi Turull is among ex-officials facing possible rebellion charges over the regional assembly's failed attempt last year to break away from Spain. (AP Photo/Manu Fernandez)

Candidate Jordi Turull fell short of the absolute majority needed to become the next Catalan president due to a division within the three parties who seek independence for the northeastern region.

An abstention from Thursday's vote by the anti-capitalist CUP party left Turull with 64 votes when he needed 68.

The regional parliament now has two months to pick a president and form a government before a new election is re triggered.

Parliament rules say Turull could have a second chance to be elected on Saturday.

But the former minister in the previous government faces a court date on Friday that could end with his indictment on rebellion charges and preventative jail.

___

6:25 p.m.

Catalan presidential hopeful Jordi Turull says he wants to foster dialogue with Spain's central authorities if he's elected as the regional president. He didn't specify what the dialogue would entail.

In a speech to fellow lawmakers, the pro-independence ex-minister outlined some of the social, economic and other measures he would implement if elected on Thursday.

There was no mention of "independence" or "republic" in the hour-long speech.

Turull is the third candidate proposed by parties that support Catalan independence. His bid appears because lawmakers of the anti-capitalist CUP party want a president who vows to realize the region's secession.

He is also facing a possible indictment on rebellion and other charges.

He told the Catalan parliament: "I prefer to accept the risk of being a victim of injustice than to back away from what is happening."

___

5:05 p.m.

Catalonia's parliament is holding a session to elect as the Spanish region's next president a former separatist minister who could be indicted on rebellion charges as early as Friday.

Jordi Turull is among the former Catalan officials facing possible rebellion charges over the regional assembly's failed attempt last year to break away from Spain.

A Supreme Court judge overseeing the investigation plans to issue indictments Friday. That could lead to Turull being imprisoned and, at a later stage, possibly banned from public office.

Turull also appears to lack the support he needs to be elected as Catalonia's next president on Thursday. The radical-left separatist CUP party says its representatives won't vote for Turull, leaving him short of an absolute majority in the regional chamber.

If Turull is not jailed by a judge on Friday, parliament rules would give him a second chance to be elected as the northeastern region's leader on Saturday.

___

4 p.m.

Spain's Supreme Court has rejected an appeal to release two Catalan independence leaders from pre-trial detention while a judge investigates Catalonia's illegal attempt to secede from Spain last year.

The top court ruled that there is still risk for Joaquim Forn, the ousted Catalan Interior Minister, and Jordi Sanchez, the former president of the pro-independence civil rights group ANC, to repeat the offenses that landed them in jail.

Supreme Court Judge Pablo Llarena is set to issue indictments for Forn and other separatist politicians on Friday, in a probe looking into possible rebellion, sedition and embezzlement charges.

Llarena is investigating Sanchez in connection with the turbulent events last fall, and particularly whether the activist should be held accountable for allegedly orchestrating protests that hindered officials trying to stop a banned independence referendum.

___

11:50 a.m.

Spain's government has rejected a plan by separatists in Catalonia's regional parliament to elect prominent secessionist politician Jordi Turull as Catalan president.

The secretary of state for territorial administration, Roberto Bermudez de Castro, says Thursday's vote in Barcelona is just another ploy in the region's frustrated attempt to gain independence.

He told the Spanish Senate the government will oppose the election of any candidate who faces legal proceedings. Turull is among ex-officials facing possible rebellion charges over the regional parliament's failed attempt last year to break away from Spain.

A Supreme Court judge overseeing the rebellion investigation plans to issue indictments Friday.

Turull is the third candidate proposed by pro-independence lawmakers since a December election. The central government is running Catalonia from Madrid.

Jordi Turull, the former chief of staff and spokesman for the ousted Catalan government, walks back to his sit after intervening at a parliamentary session at the Parliament of Catalonia in Barcelona, Spain, on Thursday, March. 22, 2018. Catalonia's parliament is holding a session to elect, as the Spanish region's next president, a former separatist minister who could be indicted on rebellion charges the next day. Jordi Turull is among ex-officials facing possible rebellion charges over the regional assembly's failed attempt last year to break away from Spain. (AP Photo/Manu Fernandez)

Jordi Turull, the former chief of staff and spokesman for the ousted Catalan government, intervenes during a parliamentary session at the Parliament of Catalonia in Barcelona, Spain, on Thursday, March. 22, 2018. Catalonia's parliament is holding a session to elect, as the Spanish region's next president, a former separatist minister who could be indicted on rebellion charges the next day. Jordi Turull is among ex-officials facing possible rebellion charges over the regional assembly's failed attempt last year to break away from Spain. (AP Photo/Manu Fernandez)

Jordi Turull, the former chief of staff and spokesman for the ousted Catalan government, intervenes during a parliamentary session at the Parliament of Catalonia in Barcelona, Spain, on Thursday, March. 22, 2018. Catalonia's parliament is holding a session to elect, as the Spanish region's next president, a former separatist minister who could be indicted on rebellion charges the next day. Jordi Turull is among ex-officials facing possible rebellion charges over the regional assembly's failed attempt last year to break away from Spain. (AP Photo/Manu Fernandez)

Jordi Turull, the former chief of staff and spokesman for the ousted Catalan government, intervenes during a parliamentary session at the Parliament of Catalonia in Barcelona, Spain, on Thursday, March. 22, 2018. Catalonia's parliament is holding a session to elect, as the Spanish region's next president, a former separatist minister who could be indicted on rebellion charges the next day. Jordi Turull is among ex-officials facing possible rebellion charges over the regional assembly's failed attempt last year to break away from Spain. (AP Photo/Manu Fernandez)

Jordi Turull, the former chief of staff and spokesman for the ousted Catalan government, intervenes during a parliamentary session at the Parliament of Catalonia in Barcelona, Spain, on Thursday, March. 22, 2018. Catalonia's parliament is holding a session to elect, as the Spanish region's next president, a former separatist minister who could be indicted on rebellion charges the next day. Jordi Turull is among ex-officials facing possible rebellion charges over the regional assembly's failed attempt last year to break away from Spain. (AP Photo/Manu Fernandez)MEXICO CITY (AP) - Police in Mexico's Gulf coast state of Veracruz say a journalist who ran a local news website has been shot to death.

State police said Leobardo Vazquez, 48, was found dead late Wednesday near a taco stand he also ran in the town of Gutierrez Zamora.

Vazquez managed the news site Enlace Informativo Regional and previously worked for other outlets.

The site covers general news and crime in the coastal town, which is located in an area known for drug cartel activity.

He is at least the second journalist slain in Mexico this year. In 2017, ten journalists were killed in the country, at least three of whom died in Veracruz.WASHINGTON (AP) - Special counsel Robert Mueller is scrutinizing the connections between President Donald Trump's campaign and the data mining firm Cambridge Analytica, which has come under fierce criticism over reports that it swiped the data of more than 50 million Facebook users to sway elections.

Mueller's investigators have asked former campaign officials about the Trump campaign's data operations, particularly about how it collected and utilized voter data in battleground states, according to a person with direct knowledge of the line of inquiry but not authorized to discuss it publicly.

The investigators have also asked some of Trump's data team, which included analysts at the Republican National Committee, about its relationship with Cambridge Analytica, according to two former campaign officials. The campaign paid the firm just under $6 million for its work in 2016, according to federal records.

The offices of Cambridge Analytica (CA) in central London, after it was announced that Britain's information commissioner Elizabeth Denham is pursuing a warrant to search Cambridge Analytica's computer servers, Tuesday March 20, 2018. Denham said Tuesday that she is using all her legal powers to investigate Facebook and political campaign consultants Cambridge Analytica over the alleged misuse of millions of people's data. Cambridge Analytica said it is committed to helping the U.K. investigation. (Kirsty O'Connor/PA via AP)

Authorities in Britain and the United States are investigating whether Cambridge Analytica may have used data improperly obtained from Facebook to try to influence elections, including the 2016 White House race.

Mueller is leading a criminal probe into whether Trump's Republican presidential campaign had ties to Russia and whether he may have obstructed justice.

The Trump campaign has distanced itself from the data mining firm, which had been financed by major Republican donors and, for a time, employed Steve Bannon, the conservative provocateur who later became Trump's campaign chief executive.

Trump turned to Twitter on Thursday to boast about his campaign's social media efforts compared with those of his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, but it was not clear what prompted the declaration.

"Remember when they were saying, during the campaign, that Donald Trump is giving great speeches and drawing big crowds, but he is spending much less money and not using social media as well as Crooked Hillary's large and highly sophisticated staff. Well, not saying that anymore!" Trump wrote.

A request for an explanation from the White House was not returned.

The exact role that Cambridge Analytica played for the Trump campaign has remained murky.

Staffers at Cambridge Analytica made several overtures to the Trump campaign before eventually being retained. They first requested a meeting in spring 2015, before the celebrity businessman officially announced his candidacy, according to four former campaign officials who were not authorized to publicly discuss internal operations and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Alexander Nix, the Cambridge Analytica CEO captured on a sting video released this week, met with then-campaign manager Corey Lewandowski to make a pitch for the data-mining company's voter target products, including its so-called psychographic method.

Lewandowski passed, in part because the staff believed Trump would not be willing to make a sizable financial investment in an analytics firm, according to two of the campaign officials.

Cambridge then went to work for the campaign of Trump's Republican rivals Ben Carson and Ted Cruz. But after Trump became the GOP's presumptive nominee, the data firm reached out again, this time to Paul Manafort, who had replaced Lewandowski to become campaign chairman.

Manafort was also skeptical about the effectiveness of the firm's methods, but Cambridge was hired, in part as a friendly gesture to the Mercer family, heavyweight Republican donors who helped fund the company's launch a few years earlier, according to one of the former campaign officials.

With the Trump campaign concerned that the RNC might not fully invest in Trump - he had clashed repeatedly with the organization - Cambridge was retained. Campaign finance records indicate that the Trump campaign's first payment of $100,000 to the firm came in July 2016.

Five of the firm's staff members were assigned to work with the campaign's digital director, Brad Parscale, at his Texas-based firm, where much of the campaign's digital operation was located.

Parscale and Jared Kushner, the candidate's son-in-law, emphasized using social media - and particularly Facebook - to better target voters and pressed its importance on Trump.

The campaign tapped Cambridge to build out a database of small-dollar GOP donors, a dataset the company had from its prior work for the Cruz and Carson campaigns.

But when it became clear the RNC would share its much-improved data operation with the Trump campaign, Cambridge became de-emphasized. Two of the former campaign officials said their tools were not useful, though Parscale, during a Google forum a month after the election, said the firm became involved in daily tracking polls and helped inform the campaign's decisions on where to spend its resources.

Another of the campaign officials said Cambridge was kept around mostly to placate the Mercers and their allies on Trump's staff.

All told, the Trump campaign paid Cambridge just under $6 million, according to Federal Election Commission records. The largest payment to Cambridge Analytica - $5 million on Sept. 1, 2016 - was made about two weeks after Bannon was appointed the chief executive of the Trump campaign, according to FEC records. At that same time, another Mercer ally, pollster Kellyanne Conway, was named his campaign manager to replace Manafort.

Bannon, with the Mercers' backing, served as vice president of the firm from June 2014 to August 2016, when he joined the Trump campaign. He has since had a falling-out with the Mercers and with Trump over disparaging comments he made about the president's family.

Chris Wylie, a former Cambridge Analytica employee who became a whistleblower, told The Washington Post that Cambridge had begun testing phrases like "drain the swamp" and "deep state" well before Trump launched his campaign. The president began incorporating those concepts into his stump speech in the stretch run of the campaign, soon after Bannon came on board.

Wylie has said he fears the data was turned over to Russians who aimed to interfere with the U.S. election.

Parscale, who has been appointed Trump's 2020 campaign manager, has slammed the firm on Twitter for taking credit for Trump's victory. "So incredibly false and ridiculous," he wrote this week, declaring Cambridge's comments "an overblown sales pitch."

Lawmakers have demanded answers from both Cambridge Analytica and Facebook, as Sen. Mark Warner, the Virginia Democrat who is vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, declared this week that the blooming scandal was "more evidence that the online political advertising market is essentially the Wild West."

"Whether it's allowing Russians to purchase political ads, or extensive micro-targeting based on ill-gotten user data, it's clear that, left unregulated, this market will continue to be prone to deception and lacking in transparency," Warner tweeted.

The news of Mueller's interest in Cambridge Analytica was first reported by ABC News.

___

Follow Lemire on Twitter at http://twitter.com/@JonLemireMADISON, Wis. (AP) - A Wisconsin judge Thursday ordered Gov. Scott Walker to call special elections to fill a pair of legislative seats vacated by fellow Republicans, handing a victory to Democrats who have pushed for the elections to be held.

A national Democratic group led by former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder filed the lawsuit on behalf of voters who argued they were disenfranchised by Walker's decision not to call elections to fill the vacancies that occurred on Dec. 29.

Attorneys for Holder's groups, the National Redistricting Foundation, argued that Walker has a legal obligation to call special elections as soon as possible. Democrats said the governor is afraid Democrats will win the seats, but Walker contends the lawsuit is a partisan, special interest effort to waste taxpayers' money and he's under no legal obligation to hold the elections.

Dane County Circuit Judge Josann Reynolds, whom Walker appointed in 2014, rejected all of his defense arguments in requiring him to issue an order no later than March 29 calling special elections within the next 11 weeks. Reynolds said Walker's interpretation of the law was inconsistent and incompatible with a strict interpretation of the Constitution, something she noted the conservative governor has long said he adheres to.

The case turned on interpretation of state law about when special elections must be called.

The law states elections must be called if they occur before the second Tuesday in May in an election year. Walker argued that only covers vacancies that happen after Jan. 1 of the same year as the election, and since these happened on Dec. 29, 2017, he's under no requirement to act. Plaintiffs contend the requirement applies to vacancies at any point prior to the second Tuesday of May in the election year, not just the same year as the election.

"That is textbook voter disenfranchisement," plaintiff's attorney Elisabeth Frost said. "I can't imagine a more clear case of disenfranchisement of the right to vote."

The judge agreed. Reynolds said Walker's interpretation of the law "flies in the face of reason," ''violates basic rules of grammar" and would lead to an "absurd result." She said voters would clearly suffer harm if the seats were vacant all year, noting that Walker could be forced to call a special election if the U.S. Supreme Court orders Wisconsin lawmakers to redraw political boundary maps in a redistricting case awaiting a ruling.

Frost said after the hearing she was gratified by the ruling and hoped Walker would end the legal battle and instead promptly call the special elections.

Walker spokeswoman Amy Hasenberg said the governor was discussing next steps with Department of Justice attorneys.

Two voters who live in the affected districts testified they were angry and insulted they didn't have a lawmaker to contact with their concerns.

"It's one thing it's vacant, it's another thing they're not going to fill it," said Jennifer Meyer, who lives in the town of Scott. "We have nobody representing the interests of our district in the state Senate right now and that upsets me."

Assistant Attorney General Steve Kilpatrick countered that while some voters may be harmed due to the vacancies, the damage does not rise to the legal requirement to force Walker to call special elections.

The pair of Republican legislators resigned two weeks after an upset Democratic victory in a state Senate district that President Donald Trump carried in 2016 and had been held by a Republican for 17 years.

The win emboldened Wisconsin Democrats who have been calling on Walker to call special elections in the other vacancies: one in the state Assembly and the other in the state Senate. Republicans hold an 18-14 majority in the Senate and a 63-35 advantage in the Assembly, so neither race threatens to change the balance of power.

Democrats, including Holder's group, have launched a coordinated effort to chip away at Republican dominance from lower-level offices on up.

The vacant Wisconsin seats were held by Republican Sen. Frank Lasee, of De Pere, and Rep. Keith Ripp, of Lodi. Both resigned to take jobs in Walker's administration. The Senate seat, which covers the Door County peninsula northeast of Green Bay, has been under Republican control for at least the past 40 years, while Ripp held the Assembly seat, in a rural area north of Madison, since 2008.

___

Follow Scott Bauer on Twitter at https://twitter.com/sbauerAPWASHINGTON (AP) - Congress was poised to pass a giant $1.3 trillion spending bill that would end the budget battles for now, as leaders cleared final Senate obstacles aafter conservatives objected to big outlays on Democratic priorities at a time when Republicans control the House, Senate and White House.

As the Senate began showdown votes on the bill, it became clear lawmakers would avoid the third federal shutdown this year, an outcome both parties wanted to avoid. But in crafting a sweeping deal that busts budget caps, they've stirred conservative opposition and set the contours for the next funding fight ahead of the midterm election.

The House easily approved the measure Thursday, 256-167, a bipartisan tally that underscored the popularity of the compromise, which funds the government through September. It beefs up military and domestic programs, delivering federal funds to every corner of the country.

Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, R-Wis., speaks during a news conference about the massive government spending bill moving through Congress, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, March 22, 2018. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

The Senate began voting just after midnight Friday morning after delays caused by conservatives running the clock in protest. The worry had been that without agreement, voting would have spilled into the weekend, past the midnight Friday deadline to fund the government.

"Shame, shame. A pox on both Houses - and parties," tweeted Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., who spent the afternoon tweeting details found in the 2,200-page bill that was released the night before. "No one has read it. Congress is broken."

Paul later said he'd not delay the legislation any longer, saying he'd made his point.

A fresh obstacle arose when Sen. James Risch, R-Idaho, tried forcing the removal of language renaming a forest in his home state after the late Cecil Andrus, a four-term Democratic Idaho governor. But that problem was also resolved.

The omnibus spending bill was supposed to be an antidote to the stopgap measures Congress has been forced to pass - five in this fiscal year alone - to keep government temporarily running amid partisan fiscal disputes.

Leaders delivered on President Donald Trump's top priorities of boosting Pentagon coffers and starting work his promised border wall, while compromising with Democrats on funds for road building, child care development, fighting the opioid crisis and more.

But the result has been unimaginable to many Republicans after campaigning on spending restraints and balanced budgets. Along with the recent GOP tax cuts law, the bill that stood a foot tall at some lawmakers' desks ushers in the return of $1 trillion deficits.

Trump only reluctantly backed the bill he would have to sign, according to Republican lawmakers and aides, who acknowledged the deal involved necessary trade-offs for the Democratic votes that were needed for passage despite their majority lock on Congress.

"Obviously he doesn't like this process - it's dangerous to put it up to the 11th hour like this," said Sen. David Perdue, R-Ga., who opposes the bill and speaks regularly to Trump. "The president, and our leadership, and the leadership in the House got together and said, Look, we don't like what the Democrats are doing, we got to fund the government."

White House legislative director Marc Short framed it as a compromise. "I can't sit here and tell you and your viewers that we love everything in the bill," he said on Fox. "But we think that we got many of our priorities funded."

Trying to smooth over differences, Republican leaders focused on military increases that were once core to the party's brand as guardians of national security.

"Vote yes for our military. Vote yes for the safety and the security of this country," said House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., ahead of voting.

But even that remained a hard sell. In all, 90 Republicans, including many from the conservative House Freedom Caucus, voted against the bill.

It was a sign of the entrenched GOP divisions that have made Ryan's job governing the majority difficult. They will likely repeat on the next budget battle in fall.

Democrats faced their own divisions, particularly after failing to resolve the stalemate over shielding young Dreamer immigrants from deportation as Trump's decision to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program has left it for the courts to decide.

Instead, Trump won $1.6 billion to begin building and replacing segments of the wall along the border with Mexico. The Congressional Hispanic Caucus opposed the bill.

Also missing from the package was a renewal of federal insurance subsidies to curb premium costs on the Affordable Care Act exchanges. Trump ended some of those payments as part of his effort to scuttle President Barack Obama's health care law, but Republicans have joined Democrats in trying to revive them.

Bipartisan efforts to restore the subsidies, and provide additional help for insurance carriers, foundered over disagreements on how tight abortion restrictions should be on using the money for private insurance plans. Senate Republicans made a last-ditch effort to tuck them insurance provisions into the bill, but Democrats refused to yield on abortion restrictions.

Still, Democrats were beyond pleased with the outcome. Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., chronicled the party's many gains, and noted they could have just have easily withheld votes Republicans needed to avert another shutdown.

"We chose to use our leverage to help this bill pass," Pelosi said.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said as the minority party in Congress, "We feel darn good."

___

Associated Press writers Matthew Daly and Jill Colvin contributed to this report.

Follow Mascaro on Twitter at https://twitter.com/LisaMascaro and Fram at https://twitter.com/AsFram

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., speak to reporters about the massive government spending bill moving through Congress, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, March 22, 2018. The bipartisan $1.3 trillion spending bill pours huge sums into Pentagon programs and domestic initiatives ranging from building roads to combatting the nation's opioid abuse crisis, but left Congress in stalemate over shielding young Dreamer immigrants from deportation and curbing surging health insurance premiums. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)LIMA, Peru (AP) - The latest on political turmoil in Peru (all times local):

6:20 p.m.

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro is celebrating the downfall of his fiercest critic - President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski of Peru.

In this handout photo provided by the Peruvian Presidential Press Office, President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski poses with his cabinet before addressing the nation and announcing his resignation from office, Wednesday, March 21, 2018. The embattled Peruvian leader offered his resignation to Congress ahead of a scheduled vote on whether to impeach the former Wall Street investor, according to a presidential aide. (Juanca Guzman Negrini/Presidencia de Peru via AP)

Maduro said Thursday on state TV that while Kuczynski has sought to bar Venezuela's leader from next month's Summit of the Americas, it is the former Wall Street investor who will conspicuously absent from the regional gathering in Peru.

Peruvian lawmakers are expected to vote Friday on whether to accept Kuczynski's offer to resign or instead hold a vote on impeaching him amid corruption allegations.

Taking aim at Peru's leader, Maduro said "the stench of corruption exploded in his face."

Kuczynski has been leading like-minded conservative leaders in Latin America in trying to isolate Venezuela's government for human rights abuses. It's unclear, however, if Kuczynski's successor would re-invite Maduro to the summit, and there is even talk that the conference scheduled to start in three weeks could be called off.

___

5:50 p.m.

Debate has begun in Peru's congress over whether to accept President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski's offer to resign.

Lawmakers are not expected to vote on the issue until Friday.

The debate is expected to be heated. But so far, only one of the four legislative blocs that have spoken says it want to reject Kuczynski's resignation offer and instead impeach him on corruption charges.

If congress does vote to accept Kuczynski's resignation, lawmakers would then swear in his replacement, Vice President Martin Vizcarra.

Opposition lawmakers have accused Kuczynski of failing to disclose $782,000 in payments from the giant Brazilian construction company Odebrecht to his private consulting firm over a decade ago when he was serving as a government minister.

Kuczynski has denied any wrongdoing.

___

11:45 a.m.

Court officials say a judge will consider a request to bar President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski from leaving the country if congress accepts the embattled leader's resignation.

Congress is expected to debate Thursday whether to accept Kuczynski's offer to step down or proceed with planned impeachment proceedings over his ties to Brazilian construction giant Odebrecht. Authorities did not address whether the request would be considered if the conservative leader is impeached.

Kuczynski would lose his presidential immunity after exiting the post regardless, making him more vulnerable to prosecution.

Opposition lawmakers accuse the president of failing to disclose $782,000 in payments from Odebrecht to his private consulting firm over a decade ago when he was serving as a government minister.

Kuczynski has denied any wrongdoing.

___

10:30 a.m.

Peru's congress is gearing up to consider whether or not to accept President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski's resignation following the release of several videos appearing to show allies offering state contracts in exchange for a vote against his pending impeachment.

Leaders of the powerful, opposition-controlled congress will begin debating late Thursday afternoon.

Some factions are already vowing to reject Kuczynski's resignation and proceed with a scheduled impeachment vote instead.

Such a move would not be unprecedented. Congress rejected former Peruvian strongman Alberto Fujimori's resignation in 2000 following a turbulent decade in power marred by grave human rights violations. Legislators then proceeded to impeach him instead.

The latest upheaval marks one of the worst political crises in Peru's recent history and is another fallout from the regionwide Odebrecht corruption scandal.ST. LOUIS (AP) - Four days before a Kansas State University graduate was due in court on charges that he sexually assaulted an unconscious man at a campus fraternity last fall, he sexually assaulted a University of Missouri-St. Louis student at gunpoint in an on-campus apartment, prosecutors allege.

Devonta Bagley, 23, of Belton, Missouri, is jailed on $500,000 bond on charges of sodomy, armed criminal action and burglary in the Missouri case, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported. He faces similar charges in Riley County, Kansas, where prosecutors say he sexually assaulted a 20-year-old inside the Sigma Chi fraternity house on Sept. 9 while the man was "unconscious or physically powerless."

Missouri court records didn't list an attorney for Bagley on Thursday and the Riley County prosecutor didn't immediately respond to a phone call seeking the name of Bagley's lawyer in the Kansas case.

Bagley was arrested in Kansas on Sept. 23 and posted $100,000 bail that day, according to court documents. As a condition of his bail, he was ordered not to have any contact with his alleged victim for 90 days and he was forbidden from the Sigma Chi fraternity property.

He was scheduled for a preliminary hearing in that case on March 15. But St. Louis County police say Bagley sexually assaulted an 18-year-old male UMSL student whom he didn't know on March 11 and was arrested two days later.

Bagley graduated from Kansas State with a sociology degree in the spring of 2017, university records show. Officials say Bagley was a graduate student at UMSL but was expelled in October after a student conduct hearing. A UMSL spokesman, Bob Samples, said he couldn't discuss the details of what led to Bagley's expulsion.

In a news release, Samples thanked law enforcement and said the "entire university family is sympathetic toward and supportive of the student who was the victim of this tragic crime."

___

Information from: St. Louis Post-Dispatch, http://www.stltoday.comSKOPJE, Macedonia (AP) - Greece's foreign minister arrived in Macedonia on Thursday for talks on resolving a decades-long dispute over the former Yugoslav republic's name.

Nikos Kotzias flew to the Macedonian capital, becoming the first Greek official to arrive in Skopje by plane in 12 years, after Macedonian authorities renamed the country's airport from "Alexander the Great" to "Skopje International Airport" in a goodwill gesture to Greece.

Direct flights between the two capitals stopped when Skopje named the airport after the ancient warrior king, which Greece objected to as a usurpation of its history.

The two countries have been at odds for a quarter-century over the name "Macedonia", which Greece claims harbors territorial aspirations on its own northern province of the same name. The dispute has prevented Macedonia, which gained independence from Yugoslavia in 1991, from joining NATO and the European Union.

But a new, more moderate government that came to power in Macedonia recently has led to renewed hopes that the issue can be resolved, and the two sides have intensified talks.

Kotzias' visit comes days after the two countries exchanged proposals on what the former Yugoslav republic's future name could be. There are no official details on the proposals, but the Greek proposal has been widely reported to be "Gorna Makedonija," which means "Upper Macedonia."

Macedonian Prime Minister Zoran Zaev has indicated he could accept a geographical qualifier such as "upper" or "north" as a compromise, but insists the new name must "respect the dignity" of Macedonia's people.

Greece says the name change must be accompanied by a change in Macedonia's constitution to assure the country has no "irredentist aspirations." Skopje opposes this, saying it amended its constitution once already in 1995 on Athens' demand.

Kotzias is to meet with Macedonian Foreign Minister Nikola Dimitrov, as well as with Zaev and opposition leaders on Friday. The two foreign ministers are to meet again in Vienna on March 30 with U.N. negotiator Matthew Nimetz.JACKSON, Miss. (AP) - Republican Sen. Thad Cochran of Mississippi on Thursday gave a farewell speech in the U.S. Senate, where he's the longest-serving current member of Congress.

"I'm optimistic about the future of our great nation," said Cochran, 80, who is retiring April 1 because of poor health.

Cochran served six years in the House before joining the Senate in 1978. He is the 10th longest-serving member of the Senate in history and is serving for the second time as chairman of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee. His departure comes as Congress is voting on a product of the committee's work - a $1.3 trillion spending bill that puts more money into the military and many domestic programs.

FILE - In this Jan. 10, 2018, file photo, Sen. Thad Cochran, R-Miss., appears at the Capitol for a vote in Washington. Cochran announced his retirement March 5 due to health issues. The state's governor will appoint Cindy Hyde-Smith to fill the vacancy, three state Republicans told The Associated Press on Tuesday, March 20. Hyde-Smith, the state's agriculture commissioner, would become Mississippi's first female member of Congress and would serve until a special election on Nov. 6. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File)

Senate colleagues paid tribute to Cochran, with Democrats and Republicans praising him repeatedly as a "gentle persuader" who is civil while working across party lines.

"He wrote the book on composure under pressure," Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said during the session shown on CSPAN2.

Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York said Cochran sought and received his support for Gulf Coast projects after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Years later, Cochran helped the Northeast after Superstorm Sandy.

"He had a long memory and knew how to work the legislative process," Schumer said.

Democrats and Republicans talked about Cochran's love of music and literature and the genuine interest he showed in meeting people when he traveled to other states and countries.

"He was nice to everyone, from the elevator operators to the highest officials around the world," Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine said.

Nearly three years remain in Cochran's term, and Republican Gov. Phil Bryant on Wednesday appointed Mississippi Agriculture Commissioner Cindy Hyde-Smith to temporarily succeed the senator. A nonpartisan special election will take place in November and the winner will complete Cochran's term, which ends in January 2021.

Hyde-Smith, who pledged Tuesday to support President Donald Trump, will face at least two other candidates - Democrat Mike Espy, a former U.S. House member who served as President Bill Clinton's first agriculture secretary, and tea party-backed Republican state Sen. Chris McDaniel, who nearly unseated Cochran in a bitter 2014 Republican primary.

Hyde-Smith will be the first woman to represent Mississippi in Congress. She served 12 years in the Mississippi Senate as a Democrat before becoming Republican in late 2010 and winning the statewide race for agriculture commissioner in 2011. McDaniel sent a fundraising email Wednesday criticizing Hyde-Smith: "Apparently, McConnell and his cronies would rather have another liberal Democrat in Washington than a principled conservative Republican."

Republicans are trying to maintain their thin Senate majority. Although Mississippi is conservative, GOP leaders are wary about splitting the party and losing a seat to a Democrat after something similar happened last year in Alabama.

Andy Taggart, an attorney who was chief of staff for Republican Gov. Kirk Fordice in the 1990s, said Wednesday that he might run in the special election to try to prevent either McDaniel or a Democrat from winning. Taggart said McDaniel showed a "lack of respect" for Cochran in the 2014 race.

____

Follow Emily Wagster Pettus on Twitter: http://twitter.com/EWagsterPettus .

Mississippi Agriculture Commissioner Cindy Hyde-Smith, left, appears with Gov. Phil Bryant, center, and Deborah Bryant after he selected Hyde-Smith to succeed fellow Republican Thad Cochran in the U.S. Senate, Wednesday, March 21, 2018, in Brookhaven, Miss. Cochran, who is 80, is stepping down April 1 because of poor health. (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis)MEXICO CITY (AP) - Eight people were killed and 11 wounded after gunmen burst into a social event in central Mexico.

The Guanajuato state prosecutors' office said Thursday the mass shooting took place a day prior in the town of Purisima del Rincon.

Prosecutors said gunmen pulled up in several vehicles, opened fire on those attending the event, and then fled toward the state of Jalisco.

There were no immediate details on the possible motive, but the region has recently seen violence.

Earlier this week, three film students disappeared on the outskirts of Guadalajara, the capital of Jalisco. On Thursday, hundreds of students marched to demand they be found.NEW YORK (AP) - A former Fox News anchor filed a defamation lawsuit on Thursday over comments by Bill O'Reilly it says were meant to damage the reputations of women who have accused him of harassment.

The suit by Laurie Dhue in federal court in Manhattan accuses O'Reilly of engaging in a "smear campaign" against his accusers after the former prime-time star or Fox settled their claims for millions of dollars. At least three other women have filed similar suits.

"As part of his desperate campaign to clear his name, O'Reilly published false statements about Dhue . calling her a liar, swearing that her allegations were fabricated in an effort to obtain a settlement," according to the suit, which seeks unspecified damages. It also accuses him of "falsely asserting that her purported claims against O'Reilly were politically motivated."

Fox ousted O'Reilly last year after The New York Times reported that at least five women with professional ties to him had received payouts totaling $13 million to settle claims of sexual harassment and other misbehavior. The newspaper said Dhue received $1 million.

There was no immediate response on Thursday to a request for comment from one of O'Reilly's lawyers. In court papers filed earlier this week in the suits brought by the three other women, his lawyers called the defamation claims "frivolous and wholly unsupported in law or fact."HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) - The Republican chief justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court lashed out Thursday at an effort by a group of GOP state lawmakers to impeach four Democratic justices over their rulings in a congressional redistricting case, calling it "an attack upon an independent judiciary."

Chief Justice Thomas Saylor issued a two-sentence statement on the impeachment drive by 12 Republicans in the state House of Representatives.

"I am very concerned by the reported filing of impeachment resolutions against justices of the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania related to the court's decision about congressional redistricting," Saylor said. "Threats of impeachment directed against justices because of their decision in a particular case are an attack upon an independent judiciary, which is an essential component of our constitutional plan of government."

Last month, Pennsylvania's highest court imposed a new congressional map for the state's 2018 elections after finding the old GOP-crafted map was unconstitutionally drawn. Democrats are hopeful the new district lines will let them flip several seats as part of their effort to reclaim the majority in the U.S. House.

The old map produced three straight election cycles in which Republican candidates won 13 of 18 congressional races, even though Democrats have a 5-4 statewide registration edge and prevailed in 18 of 24 statewide elections during the same period.

The 12 state representatives behind a series of impeachment resolutions, announced Tuesday, are among the 203-member House's more conservative members.

Their prime sponsor, Rep. Cris Dush of rural Jefferson County, denied the effort was an attack on an independent judiciary.

"When the judicial branch fails to follow the constitution, the constitutional answer is impeachment," Dush said. "I believe this action would fulfill our constitutional responsibilities and oaths."

The House Republican leader, however, went on the record in opposition to impeachment.

State Rep. Dave Reed said the Supreme Court was wrong to implement its own map but that "disagreement over the outcome of any particular case should not be grounds for impeachment."

The resolutions seek the impeachment of justices David Wecht, Debra Todd, Christine Donohue and Kevin Dougherty.

Democrats on the elected court hold a 5-2 majority.

After throwing out the old map, the justices gave lawmakers three weeks to enact a replacement that Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf would support. When that didn't happen, the four Democratic justices being targeted for possible impeachment voted to impose their own map.

Saylor and the other Republican on the court voted against throwing out the old map and making the court's own new map the law.

Republican leaders in the Legislature and eight incumbent Republican congressmen turned to federal courts to try to block the use of the new map in this year's elections. But on Monday, both a federal three-judge panel and the U.S. Supreme Court turned down separate requests to put it on hold.

Wolf has called the impeachment effort "an unprecedented and undemocratic attempt to retaliate against the judicial branch."

Lawmakers in at least a half-dozen states have sought in recent years to impeach or otherwise remove judges as a result of controversial decisions - including in some instances over same-sex marriage rulings - but without success, according to the National Center for State Courts.A teenage girl who was shot when a classmate opened fire inside their Maryland high school is brain dead and is being removed from life support, her mother said Thursday.

Melissa Willey told news reporters Thursday night that her daughter, 16-year-old Jaelynn Willey has 'no life left in her.' She said Jaelynn would be removed from life support during the evening, by the family's decision.

The mother, holding a young baby, said, 'On Tuesday ... our lives changed completely and totally forever. My daughter was hurt by a boy who shot her in the head and took everything from our lives.'

Scroll down for video

Melissa Willey told news reporters Thursday night that her daughter, 16-year-old Jaelynn Willey (pictured) has 'no life left in her'

Parents of Great Mills high school student Jaelynn Willey, Melissa Willey, and Daniel Willey, hold one of their nine children during a press conference at Prince George's Hospital Center

Police said Wednesday that the 16-year-old Jaelynn Willey (right), had recently broken up with the shooter, 17-year-old Austin Rollins (left)

Teachers and school employees depart Great Mills High School, the scene of a shooting, Tuesday

The teen was shot Tuesday by 17-year-old Austin Rollins at Great Mills High School in St. Mary's County.

Rollins died after shooting Willey. A school resource officer got there within a minute and fired a shot at Rollins, but it's not yet clear whether Rollins was killed by the officer's bullet or took his own life.

This undated photo provided by the St. Mary's Sheriff's Office, shows Deputy First Class Blaine Gaskill

The St. Mary's County Sheriff's Office said Wednesday Rollins and the girl had been in a relationship that recently ended.

'All indications suggest the shooting was not a random act of violence,' police said in a statement.

Willey had been in critical condition at the University of Maryland Prince George's Hospital Center. A fundraising page to help her family has raised more than $59,000.

Jaelynn was one of nine siblings, her mother said, and a member of the swim team.

'Jaelynn loves the snow. I wish that she had been home today to sled with her little siblings,' a YouCaring page, set up to pay for her medical bills, stated.

'Instead it's been 36 hours of being in critical condition after she was shot at her high school, a place that should be safe.'

Her uncle Timothy Cormie told CNN the family had been left heartbroken by her loss.

'Jaelynn is an amazing young lady, whose peaceful presence and love of her fellow students and family is known throughout her Maryland-based school. The second oldest of 9 children, Jaelynn is not only a role model to her siblings, but also a dedicated student and member of her school's swim team.

'She also selflessly helps take care of her brothers and sisters each and every day, whether at home, or at the beach, one of her favorite places to be. It is hard for us not to see her shining, smiling face right now, and to see her light up the room with her presence,' Cormier said.

The shooting broke out just before classes were to begin Tuesday, according to the sheriff's office, which said the gun used belonged to Rollins' father.

FBI and ATF were on the scene investigating the shooting with local law enforcement on Tuesday

Many of the students who were picked up by their parents after the shooting on Tuesday said they were afraid to go back to the school after what happened

The scenes at the school where the teens were picked up were emotional, which many parents rushing to give their shocked children hugs

A 14-year-old boy who was shot in the thigh during the encounter was released Wednesday from a hospital.

In an email Thursday to The Associated Press, his mother, Kimberly Dennis, said her family is 'eternally grateful' that her son, Desmond Barnes, is 'alive, doing well and in good spirits.'

She expressed sympathy for Willey and her family and added, 'We are also praying for the entire Great Mills High School family and young people around this country. As a community and nation, we must continue to work and fight for a world that is safe for our children.

Great Mills High School has about 1,600 students and is near the Patuxent River Naval Air Station, about 65 miles (104 kilometers) southeast of Washington.

St. Mary's County Sheriff Tim Cameron credited Deputy First Class Blaine Gaskill with preventing any more loss of life.

The other student injured in the Tuesday shooting was 14-year-old Desmond Barnes (pictured). Barnes has already been discharged from the hospital

Cameron said Gaskill, a six-year veteran with SWAT team training, responded within a minute and fired his weapon simultaneously with a final shot fired by Rollins. The officer was unharmed.

On Wednesday, authorities said the Glock handgun used in the shooting was legally owned by Rollins' father. In Maryland it is illegal for anyone under age 21 to possess a handgun unless it is required for their employment.

As Rollins identity came to light, it was revealed that one of his relatives was worried about his safety after learning about the attack.

'Prayers going out for my Brother in Law [redacted] and his family, his son Austins school was involved in an active shooter situation. We have still not heard if Austin Rollins is ok or not,' one close family member wrote.=

The Rollins clan appears to be a gun-friendly family.

Another close relative wrote on Facebook in 2011 their support of the Second Amendment.

'We ask that all gun owners put this on their wall. The Supreme Court of the United States has affirmed that the right ot keep and bear arms is a fundamental right of the individual. If you believe in the 2nd Amendment, and you are not afraid to show it, re-post this!!! ... I hope to see this re-posted a lot by my friends. Remember, if we outlaw guns, then only outlaws will have guns.'

Rollins was on the honor roll. His Facebook hasn't been updated since 2015, but shows Rollins in happy photos with friends, kayaking, and visiting the Daytona International Speedway.

Austin Wyatt Rollins, 17 (left), shot dead Jaelynn Willey in the school shooting on Tuesday

It's unclear whether Rollins (seen above in old photos) died from Gaskill's shot or his own

A YouCaring fund, started by a family friend to raise money for Willey's medical bills, stated that she loved the snow

Agents with the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives joined deputies at Great Mills High School as students endured a lengthy lockdown, cowering inside classrooms and a locker room while officers worked to make sure there were no more threats on campus on Tuesday.

Police eventually kicked in the locker room door, said Ziyanna Williams, a 14-year-old ninth-grader.

'They came in with guns, and they probably thought there might be another shooter, of course,' she said. 'About an hour or two later they came - more police came - and told us they would search us and search our bags and stuff.

Eventually, the students were escorted outside.

The school has about 1,600 students and is near the Patuxent River Naval Air Station, about 65 miles southeast of Washington. On Tuesday, ambulances, fire trucks and other emergency vehicles crowded the parking lot and the street outside, where about 20 school buses lined up in the rain to take students to nearby Leonardtown High School to be picked up by their parents.

Several of the students going home with their parents told reporters that they were afraid to go back to school after what happened.

At least one woman, who picked up two kids, said she wouldn't force them.

'Home school, the internet, they're not going back!' she said.

A student named Jonathan Freese called into CNN while he was in lockdown in his math class and said that he was told the shooting happened in the art hallway.

The school was quickly put into lockdown after the shooting on Tuesday. Students were then taken by bus to another nearby high school to be reunited with their parents

'I'm still a little shaken up. I didn't think it would happen,' Freese told CNN.

Senior Terrence Rhames told the Baltimore Sun that he knew exactly what was happening when he heard the a loud crack while standing outside his first period class.

He said he started running towards a nearby bathroom but realized it was a 'dead end'. Instead he turned around and headed for the nearest exit where he saw a girl fall to the ground out of the corner of his eye.

Maryland Congressman Steny Hoyer, the Democratic Whip, cancelled his usually weekly meeting on Capitol Hill to go to the school, which is located in the county where he lives.

He told NBC Washington that he 'sickened' that shootings continued to happen in schools, which should be 'free of threat'.

He said that the amount of mass shootings that have happened this year comes out to about one a week and is 'just unacceptable'.

'We sympathize. We empathize. We have moments of silence. But we dont have action,' Hoyer said. 'Wringing our hands is not enough.'

Sen. Ben Cardin, a Democrat, also spoke to reporters near the high school, saying that at a minimum, universal background checks and a ban on assault-style weapons are needed. He said he believes momentum is building for reform, fueled by student activism.

'I can tell you that Americans are listening to our students. I think our political system will respond,' he said.

Marylands Senate joined the House on Monday night to ban bump stocks, which enable a semi-automatic rifle to mimic a fully automatic weapon. Teachers union leaders issued statements Tuesday saying more policies must be changed nationwide to keep schools safe.

Republican Gov. Larry Hogan, meanwhile, accused the Democrat-led legislature of failing to take action on 'one of the most aggressive school safety plans in the country'.

The shooting comes just four days before the March for Our Lives, a demonstration in Washington, DC and in other cities across the country, calling for increased gun control. The march was organized by survivors of the February 14 school shooting in Parkland, Florida that left 17 dead.SEATTLE (AP) - A Canadian man who ran a helicopter-based drug-smuggling ring years before Washington state legalized marijuana pleaded guilty to a conspiracy charge Thursday, after fighting his extradition to the U.S. for much of the past decade.

Colin Hugh Martin, formerly of Malakwa, British Columbia, entered the plea in U.S. District Court in Seattle. He faces five to 40 years in prison, though the U.S. Attorney's Office said it would recommend no more than 10 years when he is sentenced in June.

The 46-year-old father of six admitted he headed a drug ring that flew marijuana and MDMA, or ecstasy, south into Washington state and exchanged it for cocaine, which was then flown north into Canada. One of his pilots, Sam Lindsay-Brown, hanged himself after flying into a law-enforcement trap in 2009, when federal agents met him when he landed in a remote clearing in northeastern Washington state.

Martin, 46, left school in eighth grade to go to work as a logger. In a 2009 interview at a restaurant his mother ran in Malakwa, about a seven-hour drive northeast of Vancouver, he told The Associated Press he became involved in the drug trade after he saw his best friend killed in a logging accident and the local salvage timber industry collapsed.

He first came to the attention of American authorities in the late 1990s, when he was indicted in federal court in Spokane for a drug smuggling operation that relied on airplanes. Martin never responded to those charges and was never extradited, but he was convicted in Canada based on the same conduct and sentenced in 2007 to 2 years in jail.

While he appealed, he continued smuggling by leasing or buying helicopters through a company, Gorge Timber, registered in his wife's name. Investigators ultimately arrested some of the ring's couriers and used them to build a case against Martin and his cohorts.

It's unclear how much the organization transported, but authorities seized more than 220 pounds (100 kilograms) of cocaine and nearly 600 pounds (270 kilograms) of marijuana. Then-U.S. Attorney Jeff Sullivan conceded, "This organization has been responsible for a much larger amount of drugs than what we were able to seize."

Martin was indicted in 2009 in Seattle along with five other people.

He fought his extradition to the U.S. partly on the grounds that federal prosecutors in Seattle had improperly stated in court documents that he had called the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, claimed to control most of the British Columbia illegal drug market and offered to act as an informant. He denied making such statements and said that suggesting he offered to be an informant endangered his life.

The American authorities insisted he had made the call and said it was relevant to the case against him. The Supreme Court of Canada rejected his claims in December, ending his extradition fight.

Among Martin's co-defendants was Jeremy Snow, a student pilot who was arrested in Idaho in 2009 after making his first flight for the drug ring. After pleading guilty and serving a nearly four-year sentence, Snow was murdered, along with his girlfriend, in Kelowna, British Columbia, in 2013.

Washington state legalized marijuana for recreational use in 2012. Sales at state-licensed stores began in 2014 and now top $500 million a year.

___

Follow Gene Johnson at https://twitter.com/GeneAPseattleRIO DE JANEIRO (AP) - Brazil's top court decided narrowly Thursday evening to give former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva temporary relief from prison on a corruption conviction until the justices meet again to decide the future of the left-leaning leader.

By a 6-5 vote, the court granted da Silva a safe-conduct that lasts until the end of the trial hearing his petition for habeas corpus. That session on the merits of the case is scheduled for April 4.

Lawyers for the former president sought the temporary relief because a warrant for the arrest of the once hugely popular politician could be issued by a lower federal court as soon as Monday.

Supporter of Brazil's former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva shout slogans in his support outside the Supreme Court in Brasilia, Brazil, Thursday, March 22, 2018. Justices on Brazil's top court are debating whether Da Silva can remain free while he appeals a corruption conviction. (AP Photo/Eraldo Peres)

Da Silva, who leads preference polls for October's presidential election, was convicted last year of trading favors with construction company OAS in return for the promise of a beachfront apartment. The conviction was upheld by a group of federal magistrates in January. The magistrates even added to the sentence, ruling that da Silva should spend 12 years and one month in prison.

According to Brazilian law, da Silva could begin serving his sentence because his conviction was upheld. He could continue to appeal to higher courts while in jail.

In an initial 7-4 vote Thursday, Brazil's top court decided that da Silva's petition was acceptable, delivering a blow to his adversaries who had expected the former president's habeas corpus request to be denied straight away.

For weeks, Chief Justice Carmen Lucia of the Supreme Federal Tribunal had not responded to da Silva's petition. But she changed course and scheduled Thursday's vote amid intense pressure, a sign of the weight that da Silva continues to wield despite a corruption conviction and several other cases pending against him.

Even a justice who is critical of the former president voted in his favor, while demonstrators calling for da Silva's imprisonment rallied outside the court in the capital of Brasilia.

"I am comfortable here because it is hard to say I have any sympathy for the Workers' Party," Justice Gilmar Mendes said, referring to da Silva's party.

Da Silva and his lawyers have always argued that the corruption conviction and all the cases against him amount to a witch hunt aimed at keeping him off the ballot this year.

Jose Roberto Batochio, da Silva's lawyer, argued that his client's constitutional rights would be violated if he wasn't allowed to remain free until there was a final verdict, a process that could take many years.

"Brazilians will not accept living under an authoritarian heel," said Batochio.

Attorney General Raquel Dodge disagreed, reminding justices that they set a precedent in 2016 when they voted that convicts could be jailed after an initial appeal was upheld, even if there were still more appeals pending or planned.

"Many who have studied that decision believe it's been important to cease with the impunity in the country," she said.

Da Silva is on tour in southern Brazilian cities in an attempt to keep his political power and swing public opinion against his arrest. Asked by journalists earlier on Thursday about the court's decision, he replied: "I don't act based on expectations."

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Associated Press writer Peter Prengaman reported this story in Rio de Janeiro and AP writer Mario Savarese reported from Sao Paulo.

A woman waves a Brazilian flag outside the Supreme Court in favor of arresting former Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in Brasilia, Brazil, Thursday, March 22, 2018. Da Silva launched a book last week in which he says he is "ready" to go to jail and serve a 12-year and one-month sentence on a corruption charge conviction. (AP Photo/Eraldo Peres)

A person wearing a T-shirt that reads in Portuguese "The people are changing Brazil." and holding an inflatable doll of Brazil's former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva wearing a prisoner's uniform, rallies in support of arresting Da Silva outside the Supreme Court in Brasilia, Brazil, Thursday, March 22, 2018. Da Silva launched a book last week in which he says he is "ready" to go to jail and serve a 12-year and one-month sentence on a corruption charge conviction. (AP Photo/Eraldo Peres)

A man dressed in a costume of Brazil's former President Luia Ignacio Lula da Silva wearing a prisoner's uniform performs by photos of Supreme Court ministers during protest in favor of arresting Da Silva in Brasilia, Brazil, Thursday, March 22, 2018. Da Silva launched a book last week in which he says he is "ready" to go to jail and serve a 12-year and one-month sentence on a corruption charge conviction. In the banner written in Portuguese "Against Brazil." (AP Photo/Eraldo Peres)

Supporters of Brazil's former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva hold up a banner that reads in Portuguese "Free Lula!" and shout slogans in his support outside the Supreme Court in Brasilia, Brazil, Thursday, March 22, 2018. Da Silva launched a book last week in which he says he is "ready" to go to jail and serve a 12-year and one-month sentence on a corruption charge conviction. (AP Photo/Eraldo Peres)

Supporters of Brazil's former President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva place posters of current President Michel Temer, left, and Supreme Court President Carmem Lucia outside the Supreme Court as they rally against Lula's possible arrest in Brasilia, Brazil, Thursday, March 22, 2018. Da Silva launched a book last week in which he says he is "ready" to go to jail and serve a 12-year and one-month sentence on a corruption charge conviction. (AP Photo/Eraldo Peres)WASHINGTON (AP) - The $1.3 trillion spending bill the House approved Thursday is so big that lawmakers are using it as a prop.

A foot tall and 2,232 pages long, the legislation keeping the government running through September has plenty for many members of Congress to like and for others to detest.

No. 2 House Democratic leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland slammed the stack of paper onto a House clerk's desk as he denounced the lack of time lawmakers had to digest it, shouting, "Join me in the well if you've read this bill."

The Capitol is seen before dawn Wednesday after a night of negotiating on the government spending bill, in Washington, March 21, 2018. Talks over a $1.3 trillion omnibus bill are almost complete as the White House and Capitol Hill Democrats ironed out deals on a first round of funding for President Donald Trump's U.S.-Mexico border wall. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

No one budged. To have met his challenge, Hoyer's colleagues would have needed to skip sleep and cover 131 pages an hour between its Wednesday evening introduction and House passage Thursday afternoon.

A look at the bill's highlights:

-$700 billion for defense, $61 billion over the last year, biggest annual defense boost in 15 years. Increases for weapons procurement including 14 Navy ships, bolstering missile defenses. Funds 2.4 percent pay raise for troops.

-$591 billion for domestic programs. Almost $5 billion to battle abuse of opioid drugs, $3 billion more than last year. National Institutes of Health get $37 billion, up $3 billion from 2017. More money for road building, rural water projects, the FBI, NASA, the IRS. Provides $4 million for anti-harrassment training for lawmakers and congressional aides.

-$1.57 billion for President Donald Trump to begin building his wall with Mexico, and to generally bolster border security.

-Holds the Environmental Protection Administration to last year's $8 billion. Rejects Trump effort to cut spending for cleaning up Great Lakes, Chesapeake Bay, other areas.

-$380 million to improve election security.

-Prods federal agencies, states to send records to the federal background check system for gun buyers that they're already supposed to provide.

-Fixes mistake in GOP tax bill giving tax advantage to farmers selling to cooperatives instead of to other buyers. Democrats in return won a more generous low-income tax credit.

-Bars employers from taking workers' tips, lets workers who successfully sue recover tips plus damages.

-Eases ability of states to get federal money for abstinence education.

-No specific money for proposed new rail tunnel under Hudson River. An aide to a chief proponent, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., says the so-called Gateway project should still get more than half of the $900 million sought.

-No protections against deportation for hundreds of thousands of young Dreamer immigrants, which Trump has halted. No penalties Republicans wanted for "sanctuary cities" that refuse to help federal authorities find immigrants here illegally.

-No restoration of federal payments that Trump ended for insurers who lower deductibles and co-payments for lower-earning consumers, no new subsidies to help insurers cover expensive customers. Both proposals, which had bipartisan support, were aimed at curbing the growth of premiums. Bargainers clashed over many differences, including proposed GOP abortion restrictions.

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Associated Press writer Matthew Daly contributed to this report.Boko Haram extremists have returned almost all of the 110 girls abducted from their Nigerian boarding school a month ago with an ominous warning, witnesses said.

The fighters rolled into Dapchi at around 2am local time in nine vehicles and the girls were left in the centre of town.

As terrified residents emerged from their homes, the extremists said this is a warning to you all, resident Baana Musa told the Associated Press.

Ministers of Information and Defence have just briefed the press ahead of the Federal Executive Council (FEC) Meeting.



The released Girls are in Dapchi and being documented; Situation is developing; release is outcome of backchannel negotiations; no ransoms were paid. pic.twitter.com/wajHHCaGUd  Presidency Nigeria (@NGRPresident) March 21, 2018

We did it out of pity. And dont ever put your daughters in school again, the extremists said.

Boko Haram means Western education is forbidden in the Hausa language.

Nigerias government said 101 of the 110 schoolgirls had been confirmed freed and that the number would be updated after the remaining ones have been documented.

No ransoms were paid, information minister Lai Mohammed said in a statement.

The girls were released through back-channel efforts and with the help of some friends of the country, and it was unconditional.

The Government Girls Science and Technical College in Dapchi (AP)

Family members travelled to the town on Wednesday morning.

When I get there we will do a headcount to see if all of them have been released, said Bashir Manzo, whose 16-year-old daughter was among those kidnapped during the February 19 attack.

Mr Manzo confirmed that his daughter was among those freed.

As I speak to you there is jubilation in Dapchi, he said.

The mass abduction and the government response brought back painful memories of the 2014 attack on a boarding school in Chibok.

Boko Haram militants abducted 276 girls, and about 100 of them have never returned.

Luggage belonging to the kidnapped girls left in the dormitory of the Government Girls Science and Technical College in Dapchi (Jossy Ola/AP)

Some girls were forced to marry their captors, and many had children fathered by the militants.

The latest mass abduction is thought to have been carried out by a Boko Haram splinter group aligned with Islamic State, one that has criticised the leader of the main Boko Haram organisation for targeting civilians and has focused instead on military and Western targets.

Residents in Dapchi fled on Wednesday morning upon hearing that Boko Haram vehicles were heading towards the town.

We fled but, from our hiding, we could see them and surprisingly, we saw our girls getting out of the vehicles, Umar Hassan told the AP.

They assembled the girls and talked to them for some few minutes and left without any confrontation, said another resident, Kachallah Musa.

The girls were at hospital in Dapchi and the counsellors are there with them, the information minister told reporters.

GREAT NEWS from Dapchi, Yobe State. Thank God for the safe return of our sisters. Alhamdulillah!  Bashir Ahmad (@BashirAhmaad) March 21, 2018

As with the released Chibok schoolgirls, they will be quarantined and be counselled before they go back to their schools.

Their release came a day after an Amnesty International report accused the Nigerian military of failing to heed several warnings of the imminent attack last month.

The military has called the report an outright falsehood.

Nigerias government celebrated the girls release.

GREAT NEWS from Dapchi, Yobe State. Thank God for the safe return of our sisters. Alhamdulillah! an aide to President Muhammadu Buhari, Bashir Ahmad, said on Twitter.The unarmed constable murdered in the Westminster Bridge terror attack was a proud and courageous police officer who did his job and never wanted any fuss, his friend has said.

Pc Shaun Cartwright paid tribute to Keith Palmer, who was killed as he stood guard at the Palace of Westminster on March 22 last year.

In a statement released through Scotland Yard he said: Keith loved being a police officer, he just wanted to help people and do his best.

A police officer holds a picture of Pc Keith Palmer (Frank Augstein/PA)

Keith was always happy, always the first to help anyone out, first in to work and the last one out.

He was a proud and courageous police officer who did his job and never wanted any fuss or to be the centre of attention.

Keith was a true and loyal friend, utterly reliable.

Most of all I will remember him as a family man who idolised his wife, daughter and his family; theyre the important ones that I think about a year on from the Westminster attack.

Senior officers are expected to attend a number of private memorial services on Thursday to mark the first anniversary of the atrocity, but the force has not made details public.

Pc Palmers name will be one of 1,400 inscribed on the new UK Police Memorial being built in Staffordshire, commemorating officers who were killed on duty.

Another 4,000 of those who died on duty will be remembered inside the memorial.

Supporters have been asked to donate 5 towards the scheme, for which 3.1 million has been raised of a total 4 million cost.

It includes an education programme to teach children about policing and support scheme for bereaved families.

Sir Hugh Orde, chair of trustees of the UK Police Memorial, said: This has been an unprecedented year for policing with officers and staff repeatedly putting themselves in danger to keep the public safe and protecting them from harm.

Sadly, in March last year we saw one of my policing colleagues Pc Keith Palmer lose his life during a terrorist attack in London whilst protecting our freedoms and safeguarding our democracy.

Keiths death put greater emphasis on the need to create a memorial where the nation can go to commemorate our police service.Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar hopes to agree guidelines on the future relationship between the EU and UK at this weeks European Council summit.

Discussions in Brussels between European leaders on Friday will focus on progress in the Brexit negotiations.

On Monday the UK and EU agreed terms for a Brexit transition period.

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar is holding Brexit discussions with other European leaders on Friday. Niall Carson/PA.

The draft text of a withdrawal treaty includes an agreement that there must be a backstop solution to ensure that there is no hard border on the island of Ireland if no other answers are found.

The Irish Government has insisted the UK has provided a cast-iron guarantee that will ensure no physical infrastructure, checks, or controls at the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic after withdrawal,

Without any other broader trade solution Northern Ireland would continue to follow EU regulations which affect the island.

Most of the detail around how the border arrangements would operate have not been agreed.

Mr Varadkar said: On Friday we will meet in Article 50 format to discuss the Brexit negotiations.

This is an important moment in the Article 50 negotiations and it is hoped that we can agree guidelines on the future relationship between the EU and the UK.

I am pleased that the UK has now agreed that a backstop solution to avoid a hard border proposed in December, will form part of the legal text, and that all the issues identified by the EU side in the draft will be addressed, to deliver a legally sound solution to avoid a hard border on our island.

Prime Minister May confirmed this in a letter to President Tusk on Monday.

Discussions over Thursday and Friday will also focus on jobs, growth and competitiveness, external relations, the future of Europe and particularly digital taxation, and further and better economic and monetary union.

On Thursday European leaders will discuss and adopt conclusions on jobs, growth, competitiveness including the Single Market, social issues, and trade.

They will also consider external relations including Turkey and the Western Balkans.

Leaders discussions are intended to facilitate open exchanges of views on the future of Europe.

Mr Varadkar added: The main focus this evening will be on digital taxation.

We believe that global solutions are needed to ensure that tax is paid by companies where value is created and profits are generated, reflecting the highly international nature of the digital economy.

I will strongly argue that the EU should wait for the OECD to complete its work before deciding on how to act, and should only do so in the context of agreement on an international level.Boots has replaced Marks & Spencer at the top of a ranking of brands among women.

The pharmacy chain climbed from third place in last years YouGov BrandIndexs Womens Rankings despite sparking controversy when saying it would not lower the price of its generic brand of emergency hormonal contraception as it did not want to be accused of incentivising inappropriate use  a decision it later reversed.

John Lewis took second place in the rankings, followed by Heinz, while M&S dropped to fourth place, one place ahead of BBC One.

YouGov BrandIndexs Womens Rankings 2018 (YouGov/PA)

The rankings use YouGovs brand tracking data and are based upon whether a respondent has a positive or negative impression of a brand.

Although Boots achieved the highest score overall, M&S took the top position among those aged between 35 and 49 and the over 50s.

Swedish furniture giant Ikea is the most popular among those aged between 18 and 34.

Amelia Brophy, UK head of data products at YouGov, said: Despite a tough time for high street retailers, Boots has cemented itself as a force among female shoppers.

Womens impression of the brand has improved in the face of some negative press around its morning after pill pricing, which threatened to damage its reputation.

She added: M&S remains a well-regarded brand, despite its drop from the top spot. As wed expect, it is particularly popular among middle-aged and older women.

It has enacted various strategies to appeal to younger consumers, and that still remains a challenge.

The rankings also reveal which brands have seen the biggest increase in impression among women over the past year, with Netflix taking the most-improved spot with a score increase of 7.3 points.

YouGovs ranking of most improved brands among women. (YouGov/PA)

McDonalds achieved the second most-improved place with a score increase of 6.8 points, followed by discount retailer B&M bargains, Comparethemarket.com and Tesco.

:: YouGov interviews 2,000 women per day, with fieldwork undertaken between March 1 2017 to February 28.Albert Squares residents are in for a shock when Kat Slater makes a surprise return as they are making plans for her funeral.

Jean and Mo Slater (Gillian Wright and Laila Morse) have already returned to the soap, with Mo claiming that Kat is dead.

The people of Walford rally together and hold a fundraiser in her honour to raise money for a send off.

Little do they know that all is not as it seems, and Kat (Jessie Wallace) is actually on her way back to the Square and is heading straight for The Vic.

Kat returns to Walford (Kieron McCarron/BBC)

How will the residents react when they discover the truth  and what is really going on?

Meanwhile, actress Lacey Turner, who plays Stacey Slater, has said the family reunion spells big trouble for her character.

The Slaters coming back just sort of ruins Staceys life, she said.

They just come back and cause a lot of trouble and expect Stacey to put it all back together.

The actress said she was thrilled when she heard her soap family were returning  but admitted it makes it a little harder to get work done.

I love being around them and I love working with them and I think its lovely for Stacey to have her family back, she said.

Lacey Turner (PA)

Were quite useless working together because all we do is laugh. We spend most of our time laughing and trying to get some work done.

Viewers can see Kat return at 9pm on BBC One on Thursday March 22.

Two episodes will air on Thursday, one at 7.30pm and one at 9pm.Serena Williams tumbled out of the Miami Open on Wednesday after a straight sets defeat to Indian Wells champion Naomi Osaka.

The Japanese went all the way in last weeks BNP Paribas Open, defeating Maria Sharapova and world number one Simona Halep along the way, and she added Williams scalp in supreme style.

The 20-year-old was dominant from the off and clinched a 6-3 6-2 victory over the 23-time grand slam champion in 78 minutes.

Serena Williams crashed out in Miami (Adam Davy/PA)

Williams was playing in just her second event since returning to the tour after giving birth to her daughter last September.

Three-time Miami Open champion Victoria Azarenka, playing just her fourth event since the birth of her son, claimed a 6-3 6-0 win over American Cici Bellis.

Azarenka, the winner in 2009, 2011 and 2016, dispatched the 18-year-old in just over an hour.

Feeling Vik-torious!@vika7 nets on an impressive 6-3, 6-0 win in her #MiamiOpen return against CiCi Bellis. pic.twitter.com/tySuKBTqIA  Miami Open (@MiamiOpen) March 21, 2018

Bethanie Mattek-Sands was beaten in her first competitive outing on the WTA Tour since a horror fall at Wimbledon last year.

The American had been sidelined since dislocating her right kneecap and rupturing a tendon when her leg buckled during her second round singles match against Sorana Cirstea at SW19 last July.

The 32-year-old doubles specialist was unable to make a winning return, having been given a wild card spot in Miami, as she went down to a 6-2 7-5 defeat to Frances Alize Cornet.

Nunca es facil lidiar con una lesion. Le deseo a @AnisimovaAmanda una pronta recuperacion.



Never easy to deal with injuries. Wishing @AnisimovaAmanda a quick recovery.@WTA @MiamiOpen pic.twitter.com/5KGInoBeIi  Garbine Muguruza (@GarbiMuguruza) March 21, 2018

Third seed Garbine Muguruza of Spain advanced to the third round after her opponent, 16-year-old American Amanda Anisimova, withdrew due to a foot injury.

Katie Boulter exited at the first hurdle in her maiden premier event appearance after suffering a 6-4 7-5 defeat to Taipeis Hsieh Su-wei.

The 21-year-old beat Canadas Carol Zhao in qualifying to move into the first round proper but could not handle the experience and drop shot of Hsieh.

Hsieh won both sets with a delicate drop shot, the first set perhaps fortuitously via a net cord.

However, reaching the first round will see Boulter climb into the top 200 next week.Royal drama The Crown has been nominated for seven gongs at the Bafta TV Craft Awards.

The lavish second series of the Netflix show, starring Claire Foy and Matt Smith, leads the way with the most nods, including costume design and drama writer.

It comes after the producers of the big-budget show apologised to its stars after it emerged that Smith was paid more than Foy.

Taboo, the BBC1 drama starring Tom Hardy, has six nominations, including costume design, make-up and hair.

Taboo star Tom Hardy (Ian West/PA)

Blue Planet II, which returned to the BBC after 16 years, receives five nods, along with sci-fi series Black Mirror and gang drama Peaky Blinders.

Black Mirrors Charlie Brooker is up against The Crowns Peter Morgan, Peaky Blinders Steven Knight and Three Girls Nicole Taylor for drama writer.

In the writer: comedy category, Peter Kay, Sian Gibson and Paul Coleman are up for Peter Kays Car Share, while Catastrophes Sharon Horgan and Rob Delaney are also in the running.

Peter Kays Car Share (BBC/Goodnight Vienna Productions)

Amazon receives its first British Academy Television Craft Award nomination for The Grand Tour, for sound: factual.

The ceremony will be held in London on April 22, hosted by Episodes actor Stephen Mangan.More pupils took term-time holidays last year, according to new figures, while the proportion of parents fined for taking their youngsters out of school without permission fell.

Official figures show around one in six youngsters (16.9%) missed at least a half day of lessons during the 2016/17 academic year, compared to 14.7% the year before.

Separate data published by the Department for Education shows the number of penalty notices issued to mothers and fathers for their childs unauthorised absence dropped by 5.4% between the two academic years.

The majority of fines issued  more than three-quarters (77.5%)  were for unauthorised holidays, the statistics show.

Pupils missing at least half a day of school due to unauthorised family holiday. Infographic from PA Graphics.

The latest figures cover the period after a father won a high-profile High Court case in May 2016 over taking his daughter out of school for a holiday to Disney World, Florida, without permission.

It suggests that after this ruling, many mothers and fathers took decisions to take term-time breaks believing it was unlikely they would face action for doing so.

The case was later referred to the Supreme Court, where the father involved, Jon Platt, lost in April last year.

The latest Government figures show the overall unauthorised absence rate  pupils missing lessons for any reason without permission  rose from 1.1% to 1.3% between 2015/16 and 2016/17.

The rate is at its highest level since records began, according to the statistics, which cover state schools in England.

This increase in unauthorised absence is due to an increase in absence due to family holidays that were not agreed by the school, Government statisticians said.

Separate figures on penalty notices show there were 149,321 fines handed out in 2016/17, compared with 157,879 the previous year.

A Department for Education spokesman said: Children only get one chance at an education and evidence shows that every extra day of school missed can affect a pupils chances of achieving good GCSEs.

Therefore we believe that no child should be taken out of school without good reason  and the Supreme Court agrees with us.

The rules on term-time absences are clear and we have put schools back in control by supporting them  and local authorities  to use their powers to deal with unauthorised absence.Coronation Street actor Sean Wilson has not ruled out a permanent return to the soap.

The 52-year-old will be back on the Cobbles on Thursday night for the first time since 2005 as part of a drug rape storyline involving his on-screen son, David Platt (Jack P Shepherd).

Wilson  who first appeared in the soap in 1985  described his return as akin to putting on an old jumper.

Sean Wilson (ITV)

David announces he's taking the kids to visit Martin in Liverpool!



Join him tomorrow (Thursday) at 8.30pm to find out what happens... #Corrie pic.twitter.com/OeLKgaasFK  Coronation Street (@itvcorrie) March 21, 2018

He told ITVs Lorraine: I walked into the building  Angela was there at the door, who was always there at the door.

The make-up girls were all the same girls, went on the set and same cameramen, every corner I walked around it was someone familiar.

He added: The first scene is with Jack and I just walked on to the set and I think the first or second take they were like Thanks very much, that was very good, boys.

I said to Jack Oh my god, this is like rolling back the years.

Asked if he would be keen to return permanently, Wilson said: I think Ive made it clear the character has enough links within the show. Past relationships, marriages, children, grandchildren  theres quite a bit to go at.

He added that Martin would bump into his ex-wife, and Davids mother, Gail Platt (Helen Worth), during his time back on the street.

After leaving the soap, Wilson launched award-winning cheese company Saddleworth Cheese, and has worked in several Michelin-starred restaurants.President Donald Trump has lashed out at Joe Biden for wanting to beat the hell out of him, saying the former vice president would go down fast and hard, crying all the way.

The Republican president tweeted on Thursday: Crazy Joe Biden is trying to act like a tough guy.

Actually, he is weak, both mentally and physically, and yet he threatens me, for the second time, with physical assault.

Joe Biden said he would "beat the hell" out of Donald Trump (Gene J. Puskar/AP)

He doesnt know me, but he would go down fast and hard, crying all the way. Dont threaten people Joe!

Mr Biden spoke at an anti-sexual assault rally in Florida on Tuesday and cited lewd comments Mr Trump made in a 2005 Access Hollywood tape about grabbing women.

The Democrat, who served as vice president under Barack Obama, said: If we were in high school, Id take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him.One million Scots are living in poverty after they have paid their rent or mortgage, new figures have revealed.

Scottish Government statistics showed that in 2016-17 1,020,000 individuals were classed as being in relative poverty after housing costs had been taken into consideration.

Over the three-year rolling period 2014 to 2017, the figure was 1,000,000 a year  a rise from 970,000 in the previous three years and the highest total since 2002 to 2005.

New figures show one million Scots living in poverty (Yui Mok/PA)

Almost one in five (19%) of Scots are now in relative poverty after paying for housing.

Communities Secretary Angela Constance criticised the damaging impact of the UK Governments austerity agenda, saying this meant Holyrood ministers are fighting poverty with one hand tied behind our back.

New poverty statistics for Scotland have been published today by the Scottish Government, showing that 1 million people in Scotland are currently experiencing poverty. We are calling for this to be used as a catalyst for more action. Read more here: https://t.co/GYBzC8UmL8  Poverty Alliance (@PovertyAlliance) March 22, 2018

The figures also showed 230,000 children  24% of youngsters  in relative poverty after housing costs in 2016-17  down from 260,000 the previous year.

However, the data for the 2014 to 2017 period showed 24% of youngsters affected, compared to 23% in 2013 to 2016 and 21% in 2011 to 2014

Meanwhile, there were 160,000 pensioners in relative poverty in 2016-17 after housing costs, up from 140,000 in 2015-16.

People are regarded as being in relative poverty if they receive less than 60% of the UK median income  with the threshold for this varying depending on how many adults and children are in each household.

A single adult with an income of less than 9,700 a year before housing costs are met is classed as being in relative poverty, with the threshold rising to 22,200 a year for a family with two adults and two children.

Two-thirds (66%) of children in relative poverty after housing costs had been met were living in families where at least one adult was working, the 2014 to 2017 figures showed  up from 64% in the previous three years.

Peter Kelly, director of the Poverty Alliance, said: It cannot be right that one million people are now living in poverty in Scotland and that ever more people are having their choices restricted, their opportunities limited and their efforts to get by made even more difficult.

Low pay, rising living costs and unstable work mean that, for many, choices between whether to heat their home or pay their rent have become commonplace.

Mark Ballard, Scottish head of Save the Children, said: Its unacceptable that a growing number of children across Scotland are experiencing poverty, with families struggling to afford a decent standard of living.

These worrying figures should be the catalyst for clear action to create a fair start for every child in Scotland, which will reduce the devastating blow poverty delivers to children and their futures.

Ms Constance said the Government was absolutely committed to reducing poverty and tackling the deeply-ingrained inequalities that exist across Scotland.

She also stressed Scotland is the only part of the UK with targets to eradicate child poverty  with ministers also having committed a further 50 million to the Tackling Child Poverty Fund.

Ms Constance said: These figures show the scale of the challenge we face, which is why we are committed to actions that make life better now as well as driving long-term change.

We know that in the face of UK Government cuts and continuing austerity, which are having a damaging impact on thousands of Scottish households, our actions mean we are fighting poverty with one hand tied behind our back.

That will not stop us continuing to be determined to tackle poverty and we will publish our tackling child poverty delivery plan next week which will deliver strong actions to reduce the number of families living in poverty.One of surrealist artist Salvador Dalis white lobster telephones could be lost from the UK unless a buyer steps in to meet the price tag of more than 850,000.

Arts Minister Michael Ellis has put a temporary export bar on the artwork, Lobster Telephone (White Aphrodisiac), by Salvador Dali and Edward James, to give buyers a chance to keep it in the UK.

It is one of eleven lobster telephones commissioned in 1938 by James, Dalis patron and an English poet known for his promotion of the surrealist movement.

Dalis lobster telephone is at risk of being exported from the UK (DDCMS/PA)

Inspiration for the telephones came in 1936 when Dali, James and others were eating lobsters and one of the discarded shells landed on a telephone, experts said.

Each of the telephones, seven of which were hand-painted white and four painted red, is slightly different and therefore unique.

James owned a private collection of surrealist work, including both versions of the lobster telephone, at Monkton, his country house in West Sussex.

Today most of the white versions are in museums abroad, including in public collections in Rotterdam, Florida, Johannesburg, Minneapolis and Lisbon.

Mr Ellis said: Salvador Dali was one of the greatest artists of the 20th century. This iconic work was created in the UK, and I want it to remain here.

It is important that we keep world-class art in this country and I hope a buyer can be found to save it for the nation.

The decision to issue a temporary export bar on the piece follows a recommendation by the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art and Objects of Cultural Interest (RCEWA), administered by The Arts Council.

RCEWA member Richard Calvocoressi said the importance of the piece could not be overestimated.

He said: With its suggestion of both eroticism and menace, pleasure and pain, Lobster Telephone (White Aphrodisiac) is a classic surrealist conceit, recalling the trap sculptures of Giacomettis surrealist phase.

It also anticipates by half a century the confrontational but also playful sculptures made of manufactured and natural found objects by artists such as Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst.

A decision on issuing an export licence has been deferred until June 21, with the possibility of extending the deadline until September 21 if a serious intention is made to buy the artwork at the recommended price of 853,047 (plus VAT of 29,000).Prime Minister Theresa May is to hold a bilateral meeting with the Irish Taoiseach in Brussels later on Thursday.

The border between Northern Ireland and the Republic is one of the most vexing issues facing Brexit negotiators.

Irish premier Leo Varadkar is hoping to agree guidelines on the future relationship between the EU and UK at this weeks European Council summit of leaders, with the focus on progress in the negotiations.

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar is to hold a bilateral meeting with Prime Minister Theresa May (Niall Carson/PA)

On Monday the UK and EU agreed terms for a transition period.

The draft text of a withdrawal treaty includes an agreement that there must be a backstop solution to ensure there is no hard border on the island of Ireland if no other answers are found.

The Irish Government has insisted the UK has provided a cast-iron guarantee that will ensure no physical infrastructure, checks or controls at the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic after withdrawal.

Without any other broader trade solution, Northern Ireland would continue to follow EU regulations which affect the island.

Most of the detail around how the border arrangements would operate have not been agreed.

Mr Varadkar said: On Friday we will meet in Article 50 format to discuss the Brexit negotiations.

This is an important moment in the Article 50 negotiations and it is hoped that we can agree guidelines on the future relationship between the EU and the UK.

I am pleased that the UK has now agreed that a backstop solution to avoid a hard border proposed in December, will form part of the legal text, and that all the issues identified by the EU side in the draft will be addressed, to deliver a legally sound solution to avoid a hard border on our island.

Prime Minister May confirmed this in a letter to (European Council) President (Donald) Tusk on Monday.

Discussions over Thursday and Friday will also focus on jobs, growth and competitiveness, external relations, the future of Europe and particularly digital taxation, and further and better economic and monetary union.

On Thursday, European leaders will discuss and adopt conclusions on jobs, growth, competitiveness including the Single Market, social issues, and trade.

They will also consider external relations including Turkey and the Western Balkans.

Leaders discussions are intended to facilitate open exchanges of views on the future of Europe.

Mr Varadkar added: The main focus this evening will be on digital taxation.

We believe that global solutions are needed to ensure that tax is paid by companies where value is created and profits are generated, reflecting the highly international nature of the digital economy.

I will strongly argue that the EU should wait for the OECD to complete its work before deciding on how to act, and should only do so in the context of agreement on an international level.Carl Framptons fight with Nonito Donaire on April 21 will be for the WBO interim featherweight title, promoter Frank Warren has announced.

The winner of the already-significant fight, at Belfasts SSE Arena, will therefore earn the right to challenge defending WBO featherweight champion Oscar Valdez, of Mexico.

Frampton, 31, is expected to next fight the winner of Mays match-up between Josh Warrington and IBF champion Lee Selby should he overcome 35-year-old Filipino Donaire, but he said: Oscar Valdez must face the interim champion when he is ready and thats a big incentive.

Carl Frampton fights Nonito Donaire at Belfasts SSE Arena on April 21

The Valdez fight is very appealing to me and obviously the winner of Selby-Warrington is also equally as appealing. The Valdez fight would get a lot more attention on both sides of the globe rather than just in the UK.

The winner of Selby-Warrington would be a big fight in the UK but a fight with Valdez would be a huge worldwide. Obviously he has an injury that he needs to recover from but theres a lot of options for me now and its always good to have options in this game.

Valdez, 27, earlier this month made the latest defence of his title when defeating Framptons long-term rival Scott Quigg, but suffered a broken jaw en route to victory.An inquest into the death of Russian businessman Nikolay Glushkov has opened at West London Coroners Court.

Mr Glushkov was found dead in his home on Clarence Avenue, New Malden, on March 12 but four days later on March 16 the Met launched a murder investigation.

The inquest was told the 68-year-olds cause of death was compression to the neck, and the court heard he was pronounced dead at 10.48pm.

Nikolay Glushko (Metropolitan Police/PA)

Mr Glushkov fled Russia after being accused of fraud during his time as deputy director of the Russian airline Aeroflot.

Last year, during a trial in absentia he was sentenced to eight years in Russian prison, convicted of stealing 87 million from the airline.

He was due to attend the commercial court in London to defend himself on Monday March 12  the day his body was discovered.

Mr Glushkov was a close friend of Putin critic Boris Berezovsky.

The oligarch was found hanged at his Berkshire home in 2013 but an inquest into his death record an open verdict.

On Wednesday Mr Glushkovs family released a statement saying they were devastated at his death.

It said: We, the family of Mr Nikolay Glushkov, are very grateful for the messages of sympathy received. A special thank you goes out to the Metropolitan Police and the emergency services for their rapid response and assistance on the night.

We are devastated at the loss of Nikolay and are coming to terms with our grief. We are assisting the Counter Terror Command with their investigation. As a result we will not be making or releasing any further public statements at this stage of the investigation.

The inquest was adjourned for a date to be fixed.Victims of the Westminster terror attack have been remembered at a special vigil.

The ceremony in Westminster Hall was held to mark the first anniversary of the attack and was attended by politicians, senior police officers and people involved in the incident.

Five people were killed, including Pc Keith Palmer, and dozens of others were injured when 52-year-old Khalid Masood launched a car and knife attack on Westminster Bridge and the Palace of Westminster before he was shot dead.

John Bercow reads a poem during the memorial event (Alastair Grant/PA)

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, told the gathering: A year ago, darkness struck across Westminster Bridge and in this palace.

It spread across the bridge like a snake, driving to left and right, killing and harming.

Reverend Rose Hudson-Wilkin, the Speakers chaplain, told the service: A year ago today on this estate and on Westminster Bridge we were visited by what I regard as evil.

Rev Hudson-Wilkin praised Pc Palmer, saying he ran towards the danger in order that we might be safe.

The vigil included a two-minute silence for the victims of the attack.

Metropolitan Police Commissioner Cressida Dick speaks to colleagues (Alastair Grant/PA)

Masoods rampage left five people dead  48-year-old Pc Palmer, who was on duty at the Palace of Westminster, along with US tourist Kurt Cochran, Romanian tourist Andreea Cristea, 31, and Britons Aysha Frade, 44, and 75-year-old Leslie Rhodes, who were mown down on the bridge.

Prime Minister Theresa May was not at the Westminster Hall service because she was attending an EU summit in Brussels.

But Downing Street said she had attended an earlier private service in the Chapel of St Mary Undercroft in the Palace of Westminster.Lithuanias president has said she is considering whether to expel Russian diplomats over the nerve-agent attack on an ex-Russian spy in Britain on March 4.

The UK has expelled 23 diplomats over the poisoning attack on a former Russian double agent and his daughter in Salisbury.

It blames Moscow for the military grade nerve-agent attack which has left both Sergei and Yulia Skripal in critical condition.

Prime Minister Theresa May with the President of Lithuania Dalia Grybauskaite in Valletta, Malta (Stefan Rousseau/AP)

Asked whether Lithuania would take similar action, Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite said: We are considering such measures.

At a European Union summit Thursday in Brussels, Ms Grybauskaite also offered her full support to British Prime Minister Theresa May.

Former Soviet state Lithuania shares a border with Russias western Kaliningrad exclave.A Russian woman fighting to force her Russian billionaire ex-husband to hand over a 453 million award is the latest victim of a cat and mouse game often played in Englands divorce courts, a lawyer has said.

Tatiana Akhmedova was given a 41.5% share of businessmans Farkhad Akhmedovs 1 billion-plus fortune by Mr Justice Haddon-Cave following a hearing in the Family Division of the High Court.

But she has told judges Mr Akhmedov has yet to pay the award  thought to be the biggest made by a divorce court judge in England  and is hiding assets.

She has taken legal action in England, Lichtenstein and the Isle of Man in a bid to get her hands on money.

Tatiana Akhmedova has taken legal action in England, Lichtenstein and the Isle of Man (Rick Findler/PA)

Mr Justice Haddon-Cave analysed further issues in the case at a hearing in London on Wednesday and a spokesman for Ms Akhmedova said she will continue to seek recoveries which satisfy the judgment.

Lawyer Georgina Hamblin, family law director at law firm Vardags, said on Thursday: Mrs Akhmedova appears to be the latest victim of the cat and mouse enforcement saga that is being played out all too regularly through the English divorce courts.

Resistance to settling awards is often fuelled not just by resentment and mistrust for their former spouse, but also by a misguided assumption that if they are clever they can outwit the courts.

But London is not the divorce capital of the world for nothing. Not only does it lead the way in equally recognising the role of breadwinner and homemaker, it has the widest reaching and most regularly exercised enforcement powers in the world. Spouses should be warned.Plans for Scotlands first low emission zone (LEZ) in Glasgow have been branded half-hearted by the Greens.

Co-convener Patrick Harvie raised criticisms of the proposals during First Ministers Questions at Holyrood.

The zone  due to come into effect at the start of 2019  will initially crack down on bus pollution, with all vehicles to be compliant with restricted emissions in the city centre by the end of 2022.

Patrick Harvie has criticised plans for a low emission zone in Glasgow (Jane Barlow/PA)

At #FMQs @patrickharvie highlights how Scot Gov transport policy has made air pollution worse. Glasgow is to get the first Low Emissions Zone and it's important it doesn't set a bad precedent. It's a half-hearted plan. Green cllrs have tried to improve. https://t.co/YsHFDbItsZ  Scottish Greens (@scottishgreens) March 22, 2018

It has been criticised by Friends of the Earth Scotland as a no ambition zone.

Mr Harvie said: Weve got a responsibility to make sure that this first zone in the country doesnt set a precedent for weak action because dozens of other communities around Scotland need to see a sense of urgency.

As it stands, this half-hearted plan would still guarantee that Glasgow fails to achieve clean air by the governments own target date.

Even using the government environment agency Sepas own figures, their own analysis of the impact of this, it is impossible for the low emission zone as currently proposed by the city council to eliminate illegal air pollution levels in Glasgow on the timescale thats being set out.

Addressing Nicola Sturgeon, he added there was a genuine concern that its her governments agency Transport Scotland that seems once again to be the biggest barrier to change, accepting the self-interested arguments of profit-driven bus companies.

The Facts: We're investing in Low Emission Zones, which will be set up in Scotland's four biggest cities. Read more about our environment plan: https://t.co/Se5oOMrU4B #FMQs pic.twitter.com/QDfdQrXOdm  The SNP (@theSNP) March 22, 2018

Will she take on the cautious business-as-usual attitude at Transport Scotland and turn it into a catalyst for change pushing the agenda forward, getting the resources spent and challenging councils to do more instead of holding them back?

Ms Sturgeon said she did not accept Mr Harvies characterisation of the plans or of Transport Scotlands involvement.

She said the proposals comprised one of the most challenging, all encompassing LEZs in Europe.

Ms Sturgeon acknowledged frustration over the lead-in times but said these were based on pragmatism to allow vehicles the time to adapt.

She said discussion and debate would continue as the plans develop to look at where improvements could be made.President Donald Trump and former vice president Joe Biden are in a rhetorical fight over which of them would prevail in a brawl.

Mr Trump, reacting to comments Mr Biden made about him earlier in the week at an anti-sexual assault rally, tweeted on Thursday: Crazy Joe Biden is trying to act like a tough guy.

Actually, he is weak, both mentally and physically, and yet he threatens me, for the second time, with physical assault.

President Donald Trump speaks at the White House (Evan Vucci/AP)

He doesnt know me, but he would go down fast and hard, crying all the way.

Dont threaten people Joe!

At the University of Miami on Tuesday, Mr Biden cited lewd comments the Republican president made in a 2005 Access Hollywood tape about grabbing women without their permission.

If we were in high school, Id take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him, said Mr Biden, a Democrat.

He also said any man who disrespected women was usually the fattest, ugliest S.O.B. in the room.

Mr Biden, 75, made similar comments in the closing days of the 2016 campaign.

He has kept open the possibility of a 2020 bid for president and is gearing up to play a big role campaigning for Democrats running in this years midterm elections.

Mr Trump, 71, dismissed the prospect of a Biden run recently at the annual Gridiron Dinner with Washington journalists, calling him Sleepy Joe and saying he could kick his ass.

Mr Trump also attacked Mr Biden on Twitter in 2016, calling him Our not very bright vice president.Shares in Reckitt Benckiser rose to the top of the FTSE 100 on Thursday after the firm announced that it has ended talks to acquire Pfizers consumer healthcare business.

The household goods giant, which is behind Durex and Dettol, said that it had wanted to acquire only part of the Pfizer division, which is worth a reported 20 billion US dollars, but this had proved impossible.

Reckitt boss Rakesh Kapoor said: Our priority remains organic growth, including the completion of the integration of Mead Johnson Nutrition and creating further value from reorganising into two new business units  Health and Hygiene Home.

Reckitt has ended talks with Pfizer (Tim Ireland/PA)

We always approach inorganic growth opportunities in a rigorous, disciplined, and financially responsible manner to ensure long-term value creation for shareholders.

An acquisition for the whole Pfizer consumer health business did not fit our acquisition criteria and an acquisition of part of the business was not possible.

Shares rallied on the London Stock Exchange, jumping 5% in afternoon trading to 5,916p.

Investors took the news as a signal that Reckitt will begin focusing on reorganising its own business, leaving the path open for new favourite GlaxoSmithKline to pick it up.

Reckitt warned on sales last year after being hit by a cyber attack in June, which significantly disrupted its manufacturing and orders systems across a raft of markets, including the UK.

It has also been undergoing an overhaul to organise the firm into two divisions  its consumer health business, including recently acquired US infant formula company Mead Johnson, and a home and hygiene arm.

Russ Mould, investment director at AJ Bell, said: Given that the weight of evidence suggests most acquisitions destroy rather than create shareholder value, the market reaction looks very rational.The Ukrainian parliament has stripped a celebrated former military pilot and presidential hopeful of her immunity as a politician, sanctioning her arrest on charges of plotting an attack on parliament with grenades and automatic weapons.

Nadiya Savchenko was served a summons minutes after the parliamentary session, where she denounced the Ukrainian government for killing and dividing the Ukrainian people.

A court was to consider putting her in custody later in the day.

Critics say the dramatic charges against Ms Savchenko were part of authorities efforts to get rid of a powerful challenger ahead of the next years presidential vote.

In Thursdays speech to politicians, prosecutor general Yuriy Lutsenko accused Ms Savchenko of plotting an attack on parliament with hand grenades, automatic weapons and even heavy mortars.

Nadiya Savchenko displays her highest state award of the Hero of Ukraine in parliament (Efrem Lukatsky/AP)

Mr Lutsenko claimed Ms Savchenko was acting in cahoots with Russia-backed rebels in eastern Ukraine to stage a terrorist coup in the interests of Ukraines enemies.

He presented wiretapped recordings in which Ms Savchenko discussed smuggling weapons from the east and went over plans for the attacks.

Ms Savchenko said she was aware of being wiretapped, and that she talked about the attacks as a surrealist political provocation to mock the government that she said failed the public after Ukrainians staged huge protests that led to the ousting of its former Russia-friendly president in February 2014.

Russia responded to those developments by annexing Ukraines Crimean Peninsula a month later and has supported a separatist insurgency fighting the government in eastern Ukraine since then.

Ms Savchenko, who has declared plans to run for president in the March 2019 election, is regarded by many as a national hero and a symbol of resistance against Russia.

She was elected in absentia to parliament in 2014, months after she was captured by Russia-backed rebels in eastern Ukraine while serving in a volunteer battalion.

She then ended up in a Russian prison.

In March 2016, a Russian court sentenced her to 22 years in prison, saying she acted as a spotter for mortar fire that killed two Russian journalists in eastern Ukraine.

During her trial she sang the national anthem and raised her middle finger in a show of contempt for Russian authorities.

Russian president Vladimir Putin pardoned her shortly afterwards amid international outrage at her sentence.

She remains popular despite falling out with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenkos government, accusing it of corruption and incompetence.

The Ukrainian government is the main evil in Ukraine, Ms Savchenko told booing politicians on Thursday.

The entire people of Ukraine think so.

Nadiya Savchenko leaves the parliament building after the vote (Efrem Lukatsky/AP)

She accused Ukrainian authorities of profiting from the fighting in the east, saying that Ukrainians on both sides want peace.

She also mocked politicians for making an about turn and casting her as an enemy, displaying her Hero of Ukraines media, the nations highest award.

Shortly after the vote, Mr Poroshenko thanked law-enforcement agencies in a Facebook statement for preventing terror attacks and exposing the Russian special operation against Ukraine.

Volodymyr Fesenko, a Kiev-based independent political analyst, noted that Ms Savchenkos arrest came amid exacerbating political tensions.

Savchenko is very charismatic and unmanageable, and it just so happened that she was isolated ahead of the start of the presidential campaign in which she could challenge many politicians, Mr Fesenko said.

The story of her plot is a clear symbol of the current anarchy which reflects our political tradition, he added.A judge has given doctors permission to take blood samples from Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia so that tests can be carried out by chemical weapons experts, following a hearing in a specialist court.

Mr Justice Williams has made a ruling following a hearing in the Court of Protection, where issues relating to people who lack the mental capacity to make decisions are considered, in London.

He said both Mr and Ms Skripal were unconscious in hospital in Salisbury and therefore unable to give their consent to blood samples being taken or tested.

Doctors have permission to take blood samples from Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia (Ben Birchall/PA)

The judge, who is based in the Family Division of the High Court in London, announced his decision on Thursday after analysing the case at a private hearing earlier this week.

Mr Justice Williams said doctors at Salisbury NHS Foundation Trust could provide blood samples to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).

He said trust bosses could also provide copies of medical notes to the OPCW.

The judge said he had concluded that such moves were in the best interests of Mr and Ms Skripal.

Mr Justice Williams said the UK Government had invited OPCW, which is based in The Hague, Holland, to send experts to assist with investigations.

He said OPCW experts wanted to analyse fresh blood samples from Mr and Ms Skripal.

The judge said bosses at Salisbury NHS Foundation Trust had told government officials that a Court of Protection judge would have to authorise such moves because Mr and Ms Skripal were incapacitated.

He said Government lawyers had then asked him to make decisions.The Russian Embassy has revealed it learned about the suspected murder of one of its citizens in Britain through the media, as an inquest opened into the businessmans death.

The countrys ambassador to London claimed officials had been deliberately ignored by Britain after requesting information on the circumstances of how Nikolay Glushkov died.

Alexander Yakovenko said the Foreign Office in the UK failed to provide any meaningful response so far following the embassys request under the Vienna Convention.

Nikolay Glushkov was found dead at his home in Surrey (Manchester Police/PA)

During a press conference in London he criticised Britain for its blame of Russia in the Salisbury spy poisoning case and highlighted the death of Mr Glushkov.

He said: It seems that the British side is deliberately ignoring our requests and continues to avoid any contacts with the Embassy on this matter.

Mr Glushkov was found dead in his home on Clarence Avenue, New Malden, on March 12 but four days later the Met launched a murder investigation.

An inquest which was opened and adjourned at West London Coroners Court on Thursday heard the 68-year-olds cause of death was compression to the neck, and that he was pronounced dead at 10.48pm.

Mr Glushkov fled Russia after being accused of fraud during his time as deputy director of the Russian airline Aeroflot.

Last year, during a trial in absentia he was sentenced to eight years in a Russian prison, convicted of stealing 87 million from the airline.

He was due to attend the commercial court in London to defend himself on Monday March 12  the day his body was discovered.

Mr Glushkov was a close friend of Putin critic Boris Berezovsky.

The oligarch was found hanged at his Berkshire home in 2013 but an inquest into his death recorded an open verdict.

On Wednesday Mr Glushkovs family released a statement saying they were devastated at his death.

The inquest was adjourned for a date to be fixed.The Trump administration is readying restrictions on Chinese investment and tariffs on nearly 50 billion US dollars worth of Chinese imports to punish Beijing for stealing American technology and pressuring US companies to hand it over.

China is already warning it will take all necessary measures to defend itself, raising the prospect of a trade war between the worlds two biggest economies.

The White House says President Donald Trump will direct the Office of the US Trade Representative to publish a list of proposed tariffs for public comment within 15 days.

President Donald Trump says China is stealing US technology (Evan Vucci/AP)

USTR has already identified potential targets: 1,300 product lines worth about 48 billion US dollars.

The president is also asking US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to come up with a list of restrictions on Chinese investment.The funeral of Cardinal Keith OBrien, formerly the Catholic Churchs most senior figure in Britain, is to be held in Newcastle next month.

The 80-year-old, who resigned as Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh in 2013 after admitting sexual misconduct, had recently been injured in a fall and died in a Newcastle hospital on Monday.

The Catholic Church has announced the requiem mass will take place at the Church of St Michael in Newcastle on April 5 with Cardinal Vincent Nichols, Archbishop of Westminster, leading the service.

He will be buried the following day at Mount Vernon Cemetery in Edinburgh in the grave of his mother and father, in accordance with his own wishes, the church said.

Cardinal OBrien welcomed Pope Benedict XVI on his visit to Scotland in 2010 (Andrew Milligan/PA)

Cardinal OBrien resigned from his position in February 2013 after three priests and a former priest alleged improper conduct during the 1980s.

He initially contested the allegations but later apologised, saying his sexual conduct had fallen beneath the standards expected of him.

Announcing his death on Monday, Cardinal OBriens successor as Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh, Archbishop Leo Cushley, said: In life, Cardinal OBrien may have divided opinion  in death, however, I think all can be united in praying for the repose of his soul, for comfort for his grieving family and that support and solace be given to those whom he offended, hurt and let down. May he rest in peace.

A statement from the Archdiocese of St Andrews & Edinburgh said: The requiem mass of Cardinal Keith Patrick OBrien RIP will take place at the Church of St Michael, Westmoreland Road, Newcastle, on Thursday April 5 at 1pm.

As requested by the Holy See, the main celebrant and homilist will be His Eminence Cardinal Vincent Nichols, Archbishop of Westminster.

Donations to SCIAFs Lenten campaign in lieu of flowers please.The Scottish Government is to review the Scottish Business Pledge scheme to encourage more firms to sign up.

The programme was launched in May 2015 to promote fair work practices, including paying the living wage, and boost productivity.

So far, 450 firms have joined, employability and training minister Jamie Hepburn told MSPs.

Jamie Hepburn announced a review of the Scottish Business Pledge (Andrew Cowan/Scottish Parliament/PA)

To sign up to the pledge, a company must commit to paying the living wage of 8.75 an hour and to at least two other criteria, ranging from not using zero hour contracts to paying bills promptly and creating opportunities for young people.

Opposition politicians have criticised the level of interest the initiative has generated, with 371 firms signed up by the start of June last year, equivalent to 0.2% of Scotlands registered business base.

Employability Minister @JamieHepburn today confirms that

laser company @M2Lasers are the 450th company signed up to the Scottish

Governments Business Pledge #ScotBizPledge @KeithBrownSNP  Scottish Government Finance and Economy (@scotgoveconomy) March 22, 2018

Speaking in a Holyrood debate, Mr Hepburn said: Today Im announcing a short review of the business pledge focusing on securing greater business buy-in and impact.

Over the summer we will work with current pledge companies, the main business organisations and the wider business community to explore barriers to making a commitment to the business pledge and indeed ways the pledge might evolve.

He also announced Scottish Government funding to support trade unions to promote fair work would continue for a third year, with 250,000 and 100,000 to go to the Scottish Trades Union Congress for fair work leadership and equality programmes.

Mr Hepburn said Economy Secretary Keith Brown would bring forward a fair work action plan before the end of the year and invited other parties to contribute.

Looking forward to some of the Bad Bosses we know being made to publish a #fairwork action plan   BetterThanZero (@betterthanzero) March 22, 2018

Conservative Dean Lockhart said: If the Scottish Government is serious about delivering fairness it needs to start addressing some of the hard economic realities.

We have a stagnant economy, an increasing skills gap, declining education standards, inadequate training with 160,000 college places cut and not replaced.

We have increasing failure rates for small businesses and workers in Scotland, have the lowest wage growth in the UK and the lowest disposable incomes, but they are paying the highest level of income tax in the UK.

Labours Jackie Baillie criticised the working practices on public-sector projects, saying some staff had been on bogus self-employment contracts which involved charges of 100 by umbrella companies to receive their wages.

She claimed the Scottish Government had employed some agency workers for five years on lesser terms and conditions than civil servants doing exactly the same job.

She said: It is breath-taking hypocrisy for the SNP government to pretend to champion fair work whilst engaging in some of the practices they rightly condemn.

Green co-convener Patrick Harvie scored the Scottish Government at six out of 10 for its efforts to improve working practices, saying: Its a pass mark but it needs to go a lot further.The police officer exposed to the Novichok nerve agent after the Salisbury poisoning has said normal life for me will probably never be the same after he was discharged from hospital.

Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey said he has been overwhelmed by the support he has received during the completely surreal experience.

The news today that DS Nick Bailey has left hospital is great to hear. I know that Nick has been in the minds of many people across the country including our own officers and staff. My thoughts and best wishes continue to be with Nick... Read more: https://t.co/WdA2uJnZXQ  Office Police & Crime Commissioner Wilts & Swindon (@OPCCWiltSwindon) March 22, 2018

He was taken to Salisbury District Hospital after responding to the attack on former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal, 66, and his 33-year-old daughter Yulia on March 4.

Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey (Wiltshire Police/PA)

At a press conference outside the hospital, Cara Charles-Barks, chief executive of Salisbury NHS Foundation Trust, said he was discharged on Thursday afternoon after his condition improved.

The Skripals remain in a critical but stable condition, she told reporters.

Chief Constable Kier Pritchard has read statements on behalf of DS Nick Bailey & his wife Sarah, during a press conference held at #Salisbury District Hospital. @wiltspoliceCC also read a statement on behalf of the Force - all are available on our website https://t.co/FLKjLj0gbE pic.twitter.com/vwWAfmfRJ7  Wiltshire Police (@wiltshirepolice) March 22, 2018

In a statement read by Wiltshire Police Chief Constable Kier Pritchard, DS Bailey, said: People ask me how I am feeling  but there are really no words to explain how I feel right now. Surreal is the word that keeps cropping up  and it really has been completely surreal.

I have been so very overwhelmed by the support, cards and messages I have received  everyone has been so incredible.

His wife, Sarah, said in a statement: Nick doesnt like the term hero, but he has always been a hero to me and our children.

DS Bailey insisted I am just a normal person with a normal life, but added: I recognise that normal life for me will probably never be the same  and Sarah and I now need to focus on finding a new normal for us and for our children.Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy has defended himself against the mad allegations that he accepted millions of euros in illegal campaign funding from late Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.

Its an ignominious act, not (just) a lie, Sarkozy said during a live television interview. I owe the French people the truth: I never betrayed their trust.

The one-term ex-leader was handed preliminary charges on Wednesday in an investigation of his successful 2007 campaign for the French presidency.

The charges include illegally funding the campaign, passive corruption and receiving money from Libyan embezzlement.

Sarkozy is driven away from the police station in Nanterre (Francois Mori/AP)

Im not above the law, but Im not below it either, Sarkozy, 63, said during the TF1 interview.

He was detained and questioned by anti-corruption police before he was given the preliminary charges by judges leading the probe.

Le Figaro newspaper reported on Thursday that Sarkozy said in his statement to the investigating judges that I am accused without any physical evidence.

He said he was living the hell of this slander since 2011 and denounced the accusations as lies, according to a text of the statement published by the newspaper. The allegations were first made in 2011 by Gaddafis son Saif al-Islam.

According to the text, the former president told investigators that the allegations even cost him a re-election bid in 2012 when they emerged during the campaign.

Investigators are examining allegations that Gaddafis regime secretly gave Sarkozy 50 million euros for his 2007 presidential election bid.

The former president was released on Wednesday night but placed under judicial supervision.

As Frances president from 2007 to 2012, Sarkozy put France in the forefront of the Nato-led airstrikes against Gaddafis troops that helped rebel fighters topple Gaddafis regime in 2011.

An investigation has been under way since 2013 into the case.

It got a boost when French-Lebanese businessman Ziad Takieddine told the online investigative site Mediapart in 2016 that he delivered suitcases from Libya containing 5 million euros in cash to Sarkozy and his former chief of staff, Claude Gueant.

Mr Takieddine repeated his allegations during a live interview with Frances BFM TV on Wednesday night.The Founder and Chief Editor of International Buddhist MagazineMettavalokanaya, Buddhika Sanjeewa has been elected as Director of Mass Communication of the World Alliance of Buddhists (WAB). He is the first Sri Lankan to sit on this internationally prestigious body.

This achievement for Sri Lanka came at the Executive Council Meeting which was held in Mandalay, Bagan Buddha Temple premises, Myanmar.

Mr. Sanjeewa selected for the post through the 28 countries and 60 Buddhist organizations in the world. The picture shows the appointment letter handover to Mr. Sanjeewa by Most Venerable Palawadhammo (Dr. Pornchai Pinyapong), the President of the WAB.As Sri Lanka acknowledged with its co-sponsorship of the UN resolution of 2015, devolution of political authority through constitutional reform is integral to lasting reconciliation and non-recurrence of violations and abuses, a joint statement issued by four UN member States said.

The statement issued on behalf of Macedonia, Montenegro, the US and the UK said they remain concerned about reports of abuse of authority by some security officials in Sri Lanka.

Also, the multiple incidents of inter-communal violence, attacks and hate speech against minorities are alarming and demonstrate the need for reconciliation efforts, it said.

While thanking the UNHR High Commissioner for his update on Sri Lanka, the four countries said they welcome the overall improvement in human rights and democratic reforms noted by his update.

The statement said Sri Lanka is safer and freer than it was in 2015 and The Governments constructive engagement with UN special procedures and support for the Peace-building Priority Plan is welcome.

The Consultation Task Force issued an important report to reflect the views of Sri Lankans and recent legislation on enforced disappearance is also positive. While welcoming these steps, we are disappointed that the pace of progress has been slow. Much still remains to be done to implement Sri Lankas commitments, it said.

It said families of disappeared persons from all communities have waited too long for answers and urged that the Office on Missing Persons be fully operational without delay.

With determined leadership and a clear timeline for action, this Government can deliver the reform and justice agenda, and take the actions needed to support long-term reconciliation. Sri Lanka still has an historic opportunity to avoid returning to divisions of the past. We firmly believe that implementing the reforms in the UN resolutions 34/1 and 30/1 will help give all Sri Lankans assurance of the safe, peaceful and a prosperous future, it said. (Lahiru Pothmulla)Film director Nilendra Deshapriya has scenes in his short film Thanha, Rathee, Ranga as to how the majority Sri Lankans took to the streets to celebrate the militarys crushing of the LTTE

One just has to browse through the list of television programmes. Sri Lankans watch during the week and it will be evident that this island nation has the mentality to stage a war anytime, anywhere.

The majority of channels show movies or tele series which fuel patriotic feelings. Maharaja Gemunu and now Muthukuda make our hairs stand on end. The latter shows the battle between Sinhala rebels and British soldiers, dating back to the time of King Sri Wickrama Rajasinghe.

The tele series is scripted in a way that we not only hate the British, but also want to see any existing families of Kandys elite Sinhala chieftains perish. The story towards the end of the tele series Muthukuda underscores how survival those days boiled down to betrayal! Even though the tele series gives us a peep into the islands history and presents true facts, the net result is that we succumb to thoughts of hatred.

We forget that when one community celebrates this win, there is another that sulks because those who fought for their cause were vanquished

The article reveals how people buy liquor from the wine store owned by a Tamil, purchase the soda they want from the store owned by a Sinhalese and visit the boutique owned by a Muslim for the bites

Silence not peace

Its just eight years and some months after the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Ealam (LTTE) were banished. The Sinhalese lit crackers and served milk rice to passersby on roads to celebrate this victory. Film director Nilendra Deshappriya in his short film Thanha, Rathee, Ranga shows these scenes in the most colourful manner.

We forget that when one community celebrates this win, there is another that sulks because those who fought for their cause were vanquished. All these and the recent incidents in Teldeniya and Digana have similar endings. A rebellion was squashed. A minority was silenced. Yes. From time to time there is silence in this country. What we see is silence; not peace.

The media plays a huge role in carrying information to the masses. Most media institutes have taken painstaking efforts to show that violent mobs which torched and damaged the belongings of Muslims werent influenced by the clergy. Sri Lankas history reveals, like its highlighted during the entire tele drama Muthukuda, that all rebellions, featuring the majority Sinhalese, started from temples with the blessings of the clergy. In this context its pertinent to ask this question; where is it said in Gautama Buddhas teachings that a Buddhist nation has the permission to go to war or behave violently under any circumstance?

There is no confusion when a Muslim or a Hindu goes to war if these efforts are to protect their religions. This writer says this because their religions (Hindu and Islam), in their scriptures, give them permission to do so.

A rebellion was squashed. A minority was silenced. Yes. From time to time there is silence in this country. What we see is silence; not peace

Identity problem

As much as a good number of Sri Lankan Buddhists, this writer is referring to those who have not made any effort to practice the Dhamma, have an identity problem, so do extremist Muslims who think they are superior to all those who belong to other faiths. A close analysis of what members of these two groups do and say suggest that they wish to show the world that they belong to a great religion; not necessarily that they practice what the scriptures say.

When MJ Kumarasinghe, a lorry driver, was brutally beaten during a recent clash, which featured four Muslims, the initial public attraction was almost zero. The man who was mauled, he later died in the ICU, and those who attacked him figured in an incident of insignificance. This was because no identity was pinned on them. But the moment the assaulted man died and his assailants were identified as Muslims, (Not forgetting the dead man being identified later as a Sinhalese) the death was turned into a source that started spreading evil.

The Sunday edition of Ravaya (2018-03-11) highlights beautifully the happy coexistence between the Sinhalese, Tamils and Muslims in a recent article that analyses the Teldeniya and Digana violence. In the article it is said how people in the area buy liquor from the wine store owned by a Tamil, purchase the soda they want from the store owned by a Sinhalese and visit the boutique owned by a Muslim for the bites. What a marvel! What unity! But the roots of that unity arent deep rooted, in this island nation. This unity was existing in Digana, but before these incidents took place. All that brotherhood has been buried under the rubble now.

All what recently happened and the many incidents in the history of this country show that wars and battles have been fueled by religious thoughts. Global records show that over 5000 wars have been fought in the name of religion.

The Sinhalese owe one to the Muslims. Its certainly not nice to see the Sinhalese owned shops flourish doing business during the festive month of April when the neighbouring Muslim shops have been reduced to ashes.

On lowering standards

The topic religious wars compels this writer to make mention of the Satyagrahi Movement which was initiated by Mahatma Gandhi. Paramahansa Yogananda (1893-1952), one of Indias revered spiritual gurus, once asked Gandhi, May one kill a cobra to protect a child and oneself. Gandi replied, I couldnt kill a cobra without violating two of my vows; fearlessness and non-killing. I would rather try to inwardly calm the snake by vibrations of love. I cant possibly lower my standards to suit the circumstances.

We cant escape Karma. We will be punished sometime during Samsara (the endless cycle of life and death) for the bad we do. The debate about killing and going to war in the name of religion will continue. How about putting religion aside for a while and using commonsense for a change? How about using the month of April-the month that the Sinhalese celebrate New Year- to mend broken relationships with the

minority Muslims?

The Sinhalese owe one to the Muslims. Its certainly not nice to see the Sinhalese owned shops flourish doing business during the festive month of April when the neighbouring Muslim shops have been reduced to ashes. The Sinhalese have to do more than make milk rice and sweetmeats during this Avurudu. Even if mending these strained relationships is harder that getting the head of the Kevuma (Sri Lanka oil cake), they still must do it.JVP MP Bimal Ratnayake said today former MP Piyasiri Wijenayake, who was held responsible for fraud by PRECIFAC, had accompanied the President on his recent visit to Japan and said this would negatively influence the legal proceedings against him.

He asked in parliament how the President took him on a state visit when he was accused of a fraud by a commission.

"Mr. Wijenayake was seen attending a discussion between the President and the Japanese Prime Minister. How is the law enforced on such suspects when they are taken on state visits like this. I ask the Law and Order minister to inform parliament whether this would unduly influence the judiciary and the police," Mr. Ratnayake asked.

He said PRECIFAC had held about 200 people responsible for fraud and corruption. (Ajith Siriwardana and Yohan Perera)A soldier and three others accused of killing a Hindu priest in Murugumoorthi Sankanai, Jaffna on April 11, 2010, and severely injuring another were convicted and sentenced to death yesterday (22) by Jaffna High Court Judge Manikkavasagar Illanchelian.

The three who were convicted were identified as Pedurusingha Gunasena, K. Muhundan alias Shakthi and Balasubramaniam Shivaruban of Jaffna

The Judge stated that after a lengthy trial the prosecution had been able to prove their case beyond a shadow of a doubt. Accordingly, he ordered that the three who were convicted be hung on a date to be determined by the President.

The murder of the chief priest of the Hindu Kovil S. Sivanathan at Murugamoorthy Road Sankanai in Jaffna was proved to have been carried out by these three convicts using automatic firearms. His two sons had also been injured in the shooting. The killers had also got away with Rs.50,000 and a motorcycle.

Manipay Police had launched investigations into the killing while the army had also launched an investigation into the incident given the fact that a soldier was one of those accused.

The judge also sentence all three to 20 years imprisonment for robbery and assault. (Sithum Chathuranga)It is an identity crisis..an open dialogue of both the communities would help address the issue

The hate speeches already made by various people, especially since 2012 and the statements posted in the social media for the past six years, have fed the communities with hate

Business rivalry, envy and politics have been attributed to the recent wave of hate campaign by various groups and individuals

The rise of the percentage of Muslim population due to the drop in Tamil population from 21 percent to 12 percent was cited as an unusual growth

The deaths and migration of Tamils to other countries as a result of the war had caused an increase in the percentage of Sinhalese population as well

Most abayas sold here do not conform to the requirements taught in Islam

As it did on the wake of previous communal clashes in various places in the country, the Government said after the communal clashes in early this month that it would take action to filter the hateful statements and posts in the social media.



It was reported that Ministers had discussions in this regard with officials of the Facebook Inc. who visited the country after the temporary ban on social media following the anti-Muslim riots in Ampara and Kandy Districts.



However, the hate speeches already made by various people, especially since 2012 and the statements posted in the social media for the past six years, have fed the communities with hate sufficient to make a hell even out of a small road accident.



Interestingly, the trigger for the communal attacks in Aluthgama in 2014, in Gintota last year and in Digana this month, had been traffic issues.



However, there is a vast difference this time with Sinhalese intellectuals, Buddhist monks and the media being swift in countering the misconceptions such as the wanda pethi and with monks even physically coming forward to protect Muslims and their mosques in various parts of the country.



Sinhalese in Anamaduwa had dared to challenge racist elements by reconstructing an eatery that came under arson attack, within a day.



Monks in some areas had given shelter to terrified Muslim families in their temples, in spite of the Government being accused of inaction and the Police in some areas being accused of colluding with rioters.



This is a situation that could not be expected some three years ago.



Various reasons including business rivalry, envy and politics have been attributed to the recent wave of hate campaign by various groups and individuals, the prime ingredient of which has been vicious lies and distortions.



However, a sizable number of Sinhalese, including some educated people seem to succumb to those distorted campaigns.



During the Halal Controversy between 2012 and 2014, the Government or the concerned members of the business community, who had obtained the Halal Certificate voluntarily did not come forward to clear the misconception that prices had gone up due to the Halal Certificate.



Only one person had the courage to say that he had spent only 27 rupees per day for this certificate in order to broaden his market.



The Quran verses, almost all of which are contextual, were then cited out of context to demonize Muslims and these claims were vindicated by reports of barbaric acts of various terrorist groups in the Middle East, who are fighting each other in the name of Islam.



After being static for a century until the early eighties, the rise of the percentage of Muslim population due to the drop in Tamil population from 21 percent to 12 percent, was cited as an unusual growth in Muslim population.



In fact, the deaths and migration of Tamils to other countries as a result of the war after the eighties had caused an increase in the percentage of Sinhalese population as well.



The canards stooped to such a low level intellectually that claims were made that the welcome toffees served at certain shops owned by Muslims and under-garments sold at those shops contained sterilizing chemicals.



While the Government of the day seemed to connive with the groups spreading hate, one Minister of that Government warned that a small matchstick could create a hellhole as enough petrol had already been sprinkled all over the country.



He also suspected a foreign hand behind the hate campaign with a view to defeat President Mahinda Rajapaksa at the next Presidential election by antagonizing the Muslims against his Government. But his warnings fell on deaf ears of the leaders.



The hate campaign driving the past six years had been such that even a clump of flour in a plate of beef curry was used to incite violence.



The hate campaign was facilitated by the Muslims as well by adamantly embracing more and more elements of Arab and Pakistani cultures such as the womens abaya, face veil and the mens Jubba. The more they changed their physical appearance the more did they psychologically detach themselves from the national fabric, creating an insular society amidst the Sinhalese.



This insularity is such that they, for years debate the way they should greet a non-Muslim or a Non-Muslim priest. This mindset, while strengthening the already prevalent language barrier, prevented them from not only allaying fears and misconceptions spread by the hate mongers among their neighbours but rather made the latter even to view them as strange creatures and suspect them.



The depiction of abaya, especially the black ones and the Jubba as symbols of extremism or fundamentalism is an unfounded vilification of Muslims as most of those who wear them, especially the women, do not know any politics or anything happening around them.



And there are no radical Islamic groups in Sri Lanka, except for fringe groups occasionally fighting each other over religious issues.



These attires came into the country as a result of Sri Lankans migrating to West Asian countries for employment.



However, there is no any specific reason for them to stick to those attires so admirably or adamantly in Sri Lanka, as Islam does not recommend a particular dress, but only certain requirements in any dress.



For the Muslims to assimilate with the Sinhalese in this regard is easier, as a majority of the latter has chosen, for their day-to-day use, the Western and Indian attires which are not strange or unacceptable to Muslims as well. Abaya or the Jubba is not popular among Muslims in Indonesia which is the home for the largest Muslim population in the world.



In fact, the most abayas sold at the Sri Lankan market do not conform to the requirements taught in Islam as they are so tight and decorative and pompous and also highly expensive.



The abaya, along with the face-veil, has in most cases become merely a fashion not corresponding with the Islamic way of life. Yet, certain businessmen have been successful in promoting such attires.



There is a campaign among the Muslims in the country for the proper integration of the community into the Sri Lankan social fabric, without harming the basic religious tenets, but unfortunately by a relatively small group. Their voice is hence not sufficiently heard of within the community and is not known to the Sinhalese either, due to the language barrier.



The increasing insular mindset of the Muslims and the unceasing vilification and alienation of them by hate-mongers have posed a question to the Muslims themselves as to who they are in Sri Lanka.



It is, in fact, an identity crisis. An open dialogue between the intellectuals of both the communities would help address the issue or minimise the ill effects of it.The Supreme Court today announced that the decision on seven petitions over the draft Judicature (Amendment) Bill to set up Permanent High Court of Trial at Bar would be informed to Parliament in future.

The SC today concluded the case on petitions filed by seven individuals including the leader of the Joint opposition Dinesh Gunawardena, Professor G L Peiris, Bar Association President Udaya Rohan de Silva.

Supreme Court ordered to submit the written submissions on petitions and intervening petitions by March 26.

Those petitions alleged that certain sections of the proposed draft bill would enable the government to execute the powers of the judiciary and that certain selected individuals would be targeted to take revenge through the Special High Court to be created by the bill.

The petitions were taken up before a three-member judge bench comprising Chief Justice Priyasad Dep, Buwaneka Aluwihare and Nalin Perera, who today concluded the proceedings after hearing deliberations for four days. (Thilini de Silva and Ranjan Katugampola)President Maithripala Sirisena left Sri Lanka for Pakistan this afternoon with a delegation of 20 members.

The Presidents visit is planned for two days, during which he is expected to meet Pakistani President Mamnoon Hussain and Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi and be a Guest of Honor on the Pakistan Day parade.

A Memorandum of Understanding relating to youth development and the training of civil servants and diplomats will also be signed. (T.K.G. Kapila)The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) yesterday told the UNHRC that it much regrets to learn of the slow progress in establishing transitional justice mechanisms in Sri Lanka.

Speaking at the 37th session of the Human Rights Council, Kate Gilmore, the United Nations Deputy High Commissioner for Human Rights however welcomed the Governments constructive engagement with the OHCHR and the human rights mechanisms, including its cooperation with visits of this Councils Special Rapporteurs on human rights and terrorism; on truth, justice, reparation and guarantees of non-recurrence; and the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention. It said that in the absence of concrete results or publicly available drafts of legislation, it seems doubtful that the transitional justice agenda committed to by the Government under this Councils resolution 30/1 could be fully implemented before our next report in March 2019.

She also said that the HR commission was seriously concerned about multiple incidents of inter-communal violence, attacks and hate speech against minorities observed last year  a worry further exacerbated by recent developments that have occurred since the drafting of the report, including violence against Muslims in the Kandy district that led to the proclamation of a state of emergency for 12 days.

Allegations of continuing use of torture and reports of harassment or surveillance of human rights defenders are more than worrying.

In light of the gravity of the above matters and given the important role that this Council has played to date, the High Commissioner strongly advises that this Council continue to focus its attention on the human rights of the people of Sri Lanka and in particular on the processes in place for accountability and reconciliation, the statement added.

FULL STATEMENT:The body of a Sri Lankan woman, who had worked as a housemaid in Saudi Arabia, will be repatriated within two weeks following the issuance of the postmortem report, the Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment (SLBFE) said yesterday.

The woman, Priyantha Jayasekara (38), was shot dead by a Saudi national on March 10 in Buraidah and the suspect later committed suicide.

SLBFE Internal Affairs Additional General Manager W.M.V. Wansekara told Daily Mirror that the Sri Lankan Embassy in Saudi Arabia continually visited the crime scene to keep track on the progress of investigations.

The authorities that concluded the postmortem were now waiting for the final report which will take another two weeks. It is only then they will decide on a date to release the body. We will assist in bringing back the body to Sri Lanka. The officials attached to the embassy had requested the authorities to expedite devising the final report, he said.

Meanwhile, Foreign Employment Minister Harin Fernando and Foreign Employment Deputy Minister Manusha Nanayakkara who recently visited the residence of the deceased assured to secure the future of her children. (Kalathma Jayawardhane)The Canadian Government today urged the Sri Lankan government to set a time-bound strategy for full implementation of the UN Resolution, with technical support from the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR).

We call on Sri Lanka to meet its domestic and international human rights obligations to ensure a peaceful, reconciled and prosperous future for all Sri Lankans, it said in a statement.

Canada welcomed the High Commissioners Representatives report on Sri Lanka and aid it supports the governments constructive engagement with the OHCHR.

We acknowledge the initial steps taken on human rights and welcome the establishment of the Office of Missing Persons. We call for its full operationalization and implementation, it said.

It said the Wednesdays report at the 37th UNHRC session in Geneva highlighted that continued effort is needed on transitional justice, including reparations, truth seeking and accountability mechanisms and on implementing confidence-building measures critical to reconciliation such as repeal of the Prevention of Terrorism Act.11:50 | Bogota (Colombia), Mar. 22.





The message was contained in a press release issued by the Foreign Affairs Ministry on behalf of the Santos administration.





"Colombia as a brother country aware of Peru's democratic tradition is confident the presidential transition of power will take place within the framework of the democratic principles enshrined in the Constitution and laws of Peru," the document reads.





Additionally, the ministry expressed confidence in the stability of the Inca country, with which Colombia has strong bilateral and regional ties under the umbrella of the Andean Community and the Pacific Alliance





Resignation





Pedro Pablo Kuczynski announced his resignation in a televised address to the nation on Wednesday afternoon.





The announcement came ahead of the congressional impeachment debate scheduled for Thursday.





As is known, a group of legislators from opposition parties filed a presidential impeachment motion on the grounds of moral incapacity after he survived a previous impeachment vote back in December.





This new motion was intended to oust Kuczynski for alleged links with Brazilian construction company Odebrecht.





(END) NDP/RMB/MVB

The Government of Colombia on Thursday said it deeply regrets Pedro Pablo Kuczynski's decision to resign from his post as Peruvian President.Published: 3/22/201814:59 | Lima, Mar. 22.

The public officer explained the court cannot handle the case until Kuczynski's immunity from prosecution is lifted.

It must be noted, he said, that even though the embattled leader offered to step down on March 21, Congress still has to accept his resignation before its publication in El Peruano official gazette.Acid attack victims now stand a better chance of becoming specialist doctors with the Centre expanding the disability quota for admission in post graduatemedical courses.



The percentage of seats to be filled by persons with disabilities has been increased from 3 to 5% in accordance with the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016, the Union Health Ministry said in a statement.

People with 21 types of disabilities are eligible to take advantage of the quota.

While 20 out of the 21 types of disabilities are some type of disease, acid attack victims are also considered as disabled under the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016, that was followed while amending the regulations.

Some of the other common disabilities covered under the new rule are blindness, low-vision, leprosy cured persons, thalassemia patients and people who are deaf or hard of hearing.

"After 20 years the government has taken a historic decision for welfare of divyang (disable) sisters and brothers in line with the Prime Minister's vision of sabka saath, sabka vikaas. Now all 21 benchmark disabilities as per the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016 can register for admission to medical courses," said Health Minister J P Nadda.

India currently has a huge shortage of specialist doctors.

Heart disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder (lung diseases), brain stroke, diarrhoea, chronic kidney disease, tuberculosis, neo-natal pre-term birth and accidents are among the leading causes of death, most of which can't be cured by an ordinary MBBS graduate, some of India's top doctors informed a panel of lawmakers a few months ago.In the midst of revelations of a major data breach, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg today admitted that his company made mistakes on user data secrecy and vowed to take steps to prevent the misuse or breach of personal data of users by developers or business partners.



Zuckerberg, 33, through a lengthy Facebook post, broke his silence over the alleged privacy scandal that hit the social media giant.

"I started Facebook, and at the end of the day, I'm responsible for what happens on our platform. I'm serious about doing what it takes to protect our community," Zuckerberg said.

Reports alleged that personal data from as many as 50 million people might have been used improperly in Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign by Cambridge Analytica, a UK-based political research firm.

Zuckerberg said Facebook has a "responsibility" to protect its users' data and if it fails, "we don't deserve to serve you."

He acknowledged that there is more the company needs to do.

"...But we also made mistakes, there's more to do, and we need to step up and do it," he said.

Over the past several days, Facebook has been facing an investigation by the Federal Trade Commission and calls for legislative testimonies in the US and Europe.

India's IT and Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad has warned social media companies such as Facebook of stringent actions if there was an attempt to influence the electoral process of any country.

Amidst a global outrage against Facebook, the Silicon Valley-based company, which currently has 2 billion monthly active users, has suffered a loss of USD 50 billion in market value.

In a damage control mode, Zuckerberg announced a slew of measures aimed to "secure our platform further and make our community safer for everyone going forward".

For this, the Facebook founder said, his company will take three steps to prevent the data misuse.

"We will investigate all apps that had access to large amounts of information before we changed our platform to dramatically reduce data access in 2014, and we will conduct a full audit of any app with suspicious activity," he said.

"We will ban any developer from our platform that does not agree to a thorough audit. And if we find developers that misused personally identifiable information, we will ban them and tell everyone affected by those apps," he added.

Zuckerberg said that the second step is to restrict developers' data access even further to prevent other kinds of abuse.

He cited an example for this: "It (Facebook) will remove developers' access to one's data if the app hasn't been used by the person in three months."

"We will reduce the data you give an app when you sign in -- to only your name, profile photo, and email address. We'll require developers to not only get approval but also sign a contract in order to ask anyone for access to their posts or other private data. And we'll have more changes to share in the next few days," Zuckerberg said.

In the last of the three steps, he said in the next month Facebook will show everyone a tool at the top of their News Feed with the apps they have used and an easy way to revoke those apps' permissions to their data.

"We already have a tool to do this in your privacy settings, and now we will put this tool at the top of your News Feed to make sure everyone sees it, Zuckerberg said.

Zuckerberg said that his company had already taken a series of steps in 2014.

Giving a timeline of the events, Zuckerberg said in 2013, a Cambridge University researcher named Aleksandr Kogan created a personality quiz app. It was installed by around 300,000 people who shared their data as well as some of their friends' data.

Given the way Facebook platform worked at the time, this meant Kogan was able to access tens of millions of their friends' data, he said.

Zuckerberg said in order to prevent the "abusive apps", a series of measures were taken in 2014 to dramatically limit the data apps could access.

In 2015, Facebook learned from journalists at The Guardian that Kogan had shared data from his app with Cambridge Analytica. It is against Facebook's policies for developers to share data without people's consent, he said, adding that he immediately banned Kogan's app from Facebook, and demanded that Kogan and Cambridge Analytica formally certify that they had deleted all improperly acquired data. They provided these certifications.

Zuckerberg cited some media reports that suggested Cambridge may not have deleted the data as they had certified.

This, according to him, was not only a breach of trust between Kogan, Cambridge and Facebook but also between his company and its users.

"But it was also a breach of trust between Facebook and the people who share their data with us and expect us to protect it. We need to fix that," he said.

"In this case, we already took the most important steps a few years ago in 2014 to prevent bad actors from accessing people's information in this way. But there's more we need to do," Zuckerberg said.An Indian-origin physiotherapist was sentenced to 11 months' jail and three strokes of the cane for molesting a teenage girl patient during treatment.



Luke Manimaran Degarajoo, 43, had touched the 18-year old inappropriately during a physiotherapy session massage at his clinic about a year ago. He was sentenced yesterday.

The teen victim had turned up at the clinic on March 25 last year at 6.20pm (local time) seeking treatment for back and hip pain, according to a report by The Straits Times.

Luke told her the session would last 15 minutes and directed her to a massage bed in a therapy room.

Meanwhile, the victim's friend waited outside and the door to the room was left half shut.

When the massage started, the teenager was fully clothed. But then Luke told her to remove her top and loosen her shorts.

The victim complied as she thought it was part of the treatment. While massaging her, Luke molested her twice after rolling down her underwear and shorts.

Deputy Public Prosecutor Gail Wong said, "The victim felt uncomfortable by the contact but did not shout or ask for help as she was unsure if it was part of the treatment or not."

The massage ended when the victim heard Luke speaking to her friend who had glanced into the room and was surprised to find her in the nude.

When confronted, Luke claimed the victim needed a deep

After the session ended, he gave her a report detailing his assessment of her condition. She did not complain initially as she was not sure whether the way he touched her was part of the treatment.

The teenager told her friend about her ordeal when they left the clinic at around 7.40 pm (local time) before lodging a police report about four hours later.

Luke is out on SGD 10,000 bail after the court granted his request to defer his sentence as he had to settle some personal matters.

He will surrender himself at the State Courts on April 20 to begin serving his sentence, according to The Straits Times report.

For outraging the girl's modesty, Luke could have been jailed for up to two years and fined or caned.Distraught with the news of her husband's death in Mosul, Dipali Tikadar now harbours just one wish: a meeting with West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee to seek a government job.



Dipali's husband Samar Tikadar was kidnapped along with 38 other Indians in Iraq in 2014 by Islamic State. External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj announced in Parliament on Tuesday that all 39 men were dead.

"I will tell the CM when I meet her about my poor financial condition and appeal for a government job. I think she will understand my situation," Tikadar, a mother of two, said.

Over the past four years, she had been toiling hard to make ends meet for her two children with a hope that her husband's return will change their life for better.

"I thought after Samar returns, our days of hardship would be over. But now, I don't know what to expect from life," Dipali Tikadar told PTI.

She is staring at an uncertain future with little means to provide for her children. Her son Sudip is making preparations for Class X board exams and daughter Sharmistha is a student of Class 4.

"I want a government job so that I can arrange for the education of my children," the 35-year-old woman said.

The tin shed over her mud house in Nadia district, along the Indo-Bangladesh border, is also in need of immediate repair, but Tikadar says she has no money.

"I get Rs 4,800 as an Integrated Child Development Service worker. It is not enough to run a family. Please arrange to take me to Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee," she pleaded.

Samar Tikadar had left for Iraq in 2011, much like Khakon Tikadar - both residents of Chapra Mahakhola area of Nadia district, close to India-Bangladesh border. Their families last heard from them early 2014 before the abduction by IS militants.

Minister of State for External Affairs VK Singh has said that it would take the government eight to 10 days to bring back the remains of the 39 workers.

Dipali Tikadar, however, is not keen on visiting Kolkata airport to receive her husband's remains.

"Even if I get a scope to go to the airport to receive the remains of my husband, I won't go. I am too depressed to handle the situation," she said, adding that the Nadia administration has collected blood samples from Samar's siblings for a DNA test.Leveling Lovell

Small businesses make room for a mega-building.

by Sabine Bickford

From the March, 2018 issue

After thirty years in the small blue building at Hoover and Greene, Jordan Lovell Picture Framing is closing for good. The announcement comes on the heels of Southfield-based development company REDICO's application to re-zone, level, and redevelop the entire south-side block bordered by Hoover, Green, Davis, and Brown.



The proposal has yet to be approved, but owner Marsana Lovell told us that even before REDICO got involved, her landlord had already been planning a redevelopment on her side of the block. She decided to leave as soon as she heard the news.



"My husband passed away five years ago, and ever since then I've been toying with the idea of retiring," she explains. "I just didn't have a game plan. This was kind of like 'here's your sign.' I'm sixty-six years old. It was just time. That was the sign to bow out gracefully."



REDICO is proposing to build a four-story apartment complex covering the entire block, with just a smidgen of retail space on the ground floor. "It's going to change, drastically, the look of that neighborhood," says Lovell. "That's what bothers me more than anything else, because I grew up there." She lived just one block away from the store until she was twelve.



A frame shop in some form has been there since 1968, when it was Nourse Frame & Gallery. After a "succession of owners," Lovell ended up working there part-time in 1986. She had a background in art and in framing her own works, and the then-manager offered her a job that worked well with her schedule as a mother. Over the years, Lovell became manager herself, followed by co-owner and finally sole owner.



When asked if the "Jordan," in the name was her one-time partner, she laughs and explains that "Jordan Lovell" was actually her dog. "I used to bring him to work with me every day." When she bought out her partner Ann Courtney in 2000, she needed a new

...continued below...

name."My name is so strange I knew people would just butcher it, so my husband said 'why don't you just name it after the dog?' I thought 'yeah!' I was waiting in line at city hall with my paperwork and I just put down 'Jordan Lovell.'"Lovell says she is looking forward to traveling and spending time with family and friends, but first she has to sell off her framing equipment. When we spoke in mid-February, she was still taking phone messages from those interested in buying the last few supplies, but hoping to be out of the building by the end of the month."It was a wonderful experience," she says, "I really, really liked doing it. I met a ton of wonderful people over the years."Also leaving the building on Hoover and Greene is the small offshoot ofa Troy-based shop carrying new and antique violins. Its new appointment-only location will be at Varsity Dr. and Ellsworth. [Originally published in March, 2018.]A special court today granted bail to former Himachal Pradesh chief minister Virbhadra Singh, his wife and three others in a Rs seven crore money laundering case.



Special Judge Arvind Kumar granted the relief to Singh and his wife Pratibha Singh, who were present in the court in response to the summons issued against them on the last date of hearing.

The court also granted bail to Universal Apple Associate owner Chunni Lal Chauhan, besides other accused Prem Raj and Lawan Kumar Roach.

All the accused got the relief on furnishing a personal bond of Rs 50,000 and one surety of the same amount each.

During the proceedings, ED counsel Nitesh Rana opposed their bail plea, seeking judicial custody for them.

The court, however, granted them bail considering they were not arrested by the ED during the investigation.

The court had on February 12 issued summons against the accused saying there was "prima facie" enough evidence against them.

The Enforcement Directorate had charge-sheeted 83-year-old Singh, accusing him of projecting around Rs seven crore "proceeds of crime" as agricultural income in connivance with his wife and others and had invested the sum in LIC policies.Fifteen Naxals, two of them carrying cash rewards, were arrested from two places in Chhattisgarh's Maoist hotbed Sukma district, police said today.



The arrests were significant as they came almost eight days after nine personnel of the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) were killed in an IED blast when suspected Maoists blew up their mine-protected vehicle in Sukma, a senior police official said.

However, the arrested Naxals were not involved in the last week's attack on the CRPF, but were involved in the attack on a police team in which two personnel were killed in February, police said.

During a search operation, 14 ultras, including two women, were arrested from a forest in Bhejji area and another cadre was caught from the district's Pushpal area yesterday, Deputy Inspector General of Police (south Bastar range) Sundarraj P told PTI.

A joint team of the Special Task Force (STF), the District Reserve Guard (DRG), the District Force (DF) and the CRPF was involved in the operation carried out in Bhejji to nab the 14 ultras.

Besides, a combined squad of the Chhattisgarh Armed Force (CAF) and DF nabbed the rebel in Pushpal area, he said.

All the 14 cadres arrested from Bhejji were allegedly involved in the attack on a police team in Elarmadgu forest in the area on February 18 this year, in which two personnel were killed and six others were injured, he said.

They were also involved in another incident on the same day in the area, in which a labourer was killed and 10 construction-related equipment and vehicles engaged in road laying work were torched, the DIG said.

Of the arrested Naxals, Sodhi Pojja (42), who was acting as the head of Dandakaranya Adivasi Kisan Majdoor Sangthan - a frontal wing of Maoists in the area - was carrying a reward of Rs 1 lakh on his head, he said.

The two women cadres - Rawa Kosi (22) and Hemla Hungi (32) - were working as members of the local guerrilla squad (LGS) in Kistaram and the medical team of Maoists, respectively, he said.

The other arrested cadres were lower rung members of the outlawed Communist Party of India (Maoist), he added.

Besides, the Naxal arrested from Pushpal area, Madkam Somaru (25), was active as an LGS member in Machkot area and was carrying a cash reward of Rs 1 lakh on his head.

He was allegedly involved in at least 10 Naxal-related incidents, including attacks on policemen, killings, torching vehicles used in road construction works and planting improvised explosive devices (IEDs) to harm the security personnel at separate places in Sukma, the DIG said.

On March 13, nine CRPF personnel were killed after Maoists blasted their mine protected vehicle using over 50 kgs of explosives in Sukma, which is a hotbed of the ultras in Chhattisgarh.

On March 11 last year, 12 personnel of the force were killed in the Bhejji area and their arms looted when Naxals ambushed their patrol party.

A few days later on April 24 last year, 25 personnel of the paramilitary were killed in a similar ambush in Sukma.Traffic on all national highways came to a halt on Thursday as all opposition parties blocked national highways demanding Special Category Status for Andhra Pradesh.The Rasta Roko campaign also found support from ruling Telugu Desam Party which has announced moral support to the call given by opposition parties.





Due to the ongoing SSC exam in the state, the police have announced alternative routes in all major cities including Vijayawada. The Vijayawada police commissioner has urged the people to reach their destinations before 10 am on Thursday and avoid going out till noon, as the Rasta Roko campaign will continue for two hours.

While all the vehicles going towards Hyderabad have been diverted to Sathupalli-Tallada-Khammam- Suryapet, all vehicles going towards east coast have been diverted to Sathupalli-Devarapalli. Traffic towards Chennai has been diverted towards Machilipatnam- Bapatla-Ongole route.

"We will support any political party that comes forward in highlighting centre's step-motherly treatment towards AP. However, I urge everyone to protest in a peaceful manner and not indulge in violence. Wear black badges and protest," chief minister and TDP chief Nara Chandrababu Naidu said. He wanted people to emulate Japanese way of expressing dissent by working and producing more than usual.

Meanwhile, Janasena party chief Pawan Kalyan has urged party cadre to help students reach examination centres and not to stop vehicles ferrying students to their destinations. APCC chief N Raghuveera Reddy has said that party leaders will participate in Rasta- Roko near Kanakadurgamma Varadhi linking Krishna with Guntur district.The death toll from the devastating forest in the reserve forest atop the Kurangani hills in Theni, 500 km from here, on Thursday rose to 18 with a young woman succumbing to her injuries at a private hospital in Coimbatore.

E Jayashree, hailing from Chennai, was rushed to a private hospital in Coimbatore on March 12, a day after the fire engulfed the forest leaving more than 30 trekkers trapped. Massive rescue efforts were mounted to save all those trapped, but nine bodies were recovered and the rest, some with severe burn injuries, were rescued and admitted to hospitals.

Jayashree, who was rescued with 80 percent burn injuries, breathed her last on Thursday morning, sources said, adding that with her death, the toll in the fire incident has risen to 18. The trekkers, most of whom were women, had gone to the Kurangani forest as part of an expedition on the occasion of Women's Day.

While the government claims the trekkers had no permission to enter the hills, those who were part of the tour say they paid Rs 200 as entry fee before entering the check post.

Meanwhile, seasoned Atulya Misra, currently the Principal Secretary, Revenue and Disaster Management, Tamil Nadu Government, began his inquiry into the incident. The senior IAS official is expected to submit his report on what led to the fire and how to ensure incidents of such nature do not recur in the future within two months.

Misra will interact with people from villages near the Kurangani hills and he has already asked those with knowledge about the terrain and incident to submit comments or suggestions in writing.The Rajya Sabha on Thursday witnessed a rare bonhomie among warring MPs to psss the Payment of Gratuity bill but sank into pandemonium within minutes forcing Chairman M Venkaiah Naidu to adjourn the House till next day, as he did not want people to see "ugly scenes" in Parliament.

The proceedings of the 14th day began on a perfect note after a meeting government and Opposition MPs had over the Payment of Gratuity Bill and agreeing to pass the legislation without a discussion. A formula was worked out in the meeting to get the Bill passed by allowing one each MP from TDP, which is demanding special category status for Andhra Pradesh, and AIADMK, which wants setting up of Cauvery Management Board, to speak.

After his remarks on World Water Day and customary laying of papers on the table of the House, Naidu said he had received notices to discuss a Supreme Court order that bars instant arrest in SC/ST atrocities cases and that he would consider it.

He then called TDP's C M Ramesh and AIADMK's V Maitreyan to speak on their issues before calling Labour Minister Santosh Kumar Gangwar to introduce the Bill, which amends the existing Act to enhance the maternity leave from 12 weeks to 26 weeks and remove the ceiling of gratuity available to employees. The House passed the Bill through a voice vote as Opposition MPs did not move any amendments.

However, as soon as the Bill was passed, TDP and AIADMK MPs rushed to the Well. These protests angered the Congress as its MPs from Andhra Pradesh were not allowed to speak on the issue and they too rushed to the Well.

As the House submerged in sloganeering, BJD and Samajwadi Party MPs demanded that the House be allowed to run and accused the ruling BJP of not doing anything to resolve the issue. While Naidu asked protesting MPs to return to their seats, Minister of State for Parliamentary Affairs Vijay Goel accused the Opposition of not allowing the House to function.

"People are asking why I was adjourning the House. There were media reports that the Chairman was adjourning the House within minutes. I have been adjourning (the house) because I don't want these ugly scenes to be seen by the people," Naidu said as he adjourned the House till Friday morning.In this process, many communities are reviving open wellsinvested in storage of rooftop rainwater. Old ones that are revived and new ones that are dug are becoming part of communities water supplies. In essence, this is a contemporary version of our heritage and the wisdom of the past.

Communities have also invested in storage of rooftop rainwater reuse their treated waste water to supplement and reduce dependence on other fresh water sources  be it piped water supply or groundwater. For many communities, these investments in rainwater harvesting could be justified solely on the flood control impact they had within their properties or campuses. Bengaluru has a rainfall equivalent of close to 3,000 MLD (Million Litres a Day)  thats more than what the piped supply would be after investments in the next stage of the Cauvery : 1,480 + 750 = 2,230 MLD.

Reusing wastewater

Then there are the stories of pioneering communities that have retrofit dual plumbing into their apartments to reuse their treated waste water take care of Bengalurus lakesin flushes or a community that actually drinks its own treated waste water! Many have at least begun to use treated wastewater for all landscaping purposes  that can represent a significant demand for water in many campuses. They are demanding more enlightened regulation to dispose of their excess treated water responsibly, but in a way that it comes back into Bengalurus water cycle as a useful resource. At least 80 percent of all water we use flows out as wastewater and residents are showing how we can begin to treat this as a source of water for the city.

Encouraging water conservation livelihoods

This means the city has and is developing a vibrant set of well diggers, plumbers, masons, electricians, metring product developers, rainwater harvesting and waste water treatment service providers with skills, knowledge and understanding of these solutions. These people are a very important part of the solution  they are day-in and day-out dealing with the problems people face, working with them to implement solutions, to monitor them, and to continuously improve them. Their innovations need to be recognised and their work needs to be incentivised.

Protecting local water bodies

Entire neighbourhoods are coming together to form lake groups to take care of Bengalurus lakes and wetlands  to find a lakes most appropriate functions in a changing urbanscape: waste water management, groundwater recharge, flood control and also a space for urban biodiversity, a public space and a space for peace and meditation. They are forging alliances with corporates and civil society, and working with government institutions to help revive and maintain lakes. And these lake groups are realising how different livelihoods  such as that of the fisherman and the cowherd  is in such synergy with that of the lakes well-being that it is beginning to make the citys new-age IT citizen realise the importance of their stakeholding in the lake!

It is important for Bengaluru to share and tell these stories and celebrate its characters. It is important for Bengaluru to make these stories a part of the mainstream of its water narrative. Bengaluru.urbanwaters.in is an online space to help bring these stories together  you can read many of the pioneering stories referred to earlier in this space. For example, on this site is a comic book you will find that narrates the story of Meghdooth Enclave, which is based on the real work of a community in Bengaluru. The site also contains site primers, guides, glossaries, FAQs and service provider contacts for all your water management problems and needs.

With the recent Supreme Court judgement on the Cauvery dispute, Bengaluru now has a greater share of the Cauvery waters for itself. With financial assistance from the Japan International Cooperation Agency, Bengaluru is now making its next big investments in water infrastructure  the Cauvery fifth stage water supply project  to bring in an additional 750 MLD. Will this water-supplied-in-the-pipe enter Meghdooth Enclave and drown out the relevance of its story? Or will Bengaluru realise smartness lies in listening to these stories and transitioning its citizens from being the problem to being a part of the solution?

----

Avinash Krishnamurthy works at Biome Environmental Trust and was part of the team that set up the urbanwaters.in website, a community project funded by Wipro. You can write and share your water story with the city in this space; email water@biome-solutions.com.Launching a stinging attack against the government, Congress president Rahul Gandhi today said it invented a story on data theft by the Congress to divert attention from the death of 39 Indians in Iraq.



The Congress president also accused the government of baiting the media.

Problem: 39 Indians dead; Government on the mat, caught lying. Solution: Invent story on Congress and Data Theft. Result: Media networks bite bait; 39 Indians vanish from radar. Problem solved, he said on Twitter.





Problem: 39 Indians dead; Govt on the mat, caught lying.



Solution: Invent story on Congress & Data Theft.



Result: Media networks bite bait; 39 Indians vanish from radar.



Problem solved.  Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) March 22, 2018





The Congress has been accusing the government of managing headlines to deflect the country's focus from the multi-crore PNB bank scam, the dilution of provisions of the SC/ST Atrocities Act and questions being raised by the families of those killed in Iraq.

Adding to the chorus of Congress criticism, the party's communications in-charge Randeep Surjewala said the government had lied to the families of the 39 Indians about their loved ones being alive even after evidence suggested they were killed years ago.

He also asked why the Modi government misled the country for four years on the killing of 39 Indians after their kidnapping in Mosul of Iraq.

Families ask questions - Why did Modi Government and Sushmaji mislead them for 4 yrs? Why does the Government not reveal the date of death? What evidence did the EAM have of them being alive for all these years? Why is Government not agreeable to compensating the families?

Another lie, Another spin exposed as truth unravels on Mosul Tragedy. All 39 Indians had died years ago as the evidence and witnesses suggested and corroborated now by Martyrs Foundation. Yet Modi Government lied, duped and deceived the families and the Nation! Surjewala said.On 21 March Artsakh Republic President Bako Sahakyan partook in Antelias at a solemn opening ceremony of an Independence Monument within the frameworks of the conference dedicated to the 100th anniversary of the Republic of Armenias Independence, Presidential Office informed Artsakhpress.

March 22, 2018, 09:41 Artsakh President partakes at opening ceremony of Independence Monument in Antelias

STEPANAKERT, MARCH 22, ARTSAKHPRESS:Catholicos of the Great House of Cilicia Aram I, representatives from Armenia, the Diaspora and Artsakh partook at the event.India today successfully test fired the Brahmos supersonic cruise missile with an indigenous seeker at Pokhran test range in Rajasthan.



Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said the missile hit the target with "pin-point" accuracy and the success will further bolster India's national security.

The test firing comes three months after the Brahmos cruise missile was successfully test fired for the first time from the Indian Air Force's frontline Sukhoi-30 MKI combat jet.

"Formidable Supersonic Cruise Missile #BrahMos was successfully flight tested at 8:42 AM today at Pokhran test range, Rajasthan. The precision strike weapon with Indian-made seeker flew in its designated trajectory and hit the target with pin-point accuracy," Sitharaman tweeted.

The range of the missile, an Indo-Russia joint venture, can be extended up to 400 km as certain technical restrictions were lifted after India became a full member of the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) last year.

Brahmos is a joint venture between DRDO of India and NPO Mashinostroyenia (NPOM) of Russia.

The Defence Minister congratulated the DRDO on today successful test firing.

Brahmos missile is the heaviest weapon to be deployed on India's Su-30 fighter aircraft.

Work has already begun to integrate the Brahmos supersonic cruise missile on 40 Sukhoi combat aircraft which is expected to fulfil the critical needs of the Indian Air Force in the wake of evolving security dynamics in the region.Exuding confidence of forming a grand alliance against "communal" BJP before 2019 general elections, former JD(U) MP Sharad Yadav says a fight for social justice alone can stop the communalism being spread by the BJP.



"The biggest fight in the country is for social justice. Only this can stop the communalism being spread by the BJP. I am touring the entire country and meeting people. I hope a grand alliance will come up against the BJP by 2019," he told PTI.

Yadav, who was once the NDA convenor said, "I am working to unite parties against the BJP as its ideology is communal. When I was the NDA convenor, it was under the leadership of Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Lal Krishna Advani and it had a national agenda, which has changed now."

"This agenda has turned divisive now. The present government at the Centre is dividing people in the name of religion," he said in an interview here.

Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath is only taking round of temples and making unconstitutional statements, he said.

Asked about his role in the alliance proposed by him, Yadav said, "Let it materialise first. My objective is to unite the opposition. I have been an MP for eleven terms and resigned four times. This time around, I've got time (after revocation of his membership following a dispute in JD(U) to travel across the country and unite people."

Terming defeat of the BJP and victory of the Samajwadi party in Gorakhpur and Phulpur Lok Sabha bypolls as "significant", Yadav said the "message of this victory in CM and deputy CM's constituencies have gone to the entire country. People have now realised their power".

Claiming that the BJP would taste defeat in 2019, Yadav said, "The BJP and its allies got maximum seats in UP, Bihar, Jharkhand and West Bengal. But the political equations have changed now there. No section of the society is happy with the BJP. This time Hindu-Muslim agenda of the BJP is not going to work," he said.

Accusing the BJP of resorting to "political corruption", Yadav said, "in Goa and Manipur, the Congress got maximum seats but the BJP formed the government. In Meghalaya too, the Congress was the largest party.

The BJP has abandoned political dignity and morality. Its only agenda is to grab power by forming government."

Asked about the fears against misuse of EVMs, Yadav said, "Even Hitler could not suppress the people's will. Gorakhpur and Phulpur elections too were held through EVMs."

Asked about the possible seat he may choose to contest the next Lok Sabha elections, Yadav said, "I have not yet decided about my self."

Yadav, who was here recently, had met SP supremo Akhilesh Yadav and discussed political situation with him, also expressed desire to meet BSP chief Mayawati in coming days.

"The NDA is a sinking ship. In the days to come, its allies will part ways. The NDA agenda has turned divisive. After Shiv Sena, TDP too has left NDA. Before soon, no one will be left in the NDA," Yadav had claimed after meeting Akhilesh.

On his fight with the JD(U) leadership, he said he was contesting a case in the court and also before the EC. He added that he was also exploring a name for his new party.Consulting firm White Page International (WPI) has released its annual list of Asia's 100 Most Admired Brands and Leaders in its sixth edition of Asian Brand and Leadership Conclave held in Singapore.

At a conclave organised in association with UK Asian , 100 Asian Brands Business Council across different categories, 50 Business Leaders and 50 of the best Asian CFOs were honoured for their contribution to the industry.

"The 6th edition that you are about to see, speaks great volumes of the brands that have a legacy and continue to strive to excellence in the economy," said Dr Malcolm McDonald, Non-Executive Chairman, White Page International, while addressing the delegates.

The Jury members who listed the 100 most admired brands and leaders from different Asian countries through a thorough selection process included Taha Coburn- Chairman of UK Asian Business Council, Ashish Bhasin- Chairman and CEO South Asia Dentsu Aegis Network, Sunil Lulla- Chairman and MD, Grey Group India, and Rohit Ohri.

Some of the selected brands in the list included -- Kent RO, Sri City, Britsh Biologicals, Asian Heart Institute, Bangladesh Edible Oils, Dentzz Dental Care, Envision Scientific, KAEduAssociates, Arth World, Bajaj Almond Drops, Frasers Hospitality, Bajaj Allianz, Fullerton, DBS Bank, Prestige Construction, among othersThe freeze on security aid to Pakistan, announced by the Donald Trump Administration early this year, has been incorporated in the USD 1.3 trillion spending bill which will fund the federal government for the remainder of fiscal 2018.



Congressional leaders, after weeks of negotiations, last night reached a deal on federal spending until September 30, two days before a deadline to fund the government or risk a shutdown.

The 2,232-page draft bill provides the largest funding increase for the US military in 15 years and makes significant investments in national priorities like infrastructure and border security.

In January, the US had suspended about USD 2 billion in security aid to Pakistan for failing to clamp down on the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani Network terror groups and dismantle their safe havens.

According to the legislation, any assistance to Pakistan under the "Foreign Military Financing Programme" may be made available only to support counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency capabilities in Pakistan.

The bill withholds USD 33 million in financial assistance to Pakistan unless the Secretary of State informs the Congress that Dr Shakil Afridi is released from jail and cleared of all charges relating to the assistance provided to the US in locating Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden.

In 30 days of the enactment of the Act, the Secretary of State would consult with the Committees on Appropriations on the funds that are anticipated to be subject to the January 2018 policy decision of the Trump Administration to suspend security assistance for Pakistan.

The Congress expects the Secretary of State to promptly inform it in the case of any changes to its current policy along with its justification.

For the civilian assistance to Pakistan, the omnibus spending bill asks the Secretary of State to provide a report on the amount of financing and other support, if any, provided by the Pakistan government to schools supported by, affiliated with, or run by the Taliban or any domestic or foreign terrorist organisation in that country.

The Congress would also seek certification from the Defense Secretary and the Secretary of State on issues, including that the Pakistan government was cooperating with the US in counter-terrorism efforts against the Haqqani Network, the Quetta Shura Taliban, the Lashkar e-Tayyiba, the Jaish-e-Mohammed, the Al Qaeda and other domestic and foreign terrorist organisations.

Also, that they were taking steps to end support for such groups and prevent them from basing and operating in Pakistan and carrying out cross-border attacks into neighbouring countries.

They also need to certify that Pakistan is not supporting terrorist activities against the US or coalition forces in Afghanistan, and Pakistan's military and intelligence agencies are not intervening extra-judicially into political and judicial processes.

The Defense Secretary and the Secretary of State also need to certify that Pakistan is dismantling improvised explosive device (IED) networks and interdicting precursor chemicals used in the manufacture of IEDs; preventing the proliferation of nuclear-related material and expertise and implementing policies to protect judicial independence and due process of law.

However, as is in all such cases, there is a provision of national interest waiver; but this needs to be on a case-by-case basis with proper explanation to the Congress, the bill says.

Republican leaders had said that the House of Representatives plans to vote today, which would soon be followed by the Senate.

The White House had yesterday said that the President has agreed to the bill.Altran, part of $2 billion French technology and innovation consulting company, on Thursday announced the completion of the acquisition of Aricent Technologies.

Aricent, Santa Clara (California)-headquartered global design and engineering company, will help Altran to become the undisputed global leader in semiconductors, digital experience and design innovation.

The announcement follows receipt of all required approvals of all closing conditions under an agreement announced on November 29, 2017, between Aricent, Altran through its subsidiary Altran US and KKR.

The acquisition will help the Paris-headquartered Altran to assume global leadership in engineering and R&D services, which is expected to reach $220 billion by 2020.

The announcement follows receipt of all required approvals and satisfaction of all closing conditions under an agreement announced on November 29, 2017, between Aricent, Altran through its subsidiary Altran US and KKR.

Commenting on the development, Altran CEO and Chairman Dominique Cerutti said the acquisition will help the company partner with its clients in better way to create innovative products and services, from initial concept through industrialisation.

"Together, the members of the Altran and Aricent teams offer an unmatched value proposition to address clients' transformation and innovation challenges," said Cerutti.

Combined, Altran and Aricent generated revenues of 2.9 billion in 2017, with some 45,000 employees in more than 30 countries.

Aricent CEO Frank Kern said today marks a new beginning for Aricent. "We are excited to officially join Altran and combine the ingenuity and creativity of our unmatched global talent into one company," he said.

He also said the company is looking forward to provide clients with the industry's most advanced innovations and solutions, enabling them to continue to achieve unparalleled success.

Besides office in Bengaluru, Altran has offices in Noida, Hyderabad and Coimbatore. Aricent has presence in Bengaluru, Pune, Noida, Gurugram, Hyderabad and Chennai,India and China are "frenemies" which are working with each other despite disagreements and the world can learn from their relationship, India's top diplomat at the UN has said.



"In Hollywood, there is a term, which has become quite popular. And that, I think, is called frenemies. That's what we have with China. We engaged with them, we compete with them. In some areas, we work with them together and in some areas we agree to disagree and move on, India's Permanent Representative to the UN, Syed Akbaruddin, said here on Tuesday.

Responding to a question after delivering the inaugural Ambassador Howard Schaffer Memorial Lecture at the Georgetown University, the senior Indian diplomat said India has engaged with China on its development initiatives like Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) but opposed it on its Belt and Road initiative.

"Belt and Road Initiative, to me, is not a normal multilateral or plurilateral approach...We are not party to that, he said at the event organised by the Georgetown India Initiative.

India skipped China's high-profile Belt and Road Forum last year due to its sovereignty concerns over the USD 50 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), which passes through PoK.

Touted as Chinese President Xi Jinping's ambitious project, the One Belt One Road initiative focuses on improving connectivity and cooperation among Asian countries, Africa, China and Europe.

Asked about his views on India-Pakistan relationship and Islamabad raising the Kashmir issue on UN platform and seeking a plebiscite, he asserted that Pakistan has no internal support on this.

"Frankly to me, issues of India and Pakistan, the way you framed it are yesterday's problems. This does not mean that we don't need to address them, he said, responding to a question.

"This does not mean that they are not of a serious nature. But in terms of where we look at ourselves 20 years from now or 25 years from now, we don't see these as issues of a nature which will destabilise us in fundamental ways, Akbaruddin said, adding that in the last one year not a single country joined Pakistan in raising the Kashmir issue at the UN General Assembly.

"How come, other than the 13 times, Pakistan spoke, not one other country spoke. So is this today's issue? It's clear that others are not bothered about. The world has too many other issues to focus on. India and Pakistan need to address these as neighbours," he said.

While China and India are frenemies, he said, others can learn from the relationship between the two countries.

"Perhaps what others can learn from our relationship is that despite a border that is the longest un-demarcated border in the world, there haven't been casualties on that border since the last 40 years, he said.

"If our western neighbour can also look at that as a model --- we agree to disagree, we try and work out, if it doesn't work, we continue to push out own interest. But the way of trying to resolve it through underhand death that by a thousand cuts is not going to help. We are a billion people. With thousand cuts, you would not reach a billion. So it's best if we reconciled to each other, he said.

Reiterating India's position on the long due expansion of the UN Security Council, he rued that the present structure does not represent the current scenario.

"If you do not provide as an opportunity to be part of the solution there are other ways that we would start finding to be contributing to a solution that may not mean something to everyone's liking. But that will inevitably happen, Akbaruddin said.Jammu and Kashmir police said that five militants killed in an encounter in northern Kupwara district on Wednesday, were foreigners, as security forces launched a search operation in the dense forest area to locate a missing army personnel.



"The operation is at controlling stage as searches are underway at some places. We have recovered arms and ammunition in large quantity. All those killed are foreign terrorists and prima facie it appears they are affiliated to LeT," Inspector General of Police (IGP) Kashmir Range, Swam Prakesh Pani told reporters in Srinagar.



Five militants and five security forces, including three army personnel and two policemen, were killed in the encounter that started on Tuesday afternoon at Halmatpora near Line of Control (LoC) in Kupwara. One army personnel had reportedly gone missing during the operation.



"The encounter that started in the dense forest was a difficult task for the security forces owing to the thick vegetation. But the forces carefully completed the operation," the IGP said.



Sources said the operation was suspended Wednesday night due to darkness in the dense forest to avoid any casualty and security forces resumed it early morning to trace the missing soldier.



"The militants might have recently infiltrated from Pakistan occupied Kashmir (PoK), but were neutralised before they could reach to the hinterland. A few hundred militants have become active across the LoC with an aim to infiltrate into the state and create disturbances," they said.



"All these groups belonged to Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), Hizbul Mujahideen and Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) outfits."



Sources said some of the militant commanders of these three outfits were also active across the LoC to facilitate infiltration attempts by the militants. "There is pressure on militants waiting on launching pads to infiltrate due to depleting the number of terrorists in the state in view of successes achieved by security forces against the militants,'' they added.



The government of Armenia approved the bill on ratifying the 2017 July 25 convention On excluding double taxation on income and property and preventing tax evasion between Armenia and Israel.

March 22, 2018, 15:03 Armenia, Israel to rule out income and property double taxation

STEPANAKERT, MARCH 22, ARTSAKHPRESS-ARMENPRESS:During todays Cabinet meeting, finance minister Vardan Aramyan mentioned that the Constitutional Court has recently endorsed the agreement.

As of this moment, we have this kind of agreements with 46 countries. With another three countries  Kyrgyzstan, Seychelles and Uzbekistan, we have almost completed procedures. By yearend, we will most likely complete talks with another 4 countries and the agreements will be prepared for signing, he said.The Yogi Adityanath government in Uttar Pradesh may withdraw riot cases if they are "politically motivated", the state's Law Minister Brijesh Pathak said today.



Pathak was replying to a specific question by a media-person on cases related to Muzaffarnagar and other riots in the state.

"Riot cases are also registered under the IPC. If these are politically motivated, we will surely consider their withdrawal," the minister said.

He, however, made it clear that only those cases were being withdrawn which smacked of political vendetta.

"Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath has decided to withdraw those cases which were filed due to political reasons. We have initiated a process in this regard," he said.

Pathak said the state government had received applications from leaders of all the parties.

"The cases lodged because of political rivalry are being withdrawn by the state government," the minister said.

Over 62 lakh cases were pending before UP courts, he said.

The minister was, however, did not give a specific reply on a news report that the BJP government had initiated the process of withdrawal of 131 cases linked to the 2013 Muzaffarnagar and Shamli communal riots.

At least 62 persons died and a large number of people lost their homes in the riots that took place in September 2013.

Following the violence, a total of 503 cases were lodged against around 1,455 persons at police stations in Muzaffarnagar and Shamli by the then Samajwadi Party government.The ambitious National Health Protection Mission will offer 1,347 treatment packages, for which the poor and marginalised section of the society would receive up to Rs 5 lakh medical insurance cover from the government.

The Union Health Ministry is in the process of finalising the standard treatment rates for the packages that would subsequently be shared with the state governments and insurance firms.

The package rates will include all the costs associated with treatment such as hospitalisation, essential diagnostics, surgery cost (if required) and medicine expenses. The expenses of lens (for cataract surgery) or stents (for angioplasty), for instance, will be covered in the package.

At the moment only organ transplant like kidney, liver and eye transplant has been kept outside the scheme, which is being dubbed by the BJP as Modi Care.

Once the package rates are fixed by the health ministry, State governments will have the flexibility to modify these rates within a limited bandwidth.

The beneficiaries would be identified by on the basis of 2011 Socio-Economic Caste Census, whose results would be updated through a nation-wide exercise from April onwards.

Subsequently every eligible family nearly 10.74 crore will receive an official letter with a QR code for the family. The quick response code is the same unique number generated by the SECC for each household, health ministry sources told DH.

"Once a family receives the letter, it can produce the same or a photocopy at the empanelled hospital. The information technology backbone would then identify the person and keep track of the treatment," said an official.

A massive IT infrastructure is being created to keep track of loads of data that will come from nearly 50 crore potential users and hundreds of hospitals. The Health Ministry hopes the IT backbone would be up and ready for testing by July.

The two target launch dates for the flagship programme approved by the Union Cabinet on Wednesday are August 15 and October 2, depending on the progress made in readying the infrastructure, training the personnel and finalising the deals with insurance companies.

The ministry is yet to arrive at what could be the premium for each family. That would be known only after negotiation with insurance firms and completion of the tender process.

"The response from the insurance companies are positive and initially we have set aside Rs 10,000 crore for the programme. Money is not an issue. All the states except Tripura took part in the consultation and the response was positive," said Union Health Minister J P Nadda.Wary of the Samajwaadi Party (SP)-BSP combine following humiliating defeats in the recent by-polls in Phulpur and Gorakhpur Lok Sabha constituencies, the BJP government in Uttar Pradesh is considering to provide reservations to the 'Mahadalits' and 'Most Backward Communities' (MBC).

Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath said in the State Assembly on Thursday that the government could consider reservations for these communities if needed.

''The demand for reservation by these communities, who really require it, has been ignored by successive governments,'' Adityanath said while making his reply on the general budget.

He said that the government would soon constitute a high-level committee to look into the issue and submit a report.

Former UP chief minister and the present union home minister Rajnath Singh had also proposed a similar reservation in 2002 but it had been scrapped by the court.

According to the sources in the BJP, the main objective behind the move was to counter the SP-BSP combine in the next Lok Sabha polls in 2019. ''It will dent the vote banks of BSP supremo Mayawati and also galvanise the non-yadav OBC votes in our favour,'' remarked a senior BJP leader here.

The Opposition parties, however, sought to portray the move as a proof of the ruling party's wariness. ''BJP knows that such a decision can never be implemented....it is only trying to misguide the people and win their votes as it has now realised that its days are numbered,'' said a senior SP leader here while speaking to Deccan Herald.The ruling AIADMK in Tamil Nadu today said it was exerting adequate pressure on the Centre over the Cauvery issue and cited the persistent protests by party MPs in Parliament to drive home its point.



Deputy Chief Minister O Panneerselvam informed the state Assembly that the government was firm on its stand that the Centre must constitute the Cauvery Water Management Board (CWMB) and the Cauvery Water Regulation Committee (CWRC).

He was responding to DMK working president and Leader of Opposition MK Stalin, who raised the issue, and sought to know if AIADMK will move a no-confidence motion against the BJP government like the N Chandrababu Naidu-led TDP had done.

Telugu Desam Party had recently ended its alliance with BJP over the issue of Special category status for Andhra Pradesh and moved the no-trust motion.

Responding to Stalin, Panneerselvam recalled the final verdict of the Supreme Court on the Cauvery issue on February 16 and pointed out Tamil Nadu was steadfast on its demand for setting up CMB and CWRC.

"Our determined stand is that CWMB and CWRC should be constituted," he said.

Further, the AIADMK was exerting adequate pressure on the Centre over the issue, he said, and cited the persistent protests by party MPs in Parliament on the matter.

"Our MPs are exerting so much pressure that parliament has remained stalled," he said, even as the stalemate entered the second week today in Delhi.

Proceedings in both Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha were disrupted for the 14th straight day today on the second leg of the budget session due to unabated protests by opposition parties and those from some southern states, including AIADMK.

Panneerselvam said there was time till the end of the month for constituting CWMB and CWRC and hinted that the government will formulate its move thereafter based on the Centre's move on constituting them.

The government could also involve the opposition to chalk out a strategy, he added.

The AIADMK government had earlier convened a meeting of all political parties and farmers' representatives on the Cauvery issue, where it was decided that an all-party delegation would meet Prime Minister Narendra Modi to urge him to constitute the Cauvery panels.A week after he was called back for consultations amid raging row between India and Pakistan over harassment of diplomats, Pakistan High Commissioner to India Sohail Mahmood will return from Islamabad tonight, Pakistani government sources said today.



According to sources, Mahmood will host a series of events tomorrow to mark the 'Pakistan National Day' at the country's mission in New Delhi, including a dinner reception.

In the morning, the Pakistani envoy will also hoist the flag and deliver a speech, they said.

Mahmood was called back to Islamabad for consultations after alleged incidents of "harassment" of its diplomatic staff in New Delhi with Pakistan Foreign Office spokesman Muhammad Faisal claiming that the Indian government failed to take notice of the increasing incidents of intimidation of Pakistani diplomats, their families and staffers by its intelligence agencies.

India and Pakistan have accused each other of harassing diplomats in Islamabad and New Delhi respectively.The Centre will soon file a special leave petition (SLP) in the Supreme Court seeking review of its decision on the department-wise implementation of reservation in the appointment of faculty members in the country's universities and colleges.



The Allahabad High Court, while hearing a petition in this connection last year, had ordered for a department-wise implementation of quota in the appointment of teachers in higher education institutions, instead of taking institution as one unit.

The Supreme Court also upheld the Allahabad High Court's order, prompting the UGC to revise its regulations for the implementation of the government's reservation policy under a new formula, where each of the departments of a university or a college will be treated as separate units for the purpose of filling up vacant positions of teachers.

This, however, drew sharp criticism from various sections of teaching community, academicians and other stakeholders in the education sector as they felt that the new UGC formula for department-wise calculation of vacancies and filling up of the posts would deny job opportunity to many eligible candidates who belong to Scheduled Castes, Scheduled Tribes and Other backward classes.

Many parliamentarians, who belong to Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, also spoke against the revised UGC rule for the implementation of quota.

Amid an outrage over the issue, Union Minister for Social Justice and Empowerment Thawar Chand Gehlot wrote to the Prime Minister's Office (PMO), urging for withdrawal of the UGC's revised formula for implementation of reservation rules in the appointment of faculties.



The central government last week constituted an inter-ministerial committee to examine the issue after a parliamentary standing committee called for it, taking suo-moto cognizance of the matter.

The committee, comprising senior officials of the Union ministries of social justice, human resource development, tribal affairs and law, as well as the department of personnel and training, recommended for the filing of a SLP in the Supreme Court for review of its decision.

"We are going to file a SLP in Supreme Court soon," a top HRD ministry official told DH.US Congressmen urged to stop funding Azerbaijan and instead to assist Armenia and Artsakh, Voice of America reports.

March 22, 2018, 17:31 Providing aid to Armenia and Artsakh discussed at US Congress hearings

STEPANAKERT, MARCH 22, ARTSAKHPRESS:During the hearings of the Congress committee on foreign affairs Congressman Brad Sherman called on the USAID head to provide assistance to Artsakh.

You know that Armenia, which is blockaded by Turkey and Azerbaijan, deserves our support. You are aware that Nagorno Karabakh, now the Republic of Artsakh, is a neighbor to a militaristic force, and that the southern region of Georgia, which is called SamtskheJavakheti, is a region which also deserves most of our support. I believe many of my colleagues have addressed a letter on this occasion, the Congressman said.

37 Congressmen called on their partners to reach the US aid to Armenia 60 million USD. In particular, they called on to provide 30 million USD economic, 10 million USD military aid to Armenia and 20 million USD to Armenian refugees of the Middle East who resettled in Armenia. The letter also calls on to stop any assistance to Azerbaijan and provide aid worth 10 million USD to Artsakh aimed at conducting demining activities and installing cameras to record the ceasefire violations.Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar on Thursday issued a veiled threat to his alliance partner- the BJP - and asked the saffron party leaders to desist from their bid to disturb communal harmony in the state.



"I extend my best wishes to everyone on the occasion of Ramnavmi. But at the same time, I would ask 'certain elements' to desist from their attempt to fan communal trouble in this peace-loving state," said Nitish, in an oblique reference to the BJP, but without naming his ally.

The JD (U) strongman was addressing a gathering on the occasion of concluding function of the Champaran Satyagraha Centenary Celebration here in the state capital.

The function coincided with Bihar Diwas celebrations too. Vice President Venkaiah Naidu, who was the chief guest on the occasion, was on the dais, besides Deputy Chief Minister Sushil Modi, when Nitish issued the terse message to the BJP leaders.

This is the second occasion this week when the chief minister, reportedly miffed with Union ministers Giriraj Singh and Ashwini Choubey and Bihar BJP chief Nityanand Rai for fanning communal tension, has expressed his displeasure publicly, albeit subtly, about his ally.

"A similar attempt to disturb communal harmony was made earlier also when Dussehra and Muharram a the two important festivals of Hindus and Muslims - were at the same time. But I am known to enforce the rule of law and establish good governance. So the attempt to disturb amity was nipped in the bud," said Nitish, even though the BJP leaders present on the occasion tried to hide their discomfiture.

Later, Naidu, while addressing the crowd, highlighted the contribution of Mahatma Gandhi and Champaran Satyagraha in the freedom struggle.

He also recalled the contributions made by first President Dr Rajendra Prasad. "The new generation should take a leaf out of Gandhi Ji, Rajendra Babu and Jaya Prakash Narayan's book," said Naidu.Following protests from the men in uniform, the Central Government has withdrawn its controversial decision to cap educational expenses of children whose parents either died or were injured in a military action.



Last year, the Defence Ministry introduced a cap of Rs 10,000 per month on hostel and tuition charges of such children on the basis of 7th Pay Commission recommendations.

The cap would help save Rs 3.2 crore for the government, Subhash Bhamre, Minister of State for Defence stated, responding to an MP's query in January.

With the move evoking sharp criticism of the government for its insensitivity, the Finance Ministry on Wednesday came out with a revised order, dropping the Rs 10,000 a month cap.

There is, however, a rider that the concession would be available to children studying in government or government-recognised schools and colleges, ruling out foreign education.

The concession would be available to the children of armed forces officers and persons below officer rank (PBOR), who is missing, disabled or killed in action.

Govt bows

Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman had requested Finance Minister Arun Jaitley to remove the cap after she was approached by Admiral Sunil Lanba, Chairman, Chiefs of Staff Committee, with a request to lift the cap as a humanitarian gesture.

Sitharaman received similar requests from Punjab Chief Minister Capt Amarinder Singh and Minister of State for External Affairs and former Army Chief Gen V K Singh.

There is no such ceiling in the existing scheme that was announced in the Lok Sabha two days after India's victory in the 1971 war against Pakistan and implemented from 1972.

In 1990, the Defence Ministry extended the scheme to children of officers and soldiers killed or disabled in Operation Meghdoot (Siachen) and Operation Pawan (Sri Lanka). Another amendment in 2003 brought the children of those killed or disabled in counter-insurgency operations under the ambit of the scheme.

Approximately 250 students would be benefited in the current financial year.

In 2017-18, out of 2,679 students (up to December 27, 2017), 193 students were drawing more than the capped amount. The highest amount drawn was Rs 18.95 lakh per annum.NEW DELHI, DHNS: Ovleno Business Intelligence (OBI), the India partner of Cambridge Analytica (CA), on Thursday said it is "looking to end" its association with the global company, which is at the centre of allegations of misusing user data for campaigns.



The OBI, which is owned by senior JD(U) leader K C Tyagi's son Amrish, found itself in the media glare following its association with CA and reports of it working for BJP, Congress and JD(U) in different elections. The association has also put the focus on Tyagi.

In a statement, the OBI said it was not denying its association with Strategic Communications Laboratories (SCL), the parent company of CA, or CA itself.

It said OBI was a ground research company closely working with various media houses and did not undertake any project with CA related to social media, especially Facebook.

"We are equally shocked and surprised to see the data breach controversy and we are also looking to end our association with them," the OBI vice president Himanshi Sharma said.

"We again want to clarify that neither the whistleblower nor Facebook has confirmed that there is any kind of data breach in India," he said. Sharma's LinkedIn profile claimed that OBI handled BJP's four election campaigns.

The company had claimed that its clients included BJP, Congress, JD (U), ICICI Bank, and Airtel. SCL and OBI had joined hands to form SCL India. However, OBI's website has been taken down now and it could not be accessed.

Amid reports that JD(U) chief Nitish Kumar has sought explanation from him, Tyagi, the party general secretary, told reporters that JD(U) has no connection with the CA.

"Neither JD (U) nor my son has got any kind of help from Cambridge Analytica. In any case, JD(U) is a socialist outfit and we stay away from such things, except for maybe Prashant Kishoreji helping us during the last Assembly polls," he said.

"There was only a work relation between my son Amrish's company and Cambridge Analytics. There is no financial transaction or shareholding - everything is open to probe. JD(U) also has no links with this, neither did they promote us in 2010 polls," he said.

Tyagi also asked Union Law Minister Ravishankar Prasad to initiate an inquiry into the allegations against Cambridge Analytica.New Delhi, DHNS: Rahul Gandhi on Thursday hit out at the Modi government for "inventing" a story on data theft by the Congress to divert attention from the death of 39 Indians in Iraq.



"Problem: 39 Indians dead; Government on the mat, caught lying. Solution: Invent story on Congress and Data Theft. Result: Media networks bite bait; 39 Indians vanish from radar. Problem solved," Gandhi, the Congress president tweeted.

The Congress also launched an acerbic attack on the Modi government dubbing Law Minister Ravishankar Prasad the 'minister of lies' and likening him to Goebbels, the propaganda minister of Hitler.

"Hitler had an associate called Goebbels, Modiji has an associate called Ravi Shankar Prasad. The BJP government has become a manufacturer of fake news. The biggest data thieves are those making the most noise," Randeep Singh Surjewala, the chief spokesperson of the Congress, told a press conference here.

He reiterated that it was the BJP that had utilised the services of disgraced data-mining firm Cambridge Analytica (CA) for elections in Bihar, Maharashtra, Haryana, Jharkhand and Delhi.

Key Congress strategist Sam Pitroda called the BJP's allegations "utter rubbish" and "pure lies" and asserted that there were several data analysts of international repute in India who would do the same services as CA at a much lower cost.

"I know that Cambridge Analytica has nothing unique to offer us that people like me do not know or cannot learn. We are capable of doing these things on our own and do not need expensive foreign experts to teach us to execute," Pitroda, the chairman of the Overseas Congress, said.

Surjewala also accused the BJP of levelling allegations against the Congress on the CA issue as a "diversionary tactics" as the government was facing the heat over the handling of the deaths of 39 Indian nationals in Iraq.

The Congress has been accusing the government of managing headlines to deflect the country's focus from the multi-crore PNB bank scam, the dilution of provisions of the SC/ST Atrocities Act and questions being raised by the families of those killed in Iraq.The government may file a petition in the Supreme Court seeking a review of its judgement diluting the provisions of the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, a ruling that has been slammed by leaders across party lines.



Dalit MPs from the BJP and alliance partners have doubled up efforts to put pressure on the Modi government to go for a review of the apex court judgement that issued guidelines to protect civil servants and private employees from arbitrary arrests under the Atrocities Act.

The Lok Janashakti Party, a partner in the NDA government, declared that it would file a review petition in the Supreme Court next week on the judgement delivered on Tuesday that has had political parties up in arms.

A delegation of Dalit MPs met Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad to share their anxieties over the judgement and pitched for a review petition.

"We will study it and respond accordingly," Prasad told reporters at a press conferences here.

A top BJP source said the party's leadership has been apprised of the concerns raised by the SC/ST communities, who contend that the strongest weapon in the armoury has been snatched away by the verdict.

"SCs and STs across the country are angry about this judgement and the government should file a review petition," Union Minister Ram Vilas Paswan said here, mounting pressure on the government to take quick action in this regard.

Paswan is already upset about the inflammatory statements made by the Union ministers which had made a dent in his support base in Bihar comprising mostly voters from backward classes and minority communities.

"We will file a review petition in the Supreme Court next week," Chirag Paswan, chairman of the LJP parliamentary board, told reporters here.

The Supreme Court, in its judgement, had observed that the Atrocities Act had become an instrument to "blackmail" innocent citizens and public servants.

"Every law is prone to misuse; that does not mean that those laws should be abolished," senior Congress leader P L Punia said in a statement here. He demanded a review of the judgement.

CPI and Dalit Shoshan Mukti Manch, too, have demanded a review of the apex court judgement.In a further sign of positive bilateral engagement, India and China concluded their 11th round of talks on "working and coordination mechanism" for border affairs on Thursday.

Significantly, as a Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) statement emphasised, India "underlined that maintenance of peace and tranquillity in the India-China border areas is an important pre-requisite for a further development of bilateral relations between the two countries."

The MEA statement said various confidence-building measures aimed at further enhancing the level of mutual trust and understanding between border personnel were discussed.

The discussions were held in a friendly and cordial atmosphere. Both sides exchanged views on ways to improve border management, the statement said.

Both sides also agreed to explore the possibility of strengthening cooperation through exchange of visits and institutionalised dialogue mechanisms in order to promote better understanding and cooperation between the two defence forces, it said.

The Working Mechanism on Consultation and Coordination for India-China Border Affairs (WMCC) was established in 2012 as an institutional mechanism for consultation and coordination for the maintenance of peace and tranquillity in the India-China border areas.

It also serves to exchange views on strengthening communication and cooperation, including between their border security personnel.

The Indian delegation was led by Pranay Verma, joint secretary (East Asia) of the MEA while the Chinese delegation was led by Yi Xianliang, director general, department of boundary and oceanic affairs of China's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The two sides agreed to hold the next meeting of the WMCC at a mutually convenient time.

Two days ago, Prime Minister Narendra Modi's phone conversation with Chinese President Xi Jinping was seen boosting the process of bilateral engagement, began with the foreign secretary's visit to Beijing.

Modi offered his congratulations to Xi for his re-election and discussed efforts to enhance high-level exchanges and deepen bilateral cooperation.

Xi appreciated Modi's congratulations, even as the Indian Prime Minister said Xi's re-election shows that he enjoys the support of the whole Chinese nation.

The two leaders also agreed to continue their close consultations on regional and international issues of mutual interest.

Foreign minister Sushma Swaraj is expected to visit China for the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation foreign ministers' meet on April 24 and possibly have a separate dialogue with her Chinese counterpart. Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman is also due to visit China next month.The finance ministry on Thursday asked over 9,000 non-compliant NBFCs to register with FIU-IND to fulfil the requirements under Prevention of Money Laundering Act(PMLA).



PMLA imposes obligation on reporting entities (REs) including Non-Banking Financial Companies (NBFCs) to verify identity of clients, maintain records and furnish information to FIU-IND (Financial Intelligence Unit - India).

In a statement, the ministry said as unregistered NBFCs remain outside the reporting ambit of FIU, they pose a risk to the integrity of the country's financial system.

The FIU, in the finance ministry, has published a list of 9,236 'non-compliant NBFCs' which have not fulfilled their obligation under PMLA.

"All NBFCs which have failed to comply with any of the... requirements are now required to register their RE, Principal Officer (PO) and Designated Director with FIU-IND," the ministry said.

The list would be revised monthly. To facilitate the filing of prescribed reports under PMLA, FIU has developed a portal called FINnet Gateway.

The procedure for registration of RE and PO is available on the FIU-IND website.Handing down a major victory to Lt Governor Kiran Bedi, the Madras High Court on Thursday upheld her decision to nominate three MLAs, all BJP leaders, to the Puducherry Assembly without consulting Chief Minister V Narayanaswamy and his Cabinet.



Though the verdict comes as a major setback to the Congress government led by Narayanaswamy, it is unlikely to pose any threat to his dispensation since it enjoys simple majority with the support of 17 MLAs in the House of 30.



With Thursday's order, the strength will increase to 33.



Bedi had stoked controversy on July 4, 2017 when she appointed three BJP leaders - Puducherry party chief V Saminathan, K G Shankar and S Selvaganapathi - without consulting Narayanaswamy and his cabinet.

The Congress government took strong objection to the "unilateral" decision by Bedi, as it felt that would facilitate the entry of BJP in the Assembly "through the backdoor".



Assembly Speaker V Vaithilingam also toed his party's line and ensured that the three nominated members did not enter the Assembly by banning their entry inside the premises.

However, the Lt Governor stood her ground, maintaining that she went by the rule book and said it was not necessary for her to consult the Cabinet.

"We hold that the nomination of three MLAs to the Puducherry Legislative Assembly is valid... the three nominated MLAs will take their seat in the Puducherry Legislative Assembly forthwith," a bench of Chief Justice Indira Banerjee and Justice M Sundar ruled.

The judges were ruling on a bunch of petitions filed both for and against the nominations, including the one by the three MLAs challenging the notice issued by the Puducherry Assembly secretary refusing them permission to attend House proceedings.

In its judgement, the bench also recalled previous instances where members with political affiliations were nominated as MLAs and rejected the contention that the decision by the Lt Governor was in contradiction with established rules.

Within minutes of the judgement, an elated Bedi issued a terse statement saying the verdict has strengthened democracy.The House of Representatives passed a $1.3 trillion omnibus bill Thursday that boosts military spending, provides billions to combat the opioid epidemic and supports infrastructure investments.

The bill, which passed by a 256-167 vote, will fund government operations through Sept. 30. Congress must act before midnight Saturday to avoid a federal government shutdown.

New York's congressional delegation was divided on the omnibus bill. Most of the state's nine Republican representatives voted for the measure. They were joined by eight Democrats.

U.S. Rep. Paul Tonko, an Albany-area Democrat who supported the spending bill, highlighted the benefits of the bill. He specifically mentioned water infrastructure funding, support for clean energy research and broadband deployment.

Tonko expressed concern about large military spending increases and other budgetary challenges. But other aspects of the measure outweighed those concerns.

"Overall, the other priorities represented in this bill will help millions of Americans who are still being largely ignored and forgotten by this president and Republican leaders in Congress," he said.The Supreme Court on Thursday told the Karnataka government to "modulate" between institutional preference and residential requirement for candidates in admission to NEET PG-2018 seats in its medical colleges.



A bench of Justices Arun Mishra and Navin Sinha made an oral suggestion to senior advocate Basava Prabhu Patil, representing the state government, to reconsider the 10-year residence or study criteria for candidates to be eligible to post-graduate (PG) courses. The counsel, on his part, assured the court that he would hold discussions with the chief secretary in the matter.

The top court was hearing a writ petition filed by advocate Amit Kumar on behalf of Dr Kriti Lakhina and 39 others, challenging the 10-year study criteria prescribed in the information bulletin of the Karnataka Examination Authority on March 10 for admission to PG courses.

The petitioners, who are residents of other states but completed their MBBS and BDS courses from the Karnataka colleges, termed the eligibility criterion as "illegal, arbitrary, discriminatory, unconstitutional and thus void, being in clear violation of Articles 14, 15, 19(1)(g) and 21 of the Constitution".

On Thursday, the bench told Patil, "the MCI is opposing it on substantial ground. You have to modulate between institutional preference and residential requirement." The court put the matter for further consideration on March 27.

Advocate Gaurav Sharma, appearing for the regulatory body, MCI, had earlier said, according to rules, such kind of eligibility cannot be introduced in PG degree courses as seats are very limited.

The petitioners claimed the notification was also contrary to Regulation 9 of the Postgraduate Medical Education Regulations, 2000, framed by MCI under Section 33 of Indian Medical Council Act, 1956, which stated that admission to PG courses shall be strictly on the basis of merit.The Supreme Court on Thursday asked the Centre to bring in an appropriate law to deal with the pension issues of a government employee after finding a "classic case" of a Railways staff who had to wait for 27 years to decide his post-retirement dues, "unfortunately not in his favour".



A bench of Justices Madan B Lokur and Deepak Gupta quoted proceedings in the Privy Council more than 140 years ago, "These proceedings certainly illustrate what was said by Mr Doyne, and what has been often stated before, that the difficulties of a litigant in India begin when he has obtained a decree."

"A somewhat similar fate seems to await government servants - on getting retired, they have to struggle for the due pension. This is a classic case of a railway employee who retired as a train examiner on March 31, 1991. His pension woes are being decided after 27 years and unfortunately not in his favour," the bench said.

The court expressed its annoyance after noting that there was no comprehensive legislation to deal with the issue of pension of government employees and they have to suffer due to frequent amendments in rules, leading to confusion among authorities.

"We recommend to the Department of Personnel and Training of the Government of India to try and make life after retirement easier for a government servant by having appropriate legislation enacted by Parliament or applicable Pension Rules rather than a 'khichdi' (mixture) of instructions, office memoranda, clarifications, corrigenda and so on and so forth," the bench said.

The court passed its judgement on an appeal filed by the Union government against a Madras High Court judgement pertaining to the pension of R Sethumadhavan.The BJP workers protested during the inauguration of the private bus stand in town on Thursday, as the BJP MLA was not invited to the function of the private bus stand.



The situation turned chaotic, following a verbal fight between the BJP and Congress workers.

After inaugurating Indira Canteen, District In-charge Minister M R Seetharam, CMC president Kaveramma Somanna and Deputy Commissioner P I Srividya arrived at the bus stand for the inaugural programme.

Slogans

Zilla Panchayat president B A Harish, BJP leaders Mahesh Jaini, Satish, Arun Kumar and others shouted slogans when the minister was inaugurating the bus stop and pointed out that the local MLA was not invited. The project was sanctioned during BJP tenure. The inauguration is undertaken before competition of the work. There is a political motive behind the same, they said.

In opposition, Congress workers shouted slogans against BJP.

The incident resulted in a war of words between the members of the parties. When the situation turned worse, police intervened and sent the BJP members away.

Minister upset

An angry M R Seetharam said that he had invited MLA K G Bopaiah but Bopaiah had said that he could not make it due to a pre-planned programme in Bengaluru. Now, the BJP members are creating confusions, which is typical of the party, he said.

He, meanwhile, pointed out that even after being elected more than thrice, MLAs from the BJP had not been able to fulfil the demand for a private bus stand. Why are the people electing such people again and again, he wanted to know.

CMC president Kaveramma Somanna said that 75% of the work is complete and will finish by the next month. The work got delayed due to rains. A meeting of the Transport and the Police Department officials will be convened in the near future and arrangements will be done for the stoppage of buses in the bus stand, she said.

MLC Veena Acchaiah and ZP CEO Prashant Kumar Misra were present.As a lorry transporting dry grass accidentally caught fire at Arji village on Wednesday night, an autorickshaw and a motorbike were also set ablaze during the incident.



The lorry, loaded with dry grass, was parked at Malbar road on Wednesday and caught fire at around 11.30 pm. Since there was a huge crowd following the annual fest at Muttappa Temple nearby, the lorry driver drove the lorry to Arji village, half a km away from the spot, to prevent a possible disaster.

Later, he tried to douse the fire by removing the stock. During this, an autorickshaw and a motorbike parked in the vicinity too caught fire and were entirely burnt.

A loss of about Rs 10 lakh has been estimated. Virajpet city police have registered a case. The police said miscreants' act is suspected.Union Minister Ram Vilas Paswan on Thursday opposed the Karnataka government move to grant a separate religion status to the Lingayat community.



"We oppose identifying Lingayat as a separate religion," Paswan, the president of the Lok Janashakti party, told reporters here.

Paswan said Basavanna fought against untouchability which has earned him followers across the SC/ST communities. "By identifying Lingayat as a separate religion, the SC/ST followers stand to lose their rights under the reservation policy," the union minister said.

He said there were several sects within the Hindu religion and each cannot be recognised as a separate religion. The row over separate religion status for Lingayats has erupted ahead of the Karnataka Assembly elections after Chief Minister Siddaramaiah recommended religious minority status to the community.

Siddaramaiah has now left it to the Modi government to recognise Lingayats as a separate religion. The BJP, which enjoyed the support of the community, is in a fix and dubbed the move as a political ploy of the Congress ahead of the Karnataka Assembly elections.The Akhila Bharata Veerashaiva Mahasabha, headed by Congress veteran Shamanur Shivashankarappa, is expected to adopt a resolution Friday on the Cabinet decision to accord 'religious minority' status to Lingayats and Veerashaiva-Lingayats who believe in 12th century social reformer Basavanna's ideology.



Shivashankarappa has already opposed the government's decision, calling it "height of injustice." The March 19 Cabinet decision has evoked mixed reactions, with the Lingayat camp comprising Water Resources Minister M B Patil celebrating it whereas the Pancha Peethas (holy pantheon) opposing it.

The BJP will keenly await the Mahasabha's stand and the saffron party, it is said, wants to leverage the rift that the Cabinet decision has caused within the Congress.

"We have convened a meeting of our executive committee members. Our point is that the recommendation that will be made to the Centre based on this Cabinet decision will not see fruition because a previous petition that was made seeking 'separate religion' status, which was signed by those who are now in the Lingayat camp, did not come through," Veerashaiva Mahasabha senior vice-president N Thippanna said.

In the run up to the Cabinet decision, the Lingayat and Veerashaiva camps had locked horns on what the religion should be called. Lingayats argued that theirs was a religion founded by Basavanna that was independent of the Veerashaiva faith. The Veerashaivas opposed this based on their argument that Lingayats and Veerashaivas were the same.

Lingayats and Veerashaiva-Lingayats (believers of Basava principles) will be recommended for grant of 'religious minority' tag, the Cabinet decided. Shivashankarappa has pointed out that the decision was flawed in that the Veerashaiva faith predated Basavanna.

BJP state president BS Yeddyurappa, a Lingayat, is wooing Shivashankarappa to join his party.

Yeddyurappa is also eyeing Congress legislators from Vijayapura district who are miffed with M B Patil, who has also emerged as a Lingayat leader in the region. For instance, Devarahippargi MLA A S Patil (Nadahalli) has already joined the BJP. Yeddyurappa is looking for ways to rope in Muddebihal MLA C S Nadagouda, Basavana Bagewadi MLA Shivanand Patil and Indi MLA Yeshwantraigouda Patil, sources said.The Air Intelligence Unit (AIU) of the Customs at the Kempegowda International Airport arrested four passengers, all from Kozhikode in Kerala, and recovered gold worth Rs 93 lakh that they tried to smuggle over the past five days.



The sleuths picked up Nalakam Paramba Mohammed Rafeeque, 27, as soon as he landed at KIA from Dubai on Wednesday. His body language gave him away, the sleuths said. Growing suspicious of his body language, the sleuths frisked him. They recovered 728 g of gold worth Rs 22.8 lakh concealed in the form of powder mixed with soil and chemicals hidden in his waist belt.

Earlier, in a similar fashion, another passenger identified as Mustafa Pallipurayl, 38, was nabbed after he landed at the KIA from Sarjah on Tuesday. The sleuths recovered gold in the form of powder mixed with soil and chemicals concealed in waist belt too, weighing a little more than 1 kg that was valued at Rs 31.46 lakh.

The officials on the same day, arrested Jamaludeen, 40, and recovered 1 kg of gold valued at Rs 31.35, again, concealed in the form of dust mixed with soil and chemicals, concealed in his waist belt.

The Customs officials also arrested Shamsudheen, 34, and recovered 217 g of gold valued at Rs 6.8 lakh that was disguised as a bracelet and buckle, fixed to his waist belt.The Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike has revived the Kalkere lake near Ramamurthy Nagar in the city.



The civic body had undertaken the rejuvenation project about two years ago as the lake was completely polluted with sewage water entering into it from places such as Horamavu, Kalkere, Hebbal and Nagawara.

In order to prevent this, the Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board (BWSSB) has set up a sewage treatment plant (STP) near Horamavu region. Now, about 2 crore litres of treated water is being released from the STP into the lake.

The civic body has also removed silt from the lake and planted saplings that absorb nitrates and phosphates.

A provision for boating will also be made for tourists to go around the lake. Along with this, a pathway of 6.75 km has been laid for walkers. The lake has been completely fenced.

A separate provision has also been made for people to immerse idols during the Ganesha festival.

Apart from this, the lake has also become a habitat for birds and different variety of birds can be seen here.

"Earlier, the place used to stink with sewage water and it was difficult for us to live. Mosquito-related diseases were also prevalent here. The lake has been completely revived now. This should be done in other places also," said Ramesh, who goes for a walk every day.

About 12,000 saplings including honge, neem, and banyan tree have been planted in the western and southern parts of the lake. The Palike is also planning to plant 3,000 more saplings.

Jagannatha Rao, Deputy Conservator of Forests, BBMP Lakes, said: "We have written to Karnataka State Tourism Development Corporation (KSTDC) to begin boating facilities at both the Kalkere and Kempambudhi lakes. We have not received any response yet. Once we get their response, we will place the request before the council."Congress has finalized a $1.3 trillion spending bill that funds the government through the end of September and includes billions to address a major health crisis: The opioid epidemic, which has ravaged communities across New York and the country.

The omnibus bill increases funding to combat the opioid epidemic by $3.3 billion over last year's levels. Much of the funding will support prevention and treatment, including $1 billion in newly established state opioid response grants.

There is $500 million for the National Institutes of Health to conduct research on opioid abuse, $250 million of which will focus on examining opioid addiction, the development of opioid alternatives, pain management and addiction treatment.

New initiatives will aim to address the opioid epidemic in rural areas. The bill includes $100 million that will be distributed among 220 counties identified by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as being high risk areas for substance abuse disorders.Outrage over last months deadly school shooting in Parkland, Fla. is manifesting into political action at the local level as Del Mar and Solana Beach gear up to pressure state and federal officials for deeper and wider gun control laws, and mount the loudest calls yet for the Del Mar Fairgrounds to stop hosting gun shows.

Two days after joining a protest of the gun shows latest iterationits first of five scheduled this yearthe Del Mar City Council unanimously approved a wide-ranging resolution on March 19 calling for a crackdown on the kinds of weapons used to kill 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School last month and 58 in October at the Route 91 Harvest country music festival in Las Vegas.

Reforms in Del Mars resolution include: raising the age to buy a firearm to 21 years old; reinstating the federal ban on assault weapons; banning bump stocks and other devices that accelerate a weapons rate of fire; banning magazines that hold more than 10 rounds; universal background checks; mandatory safety training prior to buying a firearm; and repeal of the Dickey Amendment, a 1996 measure that effectively prevents federal funds from being used to research gun violence.

People say, This isnt really happening in Del Mar, why are we worried about this? said Mayor Dwight Worden. Well, if youd asked Sandy Hook in 2011, it wasnt happening there, either. If you asked Florida last month, it wasnt happening there, either. We had a gun threat in an Escondido elementary school last week. We had two students at Torrey Pines High School arrested for making threats. We had threats at Rancho Bernardo High School. This is in our backyard and, in my view, its a responsibility of all of us to stand up for the values that we think are important for our community. If you have a gun and you want to use it for hunting, fine. You want to have a gun and use it for self-protection at home, fine. You want to have an AR-15 with an extended magazine, Im sorry but no. Its time to stop that.

Meanwhile, the Solana Beach City Council signaled last week that it will take a similar tack. At the councils March 14 meeting, eight members of NeverAgainCA implored the city to take a stand against gun violence. Of particular concern is the Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act, a bill that has breezed through congressional committees since being proposed in November. The top legislative priority of the National Rifle Association, the measure would allow anyone with a concealed-firearm permit from one state to exercise it in every other state.

Councilmembers Jewel Edson, Judy Hegenauer and Dave Zito responded to the activists entreaties by directing city staff to schedule a resolution on gun control for an upcoming agenda. Mayor Ginger Marshall did not echo the directive.

The topic hit Hegenauer particularly hard, having a few days earlier met with administrators from the Solana Beach School District to review the evacuation plans for each of the districts schools. Only hours before the councils meeting, students across the countryincluding at several local schoolswalked out of class in a show of solidarity to mark the one-month anniversary of the Parkland shooting.

A friend of mine last week told me her 14-year-old wouldnt go to school until they got a bullet-proof vest. So its close at hand, she said. Im absolutely grateful to the Florida students for being the adults in the building and the country.

The citys gun control discussion will be held at the Solana Beach City Councils March 28 meeting.

By the time Solana Beach takes its first steps, Del Mars effort will be well underway.

Councilwoman Ellie Haviland, who co-wrote Del Mars resolution and an accompanying position statement, said the city has three goals: to ensure schools are equipped to address cultural and mental health crises, but without arming teachers; to hold the line on Californias gun laws, which are among the nations tightest; and, most importantly, she said, to bring about reforms at the federal level.

Without change there, I dont think were going to see a significant change in the overall gun violence problems in our communities, Haviland said.

Del Mars council will send letters to President Donald Trump, House Speaker Paul Ryan and a host of elected officials in key leadership positions at the federal and state level.

Closer to home, the city is taking aim at the Crossroads of the West Gun Show. Since coming to the fairgrounds in 1990, Crossroads has grown into one of the largest gun shows in California, with each event drawing hundreds of vendors, several thousand attendees and generating around $100,000 in revenue. The state agency that runs the fairgrounds, the 22nd District Agricultural Association (DAA), pockets roughly $20,000 per show as rent.

Del Mar is turning to state Sen. Toni Atkins and Assm. Todd Gloria to help persuade the DAAs board of directors to cancel the gun show, the next of which is scheduled for May 19 and 20. The city also wants legislation that would prohibit gun shows at any state fairgrounds whose surrounding jurisdiction objects.

The groundswell is not the first to take on Crossroads presence at the fairgrounds. A month after the December 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary, a petition to shutter the gun show amassed more than 1,000 signatures. The DAA board, however, declined to discuss the issue.

Ensuing years brought sporadic objections, until Del Mar resident Rose Ann Sharp started organizing protests decrying Crossroads role in glorifying gun culture. Those protests typically mustered one or two dozen die-hards.

The March 17 protest, bolstered by the Never Again Movement that emerged after the Parkland shooting, drew five times as many orange-clad protesters to the corner of Jimmy Durante and Via de la Valle.

Those numbers were dwarfed by as many as 10,000 gun enthusiasts who poured into OBrien Hall to behold and shop the latest wares from more than 250 vendors, whom organizers are adamant abide by Californias already-strict laws regulating gun shows.

Gun-rights advocates made that case at the DAAs monthly meeting on March 13, a meeting that had been moved to a larger venuewith armed security looking onin anticipation of a large turnout.

None materialized. One student, Ash Lineman, a junior at SOUL Charter School in Solana Beach, urged the board to join the ranks of Americans energized against gun violence and to oppose this symbol of violence.

Her plea was countered by nearly a dozen gun owners and activists calling on the board to protect their lawful assemblya defense that has grown tiresome in its increasing frequency, said Michael Schwartz, executive director of San Diego County Gun Owners. The group hosted some 300 people at the fairgrounds for a three-hour session on state gun laws the evening of March 17, and is set to return for its annual gala on April 28.

Were sane, trained, law-abiding citizens in California, and were determined to do the right thing and work within the system, Schwartz told the board.

While other speakers invoked the Second Amendment, Crossroads owner Bob Templeton said the gun show is perhaps more so a First Amendment activity.

It gives folks the opportunity to assemble and to share their views with like-minded individuals, he said, and as such, I hope we can keep that in mind as we hear the arguments from both sides.

At least one state legislator has come to the gun shows defense. In a letter read to the DAA board, Assm. Randy Voepelthe former mayor of Santee who now represents District 71asked the DAA board to keep its gates open to the gun show, citing its enduring popularity and record of adhering to its myriad regulations.

The DAA board did not discuss the gun show and had not announced its April 10 agenda as of press time.

Worden, Del Mars mayor, told his colleagues on March 19 to expect division among the boards nine members. But while Del Mar wants the gun shows eliminated altogether, the citys representatives in Sacramento have not come out as aggressively.

Atkins, the newly-appointed Senate president, has been an outspoken advocate for gun control but has yet to take a public stand on the gun show. Her office did not return a request for comment by press time.

Gloria, meanwhile, has so far asked the DAA only to pare back from five annual gun shows.

With the continued prevalence of gun violence in our nation, it is impossible to ignore the link to the number of guns in our community, he wrote in a March 12 letter to the DAA. That is why I believe it is imperative to remove the State, to the extent possible, from complicity in these tragedies by limiting the frequency of gun shows at the Del Mar Fairgrounds.

A Gloria spokesman said on March 20 that next steps will include looking into the precise nature and extent of the legislatures authority over DAAs and their state-appointed boards of directors. More broadly, he said, the nascent discussions should take much clearer shape in the weeks and months ahead.

We want it to be meaningful, we want it to be respectful of the Ag boards role and also how the community is feeling, said spokesman Nick Serrano. There is much to be done. Stay tuned.Dozens of species have seen their numbers decline, in some cases by two-thirds, the scientists said in a pair of studies  one national in scope and the other covering a large agricultural region in central France. The situation is catastrophic, said Benoit Fontaine, a conservation biologist at Frances National Museum of Natural History and co-author of one of the studies.Our countryside is in the process of becoming a veritable desert, he said in a communique released by the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), which also contributed to the findings.The common white throat, the ortolan bunting, the Eurasian skylark and other once-ubiquitous species have all fallen off by at least a third, according a detailed, annual census initiated at the start of the century.A migratory song bird, the meadow pipit, has declined by nearly 70%.The museum described the pace and extent of the wipe-out as a level approaching an ecological catastrophe.The primary culprit, researchers speculate, is the intensive use of pesticides on vast tracts of monoculture crops, especially wheat and corn.The problem is not that birds are being poisoned, but that the insects on which they depend for food have disappeared.There are hardly any insects left, thats the number one problem, said Vincent Bretagnolle, a CNRS ecologist at the Centre for Biological Studies in Chize.Recent research, he noted, has uncovered similar trends across Europe , estimating that flying insects have declined by 80%, and bird populations has dropped by more than 400m in 30 years.Despite a government plan to cut pesticide use in half by 2020, sales in France have climbed steadily, reaching more than 75,000 tonnes of active ingredient in 2014, according to European Union figures.What is really alarming, is that all the birds in an agricultural setting are declining at the same speed, even generalist birds, which also thrive in other settings such as wooded areas, said Bretagnolle.That shows that the overall quality of the agricultural eco-system is deteriorating. [ more ]

Catastrophe as Frances bird population collapses due to pesticides

20 March 2018 (Museum National Dhistoire Naturelle)  The latest results from two bird monitoring studies, one conducted nationally, the other more locally, have just been released. Researchers at the National Museum of Natural History and the CNRS come to the same conclusion: the birds of the French countryside are disappearing at a vertiginous speed. On average, their populations have shrunk by one third in 15 years . Given the acceleration of losses in the last two years, this trend is far from bending.

Thanks to professional and bird-watchers who identify and count birds throughout the metropolitan area, the STOC (Temporary Monitoring of Common Birds, a participatory science program run by the National Museum of Natural History within CESCO), produces annual indicators (see the latest published STOC results) on the abundance of species in different habitats (forest, town, countryside, etc.). Surveys conducted in rural areas show a decrease in bird populations living in agricultural areas since the 1990s. Specialist species such as the skylark, the grisette or the ortolan sparrow have average one in three in fifteen years. And the numbers show that this decline intensified further in 2016 and 2017 .These national results are confirmed by a second study carried out at a local scale on the Plaine & Val de Sevre Workshop Zone carried by the CNRS. Since 1995, researchers from the CEBC follow each year, in the Deux-Sevres, 160 zones of 10 hectares of a cereal plain typical of French agricultural territories. In 23 years, all lowland bird species have seen their populations melt: the lark loses more than one in three (-35%); with eight out of ten individuals lost, partridges are almost decimated. This decline affects all bird species in agriculture, both the so-called specialist species  mainly attending this environment  and the so-called generalist species  found in all types of habitats, whether agricultural or not. According to STOC, generalist species do not decline at the national level; the observed decrease is therefore specific to the agricultural milieu, probably related to the collapse of insects.This massive disappearance observed at different scales is concomitant with the intensification of agricultural practices over the past 25 years , especially since 2008-2009. A period that corresponds, among other things, to the end of the fallow periods imposed by the common agricultural policy, the surge in wheat prices, the resumption of the nitrate over-amendment allowing for the over-protein wheat and the generalization of neonicotinoids, very persistent neurotoxic insecticides.These two studies, both conducted over twenty years and at different spatial scales, reveal the extent of the phenomenon: the decline of birds in agricultural areas is accelerating and reaching a level close to the ecological disaster . By 2018, many areas of cereal plains could experience a silent spring (Silent Spring) announced by American ecologist Rachel Carson 55 years ago about the infamous DDT banned in France for over 45 years. If this situation is not yet irreversible, it is urgent to work with all the players in the agricultural world to accelerate changes in practices; and first with farmers who now have the keys to change the trend. [Translation by Bing]Save my User ID and Password

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OSU will hire an engineering firm to determine the cause and to evaluate whether any other CLT elements in the building are at risk.



CORVALLIS, Ore. (AP)  Construction on portions of the new College of Forestry building at Oregon State University has been halted after a large section of subflooring made of cross-laminated timber gave way between the second and third stories.

University spokesman Steve Clark said no one was injured in the March 14 incident at Peavy Hall, the Corvallis Gazette-Times reported. He said the university plans to hire an engineering firm to determine a cause and to evaluate whether any other cross-laminated structural elements in the building are at risk.





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DILLARD, Ore. (AP)  Roseburg Forest Products says one of its employees died in an accident at its plywood plant in Dillard, Oregon.

The Springfield-based company has yet to release details about what happened, and says the incident is under investigation. The employee was identified as 57-year-old Joel Kuhse, who had worked for the company since 2010.





. . .The language in the spending bill provides $5 million to support the deployment of pilot remote tower systems to at least two more airports. It also directs the Federal Aviation Administration to launch the remote air traffic control pilot program within 45 days of the bill's enactment.

Katko said in May that the legislation could benefit a central New York firm, Saab Sensis, which could compete for contracts in the pilot program.

"Innovative technology to help improve safety and operations at small and regional airports nationwide is produced right here in central New York," he said. "This legislation will give our local workers  some of the foremost creators of this remote tower technology  the opportunity to compete and grow in this groundbreaking and forward-thinking field."

The omnibus bill passed the House Thursday with Katko's support. It now heads to the Senate for approval.

Once the Senate passes the measure, it will go to President Donald Trump for his review. He is expected to sign the bill.

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Be the first to know Get local news delivered to your inbox! Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy.Rampant speculation on divestment of Air India

While the civil aviation ministry remains tight-lipped about divestment in the Air India group, media speculation continues to be rampant with all kinds of theories being floated.

On Thursday, there were reports that the government was thinking in terms of conducting the strategic sale of its stake in the airline in phases. A day earlier, there were rumours about IndiGo and Qatar Airways planning a joint bid for Air India (See: On Thursday, there were reports that the government was thinking in terms of conducting the strategic sale of its stake in the airline in phases. A day earlier, there were rumours about IndiGo and Qatar Airways planning a joint bid for Air India ( IndiGo, Qatar Airways likely bid for Air India ).

A report on Thursday, citing unnamed officials, said the exercise involving divestment in the parent body and its various subsidiaries would not be bunched.

Air India and its low-cost Air India Express will not be merged, but will be sold to a single buyer, the report quoted the officials. Other subsidiaries including Air India Air Transport Services, Air India Engineering Services, Airline Allied Services and Hotel Corporation of India will be sold separately, it claimed.

Meanwhile, Qatar Airways also denied media reports that it was planning a joint bid with IndiGo for a stake in Air India. Media reports had on Wednesday speculated that the two airlines were likely to make a joint bid to acquire Air India.

Qatar Airways firmly denies that it is involved in any talks regarding the acquisition of Air India, said an airline statement.

IndiGo too denied the speculation. While IndiGo normally does not respond to rumours, in this particular instance we would like to state that there are no ongoing discussions of this nature, said the airline.

The divestment of the governments stake in Air India has generated a lot of speculation in recent weeks. Domestic airlines, along with foreign partners, are keen to acquire some stake in the national airline.

They include the Singapore Airlines-Tata combine and a Jet Airways-led partnership including Air France-KLM and Delta.Amazon chief Jeff Bezos takes robot dog to MARS conference

The founder and chief executive of Amazon.com arrived at the MARS conference on Monday with a Boston Dynamics robot dog in tow. The dog is said to be the SpotMini robot seen in a recent video opening doors. Taking my new dog for a walk, he said in a tweet.

Amazons annual conference in Palm Springs, California, is an invitation-only event focused on machine learning, automation, robotics and space exploration. Amazons annual conference in Palm Springs, California, is an invitation-only event focused on machine learning, automation, robotics and space exploration.

According to social media, the Amazon chief also played the bottle flip game and led a mini robot parade.

According to commentators, Bezos certainly knows how to make a statement at such events. Last year at the conference, he piloted a 13-foot robot from South Koreas Hankook Mirae Technology that seemed all primed to take on aliens.

Bezos, who rarely tweets, posted the picture on his Twitter account to his 480,000 followers.

Bezos love for robots was seen in another tweet in which he plays the bottle flip game with a robot.

Meanwhile, according to experts while the likes of Bezos may love robots, there may be valid reasons for concern about the development of the technology. Also the most recent season of Netflixs Black Mirror features a murderous, highly autonomous SpotMini look-alike.

Sam Charrington founder of Cloudpulse Strategies said in This Week In Machine Learning & AI newsletter, while he does not expect the robot uprising anytime soon, but theres plenty for us to worry about here  as a society, a culture, and a species.

He says that autonomous killer robots we imagine instill so much fear because they are autonomous, are driven to kill, for some reason, and they are armed.

He says killer robots seem like an inevitability and military robots already exist. He points out that many governments are researching and developing more military robots. According to Statista, global spending on military robotics stood at $6.9 billion in 2015, and is expected to grow to $15 billion by 2025.Apple to design, produce its own device displays for first time

Apple Inc is designing and producing its own device displays for the first time, at a secret manufacturing facility near its California headquarters to make small numbers of the screens for testing purposes, Bloomberg reported, citing unnamed sources.

According to the sources, the company is making a significant investment in the development of next-generation MicroLED screens. MicroLED screens use compounds that are different from the ones used in current OLED displays and hold promise of making future gadgets slimmer, brighter and less power-hungry.

The production of the screens is much more difficult than OLED displays and the project was almost scrapped by the company a year or so ago, according to the people. They add that engineers have since then been able to make much progress and the technology is now at an advanced stage. Consumers would, however, have to wait a few years before the results can be seen.

According to commentators, the ambitious undertaking is the latest example of Apple bringing the design of key components in-house.

They point out that Apple has designed chips powering its mobile devices for several years and its move into displays has the long-term potential to hurt a range of suppliers, from screen makers like Samsung Electronics Co, Japan Display Inc and others.

Meanwhile, LG plans to continue with an LCD display for its next-generation G7 flagship smartphone, according to a report from S Koreas The Investor. According to the report the move will cut costs, with an LCD panel available for less than that of an OLED display.

According to commentators, it is odd to see LG going back to LCD displays when the whole industry is adopting OLED panels for their flagship smartphones. According to the report, LGs decision to pump more resources in LCD could be related to Apple, which received a mixed response to its iPhone X, the companys first smartphone with an OLED panel.Cambridge Analytica stung again, denies offering honeytraps

Cambridge Analytica has hit back at an undercover British television report showing senior executives talking to reporters posing as potential clients about bribes, honeytraps and how the company allegedly obtains and distributes damaging material on political opponents.

The Channel 4 report is "edited and scripted to grossly misrepresent the nature of those conversations and how the company conducts its business", Cambridge Analytica said in a statement to CNN on Monday.

Privately-owned Cambridge Analytica, is partly owned by the family of Robert Mercer, an American hedge-fund manager who supports many politically conservative causes.

It is the controversial data firm that worked for Donald Trump's presidential campaign. The company reportedly harvested data from 50 million Facebook users, and is currently under investigation by the United Kingdom's Information Commissioner's Office for "the acquisition and use" of that data.

Facebook last week suspended Cambridge Analytica and its parent group Strategic Communication Laboratories (SCL) after receiving reports that they did not delete information about Facebook users and it had been inappropriately shared (See: Facebook suspends Trump-linked Cambridge Analytica for data misuse).

Beyond reportedly harvesting user data, Cambridge Analytica is now under fire for other alleged campaign tactics highlighted in the Channel 4 report.

Channel 4 secretly recorded the company's chief executive Alexander Nix telling undercover reporters posing as prospective Sri Lankan clients that the company could entrap politicians in compromising situations.

When asked about getting damaging material on opponents, Nix said the company could "send some girls around to the candidate's house".

The undercover reporter then asked, "... you're using the girls for this, like the seduction, they're not local girls? Not Sri Lankan girls?"

Nix said no. "Just saying we could bring some Ukranians in," he said, adding "they are very beautiful, I find that works very well."

Nix also said Cambridge Analytica could send someone posing as a wealthy developer to Sri Lanka to bribe politicians, film the encounter "and then post it on the internet".

It is illegal in the United States and the United Kingdom to bribe public officials. Cambridge Analytica is registered in the United States and operates in the United Kingdom.

Cambridge Analytica said in a statement that Nix and the executives were humouring the undercover reporters posing as prospective clients, and when the conversation turned toward practices such as corruption and entrapment, the executives did not meet with them again.

The statement also includes an admission from Nix that he may have misjudged the situation.

"In playing along with this line of conversation, and partly to spare our 'client' from embarrassment, we entertained a series of ludicrous hypothetical scenarios," Nix said.

"I am aware how this looks, but it is simply not the case. I must emphatically state that Cambridge Analytica does not condone or engage in entrapment, bribes or so-called 'honeytraps', and nor does it use untrue material for any purpose," he said.

Previously, in the UK, Cambridge Analytica worked on the Leave EU-campaign for the United Kingdom's withdrawal from the European Union.Its's role and effect on campaigns has been controversial and is the subject of ongoing criminal investigations in the US and the UK.

On March 17, 2018, The New York Times and The Observer reported on Cambridge Analytica's use of personal information acquired by an external researcher who claimed to be collecting it for academic purposes. In response, Facebook banned Cambridge Analytica from advertising on its platform. The Guardian also reported that Facebook had known about this security breach for two years, but did nothing to protect its users.Flipkart to invest Rs600 crore in Kolkata logistics hub

Flipkart, Indias leading e-commerce major, plans to invest about Rs600 crore for an integrated mega logistics hub in West Bengal, to cater to the eastern and northeastern regions of the country.

The company plans to set up the 40 lakh sq ft high-tech logistics hub near Kolkata, the state capital. A company spokesperson said on Wednesday that it had already started looking for an 80-acre plot of land on the outskirts of Kolkata.

According to him, it will be the biggest investment in logistics by any e-commerce company in eastern India. The new facility will provide jobs to about 5,000 people, and also generate an additional 15,000 jobs indirectly.

Flipkart Ltd, which is backed by SoftBank, is one of the three major e-commerce giants in India, and faces stiff competition from Amazon and digital payment site Paytm, which is backed by Alibaba Holdings. All three major firms have been splurging funds to acquire a bigger market share.

A report by an international agency on Wednesday said that Flipkart had accumulated losses of nearly Rs24,000 crore ($3.6 billion) as of March 2017, as against Rs10,000 crore a year earlier.

Citing data filed by the company with the Accounting and Corporate Regulatory Authority of Singapore, the report said that Flipkart sold an average of Rs54.4 crore every day for the fiscal ending 31 March 2017, as against Rs42.2 crore in the previous fiscal.

Flipkart is in talks with Walmart Inc in a bid to take on its two rivals in India. The company also has other fashion brands including Myntra and Jabong, and also owns PhonePe, the payments platform.IRCTC in tie-up with Ola for doorstep pickups, drops for passengers

Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation (IRCTC) and Ola, the countrys leading ride-sharing company, announced a tie-up on Tuesday that would enable commuters to book the cabs on the IRCTC website and app for drops to their doorstep.

State-owned IRCTC also integrated Ola booking API on platforms to ensure last-mile connectivity to commuters. The partnership between the two will enable commuters to book Ola cabs and autos, besides opting for Ola Share services from their IRCTC app or website.

Customers can also choose to pre-book cabs up to seven days in advance or on reaching the railway station. Travellers will also be able to avail the booking facility as a part of tourism packages, and travel itineraries. Olas self-serving kiosk on IRCTC outlets at railway stations will also enable commuters to book cabs.

We are proud to partner with IRCTC and this partnership truly stands for our vision to build robust and reliable mobility for a billion people, said Saurabh Mishra, Head of Alliances at Ola. Since inception, it is our constant endeavour to integrate our smart mobility solutions as an extension to existing public transportation infrastructure such as Railway Stations, Metros, and Airports, ensuring reliable first and last-mile connectivity for the commuters.

According to an IRCTC spokesperson, the partnership will provide first and last-mile connectivity to commuters. The ease of travel of our commuters is of prime importance to us and we believe that this association will help in delivering unparalleled convenience to the users on our platform, fostering and strengthening the culture of Digital India, added the spokesperson.IndiGo forced to ground another A320neo as P&W engine problems persist

Low-cost carrier IndiGo was forced to ground another A320neo (new engine option) aircraft on Sunday as the snag-prone Pratt & Whitney engine again developed problems.

This is the third incident of an A320neo powered with P&W engines running into a technical glitch since the grounding of 8 IndiGo's aircraft a week ago, which sent the airline's flight schedules haywire and wreaked havoc with flyers' travel plans. This is the third incident of an A320neo powered with P&W engines running into a technical glitch since the grounding of 8 IndiGo's aircraft a week ago, which sent the airline's flight schedules haywire and wreaked havoc with flyers' travel plans.

The IndiGo flight (6E 132) which was grounded at Delhis Indira Gandhi International Airport operated in the Bangalore-Delhi sector before a problem in the engine was detected by the pilot.

An A320 neo aircraft that operated Bangalore-Delhi this morning was proactively withdrawn in Delhi for a maintenance check to attend to a Pilot Reported Defect. These maintenance checks are part of a comprehensive program of early detection, said an IndiGo statement.

IndiGo has cancelled close to 500 flights this month due to the P&W problem. On Sunday, the plane on the Bengaluru-New Delhi morning flight was reported to have been grounded after metal particles were detected in the jet's engine oil.

During the maintenance check, metal chips were observed on engine number 1 and number 3 bearing chip detector, which is a known concern on the neo engine, the airline further stated.

See: A number of A320neo aircraft powered by P&W engines were earlier grounded due to safety concerns, and another aircraft has now been added to this number. ( DGCA grounds 11 Airbus aircraft over IndiGo's mid-air engine failure ).

Sunday's incident comes at a time when the Directorate General of Civil Aviation has been asked to submit an affidavit in the Bombay High Court next week, in response to a Public Interest Litigation, on the steps taken by it to allay the fears of passengers over issues related to P&W engines.

The DGCA had on Monday ordered the grounding of 11 A320neo planes fitted with P&W1100 engines beyond ESN 450 series due to recurring problems, including mid-air shutdowns. Of these, eight belong to IndiGo while three are from the GoAir fleet. Another three A320 neos of IndiGo are already on the ground since February.

The decision was taken within hours of an Indigo A320 neo aircraft being forced to make an emergency landing at the Ahmedabad airport due to engine failure in mid-air. The aircraft had taken off from Ahmedabad for Lucknow but had to return because of the snag. The DGCA announced that A320 neos fitted with PW1100 engines beyond ESN 450 have been grounded with immediate effect due to safety reasons. Both IndiGo and GoAir have been directed not to refit these engines, which are spare with them in their inventory.

IndiGo had on Friday said that it was actively engaged with the engine and aircraft manufacturers in finding a long term solution at the earliest. The setback also comes at a time when IndiGo plans to seek permission from the government to fly long-haul international flights. Currently it flies foreign destinations only in West Asia and South-east Asia.

The airline had during the October-December quarter received compensation from Pratt & Whitney for the disruption of flights due to technical snags in the engines earlier. It is, therefore, likely to move for similar compensation now.SC orders status quo on RCom's assets sale to Jio

The supreme Court today stayed Anil Ambani-owned Reliance Communications' (RCom) plans to sell its asets to elder brother Mukesh Ambani's Reliance Jio Infocomm (Jio) while refusing a plea by RCcom, backed by a consortium of banks, to lift the stay on the sale of assets by the Mumbi High Court on 8 March 2018.

RCom had moved the apex court following the Bombay High Court's dismissal of its appeal to set aside an interim order by an arbitration tribunal to stay the Relaince Jio's acquisition of Reliance Communications' asses to enable debt-laden RCom to escape bankruptcy proceedings. RCom had moved the apex court following the Bombay High Court's dismissal of its appeal to set aside an interim order by an arbitration tribunal to stay the Relaince Jio's acquisition of Reliance Communications' asses to enable debt-laden RCom to escape bankruptcy proceedings.

The apex court had said that it will hear pleas of consortium of banks, R-Com against stay of assets sale by Mumbai High court on 5 April.

The court said that the sale could take place subject to its final order.

On 28 December 2017, RCom had announced the sale of its wireless spectrum, tower, fibre and media convergence node assets to Jio, as a resolution plan to reduce the company's debts by Rs39,000 crore.

On March 8, the Bombay high court rejected RComs appeal against an order of an arbitration tribunal barring the sale or transfer of its assets without prior permission.

Swedish telecom equipment maker Ericsson had moved an arbitratoion tribunal seeking to restrain the sale of RCom consolidated's assets in a bid to recover Rs1,150 crore from Rcom. The tribunal on 5 March allowed Ericsson claim, which RCom challenged and lost in the Mumbai High court on 8 March.

See: On Wednesday, 21 March, State Bank of India (SBI) as the lead bank of a consortium of 24 Indian lenders also backed RCom's plea in the top coourt for staying the Mumbai High Court's order barring the sale of its assts ( SBI approaches Supreme Court to allow RCom asset sale to Reliance Jio ).

SBI in its petition before the Supreme Coyurt has challenged the Mumbai High Court decision saying an an unsecured creditor (Ericsson) could not be prioritised for payments over secured creditors like SBI.

RCom's total dues to SBI as on 28 February stood at Rs 4,027 crore.

RCom in a statement to the bourses on Wednesday said that its bondholders have approved "with overwhelming majority" sale of its "certain assets" to Jio.MNS resort to violence as Uber, Ola cabs go off roads

The Maharashtra Navnirman Sena has reportedly not been shy of violence amid the call for an indefinite strike by drivers of app-based taxi aggregators Ola and Uber in major cities, including Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Pune and Bengaluru.

A video released by news agency ANI shows a stick-wielding MNS worker damaging the windshield of a taxi in Mumbai and threatening the driver to stop plying the vehicle. The MNS worker can be heard telling the taxi driver, Gaadi band matlab gaadi band (no vehicle means no vehicle). A video released by news agency ANI shows a stick-wielding MNS worker damaging the windshield of a taxi in Mumbai and threatening the driver to stop plying the vehicle. The MNS worker can be heard telling the taxi driver, Gaadi band matlab gaadi band (no vehicle means no vehicle).

The strike has been called by Maharashtra Navnirman Vahatuk Sena, a subsidiary of the MNS, after Ola and Uber drivers claimed that they were given big assurances but were unable to cover even their basic costs.

"Ola and Uber had given big assurances to the drivers, but today they are unable to cover their costs. They have invested Rs5-7 lakh, and were expecting to make Rs1.5 lakh a month but are unable to even make half of this, owing to the mismanagement by these companies," Sanjay Naik of the Maharashtra Navnirman Vahatuk Sena, the transport wing of the Raj Thackeray-led MNS, told media.

Union leaders said that drivers in other cities like New Delhi, Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Pune among others were also participating in the strike.

Naik alleged that these taxi-hailing companies were giving first priority to company-owned cars rather than driver-owned vehicles, causing a slump in their business.

Other taxi unions, including the Mumbai Taximen's Union, have extended support to the strike.

Meanwhile, police has issued notices to leaders of the union under Section 149 of Criminal Procedure Code relating to unlawful assembly.

"Notices of Section 149 of CrPC have been issued to Sanjay Naik, president, Arif Shaikh and Nitin Nandgaokar of the Maharashtra Navnirman Vahatuk Sena as preventive action. If they violate any orders, they are liable to be prosecuted," Pandit Thorat, Senior Inspector of the Andheri police station, told NDTV.

In Mumbai alone there are over 45,000 such cabs but a slump in business has seen a drop of about 20 per cent in their numbers.

The cab hailing companies have so far stayed away from interfering in the matter. "We have been informed by the Mumbai Police that they have proactively taken all the necessary steps to ensure safety of commuters during the cab rides in the city," an Ola spokesperson said.

While taxi-hailing companies offered loan-guarantee letters to drivers through the Mudra scheme and that too without any verification, they are defaulting on repayment now as their costs are not covered, Naik claimed.

Swaraj Vahan Chalak Malak Sanghatna President Guru Katti said a hike in fuel prices has left drivers in distress with many being unable to pay their instalments on the loans they took for their cabs.

Where the per-kilometre fare once hovered around Rs10, this has dropped to Rs6 now due to the stiff competition between Ola and Uber. Moreover, Ola Share offers share pass depending on the distance one intends to travel. For instance, one can buy a pass for Rs10 valid for 30 days, whereby one would be required to pay just Rs30 for a distance of up to 4 km and Rs200 for a distance up to 20 km. Similarly, Uber offers slashes rates on its POOL rides and often gives 50 per cent discount to users on Uber Go, which is the cheapest Uber car ride.AUBURN  It's an increasingly common sight weekend mornings at the intersection of Dill and State streets: lines of people, mostly young adult men, grinning with anticipation.

They'll be back this Saturday. And there will probably be more of them than ever.

At 11:30 that morning, Prison City Pub & Brewery will release its Mass Riot India pale ale in 16-ounce cans for the first time. It's the same beer Paste Magazine named No. 1 in a August 2016 blind tasting of almost 250 IPAs from across America. Since its profile exploded that summer, Mass Riot has been released a few times in Crowlers (32-ounce cans). But customers could only get one or two. Saturday, they'll be able to get up to four four-packs  a reward more worth long drives and longer waits in line.

Saturday's release will therefore see Prison City deliver Mass Riot into the most hands ever, doing the most to meet demand for a product that was effectively named the best of its kind. And the IPA style is far and away the most popular in craft beer today, with flavors ranging from bitter pine resin to sweet fruit juice. So after Paste singled out Prison City's for perfecting the latter extreme, beer enthusiasts from across the country descended on the Auburn brewpub, desperate to get a taste of brewer Ben Maeso's creation.

But Prison City, which opened in December 2014, has been forced to turn most of those customers away because of its size. Making a batch of Mass Riot on the brewpub's modest 5-barrel system takes Maeso about 28 days. The eight or so kegs that result are gone in just a couple, and any Crowlers are claimed within minutes of their release.

Maeso could make Mass Riot more often  but it would come at the expense of the stouts, sours and other award-winning beers that have helped craft Prison City's adventurous reputation. For Maeso and the brewpub's owners, Dawn and Marc Schulz, it's been an identity crisis since Paste published its list. That day in 2016, they could have started making nothing but their No. 1 IPA and become "the Mass Riot brewery." But instead, they continued making it alongside English bitters and dunkelweizens and remained Prison City.

Marc Schulz said Friday that most of the people who unsuccessfully ask for Mass Riot understand the brewpub's situation. But some don't, Schulz continued, like one caller who used "very vulgar language" to tell a 17-year-old hostess that Prison City's business model is terrible and the owners don't know what they're doing.

"(To them) we have this one beer, and if we don't have it we're stupid," Schulz said. "But any brewery at its core is artistic and crafty, and doesn't want to be the (blank) brewery."

Maeso brewed Mass Riot as a tribute to the sought-after hazy IPAs of New England breweries Trillium and Treehouse, he said Friday. The beer was originally called Riot in Massachusetts, he continued, but the name was condensed because no one wanted to write that on a Crowler. Regardless, the beer was Maeso's first stab at a style he and Schulz had traded or waited in line to obtain. That made it all the more surreal to see Mass Riot beat those same breweries on Paste's list, Maeso said.

Maeso always brews Mass Riot with the same malt bill and the same hops  Citra, Simcoe and Mosaic  though he dry-hopped one batch with Galaxy. He tweaks the percentages, he said, but what distinguishes each batch the most is where the hops come from. Like any agricultural product, one farm's Citra can differ wildly from another's. That mercurial quality is why Maeso wants to continue playing with hops via Prison City's other IPAs. Neither he nor Schulz thinks Mass Riot is even the brewpub's best.

"People flock to it based on the name. It influences their judgment," Maeso said. "Given a blind taste test, I think people would prefer the other IPAs we make."

Someday, it'll be easier for customers to take that test. Prison City is planning a new facility that will raise its production from about 1,000 barrels a year to more than 10,000. Schulz said a few sites in and out of downtown Auburn are being considered, and the facility will have $900,000 in state funding available to support it. Contract brewing at other facilities and opening more Prison City brewpubs  which have been courted from as far as Buffalo and Schenectady  are also options, Schulz said. Distribution is a less appealing one.

"If you're making these beers, you have to count on people coming through your doors," Schulz said. "I only ever really want to sell Mass Riot out of the brewery so that it's as fresh as it possibly can be going out the door, and we know we've done everything we can that you get the best possible representation of that style."

However Prison City expands, Schulz said its purpose will be to make all of Maeso's IPAs constantly and conveniently available, from Mass Riot to The Shawdank Redemption and Go Ahead Punk, Make My Haze. Citing Trillium's Canton facility as a model, Schulz said he doesn't want customers to have to wait hours by the brewpub's door to buy a case of Mass Riot. And that steadiness of supply, Schulz believes, will do more to lift Prison City's other IPAs to Mass Riot's level among beer fans than another No. 1 ranking.

Schulz and Maeso are also wary of another consequence of Mass Riot's hype: "line culture." At breweries where customers do have to wait for coveted beer, like Other Half in Brooklyn or Equilibrium in Middletown, lines often form before the sun rises. Though the mood is communal and friendships form through shared enthusiasm, sometimes garbage is strewn across sidewalks and neighbors gripe. Schulz said it's flattering that Prison City has drawn "line culture" to downtown Auburn, but it's not something the brewpub intends to chase.

That's why Prison City has yet to make plans for any additional can releases, Schulz said, be they 16 or 32 ounces. The brewpub is also waiting to see how Saturday's unfolds. Schulz said the demand for Mass Riot has gone down since August 2016, due to both the passage of time and the emergence of more great New England-style IPAs from upstate New York breweries. But that demand still exceeds Prison City's supply so much that Schulz estimates the brewpub could be doing at least 25 to 30 percent more business if it could guarantee cans to all customers.

The length of the line Saturday morning will say for sure.

"I don't know if the slipper is falling off or there's just a lot more Cinderellas out there right now," Schulz said. "This is a real test for us."

Lake Life Editor David Wilcox can be reached at (315) 282-2245 or david.wilcox@lee.net. Follow him on Twitter @drwilcox.

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Get local news delivered to your inbox! Subscribe to our Daily Headlines newsletter. Sign up! * I understand and agree that registration on or use of this site constitutes agreement to its user agreement and privacy policy.Uber's driverless car fatally knocks pedestrian

For Uber, trouble keeps rupturing all the time. On Sunday, the American company saw its dreams of introducing driverless vehicles shattered when one of its autonomous SUVs knocked off a woman pedestrian in Tempe near Phoenix in Arizona. The victim later succumbed to her injuries at a hospital.

The American National Transportation Safety Board is sending investigators to probe the accident involving the Volvo XC90 sport utility vehicle, which had been fitted with Ubers sensing system.

The car was in an autonomous mode, but had a human safety driver. There were no passengers in it when the woman was knocked down at 10 in the night.

Jason Levine, executive director, Center for Auto Safety, a US advocacy group, predicted that the accident would set consumer confidence in driverless technology back by years if not decades.

Incidentally, Arizonas Republican governor Doug Ducey had a few days earlier signed an executive order making companies operating autonomous vehicles responsible for anything happening on roads including in the event of a murder.

Ducey has been wooing producers of self-driving cars to Arizona for the past three years; he had succeeded in getting Uber away from California to his state for testing the vehicles.

The US company, which also has extensive operations across Indian cities, was planning to go public next year, but the latest accident will once again derail its plans.

Uber has been battling several scandals around the globe and continues to face charges in many countries. The US Department of Justice opened a criminal investigation into the use of software by the company that allegedly helped drivers evade local transport regulators (See: Uber probed for thwarting regulators).

Initially, Uber claimed the technology was deployed to prevent fraud and protect drivers, but later withdrew it after the scam broke out. Authorities in the US also plan to probe whether the company violated other price-transparency laws.

Ubers founder Travis Kalanick quit last August after battling several cases around the globe and was replaced by Dara Khosrowshahi as the CEO (See: Expedias Dara Khosrowshahi to replace Kalanick as Uber CEO).

The new boss has been trying to settle many of the disputes .

Last month, for instance, the company agreed to pay $245 million to Alphabet Inc, after a case was filed against it for stealing trades secrets relating to self-driving vehicle technology (Uber chief Khorowshahi says $245-mn settlement with Waymo well worthwhile).

Even in India, Uber has been battling cases involving its drivers. About four years ago, a 26-year-old passenger was kidnapped and raped in an Uber car in India. She filed a suit against the company in the US and won the case; Uber had to settle the case with her.Israel military admits bombing Syrian nuclear reactor in 2007

Israeli armed forces released classified images on Wednesday admitting for the first time that it had bombed a suspected nuclear reactor in Syria on 6 September 2007.

Eight F-16s and F-15s had taken off from two air bases and dropped 18 tonnes of munitions over a suspected nuclear reactor in Syrias Deir al-Zor region, about 450 km from Damascus, the capital, said the military.

The reactor, which was being built with North Korean help and funding from Iran, was months away from activation, claimed the authorities.

The message of the attack on the nuclear reactor in 2007 is that the State of Israel will not allow the establishment of capabilities that threatens Israels existence, military chief of staff Lieutenant-General Gadi Eisenkot said in a statement. This was our message in 2007, this remains our message today, and will continue to be our message in the near and distant future.

The countrys intelligence minister, Israel Katz, also tweeted: The (2007) operation and its success made clear that Israel will never allow nuclear weaponry to be in the hands of those who threaten its existence - Syria then, and Iran today.

According to the Israeli army, its intelligence had been monitoring the nuclear project in Syria for two years and had feared it would be activated by the end of 2007.

Israel has for years been warily monitoring the situation in Syria, especially the involvement of Iran in the ongoing civil war. It has warned both countries that it would not tolerate an Iranian military presence near the Golan Heights or in areas bordering Israel.Lalu Prasad convicted in fourth fodder scam

Currently serving a three and a half year jail term in Ranchi, former Bihar chief minister and Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) chief, Lalu Prasad Yadav was convicted on Monday in the fourth fodder scam case by a special CBI court in Ranchi.

Lalu Prasad Yadav

CBI judge Shivpal Singh pronounced the judgment in which a total of 19 accused were convicted, and another 12 acquitted.

The case pertains to fraudulent withdrawal of Rs 3.5 crore from the Dumka treasury.

The court, however, acquitted a nother former Bihar CM, and Lalu Prasad's predecessor, Jagannath Mishra in the case. Mishra, a was also acquitted in the second fodder scam case on December 23 last year.

The order on the quantum of punishment will be passed following arguments on from 21 to 23 predecessor.

The scandal came to light in 1996 following a raid by the Deputy Commissioner of Chaibasa, Amit Khare, at the Bihar Animal Husbandry Department. In 1997, Lalu Prasad was charged under the Prevention of Corruption Act in connection with the fodder scam.

The CBI, which was investigating allegations of misappropriations of treasury funds to non-existent companies for purchase and supply of cattle fodder in Bihar, had found alleged irregularities worth Rs 950 crore, forcing Lalu Prasad to resign as the chief minister of Bihar, anointing his wife Rabri Devi as CM.

Under pressure from critics in his party, the Janata Dal, he quit the party and floated his own party, the Rashtriya Janata Dal.

The CBI has filed 63 cases under IPC Sections 420 (forgery) and 120 (b) (criminal conspiracy) and Section 13 (b) of the Prevention of Corruption Act.

Lalu Prasad Yadav was first convicted in 2013 in the first fodder scam case and awarded five years in jail. The court charged lalu Prasad with fraudulent withdrawal of Rs47 lakh from the treasuries at Banka and Bhagalpur districts, where alleged forged bills were drawn by the Animal Husbandry Department in 1995-96 when he was the CM.

Among the 45 other convicts were former chief minister Jagannath Misra.

The conviction also barred Yadav from contesting elections for 11 years in line with the Supreme Court order disqualifying convicts jailed for more than two years from contesting for six years after completion of their sentence. Later, he had got bail in the case.

His next conviction came in 2017, months after current Bihar chief minister and JD(U) chief Nitish Kumar walked out from an alliance with lalu Prasad and joined hands with the BJP to form a new government.

In December the same year Lalu Prasad was convicted in the second fodder scam case, which pertained to fraudulent withdrawal of money amounting to over Rs89 lakh from Deoghar treasury between 1991 and 1994 when he was the chief minister and also handled the finance portfolio.

In this case he was sentenced by a special CBI court to three-and-a-half years of rigorous imprisonment, while his predecessort Jagannath Misra was acquitted. The court also imposed a cumulative fine of Rs5 lakh in connection with charges under the Indian Penal Code and Rs5 lakh pertaining to charges under the Prevention of Corruption Act.

A month after he was convicted in the third fodder scam case, on 25 January 2018, in a case pertaining to fraudulent withdrawal of Rs37.62 crore from the treasury of Chaibasa (now in Jharkhand)  in 1992-93.

Tthis time Jagannath Mishra was also convicted. Both Lalu and Mishra were sentenced to five-year rigorous imprisonment under various sections of the IPC and the Prevention of Corruption Act, along with a cumulative fine of Rs 10 lakh.

In the fourth fodder sacam case, today, 19 March 2018, a special CBI court in Ranchi, on pronounced Lalu Prasad Yadav guilty in the case pertaining to alleged fraudulent withdrawal of Rs3.5 crore from the Dumka treasury (also in Jharkhand now) over two decades ago. The court, however, acquitted Jagannath Mishra in the case.

A special CBI court will pronounce its judgment in the fifth fodder scam, pertaining to fraudulent withdrawal of Rs47.5 crore from the Doranda treasury in the '90s, in the months ahead.Bangla SC stays Khaleda Zia's release on bail for 20 days

The Bangladesh Supreme Court has stayed the release of former prime minister Khaleda Zia, 72, on bail in a corruption case in which she was sentenced to five years in jail.

On March 12, the Dhaka High Court granted Zia the chairperson of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) a four-month interim bail, following her conviction to a five-year prison term in February. On March 12, the Dhaka High Court granted Zia the chairperson of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) a four-month interim bail, following her conviction to a five-year prison term in February.

See: Khaleda was given a shorter term while her son, Tarique Rahman, and four others were jailed for 10 years at the end of a case that lasted nearly 10 years. ( Former Bangladesh PM Khaleda Zia gets 5 years in jail for graft ).

Rahman, a senior party leader and an heir-apparent the BNP, lives in London. He was tried in absentia along with two others. Two defendants are behind bars.

Khaleda, Rahman and aides were convicted of stealing 21 million taka ($248,154) in foreign donations received by an orphanage trust set up when she was last prime minister, from 2001 to 2006, lawyers said.

The conviction means that Zia, head of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, will be barred from running in the next national elections scheduled for December, as Bangladesh law says anyone imprisoned for more than two years cannot run for office for the next five years.

"The full bench of the appellate division (of the Supreme Court) stayed until May 8 her (Zia's) bail, which means she will not be freed until that day," a spokesperson from the Attorney General's office said.

The five member apex court bench, headed by Chief Justice Syed Mahmud Hossain, also fixed 8 May as the date for hearing the arguments supporting and opposing Zia's four-month interim bail by the High Court.

PTI reported quoting legal experts, even if Zia would have got the bail, she was unlikely to be released from jail as she was shown "arrested" in another criminal case under a separate arrest warrant by a court in central Comilla district.After McCabe sacking, Republicans warn Trump not to fire Mueller too

Key Republican senators warned President Donald Trump on Sunday not to fire Special Counsel Robert Mueller, and said the president must let federal investigators looking into Russian meddling in the US election do their jobs.

The warnings came after Trump on Sunday morning criticised Mueller on Twitter, and one day after his lawyer John Dowd issued a statement saying he prays for the Justice Department to end the special counsel's investigation into alleged Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election,.

The Republican president has renewed his Twitter attacks on both the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Muellers probe since the firing on Friday of the bureaus former deputy director, Andrew McCabe, two days before he was eligible to retire with a full pension.

In his tweets, Trump reiterated that there had been "no collusion" between his team and Russia and called the probe a "witch hunt" dominated by "hardened Democrats".

Republican Senator Jeff Flake, who has criticized Trump harshly, said the presidents latest comments appeared to be aimed at the firing of Mueller. Senator Lindsey Graham, another Republican, said if Trump were to dismiss Mueller, it would mark "the beginning of the end of his presidency".

AshLee Strong, a spokeswoman for Republican House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan, said, "As the speaker has always said, Mueller and his team should be able to do their job."

In an effort to tamp down the chatter, White House lawyer Ty Cobb issued a statement on Sunday night saying Trump was not weighing Muellers removal.

"In response to media speculation and related questions being posed to the Administration, the White House yet again confirms that the President is not considering or discussing the firing of the Special Counsel, Robert Mueller," he said.

The Republican comments underscored the risks for Trump if he goes too far to thwart the federal probe.

"I dont know what the designs are on Mueller, but it seems to be building toward that (firing him), and I just hope it doesnt go there, because it cant. We cant in Congress accept that," Flake told CNNs State of the Union.

Flake said he expected his colleagues in Congress to push back on the President's comments on Mueller and any potential move to force the end of the probe.

"I mean, talking to my colleagues all along it was, you know, once he goes after Mueller, then we'll take action," Flake said.

"So I would expect to see considerable pushback in the next couple of days urging the president not to go there."

In a series of tweets over the weekend, Trump accused the FBI leadership of lies, corruption and leaking information. He called the Russia probe a politically motivated witch hunt.

"The Mueller probe should never have been started in that there was no collusion and there was no crime," Trump said on Saturday. On Sunday, he attacked former FBI Director James Comey and McCabe, top officials who were involved in the Russia probe and subsequently fired.

The Fake News is beside themselves that McCabe was caught, called out and fired. How many hundreds of thousands of dollars was given to wifes campaign by Crooked H friend, Terry M, who was also under investigation? How many lies? How many leaks? Comey knew it all, and much more! one Tweet said.

The Mueller probe should never have been started in that there was no collusion and there was no crime. It was based on fraudulent activities and a Fake Dossier paid for by Crooked Hillary and the DNC, and improperly used in FISA COURT for surveillance of my campaign. WITCH HUNT! said another.

A third tweet read, Why does the Mueller team have 13 hardened Democrats, some big Crooked Hillary supporters, and Zero Republicans? Another Dem recently added...does anyone think this is fair? And yet, there is NO COLLUSION!

The US intelligence community has concluded that Moscow conducted an influence campaign aimed at swaying the 2016 presidential election to Trump over Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. Mueller is investigating the Russian meddling and any possible collusion with the Trump campaign.

Republican US Representative Trey Gowdy criticized Dowd in an interview with "Fox News Sunday."

"I think the presidents attorney, frankly, does him a disservice when he says that and when he frames the investigation that way," Gowdy said. "If you have an innocent client, Dowd, act like it."

White House legislative affairs director Marc Short said the Trump team was fully cooperating in the Mueller investigation and that the president was expressing his growing frustration with how long the probe has lasted.

Graham, a co-author of legislation that would make it harder for a president to fire a special counsel, said it was very important that Mueller be allowed to proceed without interference and that many Republicans share this view.

"The only reason Mueller could ever be dismissed is for cause. I see no cause when it comes to Mueller," Graham said on CNN.

Trump also drew criticism from fellow Republicans on Sunday over the firing of McCabe, who said he believed he was targeted because he corroborated Comeys claims that Trump tried to pressure Comey into killing the Russia probe.

"I dont like the way it happened. He shouldve been allowed to finish through the weekend," Senator Marco Rubio said on NBCs "Meet the Press.

On Twitter, Michael Bromwich, McCabes lawyer, hit back at Trumps tweets about his client, calling the presidents comments "childish, defamatory, disgusting & false".

"The whole truth will come out in due course," Bromwich wrote. "But the tweets confirm that he has corrupted the entire process that led to Mr McCabes termination and has rendered it illegitimate."Putin basks in landslide poll victory, opposition cries foul

Russian President Vladimir Putin basked in a landslide re-election victory on today, extending his rule over the world's largest country for another six years at a time when his ties with the West are on a hostile trajectory.

Vladmir Putin

Putins victory in the presidential election on Sunday gives him at least another six years in power as Moscow`s relations with the West become increasingly strained.

Putin, who has ruled Russia for almost two decades, recorded his best ever election performance with more than 76 per cent of the vote, but the opposition cried foul.

Monitors reported ballot stuffing and other cases of alleged fraud as the Kremlin pushed for a high turnout to give greater legitimacy to Putin`s historic fourth term.

The Russian strongman ran against seven other candidates, but his most vocal critic Alexei Navalny was barred from the ballot for legal reasons and the final outcome was never in doubt.

Putin's victory will take his political dominance of Russia to nearly a quarter of a century until 2024, the longest rule since Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, by which time Putin will be 71. He has promised to use his new term to beef up Russia's defences against the West and to raise living standards.

The Central Election Commission, with nearly 100 per cent of the votes counted, announced that Putin, who has run Russia as president or prime minister since 1999, had won 76.66 percent of the vote.

In a late night victory speech near Red Square, Putin told a cheering crowd he interpreted the win as a vote of confidence in what he had achieved in the last few years in tough conditions.

"It's very important to maintain this unity," said Putin, before leading the crowd in repeated chants of "Russia!" He told a meeting of supporters afterwards that difficult times were ahead, but that Russia had a chance to make "a breakthrough".

Backed by state TV, the ruling party, and credited with an approval rating around 80 per cent, Putin faced no credible threat from the challengers.

His nearest rival, Communist Party candidate Pavel Grudinin, won 11.8 per cent, according to near final results, while nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky got 5.6 per cent. His most vocal opponent, anti-corruption campaigner Navalny, was barred from running.

Critics alleged that officials had compelled people to come to the polls to ensure that boredom at the one-sided contest did not lead to a low turnout.

Near final figures put voter turnout at 67.47 percent, just shy of the 70 per cent the presidential administration was reported to have been aiming for by Russian media before the vote. About 107 million Russians were eligible to cast ballots and in its latest update on participation.

Selfie competitions, giveaways, food festivals and children`s entertainers were laid on at polling stations in a bid to create a festive atmosphere around the election.

But employees of state and private companies reported coming under pressure to vote, while students were threatened with problems in their exams or even expulsion if they did not take part, according to the independent Novaya Gazeta newspaper.

Russia's Central Election Commission said on Monday morning it had not registered any serious complaints about violations, and there were half as many irregularities as reported in the last election in 2012.

Putin loyalists said the result was a vindication of his tough stance towards the West.

"I think that in the United States and Britain they've understood they cannot influence our elections," Igor Morozov, a member of the upper house of parliament, said on state television.

Valentina Matviyenko, speaker of the upper house, hailed the victory as a moral one over the West.

"Our elections have proved once again ... that it's not possible to manipulate our people," she said. "People came together."

Chinese President Xi Jinping was among the first to offer his congratulations to Putin, saying in a Chinese foreign ministry statement he believed Russia would "definitely continue to create new glories for national development".

Opposition leader Navalny is expected to call for anti-Putin protests demanding a re-run of an election he says was neither free nor fair and international observers were due to give their verdict on how clean the election was later on Monday.

The longer-term question is whether Putin will now soften his anti-Western rhetoric.

Putin's bellicose language reached a crescendo before the election in a state-of-the-nation speech when he unveiled new nuclear weapons, saying they could hit almost any point in the world and evade a US-built missile shield.

At odds with the West over Syria, Ukraine, allegations of Russian election meddling and cyberattacks and the poisoning in Britain of a former Russian spy and his daughter, Moscow has seen relations with the West reach a post-Cold War low.

Allies laud the former KGB agent as a father-of-the-nation figure who has restored national pride and expanded Moscow's global clout with interventions in Syria and Ukraine.

Critics accuse him of overseeing a corrupt, authoritarian system and of illegally annexing Ukraine's Crimea region in 2014, a move that isolated Russia internationally.

Western sanctions on Russia imposed over Crimea and Moscow's backing of a pro-Russian separatist uprising in eastern Ukraine remain in place and have damaged the Russian economy, which rebounded only last year after a prolonged downturn.

Britain and Russia are locked in a diplomatic dispute over the spy poisoning incident, and Washington is eyeing new sanctions on Moscow over allegations it interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, which Russia denies.

Putin said late on Sunday it was nonsense to think that Russia would have poisoned former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Britain and said Moscow was ready to cooperate with London.

Officials and analysts say there is little agreement among Putin's top policymakers on a new economic strategy. A government reshuffle is likely to take place after Putin's inauguration in May.

How long Putin wants to stay in power is uncertain.Life has become 'hell' for former French President Sarkozy

Former French President Nicolas Sarkozys life has become hell since 2011, with allegations that he had taken money from the late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi for his 2007 election campaign.

Sarkozy, who is currently being probed for allegedly taking illegal funding from Gaddafi, told a newspaper that this calumny has made my life a living hell since March 11, 2011. Sarkozy, who is currently being probed for allegedly taking illegal funding from Gaddafi, told a newspaper that this calumny has made my life a living hell since March 11, 2011.

The former French president said he was a victim of a campaign that began that month based on accusations made by a Franco-Lebanese businessman.

According to Sarkozy, his accusers in Libya are seeking vengeance over his decision to send French warplanes to their country in 2011, when Gaddafi was overthrown

The ex-president was detained by the police in 2014 in a case of alleged campaign funds abuse. His problems worsened when two years later, French-Lebanese businessman Ziad Takieddine told a French web site that in 2006 he had handed over three suitcases stuffed with euro notes to Sarkozy and Claude Gueant, his then chief of staff.

Takieddine said Gaddafi had sent the cash (about $6.2 million) to fund Sarkozys presidential campaign. He had handed over the money to Gueant for Sarkozys campaign, claimed Takieddine.

The French leader could not win the 2012 elections and lost to socialist Francois Hollande. A year later, the French authorities opened investigations into charges that Sarkozys campaign had gained from millions of euros of illicit fund transfers from Gaddafi.

Sarkozy has also faced other charges including one involving secret funding from Liliane Bettencourt, the LOreal heiress. He was, however, cleared of the charges.Living sensor can potentially prevent environmental disasters from fuel spills

The Colonial Pipeline, which carries fuel from Texas to New York, ruptured last fall, dumping a quarter-million gallons of gas in rural Alabama.

By the time the leak was detected during routine inspection, vapors from released gasoline were so strong they prevented pipeline repair for days. Now, scientists are developing technology that would alert pipeline managers about leaks as soon as failure begins, avoiding the environmental disasters and fuel distribution disruptions resulting from pipeline leaks.

"The advantage with our sensor is that it can detect very small leaks, and operators can take quick action to repair them," says Veera Gnaneswar Gude, Ph.D., leader of the project. "We no longer have to wait until the leak is out of hand. Plus if we are able to develop this system on a larger scale, the same unit would be able to treat the waste and to remediate the soil and water that has been contaminated."

Pipelines are currently inspected by a device called a smart pig, an electronic sensor that travels through the pipe detecting cracks or welding defects. Despite regular inspection, leaks still occur.

Gude, who is at Mississippi State University, is developing a sensor that would complement this process by providing additional information about the integrity of the pipes. This sensor adheres to the outside of the pipe, and takes advantage of the metabolic process of bacteria to detect gas leaks in real time.

In previous research, Gude studied the use of microorganisms in wastewater treatment, and he has recently turned his focus to building biosensors from similar species. In the current study, he is testing bacteria that will elicit an adequately measurable cathode voltage while also being able to survive in a marine environment for the application of offshore oil spill detection. For this to work, the bacteria have to remain robust through a range of alkalinity, pressure and pH conditions.

One type of bacteria he is testing is referred to as "electrogenic," which means that it releases electrons to its environment through metabolic processes. Gude created an organic sensor composed of an electrogenic anode made up of bacteria that consume carbon-based material (gas or oil) and expel electrons. The electrons then travel across a resistor to a cathode.

A different set of bacteria, hungry for electrons, resides at the cathode encouraging electron flow. An increase in the metabolic processes of the anode bacteria will correspond to a voltage increase in the sensor, which could alert a technician to a potential leak.

"The sensor is not difficult to implement," says Gude. "Placing the sensor onto a pipe is not a big challenge. It is a very versatile technique."

Currently, Gude is looking for a medium in which to immobilize the bacteria. He is testing high-porosity plastics and bio-based films that optimize the surface area that the electrogenic bacteria can cover.

Once rugged bacteria are identified and immobilized, they can be used as leak detectors in a range of oil transport and drilling applications, including fracking. It is possible that at some point in the future the sensor could be sprayed as a coating on the exterior of pipes insuring that the entire length is continuously monitored.Cutting carbon emissions sooner could save 153 min lives

Kolkata and Delhi lead the list of cities benefitting from accelerated emissions cuts with up to 4.4 million projected saved lives and up to 4 million projected saved lives, respectively.

As many as 153 million premature deaths linked to air pollution could be avoided worldwide this century if governments speed up their timetable for reducing fossil fuel emissions, a new Duke University-led study finds.

The study is the first to project the number of lives that could be saved, city by city, in 154 of the world's largest urban areas if nations agree to reduce carbon emissions and limit global temperature rise to 1.5C in the near future rather than postponing the biggest emissions cuts until later, as some governments have proposed.

Premature deaths would drop in cities on every inhabited continent, the study shows, with the greatest gains in saved lives occurring in Asia and Africa.

Apart from Kolkata nd Delhi, 13 other Asian or African cities could each avoid more than 1 million premature deaths and around 80 additional cities could each avoid at least 100,000 deaths.

Nearly 50 urban areas on other continents could also see significant gains in numbers of saved lives, with six cities  Moscow, Mexico City, Sao Paolo, Los Angeles, Puebla and New York  each potentially avoiding between 320,000 and 120,000 premature deaths.

The new projections underscore the grave shortcomings of taking the lowest-cost approach to emissions reductions, which permits emissions of carbon dioxide and associated air pollutants to remain higher in the short-term in hopes they can be offset by negative emissions in the far distant future, said Drew Shindell, Nicholas Professor of Earth Sciences at Duke's Nicholas School of the Environment.

"The lowest-cost approach only looks at how much it will cost to transform the energy sector. It ignores the human cost of more than 150 million lost lives, or the fact that slashing emissions in the near term will reduce long-term climate risk and avoid the need to rely on future carbon dioxide removal," he said. "That's a very risky strategy, like buying something on credit and assuming you'll someday have a big enough income to pay it all back."

Shindell conducted the new research with Greg Faluvegi of Columbia University's Center for Climate Systems Research and NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies; Karl Seltzer, a PhD student in earth and ocean sciences at Duke; and Cary Shindell, an undergraduate student in civil and environmental engineering at Duke. They published their peer-reviewed findings March 19 in the journal Nature Climate Change.

Funding came from NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

To conduct the study, they ran computer simulations of future emissions of carbon dioxide and associated pollutants such as ozone and particulate matter under three different scenarios.

The first scenario simulated the effects of having accelerated reductions of carbon emissions and almost no negative emissions over the remainder of the 21st century.

The second scenario simulated the effects of allowing slightly higher carbon emissions in the near term, but with still enough overall reductions to limit atmosphere warming to 2C by century's end.

The third scenario simulated the effects of an even more accelerated approach, in which near-term emissions are reduced to a level that would limit atmospheric warming to 1.5C.

The researchers then calculated the human health impacts of pollution exposure under each scenario all over the world  but focusing on results in major cities  using well-established epidemiological models based on decades of public health data on air-pollution related deaths.

"Since air pollution is something we understand very well and have extensive historical data on, we can say with relatively high certainty how many people will die in a given city under each scenario," Shindell says. "Hopefully, this information will help policymakers and the public grasp the benefits of accelerating carbon reductions in the near term, in a way that really hits home."SBI approaches Supreme Court to allow RCom asset sale to Reliance Jio

State Bank of India on Tuesday pleaded before the Supreme Court to allow the sale of the assets of Reliance Communications Ltd (RCom).

It moved the Supreme Court on Tuesday challenging the arbitration tribunals order, which was upheld by the Bombay high court, that permitted Ericsson to stake a claim on RCom consolidateds assets.

RCom requested the top court for a stay on the Mumbai High Court and National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) decisions to bar it from selling its wireless assets to Reliance Jio without prior approval. Both petitions will be heard by the Supreme Court concurrently.

RCom owes Indian lenders Rs42,000 crore. SBI argued that as a secured lender, its claim took precedence over others.

On 8 March the Mumbai High Court had rejected RComs appeal against an order barring the sale or transfer of its assets without prior permission.

SBI has total dues of around Rs4,000 crore against RCom. Apart from it is in debt to 24 other Indian banks.

They had initiated sale through bidding of RCom Consolidateds assets in the hope of recovering their dues.

However, Swedish telecom equipment maker Ericsson moved the arbitratoion tribunal seeking to restrain the sale of RCom consolidateds assets in a bid to recover its claim of Rs1,150 crore from Rcom. The tribunal on 5 March allowed Ericsson claim, which RCom challenged and lost in the Mumbai High court on 8 March.

SBI in its petition before the Supreme Coyurt has challenged the Mumbai High Court decision saying an an unsecured creditor (Ericsson) could not be prioritised for payments over secured creditors like SBI.MORAVIA  The Moravia Central School District debated which of two tax levies to present to the community for voting in May, ultimately opting to decide next month.

The board of education debated the merits of a 2.79 or 3.29 percent levy  which is the district's tax cap allowed by the state  for the district's 2018-2019 budget during its meeting Wednesday night.

Giving a recap of the district's previous budget discussion with the state, Superintendent John Birmingham said he and district business administrator Jeff Lawrence recommended at the previous meeting that the board approve to go up to the cap. Birmingham said the board also asked the district to explore either a 2.29-percent tax levy or a 2.79-percent levy. The board decided later during the Wednesday meeting to abandon the 2.29-percent option.

Birmingham said that based on recommendations the district received, factors such as a fourth-grade teacher, a sixth-grade teacher, a student resource officer and a bus to take students home from after-school activities have been built into the budget. If the district were to bring the levy to the cap, the district would also be able to have Dell devices available for students for a cost of $40,000.Delhi HC issues notices to Raja, Kanimozhi in 2G scam cases

The Delhi high court issued a notice on Wednesday to former telecom minister A Raja and Kanimozhi, daughter of DMK leader M Karunanidhi, on a plea by the Enforcement Directorate, challenging their acquittal by a special court (See: 2G verdict may see host of telcos suing Centre).

On 20 March the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) moved the Delhi High Court on Tuesday just a day after the Enforcement Directorate (ED) filed an appeal challenging the acquittal of former telecom minister A Raja and DMK MP Kanimozhi in the 2G scam.

The court also issued another notice to both of them relating to a plea by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) challenging the acquittal by the special court in the 2G spectrum allocation case.

The high court ruled that status quo would be maintained with regard to properties attached by the ED in the Prevention of Money Laundering Act case.

See: Both the ED and the CBI had challenged the special court orders acquitting the accused  including Raja and Kanimozhi  in the cases. The ED in its charge sheet had accused Kalaignar TV, owned by the DMK, of having got Rs200 crore from Swan Telecom, which had obtained the 2G licence ( CBI, ED challenge acquittal of Raja, Kanimozhi in Delhi HC ).

The CBI alleged a loss of more than Rs30,000 crore to the national exchequer following the allocation of 2G licences. The Supreme Court had scrapped the licences in 2012.BrahMos successfully flight-tested with indigenous seeker

BrahMos, the worlds fastest supersonic cruise missile, was successfully flight-tested with an indigenous seeker at 8.42 am on Thursday at the Pokhran test range in Rajasthan.

The precision strike weapon with Indian-made seeker flew in its designated trajectory and hit the target with pin-point accuracy, tweeted defence minister Nirmala Sitharaman. The precision strike weapon with Indian-made seeker flew in its designated trajectory and hit the target with pin-point accuracy, tweeted defence minister Nirmala Sitharaman.

The versatile missile can be fired from the land, fighter jets, ships and even submarines. The two-stage missile can achieve a cruise speed of 2.8 Mach and can carry a conventional warhead of 300 kg.

In what is also billed as a boost for the Make in India campaign of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the seeker  a critical element for the missile  was developed in the country. The BrahMos system has been jointly developed by India and Russia.

Sitharaman said the missile hit its target with pinpoint accuracy and the launch will boost Indias national security. The missile is the heaviest to be deployed on the Sukhoi-30 fighter aircraft.

See: The BrahMos cruise missile was successfully test-fired for the first time in November 2017 from the IAFs frontline fighter aircraft the Sukhoi-30MKI against a sea-based target in the Bay of Bengal ( IAF successfully test-fires BrahMos missile from Sukhoi fighter jet ).

The successful maiden test firing of the Air Launched Cruise Missile (ALCM) boosted the IAFs air combat operations capability from stand-off ranges. It was the first time in the world that such a heavy missile was fitted on a fighter jet.

According to the defence ministry, the Brahmos ALCM weighing 2.5 ton is the heaviest weapon to be deployed on Indias Su-30 fighter aircraft modified by HAL to carry weapons.

The world-class weapon with multi-platform, multi-mission role is now capable of being launched from land, sea and air, completing the tactical cruise missile triad for India.

The cruise missile will be integrated on 40 Sukhoi combat aircraft meeting the needs of the IAF.

With India now a part of the Missile Technology Control Regime, it can extend the range of BrahMos missile from 300 km to 450 km. The India-Russia joint venture that is developing the missile plans to extend its range to 800 km.

The versatile missile can be fired from the land, fighter jets, ships and even submarines. The two-stage missile can achieve a cruise speed of 2.8 Mach and can carry a conventional warhead of 300 kg.

The missile developed by India and Russia takes its name from two rivers in the respective countries  Brahmaputra and Moskva.People are willing to pay to curate their online social image

Social media provides a new environment that makes it possible to carefully edit the image you want to project of yourself. A study from Lund University in Sweden suggests that many people are prepared to pay to "filter out" unfavourable information.

Economists Hakan Holm and Margaret Samahita have investigated how we curate our social image on the web using game theory.

Previous studies have been conducted on, for example, how anonymity affects our willingness to act pro-socially, and thus our concern for social image. However, the internet and social media now make it possible to edit the image we want to project of ourselves retroactively.

One can therefore expect other, less impulsive, mechanisms to control this behaviour. The purpose of the study was therefore to better understand online behaviour.

Each subject participated in a cooperative situation with an anonymous person, and the participants earned real money during the experiment. They could be "good" and cooperate a lot, which is costly, or be less cooperative, which costs less.

They then found out that information about how much they actually cooperated could be published online along with their name, but that they could avoid this publication if they paid to censor the information.

It turned out that those who cooperated less, valued the censorship highest which meant that information about this group's actions tended to be filtered out.

"That the image people share of themselves is 'softened' on the internet is perhaps not that surprising. What is new is that this is shown under experimental control and that the will to 'filter out' is so strong that one is prepared to pay for it", explains Hakan Holm.

Before the cooperative situation was presented, a group of subjects had to take a "selfie" while other subjects did not. One question was the effect of a selfie on the willingness to share sensitive information.

"The selfie can be said to increase visibility, and by combining this with the information about subjects' cooperation, we found that it increased their valuation of censorship. This was especially true for those who cooperated little", says Holm.

Another effect that surprised the researchers was that the likelihood to cooperate, for subjects who reported that they often took selfies, was greatly influenced by the selfie-taking. For the frequent selfie-takers who took a selfie before the cooperative situation, cooperation was significantly lower than those who did not take a selfie.

"One interpretation is that among some groups, a selfie can initiate a temporary selfish mindset that crowds out other motives such as the willingness to cooperate with others. However, we would like to see more studies about this effect before it can be considered scientifically established", Hakan Holm concludes.CBI, ED challenge acquittal of Raja, Kanimozhi in Delhi HC

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) moved the Delhi High Court on Tuesday just a day after the Enforcement Directorate (ED) filed an appeal challenging the acquittal of former telecom minister A Raja and DMK MP Kanimozhi in the 2G scam.

On Monday, the ED had moved the Delhi HC, accusing the special judge, who had exonerated all 17 accused in the 2G telecom scam, of non-application of mind.

The special judge has completely mis-directed himself in holding that the offence of money laundering has not taken place merely because of the acquittal of the accused in the offences investigated and tried by the CBI, said the plea by the ED.

According to the directorate, the 2G licence had been given to Swan Telecom, which had allegedly paid Rs200 crore to DMK-run Kalaignar TV, which was owned by Kanimozhi.

A Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) report in 2010 had said that the exchequer had lost potentially upto Rs1.76 lakh crore because of the 2008 allocation of 2G spectrum. In 2012, the Supreme Court scrapped the licences that had been issued by the government (See: SC cancels all 2G licences, orders fresh spectrum auction).

In December, the special court had acquitted Raja, Kanimozhi and others accused in two cases registered by the CBI and the ED.

The special court had been set up in 2011 for hearing three separate cases involving the 2G scam. There were nearly 45 accused persons in all three cases.

O P Saini, the special court judge, had been critical over the manner in which the agencies were conducting the case. It accused the CBI of filing a well-choreographed charge sheet.

I have endeavoured hard to persuade myself to take an expansive and liberal view of the prosecution case, he had said. However, in view of deficient, or I may say nil evidence on record, I find myself unimpressed and unmoved, whatever may be the nature of the case. High profile nature of a case cannot be used as a ground for holding people guilty without legal evidence.Teenager 18, dies after phone explodes while charging

A teenager who tried to charge her phone while having a conversation on it died after the phone exploded.

Eighteen-year-old Uma Oram from Kheriakani, Odisha, was at her home when the incident happened. The sudden explosion happened after she plugged it in to charge during the conversation. Uma who suffered injuries to her hand, leg and chest, was rushed to a local hospital, where she died. Her brother Durga Prasad Oram said, "As the battery of the mobile phone was draining out, she plugged it for charging while talking over it simultaneously.

The cause of the blast is not known.

The cell phone was put on charging when she started talking to a relative. Its battery exploded suddenly. Before we could know what exactly happened, Uma fell unconscious. She was declared dead at the hospital, Oram said.

The phone was a Nokia 3310, though according to commentators, it bears a resemblance to a Nokia 5233.

However, Nokia denied it was one of their devices. A spokesperson for Nokia said, While we have not been able to independently verify the facts of any of these reports, we can confirm that the mobile phone in question was not manufactured or sold by HMD Global, the new home of Nokia phones, set up in 2017 to create a new range of Nokia devices.

As HMD Global, we are committed to producing high quality handsets which deliver a strong user experience and meet high customer expectations.

Another incident reported last year involved one of the fastest growing smartphone brands in India, Xiaomi.

The companys best-selling Redmi Note 4 exploded when it was not charging. A shopkeeper merely inserted the SIM card which caused the handset burst into flames.

Commentators point out that while these are one-off cases, Samsung had suffered both financially and brand-wise, when its flagship Galaxy Note 7 was recalled after it was deemed unsafe for use due to faulty batteries.Alibaba Group Holdings plans another $2-bn investment in Lazada Group SA

Alibaba Group Holding Ltd plans another $2 billion worth of investment in privately-owned German e-commerce company Lazada Group SA and have one of its most senior executives run the business as it doubles its bet in Southeast Asia.

According to a statement today, Lucy Peng who is already chairman of Lazada would take over as chief executive officer. Current CEO Max Bittner, who will step down, will continue as senior adviser.

Alibaba is gearing up for an intense battle in Southeast Asia, where Amazon has launched in Singapore-based south east Asia focussed Sea Ltds Shopee, and is expanding to win consumers, according to commentators.

The new investment, which follows Alibaba spending $2-billion to take control of Lazada, will help the company with technology development and customer acquisition.

This is part of its overseas expansion strategy, where its using a specific platform as a testing ground, said Steven Zhu, a Shanghai-based analyst with Pacific Epoch. Now its going to run operations itself, Bloomberg reported.

According to commentators, Southeast Asia is an important aspect of Alibabas global expansion and a thriving region that Chinese archival JD.com Inc is also targeting.

JD CEO Richard Liu has pledged to set up a presence in every Southeast Asian country before the end of the year.

Lazada has operations in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam and Singapore.

According to commentators, Southeast Asia is a lucrative market for e-commerce players as millions of first-generation internet users go online for shopping.

Internet economy in the region is projected to grow to $200 billion by 2025, primarily driven by growth in e-commerce.

Amazon entered the market for the first time last year, with the launch of its express, same-day delivery service, Prime Now in Singapore.Raising transparency in the online advertising ecosystem

The online advertising business, led by companies like Google or Facebook, generated over $200 billion revenue in 2017, with an inter-annual growth over 15 per cent. This online advertising explosion is raising serious data privacy concerns

The explosion of online advertising is raising serious data privacy concerns. / @IMDEA Networks Institute

The online advertising business, led by companies like Google or Facebook, generated over $200 billion revenue in 2017, with an inter-annual growth over 15 per cent. This online advertising explosion is raising serious data privacy concerns.

Advertisers track users when they are online by shadowing them as they browse websites, perform web searches or watch movies. Tracking companies build a profile of each user based on such activities.

Collecting and processing personal data and then offering it to interested parties often means maintaining a balance between sustaining the many gains the industry brings and concerns over the privacy of internet users.

The TYPES ["TransparencY and Privacy in the onlinE" advertising business] project "protects individuals' privacy while empowering them to control how their data is used by service providers for advertising purposes," says Rosa Araujo, from Eurecat (Barcelona, Spain), project coordinator for the EU-funded initiative. 'By raising end user trust and advertiser transparency, all stakeholders of the advertising ecosystem stand to benefit.'

Arturo Azcorra, director of IMDEA Networks Institute (Madrid, Spain), says one of ten consortium members that have collaborated in the project, says about the results achieved, "TYPES has created solutions that protect user's privacy while empowering them to control how their data is used by service providers for advertising purposes.

"At the same time, TYPES has raised awareness about the need to take decisive action to protect users' online rights and to ensure that the use of personal data, if and when it happens, is transparent and entails a reasonable value added to users."

Keeping internet advertisers in check

TYPES has created tools designed to support the idea of a healthier, more transparent and thriving online advertising sector. This suite of tools enables users to 'better understand how their personal data is used online, ultimately building a strong foundation on which both industry and they can thrive,' continues Araujo.

The Web Browser Plug-In (available as corporate and open-source versions) and Network Proxy tools concern privacy violation detection and safeguarding. Araujo explains that they allow users to 'know what information is being collected and tracked by websites and advertisers, among others.'

Data valuation tools estimate the value that the online advertising market or users associate with different data which is mostly unknown and particularly difficult to assess. Software includes the Web Survey tool, Data Valuation Web Portal, YouTube Video Valuation tool and the Facebook Data Valuation tool. 'Divulging such information would be beneficial for both end users and the online advertising industry,' notes Araujo.

TYPES also developed Data Broker, a privacy-by-design advertising and marketing solution. Araujo stresses that it 'helps end users to share and benefit from their data in the digital advertising ecosystem.'

Products to boost business and protect privacy and personal data

Some solutions are ready to hit the market, while others are well on their way. The corporate Web Browser Plug-In is being commercialised for SMEs. One of the project partners, a digital agency, will offer the open-source version to its customers.

The subsidiary of a global security services company is expected to introduce the Network Proxy tool to its client base.

"This is a huge success for the project and the potential it can offer, because the company has a portfolio of several dozen companies who purchase solutions for improving their users' web experience," emphasises Araujo.

The Web Survey tool is freely available on the project website. Several partners intend to offer the Web Portal as a public service, aimed at maintaining transparency and creating awareness among citizens of personal data's value.

There are plans to apply for public research funds to maintain the Facebook Data Valuation tool, which informs Facebook users in real time about the money they're generating for the social networking website. It's the only product of its kind in the marketplace. A patent has also been issued for the Data Broker algorithms.

"Key market players and national organisations from the advertisement sector have expressed concern about the impact the project will have on established business models," continues Araujo. "Despite this, there's a certain underlying realisation that something needs to be done regarding transparency, and that the EU's new legislative framework for data privacy that comes into force in 2018 will make tools not only relevant, but needed."

"The rise of the digital economy must not be equated with a loss to our privacy, even more when it is a fact unprecedented in history that minors have become major users of the services provided. The existence of parental controls is not enough to protect them when it comes, for example, to sharing their location in real-time," concludes Azcorra.

"IMDEA Networks will continue work about the online advertising ecosystem in the context of the recently launched "MyBubble" initiative in collaboration with University Carlos III of Madrid and the MIT. MyBubble focusses on the personalisation filter, the so-called "filter bubble" generated by online services on the basis of our preferences and interests, and how it influences the information we access."Drawing inspiration from plants and animals to restore tissue

Researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering have developed new wound dressings that dramatically accelerate healing and improve tissue regeneration. The two different types of nanofiber dressings, described in separate papers, use naturally-occurring proteins in plants and animals to promote healing and regrow tissue.

"Our fibre manufacturing system was developed specifically for the purpose of developing therapeutics for the wounds of war," says Kit Parker, the Tarr Family Professor of Bioengineering and Applied Physics at SEAS and senior author of the research. "As a soldier in Afghanistan, I witnessed horrible wounds and, at times, the healing process for those wounds was a horror unto itself. This research is a years-long effort by many people on my team to help with these problems."

Parker is also a Core Faculty Member of the Wyss Institute.

The most recent paper, published in Biomaterials, describes a wound dressing inspired by fetal tissue.

In the late 1970s, when scientists first started studying the wound healing process early in development, they discovered something unexpected: wounds incurred before the third trimester left no scars. This opened a range of possibilities for regenerative medicine. But for decades, researchers have struggled to replicate those unique properties of fetal skin.

Unlike adult skin, foetal skin has high levels of a protein called fibronectin, which assembles into the extracellular matrix and promotes cell binding and adhesion.

Fibronectin has two structures  globular, which is found in blood, and fibrous, which is found in tissue. Even though fibrous fibronectin holds the most promise for wound healing, previous research focused on the globular structure, in part because manufacturing fibrous fibronectin was a major engineering challenge.

But Parker and his team are pioneers in the field of nanofiber engineering.

The researchers made fibrous fibronectin using a fibre manufacturing platform called Rotary Jet-Spinning (RJS), developed by Parker's Disease Biophysics Group. RJS works likes a cotton candy machine  a liquid polymer solution, in this case globular fibronectin dissolved in a solvent, is loaded into a reservoir and pushed out through a tiny opening by centrifugal force as the device spins.

As the solution leaves the reservoir, the solvent evaporates and the polymers solidify. The centrifugal force unfolds the globular protein into small, thin fibres. These fibres  less than one micrometer in diameter  can be collected to form a large-scale wound dressing or bandage.

"The dressing integrates into the wound and acts like an instructive scaffold, recruiting different stem cells that are relevant for regeneration and assisting in the healing process before being absorbed into the body," said Christophe Chantre, a graduate student in the Disease Biophysics Group and first author of the paper.

In in vivo testing, the researchers found that wounds treated with the fibronectin dressing showed 84 per cent tissue restoration within 20 days, compared to 55.6 per cent restoration in wounds treated with a standard dressing.

The researchers also demonstrated that wounds treated with the fibronectin dressing have close to normal epidermal thickness and dermal architecture, and even regrew hair follicles -- often considered one of the biggest challenges in the field of wound healing.

"This is an important step forward," said Chantre. "Most work done on skin regeneration to date involves complex treatments combining scaffolds, cells and even growth factors. Here we were able to demonstrate tissue repair and hair follicle regeneration using an entirely material approach. This has clear advantages for clinical translation."

In another paper published in Advanced Healthcare Materials, the Disease Biophysics Group demonstrated a soy-based nanofiber that also enhances and promotes wound healing.

Soy protein contains both estrogen-like molecules -- which have been shown to accelerate wound healing -- and bioactive molecules similar to those that build and support human cells.

"Both the soy and fibronectin fibre technologies owe their success to keen observations in reproductive medicine," said Parker. "During a woman's cycle, when her estrogen levels go high, a cut will heal faster. If you do a surgery on a baby still in the womb, they have scar-less wound healing. Both of these new technologies are rooted in the most fascinating of all the topics in human biology -- how we reproduce."

In a similar way to fibronectin fibres, the research team used RJS to spin ultra-thin soy fibres into wound dressings. In experiments, the soy and cellulose-based dressing demonstrated a 72-per cent increase in healing over wounds with no dressing and a 21-per cent increase in healing over wounds dressed without soy protein.

"These findings show the great promise of soy-based nanofibers for wound healing," said Seungkuk Ahn, a graduate student in the Disease Biophysics Group and first author of the paper. "These one-step, cost-effective scaffolds could be the next generation of regenerative dressings and push the envelope of nanofiber technology and the wound care market."

Both kinds of dressing, according to researchers, have advantages in the wound-healing space. The soy-based nanofibres  consisting of cellulose acetate and soy protein hydrolysate  are inexpensive, making them a good option for large-scale usage, such as on burns. The fibronectin dressings, on the other hand, could be used for smaller wounds on the face and hands, where the prevention of scarring is important.EBRD finance and EU grants to boost trade and economic development

The EBRD and the EU are extending their support to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine to a total of almost 1.1 billion in credit lines and trade finance and 58.3 million in EU grants.

At a high-level conference in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, Katarina Mathernova, Deputy Director-General for Neighbourhood Policy and Enlargement Negotiations of the European Commission, said: We are pleased to announce the extension of our successful programme of access to finance supporting reforms important for the Deep and Comprehensive Free Trade Area to function. The EU4Business-EBRD Credit line has allowed SMEs in sectors such as manufacturing, retail, agriculture and food processing, transport, services and health care to improve their products, strengthen their export potential and adopt EU standards and technical norms. The combination of EBRD finance and EU grants has proven to be a perfect match to the needs of Georgian companies."

Through the EU4Business-EBRD Credit line  a joint EBRD-EU programme supported by the EU4Business initiative and active since September 2016  over 100 Georgian companies have received 60 million in financing so far. Concrete projects under the EU4Business-EBRD Credit Line range from investments in machinery to complex programmes where companies had the opportunity to draw on free technical assistance provided by an international team of experts. Half of the projects financed in Georgia are with companies located in regions outside the capital, Tbilisi.

We are delighted to see the first real results of our financing supporting Georgian companies. From hazelnut processing to road construction, from promoting local produce to succeeding in foreign markets  companies financed by the programme have decided to invest in the European standards, and we are happy to be part of their success, said Bruno Balvanera, EBRD Director for the Caucasus, Moldova and Belarus.

The EU4Business-EBRD Credit Line is also available in Moldova and will soon be launched in Ukraine. It will assist local SMEs in reaping the benefits associated with their countries free trade agreements with the EU, the worlds largest trading block.

The EBRD supports businesses with much-needed finance through local partner banks, which allows them to invest in efficient and modern equipment and technologies. EU funds complement investments with technical expertise and provide incentive payments to companies for successful completion.

Access to knowledge and know-how is yet another dimension of the EBRD-EU cooperation, with EU funding of 18 million, while the EBRD SME Finance and Development Group fosters advisory services for enhanced performance and growth in all EU Eastern Partnership countries.

The conference in Tbilisi today gathered representatives of the EU, EBRD, International Monetary Fund, International Finance Corporation, local firms and business associations. It provided an opportunity to take stock and discuss the future outlook of the programme. Participants agreed that the combination of EBRD finance through local banks such as TBC Bank or Bank of Georgia and EU grant funds remains an attractive and crucial proposition for local businesses.



Value of Ireland's thriving seafood sector breaches EUR 1B

Ireland's seafood sector posted its third consecutive year of growth in 2017, its value up 6.4% compared with the previous year and breaching the 1 billion mark for the first time.

The growth was driven by a 12% increase in net exports (331 million), a 4% increase in domestic consumption (429 million) and significant ongoing investment, both private and public (386 million), according to Bord Iascaigh Mhara (BIM), Ireland's Seafood Development Agency in a report.

The value of trade surpassed 1 billion for the first time (registering 1.15 billion), BIM said.

Saying Ireland's seafood industry is thriving, BIM CEO Jim O'Toole bared that over the last two years, the contribution of the seafood sector to Ireland's GDP has grown by over 14%.

"The fact trade sales have exceeded 1 billion for the first time demonstrates the clear demand for Irish seafood", he said.

The EU remains Ireland's main export market valued at 392 million (up 9%). France is Ireland's No. 1 export market for seafood accounting for over one quarter of total exports.

The BIM report also said that Irish seafood is building significant growth markets across Africa, Asia and the Middle East, all demonstrating double-digit growths.

On the domestic market, Irish consumers' purchase of seafood grew 4% valued at 429 million. Domestic consumption covers sales in supermarkets and shops as well as in restaurants, cafes and canteens. Salmon, cod and prawns continued to be favoured by Irish consumers, with salmon valued at 96 million and cod at 48 million.Search All categories Advertising General Aerospace General Agriculture General Airlines General America - Post 9/11 General Apparel General Apple Products General Architectural General Architecture Architecture Art & Entertainments Books Celebrities Country Music Dance Magazines Movies Museums Music Music Downloads News & Talk Shows Performing Arts Photography Television Web Sites Arts/Culture General Auction General Automotive Aftermarket Classic Autos Consumer Publications General Motorcycle & Bike Racing Recreational Vehicle Repair & Service Trade Publications Blogging & Social Media Blogging & Social Media Business Advertising / Marketing Books Consumer Research Direct Marketing e-Commerce Entrepreneurs Finance Franchise Human Resources Insurance Investment Management Markets Network Marketing Online Marketing / SEO Payday Loans Public Relations Publications Real Estate Retail Stocks Supermarkets Women in Business Careers/HR General Chemical General Coaching / Mentoring Coaching / Mentoring Computers Apple Products Databases Games & Entertainment General Hosting Instruction Linux / GNU "Open Source" Macintosh Microsoft Windows PC Operating Systems Programming Security Software Tablet PCs Utilities Construction General Consumer Gifts and Collectibles Hobbies Web sites / Internet Design Graphic Design Industrial Web E-Cigarette General eCommerce General Economy General Education College / University General Home Schooling K-12 Post Graduate Technical Electronics General Email Marketing General EmailWire Press Releases Press Release Tips Employment/Careers General Engineering General Entertainment General Environment General Events / Trade Shows General Finance General Food General Franchise General Fraud / Identity Theft General Gaming General Government General Judicial Law Enforcement Legislative Local National Public Services Security State Transportation Healthcare General Home and Family Banking / Personal Finance Bereavement / Loss Home Furnishings / Interiors Landscaping & Gardening Marriage / Relationships Money Parenting Payday Loans Pets Taxes Wedding / Bridal Home Schooling General Hotels/Resorts General Household General Industry Aerospace / Defense Agriculture Apparel / Textiles Broadcast Construction / Building Electrical Food Funeral Healthcare Leisure / Hospitality Logistics / Shipping Manufacturing / Production Mining / Metals Oil / Energy Paper / Forest Products Plumbing, Heating & AC Print Media Printing Publishing Radio Restaurants Tobacco Toy Insurance General Internet/Online General Legal General Leisure General Lifestyle Beauty Dating / Singles Diet / Weight Loss Fashion Food / Beverage Health & Fitness Hotel / Resorts Pastimes Restaurants Retirement Travel & Tourism Machinery General Maritime General Medical Addiction Allergies Alternative Medicine Asthma Cancer Cardiology Chiropractic Dental Dermatology Diabetes Emergency Family Medicine General General Geriatrics Hospitals Infectious Diseases Internal Medicine Managed Care / HMO Medical Products Mental Health Neurology Nursing Nutrition OB / GYN Pediatrics Pharmaceuticals Physical Therapy Plastic Surgery Psychology Radiology / Imaging Research Sports Medicine Surgery Vision Military General Mining/Metals General Miscellaneous General Nanotechnology Nanotechnology Non-profit General Occupational Safety Occupational Safety Oil/Energy General Opinion / Editorial Opinion / Editorial Paper Products General Paper/Forest General Pharmaceuticals General Podcasting Announce Tools and Services Politics Politics Print Media General Public Utilities Public Utilities Publishing General Radio General Real Estate General Religion Christian General Islam Jewish Other Restaurants General Retail General RSS & Content Syndication RSS & Content Syndication Science and Research Science and Research Self-Help / Personal Growth Self-Help / Personal Growth Shipbuilding General Society African American Interests Asian Interests Childrens Issues Disabled Issues / Disabilities Gay / Lesbian Hispanic Mens Interests Native American Senior Citizens Social Services Teen Issues/Interests Womens Interest Software General Sports Baseball Basketball Bicycling Boating / Maritime Bowling Boxing Fishing Football Golf Hockey Hunting Martial Arts Outdoors Rugby Soccer Tennis Water Winter/Snow Sports/Fitness General Stocks General Supermarkets General Technology Biotechnology Computer Electronics Enterprise Software Games Graphics/Printing/CAD Hardware / Peripherals Industrial Information Internet Multimedia Networking Public Sector/Government Robotics Semiconductor Software Telecommunications Webmasters Telecom General Wireless Television General Tobacco General Trade General Transportation General Travel General Utilities General Volunteer Volunteer Weather WeatherMy latest article in Al Ahram Weekly

Much of the Western media seems determined to ignore the enormous efforts being made to improve the lives of ordinary people in Egypt, writes Azza Radwan Sedky

Not long ago, the headline of an article in The Independent, a British newspaper, read Poverty in Egypt: How the Turbulence of the Arab Spring Revolution has led the Country to Economic Ruin, with the article going on to say that the policies of President Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi have done little to improve the lives of ordinary Egyptians. It went on from there to add that some Egyptians were unable to put food on the table as they were on the brink of poverty and were having to tighten their belts further. It also spoke about tumbledown dwellings in the Doweqa district, saying that residents had nowhere to sleep when their homes collapsed. It focused on what it said were neglected rural areas with no opportunities for growth.

Though the article mentioned the social-support system available to the poor through programmes such as Takaful and Karama and the state rehousing scheme, as a whole it produced a kind of doomsday image of contemporary Egypt. Reading the article, I wondered if the author realised how narrow his vision was. Undoubtedly, more needs to be done for Egypts poor, but to intentionally overlook the efforts that are being made is appalling.

However, The Independent, like many other Western media outlets, has often misinformed its readers by focusing on the negatives and neglecting to mention the positive things that are happening in Egypt. Are the poor really being overlooked in the current race-against-time to improve the status of all Egyptians? Are they getting their fair share of support? Do the governments current mega-projects really cater for the wealthy alone?

Consider the broad improvements that are affecting everyone, wealthy and non-wealthy alike. When Egypt builds a new road network, now totalling some 7,000 km, this serves the mega-projects and other businesses. Commodities arrive faster and businesses perform more efficiently, both of which are vital for the development process. However, that new road network also serves bus and vehicle passengers, motorists and truck drivers, and regular commuters. Safe, dependable roads save all travellers time and reduce the number of road accidents.

According to the article, by building dubious mega-projects the country is being subjected to years of austerity. Lets look at one such mega-project. The Benban Solar Park, the biggest solar installation in the world, will have an enormous impact on Upper Egypt, the poorest region in the country. It will employ 4,000 workers, provide clean energy, jump-start growth and curb carbon emissions.

Mohamed Emara, an engineer working on the Solar Park, says the project has improved the lives of the local community in the Aswan governorate and that it is currently employing thousands of workers. Many of the people working on this site have never had steady employment before. They were mostly day labourers. But now they are being trained and [receiving] skills that will help them find work on other projects, he said.

The same thing goes for other mega-projects. Development projects such as the countrys new cities or the Suez Canal Corridor, lead to economic growth, and this positively affects local people as much as the economy in general.

Now lets focus on how those in need are being directly helped by Egypts social-support system. In order to rid the country of its worst informal housing areas, some of which are deemed unsafe, the government has embarked on dozens of housing projects that have relocated thousands of residents to high-rise apartment buildings such as those in Hayy Al-Esmarat. There they enjoy clean running water, electricity, a safe environment, and dignity and respect. People who previously lived in Doweqa, Establ Antar, Ezbet Khairallah and other areas of Cairo and other cities in Egypt are now being moved to cleaner, better dwellings.

The achievements of this programme are there for all to see, and they have been pointed to in a recent World Bank Bulletin. The Egypt Inclusive Housing Finance Programme will reach 3.6 million people, including an estimated 1.6 million beneficiaries living below the poverty line. It will also contribute to generating an estimated 1.5 million construction jobs over a five-year period, the life of the programme, the Bulletin has noted.

The Takaful and Karama programmes that make up part of the countrys social security system have already reached close to two million families from the countrys poorest and most marginalised populations. Through the income support that these programmes provide, those in need, often the elderly and disabled, are helped to live decent lives. While that assistance may in some cases unfortunately still not be enough, the fact that it is there is undeniable, and it is making an enormous difference.

Egypts current economic reform programme includes provisions to ensure that those in need continue to be protected. Electricity is thus still subsidised by the state for certain bands of consumers, bread subsidies remain untouched, and dozens of foodstuffs, including sugar, rice, tea and cooking oil also remain subsidised. Egypt set aside LE330 billion ($18 billion) in the 2017-2018 budget for such subsidies.

The Aman insurance programme is another state-led programme providing support for those who need it. This is a life-insurance programme serving workers in the informal sector, including casual, seasonal, daily-hire and temporary workers, who are estimated to number around 15 million.

The Aman programme provides insurance coverage in cases of natural or accidental death, paying beneficiaries lump sums of between LE10,000 and LE250,000, or monthly pensions of LE200 to LE1,000 over five years or LE120 to LE600 over 10 years depending on the coverage.

It is undeniable that the Hepatitis C virus has affected many of the countrys poorer people. However, through a state-financed campaign that has been little short of a miracle almost two million people have been cured of this disease at little or no expense to them personally.

Economic growth alone is not worth much if it does not translate into better livelihoods for all members of society, especially for those in need. The poor are definitely not left to fend for themselves in Egypt.

The writer is a political analyst.Afrin resident tells the story of terror cruelty in Afrin

An Afrin resident expresses his gratitude to Turkish Armed Forces and says YPG has taken all of his children away.

Turkey launched Operation Olive Branch to clear YPG/PKK-Daesh terrorists from Afrin, and to establish security along Turkey's borders as well as to protect Syrians from the oppression and cruelty of terrorists. On Sunday, Turkish forces have entered Afrin city center and liberated the region, which had been a major hideout for the PKK/YPG since 2012.

After Turkish military and Free Syrian Army clears Afrin of YPG as part of Operation Olive Branch, an Afrin resident is in tears said that hes grateful that his town has been cleared of YPG/PKK by the Turkish Army and FSA.

Resident expressed that YPG has taken all of his children away. They took our honour. They took our children. I had eight children. All of them are gone. resident said.

Afrin resident tells the story of terror cruelty in AfrinTurkish soldiers help Afrin residents out

Turkish troops have given health check-ups and distributed food to civilians in Syrias Afrin, recently liberated as part of Operation Olive Branch.

Turkey launched Operation Olive Branch to clear YPG/PKK-Daesh terrorists from Afrin, and to establish security along Turkey's borders as well as to protect Syrians from the oppression and cruelty of terrorists.

With the Afrin center liberated, Turkish military provided Afrin residents with medication and food, and also gave them free health check-ups.

Residents of Afrin welcomed Turkish soldiers with cheers while Turkish soldiers also offered them chocolate and Turkish delight.

Turkish Army started taking measures to oversee security and order in Afrin.

Turkish soldiers help Afrin residents out WATCHJim Carrey has been expressing his opposition to U.S. President Donald Trump and his party through art recently, drawing ire and praises alike from people. His latest artwork is a distorted representation of Trump's lawyer Joe diGenova.

Trump's Lucky Charm

Carrey portrayed diGenova as a puppet, more specifically, a troll in his latest artwork which he shared on Twitter on Wednesday. The cartoon shows Trump looking all sweaty as he gazes at his rearview mirror while a troll representation of DiGenovia sits with a smile on his face on the car's dashboard.

The actor described the lawyer as Trump's "lucky charm" since he puts "Dirty Donald's troubles in the rearview mirror." Carrey even makes a pun and cites the common warning sign found in car mirrors about the "objects in the mirror being closer than they appear."

Lawyer and lucky charm Joe diGenovia hopes to put Dirty Donald's troubles in the rearview mirror. But the objects in the mirror are closer than they appear. ;^P pic.twitter.com/td8vGaQdKu  Jim Carrey (@JimCarrey) March 21, 2018

The post has since been retweeted 2,169 times and liked 12,881 times as of this writing. The art drew different reactions from commentators. Others complimented it while some thought it is a waste of the actor's energy to express opposition to the U.S. President into his artwork, instead of being vocal about it like Robert De Niro and Meryl Streep.

"You need to sell prints of these! I want a signed copy! Great work and message is clear!" one fan wrote, while another said, "Keep up the great political art work. There are more people for you than against you @JimCarrey.

"Wow Trump is living rent free in this wacko's head. Kind of childish art technique as well," another Twitter user commented.

Other Portraits

A day before he shared his DiGenovia portrait, he painted Trump as the Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz. He also cited Russian President Vladimir Putin in his artwork. The painting drew ire from people, who suggested that the Dumb and Dumber actor should have himself treated in the head.

If you liked my last cartoon you may also enjoy... "THE WICKED WITCH OF THE WEST WING AND PUTINS FLYING MONKEYS pic.twitter.com/slBG7j1s8d  Jim Carrey (@JimCarrey) March 19, 2018

"You really ought to check yourself in somewhere. You need some serious help. I mean around the clock help by a team of leading specialists. People watching and observing 24-7," one Twitter user said.

Carrey also revealed his artwork for Trump's White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders three days ago, which earned him a few demeaning words from her father, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee. He called the actor a "bigot," a "sexist," and a "bully," to name a few.

Carrey has been using his talent in art to express his opposition to Trump and members of his cabinet party. The Ace Ventura star, who learned painting around six years ago, rarely namedrops the subjects of his portraits although some are notably prominent political figures.Fred Savage is denying claims that he verbally and physically assaulted a former costume designer on the set of his Fox comedy, Grinder.

The allegations against Savage come as female-led movements such as Time's Up and #MeToo have taken Hollywood by storm.

Savage Accused Of Assault

On Wednesday, March 21, YoungJoo Hwang, a former costume designer who worked on the now-canceled series, filed a lawsuit in a Los Angeles court alleging that the actor created a hostile environment on set and behaved aggressively toward women during the show's filming in 2015.

Hwang also claims that that Savage, who played the role of Stewart Sanderson on the series, was verbally abusive toward her on set and also cited an incident when the 41-year-old actor had a violent outburst and physically attacked her.

She alleges that one time when she was brushing dandruff off his tuxedo jacket, Savage lost his cool and violently struck her on the arm thrice with his hand.

Hwang has filed the suit not only against Savage but also against Fox, stating that the network was protecting the actor and did not take any action to correct his behavior or the hostile work environment he created on set.

The costumer is suing Savage and the network for assault, battery, discrimination, and gender harassment, among other claims, and is seeking real and punitive damages for the same.

Savage And Fox Deny Hwang's Claims

Savage released a statement on Wednesday, vehemently denying Hwang's meritless and false allegations.

"None of her claims could be substantiated because they did not happen," Savage said in the statement. "While none of the accusations being leveled at me are true, I wholeheartedly support all people who feel they are being mistreated come forward and speak to human resources and those in charge."

Fox also released a statement saying that it takes allegations of inappropriate behavior in the workplace very seriously, and after conducting a thorough investigation into Hwang's allegations, it found no evidence to support her claims. The network added that it will continue to defend the meritless claims put forth by the former costume designer.

Savage, who shot to fame as a child artist on The Wonder Years, currently features on the Netflix comedy Friends from College. He also hosts the ABC game show series Child Support, which was recently picked up for a second season.Antonio Banderas made the bold move of shaving his head and eyebrows all for the sake of his new series Genius: Picasso, where he portrays renowned artist Pablo Picasso.

'Genius: Picasso' Photocall

Banderas risked the no-eyebrows look and shaved his head in an effort to achieve a likeness to the legendary painter. His shaved head is a new departure from his usual curly locks. The Mask of Zorro star appeared before photographers with his freshly shaven head and eyebrows during a promotional tour for Genius: Picasso in Madrid on Wednesday. It is also worthy to point out that Banderas has dyed his hair to gray.

The 57-year-old actor stepped out for the Madrid photocall wearing an all-black ensemble of long-sleeved shirt and black pants, paired with black sneakers. Banderas looked completely at ease posing for the camera on the red carpet. He shared a couple of photos from the photocall on his Instagram.

Banderas's appearance on the red carpet comes after he experienced a health scare. The actor appeared in high spirits during Wednesday's event following a heart attack last year. The actor released a statement to press at the time saying the attack was not serious and has not caused any damage. Banderas clarified that the heart attack has not been dramatic as some have written. However, he revealed that he underwent a procedure to place three stents in his arteries.

Buzzed Cut

The Desperado star first stepped out with his shaved head for his role in Genius: Picasso late in October. Photos from his visit to Malaga, Spain already showed Banderas with his buzzed cut. He almost looked unrecognizable although he bears a slight resemblance to the famous artist.

This is also not the first time that Banderas shaved his head for a movie role. The Assassins actor also sported a buzzed cut in 2013 for his role as Jacq Vaucan in the 2014 Spanish-Bulgarian science fiction thriller Automata, where he starred opposite now ex-wife Melanie Griffith.

Banderas portrays Picasso in his later years in the 10-part Genius: Picasso. Meanwhile, Alex Rich (Glow, True Detective) has been tapped to play the painter during his younger years.

Genius: Picasso premieres April 24 on The National Geographic Channel. The National Geographic series previously garnered praises for its representation of Albert Einstein, portrayed by the 66-year-old Geoffrey Rush (Pirates of the Caribbean).Kanye West has found himself on the verge of losing his Yeezy nickname. A Chinese company is vying for rights to the title.

Losing His Identity

A Chinese company filed legal documents to stake a claim for the brand name made popular by the rapper and businessman.

The company is looking to trademark Yeezy. West's company owned the name for its footwear line since 2013. However, last year, they abandoned the title for all other clothing items aside from shoes.

It's unclear why they did not file an extension request at the time, but for whatever reason, Yeezy is now up for grabs.

The Chinese company, Fujian Baby Network Technology Co., grabbed the opportunity and immediately filed the trademark paperwork for "Yeezy Boost" for its own clothing products.

West's company subsequently refiled its application for Yeezy clothing. However, the trademark office confirmed the Chinese company now has dibs on the title.

Although the sneakers are probably safe, if West wishes to branch out and mark other clothing items with the Yeezy stamp, he might have a serious legal battle on his hands.

Season 7 Speculation

Earlier this month, there was widespread fan speculation that Yeezy Season 7 would only include footwear, as opposed to apparel or accessories.

Rumors kicked into high gear after a social media account, Yeezy Mafia, claimed West had invited buyers to an empty showroom.

"It was an unexpected meeting explaining that there won't be any apparel or accessories for SEASON 7 as Kanye West couldn't do what he wanted to achieve with this collection," one of their tweets read.

However, West's wife, Kim Kardashian-West, who had already been spotted in pieces purporting to be from Yeezy Season 7, shot the report down as patently false.

"How can a verified account represent Yeezy with false information. You do NOT work for Yeezy and NOT affiliated. How are you gonna believe an account that posts fake color way," she tweeted in response.

Bad Timing

The stress of re-trademarking his own brand is the last thing West needs right now. He and Kardashian-West recently welcomed baby daughter Chicago West by surrogate at the beginning of the year.

There's been some talk of the couple's plans of possibly having a fourth child and even suggestions that their marriage may be in trouble following West's supposed absence as a father.

The trademark dispute is just another stressful addition to the couple's already chaotic life.Big sister knows best! Lionel Richie isn't the only family member who isn't fond of Sofia Richie's relationship with Scott Disick.

Sofia's half-sister, Nicole Richie, isn't too thrilled either.

Hollywood Life reports that Nicole has been pleading with Sofia to end her relationship with Disick before things get too far and before Kourtney Kardashian's kids get attached to her. <

A source claims that Nicole was truly bothered by Sofia's relationship with the Keeping Up With the Kardashians star. When her sister started hanging out with Disick's kids, she realized things were getting serious between the two.

"Nicole thinks Scott is way too old for Sofia and Nicole is freaked out when she learned that Sofia has been hanging out with Scott's kids too," the source stated.

Fans of Kardashian know that she shares three children with Disick, 8-year-old Mason, 5-year-old Penelope, and 3-year-old Reign.

The paparazzi caught Sofia and Disick out several times before and his three children were in tow. Recently, the pair was spotted out in Los Angeles with the reality star's two eldest children, Mason and Penelope.

The outing sent social media into a frenzy as several social media users pointed out that the model is way too young to be playing stepmom to Disick's children.

Kourtney Doesn't Want Sofia Around Her Kids

Nicole is not the only who wants Sofia to stay away from the Disick kids. Sources have stated that Kourtney Kardashian doesn't want Sofia around them either.

The former Kourtney and Khloe Take The Hamptons star has reportedly asked Disick to stop bringing Sofia around her children.

"Kourtney does not like the influence Sofia has over the kids and she does not want the kids getting attached to someone that Kourtney feels will not be around or a part of their lives very long," a source close to Kardashian explained.

Will Scott And Sofia Last?

Despite Nicole's and Kardashian's feelings about Sofia and Disick's relationship, the two have been together for some time now.

The first time that the duo became an item was during the Cannes Film Festival in May 2017. However, neither of the two confirmed nor denied their relationship.

It was only in December of last year that the couple went public with their relationship. Their appearance in Art Basel in Miami confirmed rumors that they were already a couple.BMW SA Open hosted by the City of Ekurhuleni

Glendower GC, City of Ekurhuleni, Gauteng, South AfricaThis Page Is Under Construction - Coming Soon!

Why am I seeing this 'Under Construction' page?Birthday wishes

Call 281-422-8302 or email david.bloom@baytownsun.com to wish someone a happy birthday. We will print your birthday wish on Page 2 of The Sun.

Happy Birthday WishesFARMERS from across the WA grainbelt have heard from the CBH Groups boss about how the co-operative plans to reduce supply chain costs to remain competitive against the rising threat of the Black Sea, at grower group meetings across the State.

Over the past two weeks the bulk handlers chief executive officer, Jimmy Wilson, has toured Mingenew, Dalwallinu, Green Range, Esperance, Moorine Rock and Kukerin, sharing CBHs plans to drive down paddock to customer costs.

According to CBH figures, it costs about $248 a tonne for WA grain to reach Indonesian customers.

This includes on-farm costs, as well as land-bound and seaborne logistics.

Meantime, despite having to travel a further distance, it costs $51/t less for Ukrainian grain to travel to Indonesia at $196/t, giving Ukrainian exporters a significant competitive edge.

Mr Wilson said this was having a significant impact on WAs harvest shipping.

Were seeing less grain moving out of WA, were seeing less harvest shipping and potentially a larger carry-over this year, Mr Wilson said.

The customer has optionality, they can decide whether they want to take that grain or not and so low and behold theyre sort of going down this end of the scale to the cheaper grains  they call it filler wheat  but theres quite a broad spectrum in that area.

The former BHP iron ore boss said CBH would focus on the relentless pursuit of the basics to lower costs and increase value within the outbound logistical chain.

Mr Wilson said several structural changes within the business had already been initiated to drive efficiencies and better define management roles.

The structure that you had before was Operations that used to look after the planning side of the network, the building side of the network and the operating side of the network, Mr Wilson said.

What weve done is weve split up planning, building and operating and we put that under three general managers, as opposed to just one general manager who was trying to cover what was a very large scope.

Mr Wilson said the delivery of the co-operatives $750 million Network Strategy was another major area of focus.

Last harvest, 123 CBH receival sites were open across the four port zones, down from 142 in the 2016-17 harvest.

Of the 13.2 million tonnes received through the system last harvest, 96 per cent of grain was delivered to the 100 Network Strategy sites.

More than two thirds of the grain was captured in the largest 30 sites, with 22pc in the next 30 sites and 12pc in the remaining 63 sites.

The CBH Groups general manager of operations David Capper said the co-operative was working to strike the right balance while delivering the Network Strategy.

Mr Capper said it was important receival sites were not closed too soon, before capacity under the Network Strategy sites was increased.

We know we need to trend towards efficiency and move towards the Network Strategy but at the same time were very cognisant that its not built yet  weve got 4mt of storage to build and throughput gains to grab, Mr Capper said.

Theres a real balance there, to drive for efficiency but still provide the service while were building those 100 sites to where they need to be.

With the number of receival sites reducing over time Mr Wilson said it would be impossible to please everyone.

He said while inevitably some growers would have to travel further to deliver grain as more sites closed, overall costs could be reduced by improving efficiencies throughout the network, which would ultimately be returned to growers.

At the end of the day weve got to look at the average grower and thats what weve got to focus on.

If we are able to be successful at lets say reducing our total costs by 25pc, everyone will be getting a benefit  some people will be getting a slightly less benefit than others  but at the end of the day everyone will get a benefit.

What we aspire is to reduce the total costs quite dramatically, that is the whole idea behind the transformation.STATE politicians have created unnecessary conflict between WAs genetically modified (GM) and non-GM growers by supporting an inquiry investigating contamination compensation, according to CropLife Australia boss Matthew Cossey.

Mr Cossey has served as chief executive officer of national advocacy group CropLife since 2011, and was one of the guest speakers at the WAFarmers Vitality 2018 conference in Perth last week.

His assertion came after submissions to a parliamentary inquiry exploring potential compensation mechanisms for farmers who suffer economic loss because of GM contamination closed last month.

The inquiry  supported by the Labor government and conducted by the standing committee on environment and public affairs  was triggered by Greens MLC Diane Evers, who tabled a petition in parliament last year prompted by the high-profile Marsh versus Baxter legal case.

Kojonup farmer Steve Marsh lost his organic certification after GM canola from Michael Baxters neighbouring farm was found on the Marsh property in 2010.

With no major issues in the State since then, Mr Cossey said there was no need for increased regulation that would unnecessarily impose costs onto the farming sector .

Unfortunately politicians dont always respond to the facts and evidence and science of an issue, they respond to the noisy wheel, Mr Cossey said.

There was no basis for this conflict to have occurred in WA and there is no basis for an action that I know is being considered by your parliament, or committee thereof, at the moment.

It is in that classic form of a solution looking for a problem that doesnt exist.

If we were to move to a strict liability position and establish such a dramatic precedent for farming, it would ironically over the next few years be a greater threat to the organic sector than anything else, if we impose strict liability for disease spread.

Mr Cossey said while he understood that the inquiry was initiated with the best intentions, such decisions needed to have a greater focus on scientific evidence.

Ms Evers was also at the conference and defended her decision to initiate the inquiry.

She said there were several concerns within the organic farming community that had been raised that deserved investigation.

Ms Evers recognised growers could suffer significant yield drops without GM technology and chemical use, but said value could be added in other areas.

I tabled that petition at the request of a number of farmers who were concerned about a problem that they could see, Ms Evers said.

Quantity doesnt make us healthier in every case, sometimes its the variety and the nutrition you can get out of it as well.

Mr Cossey welcomed debate surrounding GM farming and said it was more important than ever for growers to advocate for their industry.

In a world that was increasingly interested in food, he said it was essential the broader population were better informed about agriculture and farming practices.

Debate will eventually lead to more facts joining the public discourse and that will only lead to benefit, Mr Cossey said.

Its beholden more and more on us to recognise that industry stewardship and worlds best practice is not just good for our own businesses, good for farming broadly, and good for Australia, but also a self protection mechanism from a tougher environment in which were all doing business.

WAFarmers grains section president Duncan Young also weighed in on the debate, and said the lobby group filed a submission to the inquiry mid-February which he hoped would be given due consideration.

Mr Young said WAFarmers did not believe a compensation mechanism was necessary and he would continue to advocate for laws to remain as they are.

We dont believe that theres a need for introducing this, we cant see that there is a systemic problem within not only this State but the rest of Australia, Mr Young said.

We have a segregation in this State that has been proven to work with CBH, we havent had any instances in this State and we have a market for it so its pretty clear that things are travelling pretty well.

I cant see why youd want to impose extra costs on farmers, we already have enough of those.

The committee conducting the inquiry is scheduled to meet next week.A LOW drone hummed across the paddocks near Nyabing as dust clouds blew out of the clover harvester exhausts.

Two tractors pulled five harvesters across what looked at a distance like an empty paddock, to suck up (vacuum cleaner style), about 800 kilograms of clover seeds per hectare.

Rachel and Trenton Browne were busy into their clover harvesting program when Farm Weekly visited them recently.

The Brownes plan to sow a portion of the seeds as a pasture phase, to improve nitrogen fixation for subsequent crops and as additional feed for their 3500 head commercial Dohne ewe flock, as part of their much bigger program of selling onto other producers.

The Brownes clover seeding program is set to start this week, around the same time as lambing, and cover 2036 hectares.

Ms Browne said they harvested "large tonnages of Bartolo Bladder and Dalkeith subterranean clover" and were working on bulking up Tammin, seeing that as a potentially viable clover option for a mixed farming operation, although she said time would tell on that one.

This year, the family operation also intends to seed 2015ha of wheat, 2034ha of barley and 1887ha of canola  as well as Bartolo, lupins, oats and the clover.

In 2013 the Brownes trialled the RocksGone Reefinator prototype to reclaim 45ha of laterite rock (ironstone), which was sown to a cash crop of canola in 2014.

Ms Browne said "the results were ridiculously pleasing, with 1.9 tonnes a hectare canola harvested off the rock crushed paddock compared to 1.6t/ha average over the rest of the canola program".

Its turned rock into arable soil to grow crops and pastures in, Ms Browne said.

They seeded using three metre spacings with an RTK auto steer set-up, while running on tramlines at multiples of 13.4 metres.

Ms Browne said they seeded into the previous years furrows to minimise non-wetting soils and maximise water use.

They also have a large annual lime application, which is driven by farm profitability.

In a good year we choose to invest in large tonnages and when things get tighter, less tonnes are purchased, she said.

We dont radically chase markets, but we do closely monitor key performance areas, enterprises and strategically base our decisions around these.

The Brownes also have undertaken large scale landcare projects since 2010 through the South West Catchment Council and more recently through Wheatbelt Natural Resource Management.

Greening Australia is doing a 116ha project this coming season for Phascogale habitat and fodder shrubs for livestock, Ms Browne said.

Landcare holistically is very important to us, not just planting trees, but stubble management, groundcover retention and integrated weed management.

Its nothing ground-breaking but it all contributes to ongoing sustainability and profitability.

On our farm we work for past, present and future generations.

Ms Browne grew up on a livestock operation near Lancelin before attending boarding school, followed by Muresk, before joining the Browne family and moving to Nyabing.

She said she has always had a love for livestock and now oversees that side of the family operation.

The Brownes run Chirniminup Dohnes  a stud with 1000 breeding ewes.

They are the largest sellers of Dohne rams in WA  with about 200 rams sold annually.

When Ms Browne first arrived on the farm the family operated a Merino flock like everybody else was doing.

In 2003 they purchased a dozen Dohne ewes and a stud sire with the intention of breeding rams for their own use, however, things expanded quickly when in 2006 they took over the Amuri Creek Dohne stud with 360 breeding ewes and have since incorporated others into the program.

Ms Browne said her attraction to the Dohne breed was because of their do-ability and dual-purpose nature.

Compared to the Merino flock we used to run, the Dohnes just do better all round, she said.

Their lambing percentage is higher year in, year out, we aim to sell as many wethers over the hooks as possible before spring is over, they are less selective about what they eat and maintain their condition better in the tough months.

They do better in our environment and still produce a AAAM fleece.

We average about 19 micron for wool and theres also a better carcase weight on the lambs (and the ewes) compared to what we used to have 15 years ago.

The stud has also had success in selling genetics across the State, to South Australia, Victoria and New South Wales, as well as multiple exports to South America.

Genetic exportation is a very small part of the overall business, she said.

To me, for any breeder to be able to sell genetics internationally, it shows they are doing okay.

Ms Browne said she would be part of the 29 Dohne breeders delegation from Australia, New Zealand and South Africa to Uruguay, Argentina and Chile in April  and looked forward to seeing how some of their genetics had performed in the South American flocks.

Ms Browne said the family had an overall commercial focus.

I believe a reflection of a studs success is how well their clients and their commercial flock perform, she said.

Our stud is based mutually on measured performance of sheep in any given year, as well as over their lifetime (in the case of breeding ewes).

We use measured traits and full pedigree of sheep to produce industry standard ASBVs, in conjunction with visual assessment, to produce a unit that a client can be confident in purchasing.

Whatever the focus, Ms Browne said, with a full cropping and livestock program there were challenges.

Trying to find a balance between sheep and cropping enterprises where they are complimentary, like weed management and biomass reduction and sometimes antagonistic, like needing to spray the paddock the ewes are lambing in, that can be a challenge, she said.

Theres also challenges with finding and retaining good labour and increasing red tape and compliance.

Ms Browne said after some encouragement from another breeder  as well as a few successful ram sales and a gentle increase in self belief  she decided to join the Australian Dohne Breeders Association national council.

I started on the promotions committee, moving onto anomalies then into the technical stream, she said.

Currently I am the vice president and in my second year in that role.

Ms Browne said she had discovered a much greater appreciation of the work involved in being part of the council as opposed to just being a stud breeder.

Her aim on the council is to drive the breed to meet the Dohne aim, which is to maximise returns to commercial producers through the optimum balance of meat and wool production in a sustainable and profitable system.

I see a big future for the Dohne across different production systems, whether that is as a self replacing Dohne flock, maternal ewe for terminal lamb production or as an introduction of genetics into a Merino flock, she said.

Testament to this success is that the Dohnes are having a positive impact in the Australian sheep flock with up to 22.1 per cent of the national sheep flock consisting of Dohne genetics (MLA Survey 2014), which is old data now, but still relevant.

WA Dohne breeders saw their best year yet in 2017 with some milestones achieved.

The highest number of rams over the past 10 years, were sold (894) at public auction and the highest average of $1362 was paid.

The breed grossed more than $1.2 million at public auctions in WA for the first time.Agriculture and Food Minister Alannah MacTiernan said the State government views the building and operating of new saleyards as the role of the private sector.

THE ongoing discussion about building and operating new saleyards, to replace the Boyanup Saleyards, continued with a high-level roundtable discussion in Perth last week.

WA Agriculture and Food Minister Alannah MacTiernan hosted the meeting last Wednesday, March 7, outlining her case and discussing the options she saw as relevant for the industrys future.

The meeting was held with various industry representatives, including the Western Australian Livestock Salesmens Association, the WA Meat Industry Authority (WAMIA), Capel and Harvey shires, Elders, Landmark, Westcoast Wool & Livestock, S & C Livestock, the South West Saleyard Action Group, the Red Meat Action Group, Harvey Beef, V&V Walsh, WAFarmers, the Pastoralists and Graziers Association of WA (PGA) and the Livestock and Rural Transport Association of WA.

Feedback from some at the meeting suggested Ms MacTiernan wasnt interested in thrashing out ideas and instead was stating the position of the government and giving potential investors an opportunity to come back to her with a plan.

Ms MacTiernan said it remains our view that building and operating new saleyards is the role of the private sector, as she dismissed a range of options that the groups had brought to the meeting to discuss.

She said the meeting clarified the benefit of having a modern saleyard facility in the South West  a facility that will see cattle not lose condition, resulting in better prices and that could attract more cattle to the yards to help achieve a critical mass, she said.

It was clear there is interest from private sector investors and operators in building a new South West saleyard facility, if we can get the package right.

There was interest in the room  although not unanimous  in a package involving the Muchea Livestock Centre (MLC) to create a real financial incentive for potential investors and operators.

Groups involved in the meeting will come back to us over the coming weeks to finalise their positions on the next steps forward.

PGA western beef and sheep producers chairman Chris Patmore said the PGA was open to all options and that generally private investors run saleyards better than governments.

It may cost a bit more but along with increased costs there are more or better services available, Mr Patmore said.

We will be writing to Ms MacTiernan to encourage her to look at the options put on the table by private investors.

S & C Livestock agent Phil Petricevich said it was an interesting meeting which threw up options, but no conclusions.

He said Ms MacTiernan made it clear that the government doesnt have any desire to fund a new facility in the South West.

He also said the government believed it was subsidising the saleyard industry, which confused him.

I am somewhat perplexed as to why the government claims it is subsidising the saleyard industry and that the MLC was running at a loss, Mr Petricevich said.

According to WAMIAs financials, Midland was a profitable business for a succession of State governments and now the MLC appears to be making money.

I feel that the bureaucrats may be understating the financial position of the MLC to support their case for a private operator to build new yards in the South West.

I think that producers would be disappointed that so much money appears to be wasted in Muchea  and they are staring down higher prices if private investors build new yards.

Mr Petricevich said WA saleyard fees and charges were quite modest when compared to some saleyards in the Eastern States.

Im not against a private facility but it will mean higher fees and charges, he said.

I can understand that for private enterprise to invest in WA they would want to package up the MLC and the South West, because that would provide the numbers to run a business.

Mr Petricevich said he was surprised that the government ruled out Kemerton so quickly.

It is Crown land so there is a potential to save $6-8 million by not having to purchase land elsewhere, he said.

WAMIA confirmed (during the meeting) they have $7.5m sitting in an account to develop commercial sites at Muchea.

Add that to the Crown land saving and we have the $15m to build a set of yards  maybe its not that simple?

Mr Petricevich said the Boyanup saleyards were so far out of date for them to operate beyond 2022, which he said may happen if Ms MacTiernan hadnt resolved the issue by then.

South West Saleyard Action Group president Rodney Galati said from an industry view I personally feel that the money that is left should be used as it was intended.

I dont think anyone should rush into saying yes to privatising what farmers see as their assets, Mr Galati said.

Leasing MLC and building then leasing a new facility, could be an option.

It was a bit disappointing that the minister shot most groups ideas down before we got to present them, including Kemerton, as apparently its a hi-tech, state-of-the-art industrial park.

The government seems to have a clear agenda and if we just rush in now we may regret it in years to come.

It was also made clear that the government would override any decision to close Boyanup in 2022 if a new facility wasnt available as it is on State land, provided to the Shire of Capel for the purpose of a saleyard.- New John Deere SP at Woolorama

AFGRI Equipment unveiled John Deeres latest self-propelled boomsprayer at last weeks Make Smoking History Wagin Woolorama.

Designated the R4045, the big feature is its carbon-fibre boom, which is a commonly-used material for yacht masts.

According to Deere, carbon fibre is about was 35 per cent lighter than equivalent steel models and has a low inertia, resulting in greater boom stability.

There already is talk that Deere might offer a 40.2 metre (132 foot) boom as an option because of the lower weight.

The boom tip has an 80 degree breakaway in the forward and reverse direction, while the inner arms have a 35o breakaway.

The new model also comes with Deeres ExactApply nozzle control, giving improved spray quality, precision and speed ranges, allowing the operator to better manage drift.

ExactApply offers individual nozzle control and turn compensation.

It has air induction nozzle compatibility and features programmable rates by nozzle or selection, such as a higher range behind the rear tyres.

The new model boasts a 4500 litre tank, has a power rating of 258 kilowatts (346 horsepower) and has a direct injection product mixing option.

Maximum operating speed is 40 kilometres an hour.

- Staff changes at AFGRI

AFGRI Equipment is continuing its focus on promoting careers within its dealerships along with re-shaping its team.

John Schreurs is branch manager at AFGRIs Moora branch, replacing Andrew Vernon who is group sales manager.

Campbell Aiken has moved from Quairading to become the regional sales manager (southern region) and Terry Macanas is in charge of new and used sales (southern region).

The companys latest addition is former New Zealand machinery salesman Glenn ODocherty, who started at the Lake Grace branch last week.

According to AFGRI marketing director Jacques Coetzee, the company is on track to train 25 new apprentices, who will be attending the AFGRI Apprentice Academy at the Central Regional TAFE Moora.

We have an official opening of the Academy on Monday, March 19 at Moora and we plan to target 25 apprentices a year for the next four years, Mr Coetzee said.

We also are continuing with our internal parts traineeships under a TAFE mechanical parts program.

We want to encourage male and female participants.

Call your local AFGRI branch if you have a son or daughter who is interested in a career in the farm mechanisation industry.

- Steeling for impact

WHO would be a United States farmer?

Just as the ag industry was looking upbeat with positive sentiment over the past few months, President Donald Trump has become the proverbial bull in a China shop.

Ironically his tirade against China and his threat to slap a 25 per cent tariff on steel imports (and 10pc on aluminium) must be a What the? moment for the Chinese, because that country accounts for only 2pc of US steel imports.

But it does supply aluminium to the US.

Trying to give China a black eye is not good news for US soybean farmers who rely on China as their largest customer  representing nearly $18 billion in annual sales, or more than a third of total US soybean production (Chinas retort could well be: Right back at you Mr Trump, or chump, we will deal with Brazil and Argentina).

Trumps temper tantrum in wanting to start a trade war, has also become alarming news for US farm equipment industry organisations  let alone the general industry.

American Soybean Association president John Heisdorffer, an Iowa soybean grower, said retaliation by China could be devastating to US soy growers.

Our competitors in Brazil and Argentina are all too happy to pick up supplying the Chinese market, Mr Heisdorffer said.

Retaliation from China would add significant injury to an already-hobbled farm economy.

Prices are down 40pc and farm income is down 50pc and we simply cant afford for those numbers to get worse.

According to Association of Equipment Manufacturers president Dennis Slater, Trumps tirade could not have come at a worse time.

The first thing you hear, and its universal, is theres total alarm out there in our industry, Mr Slater said.

Whats going to happen here is you put this tariff on and you raise the price of steel for manufacturers.

Youre going to raise the cost of their equipment at a time, when especially in the ag economy, its pretty fragile out there.

Sales are starting to improve a little bit, but not that much, and youre at a time here where were going to raise costs  costs they probably couldnt pass on to the farmer at this point  so thats pretty alarming.

Farm Equipment Manufacturers Association executive vice president Vernon Schmidt said costs were bound to increase.

With equipment dealers holding very limited implement inventory, higher steel costs are likely to make their way through the distribution network quicker than some end users would expect, Mr Schmidt said.

Its hard to think of a worse time to drive up the cost of equipment purchases for farmers and ranchers, but manufacturers will likely be forced to pass cost increases on very quickly.

The equipment manufacturers depend so much on the export market and about 30 to 35pc of their manufacturing is going to go into exports, and now the machines are more expensive.

So you undermine their competitiveness globally.

While they face the higher-priced steel, their competitors overseas are with the lower-priced steel and will be able to basically undercut them on price for their machines.

They get hit on the cost of production here and they get hit on trying to stay competitive world-wide.

It makes the US a more expensive manufacturing base at a time when youre seeing this resurgence in manufacturing in the US.

Australia is, of course, exempt from paying tariffs but there obviously will be a ripple effect affecting Australian farmers wanting to buy new US-made gear.

If you have forward ordered gear, you might be lucky if you signed a no price increase clause.

Good luck with getting that now.

Ah, Donald, youve done it againThe Fauquier Times is honored to serve as your community companion. To say thank you, we are excited to offer 4 weeks FREE Digital & Print access to all subscribers new and returning alike.

We are dedicated to continuing providing reliable, high quality journalism. This is possible with the trust and support of our subscribers in the community we are proud to serve.2020 was a year marked by hardships and challenges, but the Fauquier community has proven resilient. The Fauquier Times is honored to serve as your community companion. To say thank you for your continued support, wed like to offer all our subscribers -- new or returning --

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We are dedicated to providing the reliable, local journalism you have come to expect. We are committed to serving you with renewed energy and growing resources. Let the Fauquier Times be your community companion throughout 2021, and for many years to come.Category Select Category Apparel/Garments Textiles Fashion Technical Textiles Information Technology E-commerce Retail Corporate Association Press Release

SubCategory Select Sub-CategoryATTORNEY-GENERAL OPENING STATEMENT AT THE 3RD PACIFIC REGIONAL DIALOGUE ON NDC AND CONSULTATION ON THE REGIONAL PACIFIC NDC HUB





The British High Commissioner,Other members of the Diplomatic Corps,Development Partners,Senior Government officials both from Fiji and outside of Fiji,The NGO and civil society representatives,Ladies and gentlemenBula vinaka and a very good morning to you all.1. I am delighted to be here today to open the Third Pacific Regional Dialogue on Nationally Determined Contributions, or NDCs, and the Consultations on the Regional Pacific NDC Hub. These are two major opportunities to support the implementation of more ambitious NDC action throughout the Pacific, and continue the impressive legacy of achievement we share as Pacific nations in confronting the reality of climate change; a legacy that we built upon, side-by-side, during the Fijian Presidency of the COP23 negotiations in Bonn, Germany last year.2. Our COP23 Presidency is a Pacific Presidency. It is a Presidency that is taking the perspective of Small Island Developing States to the centre stage of international climate discourse. And it is a Presidency that is consistently pushing the implementation of the Paris Agreements most ambitious goal of limiting global average temperature rise to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels. Realising that ambitious target will require global emissions of greenhouse gases to reach net zero in just a few decades  by 2050 at the latest.3. As part of that campaign, we plan to make the 1.5-degree target an integral part of the Talanoa Dialogue on climate ambition. This dialogue is based on the participatory and inclusive Talanoa process of decision-making, devoid of finger pointing, that is shared among many of us in the Pacific. The Dialogue was launched at the COP23 negotiations, and the Fijian and Polish Presidencies will partner on the initiative at COP24. Through the dialogue, we plan to accelerate climate action through greater ambition in our NDCs to reduce carbon emissions, and help adapt vulnerable economies to climate impacts.4. Ladies and gentlemen, we all know that the full implementation of the Paris Agreement is critical for the secure future of every person on earth, and we know that our success in that regard is tied to our progress in realising the 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda. When we realise greater ambition in our NDCs, we also accelerate our progress towards realising the sustainable development goals, as these targets share inherent linkages with one another. So it is in everyones interest that we pursue more ambitious NDC action in the Pacific and that we encourage that same spirit of ambition and commitment everywhere else in the world.5. Unfortunately, as we know it, the current collective commitments set out in international NDCs fall far short of what is required. They have the world on track to a catastrophic warming of three degrees or even higher, which would devastate vulnerable nations and people around the world. This is why we must continue to demand and deliver even stronger NDCs from the global community.6. That commitment and sense of urgency led Pacific leaders, members of civil society and the private sector to make our united call for a regional facility to attract investment to support the implementation of Pacific NDCs at the Climate Action Pacific Partnership Conference held last July right here in Suva.7. We are extremely proud to have answered that call at COP23 with the launch of the Regional Pacific NDC Hub. And we are grateful to the Global NDC Partnership, the German, British and Australian Governments, and our other development partners for providing the initial resources to establish the Hub, along with every country represented here today for their support towards this regional dialogue.8. Together we are going to utilise this Hub to accelerate flows of public and private finance to every Pacific Island Country  finance of both a concessional and non-concessional nature. And together, we are going to pursue new approaches and innovative strategies that can make our region an example to the world in adapting to climate impacts and pursuing sustainable development.9. We know the reality we face, and weve pointed out that reality repeatedly on the global stage: We in the Pacific contribute the least to the harmful emissions causing climate change, but we stand to lose the most from climate-related impacts. In fact, all of us are only one severe weather event away from losing decades of development in a matter of hours.10. Make no mistake, every nation on earth is put at-risk by our changing climate, but Pacific nations face an extreme and unique vulnerability, and that must be reflected in our NDCs. Our NDCs must be focused on greater ambition and they must build our overall resilience to the increased flooding, the rising seas and the more frequent and more severe cyclones that are already causing immense destruction around the region.11. This Regional Pacific NDC Hub gives us all a formidable tool in that regard. It will allow us to share knowledge, experiences and best practices that are tailored to the challenges we face in the Pacific and within our own nations. And in wielding this tool, we need to place ourselves on the cutting edge of new strategies in adaptation and we must become incubators for new and innovative approaches that build resilience and protect our development. When we achieve that, the world will look to us as leaders; not only as those who are most vulnerable, but as those who are the boldest and most innovative in adapting to our changing environment.12. Of course, we need to make preparations of our own to lay the groundwork for greater public and private investment. We need dedicated leadership and a higher level of collaboration between our countries and within our own governments to implement, review and enhance our NDCs. In many cases, that will require reforms at the domestic level.13. The effective implementation of our NDCs needs to be supported by our shared evidence base, and by our financial institutions, our tax systems, our legal and policy frameworks and our systems of insurance. Just as the effects of climate change are wide-reaching, affecting every aspect of our development, so must be our collective response, and we must involve every sector of our economies and every level of government in meeting our commitments under the Paris Agreement.14. Weve seen some successes in that aim here in Fiji, and weve built a wealth of knowledge that we are keen to share with our Pacific partners and the wider global community.15. In partnership with the Word Bank, Fiji has undertaken a Climate Vulnerability Assessment of economic sectors that are most vulnerable to climate impacts, and weve laid out a game plan for climate-sensitising our development aspirations over the next ten years. This assessment is providing us with facts and hard evidence that is informing our climate-related expenditures and allowing us to craft a more ambitious and effective NDC.16. Weve also developed a NDC Implementation Roadmap, with the support of the Global Green Growth Institute that we formally launched during COP23. The Roadmap is focused on electricity generation, transmissions and distribution; demand side energy efficiency; and energy efficiency in land and maritime transportation, all to support Fijis commitment to achieve 100 per cent renewable energy and reduce CO2 emissions by 30 per cent by 2030.17. We also successfully launched our 100 million Fijian dollar Green Bond, the first in any emerging economy and the third-ever in the world. The first tranche of the Bond received a phenomenal response from local and foreign investors. The Green Bond proceeds are being used to finance climate adaptation and mitigation projects that are critical to achieving our NDC, and we are very excited that our Honourable Prime Minister will actually be opening the London Stock Exchange next month when Fijis Green Bond is listed.18. Were also excited that our Fijian Development Bank has received Green Climate Fund accreditation and is looking to scale up its accreditation to assist investments not just in Fiji but throughout the Pacific.19. We are also pursuing innovative new partnerships, such as the proposed revolving fund for renewable electrification of communities in Fiji in partnership with the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation. Under the project, communities that currently rely on fossil fuel or cannot be connected with the national grid in the medium to long term will gain access to reliable renewable energy.20. Weve implemented an Environmental and Climate Adaptation Levy that includes a ten cent levy on plastic bags, along with additional levies on vehicles with an engine size above 3000cc; yacht docking fees; individual income earnings of above $270,000; and prescribed services, such as hotels, restaurants, cinemas and tour services all have a 10 per cent tax on it as far as ECAL or climate adaptation levy is concerned. Proceeds from this levy are being put into a ring-fenced account that is also being used to finance climate adaptation and mitigation projects. In fact, by law as passed by Parliament we can only spend those monies in climate related areas. We actually have a trust account and we have to publish on a regular basis where all this money has been spent, and they must only be spent in areas such as environment and climate adaptation.21. Fiji is also undertaking a review of our legal framework to make sure it is ready and able to support greater investment in key areas such as renewable energy and transportation, in line with our NDC.22. And, as I mentioned in Parliament last week, we have launched the Pacific Climate Finance and Insurance Facility or the Drua Incubator with important seed funding from the Government of Luxembourg and support from the Asian Development Bank.23. Working with and building on other regional initiatives, the Drua Incubator will, among other initiatives, work towards the development of insurance products targeted towards low-income households and farmers that, once piloted, can be scaled up to other Pacific Island countries. And there are people here from our team who would love to talk with you about that.24. The Incubator will also focus on the development of transformational and scalable initiatives to increase the flow of climate finance, especially from the private sector, for adaptation.25. We in Fiji are fully committed to working alongside all of you through this Regional NDC Hub to share more of our experiences, good and bad, in our journey to implement and raise the ambition of our NDC. And in the true spirit of Talanoa, we look forward to working with all of you to use this NDC Hub to take on the knowledge and experiences of member countries, institutions and Pacific regional experts to massively boost the implementation of Pacific NDCs as a whole and generate even greater political will for more ambitious NDC action throughout the Pacific. And that, combined with a new level of effort and commitment around the world, will help us achieve the 1.5-degree target of the Paris Agreement that is so critical to our secure future.26. Our commitment, since the very beginning of our COP23 Presidency, has been to work with all of those willing to take action in our campaign for decisive climate action. Weve made great progress so far in our Presidency, and we need to take full advantage of opportunities, such as these events, to build upon our achievement all the way up to the handover of the Presidency to Poland at COP24, and beyond.27. Before I conclude, Id like to acknowledge the tremendous support given towards this important regional dialogue from the German Government, the European Union, the Japanese Ministry of Environment, the Norwegian Ministry of Climate and Environment, the NDC Partnership, the Pacific Community, the Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme and the United Nations Development Programme.28. Thank you to all of you for your participation, I wish you well in your deliberations.Vinaka vakalevu and thank you.HON. PM BAINIMARAMA AT THE GROUNDBREAKING CEREMONY AT KEIYASI SUBDIVISIONAL HOSPITAL





Honourable Minister for Health and Medical Services;Na Turaga Talatala;Na Tui Namataku, Tui Nasikawa, Tui Magodro, Tui Noikoro, Tui Davutikia,Tui Nasaunivalu, kei na Taukei Nasova.Permanent Secretaries;Commissioner Western Division;Ladies and Gentlemen.Bula vinaka, and a very good afternoon to you all.Im very pleased to be here in Keiyasi today, as we officially break ground for the new Navosa Sub-Divisional Hospital.This hospital will replace the current Keiyasi Health Centre, dramatically upgrading the health services offered to the entire Nadroga-Navosa Province, an expansive area of land with dozens of deep rural villages and settlements that will utilise this new facility upon its opening. In the past, the nearly 10,000 Fijians residing throughout this sub-division have needed to travel to Sigatoka, or Nadi, or even as far as Ba to seek specialised treatments, x-rays and ultrasounds, maternity services, pharmacy services, and laboratory testing. I am proud to say that, upon the completion of this hospital, that will no longer be the reality for healthcare. All of these services will be offered right here in Keiyasi.Ladies and Gentlemen, this ground-breaking isnt just a one-off win for Fijis maritime and deep rural communities.Fijis 5-Year and 20-Year National Development Plansour NDPswhich were unveiled at COP23 in Bonn last year, set out my Governments framework for expanding and upgrading our health facilities all across Fiji, putting quality medical care closer and more easily accessible to more Fijians than ever before. All over Fiji, we have set up new healthcare facilities, with a particular emphasis on delivering more and better services to our fellow Fijians in remote maritime and deep-rural communities like this one.In the next five years, even more investment will be made to upgrade and expand our existing divisional hospitals, making room for more beds, providing more services, and creating an overall better experience for those seeking treatment.My Government is committed to this goal, and the Navosa Sub-divisional Hospital ground-breaking here today is proof that these NDPs are more than words on paper or empty promisesthey are testament to the fact that my Government puts plans to action. This forward-thinking is a continuation of the immense progress that we as a nation have already achieved together. But we are not sitting on our laurels.We already have further plans in place to improve health centres and medical services in our Western division, including upgrading the Votualevu Health Centre, the Sabeto Health Centre, and the Korovuto Health Centre. I am also proud of my Governments recently-announced plans to bring Fijian health system to new heights with a Public Private Partnership, or PPP, which will provide new opportunities for the medical staff and increased and better services for the patients at our Ba and Lautoka Hospitals, and overall Western Division.In fact, it is estimated that this innovative partnership will bring new and higher-quality medical services to around 380,000 Fijians, with certain treatments and procedures to be offered in Fiji for the first time ever. And I am even prouder to say that all of this progress, this unprecedented access here at home, will come at no additional cost to the patient.Ladies and Gentlemen, as your Prime Minister, I am committed to bringing each and every Fijian into the fold. Whether this is through expanded access to healthcare, to clean water, to infrastructure, to education, to Walesi Free-to-Air television, or to the many other benefits we are spreading far and wide in Fiji every day, you deserve to share the progress that Fiji is experiencing as a whole as much as anyone else, and I am personally committed to sharing the unprecedented prosperity that Fiji is experiencing with each and every one of you.My Government has proven time and again that we have the experience, the expertise, and the dedication to improving the lives of ordinary Fijians, that will continue to get things done. Unlike previous Governments, and unlike the current opposition, my Government is about action.Also, as not only your Prime Minister, but as a fellow Fijian, I want to use this hospital ground-breaking as a fitting opportunity to stress the importance of taking care of yourself. Because, Ladies and Gentlemen, we can continue to build new hospitals, health centres, and nursing stations throughout Fiji, but unless you look out for your own health and that of your family and neighbours, all of this progress, all of these new buildings and services, would be for nothing.Over the past decade, Fiji has made serious progress in improving the health of our citizens; from increasing life expectancy to improving health outcomes and reducing disease.But even with this progress, there are still risks and realities that we face every day, and we must work together to tackle these issues head-on.In particular, I want to personally stress the current importance of all Fijians checking themselves for signs of meningococcal disease, as it was announced just yesterday that Fiji is experiencing a new outbreak that has a high fatality rate. The Ministry of Health and Medical Services has already set up a taskforce to help strengthen early detection and treatment, but above all, we need the buy-in of our citizens. The disease is life-threatening, but it can be treated if detected early, and prevented altogether by avoiding coming into contact with saliva of an affected person.Please, my fellow Fijians, take careful steps to avoid coming into contact with the disease. Wash your hands and handkerchiefs regularly, especially after you cough or sneeze.If you share saliva with an infected person, whether by kissing a loved one or passing along a kava bowl, you are putting yourself at risk. As someone who enjoys a cup of grog as much as anyone, I just ask that you are cautiouswith your awareness and proactive steps, you are helping us contain this disease.You should also be aware of the symptoms of meningococcal disease; by being alert and aware of the symptoms, you can stop it early with the proper antibiotic medication. It is found most often in babies and teenagers and young adults, but anyone can get the disease. For older children and adults, signs include nausea, your eyes being sensitive to light, confusion, and rash. For babies, symptoms vary much more, but they can include unusual behaviour, high fever, and red or purple spots. Be alert; by looking out for these warning signs and visiting your local health facility as soon as possible, lives will be saved.I say these things because I genuinely care about each and every one of you, the Fijian people. You are what drive me every day, and you are what gives me the energy to travel the globe to meet with Leaders, finding new and creative ways to promote Fiji and seek out investment and innovations that will improve the lives of all Fijians. And you are the reason that here at home among you allthe place where I am most comfortable. I am building the strongest possible foundation so that our children and grand-children to inherit a new Fiji, a prosperous Fiji, and a united Fiji a Fiji for all Fijians.Ladies and Gentlemen, this is more than a symbolic gesture today, we mark the beginning of a new era in healthcare for the many thousands of Fijians who will be serviced by this new healthcare facility. It is, therefore, with great pride that I will now break ground on the Navosa Subdivisional Hospital.Vinaka vakalevu. Thank you.Works by Asian artists young and old will take centre stage when the arts world again descends on Hong Kong at the end of March.



Art Basel, the showcase international event that anchors a week of arts-related activity across Hong Kong, has announced the line-up for its Kabinett segment, which promises a set of 30 specially curated installations.



Among the big name artists taking part will be Yoko Ono, who brings her work Mirror Image for Hong Kong, which made its debut at the Venice Biennale last year. Ono, an icon of the 1960s, has furnished a large oval mirror, chairs and a table,...

 Haymarket Media Limited. All rights reserved.How to Get the Most Bang for Your Buck in 10 Cities

SANTA MONICA, CA / ACCESSWIRE / March 21, 2018 / The American Dream - a house, a dog, a picket fence, and 2 kids. That's what Americans strive for. It is a dream that was once clear-cut. Work hard and have that dream. Now, it isn't so simple anymore. The economy has changed and with that change, home ownership isn't always the first choice, Neil Shekhter notes.

Many Americans look around at the economy, the job market, and the housing market and wonder: Is is smarter for me to rent or to buy right now? The real estate market is a monster, and house prices keep increasing. Rent prices are also on the rise, so Americans really have to do a thorough comparison to see which option is best for their budgets, Neil Shekhter points out.

Let's say you've taken everything into consideration. You're tired of throwing away money on rent for a home that will never be yours. You've taken care of your credit, and you have decided exactly where you want to lay down roots and begin your piece of the American Dream pie. The first hurtle to overcome is that large down payment, plus other opening costs. This is where many people get stuck on home ownership - at the beginning. That down payment can be intimidating, especially for people who may be burdened with other debt such as student loans. Home ownership is the way to go, because in the long run it will save a person money. An economist for Realtor.com stated that "home ownership is the opportunity to build wealth. It also helps people be more stable". This is true, but they must first get that large down payment and that can be intimidating, according to Neil Shekhter.

Per Neil Shekhter, here is some information to help with your decision. Realtor.com did some research in hundreds of the largest cities in the United States to determine if it was better (financially safer) to buy or to rent in those areas. They studied the yearly median costs of renting compared to buying. They took into account mortgage, taxes, and insurance payments. Then they factored in median incomes for each of these areas and after gathering all this date, they created a comprehensive report of monthly costs of renting vs. monthly costs of buying. The report doesn't factor in down payment sizes, annual maintenance, insurance costs, or home appreciation. About home, appreciation, Realtor.com suggests that you stay in your home for at least seven years to build the equity. This comprehensive report is here and available for you to use to help with your decision of renting vs. buying. Good luck!

Launching NMS Properties in 1988, Neil Shekhter assumed the role of CEO in January 1995. The real estate management company focuses on multi-family and mixed-use properties in the Greater Los Angeles area and in Santa Monica. At present, NMS properties manage more than 70 properties.

Over the course of 2017, NMS deployed 40 furnished units in Los Angeles, and Neil Shekhter plans to triple that number in 2018. The company currently manages some of its properties while testing a pilot with MY SUITE.

Neil Shekhter - Founder and CEO of NMS Properties

Apartments For Rent In Los Angeles NMS Residential: http://www.nmsresidential.com

NMS Properties - Real Estate Management Firm: http://www.nmsproperties.com

Contact Information: info@NeilShekhter.com

Discover My Suite - a unique collection of furnished apartments and suites characterized by their well-appointed interiors, short-term lease periods and unparalleled value. My Suite is located near some of Los Angeles' most coveted destinations and range from studios to three bedrooms. My Suite offers a truly turnkey solution for those looking for temporary furnished apartments, for a stay of 31 days or longer.

SOURCE: NMS Properties, Inc.LONDON, March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

Dogs unleashed and cats miaow-ving up the charts

Today, the Pet Food Manufacturers' Association (PFMA) releases its 2018 pet population data, based on interviews with 8000 households[i], confirming a 400,000 rise in the dog population, which now stands at 9 million. 26% of households now own a dog, representing an increase of around 300,000 households.

(Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/657298/PFMA.jpg )



From the research, it is clear that a rise in dog ownership among families is the key driver. The number of households with children owning a dog has grown by 11%[ii] to 2.3 million, 230,000 more than last year. However, dogs are not the only pets to have moved up the charts.The cat population is at its highest for five years at 8 million. 18% of households own a cat, which equates to 140,000 more cats and 75,000 more households.

Key Findings:

13 million households (45% of UK households) have a pet

600,000 more households have a pet this year

5 million households own a cat (75,000 more than last year)

6.6 million households own a dog (300,000 more than last year)

4.4 million (53%) households with children own a pet

28% of UK households with children now own a dog, compared to 24% last year

2.3 million families have a child and a dog compared to 2 million last year

Michael Bellingham PFMA Chief Executive adds: "I was not surprised to read about the growth of the dog population among households with children as personally I have recently joined this movement. Tessa, a Schnoodle, is very much part of our family and I am delighted that 11% more families in the UK are benefitting from dog ownership.Pets in varied shapes and sizes - from lizards and snakes to hamsters and cats - can bring so much joy to children.

With the demands of modern life and the pull of digital companions, we are so pleased that more children will benefits from the social, emotional and physical benefits of pet interaction."

"Dogs Trust Veterinary Director, Paula Boyden, said: "We have long known that dogs are man's best friend and it is positive to see an increase in the number of households with children also sharing their lives with dogs. Owning a dog can have so many benefits for families and our hugely successful Be Dog Smart campaign is packed full of advice and information to ensure this harmonious relationship continues."

PFMA's top ten pets for 2018 are:

9 million dogs

8 million cats

900,000 rabbits

500,000 indoor birds

500,000 domestic fowl

400,000 guinea pigs

300,000 hamsters

300,000 tortoises and turtles

200,000 lizards

200,000 snakes

There are 3 million indoor fish tanks, proving that fish are a very popular pet[iii]. To view our full 'Pet Data Report', please visit http://www.pfma.org.uk/statistics.

i. Each year 4,000 UK adults are interviewed by TNS / Solus Consulting, in face-to-face interviews. In order to further reduce statistical uncertainty, survey results are averaged over 2 years, giving an effective sample of over 8,000 people.

ii. The number of households with children and dogs has increased from 2,074,756 in 2017 to 2,303,029 in 2018, an increase of 228,273 (rounded to 230,000)

iii. Our methodology for assessing the number of fish has changed this year and we are looking at one year's worth of data. Next year we will be able to confidently publish numbers.Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - March 21, 2018) - East Asia Minerals Corporation (TSXV: EAS) (East Asia Minerals or the "Company") announces that further to the news release dated February 1, 2018, that the Company is still proceeding with a private placement raising $2,000,000 under the same terms previously announced (an offering of 33,333,333 units (the "Units") at $0.06 per Unit (the "Offering") where each Unit consists of one common share in the capital of the Company (a "Share") and one share purchase warrant (each whole warrant, a "Warrant"). Each Warrant shall entitle the holder to purchase one additional common share in the capital of the Company (a "Warrant Share") at a price of $0.12 per Warrant Share for a period of 2 years from the closing of the Offering).

The Company may pay eligible finders a finder's fee of cash, warrants or a combination of both.

The net proceeds of the Offering after payment of commissions will be used by the Company to pay expenses related to the exploration and development of the Company's properties in Indonesia, settle payables and for working capital. Specifically, the exploration and development expenses will fund the development of Sangihe Project and other business developments.

For further information, contact Mark Sommer at 1-604-684-2183, info@eastasiaminerals.com or visit the Company's website at www.eastasiaminerals.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.

Certain statements in this News Release, which are not historical in nature, constitute "forward looking statements" within the meaning of that phrase under applicable Canadian securities law. These statements include, but are not limited to, statements or information concerning future work programs, results and timing of any work programs, the Company's performance or events as of the date hereof. These statements reflect management's current assumptions and expectations and by their nature are subject to certain underlying assumptions, known and unknown risks and uncertainties and other factors which may cause actual results, performance or events to be materially different from those expressed or implied by such forward looking statements. Those risks include the interpretation of drill results; the geology, grade and continuity of mineral deposits; the possibility that future exploration, development or mining results will not be consistent with our expectations; commodity and currency price fluctuation; failure to obtain adequate financing; regulatory, recovery rates, refinery costs, and other relevant conversion factors, permitting and licensing risks; general market and mining exploration risks and production and economic risks related to design and engineering, manufacturing, technological processes and test procedures and the risk that the project's output will not be salable at a price that will cover the project's operating and maintenance costs. Forward-looking statements should not be construed as investment advice. Readers should perform a detailed, independent investigation and analysis of the Company and are encouraged to seek independent professional advice before making any investment decision. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on any forward-looking statement. Except as required by applicable securities laws, the Company disclaims any obligation to update or revise any forward looking statements to reflect events or changes in circumstances that occur after the date hereof.New Data Center will offer up to 60MW IT load across 24.000 sqm of IT space

e-shelter, a leading data center provider in Europe and an NTT Communications Group Company, has today announced the acquisition of new development site in Frankfurt, which will be its 4th location in the city.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180321006285/en/

The expansion comes on the back of strong customer demand in Frankfurt, as market leader, e-shelter already operates 3 sites across the city, including Europe's largest data center campus, Frankfurt 1.

The "Frankfurt 4 Data Center" campus is located in Hattersheim in the west of the city and will feature 5 DC buildings built out in phases, with the first building of 9.7MW IT load scheduled to open in early 2019. Once fully built out, the site is capable of housing up to 60MW IT load and 24,000 sqm of IT space, supporting an average power density of 2.5 kW/sqm.

The new facility will follow e-shelter's successful business model offering both wholesale and retail colocation services, along with hybrid IT enterprise solutions and it will also fulfil NTT Communication's Nexcenter global data center standards.

The "Frankfurt 4 Data Center" will offer flexible and scalable colocation space with high power density, carrier neutrality, cloud network access, connectivity and on-site support services, as well as on site first-class dedicated service personnel 24/7. Customers will be able to choose from flexible colocation deployments of single rack colocation and suites through to turnkey build to suit or shell core solutions.

e-shelter currently operates across ten locations in the DACH region and a data center area of around 90,000 sqm. Outside of DACH e-shelter is also expanding to new markets with a new data center campus opening in Amsterdam in early 2019 and development sites secured in both Madrid and London.

The essential specifications of the new Frankfurt 4 Data Center campus include:

60MW IT load capacity

24,000 sqm IT space

Separate emergency power supply and

Average power density of 2,5 kW/sqm

About e-shelter

e-shelter is one of the leading data center operators in Europe providing highly secure environments for housing and connectivity of IT and network systems. With a presence in all key city-markets of the DACH-region, e-shelter leverages 300 MW of power capacity to deliver scalable data center solutions. As a subsidiary of NTT Communications, e-shelter is part of a global network of over 140 data centers and over 400,000 sqm of data center space. Among e-shelter's clients are financial services companies, telecoms operators, public sector, IT service and outsourcing providers as well as cloud service providers.

In addition to e-shelter, the companies Arcadin, Dimension Data, itelligence, NTT Communications, NTT DATA and NTT Security are part of the NTT Group in Germany. In this region, the NTT Group represents around 5,300 employees and a revenue of more than 1.2 billion the NTT Group. You can find further information on the global NTT Group at www.ntt-global.com.

www.e-shelter.com

About NTT Communications Corporation

NTT Communications provides consultancy, architecture, security and cloud services to optimize the information and communications technology (ICT) environments of enterprises. These offerings are backed by the company's worldwide infrastructure, including the leading global tier-1 IP network, the Arcstar Universal One VPN network reaching over 190 countries/regions, and over 140 secure data centers worldwide. NTT Communications' solutions leverage the global resources of NTT Group companies including Dimension Data, NTT DOCOMO and NTT DATA.

www.ntt.com | Twitter@NTT Com Facebook@NTT Com LinkedIn@NTT Com

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180321006285/en/

Contacts:

For more information

NTT Communications Corporation

Hiroshi Seo

Cloud Services

wg-cl@ntt.com

or

e-shelter

Claudia Isabel Knoll

Head of Marketing

press@e-shelter.comLUXEMBOURG, March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --SOF-11 Starlight 10 EUR S.a.r.l., Luxembourg ("Bidder"), a wholly owned, indirect subsidiary of SOF-11 International, SCSp, part of a collection of entities known as Starwood Global Opportunity Fund XI and an affiliate of Starwood Capital Group ("Starwood"), makes the following announcement pursuant to Sec 5 para 3 Austrian Takeover Act ("ATA"):

On 22 March 2018, the Bidder decided to launch voluntary public takeover offers pursuant to article 4 et seq ATA to (i) the shareholders of CA Immobilien Anlagen AG ("CA Immo") and to (ii) the shareholders of Immofinanz AG ("Immofinanz").

The takeover offer to the shareholders of CA Immo is aimed at acquiring up to 25,690,167 bearer shares of CA Immo (ISIN AT0000641352) representing up to 26.00% of the overall issued bearer shares of CA Immo.

The takeover offer to the shareholders of Immofinanz is aimed at acquiring up to 55,831,570 bearer shares of Immofinanz (ISINAT0000809058) representing up to 5% of the overall issued bearer shares of Immofinanz.

The shareholders of CA Immo are offered an offer price of EUR 27.50 per CA Immo share on a cum dividend basis. That means that the offer price per CA Immo share will be reduced by the amount of any dividend declared per CA Immo share between the announcement of this takeover offer for CA Immo and settlement of this takeover offer for CA Immo, provided that settlement of this takeover offer for CA Immo occurs after the relevant record date for CA Immo.

The shareholders of Immofinanz are offered an offer price of EUR 2.10 per Immofinanz share on a cum dividend basis. That means that the offer price per Immofinanz share will be reduced by the amount of any dividend declared per Immofinanz share between the announcement of this takeover offer for Immofinanz and settlement of this takeover offer for Immofinanz, provided that settlement of this takeover offer for Immofinanz occurs after the relevant record date for Immofinanz.

The completion of the takeover offer for CA Immo will be subject to the following offer conditions:

(i)merger control clearance;

(ii)no material adverse change at CA Immo including but not limited to merger, spin-off or split; and

(iii) no consent by CA Immo management to transfer the four registered name shares.

Details on the contents and scope of the offer conditions will be set out in the offer document.

The completion of the takeover offer for Immofinanz will be subject to the following offer conditions:

(i)merger control clearance;

(ii)no material adverse change at Immofinanz including but not limited to merger, spin-off, split or disposal over the 26% stake and/or the four registered shares held by Immofinanz in CA Immo.

Details on the contents and scope of the offer conditions will be set out in the offer document.

Both takeover offers are independent from each other.

Barry Sternlicht, Chairman and CEO of Starwood Capital Group, said, "Starwood Capital has a long track record of investing in and successfully growing public companies, and we believe that the substantial capital resources and experience we can contribute as a strategic shareholder of CA Immo and Immofinanz could provide significant value."

Keegan Viscius, a Vice President responsible for real estate investments across Europe, said, "We have a tremendous amount of respect for the achievements of the management teams at both CA Immo and Immofinanz, and are firmly supportive of both management teams through the next phase of growth."

The publication of both offer documents will take place in accordance with the legal provisions.

It is not the intention of the Bidder to completely take over CA Immo and Immofinanz with these takeover offers. Upon completion of both takeover offers, CA Immo and Immofinanz shall remain listed on the Vienna Stock Exchange (and relating to Immofinanz also on the Warsaw Stock Exchange).

About Starwood: Starwood Capital Group is a private alternative investment firm with a core focus on global real estate, energy infrastructure and oil & gas. The Firm and its affiliates maintain 11 offices in four countries around the world, and currently have approximately 3,700 employees. Starwood Capital Group has raised $44 billion of equity capital since its inception in 1991, and currently manages approximately $56 billion in assets. The Firm has invested in virtually every category of real estate on a global basis, opportunistically shifting asset classes, geographies and positions in the capital stack as it perceives risk/reward dynamics to be evolving. Over the past 26 years, Starwood Capital Group and its affiliates have successfully executed an investment strategy that involves building enterprises in both the private and public markets. Additional information can be found at starwoodcapital.com.

UBS acts as financial advisor to the Bidder. Schonherr Rechtsanwalte GmbH is the Bidder's Austrian legal advisor and representative and authorized recipient vis A vis the Takeover Commission (Ubernahmekommission).ORANGE COUNTY, CA / ACCESSWIRE / March 21, 2018 / While marketing strategies have greatly changed over the decades purely from the changes within human interest and the ways in which people consume media, there is no question technology and the internet has taken marketing strategies to a whole new level. Nick Kohlschreiber, a renowned entrepreneur from California, points out that a profound transformation of marketing techniques is already well underway, as consumers spend an increasing amount of time on their smartphones and computers. This has created a challenge for brands as they seek to connect with customers through all these devices in real-time, while also developing advertising campaigns that are effective across social media, display advertising and e-commerce.

Sweeping technological advances and the expansive outreach of social media has permanently altered the nature of marketing as a whole, a sentiment Guardian contributor David Benady noted prior to a panel discussion with industry executives. "Real-time conversations brands have with people as they interact with websites and mobile apps has changed the nature of marketing," Benady wrote. "The modern-day marketing department needs to combine the creative side of the discipline - using powerful narratives to tap into people's wishes and aspirations - with the technical side of data, digital engineering and analytics." The potential reach of an advertising campaign has also broadened. Facebook, YouTube, online news websites, and integrated apps for smartphones and tablets now allow strong ideas to quickly spread and influence in the span of a single day. "If you come up with that nugget of an idea, you've now got such reach that you can expand that and get tremendous coverage just from a little niche idea," said Mark Singleton, head of marketing at betting brand Paddy Power.

Various technological tools enable modern marketing techniques to provide a highly personalized customer experience, often through insightful analytics providing a more targeted audience. As the number of tools and options continues to grow at rapid rates, marketers are faced with increasingly complicated decisions while deciding on their strategy. Nick Kohlschreiber encourages them to carefully weigh the numerous choices available and focus on methods that best fit their brand, while offering the highest level of direct access to their targeted consumer base. Kohlschreiber also advises companies to constantly reevaluate their strategies in light of emerging entities that may ensure even higher degrees of innovative and strategic advertising. By continuing to embrace evolutions in technology, marketing experts can stay ahead of the latest trends, adapting to changes while receiving optimal results.

Nick Kohlschreiber is an experienced businessman and entrepreneur, beginning his career at a young age as the head of marketing at an online wholesale product company, where he invigorated sales with his innovative approach to the online selling and direct shipping of products to its consumers. Now the owner of a media company based in Newport Beach, Kohlschreiber oversees hundreds of employees and tens of thousands of clients every day, while striving to further the connections to the modern communication platforms - from document preparation, to online, multimedia-driven business development. In his spare time, he is a dedicated philanthropist assisting both local charities and various international non-profit organizations.

Nick Kohlschreiber - Expert in Modern Marketing: http://www.nickkohlschreibernews.com

Nick Kohlschreiber - Business Entrepreneur & Founder of TeleTree: http://nickkohlschreiberreviews.com

Nick Kohlschreiber - Creative Marketing Solutions Expert: http://nickkohlschreibermarketing.com

Contact Information

NickKohlschreiberNews.com

www.NickKohlschreiberNews.com

contact@nickkohlschreibernews.com

SOURCE: Nick KohlschreiberAVITA Medical (ASX AVH, OTCQX: AVMXY) announced that Maricopa Integrated Health System (MIHS) Burn Center will hold a press conference today to highlight the recent treatment with RECELL of a woman with necrotizing fasciitis, or flesh eating bacteria. The woman was treated with the RECELL Autologous Cell Harvesting Device under a U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved Compassionate Use Investigational Device Exemption (IDE) program.

RECELL is a medical device designed to facilitate skin regeneration. In the United States, RECELL is an investigational device limited by federal law to investigational use. In September 2017, Avita submitted to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) a PreMarket Approval (PMA) application for RECELL for the treatment of severe burn injuries, and that application is currently under review.

An announcement from MIHS about the press conference is included below.

MARICOPA INTEGRATED HEALTH SYSTEM (MIHS)

Maricopa County Special Health Care District

NEWS

March 21, 2018

Flesh eating bacteria survivor to tell her story of survival; Burn surgeon to discuss groundbreaking use of "skin spray" to treat wounds from the disease

A Peoria woman who contracted flesh eating bacteria in January will appear at a news conference Thursday to discuss her fight for survival against the rare disease.

Christin Lipinski, still a patient at MIHS's Arizona Burn Center, will appear with Burn Center Director Dr. Kevin Foster, who has pioneered use of the investigational RECELL "skin spray" to treat burn victims.

Dr. Foster obtained FDA approval for "compassionate use" of Avita Medical's RECELL treatment on Mrs. Lipinski. This is the first time in the United States that RECELL has been used to treat a victim of necrotizing fasciitis, or flesh eating bacteria.

When: 10 a.m., Thursday, March 22, 2018

Where: Maricopa Medical Center Administration Building, 2601 E. Roosevelt Street (just east of the hospital)

Who: Christin Lipinski, a mother and Peoria school teacher who contracted flesh eating bacteria in January. She will talk about her experience, her treatment, and outlook for recovery.

Contact: Michael Murphy (602) 568-0010

About Maricopa Integrated Health System (MIHS)

Located in Phoenix, Ariz., Maricopa Integrated Health System has a proud tradition of being both the community safety net health care system, with a mission and commitment to serving the underserved and Arizona's only public teaching hospital. MIHS consists of Maricopa Medical, the only Level I Trauma Center in Arizona verified by the American College of Surgeons to care for both adults and children, Arizona's only nationally verified Burn Center serving the entire Southwestern United States, MIHS's McDowell Healthcare Center, which is the largest provider of HIV primary care in Arizona, the Refugee Women's Health Clinic, the Arizona Children's Center, two behavioral health centers, and 13 neighborhood Family Health Centers. To learn more about MIHS, please visit www.mihs.org.

2015 MIHS Contact Privacy Policy

ABOUT AVITA MEDICAL LIMITED

AVITA Medical is a regenerative medicine company with a technology platform positioned to address unmet medical needs in burns, chronic wounds, and aesthetics indications. Avita's patented and proprietary collection and application technology provides innovative treatment solutions derived from the regenerative properties of a patient's own skin. Our medical devices work by preparing a Regenerative Epithelial Suspension (RES), an autologous suspension comprised of the patient's own skin cells and wound healing factors that are necessary to regenerate natural healthy skin. This autologous suspension is then sprayed onto the areas of the patient to be treated.

In all countries outside of Europe, our portfolio is marketed under the RECELL brand to promote skin healing in a wide range of applications including burns, chronic wounds and aesthetics. RECELL is TGA-registered in Australia, and CFDA-cleared in China.

In Europe, our portfolio of medical device products received CE-mark approval as three tailored product presentations, with three individual brand names. RECELL is designed for the treatment of burns and plastic reconstructive procedures; ReGenerCell has been formulated for chronic wounds including leg and foot ulcers; and ReNovaCell is tailored for aesthetic applications including the restoration of pigmentation.

To learn more, visit www.avitamedical.com.

CAUTIONARY NOTE REGARDING FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS

This letter includes forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements generally can be identified by the use of words such as "anticipate," "expect," "intend," "could," "may," "will," "believe," "estimate," "look forward," "forecast," "goal," "target," "project," "continue," "outlook," "guidance," "future," other words of similar meaning and the use of future dates. Forward-looking statements in this letter include, but are not limited to, statements concerning, among other things, our ongoing clinical trials and product development activities, regulatory approval of our products, the potential for future growth in our business, and our ability to achieve our key strategic, operational and financial goal. Forward-looking statements by their nature address matters that are, to different degrees, uncertain. Each forward- looking statement contained in this letter is subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such statement. Applicable risks and uncertainties include, among others, the timing of regulatory approvals of our products; physician acceptance, endorsement, and use of our products; failure to achieve the anticipated benefits from approval of our products; the effect of regulatory actions; product liability claims; risks associated with international operations and expansion; and other business effects, including the effects of industry, economic or political conditions outside of the company's control. Investors should not place considerable reliance on the forward-looking statements contained in this letter. Investors are encouraged to read our publicly available filings for a discussion of these and other risks and uncertainties. The forward-looking statements in this letter speak only as of the date of this release, and we undertake no obligation to update or revise any of these statements.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180321006305/en/

Contacts:

Australia:

Monsoon Communications

Sarah Kemter

Phone: +61 (0)3 9620 3333

Mobile: +61 (0)407 162 530

sarahk@monsoon.com.au

or

USA:

Westwicke Partners

Caroline Corner

Phone: +1 (415) 202-5678

caroline.corner@westwicke.com

or

AVITA Medical Ltd

Dale A. Sander

Chief Financial Officer

Phone: +1 (858) 663-6993

dsander@avitamedical.comMUNICH, March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

Owing to Wirecard's cooperation with Travel Easy, Chinese consumers benefit from direct value added tax refund at MCM boutiques - in addition to fully digital payments

Wirecard, one of the leading specialists in digital financial technology, has won a further customer for Alipay together with its solution partner TravelEasy. Together with Travel Easy, one of the leading experts for travel services connecting Europe and China, Wirecard will be offering European merchants an integrated payment and marketing approach for Alipay, the preferred payment solution in China. As a result of the partnership with Travel Easy, merchants will be able to expand their range of value-added services by integrating automatic 100% VAT refunds for Chinese customers at the point of sale.

The latest addition among the cooperation partners is MCM, the renowned brand for luxury travel goods and accessories. Wirecard will integrate China's leading mobile payment solution via the new digital platform Wirecard ePOS App into their existing payment infrastructure. The mobile app gives stationary merchants access to a wide selection of popular international payment methods as well as value-added services.

Due to the strategic partnership between Wirecard and Travel Easy, MCM will be able to offer Chinese customers more payment convenience as well as value added tax refunds in real-time. As an internationally recognized brand, with 500stores in 39countries, MCM accessories and travel items are popular products. Shopping of luxury goods is particularly popular with Chinese tourists and is an integral part of their holiday activities.

Giving Chinese tourists the opportunity to take advantage of their favorite and trusted payment method is an enhanced sales opportunity for retailers: With 520million active users and more than 175million transactions per day, Alipay is the world's largest mobile payment network. On account of a variety of technical solutions for the acceptance of Alipay provided by Wirecard, companies outside Asia can also benefit from this development. The experience of other Wirecard customers has proven that offering Alipay as a new payment method has led to a significant sales increase in transaction volume with travelers from China.

Ralf Kern, General Manager at Travel Easy, says: "Our strategic objective is to provide European retailers with exclusive insights into Chinese target groups, simultaneously offering Chinese consumers innovative value-added services. As payment is one of the key factors used to target Chinese travelers, we are delighted to align with such a strong partner as Wirecard."

Stephan Ritzenhoff, Team Lead Partner Management at Wirecard, adds: "There is a considerable potential for European retailers since Chinese are world champions in travel. Only in 2017, around 12.4 million Chinese tourists visited Europe. We are looking forward to supporting a brand like MCM to take a step forward in equipping their stores with an advanced, convenient payment method. In the future we are also planning to extend our collaboration with Travel Easy to further fields."

About Wirecard:

Wirecard AG is a global technology group that supports companies in accepting electronic payments from all sales channels. As a leading independent supplier, the Wirecard Group offers outsourcing and white label solutions for electronic payments. A global platform bundles international payment acceptances and methods with supplementary fraud prevention solutions. With regard to issuing own payment instruments in the form of cards or mobile payment solutions, the Wirecard Group provides companies with an end-to-end infrastructure, including the requisite licences for card and account products. Wirecard AG is listed on the Frankfurt Securities Exchange (TecDAX, ISIN DE0007472060, WDI). For further information about Wirecard, please visit http://www.wirecard.com or follow us on twitter @wirecard.

About Travel Easy:

Travel Easy is one of the most innovative partner for travel services connecting Europe to China. We are building a network that adds value and potential for all members, enabling travel agencies, shops and tourists to benefit from a clear win-win synergy. In our headquarter in the heart of Europe's financial centre experts work around the clock on technological innovations and marketing strategies for "here & now" as well for the future. Smart solutions for small shops as well as for shopping malls, even better and faster options for Duty Free-Returns, more efficient processes and transactions. We build bridges between companies and people, between cultures and systems, between visions and reality. We are in the business of connecting, streamlining and improving.

Wirecard media contact:



Wirecard AG

Jana Tilz

Phone: +49(0)89-4424-1363

Email: jana.tilz@wirecard.com

EQS Group-Ad-hoc: Airopack Technology Group AG / Key word(s): Final Results Airopack Technology Group AG: Airopack reports 2017 production and sales growth 22-March-2018 / 06:50 CET/CEST Release of an ad hoc announcement pursuant to Art. 53 KR The issuer is solely responsible for the content of this announcement. Ad-hoc release / Press Release *Airopack reports 2017 production and sales growth* *- New production platforms brought up to speed - 40 million Airopacks produced* *- Net sales increased by 90% compared to the previous year, totalling EUR 21.5 million* *- EBITDA improved by EUR 7.5 million compared to 2016* *- Net loss of EUR 40 million related to investments in organization and production capacity for planned growth* *- Expectation to reach annual production and sales run rate of 100 million Airopack dispensers in the second half of 2018, leading to the break-even EBITDA point* Baar, 22 March 2018 - Airopack Technology Group AG ("Airopack"), manufacturer of the Planet Friendly Aerosol, today announced its results for full year 2017. Over the year, the new Waalwijk factory was upgraded and improved, with almost 40 million Airopack dispensers manufactured in 2017. Airopack also succeeded in securing several breakthrough contracts with both existing and new customers. The company achieved net sales of almost 21.5 million euros and is on track for an annual production and sales run rate of 200 million Airopack dispensers by the end of 2018. Airopack produces a safe, all-plastic pressurized dispenser powered purely by air that is environmentally and planet friendly. It was developed by Airopack Technology Group, which holds the relevant patents and is worldwide the sole producer of this unique Planet Friendly Aerosol. Quint Kelders, Chief Executive Officer, said: "2017 was a momentous year in various aspects. First and foremost, we brought our new Waalwijk (Netherlands) plant up to speed, while testing, improving as well as expanding the various production platforms. As a result, in 2017, almost 40 million Airopack dispensers were manufactured in the Dutch plant. Secondly, Airopack succeeded in securing several breakthrough contracts with both existing and new customers. Based on the production experiences to date, in combinations with growing customer demand, we confirm the expectation to reach an annual production and sales run rate of 100 million Airopack dispensers in the second half of 2018, leading to the break-even EBITDA point." *General* Due to the continued strong customer demand in 2017, Airopack started preparations to increase production capacity from an initial 80 million to 200 million Airopack dispensers annually. While preparing the plant for this expansion, the company produced almost 40 million of the 53mm RTF Airopacks. For this purpose, the plant manufactured over 357 million single components in 2017. Whereas production of PET Preforms and PET Containers was previously outsourced to a joint venture partner, these parts are now fully produced in-house at the new plant, with manufacturing numbers totalling almost 160 million parts. Airopack also recruited and trained 125 specialized full-time employees in 2017 for the new Waalwijk (Netherlands) plant. Over time, the teams moved from one shift to two shifts and eventually three shifts by the end of the year, utilizing the installed capacity step-by-step at a realistic and manageable pace. Given the robust commercial pipeline, in 2017 the Board of Directors approved a plan to further increase the installed production capacity in Waalwijk (Netherlands) to 200 million Airopack dispensers annually. A first step has been taken at the end of the reporting year. In line with its strategy to be a market leader, Airopack has also introduced a new and improved quality standard. The company set an Acceptance Quality Limit of 0.065 for critical defects, which is a target well beyond the current market standard. All manufacturing technology and processes were adapted to ensure that this improved and market leading AQL was achieved. Airopack believes in high-quality, innovative and sustainable products and is proud to announce to have produced with a 38% lower carbon footprint and 55% lower environmental footprint in comparison to traditional Aluminum Bag on Valve aerosol. To further increase the international presence of Airopack products, in December 2017 we joined the Comite Francais des Aerosols (CFA), which is a key step for increasing market penetration of our Planet Friendly Aerosol. *Financial highlights* The full 2017 annual report is available for download on the Airopack website (www.airopackgroup.com [1]) under the link - investor relations - reports (www.airopackgroup.com/en/investor-relations/reports [2]). *Sales* During 2017, the company sold 32.9 million units, more than quadrupling the sales over 2016 (7.3 million units). More importantly, the 2017 sales volume represents a 57% increase over the 2015 number of 21 million units, which was the last full year of production in our former factory in Bilten (Switzerland). Airopack's subsidiary Airosolutions successfully refocused its business on the production and sale of the Airoball Lip Care products, which are produced for Beiersdorf under the Labellino brand. During 2017, the production of components was insourced, thereby increasing quality control and supply chain security. The success of this product, which was entirely designed and developed by our own R&D team, has led our customer to significantly extend the number of related product applications for 2018. Net sales for the year increased by 90% compared to the previous year, totalling EUR 21.5 million. This is a direct result of the increased sales of Airopacks, which represented a value of EUR 13.1 million compared to EUR 3.4 million in 2016. Airosolutions saw its sales grow to EUR 8.5 million compared to EUR 7.9 million in the previous year. Airopack succeeded in securing several breakthroughs with both existing and new customers, which will considerably boost sales in 2018. These include Procter and Gamble, Edgewell, Morning Glory, and Icon Brands, among others. *Result development* The results over 2017 progressed against the results over 2016, with EBITDA improving by EUR 7.5 million. Efficiency improvements and investments in ramping up production capacity while securing high product quality during the year, explain the negative EBITDA of EUR -21.0 million. The capacity increase led to increased charges for depreciation (2017: EUR -5.1 million), which, combined with the cost for amortization (2017: EUR -9.7 million) and interest costs (2017: EUR -9.1 million), resulted in a net loss of EUR 40.1 million. This includes EUR 3.4 million of exceptional costs for impairment and consultancy charges. *Outlook* While 2017 was the company's first full year of production in the Waalwijk plant, 2018 will be a year of further capacity expansion, production improvements, and utilization optimization. Airopack will continue to invest in increasing its production capacity over the year, while carefully monitoring production quality. Our core value remains continuing to produce at the highest quality standards. Due to growing customer demand and pipeline development, we plan further modular expansion of production at Waalwijk over the course of 2018. In a two-step approach the company will increase its annual production capacity to 200 million Airopacks at the Waalwijk plant, a level it is expecting to reach by the end of 2018. The company is also making substantial progress with attracting and contracting new customers, both in the EU and the US. Additional contracts are expected to be announced over the course of 2018. The Board of Directors and Group Management confirm the earlier expressed expectation to reach an EBITDA break-even run rate during the second half of 2018. Break-even levels will be achieved once operating at an annual production and sales run rate of 100 million Airopack dispensers, which is an equivalent of 8.3 million pieces per month. The expectation is substantiated during the production and sales increases in 2017, measured on a month by month bases, which demonstrated significant EBITDA improvements per million volume increase. The Board of Directors and Group Management remain confident that the medium-term goal of a run rate volume of over 700 million Airopack dispensers annually can be achieved, compared to a total aerosol market of 15.48 billion annual units as of the end of 2015. *Events after closing date* On 8 February 2018, Airopack closed the acquisition of Scholle IPN Equipment B.V., the Airopack production partner for its full range of Airofiller filling equipment (www.airofiller.com [3]). With this acquisition Airopack secures the production capacity to keep up with the strong growth in demand for Airofiller equipment by both Airopack clients and contract fillers resulting from the growing demand for the Airopack Planet Friendly Aerosol. Airopack has also secured additional debt and lease facilities from Rabobank to fund the acquisition and for capacity growth purposes. To demonstrate progress the company has made in the past year, Airopack will organize a plant visit for a number of investors at its state-of-the-art plant in Waalwijk (Netherlands) in the second quarter of 2018. *For more information:* *For investors*: Airopack Technology Group AG Quint Kelders, CEO / Liebwin van Lil, CFO Blegistrasse 5/ 1 OG CH-6340 Baar T: +41 41 768 50 50 E-Mail: quint.kelders@airopackgroup.com E-Mail: liebwin.vanlil@airopackgroup.com *For media :* Hill + Knowlton Strategies Frans van der Grint T: 31 (0) 20 404 4707 E-Mail: frans.vandergrint@hkstrategies.com Airopack Technology Group AG ("Airopack"), manufacturer of the Planet Friendly Aerosol, is a leading developer and supplier of mechanical and pressure-controlled dispensing packaging technologies and systems for manufacturers and suppliers of cosmetics, body care, home care, pharmaceutical and food products. The revolutionary Airopack(R) technology offers a safe, all-plastic pressurized dispenser that is environmentally and planet friendly. Airopack holds the patent and is worldwide the sole producer of this unique dispenser. Airopack operates a production facility for Airopack ready-to-fill dispensers in Waalwijk (Netherlands), a full-service filling operation (Airosolutions) for ready-to-sell Airopack dispensers in Heist-op-den-Berg (Belgium) and a manufacturer of Airofiller filling equipment (Airofiller Equipment Solutions) in Houten (Netherlands). The Global Research and Development Team, the Airopack Global Management and the Customer Service Organisation are also based in Waalwijk (Netherlands). The shares of the company are listed on the Swiss Reporting Standard of the SIX Swiss Exchange since 2010. (Ticker: AIRN / ISIN: CH0242606942). www.airopackgroup.com End of ad hoc announcement Language: English Company: Airopack Technology Group AG Blegistrasse 5 6340 Baar Switzerland Phone: +41 417663500 Fax: +41 417663509 E-mail: liebwin.vanlil@airopackgroup.com Internet: www.airopackgroup.com ISIN: CH0242606942 Listed: SIX Swiss Exchange End of Announcement EQS Group News Service 667205 22-March-2018 CET/CEST 1: http://public-cockpit.eqs.com/cgi-bin/fncls.ssp?fn=redirect&url=26ec27d0679301fe63ce8a1daf26a8df&application_id=667205&site_id=vwd&application_name=news 2: http://public-cockpit.eqs.com/cgi-bin/fncls.ssp?fn=redirect&url=bb303f04b7d1c1dad3d6879353707c8f&application_id=667205&site_id=vwd&application_name=news 3: http://public-cockpit.eqs.com/cgi-bin/fncls.ssp?fn=redirect&url=7c6988112bc2ffe5a7d02388ddfd9e49&application_id=667205&site_id=vwd&application_name=news

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

March 22, 2018 01:50 ET (05:50 GMT)LONDON, March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Constantine Cannon is pleased to announce that Madalina Dumitrescu, a partner in the firm's London office, has been selected to join the Board of Directors of The Dispute Board Federation (DBF) in Geneva and London.

In addition to her role as a director, Ms. Dumitrescu has also been appointed as an Advisor to the Nominating Committee of the Board of Governors of the DBF.

The DBF is a prominent International Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) whose members assist in resolving international infrastructure and other commercial disputes in more than 23 countries on four continents. The Group nominates arbitrators, mediators and adjudicators worldwide, sets out rules governing the resolution of major international construction disputes, and works to eliminate corruption in large international infrastructure projects through the monitoring function of Dispute Adjudication Boards.

Ms. Dumitrescu practices law in Constantine Cannon's London office and is part of the firm's International Commercial Litigation and Arbitration practice groups. She has a strong international practice specialising in commercial dispute resolution, energy and natural resources, international arbitration and civil fraud. She has represented the oil and gas industry, international traders, resort and hospitality clients, and many other large companies in arbitration disputes internationally. Madalina is an arbitrator for the ICC in Paris and is a Fellow of the DBF's Dispute Adjudication Board Panel and on its Arbitration Panel in Geneva. She also advises clients in multi-jurisdictional white-collar crime matters, extradition issues, and claims at the European Court of Human Rights.

"Madalina has built a strong career as an international litigator and advisor to multi-national clients," said Richard Aborn, Managing Partner of Constantine Cannon. "Her appointment as a member of the DBF's Board of Directors is further testament to her prominence in these critical areas of legal practice."

About Constantine Cannon LLP



Constantine Cannon, with offices inNew York,Washington, D.C.,San FranciscoandLondon, has deep expertise in practice areas that include antitrust and complex commercial litigation, whistleblower representation, government relations, securities and e-discovery. The firm's antitrust practice is among the largest and most well recognized in the field.Constantine Cannon's experience spans multiple industries including healthcare, banking, electronic payments, insurance, high tech, telecommunications, the Internet and government contracting.

Media contact:

PRCG | Haggerty

Andrea M. Garcia

212-683-8100

agarcia@prcg.comHAARLEMMERMEER, Netherlands, March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Wuxi Suntech Power Co., Ltd. ("Suntech") announces today itis participatingthe 2018 Solar Solutions Int. in Haarlemmermeer.

Solar Solutions Int. is the largest commercial platform for solar energy industry in the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg. It provides sales and trade opportunitiesfor all the professionals regard to the supply chain in this area.

Suntech shows the 300W all black half cut solar modules. It contains different ways of designing which is using thehybrid mode with series-connected and parallel-connected. With half-cell technology, the module power output can be maximum10W higher than the traditional design, and it reduces the system cost with the help of higher module power output. Under the condition withthe same current and voltage, the internal current reduces to 50% of the traditional modules and the cell temperature decreases to 20~25" during operation, compared to the traditional designwhich alleviates the hot spot effect.

In addition, the size of half-cell is smaller than the traditional cell, which means that the damaged area is also smaller for half-cells when cracks occur bythe external force. At the same time, the special complex circuit is optimized by using the distributed junction box design, and the power loss can be further reduced in a cross layout of installation. This module uses all black materials to get a premium appearance. Flexible collocation is suitable for residential rooftop projects.

"Since nowadays PV is on the way of entering common people's life, we have been devoting to develop the products really match the demand of the market and end users. Europe is one of the places who firstly initiate PV industry all over the world. That's why it always has high demand of innovative products and easy to accept new things," said Mr. Shuangquan He, President of Suntech. "In the past 18 years, we have achieved a great progress in product technology and gained brand reputation in European market. It is sitting on the long term Bloomberg Tier1 supplier list, and holding VDE quality inspection certificate, Suntech offers anindustry-leading 12-year productwarranty anda25-year linear performance warranty which is reinsured by the world-leading reinsurance company - Munich Re. In 2018, Suntech will continue to focus on European businesses and provides high quality and cost-effective products. With concrete actions as following, Suntech will achievea great success in the European PV market."The Renewables Academy AG (RENAC), based in Berlin (Germany), is very proud to celebrate its 10th anniversary. Since its founding in 2008, RENAC has become an important and innovative provider of international trainings and capacity building for renewable energy and energy efficiency all around the world. More than 10,000 participants from over 140 countries have joined RENAC programmes.

In 2008, Berthold Breid, RENAC's founder and director, had the dream to support the international development of green energy markets through know-how transfer and exchange of expertise on renewable energy and energy efficiency. "Knowledge is one of the key factors for the sustainable development of clean and secure energy supplies", said Mr. Breid. "Through our activities, we aim at satisfying the increasing demand for expertise throughout the public sector, private sector, finance sector, and potential investors in the green energy markets. Thanks to our participants, clients, partners, and, of course, the RENAC team, this dream has been possible."

One of the first big projects was TREE Transfer Renewable Energy and Efficiency. TREE offered comprehensive training on technical, legal and economic aspects of renewable energy technologies for participants from 90 countries. Since then, RENAC has implemented more than 500 capacity buildings projects worldwide. Some of the many success stories include the design and installation of Training Centres and regional Train-the-Trainer seminars at Wigton Windfarm (Jamaica) as well as at the EARTH University (Costa Rica), the programme Green Banking -Capacity Building on Green Energy and Climate Finance for the finance sector and trainings on grid integration of renewable energy.

RENAC also offers the academic degrees MBA Renewables -in collaboration with the Beuth University of Applied Sciences and Especializacion en Energias Renovables together with the Earth University-, as well as a wide variety of face-to-face and online open trainings. Additionally, as consultant for the German Energy Solutions Initiative of the Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs and Energy, RENAC has organised about 350 events for German companies so far.

For further information on RENAC trainings and services, please visit www.renac.de.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180322005017/en/

Contacts:

Elena Cantos

Renewables Academy AG

Head of PR Marketing

cantos@renac.de

+49(0)30-526 895 8 70Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - March 22, 2018) - Explorex Resources Inc. (CSE: EX) (FSE: 1XE) (OTC Pink: EXPXF) (the "Company" or "Explorex") is very pleased to announce that it has executed a Letter of Intent with three private Finnish companies to acquire the development stage Hautalampi project ("Hautalampi" or "Project") within the renowned Outokumpu Mining Camp of eastern Finland owned by Vulcan Hautalampi Oy (a.k.a. FinnCobalt).

Hautalampi is an unmined, cobalt enriched nickel-copper sulphide deposit that was a focus of pre-production development in the mid 1980's and extensive engineering supporting a feasibility study in 2009. Given the advanced stage aspect of the deposit, the established infrastructure and nearby mine development and mine operation services, Explorex believes the Project can be fast tracked to development. Upon completion of a due diligence period, the LOI provides for Explorex to earn a 91% initial interest plus an additional 9%, should the vendors convert a residual interest to a royalty. Project details, terms and upcoming plans are provided below.

Key Project Highlights

A feasibility study was completed in 2009 by a previous operator;

Significant pre-production development completed consisting of an 850 metre decline, 1,250 metres of additional underground development and a ventilation raise;

Key permits allowing for re-opening of underground workings have been granted;

Potential opportunity for near term production;

The Hautalampi deposit occurs at a shallow depth of less than 150m below surface;

Existing historical Co-Ni-Cu mineral resources and reserves estimates defined by 21 kilometres of drilling;

Significant exploration potential extending beyond historical mineral resources; and

Project is located in a mature mining district with personnel, plant and processing options locally available.

Gary Schellenberg, CEO stated: "Hautalampi provides Explorex with an excellent opportunity to fast track this historically defined asset within a mining friendly jurisdiction that has some of the best infrastructure in the world. Building on the comprehensive work previously conducted, we anticipate being able to provide an updated resource estimate followed quickly by economic studies, all in the environment of rising commodity prices. Backed by our key strategic funding partner, Ganfeng Lithium Co. Ltd., we anticipate being able to recast Explorex to a development stage company in the coming year".

Key Corporate Transaction Aspects

Advanced Stage Asset - once due diligence is completed, Explorex will focus on work that will lead to an updated feasibility study;

Platform for Growth - the Project will facilitate Explorex's business plan to leapfrog to a development stage company in combination with a diverse range of global cobalt exploration projects; and

Overnight Entrant - the Project sets Explorex on a rapid path to become an emerging entrant in the rechargeable battery supply chain.

Key Hautalampi Deposit Attributes

The Hautalampi deposit was the focus of development in the mid-1980's by Outokumpu Oy during which 2.1 km of underground development was completed, including an 850m decline and initial stope development to access the deposit and extract a 10,000-tonne bulk sample. However, declining commodity prices at that time curtailed advancement to full production. In 2009, a feasibility study ("Feasibility Study") was completed by Finn Nickel Oy, a previous owner and operator, to advance the project to production, but once again, work stopped due to falling metal prices.

The Feasibility Study outlined the mineral resources at Hautalampi, which Explorex is treating as a historical resource estimate under National Instrument 43-101 and not as a current mineral resource.

The historical mineral resources are summarized in the following table:

Mineral Resources

Tonnes

Ni %

Cu %

Co %

Measured 1,030,000

0.47 0.47

0.13 Indicated 1,226,000 0.42 0.30 0.13 Measured & Indicated

2,256,000 0.44 0.38 0.12 Inferred 895,000 0.40

0.30 0.10

The exploration potential along trend towards the NE from Hautalampi is considered high. Multiple drill intersections have identified several distinct mineralized zones at different levels along a prospective 2,500 m corridor. The main Hautalampi deposit was the primary focus of the historic drilling and additional drilling will be required to properly define a mineral resource to NI 43-101 standards within this corridor. The geological setting and mineralization of these target zones are similar to the Hautalampi deposit.

The Hautalampi historical resource estimates of grade and tonnage in this press release are viewed as relevant based on the information and methods used at the time. A Qualified Person for Explorex has not sufficiently reviewed and verified the work to consider this a current mineral resource.

Additional work including, drilling, metallurgical test work, re-assaying and QC/QA will need to be completed to upgrade the historical resource to current NI 43-101 reporting standards. The Vendor has recently commenced this work by completing an 8-hole drill program for additional metallurgical work. Assay results of the drilling campaign are pending and will be reported in due course.

The Project comprises a 283.5 hectare mining concession, including surface rights, with an environmental and water discharge permit in full force and effect. The permits allow for the dewatering of the mine workings and rehabilitation of the access to the deposit.

Agreement Summary

The Letter of Intent ("LOI") dated March 16, 2018, certain portions of which are not binding and are subject to completion of due diligence and definitive transaction agreements (the "Transaction Agreement"), provides Explorex with the option to either (i) acquire a 91% interest in the Finnish company that owns the Hautalampi project; or (ii) enter into an earn in arrangement with the shareholders of the Finnish company over a maximum of 3 years to acquire a 91% interest. In either possible scenario, the vendors have the option to retain a 9% carried interest or convert the 9% carried interest to a 1.5% net metals royalty with Explorex acquiring the full 100% interest in the Finnish company. Explorex paid an aggregate of USD$50,000 (non-refundable) to the sellers on signing of the LOI.

On signing the LOI, Explorex will have a 90-day due diligence period to perform a comprehensive review of the technical data and evaluate the Project prior to committing to the transaction. Upon completion of the due diligence period and signing of the Transaction Agreement, Explorex will commit to fund an updated feasibility study and release the full details of the transaction terms once ratified. The Transaction Agreement will contain the definitive terms to acquire the Hautalampi project, which may be an all cash purchase or may be a combination of cash and shares of Explorex.

Final acceptance of the LOI is subject to terms and conditions customary to a deal of this nature, including regulatory acceptance and board approvals.

Project Background

The project is located 2 km SW of the town centre of Outokumpu, which is 45 km NW of the regional city of Joensuu, and 375 km NE of Helsinki in south eastern Finland. Infrastructure, labour supply and contractor availability in the immediate area is excellent due to extensive and nearby historic mining activity at both the Keretti poly-metallic mine and Vuonos copper mine. These historic mines gave rise to the Finnish stainless steel and mineral processing technology company, Outokumpu Oyj and Outotec Oyj. Year-round access is provided by a paved road running through the centre of the property, with a number of high voltage power lines present.

The Keretti mine, situated within the Project's mining concession, operated from 1913 to 1989 and produced a total of 28.5 Mt grading 3.8% Cu, 0.24% Co, 0.12% Ni, 1.1% Zn, 8.9 ppm Ag and 0.8 ppm Au. The Vuonos mine, located 6 km to the NNE from Keretti, operated from 1972 to 1986 and produced 5.5 Mt of ore grading 2.13% Cu, 1.32% Zn, 0.14% Co, 0.12% Ni and 10 ppm Ag. While these historic mining results have no impact on Hautalampi, they illustrate the extent of historic mining infrastructure in the immediate region.

Hautalampi is the unmined hanging-wall Co-Ni-Cu rich mineralised horizon occurring 150 to 200 metres vertically above the historic Keretti mine.

Geological Setting/Mineralization

The Hautalampi deposit lies within a NE trending 2 km wide horizon of black schists and serpentinite bodies that defines the western margin of the "Outokumpu belt". Mineralisation occurs in tightly folded metamorphic rocks consisting of mainly quartz rocks with anthophyllite-tremolite skarn bands and interlayers with variable amounts of chlorite. In some places the mineralised zone is also hosted by skarned dolomitic rocks. Minor diopside can occur with other skarn minerals. Mineralisation mainly occurs as disseminations in bands due to metamorphosis.

Some drill holes indicate that in the NW parts, the mineralisation is cut by the present erosion surface. Mineralisation has a 10 - 55 dip to the SE (averages 25-30). The main part of the mineralisation is some 70-120 m below surface and the deepest parts are 150 m below surface. Maximum thickness of the mineralization is up to 30 m.

Mining in Finland

Finland consistently ranks in the top three of the Fraser Institute's top global mining investment survey and is highly ranked as an underexplored, stable jurisdiction. Finland only opened its borders to foreign mining investment in the mid-1990s, prior to which all mining and exploration activities were conducted by state-controlled entities. Finland stands out for its expanding mining sector within the EU where mining has generally declined over the years. With the EU becoming increasingly concerned about dependency on imports for key raw materials, Finland offers a potential pipeline of supply security.

The scientific and technical disclosure in this news release has been supervised and approved by J. Harrop P.Geo., a Qualified Person as that term is defined in NI 43-101.

About Explorex Resources Inc.

Explorex is an exploration company that has an option agreement to acquire 100% in the Cobalt-Paragon project, located within the Cobalt Embayment region of north-eastern Ontario and is also earning a 70% interest in the Kagoot Brook Cobalt target in New Brunswick. The cobalt projects form a nucleus of a strategy to acquire additional projects where the commodity focus is on metals critical to rechargeable battery technology. The Company also owns 100% of the Silver Dollar project, subject to issuance of an additional 800,000 shares.

On behalf of the Board,

Gary Schellenberg,

CEO

For further information, please contact Gary Schellenberg, CEO or Mike Sieb, President at 604-681-0221 or Ron Birch at bircress@shaw.ca; phone 1-800-910-7711

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 press release.

Except for historical information contained herein, this news release contains forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially and there are no assurances that the transaction described in this news release will close on the terms described or at all. Except as required pursuant to applicable securities laws, the Company will not update these forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date hereof. More detailed information about potential factors that could affect financial results is included in the documents filed from time to time with the Canadian securities regulatory authorities by the Company. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward looking statements.PPG (NYSE:PPG) today announced the completion of a COLORFUL COMMUNITIES project in Wuppertal, Barmen, Germany, that helped revitalize a house for "Treffpunkt fur Alleinerziehende" (Meeting Point for Single Parents). The Colorful Communities program provides PPG volunteers and products along with financial contributions to bring color and vitality to communities where the company operates around the world, such as in Wuppertal, where PPG has an automotive OEM coatings facility.

The project brought together more than 40 PPG volunteers, who spent three days revitalizing a small house that serves as a meeting point for single parents facing difficult life circumstances. PPG provided $27,050 and 53 gallons of SIGMA COATINGS paint products to assist with the project.

"Treffpunkt fur Alleinerziehende" helps single parents and their children transition back to their normal lives after a divorce, death or other life situation. The facility is open to all parents and their children, who receive support from trained social workers and have the opportunity to meet others in similar situations. More than 100 people who use the organization's services each year will benefit from the Colorful Communities project.

Volunteers painted the meeting house's walls, window frames, doors and playhouse in a color palette of green, yellow and orange. These colors were chosen to create a welcoming, bright and encouraging space.

"PPG is pleased to support the mission of 'Meeting Point for Single Parents' to help families in our community," said Heiko Stuhl, PPG plant manager, Wuppertal. "I am also proud of the dedication, creativity and enthusiasm of our employee volunteers, who made this project a reality. It was an amazing experience from start to finish."

The Colorful Communities program, PPG's signature initiative for supporting communities, aims to protect and beautify the neighborhoods where PPG operates around the world. Through the Colorful Communities program, PPG's committed volunteers contribute their time and PPG paint products to help transform community assets from painting classrooms, to bringing color to a maternity ward and redesigning a playground. Since 2015, PPG has completed more than 125 Colorful Communities projects, impacting more than 4 million people in 23 countries.

PPG and the PPG Foundation aim to bring color and brightness to PPG communities around the world. We invested more than $10.5 million in 2017, supporting hundreds of community organizations across 29 countries. By investing in educational opportunities, we help grow today's skilled workforce and develop tomorrow's innovators in fields related to coatings and manufacturing. Plus, we empower PPG employees to multiply their impact for causes that are important to them by supporting their volunteer efforts and charitable giving. Learn more at www.ppgcommunities.com.

PPG: WE PROTECT AND BEAUTIFY THE WORLD

At PPG (NYSE:PPG), we work every day to develop and deliver the paints, coatings and materials that our customers have trusted for more than 130 years. Through dedication and creativity, we solve our customers' biggest challenges, collaborating closely to find the right path forward. With headquarters in Pittsburgh, we operate and innovate in more than 70 countries and reported net sales of $14.8 billion in 2017. We serve customers in construction, consumer products, industrial and transportation markets and aftermarkets. To learn more, visit www.ppg.com.

We protect and beautify the world and Colorful Communities are trademarks and the PPG Logo is a registered trademark of PPG Industries Ohio, Inc.

Sigma Coatings is a trademark of PPG Coatings Nederland B.V.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180322005113/en/

Contacts:

PPG Media Contact:

Ken Armistead, +44 1924 354848

PPG Corporate Communications, EMEA

EMEACommunications@ppg.com

www.ppgcommunities.comOXFORD, England, March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Peking University, the leading institution of higher education in China, will mark its 120 anniversary this year with a series of celebrations highlighting its rich history and its dedication to teaching, learning, innovation, and research. The anniversary will start with festivities on its first offshore campus in Oxford, England. The kick-off event overseas will run from March 23 to 25 featuring an academic symposium, inauguration ceremony of its UK Campus, and the inauguration of the Peking University Alumni Finance Association London.

The two-day academic symposium will be a highlight of PKU's 120th anniversary celebratory events and a significant platform for Sino-British academic exchange. Scholars from the UK and China will discuss contemporary issues across a variety of fields, and the schedule will include Nobel Laureates Thomas Sargent and Sir John Gurdon's lectures and discussions. A sampling of topics ranging from research fields of international relations, science and technology, economics, and globalization includes "Why Should Governments Pay Their Debts?", "Cell Replacement Therapy in Humans," "Preventing Systematic Financial Crisis in China," " Humans Are Always in the Making," and "R&D at Peking University ."

Professor Wen Hai, the founding dean of PHBS and vice chairman of the Peking University Council will preside over the inauguration ceremony on March 25. President of Peking University Jianhua Lin will deliver a keynote speech for the inauguration. President Lin considered the opening of UK Campus a turning point for Peking University and China's higher education. By taking this initiative, he hopes it can further strengthen the university's international reputation and bolster its research and teaching capabilities. Supporting dignitaries scheduled to participate include China Ambassador to the UK Xiaoming Liu and representatives of the U.K. government.

The UK campus began operations this spring and mainly serves students from the UK and Europe. Students spend their first year on the UK Campus and their second year on PKU Shenzhen campus. Additionally, all students enrolled in the Shenzhen program can apply to spend one semester studying at the UK campus. As the initiator of this overseas campus, Peking University HSBC Business School (PHBS) in Shenzhen, China, undertakes the main administration duties of the UK Campus.

Professor Wen Hai remarked that "this new campus is instrumental in facilitating further academic exchanges among China, UK and Europe." The overseas celebration with the UK Campus inauguration in Oxford is an essential event on Peking University's 120th Anniversary calendar, as the UK campus is a major milestone in the development of internationalized offerings for one of China's oldest and most prestigious institutions, as well as a beacon of current global developments with China playing an increasingly influential role in the global economy."

About Peking University and PHBS

Founded in 1898, Peking University was originally known as the Imperial University of Peking before it adopted its present name in 1912. It was the first national university covering comprehensive disciplines in China and has been a leading institution of highereducation in China since its establishment.Peking University is a member of the C9 League, analogous to the Ivy League in the United States. In 2017, Peking University was ranked the best university in China by Chinese Universities Alumni Association (CUAA) for the 11th consecutive year. According to Times Higher Education, Peking University ranked 27th in the 2018 world university rankings.

Peking University HSBC Business School (PHBS) was founded in 2004 to advance PKU's involvement in global economics, finance and management research. Promoting its international purview, classes in the school's full-time master's degree and full-time MBA programs are conducted in English. Nearly half of the faculty are international. Located in Shenzhen (just north of Hong Kong), PHBS brings Peking University's historical presence and first-tier business education programs to the country's south and benefits from the dynamic and entrepreneurial spirit of the thriving city. PHBS is accredited by EPAS and is in the final process of AACSB accreditation, the hallmark of excellence in business education.

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/657436/Peking_University.jpgMGX is Moving to Wall Street: It's Time for Transition and Monetization



ZURICH, SWITZERLAND / ACCESSWIRE / March 22, 2018 / Looking to develop large-scale lithium and petrolithium projects, today MGX Minerals Inc. (CSE: XMG; OTCQB: MGXMF; Frankfurt: 1MG) announced the engagement of investment bank Capstone Headwaters LLC, indicating the time of traditional lithium processing may be nearing an end as the company's breakthrough technology is poised to eclipse solar evaporation with nano-filtration.

MGX's disruptive expansion plans are now backed by one of the most experienced and best connected resource firms on Wall Street.

As MGX prepares for commercial deployment of its rapid lithium extraction system and the simultaneous advancement of its world-class magnesium project, the emerging greentech conglomerate has partnered up with one of the largest independent investment banks in the US to advise and finance MGX's lithium, magnesium and energy projects.

The leading middle market investment bank will assist in monetizing MGX's diverse assets focussed on advanced materials, energy commodities and energy technology.

Strictly speaking, it's about driving shareholder value by deploying its rapid extraction technology and entering the lithium space, synchronously monetizing its project portfolio with the right strategic partners. Capstone Headwaters has been engaged, and is committed to play a key role during this exciting time of transition and monetization.

The full report can be accessed with the following links:

English: http://rockstone-research.com/index.php/en/research-reports/4433-MGX-Set-to-Alter-Lithium-Landscape,-Partners-with-Investment-Bank-Heavyweight-Capstone-Headwaters

German: http://rockstone-research.com/index.php/de/research-reports/4434-MGX-veraendert-die-Lithium-Landschaft,-verbuendet-sich-mit-Investmentbank-Schwergewicht-Capstone-Headwaters

Disclaimer: Please read the full disclaimer within the full research report as fundamental risks and conflicts of interest exist.

SOURCE: Rockstone Research



BRUSSELS (dpa-AFX) - At 5.30 am ET Thursday, the Office for National Statistics releases UK retail sales data. Sales are forecast to rise 0.3 percent on month in February, faster than the 0.1 percent rise seen in January. Before the data, the pound traded mixed against its major counterparts. While the pound rose against the euro, it held steady against the rest of major rivals. The pound was worth 149.67 against the yen, 1.3415 against the franc, 0.8716 against the euro and 1.4163 against the greenback at 5:25 am ET. 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.LALPINA Hydrogen CBD also expected to be a part of same GNC pilot program

PLAYA VISTA, CA / ACCESSWIRE / March 22, 2018 / American Premium Water Corporation (OTC PINK: HIPH) ("APWC") announces that its LALPINA Hydrogen has established distribution in General Nutrition Center (GNC).

LALPINA Hydrogen, as part of a pilot program, is currently available for sale at two southern California locations; GNC Walnut, CA located at 20687 Amar Road and GNC Rancho Cucamonga, located at 10768 Foothill Boulevard.

GNC, one of the world's largest vendors of health and nutritional products, with over 4600 outlets in the US and 1900 international stores. California is the nation's largest market for bottled water products according to the Beverage Marketing Company. The greater-Los Angeles areas is the largest market in the state, and this pilot program positions LALPINA Hydrogen for distribution in all 102 GNC locations in the region.

"GNC is key account for us going forward, and I'm happy that we can include them in our initial rollout of LALPINA Hydrogen. I am confident that the product will be well received in these two locations and this will open the door for other locations across the Los Angeles area, California, and other states and cities nationwide. I've always viewed GNC as the standard for health supplements and nutrition, and I'm pleased that LALPINA Hydrogen will be side by side with other leading nutritional products." commented Ryan Fishoff, CEO American Premium Water Corporation.

Mr. Fishoff continued, "Getting placement into GNC is part of a larger wholesale distribution strategy that we will be rolling out in the coming months. Our Gents subsidiary is sold in over 200 outlets, and we will look to sell LALPINA in some of these outlets, including LALPINA CBD, which I think will be attractive to some of our boutique accounts. I just arrived back from China setting our new Gents JV over there, and I see tremendous potential for LALPINA there as well. We can use the Gents JV partnership to establish a base for LALPINA in that country. GNC has a large presence in China, and with their announcement of a joint venture with Harbin Pharmaceutical (SHA: 600664), there is lots of growth opportunity. Cross-selling accounts are part of the synergies that we anticipated when Gents was brought into HIPH. It's good to see the early positive results from what we planned back in 2017."

The Company is still expected to start selling its LALPINA Hydrogen CBD product by the end of June or sooner. LALPINA Hydrogen CBD contains Cannabinoid oil, or CBD, a hemp extract that is legal for sale in all 50 states which has many therapeutic benefits. LALPINA HYDROGEN CBD prototype was delivered in Jan 2018 Currently no other hydrogen infused CBD energy drink exists in the market. Hydrogen infusion allows for greater and quicker absorption of CBD into the body HIPH intends to follow the same plan launching LALPINA Hydrogen CBD in GNC pilot program later this year.

"We expect that once LALPINA Hydrogen CBD is ready for release, we will do the same GNC pilot program for the product. In my opinion, Southern California will be the most important market for LALPINA Hydrogen CBD. HIPH is the front-runner in this category. Getting this product into GNC along with the major marijuana dispensaries is our two-pronged strategy to grow the category and our market share. This will create a solid foundation for the product that we will look to expand to other markets nationwide in coordination with our e-commerce and Amazon initiatives" concluded Mr. Fishoff.

Please follow us on our social media outlets listed below:



@americanpremium

@lalpinabrands

@GentsCo

Gentsco

lalpinahydrogen

For more information on American Premium Water Corporation / HIPH, go to http://www.lalpinahydrogen.com/investor-page.html

Gents

The New York-based Gents is a producer of luxury hats and other fine accessories and apparel. Their line is carried in over 200 retail outlets internationally, including Bloomingdale's (M), Nordstrom (JWN), and Saks Fifth Avenue (HBC).

Visit www.gentsco.com to learn more. https://www.gentsco.com

@GentsCo

GentsCo

Safe Harbor Notice

Certain statements contained herein are "forward-looking statements" (as defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995). American Premium Water Corporation cautions that statements made in this news release constitute forward-looking statements and makes no guarantee of future performance. Forward-looking statements are based on estimates and opinions of management at the time statements are made. These statements may address issues that involve significant risks, uncertainties, estimates and assumptions made by management. Actual results could differ materially from current projections or implied results. American Premium Water Corporation undertakes no obligation to revise these statements following the date of this news release. Additional details of the Company's business can be found in its public disclosures as a reporting issuer under the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission's ("SEC") EDGAR database.

This press release is issued on behalf of the Board of Directors by Alfred Culbreth, Founder /Director.

Disclaimer Regarding Forward Looking Statements

Certain statements in this press release, on American Premium Water Corporation's ("APWC") website and other oral and written statements made by APWC from time to time are "forward-looking statements", as that term is defined in Section 27A of the United States Securities and Exchange Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E of the United States Securities and Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, Forward-looking statements include, without limitation, statements regarding beliefs, objectives, intentions, goals, plans, strategies, financial projections, any other statements regarding the future and any statements that are not purely historical. These statements are only predictions and involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors that may cause our actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Given these uncertainties, you should not place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements speak only as of the date on which they are made, and APWC expressly disclaims any obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date thereof. All forward-looking statements, whether written or oral and whether made by or on behalf of the APWC, are expressly qualified by these cautionary statements. Forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties which could cause actual results or outcomes to differ materially from those expressed in the forward-looking statements. APWC's expectations, beliefs, and projections are expressed in good faith and are believed by the APWC to have a reasonable basis, but there can be no assurance that management's expectations, beliefs or projections will result or be achieved or accomplished. A variety of factors, many of which are beyond APWC's control affect APWC's operations, performance, business strategy, and results and could cause the actual results, performance or achievements of APWC to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements that may be expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. For APWC, particular uncertainties arise, amongst others but not limited to and not in any order of importance, from (i) focusing on and allocating more resources on certain target markets (ii) the possibility to raise further equity and debt to fund future growth, (iii) changes in demand for APWC's products, (iv) performance issues with key suppliers, affiliates, agents, advisors or subcontractors, (v) changes in government changes in laws or regulations to which APWC or its suppliers are subject, including environmental laws and regulations relating to water or water sources and (vi) the inability to complete announced acquisitions, difficulty or unanticipated expenses in connection with integrating acquired businesses and the risk that anticipated synergies and opportunities as a result of acquisitions will not be realized or the risk that acquisitions do not perform as planned, including, for example, the risk that acquired businesses will not achieve revenue projections.

THIS NEWS RELEASE HAS BEEN PREPARED BY APWC'S MANAGEMENT, WHO TAKES FULL RESPONSIBILITY FOR ITS CONTENTS. NO SECURITIES REGULATORY AUTHORITY HAS APPROVED OR DISAPPROVED OF THE CONTENTS OF THIS NEWS RELEASE. THIS NEWS 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 JURISDICTION IN WHICH SUCH OFFER, SOLICITATION OR SALE WOULD BE UNLAWFUL PRIOR TO REGISTRATION OR QUALIFICATION UNDER THE SECURITIES LAWS OF ANY SUCH JURISDICTION.

Contact Information:

American Premium Water Corporation

12777 Jefferson Blvd.

Suite 300

Playa Vista, CA 90066-7408

(888)-983-0054

Stock Symbol: HIPH

General Inquiries: info@americanpremiumwater.com

Investor Relations: ir@americanpremiumwater.com

Company Website: http://www.lalpinahydrogen.com/investor-page.html

Twitter: @americanpremium, @lalpinawater

Instagram: lalpinahydrogen

SOURCE: American Premium Water CorporationOne in Five Global Business Travellers Skip Leisure Additions to Business Trips Due to Employer Perception

LONDON, March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --Egencia, a leading global travel management company, today announced findings from the Egencia 2018 Bleisure Trends study uncovers the trends, behaviours and motivators behind bleisure travel - tacking on leisure portions to business trips. Polling 9,000 Egencia users across North America, Asia Pacific and Europe, the study illustrates that while bleisure travel is on the rise, employer perception, destination and proximity to the weekend all play into the bleisure decision-making process.

Perception and policy matter in business travel, with high attention paid to the optics of the practice. Twenty percent of business travellers have foregone adding leisure portions to their trips because of how it may look to their employer. Business travellers in Asia are the most conscious of this at 32 percent, with North America and Europe following at 20 percent and 15 percent, respectively.

"The insight that many business travellers have skipped bleisure trips due to employer perception reveals an opportunity for differentiation in the race for top talent," said Wendy White, vice president of marketing at Egencia. "With more companies today prioritising work-life balance, it may be time to start including bleisure in your travel program to invest in employees and encourage them to make every trip count."

Proximity to the weekend may minimise that perception, with nearly one-quarter of respondents saying this impacts their decision. Of those who take the bleisure dive, less than two percent globally have billed back bleisure expenses to their companies.

Additional findings include: a majority (55 percent) of Egencia global business travellers take less than six business trips per year on average, and 68 percent take at least one bleisure trip per year.

When it comes to activities, the destination and sight-seeing are top of mind:

Destination location is by far the biggest factor in determining whether or not to take a bleisure trip, with 30 percent of North America business travellers prioritising location, compared to 25 percent in the EU and Asia .

business travellers prioritising location, compared to 25 percent in the EU and . Proximity to the weekend and proximity to friends and family came in a close second and third for global respondents, at 23 percent and 16 percent respectively.

Sight-seeing is the most popular bleisure activity for business travellers across all regions.

Bleisure is Well-Planned:

Seventy-four percent of North American business travellers are either planning or considering a bleisure trip in the next 6 months, compared to 87 percent in Asia and 68 percent in Europe .

and 68 percent in . Half of Asia business travellers are planning a bleisure trip this year, compared to 41 percent of North Americans and 32 percent or Europeans.

business travellers are planning a bleisure trip this year, compared to 41 percent of North Americans and 32 percent or Europeans. Bleisure trips are a big 2018 resolution: 37 percent of Asia business travellers, 25 percent of Europeans and 20 percent of North Americans made it one of theirs.

To help you make the most out of your next bleisure trip, check out the city guides from our Top 100 Preferred Corporate Hotel awards program.

About Egencia

Egencia makes every business trip count for travellers and travel managers. The travel management company's industry-leading technology platform simplifies the process of planning, booking and managing business travel. Relying on timely, data-driven insights from Egencia, businesses stay one step ahead by making choices that align with traveller preference and corporate policy. A dedicated team of travel consultants is ready to assist every step of the way, whenever and wherever needed. Egencia serves small, mid-cap and multi-national companies in more than 65 countries. To connect with Egencia, visit egencia.com or find us @EgenciaUK and LinkedIn. Follow along on our blog.

 2018 Egencia LLC. All rights reserved. Egencia, and the Egencia logo are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Expedia, Inc. in the U.S. and/or other countries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Logo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/149261/egencia__an_expedia__inc__company.jpgTrading revenues at IG Group surged 30% in a record quarter for the online broker thanks to a high level of client activity. Net trading revenue of 152.9m was swelled by 35% growth in UK over-the-counter leveraged trading, 25% from Europe, Middle East and Africa and 29% from the Asia Pacific region. The much smaller US operations saw revenues up 9%, while the nascent share dealing arm grew revenues 77% to 1.1m. OTC leveraged revenue per client of 1,482 in the quarter was 25% higher than ...

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.HONG KONG, March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- More than 1,800 educators and staff members from the global network of Yew Chung International Schools (YCIS) and sister schools, Yew Wah International Education Schools (YWIES), gathered at six cities around China on March 15 and 16 to focus on the future of education at conferences marking the 85th anniversary of the schools' founding.

YCIS and YWIES are the largest privately-run international education group in China, with a network of kindergartens, schools, and a college catering to over 10,000 students across 20 locations in mainland China, Hong Kong, and Silicon Valley, US.

The two-day conference, the group's largest ever, was held concurrently in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Beijing, Qingdao, Chongqing and Yantai. The theme, "Reinvention: The Future Beckons", focused on the changes to education required to keep up with ever-increasing advancements in technology, in areas such as artificial intelligence.

The theme also represents YCIS' stated mission to pioneer educational pedagogy through the introduction of "Learning Communities" and a focus on global competencies.

YCIS & YWIES CEO and School Supervisor Dr Betty Chan opened the conference, saying "'Reinvention' is precisely our call to action. This is our opportunity to reinvent education. As we gather here to celebrate our 85th anniversary, we come together to lay the future direction for the education of our children. The existing pedagogy, methodologyand content should be modified to equip the next generation so that they will become the leaders of tomorrow."

Several education specialists were invited to share their expertise at the conference. According to Dr Troy Lui, Chief Education Officer at Yew Chung and Yew Wah Schools, "If schools want to rethink the direction of education, it is not enough to rely solely on past experience. It is imperative to consult scholars and experts to understand the latest research results and practical experience."

The keynote speakers at the conference included:

Dr Stephanie Sanders-Smith , Assistant Professor of Early Childhood Education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign .

, Assistant Professor of Early Childhood Education at the . Dr Nathan Holbert , Assistant Professor of Communication, Media, and Learning Technologies Design at Teachers College, Columbia University .

, Assistant Professor of Communication, Media, and Learning Technologies Design at . Dr May Liu , Senior Lecturer at Singapore Centre for Chinese Language, Nanyang Technological University , and Adjunct Lecturer in Early Childhood Education at Singapore University of Social Sciences.

The speeches included insights from an intensive independent research project which highlighted how the new model of education at YCIS positively impacts young learners' development through its student-centred Learning Community approach, and also focused on the importance for children to leverage computational power through access to meaningful interaction with technology.

Throughout the event, workshops and panel discussions served to augment the continuous professional development provided for educators at YCIS. Video and conferencing links allowed for inter-city and cross-regional idea exchange. Following in-depth discussion and debate, tactical implementation ideas for new learnings were proposed across the school network.

"This conference affirmed that our schools are taking the lead in 21stcentury teaching methodology," Dr Lui added. "We've already implemented teaching methods which prepare children to be successful in navigating the unknown challenges they will face in the coming decades. We aim to be a shining example for educators worldwide through our forward-thinking approach."

More information about the Yew Chung network of schools can be found at www.ycef.com and ycis-schools.com.

About YCIS:

Founded in 1932 by Madam Tsang Chor-hang, Yew Chung has provided quality bilingually-focused education for 85 years. The global YCIS network provides international education for early childhood, primary, and secondary students.

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/657538/YCIS_CEO_Dr_Betty_Chan.jpg

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/657539/YCIS_Educators_Conference_Teachers_QA.jpg

Photo - https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/657540/YCIS_Keynote_speaker_feedback.jpgLAGOS, Nigeria, March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

More than 150,000 Africansfrom 114 countries worldwide applied to join the 4thcycle of The Tony Elumelu Foundation's (TEF) 10-year, $100 million TEF Entrepreneurship Programme. Today, the Foundation announcedthe African entrepreneurswith the most innovative, high-potential business ideas.

The 2018 cohortincludes an additional 250 entrepreneurs to the standard selection of 1,000 -thanks to a $1,000,000 partnership with the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to support 200 entrepreneurs in conflict and fragile zones of Nigeria(theNorth East where the Boko Haram scourge is felt and the Niger Delta region which suffers environmental degradation from oil spillage)a $200,000 agreement with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) to support 40 pan-African entrepreneurs and a $50,000 partnership with Indorama to support 10 Nigerians.

TEF Founder, Tony O. Elumelu, CON,commented:"The number and quality of applicants, 151,000in total, was outstanding - it illustrates the strength and depth of entrepreneurial promise and commitment onour continent. Selection is never easy, and we profoundly regret that we cannot help all.Our partnerships with the Red Cross, UNDP and Indorama, alongside ongoing discussions with other international organizations, reflect the growing global recognition of what we have known all along - that entrepreneurship is the most effectivepath to sustainable development on our continent and our Programmeis the model to follow."

There was a near 50-50 split between male and female applications, reflecting the entrepreneurial ambition of Africa's women. Agriculture was the leading sector among selected entrepreneurs at 30.5%, followed by technology (10.5%) and education & training (7%).

TEF CEO, Parminder Vir OBE,said: "Over the next nine months, the entrepreneurs will receive online training and mentoring,and will use the skills acquired to develop business plans prior toreceiving $5,000* in seed capital. This will bringTEF's totalProgrammeinvestment so far to$15million in direct funding to entrepreneurs and $5.8million in Programme & technology development andoperations."

"Our beneficiaries have createdmore than 55,000 jobsand counting,and will convene from across all of Africa's 54 countries to Lagos this October for the TEFForum - the largest gathering of African entrepreneurs in the world."

For a list of the selected 2018 Tony Elumelu Entrepreneurs and information on our applicants, please visit http://www.tonyelumelufoundation.org

*$5,000 seed capital is calculatedon the official Central Bank of Nigeria naira equivalent value at the date of selection for the programme.REHOVOT, Israel, March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

Kanabo Research, a Tel-Aviv-based medical cannabis R&D company, announced that it has signed a partnership agreement with Jupiter Research, an innovative manufacturer of high-performance inhalation hardware and technology for plant based extracts.

(Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/657554/KANABO_Mark_and_Avihu.jpg )



The partnership agreement was officially signed during the CannTech conference held this week in Tel Aviv with the presence of senior officials from Jupiter, visiting from Phoenix, Arizona.

As part of the strategic partnership, Kanabo licensed Jupiter's L9 vaporizer platform under the VapePod brand. Kanabo and Jupiter collaborated to fine tune the vaporizer for medical use, and then Kanabo worked to have VapePod approved as a medical device by the Israeli Ministry of Health. Kanabo Research has the exclusive rights to distribute the certified VapePod in Israel, Europe, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand.

Jupiter Research has developed three superior vaporizer platforms that utilize CCELL ceramic core technology for unparalleled vapor performance. Jupiter's vaporizers are preferred by leading companies, and are sold in the US market and globally. Due to their high quality vaporizers, the company has achieved explosive growth.

Moving forward, Kanabo and Jupiter will work together to research and develop the next generation of "smart" vaporizers for the global medical cannabis market.

"Our partnership agreement with Jupiter Research is an important strategic step in Kanabo's global expansion," said Avihu Tamir, Founder and CEO of Kanabo Research. "Jupiter's superior technology and high presence in the US market combined with our medical validation and formulation capabilities in Israel will allow us to create a suitable infrastructure for rapid growth and accelerate our entry into new markets."

"Through years of research, development and testing, we've developed a product that meets the demands of today's medical consumer. We are honored to partner with Kanabo Research to bring the VapePod to market, featuring revolutionary CCELL technology," said Mark Scatterday, President of Jupiter Research.

It should also be noted that the Israeli Ministry of Health has granted initial approval as a medical device to Kanabo's VapePod vaporizer. This action makes Israel the first county in the world to grant medical device approval to a vaporizer for the use of medical cannabis extracts and formulations.

www.jupiterresearch.comFollowing are the latest Corporate Social Responsibility news releases and story ideas available from Business Wire. These recaps, curated by Business Wire, provide reporters and bloggers around the globe instant access to the latest news releases, providing relevant and trending content to share with their audiences. Discover more news via Business Wire's Hot Topic recaps or create a custom news feed specific to your needs here. This service is provided at no charge to members of the media and financial communities.

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180322005272/en/

DAYTON, Ohio -- Dayton Power and Light Awards Three $25,000 Community Environmental Grants to Enhance Area Cities Source: The Dayton Power and Light Company

SALISBURY, N.C. -- Food Lion Feeds Launches Meal Madness Social Media Campaign Among Food Bank Partners Source: Food Lion

DALLAS -- Walgreens Expands ItEndsWithUs Campaign to Educate Texas Teens on Opioid Awareness Source: Walgreens

CINCINNATI -- New Documentary Raises Global Water Crisis Awareness As 844 Million People Still Lack Access to Clean Drinking Water Source: Procter Gamble

NEW YORK PITTSBURGH -- Cintas Corporation Selected as Inaugural Recipient of Evoqua Water Sustainability Award Source: Evoqua Water Technologies

ROANOKE, Va. -- UnitedHealthcare Donates Hasbro's NERF ENERGY Game Kits to Boys Girls Clubs of Southwest Virginia Source: UnitedHealthcare

PARIS -- CONQUEST Group Announced the Expansion of its Asset Management Business with the Appointment of Philippe Taillardat to the Role of Director Source: CONQUEST Group

LINCOLN, Neb. -- Arbor Day Foundation and Publix Collaborating to Protect the Natural Waters of Florida Source: Publix

HOUSTON -- UnitedHealthcare Donates Hasbro's NERF ENERGY Game Kits to Boys Girls Clubs of Greater Houston Source: UnitedHealthcare

LOS ANGELES -- TriLinc Global Impact Fund Makes Impact Investments in Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia Source: TriLinc Global Impact Fund

BELLEVUE, Wash. -- Symetra Awards Top Honor for Community Service to Delois Howell Source: Symetra Financial Corporation

WATERBURY, Vt. -- Laughing Man Coffee and Hugh Jackman Inspire Consumers to 'Make Every Cup Count' in Support of Coffee Farming Communities Source: Keurig Green Mountain, Inc.

SALISBURY, N.C. -- Food Lion Feeds to Partner with Local Meals on Wheels Feeding Agencies to Help Feed Seniors Source: Food Lion

Follow the CSR Circuit newsfeed on www.twitter.com/BWCSRNews

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Matt VanTassel, 212-752-9600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.X-Analytics Powers Objective Cyber-Risk Underwriting Decisions and Cyber-Insurance Portfolio Growth

Following on the heels of an at-capacity event at the U.S. Embassy, Secure Systems Innovation Corporation (SSIC), a cyber risk management firm with a patented method for measuring and modeling cyber risk, X-Analytics, will present today at the Cyber Insurer and Broker Assembly.

In his presentation, Robert Vescio, inventor of X-Analytics, will highlight the use of cyber-risk economics to define, measure, and manage financial exposure related to cyber insurance.

WHO: Robert Vescio, Inventor of X-Analytics and Chief Analytics Officer at SSIC WHAT: "Measuring Cyber-Risk Exposure to Unlock the Insurance Industry's Cyber-Risk Capacity" at Cyber Insurer Broker Assembly BACKGROUND: While understanding and quantifying cyber risk is a top priority and challenge for the insurance industry, it is also extremely challenging. The lack of metrics related to cyber risk amplifies fear and misunderstanding. One of the leading experts in the emerging field of cyber-risk economics, Vescio will demonstrate how analysis and measurement of the economic impact of cyber risk enables insurers, brokers, and reinsurers to make objective cyber-risk underwriting decisions. Vescio will be joined by a leading global insurer to discuss how more accurate valuation of known cyber-risk exposures inside large businesses can help insurers manage their exposure levels and grow their cyber-insurance portfolios. WHEN: March 22, 2018 at 14:30 GMT WHERE: etc.venues Fenchurch Street 8 Fenchurch Place London EC3M 4PB MEDIA CONTACT: Brianna Carroll Boyle +1-301-502-9012 bboyle@securesystemscorp.com

About SSIC

Based in the Washington, D.C. area, Secure Systems Innovation Corporation (SSIC) is a cyber risk management firm that informs strategic decision making. Its innovative, patented method for measuring and modeling cyber risk, X-Analytics, objectively expresses the economics of cyber risk. SSIC is changing how executives and boards understand and manage cyber risk. For more information, please visit https://www.securesystemscorp.com

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180322005627/en/

Contacts:

Secure Systems Innovation Corporation

Brianna Carroll Boyle, +1-301-502-9012

bboyle@securesystemscorp.comThere has been a slump. While international tourism arrivals worldwide increased 7 percent in 2017  a seven-year high  the United States is missing out on that boom, according to the U.N. World Tourism Organization. Data from the U.S. Commerce Departments National Travel and Tourism Office show international arrivals to the United States fell 3.8 percent during the first three quarters of 2017, compared with the same period in 2016.

Tourism is Americas second-largest export and a $1.54 trillion a year industry. The drop in international arrivals to U.S. destinations translated to $4.6 billion in lost spending and 40,000 jobs in November 2017, compared with the year before, according to research from the U.S. Travel AssociationLONDON (dpa-AFX) - Policymakers of the Bank of England decided to leave the benchmark rate unchanged in a split vote on Thursday. At the rate-setting meeting, the Monetary Policy Committee, governed by Mark Carney, voted 7-2 to maintain the benchmark rate at 0.50 percent. The bank had previously raised its key rate in November 2017, which was the first hike in a decade. Ian McCafferty and Michael Saunders preferred a quarter point rate hike. Policymakers unanimously decided to maintain the quantitative easing at GBP 435 billion. All members agree that any future increases in bank rate are likely to be at a gradual pace and to a limited extent. 'Seven members thought that the current policy stance remained appropriate to balance the demands of the MPC's remit,' the bank said in the statement. 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.The Foundation's Advisory Council Includes Dr. Jacob Frenkel, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the G30 and of JPMorgan Chase International, and Prof. Myron Scholes, Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences

The Saga Foundation (saga.org) announces today its mission to create Saga (SGA), the first non-anonymous blockchain-based digital currency. The currency is designed with a tamed volatility mechanism. These characteristics can set the ground for the currency to become a store of value and a medium of exchange.

Saga is designed to address legitimate concerns expressed by policy makers, regulators and market participants regarding cryptocurrencies; mainly their anonymity, lack of underlying value and high volatility.

Saga holders must satisfy full KYC (Know Your Customer) qualification and AML (Anti Money Laundering) requirements under Swiss law. With such disclosures, Saga resolves concerns about participant accountability, an issue that is generally raised regarding cryptographic currencies.

Saga aims to promote a low-volatility environment, combining the virtues of blockchain technologies with algorithmic representations of financial tools. For this reason, Saga is backed by a variable fractional reserve that is anchored to the IMF's SDR. These reserves will be deposited with regulated banks through algorithms in the underlying Smart Contract System.

Dr. Jacob Frenkel stated: "While Blockchain technologies have gained growing acceptance, encryptic currencies have raised public policy concerns, since they are anonymous, unbacked, and are highly volatile. I share these concerns and see great value in Saga's vision to address them properly

Prof. Myron Scholes stated: "Blockchain technologies will change financial infrastructure, from a current focus on transactions processing to transactions analyzing. This facilitates more efficient client solutions to their financial problems. The Saga project aims to develop a sustainable and efficient blockchain-based cryptocurrency that I support through becoming a member of its advisory council

Mark Tluszcz, CEO at Mangrove Capital Partners stated: "Saga represents a step change in maturity for digital currencies. The first that combines material benefits to the existing financial system with the potential and needs of the digital world. It's the strongest team in the space and we are delighted to be backing the project."

Saga Foundation's Founder President, Ido Sadeh Man stated: "The creation of Saga is based on interdisciplinary knowledge, permitting the implementation of monetary models to tame volatility and allow regulatory access to participants' identity. We are fortunate to have the involvement and insights of global leaders, who along with the other members of our Advisory Council, are helping us to design the first non-anonymous blockchain-based digital currency

Additional members of the Advisory Council are:

Prof. Dan Galai: Co-Developer of the Chicago Board Options Exchange's Volatility Index (VIX)

Prof. Emin Gun Sirer: Professor Co-Director at the Initiative for Cryptocurrencies and Smart Contracts at Cornell University

Prof. Raz Chen-Morris: Humanities Department Chair at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem

The Saga Foundation is not conducting an ICO. Rather, it enjoys the support of accredited investors, VC's and hedge funds, amongst which are Mangrove Capital Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, The Singulariteam Technology Group and Initial Capital.

About Saga:

Saga Foundation is headquartered in Switzerland, and is governed by Swiss law and regulations, including the rules of the Supervisory Authority of Swiss Foundations ESA and the Financial Market Supervisory Authority FINMA. The purpose of the not for profit Saga Foundation, as defined in its statutes, is: "promoting and developing new technologies and applications, especially in the fields of new open and decentralized software architectures. A dominating but not exclusive focus is set on the promotion and development of the so-called Saga protocol and the related technologies, as well as the promotion and support of applications using the Saga protocol". The Foundation aims tocreate of a digital currency which functions as a means of payment, in order to facilitate a stable global ecosystem. For more information, go to: saga.org

Press Inquiries:

Email: press@saga.org

Twitter: twitter.com/sagafoundation

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180322005103/en/

Contacts:

Saga Foundation

Roi Carthy

press@saga.orgGBG will distribute men's and women's footwear and manufacture and distribute women's handbags and men's and women's accessories in select territories for the American label

NEW YORK, March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --In an effort to continue global expansion of the brand, Kenneth Cole Productions, Inc. has signed a 4-year agreement with GBG Europe Footwear and Accessories Limited, a United Kingdom corporation, to distribute men's and women's footwear and to manufacture and distribute women's handbags in select countries across Europe, Middle East, and Africa.

The distribution of footwear from the globally recognized Kenneth Cole brand in select cities including London, Paris, Milan, and Berlin, is slated for Fall 2018. There will be a focus on Men's and Women's Kenneth Cole New York and Reaction Kenneth Cole footwear and Women's Gentle Souls footwear. Women's handbags will be manufactured and distributed under the Kenneth Cole New York and Reaction Kenneth Cole labels and will launch for Spring 2019. The agreement also gives GBG Europe Footwear and Accessories Limited the rights to manufacture and distribute briefcases, luggage, portfolios, backpacks, and small leather goods.

"We are looking forward to having a central European based partner who specializes in footwear and is able to offer best in class service to department stores and independent retailers in these regions," stated Marc Schneider, Kenneth Cole Productions Inc.'s Chief Executive Officer. "We are excited about this partnership and the growth opportunities it affords us in these categories of our business."

"Kenneth Cole and his brand had defined the standard for New York style and social consciousness for more than three decades," said Mike Hiscock of Global Brands Group Holding Limited. "We believe that the Kenneth Cole brand has tremendous potential to resonate with consumers far beyond the levels it is currently reaching and we are excited to introduce the product to new customers in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa."

GBG will bring Kenneth Cole's modern footwear designs to the European, Middle Eastern, and African customer through all major retail channels including department stores, independent retailers, and ecommerce. Kenneth Cole Productions and GBG are working with some of Europe's top retailers for a market launch in Fall 2018.

The company has built a strong presence globally through Kenneth Cole owned and operated direct retail business as well as boutiques located within select department stores and specialty retailer locations in North America, as well as through distributor-operated shops in Asia and Latin America.

GBG is part of the Fung Group and manages licensing for several dozen brands including Under Armour, Kenneth Cole, Juicy Couture, Kate Spade New York, Katy Perry, Fiorelli and All Saints.

About Kenneth Cole Productions, Inc.

Kenneth Cole is an American designer, social activist, and visionary who believes business and philanthropy are interdependent. His global company, Kenneth Cole Productions, creates modern, functional, clothing, shoes, and accessories for inspirational urban lifestyles under the brand names Kenneth Cole New York, Kenneth Cole Reaction and Unlisted, as well as footwear under the name Gentle Souls. The company has also granted a wide variety of third party licenses for the production of men's and women's apparel, fragrances, watches, jewelry, eyewear, and several other accessory categories, including children's footwear. The company's products are distributed through department stores, better specialty stores, company-owned retail stores and its e-commerce website. Over 30 years ago, Kenneth Cole leveraged his passion and unique brand platform to make a meaningful impact on people's wardrobes, as well as communities in need. He did what others didn't and said what others wouldn't. Today, The Kenneth Cole Foundation remains committed to helping communities in need by supporting Collective Health, Civil Liberties, and Artistic Activism.

www.kennethcole.com

About Global Brands Group Holding Limited

Global Brands Group Holding Limited (SEHK Stock Code: 787) is one of the world's leading branded apparel, footwear and fashion accessories companies. The Group designs, develops, markets and sells products under a diverse array of owned and licensed brands and a wide range of product categories.

Global Brands' innovative design capabilities, strong brand management focus, and strategic vision enable it to create new opportunities, product categories and market expansion for brands on a global scale. In addition, the Group is the global leader in the brand management business through its joint venture, CAA-GBG Brand Management Group. For more information, please visit the corporate website: www.globalbrandsgroup.com

Logo- https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/73946/kenneth_cole_productions__inc__logo.jpg

Logo- https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/656561/GBG_EUROPE_FOOTWEAR_ACCESSORIES_Logo.jpgNew York, New York--(Newsfile Corp. - March 22, 2018) - NetworkNewsAudio announces the Audio Press Release (APR) titled "Preparation Continues for Expanding Legalized Cannabis Market in Canada," featuring Choom Holdings Inc. (CSE: CHOO) (OTCQB: CHOOF).

To hear the NetworkNewsAudio version, visit: http://nnw.fm/ycF71

To read the original editorial, visit: http://nnw.fm/VmWL8

Choom is going big on investment in the recreational cannabis market, and it's easy to see why. As cited by the Financial Post, Canaccord Genuity forecasts that there will be an estimated 3.8 million recreational and 500,000 medical cannabis users in Canada by 2021. That's more than eight times as many users as exist in the current already profitable and purely medical market. This growth is predicted to create an industry significantly larger than the $5 billion industry in spirits and almost as large as the $7 billion wine industry. Choom's aim is to become a leading retailer within that industry. The company's early start, which includes years of planning and preparing branding, facilities and business strategy, could put it in a strong position to reach that goal. Choom's tactic is to position itself as a purely recreational brand with a line of premium products. It will be a fully integrated company positioned to scale up as needed. As part of this, it intends to develop and acquire positions, brands and products focused specifically on this market. This approach provides contrast with competitors emerging from the medical market.

About Choom

Channeling the spirit of Hawaii in the Okanagan, high-grade handcrafted strains by Choom are all about cultivating good times and good friends. Choom was inspired by the Choom Gang; a group of buddies in Honolulu during the 1970s. Now, after four decades, Choom is bringing the spirit of Hawaii to the Okanagan. The company is planting its flag in the rapidly growing legal cannabis industry in Canada with its own brand of high-grade handcrafted herb. For more information, visit the company's website at www.Choom.ca.

About NetworkNewsAudio

NetworkNewsAudio (NNA) , a NetworkNewsWire (NNW) Solution, allows you to sit back and listen to market updates, CEO interviews and a Company AudioPressRelease (APR). These audio clips provide snapshots of position, opportunity and momentum. NetworkNewsAudio (NNA) is another NetworkNewsWire (NNW) Solution that can assist your company by cutting through the overload of information in today's market, NNA brings its clients unparalleled visibility, recognition and brand awareness. NetworkNewsWire (NNW) is where news, content and information converge. NetworkNewsWire (NNW) is a comprehensive provider of news aggregation and syndication, enhanced press release services and a full array of social communication solutions. As a multifaceted financial news and distribution company with an extensive team of journalists and writers, NNW has the unparalleled ability to reach a wide audience of investors, consumers, journalists and the general public with an ever-growing distribution network of more than 5,000 key syndication outlets across the nation.

For more information, visit: www.NetworkNewsAudio.com

About NetworkNewsWire

NetworkNewsWire (NNW) is a financial news and content distribution company that provides (1) access to a network of wire services via NetworkWire to reach all target markets, industries and demographics in the most effective manner possible, (2) article and editorial syndication to 5,000+ news outlets, (3) enhanced press release services to ensure maximum impact, (4) social media distribution via the Investor Brand Network (IBN) to nearly 2 million followers, (5) a full array of corporate communications solutions, and (6) a total news coverage solution with NNW Prime. As a multifaceted organization with an extensive team of contributing journalists and writers, NNW is uniquely positioned to best serve private and public companies that desire to reach a wide audience of investors, consumers, journalists and the general public. By cutting through the overload of information in today's market, NNW brings its clients unparalleled visibility, recognition and brand awareness. NNW is where news, content and information converge. For more information, please visit https://www.NetworkNewsWire.com.

Please see full terms of use and disclaimers on the NetworkNewsWire website applicable to all content provided by NNW, wherever published or re-published: http://NNW.fm/Disclaimer.

Forward-Looking Statements

This release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended. All forward-looking statements are inherently uncertain as they are based on current expectations and assumptions concerning future events or future performance of the company. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which are only predictions and speak only as of the date hereof. In evaluating such statements, prospective investors should review carefully various risks and uncertainties identified in this release and matters set in the company's SEC filings. These risks and uncertainties could cause the company's actual results to differ materially from those indicated in the forward-looking statements.

Corporate Communications Contact:

NetworkNewsWire (NNW)

New York, New York

www.NetworkNewsWire.com

212.418.1217 Office

Editor@NetworkNewsWire.com

PANAMA (dpa-AFX) - Carnival Corporation & plc (CCL, CUK, CCL.L) said it now expects full year 2018 adjusted earnings per share to be in the range of $4.20 to $4.40 compared to December guidance of $4.00 to $4.30 and 2017 adjusted earnings per share of $3.82. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expected the company to report earnings of $4.31 per share for fiscal year 2018. Analysts' estimates typically exclude special items.



The company expects full year 2018 net revenue yields in constant currency to be up approximately 2.5 percent compared to the prior year, in line with December guidance. The company expects full year net cruise costs excluding fuel per ALBD in constant currency compared to the prior year to be up approximately 1.0 percent, also in line with December guidance. Changes in fuel prices (including realized fuel derivatives) and currency exchange rates are expected to increase earnings by 0.10 per share compared to December guidance.



At this time, cumulative advanced bookings for the remainder of 2018 are in line with the prior year at higher prices. Since January, booking volumes for all future periods have been running ahead of prior year at higher prices.



Carnival Corporation & plc President and Chief Executive Officer Arnold Donald said, 'We remain on track to achieve double-digit return on invested capital while continuing to return cash to shareholders through ongoing share repurchases and dividend growth.'



The company expects adjusted earnings per share for the second quarter 2018 to be in the range of $0.56 to $0.60 versus 2017 adjusted earnings per share of $0.52. Analysts expect earnings of $0.53 per share for the second-quarter.



Second quarter constant currency net revenue yields are expected to be up about 2.5 to 3.5 percent compared to the prior year. Net cruise costs excluding fuel per ALBD in constant currency for the second quarter of 2018 are expected to increase by approximately 4.0 to 5.0 percent compared to the prior year.



Copyright RTT News/dpa-AFX

Kostenloser Wertpapierhandel auf Smartbroker.deReno, Nevada--(Newsfile Corp. - March 22, 2018) - On March 15, 2018, a special meeting of Utilicraft Aerospace Industries, Inc.'s (OTC Pink: UITA) Board of Directors was held to accept the resignation of Kevin Williams as the CEO, President, Secretary, Treasurer, and Director of the Board and Appointed Richard Kilchesky, as the new President, CEO, and Chairman of the Board of Directors.

Utilicraft Aerospace Industries, Inc. is working diligently to bring all financial statements, quarterly's, annual reports, income statements and balance sheets current for all recent corporate activities; which would include all filings necessary for the OTC Markets to allow a PINK Current Status.

There is no Reverse Split scheduled for this company anytime in the foreseeable future, as management has concluded that the share structure is in a healthy condition.

Utilicraft Aerospace Industries, Inc. has reinstated its Nevada Secretary of State Registration and hired a new Registered Agent located at 401 Ryland St STE 200-A, Reno, NV 89502.

"We are looking to bring this company current on every aspect of its operations," said CEO, Richard Kilchesky; he went on to say, "The U.S. Economy is strong right now, and there has never been a better time for us to enter the public arena, and I want shareholders to know that Utilicraft will be entering into a new market sector, applying for a ticker symbol change, and applying for an uplist to the OTCQB Tier in the near future."

Safe-Harbor Statement under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995: This press release may contain forward-looking information within the meaning of Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended (the Exchange Act), including all statements that are not statements of historical fact regarding the intent, belief or current expectations of the company, its directors or its officers with respect to, among other things: (i) the company's financing plans; (ii) trends affecting the company's financial condition or results of operations; (iii) the company's growth strategy and operating strategy; and (iv) the declaration and payment of dividends. The words "may," "would," "will," "expect," "estimate," "anticipate," "believe," "intend" and similar expressions and variations thereof are intended to identify forward-looking statements. Investors are cautioned that any such forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance and involve risks and uncertainties, many of which are beyond the company's ability to control, and that actual results may differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements as a result of various factors including the risk disclosed in the company's Forms 10-K and 10-Q filed with the SEC.

For further information contact:

Mark Miller

(612) 615-9334

mjbuildersmn@gmail.comToday, Anixter Inc. (NYSE: AXE) celebrated the opening of a new custom-built distribution facility in Lichfield, West Midlands, U.K., with a ribbon-cutting ceremony and key exchange at 10:00 GMT. Despite having 180,000 less square feet than the old facility in Birmingham, U.K., the new Lichfield distribution center has 20 percent more cubic storage capacity as a result of the improved floor plan, more efficient design and the cube capacity gain from having racking that extends to 42 feet.

The Lichfield distribution center was designed to achieve a BREEAM (Building Research Establishment Environmental Assessment Method) "Very Good" rating and the best possible Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) rating for its size. It utilizes a combination of skylights, motion-activated LED lighting, and rooftop solar installation that will generate 10 percent of its regulated energy. It also features built-to-suit spaces for product preparation and staging, including a camera testing and configuration room, value-added services area and contractor services area.

"At approximately 213,000 sq. ft., this new distribution hub will be Anixter's largest distribution center in Europe, serving our markets in the United Kingdom and mainland Europe," said Ross Brown, regional operations manager for Anixter in the U.K. "With additional storage capacity and new areas allocated for supply chain services, we will be able to get product into the shipping system and out to our customers much faster."

According to Brown, Anixter is looking to implement pick-to-voice technology in the facility in 2019, which will further increase the efficiency of its warehouse associates, while enhancing safety and accuracy. With Bluetooth headsets and Android devices directing them to their next pick, employees will have their hands and eyes free, and be able to confirm vocally in their preferred language.

"Having a modern, efficient distribution center in Lichfield is critical to supporting Anixter's operations in the region, not only in the U.K., but all throughout Europe," said Orlando McGee, executive vice president of global operations for Anixter.

About Anixter

Anixter International is a leading global distributor of Network Security Solutions, Electrical Electronic Solutions and Utility Power Solutions. We help build, connect, power and protect valuable assets and critical infrastructures. From enterprise networks to industrial MRO supply to video surveillance applications to electric power distribution, we offer full-line solutions, and intelligence, that create reliable, resilient systems that sustain businesses and communities. Through our unmatched global distribution network along with our supply chain and technical expertise, we help lower the cost, risk and complexity of our customers' supply chains.

Anixter adds value to the distribution process by providing our customers access to 1) innovative supply chain solutions, 2) over 600,000 products and over $1.0 billion in inventory, 3) over 300 warehouses/branch locations with approximately 9.0 million square feet of space and 4) locations in over 300 cities in approximately 50 countries. Founded in 1957 and headquartered near Chicago, Anixter trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol AXE. For more information, visit www.anixter.com.

View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180322005849/en/

Contacts:

Anixter Inc.

Dawn Marks

Vice President of Global Communications

1-847-224-8665

dawn.marks@anixter.comJUBA, SOUTH SUDAN / ACCESSWIRE / March 22, 2018 / The Ministry of Petroleum of the Republic of South Sudan urges the United States government to work with the Republic of South Sudan to overcome the challenges faced by the oil and gas industry and the economy at large in the country.

On Wednesday, March 21, the Ministry of Petroleum was informed that, along with the Ministry of Mining, national oil company Nilepet and twelve oil and gas operators and service companies, it would face new restrictions on imports of U.S. petroleum technology to the Republic of South Sudan. These measures are viewed by the Ministry of Petroleum as counterproductive to the shared mission of the Republic of South Sudan's and the United States' governments to bring peace and stability to South Sudan. The Ministry of Petroleum pledges to work closely with the U.S. Department of Commerce and take all possible measures to remove these restrictions and resume normal relations with the U.S.

The Republic of South Sudan's Transitional Government of National Unity and the Ministry of Petroleum will continue to invite investment in the petroleum sector and to work tirelessly to create an enabling environment for business to thrive in the Republic of South Sudan. The oil and gas sector is a foundation of the economy and depends on international technology imports. Existing petroleum operations will not be affected, as materials are not currently being imported from the U.S., but the Ministry of Petroleum is nevertheless committed to resolving this situation and improving the trading relationship between the Republic of South Sudan and the U.S.

Since the founding of our nation, the United States has been considered our closest partner and ally in our mission to build a free and prosperous society. We have faced numerous challenges together and will continue to view the U.S. as a role model and partner as we lay the foundations for the Republic of South Sudan's recovery and growth.

SOURCE: The Ministry of Petroleum of the Republic of South SudanYemeni air defense forces, backed by fighters from allied Popular Committees, have reportedly intercepted and shot down an F-15 fighter jet belonging to the Royal Saudi Air Force.

An unnamed Yemeni military source told Arabic-language al-Masirah television network that the aircraft was targeted with a surface-to-air missile as it was flying in the skies over the northwestern Yemeni province of Saada on Wednesday.

The jet had purportedly taken part in airstrikes against residential neighborhoods in the province.

Earlier in the day, Saudi fighter jets targeted a vehicle as it was travelling along a road in the Nihm district of Yemens west-central province of Sana'a.

Separately, a civilian sustained injuries when a cluster bomb went off in the Maran area of ?aydan district in Saada Province.

Cluster munitions, which are banned by more than 100 countries, present an enormous danger to civilians.

Dropped from the air or fired from the ground, they are designed to break open in mid-air, releasing the sub-munitions over a wide area in a way that cannot discriminate between civilians and military targets.

Many of the sub-munitions fail to explode on impact and effectively become anti-personnel mines. Unexploded sub-munitions have the potential to remain lethal for years, posing a high risk to the civilian population, both during and after the conflict.

Cluster bombs are banned under the Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM), an international treaty that addresses the humanitarian consequences and unacceptable harm caused to civilians by cluster munitions through a categorical prohibition and a framework for action.

About 14,000 people have been killed since the onset of Saudi Arabias military campaign against Yemen in March 2015. Much of the Arabian Peninsula country's infrastructure, including hospitals, schools and factories, has been reduced to rubble due to the war.

A photo taken on March 18, 2018, shows a Yemeni child walking in the rubble of a building that was destroyed in a Saudi airstrike in the southern Yemeni city of Taizz. (Photo by AFP)

The United Nations says a record 22.2 million people are in need of food aid, including 8.4 million threatened by severe hunger.

A high-ranking UN aid official recently warned against the catastrophic living conditions in Yemen, stating that there is a growing risk of famine and cholera there.

After three years of conflict, conditions in Yemen are catastrophic, John Ging, UN director of aid operations, told the UN Security Council on February 27.

He added, People's lives have continued unraveling. Conflict has escalated since November driving an estimated 100,000 people from their homes.

Ging further noted that cholera has infected 1.1 million people in Yemen since last April, and a new outbreak of diphtheria has occurred in the war-ravaged Arab country since 1982.BEIJING (dpa-AFX) - Thursday, the U.S. Government is likely to impose heavy tariffs on imports from China, saying that it has strong evidence of its Chinese counterpart violating its commitments on intellectual property and technology transfers. 'Tomorrow the president will announce the actions he has decided to take based on USTR's 301 investigations into China's state-led, market-distorting efforts to force, pressure and steal US technologies and intellectual property,' White House Principal Deputy Press Secretary Raj Shah said Wednesday. The White House said it was forced to take action after years of talks about the issue that failed to produce change. China responded by saying that it was ready to retaliate with 'necessary measures.' The development is expected to hurt US-China relations. The US has a massive trade deficit with China, which is its most important trading partner. The U.S. media recently reported that the Government was preparing to impose annual tariffs amounting to $60 billion on goods imported from China. Major American companies in the retail sector wrote a letter to President Donald Trump requesting him to reconsider the decision, which they say could hurt American interests. They warned that a broadly applied tariff remedy on imports from China could hurt American households with higher prices and exacerbate a U.S. tariff system that is already stacked against working families. The letter points out that the U.S. levies the highest tariffs on basic consumer goods, which force families shopping in American stores pay higher prices. The United States already levies import taxes as much as 32 percent on basic clothes and 67 percent on shoes. 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.Parity announced the award of a recruitment managed services contract with Primark Stores on Thursday, which began on 21 March and under which Parity Professionals would provide all of the fashion retailer's contract and interim IT staff. The AIM-traded firm said Primark Stores - an international retailer, part of Associated British Foods - was undertaking "rapid expansion" in overseas markets. Operating more than 320 stores in Europe and America required "significant investment" in the ...

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.PUNE, India, March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

The report "Artificial Intelligence in Military Market by Offering (Software, Hardware, Services), Technology (Learning & Intelligence, Advanced Computing, AI Systems), Application (Information Processing, Cyber Security), Platform, Region - Global Forecast to 2025", published by MarketsandMarkets', the market is estimated to be USD 6.26 Billion in 2017 and is projected to reach USD 18.82 Billion by 2025, at a CAGR of 14.75% from 2017 to 2025. Increasing investment towards the development of AI integrated systems and rising adoption of cloud-based applications are key factors projected to drive the growth of the artificial intelligence in military market.

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160303/792302 )



Browse 67 market data Tables and46 Figures spread through 149 Pages and in-depth TOC on"Artificial Intelligence in Military Market - Global Forecast to 2025"

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Early buyers will receive 10% customization on this report

Based on platform, the land segment is projected to lead the artificial intelligence in military market.

Based on platform, the land segment is expected to lead the artificial intelligence in military market from 2017 to 2025. Militaries worldwide are focused on the integration of AI with land platforms. The incorporation of AI technology into unmanned ground vehicles assists in the successful execution of various ground operations, such as disabling Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) and other kinds of roadside bombs intended to cripple military patrols and convoys.

Based on offering, the software segment of the artificial intelligence in military market is expected to grow at the highest CAGR during the forecast period.

Based on offering, the artificial intelligence in military market has been segmented into hardware, software, and services. The software segment of the artificial intelligence in military market is projected to grow at the highest CAGR during the forecast period. The growth of the software segment can be attributed to the significance of AI software in strengthening the IT framework to prevent incidents of security breach.

Ask for PDF Brochure : https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/pdfdownload.asp?id=41793495

The US is projected to lead the artificial intelligence in military market during the forecast period.

Based on country, the US is estimated to account for the largest share of the artificial intelligence in military market in 2017. This growth can be attributed to the need for automated warfare systems, the involvement of the military in asymmetric warfare, and various modernization programs carried out by the US Armed Forces, which, in turn, has enabled major defense manufacturers in this country to develop techno-efficient AI systems for military operations.

Key players operating in the artificial intelligence in military market are Lockheed Martin (US), Raytheon (US), Northrop Grumman (US), IBM (US), Thales Group (France), General Dynamics (US), NVIDIA (US), and BAE Systems (UK).

Know more about the Artificial Intelligence In Military Market:

https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/artificial-intelligence-military-market-41793495.html

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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 5000 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, "RT" connects over 200,000 markets and entire value chains for deeper understanding of the unmet insights along with market sizing and forecasts of niche markets.

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Connect with us on LinkedIn @ http://www.linkedin.com/company/marketsandmarketsTrump has taken to Twitter to boast about securing $1.6bn from the US budget bill to start building the Mexican border wall. He claims that he had to "waste money on Dem giveaways". The US Congress finished a $1.3trn budget bill on Wednesday that boosts the military sector and domestic spending in the US. According to Trump's tweet $700bn will go to rebuilding the military this year and $716bn for 2019. He also said that "Democrats refused to take care of DACA. Would have been so easy, but they ...

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.CALGARY, Alberta, March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

Over 250 Operations leaders will gather in Calgary at the Operational Excellence in Energy, Chemicals & Resources Summit this June 4-6.

Senior executives from Irving Oil, Enbridge, Energy Safety Canada, Toronto Hydro, SaskPower, Suncor, BP, Shell, Veolia and many more will share their expertise and give an inside look at their operations.

More than 40 industry leading speakers are confirmed to attend this year's conference, including:

Mike Baker , Manager, Operational Excellence, Royal Dutch Shell

, Manager, Operational Excellence, Matt DiGeronimo , Vice President, Operations, Veolia

, Vice President, Operations, Hugo Ashkar , Global Risk Manager, BP

, Global Risk Manager, Cynthia Hansen , President, Gas Distribution & Power, Enbridge

, President, Gas Distribution & Power, John Rhind , CEO, Energy Safety Canada

Mark Little, Vice President of Health & Safety at Cenovus said: "I attend every year and it's always a great opportunity to network with peers and get different industry perspectives."

The event offers roundtables, panels, case studies and workshops on a variety of topics, including Human Factors, Personal & Process Safety, Operational Risk Management, Business Transformation, Asset Integrity Management & Digital Operations. Industry professionals have a unique opportunity to learn from Canadian and international experts who have successfully executed on strategy and delivered substantial improvements in operational and business performance.

"I like the operational excellence conference because it is really about the people-to-people and people to-machine interface and how companies can build up and create a highly reliable organization that works with very large assets," says Leigh Mork, Director of Maintenance and Reliability Integration at Suncor, who attends the event every year with his team.

Download the 2018 agenda >> https://opexsummit.iqpc.com/agenda

Tickets and full event program are available online at https://opexsummit.iqpc.com/ST. JOHN'S, NEWFOUNDLAND AND LABRADOR -- (Marketwired) -- 03/22/18 -- Fortis Inc. ("Fortis" or the "Corporation") (TSX: FTS)(NYSE: FTS) today announced the Wataynikaneyap Power project has reached a major milestone with the announcement of a funding framework among Wataynikaneyap Power, the Government of Canada and the Government of Ontario. The project will connect 17 remote First Nations communities in Northwestern Ontario to the main electricity grid through the construction of 1,800 kilometres ("km") of transmission lines. Fortis subsidiary, FortisOntario, will be responsible for construction management and operation of the transmission line. The estimated project construction cost is $1.6 billion.

Wataynikaneyap Power is a licensed transmission company, regulated by the Ontario Energy Board ("OEB"), equally owned by First Nations communities (51%), in partnership with Fortis (49%).

Today's announcement supports the Corporation's growth strategy and will increase its five-year capital investment plan by approximately $600 million to $15.1 billion through 2022. Rate base will grow accordingly to reach approximately $33 billion by 2022, representing a 40-basis point increase in the five-year compound annual growth rate to 5.4%. The project will take approximately five years to complete and will contribute to Fortis earnings and cash flow upon completion of each phase of the project.

"Utilities can play an important role in the social and economic development of First Nations communities in our country," said Barry Perry, President and Chief Executive Officer, Fortis Inc. "Fortis is pleased to bring its expertise to the table in the construction and operation of 1,800 km of transmission lines. Once complete, the lines will provide reliable electricity to the communities and help improve the lives of thousands of community members."

The announcement is the culmination of years of productive discussions among area Chiefs to connect their communities to a reliable energy grid. FortisOntario was chosen as the partner through a competitive process in 2015.

"Fortis is proud to be part of the Wataynikaneyap Power Project," said Scott Hawkes, President and Chief Executive Officer, FortisOntario. "Today's announcement is a milestone in what is Canada's largest First Nations-led infrastructure project to date."

Fortis utilities have completed many significant transmission projects throughout North America. Several of these projects have occurred in consultation with First Nations communities, including the completion of an underwater transmission cable from Prince Edward Island ("PEI") to New Brunswick in 2017 by Maritime Electric, the Corporation's utility on PEI.

Wataynikaneyap Power will develop, own, and operate approximately 1,800 km of 230 kilovolt ("kV"), 115 kV, and 44 kV power lines in Northwestern Ontario in order to connect remote First Nations communities to the provincial electricity grid. In addition to providing participating First Nations communities ownership in the transmission line, the project provides socio-economic benefits, reduces environmental risk and lessens greenhouse gas emissions associated with diesel-fired generation currently used in remote locations.

"This project will redefine the relationships and the landscape of how business must be conducted with the First Nations through creating a sustainable First Nation equity position overall," said Margaret Kenequanash, Chief Executive Officer, Wataynikaneyap Power. "This provides the foundation for the communities to participate meaningfully in the economic prosperity of this country. Now we need to get the line that brings light into the communities. These are exciting times!"

The initial phase of the project from Red Lake to Pikangikum is fully funded by the Canadian government and is expected to be complete by the end of 2018. The next two phases are subject to receipt of all necessary regulatory approvals, including the leave-to-construct approvals from the OEB, anticipated by early 2019. These phases are targeted to be completed by the end of 2020 and 2023, respectively.

The Corporation's consolidated capital investment plan consists mostly of a diversified mix of highly executable, low-risk projects. Fortis is focused on executing the five-year capital expenditure program and securing further organic growth opportunities at its subsidiaries, which may be funded through debt raised at the utilities, cash from operations, common equity contributions from the dividend reinvestment plan and the recently announced at-the-market common equity program. Fortis expects the long-term sustainable growth in rate base to support continuing growth in earnings and dividends.

About Wataynikaneyap Power

Wataynikaneyap Power is a licensed transmission company, regulated by the Ontario Energy Board, equally owned by 22 First Nations communities (51%), in partnership with Fortis (49%). For further information visit www.wataypower.ca.

About Fortis

Fortis is a leader in the North American regulated electric and gas utility industry with 2017 revenue of $8.3 billion and total assets of approximately $48 billion. The Corporation's 8,500 employees serve utility customers in five Canadian provinces, nine U.S. states and three Caribbean countries.

Fortis shares are listed on the TSX and NYSE and trade under the symbol FTS. Additional information can be accessed at www.fortisinc.com, www.sedar.com, or www.sec.gov.

Forward-Looking Information

Fortis includes "forward-looking information" in this media release within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities laws and "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 (collectively referred to as "forward-looking information"). Forward-looking information included in this media release reflect expectations of Fortis management regarding future growth, results of operations, performance and business prospects and opportunities. Wherever possible, words such as "anticipates", "believes", "budgets", "could", "estimates", "expects", "forecasts", "intends", "may", "might", "plans", "projects", "schedule", "should", "target", "will", "would" and the negative of these terms and other similar terminology or expressions have been used to identify the forward-looking information, which includes, without limitation: statements related to the Wataynikaneyap Power Project, including but not limited to, the expected costs, timing, benefits and conditions precedent to various phases of the project, including regulatory approvals; the Corporation's forecast capital spending for the five-year period 2018 through 2022 and expected sources of funding; the Corporation's consolidated forecast rate base for 2022 and the associated compound annual growth rate; and the expectation that long-term sustainable growth in rate base will support continuing growth in earnings and dividends.

Forward-looking information involves significant risk, uncertainties and assumptions. Certain material factors or assumptions have been applied in drawing the conclusions contained in the forward-looking information. These factors or assumptions are subject to inherent risks and uncertainties surrounding future expectations generally, including those identified from time to time in the forward-looking information. Such risk factors or assumptions include, but are not limited to: risks relating to the ability to obtain regulatory approvals in connection with the project and the timing and terms thereof; reasonable decisions by utility regulators and the expectation of regulatory stability; the implementation of the Corporation's five-year capital plan; no material capital project and financing cost overrun related to any of the Corporation's capital projects; and sufficient human resources to deliver service and execute the capital program. Fortis cautions readers that a number of factors could cause actual results, performance or achievements to differ materially from the results discussed or implied in the forward-looking information. These factors should be considered carefully and undue reliance should not be placed on the forward-looking information. For additional information with respect to certain of these risks or factors, reference should be made to the continuous disclosure materials filed from time to time by the Corporation with Canadian securities regulatory authorities and the Securities and Exchange Commission. All forward-looking information included in this media release is given as of the date of this media release and Fortis disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking information, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

Contacts:

Investor Enquiries:

Ms. Stephanie Amaimo

Vice President, Investor Relations

Fortis Inc.

709.737.2900

investorrelations@fortisinc.com



Media Enquiries:

Ms. Karen McCarthy

Director, Communications & Corporate Affairs

Fortis Inc.

709.737.5323

media@fortisinc.com



Vancouver, British Columbia--(Newsfile Corp. - March 22, 2018) - Provenance Gold Corp. (CSE: PAU) ("Provenance", or the "Company") announces that its shares are listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange ("FSE") under the trading symbol 3PG.

The listing of the Company's shares on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange in addition to the Canadian Securities Exchange (CSE) will further broaden the potential exposure for the company in markets that understand the resource sector and can recognize promising opportunities in a potentially significant new exploration landscape such as the Company's Yukon property.

The Yukon property consists of 192 Yukon quartz mining claims covering 9,156 acres in the Moosehorn Range area of Yukon approximately 133km SSW of Dawson City. This field season, the Company plans to focus on specific lode gold areas that were identified by last year's work. These targets are within a newly recognized broad northeast-trending zone of faulting and shearing that extends for at least six kilometers across the property and hosts the lode gold discoveries. This gold zone is believed to be the source of the region's rich placer systems that have been in continuous successful ongoing production for more than 30 years.

With the understanding gained last season of the gold system on the property and the anticipated near term closing of the Company's 25 cent private placement, the Company is looking forward to a busy and rewarding 2018 exploration season.

For further information, sponsorship or funding enquires please visit the Company's website at http://www.provenancegold.com or contact Rob Clark @ rclark@provenancegold.com.

Rauno Perttu, P. Geo., a Qualified Person (as defined by National Instrument 43-101) has reviewed and approved the contents of this News Release.

On behalf of the Board,

Provenance Gold Corp.

Rauno Perttu, Chief Executive Officer

Neither the CSE, nor its regulation services provider, accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this press release.

Statements included in this announcement, including statements concerning our plans, intentions and expectations, which are not historical in nature are intended to be, and are hereby identified as "forward-looking statements". Forward-looking statements may be identified by words including "anticipates", "believes", "intends", "estimates", "expects" and similar expressions. The Company cautions readers that forward-looking statements, including without limitation those relating to the Company's future operations and business prospects, are subject to certain risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those indicated in the forward-looking statements.Oregon Coast's Hatfield Marine Science Center Fully Reopens for Spring Break

Published 03/19/2018 at 7:35 PM PDT - Updated 03/19/2018 at 8:05 PM PDT

By Oregon Coast Beach Connection Staff





(Newport, Oregon)  Newport's popular Hatfield Marine Science Center fully opens up its education wing this weekend, just in time for the beginning of spring break on the Oregon coast. March 24 is when the visitor center swings open its doors completely, after closing for repairs at the end of last year.

The visitor center had partially reopened in February as part of OSU's 150th anniversary celebration while work continued in other areas. Crews replaced the rusting, 21-year-old metal stands under many of the saltwater tanks, removed some exhibits, and created artificial rockwork modeled after real formations in Yachats.

Even so, some additional renovations continue at the much-lauded Oregon coast facility, including some of the tanks. Aquatic life residing in those have been moved to other areas of the Hatfield. Oregon Sea Grant operates the visitor center and will soon be creating a habitat theme around the tanks so that when visitors walk through they will move from shore to shallows to deep sea.

The center's manager, Maureen Collson, said more exhibits are coming that show examples of the research being done in these environments.

Every year about 150,000 people pass through the doors of the center, where they can touch aquatic critters in an indoor tidepool, crash simulated tsunami waves against Lego structures, or watch an aquarist feed the octopus.

A recent economic analysis by OSU economist Bruce Sorte showed the Hatfield's visitor center and its research facilities support $7.6 million in income for Oregonians, $13.2 million in sales for businesses in Oregon, and 156 jobs throughout the state. About three-quarters of those impacts occur in Lincoln County, Sorte said.

Since 1965, the Visitor Center has been teaching children and adults about marine science through fun, hands-on exhibits, said Shelby Walker, the director of Oregon Sea Grant. Although you can't put a price tag on the value of that experience, as Bruce's analysis shows, we can estimate the important economic contribution of the Visitor Center to Lincoln County and the state.

These figures include the salaries paid to employees at the center and a multiplier effect of those dollars, the amount of money visitors spend on food and lodging, and the household expenditures of Oregon Sea Grant employees and people who supply goods and services linked to the center.

The Visitor Center is open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. from Thursday - Monday through Memorial Day, then from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily until Labor Day. The Hatfield Marine Science Center is at 2030 SE Marine Science Dr. Newport, Oregon. ( Oregon Coast Hotels for these events - Where to eat - Map and Virtual Tour)



















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All Content, unless otherwise attributed, copyright BeachConnection.net Unauthorized use or publication is not permittedBUENOS AIRES (dpa-AFX) - The Argentinean government officially request an exemption from new U.S. duties on steel and aluminum imports. The request was sent through a letter signed by the Minister of Production, Francisco Cabrera, and the Foreign Minister, Jorge Faurie, to the U.S. Trade Representative, Robert Lighthizer. In the document, the Argentineans highlighted the 'cooperation in defense and security between both countries and also the several institutional mechanisms to address economic issues, such as the bilateral Trade and Investment Framework Agreement.' They also stressed the strong trade ties between Argentina and the United States and also the surplus the Americans would have with the exemption. Argentina represents only 0.6% and 2.3 of total steel and aluminum imports by the U.S., respectively. Finally, the document stated that Argentina is not a country of transshipment or triangulation for exports of steel or aluminum to the United States, noting that it is an active participant in efforts to combat global oversupply of steel. 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.Anterra Capital, an Amsterdam and Boston-based specialist venture capital firm that backs the entrepreneurs who are transforming the global food system, raised $75m extension to its fund.

Backed by Rabobank and Eight Roads, the fund now totals $200m.

Led by Adam Anders, Managing Partner, and Philip Austin, partner and co-founder, Anterra invests in companies bringing proven science and technology breakthroughs into the global food system.

The firm has begun investing the new monies with previously unannounced investments including:

 Agriconomie, a marketplace for farmers and their suppliers, and

 Voltea, a water technology company capable of desalinating water in applications from the farm to consumers homes.

Anterra also founded Enko Chem, a company discovering novel crop protection chemicals which is led by Anterra venture partner Jacqueline Heard with Tom Meade, formerly Dow AgroSciences global seeds discovery research leader, recently joining as CSO.

With this announcement, Axel Wehr and Dan Harburg have joined the firm as investment professionals focusing on software, digital commerce, robotics and automation.

Before joining Anterra, Wehr spent 5 years at Bain Capital Private Equity and then was a partner at Firestartr, a London based seed-stage investment firm. Harburg previously ran business development at a venture-backed agtech robotics company and holds a PhD in this field.

Michelle Haven and Juergen Horn have joined the team as special advisors, with a focus on animal health. Haven has been a leader in the animal health industry for over 20 years, most recently as the senior vice president of corporate development, strategic alliances and solutions at Zoetis. Horn has over 15 years of sector experience having held senior executive positions at Nexvet Biopharma, Novartis Animal Health and Elanco.

FinSMEs

21/03/2018As you expand your business to customers in other countries, you might want to change your websites content and setup. This said, youll find that you need to learn more about international SEO and how to implement it. International SEO, if executed the right way, can rake a huge ROI for your business.

What is international SEO?

International SEO is optimizing your web pages so that the search engines will be able to identify exactly which countries you are targeting, the specific content you are displaying, and the language of the user in the specific location. In a way, its like Miami SEO for small businesses. However, instead of just focusing on Miami, it targets multiple locations.

Though many websites, in an effort to implement international SEO, copy and paste versions of their local website into different languages, it is not ideal. Its true that translation and localization of the web content are important steps in the process. However, you also need to be able to fully optimize your websites to cater to each countrys local audience. And, yes, you need a separate website for each country.

Different Phases of an International SEO Process

Its important to understand that it takes careful planning to be successful in your international SEO. If you dont know how to go through it, heres an overview of the fundamental phases of the process:

One: Research

You need to validate the potential of your international market. Do not venture where you know youll fail. You might want to use tools like the Google Analytics to find out the volume of organic search traffic and visibility from each country.

Two: Targeting

Which countries show impressive organic search volume of relevant competitive keywords? You need to target these and prioritize them in your SEO efforts. You also need to affirm that youll have a huge target audience and the conversion volume is potentially high.

Three: Optimization

Once you know your target, you need to optimize your website and make sure that it is indexable. Pay careful attention to its overall performance. You dont want to face search results misalignment issues. This happens when your websites compete against each other or, worse, not indexed at all. For instance, your website designed for Los Angeles should not appear or outrank your website designed for Singapore.

Improving International SEO

If you have already taken the first steps towards international SEO, and you still dont see any results, you might need to improve your strategy. Here are tips that you can use:

1. Choose the right search engines.

Remember that Google is not the only search engine in the world. In fact, in China, Baidu is more widely used. In Russia, theres Yandex. In South Korea, theres Naver.

2. Remember that translation is not enough.

While its quicker and easier to translate the original local content, you might not be able to get the right message across. You should consider the change of audience. Your approach in one country may not work in another.

3. Localize your content.

If your webpage contains several languages, it might not be considered relevant by search engines. You need to localize your website.

Conclusion

International SEO is a complex process that needs careful research and analysis so you can target your global audience correctly. It will not be easy to achieve success in your international SEO goals; you need to build a strong strategy and implement it.Verdane Capital, an investment firm with offices in Copenhagen, Helsinki, London, Oslo and Stockholm, has closed a new fund, at SEK 3 billion.

Verdane Edda was oversubscribed and closed at its hard cap, with 60% of investors coming from outside the Nordic region. The fund received commitments from leading global university endowments, foundations, insurance companies, family offices, government agencies, as well as private and public pension funds. Over 50% of the capital was from non-profit investors.

Led by Bjarne Lie, Managing Partner, and Jakob Tolleryd, Johnny Rindahl, and Henrik Aspen, Partners, Verdane Edda will invest in fast-growing companies in the Nordics within software, consumer internet and more traditional sectors where digitalization can be a key driver of success.

The fund will generally aim to take controlling stakes in single companies, but minority positions may also be relevant. It will target individual investments reaching up to SEK 500m.It has been reported that the companies falsify the figures on cash flow projections in order to get new loans from banks.

Intensifying its efforts for crackdown on banking frauds, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has urged auditors of the state-owned lenders to heighten their vigil on public sector banks (PSBs) and keep a close watch on unrealistic cash flow projections, according to this Economic Times report.

In the aftermath of the Rs 13,600 crore Punjab National Bank (PNB) that was exposed on 14 February, 2018, more such cases have started to tumble out of the banking sector over the past few weeks, a development that has worried the central bank as well as the finance ministry which also holds sway over these state banks.

It has been reported that the auditors had failed to detect the PNB fraud which was going since 2011 without the knowledge of senior most bank officials at the banks Brady House branch in South Mumbai. Interestingly, the bank could find out the fraudulent transactions in 2018, which is seven years after it started.

According to the report cited above, companies falsify the figures on cash flow projections in order to get new loans from banks and also to reorganise the existing loans to buy more time.

The RBI expects the auditors of the public sector banks to do more work especially at a time when most of these banks have huge debt burden in the form of non-performing assets (NPA). The total NPA of these PSBs has now gone up to Rs 8 lakh crore.

On Wednesday, the State Bank of India (SBI) in what could be termed as another banking fraud charged the Chennai-based Kanish Gold of cheating as many as 14 banks and defrauding loans worth Rs 824 crore. The media reports said the loan amount could be more than Rs 1,000 crore if the interest due in principal was also included.

On Thursday, news agency IANS reported the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) was questioning the directors of Kanishk Gold Pvt Ltd (KGPL) on a loan fraud complaint filed by the SBI.

A CBI official told IANS: "Questioning of KGPL Directors Bhoopesh Kumar Jain and Neeta Jain is being carried out at our Bengaluru office." The official added both the persons had arrived here in Bengaluru on Wednesday evening. Some media reports had said on Wednesday the husband-wife duo might have fled the country and could be living in Mauritius.India has dropped a plan to double a wheat import tax to 40 percent, in a sign it expects imports to make up for a shortfall in domestic production

New Delhi: India has dropped a plan to double a wheat import tax to 40 percent, two government sources said, in a sign it expects imports to make up for a shortfall in domestic production for the third year in a row.

As late as a few weeks ago, the food, trade and finance ministries were considering hiking the tax to 40 percent to ensure that local prices remained steady and millions of domestic farmers got good returns for their harvest.

The government tries to keep local wheat prices steady until at least May/June, by when farmers would have sold their wheat crop. The grain is grown only once in a year in India, with plantings in October and harvests from March.

The three concerned ministries have decided against raising the tariff for now, the two government officials told Reuters.

The officials, who are directly involved in decision making, declined to be identified because they are not authorised to speak to the media.

Traders said the decision to avoid hiking the import tax implied that the crop could be lower than forecast.

We can now infer that production will be less than expected, and in my view, its going to somewhere between 91-92 million tonnes, said Tejinder Narang, a New Delhi-based analyst who advises some leading global trading companies.

In February, the farm ministry forecast that this years harvest would reach 97.11 million tonnes against a target of 98.51 million tonnes. Local media quoted two government officials as saying output would even cross 100 million tonnes.

Wheat demand in India, the worlds second-biggest producer and consumer of the grain, is estimated at about 100 million tonnes, with consumption rising by 1-1.5 percent a year.

Traders said it was too early to accurately pin down Indias wheat imports this year, but most said they believed it could be between 2-4 million tonnes with the rest of the demand being met by stocks.

Indian flour millers imported nearly 2 million tonnes of wheat last year and 6.5 million tonnes in 2016.

Purchases by India could buoy the benchmark Chicago price that hovered just above the prior sessions one-month low on Wednesday.

Most import cargoes are booked by flour millers near port cities in the southern parts of India, as they find it cheaper to buy from Australia, Russia and Ukraine.

Imported wheat is mostly blended with Indian flour to make pizzas and pasta.An estimated 31.20 crore Jan Dhan accounts with an aggregate deposit balance of over Rs 75,000 crore were opened till February, out of which 25.18 crore (or 81 percent) were operative, Minister of State for Finance Shiv Pratap Shukla told the Rajya Sabha

New Delhi: Almost 20 percent of the total 31 crore Jan Dhan accounts are lying dormant, the government said on Thursday.

An estimated 31.20 crore Jan Dhan accounts with an aggregate deposit balance of over Rs 75,000 crore were opened till February, out of which 25.18 crore (or 81 percent) were operative, Minister of State for Finance Shiv Pratap Shukla told the Rajya Sabha in a written reply to a question.

This means that over 6 crore accounts -- or 19.29 percent -- opened under the Pradhan Mantri Jan-Dhan Yojana (PMJDY) are lying dormant.

The Minister added that till February, about 59 lakh (1.9 percent) Jan Dhan accounts had been closed since the launch of the scheme.

"Jan Dhan accounts are closed as per the request of account holder. Some of the Jan Dhan accounts are closed due to conversion into normal savings account as per request of the account holder.

"In some cases, accounts are closed due to account holders having multiple accounts in their name in the same bank," he added.Government is planning to conduct disinvestment process of Air India group in phases and a EoI will be issued for each entity under the corporation

The government is planning to execute the disinvestment process of the troubled Air India group in phases, and separate expressions of interest (EoIs) will be issued for each entity under the corporation, according to a media report.

The EoIs are likely to be issued by the end of this month. The government will kick off the exercise with that of the parent airline along with Air India Charters, which operates low-cost flights under the Air India Express brand name, said a Moneycontrol report.

"Besides the parent and two subsidiaries that operate flights, there are three other arms that are all different businesses of varying scale. The business operations of the companies who will be interested in bidding for those subsidiaries will also be different......," an official familiar with the development told Moneycontrol.

The government aims to split the airline into four different entities and hopes to sell each entity.

Meanwhile, IndiGo and Qatar Airways have denied a report that said the two firms would table a joint-bid for Air India, even as the government is on the verge of announcing the modalities for the sale of the debt-ridden national carrier.

"Qatar Airways firmly denies it is involved in any talks regarding the acquisition of Air India," it said in a statement on Wednesday.

Budget airline IndiGo said that it is not in any "ongoing discussions" with any Gulf-based carrier for an Air India bid, the IANS reported. "While IndiGo normally doesn't respond to rumors, in this particular instance, we would like to state that there are no ongoing discussions of this nature," the airline said in a statement on Wednesday.

In June 2017, the Cabinet Committee on Economic Affairs (CCEA) gave its in-principle approval for the strategic divestment of Air India, which has a debt burden of over Rs 50,000 crore. The government expects to complete the privatisation of Air India this year and is planning to retain a 24 percent stake in the carrier.

With inputs from agenciesSBI-led consortium of lenders to Essar Steel on Wednesday rejected the bids by both Numetal as well as ArcelorMittal after finding them to be ineligible

Mumbai: In what could further delay the resolution of Essar Steel that owes over Rs 45,000 crore to lenders, the SBI-led consortium of creditors on Wednesday rejected the bids by Numetal, an SPV floated by Russian lender VTB Bank and Rewant Ruia, and ArcelorMittal, finding them ineligible under the IBC laws that debar related parties from bidding.

The decision to reject both the bids was taken at a meeting of the committee of creditors (CoC) of Essar Steel in Mumbai on Wednesday, a banking source said, adding however, they have voted to allow a second round of bidding for the nearly crippled 10-million tonne-asset at Hazira in Gujarat.

"They (Numetal and ArcelorMittal) were found to be ineligible under Section 29 A of the amended IBC. They did not fall under the satisfactory criterion that the defaulting promoters' link should not be there or connected persons should not be there in the new company that is bidding," a banking source told PTI in Mumbai.

Numetal and ArcelorMittal were the only two bidders for Essar Steel which owe the banks over Rs 45,000 crore. These companies have put up their bids on 12 February but have since been battling with each other amidst questions about their very eligibility to bid.

Even though the Luxembourg-based ArcelorMittal has teamed up with Nippon Steel & Sumitomo Metal Corp to bid for Essar Steel, it has been found ineligible for its joint venture with Uttam Galva, which is at the NCLT awaiting resolution now, and Numetal's bid was done in by the fact that one of the promoters of the special purpose vehicle is Rewant Ruia, the son of an Essar Group promoter Ravi Ruia, one of the original promoters of Essar Steel.

Bankers, however said if these companies delinked their connection from the promoters or standardise their loans they can bid again in the second round of bidding.

The lenders have set an 2 April deadline for the second round of bidding for Essar Steel that owes over Rs 45,000 crore to over 30 banks and other creditors. But this is unlikely to yield the desired results as biggies like Tata Steel, the Anil Aggrawal-led Vedanta and JSW Steel have reportedly decided against bidding for Essar Steel.

The shareholders of the Mauritius-based Numetal, a special purpose vehicle that focuses on steel and infra space along with manufacturing, are VTB Capital, the PE arm of the Russian state-owned lender VTB Bank and Aurora Trusts in which Rewant Ruia is a beneficiary and owns 25 percent.

The other promoters include the Russian steel and engineering major TyazhPromExports (TPE) and Indo International, a Dubai-based metals trading firm promoted by an NRI. VTB Capital owns majority in Numetal.

Bids of these firms were evaluated by resolution professional Satish Kumar Gupta, along with risk advisory Grant Thornton and law firm Cyril Amarchand Mangaldas.

The rejection comes a day after Numetal moved the Ahmedabad NCLT seeking to declare its eligibility, as it apprehended that all the full facts it submitted to the RP were not assessed properly.

Earlier in the day, Numetal in a statement had said it had filed an application the Ahemdabad bench of NCLT to declare its elegibility as it "apprehends that full facts submitted by it for eligibility to submit a resolution plan have not been appropriately assessed by the RP." An industry observer said following the rejection of its bid, Numetal may ask Rewant Ruia to exit the firm, something that the company was anyway ready to do.

"If public perception is a challenge because of the presence of Rewant Ruia in Numetal or his minority investment in the company, we are ready to change that," Antoine Chemali, a senior advisor at Numetal Mauritius, had told PTI last week.

"We've already spoken to him (Rewant) and are ready to do whatever it takes us to win the Essar Steel bid. We, the rest of the shareholders, are ready to buy out his minority stake from Numetal," Chemali added.

But he was quick to point out that Rewant did not have any say in the management of Numetal or enjoyed a board position. And an Essar Group official also told PTI that Rewant had resigned from the Essar Steel way back in 2012, and thus in no way was related to the Essar Steel promoters now.

It can be noted that both Numetal and ArcelorMittal had threatened to challenge NCLT and RP in higher courts if their bids were rejected, forcing government to recently hint that it was amenable to make more changes to Section 29 of the IBC Act to redefine "connected/related parties" to exclude only original promoters who are defaulters from bidding for an asset that has gone to kaput and went to the bankruptcy court.

The move is to distinguish between the promoters of defaulting companies that don't have a managerial role from those who also manage the stressed assets.

As per media reports, the corporate affairs ministry is considering two amendments to change the definition of "connected people" as per the IBC Code. Now, a promoter or investor in a defaulter is not eligible to participate in the auction of stressed assets referred to NCLT.

As per the IBC code, bids should be presented to the committee of creditors at least a month before the deadline, which in the case of Essar Steel is 29 April.

The Mittals have also reportedly offered to pay 50 per cent of its dues to lenders so that it becomes eligible to bid, something the new Section 29 A allows.Infosys co-founder NR Narayana Murthy on Wednesday said he himself could not understand the logic behind the demonetisation

Kolkata: Infosys co-founder NR Narayana Murthy on Wednesday said urban intellectuals did not buy the idea of demonetisation that the government implemented in 2016, but it did go down well with a majority of rural Indians.

Murthy was speaking on the government's demonetisation of high value banknotes in November 2016 at a session with students of Presidency University in Kolkata.

"I am not an expert in economics but I saw that urban intellectuals did not buy the idea of demonestisation, but a vast majority of rural Indians seemed to have welcomed it," he said.

Murthy said he himself could not understand the logic behind the demonetisation move since he is not an expert on the subject.

"Though I am not expert, but as a lay person I saw that when, for some reason, old 500 notes were demonetised, the government introduced new notes pretty quickly of the same denomination and even of higher Rs 2000 denomination. Only an expert can answer why this happened. I cannot understand... you should talk to experts," Murthy said.

To another question, Murthy said India had not focused on low-tech manufacturing unlike countries like Japan or China, since the 1950s.

He said it is unfortunate that 75 percent children in the country go to school but drop out before they reach class 8.

"Hence, when they reach the age of 22, they need job, but they are only fit for a job which is in low-tech manufacture. The economists should have thought of them right from 1950s," Murthy said.

Stressing on the need to strike a balance between automation and human beings, he said, "We can take a decision...we will not follow automation up to certain level

of our manufacture or services".

"We have to strike a balance, we have to be internationally competitive in products, services....we may slow down automation for domestic purposes," he saidOregon Coast Spring Break Adventures: Whales, Cleanup, Maybe Snow

Published 03/21/2018 at 2:05 PM PDT

By Oregon Coast Beach Connection Staff





(Oregon Coast)  A vast array of wonders happen on the Oregon coast for spring break, both calming and adventurous. Take refuge in the respite of the gentle waves, or go a bit bonkers with the regions hiking and tidepooling activities, or even its at-times-wacky nightlife scene. (Above: a mother whale and calf in Seaside, courtesy Seaside Aquarium).

Whales and the big beach cleanup are some of the event highlights taking place for Oregon spring breakers, but both Washington and local vacationers can partake in the Festival of Illusions in Lincoln City.

Driving to the beaches may get a little daring as well, although only slightly, if at all. The National Weather Service (NWS) in Portland said theres likely a bit of snow in the coast range later this week and over the weekend.

On Thursday, the NWS snow accumulation should be no more than half an inch, and then only on the absolute higher elevations of the coast range. That likely translates to only the tops of Highway 26 and maybe a small section of Highway 18.

On Friday, snow increases to a chance of one to two inches of snow and some thunder is possible as well.

Saturday and Sunday show a smaller chance of snow showers, if it all. See full Oregon Coast Weather.

Whale numbers have been outstanding lately, to the tune of five to ten sightings a day. It's only going to get bigger and better. The 2018 Spring Whale Week starts on March 24 and runs through March 31. There, dozens of high vantage points along the Oregon coast will feature volunteers to help you spot the giant cetaceans wander north, from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. each day.

Some 18,000 gray whales migrate northward on their way to feeding grounds in Alaska. Youll also start to see some Humpbacks and a growing number of Orcas over that week. www.whalespoken.org.

The SOLVE Spring Oregon Beach Cleanup hits the sands for a day of scouring on March 24.

That day, Oregonians will mobilize along the entire coast to remove tens of thousands of pounds of litter and marine debris washed in from winter storms. The group is asking for volunteers: reaching out to individuals, families, schools, business groups, and people of all ages to join together in cleaning Oregon's beaches.

The event starts 10 a.m. on that Saturday and goes until 1 p.m.

How can you get involved? Register at one of 45 beach cleanup sites from Fort Stevens State Park near Astoria to Harris Beach in Brookings. For more information and to see a list of cleanup sites, visit solveoregon.org or call 503-844-9571 x332.

Other highlights include:

Spring Break at Oregon Coast Aquarium. Hours are extended an extra hour for spring break, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. March 24 through April 1.



March 24. Oregon Coast Aquarium will be hosting the SOLVE Oregon Beach Cleanup in South Beach from 10 a.m - 1 pm. Volunteers get a discounted admission.



March 28. The Aquarium is hosting Enrichment Day. This will include a lot of fun activities and even a behind the scenes look at its mammal enrichment. This is a Wednesday, so Lincoln County residents get their usual $5 admission. The Lincoln County Animal Shelter and 4-H group will also have booths. Oregon Coast Aquarium. 2820 S.E. Ferry Slip Rd., Newport, Oregon. www.aquarium.org, 541-867-3474.



Spring Break at Hatfield Marine Science Center. The center be open everyday from 10  4, March 24 -31. Daily interpretive presentations happen at 11 a.m., with a focus on marine mammals and Orcas. Octopus presentations take place at 1 p.m. Saturday, Monday, and Thursday, talking about the Hatfield's Giant Pacific octopus. Hatfield Marine Science Center. 2030 SE Marine Science Drive. Newport, Oregon. 541-867-0100. http://hmsc.oregonstate.edu/. Oregon Coast Hotels for these events - Where to eat - Maps - Virtual Tours















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All Content, unless otherwise attributed, copyright BeachConnection.net Unauthorized use or publication is not permittedDrivers of app-based cab service Ola on Wednesday called off their three-day-old strike, the transport wing of Maharashtra Navnirman Sena said

Mumbai: Drivers of app-based cab service Ola on Wednesday called off their three-day-old strike, the transport wing of the Raj Thackeray-led Maharashtra Navnirman Sena, spearheading the stir, said.

Claiming "victory" for the "owner-operators" of Ola cabs in Mumbai and other places, the MNS, in a statement on Wednesday, said the Ola management, during their talks with the police and the wing's representatives earlier in the day, has given a written commitment on meeting the various demands.

These include a relook at drivers blacklisted by the taxi aggregator and putting up stickers in Marathi on Ola cabs, the statement said.

An Ola spokesperson, in a separate statement, confirmed that the strike had been called off with immediate effect.

"Ola would like to apologise to all its customers for the inconvenience caused due to factors beyond its control," the company said.

Meanwhile, a similar strike by drivers of Uber, another popular ride-hailing app, continues.

"An official of Uber will meet us in Mumbai on Thursday and a decision on the status of Uber drivers' stir is expected after that meeting," MNS transport wing president Sanjay Naik told PTI.

Almost 90 to 95 percent of Ola and Uber drivers in Mumbai participated in the strike on the third day Wednesday, Naik said.

On 19 March, their drivers went on an indefinite strike to protest against what they claimed low profit margins they get.

Naik rubbished claims that agitating drivers hurled stones on Ola and Uber cabs plying on the Mumbai roads.

Police have so far arrested 15 people from various parts of the metropolis for damaging cars, a senior official said.

It is estimated that over 45,000 app-based cabs operate in the financial capital alone.

Drivers of the traditional black and yellow cabs had a field day as they charged extra fare from hapless commuters.The Parliament on Thursday passed the Payment of Gratuity (Amendment) Bill, 2017, paving the way for doubling the limit of tax free gratuity.

New Delhi: The Parliament on Thursday passed the Payment of Gratuity (Amendment) Bill, 2017, paving the way for doubling the limit of tax free gratuity to Rs 20 lakh and empowering the government to fix the ceiling of the retirement benefit through an executive order.

The Rajya Sabha passed the bill, which was approved by the Lok Sabha last week, on 15 March.

Besides enabling the central government to fix the ceiling of tax free gratuity, the bill will also empower it to fix the period of maternity leave through executive order.

It also notifies the period of maternity leave as part of continuous service and proposes to empower the central government to notify the gratuity ceiling from time to time without amending the law.

Rajya Sabha Chairman M Venkaiah Naidu said in the Upper House that he had met leaders of various parties in the morning and it was decided that the House would take up the crucial Payment of Gratuity (Amendment) Bill as it was of importance to the employees.

Labour minister Santosh Kumar Gangwar then moved the Bill for consideration and passage. It was passed by a voice vote without a debate.

The labour ministry later said in a statement that the Bill also envisages amending the provisions relating to calculation of continuous service for the purpose of gratuity in case of female employees who are on maternity leave from "twelve weeks" to such period as may be notified by the central government from time to time.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi tweeted: "A significant pro-people measure passed in Parliament. Will benefit lakhs of Indians."

After implementation of the 7th Central Pay Commission, the ceiling of tax free gratuity amount for central government employees was increased from Rs 10 lakh to Rs 20 lakh. The unions have been demanding for inclusion of the change in the Act.

At present, formal sector workers with five or more years of service are eligible for Rs 10 lakh tax-free gratuity after leaving job or at time of superannuation.

A senior government official had earlier said that the government wants to provide tax-free gratuity of Rs 20 lakh to organised sector workers at par with the central government.

The Payment of Gratuity Act, 1972, was enacted to provide for gratuity payment to employees engaged in factories, mines, oilfields, plantations, ports, railway companies, shops or other establishments.

The law is applicable to employees, who have completed at least five years of continuous service in an establishment that has 10 or more persons.

The amendment will also allow the central government to notify the maternity leave period for female employees as deemed to be in continuous service in place of existing twelve weeks.

The proposal comes against the backdrop of the Maternity Benefit (Amendment) Act, 2017 enhancing the maximum maternity leave period to 26 weeks.Kanishk Gold makes gold jewellery marketed under the brand 'Krizz', which were sold through distributors till 2014.

The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has grilled Kanishk Gold (KGPL) directors Bhoopesh Kumar Jain and his wife Neeta Jain in the Rs 824 crore loan fraud case, the PTI reported on Thursday.

The husband-wife duo who had arrived in Bengaluru on Wednesday allegedly duped as many as 14 state-owned banks using their company Kanishk Gold as a front firm. Earlier in the day, media reports had claimed the couple might have fled the country in order to avoid arrest or questioning from the law enforcement agencies.

Another report had said they might have been living in Mauritius since the consortium of banks was unable to locate their whereabouts despite making various attempts in the past.

The CBI also filed a case in the matter after the State Bank of India (SBI), the biggest lender to the KGPL with Rs 240 crore exposure, came forward and lodged a complaint with the premier investigation agency.

SBI has alleged that Kanishk Gold "misrepresented and falsified" the records and financial statements of the company to show a "rosy picture" since 2009 to take credit. Kanishk Gold and its directors allegedly diverted the funds in a move that was against the interests of the bank, SBI said in the complaint, according to the PTI.

The company makes gold jewellery marketed under the brand 'Krizz', which were sold through distributors till 2014. In 2015, it changed its business model to B2B or business-to-business and started supplying to large retail jewellers, SBI said in the complaint to CBI.

However, the CBI fears it may not be able to collect crucial evidence in the case as the whole matter was leaked to the public even before the agency could complete its search operations, according to the PTI.

The Punjab National Bank (PNB) is the second largest bank in the case with an exposure of Rs 128 crore after the SBI. Besides following are the other public sector banks which have given loan to the Chennai based gold jewellery chain.

Bank of India (Rs 46 crore), IDBI (Rs 49 crore), Syndicate Bank (Rs 54 crore), Union Bank (Rs 53 crore), Uco Bank (Rs 45 crore), Central Bank (Rs 22 crore), Corporation Bank (Rs 23 crore), Bank of Baroda (Rs 32 crore), Tamil Nadu Mercantile Bank (Rs 27 crore), HDFC (Rs 27 crore), ICICI Bank (Rs 27 crore) and Andhra Bank (Rs 32 crore), according to the IANS.India ranked 146th in Trading Across Borders component of ease of doing business, out of 190 countries ranked by the World Bank in its latest report

New Delhi: The Prime Minister's Office has directed the commerce ministry to take immediate steps on streamlining procedures for trade with a view to facilitate movement of goods across borders and improve India's ranking in ease of doing business, an official said.

India ranked 146th in Trading Across Borders component of ease of doing business, out of 190 countries ranked by the World Bank in its latest report. "As the ranking in this parameter is not good, the Prime Minister's Office has directed the ministry to take steps in this direction," the commerce ministry official said.

The logistics division of the ministry is working to significantly improve the position in the next year's report. As part of the steps, the ministry has written to all the major stakeholders, including ports, customs, regulatory bodies such as Food Safety and Standards Authority of India to give all approvals and clearances in a paperless manner.

"We have asked to give all clearances for exports and imports online. Paper transaction needs to be eliminated as it increases inefficiencies," the official added. The move would significantly help in reducing both time and cost of traders for taking different kinds of approvals.

Although the government has reduced the number of mandatory documents required for import and export of goods to three in each case, it takes time to get approval. The ministry has also asked customs to carry out 'direct port delivery' for majority of consignments with a view to speed up movement of cargo containers.

According to an exporter, it takes several days for clearance of cargos without 'direct port delivery' system. Under this delivery mechanism, it takes about 50 hours.

The whole exercise is aimed at pushing the country's exports.

As per the latest World Bank report on ease of doing business, India's ranking was improved to 100th from 130th.Yet another bank fraud has come to light, with the CBI filing a case against Hyderabad-based Totem Infrastructure Ltd for allegedly defrauding a consortium of eight banks led by Union Bank of India (UBI) to the tune of Rs 1,394 crore

Hyderabad: Yet another bank fraud has come to light, with the CBI filing a case against Hyderabad-based Totem Infrastructure Ltd for allegedly defrauding a consortium of eight banks led by Union Bank of India (UBI) to the tune of Rs 1,394 crore.

A Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) team also carried out raids at several places here after filing the FIR against the firm and its Promoters and Directors Tottempudi Salalith and his wife Tottempudi Kavita.

The CBI filed the case on the basis of a complaint filed by UBI which was cheated of Rs 303.84 crore by the firm.

"Loan was taken from a consortium of eight banks including UBI which was the lead bank. Total dues outstanding for the consortium is Rs 1,394.43 crore. This account became NPA on 30 June, 2012 after loan and interest payment default," a CBI official said.

Totem Infrastructure was in the business of road projects, water works and building construction.

It is alleged that funds were diverted and expenditure was inflated, the official said.

On Wednesday, the CBI filed a case against a Chennai-based jeweller, Kanishk Gold Pvt Ltd, for defrauding a consortium of 14 banks led by the State Bank of India to the tune of Rs 824.15 crore in the form of loans that have now been declared as non-performing asset (NPA).Fifteen Naxals, two of them carrying cash rewards, were arrested from two places in Chhattisgarh's Maoist hotbed Sukma district, police said on Thursday.

Raipur: Fifteen Naxals, two of them carrying cash rewards, were arrested from two places in Chhattisgarh's Maoist hotbed Sukma district, police said on Thursday.

The arrests were significant as they came almost eight days after nine personnel of the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) were killed in an IED blast, when suspected Maoists blew up their mine-protected vehicle in Sukma, a senior police official said.

However, the arrested Naxals were not involved in the last week's attack on the CRPF, but were involved in the attack on police team in which two personnel were killed in February, police said.

During a search operation, 14 ultras, including two women, were arrested from a forest in Bhejji area and another cadre was caught from the district's Pushpal area on Wednesday, Deputy Inspector General of Police (south Bastar range) Sundarraj P told PTI.

A joint team of the Special Task Force (STF), the District Reserve Guard (DRG), the District Force (DF) and the CRPF was involved in the operation carried out in Bhejji to nab the 14 ultras. Besides, a combined squad of the Chhattisgarh Armed Force (CAF) and DF nabbed the rebel in Pushpal area, he said.

All the 14 cadres arrested from Bhejji were allegedly involved in the attack on a police team in Elarmadgu forest in the area on February 18 this year, in which two personnel were killed and six others were injured, he said. They were also involved in another incident on the same day in the area, in which a labourer was killed and 10 construction-related equipment and vehicles engaged in road laying work were torched, the DIG said.

Of the arrested Naxals, Sodhi Pojja (42), who was active as the head of Dandakaranya Adivasi Kisan Majdoor Sangthan  a frontal wing of Maoists in the area  was carrying a reward of Rs 1 lakh on his head, he said. The two women cadres  Rawa Kosi (22) and Hemla Hungi (32)  were working as members of the local guerilla squad (LGS) in Kistaram and the medical team of Maoists, respectively, he said.

The other arrested cadres were lower rung members of the outlawed Communist Party of India (Maoist), he added.

Besides, the Naxal arrested from Pushpal area, Madkam Somaru (25), was active as a LGS member in Machkot area and was carrying a cash reward of Rs 1 lakh on his head. He was allegedly involved in at least 10 Naxal-related incidents, including attacks on policemen, killings, torching vehicles used in road construction works and planting improvised explosive devices (IEDs) to harm the security personnel at separate places in Sukma, the DIG said.

On 13 March, nine CRPF personnel were killed after Maoists blasted their mine protected vehicle using over 50 kgs of explosives in Sukma, which is a hotbed of the ultras in Chhattisgarh.

On 11 March, 2017, 12 personnel of the force were killed in the Bhejji area and their arms looted, when Naxals ambushed their patrol party. A few days later on 24 April, 2017, 25 personnel of the paramilitary were killed in a similar ambush in Sukma.The 39 Indian constructions workers whose bodies were discovered in a dirt mound outside a village in Iraq's Mosul were shot dead, most of them in the head

The 39 Indian constructions workers whose bodies were discovered in a dirt mound outside a village in Iraq's Mosul were shot dead, most of them in the head, Iraqi authorities have confirmed.

Dr Zaid Ali Abbas, head of Iraqs Department of Forensic Medicine under its Ministry of Health, who conducted the forensic tests and the DNA analysis on the bodies, told The Associated Press that most of the victims were shot, many in the head.

While authorities have not said when they believe the group of Indian workers were killed, the bodies were badly decomposed and had clearly been buried for a long time.

"When the remains came to us, they were just skeletons, only bones. They had no muscle or tissue. Forensically, I can confirm that they definitely died over a year ago, Abbas, who is also Iraq's forensic director had told Hindustan Times.

According to AP, they found the bodies of men with long black hair and silver bracelets known as karas that are worn by followers of the Sikh religion. Islamic State is likely to have killed them for their religious beliefs.

The dirt mounds outside the the hilly region in Badush, near Mosul, were known as place where Islamic State fighters had buried some of their enemies after they overran much of northern Iraq nearly four years ago, but the identity of the 39 bodies were discovered only when Iraqi authorities began digging last summer. The bodies were exhumed by Martyrs Foundation.

The workers, mostly from northern India, had been employed by a construction company operating near the northern city of Mosul. Around 10,000 Indians lived and worked in Iraq at the time.

Forty Indians were captured by the militants, though one man, Harjit Masih, had managed to escape.

The authorities have now confirmed Masih, who for long had maintained that the rest of the group had been killed. He said they had all been held for a number of days, then taken outside and ordered to kneel. Then the militants opened fire.

"They were killed in front of my eyes," he told reporters earlier this week. He was shot in the thigh but had managed to escape.

The Indian government, however, hadn't confirmed the death of the 39 Indians till 20 March.

In fact, Minister of External Affairs Sushma Swaraj, had on Wednesday said that how the victims were killed was irrelevant while defending his ministry's stand on not relying Masih's account of events. Addressing a press conference Swaraj had said on Tuesday that this was Masihs individual account, and that his version of events about how he had escaped did not check out. She said the government could not have declared the 39 Indians dead without concrete evidence.

The killing was a "heinous crime carried out by Daesh (Arabic acronym for Islamic State) terrorist gangs," Najiha Abdul-Amir al-Shimari, the head of Iraq's Martyrs Establishment, told reporters.

Those killed were "citizens of the friendly Indian state. Their dignity was supposed to be protected, but the forces of evil wanted to defame the principles of Islam," said al-Shimari, who heads the government body which documents those killed by Islamic State.

Dozens of mass graves have been discovered in territory once held by Islamic State, though Iraq's government has only been able to examine a handful of them. Iraqi officials say they lack the resources and trained personnel to properly exhume so many sites.

At the height of its power, Islamic State controlled nearly a third of the country. In recent years, Iraqi forces backed by a US-led coalition have gradually driven the militants from all the territory they once held. The area around Badush was retaken last summer.

Search operations led to the mound of dirt near Badush, where local residents said bodies had been buried by Islamic State, Swaraj said in Parliament.

Iraqi authorities used radar to verify that the mound was a mass grave, she said, and then exhumed the bodies. Indian authorities then sent DNA samples from relatives of the missing workers.

"It is indeed a moment of deep grief and sadness for us," India's ambassador to Iraq, Pradeep Singh Rajpurohit, told reporters in Baghdad. "India strongly condemns terrorism in all forms and manifestations and stands in solidarity with the government and the people of Iraq in their fight against terrorism." He said the bodies will be sent back to India "in a couple of weeks or so."

With inputs from APMain opposition party AAP urged Punjab government to order a vigilance probe into illegal mining in the state and demanded that the government should take over the business of sand and gravel mining to curb the illegal practice

Chandigarh: Main opposition party AAP urged the Punjab government to order a vigilance probe into illegal mining in the state and demanded that the government should take over the business of sand and gravel mining to curb the illegal practice.

After the Question Hour on the second day of the Budget Session of the Assembly, AAP MLA and Leader of Opposition Sukhpal Singh Khaira raised the issue of illegal mining in the state while describing it as a burning matter.

He claimed that illegal mining had been going on during the 10-year SAD-BJP regime and one year of the Congress-led government.

But the practice of illegal mining had stopped for the time being after Chief Minister Amarinder Singh ordered a crackdown against it, he said.

Citing media reports, Khaira claimed that names of a cabinet minister and a former minister had cropped up with regard to illegal mining.

You should hold a vigilance probe into the illegal mining, Khaira told the government.

The AAP leader also sought development of a mobile app, allowing people to post photos of illegal mining.

Claiming that the auction of sand mining had turned out to be a flop as a majority of the contractors had run away, Khaira said mining in the state should be nationalised. The government can take over the mining business, he said.

AAP MLA Kanwar Sandhu asked the government to reveal any agreement or MoU signed with Canada when Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had met the chief minister recently.

Participating in the discussion on the governor's address, opposition AAP and SAD-BJP members lashed out at the Congress-led government for "not being able to fulfil its poll promises".

They took on the government on the issues of farm debt waiver, job scheme for youths and alleged that the government failed to work for the welfare of Dalits, farmers, youths etc.

Later, Akali MLA NK Sharma and Congress legislator Balbir Sidhu also had a verbal spat when Sharma was pointing out the achievements of the previous SAD-BJP regime.

During the discussion on the governor's address, Aam Aadmi Party MLA Kultar Singh Sandhwan urged the state government to instruct the bureaucrats to behave properly with the legislators.

The AAP legislator from Kotkapura alleged that an IAS officer in Faridkot did not behave with him properly when he raised the issue of MNREGA.

I was told you are just an MLA, Sandhwan said while pointing out that he kept standing when he met the IAS officer during the meeting.

Sandhwan and an IAS officer in Faridkot got involved in a verbal spat this month.

A video of the purported spat had gone viral on the social media. In the video, the officer could be seen asking Sandhwan to leave the office after telling him not to raise his voice.India and the US have a shared interest that their navies provide security which guarantees a peaceful and prosperous Indo-Pacific region, the US Navy chief has said.

Washington: India and the US have a shared interest that their navies provide security which guarantees a peaceful and prosperous Indo-Pacific region, the US Navy chief has said.

US chief of Naval Operations Admiral John Richardson had a meeting at the Pentagon with Indian Navy chief Admiral Sunil Lanba who is on a five-day visit to America.

It was Richardson's fourth meeting with Lanba. The two had last met at the IMDEX Asia defence conference in May 2017.

"We have a shared interest that our navies provide the security that underwrites a peaceful and prosperous Indo-Pacific region," Richardson told PTI yesterday after his meeting with Lanba. "I've met often with Admiral Lanba and our discussions center on a naval partnership built on respect and trust," he said.

The two heads of Navy met with Secretary of Navy Richard V Spencer and discussed ways to improve interoperability to include additional naval exercises and staff talks, said a Pentagon readout of the meeting. "Naval exercises like Malabar and the Rim-of-the-Pacific are examples of our deepening cooperation and I look forward to continuing to explore opportunities that increase our interoperability," Richardson said.

He is on a five-day visit to the US during which he will hold extensive talks with the top military brass of the Trump administration to consolidate bilateral naval cooperation, including in the Indo-Pacific region. The US has been pushing for a broader role for India in the strategically important Indo-Pacific region.

In November 2017, India, the US, Australia and Japan gave shape to the long-pending Quad or quadrilateral corridor to develop a new strategy to keep the critical sea routes in the Indo-Pacific free from Chinese influence. "The relationship between the US Navy and the Indian Navy has never been stronger," said Richardson.

"There has been meaningful progress made in strengthening the cooperation between our two-great democratic and maritime nations. We are exploring every way to expand that partnership even further based on our shared interests," he said.

India was accorded Major Defence Partner status by the US in 2016, bringing New Delhi on par with Washington's closest allies for defence-related trade and technology transfer.

The Indian Navy cooperates with the US Navy on several fronts which include operational interactions such as the Malabar naval exercise and exchange of white shipping information. Warships from both navies have also been regularly visiting each other's ports.AIMIM chief Asaduddin Owaisi on Thursday said Uttar Pradesh Law Minister Brijesh Pathak's comment that the state government may withdraw 'politically motivated' riot cases, was 'travesty' of justice

New Delhi: AIMIM chief Asaduddin Owaisi on Thursday said Uttar Pradesh Law Minister Brijesh Pathak's comment that the state government may withdraw "politically motivated" riot cases, was "travesty" of justice and a "cruel joke" on victims of the violent incidents.

The Hyderabad MP alleged that the minister's comment shows that the BJP indulges in "appeasement" of Hindus and the Yogi Adityanath government does not believe in the rule of law.

He also accused the BJP government in Uttar Pradesh of "rewarding" those who are facing prosecution for heinous crimes.

"It is a travesty of justice. It is a cruel joke that is being played on all those who were murdered, raped, and 50,000 people were made homeless and refugees in their own country. This clearly shows the BJP indulges in appeasement of Hindutva," Owaisi told a news channel outside Parliament.

The All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen (AIMIM) chief also accused the Adityanath government of abdicating its constitutional duty, which warranted it to ensure that anyone charged for any offence is gets convicted.

Earlier in the day, Pathak said the state government may withdraw riot cases if they are "politically motivated" as he replied to a specific question by a mediaperson on the cases related to Muzaffarnagar and other riots in the state.

"Riot cases are also registered under the IPC. If these are politically motivated, we will surely consider their withdrawal," the minister said.

Pathak, however, made it clear that only those cases were being withdrawn which smacked of political vendetta.A group of BJP's Dalit MPs, who on Thursday met Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, said they would meet party chief Amit Shah to press for a review petition against a Supreme Court order, which dilutes a law covering cases of atrocities against scheduled castes and tribes.

New Delhi: A group of BJP's Dalit MPs, who on Thursday met Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, said they would meet party chief Amit Shah to press for a review petition against a Supreme Court order, which dilutes a law covering cases of atrocities against scheduled castes and tribes.

BJP's 'SC Morcha' chief Vinod Kumar Sonkar, who is also a Lok Sabha member, told PTI that they met Prasad and would meet Shah, and insisted that the government would ensure that no harm was done to the interests of the community.

Prasad told a press conference that the government was examining the apex court's judgement and would give a structured response to it in the coming days.

Some MPs said on the condition of anonymity that the only way out for the government was to file a review petition in the court as the issue had the potential to become a political hot potato for the saffron party, which had been wooing Dalits.

Expressing concern over misuse of the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, the Supreme Court on Tuesday introduced the provision of anticipatory bail and ruled against automatic arrest of the accused booked under the law.

Several BJP leaders said it would work against the interests of Dalits with one of them saying that several laws were misused but it should not result in diluting them and that atrocities against Dalits remained a serious issue in vast parts of the country.

Bizay Sonkar Shastri, a Dalit leader from the BJP and its spokesperson, said it was a serious issue, more so as 90 percent of criminal cases resulted in the acquittal of accused and the order would further weaken the law.

He recalled that the then Uttar Pradesh chief minister Mayawati in 2002 had passed an order asking police invoke the SC/ST Act in serious cases only and claimed that he as the then chairperson of the SC and ST Commission had played a role in pressuring her to withdraw the decision.

"The Supreme Court's order more dangerous than that," he said.

Shastri said BJP leaders had met non-SC/ST lawmakers in Parliament as well and they were also sympathetic to their plea.The test firing comes three months after the BrahMos cruise missile was successfully test fired for the first time from the Indian Air Force's frontline Sukhoi-30 MKI combat jet.

New Delhi/Pokhran: India on Thursday successfully test fired the BrahMos supersonic cruise missile with an indigenous seeker at Pokhran test range in Rajasthan.

Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said the missile hit the target with "pin-point" accuracy and the success will further bolster India's national security.

The test firing comes three months after the BrahMos cruise missile was successfully test fired for the first time from the Indian Air Force's frontline Sukhoi-30 MKI combat jet.

"Formidable Supersonic Cruise Missile BrahMos was successfully flight tested at 8:42 AM today at Pokhran test range, Rajasthan. The precision strike weapon with Indian-made seeker flew in its designated trajectory and hit the target with pin-point accuracy," Sitharaman tweeted.

The range of the missile, an Indo-Russia joint venture, can be extended up to 400 km as certain technical restrictions were lifted after India became a full member of the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) last year.

BrahMos is a joint venture between DRDO of India and NPO Mashinostroyenia (NPOM) of Russia.

The Defence Minister congratulated the DRDO on Thursday's successful test firing.

BrahMos missile is the heaviest weapon to be deployed on India's Su-30 fighter aircraft.

Work has already begun to integrate the BrahMos supersonic cruise missile on 40 Sukhoi combat aircraft which is expected to fulfil the critical needs of the Indian Air Force in the wake of evolving security dynamics in the region.A stormy day is expected in the Parliament on Thursday, where proceedings were washed out for the 13th consecutive day on Wednesday as members of some parties like the AIADMK and TRS continued with their noisy protests

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Amid the outrage over the Nirav Modi scam and Karti Chidambaram's arrest in the INX Media case, the NDA government is possibly staring at a stormy second half of Budget Session which begins from Monday. The first part of the budget session was held from 29 January to 9 February, while second half of the session will come to a close on 9 April.

The Congress is also likely to denounce the government over the arrest of former Union finance minister P Chidambaram's son Karti by the CBI in the INX Media alleged bribery case. The Congress has termed the CBI action "political vendetta".

The Opposition is also likely to corner the government over the tussle between Prasar Bharti and the Information and Broadcasting ministry. It is likely to raise issues concerning farmers, the Rafale deal, Staff Selection Commission "job scam", loss of life and property due to ceasefire violations on the LoC and increase in cost of petroleum products.

Meanwhile, YSRCP MPs from Andhra Pradesh are likely to hold a dharna against the Centre in the Parliament premises. The party is also expected to initiate a no-confidence motion in Lok Sabha on 21 March, reported Livemint.

BJP MP Vinay Sahasrabuddhe calls for suspension of today's session under rule 267 of the Parliament in order to discuss allegations of corruption indulged by family members of former ministers under the tacit protection of ministers.

D Raja of the CPI too has issued an adjournment notice in the Rajya Sabha in order to discuss the Punjab National Bank scam. This is the third adjournment motion on the issue.

CNN-News18 is reporting that the BJP president will be meeting a delegation from the TDP to discuss the issue of special status to the state of Andhra Pradesh. According to the report, TDP is currently adamant on the 19 demands for the state. On the other hand, the YSRCP is also pressurizing the government over the same issue.

The bill to target economic offenders was approved by the government following the escape of diamond merchant Nirav Modi and other accused in the over Rs 12,700-crore Punjab National Bank scam.

The passage of the Fugitive Economic Offenders Bill, which seeks confiscation of assets of absconding fraudsters and loan defaulters, and the triple talaq bill will be high on the government's agenda.

The Payment of Gratuity (Amendment) Bill 2017 and The Specific Relief (Amendment) Bill 2017 will be tabled in the Lower House of the Parliament, reported PTI.

TDP MPs prtoest outside the Parliament over the issue of special status for Andhra Pradesh

Today has been the day of adjournment motions. A notice for an adjournment motion can be issued under rule 267 of the Parliament. It is generally utilised by an MP to discuss a matter of public importance. Three of the adjournment motions have been issued to discuss the Nirav Modi scam, while Pappu Yadav has issued an adjournment motion to discuss the alleged scam in the SSC exams. On the other hand, BJP MP Vinay Sahasrabuddhe has issued an adjournment notice to discuss the allegations of corruption by relatives of former ministers.

While the Opposition is expected to target the government over financial scams in the recent past, the BJP is likely to pin the blame on the Congress-led UPA regime. The BJP has already claimed that the PNB scam had begun when the UPA was in power and its government has acted with alacrity after the fraud came out in the open. The party, energised by the win in Tripura and impressive performance in Nagaland and Meghalaya elections, is likely to be aggressive in Parliament and rake up scams that happened on the Congress watch to pin it down, party sources said.

However, Opposition created a ruckus in the House as soon as the session began.

Chairman of the Rajya Sabha Venkaiah Naidu is saying that everyone who issued an adjournment notices under rule 267 will get a chance once he holds a discussion with Arun Jaitley, the Leader of Rajya Sabha. He added that many of the members have to look at some other rule in the Parliament rule book to talk in the Parliament. On the issue of Cauvery water, Naidu said that the adjournment notice issued by AIADMK MP Navneethakrishnan will be discussed in Zero Hour.

According to Financial Express, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley and BJP president Amit Shah are scheduled to meet a TDP delegation, and more importantly the Andhra Pradesh finance minister, over the issue of granting Andhra Pradesh with special category status.

"Don't create hungama," said Venkaiah Naidu as Opposition continued to create ruckus over PNB scam, 'Special Category Status' to Andhra Pradesh and other issues. This forced Naidu to adjourn the Upper House of the Parliament till 2 pm.

However, the Opposition continues to create ruckus. The Opposition has also walked into the Well of the House to protest against the government.

The resignation of Neiphiu Rio, who was elected to the Nagaland Assembly unopposed, and who is likely to be the next Chief Minister of Nagaland, has been accepted by Speaker Sumitra Mahajan.

The Rajya Sabha has resumed operations, with PJ Kurien seated at the Chair. However, MP's continued there agitation even as the Speaker took his seat. Slogans of "Nirav Modi vapas lao" raged in the Parliament while Kurien urged the MPs to maintain decorum of the House.

PJ Kuries, in an attempt to calm down the agitated members, acknowledged that the issues raised by them were important and agreed to allow discussion on them one by one. For today, he granted permission to conduct a debate on the frauds in public sector banks. However, Opposition MPs refused to vacate the Well and continued raising slogans. There demand was that the prime minister must explain why he could not keep his promise to bring back Nirav Modi and other people alleged scamsters.

In the Rajya Sabha, ministers are laying the papers on the table

Members of the Opposition come to the Well of the House to protest against Nirav Modi. Slogans of "Nirav Modi ko wapas lao" are being heard. Meanwhile, Venkaiah Naidu has adjourned Rajya Sabha till 11.30 am.

Times Now is reporting that Lok Sabha will be holding a marathon four-hour-long discussion on the issue, starting at noon.

The Union Cabinet on Thursday approved the much talked about Fugitive Economic Offenders (FEO) Bill, 2018 which will be tabled in the remaining Budget session in Parliament. Finance Minister Arun Jaitley on Thursday said that the government has also decided to set up an independent body NFRA (National Financial Reporting Authority) to crackdown on big scams and avoid Nirav Modi-like situation in future. For the purpose the government will amend Companies Act.

While the ministers have tabled their papers, the Opposition continue raise slogans against the government. The Opposition is raising slogans like "Chota Modi, bada Modi Murdabad".

"The second half of the Budget Session is important for passing financial bills. I request the Congress, TDP, TRS and other parties to calm down and let the Hosue continue its work," Parliamentary Affairs Minister Ananth Kumar said.

While speaking in the Parliament, Union Minister Ananth Kumar said that Arun Jaitley will be making a statement on the issue. However, he also took the opportunity to target the Congress and the previous UPA government. "No one involved in the Congress-led UPA era corruption scandals will be spared," he said.

According to News18, MPs from four parties storming the Well to protest for different demands. While the Congress and the Trinamool Congress want debate on the PNB scam, the AIADMK is protesting over the Cauvery issue. The TRS wants the Constitution amended to skirt the 50% ceiling for reservation in jobs and education, while the TDP wants special status for Andhra Pradesh.

"We have to look at the importance of passing the women's reservation bill," Kanimozhi said.

"Families want to abort and kill the girl child. There are so many dowry deaths. Domestic violence is on the rise. When is all this going to stop?" she further said.

"Men are celebrating us today as mothers, sisters, daughter. I think it's time for women to say, 'enough of that'. We don't want to be celebrated for our sacrifices. We want to be celebrated for our identity," Kanimozhi said in the Rajya Sabha.

Women don't want to be celebrated for their sacrifices, they want to be celebrated for their identities: Kanimozhi

"I find it strange that we celebrate Women's Day. But men don't celebrate any particular day. I am not in favour of this tokenism. I request all the men to stop throwing crumbs at us and treat us with respect throughout the year," Anu Aga said in the Rajya Sabha.

"Earlier, people used to say, 'behing every successful man, there is a woman'. But now, the saying has become 'behind every successful man, there is a nationalised bank," said Derek O'Brien in the Rajya Sabha, clearly taking a dig at the Modi government over the PNB scam.

"Everyone should promise that the restrictions imposed on women by men will be abolished. On Valentine's Day, girls and couples should not be beaten up. In the name of anti-Romeo squad, women were beaten up in UP," AAP's Sanjay Singh said in the Rajya Sabha.

"On other hand, there are crimes against women which bring about shame to us. Which is why this day is one on which we should take a pledge to end such crimes," Swaraj said. "This should be a movement," she added.

"India is a country where a woman became president, prime minister, twice became the Speaker of a House," she said. "Today, women are doing combat duty in the army, flying planes in the air force," she added.

"International Women's Day gives us an opportunity to look at the requirements for gender equality," Sushma Swaraj said in the Rajya Sabha. "Women's reservation bill is important. But there are achievements by women even without reservation," she said.

We should take a pledge this day to end crimes against women: Sushma Swaraj

The Opposition parties protested against the passage of the budget without debate, as the session is slated to continue till 6 April.

The Finance Bill as well as the Appropriation Bill were passed in a matter of 25 minutes during which Opposition parties and ruling NDA ally TDP shouted slogans and created a din. The Lower House was adjourned for the day immediately thereafter.

The Lok Sabha on Wednesday passed the crucial Finance Bill 2018 and a Rs 89.25 lakh crore spending plan for the next fiscal year without discussion amid ruckus, which led to the adjournment of both the Houses of Parliament for the eighth day.

The Rajya Sabha began Thursday's session with an obituary of former MP Hamida Habibullah. The members observed a minute of silence for the same.

Lok Sabha MPs could be heard protesting in the background even as Speaker Sumitra Mahajan tries to conduct the Thursday's session. Congress and other Opposition party members stormed the Well. Ministers speaking can hardly be heard over the din.

Even as Opposition party members stormed the Well in the Lok Sabha, Parliamentary Affairs Minister Ananth Kumar said the Centre is willing to discuss the Cauvery issue and special package to Andhra Pradesh but it cannot be done so with protests in the Well.

Lok Sabha Speaker Sumitra Mahajan was forced to adjourn the Lower House till 12 pm on Thursday within less than 10 minutes of the session's beginning.

Former Union minister and TDP MP YS Chowdary speaks on why he resigned from the BJP-led Centre in Rajya Sabha

Speaking in the Rajya Sabha, former Union MoS for Science and Technology YS Chowdary said that the Andhra Pradesh bifurcation was done unjustly and unscientifically. "The division could have been done after taking care of employment potential, development in both states. Both states must have been developed equally for 10 years by the government in power at the time," he said. Following his opening remarks, other members of the House began to clamour and protest, creating a din.

Rajya Sabha Chairman M Venkaiah Naidu was forced to adjourn the House due to loud protests over former Union minister and TDP MP YS Chowdary's remarks on why he resigned from the Council of Ministers of the Narendra Modi-led NDA government.

Opposition MPs continued to storm the Well of the House even as Speaker Sumitra Mahajan resumed the session.

The Rajya Sabha was earlier adjourned till 2 pm on Thursday amid sharp exchanges between former Union minister from the TDP, YS Chowdary, and the Congress members over the bifurcation of Andhra Pradesh in 2014 under the UPA government.

If accepted, it will be the first no-confidence motion moved against the Modi-government.

The motion can be accepted only if it has the support of at least 50 members in the House. YSR Congress has nine MPs in the Lok Sabha.

The YSR Congress's MP YV Subba Reddy gave the notice to the Lok Sabha secretariat for including the motion in Friday's list of business, his office said.

The YSR Congress on Thursday gave a notice for moving a no-confidence motion against the BJP-led NDA government following the Centre's refusal to grant special category status to Andhra Pradesh and found unlikely support from its arch-rival Telugu Desam Party (TDP).

YSR Congress Party MP YV Subba Reddy submitted a notice to the Lok Sabha Secretary-General Snehalata Shrivastava for moving a motion on 'No-Confidence in the Council of Ministers' in the house.

The Telugu Desam Party (TDP) has become the first BJP ally to break away from the National Democratic Alliance (NDA). Follow LIVE updates on the same here.

After announcing the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) pulls out of the NDA, party MP Thota Narasimhan told ANI that the TDP will be moving a no-confidence motion on Friday. "We have decided... we are out of the NDA," he added.

"TDP withdrew support from the NDA, which did injustice to Andhra Pradesh. TDP president Chandrababu Naidu took this decision in an emergency teleconference with party politburo members and MPs, which was unanimously supported. TDP to also introduce no-confidence motion against NDA government," ANI quoted the Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister's Office as saying.

"TDP's decision to quit was inevitable after its mischievous propaganda against Centre. People of Andhra Pradesh have now realised that TDP is resorting to lies to cover up its inert governance. TDP's exit is a timely opportunity for the BJP to grow in Andhra Pradesh," BJP national spokesperson GVL Narasimha Rao tweeted.

Speaking to ANI , BJP MP Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi commented on the TDP-NDA break up saying that every year before actual elections, there is always a rehearsal in Parliament. "We will see what happens in Parliament, which party chooses to go which way. In a way it is election year, and every state has demands and issues. It is not right for us to comment on it. It is a custom, before actual elections there is always a rehearsal in Parliament," he said.

Sarfaraz Alam (Araria, Bihar), Nagendra Pratap Singh Patel (Phulpur, Uttar Pradesh), Pravin Kumar Nishad (Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh), who won the recent bypolls held in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, took their oath as Lok Sabha MPs on Friday.

Supporting the no-confidence motion against the NDA government, CPM general secretary Sitaram Yechury tweeted: "Its (BJP's) betrayal of the promise of special status for Andhra Pradesh is inexcuseable. Its all-round failure and evasion of parliamentary accountability needs to be highlighted."

After the obituary references were read out, Opposition parties' MPs created a ruckus over the no-confidence motion against the NDA government. Speaker Sumitra Mahajan adjourned the House till 12 pm.

All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen chief Asaduddin Owaisi said his party will support the no-confidence motion against the NDA government in the Lok Sabha. "MIM party will support the no confidence motion in Lok Sabha, not only for failure of Modi government to implement State Reorganisation Act but their failure to fulfill their promise to provide employment to youth ans for injustice to Muslim women and minorities," CNN-News18 quoted him as saying.

"We have no confidence in their no-confidence motion, so we have decided to go on our own," he said. - PTI

TDP MP CM Ramesh added that YSR Congress MP Vijaysai Reddy was seen making attempts to meet the prime minister and this hinted at a nexus between both parties.

Andhra Pradesh's ruling party had on Thursday offered to back the YSR Congress' no-confidence motion but has now said it withdraws the support as it smells a nexus between it and the BJP.

TDP decided to move its own no-confidence motion after suspecting nexus between YSRCP and BJP

Speaking to ANI , BJP national spokesperson GVL Narasimha Rao claimed that the Andhra Pradesh government and TDP are wary of the BJP's rise in the state. "The state government and TDP are feeling the pinch of the public opinion going against them and BJP will use this as an opportunity to grow as a political party and emerge as a dominant political force in Andhra Pradesh. For us it will prove to be the next Tripura," Rao said.

Even as Opposition MPs continued to chant slogans in the House, with TRS, TDP MPs storming the Well of the House, Speaker Sumitra Mahajan began with business for the day. She also said that she is duty-bound to introduce the two no-confidence motions but asked protesting MPs to sit in their places. As she said this, Opposition protests began to get louder.

The Lok Sabha was adjourned for the day after Telagana Rashra Samithi (TRS) MPs stormed the Well. Speaker Sumitra Mahajan said she cannot introduce the two no confidence motions by YSRCP and TDP if House members continued to disrupt proceedings as she needed to check if there are 50 members to support each motion. Protesting MPs created more ruckus in response, forcing her to adjourn Lok Sabha till Monday.

The NDA had stormed to power with 336 seats in 2014, of which the BJP alone claimed 282 seats. However, a series of bypolls that went against the saffron party meant that its tally in the Lok Sabha currently stands at 273 seats. When one adds the allies the BJP does have by its side  Shiv Sena, JD(U), Apna Dal, LJP, SAD, RLSP, PDP  the tally rises to 312. If the TDP can be persuaded to come around once again, this could rise to 328, a comfortable majority.

The TDP has 16 MPs, and it said it would move a no-confidence motion against the Central government. In doing so, it would be following in the footsteps of rival Andhra Pradesh party, the YSR Congress, which has also said it would be moving a no-confidence motion against the Centre. The two Andhra parties have been miffed with the BJP following the latter's inability to grant special status for the state.

As some other Congress members were on their feet trying to join the issue simultaneously, Naidu adjourned the House till 2.30 PM.

"Do you want this sort of a thing to continue? ... Is that your suggestion. This is your party view," he said.

To this, Naidu asked if somebody committed a mistake in the past, does it mean that he should also do the same.

As he was making the appeal, Congress member Satyabrat Chaturvedi stood up and said he agreed with the Chair, but sought to know whether it was for the first time that he is witnessing such a scenario in Parliament.

"I am very much pained that the Upper House of Parliament is not able to transact its business for last two weeks. Dont't test my patience...We are meeting, greeting and not doing anything and adjourning," the Chairman said.

Before adjourning the House till 2.30 PM, Naidu said there were larger issues like banking scam, Cauvery river water sharing, demand for a special package to Andhra Pradesh and sealing in the national capital, which were agitating the minds of people and needed to be discussed.

After tabling of the listed papers, Naidu expressed his anguish saying the House has not functioned ever since it resumed on March 5 after recess during the Budget session.

The Rajya Sabha today witnessed an abrupt adjournment following a brief argument between Chairman M Venkaiah Naidu and some Congress members soon after the House assembled for the day.

Deputy Chairman of Rajya Sabha told Chowsary to resume his speech from yesterday, which was interrupted due to the disruption of the House. He, however, added that Chowdary must stick to the speech approved by the Chairman and resist making any allegations.

Chowdary said that the former prime minister Manmohan Singh has promised that Centre's hand-holing to Andhra. He then added that both the national parties were responsible for the secession of Andhra Pradesh and a certain help was promised to us at the time. Chowdary further said that the new constitutional restriction being cited by the Centre should not be applicable retrospectively to what was promised to Andhra.

The deputy chairman, however, expunged those remarks as he said the Chairman had seen and vetted the speech but Chowdary had deviated from the approved version.

In the course of his speech, Chowdary quoted the Opposition MP Venkaiah Naidu requesting special status for Andhra for at least 10 years. This elicited an objection from Railway Minister Piyush Goyal who said that Chowdary was trying to cast aspersions on the Chair (Venkaiah Naidu). This was met with sharp opposition from the Congress members who requested the quotes to be repeated.

It is expected to be a stormy day in the Parliament on Monday, especially for the Lok Sabha where the two no-confidence motions against the Narendra Modi-led NDA government by the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) and YSR Congress Party are likely to be taken up.

However, equations with the existing allies aren't particularly rosy. In particular with Shiv Sena, the largest non-BJP constituent of the NDA. If the Sena follows TDP by backing out, the figure of 314 will go down to 296, just 23 more than the magic figure of 273, and the BJP can no longer be certain of its future.

The NDA had stormed to power with 336 seats in 2014, of which the BJP alone claimed 282 seats. However, a series of bypolls that went against the saffron party meant that its tally in the Lok Sabha currently stands at 274 seats. When one adds the 11 allies the BJP still has by its side  Shiv Sena, JD(U), Apna Dal, LJP, SAD, RLSP, PDP, PMK, SWP, NPP and AINR Congress  the tally rises to 314 . If the TDP can be persuaded to come around once again, this could rise to 330, a comfortable majority.

RECAP: With TDP quitting NDA, Centre's strength comes down to 314 from 336 in Lok Sabha

RJD's JP Yadav gave an adjournment motion notice in Lok Sabha on Monday over the recent "communal incidents of violence in Araria, Bhagalpur and Darbhanga", reported ANI .

Speaking to ANI, Shiv Sena leader Sanjay Raut said the party will "wait and watch" what happens in the Parliament on Monday. He said: "We will also have to see if the Speaker allows the no confidence motion or rejects it. TDP has its own state issues and we welcome them. As of now we have not decided yet on no confidence motion. Uddhav ji (Thackeray) will take a call."

The Parliament secretariat received three separate notices for a no-confidence motion against the BJP government on Monday, two of which were from TDP and one from the YSR Congress, reported ANI . Lok Sabha Sumitra Mahajan is likely to take up the notices after Question Hour if the House is in order.

CPI leader Duraisamy Raja said that the Left parties will be supporting the no-confidence motion in the Parliament on Monday. "People have started expressing their no confidence in the Modi government, it is time the Parliament does it too," ANI quoted him as saying.

He had earlier also said the BJP enjoys support "inside and outside" the Parliament, according to Business Standard . "I want to tell the Congress and other Opposition members that there is confidence inside and outside the House. That's why the BJP is ready to face the no-confidence motion," said Kumar.

Ahead of Monday's Parliament session, Parliamentary Affairs Minister Ananth Kumar said that the saffron party was ready to face the no-confidence motion as it is sure it has the necessary support.

In less than two minutes of being in session, the Lok Sabha was adjourned till 12 pm. As soon as Speaker Sumitra Mahajan entered the House, loud protests and sloganeering dominated the scene, making it impossible for any business to be conducted amid the din.

Slogans of "We want justice" could be heard as Chairman Venkaiah Naidu said, "This is not in the interest of the country, and Parliament. I am willing to allow also these discussions. How long should we continue like this?"

The Upper House of the Parliament was adjourned till tomorrow after TDP and AIADMK MPs began protesting in the Rajya Sabha.

He also said that the TDP also increased the state's budget by Rs 1100 crores. "We will strive to do the same in future. We are moving to work to move forward in skill development to help the people of Andhra Pradesh," he said.

He also claimed that the YSR Congress Party is only 'playing politics' and has no interest in the state's welfare. Trying to assuage people's sentiments, Naidu said that the "TDP government is undertaking multiple irrigation projects to ensure the state's development is not stalled amid all this."

Andhra Pradesh chief minister and TDP president N Chandrababu Naidu on Monday said that the state is being cheated by the Central government. "We are being cheated by the government. The BJP is making false allegations against me," he said.

Shiv Sena MP Arvind Sawant told ANI that the party will abstain from the no-confidence motion. "We will neither support the government nor the Opposition. We will abstain," he said.

As soon as Speaker Sumitra Mahajan took up the Question Hour, members from these parties trooped into the Well holding placards. While members from the TDP, YSR Congress, TRS and AIADMK were in the Well raising slogans and holding placards, MPs from the TMC and Congress were seen standing at their seats. This forced the House to be adjourned till 12 pm.

The Lok Sabha proceedings were disrupted for the 11th day on Monday as the TDP, YSR Congress, TRS and AIADMK continued their noisy protests over various issues, including the banking scam and special status for Andhra Pradesh.

Even as the Lower House resumed its proceedings, sloganeering dominated the scene as TDP, AIADMK MPs could be heard shouting "We want justice". However, Speaker Sumitra Mahajan began with day's business, asking ministers to lay their papers on the table.

Home Minister Rajnath Singh said: "We want discussion on the no-confidence motion. I request all MPs to maintain decorum so that we can discuss it. We are ready to discuss any issue with any member."

Following continuous uproar in the Lok Sabha, Speaker Sumitra Mahajan adjourned the House till Tuesday. TSR, YSRCP MPs trooped into the Well, while chanting slogans such as "We want justice". Mahajan tried to introduce the no-confidence motion notices but requested all MPs to sit at their designated spots so that a quorum could be established. Opposition members and other parties' MPs continued to create a ruckus, forcing the House to be adjourned for the day.

The Samajwadi Party on Monday accused the government of egging AIADMK to stage protests in the Lok Sabha to avoid a no-confidence motion even as Tamil Nadu's ruling party warned that it would not allow business in both the Houses of Parliament till the Centre gives an assurance on the constitution of the Cauvery River Management Board.

MoS Parliamentary Affairs Vijay Goel said the government is ready discuss all issues. However protests cause Vice-President Venkaiah Naidu to adjourn the Rajya Sabha till 21 March.

Sushma Swaraj starts speaking about the Indians in Mosul. She had spoken about the issue in the Rajya Sabha earlier.

The Bills have already been passed in the Lok Sabha

Finance Minister Arun Jaitley to move Fugitive Economic Offenders Bill in Lok Sabha on Wednesday. The Bill gives the government power to confiscate the assets of such defaulters.

"Let us all protest and, if required, sit on hunger strike at every place, sport black badges during working hours in offices. Let us awaken the people," party chief N Chandrababu Naidu said at a meeting of women self-help groups.

Telugu Desam Party (TDP) held protests in Vijayawada on Thursday about the Andhra Pradesh special status row, reported CNN-News18. The TDP had decided to extend support to the National Highways blockade programme called by the Opposition parties in Andhra Pradesh seeking special category status to the state.

As the deadlock in both the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha continued on Wednesday, here is a look at how both the Houses spent their time while in session ( as per PRS ):

What has the Parliament been spending its time on?

Protests and sloganeering marked the day's proceedings in the Lok Sabha as it began on Thursday. Opposition MPs could be heard chanting "We want justice" in the background, even as Speaker Sumitra Mahajan tried to conduct the day's business. As the protests grew louder, she said, "Nobody wants to listen, nobody wants to run the House." She then adjourned the Lok Sabha till 12 pm.

"At the time of passing the AP Reorganisation Act, they (government) gave some provisions under it. People are suffering in Andhra Pradesh," said TDP's CM Ramesh.

Chairman Venkaiah Naidu said that several leaders had approached him personally and let the the amendment Bill be passed.

MoS Parliamentary Affairs Vijay Goel said, "The government wants to discuss everyone's issues. I request we discuss and pass other Bills."

Just as the House passed the Gratuity Bill, AIADMK and TDP MPs trooped into the Well of the House holding placards and created ruckus. To this, Chairman Venkaiah Naidu said " People want to know why the Chairman is adjourning the House? I would like to tell the people that I don't want these ugly scenes to be seen by them. Each day, some or the other party troops into the Well." Nearly 20 MPs stood in the Well surrounding Naidu, and chanting loud slogans.

As the Opposition refused to back down, Chairman Venkaiah Naidu adjourned Rajya Sabha for the day.

"I would like to request all the MPs to go back to their places and let the House function. We are ready to talk about all issues, including the no-confidence motion notices that are being brought to the House," said Parliamentary Affairs Minister Ananth Kumar in the Lok Sabha on Thursday, even as AIADMK and TDP MPs continued their sloganeering near the Well of the House.

Speaker Sumitra Mahajan said she cannot act upon the no-confidence motion notices until there is order in the House. "I can't see anybody. I need to count heads (to establish a quorum of 50 members)," she said.

After 14 days of low productivity in the second edition of the Budget Session of the Parliament, the Centre is likely to make a fresh push to pass pending bills even as the Opposition remain vehement to corner the government over issues like the Punjab National Bank scam, the murder of 39 Indians in Iraq by Islamic State among others.

The Congress has issued a three-line whip to all its MPs in the Rajya Sabha asking them to be present in the House at 11 am in full strength on Friday and support the party's stand, PTI reported.

The Parliament is lagging behind in terms of finishing scheduled tasks with productivity level really low. The Budget Session of Parliament, which reconvened after a brief break on 5 March, has been marred with protests, with the daily functioning in both Lok Sabha and Rajya well below 0.1 hours (six minutes), according to PRS data.

With TDP's no-confidence motion notice still pending before the Lok Sabha, Chandrababu Naidu's party, which recently exited the NDA alliance, has appealed to Speaker Sumitra Mahajan to hold an all-party meeting on special status to Andhra Pradesh as well, reports said.

"I request the leaders of the parties to come to the chamber of the chairman," Naidu also said.

"This is totally undemocratic, totally unbecoming of Members of Parliament. You are weaking your cause. Please, you are all members. You must uphold the dignity of the House," Rajya Sabha Chairman M Venkaiah Naidu said before adjourning the House for 15 minutes.

"Madame Speaker, you have always asked the House to be conducted in order. The government is ready for a discussion...Congress has become a marginal party," said Union minister Ananth Kumar in response.

"There are more than 50 members here who want to move a no-confidence motion," said Leader of Congress in Lok Sabha Mallikarjun Kharge.

As the ruckus in the Lower House continued, Speaker Sumitra Mahajan adjourned the House for the day.

Narendra Modi to retiring Rajya Sabha MPs: I am sorry Parliament failed you in this last session

Modi also said that the doors of Parliament and his Prime Minister's Office (PMO) will always remain open to them, and they are welcome to visit him whenever they like.

While bidding the departing MPs goodbye, Modi also took a sarcastic jibe at protesting Opposition MPs, saying they nearly ensured this Session didn't take place and nearly denied this vote of thanks.

Opposition ensured this Sesssion didn't take place and nearly denied this vote of thanks: Narendra Modi

Narendra Modi also added that it was unfortunate that they didn't get a chance to pass important legislations in their final session, but may look back at their tenure gladly given the passing of landmark bills like the Triple Talaq bill.

Unfortunate that you didn't get chance to pass important legislations in their final session: Narendra Modi

"People have been agitating for special status, for their water, for their poor farmers and labourers. The MPs have been fighting on their behalf. If the people get what is rightfully theirs, it's not their parliamentarians who will stand to benefit," Azad said.

He added that it's unfair to say MPs have been fighting and disrupting Parliament, because they are sent to Parliament to represent the needs of the people.

Leader of Opposition in Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad, meanwhile, said the Central Hall of Parliament is full of former MPs and he looks forward to seeing many of the retiring MPs at the same place in the future.

Unfair to say MPs have been disrupting Parliament, because they are sent to Parliament to represent needs of the people: Ghulam Nabi Azad

The second part of this session has 22 sittings, and is scheduled to conclude on 6 April. Five more sittings are slated.

This is the final week that the Houses are functioning in the Budget Session

Members from the Congress, the Left, the TDP and some other parties stood up holding the blue placards, apparently to show her that there were 80 members supporting the no-confidence motion

After a brief discussion on scams in public-sector banks, Bills such as the Motor Vehicles (Amendment) Bill and the Prevention of Corruption (Amendment) Bill to be tabled in Rajya Sabha today

Arun Jaitley to move Fugitive Economic Offenders Bill in the Lok Sabha today, which is a Bill to deal with economic offenders who leave the country

"Most MPs are already seated. If everyone stops shouting and goes back to their seat, I can see how many support for the no-confidence motion. the House must be in order," Sumitra Mahajan said.

Day 19 of Parliament's Budget Session is likely to get underway shortly, but MPs from various Opposition parties have already begun protesting inside Parliament premises, drawing attention to various causes.

With Opposition parties slamming the central government over atrocities being committed on Dalits, Union minister Ananth Kumar has said the government is "committed" towards protecting the rights of Dalits. "Whenever Congress is in power, they are responsible for inciting people and spreading violence," Ananth Kumar said.

Lok Sabha was adjourned till noon within six minutes of starting proceedings, with Tamil Nadu MPs launching their demand the formation of a Cauvery Management Board.

Congress MPs from Punjab have climbed on to the roof of Parliament

When Lok Sabha reconvenes at noon, Home Minister Rajnath Singh is likely to address the House. Rajnath is expected to talk about the violence that singed large parts of the country of Monday.

As Opposition MPs kept up noisy protests, Home Minister Rajnath Singh addresses Lok Sabha over violence that singed large parts of the country on Monday. "The government has not diluted the provisions of the SC/ST Atrocities Act. In fact, we have strengthened the act. We have introduced provisions for the protection of victims, who are already suffered enough. Moreover, if officials are found lacking in their response to a complaint filed by anybody, we want action initiated against them as well," Rajnath Singh said.

Lok Sabha Speaker Sumitra Mahajan tried to address Lok Sabha on Tuesday, but noisy protests kept her from speaking. She was responding to Home Minister Rajnath Singh's speech earlier in the day. Faced with unrelenting Opposition protests, Mahajan adjourned Lok Sabha for the day.

Within minutes of proceedings beginning, Lok Sabha was adjourned till 12 pm after MPs raised slogans of 'We want justice, we want Cauvery board'

Amid loud protests, Deputy Chairman PJ Kurien adjourned the Rajya Sabha for 30 minutes, after having pleaded with protesting MPs to go back to their seats.

New members who took oath on Wednesday, have not been given division: Anand Sharma

Announcing the decision, Parliamentary Affairs Minister Ananth Kumar said it has been decided that the NDA MPs would be giving up their salary and other allowances for 23 days "for which parliament was not allowed to function by the Congress".

BJP and NDA party MPs announced on Wednesday night that they will take a pay cut for the 23 days wasted in the second phase of the Budget Session as they accused the Congress party of playing negative politics.

Congress issues three-line whip to its Rajya Sabha MPs asking them to be present in Upper House, reports ANI

Over a dozen Opposition parties had appealed to Lok Sabha speaker Sumitra Mahajan and Rajya Sabha chairman M Venkaiah Naidu on Wednesday for holding discussion on key matters like the SC/ST Act, PNB bank fraud, CBSE paper leak and Cauvery issue. Opposition leaders, including from the Congress, BSP, SP, DMK, NCP, TMC and the Left parties, had met in Parliament to discuss the lack of debate.

Leaders of several Opposition parties are holding a demonstration inside the Parliament premises over various issues.

Congress had said on Wednesday that it would not mind if Parliament session was extended by a day or two, but a debate on key issues should take place. "We want to hold discussions on key issues of national importance and we also want to pass legislation. The government should take the lead in doing so. We are not averse even if the session is extended by a day or two," Leader of Opposition in Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad had told reporters.

Congress president Rahul Gandhi and UPA chief Sonia Gandhi have joined the Opposition protest in New Delhi against the Centre.

Asserting that he attended the House proceedings daily, Subramanian Swamy said that it isn't his fault if the Parliament didn't function. "Anyhow, I'm the president's representative. Until he says so, how can I say I'll not take my salary?" ANI quoted him as saying.

Both the Houses of the Parliament were adjourned within minutes of reconvening on Thursday amid protests by the Opposition parties.

Congress leader Mallikarjun Kharge urged Lok Sabha Speaker Sumitra Mahajan to take up the no-confidence motion as the AIADMK continued protesting in the Lower House.

Kurien went on to read the rules of the Rajya Sabha. "You are all eligible for suspension," he said.

Deputy Chairman PJ Kurien said that he has an alternative to deal with the protests in the Upper House. "As per rule. I will see that a motion is moved to expel all protesting members. Thereby, you will lose all your voting right," he told the protesting MPs.

LS Speaker reminded the MPs that today was the last day of the second leg of the Budget Session, even though the MPs continued shouting.

"This Sabha is for a platform the raise issues for the welfare of the people. I understand that MPs have several issues they want to raise but they should keep in mind that the country has a variety of issues which need to be focused on," said Speaker Sumitra Mahajan.

"I make an appeal to all of you to appear here next time to do what we were given to do at the time of Independence," said Rajya Sabha Chairman M Venkaiah Naidu.

BJP works for connecting people, Congress works for dividing people. Congress indulges in divisive, negative politics. It didn't let the House function. We'll sit in protest against the negative attitude of Congress during last 23 days: Ananth Kumar,Parliamentary Affairs Minister pic.twitter.com/T710ENwveX

BJP MPs to observe fast on 12 April to protest the impasse in Parliament caused by Congress: Union minister Ananth Kumar | PTI

"Congress has become a marginal party, even in the Parliament," he said. "They don't have their own parliamentary strategy for both the Houses. They don't have parliamentary logic," he added.

"From 5 March to 27 March, why did the Congress not allow business to happen?" said Union minister Ananth Kumar. "On 15 and 16 March, the YSRCP and TDP motions of no-confidence were brought up. Congress brought it up on 27 March? Why did they bring it up so late?" he added.

Budget Session of Parliament updates: Opposition protests continued to disrupt Lok Sabha proceedings when it resumed session at 12 pm, forcing Speaker Sumitra Mahajan to adjourn the proceedings for the day. AIADMK and TDP MPs stormed the Well while chanting slogans. The no-confidence motion notices couldn't be taken up as well as the House was not in order.

Just as the Rajya Sabha passed the amendments to the Gratuity Act, AIADMK and TDP MPs trooped into the Well holding placards and created a ruckus. Nearly 20 MPs stood in the Well surrounding Chairman Venkaiah Naidu, and chanting loud slogans, forcing him to adjourn House proceedings till Friday, 11 am.

Protests and sloganeering marked the day's proceedings in the Lok Sabha as it began on Thursday. Opposition MPs could be heard chanting "We want justice" in the background, even as Speaker Sumitra Mahajan tried to conduct the day's business. As the protests grew louder, she said, "Nobody wants to listen, nobody wants to run the House." She then adjourned the Lok Sabha till 12 pm.

MPs from the Telugu Desam PArty (TDP) held protests inside the Parliament premises on Thursday demanding a special category status for Andhra Pradesh.

The proceedings in Parliament were washed out for the 13th consecutive day on Wednesday as members of some parties like the AIADMK and TRS continued with their noisy protests, with the Lok Sabha unable to take up the notices of no-confidence motion against the government for the fourth day.

While the Rajya Sabha was adjourned for the day without transacting any business barely four minutes after it assembled, the Lok Sabha was adjourned till noon and thereafter for the day due to the protests by parties from Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Telangana.

Chairman M Venkaiah Naidu adjourned the Rajya Sabha in four minutes after the start of proceedings as members of Andhra parties, including TDP, and KVP Ramachandra Rao of the Congress trooped into the Well raising slogans seeking a special status for the state.

No sooner were the listed papers laid on the table, the members of Tamil Nadu parties  DMK and AIADMK  too walked into the Well demanding immediate constitution of the Cauvery Water Management Board for river water sharing between their state and Karnataka.

Congress members too joined them in the Well shouting slogans against the government.

Leader of the Opposition and senior Congress leader Ghulam Nabi Azad sought a discussion on the atrocities against the SCs and STs as well as on the statement of External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj on the killing of 39 abducted Indians in Iraq.

He said the House should debate the statement Swaraj made last year and what she stated on Tuesday.

Chairman M Venkaiah Naidu asked him to give proper notice for the same and asked the members to allow the House to function. "What is happening? Are we so helpless?" he asked.

"Go back to your respective seats and raise issues," Naidu said, adding he was willing to allow members to raise issues from their seat and asked them not to shout slogans.

Asking if the MPs wanted images of disruption to be seen by the nation, he said "is this Parliament or something else? ... I am sorry this is not the way." Thereafter, he adjourned the proceedings for the day.

This is the third day that Naidu has adjourned the proceedings for the day right after the House assembled. On Tuesday, the Chairman had called it a day right after Swaraj had made a statement on the issue of abducted Indians in Iraq.

Both the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha have not transacted any substantial business since the Budget session of Parliament resumed on 5 March, barring the passage of the Union Budget by the Lower House without any debate.

The Lok Sabha proceedings were first disrupted right after it had assembled with Speaker Sumitra Mahajan adjourning the proceedings for an hour due to protests by parties from Andhra within about four minutes.

At noon, members from the AIADMK, TDP and the TRS were again seen raising slogans and holding placards in the Well.

After the laying of papers by ministers, Parliamentary Affairs Minister Ananth Kumar urged the members to return to their seats so that legislative business could be taken up.

He said the government is willing to discuss any issue, including the no-confidence motion. "We have the confidence of the House as well as of the entire country," he said.

When the Speaker took up the two notices of the trust vote given by the TDP and YSRC, the AIADMK members raised the pitch of their slogans. TRS members were also seen in the Well.

Mahajan said she cannot do a headcount of 50 members supporting the move, a pre-requisite for taking up the notices for the trust vote. Placards held by protesting MPs were apparently blocking her view, as she said as she can't see anything from the Chair.

Members of the Congress, TMC and the Left then raised their hands and stood at their seats to indicate to the Speaker that they were supporting the no-confidence motion.

But Mahajan said as the House is not in order, she cannot move ahead with the issue and adjourned the House for the day.

At least 50 members have to support the motion before it is moved, for which a headcount is needed to be carried out.

While the AIADMK has been seeking early establishment of the Cauvery river board to settle the water dispute with neighbouring states, the TRS is demanding hiked quota for jobs in Telangana and the TDP wants special status for Andhra Pradesh.

Expelled RJD member Rajesh Ranjan alias Pappu Yadav was also seen holding a placard demanding special status for Bihar.

With inputs from PTICambridge Analytica has stated on its website that it 'was contracted to undertake an in-depth electorate analysis for the Bihar Assembly Election in 2010'.

Cambridge Analytica (CA), the UK-based private company which engages in data mining and analysis for electoral processes, is at the heart of a controversy in which it allegedly used information from over 50 million Facebook accounts to help Donald Trump win the elections.

This controversy has also affected India as Ovleno Business Intelligence (OBI), lists the BJP, Congress and JD(U) as its clients. JD(U) leader KC Tyagi's son Amrish has admitted that the Youth Congress in Jharkhand, BJP and JD(U) had used OBI's services to conduct research.

CA has itself stated on its website that it "was contracted to undertake an in-depth electorate analysis for the Bihar Assembly Election in 2010".

It also says that apart from research, CA was also asked to "organise the party base" by working to increase supporter motivation.

"Our client achieved a landslide victory, with over 90% of total seats targeted by CA being won," it said. In the 2010 Bihar Assembly election, the then JD(U)-BJP alliance won 206 out of the 243 seats.

BJP has also accused Congress of compromising national security by roping in CA to run its 2019 campaign. In response, Congress denied the alleged links to CA and accused BJP of using its services in 2010.

In the 2016 US election, CA said it "identified the most persuadable voters and the issues they cared about" for Donald Trump's campaign.

"In total, we polled 180,000 individuals across 17 battleground states, online and by telephone. This information allowed us to speak to voters in a way they would understand and respond strongly to," CA said on its website. Trump went on to win the US elections in 2016.

CA has also said it helped Republican leaders Ted Cruz and Ben Carson in their campaigns for the presidential election.

The firm also claims to have reduced the possibility of electoral violence across South Africa in the first post-apartheid election in April 1994. The African National Congress led by Nelson Mandela had won that election.

In the 2013 Kenyan presidential election, "CA designed and implemented the largest political research project ever conducted in East Africa" by sampling and interviewing 47,000 respondents. The 2013 Kenyan election was the first to be held after electoral violence of 2008 and under a new constitution. CA's client, the National Alliance (led by Uhuru Kenyatta), won that election.

CA had also engaged in data mining and analysis for the electoral processes in other countries like Colombia, Indonesia, Italy, Malaysia and Thailand.While the BJP and Congress traded barbs at each other over the Cambridge Analytica data breach, JD(U) invited the wrath of RJD as it denied having links with the firm.

The controversy surrounding the alleged data breach involving London-based Cambridge Analytica turned into a full-blown political blame game on Thursday. While the BJP and Congress traded barbs, the RJD questioned the lack of action by the JD(U) against senior leader KC Tyagi over the links of his son's company Ovleno Business Intelligence with the firm.

Congress president Rahul Gandhi charged the Narendra Modi government of using the data breach row to divert attention from the news of the 39 Indians killed in Iraq.

Problem: 39 Indians dead; Govt on the mat, caught lying. Solution: Invent story on Congress & Data Theft. Result: Media networks bite bait; 39 Indians vanish from radar. Problem solved.  Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) March 22, 2018

Union Minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi lashed out at Rahul and asked why the Gandhi scion had a problem with the data leak expose.

Rahul Gandhi Ji akal se bilkul paidal hain kya? He should think over it, a grave crime of innocent Indians' data theft is being committed & if people involved in this are being exposed, he has a problem?: MA Naqvi on Rahul Gandhi's tweet pic.twitter.com/WDCi0xs1Wq  ANI (@ANI) March 22, 2018

Union law minister Ravi Shankar Prasad accused the Congress of "lying' and referred to three news articles which claimed that Congress was in talks with the data mining company before the Gujarat elections.

These three articles published between October and November 2017, Prasad alleged, show that Congress misused the services of Cambridge Analytica to win elections in India.

"There are many suspicious signs available that show that they (Congress) misused the services of the company," he said. One of the articles defined the services of the data mining company as Congress' 'Brahmastra' in the Gujarat elections, he added.

"They have used and misused Cambridge Analytica during the Gujarat elections. And when they are caught, they are saying we have no connection with the company," he said.

Prasad alleged that Rahul's "entire social media campaign has been managed with the help of Cambridge Analytica and they have had meetings also."

At a press conference, Congress communications in-charge Randeep Surjewala said, "39 Indians lost their lives in Iraq. For four years, Modi government kept misguiding the people of the country. The proceedings are being disrupted so that they faults are not discussed."

Lashing out at the BJP, he said, "Ravi Shankar Prasad should be renamed from law minister to 'jhoot mantri'".

Taking a dig at the BJP-led government, he said, "Hitler had an associate called Goebbels, Narendra Modi has an associate called Ravi Shankar Prasad."

He accused the BJP of manufacturing "fake news". "Sabse bade data chor macha rahe hain sabse zyada shor (The biggest data thieves are now creating noise)", he said.

The Congress also alleged links between the BJP and Cambridge Analytica. As an evidence, it said that the former BJP IT data head and current head of MyGov website Arvind Gupta had tweeted in 2017, praising the firm. It also said that Union minister Smriti Irani follows Cambridge Analytica on Twitter.

CA is powerful tool and when used correctly, can provide deep insights and fine tune communication and outreach strategy  Arvind Gupta (@buzzindelhi) October 15, 2017

JD(U) denies link with Cambridge Analytica

Tyagi denied that his son Amrish has received any help from the company Cambridge Analytica. "There was only a work relation between Amrish's company and Cambridge Analytics. There is no financial transaction or shareholding (by us in the data mining firm)."

Several reports had suggested a connection between OBI, owned by Amrish, and Cambridge Analytics.

"JD(U) also has no links with this, neither did they promote us in the 2010 polls," he told reporters. "If my son has committed a mistake, I would want the Indian government to take action against him," Tyagi's comment came after Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar sought his response over the issue on Thursday. RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav took a dig at Nitish Kumar's stance on zero tolerance of unethical practices, and told ANI that there is a difference between what "they say and what they do." Tejashwi also took to Twitter to question the two parties' involvement in the alleged data leak.

Bihar CM Nitish's close confidante and one instrumental in JDU's reunion with BJP- KC Tyagi's son Amrish Tyagi worked for #CambridgeAnalytica and helped it work for BJP as report confirms! Nitish & PM Modi has a lot to answer!  Tejashwi Yadav (@yadavtejashwi) March 22, 2018

OBI reportedly mentions JD(U) and BJP as its clients on its website.

'Looking to end association with Cambridge Analytica'

The OBI released a statement, saying that it believes in ethics and the legal system of India.

"We are not denying our association with SCL/Cambridge Analytica but we are a ground research company closely working with various media houses and are not undertaking any project with Cambridge Analytica related to social media (specially Facebook). We are equally shocked and surprised to see the data breach controversy and are also looking to end our association with them. Cambridge Analytica has already suspended Alexander Nix, who is under fire in this controversy, but we are not authorised to speak on behalf of them," OBI said.

"We again want to clarify that neither the whistleblower nor Facebook has confirmed that there is any kind of data breach in India," it said.The BJP and the Congress on Wednesday accused each other of using the services of embattled data consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica (CA).

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It also says that apart from research, CA was also asked to "organise the party base" by working to increase supporter motivation.

CA has itself stated on its website that it "was contracted to undertake an in-depth electorate analysis for the Bihar Assembly Election in 2010".

CA had also engaged in data mining and analysis for the electoral processes in other countries like Colombia, Indonesia, Italy, Malaysia and Thailand.

CA has engaged in data mining for electoral processes across the world

On Thursday, media reports said that senior JD(U) leader KC Tyagis son, Amrish, is the owner of Ovelina Business Intelligence (OBI), the Indian associate of Cambridge Analytica, which is under the scanner over allegations stealing the data of over 50 million Facebook users.

Lashing out at the BJP for levelling charges against the Congress over the alleged data theft, he said, "Ravi Shankar Prasad should be renamed from law minister to 'jhoot mantri'."

Congress spokesperson Randeep Surjewala said, "39 Indians lost their lives in Iraq. For four year, Modi government kept fooling the people of the country. The proceedings are being disrupted so that they faults are not discussed."

He accused the BJP of manufacturing "fake news". "Sabse bade data chor macha rahe hain sabse zyada shor", he said.

Taking a dig at the BJP-led government, he said, "Hitler had an associate called Goebbels, Narendra Modi has an associate called Ravi Shankar Prasad."

"The BJP's daily encounter of truth, both inside and outside the Parliament, is being witnessed by the country," said Congress communications in-charge Randeep Surjewala.

"If my son has committed a mistake, I would want the Indian government to take action against him," he added.

Senior JD(U) leader KC Tyagi denied that his son Amrish had any links to Cambridge Analytica. In 2010 polls, there was no role of the firm. On behalf of JD(U), I want to say the party did not take take any help from the firm."

He also took to Twitter to question the two parties' involvement in the alleged data leak.

He told TImes Now that Ovelina Business Intelligence, which is under the scanner for the alleged data theft, mentions JD(U) and BJP as its clients on its website.

Taking a dig at Nitish Kumar's stance on zero tolerance, RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav told ANI that there is a difference between what "they say and what they do."

"We again want to clarify that neither the whistle-blower nor Facebook has confirmed that there is any kind of data breach in India," it said.

"We are not denying our association with SCL/Cambridge Analytica but we are a ground research company closely working with various media houses and are not undertaking any project with Cambridge Analytica related to social media (specially Facebook). We are equally shocked and surprised to see the data breach controversy and we are also looking to end our association with them. Cambridge Analytica has already suspended Alexander Nix, who is under fire in all this controversy, but we are not authorised to speak on behalf of them," OBI said.

In a statement, Ovelina Business Intelligence (OBI) said that it believes in ethics and legal system of India.

At a press conference, the Congress alleged links between the BJP and Cambridge Analytica. As an evidence, it shared that the former BJP IT data head and current head of MyGov website Arvind Gupta tweet praising Cambridge Analytica in 2017. It also claimed that Union minister Smriti Irani follows Cambridge Analytica on Twitter.

Problem: Rahul led @INCIndia to defeats in 26 states.Balle Balle only in Punjab & two! Solution: Resort to lies, propaganda,block Parliament, fake social media support,get thrashed at overseas events. Result: Loss in Karnataka & Mizoram soon & LS 2019 Problem CANNOT be solved https://t.co/V3t688uMMR

On Thursday, media reports said that senior JD(U) leader KC Tyagis son, Amrish, is the owner of Ovelina Business Intelligence (OBI), the Indian associate of Cambridge Analytica, which is under the scanner over allegations stealing the data of over 50 million Facebook users.

Lashing out at the BJP for levelling charges against the Congress over the alleged data theft, he said, "Ravi Shankar Prasad should be renamed from law minister to 'jhoot mantri'."

Congress spokesperson Randeep Surjewala said, "39 Indians lost their lives in Iraq. For four year, Modi government kept fooling the people of the country. The proceedings are being disrupted so that they faults are not discussed."

He accused the BJP of manufacturing "fake news". "Sabse bade data chor macha rahe hain sabse zyada shor", he said.

Taking a dig at the BJP-led government, he said, "Hitler had an associate called Goebbels, Narendra Modi has an associate called Ravi Shankar Prasad."

"The BJP's daily encounter of truth, both inside and outside the Parliament, is being witnessed by the country," said Congress communications in-charge Randeep Surjewala.

"If my son has committed a mistake, I would want the Indian government to take action against him," he added.

Senior JD(U) leader KC Tyagi denied that his son Amrish had any links to Cambridge Analytica. In 2010 polls, there was no role of the firm. On behalf of JD(U), I want to say the party did not take take any help from the firm."

There was only a work relation between my son Amrish's company and #CambridgeAnalytics , there is no financial transaction or shareholding, everything is open to probe. JDU also has no links with this,neither did they promote us in 2010 polls: KC Tyagi,JDU pic.twitter.com/lixBo9fd15

Bihar CM Nitish's close confidante and one instrumental in JDU's reunion with BJP- KC Tyagi's son Amrish Tyagi worked for #CambridgeAnalytica and helped it work for BJP as report confirms! Nitish & PM Modi has a lot to answer!

He also took to Twitter to question the two parties' involvement in the alleged data leak.

He told TImes Now that Ovelina Business Intelligence, which is under the scanner for the alleged data theft, mentions JD(U) and BJP as its clients on its website.

Taking a dig at Nitish Kumar's stance on zero tolerance, RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav told ANI that there is a difference between what "they say and what they do."

JDU has no relation with #CambridgeAnalytics , neither has its CEO ever met Nitish ji nor me. In any case JDU is a Socialist outfit and we stay away from such things, except for maybe Prashant Kishore ji helping us during last assembly polls: KC Tyagi,JDU pic.twitter.com/VVVoowM2KD

"We again want to clarify that neither the whistle-blower nor Facebook has confirmed that there is any kind of data breach in India," it said.

"We are not denying our association with SCL/Cambridge Analytica but we are a ground research company closely working with various media houses and are not undertaking any project with Cambridge Analytica related to social media (specially Facebook). We are equally shocked and surprised to see the data breach controversy and we are also looking to end our association with them. Cambridge Analytica has already suspended Alexander Nix, who is under fire in all this controversy, but we are not authorised to speak on behalf of them," OBI said.

In a statement, Ovelina Business Intelligence (OBI) said that it believes in ethics and legal system of India.

At a press conference, the Congress alleged links between the BJP and Cambridge Analytica. As an evidence, it shared that the former BJP IT data head and current head of MyGov website Arvind Gupta tweet praising Cambridge Analytica in 2017. It also claimed that Union minister Smriti Irani follows Cambridge Analytica on Twitter.

Latest updates: Ovelina Business Intelligence has said that it is seeking to end its association with Cambridge Analytica. Senior JD(U) leader KC Tyagi has denied any links between his son and Cambridge Analytica. The RJD, however, questioned Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar's stand on his 'zero tolerance' policy.

Congress lashed out at the Narendra Modi government for levelling charges against it for the alleged data leak and said that the BJP is the "inventor of fake news".

Bihar chief minister Nitish Kumar has sought explanation from senior JD(U) leader KC Tyagi over his son's role in the alleged data theft. Tyagis son, Amrish, is the owner of Ovelina Business Intelligence (OBI), the Indian associate of Cambridge Analytica, which is under the scanner over allegations stealing the data of over 50 million Facebook users.

Union minister Mukhtar Abbas Naqvi lashed out at Rahul Gandhi, asking why the Congress president has a problem with the data leak expose. BJP's Ravi Shankar Prasad has alleged that Rahul Gandhi's entire social media campaign was managed by CA.

The BJP and the Congress on Wednesday accused each other of using the services of embattled data consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica (CA) that along with Facebook is at the centre of a global row over the alleged unauthorised use of personal data from the social media giant.

As the firestorm over the issue hit India, the government warned Facebook, which is being probed by US and British lawmakers over a potential breach of user confidentiality, of stringent action if any attempt was made to influence the country's electoral process through "undesirable means".

However, the company's India partner Oveleno Business Intelligence (OBI) lists the BJP, the Congress and the JD(U) as its clients. The India partner is by Amrish Tyagi, son of senior JD(U) leader KC Tyagi. In media interviews, the junior Tyagi admitted that the Youth Congress in Jharkhand, the BJP and the JD(U) had used its services to conduct research.

BJP leader and Union Law and IT and Telecom Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad cited media reports to allege that the Congress was using the services of the London-based political data analytics firm for the next Lok Sabha election and boost its president Rahul Gandhi's social media profile and its outreach.

"The Congress must explain if it has engaged in data trade with Cambridge Analytica," the minister said.

He said the number of Gandhi's followers on Twitter had risen recently and wondered if the Congress had used the services of the Cambridge Analytica for this "fake popularity".

"Will the Congress now depend on data manipulation and theft to woo voters," Prasad asked.

"These days, there is a lot of news about CA and how it has been involved in data theft, psychometric analysis, data manipulation and subversion of democratic processes. Can the Congress deny that?" he asked.

The Congress returned the fire and accused the BJP of having availed the firm's services in 2010.

"The Congress or its president have never used or hired the services of Cambridge Analytica," Congress spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala said.

"This is fake agenda, a white lie being dished out on fake facts by the law minister. And this has become a daily order with Prasad."

Surjewala alleged it was the BJP and its ally Janata Dal-United which used the services of Cambridge Analytica.

"I think the BJP and Ravi Shankar Prasadji have the maximum experience of Cambridge Analytica, the company they say has indulged in manipulation."

Surjewala cited the firm's website saying that it "was contracted to undertake an in-depth electoral analysis for Bihar assembly elections in 2010".

"If the company does manipulation, why were the BJP and the JD-U using it. But in his pack of lies, he forgot to tell the truth."

Citing media reports, the BJP leader asked the Congress to clarify whether the now-sacked CA CEO Alexender Nix had met several opposition leaders to plan the UPA's election strategy for 2019.

"How many times did Rahul Gandhi and Nix meet and what did they discuss? What is the CA's role in Rahul Gandhi's social media presence?"

"It is a matter of grave concern for crores of online users in India that online data and browsing patterns are being used for such means. I want to specifically warn the Congress that the nation will not tolerate any kind of data theft or manipulation in India."

He asked the "Grand Old Party" how much stolen data from Cambridge Analytica was in its possession and how much data of Indian users had been handed over to the firm by the Congress.

Alleging that the firm had been found using illegal means of data manipulation to subvert the democratic process in Kenya, Prasad said the Congress was aligning with such forces to divide the society and win elections.

Prasad, speaking about the concerns being raised over Cambridge Analytica influencing election results, said the government was in touch with the US Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Justice to assess the privacy violations of Indian users.

"We will also summon the company and Facebook to assess the data theft of Indian users and will take strictest action."

Prasad reminded Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg of powers of India's IT Act, saying "you better note the observation of the IT Minister of India".

"If any data theft of Indians is done with the collusion of Facebook systems, it will not be tolerated. We have got stringent powers in the IT Act including summoning you in India."Himanshu Sharma, a director at OBI, stated on his LinkedIn profile that he managed four election campaigns successfully for the BJP. These references have now been deleted.

The controversy over data mining involving UK-based company Cambridge Analytica has led to pitched battles between the BJP and the Congress, with both parties seeking to deny their own involvement and implicate the other. However, a report by NDTV has brought to light fresh evidence of links of the firm with the BJP.

The report states that Himanshu Sharma, a director of Ovlevo Business Intelligence (OBI), had mentioned on his LinkedIn profile that he "confidentially maintaining the database to be provided constituency wise to BJP candidate(s) as an additional support for national elections and state elections of Haryana, Maharashtra, Jharkhand and Delhi." He was also said to have mentioned that as director of OBI, he managed four election campaigns successfully for the BJP.

OBI is the India partner of CA.

Here are screenshots of LinkedIn page of Director of Cambridge Analytica's Indian arm, saying "managed 4 elections successfully for BJP", "helped achieve mission 272." @BJP4India: response please? pic.twitter.com/NaxNJJdzzb  Sreenivasan Jain (@SreenivasanJain) March 21, 2018

However, the references to the BJP and the providing support for national and state elections have now been deleted from his LinkedIn profile.

Media reports have said that CA had access to millions of Facebook users' personal data, which is used to identify the personalities of voters in the US and influence their behaviour to help Donald Trump win the presidential elections there.

A case study on the company's website cites the example of the Bihar Assembly Election 2010, stating that the company undertook an 'in-depth electorate analysis' for the polls. It was tasked with identifying floating/swing voters for each party. According to the website, electoral apathy was prevalent there due to "the poor and unchanging condition of the state after 15 years of incumbent rule."

"Our client achieved a landslide victory, with over 90 percent of total seats targeted by CA being won," the website states. The JD(U)-BJP alliance won the 2010 election in Bihar.

In the recent past, the BJP and Congress have been hitting out at each other over the issue. Union Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad has alleged that the Congress used the services of Cambridge Analytica during the 2017 Gujarat Assembly Election. He accused the party of using illegal means to attempt to gain an upper hand in the election.

"Will Congress party depend upon data manipulation and theft to win votes?" he had asked.

The Congress was no less acerbic in its criticism of the ruling party. "The BJP government has now become a manufacturer of fake news and an epitome of post-truth," its spokesperson Randeep Surjewala said on Thursday. He alleged that the nexus between the BJP-JD(U) and CA has now been exposed.

Media reports also state that Amrish Tyagi, son of senior JD(U) leader KC Tyagi, is the CEO of OBI. However, speaking to reporters on Thursday, KC Tyagi said that Amrish has received no help from the company Cambridge Analytica.

He also claimed that the JD(U) has no connection with the company. He has, however, asked the government to probe whether there was any misuse of data.SC's order diluting the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act continues to face fierce opposition from across the political spectrum.

The Supreme Court's order diluting the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act continues to draw fierce opposition from leaders and parties across the political spectrum.

On Wednesday, Dalit MPs belonging to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) met Union minister for social justice and empowerment, Thaawar Chand Gehlot, and urged him to take up the issue with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, reported The Indian Express. Sources told the newspaper that the MPs have also asked for a review petition to be filed in court against the verdict.

The Congress too asked for a review of the judgment. It described the order as "unfortunate", and claimed it led to a "sense of insecurity" among Dalits and other oppressed classes.

Alleging a rise in atrocities against Dalits under the NDA government, the Congress expressed serious concerns over the apex court's judgment and demanded a review or an amendment to the law. Senior Congress spokesperson Anand Sharma asked the government to clarify its stand on the issue, claiming there was a "sense of insecurity" among Dalits and other oppressed classes after the apex court verdict.

"There are serious concerns over Tuesday's decision of the Supreme Court. If it is not reviewed, it will be very unfortunate. There is a feeling of insecurity among the SC/STs and other oppressed classes. We feel a review of this decision will be in the national interest. Why is the government silent on this issue? The government should clarify its stand and should present its version before the Supreme Court through the attorney general. If the government remains silent, it means it supports the decision," Sharma told reporters.

Party MP Kumari Selja alleged this insecurity was a result of the BJP-RSS' policy, saying the government is "conspiring to end reservation".

Jyotiraditya Scindia, chief whip of Congress in Lok Sabha, also said BJP and RSS want to end reservation and neither the prime minister nor any other minister from the central government has yet given any clarification on the issue.

The executive committee of the Dalit Shoshan Mukti Manch (DSMM) appealed to the Centre to challenge the judgement, arguing it would have a "negative impact" on the concept of social justice. The manch expressed grave concern over the verdict and dubbed it "unfortunate".

It also demanded that the Centre file a review petition immediately, so that the SC/ST Act remains effective. Ramchandra Dom, general secretary of the organisation and former MP, said in a statement, "This judgement has a negative impact on the concept of social justice which is a basic principle enshrined in the Constitution."

The Supreme Court on Tuesday said that the arrest of an accused under the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, is not mandatory and recourse to coercive action would be only after preliminary inquiry and sanction by the competent authority. Coupled with this, the court said, that there was also no "absolute bar against grant of anticipatory bail in cases under the Atrocities Act if prima facie case is made out or where on judicial scrutiny the complaint is found to be prima facie mala fide".

"... we direct that in absence of any other independent offence calling for arrest, in respect of offences under the Atrocities Act, no arrest may be effected" without the permission of appointing authority in case of public servant or that of Senior Superintendent of Police in case of general public, said the bench of Justice Adarsh Kumar Goel and Justice Uday Umesh Lalit in its judgment.

The bench said it provided for the safeguard "in view of acknowledged abuse of law of arrest" under the Act.

Speaking for the bench, Justice Goel said, "It is necessary to express concern that working of the Atrocities Act should not result in perpetuating casteism which can have an adverse impact on integration of the society and the constitutional values."

With inputs from agenciesThe Ministry of Defence has removed the Rs 10,000 cap on educational concession provided to the children of these soldiers missing, disabled or killed in action.

In a major relief to the families of soldiers missing, disabled or killed in action, the Ministry of Defence has removed the Rs 10,000 cap on educational concession provided to the children of these soldiers.

Ministry of Defence issues order that Educational Concession will continue without the cap of Rs 10,000 per month for the children of Armed Forces Officers, PBORs (Personnel Below Officer Rank) missing, disabled or killed in action.  ANI (@ANI) March 22, 2018

The concession will also include clothes, books and other supplies apart from the tuition fees, reported Times Now.

In February, the defence ministry had requested the finance ministry to remove the cap of Rs 10,000 per month on educational assistance given to children of those disabled or killed in action.

On 1 July, 2017, the government had issued an order saying the assistance under the scheme cannot exceed Rs 10,000 per month, triggering widespread discontent among all the three services.

The Chiefs of Staff Committee (CoSC), comprising the Army, Navy and the Air Force chiefs, had also written to the defence ministry requesting it to remove the cap.

Under the scheme, which was initially rolled out in 1972, tuition fee of children of martyrs or those disabled in action were completely waived in schools, colleges and other professional educational institutions.

"The defence minister has requested the finance ministry to remove the cap. We are hoping for a favourable decision," a defence ministry source said.

Approximately 250 students were affected during the current financial year following the governments decision to cap the assistance, according to officials.

Replying to a question in the Rajya Sabha, Minister of State for Defence Subhash Bhamre last month had said that the annual saving on account of putting the cap would be Rs 3.20 crore per annum. He had said the highest amount drawn has been reported to be Rs 18.95 lakh per annum per student.

With inputs from PTIDistraught with the news of her husband's death in Mosul, Dipali Tikadar now harbours just one wish: a meeting with West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee to seek a government job.

Chapra (Nadia): Distraught with the news of her husband's death in Mosul, Dipali Tikadar now harbours just one wish: a meeting with West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee to seek a government job.

Dipali's husband Samar Tikadar was kidnapped along with 38 other Indians in Iraq in 2014 by the Islamic State. External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj announced in the Parliament on Tuesday that all 39 men were dead.

"I will tell the chief minister when I meet her about my poor financial condition, and appeal for a government job. I think she will understand my situation," Tikadar, a mother of two, said.

Over the past four years, she had been toiling hard to make ends meet for her two children with the hope that her husband's return will change their life for better. "I thought after Samar returns, our days of hardship would be over. But now, I don't know what to expect from life," Dipali Tikadar told PTI.

She is staring at an uncertain future with little means to provide for her children. Her son Sudip is preparing for the Class X board exams and daughter Sharmistha is a student of Class IV.

"I want a government job so that I can arrange for the education of my children," the 35-year-old woman said.

The tin shed over her mud house in Nadia district, along the India-Bangladesh border, is also in need of immediate repair, but Tikadar says she has no money.

"I get Rs 4,800 as an Integrated Child Development Service worker. It is not enough to run a family. Please arrange to take me to Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee," she pleaded.

Samar Tikadar had left for Iraq in 2011, much like Khakon Tikadarboth residents of Chapra Mahakhola area of Nadia district, close to the India-Bangladesh border. Their families last heard from them in early 2014 before their abduction by IS militants.

Minister of State for External Affairs VK Singh has said that it would take the government eight to 10 days to bring back the remains of the 39 workers.

Dipali Tikadar, however, is not keen on visiting Kolkata airport to receive her husband's remains. "Even if I get scope to go to the airport to receive the remains of my husband, I won't go. I am too depressed to handle the situation," she said, adding that the Nadia administration has collected blood samples from Samar's siblings for a DNA test.India and China are 'frenemies' which are working with each other despite disagreements and the world can learn from their relationship, India's top diplomat at the UN has said.

Washington: India and China are "frenemies" which are working with each other despite disagreements and the world can learn from their relationship, India's top diplomat at the UN has said.

"In Hollywood, there is a term, which has become quite popular. And that, I think, is called frenemies. That's what we have with China. We engaged with them, we compete with them. In some areas, we work with them together and in some areas, we agree to disagree and move on, India's Permanent Representative to the UN, Syed Akbaruddin, said on Thursday.

Responding to a question after delivering the inaugural Ambassador Howard Schaffer Memorial Lecture at the Georgetown University, the senior Indian diplomat said India has engaged with China on its development initiatives like Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) but opposed it on its Belt and Road initiative.

"Belt and Road Initiative, to me, is not a normal multilateral or plurilateral approach...We are not party to that, he said at the event organised by the Georgetown India Initiative.

India skipped China's high-profile Belt and Road Forum last year due to its sovereignty concerns over the $50 billion China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC), which passes through PoK.

Touted as Chinese President Xi Jinping's ambitious project, the One Belt One Road initiative focuses on improving connectivity and cooperation among Asian countries, Africa, China and Europe.

Asked about his views on India-Pakistan relationship and Islamabad raising the Kashmir issue on UN platform and seeking a plebiscite, he asserted that Pakistan has no internal support on this.

"Frankly to me, issues of India and Pakistan, the way you framed it is yesterday's problems. This does not mean that we don't need to address them, he said, responding to a question.

"This does not mean that they are not of a serious nature. But in terms of where we look at ourselves 20 years from now or 25 years from now, we don't see these as issues of a nature which will destabilise us in fundamental ways, Akbaruddin said, adding that in the last one year not a single country joined Pakistan in raising the Kashmir issue at the UN General Assembly.

"How come, other than the 13 times, Pakistan spoke, not one other country spoke. So is this today's issue? It's clear that others are not bothered about. The world has too many other issues to focus on. India and Pakistan need to address these as neighbours," he said.

While China and India are frenemies, he said, others can learn from the relationship between the two countries. "Perhaps what others can learn from our relationship is that despite a border that is the longest undemarcated border in world, there hasn't been casualties on that border since the last 40 years, he said.

"If our western neighbour can also look at that as a modelwe agree to disagree, we try and workout, if it doesn't work, we continue to push out own interest. But the way of trying to resolve it through underhand death that by a thousand cuts is not going to help. We are a billion people. With thousand cuts, you would not reach a billion. So it's best if we reconciled to each other, he said.

Reiterating India's position on the long due expansion of the UN Security Council, he rued that the present structure does not represent the current scenario.

"If you do not provide as an opportunity to be part of the solution there are other ways that we would start finding to be contributing to a solution that may not mean something to everyone's liking. But that will inevitably happen, Akbaruddin said.In yet another diplomatic note, India on Thursday asked Pakistan to ensure safety and security of its officials working at the Indian mission in Islamabad

New Delhi: In yet another diplomatic note, India on Thursday asked Pakistan to ensure safety and security of its officials working at the Indian mission in Islamabad, saying they continue to face "harassment" and "intimidation", official sources said.

In its 16th 'Note Verbale' to the Pakistan Foreign Ministry, the Indian High Commission specifically mentioned three incidents of harassment of senior officials, they said.

India has conveyed to Islamabad that safety and security of the Indian High Commission, its officers, staff members and their families is the responsibility of the Pakistan government, the sources said.

On the incidents mentioned in the 'Note Verbale', they said the vehicle of the deputy high commissioner, while going to an embassy within the diplomatic enclave for a meeting, was aggressively followed by two people in a car.

They said the Naval Attache of the Mission was also "aggressively followed" by a person on a motorbike while going to Serena Hotel for a meeting.

The second secretary (political) of the mission was also aggressively followed and harassed by a person at the Street-1 Cafe within the diplomatic enclave. He had gone there for an official meeting with a diplomat, they said.

The sources said the website of the High Commission of India continues to be intermittently blocked, adding it is causing inconvenience and has affected normal functioning of the mission.

"Such incidents of harassment, intimidation and threats to physical security of diplomats and officials are in violation of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations of 1961, and a threat to the security and safety of the personnel of the High Commission of India," said a source.

The sources said India has asked the Pakistan Foreign Ministry to immediately investigate all the incidents and direct the relevant authorities to ensure that such incidents do not recur.

Pakistan has also been accusing India of harassing its diplomats and releasing videos of alleged intimidation of its officials. However, the veracity of these videos could not be ascertained.

Islamabad has also called its High Commissioner to India back home for consultations on the issue.The Madras High Court on Thursday upheld the appointment of the three BJP MLAs of Puducherry nominated by Lieutenant Governor Kiran Bedi, media reports said.

The Madras High Court on Thursday upheld the appointment of three Puducherry BJP MLAs who were nominated by Lieutenant Governor Kiran Bedi, media reports said. The MLAs were appointed by Bedi in July last year leading to exchange of barbs between the lieutenant governor and Chief Minister V Narayanaswamy. Bedi

The chief minister had called Bedi a 'BJP agent'and used words like 'murder of democracy' while she had clarified that she was an 'agent of the Constitution'. Bedi had also said repeatedly that the MLAs were nominated to the Assembly in keeping with the norms and an unnecessary uproar was created over it.

The MLAs, all belonging to the Puducherry unit of the BJP, could not enter the Assembly all these days as the speaker had refused to swear them in, The Times of India reported.

Madras High Court upholds appointment of the three MLAs of Puducherry nominated by Lt.Governor Kiran Bedi  ANI (@ANI) March 22, 2018

The Congress government in Puducherry and Bedi have been at loggerheads since she assumed office in 2017 over several issues, including medical admissions, civic problems and induction of three nominated MLAs.

On 24 January, Narayanasamy had said he would soon meet the president and the prime minister to discuss the unabated violation of statutory provisions in discharging her (Bedi) duties and "interfering in the routine administration by the elected ministry". "Whenever differences arise between the lieutenant governor and the government on any matter, the concerned files should be sent to the president for final decision as had been prescribed in the statute relating to the administration of Puducherry," he had noted.

Earlier in December 2017, V Narayanasamy had alleged that Bedi's "style of functioning is more like a leader of Opposition than an administrator" of the Union Territory. Narayanasamy had said although he had written to the lieutenant governor asking her not to "overstep her constitutional and statutory limits" and not to "interfere in the routine working of the elected government", she had been doing so.

"I have written letters to her on more than 15 occasions registering protest against her style of functioning. But, she keeps functioning more like a leader of Opposition than an administrator," he had said.

With inputs from PTIThe Maharashtra government on Thursday assuring complete support to cultivators, and said it would take steps for the procurement of all their farm produce.

Mumbai: The Maharashtra government on Thursday assuring complete support to cultivators, and said it would take steps for the procurement of all their farm produce.

State co-operation minister Subhash Deshmukh said in the Legislative Assembly that 12.69 lakh tonne 'tur', 54,000-tonne 'moong' and 5.86 lakh tonne 'udid' (all varieties of pulses grown by farmers) have been procured by the government so far in the financial year 2017-18.

He admitted that the price of soyabean was more in the market than the minimum support price (MSP), so there was less procurement of the legumeabout 2.62 lakh tonneby the government during this financial year.

"The government will stand by farmers and ensure that all their farm produce is procured," he said in reply to questions raised by the Opposition members.

Deshmukh also said that instructions have been issued to the authorities concerned to take action against traders who procure the farm produce at a price less than the MSP.

Earlier, the issue of procurement of gram, tur and soyabean was raised by Leader of Opposition Radhakrishna Vikhe Patil after the Question Hour.

He said farmers were facing hardships since the government had not completed the procurement of farm produce.

Vikhe Patil said the state government has not started the procurement centres.

The procurement of farm produce was being done through the National Agricultural Cooperative Marketing Federation of India Ltd (NAFED), he pointed out.

"The NAFED is telling farmers that it has been asked by the state government to procure only 27 percent tur (of the total produce). The actual procurement of tur is only about 4 to 5 percent, and the gram procurement (target) is 3 lakh tonne. The government should ensure that purchase centres are set up to complete the procurement process," he said.

Jayant Patil (NCP) said the import of peas, lentils and beans should be stopped.

He said the procurement of tur was less than the target of 4 to 5 lakh tonne, out of the total 11.5 lakh tonne produced during the current financial year.

"The tur worth Rs 600 crore has been procured, but farmers have got only Rs 10 crore," Patil claimed.

He also said that the gram production was 11.8 lakh tonne and the procurement target was three lakh tonne.

But, the actual procurement was only 218 tonne, he said.

"Why is the government machinery so lethargic when it should be giving relief to farmers?" he asked.

Prithviraj Chavan (Congress) claimed that the central government had signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Mozambique (a southern African country) for the import of tur.

"The MoU was signed when Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited that country in 2016. The tur is imported from the other country (referring to Mozambique) when our cultivators are waiting for the procurement of their farm produce," he said.

"We demand that the MoU for the import of tur be scrapped," Chavan added.The Monsoon Session of the Maharashtra legislature would be held either in Mumbai or Nagpur from 4 July.

Mumbai: The Monsoon Session of the Maharashtra legislature would be held either in Mumbai or Nagpur from 4 July.

"The Cabinet on Thursday decided that the Monsoon Session would be held either in Nagpur or Mumbai from 4 July," state Parliamentary Affairs Minister Girish Bapat said on Thursday.

As per convention, the Winter Session of the state legislature is held in Nagpur, the second capital of the state, whereas the monsoon and Budget sessions are convened in Mumbai.

Bapat said the issues related to Vidarbha and Marathwada regions would be discussed during the three-week-long monsoon session.

"We can also pass several supplementary demands in this session," the minister said.

The ongoing Budget session would end on 28 March.

However, another minister said the next session would be held in Nagpur so that most of the proposals pertaining to Vidarbha would be sanctioned.

Many organisations have been demanding carving out of separate Vidarbha state from Maharashtra.

Bapat said a sub-committee would be formed under him which would hold talks with Opposition leaders over finalising the venue.

He said the state could not spend much time on discussing and addressing the issues pertaining to Vidarbha and Marathwada during Winter Session.

"Even if a Budgetary approval is sought (in winter session which is typically held in December), the government gets only three months to spend the money (before Budget session which is held in March), which is an injustice. Hence we are trying to correct it. If Monsoon Session is held in Nagpur then the winter session will be held in Mumbai," he added.Prime Minister Narendra Modi, on Wednesday, called German Chancellor Angela Merkel to congratulate her on assuming office for the fourth successive term

New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi, on Wednesday, called German Chancellor Angela Merkel to congratulate her on assuming office for the fourth successive term.

An official release said Modi lauded "the strong leadership" provided by Chancellor Merkel to Germany, and the pivotal role played by Germany in European affairs during her tenure.

"Prime Minister Modi reiterated his commitment to continue working with Chancellor Merkel for deepening and strengthening the Indo-German bilateral relationship," the release said.

The Prime Minister also said during the telephonic conversation that he is looking forward to his forthcoming meeting with German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who will be on a State Visit to India from 22 to 26 March.

Merkel was officially reelected as the German Chancellor with the majority of lawmakers in the Lower Parliament backing her candidacy in a vote last week.

The majority vote in the Bundestag allowed the Christian Democratic Union leader to embark on her fourth term at the helm of German politics following months of negotiations with the Social Democratic Party (SPD) that culminated in the revival of the so-called grand coalition.

In a secret ballot, 364 of the Bundestag's 709 members had voted in favour of Merkelnine more than the 50 percent required, CNN had reported.In an unprecedented deal, China has sold Pakistan a powerful tracking system which could speed up the development of multi-warhead missiles by its all-weather ally, state-run Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) said.

Beijing: In an unprecedented deal, China has sold Pakistan a powerful tracking system which could speed up the development of multi-warhead missiles by its all-weather ally, the state-run Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) said.

Zheng Mengwei, a researcher with the CAS Institute of Optics and Electronics in Chengdu, Sichuan province, confirmed to the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post that Pakistan had bought a highly sophisticated, large-scale optical tracking and measurement system from China.

"We simply gave them a pair of eyes. They can use them to look at whatever they want to see, even the moon," he said.

Zheng said he could not elaborate on the technology nor where in Pakistan it was being used as it involved the country's defence interests.

He, however, said that the Pakistani military recently deployed the Chinese-made system "at a firing range" for use in testing and developing new missiles.

China was the first country to export such sensitive equipment to Pakistan, the CAS said.

The Post report attributed the sale of the equipment to Pakistan to India testing the most advanced nuclear-ready intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) Agni-V with a range long enough to hit Beijing or Shanghai.

Chinese authorities declassified information about the sale of the tracking system on Wednesday.

While India's single-warhead missiles are bigger and cover longer distances, Pakistan has focused its efforts on developing multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles (MIRVs), a type of missile-carrying several nuclear warheads that can be directed towards different targets, the report said.

The US Defence Intelligence Agency officially confirmed in March that Pakistan conducted the first test launch of its nuclear-capable Ababeel missile in January 2017, "demonstrating South Asia's first MIRV payload", it said.

But outside Pakistan, military experts believe that it will take much more time before the Ababeel missile is ready for use in battle. It is thought to be still at an early stage of development, with plenty of room for improvement.

China has been the biggest supplier of arms to Pakistan which included ships, submarines and fighter jets.

The Chinese team which took the tracking system to Pakistan enjoyed VIP treatment during the nearly three months stay to assemble and calibrate it and training technical staff, the CAS statement said.

"The system's performance surpassed the user's expectations," it said, adding that it was considerably more complex than Pakistan's home-made systems.

The report did not reveal how much Pakistan paid for the system.

An optical system is a critical component in missile testing. It usually comes with a pair of high-performance telescopes equipped with a laser ranger, high-speed camera, infrared detector and a centralised computer system that automatically captures and follows moving targets.

The device records high-resolution images of a missile's departure from its launcher, stage separation, tail flame and, after the missile re-enters atmosphere, the trajectory of the warheads it releases."The uniqueness of the Chinese-made system lay in its use of four telescope units, more than normally required," Zheng said.

Each telescope, with a detection range of several hundred kilometres is positioned in a different location, with their timing synchronised precisely with atomic clocks. Together, the telescopes provide visual information of unprecedented detail and accuracy, which missile developers can use to improve designs and engine performance, the CAS said.

Using more telescopes allows the system to track war heads simultaneously from different angles, reducing the risk of losing a target.

High-quality optics are essential in missile development, especially MIRVs, said Rong Jili, deputy director at the Beijing Institute of Technology's School of Aerospace Engineering.

Other types of tracking devices, such as radar, can collect more precise data at longer distances, but the Chinese-made optical system provided the intuitive, close-up look at real-life action that missile developers craved, he said.

Unlike the US, which accounts for one-third of exports and supplies to at least 100 countries, China delivered major arms to 44 countries, mostly in Asia and Africa.

More than 60 percent of China's military exports went to Pakistan, Bangladesh and Myanmar and another 22 percent went to Africa, according to a recent study report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.The stage is set for Rajya Sabha polls on Friday for the remaining 25 seats in six states including Uttar Pradesh where BJP is virtually assured of 8 of the 10 seats.

New Delhi: The stage is set for Rajya Sabha polls on Friday for the remaining 25 seats in six states including Uttar Pradesh where BJP is virtually assured of 8 of the 10 seats amid suspense whether it can snatch an extra seat in the light of the newfound bonhomie between former arch rivals Samajwadi Party and BSP.

For the 58 Rajya Sabha seats to be filled, 33 candidates from 10 states were declared elected unopposed on 15 March. Seven union ministers including Ravi Shankar Prasad and Prakash Javadekar were among them.

Besides Uttar Pradesh where Finance Minister Arun Jaitley is in the fray and who is certain to win, West Bengal, Karnataka, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Telangana will also feature in the polls. Counting of ballots will be taken up at 5 pm, an hour after the end of voting.

A bypoll will also be held for one seat in Kerala where MP Veerendra Kumar, the Left-backed candidate of Sharad Yadav faction of the JD(U), is pitted against Babu Prasad of the Congress.

The four-MLA strong Suheldev Bharatiya Samaj Party (SBSP), after being placated by BJP chief Amit Shah, and the Apna Dal (Sonelal) with nine MLAs have decided to vote for BJP nominees.

"We are standing with the BJP. We had held a meeting of our MLAs and it was decided that we will strongly support the BJP," national president of Apna Dal (S) Ashish Patel said in Lucknow.

In all there are 11 candidates in the fray for the 10 seats.

The BJP and its allies have 324 MLAs in the 403-member Assembly after the death of its Noorpur MLA in a road accident recently.

To secure a win, a candidate needs 37 first preference votes. Arithmetically, the BJP can easily win eight of the 10 seats and will be left with 28 surplus votes.

"There will be contest on the ninth seat," a senior Uttar Pradesh BJP leader said, exuding confidence that the saffron party would bag nine seats.

The Samajwadi Partyand the BSP also appeared sure of win one seat each.

The Samajwadi Party has fielded Jaya Bachchan and the BSP Bhimrao Ambedkar. With 19 MLAs, the BSP is short of 18 first preference votes and with Naresh Agarwal's son Nitin, who is still an Samajwadi Party MLA, likely to cross-vote for the BJP, the task will become difficult for the candidate of the Mayawati-led party.

BSP insiders said to be doubly sure of victory, Mayawati has sought a list of Samajwadi Party's loyal MLAs who will vote for her party candidate. She is also banking on some independent MLAs, who, though, are yet to reveal their cards, they said.

Riding on the new bonhomie with the Samajwadi Party, Mayawati is banking on the 10 surplus votes of Akhilesh Yadav's party, besides seven votes of the Congress and one of RLD to reach the magic figure of 37 votes.

However, Nitin Agarwal can queer the BSPs pitch if he votes for the BJP. Naresh Agarwal, who recently quit the Samajwadi Party and joined the BJP, has said his son would vote for the saffron party in the Rajya Sabha polls.

The country's most populous state sends 31 MPs to the 245-member Rajya Sabha, and the BJP, which won a massive victory in the 2017 Assembly elections, is yet to get a lion's share of these. Presently, the BJP has 58 Rajya Sabha MPs.

Besides Jaitley, the others in the fray are Ashok Bajpai, Vijay Pal Singh Tomar, Sakal Deep Rajbhar, Kanta Kardam, Anil Jain, Harnath Singh Yadav, GVL Narasimha Rao and Anil Kumar Agarwal.

Altogether, six candidates, including Congress nominee Abhisek Manu Singhvi, are in the fray for the five Rajya Sabha seats from West Bengal. The state's ruling TMC has decided to back the eminent lawyer.

Five candidates are in the electoral arena in Karnataka for four seats. The state's ruling Congress has fielded three nominees, while there are one each of the BJP and JD(S).

Elections will also be held for two seats in Jharkhand where three candidates are in the fray, including two of the state's ruling BJP and one of the Congress.

One candidate each of the ruling BJP and main opposition Congress will cross swords for the lone Rajya Sabha seat from Chhattisgarh.

Four candidates will try their luck from Telangana where polling will be held for three seats.UN chief Antonio Guterres said on Thursday that effective management of water was critical to meet the increasing challenges of its scarcity on the planet as he cited cooperation on water issues between India and Pakistan.

United Nations: UN chief Antonio Guterres said on Thursday that effective management of water was critical to meet the increasing challenges of its scarcity on the planet as he cited cooperation on water issues between India and Pakistan.

General Guterres was speaking at the launch of 'International Decade for Action on Water' for sustainable development.

Launched on the occasion of World Water Day, the decade which will run from 2018-2028 calls for a greater focus on the sustainable development and integrated management of water resources for the achievement of social, economic and environmental objectives.

It also calls on the implementation and promotion of related programmes and projects, as well as on the furtherance of cooperation and partnership at all levels in order to help achieve internationally agreed water-related goals and targets, including those contained in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.

"With demand for freshwater projected to grow by more than 40 percent by the middle of the century, and with climate change having a growing impact, water scarcity is an enormous concern. By 2050 at least one in four people will live in a country where the lack of fresh water will be chronic or recurrent, Guterres said.

"We cannot continue to take water for granted and expect to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. Today, I am using the launch of the Water Action Decade to make a global call to action for water, sanitation and hygiene: or WASH - in all healthcare facilities, he said.

The UN chief said without effective management of the planet's water resources, nations risk intensified disputes between communities and sectors and even increased tensions among nations.

Growing demands for water, coupled with poor water management, have increased water stress in many parts of the world, he said.

He, however, expressed satisfaction that so far, water has historically proven to be a catalyst for cooperation not for conflict.

"From my own experience, the Albufeira Convention, agreed during my time as Prime Minister of Portugal, continues to promote good relations on water management between Spain and Portugal. And, there are many more examples of cooperation on water, between India and Pakistan, Bolivia and Peru, and several others," he said.

India and Pakistan, nuclear-armed arch rivals in south Asia, signed the Indus Waters Treaty in 1960 after nine years of negotiations, with the World Bank also being a signatory.

The Treaty sets out a mechanism for cooperation and information exchange between the two countries regarding their use of the rivers.

However, there have been disagreements and differences between India and Pakistan over the treaty.

While the World Bank has said India is allowed to construct hydroelectric power facilities on tributaries of the Jhelum and Chenab rivers with certain restrictions under the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty, Pakistan opposes the construction of the Kishanganga (330 megawatts) and Ratle (850 megawatts) hydroelectric power plants being built by India.

The water decade was launched by Guterres, President of the General Assembly Miroslav Lajcak, President of Tajikistan Emomali Rahmon and water experts and practitioners.

Guterres said nations cannot take peaceor their precious and fragile water resourcesfor granted.

"Quite simply, water is a matter of life and death. Our bodies are 60 percent water. Our cities, our industries and our agriculture all depend on it," he said.

Underlining how dire the problem of water scarcity can be for the planet, Guterres said 40 percent of the world's people were affected by water scarcity, 80 percent of waste water is discharged untreated into the environment and more than 90 percent of disasters are water-related.

More than two billion people lack access to safe water, and more than 4.5 billion people lack adequate sanitation services.

"What these numbers mean is a harsh daily reality for people in rural communities and urban slums in all regions of the world. Many of the most serious diseases in the developing world are directly related to unsafe drinking water, poor sanitation, and insufficient hygiene practices," he said.Goel said he will be visiting key leaders of opposition parties, including the Congress, AIADMK, TDP and TRS, to persuade them to call off their protests, which have resulted in a washout of Parliament's proceedings since March 5

New Delhi: Union minister Vijay Goel will meet key Opposition leaders at their residence in an effort to break the logjam in Parliament, which has been paralysed for 14 days due to protests by various parties.

The government is willing for a discussion on no-confidence motions against it and enjoys a strong majority in the Lok Sabha, Goel, who is Minister of State for Parliamentary Affairs, said on Thursday, wondering why the Opposition leaders were debating on television and not in the House.

Goel said he will be visiting key leaders of Opposition parties, including the Congress, AIADMK, TDP and TRS, to persuade them to call off their protests, which have resulted in a washout of Parliament's proceedings since 5 March when it met after a recess to continue the Budget session.

At a press conference, Goel noted that over Rs 2.5 lakh is spent per minute in running Parliament, and asked Opposition parties to raise their issues and debate them in the two Houses.

The second leg of the Budget Session is of 23 days and all 14 days so far have been wasted, Goel said.

"I have been meeting Opposition leaders in Parliament and will now visit their homes to persuade them to call off their protests and start discussion on their issues" in the two Houses, he said.

On issues like the PNB scam, the government has more to tell the people than the Opposition, he claimed and said the Modi government has been an honest dispensation which has worked against corruption.

"Parliament is meant for debate. It is sad that Opposition leaders can debate outside and on TV channels but not in Parliament. It is also strange for some of them to keep protesting in the Well of the two Houses and then say that it is the government's job to run them," he said.

Arjun Ram Meghwal, who is also a junior minister for parliamentary affairs, said it is difficult for the Speaker to take up notices for no-confidence motions as long as members are present in the Well as she is required to do a head-count of members supporting the notices.

The Telugu Desam Party (TDP) and the YSR Congress have given notices for no confidence motion against the government following the Centre's stand that it cannot provide special category status to Andhra Pradesh.

Several parties have been protesting in the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha over various of issues such as banking scam, Cauvery board, special status to Andhra Pradesh and quota hike, leading to daily adjournments.

A large number of bills, including on triple talaq, whistleblower protection and OBC Commission, are pending in Parliament. The Lok Sabha passed the crucial Finance Bill without any discussion. A couple of other bills have also been pushed in the two houses amid the din.UNESCO's report ahead of World Water Day should serve as a wake-up call for every Indian. It highlights how India is staring at a deepening water crisis.

UNESCO's report ahead of World Water Day on 22 March should serve as a wake-up call for every Indian. It highlights how India is staring at a deepening water crisis with few steps being taken to ameliorate this bleak situation. It predicts an intensified water crisis across the nation by 2050, with many parts of central India battling a withdrawal of 40 percent of the renewable surface water resources.

More than half of our rivers are heavily polluted. Contamination is no longer a problem with surface water alone but also with groundwater resources which have been found to contain both metallic contamination and also contamination from improper disposal of human excreta.

The Central Pollution Control Board has doubled the number of 'polluted' rivers from 121 to 275 in the last five years, blaming the huge quantities of untreated sewage being dumped into our rivers for this state of affairs.

The CPCB collated monthly water quality analysis figures submitted by all state pollution control boards between 2015 and 2016. The State Pollution Control Boards evaluated 275 rivers across 29 states through 1,275 monitoring stations on the basis of their biochemical oxygen demand  the concentration of oxygen required for sustaining aquatic life  under the National Water Quality Monitoring Programme.

The report found that while Maharashtra had 49 polluted river stretches, including Mithi, Godavari, Bhima, Krishna, Ulhas, Tapi, Kundalika, Panchganga, Mula-Mutha, Pelhar, Penganga and Vaitarna, among others, Assam ranked second at 28, Madhya Pradesh third with 21, Gujarat 20, and West Bengal 17.

The situation is no better in the south where the quantum of water in the main rivers including the Godavari, the Cauvery and the Krishna is much reduced.

Water activist Bolisetty and Satyanarayana from Andhra Pradesh points out, "In the Krishna river, there is no water beyond the Srisailam dam which means that for last 140 kilometres (up to the sea) it remains largely a dry river. Similarly, the Cauvery is practically dry beyond the Mettur dam and the situation is the same with the Godavari river after the Rajamundhry dam."

"Already, farmers in Andhra Pradesh have been asked not to grow water-intensive crops such as paddy and sugarcane but rather to grow crops which require less water," said Satyanarayana.

The scientists who have helped put together the UNESCO report warn that the situation with groundwater is equally dire. TERI's SK Sarkar points out that groundwater depletion in Punjab, Haryana and Delhi has become so severe that it carries the risk of salinity.

The situation has now frighteningly extended to central India, where fresh surface water resources have been depleted and groundwater is being accessed in larger quantities.

The CPCB warns that if the situation is not reversed immediately, the "demand for freshwater for all uses will be unmanageable".

Water expert physicist Professor Vikram Soni of JNU is in agreement with the UNESCO report, pointing out that because we have loaded our rivers with untreated sewage from our cities, effluents from industries and pesticides and fertilizers "our rivers are neither nirmal or aviraal". The only way out is "to start treating all sewage in a decentralised manner at the colony level. The government needs to fine and close down all industries that do not recycle and safely dispense their pollutants into rivers," he said.

Planning Commission ex-member Mihir Shah had also warned that we will have only half the water that we require by 2030. That is why, experts keep stressing on the need to redraw the agricultural map of the country and switch over to more efficient water practices including drip irrigation.

One clear indicator of the strain is the annual per capita water availability. This was 5,177 cubic metres in 1951 but this has declined to 1,545 cubic metres in 2011, against the international threshold for water stress pegged at 1,700 cubic metres. However, National Institute of Hydrology pegs India's utilisable per capita water availability at just 938 cubic metres in 2010 and expects this to drop to 814 cubic metres by 2025.

Unregulated agriculture and over-drafting of water from the floodplain would have the even more serious consequence of reducing water levels in our aquifers. If these fall below the level of water in the rivers, the pollution from the rivers will seep in and completely destroy the aquifers, which are irreplaceable.

Neither the water resources ministry nor the Central Water Commission has focused their attention on this problem. They need to act immediately since this is the only source of unpolluted water left in the country.

Eminent water conservationist and Magasasy awardee Rajender Singh also warns of unprecedented drought conditions that are increasing every year across larger swathes of the country, causing further distress to millions of farmers.

Singh said, "India is facing severe drought conditions across several states that include Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. Neither the central nor state governments have come up with any long-term plan to tackle this situation."

He finds it ironic and tragic that over the centuries, India had developed an expertise to manage drought and had also developed an expertise on how to manage floods. Both, he said, are the same sides of one coin.

"These traditional, community-driven, time-tested models on how to handle drought as also our water resources helped ensure that our rivers, lakes, wetlands and other water bodies remained intact over the centuries but are being totally ignored today," said Singh.

"It is these areas of expertise that we should have promoted within India and across the globe. We were gurus in protecting wildlife and nature. Other countries could have learnt this knowledge from us. But in all these international meets, the only green technology being promoted are technology related to energy efficiency, whereas our traditional water management systems are not showcased at all. The only people assisting our official delegations are corporate consultants. How do they represent the viewpoint of millions of Indians?" Singh asked.

Singh went on to add that India had missed a great opportunity to become a rallying point for other nations?

He cited the example of how Prince Charles had approached him to help provide solutions for the flooding of the Thames river in the United Kingdom. "I went there to make an on-the-spot assessment. I provided him with a traditional Indian solution where the flow of the river was slowed down by the construction of small barrages at the places where the river meandered. I provided them with a typical Indian solution which the UK government has happily accepted,"

"Now I am invited there (periodically) to monitor the river flow. There are hundreds of Indians who possess similar expertise. Why is the government not using their skills and knowledge?" he wondered.

"All our water bodies  whether our rivers or our tanks, ponds and wells  are facing major encroachments. We are also plagued with the problem of over-extraction. Our present educational system has come up with a breed of students who are taught subjects such as soil, climate and water use without understanding that these are evolutionary resources that are irreplaceable," Singh said.

Realising the gravity of the situation, Satguru Jaggi Vasudeva in his Rally for Rivers campaign has proposed that a one-kilometre-wide belt along river banks be reserved for generating tree cover. He further proposed that the Compensatory Afforestation Fund Act could make Rs 6,000 crore available annually to state governments to grow trees along the river banks as these would provide environmental and economic benefits to the farming community and to the people at large.

Out of all the water on the planet, only about two percent is fresh water. A large portion of this water worldwide has already been contaminated by chemicals, industrial effluents, sewage, and fertilisers. Only fresh water can be used for human consumption and agriculture. This water is not just for human beings. It must be shared with all living creatures and it is this two percent of the fresh water that we must endeavour to save.As the Yogi Adityanath government completes one year in Uttar Pradesh, this Khabar Lahariya special report examines how cows are actually faring in the heartland of gauraksha

Editor's note: Khabar Lahariya, an independent feminist news platform reporting out of rural Uttar Pradesh with local women journalists only, is working on a series of video stories chronicling the performance of Yogi Adityanaths government over the past one year. The focus is on three major policies: farmer loan waivers, Anti-Romeo squads and gauraksha. Firstpost will be publishing these reports as well.

***

The beam from Vimla Devi's torch illuminates the bovine intruders placidly destroying the crops in her field near Chitrakoot, in the dead of the night. Vimla indicates the cows, who're eating their way through her farm, and asks, "How can I chase these away on my own?" Her eyes well up with tears as she surveys the destruction.

In a Bundelkhand defined by drought and agricultural disaster, cows have very much been the meat of the matter through this first year of the Yogi Adityanath-led BJP government in the state: Protecting them through sickness and health, making their transport and sale highly regulated (by extra-administrative forces if nothing else), clearing the landscape and roads of abandoned bovines, creating (no less than 14) dairies producing lakhs of litres of milk.

Now with Yogis Ek saal naya misaal celebrations echoing through the state, we take a look at how cows are actually faring in the heartland of cow protection. Is the cow anything but a saffron-charged political tool for the ruling party? Is there any point of protection when life as a hungry and thirsty cow in Bundelkhand is a fate worse than death? Does the considerable budgetary allocation  from 40 crores in 2017, to 98 crores in the current fiscal  trickle down to panchayats battling scores of besahara pashu in search of shelter?

Accordingly to records held by district veterinarians in Chitrakoot, this one district has between 50,000-55,000 abandoned/stray cows at present. One farmer, Bansidhar Pathak, says he reckons 60 percent of the farming population has migrated, and a chief reason for this is stray cattle attacking their meagre yields.

RK Patel, a popular party-hopping politician in Chitrakoot, currently the BJP MLA from Mau-Manikpur constituency, claims he has seen the practice of farmers leaving their cattle loose every year during the dry months, when it becomes difficult to feed them (annapratha), from the time he was a child. If we assume the government will be able to solve the problem of annapratha by making shelters, then were wrong. Farmers have to become more aware. The problem is farmers, and the solution is farmers, he says.

Also read  Yogi Adityanath govt completes one year: Have loan waivers for Uttar Pradesh farmers materialised?

What of all those election promises and mandates, then? Ram Singh Patel, the district president of the Bharatiya Kisan Union says scathingly, that the government is good for announcements and not much more. And Kallu, a farmer from Mahoba, one of the many who pitch their flimsy plastic tents in their fields through the debilitating winter months, to protect them from hungry cattle, declares that the government should either provide food for these cows, or facilitate their sale and butchery.

Promises and plans made by the state for support and subsidies to farmers who shelter cows havent been followed up with any actual cash flow: according to the district veterinarian, Devendra Singh, the 60-65 cow shelters in the district are all privately run. Individuals, and groups  such as Yogis own Hindu YuvaVahini  have volunteered their land and services to the district administration, but most often, their offers have not been supported by funds or administrative action.

Meanwhile, cows still wander the Bundelkhandi fields, and plastic cow-shaped piggy banks beckon from shop windows in Karwi town to solicit public contributions.

Watch Khabar Lahariya's report on the issue here.TDP has decided to extend support to the National Highways blockade programme called by the Opposition parties in Andhra Pradesh.

Amaravati: The Telugu Desam Party has decided to extend support to the National Highways blockade programme called by the Opposition parties in Andhra Pradesh on Thursday seeking special category status to the state.

"Organisers of the agitation requested our support and the party chief (Chief Minister Chandrababu Naidu) consented to it in the interests of the state," TDP AP unit president K Kala Venkat Rao told party leaders during a teleconference on Wednesday night.

A party release later said the TDP would not, however, participate in the agitation along with the main Opposition YSR Congress since the "latter might create trouble."

Naidu, whose party, the TDP, quit the BJP-led NDA over the special category status issue, earlier called for a people's movement "till justice is done to the state."

As a first step, the chief minister extended his government's support to the statewide National Highways blockade programme called by the Opposition parties.

"Let us all protest and, if required, sit on hunger strike at every place, sport black badges during working hours in offices. Let us awaken the people," he said at a meeting of women self-help groups.

Rao said the protests would be organised peacefully in solidarity with TDP MPs who have been fighting in New Delhi to protect the states interests.

"Sit-in protests and meetings will be organised in all assembly constituencies across the state," Rao said.

MPs, legislators and other senior leaders took part in the teleconference.BJP govt is a manufacturer of fake news and an epitome of post-truth. Their nexus with Cambridge Analytica has been exposed, Randeep Surjewala said.

Responding to the BJP's accusations that the Congress misused the services of data mining company Cambridge Analytica, which has been in the news for allegedly manipulating Facebook and mining personal data without authorisation, the Grand Old Party's spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala launched a counter-assault against the saffron party on Thursday.

He said that there are no links between the Congress and the analytics company and added that the BJP's accusations were a way for them to deflect the truth. He said that the Narendra Modi-led dispensation themselves had used the 'stolen data to manipulate elections'.

"The BJP government has now become a manufacturer of fake news and an epitome of post-truth. The BJP-JD(U)-Cambridge Analytica nexus has now been exposed," Surjewala said.

"Hitler had an associate called Goebbels, Modiji has an associate called Ravi Shankar Prasad. BJP government are the biggest data thieves," Surjewala added, as per ANI.

Alleging clear links between the IT ministry and the analytics firm, he challenged Prasad to register an FIR against the Indian arm of the firm.

"Smriti Irani is following Cambridge analytics' on Twitter and Arvind Gupta, CEO of MyGov, has been praising the firm," he alleged.

Citing three news articles which were published between October and November 2017, some of which had claimed the services of Cambridge Analytica as 'Congres party's Brahmastra' against BJP and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Prasad had alleged that Congress has "used and misused" the services of the company to win the elections.

"There are many suspicious signs available that show that they (Congress) used and misused the services of the company. Congress was involved with Cambridge Analytica in the Gujarat elections," Prasad had alleged.

Surjewala dismissed the claims and the articles as fabricated while calling Prasad 'minister of lies'. He said that the Modi government was running from accountability. "They are not letting Parliament work because they don't want to answer tough questions," he said.

Questioning from where the data leak happened, he also questioned the 'bonhomie between Modi and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg'.

On Thursday, launching a direct attack on Rahul Gandhi in a press conference, Prasad had questioned why the Congress president failed to clarify his party's links with Cambridge Analytics when the articles first appeared last year. "When they are caught, they are saying we have no connections with the company," he said.

Prasad also said that Congress' conspicuous silence on the issue  for four-five months  has raised some serious questions about its leadership's (Rahul's) "ability to govern the country".

The BJP spokesperson had also raised the same issues on Wednesday as well asking Gandhi to explain Cambridge Analytica's role in his social media profile. "Will Congress party depend upon data manipulation and theft to win votes?" he had asked.

Hitler had an associate called Goebbels, Modi ji has an associate called Ravi Shankar Prasad. BJP Govt has become a manufacturer of fake news. Sabse bade data chor macha rahe hain sabse zyada shor: RS Surjewala,Congress #CambridgeAnalytics pic.twitter.com/bjPTn7oPuG  ANI (@ANI) March 22, 2018

Cambridge Analytica is in the eye of a fresh data leak controversy, as reports emerged that the firm had access to millions of Facebook users' personal data, which is used to identify the personalities of American voters and influence their behaviour to help US president Donald Trump win elections.

According to reports, the company's CEO Alexander Nix had been in talks with several Opposition parties in India to design an electoral strategy for the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) in the upcoming Lok Sabha Elections.

Another report claimed that the company was in talks with both Congress as well as BJP through its India partner Oveleno Business Intelligence Private Limited. Interestingly, OBI's CEO is Amitesh Tyagi, son of Janata Dal (United) leader KC Tyagi, who has previously worked with individual candidates in the Uttar Pradesh elections in 2017 and with JD(U)-BJP to manage booth-level demographic data. The company, however, denies its involvement in any social media work yet.

Polling for the new state Assembly had taken place in two phases on 9 and 14 December, and the results were declared on 18 December. Though BJP had retained power winning 99 seats in the state Assembly election, Congress had surprised everyone by winning 73 seats in Modi's home state.

But despite neck-to-neck campaigning by senior BJP leaders, including the prime minister and a few pre-poll sops, BJP failed to achieve its target of winning 150 seats in the 183-member Assembly.

Click here for live updates on Cambridge Analytica row'If the company does manipulation, why were the BJP and the JD(U) using it. But in his pack of lies, he forgot to tell the truth,' said Randeep Singh Surjewala.

The BJP and the Congress on Wednesday accused each other of using the services of embattled data consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica (CA) that, along with Facebook, is at the centre of a global row over the alleged unauthorised use of personal data from the social media giant.

As the firestorm over the issue hit India, the government warned Facebook, which is being probed by US and British lawmakers over a potential breach of user confidentiality, of stringent action if any attempt was made to influence the country's electoral process through "undesirable means".

However, the company's India partner, Ovleno Business Intelligence (OBI), lists the BJP, the Congress and the JD(U) as its clients. The India partner is by Amrish Tyagi, son of senior JD(U) leader KC Tyagi. In media interviews, the junior Tyagi admitted that the Youth Congress in Jharkhand, the BJP and the JD(U) had used its services to conduct research.

OBI's website was taken down soon after the slugfest between the BJP and the Congress started, reported News18. The companys website proclaimed that BJP, Congress and JD(U) were its clients, apart from ICICI Bank and Airtel. The website said that it works on political campaign management and had photos of Narendra Modi and Arvind Kejriwal on its homepage. However, the company did not list Aam Aadmi Party as its client.

The BJP had first hit out at Congress, accusing it of compromising national security by reportedly roping in political data analytics firm CA to run its 2019 election campaign. It had alleged that CA had been found involved in data manipulation and warned that any attempt to misuse social media to influence India's electoral process would not be tolerated and the government would take necessary legal action.

Union Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad had said that CA is accused of using bribes, sex workers to entrap politicians and stealing data from Facebook. Accusing Congress of depending upon data manipulation and theft to win votes, Prasad had also asked the Congress whether it depends on data theft, and found manipulation ability the sole criteria to hire CA. Citing media reports, the BJP leader had also asked the Congress to clarify whether now-sacked CA CEO Alexender Nix has met several opposition leaders to design the the UPA's electoral strategy for the next Lok Sabha elections.

The Congress had responded quickly as it denied links to CA while accusing the BJP of having availed its services in 2010. "The Congress or its President have never used or hired the services of Cambridge Analytica," said Congress communications in-charge Randeep Singh Surjewala, hours after Prasad aired his accusations.

"This is fake agenda, a white lie being dished out on fake facts by the Law Minister. And this has become a daily order with Prasad," he had said, alleging that it was actually the BJP and its ally JD(U) which used the services of CA in 2010.

For this, he cited the firm, saying on its website, that it "was contracted to undertake an in-depth electoral analysis for Bihar assembly elections in 2010".

"If the company does manipulation, why were the BJP and the JD(U) using it? But in his pack of lies, he forgot to tell the truth," the Congress leader had said, accusing the BJP of seeking to divert attention from urgent issues through "fake news".

The Congress had also said that the LinkedIn profile of Himanshu Sharma, who is the vice-president of OBI, lists achievements like achieving Mission 272+ for the BJP and elections in other states.

CA, the London-based data consultancy firm in the midst of a global row, has allegedly been using Facebook users' data to unfairly influence election results by psychological manipulation, entrapment techniques and fake news campaigns.

But Britain's Channel 4 News on Monday exposed how senior executives at CA were caught on camera suggesting that the firm could use sex workers, bribes and misinformation in order to try and help political candidates win votes around the world. The investigation followed articles published by The New York Times and The Observer that outlined how the data of millions of Facebook profiles ended up being given to CA. The companies have denied any wrongdoing.

With inputs from IANSSenior JD(U) KC Tyagi, speaking to reporters, claimed that his son Amrish has no links to the company Cambridge Analytica, which is currently in the eye of a storm.

Senior JD(U) KC Tyagi, speaking to reporters on Thursday, claimed that his son Amrish has received no help from the company Cambridge Analytica, which engages in data mining and analysis for electoral processes.

"JD(U) has no connection with Cambridge Analytica. Neither JD(U) nor my son has got any kind of help from the company," he said.

However, the JD(U) leader called upon the government, particularly Union Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, to probe whether there was any misuse of data.

He also said the government should investigate the role of his son if necessary.

Amrish Tyagi is said to be the CEO of Oveleno Business Intelligence (OBI), the India partner of Cambridge Analytica, as per this report. A report in Hindustan Times states that both CA and OBI approached the Congress and BJP for a possible collaboration for the 2019 Lok Sabha election.

CA is currently in the eye of a storm for allegedly having using information from over 50 million Facebook accounts to help Donald Trump win the US presidential elections.

Bihar leader of Opposition Tejashwi Yadav has also raised the issue of the alleged involvement of Amrish Tyagi, saying:Incidentally, much before BJP had brought Congress' links with Cambridge Analytica to public attention, a number of reports from noted media organisations had indicated that the Grand Old Party is in touch with the data analytics firm.

If data is the new oil, political parties around the world are slipping on it. That includes the two biggest 'national' parties in India. None among BJP and Congress emerge out of the Cambridge Analytica scandal smelling of roses. Both have resorted to denial while blaming the other in pious outrage. The spectacle is immature and worrying. Instead of trading charges, both should come clean on their connection with the disgraced data analytics firm.

Political parties are in the business of public opinion. It is natural that they will find big data useful for their purpose  which is to shape public opinion. While it isn't a crime to use the services of companies (who uses data analytical tools) to micro-target political messaging and influence voter behavior, trouble starts when the data is obtained unethically and illegally. Such behavior, if unchecked, may eventually threaten the very fabric of democracy. The danger is more relevant and immediate in India, where laws around privacy and secure handling of big data are just emerging out of stone age.

The backbone of democracy is consent, which in turn is based on informed choice. The democratic treatise rests on a notion that voters will act as independent actors while giving their considered consent and mould own future. Now, how convenient would it be for parties in a representative democracy if they can manipulate the voters and manufacture this consent?

What firms such as Cambridge Analytica claim to do is to gather big data  by cheating/buying/skimming off information from gargantuan commercial data platforms such as Facebook  and then use analytical tools to break down this information and gain insights over the targets (voters) for their clients (political parties, corporates or whoever is interested). The clients may now proceed to target the demography of their choice through specific messaging. The question has now moved from whether to how effectively this can be done.

Let us be careful here. There are no dearth of skeptics who question the very basis of the idea  that insights provided by big data can be used to change voter behavior or political insights. Cyber security expert and author Arnab Ray argues forcefully that such fears are overstated.

However, in the age of smart algorithm and smarter Artificial Intelligence, the ability to weaponise big data is not the domain of science fiction. Some researchers say that such practices have already begun.

Eitan Hersh, associate professor of political science at Yale University and author of Hacking the Electorate: How Campaigns Perceive Voters was quoted as saying by Vox that "Campaigns can now do a lot more targeting based on individual-level characteristics or even neighborhood-level characteristics, as opposed to thinking generally about what the typical American or the typical constituent wants to hear Big data makes it easy for candidates to dismiss their opponents. They now know, with greater and greater precision, how people voted and how they're likely to vote in the future, and their campaigns reflect that."

Instances of Russian interference in US presidential elections and elsewhere through social media platforms also raise the possibility that foreign forces inimical to India's interests could similarly interfere with our elections by manipulating the digital medium. At last count, India has the highest number of Facebook users in the world. Latest available data (13 July, 2017) suggests there are 241 million active users in India, compared to 240 million in the US. It can't be too difficult for a foreign nation (Pakistan, for instance) to breach this data minefield and target elections in India.

It is precisely this happenstance that has now put Facebook in the dock in the US. Founder Mark Zuckerberg could soon be summoned by a US Congressional committee. On Wednesday, Zuckerberg admitted in an interview with CNN that Facebook failed to cope with the Russian threat in 2016 US Presidential polls and vowed not to let that happen anywhere else, including India.

"I think what's clear is that in 2016, we were not as on top of a number of issues as we should have [been] whether it was Russian interference or fake news And we have a responsibility to do this, not only for the 2018 midterms in the US, which are going to be a huge deal this year and that's just a huge focus for us but there's a big election in India this year, there's a big election in Brazil, there are big elections around the world, and you can bet that we are really committed to doing everything that we need to make sure that the integrity of those elections on Facebook is secured."

In the backdrop of such developments, it was disconcerting to note the behavior of Indian political parties. On Tuesday, BJP targeted Congress for not being open about using the services of Cambridge Analytica (CA) to spruce up Rahul Gandhi's social media image and electoral campaigns. However, BJP has been defiant about counter-charges from Congress about its own links.

Media reports based on a screenshot from the website of Ovleno Business Intelligence, the Indian affiliate of CA, claimed that "BJP, Congress and JD(U) were its clients, apart from ICICI bank and Airtel". The website has since been taken down.

Such links have ostensibly been corroborated by the LinkedIn Profile page of Himanshu Sharma, one of the directors of OBI, who described among his achievements that he "managed four election campaigns successfully for the ruling party BJP" and "achieved the target of mission 272". But the association with the BJP now stands deleted from Sharma's LinkedIn profile.

While the BJP has a lot of questions to answer, the conduct of Congress is no better. On Wednesday, party president Rahul Gandhi dismissed BJP's charges as fake news and claimed that the government was trying to deflect attention from the murder of 39 Indians by Islamic State in Iraq.

Problem: 39 Indians dead; Govt on the mat, caught lying. Solution: Invent story on Congress & Data Theft. Result: Media networks bite bait; 39 Indians vanish from radar. Problem solved.  Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) March 22, 2018

Incidentally, much before BJP had brought Congress' links with Cambridge Analytica to public attention, a number of reports from noted media organisations had indicated that the Grand Old Party is in touch with the data analytics firm.

The Economic Times had reported back in 9 October, 2017, that "Congress is in touch with Big Data firm Cambridge Analytica that helped US President Donald Trump win last year." The article further mentioned: " According to media reports, Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix has met several opposition leaders to design electoral strategy for the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) in the next Lok Sabha elections. The company has made a presentation to the Congress in which it detailed the strategy to target voters online."

In a subsequent update to this story done on 22 March, 2018 , The Economic Times has now sourced this story to an article that originally appeared in Navbharat Times last July.

On 12 November, 2017, Abhinandan Mishra of Sunday Guardian reported that "The Congress under (then) party vice-president Rahul Gandhi is in an 'advanced' stage of discussions with Cambridge Analytica (CA), to use the services of this London-headquartered 'data mining and analysis' company, which specialises in helping political parties and individuals win elections by targeted communication and by changing audience preferences." The report also mentioned, quoting sources, that "if things work outthe Congress would use the expertise of the company during the Assembly elections of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Chhattisgarh that are due in less than a year. However, when it comes to using the expertise of Cambridge Analytica, the larger focus of the party will be the 2019 general elections."

On 19 March, 2018, Moneycontrol reported that "Big data firm Cambridge Analytica in talks with Indian opposition party for 2019 polls." The article did not mention the name of any political party but reported that CA "is in talks with a large Opposition party in India for the upcoming general elections in 2019" and has apparently made a presentation last August, where CA "etched a data-driven strategy to target voters on social media, analysing online user behaviour and 'connecting the dots' across different citizen databases."

It is interesting to note that while Rahul has rejected BJP's allegations as "fake news", Congress did not object to any of these reports from credible organisations, some of which had indicated explicit links between CA and Congress going as far back as last year.

Divya Spandana, Congress's social media and digital communications chief, has clarified that "any news about Congress engaged/engaging with Cambridge Analytica is absolutely false." This is quite a vehement refutation.

News about Congress engaged/engaging with Cambridge Analytica is absolutely false.  Divya Spandana/Ramya (@divyaspandana) March 21, 2018

However, Congress's social media head was described as "reticent" on the usage of big data analytics in electoral campaigns in an interview done by News18 in October 2017 last year.

According to that interview, "when quizzed on the use of big data analytics, the Congress social media head is reticent. There have been reports of Congress signing up data mining and analytics giant Cambridge Analytica, the company that was closely associated with Donald Trump's presidential bid last year."

It is not clear why Divya was not vehement in her denials about the links between Congress and Cambridge Analytica in that instance.

It is to be also noted that rebel Congress leader Shehzad Poonawalla on Wednesday told ANI that the Congress party was lying about its links with Cambridge Analytica. He posted three tweets in support of his claims.

Mr Surjewala lying as usual- Indian wing Ovleno associated with Cambridge Analytica - through Amrish Tyagi - approached me for work with Congress & Rahul Gandhi - never with BJP- here is his email-I then learnt he was able to engage with INC - Also who did CEO of CA meet in India pic.twitter.com/E9kdb9nWl0  Shehzad Jai Hind (@Shehzad_Ind) March 21, 2018

In Sept 2016 Amrish Tyagi of Ovleno was in US - met Cambridge Analytica's Alexander Nix... (see pic) PRESENTATIONS TO INDIAN OPPOSITION LEADERS PLANNED... services were to be offered through front companies..Since 2012 Amrish was in touch with "boss" of INC as per his mail to me pic.twitter.com/EUTOg2XsDS  Shehzad Jai Hind (@Shehzad_Ind) March 22, 2018

Live now - Truth about Ovleno & #CambridgeAnalytica ; their political link;explosive documents Will Surjewala ans?? https://t.co/u51d6h14fQ  Shehzad Jai Hind (@Shehzad_Ind) March 22, 2018

As this trading of charges continues, it is evident that the larger question is getting buried under the debris of political slugfest. If data is not safe and secure then the user loses control over it. When that happens, the demise of democracy won't take long.Chandrababu Naidu's sudden revolt against the Centre is a clever strategy to frustrate the plans of the ambitious BJP while countering the YSR Congress.

Chandrababu Naidu's sudden revolt against the Centre is a clever strategy to frustrate the plans of the ambitious BJP. As part of its 'Mission-seven states', the BJP was determined to increase its tally at least in the parliamentary seats in Andhra Pradesh.

The Saffron party was restless with TDP as Naidu is known to be unyielding. Thus sailing with TDP, the BJP has always maintained undeclared cordiality with opposition YSR Congress; and the latter reciprocated. Upset with this bonhomie between his alliance partner BJP and arch-rival YSR Congress, Naidu engineered a coup of sorts by declaring a sentimental war on the BJP-led Centre.

With this, he seeks to accomplish multiple objectives with one shot  making BJP a political untouchable in state politics, thwart any possible alliance between YSR Congress and BJP, divert the people's attention from YS Jagan Reddy's padayatra, ensure multi-cornered contest in the state to split anti-establishment vote benefiting TDP and tide over the possible anti-incumbency by diverting the people's anger at the Centre.

BJP, even while sharing power with the TDP, was never comfortable as a party with its regional ally. Despite personal chemistry of few BJP leaders with TDP supremo Naidu, the party was restless. He was never its trusted ally given the past experience and the BJP is unsure of its support in the future.

The saffron party was, therefore, working on making the hay while the sun shines. Team Narendra Modi is doubly suspicious as Naidu was instrumental in triggering the anti-Modi campaign during the Atal Bihari Vajpayee regime post the 2002 Gujarat riots.

Andhra Pradesh is among BJP chief Amit Shah's 'Mission-seven states'. These are the seven states which the BJP would like to focus on in 2019, to make gains as the party expects an inevitable loss of seats in north Indian states, where it had a saturated mandate in 2014. The party aimed at compensating the losses in the north with gains in these south Indian and eastern states.

The BJP leaders, even while attacking the TDP government much before estrangement, never questioned Reddy. The bonhomie between the BJP and its adversary was always unpalatable for the TDP.

While the central investigation agencies were hunting Opposition leaders like Lalu Prasad Yadav and Arvind Kejriwal, there was no significant progress in the cases pending against Reddy.

Reddy also reciprocated by extending unconditional and even rather unsolicited support to BJP nominees in the presidential and vice-presidential elections. In fact, the YSR Congress had a reservation on the vice-presidential nominee, M Venkaiah Naidu, who is considered to be closer to the TDP chief.

But, this did not matter for YSR Congress when it came to supporting the Modi-led BJP at the Centre. The leaders of YSR Congress right from its chief to Vijaysai Reddy, MP and close aide of Reddy, never had any problem in getting an appointment with the prime minister while the constitutional head of the government in the state, Naidu, often had to wait as Modi was busy with an official occupation.

Even on the question of the special status, Reddy was cautious enough not to target the Modi regime, but, chided Naidu for his alleged inability to get the maximum from the Centre. All this gave credence to the political grapevine that BJP has a clandestine deal with YSR Congress and considered Reddy's party as an ally in reserve.

The BJP was also uncomfortable with TDP as it feared that this alliance is detrimental to the growth of the saffron party in the state. They were sure that Naidu would not yield any more seats for the party. Several state BJP leaders, including minister Manikyala Rao, openly expressed dissent that the TDP is not allowing BJP to grow and enough importance is not given to the alliance partner.

On the contrary, the BJP was confident that they can strike a better bargain with YSR Congress, at least in parliamentary seats. Reddy is certainly not expected to be as particular as Naidu when it comes to contesting Parliament seats as his thrust is to win the Assembly elections to be held along with the parliamentary elections in 2019. He is desperate to ally with the Centre for personal reasons.

Meanwhile, Reddy is in Opposition and is also desperate to have allies. His bargaining power is definitely less as compared to the ruling party. The cases pending against Reddy can be an effective weapon for the BJP to arm-twist YSR Congress into any seat-sharing negotiations. The BJP was also expecting that the sporadic discontent on TDP rule will galvanise into anti-incumbency.

The TDP supremo, who is a veteran of many electoral battles and known for his killer instinct in politics, could smell the BJP's electoral strategy for 2019. Thus, he intensified his attack on the central government despite accepting the special package in lieu of special status.

Naidu could successfully get several objectives realised with one shot. The BJP is made untouchable for any political party as there is a simmering anger against the Modi government for the manner in which the Centre has let down the state.

There is a growing convergence in the anti-Centre protests evident from TDP, YSR Congress, Jana Sena, Congress and the Left forming part of 'Highway Bandh' observed on Thursday. The attention on Reddy's padayatra, which has now entered the TDP stronghold of Amaravati region, is diverted away as the focus shifts to Parliament protests and the no-confidence motion.

Reddy cannot have any alliance partner as he has to fear political backlash if he strikes any pre-poll arrangement with BJP, given the general climate of hostility towards the saffron party in the state. There will be a multi-cornered contest splitting the anti-establishment vote.

This would obviously benefit TDP. Given the slender margin of victory in 2014, Naidu feels that the fragmented polity would yield him electoral dividends. Besides, this coup of sorts will also help him to tide over anti-incumbency.

The author is former MLC in Telangana, former editor, The Hans India and professor, journalism, Osmania University.The Congress on Thursday night issued a three-line whip to all its MPs in the Rajya Sabha asking them to be present in the House at 11 am on Friday in full strength and support the party's stand.

New Delhi: The Congress on Thursday night issued a three-line whip to all its MPs in the Rajya Sabha asking them to be present in the House at 11 am on Friday in full strength and support the party's stand.

According to sources, the whip has been issued by the opposition party which seeks to corner the government on some burning issues.

The party has been raising the issues of PNB scam, the Supreme Court's order on SC/ST Act issue and the death of 39 Indians in Iraq.

Some party MPs have also given a notice for moving a privilege motion against External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj for allegedly "misleading" the House on the death of the Indians.

Sources said the party MPs in Rajya Sabha are also likely to meet on Friday morning.Union law minister Ravi Shankar Prasad accused Congress of 'lying' and 'misusing' the services of the data mining company Cambridge Analytica to win the Gujarat Assembly elections in December 2017

Union law minister Ravi Shankar Prasad accused Congress of "lying" and of misusing the services of data mining company Cambridge Analytica, which has been in the news for allegedly manipulating Facebook and mining personal data without authorisation, during the Gujarat Assembly elections in December 2017.

Citing three news articles which were published between October and November 2017, some of which had claimed the services of Cambridge Analytica as 'Congres party's Brahmastra' against BJP and Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Prasad alleged that Congress has "used and misused" the services of the company to win the elections.

"There are many suspicious signs available that show that they (Congress) used and misused the services of the company. Congress was involved with Cambridge Analytica in the Gujarat elections," Prasad alleged.

Prasad also called Congress of being a party without ethics, saying they used illegal means to gain an upper hand in the state Assembly election.

Launching a direct attack on Rahul Gandhi in a press conference on Thursday, Prasad questioned why the Congress president failed to clarified his party's links with Cambridge Analytics when the articles first appeared last year. "When they are caught, they are saying we have no connections with the company," he further added.

Prasad also said that Congress' conspicuous silence on the issue  for four-five months  has raised some serious questions about its leadership's (Rahul's) "ability to govern the country".

The BJP spokesperson had also raised the same issues on Wednesday as well asking Gandhi to explain Cambridge Analytica's role in his social media profile. "Will Congress party depend upon data manipulation and theft to win votes?" he had asked.

Cambridge Analytica is in the eye of a fresh data leak controversy, as reports emerged that the firm had access to millions of Facebook users' personal data, which is used to identify the personalities of American voters and influence their behaviour to help US president Donald Trump win elections.

According to reports, the company's CEO Alexander Nix had been in talks with several Opposition parties in India to design an electoral strategy for the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) in the upcoming Lok Sabha Elections.

Another report claimed that the company was in talks with both Congress as well as BJP through its India partner Oveleno Business Intelligence Private Limited. Interestingly, OBI's CEO is Amitesh Tyagi, son of Janata Dal (United) leader KC Tyagi, who has previously worked with individual candidates in the Uttar Pradesh elections in 2017 and with JD(U)-BJP to manage booth-level demographic data. The company, however, denies its involvement in any social media work yet.

Polling for the new state Assembly had taken place in two phases on 9 and 14 December, and the results were declared on 18 December. Though BJP had retained power winning 99 seats in the state Assembly election, Congress had surprised everyone by winning 73 seats in Modi's home state.

But despite neck-to-neck campaigning by senior BJP leaders, including the prime minister and a few pre-poll sops, BJP failed to achieve its target of winning 150 seats in the 183-member Assembly.

Click here for live updates on Cambridge Analytica rowThe Delhi High Court is likely to pronounce on Friday its verdict on the plea of 20 Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) MLAs challenging their disqualification for holding office-of-profit when they were appointed parliamentary secretaries.

New Delh: The Delhi High Court is likely to pronounce on Friday its verdict on the plea of 20 Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) MLAs challenging their disqualification for holding office-of-profit when they were appointed parliamentary secretaries.

A bench of justices Sanjiv Khanna and Chander Shekhar kept its decision pending since 28 February, when it had reserved the judgement after the legislators, Election Commission of India (EC) and other parties had concluded their arguments.

During the arguments, the MLAs had told the court that EC's order disqualifying them for allegedly holding office-of-profit was passed in "complete violation of natural justice" as they were not given an opportunity to explain their stand before the poll panel.

The bench was also requested by the legislators to remand their case back to the poll panel with a direction to hear the matter afresh. They had approached the high court challenging their disqualification after President Ram Nath Kovind gave his assent to the Election Commission's recommendation.

Backing its recommendation to the President for AAP MLAs' disqualification, the poll panel had submitted that the legislators cannot claim that they were not holding office-of-profit. It had also claimed that these MLAs' pleas were not maintainable and were liable to be dismissed.

The MLAs are accused of holding offices of profit, as they were appointed parliamentary secretaries to ministers in the Delhi government in March 2015. This was soon after they were elected to the Delhi Assembly. In September 2016, the Delhi High Court had ruled against their appointment as parliamentary secretaries, after hearing their pleas on a daily basis since 7 February.

The high court had on 24 January refused to stay the Centre's notification disqualifying them, but had restrained the poll panel from taking any "precipitate measures" such as announcing dates for by polls to fill the vacancies.

The Election Commission had on 19 January recommended the disqualification of 20 AAP MLAs - Alka Lamba, Adarsh Shastri, Sanjeev Jha, Rajesh Gupta, Kailash Gahlot, Vijendra Garg, Praveen Kumar, Sharad Kumar, Madan Lal, Shiv Charan Goyal, Sarita Singh, Naresh Yadav, Rajesh Rishi, Anil Kumar, Som Dutt, Avtar Singh, Sukhvir Singh Dala, Manoj Kumar, Nitin Tyagi and Jarnail Singh. The President had accepted the Election Commission's opinion the next day.For two weeks now, people of India have been held at ransom by their elected leaders in Parliament, with almost no work done in the Budget Session.

For two weeks now, the people of India have been held at ransom by their elected leaders in both Houses of Parliament. Whatever the protests or reasons  real and imagined  for not going to work, the fact is that these members (545 in the Lok Sabha and 245 in the Rajya Sabha) flew in for free to attend the session. They also got Rs 2,000 per day during the session for merely signing their names.

If they renege on their duty and refuse to honour their commitment and trivialise governance, then there have to be consequences. After all, if the public sector dares to protest or the private sector puts down its tools, the government sees it as a hostile resistance and an immediate cause and effect comes into play.

People are suspended, sacked, their pay docked because it is seen as detrimental to the commonwealth. What could be more damaging than a representation that willfully refuses to work and makes a joke of the responsibility vested in it, singly and collectively?

They did this in 2016 and now they are doing it again. And they are not even doing it off their own bat. They are taking money from the public for not doing their job. That displays a total lack of propriety. You fly in without spending a rupee, you live free, you have a laundry allowance of Rs 25,000 per month (clearly insufficient to clean the stains on their conscience but arguably more than the earnings of 90 percent of Indians) and you take money every day for disrupting the proceedings.

This is seen as democracy at work. But it can also be seen as dishonest earnings. Would our paymasters not dock our pay if we went on strike or goofed off or even take us off the roster if we failed to produce day after day?

So, perhaps, there is a need for the people to demand a review of the relationship between themselves and the people they elect. First off, the five-year tenure should not be sacrosanct. There should be interim assessments and if the people of a certain constituency are not happy with the incumbent, he should be placed on probation followed by three warnings given in writing and then an expulsion. Why should they be under different rules?

We must find a way out of this mess. We cannot keep accepting the premise that it is fine to play bagatelle with your duty and just enjoy yourself. We shrug and write it off as 'normal for the day's agenda to be 'washed out'. What do you expect, they are politicians after all. In fact, the day work is actually done, this rare moment is enshrined as news.

Unless these 700-odd privileged members are made accountable, things will not change. We have members who are so indifferent they do not even attend the House, only suck up the perks. Perhaps the one initial step would be to hurt them in their pockets.

Block all these financial rights because they have now become wrongs. No salary, no travel allowance, let them fork out cash for an air trip in business class. If Parliament is frozen or disrupted, pay for your stay... no freebies allowed. No subsidised meals, board or lodging. Fend for yourself. See how soon they come to their senses.

On Thursday, they worked for 15 minutes. Thats truly taking the nation to the cleaners.Parliament proceedings were washed out for the 14th consecutive day as both the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha were adjourned in less than 15 minutes of being in session on Thursday

Parliament proceedings were washed out for the 14th consecutive day as both the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha were adjourned in less than 15 minutes of being in session on Thursday. Protests from AIADMK and TDP MPs disrupted both Houses over demand for special status for Andhra Pradesh and formation of Cauvery Management Board.

In all the hullabaloo that ensued, the no-confidence motion noticed moved against the NDA government by the Telugu Desam Party and YSR Congress Party could not be taken up in the Lok Sabha as well.

No-confidence motions not taken up for fifth day

Protests and sloganeering marked the day's proceedings in the Lok Sabha as it began on Thursday. Opposition MPs could be heard chanting "We want justice" in the background, even as Speaker Sumitra Mahajan tried to conduct the day's business. As the protests grew louder, she said, "Nobody wants to listen, nobody wants to run the House."

As soon as the House met, several members rushed near the Speaker's podium raising slogans and showing placards. Mahajan tried to take up the Question Hour but the protests continued.

Barely a minute in, she adjourned the Lok Sabha till 12 pm.

Before the session resumed, TDP MPs were seen demonstrating inside the Parliament premises demanding special category status for Andhra Pradesh.

The Lower House resumed amid chaos as AIADMK and TDP MPs stormed the Well, making it impossible to run the House. Mahajan, however, continued business as usual.

The Speaker granted extension of time to the department-related Parliamentary Standing Committee on Labour for presentation of the Report on "Code on Wages Bill, 2017", as introduced in Lok Sabha, up to the end of Monsoon Session, 2018, according to PRS.

Parliamentary Affairs Minister Ananth Kumar asked the dissenting members to let the House function normally and said the Centre was open to discuss all issues including the no-confidence motions. "I make an appeal to all the MPs that they let the House run. The government is ready for discussion on all issues, be it no-confidence motions or banking related matters," he said.

At this point, Mahajan brought up the issue of the no-confidence notices and said she cannot take up the matter until the House was in order. "I can't see anybody. I need to count heads (to establish a quorum of 50 members)," she said, even as Opposition MPs continued booing, forcing her to adjourn the House till Friday.

Rajya Sabha deadlock continues

The Rajya Sabha was adjourned for the day shortly after the House met on Thursday amid an unending Parliament deadlock on the 14th consecutive day of the second half of the Budget Session.

However, the government managed to pass a key legislation that empowers it to fix the period of maternity leave and the tax-free gratuity amount of employees with an executive order.

The bill was passed by voice vote amid a racket by Opposition parties including the Congress, AIADMK and TDP who were protesting over their various demands.

Soon after the House met, Chairman M Venkaiah Naidu greeted the members and the country on World Water Day and urged all to protect the eco-system and support the conservation of water for the future generations.

Naidu sought the cooperation of the members for the passage of the Payment of Gratuity (Amendment) Bill moved by Labour Minister Santosh Kumar Gangwar. It was passed by the Lok Sabha on 15 March amid a ruckus.

Soon after the bill was passed, members belonging to the AIADMK, the TDP and the Congress gathered near the Chairman's podium and began shouting slogans. Nearly 20 MPs stormed the Well, and refused to go back to their seats.

MoS Parliamentary Affairs Vijay Goel said, "The government wants to discuss everyone's issues. I request we discuss and pass other Bills."

Naidu urged the protesting MPs to return to their seats but they did not relent. Amid the din, he adjourned the House for the day.

The Congress, the Trinamool and some other Opposition members have been protesting against the banking fraud allegedly committed by absconding jeweller Nirav Modi and his associates, while the TDP and the YSR Congress have been demonstrating for special status to Andhra Pradesh.

The AIADMK has been demanding the setting up of a board for the management of the disputed Cauvery river water.

Since the Budget Session resumed on 5 March, both proceedings have been repeatedly disrupted by members, preventing from transacting legislative business in the Houses. Here is a representation of how many hours both Houses spent since the Parliament resumed its Budget Session:



With inputs from IANS87% percent of the candidates contesting the upcoming Rajya Sabha elections are crorepatis with JD(U)'s Mahendra Prasad has the highest assets worth Rs 4,078 crore, says ADR

New Delhi: Eighty-seven percent of the candidates contesting the upcoming Rajya Sabha elections are crorepatis with JD(U)'s Mahendra Prasad has the highest assets worth Rs 4,078 crore, says a release by election watchdog Association of Democratic Reforms (ADR).

The other top candidates with the highest assets are actor-turned politician Jaya Bachchan of Samajwadi Party (over Rs 1,001 crore), BM Farooq of JD (S) (over Rs 766 crore), Abhishek Manu Singhvi of Congress (over 649 crore), CM Ramesh of TDP (over Rs 258 crore), the release said.

Jaya Bachchan, who is contesting from Uttar Pradesh, has a declared liability of over Rs 105.64 crore, while Singhvi has over Rs 98 crore liability, Farooq over Rs 97 crore and Ramesh over Rs 39 crore, it said.

Vemireddy Prabhakar Reddy, who is contesting from Andhra Pradesh, with total declared assets of over Rs 230 crore, has liabilities of over Rs 96 crore, the ADR said.

The election watchdog has analysed the self-sworn affidavits of 63 out of 64 candidates contesting for the Rajya Sabha elections to be held on 23 March for 58 seats in 16 states.

One candidate  Dhiraj Kumar Sahu (INC)  contesting from Jharkhand has not been analysed as his affidavit was badly scanned.

The average assets of 63 candidates analysed was Rs 122.13 crore, the release said, adding 55 candidates or 87 percent were 'crorepatis'.

Among the party-wise crorepati candidates, 26 out of 29 candidates from the BJP, 10 out of 11 candidates from Congress, 3 out of 4 candidates from AITC, 3 candidates from TRS, two candidates from JD(U) and a candidate from Samajwadi Party have declared assets worth more than Rs 1 crore, the release said.

There were 16 or 25 percent candidates with criminal cases, while eight candidates had serious criminal cases against them such as kidnapping, attempt to murder and robbery.

The candidate with the lowest declared total assets is Achyutananda Samananta of BJD who has assets worth Rs 4.96 lakh. Other candidates with low assets are Samir Oraon, V Muraleedharan , Sakaldeep of BJP ( over Rs 18 lakh, Rs 27 lakh and Rs 35 lakh, respectively) and Rajmani Patel of Congress (over Rs 34 lakh), the release said.

As many as 13 candidates have declared total annual income of more than Rs 1 crore in their ITR 2016-17 with Mahendra Prasad showing the self-income of over Rs 303 crore, Singhvi over Rs 130 crore and Farooq over Rs 10 crore.

Jaya Bachchan had declared Rs 13 lakh as her self-income, but her total income amounted to over Rs 78 crore if the income of spouse and dependent were included.

Rajeev Chandrasekhar of the BJP, who is contesting from Karnataka, had a self-income of over Rs 28 crore.

Seven (11 percent) candidates have declared their educational qualification to be between 10th and 12th, while 55 (87 percent) candidates have declared themselves as graduates or above, the release said.

None of the candidates have declared their age below 42 years with 38 (60 percent) candidates under the age group of 42 to 60 years, while 25 (40 percent) candidates declared their age between 61 to 80 years.

Five women candidates are contesting the election to the Upper House, the release added.In this satirical piece, Karnataka chief minister Siddaramaiah finds himself in a fix when one after 37 Hindu communities in the state call him seeking minority status

Karnataka chief minister Siddaramaiah was in the middle of a meeting of officials and ministers in a large room at his residence in Bengaluru that had been recently renamed 'Tipu Nilaya'. The room had a window overlooking a lawn. My source  I call him Deep Throat  crouched on the lawn, peeped into the open window and watched the proceedings.

"I have successfully finished with the first part of my governments two-point agenda as we approach elections," Siddaramaiah was saying. "It goes without saying, but Ill say it anyway, that I am referring to the conversion of Hindu upper caste Lingayats into a brand new, minority religion. Now we shall come to the second part of my agenda, which is the celebration of the birth anniversaries of Muslim rulers. After the recent gala celebration of Tipu's birthday, we now wish to have a good time on the birth anniversaries of 50 other Muslim rulers. They include Babar, Humayun, Aurangzeb, Muhammad bin Tughlaq, Ibrahim Lodi, Hyder Ali and..."

Siddaramaiah paused as he heard a melee outside the door. He picked up the phone and shouted into it with a grimace: "Whats that awful noise there, secretary?"

"A man who calls himself Peddaramaiah demands to be seen immediately, sir," the secretary replied.

"What may he want?"

"He wont reveal, sir. He says quote its a matter of urgent national importance unquote, sir. He says quote I am the chief of Karnataka Kurubara Sene unquote. It's an organisation of Kurubas, sir."

Siddaramaiahs face lit up as if a bulb inside his head had been turned on. "Thats my caste. Let Peddaramaiah in," he said.

Peddaramaiah strutted in, escorted by the secretary. He was a middle-aged, heavy-built man whose face may have looked amiable without his Veerappan-like moustache.

"I demand Kurubas be made a separate minority religion," he said without a preface.

Officials and ministers gaped at the newcomer in amazement.

"But we are Hindus, are we not?" Siddaramaiah asked.

"Yes, but we are different," the visitor said, adding, "Take for example Ramayana. We call it Ramayana. Other Hindus in Karnataka call it Ramayanam. We can always say we are also raving mad about the intellectual tyranny of Brahmins. But never mind all that. Whats important is this: we need to open up educational institutions of our own. You know very well  dont you?  that, thanks to the past Congress governments, no educational institute can successfully and without official interference run in India unless it belongs to minorities. They get away with all the constitutional lollipops. So Kurubas must become a minority. That will even make them vote for you with more enthusiasm."

Right to Education vs Right to Happiness

"Really?" Siddaramaiah asked.

"Really," Peddaramaiah replied. "Right to Education can go to bloody hell. We want Right to Happiness like Muslims and Christians."

"I must look into..." Siddaramaiah said and paused as his secretarys mobile phone rang again. He answered the phone and handed it to the chief minister, saying: "It's Shri HD Deve Gowda, sir."

"I demand my Vokkaliga caste be made a minority religion without the delay of even one minute," Gowda said.

Siddaramaiahs entire face resembled a question mark. "But Vokkaligas are Hindus, are they not?" he queried.

"Yes, but we are different. We believe that when Lord Ram went into his forest exile, Sita walked four inches behind him. Other Hindus say she was five inches behind. For effect, we can always say we are protesting against the intellectual arrogance of Brahmins. But who cares about that? Our communitys engineering and medical colleges are going broke with too much interference from the government. The only way to stop that is to give us the cover of a minority religion. For heavens sake, do it before the election model code of conduct kicks in."

"Let me rig up a suitable expert committee to..." Siddaramaiah said and stopped as he found that Gowda had hung up. The secretarys phone rang again soon afterward.

The officer spoke into it for a minute, and then turning to the chief minister, said: "Its the same song, sir. Now, its the chairman of the All-Karnataka Idiga Sangha. Wants minority status for Idigas. Says they spell Seethaa with two a's at the end and not with one as other Hindus, hates Brahmins and wants to establish minority engineering/medical colleges."

The phone rang 33 times more with leaders of sundry Hindu castes making the same demand for the same reasons. With head lowered into hands, Siddaramaiah sat, scowling like a man about to lose an election. Officials and ministers around the table looked similarly aghast.

A minute later, however, Siddaramaiah looked up, smiling as if he had been struck with a divine epiphany. He said: "Take this order down. Henceforth, all Hindu castes except Brahmins will be considered separate minorities. Only Brahmins will be deemed as majority Hindus. We shall set up an expert committee that will be asked to make this recommendation. Karnataka shall have as many minorities as IT companies. The state will top the chart of GDM (gross domestic minority-ism). Further, we shall find a way to truncate the new Lingayat religion into many pieces. And we shall try to have at least one minority religion in each of the 224 Assembly constituencies. With a majority of the minorities supporting the Congress, the party shall be known as a minority party."

"The Congress," the secretary remarked, "is already a minority party, sir  politically."

Deep Throat said that this remark was drowned in the horrendous noise of standing ovation from the ministers and officials that followed. Siddaramaiah stood up with a triumphant look and was about to conclude the proceedings when the secretarys phone shrilled for the 37th time.

"It's the chief of the All-India Brahmin Mahasabha, sir. He got wind of whats going on. He says if all castes walk away from Hinduism, Brahmins will be reduced to a teeny-weeny minority. So, he wants a minority religion status for Brahmins to..."

Siddaramaiah screeched in agony as if ants were crawling up his legs. "Throw that blighted phone out of the window, before others call and demand separate religions for Brahs and Mins!"

This article is a work of satire. The author wrote a weekly satire column called True Lies in The Times of India from 1996 to 2001. He tweets at @sprasadindiaMedia reports had said Raj Babbar had offered to step down following the party's disastrous performance in by-elections to Gorakhpur and Phulpur, but two days later, the actor-turned-politician dismissed these reports

Uncertainty continues to surround the future of Uttar Pradesh Congress chief Raj Babbar, who had reportedly offered to resign from his post two days ago. Media reports had said that Babbar had offered to step down following the party's disastrous performance in the Gorakhpur and Phulpur by-elections earlier this month, but the party hierarchy was yet to accept his resignation.

However, two days later, the actor-turned-politician dismissed these reports. An article on The Times of India quoted Babbar as saying that he hasn't resigned.

"Changes are bound to happen as a new president has taken over the party. Though I have not resigned, I am open to any role given to me in the new beginning," he said.

Reports of Babbar's alleged resignation as Uttar Pradesh Congress president had emerged after the Rajya Sabha MP had posted a cryptic tweet quoting Hindi poet Kedarnath Singh.

However, Babbar has now clarified that his intention was not to bid farewell to the party post, but he was merely paying homage to the deceased poet.

"My tweet has been misinterpreted. I was paying tributes to deceased poet Kedarnath Singh. The lines I chose to pay homage to him were the most striking lines by him in my opinion. I had clearly mentioned this in the tweet," he was quoted as saying in The Times of India report.

Congress was rocked by the resignation of Goa Congress chief Shantaram Naik earlier this week. Naik put in his papers on Tuesday, saying he was "inspired" by Congress president Rahul Gandhi's speech at the party conclave where the party president said he wanted the younger generation to take the leadership of the party.

At the plenary session on Sunday, Gandhi had promised to break the "walls" in the party between workers and leaders and promised to give more tickets to the youth in the forthcoming elections to defeat BJP.Asheeta Regidi

On Day 20 of the Aadhaar hearings, the Attorney General of India, KK Venugopal, commenced his arguments on behalf of the State. His primary argument was on how the benefits of Aadhaar through providing a right to life with dignity to the poor, outweighed the right to privacy. The right to privacy, he argued, must give way to distributive justice. The Bench, however, stated that political guarantees were meant to advance economic and social rights, and not instead be foregone for their sake. The Attorney General asked for the Court to balance the competing rights.

Tremendous effort went into securing Aadhaar

The first argument of the Attorney General was to address concerns with the security of the Aadhaar system. Tremendous effort, he argued, had gone into the security of this system, with examinations by several committees. Several alternatives including smartcards had been considered and rejected for being unsuitable to the Indian context. Aadhaar, he argued, was thus a serious effort to insulate deserving beneficiaries from the effects of corruption. The World Banks support to Aadhaar via the Identification for Development Report (the ID4D Report) was also cited.

Powerpoint presentation and video on Aadhaar security arrangements offered

To alleviate security concerns, the Attorney General offered to show a PowerPoint presentation by the CEO of the UIDAI on the security of the Aadhaar system, along with a 4-minute video on security arrangements for the CIDR, such as a wall thirteen feet long and five feet wide protecting the servers.

The Court asked for the legal contentions raised by the petitioners to be addressed first. A Word version of the PPT was also asked to be submitted initially. The Court outlined the legal contentions to include issues on privacy, anonymity, dignity, surveillance, aggregation, presumptive criminality, unconstitutional conditions, and absence of a law and security.

Aadhaar enables the right to life for the poor

The Attorney General commenced his arguments on the law by laying down the objectives of the Aadhaar project. He argued that at the time of independence, poverty was 66 percent, which had now been reduced to 27 percent. Intensive corruption, through middlemen and public servants, had led to diversions of public benefits to the tune of Rs 1,000 crores. The Aadhaar Act, he argued, was framed to address these fears.

Further, he argued, the Aadhaar Act was designed to have the least possible violation of privacy. Even before the Act was passed, he argued, enrolment in Aadhaar was voluntary, removing any question of violation of privacy. The right to life, he argued was not just mere animal existence, but the right to live with dignity. Aadhaar, he argued, ensured this.

The right to privacy must give way to distributive justice

The Bench, here, noted the interesting fact that the arguments of both sides were founded on the same rights, right to life and to dignity. The clash between these rights and the right to privacy was pointed to. The Bench then stated that the Attorney Generals argument seemed to be that the right to privacy must give way to distributive justice.

The issue of exclusion via Aadhaar was asserted to as an issue with this argument. To this, the Attorney General stated that no individuals had come forward or complained of exclusion. Complaints, he stated, were mainly by NGOs. The Bench, however, disagreed with this, pointing to the affidavits filed in this case, as well as the petitioners who had appeared before them in person.

Political guarantees must advance economic justice

The Bench, here, asserted that individual rights cannot be made subordinate to distributive justice. Political guarantees, it was argued must advance economic rights, as against foregoing political liberties for the sake of economic and social justice. The Bengal and Maharshatra famine and the crucial role played by the free flow of information in reducing the number of deaths in the latter were cited in this context.

Balancing competing rights

To this, the Attorney General argued that the fundamental right of the poor to live without hunger, it was argued, prevailed over the right to privacy. The Bench, here, stated that the poor had an equal right to privacy. The Attorney General responded by stating the need to balance the two rights.

To further emphasise this, he argued that Aadhaar was an enabler for millions of Indians, their right to food, livelihood and pensions. This, he argued, furthers Article 21 as well as the Directive Principles of State Policy.

Can consent be assumed?

He further argued that since enrolment prior to 2016 was voluntary, there was no question of violation of rights. The Bench, to this, stated that the consent of the people was for acquiring Aadhaar, and not to surrender their data or to commercialisation. Further, they questioned if there could be a waiver or assumption of informed consent.

Support to Aadhaar in the Aadhaar-PAN judgment

The Attorney General then went on to cite various parts of the Aadhaar-PAN judgment, arguing that there, the objectives of Aadhaar had been supported by the Bench. Various statements in support of Aadhaar in the judgment were cited such as that Aadhaar is the best way to achieve deduplication and to deal with issues like fake PANs, black money, and money laundering. The rejection of the Article 14, i.e., the right to equality, challenge to the Aadhaar-PAN linkage was also cited.

Why are pensions under Section 7 of Aadhaar Act?

The Attorney General then proceeded to read out various schemes that were covered under the scope of Section 7 of the Aadhaar Act. Here, the Bench questioned how pension could be included, since the section refers to subsidies, benefits or services, while pension was an entitlement or right of the person. The Attorney General responded that this was since pensions were drawn from the Consolidated Fund of India.

He also pointed to the issue of fake pension cards. The Bench, again, showed concern for the exclusion caused. Problems of non-resident pensioners who are not entitled to acquire Aadhaar, and of pensioners with dementia, whose fingerprints may not work for authentication were cited as examples of this issue. To this, the Attorney General stated that Aadhaar was not a necessity for non-resident pensioners, and mechanisms were established under the Aadhaar Act for people who are unable to authenticate.

Official identification as a basic human right

The Attorney General then argued that poverty was a violation of human rights. The 300 million poor people in India, he argued, deserved the right to live with dignity. Asking the Court again to balance interests, he asked what the choice of such people would be, between a right to life and a right to privacy.

Official identification, he argued, was a means of resolving this. It helps achieve economic development, participation in the electoral process, as well as in the provision of benefits by the government. A unique digital identity, he argued, was thus very important today. The World Banks ID4D report was again quoted in this context, which states in its foreword that official identification is more than a convenience, but a fundamental human right.

Less intrusive method of providing unique identity?

The Bench agreed to this argument on the need for a unique identity. However, they questioned that if a less intrusive method could be found to provide it. When the aim is to achieve identification, they argued, why was there a need for centralisation and aggregation of data. They questioned the centralised storage of data, and further pointed to the risks created by the collection of metadata.

The Attorney General, to this, reasserted that alternatives like smartcards had been considered and found to be unworkable. He further argued that the CIDR does not store data for the purpose of transactions. The Bench, here, pointed to the fact that the CIDR does maintain authentication records, which also poses a risk.

The Attorney General will continue his arguments on behalf of the State on 22 March 2018.

Sources of arguments include live-tweeting of the case by Gautam Bhatia, Prasanna S, and SFLC.in, and Note by the Respondents presented to the Court by the Attorney General.

Read our past coverage of the on-going Aadhaar Supreme court hearing:

Why SC needs to look into technical evidence of Aadhaars surveillance capabilities

Lack of governmental ownership of CIDRs source code can have serious consequences

Will State give citizens rights only if they agree to be tracked forever, asks lawyer Shyam Divan

Coalition for Aadhaar: A collective of private companies wants to ensure that Aadhaar ID and related services continue to be offered

Petitioners argue on centralisation of data and challenge Aadhaars claims on savings

Petitioners argue for a voluntary ID card system that does not collect user data

Petitioners argue that receipt of govt benefits cannot be at the cost of compromising fundamental rights

Aadhaar is architecturally unconstitutional, argue the petitioners

Petitioners argue that Aadhaar violates dignity by objectifying and depersonalizing an individual

Petitioners seek compensation for starvation deaths and extension of March 31st deadline

Section 7 exception in Supreme Courts interim order greatly affects peoples constitutional rights

Entire Aadhaar project is beyond the stated objectives of Aadhaar Act, argue petitioners

Petitioners conclude their arguments on 'the number of the beast' Aadhaar, highlighting various issues

The author is a lawyer and author specializing in technology laws. She is also a certified information privacy professional.tech2 News Staff

Five days after what was revealed to a be a major data breach on social networking giant Facebook, its CEO Mark Zuckerberg finally broke his silence on the topic and appeared in a number of interviews.

The Facebook CEO also published a long status message on his Facebook wall addressing the issue and acknowledging that Facebook had made a mistake. But his response indeed seemed a bit too short and a case of too little too late, especially when the damage done applies to its users at a such a personal level.

While the investigations are still on, and Zuckerberg as admitted to the mess, let's take a look at what our team at tech2 has to say in response to Zuckerberg's letter.

Ankit Vengurlekar:

Dear Mark,

It is good of you to finally address a situation that is a global headline and has wiped off tens of billions of dollars from Facebook's share value. While this may help assuage stakeholders, this response is inexplicably inadequate for your most important stakeholders  Facebook's users, all 2.2 billion of them.

I am frankly surprised at how late this response has been and how little it addresses. There is no apology, even though there is an admittance of oversight.

I cannot believe when Mark says that they took the word from Cambridge Analytica (CA) and some certification to prove that all the wrongly acquired data was deleted. As Channel 4's expose shows, this seems like a network of highly sophisticated spies and folks who know how to game the system. And you're being naive in believing them and asking us, the users to believe you that our data is safe.

CA and their misuse of data blew up because of stellar journalistic work by The Guardian, The New York Times and Channel 4. Not because you came out in the open 3 years ago and admitted to having a data breach. You haven't mentioned the words even once in your response. Why should we believe that any of the hundreds of thousands of apps that have had access to Facebook's user data haven't done what CA did? Are you suggesting you're going to inspect the servers and data backups of thousands of these app developers? How will you access the data dumps exchanging hands in the deep web?

User trust has completely taken a beating and frankly, anybody who uses Facebook now is nothing short of a daredevil. As the largest contributor to your global expansion and growth, I expect that Facebook India should address their user base separately and help them with steps officially to keep their data secure if they still choose to continue using Facebook.

I am extremely disappointed in Mark's response and hope that independent investigations show the real extent of user data breach.

Nimish Sawant:

Mark Zuckerberg finally put out an official statement and followed it up with an interview with CNN and many other media organisations in the US, where the issue was discussed at length. Yes, I felt that the response was late considering the note on which Zuckerberg started 2018  "My personal challenge for 2018 is to focus on fixing these important issues. We won't prevent all mistakes or abuse, but we currently make too many errors enforcing our policies and preventing misuse of our tools," he had said on 4 Jan 2018. And yet, we learn that Facebook was aware of the Cambridge Analytica issue in 2015 and took their assurance that they don't have any Facebook data at face value.

There are still many questions that remain unanswered. How can Facebook ensure that the user data that app developers had access to, is not available on the dark web for sale? What's the guarantee that there are no developers such as Kogan, who sold Facebook data to third parties?

Zuckerberg has announced measures which are logical but seem like they should've taken these steps when they were first intimated of the issue. Doing an audit of Cambridge Analytica and Alexander Kogan now seems pointless and I wonder if that is even possible given the time that has already passed. That dataset has already been abused.

Also, the measures Zuckerberg has announced also challenges a lot of its business models, so I wonder how investors will respond to these. With data regulations such as UK's data protection law and EU's GDPR on their way, I wonder how Facebook will be able to run roughshod over user data, without paying heavy penalties.

Closer home, with general assembly elections coming up next year, political parties have already started bickering about Cambridge Analytica and possibility of data abuse. It's high time that Facebook India team also addresses some of these questions that will be India specific. India is, after all, the largest user base of Facebook.

Sheldon Pinto:

The Cambridge Analytica-Facebook fiasco indeed sounds like the first of many to come and is more of an eye-opener to the general public than to privacy seekers and geeks who have been eyeing the vast amounts of user data being generated on such platforms.

Mark Zuckerberg's apology falls short of the mistakes committed by the social network in terms of dealing with user data and the Channel 4 sting with co-founder Christopher Wylie's inputs shows good enough evidence that Facebook was and (still could be) least bothered about securing user data. What happened was unethical for a brand this big (and this personal) and it makes a lot of sense for everyone to #deletefacebook because trust once lost, is lost forever. When a user opens their Facebook page now he/she will know how much of an influence they are to the whole system of ads and why they are being flooded with them. More importantly, they will now start to reason out why they see what they see on their news feeds.

Facebook can be as transparent as they want to now. But the damage is done and Zuckerberg's apology is a clear case of too little too late as there's nothing that can be done to scavenge or improve what's left of the brand's image in the face of both users and investors.

Lastly, it's easy to say that with Facebook under the scanner, WhatsApp and Instagram will be the next big targets of government scrutiny. While the bigger question still remains as to who else had access to the same data, Facebook will now have its fair share of questions to answer not just from governments and investors but it's users as well.

Rehan Hooda:

Dear Mark,

Thank you for finally responding to one of the most critical discussions about the data privacy and protection of the private data of Facebook users in a long time. Earlier the discussions were present but only limited to a small part of the internet. Thanks to Cambridge Analytica, this topic has has now become mainstream, taking the spotlight of conversations to average Facebook users who would normally not be interested in discussing topics such as privacy or data protection. There may be pockets of users that are still cut off from news and current discussions, but still better late than never.

However, after reading the apology in a number of interviews, the response does not feel anything more than a template response to most of the questions. Even the apology, if I may consider it one, is also just discussion of what we already know, a light 'admission' of mistakes that we suspected for long. The interviews then go into discussions about the mismatch of what you consider important for users and what users really want to happen on the platform. When it comes to taking any proper steps about ensuring that this is not repeated, you divert us by telling us that all the necessary steps were taken back in 2014. The concrete steps about limiting the data that developers can access is just too little, too late. You have not even mentioned any reason why Facebook took so long to react.

What is astonishing is the part where you added that you now understood that users valued privacy more than their data being shared "for a better experience" after almost 15 years of the service being active. It is quite difficult to believe that and to fathom how much data, the company, by its design shared with developers because of an 'idealistic' view of the world. And lastly, instead of giving us excuses and counting the problems, Facebook should focus on coming up with solutions.This can include pushing for more funding in improving Artificial Intelligence or any assistive tools to help the company.The funding and research should not be limited to that and even extend to ideas and plans on how to overhaul the internal structure of Facebook to make user data more private and secure, rather than just talking about it. This is just the beginning and it's imperative that the company takes it through without quoting issues that will understandably come in the way.tech2 News Staff

On the 98th birth anniversary of renowned Japanese geochemist Dr Katsuko Saruhashi, Google Doodle has a young bespectacled Saruhashi in the backdrop of what looks like an ocean. She is known for her groundbreaking research which is known to have helped oceanographers immensely.

According to the Google Doodle, Saruhashi is known for her path-breaking work in chemistry. Her remarkable works include measuring the concentration of carbonic acid in water. This was measured based on its temperature, pH level and chlorinity. This method was named after her and is called the Saruhashi Table. It is used by oceanographers world over.

She is also known for developing a technique to trace the distance radioactive fallouts can traverse across oceans. In 1963, this was useful in bringing restrictions to the practice of oceanic nuclear experimentation.

Her journey in science began in school. During her childhood, when she was in primary school, Saruhashi while observing the raindrops sliding across the window wondered the reason behind raining. The burning curiosity and thirst for knowledge urged her to cover some major milestones, a feat which was quite unheard of among the women scientists of her generation.

In 1957, she became the first woman to earn a doctorate in Chemistry from the University of Tokyo. Later, in 1980 she became the first female scientist to be elected to the Science Council of Japan. Five years later, in 1985 she was coveted with the Miyake Prize in geochemistry, a first among women.

Meanwhile, in 1981, she introduced the Saruhashi Prize which honoured women for their distinguished research in science.

Saruhashi, known for her immense contribution to science, had once said, There are many women who have the ability to become great scientists. I would like to see the day when women can contribute to science and technology on an equal footing with men.

The spread of the Doodle is in India, Australia, Japan, North America, parts of South America, Sweden, Iceland, the UK and Serbia.tech2 News Staff

Almost five days after the Cambridge Analytica controversy that exploded the internet, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg finally issued an official statement on his Facebook profile.

In the meantime, this issue has sparked movements such as the #DeleteFacebook and causing irreversible damage to Facebooks image in the public eye.

In fact, one of the key criticisms that the company is battling is why did the CEO of social media giant take five days to issue a statement. He went on to detail the timeline of the events and the steps that Facebook is taking as a response to the misuse of personal data of its users. However, it does not seem that the statement did much to help the case in favour of Zuckerberg as politicians have demanded Zuckerberg to come and testify in front of Congress.

According to a report by CNN, Zuckerberg has never testified in front of a congressional committee. However, now seems to be the right time where the company may need it more. He clarified in the interview that he is happy to testify if that is the right thing to do. He went on to add that Facebook tries to send the person who is most knowledgeable about the matter and if it is him then he is happy to go.

He clarified and apologised in the interview, This was a major breach of trust, and I'm really sorry that this happened. We have a basic responsibility to protect peoples' data. Facebook apps are the reason for this breach so he added that the company will further restrict developers access to user data along with the safeguard where all the access that the app has is removed if the user has not opened the app in at least three months.

He was unsure of what the company will find in investigating the apps but added, It's hard to know what we'll find, but we are going to review thousands of apps. Though what is worse is that Zuckerberg admitted that Facebook took Cambridge Analytica at face value and did not double check if they had actually removed all the data.

He added, I don't know about you, but I'm used to when people legally certify that they are going to do something, that they do it. But I think this was clearly a mistake in retrospect. We need to make sure we don't make that mistake ever again."

Zuckerberg also added that he will ensure that the company notifies all the affected users if any app is found to be doing sketchy things.

During the course of the interview, Zuckerberg was also asked about other issues that the company has been struggling with since last year, including fake news and Russia trying to meddle with the mid-term elections in the United States. He admitted that the company had not done a good job in tackling Russian interference adding, What's clear is that in 2016 we were not as on top of a number of issues as we should have been, whether it was Russian interference or fake news. The reality here is that this isn't rocket science, I mean there's a lot of hard work that we need to do to make it harder for nation-states like Russia to do election interference, to make it so that trolls and other folks can't spread fake news.

What is interesting is that he admitted that it is likely that Russia may be trying to meddle with the elections with a second version of the scheme by stating, I'm sure someone's trying, right? I'm sure that there's v2, version two, or whatever the Russian effort was in 2016, I'm sure they're working on that."

While talking to Recode, Zuckerberg pointed out that the mistakes are not just surface level things that can be fixed with better decisions. Some of these mistakes while building the entire social platform go as far back as 2007. He added, We let the community down and I feel really bad and Im sorry about that.

The primary mistake that Facebook committed while building Facebook was that they opened the data that the company held, so broadly to third-party developers without any moderation or limits. This mistake multiplied in magnitude with the introduction of Facebook Connect in 2008. In response to the mistake, Zuckerberg said, Frankly, I just think I got that wrong. In the interview, he stated that there was a constant tussle between data portability and privacy where he leaned towards portability for it could create good experiences for users. We feel that it is unbelievable that it took the Facebook CEO close to 15 years to realise that its users valued privacy.

Talking about third-party apps, he added that Facebook has all the request logs and will flag apps with suspicious behaviour, asking the developers to go through a deeper audit. Zuckerberg admitted that the process would take months and could cost many millions of dollars with a basic analysis of the data collected from hundreds of thousands of third-party apps registered with Facebook.

To realise the scale of the audit, he added that Facebook is trying to check if there are enough people in the world that are trained auditors for the number of audits that the social media platform needs to do quickly. The last thing that he added was that he is trying to figure out a way to set policies of Facebook in such a way that they reflect values of the community instead of forcing him to make the decision for the entire user base of Facebook.

While talking to Wired, Zuckerberg spoke about on how the focus of users has changed over the years. He also pointed out that the cause of most of the problems is the disconnect between the real problems that users want the company to be fixed and the things that the company has been concentrating on. He added that Facebook needs to find a better way to deal with the tradeoffs or find a solution around them.

Zuckerberg also revealed additional details about the improvements in AI tools to detect fake accounts while talking to the New York Times. He quoted that Facebook deployed some of these new tools to counter false news last year during the special election in Alabama and a significant number of Macedonian accounts were found spreading false news. The company eliminated those accounts to ensure that false news by state actors is not as rampant.

He added that the company will be increasing its focus on security to ensure that it can tackle any such attempts to interrupt not only the elections in the United States this year but also other elections in India, Brazil and other countries.Reuters

Brazilian prosecutors on Wednesday said they had opened an investigation into whether London-based political consultancy Cambridge Analytica acted illegally in Brazil, as the controversy over the firms data harvesting practices spreads across the globe.

Prosecutors for Brazils Federal District, which includes Brasilia, the capital, said in a written statement that they will look into whether the firm, through its partnership with Sao Paulo-based consulting group A Ponte Estrategia Planejamento e Pesquisa LTDA, illegally used the data of millions of Brazilians to create psychographic profiles.

Calls to CA Ponte, as the partnership is called, were not answered.

Prosecutors from a specialised data unit will look into whether there were security breaches that allowed the firm to illegally access personal data.

Regulators and lawmakers in the United States and Europe have demanded an explanation of how the consulting firm, which worked on US President Donald Trumps election campaign, gained access to data on 50 million Facebook Inc users in order to build voter profiles.

Reports on Monday said that the firm may have improperly gained access to the data, and Cambridge Analytica has since suspended its chief executive Alexander Nix, while Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said his company made mistakes in its handling of user data.

By many measures, Brazil is Facebooks third largest market.Reuters

The US Senate passed legislation on Wednesday aimed at penalising website operators that facilitate online sex trafficking, chipping away at a bedrock legal shield for the technology industry.

The bill passed the House of Representatives last month and was expected to be signed into law as soon as this week by President Donald Trump.

The legislation, which passed the Senate on a 97-2 vote, would make it easier for state prosecutors and sex-trafficking victims to sue social media networks, advertisers and others that failed to keep exploitative material off their platforms.

Law enforcement has lobbied for years for such a law, an effort which resulted in part from a crackdown on backpage.com, the second largest U.S. classified ad service and which is used for sex advertising.

Passage of the bill represented a rare defeat for the internet industry, which despite coming under renewed scrutiny for how companies protect user data or guard against Russian meddling has for years avoided meaningful regulation in Washington.

Silicon Valley long opposed efforts to rewrite the decades-old Communications Decency Act, which protects companies from liability for content posted by their users and has long been credited for helping Silicon Valleys rapid growth over the past 20 years.

But supporters of the bill said that part of the law, known as Section 230, has been too broadly used to protect websites like backpage.com.

The Supreme Court in January 2017 refused to consider reviving a lawsuit against backpage.com that was filed by three young women who claimed that the website facilitated their forced prostitution, letting stand a lower court ruling because of the protection afforded by the Communications Decency Act.

Todays vote is a victory for trafficking survivors and a victory for our efforts to help stop the selling of women and children online, said Republican Senator Rob Portman, an original sponsor of the bill, the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act.

Facebook Inc and other technology companies and influence groups largely withdrew opposition to the measure in recent months after negotiating some changes that narrowed its potential impact.

Erin Egan, Facebooks vice president of U.S. policy, applauded the bills passage, saying in a statement that it would help make the internet safer for vulnerable children, women, and all trafficking targets.

Under the bill, victims would be required to show that a website knowingly facilitated sex trafficking in order to file a successful lawsuit. Senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat, and Senator Rand Paul, a Republican, cast the only votes against the bill.

Wyden said the bill would lead to an onslaught of lawsuits against small websites that lack the resources to closely police user-generated content or defend themselves in court, and said it would actually benefit large internet companies.

People following this debate might ask why some of the biggest internet companies like Facebook support it, Wyden said. Its because it will pull up the ladder in the tech world, leaving the established giants alone at the top.Reuters

French media giant Vivendi is selling its stake in Ubisoft for 2 billion euros ($2.45 billion) to investors including Chinese tech titan Tencent, ending a potential takeover battle for the French video games maker.

Billionaire Vincent Bollores Vivendi, which had been raising its holding in Ubisoft, has agreed to sell its 27.3 percent stake in the company, best known for its Assassins Creed and South Park games.

Tencent Holdings Ltd, which dominates Chinas mobile gaming market, is investing almost 370 million euros for a 5 percent stake, while the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan is spending 250 million euros for a 3.4 percent stake.

Ubisoft and Tencent will also form a strategic partnership to boost Ubisofts reach into China, the worlds largest video game market with estimated sales of $32.5 billion last year, according to data from gaming consultancy Newzoo.

The move represents a strategic setback for Bollore and Vivendi, which has pledged to make video gaming one of its key pillars along with advertising, music and pay-TV. As part of the deal Vivendi has committed to not acquire any further shares in Ubisoft for five years.

Vivendis stake-building since 2015 had prompted Ubisofts founding Guillemot family to court Canadian investors to fend off any hostile takeover.

After the sale Vivendi will remain active in video gaming through its acquisition of mobile game maker Gameloft, which was also founded by a Guillemot brother but is much smaller than Ubisoft, the French leader in this market.

Along with the investments from Tencent and Ontario Teachers, the deal also includes a share buy-back by Ubisoft that adds up to an 8.1 percent stake, as well as a share purchase by Guillemot Brothers SE and an accelerated book building with institutional investors.

Ubisoft said Vivendi had approached it several weeks ago about its intention eventually to sell its stake. Ubisoft started tapping up potential investors at that stage.

Tencent, Asias biggest listed firm with a market value of around $540 billion, is investing heavily to expand its gaming empire at home and abroad. It launched some of its top games overseas last year, and last month invested 3 billion yuan ($474.73 million) in Chinese peer Shanda Games.

The firm, which stretches from social media to online payment, announced a strong fourth-quarter profit on Wednesday but said mobile gaming revenue growth had slowed.tech2 News Staff

Chinese smartphone manufacturer Vivo has finally launched its brand-new Vivo V9 smartphone in the Philippines. The company on 19 March launched the Vivo X21, which is the more powerful version of the Vivo V9. The Vivo V9 will be launched on 23 March in India after the company preponed the event from the earlier 27 March launch date.

As reported earlier the smartphone comes with an iPhone X-like notch at the top of the display and 16 MP+5 MP dual-camera setup aligned vertically on the rear side of the device. It has a 24 MP selfie camera that comes with features like AI Face Beauty Natural Light, Studio Light, and Monochrome background which the Vivo claims makes selfie photography a better experience on its smartphone. Another feature that uses AI and the front camera is face unlock allows the users to unlock the smartphone by simply looking at their smartphone.

The Vivo V9 features a 6.3-inch FHD+ display and is powered by a 3,260 mAh battery. The smartphone comes with Micro-USB port for charging and runs on Snapdragon 626 SoC with its CPU clocked at 2.2 GHz. It packs 4 GB of RAM and 64 GB of internal storage. The internal storage can be expanded using an external microSD card. The smartphone will come with Android 8.1 Oreo and has been launched in gold and black variants for the Philippines.

GizmoChina reports that the selfie-smartphone will be launched in countries where the company has launched the previous versions of the V series of smartphones, so it's clear that India falls on that list.

Vivo X21 and X21 UD were unveiled in China on 20 March. The X21 UD variant comes with under-display fingerprint scanner, the X21 has fingerprint placed on the back of the smartphone. Vivo is the first smartphone brand to bring the under-display fingerprint scanner feature to the market. The Vivo X21 starts from CNY 2,898 (approx Rs 29,000), while the X21 UD is priced at CNY 3,598 (approx Rs 36,000) in China. Vivo X21 comes with 3 GB RAM/64 GB storage and 6 GB RAM/128 GB storage variant, while the X21 UD only comes with 6 GB RAM/128 GB option. There are no details on weather the premium smartphone will be launched in India.

Vivo India recently appointed Amir Khan as its ambassador replacing Ranveer Singh in India.Catalonia's parliament is to hold a debate and vote on Thursday on a new candidate for regional president, Jordi Turull, who risks being disqualified from holding office over his role in the region's separatist drive.

Barcelona: Catalonia's parliament is to hold a debate and vote on Thursday on a new candidate for regional president, Jordi Turull, who risks being disqualified from holding office over his role in the region's separatist drive.

"I will propose to the chamber that Jordi Turull be candidate for president," Catalan parliament speaker Roger Torrent told reporters late on Wednesday, just hours after Turull was summoned to appear in court on Thursday.

Turull, a former Catalan government spokesman, is under investigation over Catalonia's secession drive but remains free under bail.

He was third on ousted Catalan president Carles Puigdemont's "Together for Catalonia" list in December elections which saw separatist parties retain their absolute majority.

A Supreme Court judge has summoned Turull and other Catalan separatist leaders under probe on Thursday to tell them exactly what they are charged with.

According to a court document seen on Wednesday by AFP, the judge will also decide whether or not to remand Turull and the others in custody.

Puigdemont, who was sacked by Madrid after Catalan lawmakers declared independence last October. He left for Belgium, where he now lives in self-exile, and was the separatist party's first candidate to lead the region again.

But he faces arrest if he returns to Spain, and he eventually dropped his bid after Spain's Constitutional Court ruled he could not be appointed remotely.

The separatist party's second choice, Jordi Sanchez, a separatist civic leader in jail over his alleged role in Catalonia's secession drive, has also dropped his bid to lead the region, Torrent said earlier on Wednesday.Nicolas Sarkozy was handed preliminary charges over allegations he accepted millions of euros in illegal campaign funding from the late Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.

Paris: Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy was handed preliminary charges on Wednesday over allegations he accepted millions of euros in illegal campaign funding from the late Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.

A judicial official told AP that investigative judges overseeing the probe gave the ex-president charges of illegally funding his 2007 winning campaign, passive corruption and receiving money from Libyan embezzlement. The person was not authorised to speak publicly about the case.

The charges came after Sarkozy was detained for two days of questioning by anti-corruption police at a station in Nanterre, northwest of the French capital.

Sarkozy, 63, who was France's president from 2007-12, has repeatedly and vehemently denied any wrongdoing. An investigation involving funding for his winning 2007 presidential campaign first was launched in 2013. Investigators are examining claims that Gaddafi's regime secretly gave the politician 50 million euros overall for his campaign.

The sum would be more than double the legal campaign funding limit at the time  21 million euros. In addition, the alleged payments would violate French rules against foreign financing and requiring that the source of campaign funds be declared. His lawyer, Thierry Herzog, did not respond to requests for comment.

Sarkozy's former top aide, the ex-minister Brice Hortefeux, was also questioned Tuesday, but not detained. He said on Twitter that the details he gave investigators "should help put an end to a series of mistakes and lies."

The investigation got a boost when French-Lebanese businessman Ziad Takieddine told the online investigative site Mediapart in 2016 that he delivered suitcases from Libya containing 5 million euros ($6.2 million) in cash to Sarkozy and his former chief of staff, Claude Gueant.

Takieddine repeated his allegations during a live interview with France's BFM TV on Wednesday night.

He claimed he personally handed a suitcase containing 2 million euros (about $2.5 million) in cash to Sarkozy at the then-candidate's apartment and another suitcase with 1.5 million euros (about $1.9 million) to Sarkozy and a close aide at the French Interior Ministry. Sarkozy was interior minister at the time.

Takieddine alleged he gave a third suitcase with 1.5 million euros in cash to the aide alone. He said the money was not meant to finance Sarkozy's presidential campaign in 2007, but to honour contracts between France and Libya.Since January this year, London has seen double the number of fatal shootings and knife attacks compared with the same period last year.

London: A 48-year-old Indian-origin man has been killed in a knife attack in the city's Southall suburb, police said on Wednesday, amidst a rise in street crimes in the British capital .

Scotland Yard has identified the victim as Balbir Johal, a logistics planner and a resident of Slough, who was attacked on Monday but he succumbed to injuries in a hospital a short while later.

Detectives from the Metropolitan Police Homicide and Major Crime Command launched a murder investigation and have charged two people.

Hassan Mohammed, 23, and Yassin Yussuf, 21, appeared before the Ealing Magistrates Court charged with murder.

"Next of kin have been informed. While formal identification awaits, the deceased can be named as Balbir Johal from Slough. A post-mortem examination is scheduled to take place, a Met Police statement said.

A 32-year-old man, arrested as part of the manhunt, has been released under investigation.

The attack on Johal marks a spike in violent attacks on the streets of the city. Since 14 March, five people have been stabbed to death, one victim stabbed and shot, and another fatally shot. All the victims are men and half of them are aged 23 or younger.

Since January this year, London has seen double the number of fatal shootings and stabbings compared with the same period last year.

Official figures reveal that a total of 26 people have been fatally stabbed or shot since the start of 2018.

Earlier this week, Mayor of London Sadiq Khan outlined a pledge of 1.4 million pounds for anti-knife crime projects for the city.

He announced nine community and anti-knife initiatives across London which will receive a share from the money to help prevent people getting involved with violence and to beat the scourge of knife crime.

"Knife crime is rising across the UK, not just here in London  this is a national problem that requires national solutions. Londoners need the governments help if we are to beat it,"The United Nations has strongly condemned the deadly attack near a university in Afghanistan's capital Kabul that killed at least 33 people and injured 65 others

United Nations: The United Nations has strongly condemned the deadly attack near a university in Afghanistan's capital Kabul that killed at least 33 people and injured 65 others as Afghans gathered to celebrate the Persian new year Nowruz.

The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) has underscored the need to hold perpetrators and financiers of these "reprehensible" acts accountable, a day after the Islamic State-claimed attack targeted "a gathering of Shiites celebrating Nowruz."

In a statement attributable to his spokesperson, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres offered his condolences to the families of the victims and wished a speedy recovery to those injured.

"Nowruz is a time of renewal and celebration, and should be a time for promoting the values of peace and solidarity," he said, reiterating that those organised the attack "must be brought to justice."

The UN chief also expressed his solidarity with the government and the people of Afghanistan in the aftermath of the violence.

In a separate statement, Tadamichi Yamamoto, the head of the UN Mission, echoed the secretary-general's condemnation.

"I reiterate that under no circumstances are such attacks justifiable, and I once again call on all parties to uphold their obligations under international humanitarian law, at all times."

In a press statement on the terrorist attack, members of the 15-nation Security Council condemned in the strongest terms the "heinous and cowardly" terrorist attack.

"The members of the Security Council reaffirmed that terrorism in all its forms and manifestations constitutes one of the most serious threats to international peace and security," the press statement said.

The Council underlined the need to hold perpetrators, organisers, financiers and sponsors of the reprehensible acts of terrorism accountable and bring them to justice. The Council urged all nations to cooperate actively with the Afghan government and all other relevant authorities in this regard.

"The members of the Security Council reiterated that any acts of terrorism are criminal and unjustifiable, regardless of their motivation, wherever, whenever and by whomsoever committed," the statement said.

Both the Taliban and Islamic State carry out attacks in Kabul.

The Taliban controls large swathes of Afghanistan and Islamic State terrorists hold sway in a much smaller number of districts.Maldivian authorities have charged former strongman Maumoon Abdul Gayoom and several senior judges with 'terrorism' for attempting to topple President Abdulla Yameen, the government said on Wednesday

Colombo: Maldivian authorities have charged former strongman Maumoon Abdul Gayoom and several senior judges with "terrorism" for attempting to topple President Abdulla Yameen, the government said on Wednesday.

Eighty-year-old Gayoom and ten others, including the sacked chief justice Abdulla Saeed, were charged under State of Emergency laws imposed in the paradise tourist island last month.

Gayoom has been held since 5 February as a State of Emergency was declared by Yameen, deepening the political crisis in the Indian Ocean archipelago.

The country's criminal court, on Wednesday, ordered Gayoom be remanded in custody until the conclusion of his trial, although it was not immediately clear when the case would commence.

Yameen had resorted to Emergency laws to prevent himself from being impeached by the national Parliament after he lost his majority following a Supreme Court ruling on 1 February.

The State of Emergency is due to lapse on Thursday unless Yameen extends it further.

The Prosecutor General's office said on Wednesday that Gayoom, who ruled the country for 30 years until 2008, had been charged with attempting an "act of terrorism and obstruction of justice".

Gayoom's legislator son Faris Maumoon and son-in-law were also charged, along with another judge.

The 11 charged are accused of trying to topple Yameen who came to power following a controversial election run-off in November 2013, when he narrowly defeated former president Mohamed Nasheed.

Yameen's Emergency move curtailed the powers of the judiciary and the legislature, after the country's Supreme Court ruled to quash criminal convictions against high profile opposition politicians.

The ruling would have allowed Nasheedwho lives in exile in London to return to the archipelago and challenge Yameen for the presidency later this year.

Yameen refused to carry out the court order and instead arrested the chief justice and another Supreme Court judge.

The remaining judges revoked the earlier decision to reinstate the MPs, who had been sacked for defecting to the opposition, while Yameen also stripped Parliament of its power to impeach him.

He has resisted international calls to end the State of Emergency, release all political prisoners and restore the rule of law.

The crackdown has dented the nation's image as a popular tourist destination, which remains vital to its economy.Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy was charged on Wednesday over allegations that he received millions of euros towards his 2007 election campaign from the late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi.

Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy was charged on Wednesday over allegations that he received millions of euros towards his 2007 election campaign from the late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi.

Sarkozy has already been charged in two other cases. Here is a summary of the various scandals involving the ex-president directly, or people close to him:

2007 Libya funding:

Since 2013, investigating magistrates have been examining allegations that Gaddafi's regime helped finance Sarkozy's successful 2007 presidential campaign. The first claims were made by the Libyan dictator's son Seif al-Islam in 2011 who said the French Right-winger should "give back the money he took from Libya to finance his electoral campaign".

A year later, the investigative website Mediapart published a document allegedly signed by a Libyan intelligence chief saying that Gaddafi had agreed to support Sarkozy with up to 50 million euros.

Since then, former Libyan spy boss Abdullah al-Senussi, a lawyer to a former prime minister, one of Gaddafi's cousins and a former interpreter have all made allegations about illicit financing.

Documents belonging to former Libyan oil minister Shukri Ghanem, which refer to three payments in 2007, as well as a taped interview with a businessman who claimed he delivered suitcases stuffed with cash for Sarkozy, have added to evidence against the former president.

Sarkozy has denied all allegations, portraying them as the work of angry members of the former Libyan regime that he helped depose via a NATO-led offensive in 2011.

Among other leads, investigators have probed a 500,000-euro payment from overseas made to Sarkozy's close aide Claude Gueant in 2008, as well as the sale of a luxury villa for an inflated price in the south of France to a Libyan investor.

The Bettencourt affair:

This also relates to allegations that Sarkozy's then UMP party accepted illicit payments for the 2007 campaign, this time from L'Oreal heiress Liliane Bettencourt in the form of cash-filled envelopes.

After a lengthy investigation which he claimed was politically motivated, Sarkozy was personally cleared last year of taking advantage of the elderly woman while she was too frail to understand what she was doing. But his campaign treasurer is one of 10 people awaiting trial in the case.

2012 election funding:

Sarkozy has been charged over the illegal funding of his failed 2012 reelection bid, which featured huge US-style stadium rallies. His campaign overshot strict French campaign spending limits by more than 10 million euros through a system of fake invoices which were fraudulently passed off as party expenses.

Sarkozy has denied any knowledge of the alleged fraud. In February 2017, a judge ordered that the case be brought to trial. Sarkozy and 13 other co-accused have appealed the decision to send the case to trial.

Influence peddling:

Sarkozy has been charged with corruption and influence peddling over an alleged attempt by his lawyer to get information from a judge who was investigating him.

In recordings from a phone that had been secretly tapped, the lawyer discusses the possibility of giving a magistrate from a top appeals court, Gilbert Azibert, a juicy job in Monaco in return for information on the Bettencourt investigation.

Sarkozy has argued that the job never materialised, meaning he is not guilty of anything, but investigators believe the deal fell through because the former president and his lawyer learned their phones were being tapped.

The Karachi affair:

The long-running investigation involves two former Sarkozy aides who have been charged by judges probing alleged kickbacks on a Pakistani arms deal concluded when Sarkozy was budget minister.

A shell company was allegedly used to channel kickbacks to then prime minister Edouard Balladur's unsuccessful 1995 presidential bid, which Sarkozy helped run. Sarkozy has been interviewed as a witness, not a suspect, while Balladur faces corruption charges.

Magistrates are also probing whether a 2002 Karachi bombing that killed 11 French engineers was revenge for the cancellation of bribes secretly promised to Pakistani officials.

Tapie payout:

Six people have been charged over a controversial 400 million euro payout by the French state to tycoon Bernard Tapie in 2008. Judges investigated whether the former Adidas owner received favourable treatment in the case as a reward for supporting Sarkozy in the 2007 election.

The case ensnared IMF chief Christine Lagarde, who was found guilty of "negligence" in 2016 for authorising the Tapie payout when she was finance minister, through a private arbitration panel, instead of a court. Sarkozy has not been targeted personally.

Polls cronyism:

Investigators have charged three former presidential aides for benefiting from contracts for opinion polling carried out during Sarkozy's 2007-12 term as president. The probe was triggered by anti-graft organisation Anticor, which says the contracts were handed to political cronies without any tender process and public funds were used to carry out political party electoral research.

Sarkozy benefited from legal immunity in the case. The investigation concluded in May 2017.Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy blasted what he said was a lack of evidence for the corruption charges against him over allegations that late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi funded his 2007 election campaign, in his court statement published on Thursday

Paris: Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy blasted what he said was a lack of evidence for the corruption charges against him over allegations that late Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi funded his 2007 election campaign, in his court statement published on Thursday.

The morning after he was charged in one of France's most explosive political scandals in years, the 63-year-old rightwinger said he had been in "living hell" since the allegations first emerged in 2011.

Demanding that he be treated as a witness rather than a suspect, he urged magistrates to consider "the violence of the injustice" if it was proven, as he claims, that the accusations are a "manipulation by the dictator Gaddafi or his gang".

"In the 24 hours of my detention, I have tried with all my might to show that the serious corroborating evidence required to charge someone did not exist," Sarkozy said in his statement.

"I stand accused without any tangible evidence through comments made by Mr Gaddafi, his son, his nephew, his cousin, his spokesman, his former prime minister," he added.

Judges decided they had enough evidence to charge the combative one-term president on Wednesday after five years of investigation and two days of questioning in police custody.

Sarkozy, who served from 2007-2012, was charged with corruption, illegal campaign financing and concealment of Libyan public money.

"I've been living the hell of this slander since 11 March, 2011" when Gaddafi first made the allegations, Sarkozy said.

Sarkozy lashed out at Franco-Lebanese businessman Ziad Takieddine who claims to have delivered three cash-stuffed suitcases from Gaddafi in 2006 and 2007, when Sarkozy was preparing his first run for president.

Takieddine, who claimed he provided 1.5 to 2 million euros ($2.5 million) in 200-euro and 500-euro notes, has "highly suspect characteristics and a questionable past", Sarkozy retorted.The White House, which has suffered frequent leaks  at times of notable severity  said in a statement it would be a 'fireable offense and likely illegal' to leak Trump's briefing papers to the press, after word emerged that the president had been warned in briefing materials not to congratulate the Russian president on his re-election.

The tempest over President Donald Trump's congratulatory phone call to Vladimir Putin quickly grew on Wednesday into an uproar over White House leaks, sparking an internal investigation and speculation over who might be the next person Trump forces out of the West Wing.

The White House, which has suffered frequent leaks  at times of notable severity  said in a statement it would be a "fireable offense and likely illegal" to leak Trump's briefing papers to the press, after word emerged that the president had been warned in briefing materials not to congratulate the Russian president on his re-election.

Trump did so anyway, and on Wednesday he defended the call, saying George W. Bush did not have the "smarts" to work with Putin, and that Barack Obama and his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton "didn't have the energy or chemistry" with the Russian leader.

Aides had included guidance in Trump's talking points for the call to Putin stating: "DO NOT CONGRATULATE," a senior administration official said Wednesday, speaking to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because the official had not been authorized to discuss internal matters.

The document had been accessible only to a select group of staffers, two officials said, and had been drafted by aides to National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster. They also said there now is an internal probe of the leak but provided no other details. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive internal deliberations. The White House is not formally acknowledging the veracity of the presidential guidance first reported by The Washington Post.

Trump defended his decision to congratulate Putin in his Wednesday tweets, saying Obama did the same in 2012.

"Getting along with Russia (and others) is a good thing, not a bad thing," Trump said, adding that Russia can "help solve problems" from North Korea to "the coming Arms Race."

The White House statement earlier Wednesday about a possible firing was an unusual threat and an indication of the seriousness with which the administration is treating the latest breach. Trump and Chief of Staff John Kelly are both angry over the disclosure, officials said, especially because of the small circle of distribution.

Trump has told confidants that be believes the leak was meant to embarrass and undermine him, said White House officials and outside advisers familiar with the president's thinking but not authorized to publicly discuss private conversations.

The president has suggested it was done by "the deep state," they said. That's the catchall phrase for career officials and the Washington establishment who, Trump believes, have tried to protect their own grasp on power by sabotaging him.

Trump has insisted that maintaining a strong personal relationship with Putin is the United States' best chance of improving ties with Russia and has signaled to allies that he trusts his own instincts in dealing with the Russian president.

Other leaks of classified material  including partial transcripts of Trump's calls with foreign leaders  have not garnered specific warnings of termination or criminal action. It was not clear whether this week's document was classified, but it was included with other classified papers.

It also was unclear whether Trump, who prefers oral briefings, had read the talking points prepared by his national security team before Tuesday's call. McMaster briefed the president by phone before the conversation while Trump was in the White House residence.

The leak further cast doubt on McMaster's longevity in the top foreign policy post. Trump has been moving toward replacing McMaster on the advice of Kelly and Secretary of Defense James Mattis, but has not settled on timing or a successor.

Trump's call of congratulations to Putin drew bruising criticism from members of his own party even before the revelation that he was advised against it.

"An American president does not lead the free world by congratulating dictators on winning sham elections," said Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee and has pressed the Trump administration to respond aggressively to Russia's interference in the U.S. presidential election.

Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, told CNN, "I wouldn't have a conversation with a criminal."

The call was the latest indicator of Trump's personal reluctance to publicly criticize Putin. The White House said Trump did not raise Russia's meddling in the U.S. elections or its suspected involvement in the recent poisoning of a former spy in Britain in the call with Putin. Trump did discuss the attack against Sergei Skripal Wednesday in a call with French President Emmanuel Macron.

Trump also said he and Putin might meet "in the not too distant future" to discuss the arms race and other matters.

He said that during their hoped-for meeting the two men would likely discuss Ukraine, Syria and North Korea.

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders defended Trump's call, noting Obama's similar call and saying, "We don't get to dictate how other countries operate."

Florida Sen. Marco Rubio called the leak a "bigger outrage" than Trump's congratulations for Putin. He said on Twitter that "this ongoing pattern of duplicity holds potential for serious damage to the nation."

Russia has received global condemnation after Britain blamed Moscow for the recent nerve agent attack that sickened Sergei Skripal and his daughter. Russia has denied the accusation.

Trump's call came at a period of heightened tension after the White House imposed sanctions on Russia for its interference in the 2016 U.S. election and other "malicious cyberattacks." Sanders insisted that the administration has scolded Putin at the appropriate times.Farmers, electronics retailers and other U.S. businesses are bracing for a backlash as President Donald Trump targets China for stealing American technology or pressuring U.S. companies to hand it over.

Washington: Farmers, electronics retailers and other US businesses are bracing for a backlash as President Donald Trump targets China for stealing American technology or pressuring US companies to hand it over.

The administration is expected on Thursday to slap trade sanctions on China, perhaps including restrictions on Chinese investment and tariffs on as much as $60 billion worth of Chinese products.

Dozens of industry groups sent a letter last weekend to Trump warning that "the imposition of sweeping tariffs would trigger a chain reaction of negative consequences for the US economy, provoking retaliation; stifling US agriculture, goods, and services exports; and raising costs for businesses and consumers."

The announcement will mark the end of a seven-month US investigation into the hardball tactics China has used to challenge US supremacy in technology, including dispatching hackers to steal commercial secrets and demanding that US companies hand over trade secrets in exchange for access to the Chinese market. The administration argues that years of negotiations with China have failed to produce results.

"It could be a watershed moment," said Stephen Ezell, vice-president of global innovation policy at the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, a think tank. "The Trump administration's decision to go down this path is illustrative that previous strategies have not borne the hoped-for fruit."

Business groups mostly agree that something needs to be done about China's aggressive push in technology  but they worry that China will retaliate by targeting US exports of aircraft, soybeans and other products and start a tit-for-tat trade war of escalating sanctions between the world's two biggest economies.

"The sanctions are a very big deal," says Mary Lovely, a Syracuse University economist and senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. "The Chinese see them as a major threat and do not want a costly trade war."

The move against China comes just as the United States prepares to impose tariffs of 25 percent on imported steel and 10 percent on aluminum  sanctions that are meant to hit China for flooding the world with cheap steel and aluminum but will likely fall hardest on US allies like South Korea and Brazil because they ship more of the metals to the United States.

Trump campaigned on promises to bring down America's massive trade deficit  $566 billion last year  by rewriting trade agreements and cracking down on what he called abusive commercial practices by US trading partners. But, he was slow to turn rhetoric to action. In January, he imposed tariffs on imported solar panels and washing machines. Then, he unveiled the steel and aluminum tariffs, saying reliance on imported metals jeopardizes US national security.

To target China, Trump has dusted off a Cold War weapon for trade disputes: Section 301 of the US Trade Act of 1974, which lets the president unilaterally impose tariffs. It was meant for a world in which large swaths of global commerce were not covered by trade agreements. With the arrival in 1995 of the World Trade Organization, which polices global trade, Section 301 fell largely into disuse.

At first it looked like Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping were going to get along fine. They enjoyed an amiable summit nearly a year ago at Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. But America's longstanding complaints about Chinese economic practices continued to simmer, and it became more and more apparent that the US investigation into China technology policies was going to end in trade sanctions.

Chinese Premier Li Keqiang this week urged Washington to act "rationally" and promised to open China up to more foreign products and investment. "China has been trying to cool things down for weeks. They have offered concessions," Lovely says. "Nothing seems to cool the fire. I fear they will take a hard line now that their efforts have been rebuffed... China cannot appear subservient to the US."Cant an old gangster just die in peace?Brooklyn federal prosecutors have an answer: Not a chance.Theres a brewing courtroom clash over the last days of a reputed Luchese soldier, the Daily News has learned.Frank "Frankie Pearl" Federico, 90 and ailing, wants to end his supervised release early so he can die in Italy among family and friends.But prosecutors have no interest in letting the Bronx nonagenarian live out la dolce vita in the country where he was born.Now the dispute is up to a judge who once called Federico a cold-blooded murderer and hoped hed never leave a prison cell.Federicos convictions stem from 70s and 80s, when the Luchese crime family controlled much of Long Islands garbage carting business, prosecutors said.The wiseguy-controlled haulers colluded to charge high prices for their services. But in 1980, carting business owners Jerome Kubecka and his son, Robert, were done with the mobbed-up monopoly game. They, and Roberts brother-in-law, Donald Barstow, put in lower, competitive bids.That unleashed the so-called garbage wars meant to force the Kubeckas to go along  or get out.The Kubeckas began cooperating with the authorities, who launched criminal and civil cases to clean up the industry.In August 1989, Robert Kubecka, 40, and Barstow, 35, were shot in the Kubeckas Suffolk County office. Kubecka was heard gasping on his 16-minute 911 call, slipping out of consciousness, as he tried describing his killer. A day earlier, Kubecka got a telephone call vowing, Youre going to get killed.Investigators found three blood types at the scene and served Federico with a 1992 grand jury subpoena to give blood and hair samples, court papers said.Federico went on the lam  to Italy  for about 10 years before his 2003 bust at a Bronx doughnut shop. His blood and DNA samples matched the crime scene, according to court papers.Just ahead of trial, Federico pleaded guilty in exchange for a 15-year prison term.Since his 2016 release, Federicos had no scrapes or new cases, according to his lawyer Murray Richman. Federico lives alone and has congestive heart failure, artery failure, high blood pressure and hip problems.Hes got it all, Richman told The News.But prosecutors said earlier this month that Federicos poor health didnt count as a changed circumstance. He shouldnt get special treatment for staying out of trouble on supervised release, because thats what hes supposed to do, they said.They stressed Federico was in supervised release because of his extraordinarily serious crime of murdering two cooperators.Early termination of the defendants term of supervised release for such a serious crime is not in the interest of justice, prosecutors wrote.Richman said Federico is absolutely remorseful and recognizes the horror and terror of his case.The man is literally on deaths door, Richman said. Is it our intent to continue with our vindictiveness, to cross the threshold of life itself to continue the punishment?Brooklyn federal prosecutors have been at odds with oldfellas before.In 2016, they successfully fought against the compassionate release of John "Sonny" Franzese, a former Colombo underboss looking to leave prison ahead of his term.Franzese was released from prison last June at age 100 after doing all his time.http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/mobster-die-italy-da-fights-locked-article-1.3882981.                  ,       ,   EU Observer.        ,    []             ,  ,            ...Working from home? Switch to the DIGITAL edition of CLICK HERE to signup now!Dolby Laboratories today announced a strategic intellectual property partnership with OPPO. The partnership will result in OPPO collaborating with Dolby on High-Efficiency Advanced Audio Coding (HE-AAC), JPEG-HDR and other audio and video technologies.

High-Efficiency Advanced Audio Coding (HE-AAC) is an international standard for audio encoding by Dolby Laboratories that is currently being used by hundreds of companies around the world. JPEG-HDR is part of the static image encoding standard whilst also storing data in a highly dynamic range of more than 8 bits so users can sample the entire range during post-processing.

OPPO also said that 2018 marks the 10th anniversary of the OPPO smartphones. The company at the start of 2018 has officially entered the Japanese market and has mentioned that it is working on entering into Europe market very soon. Dolby Labs said its agreement to share its IP-based audio-visual technology with OPPO.

Commenting on the partnership, Andy Sherman, Executive Vice President, General Counsel & Corporate Secretary, Dolby Laboratories said:

OPPO, a leader in global consumer electronics, is well-known for its smartphones incorporating innovative technologies, and we are delighted to welcome them to our community of global partners.

Adler Feng, Director of OPPO IP Department, said:Why I oppose Bay Harbour Marina Village

To the Editor:

I am voicing my strong opposition to the Proposed Bay Harbour Marina Village Land Use Change CPA2017-00005 DRMUVD. As a local resident who has lived on San Carlos Island for over 50 years, and business owner who has multiple businesses which operate on this island, I request that the county DENY the Proposed Bay Harbour Marina Village Land Use Change Request.

My reasoning comes from the recommendation to deny the project as stated by the Lee County Hearing Examiner, Laura Belflower, during her examination of the projects rezoning application from 2016. My reasoning agrees with her points of opposition, which are as follows:

1. The Requests density is not consistent with the Lee Plan.

2. The Request is incompatible with and negatively affects the character of the surrounding area;

3. Put simply, the Request seeks too much too much density, too much intensity. It seeks the maximum allowances while not sufficiently the minimum requirements.

4. The Requests residential density is not consistent with the Lee Plan.

5. The Requests property is in the Coast High Hazard Area, where the Lee Plan does not support higher densities except with significant justification.

6. The Request sees to use the size of the whole property to calculate density but does not provide the type of mixed-use development that allows that calculation. Therefore, the requested density exceeds the Lee Plan allowance.

7. The Request as proposed is not eligible for the requested bonus density because it does not meet all of the requested minimum criteria. Therefore, the requested density exceeds the Lee Plan allowance.

8. The Request is incompatible with and negatively affects the character of the surrounding area.

9. The Request does not demonstrate the necessary urban services are available and adequate to accommodate the proposed density and intensity.

10. Matanzas Harbor is the only remaining major seaport designated by the Lee Plan. Matanzas is a designated federal channel; the only one between Key West and Tampa. The southern waterfront area is a designated Florida Working Waterfront with the Florida Department of Economic Opportunitys Waterfronts Florida Partnership Program.

11. The Requests density is inconsistent with the Lee Plan.

12. The requested density is inconsistent with the Lee Plans directives for density in the Coast High Hazard Area.

13. The Request has not demonstrated the necessary significant justification.

14. The proposed density is not compatible with the surrounding area. The mix of uses and design of the site do not reflect the desired missed-use development form. The transportation facilities are constrained, and transit is not reasonably available. Therefore, the proposed Request des not sufficiently override the Lee Plan directive for lower density in the CHHA. Accordingly, its density is inconsistent with the Lee Plan.

15. The Request exceeds the Lee Plan density limits because the Request does not meet the requirements to calculate density using the size of the whole property.

16. The Request seeks to include the propertys entire 7.58 acres in calculating density including the non-residential areas.

17. Applicant has not demonstrated the mix of uses meets even the minimum requirements to calculate density using the entire property.

18. The Applicant did not adequately demonstrate the mix of uses, at the proposed intensity, is compatible, and viable.

19. The Request does not support a transit-orientation. Parts of the Request are dependent on transit to function, yet the Request does not sufficiently address transit.

20. The Request does not provide sufficient open spaces.

21. The Applicant did not demonstrate the prosed design will provide a truly functional pedestrian friendly environment.

22. The Applicant has not demonstrated the Requests design created a pedestrian friend human scale environment.

23. The Request does not provide sufficient civic spaces.

24. The Applicant has not sufficiently demonstrated the whole Request property qualifies as a mixed-use development.

25. The weight of the evidence indicates major portions, if not all, of the Request does not qualify for inclusion in the density calculations. Accordingly, the Request as proposed exceeds the Lee Plan allowed density.

26. Bonus density is not preferred on San Carlos Island.

27. The prosed type of affordable housing is not a type of affordable housing prioritized byt the Lee Plan.

28. The Request is incompatible with and negatively affects the character of the surrounding area.

29. The Request is not justified by the Ebbtide approval.

30. The Requests density is incompatible and inconsistent with the surrounding area.

31. The Requests gross residential densities are inconsistent and incompatible with the area.

32. The Requests heights are incompatible.

33. The Requests heights ae inconsistent and incompatible with the surrounding residential neighborhoods.

34. The Requests heights are inconsistent and incompatible with the surrounding non-residential areas.

35. The Request is not consistent with the character of the working waterfront/port.

36. Incompatibility with the character of the area conclusion.

37. One of the objectives of the San Carlos Island Lee Plan provisions is to manage development to maintain and enhance the areas quality of life. Similarly, commercial development should blend with the character of the surrounding area and redevelopment activities must be consistent with the desired community character. The weight of the evidence indicates the Applicant did not sufficiently demonstrate the Request meets these requirements.

38. The Requests densities are inconsistent and incompatible with the residential development in the surrounding area. They not only do not improve the areas existing character, they are potentially destructive to the character of the surrounding area.

39. Further, the heights and building sizes are too intense for and inconsistent with the character of the surrounding area. The Requests design exacerbates rather than mitigates these impacts. Consequently, the Request is not compatible with, nor does it protect the character of, the surrounding area.

40. The Request is inconsistent with several provisions of the LDC.

41. The Request creates unresolved transportation issues.

42. Not all of the requisite urban services are available.

Bill Semmer

San Carlos IslandThe Cape Coral Police Department is asking parents whose children attended a daycare where an arrest was made after a mother told police her 5-year-old daughter was shown sexual videos to contact the agency.

The Cape Coral Police Department is actively investigating a crime that occurred in an unlicensed daycare located at 1228 SE 21st Place Cape Coral, Fl., the release states. The Cape Coral Police Department requests that any parents whom had children attend this facility to please contact Detective Patricia Bell at 239-574-0652 or pbell@capecoral.net .

Felipe Cruz Hernandez, 66, whose listed address is the same as the daycare, was charged with lewd lascivious behavior-molest victim less than 12 offender 18 or older and obscene material sell  to minor on March 15.

CCPD investigators went to the residence on March 13 after receiving a complaint that an elderly male, later identified as Cruz Hernandez, had made sexual gestures and showed sexual videos to the child, the arrest report states. The girl told her mother that popo had shown her these things on a phone.

The child was interviewed on March 14 by a Child Protection Team case coordinator.

Police then contacted Cruz Hernandez, who came voluntarily to the police station where he told officers the children at the center call him papa, the arrest report states.

Cruz Hernandez was arrested and taken to the Lee County Jail.

Bond was set at $90,000 on the lewd lascivious behavior; $10,000 for the obscene material charge.

Bond was paid on March 15 and Cruz Hernandez, who the arrest report states is visiting from Cuba, was released on March 16, according to jail records.

A trial date has been set for April 16.When Lee Countys public school students return to class from spring break on Monday, 40 additional school resource officers will be on patrol.

Lee County Undersheriff Carmine Marceno made the announcement in a joint news conference with the School District of Lee County on Tuesday.

The Sheriffs Office Youth Services Division will grow to 100 members by immediately reassigning supervisors, lieutenants, sergeants and patrol deputies.

Our goal is to have a deputy assigned to each and every school as quickly as possible, Marceno said.

School district officials hailed the staffing program

I am humbled, I am honored and I am deeply appreciative of the efforts of this team, because through their efforts our children are going to be safer in Lee County, Superintendent Dr. Greg Adkins said.

The Sheriffs Office is also increasing its presence at Lee County Schools by directing:

Patrol deputies to use school facilities to complete reports

Detectives to use school facilities as a base of operations whenever possible

Patrol deputies to increase their already frequent area checks of schools during every shift

I want that omnipresence, Undersheriff Marceno said. I want people to see our deputies everywhere possible, as much as possible and as often as possible.

The School District of Lee County and the Lee County Sheriffs Office are choosing the use of additional School Resource Officers to meet the requirements of SB7026, The Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Act, officials said.

Theyre a proven entity for us. Student safety is our number one concern, and I as a superintendent certainly want to go somewhere I know I can depend on, and that would be the Sheriffs Office, , Adkins said.

The full news conference with Superintendent Adkins, Undersheriff Marceno, School Board Chair Cathleen Morgan and State Legislature and Lee County Commission officials an be seen on the School Districts Facebook page at:www.facebook.com/schooldistrictofleecounty/videos/1724137444311372/

Source School District of Lee CountyIf youre looking for a car that will go 200,000 miles without much trouble, you basically have three choices:

Buy a Toyota.

Buy a Honda.

Buy an F-150.

Thats the gist of the latest survey conducted by the folks at Consumer Reports, who tallied the responses from its members and figured out which models made it that far the most often without needing much in the way of major repairs.

The Toyota Camry topped the list, which was ranked by the percentage of each model that didnt require any work done in the past year, and doesnt specify any particular model years, just the full spectrum of cars that hit the mileage mark. The Honda Accord came in second, followed by a variety of cars from the two brands and a lonely Ford F-150 in the tenth spot.

Heres the full list:

Toyota Camry

Honda Accord

Toyota Prius

Honda CR-V

Toyota Sienna

Honda Civic

Toyota Corolla

Toyota 4Runner

Toyota Highlander

Ford F-150

FOLLOW FOX NEWS AUTOS ON FACEBOOK FOR MORE NEWSThe first video publically released that shows the moment a self-driving Uber fatally struck a pedestrian in Tempe, Ariz., suggest that neither the SUV, nor the backup driver inside of it took evasive action to avoid the collision. Experts say that the vehicle should have.

Elaine Herzberg can be seen emerging from the darkness ahead of the Volvo XC90 equipped with Uber's self-driving technology, which includes cameras and a laser-based Lidar scanning system, as she jaywalks her bike across the road.

About two seconds pass before the vehicle hits Herzberg at approximately 40 mph, with no obvious signs that it applied its brakes. A shot from a camera focused on the driver shows her looking down and away from the road just before the impact, again with no clear indication that the brakes were used.

"The victim did not come out of nowhere. She's moving on a dark road, but it's an open road, so Lidar and radar should have detected and classified her" as a human, Bryant Walker Smith, a University of South Carolina law professor who studies autonomous vehicles told the Associated Press.

Smith said the video may not show the complete picture, but "this is strongly suggestive of multiple failures of Uber and its system, its automated system, and its safety driver."

Sam Abuelsmaid, an analyst for Navigant Research who also follows autonomous vehicles, said laser and radar systems can see in the dark much better than humans or cameras and that Herzberg was well within the range.

"It absolutely should have been able to pick her up," he said. "From what I see in the video it sure looks like the car is at fault, not the pedestrian."

Smith said that from what he observed on the video, the Uber driver appears to be relying too much on the self-driving system by not looking up at the road.

"The safety driver is clearly relying on the fact that the car is driving itself. It's the old adage that if everyone is responsible no one is responsible," Smith said. "This is everything gone wrong that these systems, if responsibly implemented, are supposed to prevent."

The experts were unsure if the test vehicle was equipped with a video monitor that the backup driver may have been viewing.

Uber immediately suspended all road-testing of such autos in the Phoenix area, Pittsburgh, San Francisco and Toronto. The National Transportation Safety Board, which makes recommendations for preventing crashes, is investigating the crash.

An Uber spokeswoman, reached Wednesday night by email, did not answer specific questions about the video or the expert observations.

"The video is disturbing and heartbreaking to watch, and our thoughts continue to be with Elaine's loved ones. Our cars remain grounded, and we're assisting local, state and federal authorities in any way we can," the company said in a statement.

Tempe police have identified the driver as 44-year-old Rafael Vasquez. Court records show someone with the same name and birthdate as Vasquez spent more than four years in prison for two felony convictions  for making false statements when obtaining unemployment benefits and attempted armed robbery  before starting work as an Uber driver.

Tempe police and the National Transportation Safety Board declined to say whether the Vasquez who was involved in the fatal crash is the same Vasquez who has two criminal convictions.

Attempts by the AP to contact Vasquez through phone numbers and social media on Wednesday afternoon weren't successful.

Local media have identified the driver as Rafaela Vasquez. Authorities would not explain the discrepancy.

The fatality has raised questions about whether Uber is doing enough to screen its drivers.

Uber said Vasquez met the company's vetting requirements.

The company bans drivers who are convicted of violent crimes or any felony within the past seven years  which Vasquez would have passed given that records show the offenses occurred in 1999 and 2000.

The company's website lists its pre-screening policies for drivers that spell out what drivers can and cannot have on their record to work for Uber.

Their driving history can't have any DUI or drug-related driving offenses within the past seven years, for instance. They also can't have more than three non-fatal accidents or moving violations within the past three years.

With the Associated PressKim Cattrall supports her Sex and the City co-star Cynthia Nixons run for New York governor.

On Thursday, Cattrall, 61, responded to a fan on Twitter who asked about Nixon, writing: I support & respect any former colleagues right to make their own career choices.

Nixon, 51, announced her bid for New York governor on Monday. Soon after, Kristin Davis  who played Charlotte on Sex and the City  shared her support for Nixon by tweeting, I know she would be an excellent Governor.

Cattrall  who played Samantha on the hit HBO series  hasnt had the kindest words for all of her former co-stars, and recently reignited her feud with Sarah Jessica Parker.

You are not my family. You are not my friend, Cattrall wrote to Parker, 52  who played Carrie  on Instagram in February following Parkers public offering of condolences following the death of Cattralls brother. So Im writing to tell you one last time to stop exploiting our tragedy in order to restore your nice girl persona.

Their other co-stars have since spoken out on SJPs behalf  and Nixon and SJP hung out just weeks ago.

This article originally appeared in the New York Post's Page Six.Meghan McCain is adding more fuel to her feud with Teddi Mellencamp.

The two famous daughters have been beefing from afar since The View co-host McCain dubbed the Real Housewives newbie boring while appearing on Watch What Happens Live in February.

In an interview with TooFab last week, Mellencamp responded, I would never comment on how I think Meghan McCain does at her job, adding, I just wouldnt. Thats not my place. Im about empowering other women to be the best they can be.

But that rebuttal didnt cut it for the daytime debater, who gave another pointed interview this week about Mellencamp.

Even I thought that response was boring, McCain dished on the podcast Everything Iconic with Danny Pellegrino on Wednesday. That was such a boring response. If youre going to cat fight with me, then fking cat fight with me, like come up with something better than that. Youre boring.

Adding to her rant, McCain said: Thats boringness of all boring, like youre not even answering in a good way.

As for the other Housewives of Beverly Hills, McCain said, I hate Dorit [Kemsley] this season.

Ive really tried to like Dorit, she lamented. Ive tried and tried. I dont like her, I dont like her accent [or] her wigs.

But in McCains eyes, Erika Girardi  whose icy relationship with Mellencamp has played out on camera this season  can do no wrong.

Erika could probably, like, run over my cousin and I still wouldnt be mad, she said of the newly minted author.

Mellencamp fired back at McCains latest barb in a statement to Page Six on Wednesday night.

For someone who thinks Im so boring she sure has a lot to say about me, she said. Of all the horses I have ever ridden, I have never been on one as high as the one Meghan sits on, the former pro equestrian added.

This article originally appeared in the New York Post.Lillo Brancato is looking forward to being back in the spotlight.

The actor, best known for starring in 1993s A Bronx Tale, is appearing in a new film noir titled Dead on Arrival, written by director Stephen Sepher of Heist fame.

Brancato is aware not everyone will be welcoming him to the big screen with open arms. The former Sopranos actor was released on parole in 2013 after serving eight years for his involvement in an attempted burglary that killed NYPD officer Daniel Enchautegui.

The 41-year-old told Fox News director Sepher, a longtime friend of his, thought he should take on the film.

He said, I want you to shave your head,' Brancato recalled. I want you to be someone different than Lillo. And the fact that he knew me, I knew he would write something that I would like. So I was automatically drawn to this film and playing this character It was one of those projects, one of those movies that I wish had come earlier.

The new movie also includes Maria OBrien, daughter of Edmond O Brien who appeared in 1949s D.O.A.

Dead on Arrival explores how a pharmaceutical sales rep visiting a small town in Louisiana on business finds himself in a dark world of corruption and murder.

A jury found Brancato guilty on the attempted burglary charge in 2008 but acquitted him of murder in the death of the 28-year-old. The actor was sentenced to 10 years. His partner in crime, Steven Armento, was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison without parole.

Brancato has since been keeping himself busy acting again.

I always wonder, do people think that I lost it? he said. Do people think that I dont have the chops anymore? I feel like I have to prove something when Im in front of the camera. Especially for my good friend Steven He believed in me and had the courage to hire me and cast me for this film, which, lets face it, not everyone would have.

"I felt had to really, really do right by him and give this character and my performance my all, just to say thank you to Steve for believing in me.

Brancato also stressed hes changed a lot over the years.

When Brancato made his film debut at age 17, he was personally handpicked and mentored by Robert De Niro for the icon's directorial debut in A Bronx Tale."

He was quickly considered to be one of Hollywoods hottest actors. However, in the years to come, he got into hard drugs, including cocaine and heroin.

Even as Brancato filmed The Sopranos in 2000, the shows biggest star noticed something was wrong.

My drug addiction was already spiraling out of control, he recalled. I think [James Gandolfini] took notice of that He did say, We have a really good thing here. Were acting and not too many people have opportunities like we have. Just be careful. And I knew exactly what he was talking about.

But the late actors advice wouldnt stop Brancato. His addiction escalated to the point that on December 10, 2005, he and Armento broke into a house in the Bronx, NY, attempting to steal prescription drugs. The break-in prompted Enchautegui, who was off-duty at the time, to investigate the burglary. He was shot point-blank in the chest by Armento.

Brancato said became sober on November 18, 2006, a few days after overdosing in his jail cell. A visit from his loved ones was his wakeup call.

They were fed up with me, he said. They were saying, What were you thinking? We love you. We want to see you get better. And for some reason on that day, something just sunk in. And I just decided that day when they left, and I was being escorted back to my cell, I just made that decision in my mind I can never, ever have another drink or another drug in my life.

Brancato said hes been sober for 11 years, but its not always easy.

Brancato now says he wants to help young people avoid making similar, drug-fueled mistakes.

Sobriety is something that can be a challenge every single day, he said.  It can take the littlest thing to trigger a relapse And you know, when I am candid about sobriety, others do reach out to me. And you know what? I do try to help. Because it helps them. But at the same time, it helps me.

"As far as my sobrietys concerned, I have it under control just for today. I dont know what tomorrow is going to bring and you cant ever get too cocky or complacent when it comes to this, because that could be my demise. But just for today, I feel strong, I feel great and I want to continue on this path forever.

Brancato is aware not everyone will support his appearance in Dead on Arrival.

In 2015, the head of the New York Police Departments union had called for a boycott of his film, 2016s Back in the Day, which starred Alec Baldwin, Michael Masden and Danny Glover.

 Lets not kid ourselves, I made some monumentally bad choices, he said. Theres not a day that goes by that I dont think about that heroic police officer who lost his life.

"And theres not a day that goes by I dont think and wish how I could change that and the outcome of that night. But I cant do that. What I can do is control myself and my own actions.

Despite backlash he may spark for appearing in films again, Brancato said hes determined to stay clean.

I was a drug addict, he said. I was at the wrong place at the wrong time And the fact that I have been on the right path and willing to help others and love doing so, I think that is worthy of a second chance and that is worthy of peoples support.

"Dead on Arrival" premieres in theaters March 23.Celebrated director Wes Andersons latest film Isle of Dogs has been accused of cultural appropriation by a film critic.

Justin Chang, who critiques movies for the Los Angeles Times, wrote the movie is beautiful, but its cultural sensitivity gets lost in translation.

Bluntly put, does this white American filmmakers highly selective, idiosyncratic rendering of an East Asian society constitute a sincere act of homage, or a clueless failure of sensitivity? Chang wrote.

The film is set in Japan 20 years in the future and follows a group of dogs that are exiled to Trash Island after a canine-borne disease breaks out in the country. The voices of the dogs include A-listers such as Edward Norton, Scarlett Johannsen, Bill Murray and Bryan Cranston.

OWEN WILSON CAUSES HOTEL EVACUATION, SETS OFF ALARM WITH CIGARETTE

Chang wrote the humans in the movie speak Japanese, but English subtitles are strangely omitted from the screen. However, the dogs speak English, which Chang found ridiculous.

The dogs, for their part, all speak clear American English, which is ridiculous, charming and a little revealing, he wrote. You can understand why a writer as distinctive as Anderson wouldnt want his droll way with the English language to get lost in translation. But all these coy linguistic layers amount to their own form of marginalization, effectively reducing the hapless, unsuspecting people of Megasaki [the films fictional Japanese city] to foreigners in their own city.

Chang wrapped up the review by noting he understood the film was set in Wes Anderson Land, but some parts are less fun than others, and what we see of it in Isle of Dogs is finally ugly in ways beyond what even its maker could have intended.

Following the review, which was published on Wednesday, Chang took to Twitter to clear up his analysis of the film.

"Bluntly put, does this white American filmmakers highly selective, idiosyncratic rendering of an East Asian society constitute a sincere act of homage, or a clueless failure of sensitivity?"  Justin Chang

My issue is not that Anderson set a film in Japan, but how he went about it.

My job is to assess whats on the screen, not the intentions behind it, but since you asked, I dont think Andersons were malicious, he wrote. My chief issue  the handling of language  feels like the result of a compromise, rather than blunt negligence or a desire to give offense.

ZACH BRAFFS NEW SHOW ALEX, INC. IS LESS RISQUE THAN SCRUBS: ITS MORE OF A FAMILY SHOW

Changs co-worker Jen Yamato supported Changs review and thanked the writer for devoting far more attention than most critics will to many of the willfully tone-deaf ways Wes Anderson appropriates and marginalizes Japanese culture and people in his so-called homage. It is ugly indeed.

Other publications praised the film, including The New York Times and Rolling Stone. However, Vox said the film lacked depth and The Washington Post said the movies script feels less like an organic whole than an effort to keep building up a scrawny central premise until it felt like a movie.

The movie currently has a 97 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes.Alyssa Milano probably wont be craving Wendys anytime soon.

The actress took to social media to slam the fast-food chain for its refusal to join the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) Fair Food Program, an initiative inspired in part by the MeToo movement that demands safe working conditions and looks to end sexual harassment in farm fields.

Last week, female farmworkers and supporters protested fasting for five days outside the New York City offices of Wendys board chairman and hedge fund investor, Nelson Peltz.

They reportedly pointed out that Wendys stopped buying tomatoes from Florida when the Fair Food Program was incorporated there, and now the chain purchases tomatoes from Mexico, where workers continue to confront wage theft, sexual harassment, child labor, and even slavery without access to protections, according to Boycott-wendys.org.

Taking to Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to share her message, Milano, 45, chastised the Ohio-headquartered chain for the dangers of their dissent with the CIW. Wendys operates over 6,500 restaurants in more than 29 countries and territories worldwide, as per the company website.

MASSACHUSETTS BURGER KING REMOVES SIGN ABOUT OVERDOSING AFTER COMPLAINTS

These incredible women, who come from one of the harshest working environments in the U.S. and who put food on our tables, are a shining example in the fight to protect the dignity and safety of all women: They have not only shone a light on the routine abuse that farmworker women face, but they have built a proven solution to bring that abuse to an end, and have become an example to millions of women across industry lines, Milano wrote on Facebook.

It was therefore shocking to me today that Wendy's, in responding to a Huffington Post reporter, stated that these members of the CIW are "trying to exploit the positive momentum that has been generated by and for women in the #MeToo and Time's Up movement to advance their interests."

Wendy's, this is very simple: These women are the #MeToo movement, which is a grassroots movement of women from all corners of society exposing the painfully common experience of sexual harassment, misconduct and assault. To suggest that farmworker women are somehow unwelcome intruders in the fight for dignity and safety for women is downright absurd and unbelievably offensive. And that such a statement was made by a company like Wendy's, who pulled their purchases entirely from "the best working environment in American agriculture" and now partners with an industry with well-documented human rights abuses, including sexual violence, is even more outrageous.

I stand with our sisters in the fields, and applaud their efforts to expand the new protections guaranteed in the Fair Food Program to the millions more women who are seeking change, the vocal Charmed and Whos the Boss alum concluded in the post, which has garnered over 480 reactions and 260 shares on Facebook.

And a final word of advice, Wendy's: If you really want to get on the wrong side of the Time's Up movement, keep using our name to attack and belittle farmworker women who are fighting to keep themselves and their sisters safe from rape in the fields.

MCDONALDS CUSTOMER TURNS VIOLENT AFTER RECEIVING WRONG BREAKFAST ORDER

In solidarity, Amy Schumer soon shared a screenshot of Milanos post to her Instagram story, People reports.

Wendys responded to Fox News request for comment with the following statement:

This has been an ongoing campaign against Wendys and this group is spreading false and misleading information about the brand and our business practices in their continuing effort to extract a financial commitment from us, a Wendys spokesperson said on March 22, sharing a longer blog post on the matter by Wendys Chief Communication Officer Liliana Esposito.

FOLLOW US ON FACEBOOK FOR MORE FOX LIFESTYLE NEWS

At Wendys, we have long upheld high standards of quality, and a strong commitment to human dignity throughout our business and our supply chain; we have no tolerance for anything less. All of our suppliers are bound to a strict Code of Conduct that requires ethical practices, and certain fresh produce suppliers, including all tomato suppliers, undergo third-party certified human rights assessments. The suppliers we purchase from are reputable and many participate in the Fair Food Program, they said.

Wendys is currently not buying tomatoes in Florida where the Fair Food Program operates. We believe that is at the heart of the CIWs campaign against us  we buy a lot of tomatoes for which they directly or indirectly receive no money, they added. We have no reason to doubt that the CIWs work has improved conditions on tomato farms in Florida. However, linking this work with the idea that joining their program, and purchasing Florida tomatoes, is the only way to operate ethically is simply not true.A horrible accident ended in a leg amputation for a British tourist visiting Thailand on an extended stay.

Harry Buster was on his motorcycle heading to the Immigration office in Kancahanaburi to extend his visa when he collided with a truck. He was dragged under the wheels and down the road.

The 29-year-olds leg and pelvis were shattered, his ribs were broken, and he was left with internal bleeding on his liver, kidneys and lungs.

Surgeons had to amputate his upper leg above the knee to save his life  and are preparing to remove everything below the hip due to damage to his pelvis socket.

QUADRUPLE AMPUTEE MOM SAYS, 'I JUST HAVE TO GO WITH IT'

AFTER SURGERY

His friend James Bailey told SWNS the truck carrying sugarcane failed to stop.

He was dragged and his right leg has been totally gloved above the knee. He added, It was almost ripped off, leaving the muscle and bone exposed.

Harry was wearing a helmet and lost two liters of blood at the scene.

James explained, I received a call on Monday morning and went to the hospital, where I watched Harry being wheeled into intensive care with a stump after his leg had been amputated above the knee.

It was horrific  I had to go out to my car and began screaming inside. His bone marrow has been exposed so there is fear of infection, which could kill him," he recalled.

The 43-year-old friend said that Harrys has a 50/50 chance of survival.

Harry, a bartender from London, doesn't have health insurance, so his friend James has launched a funding campaign to pay an estimated $32,000 in medical bills.

James is hoping the money will allow Harry to be moved to a different hospital, where surgeons could save the rest of his leg by repairing the joint.

Because they cant put the leg back in the pelvis socket, they are saying they may have to amputate it at the hip, said James, who manages a local pizza shop with his wife.

He added, I will be letting that happen over my dead body.

DOUBLE AMPUTEE COULD BECOME THE FIRST TO CLIMB MT. EVEREST WITH NO LEGS

Harry has been granted a three-month visa while in the hospital. "At least Im still alive," he uttered after regaining consciousness.

James and his wife Nattima met Harry at the beginning of his five-month trip when he visited their pizza shop in October.

The loyal friend described having to call Harry's parents about the accident, "His mom wouldn't stop screaming. I kept saying 'He's alive and that has to be the main focus.'"

James Gofundme page has raised almost $16,000 so far.A Louisiana teen was banned from entering prom with her date because of her dress, which had two mesh cut-outs on the side. Her mother feels her daughter was unfairly targeted by the schools staff.

Josie Reason, 16, agreed to attend prom with her date, Christian, at his Christian high school in Central, LA.

Josie started preparing for the March 17 dance by shopping with her mother, Rebecca Reason.

Josie is pretty conservative and since the prom was at a Christian school, she was concerned about looking appropriate, Rebecca tells Yahoo Lifestyle.

TEEN LOANING OUT PROM DRESS ON TWITTER SPARKS A SOCIAL MEDIA MOVEMENT

Rebecca explained that her daughter was shopping with the dress code in mind and had vetoed dresses that were too tight, had a high slit or too low of a cut.

Rebecca, similarly, told Josie to find a dress that could easily pass at church, Yahoo Lifestyle reported.

Eventually the pair settled on a $400 floor-length gown with a floral skirt and black razorback top with two cut-out panels covered by mesh.

I texted photos of the dress to Christians mom to make sure it was decent and we could coordinate about the corsage colors, says Rebecca to Yahoo Lifestyle. She agreed it was pretty.

Before the big night, Rebecca said Christians mom even reached out to the school, Central Private, to confirm that mesh-covered cut-outs were appropriate. The school allegedly told Christians mom they were ok as long as no bare skin showed, Yahoo Lifestyle reports.

On prom night Christian and Josie headed off to the school in a limo. However, soon after the couple left, Rebecca received a phone call from Josie.

I could tell Josie was trying not to cry, she says to Yahoo Lifestyle. She said, Mom, they wont let me in the prom because of my cut-outs  I either have to wear Christians jacket all night or walk 40 minutes to Walmart and buy a belt.

I feel they treated Josie unfairly because she doesnt attend Christians school."  Rebecca Reason

Josie had tried to explain that her cut-outs had a mesh covering and were not her bare skin, but the faculty at the entrance still would not let her in because the panels were see-through.

Though Christian could have loaned Josie his jacket, he refused because he felt it wasnt fair that she had to wear it all night.

He said girls wearing more revealing dresses were allowed in and it wasnt fair, says Rebecca.

I was the only one denied entrance, Josie told Fox 8 Live.

FOLLOW US ON FACEBOOK FOR MORE FOX LIFESTYLE NEWS

When the teens could not get in to the dance, Christians mom picked them up and took them to dinner and a movie. However, Rebecca is upset about the way the school treated her daughter.

I feel they treated Josie unfairly because she doesnt attend Christians school, Rebecca told Yahoo Lifestyle.

The pair will try again at Josies prom at Central High School on Saturday. This time her mother packed a prom care package for her to take in case she or anyone else accidentally violates the dress code. The kit is equipped with a needle and thread, marker, scissors, measuring tape and a belt.

I dont want this to happen to anyone else, she said.

Central Private has not released a statement on the incident.NEW You can now listen to Fox News articles!

Maybe it wasn't the Russians after all.

Mark Zuckerberg had all but disappeared after a report emerged over the weekend that a data analytics firm allegedly harvested 50 million Facebook profiles of U.S. voters and used them to construct a software program to influence the 2016 presidential election. But he finally emerged on Wednesday to say this, in effect: Mistakes were made.

"We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can't then we don't deserve to serve you, Zuckerberg said in a legalistic statement posted, of course, on Facebook. I've been working to understand exactly what happened and how to make sure this doesn't happen again."

In his statement, the creator of Facebook then catalogues all the mistakes and oversights and "breaches of trust" that led to "bad actors ... accessing people's information." Zuckerberg never apologizes, but does say: "I started Facebook, and at the end of the day I'm responsible for what happens on our platform."

Zuckerberg again offered no apology for not guarding his customers' most private information, instead offering only a dry accounting of what went wrong and what Facebook plans to do to counter such breaches in the future.

The whole fiasco has been a public relations nightmare and a crisis-management disaster. Facebook's two top executives, CEO Zuckerberg and Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, both disappeared after the story broke. When worried Facebook staffers were gathered on Tuesday for a question-and-answer session in the company's cafeteria, neither top executive showed up. Instead, they sent a company lawyer.

It took five days for Zuckerberg to finally appear and address the matter. In that time, demands for Zuckerberg to testify before Congress and lawmakers in Europe have emerged and Facebook's stock has lost $50 billion in market value.

The Federal Trade Commission has opened a probe into Facebooks user-data practices, and even faithful users appear fed up, with the hashtag #deletefacebook trending on Twitter and elsewhere.

"This will go down as the textbook case study as how not to handle a crisis," Scott Galloway, a New York University professor of marketing, told ABC News on Wednesday. "The only thing we know about this and are comfortable predicting is that it's going to get worse."

Probably a lot worse. First, there was immediate criticism about Zuckerberg's heavily lawyered statement, which sets out some specifics about how the breach occurred and offers some vague solutions for preventing it from happening again.

John Podhoretz, contributing editor of the Weekly Standard and the New York Post, cut right to the chase, tweeting: The disingenuousness of that CYA Zuckerberg statement is just staggering.

But there's more behind the anger. Of course, the mainstream media are interested  and riled up  because the breach involved Cambridge Analytica and former Trump adviser and Breitbart Executive Editor Steve Bannon.

The fact that the data analytics firm worked with Donald Trumps election team has severely soured liberal users on Facebook, who now feel violated. The social media giant also has already alienated conservatives by labeling some posts as "fake news" and altering algorithms to deter traffic from going to conservative sites.

But Facebook faces other problems, including much discussed (and disputed) rumors that the massive company listens to users' phone calls. Some anecdotes by users have exploded on social media, like the one in which a man says he mentioned to a friend in a phone call that he might get a cat, then was suddenly inundated with cat food ads on Facebook.

And more and more people now know that Zuckerberg himself once said people who willingly hand over their personal data are "dumb f----."

With yet another crisis for Facebook, the same old excuses are wearing thin.

"My biggest skepticism is that we've seen this play before," Helio Fred Garcia, a professor of crisis management at NYU and Columbia University told ABC. "They're caught coming short of customers' privacy expectations. They tweak procedures. But they don't seem to learn from mistakes, don't really seem to care."

And Zuckerberg again offered no apology for not guarding his customers' most private information, instead offering only a dry accounting of what went wrong and what Facebook plans to do to counter such breaches in the future.

When he waited so long to deliver a statement that even that became a story, in the end, he expressed no remorse for what was one of the largest data breaches in history.

That's not how you do crisis management. And the fact that Zuckerberg still doesn't know that doesn't bode well for the next crisis that will inevitably come for Facebook.

The only "breach of trust" that will be remembered out of this fiasco is the one Facebook users now feel.NEW You can now listen to Fox News articles!

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerbergs response to what he referred to as the Cambridge Analytica situation  in which 50 million Facebook users reportedly had their profiles accessed without permission by the research firm  sounded a lot like a mea culpa laced with promises to do better in the future. It came across as notably empty, from a guy who has been under tremendous pressure to say something in recent days.

Following a lengthy post on Facebook, Zuckerberg said in an interview with CNN Wednesday night: "Im really sorry this happened. We have a basic responsibility to protect peoples data.

Is Zuckerberg sorry this happened, or sorry for his role in compromising the privacy of 50 million Facebook users?

As he went through the timeline of events in his statement on the Cambridge Analytica situation, Zuckerberg talked about years 2007, 2013, 2014 and 2015.

However, the one big glaring hole in his timeline is 2012. While not directly connected to Cambridge Analytica, this missing piece of the puzzle exposes the culture of Facebook and how the company approach the privacy of its users.

In a series of tweets this week, former Obama for America Director of Integration and Media Analytics Carol Davidsen divulged how the 2012 Obama campaign was able to gain control of Facebooks social graph. This enabled the campaign to capture data on users friends by getting Facebook users to log into the campaign website via their Facebook pages.

Facebook was surprised we were able to suck out the whole social graph, but they didnt stop us once they realized that was what we were doing, Davidsen tweeted.

They came to office in the days following election recruiting & were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldnt have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side, she continued on Twitter.

I worked on all of the data integration projects at OFA (Obama for America). This was the only one that felt creepy, even though we played by the rules, and didnt do anything I felt was ugly, with the data, Davidsen tweeted.

In case there is any question about what the Obama campaign was really doing  and what Facebook was complicit in by allowing the campaign to do it  Sasha Issenberg spelled it out in no uncertain terms.

Back in 2012 Issenberg  author of The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns  wrote in MITs Technology Review that the information the Obama campaign was able to learn from Facebook was used in conjunction with other information like voter-registration lists.

Isenberg said this led to a new political currency that predicted the behavior of individual humans. The campaign didnt just know who you were; it knew exactly how it could turn you into the type of person it wanted you to be.

All the while Facebook users were completely in the dark. Paging George Orwell.

Zuckerberg also conveniently failed to address 2010, when Facebook announced it was getting rid of a policy where it only stored information for up to 24 hours. While in 2015 the company changed its approach and tightened it up, this speaks to a pattern of playing loose with the security of Facebooks users.

So while now Zuckerberg claims he has an obligation to protect data of users, his history tells a very different story.

Zuckerberg broke his silence Wednesday and embarked on an orchestrated media campaign beginning with a lengthy statement comprised of a whole lot of words that said a whole lot of nothing. Not by accident, he ended the day on CNN, an Obama-friendly network, knowing hed be in a safe space when it came to year 2012.

Now Zuckerberg is finally speaking to the media in an effort at damage control. While its highly unlikely is that Facebook is in jeopardy of going bottom-up anytime soon, too many secrets are being divulged concerning collusion between the technology we use and the liberal political agenda.

Turns out Big Brother really is watching, and he just launched a media campaign to tell us hes not.NEW You can now listen to Fox News articles!

For the past few days, the nations media and political class have been fixated on the firing of the No. 2 person in the FBI, Deputy Director Andrew McCabe. McCabe became embroiled in the investigation of President Donald Trump because of his alleged approval of the use of a political dossier, written about Trump and paid for by the Democrats and not entirely substantiated, as a basis to secure a search warrant for surveillance of a former Trump campaign adviser who once boasted that he worked for the Kremlin at the same time that he was advising candidate Trump.

The dossier itself and whatever was learned from the surveillance formed the basis for commencing the investigation of the Trump campaigns alleged ties to Russia by the Obama Department of Justice, which is now being run by special counsel Robert Mueller and has been expanded into other areas. The surveillance of the Trump campaign based on arguably flimsy evidence put McCabe into President Trumps crosshairs. Indeed, Trump attacked McCabe many times on social media and even rejoiced when Attorney General Jeff Sessions fired him at 10 p.m. last Friday, just 26 hours before his retirement was to have begun.

Why the fixation on this? Here is the back story.

After the unlawful use of the FBI and CIA by the Nixon administration to spy on President Nixons domestic political opponents, Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 1978. This statute outlawed all domestic surveillance except that which is authorized by the Constitution or by the new Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

That court, the statute declared, could authorize surveillance of foreigners physically located in the United States on a legal standard lesser than that which the Constitution requires. Even though this meant Congress could avoid the Constitution -- an event that every high school social studies student knows is unconstitutional -- the FISC enthusiastically embraced its protocol.

That protocol was a recipe for the constitutional crisis that is now approaching. The recipe consists of a secret court whose records and rulings are not available to the public. It's a court where only the governments lawyers appear; hence there is no challenge to the governments submissions. And it's a court that applies a legal standard profoundly at odds with the Constitution. The Constitution requires the presentation of evidence of probable cause of a crime as the trigger for a search warrant, yet FISA requires only probable cause of a relationship to a foreign power.

In the years in which the FISC authorized spying only on foreigners, few Americans complained. Some of us warned at FISAs inception that this system violates the Constitution and is ripe for abuse, yet we did not know then how corrupt the system would become. The corruption was subtle, as it consisted of government lawyers, in secret and without opposition, persuading the FISC to permit spying on Americans.

The logic was laughable, but it went like this: We need to spy on all foreigners, whether they're working for a foreign government or not; we need to spy on anyone who communicates with a foreigner; and we need to spy on anyone who has communicated with anyone else who has ever communicated with a foreigner.

These absurd extrapolations, pressed on the FISC and accepted by it in secret, turned FISA -- a statute written to prevent spying on Americans -- into a tool that facilitates it. Now, back to McCabe.

Though the use of FISA for domestic spying on ordinary Americans came about gradually and was generally known only to those in the federal intelligence and law enforcement communities and to members of the Senate and House intelligence committees, by the time McCabe became deputy director of the FBI, this spying was commonplace. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (is it really a court, given that its rulings are secret and it hears only the government and it rejects the constraints of the Constitution?) has granted 99.9 percent of government surveillance requests.

So when McCabe and his colleagues went to the FISC in October 2016 looking for a search warrant to conduct surveillance of officials in the Trump campaign, they knew that their request would be granted, but they never expected that their application, their work and the purpose of their request -- as far removed as it was from the original purpose of FISA -- would come under public scrutiny.

Indeed, it was not until the surveillance of Trump and his colleagues in the campaign and the transition came to light -- with McCabe as the poster boy for it -- that most Americans even knew how insidiously governmental powers are being abused.

The stated reason for McCabes firing was not his abuse of FISA but his absence of candor to FBI investigators about his use of FISA. I dont know whether those allegations are the true reasons for his firing or McCabe was sacrificed at the altar of government abuse -- because those who fired him also have abused FISA.

But I do know that there are lessons to learn in all this. Courts are bound by the Constitution, just as are Congress and the president. Just because Congress says something is lawful does not mean it is constitutional. Secret courts are the tools of tyrants and lead to the corruption of the judicial process and the erosion of freedom.

And courts that hear no challenge to the government and grant whatever it wants are not courts as we understand them; they are government hacks. They and the folks who have facilitated all this have undermined personal liberty in our once free society.

The whole purpose of the Constitution is to restrain the government and to protect personal liberty. FISA and its enablers in both major political parties have done the opposite. They have infused government with corruption and have assaulted the privacy of us all.NEW You can now listen to Fox News articles!

Need more evidence that Deep State actors, cheered on by a partisan press, are doing everything within their power to damage, unseat a duly elected president?

You can bet it was a swamp dweller who ran to the Deep States favorite media outlet, The Washington Post, with the latest targeted leak meant to smear the president. Here's the headline: Trump's national security advisers warned him, do not congratulate Vladimir Putin and he did it anyway.

Well, it turned out to be more fake news. A senior administration official told Fox News it is likely that President Trump never saw the memo that contained the warning about Putin because he was briefed about his conversation with the Russian president over the phone.

You are being lied to on a daily basis by the destroy-Trump media and the Deep State.

That didnt stop the destroy-Trump media from cranking up their phony, feigned outrage machine.

It's not just what President Trump said during that phone call with Vladimir Putin, said ABCs Cecilia Vega. It is also what he did not say that has come in his party angry this morning.

Retired Navy Admiral James Stavridis chimed in, This would be like J. Edgar Hoover as the director of the FBI calling Al Capone to congratulate him on bank robbery.

Oh, sure. Got it. They didnt mention that President Obama congratulated Putin on his last election victory, in 2012. Not relevant, I guess.

And over on MSNBC, Mika Brzezinki asked if it going too far to say that the White House is failing America on world stage?

And there at the intersection of biased media and Deep State creeps, is former CIA Director John Brennan. Heres what he had to say on MSNBC:

Well, I think one can speculate as to why, that the Russians may have something on him personally that they could always roll out and make his life more difficult, Brennan said. Clearly, I think it's important for us to be able to improve relations with Russia but the fact that he has had a fawning attitude toward Mr. Putin has not said anything negative about him. He continues to say to me that he does have something to fear.

Isn't John Brennan the guy who voted for a communist for president of the United States back in the '70s? He is supposed to be nonpartisan. By the way, how did he ever become the CIA director?

In reality, he is nothing more than an Obama deep state stooge. He recently tweeted out this threat to President Trump: When the full extent of your venality and moral turpitude and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history. So, may scapegoat Andy McCabe, but you will not destroy America. America will triumph over you.

Well John, Andy McCabe got fired because the FBI recommended he'd be fired. The inspector general report recommended the same. It wasn't Donald Trump.

No wonder a new poll shows 74 percent of the American people believe unelected bureaucrats, deep state operatives, are secretly trying to manipulate policy and opinion in this country. It's more apparent than ever that people like John Brennan and James Clapper and the rest of them are not even trying to hide their abuse and their bias against President Trump. They want him out of office regardless of what he does or doesn't do.

You are being lied to on a daily basis by the destroy-Trump media and the Deep State. Its on a scale and level we have never seen in the history of this country.

Its a good thing most of us know exactly what theyre up to.

Adapted from Sean Hannity's monologue on "Hannity," March 21, 2018NEW You can now listen to Fox News articles!

Congressional Republicans are jeopardizing the Second Amendment rights of 4.2 million senior citizens. At the same time, they have voted to funnel tens of millions of dollars to gun control organizations and support other actions that Democrats will love.

All of this is wrapped up in the giant $1.3 trillion spending bill that the House of Representatives approved Thursday on a 256-167 vote and sent to the Senate.

Just before President Obama left office, his administration finalized new regulations banning Social Security recipients from buying a gun if they have trouble managing their finances.

About 10 percent of all people 65 and older risked being classified as financially incompetent  about 4.2 million in all.

Using the Congressional Review Act, Republicans and two Democrats passed a bill overturning the regulation. But the bill did more than that. It also prevents any future president from reinstituting the ban without new legislative authorization from Congress.

Unfortunately, the spending bill passed Thursday allows the ban to be reinstituted because it reauthorizes the 2007 National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) Improvement Amendments Act. This act allowed government agencies, not just the courts, to determine if someone is mentally incompetent to buy or possess a gun.

House Rules Committee Chairman Pete Sessions, R-Texas, said during testimony late Wednesday that he was disturbed that the bill would undo part of Republicans good work. But by Thursday morning, the House leadership had decided to go ahead with the measure.

Despite the name Fix-NICS, the bill is likely to cause more problems than it is worth.

Criminals are often dumb, but they are rarely so stupid as to buy a gun through a legal background check process. The people who get stopped are law-abiding citizens who simply have similar names to the criminals on the NICS list.

These false positives are a real problem. From 2006 to 2015, the National Instant Criminal Background Check System denied gun purchases by 826,144 people. But all those denials led to only 488 prosecutions in the whole 10-year period  fewer than 50 a year. Less than half of these ended in convictions.

This is an easy problem to fix. The government need only hold itself to the same standards it demands of companies performing background checks on their employees. But the problem isnt being fixed, and so adding more names to NICS will only result in more false positives.

Democrats want to fix NICS, but they wont even accede to Republican requests mandating the full, annual NICS reports that the Obama administration discontinued in 2010.

Another part of the spending bill provides $50 million for the STOP School Violence Act, which will provide schools with training in how to cope with attacks and how to identify violence-prone individuals. Despite President Trumps push to encourage schools to arm teachers and staff, the bill expressly forbids schools from using any federal money to do just that.

Sandy Hook Promise designed the STOP School Violence Act, tailoring it to the contracts that will be given out. Unfortunately, Sandy Hook Promise advocates extreme gun control measures and promotes such measures to teachers and students.

Why should tax dollars from National Rifle Association members and other supporters of our Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms be used to fund organizations that teach children and teachers that gun ownership is bad?

Another part of the spending bill authorizes the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to do research on gun violence.

But despite all of the claims by gun control advocates, the CDC was never banned from doing such research. In 1996, Arkansas Republican Rep. Jay Dickey placed a provision in the CDC budget stating: None of the funds made available in this title may be used, in whole or in part, to advocate or promote gun control.(Italics added).

Democrats are already claiming the gutting of this provision as a major victory. But either Democrats have never read the Dickey provision or theyve been intentionally misleading people. In fact, the Obama administration funded gun violence research anyway through the CDC and other agencies. There was no reduction in gun control research after the Dickey provision.

It is bad enough that the government cant keep politics out of its decisions about what research to fund. But what possible justification could there be for letting government agencies use federal tax dollars to advocate or promote gun control?

Republicans cant get anything on gun control through the Senate without 60 votes. With Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., absent for months to receive cancer treatments, that means nothing can pass the Senate without the votes of 10 Democrats.

Republicans who value the Second Amendment have given up a lot. The millions of Americans who believe in the amendment and who believe in our right to self-defense and to defend our families now have reason to be concerned.NEW You can now listen to Fox News articles!

President Trump signed an executive memorandum Thursday slapping $50 billion in annual tariffs and other penalties on a broad range of imported Chinese products, fulling his campaign promise to challenge a rising and increasingly rogue China. The move is justified and long overdue.

The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative will publish a list of targeted products in 15 days. That will be followed by a 30-day period for public comment. Tariffs will not be imposed for 60 days, to allow time for comment.

Nervous traders on Wall Street initially sent stock prices tumbling in reaction to reports that the president would impose the tariffs. But in the long run, the presidents action will be a plus for the U.S. economy and preserve American jobs.

By acting decisively, the president has once again proven that he will take on the toughest of foreign policy challenges, knowing there could be major political repercussions. And while many pundits are calling the presidents action a mistake, the start of a potential trade war or even foolish, I have a better definition: its called leadership.

President Trump framed Thursdays actions as a response to blatantly unfair and improper Chinese rules that force U.S. firms seeking to access the Chinese market to form joint ventures with Chinese companies.

The rules enable the Chinese firms to routinely steal the intellectual property of the U.S. companies. This gives the Chinese the ability to use American-developed advanced technology to strengthen their own industries to better compete with American firms in China and around the world.

President Trump is saying, in effect, that he will not allow China to steal our trade secrets and then use those secrets to compete against us. He is pushing back against a Chinese government that is slowly but surely leveraging its newfound economic muscle  an economy worth over $11 trillion that is now the second biggest on the planet  to gain economic, political and military power throughout Asia and across the globe.

Consider for a moment some of the antagonistic actions Beijing has taken in the economic realm and beyond over the past few years. While the list below is certainly not comprehensive, it is long past time for Washington to react:

Intellectual property: As noted above, many U.S. firms can only gain access to the Chinese market if they agree to what amounts to surrendering their intellectual property when they partner with a local firm. Considering such property is the innovative blood of a first-class economy like America  and the fact that intellectual property theft could cost the U.S. as much as $600 billion annually  this is something that must be addressed.

In fact, some of the damage might be irreversible, with China now on its way to becoming the global leader in international patent filings  passing the U.S. in just three years  according to the United Nations .

Trade deficit: The U.S.-China trade deficit in 2017 rose to an astounding $375 billion. For an idea of the scale of such an imbalance in trade, it equals the total gross domestic product of Austria and nearly equals the GDP in the state of Maryland.

Just recently, the Trump administration has declared a goal of cutting our trade deficit with China by $100 billion annually  something that Chinese propaganda outlets did not take too keenly to.

Industry subsidies: We all know that a key part of the Trump administrations plan to Make America Great Again is to encourage Americans to purchase U.S.-made products. China wants its citizens to buy Chinese products, but to achieve this goal the government is handing out massive subsidizes to its domestic industries so they can dominate the home market and the global economy of the future. This unfair practice puts U.S. companies trying to sell in China at a tremendous disadvantage.

Chinas domestic industry subsidy program is called Made in China 2025. Beijing has set aside hundreds of billions of dollars for a plan to dominate and subsidize growing industries like robotics, 5G, bio-pharmaceuticals, artificial intelligence, electric cars and more in the next decade. China wants to make sure that it holds around 80 percent of its domestic market in just eight years  something not allowed according to World Trade Organization regulations  and wants to be a major player in trade around the world.

The New York Times reported this month that the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China concluded that the Chinese want to achieve their goal by providing large, low-interest loans from state-owned investment funds and development banks; assistance in buying foreign competitors; and extensive research subsidies, all with the goal of making China largely self-sufficient in the targeted industries.

Weapons designs: Beijing has embarked on a campaign to steal many of the most classified and lethal weapons systems the U.S. military has ever produced. The list of compromised military hardware is shocking. It includes systems such as the Patriot missile, the THAAD Missile Defense System, the F/A-18 Fighter, the V-22 Osprey, the new Littoral Combat Ship and many more.

Worst of all, many reports suggest China has successfully gained access to various design aspects of the $1 trillion F-35 program, the most important and technologically advanced U.S. military program in history.

While it is difficult to know how much of these actions are government sponsored, the reasons for such moves are obvious. With Beijing attempting to sell advanced military hardware around the world as well as build armed forces that could defeat the U.S. in battle, the motivations for such theft is clear.

As one senior Pentagon official put it to me recently: China has stolen some of our most advanced military hardware designs. They need to pay a price for that.

Federal employee data: In a breach of national security that was clearly unprecedented, the personal information of some 21 million Americans was stolen from the federal governments Office of Personnel Management by what the FBI believes were Chinese-government hackers. The personal information came from current and former U.S. government employees and spouses of those employees.

The scale and scope of this cybertheft  more like cyberattack  should not be understated. These hackers stole countless pieces of personal information. This included detailed security clearance data and fingerprint information. This stolen material likely included the all-important SF-86 form, which is used for conducting federal employee background checks.

As a report from Wired explained, these forms can hold a wealth of sensitive data not only about workers seeking security clearance, but also about their friends, spouses and other family members. They can also include potentially sensitive information about the applicants interactions with foreign nationals  information that could be used against those nationals in their own country.

Military dominance: Over the last decade, Beijing has attempted to dominate large stretches of territory across Asia. This includes building islands to ensure its control of the South China Sea, the eventual subjugation of the island democracy of Taiwan, and pushing Japan out of the East China Sea. In addition, Beijings massive military build-up  including the deployment of new aircraft carriers, a massive missile force as well as modernized army  is all part of this plan.

The above only scratches the surface of Chinas aggressive actions. In fact, I would argue that President Trumps action on tariffs should be seen as a response to something that has been building for decades: a natural reply by our nation to defend our own economic, military and geopolitical interests.

We should view President Trumps tariff move alongside other actions he is taking, such as creating closer ties with Taiwan and Vietnam, rebuilding U.S. military power and awakening of like-minded conservatives to the challenges posed by Beijing.

When looked at as part of this bigger picture, we can see the new tariffs on Chinese products are the beginnings of a comprehensive U.S. strategy thats in our national interest and that will protect American jobs and our economy from Chinas unfair practices.

My only regret is that past presidents did not have President Trumps courage and did not punch back against China sooner.NEW You can now listen to Fox News articles!

Facing the threat of another government shutdown, legislators are racing to pass an omnibus bill that would fund the federal government for the rest of the fiscal year and tackle several of the important issues on Congress's plate, including immigration and gun safety. Among those issues is one borne of our increasing reliance on the cloud, in which our personal data  email, photos, and the like  is stored on servers around the world. Specifically, Congress is grappling with the law governing how law enforcement officials obtain our data when it is stored on a server in another country.

The best approach to this important privacy issue should be determined by the government officials we elect. But until now, Congress has failed to update the governing statute, the 1986 Stored Communications Act (SCA), which was enacted long before the cloud existed.

Now the Supreme Court has stepped into that void and is on the verge of doing Congress's job for it. The justices are set to decide U.S. v. Microsoft  Microsoft's legal challenge to a federal search warrant compelling it to turn over the contents of emails stored on its server in Ireland  no later than June.

If the justices are forced to take on the nuanced task of modernizing the SCA in the face of Congressional inaction, it will be unfortunate because courts lack the policy expertise, global perspective, and democratic mandate of Congress. Not to mention that the Constitution explicitly grants all legislative power to Congress.

With a High Court decision nonetheless looming, a bipartisan group of Senate and House members introduced the CLOUD (Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data) Act last month with the aim of modernizing the SCA before the Court rules. Negotiators' decision this week to include the CLOUD Act in the omnibus bill now presents Congress with a golden opportunity to update America's antiquated privacy laws to reflect the new world of global cloud computing. If they succeed, the Microsoft case will be become moot or result in a narrow decision that has little impact.

Like all omnibus bills, this one has provoked the inevitable squawking about what was and wasn't included. While no one can deny that such catchall bills often contain add-ons that are neither important nor urgent and deserve further debate rather than expedited enactment, the CLOUD Act is precisely the opposite.

Our growing reliance on the cloud makes this Act undeniably important. Likewise, a badly outdated statute causing legal and industry uncertainty plus an imminent Supreme Court decision that could make the problem worse makes passage urgent. Finally, many years of discussion about how to update the statute and more than four years of litigation in U.S. v. Microsoft mean that further debate would add little.

Moreover, the current state of the law is unsustainable. Microsoft went to court because it and other technology companies often lack any viable options when responding to cross-border data requests by U.S. law enforcement. If a company complies, it may be subject to criminal or civil sanctions under the law of the country where the server is located. If it refuses to comply, it can be held in contempt by an American court.

The CLOUD Act would remove this catch-22 by creating a modern, comprehensive legal and political framework governing how law enforcement agencies in the U.S. and abroad can access data across borders as part of their efforts to prevent and solve crime and terrorism in the age of cloud computing. By facilitating bilateral agreements with other governments and creating mechanisms for resolving disagreements among nations, the Act would encourage the government-to-government cooperation and comity necessary to fight international crime.

Consumers would benefit as well. As the App Association notes, through "bilateral agreements with other countries, this legislation enables consumers to benefit from their home countries due process protections, wherever their data may be stored." In fact, "the CLOUD Act legislation includes an impressively long list of privacy protections [here and abroad]," according to Georgia Tech Professor Peter Swire, the former Chief Counselor for Privacy in the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, and American University Law Professor Jennifer Daskal.

No wonder the CLOUD Act is supported by both sides in the Microsoft case, as well as by the National Association of Attorneys General and a broad array of tech companies.

Passage of the CLOUD Act would make the Supreme Court happy as well. At oral argument in U.S. v. Microsoft last month, it was unclear how the Court will rule if Congress fails to act. However, most of the justices made it clear that the question before them was better left to Congress. Justice Sonia Sotomayor observed that they were being asked "to imagine what Congress would have done or intended in a totally different situation today."

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg noted that Congress "can write a statute that takes account of various interests," whereas "there's nothing nuanced about" what a court can do.

As Microsoft said in its brief to the Justices, only Congress possesses the "tools to rewrite the statute to strike a new, 21st-century balance between law-enforcement interests, our relations with foreign nations, the privacy of our citizens, and the competitiveness of our technology industry." With the inclusion of the CLOUD Act in the omnibus bill, Congress is on the verge of striking that very balance.Former Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy, a Democrat who said he was thrown under the bus when he was fired in 2015 by Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, released a video Wednesday evening announcing hes running for mayor.

The video, posted on McCarthy's website, is titled, "Chicago Needs Change."

Between the taxes, our economy, the schools and the crime rate here, were a laughingstock in America, McCarthy told the Chicago Tribune. The prevailing thought about Chicago is were on our way down in all those areas, and they all infect each other, and nobody seems to get that. Its almost like a Wake up, Chicago moment.

"Between the taxes, our economy, the schools and the crime rate here, were a laughingstock in America."  Garry McCarthy, announcing a challenge against Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel

McCarthy, a self-described pro-police, limited-government candidate, is taking on Emanuel, a liberal who sent shockwaves through the city when he fired McCarthy.

It will make for a very personal race and some fiery political theater as McCarthy be fighting back against a fellow Democrat and President Barack Obamas former White House chief of staff.

Emanuel recently stabilized from citywide demands and protests calling for him to resign after he was accused of helping secure his mayoral re-election by burying a tape that showed Chicago police Officer Jason Van Dyke shooting 17-year-old Laquan McDonald 16 times. Emanuel has denied any cover-up.

However, in the court of public opinion, Emanuel still hasnt necessarily been cleared of the widely accepted accusation that he kept the tape under wraps.

Emanuel has never gone into great detail about the alleged secrecy surrounding the tape and, after initially defending Van Dyke and McCarthy, Emanuel ultimately placed blame on the then-top cop and fired him.

McCarthy argues the tape was out of his hands and that Emanuels city council voted to quickly pay the victims family millions of dollars.

McCarthy told Fox News he plans to make the McDonald tape a key piece of his campaign against Emanuel and demand that the mayor publicly explain what happened. It could place Emanuel in some interesting positions in any potential public forums or debates.

An e-mail address provided for Emanuels re-election campaign has not returned Fox News e-mail seeking comment about McCarthy's campaign plans.

The officer involved in the videotape, Van Dyke, awaits trial on murder charges.

McCarthys time as the top cop was not without blemish, but he is credited with significantly reducing crime.

One additional criticism against McCarthy is that he hails from New York and doesnt have true political experience.Congressional Republican leaders released the final version of a proposed $1.3 trillion spending bill Wednesday evening, approximately 52 hours before the deadline to avoid a partial government shutdown.

The 2,232 page "omnibus" bill was made public hours after House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., dashed through a Washington snowstorm to meet with President Trump at the White House amid concerns that Trump's support for the package was wavering. The White House later said the president backed the legislation, even as some conservative Republicans balked at the size of the spending increases and the rush to pass the bill.

The powerful House Rules Committee was scheduled to meet later Wednesday to prepare the bill for debate in the full House. Leaders have said they hoped to start voting as soon as Thursday, but a stopgap measure may be needed to ensure federal offices remain open at midnight Friday when funding for the government expires.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., signaled his support for the bill that he said "puts workers and families first."

"Every bill takes compromise, and there was plenty here, but at the end of the day we Democrats feel very good because so many of our priorities for the middle class were included," said Schumer.

In contrast, the conservative House Freedom Caucus said all 32 of its members would vote unanimously against the bill.

"The policy proposals outlined in this ... bill are not consistent with what we told the American people we would do when they sent us to Washington. Many of the policies in the bill are in fact the opposite of what we promised," the caucus statement read. "This is an insult to Americas taxpayers, as well as their many rank-and-file representatives who had no say in the omnibus negotiations."

Both sides of the aisle have been keen to avoid a repeat of the shutdown in January, which came after lawmakers clashed over the state of the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which gave protection to illegal immigrants brought to the country as children. DACA was set to expire this month, but that expiration has been delayed by court orders.

The bill does not include a DACA provision and also gives limited funding to border security measures that President Trump had pushed for.

Trump had called for $1.6 billion for 74 miles of border wall, with an extra $1.1 billion for technology and other assets. Instead, the omnibus appropriates $1.57 billion for barriers along the border, but none of it for the new prototypes he recently visited in California.

The money would fund about 33 miles of new construction in the San Diego area and the repair of about 60 miles of existing segments, some that double as levees, along the Rio Grande in Texas.

In one win for immigrant advocates, negotiators rejected Trump's plans to hire hundreds of new Border Patrol and immigration enforcement agents.

"We are disappointed that we did not reach agreement on Dreamer protections that were worthy of these patriotic young people," said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who vowed that Democrats "will continue to ask the Speaker to give us a vote to protect Dreamers and honor our values."

The Associated Press reported that the bill would include an $80 billion bump for the Pentagon, giving Trump and GOP hawks a major victory as it brings the military budget to over $700 billion.

In a statement, Ryan said the agreement "marks the beginning of a new era for the United States military."

"Our service members are the finest in the world, but the poor state of our military readiness has left them under-equipped and underprepared for the threats they face," Ryan said. "This legislation fulfills our pledge to rebuild the United States military."

"No bill of this size is perfect," Ryan added. "But this legislation addresses important priorities and makes us stronger at home and abroad."

The bill also includes the so-called "Fix NICS" measure meant to strengthen the federal background check system for gun purchases as Congress attempts to respond to respond to the deadly assault on a Florida high school and other shootings.

The measure would provide funding for states to comply with the existing National Instant Criminal Background Check system and penalize federal agencies that don't comply. The bipartisan measure was approved in the House, but stalled in the Senate amid concerns by some Republicans about restricting gun rights without due process and complaints by Democrats that it does not go far enough to address gun violence.

"The calls from the American people to address gun violence in our schools and communities have been deafening, and Im grateful well soon get that chance, Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn, R-Texas, a driving force behind the bill, said. "Fixing the background check system will help save lives and reduce the likelihood of what occurred in Parkland and Sutherland Springs from happening again."

The spending bill also includes more than $2 billion to train school officials and law enforcement officers how to identify signs of potential violence and intervene early, install metal detectors and take other steps to "harden" schools to prevent violence.

The House approved the STOP School Violence Act earlier this month, but the measure has not been taken up in the Senate.

The bill states that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention can do research on gun violence, though not advocacy, an idea Democrats pushed.

The plan also removes a much-debated earmark protecting money for a rail tunnel under the Hudson River, a top priority for Schumer. Trump had vowed to veto the bill over the earmark. However, the project would remain eligible for federal funding, however, and a Schumer aide said it was likely to win well more than half of the $900 million sought for the project this year.

Both parties touted $4.6 billion in total funding to fight the nation's opioid addiction epidemic, a $3 billion increase. Child care and development block grants would receive a huge $2.4 billion increase to $5.2 billion. And an Obama-era transportation grant program known as TIGER would see its budget tripled to $1.5 billion. Head Start for preschoolers would get a $610 million boost, while an additional $2.4 billion would go for child care grants.

Fox News' Adam Shaw, Chad Pergram and The Associated Press contributed to this report.President Barack Obama and former first lady Michelle Obama sent a letter to the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, commending them on their actions, saying they helped awaken the conscience of the nation.

A copy of the letter obtained by Mic.com showed the Obamas saying that they were inspired by the students resilience, resolve and solidarity shown after the tragedy struck on Valentines Day.

A lone gunman allegedly entered the Parkland high school just after 2 p.m. and opened fire, killing 17 people.

The Obamas commended the survivors who have urged legislators since the attack to strengthen gun control.

Not only have you supported and comforted each other, but youve helped awaken the conscience of the nation, and challenged decision-makers to make the safety of our children the countrys top priority, the letter read.

Parkland students have organized a rally in D.C. on Saturday to bring more attention to the gun debate and encourage lawmakers to act swiftly on implementing stronger gun laws.

There may be setbacks; you may sometimes feel like progress is too slow in coming, the Obamas wrote, but we have no doubt you are going to make an enormous difference in the days and years to come, and we will be there for you.One of former President Bill Clinton's top strategists has suggested in a new book that the Clintons had "at least a one-way open marriage" during Clinton's presidency.

Mark Penn, who was also chief strategist in Hillary Clinton's failed bid for the Democratic nomination in 2008, made the claim in "Microtrends Squared," which hit shelves on Tuesday.

In discussing the Clintons' relationship, Penn wrote, "Perhaps [the open marriage] was not by choice, but the stories accumulated over the years until the fact of it became apparent."

He added: "There was also no question that at the same time their relationship was deep and enduring. If this was the model of the first couple, what did it mean for the rest of the country?"

Penn's discussion of the relationship between the 42nd president and his first lady is tucked into a chapter on open marriages, which he considers to be "more of a fad than a trend."

A spokesman for Hillary Clinton did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Allegations of sexual misconduct against ex-President Clinton have dogged the couple during their 43-year marriage. In 1998, he admitted to having had sexual encounters with Gennifer Flowers and White House intern Monica Lewinsky. The following year, he reached a confidential settlement with another accuser, Paula Jones, to get her to drop a sexual harassment lawsuit against him.

Three other women -- Juanita Broaddrick, Kathleen Willey and Leslie Millwee -- accused Clinton of sexually harassing and assaulting them at various times between 1977 and 1993.

Broaddrick has alleged that Clinton raped her in April 1977 and that Hillary Clinton intimidated her in an effort to keep her silent. Broaddrick gave an interview to NBC in 1999 but the network did not air her account until Clintons impeachment process concluded with an acquittal.Karen McDougal, the former Playboy model who plans to tell her story tonight to CNN's Anderson Cooper, is claiming that the National Enquirer's parent company tried to intimidate her into keeping quiet about Donald Trump.

But there is more to the story, which plays out in correspondence between her lawyer and the company, American Media Inc.

The company's view, according to sources familiar with its stance, is that this is little more than a money grab by a woman who became dissatisfied with the $150,000 contract she had signed.

The media are going full tilt now that McDougal is one of three women making renewed accusations against the president. The second is Stormy Daniels, the ex-porn star who says she had an affair with Trump in 2006, and whose interview with Cooper is slated to air Sunday on "60 Minutes." The third is Summer Zervos, a former "Apprentice" contestant who says Trump made unwanted advances, and who just got a judges approval to pursue a defamation suit against him.

The president has denied the accounts of these and other women who surfaced during the campaign, and the degree to which the public cares about their allegations remains to be seen.

McDougal recently spoke to the New Yorker as it reported her account of a consensual affair with Trump starting in 2006, around the same time as the alleged relationship with Daniels. She did not address the affair directly, but Ronan Farrow obtained, most likely from her boyfriend, notes she made about the relationship during or after the 2016 campaign.

When the Enquirer's parent firm bought McDougal's limited life rights and other services in the fall of 2016, it was widely viewed as a case of "catch and kill"buying a story in order to bury it. AMI is owned by David Pecker, a friend of Trump who is said to have done the president such favors.

But the contract also called on McDougal to write columns and appear on two magazine covers, which became a point of contention.

Last month, McDougal's then-lawyer, Carol Heller, wrote to AMI that they were inundated with questions about her relationship with the company and wanted to do interviews. (McDougal is allowed to respond to "legitimate press inquiries" under a contract amendment added after the 2016 election.) Heller also raised the notion of renegotiating the dealwhich the company viewed as a way of demanding more money in exchange for staying quiet about Trump.

AMI wrote back that the wave of questions was McDougal's own fault, as a result of talking to the New Yorker's Ronan Farrow. The company said it was negotiating the sale of McDougal's limited life rights, and that those talks would be damaged by any further publicity. This, said AMI, would a breach of McDougals contract and subject her to substantial financial damages.

Her new lawyer, Peter Stris, may have had this in mind when he said "a quarter billion dollar company posing as a media organization systematically intimidated and silenced Karen McDougal in order to achieve its political and financial ends, and she will no longer be quiet." (Stris did not respond to a request for comment.)

McDougal said in her own statement that "AMI lied to me, made empty promises, and repeatedly intimidated and manipulated me."

AMI denied trying to silence McDougal, saying in a statement that she "has been free to respond to press inquiries about her relationship with President Trump since 2016."

The sources said AMI had been approached by a network and was in talks about producing a story on the alleged McDougal-Trump relationship.

AMI believes McDougal breached the contract by talking to the New Yorker and would commit an even more blatant breach if she goes ahead with the CNN interview.

American Media last month agreed to feature McDougal on the cover of Men's Journalthe second of two covers required by the contractand tried to set up a March 13 photo shoot. The company even specified that the former Playmate of the Year wouldn't have to wear a bathing suit and could choose her own clothing.

Despite several emails, McDougal never agreed to the photo shoot.

As for her columns, McDougal herself wrote to AMI earlier this month and balked at a request to write a second piece for the month, saying she is only obligated to write one a month. (The contract calls for six columns a month but the understanding is that a single monthly piece would run in six outlets.)

This correspondence would seem to undercut McDougal's argument that AMI wasnt giving her enough exposure under the deal.

As with Stormy Daniels, the lawyers will fight over the fine print and whether both women are flouting non-disclosure agreements that they voluntarily signed.

The question for the court of public opinion is whether Trump and his tabloid ally are trying to suppress both womens stories.

Unlike Bill Clinton, the alleged infidelities occurred back when he was a celebrity businessman, not living in the White House.Conservatives and establishment Republican lawmakers clashed Thursday ahead of a key vote on a massive $1.3 trillion spending bill -- in particular over the funding of President Trumps central campaign promise of a wall on the southern border.

Trump had requested $1.6 billion in funding for the border wall, with additional money for border technology, and appeared to have secured that in the spending bill. But a closer look indicates that it differs from what Trump requested.

The $1.6 billion funding offers:

Some $251 million for 14 miles of secondary fencing along the southwest border in the San Diego Sector.

It also funds $445 million for 25 miles of primary pedestrian levee fencing along the southwest border in the Rio Grande Valley Sector, as well as an additional $196 million for fencing along the same border. White House budget director Mick Mulvaney indicated this would be an additional eight miles, less than the 32 miles the White House requested.

It also gives $445 million for the replacement of existing primary pedestrian fencing along the southwest border.

An additional $38 million is for border barrier planning and design as well as $196 million for acquisition and deployment of border security technology."

Yet even that money comes with strings attached. The omnibus says that the only designs that can be used are those already approved in 2017, such as currently deployed steel bollard designs.

Mulvaney said that in addition to the 63 miles of replacement barriers included, which the White House did not request, they also got more money than requested for technology and facilities. He said the White House was happy with the immigration provisions even as he conceded that they were not able to get everything they wanted.

"We asked for 74 miles worth of wall, we got 100," Mulvaney said. "Not exactly what we wanted, where we wanted. Congress chose to ignore some of the suggestions that [Customs and Border Protection] made on where the best kind of wall should go and that's unfortunate."

The omnibus also does not include the cutting of funding to sanctuary cities, nor does it increase the number of detention beds or ICE deportation agents -- two items that Trump had wanted in.

Both House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., and President Trump said the bill does, in fact, fund the wall. The White House said in a statement Wednesday that it funds "more than 100 miles of new construction for the border wall" while Trump tweeted that it would start the wall and that the rest would be "forthcoming."

The administration asked for 74 miles of border wall funding, we did about 100 in this bill so we actually exceeded what the administration asked for, Ryan said on Fox and Friends on Thursday.

He also played up the technology provisions: "You can't build a wall over a mountain, so you need cameras and you need drones up there, so it's a border wall system that the Border Patrol tells us they need."

He noted that at different parts of the border, different barriers are required, with fencing in some areas and levees in others, and that they had listened to Border Patrol officials about what they needed in different areas.

But conservatives pushed back, saying that the funding for the type of wall that Trump has promised, and previewed this month in California, was non-existent. Critics pushed back not only on the fact that it would be existing models, but also noting that the "100 mile" figure included areas that are being repaired.

"The money they have allocated for additional border security is woefully inadequate," Jessica Vaughan at the Center for Immigration Studies told Fox News. "It appears that Congress is allowing only 33 miles of new barriers, and only using the old-style fencing, not allowing a modern wall construction such as the prototypes that were developed."

"DHS will be able to do more planning, but the new wall project is basically stifled," she added, while also describing the failure to penalize sanctuary cities as "equally concerning."

Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio., offered a list of concerns for the bill, noting its big spending and other features such as a failure to defund Planned Parenthood. But he challenged the narrative on the wall.

The one thing we dont fund is the one issue we all campaigned on -- a border security wall -- and that is not in the legislation, he said. So it cant get any worse than this bill.

The conservative House Freedom Caucus wrote to Trump late Wednesday slamming the bill, also mentioning the border provisions as a key point.

This bill does not provide adequate funding for border security. $1.5 billion will be minimally effective in delivering not just our promise, but your promise, to build a wall and keep our country safe, the letter said.

The American people elected us not to buckle, but to deliver, the letter read.

The narrative was supported somewhat by Democrats, who cheered at the development, with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi hailing the money as a win for Democrats despite their failure to get a DACA fix in the bill.

Democrats won explicit language restricting border construction to the same see-through fencing that was already authorized under current law, she said. The bill does not allow any increase in deportation officers or detention beds.

She added that she was disappointed that they did not reach agreement on DACA.

The House was due to vote on the measure early Thursday afternoon as lawmakers rush to get the bill through Congress before Friday night in order to avoid another government shutdown.

A senior congressional GOP source told Fox News that the White House had proposed $25 billion for the wall in return for a three-year DACA fix, but talks had broken down when Democrats said they wanted citizenship for an expanded DACA population of 1.8 million people.

The source said that Ryan followed up with a second offer that moved toward Democrats by offering an age-in proposal to expand the DACA population. But Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-NY, rejected that offer.

Fox News Chad Pergram and Mike Emanuel contributed to this report.The House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence voted Thursday to release the Republican version of the committees report on its Russia investigation, which found no evidence of collusion, coordination or conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russians.

The report will be released to the public, pending a classification review by the Intelligence Community.

Last January, we set out to investigate Russian active measures during the 2016 election. Today, we are one step closer to delivering answers to the questions the American people have been asking for over a year, Rep. Mike Conaway, R-Texas, who has led the committees probe since last April, said in a statement Thursday.

The committees vote Thursday morning to release the report comes just one week after the Republicans announced the end of their Russia probe and the fact that they found no evidence of collusion, and that they disagreed with the intelligence communitys assessment that Russian President Vladimir Putin had a supposed preference for then-candidate Donald Trump.

TRUMP TOUTS HOUSE INTELL FINDINGS OF 'NO EVIDENCE OF COLLUSION' BETWEEN CAMPAIGN, RUSSIA

The Democrats on the committee, led by Ranking Member Adam Schiff, D-Calif., also released their findings last week, noting that Republicans prematurely shut down the committees Russia probe.

Schiff, following the committees vote to release the Republican report Thursday, called the Russia probe a sad chapter, and called it a completely political document.

But House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., who stepped down from leading the probe in April 2017, invited Democrats on the committee to submit their recommendations to the report.

The report, which will include minority views if the minority submits them, presents the comprehensive results of what the Committee has learned during its fourteen-month-long investigation, and will be useful in thwarting any attempts by Russia or any other foreign powers to further meddle in U.S. elections, Nunes said in a statement Thursday.

The report has a series of findings and recommendations that show a pattern of Russian active measures in the U.S. through cyberattacks and social media to sow discord.

The report states that Russia conducted cyberattacks on U.S. political institutions in 2015 and 2016, and that Russian state actors were responsible for the dissemination of documents and communications stolen from U.S. political organizations.

This poses a serious threat to future U.S. elections, including the primary elections that are already underway, Conaway said. Its critical to release this information now, to protect our country and our elections from foreign interference.

Further, the report goes on to state that the FBIs notification of Russian hacking victims was largely inadequate, that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the Department of Homeland Securitys statements attributing election interference to Russia was ineffective, the Executive Branchs post-election response was insufficient.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation opened an enterprise counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign after receiving information related to Trump campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos, the report read. As part of the enterprise counterintelligence investigation into the Trump campaign, the Federal Bureau of Investigation opened an individual counterintelligence investigation into Carter Page.

Executive Branch officials, at the time, members of the Obama administration, according to the report, did not notify the Trump campaign that members of the campaign were assessed to be potential counterintelligence concerns.

TOP DEM ON HOUSE INTEL COMMITTEE BLASTS REPUBLICANS FOR 'PREMATURELY' SHUTTING DOWN RUSSIA PROBE

The report notes that the now-infamous anti-Trump dossier compiled by British ex-spy Christopher Steele formed an essential part of an application to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to obtain electronic surveillance on Carter Page. The dossier was paid for by the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign as opposition research against Trump.

The committee also noted that Special Counsel Robert Mueller indicted former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort on several charges, but none of which relate to allegations of collusion, coordination, or conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.

The report references the Republican Party platform during the 2016 electionspecifically the change regarding Ukraine, which resulted in a stronger position against Russia, not a weaker one, and noted that there was no evidence that Manafort was involved in that change.

The report outlined that none of the interviewed witnesses provided evidence of collusion, and noted that the Committee found no evidence that President Trumps pre-campaign business dealings formed the basis for collusion during the campaign.

The committees findings state that there is no evidence that Trump associates were involved in the theft or publication of Clinton campaign-related emails, although Trump associates had numerous ill-advised contacts with WikiLeaks.

The Committee found no evidence that meetings between Trump associates including Jeff Sessionsand official representatives of the Russian governmentincluding Ambassador Kislyakreflected collusion, coordination, or conspiracy with the Russian government, the report read.

The report also notes leaks of classified information from the intelligence community, and suggests it damaged national security and potentially endangered lives.

Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, now a CNN national-security analyst, provided inconsistent testimony to the Committee about his contacts with the media, including CNN, the report read.

The majority staff outlined a summary of recommendations for Congress and the executive branch.

But Schiff said Democrats voted against the release of the deeply flawed Republican report, and had submitted several motions for the committee meeting Thursdayall of which were rebuffed by the Majority.

We had motions to hold Mr. [Steve] Bannon in contempt, as well as about a dozen motions to require subpoenas for those who refused to answer questionseither because they had made claims of illusory privilege or they simply made no claim but refused to answer our questions nonetheless, Schiff said in a statement Thursday, noting that Democrats also moved to issue subpoenas for a wide set of documents.

But our work will go on nonetheless. We will be submitting Minority Views. We will also be conducting additional interviews and obtaining additional documents, indeed that work has never stopped. Witnesses have decided to continue cooperating with our committee, even if the Majority will not be participating, Schiff said.

Schiff went on to criticize Republicans for altering key findings in their draft report, saying it shows the fundamental unseriousness of their endeavor.

When you have the opportunity to see their report, you will see just how unserious it is, and of course we intend to hold them to their commitment to releasing all the witness transcripts now that they have said the investigation is over, Schiff said.

The Democrats "Minority View" is expected to be released next Monday.More towns and cities in California are exploring options to follow Los Alamitos in rejecting the states sanctuary law.

Members of the Los Alamitos Council voted Monday to opt out of a state law that limits cooperation between local police and federal immigration agents.

"Tiny Los Alamitos has kicked open the door," state Assemblyman Travis Allen told the Orange County Register, "and now other cities across California are looking to get on board and stand up against the illegal sanctuary state.

The law, signed by Gov. Jerry Brown last year and in effect since Jan. 1, includes prohibiting state and local police agencies from informing federal authorities in cases when illegal immigrants facing deportation are released from detention.

Los Alamitos adopted ordinance claims the new state law may be in direct conflict with federal laws and the Constitution.

The council, therefore, said it finds that it is impossible to honor our oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, if it does not opt out.

SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA TOWN STANDS UP TO STATE, VOTES TO REJECT SANCTUARY LAW

The councils move inspired officials in Orange County and the cities of Aliso Viejo and Buena Park to consider adopting similar measures against Californias sanctuary law.

Orange County Supervisor Michelle Steel said in a statement Tuesday that she plans to present a similar ordinance to the Board of Supervisors.

"I thank the City of Los Alamitos for standing up for its citizens and rejecting the so-called sanctuary' legislation passed in Sacramento, and I urge the County of Orange and all of our cities to do the same," Steel said in the release.

Aliso Viejo Mayor Dave Harrington said his council will discuss similar action next month.

It is a great thing what they did, Harrington told the Orange County Register. I think they were spot-on, that we take the oath of office to uphold the Constitution of the United States.

Buena Park Councilwoman Beth Swift said she will follow the lead as well and will request a discussion on the measure at the next council meeting.

Huntington Beach had been considering opting out of the states sanctuary law even before Los Alamitos' decision, Assemblyman Allen told the publication.

The attempts to rebel against Californias sanctuary law will no doubt pit state and local lawmakers against each other.

Californias Senate leader, Kevin de Leon, who authored the controversial sanctuary law and is aiming for U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein's seat, said the law doesnt violate the Constitution and those councils opting out of it are risking to be sued.

The Los Alamitos Councils symbolic vote in favor of President Trumps racist immigration enforcement policies is disappointing, de Leon told the Ventura County Star.

Local governments that attempt to break state law will saddle their residents with unnecessary and expensive litigation costs.A North Carolina politician has allegedly been misidentifying herself as a nurse online, drawing the ire of the states nursing board earlier this week.

State Rep. Beverly Boswell mislabeled herself as a registered nurse on her campaign website and Facebook page until the North Carolina Nursing Board told her to cut it out after receiving a complaint, Raleighs News & Observer reported Wednesday.

"Working her way up from struggling single mother to registered nurse and Dare County Commissioner, Beverly rejects the liberal notions of victim-hood and government dependency," the Observer reported the Facebook page as saying Tuesday morning.

But the nursing board challenged the lawmaker's claim.

"Rep. Boswell is not a licensed nurse nor has she ever been a licensed nurse," board spokesman David Kalbacker told the paper Tuesday.

The Republican is actually a medical assistant and phlebotomist who is trained to draw blood  a profession that is not regulated by the state and doesnt require a nursing license.

The House health committee member said she was unaware of the mistake until the board contacted her last week, according to the paper. While Boswell corrected her website, she didn't fix her Facebook page until Tuesday, when the board called again.

She told the paper in an interview Tuesday that the Facebook correction fell through the cracks.

Boswell claimed a campaign volunteer had misunderstood her job, going on to call it a non-story and non-issue.

"Anytime you put on a uniform and go in a doctor's office people assume you're a nurse or doctor and you have to correct and correct and correct," Boswell told the paper.

The lawmaker's online presences have since been amended, though it wasnt clear how long they described Boswell as a registered nurse.

Click here for more from the News & Observer.Republican congressional candidate Rick Saccone conceded the special election to Democrat Conor Lamb more than a week after the close election ended.

Lamb, who had already declared victory in the race, revealed Saccones call in a tweet on March 21. Lamb offered congratulations to his opponent for a close, hard-fought race and said he wished him the best.

Lamb won the seat by a margin of about 750 votes. Republicans considered seeking a recount request or a lawsuit to contest the result, even as vote-counting over the past week continued to pad Lamb's lead. But officials said those efforts have been dropped since Saccone conceded.

Ahead of the election, Democrats had hoped to stir up enough enthusiasm  especially among union members  to increase voter turnout and change the party representing a district that has recently been red.

The one fact that has remained the same this year  whether Democrats have won or lost [recent special elections]  is Democrats are doing better in terms of turnout and enthusiasm, Kevan Yenerall, a social sciences professor at Clarion University, told Fox News before the election.

The congressional seat opened after Republican Rep. Tim Murphy, who in public was staunchly anti-abortion, resigned in 2017 amid reports that he asked his mistress to get an abortion when he believed she was pregnant.

Here's a look at the candidates and what is unique about Pennsylvania's 18th district.

Conor Lamb

A Marine Corps captain, Conor Lamb, 33, said on his campaign website the biggest issues facing the 18th congressional district arent partisan.

My only bias is the one they taught us in the Marines: a bias for action, Lamb said on his website.

His congressional to-do list includes: battling the nations heroin epidemic, modern energy development and creating jobs.

In Pennsylvania, Lamb already worked towards ending the growing heroin crisis; as an assistant U.S. attorney, Lamb worked to make the Justice Departments Pittsburgh office a national leader in the fight, according to his campaign website.

Lamb has advocated for new leadership in the House and said he would not vote for Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., as Minority Leader again  a politically astute move that could garner him the support of more moderate or independent voters, said Yenerall.

Most Democrats in the district may not dislike Pelosi, per se, but would like to shake up the status quo, Yenerall explained.

He added that Lambs background as a veteran and U.S. attorney as well as his temperament does fit the district more so than other Democrats have.

Lamb spoke out about gun control in the wake of the Parkland, Fla., high school massacre. He said he doesnt believe additional gun laws are needed to prevent mass shootings.

"The broad agreement already is that we're not doing a good enough job keeping guns out of the hands of people with mental health conditions and with criminals," Lamb said at a campaign event.

He told the Weekly Standard he would not have voted for legislation that would have prohibited abortions after 20 weeks, adding that he doesnt label himself as pro-life because its a political term.

Former Vice President Joe Biden campaigned for Lamb a week ahead of the election, comparing the candidate to his late son Beau and praising him for his dedication to unions.

Lamb will never ever stop, will never ever play a game, Biden said, according to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Thats this guy. This guy gets it.

Rick Saccone

A longtime state representative, Rick Saccone, 60, is a conservative Republican who more embodies the policies of President Trump.

Saccone is more known for his religious conservatism as opposed to Murphy, who is a more mainstream Republican, Robert Speel, an associate professor of political science at Pennsylvania State University in Erie, told Fox News.

He was one of the lawmakers who championed Pennsylvanias Castle Doctrine, or stand your ground law, which allows law-abiding people to protect themselves, their families and others from intruders and attackers without fear of prosecution or civil action for acting in defense of themselves and others.

Saccone also sponsored a bill that would require public school buildings to bear the motto In God We Trust. Additionally, he pushed for a National Fast Day in the state to mirror President Lincolns proclamation of a national day of humiliation, fasting and prayer.

PARTY LEADERS SENDING BIG MONEY, TOP STARS TO RIGHT PENNSYLVANIA HOUSE RACE

Saccone is a retired Air Force officer with vast experience in counter-terrorism efforts, including working on task forces for two Olympic Games, according to his campaign website.

Ive got a resume that my opponent doesnt have, Saccone told Fox News.

Trump often tweeted his support of Saccone, including ahead of a January visit to the Keystone state.

Rick is a great guy. We need more Republicans to continue our already successful agenda, the president said.

Trump again traveled to western Pennsylvania the weekend before the election, urging voters to elect Saccone to advance the White House agenda.

We need our Congressman Saccone, Trump said.

Aside from Trump, Saccone also received support from Vice President Mike Pence and Ivanka, the president's daughter and adviser.

But not all Republicans were happy with Saccone, Politico reported just before the election. Strategists and national GOP officials described Saccone to the publication as deeply underwhelming as a candidate and complained about his fundraising ability. Saccone told Fox News the reported friction was nonsense peddled by his opponents.

Saccone is married with two sons. He studied in Africa, visited 75 countries, authored multiple books on North Korea and earned a Ph.D. in international affairs.

The district

Pennsylvanias 18th congressional district is located in the western part of the state near Pittsburgh. It includes parts of Allegheny, Greene, Washington and Westmoreland Counties and is made up of many rural, blue-collar voters.

There are actually more registered Democrats than Republicans in the district  a result of strong organized labor in the area.

Union workers are a key demographic for the special election, although Trump made inroads with the more than 80,000 members in the district with his candidacy, Yenerall said.

But Saccones anti-union voting record in the state legislature ultimately hurt him.

Due to redistricting in the state, both Lamb and Saccone are expected to run again later this year  in what will now be separate districts.

What shaped the election

Bellwether election: Pennsylvanias 18th district overwhelmingly voted for Trump over Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. The election shaped up as the next test of Democrats enthusiasm and GOP resilience in the Trump era and an early indicator of whether a midterm wave could be coming later this year.

Political activists are certainly looking at this race as an indicator of Pennsylvania and national trends, Speel said.

Lambs win could spell major trouble for Republicans in similar districts across the country, Yenerall said ahead of the election.

Both parties have a great deal at stake here. If a Democrat can win this type of district with the right type of candidate  it would mean the Democrats would do better than expected in the midterms," he had predicted.

Spending: This race was expensive. Lamb raised more than $3.3 million this year, compared to just $703,000 for Saccone, according to FEC records.

Ending Spending Inc., a super PAC founded by billionaire Joe Ricketts, was the first to hit the airwaves with a $1 million ad buy in support of Saccone.

The Congressional Leadership Fund, a super PAC tied to Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan, announced earlier this year that it would open two field offices in the district with 50 full-time canvassers.

In Lambs first television spot, he noted that he has refused corporate PAC money.

Tim Murphy fallout: The reasoning behind Murphys decision to leave office could have an effect on voters, some politicos in the state warned ahead of election night.

Itll be interesting to see if voters turn against the Republican Party, seeing them as hypocritical, Speel said.

Lamb has already painted Republicans as the party of hypocrisy. When he was selected as the Democrats nominee, Lamb said he planned to expose Republicans public hypocrisy fully equal to the private hypocrisy of Tim Murphy, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported in November.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.President Trump signed a memorandum leveling a new round of protective tariffs and investment restrictions against China on Thursday, pushing for a reciprocal trade relationship with the nation.

The president, joined by Vice President Mike Pence, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, and CEO of Lockheed Martin, Marillyn Hewson, announced the measure from the White House.

I view them as a friend, Trump said of China, noting he has tremendous respect for Chinese President Xi Jingping, but he also said the U.S. has the largest deficit of any country in the history of our world.

An administration official told Fox News the tariffs, which could amount to $30 billion or more, are not meant to punish China, but rather designed to recover damages from Chinas unfair trade practices.

The investment restrictions, on the other hand, are meant to blunt Chinas attempts to capture the technology businesses of the future. The official told Fox News that Chinas practices of taking over international technology companies including those in the U.S.distorts markets and destroys the innovation cycle.

It is out of control. We have a tremendous intellectual property theft going on, Trump said, underscoring the unfair trade practices that currently exist with China. Ive spoken to the president, and Ive spoken with representatives of China, and Ive asked them to reduce the trade deficit immediately by $100 billion. We have to do that.

China is strongly disappointed and firmly opposes such an action, the Chinese Embassy in the U.S. responded. China is not afraid of and will not recoil from a trade war. China is confident and capable of facing any challenge. If a trade war were initiated by the U.S., China would fight to the end to defend its own legitimate interests with all necessary measures.

Last August, the president instructed Lighthizer to consider an investigation of Chinese laws, policies and practices that may be harming American intellectual property rights, innovation, or technology development. Lighthizer determined that an investigation was warranted, and it began under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974.

On Thursday, upon the presidents announcement, Lighthizer said technology is the backbone of the future of the American economy.

The president said that he was hoping for a reciprocal relationship with China.

The word that I want to use is reciprocal. When they charge 25 percent for a car to go in, and we charge 2 percent for their car to come into the U.S., thats not good, Trump said. Thats how China rebuilt itself.

The president referenced the steel and aluminum tariffs he leveled earlier this month, but said that every single [country] wants to negotiate.

Maybe in all cases, well end up negotiating a deal. Well see where it takes us, Trump said. Were in the midst of very major and very positive negotiations, positive for the United States and actually very positive for other countries also.

Trump added that countries, smilingly will agree with us.

A little smile on their face. And the smile is, I cant believe weve been able to take advantage of the United States for so long, Trump said. But those days are over.

A USTR official told Fox News that they had given a great deal of thought to how China may react to the tariffs, and what the potential reaction could mean for the U.S.

Its not as simple to say its a simple end game, the official said.

Fox News' Kristin Brown, John Roberts and Jennifer Bowman contributed to this report.Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is out as the nation's top diplomat.

President Trump announced the news in a tweet on the morning of March 13. Mike Pompeo, the current director of the CIA, will take Tillerson's place as secretary of state, he said. Gina Haspel, the current CIA deputy director, will then take over Pompeo's role at the intelligence agency.

"Mike Pompeo, Director of the CIA, will become our new Secretary of State. He will do a fantastic job! Thank you to Rex Tillerson for his service! Gina Haspel will become the new Director of the CIA, and the first woman so chosen. Congratulations to all!" Trump tweeted.

The news broke amid Tillersons contentious relationship with President Trump. In October 2017, NBC News reported that Tillerson allegedly called Trump a "moron," and considered resigning from his position during the summer amid disputes with the White House. And sources told Fox News late last year that Tillerson planned to step down from his position in January 2018, though he did not.

Heres what you need to know about Tillerson's career as secretary of state.

March 22, 2018 -- In a farewell speech to State Department employees, Tillerson highlighted values such as integrity, honesty, respect and accountability. Tillerson, who did not mention President Trump in his speech, also said that Washington, D.C. can be a very mean spirited town.

But you don't have to choose to participate in that, he added. Each of us get to choose the person we want to be, and the way we want to be treated, and the way we will treat others.

March 15, 2018 -- Fox News learned that Tillersons plan, as of now, is to stay at the department until March 22 and then return to Texas. He officially remains secretary of state through the 31st.

March 13, 2018 -- In a tweet, Trump announced that Tillerson was out as secretary of state. He will be replaced by Pompeo, the current director of the CIA, Trump said.

Dec. 4 - Dec. 8, 2017 -- Tillerson embarked on a trip to Europe, which included a number of activities, among them the NATO Foreign Ministers meeting in Brussels, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) Ministerial Council in Vienna and meeting "senior French leaders" in Paris, the State Department said.

Dec. 3, 2017 -- In an interview broadcast on "Fox News Sunday," national security adviser H.R. McMaster said he's "not aware of any plan at all" to replace Tillerson.

"What I'm aware of is that the secretary of state is traveling today to advance and protect our interests, as is our secretary of defense," McMaster said.

Dec. 1, 2017 -- Tillerson attended two meetings at the White House with Trump  one with Libya's visiting prime minister and then a lunch with the president and Defense Secretary James Mattis.

Before those meetings, Tillerson told reporters at the State Department that speculation he was on his way out was "laughable."

"The media has been speculating that I fired Rex Tillerson or that he would be leaving soon - FAKE NEWS!" Trump tweeted that day. "Hes not leaving and while we disagree on certain subjects, (I call the final shots) we work well together and America is highly respected again!"

Nov. 30, 2017 -- Reports said that Tillerson was expected to step down in January.

While meeting with the Crown Prince of Bahrain in the Oval Office Thursday, Trump was asked if he wants Tillerson "on the job."

"He's here," Trump told reporters. "Rex is here."

Nov. 4 - Nov. 16, 2017 -- Tillerson joined the president during his five-nation tour of Asia that included stops in Japan, South Korea, China, Vietnam and the Philippines, the State Department said. Tillerson later visited Burma during his travels.

Oct. 20 - 26, 2017 -- Tillerson took part in the first Coordination Council meeting with the Saudi and Iraqi governments in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, the State Department said. His trip also included stops in Qatar, Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, India and Switzerland.

Oct. 4, 2017 -- It's reported that Tillerson allegedly called Trump a moron after a meeting with cabinet officials on July 20. The comments came after President Trump gave a controversial speech to the Boy Scouts of America in July. Tillerson, who served as the president of the organization from 2010-2012, was reportedly upset over the content of the speech and allegedly threatened to quit.

Trump later labeled the report fake news.

Later that day, Tillerson called a press conference to address the reports, but sidestepped questions about his moron comment.

"I'm not gonna deal with petty stuff like that," Tillerson said at the time. "The places I come from, we don't deal with that kind of petty nonsense. It is intended to do nothing but divide people and I'm not gonna be part of this effort to divide this administration."

He did reaffirm that he was not planning to resign, however.

TILLERSON BLASTS REPORT OF RIFT WITH TRUMP

Oct. 2, 2017 -- Trump appeared to publicly chide Tillerson on his handling of North Korea. At the time, the president said Tillerson was wasting his time trying to negotiate with the rogue country over its missile and nuclear programs.

Sep. 28 - Oct. 1, 2017 -- Tillerson visited China and spoke about topics like trade and the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, according to the State Department.

Sep. 19 - 22, 2017 -- Tillerson had meetings and events in New York.

On the margins of the UN General Assembly, Secretary Tillerson met with a number of his counterparts to discuss a range of bilateral and global issues, the State Department said.

Sep. 13 - 14, 2017 -- Tillerson went to London for meetings on North Korea and Libya that were hosted by the United Kingdom, the State Department said.

Aug. 5 - 9, 2017 -- Tillerson went to several events including the ASEAN Regional Forum and the East Asia Summit Ministerial, in Manila, the State Department said. Tillerson later visited Thailand and Kuala Lumpur.

July 5 - 13, 2017 - Tillerson accompanied Trump to Hamburg, Germany, before going to Ukraine and meeting President Petro Porosheno, the State Department said. Tillerson later made stops in Turkey, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, meeting officials in those countries.

While in Germany, Tillerson was at Trump's meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin on the sidelines of the G-20.

The President opened the meeting with President Putin by raising the concerns of the American people regarding Russian interference in the 2016 election, Tillerson later told reporters.

They had a very robust and lengthy exchange on the subject. The President pressed President Putin on more than one occasion regarding Russian involvement. President Putin denied such involvement, as I think he has in the past.

Tillerson said that Trump and Putin agreed, though, that this is a substantial hindrance in the ability of us to move the Russian-U.S. relationship forward.

June 5 - 6, 2017 -- Tillerson visited Sydney, Australia and Wellington, New Zealand.

May 19 - 25, 2017 -- Tillerson accompanied Trump on his trip to Riyadh, Jerusalem, Rome and Brussels.

May 10 - 11, 2017 -- Tillerson traveled to Fairbanks, Alaska where he attended the 10th Arctic Council Ministerial Meeting, an intergovernmental forum designed to address issues related to the Arctic region. Tillerson attended along with representatives from the eight Arctic States.

April 28, 2017 -- Tillerson visited New York City to chair a special ministerial meeting of the United Nations Security Council.

April 9 - 12, 2017 -- Tillerson traveled to Italy and Russia. In Lucca, Italy, he attended the G-7 Foreign Ministers Meeting. Later in Moscow, Tillerson met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and other Russian officials to discuss Ukraine, counterterrorism efforts and bilateral relations, among other things.

WHO IS REX TILLERSON?

March 30 - 31, 2017 -- Tillerson traveled to Belgium and Turkey. He visited NATO in Brussels after meeting with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and other officials about how to defeat ISIS in Syria and Iraq.

March 15 - 19, 2017 -- The secretary of state traveled to Japan, China and the Republic of Korea. In each country, he met with senior officials to discuss the nuclear and missile threat from North Korea.

He also reaffirmed the United States commitment to further broaden and enhance U.S. economic and security interests in the Asia-Pacific region, according to the State Department.

Feb. 22 - 23, 2017 -- Tillerson traveled to Mexico City to talk border security, law enforcement cooperation and trade with the President of Mexico, Enrique Pena Nieto and other Mexican officials, according to the State Department. He was joined by John Kelly, who was then the U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security.

Feb. 15 - 17, 2017 -- Tillerson traveled to Bonn, Germany to attend the G-20 Foreign Ministers Meeting, marking his first trip as secretary of state.

Feb. 1, 2017 -- The Senate confirmed Tillersons role in a 56-43 vote. A swearing-in ceremony was held in the Oval Office.

This is where you were meant to be, right here, today, at this crossroads in history, Trump told Tillerson.

Jan. 11, 2017 -- During a Senate confirmation hearing, the former Exxon Mobil CEO was grilled mainly by Democrats on everything from climate change, to his business interests, to his stance on Russia and China.

Dec. 13, 2016 -- Trump said he planned to nominate Tillerson for secretary of state, calling him one of the truly great business leaders of the world.

Dec. 6, 2016 -- Tillerson met the president-elect, before meeting him again Dec. 10, the Washington Post reported.

Fox News' Brooke Singman, Rich Edson and The Associated Press contributed to this report.President Trump has promised to crack down on so-called sanctuary cities, signing an executive order in January 2017 that moved to strip federal grant money from towns that harbor illegal immigrants.

A federal judge permanently blocked it in November 2017, saying the Trump administration lacks the authority to impose new conditions on spending that has already been approved by Congress.

But the Justice Department has taken legal action against California, the first sanctuary state. Its designation means the nations most populous state will limit just how much local law enforcement will cooperate with federal immigration authorities.

What are sanctuary cities?

While the exact specifications can vary, sanctuary city policies overall limit how much local law enforcement officials can comply with federal immigration authorities.

San Francisco, for example, passed an ordinance in 1989 that prohibits city employees, funds or resources from assisting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in enforcing federal immigration law unless its required by state or federal law.

It also passed an ordinance that limits when law enforcement officials can give ICE notice that an immigrant has been released from a local jail and prohibits law enforcement officials from cooperating with detainer requests from ICE.

Berkeley, near San Francisco, is reportedly the original sanctuary city. It passed a resolution in 1971 that protected sailors who wanted to resist the Vietnam War.

Its difficult to nail down a concrete number of just how many cities are considered to be a sanctuary for illegal immigrants  some cities have an ordinance or policy in place; others do not.

What about states?

Aside from cities, five states  California, Oregon, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Vermont  have enacted laws that limit how much police can contribute assistance to federal immigration agents, according to The New York Times.

California Gov. Jerry Brown signed the law that went into effect this year designating California as a sanctuary state. The law, in part, bars police from asking people about their immigration status or participating in some federal immigration enforcement activities.

How are they viewed?

The debate about sanctuary cities intensified in July 2015 when Kate Steinle, 32, was killed as she strolled along the San Francisco waterfront with her father. Steinle was shot by a man with a criminal record who had slipped into the U.S. multiple times illegally.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions addressed a roomful of federal prosecutors and law enforcement officials last year and criticized cities, like Philadelphia, that are giving sanctuary to criminals. He asked them to reconsider the harm they are doing to their residents.

And in suing California, Sessions told Fox News that its federal law [that] determines immigration policy.

The state of California is not entitled to block that activity, he said. Somebody needs to stand up and say no, youve gone too far, you cannot do this, this is not reasonable. Its radical, really.

Not every city in The Golden State is on board with the states sanctuary policies, however. The Los Alamitos Council voted to opt out of the sanctuary policies, and other municipalities are reportedly exploring similar options.

But the Immigrant Legal Resource Center (ILRC) argues that local law enforcement jurisdictions do not have a legal obligation to assist with civil immigration enforcement, which is the responsibility of the federal government.

A local decision to offer resources to federal immigration enforcement authorities is completely voluntary, the legal organization said in a 2016 report.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.The White House told Congress Thursday that it plans to approve a $1 billion arms sale to Saudi Arabia, a package that includes about 6,700 U.S.-built anti-tank missiles.

The sale also includes support, maintenance and spare parts for American tanks, helicopters and other equipment already in Saudi Arabia's arsenal. Lawmakers have 30 days to act if they want to try and stop the deal.

The announcement came two days after Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman met with President Trump as the royal started a three-week tour of the U.S.

Earlier Thursday, Defense Secretary Jim Mattis told the prince that Saudi Arabia was "part of the solution" in Yemen, where the Saudis are leading a U.S.-backed military campaign against Houthi rebels that has been heavily criticized for inflicting civilian casualties.

Earlier this week the Senate debated and then shelved a resolution calling for an end to U.S. support for the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen. Mattis had opposed the measure, saying it would be counterproductive by increasing civilian casualties, jeopardizing counterterrorism cooperation and emboldening Iran to increase its support for Houthi rebels.

Mattis said the Saudis had "stood by the United Nations-recognized government, and we are going to end this war. That is the bottom line. And we are going to end it on positive terms for the people of Yemen but also security for the nations in the peninsula."

The Associated Press contributed to this report.President Trump is known for giving his political opponents and critics nicknames, especially on social media.

Read on for a list of Trump's most iconic nicknames.

Wacky Omarosa

Omarosa Manigault-Newman lasted one year in the White House, and her departure has been anything from cordial.

In particular, Manigault-Newman has been under fire from the Trump administration for secretly recording the chief of staff John Kelly in the Situation Room, raising national security concerns. She's since released some of the tapes.

Trump, in a series of tweets, called Manigault-Newman "wacky" and a "lowlife."

"Wacky Omarosa, who got fired 3 times on the Apprentice, now got fired for the last time. She never made it, never will. She begged me for a job, tears in her eyes, I said OK," Trump said. "People in the White House hated her. She was vicious, but not smart. I would rarely see her but heard really bad things."

"Nasty to people & would constantly miss meetings & work. When Gen. Kelly came on board he told me she was a loser & nothing but problems. I told him to try working it out, if possible, because she only said great things about me - until she got fired!" Trump said.

"While I know it's 'not presidential' to take on a lowlife like Omarosa, and while I would rather not be doing so, this is a modern day form of communication and I know the Fake News Media will be working overtime to make even Wacky Omarosa look legitimate as possible. Sorry!" he continued.

Slippery James Comey

Trump dubbed former FBI Director James Comey the "worst" in history while blasting his new tell-all book, "A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies and Leadership." In a series of tweets, Trump also nicknamed the former FBI chief "Slippery James Comey."

Slippery James Comey, a man who always ends up badly and out of whack (he is not smart!), will go down as the WORST FBI Director in history, by far! Trump tweeted.

Trump fired Comey in May 2017, citing the ex-director's handling of the FBIs investigation into Hillary Clintons email practices.

Trump also called Comey a slimeball and suggested the former FBI director deserved jail time for mishandling the Clinton email probe.

Animal Assad

In the aftermath of a suspected chemical attack in Syria, Trump blasted Syrian President Bashar Assad and warned that those responsible would pay a big price. Trump also nicknamed the Syrian president Animal Assad.

Many dead, including women and children, in mindless CHEMICAL attack in Syria. Area of atrocity is in lockdown and encircled by Syrian Army, making it completely inaccessible to outside world, Trump alleged in a tweet. President Putin, Russia and Iran are responsible for backing Animal Assad. Big price to pay. Open area immediately for medical help and verification. Another humanitarian disaster for no reason whatsoever. SICK!

Trump also blamed former President Barack Obamas foreign policy decisions for Animal Assad.

And in a later tweet, Trump warned Russia against shooting down any missiles the U.S. would fire at Syria in retaliation for the purported attack, saying the country shouldnt be partners with a Gas Killing Animal who kills his people and enjoys it!

Little Rocket Man

Trump has never really had kind things to say about North Korea leader Kim Jong Un  referring to him on Twitter as a maniac a whack job" and "rocket man"  which is a President Trump original," White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders told Fox News.

Trump tried out the "rocket man" nickname at the 2017 United Nations General Assembly.

He's also tried out the moniker on Twitter.

"The Chinese Envoy, who just returned from North Korea, seems to have had no impact on Little Rocket Man. Hard to believe his people, and the military, put up with living in such horrible conditions. Russia and China condemned the launch," he tweeted.

In addition, Trump has called the North Korean leader a "sick puppy."

Lamb the Sham

Ahead of a tight special House election in Pennsylvania, Trump visited the Keystone state to stump for Republican Rick Saccone  and hit Democrat Conor Lamb.

Trump accused Lamb of saying nice things in order to get elected in Trump country, but promised those at a rally that the Democrat is not going to vote for us if elected. And the president dubbed the 33-year-old Marine Lamb the Sham.

Lamb the Sham. Lamb the Sham. He is trying to act like a Republican. He won't give me one vote, Trump said.

Trump also said he is better looking than Lamb.

Sloppy Steve

Steve Bannon used to be in the presidents good graces, but the pair has had a very public falling out. Bannon, the former White House chief strategist and ex-Breitbart executive, was quoted in a blistering tell-all book, painting the presidents son in a negative light.

Trump heavily rebuked Bannon in a public statement, saying Bannon lost his mind after he was fired from the White House.

Steve was rarely in a one-on-one meeting with me and only pretends to have had influence to fool a few people with no access and no clue, whom he helped write phony books, Trump said.

Ahead of the release of the controversial book by Michael Wolff, Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House, Trump slammed both the author and Bannon on social media  giving Bannon his nickname.

Look at this guys past and watch what happens to him and Sloppy Steve, Trump warned.

Trump reiterated the Sloppy Steve nickname in other tweets, including one which he praised the Mercer family  wealthy conservative mega-donors  for having dropped the leaker known as Sloppy Steve Bannon.

Pocahontas

The president reused one of his favorite nicknames for Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., while he honored Navajo code talkers at the White House in November. At the event  held to honor the Native Americans who used their native language during World Wars I and II to help the U.S.  Trump mocked Warren as Pocahontas.

Trump has often criticized Warren, specifically over her claim to be of Native American heritage.

Shes got about as much Indian blood as I have. Her whole life was based on a fraud, Trump told The New York Times in May 2016.

Warrens potential Native American heritage was first questioned during her 2012 Senate run.

Trump also calls Warren goofy.

Dicky Durbin

Trump made waves when he referred to Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill., as Dicky Durbin online.

Senator Dicky Durbin totally misrepresented what was said at the DACA meeting. Deals cant get made when there is no trust! Durbin blew DACA and is hurting our military, said Trump in a tweet.

Durbin was part of a group of lawmakers who visited Trump at the White House in January to discuss immigration reform. After reports surfaced that Trump referred to certain nations as s---hole countries at the bilateral meeting, Durbin accused the president of saying things that were hate-filled, vile and racist.

Trump has admitted to using tough language at the meeting but denied certain remarks attributed to him.

Sneaky Dianne Feinstein

A transcript of a Fusion GPS official's August interview with the Senate Judiciary Committee was unilaterally released by the committees ranking member, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.

The release of the bombshell interview drew ire from some Republicans, including the president and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa.

In a tweet following the release, Trump blasted the 84-year-old senator and called her Sneaky Dianne Feinstein.

The fact that Sneaky Dianne Feinstein, who has on numerous occasions stated that collusion between Trump/Russia has not been found, would release testimony in such an underhanded and possibly illegal way, totally without authorization, is a disgrace, Trump tweeted. Must have tough Primary!

Jeff Flakey

Like Trump and Sen. Bob Corker, Trump and Republican Sen. Jeff Flake have been feuding for quite some time. In announcing his retirement from the Senate, Flake slammed both the Republican Party and Trump.

Flake was also caught on a hot mic saying if the GOP becomes the party of Roy Moore and Donald Trump, were toast. That comment gave Trump the opportunity to dub the Arizona senator Jeff Flakey.

Sen. Jeff Flake(y), who is unelectable in the Great State of Arizona (quit race, anemic polls) was caught (purposely) on mike saying bad things about your favorite President. Hell be a NO on tax cuts because his political career anyway is toast, Trump tweeted.

Al 'Frankenstien'

After Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., was accused of kissing and groping Los Angeles radio host Leeann Tweeden during a USO tour in 2006, Trump blasted the lawmaker on Twitter.

"The Al Frankenstien picture is really bad, speaks a thousand words. Where do his hands go in pictures 2, 3, 4, 5 & 6 while she sleeps?" Trump wrote, including an apparent misspelling of "Frankenstein." "And to think that just last week he was lecturing anyone who would listen about sexual harassment and respect for women. Lesley Stahl tape?"

Liddle' Bob Corker

The feud between Trump and Sen. Bob Corker has been going on for some time, but the Tennessee senator finally got a nickname.

The Failing [New York Times] set Liddle Bob Corker up by recording his conversation. Was made to sound a fool, and thats what I am dealing with! Trump tweeted on Oct. 10.

Corker slammed Trump in an interview with the newspaper and said the president is so reckless that he might be on the path to World War III. A transcript from the interview revealed that Corker acknowledged the conversation was on the record.

Wacky Congresswoman Wilson

Trump and Rep. Frederica Wilson, D-Fla., became locked in a public feud involving a Gold Star family  earning the Florida congresswoman her nickname.

The Fake News is going crazy with wacky Congresswoman Wilson (D), who was SECRETELY on a very personal call, and gave a total lie on content! Trump tweeted.

Wilson accused Trump of making insensitive remarks to the pregnant widow of one of the four American soldiers killed during an attack in Niger. The White House, including chief of staff John Kelly, has ardently defended the presidents comments.

Jerry Moonbeam Brown

Trump hasn't seen eye-to-eye with California Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, throughout much of his time in office  but the president was especially critical after Brown pardoned 56 convicted felons, including five ex-convicts facing deportation.

Trump blasted the pardoning on Twitter, calling the governor Jerry Moonbeam Brown.

Is this really what the great people of California want? Trump said.

Trump cant take full credit for Browns nickname. The Moonbeam moniker was given to the governor first in the 1970s by a columnist who said Brown was garnering the "moonbeam vote," or the younger, more idealistic voters in his gubernatorial campaign, according to The New York Times. The nickname continued as Brown pressed for California's space programs.

Crazy Joe Biden

It all started when former Vice President Joe Biden addressed an anti-sexual assault rally in Florida and cited lewd comments Trump made about women in the infamous Access Hollywood tape more than a decade ago.

Biden, who has crusaded against sexual assault and harassment, said, If we were in high school, Id take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him.

A few days later, Trump lashed out on Twitter, nicknaming the former senator Crazy Joe Biden.

Crazy Joe Biden is trying to act like a tough guy. Actually, he is weak, both mentally and physically, and yet he threatens me, for the second time, with physical assault, Trump said on March 22. He doesnt know me, but he would go down fast and hard, crying all the way. Dont threaten people Joe!

In the past, Trump has referred to Biden on social media as our not very bright vice president.

Little Adam Schiff

Trump accused Rep. Adam Schiff of leaking confidential information from closed committee hearings and called for him to be stopped. The president also referred to the Democrat from California as Little Adam Schiff.

Little Adam Schiff, who is desperate to run for higher office, is one of the biggest liars and leakers in Washington, Trump said in a tweet, comparing him to former FBI Director James Comey, former National Intelligence Director James Clapper and former CIA Director John Brennan. Adam leaves closed committee hearings to illegally leak confidential information. Must be stopped!

Schiff is the ranking minority member on the House Intelligence Committee which released a controversial memo that detailed alleged improper surveillance techniques used in the Russia investigation. Schiff was critical of the memos public release  supported by Republicans  calling it misleading and undermining of the probe.

Crooked Hillary

Throughout the presidential campaign, Trump would often hit his opponent, Hillary Clinton, with criticisms on social media. Trump gave her the nickname Crooked Hillary, usually when he mentioned her use of a private email server during her tenure as secretary of state.

The first time Trump tweeted about Crooked Hillary was in April 2016.

Sometimes Trump switched it up and would call the former first lady Lyin Hillary.

Wild Bill Clinton

While criticizing former FBI Director James Comey's memoir, Trump referenced the now-infamous meeting between former President Bill Clinton and Loretta Lynch on a Phoenix airport tarmac in June 2016. The meeting was questioned because the then-attorney general was leading the investigation into Hillary Clintons email scandal.

Comey throws AG Lynch under the bus! Why cant we all find out what happened on the tarmac in the back of the plane with Wild Bill and Lynch? Trump said. Was she promised a Supreme Court seat, or AG, in order to lay off Hillary. No golf and grandkids talk (give us all a break)!

Lynch has said she and Clinton discussed only innocuous things on the tarmac but acknowledged that her speaking to the former president raised concerns in peoples minds about whether or not there was going to be any impact on the email investigation.

Cheatin Obama

Trump praised his own approval ratings on social media  while taking a jab at former President Barack Obama.

The president said the honest polling of Rasmussen shows his approval rating at 50 percent, which is higher than Cheatin Obama at the same time in his Administration.

The April 2 Rasmussen poll showed 50 percent of likely U.S. voters approved of Trump. However, 49 percent disapproved.

Little Marco

The rhetoric among the Republican presidential contenders hit a different kind of low as Florida Sen. Marco Rubio went after Trump for having small hands and Trump started to call the senator Little Marco. The two also discussed the size of Trumps hands  and other things  during a GOP debate in March 2016.

Trump first tweeted the Little Marco nickname in February 2016.

Lyin Ted

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Trump didnt start out as enemies during the 2016 campaign, but the two Republican contenders were soon at each others throats. Trump dubbed Cruz Lyin Ted when he went after him for his immigration policies in a campaign ad in March 2016.

Low Energy Jeb

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush also got a Trump nickname when he was a 2016 Republican presidential contender  Low energy Jeb Bush.

Despite the exclamation point in Bushs campaign logo, Trump started to use the nickname to criticize his opponent during the campaign. Trump told Business Insider that there wasnt a backstory to the nickname, he just seemed like a low energy person to Trump.

1 for 38

When Ohio Gov. John Kasich attempted to team up with Cruz during the Republican primary to deny Trump the partys nomination, Trump took to Twitter to dole out a new nickname. And Kasich became 1 for 38.

Trump assigned Kasich the name because he won only one state in the primary and lost the others, Trump said in a statement in August 2016. Eventually Kasich would also be referred to as 1 for 42 by the eventual president.



Crazy Bernie

Sen. Bernie Sanders, the white-haired Independent socialist who became a progressive icon during the 2016 election, earned himself the nickname Crazy Bernie from Trump.

Trump first tweeted about Crazy Bernie in May 2016 when he criticized Crooked Hillary for looking very bad against Sanders.

Crying Chuck

After Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, N.Y., criticized Trump for firing F.B.I. Director James Comey, Trump hit him right back  with an original nickname.

Cryin Chuck Schumer stated recently, I do not have confidence in him (James Comey) any longer. Then acts so indignant, he tweeted on May 9, 2017.

Schumer shed some tears when he discussed Trumps immigration ban earlier in 2017.

But Schumer wasnt crying after Trump agreed to the Democrats short-term debt-limit increase and Hurricane Harvey aid.

Crazy Jim Acosta

Trump had a surprising tweet of gratitude Tuesday morning for CNNs White House correspondent, Jim Acosta  while also bestowing a nickname on his media adversary.

Even Crazy Jim Acosta of Fake News CNN agrees: Trump World and WH sources dancing in end zone: Trump wins againSchumer and Dems cavedgambled and lost. Thank you for your honesty Jim! Trump tweeted.

Trumps tweet referenced Acostas earlier social media post.

The president and his administration has often slammed Acosta and CNN for coverage they deem unfair  or fake news. Trump has also kicked Acosta out of the Oval Office.

Sleepy Eyes

Trump has thought NBC reporter Chuck Todd has looked sleepy long before the election or campaign. He first dubbed Todd sleepy in a 2001 tweet, but upgraded his nickname to Sleepy Eyes by 2012.

And in 2018, at a campaign rally for a Republican congressional candidate, Trump slammed the NBC anchor as a son of a b-----.

Trump mentioned a 1999 "Meet the Press" appearance when he discussed North Korea.

Its 1999, Im on 'Meet the Press,' a show now headed by sleepy-eyes Chuck Todd, Trump said. Hes a sleeping son of a b----, Ill tell you.

Dumb as a Rock Mika

From writer Toure to National Review, Trump has called many things dumb as a rock. But Mika Brzezinski, co-host of MSNBCs Morning Joe earned the nickname in July after she and Joe Scarborough criticized the president.

Crazy Joe Scarborough and dumb as a rock Mika are not bad people, but their low rated show is dominated by their NBC bosses, he tweeted. Too bad!

His attack on the news anchor continued, as he called her low I.Q. Crazy Mika and said she was bleeding badly from a face-lift when she came to Mar-a-Lago around New Years Eve.

Psycho Joe

In a Twitter rant about his dislike of MSNBCs Morning Joe program, Trump dubbed host Joe Scarborough Psycho Joe.

Crazy Megyn

Trumps comments about then-Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly were often criticized and deemed misogynistic by critics. During their feud, Trump took to calling Kelly Crazy Megyn.

Little Jeff Zucker

Trump criticized CNN in an April tweet  and called its president Little Jeff Zucker.

Check out the fact that you cant get a job at ratings challenged [CNN] unless you state that you are totally anti-Trump, the president alleged on social media. Little Jeff Zucker, whose job is in jeopardy, is not having much fun lately. They should clean up and strengthen CNN and get back to honest reporting.

Fox News' Matt Richardson and The Associated Press contributed to this report.President Trump retained the law firm diGenova & Toensing this week to represent him in Special Counsel Robert Muellers investigation into Russian meddling and potential collusion with Trump campaign associates in the 2016 presidential election, sources told Fox News on Thursday.

Reports this week suggested Joseph diGenova had joined Trumps outside legal team, alongside Jay Sekulow, but a source confirmed to Fox News that his wife and law partner, Victoria Toensing, also would represent the president.

Toensing served as deputy assistant attorney general in the criminal division of the Justice Department under the Reagan administration, and as an assistant U.S. attorney in Detroit. Toensing was chief counsel for then-Sen. Barry Goldwater, who sat as chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

diGenova and Toensing, together, were appointed by the House of Representatives in 1997 as special counsel to investigate the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. The two also were retained to investigate former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer in the Democrat's political surveillance controversy, also known as Troopergate.

There have been concerns of a potential conflict of interest with diGenova and Toensing representing the president in Muellers investigation, after Toensings representation of former key witnesses in the probe.

Recently, Toensing represented Mark Corallo, an ex-spokesman to former Trump attorney Marc Kasowitz, in his interview with the special counsels team. Toensing also represented Sam Clovis, a 2016 Trump campaign associate who supervised George Papadopoulos, in Clovis' Mueller interview. Papadopoulos pleaded guilty last year to making false statements to the FBI as part of the special counsels probe. Toensing also represented Erik Prince, a former informal adviser to Trump, who allegedly attended a meeting in January 2017 with a Russian investor in Seychelles, that Mueller reportedly is investigating.

But Corallo told Fox News on Thursday there was no conflict of interest.

I signed a waiver acknowledging I see no potential conflicts with their representation of the President, Corallo told Fox News in an email on Thursday, explaining it was a standard waiver of potential conflict.

A source close to diGenova and Toensing told Fox News that Corallo, Clovis and the president signed a waiver.

The conflict is owned by the client. The conflict privilege is owned by the client, the source told Fox News. Its the clients who have the privilege to waive. And the president waived it too.

The source told Fox News that when one attorney at a firm is retained, the entire firm is retained, and when one attorney has a conflict, the entire firm as a conflict, pointing to Ted Olson.

If one lawyer has a conflict, they all do. Ted Olson, who wanted to join the team couldnthis law firm represents Fusion GPS, the source said.

Olson, a former solicitor general, was invited to join the presidents legal team but declined, a source with knowledge of the outreach told Fox News. Olson's firm, Gibson Dunn, represents Fusion GPSthe research firm behind the now-infamous anti-Trump dossier.

The news of Toensings addition to Trumps team came after the presidents lead attorney John Dowd resigned, and Trump graciously accepted.

Dowd had voiced strong opposition to the president doing an interview with Mueller.

But on Thursday, when Trump was asked if he wanted to testify before the special counsels team, the president responded, Yes. I would like to. I would like to.

Fox News John Roberts contributed to this report.The Senate passed a $1.3 trillion omnibus spending bill, which is 2,232 pages, with a 65-32 vote just after midnight Friday, making their deadline to avoid a partial government shutdown.

President Trump signed the spending bill Friday despite an earlier threat to veto the legislation.



"800,000 plus DACA recipients have been totally abandoned by the Democrats (not even mentioned in Bill) and the BORDER WALL, which is desperately needed for our National Defense, is not fully funded," the president tweeted Friday morning.

Trump said he had to sign the bill "as a matter of national security."

"There are a lot of things Im unhappy about in this billBut I say to Congress, I will never sign another bill like this again. I'm not going to do it again, he added.

Read on for a look at five things to know about the omnibus bill.

Immigration

President Trump didnt get every penny he wanted for his border security plan, but a solution for those under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program arent going to find reprieve in the bill either.

The bill includes $1.57 billion for barriers along the border. Democrats seemed willing to concede on that funding, but dug in their heels against Trumps plan to hire hundreds of new Border Patrol and immigration enforcement agents.

Gun violence

The bill does include incremental steps to curb gun violence, including the so-called "Fix NICS" measure which would strengthen the background check system.

The measure to fix the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS), would provide additional funding to agencies and states that comply with the system. Those that did not, would be penalized.

More than $2 billion was also allocated to train school officials and law enforcement officers to identify signs of potential violence so they would be able to intervene earlier. This money, to improve school safety, would also be used to install metal detectors.

Gateway project

Despite opposition from Trump, a project to build a new rail tunnel under the Hudson River could get some funding through this bill.

The Gateway project has garnered bipartisan support among many New York and New Jersey lawmakers, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and New Jersey Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen, a Republican who chairs the House Appropriations Committee.

The House spending bill initially allocated $900 million for the project, according to NJ Advance Media. The spending bill removed the earmark that protected funding for the project, but a Schumer aide said it should still get significant funding.

The Gateway Project could receive as much as $540 million, the New York Post reported.

New York and New Jersey have committed to picking up half of the estimated $11 billion cost.

Tax fix

When Republicans pushed their $1.5 trillion tax bill last year, they did so in such a quick manner that it included mistakes. One of those mistakes was language that accidentally gave farmers a higher tax advantage if they sold crops to cooperatives as opposed to other buyers.

The spending bill fixed some of these mistakes. Democrats were able to get on board with the fix in exchange for expanded tax credits for low-income housing.

Johnson Amendment

The spending bill leaves out two provisions included in a previous House plan that would dismantle the Johnson Amendment, the 1954 tax law that prohibits charitable, philanthropic and religious organizations from partisan politicking.

Trump signed an executive order in May 2017 aimed at weakening the law.

Fox News' Samuel Chamberlain and The Associated Press contributed to this report.Gen. Herbert Raymond H.R. McMaster can now add former national security adviser to a long list of positions he's held over the years. President Trump confirmed in a March 22 tweet that McMaster will be replaced by former U.N. ambassador John Bolton.

Trump congratulated McMaster on an "outstanding job," adding that he will "always remain [a] friend."

Bolton will officially replace McMaster on April 9.

"There will be an official contact handover [at that time]," Trump added.

McMaster thanked the president for giving him the opportunity to hold the position and said he was especially proud to have served with National Security Council staff.

"I am grateful for the friendship and support of the members of the National Security Council who worked together to provide the President with the best options to protect and advance our national interests," McMaster said in a statement. I know that these patriots will continue to serve our President and our nation with distinction."

McMaster was appointed national security adviser on February 20, 2017.

He replaced Michael Flynn, who resigned over revelations he misled the administration about his communications with a Russian official. Flynn is one of several individuals charged in Special Counsel Robert Muellers Russia investigation.

General McMaster has served with distinction in the United States Army for over three decades and will now bring that tremendous experience to his new post as my National Security Advisor, Trump said in a statement at the time. My first duty as President is to keep the American people safe. General McMaster has the knowledge and foresight necessary to provide me with expert advice as we work to protect Americas interests at home and abroad.

Earlier this month, reports swirled that Trump was going to remove McMaster from his post  a move the White House denied at the time.

"Just spoke to [Trump] and Gen. H.R. McMaster - contrary to reports they have a good working relationship and there are no changes at the NSC," White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders tweeted on March 15.

Here are three things to know about McMaster.

McMaster is a highly decorated military officer

McMaster, 55, served in the U.S. Army for more than three decades, earning numerous medals and honors, including a Purple Heart and the Silver Star for his heroism during the Gulf War  particularly during the Battle of 73 Easting.

It was during that incident  a Desert Storm tank fight in 1991  that then-Captain McMasters group of only nine tanks took on  and destroyed  more than 80 Iraqi tanks and a variety of other vehicles, according to Times profile of McMaster when he was named one of the magazines 100 Most Influential People. His troop did not lose one tank.

In a 2016 essay about the battle, McMaster described the furious action that lasted 23 minutes. He said his troop stopped when there was nothing left to shoot.

Although future battles will likely be fought against more capable enemies and under more challenging and complex conditions, there are lessons from battlefield victories twenty-five years ago that remain relevant to combat readiness today and in the future, McMaster wrote. Well-trained, confident platoons and companies provide the foundation for our Armys and Joint Forces ability to fight.

Aside from serving as captain in the Gulf War, McMaster also had pivotal roles in Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom, the White House noted.

His college thesis was turned into a book

McMasters Dereliction of Duty, published in 1998, was based on research he used for his doctoral dissertation when he studied military history at the University of North Carolina, the Raleigh News & Observer reported.

The book is a stunning analysis of how and why the United States became involved in an all-out and disastrous war in Vietnam, publisher HarperCollins described. McMaster studied, in particular, the role the Joint Chiefs of Staff played in the war.

United Press International war correspondent Joseph Galloway told Politico Magazine McMaster had consulted him on turning the dissertation into a book. Galloway said he was concerned about the impact the book  along with its critiques of the leadership during the war  would have on McMasters military career.

So he writes the book while teaching a full load at West Point, staying up until 2 a.m. every night writing, and the book turned out perfect, Galloway said.

Known for his vehement outspokenness, its McMasters own penchant for candidness that could have thrown a wrench into his career.

McMaster was passed over for a promotion to a one-star brigadier general twice, according to Politico Magazine. He was finally promoted by a panel led by retired Gen. David Petraeus  someone who the Washington Post noted was one of his advocates.

He was the subject of a Tom Clancy book

McMasters insight was included in Tom Clancys non-fiction book, The Armored Cav. The book gave a penetrating look inside an armored cavalry regiment  the technology, the strategies, and the people, according to publisher Penguin Random House.

In his book, McMaster detailed to Clancy the Battle of 73 Easting. He also revealed that he met his wife, Kathleen Trotter McMaster, when he played for West Points rugby team.As White House counselor to President Trump, Kellyanne Conway is one of the more senior females in the administration.

A veteran pollster, Conway, 53, became Trumps campaign manager just a few months shy of the election. And in obtaining that job, the mom of four became the first woman to successfully manage a presidential campaign.

Read on for a look at five things to know about Conway.

Shes the first woman to successfully manage a presidential campaign

At 49 years old, Conway became the first woman to manage a successful presidential campaign.

She was named Trumps campaign manager in August 2016 after the resignation of Paul Manafort. Upon taking over the campaign, Conway kept Trump  a bombastic candidate  in line, the Washington Examiner reported. That role included monitoring just what, and how often, Trump tweeted.

Conway was raised by women

After her parents divorced when she was just 2, Conway was raised by her single mother, she said in a 2017 Cosmopolitan profile.

Shes called her upbringing a South Jerseys version of The Golden Girls, including during a speech at the Conservative Political Action Committee, as her grandmother and two aunts also helped to raise her.

I was raised to be a very strong and independent woman without anybody ever saying the word feminist or having any political conversation, she said in the 2017 speech, according to transcripts.

She worked to elect another GOP candidate in 2016, too

Trump hired Conway in July 2016  but he wasnt the first Republican presidential candidate in 2016 that she worked for.

Prior to Trumps campaign, Conway led the large Keep the Promise I super PAC that supported Texas Sen. Ted Cruzs presidential bid. The PAC ran anti-Trump campaign ads.

Along with the PAC, Conway was also critical of Trump prior to joining his campaign. She referred to him as a bully who was winning the primary based on being offensive in a 2016 interview with Roll Call.

Her firm, The Polling Company, was bought by CRC Public Relations in 2017.

Conway had her own "Me Too" moment

While speaking at Politicos Women Rule Summit in December 2017, Conway said that yes, of course, she experienced instances of sexual harassment in what has been known as the nationwide Me Too movement.

She recalled an interview she did during the presidential campaign with MSNBC in which she accused several lawmakers of harassment.

I would talk to some of the members of Congress there when I was younger and prettier, them rubbing against girls, sticking their tongues down women's throats who were uninvited, didn't like it, she said then, adding that some of those lawmakers were not Trump supporters.

Conway did not specifically name any of the lawmakers.

During the Politico event, Conway alleged that nobody cared about what she said more than a year prior because she is a conservative.

Conway also told Cosmopolitan that she faced sexism and sexual harassment when she went into political consulting work after college, especially when she launched her firm, The Polling Company, when she was 28.

I encountered all kinds of sexism, Conway told the magazine. The most extreme examples were unwanted sexual advances. Always by older men, often in positions of power, with some fancy title before their name and an R or a D after it.

Conway said she didnt report instances of sexual harassment then because it was taboo during that time. She said women would often just pretend it didnt happen, that it was your fault or that it would never happen again.

Shes been harshly criticized for televised gaffes while defending the president

From alternative facts to violating the Hatch Act, Conway has often been criticized for how shes defended the president.

Conway uttered the phrase alternative facts  which became one of 2017s most notable quotes  during an interview with NBCs Meet the Press defending then-press secretary Sean Spicer. Spicer had mischaracterized the size of Trumps inauguration crowd to reporters.

She also drew scrutiny after she promoted Ivanka Trumps Nordstrom products in an interview with Fox & Friends. After, Spicer said Conway had been counseled on the matter.

A federal watchdog group also found that she violated the Hatch Act, a federal law that bars government officials from using their positions to influence political campaigns.

The Office of Special Counsel said Conway violated the law twice last year when she spoke about U.S. Senate candidates Roy Moore and Doug Jones during television interviews.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.Rex Tillerson is out as secretary of state, the White House announced on March 13 as he came back to the U.S. from a trip to Africa.

Tillerson will be replaced as the nations top diplomat by CIA Director Mike Pompeo.

Rumors that Tillerson would be out as secretary of state have been circling for quite some time, and he was expected to step down from the position in January.

Tillerson told reporters that his last day will be March 31. Until then, he will delegate all of his responsibilities to the deputy secretary of state.

In leaving, Tillerson lamented that Washington, D.C., can be a "very mean-spirited town." He told the State Department employees that "personal integrity" is the "most valuable asset you posses."

Heres a look at who Tillerson is and what he did before joining the ever-evolving Trump administration.

Who is Rex Tillerson?

Tillerson, 65, grew up in Texas and Oklahoma. He graduated from the University of Texas at Austin, where he earned a bachelor of science degree in civil engineering.

Tillerson is also known for his involvement with the Boy Scouts of America. He served as the organization's national president from 2010 to 2012.

Following the oft-criticized speech Trump gave to the Boy Scouts in 2017, Tillerson reportedly threatened to resign from the State Department.

What about his resume?

Prior to becoming secretary of state, Tillerson did not have any experience in the public sector.

Tillerson was the chairman and CEO of ExxonMobil until 2016. He served in that role starting in 2006, but he actually joined the company in 1975 as a production engineer, according to an archived version of his Exxon biography.

What has he done as secretary of state?

Tillersons tenure as secretary of state was fairly contentious with Trump. He reportedly called Trump a moron in front of other Cabinet officials in July 2017. Following reports of the remark, Tillerson gave an unusual personal address and reassured people he was not quitting.

As secretary of state, Tillerson traveled extensively  visiting Australia, Europe, Mexico and Africa, among other places. He assumed the position of secretary of state on Feb. 1.

Tillersons ties to Russia have also been scrutinized  a criticism that has plagued many Trump administration officials as investigators continue to look into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

Tillerson was named vice president of Exxon Ventures (CIS) Inc., and president of Exxon Neftegas Limited in 1998. In those roles, Tillerson was tasked with overseeing Exxons holdings in Russia and the Caspian Sea, his Exxon biography stated. He met with Russian President Vladimir Putin multiple times before becoming secretary of state.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.Operation HAMMER may sound like the villain's master scheme from a Roger Moore-era James Bond film, but it's actually NASA's plan to deal with asteroids threatening the Earthsuch as one the size of the Empire State Building that could crash into the planet in 2135, Staten Island Live reports.

NASA says the asteroid, known as Bennu, has a one in 2,700or 0.037%chance of striking Earth in September of that year. While that's not a very good chancePlease dont print that an asteroid is going to crash into Earth," a NASA aerospace engineer tells the Washington Postthat hasn't stopped NASA from putting together a contingency plan: Hypervelocity Asteroid Mitigation Mission for Emergency Response. Details of operation HAMMER were revealed in a recent study by NASA and the National Nuclear Security Administration published in Acta Astronautica. One possibility is sending a 9-ton spacecraft to smash into Bennu, redirecting it out of Earth's orbit. A more likely possibility sees NASA detonating a nuclear device on Bennu, Armageddon-style. However, there's no current plan for HAMMER to become a reality. "We're doing these design studies to prepare ourselves, so if we do find a threatening object, we're better prepared to deal with it," the aerospace engineer tells the Post. But Gizmodo reports there could be an easier way to deal with Bennu: splash part of it with solar radiation-absorbing paint. A NASA spacecraft is currently on year two of its journey to collect a sample from Bennu.

This article originally appeared on Newser: NASA May Go Armageddon on AsteroidArchaeologists in South Africa have located the site of a centuries-old lost city using sophisticated laser technology.

Local landowners had known about ruins at Suikerbosrand near Johannesburg for generations, according to Karim Sadr, professor at the School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies at the University of the Witwatersrand. Archaeologists from my University dug several of the homesteads there in the 1970s and 1980s, he told Fox News, via email. But no one ever saw the ruins as anything more than a scatter of homesteads, a few villages dispersed here and there.

Sadr, who has visited the area multiple times in the past three decades, explained that he used LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) technology to reveal the citys secrets. The in-depth aerial images tell a fascinating story of the archaeological site, which is known as 'SKBR.'

MYSTERIOUS LOST MAYA CITIES DISCOVERED IN GUATEMALAN JUNGLE

It is only when I obtained LiDAR imagery for about 20 square kilometres (7.72 square miles) of the western foothills and had examined it in minute detail that I started to see the aspects of the built environment that are largely invisible from the ground and on air photos because of the vegetation cover, he said. A host of stone structures showed up on the images.

LiDAR uses a laser to measure distances to the Earths surface and can prove extremely valuable to study what is hidden in areas with thick vegetation. LiDAR is also used extensively in other applications, including autonomous cars where it allows vehicles to have a continuous 360 degrees view.

Sadr commissioned a LiDAR aerial survey of the first 10 square kilometres in late 2014 and the remainder the following year. It was only in 2016 after poring over all of that detailed imagery that I eventually realized that the homesteads are not a scatter of villages but parts of one entity; a city, rather than a dispersion of homesteads, he told Fox News.

SPY SATELLITES, DRONES, HELP EXPERTS DISCOVER LOST CITY IN IRAQ FOUNDED AFTER ALEXANDER THE GREAT

The Conversation reports that the city was occupied by speakers of the Tswana language from the 15th century until about 200 years ago. Other Tswana cities were known to exist in the region, but not in that specific area. The Tswana city-states collapsed as a result of early 19th-century civil war, according to The Conversation.

It is significant because we did not know that there was a Tswana city this far east of the group that had already been visited by the European travellers at the beginning of the 19th century; so we have extended the range of this archaeological culture and its city-states, said Sadr.

SKBR covered an area of about 6.2 miles from north to south and was about 1.2 miles to 2 miles wide. I have counted about 800 homesteads in this area and there are probably more, but it is difficult to say how many people occupied the city at any time, since not all the homesteads would have been occupied concurrently and some may have contained many more people than others, Sadr said. My guess is that the city never had more than 10,000 people at any one time, but that is just an educated guess.

'LOST CITY' DISCOVERY: KANSAS SITE SHEDS NEW LIGHT ON NATIVE AMERICAN HISTORY

While more LiDAR coverage of SKBR is planned, archaeologists are also preparing to examine the site up close. LiDAR cannot show everything and many of the parts of the city need to investigated on the ground from up close, said Sadr, noting that this research can form the basis of students theses. Eventually we will want to excavate some parts of the site and since the deposits are not generally deep, not a lot of earth has to be moved.

Beyond SKBR, there are also questions about the spatial limits of this city-state, its boundaries, outpost, neighbours, external trade connections and such that need to be answered, he added. And eventually, the big question to answer is why did the Tswana decide to become an urban population around a quarter of a millennium ago?

Follow James Rogers on Twitter @jamesjrogersIf you're experiencing a spell of bad luck, many people may ask you the same question: is Mercury in retrograde? Astrologists believe the planet is to blame for bringing periods of misfortune down to Earth  and it's happening again on Friday.

Mercury is expected to enter retrograde, appearing to turn the opposite direction in relation to other planets within its solar system, for the second time in 2018 on Friday. It will remain in that position until Dec. 6.

"Normally, the planets move west-to-east through the stars at night. This is referred to as prograde motion," a blog post by NASA's Astrophysics Science Division (ASD) explains. "However, periodically the motion changes and they move east-to-west through the stars. We call this retrograde motion."

MYSTERIOUS 'CREATURE' SPOTTED IN JUPITER'S CLOUDS STUNS NASA, SPACE ENTHUSIASTS

When planets go through retrograde, they just appear to be moving in the opposite direction when we look up at the sky from Earth.

"It is not REAL in that the planet does not physically start moving backward in its orbit," ASD clarifies. "It just appears to do so because of the relative positions of the planet and Earth and how they are moving around the Sun."

From our point of view, it looks like the planet is making a giant "loop-di-loop or squiggle" in the sky, The Washington Post described in a post last spring.

Since Mercury is the closest planet to the sun, it circles the big star in the center of the solar system faster than any other planet  "every 88 Earth days, traveling through space at nearly 112,000 mph," according to Space.com.

MARS CURIOUSITY ROVER'S SURPRISING FINDS FROM THE RED PLANET THROUGH THE YEARS

Therefore, Mercury tends to undergo this effect more frequently than its neighbors, about every four months. And every time it does, astrologers warn people to prepare themselves for weeks' worth of bad first dates, work frustrations and a variety of other problems.

Some believe the idea of the planet turning back represents a suggestion that people should reflect back on their lives. Thus, it's a bad idea to start anything new  relationships, projects, etc.  until Mercury is officially out of retrograde, astrology believers say.

The superstition has grown over the years. Someone even created a website called ismercuryinretrograde.com to track the astrological event and provide an explanation as to why something is "bumming you out."

Astronomers, on the other hand, have repeatedly rejected the theory that Mercury has any impact on your mood or outcome of your day.

"The idea that the gravity from these very distant bodies affects our lives in some way just doesn't work in the framework of physics," Jean-Luc Margot, a planetary astronomer and professor at UCLA, told LiveScience back in 2016.

Columbia University astronomy professor David Helfand agreed, emphasizing that the event is simply an illusion and doesn't have any deeper meaning.

Magical thinking isnt going to solve [our problems], he told the New York Post in 2015. Astrology has no physical mechanism to explain any physical effect. It doesnt need to explain anything.

Many people want to point blame at someone  or something  but whether Mercury is in retrograde or not, you're ultimately responsible for your own actions and life, Helfand added.California residents, brace yourselves: an atmospheric river could continue to bring rain to multiple parts of the state this week.

Read on for a look at the meteorological phenomenon -- and what to expect from the storm.

"Rivers in the sky"

An atmospheric river is a huge plume of subtropical moisture.

Atmospheric rivers are relatively long, narrow regions in the atmosphere  like rivers in the sky  that transport most of the water vapor outside of the tropics, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) says.

When the atmospheric rivers make landfall, they often release this water vapor in the form of rain or snow, according to the agency.

They may also bring severe precipitation and destruction, though most are weak systems that often provide beneficial rain or snow that is crucial to the water supply.

The NOAA says atmospheric rivers are typically 250 to 375 miles in width.

CALIFORNIA MUDSLIDES: WHERE AND WHY THEY HAPPEN

Whats going on with California?

The storm continued to spread rain March 22, swelling rivers, flooding streets and causing some mud and rockslides -- but so far sparing communities a repeat of the disastrous debris flows that hit during a downpour in early 2018.

The National Weather Service (NWS) issued flood warnings along foothills on the western flank of the Sierra Nevada and there were numerous reports of street flooding in Central Valley cities including Fresno and Clovis.

Santa Barbara County tweeted that mandatory evacuation orders would be lifted at 5 p.m.

In Los Angeles County, authorities canceled some planned mandatory evacuations because of a projected decrease in rainfall but kept others in place because of debris flows in one canyon area stripped bare by wildfires.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.A former contractor for scandal-hit political consulting company Cambridge Analytica said Wednesday that he intended to testify before Congress about the work he did for the company that aided Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential campaign.

Chris Wylie tweeted that he would appear before the House Intelligence Committee and House Judiciary Committee, as well as the British Parliaments Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee.

Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, had invited Wylie to appear for an interview earlier this week.

Wylie, a 28-year-old Canadian, is at the center of allegations that Cambridge Analytica improperly used data from more than 50 million Facebook users to identify voters who might be sympathetic to Trumps message, and target them with social media messages. The allegations were first reported by The New York Times and The Guardian newspaper based in the U.K.

On Friday, Facebook announced it had suspended Wylie and Cambridge Analytica, while it investigated the allegations.

In a public talk in London Tuesday night, Wylie detailed his work for Cambridge Analytica and Steve Bannon, who later became the Trump campaigns chief strategist.

Between 2013 and 2015, Wylie claimed, he and his team spoke to Americans in focus groups to identify deep-seated concerns. Then they tested ways to tap into those fears through social media. The slogans they developed later became the catchphrases of the Trump campaign, he says.

My ears perked up when I started hearing some of these things like drain the swamp or build the wall or the deep state, Wylie said Tuesday, because these were all narratives that had come out from the research that we were doing.

Wylie said Facebook data collected by a Cambridge University researcher was used as part of a project commissioned by Cambridge Analytica. The firm says none of the Facebook data was used in the work it did for the Trump campaign.

Wylie described the work as a mix of old-fashioned canvassing and the use of millions of data points to test out slogans and push them onto social media.

We would just go chat with people. We would go sit in their living rooms. We would look at how they live, said Wylie, who later added, "One of the things that started to emerge was that we literally heard these sort of narratives about Washington as something that was, like, gross and disgusting, that was dirty."

So his team tested the phrase drain that swamp to see if people would respond to it on social media. After all, they had access to the data of millions of Facebook users without their knowledge.

And people responded. Through the Internet and Trumps speeches, the slogan became one of the campaigns most identifiable soundbites.

Wylie also described Bannon as obsessed with the idea of separating the U.S. from the rest of the world so the country can rediscover itself.

Trumps campaign for a wall along the Mexican border is not really about stopping immigrants, Wylie said.

Its to embody separation, he said. If you can embody that separation and you can further distance in the minds of Americans, us here in America, and them elsewhere, even if it is just across a river, or just across a desert, then you have won that culture war.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.Darieth Chisolm was moving on from a year-long relationship when she got a chilling message from her ex last year.

He said to me: I will shoot you in your head and stab you in your heart if I dont come back to the relationship. And if he wouldnt do it he would find someone that would, Chisolm, the founder of 50 Shades of Silence, told Fox News.

His threats didnt end there, she said. Chisolm, a former news anchor, became the latest victim of revenge porn. Within weeks, he began texting her lewd photos and videos he had taken of her while she was asleep. He threatened to make them public  and then followed through on his threats, creating a website full of naked images of her.

She grew frustrated because, for months, there was nothing she could do about it. A new app and search engine aims to help women like Chisolm by helping them find all their images on the web  and, in some instances, helping them pull them from the Internet.

The quicker you can get the photos, the content, the harassing memes, whatever it is removed, Chisolm said, obviously, it can spread quickly so you want to move.

The app, FacePinPoint, launched three months ago and claims to be the first of its kind. It uses facial recognition technology to track down a victims intimate photos and videos online.

Chisolm said the site, which she did not use but endorses, is designed to give a voice to victims of cyber harassment and other online crimes. And, she added, it helps victims trace content they may not know existed.

With his app, at least with this facial recognition for some people, particularly those whose content has been imported on to a porn website, youre able to use his app and hone in and hopefully track it down and possibly get it removed, Chisolm said.

In Chisolms case, she said she reached out to GoDaddy.com, the webhosting company where the images were displayed, but the company said she had to get a court order to have them removed. Months later, she is still in court.

"If we can independently confirm a violation of our terms of service we will take action," Godaddy.com representative Nick Fully told Fox News. "However, this is not often the case, such that we rely on due process afforded by the courts to dictate the appropriate course of action."

She now travels the world giving speeches and helping other victims of revenge porn through her site, 50ShadesofSilence.com.

Many sites require the original photo in order to have it removed, making it difficult for victims to have them removed if they did not take or have access to the photo. FacePinPoint uses a profile picture that clearly shows the victims face to find the explicit content.

FacePinPoint is the best insurance to make sure your content is not online and if it is online, then youre going to find it before someone that you know is going to use that to jeopardize your reputation, FacePinPoint Founder Lionel Hagege told Fox News.

Once the user's identity has been confirmed  using photos and metrics  the website uses facial recognition to search for inappropriate images.

When we find those naked pictures, we store the face, Hagege said. We store them in our database and after, as a user, you just have to visit FacePinPoint.com.

Hagege says facial recognition is very accurate unless there is excessive weight gain or loss.

We measure the distance between your eyes, your nose, your forehead, everything. So, basically we not looking for your face, we are looking for the measures of your face, Hagege said. if its like a couple pounds it will work fine.

Hagege says if there is a match, the customer will get results in their user interface and a link where they can locate the photos online.

But experts question how effective these types of technology will be given that many of these revenge porn photos are posted in subscription sites  which are difficult to track down.

Facebook is developing its own revenge porn service, which is now being tested in Australia. Google Image Search could also be used.

Archie Agarwal, CEO of ThreatModeler, a cybersecurity firm, said regardless, finding the images is easy  it's taking them down from the web that is difficult.

In my opinion, this type of service may not be worth using because it is unclear how accurate it will be and in the end, its not finding the images that is the problem, its getting the sites to take them down, Agarwal said.

FacePinPoint does provide a network of pro-bono lawyers and psychologists, but only in five states. They are hoping to extend this service to the one in 25 Americans who are victims of revenge porn across the US by the end of 2018.

They need to be heard, Hagege said. They need to get the justice they deserve.The City of Atlanta has been targeted in a ransomware attack that has impacted a number of its systems.

The City of Atlanta is currently experiencing outages on various internal and customer facing applications, including some applications that customers use to pay bills or access court-related information, a spokesperson for the city explained, in a statement emailed to Fox News.

The outage, which included the encryption of some city data, did not affect the public safety department, water department or Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, Chief Operating Officer Richard Cox said.

But some applications that people use to pay bills or access court information were affected. Cox said an investigation would determine whether any personal information has been compromised.

The attack was discovered by the city's information security team, which noticed something that looked peculiar on the server and began investigating, acting Chief Information Officer Daphne Rackley said.

Atlantas Information Management team is working with Microsoft to resolve the issue, according to the city. We are confident that our team of technology professionals will be able to restore applications soon, it added. Our City website, Atlantaga.gov, remains accessible and we will provide updates as we receive them.

SCARY RANSOMWARE ATTACKS FAMOUS NORTH CAROLINA COUNTY

Citing a screenshot taken by a city employee, WXIA reported that that hackers were demanding $51,000 in bitcoin. The cryptocurrency is popular with hackers because it is hard to trace.

The FBI is working with the city to determine what happened in the attack.

Last year, a major ransomware attack forced the shutdown of a host of IT systems at Mecklenburg County, North Carolina.

HACKER TARGETS SACRAMENTO REGIONAL TRANSIT, DELETES 30 MILLION FILES IN RANSOMWARE ATTACK

Also in 2017, a hacker targeted Sacramento Regional Transit, deleting 30 million files in a ransomware attack. Officials worked to restore the data from backup files.

In 2016, a Los Angeles hospital paid a ransom of nearly $17,000 in bitcoins to hackers who infiltrated and disabled its computer network.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Follow James Rogers on Twitter @jamesjrogersFacebook has denied a claim that it displayed favoritism toward Barack Obamas 2012 presidential election campaign.

With controversy raging over Cambridge Analyticas alleged misuse of Facebooks data, other groups historic use of the social network have also been thrust into the spotlight.

Earlier this week, Carol Davidsen, the former director of integration and media analytics at Obama for America (OFA), tweeted that the 2012 campaign was able to suck out Facebooks social graph that maps users connections. Using Facebooks Application Programming Interface (API), this let the campaign access information on users friends when they used the Facebook log-in button to access the campaigns website, according to the Washington Post.

MARK ZUCKERBERG APOLOGIZES FOR FACEBOOK DATA SCANDAL, 'MAJOR BREACH OF TRUST'

They came to office in the days following election recruiting & were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldnt have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side, Davidsen added, in a subsequent tweet.

Facebook shot back that both Obama and his Republican rival Mitt Romney had access to the same Facebook resources in 2012. The tweet is inaccurate  both the Obama and Romney campaigns had access to the same tools, and no campaign received any special treatment from Facebook, it explained, in a statement emailed to Fox News on Wednesday.

Davidsen tweeted this week that, while the Obama campaign played by the rules in its use of the data, she still felt uncomfortable. I worked on all of the data integration projects at OFA. This was the only one that felt creepy, even though we played by the rules, and didnt do anything I felt was ugly, with the data.

The former Obama campaign official also tweeted that she is 100% positive that Facebook also recruits people from the other end of the political spectrum.

At least one conservative commentator has accused sections of the media of double standards after lauding the Obama campaigns use of data mining, compared with their coverage of the Trump campaigns data mining in 2016.

However, Jim Messina, Obamas 2012 campaign manager, tweeted Tuesday that comparisons between Obamas 2012 use of Facebook data and the current Cambridge Analytica data scandal are wide of the mark. The '12 campaign told voters what they were sharing and for what purpose. Conflating these two cases is misleading, he wrote.

Reports emerged over the weekend that Cambridge Analytica improperly used information from more than 50 million Facebook accounts, prompting the social network to suspend the U.K.-based company. Cambridge Analytica, which has ties to Donald Trumps 2016 presidential election campaign, denies any wrongdoing.

CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA WHISTLEBLOWER SAYS HE'LL TELL LAWMAKERS ABOUT WORK THAT HELPED TRUMP CAMPAIGN

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg apologized for the data scandal in a lengthy post Wednesday. He also described the situation as a major breach of trust" in an interview with CNN.

In 2013, a Cambridge University researcher named Aleksandr Kogan created a personality quiz app, he explained, in his blog post. It was installed by around 300,000 people who shared their data as well as some of their friends' data. Given the way our platform worked at the time this meant Kogan was able to access tens of millions of their friends' data.

Zuckerberg added that, in 2015, Facebook learned from The Guardian that Kogan had shared data from his app with Cambridge Analytica. It is against our policies for developers to share data without people's consent, so we immediately banned Kogan's app from our platform, and demanded that Kogan and Cambridge Analytica formally certify that they had deleted all improperly acquired data, he wrote. They provided these certifications.

The Facebook chief added that, last week, the company learned from The Guardian, The New York Times and Channel 4 that Cambridge Analytica may not have deleted the data as they had certified. Cambridge Analytica, he added, claims they have already deleted the data and has agreed to a forensic audit by a firm hired by Facebook.

Facebook tightened its data policy in 2014, according to Zuckerberg. The social network is also launching an investigation into all apps that had access to large volumes of data prior to that time and, moving forward, will also restrict developers data access. For example, we will remove developers' access to your data if you haven't used their app in 3 months, he wrote.

FACEBOOK ALTERNATIVES: ARE THERE SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS THAT DON'T COLLECT AND SELL YOUR DATA?

Cambridge Analytica, which describes itself as a data-driven communications and marketing agency, denies any wrongdoing.

Kogan, a psychology researcher at Cambridge University, told the BBC that both Facebook and Cambridge Analytica have tried to place the blame on him, even though the firm assured him that everything he did was legal. "One of the great mistakes I did here was I just didn't ask enough questions," he said. "I had never done a commercial project. I didn't really have any reason to doubt their sincerity. That's certainly something I strongly regret now."



Kogan declined to comment on this story when contacted by Fox News.

Fox News Samuel Chamberlain and the Associated Press contributed to this article.

Follow James Rogers on Twitter @jamesjrogersMissiles that spit out warheads traveling up to 20 times the speed of sound and with the ability to perform elusive acrobatics may be too much for U.S. defenses to block.

That's according to the head of the U.S. Strategic Command, Air Force Gen. John Hyten, who testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee yesterday (March 20).

When asked by Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., what kind of defenses the U.S. has against hypersonic weapons, Hyten replied: "We have a very difficult  well, our defense is our deterrent capability. We don't have any defense that could deny the employment of such a weapon against us, so our response would be our deterrent force, which would be the triad and the nuclear capabilities that we have to respond to such a threat," Military.com reported. [7 Technologies That Transformed Warfare]

Hyten is referring to the triad of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), submarine-launched ballistic missiles and strategic bombers, which are bomber aircraft designed to fly into enemy territory and destroy strategic targets. Ballistic missiles, both hidden underground and in secret submarines, can travel huge distances at whirring speeds.

But weapons that can travel well above the speed of sound seem to be a real threat, as both Russia and China are "aggressively pursuing" such hypersonic weapons, Hyten also said, as reported by CNBC.

On March 1, during an annual address, Russian president Vladimir Putin announced a new class of weapon delivery systems designed to evade NATO's ballistic missile defenses. Speaking on Russian television, Putin indicated the country was building a new hypersonic missile and a cruise missile with "unlimited range" that could avoid adversaries' detection technologies.

This nuclear-powered cruise missile could travel unlimited distances, and, unlike ballistic missiles, it could cruise low to the ground where it would be obscured by other objects  meaning it would evade radar detection, Live Science previously reported.

"In theory, a cruise missile carrying a nuclear bomb could slip under American defenses and detection systems, and detonate before Americans could mobilize a response," Live Science reported. [Could the US Stop Nuclear Weapons?]

Modern technology available today wouldn't be able to stop such an attack, nor could it defend against missile-deploying warheads at hypersonic speeds, Philip Coyle, a nuclear weapons expert, previously told Live Science's Rafi Letzter.

Even so, Gen. Hyten assured the Senate Committee that U.S. defenses are prepared for such a battle. "The first, most important message I want to deliver today is that the forces under my command are fully ready to deter our adversaries and respond decisively, should deterrence ever fail. We are ready for all threats," Hyten said in his opening remarks, according to a Department of Defense statement.

Other generals have suggested supplementing the U.S. defense arsenal with low-yield nukes, or those that pack less power. In addition, space-based detection systems could theoretically detect and track hypersonic missile threats, Lt. Gen. Samuel Greaves, director of the Missile Defense Agency, said on March 6, according to Military.com.

"To maintain military superiority in this multipolar, all-domain world, we must out-think, out-maneuver, out-partner and out-innovate our adversaries," Hyten said. "Deterrence in the 21st century requires the integration of all our capabilities, across all domains, enabling us to respond to adversary aggression anytime, anywhere."

Just this week, President Donald Trump said the U.S. needs a "space force," Live Science's sister site Space.com reported.

Originally published on Live Science.An airline crew member was caught by U.S. Customs and Border Protection allegedly trying to smuggle cocaine through John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City.

Last week, Fly Jamaica Airways employee Hugh Hall arrived at JFK Airport March 17 on a flight from Montego Bay, Jamaica. Hall, a Jamaican citizen, went through a security inspection at the New York City airport where customs officers discovered four packages containing white powder taped to his legs, officials said.

'COCAINE BABE' PLEADS GUILTY TO SMUGGLING DRUGS ON PRINCESS CRUISE

The powder reportedly tested positive for cocaine. Nearly nine pounds of the illicit substance was found among the four packages. The street value was approximated at $160,000, ABC7 reports.

Hall now faces federal narcotics smuggling charges.

FOLLOW US ON FACEBOOK FOR MORE FOX LIFESTYLE NEWS

Acting Director of CBP's New York Field Operations Leon Hayward was proud of Customs officers findings.

"This seizure is another example of our CBP officers being ever vigilant in protecting the United States from the distribution of illicit drugs," Hayward said, ABC7 reported.

This is not the first time JFK Airport has caught a person attempting to smuggle cocaine by taping bags to their legs.

Almost exactly one year ago, two people were caught with 5 and 10 pounds of cocaine, respectively, strapped to their legs.After a series of animal mishaps, the United Air CEO said that the airline got it wrong, referring to an incident last week that resulted in the death of a dog after a flight attendant placed the pet in an overhead bin.

CEO Oscar Munoz said Wednesday that company rules have prevented United employees from thinking outside the box when problems arise, Bloomberg reported.

We put our folks in bad places when we give such definitive, specific, concrete, rigid rules that theyre not allowed to show a little caring and compassion, he said.

A French bulldog died on flight from Houston to New York on March 12 after a flight attendant insisted that the dog be placed in its carrier and in the overhead bin through the duration of the flight.

The airline says that the unidentified employee did not understand that there was actually a dog inside the carrier, a story the family and other passengers say is not true.

UNITED FLIGHT ATTENDENT WHO FORCE DOG INTO OVERHEAD BIN LYING, OWNERS DAUGHTER SAYS

Ultimately, this whole thing is about trust, Munoz said. You have the right to demand the highest level of performance from us.

He added that United will be putting thousands of workers through a new training program called Core4 that will train them to better handle situations based on safety, compassion and efficiency, Bloomberg reported.

The training program comes just as the company announced that they would be halting new PetSafe reservations while it improves the program.

DOG MISTAKENLY SENT BY UNITED TO JAPAN RETURNING HOME TO HIS OWNERS

United recently charted a private jet to fly a German shepherd home after it was mistakenly sent to Japan instead of Kansas.

In a separate incident two days later, a United flight made an unplanned landing in Ohio after it was discovered it was carrying a dog that was put on the wrong plane.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.A Canadian woman who recently pleaded guilty to smuggling cocaine aboard a glamorous round-the-world cruise admitted in court on Wednesday that she was partly doing it for Instagram likes.

During her sentencing hearing in Sydney, Australia, 24-year-old Melina Roberge informed the court that she accepted the gig as a glamorous cover for the drug-smuggling operation after a man she described as my sugar daddy offered her money, trips and gifts, News.com.au reported.

In addition to the ritzy perks of the job, the court also heard that Roberge enjoyed "tak[ing] photos of myself in exotic locations for 'likes' and attention," according to the Associated Press.



'COCAINE BABE' PLEADS GUILTY FOLLOWING SENTENCING OF PORN STAR FRIEND

Roberge and her cruise companion Isabelle Lagace  whom the Australian and British media dubbed the cocaine babes due to their penchant for posting bikini photos along the voyage  were arrested in August 2016 following a 51-day cruise from the U.K. to Sydney aboard the Sea Princess. Another passenger, Andre Tamine, 63, was also arrested in connection with the incident.

The Australian Border Force (ABF) became suspicious of the trio while observing the Sea Princess, which was under observation due to its many ports of call between the U.K. and Sydney, the Telegraph reported. The ABF later boarded and searched the ship upon docking in Sydney after authorities identified Roberge, Lagace and Tamine as high risk travelers.

Officials discovered 77 pounds of cocaine in Roberge and Lagaces shared cabin, and an additional 130 pounds in Tamines room, together estimated to be worth anywhere between $21.5 million and $30 million.

SEE IT: LUXURY CRUISE SHIP CUT IN HALF AHEAD OF 49-FOOT EXPANSION

Roberge further told the court that she and Lagace, whom News.com.au identified as a 29-year-old former Canadian porn star, were recruited by the unidentified sugar daddy to serve as foils for the operation. The two had also worked as escorts for the sugar daddy in Morocco prior to taking the gig on the cruise, according to the site.

"I was meant to just be there and look like I was on holiday and look like a cover for everyone else," Roberge told the court of her role on the cruise.

Lagace was sentenced to seven-and-a-half years in prison after pleading guilty in Nov. 2017. At her sentencing, she claimed she participated in the operation as a means of paying back a $20,000 debt she owed.

Roberge and Tamine pleaded guilty to similar charges this past February. During Wednesdays sentencing hearing, however, Roberges lawyer claimed she only played a minor role in the scheme, News.com.au reports.

FOLLOW US ON FACEBOOK FOR MORE FOX CRUISE NEWS

Roberge also apologized for her actions during the hearing.

Since I have been in jail I have come across people struggling with addiction, she said. I dont want to be part of that.

Roberges sentence will be revealed at a later date.A professional skateboarder is claiming he was kicked off a Frontier Airlines flight for wearing a sweatshirt that offended another passenger.

Justin Mallory is speaking out about the incident, which he says took place March 2nd in Atlanta as he tried to board a plane bound for Phoenix, Ariz. to attend a skating event. Mallory is claiming he was discriminated against because his shirts logo displays two guns with the words Big Black Biscuit written above, Fox 5 reports.

"Your man was taken off a flight for wearing a Big Black Biscuit hoodie," Mallory told the crowd that gathered Wednesday for a news conference with his lawyer, Mawuli Davis.

70-YEAR-OLD MAN REMOVED FROM PLANE FOR 'RACIAL ABUSE'

Davis said Mallorys manager/girlfriend called Frontier immediately after the incident and was allegedly told by the airline that Mallory was removed because his sweatshirt made another passenger feel uncomfortable, Fox 5 reports.

"You have a right to wear this kind of artistic design ...you have that right without being discriminated against," Davis said to Fox 5.

Frontier Airlines denies the allegations and said Mallory was removed because he was disruptive.

According to incident reports, Justin Mallory was removed from his flight on March 2, 2018, for being disruptive and not complying with crew member instructions. He became argumentative prior to boarding when asked to check a skateboard. It is Frontier's policy that skateboards are not permitted in the cabin. After eventually checking the item, the passenger boarded the aircraft and continued to exhibit disruptive behavior. Frontier Airlines takes the safety and security of our flights, and all our customers, seriously and it was determined that the passenger should not fly. We refunded the passenger's ticket to allow him to make other travel arrangements, the airline said in a statement to Fox 5.

FOLLOW US ON FACEBOOK FOR MORE FOX LIFESTYLE NEWS

Frontier Airlines did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting survivor and pro-Second Amendment activist Kyle Kashuv had a bumpy landing en route to a millennial-focused forum at the White House Thursday, when a flight attendant aboard his Spirit Airlines flight shared her feelings about the March For Our Lives movement, offending Kashuv.

Just landed in Baltimore on @SpiritAirlines and the stewardess felt compelled to give us all a speech about the March for Our Lives, which openly says on the petition are trying to categorically ban AR-15's, and made everyone clap, the Parkland, Fla. high school junior tweeted on March 22. Can anything just be non-political anymore?

COCAINE BABE TELLS COURT SHE SMUGGLED DRUGS FOR LIKES AND ATTENTION ON INSTAGRAM

Though Kashuvs tweet was met with mixed reactions by his 113,000 Twitter followers, the carrier quickly responded to his claim.

While we appreciate that our Team Members are individuals, we dont believe politics should be part of the Guest experience. We are looking into the incident and apologize to any Guests offended by these comments, the official account for the Florida headquartered airline responded.

That's great to hear. Please keep me posted, he replied.

In response to Fox News request for comment, Spirit Airlines Communications Director Stephen Schuler echoed the airline's statement, word for word.

UNITED PASSENGER CLAIMS HE FRACTURED SPINE AFTER AIRLINE TOOK AWAY WHEELCHAIR

According to his Twitter feed, Kashuv has been busy since arriving in Washington, D.C.

He first met with House of Representatives Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, whom he described as "genuinely one of the funniest people I've ever met. Then the student attended a meeting at the Alternative White House," aka the Trump International Hotel, before heading to the White House for the summit.

Ahead of the event, he also tweeted his enthusiasm for hearing Ivanka Trump speak.

FOLLOW US ON FACEBOOK FOR MORE FOX LIFESTYLE NEWS

News of Kashuv's flight comes one day after CNN canceled what would have been his first one-on-one interview on the network, scheduled for March 21. The appearance was reportedly canceled after Kashuv retweeted a story describing anchor Brooke Baldwin as a fake news hypocrite.

For his part, Kashuv has already moved on.

But don't worry, CNN really wants to have the other side on, as long as they're complicit, he tweeted later that day.

This is Kashuvs second trip to the White House this month. On March 9, he met with President Trump and first lady Melania Trump to discuss his app to prevent future school shootings.The serial bomber who terrorized Austin, Texas for three harrowing weeks was identified Wednesday morning -- just hours after he blew himself to bits with his own device as cops closed in.

Mark Anthony Conditt, 23, was named as the bomber, an ATF source told Fox News. A picture of Conditt in 2013 from his mother's Facebook page was authenticated by The Austin-American Statesman.

Conditt was killed near the motel he was traced to by authorities using surveillance footage from a Federal Express drop-off store and cell phone triangulation technology, according to The Austin American-Statesman.

He died after fleeing the motel in a car, with police hot on his tail. He drove into a ditch, sparking the fatal confrontation.

"We wanted this to come to a peaceful resolution tonight," said Austin Police Chief Brian Manley. "However, we were not afforded that opportunity when he started to drive away."

Conditt was home-schooled and went to Austin Community College, neighbors told the Austin American-Statesman.

I know this is a cliche but I just cant imagine that, a neighbor who spoke to the newspaper on the condition of anonymity, and whose children grew up playing with Conditt.

Authorities have said Conditt was 24, but public records obtained by the Statesman indicate he was 23.

His mother, Danene Conditt, posted a picture of him in February 2013 to mark his completing a high school-level education.

I officially graduated Mark from High School on Friday. 1 down, 3 to go. He has 30 hrs of college credit too, but hes thinking of taking some time to figure out what he wants to do.maybe a mission trip. Thanks to everyone for your support over the years.

He and his father, Pat Conditt, purchased a Pflugerville property last year that is now valued at about $69,000, according to property records.

The neighbor said Mark Conditt had been living in that house, which he built with his fathers help.

AUSTIN SERIAL BOMBER MAY HAVE OTHER DEVICES 'OUT THERE,' COPS UNCOVER 'TREASURE TROVE OF INFORMATION'

Conditt had worked at Crux Semiconductor in Austin as a "purchasing Agent/buyer/shipping and receiving," according to a profile on a job recruiting website and had previously worked as a computer repair technician, according to the Statesman.

Police said Conditt detonated two package bombs as police closed in, firing at him. It was not immediately clear whether he died from the bombs or shots fired by police. One officer was knocked back by the blasts, but none were seriously hurt.

Manley said police had zeroed in on a "person of interest" over the last 24-36 hours, tracing him to the motel in Round Rock, where they spotted his vehicle. The suspect is believed to be from the Pflugerville area, located near the site of the showdown with cops in Round Rock, FOX7 reported.

"Late last night and early this morning, we felt very confident this was the suspect in bombings throughout Austin," Manley said.

As police took up positions around the motel and waited for tactical units to arrive, the suspect bolted, Manley said.

AUSTIN PACKAGE BOMB ATTACKS TIMELINE

Police followed the vehicle, and, when it went off the road, SWAT team officers moved in.

"The suspect is deceased with significant injuries," Manley said, adding that he has not yet been positively identified by the medical examiner.

Manley also warned more package bombs could be out there.

"We don't know where he has been in the past 24 hours," Manley said. "If you see something that looks suspicious, see something out of place, see something that gives you concern, call 911."

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott told "FOX & Friends" the suspect did not destroy his digital footprint, and that there is a "treasure trove of information that should shed light on who he is, what he did, and why he was doing it."

Abbott said Conditt, who is not ex-military, did not post things on social media beforehand that would be "red flags," and that he lived with two roommates in Pflugerville, located about 20 miles north of Austin.

"Those two roommates have been talking to law enforcement," Abbott said, adding they are not suspects at this time.

The Texas governor said authorities are now going to spend the next 24 hours trying to figure out if anyone else was working with Conditt, and if there are any other bombs out there.

President Trump reacted to the news early Wednesday morning, tweeting, "AUSTIN BOMBING SUSPECT IS DEAD. Great job by law enforcement and all concerned!"

Witnesses to the confrontation told FOX7 there was a bomb robot used by law enforcement, but they didn't hear any explosion.

"There was no smoke coming out of the cars," an unidentified witness told FOX7.

The incident appears to have brought to an end a terrifying sequence that began March 2, when Anthony Steven House, 39, was killed when a package he discovered on his porch in northeast Austin exploded.

Ten days later, a second "porch bomb" exploded nearby, killing 17-year-old Draylen Mason and injuring his mother. A third bomb went off on March 12, injuring Esperanza Herrera, 75, and police quickly determined all three were connected.

As the Texas capital's residents sought answers, developments took a frightening turn March 18, when two men were injured by a bomb that was set off by a sophisticated "trip wire" made of fishing string. That bomb, along with the accelerated pattern of attacks, spurred fears authorities were hunting a highly trained maniac.

IS THE AUSTIN BOMBER SHOWING SHADES OF THE UNABOMBER?

Just after midnight on March 19, a packaged destined for Austin exploded at a FedEx delivery facility in Schertz, some 65 miles south of Austin. That package had been sent from Austin, and police were able to track it to the drop-off store where they obtained surveillance video.

Also Tuesday, the FBI said a suspicious package reported at a FedEx distribution center near the Austin airport "contained an explosive device." The two packages were sent from a mail delivery office in Sunset Valley, an Austin suburb south of downtown.

Fox News' Travis Fedschun, Jonathan Hunt, Maggie Kerkman and the Associated Press contributed to this report.The Austin bombing suspect allegedly used a fake name to mail explosive packages in Texas, Fox San Antonio reported Wednesday.

Mark Anthony Conditt, whom federal prosecutors identified as being behind the string of blasts throughout March that left two people dead and several others injured, used the alias Kelly Killmore in order to send the packaged bombs, the outlet said, citing sources familiar with the investigation.

Fox San Antonio also confirmed that Conditt was the individual caught in surveillance photos on Sunday bringing two suspicious packages to a South Austin FedEx Office store on Brodie Lane.

One of the two packages detonated at a FedEx sorting facility in Schertz early Tuesday morning, injuring one person. The second package was intercepted by authorities later that day at a facility near the Austin airport. Officials said the package contained an explosive device and no one was injured.

AUSTIN PACKAGE BOMB ATTACKS TIMELINE

With the help of the surveillance photos that showed Conditt in disguise and evidence investigators obtained from the packages, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott told FOX & Friends that authorities were able to track down the suspect.

Conditt died amid a confrontation with police overnight Wednesday, during which one of his bombs detonated.The remains of a worker killed in a chemical plant explosion last week were recovered on Wednesday.

Dylan Mitchell, 27, was killed in the explosion at the Tri-Chem Industries plant in Cresson last Thursday. But the subsequent fire from the explosion burned for days, preventing any recovery efforts by officials.

Investigators had to wait on the fire to burn itself out before they were able to search through the entire plant. Dangerous chemicals spilled and mixed during the explosion, leading to a slow cleanup.

One of the two other workers injured by the explosion remains hospitalized.

Dylan's family is angry, but not at fire officials or the owners of Tri-Chem Industries.

"We can't be mad at the Lord because the Lord doesn't hurt us, said father Vernon Mitchell. It was an accident, as far as I know. And that's how I'm going to look at it until I'm told otherwise."

Read more on FOX 4 News.Officials at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida are requiring that all students only wear clear backpacks on campus as a new round of safety measures are implemented in Broward County Public Schools.

Superintendent Robert Runcie on Wednesday stated in a letter that the new rules come amid recent "inquiries regarding the Districts efforts to fortify school campuses and enhance safety protocols."

STONEMAN DOUGLAS STUDENTS ARRESTED FOR KNIVES, DEPUTY SUSPENDED FOR SLEEPING ON JOB

In addition to students having to wear clear backpacks, which the Miami Herald reported will be provided by the school district, students must also wear identification badges while on the Stoneman Douglas campus.

Following the Feb. 14 massacre carried out by Nikolas Cruz, a former student, one teacher said an email had circulated among staff letting them know Cruz should not be permitted to wear a backpack on school grounds.

Other safety measures to be enacted include locking classroom doors "at all times," securing outside doors and gates often, and "conducting emergency preparedness and response training for faculty, staff and students on a regular basis."

"Code red" active shooter trainings will continue to be conducted, although the "protocols and frequency" of the drills will soon be evaluated with law enforcement, and the school district's security camera system will be upgraded throughout Broward County.

The new rules will take effect during the first week of April, when students return from spring break.

The letter cited the recent school safety bill, signed by Florida Gov. Rick Scott, as the reason such safety measures can now be afforded to the school district. The bill allocated $400 million to benefit school safety and mental health measures.

The bill, Runcie's letter stated, will also provide Broward County schools with $8.5 million to position at least one school resource officer at each school beginning in the next school year.

The Herald reported that the school district is also "exploring options for consolidating points of entry for students and staff to include utilizing metal-detecting wands and potentially installing permanent metal detectors."

The letter came a day after Deputy Moises Carotti, of the Broward County Sheriff's Office, was suspended after allegedly being caught sleeping in his car while he was supposed to be patrolling the 1200 building of Stoneman Douglas.

After the reported suspension, Gov. Scott offered to send eight Florida Highway Patrol officers to the high school for extra security  an offer the district accepted.A police officer and five civilians -- including a suspect -- were wounded during an exchange of gunfire in San Francisco on Wednesday afternoon.

When the shooting was over, the suspect was in custody, FOX 2 reported.

Dramatic video posted on Twitter shows the injured officer crawling to safety.

Police were responding to a call on the edge of the city's Crocker-Amazon and Excelsior neighborhoods around 4:30 p.m. when a suspect fired at the officers, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

The scene became immersed in chaos as dozens of schoolchildren and pedestrians ducked for cover and hid behind cars to avoid stray bullets, the report said.

The owner of a nearby pharmacy described the scene to the Chronicle.

I couldnt believe what was happening, he said, estimating he heard 20 to 25 shots. Ive never experienced something like this before and Ive been here 30 years. We have had shootings before but never in broad daylight or during business hours. It was scary, the way it happened.

One officer was struck in a leg and wounded. He was treated behind a patrol car and was in stable condition at San Francisco General Hospital.

Five civilians, including the suspect, were injured  two critically, and three in stable condition, police said. One of the injured pedestrians was reportedly a minor, but there were no further details on the minors condition, FOX 2 reported.

San Francisco authorities are still investigating.Alabama became the third state to allow the execution of prisoners by nitrogen gas Thursday after Republican Gov. Kay Ivey signed legislation permitting the practice as an alternative to lethal injection.

The new law would allow execution by nitrogen hypoxia if lethal injection drugs are unavailable or ruled unconstitutional. Breathing the inert gas causes oxygen depletion in the bloodstream.

According to AL.com, inmates on death row also could choose to be electrocuted, though none have done so since Alabama adopted lethal injection in 2002.

The bill overwhelmingly passed the Alabama House of Representatives on Tuesday after it was approved unanimously by the State Senate last month. Supporters argued the state needs another method of carrying out death sentences as drug companies become hesitant to supply chemicals for executions and lethal injection faces continued court challenges.

It would simply put him to sleep. Its humane. Its quick, and its painless, Republican Rep. Jim Hill of Moody said during debate.

Opponents of the bill questioned how lawmakers could assert it would be painless since the method hasnt been tried.

We had Yellow Mama. Now, we are going to bring back the gas chamber, Rep. Thomas Jackson, a Democrat from Thomasville, said, referencing the nickname for the states yellow-painted electric chair.

Last week, Oklahoma officials announced that they would use nitrogen to execute inmates once the state resumes using the death penalty. State Attorney General Mike Hunter said the administration of the gas likely would require the use of a mask placed over the inmates head, but he said the mechanical details still have to be worked out.

Oklahoma put executions on hold in 2015 after a series of execution mishaps. In 2014, a botched lethal injection left an inmate writhing on the gurney. The following year, one inmate was executed with an unapproved drug, and a second inmate was just moments away from being led to the death chamber before prison officials realized the same wrong drug had been delivered for his execution.

Since then, several top officials connected to the bungled executions have resigned and the states multicounty grand jury delivered a scathing report on Oklahomas lethal injection process that accused a number of individuals involved in the process of sloppy and careless work.

The Oklahoma Legislature formally approved the use of nitrogen gas as an execution method in 2015. Mississippi became the second state to approve the method last year.

Four other states allow the use of a gas chamber as an alternative method of execution, including Arizona, California, Missouri and Wyoming, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.Authorities launched a dragnet Wednesday for a psychologist and patient who walked out of the Arkansas State Hospital without permission earlier this week.

An arrest warrant was issued for Michelle Messer, 41, a psychological examiner at the hospital accused of taking Cory Chapin, 46, a patient, out of the Little Rock psychiatric inpatient facility, police said.

Messer was spotted on surveillance video around 8:20 a.m. Tuesday using her access to the hospitals forensic unit and walking Chapin out of the building, police said.They were spotted leaving the area in a blue Mazda 3S Grand Touring with a Arkansas license plate number 502RBD.

Messer is wanted on a misdemeanor charge of aiding an unauthorized departure. The hospital said Messer will be fired once located. Police referred to Messer as a psychologist, though the hospitals website named her as a psychological examiner for forensics.

Its unclear what the relationship is between Messer and Chapin. Messer appeared to post comments on Chapins Facebook page about two months ago, according to Arkansas Online.

Chapin was acquitted in 2015 of kidnapping, theft, unauthorized use of a vehicle and drug possession charges by reason of mental illness or defect. He had told authorities God said to kidnap a woman who cut his hair, Arkansas Online reported.

Chapin was committed to the hospitals forensic unit, used to assess and treat patients with mental illnesses who are accused of committing a crime. A doctor said he posted as a moderate risk for violence without treatment.

But by February 2016, 46-year-old had engineered an escape. Chapin fled Arkansas after receiving a 48-hour pass to leave with his father. He was found in Las Vegas last year and returned to the hospital in November.

Messer is a licensed independent psychological examiner by the Arkansas Psychology Board, according to Arkansas Online. Messer has worked for the Department of Human Services for more than nine years, state records show.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.Richard Dawkins, prominent atheist author and evolutionary biologist, has warned against celebrating what some call the demise of Christianity in Europe.

Dawkins tweeted Wednesday: Before we rejoice at the death throes of the relatively benign Christian religion, lets not forget Hilaire Bellocs menacing rhyme: Always keep a-hold of nurse  For fear of finding something worse.

The outspoken atheist linked to an article by The Guardian titled Christianity as default is gone: the rise of a non-Christian Europe, which starkly illustrated research showing a majority of young people in a dozen countries do not follow a religion.

The article highlighted the dying Christian faith and the sharp rise of young Muslims.

The Muslim birthrate is higher than the general population, and they have much higher [religious] retention rates, Stephen Bullivant, a professor of theology and religion at St. Marys University in London told The Guardian.

Dawkins, who called himself an equal opportunity religion basher on Fox News, also had an event cancelled in Berkeley for his criticism of Islam.

Dawkins has previously voiced concern over the decline of the Christian faith, in so far as Christianity might be a bulwark against something worse, which he echoed in his tweet.

The atheist speaker warned that Islam as a religion poses a more dangerous threat than any other, pointing to the fact that moderate Muslims suffer more at the hands of Islam than anyone else, The Christian Post reported.

"It's tempting to say all religions are bad, and I do say all religions are bad, but it's a worse temptation to say all religions are equally bad because they're not," Dawkins said. "If you look at the actual impact that different religions have on the world it's quite apparent that at present the most evil religion in the world has to be Islam.The 23-year-old man linked to the deadly bombings that rocked Austin, Texas, and surrounding areas over the past month had a "target list" of future locations he wanted to strike, the chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security said Thursday.

Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, said that authorities have discovered that Mark Anthony Conditt, 23, had a "target list of future targets" including residences and addresses discovered by authorities.

"I think he had pulled these addresses, these were his future targets. It was a target list." he said on "America's Newsroom."

McCaul added that based on the data authorities were able to retrieve from Conditt, they were able to go the homes and "clear them" from any suspicious packages.

"We were also able to use technology to find a digital footprint of where his cellphone had been, so that the key evidence was getting his cellphone number so that when he turned his cellphone immediately the SWAT teams descended on him at about 3 oclock in the morning so we got close to him before he blew himself up," he said.

McCaul told Fox News that authorities are now looking at those addresses that Conditt pulled to try to find a link between them.

"That is what we are looking at right now. What is the common denominator between all these victims, or is it just completely random?" he said.

McCaul said law enforcement conducted a search of the home in Pflugerville, located northeast of Austin on Wednesday and have "a lot of computer data, hard drives."

"Those things will be very telling along with social media about what was motivating him to do this, and also was there any connectivity between all these victims or was it just a completely random event," he told Fox News.

AUSTIN BOMBER KNOWN AS 'COMPUTER GEEK,' PERSON WHO WAS 'ROUGH AROUND THE EDGES'

Conditt also used "exotic batteries" to make his weapons that terrorized Austin this month, according to McCaul, who added that because he used "very unique" battery packs ordered off the internet from Asia, authorities were able to see all of the devices were from the same bomb maker.

The 23-year-old had also used nails purchased at a Home Depot, according to the congressman.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said Conditt's purchases at the Home Depot also included five "CHILDREN AT PLAY" signs, one of which was used to rig a tripwire that was set off by two men Sunday in a southwest Austin neighborhood. One of them was walking and the other was riding a bike.

AUSTIN BOMBER RECORDED 25-MINUTE 'CONFESSION' TO HIS DEADLY CRIMES, POLICE SAY

McCaul said that that Conditt's 25-minute-long "confession" to his crimes before detonating a bomb in his sport utility vehicle as officers moved in for an arrest near Austin was a sign of a "disturbed young man."

"I think it's clear from his confession that this is not terror-related, although he terrorized the city of Austin," he said.

Officers located the recording, in which Conditt described creating seven devices, including one he blew up during the conflict with police, Austin Police Chief Brian Manley said at a news conference. The recording was made on a phone, which was found in the suspect's possession following the confrontation.

In the recording, Manley said the message is rather "the outcry of a very challenged young man talking about challenges in his personal life."The 23-year-old man linked to the deadly bombings that rocked Austin, Texas, and surrounding areas over the past month was described by a family member on Wednesday as a "computer geek," while a friend described Mark Anthony Conditt as being an intimidating person.

Authorities announced late Wednesday that Conditt recorded a 25-minute-long "confession" to his crimes before detonating a bomb in his sport utility vehicle as officers moved in for an arrest near Austin.

Officers located the recording, in which Conditt described creating seven devices, including one he blew up during the conflict with police, Austin Police Chief Brian Manley said at a news conference. The recording was made on a phone, which was found in the suspect's possession following the confrontation.

In the recording, the 23-year-old did not mention "anything about terrorism, nor does he mention anything about hate," the police chief said. The message is rather "the outcry of a very challenged young man talking about challenges in his personal life."

AUSTIN BOMBER RECORDED 25-MINUTE 'CONFESSION' TO HIS DEADLY CRIMES, POLICE SAY

Conditt was the oldest of four children and grew up in Pflugerville, located northeast of Austin. On Wednesday, authorities recovered homemade explosives from inside the home, which he shared with two roommates.

His uncle, who lives in Lakewood, Colorado, described him in an interview with the Associated Press as smart, and a "computer geek."

"I mean this is coming from nowhere. We just don't know what. I don't know how many ways to say it but everyone is caught off guard by this," Mike Courtney said.

Conditt's aunt told FOX 31 her nephew's actions were a "horrible, horrible thing."

"It's just awful and I'm so sorry that everybody's dealing with this," Mary Conditt told the television station.

"I have no idea [why he did this]," she said. "He was at my Christmas table. He was a great kid. He was smart, loving, kind. I have no idea who this person is."

Conditt attended Austin Community College from 2010 to 2012 and was a business administration major, but he did not graduate, college spokeswoman Jessica Vess told the AP, adding that no disciplinary actions were made against Conditt.

AUSTIN SERIAL BOMBER ID'D AS MARK ANTHONY CONDITT: WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT THE PFLUGERVILLE RESIDENT

A friend of Conditt told the Austin American-Statesman he was smart and opinionated, but also intimidating.

When I met Mark, he was really rough around the edges, Jeremiah Jensen told the newspaper. He was a very assertive person and would...end up being kind of dominant and intimidating in conversation. A lot of people didnt understand him and where he was coming from. He really just wanted to tell the truth. What I remember about him he would push back on you if you said something without thinking about it. He loved to think and argue and turn things over and figure out what was really going on.

Jensen, 24, told the Statesman they two were home-schooled and he would often go to the Conditt home for lunch after church on Sundays and they attended Bible study and other activities together. They became close in 2012 and 2013.

Conditt had attended regular church services at Austin Stone Community Church, according to Jensen, who added that he didn't know if Conditt "held onto his faith."

I know faith was a serious thing for him, Jensen said. I dont know if he held onto his faith or not. The kind of anger that he expressed and the kind of hate that he succumbed to, thats not what he believed in in high school. I dont know what happened along the way. This wasnt him.

A spokesman for the church told the paper no records of past engagement or past involvement by Conditt were found.

Fox News' Elizabeth Zwirz, Nicole Darrah and The Associated Press contributed to this report.The "serial bomber" who terrorized Texas for three weeks was revealed Wednesday to be Mark Anthony Conditt, a 23-year-old who worked in manufacturing and computer repair -- and who apparently kept his dark side hidden from neighbors and roommates alike.

A law enforcement source confirmed to Fox News that Conditt was the bomber, who died as cops closed in on him Wednesday. Conditt killed two people and injured several others in a string of March bombings.

Relative Mary Conditt said she was shocked to learn the man she knew as "low-key and peaceful" would commit such a crime.

"I would say to everybody, this is a horrible, horrible thing. You just never know," Mary told Fox 31 Denver on Wednesday. "It's just awful and I'm so sorry that everybody's dealing with this. I have no idea [why he did this]."

His uncle, who lives in Lakewood, Colorado, described him in an interview with The Associated Press as smart, and a "computer geek."

"I mean this is coming from nowhere. We just don't know what. I don't know how many ways to say it but everyone is caught off guard by this," Mike Courtney said.

Here's what's known so far about the suspect, as law enforcement officials continue to hunt for a motive.

Who is he?

Conditt is a 23-year-old white male.

The first photo of Conditt -- from 2013 -- circulated early Wednesday. It was authenticated by the Austin-American Statesman, which reported the picture came from the Facebook page of his mom, Danene Conditt, who appeared to be celebrating his high school graduation.

I officially graduated Mark from High School on Friday," her post said. "1 down, 3 to go. He has 30 hrs of college credit too, but hes thinking of taking some time to figure out what he wants to do.maybe a mission trip. Thanks to everyone for your support over the years.

Other than that, Conditt appeared to have little social media presence. But Texas Gov. Greg Abbott told Fox News on Wednesday that Conditt did not delete his digital footprint and authorities had a "treasure trove of information" to work with.

Abbott said the suspect, who is not ex-military, did not post anything on social media beforehand that would be "red flags."

He did, however, write several posts in 2012 on what appears to be his personal blog, expressing opinions about a range of topics, including gay marriage.

Where did he live?

Conditt grew up in Pflugerville, located about 20 miles north of Austin, and was the oldest of four children. He was still living there with two roommates, Abbott told "FOX & Friends."

"Those two roommates have been talking to law enforcement," Abbott said, clarifying they are not suspects at this time.

Pflugerville Mayor Victor Gonzales confirmed the bomber lived in his city -- just two blocks from his own home.

Jay Schulze, who has lived in Pflugerville for 13 years, says he was out jogging when he was stopped by police and asked about the bombings Tuesday night. He described a large police presence in his neighborhood overnight.

Police flew drones over what he called a rundown, "weird house with a lot of people coming and going" from about 9 p.m. until about 3 a.m.

Conditt and his father, Pat, purchased a Pflugerville property last year that is now valued at about $69,000, according to property records. The neighbor said Conditt had been living in that house, which he reportedly built with his assistance from his dad.

What was his motive?

It's still too early to tell, according to authorities. For weeks, police said they had not been ruling out any motives.

"We do not understand what motivated him to do what he did, and that will be part of the continuing investigation as we try to learn more about him and to understand why he took the actions he did," Austin Police Chief Brian Manley said Wednesday.

Initially, investigators said the blasts could be acts of domestic terrorism or possibly hate crimes since the victims of the first attacks were all minorities. But officials soon backed off of that possibility and the two men hurt in Sunday's explosion were white men in their 20s.

Was he acting alone?

A federal agent says it's "hard to say" whether the Austin bombing suspect was acting alone.

But Fred Milanowski, agent in charge of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms' Houston Field Division, told reporters Wednesday investigators believe the dead suspect built all four of the package bombs that have blown up in Austin since March 2.

Abbott said authorities are going to spend the next 24 hours trying to determine if anyone else was working with Conditt, in addition to hunting for any remaining explosive devices.



What else do we know?

Conditt was home-schooled and went to Austin Community College from 2010 to 2012. He was business administration major, but he did not graduate, college spokeswoman Jessica Vess told The Associated Press, adding that no disciplinary actions were made against Conditt.

Conditt had attended regular church services at Austin Stone Community Church, according to Jensen, who added that he didn't know if Conditt "held onto his faith."

I know faith was a serious thing for him, his friend, Jeremiah Jensen, told the Austin American-Statesman. I dont know if he held onto his faith or not. The kind of anger that he expressed and the kind of hate that he succumbed to, thats not what he believed in in high school. I dont know what happened along the way. This wasnt him.

He had worked at Crux Semiconductor in Austin as a "purchasing Agent/buyer/shipping and receiving," according to a profile on a job recruiting website and had previously worked as a computer repair technician, the Statesman reported.

Fox News' Travis Fedschun and The Associated Press contributed to this report.The father of a boy with Down syndrome filed a lawsuit last week accusing the Boy Scouts of America of allegedly blocking his son from becoming an Eagle Scout and revoking his 22 merit badges that he worked two years to earn.

Logan Blythe, 15, has been a boy scout through the National Parks Council in Utah, and has been able to advance up the ranks because the council has made accommodations when necessary, his father, Chad, said.

The teenager had planned to create kits for special-needs babies as his Eagle project when the family learned in November the national organization voided every merit badge he obtained. Chad Blythe told The Washington Post on Tuesday he learned of the news in an email.

I have been asked to suspend Logans Eagle Project approval, the email stated. Please do not do any more work on his project.

60-YEAR-OLD SNOWMOBILER SURVIVES FOUR NIGHTS IN UTAH WILDERNESS WITHOUT FOOD OR WATER

The family sued the Boy Scouts and the Utah National Parks Council for "outrageous and reckless conduct."

In the suit, they demanded the Boy Scouts of America accommodate Logan and provide damages of at least $1.

Chad Blythe told People his son was distraught after learning he was blocked from becoming an Eagle Scout.

He was let down. Hurt. You could see in his mannerisms that he was not happy, the father told the magazine. Since then, weve only been able to get him to wear his scout uniform one time. He wont even go near it. He looks visibly distraught when we talk about this.

Chad told Fox News his son has stopped going to meetings and felt he should have been able to keep the badges.

"This particular boy's case, this is as much as he can do. Let's accept that and give him the badge. Why? Because he tried and he's done his best," he said.

The Boy Scouts said it worked with the council and the Blythe family to offer "alternative merit badges" and a path to becoming an Eagle. A spokesperson for the organization told People that Logan was still considered a Boy Scout and his badges were not voided.

"He was let down. Hurt."  Chad Blythe

UTAH LAWYERS RECEIVE EMAIL OF A TOPLESS WOMAN FROM THE STATE BAR

However, Chad Blythe told The Washington Post the organization has not contacted the family and would not respond to his emails. He said he has received a lot of support from the public following the news.

If we can make a change and make something positive come of all of this, then the next kid  wont have to do what were doing now, Chad Blythe said. And they wont be hurt and let down the way Logan has been let down.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.An Arizona congresswoman eyeing a U.S. Senate seat has proposed building a border wall between her state and California.

U.S. Rep. Martha McSally, a Republican and a retired U.S. Air Force member, made the suggestions at the White House on Tuesday during a roundtable discussion on sanctuary cities, the Hill reported.

Arizona's neighboring state has come under fire in recent its refusal to cooperate with federal immigration officials during a series of raids.

As we look in Arizona, we often look into the dangers of the southern border, McSally said. But if these dangerous policies continue out of California, we might need to build a wall between California and Arizona as well to keep these dangerous criminals out of our state."

She lambasted California for providing sanctuary for these criminals and for thinking that its policies do not transcend borders.

California and the Trump administration have been embroiled in a lawsuit. Administration officials have threatened to crack down on policies that curtail federal immigration officials from apprehending illegal immigrants.

McSally has put in a bid to replace U.S. Sen. Jeff Flake, a frequent critic of President Donald Trump who will retire at the end of his term.Authorities and residents in California were bracing for the worst on Thursday as forecasters warned that major problems could still be on the way from a dangerous Pacific storm.

Record rain fell Wednesday in parts of Southern California, where thousands left their homes over fears of mudslides and debris flows.

Although nothing disastrous occurred, forecasters warned that the potential for disaster was still very possible as rain was set to pick up.

"We're very concerned," National Weather Service meteorologist Joe Sirad said. We're hoping this isn't a cry-wolf scenario where people will pooh-pooh what we're saying.

A long plume of subtropical moisture, known as an atmosphere river, came ashore on the central coast and spread as far south as Los Angeles and as far north as the San Francisco Bay Area.

The storm moved eastward, bringing the threat of flooding to the San Joaquin Valley and Sierra Nevada, where winter storm warnings for fresh snow were in effect on the second day of spring.

As nearly 5 inches of rain fell in some parts of the state, authorities were keeping close watch on Santa Barbara County -- hoping there wouldnt be a repeat of Januarys mudslides that killed 21 people in Montecito. A similar atmospheric river was the cause of those storms.

A UCLA climate scientist wrote in a blog that this storm could be the years strongest and may bring more rain than January's storm did.

Mud and rockslides closed several roads in the region, including Highway 1 at Ragged Point near Big Sur, not far from where the scenic coast route is still blocked by a massive landslide triggered by a storm last year.

A large pine tree was felled in Los Angeles, landing across a residential street into a picket fence. No one was hurt.

Santa Barbara County had already ordered the evacuation of areas along its south coast near areas burned by wildfires dating back to 2016.

We're hoping this isn't a cry-wolf scenario where people will pooh-pooh what we're saying."  Meteorologist Joe Sirad

"We actually do feel good about the evacuation order," Grimmesey said. "Law enforcement was out in the extreme risk areas of Montecito yesterday knocking on doors. For those that were home, we had a very good cooperation rate with people leaving."

Many residents in Santa Barbara and Ventura counties have faced repeated evacuations or advisories since December, when a wind-driven fire grew into the largest in recorded state history and destroyed more than 1,000 buildings.

In Los Angeles County, authorities canceled some planned mandatory evacuations because of a projected decrease in rainfall but kept others in place because of debris flows in one canyon area stripped bare by wildfire.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.In a miraculous turn of events, an orange tabby cat was reunited with its owner 14 years after going missing following Hurricane Jeanne in 2004.

Retired Florida K9 officer Perry Martin told FOX 4 in Southwest Florida that he adopted the stray cat named Thomas Jr., nicknamed T2, two years before the deadly hurricane struck the Florida coast.

"He was a stray. Just kind of showed up," he said. "Took him to the vet, gave him his shots and that's when he got his microchip."

After his furry friend escaped his home during the aftermath of the storm, Martin filed a report with the Humane Society and hoped for the best.

"My vet even listed him as deceased," Martin told the station.

It took 14 years, but Martin finally received the call hed been waiting to hear after a cat was dropped off at the Humane Society of the Treasure Coast in Florida with a microchip registered to his name, the station reported.

"They said, 'Perry what would you do if we told you that T2 was alive?' And I said, 'I'd probably tell you you're crazy because he died a long long time ago!'" Martin told the station.

Although the information on the microchip was outdated, the Humane Society was able to track down Martin and reunite the duo.

As soon as I looked at that face, I knew exactly who he was. A little bit older, kind of like me," said Martin.

TJ is now 18 years old and Martin plans to make sure his old friend spends the rest of his days just like he did before he got lost, spoiled.Authorities in Colorado are searching for a mother of three who was last seen leaving a bar early Sunday after celebrating St. Patrick's Day.

The Longmont Police Department said in a Facebook post that Rita Gutierrez-Garcia, 34, was last seen around 2:30 a.m. in an alleyway in the downtown area, about 35 miles north of Denver.

She was with friends, and she was on the phone, Deputy Chief Jeff Satur of the Longmont Police Department told FOX31. They heard her on the phone. They left and they havent seen her since.

Police said she was out bar-hopping with her friends on St. Patrick's Day, and was last seen behind 3s Bar less than an hour after last call.

As you can imagine, everybody is concerned, Satur said. This is unusual behavior.

During a news conference Wednesday, Satur said Gutierrez-Garcia was on the phone with an unknown person and told her friends, who she'd driven to the area with, that she'd get a ride home from someone else.

Satur said the police department is "exploring all the avenues that we can" but said they needed witnesses to come forward.

Gutierrez-Garcias mom arrived at her daughters home on Sunday to take her grandsons, ages 9, 13 and 18, to church, which is when they learned she was missing, police told FOX31.

She was last seen wearing a long-sleeve black shirt and black leggings and is 5-foot-7 and 140 pounds, according to police.

LONG ISLAND COPS DIG UP SKELETAL REMAINS THAT MAY BELONG TO WOMAN MISSING SINCE 1966

Gutierrez-Garcia's mother, Diane, and sister, Jessica, spoke during the emotional news conference, pleading with her to come home.

"She's my daughter and I just need her back home," her mother said. "I need the inside of me that's just going crazy to stop."

"Rita, come home," she pleaded. "Your sisters are a wreck. I'm trying not to be but I am."

Her sister said she's "trying to be as strong as I can for the boys everyday but I need you, we need you."

A neighbor told FOX31 it was "really weird" and "unlike her" for the single mother to go away without telling anyone, adding that she is an attentive and compassionate mother.

Her phone is not on, and shes not responding to any family and stuff like that, Michelle Young said. Thats really scary.

Police ask that anyone who may have information about Gutierrez-Garcia, her associates or possible whereabouts to contact them at (303) 651-8501.

Fox News' Elizabeth Zwirz contributed to this report.A Facebook post is going viral for its humorous take on the nor'easter that slammed the East Coast this week.

Police in Bridgeville, Pa., took to social media on Wednesday to poke a little fun as it updated the community on the latest weather conditions regarding the storm. Bridgeville is about 13 miles southeast of Pittsburgh.

The police posted an image of a map on Facebook scribbled all over in the red, with the words Everyone Crashed.

Todays traffic report: STAY HOME!! reads the caption.

The post, which has been shared more than 13,000 times, received mostly positive reactions.

Somebody at the ole police station has a sense of humor, one user wrote.

The fourth noreaster in the last three weeks dumped more than a foot of snow in some places, including parts of Pennsylvania, and left travelers stranded as airlines canceled more than 4,000 flights Wednesday.

The storm was making its way to New England on Thursday, while millions of others begin to clean up the wintry mess left behind.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.A divided federal appeals court has reinstated the death sentence of Mississippis only woman on death row, after her capital murder conviction was previously overturned by federal judges.



The 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 9-5 Tuesday that allegations of racial bias in jury selection were insufficient and shouldnt have led to Lisa Jo Chamberlins sentence being reversed.

The ruling came nearly three years after a federal court ruling granted her a new trial in a 2004 double homicide in Hattiesburg, Miss., the Clarion Ledger reported.

In 2015, U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves ordered the state to grant Chamberlin a new trial, and said prosecutors intentionally struck black potential jurors from her capital murder trial, the report said. Chamberlain argued on appeal that her rights were violated, as she is white.

But in the 5th Circuit 9-to-5 ruling, Judge Edith Clement wrote for the majority, saying: "The prosecution in Chamberlins case did what it was supposed to do: it rejected some black prospective jurors and accepted others, accepted some white prospective jurors and rejected others. When asked why it struck individual black prospective jurors, it gave specific race-neutral reasons for the strikes."

Clement wrote that that Mississippi Supreme Court found on multiple occasions that the prosecution did not invidiously discriminate against black prospective jurors.

The five who opposed reinstating Chamberlins conviction said: The prosecution struck nearly two times as many black jurors as it accepted (eight strikes compared to five accepted, including one alternate), while accepting more than four times as many white jurors as it struck (five strikes compared to 23 accepted, including three alternates)."

The dissent also said 62 percent of the strikes exercised were on black jurors, "despite black jurors making up only 31 percent of qualified prospective jurors."

More than half of the women facing capital punishment in 16 states and the federal prison system are white. Black women constitute 22.7 percent of all women on death rows while they are 14.6 percent of all U.S. females, according to calculations of Census Bureau estimates from 2013.

Chamberlin was convicted in the 2004 murders of Linda Heintzelman, 37, and Heintzelmans boyfriend, Vernon Hulett, 34.

Evidence showed the victims were killed after they argued with Chamberlin and her then-boyfriend, Roger Gillett, at a home they all shared.

Hulett was hit in the head with a hammer, had his throat slashed, and was later decapitated. Heintzelman was abandoned after being strangled and stabbed. When the assailants returned to find Heintzelman still breathing, she was suffocated with plastic bags.

The bodies were stuffed in a freezer and taken to Kansas, where Gillett and Chamberlin were arrested after state agents raided an abandoned farm house near Russell, Kansas.

Gillett and Chamberlin were convicted in separate trials of two counts of capital murder.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.A Florida man drowned moments after killing his mother with a hammer the night before Hurricane Irma made landfall in the state, police said Wednesday.

The badly decomposed body of Lance Whatley, 40, was found on Sept. 13, days after Hurricane Irma struck the region, the Palm Beach Post reported. Whatley was reported missing after his mother, Kathie Whatley, 67, was found dead at River Park Marina on Sept. 9, the St. Lucie County Sheriffs Office said.

Mystery surrounded their deaths for months as authorities attempted to piece together the night the mother-son duo was last seen together.

Authorities said Wednesday that Whatley, who suffered from chronic mental illness, beat his mother the night before Hurricane Irma made landfall as a Category 3 storm, the Palm Beach Post reported. He then drove his car into the North Folk of the St. Lucie River and committed suicide by drowning, investigators said.

"She would have to come home from her workplace and drive him around all night, in an effort to calm him," St. Lucie Sheriff Ken Mascara said. "From the statements we've taken, he was so excited about this storm coming -- we made the conclusion that he was just unable to be calm. They pulled over at the River Park Marina where an argument ensued, most likely due to her frustration trying to calm him from the storm and the result is that he killed her."

A hammer covered in blood was found lying next to Kathie Whatleys body. The partially submerged car was also located nearby.

Lance Whatleys body was discovered as the water brought in by Hurricane Irma was receding in Rivergate Park.

The body was in a decomposing state and was also missing a head and both hands, most likely from exposure to the elements and Hurricane Irma, making identification extremely difficult, Mascara said.Five teenagers who survived the deadly school shooting in Parkland, Florida are being featured on Time magazine's latest cover, the publication revealed in a Thursday tweet.

Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School students Jaclyn Corin, Emma Gonzalez, David Hogg, Cameron Kasky and Alex Wind are standing together in the image.

A simple message was stretched across the page in big, bold letters: ENOUGH.

Time linked to an article about the Parkland teens, who are spearheading Saturdays March For Our Lives rally in Washington, in the tweet.

MARCH FOR OUR LIVES GUN CONTROL RALLY TO DRAW THOUSANDS ACROSS US

The students are also holding a gun-reform rally Thursday at a charter school in Washington where two students were killed by gunfire earlier this year.

Wind retweeted Time on Thursday, thanking the publication for this incredible opportunity.

Gonzalez also took to Twitter, sharing the cover image.

Just a quick plug to remind everyone that the March is in 2 DAYS !!! we are all gonna make history together :-), she wrote.

Nikolas Cruz, 19, is accused of carrying out the Feb. 14 massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas, killing 17 people. He has since been indicted on multiple charges.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.The handgun used in a shooting at a Maryland high school was legally owned by the gunmans father, authorities said Wednesday.

Austin Rollins, 17, brought the Glock 9mm pistol to Great Mills High School on Tuesday and opened fire, wounding a 16-year-old girl and a 14-year-old boy, the St. Marys County Sheriffs Office said.

A school resource officer got to the scene within a minute and fired a shot at Rollins, but it wasnt immediately clear whether Rollins was killed by the officer or if he took his own life. Rollins died at the hospital hours later.

Authorities didnt divulge any further information about the weapon, including how Rollins was able to have access to it or where it was purchased, according to the Baltimore Sun.

Maryland law bars a person from leaving a loaded weapon somewhere that could be accessed by someone under the age of 16, the newspaper reported. It is also illegal for anyone under the age of 21 to possess a handgun unless it is required for their job.

Police said the shooting appears to be the action of a lovesick teenager, but authorities admitted that a precise determination of Rollins motive may be impossible now that he is dead.

All indications suggest the shooting was not a random act of violence," police said.

Investigators have failed to find any threatening posts or statements made by Rollins, the Baltimore Sun reported.

The 16-year-old girl was identified as Jaelynn Wiley and is still fighting for her life at the University of Maryland Prince Georges Hospital Center. She remained in critical condition as of Wednesday, the hospital said in a statement.

The 14-year-old boy was released from MedStar St. Marys Hospital, according to the Baltimore Sun.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.Hundreds protested at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point campus Wednesday over a proposed realignment to the schools majors  dropping the humanities for an emphasis on more practical courses to lead students to sustainable futures.

University officials have proposed cutting 13 majors, mainly in social studies and the humanities  programs with lower enrollment, the school said.

The 13 programs that could be eliminated are American studies, art, English, French, geography, geoscience, German, history, music literature, philosophy, political science, sociology and Spanish.

The university, located about 100 miles north of Madison, also plans to add or expand 16 programs that have a higher demand to deal with declining enrollment and reduced tuition revenue. Those pragmatic majors include marketing, management, computer information systems, graphic design and aquaculture  areas that have demonstrated value and demand in the region, according to the school.

The campus  one of 11 campuses in the University of Wisconsin system  is looking to focus on majors that have clear career pathways, The Washington Post reported.

Although some majors are proposed to be eliminated, courses would continue to be taught in these fields, and minors or certificates will be offered, the school said in a statement, as reported by The Hill.

Political science professor Jennifer Collins told WAOW-TV Wednesday that the reshuffling would change the nature of the university radically and reduce opportunities available to students in central Wisconsin.

Vice chancellor for academic affairs Greg Summers last week said reshuffling resources toward more popular majors is necessary because of increased competition in attracting a declining pool of high school students.

Wednesday afternoon Chancellor Bernie Patterson met the demonstrators, including students, faculty, alumni and others. Patterson said the status quo is not an option to deal with a looming budget deficit projected to be $4.5 million over two years.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.A North Carolina man has been charged with murder and elder abuse because authorities say he left his mother to die on the floor of their home after a fall so he could collect her savings.

Eric Paul Brunner, 39, also withheld his mother's medications for diabetes and other ailments for six days while she lay helpless, police told the News & Observer of Raleigh.

"Mr. Brunner admits to having been in and out of the house, walking past his mother's corpse, for at least 24 hours if not longer," Investigator J.T. Willis wrote in a report, according to the newspaper.

Being the caregiver to 74-year-old Cynthia Brunner, the son already had at least partial access to the mother's money, police told the newspaper. The son told police his mother had about $30,000 in the bank, police said.

Brunner reported his mother's death Feb. 19, "more than 24 hours" after she fell and was left, the son's words to police, "squirming," the paper reported.

"Mr. Brunner admits that he and his mother have had a tenuous relationship," Investigator J.N. Yoakum told the newspaper.

Brunner was arrested March 13. He was being held without bail and is scheduled for a court hearing April 14. It was unclear if he has a lawyer.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.Defense Secretary Jim Mattis on Thursday said Saudi Arabia was "part of the solution" in Yemen, where the Saudis are leading a U.S.-supported military campaign against Houthi rebels that is heavily criticized for inflicting civilian casualties.

Mattis spoke at the start of a Pentagon meeting with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who is on a three-week U.S. visit. Earlier this week the Senate debated and then shelved a resolution calling for an end to U.S. support for the Saudi-led coalition in Yemen. Mattis had opposed the measure, saying it would be counterproductive by increasing civilian casualties, jeopardizing counterterrorism cooperation and emboldening Iran to increase its support for Houthi rebels.

During a photo-taking session with the crown prince, Mattis was asked by a reporter whether he would raise concerns about civilian casualties in Yemen. Mattis said the U.S is working with the U.N.'s new envoy to Yemen, Martin Griffiths of Britain, in pursuit of a political solution to the civil war, which has killed more than 10,000 civilians since it started in March 2015.

"We believe that Saudi Arabia is part of the solution," Mattis said. He added: "They have stood by the United Nations-recognized government, and we are going to end this war. That is the bottom line. And we are going to end it on positive terms for the people of Yemen but also security for the nations in the peninsula."

In prepared remarks, Mattis said the U.S. has a strong relationship with Saudi Arabia in fighting extremists and deterring malign activities by Iran. He said a political settlement in Yemen would protect Saudi Arabia and deny safe haven to terrorists.

"Your significant amounts of humanitarian aid is critical to help the innocent caught up in this conflict (and) we applaud you for that," he told the crown prince.A natural birthing center in North Carolina has stopped delivering babies after the deaths of three newborns in the past six months.

The News & Observer of Raleigh reports Baby+Company in Cary has told its customers by email that it is sending all mothers in labor to WakeMed Cary, a local hospital which is its business partner. The company didn't provide specific information on when the deaths occurred, citing privacy laws.

The company also said the Cary site has had four deaths since it opened in October 2014. That compares to only one death at its other five centers in three states.

Baby+Co. has also opened facilities in Charlotte and Winston-Salem. It also operates centers in Tennessee and Colorado, opening the first one in 2013.

___

Information from: The News & Observer, http://www.newsobserver.comAt one point, it was the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history. Two years after 49 people were massacred inside a crowded nightclub in Orlando, the wife of the gunman responsible was put on trial -- with families of the victims looking for justice.

Omar Mateen opened fire with a Sig Saur semi-automatic rifle on June 12, 2016, killing dozens of people before he was fatally shot hours later by police. The trial of his widow, Noor Salman, was the only criminal prosecution for the incident.

Testimony began on March 14. After deliberating for three days, the jury announced on March 30 that Salman was found not guilty of obstruction and providing material support to a terrorist organization.

In light of the verdict, here's what you need to know.

What was she being accused of?

Salman pleaded not guilty to charges of aiding and abetting Mateen's allegiance to the Islamic State. She was also charged with obstruction of justice, as FBI agents say she lied to them during questioning hours after the attack.

Assistant U.S. Attorney James Mandolfo said Salman gave conflicting statements to FBI agents. In one conversation with authorities, before they informed her of any details of the attack, she said, "My husband is safe with guns."

"No one ever told her about guns," Mandolfo said.

FBI agents interviewed Salman three times after the attack. They said she was aware Mateen was planning to do something and that texts to her husband prove it.

"She knew he was going to conduct the attack," federal prosecutor Roger Handberg told a judge during a hearing in Oakland on Jan. 17, 2017.

One text recovered from Salmans phone reads, If ur mom calls say nimo invited you out and noor wants to stay home. Another reads, She asked where you were xoxo. Love you.

Nimo, or Nemo, is the name of one of Mateens friends, whom defense attorneys said Mateen often used to cover his tracks when he went out to cheat on his wife.

She shopped with her husband at Walmart the night before the attack when he bought five containers of ammunition, a source close to the investigation previously told Fox News.

A law enforcement source also told Fox she had driven her husband to Pulse nightclub at least once before the deadly shooting.

What was her defense?

The family and Salmans lawyers denied she had anything to do with Mateens plot.

In a November 2016 interview with The New York Times, Salman apologized for her husband's act and claimed she was unaware of his plan.

"I don't condone what he has done," she told the newspaper. "I am very sorry for what has happened. He has hurt a lot of people."

Defense attorneys described Salman as a simple woman with a low IQ, who was abused by her husband and was in constant fear for her life. Her attorneys also claimed she wasn't given proper Miranda warnings, which tell suspects they have a right to remain silent and have an attorney present, before she made statements.

I knew when he left the house he was going to Orlando to attack the Pulse Night Club, Salman confirmed in a signed statement written by an FBI agent, according to documents obtained by the Orlando Sentinel.

Defense attorney Linda Moreno argued that this confession was coerced and, therefore, should not be admissible in court.

"Noor Salman denied any knowledge of Omar Mateen's plans for hours," Moreno said, claiming agents told Salman that she could go to jail and not see her child.

What about her family?

FBI agents arrested Salman in January 2017 inside her California home, where she had been living with her young son, whom she shared with Mateen.

The now 5-year-old boy, who lives with his maternal grandmother in California, has since learned about his father's act and hasn't had any contact with Mateen's side of the family, Susan Clary, spokeswoman for Salmans family, told the Orlando Sentinel.

Salman reportedly calls the boy daily.

"They talk about what he learned in his kindergarten class that day and what his favorite toys are," according to the Florida newspaper.

What were the highlights of her trial?

U.S. District Judge Paul G. Byron, federal prosecutors and defense attorneys picked 12 jury members and six alternates on March 12.

Opening statements started in federal court on March 14 in downtown Orlando.

On the first day of the trial, jurors listened to a witness who hid under a dead body for three hours as shots were fired and an Orlando police detective who choked up on the stand. They also watched a video taken during the shooting by a survivor inside the club.

Jurors watched graphic videos of the massacre the next day. Salman shielded her face as the videos and images were displayed on screen, the Orlando Sentinel reports.

One video showed Mateen opening fire  shooting people already lying motionless on the dance floor. He then walked toward the restroom where he began targeting people hiding in the bathroom stalls.

On March 18, Salman's defense team filed a motion, asking the judge to ban the prosecution from using any damning statements the widow may have made to an FBI agent about Mateen's plan, according to the Orlando Sentinel.

The next day, FBI Special Agent Ricardo Enriquez took the stand to reveal the statement Salman had given him the night he questioned her about the mass shooting.

I am sorry for what happened, Enriquez read Salman's note, according to the Orlando Sentinel. I wish Id go back and tell his family and the police what he was going to do.

Salman's defense attorneys argued those statements weren't accurate.

On March 20, the mother of Mateen's friend, known only by the nickname "Nemo," testified in court. She discussed the pair's relationship, and told the court her son was working that night in Washington, D.C., and had not been with Mateen.

Jurors got a deeper look into Mateen's past on March 21 as they searched through his browser history, which included ISIS propaganda and beheading videos. They also flipped through photos taken inside his Florida home.

Final text messages between the couple were then read aloud in court.

Salman texted Mateen twice during his hours-long standoff with police, asking, "Where are you?"

Mateen responded, "You heard what happened."

"????" Salman replied. "What happened?!" Salman texted.

"I love you babe," Mateen wrote in his last text message at 4:29 a.m.

"Habibi what happened?!" Salman wrote, using an Arabic term of endearment. "Your mom said that she said to come over and you never did."

On March 22, jurors watched security footage of Salman standing by her husband's side -- with their young son close by -- as Mateen bought ammunition at Walmart.

"I knew Omar was preparing for Jihad when he bought the rifle, was going to the range to shoot, was spending a lot of money and bought the ammunition, Salman said, according to a transcribed statement jurors were given earlier, the Orlando Sentinel reported. I saw these things as a green light for Omar to do an act of violence."

On March 24, lawyers revealed that Mateen's dad was a secret FBI informant for more than a decade -- a revelation that led to immediate calls by the defense for a mistrial.

"Seddique Mateen was a FBI confidential human source at various points in time between January 2005 and June 2016, the defense lawyers, in a court document, quoted United States Attorney Sara Sweeney as saying in a letter.

Salmans lawyers, who denied she had anything to do with the attack, added: Moreover, the defenses questioning of the Governments witnesses has also been hindered by the Governments actions. During the cross-examination of Shahla Mateenshe denied any knowledge of a relationship between Seddique Mateen and the FBI. This was either false and the Government knew it since Seddique Mateen had been working with the FBI for eleven years or Seddique Mateen had kept this information from his wife  a situation ripe for cross-examination.

U.S. District Judge Paul Byron rejected the defense's motion for a mistrial on March 26, saying it had little bearing on the trial.

"This trial is not about Seddique Mateen. It's about Noor Salman," Byron said.

Sweeney told the 12 jurors on March 28 that Mateen's initial target was not Pulse, but Disney Springs.

The target of that terrorist attack was not the Pulse nightclub. ... The target of his attack was Disney, Sweeney argued during closing arguments, showing the jury photos of a baby stroller and doll she believed Mateen planned to use to hide his weapons and get into Disney, according to the Orlando Sentinel.

Salman's defense lawyers said Sweeney's information didn't make the incident "any less tragic" and argued that it had nothing to do with his wife's knowledge of an attack.

"It's a horrible, random, senseless killing by a monster. But it wasn't pre-planned," defense attorney Charles Swift said. "And if he didn't know, she couldn't know."

Deliberations began following the closing arguments around 2 p.m. on March 28.

On March 30, after deliberating for three days and 12 hours, the jury in Salman's case reached a not guilty verdict on all counts. The widow was found not guilty of obstruction and providing material support to a terrorist organization.

Fox News' Phil Keating and The Associated Press contributed to this report.Two people wanted for shoplifting were arrested Wednesday after they inadvertently walked into police headquarters in Delaware.

Authorities said that Christopher McDowell, 34, and April J. Wright, 48, were wanted on shoplifting warrants for an incident at a Kohls department store in February.

According to Delaware State Police, McDowell had attempted to make a fraudulent return at the department store on Feb. 22, but was denied due to his history with previous suspicious activity, WDEL reported.

Wright, who was with him, then took merchandise on display and left the store without paying for it, despite store security trying to stop them.

Arrest warrants for shoplifting were issued against the pair.

On Wednesday, McDowell, who reportedly appeared to be drunk, walked into Delaware State Police headquarters and asked for a ride home.

Cops identified McDowell as a wanted suspect and took him into custody.

After being processed on charges of shoplifting and third-degree conspiracy, McDowell was released on $1,000 unsecured bond after an arraignment. He was allowed to contact an acquaintance for a ride home.

Police said he contacted Wright, who showed up to give him a ride home.

Wright was arrested and charged before being released on a $1,5000 unsecured bond.A teen in Minnesota hit a bit of a snag during her driving test Wednesday afternoon when she accidentally crashed into the building of the exam office, police said.

The collision occurred after the 17-year-old girl put the car in drive when she really meant to put it in reverse, the Buffalo Police Department said in a Facebook post.

DASHCAM VIDEO OF DEADLY SELF-DRIVING UBER CRASH RELEASED

This led to the vehicle lurching forward when she accelerated, police said, sending the car over the curb, striking the building housing the exam station.

A photo shared by authorities showed the vehicle sitting within the wall of the building and glass scattered on the sidewalk.

POTATO TRUCK TOPPLES IN TRAFFIC CIRCLE

The 60-year-old woman who was administering the driving test was taken to the hospital for treatment of non-life threatening injuries, police said. Neither the teen nor anyone inside the building was reportedly hurt.

But police said there was significant damage to the car and the building.

No charges are pending, police said.A Tennessee man wrongfully imprisoned for more than three decades for rape and burglary convictions was awarded $1 million from the state Wednesday.

Lawrence McKinney, 61, was exonerated by Gov. Bill Haslam nine years ago after new DNA evidence led to his 1978 convictions being overturned, the Tennessean reported.

McKinney sought the legal maximum of $1 million for wrongful imprisonment, which was unanimously approved by the Tennessee Board of Claims, according to the newspaper.

After being released in 2009, McKinneys request for exoneration was initially denied by the state board of parole, which makes recommendations to the governor.

In the years following, McKinney demanded justice after spending 31 years, nine months, 18 days and 12 years behind bars for crimes he did not commit, according to Fox 17 Nashville.

They took my life away from me, they took everything away from me where I didnt have a chance to have a family, raise kids or nothing," McKinney told the station in 2016. All my 20s and all my 30s and 40s, they were taken away from me. I didn't have a chance to build something for myself.

While in prison, McKinney said he found solace in newfound spirituality.

I know that God put peace in my heart," McKinney told the Fox affiliate. Love God with all your heart, your mind and your soul, and love your neighbor as you love yourself.

McKinney, who resides in Lebanon, Tenn., will reportedly receive $353,000 up front to cover legal fees, debts and funds to purchase a vehicle. The remaining $647,000 will be distributed monthly for life starting May 1, the Tennessean reported.

Gov. Haslam granted McKinney an executive exoneration in December, which ultimately cleared a path for his request for recompense.

Though the facts of this case are complex and reasonable minds may draw different conclusions from them, ultimately I respect the determinations of the Shelby County Criminal Court and District Attorney General that Mr. McKinney was not guilty of the crimes for which he was convicted, Haslam said, and would not have been prosecuted if the DNA testing results had been available at the time of trial.A woman who repeatedly purchased containers of compressed air at a Walmart store in Florida was arrested Tuesday after a sheriffs deputy found her covered in vomit inside her vehicle outside the store, authorities said.

Police say Tammy Irvin, 34, was likely inhaling the compressed air over the course of six hours outside the Callahan, Fla., store, the Nassau County Sheriff's Office told Fox 30 in Jacksonville.

The heater in Irvins vehicle was turned to the highest setting, consistent with heating compressed air, a police report said. The deputy at the scene said Irvin was found to be holding one bottle of compressed air, with three other bottles inside the vehicle.

Deputies said Irvin told them she planned to sit in her truck and "not go anywhere," the station reported.

Irvin was charged with inhalation of a dangerous chemical, the report said.Two American tourists died and two others sustained minor injuries when a helicopter crashed on Australia's Great Barrier Reef on Wednesday, officials said.

Police Inspector Ian Haughton said the pilot pulled one of his four passengers from the wreckage after the crash at a coral-viewing pontoon northeast of the Whitsunday Islands. But desperate attempts to revive the 65-year-old woman failed.

Haughton said a 79-year-old man also died despite bystanders' attempts to resuscitate him.

The man and woman have not been identified, but are both Hawaii residents, the New York Times reported.

A 34-year-old man and a 33-year-old woman from Colorado were taken to the Australian mainland for medical treatment for non-life-threatening injuries, Haughton said.

All four tourists knew each other.

Police said the helicopter was on its final approach for landing at the Hardy Reef viewing pontoon on what was a routine flight. The people were also on a nearby dive and snorkel platform when the helicopter crashed, police told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

The five-seat, single-engine Eurocopter EC120 Colibri crashed 40 miles northeast of the Whitsunday Islands near a pontoon that has underwater viewing chambers to see coral and is a popular tourist destination.

The U.S. Embassy in Australia said in a statement it was aware that two U.S. citizens had died and was "providing all appropriate consular assistance."

Whitsunday Air Services suspended operations as it works with authorities to determine the cause of the crash, as an independent, robust and transparent investigation is underway, Haughton said.

He said the consequences are tragic for the people on board and that you couldnt begin to imagine the impact on them.

"We are extremely saddened by this incident and our deepest condolences are with the families of all of the passengers," the company said in a statement.

Its just gut-wrenching, Andrew Willcox, the Whitsunday mayor, told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. My deepest sympathies goes out to those who lost their lives and those that were injured."

The Australian Transport Safety Bureau confirmed a crash investigation was underway.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.next Image 1 of 2

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European Union leaders are set to condemn Turkey's efforts to stop natural gas exploration off Cyprus ahead of a meeting next week between top EU officials and President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

In a draft statement, seen by The Associated Press, they call on Turkey "to cease these actions and respect the sovereign rights of Cyprus to explore and exploit its natural resources in accordance with EU and international law."

Last month, Turkish warships blocked a rig from reaching an area southeast of Cyprus where Italian company Eni was scheduled to drill.

Ankara said it would prevent any further drilling off Cyprus without the direct involvement of the ethnically divided island's breakaway Turkish Cypriots.

The EU leaders, meeting in Brussels Thursday, urged Turkey to normalize ties with Cyprus.Swedish journalist Kim Wall was possibly strangled or had her throat slit aboard the UC3 Nautilus, a 58-foot submarine built by Danish inventor Peter Madsen, a medical examiner said Thursday during the third day of the murder trial.

Christina Jacobsen told the courtroom there was a cut on Wall's neck that "doesn't seem to have anything to do with the dismembering," but that officials have not yet been able to prove it has a connection with her death due her head being in the water and decomposition, Sky News reported.

What we think happened is that the airways were totally or partially cut off," she said in court. "That would be due to either strangulation, throat cutting or drowning, she said.

When Madsen's lawyer then questioned if Wall's autopsy showed typical signs of strangulation, Jacobsen replied "No."

Madsen, 47, is charged with murder, dismemberment and indecent handling of a corpse for the way he disposed of Wall's body after she had gone out for a sail in his vessel for an interview. The inventor has charged his version of the story several times since Wall was reported missing in August 2017, but maintained her death was accidental.

He told the court at the start of the trial that Wall died when the mess room of the submarine filled with toxic fumes, causing her to suffocate. He said he went into a psychosis and decided to dispose of Walls body, but did not provide details about the dismemberment, saying it was horrible.

KIM WALL'S GRUESOME DEATH DETAILED IN PETER MADSEN MURDER TRIAL: A TIMELINE

On Wednesday he admitted to stabbing the journalist, but said he did it after she died to prevent gases from being trapped so her body would sink when she was dumped in the ocean.

"It's something so horrible that I do not want to go into detail. I will just say, that it was horrible," he said, according to Sky News.

Madsen admitted to stabbing Wall after prosecutors mentioned the multiple stab wounds found on the recovered body parts. The inventor said he used a sharpened screwdriver to stab the body, but insisted they were done to make sure the parts would sink.

WHO IS PETER MADSEN, THE DANISH INVENTOR CHARGED WITH MURDERING KIM WALL?

Prosecutor Jakob Buch-Jepsen had said a psychiatric report of Madsen concluded that he is an intelligent man "with psychopathic tendencies" who has "no empathy or feelings of guilt."

The case is expected to end on April 25, and a total of 37 witnesses are expected to be called during the trial.

In Denmark, murder typically carries a jail sentence of 12 years, according to Sky News. It some cases, however, it's possible for a convicted murderer to remain in custody for life if he or she is deemed too dangerous to be released.

Since September, the "Kim Wall Memorial Fund Grant," an online crowdfunding campaign, has raised funds that will be given to a female reporter. The $5,000 grant will be awarded on March 23, which would have been Walls 31st birthday.

Fox News' Katherine Lam contributed to this report.next Image 1 of 2

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A Malaysian police investigator says the absence of four North Korean suspects believed to have orchestrated the killing of their leader's half brother didn't cause prejudice against the two women who are on trial.

Defense lawyers say Doan Thi Huong of Vietnam and Siti Aisyah of Indonesia are scapegoats in the murder of Kim Jong Nam at Kuala Lumpur's airport on Feb. 13 last year. Prosecutors say four North Koreans recruited the women and provided them VX nerve agent before fleeing the country.

Chief police investigator Wan Azirul Nizam Che Wan Aziz on Thursday disagreed with the defense's contention that the absence of the four North Koreans caused prejudice, saying the women were the ones who had actually committed the killing.A Nigerian schoolgirl remains in Boko Haram custody after the Islamic extremist group released more than 100 others, and her mom said Thursday it's because the girl wouldn't convert to Islam.

The girl, Leah Sharibu, 15, was about to board a vehicle that would have returned her to freedom with 104 other abductees. But she was stopped by the extremists, who said she would be left behind if she refused to convert, according to The Associated Press.

"Her friends said they tried to convince her but she said she will not convert to Islam. Boko Haram said since she will not convert to Islam she should remain behind. That was how they left her, her mother said.

Freed girls and other parents have said Sharibu is Christian and remains a captive because she won't convert.

On Wednesday, Boko Haram members drove nine vehicles carrying 104 girls to Dapchi, Nigeria, and left them in the center of town, according to witnesses.

Before leaving they reportedly told residents never to "put your daughters in school again.

Boko Haram means Western education is forbidden in the Hausa language.

President Muhammadu Buhari confirmed that Sharibu was the only schoolgirl abducted by the group that remained in captivity. The Nigerian leader vowed that she would "not be abandoned.

Buhari, a Muslim, slammed the extremists over the episode, saying that true followers of Islam all over the world respect the injunction that there is no compulsion in religion.

According to Time magazine, after declaring in 2015 that the Boko Haram had been defeated, the Nigerian government said last month that 110 girls were missing after the militants stormed a school in the northeastern town of Dapchi on Feb 19.

The apparent abduction, Time said, had revived painful memories of the infamous 2014 kidnapping of 276 girls from a school in Chibok.

Many of them were forced to marry their captors and had children fathered by them.

Fox News Ryan Gaydos and The Associated Press contributed to this report.The police officer who was exposed to a nerve agent when he came to the aid of a Russian ex-spy and his daughter was released from the hospital on Thursday.

National Health Service Executive Cara Charles-Barks said details about Detective Sgt. Nick Bailey's condition will be kept private because of patient confidentiality, and that ex-spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia remain in critical but stable condition.

Wiltshire's police chief read a statement from Bailey, in which said he was "so very overwhelmed by the support, cards and messages I have received - everyone has been so incredible."

"People ask me how I am feeling - but there are really no words to explain how I feel right now," his statement said. "Surreal is the word that keeps cropping up - and it really has been completely surreal."

Charles-Barks said 48 other people sought advice from the hospital after the nerve agent attack and have been assessed.

In regards to the condition of the Skripals, the Court of Protection in London on Thursday said it was "not possible to say when or to what extent" the two may "regain capacity," Sky News reported.

"The precise effect of their exposure on their long term health remains unclear albeit medical tests indicate that their mental capacity might be compromised to an unknown and so far unascertained degree," Judge David Williams said in his ruling.

POISONED EX-SPY LIKELY LATEST VICTIM IN LONG LINE OF KREMLIN-ORDERED HITS

The former spy and his daughter remain stable in hospital and under heavy sedation after the Salisbury attack on March 4, a consultant told the court. The unnamed consultant said the elder Skripal "is unable to communicate in any way" while his daughter "is unable to communicate in any meaningful way."

While their condition is "not expected to change in the immediate or near future", officials said in court that "it is not inconceivable that their condition could rapidly deteriorate."

The British judge also ruled that doctors may take blood samples for testing by chemical weapons experts.

The ruling Thursday means the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons will be able to test the Skripals' blood as part of the inquiry into British claims the two were poisoned by a nerve agent produced in Russia.

They were unable to give consent for the blood test, so the matter was brought to the Family Division of the High Court in London. Williams ruled it is in their best interests to have the samples drawn.

Britain blames Russia for the attack, which Russia denies.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.Russian media outlets say they will stop sending reporters to cover the lower chamber of the Russian parliament after it exonerated an influential lawmaker who has faced multiple allegations of sexual harassment.

Three female journalists have come out with detailed accounts of how Leonid Slutsky, chairman of the State Duma's foreign affairs committee, behaved inappropriately toward them in the past years. The Duma's ethics committee convened on Tuesday and found "no violations" in Slutsky's behaving.

The decision has caused outrage in media circles. The Ekho Moskvy radio station announced on Wednesday that it would stop sending reporters to the Duma because it deems it unsafe, joining RBC which recalled all of its Duma reporters and Kommersant which said it would not be using Slutsky for comment.Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy was placed under formal investigation and handed preliminary charges over allegations his 2007 presidential campaign received more than $60 million from former Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi.

The charges reportedly include illicit funding of a campaign, receiving money from Libyan embezzlement, and passive corruption.

Sarkozy, 63, was in custody Tuesday but was freed on bail Wednesday following days of questioning. It remained unclear if he can travel outside France.

He denied any wrongdoing and said his Libyan accusers were seeking revenge on him for his decision to send warplanes during the uprising in 2011 that led to Gadhafi's downfall and death, the BBC reported.

Authorities also reportedly questioned Sarkozy's former minister and close ally Brice Hortefeux on Tuesday.

Investigators are looking into whether the former president secretly accepted $61.6 million in total for his 2007 campaign from the late Libyan dictator. The figure is more than twice the allowed funding for a campaign at the time.

The payments would also violate the countrys rules against foreign financing.

The investigation into the alleged dealings with the Libyans began in 2013, but gained steam in 2016 when Lebanese businessman Ziad Takieddine told Mediapart that he gave suitcases containing $6.2 million in cash to Sarkozy and his former chief of staff Claude Gueant.

The allegations were reportedly corroborated by Bashir Saleh, who ran Libyas sovereign wealth fund at the time, according to French daily Le Monde.

Gueant denied the allegations, telling French media Tuesday that he had "never seen a penny of Libyan financing, according to the BBC.

A former Sarkozy aide, Alexandre Djouhri, is currently fighting extradition to France after his arrest in London earlier this year on suspicion of money laundering as part of the case, the broadcaster reported.

A number of Sarkozys political opponents have jumped on the issue, demanding answers about the allegations.

Segolene Royal, who ran against Sarkozy in 2007, said in a tweet that the election result may have been swayed to her opponent because of illegal funds. Millions of citizens have the right to know if (we) were on an equal footing, she said, according to the Times of London.

Marine Le Pen, leader of France's right-wing National Front, said the money could have influenced Sarkozys decision in 2011 to join military intervention against the Gadhafi regime.

We are talking about a war which was decided about the elimination of a head of state, about the destabilization of a country and about the wave of migration that has followed, said Le Pen, according to the paper.

The judges must complete their inquiries and not allow themselves to be manipulated. They must give their decision with great seriousness because it could have particularly important consequences, notably at an international level.

If found guilty, Sarkozy could get up to 10 years behind bars, although many are skeptical that a former president could be imprisoned and he much more likely would be given a fine.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.Free Freightnet Membership

List your company in the Freightnet directory. It's Free, it's Easy and your company can be displayed in front of potential freight buyers within 24 hours.Reporter

Before coming to work for The Daily News as a staff reporter, Connor worked for us as a freelance correspondent throughout 2017. He has written for other publications such as the Washington Post.Welcome to my genealogy blog. Genea-Musings features genealogy research tips and techniques, genealogy news items and commentary, genealogy humor, San Diego genealogy society news, family history research and some family history stories from the keyboard of Randy Seaver (of Chula Vista CA), who thinks that Genealogy Research Is really FUN! Copyright (c) Randall J. Seaver, 2006-2021.clarajancita at 22-03-2018 12:54 PM (3 years ago) (f)

Minister of Transportation, Rotimi Amaechi, has chastised Igbos for not voting President Muhammadu Buhari in 2015. Speaking on the topic The Igbo in the politics of Nigeria at the 12th convocation of the Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, Anambra State, Amaechi said Buhari has done more for Igbo people in 2 years than the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in 16.

Minister of Transportation, Rotimi Amaechi, has chastised Igbos for not voting President Muhammadu Buhari in 2015. Speaking on the topicat the 12th convocation of the Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, Anambra State, Amaechi said Buhari has done more for Igbo people in 2 years than the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in 16.

Amaechi asked that Igbos vote Buhari for a second term in 2019, so that they may rule the country after he is gone. He said: You (Igbo) did not vote for Buhari, true or false? You voted for PDP and what did they do for you? PDP abandoned the Enugu-Onitsha expressway since 1999, but Buhari is working on it, true or false? he asked.



Buhari is working on the second Niger Bridge, he is working on the Otuocha-Ibaji-Abuja road, he is working on the Abakaliki-Onueke road, he is working on the Oji-Achi-Naku road in Enugu state, he is also working on Ozalla-Akpugo-Amagunze road. He is working on the Aba-Ikot Ekpene road.



Under Buhari, all major cities of the south-east are captured in the existing railway project. Name one government that has done up to this within two years. Our problem is that we are just being emotional.



Igbo should go for confession, seek forgiveness and move into a national party, and look for way to fight from inside. They should vote for Buhari for a second term, and then force him out and look for Igbo president. Let the quarrel with the North, real or imagined, stop now. Amaechi asked that Igbos vote Buhari for a second term in 2019, so that they may rule the country after he is gone. He said: You (Igbo) did not vote for Buhari, true or false? You voted for PDP and what did they do for you? PDP abandoned the Enugu-Onitsha expressway since 1999, but Buhari is working on it, true or false? he asked.Buhari is working on the second Niger Bridge, he is working on the Otuocha-Ibaji-Abuja road, he is working on the Abakaliki-Onueke road, he is working on the Oji-Achi-Naku road in Enugu state, he is also working on Ozalla-Akpugo-Amagunze road. He is working on the Aba-Ikot Ekpene road.Under Buhari, all major cities of the south-east are captured in the existing railway project. Name one government that has done up to this within two years. Our problem is that we are just being emotional.Igbo should go for confession, seek forgiveness and move into a national party, and look for way to fight from inside. They should vote for Buhari for a second term, and then force him out and look for Igbo president. Let the quarrel with the North, real or imagined, stop now.

Post Reply I am a metro reporter on Gistmania, I have been publishing news materials for over 5 years Posted: at 22-03-2018 12:54 PM (3 years ago) | HeroAdds 1,646 Square Kilometers In The CSG Fairway

Highlights

1,646 KM2 area totaling 406,735 acres added to Strata-Xs Botswana CSG portfolio.



Offsets existing License areas in the CSG fairway, where ASX listed TLOU has established commercial production. (1)



The additional acreage is expected to add to the 1.4Tcf Prospective Resource in Strata-Xs existing licenses following review by independent evaluator MHA (1)



Strata-X holds 100% working interest in its current and newly acquired Licenses.

ASX disclosure note - 5.28.2 - The estimated quantities of petroleum that may potentially be recovered by the application of a future development project(s) relate to undiscovered accumulations. These estimates have both an associated risk of discovery and a risk of development. Further exploration appraisal and evaluation is required to determine the existence of a significant quantity of potentially moveable hydrocarbons.



DENVER and BRISBANE, Australia and VANCOUVER, British Columbia, March 20, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The directors and management of Strata-X Energy Ltd. (Strata-X or the Company) (TSX-V:SXE) (ASX:SXA) are pleased to announce that the Company has acquired two new Prospecting Licenses for its Serowe CSG Project covering 406,735 acres. The new licenses offset those already held by the Company in addition to offsetting lands of ASX listed peers. The Serowe CSG Project now spans 680,000 acres in heart of the Botswana CSG fairway, that are 100% owned and operated by the Company.



With the goal of developing the CSG resource, the Company has selected a Botswana environmental firm to seek the necessary environment approvals required before the appraisal program can begin. The environmental approvals are expected in the third quarter of 2018. The proposed appraisal programme is designed to prove commercial completion methods and convert resources to reserves. To achieve this, the Company plans to apply the latest completion and production methods to yield commercial gas flow rates. Once that is achieved, the Company can convert resources into reserves.



Ron Prefontaine, Chairman of the Board, stated that, With the new licenses, Strata-X now has 680,000 acres in its 100% owned Serowe CSG Project, which is located within the Kalahari Basin CSG fairway. The new additions provide our shareholders material upside for our proposed appraisal programmes in Botswana.

The new acreage lies adjacent to a bitumen highway between Serowe, the regional capital, and Orapa, the site of the worlds largest diamond mine and large potential energy market.

Tenement Renewal Terms

The new Prospecting Licenses known as PL016-2018 and 017-2018 carry a primary term of 3 years with two, 2-year extensions. To complete the issuance of the PL016-2018 and 017-2018 Prospecting Licenses, Strata-X Australia Pty Ltd, owner of the existing Republic of Botswana subsidiarys Rhino CBM Pty Ltd and Sharpay Enterprises Pty Ltd, created a new wholly owned Republic of Botswana subsidiary to hold Licenses called Jab Right Pty Ltd.

About Strata-X

Strata-X is a Denver, Colorado (USA) based company and is engaged in the business of oil and gas exploration and development with a variety of exploration opportunities in the States of California and Illinois in the United States of America and the Republic of Botswana. Strata-X has 89,825,208 common shares outstanding and trades under the symbol "SXE" on the TSX-V and "SXA" on the ASX.

For further information please contact:

Tim Hoops (USA)

President

+1 855-463-2400

info@strata-x.com

(1) Prospective Resources figures are from an audit report prepared by MHA Petroleum Consultant, a qualified reserves auditor, dated and effective 26 October 2016 following their audit in accordance with the COGE Handbook of the available technical data including the geological interpretation, information from relevant nearby wells, analogous reservoirs and the proposed program for the Project, prepared and presented to MHA by Strata-X. Prospective Resources are those quantities of petroleum estimated, as of a given date, to be potentially recoverable from undiscovered accumulations by application of future development project. Prospective Resources have both an associated chance of discovery and a chance of development. A high level of uncertainty exists with the Prospective resources given the lack of historical drilling, available data and other productivity factors that limit the economic viability of coal seam gas deposits. The Report reviewed only Prospective Resources as the project is not sufficiently developed to assign Contingent Resources or additional Petroleum Reserves to it. Stated Prospective Resource figures are Best Estimate  undiscovered natural gas quantities and net of a 6% royalty and are shown at a 100% working interest in the Project. The total costs associated with establishing the commerciality of this project are unknown at this time given the early stage of the Projects development. There is no certainty that any portion of the resources will be discovered, if discovered, there is no certainty that it will be commercially viable to produce any portion of the resources. For additional information see Strata-X November 2016 Presentation

This announcement was made in Canada for the TSX.V and in Australia for the ASX.



Public documents for Strata-X Energy Ltd. can be found at SEDAR (Canada) (www.sedar.com) and ASX.com.au (Australia).



FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS

This news release contains forward-looking statements, which relate to future events or future performance, including but not limited to, the completion and size of the Placement, receipt of regulatory approvals and timing thereof, the Corporations business strategies and plans for the use of such Placement proceeds, capital expenditure programs and estimates relating to timing and costs, and reflect management's current expectations and assumptions, including, but not limited to the timing and receipt of necessary regulatory approvals and third party approvals and completion of the Placement and stability of general economic and financial market conditions. The use of any of the words "anticipate", "continue", "estimate", "expect", 'may", "will", "project", "should", 'believe", and similar expressions is intended to identify forward-looking statements. Such forward-looking statements reflect management's current beliefs and are based on assumptions made by and information currently available to the Company. Readers are cautioned that these forward-looking statements are neither promises nor guarantees, and are subject to risks and uncertainties , including imprecision in estimate capital expenditures and operating expenses, stock market volatility, general economic and business conditions in North America and globally, risks associated with liquidity and capital resource requirements, that may cause future results to differ materially from those expected and the forward-looking statements included in this news release should not be unduly relied upon. See also "Risks Factors" in the Company's Annual Information Form available on SEDAR at www.sedar.com. Those factors are not, and should not be construed as being exhaustive. These forward-looking statements are made as of the date hereof and the Company does not assume any obligation to update or revise them to reflect new events or circumstances save as required under applicable securities legislation. This news release does not constitute an offer to sell securities and the Company is not soliciting an offer to buy securities in any jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful prior to registration or qualification under the securities laws of such jurisdiction.



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.An Egyptian Coptic Christian reported to have committed suicide in his army unit last week was actually murdered by his Muslim commanding officer, his family has claimed.



Last week, Matthew Samir Habib, 22, was pronounced dead at his Al-Ahram Palace Club unit in Giza, just south of Cairo after shooting himself twice, according to the official cause of death lodged on the burial permit.



However, the young man's family members refuse to believe he took his own life, insisting he was killed at the hands of his Muslim commanding officer.



"Matthew told us many times before that the colonel in his military unit, Ayman Mohamad Ahmed El Kabeer, was always persecuting and insulting him because of his religious identity," a family member, who did not wish to be named, told World Watch Monitor.



"Matthew, however, was patient and endured it all. His friends from the same unit told us that there had been a quarrel between Colonel El Kabeer and him on the day of the incident, when he had objected to something the colonel said."



The family member said that Matthew was a devout Christian whose faith would have prevented him from taking his own life. Additionally, the family member expressed doubt that the young man could have shot himself twice in the chest, when the first shot should have proved fatal.



A priest from a local Coptic church, who did not wish to be named, also told the outlet that Matthew, who was expected home from the military in June, had told him about his persecution in the army.



"Matthew was a devout young man and came from a very religious family," the priest said. "He was very modest and loved by all people in our village. We call for the real circumstances of Matthew's death to be revealed, and for those responsible to be held accountable, because Matthew could not have committed suicide."



A group of Matthew's family and friends protested in front of the local police station last week, demanding urgent investigation into his death. A human rights activist in Minya and Asyut, who did not wish to be named, called for an investigation into Matthew's death, and also those of a number of other Copts found dead in their units.



"The alleged suicide of a number of Christian soldiers have raised many questions, but there has been a lack of investigations," the activist said. "In many cases, the military spokesman declares data on the development of various issues. So why have they not used the same method to declare facts about Coptic soldiers' cases? Families of victims have a right to know what happened to their sons and learn all the facts.



"Why don't we hear that Copts commit suicide in their homes? Why do they just commit suicide inside their military units?"



Egypt ranks No. 17 on the 2018 World Watch List for both radical Muslim persecution resulting in violence as well as social pressures interfering with jobs, schools and churches.



On Palm Sunday 2017, two suicide bomb attacks on churches killed 45 and injured 100 others in the cities of Tanta and Alexandria.



In May 2017, 30 to 35 Christians (depending on reports) were killed and 28 wounded while traveling to a monastery. The gunmen tried to get them to convert to Islam before opening fire.



In July 2017, an Egyptian Christian soldier was beaten to death for refusing to remove his tattoos of a cross and Christian saints.



Copts are the native Christians of Egypt, accounting for about 10 percent of the country's 88 million people.

While the cost of pensions and retirees health care have been hot topics in the public sector for years, a similar and vital funding issue has gone virtually unnoticed: current employees health plans. It was brought to light, though, by the nine-day teachers strike in West Virginia last month.The problem: The state is required to keep 14 percent of its anticipated health care payments for current employees on reserve but was running $29 million short. The legislatures solution: Increase deductibles and copayments for state employees, who currently pay for 20 percent of their plans.The West Virginia teachers union argued that asking them to pay more for health care was equivalent to apay cut, and members walked. Ultimately, the teachers prevailed , and the state used general fund revenue to pay for the $29 million that was needed. The teachers also got a 5 percent pay raise.But, Ted Cheatham, director of the West Virginia Public Employees Insurance Agency, warns that the basic problem is not unique to West Virginia. Its a challenge to every state as health care costs continue to go up.In the last decade, states have increasingly opted to fund their employee health plans rather than turning to an insurance company. Currently, 29 states self-insure all their employee health plans, while another 19 self-insure a portion of them. According to the Self-Insurance Institute of America, states that self-fund insurance commonly keep funds for employee health care on reserve because claims can fluctuate from one year to the next. That way, even when faced with an unexpected rise in costs, employee claims can still be paid.But faced with other budget problems, some states are neglecting to fully fund these reserves -- and that could lead to more labor unrest outside West Virginia.The problems caused by an underfunded health plan have been particularly severe in Illinois. Not only did the state allow its reserves to dry up, but it's running a $1.6 billion backlog of unpaid health claims, according to the Illinois Office of Management and Budget.In Fiscal Years 2016 and 2017, when Illinois was operating without a budget because of partisan gridlock, University of Illinois employees were hit particularly hard. According to the, some doctors and dentists were requiring them to pay their full medical bills upfront, while others simply refused to accept the states insurance.Its been devastating for higher education [hiring] in Illinois, says Thomas Harnisch, director of state relations and policy analysis at the American Association of State Colleges and Universities. The best and the brightest job applicants dont want to go into a situation thats unstable. And more broadly, it is hurting the reputation of the entire university system.One glimmer of light: The state is now putting enough money into the plan to pay its current bills -- though the backlog of overdue bills remains.Even when health care reserves are well-stocked, employees may have cause to worry.In Kentucky, for instance, the reserves have reached a healthy $729 million, partially because the state has made employees pay more for their health care. But now, lawmakers want to use some of those reserves to help balance the state budget. The state House proposed taking $480 million out, and the Senate proposed $310 million -- chunks so big that unions worry employee contributions could go up again."It's unfair," says Jason Bailey, executive director of the Kentucky Center for Economic Policy. "It's balancing the budget on the backs of employees."Whatever the legislature decides to do could have big consequences: Kentucky was one of several states where talk of protests increased in the wake of West Virginias successful strike.The killing of 14 high-school students and three school staff members in Parkland, Fla., last month has brought renewed debate on gun control, but it also has brought into stark relief how difficult it is to have that debate without adequate data on guns and the violence associated with them. Certainly congressionally imposed limitations on federal research are to blame for the fact that we do not know the answers to such basic questions as how many households own guns. But there's another reason for the lack of the data we need on guns and on other pressing societal problems: a failure to demand adequate data due to the absence of training and lack of data science know-how among those who govern.Despite the tremendous potential to use data, as Chicago does to reduce foodborne illness, for example, and as every state does to advance public health's understanding about cognitive decline, much of the promise of such data-driven and evidence-based decision-making has failed to materialize because those in public institutions lack the experience needed for turning data into actionable insights through the effective use of data science -- the application of interdisciplinary, quantitative methods that transform data into useful information.This stands in stark contrast to a broader movement toward evidence-based policymaking. Researchers with the Pew-MacArthur Results First initiative have identified more than 100 state laws across 42 states passed between 2004 and 2014 that support the use of evidence-based programs and practices. To produce more data-driven decision-making, explains Beth Blauer, executive director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Government Excellence (GovEx), what's needed is more investment in training those in public service.Thankfully, there are more and more opportunities for that kind of training. Julia Lane at New York University, Rayid Ghani and Robert George at the University of Chicago, and Frauke Kreuter at the University of Maryland, for example, are offering what they call the Coleridge Initiative , which provides training programs to build capacity and knowledge, secure data research facilities to host confidential data, and a network that facilitates a community of practitioners. The program, which consists of a prerequisite tutorial followed by 10 training days over two weeks, costs $10,000 for government and nonprofit participants.GovEx is offering what it calls "a system of trainings, technical assistance, resources, and other supports" to help public officials learn to use data to improve governance. The organization provides a range of offerings such as a "Data Science Specialization" program developed by Johns Hopkins University, which costs $441, as well as a free course developed by Udacity entitled "Intro to Data Science."And our own organization, the Governance Lab at NYU's Tandon School of Engineering, has an offering of its own: "Solving Public Problems with Data" is a free introduction to data science and data analytical thinking in the public interest that is designed as a gateway to these other more advanced programs. A crash course on data science technologies, data analytical techniques and data sharing methods, it covers a broad range of topics, from "Strengthening a Data Analytic Culture" to "Data Collaboratives: Creating Public Value by Exchanging Data."The GovLab lecture series features almost a dozen leading data experts, including Quentin Palfrey, a former executive director of J-PAL North America; Carter Hewgley of Johns Hopkins; and Gideon Mann of Bloomberg. They share anecdotes, lessons and expertise from the field in a format designed to engage individuals who have committed to working for the public good but haven't had the opportunity to learn the basics of data and how it can be leveraged to achieve their public mission.As Tom Steinberg, founder of the nonprofit digital tool builder mySociety, put it in an essay back in 2016, "The world's national, state and local governments don't have the right digital skills in the right quantities to meet the challenges of the coming century." That's still true, but courses like "Solving Public Problems with Data" have been designed with the understanding in mind that we do not necessarily need to start from scratch when approaching this issue.Governments around the nation are working to design the best vaccine policies that keep both their employees and their residents safe. Although the latest data shows a variety of polarizing perspectives, there are clear emerging best practices that leading governments are following to put trust first: creating policies that are flexible and provide a range of options, and being in tune with the needs and sentiments of their employees so that they are able to be dynamic and accommodate the rapidly changing situation.A Dane County judge on Thursday ordered Gov. Scott Walker to promptly call special elections in two state legislative districts that have had vacancies since December, saying the governor misinterpreted a state law in choosing not to fill the seats until the November general election.Circuit Judge Josann Reynolds gave Walker one week to order special elections for the two open seats, Senate District 1 and Assembly District 42. Reynolds' order states that the elections must take place on a Tuesday between 62 and 77 days from the date Walker calls for them.If Walker were to order the elections on March 29, they would take place on June 5 or June 12. But if he issues the order one day earlier, the elections could be held on May 29.Reynolds said that Walker, represented by the state Department of Justice, misinterpreted a state law that spells out how legislative vacancies should be filled. DOJ lawyers argued that Walker was required to call a special election only if a vacancy occurs after Jan. 1 and before the second Tuesday in May of an election year.But Reynolds said that interpretation "flies in the face of reason and applicable statutory principles," as well as the law's plain language, which requires the governor to act anytime a vacancy occurs before the second Tuesday in May in an election year.Taken to its logical conclusion, Reynolds said, if a legislator dies shortly after taking office, that person's seat could remain unfilled until the next regular election two years later, which is clearly not what the law mandates."Either one of the defense's interpretations leads to an absurd result," Reynolds said. "Defendant's reading creates a window of just four months in any two-year period in which special elections must be held and thus leaves open the possibility that residents of Wisconsin could go unrepresented for almost two years if any governor declined to issue an order calling for a special election."She also noted that when other vacancies have arisen in the past, Walker has promptly called for special elections.Walker spokeswoman Amy Hasenberg said the governor's office is "working with DOJ to determine the next steps in this case."Elisabeth Frost, who argued the case Thursday for a group of voters in both of the districts, said she was hopeful that the governor would act quickly "to restore representation to these districts and stop spending taxpayer money on this litigation."A national Democratic group headed by former U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder sued Walker last month demanding that Walker hold special elections in the two traditionally Republican districts. Both of the legislators who held those seats were appointed to jobs in the Walker administration in December. The Senate district was represented by Sen. Frank Lasee, R-DePere; the Assembly district by Rep. Keith Ripp, R-Lodi.Critics have said that Walker put off calling the special elections after Democrat Patty Schachtner won a special election in Senate District 10, a heavily Republican area in northwestern Wisconsin, in January.In addition to arguing that he wasn't required to fill the seats, Walker said calling special elections before the November general election would be a waste of taxpayer money.Assistant Attorney General Steven Kilpatrick said even if special elections were held, the newly elected legislators would never have the opportunity to vote on any legislation because the current two-year session was due to end Thursday. The seats would also be up for election again in November, Kilpatrick said, and the terms would end in January.Kilpatrick also argued that even though constituents in Senate District 1 don't have a senator and constituents in Assembly District 42 don't have a representative, they're still represented in the Legislature by, in the case of the former, one of three representatives, and in the case of the latter, a sitting senator.But Frost argued that constituents in the districts are deprived of equal representation in both houses and that legislative staff persons who still work out of the offices cannot be adequate substitutes for legislators because they cannot vote on issues or take any other official actions.Charge of'activist judge'Senate Minority Leader Jennifer Shilling, D-La Crosse, said she was glad to see the court "uphold the constitutional right for Wisconsin residents to be represented."Gov. Walker is clearly intimidated by the thought of losing more power when voters go to the polls," Shilling said in a statement. "His refusal to call special elections is depriving thousands of Wisconsin families equal representation in the Legislature."Assembly Speaker Robin Vos said he hadn't read the decision, which was issued orally, but believes the judge interjected her own opinion into the process. He said the state will do what it can to avoid "duplicative elections.""I'm optimistic that, of course, the DOJ will appeal," he said. "And like we have found in so many cases, an activist Dane County judge is usually overruled by a common-sense appeals court that says that we should not be legislating from the bench."Reynolds was appointed to the bench by Walker in 2014. She was elected to a six-year term the next year.Vos said he didn't realize Reynolds was a Walker appointee, "But one thing I've learned about appointments," he said. "You don't always get it right."In her ruling, Reynolds said she was admittedly "not a political animal." But, she said, "for the life of me, I cannot reconcile the incongruity between Gov. Walker's administration's very vocal and consistent policy advocating for strict constructionism and the position taken by the attorney general in this case involving the most basic constitutional guarantees and the interpretation of one simply worded statute. The two views are inconsistent, incompatible, and irreconcilable."Desiree Frank, of Brandon, one of the plaintiffs in the case who has been without a representative in the Assembly since Ripp left, said after Reynolds' ruling that she feels "very, very good" about the ruling."I feel good and I'm eager to vote," Frank said.Washington will attempt to add more voices to "the chorus of democracy" with a series of laws that will make it easier to register to vote, encourage teens to pre-register and provide more information on campaign contributions from non-profit groups.Surrounded by legislators, election officials and students from Foster High School in Tukwila, Gov. Jay Inslee signed five bills from the recent session that make Washington one of the most progressive states for voter access.Starting in July 2019, Washington residents who are American citizens will be automatically registered to vote when they apply for or change their address on an enhanced driver's license or identification card. Unlike regular driver's license, an enhanced license or ID requires proof of citizenship.Also starting in July 2019, the state will allow 16- and 17-year-olds to pre-register to vote when they get their driver's license, which is the most common way to register in the state. They would be added to the rolls and sent a ballot at that address when they turn 18. Current law only allows 17-year-olds to sign up to vote if they will turn 18 by Election Day.That new law also requires schools to coordinate a voter registration event on Temperance and Good Citizenship Day in mid-January.At the same time, a separate law will shorten the amount of time before an election that a voter can register or change their address. Registrations by mail or online will be accepted up to eight days before an election, and new voters will be able to register and vote up to 8 p.m. on Election Day by going to the county elections office in person.Maria Alvarez, a Foster High School student who helped organize a demonstration last week in support of the victims of a mass shooting at a Parkland, Florida high school, said the changes will help energize young voters.Pre-registration will engage young people to be lifetime voters and "end some of the voicelessness" for teens, Alvarez said."It's not OK for adults to take over our future. We are the change," Alvarez said, and drew laughs when she added Election Day registration would benefit teens because "we do procrastinate."Inslee also signed the 2018 Voting Rights Act, which allows individuals to challenge whether their local governments give minorities a greater chance to a fair chance to be elected to office. Cities and other local districts facing challenges about under representation could take action such as establishing district positions rather than electing council members or board members at large.Supporters of the legislation said it would make redistricting easier but opponents said it would generate lawsuits.Taken together, the new provisions give Washington the most accessible voter laws in the country, said Inslee, who dubbed four bills "the four horseman of democracy.""The chorus of democracy ... will swell with new voices," he said.The fifth bill signed Monday was the Disclose Act, which requires nonprofit organizations that make $25,000 or more in contributions to election campaigns to register with the Public Disclosure Commission starting next year. They must list their top contributors, committee officers and the candidates or ballot measures they support or oppose.Sen. Andy Billig, D-Spokane, is the sponsor of the Disclose Act and a longtime advocate of measures to increase youth voter participation."By increasing access for more voters, alongside clear information, we can have a more engaged and informed electorate," he said in a press release after the signing.The Disclose Act becomes law as Congress is considering a change in federal law that will allow charitable, religious and philanthropic organizations to support or oppose candidates for public office.Attorney General Jeff Sessions released a memo on Wednesday officially directing federal prosecutors to seek the death penalty for some drug traffickers. The memo follows comments made by President Trump in New Hampshire on Monday where he unveiled his plan to combat the opioid epidemic.If we dont get tough on the drug dealers, were wasting our time, Trump said. "Some countries have a very, very tough penalty -- the ultimate penalty -- and by the way, they have much less of a drug problem than we do."Sentencing drug dealers to death is constitutionally questionable . The Supreme Court has consistently ruled that capital punishment is only appropriate for crimes that directly result in in a death. But even if this proposal ends up being legally sound, it comes at a time when the death penalty is less popular than it's ever been.By every marker, we see that the public and the states are turning away from the death penalty. Support in public opinion polls is at historic lows , and the trend line is only going down, says Cassandra Stubbs, director of the ACLU Capital Punishment Project.In fact, just days before Trump traveled to New Hampshire, the state's Senate passed a bipartisan bill abolishing the death penalty. The bill still has to make it through the House, and Republican Gov. Chris Sununu has sworn to veto it. But its passage -- which wasn't possible in 2016 because it lacked enough Republican support -- is indicative of a broader shift over the last decade.Since 2007, six state legislatures have outlawed the death penalty: Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, New Jersey, New Mexico and New York.That brings the total number of states where capital punishment is illegal to 19. In four additional states -- Colorado, Oregon, Pennsylvania and Washington -- governors have placed moratoriums on executions.Where capital punishment is an option on the books, it's rarely used -- 30 states have not executed a single person in the last 10 years. In New Hampshire, despite the governors opposition to abolishing the practice, the state has not executed anyone since 1939.In many cases, carrying out executions has become morally fraught and logistically impossible. States have struggled to obtain the necessary execution drugs, in some cases leading courts to halt the practice . And after several botched executions , states like Ohio and Oklahoma have been forced to enact moratoriums.Supporters of ending or restricting the use of the death penalty have historically been Democrats, but the tide has begun to turn among conservatives.Many of us conservatives dont trust government to launch a health-care program or fill potholes, let alone carry out life and death, Marc Hyden, a former field representative with the National Rifle Association who now works for Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty, toldin 2016. Its the quintessential broken big-government program.Last year, seven states, many of them red, put forward bills to prohibit the death penalty for people who suffer from a serious mental illness -- Arkansas, Indiana, Ohio, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia.In 2016, a bill to abolish the death penalty in Kentucky fell short by just a single vote in a House committee. The year before, the Nebraska Legislature overrode a governors veto to end the practice And in Montana, the House evenly divided on the issue, killing a repeal bill for now.Still, a slim majority of Americans continue to support the practice, as they have proved at the ballot box.The Nebraska law to repeal the practice, for instance, never took effect because in 2016, voters approved a ballot initiative restoring the death penalty. That same year, California and Oklahoma voters reaffirmed their commitment to capital punishment, either restoring or strengthening the practice in their states.But the ACLU's Stubbs says the trends are clear.There is no question," she says, "the death penalty is on the way out in America."The Governors Official Program is comprised of a wide range of constitutional and legal duties and ceremonial and community engagements. Each year, the Governor hosts thousands of visitors to Government House to take part in investiture and award ceremonies, Open Days, receptions and meetings, and travels widely throughout Queensland to support the activities of Patron groups. View a chronological record of the Governors daily program below.

On Wednesday, in the morning, in Wuhan City, Peoples Republic of China, His Excellency the Honourable Paul de Jersey AC and Mrs Kaye de Jersey visited the Hubei Provincial Library, where they viewed the Hubei-Queensland childrens painting exchange exhibition and undertook a guided tour of the Library.

Following, at the Office of Hubei Provincial Government, the Governor and Mrs de Jersey met the Governor of Hubei Provincial Peoples Government, Mr Wang Xiaodong; Vice-Governor, Hubei Provincial Peoples Government, Ms Chen Anli; Secretary General, Hubei Provincial Peoples Government, Mr Bie Bixiong; Director General, Hubei Provincial Department of Education, Mr Tao Hong; Vice-Mayor, Wuhan Municipal Peoples Government, Ms Xu Honglan; Deputy Director-General of Hubei Provincial Foreign Affairs Office, Mr Hu Yinghai and Deputy Director-General of Hubei Provincial Department of Culture, Mr Yan Rongli.

Following, at the Westin Hotel, the Governor attended a Queensland Education Networking Luncheon, and addressed guests.

In the afternoon, the Governor and Mrs de Jersey visited the Hubei Shuiguohu No. 2 Middle School, where the Governor addressed the second-round shortlisted students in the Queensland Cup Amazing Hubei English language talent competition.

Following, the Governor and Mrs de Jersey visited the Hubei Provincial Museum, where they attended a musical performance.Description

GIS  22 March 2018: Chairpersons and Committee members from five different Social Welfare Centres (SWCs) namely Mount Ory, Saint-Pierre, Nouvelle Decouverte, Quartier Militaire and Saint Julien DHotman, gathered this morning at the Mahatma Gandhi Institute in Moka to discuss the regulatory framework within which SWCs function and to enable an informed dialogue between different stakeholders. Some 80 participants were in attendance.

This initiative of the Ministry of Gender Equality, Child Development, and Family Welfare offered a platform for committee members to clearly understand their roles and responsibilities in the promotion of the well-being of residents.

Present at the event, the Private Parliamentary Secretary, Mr Rajcoomar Rampertab, underlined that activities at the SWCs should be geared towards empowering communities by providing them with the relevant tools and skills to contribute to the countrys social, cultural and economic development.

Mr Rampertab emphasised that the participants should encourage the inhabitants to avail themselves of the facilities and opportunities provided by the SWCs and to participate in the different activities organised in their localities.

He added that there has been significant progress in the evolution of SWCs since the Independence of Mauritius. This transformation concerns each and every one and it can be a motivating factor for the youth to develop the interest of engaging in social works, he pointed out.

For his part, the Acting Social Welfare Commissioner, Mr Premnath Ramputh, highlighted that chairpersons and committee members have a key role to play in improving the lives of families in the local communities. He stressed on the need to mobilise resources in the community for the realisation of more activities and social projects.

He underlined that the meeting was also an opportunity for stakeholders to network and shed light on the important aspects of administrative management of SWCs. He called upon all the stakeholders to develop a strong partnership and work together for providing high quality services to the community.Description

GIS  22 March 2018: Info-Highway, a project of the Government of Mauritius, geared towards providing a secure, scalable and robust E-services platform, has been ranked among the top five most voted in the category 7 E-government by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) Prizes 2018 Ceremony held on 20 March 2018 in Geneva, Switzerland. The project has received international recognition and acknowledged as a WSIS Prizes 2018 champion.

The Minister of Technology, Communication and Innovation, Mr Yogida Sawmynaden, who attended the ceremony hosted during the WSIS Forum (19-23 March) 2018 received the certificate of recognition for outstanding contribution towards strengthening the implementation of the WSIS Outcomes from ITU Secretary-General, Mr Houlin Zhao.

About the project

Info-Highway, a project of the Ministry of Technology, Communication and Innovation, has been chosen out of 492 nominated ICT success stories from around the world, following a comprehensive review by the Expert Group of 685 projects submitted by the WSIS Stakeholders community.

The main objective of Info-Highway is to provide a robust service platform to facilitate the consumption of published data amongst Government agencies and private entities to improve operation efficiency in public administration and business operations. It also aims at establishing links to other Ministries/Departments and institutions.

WSIS Prizes 2018

The ITU has in fact announced the top 90 ICT-related projects initiatives recognised for implementing the WSIS Action Lines, competing for the prestigious WSIS Prizes 2018. With participants emerging from across the globe, 72 champions were honoured and 18 winners voted in each of the 18 categories at the ceremony.

During the submission phase from 11 September 2017 to 10 January 2018 received a record number of 685 entries were received, out of which 492 exceptional projects were nominated for WSIS Prizes 2018. Close to one million online votes were cast during the period 29 January till 18 February 2018 for these projects. Following a comprehensive review exercise by the Expert Group, 90 extraordinary ICT-related projects and initiatives for the seventh edition of the WSIS Prize contest were retained.

Since 2012, WSIS Prizes has been rewarding remarkable efforts made by entities and organisations from around the globe that focus on accelerating socio-economic progress of the whole world as a communityDescription

GIS  22 March 2018: Climate change is one of the most critical global challenges of our times. There is compelling evidence that small states and Least Developed Countries are suffering from the impacts of climate change in a disproportionate way, thus reversing their progress on poverty alleviation, economic growth and stability and their ability to meet the sustainable development goals.

This statement was made this morning by the Minister of Ocean Economy, Marine Resources, Fisheries and Shipping, Mr Premdut Koonjoo, at the opening of the closing workshop of the Marine Science for Management (MASMA) funded Project Emerging knowledge for local adaptation funded by the Western Indian Ocean Marine Science Association (WIOMSA). The workshop is being held at the Mauritius Oceanography Institute (MOI) in Albion.

Minister Koonjoo pointed out that in view of the ecological, social and economic impacts of climate change on fisheries and the growing vulnerability of ocean ecosystems, coastal biodiversity and communities, it is imperative to meet the challenges of climate variability.

He emphasised that Government is determined to strengthen scientific climate research in collaboration with the neighbouring states development partners. Mauritius, he said, is also promoting extensive and ongoing climate research as well as focusing on climate monitoring and mitigation measures of the impacts of climate change.

The Minister concluded by appealing to all stakeholders to step up efforts in strengthening governance structures and to use emerging knowledge on coastal vulnerability for effective planning and implementation.

For her part, the Director of the MOI, Dr Ruby Moothien-Pillay, highlighted that the impacts of climate change differ in different continents and regions around the world. She pointed out that Africa is the most vulnerable due to its low adaptation capacity to climate change. According to the Global Climate Risk Index, Mauritius is ranked 14th as regards its disaster risk and is the 7th most exposed to natural hazards, she added.

She underscored the importance of giving due attention to local governments and understand the challenges they face when dealing with climate change. The workshop, she underlined, comes at an opportune time since it will build capacity of local government to optimise the use of the acquired knowledge in the implementation of projects.

MASMA project

The project aims to develop strategies to extend the impact of emerging knowledge relating to coastal vulnerability to enable local government and communities to use knowledge in order to facilitate adaptation and build resilience to climate change.

The specific objectives of the project are to assess the type and readiness of emerging knowledge on coastal vulnerability to inform and guide climate change adaptation at local government level; and evaluate the current capacity of local government and governance structures to use emerging knowledge on coastal vulnerability to inform adaptation and build resilience.

Participants will be called upon to devise strategies and make recommendations to strengthen knowledge management systems to generate, manage and disseminate knowledge relating to vulnerability to climate change to local government, with a particular focus on how this knowledge can be successfully taken up by local government.Description

GIS  22 March 2018: Mauritius is hosting the 2018 mid-year meeting of the Executive Committee of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association (CPA) from 22 to 23 March. The meeting opened this morning at the Hilton Mauritius Resort and Spa Hotel in Flic en Flac, in the presence of the Speaker of the National Assembly, also the President of the CPA Mauritius Branch, Mrs Santi Bai Hanoomanjee . Some 50 high level heads of delegation including, Speakers from Member States are participating in this convention.

The CPA aims to strengthen the capacity of Parliamentarians, to control and manage the activities and business of the Association. It enables Commonwealth Parliamentarians to contribute in a global setting to the development of the best parliamentary practices and the most effective policies. It speaks out for the rights of Parliaments and Parliamentarians to play a more active role in the development of their countries.

In her address, Mrs Hanoomanjee highlighted that the Commonwealth is an association of nations of different history, culture and traditions. The peaceful coexistence of the multi-ethnic groups in Mauritius, she pointed out, is exemplary as it demonstrates the trust that citizens have in the institutional set up of the country. She observed that careful planning and policies have lead to the countrys impressive economic performance and added that presently Mauritius is among the few Sub Sahara African countries who have successfully evolved into a fully diversified economy.

She further underlined that Mauritius has been constantly inspired by the fundamental values of the Commonwealth namely democracy, fundamental human rights, and the rule of law which are entrenched in our Constitution.

Mauritius joined the Commonwealth of Nations fifty years ago, on 12 March 1968, as a newly independent country, Mrs Hanoomanjee stated. This event coincides with the celebrations of the anniversary of the Independence of Mauritius which is indeed a milestone in the history of our country, she added.

For her part, the Chairperson of CPA, Mrs Emilia Monjowa Lifaka underlined that Parliaments and Legislatures of the Commonwealth are essential elements in the exercise of democratic governance. Political democracy, she pointed out, is a powerful tool for socio-economic change and a stronger Parliament.

Commonwealth Parliamentary Association

The CPA was founded in 1911 with the objectives to connect, develop, promote and support Parliamentarians and their staff to identity benchmarks of good governance and the implementation of the enduring values of the Commonwealth. Its activities focus on the Commonwealths commitment to its fundamental political values including just and honest government; the alleviation of poverty; fundamental human rights; international peace and order; global economic development; the rule of law; equal rights and representation for all citizens of both genders; the separation of powers among the three branches of government and the right to participate in free and democratic political processes.

At present there exist CPA branches in 175 national, state, provincial and territorial Parliaments, with a total membership of approximately 17 000 Parliamentarians.Description

GIS  22 March 2018: Fostering conditions for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) to thrive is a topmost priority for the SME Mauritius Ltd which has been set up to take over the functions of the Ex- Small and Medium Enterprises Development Authority (SMEDA). The SME Mauritius Ltd is expected to meet the present exigencies of the SME sector and to continue ensuring a range of services that were earlier provided by the latter.

The Minister of Business, Enterprise and Cooperatives, Mr Soomilduth Bholah, made this announcement yesterday during a press conference held at the seat of the Ministry in Port-Louis.

He highlighted the main objectives of SME Mauritius Ltd which are to promote entrepreneurship and provide the necessary support as well as assistance to the micro, small and medium enterprises in Mauritius.

The institution, he emphasised, will be responsible for the successful implementation of the ten year Master Plan which advocates for major institutional reforms that Government is undertaking so as to revive the sector. He also allayed any apprehensions about job losses amongst the employees of Ex-SMEDA and gave assurance that none of them will suffer from job losses.

Minister Bholah underpinned that MyBiz, the one-stop shop for business support solutions to entrepreneurs, has been replaced by the SME Registration Unit which provides registration and counselling services to entrepreneurs. More than 600 entrepreneurs have already benefited from the services of the SME Registration Unit, he added.

With regard to the Made in Moris label, the Minister recalled that a Memorandum of Understanding has been signed between the SME Mauritius Ltd and the Association of Mauritian Manufacturers as a means to facilitate the implementation of a budgetary measure for SMEs whereby Government contributes Rs 5,000 towards the costs of membership in the Made in Moris label.

The Made in Moris label, he underlined, will help SMEs to safeguard the authenticity of their products and increase the visibility of Mauritian brands. On this score, he announced that a hologram will be designed to ensure that products with Made in Moris label remain authentic in local and international markets.(TNS)  Internet service providers are promising to maintain a free and open internet. They just don't want Rhode Island lawmakers to try to make them to do it.Telecommunications and cable companies this week mobilized to stop two bills in the General Assembly that would use state government purchasing power to try to keep soon-to-expire federal "net neutrality" rules in place.After successfully lobbying last year to end net neutrality rules at the Federal Communications Commission, the industry is arguing at state houses around the country against proposals such as the ones in Rhode Island."Regardless of any legal mandates, broadband Internet service providers will not block or throttle lawful Internet traffic or engage in unfair discrimination against lawful content, applications, or devices," wrote Matthew Brill, a lawyer representing the New England Cable and Telecommunications Association, in testimony to the House Corporations Committee."At the same time, NECTA opposes any effort by Rhode Island or other states to establish their own net neutrality regimes because state legislation is unnecessary and would be counterproductive and unlawful."Industry and pro-net neutrality lobbyists, some flying in from Washington, D.C., crammed into a House Corporations Committee meeting Tuesday to testify about net neutrality bills from Providence Democratic Rep. Aaron Regunberg, who is also running for lieutenant governor; and another sponsored by members of House leadership including Rep. Brian Patrick Kennedy, D-Hopkinton."Given how internet traffic flows between, among and across states, a patchwork of state laws attempting to regulate how content and services are delivered over the internet would simply be unworkable," wrote Jonathan Banks, senior vice president at US Telecom.But net neutrality supporters, like Chad Marlow of the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington, said that without new laws like the Rhode Island proposals, the future of the internet could look more like the censored live stream of a 2007 Pearl Jam concert."In the absence of net neutrality in the United States and elsewhere we have seen content slowed and blocked based upon the political views and business interests of [internet service provider] companies," Marlow told the Corporations Committee.As examples, Marlow offered AT&T's apology after Pearl Jam's criticism of then-President George W. Bush was blocked from a web stream; Verizon rejecting abortion-rights group Naral Pro-Choice from a text message program; and all of the major telecom companies blocking Google Wallet to help their own payment systems.Net neutrality refers to the concept that internet service providers cannot block, slow down or speed up different content over the web, for either political or financial considerations.The Federal Communications Commission decision to end the Obama-era net neutrality rules, effective April 23, also preempted states from trying to regulate the internet on their own.The Rhode Island net neutrality bills from Regunberg and Kennedy skirt that issue by only targeting government contracts. They would prevent state agencies or municipalities from buying internet services, including mobile phone data, from providers that don't honor net neutrality rules.Regunberg said that although the two bills are very similar, his version features narrower language meant to avoid any conflicts with federal law.But despite five members of House Speaker Nicholas Mattiello's leadership team sponsoring the Kennedy bill, it may face an uphill battle getting a vote."Speaker Mattiello believes that net neutrality is essentially regulated by the federal government and there is little ability for the state to affect this issue," Larry Berman, spokesman for the speaker, wrote in an email. "He has spoken to internet providers and they have assured him they have no plans of changing their net neutrality policies, so he believes this issue is not imminent. However, the bill was heard by the Corporations Committee and he will confer with Chairman [Robert] Jacquard and the committee members to review the testimony."(TNS)  Warning: Most virtual currencies are based upon computer cryptography and derive their value solely from the markets perception of their value, which can experience great swings. You should be aware that there is a potential for you as a consumer to lose all of your virtual currency.This disclosure is something a state agency wants local consumers to get from brokers of virtual currencies such as Bitcoin before making transactions.The warning is in Senate Bill 3082, which was heard Tuesday by the House Consumer Protection Committee.Hawaiis Division of Financial Institutions at the Department of Commerce and Consumer Protection endorses much of the measure, which has a mix of virtual currency industry support and opposition. SB 3082 also contains proposed regulations opposed by DFI and industry businesses.Regulating virtual currency trading in Hawaii is an issue of high importance this year because DFI in 2016 interpreted state law governing money transfer businesses as applying to virtual currency brokers, and that led at least one major firm, Coinbase, to quit doing business in the state last year.Also, consumer awareness of virtual currencies is growing, especially with highly publicized gyrations in Bitcoin values that spiked from under $1,000 early last year to just over $19,000 in December and then fell to around $8,000 earlier this month.Other virtual currencies exist, including Zcash, Dash, Ethereum, Tether, Stellar, Monero, Litecoin, Ripple and Dogecoin.Meanwhile, more businesses are moving to accept virtual currencies as payment for goods and services. The Kauai Shores Hotel announced last month that it would take Bitcoin for online room bookings.Currently, companies that broker purchases or sales of virtual currencies for Hawaii consumers must be licensed as a money transmitter under state law and hold in reserve cash or other allowed liquid assets equal to the value of the virtual currency held for Hawaii customers.San Francisco-based Coinbase said this reserve makes doing business in Hawaii unfeasible.The policy forces virtual currency custodians like Coinbase to hoard huge sums of cash, the company said in written testimony. As a result, Hawaii has shut down all lawful virtual currency operators, even while unlawful, offshore service providers persist.To address the issue, DFI advocates eliminating the reserve requirement while maintaining licensing. Other provisions in the bill include third-party security audits if a company stores virtual currency for customers and giving customers a warning that also notes a computer failure or software attack could wipe out a customers virtual currency holdings.DFI opposed a part of the bill that would adopt about 60 pages of regulations proposed by the Uniform Law Commission. DFI said no state has adopted this model. This part of the bill was added by the House Committee on Intrastate Commerce last week. The Intrastate Commerce Committee, chaired by Rep. Takashi Ohno, added similar language to a companion bill, House Bill 2257, which has yet to be heard by Senate committees.J.P. Schmidt, a former Hawaii insurance commissioner now advising virtual currency platform Ethereum Foundation, favors no virtual currency regulation in Hawaii but said DFIs plan is worth supporting because Hawaii is the only state where consumers cant trade virtual currency.This sends a very bad message about Hawaii and our dealing with new technology, he said at Tuesdays hearing. We need to at least take that first step allowing citizens to exchange and trade virtual currency.Also endorsing DFIs position were Coinbase along with Hawaii companies Blockweather Holdings, Blockchain Investments and Blockchain Solutions Hawaii.Opponents of the bill include Hawaii-based Anatha Technologies. Industry supporter Ty Robinson said government cant effectively regulate virtual currencies. Requiring a license to transmit and/or receive virtual currency is, in this global climate of high tech growth, not only out of place but out of time, he said in written testimony.The committee deferred a decision on the bill until today.(TNS)  LOS ANGELES  The Los Angeles Police Departments years-long practice of keeping video from body cameras and patrol cars under wraps will soon end after the agencys civilian bosses approved a policy Tuesday that requires the release of recordings in the future.The 4-0 vote by the Police Commission marks a dramatic about-face for a department that refused to release such footage even as it rolled out thousands of body cameras to officers across the city in recent years.The new approach will give the public a firsthand look at some of the most crucial moments involving the LAPD, including shootings by officers, deaths that occur in their custody and other encounters when they use force that kills or seriously injures someone.The public has a right to see these videos, said Commissioner Shane Murphy Goldsmith, who helped draft the policy. I hope it informs a more informed public debate about policing today.The implications could be felt beyond Los Angeles. Law enforcement agencies across the country are still struggling with when and how to release video  if at all. In California, lawmakers attempts at a statewide answer have repeatedly stalled, leaving a patchwork of policies with varying degrees of transparency.Matt Johnson, the commissions vice president who also helped write the new rules, said he and others hoped the LAPDs approach would become a model for other law enforcement agencies.I think this will go a long way in helping build public trust through a significant increase in transparency, he said.Video can be a crucial piece of evidence in encounters involving police officers, both for those investigating the incidents and for outsiders interested in how they unfolded. For many, the release of those recordings offers residents the chance to see for themselves exactly what happened, rather than rely on sometimes-conflicting accounts from police and witnesses.But opponents fear that making such footage public could thwart an investigation, inflame tensions between the public and the police or, as LAPD Chief Charlie Beck has said, offer a limited, incomplete snapshot of an incident if other evidence isnt also shared.The policy calls for the release of other evidence along with the video  information that until now the public could only read about in a report summarizing an incident that typically is published about a year after it occurs. That information could include recordings of 911 calls, toxicology reports, photos of the scene or details about the weapons used, Beck said.Under the new rules for the LAPD, video from critical incidents involving the police would automatically become public within 45 days after they occur. The Police Commission or police chief could also opt to release video from other encounters if they decided doing so was in the public interest.The policy extends beyond video captured by police cameras. Other images the LAPD has of such incidents, including recordings from security cameras or bystanders cellphones, will also be released.There is also a caveat that allows the release to be delayed if the police chief and two police commissioners unanimously decide there is a valid, and specific, reason for doing so.Beck said that what gave him pause was the question of whether releasing a video would threaten a prosecution against anyone involved in the incident, officer or civilian. But he stressed he believed that in the vast majority of cases the 45-day window offered authorities plenty of time to build their cases and still make the video public.I would anticipate that this is a caveat that gets used very rarely, he told reporters.In an email campaign and again at Tuesdays meeting, the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California pressed the commission to amend the policy to include a 90-day cap on delaying any release, expressing concern that the exception will be overused.The department has routinely withheld video on grounds that it will interfere with ongoing investigations, staff attorney Melanie Ochoa told commissioners before their vote. We want to make sure this does not occur under the new policy as well.Overall, Ochoa said, reversing the LAPDs past practice and allowing the release of video can be an important step towards greater transparency.The public has seen glimpses of LAPD body camera footage recently  from a deadly police shooting on skid row and a hit-and-run investigation that prompted allegations of officer misconduct  but only after the recordings became part of a court case and were published by news outlets. Earlier this month, the district attorneys office released video from a police shooting for the first time when prosecutors announced they would not charge an LAPD officer who killed a homeless man near the Venice boardwalk in 2015.The shooting in Venice, Beck said, was only one of a few instances in which he would have felt strongly about delaying the release of the video.On those one-in-1,000 instances where I think there might be a criminal prosecution of a police officer, I think we need to understand that we cant jeopardize that, he said.The new disclosure rules were a year in the making. The panel brought in a group from the New York University School of Law to collect feedback. The results indicated broad support  from both the public and police  for making the footage public.The LAPD and the union representing rank-and-file officers were also consulted. So was Dist. Atty. Jackie Lacey, who had harsh words for the proposal now on the table.Lacey laid out her position in a memo last year, saying her office would not publicly release video evidence from a police shooting until after deciding whether to file criminal charges. Doing so earlier, Lacey wrote, could bias potential jurors.The Police Commission policy jeopardizes the justice process by exposing witnesses to video evidence before they are interviewed by our independent investigators, she said last month. It will make seeking justice in these politically charged cases more difficult.The police officers union aligned with Lacey, saying it would have preferred that LAPD video not be released until after investigations were complete. But, the unions directors said, they were glad that some of their input was included in the policy and believed that input helped strengthen the final product.We may not always agree on everything, Jerretta Sandoz, the unions vice president, told the commission. But we do respect the relationship that we formed and the dialogue we had related to this policy."The new rules go into effect in 30 days and will apply to shootings or other critical incidents that occur after that.When video does come out, Beck cautioned, it wont always provide the clear-cut answers new viewers might expect. Officers hands might block the cameras view. So could a steering wheel. There might be a struggle between an officer and a civilian that makes it hard to see what exactly happens.Sometimes these things, even when they are completely justified, completely appropriate, are still hard to watch, he said. There is no acceptable way for a viewer to watch somebody get shot.Cynthia McClain-Hill, another commissioner, agreed. She and other police commissioners have watched dozens of videos from police shootings as they determine whether officers violated LAPD rules for using deadly force.I still flinch every time I hear a gunshot. Every time, she said. Whether an officer is defending their life or whether a shooting is out of policy, it doesnt matter. Whats occurring is tragic and beyond difficult to see.(TNS)  San Diego City Attorney Mara Elliott has filed a lawsuit against consumer credit giant Experian, contending the company suffered a massive data breach that affected 250,000 people in San Diego and millions more  but never told customers about it.The lawsuit seeks civil monetary penalties under the states Unfair Competition Law, as well as a court order compelling the Costa Mesa-based company to formally notify consumers whose personal information was stolen and to pay costs for identity protection services for those people.Experian representatives did not respond to requests to comment on the lawusit Wednesday.The lawsuit contends that the theft of up to 3 million records began in 2010 and was orchestrated by a then-teenager in Vietnam, Hieu Minh Ngo. Ngo, posing as private investigator based in Singapore, gained access to a database of consumer information that was then held by a company called Court Ventures Inc. or CVI.He then sold the access to the database to identity thieves and other criminals via websites on the so-called dark web, the suit contends. Some 1,300 thieves worldwide bought access to the data, paying Ngo $1.9 million over an 18-month period ending in February 2013.Experian purchased CVI in 2012. The suit says the company knew or should have known about the data theft. It says CVIs biggest customer was the bogus private investigative firm Ngo set up, which was routinely paying $15,000 per month for access to the database. Company records also showed that millions of queries to the database were being made.Ngo was eventually arrested by federal authorities in February 2013 and pleaded guilty in March 2014 to accessing the database. He was sentenced to 13 years in prison in July 2014.The suit faults Experian for never notifying any consumers in the state that their information had been hacked, as required by California law. Federal investigators informed Experian in late 2012 about the investigation into Ngo and the security lapse.There is no law enforcement investigation that has prevented notices, the suit argues. Rather, defendants simply refuse to provide it. The law carries penalties up to $2,500 for each violation, meaning the company could be facing potentially millions in fines.The suit estimated that 30 million consumers could have had their information hacked, including an estimated 250,000 in San Diego. Elliotts office cited the Internal Revenue Service in saying hackers filed more than 13,000 false returns using the hacked information, obtaining $65 million in fraudulent tax refunds.(TNS)  A bipartisan group of senators Tuesday said the nation's election systems, targeted by Russian intelligence operatives in 2016, are badly in need of federal funds and expertise to prevent cyberattacks that could impede or distort future elections.The Senate Intelligence Committee, as part of its investigation into Russian efforts to influence the 2016 presidential campaign, faulted the government's lackluster response to the Russian hacking at the time, and said states need help in replacing vulnerable voting systems."Let me say this with a great deal of confidence  it is clear the Russian government was looking for vulnerabilities in our election system and highlighted some of the key gaps," said Sen. Richard M. Burr of North Carolina, the committee's Republican chairman, outlining some of his panel's findings before a hearing Wednesday.As part of Moscow's scheme to disrupt the 2016 campaign and help elect President Trump, Russian hackers attempted to penetrate computerized voting systems in at least 21 states, and succeeded in penetrating the Illinois voter registration database, officials said.There's no evidence that any ballots were sabotaged or changed, and U.S. intelligence officials quickly detected the activity by foreign hackers. But they didn't provide real-time warnings to election officials in the states and counties under digital attack, senators said.Sen. Mark R. Warner of Virginia, the committee's top Democrat, said it took Homeland Security officials nine months to notify the 21 states about the intrusions."We were all disappointed that states, the federal government and the Department of Homeland Security was not more on their game in advance of the 2016 election," Warner said.At the time, intelligence officials were reluctant to share classified information with county and state election officials who didn't have security clearances.Since then, many state election administrators have obtained or have applied for clearances  but some say they still don't get the information they need. The committee urged the administration to expedite the process."When the federal government has access to intelligence information, it's really important that they have a way of getting that information out in timely ways," said David J. Becker, executive director for the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation and Research.Becker said federal-state cooperation is "light-years ahead" of 2016 but the states remain badly in need of federal money to replace outdated election systems. Most states use voting machines and other equipment more than a decade old, with outdated software.Five states use voting machines that don't produce an auditable paper trail of ballots, which the committee said should be the minimum security standard. And the panel said all state election systems should have two-factor security authorization to operate, making it more difficult for hackers to access or sabotage the data.With some 2018 primary races already underway, California Secretary of State Alex Padilla said "time is of the essence" to fix security gaps before the first ballots are cast."The urgency is there on our part," he said. "I don't see the urgency coming out of the Oval Office. I'm hoping Congress can overcome that."Burr said the Senate should provide more money to assist states, possibly in the next spending bill, but the report falls short of specific recommendations for funding.The consensus on the Senate committee about the danger of the Russian intrusion, and the failure of the White House to respond to it, stands in sharp contrast to squabbling on the House Intelligence Committee.The Republican majority in that committee recently ended its inquiry with a finding that Moscow had not sought to help Trump win the White House  a conclusion at direct odds with the U.S. intelligence agencies.In two declassified reports, the intelligence community said sophisticated hackers backed by Russian intelligence had penetrated computers used by top Democrats and then leaked thousands of internal emails to undermine Hillary Clinton's campaign.Moscow also allegedly created a campaign to spread disinformation to U.S. voters on social media using stolen and fake IDs. The special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, recently obtained criminal indictments against 13 Russians and three entities who were allegedly involved in that campaign.Trump has repeatedly downplayed the gravity of the Russian operation by insisting that it didn't change votes.But the senators, echoing concerns from U.S. intelligence chiefs, warned that the nation is still at risk."It may not be the Russians next time," said Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.). "It could be the North Koreans. It could be the Iranians. It might be a domestic hacktivist group that uses that same playbook to try to seed chaos."Air quality in major cities is a critical issue, especially with regard to road traffic and residents health. However, emissions do not just remain in conurbations; particles and gaseous pollutants can be transported thousands of kilometers by the wind. This scenario is particularly relevant in Asia, home to the worlds largest concentration of megacities.

From 10 March to 9 April 2018, the German Aerospace Centre (Deutsches Zentrum fur Luft- und Raumfahrt; DLR) is conducting research flights from Tainan in Taiwan more closely to examine the spread and transformation of emissions from major cities such as Manila, Taipei, Seoul, Tokyo, Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou.





HALO in-hangar in Taiwan.

The University of Bremen is the scientific base of the international project known as EMeRGe (Effect of Megacities on the transport and transformation of pollutants on the Regional and Global scales). The aim is to better understand and predict the extent and impact of urban air pollution on Earths atmosphere. Previously, the researchers studied European conurbations from the air.

The transport and transformation of plumes from selected European and Asian major population centers (MPCs) will now be investigated with special focus on the rate of formation of ozone and aerosols. In EMeRGe the composition of the plumes of pollution entering and leaving Europe and leaving Asia will be measured by performing optimized transects and vertical profiling.

This strategy enables the outflow from a variety of MPCs, having different characteristics, to be studied in quasi-Lagrangian approach and therefore to identify differences and commonalities in the transport, and transformation of the outflow from European and Asian MPCs.

Key scientific questions of the analysis will be the dispersion and transport patterns, the factors dominating the chemical transformation of MPCs emissions, the regional, hemispheric and global effect of European and Asian MPCs in the change of atmospheric composition, the relevance of emission from European and Asian MPCs for radiative forcing and climate change and the adequacy of chemical models for the simulation of transport and transformation processes of European and Asian MPC plumes.

A total of approximately 100 flight hours are planned for the measurement flights in the emission plumes of Asian cities, said John P. Burrows, the Principal Investigator of the mission and a professor at the Institute of Environmental Physics at the University of Bremen.

The High Altitude and Long Range Research Aircraft (HALO) is equipped with a total of 20 measurement instruments to record the various gas and particle emissions of major cities and the related reaction products.





We want to gain a detailed understanding of how emissions in the atmosphere spread and transform in different weather conditions. In Asia, in particular, high temperatures, humidity, solar radiation and the frequency of storms play a major role. When it comes to the spread of emissions, for example, we are interested in how much ozone is produced from the precursor nitrogen oxides and hydrocarbons, as well as the extent of new particle formation from gaseous precursors, such as sulfur dioxide and organic compounds. Hans Schlager from the DLR Institute of Atmospheric Physics

The specially equipped HALO takes off from Tainan Airport in Taiwan to conduct measurement flights over the various Asian cities and conurbations.

To ensure that the researchers obtain an accurate picture of the distribution of urban emissions, HALO first flies in atmospheric layers close to the ground, before gradually climbing to higher altitudes. In Asia, some careful, long-term planning is required for the research flights because they involve air traffic control centers in many different countries, and the traffic density around the megacities is extremely high. Frank Probst, DLR Flight Experiments Facility

Since clear skies are required for the measurement flights in order to fly at low altitudes into the urban emission plumes, they are now operated in spring in relatively favorable weather conditions.

When taking the measurements, flight paths are sometimes less than one kilometer above the ground, for example, during the first local measurement flight on 17 March 2018 over the East China Sea, when emissions were recorded from megacities, such as Shanghai.

We are conducting low-level visual flights and can only fly in cloudless areas. DLR research pilot Stefan Grillenbeck

During the first part of the project in summer 2017, the researchers on board HALO already examined the environment over European cities and conurbations such as London, Rome, Paris, Marseilles, Barcelona and the Ruhr region, as well as the Po Valley.

EMeRGe comprises more than 50 partners from 17 different countries, including 27 partner institutions from Asia.

These partners will carry out additional measurements using other aircraft platforms and ground-based networks, in parallel to the HALO flights, Burrows says. For example, unmanned light aircraft are being used by the Research Center for Environmental Changes at Academia Sinica in Taipei, our partner institution in Taiwan. Ground measurements are being taken in China, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, the Philippines and Thailand, for example. Special thanks go to our hosts, the researchers at Academia Sinica in Taiwan, including its director, Pao-Kuan Wang, and deputy director, Charles C.K. Chou, as well as the National Taiwan University, especially Po-Hsiung Lin. Joohn Burrows

In total, approximately 10 HALO measurement flights over Asia are planned within the next four weeks. DLR will provide information about the location of the flights conducted via its social media channels.

In addition to the University of Bremen, project partners in Germany are the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry, the universities of Mainz, Heidelberg and Wuppertal, as well as the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and Forschungszentrum Julich. The EMeRGe project receives around 6 million (US$7.4 million) worth of funding from the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, DFG), the Max Planck Society (MPG) and DLR.

The HALO research aircraft is a joint initiative of German environmental and climate research institutions. HALO was procured with funds from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), the Helmholtz Association and the Max Planck Society. HALO is operated by the German Research Foundation, the Max Planck Society (MPG), Julich Research Center (FZJ), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), the German Research Centre for Geosciences (Deutsches GeoForschungsZentrum; GFZ) in Potsdam and the Leibniz Institute of Tropospheric Research in Leipzig (TROPOS). DLR both owns and operates the aircraft.The University of Helsinki and Nokia Bell Labs are developing a technology which uses the 5G network to generate precise, smart real-time data on the environment and air quality.

The goal of the MegaSense project is to create a global monitoring system that can provide exact data on air quality and harmful substances in the air. The resulting information could also be used in a variety of devices in cars, at home or at the office.

The MegaSense project is based on a dense network of air quality sensors covering an urban area to detect air polluters and develop a real-time overview of air quality. The results from the sensors are supplemented by data from the University of Helsinkis SMEAR research stations in Finland and China. All data are then combined and processed via the 5G network.

The project uses existing air pollution map and prediction models which also consider wind direction and the location of the air quality sensors. The calibrated air quality data and the information refined from it can also be used in a variety of applications almost in real time.

In the future, air quality sensors could be very small. One of the first potential consumer applications is the Green Path, which offers visualised air quality information.

The first MegaSense pilot is currently ongoing at the University of Helsinkis Kumpula Campus. There the air quality sensors have been connected to Nokias NetLeap/NDAC network as a cloud service, and the data processing and application use take place in a local cloud server.

The next pilot will be arranged in Beijing. There the goal is to create an extensive environmental measuring system based on the 5G network to monitor air quality and the environment.China is stepping up its pursuit of control of the lithium supply chain, underpinned by the rapid growth of its lithium-ion battery industry building on agressive policy surrounding electric vehicle sales, according to metals and mining consultancy Roskill.

One of Chinas largest lithium-ion battery manufacturers, CATL, recently acquired North American Lithium from past owner Jilin Jien Nickel Industry. Jilin Jien, which bought the Quebec Lithium mine and lithium carbonate conversion plant from its creditors in 2016, is understood to have entered bankruptcy in China and had struggled to raise the funds to complete the re-commissioning.

CATL has been importing spodumene concentrate from Quebec since December 2017, presumably trialling its conversion potential in China.

Meanwhile, Altura Mining confirmed it had been in discussions with Shaanxi J&R Optimum Energy, another of Chinas lithium-ion battery behemoths and competitor of CATL, regarding a potential control transaction. News had circulated that Optimum, currently Alturas largest shareholder and off-taker of 100ktpy of spodumene concentrate, was seeking to take control of Altura and its Pilgangoora project that is currently in the commissioning phase.

Nextview New Energy, underwritten by Tibet Summit Resources and Tajik-China Mining, has completed its previously announced acquisition of Lithium X Energy for approximately C$257 million (US$197 million), despite worries over the deals likelihood following reports by another Nextview targetBacanora Mineralsover delays to an investment.

Nextview takes control of the Sal de los Angeles lithium brine project in Argentina, containing over 2Mt LCE of resources. Nextview also takes over the Arizaro lithium brine project and has consolidated Lithium Xs Clayton Valley holdings with those held by Pure Energy, in the process, becoming Pure Energys largest shareholder; it now holds approximately 19% of Pure Energys shares.

Major battery producer BYD was already invested in domestic lithium sources but, with limited opportunities, its competitors are following suit overseas. China inc. faces headwinds, however, with Chiles minerals development agency Corfo asking antitrust regulators to block the sale of a 32% stake in SQM to Tianqi Lithium on competition grounds.

Roskill believes Corfos statement on competition is exaggerated but clearly the goal is to prevent control of Chiles strategic and now expandable Atacama asset falling into Chinese hands, a situation that the governments of Argentina and Australia also face but, perhaps, of more concern to ex-China automakers that have been slower to ensure lithium supply security.SEAT, a member of the Volkswagen Group, will introduce its first fully electric vehicle in 2020. Built on the Volkswagen Groups MEB platform, the new EV will feature a range of 500 km (311 miles).

The EV launch comes as part of a product offensive, in which SEAT will launch one new car every six months until 2020. The first two vehicles will be the SEAT Tarraco and the CUPRA Ateca, which are going on sale at the end of 2018. Next year the new generation SEAT Leon will be available in dealerships with two variants, the five-door model and the ST family sized version.

SEAT is going to launch one new car every six months until 2020. 2020 will be SEATs year of electrification with the launch of a plug-in hybrid version of the new SEAT Leon, to be built in the Martorell factory and featuring a range of at least 50 kilometers, as well as the brands first fully electric vehicle, manufactured on the Volkswagen Groups MEB platform. SEAT President Luca de Meo

And in 2020, the new EV will be joined by the first CUV (Crossover Utility Vehicle) in the SEAT model line-up as well as a plug-in hybrid version of the new generation Leon. In addition, the brand will remain committed to vehicles powered with compressed natural gas (CNG) as well as internal combustion engines.

We are leading the CNG vehicle technical development project within the Volkswagen Group. With the Arona TGI we are launching this year we will have the only SUV in the world powered with natural gas. Luca de Meo

The new model offensive comes as a result of the highest investment figure since the Martorell factory was built in 1992. Last year, SEAT allocated 962 million (US$1.2 billion) to investments and R&D expenses11.6% more than in 2016 (862), and 10.1% of the brands total turnover. Of this amount, 464 million (US$572 million) were earmarked entirely for R&D, a figure which represents close to 3% of the total R&D investment expenses in Spain, making SEAT the leading industrial investor in Spain.

From 2013 to 2017, SEAT invested more than 3.3 billion (US$4.1 billion) in its future, mainly allocated to its biggest ever product offensive, as well as to developing new services to achieve the goal of placing the company at the forefront of digitization, connectivity and smart mobility.

SEAT also recently created XMOBA, a new company whose main goal is to identify, test, sell and invest in projects that contribute to boosting new solutions that improve future mobility. XMOBA and CUPRA join SEAT Metropolis:Lab Barcelona, SEATs wholly owned digital-lab inaugurated in 2017, which is a part of the Volkswagen Groups worldwide network of IT-Labs.

Furthermore, de Meo reaffirmed SEATs commitment to opening outward and building a digital ecosystem around the car. Within this framework are the partnerships and agreements reached with companies such as Amazon Alexa, Shazam, Waze, Telefonica or Saba.

Luca de Meo also pointed to SEATs globalisation as a further pillar of the strategy. The company operates in more than 80 countries, but only 15% of sales are made outside Europe. In this sense, the strategic growth regions are Northern Africa, where SEAT leads the Volkswagen Groups vehicle assembly project in Algeria, and Latin America and Mexico, where the company is studying the feasibility of producing.

In addition, markets have been opened recently in Norway and New Zealand, now making the company present on all five continents. SEAT is also participating in the joint venture between Volkswagen Group China and JAC by contributing its technical support and know-how in R&D and design.The Sweetwater County Commissioners will not sign a contract with Castle Rock Hospital District to provide the district with $81,000.

During the Commissioners meeting Tuesday morning, the Commissioners were divided on whether or not to enter into a contract with CRHD after the board raised issues with having to publish their salaries in the newspaper several months ago.

Commissioners Randy Wendling and Wally Johnson voted in favor of the contract, while Commissioners Reid West, Don Van Matre and John Kolb voted against.

Chairman West said CRHD was upset with the Commissioners because they wanted CRHD to publish their employees salaries in the newspaper.

At the time, CRHD board members argued that Sweetwater Medics should have to publish their salaries too.

However, the Commissioners pointed out Sweetwater Medics is privately funded.

West said CRHD refused to sign the contract up until now, which he didnt understand.

Because they havent signed the contract until now, CRHD has been operating without a signed contract.

According to the proposed contact, Castle Rock shall provide to county a list of all its full-time positions and wages and salaries paid each position (no names of employees), to the county on or before the first Monday of March. Castle Rock acknowledges that county will publish this information in the countys official newspaper and the countys website.

Even though CRHD sent in their monthly vouchers and their employees salary information, the Commissioners still remembered how they were treated by CRHD board members and they didnt like it.

West asked the other Commissioners what amount would they like to fund the CRHD. Deputy attorney James Schermetzler said they have to fund CRHD for the full $81,000 because thats what the contract was written for.

Its a couple of individuals that caused this problem, Johnson said.

He said others will suffer if the county doesnt sign the contract and give them the $81,00o and they shouldnt have to because of the actions of few.

Kolb said the Commissioners are now faced with a contract and they need to make a decision.

I wasnt happy on how they took it to a personal level on a business decision ..., Kolb said about the CRHD board members. I think that was certainly uncalled for.

He suggested the contract be prorated on a monthly basis to prevent a problem like this from happening again.

I do feel we need to relook at that again, Van Matre said. Maybe for right now we have to do what we have to do. I understand that it was the board that did that, but Im very disappointed that there isnt a better rapport and working relationship.

I hate to say this, but if they want to play hard ball, I dont think things are going to end well for them, Van Matre said.

He said the relationship has changed and the Commissioners might look at funding them differently in the future.

West said the Commissioners have helped them over the years to about a total of $1 million when they were in financial trouble. They also supported CRHDs bond issue and their six-cent initiative.

The tiff over publishing positions and salaries in the paper, a transparency issue, is absolutely ridiculous, West said.

With that being said, a motion was made to approve the contract, but the motion died 3-2.Stopping off in Green River as part of a state tour to promote his gubernatorial campaign, Wyoming State Treasurer Mark Gordon hosted a meet and greet Tuesday afternoon at the Sweetwater County Library.

Gordon, a Republican, said hes blessed to have the opportunities hes been given in Wyoming and wants to preserve those opportunities for the residents of the state, their children and grandchildren. Hes running on a prosperity-based platform, focusing on ensuring the state government not only operates within its means, but also focuses on strengthening the states existing industries and growing new industries. Gordon said he also supports a strong educational system that trains the states youth in developing technology and the jobs that technology would bring.

Speaking about the education debate during the recent legislative session in Cheyenne, Gordon said the state should maintain its teachers salaries, saying its critical for Wyoming to have the best educational system it can provide. Gordon also believes education funding is an issue that needs to be revisited.

We have much more work to do, he said.

If elected, Gordon said one of his three top priorities would be to look at the states budget, saying it would have to be adjusted as it would have some noodling that would need to be dealt with. Beyond that, Gordon said hes wants to work on issues impacting the states industries, specifically mentioning Sweetwater Countys Ur-Energy and its struggles with uranium dumping in the global market.

He said President Donald Trump has made a commitment to the cause of putting America first and wants to see issues in the uranium market changed to support Ur-Energy and other uranium producers.

We need to get those things fixed, he said.

The third thing he mentioned is a desire to see expedited permits for mineral exploration on federal lands. He said the Trump administration has opened the door to more permitting, something he believes can be a major benefit to the states energy industry.

Gordon has served as the states treasurer for the past six years, replaying former treasurer Joe Meyer after his death. Gordon said he has a record of strong leadership in the Wyoming Treasurers office. He won election to the office in 2014.

Gordon said hes grown the states investments since taking office, with campaign materials citing growth of $1.17 billion during the 2016-2017 fiscal year.Rep. Stan Blake, D-Green River, had an interesting story to tell about the recent session in Cheyenne.

Blake said a lobbyist had approached him and inquired about how he would be voting on a bill the lobbyist supported. Blake told the lobbyist he wouldnt support the bill, which prompted the lobbyist to casually remind Blake that the group the lobbyist represented supported him in the past through a campaign donation and he should consider that when making his vote. Blake said his position remained unchanged after that discussion and that the lobbyists actions were out of the ordinary for lobbyists in Cheyenne, but it does raise an interesting question.

When we vote for any elected position, be it city council, county commissioner or legislative seat, were doing so under the assumption the candidate were voting for has our best interests in mind. Not the oil-and-gas industrys interest. Not the Wyoming Outdoor Councils interest. Not the Wyoming Liberty Groups interest.

Wyomings residents should be appalled with this type of behavior and should question if their elected representatives are influenced by lobbyists. This is especially true for issues where it seems one specific group wins out over the public interest.

Unfortunately, there isnt anything illegal about lobbyists pushing the envelope to ensure a bill their employers support gets passed. This leaves us to trust our elected officials have our best interests at heart when theyre casting their votes. However, the cynical thought is how much does dinner and increased pressure on legislators influence the votes.

With 2018 being an election year, this makes a perfect opportunity for voters to look at their representatives and decide whose interests they have at heart. We should start asking ourselves who has our interest at heart when they travel to Cheyenne. If the answer isnt clear and simple, its time to find someone to represent us at the State Capitol.Everyone Poops.

Thats the title of a popular childrens book, but its also a good reminder for adults. Bathroom talk is often considered taboo for anyone older than age five, but when it comes to colorectal cancer, talking about your bowels may just save your life.

March is Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month, and though colorectal cancer is one of the most common cancers in the U.S., its not discussed as openly as other cancers. More than 140,000 people in the U.S. are expected to be diagnosed with colorectal cancer in 2018 and 50,630 will die of this disease. In Wyoming alone, 210 will be diagnosed and 80 will die of colorectal cancer in 2018.

People often think they are not at risk for colorectal cancer, but anyone can get this disease. Despite common misconceptions, it doesnt affect only men and its not just an old persons disease. In fact, colorectal cancer rates for men and women are similar, with one in 22 men and one in 24 women diagnosed. Although the risk of colorectal cancer does increase as we get older, rates in young people are on the rise. There is also greater risk for those of us who smoke, are overweight, drink alcohol in excess, or have a personal or family history of colorectal cancer, polyps, or inflammatory bowel disease.

Dont ignore the symptoms. If you experience rectal bleeding or blood in your stool; a change in bowel movements; stools that are more narrow than usual; abdominal problems (bloating, fullness or cramps); or diarrhea, constipation or a feeling that your bowel movement isnt complete, inform your health care professional immediately. With screening, your doctor can find polyps (growths) that can be removed before they become cancerous or detect cancer early, when successful treatment is more likely.

About that screeningpreparation for colonoscopies may not be pleasant, but its a breeze compared to colorectal cancer. A colonoscopy is still the gold standard in colorectal cancer screening, but the best test is the one that gets done! Talk to your health care professional about your screening options. If you are at average risk, the recommendation is to begin colorectal cancer screening at age 50. If you are at increased risk, the recommendation is to begin screening earlier or be screened more often. Talk with your health care provider about continuing screenings after the age of 75.

The Wyoming Department of Health offers free cancer screening programs, including colorectal screenings, across the state. For more information about this program, call (800) 264-1296 or visit their website at https://health.wyo.gov/cancer.

We can reduce our risk of colorectal cancer by exercising, limiting our alcohol intake, avoiding tobacco, and maintaining a healthy weight. To learn more, visit http://www.preventcancer.org.

Diana Enzi is an 11-year colon cancer survivor and active in volunteer organizations that encourage men and women to get appropriate screenings. Bobbi Barrasso is a 15-year breast cancer survivor and active in volunteer organizations providing mammograms, low-cost screenings, and health services. Both are members of the Congressional Families Cancer Prevention program of the Prevent Cancer Foundation. They are the spouses of U.S. Senators Mike Enzi and John Barrasso.OCEAN SPRINGS, Mississippi -- Investigators are awaiting the results of an autopsy to determine what killed a 33-year-old Ocean Springs man whose body was found in a drainage ditch alongside U.S. 90 Wednesday afternoon.

Ocean Springs Police Capt. Chuck Jackson said officers were dispatched on a call of a body lying in a ditch between the highway and service drive on U.S. 90 west -- east of Ocean Springs Hospital and across the highway from Rumours Lounge -- about 2:09 Wednesday afternoon.

Personnel from both the Ocean Springs Fire Department and Acadian Medical Services responded to the scene, but were unable to revive the male subject -- later identified as Aaron M. Sullivan Jr. of Ocean Springs.

The Ocean Springs Criminal Investigations Division is handling the case. Police Chief Mark Dunston told The Mississippi Press Thursday there were no immediate signs at the scene suggesting a possible cause of death.

"But we treat every unknown death as a homicide until it's proven otherwise," Dunston said.

Investigators believe the body had likely been there 10-12 hours. Dunston said the ditch was full of rainwater and the body was submerged, likely explaining why it remained there unnoticed until mid-afternoon Wednesday. The motorist who finally spotted the body and reported it was driving on the service road, not the highway, he said.

An autopsy was scheduled for Friday in Jackson, according to Jackson County Coroner Vicki Broadus.

Anyone with information on the case is asked to contact the Ocean Springs Police Department at 228-875-2211 or Mississippi Coast Crime Stoppers at 877-787-5898.Its last day is April 1. Photo: Shanna Ravindra

Another East Village classic is on its way out. The 26-year-old pizzeria Three of Cups will close on April 1, owner Anthony Barile announced in a Facebook post. In his heartfelt note, Barile writes that there are several reasons why the restaurant is closing, but that ultimately he cant sustain it any longer. He goes on to talk about its role in his family life  his wife worked there before they married  and as a home for the unique souls of the East Village, also acknowledging his partner Santo Fazio and asking people to come before it shutters.

The day has come where I must share the sad news that Three of Cups will be closing. Ive thought often about what I... Posted by Anthony Barile on Wednesday, March 21, 2018

The closing is probably unexpected for fans, given that Three of Cups announced that theyd signed a new lease last April. But the East Village hasnt been what it used to be for a long while now, and the last vestiges of its past  counterculture and otherwise  have been fading. Music mecca HiFi Bar, Noho Star, and Cafe Orlin all closed late last year, and other oldies like Dempseys, Stage Restaurant, and De Robertis Caffe also closed in recent years.

Taking Three of Cups place will be one of New Yorks trendiest pizzerias: Matt and Emily Hyland were at the Community Board 3 meeting on Monday night applying for a liquor license for Emmy Squared. A lease has not been signed for the space yet, but theyre expecting to sign one next week, as well as one for the nearby space that formerly housed GGs.JACKSON COUNTY, Miss. -- Law enforcement officials have identified the man and woman involved in a fatal car accident Thursday morning.

Kevin M. Hyatt, 54-year-old of Mobile, Ala., was the driver of the 2009 Honda Pilot, killing 31-year-old Ashley S. Killingsworth of Moss Point, and himself, according to Mississippi Highway Patrol spokesman, Chase Elkins.

The crash occurred on Hwy. 614 eastbound, near Otis Cooper Road, at approximately 6 a.m., near the Alabama state line and Hurley community.

Upon arrival, Elkins said it appeared Hyatt was traveling west on Hwy. 614 in his vehicle.

The vehicle crossed the center line, entering the eastbound lane, and crashed head on with an eastbound 2016 Ford Expedition driven by Killingsworth.

Both were pronounced dead at the scene from injuries sustained in the crash. Three passengers in the Ford were transported by Acadian to the University of South Alabama Medical Center.Spend a night with Miguel. Photo: Matthew J. Lee/Boston Globe via Getty Images

Events to check out this weekend, March 22 to 25.

1. Hear works from rising literary stars.

The 2018 Whiting Awards winners were announced last night, and this evening at 6:30 p.m. you can hear all ten of them  Anne Boyer, Patty Yumi Cottrell, Nathan Alan Davis, Hansol Jung, Rickey Laurentiis, Antoinette Nwandu, Tommy Pico, Brontez Purnell, Esme Weijun Wang, and Weike Wang  read at Housing Works, introduced by Alice Sola Kim, a Whiting 2016 fiction winner.

2. Get ready for some reads.

Haters Roast: The Shady Tour comes to Town Hall on Friday, featuring comedy queen contestants from RuPauls Drag Race on the dais. There are two shows at 8 and 11:30.

3. Experience South African history through a play.

Its the final days for The Fall at St. Anns Warehouse, which follows a cast of seven student leaders as they recount a tumultuous protest movement on the campus of the University of Cape Town. Shows go though Sunday.

4. Hear a discussion of decaying fruit.

In the early to mid-90s, artist Zoe Leonard saved her fruit peels, sewed them together, and displayed them in a Lower East Side studio, letting them decay in a meditation on the loss and mourning resulting from the AIDS epidemic. Strange Fruit is now on display in the Whitney as part of Leonards retrospective, with a panel of speakers converging on Saturday to discuss its relevance today. The event will also be livestreamed.

5. Find some new art to love.

The Affordable Art Fair takes over the Metropolitan Pavilion through Sunday, showcasing contemporary works from 300 local, national, and international artists with prices running from $100 to $10,000. Tickets are $10, with free admission Friday from 6 p.m. to 8 p.m.

6. Chill out with some chill tunes.

This Friday at Terminal 5, and Saturday at Brooklyn Steel, stay warm with the sultry R&B of Miguel. For something more psych-pop, MGMT are at the Kings Theater on Friday, and Brooklyn Steel on Sunday and Monday.

7. Get jazzy and spirited.

On Saturday, the NYC Craft Distillers Festival at the Bowery Hotel adds 1920s-style jazz bands to over 60 craft spirits from distillers like Widow Jane, Gin Lane 1751, and Cooperstown Distillery at the Bowery Hotel. Period wear is encouraged, but youll probably be fine if you come armed with a good Charleston.

8. Drink some damn-good beer.

On Sunday, the culty Denmark-based Mikkeller Brewery opens its first East Coast location (and the first in the U.S. outside of San Diego), a 10,000-square-foot brewery, bar, and dining space attached to Citi Field, with 60 rotating taps to enjoy before or after a Citi Field event. Or during, if the event happens to be very disappointing.

9. Laugh at a Grammy-winning comedian.

Make that four-time Grammy-winning comedian. The great Weird Al Yankovic flexes his musical-satire muscles with two intimate nights of original music (no parodies), Thursday and Friday at the Apollo.

10. March for your life.

On Saturday, beginning at 11 a.m., there will be approximately 838 March for Our Lives events to end gun violence around the globe, including Manhattans march  which kicks off at Central Park West and 72nd Street  and the Coney Island Anti Violence Collaborative March, happening on the boardwalk. Find events to attend and more information here.National Communication Authority Suspends Vivacell Operations

The government of South Sudan on Tuesday suspended the operations of the countrys largest mobile network provider, Vivacell.

By James Deng Dimo and Charles Kay



WAU, 22 March 2018 [Gurtong]  In a statement extended to Gurtong on Tuesday evening; the Director General of the National Communications Authority (NCA), Dr Lado Wani, the company has failed to comply with government policies issued to them.



The government has since obtained a policy of having an international gateway which Vivacell is requested to switch its system to but it is not doing so. They are supposed to connect to that gateway, but they are not complying with it and the gateway project belongs to the Ministry of Information, he said.



Meanwhile Vivacell issued their statement saying that they are working with the relevant authorities to have the matter resolved with the highest priority.



Subscribers of the network were disappointed and complained at the move the government has taken without issuing a notice.



Suspension of Vivacell is unfortunate, we urge all the citizens to stand together in protest so that the government reverses their decision, said one subscriber.



Philip Juang from the UNs protection of civilians Sites one, POC1 is another subscriber who is not happy with the order.



The government must reverse their order and reopen the network that is serving the people. said Juang.



Another mobile user, James, complained that as a citizen of the country, it is his right to communicate with people in and out of the country without interference from the government.

We have to stand firm with vivacell so that the government reverses the decision James said.





OCEAN SPRINGS, Mississippi -- What carried the potential for disaster will instead only result in a delay as the contractor on Ocean Springs' Porter Avenue improvement project discovered an old, unmarked gas line running under the roadway and in the path of scheduled improvements.

Crews from Lane Construction were continuing work on the $1.2 million project, which will ultimately result in continuous sidewalks from Washington Avenue to Front Beach, as well as drainage and roadway improvements, when the gas line was discovered.

"It has the potential to be a bad situation," said Ocean Springs alderman Rob Blackman, himself a project manager for the Machado-Patano engineering firm. "We were fortunate the contractor found it in a delicate digging situation and didn't go in there wide open with a backhoe. We're fortunate to have a good contractor who knows how to gingerly dig for things when he's not sure what's there."

The discovery will result in a delay for the project of up to five weeks, said Ocean Springs Planning and Grants Administrator Carolyn Martin.

"This is an old part of town, so you're going to run into things you don't know are there," Martin said. "This gas line was a surprise to everyone. It's a steel gas line, so it takes a special, certified crew to move it."

Both Blackman and Martin said the City is "at the mercy" of CenterPoint Energy, owners of the gas line.

"CenterPoint was contacted and gave their standard 'two weeks' response," Blackman said. "They have a bad habit of, everytime you need something, giving the answer 'two weeks.'"

Martin said it will be two weeks before the work is even scheduled.

"We'll know better by next week," she said. "We won't know for sure when it's going to be scheduled for another two weeks."

The project was originally scheduled to be completed within 100 days, putting completion sometime in May.

"This will probably add four to five weeks to the project overall," Martin said.

What it will not add, however, is cost.

"That's why we have to wait," Martin said. "It could potentially add cost to the project if we tried to work around it. It's better for the overall project to just wait until the line is moved."

Once CenterPoint begins the process of moving the gas line, there will likely be closures of Porter Avenue. Thus far during construction, total closures of the road have been minimal.

"There moving a main gas line, so I'm fairly certain it will be a road closure situation," Martin said. "We'll work as closely as we can to keep that to a minimum."



Haiti - Security : USA does not close the door to support the army of Haiti





As part of his tour in the North, during a conference-debate given at Campus Henry Christophe of Limonade, US Ambassador to Haiti Michele Jeanne Sison suggested that the United States leave the door open for a possible cooperation agreement on the process of remobilization of the Armed Forces of Haiti (FAd'H).



Asked about the refusal of the United States not to want to assist the new army of Haiti https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-19746-haiti-security-usa-will-not-help-haiti-to-have-an-army.html https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-21123-haiti-security-john-kelly-against-the-establishment-of-an-army-in-haiti.html , the US diplomat first recalled that for 20 years the United States supported the development of capabilities of the National Police of Haiti.



Understanding that Haiti is a sovereign country and that the armed forces have been restored to respond according to President Moise to major natural hazards and to ensure border surveillance https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-22187-haiti-flash-jovenel-moise-evokes-the-army-of-haiti-at-the-tribune-of-the-un.html , she said the United States is keeping the door open for discussions with the Haitian government on this issue.



Recalling in the wake the recent visit to Washington of Defense Minister Herve Denis https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-23367-haiti-politic-the-minister-of-defense-in-washington-dc.html , Ambassador Sison did not rule out the possibility of a possible cooperation agreement between her country and Haiti around the remobilization of the FAd'H, while reiterating that the priority of the United States was first of all the development of the Haitian National Police.



See also :

https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-22187-haiti-flash-jovenel-moise-evokes-the-army-of-haiti-at-the-tribune-of-the-un.html

https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-21123-haiti-security-john-kelly-against-the-establishment-of-an-army-in-haiti.html

https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-19746-haiti-security-usa-will-not-help-haiti-to-have-an-army.html



TB/ HaitiLibre





















Haiti - Education : Inauguration of the 175th School of the Digicel Foundation





This week the Digicel Foundation in the presence of its Founder Denis O'Brien and many local authorities, was inaugurated the National Congregational School of Our Lady of Perpetual Help located at Bel Air (Dept. West), which had been completely destroyed during the earthquake of 2010.



This school, which had been operating since then in hangars, was relocated 8 years later, in a modern establishment, which will house more than 600 pupils from the 1st to the 9th fundamental year, comprising 12 fully furnished classrooms, an administration, a sanitary block and a refectory built at a cost of nearly US $ 450,000.



"11 years already since we bring our support to the improvement of the living conditions of the country. We are pleased to have chosen education as a priority sector and are confident that the students and teachers we have supported through our various programs will make a great contribution to the country's development," declared Mrs. Josefa Gauthier, President-Executive of the Digicel Foundation.



This 175th school, inaugurated as part of the Foundation's 11th anniversary celebration, completes the construction program that includes 25 additional schools, a commitment made by Denis O'Brien in November 2014 during the inauguration of the 150th school of the Foundation to Saut d'Eau.



Thanks to the schools built by the Foundation Digiciel through its programs and its various partnerships, more than 60,000 students attend daily a school meeting the international standards of construction seismic and para-cyclonic.



See also :

https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-23406-haiti-flash-our-grenadieres-u-20-qualified-for-the-world-cup-france-2018.html



HL/ HaitiLibre





















Haiti - Politic : The number of civil servants insufficient





According to Josue Pierre-Louis, the Director General of the Office of Management and Human Resources (OMRH) intervening on several radio stations of the capital, 81,948 people including contractual (23,429 women 28.6% and 58,519 men 71.4%) are currently working in public administration.



Josue Pierre-Louis believes that the State is under-administered, the public service does not have a sufficient number of civil servants, with 8 per 1,000 inhabitants, citing the neighboring Republic which has 400,000 civil servants (34 per 1,000 inhabitants) of which more than 60% are women. Moreover, regarding the representation of women, he emphasizes that in Haiti we do not respect the quota of 30% minimum required in the Constitution. In addition, it states that of the 28.6% of women in the public service, only 13% occupy a management position.



He recalled that the new Government on his arrival in power had laid off many employees and contractuals in several public institutions, but on the other hand, the Directorate of the Budget complains about the weight of the wage bill on the domestic revenues of the State.



More than one wonders how the Government will be able to increase the number of its civil servants, while the functioning of the public administration currently represents more than 50% of the national budget of which nearly 40 billion Gourdes for wages and the Government already shows a deficit of 9 billion for the first 5 months of 2017-2018 https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-23742-haiti-news-zapping.html , deficit that could reach this year 30 billion https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-23846-haiti-news-zapping.html



S/ HaitiLibre





















Haiti - News : Zapping...





Dedollarisation of the economy

Wednesday at the National Palace, President Moise had a meeting with members of the Private Sector, Insurance, Banks, Subcontracting and Tourism on the Decree on the dedollarisation of the economy. A follow-up advisory group was set up See also : https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-23849-haiti-politics-brh-reminder-on-foreign-currency-accounts.html https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-23720-haiti-economy-transactions-in-gourdes-the-economic-forum-writes-to-the-minister-of-commerce.html https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-23701-haiti-politic-obligation-to-carry-out-all-commercial-transactions-in-gourdes.html



The Colombian Chancellor in Haiti

This Thursday, as part of her Caribbean tour, Maria Angela Holguin, the Colombian Minister of Foreign Affairs will be in Haiti. In the afternoon she will meet with Chancellor Antonio Rodrigue, to advance in bilateral agendas for technical, educational and cultural cooperation, trade, investment, tourism, security and immigration .



Young executives of the Fusion Party accuse their President

Young executives of the Fusion Party of Haitian Social Democrats denounce the impeachment of their President Edmonde Supplice Beauzile, whom they accuse of mismanagement, to seek a second term at the next Congress scheduled for late April 2018 and call the 14 regions to mobilize to allow this formation to resume its place on the political spectrum.



Senator Nawoon Marcelus transported to Miami

Senator Nawoom Marcellus (Bouclier) victim of a serious malaise Tuesday in the Senate https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-23884-haiti-news-zapping.html hospitalized in the Intensive Care Unit of Bernard Mevs Hospital was transported Wednesday afternoon, by an Ambulance plane to the "Jacksonville Memorial Hospital" (Miami) where he must receive care after suffering a stroke...



"I learned with pain the discomfort experienced by Senator Nawoom Marcellus in full session. In the company of the Prime Minister and my wife, I went to Bernard Mevs Hospital to give my moral support to the senator. Already I wish him a speedy recovery," Jovenel Moise.



"On behalf of the Chamber of Deputies, I wish a speedy recovery to the North Senator, Honorable Nawoon Marcelus, victim of a stroke in full session this Tuesday, March 20, 2018," Deputy Gary Bodeau.



"Senator Jean-Marie Ralph Fethiere sympathizes with Senator Nawoon Marcellus, who suffered discomfort during Tuesday's sitting in the Senate. That this moment of rest lasts only the time to regain your momentum and the energy necessary to regain full form. Already I wish you a speedy recovery, I hope that you will heal quickly and that we will be able to meet again soon. "



Symposium "Professionalisation, innovation and transformation"

As part of the activities of the International Francophonie Day, the Caribbean Regional Directorate of the University Agency of La Francophonie (AUF) is a partner of the XXIII REDFORD 2i symposium organized by the Center for Studies and Research in Education (CERED ), the Faculty of Education Sciences (FSED) of the Quisqueya University of Haiti and the Scientific Interest Group of the Education Development and Training Network (GIS REDFORD 2i) as well as the Paris Est Creteil University (UPEC) with the theme: "Professionalization, innovation and transformation, levers of development" which will take place on March 22 and 23 at Quisqueya University.



HL/ HaitiLibre

















Enotria&Co expands Californian portfolio with Louis M Martini

By Lisa Riley

Enotria&Co has signed a deal as the exclusive UK distributor of Napa Valley producer Louis M Martini.

The deal, which takes place with immediate effect, includes Enotria&Co distributing the E&J Gallo owned portfolio across both the on and off-trade in the UK.

Known worldwide as the King of Cabernet, Louis M. Martinis boasts to have some of the greatest expressions of Cabernet Sauvignon in its portfolio, made using grapes harvested from some of Napa and Sonomas most coveted sites - including the Monte Rosso vineyard.

Now was the perfect time to debut the range in the UK, said Scott Kozel, vice president of coastal winemaking, E&J Gallo, adding there had never been a better time for Californian wine.

Our wines are readily embraced by the UK market and there is a growing awareness of their quality amongst British consumers, he said, creating an iconic portfolio of wines that held true to the vision of its founder.

In selecting the best grapes from Northern Californias leading vineyards, we are crafting a range of outstanding wines that celebrate luxury, excellence and enduring legacy.

Acquired by E&J Gallo in 2002, Louis M Martini was founded in 1933 by Italian born Martini, who started winemaking a the best grapes make the best wines premise.UPDATED



Lawmakers sent a message to President Donald Trump and U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos in their bill to fund the federal government: Were not the biggest fans of your big education ideas.

Congress would increase spending at the U.S. Department of Education by $2.6 billion over previously enacted levels in fiscal year 2018, up to $70.9 billion, under a new omnibus spending bill that could finally resolve a months-long logjam on Capitol Hill.

In addition, funding for Title I, the biggest pot of federal money for public schools, which is earmarked for disadvantaged students, would increase by $300 million from fiscal 2017 enacted spending, up to $15.8 billion.

The fiscal 2018 spending bill, released late Wednesday, doesnt contain several key changes sought by Trump in his first budget plan. In fact, Trumps budget plan for fiscal 2018 would have cut discretionary education spending by $9.2 billion. So Congress bill is a significant rebuke of sorts to the presidents education vision.

In fact, the spending bill leaves out a $250 million private school choice initiative the president and DeVos sought, as well as a $1 billion program designed to encourage open enrollment in districts.

Title II, which provides professional development to educators, would be flat-funded at roughly $2.1 billion. The Trump budget pitch for fiscal 2018 eliminated Title II entirelyit was the single biggest cut to K-12 Trump sought for fiscal 2018. And Title IV, a block grant for districts that can fund a diverse set of needs from school safety to ed-tech, would receive $1.1 billion, a big increase from its current funding level of $400 million. Trump also sought to eliminate Title IV.

Funding for 21st Century Community Learning Centers would rise up by $20 million up to $1.2 billion; thats another program the Trump budget proposal axed. In addition, special education grants would go up by $299 million to $13.1 billion. And federal aid to charter schools would increase to $400 million, a $58 million boost.

The bill also bars funds from the bill being used for a reorganization that decentralizes, reduces the staffing level, or alters the responsibilities, structure, authority, or functionality of the Budget Service of the Department of Education. DeVos has been seeking such a change as part of her effort to restructure and streamline the department.

Lawmakers also rebuffed a move by DeVos to reduce the office for civil rights budget by $1 millionthe bill increases funding from $109 million to $117 million.

The spending agreement includes a $2.37 billion increase to the Child Care Development Block Grant, totaling $5.226 billion. And it hikes up Head Start funding by $610 million, bringing it to $9.863 billion. Meanwhile, the Preschool Development Grants, which the Trump administration sought to eliminate, were level-funded at $250 million. The program, which was created through ESSA, is a big priority for Sen. Patty Murray of Washington state, the top Democrat on the Senate education committee.

The bill also seeks $120 million for the Education Innovation and Research program or EIR, which helps test out promising practices at the district level. In its most recent budget request, the Trump administration sought to boost that program to $200 million, and fund only projects that would help bolster science, technology, engineering, and math education. Instead, the bill would set-aside a chunk of EIR funding for STEM, $50 million. The rest could go to other kinds of projects.

Congress must first pass the bill and send it to Trump for his signature before these spending levels are set. The government will shut down when Friday turns to Saturday if new spending levels for fiscal 2018 arent finalized by then.

Technically, the deadline for lawmakers approving appropriations legislation for this fiscal year was the start of last October. But as youve probably heard, Capitol Hills dealmaking ability on spending has been weak recently. So federal spending has limped along through a series of resolutions that have largely carried over fiscal 2017 spending.

A sign of how far behind Congress is: House lawmakers just heard from U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos about the presidents fiscal 2019 budget blueprint on Tuesday.

Changes to School Safety

While the bill raises overall federal school safety funding, it also shifts funds from an existing, wide-ranging school safety grant program that focuses on school environments toward the new STOP School Violence Act, which allows that funding to be used for physical security measures, like metal detectors. (The STOP Act, introduced previously in the House and Senate, is included in the omnibus bill.)

The bill takes $75 million appropriated for the Comprehensive School Safety Initiativean existing program in the Department of Justice that funds research and implementation of a wide range of evidence-based safety programs that range from bullying prevention to innovative approaches to school policingand redirects that funding toward programs authorized under the STOP School Violence Act.

The Comprehensive School Safety Initiative, which was developed after the 2012 school shooting in Newtown, Conn., emphasized evaluation to determine best practices and build an evidence base for school safety programs. The STOP School Violence Act does not include a focus on research and evaluation of the program it funds.

The bill says funding provided through the STOP School Violence Act can be used to support evidence-based programs, violence prevention efforts, and anonymous reporting systems. But it can also be used to support physical security upgrades for schools, like metal detectors, locks, lighting, and other deterrent measures.

Some school safety researchers have largely favored efforts to build safe and supportive schools over physical security measures, which theyve said can make some students feel less safe.

Reaction Comes In

The top Senate Democrat for education, Sen. Patty Murray of Washington state, praised the bipartisan agreement to dismiss the extreme ideas to privatize our nations public schools and dismantle the Department of Education from DeVos.

Im proud to have worked with Republicans in Congress to flatly reject these ideas, and increase funding for programs Secretary DeVos tried to cut, including K-12 education, civil rights protections, college affordability, and more, Murray said in a statement.

And Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., praised the bill for including the STOP School Violence Act , as well as funding for other programs that can be use to help with school safety, such as Title IV:

In addition to #STOPSchoolViolenceAct in the Omnibus we were able to get $75M for the Comprehensive School Safety Initative,a $47m increase for school safety grant programs & $700m increase in grants to school districts for school counselors & school-based mental health  Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) March 22, 2018

Meanwhile, the Title IV-A Coalition, which backs more funding for the program, also celebrated the spending bill.

This level of funding will allow school districts to have true flexibility in determining how to meaningfully invest in and support programs that support safe and healthy students, a well-rounded academic curriculum, and an effective educational technology program, the group said in a statement.

Need some key spending bill information in chart form? Weve got you covered. Check it out below:

Staff Writer Evie Blad and Assistant Editor Alyson Klein contributed to this blog post.

Follow us on Twitter at @PoliticsK12 .In cities that have embraced school choice policiesbe it charter schools, private school vouchers, or even just allowing students to attend any district school they chooseblack students travel further to school than their white and Hispanic counterparts.

But low-income students in high choice cities tend to travel lesser distances to get to school overall than their wealthier peers. At the same time however, families without cars have substantially fewer school choice options available to them within a 15-minute drive from their homes.

Those were among myriad findings from an analysis by the Urban Institute of student travel patterns across cities that offer a lot of school choicethe District of Columbia, Denver, Detroit, New Orleans, and New York Citythat raise some important questions about equity and access in school choice.

Having a car dramatically opens up the number of schools you can get to within a 15-minute drive, and low-income families are less likely to have a car, said Kristin Blagg, a research associate at the Urban Institute. All of these cities have evolved this ecosystem of school choice, and this is a path that other cities appear to be on as well, but nobody has taken a comprehensive look at these issues dealing with the way students get to school. Were not saying that long travel times to school is inherently bad, but there are trade-offs.

Every city included in the study has some combination of charter schools, magnet schools, and private schools, which students can attend with state-funded tuition vouchers, as well as the option for students to attend traditional public schools beyond the ones zoned for their neighborhoods.

The Urban Institute study examined travel times between the homes and schools of nearly 190,000 students. The researchers analyzed only one year of data for elementary, middle, and high school students, so they couldnt glean much about changing trends, and they did not look at the type of transportation that students actually use.

Blagg and her fellow researchers found that black students across all grades, on average, attended schools that are 1-to-5 minutes further by car than the schools that white and Hispanic students were enrolled in.

That may not seem like a lot, but thats assuming that all students drive. Many dont. The researchers just used drive-times as a baseline.

In D.C, for example, where theres no yellow bus transportation for students ... five minutes driving distance can be substantially longer if youre taking public transit. A 5-minute drive could be a 10, 15-minute transit time difference, said Blagg.

The same goes for yellow bus service, she added, which makes a lot more stops than, say, a personal vehicle.

And there are fewer schools to choose from within a 15-minute drive than a 15-minute transit ride. For example, in D.C., the average kindergartener can reach 31 schools within a 15-minute drive but only 7 schools within a 15-minute transit ride.

Abundance of School Choice Doesnt Guarantee Access

Transportation and commute times are just one issue among a broader set of factors that can affect how accessible school choice policies are for disadvantaged students.

And its an area of research weve been seeing more activity in lately.

Getting information on school quality and navigating a profusion of different school applications and due dates also create barriers for families when choosing a schoolespecially for parents with less income, less education, and children with disabilities , according to ongoing research by the Center on Reinventing Public Education.

Some cities are experimenting with ways to address these issues such as mandating that all schools, including charters, provide yellow bus service, creating a single, citywide application system for all schools, and providing comprehensive guidebooks on schools that include how well they perform academically and the services they offer.

There are a lot of other interesting findings in the Urban Institute study that dont really fit into a tidy narrative, but are germane to the debate around school choice access. Here are some of the highlights in no particular order:



In all five cities, the group of students who traveled the farthest to school were high schoolers.

Charter school students generally do not travel farther than their peers enrolled in their neighborhood district school.

Cities that provide buses to students do not necessarily have more students attending schools further out. For example, New Orleans mandates schools provide yellow bus service for all students living beyond 1 mile from their campus while D.C. only provides students with public transportation passes. The commute distances for kindergarteners in both cities is virtually the same.

Only a small proportion of the studys sample was made up of students who were not low-incomein this case, students who do not receive a free or reduced-priced lunch from the federal government. But of those students, most tended to travel farther than their low-income counterparts.

On average, 9th graders across all five cities live about a 10-minute drive from a high-quality school, which the researchers defined as schools that offer calculus and have high graduation rates and high proportions of veteran teachers.

Almost 60 percent of elementary-aged children in Denver have a public schooleither district or charterin their neighborhood. But the same was true for only 21 percent of children in New Orleans. Part of that could be due to people being redistributed around the city after wide swaths of it were flooded following Hurricane Katrina.

Perhaps the last major takeaway one can glean from this research is that each citys experience is unique and that national generalizations about how school choice effects student commute times and access may not be as helpful to local policymakers as localized research.

On that note, Blagg said the Urban Institute plans to release more detailed, city-specific reports later this year. It will be interesting to see what they find at a more micro level.

Related stories:by Andrew Walden

Does the Ethics Commission offer a process which can break through the veil of secrecy behind which sex harassment complaints have been hidden in Hawaii?

Thats the message today from former DHS Director Rachael Wong, whose ethics complaint just forced the resignation of former House Speaker Joe Souki.

Akamai readers will remember that the Hawaii Civil Rights Commission utilizes a process which keeps sex harassment complaints private . Similarly, rules of the Hawaii State Senate and House of Representatives prohibit staff from revealing illegal or improper conduct .

The Associated Press, December 22, 2017, reports that under these rules, sex harassment complaints have been secretly adjudicated against three unnamed State Representatives and one State Senator. Assuming that Souki is one of the three Representatives, this means that names of at least three State legislator sex-harassers remain secret.

Souki was outed in the wake of his participation in a failed effort to unseat current House Speaker Scott Saiki. In response to the Ethics Commission revealing settlement terms of the sex harassment complaint against Souki, Saiki writes:

The House of Representatives takes a zero tolerance approach to workplace harassment, no matter the power or influence of the accused. As many other institutions are already doing nationwide, we will conduct a comprehensive review of our workplace policies. The objective is to ensure that the House is able to receive, investigate and adjudicate complaints in a timely and vigilant manner. We will also explore other means to ensure that people feel respected and safe in the workplace.

If this were really true, Saiki would name names instead of exploiting complaints for factional purposes.

Meanwhile, Wong suggests that the Ethics Commission process opens the door to exposing the sex harassers in the Legislature and elsewhere. In a four page statement issued today, Wong says:

This can be a springboard to a different future for us all  I would like to thank the Hawai  i State Ethics Commission for its thorough investigation of my complaint and the tremendous amount of work that went into the resolution. The Commission staff are consistently professional and responsive, and they honored the requests for confidentiality from all of us who came forward throughout this process. I am grateful that an entity like the Commission exists and that it is led with and grounded in law and ethics. It must be known that it is a safe and effective conduit for reporting sexual harassment by state officials. I quietly filed my complaint with the Hawaii State Ethics Commission after recognizing it as a viable, confidential entity for reporting sexual harassment in the state workplace and with the hope that resolution could open up space for the community to focus on some real issues at hand.

There may be more to come. Wong continues:

Second, I would like to thank and applaud the courageous women who also filed complaints with the Ethics Commission. Several found me after the news about my complaint became public. In this current culture, not one of them is in a place where they feel they can safely disclose their identities at this time. This is significant.

---30---Kakaako United President Announces Run for State Senate

Sharon Moriwaki to Bring Voice of Community to Capitol

News Release from SharonMoriwaki.com

(Honolulu, Hawaii) March 21, 2018  This afternoon at Ala Moana Beach Park, Sharon Moriwaki announced her candidacy as a Democrat for Hawaii State Senate District 12 (Waikiki, Ala Moana, Kakaako, Sheridan, McCully, Moiliili). A resident of Kakaako for the past decade, shes the founding president of Kakaako United , a nonprofit volunteer organization that fights for a better life for area residents and businesses through smart development and accountability.

As a state senator, I will bring the community together to address problems not being fixed: housing for our residents not offshore investors, keeping kupuna at home as they age, and reducing crime including drug-related and homeless-related crime in our neighborhoods, Moriwaki said.

Moriwaki recently helped with efforts to protect senior residents of Na Lei Hulu Kupuna, who feared losing their homes after a proposed spike in rent from the development company that owns the Kakaako low income rental building. The issue garnered local media and even Governor David Iges attention. At a press conference, Ige promised to rectify the situation and help the seniors.

Ive been fighting the Kakaako luxury blight for the past five years because Honolulu is in the midst of the greatest housing crisis in the U.S. and our elected officials are failing us, Moriwaki said. With Honolulu being one of the least affordable housing markets in the country, its no wonder homelessness continues to rise.

If elected, Moriwaki will bring extensive experience to the office. As the former associate director of the University of Hawaiis Public Policy Center , she knows how to work and accomplish goals with a diverse group of people. Moriwakis history of moving legislation forward as part of a team means that she will waste no time once in the state senate.

Moriwaki was chosen by then-Governor John Waihee to be part of his first cabinet as Labor Department Deputy Director. Four years later, Waihee appointed her as his Director of Human Resources, where she instituted major personnel system reforms. Her subsequent leadership included serving as Hawaii Court System Administrative Director and as UH Assistant Vice President.

I believe we must do more for the communities from Waikiki to Kakaako, Moriwaki said. Its time for us to start caring for each other, and its time for our elected officials to truly represent us.

To learn more, visit SharonMoriwaki.com .

VIDEO: Campaign Announcement

# # #

Related:

2015: Residency: Senator Galuteria Tangled in Lies?HAWAII REACHES MULTI-MILLION DOLLAR ARBITRATION SETTLEMENT WITH TOBACCO COMPANIES

Direct Payment to Hawaii in Excess of $54 million is Expected in 2018

News Release from Office of the Attorney General, March 14, 2018

HONOLULU  Acting Attorney General Russell Suzuki today announced that the State of Hawaii has agreed to a multi-million dollar arbitration settlement with the Tobacco Industry. The settlement resolves an ongoing dispute between the tobacco companies and Hawaii, relating to compliance with the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement (MSA) from 2004 - 2017. As part of the settlement, the State expects to receive in excess of $54 million dollars in April 2018 from funds that have been withheld from Hawaii during the disputed years.

In 1998, leading United States tobacco manufacturers entered into the MSA with 46 States, including Hawaii, and the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, Guam, the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. In consideration for a release of past, present, and certain future claims, the manufacturers agreed to pay substantial monies to the settling States.

The MSA allows for adjustments in calculating the annual payments disbursed to the States. Hawaii, along with all of the other States who signed the MSA, has received adjusted annual payments. One such adjustment is the non-participating manufacturer (NPM) adjustment. The monies that are withheld due to the NPM adjustment go into the disputed payment account, which includes Hawaiis portion or monies that Hawaii would have received had Hawaii prevailed in the diligent enforcement arbitration. The monies in the disputed payment account are at the center of the NPM arbitration, with hundreds of millions of dollars at stake for each contested year.

Hawaii joins several other States in entering into the current settlement. Twenty-five other States, Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia have previously settled with the tobacco industry. The settlement will not only spare Hawaii the risk of losing millions of dollars for each disputed year if an adverse ruling is received, but will save the State the expense and uncertainty of protracted litigation - litigation which would likely have lasted several decades.US offshore regulator, under spotlight for rule changes, finds serious safety problems in Gulf of Mexico

In early March, the US Interior Departments Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) sent teams to the Gulf of Mexico last week to inspect giant cranes used in offshore oil and gas operations that are a significant source of accidents. The inspections uncovered a number of issues, some serious.

Stock image

More than 50 inspectors conducted surprise inspections on about 40 offshore platforms and drilling rigs, said Jason Mathews, the head of offshore safety management for the Gulf of Mexico at the BSEE. The results were still being compiled, he said, but the inspectors found serious problems, including some that were potentially life threatening.



Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke had discussed plans for the inspection push this month after the safety bureau issued an alert to offshore oil and gas operators in the Gulf. It warned about a series of potentially catastrophic crane and lifting incidents that occurred late last year on platforms and drilling rigs.



No one was killed or injured in those crane incidents, but lifting-related accidents are the second-largest cause of offshore fatalities, outnumbered only by fires and explosions, agency records show. The cranes are used to move workers and supplies from the Gulf up to the decks of the platforms.



The Interior Department and its offshore safety bureau have been under a spotlight since the agency was ordered by President Trump to re-evaluate regulations enacted during the Obama administration in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon accident in 2010, which killed 11 offshore workers and created the largest marine oil spill in drilling history.



Many offshore oil and gas operators complained that the regulatory response to the accident had been excessive.



The focus of the regulatory review has been two safety rules that govern offshore drilling and the production of oil and gas. But the deregulatory push has also meant that progress has slowed, if not stopped, on finalising other safety rules, including a 2015 proposal to enact new standards for offshore crane safety.



The New York Times reported on March 10 that several of the independent companies seeking a lightening of the regulatory burden had been cited for workplace safety violations in recent years at a rate much higher than the industry average.



Interior Department records released to the NYT show the rate of lift-related offshore accidents last year increased by more than 4%, reaching the second-highest annual level in the past decade. On average, there was one incident for every 13.5 offshore platforms or drilling rigs, according to agency data.



The crane inspections resulted in noncompliance notices for some offshore operators, which could result in fines, the BSEEs Mathews said.



The crane inspections are part of a broader effort to make safety inspections more focused on risks rather than routine scheduling, meaning inspectors concentrate on known hazards like gas leaks, or on companies that have a history of safety violations. The risk-based approach has been suggested to the Interior Department for several years by the Government Accountability Office.



Secretary Zinke announced this month that a risk-based program was formally in place, but the NYT says questions remain about the agencys commitment to safety.



Last month, a group of 19 Senate Democrats wrote to Zinke questioning why the agency had issued a stop-work order for a study by the National Academy of Sciences that was looking at ways to reduce offshore accidents.



In late December, BSEE sent the White House a proposal to overhaul the Obama well-control rule, estimating that oil companies would save $986 million in the coming decade. The proposal included many changes requested by the industry, such as loosening inspection requirements for blowout preventers and eliminating the need to shut down operations as lift boats approached.



There have also been allegations that the Trump administrations appointment of Scott Angelle as BSEE Director could lead to conflicts of interest, given his close links to the oil and gas sector.



Angelle rejected the criticism as unfounded, said his agency was committed to safe operations in the Gulf and that the regulatory changes would remove a burden on companies while maintaining standards.



In a January article in USA Today Angelle wrote: Contrary to recent misleading news reports, the Department of the Interior is not weakening offshore safety or environmental rules. As a Louisiana native, and my states interim lieutenant governor at the time of the Deepwater Horizon tragedy, I fully understand the importance of worker safety and environmental protection.



Our agency is working hard to fulfill Executive Orders, which require an extensive review of our regulations. Our common sense approach is to propose revisions that could potentially reduce burdens on operators without impacting safety and protections of the environment. Our changes will never reduce safety, and will in some cases improve safety.



Our agency enforces dozens of regulations, but we are currently seeking public input on changes to one: the Production Safety Systems Rule. Enacted in late 2016, this regulation is not related to the Deepwater Horizon incident. The changes we propose are common sense - reducing unnecessary notifications, clarifying when operators must provide documentation, and specifying that safety and pollution prevention equipment that meets required industry standards have achieved third-party verification. We propose to codify 17 updated standards so they bear the force of law as another sign of our commitment to safety. We are examining other rules, but have not reached the public-comment phase.



We have no plans to alter two significant rules enacted following Deepwater Horizon, the Drilling Safety Rule and the Safety and Environmental Management Systems Rule. The SEMS approach rightly moves operators toward a performance-based safety approach, allowing the government, industry and independent third parties to focus on improving safety outcomes.



We are also strengthening our inspection program by implementing risk-based process that focus our efforts on potential safety problems. I am confident that we will be able to achieve the goal of integrating a risk-based inspection protocol in 2018. Through these efforts, and many others, we are moving forward toward meeting the Administrations goal of achieving energy dominance without sacrificing safety.



But, according to the NYT, federal safety inspection records hint at the difficulties many smaller operators have faced, and help explain why regulatory changes by the Trump administration are seen as so crucial to the industrys survival in the shallower sections of the Gulf.



Approximately 240 platforms in the shallow waters of the Gulf, serving over 2,000 oil and gas wells as of last year, are listed by the Interior Department as idle iron. This means that they are severely damaged, not operating and no longer economically viable, and that they pose environmental and safety hazards. Most of these platforms are controlled by smaller operators.



One abandoned well, formerly operated by a now-bankrupt company, has been leaking oil for 10 years and is considered to be the second worst source of US oil pollution after the Deepwater Horizon incident.



The rule changes include proposals to ease the burden of set-aside payments by operators to pay for the decommissioning and removal of this idle iron.



The Gulf generates 97% of offshore oil in the United States, about 18% of the countrys crude oil and $2.8 billion a year in royalty and lease payments to the federal government. In 2017, the Gulf produced a record 1.65 million barrels a day.



More information...Editors Note: In todays education reform landscape, there is an emphasis on learning from whats happening in other countries. However, as David Andrew Tow, English and Social Science teacher at Terra Linda High School and the Marin School of Environmental Leadership in California, explains, not everyone wants to implement these best practices. Here are his ideas on getting buy-in for international ideas.

By guest blogger David Andrew Tow



I had developed an annoying trait. In emails to colleagues about some new protocol or curriculum idea, I often began my reply with, In Germany..., or In Israel....

During meetings tasked with exploring instructional goals or defining assessments, Id interject with, Well, when I was in Finland..., or My friend who teaches in Singapore suggests....

Maybe Im imagining it, but whatever followed was met with held breath or rolled eyes and a polite but direct return to the subject at hand. And I was left to chew on my thoughts on Finnish classroom management or Israeli multicultural education or Singaporean collaborative methods on my own.

Before I became exposed to, and ultimately, invested in, international education, I was also somewhat resistant to lessons from other countries. I think there is a natural hesitancy to incorporating best practices from international education for many reasons. While part of it might involve innate feelings of American exceptionalism, many of the objections I hear emphasize the contrasts between the United States and other countries, framing those differences as unconquerable hurdles to any mimicked reforms in American education.

Some skeptics point to contrasts of scalewhat works in a tiny country like Singapore could never work in the United Statesand others point to demographics as destiny, claiming that a homogenous country like Finland cannot teach multicultural America any lessons on pluralitynever mind the falsehood buried in that premise.

Most recently, however, the objections Ive heard involve a more abstract ideological differencethat since the United States is founded on a different philosophical point of view than most countries, its hard to translate best practices, which are themselves implicitly ideological.

As a result, I suggest that those who are interested in international education consider reframing policies not just to make them more palatable to those resistant to or skeptical of reforms, but to allow those advocates to understand that, while the national origin and context of an idea is generally interesting, its the ideas themselves that are the most important. I no longer start my sentences with In Germany, becoming less annoying and more able to clearly emphasize the strategy rather than merely its origin. Below, I offer ways reformers can start by first reforming the way they present best practices from other countries.

Leverage the Strategy

When presenting new ideas, whether to a school board or administration team or even a few collaborating teachers, emphasize reforms in terms of one key strategic change rather than the origin of the larger model. Furthermore, underscore this change in terms of what specifically will look different in the classroom, rather than how it can be a part of a larger systemic change.

When I returned from Finland as a Fulbright Distinguished Teacher, having spent my time researching how Finnish teachers used school structures to encourage and reinforce civic identity , I was excited to dramatically remake my teaching environment and work towards having the school reflect the sort of nation I wanted to see America become, until I recognized that not everyone had seen what I had and were not as eager to start over as I was. Reform is hard, and it is easier to change one thing than everything.

Read It

One of the things teachers miss when they enter the classroom is the opportunity to talk about material as equals, rather than as the learned sage and resident expert. A way to feed that desire is to use a reading group to introduce some best practices or theoretical frameworks. Even if its two colleagues reading about German Gemainschaftschulen instead of one just explaining, the results can produce some incremental change.

Elizabeth Kolbert wrote in The New Yorker last year about the difficulty of integrating new information into existing systems of belief. The takeaway is that the only way to change your mind is by the careful and unemotional exploration of information, clearly stated, with an emphasis less on being convinced than on mutual understanding.

Avoid the Administration

Ive been blessed with having administrators throughout my career who have been supportive of almost any idea that my colleagues have brought them. Im sure the same can be said of many other administrative teams.

Nonetheless, the most sustainable reforms tend to happen far from the front office. In true American tradition, top-down programs tend to be greeted with more skepticism by teachers than reforms that are led by the teaching staff. Granted, without administrative support, a program is less likely to flourish, so it is important to get them on board early.

Assemble working groups with other teachers to talk about new ideas and get the ball slowly rolling. Its far easier to approach administration with the beginnings of consensus and ask for help in implementationand there is the significant possibility that the best practices could be bettered with at least a dash of local input.

Speak with Students

Almost every suggestion I give colleagues involves soliciting input and eliciting feedback from students. Personally, Im of the opinion that, although parents and their fellow taxpayers are our constituency, the true client is the studentit is their best interests we serve.

In that spirit, I suggest dedicating some valuable class time to see what students think about potential reforms. Not only are students more struck by the romance of learning internationally, but I also think the decade-long emphasis on growth mindsets has finally managed to produce dividends. They are able to quickly evaluate new and strange-seeming ideas, engage with those ideas in a candid conversation, and integrate them. If having an all-class conversation seems impossible or unwieldy, consider offering an afterschool Socratic seminar as a way to recoup lost participation or homework points, and engage in some critical reflection in the process.

Avoid Panaceas

In the broader political context, theres a keen desire to find a single solution to a whole menu of problems. Especially in considering lessons from abroad, its remarkably appealing to discover a single strategy, policy, or shift that would alleviate a whole host of woes in American schools.

It is also incredibly unlikely, if not impossible, that one magic move or silver bullet will suddenly fix everything. And in order to convince the skeptics, reformers oftentimes invoke the magical language of panaceas. The unintended side effect, however, is that expectations become unreasonably high and the strategy can do naught but fail. Instead, focus on the strategy and its hypothetical modest but sustained change. One can argue that steady change trumps paradigm shifts anyway.

Aim for Integration

When looking for the practices that best fit in your classroom, school, or even would make for compelling discussion, try to identify those that work with the systems already in place. If part of the hesitancy to reform is the wholesale upending of familiar systems, it adds palatability if the new idea fits nicely with the old.

This is true for both teachers and students, both of whom are unlikely to toss out entire systems based on some sheets of paper describing successes in a faraway country. Looking for ways to make the practice fit will also help you understand better how American education can actually benefit from other countries, rather than remaking itself in their image. For example, while its unlikely that my suburban district will build a comprehensive vocational and apprenticeship program like I saw in Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany, we can try and leverage opportunities like career technical education (CTE) programs in technical writing and computer technology or Regional Occupational Program classes in medical tech through a partnership with Kaiser Permanente to reach outcomes that are similar.

TANSTAAFL

Lastly, an old acronym, which I learned from science fiction writer Robert Heinlein but has been around longer than him: There aint no such thing as a free lunch, or TANSTAAFL . International education and best practices aside, theres a natural and welcome skepticism if something seems too good to be true. Theres nothing, especially in education, that doesnt cost anythingtime, resources, energy, or even a trade-off of not doing something else. Its all an even exchange. Thus, when framing and offering strategies, dont oversell it.

Give teachers reasonable strategies that can accomplish modest gains, support the case with practical support and just enough context and data to make it compelling, and let them take the idea for a spin. After all, its almost the same as what we expect of students.

We dont want students taking every word as gospel and every idea as truth. Instead, we want them to remain skeptical and critical, needing to be convinced both by an effective argument and by compelling facts, and finally change their mind when theyve gotten enough first-hand evidence to come to a reasonable conclusion. If thats what we hope for students, I imagine its what we would prefer in our teachers and administrators.

Connect with David and Heather on Twitter.

Image created on Pablo .Supo on Wednesday revealed that last year it detected a number of foreign state-backed cyber attacks designed to obtain sensitive information about critical national infrastructure and the product development projects of businesses in Finland.

Both cyber and traditional espionage have become common occurrences in Finland, according to the latest yearbook of the Finnish Security Intelligence Service (Supo).

Antti Pelttari, the director-general of Supo, said cyber espionage poses a serious threat to the countrys information capital.

If product development data [are] stolen to another country, it is possible that the company loses its whole future, he explained in a press release from Supo.

Finnish security authorities, however, are finding it increasingly difficult to prevent such threats, first, because businesses are outsourcing their data administration operations abroad and, second, because the authorities do not have the necessary capabilities to detect the threats.

We have no access to data networks, so our capability to detect cyber espionage is completely inadequate, lamented Pelttari.

Supo has lobbied vocally for the introduction of new intelligence legislation that would grant it the authority to sift through network traffic for intelligence and thereby improve its ability to identify and respond to contemporary security threats. The Finnish government submitted its proposal for new civilian and military intelligence laws to the Parliament on 25 January, 2018.

Supo also reminded yesterday that traditional espionage activities are not uncommon in Finland.

Foreign intelligence services, it said, continue to attempt to recruit local residents to provide them with sensitive information especially on foreign and security policy making. Russian intelligence organisations have been particularly active, although they are by no means the only organisations with operations in Finland.

The key areas of interest last year included the proposed intelligence laws, cyber security capabilities and measures to combat information operations.

Supo also reiterated its assessment that individuals and small groups with direct or indirect ties to jihadist terrorist organisations continue to post the greatest terror threat in Finland.

Security authorities, it revealed, have uncovered a growing number of serious terrorism-related plans and projects in the country and have designated a total of 370 people as so-called counter-terrorism target individuals  a number that has all but doubled over the past decade.

Supo additionally drew attention to the knife attack that took place in Turku, South-west Finland, last August, describing it as an example of the change that has taken place in the security environment and counter-terrorism operating environment in Finland.

The terrorism threat level remains elevated, it said.

Aleksi Teivainen  HT

Photo: Heikki Saukkomaa  Lehtikuva

Source: Uusi SuomiA school-based sheriffs deputy confronted a student gunman at a Maryland high school Tuesday, ending a shooting that left two other students wounded.

Authorities immediately praised the deputy as a hero who had spared the lives of countless others and whose swift action demonstrated the need for more school-based law enforcement to prevent and stop deadly shootings, like the Feb. 14 massacre in a Parkland, Fla., high school that left 17 people dead.

Police say Austin Rollins, 17, started firing a semi-automatic handgun in a hallway of Great Mills High School in Great Mills, Md., at the start of the school day. Classmate Jaelynn Willey, 16, was in critical condition Wednesday afternoon and a 14-year-old boy, who has not been named, was released from the hospital after he was treated for a leg wound, the Associated Press reported.

Rollins died after he was confronted by St. Marys County Deputy Blaine Gaskill, who worked as a school resource officer at Great Mills. But the precise facts of what unfolded between the SRO and the student shooter are still not clear as investigators are still determining if Gaskill shot Rollins or if Rollins killed himself, the Associated Press reports.

The whole thing was over in less than a minute, law enforcement officials said.

This is a tough guy who closed in quickly and took the right action, Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican, said of the officer.

Within hours of the shooting, state and federal lawmakers who were already calling for putting more police in schools after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland used Gaskill as a supporting example.

And political punditswhove pitched the post-Parkland debate as a binary choice between stricter gun laws and hardening schools with stepped-up security measuresused the Maryland shooting as evidence that they were right. On the one hand: How did Rollins get the gun to begin with? On the other hand: A good guy with a gun stopped the shooting.

The National Rifle Association, usually silent in the early days after school shootings, tweeted videos from its NRA TV account Tuesday, praising the actions of the officer.

A man who wears a flag on his shoulder and a badge on his chest was able to spring into action and save countless lives, NRA TV host Grant Stinchfield said in one video. What happens from the mainstream medias perspective? They dont want to cover it.

(The mainstream media did cover it: Outlets like the Washington Post and the Associated Press all noted Gaskills response.)

After the Maryland shooting, here are some things to keep in mind about the debate over police in schools.

School shootings are rarely stopped by school resource officers.

School-based law enforcement officers, often referred to as school resource officers, are more likely to be found patrolling traffic in a high school parking lot or standing in a busy hallway between class periods than stopping a crisis like a school shooting.

Though an increasing number of schools have officers, shootings at schools are statistically rare. And intervening in a fast-moving situation requires an officer to be close by and prepared for the unique complexities of each shooting event, like crowded cafeterias, shooters moving through hallways, and the response of other students to the gunfire.

So even school police who are more responsive than the sheriffs deputy assigned to Stoneman Douglas, whos under investigation for remaining outside of the building during the shooting there, may not be the ones to stop the gunfire.

The Washington Post analyzed every school shooting event since the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colo., the indelible event that changed the debate over school safety.

Of the nearly 200 Post-identified incidents of school gunfire, only once before this week has a resource officer gunned down an active shooter, the Post reported Wednesday. In 2001 , an 18-year-old with a 12-gauge pump-action shotgun was firing at the outside of a California high school when the resource officer rounded a corner and shot him in the face.

Proponents of school police also pitch them as a deterrant: If would-be shooters know theres an armed presence on campus, they are less likely to carry out their plans, they say. But both the accused Parkland shooter and the Maryland gunman had been students at the schools they attacked, and both presumably knew that there were on-site officers. Despite that, they both chose to carry weapons onto campus.

School police vs. arming teachers

Since the Parkland shooting, President Donald Trump has faced pushback for his calls to train and arm some teachers and school staff.

Schools without armed adults leave students as sitting ducks and targets for sickos, Trump has argued.

But, while some states allow teachers and staff to carry weapons, many educator groups said it is far from being a national solution to school safety concerns. Recent polls show most teachers dont want to carry a weapon and most dont believe doing so would make their schools safer.

Still, some advocates for arming teachers said on social media that Gaskills response proved the value of armed adults in schools, and they didnt draw a distinction between badge-wearing officers and teachers with less training.

But Gaskill has even more training than many school resource officers in crisis intervention.

The deputy, who has worked at Great Mills since the start of the school year, has completed SWAT training and previously worked as a correctional officer, the Baltimore Sun reported.

Gaskill won praise in 2016 for convincing an armed man who confronted him to surrender, which was all caught on a police body camera, St. Marys County Sheriff Tim Cameron said.

The National Association of School Resource Officers, or NASRO, which trains school police, has spoken out against calls to arm teachers. The level of regular training required to maintain the necessary firearm skills would be a big hurdle for even interested educators, the organization has said.

Civil rights groups have concerns about police in schools

As Education Week covered in its Policing Americas Schools package last year, civil rights groups have long been concerned that an increased presence of police in schools has led to harsher school discipline and poor school climates, particularly for black and Latino students.

Only 12 states require specialized training for officers who work the school beat , according to a 2015 study by the American Institutes for Research, which means some officers have little transition between patrolling city streets and monitoring school hallways. Schools are unique environments, civil rights groups argue, requiring training in areas like teen brain development and the unique needs of students with disabilities.

NASRO encourages schools to form agreements with law enforcement agencies that outline when and how officers can intervene in student misbehavior. Officers should stay out of routine disciplinary issues, the agency says, only involving themselves in criminal matters.

But that doesnt always happen, advocacy groups have said, pointing to higher school arrest and law-enforcement referral rates for black students than their white peers.

Those communities do not trust police on the streets, so they will not trust police in the hallways , Judith Browne Dianis, executive director of the Advancement Project, said this week.

School districts like Atlanta have sought to address these concerns by standing up their own independent police forces and requiring special training for school-based officers.

Gun laws vs. school safety measures

After Parkland, the choice between gun laws and school safety measures like school police is not always an either/or situation, as Florida proved.

The state moved quickly to pass a school safety bill that includes a wide range of provisions: a plan to arm some school staff, adding a police officer to every school, new restrictions on gun purchases, and funds for school safety upgrades.

Parts of the bill drew criticism and praise from groups on all sides of the debate. The NRA sued over the gun restrictions, teachers groups spoke out against armed school staff, and civil rights groups feared an uptick in school police. But families of the Parkland victims supported the bill, calling for compromise.

I know the debate on all these issues will continue. And thats healthy in our democracy, Republican Gov. Rick Scott said as he signed the bill. This is a time for all of us to come together, roll up our sleeves and get it done.

Photos: Crime scene tape is set around Great Mills High School, the scene of a shooting on March 20 in Great Mills, Md. --Alex Brandon/AP

Gaskill --St. Marys County Sheriffs Office

Related reading about school police, safety, and Parkland:

Follow @evieblad on Twitter or subscribe to Rules for Engagement to get blog posts delivered directly to your inbox.Implications of population decline The recent U.S. 2020 Census Count revealed that Flint and Genesee County experienced a decline in population over the past...

Remember When  We have the best natural resources in Michigan and the world knows it; that is why everyone loves our state....

Career exploration helps students become successful adults When I was a child, I didnt have a clue that I could be doing the work that I am...By years end 1863 3-year-old Charley Curtis was effectively an orphan. His French-Indian mother, Ellen (nee Pappan) Curtis, died in April, leaving Charley and baby sister Elizabeth ostensibly in their fathers care in war-weary Kansas. Orren Arms Curtis was descended from Pilgrim stock, though in his case their puritanical ways had skipped a generation. The widower and his wards lived on the north banks of the Kansas (or Kaw) River in Topeka. But Orren wouldnt remain at home long. On August 21 Confederate guerrilla Captain William Clarke Quantrill and some 400 of his Missouri border raiders sacked and burned Unionist Lawrence, Kansas, murdering more than 150 townsmen and boys. When Kansas Jayhawker Colonel Charles Doc Jennison recruited men to respond in kind, newly remarried Orren enlisted. Charley never lived with his father again.

Young Charley was born in Topeka on Jan. 25, 1860, the year before Kansas became a state. His mother had been educated in a St. Louis convent, and she had her son baptized at the Catholic mission at St. Marys, Kan. The first words he spoke were in Kansa and French, not English. After his mother died and his father rode off to war, Charley and sister Elizabeth stayed with his paternal grandparents, William and Permelia (nee Hubbard) Curtis, in North Topeka. William had come to Kansas Territory in 1859 and gradually acquired a large tract of land. In time he gifted it to his 14 sons and daughters. It was Permelia, though, who reportedly ruled the family with a strong but gentle hand.

Charleys maternal grandparents, Louis and Julie (nee Gonville) Pappan, resided nearby. Julieof French, Kaw and Osage ancestrywas among the grantees of the half-breed lands (stretching from Topeka almost to Lecompton) outlined in an 1825 treaty between the U.S. government and Kaw tribe. In 1866 she and her French-Canadian and Potawatomi husband left Topeka to claim their allotment and join relatives in Council Grove on the Kaw Indian Reservation. They brought 6-year-old Charley with them. The Pappans and Curtises were related to virtually every living soul in North Topeka, and more than anyone else Charleys grandmothers shaped his life. One was Methodist Episcopal, the other Catholic; one was white, the other mixed blood; one a staunch Republican, the other ineligible to vote. For a brief time these diverse cultures coexisted, even complemented one another. But it could not last.

Orren Curtis remained absent from son Charleys life. At wars end Captain Jack, as the elder Curtis was known, faced a court-martial for having hanged three prisoners in his charge. Though convicted, dishonorably discharged and sentenced to a year of hard labor in the Missouri State Penitentiary for executing the bushwhackers, he received a pardon after only a month behind bars. Orren had remarried on Christmas Day 1864, less than a week after divorcing his third wife. But on his release from prison he did not take responsibility for his son.

Charley was just 8 on June 3, 1868, when 100 mounted Cheyenne warriors rode down on the reservation of their old enemy at Council Grove. While Kaw men painted their faces and rose to the occasion, the children took shelter in the Quaker school. Charley, however, was tapped to accompany Kaw interpreter Joe Jim on horseback the 60 miles to Topeka to seek help from the governor. In a 1927 newspaper interview Curtiswho by then was a U.S. senator from Kansas and would soon be elected the 31st vice president of the United Statesleft out the fact Joe Jim had been at the reins. Indeed, in his retelling hed trudged the 60 miles afoot in just 20 hours:

Though only 8 years old at the time, I was selected to make the trip. One reason was that I spoke the language of the white man. I could deliver my message. Another was that I had traveled back and forth to Topeka many times, visiting my fathers relatives.

This trip was my first turn toward the United States Senate. It had to do with starting me into the life of the white man instead of that of the Indian. But for the raid of the Cheyennes I might have drowsed my life away there as a member of a tribe that was a charge of the government.

Through the 1850s white settlers and travelers on the Santa Fe Trail had steadily encroached on the 20-square-mile Kaw Agency. It got so bad, the Kaws found it nearly impossible to plant a crop of corn. If not for the hostile Cheyennes and Pawnees, the beleaguered Kaws might have packed up and moved farther west. They appealed to the U.S. government, but the Indian agents were at best ineffectual in evicting the squatters and at worst complicit with the white interlopers. In the May 22, 1858, Kansas Herald of Freedom Dr. C.H. Gran, a visiting physician from Illinois, shared a detailed, albeit prejudiced, description of life on the Kaw reservation:

Their village contains about 18 or 20 lodges, built in the following style: from 6 to 8 feet long; green, limber saplings are stuck into the ground; canvas of various colors, hides, buffalo robes, etc., are tied around the same; and, drawing them tighter toward the top, they bring the saplings together, leaving room, however, for the smokeor, at least, for someto escape. Such is their house. Stepping inside we were greeted with a shouting sound, like How, how? The lords and masters we found smoking and card playing, old and young. The squaws (ladies) were making or ornamenting leggins [sic] or moccasins. Some, old and young, sat round their center fires, tailor fashion, talking away lustilyvery likely about their white intruders and their pale, sickly appearance. Some of them had quite a number of buffalo robes, prepared and unprepared, which they were selling.They do not appear to like the life of a farmer, mechanic, etc., very much, and I hesitate not in asserting that, whenever they die, it is, in nine cases of 10, not in consequence of having overworked themselves.

In the 1860s the Kaws remained under pressure from encroaching white settlements to the east and hostile tribes to the west. But life was still mostly good, at least for a boy like Charley. In countless interviews during his political career Curtis fondly recalled his childhood on the reservation. His descriptions were largely idyllicdays spent fishing or horseback riding, the companionship of other children, the presence of his loving grandmother. He recalled how he and other Kaw boys used bows and arrows to shoot at coins white visitors would slip into split sticksthe coins themselves their reward for hitting the target. Perhaps he was looking through rose-colored glasses or the fog of memory, for reservation life was not ideal. Impoverished Kaws often begged from white neighbors and on occasion stole a chicken. To feed their families in past decades, the Kaws would venture onto the Plains for a summer bison hunt, but fear of their enemies kept them home.

The summer of 1867 was a volatile one on the Plains, as Maj. Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock put on a show of force intended to subdue those recalcitrant Indians standing in the way of progress. Hancocks War, however, was a failure that only served to inflame hostile tribes, especially the Cheyennes, whose camp on Pawnee Creek the general razed that April, touching off hostilities. On the heels of a Cheyenne raid on Fort Wallace in late June, Cheyennes and Lakotas massacred a 12-man patrol under Lieutenant Lyman Kidder in northwestern Kansas. With the signing of the Medicine Lodge Treaty that October, the Kaws hoped their old enemies would be placated. At the very least, they figured, it would again be safe to hunt.

They figured wrong. The next month Cheyennes interrupted the Kaws bison hunt in central Kansas, and a battle ensued. The Kaws got the best of their enemy but thought it best to march the 100 miles east to the relative safety of the reservation. They had little meat to take home. Scores died from exposure and starvation en route. Arriving at Fort Riley, the survivors performed tribal dances for white audiences to earn cash for food.

These Kanza [Kaw] dead have no grave markers, wrote Ron Parks, former administrator of the Kaw Mission State Historic Site. Their lives were as evanescent as wind-driven cloud shadows drifting across the plains. We know they were disproportionately young and female, but we dont know their names. They are historical nonentities. During a few cold days in December 1867 they became too weak to go farther, dropped to the ground, then died61 of themon the Kansas prairie.

The dead were Charleys cousins, uncles, aunts, playmates. Despite the tragedy, the surviving Kaws held a scalp dance to celebrate their victory over the Cheyennes. Charley no doubt witnessed it, though he never publicly discussed the death march or its aftermath.

I remember well the thrilling spectacle of Indians on the warpath and attacking, Curtis recalled, mounted, of course, bedecked with feathers, their faces smeared with war paint

He did regale reporters with his memories of a more notable event the following summerthe June 3, 1868, Cheyenne raid on Council Grove:

It was a glowing summer afternoon, and the reservation lay sleeping in the sun.Suddenly the quietude of those vast open spaces was sharply broken. The rattle of many rifles brought the drowsing Kaws to their feet. I remember well the thrilling spectacle of Indians on the warpath and attackingmounted, of course, bedecked with feathers, their faces smeared with war paint. They galloped in circles about our camp, firing steadily into it as they went.

Before the attack the well-armed main body of 400 Cheyennes and Arapahos, led by Tall Bull and Little Robe, had parleyed with a white delegation from Council Grove, assuring the hamlets safety as long as the townsmen didnt intervene. Some white settlers may have even welcomed the attack, as it might accelerate the Kaw removal. Our settlers had no objections to Indians exterminating each other, a resident later recalled.

Parks wrote that up to 100 resolute Kaws painted themselves for battle as Joe Jim and young Charley galloped off to Topeka for help. They neednt have bothered. Despite the thousands of shots fired in the all-Indian engagement, only one warrior was wounded on each side. By the time help did arrive, the attackers had abandoned the fight and returned to the high Plains. From a military standpoint historians agree the 1868 raid on Council Grove had little significance. The ripple effect, though, was tremendous.

Settlers in eastern Kansas, believing themselves immune to the attacks and depredations occurring in the western reaches of the state, were terrified. Governor Samuel J. Crawfordan active brevet brigadier general when first elected governor in 1864was infuriated, considering it a personal insult hostile tribes would venture so far east. After all, Council Grove was only 60 miles from the capital of Topeka. Patrols increased, and authorities withheld promised arms and ammunition from the Cheyennes and Arapahos. Though Thomas Murphy, superintendent of Indian Affairs in Atchison, ultimately acceded to Indian demands for weapons, the impatient Cheyenne Dog Soldiers by then had ridden off to attack settlements along the Saline and Solomon rivers. Their actions in turn incensed Maj. Gen. Phil Sheridan, commander of the overseeing military Department of the Missouri. He began planning a winter campaign that would culminate in Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custers attack at the Washita in Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma). The 19th Kansas Volunteer Cavalryauthorized by Governor Crawford, who then resigned to personally lead the regimentassembled on the outskirts of Topeka for abbreviated training before taking the field. Among the recruits was Charleys father, Captain Jack Curtis, who served as quartermaster sergeant, and among the scouts were a half-dozen Kaws, eager to exact vengeance on their old enemies.

The Plains Indian war had escalated, and the little mixed-blood boy who had witnessed and even participated in it to a small degree, soon reached the understandable conclusion it was not safe to be an Indian in Kansas. Grandmother Julie Pappan told him as much, and in the wake of the 1868 raid she sent Charley packing to grandmother Permelia Curtis. Whether the Methodist matriarch had put her foot down or the grandmothers had reached a mutual decision is not known. Regardless, Charley began attending a white school in Topeka. Teased whenever he spoke Kansa and French, he soon forgot those languages.

In June 1872 Interior Secretary Columbus Delano came to Council Grove to obtain the necessary signatures to implement a pending Kaw removal bill. As recorded by the tribes interpreter, Chief Allegawaho addressed the assemblage:

Bechego [the Kansa name for the U.S. president], we hear what you have to say about our removal to a new country farther south. Only a few years ago our home was on the river farther north, but we were driven from it and settled here, where we were promised we might remain as long as the grass grows and the water flows. Now you come asking us to give up this land where our homes are established, where our loved ones are buried; ask us to leave all that we hold sacred and move to a new and a strange country. Bechego, you treat my people like a flock of wild turkeys. We settle down on one stream, you come and scare us up, we fly over and alight on another stream; again you come and scare us over to another stream, and I fancy you will soon drive my people into the ocean beyond the [mountains].

No amount of eloquence, however, could stop their planned removal to Indian Territory. A year later many of the Kaws journeyed north to bid farewell to their cousins the Potawatomies. On learning the Kaws were encamped outside Topeka, Charley went out to visit. Having learned to ride ponies bareback, the light, wiry 13-year-old was earning his keep as a full-fledged jockey. But his grandfather William Curtis had died only months earlier, and Charley felt lost:

This was the great crisis in my life, Curtis recalled in later life. By the action I then took, I would be either white man or Indian for life

Being adrift, I threw my lot with them.We traveled for one days journey out of Topeka and made camp. The evening meal was eaten. Our Indian pallets were made on the ground. The camp had fallen asleep. It was then that Julie Pappan came to my bed. She awakened me. She told me of the love she felt for me, the son of her lost daughter, of the joy of having me back with the tribe. She said that she loved me above all else in this world. But she wanted me to leave the Indians. She wanted me to go back to the white men. This was the great crisis in my life. By the action I then took, I would be either white man or Indian for life. The world belonged to the white man. She, Indian woman, knew that. She, against the urge of her heart, wanted me to return to my fathers people.

If I have been of service, the thanks is due to Julie Pappan, Indian woman of the Kaw tribe.

Indian Charley became a sensation in the state capital. While attending school, he doubled as a hack driver, often carrying lawyers and legislators about their business. He began reading the law, passed the bar at age 21 and three years later was elected Shawnee County attorney. Though he ran on a platform vowing to enforce prohibition, in all likelihood swayed voters believed that any son of Captain Jack Curtis, the saloons most loyal customer, would never follow through on that promise. Yet as Charley set about shutting down saloons, it was his father, who had since become a county deputy, who often testified to the illegal liquor sales. The young county attorney capped off his banner year of 1884 by marrying Annie Elizabeth Baird, daughter of a prominent Topeka businessman. The couple went on to raise three children, the first named Permelia, after Charleys indomitable paternal grandmother.

As his political star rose, Charley morphed from Indian Charley to Our Charley. Elected the first Republican Senate majority leader in 1925, he was considered by some the most powerful man in the nation. Three years later, at age 68, he was elected the first American Indian vice president, serving from 1929 to 1933 under President Herbert Hoover, though he was not a Hoover man per se. Charley ever credited his grandmothersone Indian, the other whitewith his rise from a tepee to the U.S. Capitol.

In 1898 Charley drafted and introduced the bill that would become the Curtis Act, though he later condemned it in its final form. The bill that extended the Dawes Act to the Five Civilized Tribes (Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek and Seminole) was the final blow to the sovereignty of the Indian nations. By abolishing tribal courts and subjecting all persons in Indian Territory to federal law, the Curtis Act dissolved tribal governments. While its namesake was displeased with the outcome, it would not be accurate to say he opposed assimilation. Charley Curtis, who died in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 8, 1936, at age 76, once told a reporter that American Indians would eventually disappear, wholly absorbed into the white race. Judging from his life experience, it seemed the only way Indians could survive in the modern world. WW

Kansan Deb Goodrich is the Garvey Historian in Residence at the Fort Wallace Museum. Shes writing a book and a screenplay about Charley Curtis. For further reading Goodrich recommends The Darkest Period: The Kanza Indians and Their Last Homeland, 18461873, by Ronald D. Parks.Teresa Groves, an affiliate broker with Real Estate Partners Chattanooga LLC, has earned the nationally recognized Seniors Real Estate Specialist designation from the Seniors Real Estate Specialist Council of the National Association of Realtors.

Officials said, "Working with seniors to meet their housing needs requires an expert understanding of their lifestyle and financial needs, and the SRES designation means that a realtor has that understanding. Whether they are buying or selling, seniors can be confident that a realtor designated SRES will be able to help them every step of the way.

"A SRES can help homeowners downsize and buy a smaller home or help homeowners sell their home to move to a retirement facility."



Ms. Groves is the former executive officer of the Home Builders Association of Greater Chattanooga. She worked for BB&T where she was an assistant vice president in the Residential Construction Department. She has been a multi-million-dollar producer since she joined the real estate industry.



For more information, contact Teresa Groves at 423-364-1834.



Already laying the groundwork for his next film, a mix between a thriller and heist which he starts shooting New Orleans next month, Scott Eastwood has become a hard-working, leading light in Hollywood and shows no signs of slowing down and a hunger to work with as many people as he can Directors, this is a man who wants to play ball.

Pacific Rim: Uprising is out on March 23.As an existing print subscriber it is easy to get FREE access to all our online content.

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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.George Bridges/MCT/Getty Images(WASHINGTON) -- John Dowd, President Trumps lead attorney for the ongoing investigations by special counsel Robert Mueller, has resigned.



"I love the president and wish him well, Dowd told ABC News.



Just last weekend, Dowd created a firestorm when he said, "I pray that Acting Attorney General Rosenstein will follow the brilliant and courageous example of the FBI Office of Professional Responsibility and Attorney General Jeff Sessions and bring an end to alleged Russia collusion investigation manufactured by McCabe's boss James Comey based upon a fraudulent and corrupt dossier," Dowd said, reacting to the termination of former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe.



"John Dowd is a friend and has been a valuable member of our legal team. We will continue our ongoing representation of the president and our cooperation with the Office of Special Counsel, Jay Sekulow, counsel to the president, told ABC News.



The news was first reported by The New York Times.

Sources familiar with Dowds resignation told ABC News that, over the last several months, the attorney has felt Trump was taking less of his advice.



Since taking over as the presidents lead attorney, Dowd has served as the point person on negotiating what an interview for President Trump with the special counsel could look like.



As ABC previously reported, part of that negotiation included the format -- whether it was an interview, a questionnaire or a mix of both. Sources have also previously told ABC News that among the topics the special counsel wants to ask President Trump about are the firing of former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and the firing of former FBI Director James Comey.



It is unclear who will take lead on the negotiations after Dowds departure.



Trump was asked by the pool press on Thursday whether he would still like to testify before the special counsel. The president responded, Yes, I would like to. I would like to.



Trump did not answer a press question about Dowd.



Jay Sekulow remains on the presidents team working with Joe diGenova, who joined the team last week, for all matters related to the president -- meaning Trump himself. DiGenova has been a fierce defender of the president on cable TV.



Earlier this month, he told Fox News that the media is out to attack the president because the press hate Trump. And they believe that anything, including violating every known standard of federal law enforcement, is justified to either keep him from office or, if elected, take him out of office, he said.



Ty Cobb has served as the White House attorney handling all matters related to the investigation for the presidency -- meaning the administration, staff, etc. He has also been on thin ice with Trump; in recent weeks, the president has talked to his closest advisors about potentially firing Cobb, but he has privately told the attorney he has no plans to remove him.



Eleven days ago, Trump took to Twitter to say he was perfectly happy with his team.



Dowds departure is not the first round of changes among the presidents lawyers on this probe; last summer, the president removed his longtime personal attorney, Mark Kasowitz, as the lead attorney on the probe.



Copyright  2018, ABC Radio. All rights reserved.United States Senator Lamar Alexander Wednesday said the government funding bill provides $663 million for the Uranium Processing Facility at the Y-12 National Security Complex -- one of the largest construction sites in the country -- with an overall budget of $6.5 billion and scheduled to be completed in 2025. The bill also provides $639 million for cleanup of former Cold War sites in Oak Ridge, including the Outfall 200 mercury treatment facility.

This bill makes sure that we are effectively using taxpayer dollars -- it provides $663 million for the Uranium Processing Facility at the Y-12 National Security Complex, which will continue to keep this project on time and on budget -- with a completion year of 2025 at a cost no greater than $6.5 billion -- and create more jobs for Tennesseans," said Senator Alexander. "Generous funding for this project shows how much Congress recognizes Oak Ridges contributions to our countrys national security and economic future. This bill also includes record funding levels for our nuclear weapons programs -- President Trump has said we should modernize and rebuild our nuclear arsenal, and I agree. The bill includes $14.7 billion for the National Nuclear Security Administration, including $4 billion to continue the four ongoing life extension programs, which fix or replace components in nuclear weapons systems to make sure they're safe and reliable.

Senator Alexander -- who is chairman of the Senate Energy and Water Development Appropriations Subcommittee -- said his two Department of Energy defense priorities are modernizing nuclear weapons that are used to help keep Americans safe and cleaning up former Cold War sites. Senator Alexander said he has made a personal commitment to increase funding for cleanup of hazardous materials and facilities at Cold War-era sites in Oak Ridge.

Senator Alexander said, The bill provides $639 million to accelerate cleanup of hazardous materials and facilities at the East Tennessee Technology Park, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Y-12 National Security Complex. This is $141 million above last year's funding level and $125 million above the president's budget request. The funding supports vital investments in a new mercury treatment facility -- also known as Outfall 200 -- which will help reduce the amount of mercury getting into Tennessee waterways to safe levels and make it possible for cleanup work at Y-12 to continue which supports thousands of jobs.

Senator Alexander spoke at the groundbreaking of the Outfall 200 mercury treatment facility in November.

Senator Alexander said, The bill also provides $35 million to develop and demonstrate new technologies, of which $5 million will continue to fund a research consortium led by Vanderbilt University. I hope that the Senate passes this bill soon so we can fund these important programs.

The bill includes:

Provides $14.7 billion for the National Nuclear Security Administration, which is a record level of funding for the agency

$663 million for the Uranium Processing Facility at the Y-12 National Security Complex

$639 million for environmental cleanup of former Cold War sites in Oak Ridge

$17.1 million for the Outfall 200 mercury treatment facility at the Y-12 National Security ComplexSubscribing to our services is a three step process. First you have to create an account and then you have to pick if you want to subscribe to digital and or print.

Some people only want to be a digital subscriber to get access online and others want to also receive the print edition.

If you are already a print subscriber and want online access, it is free, you simply have to create an online account and then attach your print subscription account number to the online account you create.United States Senator Lamar Alexander Wednesday said the government funding bill increases funding for the most important federal program  the Office of Science  that supports work at Oak Ridge National Laboratory for the third consecutive year, and sets a new record funding level in a regular appropriations bill. The bill also includes significant funding increases in supercomputing and environmental cleanup in Oak Ridge.

The government funding bill includes record funding  in a regular appropriations bill - for the third consecutive year for the most important federal program that supports the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and demonstrates the importance that Congress attaches to the hard work of thousands of men and women who work in Oak Ridge and the importance of that to our national security and our high standard of living," said Senator Alexander. "Tennesseans know that innovative energy research at Oak Ridge National Laboratory means thousands of high-tech jobs for our state and higher family incomes. The funding in this legislation will help support Oak Ridges supercomputing facility, and Oak Ridge leads the world in some areas in that. Dozens of companies, from small business to Fortune 500 giants, have used supercomputers at Oak Ridge to remain competitive in the global market. Not only does supercomputing help scientists and companies, supercomputers at our national laboratories can be used by federal agencies to combat issues like waste, fraud, and abuse; finding terrorists and criminals; and helping the National Institutes of Health find cures and treatments for diseases. Im glad we were able to provide a substantial amount of new funding for this effort.

The bill includes the following priorities for the federal program that supports ORNL:

$6.26 billion for the Office of Science, which is $868 million more than last year and a 16 percent increase in the Office of Sciences funding level over last year.

$810 million for Advanced Scientific Computing Research, which is an increase of $163 million over last year.

Of this amount, $162.5 million is included for the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility, an increase of $52.5 million  or nearly 50 percent  above last year.

Supercomputing is one of the most important programs at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and later this year the new Summit supercomputer at Oak Ridge could be the fastest open source research computer in the world.

Oak Ridge is also leading the way on the development of the next generation of supercomputers  known as exascale.

The Exascale Computing Project will receive $205 million, which is an increase of $41 million over last year. Oak Ridge National Laboratory hosts the Exascale Computing Project Office.

Senator Alexander said, In addition, the bill includes new funding for advanced manufacturing, which is attracting companies to learn about ways to create new jobs. Last year, I had the opportunity to show Secretary of Energy Rick Perry Oak Ridge National Laboratorys Manufacturing Demonstration Facility, where we saw a collection of 3-D printers that companies to Oak Ridge and use to develop advanced manufacturing techniques. Industries are now 3-D printing everything from medical devices to epilepsy drugs, robotic arms to airplane parts, whole cars and buildings. This technology is already used by the automotive and aviation industries and has the potential to do much more. Government-sponsored 3-D printing research is beginning to transform the manufacturing sector in the same way that government-sponsored research played a large role, along with our free enterprise system, in the development of unconventional natural gas that has transformed the energy sector and will continue to shape Americas energy policy for decades.

The bill also includes:

$305 million for advanced manufacturing, which is $47.5 million more than last year.

For Oak Ridge, $20 million is included for the Manufacturing Demonstration Facility.

This funding will support the development of 3-D printing, low-cost carbon fiber, and other advanced manufacturing technologies.

$14 million for the Institute for Advanced Composites Manufacturing Innovation, which partners with the University of Tennessee.

Senator Alexander said he has made a personal commitment to increase funding for cleanup of hazardous materials and facilities at Cold War-era sites in Oak Ridge. Senator Alexander went on to say, This bill accelerates cleanup of hazardous materials and facilities at the East Tennessee Technology Park, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Y-12 National Security Complex. The funding supports vital investments in a new mercury treatment facility  also known as Outfall 200  which will help reduce the amount of mercury getting into Tennessee waterways to safe levels and make it possible for cleanup work at Y-12 to continue which supports thousands of jobs.

Senator Alexander spoke at the groundbreaking of the Outfall 200 mercury treatment facility in November.

The bill includes the following funding for cleanup:

$639 million for cleanup of Cold War sites in Oak Ridge, including the Outfall 200 mercury treatment facility.

This is $141 million above last year's funding level and $125 million above the president's budget request.

Senator Alexander concluded: Im glad we have rejected the budget proposal and increased investment in ARPA-E.

Finally, the bill:

Rejects the budget proposal to eliminate the Advanced Research Projects Agency  Energy and provides $353 million to continue this agencys research.

ARPA-E was created by the 2007 America COMPETES Act that Senator Alexander helped write, and was signed into law by President Bush, to invest in high-impact energy technologies.

To date, 136 ARPA-E project teams have attracted more than $2.6 billion from the private sector to bring their technologies to market and another 109 ARPA-E projects teams have partnered with government agencies to develop new technologies that will ultimately benefit taxpayers.

Senator Alexander is the chairman of the Senate Energy and Water Development Appropriations Subcommittee which is responsible for recommending funding levels each year for the Department of Energy, including the Office of Science and the National Nuclear Security Administration.The debate over the size of a class at Lanesborough School showed how difficult the budget discussions may be with the funding mechanism being used in the expanded regional district.

Lanesborough Elementary Class Size Leads to Broader Funding Discussion



Williamstown Elementary School Principal Joelle Brookner and Lanesborough Elementary School Principal Martin McEvoy participate in Tuesday's Transition Committee meeting. WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass.  A question about the size of a single classroom at Lanesborough Elementary School led to a big-picture discussion about school funding at Tuesday's Mount Greylock Transition Committee meeting.

And it highlighted one of the challenges the district is likely to face as it implements an elementary school funding approach that paved the way for passing full regionalization in November.

At issue was next year's fourth grade at the PreK-6 school, one of three in the recently expanded district.

Fourth-grade teacher Jennifer Szymanski and third-grade teacher Anna Mello each urged the Transition Committee to find a way to split the 25 pupils into two rooms for next year.

Lanesborough Principal Martin McEvoy said if more funds were available, splitting the grade would be on his list of priorities for how to spend the money. But, citing the fiscal realities of his budget, McEvoy said he had to make the decision to keep the cohort in one classroom.

Those realities include the fact that Lanesborough Elementary's impact on local taxpayers for fiscal 2019  after adjusting for shifts between the town and school budgets because of regionalization  is down by .86 percent, from $2.47 million in the current fiscal year to $2.45 million in FY19.

That slight decrease is offset by a 3.34 percent increase in Lanesborough's contribution at the district's middle-high school under a budget approved by the Transition Committee on Tuesday night.

Prior to that approval, the annual public hearing drew four comments from the floor of the Mount Greylock library. Each of the members of the public identified as either a teacher at Lanesborough or a resident of Lanesborough.

Szymanski made the strongest appeal.

"I'm sure that it looks awfully self-serving for the fourth-grade teacher to make this request," she said. "But in 23 years of teaching, I've only come before this type of committee once. I'm alarmed that 25 9-year-olds are going to be in a fourth-grade classroom. In the entire history of fourth-grade at the current building, we've never had 25. By the time they get to sixth grade, we do have bigger classes  but with the expectation on fourth-grade, the expectation on these 9-year-olds to meet state standards in a class of 25 is difficult.

"As elementary school teachers, we handle it. We play the hand we're dealt. But I don't want to just 'handle it.' I feel like now is our opportunity to plan for something better."

And, the educators said, the lacker of a "better plan" raises a question of funding equity in the expanded region. Both Szymanski and Mello questioned why the 25-pupil classroom at Lanesborough is larger than any room at Williamstown Elementary.

"In another elementary school in our district, I know there are not 25 students in the fourth grade," Szymanski said. "We're expecting the same progress and the same results, and we're sending the students to the same middle school.  Every elementary school teacher in my position would handle it, but why are we setting it up to be a problem?"

Mello said she's had to "piecemeal" things and use every volunteer she can find to get through a year of having 25 pupils in her third-grade classroom and asked the committee to seriously look at the issue for next year.

"What is the cutoff number [for class size] at Williamstown?" Mello asked.

Williamstown Principal Joelle Brookner said her school has "ideal sizes" for its classroom and is constrained by a teachers' contract that caps sizes at 24.

"What's your biggest class right now?" Mello persisted.

"Twenty-two," Brookner answered. "But they've been bigger. We've had up to 24."

Mello reiterated her support for Szymanski's request.

"At this developmental stage when you're teaching basic math, basic writing, please think about what my colleague said," Mello said. "Let's give them every opportunity to thrive."

The Transition Committee, an amalgam of elected officials from the three previously independent school districts, assumed control of the expanded district on Jan. 1 and is responsible for all matters, including the FY19 budget, that impact the three schools after June 30, when the current Mount Greylock, Lanesborough Elementary and Williamstown Elementary school committees will dissolve. A new seven-member Mount Greylock Regional School Committee will be elected in November 2018.

After hearing the public comment on next year's budget, the Transition Committee members discussed a number of possible solutions to the fourth-grade issue at Lanesborough, including one proposed by Szymanski: opening up enough School Choice slots at the school to fund an additional teacher.

Transition Committee Chairman Joe Bergeron, also the chair of the Williamstown School Committee, argued that solution is especially problematic because he has seen first hand the pitfalls of building a budget that relies on School Choice revenue.

The committee also speculated on whether Lanesborough's tuition revenue from New Ashford, which is not included in the FY19 budget, could help fund an additional teacher. Interim Superintendent Kimberley Grady told the panel Tuesday she had a meeting scheduled Wednesday morning with her counterpart and the school committee chair in New Ashford to discuss whether the town and regional district could agree on a tuition rate . But ultimately, the New Ashford budget is subject to the approval of that town's town meeting and can't be counted as a certainty going into the district's budgeting process.

"If the agreement comes through, a portion of that money can be used," Grady said. "But based on the budget we have in front of us and the revenues we have available, I'd have to make cuts somewhere else at Lanesborough [to fund an additional position]."

Transition Committee member Regina DiLego argued against relying on the tuition revenue to solve the issue.

"To me, philosophically, using tuition to pay for a teaching position is the same as using School Choice to pay for a teaching position," said DiLego, the chairwoman of the LES Committee. "I'd rather vote to add money [to the appropriated budget] and advocate for a teaching position or not."

Transition Committee member Steven Miller, who comes from the Mount Greylock School Committee, asked how many years in a row Lanesborough Elementary School has been level funded. McEvoy replied that FY19 would mark the fourth straight year.

"Why?" asked Chris Dodig, also a member of the Mount Greylock committee. "Why four years in a row remaining flat?"

"From the town's perspective, they're going to say we have declining enrollment," Grady replied.

Al Terranova, another Mount Greylock School Committee member and, like Dodig, a resident of Lanesborough, argued that "Lanesborough is an education town," and the voters would support a larger school budget.

The budget approved by the Transition Committee on Tuesday night gives Lanesborough a total assessment (adjusted for cost shifts between town and district) of $5,724,412 for FY19; in FY18, the town's outlay for education was $5,639,989. That means an FY19 increase of $84,423, or 1.4 percent.

Grady noted that town meeting in either town could vote to increase the budget for its elementary school later in the spring, but the Transition Committee was locked into a maximum assessment as voted on Tuesday night.

As for the idea that there are disparities between class sizes at the district's two elementary schools, that points to the funding mechanism the towns agreed to when they voted to regionalize in the fall.

"It was one of the things we talked about with regionalization, this question of equity," said Transition Committee member Carolyn Greene, a Williamstown resident on the Mount Greylock School Committee. "We had this decision that the towns would pay for their elementary schools, and it's kind of in contradiction, right? So here we are facing the reality where we would like to be providing equity across towns, but we're also limited by what each town will support for its elementary school.

"We don't have full ability to have equity even if we wanted to because it's based on what each town would support."

Dodig argued that the regional school district's job is to advocate for the budget the schools need and let the voters decide at town meeting.

"I think going forward, with [Greene's point about the funding mechanism] understood, it's the school committee's obligation to try to do the right thing for those schools," Dodig said. "We can't assume those towns need a zero budget. The people at the select board may tell us that's what they want, but we can't assume that's what the town wants, and that's who we work for. I'm struggling with this. Even though that's how we decided to finance regionalization  individual towns paying for elementary schools  as a school committee, that's tough to practice."'A Wrinkle in Time': Folds, Spindles and Doesn't Exhilarate

'A Wrinkle in Time': Folds, Spindles and Doesn't Exhilarate

2 popcorns

By Michael S. Goldberger

film critic

I expected more from director Ava DuVernay's "A Wrinkle in Time," an adaptation of Madeleine L'Engle's 1962, adventure-fantasy novel.

The book has been touted by a couple generations of youngsters, including my own moppet, Erin, who in retrospect adds that the freaky ideas were also a bit terrifying to a 9-year-old who hadn't to date "given that acid trip-type stuff much thought." Well, that's gratifying. But in any case, I saw my critiquing mission as a sort of command performance and wanted to bring news of a nostalgic, era-capturing event.

Alas, 'twas not to be, and while I'm only the messenger, I somehow feel a bit of a failure. Oh, it's not quite as bad as promising a puppy that never materializes or skipping a dance recital -- Heaven forbid, which is probably where Muffin, the delivered Yorkie, is now dining on slippers Provencale. The sad fact is that L'Engle's once cutting-edge fable, a moralistic, science-oriented vision of dimensions beyond Way Out, isn't stirringly transported into our CGI-laden, take-it-for-granted world of wholesale psychedelia.

Still, there's no devaluing the high-minded aspirations of this story about a dad who goes missing whilst looking for other worlds and the valiant daughter hell-bent on finding and bringing him back to terra firma. Ethical pronouncements spill from its seams, which would seem a bit much in more virtuous times. However, with the land currently awash in bad behavior and a tacitly official policy of amorality suggesting that not only shouldn't one give a sucker an even break, but that it is meritorious to outright swindle him, the more goody-two-shoes stuff the better.

This extra-added added dollop of what it takes to be a mensch is all about bravery, self-esteem, good citizenship and caring for your fellow human beings not because it makes good copy, but because that's what the gregarious nature of our species requires. It keeps us from slipping back into the muck and mire of might makes right. Meg Murry, the teen heroine here, epitomizes those qualities.

Played with likable credibility by Storm Reid, Meg is the Jeanne d'Arc of her peer group, commissioned by the author not only to be a devoted daughter, but to serve as a model of female empowerment and, while she's at it, show how to invalidate the mean girl who's been bullying her. Again, it's another important national issue addressed by the arts if not by those we've elected to do so. It's praiseworthy in that light, which makes the critic feel like a bit of an ogre for nonetheless submitting a negative appraisal.

In defense, you can't give the heart surgeon who repeatedly leaves instruments in his patients a pass just because he always brings doughnuts to the operating room. The art of teaching life's lessons to children through film requires much more than an iteration of what good parents and dedicated teachers should be inculcating ad nauseam. Kids prefer to get their attitudes from colleagues and infatuating media creations that make it feel as if the ideas are their own. Pretty as it is, "A Wrinkle in Time" is anything but subtle.

Making things tougher, I also feel like I'm letting Oprah down. She valorously tries to channel her humanitarian conviction into the role of Mrs. Which, an honest, female antithesis of Frank Morgan's Wizard of Oz. However, the obviously heartfelt portrayal comes off more preachy than life changing. Reese Witherspoon and Mindy Kaling as her supernatural acolytes, Mrs. Whatsit and Mrs. Who, respectively, are equally ineffective.

Insofar as the plot itself, the screenplay adapted by Jennifer Lee and Jeff Stockwell, though afforded all the galaxies to explore, charts a neo-"Alice in Wonderland," follow-the-dots style that, perhaps for fear of being untrue to the source material, fails to color outside the lines. We hopscotch from dimension to dimension, predictably alternating encounters: good guys, bad guys, good guys, ad infinitum.

While Meg faces these outside challenges with true-believer alacrity, the sudden bodysnatching by evil forces of her genius younger brother, Charles Wallace (Deric McCabe), a precociously annoying tyke, adds internal strife to the mix. Rounding out the troika of space and time travelers is Levi Miller's Calvin, Meg's schoolmate who, providing the example that there's good folks of every stripe, is the popular boy smitten with our heroic nonconformist.

So all the elements are there. But while not as bad, let us say, as a botched attempt by Scotty to beam you up, wherein your atoms and molecules are unable to reunify, the inability of all these positive particles to coalesce leaves parents in a quandary: to take or not to take Scarlett and Logan to see "A Wrinkle in Time?" Of course if the urchins insist, simply look at it as another dance recital.

"A Wrinkle in Time," rated PG, is a Walt Disney Pictures release directed by Ava DuVernay and stars Storm Reid, Oprah Winfrey and Reese Witherspoon. Running time: 109 minutes



iciHaiti - Economy : World leader in BPO explores Haiti's potential





In search of a new site near its customers, IBEX Business Process Outsourcing (BPO/IBEX), a leading provider of contact center services and other business process outsourcing solutions (BPO), is on a mission to Haiti this week to explore the country's potential.



The Investment Facilitation Center (IFC) received the IBEX Project Director, Mr. Greco Farias, to inform him about the accompaniments and incentives offered by the Haitian government as well as the investment facilities available throughout the country.



Remember that IBEX, headquartered in Washington, is a leading provider of advanced technology Customer Lifecycle Experience (CLX) solutions. IBEX assists leading global brands in acquiring, engaging and retaining customers and has 26 locations in 7 countries and a network of more than 15,000 employees.



See also :

https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-16192-haiti-economy-the-bpo-sector-a-promising-market-of-13-000-jobs.html

https://www.haitilibre.com/en/news-16051-haiti-economy-official-launch-of-the-haitian-bpo-sector.html

https://www.icihaiti.com/en/news-16013-icihaiti-economy-priority-sector-for-socio-economic-transformation-of-haiti.html



IH/ iciHaiti

















CoPAC and the Shaking Ray Levi Society will present Gyan Riley in concert Tuesday, April 3, at 7:30 p.m. The concert will be at Barking Legs Theater, 1307 Dodds Ave. Tickets are $15 in advance and at the door and $10 for students at the door.

Review for Gyan Riley:

The celebrated contemporary classical guitarist Gyan Riley has earned universal acclaim for his technical prowess, nimble dexterity and unbridled creativity as a composer.

Gyan Riley won his first guitar in a raffle when he was 12 years old. Shortly after learning all of the songs in his cassette collection by ear, he became the first full-scholarship graduate guitar student at the San Francisco Conservatory. Gyan's diverse work now focuses on his own compositions, improvisation, and contemporary classical repertoire. Gyan has been commissioned by the Kronos Quartet, New Music USA, the Carnegie Hall Corporation, the American Composers Forum, and the New York Guitar Festival. He has performed with Zakir Hussain, Lou Reed, John Zorn, the Kronos Quartet, Lee Ranaldo (of Sonic Youth), Iva Bittova, Julian Lage, the Bang-On-A-Can All-Stars, Bryce Dessner, Nico Muhly, Secret Chiefs 3, the San Francisco Symphony, the Philadelphia Chamber Orchestra, and his father, the composer/pianist/vocalist Terry Riley.

Various tours have taken him throughout Europe, Canada, Latin America, Asia, and the U.S., both as a soloist and in various ensembles. Gyan resides in New York City and frequently performs with the duo Probosci, the trio Eviyan, the electric guitar quartet Dither, guitarist Julian Lage, and his father Terry Riley. Terry and Gyan recently scored a new film by writer/director Francois Girard (The Red Violin) entitled "Hochelaga, Terre des Ames" that premiered at the 2017 Toronto Film Festival and was recently selected as Canada's pick for best foreign language film category at the 2018 Oscars.

Gyan has five solo CD titles and many ensemble/collaborative recordings, most recently released on National Sawdust Tracks and Tzadik Records in New York. Gyan's latest solo album, "Sprig," will be released on March 30, and one tree will be planted per physical copy sold, through the conservation organization American Forests.

For more information on Gyan visit http://gyanriley.com/ or https://gyanriley.bandcamp.com

For more information on the concert visit the Facebook page.

Scimitar-Wielding Turk Vows to Conquer Jerusalem

The Fellowship | March 22, 2018

Israels closest neighbors are not the only ones in the Middle East lobbing threats her way. The Times of Israel reports that a Turkish governor made a recent speech raving that his nation would take Jerusalem  all while waving a scimitar:

Necati Senturk, the government-appointed governor of the Kirsehir province, raised eyebrows with a speech from the balcony of the governors office as Turkish troops were poised to take the Syrian city of Afrin from Kurdish militia.

God willing, we will take Afrin. We will take Manbij, he said in videos posted on Turkish news websites, referring to another Kurdish-held city in Syria.

Waving a sword known locally as a zulfiqar above his head with one hand and holding a megaphone in another, he added: We will also go to Mosul, and we will go to Jerusalem! God is Greatest!

The Turkish sultans controlled both the Iraqi city of Mosul and the holy city of Jerusalem for long periods during the Ottoman Empire



The waning days of fall and the arrival of winter in the Southeast bring with them colder, and decidedly wetter, weather. This dour season may dampen the spirits of the regions human residents, but days of steady winter drizzle help refill temporary forest pools that serve as a vital habitat for many animals.These impermanent bodies of water  sometimes called vernal pools or ephemeral ponds  are important breeding grounds for salamanders and frogs. The annual reappearance of these pools triggers mass migrations of animals such as Spotted and Mole Salamanders.Between February and April, they return, en masse, to the same ponds to lay eggs in fish-free waters.I have a long appreciation for vernal pools, which are really cool aquatic systems, said Dr. Josh Ennen, a conservation biologist at the Tennessee Aquarium Conservation Institute. You have thousands and thousands of animals coming to one location, and you know theyll be there within a three-week time period.While often overlooked by the public, ephemeral ponds serve as important havens for aquatic biodiversity, said Dr. Jon Davenport, an assistant professor of biology at Southeast Missouri State University and an adjunct scientist at the Tennessee Aquarium Conservation Institute. It is amazing that generation after generation of these salamanders return to those same fish-free ponds to deposit their eggs.In February, Dr. Ennen and Dr. Davenport embarked on a months-long study analyzing how salamanders use vernal pools in a wildlife management area near downtown Chattanooga.On a breezy gray late winter morning, Dr. Ennen and a pair of SEMO researchers, Kenzi Stemp and Kayli Thomas, worked their way methodically along the edges of a chest-deep ponds in Prentice Cooper State Forest. Along the way, they checked minnow traps they placed in the water to collect salamanders.The success of their collection effort was evident in a series of plastic tubs along the shore that were overflowing with dozens of wriggling salamanders. Some were still massively swollen with unlaid eggs.Today, we found several hundred, if not a thousand Spotted Salamanders and Mole Salamanders, Dr. Ennen said. Through these mass migrations, they bring a lot of nutrition from the terrestrial environment into aquatic systems that other animals can use in the food chain.Most salamanders begin life as purely aquatic larva that later undergo metamorphosis into primarily terrestrial adults. Adult salamanders then complete their life cycle by returning to aquatic breeding grounds, such as vernal pools, where they lay their eggs in large, gelatinous masses. This reliance on water and a moist environment makes salamanders especially populous in the Southeast, where geologic stability and a warm, wet climate have contributed to their abundance, Ennen said.Some of the density estimates of salamanders from the terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems show that they make up the greatest percentage of vertebrate biomass, he said. Pound for pound, there are more salamanders in these ecosystems than any other vertebrate.Because of their sensitivity to environmental changes, scientists consider salamanders and other amphibians to be a kind of living bellwether for the health of the surrounding habitat. Being able to more accurately judge salamander populations will help scientists form a more complete picture of the health of aquatic ecosystems such as vernal pools.Theyre almost like a canary in a coal mine, Dr. Ennen said. Theyre a kind of indicator species that reflect the health of their ecosystem as a whole.The vernal pool study was focused on Mole Salamanders, in particular larvae and paedomorphic adults (those that have retained their juvenile gills). To identify the individuals they collected, researchers implanted tags under the salamanders skin.When exposed to a handheld ultraviolet light, these tags glow. Researchers used different tag colors and implanted the tags in different positions of the salamanders bodies at each collection site. By checking salamanders for these tags and noting its color and location, researchers can track the animals movement through and around the pond.In the future, this research will help scientists to understand how larval salamanders use vernal pools, improve the effectiveness of collection methods and help researchers to more accurately estimate salamander abundance in a given location.Even as scientists seek to better understand salamanders migrations, seeing thousands of amphibians making their annual journey, often right through backyards and neighborhoods, is a memorable experience more Southerners  especially children  should experience, Dr. Ennen said.I think people would be impressed by this behavior, he said. I always enjoyed knowing things are in my backyard. My kids do, too. I think its just a point of pride when you have anything thats wild sharing the same space as you.But people dont have to venture out into the wilderness to see this seasonal march of the salamanders. Spotted salamanders are one of the main animal characters featured in the new IMAX film, The Wild Around You 3D now showing at the Tennessee Aquarium IMAX 3D Theater. Audiences witness the spectacular spring migration of these amphibians. The filmmakers were able to document the mass spawning aggregations and used macro, time-lapse cinematography techniques to capture baby salamanders hatching from their eggs.Imperial Valley News Center

Last of Four Defendants Sentenced to Prison in Multi-State Dog Fighting Conspiracy

Washington, DC - Four defendants were sentenced this month in federal court in Trenton, New Jersey, as a result of their roles in a multi-state dog fighting conspiracy that extended to New Mexico and Indiana. Acting Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey H. Wood of the Justice Departments Environment and Natural Resources Division and U.S. Attorney Craig Carpenito of the District of New Jersey made the announcement.

Today, Lydell Harris, 32, of Vineland, New Jersey, a/k/a Sinn, was sentenced to serve 17 months in prison. He had pleaded guilty to one felony count of conspiracy to sponsor or exhibit a dog in an animal fighting venture, and one felony count of possessing a dog intended for use in an animal fighting venture.



Anthony Monte Gaines, 37, of Vineland, New Jersey, was sentenced on March 5, 2018, to serve 42 months in prison. Gaines had pleaded guilty to two felony counts of conspiracy to buy, sell, receive, transport, deliver, and possess dogs intended for use in an animal fighting venture, and one felony count of possessing a dog intended for use in an animal fighting venture.



Frank Nichols, 40, of Millville, New Jersey, was sentenced March 9, 2018, to serve 57 months in prison. He had pleaded guilty to one felony count of conspiracy to transport, deliver and receive dogs intended for use in an animal fighting venture, and one felony count of possessing a stolen firearm subsequent to a felony conviction.



Pedro Cuellar, 47, of Willow Springs, Illinois, was sentenced on March 12, 2018, to serve 12 months and a day in prison. He had pleaded guilty to one felony count of conspiracy to transport, deliver, and receive dogs intended for use in an animal fighting venture.

A fifth co-defendant who has pleaded guilty will be sentenced on April 18, 2018. The court is expected to set a trial date for four additional defendants for some time this summer. Judge Anne E. Thompson sentenced Gaines and Judge Peter G. Sheridan sentenced Harris, Cuellar, and Nichols.

According to court documents filed in connection with the cases, from October 2015 through June 1, 2016, the defendants and their associates fought dogs  including to the death  and trafficked in dogs with other dog fighters in Indiana, Illinois, New Mexico, and elsewhere so that those dogs could be used in dog fights. They also maintained fighting dogs and dog fighting equipment such as dog treadmills, intravenous drug bags and lines, breeding stands used to immobilize female dogs, and chains weighing up to several pounds per linear foot. Agents found canine blood on the floor, walls, and ceiling of the basement of one defendants residence, indicating that the area was likely used as a dog fighting pit. Among other acts involved in the charges, one of the pleading defendants admitted that his dog died in his car on the way home after losing a dog fight.

In close partnership with the U.S. Attorneys Offices and USDA Office of Inspector General, our Division is aggressively pursuing those who engage in illegal animal fighting ventures, said Acting Assistant Attorney General Wood. These sentencings demonstrate our firm commitment to prosecute those who violate federal laws banning the torture of animals in the fighting ring. As these cases also demonstrate, animal fighting ventures often involve other forms of serious criminal conduct like illegal gambling and illegal trafficking in drugs and weapons. I applaud the law enforcement officers and prosecutors who worked tirelessly to deliver justice in these cases.

Dog fighting is vicious and cruel. And beyond the needless suffering it inflicts on animals, it exacts a toll on local animal shelters, charitable humane organizations, and the taxpayers of New Jersey, said U.S. Attorney Carpenito. We applaud our local and federal partners who investigated this case and brought the offenders to justice. The message from these sentencing is simple: if you fight dogs in New Jersey, you will face prosecution and imprisonment.

The provisions of the Animal Welfare Act were designed to protect animals from being used in illegal fighting ventures, which often entail other forms of criminal activity involving drugs, firearms and gambling, said Special Agent in Charge Bethanne M. Dinkins for U.S. Department of Agricultures Office of Inspector General. Together with the Department of Justice, animal fighting is an investigative priority for USDA OIG, and we will work with our law enforcement partners to investigate and assist in the criminal prosecution of those who participate in animal fighting ventures.

Homeland Security Investigations is proud to have been involved in this interagency investigation that sends a clear message that New Jersey will prosecute such offenders to the fullest extent of the law, said Resident Agent in Charge Richard Reinhold for Cherry Hill Homeland Security Investigations. It also points to the diverse law enforcement work that HSI performs on a daily basis.

This case is part of Operation Grand Champion, a coordinated effort across numerous federal judicial districts to combat organized dog fighting. The phrase Grand Champion is used by dog fighters to refer to a dog with more than five dog fighting victories. To date, 98 dogs have been rescued as part of Operation Grand Champion, and either surrendered or forfeited to the government. The Humane Society of the United States assisted with the care of the dogs seized by federal law enforcement. The government is represented by Trial Attorney Ethan Eddy of the Justice Departments Environmental Crimes Section, and Assistant U.S. Attorney Kathleen OLeary. The case is being investigated by the U.S. Department of Agriculture  Office of Inspector General, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security  Homeland Security Investigations, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.Imperial Valley News Center

Iranian National Arrested for Scheme to Evade U.S. Economic Sanctions by Illicitly Sending More Than $115 Million From Venezuela Through the U.S. Financial System

Washington, DC - An indictment was unsealed today charging Ali Sadr Hashemi Nejad (Sadr) for his alleged involvement in a scheme to evade U.S. economic sanctions against Iran, to defraud the U.S., and to commit money laundering and bank fraud. Sadr was charged with participating in a scheme in which more than $115 million in payments for a Venezuelan housing complex were illegally funneled through the U.S. financial system for the benefit of Iranian individuals and entities.

Assistant Attorney General for National Security John C. Demers, U.S. Attorney Geoffrey S. Berman for the Southern District of New York, New York County District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr., and Assistant Director in Charge William F. Sweeney Jr. of the FBIs New York Field Office made the announcement.

Sadr was arrested yesterday on a six-count Indictment (the Indictment) and presented this afternoon in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. Sadrs case has been assigned to U.S. District Judge Andrew L. Carter Jr. in the Southern District of New York.

According to the Indictment unsealed today:

Beginning in 1979, the President, pursuant to the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (the IEEPA), has repeatedly found that the actions and policies of the government of Iran constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States and declared a national emergency to deal with the threat. In accordance with these presidential declarations, the United States has instituted a host of economic sanctions against Iran and Iranian entities. This sanctions regime prohibits, among other things, financial transactions involving the United States or U.S. persons that were intended for the benefit of the Government of Iran or Iranian individuals or entities.

In August 2004, the Governments of Iran and Venezuela entered into an agreement (the Agreement), whereby they agreed to cooperate in certain areas of common interest. The following year, both governments supplemented the Agreement by entering into a Memorandum of Understanding regarding an infrastructure project in Venezuela (the Project), which was to involve the construction of thousands of housing units in Venezuela.

The Project was led by Stratus Group, an Iranian conglomerate controlled by Sadr and his family with international business operations in the construction, banking, and oil industries. In December 2006, Stratus Group incorporated a company in Tehran, which was then known as the Iranian International Housing Corporation (IIHC). IIHC was responsible for construction for the Project. Thereafter, IIHC entered into a contract with a subsidiary of a Venezuelan state-owned energy company (the VE Company), which called for IIHC to build approximately 7,000 housing units in Venezuela in exchange for approximately $475,734,000. Stratus Group created the Venezuela Project Executive Committee to oversee the execution of the Project. Sadr was a member of the committee and was responsible for managing the Projects finances.

In connection with his role on the Project, Sadr took steps to evade U.S. economic sanctions and to defraud U.S. banks by concealing the role of Iran and Iranian parties in U.S. dollar payments sent through the U.S. banking system. For example, in 2010, Sadr and a co-conspirator used St. Kitts and Nevis passports and a United Arab Emirates address to incorporate two entities outside Iran that would receive U.S. dollar payments related to the Project on behalf of IIHC. The first entity, Clarity Trade and Finance (Clarity), was incorporated in Switzerland, and the second, Stratus International Contracting, J.S., aka Stratus Turkey, aka Straturk, was incorporated in Turkey. Stratus Turkey and Clarity were both owned and controlled by Sadr and his family members in Iran. Sadr then opened U.S. dollar bank accounts for Clarity and Stratus Turkey at a financial institution located in Switzerland.

Thereafter, Sadr and others conducted a series of international financial transactions using Clarity and Stratus Turkey for the benefit of Iranian parties in a manner that concealed the Iranian nexus to the payments, in violation of U.S. economic sanctions. Specifically, between April 2011 and November 2013, the VE Company, at the direction of Sadr and others, made approximately 15 payments to IIHC through Stratus Turkey or Clarity, totaling approximately $115,000,000.

Sadr and others directed that payments be routed through banks in the U.S. to Stratus Turkeys or Claritys bank accounts at the financial institution in Switzerland. The majority of the funds were then transferred to another offshore entity located in the British Virgin Islands, which had been incorporated by Sadr and others in 2009. In addition, on Feb. 1, 2012, Clarity wired more than $2,000,000 of proceeds from the Project directly into the United States. Those proceeds were then used to purchase real property in California.

The Indictment charges Sadr with: one count of Conspiracy to Defraud the United States which carries a maximum penalty of 5 years in prison; one count of Conspiracy to Violate IEEPA which carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison; one count of Bank Fraud which carries a maximum penalty of 30 years in prison; one count of Conspiracy to Commit Bank Fraud which carries a maximum penalty of 30 years in prison; one count of Money Laundering which carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison; and one count of Conspiracy to Commit Money Laundering which carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison.

The charges in the Indictment are merely allegations, and the defendant is presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty. The maximum statutory sentences are prescribed by Congress and are provided here for informational purposes only. If convicted of any offense, the sentencing of the defendant will be determined by the court after considering the advisory Sentencing Guidelines and other statutory factors.

Mr. Demers and Mr. Berman praised the outstanding investigative efforts of the New York County District Attorneys Office and the FBI. Mr. Berman also thanked the New York County District Attorneys Office for their ongoing assistance in this investigation.

Assistant U.S. Attorneys Andrew J. DeFilippis and Matthew Laroche, and Special Assistant U.S. Attorney Garett Lynch, Deputy Chief of the Major Economic Crimes Bureau at the New York County District Attorneys Office, are in charge of the prosecution, with assistance from Trial Attorney Matthew Walczewski of the National Security Divisions Counterintelligence and Export Control Section.Real Estate Investor Sentenced to 30 Months in Prison for Rigging Bids at California Public Foreclosure Auctions

San Francisco, California - A real estate investor was sentenced today for his role in conspiracies to rig bids at public real estate foreclosure auctions in Northern California, the Department of Justice announced.

Michael Marr was charged on Nov. 19, 2014, in an indictment returned by a federal grand jury in the Northern District of California. He was convicted on June 2, 2017, of conspiring to rig bids at foreclosure auctions in Alameda and Contra Costa County. Today, Marr was sentenced to serve 30 months in prison and to serve 3 years of supervised release. In addition to his term of imprisonment, Marr was ordered to pay a criminal fine of $1,397,061.59.

Michael Marr was a driving force behind a multi-year conspiracy to corrupt the public foreclosure auction process through a system of illegal payoffs, said Assistant Attorney General Makan Delrahim of the Department of Justices Antitrust Division. Todays sentence reflects the seriousness of that crime.

The evidence at trial showed that the defendant conspired with others to rig bids to obtain hundreds of properties sold at foreclosure auctions. The conspirators designated the winning bidders to obtain selected properties at the public auctions, and negotiated payoffs among themselves in return for not competing with one another. They subsequently conducted private auctions among themselves at or near the courthouse steps where the public auctions were held, awarding the properties to the conspirators who submitted the highest bids in those private auctions.

As the CEO of Community Fund, LLC and Community Realty Property Management Inc., Marr sent multiple employees to the foreclosure auctions to rig bids on his behalf. As part of the conspiracies, Marrs agents purchased several hundred properties through the bid-rigging conspiracies and were owed payoffs on hundreds more.

When real estate properties are sold at public auctions, the proceeds are used to pay off the mortgage and other debt attached to the property, with the remaining proceeds paid to the homeowner.

The sentence is a result of an ongoing investigation into bid rigging at public real estate foreclosure auctions in Californias San Francisco, San Mateo, Alameda, and Contra Costa counties, which is being conducted by the Antitrust Divisions San Francisco Office and the FBIs San Francisco Office. Anyone with information concerning bid rigging or fraud related to public real estate foreclosure auctions should contact the Antitrust Divisions San Francisco Office at 415-934-5300 or call the FBI tip line at 415-553-7400.Justice Department Obtains $625,000 Settlement Of Sexual Harassment Lawsuit Against Two Landlords

St. Louis, Missouri - The Justice Department Monday announced a settlement with two St. Louis landlords, Hezekiah and Jameseva Webb, to resolve a lawsuit alleging that they violated the Fair Housing Act by subjecting fifteen female tenants in their rental properties to sexual harassment over the course of two decades.

The lawsuit arose from a complaint filed by a former tenant with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). The suit alleged that Hezekiah Webb, who served as property manager for the Webbs rental properties, sexually harassed female tenants at those properties. The United States alleged that Hezekiah Webb conditioned housing and housing benefits on female tenants agreement to engage in sexual acts, coerced female tenants to engage in unwelcome sexual acts, subjected female tenants to unwanted sexual touching and other unwanted sexual acts, made unwelcome sexual comments and advances to female tenants, and took adverse actions against female residents when they refused his sexual advances. The lawsuit further alleged that Jameseva Webb was liable under the Fair Housing Act because Hezekiah Webb acted as her agent when he engaged in the harassment.

Under the settlement, Hezekiah and Jameseva Webb will pay a total of $600,000 in monetary damages to fifteen former and prospective tenants who were subjected to sexual harassment, as well as a $25,000 civil penalty to the United States. The settlement also bars Hezekiah and Jameseva Webb from continuing to serve as property managers. The Webbs have advised the United States that they plan to sell their remaining five residential rental properties. If they fail to do so within 180 days, the settlement will impose certain requirements on them with regard to the remaining properties, including adoption of a sexual harassment policy, creation of tenant complaint procedures, and training on the Fair Housing Acts requirements.

Sexual harassment is unacceptable and intolerable, especially in the home, where landlords and property managers have the power to control so many aspects of a vulnerable tenants life, said Acting Assistant Attorney General John Gore of the Civil Rights Division. The Justice Department and its Sexual Harassment in Housing Initiative will continue to aggressively pursue sexual harassment in housing, even when the conduct occurred years ago.

No woman should have to put up with unwanted sexual advances in order to keep a roof over her head, said Anna Maria Farias, HUD Assistant Secretary for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity. Todays settlement sends a loud and clear message that HUD and the Justice Department are committed to taking appropriate action against housing providers who deprive women of the right to feel safe and secure in their home.

In October, the Justice Departments Civil Rights Division announced the Sexual Harassment in Housing Initiative (SHHI). The initiative specifically seeks to increase the Departments efforts to protect individuals from harassment by landlords, property managers, maintenance workers, security guards, and other employees and representatives of rental property owners. In 2017, the Justice Department recovered more than $1 million in damages for harassment victims. This is the first settlement announcement in 2018.

The Justice Department, through the U.S. Attorneys Offices and the Civil Rights Division, enforces the Fair Housing Act, which prohibits discrimination in housing based on race, color, religion, national origin, sex, disability and familial status. Sexual harassment is a form of discrimination prohibited by the Act.Philadelphia-Area Political Consultant Charged in Superseding Indictment With Obstructing Investigation of Federal Election Commission

Washington, DC - A federal grand jury sitting in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania returned a superseding indictment today adding charges in a pending criminal case against a Philadelphia-area political consultant, announced Acting Assistant Attorney General John P. Cronan of the Justice Departments Criminal Division and U.S. Attorney Louis D. Lappen for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.

The original indictmenz, returned on Oct. 24, 2017, charged Kenneth Smukler, 57, of Villanova, Pennsylvania, with causing unlawful campaign contributions, causing the filing of false reports to the Federal Election Commission (FEC), and causing false statements to the Federal Election Commission in connection with a 2012 congressional campaign. The superseding indictment charges Smukler with these same offenses, as well as making conduit contributions to a federal campaign committee and obstructing an FEC investigation in connection with the 2014 congressional campaign of a different candidate.

According to the indictment, Smukler made and caused to be made excess and conduit contributions and engaged in a falsification and obstruction scheme involving a candidate for the Democratic Partys nomination for Member of the U.S. House of Representatives in 2014. According to the indictment, the excess contributions came from associates of Smukler and were funneled through two of Smuklers consulting companies. The conduit contributions were routed through another political consultant and the candidate.

As alleged in the indictment, in or about April 2014, Smukler became aware that the campaign was running out of funds that it could spend on primary election expenses. According to the indictment, Smukler nevertheless directed the campaign to continue paying for goods and services associated with the primary election. According to the indictment, in or about May 2014, one of Smuklers companies made a $78,750 payment to the campaign that was used to pay for primary election expenses. Smukler falsely told the campaign that this money came from a segregated media account, when in fact the payment was funded by an associate of Smuklers and therefore constituted an illegal campaign contribution.

As alleged in the indictment, after the campaign lost the primary election, the campaign did not have sufficient funds to repay the contributions that the campaign had received for the general election. As alleged in the indictment, in order to conceal this shortfall, Smukler funneled illegal contributions totaling $150,000 from an associate to the campaign through two of Smuklers consulting companies. As alleged in the indictment, Smukler falsely told the campaign that these payments were refunds of money that had been escrowed in Smuklers companies for general election expenses, when, in fact, the money had come not from escrow accounts but from Smuklers associate, and the money could not have been escrowed campaign funds because Smuklers companies had already spent a significant portion of the funds they had received from the campaign.

According to the indictment, Smukler caused the campaign to falsely characterize the payments from his companies as refunds in FEC reports and in a letter to the FEC, which led the FEC to dismiss a pending complaint against the campaign.

In addition, the indictment alleges that Smukler made an unlawful conduit contribution to the campaign in excess of $2,000 through another political consultant. And, according to the indictment, in or about June 2015, Smukler made another unlawful conduit contribution to the campaign, this time in excess of $10,000, through the candidate.

An indictment is not a finding of guilt. An indictment is merely an accusation. The defendant is presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law.

The case was investigated by the FBI and Trial Attorney Jonathan Kravis of the Criminal Divisions Public Integrity Section and Assistant U.S. Attorney Eric Gibson of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania are prosecuting the case.Chattanooga Neighborhood Enterprise is hosting the fourth annual Money School on Saturday, April 14, from 8 a.m.-1 p.m. at The BX - Brainerd Crossroads.

Money School is a free financial education day that includes speakers and professionals providing hands-on learning opportunities regarding money management, debt elimination, increased savings, retirement, estate planning, raising your credit score, and more. The day is open for anyone aged 13 and older.

Money School provides resources to empower the citizens of Chattanooga to make knowledgeable, confident financial decisions, says Martina Guilfoil, president and CEO of CNE. The cornerstone for a strong community is stable families, and a key component of family stability is financial literacy and money management skills. These are services Money School offers.

Money School will be kicked off by Carol Hunter, a Chattanooga-based personal finance expert educating people on financial freedom, accumulating wealth and establishing small businesses.

The event focuses on five financial areas, offering a range of related workshops. The workshops will be grouped into the following areas: 1) The Road to Homeownership, 2) Preparing for the Future, 3) Planning for the Now, 4) Getting out of Debt, and 5) Money Skills for Teens. These workshops will be led by experts in their respective fields.

Free one-on-one sessions are also available for credit report analysis, mortgage assessments and personal finance advising.

Many people do not have the opportunity to meet with a financial advisor, says Jennifer Holder, communications and special projects manager at CNE. Money School opens the door to a better financial outcome with the one-on-one financial advising.

The goal of Money School is to help Chattanoogans improve their understanding of financial concepts and services so they are empowered to make informed choices and take action to improve their present and long-term financial well-being.

At Money School 2017, 100 percent of survey respondents felt educated with useful financial knowledge. Ninety percent said they were more knowledgeable about financial products and feel more confident in knowing the steps to achieve financial security. In addition, 80 percent of respondents set new financial goals such as paying off credit cards, school or other debts, diversifying investments and setting retirement, estate and long term care plans.

Sponsors of the event are Lyndhurst Foundation, Benwood Foundation, EPB Fiber Optics, BB&T Bank, CFA Society of East Tennessee, Citizens Tri-County Bank, CHI Memorial, Grant Konvalink and Harrison, Pinnacle Bank, Synovus Bank, Tennessee Valley Federal Credit Union, SmartBank, and Healthcare Services Credit Union.

In addition to CNE, local organizations participating in the day include Common Cents Financial Literacy, Consumer Credit Counseling Service, Empower Chattanooga, DRW Financial, UTC Financial Wellness Center, Operation HOPE, Change Your $tory, US Small Business Administration, Pierce Law Firm, Bridge Financial Planning, BrightBridge Womens Center, SCORE, Liberty National Life Insurance, A Step Ahead Foundation, Tech Goes Home, City of Chattanoogas Office of Multicultural Affairs, Lee Prichard of Edward Jones, and Gary Hathaway of New York Life Insurance Company.

The BX  Brainerd Crossroads is at 4011 Austin St. For more information about Chattanooga Neighborhood Enterprises Money School event, including the complete schedule, visit www.MoneySchoolCHA.org or call 756-6201.





Free Tai Chi classes begin April 3 at John A Patten Center in Tiftonia.

Classes are for beginners and are designed to help those with arthritis, but others may benefit from this relaxing exercise, officials said.

Classes will be held on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 11-11:45 a.m. in April. Call UT Extension at 423-855-6113 to register. Leave your name and phone number. Registration is required and class size is limited.





For full functionality of this site it is necessary to enable JavaScript. Here are the instructions how to enable JavaScript in your web browserIn todays consumerist society, the younger a child learns about saving money, the better. Thats why local writer Ithream Auntie I Blackmon started creating childrens books about financial literacy.

Blackmon is fond of penning short stories, poems and music lyrics, and she recently tried her hand at writing and publishing childrens books. Her young niece inspired her to write Sydneys First Piggy Bank, a fairy tale that introduces the concept of saving money.

When my niece turned one year old I gifted a crayon shaped-savings bank and put a handful of coins in there, Blackmon said. When I started to write the story, I realized this subject matter should not be limited to my nieces. I thought it would be something really good to write for preschool-aged children. Its an invaluable lesson that all children should learn.

In Sydneys First Piggy Bank, a dad encourages a little girl to save a penny in a piggy bank and she soon discovers the penny is magical. Blackmon added elements of a whimsical fairy tale to her books so the educational story has a greater appeal to children. Her second book, Learning Together includes vocabulary words and an activity section.

Blackmon adopted a grassroots approach to spread the word about her work, going from local businesses such as daycares and hair salons to share her books with the community. She is also trying her hand at using social media to promote her work, sharing information on Facebook and Twitter.

The funniest things happened, said Blackmon. One of the children of the parents who brought my book asked me if I was on Snapchat. I was like, Whoa, I gotta be on Snapchat too? I guess I gotta go get on there, the babies are on Snapchat.

At the end of the day, she hopes her work inspires the next generation to be financially savvy.

The ultimate message is about saving money, said Blackmon. I hope the readers will be better managers of their money when they get older. The secondary message is about earning money and creating new opportunities for themselves.

To learn more and purchase books, visit auntieicorp.com. Blackmons books also are available on amazon.com.

Contact reporter Keshia McEntire at 317-762-7853. Follow her on Twitter

@Keshiamc12.O

n National Student Walkout Day, Black students joined thousands of their peers across the country to march for more gun control and safer schools.

Will students turn that activism into votes this election year?

They know that their voice is their vote, said Byron Ratcliffe, college and youth advisor for the Greater Indianapolis Branch of the NAACP.

Ratcliffe believes high school and college students united on political issues after last months deadly shooting at a Florida high school, as well as another this week in Maryland.

Those events have activated them in the political realm, he said.

In recent years Black voter turnout has declined overall, including among millennials, those between the ages of 18 and 35.

After reaching a record high of 66 percent in 2012, Black voter turnout fell to 59 percent during the 2016 election, according to the Pew Research Center. Among Black millennials, it dropped from 55 percent to 49 percent.

However, students say that despite those declining numbers, most of their peers are actually interested in the political process.

With the results of the most recent election I think they are more encouraged to vote this time, said Khayleia Foy, president of the Black Student Union at Butler University.

Beyond the numbers

Foy believes the decline in turnout among young voters has more to do with lack of information than lack of interest.

Some students may be uninformed on the importance of politics and the state of our country, she said.

To solve that problem, Butlers Black Student Union sponsored events to educate students on the importance of voting and how it impacts issues they care about.

Teen Works, which places local youth in jobs, implemented a non-partisan voter registration program that prepares teens for voting. Civic engagement is part of the organizations goals in addition to college preparation and career placement.

Helping kids get registered to vote is a big part of what we do, said Tamara Barney, president of Teen Works. Its about providing our teens good information to make decisions about the communities they live in.

Barney noted that many millennials are interested in the political process, they just need more avenues to get involved such as registration events and government internships. Some of them may also come from homes where parents are apathetic about the process, she noted.

When we host our hiring fair this year we want both the teens and the parents to have an opportunity to get registered, Barney said.

More options

Transportation to polling places is a challenge for many younger voters, and voting may seem difficult to college students from other states who are not registered in Indiana.

We have to make students aware that absentee ballots are an option, Foy said. Voting should also be made available on campus so that if a student doesnt have transportation off campus they can just do it here.

Ratcliffe agrees, and believes that early voting sites should be expanded for all voters. Currently, Indianapolis has only one early voting site, although Marion County includes the states largest population.

The NAACP and other organizations are currently working through the courts to expand early voting opportunities, noting that other counties in Central Indiana with smaller populations have more early voting options.

Thats unfair, Ratcliffe said. Our only option is downtown, and that could stop youth from voting because a lot of them dont drive. Weve got to make it easier for them to vote.

Still, Ratcliffe is optimistic that more African-American millennials will vote in this years election, when voters will determine the direction of Congress and who will serve in many important local offices.

We will get those numbers up, he said. Those who are eligible, especially those in our youth and college groups, will be going to the polls and working to get people registered.

How to register to vote

You are eligible if you are a U.S. citizen, an Indiana resident, at least 18 and have lived in your precinct at least 30 days.

You can register online by visiting indianavoters.in.gov, in person at your county clerks office or by mail. Mail a completed registration form to your county voter registration or the Indiana Election Division, 302 W. Washington St. E204, Indianapolis, IN 46204.

You can register at Indiana BMV branches, and forms are available at library branches.

Their Vote, Their VoiceWe're always interested in hearing about news in our community. Let us know what's going on!

Go to formBangladeshi American professor Syed Ahmed Jamal, seen here with his children, has been freed from jail. The undocumented Kansas-based chemistry professor had been arrested in January by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents as he prepared to take his daughter to school. His Indian American attorney, Rekha Sharma-Crawford, said he was being held in the Platte County, Missouri, jail, about 25 miles north of Kansas City. (photo provided)The Super 8 Motel in Kimball, Nebraska, 120 miles northeast of Denver, Colorado. Indian Americans Vishnubhai Chaudhari and Leelabahen Chaudhari, the owners of the motel, were sentenced to a year in prison for enslaving their nephew there for more than two years. (Super 8 Facebook photo)Navin Varadarajan, an associate professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the University of Houston, was among two university researchers awarded a grant from the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas. This is the Indian American researchers second CPRIT grant (uh.edu photo)March 21, 2018 " Information Clearing House " - A bipartisan effort to end US involvement in a bloody, three-year war in Yemen failed in a close Senate vote on Tuesday afternoon.

The vote demonstrated growing pushback on President Donald Trumps coziness with Riyadh, which is leading the war effort in Yemen. That same day, the president met with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, who was visiting Washington during a country-wide tour.

A disparate group of senators  Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Mike Lee (R-UT), and Chris Murphy (D-CT)  drafted and introduced the resolution to stop Americas support for the bloodshed. This is one of the great humanitarian disasters of our time, Sanders told Vox in an interview last week.

But the GOP-controlled Senate voted to table  that is, kill  the resolution that says America shouldnt assist Saudi Arabia in its three-year fight against Iran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen. By a 55-44 margin, a majority of Republicans and some Democrats effectively said the US can still help Riyadh, by refueling its planes and providing intelligence in the Saudis brutal air campaign.

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Supporters of the resolution claimed it would immediately end Americas involvement in the war; critics said it wouldnt.

So far, the conflict has claimed more than 13,500 lives  many of them in airstrikes. Roughly 20 million Yemenis need humanitarian assistance to meet basic needs  including food and water  out of a prewar population of 28 million, and nearly 1 million people are suffering from cholera. However, conditions are so bad there that it is hard to have a reliable tally of any of these measures, which means the situation could be much, much worse.

Part of the reason its so hard to navigate Yemen is Riyadhs relentless bombing campaign. The Saudi military has conducted more than 145,000 missions in Yemen over the past three years. A Saudi general told the Wall Street Journal that about 100,000 of those were combat missions, conducting about 300 missions per day. One human rights group counted around 16,000 Saudi airstrikes in total, killing thousands of civilians in total.

During a blockade last year, Saudi Arabia put various restrictions on Yemens airspace and seaports, which led to the deaths of more than 5,000 civilians, more than 20 percent of whom were children.

Lee, one of the measures co-sponsors, told me the push to pass the resolution was also to make a statement about how America goes to war. We have a set of processes that have to be followed, he said, noting that Congress has the constitutional authority to declare war. If advocates for this war within our government are confident that this is that important to Americas national security interest, then they should bring forward those arguments and ask for an authorization, he continued. But without that, we have no business getting involved in someone elses civil war.

The Trump administration lobbied to defeat the measure. Last week, Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis sent a letter to Congress requesting that lawmakers not restrict Americas support for Riyadhs military. He claimed that stopping US assistance could increase civilian casualties, jeopardize cooperation with our partners on counterterrorism, and reduce our influence with the Saudis  all of which would further exacerbate the situation and humanitarian crisis. Mattis traveled to the Hill on Tuesday to encourage members of both parties to block the resolution.

This isnt the first time Congress has tried to stand up to the president on Americas involvement in Yemen. Last November, the House of Representatives passed a similar resolution to the Senate version. Thats because, by a wide 366-30 margin, the House believed the US is only authorized to fight terrorist groups like ISIS or al-Qaeda. Lawmakers said the US doesnt have authorization to fight the Houthis.

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), who led the House effort, noted his displeasure with the vote in an interview with me but struck a note of optimism. Eventually, we will prevail because our position is on the side of human decency and human rights, consistent with basic American values, he told me. We just need to keeping speaking up for peace and for the children in Yemen.

Scott Paul, a Yemen expert at the humanitarian group Oxfam America, was unhappy with the news, telling me that today should have been the day that the Senate moved to end US involvement in this catastrophe. But Paul noted that some senators may have voted against the measure because the Senate Foreign Relations Committee may soon take up the issue. We expect Congress to take decisive action soon, he said.

But Tuesdays vote was relatively close, and that is important on its own. Its even more noteworthy because on Tuesday, Trump welcomed Saudi Arabias crown prince and the driving force behind the Yemen war to the White House to discuss their burgeoning relationship and arms sales.

Trump had previously issued statements asking Saudi Arabia to cease violating human rights in Yemen. But in his two public statements alongside MBS, as the crown prince is widely known, at the White House, Trump didnt mention the word Yemen once.

One man drives the Saudi-led war on Yemen

Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabias de facto leader, champions the fighting in Yemen. Its part of his aggressive anti-Iran policy in the Middle East, which led him to intervene in Yemen in support of the internationally recognized government against the Houthis.

Irans government is a Shia Muslim theocracy; Saudi Arabias government is a monarchy closely aligned with the countrys Sunni Muslim religious establishment. The two countries represent two ideological and political poles and have spent decades fighting each other for dominance in the Middle East and for the right to represent the Muslim world.

MBS, along with his father, King Salman, completed a purge of an astonishing 11 princes and dozens of other officials and businessmen last November. That allowed MBS to consolidate even more power in Saudi Arabia, which gives him even more authority to direct Riyadhs war in Yemen.

Trump continues to support MBS, going so far as to approve his purge in a tweet on November 6. At a joint appearance at the White House on Tuesday, Trump continued to show his backing for MBS and Saudi Arabia writ large.

The relationship is probably the strongest its ever been, Trump said. We understand each other.

Zack Beauchamp contributed to this report.Brainerd Farmers' Market will celebrate its 9th Earth Day and the early spring harvest on opening day, Saturday, April 21, from 10 a.m.-12 p.m. on the corner of Brainerd Road and Belvoir Avenue.

The market features fresh local produce, meats, eggs, dairy, baked goods, jams and jellies, food artisans and craft wares.

For more information visit the Facebook page.March 21, 2018 " Information Clearing House " - Just one day after the 15th anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, 10 Democrats voted to indefinitely stall a bill that would have withdrawn U.S. support from the Saudi-led war on Yemen.

The 10 Democrats helped Republicans table S.J.Res.54, which was introduced in late February by Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Mike Lee (R-Utah). The bill invokes the 1973 War Powers Resolution to force the Senate to hold a vote on withdrawing the U.S. military from the unauthorized war.

Some peace activists argue that the legislation does not go far enough, as it stipulates an exception for forces engaged in operations directed at al Qaeda or associated forces, which still leaves room for U.S. military operations in the country. A classified number of U.S. troops have been deployed to fight Al Qaeda, which has gained significant territory since the Saudi-led war began, with evidence that forces affiliated with Al Qaeda have even fought alongside U.S. coalition partners. Despite this carve out, advocates say the bill would have meaningfully rolled back the U.S. role in the Saudi-led onslaught and brought immediate relief to Yemenis living under the threat of U.S.-manufactured bombs.

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The Senate voted 55-45 on Tuesday afternoon to table the measure, meaning that the bill will not make it out of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and instead will be set aside for an indefinite period of time. While some senators cited concerns with the procedural steps invoked in the bill, the vote to table effectively amounts to a green-light for ongoing U.S. support for the war. The following Democrats voted in favor of tabling the measure:

Chris Coons (DE)

Catherine Cortez Masto (NV)

Joe Donnelly (IN)

Heidi Heitkamp (ND)

Doug Jones (AL)

Joe Manchin (WV)

Bob Menendez (NJ)

Bill Nelson (FL)

Jack Reed (RI)

Sheldon Whitehouse (RI)

The 45 Senators who voted in favor of S.J.Res.54 today made a strong statement that U.S. support to the Saudis is not unconditional, says Shireen Al-Adeimi, who was born in Yemen and now lives in Cambridge, where she has been organizing independently to build support for the Sanders-Lee bill. However, this is by no means a celebration, as the 55 who opposed the bill have ensured that millions more Yemenis will suffer needlessly.

For almost three years, the U.S. military has provided arms, intelligence and refueling support to back the Saudi-led bombing campaign. While no one knows exactly how many Yemenis have died as a result, the United Nations determined in June 2017 that bombs have killed at least 4,971 civilians and wounded 8,533. Other reports have estimated more recently that the coalition has killed at least 10,000 people.

The Saudi-led coalitionwhich includes the United Kingdom and Gulf alliesis responsible for the vast majority of civilian deaths, targeting hospitals, weddings, schools and funeral processions. The coalitions naval blockade, abetted by U.S. vessels, has choked off food and medical equipment to the country, driving a famine and the largest recorded cholera outbreak in world history. According to UNICEF, an average of five children a day have been killed since the war began, and more than 22 million peopleand nearly all childrenare in desperate need of humanitarian assistance.

While the U.S. role in the war began under former President Barack Obama, the Trump administration has eagerly picked up the batonand aggressively pressured senators to reject the bill. Sens. Todd Young (R-Ind.) and Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) recently submitted an alternative, weaker bill that would not immediately end U.S. support for the Saudi-led coalition and is widely opposed by anti-war organizations which consider the legislation a red herring.

Meanwhile, many Democrats who champion themselves as part of the resistanceincluding Tammy Duckworth of Illinois and Chuck Schumer of New Yorkdeclined to come out early on in support of the bill, missing an opportunity to build political support for the effort.

The fact that 10 Democrats decided to table this resolution speaks volumes, Matt Howard of about Face: Veterans Against the War tells In These Times. It lets us know loud and clear that they are complicit in the continued humanitarian disaster in Yemen and arent ashamed of that fact. Howard is part of a grassroots coalition that backed the Sanders-Lee bill, including Just Foreign Policy, United for Peace and Justice and other organizations.

Some from that coalition say that the vote was far closer than they were expecting, and achieved the goal of creating a public discussion about an often-ignored war while forcing lawmakers to reveal where they stand. This resolution was designed to do two things: send a clear message to the Saudis that the war needs to end now, and force Congress to vote on a war that we pretend were not involved in, Stephen Miles of Win Without War tells In These Times.

The vote came the same day that President Donald Trump welcomed Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to the Oval Office by championing numerous multi-million-dollar U.S. arms deals, saying of the price tag, Thats peanuts for you. It follows another political effort in June 2017 to halt a $510 million U.S. arms sale to Saudi Arabia. That push narrowly failed after Democratic Sens. Bill Nelson of Florida, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Mark Warner of Virginia and Joe Donnelly of Indiana voted in favor of the sale.

It is fitting that the Yemen vote comes on the 15th anniversary of the 2003 U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, which is now widely recognized as a historic atrocity. The Iraq War directly killed more than one million Iraqis and continues to unleash cycles of violence throughout the region. In October 2002, the U.S. Senate voted overwhelmingly77 to 23to authorize President George W. Bush to use force in Iraq. Many of those who voted in favor of the invasion later said they regretted the decision. The following Democrats voted yea to the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq:

Max Baucus (MT)

Evan Bayh (IN)

Joseph Biden (DE)

John Breaux (LA)

Maria Cantwell (WA)

Jean Carnahan (MO)

Thomas Carper (DE)

Max Cleland (GA)

Hillary Clinton (NY)

Thomas Daschle (SD)

Christopher Dodd (CT)

Byron Dorgan (ND)

John Edwards (NC)

Dianne Feinstein (CA)

Thomas Tom Harkin (IA)

Ernest Fritz Hollings (SC)

Tim Johnson (SD)

John Kerry (MA)

Herb Kohl (WI)

Mary Landrieu (LA)

Joseph Lieberman (CT)

Blanche Lincoln (AR)

Zell Miller (GA)

Bill Nelson (FL)

Benjamin Ben Nelson (NE)

Harry Reid (NV)

John Rockefeller (WV)

Charles Chuck Schumer (NY)

Robert Torricelli (NJ)

It seems that many have not learned from prior decisions to wage unjustified war, says Al-Adeimi, and have, once again, condemned millions of people to unspeakable suffering.

Sarah Lazare is web editor atMarch 21, 2018 " Information Clearing House " - Missiles that spit out warheads traveling up to 20 times the speed of sound and with the ability to perform elusive acrobatics may be too much for U.S. defenses to block.

That's according to the head of the U.S. Strategic Command, Air Force Gen. John Hyten, who testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee yesterday (March 20).

When asked by Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., what kind of defenses the U.S. has against hypersonic weapons, Hyten replied: "We have a very difficult  well, our defense is our deterrent capability. We don't have any defense that could deny the employment of such a weapon against us, so our response would be our deterrent force, which would be the triad and the nuclear capabilities that we have to respond to such a threat," Military.com reported. [7 Technologies That Transformed Warfare]

Hyten is referring to the triad of intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), submarine-launched ballistic missiles and strategic bombers, which are bomber aircraft designed to fly into enemy territory and destroy strategic targets. Ballistic missiles, both hidden underground and in secret submarines, can travel huge distances at whirring speeds.

But weapons that can travel well above the speed of sound seem to be a real threat, as both Russia and China are "aggressively pursuing" such hypersonic weapons, Hyten also said, as reported by CNBC.

On March 1, during an annual address, Russian president Vladimir Putin announced a new class of weapon delivery systems designed to evade NATO's ballistic missile defenses. Speaking on Russian television, Putin indicated the country was building a new hypersonic missile and a cruise missile with "unlimited range" that could avoid adversaries' detection technologies.

This nuclear-powered cruise missile could travel unlimited distances, and, unlike ballistic missiles, it could cruise low to the ground where it would be obscured by other objects  meaning it would evade radar detection, Live Science previously reported.

"In theory, a cruise missile carrying a nuclear bomb could slip under American defenses and detection systems, and detonate before Americans could mobilize a response," Live Science reported. [Could the US Stop Nuclear Weapons?]

Modern technology available today wouldn't be able to stop such an attack, nor could it defend against missile-deploying warheads at hypersonic speeds, Philip Coyle, a nuclear weapons expert, previously told Live Science's Rafi Letzter.

Even so, Gen. Hyten assured the Senate Committee that U.S. defenses are prepared for such a battle. "The first, most important message I want to deliver today is that the forces under my command are fully ready to deter our adversaries and respond decisively, should deterrence ever fail. We are ready for all threats," Hyten said in his opening remarks, according to a Department of Defense statement.

Other generals have suggested supplementing the U.S. defense arsenal with low-yield nukes, or those that pack less power. In addition, space-based detection systems could theoretically detect and track hypersonic missile threats, Lt. Gen. Samuel Greaves, director of the Missile Defense Agency, said on March 6, according to Military.com.

"To maintain military superiority in this multipolar, all-domain world, we must out-think, out-maneuver, out-partner and out-innovate our adversaries," Hyten said. "Deterrence in the 21st century requires the integration of all our capabilities, across all domains, enabling us to respond to adversary aggression anytime, anywhere."

Just this week, President Donald Trump said the U.S. needs a "space force," Live Science's sister site Space.com reported.

Originally published on Live Science.Why Russia's Military Edge Reassures By Finian Cunningham - Maria Zakharova, Russias Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, shoots from the lip and never misses. She calls the whole shenanigans out of Britain concerning the alleged spy-poisoning affair for what it is  a grandiose provocation. March 21, 2018 " Information Clearing House Maria Zakharova, Russias Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, shoots from the lip and never misses. She calls the whole shenanigans out of Britain concerning the alleged spy-poisoning affair for what it is  a grandiose provocation. Bang on target. Spare the words and head-wrecking argumentation. On a recent Russian TV debate show, 60 Minutes, the feisty and articulate Zakharova not only summed up the farce of the latest British propaganda stunt. She put it in the context of several other similar provocations, from allegations against Russia over Ukrainian aggression to the Olympics doping scandal. They are indeed all "grandiose provocations" that are hardly worth deliberating on. So baseless and fatuous are these claims leveled by Washington and London in particular. Are You Tired Of The Lies, Bull*hit And Non-Stop Propaganda? Get Your FREE Daily Newsletter But the disturbing thing is this. These unhinged provocations keep mounting and multiplying to the point where they are becoming dangerous triggers for a war. Not just Russia, but the rest of the world too, can be relieved that Russian weaponry has reached such a high-level of development to evade American so-called missile defense systems. President Putin was very careful in his speech to emphasize that his country was not seeking to start a war, or threaten anyone. The Russian arsenal is strictly defensive. But, in an extreme situation, the force that Russia can unleash against a would-be enemy will be invulnerable and superior. It was critically important that Putin unveiled the new Russian weapon systems at this juncture. It was needed in order to dispel any delusion among American leaders and their allies of prosecuting a preemptive war against Russia, which seems to be their reprehensible inclination. It should be clear even to intellectually challenged Western politicians that Russia's new generation of weapons will inflict devastating consequences. So don't even think about it. It is clear that Moscow is not trying to intimidate anyone, despite what the Western propagandize about "Russian aggression" and "Soviet revanchism". Following his landslide election victory at the weekend, Putin reiterated Moscow's desire to pursue constructive partnerships with other foreign states. However, what Russia is up against are some deeply delusional powers who are so filled with arrogance and hubris, and an irrational Russophobia, that it is imperative to have the decisive military power in order to keep these powers in check. Washington and its uppity imperialist sidekick in London are particularly dangerously deluded. The provocations emanating from those two seem to have no end. Boris Johnson, the British Foreign Minister, is a case study in arrogant ignorance. He accuses Russian leader Vladimir Putin of personally ordering the alleged poison-assassination of a disgraced former Russian spy living in Salisbury. Yet Johnson has not the decency to know that his evidence-free assertions betray his own stupidity. He has the audacity to call Russia's reasonable demands for demonstration of evidence and due legal process as "absurd" and a "haystack of lies". Truly, dealing with such numbskulls must be so tiring. Simultaneously, the Trump administration unveils new sanctions against Russia's state security services claiming that Russia is carrying out "malicious cyberattacks" on US infrastructure. Again, no evidence is provided. The US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin simply referred to Britain's outlandish claims of a poison-assassination plot as "evidence". This is merely circular, self-referencing fantasies articulated by politicians who are deluded and ignorant. They are so arrogant, they don't even sense the obligation to provide evidence. Their incorrigibly propagandized brains are programmed to not question, but to follow the script of irrational Russophobia. READ MORE: WATCH Russian Mig-31 Test-Firing the Hypersonic Missile Putin Announced In recent days, British and American media have reported their state security services warning of Russian cyberattacks on vital national infrastructure, including electricity grids, nuclear power stations, water delivery systems and aviation networks. "Cyberattacks Put Russian Fingers on the Switch at Power Plants, US Says," reported the New York Times with reckless sensationalism. "Forensic analysis suggested [sic] that Russian spies were looking for inroads  although it was not clear whether the goal was to conduct espionage or sabotage, or to trigger an explosion of some kind," claimed the NY Times, without substantiating its far-fetched scaremongering. So much for America's supposedly "finest journalism". The British media carried similar hysteria. Britain's state security services are warning power and utility companies, as well as the National Health Service, to beef up cyber security because of an imminent attack from Russian state hackers. This is shameless instilling of fear in the public. Or put bluntly, British and American state-sponsored terrorism against their own people. American and British politicians, aided and abetted by shameless media propaganda, have entered into a twilight zone of unreality with regard to Russia. The non-stop provocative slander against Russia is a sign of political psychosis in Washington and London. Unfortunately, other European states have shown susceptibility to the sickness, as can be seen this week with EU foreign ministers supporting Boris Johnson's accusations against Moscow. Russia is right to treat the latest slander from Britain over the alleged spy-poisoning case with contempt. It is not Moscow that has a case to answer. It is London that must answer for its absurd, evidence-free allegations. It's not Moscow that needs to abide by international law and norms. It's London. READ MORE: 'Interesting' Timing of Skripal Scandal 'Close to Russian Elections'  Analyst Russia should be demanding the British to answer for the de facto detention of one its citizens, Yulia Skripal, who was visiting her father in Salisbury on March 4 when the pair fell ill. As Maria Zakharova reminded: Who is London to haughtily issue 24-hour deadlines to anyone? A country that has violated countless international laws to destroy the lives of millions of people by waging illegal wars around the planet. Boris Johnson needs to get on his bike and cycle back to the funny farm whence he came. His snotty, upperclass privileged life has blinded him to any reality or truth, and yet he goes around with a fancy accent accusing others of "reckless defiance of essential international rules". The provocations coming out of Washington and its British bulldog are indeed provocative. There's not much point examining them and dissecting their falsehoods. They will just keep making up more lies and other excuses for slandering Russia. It's a pretty grim reality, but nonetheless a vital one in this climate of hysteria. The reality being that should the deluded ones in Washington and London push their arrogance too far, they are no match for Russia's ability to defend itself with superior military force. Russia has no need for bluff or bluster, unlike the Americans and British who are compensating for their own inadequacy and incompetence. The Americans and British rarely won a war in their history. They are only good for attacking weaker, defenseless countries. Russia, on the other hand, is a bear that only a fool would push. And it was good the Russian bear bared its claws recently. Just to remind the arrogant deluded fools. Finian Cunningham has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several languages. He is a Masters graduate in Agricultural Chemistry and worked as a scientific editor for the Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge, England, before pursuing a career in newspaper journalism. He is also a musician and songwriter. For nearly 20 years, he worked as an editor and writer in major news media organisations, including The Mirror, Irish Times and Independent. This article was originally published by "Sputnik " - The views and opinions expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect those of Information Clearing House. ===== In case you missed it: Russia successfully tests hypersonic missile which renders Western defenses obsolete Join the Discussion It is not necessary for ICH readers to register before placing a comment. We ask that you treat others with respect. Take a moment to read the following - Comment Policy - What Or Who is Information Clearing House and Purpose and Intent of this website: It is unacceptable to slander, smear or engage in personal attacks on authors of articles posted on ICH. Those engaging in that behavior will be banned from the comment section.By James Petras

Introduction: The dynamic of contemporary US imperialism is built around two structural features: the drive toward global military expansion, conquest and occupation backed by the intensification of exploitation of domestic labor and pillage of the domestic economy.

March 21, 2018 " Information Clearing House " - In this paper we will challenge the notion that overseas economic exploitation has transferred income to buy-off the domestic working and middle classes, in the course of consolidating imperial hegemony.

We will argue that the empire is no longer based on robust overseas growth but rather the empire today is a costly and declining proposition.

We will proceed to outline the costs of militarized imperialism and the relative economic decline of the empire.

We will then turn to analyzing how the US imperial state has resorted to financing the empire though its regressive tax, regulator and budgetary policies.

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We will conclude by refuting the notion that the US turn to protectionism will revive the US economic empire.

Empire: Past and Present

From the end of WWII to the end of the Cold War, the US empire was driven by the wealth and power of the multi-national corporations to extract and transfer profits to the domestic economy and sustain a trickle down effect on a partially unionized labor force, and to fund its military guardians of global capital.

The US dominated world trade, and led global investments, as well as acting as the leading force creating the international financial institutions (World Bank, the IMF). Free trade and neoliberal doctrine flowed from the Washington Consensus designed to induce the denationalization and privatization of targeted national economies around the world.

US empire further ensured global ascendance with the demise of the USSR, the absorption of the ex-Soviet client states and the pillage of the Russian economy. Washington declared that the world had become a unipolar state, in which the US was the sole dominant power, free to invade, conquer and exploit any rival.

To sustain and further its global military dominance, Washington declared a world-wide war on terrorism which accentuated the military dimensions of unipolarity. The US empire was redefined through its military capacity to overthrow independent regimes, to carry on multiple wars, and to simultaneously fund overseas economic conquests while maintaining dynamic domestic growth.

The empire builders pillaged Russia but failed to build a viable productive satellite. Instead it poured billions of dollars into expanding NATO to Russian borders. In contrast, Germany profitably incorporated the post-Communist economies into the European Union.

The empire builders unipolar vision led them to endless billion-dollar wars, which did not finance themselves and reduced the US global economic presence as a source of profits. The empires pursuit of the unipolar world, through global wars on terror, led to a highly militarized imperial state which greatly reduced US economic competitiveness and the exponential growth of its commercial deficit.

In response to military demands for state financing, MNC sought lower taxs, cheap labor and lurative overseas markets. De-industrialization was accompanied by the financialization of the US economy.

The imperial state was a two-faced Janus: militarized foreign policy and financialized domestic policy. Military induced deficits and multiple and inconclusive wars led empire builders to make further demands on the economy.

Financialization led to a deep economic crisis in 2008/09 and a decade long trillion-dollar bailout.

The financial-military empire was a cost not a benefit to the economic empire. Imperial empire builders found few overseas partners willing or able to share the costs. The empire builders turned to intensifying the exploitation,of the domestic labor market, reallocating the federal budget and reducing taxes for economic elite. The US redefined empire building as exploiting the domestic economy to militarize the empire.

Washington debated two parallel options: one based on further internationalizing the US economy hoping to regain markets and capital; the second option was turning the US into a fortress Americana by creating walls around a protectionist state and preparing a trade war. Both options depended on lowering labor costs, concentrating wealth and reducing labor and welfare.

President Obama opted for internationalization, linking economic and military imperialism. President Trump chose a protectionist-militarist strategy designed to bring overseas capital to the US domestic market through military and trade threats in order to intimidate adversaries. Both approaches were basically premised on domestic colonialism.

The Elements of Internal Colonialism

The run-up to the financial crises of 2008-09 and the trillion-dollar bail-out led to the pillage of the state and deepened the financialization of the economy. The large-scale transfer of profits from domestic manufacturing to overseas markets and to banking, real estate and insurance (FIRE) sectors contributed to the growing polarization of the economy and deepening social inequalities.

Theses shifts in the economy were accompanied by regressive changes in the tax burden: the multi-nationals avoided hundreds of billions in taxes through overseas tax havens (FT 3/12/18 p. 1) and paid less domestic taxes as the effective tax rate declined (FT 3/12/18 p.3.

National states competed to lower taxes for the elite which led to reducing welfare spending; deregulation of the banking and energy sector led to the rise of speculative capital.

Global capital grew at the expense of the domestic economy; the growth of financial capital reduced the income of the working and middle class; costly imperial wars increased the commercial deficit; low paid, temporary employment in the services became the norm.

Health and environmental conditions deteriorated. Empire building intensified and domestic under development to finance a rising commercial deficit and a declining empire. Popular dissent grew.

The imperial state faced two choices to further marginalize the majority or to turn toward a protectionist policy which in effect sought to direct mass discontent outwardly toward economic and military competitors.

The Democrats sought to blame Russia, the Republicans pointed to China and Iran.

The election of Trump led to the adoption of a policy of deepening deregulation, increasing the concentration of wealth, massive tax reductions for the MNC , a trade war for local capital , a protectionist policy for labor unions and a war policy to satisfy the ideological warlords.

The Obama regimes resort to military and financial imperialism based on internal colonialism had reached its limits. The Trump regime sought to externalize enemies, first and foremost directing its national imperialism against China.

President Trump: China and the Commercial Deficit

The Trump regime backed by the Democrats sought to sustain at militarized imperialism by fabricating a Russian war threat in Syria, Ukraine, UK (the toxin spy caper) The Democrats promoted the Russian conspiracy to control the US presidential elections.

Trump sought to avoid facing the impending failure of its trickle down economic policy, by blaming China, of unfairly exploiting the US via one-sided trade, investment and technology relations - all leading to large trade deficits.

Contrary to Trump, the tradedeficit has everything to do with the perverse economic structure and policies of the US, which its ruling elites created .

The US trade deficit is a result of the MNC moving to China and exporting back to the US. US exports from China account for nearly one-third of the deficit. Washington is unable and unwilling to coerce or attract the MNC to return to the US even with generous tax incentives.

Secondly, the trade deficit is a result of growing US military spending in multiple and continuing wars, instead of increasing investment in export sectors. In contrast, China increases its public investments in high growth export sectors which add value and secure new markets.

Thirdly, the US restricts exports of high tech and military technology to China to further the interests of the warlord economy, leading to the loss of markets and the ability to lower the deficits.

Fourthly, the US restricts Chinese investments in sectors that would finance export industries that could rebalance trade relying on the fake argument of national security.

Fifthly, US, MNC are allowed - receive incentives from the state- to retain 2.5 trillion dollars abroad in tax havens, thus reducing the capacity of the US to finance its export sector and balance trade with China (and the rest of the world).

Sixthly, the US accuses Beijing of insisting that US corporations which invest in China transfer technology. This is a win-win situation: US MNC reap profits, China gains know-how. If the US invested their profits in constantly upgrading its technology it could continue to retain markets, and profits and its export advantages.

In a word China is not cheating it is learning and growing; its up to the US to do the same, instead of taking profit and moving to tax havens and the financial sector.

The US threat of a trade war against China will devastate US exports in technology, transport, agriculture and advanced industries, while undermining the domestic consumer sectors.

The net result will be the reduction of employment, income and trade. The US will have to squeeze the domestic income to sustain the primacy of its military and financial elite - provoking greater domestic discontent.

One thing is clear: in the face of a trade war China will adapt to its global infrastructure investments and secure alternative trading partners - it will survive a trade war .

Conclusion

US military and financial imperialism was a temporary and short lived success based on the demise of the USSR, and a mono-polar world, and the launch of the global war on terror . With the military rise of Russia, and Chinas dynamic economic growth, these short term advantages disappeared and all the vulnerabilities resounded. Trillion-dollar bank bailouts and prolonged military losses undercut whatever temporary advantages existed. The pillage of the domestic economy deepened domestic discontent. Trump style national imperialism increased profits but lost trade wars.

A speculative economy, a plundered public treasury and a militarized empire cannot restructure the economy not even with trade war rhetoric and trillion dollar tax handouts. Time is running out President Trump; the economy is preparing to plunge and the voters are turning their backs.The British Prime Minister Theresa May insinuated that the British-Russian double agent Sergej Skripal and his daughter Yulia, who collapsed on March 4 on a public bench in Salisbury, were affected by a 'Russian' nerve agent:

March 21, 2018 " Information Clearing House " - A week ago we asked if 'Novichok' poisons are real. The answer is now in: It is 'yes' and 'no'. Several Russian scientist now say that they once researched and developed lethal poisons but they assert that other countries can and have copied these. 'Novichok', they say, is a just western propaganda invention. They see the British accusations as a cynical plot against Russia. The people who push the 'Novichok' accusations have political and commercial interests.

The four substances were developed by Pyotr Kirpichev and Vladimir Uglev. These substances were not readily usable by the military as they could not be safely transported and used in the field like binary chemical weapons can. Once synthesized they were extremely dangerous. Professor Leonid Rink, working later in a different group, tackled the problem but did not succeed. Uglev confirms that Vil Miranzayanov was not involved in the development at all. His group was responsible chemical analysis and for environmental control around the laboratory.

All four chemical agents are FOS or organophosphorous compounds which have a nerve paralyzing effect, but they differ in their precursors, how they were discovered and in their usage as agents of chemical warfare.

 In order to make it easier to understand the subject matter, I will not use the name Novichok which has is now commonly used by everyone to describe those four substances which were conditionally assigned to me to develop over a period of several years. Three of these substances are part of the Foliant program, which was led by Pyotr Kirpichev, a scientist with GOSNIIOKHT (State Scientific-Research Institute for Organic Chemistry and Technology). The first substance of a new class of organophosphorous chemical agents, I will call it A-1972, was developed by Kirpichev in 1972. In 1976, I developed two substances: B-1976 and C-1976. The fourth substance, D-1980, was developed by Kirpichev in the early 1980s. All of these substances fall under the group referred to as Novichkov, but that name wasnt given to the substances by GOSNIIOKHT.

 The Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs insists that there was no research nor development of any substance called Novichok, not in Russia, nor in the USSR. Is that true?

The English-Russian magazine The Bell interviews another Russian scientists involved in the issue:

He claims Britains use of the name Novichok for the nerve agent is intended to convince the public that Russia is to blame.

Echoing Russian government statements, Rink says it wouldnt make sense for Moscow to poison Sergei Skripal, a military intelligence officer who spied for Britain, because he was a used asset drained by both Russia and Britain.

The Associated Press summarizes other parts of the interview with Professor Rink:

At that time I worked in Shikhany, in the branch of GosNIIOKhT (State Research Institute of Organic Chemistry and Technology, during Soviet times was engaged in the development of chemical weapons), was a leading researcher and head of the laboratory.

- Yes. This was the basis of my doctoral dissertation.

Western media claimed that Vil Miranzayanov is the developer of the 'Novichok' chemicals. It turns out that this is not the case. Interviews with two retired Russian chemists, both published only yesterday, tell the real story. The Russia news agency RIA Novostni talked with Professor Leonid Rink ( machine translation ):

The spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry and famous high heels folk dancer (vid) Maria Zakharova explains in a TV interview (vid, English subtitles) that 'Novichok' was not and is not the name of any Soviet or Russian program. The word was introduced in the "west" simply because it sounded Russian.

The Russian government rejects the British allegations and demands evidence which Britain has not provided. Russia joined the Chemical Weapon Convention in 1997. By 2017 it had destroyed all its chemical weapons and chemical weapon production facilities. Under the convention only very limited amounts of chemical weapon agents are allowed to be held in certified laboratories for defense research and testing purposes. The U.S. has such laboratories at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland, the British lab is in Porton Down, a few miles from Salisbury. The Russian lab is in Shikhany in the southern Saratov Oblast. The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) audits these laboratories and their declared stocks "down to the milligram level".

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A 'Novichok' nerve agent plays a role in the current seasons of the British-American spy drama Strike Back which broadcasts on British TV. Theresa May might have watched this clip (vid) from the series. Is it a source of her allegations?

"Russia did it", says Mirzanyanov, "OR SOMEONE WHO READ MY BOOK".

AFP interviewed the author of the 'Novichok' book about the Salisbury incident:

The name 'Novichok' comes from a book written by Vil Mirzanyanov, a 1990s immigrant to the U.S. from the former Soviet Union. It describe his work at Soviet chemical weapon laboratories and lists the chemical formulas of a new group of lethal substances.

A highly potent nerve agent would hurt anyone who comes in contact with it. But the BBC reported that a doctor who administered first aid to the collapsed Yulia Skripal for 30 minutes was not affected at all . Another doctor, Steven Davies who heads the emergence room of the Salisbury District Hospital, wrote in a letter the London Times:

Vladimir Uglev, like Renk and Miranzayanov, notes that these agents "of a type developed by Russia" can now be produced by any sufficiently equipped laboratory, including private ones.

Uglev mentions a criminal use of one of the agents in the 1990s:

One of these substances was used to poison the banker, Ivan Kivelidi and his secretary in 1995. A cotton ball, soaked in this agent, was rubbed over the microphone in the handset of Kivelidis telephone. That specific dose was developed by my group, where we produced all of the chemical agents, and each dose which we developed was given its own complete physical-chemical passport. It was therefore not difficult to determine who had prepared that dose and when it was developed. Naturally, the investigators also suspected me. I was questioned several times about this incident.

Journalist Mark Ames, who worked in Moscow at that time, remarks:

This muddles the narrative a bit "novichok" used in 1995 Moscow mafia poison hit on top mobster Ivan Kivelidi. So:

1) novichok [is] in mob hands too

2) used during reign of #1 Mobfather Boris Yeltsin, Washington's vassal

Uglev further notes that blood samples from the Salisbury victims, which Moscow demands but Britain has not handed over, can show what agent (if any) were involved and "where the specific dose was produced and by whom."

A new article in the New Scientists confirms the claims by the Russian scientists that the 'Novichok' agents which may have affected the Skripals may have been produced elsewhere:

Weapons experts have told New Scientist that a number of countries legally created small amounts of Novichok after it was revealed in 1992 and a production method was later published.

In 2016 Iranian scientists, in cooperation with the OPCW, published production and detection methods for such agents. It is likely that the various government labs secretly re-developed and produced these chemicals for their own purposes even prior to the Iranian publication.

[UPDATE] In an interview with Deutsche Welle British Foreign Minister Boris Johnson admits that Proton Down had (illegal?) 'Novichok' agents when the incident in Salisbury happened:

DW: You argue that the source of this nerve agent, Novichok, is Russia. How did you manage to find it out so quickly? Does Britain possess samples of it? Boris Johnson: Let me be clear with you  When I look at the evidence, I mean the people from Porton Down, the laboratory  DW: So they have the samples  Boris Johnson: They do. And they were absolutely categorical and I asked the guy myself, I said, "Are you sure?" And he said there's no doubt.

But Porton Down did not agree with the British government to claim that the supposed nerve agent was "made by Russia." It only agreed to the compromise formulation "of a type developed by Russia" i.e. it could have been made anywhere. [End Update]

The claims by the British government that a. the Skripals were affected by a nerve agent and that b. Russia was involved in the Skripal incident because it has some exclusive access to these agents seem both baseless. Unless there is significant further evidence the British incrimination of Russia looks like a cynical plot invented for political and/or commercial purposes.

As usual in the military-industrial complex the people who push such scares, are the ones who profit from them.

The British Morning Star points to one former British military intelligence officer, Colonel (rtd) Hamish de Bretton-Gordon, as a common protagonist in the Skripal case, in the claims of Syrian chemical weapon use and in commercial interests around chemical weapon defense:

Quoted daily by multiple media outlets on the Skripal case, de Bretton-Gordon has become a very public expert, relied upon for unbiased comment and analysis by the British and foreign media on chemical weapon threats from Salisbury to Syria. He is a former assistant director of Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance Land Forces with the Ministry of Defence. Before that de Bretton-Gordon was commanding officer of Britains Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear (CBRN) Regiment and Natos Rapid Reaction CBRN Battalion. While his CBRN background is often mentioned, his military intelligence links are rarely referred to publicly. Long before the Salisbury event, de Bretton-Gordon was urging greater government expenditure on chemical protection counter-measures and equipment.

...

de Bretton-Gordon is managing director CBRN of Avon Protection Systems, based in Melksham, Wiltshire.

...

In 2017, the company made 50m from its US military contracts and a further 63.3m from other protection and defence revenue.

The former(?) army intelligence officer is also deeply involved in the "moderate rebels" chemical weapon scams in Syria:

On April 29 2014, the [Daily Telegraph] reported that it obtained soil samples collected from sites of chemical attacks inside Syria by Dr Ahmad  a medic whose real identity cannot be revealed for his own protection  who had previously received training in sample collection by western chemical weapons experts. Mr de Bretton-Gordon, a British chemical weapons expert and director of Secure Bio, a private company, was one of the trainers. And who carried out the tests? None other than de Bretton-Gordon himself.

The "White Helmets" propaganda group in Syria was founded and is run by the former(?) British army intelligence officer James Le Mesurier with British and U.S. government money. His former(?) colleague de Bretton-Gordon is running the parallel Syria chemical weapon scam. Both profit from their government financed operations.

Other British agents involved in the Skripal case are Pablo Miller who recruited Skripal for the MI6. He was a friend of Skripal, also lived in Salisbury and worked for Christopher Steele, the former(?) MI6 agent who produced the 'dirty dossier' about Donald Trump for the Clinton campaign. Both are involved with Russian mafia emigres in Britain like Boris Berezovski and the deceased Alexander Litvinenko who's father says that he was killed by an MI6 or CIA guy.

While the British government blamed the Russians just a week after the incident in Salisbury happened it now seems interested in delaying any further investigations. It took more than two weeks after the incident for the British government to invite the OPCW to help with the case. The head of the OPCW says it will take another three weeks for the organization to analyze the samples the British laboratory now handed over. The British police requires several months to find out what happened to the Skripals.

How could the British government be sure of "Russian" involvement within a week and even expel Russian diplomats when the primary chemical experts on the issue will need three weeks for their first analyses and the British police predicts a several months long investigation?

The Russian scientist and their government have explained their history and position in relation to 'Novichoks' and the Skripal incident. It is high time now for the British government, its scientists at Porton Down and its greedy mafia of former(?) British intelligence officer and their criminal Russian emigres to come clean about their own roles in it.35-year old Nigerian actress and movie producer, Ebube Nwagbo rocked a transparent black top and a very short skirt that left her clean and long legs in the full glare of the public.

The Anambra native who is yet to be married in the face of societal pressure is presently modeling for a fashion brand. Ebube is one of the big girls in Nollywood raking the cash despite being behind the TV screens in recent times.

Posting the picture above on Instagram, she added the note below:

Good Things Come To Those Who Wait.. UhmmScratch ThatBetter Things Come To Those Who Get Off Their Ass And Do Something To Make It Happen..!!!It Is written in the books of our forefathers..Pls dont ask me what edition?Im not around..Im in my farm..

Check out other fantastic photos of the actress below:A seven-month-old baby has miraculously survived after being thrown off a 118ft bridge by her own mother in north-east area of Brazil.

The mother with the name, Carla Regina Mendes, 23, threw baby Thayller over the railings on Jose Sarney Bridge, in Sao Luis, north east Brazil, on Sunday afternoon in front of shocked passersby.

The child had already sunk deep into the swampy river when two quick-thinking off-duty police officers got to her, just in time before she disappeared underneath the surface.

Baby Thallyer suffered a blow to her head and bruising to her back after landing in a stagnant stretch on the Sao Francisco river.

Ms Mendes, who was arrested at the scene, later told police to be suffering from mental health problems and depression.

She has been sent for psychiatric tests and could face charges of attempted murder depending on the outcome of the evaluations.Boko Haram members on Wednesday, returned 104 of the girls of the Dapchi while five of the girls were said to have died in captivity, Liya Sharibu, the only Christian among them, was detained for allegedly refusing to convert to Islam or wear the hijab. Many Nigerians are saying the federal government must do all it can to bring back the only remaining Dapchi girl. See reactions below;

Its no longer news that the only girl that was left behind amongst the Dapchi girls was a Christian. I dont blame Buhari or Boko Haram: I blame CAN, PFN and Osinbajo. For God sake do something for this little girl that refuses to renounce her faith and that stands for Christ!  Femi Fani-Kayode (@realFFK) March 22, 2018

Please lets not forget that the only Christian girl abducted by Boko Haram in Dapchi is still being held in their custody. All were released except her .its surprising that the media isnt emphasising on this. Is she not worth releasing because she is Christian??  follow GraviManiac on IG (@FuxkSallieMae) March 21, 2018

Liah Sharibu the Dapchi christian girl held behind because she refused to denounce her faith is the new Malala Yousefzai. Liah, you have earned my respect, you are my heroine already. #DapchiGirls #Rescuenigerianow  Governor Onuh (@Reclaim_Nigeria) March 22, 2018

The Dapchi girl that is held back because she is a Christian must be released.she is a Nigerian and the Government must do everything for her to be released. #can #pfn  idah pee (@IdahPeterside) March 22, 2018





It has been reported that the Osun State Police Command has arraigned a 38-year-old man, Odesola Odedokun, for allegedly attempting to kill his daughter, Mary Odedokun, for money ritual.



According to Daily Sun, the suspect was docked at Osogbo Magistrate Court alongside two other accused persons on a four -count charge bordering on attempted murder, unlawful possession of charms and fraud allegation levelled against them.



The two other accused were Isaac Ajao, 40, and Kazeem Ibrahim, 42.



Police prosecutor, Inspector Mustapha Tajudeen, told the court that the accused and others that were still at large committed the offence on March 7, 2018 at about 07:30hrs at Iron community.



He explained that Odedokun, the father of the victim and two other suspects conspired to kill one Mary Odedokun with the intention of using her for money ritual.



He added that the third accused person, Kazeem Ibrahim, fraudulently obtained the sum of N34,000 from one Mr Isaac Ajao under the guise of using it for money doubling ritual.



The prosecutor said the offence was contrary to Sections 320, 418 and punishable under Section 419 of the Criminal Code Cap 34 Volume 11.Laws of Osun State 2002.



The three accused persons pleaded not guilty to the allegations.



Defence Counsel, Remigus Ugwu, applied for the bail of the accused in the most liberal terms.



Ugwu assured the court that reliable sureties were ready to stand for them. He said they would not jump bail if granted.



In her ruling, Magistrate Fatimoh Sodamade, granted the three accused persons bail in the sum of N500,000 with one surety each in like sum.



She said each surety must be a Grade level 15 civil servant and must be resident within the court jurisdiction and produce evidence of three year tax payments.



Sodamade added that the sureties must provide three passports sized photographs attached with an affidavit.



He added that their addresses must also be verified by the police in charge of the case.



She then adjourned the case till April 30 for hearing.The final leg of the wedding ceremonies of Africas Richest man, Aliko Dangotes daughter, Fatima, to her pilot hubby, Jamil Abubakar, will hold at the Eko Hotel and Suites in Lagos state tomorrow March 23rd.

The wedding reception dinner will be attended by digniaries from all works of life. Founder of the Microsoft Corporation, Bill Gates is already in Nigeria and he will be attending the wedding which has been described as the mother of all wedding receptions.

Past and Current heads of government are expected to attend the wedding reception.

Fatima and Jamil exchanged marital vows in Kano last week. They have so far had 5 pre-wedding and wedding dinners. At all the dinner parties, Fatima looked beautiful in her Deola Sagoe dresses.

At the wedding reception dinner tomorrow, guests are expected to be seated by 7.30pm and the dress code is National attire. The invitation comes with a food voucher for drivers.

See photo of the invitation card below

Source: Linda Ikejis blogStudents and community members from greater Chattanooga will gather for a sibling march, as part of the March for Our Lives movement, on Saturday from 10 a.m.-noon at Coolidge Park then after short program, participants will march across Walnut Street bridge and to the courthouse.

"The march is one of over 800 marches happening around the country planned by students and survivors of gun violence in communities big and small, in all 50 states," organizers said. "The national day of action will focus on calling for lawmakers to make students lives and safety a priority and to pass common-sense gun safety legislation.



"In Chattanooga, students have been organizing for a month.





To amplify their efforts Chattanooga students started a new group: Chattanooga Students Leading Change. This coalition has identified three areas to focus on: Awareness, Advocacy and Accountability. CSLC coordinated with area schools for the walk-out on March 14. In addition to the MFOL planning, these student leaders are leading a letter-writing campaign, speaking at the school board meeting on Thursday against arming teachers, planning a visit to Nashville to speak with state legislators and Gov. Haslam and hope to meet with Senator Corker, Senator Alexander and Representative Fleischmann in Washington.Students quotes:A half a century ago, students rallied to reshape the nation through the Civil Rights movement and Vietnam War protests, and they will do the same today. Allen Liu, McCallieI am marching because I am tired of politicians and leaders saying that they dont have to listen to us. Sileas Balthrop, CSASI am marching because I want to go to school to learn and not to be faced with a mass shooting. Finny Heck, CCAI am marching because I dont want to be next. Sophie Albarakat, CSASAs students, we are the future, we should not wait to start working for change when we can start now. After all, we are the kids that in the classrooms; we are the ones at risk. Chrischahna Smith, Normal ParkA Young Nigerian man has praised Nigerian girls, calling them sweet names while adding that they are always faithful to their partner.

The man, identified as Nomso, took to twitter to share his thoughts about Nigerian girls.

He tweeted: Nigerian girls are angels, they never cheat & are the most caring ladies youll ever meet in the World. Get a Nigerian Woman today & enjoy greatness

Some of his followers did not agree with his view and one even asked if his account was hacked, LOL 

See the conversation that ensued;The Co-Chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Mr. Bill Gates, on Thursday urged the Federal Government to invest more in health and education.

Abuja  A Bill for an Act to amend the Public Enterprise (Privatisation and Commercialisation) Act to review the list of enterprises to be privatised passed second reading on Thursday at the House of Representatives.

There was palpable panic at the premises of the Federal High Court, Abuja, on Thursday, when large number of Fulani men who were displaced by anti-open grazing law in Benue state stormed the court to register their discontent with the delay in delivery judgement on the matter.

Thisday

The federal government wednesday approached the Federal High Court in Abuja, for an order to temporarily freeze properties and assets linked to the Deputy Senate President, Senator Ike Ekweremadu.The incidence of liver cancer, also known as hepatocellular carcinoma, is steadily increasing. In the last twenty years, the number of cases has almost doubled in Switzerland. Hepatocellular carcinoma is usually diagnosed at a very late stage when the liver is already severely damaged and hence overall prognosis is poor. Detection of the anti-cancer protein LHPP as a biomarker may allow clinicians to provide better treatment options.

New anti-cancer protein LHPP

Liver tumors develop from mutated cells that grow and proliferate uncontrollably. Anti-cancer proteins, so-called tumor suppressors, prevent uncontrolled cell growth. Tumor suppressors are often defective in cancer cells. The researchers led by Prof. Michael N. Hall, Biozentrum of the University of Basel, have now discovered a new, so far unknown tumor suppressor, the protein LHPP. In their study, they show that the loss of LHPP promotes tumor growth and reduces the chance of survival of cancer patients. LHPP could potentially be used as a prognostic biomarker.

The researchers generated a mouse model for hepatocellular carcinoma by activating mTOR signaling specifically in the liver. They analyzed a total of more than 4,000 proteins, comparing them in healthy and tumor tissue. An enzyme emerged as the top favorite: the histidine phosphatase LHPP. It is striking that LHPP is present in healthy tissue and completely absent in tumor tissue, says first author Sravanth Hindupur. Re-introduction of the genetic information for LHPP by the researchers prevents the formation of tumors and maintains liver function.

Loss of LHPP in cancer patients

Similar to the mouse model, we also saw a striking decrease in LHPP levels in tumors of patients with liver cancer, says Hindupur. Additionally, both disease severity and life expectancy correlate with LHPP levels. With complete loss of the tumor suppressor, cancer patients die on average two years earlier. LHPP is useful as a biomarker to classify tumors.

Phosphorylation important for tumorigenesis

LHPP is a phosphatase that removes histidine-linked phosphate groups from proteins. Like all amino acids, histidine is a basic component of proteins. Histidine phosphorylation of proteins has been poorly investigated due to the lack of suitable tools. Tony Hunter, from the Salk Institute in the USA, has provided us with new tools to analyze histidine phosphorylation. We have now been able to visualize a whole new layer of complexity in tumor formation, says Hindupur.

Due to the absence of LHPP, global protein histidine phosphorylation is increased, which can lead to activation of several important functions and uncontrolled cell proliferation. This absence promotes the growth of tumors via increasing histidine-phosphorylated proteins. The tumor suppressor LHPP may also play a role in the development of other cancers.

Original source

Sravanth K. Hindupur, Marco Colombi, Stephen R. Fuhs, Matthias S. Matter, Yakir Guri, Kevin Adam, Marion Cornu, Salvatore Piscuoglio, Charlotte K.Y. Ng, Charles Betz, Dritan Liko, Luca Quagliata, Suzette Moes, Paul Jenoe, Luigi M. Terracciano, Markus H. Heim, Tony Hunter, Michael N. Hall

The protein histidine phosphatase LHPP is a tumor suppressor

Nature (2018), doi: 10.1038/nature26140

Further Information

Prof. Dr. Michael Hall, University of Basel, Biozentrum, phone: +41 61 207 21 50, email: m.hall@unibas.ch

Dr. Katrin Buhler, University of Basel, Biozentrum, Communications, phone +41 61 207 09 74, email: katrin.buehler@unibas.chMarch 22, 2018 (Investorideas.com Newswire) Technical analyst Clive Maund is bullish on a company that uses drones to help farmers stay on top of their crops.

Deveron UAS Ltd. (DVR:CSE) is an interesting company, because it provides professional drone services to assist farmers in maximizing production. Deverons stock has not been so interesting over the past year or so, however, because it has basically moved sideways, and some of you may recall that we bought it last April and after missing the opportunity to sell on a rally soon after we got stuck with it.

Now though it looks like the company's prospects could be about to improve, perhaps dramatically, because there is clearly huge potential in what it does, and it is understood to be teaming up with the giant agri-company Monsanto, and another positive is that it has just successfully completed a financing.

So while there is certainly scope for the downtrend now in force to take the stock price back down to the nearby support shown on its 1-year chart in the C$0.20C$0.23 zone, especially in adverse market conditions, there is considered to be a fair chance, given the positive factors just mentioned, that it will turn up here or very soon, from support at the lower boundary of the uptrend channel, and if so a sizable rally will be in prospect.

The 2-year chart is presented below so that you can see all of the action from where it came out of a long trading halt or period of suspension in mid-2016. There are 3 interesting points to observe on this chart. One is that it shows that the overall trend has been neutral since it started trading again, the next is that the C$0.21 area is clearly an important support level, as the price has reversed at this level four times now. Finally we can see quite strong volume kicking in on the rally in November and again in January, which is bullish, and makes it more likely that the uptrend shown will remain in force, which means it should turn up here.

Lastly, we will look at a 6-year chart, which shows all of the action since it started trading back in 2012. It is more evident on this chart that there is a considerable degree of compression in Deveron stock here as it is being forced into a narrowing range between the horizontal band of support at about C$0.21 and the falling trendline descending on it from above. Superficially this Descending Triangle looks bearish, but any bearish interpretation of this pattern is belied by the quite strong volume driving the November and January rallies, which imply that it will break out upside from the Triangle, and if it does, it is likely to make a big move.

Conclusion: the charts for Deveron look bullish, especially given its positive fundamentals. Holders should therefore stay long and it is rated a buy here and especially on any dip towards the support in the C$0.21 area. Deveron has 29.2 million shares in issue (fully diluted).

Deveron UAS Corp website

Deveron UAS Corp, DVR on Canadian Stock Exchange, closed at C$0.30 on 15th April 2018.

Clive Maund has been president of www.clivemaund.com, a successful resource sector website, since its inception in 2003. He has 30 years' experience in technical analysis and has worked for banks, commodity brokers and stockbrokers in the City of London. He holds a Diploma in Technical Analysis from the UK Society of Technical Analysts.

Disclosure:

1) Clive Maund: I, or members of my immediate household or family, own shares of the following companies mentioned in this article: None. I personally am, or members of my immediate household or family are, paid by the following companies mentioned in this article: None. My company has a financial relationship with the following companies mentioned in this article: None. CliveMaund.com disclosures below. I determined which companies would be included in this article based on my research and understanding of the sector.

2) The following companies mentioned in this article are billboard sponsors of Streetwise Reports: None. Click here for important disclosures about sponsor fees. As of the date of this article, an affiliate of Streetwise Reports has a consulting relationship with Deveron UAS Ltd.

3) Statements and opinions expressed are the opinions of the author and not of Streetwise Reports or its officers. The author is wholly responsible for the validity of the statements. The author was not paid by Streetwise Reports for this article. Streetwise Reports was not paid by the author to publish or syndicate this article. The information provided above is for informational purposes only and is not a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Streetwise Reports requires contributing authors to disclose any shareholdings in, or economic relationships with, companies that they write about. Streetwise Reports relies upon the authors to accurately provide this information and Streetwise Reports has no means of verifying its accuracy.

4) This article does not constitute investment advice. Each reader is encouraged to consult with his or her individual financial professional and any action a reader takes as a result of information presented here is his or her own responsibility. By opening this page, each reader accepts and agrees to Streetwise Reports' terms of use and full legal disclaimer. This article is not a solicitation for investment. Streetwise Reports does not render general or specific investment advice and the information on Streetwise Reports should not be considered a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Streetwise Reports does not endorse or recommend the business, products, services or securities of any company mentioned on Streetwise Reports.

5) From time to time, Streetwise Reports LLC and its directors, officers, employees or members of their families, as well as persons interviewed for articles and interviews on the site, may have a long or short position in securities mentioned. Directors, officers, employees or members of their immediate families are prohibited from making purchases and/or sales of those securities in the open market or otherwise from the time of the interview or the decision to write an article, until one week after the publication of the interview or article. As of the date of this article, officers and/or employees of Streetwise Reports LLC (including members of their household) own securities of Deveron UAS Ltd., a company mentioned in this article.

Charts provided by the author.

CliveMaund.com Disclosure:

The above represents the opinion and analysis of Mr Maund, based on data available to him, at the time of writing. Mr. Maund's opinions are his own, and are not a recommendation or an offer to buy or sell securities. Mr. Maund is an independent analyst who receives no compensation of any kind from any groups, individuals or corporations mentioned in his reports. As trading and investing in any financial markets may involve serious risk of loss, Mr. Maund recommends that you consult with a qualified investment advisor, one licensed by appropriate regulatory agencies in your legal jurisdiction and do your own due diligence and research when making any kind of a transaction with financial ramifications. Although a qualified and experienced stock market analyst, Clive Maund is not a Registered Securities Advisor. Therefore Mr. Maund's opinions on the market and stocks can only be construed as a solicitation to buy and sell securities when they are subject to the prior approval and endorsement of a Registered Securities Advisor operating in accordance with the appropriate regulations in your area of jurisdiction.

TechSectorStocks.com - investing ideas in tech stocks - mobile payments, social media, AI and Robotics, Drone Stocks, GPS, Internet of Things (IoT) Like Tech Stocks? View our Tech Stocks Directory Get News Alerts on Tech Stocks

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Beginning this Sunday, bear experts from all over the world will be meeting for the 5th International Human-Bear Conflicts Workshop at the Park Vista Hotel in Gatlinburg. Bear specialists from Asia, the Middle East and South America will join their colleagues from the U.S. and Canada to discuss strategies on dealing with human-bear conflicts.Beginning in Yellowknife, Northwest Territories in 1987, human-bear conflict specialists and community organizers have come together four times to share their experiences and successes. This year, the fifth workshop will take place for the first time ever in the eastern part of North America.TWRA Black Bear Program Coordinator Dan Gibbs and several colleagues from the southeastern U.S.attended the last HBC workshop in Montana in 2012. Mr. Gibbs said, Attending that workshop enabled us to see that other agencies are dealing with the same issues. We were able to learn from their successes and, in some cases, their failures. We came back refreshed, rolled our sleeves up, and got to work. Mr. Gibbs went on to say that the concept of a regional bear education program that is administered by state wildlife agencies was first discussed at that meeting in Montana. That particular program, now known as BearWise, has been implemented and is gaining traction at educating people on how to live responsibly with black bears.According to the 5th International Human-Bear Conflicts Workshop website, the workshops format is designed to encourage participants to interact with professional and community human-bear conflict specialists. Attendees leave with: A better understanding of the history, causes and current trends in human-bear conflicts; New and proven methods of reducing human-bear conflicts; Tools, techniques and tactics that work in the real world.The workshop concludes on Thursday, March 29.March 22, 2018 (Investorideas.com Newswire) Bob Moriarty of 321 Gold discusses this gold explorer's major financing.

Guyana Goldstrike Inc. (GYA:TSX.V; GYNAF:OTC; 1ZT:FSE) recently announced a major financing with Zinjin of China for a total of $3.475 million for work on GYA's Marudi gold project in southern Guyana. The private placement was for 13.9 million units at $0.25 with a full warrant at $0.35 good for two years. On a fully diluted basis, the investment would represent 39.3% of Guyana Goldstrike once the warrants have been exercised.

Guyana Goldstrike is a young company that did a deal to acquire Roanex Guyana Ltd., holder of the Marudi Mountain mining license in Guyana. The project has had over $30 million USD spent on it since 1985 including 42,000 meters of diamond drilling in 141 holes so far. It comes with a 20-year mining permit with an established camp and infrastructure in place. Local alluvial miners are working parts of the property with the permission of the company and that generates about $250,000 a year in revenue.

About 5% of the project has been explored with only two zones drilled. The Mazoa Hill zone comes with a current 43-101 showing over 259,000 ounces of gold indicated at 1.80 g/t and 86,200 ounces gold inferred at a grade of 1.60 g/t. The gold is found as alluvial, weathered saprolite and in hard rock form. The company is targeting between 1 and 2 million ounces.

Now that the financing has been completed, the company plans on hitting the ground running. They are working on a program to generate drill targets for an upcoming diamond drill program and have scheduled an airborne geophysical survey of the entire property. A trenching and surface sampling program is in progress for newly discovered mineralized zones.

It's going to take either a tailwind from the price of gold or major progress on the ground to get the shares moving. At today's prices, the company has a market cap of about $8 million USD and just over $3 million in the bank. They are well-financed and as time progresses and more news comes out, liquidity should increase in the shares. For now you have to make an appointment to buy or sell shares even though the price is 20% lower than the cheapest financing completed. With an existing 43-101 in place, a floor should be under the price about where it is now, representing gold at $23 an ounce USD which is about right. If you subtract the cash on hand investors are paying $14 an ounce for gold in the ground and getting the upside for free.

Guyana Goldstrike is an advertiser. I have bought shares in the open market and that gives me a bias. Please do your own due diligence.

Guyana Goldstrike Inc

GYA-V GYNAF-OTCBB $0.21 (Mar 21, 2018)

52.4 million shares

Guyana Goldstrike website

Read what other experts are saying about:

Bob and Barb Moriarty brought 321gold.com to the Internet almost 16 years ago. They later added 321energy.com to cover oil, natural gas, gasoline, coal, solar, wind and nuclear energy. Both sites feature articles, editorial opinions, pricing figures and updates on current events affecting both sectors. Previously, Moriarty was a Marine F-4B and O-1 pilot with more than 832 missions in Vietnam. He holds 14 international aviation records.

Disclosure:

1) Bob Moriarty: I, or members of my immediate household or family, own shares of the following companies mentioned in this article: Guyana Goldstrike. Guyana Goldstrike is an advertiser on 321 Gold. I determined which companies would be included in this article based on my research and understanding of the sector.

2) The following companies mentioned are billboard sponsors of Streetwise Reports: Guyana Goldstrike. Click here for important disclosures about sponsor fees.

3) Statements and opinions expressed are the opinions of the author and not of Streetwise Reports or its officers. The author is wholly responsible for the validity of the statements. The author was not paid by Streetwise Reports for this article. Streetwise Reports was not paid by the author to publish or syndicate this article. The information provided above is for informational purposes only and is not a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Streetwise Reports requires contributing authors to disclose any shareholdings in, or economic relationships with, companies that they write about. Streetwise Reports relies upon the authors to accurately provide this information and Streetwise Reports has no means of verifying its accuracy.

4) The article does not constitute investment advice. Each reader is encouraged to consult with his or her individual financial professional and any action a reader takes as a result of information presented here is his or her own responsibility. By opening this page, each reader accepts and agrees to Streetwise Reports' terms of use and full legal disclaimer. This article is not a solicitation for investment. Streetwise Reports does not render general or specific investment advice and the information on Streetwise Reports should not be considered a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Streetwise Reports does not endorse or recommend the business, products, services or securities of any company mentioned on Streetwise Reports.

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Global investors must adhere to regulations of each country. Please read Investorideas.com privacy policy: https://www.investorideas.com/About/Private_Policy.aspVancouver, British Columbia - March 22, 2018 (Newsfile Corp.) (Investorideas.com Newswire) Explorex Resources Inc. (CSE: EX) (FSE: 1XE) (OTC Pink: EXPXF) (the "Company" or "Explorex") is very pleased to announce that it has executed a Letter of Intent with three private Finnish companies to acquire the development stage Hautalampi project ("Hautalampi" or "Project") within the renowned Outokumpu Mining Camp of eastern Finland owned by Vulcan Hautalampi Oy (a.k.a. FinnCobalt).

Hautalampi is an unmined, cobalt enriched nickel-copper sulphide deposit that was a focus of pre-production development in the mid 1980's and extensive engineering supporting a feasibility study in 2009. Given the advanced stage aspect of the deposit, the established infrastructure and nearby mine development and mine operation services, Explorex believes the Project can be fast tracked to development. Upon completion of a due diligence period, the LOI provides for Explorex to earn a 91% initial interest plus an additional 9%, should the vendors convert a residual interest to a royalty. Project details, terms and upcoming plans are provided below.

Key Project Highlights

A feasibility study was completed in 2009 by a previous operator;

Significant pre-production development completed consisting of an 850 metre decline, 1,250 metres of additional underground development and a ventilation raise;

Key permits allowing for re-opening of underground workings have been granted;

Potential opportunity for near term production;

The Hautalampi deposit occurs at a shallow depth of less than 150m below surface;

Existing historical Co-Ni-Cu mineral resources and reserves estimates defined by 21 kilometres of drilling;

Significant exploration potential extending beyond historical mineral resources; and

Project is located in a mature mining district with personnel, plant and processing options locally available.

Gary Schellenberg, CEO stated: "Hautalampi provides Explorex with an excellent opportunity to fast track this historically defined asset within a mining friendly jurisdiction that has some of the best infrastructure in the world. Building on the comprehensive work previously conducted, we anticipate being able to provide an updated resource estimate followed quickly by economic studies, all in the environment of rising commodity prices. Backed by our key strategic funding partner, Ganfeng Lithium Co. Ltd., we anticipate being able to recast Explorex to a development stage company in the coming year".

Key Corporate Transaction Aspects

Advanced Stage Asset - once due diligence is completed, Explorex will focus on work that will lead to an updated feasibility study;

Platform for Growth - the Project will facilitate Explorex's business plan to leapfrog to a development stage company in combination with a diverse range of global cobalt exploration projects; and

Overnight Entrant - the Project sets Explorex on a rapid path to become an emerging entrant in the rechargeable battery supply chain.

Key Hautalampi Deposit Attributes

The Hautalampi deposit was the focus of development in the mid-1980's by Outokumpu Oy during which 2.1 km of underground development was completed, including an 850m decline and initial stope development to access the deposit and extract a 10,000-tonne bulk sample. However, declining commodity prices at that time curtailed advancement to full production. In 2009, a feasibility study ("Feasibility Study") was completed by Finn Nickel Oy, a previous owner and operator, to advance the project to production, but once again, work stopped due to falling metal prices.

The Feasibility Study outlined the mineral resources at Hautalampi, which Explorex is treating as a historical resource estimate under National Instrument 43-101 and not as a current mineral resource.

The historical mineral resources are summarized in the following table:

The exploration potential along trend towards the NE from Hautalampi is considered high. Multiple drill intersections have identified several distinct mineralized zones at different levels along a prospective 2,500 m corridor. The main Hautalampi deposit was the primary focus of the historic drilling and additional drilling will be required to properly define a mineral resource to NI 43-101 standards within this corridor. The geological setting and mineralization of these target zones are similar to the Hautalampi deposit.

The Hautalampi historical resource estimates of grade and tonnage in this press release are viewed as relevant based on the information and methods used at the time. A Qualified Person for Explorex has not sufficiently reviewed and verified the work to consider this a current mineral resource.

Additional work including, drilling, metallurgical test work, re-assaying and QC/QA will need to be completed to upgrade the historical resource to current NI 43-101 reporting standards. The Vendor has recently commenced this work by completing an 8-hole drill program for additional metallurgical work. Assay results of the drilling campaign are pending and will be reported in due course.

The Project comprises a 283.5 hectare mining concession, including surface rights, with an environmental and water discharge permit in full force and effect. The permits allow for the dewatering of the mine workings and rehabilitation of the access to the deposit.

Agreement Summary

The Letter of Intent ("LOI") dated March 16, 2018, certain portions of which are not binding and are subject to completion of due diligence and definitive transaction agreements (the "Transaction Agreement"), provides Explorex with the option to either (i) acquire a 91% interest in the Finnish company that owns the Hautalampi project; or (ii) enter into an earn in arrangement with the shareholders of the Finnish company over a maximum of 3 years to acquire a 91% interest. In either possible scenario, the vendors have the option to retain a 9% carried interest or convert the 9% carried interest to a 1.5% net metals royalty with Explorex acquiring the full 100% interest in the Finnish company. Explorex paid an aggregate of USD$50,000 (non-refundable) to the sellers on signing of the LOI.

On signing the LOI, Explorex will have a 90-day due diligence period to perform a comprehensive review of the technical data and evaluate the Project prior to committing to the transaction. Upon completion of the due diligence period and signing of the Transaction Agreement, Explorex will commit to fund an updated feasibility study and release the full details of the transaction terms once ratified. The Transaction Agreement will contain the definitive terms to acquire the Hautalampi project, which may be an all cash purchase or may be a combination of cash and shares of Explorex.

Final acceptance of the LOI is subject to terms and conditions customary to a deal of this nature, including regulatory acceptance and board approvals.

Project Background

The project is located 2 km SW of the town centre of Outokumpu, which is 45 km NW of the regional city of Joensuu, and 375 km NE of Helsinki in south eastern Finland. Infrastructure, labour supply and contractor availability in the immediate area is excellent due to extensive and nearby historic mining activity at both the Keretti poly-metallic mine and Vuonos copper mine. These historic mines gave rise to the Finnish stainless steel and mineral processing technology company, Outokumpu Oyj and Outotec Oyj. Year-round access is provided by a paved road running through the centre of the property, with a number of high voltage power lines present.

The Keretti mine, situated within the Project's mining concession, operated from 1913 to 1989 and produced a total of 28.5 Mt grading 3.8% Cu, 0.24% Co, 0.12% Ni, 1.1% Zn, 8.9 ppm Ag and 0.8 ppm Au. The Vuonos mine, located 6 km to the NNE from Keretti, operated from 1972 to 1986 and produced 5.5 Mt of ore grading 2.13% Cu, 1.32% Zn, 0.14% Co, 0.12% Ni and 10 ppm Ag. While these historic mining results have no impact on Hautalampi, they illustrate the extent of historic mining infrastructure in the immediate region.

Hautalampi is the unmined hanging-wall Co-Ni-Cu rich mineralised horizon occurring 150 to 200 metres vertically above the historic Keretti mine.

Geological Setting/Mineralization

The Hautalampi deposit lies within a NE trending 2 km wide horizon of black schists and serpentinite bodies that defines the western margin of the "Outokumpu belt". Mineralisation occurs in tightly folded metamorphic rocks consisting of mainly quartz rocks with anthophyllite-tremolite skarn bands and interlayers with variable amounts of chlorite. In some places the mineralised zone is also hosted by skarned dolomitic rocks. Minor diopside can occur with other skarn minerals. Mineralisation mainly occurs as disseminations in bands due to metamorphosis.

Some drill holes indicate that in the NW parts, the mineralisation is cut by the present erosion surface. Mineralisation has a 10 - 55 dip to the SE (averages 25-30). The main part of the mineralisation is some 70-120 m below surface and the deepest parts are 150 m below surface. Maximum thickness of the mineralization is up to 30 m.

Mining in Finland

Finland consistently ranks in the top three of the Fraser Institute's top global mining investment survey and is highly ranked as an underexplored, stable jurisdiction. Finland only opened its borders to foreign mining investment in the mid-1990s, prior to which all mining and exploration activities were conducted by state-controlled entities. Finland stands out for its expanding mining sector within the EU where mining has generally declined over the years. With the EU becoming increasingly concerned about dependency on imports for key raw materials, Finland offers a potential pipeline of supply security.

The scientific and technical disclosure in this news release has been supervised and approved by J. Harrop P.Geo., a Qualified Person as that term is defined in NI 43-101.

About Explorex Resources Inc.

Explorex is an exploration company that has an option agreement to acquire 100% in the Cobalt-Paragon project, located within the Cobalt Embayment region of north-eastern Ontario and is also earning a 70% interest in the Kagoot Brook Cobalt target in New Brunswick. The cobalt projects form a nucleus of a strategy to acquire additional projects where the commodity focus is on metals critical to rechargeable battery technology. The Company also owns 100% of the Silver Dollar project, subject to issuance of an additional 800,000 shares.

On behalf of the Board,

Gary Schellenberg,

CEO

For further information, please contact Gary Schellenberg, CEO or Mike Sieb, President at 604-681-0221 or Ron Birch at bircress@shaw.ca; phone 1-800-910-7711

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 press release.

Except for historical information contained herein, this news release contains forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially and there are no assurances that the transaction described in this news release will close on the terms described or at all. Except as required pursuant to applicable securities laws, the Company will not update these forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date hereof. More detailed information about potential factors that could affect financial results is included in the documents filed from time to time with the Canadian securities regulatory authorities by the Company. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward looking statements.

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Global investors must adhere to regulations of each country. Please read Investorideas.com privacy policy: https://www.investorideas.com/About/Private_Policy.aspMarch 22, 2018 (Investorideas.com Newswire) George Topping, an analyst with iA Securities, discussed the business combination arrangement on the table between the two mining companies.

Rye Patch's Florida Canyon Mine

George Topping, an iA Securities analyst, reported in a March 19 research note that Rye Patch Gold Corp. (RPM:TSX.V; RPMGD:OTCQX) announced that Alio Gold would acquire all of its outstanding shares. "While the offer for Rye Patch's recently commissioned mine in Nevada [with a 200 thousand ounce (200 Koz) per year plant] is highly undervalued, Alio brings a lot to the table in terms of cash, technical ability and risk reduction," he concluded, referencing Rye Patch's Florida Canyon mine.

The analyst described Alio as a junior producer with three mines in Mexico, one in production, another in development and a third in exploration. The company produced 83.5 Koz in 2017 and guided for 90100 Koz in 2018. Major shareholders of Alio include Goldcorp and the Lundin Group.

The "upside for Rye Patch," Topping explained, would come from Alio's $51.6 million ($51.6M) cash reserve, its cash flow-generating assets and its team's expertise, all of which would further mitigate risk during the continuing Florida Canyon mine ramp-up.

Via the proposed merger, Rye Patch shareholders would receive 0.48 of a common share of Alio in the place of one Rye Patch share. This represents a 35% premium over the 20-day volume weighted average price and is equal to about $1.57 per share, or $128M undiluted. "With 47% ownership of Alio going forward, Rye Patch shareholders will still enjoy the growth in production and gold prices but at a much reduced technical, managerial and financial risk," Topping noted. The Rye Patch-Alio deal is expected to close on May 25, 2018.

However, Topping indicated "many Rye Patch shareholders were disenchanted" with the proposed transaction and several bigger ones, along with members of management, have already chosen to tender their shares. Further, a competing bid is unlikely, he added, largely because "the $15.3M warrants with an exercise price of $1.65 are a deterrent to a materially higher offer."

IA Securities revised its rating on Rye Patch to Tender from Buy and reduced its price target to CA$1.60 per share from CA$3.25 per share. Rye Patch is currently trading at around CA$1.26/share.

Read what other experts are saying about:

Disclosure:

1) Doresa Banning compiled this article for Streetwise Reports LLC and provides services to Streetwise reports as an independent contractor. She or members of her household own securities of the following companies mentioned in the article: None. She or members of her household are paid by the following companies mentioned in this article: None.

2) The following companies mentioned in this article are sponsors of Streetwise Reports: Rye Patch Gold Corp. Streetwise Reports does not accept stock in exchange for its services. Click here for important disclosures about sponsor fees. The information provided above is for informational purposes only and is not a recommendation to buy or sell any security.

3) Comments and opinions expressed are those of the specific experts and not of Streetwise Reports or its officers.

4) The article does not constitute investment advice. Each reader is encouraged to consult with his or her individual financial professional and any action a reader takes as a result of information presented here is his or her own responsibility. By opening this page, each reader accepts and agrees to Streetwise Reports' terms of use and full legal disclaimer. This article is not a solicitation for investment. Streetwise Reports does not render general or specific investment advice and the information on Streetwise Reports should not be considered a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Streetwise Reports does not endorse or recommend the business, products, services or securities of any company mentioned on Streetwise Reports.

5) From time to time, Streetwise Reports LLC and its directors, officers, employees or members of their families, as well as persons interviewed for articles and interviews on the site, may have a long or short position in securities mentioned. Directors, officers, employees or members of their immediate families are prohibited from making purchases and/or sales of those securities in the open market or otherwise from the time of the interview or the decision to write an article, until one week after the publication of the interview or article.

Disclosures from iA Securities, Rye Patch Gold Corp., Research Update, Mar. 19, 2018

Conflicts of Interest: The research analyst and or associates who prepared this report are compensated based upon (among other factors) the overall profitability of iA Securities, which may include the profitability of investment banking and related services. In the normal course of its business, iA Securities may provide financial advisory services for the issuers mentioned in this report. iA Securities may buy from or sell to customers the securities of issuers mentioned in this report on a principal basis.

Analyst's Certification: Each iA Securities research analyst whose name appears on the front page of this research report hereby certifies that (i) the recommendations and opinions expressed in the research report accurately reflect the research analyst's personal views about the issuer and securities that are the subject of this report and all other companies and securities mentioned in this report that are covered by such research analyst and (ii) no part of the research analyst's compensation was, is, or will be directly or indirectly, related to the specific recommendations or views expressed by such research analyst in this report.

Analyst Trading: iA Securities permits analysts to own and trade in the securities and or the derivatives of the issuer under their research coverage, subject to the following restrictions. No trades can be executed in anticipation of coverage for a period of 30 days prior to the issuance of the report and 5 days after the dissemination of the report to our clients. For a change in recommendation, no trading is allowed for a period of 24 hours after the dissemination of such information to our clients. A transaction against an analyst's recommendation can only be executed for a reason unrelated to the outlook of the stock for the issuer and with the prior approval of the Director of Research and the Chief Compliance Officer.

Within the last 12 months, iA Securities has received compensation for investment banking services or has provided investment banking services with respect to the securities of the issuer.

In the past 12 months, iA Securities has managed or co-managed a public offering of securities for the issuer.

The analyst has visited the issuer's operations. No payment or reimbursement was received from the issuer for the associated travel costs.

In the past 12 months, neither iA Securities, its officers or directors, nor any analyst involved in the preparation of this report have provided services to the issuer for remuneration other than normal course investment advisory or trade execution services.

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Global investors must adhere to regulations of each country. Please read Investorideas.com privacy policy: https://www.investorideas.com/About/Private_Policy.aspMarch 22, 2018 (Investorideas.com Newswire) Technical analyst Clive Maund talks about the world's largest and lowest cost producer of both lead and silver.

South32 Ltd. (S32:ASX) has the distinction of owning the giant Cannington Mine, the world's largest and lowest cost producer of both lead and silver, which is good to know, since we are of the opinion that silver is at a very low price and is an extremely good value investment here. The company is also a very big producer of other base metals, but as far as is known has not yet discovered any unobtanium. The stock charts only go back about 3 years because the company was spun off from BHP Billiton several years ago.

On the all data chart which goes back to mid-2015 we can see that after being spun off, South32 continued to drop in a severe downtrend in sympathy with a weak sector, until it hit bottom in January 2016. It then reversed into a strong uptrend, again in sympathy with a now strong sector, but while the sector advance stopped and reversed in August 2016, South32 carried on to higher levels until December 2016, and then ran off into a long consolidation pattern that ended with an upside breakout the following September. This quite strong upleg continued until January and last month it reacted back to its rising 200-day moving average and to a point not far above the support level shown, where it is suspected to be forming an intermediate base pattern, because the rising 200-day moving average is an indication that the trend is still up, and this factor is thought to override the rather weak On-balance Volume line in the recent past, especially because of the now positive outlook for gold and particularly silver.

The following chart is the same all data chart as the one above, but with the Market Vectors Gold Miners ETF, GDX, overlayed, so that the performance of South32 can be compared with the performance of the PM sector as a whole. As we can see, it moved with it until the Summer of 2016, but after that South32 outperformed significantly, which is all the more impressive given the drab performance of silver over the past year or two.

On the 1-year chart we can see recent action in rather more detail, in particular how the reaction back from the January high has presented a better entry point. The still rising 200-day moving average and proximity of strong support indicate a high probability that it will turn up from this area, and it is currently believed to be making a small Double Bottom with its late January low, that will lead to another upleg.

The number of shares in issue is a daunting 5.2 billion, but that doesnt seem to have slowed it down, probably because it is a mining company whose output of silver and base metals is on a truly gigantic scale.

A preliminary search for the company's website turned up what I at first thought was a social or welfare club. When you enter it you find yourself on a website that is wonderfully politically correct, and for example it is easier to find information on the company's anti-slavery policy than it is to find information on production and the company appears to be almost apologizing for mining as in "Look, we have to make these big holes in the ground, so that you can have metals for your cars, iphones and washing machines etc  it's enough to make an old school miner cringe  wonder what Crocodile Dundee would have to say about it? that in reality they would look more like all-in wrestlers.

Back to South32, while the companys website may portray it is as a social club and a fun place to work, the underlying reality is that they produce the goods and in vast quantities, and in a world in which many companies produce nothing of any substance, it represents a solid investment at a time when commodities look set to move to the forefront and become one of the best performing sectors.

South32 is thus rated as a solid investment here for the future, that is at a good entry point after its recent dip. The company's stock also trades on the London Stock Exchange in big volumes and the Johannesburg Stock Exchange.

South32 website

South32 Ltd, S32.ASX, S32.LSS, closed at A$3.18 on 13th March 18, trading at 181.10 at 2.53 pm GMT on 13th March 18.

tay tuned  for upcoming reports on neighboring South31 and South33.

Clive Maund has been president of www.clivemaund.com, a successful resource sector website, since its inception in 2003. He has 30 years' experience in technical analysis and has worked for banks, commodity brokers and stockbrokers in the City of London. He holds a Diploma in Technical Analysis from the UK Society of Technical Analysts.

Disclosure:

1) Clive Maund: I, or members of my immediate household or family, own shares of the following companies mentioned in this article: None. I personally am, or members of my immediate household or family are, paid by the following companies mentioned in this article: None. My company has a financial relationship with the following companies mentioned in this article: None. CliveMaund.com disclosures below. I determined which companies would be included in this article based on my research and understanding of the sector.



2) The following companies mentioned in this article are billboard sponsors of Streetwise Reports: None. Click here for important disclosures about sponsor fees.

3) Statements and opinions expressed are the opinions of the author and not of Streetwise Reports or its officers. The author is wholly responsible for the validity of the statements. The author was not paid by Streetwise Reports for this article. Streetwise Reports was not paid by the author to publish or syndicate this article. The information provided above is for informational purposes only and is not a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Streetwise Reports requires contributing authors to disclose any shareholdings in, or economic relationships with, companies that they write about. Streetwise Reports relies upon the authors to accurately provide this information and Streetwise Reports has no means of verifying its accuracy.

4) This article does not constitute investment advice. Each reader is encouraged to consult with his or her individual financial professional and any action a reader takes as a result of information presented here is his or her own responsibility. By opening this page, each reader accepts and agrees to Streetwise Reports' terms of use and full legal disclaimer. This article is not a solicitation for investment. Streetwise Reports does not render general or specific investment advice and the information on Streetwise Reports should not be considered a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Streetwise Reports does not endorse or recommend the business, products, services or securities of any company mentioned on Streetwise Reports.

5) From time to time, Streetwise Reports LLC and its directors, officers, employees or members of their families, as well as persons interviewed for articles and interviews on the site, may have a long or short position in securities mentioned. Directors, officers, employees or members of their immediate families are prohibited from making purchases and/or sales of those securities in the open market or otherwise from the time of the interview or the decision to write an article, until one week after the publication of the interview or article.

Charts provided by the author.

CliveMaund.com Disclosure:

The above represents the opinion and analysis of Mr Maund, based on data available to him, at the time of writing. Mr. Maund's opinions are his own, and are not a recommendation or an offer to buy or sell securities. Mr. Maund is an independent analyst who receives no compensation of any kind from any groups, individuals or corporations mentioned in his reports. As trading and investing in any financial markets may involve serious risk of loss, Mr. Maund recommends that you consult with a qualified investment advisor, one licensed by appropriate regulatory agencies in your legal jurisdiction and do your own due diligence and research when making any kind of a transaction with financial ramifications. Although a qualified and experienced stock market analyst, Clive Maund is not a Registered Securities Advisor. Therefore Mr. Maund's opinions on the market and stocks can only be construed as a solicitation to buy and sell securities when they are subject to the prior approval and endorsement of a Registered Securities Advisor operating in accordance with the appropriate regulations in your area of jurisdiction.

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Global investors must adhere to regulations of each country. Please read Investorideas.com privacy policy: https://www.investorideas.com/About/Private_Policy.aspThe Ames Main Street Farmers Market is a local market that has been a staple of downtown Ames for the past eight years. The market Carol J. Adams, MDiv (Yale University), is a feminist-vegan advocate, activist, independent scholar, and prolific author. Her newest book, "Protest Kitchen: Fight Injustice, Save the Planet, and Fuel Your Resistance One Meal at a Time," will be released Oct. 1. A collaborative effort between multiple universities, nonprofits, and individuals is bringing Ms. Adams to Chattanooga on March 28-29 for three presentations.

She will speak on the Sexual Politics of Meat on March 28 at 7 p.m. at UTC in the Tennessee Room, University Center. She will speak on "an evolving and challenging presentation that uses images of women and animals in contemporary popular culture to discuss oppressive attitudes."

Her talk on March 29 at 11 a.m. at Southern Adventist University in the Lynn Wood Chapel will be Dreaming of an Inclusive Democracy. The lecture covers the connections between racism, sexism and attitudes toward animals.

Justice in the Small Things will be the topic on March 28 at 2 p.m. at the Hamilton Family Justice Center. The lecture will cover Alzheimers, aging parents, and care giving.

All presentations are free and open to the public.La Paz Chattanooga hosts its annual Sangria on the Bluff fundraising event on Thursday, May 17, to benefit Chattanoogas Latino community.

Sangria on the Bluff is La Paz Chattanoogas much-anticipated annual cultural event highlighting Latino and Hispanic heritage. The Hunter Museum will serve as this year's backdrop to an evening of cultural richness and vibrancy.

Spain will be featured this year, acknowledging the root of Hispanic heritage, influencing what is known as Latin America. Spanish culture will be showcased through performances from dance group Calo Gitano. Fresh sangria, beer and wine will be served next to an array of authentic Spanish cuisine.

The event will be held at the Hunter Museum of American Art from 6:30-10:30 p.m. Tickets can be purchased for $85 online at www.lapazchattanooga.org/sangria.

Sponsors include Coca-Cola, Kelly Cars and First Tennessee.

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Guest Commentary Fair maps for our children, for our Hispanic communities, for our futures My son will vote for the first time next year. And for his first time, the state of Indiana will have brand new legislative and congressional districts. It should feel like a clean...

Voice of the People During the 13 years I have called Chesterton my home, there are few small-town activities I have come to enjoy quite like the high schools homecoming parade. It is always a beautiful moment of celebrating our students, gathering for an afternoon of fun and seeing...

Voice of the People I find it hard to believe that the majority of Town employees will put their self-interest over the GREATER GOOD which is, the viability of the Town of Chesterton by not getting vaccinated. Our town tried to save money by self-insuring itself. We could be...HOLLYWOOD CALLING The cast of Out of the Blue was out on the town earlier this month as actors, cameramen, producers and directors set up shop to film scenes at Simpatico Jamestown....

Proposal would allow dogs off leashes Dogs will be able to run free during the offseason at seven publicly owned recreational facilities, including Fort Getty, if a proposed ordinance written by Councilman Randy White is approved....

Council seeks input on future of parking lot The town council wants to hear from residents about what to do with the municipal lot on Narragansett Avenue that was turned into an outdoor dining room to support restaurants...The China-Canada Tourism Year 2018 was launched here Wednesday with an aim to strengthen cooperation between China and Canada in terms of tourism flows and investments.

Canadian tourists interact with Chinese mythological figures in Taizhou city, east Chinas Jiangsu Province on March 13, 2018. [Photo: IC]

An official ceremony was held at Toronto's Four Seasons Center for the Performing Arts and attended by high-level officials and hundreds of representatives from the tourism industry in both countries.

Canadian Minister of Small Business and Tourism Bardish Chagger said at the ceremony that the tourism year will not only promote the industry, but also will boost mutual understanding and bilateral ties.

Chinese Ambassador to Canada Lu Shaye told Xinhua that the tourism year is a milestone in the relationship between China and Canada.

Canadian Ambassador to China John McCallum said the hosting of the Tourism Year program will open a new chapter of bilateral tourism exchange and cooperation and help advance bilateral relations.

Since China and Canada established diplomatic relations in 1970, the political, economic, trade and people-to-people bonds between the two countries have been deepened, yielding fruits that benefit both Chinese and Canadian people in various fields.

China is currently Canada's second largest trading partner. In 2017, more than 1.5 million visits were made between the two countries, promoting people-to-people exchanges and bilateral cooperation.

Canada has set a goal of doubling the number of Chinese tourists visiting Canada by 2021. It recently opened seven new visa application centers in China to facilitate trips of Chinese visitors.At the UN Human Rights Council [official website] Wednesday, 45 nations condemned [text] the increasingly authoritarian actions taken by the regime in Cambodia.

Last fall, opposition leader Kem Sokha [JURIST report] was jailed and is being held in terrible conditions in an isolated prison. Shortly thereafter, his party was officially dissolved by the supreme court. The partys previous leader Sam Rainsy [JURIST report] has been in exile since 2015. These actions were taken based on the claim that the party was collaborating with the United States in a plot to overthrow the government. Under the current regime the freedom of press organizations and NGOs has been limited.

With elections scheduled for July of this year, these nations warn against back tracking on progress towards democracy. The condemnation came from New Zealands representative to the human rights council and countries in agreement include Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, the US and the United Kingdom. They demand a reversal to these actions that threaten democracy. For their part, the representative from Cambodia brushed aside the rebuke and criticized the council for considering this topic that was not on the agenda.ROGUE RIVER, Ore.  A man from Rogue River has been arrested and accused of sexually abusing a young girl, according to the Oregon State Police (OSP). The arrest occurred on March 14, 2018.

A statement from OSP claims that 18-year-old Daniel Cooley abused the young lady when she was 12-years-old or younger. The abuse continued over a period of several years, in multiple jurisdictions throughout Oregon.

A Josephine County Grand Jury indicted Cooley on March 20 for two counts of First-Degree Sexual Abuse and one count of Unlawful Sexual Penetration in the second degree. Cooley's bail has been set at $100,000.

The OSP statement stresses that the investigation of Cooley's conduct is still underway, and they anticipate more charges. They ask that anyone with information regarding the case contact OSP Detective Bryan Scott at (541) 618-7957.MEDFORD, Ore.  People in the Rogue Valley with serious injuries will no longer be airlifted to Portland. Asante Rogue Regional Medical Center is now a Level 2 trauma center, the only one in Southern Oregon.

The hospital says it expects this to help increase care to its patients.

Hospital Trauma "Level" Designations (in short): Level I - Provides the highest level of comprehensive care for severely injured adults and pediatric patients with complex, multi-system trauma. This is the regional resource trauma center and can provide total patient care for every aspect of injury, from prevention through rehabilitation.

Provides the highest level of comprehensive care for severely injured adults and pediatric patients with complex, multi-system trauma. This is the regional resource trauma center and can provide total patient care for every aspect of injury, from prevention through rehabilitation. Level II - Similar to Level I, with the ability to provide care for severely injured individuals with complex trauma. Has a broad range of specialists available and comprehensive diagnostic capabilities.

Similar to Level I, with the ability to provide care for severely injured individuals with complex trauma. Has a broad range of specialists available and comprehensive diagnostic capabilities. Level III - Provides initial evaluation and stabilization, including surgical intervention. Can provide comprehensive inpatient services to patients who can be maintained in a stable or improving condition. Critically injured patients are transferred to a higher level hospital.

Provides initial evaluation and stabilization, including surgical intervention. Can provide comprehensive inpatient services to patients who can be maintained in a stable or improving condition. Critically injured patients are transferred to a higher level hospital. Level IV - Provides resuscitation and stabilization of the severely injured, before transfer to a higher level hospital. This may include some surgical intervention. Trained nursing personnel are available to perform life-saving maneuvers.

Serena Neve, who lives in Grants Pass, knows firsthand the pain from having a family member air-lifted to a hospital hours away. A dog attacked her son, Jeremiah, earlier this winter. His face, scalp, and neck received serious injuries.

"The top part of his scalp is ripped off," Neve said. "It definitely would've made it a lot easier on our family to not be separated."

To become a Level 2 trauma center, Asante had to fulfill certain requirements, such as have a surgeon and anesthesiologist on-call 24 hours a day. They must also have a neurosurgeon and trauma-trained nursing staff readily available at all hours.

The hospital had to spend a significant amount to upgrade, according to Jackie DeSilva, the trauma coordinator. But it came out of the hospital's own budget.

"I don't know the exact price point but there definitely was a surge in money they had to be put forward," said DeSilva. "We decided that it was worth it to be able to take care of her community, and to do what we need to do for people in our area."

DeSilva says it's been operating at a Level 2 standard for several years, to prove that it was capable. The state officially gave it the Level 2 status in December.

Providence Medford Medical Center is currently a Level 3 hospital. "Providence provides excellent emergency care, and we have successfully completed our Level 3 re-certification. We continue to work together with other health care providers to support the needs of the communities we serve," said Maria Calloway, Providence Chief Nursing Officer.

According to the American Trauma Society, the primary distinction between Level 1 hospitals (like the Oregon Health & Science University hospital in Portland) and Level 2 hospitals is one of education. Level 1 hospitals provide continuing education and research programs for medical practitioners.

If you want to help Jeremiah's family with medical costs, visit their GoFundMe.

Map Credit: Oregon Health Authority (the interactive map of hospitals can be found here)EAGLE POINT, Ore. -- Parents expect their students to be safe when their kids are at school. A Southern Oregon school district is making it harder for someone to break through their schools windows. Windows and doors at Eagle Point School District schools are covered in SolarGard . Its a film that holds shattered glass together when its hit or shot at, like you can see here in the company's video. The left side shows how quickly an intruder is able to get through a shattered window without SolarGard  in about 10 seconds. On the right, the video shows the intruder trying to break through a window with SolarGard . It takes about a minute and a half for him to get through.

"I've heard over and over again the last couple of years with school shootings that if we had some way of knowing, 15-20 seconds to respond could have saved lives. Our district made a significant financial investment to make sure we have solargards in all of our schools," said the Attendance and Student Services Supervisor for the Eagle Point School District, Phil Ortega.

The Eagle Point School District describes SolarGard  as an extra layer of deterrent for someone trying to bust through a window. It allows faculty and students extra time to get to safety.

"Its frustrates [the intruder]. They had a plan in place and now they have something that's stopping them from doing that so now they're focusing on a window as opposed to trying to focus on trying to find that next target, which once again, is buying seconds," said the School Resource Officer, Officer Michael Anselmi.

In a school shooting every second counts.

"Seconds can mean pulling a kid from a hallway when they went to a restroom to get into a classroom so they don't become a victim. It gives staff enough time to deal with students with special needs to get them the medication or things that they might need to survive. It means the world," said Ortega.

The Eagle Point School District said this is just one way its protecting its students from becoming potential victims. On Wednesday, Hillside Elementary School practiced what to do just in case someone did come on campus and threaten everyones safety.

"We are going to have a drill. I repeat we are going to have a drill at this point we are going to follow with our ALICE protocol and we are going to be barricading our classrooms," said Principal Jodi Salinas over the PA system. She said practice makes perfect.

"Because when we practice it becomes automatic and that's why we practice fire drills so that it becomes automatic so if they hear this they know to do this. So depending on the situation they know how to react and keep themselves safe," Salinas added.

ALICE drills are no exception. ALICE stands for alert, lockdown, inform, counter, evacuate it helps keep students and faculty safe if there is an intruder on campus. The school district said this drill is important for students of all ages.

"Every single day that I come to school, I ask myself did I do more harm than good. When we practice, we initiate a sense of direction and ownership of my safety, for their safety, for staff safety so I appreciate that our school district does practice and make it a priority," Ortega said.

Staff, including Salinas, Ortega and Anselmi went to different classrooms making sure, students were inside, the doors were locked and windows were covered so if the real thing happened, students would know exactly what to do.

"Because our kids lives depend on it," Ortega said.

NewsWatch 12 reached out to other school districts in our region. The Ashland School District said it is currently reviewing a product similar to SolarGard .ACROSS OREGON-- Oregon continues to reform its rape kit backlog-- with the recent passage of a statewide tracking system.

It's one of many pieces of legislation aimed at making sure kits don't sit untested for years.

Just a few years ago, Oregon State Police said there were over 5000 kits waiting to be tested, now there are around 1000 left to be tested.

The backlog progress comes after a state law ordered quicker testing and more funding.

Labs, both in and out of the state, are within months of finishing tests on thousands of older kits that had built up in police custody...since 1983.

Survivor and activist Danielle Tudor says with the passage of the new tracking system, Oregon has completed its last pillar of backlog reform.

Danielle Tudor says, "The hope and the goal is that it will inspire future victims to think twice and think, hey maybe it is worth it for me to report my rape and have that kit done because they are going to do something with it. I have a fair chance at justice."

Tudor says they will be putting together a task force to decide which tracking system will be implemented.

She says we may use the system the Portland Police Bureau invented which uses barcodes and keeps victims up to date on the progress of their kits.

Oregon along with California, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and Utah are some of the few states that have given survivors the right to know the status of their kit.The offices of Cambridge Analytica (CA) in central London, after it was announced that Britain's information commissioner Elizabeth Denham is pursuing a warrant to search Cambridge Analytica's computer servers, Tuesday March 20, 2018. Denham said Tuesday that she is using all her legal powers to investigate Facebook and political campaign consultants Cambridge Analytica over the alleged misuse of millions of people's data. Cambridge Analytica said it is committed to helping the U.K. investigation. (Kirsty O'Connor/PA via AP)FILE - In this Dec. 17, 2017 file photo, CNN president Jeff Zucker attends the 11th annual CNN Heroes: An All-Star Tribute in New York. Zucker says that rival Fox News Channel is a propaganda machine that is doing an incredible disservice to the country. Zucker spoke Thursday at the Financial Times Future of News conference. (Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP, File)The Cenovus logo seen at the company's headquarters in Calgary, Wednesday, Nov. 15, 2017. Cenovus Energy Inc. says it has been running its oilsands operations at reduced production rates and storing excess production due to are wider-than-normal light-heavy oil price differentials and pipeline capacity constraints. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Jeff McIntoshCeline Dion performs in memory and honour of her late husband Rene Angelil at the Gala Adisq awards ceremony in Montreal, Sunday, October 30, 2016. Dion has cancelled a string of shows between March 27 and April 18 due to a hearing condition called Patulous Eustachian tube that she says will require a "minimally invasive surgical procedure." THE CANADIAN PRESS/Graham HughesUh-oh! It could be you, or it could be us, but there's no page here.West Kelowna Mayor Doug Findlater, shown here in a file photo beside the town's welcome sign, said Tuesday taxpayers are tired of being nickel-and-dimed as he voted down a proposed new levy that would have netted the municipality an extra $450,000 a year.Most of the 300-plus trees that once flanked Kelowna's Haunted Lane have now been cut down, or soon will be. The tall cedars flanked an alley on the north side of Guisachan Heritage Park.FILE- In this June 17, 2017, file photo, Bill Cosby exits the Montgomery County Courthouse after a mistrial was declared in Norristown, Pa. On Thursday, March 15, 2018, a judge agreed to let five additional Cosby accusers testify at his April 2 sexual assault retrial, giving prosecutors a chance to portray the man once known as "America's Dad" as a serial predator who made a habit of drugging and molesting women. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke, File)Lottie Small use the die stamping press at the workshop of Barnard and Westwood in London, who are printing the invitations for Prince Harry and Meghan Markle's wedding in May, Thursday March 22, 2018. Prince Harry and Meghan will get married at St George's Chapel in Windsor Castle on Saturday May 19. (Victoria Jones/Pool via AP)Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, March 22)  A Filipino-American boy might just meet Stranger Things stars Millie Bobby Brown and Gaten Matarazzo on his next birthday after the two actors asked him for invites to his celebration.

After his sister tweeted classmates had skipped his Stranger Things-themed party, two of the series' stars have volunteered to join in the Lambat family's next celebration.

"What!!!! Oh Well You can let them all know that everyone on behalf on Stranger things would've come! I think your awesome and next year I would like an invite... Please?" said Brown on Twitter.

What!!!! Oh Well You can let them all know that everyone on behalf on Stranger things wouldve come! I think your awesome and next year I would like an invite... Please? https://t.co/gNir0sMpsm

 Millie Bobby Brown (@milliebbrown) March 20, 2018

Brown was reacting to a tweet by the boy's sister, Ayen Lambat, which showed a Stranger Things-themed cake and Christmas lights mimicking scenes from the popular tv series.

"My brother invited 8 of his classmates for his Stranger Things-themed bday party & none of their punk selves showed up," Lambat tweeted on March 18.

Ayen also posted a video of her brother, Aaron, blowing his cake.

After seeing Brown's tweet, Materazzo, who plays Dustin in the series, said he wanted in on the future celebration.

"Count me in too! I'll bring the chocolate pudding," he said.

As of writing, Brown's tweet has more than 504,000 likes.

Ayen, meanwhile, posted an update on Aaron, saying he's "chilling now" and has decided not to go to his classmate's parties if they invite him in the future.

Aside from Brown and Materazzo, other celebrities also took time to greet the birthday boy.

Shannon Purser, who played Barb in Stranger Things wished Aaron a happy birthday

"I hope he had a great birthday nonetheless!!! Barb totally would have been there!" she said.

Filipino-American social media personality Bretman Rock also greeted his fellow Filipino.

"Awww Happy Birthday !! I love all the Filipino food," he said.FILE - This Aug. 26,1968, file photo shows Chairman of the Alabama Democratic Party Robert Vance at Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Vance, who became a U.S. circuit judge, was killed by Walter Leroy Moody Jr., with a mail bomb in 1989. Alabama has set an April 19, 2018, execution date for Moody. (AP Photo/File)Manila (CNN Philippines Life)  On the day of Ryan*s funeral, his mom, Delia*, placed chicks on top of the coffin.

Noong inilibing na, nanghina yung sisiw, she says. Pamahiin yun, para yung pumatay, magsisi. Yung gumawa, makonsensya.

Her son died on Sept. 17, 2016, after a man in a black masked bonnet shot him seven times  one in the heart, two in the gut, and the rest across his torso.

Nagtitinda ho talaga siya, she says, gently admitting that her son was, in fact, a drug pusher.

Nag-usap pa kami nung araw ng Huwebes kasi Sabado po nangyari yun eh  Sabi sa akin, Nay kaya ako gumagawa ng ganito kasi hindi niyo mapapagawa yung bahay at saka yung mata mo hindi mapaoperahan, she shares.

In 2015, their house in Mandaluyong was one of the casualties of a fire that burned down over 800 houses. Delia says that 34-year-old Ryan, being the eldest, had to find ways to help rebuild their home and feed their family, especially since she and her husband do not have regular jobs.

Another mother still mourning the homicide of her child is Grace*, a vegetable vendor in Mandaluyong, whose daughter, Rachel*, died in Oct. 16, 2016. Rachel was at a friends house with four other people when a man in a black masked bonnet, again, barged in and shot all of them that night.

Sabi ng mga kapitbahay nanlaban daw yung anak ko. Dapa! sabi daw ng nagtokhang, sabi daw dumapa daw siya pero sabi bumangon daw yung anak ko, nanlaban daw, Grace recalls.

Delia's (left) son died on Sept. 17, 2016, after a man in a black masked bonnet shot her son seven times  one in the heart, two in the gut, and the rest across his torso. Photo by JL JAVIER

She admits that Rachel used shabu from time to time, but asserts that her daughter never once sold drugs. Rachel, who bore four children, had convinced her mother to sell their house because she wanted all of them to leave the city and move to the province to start anew.

The day of the incident, she found a buyer of their home, got 200,000 in hard cash  and the promise of a better life.

Wag niyong kunin yung pera, benta ng bahay namin yan. Para sa nanay at anak ko yan. Magbabagong buhay na ako. Yan ang sabi. Wala pa rin. Binaril pa rin, Grace shares as her voice breaks.

'The war on drugs is a war on the poor'

According to the Human Rights Watch World Report 2018, more than 12,000 drug users and dealers have been killed since 2016, of which 4,000 were during operations headed by the police while the rest by unidentified gunmen. The same report states that these victims mostly come from families in urban poor communities across the country.

In these urban poor areas, victims of extrajudicial killings are largely male, and are usually the breadwinners of the family. Anna*, a member of Samahan ng Nagkakaisang Pamilya ng Pantawid (SNPP), which is a collective of beneficiaries of the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps), says that shes seen how disabling the death of a man in a household has been in the community that she helps in Mandaluyong.

She also says that most of the victims of the killings are also beneficiaries of the 4Ps, a development program led by the Department of Social Welfare and Development that provides cash grants to the poorest of the poor. As part of SNPP, Anna, together with other members, aims to give voices to other beneficiaries of 4Ps and also urge the government to include more Filipinos who need the cash support the most. At the moment, the unconditional cash transfer provided is only at 200 per month or 6 a day per family.

Dapat naman kasi yung pinapatay yung puno, Anna says. Hindi yung mga mahihirap na kagaya nila, kasi kung puno ang napatay, wala na ang shabu na yan.

Annas work with SNPP typically involves talking to families in her communities and asking what else can be done to help them. But it was only when she was approached by EveryWoman, an all-female coalition that defends the dignity and rights of Filipino women, to look for female victims of extrajudicial killings that she started meeting with women like Grace and Delia.

Kaya napunta ako sa kanila kasi alam ko yung limang pinatay, [kasama yung anak ni Grace], she says. Doon din ako naawa sa mga bata na naiwanan. Kaya sabi ko sige, kung kailangan niyo ng mga tao na ganon na mga EJK, ikutin ko sila dito sa Mandaluyong, gusto ko matulungan sila.

She also strongly opposes the war on drugs, saying that only the poor are being targeted. Kaya isa ako diyan na hindi pumapayag na pinapatay sila. Dapat naman kasi yung pinapatay yung puno, she says. Hindi yung mga mahihirap na kagaya nila, kasi kung puno ang napatay, wala na ang shabu na yan.

Her claim is not groundless, especially when cases against alleged drug lords like Kerwin Espinosa, Peter Lim, and Peter Co were dismissed. Amnesty Internationals investigation has also revealed how the police have systematically targeted the poor.

Kaya kahit papaano nagpasalamat kami na pumasok yung mga tumutulong na yan, she says, referring to EveryWoman for all the help extended to their community.

Napakaimportante yun, malaking bagay yun, adds Grace, who EveryWoman helped when her husband was rushed to the hospital.

The direct effect on women

Formed during the congressional inquiry on Sen. Leila de Lima, EveryWoman includes individuals and community groups that advocate for womens rights. One of these is Baigani, a community that helps widows, mothers, and children of those killed because of the war on drugs.

Kristina Gaerlan, a member of Baigani, says that shes been part of the feminist movement for years now, and when President Duterte took office, she also joined discussions on the feminist agenda of the administration.

Natuwa pa kami diba kasi pro-Reproductive Health Bill siya [pero] nung nag-rape joke na siya, uh oh. Something is wrong, she says.

Grace is a vegetable vendor in Mandaluyong. Her daughter, Rachel*, died in Oct. 16, 2016. Rachel was at a friends house with four other people when a man in a black masked bonnet barged in and shot all of them that night. Photo by JL JAVIER

During the first year of Dutertes presidency, when death tolls continued to rise due to drug-related killings, she, together with other women, initiated Baigani.

We realized already as early as then that karamihan na namamatay ay lalaki at ang nababalo, ang naiiwan, ay mga kababaihan. So there was really going to be a serious impact on women nung EJKs, she says.

The majority of the burden of raising children are now placed on the women, she explains. Grace, for example, is the only person providing for her family composed of three children, 10 grandchildren, and her ailing husband.

Gaerlan adds that these urban poor communities are those that do not have access to reproductive health information, so most of Baiganis beneficiaries are families with at least five children. It is also not only the women that are gravely stigmatized, but the children as well. When they would go around to ask children about their identities, some would automatically say that theyre anak ng natokhang.

There is a ripple effect on the children, and the mothers, she says, had to deal with other practical concerns first before they can even deal with getting involved with the psychological effects of the incident to their children.

Yung mga nanay, they barely have the time or the energy to address this, she says.

Women supporting other women

A continuous initiative that the organization does is holding what they call a family camp, where they invite 10 to 12 families, which usually amounts to 60 heads, to go out of town (the exact place withheld by Gaerlan for safety purposes).

For three days, these women and children attend a series of activities and different forms of therapy sessions  from art therapy for children to laughing therapy for the moms  that aim to make sense of their grief, as well as share ways on how they can all help each other.

Pinapaalala namin na grief is not linear, na akala mo pag naka-move on ka na okay na yun. Hindi. Sometimes grief comes back in waves, she says. So tinuturo sa kanila yun para hindi sila natatakot para nauunawan [nila] so they can deal with it better.

The camp also has licensed professionals and counsellors that facilitate the sessions. They started the first camp in the summer of 2017 and facilitated another one in December 2017. Ang layunin namin ay una, to provide them with a safe space para makapag-share ng mga kwento nila. Makapag-grieve, Gaerlan says. Kahit papano, from their sharing, matuto sila how to cope.

But it wasnt so easy to have the women share, she says. The killings, she adds, has heightened the sense of distrust and fear in communities. Gaerlan recalls one woman shared during the camp that nobody from their neighborhood attended the burial of her husband because nobody wanted to be associated with them. It was just her, alone and drenched in rain, mourning.

Pinapaalala namin na grief is not linear, na akala mo pag naka-move on ka na okay na yun. Hindi. Sometimes grief comes back in waves. Kristina Gaerlan

She also recalls another woman who said that she was physically abused by her husband. The woman said that she had trouble reconciling her sense of relief and her sadness because of her husbands untimely death. Gaerlan says that the range of the stories and the complexities of the situations were challenging to digest, but once the women share, she says that the families were able to see similarities and particularities that resonated with each other.

[Malaki] nga yung impact dun sa ibang mga nanay. Yung isa na medyo suicidal na siya, alam mo madilim talaga yung mukha niya, she shares. Yung mga exercises, nung una, halos hindi niya ginagawa pero tintutukan siya ng facilitator tapos ayun, sabi niya, after so long, nakatawa na siya.

Where do we go from here?

For the last day of the camp, the facilitators dedicate sessions on helping women find concrete ways to move forward. The women share their skills, their strengths, and together, attendees and counsellors, suggest plausible livelihood and jobs that they could take on.

There is also resource sharing, ranging from what the other families can do to help another family to giving them a list of organizations, such as Caritas, that they may be able to ask help from.

These practical ways are doable, but the call for justice doesnt seem to be. Delia and Grace are both afraid to take their cases to court for fear of being targeted again.

Ako sa totoo lang gusto ko mabigyan ng katarungan kaso natatakot kami, says Grace.

Kahit umuwi ka ng probinsya, pupuntahan ka pa rin doon eh. Diba? Kung may pera naman sila, pamamasahe lang naman nila eh, adds Delia.

Nathalie Africa-Verceles, a professor at the University of the Philippines College of Social Work and Community Development who specializes in feminist economics, says that despite efforts to help these women, the State should have the principal responsibility to respect, protect, and fulfill human rights.

It should effectively implement and enforce the numerous pro-women laws that guarantee these rights, such as the Magna Carta for Women, she says.

Anna (rightmost), a member of Samahan ng Nagkakaisang Pamilya ng Pantawid (SNPP), which is a collective of beneficiaries of the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (4Ps), says that shes seen how disabling the death of a man in a household has been in the community that she helps in Mandaluyong. Photo by JL JAVIER

While the aid extended by EveryWoman, Baigani, SNPP, and other individuals, can only go so far, Verceles says that these initiatives by private individuals and other organizations are indispensable nonetheless.

The best [thing] to do is to work with women in communities, organize them, ascertain their needs with them, capacitate and empower them to claim their rights from the State, she says. Organizing women in poor communities is so critical in order for them to realize political, social, economic, and personal empowerment.

Gaerlan agrees. Maraming grupo na thankfully nag-join. Increasing yung public awareness nung effect ng EJKs at yung kagustuhang matulungan [yung mga biktima]. Sana yung tulong, sa lahat ng levels na kaya natin.

After the interview, Delia and Grace are going back to their homes to continue looking for ways to provide for their families. Their dreams for Ryan and Rachel may have ended, but they continue to hope for a better future for their grandchildren.

Wish ko lang mapa-graduate ko man lang sila kahit man lang high school, says Grace. Ako din gusto ko lang makatapos ngayon yung mga apo ko, adds Delia.

*Names have been changed to protect their privacy.Manila (CNN Philippines Life)  A recent report by the World Economic Forum states that globally, gender equality is making a backslide. In fact, when looking at economic inequality, researchers predict that it will take about 217 years for the gender pay gap to close.

With this widening gap, its good to see that, today, there are corporations taking different measures in maintaining a safe environment against gender-based discrimination and harassment. As the world is waking up and becoming more vigilant and sensitive to these issues, companies are realizing their roles as initiators and agents of social change.

Past the all-gender bathrooms in the office of Unilever Philippines, people walked to a conference room to attend a panel discussion on creating a culture of gender equality in the workplace. In celebration of International Womens Day, Unilever invited a number of influential women, and one man, to talk about cultural drivers to equality, such as bold leadership, comprehensive action, and having an empowering environment.

The panel included Unilevers own Head of PR Apples Aberin (as moderator), VP for Personal Care Gina Lorenzana, VP for Human Resources Amrita Padda, VP for Finance Arif Hudaya, as well as Myrza Sison, the Managing Editor of Summit Media, and Armie Jarin-Bennett, President of CNN Philippines.

Here are some insights and takeaways from what turned out to be a very personal, emotional, and earnest panel discussion.

The fight for gender equality starts at home

Family plays an important role in all of this, says Bennett, who shares that her grandmother raised her as a child. I had very strong women in my family. This helped her while she was growing up as a journalist in CNN International, where she never felt that gender was a deterrent or a barrier in her growth.

In a similar manner, Sison cites her father as one of her major influences. Growing up, I had a father who believed in me. I never grew up thinking there was nothing I couldnt do. When it came to raising his daughters, [my father] didnt treat us based on gender. As she grew up to be a shaper of some of the countrys most influential womens and mens magazines, she saw the machismo that plagued daily life in Philippine society.

Seeing this inequality moved me to do something in my later years, Sison adds. Even as early as my youth, I knew that there was something wrong. It shouldnt be this way. Why do people continue to believe in these things? I knew that things should not be the way they are and [so I would ask] how can I make a difference? How can I help?

Male involvement is just as important

The first thing is really about the role of men, because when we talk about gender equality, usually, we talk to the women, says Lorenzana, Unilevers Vice President for Personal Care.

But actually what is necessary is to create not just structurally a place or environments that have a balance, but also equally a culture that actually encourages and imbibes that. Because when we say culture, it is the society in which we live, its the workplaces in which we thrive, and men are pretty much a big part of the equation because they help drive the environment. So whether they are husbands or partners that we have at home, or they are our workmates, men have a big role.

As a case in point, Bennett talks about her relationship with her husband, who worked for CNN USA at the same time she was working for CNN International. When her husband left the world of breaking news, he supported her growth as she moved up to become the head of CNN Philippines.

And guess what? My kids are so happy because they have a father whos looking after them. And thats what gender equality is. My husband never told me to my face, I gave up my job for you. He was so excited to see my growth.

When I think of these words  empowerment, equality, parity  You know what I love even more? Inclusivity. Because theres so much that we can learn from men so I dont want to push them away. And I hope that they do recognize the value that we bring in society. So its about partnering and earning the respect and working together to make us a stronger society because we do need each other.

Quality over quantity in work-life balance

Padda champions harnessing human potential by creating harmony at work and at home. As the Vice President for Human Resources, her work at Unilever and her family are her key anchors. She also shares a bit about husbands roles in contributing to a healthy environment at home, which influences how the wife emotionally operates at work.

There is an emotional cost of, am I doing the right thing? Am I as good a mother as some of the other mothers? Do I spend as much time with my children? she says. [Studies say] it might take 200 years for us to achieve gender equality because we are where we are, because we are paying a really heavy cost. Its parity when we dont have that emotional or psychological burden.

Padda adds, I have the best husband in the world, but he helps with the kids. Thats a thing, right? Why does a man help out at home? Why is it such a big deal that, oh my god, I have such a good husband because he plays with the kids, he cooks, he takes the kids to school? The big highlight when I go back to my family is about me being the most privileged person, which I am, and Im really thankful, but thats the big highlight, when its normal, it needs to be done.

Hudaya, Unilevers Vice President for Finance, and the only man in the panel, shares how he supported her wifes career and postgraduate studies. Shes busier than me! he quips. But I have spent more time with my kids and my wife, in the quality rather than quantity element.

Raised by a single mother, Hudaya says, I got fortunate enough in an unlucky situation where my parents split but it gave me inspiration on what a woman and a man could be. And to see my wife show me the way of how to chase passions and how to make a difference, in whatever situations and whatever gender you are.

Everybody deserves a seat at the table

It is a womans right, as much as a mans, to grow in her own field. In Sheryl Sandbergs book Lean In, as Sison cites, the author had key tips  one is, 'Sit at the table,' meaning claim your rightful place.

Have unwavering belief in yourself and sit at the table, she continues. "When there is a woman who is assertive, strong, confident, and ambitious, what do we call her? Atribida, presentada, intrimitida, or even GGSS (Gandang Ganda Sa Sarili), I mean, what is so wrong about that? Men have no such terms.

As a journalist, Bennett was given a lot of opportunities, but she says that I also never gave my bosses a reason to think that I would have a problem taking on assignments. I wanted to present myself to them that Im equally strong and equally talented.

Speak up, speak up! she tells her employees who are apologetic. I empower them. Yes, they get scared. But I give them opportunities also to overcome their fears. Sometimes, I think were very hard on ourselves, or were not openly celebrating the success of another woman.

Padda believes that equality is when women stop asking for permission. When you dont feel that your husband gives you the permission because men cannot ask for the permission. A man doesnt feel that way because it is a given, its a privilege. For us, it takes so much to get there. Im not taking away from men, Im just saying that there is this thing where, as women we find ourselves in this position where we are lower. We need permission. We want to stop taking permission. Weve got to stop thinking that someone is giving us something. Its equally our decision, its our right.

Lorenzana weighs in: The culture can only happen when all of us are around the table, not only women, but all sorts of diversity, whether it is gender, your education, or your background, or ethnicity. Because its only with diversity and creating that culture that we can get the richness of ideas as we see in diverse environments.

Let go of personal biases

Just like the misogyny internalized by women and men everywhere, everybody has their own unconscious biases. But we have to educate ourselves about the biases we have, says Padda.

We ourselves need to think about what are we doing to create an inclusive culture in our environments, Lorenzana advises. Its not just about winning women, its also about behaviors. For example, do we favor extroverts versus introverts? Therefore, we need to think about also how we make easy judgments on people and not give them the opportunity to speak.

Bennett shares her own biases and how to overcome them:

Theres something to be said about all of us helping each other, male or female. We can be a stronger society, and I wish I had known that more in the past to help me get through some of the biggest challenges in my life. Yes, I have judged models, thinking theyre only pretty. We always have these biases but lets take all of these biases and barriers down and understand people. Let us not stop learning from each other because there is so much that we can learn in our own little way.

The journey to inclusivity will serve the next generation

Many of us here are parents, and many of us here have sons or nephews, and actually it starts from that next generation, says Lorenzana. We cant change the problems of the world but we can start with younger people and how they help mold that. Then that can actually help create a next generation of young men who can create that culture in which it is okay for everybody to be equal because everybody should have a place at the table.

As the mothers and fathers in the conference room paid attention, panel moderator Aberin echoed the sentiment in everyones minds in that moment: It is our responsibility to help the next generation because they are the ones who are going to be here a hundred years from now.Manila (CNN Philippines Life)  This weekend, join an all-women art fair, listen to the sounds of Haruki Murakamis novels, cosplay for a cause, catch the screening of a film about motherhood in the Philippines, join a talk on architecture and urban planning in the country, and catch a spoken word and open mic show celebrating revolutionary women.

"Gandang ganda sa sariling gawa!" A book/zine/art fair by women

This Saturday, March 24, join a whole day book, zine, and art fair of works crafted by women. The fair, which will be held at the Cultural Center of the Philippines, from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m., is hosted by Gantala Press, an independent literary press that champions literary works by and for women.

Sellers participating at the fair include Batis AWARE x The Youth & Beauty Brigade, Berna Sastrillo x Katrina Tankeh x Jules Ruizol, Cat Gablin, Christine Silva, Cubaohaus, Czyka & Sophie Tumaliuan, Gantala Press x Dead Balagtas, Haliya Publishing, High Chair, Katrina Stuart Santiago, Hubon Manunulat: West Visayan Writers, Luv Ya Majora, Magpies Press, Mako x Zeempleng Tao, Nagmamahal, Maria Clara, Philippine High School for the Arts, Power in Her Story, Project October, Rayji de Guia x Lian Sing, #RomanceClass, S A K A, So Ayun, Studio Soup Zine Library, Teaching, Exhibitions Zine, The Cabinet, Tulaan sa Liwasan, and ZEEN NOT ZIGN.

The Cultural Center of the Philippines is located at CCP Complex, Roxas Blvd., Pasay City. For more information, visit the Facebook event page.

Listen to Murakami: Jazz, Classical Music, and The Beatles

Fans of the world-famous Japanese author, who penned bestsellers like 1Q84, Kafka on the Shore, and Norwegian Wood, can make their way to the Globe Auditorium this weekend for two nights of jazz, classical music, and The Beatles.

Happening at 8 p.m. on Friday, March 23, and Saturday, March 24, the live concerts will have performances of the music featured in Murakamis novels. The concert is curated by music culture professor Junichi Konuma, and will include artists like jazz pianist Hiroko Kokubo and her trio, the Beatles-inspired classical ensemble, 1966 Quartet from Japan, and pianist April Dawnena Merced-Misa, along with spoken word performer David Ezra.

The Globe Auditorium is located at The Maybank Performing Arts Theater, BGC Arts Center, 26th St. cor. 9th Ave., Taguig City. For more information, visit the Facebook event page.

CauseCon Manila 2018

Join fellow geeks, artists, and cosplayers as they cosplay for a cause this weekend at CauseCon Manila, 2018.

CauseCon International is an organization and advocacy created by Michael Mulligan thats dedicated to using cosplay and geek culture as a platform for raising awareness for causes. The charity for this years CauseCon is Love Yourself Inc., the leading NGO for HIV awareness, counseling, and testing in the country.

The event will be held at the NOVA Gallery Manila, located at Warehouse 12A, La Fuerza Compound, Don Chino Roces Ave., Makati City. For more information, visit the Facebook event page.

Motherland screening at Cinema Centenario

Celebrate Womens Month by attending a screening of Motherland, a film about the busiest maternity hospital in the Philippines. The film highlights issues such as reproductive rights and maternal rights in a Catholic country that is densely populated and rife with poverty.

The screening takes place at Cinema Centenario on Friday, March 23, at 7:30 p.m.

Cinema Centenario is located in 95 Maginhawa St. Quezon City. For more information, visit the Facebook event page.

Exhibit Encounters 3: How can we make our cities more human?

As part of Artkitektura Festivals series of events and workshops, the UP Vargas Museum will be hosting Vargas Conversations: How can we make our cities more human? The talk will feature contemporary artist Indy Paredes and urban experts such as Prof. Jose Edgardo Gomez Jr., Prof. Mark Anthony Morales, and Prof. Faith Varona to discuss housing, metropolitanization, transit-oriented development, and the role of technical professionals (architects/planners/engineers) in helping poor communities.

The event is happening on Saturday, March 24 starting at 2 p.m. at the Jorge B. Vargas Museum and Filipiniana Research Center, Roxas Ave., U.P. Diliman, Quezon City. For more information, visit the Facebook event page.

HerStory 3: Women's March

In another Womens Month celebration, CT/FX Creatives, along with Collaboratory.PH and The Loudmouth Collective, present HerStory 3: Womens Match, a show and open mic celebrating female revolutionaries who challenge the norm and pave the way towards a more understanding society.

Among those performing will be JOYEN, Anshe Jazul, Tiff Torres, Collaboratory PH, and The Loudmouth Collective. Join the show this Saturday, March 24 at Commune, Makati. Doors open at 7 p.m.

Commune is located at 36 Polaris St., Poblacion, Makati. For more information, visit the Facebook event page.Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, March 22)  The Governor of Aklan has revealed a timelime for the rehabilitation of Boracay, saying the islands drainage system will be cleaned up by May 31.

Governor Florencio Miraflor told CNN Philippines Thursday said they were fast-tracking the rehabilitation, starting with the drainage and sewerage system.

"This is actually the main culprit why Boracay was called a cesspool," he acknowleged.

Apart from opening up and declogging the drainage system, they were also identifying illegal connections.

"Sadly there are illegal connections coming from business establishments that drains or discharges their wastewater to the drainage system," Miraflor said.

He mentioned they submitted a timeline to President Rodrigo Duterte to serve as a "pledge of commitment."

"We are asking for the reconsideration from the interagency group," Miraflor added.

"By May 31st we are able to finish this cleanup of the drainage for the whole island, because fortunately there is another offer from the private sector  the Lucio Tan group  that they will help in the rehabilitation of existing drainage,"he said.

As far the island's sewerage system, Miraflor said a sewerage system is about to be completed, and another has already been opened.

What remains is for both systems to be connected by a sewer line so the pressure on wastewater treatment can be reduced.

The Governor said this would be completed by April 5.

A materials recovery facility was also being rehabilitated which will allow for solid waste to be processed on the island, and only residuals to be taken out.

This would "subtantially reduce waste" on Boracay said Miraflor.

All illegal structures on the island have been identified, said the Governor, and these will be demolished immediately.

Decongesting traffic in Boracay was also in the works.

But despite the plans and rehabilitation efforts already happening, Miraflor said they are still prepared for Boracay's proposed closure.

"We will continue with our rehabilitation whether it is closed or not. We're committed to rehabilitating the whole island together with the Boracay stakeholders," he said.

"This is an opportunity for us. The President gave us an opportunity that we can get all the support from national government, once and for all finish this issue of drainage, sewerage, traffic, and the like," the Governor added.NEW HAMPTON, Iowa (AP)  A trial has been delayed again for a northeast Iowa man whose dead 4-month-old son was found in an infant swing, his body infested with maggots.

The delay in the trial of Zachary Koehn was granted Tuesday. Lawyers for both sides wanted more time to prepare. The trial in New Hampton had been scheduled to begin March 28 after being delayed from a Jan. 3 start. The new date is June 11.

Koehn and the baby's mother, Cheyanne Harris, have pleaded not guilty to murder and related charges in the death of their son, Sterling Koehn. Her trial starting date also is June 11. They're having separate trials.

Authorities say deputies and medics called to the couple's Alta Vista apartment on Aug. 30 found Sterling dead in the swing.

RELATED:

Jan. 29, 2018: Trial delayed for mother accused of first-degree murder

Jan. 3, 2018: Trial delayed for Iowa dad in death of maggot-infested baby

Nov. 19, 2017: Second trial date set in death of Chickasaw County baby

Nov. 14, 2017: Trial date set for man accused of murdering son

Nov. 9, 2017: Parents accused of murdering baby plead not guilty

Oct. 26, 2017: Court documents: 'Failure to provide critical care' reason for Chickasaw Co. baby deathMASON CITY, Iowa - A case of embezzlement from a convenience store is set for trial.

54-year-old Melissa Joy Gott of Mason City is pleading not guilty to a charge of 1st degree theft. She's accused of stealing more than $32,000 in bank deposits while she managed the Yesway store on 4th Street SW in Mason City. Authorities say the thefts happened between January 3 and January 14.

Her trial is scheduled for May 15 in Cerro Gordo County District Court.CLEAR LAKE, Iowa - Hundreds of people from all over the area honored Vietnam Veterans at the Clear Lake VFW on Wednesday. It was a war many of those who served have varying memories of.

Its steadily got worse from when I got there to when I left, said Allan Thompson, of Kensett.

America doesnt really understand everything that went on back in the 60's in the Vietnam War, said Bob Lembke, of Mason City.

Those who fought in the war, like Thompson, are hoping to learn a little more about a war where many felt thankless.

The soldiers were just going over there because the country wanted them to, he said. They want to go. They were being accused of something they were told to go over and do.

That is why Lembke spoke. He wanted to give details to many people who dont know about the war, including why America was involved in the first place.

To sum it up in one sentence, we were there to stop the spread of communism in Southeast Asia, Lembke said. We were not in a battle between South and North Vietnam.

Lembke has been reading and learning about the Vietnam War since coming back as a way to cope with how he was treated when he came home.

He says it took him 40 years to be able to start discussing the war, but says it started long before 1955.

The United States made a commitment to the French Government after WWII to help them try and take back and recolonize all of Indochina, he said.

While many were hoping to learn about what happened during Vietnam from speakers like Lembke, Thompson also wants people to realize something else.

When youre dead, youre dead, said Thompson. To die that way in any kind of war, I think, is really bad.ELDORA, Iowa  The man who pleaded guilty to sexually abusing a child and then won the lottery is now being sued.

The victim and her mother are suing Dean Edward Hilpipre of Alden. He was charged with two counts of 2nd degree sex abuse in August 2017 and pled guilty to a reduced charge of lascivious acts with a child on January 4. Hilpipre then claimed a $100,000 prize from the Iowa Lottery on January 24 after buying the winning ticket at an Alden convenience store.

Following his lottery win, Hilpipre was sentenced to five years of probation and a $1,000 fine.

A lawsuit has now been filed in Hardin County District Court accusing Hilpipre of common law sexual assault, common law assault and battery, false imprisonment, infliction of emotional distress, and loss of consortium. The victim and her mother say Hilpipre molested the child on multiple occasions over several years, held her against her will during those attacks, and inflicted both physical and emotional injuries.

The victim and her mother are asking for money for the victims suffering and to punish Hilpipre for his behavior. As part of the lawsuit, a temporary injunction was granted Thursday to stop Hilpipre from spending or giving away any of his lottery winnings.CHARLES CITY, Iowa  Two years after attacking a woman, a Rockford man is going to prison.

Jason Weitzel, 40, pleaded guilty Tuesday to domestic abuse assault, possession of methamphetamine, carrying weapons, and OWI  1st offense. The judge gave him a total of five years in prison and he must pay $3,620.74 in restitution.

On March 6, 2016, Floyd County sheriffs deputies were called to a domestic dispute. Deputies say when they arrived, Weitzel had left but they tracked his cell phone to an area between Nora Springs and Rockford, then arrested him after a brief chase.

According to court documents, Weitzel got into an argument with his wife on March 5, 2016, which escalated into him punching her. Weitzel also reportedly got a handgun and fired it outside. Authorities say Weitzels verbal and physical assaults continued into the next day. He also made a comment to shoot her and throw her out the window, according to court documents.MASON CITY, Iowa - Randy Davis doesn't have to worry much about gas money.

It gets me around town because I don't have a car. I don't drive. I haven't driven in years, Davis said.

Davis is an avid Mason City transit rider, using the bus system to get around town and to work. When asked if he feels there's something about riding the bus people underestimate, he said it's very inexpensive. Some people don't realize its only 50 cents to get on the bus and the transfer is free, Davis said.

The Mason City transit costs 50 cents per ride. In Rochester, a ride on a public transit bus costs $2. The Mason City City Council is declaring March 22 Mason City transit day. They are giving away free rides, and those like Davis are appreciative, not only for the free ride but the fact that money has been used to upgrade old buses.

That's great because I think more and more people need to get around town, and not all people can drive and there's a lot of elderly people who don't get around anymore and need to get to doctors appointments and things like that, Davis said.GARNER, Iowa  A man accused of kidnapping and beating a woman is pleading guilty to lesser charges.

Christopher James Moore, 26, of Crystal Lake was arrested in August 2017 and charged with 1st degree kidnapping, willful injury resulting in serious injury, domestic abuse assault by strangulation, and false imprisonment. Witnesses stated they heard the victim screaming, saw Moore hitting her and throwing her around, and heard Moore say he would kill her.

Moore is now entering guilty pleas to reduced charges of 3rd degree kidnapping and willful injury resulting in serious injury. Those are class C felonies, which could send him to prison for up to 10 years each.

A sentencing hearing for Moore is set for May 1 in Hancock County District Court. Court records say that because Moore is pleading guilty to two forcible felonies, he is not eligible for bail and will remain in custody until sentenced.Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, March 22)  Boracay tourism stakeholders want to talk to President Rodrigo Duterte to appeal the planned island shutdown.

Tourism Congress of the Philippines President Jojo Clemente on Thursday said businesses are ready to help the government clean up Boracay without closing down their establishments.

He warned some 36,000 people may lose their jobs if Boracay is declared off-limits.

"Mr. President, if possible, we would like to sit down with you just to present our side. We are respectfully requesting that you reconsider and the inter-agency may reconsider the plan of the improvement of Boracay," Clemente said in a media briefing.

Clemente said they are still waiting for government's specific plans on Boracay even after a dialogue with Tourism Secretary Wanda Teo earlier this week.

He said they're still clueless whether it would be a total shutdown or partial closure of the island.

"The actual timeline as we were informed was no later than March 26, the President will declare a state of calamity for Boracay and 30 days hence, they will implement the closure. What that closure means, we're not yet sure," he said.

The Environment, Tourism and Interior departments has recommended the total closure of Boracay after assessing the island's condition. Duterte has yet to issue orders, but he earlier said he will support whatever recommendation will be made by Interior Undersecretary and Officer-in-Charge Eduardo Ano regarding the island. The President said Ano told him it might take about six months to rehabilitate the island.

Speaking to CNN Philippines on Thursday, Interior Undersecretary Epimacio Densing said the inter-agency council formed to rehabilitate Boracay will recommend the closure of the island on April 26.

The closure may last for as long as six months, he said.

However, he said it would only prohibit foreign and local tourists in the island  not shut down businesses with permits. Businesses can also continue to stay open for renovation or rehabilitation during the timeframe.

"We're looking at the people who will be losing their jobs or losing their earnings. That's why we're coordinating with other agencies, specifically DOLE (Department of Labor and Employment), TESDA (Technical Education and Skills Development Authority), DSWD (Department of Social Welfare and Development), and the DTI (Department of Trade and Industry) to provide us the loan assistance and the assistance to be given to these people who will be losing earnings, he said.

If the government proceeds with a total closure, Clemente hopes this will happen in 2019 as foreign and local tourists have already booked their trips until the end of the year.

For now, he said business establishments are willing to clean their areas and make sure others comply with environmental laws as well.

"On the side of tour operators, let us just finish our bookings one year forward and we can stop selling already by tomorrow," Clemente said.

Stakeholders also said they want to revive Boracay's natural features but they want to partner with government in doing this instead of just waiting for the shutdown to take its course.DES MOINES, Iowa (AP)  Iowa Republicans have finalized mid-year cuts of more than $35 million to the state's $7.2 billion budget.

The GOP-controlled Senate voted 28-21 Wednesday night for a bill that reduces the budget that runs through June. The Republican-majority House voted for the same plan Tuesday. It now heads to GOP Gov. Kim Reynolds.

The bill cuts about $25.4 million from various state agencies, including nearly $11 million from the University of Iowa and Iowa State University. There are also reductions of $4.3 million from the agency that oversees health services and $3.4 million from corrections.

Lawmakers also agreed to take $10 million from a program that helps businesses expand.

A budget panel said last year that state revenue was below projections. The panel improved its outlook recently, but Republicans say they wanted a cushion for the budget.MASON CITY, Iowa - Iowa legislators are trying to make changes to the state constitution that would include protections for the right to bear arms.

The proposed amendment, House Joint Resolution 2009, would add the following section to the Iowa constitution:

The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. The sovereign state of Iowa affirms and recognizes this right to be a fundamental individual right. Any and all restrictions of this right shall be subject to strict scrutiny.

The amendment would essentially make it very difficult to restrict the rights of Iowa citizens to bear arms, and any potential infringement upon those rights would be subject to strict scrutiny, which is a form of judicial review that courts use to determine the constitutionality of certain laws.

Sam Lavrenz, of Mason City, said he thinks the amendment should be in the state constitution as a way to protect his rights.

Being able to know that your freedoms are actually a part of the constitution, that being able to have a gun in your house, that you dont have to be worried that someone is going to come try and take them away or something like that, Lavrenz said.

The proposed amendment needs to be approved a second time by both the Iowa House of Representatives and Iowa Senate during the next general assembly before being submitted to the electorate for voting in the 2020 general election.ALBERT LEA, Minn. -- More than 450,000 smoke alarms nationwide are being recalled after it was discovered that a yellow cap left on during the manufacturing process can cover one of the two smoke sensors and not allow the alarm to detect smoke.

Kidde has recalled 452,000 units sold in the United States for its dual-sensor PI2010 and PI9010 models, which are sold by major retailers like Walmart, Home Depot, Amazon, and Menards.

The recall date was March 21 and the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CSPC) said on its website that the production error poses a risk of consumers not being alerted to a fire in their home.

Kidde issued a statement through CSPC that, Consumers should remove the alarm from the wall/ceiling and visually inspect it through the opening on the side of the alarm for the presence of a yellow cap."

Kidde has warned customers not to take apart the alarm or remove the yellow cap.

"If a yellow cap is present, the consumer should immediately contact Kidde to receive instructions and request a free replacement smoke alarm," the company said. "They should remove and discard the recalled smoke alarm only after they receive and install the replacement alarm."

Kidde also said that if there is no yellow cap present, consumers have nothing to worry about.(Kitco News) - Despite avoiding an imminent trade war with the U.S. over steel and aluminum tariffs, Canada should not be breathing easier, this according to Shark Tank star Kevin OLeary.

I dont think the long-term outcome of the negotiations is going to be better for Canada, OLeary told Kitco News. For example, on steel, what will probably end up in the NAFTA negotiations is proof of source of all steel, he said.

Canada and Mexico, members of NAFTA, have been indefinitely exempt from the proposed steel and aluminum tariffs. However, this doesnt mean that Washington will soften its stance towards competing with Canadian industries, said OLeary, as U.S. protectionism will rear its head in other forms.

One outcome that OLeary, the chairman of OShares ETFs, predicts is that steel-consuming industries will see profits shrink as outsourcing metals becomes more difficult.

If youre a Canadian automotive manufacturing facility thats using Chinese steel to reduce your costs, youre not going to be able to do that anymore, so your margins are going to get compressed, OLeary said.

While Canada doesnt have to deal with a trade war, the same cant be said for the rest of the world as China, in particular, is in Trumps crosshairs.

Thursday, the Trump administration outlined a sweeping plan to impose 25% tariffs on $60 billion worth of Chinese imports, with a focus on IT, aerospace, and machinery. Although some analysts think that the tariffs wont have a significant impact on the economy, others believe this signals the beginning of a global trade war to come.

The S&P 500 was down over 1% on Thursdays session over fears of potential Chinese retaliation, which would hit sectors more dependent on exports to China, such as the agriculture industry. Currently, 60% of all U.S. soybean exports go to China.LONDON (Reuters) - As Donald Trumps America First trade agenda turns from steel imports to Asian technology and intellectual property, a global trade war is now seen as the most serious risk for global investors, according to a recent survey.

The growing protectionist rhetoric has helped push Europes Stoxx 600 index down more than 2 percent this week. Tech stocks have fallen furthest, not helped by the scandal over misuse of Facebook users personal data.

For now, though, the reaction of European industrial stocks that could suffer most in a real trade war does not convey a sense of panic.

An index of the regions industrial companies .MIEU0IN00GEU fell sharply in early March when the U.S. President proposed import tariffs on steel and aluminum. Since then they have recovered and performed largely in line with their U.S. peers .MIUS0IN00PUS. (U.S. MSCI industrials sector index is shown here in orange, European industrials in purple)

(For a graphic of U.S. vs European industrials since March 1 click reut.rs/2G2z9Nu)

The next test comes later on Thursday, when Washington is expected to unveil up to $60 billion in new tariffs on China targeting technology, telecoms and intellectual property.

Edmund Shing, head of equity derivatives strategy at BNP Paribas, notes that U.S. investors have been investing a lot more in foreign equities and emerging markets recently.

If you were really worried about trade issues, you wouldnt necessarily put as much money into EM equities because that will include Mexico but more importantly, China, he said.

This, said Shing, is because investors think Trumps tariff moves are a negotiating tactic to secure better terms with the European Union, China and NAFTA partners as opposed to a particular desire to ratchet up on actual tariffs per se.

Goldman Sachs said we are probably approaching peak trade risk in the near-term, while Citi analysts reckon the recent growth in world trade will overcome the impact of tariffs.

They point to figures showing strong growth in global goods trade volumes in 2017, and note that trade growth has now surpassed global GDP growth once again.

For now, our base case is for moderate increases in global protectionism and for these to mostly remain targeted at specific sectors, they wrote.

Shares in European industries in the firing line of a potential trade war took a hit on March 2 after Trump proposed the steel and aluminum tariffs, and steelmakers have continued to weaken.

(For a graphic of European steelmakers since March 1 click reut.rs/2FYZL28)

But U.S. aerospace companies have underperformed Europes - possibly reflecting the higher risk of trade retaliation damaging U.S. defense exports. Boeing jets have often been cited as a potential target by China, which has been developing the C919 as part of its civil aerospace ambitions.

Automakers - big consumers of steel - have had a mixed run, but two of the European manufacturers most exposed to the United States - BMW and Fiat Chrysler - are trading back where they were before Trumps tariff announcement.

The chart below shows European aerospace and autos stocks (purple and blue) have recovered from sharp losses after the Trump announcement to slightly outperform their U.S. counterparts (orange and green).

(For a graphic of U.S. vs Europe aerospace/autos since March 1 click reut.rs/2G0xHeA)

Risks (for the auto industry) are mitigated somewhat by high use of locally produced (c80%) and recycled (c40%) steel, Citi analysts said in a note on trade war risk.

The relative resilience of European industrial stocks cant be explained by an improving economic picture. Euro area PMI data - a key indicator of industrial sentiment - saw their sharpest monthly fall in six years at the end of February, while comparable U.S. indicators are on the up.

Economists see only a small impact on the global economy of the higher U.S. steel and aluminum tariffs. But a full-blown trade war would be something else.

The OECD projects that a permanent 10 percent rise in trade costs would lower global gross domestic product by 1-1.5 pct in the medium term, in figures cited by Citi analysts.

European drinks maker shares dropped when Trumps steel move prompted the European Union to threaten higher tariffs on imported American whiskey.

Simon Hales, Citis EMEA beverages analyst, said any EU retaliation around imported American whisky could prompt U.S. retaliation targeting imported EU spirits.

But for now investors appear to be taking that in their stride.

(For a graphic of European drinks makers since March 1 click reut.rs/2G29c0L)Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, March 21)  President Rodrigo Duterte  who campaigned in 2016 with only a handful of officials behind him  said he doesn't blame local officials who switched sides to join his political party after his victory.

He says joining a sitting president's party is a part of politics.

He said. "Hindi ninyo kasalanan ngayon na nandito kayo sa akin. Kasi, that is the culture of politics everywhere. Na kung sino yung manalo, maglipat doon pati yung incumbent mayors because you want to help. You must be friends with everybody including the president."

[Translation: It's not your fault that you're with me now. Because that is the culture of politics everywhere. You go with the winner, everyone switches even the incumbent mayors because you want to help. You must be friends with everybody, including the president.]

"It's not really opportunism but rather that is really the politics of our time. Now ako, kung suportahan ako ng karamihan ng tao, I will appreciate it," the President added.

[Translation: It's not really opportunism, but rather that is really the politics of our time. Now me, if a lot of people will support me, I will appreciate it.]

Duterte, speaking before members of the Mayor Rodrigo Roa Duterte-National Executive Coordinating Council (MRRD-NECC), said he won't mind if officials who supported his opponents in 2016 - Mar Roxas, Grace Poe, and Jejomar Binay - now express support for him.

He said the issues then were unimportant.

'Tapos na yun. Bakit pa ako mag-ano...panalo na ako [That is over. Why should I make a fuss... I won]," he said

MRRD-NECC is a volunteers group which aggressively campaigned for Duterte during the elections.Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, March 22)  The provincial board of Palawan urged its municipal government through the tourism offices to provide a dress code for women in public beaches.

A resolution filed by Board Member Cherry Pie Acosta sought to prohibit women from wearing thongs, g-strings, and t-back bikinis in public beach resorts.

However, other types of bikinis, swimsuits, shorts, and revealing tops are still allowed.

"Travellers should respect local traditions, customs, laws and religions at all times and should be aware of their actions to ensure they don't offend locals in the province," the resolution stated.

Acosta said women may attract unwanted attention wearing the revealing outfits.

"The Provincial Government of Palawan aims to protect the local and foreign tourists from harassment in the province," it added.

The resolution also cited the Republic Act No. 7160, or the Local Government Code, which states that local government units shall ensure and support the preservation and enrichment of culture, promote health and safety, and improve public morals, among others.

Acosta, meanwhile, denied filing a resolution to prohibit public displays of affection. This stems from a Facebook post by the Provincial Information Office (PIO) of Palawan on Wednesday.

However, she has earlier filed a resolution banning any sexual acts in public beaches in the province.A recent study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that about 1 in 14 women smoked while pregnant in 2016.

The study found that while the percentage went down, approximately 8 percent of pregnant women in Idaho still smoked while expecting.

Doctor Darren Coleman, an OB-GYN at St. Lukes in Twin Falls, explained some of the dangers of smoking while pregnant

"Babies smaller than average, placental problems with bleeding, preterm delivery, the bag of water breaking early, preeclampsia," he said. "There are quite a few risks can occur during pregnancy."Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, March 22)  Despite controversies hounding her, Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno was warmly welcomed by students at a forum in a university in Quezon City.

Sereno delivered a strong speech at the Univeristy of the Philippines Diliman, calling out the attacks against her person and her office as "funded by formidable machinery.

The Chief Magistrate also warned it would be dangerous for the rule of law and democratic institutions if the impeachment and resignation calls against her work.

"The stakes for the rule of law if the evil machinators of the impeachment or the resignation scheme succeed is that no one, not one man, especially not one woman will be safe in this country. Everyone will have to look for a political patron to save herself from incessant harassment, threats, and bullying," she said.

Sereno added, "It opens all kinds of interpretation which can only hasten the death of democracy in the country. This kind of malevolent and concerted attack against the values we hold dearest in our hearts...is enabled by noise and confusion."

Sereno believes fake news, alternative facts, and vulgar language used to call persons, genders, and advocacies degrading names are tactics to divert attention from what is really happening in the country's democratic institutions and Constitutional rights.

She called on the people to focus on what is important, and not on what she calls "intrigues ala showbiz" which prevent people from asking important questions.

"There are interagency and intra-agency fights that people should no longer pay attention too. There are intrigues ala showbiz that should just be noted and no longer merit the subject of long posts. They are just side shows. Instead ask the real questions. Is there reason to this apparent madness?" she said.

READ: SC: 13 justices wanted Sereno to go on indefinite leave

She urged everyone to "fight for democracy, fight for the rule of law. fight for judicial independence" and in doing so "call a red herring for what it is. A decoy...a stunt."

The Chief Justice emphasized that fighting for our democracy should be done in a spirit of calm and not anger.

She added the public should be articulate, sincere, and truthful.

When asked by reporters about the intervention filed by the Integrated Bar of the Philippines and the Makabayan bloc asking the Supreme Court to junk the quo warranto petition against her, Sereno said she was happy the interventions were filed, but did not comment on them as said said she has yet to read the documents.Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, March 22)  Two motions have been filed at the Supreme Court seeking the dismissal of a petition to remove Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno from office.

The groups, one composed of minority lawmakers, the other of concerned citizens, on Friday questioned the Solicitor General's quo warranto petition asking the high court to void Sereno's appointment.

The groups asked the Supreme Court to allow them to intervene in the case, stressing that the Chief Justice can only be ousted through impeachment, as stated in the Constitution.

Should the Supreme Court grant the quo warranto petition, the groups warned it would open the floodgates to similar petitions against impeachable officials.

"Pinakamalinaw na panganib dito ay binabalewala yung konstitusyon upang masunod ang kagustuhan ni Pangulong Duterte (The clear danger here is the Constitution is undermined to bow to the wishes of President Duterte)," said ACT Teachers party-list Rep. Antonio Tinio.

Activist priest Robert Reyes, who was among the intervenors in one motion, said the high court should not kowtow to whatever Malacanang says.

"Ang ating pinoprotektahan yung tinatawag na balance of power saka checks and balance (We should protect the balance of power and checks and balance)," Reyes said.

The Palace has repeatedly denied any hand in efforts to impeach Sereno, although it earlier called for her resignation.

The Integrated Bar of the Philippines (IBP) will file a separate intervention at the high court against Calida's quo warranto petition.

The IBP said inquiring into Sereno's alleged lack of integrity violates the separation of powers between the executive and the judiciary.

"Naisala siya ng JBC (Judicial and Bar Council) at saka ng opisina mismo ng pangulo noon at ang parehong koponan ay nagsabi na talagang meron siyang integridad," IBP President Abdiel Fajardo told CNN Philippines in an interview.

[Translation: She was screened by the JBC and the Office of the President then and they both said she has integrity. ]

Calida wants the high court to void Sereno's appointment, saying the Chief Justice has been "unlawfully holding" her post since she failed to submit her Statement of Assets, Liabilities, and Net Worth (SALN) for 10 years before she applied for the post in 2012.

Sereno on Monday filed her comment on the petition, asking her colleagues at the Supreme Court to dismiss it.

In her 130-page comment and annexes, Sereno argued that the submission of SALNs to the JBC was not an "absolute requirement" for those vying for chief justice.

The embattled chief justice is facing a quo warranto, a legal proceeding where an individual's right to hold office, on top of an impeachment case. The House Committee on Justice has just finished the articles of impeachment which will be brought to the plenary for voting.

If at least one-third of the members of the House of Representatives vote to impeach Sereno, the complaint would go to trial at the Senate.

A conviction in just one article is enough to oust Sereno.

CNN Philippines' Eimor Santos contributed to this report.A ballet blanc scene from "Giselle" by the Korean National Ballet / Courtesy of Korean National Ballet

Two ballet companies compete with different versions



By Yun Suh-young



Dancers clad in white tutus tiptoe across the stage as if they're floating in the air.



Even those who are not ballet fans have probably seen this scene at least once through the media or on stage. It's a representative scene from the famous "Giselle," which is well-known for ballet blanc, a "white ballet" where female corps de ballet all wear white.



"Giselle" is representative of romantic ballet which was popular during the 19th century. This was the period of the Industrial Revolution but quality of life was still poor. In those times, people wanted to escape reality and indulge in fantasy. So works created during this period were lyrical, romantic and mystical.



Techniques for creating a mystical mood were developed during this period such as the pointe technique (standing on tiptoes) to express weightlessness, or the usage of gas lamps for a mysterious atmosphere. Pas de deux, a dance between female and male soloists, began during this time and the tutu (the puffy fluttering ballet dress) also emerged during this period.





A ballet blanc scene from "Giselle" by Universal Ballet / Courtesy of Universal Ballet



The ballet "La Sylphide" is known to be the first ballet of the romantic period followed by "Giselle," which later gained more popularity and has been staged for over a century. "Giselle" is a piece beloved by ballerinas and the role of Giselle is the most sought after by all ballerinas to this day.



"Giselle" is about a peasant girl named Giselle who dies of a broken heart after discovering her lover, whom she knows as Loys, turns out to be Duke Albrecht who is engaged to a noble woman, Bathilde. In shock, Giselle loses her sanity and dies, becoming one of the wilis, female ghosts who have been betrayed by their lovers and dance men to death in revenge. When Albrecht comes to see her at her grave, the wilis target him to dance to the death. But Giselle's love for him protects him and saves his life.





A scene from "Giselle" by the Korean National Ballet / Courtesy of Korean National Ballet



This rather simple story was written by French writer Theophile Gautier for ballerina Carlotta Grisi, an Italian ballerina of the romantic period, after falling in love with her (unfortunately, his love was unrequited). After reading about wilis, female ghosts who have been betrayed by their lovers, in poetry by Heinrich Heine and Victor Hugo, Gautier was inspired to include them in the ballet, which was initially about a girl who is crazy about dancing and dances herself to death.



Ballet composer Adolphe Adam composed the music and Jean Coralli and Jules Perrot created the choreography. The piece premiered in Paris in 1841 with Carlotta Grisi as Giselle. The premiere received a lot of fanfare and has since been exported to various European ballet companies. The "Giselle" we know today is primarily derived from a revised version by Marius Petipa, a famous Russian choreographer of the Imperial Ballet in St. Petersburg.





A scene from "Giselle" by Universal Ballet / Courtesy of Universal BalletBeijing shifts focus of economic policy to 'innovation, efficiency'



By Kim Jae-kyoung



Over the past weeks, China has gained global attention after it erased presidential term limits from its constitution, paving the way for Chinese President Xi Jinping to stay in power indefinitely.



The move overshadowed another important decision on China's economic reform at the same annual party meeting, which could have far-reaching repercussions on Korea's economy and major enterprises.



With the aim of becoming the world's dominant economic giant by 2050, Bejing made it clear it will ditch its aggressive expansion strategy and pursue quality growth.



This means China will shift the focus of its economic policy to "innovation and efficiency" from the old quantitative growth model by cutting reliance on stimuli.



The policy shift is expected to reinforce Chinese firms' attempts to move up the value chain, positing serious threats to Korea's leading manufacturing and tech firms.



"This is a major challenge. China is imitating both Japan and Korea by moving to higher value-added products and technologies," Mauro Guillen, director of the Lauder Institute at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, told The Korea Times.



Antonio Fatas, a professor of economics at INSEAD's Singapore Campus, echoed the view. "China is a large and fat growing economy that will challenge South Korea at a level it could not do earlier," he said.



"The only way to fight this is to continue running and innovating to stay ahead. There is no magic bullet here."



According to a recent report by Natixis, the trade relationship between China and Korea has evolved over time from very complementary to one that is increasingly competitive.



The French bank said China's rapid move up the value chain has started to dent Korea's comparative advantage in high-tech products.



"Chinese companies are increasingly competitive with Korean firms," said Troy Stangarone, senior director at the Korea Economic Institute (KEI) based in Washington.



"They are growing closer to Korean firms in terms of technological sophistication, and despite rising wages China still has a labor cost advantage over Korean firms."



The experts said that in order to maintain its lead, Korean companies must beef up efforts to enhance innovation.



"To remain competitive, Korean firms will need to increasingly move towards greater innovation and push for stronger intellectual property protections internationally to maintain an advantage over Chinese firms," Stangarone said.



Guillen said, "Korean firms need to continue innovating. Domestically, invest in education, facilitate entrepreneurship, and don't try to save companies if they make mistakes."



China's reform of its economic model was designed to transform the country into the world's top economy by upgrading industries at the macro level and improving the efficiency and output of individual companies at the micro level.



In particular, it seeks to encourage Chinese firms to further develop advanced sectors, such as artificial intelligence, in a bid to create a digital economy.



"We are big but not strong enough," China's Commerce Minister Zhong Shan said in a press conference on the sidelines of the annual plenary session a week ago.



"We aim to stabilize our position as a big trading nation by 2020, turn into a strong trading nation by 2035 and finally become an economic and trade giant by 2050."



Experts said Korean firms need to adopt a more prudent strategy when investing in China or having dealings with Chinese players, given that the authorities there treat foreign players unfairly for the sake of their national interest.



"Chinese companies often compete with an unfair advantage created by government subsidies and other support intending to create Chinese control over technology and markets," said Jeffrey Jones, an international lawyer at Kim & Chang.



He urged companies and governments in all countries to watch this vigilantly and seek a transparent, fair and honest approach to doing business with the Chinese.



"It is often difficult to resist the large sums offered by Chinese buyers for technology and markets, but for the long-term survival of other economies, greater attention needs to be given to transactions with Chinese companies, particularly when it comes to acquisitions," he said.



In order to minimize the side effects of China's transition, Korea and its firms should cut their reliance on China while developing alternative markets.



"China has shown it is not a reliable trade partner with too many unfair trade practices," said Sohn Sung-won, an economics professor at California State University-Channel Islands.



"It is important not to alienate the U.S., which has both economic and security implications. Korea should decrease its trade dependence with China and increase its ties with the U.S. and other countries throughout the world."











The Export-Import Bank of Korea (Exim Bank) held a briefing session about its Vietnam-Korea Business Partnership jointly with the Korea Trade-Investment Promotion Agency (KOTRA) in Hanoi, Vietnam, Thursday.







The session was a follow-up measure after President Moon Jae-in's state visit to the Southeast Asian country to help facilitate business ties. More than 100 Korean firms who have already entered into Vietnam or plan to do so participated in the event







During the session, the Exim Bank introduced a financial program and loan procedures for Korean firms in Vietnam that need financing.







Under the program, the bank lends money to local banks in Vietnam so Korean companies there can get immediate loans from them. Vietnamese firms who conduct business with Korean ones can also participate in the program.







"The government's new approach to Southeast Asia is expected to boost business ties with Vietnam," Exim Bank Chairman Eun Sung-soo said during the session.







"I hope the Exim Bank's financial program will be a valuable foundation for Korean firms' business operations in Vietnam. I believe the program will also contribute to the Vietnamese government's national renewable energy project."







The program is expected to help not only facilitate Korean companies' operations in Vietnam but also expand their exports to the country, An Exim Bank official added.







Currently, the Exim Bank has decided to deposit a $170 million maximum credit line into three Vietnamese banks _ VietinBank, BIDV and TechcomBank.







The EXIM Bank is operating a similar financial program with 33 financial institutions in 15 countries. The program is globally worth $7.8 billion, according to the state-run bank.







(advertorial)By Janet Shin



The death of Stephen Hawking, an English physicist and cosmologist, was announced on March 14. As a philosopher, trying to know the ultimate nature of the universe by studying the limited lives of human beings, the beginning and end, creation and destruction of the universe and the theories of singularity and relativity, as studied by Hawking, have always been my intellectual concerns. Hawking's death aroused my interest to read his saju and it led to an astonishing conclusion.



Being born on January 8, 1942, Hawking's saju yields a great amount of yin metal energy. First of all, his day master is yin metal, representing a sharp, precious and destructive device like a sword, pencil or metallic items. Metal communicates information, being focused, intuitive and confident while emotional and aggressive in pursuing goals. Metals tend to be loners, isolated and often withdrawn. They can be stubborn, driven by inner faith whether they are right or wrong. They can be extremely driven to pursue their goals, and when problems arise they turn inward to find answers.



Metal is associated with autumn energy. 'Monkey, rooster and dog' or 'snake, rooster and cow' make metallic trines. In the saju of Hawking, these three zodiac letters, snake (fire), rooster (metal) and cow (earth) constitute his year, day and month pillars, on top of the three yin metal letters in heavenly stems. Consequently all six letters generated from his birth year, month and day became a great aggregation of metal energy.



Then what would a life be when the saju consists of only one element? First of all, the life becomes noble pursuing only one ultimate lifelong goal. When there is no sign against the day master, life would lead to an absolute structure and a serene ride.



In the case of Hawking's saju, earth(metal(water are the elements that flow in a stable cycle. However, I estimate he was born with the energy of fire or wood that hamper this circulation. Especially if they were wood representing four limbs and the nervous system, they would have been chopped by the strong metal energy. This can explain his health problems and paralysis.



He was diagnosed with motor neurone disease when he was 21. It was when his 10-year-luck started with the earth elements. He died in 2018 which has the same letters as when he was 21 years old. It supports the assumption his time pillar would have been wood and fire elements. It is such a quirk of fate that humans cannot go against their destiny.



Nevertheless, the genuine energy structure in Hawking's saju made a great physicist applying the black hole and singularity theories to the whole cosmos although he had difficulty with paralysis and loss of speech for most of his life.







Information : Are you interested in learning more about the ancient Chinese teachings, the "Four Pillars of Destiny" and oriental ways of fortune telling or fortune tellers? Janet teaches Saju for the public at Seoul National University of Education. For further information, visit Janet's website at www.janetshin.modoo.at or her blog, http://blog.naver.com/janet_shin .You can also contact her at 010-5414-7461 or email janetshin.kor@gmail.com

The writer is the author of "Life's Secrets".

Heo Jae-won, better known on YouTube as Heopop, is a popular YouTube creator with 1.8 million subscribers. He has drawn attention mostly from elementary school students for his hilarious, experimental YouTube videos of activities including eating food and trying out cosmetics. / Courtesy of Heopop blog



Rise of one-man media undercuts old media's influence



By Kang Hyun-kyung, Jung Da-min



Until a few years ago, Heo Jae-won, better known on YouTube as "Heopop," was a young college graduate who, he believed, had no future.



Born with a "mud spoon" in his mouth, he struggled to make ends meet. He wanted a breakthrough in his life and prepared to emigrate to Australia to seek a second chance.



To make seed money to finance his dream Heo, 31, chose to become a courier.



His tough life, however, continued. His work was physically demanding but his salary didn't reflect the long hours he put in.



In 2015, Heo created his own YouTube channel "HeopopFamily" and began to share videos on it. After six months, a video of him eating pancake Kakao bread went viral.



Kids were fascinated with his "meok-bang," or eating show, and shared it with their friends.



With 1.8 million subscribers, Heo is one of the nation's top 20 YouTube creators.



"Heo no longer considers emigration," said An Jeong-ki, the author of the book "Influencers: How Ordinary People Become Extraordinary." An had worked with Heo on the 2017 book project, "Becoming a YouTube Creator," a guidebook designed to help aspiring YouTube creators build their own channels.



"Heo makes tens of millions of won every month through his YouTube channel, which has become popular particularly among elementary school children," An said.



YouTube creators make money from advertisements served on their videos and from subscribers who watch their content.



"Heo's success shows how a social media channel has transformed an ordinary college graduate into the extraordinary man exerting enormous influence on his target audience," An said.



In the offline world, terms like come-from-behind victory or self-made people have rapidly been disappearing from dictionaries.



People lament "creek dragons," referring to highly successful self-made people, are going extinct as wealth and socio-economic status are passed down from one generation to the next. Less wealthy people are trapped in a vicious circle of poverty, having almost no chance of upward mobility.



The online world, however, defies this reality. Like Heopop, some have a successful second chance on the internet after producing appealing content for their target audiences.



The online world has emerged as a goldmine for people who have business acumen but no money to invest, causing the soaring of YouTube channels run by individuals in various topics and fields.



"Competition is heavy there," said Lee Seung-yun, a professor at Konkuk University in Seoul who co-authored "Influencers" with An.



"Becoming a top 10 YouTube creator and having millions of subscribers is as tough as a camel passing through the eye of the needle in the old proverb. Despite that rare chance, like Heopop, there are still people who succeed amid the survival-of-the-fittest competition."



Unlike traditional media, often called "legacy media" by some authors, the one-man media updates content on a daily basis. YouTube channels are more accessible than traditional media because subscribers can watch YouTube videos on smartphones anytime anywhere. YouTube channels are interactive, too; creators can respond to messages left on their channels.



The rise of YouTube creators has fueled the power shift in the media industry.



As seen in the ongoing #MeToo campaign that brought many celebrities and high-profile figures down, or in the 2017 candlelit rallies that cut ex-President Park Geun-hye's tenure short, author An said the era for ordinary people has arrived and they are able to make their voices heard, even without experience or training in journalism.



The demographic cohort, dubbed "Generation Z" or "post-millennials" are the key driver behind such a revolution-like change in the media industry. Generation Z refers to a demographic cohort born from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s.



"They are the wireless generation. Mobile phones, and later smartphones, are an integral part of their lives," An said. They are tech-savvy people and consume content mostly through their smartphones. For them, the smartphone is much more than a communication tool and they use it to create their own YouTube content with photos or videos they shoot. They share their content with their friends."



One-man media, however, is still an online phenomenon. Many star YouTubers are not known to the public offline. But their influence on the internet is enormous. "1 Million Dance Studio" is one of the most powerful YouTube channels with 8.6 million subscribers.



"They are really famous abroad. People recognize them," An said. "I bet they are one of the most popular dance groups in the world. The creator of the YouTube channel once operated a dance studio for boy and girl bands. The channel enjoys worldwide success."



The role of one-man media has been evident in K-pop. Boy band BTS owes their global success to YouTube users in the Philippines, according to An.



Philippine fans were early adaptors of the once obscure K-pop boy band. "Fans in the Southeast Asian country created YouTube videos in English about the boy band and shared them with their friends, which spread rapidly to Western fans. These dedicated fans' YouTube files helped teenagers in other countries understand the lyrics of BTS songs," An said.



Professor Lee said one-man media will keep growing.



"I believe their influence will expand further in the future. I don't think they will outgrow or replace legacy media. But one thing that is highly likely to happen is that because of the rise of one-man media, the legacy media won't be as influential as it has been. At the moment, many popular YouTube channels are designed for teenagers and people in their 20s. As these people grow older and enter their 30s and they will continue to watch their favorite content as long as it meets their expectations."



Lee said the growing popularity of one-man media is irreversible in an aging society.



"The older generation retired from work when they were in their late 50s. Then they spent their savings for the next 15 or 20 years until they died," he said. "Life expectancy has increased and sooner or later the average person will be able to live to 100."



The aging society has raised a key question _ how can we finance lives for 40 or 50 years after retirement? "The answer is that all of us need to be creators," Lee said. "We need to produce content of interest in order to make a living."

U.S. President Donald Trump / Reuters



By Oh Young-jin





Would U.S. President Donald Trump go to the North Korean capital of Pyongyang for the summit with Kim Jong-un in May?



Would Kim risk leaving his comfort zone to travel to Scandinavia or even Beijing to meet Trump?



Unless one of the two makes a concession, differences over the venue could be the stumbling block to the biggest chance so far of ending the North Korean nuclear stalemate.



For Trump, going to Pyongyang would make him a potential hostage to his sworn enemy.



After all, the U.S. President has vowed to destroy the North or threatened to rain fire and fury on the "little rocket man."



It is natural for Trump to be cautious and his aides are against him going behind enemy lines.



True, the U.S. could dispatch an armada of aircraft carriers and a fleet of strategic aircraft to near the North, sending an unmistakable message that if Pyongyang messes with Trump, the North will face the consequences.



Although the North often behaves in a way that raises questions about its sanity, would it be so crazy as to take Trump hostage?



Toward the end of his presidency, Bill Clinton tried to visit Pyongyang to seal a nuclear nonproliferation deal with Kim Jong-il, the present leader's father.

Clinton's successor, George W. Bush, disapproved of such a visit and it did not happen.



North Korean leader Kim Jong-un / Yonhap



Now is of course different from then.



U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright had visited Pyongyang in October 2000, while Jo Myung-rok, the second-most powerful man in the North, met Clinton in Washington in the October. The exchange of visits laid the ground for Clinton's proposed visit to Pyongyang, which never happened.



Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, March 22)  Senator Antonio Trillanes IV on Thursday said he will ask the Supreme Court to look into President Rodrigo Duterte's withdrawal from the International Criminal Court (ICC).

The opposition lawmaker told CNN Philippines' The Source he will file the petition "at an appropriate time."

He said other senators are also "seriously considering" filing a Senate resolution and a petition before the Supreme Court to question Duterte's move.

The President pulled the country out of the international tribunal, a month after the ICC announced a preliminary examination on alleged extrajudicial killings in the country. A preliminary examination will determine whether there is cause to go on a full-blown investigation.

READ: Duterte to critics: I challenge you to debate my decision on ICC withdrawal

Presidential Legal Counsel Salvador Panelo, along with Senate President Koko Pimentel, earlier said withdrawing from the ICC does not need to go through Senate.

Trillanes disagreed, saying "the decision to withdraw is just as important as entering into a treaty."

This view is backed by 14 other senators who filed Resolution No. 289 in February 2017, Trillanes said. The resolution states the termination of or withdrawal from any treaty or international agreement should be effective only after Senate concurrence.

Trillanes, alongside Magdalo Party-list Rep. Gary Alejano, filed a communication against Duterte at the ICC in June 2017, to complement the one earlier filed by lawyer Jude Sabio.

'Duterte in panic'

In pulling out of the ICC, Duterte is acting like "a man in panic," Trillanes said.

He also accused the President of trying to evade accountability.

Duterte in February said he welcomed the ICC's review. In March however, Duterte said the ICC had no jurisdiction over him. The Palace later announced the country's withdrawal from the treaty, with Presidential Spokesperson Harry Roque saying that Duterte found the ICC's examination "unacceptable."

Trillanes is confident there is a strong case against the government. "I'm confident because 20,000 na 'yung namatay and somebody needs to be accountable for that."

In the communication filed before the ICC, Sabio accused Duterte of "repeatedly, unchangingly, and continuously" committing mass murder. He said 1,400 individuals were killed by the so-called Davao Death Squad under the leadership of then Mayor Duterte, and 7,000 individuals were killed in the government's war on drugs since Duterte took office.

READ: PH withdrawal from ICC brings case closer to a criminal investigation, lawyer says

Trillanes and Alejano told the ICC killings in the country's drug war continued even after Sabio's communication.

More than 4,000 suspects were killed in anti-drug operations since the start of the bloody drug war in July 2016, government data show.

Local and international human rights groups said Duterte in his public pronouncements ordered or encouraged policemen to kill those involved in the drug trade. They said this resulted in more than 13,000 extrajudicial killings in the drug war.

Malacanang has said there are no state-sponsored killings and it is committed to investigate officers who violate and abuse their power.

Roque on Thursday maintained the government will not cooperate if the ICC insisted on continuing its review on the President and the war on drugs.

READ: Roque: PH won't cooperate in ICC probe on drug warDoublestar Chairman Chai Yongsen speaks during a press conference at the Korea Development Bank's headquarters on Yeouido in Seoul, Thursday. / Yonhap





By Park Jae-hyuk







Doublestar Tire will not wait for support from the Kumho Tire union indefinitely, although it hopes for a win-win partnership to secure global competitiveness, Chai Yongsen, chairman of the Chinese tiremaker, said Thursday.







He implied Doublestar may abandon its acquisition of the financially troubled firm if the union does not approve the deal.







Kumho Tire's creditors led by the Korea Development Bank (KDB) have already set a March 30 deadline for management and the union to reach an agreement on a self-rescue plan, saying failure to do so will lead to court receivership.







The Chinese businessman, who arrived in Seoul a day earlier, made a surprise visit to Kumho Tire's factory in Gwangju with KDB Chairman Lee Dong-gull to call for support from the union.







However, union leaders refused to meet the two, demanding Chai send company financial data for them to check.







"If Doublestar submits documents regarding its investment in Kumho Tire _ and guarantees the job security of union workers _ we will review them first and then decide whether to meet with the chairmen of the KDB and the Chinese company," it said.







The union has also demanded Chai guarantee job security for 10 years.







Earlier that day, the chairman said he will guarantee Kumho Tire's independent management, job security and the right to collective bargaining.







"If we complete the deal, Kumho Tire's headquarters will stay in Korea. We will guarantee the tiremaker's independent management, as Geely did when it acquired Volvo," he said in a press conference at KDB headquarters in Seoul.







"The three years of job security does not mean that we will sell or leave Kumho Tire after three years."







He also promised to guarantee the union's right to strike, as Doublestar will abide by Korean law.







He emphasized Doublestar is not trying to steal Kumho Tire's core technologies, saying his company will focus on budget products, while the Korean firm produces premium goods.







To highlight the company's technologies, Doublestar presented a video clip on its smart factories.







Chai said he will meet with Kumho Tire's union anywhere and at anytime to facilitate the company's normalization.







Doublestar has said it will invest 646.3 billion won ($603 million) in new Kumho Tire shares, which would allow it to become the largest shareholder of the company with a stake of 45 percent. The KDB-led creditors will collectively own a 23.1 percent stake.







"If we complete the project, we will invest in Kumho Tire as we promised," Chai said. "The money will be used for normalizing the company and upgrading facilities."







As for the acquisition of Kumho Tire's Chinese affiliate, Chai said he is not interested in taking it over, given that it is laden with bad debt.

By Park Ji-won



Ruling party members welcomed the President's move to seek National Assembly ratification of inter-Korea agreement, Thursday.



Woo Won-shik, the floor leader of the ruling Democratic Party of Korea (DPK), emphasized Thursday the importance of follow-up actions after the historic inter-Korea summit, stressing the need for the National Assembly to ratify the agreement. His remark came after President Moon Jae-in highlighted Wednesday the need for the Assembly to ratify the agreement with the North, saying the legacy can continue to be pursued regardless of political changes.



"If the agreement will be ratified by the Assembly, its outcome can be shared and can lead to creating eternal peace for the Korean Peninsula for every future government," said Woo, echoing what Moon told the summit preparation committee.



"We established the basis for peace last Oct. 4; however, it has been overshadowed on every government transition bringing down inter-Korea relations."





By Kim Bo-eun



President Moon Jae-in's proposal for a possible three-way summit with the leaders of North Korea and the United States is being viewed as part of the big picture to end the current armistice between the Koreas and achieve lasting peace on the peninsula, analysts said Thursday.



"Depending on the circumstances, the Seoul-Pyongyang and Pyongyang-Washington summits could lead to a three-way summit between North and South Korea and the U.S.," Moon said at a meeting on Wednesday preparing for the inter-Korean summit in April.



"Through the upcoming summits and those that will follow, we must put an end to the nuclear issue on the Korean Peninsula."



The 1950-1953 Korean war ended in an armistice, technically still leaving the North and South at war.



"The mentioning of a possible three-way summit is seen as part of efforts to use the current momentum to make achievements in denuclearization and achieve peace and possibly make a statement on the end of the Korean War," Kim Hyun-wook, professor at the Korea National Diplomatic Academy, said.





Gov't on track to repeal garrison decree amid controversy



By Lee Min-hyung





Former Defense Minister Han Min-gooCho Kuk, senior presidential secretary for civil affairs, right, speaks with Jin Sung-joon, presidential secretary for political affairs, after a press conference Thursday. / Yonhap



Voting age to be lowered to 18 under Moon's proposals



By Choi Ha-young



President Moon Jae-in proposed changing the current single five-year presidential term to a possible two-term, four-year presidency in his plan for a constitutional revision, Cheong Wa Dae said Thursday.



Under the new system, the president's power will be curtailed, while the prime minister and the National Assembly will be given more power. The envisioned changes aim to ensure policy sustainability by giving presidents the opportunity to seek re-election, according to Cho Kuk, senior presidential secretary for civil affairs.



The presidential office will officially submit the revision bill to the Assembly, March 26, in the hopes of holding a national referendum June 13, alongside local elections.



Under Moon's proposals, presidential power will be reduced significantly, Cho said. "The revision bill features checks and balances between the executive and the legislature," he told reporters.



Despite calls from conservative opposition parties, Cho dismissed the idea of authorizing the Assembly to elect or recommend a prime minister. "If the president and the prime minister are from different parties, the dual power structure will cause confusion in state affairs," he said.





Moon's Constitution proposals justify capital relocation LKP holds key to constitutional revision Moon's Constitution proposals justify capital relocation 6 in 10 back Moon's proposal for constitutional revision Instead, the revision bill stipulates various measures to mitigate presidential power  an independent committee to review special pardons; a Constitutional Court chief elected by its justices, not the president; independent authority for the prime minister to lead ministries; the Assembly to name three members of the nine-member Board of Audit and Inspection (BAI); the Assembly to have larger control over budget reviews; and more treaties to be ratified by the Assembly.



Some opposition parties have backed a parliamentary system or semi-presidential system, as a measure not to repeat the tragedies of the "imperial presidency," as shown by the abuse of power by ex-President Park Geun-hye which led to her ouster. However, Cho said opinionsurveys showed people were overwhelmingly in favor of the presidential system.



"Reform of the power structure should respect public sentiment," Cho said. "The presidential system is deeply rooted in Koreans' consciousness."



Additionally, Cho refuted the rumor that Moon is seeking another presidential term through the two-term presidency. "I clearly state that Moon is not eligible for a two-term presidency, according to Article 128 of the existing Constitution."



Under the President-led constitutional amendment, 18-year-olds could gain voting rights. "All OECD countries except Korea give them the right to vote," Cho said.



"Historically, teenagers have played an important role in pro-democracy movements including the 1960 April Revolution, 1979 Busan-Masan Democratic Protests and the candlelit protests of 2016."



The issue has become a political hot potato between conservatives and liberals, since young voters are more likely to support liberal and progressive parties.



Also, Moon touted electoral system reform to make the Assembly seats reflect the number of votes in the amendment bill. Cho cited the outcome of the 2016 general election, in which the Democratic Party of Korea and the Saenuri Party  the predecessor of the Liberty Korea Party (LKP)  received 65 percent of the vote, but took 85 percent of the seats.



"To resolve this dissonance, the revision bill states the principle of proportionally sharing Assembly seats in accordance with the voters' will," Cho said.



Following the conference, chief presidential secretary for political affairs Han Byung-do visited political parties to brief them on the revision bill.



/ Korea Times photo by Bae Woo-han



By Kim Jae-heun



The Seoul Central District Court issued an arrest warrant for former President Lee Myung-bak, Thursday, determining that he could destroy evidence pertinent to an investigation of corruption against him. Lee was taken from his home in Gangnam to the Seoul Eastern Detention Center in Songpa-gu, after the court's ruling.



The prosecution sought the arrest warrant for Lee, Monday, over allegations that he was the de facto owner of DAS, an auto parts company at the center of corruption, embezzlement and abuse of power charges leveled at Lee.



The court had planned to summon the former president Thursday to quiz him over the prosecutors' charges, but Lee refused to attend saying he had talked enough to the prosecution during questioning March 15.



Prosecutors did not force him to appear, saying: "Giving up the opportunity to state his position in court does not mean Lee will flee. It is one of his rights to not attend questioning."

The court agreed and cancelled the hearing Wednesday.



Instead, it reviewed the legality of the arrest request based on the prosecution's documents and arguments by Lee's legal counsel.



By Zaki Laidi





PARIS  U.S. President Donald Trump's decision to impose import tariffs of 25 percent on steel and 10 percent on aluminum is surprising neither for its expression of protectionist ideology nor for its sheer economic irrationality.



Rather, it is surprising because it has primarily targeted the European Union. Why is Trump taking measures against one of America's main allies instead of its principal strategic adversary, China?



Trade has always been a highly politicized issue in the United States, which is the only country to have trade policy featured in the first article of its constitution. But the U.S. is also unique in two other ways. First, Americans are much less dependent than others on world markets, owing to the sheer size of their own. That fact alone makes protectionism seem less risky.



Moreover, the relative weakness of the U.S. welfare system makes the country more sensitive than Europe to the social consequences of job losses due to foreign competition. This helps to explain why former Secretary of Commerce Donald Evans once quipped that Americans are more likely to believe in Martians than in the benefits of free trade.



Second, the U.S. regards trade primarily as an instrument of political sovereignty, whereas European countries since the end of World War II have viewed it as a tool for delivering prosperity and limiting conflict. The U.S. willingly takes part in international commerce whenever doing so strengthens its sovereignty, and it withdraws whenever Americans feel threatened. As staunch sovereigntists, Americans do not see fixed rules, only politics. They are interested in outcomes, not principles.



In fact, the U.S. wins more than 85 percent of the dispute-settlement cases that it argues before the World Trade Organization. Yet, under Trump, it is becoming increasingly hostile toward that institution. According to Trump's more protectionist economic advisers, the WTO is diluting U.S. sovereignty by creating, rather than simply implementing, trade laws.



Europeans, for the most part, have come to understand the important role that EU jurisprudence plays in national legal systems. The EU is built on a foundation of shared and integrated sovereignty, which, in the eyes of hard-line sovereigntists like Trump, is pure heresy.



But Trump's hostility toward Europe stems not only from his contempt for the EU's idea of sovereignty, but also from his obsession with reciprocity. Trump is convinced that, after aiding in the European postwar recovery, the U.S. has long offered systemic advantages to the European economy. To his mind, it is time for Europeans to repay the favor, even though it isn't all that clear which European economic and commercial activities benefited from supposed U.S.-conferred advantages, unless one links trade with security.



To be sure, the Trump administration is not entirely wrong to call out countries, like Germany, with large current-account surpluses, about which all countries, including in Europe, should be concerned. But those issues should be raised at the G20, and handled separately.



The worry now is that the U.S. will try to use the steel tariff as a bargaining chip to extract EU concessions in the automobile sector  a significant concern for Germany. Reduce the duty on cars imported from the U.S., the Trump administration will say, and your steel exports will be spared. After all, this is how the administration has been dealing with Canada and Mexico. Trump has temporarily exempted those two countries from the tariffs, but now expects concessions from them in his administration's renegotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement.



While the U.S. has, on average, less tariff protection than Europe, the difference is minor (Europe's unweighted customs duty averages 3.5 percent, versus 5.2 for the U.S.). Both countries maintain relatively open economies with stronger protections in specific sectors. Regulatory divergences are a much more important obstacle to U.S.-European trade than tariffs.



So, how should Europe react? Economically, the cost of the steel tariff is large, but hardly devastating. It will have only a minimal effect on European steel production. Nevertheless, the EU will be forced to protect itself, lest exports originally destined for the U.S. end up stuck in Europe. And in doing so, Europe could find itself unintentionally thrust into trade conflicts with other countries, whose steel exports to the U.S. will be redirected largely toward the European market.



Looking beyond the EU's immediate response, Trump's move raises two larger questions for Europe. The first concerns Trump's principal objective, which remains unclear. Does he want to extract concessions from the EU in all industrial sectors in which U.S. firms are lagging? Or does he have an even larger goal, such as pulling the U.S. out of the WTO? In that case, Europe must start preparing itself. It is anyone's guess if a global trading system without the U.S. would even be viable, and under what conditions.



The second question concerns China, which has not hesitated to exploit legal grey areas unregulated by the WTO to advance its economic and geopolitical interests. Up until now, the U.S. and the EU have had shared foreign-policy goals with respect to China. But if Trump has prioritized antagonizing Europe over winning its support against China, then that is surely a windfall for the Chinese.



Europe's leaders need to convince Trump of two things: that Europeans and Americans have common interests, despite occasional divergences, and that trade advantages in the 21st century stem not from tariffs but from the establishment of common standards. Setting the standards that will govern autonomous vehicles and related technologies is far more important than protecting old industries.



The European response to Trump's import tariffs should thus be twofold. First, the EU should retaliate  but only if the U.S. does not exempt the EU from its higher tariffs. If the Trump administration shows some openness to giving Europe a better deal, the EU should try to focus on opening a broader dialogue on trade with the U.S.



Second, the EU should approach the Trump administration about tackling shared regulatory concerns and defining a common stance vis-a-vis China. We have so much in common. When French President Emmanuel Macron visits Washington, D.C., next month, that is the message he needs to convey on behalf of Europe.





Zaki Laidi, professor of international relations at Sciences Po, was an adviser to former French Prime Minister Manuel Valls. Copyright belongs to Project Syndicate (www.project-syndicate.org).

Ever take one of those silly personality tests on Facebook? Your friends took the quiz ("What city should you actually live in?" was a popular one), so you followed the link to a website, answered some questions and shared the result: "Paris." All in good fun within your private social media group, right?



Yes, unless information from a quiz like that was harvested without consent or knowledge by a political data firm connected to the Trump campaign. In which case, your private musings may have contributed to a "psychographic modeling" effort to identify and influence American voters.



That's the damning centerpiece of news reports about Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, a data firm founded by supporters of Donald Trump.



There's a lot to be explored in the wake of investigative reporting by the New York Times and the Observer of London, but this privacy breach has the feel of a watershed moment in digital history. It relates to the devious appropriation of personal social media info for political gain.



We expect Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and those connected to Cambridge Analytica, will have to answer for this to the public, Facebook users, law enforcement authorities and members of Congress.



Here's some of what we know: Cambridge Analytica, founded by conservative firebrand Steve Bannon and Republican donor Robert Mercer, hired Russian-American researcher Aleksandr Kogan to create a quiz designed to identify Facebook users' personality traits, political views and other characteristics, such as fair-mindedness or life satisfaction.



The quiz participants, and Facebook, were told the information was for academic purposes. Instead the data went to Cambridge Analytica.



That's only part of the story. About 270,000 people agreed to take the test, but Kogan's tools also could scrape information from participants' Facebook friends.



According to the Times, Cambridge Analytica obtained private information from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users without their permission _ all to help influence several elections, including Trump's run for president.



Christopher Wylie, a Cambridge Analytica founder-turned-whistleblower, said in an interview with the Guardian that the information culled from Facebook included status updates and, in some cases, private messages.



"We would know what kinds of messaging you would be susceptible to, and where you are going to consume that," Wylie explained. "And then how many times do we need to touch you with that in order to change how you think about that."



We don't know for certain if this data swayed voters in any elections. But the Trump campaign, which used Cambridge Analytica, claimed that it successfully applied data-driven techniques to target Trump voters. The Times said information from the breach underpinned the firm's work on Trump's campaign.



For Facebook users, here's the rub: Even if no voters were influenced, Facebook apparently failed to prevent the misuse of private information from 50 million Americans for political purposes. This is a scandalous flub by the social media giant.



We anticipate scrutiny of Facebook that includes regulatory and congressional questions. There may be no appropriate measures to control the flow of information in a free society, but let Zuckerberg and others rethink their social media businesses and security practices.



For social media users, the message feels clearer than ever: Beware. Wherever you go and whatever you say online is potentially of value to others. If they see it, they may grab it.





The above editorial appeared at the Chicago Tribune. It was distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

By Gwynne Dyer





Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte once said that Ferdinand Marcos, who was overthrown by the first non-violent revolution ("People Power") in 1986, would have been the Philippines' best president "if he did not become a dictator." Just as Duterte himself had the potential to be the Philippines' best president if he had not become a mass murderer.



He doesn't react well to criticism, either. Last month the International Criminal Court began to investigate a complaint by a Filipino lawyer that the extrajudicial killings in Duterte's anti-drug war (now 8,000 and counting) amount to "crimes against humanity."



He responded by declaring that the Philippines would no longer accept the authority of the world tribunal.



On Sunday he went further, urging other countries to withdraw from ICC too: "Get out, get out, it's rude." Rude? That's a bit rich coming from a man who has called former U.S. President Barack Obama, former U.S. Ambassador Philip Goldberg, and even the Pope "a son of a whore," but Duterte does not suffer from an excess of self-awareness.



Less than two years into a six-year term, he has already threatened to pull out of the United Nations too. His main mode of speech is stream-of-consciousness, so he doesn't necessarily mean what he says, but you can never be sure.



He is not unintelligent, but the one constant that shapes everything he says and does is his tough-guy persona.



That's what Filipinos love him for (last year he had a 91 percent approval rating), but the problem is that he really is a tough guy _ and not in a good sense.



He graduated from law school and became a prosecutor in his home city of Davao, the biggest city in the southern island of Mindanao. It was then the most violent city in the country, and he set out to tame it.



It is not clear when Duterte decided that a death squad was needed to accomplish that task, but he makes no secret of its existence.



In fact, he boasts about it, and sometimes hints that he did some of the killing himself. He became the mayor of Davao in 1988, and claims that 1,700 suspected criminals were killed on his watch.



Most of them were street kids _ petty thieves and small-time drug dealers _ but it did work, after a fashion: Davao is now reputed to be the safest city in the country. And it was his promise to do the same thing country-wide that won him the presidency in 2016 with 39 percent of the vote, almost twice as many votes as the nearest runner-up among the five candidates.



It would have made more sense if the Philippines was an ultra-violent country overrun by crime and drugs, but it isn't. It is a profoundly unequal country whose politics has been dominated by a privileged and largely hereditary elite, but neither the crime rate nor drug usage is significantly higher than in other southeast Asian countries.



Amphetamine use (the Filpino drug of choice) is around the same level as in the United States or Australia, and opioids and cocaine are virtually absent in the country.



The murder rate is around the same level as the United States: four per 100,000 people in 2015, six per 100,000 in 2016 (due to Duterte's killing spree).



In less than two years in office, Duterte has presided over the extrajudicial murders of some 8,000 people, most of them drug-users who do little harm except to themselves. It is a classic displacement activity: the real problems are corrupt politicians and police and income disparities so huge that a quarter of the population lives in absolute poverty, but it's much easier to wage a war on drugs and crime.



Displacement tactics are quite common in politics (like Donald Trump promising to bring back millions of lost American jobs from foreign countries when most of them were really destroyed by automation).



But the pity of it is that Rodrigo Duterte, for all his bombast and vainglory, had other qualities that would have been very useful in the presidency.



He is an honest man, as Filipino politicians go, and he has a real empathy with the poor. During the Marcos dictatorship he protected opposition protesters in Davao, and he is gay- and Muslim-friendly in a country that has little tolerance for either.



He calls himself a "socialist," but the city of Davao achieved the highest economic growth rate in the country under his mayorship.



Alas, Duterte is also a mass murderer (he has said he will sign a pardon for himself "for the crime of multiple murder" before he leaves office.)



He has become addicted to the cheap popularity he gets from saying and doing shocking things, and lacks the discipline to work on the country's real problems.



Duterte is a disaster for the Philippines, but that's probably where the damage ends. And although he occasionally talks about abolishing the Congress and leading a self-appointed "revolutionary government," he is unlikely to be able to carry it off, because by then he won't be popular any more. The Philippines will not prosper under his rule.





Gwynne Dyer (gwynne763121476@aol.com) has worked as a freelance journalist, columnist, broadcaster and lecturer on international affairs for more than 20 years. He is the author of "Climate Wars: The Fight for Survival as the World Overheats."



Stricter punishment of swindlers needed



Rep. Seo Young-kyo of the ruling Democratic Party of Korea renewed her call Monday for the government to crack down on resurgent voice phishing fraud.



At a National Assembly session, Seo cited the recent example of an old man who sent his entire retirement payment of 900 million won ($84,200) to a phishing ring. She urged ranking police and financial officials to come up with steps to eradicate such financial scams.



The officials replied they would do their best to root out fraudsters. However, their perfunctory answer was more than regrettable given increasingly intelligent and sophisticated criminal techniques.



The 70-something victim, for instance, averted a suspicious bank clerk, saying he was "sending business funds to a relative," as told to do by a culprit on the phone. Also, a woman in her 20s remitted 800 million won to a man impersonating a prosecutor. She soon realized it was a voice phishing scam and reported it to the police, only to find the suspect had laundered the money via a cryptocurrency exchange and disappeared.



One might wonder how these people can still fall prey to con artists but the reality is not so simple. According to the Financial Supervisory Service, the number of voice phishing scams totaled 49,000 last year, up about 4,000 from 2016. Damage from this financial fraud also rose 49.9 billion won to 242.3 billion won over the period. The sharp increase was ascribable to the advent of new ways of fooling innocent people by, for instance, using virtual currency as a means of withdrawing money.



The most effective ways to deal with the evolving voice phishing schemes is to remain attentive and careful. The financial regulators say they will step up monitoring of these new tricks but the thieves have always been one step ahead of law enforcement. Potential victims should remember once again: Any and all people who ask them to send money over the phone are fraudsters.



Still, the time has also long past for the authorities to come up with far more effective steps to prevent such crimes, and much stricter punishment for the swindlers.



Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, March 22) - Sen. Antonio Trillanes IV expressed dismay over Senate President Koko Pimentel's lack of enthusiasm to put his foot down on the inciting to sedition charges he is facing.

"Under a stronger Senate leadership, the Senate President should have issued a show-cause order (against the) prosecutor and questioned her wisdom," Trillanes told CNN Philippines' The Source on Thursday.

"I hope Senator Pimentel will start to man up and protect the institution he represents," he added.

If this happened to a different senator, he believes Pimentel would have been vocally firm on the absolute parliamentary immunity for speeches delivered in the Senate.

"Probably because I'm one of the critics of the administration whom they are allied with, but if that's the case then it's unfair and unjust," he said.

Although he said he's not "holding his breath," he continues to hope Pimentel will do the right thing.

In a text message sent to CNN Philippines, Pimentel said if Trillanes "can cite a law or rule which allows me to do it then I will entertain his suggestion." Trillanes insisted it is within the powers of the Senate.

Pimentel was not among the 19 senators who signed yesterday the resolution calling for the members' constitutionally guaranteed right to parliamentary immunity. Trillanes said it would have gotten a 20th signatory - Sen. Chiz Escudero, who was absent yesterday.

Trillanes posts bail

Trillanes revealed he has posted a P12,000 bail for his temporary liberty barely a week after the Pasay City Prosecutor's Office's filed inciting to sedition case against him before the Metropolitan Trial Court.

The case stemmed from Trillanes' privilege speech on October 3, 2017 where he mentioned that the military might use an M60 machine gun against President Rodrigo Duterte because of his alleged wealth.

The complaint was filed in November 2017 by lawyer Manny Luna and fellow lawyer from the Volunteers Against Crime and Corruption (VACC) Jacinto Paras, who is now Labor undersecretary.

READ: ]

In a March 15 resolution, Senior Assistant City Prosecutor Joahna Gabatino-Lim said after Trillanes delivered his speech, "a nationwide petition-signing drive campaign was staged aimed at pressuring the President to open his financial records."

"Therefore, probable cause exists against respondent for violation of Article 142 of the Revised Penal Code, as amended," she said.

The speech, although delivered inside the Senate, was not covered by parliamentary immunity because it was supposedly "purely an attack" on the President and his family, and not made in aid of legislation.

'Signs of the Times'

Trillanes though was adamant in his stance. "Even if I said that outside the halls of the Senate, there's nothing seditious about that. It's a spin on what Duterte actually said," the opposition senator said.

Trillanes is also facing a civil case filed against him by President Rodrigo Duterte's eldest son Paolo and lawyer Manases Carpio, husband of Davao City Mayor Sara Duterte for involving them into the P6.4-billion illegal drugs smuggling issue at the Bureau of Customs.

"These are the signs of the times right now - how they bend laws to their favor and try to keep pushing the boundaries and of imagination regarding twisting the laws," he added.Swiss writing instruments maker Caran d'Ache President Carole Hubscher, third from left, cuts tape with Swiss Ambassador to Korea Linus von Castelmur, second from left, during the opening ceremony of the brand's flagship store in Jung-gu, Seoul, Thursday. / Courtesy of Caran d'AcheLee Hyeon-seok, an assistant research engineer at LS Cable & System, conducts an electrical safety check at the Sanbon traditional market in Gunpo, Gyeonggi province. / Courtesy of LS Cable & System



By Jun Ji-hye



Lee Hyeon-seok, an assistant research engineer at LS Cable & System, visits traditional markets every month to check electrical installations and cables for free as part of the firm's talent donation.



When visiting markets nationwide, he leads a volunteer team comprised of four to 10 people, in accordance with the size of the markets, and conducts the electrical safety check using the firm's technology and equipment.



Last year, Lee, who belongs to the technology development group of the company, presented an idea for the volunteer activity to CEO Myung Roe-hyun after having learned about fires that occurred at traditional markets in Daegu and Incheon.



"I thought we could carry out electrical safety checks for free by using our technologies," Lee told The Korea Times. "I was quite sure that this activity will contribute a lot to preventing electrical hazards and revitalizing traditional markets. I suggested this to the CEO."



CEO Myung welcomed Lee's idea and actively supported it, so Lee could begin the talent donation activity in September, beginning with a traditional market in Gumi, North Gyeongsang Province.



This month, Lee and members of the volunteer team visited a market in the southeastern port city of Busan and inspected electrical installations including cables, breakers and switches. Then, they repaired vulnerable facilities, and replaced old equipment with new for two days beginning Thursday.



"We usually spend three days at one market," he said. "On the first day, we conduct an on-the-spot survey to decide on how much time and manpower is needed, and which materials are necessary.



"And on the last day, we conduct safety education before wrapping up the activity."



Lee said he has actually seen some dangerous situations including a burned circuit breaker installed at a small restaurant run by an elderly woman in Gumi.



"The circuit breaker was already scorched black," he said. "If I had not visited and made an inspection, it would have led to a big fire. It was just as well that I could discover and repair it."



When carrying out education, Lee stresses the basic safety rules such as not touching sockets or outlets with moist hands.



"I believe that 95 percent of accidents can be prevented when people abide by the basic safety rules," he said.

By Kim Yoo-chul



Samsung, the country's most-influential business conglomerate, has not held any official events to celebrate the business group's 80th anniversary, Thursday, amid a continuing power vacuum following the group's top family scion Lee Jae-yong's release from prison.



Samsung said all Samsung Group affiliates agreed not to hold events to mark its 80th birthday. "No official events have been made," a Samsung spokesman said.



He said the group affiliates ran a seven-minute recorded message to employees via its internal broadcasting system.



"If we want to change, then we have to change the way we think to proceed with given tasks," Kwon Oh-hyun, chairman of Samsung Technology Center, said in the message.



Shin Jong-kyun, a former Samsung mobile chief, now serving as a vice chairman at Samsung's human resources development center, said the group will make solid partnership with subcontractors and suppliers a priority for simultaneous growth.



Samsung was established in March 1938 by the late group founder Lee Byung-chul in the southeastern city of Daegu. It began by selling cheap fruit and dried seafood.



Samsung grew with government support. In the 1960s, the group advanced financially and in the 1970s Samsung expanded its business territory to chemicals. In the 1980s, Samsung began operating its consumer electronics business. Now, it is the world's largest supplier of memory chips, displays and televisions.



When Samsung was started, its initial capital was 30,000 won; however, by last year, the combined total assets of the group's 62 affiliates amounted to 36.32 trillion won, according to data provided by the Fair Trade Commission showed.



It had 500,000 employees last year from the 40 that it had eight decades ago. The 16 listed companies took up some 30 percent of market capitalization of the country's benchmark KOSPI.



Despite such stellar business performance, Samsung's top brass had been linked to various types of wrongdoings with the group founder Lee resigning from his position due to his involvement in illegally importing some raw materials.



Lee Kun-hee, the founder Lee's youngest son and the father of Samsung Vice Chairman Lee Jae-yong, has been investigated by prosecutors over a bribery scandal. The former Samsung chairman Lee was incapacitated by a heart attack in 2014.



The vice chairman Lee was recently released from prison after an appeals court suspended his sentence in a corruption case. He has served as the de-facto head of Samsung since his father became physically unfit for the position due to the heart attack.



"One of the key criteria that lifted Samsung so far is because all critical business decisions came from the owner family. But now Samsung is experiencing a power and ownership vacuum, which is worrying all employees," said an official at Samsung.









Five carmakers and importers will voluntarily recall more than 5,000 vehicles to fix faulty parts, the transport ministry said Thursday.

It is the latest in a series of recall measures being undertaken by carmakers and importers to ensure their vehicles meet current safety rules.

The five companies -- BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Ford Motor Co., FCA and Toyota Motor Corp. -- plan to recall 29 different models totaling 5,137 vehicles, the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport said in a statement.

The models include Mercedes-Benz's C 200 sedan, BMW's X3 xDrive20d SUV, Toyota's luxury sub-brand Lexus NX300h sedan and Ford's Fusion sedan, it said.

The problems include a malfunctioning seat belt pretensioner in the C 200 sedan, a faulty part in the fuel tank of the BMW X3 xDrive20d SUV and a faulty air bag sensor in the Lexus NX300h sedan, the statement said.

Vehicle owners can now visit designated repair and service centers to have the parts replaced free of charge, it said. (Yonhap)



By Ko Dong-hwan







South Korean low-cost carrier Air Seoul has introduced an annual pass that slashes fares on flights to Japan by up to 75 percent.







Air Seoul's "Mint Pass" offers discounts from 67 to 75 percent, the Asiana Airlines subsidiary said Wednesday. The deal name refers to the airline's livery color.







The airline, with destinations in Japan, Hong Kong, Southeast Asia and Guam, has been targeting niche markets in Japan. The Mint Pass deals are limited to Yonago, Hiroshima, Takamatsu, Shizuoka, Toyama, Nagasaki and Ube.







For three roundtrips, the "Mint Pass J1," originally 600,000 won ($560), is available for 199,000 won. The "J2," for five roundtrips, is down from 1 million won to 299,900 won, while the "J3," for seven roundtrips, has been slashed from 1.4 million won to 399,000 won.







The deals can be purchased by submitting a registration form downloadable from the airline's site, starting Wednesday. The Mint Pass can be used anytime between May 1, 2018 and Apr. 30, 2019.







"Mint Pass destinations have excluded major cities and only comprise small cities with rising needs," said Park Bo-kyung from Air Seoul's PR department.







Air Seoul committed to the drastic discounts to promote itself after its launch in July 2016.







"We have not been popular yet but passengers who have used our service mostly praised our quality, including spacious seats," Park said.







The Mint Pass emerged as South Korean tourists' interest in Japan has increased. Japan's tourism ministry said Wednesday that overseas travelers in 2017 spent about 44 trillion won.







Among 28.69 million visitors to Japan in 2017, 62 percent visited at least twice. Among the visitors, South Korea (30 percent) topped the list, followed by Taiwan (25 percent), China (18 percent) and Hong Kong (13 percent).







The findings showed that tourists who visited Japan twice or more spent more than when they visited the first time. Those who visited the country 10 times or more spent as much as 40 percent more than their first visit.







The statistics also showed that South Koreans mostly purchased food and liquor during their first visit and increasingly bought cameras, watches and clothes on subsequent visits.

By Park Si-soo



The United States will temporarily exempt South Korea from new tariffs on steel imports, a top U.S. trade negotiator said Thursday (local time).

U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer told a congressional hearing that President Donald Trump authorized a "pause" in the 25 percent tariff on steel and 10 percent tariff on aluminum imports from South Korea and other nations.

Also on the list are the European Union, Argentina and Brazil. Trump earlier exempted Australia, Canada and Mexico.

"The idea that the president has is that, based on a certain set of criteria, that some countries should get out," Lighthizer said in testimony before the Senate Finance Committee, according to AFP.











An employee works at a convenience store in Seoul. / Korea Times photo by Bae Woo-han



By Kang Seung-woo



More convenience stores and fast food chains operating 24 hours a day are adopting shortened business hours to cut personnel costs against the government-driven minimum wage increase.



Starting this year, the Moon Jae-in administration raised the minimum wage by 16.4 percent to 7,530 won ($7) -- the biggest increase in two decades -- to boost private consumption and narrow the income gap.



However, the policy is igniting a backlash from small- and mid-sized firms that can ill afford higher labor expenses, which leads them to close down at night.



According to Emart24, Shinsegae Group's convenience store chain, it has seen the number of owners who choose to run their stores around the clock taking a nose dive over the past six months.



Last August, 28.7 percent of newly opened convenience stores decided to stay open all night. By September, the number dropped to 14.3 percent, by December to 9.6. In February, the number fell to 8.8 percent.



Although the minimum wage hike took effect in January, the government's advance notification last July is believed to have affected owners' decisions to shorten their store hours.



"The higher minimum wage is placing a labor burden on the convenience stores, forcing them to operate on a deficit," said Kye Sang-hyuk, head of an association of convenience store owners.



"More owners are now requesting to close down at night after suffering losses in recent months."



Fast food restaurants are also scaling back their store hours.



Since late last year, 10 McDonald's franchises in Korea have halted 24-hour operations, including a drive-thru near Hanam City Hall in Gyeonggi Province that now closes between 1 a.m. and 6 a.m.



Currently, out of the 440 McDonald's stores in Korea, 300 operate 24 hours a day.



According to McDonald's, whether to operate around the clock depends on location conditions.



Burger King has halted 24-hour services at its stores near Jongno-gu Office, Chungmuro Station, Nakseongdae and Chonnam National University, now open from 9 a.m. to midnight.



Lotteria has also decided to stop operating 24 hours at its stores in Namyangju and Pyeongtaek, both located in Gyeonggi Province.



Restaurants are introducing breaks during "quiet" times as part of their efforts to save labor costs.



"Some stores are setting a break time from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. when they have fewer visitors," said Lee Keun-jae, an executive at the Korea Foodservice Industry Association.



"In the past, premium restaurants had breaks to prepare ingredients, but now mom-and-pop stores are trending toward introducing breaks to cut costs."







Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, March 22)  Defense Secretary Delfin Lorenzana is not keen on a legislation seeking to make the Philippine Marine Corps an independent entity of the Armed Forces.

Speaking to CNN Philippines' The Source on Wednesday, Lorenzana said he dismissed the proposal.

We oppose that because the Marine is basically a ground force so kung gawin mo siyang branch of service, dalawa nang ground force natin, he said.

The Philippine Marine Corps claims they have particular skills like ship to shore operations. The Philippine Army could easily learn these skills," he said in a separate statement.

Lorenzana said this as House Bill 7304, authored by Marine Reservists House Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez and Majority Floor Leader Rodolfo Farinas, seeks to give the Marine Corps its own charter.

The Marine Corps has been under the command of the Philippine Navy, the militarys second biggest branch of service, since its creation in 1950.

In a text message, the Defense Chief also insisted military and defense leaders were kept out of the loop on the bill.

"We were totally caught by surprise," he said.

Meanwhile former Marine Commandant Lt. Gen. Juancho Sabban said the proposal has been on the table for years but was ignored.

Oo naman, matagal na yan. Pero always sina-shut down ng Navy at GHQ (general headquarters), Sabban said.

[Translation: Of course, that's been there a long time but the Navy and General Headquarters always shut it down.]

If the legislation is passed, the Marines will be able to break free from fiscal and organizational limitations while carrying out its mandate.

The bill will also set up marine headquarters in Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao, and give the Marines commandant a rank of three-star general.

Sen. Antonio Trillanes, a former military man, told CNN Philippines on Thursday officials must see both sides.

I understand the biases siyempre ni SND (Secretary of National Defense) dahil army man siya, pero kailangan din natin pakinggan ang gustong mangyari ng Philippine Marine Officers [because he is an army man, but of course we also have to listen to the Philippine Marine Officers requests], Trillanes said.

Lorenzana, however, said the Marine Corps was created as a striking force to run after pirates and smugglers. He said it was envisioned as a small force only.

This proposal comes in the wake of the navy's frigate controversy, which was seen as causing friction among defense and military leaders.Kendallville, IN (46755)

Today

A steady rain this morning. Showers continuing this afternoon. High 53F. Winds NW at 15 to 25 mph. Chance of rain 100%. Rainfall near a half an inch..

Tonight

Rain showers this evening with clearing overnight. Low 47F. Winds W at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 60%.(ST. JOSEPH, Mo.) Missouri Western State University will soon dissolve their community apprenticeship program. In July, the Missouri Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) asked the university to return funds from a Community Block Grant awarded to Western in 2012.

The $1 million grant authorized by former Missouri Governor Jay Nixon provided the funding to establish the Buchanan County Degree Attainment Initiative (BCDAI).

The BCDAI provided a $7,500 scholarship and on the job training to students employed in high demand industries, but who could not afford the costs associated with completing their degree.

Gordon Mapley, Dean and Executive Director of the Western Institute said the university wanted to implement the BCDAI to focus on the needs of adults in St. Joseph and help boost the local economy.

Some of the schools in the state chose to focus on traditional aged students in trying to help them complete a degree in less time. At Missouri Western we decided to focus on the adult population. My goal was to help incumbent workers complete a degree that would allow them to advance in their company and become more valuable to their company, Mapley said.

The program collaborated with over 20 local employers including Mosaic Life Care and Boehringer Ingelheim as well as other industry leaders in manufacturing, energy solution, bioscience, health services and information technology.

For each partnering business, at least 51 percent of program participants had to qualify with their county of residence at low or moderate income, obtain sponsorship from their current employer and maintain a 2.0 GPA.

Mapley said because the grant did not have a set expiration date, the university was highly selective of who would receive the scholarships.

We had very little notice that the funds were being pulled. Had we known that from the outset, we would have taken in more people and help more people, but we were trying to make sure our success ratio was as high as possible, Mapley said.

The university had originally planned to help over 100 students obtain their degree through the scholarship program, but due to the retraction of funds, the university has only been able to award 41 degrees through BCDAI.

Western used approximately $441,000 of the $1million grant and was required to return the remaining $559,000 to HUD for redistribution to other federal programs.

Currently Western has 24 students enrolled in the degree attainment program. Students that are currently enrolled will continue to receive scholarship money until completing their degree. However, the program will no longer take on new applicants.Metro Manila (CNN Philippines, March 22)  Partygoers may have to skip their Boracay escapades on Labor Day.

This follows a recommendation by Aklan Governor Florencio Miraflores to the local government to cancel the annual Laboracay parties this year.

I will be recommending to the local government of Malay that we should defer this for the meantime, because we are now in the process of cleaning up our drainage, our sewage system, Miraflores told CNN Philippines Newsroom on Thursday.

With the influx of more tourists, while we are rehabilitating this, it would be very difficult for us to finish it on time, he added.

Tourism Undersecretary Kat de Castro also posted on her Facebook page that a government inter-agency council, composed of the Environment, Tourism and Interior departments, has also recommended the move.

Laboracay, which happens on May 1, attracts local and foreign tourists to the island for various party events.

Interior Assistant Secretary Epimacio Densing also told CNN Philippines the six-day long event may cause more damage to the island.

"Because at Laboracay we're talking about 30-40,000 people at any given time on the island for six straight days, he told CNN Philippines News Night. That will actually add up to the pollutant and the destruction or degradation of the water system in the area for that few days, he said.

The move comes as the government works to beat President Rodrigo Dutertes six-month deadline to clean the world-famous tourist destination.

Presidential Spokesperson Harry Roque earlier said any closure will be during off-peak season following an appeal by Boracay businessmen to set the possible closure of the island to June and September when tourists are scarce.

READ: Roque: Boracay open this Holy Week; no closure date yet

In February, Duterte had told Environment Secretary Roy Cimatu to clean up the island within six months.

Following the Presidents directive, the government inter-agency council has floated the proposal of closing down the island for rehabilitation  a move that Boracay stakeholders have protested.

Densing said the inter-agency council formed to rehabilitate Boracay will recommend the closure of the island on April 26. The closure may last for as long as six months, he said.

However, he said the closure will only prohibit foreign and local tourists in the island  not shut down businesses with permits. He said businesses can continue to stay open for renovation or rehabilitation during the timeframe.Rome, March 22 - A new monument paying tribute to former premier Aldo Moro and his security detail, who were murdered by Red Brigades (BR) terrorists in 1978, has been vandalised by graffiti. The letters BR were scrawled in red on the monument in Rome's via Fani, where Moro was kidnapped and his five bodyguards were killed. Moro, a former leader of the once-dominant Christian Democrat party, was slain by the left-wing terrorists 55 days later. President Sergio Mattarella inaugurated the monument on Friday, the 40th anniversary of the day Moro was captured and his escort killed.Rome, March 22 - A loud bang heard by people in Lombardy and Valle d'Aosta on Thursday was the sonic boom of the supersonic flight of two Italian Air Force Eurofighter jets, military sources told ANSA. The fighters were scrambled to intercept a French airliner that had lost contact with air-traffic controllers, the sources said. The connection with the airliner was restored and the jets returned to base, the sources said.Rome, March 21 - Silvio Berlusconi's centre-right Forza Italia (FI) party on Wednesday rallied round Senate Whip Paolo Romani as Speaker candidate in the Upper House despite a veto from the anti-establishment 5-Star Movement (M5S) over a probe for allegedly misusing a Monza municipal cellphone. Romani, 70, is the candidate of the whole party, FI sources said. Romani's candidacy is at the centre of talks Wednesday with the leader of FI's main rightwing populist ally the League, Matteo Salvini, and the leader of its smaller rightist nationalist ally Brothers of Italy (FdI), Giorgia Meloni.Milan, March 22 - A young woman was fired from a Milanese gelateria Tuesday for refusing to serve anti-migrant League leader Matteo Salvini on the grounds that he is a racist. "I don't serve racists", the unnamed woman told the owner, who sacked her saying all clients should be treated the same, la Repubblica reported. Salvini did not hear the exchange and got his gelato from another server at the Baci Sottozero ice-cream bar, it said. photo: a Facebook post by the gelateria justifying the dismissalMilan, April 22 - TIM directors representing majority shareholder Vivendi tendered their resignations Thursday, effective April 24, the date of the AGM. The board will be renewed on May 4, TIM said in a statement. The resignations included that of Chairman Arnaud de Pouyfontaine, who said "as chairman of TIM and in the interest of all the shareholders, I wan to free the board of the climate of uncertainty that has been created and which distracts attention from what is our priority, that is the rapid realisation of the DigiTim strategic plan". A week ago the Elliott fund asked the TIM board to revoke six directors including chairman de Puyfontaine, and the deputy executive president Giuseppe Recchi, replacing them with six of their own. The other four directors Elliott International, Elliott Associates and The Liverpool Limited Partnership wanted replaced are Herve' Philippe, Fre'de'ric Cre'pin, Fe'licite' Herzog and Anna Jones. Four of these directors are linked directly to shareholder Vivendi while two are independents but still elected in the majority partner's list. Elliott and the other two investors said they wanted them to be replaced by the following six: Fulvio Conti, Massimo Ferrari, Paola Giannotti De Ponti, Luigi Gubitosi, Dante Roscini and Rocco Sabelli. TIM said it would add the issue to its agenda for a shareholders meeting on April 24. Financial sources said Elliott's problem was Vivendi and not CEO Amos Genish, who was not included among the execs it wants to replace. They said the fund considered Genish a very competent TLC expert and his business plan well constructed, and it appreciated the way the management handled the day-to-day running of TIM. The problems linked to Vivendi allegedly included conflicts of interest that allegedly spurred operations deemed disadvantageous for minority shareholders, the financial sources said. US investor Elliott's plan for TIM which envisages spinning off and floating the network "is a project that coincides with what we intend to do for the public interest," Industry Minister Carlo Calenda said Wednesday. "But I think that TIM, too, was oriented in this direction," the minister added.Bolzano, March 22 - Three people were killed on Thursday when an avalanche hit a group of mountaineers on the Gran Zebru mountain in Alto Adige, rescue sources said. Two were killed immediately and a 32-year-old Austrian tourist died later in hospital of her injuries.Milan, April 22 - TIM directors representing majority shareholder Vivendi tendered their resignations Thursday, effective April 24, the date of the AGM. The board will be renewed on May 4, TIM said in a statement. The resignations included that of Chairman Arnaud de Pouyfontaine, who said "as chairman of TIM and in the interest of all the shareholders, I wan to free the board of the climate of uncertainty that has been created and which distracts attention from what is our priority, that is the rapid realisation of the DigiTim strategic plan". He went on: "I confirm my commitment to the plan to transform TIM and I am convinced that this decision will give further stability and support to our CEO Amos Genish and his team, enabling us to create value for all our stakeholders". TIM's American depositary receipts fell 4.3% in New York on the chairman's resignation. A week ago the Elliott fund asked the TIM board to revoke six directors including chairman de Puyfontaine, and the deputy executive president Giuseppe Recchi, replacing them with six of their own. The other four directors Elliott International, Elliott Associates and The Liverpool Limited Partnership wanted replaced are Herve' Philippe, Fre'de'ric Cre'pin, Fe'licite' Herzog and Anna Jones. Four of these directors are linked directly to shareholder Vivendi while two are independents but still elected in the majority partner's list. Elliott and the other two investors said they wanted them to be replaced by the following six: Fulvio Conti, Massimo Ferrari, Paola Giannotti De Ponti, Luigi Gubitosi, Dante Roscini and Rocco Sabelli. TIM said it would add the issue to its agenda for a shareholders meeting on April 24. Financial sources said Elliott's problem was Vivendi and not CEO Amos Genish, who was not included among the execs it wants to replace. They said the fund considered Genish a very competent TLC expert and his business plan well constructed, and it appreciated the way the management handled the day-to-day running of TIM. The problems linked to Vivendi allegedly included conflicts of interest that allegedly spurred operations deemed disadvantageous for minority shareholders, the financial sources said. US investor Elliott's plan for TIM which envisages spinning off and floating the network "is a project that coincides with what we intend to do for the public interest," Industry Minister Carlo Calenda said Wednesday. "But I think that TIM, too, was oriented in this direction," the minister added.KAHULUI  The Maui Energy Conference returned to the Maui Arts & Cultural Center on March 14-15 to celebrate its fifth anniversary and the tenth anniversary of the Hawaii Clean Energy Initiative (HCEI). The event, presented by the Maui Economic Development Board and supported by the Mayors Office of Economic Development, explored the theme Decarbonization: A Business Opportunity for Innovative Communities.

The conference featured keynote speakers, panel sessions, case studies, exhibits and networking, attracting more than 300 energy industry leaders from Hawaii, the Mainland, Japan and Europe.

Participants exchanged ideas on how to better serve customers in todays rapidly changing power generation and delivery environment.

Keeping in mind the ten-year anniversary of HCEI, speakers answered questions on its achievements and limits, whether it addressed carbon and whether there is a worthy successor.

We owe a debt of gratitude to HCEI, said Doug McLeod, conference Program Committee chair. They raised the profile of Hawaii on the national energy scene in a way that created the demand for a conference like this. When we looked at the program for this year, we kept asking ourselves what the logical next step is for Hawaii after ten years of HCEI.

McLeod explained how, in the last 12 months, the energy scene in Hawaii has shown the people of Hawaii the answers.

From the dispute over the Hu Honua biomass plant on the Big Island to the Sierra Club complaint about the use of coal by HC&S on Maui, to the efforts by the mayors of all the counties in Hawaii to move toward electrification of transportation, and even the ongoing discussion of whether waste-to-energy projects such as H Power on Oahu are really a net benefit to the environment, we are seeing common themes, McLeod said. Are we really making power in a way that matches our goals and our values?

Sessions explored the theme at a policy and regulatory level as well as at the business level. One panel discussion on Convergence examined how it all comes together for a shared solution that benefits all stakeholders.

Other topics included Decarbonizing Transportation; Regulating Carbon: The Best Solutions; Storage Technologies, and more.

The Program Committee is comprised of energy experts from Maui, Oahu, Colorado and California. It welcomed new member Frederick Redell, energy commissioner, Maui County Office of Economic Development.

Hawaii became the first U.S. state to set a date, 2045, for the total decarbonization of its power supply. With renewable energy booming since 2008, when the state set a goal of making renewables 40 percent of its power mix by 2030, government and utility incentives both fostered wind power and solar.

Smarter grid design and operation is a rich area of study that has already started to smooth the integration of variable and distributed renewable energy sources. Environmental factors, the abundance of renewable energy resources such as wind, solar, geothermal, hydroelectric and ocean power, are all reasons to move more quickly.

One of the key topics at the conference was battery storage. Attendees were shown a world in which homes are completely powered by clean energy and tied into the smart grid with storage technologies providing the reliability to which we have all become accustomed. Cars are electric, and environmental costs of remaining fossil fuel usage are reflected in its price.

As prices for storage systems continue to drop, more people will begin to look at the advantages and possibly adopt them, said Hawaii Energy Advisor Walter Enomoto. Storage is the next big wave in the energy field.

This new paradigm, in fact, is already well underway in the State of Hawaii, said Daniel Suurkask, managing director of Las Vegas-based Elevation Direct and recognized expert in the energy industry.

Suurkasks clients include municipal utilities, electric cooperatives, independent generators, ratepayer advocates, lending and rating agencies, large industrial companies, energy marketers and retail energy providers.

Policy goals, such as the ambitious 100 percent renewable portfolio standard by 2045, say that all electric load in the state is to be met from solar, wind and other renewable sources, Suurkask said.

It was acknowledged that while important decarbonization inroads have been made in the electric power sector, in other polluting sectors, starting with transportation, meaningful progress has yet to be seen. Electrification of transportation in Hawaii is the newest hot topic.

Rep. Chris Lee, in his keynote presentation, said, Looking at the data is not only prudent but necessary. Viewing rising sea levels as an effect of inaction, Lee said, The costs of not going completely green are so high that the costs to ratepayers are comparatively inconsequential.

Lee agreed with the panel on Convergence: We need to rethink our approach to reach our goal. All stakeholders have a piece of the puzzle and need to align to work more efficiently. We need to discuss what the private sector wants; technology is demanding it.

Lee also talked about the electrification of transportation in Hawaii using the electric bus as an example. Decarbonizing transportation will ultimately require updates in the maritime and aviation sectors, as in the new craze, E-bikes.

We need to change to clean transportation as soon as possible, said Lee. New charging infrastructure will help create new jobs and new opportunities.

As a state representative, Lee described legislative bills to lay out the framework for a clean transportation system, with benchmarks to reduce carbon as the energy market moves forward.

Its on government and regulatory agencies to make sure investments benefit everyone, Lee explained. It is on the Public Utilities Commission to make sure there are incentives for all people.

As information about the grid is digitized, computers and cloud-based analytics have the potential to produce incredible cost savings in how the grid is designed and operated, potentially saving 20 percent or more in costs by running and planning the grid more efficiently.

Dawn Lippert, CEO of Elemental Excelerator on Oahu, discussed business opportunities created by HCEI.

The business community is passionate about fixing the world for future generations, she said. Entrepreneurs and clean energy activists are setting the stage for significant opportunities and new career paths for our youth. These jobs will not only help invent the future but will also lead to a cleaner and more resilient island.

Overseeing the strategic direction of Elemental Excelerator and the execution of its mission, Lippert has been investing in startups since 2009. Elemental Excelerator funded the startup Kevala Analytics, founded by Aram Shumavon. Based in San Francisco but working on Oahu, the company maps out the islands distribution network, rooftop photovoltaic systems and bulk power resources.

Kevala is undertaking a stakeholder-driven map exercise, explained Shumavon. In the coming months, as the mapping exercise wraps up, Kevala, along with its partners Grid Works and the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute, are building the data sets to drive trillions of dollars in value into the public domain.

My project, Pathways to an Open Grid, is focused on digital data that will make the grid more efficient, said Shumavon.

Americas electric grid, the power plants and wires that produce and distribute electricity, cost roughly $5 trillion to build. But the decision to invest that money was made when the grid was planned around century-old technologies, and there was little understanding of how technologies like wind and solar would change the value of the grid itself.

Summing up the conference, James Griffin, Ph.D., Public Utilities commissioner, State of Hawaii, said, I absolutely believe we have the opportunity for a cleaner, more affordable energy system that serves the state better than the current system. Im excited by the progress we can make in the next ten years!States unfunded liabilities tsunami hits Maui

Maui County taxpayers are getting soaked by the rising flood of public pension and health benefit costs, and lawmakers need to bring their past promises in line with what taxpayers can afford.

Every year, Maui County taxpayers fork over payments into the state Employee Retirement System and the state Employer Union Trust Fund. These payments together will be increasing from $50 million in 2017 to $60 million in 2018 and $71 million in 2019.

That 2019 total amounts to an annual cost of $432 for every man, woman and child in the county, up from $304 in 2017. And those costs are expected to continue increasing.

This drastic ramp-up in payments is partly because of rising healthcare costs, but also because of the increased benefits promised to public employees over the years. Over the past decade, benefits for public sector workers have risen five times faster than benefits in the private sector, creating an ever- larger debt for the states public pension and health benefits funds.

In order to pay for the debt, Maui County may need to cut vital services from its budget. This means that taxpayers may be paying more and getting less.

Hawaii lawmakers need to begin discussing reforms, such as managing runaway overtime costs and offering updated pension packages for new public employees, to help keep past promises aligned with what taxpayers can afford.

This would help ensure that Hawaiis taxpayers  as well as its public employees  survive the states dangerous tsunami of debt.

JOE KENT, Vice President of Research, Grassroot Institute of Hawaii



Support WomenCount

This is a site that was built for us  WomenCount is a new crowd funding platform, like Kickstarter or Indiegogo, created to support and elect progressive women.

When I heard you could search through existing slates of women candidates, to support the women who represent our values  and get your friends involved, too  I had to get our team on it.

Ive created my own slate on WomenCount, and Im asking you to help me support my 11 women Senate colleagues up for re-election. We MUST hold their seats. The Democratic women of the Senate stick together, and the voices of my friends are critical in standing up for healthcare, immigration and other issues we hold dear as Democrats.

This could be a real game-changer as we work to take back the Senate and stand up to Donald Trump  2018 is shaping up to be the biggest year for women candidates ever.

Heres the best link: womencount.org/teams/the-blue-wall-hirono/?utm_campaign=2018-3-09-Hirono.

SEN. MAZIE HIRONO



Defying the hawks on the way to a Trump-Kim Summit

Donald Trumps extraordinary decision to meet with Kim Jong-un has taken all the policy hawks by surprise -and led them to issue all kinds of warnings of impending disaster.

Trumps decision is extraordinary, because until now, the common refrain from him and all other U.S. policy-makers was that the North Koreans would have to provide evidence of moving toward denuclearization before any talks could take place. To do otherwise, as Trump once said, would be to follow the ruinous path of previous presidents, who were supposedly suckered into sitting down with North Korea and making unilateral concessions.

Now Trump, perhaps in an effort to turn the spotlight away from his domestic problems  the Stormy Daniels affair, the Rob Porter affair, the Russia investigation, the tariff announcement, the Gary Cohn resignation, etc.  has agreed to talks with nothing more than a promise from Kim to put denuclearization on the table.

The hawks are in full throttle over this seeming concession.

Victor Cha, who was slated to be Trumps ambassador to South Korea until he chafed at Trumps war talk, warns that the [North Korean] regime never gives away anything for free. Cha advises that Trump keep up the sanctions and military pressure that presumably had something to do with Kims invitation to a summit.

Lets try to be objective here; both Pyongyang and Washington have given up something to get to the table, and both have preserved crucial options. Kim Jong-un has promised to halt nuclear and missile testing and accept the reality of U.S.-South Korean military exercises. But his willingness to talk about denuclearization does not mean stopping nuclear and missile research and production, much less reducing his weapons arsenal.

Trump has dropped the no talks line but has made clear that sanctions and other forms of maximum pressure will continue. The concessions thus far are mutual, welcome, but very limited. I can imagine that Kim, like Trump, will tell his inner circle that I havent given away anything.

Hawks cant stomach giving North Korea the international legitimacy it craves. But that is precisely the kind of symbolic gesture that galvanizes an engagement process. As the South Korean delegation reported following its meetings with Kim, he wants North Korea to be considered a serious partner for dialogue. Thats not a concession; its a necessary incentive for moving forward. And it should be accompanied by a mutual agreement to cease name calling and stereotyping, at least while talks are in progress.

The U.S. and North Korea have an opportunity to move away from threats and toward a major defusing of tensions. Denuclearization  that is, the dismantlement of all North Koreas nuclear weapons  is only likely to come about, if at all, after both sides take other steps, such as a verifiable freeze on nuclear and missile testing, normalization of diplomatic relations, security guarantees to the North, resumption of economic aid to North Korea and framing of a peace treaty to finally end the Korean War.

A Trump-Kim summit at best can only set the stage for discussion of these topics. But as Churchill said, it is far better to jaw, jaw than war, war. The hawks warnings do not help matters, and in the end they may yet upset the apple cart.

MEL GURTOV, PeaceVoice



Gill Girls thank volunteers for participating in cleanup

The Gill Girls, Mariah and Hailey Gill, would like to send out a huge MAHALO to all the volunteers who participated in our first annual USC Alumni Day of SCervice Lahaina Town and Coastal Clean Up on Saturday, March 10!

It was a great success! In three hours, 30-plus volunteers cleaned the streets and beaches ranging from Shark Pit to Baby Beach. Because of their hard work, over 30 bags of trash were stopped from washing into our sensitive ocean. Keeping the streets and beaches of our coastal town free of litter is paramount to preserving the beauty of Lahaina as well as protecting our precious ocean and marine life.

Every cigarette butt, plastic bag, plastic spoon, fork and straw counts, and the cumulative impact of these individual small pieces of trash washing into the ocean can be seen in the devastating existence of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch located in the North Pacific Gyre.

No trash should be left behind or passed by. We have an amazing community of people who share a common love, respect and pride for our special and historic Lahaina Town, and it is so important to continue to foster this pride and to keep it alive for generations to come.

We look forward to hosting and participating in many more town cleanups! Aloha and mahalo!

MARIAH AND HAILEY GILL, Lahainaluna High School Class of 2008/2009, University of Southern California Class of 2012/2013KAANAPALI  For almost 15 years, Kimo Falconer and landowner Kaanapali Land Management Corp. have been caring for the coffee orchards that were once part of the old Pioneer Mill operation. Today, nearly 500 acres of coffee fields are thriving on the West Maui Mountains within the premiere agricultural community of Kaanapali Coffee Farms.

For Kimo and Kaanapali Land Management Corp., its a dream come true. Thanks to an innovative concept that melds both agriculture and real estate, Kaanapali Coffee Farms is enabling lot owners to have their cake and eat it, too.

While property owners enjoy a leisurely lifestyle and, bar none, the most spectacular views on Maui, veteran farmers care for their coffee orchards that reap MauiGrown Coffees exceptional coffee varietals  Yellow Caturra, Red Catuai, Typica and Maui Mokka.

Demand often exceeds supply, with our coffee varietals selling out each year, shared Kimo about their coffee that is sought by wholesalers and retail customers statewide, on the U.S. Mainland, as well as internationally. Its a nice problem to have, and we are now looking at planting more coffee to meet the demand for our 100% MAUI Origin Coffee.

Also experiencing success with a high demand and lack of supply is Kaanapali Coffee Farms. Today, only four estate lots remain available for sale. Those who purchase an estate lot to build their dream home, or as an investment, know the real value of this one-of-a-kind agricultural community.

According to Rohn Stark, PB of Platinum Properties Hawaii, the exclusive project broker for the development, The Kaanapali Coffee Farms offers property owners benefits that no other communities can offer. Its an opportunity to purchase a four- to five-acre estate lot with your very own coffee orchard, to live the lifestyle youve always dreamed, and to be part of an agricultural family that is helping to preserve West Mauis agricultural legacy. The fact that youre living on Maui well, that just makes ones purchase even sweeter.

For a personal real estate showing of the Kaanapali Coffee Farms community, please call Rohn T. Stark, PB, at (808) 870-5571 or e-mail Rohn@PlatinumPropertiesHI.com. You can also visit www.KaanapaliCoffeeFarms.com and/or like us on Facebook.MAKAWAO  The Maui Youth Rodeo Organization will hold a benefit on Saturday, March 24, from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m. at the Oskie Rice Arena in Makawao. Admission is free.

The event will feature a rodeo competition, family fun events, jumping castles and food booths (hamburgers, hot dogs, chili bowls, dogs and nachos, and non-alcoholic drinks).

Spectators will enjoy rodeo activities of ACTRA team roping, open barrels, ribbon roping, open breakaway roping, ranch sorting and dummy roping.

As day turns into night, attendees can enjoy a Pulehu Steak Dinner at $15 per head; listen to live music provided by Benny Uyatake and Corey Lum & Friends, ending with deejay music for dancing; and live and silent auctions.

Parking will be free for the entire event.

This annual benefit is the groups only event to raise funds for the future Rodeo Generation.

Monies help children to travel to state and national finals, and provide scholarships to seniors.

The organization helps to keep Mauis paniolo heritage and spirit alive.

Its motto is Training Arena Champions. Training Life Champions.

The group provides a safe, fun and educational environment for all youth who are interested in the paniolo life.

Its members learn the rules of great sportsmanship, leadership traits, teamwork, to support each other and the daily care of animals.

As with all Hawaii Department of Education sports, members must maintain a grade point average of 2.0 or higher in order to participate.It was an exciting time. The Cold War was over, and it wasnt hard to imagine a worldwide flourishing of peace and freedom. On Jan. 29, 1991, speaking to a joint session of Congress, then-President George H.W. Bush described a new world order, where diverse nations are drawn together in common cause to achieve the universal aspirations of mankind  peace and security, freedom, and the rule of law. He hailed the triumph of democratic ideas in Eastern Europe and Latin America. Eleven months later, on Dec. 26, 1991, the Soviet Union disappeared entirely; in its place stood 15 emerging democracies.

It was during that optimistic time that I organized a congressional Republican retreat in Princeton, N.J., where we featured a conversation with a young scholar named Francis Fukuyama, who had just published The End of History and the Last Man. The arc, or line, of history, he argued, could not sustain tyrannies; ultimately, it would be free democracies that would win, and were winning, the long struggle among competing governing ideologies. Sure enough, Vladimir Putin's never-in-doubt "reelection" as the unquestioned leader of post-Soviet Russia shows that today, even oligarchs feel the need to wrap their strongman rule in a cloak of democratic legitimacy.

But as Fukuyama knew, its a bit more complicated. Fifteen years after The End of History, Fareed Zakaria published The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad; the goal, Zakaria cautioned, was not democracy per se but liberal democracy, meaning not only free and fair elections but also the rule of law, separation of powers, and the protection of basic liberties of speech, assembly, religion, and property. And, he argued, this latter bundle of freedoms  what might be termed constitutional liberalism  is theoretically different and historically distinct from democracy.

Yascha Mounks brilliant new book, The People vs. Democracy: Why Our Freedom Is in Danger & How to Save It is the latest point on the continuum, and its a scary ride, coming at a time when both Fukuyamas predicted multiplication of democracies and the truth of Zakarias warnings have come to pass. Where we Americans have long since come to imagine democracy and constitutional liberalism as essentially a single entity, Mounk  born and raised in Germany, having lived in England, France and Italy before coming to the United States  brings an outsider's perspective and sees instead a battle between democracy without rights (what the Founders called a tyranny of the majority) and rights without democracy. Both are problematic. Given the ability to shape society without the constraints of effective mediating institutions, the masses might well use that power to eliminate the rights of nonmajorities (ironically, doing so by turning to authoritarians, whose attacks on any who would dare to stand in the way of the people  independent courts, a free press  would be freed to consolidate power and effectively do away with meaningful democracy).

Among white voters below age 30, Donald Trump won by five points in 2016.

But a system of rights without democracy is equally a threat. As Mounk notes, more and more of the important policy decisions that affect citizens lives are outside the scope of electoral influence. Unelected judges rewrite or reject policies enacted by the men and women the voters have selected for that purpose. Federal bureaucracies wield enormous power. Both the wealthy and narrow-interest activist groups have a magnified influence over government decision-making and the public will matters less and less. International treaties place important issues outside the reach of elected legislators. Those who complain that their voice is not heard are not without justification in thinking so. The problem is on both sides: The voters have become more illiberal and the elites have become less responsive.

In addition, the America of today is a far cry from that which older citizens can recall. In the past, Mounk notes, the dominance of the mass media limited the distribution of extreme ideas, created a set of shared facts and values, and slowed the spread of fake news. Now those gatekeepers have been significantly weakened by the emergence of the internet and social media. In addition, for decades, most Americans could expect improved living standards for themselves and their children; now, many citizens are treading water and their economic futures looks bleak. Finally, he observes, whereas nearly all stable democracies, including our own, were either mono-ethnic or ones in which a single ethnicity dominated, that pattern is being challenged. In the 60s, one in 20 Americans was foreign-born; today, its one in seven, identical to the massive immigration period that lasted from 1860 to 1920 and created the melting pot America that shaped the nation for the rest of the 20th century. For many, culturally, socially and economically, the ground is shifting uncomfortably beneath their feet, giving rise to anxiety and a search for someone strong enough to restore the comforting past.

This is deeply worrying, Mounk writes, because liberalism and democracy are both nonnegotiable values. If we have to give up on either individual rights or the popular will, we are being asked to make an impossible choice.

As this superb book makes clear, we need both the liberal framework and the democracy, and bringing them back together is the greatest challenge of our time.

Mounks concerns are rooted in an understanding of the world he occupies in 2018, as opposed to the one Fukuyama was writing in a quarter-century earlier. Today, nearly one-fourth of millennials (the cohort that will soon dominate public elections) think democracy is a bad way to run the country, according to data Mounk compiled from the World Values Survey, Gallup polls and other research resources. By 2011, fully 44% of Americans ages 18 to 24 felt that a political system with a strong leader who did not have to bother with Congress or elections was a good idea or a very good idea. At the same time, one in six Americans said they were in favor of military rule. Over time, young Americans have become more and more attracted to political extremes. Among white voters below age 30, Donald Trump won by five points in 2016. It is not hyperbole to suggest that there are things to worry about.

Mounks argument takes us back full circle to the trepidations of the Founders, who empowered the people to select their own leaders but whose ultimate authority would be mediated and constrained by independent forces within a constitutional framework. As this superb book makes clear, we need both the liberal framework and the democracy, and bringing them back together is the greatest challenge of our time. The last 68 pages describe what we can do to pull ourselves back from the brink; they are familiar remedies  he didnt invent them  but when you read those final pages, you should takes notes and start your to-do list. Its important.

Edwards was a member of Congress for 16 years. He later taught at Harvard and Princeton and is currently a vice president of the Aspen Institute. He is the author of The Parties Versus the People: How to Turn Republicans and Democrats into Americans."

Book jacket for Yascha Mounk's 'The People vs. Democracy'. CREDIT: Harvard University Press Harvard University Press / Harvard University Press

Yascha MounkCongressional lawmakers have formally requested that Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg testify at an upcoming hearing in response to reports that a data analytics firm used by the Trump campaign had improperly accessed the names, likes and other personal information of about 50 million users on the social site.

The request officially came Thursday from the House Energy and Commerce Committee, a powerful panel that oversees Facebook and its tech peers, and arrives a day after Zuckerberg said he would be happy to appear on Capitol Hill to address lawmakers lingering questions about Facebooks privacy protections.

The latest revelations regarding Facebooks use and security of user data raises many serious consumer protection concern, said Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.), the panels chairman, and Rep. Frank Pallone of New Jersey, the committees ranking Democrat. After committee staff received a briefing yesterday from Facebook officials, we felt that many questions were left unanswered.

Mr. Zuckerberg has stated that he would be willing to testify if he is the right person, they added. We believe, as CEO of Facebook, he is the right witness to provide answers to the American people. We look forward to working with Facebook and Mr. Zuckerberg to determine a date and time in the near future for a hearing before this committee.

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A spokesman for Facebook did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.

The upcoming hearing comes in response to a controversy with Cambridge Analytica, a firm that aided Trump and other Republican political candidates by building psychological profiles of voters.

To do that, the firm commissioned an app that, when authorized, siphoned information about its users as well as their friends  a practice that Facebook had allowed until it changed its developer policies in 2015. Facebook said it had received assurances that Cambridge Analytica had deleted the data, but recent revelations from Christopher Wylie, a former employee of the political firm, suggest that it continued to use it anyway.

In response, multiple state attorneys general have opened investigations of Facebook. So has the Federal Trade Commission, which is looking into whether the mishap means that Facebook violated a 2011 settlement with the federal government that was supposed to improve the companys privacy practices. If the agency ultimately finds that Facebook broke that consent decree, it could face massive fines well beyond millions of dollars.

On Capitol Hill, meanwhile, Facebook faces another onslaught of scrutiny. At least five other panels of lawmakers have spoken with the tech giant in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica controversy. And they could follow in the footsteps of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, asking Zuckerberg to appear  or forcing him through a subpoena if he tries to resist.

For his part, Zuckerberg has suggested a willingness to appear before Congress.

If it is ever the case that I am the most informed person at Facebook in the best position to testify, I will happily do that, he told Wired in an interview Wednesday. But the reason why we havent done that so far is because there are people at the company whose full jobs are to deal with legal compliance or some of these different things, and theyre just fundamentally more in the details on those things.

Earlier Wednesday, Zuckerberg broke days of silence, pledging to proffer a number of changes to the site  including an audit of all third-party apps and notifications to those whose data was swept up by Cambridge Analytica.

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I started Facebook, and at the end of the day Im responsible for what happens on our platform, he wrote.  While this specific issue involving Cambridge Analytica should no longer happen with new apps today, that doesnt change what happened in the past. We will learn from this experience to secure our platform further and make our community safer for everyone going forward.

Yet Zuckerbergs public comments left some of his companys congressional overseers unconvinced.

They say trust us, said Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), but Mark Zuckerberg needs to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee about what Facebook knew about misusing data from 50 million Americans in order to target political advertising and manipulate voters.Page Content

Worth over 350 billion between 2014 and 2020, cohesion policy  implemented through the European Structural and Investment Funds  is the EU's main investment tool that works to reduce regional disparities, create jobs, open new business opportunities and address major global issues such as climate change and migration. It is the only EU policy that covers all of Europe's local communities involving local stakeholders to deliver growth strategies led by shared EU goals.

As a consequence of Brexit and the need for the EU to fund new priorities such as defence, security and external border control, the financial allocations for cohesion policy risks being cut in the next EU long term budget  or Multiannual Financial Framework  which sets the EU's expenditure ceilings for the period after 2020. To avoid this and raise awareness on the vital role of cohesion policy, the #CohesionAlliance was initially launched by the leading associations of regions and cities - the Association of European Border Regions (AEBR), the Assembly of European Regions (AER), the Conference of European Regional Legislative Assemblies (CALRE), the Council of European Municipalities and Regions (CEMR), the Conference of Peripheral Maritime Regions of Europe (CPMR) and EUROCITIES - and the European Committee of the Regions in October last year.

The Alliance demands that the EU budget after 2020 makes cohesion policy stronger, more effective, visible and available for every region in the European Union. Since its launch, the Alliance's declaration has been signed by more than 4000 individual signatories, 100 regions, 70 cities and counties, 50 associations of regional and local governments, 40 Members of the European Parliament, 30 EU sectorial associations.

" Cohesion Policy is traditional but not old fashioned. It will keep playing its role in the next EU budget. We cannot guarantee no cuts but our idea is to limit them to between 5 and 10%" said EU Budget Commissioner Gunther Oettinger, inviting all partners to convince member states to back a limited increase of their contributions.

EU Regional Policy Commissioner Corinna Cretu, also stressed that: " This is probably the biggest, broadest grassroots campaign on behalf of cohesion policy ever. Through the cohesion alliance, thousands of beneficiaries of this unique policy, representing cities and regions as well as the health, education or business sectors, state loud and clear that Europe and cohesion policy are two sides of the same coin. Europe needs more cohesion ".

CoR President Karl-Heinz Lambertz who stressed that: " If we want a Europe that invests in every community, that is more effective, visible, less centralised and supports cooperation across borders, we need a strong cohesion policy for all regions and a bigger EU budget. Cutting it will have serious consequences for the prosperity and unity of the future of European Union ".

An issue highlighted also by President of CPMR and of Portugal's Regional Autonomous Government of the Azores, Vasco Alves Cordeiro:  The future EU budget needs to reflect the ambition and priorities of the EU, providing regions with the flexibility they need to realise the political vision of the European Union for the future of Europe on the ground. Certain priorities can only be achieved by Cohesion policy .

The vital role of cohesion policy was stressed by the President of EUROCITIES and Mayor of Ghent in Belgium Daniel Termont: " Cohesion policy is the glue that holds the EU together as we strive for a future that is more sustainable, inclusive, democratic and prosperous. Supporting innovation, cooperation and solidarity via a strong cohesion policy will help Europe remain a role model for the world around us for generations to come .

AEBR's Rosa Balas Torres, the Director General for External Action of the Regional Government of Extremadura , said: " The current territorial cooperation programmes must be kept as inherent pieces of European Cohesion, getting citizens and territories closer across national boundaries. Following the recent Commissions Communication on Border Regions, cross-border and transnational approaches in other EU policy fields such as employment, healthcare, accessibility and connectivity should be further developed ".

Intervening on behalf of CALRE Roberto Ciambetti, President of the Regional Council of Veneto in Italy, pointed out that : "European Regions strongly demand that the EU Budget post 2020 guarantee adequate resources in each and all of them to improve their investment capacity and continue along the path of economic growth, which would be seriously compromised by cuts in cohesion policy. Furthermore, they are convinced that the costs of structural reform must not be charged on cohesion policy, created to achieve a specific goal of the European Treaties".

The CEMR spokesperson and Councillor of Malmo in Sweden, Ilmar Reepalu, declared: " The success of the EU's new priorities, such as social inclusion and climate action, depends on towns and regions' ability to invest in their territories. These investments cannot happen without cohesion policy. The EU should be consistent and make cohesion policy strong in the future budget ".

The AER President, and President of the Region Vastra Gotaland in Sweden, Magnus Berntsson said: " A strong renewed cohesion policy for all regions is the smartest and most logical investment the EU can make for its future. In the Union of the future, cohesion policy is our most powerful tool, improving the quality of life of citizens and promoting a unified, strong and competitive Europe".

Background note

The #CohesionAlliance is a coalition of those who believe that EU cohesion policy must continue to be a pillar of the EU's future. The Alliance was created through cooperation between the leading European associations of cities and regions and the European Committee of the Regions. It demands that the EU budget after 2020 makes cohesion policy stronger, more effective, visible and available for every region in the European Union. From national, regional and local governments to SMEs, NGOs, schools, universities, cultural organisations, anyone who believes in EU cohesion policy is welcome to join the #CohesionAlliance by signing the declaration .

More info:

Photos

Cohesion Factsheets

Cohesion Alliance Signatories

The Map of Cohesion Alliance

Press Contact:

cohesionalliance@cor.europa.euAmid mounting pressure from customers and regulators, Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg broke his public silence Wednesday about the widening Cambridge Analytica scandal. He began with a prepared statement posted on his Facebook page followed by interviews with CNN, Recode, Wired and the New York Times  conversations that offered deeper insight into his perspective on what might amount to the companys biggest crisis.

Here are some key takeaways from Zuckerbergs press tour:

Zuckerberg blames Facebooks naivety

Facebooks rise from a service that judged whether Harvard students were hot or not to the worlds largest social network was, by any measure, meteoric. In the interviews, Zuckerberg makes the case that in his companys early days, he never could have anticipated the problems Facebook now faces.

If you had asked me, when I got started with Facebook, if one of the central things Id need to work on now is preventing governments from interfering in each others elections, theres no way I thought thats what Id be doing, if we talked in 2004 in my dorm room, he told the Times.

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He told Recodes Kara Swisher that he erred in judgment in his early position on data portability  essentially the movement of data between Facebook and other services.

You know, frankly, I just got that wrong, he told Recode. I was maybe too idealistic on the side of data portability, that it would create more good experiences. And it created some, but I think what the clear feedback was from our community was that people value privacy a lot more. And they would rather have their data locked down and be sure that nothing bad will ever happen to it, than be able to easily take it and have social experiences in other places. So, over time, we have been just kind of narrowing it down.

He told Wired: I think if wed internalized that sooner and had made these changes that we made in 2014 in, say, 2012 or 2010, then I also think we could have avoided a lot of harm.

Facebook isnt sure whether Cambridge Analytica is the only bad actor

In his prepared statement, Zuckerberg outlined a number of actions Facebook would take to try to prevent other outside parties from exploiting user data  but he also called for an audit of developers who gathered user data in the past. In his interviews, Zuckerberg suggested that the process of weeding out and determining other potentially bad actors would be a complex, expensive endeavor that would take a while to complete.

He told the New York Times that Facebook would be investigating thousands of apps and that the company would reach out to those developers in the near term.

It isnt perfect. But I do think that this is going to be a major deterrent going backwards, he told Recode. I think it will clean up a lot of data, and going forward, the more important thing is just preventing this from happening in the first place and thats going to be solved by restricting the amount of data that developers can have access to.

[W]e want to make sure that there arent other Cambridge Analyticas out there, he told Wired. So I think our responsibility is to now go and look at every single app and to, any time theres anything suspicious, get into more detail and do a full audit of them.

#deletefacebook is on the companys radar

Although Zuckerberg said the company hasnt seen a meaningful number of users delete their Facebook accounts in the wake of the controversy, he acknowledged theres a problem when the hashtag #deletefacebook is reverberating around social media.

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I think its a clear signal that this is a major trust issue for people, and I understand that, he told the New York Times. And whether people delete their app over it or just dont feel good about using Facebook, thats a big issue that I think we have a responsibility to rectify.

Zuckerberg says he wouldnt oppose regulation  with some caveats

Facebook and other technology companies have long benefited from lax regulation. But the tides in Washington may be turning, and Zuckerberg suggests he wont stand in the way of all regulation.

I actually am not sure we shouldnt be regulated, he told CNN. I think in general, technology is an increasingly important trend in the world, and I actually think the question is more, what is the right regulation rather than Yes or no, should it be regulated? 

Regulation he says he wouldnt oppose?

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I think there are things like ads transparency regulation that I would love to see, he told the news station. If you look at how much regulation there is around advertising on TV and print, its just not clear why there should be less on the internet. We should have the same level of transparency required.

Zuckerberg said he wasnt sure whether the bill would pass and suggested ad transparency tools already rolled out by Facebook would accomplish most of the things that are in all the bills.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) was surprised by his statement.

Just watched Mark Zuckerberg on @CNN & I was surprised to hear him say he supported the senate bill on election ads. Thats my billthe Honest Ads Actw/ @SenJohnMcCain & @MarkWarner ..Its a new position for Facebook & wed like to get it done before election. Twitter? Google?  Amy Klobuchar (@amyklobuchar) March 22, 2018

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Its a new position for Facebook & wed like to get it done before election, she tweeted. Twitter? Google?

Zuckerberg is willing to testify before Congress  with some caveats

Klobuchar and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) have called for Zuckerberg to testify before Congress to explain what happened in the data-mining incident. And in his interview with Recode, Zuckerberg said he was open to doing that.

Our responsibility is to make sure that they have access to all the information that they need to have, he said.

But there was a slight caveat: Zuckerberg told Wired he was open to testifying if it is ever the case that I am the most informed person at Facebook in the best position to testify. He noted that others at the company whose full jobs are to deal with legal compliance or some of these different things could be just fundamentally more in the details on those things.

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So as long as its a substantive testimony where what folks are trying to get is as much content as possible, Im not sure when Ill be the right person, Zuckerberg said. But I would be happy to if I were.

Facebook knows it will face even more scrutiny soon

With midterm elections on the horizon, Zuckerberg seems aware the company will be under the microscope.

In his interview with the New York Times, he said Facebook learned from the 2016 election and since then has implemented tools that helped identify 30,000 fake accounts believed to be linked to Russia that were trying to do the same kind of tactics they did in the U.S. in the 2016 election.

Facebook, he said, was able to disable those accounts and prevent that from happening on a large scale in elections in France. The company also used artificial intelligence tools during the special election for an Alabama Senate seat last year and found many accounts stemming from Macedonia.

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Theres no doubt that in 2016, there were a number of issues, including foreign interference and false news, that we did not have as much of a handle on as we feel a responsibility to for our community, he told the New York Times. I feel a lot better about the systems now.

But, Zuckerberg said, Russia and other governments are going to get more sophisticated in what they do too. He said the company will be prepared not just for elections in the U.S., but also in India and Brazil, as well as other elections going on this year that are really important.

When asked by CNN whether he thinks bad actors already are using Facebook to meddle in the upcoming midterm elections, Zuckerberg said: Im sure someones trying. Right? Im sure that theres V2, version two, of whatever the Russian effort was in 2016.

Theres a lot of hard work that we need to do to make it harder for nation-states like Russia to do election interference, to make it so that trolls and other folks cant spread fake news, but we can get in front of this, he told CNN. There are big elections around the world, and you can bet that we are really committed to doing everything that we need to to make sure that the integrity of those elections on Facebook is secured.Amy Freed sensed the guy could use some help.

Hed written a knockabout comedy but got sloppy with details and seemed to have run short of ideas, especially in segments involving the rough wooing of a brainy, independent woman. To laugh would only make an audience feel guilty.

Freed, a San Francisco-based playwright whos been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in drama, could see a love story at the plays core and felt she could excavate it while freeing the storys humor.

As she undertook a top-to-bottom rewrite, she was careful to retain the original writers poetic flow and unique syntax. With the following words, she laid out her intentions early in the script:

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My best shot Ill take and make a play of this. / Real Love Ill find in it  for that it needs, / But with enough of Bad Behavior left / That all shall find it true.

And so Shakespeares The Taming of the Shrew became Freeds compactly titled Shrew! Preview performances are about to begin at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa; the opening follows next weekend.

Intervening in such a hallowed canon is a scary thing, Freed admits, but, Im saying, OK, its my turn to take a crack at this material to find out if its possible to view this play and still respect ourselves in the morning.

Freed is best known for another Shakespeare incursion, The Beard of Avon, in which she imagines which nobles of the day might have used him as a front  gleefully leaping into the scholarly controversy about whether the Bard wrote all of the plays attributed to him.

Her work  all of it comic and almost all of it steeped in history  has been staged coast to coast by such theaters as Chicagos Goodman, Washington, D.C.s Arena Stage and the New York Theatre Workshop, but Southern California has had a front-row seat for her career because of a long and nurturing relationship with South Coast Repertory. Shrew! is the sixth of Freeds plays staged there since 1997. SCR commissioned four of them, including 1998 Pulitzer finalist Freedomland and The Beard of Avon, and another is in process.

Shrew! is the 10th full-length play shes written. While in Costa Mesa for an extended stay during rehearsals, Freed meets at the theater to talk.

A onetime actress, she is trim and elegant, with blond, shoulder-length hair. She is married to San Francisco Chronicle movie critic Mick LaSalle, her chief sounding board. As an artist in residence at Stanford University she teaches acting and playwriting.

The Taming of the Shrew, one of Shakespeares early plays, draws on a lineage of comedies in which talkative women are dealt a comeuppance  a series of slap-downs that dates to Medieval English mystery plays and, even further, to comedies in ancient Rome. Kate, the title character, is treated in the roughly comic manner that audiences of Shakespeares day would have expected, but the Bard somewhat softened the circumstances by making her roughhousing suitor, Petruchio, a perceptive man who seems drawn to Kate precisely for her mind and spirit.

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That can be hard to discern, though, when we see him starving her and contradicting her every notion, right down to insisting that the sun is really the moon.

The early-1590s play has long fascinated and troubled Freed. I have acted in it. And my students still want to do it  I think its the opportunity for a full-throttle woman onstage. Plus, theres something really sexy about this setup of unstoppable force meets immovable object that anyone whos been in a long-term relationship has to acknowledge has truth to it.

Freed studied the play still more intimately when the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 2015 commissioned her to translate it for contemporary audiences, part of that theaters initiative to create a library of such translations of all 39 plays attributed to Shakespeare. I got to know every word of it and every problem, Freed says. But she tried to be invisible, fixing only those sections truly lost to understanding and matching the original style exactly.

That fed an idea shed already been mulling: a freer, more thorough transformation of the play, which became Shrew! She writes it as though by a woman of Shakespeares era who takes over after earning his confidence, sorting out the originals logic problems and introducing new scenes. You sense in the original comedy real modern promise of a tale of two outsiders full of fire and wit trying to tear their way out of the confines of their time, Freed says.

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She helps them break through.

Shrew! is directed by L.A.-based Art Manke, who also directed Freeds The Monster Builder at SCR a year ago and has known her since the mid-1980s, when they were classmates in the graduate acting program at American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. He appreciates her wicked sense of humor and warmth, which he sees reflected in her writing. She looks at humanity with tremendous compassion and empathy, he says, and that gives her an ability to write characters grounded in the truth.

Amy Freed, left, and director Art Manke watch a rehearsal for her play Shrew! at South Coast Repertory. (Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times )

Freed is the daughter of Richard Freed, a field architect who worked for such firms as Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, and Margaret Loft, a former actress who taught voice and speech, most notably as a founding faculty member at the Juilliard School. Freed set out to be an actor but around age 30, by the time she was finishing a master of fine arts at American Conservatory Theatre, I was having a hard time with my casting bracket. She began her first play as her thesis project and self-produced it in San Francisco  and a career change took hold.

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That play, inspired by the late television newswoman Jessica Savitch, and Freedomland, about a hedonistically self-absorbed American family, are set in the present day, but most of the other plays have traveled back in history, to which she is drawn for its lessons about human behavior. History is just full of strangeness, she says, and the more you read of it, the more you realize how little has changed.

Shrew! most resembles 2005s Restoration Comedy, in which Freed reworks two 17th century British plays into a libidinous lark more attuned to 21st century tastes. And Shrew! shares the fascination with Shakespeare displayed in 2001s The Beard of Avon, in which Freed imagines how an S&M-besotted Queen Elizabeth might have written The Taming of the Shrew, using Shakespeare as her cover.

Freeds interest in history also has extended to such periods as imperial Rome (You, Nero) and the Salem trials of the 1690s (Safe in Hell). Though set in the past, the stories crackle with present-day perspectives.

Her plays have achieved limited visibility in reputation-making New York, but David Emmes, South Coast Repertorys founding artistic director, who was prominent among those bringing her into the theaters fold, says: For me she ranks as one of the foremost playwrights in the American theater. Her plays are filled with engaging ideas, he says, carried on a marvelous theatrical energy.

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Having directed three of her plays for SCR, he knows her work from the inside out. She is very aware of the world and sees the kinetic absurdity of whats going on in our society, he says. I cant think of any other playwright who is writing now for the American theater who has such a distinctive voice combining intellect and absurd comedy.

Shes a combination of Tom Stoppard and Mel Brooks.

Freed revels in this duality.

I think theater wants to be big enough to contain all elements, high and low, in what it sets out to do, she says.

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Besides, she says with a laugh: I cant write a serious play  Ive tried it. I think seriously, but I cannot write seriously.

Theater is a really big animal, and you just have to keep trying to tickle that beast on its belly. Its scary as hell; its gladiatorial to write for theater.

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Shrew!

Where: South Coast Repertory, Segerstrom main stage, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa

When: In previews Saturday through Thursday; opens March 31. Performances 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays-Thursdays, 8 p.m. Fridays; 2:30 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. Sundays. Ends April 21.

Tickets: $30-$83 ($23 and up during previews), with $20 tickets for students and $5 discounts for seniors

Info: (714) 708-5555, www.scr.org

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daryl.miller@latimes.com

Twitter: @darylhmillerThe California African American Museum has grown its visitor numbers substantially over the last two years since deputy director and chief curator Naima Keith took over programming. Now the museums collection is going through a growth spurt as well.

The museum has received a gift of 32 paintings, sculptures and mixed media works from L.A. collector, scholar and artist advocate Gordon W. Bailey.

Baileys collection is focused on self-taught contemporary artists from the South, with a large number of works by African Americans. All of the pieces he gifted to CAAM are by African Americans including Georgia Speller, Hawkins Bolden, Jimmy Lee Sudduth, Robert Howell and Missionary Mary Proctor.

One painting by Sam Doyle, St. Helena's Black Merry Go Rond, the museum said, is particularly significant. The painting on metal, created in the early 1980s, depicts cultural elements of the Gullah people whom the artist observed while living in St. Helena, S.C.

Purvis Young's "Dudes Talking," mixed media on wood door, one of 32 artworks that collector Gordon W. Bailey gave to CAAM. Marten Elder / California African American Museum.

Bailey curated the 2013 CAAM exhibition Soul Stirring: African American Self-taught Artists From the South. Many of the artists featured in that show, including Doyle, Leroy Almon, Roy Ferdinand, Herbert Singleton and Purvis Young are represented in the artworks he gifted to the museum.

"Gordon Bailey is a visionary collector and an Angeleno, CAAM Executive Director George O. Davis said in an interview, so its an honor for CAAM to join the list of institutions to which he has donated, including LACMA [Los Angeles County Museum of Art], the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the High Museum. Im impressed by his commitment and passion to ensure that self-taught African American artists get the acknowledgment they deserve.

In a statement issued by the museum, Davis called Bailey a staunch supporter of artists working outside the mainstream. His gift to CAAM, Davis said, furthers our mission of preserving and interpreting the art, history, and culture of African Americans.

Bailey said each visit to the museum strengthens his resolve for works created by marginalized artists to get a fair review. CAAM's exhibitions are broad ranging and relevant, and the museum's dynamic programming, often featuring prominent speakers, is a huge plus for Los Angeles, he said. It is an honor to be able to contribute.

Robert Howell's "Critter," mixed media wood sculpture, is one of 32 artworks that collector Gordon W. Bailey has gifted to CAAM. Chip Pankey / Marten Elder / California African American Museum

Leroy Almon's "Of Two Worlds," carved and painted wood, one of collector Gordon W. Bailey's gifts to CAAM. Marten Elder / California African American Museum

deborah.vankin@latimes.com

Follow me on Twitter: @debvankinThis spring is notable for the number of local companies on major stages showing the home crowd what they got.

Beyond whats highlighted below, Benjamin Millepieds L.A. Dance Project kicks off Live From 2245 from May 18 to June 2, its first performance series at the companys new downtown home. The company has scheduled an ambitious 12 shows, and L.A. premieres will include works by Millepied.

Versa-Style Dance is planning its 13th annual hip-hop festival May 4 to 6, and Lula Washington Dance Theater performs at the Ford Amphitheatre on June 8.

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In an unusual alignment, Dance Theatre of Harlem, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre and Complexions Contemporary Ballet  three companies whose artistic missions overlap with a mandate to represent people of color  will be here during the same week in April. Enjoy the riches that come with being in a big, diverse city.

April 5-7

Abraham.in.Motion

In Dearest Home, choreographer and MacArthur Fellow Kyle Abraham temporarily turns away from searing social commentary to look at love and its healing potential. He did not anticipate, however, that as he was creating Dearest Home, the real world would intervene in painful ways: His mother died, and a serious relationship came to an end. Neither event derailed the piece nor his ultimate conclusion that love does provide solace. Freud Playhouse, UCLA, 245 Charles E. Young Drive, Westwood. $29-$59. (310) 825-2101. www.cap.ucla.edu

Kyle Abrahams company Abraham.in.Motion will perform Dearest Home. Carrie Schneider

April 5-7

L.A. Dance Project

From its first performance six years ago at Walt Disney Concert Hall when it revived a Merce Cunningham oddity, L.A. Dance Project has presented historical works along with contemporary pieces by director Benjamin Millepied and others. On this program, the company stages three duets from one of modern dances founders, Martha Graham. The trio are excerpts from 1948s Diversion of Angels and 1952s Canticle for Innocent Comedians. Millepieds Sarabande is also on the bill as are works by New York City Ballets Justin Peck and by Ohad Naharin, the dance-maker with Israels Batsheva Dance. Bram Goldsmith Theater, Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, 9390 N. Santa Monica Blvd., Beverly Hills. $45-$125. (310) 746-4000. www.thewallis.org

L.A. Dance Project will perform three Martha Graham duets. James Welling

April 12-14

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Dada Masilo

The South African choreographer says her new retooling of the classic ballet Giselle focuses less on love and forgiveness and more on heartbreak and revenge. Masilos collaborators are two of her fellow countrymen: composer Philip Miller, who devised a score with nods to Adam Adolphes original music, and artist William Kentridge, with whom Masilo appeared last November in Refuse the Hour. Masilo is scheduled to appear as the scorned peasant girl. Bram Goldsmith Theater, Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, 9390 N. Santa Monica Blvd., Beverly Hills. $45-$125. (310) 746-4000. www.thewallis.org

April 12-15

Dance Camera West & To the Sea

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Dance Camera West, the screen-dance and live-performance festival, crops up at venues on the Westside, including the Santa Monica Pier. DCW and partner-presenter Jacob Jonas Dance have landed a coup  a performance by Pilobolus  plus the German dancer known as Rubberlegz and others. For DCW Executive Director Tonia Barber, offering audiences a menu of both screenings and live performance is a must. Four days of programming will include documentaries about flamenco artist La Chana and one directed by Martha Graham former principal dancer Terese Capucilli about the Graham companys longtime piano accompanist, Reed Hansen. Various locations in Westwood and Santa Monica. Free to $15. www.dancecamerawest.org

April 18 and 20-21

Dance Theatre of Harlem

This multi-ethnic company has struggled mightily to survive since New York City Ballet principal Arthur Mitchell co-founded it in 1969  and it has triumphed over obstacles that have felled lesser groups. With founding ballerina Virginia Johnson at the helm, its back in full health for two engagements of mixed repertory: works by resident choreographer Robert Garland; Ulysses Doves inspiring Dancing on the Front Porch of Heaven, an ode to love and loss; plus Vessels by Darrell Grand Moultrie, whom SoCal audiences might remember from Moments, his striking duet created at the National Choreographers Initiative and performed by Barak Ballet. April 18 at Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive, Irvine. $58-$68. (949) 854-4646. www.thebarclay.org. April 20-21 at the Broad Stage, 1310 11th St., Santa Monica. $60-$95. (310) 434-3200. www.thebroadstage.org

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April 18-22

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatre

For some Ailey fans, the reason to buy tickets can be summed up in one word: Revelations. Indeed, Aileys 1960 masterwork to gospel songs and spirituals will close each of the companys three programs in Costa Mesa. But new works commissioned for Aileys gifted performers are its lifeblood, and Artistic Director Robert Battle certainly believes that. So depending on what day you go, expect to see recently premiered pieces by Spanish choreographer Gustavo Ramirez Sansano and Jamar Roberts (an Ailey dancer) as well as three by Battle plus classic works from Twyla Tharp, Talley Beatty and Billy Wilson. Segerstrom Center for the Arts, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. $29-$139. (714) 556-2787. www.scfta.org

April 20-22

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Complexions Contemporary Ballet

Complexions StarDust is to David Bowie what the Joffrey Ballets Billboards was to Prince: a high-energy ballet that celebrates a popular music icon and potentially attracts new audiences at the same time. Complexions co-artistic director Dwight Rhoden says that StarDust is the first portion of what he hopes will be a three-act ballet to Bowies music. This piece includes nine songs from the rock stars catalog, including Young Americans, Space Oddity and Changes. Two other Rhoden pieces, one of which features co-director Desmond Richardson, are also scheduled. Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Music Center, 135 N. Grand Ave., Los Angeles. $34-$138. (213) 972-0711. www.musiccenter.org

Complexions Contemporary Ballet celebrates the late David Bowie in StarDust. Breeann Birr

April 26-28

Adentro!

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Argentine contemporary choreographer Diana Szeinblum knew nothing about the folkloric dances of her country when a presenter invited her to dig deep into their history to come up with something original. Szeinblum and a trio of dancers began with bare-bones written instructions of each dance and then deconstructed and rearranged the movements. The result, which translates to And Go!, bears little resemblance to the originals. REDCAT, 631 W. 2nd St., Los Angeles. $10-$25. (213) 237-2800. www.redcat.org

BodyTraffic will take to the Wallis in Beverly Hills. Lee Gumbs

May 31-June 2

BodyTraffic

Co-artistic directors Lillian Barbeito and Tina Finkelman Berkett are finalizing the program for their first performance at the Wallis. The one certainty is the premiere of A Million Voices by Matthew Neenan, a former principal dancer of Pennsylvania Ballet and co-founder of BalletX. Set to eight songs by Peggy Lee, the dance, like Lees vocal style, smolders with sensuality, Barbeito says. Bram Goldsmith Theater, Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, 9390 N. Santa Monica Blvd., Beverly Hills. $45-$125. (310) 746-4000. www.thewallis.org

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June 29-30

Barak Ballet

Digital scenic design has come to the fore in the last 10 years. But media artist Refik Anadols projected and digitally produced geometric lines, as matched with Melissa Baraks choreography and David Lawrences score, made for a revelatory effect in the 2017 piece E/Space. Happily, the young chamber-size troupe gives us a repeat performance of E/Space, along with new pieces by Barak and Nicolas Blanc, a ballet master with the Joffrey Ballet. This show is also a dry run for Barak Ballets debut at Manhattans Joyce Theatre in July. The Broad Stage, 1310 11th St., Santa Monica. $45-$75. (310) 434-3200. www.thebroadstage.com

See all of our latest arts news and reviews at latimes.com/arts.

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MORE SPRING PREVIEW:

Art: Times critic Christopher Knights picks

Classical: Times critic Mark Sweds picks

Theater: Times critic Charles McNultys picks

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Broadway, the L.A. way: Waitress, Hamilton and more

Chamber music: 15 groups to know on a more intimate scale

An art exhibition that aims to go Beyond the Streets

Amy Freed helps Shakespeare with a rewrite in Shrew!

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UPDATES:

For the Record

6:15 p.m. An earlier version of this article said L.A. Dance Projects 12 shows will include a premiere by choreographer Kyle Abraham. The companys plans have changed, and Abraham will not be among the premieres.

2:45 p.m. March 26: An earlier version of this article gave incorrect dates for Alvin Ailey American Dance Theatres performances at Segerstrom Center for the Arts. The performances are April 18-22, not April 19-21.The best shows Ive seen in 2018, Michael Michettis (still running) production of Tennessee Williams A Streetcar Named Desire at Boston Court Performing Arts Center and Richard Nelsons production of Anton Chekhovs Uncle Vanya at the Old Globe, were classic plays treated as though they were hot off their authors typewriters.

Will Bedlam, a New York company devoted to exploring the immediacy of the actor-audience relationship, work similar revivifying miracles when it brings its pared productions of Hamlet and Saint Joan to the Broad Stage? Great acting is of course the most reliable rejuvenator of old masterpieces, so theres reason to be excited about yet another revival of Long Days Journey Into Night starring two of Britains best, Lesley Manville and Jeremy Irons.

Theres no shortage of talent in the new generation of American playwriting, and a great sampling of their work will be on offer in the coming months, including Joshua Harmons Significant Other, Amy Herzogs Belleville, Dominique Morisseaus Skeleton Crew and Stephen Karams The Humans. But perhaps the biggest opening in L.A. this spring is a work by two veterans that defies categorization  playwright David Henry Hwang and composer Jeanine Tesoris Soft Power, which blazes its own trail between musical and dramatic genres.

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Unanticipated pleasures can sometimes be the most delightful. John Doyles transfiguring Broadway revival of The Color Purple, a musical I foolishly gave up on, taught me never to underestimate the power of a director to reveal overlooked brilliance. In the theater, wonder lurks as much in the familiar past as in the unpredictable present.

Thomas Sadoski will star will Anna Camp in Amy Herzogs Belleville. Catie Laffoon

March 24-April 21

Shrew!

Amy Freed (The Monster Builder) has a gift for renovating classics with fiendish wit, and here, working again with director Art Manke, she tackles Shakespeares problematic The Taming of the Shrew, a comedy desperately in need of her kind of female-centered farcical rehabilitation. South Coast Repertory, Segerstrom Stage, 655 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. $22 and up. (714) 708-5555. www.scr.org

April 3-May 6

Significant Other

This play by Joshua Harmon, author of the caustic comedy Bad Jews, made it to Broadway, attracting a millennial following to this by turns stingingly comic and touching tale about a single gay man who one by one loses his straight female BFFs to marriage. Geffen Playhouse, Gil Cates Theater, 10886 Le Conte Ave., Westwood. $25-$90. (310) 208-5454. www.geffenplayhouse.com

April 5-15

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Hamlet + Saint Joan

Bedlam, an adventurous New York company, performs in repertory two classics  William Shakespeares supreme revenge tragedy and George Bernard Shaws brilliantly disputatious chronicle  with four actors assuming nearly 50 roles with a brisk resourcefulness that won the company glowing reviews. The Broad Stage, 1310 11th St., Santa Monica. $45 and up. (310) 434-3200. www.thebroadstage.com

April 18-May 13

Belleville

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Amy Herzogs freshly inventive drama, about a young American couple in Paris grappling with a marriage that is beginning to reveal cracks, combines exquisite behavioral observation with chilling Hitchcockian suspense in a production starring two superb actors, Anna Camp and Thomas Sadoski. Pasadena Playhouse, 39 S. El Molino Ave., Pasadena. $25 and up. (626) 356-7529. www.pasadenaplayhouse.org

April 28-May 12

the theater is a blank page

Anne Bogart and the innovative SITI Company join forces with visual artist Ann Hamilton (renowned for her large scale sensory installations) in this immersive theater piece that incorporates the sinuous beauty of Virginia Woolfs prose from To the Lighthouse. Presented by Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA. Royce Hall, UCLA, 340 Royce Drive, Westwood. $119. (310) 825-2101. www.cap.ucla.edu

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Anne Bogart and SITI Company collaborates with artist Ann Hamilton in the theater is a blank page. Brooke LaValley

May 3-June 10

Soft Power

The world premiere of this collaboration between David Henry Hwang (M. Butterfly, Yellow Face) and Jeanine Tesori (Caroline, or Change, Fun Home) is described as a play with a musical. So expect the unexpected from a comedy that apparently gives way to a romantic fantasia taking note of the shifting balance of power between East and West. Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N. Grand Ave., L.A. $30-$130. (213) 972-4400. www.CenterTheatreGroup.org

May 30-June 24

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Bordertown Now

Culture Clash revisits an old hit about the Southern border, a subject that has obviously only grown in political heat. Diane Rodriguez directs this reimagined, remixed and full reloaded production. Pasadena Playhouse, 39 S. El Molino Ave., Pasadena. $28 and up. (626) 356-7529. www.pasadenaplayhouse.org

May 29-June 17, June 19-24

The Color Purple

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John Doyles Tony-winning revival, which radically distills the musical based on Alice Walkers novel into a singing spiritual parable, converted critics like me who had resisted the show in its original Broadway outing. Hollywood Pantages, 6233 Hollywood Blvd., Hollywood. $35 and up; children under 5 not admitted. (800) 982-2787. www.HollywoodPantages.com. Also at Segerstrom Hall, Segerstrom Center for the Arts, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. $29 and up. (714) 556-2787. www.scfta.org

June 5-July 8

Skeleton Crew

The final work in talented playwright Dominique Morisseaus three-play Detroit Projects series looks at the increasingly stressed relationships of employees at an auto-plant whose days appear to be numbered. Ethical dilemmas become painfully personal in a drama that recognizes the economics of destiny. Geffen Playhouse, Gil Cates Theater, 10886 Le Conte Ave., Westwood. $25-$90. (310) 208-5454. www.geffenplayhouse.com

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Dominique Morisseau, whose Skeleton Crew will come to the Geffen Playhouse. Christina House / Los Angeles Times

June 19-July 29

The Humans

Stephen Karams breathtakingly honest family drama, winner of the 2016 Tony Award for best play, takes place around the Thanksgiving dinner table, but the conversation ranges far and wide, from the fading reality of the American dream to the mounting existential terrors of modern life. Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N. Grand Ave., L.A. $30-$130. (213) 972-4400. www.CenterTheatreGroup.org

June 8-July 1

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Long Days Journey Into Night

Lesley Manville (nominated for an Oscar for her stunningly austere performance in Phantom Thread) takes on the role of Mary Tyrone, the drug-addled matriarch of Eugene ONeills autobiographical masterpiece in this heralded Bristol Old Vic production starring the dependably (and often disturbingly) suave Jeremy Irons. Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, Bram Goldsmith Theater, 9390 N. Santa Monica Blvd., Beverly Hills. $35-$125. (310) 746-4000. www.thewallis.org

charles.mcnulty@latimes.com

Follow me @charlesmcnulty

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MORE SPRING PREVIEW:

Art: Times critic Christopher Knights picks

Classical: Times critic Mark Sweds picks

Broadway, the L.A. way: Waitress, Hamilton and more

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Dance: A Bowie-themed StarDust, an angry Giselle and plus ...

Chamber music: 15 groups to know on a more intimate scale

An art exhibition that aims to go Beyond the Streets

Amy Freed helps Shakespeare with a rewrite in Shrew!Whats on for this weekend? Arts events include Independent Shakespeare Companys Alls Well That Ends Well, a survey of works by Vietnamese composers at the Musco Center for the Arts and site-specific work by Heidi Duckler Dance Theatre at the Pacific Design Center. A Delicate Ship ends its run, and Ballet Hispanico takes the stage at Cal State L.A.

Ballet Hispanico at the Luckman

New York contemporary-dance company Ballet Hispanico celebrates Latin American culture in the family-friendly En Familia, which includes an audience Q&A. Luckman Fine Arts Complex, Cal State L.A., 5151 State University Drive., L.A. 7:30 p.m. Saturday. $20. www.luckmanarts.org

Ballet Hispanico comes to the Luckman at Cal State L.A. Paula Lobo

Vietnamese composers at Musco Center

The Vietnamese American Society for Creative Arts and Music presents Of Times and Perspectives, a survey of works by five ex-pat Vietnamese composers. Pieces include scenes from P.Q. Phans opera The Tale of Lady Thi Kinh. Musco Center for the Arts, Chapman University, 415 N. Glassell St., Orange. 4 p.m. Sunday. $20 and up. www.muscocenter.org

A scene from P.Q. Phans opera "The Tale of Lady Thi Kinh." VASCAM

Heidi Duckler Dance Theatres Whale

Heidi Duckler Dance Theatre explores climate change and the human need for connection in Once in a Whale, the troupes latest site-specific piece, presented in the building known as the Blue Whale. The performance is part of the Pacific Design Centers Westweek interior-design showcase. Pacific Design Center, 8687 Melrose Ave., West Hollywood. 8:30 p.m. Friday. $25, $50. www.heididuckler.org

Heidi Duckler Dance Theatre will perform "Once in a Whale" at West Hollywood's Pacific Design Center. Heidi Duckler Dance Theatre

Delicate Ship ends voyage in NoHo

Its your last weekend to see A Delicate Ship, Anna Zieglers dramedy about a woman and two men caught up in a bizarre love triangle. It was an L.A. Times Critics Choice. The Road on Magnolia, 10747 Magnolia Blvd., North Hollywood. 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday. $15, $34. www.roadtheatre.org

Josh Zuckerman and Paris Perrault costar in "A Delicate Ship" at the Road on Magnolia. Brian M. Cole

All's Well That Ends Well at ISC Studio

Independent Shakespeare Company, which brings you the Griffith Park Free Shakespeare Festival every summer, christens its regular-season performance space with the Bards romantic adventure tale Alls Well That Ends Well. Melissa Chalsma directs and April Fritz stars as Helena. ISC Studio, Atwater Crossing Arts + Innovation Complex, 3191 Casitas Ave. #130, Atwater Village. 7:30 p.m. Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday; ends April 22. $25, $35. www.iscla.org

ALSO

The 99-Seat Beat: Recommendations from the small-theater scene

King Tut exhibition comes to L.A., but it's not the same as you might remember

With heart and humanity, this 'Raisin in the Sun' still hits homeSouthern Californias art museums will be unusually quiet this spring, with few major exhibitions opening. Smaller installations and permanent-collection re-hangs are in the offing, but at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Huntington, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Orange County Museum of Art and San Diegos Museum of Art and Museum of Contemporary Art, few significant shows will arrive before late summer or fall.

Some of the torpor is no doubt due to interruptions from planned or evolving building and expansion projects. Some is perhaps due to simple exhaustion. The massive Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, which took more than three years to produce, saw scores of Latin American and Latino art shows blossom at Southland museums starting in August and winding up this winter.

Still, a number of promising exhibitions are on the calendar, as enumerated below. Plus, there will also be time to dip into something slightly different: Civilizations, a new nine-part PBS series presented in partnership with the BBC, will tell the global story of art from the dawn of human history to the present day.

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Kenneth Clarks fabled 1969 Civilisation, inspiration for the current TV project, was limited to European art, with an occasional nod to the United States, and looked almost exclusively at white male artists, architects and writers. Its 13 episodes had the virtue of offering a deep dive into a relatively narrow field; the new show is happily broader, but its worryingly shorter  six continents covered in four fewer episodes  with a different host each week. The debut is April 17.

Mimian Hsus photograph La Gran China (The Great China), 2012, is part of the Soul Mining show at the Vincent Price Art Museum. Mimian Hsu

Through July 14

Soul Mining

More than a century ago, in the wake of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, the now-much-discussed idea of a border wall with Mexico was promoted as a method for deterring Chinese immigrants from entering the U.S. This just-opened traveling exhibition from Arizona State University Art Museum surveys art related to Asian migration to the Americas. Vincent Price Art Museum, East Los Angeles College, 1301 Avenida Cesar Chavez, Monterey Park. Closed Sun.-Mon. Free. (323) 265-8841. www.vincentpriceartmuseum.org

Circular relief, sun pyramid, Teotihuacan, Mexico, 300-450. Stone, 49.25 inches by 40.5 inches by 9.9 inches Jesus Valdovinos Al / Archivo Digital de la Colecciones del Museo Nacional de Antropologia / INAH-CANON

March 25-July 15

City and Cosmos: The Arts of Teotihuacan

Fifteen hundred years ago, Teotihuacan  the place where the gods were created  was the largest city in the ancient Americas. The original builders of its three extraordinary pyramids and other complex structures, located just outside modern Mexico City, are unknown. But the celebrated archaeological site has produced remarkable mural paintings, ceramics, ritual objects and stone sculptures, many not exhibited in the U.S. before now. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., L.A. Closed Wednesdays. $10-$25; members and children 17 and under, free. (323) 857-6010. www.lacma.org

March 27-Sept. 9

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Beyond the Nile: Egypt and the Classical World

Cultural cross-pollination among artists in Egypt, Greece and Rome between 2000 B.C. and 300 A.D. is the subject of this wide-ranging international loan show, which looks at the influence of Egyptian art on the artistic expression of cultures emerging across the Mediterranean. The Getty Center, North Sepulveda Boulevard and Getty Center Drive, L.A. Closed Mondays. Free. (310) 440-7300. www.getty.edu

April 18-Sept. 3

Plato in L.A.: Contemporary Artists Visions

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Sculptures, paintings, drawings and large-scale installations by 11 contemporary artists have been chosen for their responses to the formative contribution to philosophy made by Plato, founder of the Academy in ancient Athens. Among them are works by Mike Kelley, Rachel Harrison, Huang Yong Ping and Jeff Koons. The Getty Villa, 17985 Pacific Coast Highway, Pacific Palisades. Closed Tuesdays. Free; advanced tickets required. (310) 440-7300. www.getty.edu

Jeff Koons Play-Doh, 19942014, polychromed aluminum. Jeff Koons

May 6-Sept. 9

In the Fields of Empty Days: The Intersection of Past and Present in Iranian Art

Appropriations of Iranian history to critically describe current social circumstances are surveyed in 125 works of art  photography, painting, sculpture, video, posters, political cartoons, animation and historical illustrated manuscripts. Pre-Islamic kings and the martyrdom of Shiite Imams are among the devices artists have employed. Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., L.A. Closed Wednesdays. $10-$25; members and children 17 and under, free. (323) 857-6010. www.lacma.org

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Malekeh Nayinys All in Pink, 2007. Dye coupler print, 47.25 inches by 35.4 inches. Malekeh Nayiny

June 3-Sept. 2

Made in L.A. 2018

The fourth installment of the Hammers biennial considers whats happening now in the studios of Southern California artists. Just five of the 32 artists were born in L.A. while eight hail from other countries, a mix that reinforces the virtue of cosmopolitanism in a period marked by a disturbing xenophobia. UCLA Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Westwood. Closed Mondays. Free. (310) 443-7000. www.hammer.ucla.edu

El Camino Wagon, 2017, by Aaron Fowler, one of the artists in the Hammers Made in L.A. biennial. Aaron Fowler

June 3-Sept. 2

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This Brush for Hire: Norm Laich and Many Other Artists

Artist Norm Laich is also a skilled fabricator who has worked for numerous other artists, helping them to realize their ambitions over nearly 30 years. This show gathers together signage, wall paintings, canvases and large-scale installations to which Laich contributed, including works by Ed Ruscha, Paul McCarthy, Michael Asher, Barbara Kruger and Mike Kelley. The Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1717 E. 7th St., L.A. Closed Mondays-Tuesdays. Free. (213) 928-0833 . www.theicala.org

June 23-Aug. 25

Head Back and High: Senga Nengudi, Performance Objects (1976-2015)

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Nengudi, whose work is also on view in a survey at USC Fisher Museum of Art, was among a major group of avant-garde African-American artists who emerged in Los Angeles and New York in the 1970s. This show juxtaposes performance photographs and video from the period with more recent work in sculpture. Art + Practice, 3401 W. 43rd Place, L.A. Closed Sundays. Free. www.artandpractice.org

Senga Nengudi. Performance Piece, 1978. Senga Nengudi / Thomas Erben Gallery, New York / Levy Gorvy, New York, London

June 24-Jan. 13

Art Colony: The Laguna Beach Art Association, 1918-1935

The museum celebrates its centennial with an overview of the artists, including Edgar Payne, Anna Hills and William Wendt, who founded the seaside institution and oversaw its expansion. More than 60 paintings will constitute the first large-scale critical study of the group. Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive, Laguna Beach. Closed Wednesdays. $5, $7; 12 and under, free. (949) 494-8971. www.lagunaartmuseum.org

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christopher.knight@latimes.com

Twitter: @KnightLAT

MORE SPRING PREVIEW:

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Classical: Times critic Mark Sweds picks

Theater: Times critic Charles McNultys picks

Broadway, the L.A. way: Waitress, Hamilton and more

Dance: A Bowie-themed StarDust, an angry Giselle and plus ...

Advertisement

Chamber music: 15 groups to know on a more intimate scale

An art exhibition that aims to go Beyond the Streets

Amy Freed helps Shakespeare with a rewrite in Shrew!The New England-set crime drama Barren Trees, co-directed and co-written by Ryan Eatherton and Lei Zhenchuan is far more a tone poem than gripping saga. The snowy, small-town setting of rural New Hampshire offers a moody geographical and cultural backdrop to a tale of two aimless assassins.

Eatherton stars as Derek, a low-life hitman type, who convinces his friend Eddie (George Walter Hooker IV) to road trip to New Hampshire for a job. They share a dark past, and the taciturn Eddie needs the money to pay for his moms funeral so he agrees to go along.

Eatherton is an interesting actor, embodying the essence of a Boston hood, and Hooker has a compelling presence. Their wanderings around rural New Hampshire, peppered with philosophical conversations and stargazing are the most promising parts of the film, while the plotting around the revenge and hit job suffers.

Barren Trees attempts to pull off a looping narrative that detours for about an hour and thirty minutes into the film before circling back to tie up the loose ends. Instead of offering intrigue, its just clunky and confusing, as characters are introduced and dropped and new characters pick up the tale. The primary characters and setting of Barren Trees are solid, but the overly complicated storytelling falters.

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Barren Trees

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Running time: 1 hour, 39 minutes

Playing: Arena Cinelounge, Hollywood

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calendar@latimes.comIt seems like in movies of the 80s and 90s, children were much more willing to embrace the darker parts of childhood. I Kill Giants feels like a throwback to those kinds of films, filled with imagination and monsters in a tale of good vs. evil.

Director Anders Walter won an Oscar in 2014 for his live-action short, Helium, and his feature debut Giants is assured, compelling filmmaking, with a complex performance by Madison Wolfe in the leading role as the killer of said giants.

Writer Joe Kelly adapted his graphic novel, the story of a young girl, Barbara (Wolfe), who grapples with the complications of life by preparing to do battle with mythical giants and titans that threaten her tiny Jersey Shore town. With her ubiquitous bunny ears and glasses, Barbara cuts a memorable figure, even if she proves to be a pretty prickly character.

Things arent really all right at home, a chaotic, seaswept house run by her overextended older sister Karen (Imogen Poots). At school, Barbara clashes with everyone from the mean girls to the psychologist (Zoe Saldana), obsessively mounting her traps and collecting her tools for fighting giants.

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Like its heroine, I Kill Giants isnt afraid to tackle the darkness or rage of little girls, or their fear and pain. Barbaras seeming fantasy is real, a demon that she has to find the strength within herself to slay. Walter brings a sense of the epic to Kellys uniquely sensitive story that bravely faces down the good and the evil that exists within us all.

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I Kill Giants

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Running time: 1 hour, 46 minutes

Playing: Laemmle Music Hall, Beverly Hills

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calendar@latimes.comPage Content

Mart Vorklaev's opinion summarises the conclusions of the Broadband Platform and highlights the crucial role of the EU's structural funds in boosting connectivity

A strong cohesion policy in combination with other financing instruments is key to boosting broadband connectivity in Europe, according the European Committee of the Regions (CoR). In an opinion adopted at the plenary session on 22 March, it points out that lack of fast and reliable broadband coverage remains a problem in many rural and sparsely populated areas where there is not enough market-driven development.

As one of the measures for improving connectivity, the European Commission and the CoR have set up a joint Broadband Platform made up of local and regional policymakers and experts. Its initial conclusions are reflected in this opinion , which points out that the European Structural and Investment Funds (ESIF) play a crucial role in improving ICT and broadband infrastructure: in the current programming period, EUR 14 billion is available for that purpose.

"Currently high-speed broadband coverage only reaches 40% of rural residents in the EU compared with 90% of urban areas", says rapporteur Mart Vorklaev (EE/ALDE), Mayor of Rae Municipality. "This presents an obstacle to achieving the EU's ambitious goals for the Digital Single Market and contributes to the growing problem of rural depopulation and marginalisation throughout Europe. Therefore broadband infrastructure needs to be supported by strengthening cohesion policy in parallel with other financial instruments combining public and private financing, such as the Broadband Fund launched by the European Investment Bank."

Following concerns raised by Broadband Platform members, the opinion calls for efforts to tackle administrative burdens resulting from overregulation and lack of consistency. In particular, the EU guidelines for the application of State aid rules in relation to rapid deployment of broadband networks should be aligned with the various EU funding options for broadband rollout.

Local and regional representatives also pointed out the need for more data and technical knowledge, which is why they are urging the European Commission to extend its network of Broadband Competence Offices to all Member States. Local and regional authorities should be active partners in the design and roll-out of national broadband development plans, together with telecommunications companies and national governments.

The opinion notes that mobile and satellite broadband can often provide quicker and less costly alternatives to fibre networks, especially in sparsely populated areas. As the rapid development of high-capacity 5G communications networks raises new challenges for radio spectrum management, it is important to seek a common approach for the allocation of licences for the higher frequencies that will be used in the future.

Finally, the Committee considers it necessary to separate services from network operation, in the same way as in the energy sector. This "unbundling" should apply to both the fixed and 5G markets, in the interests of competition.

"There should be no dependence on basic infrastructure owned by the telecommunications companies that dominate the market. Networks need to be operator-neutral so that large numbers of service providers can operate on the market on an equal basis and consumers can choose the services they prefer", Mr Vorklaev stresses.

Background information:

The Broadband Platform was launched in October 2017 by CoR President Karl-Heinz Lambertz and the Commissioner for Digital Society, Mariya Gabriel. Comprising 12 CoR members and ad-hoc experts from the European Commission, it aims to contribute to the deployment of faster, better and sustainable high-speed broadband in all European regions.

Contact:

Lauri Ouvinen

Tel. +32 22822063

lauri.ouvinen@cor.europa.euNon-aficionados wont know the name Roxanne Shante, and even among fans she might have receded to the realm of pop-culture footnote. But the Queens hip-hop prodigys story grabs the mic in Roxanne Roxanne, a film that breaks the musical biopic mold in ways that are sometimes frustrating and frequently exhilarating.

As the tough and talented New Yorker, riveting newcomer Chante Adams is the embodiment of outer-borough moxie. The formidable rap-battle champ, birth name Lolita Shante Gooden, was only 14 when she became a recording sensation. In a neighbors DIY studio, she freestyled a response to a track by Brooklyn hip-hoppers UTFO  in one impatient take, so she could finish doing laundry. She was a girl talking back to the boys, and Roxannes Revenge, released in 1984, hit big.

Writer-director Michael Larnell (Cronies) treats the wider scope of rap history as a fractured kaleidoscopic backdrop. That leaves disorienting gaps in an otherwise electrifying first-person chronicle. At the movies core are the intertwined threads of sisterhood and treacherous men. Warnings of the latter danger are drummed into Shante by her hard-bitten mother (Nia Long, superb), but still she falls for drug dealer Cross (Mahershala Ali), all smooth flash and hair-trigger jealousy.

Two brilliant sequences take the film to powerful depths. In one, a trio of rhyming images morph from sexual initiation to childbirth agony to domestic abuse. The other, a harrowing encounter between a bathing Shante and the menacing Cross, turns into a baptism: Having grown up incredibly fast, a young woman takes stock of her life, and reclaims it.

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Roxanne Roxanne

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Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes

Playing: iPic Westwood

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calendar@latimes.comPadraig OMalley is, to put it mildly, a man on a mission. The fascinating subject of The Peacemaker is a restless traveler who has devoted most of his life to conflict resolution, organizing conferences on political hot spots including Iraq and Kosovo. As it follows him over a five-year period, into hotel gatherings and danger zones, James Demos sharp-eyed documentary lays waste to any assumption that inner peace is a requisite for OMalleys urgent work.

With his gaunt good looks, self-effacing humor and laser focus, the Dublin-born, Boston-based academic knows how to work a room  but not in the polished, facile manner of a politician. Hes no headline grabber but, in the words of a colleague, an instrumental backroom player.

A recovering alcoholic, OMalley funds his activities with proceeds from a bar he once haunted and now owns. Having ingeniously borrowed a foundational concept from the 12-step model, he posits the idea of shared suffering as the starting point for problem-solving forums. Divided societies counsel one another  sometimes, as in the case of a South Africa-set conference on Northern Ireland, with groundbreaking results.

The weight of the world is evident in OMalleys dour gaze, but its clear too, in Demos sensitive, piercing portrait, that the endless job hes carved out for himself is his lifeblood, and its own kind of addiction. Even as aging takes its toll, hes still crisscrossing the globe in a dauntless pursuit, his sights set far beyond comforting conventional notions of happiness and love.

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The Peacemaker

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Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes

Playing: Laemmle Music Hall, Beverly Hills

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calendar@latimes.comWhile undeniably a rough-around-the-edges first feature, theres something so appealingly genuine about Arkansas-based Justin Warrens loosely autobiographical Then There Was Joe, that youre willing to forgive the shortcomings.

Inspired by the dynamic between the director-writer and his real-life bad boy big brother, the comedy concerns the efforts of perfect son and law student Ben Hazelstein (Warren) to prepare for his bar exam despite considerable distraction in the form of older sibling Joe (Ray Grady).

Despite landing in jail for his part in robbing a bowling alley filled with third-graders, Joe will now be allowed to await trial while under house arrest thanks to the intervention of the young mens prominent judge dad (James Butch Warren), much to Bens understandable dismay.

Of course, Joe isnt going to let a minor inconvenience like an ankle monitor cramp his OG lifestyle, and the predictable sibling ribaldry ensues, forcing straight-laced Ben to face the indignity of paying one of Joes hookers with cash from an envelope marked Christmas Gifts.

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Although it wouldnt be incorrect to cite the need for much crisper comedy pacing and less clunky emotional transitions, not to mention a subtler score that didnt feel the need to pounce on all the funny bits, youll still root for the personable Warren ultimately to prevail.

Theres enough entertaining stuff here to suggest this crowd-funded production will pay off in a promising future.

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Then There Was Joe

Not rated

Running time: 1 hour, 42 minutes

Playing: Downtown Independent, Los Angeles

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calendar@latimes.comWhat do you do after youve made yet another beautiful film in a career defined  some might say stymied  by an obsessive devotion to beauty?

If youre Wes Anderson, the writer-director behind such meticulously crafted art-house miniatures as Moonrise Kingdom and The Grand Budapest Hotel, maybe you try giving ugliness a chance. Or rather, you set yourself the challenge of making ugliness beautiful, of finding ravishment in a bleak dystopian panorama strewn with toxic waste sites, abandoned factories and towering heaps of rubbish.

Being Wes Anderson, you then cobble together a story in which the underdogs populating this grim landscape are actual dogs, voiced by a human cast that includes several regular collaborators (Bill Murray, Jeff Goldblum, etc.) and given form and movement by astonishingly lifelike canine puppets. And because all this is taking place in Japan, you fill the frame with references to Kabuki theater, sumo wrestling, haiku poetry, the paintings of Katsushika Hokusai and the films of Akira Kurosawa  all set to a dramatic chorus of taiko drumbeats that is merely one element of Alexandre Desplats ever-surprising score.

This canine adventure Isle of Dogs takes place in the fictional Japanese city of Megasaki, where all dogs have been exiled to Trash Island, a floating wasteland that Wes Anderson, his cinematographer and production designers have brought to life i

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Thats as close as I can get to providing an aesthetic rationale for Isle of Dogs, Andersons madly eccentric ninth feature and his second foray into animation after 2009s Fantastic Mr. Fox. But the effort is probably futile: If there is a reason to cherish this often captivating, sometimes irritating, unavoidably perplexing movie, its that its mere existence seems to defy rational explanation. It is by turns savage and soulful, mangy and refined, possessed of an unmistakable pedigree and yet boldly resistant to categorization. Its a shaggy Frankenmutt of a movie, dressed in artisanal fur and infested by bespoke fleas.

In Fantastic Mr. Fox, the slow, painstaking animation process seemed, if anything, to accelerate Andersons narrative energies and liberate his visual imagination. Stop-motion, which requires an invisible, all-controlling hand to create the illusion of fluidity, was an intuitive medium for this most exacting of directors and his intricate, diorama-like sensibility. On a pure frame-by-frame basis, Isle of Dogs is a triumph of invention and micro-detail, a bravura showcase for cinematographer Tristan Olivers impeccable widescreen compositions and the ingenious bento-box elegance of Adam Stockhausen and Paul Harrods production design. For better and for worse, its Wes Anderson unleashed.

The plot is basically Mad Max: Furry Road. It begins some 20 years in the future, in the fictional Megasaki City, where the powerful, pro-feline Kobayashi dynasty has long waged war against mans best friend. (Cat lovers might chafe at that, but well get to the films representational issues in a moment.) Amid a city-wide epidemic of dog flu, the scheming Mayor Kobayashi (voiced by Kunichi Nomura) has ordered that the afflicted animals be deported to a floating pre-apocalyptic wasteland called Trash Island.

These dogs are  forgive me  a pretty pugnacious bunch. When they fight, which is often, they kick up a giant white cloud that resembles an exploding cotton-ball factory. Theres a lot to fight about on Trash Island, where disease runs rampant, food is scarce and danger lurks behind every turn. But there is still goodness to be found in the wide eyes and battered hearts of these abandoned canines, namely Rex (Edward Norton), King (Bob Balaban), Boss (Murray) and Duke (Goldblum), who come to the rescue of a 12-year-old boy pilot, Atari Kobayashi (Koyu Rankin), when his plane crash-lands on their island.

Atari, the mayors rebellious, brave-hearted nephew, is the only Megasaki resident loyal enough to have come back for his beloved dog  in this case, a short-haired oceanic speckle-eared sport hound named Spots (Liev Schreiber). When Spots is nowhere to be found, Atari is aided in his seemingly hopeless mission by the aforementioned friendly foursome, and also, reluctantly, by a grouchy stray named Chief (Bryan Cranston), who opposes domestication of any kind.

What happens next in this clever, multi-chaptered story (which Anderson conceived with Roman Coppola, Jason Schwartzman and Nomura) will surprise no one familiar with the writer-directors work. New friendships are cemented and dastardly political conspiracies are exposed. Young people are shown to possess the kind of integrity and courage that shames the so-called grown-ups in their midst. Theres a hint of mongrel romance between Chief and a posh show dog named Nutmeg (Scarlett Johansson), and prescient visions courtesy of a TV-addicted pooch named Oracle (Tilda Swinton).

There are also isolated moments of human-dog bonding, some of them hauntingly scored to the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Bands I Wont Hurt You, that transform these canines from mere puppets into deep repositories of soul. These moments of stillness feel essential in a movie that is otherwise happy to overwhelm you with narrative incident and textural detail; in some ways, Andersons battle-ready Kurosawa tribute cries out to be tempered by the more contemplative spirit of a filmmaker like Kenji Mizoguchi.

Its in Andersons handling of the storys humans that his sensitivity falters, and the weakness for racial stereotyping that has sometimes marred his work.

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Some, of course, will be offended by the mere invocation of these Japanese cinema giants in this particular context. The ever-contentious subject of cultural appropriation has haunted Isle of Dogs since before its recent premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival, where Anderson won a directing prize. Bluntly put, does this white American filmmakers highly selective, idiosyncratic rendering of an East Asian society constitute a sincere act of homage, or a clueless failure of sensitivity?

For what its worth, every one of Andersons films is an act of imaginative plundering  a crazy-quilt of popular touchstones and personal influences, tailored to a specific milieu, designed to flatter his sophistication and the viewers as well. Andersons appreciation of Japanese culture is nothing if not wide-ranging: While its no surprise to see him repurpose screen painting and pagoda architecture as superior design elements, his movie shows an admirable willingness to embrace the weird, the unnerving and the grotesque.

And besides, arent those dogs amazing? They are indeed. But tellingly, its in the directors handling of the storys human factor that his sensitivity falters, and the weakness for racial stereotyping that has sometimes marred his work comes to the fore.

Anderson, a stickler for verisimilitude even in the weirdest situations, has the human residents of Megasaki City speak their native Japanese, a choice that would seem respectful enough except for the conspicuous absence of English subtitles. Much of the Japanese dialogue, especially Ataris, has been pared down to simple statements that non-speakers can figure out based on context and facial expressions; longer, more complicated exchanges are translated aloud by a handy on-screen English interpreter (Frances McDormand).

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The dogs, for their part, all speak clear American English, which is ridiculous, charming and a little revealing. You can understand why a writer as distinctive as Anderson wouldnt want his droll way with the English language to get lost in translation. But all these coy linguistic layers amount to their own form of marginalization, effectively reducing the hapless, unsuspecting people of Megasaki to foreigners in their own city. Their assumed passivity is further underscored by the singularly unfortunate character of Tracy Walker (Greta Gerwig), an American foreign-exchange student who becomes the angry, heroic voice of Megasakis pro-dog resistance. At one point, she even smacks down a scientist voiced by Yoko Ono. (Yoko Ono!)

I can hear your indignant protests already: This isnt really Japan, stupid. Its Wes Anderson Land, and everyone here ultimately speaks his language and his language alone. I get it. I like Wes Anderson Land; its always a fun place to visit. But some parts are less fun than others, and what we see of it in Isle of Dogs is finally ugly in ways beyond what even its maker could have intended.

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Isle of Dogs

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(In English and Japanese)

Rating: PG-13, for thematic elements and some violent images

Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes

Playing: In general release

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justin.chang@latimes.com | Twitter: @JustinCChangAn obsession with her mothers collection of Stephane Kelian shoes was the first sign of footwear designer Charlotte Stones future career.

Later, a pair of square-toe, strappy 90s Calvin Kleins with a killer stiletto heel cemented her fate. I moved to Toronto right out of high school into a tiny studio apartment, and I learned about Holt Renfrew, this fancy department store, Stone said.

I spent my rent on a pair of Calvin Klein shoes, and that was the beginning of the end, the 41-year-old designer said on the phone from her Ventura studio. Im actually looking at them right now. I keep them on my desk to remember.

Its worth noting that Stone no longer wears the painfully high yet classic footwear.

A style from the Charlotte Stone label. Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times

Stone makes  and wears  her own comfortable, technicolor sandals, flats, mules and booties, which are coveted by Brie Larson and others. (Stone grabbed Larsons attention with an Instagram post of her lines Gloria sandal.) Her list of fans includes Emma Roberts and Solange, the first celebrity to wear Stones footwear. (She did so on her honeymoon.)

I can always count on a Charlotte Stone shoe when I need a pop of color, a rock n roll boot or a statement shoe, said stylist Djuna Bel, who has worked with Hollywood types including Millie Bobby Brown as well as brands such as Coca-Cola.

Now for the first time, Stones entire collection is available in one bricks-and-mortar space, a Platform pop-up (8850 Washington Blvd., Culver City) running through April, before shes sent to open a permanent location at Row DTLA later this spring.

Early in her design career, Stone put in serious time creating footwear collections for Joie, Cynthia Vincent and Steve Madden, and this pop-up moment comes four years after Stone launched her eponymous label with an eye on the design freedom it would bring her.

Styles available at shoe designer Charlotte Stone's pop-up space in Culver City as well as her website, www.charlottestone.com. Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times

Although Stones aesthetic appears to dip a toe into different decades and vibes, what unites her collections is a fascination with intriguing materials. I want it bright and shiny, but contrary to that, I also really love the natural leather look, she said. I want people to get excited when they see the shoes.

She said she visualizes silhouettes or patterns in the prints themselves from time to time. I see shoes in literally everything, said the surfer, who translates ready-to-wear into shoes in her head and rips apart vintage footwear styles to study construction, toe shapes and heels.

Stone said she also finds inspiration at the Lineapelle leather wares show in Italy she attends twice a year, which is my favorite, favorite thing about what I do. I get a lot of juice there.

Materials for her label come from around the world, and shoes are produced in Italy and China. However, Los Angeles also factors into the equation as Stone ramps up local production. Her shoes, which range from $178 to $350, are sold at charlotte-stone.com and other retailers such as Amour Vert stores in California and locally at Myrtle.

Stones spring 2018 collection, for example, features certified African block prints sourced entirely from downtown L.A.s Ashanti Fabrics depot. Stone said she loved the vibrant colors of the fabric but also, I read an article about how women would create stories about these prints in Africa.

One featured fabric had depictions of fans said to keep bad men at bay by blowing them away. All these prints tell stories, and I thought that was really cool, Stone said.

As for her own story, a friend prompted Stone to vocalize her dream job while she worked for an uninspiring real-estate developer in Toronto, and Stone and her friend went to the Toronto Public Library to look at school brochures.

Booties from Ventura-based footwear designer Charlotte Stone. Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times

In short order, I quit my job, moved home, saved all my money, enrolled at FIDM, came out [to Los Angeles] and never looked back, Stone said.

Two weeks into her first job post-graduation, she flew to Italy for work. For a dozen odd years, Stone worked under someone elses art direction, creating shoes and enjoyed the work. However, she eventually wanted to explore other possibilities and making her own footwear.

One of things she focused on was comfort, a hallmark of her shoes. Its a big deal for me. I want to make sure people arent in pain, she said. High-quality memory foam in padding and upper materials as well as cork figure into her footwear designs. It was something I took into consideration from the get-go, Stone said. I wasnt interested in making super-high heels.

Shoe designer Charlotte Stone at her pop-up space at Platform in Culver City. Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times

Stones furniture designer husband, Steve Nasker of Pacific Wonderland Inc., is to thank for the pop-up concept. (Stone shares a Ventura auto shop-turned-studio with him and collaborates on his woven chair bottoms.) The pop-up features giant totems made of blond domestic birch plywood, scrap from Naskers furniture. All color comes courtesy of Stones collection as well as a massive weaving by Wonderland collaborator Annette Heully inspired by a view from Ojai of the recent Thomas fire.

Stone said a weaving workshop is to come, part of a laundry list of events and programming she has planned. However, the shoes themselves hopefully draw customers  perhaps Stones dream wearer, Tracee Ellis Ross. (I would die if she wore my shoes; she is totally fearless, Stone said.)

Women say when they wear my shoes, people notice them, stop and ask them what they are, the designer said. Theres something interesting and different that makes people curious. I think its a West Coast California thing. Theyre colorful and not too serious.

Support our journalism Please consider subscribing today to support stories like this one. Get full access to our signature journalism for just 99 cents for the first four weeks. Already a subscriber? Your support makes our work possible. Thank you.

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For fashion news, follow us at @latimesimage on Twitter.Wheres the owner of this house? Kevin Hart shouted while perched on the patio of a 10,700-square-foot Midcentury Modern mansion thats nestled above the Sunset Strip and on the market for $38 million. Hart soon borrowed a microphone from the events DJ booth. It wasnt for a comedy bit. Rather, it was in hopes of locating whoever had parked a car in front of his during a fashion dinner inside the Lenny Kravitz-interior-designed Stanley House in Los Angeles on Tuesday night.

I cant get out because hes blocking the gate, Hart continued as the group roared with laughter. Ive got a wife and baby at home. This is style at an all-time high, but Ive got to go.

The event

Jennifer Morrison, from left, Jimmy Choo's creative director Sandra Choi and Jen Rade. Stefanie Keenan / Getty Images for the Hollywood Reporter

Hart joined Gwyneth Paltrow, Armie Hammer and Chadwick Boseman as they celebrated those working tirelessly behind-the-seams of Hollywood to keep stars stylish on the red carpet. In honor of the Hollywood Reporters annual 25 Most Powerful Stylists in Hollywood issue, the night was hosted by the publications fashion and beauty director Carol McColgin and style and fashion news director Booth Moore as well as Jimmy Choos creative director Sandra Choi.

The crowd

Chadwick Boseman, from left, Mary J. Blige and Kevin Hart. Stefanie Keenan / Getty Images for the Hollywood Reporter

Mary J. Blige attended in support of her stylist Law Roach, with whom she worked closely during awards season. Law opened me up to another world, said the Oscar-nominated Mudbound actress. Hes transformed me into something, fashion-wise, I didnt have the courage to be. Hes adventurous. He knows what hes doing. And he knows his girls. He knows exactly what I need. Hes given me life on a whole other level.

Blige said her favorite recent looks with Roach include her Oscar moments, in which she wore a custom white Versace gown on the red carpet and a burgundy Vera Wang gown for her performance. He made me try different things, Blige added. I wasnt afraid to  Hart interrupted and put his head on Bliges shoulder. Kevin! she laughed.

I want to chat with her, Hart said. Shes the best thing ever.

The comedian proceeded, unprompted, to discuss Blige  in front of Blige  for about two minutes. Kevin Hart will always bow down to those that I should, he said, speaking in a mix between first and third person. Mary J. is a legend. And I want the world to know that she deserves the title legend.

Youve got enough, right? Blige then joked to The Times.

But back to the stars and their fashion confidants: Boseman and Elle Fanning joined their stylists Ashley Weston and Samantha McMillen, respectively. Fannings big sister, Dakota, also works with McMillen.

The eldest Fanning revealed that she, her sister and McMillen had gotten dressed for the dinner together. We got ready in the green room at James Corden  all three of us, laughed Dakota Fanning, who was clad in Prada with Jimmy Choo accessories.

Its really important to us to work with people that feel like family, Dakota Fanning added. We definitely have that with Samantha. Shes such a kind, warm person and works so hard. Elle and I both love her so much.

Also in attendance were Daveed Diggs, Elizabeth Chambers and Yara Shahidi as well as stylists Tara Swennen (who dresses Allison Janney), Jason Bolden (Taraji P. Henson), Micaela Erlanger (Meryl Streep), Petra Flannery (Reese Witherspoon), Jeff Kim (Michael B. Jordan), Elizabeth Saltzman (Saoirse Ronan), Marni Senofonte (Beyonce), Jeanne Yang (Kumail Nanjiani) and Kate Young (Margot Robbie).

The scene

Kate Young, from left, Jeanne Yang and Ilaria Urbinati. Stefanie Keenan / Getty Images for the Hollywood Reporter

While overlooking a breathtaking 270-degree view of the Hollywood Hills, guests tucked into a three-course meal prepared by L.A. chefs Jon Shook and Vinny Dotolo of Son of a Gun and Trois Mec restaurants. The menu included pickled beet salad; striped bass, chicken paillard and vegan rice bowls; with frozen lime yogurt and Dutch chocolate fudge cake for dessert.

During the meal, Diggs kept close to John Tan. Hes the only stylist Ive ever had, Diggs said. He changed my life.

While Diggs acknowledges that the red carpet is part of his job, he admitted that it doesnt necessarily come naturally to him. Events like this arent easy for me, Diggs said, clad in a look by Comme des Garcon with Jimmy Choo shoes. But, with John, were always going to have fun and put on some really cool [clothing]. And then Im going to feel great all night wearing some wild piece of art.  Its like putting on a suit of armor.

For her part, McMillen said it was surreal seeing her magazine cover on a wall at the party. She and the Fannings posed by it shortly after.

Elsewhere, Swennen caught up with old friends. Its lovely to get together with our peers, Swennen said. Normally, when we see each other, were stressed. Were in our sweatpants, running around, pulling [clothing for clients], and pulling our hair out.

Tan agreed, As stylists, we all work in our own little cocoon. Its really nice that theres an opportunity where we can celebrate what we do.

The quote

Dakota Fanning, from left, Elle Fanning and Jamie Mizrahi. Stefanie Keenan / Getty Images for the Hollywood Reporter

Dakota Fanning admitted she doesnt always make it easy for her stylist. I hate trying on clothes, Fanning laughed, divulging that half of McMillens job involves wrangling Fanning to get her in a room for long enough before Im like, I think thats fine. I think I should just wear that. Shell say, Can we, please, try on a few more things?

The actress then clarified her statement. I love clothes. I just dont like trying on clothes. Fanning said shes been that way for some reason since I was a small child. Ive been traumatized, I think, somewhere along the line. So thats her struggle with me.

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For fashion news, follow us at @latimesimage on Twitter.Imagine being forced out of your home every time theres a heavy rain.

For some Montecito residents, who have gone through five evacuations since December, the routine is getting old. Still, most are not resisting.

Yes, its a nuisance, said Maria Luisa Carroll, 85, who was in the lobby of the Hyatt Centric hotel Wednesday in Santa Barbara with her Tibetan spaniel, Gholi, waiting to be picked up by her son. I have a very bad back and to have to pack things all the time, its painful. But you take some pills. Better safe than sorry.

Most people, like Carroll, were able to get to hotels or stay with family. Relatively few had availed themselves of the Red Cross shelter at the Earl Warren Showgrounds in Santa Barbara. One of those who opted for the shelter was a neighbor of Carrolls, 78-year-old Toby Tarquin.

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Maria Luisa Carroll, 85, with her Tibetan spaniel, Gholi, 17, at the Hyatt Centric in Santa Barbara. Carroll, from Montecito, has evacuated her home five times since December. (Robin Abcarian / Los Angeles Times )

On East Valley Road, in the middle of the mandatory evacuation zone, Tarquin lives a mile north of Carroll and very close to Oprah Winfrey, who, of course, has a mega-mansion on 42 acres. Tarquin supports herself with Social Security and described her leaky two-bedroom cottage as a teardown. Her property has 40 gorgeous oak trees and is strewn with boulders from ancient debris flows.

Montecito is known as a playground for the rich, but many of its older residents came to the area decades ago and continue to live modestly among the opulence of their newer neighbors.

During the Thomas fire in December, Tarquin had spent two weeks with her son in Westlake. But this week, she opted to stay at the fairgrounds, which is also the staging area for emergency crews and much of the heavy equipment that will be put to use if the fire-scarred mountains above Santa Barbara and Montecito give way again.

And considering that shed just spent the night on a not-very-comfortable cot, she was surprisingly upbeat.

I have evacuation goofiness, she said. Im just a little punchy from lack of sleep.

Toby Tarquin, 78, lives near Oprah Winfrey in a modest cottage. She decided to stay at the shelter at the Earl Warren Showgrounds rather than go to her adult sons home. (Robin Abcarian / Los Angeles Times )

More important, she was buoyed by some new friendships. Over the course of a day and night at the shelter, she had bonded with two other women her age. Despite invitations and pleas from their adult children, none of the women planned to leave the shelter.

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Our kids want to take care of us, but weve got this sense of independence, Tarquin said. There are three of us and we all have the same color hair and the same hairdresser: none. Weve all raised the kids, couple of dead husbands. The stories I am hearing from these women are amazing. Its senior lady camp is all I can say.

::

When you can do nothing else, telling stories is surely the best way to cope. And everywhere you go around here, people have dramatic stories.

On Hot Springs Road, about a mile from Tarquins cottage, I found Santa Barbara County Fire Capt. David Zaniboni with a crew from the Weather Channel. Behind him, Montecito Creek was rising slowly, but the water was moving swiftly and unobstructed toward the ocean, a positive sign.

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On Jan. 9, he told me, hed been awakened by a phone alert. Multiple structures were on fire in Montecito.

I was like, Thats weird because its pouring rain, he said.

The debris flow had broken gas mains, causing explosions and some fires.

Half an hour before Zanibonis phone went off, Tarquin had a similar disconnect. Shed awakened to a bright orange sun blazing outside her window.

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I thought: Oh, my gosh, I overslept. Its noon.

When she walked into her kitchen, though, a battery-powered clock showed the time as 3:30 a.m.

I look outside and the whole house is lit like there are spotlights, Tarquin said. I open the front door and my daughter comes out and says: Mom, close it! Its the bomb! It looked like Hiroshima.

Could it happen again?

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Until we get some regrowth in the mountains, Zaniboni said, this could go on for the next couple years.

::

An estimated 30,000 people had evacuated for this storm.

I wondered if some of them  especially in neighborhoods that were devastated by the debris flow in January  were experiencing post-traumatic stress from the repeat evacuations and fears of another cataclysmic event.

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There is an exhaustion vibe, and I think the PTSD is building, said Roberta Ainciart, a retired psychotherapist and leader of Santa Barbaras disaster mental health team. I bumped into her at the fairgrounds shelter, where she was available to help anyone in distress.

We have a very tired community that has really come together. Overall, I think peoples mental health is pretty good. (The people who are likely to be suffering severely, she said, are the ones who have lost loved ones or homes, or both.)

People have lost jobs, businesses have taken a big hit, and the best-laid plans have been upended. Ainciarts daughter, for instance, had scheduled her wedding for April 28 at the Biltmore hotel, where her parents tied the knot 33 years ago. But the Biltmore, damaged in the debris flow, remains closed until June 1, and the family had to scramble for a new location.

The save-the-date cards had already gone out, Ainciart said. We had to plan a whole second wedding.

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She hastened to point out that this was an inconvenience, not a tragedy.

::

After the January debris flow, Tarquin camped out with her daughter at home for three weeks  with no electricity, gas or water. If they had left, they rightly feared, they would not have been allowed to return.

Supermarkets were closed. But the Village Cheese and Wine Store in Montecitos Upper Village, a stones throw away, was feeding the repair crews and residents who stuck around. We ate a lot of cheese sandwiches, Tarquin said. It was like Gilligans Island.

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At 4 a.m. Thursday, during a hard rain, the creeks running though Montecito rose several feet. But just before noon, they had fallen again and emergency crews were optimistic the worst had passed. The evacuation order was lifted at 5 p.m. Now, things will get back to what passes for normal around here. At least until the next storm rolls in.

On Hot Springs Road in Montecito, all that remains of a home is its foundation and a chimney ornament after the Jan. 9 mudflows. (Robin Abcarian / Los Angeles Times )

robin.abcarian@latimes.com

Twitter: @AbcarianLAT

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UPDATES:

5:10 p.m.: This column was updated with the announcement that the evacuation order was lifted.

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LAPD begins sweeping criminal probe of former USC gynecologist while urging patients to come forward By Adam Elmahrek The Los Angeles Police Department said Tuesday it is investigating 52 complaints of misconduct filed by former patients of USCs longtime campus gynecologist as detectives launch a sweeping criminal probe into the scandal that has rocked the university. LAPD detectives also made an appeal for other patients who feel mistreated to come forward, noting that thousands of students were examined by Dr. George Tyndall during his nearly 30-year career at USC. More than 410 people have contacted a university hotline about the physician since The Times revealed the allegations this month. Tyndalls behavior and practices appear to go beyond the norms of the medical profession and gynecological examinations, said Asst. Chief Beatrice Girmala. We sincerely realize that victims may have difficulty recounting such details to investigators. We are empathetic and ready to listen. Read More Facebook

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At L.A.'s only school for the deaf, parents want leaders who speak the same language By Anna M. Phillips Ever since her son was 6 months old, Juliet Hidalgo has been bringing him to the Marlton School, a low-slung building in Baldwin Hills that for generations has been a second home for deaf and hard-of-hearing students in Los Angeles. Marlton staff taught Hidalgos brother and sister, both of whom are deaf. The school was where her deaf son learned to make the signs for milk and food. Hidalgo had planned to enroll her daughter, taking advantage of a popular program that allows hearing children to learn American Sign Language alongside their deaf siblings. But after more than a decade of involvement, she and other family members are considering withdrawing their children. They are not alone. Read More Facebook

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Fueled by unlimited donations, independent groups play their biggest role yet in a California primary for governor By Ryan Menezes An unprecedented amount of money from wealthy donors, unions and corporations is flowing into the California governors race, giving independent groups  unrestricted by contribution limits  a greater say in picking the states chief executive than ever before. The groups have already spent more than $26 million through Thursday, the most ever spent by noncandidate committees in a gubernatorial primary, according to a Times analysis of campaign finance reports. California elections have always been expensive, and the future is even more expensive, said Jack Pitney, a political science professor at Claremont McKenna College and a former state Republican leader. The stakes are very real. Read More Facebook

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Pressure grows on Board of Trustees amid USC gynecologist scandal By Paul Pringle USCs large and powerful Board of Trustees is coming under growing pressure to provide a stronger hand as the university faces a crisis over misconduct allegations against the campus longtime gynecologist that has prompted calls for President C.L. Max Nikias to step down. Allegations that Dr. George Tyndall mistreated students during his nearly 30 years at USC have roiled the campus, with about 300 people coming forward to make reports to the university and the Los Angeles Police Department launching a criminal investigation. USC is already beginning to face what is expected to be costly litigation by women who say they were victimized by the physician. So far, the trustees to whom Nikias reports have expressed sympathy for the women who have come forward and launched an independent investigation while also publicly backing the president. Read More Facebook

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USCs Academic Senate calls on university president to resign after a series of scandals By Matt Hamilton The body that represents USCs faculty called on President C.L. Max Nikias to resign Wednesday in the wake of relevations that the universitys longtime gynecologist faced years of accusations of misconduct by students and colleagues at the campus health clinic. The Academic Senate took the vote late Wednesday afternoon after a fiery town hall meeting attended by more than 100 faculty members, many of whom voiced outrage over Nikias and the Board of Trustees leadership. The vote came a day after the trustees executive committee stood firmly behind Nikias, saying it has full confidence in his leadership, ethics and values. At the town hall meeting, Senate President Paul Rosenbloom said he did not think Nikias or Provost Michael Quick committed wrongdoing but that the university president deserved criticism for a lack of transparency. Read More Facebook

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Californias public universities on the way to getting a big longed-for boost in funding By Teresa Watanabe The University of California and California State University systems are poised to get major funding boosts that will help them enroll thousands of additional state students and eliminate the need for tuition increases in the coming school year. A key Assembly budget panel on Wednesday approved $117.5 million in new funds for the UC. A Senate panel approved a similar sum last week. The same committees recently approved even more funding for the Cal State system. Read More Facebook

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UC regents to scrutinize Janet Napolitanos office budget in a step toward stronger oversight By Teresa Watanabe University of California regents this week plan to scrutinize the budget of President Janet Napolitano, whose office came under political fire last year for questionable spending and murky accounting. Regents will vote on the proposed $876.4-million budget for 2018-19 during their two-day meeting, which starts Wednesday, at UC San Francisco. They also will discuss state funding, financial aid, online education and transfer student policies. Board Chairman George Kieffer said regents are stepping up to exert stronger oversight of the presidents office after a blistering state audit last year found financial problems including an unreported $175 million budget reserve. Read More Facebook

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State legislative panels approve major funding boost for Cal State By Teresa Watanabe Cal State students protest against a tuition increase outside the chancellors office (Irfan Khan) After months of intensive lobbying, Cal State University has convinced two key legislative panels to approve funding to enroll nearly 11,000 more students, hire more faculty and expand housing aid to those without shelter this fall. An Assembly budget panel on Tuesday approved $215.7 million more for Cal State, adding to Gov. Jerry Browns proposed $92.1 million general fund increase. A Senate budget panel approved a similar increase last week. The extra funding  which went beyond Cal States own request to the Legislature of $171 million  is still subject to final budget negotiations with Brown. But the actions by the Senate and Assembly panels amount to a demand from Democrats that the governor hike higher education spending. Cal State University is the workhorse undergraduate university serving hundreds of thousands of Californians, said Assemblyman Kevin McCarty (D-Sacramento), who heads the Assembly Budget Subcommittee on Education Finance. We need more graduates for the California workforce and higher education is the ticket to the middle class. Cal State Chancellor Timothy P. White hailed the actions, but said it was too soon to celebrate. The CSU has a singular focus on helping students earn high-quality degrees sooner, and the entire university community has rallied to reinforce that message to our states lawmakers, he said in a statement. The actions taken thus far by the Assembly and Senate are promising and show that our message is being received, but there is still work to be done. Funding for the University of California was not taken up Tuesday as originally scheduled. McCarty would not comment on sticking points but said he was confident that a resolution would be reached this week. Were looking to provide resources above whats in the governors budget, but negotiations are ongoing, he said in an interview. State per-student funding is not what it once was, leaving both Cal State and the UC in a tough financial squeeze. Both systems raised tuition last year after a six-year freeze on higher costs. For this year, Cal State had asked for funding to enroll an additional 3,621 students, but both the Senate and Assembly panels approved three times that amount. Cal State, the largest public university system in the nation, turned away 32,000 eligible students last year because its campuses werent able to accommodate them. The panels asked that at least $50 million of the extra funding be used to hire more tenure-track faculty to help boost graduation rates. The Assembly panel also approved one-time funding of $5 million to ease hunger on campuses and $14 million for rapid rehousing pilot projects at three campuses, offering needy students rental support and short-term case management. Other items approved include $5 million to support the CSU Long Beach Shark Labs research on sharks and beach safety and $2 million for equal employment opportunity practices. This post has been updated to include comments from Assemblyman Kevin McCarty and Cal State Chancellor Timothy P. White. Facebook

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Faculty members call for USC president to step down: He has lost the moral authority to lead By Matt Hamilton Two hundred USC professors on Tuesday demanded the resignation of university President C. L. Max Nikias, saying he had lost the moral authority to lead in the wake of revelations that a campus gynecologist was kept on staff for decades despite repeated complaints of misconduct. Read More Facebook

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Gun battle, negotiations lasted 15 minutes before Texas school shooter was apprehended, sheriff says By Molly Hennessy-Fiske Minutes after a school shooter opened fire in an art class last week, killing 10 people and wounding 13, including a local police officer, fellow officers returned fire in a protracted gun battle before isolating the suspect, the local sheriff said Monday. Galveston County Sheriff Henry Trochesset praised first responders as well as Santa Fe Police Officer John Barnes, who was working as a resource officer at the school the day of the shooting. Their actions, he said, prevented the attack from spreading to other classrooms and potentially claiming additional victims. As officials continue to probe last Fridays shooting at Santa Fe High School, students are worried about returning to the scene of the attack when classes resume next week. Read More Facebook

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6 women sue USC, alleging they were victimized by campus gynecologist By Richard Winton Six women filed civil lawsuits Monday alleging that a longtime gynecologist at the University of Southern California sexually victimized them under the pretext of medical care and that USC failed to address complaints from clinic staff about the doctors behavior. One woman alleged Dr. George Tyndall forced his entire ungloved hand into her vagina during an appointment in 2003 while making vulgar remarks about her genitalia, according to one of the lawsuits. Another woman alleged that Tyndall groped her breasts in a 2008 visit and that later he falsely told her she likely had AIDS. A third woman accused the doctor of grazing his ungloved fingers over her nude body and leering at her during a purported skin exam, the lawsuit states. The wave of litigation comes as USC continues to grapple with the scandal, which legal experts said could prove costly to the university as scores of former patients come forward about their experiences with the gynecologist. Read More Facebook

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Fatalities reported in Texas high school shooting; suspect arrested, officials say By Associated Press Houston-area media citing unnamed law enforcement officials are reporting that there are fatalities following a shooting at a local high school Friday morning. Television station KHOU and the Houston Chronicle are citing unnamed federal, county and police officials following the shooting at Santa Fe High School, which went on lockdown around 8 a.m. The Associated Press has not been able to confirm the reports. The school district has confirmed an unspecified number of injuries but said it wouldnt immediately release further details. Assistant Principal Cris Richardson said a suspect has been arrested and secured. Read More Facebook

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This student followed the new L.A. schools chief on his first-day tour L.A. schools Supt. Austin Beutner is greeted by Van Nuys High School principal Yolanda Gardea. (Melissa Barales-Lopez) Melissa Barales-Lopez, a senior at Garfield High School followed Supt. Austin Beutner on his first day on the job, as he toured a variety of programs around the Los Angeles Unified School District. Heres what she took from the experience. LAUSD students and staff alike are looking for a personal champion, someone who will address and improve the difficulties afflicting their education.  What LAUSD students need is someone whos willing to listen and learn, someone who can understand the current issues affecting their schools and act to efficiently amend them, someone who can unlock the full potential of LAUSD students and enable them to reach their goals. During the entirety of his first day, superintendent Austin Beutner did indeed demonstrate a willingness to learn. Posing questions to teachers and students, Beutner engaged with the student communities he encountered to gain a better comprehension of the minutiae and nuances that distinguish each school inside an overwhelmingly large district. From inquiries about Grand View Boulevard Elementary Schools dual language program to questions regarding the services of LAUSDs after-school program, Beyond the Bell, Beutner revealed he has a lot to learn about the system. But, Beutner also showcased a willingness to tackle challenges head-on on his first day. Read More Facebook

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USC let a gynecologist continue treating students despite years of misconduct allegations By Matt Hamilton For nearly 30 years, the University of Southern Californias student health clinic had one full-time gynecologist: Dr. George Tyndall. Tall and garrulous with distinctive jet black hair, he treated tens of thousands of female students, many of them teenagers seeing a gynecologist for the first time. Few who lay down on Tyndalls exam table at the Engemann Student Health Center knew that he had been accused repeatedly of misconduct toward young patients. The complaints began in the 1990s, when co-workers alleged he was improperly photographing students genitals. In the years that followed, patients and nursing staff accused him again and again of creepy behavior, including touching women inappropriately during pelvic exams and making sexually suggestive remarks about their bodies. Read More Facebook

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Cal State trustees to discuss Browns latest budget proposal, which they say still falls $171 million short By Joy Resmovits Just how much money does California State University need to serve its students? In recent years, this question has been front and center for the nations largest public university system. Cal States leaders say that to keep their campuses quality from slipping, they need much more money than the state is giving them. This year, theyre also at odds with Gov. Jerry Brown on the question of whether any extra money should come in one-time bursts or be ongoing. Read More Facebook

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On his first day as L.A. schools chief, Beutner plans a day of visits across the district By Howard Blume L.A. Unifieds new superintendent, Austin Beutner, will kick off his first day of work on Tuesday with a choreographed tour of the nations second-largest school district, from the San Fernando Valley to Carson. His day is scheduled to begin at 5:15 a.m. at a school bus depot and end more than 12 hours later at a parent meeting at Garfield High School. Along the way, Beutner is expected to be joined by school district administrators, L.A. Unified board members and the vice president of the union that represents school bus drivers. Though he will be covering a lot of ground, Beutners tour has him skipping Tuesdays school board meeting, when board members are expected to discuss labor negotiations in closed session. Read More Facebook

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Cal State trustees to discuss Browns latest budget proposal, which they say still falls $171 million short By Joy Resmovits Just how much money does California State University need to serve its students? In recent years, this question has been front and center for the nations largest public university system. Cal States leaders say that to keep their campuses quality from slipping, they need much more money than the state is giving them. This year, theyre also at odds with Gov. Jerry Brown on the question of whether any extra money should come in one-time bursts or be ongoing. Read More Facebook

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Why a handful of rich charter school supporters are spending millions to elect Antonio Villaraigosa as governor By Ryan Menezes California voters have seen a barrage of sunny television ads in recent weeks touting former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosas record on finances, crime and education, aired by Families & Teachers for Antonio Villaraigosa for Governor 2018. But the group is, in fact, largely funded by a handful of wealthy charter-school supporters. Together they have spent more than $13 million in less than a month to boost Villaraigosas chances in the June 5 primary  at a time when his fundraising and poll numbers are lagging. Reed Hastings, the founder of Netflix, jump-started the group with a $7-million check, by far the largest donation to support any candidate in the election. Their efforts are part of a broader proxy war among Democrats between teachers unions  longtime stalwarts of the party  and those who argue that the groups have failed low-income and minority schoolchildren. Read More Facebook

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Talking schools with L.A. Unifieds new superintendent By Anna M. Phillips Al Seib / Los Angeles Times ( Incoming L.A. schools Supt. Austin Beutner talks to students at Belmont High School.) Austin Beutner, who officially starts Tuesday as the new superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, is taking on a famously difficult job at a particularly difficult time. The school board is divided and did not back him unanimously. The nations second-largest school district has deep-seated problems, including declining enrollment, lagging academic achievement and rising pension and healthcare costs that eat away at its budget. The 58-year-old former investment banker and former L.A. Times publisher has years of experience in the financial world but none as an educator. Earlier this week, he sat down with the Times education team to discuss the challenges facing the district, which has about 60,000 employees and 500,000 students in traditional public schools. He did not talk about his plans  saying repeatedly, stay tuned  but he spoke in broad terms about his mindset in approaching the tough decisions ahead. Read More Facebook

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Suspect detained, authorities search campus after reports of armed man at Palmdale high school By James Queally One person has been detained after a report of an armed man at a Palmdale high school sparked a massive law enforcement response Friday morning. The suspect was spotted at 7:05 a.m. on the campus of Highland High School in Palmdale, according to Sheriffs Department spokeswoman Nicole Nishida. The person was detained in a nearby parking lot, according to Nishida, who did not know whether that person was an adult or juvenile. Deputies at the scene are clearing the school methodically, and students will be transported home via school buses once the campus is deemed safe, Nishida said. Read More Facebook

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The education of Bertha Perez: How a UC Merced custodians disenchantment led to a political awakening By Robin Abcarian Its the third day of a three-day strike, and UC Merced custodian Bertha Perez is taking a break from a picket line at the universitys unremarkable entrance, an intersection with stop lights. Photos from other UC campuses this week have shown big crowds of striking service workers  members of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees  marching and chanting pro-labor slogans as they try to force the University of California back to the negotiating table. But here, at UC Merced, whose handful of big buildings rise from a flat expanse of farmland, the picket line is tiny, maybe two dozen workers and a few students. Its not a big-city-style show of force. Then again, a union sympathizer is banging relentlessly on a snare drum, so its noisier than youd expect. Read More Facebook

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Ref Rodriguez resigns from teacher credentialing commission By Howard Blume Ref Rodriguez appears during a court appearance. (Al Seib/Los Angeles Times) Los Angeles school board member Ref Rodriguez has resigned from the states Commission on Teacher Credentialing, which oversees the integrity and quality of Californias teachers. Rodriguez faces felony and misdemeanor charges for political money laundering. Separately, his former employer, a charter school organization, has accused him of improperly authorizing checks to a nonprofit under his control. Rodriguez has denied wrongdoing. Rodriguezs resignation from the state body was effective May 4, days after he cast a crucial vote as part of a narrow majority that voted to authorize contract negotiations with Austin Beutner to become superintendent of the L.A. Unified School District. Beutners first official day on the job is Tuesday. Rodriguez remains in his $125,000-a-year position on the Los Angeles Board of Education. The mission of the state body is to ensure integrity, relevance, and high quality in the preparation, certification, and discipline of Californias teachers. Critics had questioned Rodriguezs continued service on the commission, given that teachers can be suspended from work if they face criminal charges. They also can lose their jobs for lapses in personal behavior, such as excessive drinking, with the potential to affect their performance. Police in Pasadena arrested Rodriguez on a Friday afternoon in March for public drunkenness. He was not charged in the incident and has apologized. The state commission reviews teacher discipline cases and can take action to remove a teachers credential to work in a California classroom. The commission has 15 members. Rodriguezs departure was disclosed in a one-sentence announcement on the agencys website. Facebook

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School board members request for restraining order against blogger is rejected By Priscella Vega An Orange County Superior Court judge on Wednesday denied a school board members petition for a permanent restraining order against a Huntington Beach blogger. Attorney Jeffrey W. Shields filed the petition on behalf of Ocean View School District trustee Gina Clayton-Tarvin, 46, who alleged in court documents that Charles Keeler Johnson, 56, has threatened her on social media and at school board meetings, causing her to fear for my own safety and for that of my immediate family members. Johnson, who goes by Chuck and publishes HBSledgehammer.com, said the trustee tried to stifle his freedom of speech. He also contended that Clayton-Tarvin took his blog posts and Facebook comments too seriously and out of context, saying anyone who is afraid of metaphors has serious issues. Read More Facebook

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Deal with workers averts one-day strike that could have shut down L.A. schools By Howard Blume Los Angeles school district and union officials announced a contract agreement Tuesday night that averted a one-day strike planned for next week. The pact, which runs through June 2020, removes one labor problem from the desk of incoming Supt. Austin Beutner  whose first day on the job would have coincided with the strike. Plenty of other challenges remain. Read More Facebook

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UC labor strike expands with show of support from more unions By Teresa Watanabe Fong Chuu is a registered nurse who has assisted with countless liver transplants, kidney surgeries and gastric bypasses during 34 years at UCLA. Working with her are scrub technicians who sterilize equipment, hand medical instruments to the surgeon and dress patient wounds. They are a team, Chuu says, which is why she walked off her job Tuesday in support of those technicians and other members of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 3299. The 25,000 member AFSCME local, the University of Californias largest employee union, launched a three-day strike Monday. Read More Facebook

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We are humans too: Voices of UCLAs striking custodians, hospital aides and imaging technicians By Joy Resmovits Demonstrators parade in front of Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center. (Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times) This week, thousands of UC employees are staging a three-day strike for better pay and working conditions. On Monday, more than 20,000 custodians, cooks, lab technicians, nurse aides and other members of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 3299 walked off their jobs. By Tuesday, two more unions joined in sympathy strikes. The union and UC reached a bargaining impasse last year. The university has said it wont meet the workers demands. The strikers said they wanted better pay, more equity in the allocation of work, stable healthcare premiums and an end to the universitys use of contract workers. These are their stories. Read More Facebook

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Massive UC workers strike disrupts dining, classes and medical services By Joy Resmovits A massive labor strike across the University of California on Monday forced medical centers to reschedule more than 12,000 surgeries, cancer treatments and appointments, and campuses to cancel some classes and limit dining services. More than 20,000 members of UCs largest employee union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 3299, walked off their jobs on the first day of a three-day strike. They include custodians, gardeners, cooks, truck drivers, lab technicians and nurse aides. Two altercations involving protesters and people driving near the rallies were reported at UCLA and UC Santa Cruz. At UCLA, police took a man into custody Monday after he drove his vehicle into a crowd, hitting three staff members. They were treated for minor injuries at the scene and released, said Lt. Kevin Kilgore of the UCLA Police Department. Read More Facebook

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Sen. Kamala Harris to skip UC Berkeley commencement in support of striking workers By Teresa Watanabe Sen. Kamala Harris (Chris Dekmas) California Sen. Kamala Harris has canceled plans to deliver UC Berkeleys commencement address this weekend in support of UC workers who are on strike over wages and health benefits. Due to the ongoing labor dispute, Sen. Harris regretfully cannot attend and speak at this years commencement ceremony at UC Berkeley, said a statement from Harris office issued Monday. She wishes the graduates and their families a joyous commencement weekend and success for the future. They are bright young leaders and our country is counting on them. UCs largest employee union, the 25,000-member American Federation of County, State and Municipal Employees Local 3299, launched a three-day strike Monday and had earlier called for a speakers boycott. The union and university reached a bargaining impasse last year and subsequent mediation efforts have failed to produce an agreement. The union is asking for a multiyear contract with a 6% annual pay increase while the university is offering 3% annual increases over four years. UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ will deliver the keynote address instead, the university announced. About 5,800 students are expected to participate in the ceremony Saturday. Facebook

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School mural depicting Trumps bloody, severed head sparks controversy By Gary Warth A Chula Vista school mural that depicts the bloody, severed head of President Trump on a spear sparked a controversy that prompted officials to cover it and issue a response distancing themselves from the work. The statement also said the artist will alter the painting. We understand that there was a mural painted at the event this past weekend that does not align with our schools philosophy of non-violence, read the statement from MAAC Community Charter School director Tommy Ramirez. We have been in communication with the artist  who has agreed to modify the artwork  to better align with the schools philosophy. Read More Facebook

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New blackface incident at Cal Poly prompts calls for state investigation By Kim Christensen Cal Poly San Luis Obispo officials have asked the state attorney generals office to investigate after a new photo of a white student in blackface surfaced on a fraternity groups private Snapchat. I am outraged, Cal Poly President Jeffrey D. Armstrong said in a video address Friday to the campus. These vile and absolutely unacceptable acts cannot continue. We must not allow these acts to define us as an institution. Armstrong said the latest photo was intended to imitate an incident last month in which a white member of the Lambda Chi Alpha fraternity was photographed at a party wearing blackface. Read More Facebook

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More than 50,000 UC workers set to strike this week but campuses will remain open By Teresa Watanabe More than 50,000 workers across the University of California are set to strike this week, causing potential disruptions to surgery schedules, food preparation and campus maintenance. The systems 10 campuses and five medical centers are to remain open, with classes scheduled as planned. UCs largest employee union, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 3299, plans to begin a three-day strike Monday involving 25,000 workers, including custodians, gardeners, cooks, truck drivers, lab technicians and nurse aides. Read More Facebook

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New L.A. schools chief Beutner pledges to listen, learn and take action By Howard Blume New Los Angeles schools Supt. Austin Beutner proved Wednesday that hes a quick learner even without an education background. Like countless public officials before him, he appeared at an important event  his first speech and news conference  with a photogenic background of students. His message  that he would put those students first  seemed heartfelt if hardly original. Nor was it a huge surprise that he pledged to push cooperatively but unflinchingly to improve the districts academic performance and stabilize its finances. As an introduction, Beutner, a former investment banker who made a fortune on Wall Street, offered little flash, but that was partly the point. Read More Facebook

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In a school lockdown, one student takes stock of the stressful scene (Phalaen Chang) At the beginning of lunch one day late last month, Duarte High School, Northview Middle School, and California School of the Arts-San Gabriel Valley were advised by the Los Angeles Sheriffs Department to go into lockdown mode due to police activity in the immediate area. Phalaen Chang, a junior at the California School of the Arts, wrote a series of notes on her iPhone while she sat in a room with her classmates. By the time the lockdown ended an hour later, she wrote, she knew which of her friends would hold open the door for others, be the ones calming others down, be the ones barricading the doors. She knew that all of them have the potential to be such strong people. Read More Facebook

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Tale as old as time: L.A. Unified superintendent pick follows a historical pattern of outside-the-box choices By Joy Resmovits Navy Vice Adm. David L. Brewer III, superintendent from 2006-2008. (L.A. Times file photo) L.A. Unified has long gone back and forth between picking insiders and outsiders to run the nations second largest school district. The choice of Austin Beutner, announced Tuesday, places the district squarely back in the outsider camp  months after a consummate insider, Supt. Michelle King, announced that she had cancer and would not return to the job. Check out this timeline of former L.A. superintendents to see how the school board members have changed their minds, sometimes favoring leaders who come from the world of education and sometimes executives from elsewhere, recruited to shock the system into change. At one point, the district hired someone from the military  retired Navy Vice Adm. David L. Brewer III, who served as superintendent from 2006-2008. In hiring Brewer, board members had opted for a non-educator  largely because they sought a fresh thinker, unwedded to the bureaucracy, unafraid to make bold, even unorthodox moves, reads a 2008 Times story. Facebook

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Austin Beutner named superintendent of Los Angeles schools By Howard Blume Austin Beutner, a philanthropist and former investment banker, on Tuesday was named superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nations second-largest school system. His selection was the biggest move yet by a Los Angeles school board majority elected with major support from charter school advocates. The decision came after lengthy public testimony, most of it in support of the other remaining finalist, interim Supt. Vivian Ekchian, who is well known within the school system. Beutner, 58, has no background leading a school or school district. Less than 2 years ago, a school board with a very different balance of power named Michelle King, a former teacher who rose through the district throughout her career, to L.A. Unifieds top job. Read More Facebook

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Hearing delay gives both sides more time in Ref Rodriguezs potential trial By Howard Blume Ref Rodriguez and his attorneys will have more time to prepare their defense against charges of political money laundering, a judge ruled Monday. The preliminary hearing in the case had been scheduled to begin May 9, but that date will now be pushed back to July 23 per the ruling from L.A. Superior Court Judge Deborah S. Brazil. Rodriguez, 46, faces three felony charges of conspiracy, perjury and procuring and offering a false or forged instrument, as well as 25 misdemeanor counts related to the alleged campaign money laundering. Read More Facebook

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L.A. school board poised to name Beutner as superintendent By Howard Blume The Los Angeles Board of Education is poised to select philanthropist and former investment banker Austin Beutner to be the next superintendent of the nations second-largest school system. Barring a last-minute development, the only mystery is whether Beutner emerges with four or five votes from the boards seven members. Terms of his contract already have been under discussion, according to sources close to the process who requested anonymity because they are not authorized to speak. The selection of Beutner, 58, who has no experience managing a school or a school district, would be a signal that the board majority that took control nearly a year ago wants to rely on business management skills instead of insider educational expertise. Read More Facebook

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Teacher walkouts in Arizona and Colorado continue national debate on money for schools By Michael Livingston Following the lead of teachers who walked off the job in other states in recent weeks, thousands of teachers and their supporters took to the streets in Arizona and Colorado for the second day in a row to demand better pay and more funding for education. Read More Facebook

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Three decades before the #MeToo movement, UC San Diego led the way against sexual assault By Teresa Watanabe When Nancy Wahlig first started her fight against sexual assault, one company was marketing a capsule for women to stash in their bras and then smash to release a vile odor. Because of the very nature of society, the only person who can prevent rape is the woman herself, read a 1981 advertisement for the Repulse rape deterrent. Ideas about how to prevent sexual violence have come a long way since then, and Wahlig has helped lead that evolution on college campuses. In 1988, she started UC San Diegos Sexual Assault Resource Center (SARC), the first stand-alone program at the University of California. Today, she remains the systems most senior specialist. Read More Facebook

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Andres Alonso withdraws from consideration for L.A. schools job By Howard Blume Andres Alonso, believed to be one of three remaining finalists to lead the Los Angeles school system, has withdrawn from consideration. The remaining known candidates in the confidential search are former investment banker Austin Beutner and interim Supt. Vivian Ekchian. Alonso, 60, announced his decision on Twitter on Thursday night, saying he had notified the L.A. Unified School District on Monday. The exit of Alonso, the former Baltimore schools chief, seems to solidify the front-runner status of Beutner, who also was a former L.A. Times publisher and a Los Angeles deputy mayor. He held each of those positions for about a year. Read More Facebook

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Heres why the apparent increase in autism spectrum disorders may be good for U.S. children By Karen Kaplan The prevalence of autism spectrum disorder among American children continues to rise, new government data suggest. And that may be a good thing. Among 11 sites across the U.S. where records of 8-year-olds are scrutinized in detail, 1 in 59 kids was deemed to have ASD in 2014. Thats up from 1 in 68 in 2012. Normally, health officials would prefer to see less of a disease, not more of it. But in this case, the higher number is probably a sign that more children of color who are on the autism spectrum are being recognized as such and getting services to help them, according to a report published Thursday by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Read More Facebook

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UC shelves tuition increase for now, in hopes of getting more state funding By Teresa Watanabe University of California regents will not vote on a tuition increase next month, shelving the plan for now in hopes that state lawmakers will come through with more funding. Raising tuition is always a last resort and one we take very seriously, UC President Janet Napolitano said Thursday in a statement. We will continue to advocate with our students who are doing a tremendous job of educating legislators about the necessity of adequately funding the university to ensure UC remains a world-class institution and engine of economic growth for our state. Last week, Cal State Chancellor Timothy P. White said the 23-campus system no longer would consider a plan to raise tuition for the 2018-19 academic year. But unlike Cal State, UC officials have not taken a tuition increase off the table entirely. Read More Facebook

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A chemical spill, unchecked eyewash stations, poor training: Audit details Cal States lax lab safety By Joy Resmovits In May 2016, two bottles tumbled off a poorly supported shelf and broke, leading to a chemical spill in a Sacramento State University lab. The liquid got onto one students legs and soaked anothers feet. Five employees cleaned up the mess, even though no one knew for sure what it was and whether it was dangerous. They called fellow employee Kim Harrington, their union representative, to let her know what happened. Read More Facebook

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After blackface incident, minority students at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo say they dont feel welcome By Hailey Branson-Potts Aaliyah Ramos was walking through the Cal Poly San Luis Obispo campus last year when a prospective student approached her. Ramos was the only black person, the young woman said, that she and her mother had seen that day. They asked about the quality of education and the diversity of the student body. Ramos, a mechanical engineering student, didnt want to sugarcoat the truth: Cal Poly long has been predominantly white. But she told the young woman  who also was black  that she didnt want to discourage her from applying, because that wouldnt help with diversity at a school where only 0.7% of students are African American  the lowest percentage of any university in the California State system. Read More Facebook

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El Camino Real Charter High School in Woodland Hills wins the 2018 U.S. Academic Decathlon By Carlos Lozano El Camino Real Charter High School in Woodland Hills has won the 2018 U.S. Academic Decathlon, officials said. The winner was announced early Saturday at a ceremony in Frisco, Texas. More than 600 students from the U.S., Canada, China and the United Kingdom gathered there over the last three days to compete in the 37th annual U.S. Academic Decathlon. Congratulations to El Camino Real Charter High School for another impressive victory, said Vivian Ekchian, interim superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District. Your academic stamina and competitive spirit to win is remarkable. The entire L.A. Unified family is so proud of you. Read More Facebook

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Anticipation mounts as L.A. school board meets over superintendent selection By Howard Blume L.A. schools superintendent candidate Andres Alonso got an endorsement Friday, but Austin Beutner and Vivian Ekchian also have supporters. (Elizabeth Malby) The Los Angeles Board of Education is reconvening in closed session Friday at noon as anticipation mounts about the choice of the next leader of the nations second-largest school system. The presumed front-runner is former investment banker and philanthropist Austin Beutner, but interim Supt. Vivian Ekchian and former Baltimore Supt. Andres Alonso also are in the running. Most district insiders appear to be rooting for Ekchian, who has spent her entire career in education within the school system. After her 10 years as a teacher, her roles have included head of human resources, chief labor negotiator and regional administrator for campuses in the west San Fernando Valley. Shes managed the district since September, when then-Supt. Michelle King went on medical leave and chose Ekchian to fill in for her. King, who is battling cancer, never returned and announced her retirement in January. Numerous influential civic leaders have urged  and pressured  the board to select Beutner. Also lending their weight have been advocates for charter schools, which are independently operated, growing in number and competing for students with district-operated campuses. Four of the seven board members  enough to control the outcome  were elected with major financial support from charter supporters. Beutner has two ongoing connections with the L.A. Unified School District. The first is his leadership of an outside task force that is making recommendations on how to improve the school system. The second is his charity, Vision to Learn, which supplies glasses to low-income students. The charity and the school system are in a dispute at the moment over who is responsible for delays in providing services to students as part of a $6 million contract, half of which is paid for by L.A. Unified. Unlike Ekchian and Buetner, Alonso, who currently teaches at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, has no deep-seated local constituency, but the prospect of his selection has generated some excitement. While in Baltimore, Alonso was recognized for pushing for progress at low-performing schools, and for being willing to take strong action. While in Baltimore, he also weathered a test-score cheating scandal and occasionally rocky relations with the teachers union. But by the time he resigned, after six years, he and union leaders seemed to be working together without rancor. Leaders of some community groups have split from the pro-Beutner camp. They worry that Beutners approach to confronting the districts financial problems could shut out their voices or involve severe economic cutbacks that would undermine programs that are helping students. Some prefer Ekchian; some Alonso. Theyve been reluctant to speak out publicly because theyll have to work with whoever is selected, but they have tried to get the ear of board members. On Friday morning, one leader of a community group decided to come out in favor of Alonso. L.A. Unified has the opportunity to bring in an instructional leader of color with a history of success, said Alberto Retana, president and chief executive of Community Coalition, which works on behalf of low-income students and families in South Los Angeles. If we have a shot at that, we should go for it  because its in the best interests of our kids and of our community. Retana said his statement was not meant to criticize Beutner or Ekchian but to alert board members that there also is community support for Alonso. Facebook

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Cal State leader shelves proposed tuition hike: Its the right thing to do, but its not without risk By Joy Resmovits Cal State, the nations largest public university system, will no longer consider a plan to raise tuition for the 2018-19 academic year, Chancellor Timothy P. White announced Friday. The decision is a bet that Sacramento will come through in the end. If Cal State loses that bet, it could mean cuts to campus programs. White said in an interview that Californias economy is strong enough that families should not be shouldering the burden of higher college costs. Read More Facebook

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L.A. students to participate in national walkout activities on Friday By Joy Resmovits (Los Angeles Times) Students are taking to the streets again Friday to protest gun violence on the 19th anniversary of the Columbine school shooting. Starting at 10 a.m., students at many schools will spend 13 seconds honoring the 13 people  12 students and one teacher  killed on that day in Littleton, Colo. After that, theyll participate in a host of different activities. Within L.A. Unified, one school is having an open-mic event for students to talk about school violence, and lawmakers are visiting campuses to hear students thoughts. According to a central hub for organizing the protests  written by the students of Ridgefield High School in Connecticut  the walkouts are intended to drive the political change necessary to curb school violence. The day is also a time for students to interact on an elevated platform they have never had before, the site states. It is a day of discourse and thoughtful sharing. Bringing together communities and students to get a national discussion rolling. Organizers have suggested using the event to convey the importance of curbing gun violence to legislators. They are encouraging students to push legislation that would ban assault weapons and tighten up rules around who can buy guns and how. Over 2,500 schools nationwide are expected to participate. In L.A., some students  at campuses including Eagle Rock High School, the Ramon C. Cortines School of Visual and Performing Arts and Bravo Medical Magnet  plan to walk out. Students from various schools expect to join area marches, including those in Santa Monica and Huntington Park. Other schools are hosting career days and voter registration drives. At 1 p.m., students plan to start a rally in front of L.A. Unified headquarters. For the record: An earlier version of this article stated that 12 teachers and one student were killed in the Columbine shooting. The opposite is true: twelve students and one teacher died. Facebook

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Stabbing of popular student devastates South El Monte High School; teen friend suspected in slaying By Sonali Kohli When administrators at South El Monte High School called Jeremy Sanchezs parents to say he never showed up for class Wednesday, his father began to worry. It was unusual for the 17-year-old junior to miss school, so his father filed a missing persons report and assembled two of Jeremys close friends to look for the popular student-athlete. Their search took them to a scenic stretch of the San Gabriel River Trail, where one of the friends  a 16-year-old boy  made a tragic discovery. Among the bushes in the riverbed near Thienes Avenue and Parkway Drive was Jeremys body, punctured with stab wounds, according to Lt. John Corina of the Los Angeles County Sheriffs Department. Read More Facebook

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Racist fliers spark outrage at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo By Alene Tchekmedyian Soon after Neal MacDougall arrived on the Cal Poly San Luis Obispo campus Tuesday, the professor noticed university police standing outside a restroom near his office. A racial slur against African Americans had been scrawled in red marker on a stall wall. Later, he discovered a series of racist fliers pinned up next to his door. Someone had also slashed posters hed hung outside his office supporting students in the country illegally. The discovery was the latest controversy on the prestigious campus  which the president said is less than 55% white  that MacDougall said demonstrates a culture of racism at the university. Last week, photographs emerged of white fraternity members, including one in blackface, flashing gang signs. Read More Facebook

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The superintendent waiting game, paying for L.A.'s College Promise, Princetons slave history: Whats new in education By Joy Resmovits Acting LAUSD superintendent Vivian Ekchian is a finalist for the permanent job. (Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times) In and around Los Angeles: The L.A. Unified school board spent 10 hours interviewing and discussing candidates for superintendent. When they adjourned after 10 p.m., they said they would reconvene on Friday. Who is paying for Mayor Eric Garcettis much-touted College Promise, a program that promises two years of community college for LAUSD grads? In California: The Legislature is considering a proposal that would boost K-12 education funding for black students. When the cost of living is taken into account, California has the highest rate of child poverty. Nationwide: The families of two children killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School are suing Alex Jones and Infowars for saying the school massacre never occurred. Princeton will name two spaces  an arch and a garden  after slaves who lived or worked on the campus. Facebook

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L.A. school board meets privately with finalists and debates choice for school district leader By Howard Blume The Los Angeles Board of Education adjourned late Tuesday after spending more than 10 hours interviewing candidates and trying to reach a decision on who would be the next leader of the nations second-largest school system. When the meeting finally recessed at 10:11 p.m., a spokesman announced only that the school board would reconvene Friday at noon. Going into the days meetings, there were apparently four finalists, according to sources who could not be named because they were unauthorized to speak. Read More Facebook

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Two Sandy Hook families sue Alex Jones and Infowars for saying the school massacre never happened By David Altimari Families of two children killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School have filed lawsuits in Texas against controversial radio host Alex Jones for continually claiming the massacre never happened. Neil Heslin, the father of Jesse Lewis, and Leonard Pozner and Veronique De La Rosa, whose son Noah Pozner died in the massacre, filed separate lawsuits late Monday in Travis County, Texas. The lawsuits allege that Jones defamed the parents by constantly calling them crisis actors and insisting the shooting was a false flag operation; they also claim Jones accusations have led to death threats against the Sandy Hook families by Jones followers. Read More Facebook

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Beutner emerges as a top pick for L.A. schools superintendent amid last-minute jockeying By Howard Blume Austin Beutner has emerged as a leading contender to run the Los Angeles school district, with backers saying he is smart enough and tough enough to confront its financial and academic struggles. Though he does not have a background in education, the former investment banker has in the last year examined some of the districts intractable problems, serving as co-chair of an outside task force with the support of then-Supt. Michelle King. Sources inside and outside the school district said Beutner appears to have more support on the seven-member board than other finalists, and his name could come up for a vote as early as Tuesday. Read More Facebook

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Challenge at Chicago school construction site: Watch for 38,000 unmarked graves By Nereida Moreno A 15-year effort to build a school in Chicagos Dunning neighborhood is underway with an unusual complication: Construction workers are taking careful steps to avoid disturbing human remains that may lie beneath the soil. The $70-million school is to be built on the grounds of a former Cook County Poor House, where an estimated 38,000 people were buried in unmarked graves. Among the dead are residents who were too poor to afford funeral costs, unclaimed bodies and patients from the countys insane asylum. There can be and there have been bodies found all over the place, said Barry Fleig, a genealogist and cemetery researcher who began investigating the site in 1989. Its a spooky, scary place. Read More Facebook

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Oklahoma teacher walkout winds down despite lawmakers failure to meet demands By Washington Post Oklahomas largest teachers union has announced an end to a walkout that has drawn thousands of educators out of classrooms and to the state Capitol demanding greater investment in the states schools, which have endured the nations steepest funding cuts. The announcement Thursday from the Oklahoma Education Assn. does not necessarily end the protests at the Capitol, as teachers not affiliated with the union vowed to stay longer. Instead of a walkout, the union and school districts across the state have said they plan to send delegations of teachers to Oklahoma City to keep the pressure on lawmakers. Teachers and their supporters have also promised to push education issues to the forefront of November elections, when the state chooses a new governor. As school districts begin to reopen, the protests may lose steam. The Legislature is not in session Friday, and observers are waiting to see what happens Monday, when lawmakers return. Read More Facebook

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Most Californians are worried about school shooting threats and oppose arming teachers, survey finds By Joy Resmovits Hamilton High School student Aiyana Dabriel holds a sign during a March 14 walkout in support of the Parkland shooting victims. (Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times) Most Californians are worried that a school shooting like the one that occurred in Parkland, Fla., in February could shed blood closer to home, a new survey found. Some 73% percent of adults and 82% of public school parents said they were very concerned or somewhat concerned about school shootings. The Public Policy Institute of California surveyed 1,704 adults in the state by phone just after the March for Our Lives protest against gun violence. Latino and black respondents were significantly more likely to be concerned about school violence than white or Asian respondents, the institute found. Two-thirds of adults and public school parents said they opposed letting more educators carry weapons in school. The response differed across party lines, with 86% of Democrats and 69% of independents voicing their opposition, while 60% percent of Republicans said they would support a measure to arm educators. The poll, which had a margin of error of 3.2% in either direction, also asked Californians about school funding, educational issues in the governors race and the impact of immigration enforcement on students. You can find the full results here. Facebook

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Californias largest virtual charter school network agrees to contract with its teachers By Anna M. Phillips Nearly four years after teachers at Californias largest online charter school voted to unionize, they have reached a deal to increase pay and create job protections, according to a spokesman for the California Teachers Assn. The contract, which is still tentative and subject to ratification, is a victory for the teachers union. Although charter schools are publicly funded, most are privately managed and their employees arent protected by labor contracts. Under the terms of the contract  the result of years of negotiation and legal wrangling  approximately 500 teachers working for California Virtual Academies will no longer be at-will employees who can be dismissed for almost any reason. Their average salary will rise to just over $45,000, according to union estimates, a figure that remains far below the norm for traditional public school teachers. Still, it is an improvement over the previous average of $38,000. The accord also places a limit on the number of students each teacher is responsible for monitoring in online homeroom classes. Were very satisfied with the gains we made, said teacher Brianna Carroll, president of California Virtual Educators United. I think were going to see some extraordinary changes in our schools. According to Carroll, teachers at California Virtual Academies  better known as CAVA  had grown frustrated with the organizations foot-dragging and were making preparations to go on strike when CAVAs leadership agreed to the deal. CAVA and K12, the Virginia-based for-profit company linked to its schools, did not immediately respond to an email Tuesday asking for comment. The network currently operates nine virtual charter schools across California. In 2016, the charter network agreed to pay $8.5 million to settle claims of false advertising, misleading parents and inadequate instruction. The state attorney generals office had also accused K12 of controlling the charters for its own financial benefit. Neither CAVA nor K12 admitted to wrongdoing in the settlement. A year later, the state imposed a $2-million fine on CAVA after an audit found that it had misspent public funds. The network disputed the findings. Facebook

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School board approves a new formula for funding high-need schools By Sonali Kohli L.A. schools will soon get more money if they are located in neighborhoods with such problems as high levels of gun violence and asthma. The Los Angeles Unified school board voted unanimously Tuesday to adopt a new formula to determine how to dole out some funding to schools, based not only on the characteristics of the student populations but on the traumas that affect the communities around campuses. The new formula will be applied to $25 million in funding next fiscal year and about $263 million annually in future years  a small part of the districts $7.5 billion annual budget. Read More Facebook

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Protesters demand Ref Rodriguez resignation outside school board meeting By Sonali Kohli Students, parents, teachers and UTLA marching outside the board meeting chanting "Ref resign" pic.twitter.com/W0LRWZSIXY  Sonali Kohli  (@Sonali_Kohli) April 10, 2018 A few dozen parents, students and teachers marched outside the Los Angeles Unified School Board meeting Tuesday, some calling for board member Ref Rodriguez to resign the week after news broke that he was taken into custody on suspicion of being drunk in public at a Pasadena bar and restaurant. Rodriguez was not cited or charged in that incident, but was held for more than five and a half hours before being released. The school board member faces felony and misdemeanor charges for political money laundering. He is accused of getting more than two dozen people people to donate to his campaign for his school board seat with the understanding that he would reimburse them. He stepped down from his post as school board president after he was charged last fall, but he did not give up his seat on the board. He has pleaded not guilty to three felony counts of conspiracy, perjury, and procuring and offering a false or forged instrument, as well as 25 misdemeanor counts related to the alleged campaign money laundering. A preliminary hearing is scheduled for May. He cant give his full focus to our students, said Rebecca LaFond, a Highland Park parent whose three children marched with her as she chanted, Ref resign. One daughter marched in front of her, using a drum stick to hit the bottom of a gallon-size empty water jug. Our kids deserve someone who has the utmost ethical standards representing them, LaFond said. The protests continued into the board meeting, where some addressed Rodriguez directly, calling on him to step down during public comment portions of the meeting. Rodriguez, through his chief of staff, declined to comment. Some parents outside the board meeting did not know about the charges against Rodriguez but came out to protest the possibility of sharing their school campuses with charter schools. Protesters also oppose colocation  not all of the parents are here to ask Ref Rodriguez to step down pic.twitter.com/1Co8zQ9zSi  Sonali Kohli  (@Sonali_Kohli) April 10, 2018 Cynthia Martinez said her son, who goes to Christopher Dena Elementary School in Boyle Heights, has been bullied in the past by students from a charter school sharing the campus. She said she didnt know who Rodriguez was. Some parents and teachers are worried about losing computer labs, robotics rooms and fitness centers if they are required to share their campus with charter schools, said Ilse Escobar, a parent community organizer for United Teachers Los Angeles. The issues of Rodriguez and colocation are related, Escobar said. Rodriguez is part of a majority on the school board elected with financial backing from charter school supporters, and many parents, she said, feel that the school board is compromised if he is a part of it. Staff reporter Howard Blume contributed to this post. Facebook

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Delaine Eastin tries to gain momentum in the California governors race, one voter at a time By Seema Mehta Delaine Eastin was a sophomore in high school when a drama teacher urged her to try out for a part in The Man Who Came to Dinner. She hesitated until he told her: This is a metaphor for your whole life. If you never try out, you will never get the part. Eastin auditioned and won the role. Decades later, the advice sticks with the former state schools chief, this time in her unlikely run for governor. Despite calls for more women in leadership roles in state politics following sexual misconduct allegations in Sacramento, Eastin has been largely overlooked in the race, lagging far behind her Democratic rivals in fundraising and the polls. Read More Facebook

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Arizona high court rejects in-state tuition for DACA recipients By Associated Press Young immigrants granted deferred deportation status under a program started by President Obama are not eligible for lower in-state college tuition, the Arizona Supreme Court ruled Monday. The unanimous ruling will affect at least 2,000 students attending the states largest community college district and hundreds more at other colleges and the states three public universities. The Maricopa County Community Colleges District and state universities said they would begin raising tuition immediately for the coming school year. Read More Facebook

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New York high school students injured when bus strikes overpass By Associated Press A charter bus carrying teenagers returning from a spring break trip Sunday night struck a bridge overpass on Long Island, seriously injuring six passengers and mangling the entire length of the top of the bus. The crash happened shortly after 9 p.m. Sunday on the Southern State Parkway in Lakeview, according to New York State Police. One of the six injured passengers had very serious injuries, said State Police Maj. David Candelaria. Thirty-seven other passengers suffered minor injuries. Read More Facebook

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Some good news for California in national student test scores By Joy Resmovits National test scores for fourth- and eighth-graders were generally flat from 2015, but eighth-grade reading scores showed some improvement. Every two years, the nations fourth- and eighth-graders are tested in math and reading  and newly released results from last years tests give California at least a little reason to be pleased. The 2017 results  out Monday night  were mostly flat nationwide compared with 2015, though the average score in eighth-grade reading went up. But while that improvement largely came from the increased scores of the highest-performing students, California eighth-graders showed some reading progress from the lowest levels to the highest. Read More Facebook

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Under state control, Inglewood school districts financial picture worsened By Anna M. Phillips When Eugenio Villa agreed to return to the Inglewood schools for a second tour last summer, he knew the district remained one of Californias most troubled. Inglewood Unified had been nearly insolvent when it was taken over by the state Department of Education in 2012. Six years later, its enrollment was still declining. Its school buildings were tired  some edging into decrepitude. Its test scores and graduation rates were still below the state average. And the public was out of patience. Still, Villa, who had signed back on as the districts chief business official, was shocked at what he found when he arrived in June 2017. Two years earlier, he had left the school system on what he thought was firm ground. Read More Facebook

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Charter school group drops two lawsuits against L.A. Unified By Howard Blume A charter schools advocacy group last week announced that it would end two long-running lawsuits in which it was seeking more classroom space and construction money from the Los Angeles school district. The decision, the California Charter Schools Assn. said, reflects better relations between charter schools and the L.A. Unified School District. But the move also suggests that the litigation, which already contributed to significant gains for area charters, was unlikely to produce much more. It takes time, money and effort to litigate, said Ricardo Soto, general counsel for the charter group. Maybe its better to see if we can find the time and opportunity for collaboration. Read More Facebook

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L.A. school board member Ref Rodriguez is arrested on suspicion of public intoxication By Richard Winton Los Angeles school board member Ref Rodriguez was arrested recently on suspicion of being drunk in public at a Pasadena restaurant, the latest trouble for an elected official who faces political money-laundering charges. Pasadena police took Rodriguez into custody on March 16, according to city spokeswoman Lisa Derderian. Officers arrested Rodriguez at about 4:30 p.m. at the Yard House restaurant and bar at the Paseo Mall and held him in jail for more than five-and-a-half hours. Rodriguez was ultimately released without being cited or charged, Derderian told The Times. Other details about the arrest were not available, she When administrators invited Lynnette Zelezny, a budding psychology lecturer at Cal State Fresno, to apply for a tenure-track job, she was excited  but there was a catch.

She didnt have her doctorate yet, and tenure-track jobs required one. She was also a mother of three, and at the time, she said, there were no doctoral psychology programs in the Central Valley.

I had to make a decision: Did I want to move forward and leave the Central Valley? she said. Was I willing to take a risk with three young children?

She went to Claremont Graduate University, where she took classes and managed a research lab while her husband, a lawyer, took care of the kids. Every week, she returned to Fresno by 2 a.m. on Fridays so she could be there when her kids woke up.

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Her youngest son got so used to watching his mother studying at the kitchen table, she said, that he later studied, too  because thats what he thought his family did. He ended up becoming valedictorian of his high school.

Zelezny, 61, has been appointed Cal State Bakersfields first female president, and she hopes her story will inspire her students. My journey has been a unique one, full of challenges as well, she said. That is a story thats important to share, particularly with women, who will be working toward their own leadership journey.

With her appointment, announced Wednesday at the Cal State trustees meeting in Long Beach, more than half of Cal State systems campuses now are led by women.

Zelezny has been at Cal State Fresno since 1988. She currently serves as its provost and vice president for academic affairs. In addition to her doctorate in applied social psychology, she also has an MBA.

At Bakersfield, she said she will focus on boosting graduation rates and aligning the schools offerings with local workforce demands. She sees opportunities related to water, agriculture, food transportation and energy.

The trustees also appointed Thomas Parham, 63, a vice chancellor of student affairs at UC Irvine, to serve as president of Cal State Dominguez Hills.

They will receive the same pay as their predecessors: $324,029 for Parham, $313,044 for Zelezny.

Cal State trustees also appointed Thomas Parham as president of Cal State Dominguez Hills. (UC Irvine )

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Parham said he too, once broke new ground  as the first black academic in psychology hired at the University of Pennsylvania. After that, he was hired by UC Irvine, where he spent more than 30 years working as an administrator and adjunct faculty member. He earned his doctorate in counseling psychology and is licensed to practice in California.

Parham said he wants to make Cal State Dominguez Hills a destination campus and plans to spend his first 100 days in conversation with the campus community.

He sees himself as an orchestra leader, an inspirational visionary leader to help create a collective harmonious sound that a university collectively will produce.

Parham grew up in L.A. and says his new job will feel like a homecoming.

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Im a product of a single-parent family, where my mama and my father separated when I was about 3, Parham said. I had a mom who raised four kids by herself, Sadie Parham. She never earned more than $18,000 a year ... but still produced two kids with PhDs, a third college-educated, nobody on drugs, nobody in jail, nobody in a gang.

The school he will lead originally was named South Bay State College. An early location was in Rolling Hills Estates on the Palos Verdes Peninsula. But after the 1965 Watts riots, then-Gov. Pat Brown picked the Dominguez Hills site in Carson to try to bring opportunity to devastated nearby neighborhoods.

My background is important because I am those students in the community. The only difference between me and the residents is Ive been on the planet a little longer, Parham said. Ive been blessed with enormous opportunity. I want to provide them with the same opportunity and mentoring and guidance and support to help them realize the true promise of their possibility.

Joy.Resmovits@LATimes.com

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@Joy_ResmovitsPage Content

On 20 March 2018 the member regions of the Alps-Mediterranean Euroregion (Auvergne-Rhone-Alpes, Provence-Alpes-Cote dAzur, Piedmont, Liguria and the Aosta Valley) and the Lyon metropolitan region welcomed Karl-Heinz Lambertz, president of the European Committee of the Regions, at the premises they share in Brussels.

Elected representatives of the six local authority members of the Euroregion called for a strong and ambitious cohesion policy for the post-2020 period, which would cover all European regions and rely on the potential of the most developed regions. They also called for simplified and decentralised implementation of funding and drew attention to their specific sub-regional features (upland and urban areas) and to the importance of European territorial cooperation.

Karl-Heinz Lambertz , president of the European Committee of the Regions (CoR), the EU's assembly of local and regional elected representatives, drew attention to the CoR's support for a cohesion policy covering all Europes regions. He also mentioned his wish to see closer cooperation between the CoR and the representative offices of the regions and cities in Brussels: "The Alps-Mediterranean Euroregion proves that cohesion policy has added value even in the most advanced regions, whether it be to finance territorial, and especially cross-border, cooperation or to improve the lives of the most vulnerable Europeans in disadvantaged urban and upland areas", he stressed.

Renaud Muselier , president of the Sud-Provence-Alpes-Cote dAzur region, added his support, saying that "the Alpine and Mediterranean regions have for some months been lobbying very intensively for the post-2020 cohesion policy. Today we are more united than ever in this essential task."

David Kimelfeld , president of the Lyon metropolitan region, stressed the impact of the European regional funds at local level: "Cohesion policy is an essential lever for local public policies. In the Lyon conurbation, the ESF is crucial to helping more than 8 000 people annually to find jobs. It also makes it possible to support a hundred or so projects each year. It is therefore a fundamental contribution to urban development that benefits everyone."

Yannick Neuder , vice-president of the Auvergne-Rhone-Alpes region, responsible for higher education, research, innovation and European funds, said that "the European regions are facing real competitiveness challenges and are relying on innovation and training to reduce digital, energy and medical divides: cohesion policy is essential to achieving these objectives."

The six local authorities represented then signed the Cohesion Alliance in the presence of Mr Lambertz, to formalise their support for the initiative.

Note for editors:

The #CohesionAlliance is a grassroots campaign open to all who believe that EU cohesion policy must continue to be a pillar of the European Union's future under the post-2020 EU budget. The Alliance was launched by the European Committee of the Regions in partnership with the leading European associations of local and regional authorities to defend a cohesion policy that is stronger, more effective, visible and available to all cities and regions after 2020.

Since its launch in October last year, the Alliance has gained almost 4 000 signatories, including local and regional authorities, MEPs, EU ministers, and business, university and trade union associations.

More information at https://cohesionalliance.eu.

The Alps-Mediterranean Euroregion brings together five French and Italian regions in a single, integrated geographical framework straddling the frontier: Provence-Alpes-Cote dAzur, Liguria, Piedmont, the Aosta Valley and Auvergne Rhone-Alpes. It has a population of 17 million inhabitants and covers an area of 110 460 km in France and Italy.

The Alps-Mediterranean Euroregion is an interregional cross-border association whose first institutional meetings were launched in 2006; its member regions signed a memorandum of understanding in 2007 at a meeting at Bard in the Aosta Valley. The objective of this association is to consolidate its role in Europe, influence the European institutions and develop joint projects in the framework of integrated cross-border cooperation. The member regions have shared offices in Brussels and cooperate to make their voices heard more clearly in the European institutions.

Contact:

Nathalie Vandelle

Tel. +32 2 282 2499

nathalie.vandelle@cor.europa.eu

For the Euroregion

Hortense Lutz-Hermellin

Tel.: (BE) +32 2 282 00 23 Tel.: (FR) +33 4 26 73 61 29

hortense.lutz-hermellin@auvergnerhonealpes.frIn the face of growing public tension, Sacramento police have released video footage of officers fatally shooting an unarmed black man in his backyard after a chaotic nighttime pursuit last weekend.

Show me your hands! Gun, gun, gun! an officer shouts in one video before he and his partner fire repeatedly at a dark figure. When the gunfire ends, a haze of gray smoke swirls in the beam of their flashlights. Shots fired! the officer shouts. Hes down.

The officers, who said they thought 22-year-old Stephon Clark was pointing a gun at them in the darkness, fired a total of 20 rounds during the encounter. But no gun was found.

The only item found near the suspect was a cellphone, the Police Department said a statement.

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Police have not identified the officers involved in the shooting, nor have they publicly named the dead man. But in the shootings aftermath, relatives and community members have identified him and have criticized the department, saying it was Clark who had the most to fear from officers, not the other way around.

Anger over the shooting drew hundreds of protesters to City Hall on Thursday, where members of Black Lives Matter and other activists condemned the incident as yet another case of officers shooting an unarmed black person.

Protesters blocked streets and for a while closed down Interstate 5. The demonstrators also blocked access to the Golden 1 Center, preventing some fans from attending a Sacramento Kings game. The protests prompted officials to stop admission to the game, which went on, but with relatively few in the stands.

Mayor Darrell Steinberg, according to a report in the Sacramento Bee, said he understood the publics reaction but called for calm.

I urge our community to remain peaceful, to respect one another, to try and be extra kind to each other, Steinberg said. Let us channel our anguish into healing and to justice.

Among those who have condemned the shooting are Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) and the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People. A candlelight vigil for Clark has been planned for Friday night near where the shooting occurred.

The Sacramento Police Department recognizes the significance of this incident and the impact it has on our community, the department wrote on its Facebook page Wednesday. We are committed to providing timely information and communicating openly with our community.

The recordings released by the department include the original 911 call about a man breaking car windows that police had responded to Sunday night. The video footage came from the body cameras worn by the two officers who encountered Clark, as well as from a sheriffs helicopter that hovered overhead.

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In a statement, police said that more audio and video footage would be released in the near future.

 Body cam footage of officer involved shooting.

The deadly encounter occurred behind the home that relatives said Clark shared with his grandparents and siblings. The 911 caller told police that a man had busted both my truck windows out, and hes in peoples backyards right now. The caller said the man was wearing a black hoodie.

The officers arrived in the neighborhood at 9:13 p.m., the department said. About 9:25 p.m., the sheriffs helicopter spotted a man in a backyard and told police that the suspect had picked up a toolbar and broken a window to a home. As the man climbed a fence and entered another yard, the pilot directed officers to his location.

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Video taken from the helicopter appeared to show Clark scaling a tall fence and peering into a vehicle before running into his backyard, where officers pursued and shot him.

Sacramento Police said Clark fled from the officers, who "feared for their safety."

Clark's girlfriend said she knows that he was the one who "was scared for his life" in his final moments. @ABC10 #StephonClark pic.twitter.com/Vo9rw4s0Be  Frances Wang (@FrancesWangTV) March 21, 2018

Shaky body cam footage shows officers running up a dark driveway with flashlights. Hey! Show me your hands! Stop! Stop! an officer yells. As the patrolmen run into a backyard, they turn a corner and spot Clark in the glare of their flashlights. The officers take temporary cover behind the corner and then confront the suspect once more. This time, an officer yells at Clark to show his hands, then begins shouting, Gun, gun, gun! Gunfire then erupts.

A department statement said that prior to the shooting, the involved officers saw the suspect facing them, advance forward with his arms extended, and holding an object in his hands. At the time of the shooting, the officers believed the suspect was pointing a firearm at them.

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The departments rapid release of audio and video footage follows a 2016 vote by the Sacramento City Council ordering police to release all video from an officer-involved shooting, in-custody death or complaint to the Office of Public Safety Accountability within 30 days  except in cases where release of the video would hamper or taint an ongoing investigation.

The decision to compel release of the videos followed a series of controversial incidents, including one in July 2016 in which two Sacramento Police Department officers tried to strike a mentally ill homeless man with their cruiser.

Sickened by the senseless shooting that ended the life of #StephonClark. His life mattered, and he should be alive today. I extend my condolences to his children, family and friends. #BlackLivesMatter https://t.co/IFJJ2fpTad  Nancy Pelosi (@SpeakerPelosi) March 22, 2018

After Clarks death, the NAACP released a statement saying that although it respected the role of police, shootings such as the latest one have angered, frustrated and frightened the community. We are also frustrated with the justice system which fails to indict such killings. We are a community experiencing post-traumatic stress.

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It remains unclear what impact the release of the video and audio tapes will have on the publics view of the shooting. Even experts in police use of force were split over the officers actions and the value of the tapes.

Seth Stoughton, a former Tampa police officer and University of South Carolina law professor, said the officers body cam footage offered very little useful visual information and served mainly as a powerful reminder of that type of cameras limits.

Ed Obayashi, a deputy sheriff and legal advisor to Plumas County, examines police shootings. He called Sundays shooting reasonable, adding that a cellphone can easily be perceived as a gun in that environment of poor light.

Obayashi said the officers threat radar is way high after moving through backyards in pursuit of a suspect reported to have committed several dangerous felonies, including breaking into a home. This guy wasnt complying with orders and raised his hands with an object in his hands, he said.

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Geoffrey Alpert, a University of South Carolina criminologist who studies police chases and shootings, disagreed.

It doesnt look good, Alpert said, noting that the yelling of the words gun here seem to trigger the shooting.

The officers are going to have to explain all 20 shots. They are going to have to justify repeatedly shooting, he said. The bottom line is we have a young African American man with a cellphone being shot dead by police.

UPDATES:

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10:30 p.m. Updated with protests at Kings game.

5:24 p.m.: This article was updated with more protests.

4:50 p.m: This article has been updated with information on a City Hall protest.

This article originally published at 2:35 p.m.Community groups lost a legal battle Thursday to reopen a pathway into Griffith Park that had been popular with hikers and tourists trekking to see the Hollywood sign.

Los Angeles Superior Court Judge James Chalfant ruled that the city had not broken the law when it locked the Beachwood Drive entrance gate to pedestrians last year.

The city locked the gate after being sued by Sunset Ranch Hollywood Stables, which argued that L.A. had blocked its business and put people at risk as thousands of hikers were funneled onto a winding access road leading to its facility. The ranch has long had a right-of-way agreement, or easement, that allows staff and customers to cross city property.

Shutting the entrance gate was applauded by some Beachwood Canyon homeowners who had complained about traffic, fire hazards and other dangers from the crowds of tourists hiking up their street to the Hollyridge Trail.

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But it drew protests from other Angelenos who complained that the city had eliminated a key way to access the park. A trio of local groups sued the city, alleging it had flouted state and local laws when it closed the gate to pedestrians.

The Friends of Griffith Park, the Los Feliz Oaks Homeowners Assn. and the Griffith J. Griffith Charitable Trust argued that any decision on how people access Griffith Park must be made by a city commission at a public hearing.

In a court filing, their attorneys contended that the city had many ways to stop interfering with ranch access, but it chose to violate its charter and code to resolve the dispute.

Even when the city has so much as changed the hours a park entrance is open, it has required the public vote of the Recreation and Park Commission, attorneys Mitchell Tsai and Mike Gatto wrote.

City attorneys countered that Los Angeles was well within its legal authority to lock the gate, saying in a legal filing that it was a reasonable way to comply with a ruling that found the city had interfered with access to Sunset Ranch. The parks department did not need commission approval to make that decision, they argued.

In court documents, the attorneys added that hikers and tourists still have other ways to reach the Hollyridge Trail, and the city continues to explore alternative access concepts. At the Thursday hearing, Deputy City Atty. Robert Mahlowitz added that the city was open to having the parks commission look at possible options in the future.

Chalfant concluded that locking the gate was not a strategic decision that had to be made by the commission, but an operational matter that could be handled by the department. He said it would be impossible for the parks commission to hold a public hearing on every decision about the day-to-day operations of L.A. parks.

Chalfant added that the decision to lock the gate is not final, noting that the Sunset Ranch case is still ongoing.

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The three groups that lodged the lawsuit have yet to decide whether to appeal, Gatto said after the Thursday hearing.

Obviously were disappointed, said Marian Dodge, president of Friends of Griffith Park. The group supports public access at public parks.

Last year, representatives of Sunset Ranch complained that hikers were still getting in at the Beachwood Drive gate by propping it open, waiting to enter as other people exited, or climbing over and unlocking it for other pedestrians. It argued that L.A. was in violation of the court order and should be ordered to permanently prevent the pedestrian gate from opening, possibly by chaining or welding it shut.

The city said it couldnt do that because it risked trapping hikers trying to escape in a wildfire or other emergency. A judge rejected the request from Sunset Ranch in August, finding that the city had not shown willful disobedience with the court order.

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emily.alpert@latimes.com

Twitter: @AlpertReyesLos Angeles police cleared a package delivered to a Leimert Park home that came from Austin, Texas, where a serial bomber terrorized the city for 19 days before blowing himself up.

About 6:20 p.m., the LAPD bomb squad was called to the 4200 block of South Bronson Avenue, where a FedEx package was delivered from an Austin address, Officer Tony Im said.

Investigators determined there was no bomb or anything suspicious in the package, Im said. He said the package contained marketing material.

The residents called the police because they were not expecting a package and did not know who sent it.

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The delivery came hours after the serial bomber, Mark Anthony Conditt, 23, blew himself up as authorities closed in.

Conditt left behind a list of future targets and a 25-minute confession on his phone, officials said Wednesday.

Officials, who discovered a bomb-making room in Conditts home in the Austin suburb of Pflugerville, still havent offered any theories for why Conditt embarked on a bombing campaign that left two dead, four injured and an entire city unnerved.

alene.tchekmedyian@latimes.com

Twitter: @AleneTchek

UPDATES:

10:00 p.m.: This article was updated to reflect that the package was cleared by authorities.

This article was originally published at 9:05 p.m.The man San Diego Police Officer John Perdue pulled over in the Hillcrest neighborhood late last year did not hesitate to admit the smell wafting from his car was marijuana.

After the driver said he not only smoked pot recently but did it on a regular basis, Perdue ran him through several field sobriety tests. The man passed them all without a stumble.

In the case of a drunk driver, a breathalyzer could have confirmed whether a person was impaired by alcohol. But there isnt such a device for marijuana.

Faced with a driver who confessed to habitually smoking marijuana but no proof the man was impaired at the moment, Perdue decided to let him go.

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After the legalization of recreational pot in California, law firms specializing in DUI stepped up warnings to marijuana users about being busted. Signs along freeways also have warned drivers that being high on marijuana can get them arrested. A bill proposed in the state Senate last month calls for a one-year driving suspension for any motorist under 21 caught with marijuana in his or her system.

But as Perdues stop in the waning months of 2017 shows, policing marijuana-induced DUIs isnt as easy as arresting and prosecuting drunk drivers. And with Proposition 64 now in full effect, police across California are more concerned than ever about stoned drivers taking to the states streets and freeways.

Unlike Washington  which also made recreational pot use legal  California has not established a per se level, such as a 0.08% blood-alcohol level, that would make a person legally too stoned to drive.

Lt. Rob Sharpe, who works for the Washington State Patrols impaired driving unit, said he believes establishing a legal limit for pot is a necessity.

If I dont know how much marijuana I can consume and safely drive, how can I be held to a standard that its unsafe to drive? he asked.

Strains of flowers at the grand opening of Cookies Los Angeles in Maywood, the citys first marijuana dispensary to sell recreational use cannabis under Proposition 64. (Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times )

Absent a standard, the final decision on whether an arrested driver was impaired will rest with a judge or jury.

California, like other states that have legalized marijuana, now relies on drug recognition experts  police officers trained during a two-week course to conduct cognitive tests and notice other physical signs of drug-related impairment during a motor vehicle stop  to make the initial determination that a driver is intoxicated.

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Law enforcement officials said they believe these experts are more than capable of determining impairment, even without an objective standard. In addition to those experts, the California Highway Patrol has trained thousands of officers through its Advanced Roadside Impaired Driving Enforcement program, according to Sgt. Glen Glaser of the agencys impaired driving unit.

They do a 12-step examination. It goes from having the subject perform a field sobriety test, but we also evaluate their physical signs, take their blood pressure several times, take their pulse, Glaser said. Its a very thorough exam.

Glaser said the CHP has no interest in conducting sweeping arrests.

We want them arresting people who are impaired, he said. Those are the people we want to remove off the roadways. We dont want someone who just has the presence of THC.

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But cannabis entrepreneur Virgil Grant said thats not good enough.

Although he wants to ensure that people dont get behind the wheel if theyve ingested too much marijuana, Grant is concerned that the lack of an objective intoxication standard could lead to racial profiling in motor vehicle stops.

As a black man in America, I think thats a no-brainer, Grant said. If we left everything up to law enforcement in our community, we would be getting locked up at even more alarming rates.

San Diego police have been using two Drager DrugTest 5000 machines during DUI checkpoints since March 2017. Although the devices can detect the presence of the psychoactive compound THC  which shows if a person has used marijuana recently  in a persons saliva, they cannot tell if a person is impaired.

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The CHP does not have the devices, and the Los Angeles Police Department is not currently using them in the field.

Blood remains the forensic standard to measure intoxication in California, but it may take as long as two hours after a traffic stop to get the drivers blood drawn. Nearly 70% of the psychoactive THC in a persons bloodstream might vanish within an hour, according to Glaser, and that lag time could weaken a DUI case.

The critical time element in any DUI case, whether marijuana or any other intoxicant, is the drivers condition at the time of driving, said attorney Darren Kavinoky, whose firm specializes in defending DUI cases. If youre talking about a test a couple of hours later, you have some inherent difficulties.

Some cannabis users may be taking advantage of this state of flux, he added, especially because its effects are less obvious than effects produced by alcohol.

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Theyre more readily masked through Visine and breath mints, Kavinoky said. You may not pick up on it, especially in the case of experienced marijuana users.

In the absence of more accurate testing, police officers have to make a judgment call to determine if someone is driving high.

Theres a lot of subjectivity on the officers, and it puts a lot of pressure on them, in that moment, to determine what to do without having any forensic evidence to prove it, said Lou Shapiro, a Los Angeles criminal defense attorney and member of the National College for DUI Defense.

Its also unlikely that a drug recognition expert can be present each time an officer is concerned about a marijuana-impaired driver. The CHP has increased the number of courses it offers to train such officers since the passage of Proposition 64, but there are only 1,549 qualified drug recognition experts across California, according to CHP records.

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As of December 2016, more than 26 million people held drivers licenses in the state, according to the Department of Motor Vehicles.

If I dont know how much marijuana I can consume and safely drive, how can I be held to a standard that its unsafe to drive? Washington State Patrol Lt. Rob Sharpe

Drivers in Washington, where recreational marijuana became legal in December 2012, are presumed to be impaired if they have more than 5 nanograms of THC per milliliter in their bloodstream.

Statistics show that the number of fatal crashes involving people with marijuana in their system increased steadily from 2013 through 2016, although the data do not clarify whether or not the person was impaired at the time of the crash. The data track people who had carboxy-THC in their system, which can build up from repeated use, rather than psychoactive THC.

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Recreational marijuana became legal in Colorado in January 2014. The number of marijuana-related crashes reported to the Colorado State Patrol has remained relatively static since 2014, records show.

The question of whether California should establish an impairment standard similar to Washingtons has split marijuana advocates and attorneys.

Paul Armentano, a California-based deputy director for the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws, believes establishing a hard cap for intoxication would fly in the face of accepted science.

Peak drug effects lag behind peak drug blood levels, he said. We dont have that with alcohol, fortunately. Peak blood-alcohol content corresponds with peak impairment of performance.

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A study published by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration last year also suggests there is little correlation between THC levels and driver impairment.

Virgil Grant, a Compton native and a leading cannabis entrepreneur, at Dees Liquor Market, a store owned by his father. (Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times )

Shapiro believes the lack of a uniform standard could open the door for unnecessary arrests and fear-driven plea deals. In Los Angeles, Shapiro said, he has seen a number of clients arrested on suspicion of impaired driving this year who almost immediately pleaded guilty to a lesser crime for fear of an effect on their license.

You never know what a jury is going to do, he said. They actually end up suffering a criminal conviction. Its not a DUI, but it does affect their public record, and they are put on probation. The status quo is really unacceptable, and its unfair to the average recreational user . The state has to come up with some kind of law and/or technology to clear up all this ambiguity.

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Calaveras County Sheriff Rick DiBasilio said California should have had a system in place before legalizing recreational marijuana.

We can say the person crossed the double yellow line or he was lethargic or failed the field sobriety test, but it falls on the court to decide if the officer did their job correctly, he said. Were back to the proverbial cart before the horse.

To read this article in Spanish click here

james.queally@latimes.com

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sarah.parvini@latimes.com

Twitter:

@JamesQueallyLAT

@sarahparviniThe gun that authorities say a man used to kill his ex-wife at a Thousand Oaks mall over the weekend had been seized by deputies years earlier  and wrongfully returned to him.

On Saturday, Kevin Crane, 33, shot and killed his ex-wife, Parisa Siddiqi, 29, and then shot himself in a murder and attempted suicide at the Oaks shopping mall, officials said, causing panicked shoppers to stream for exits and prompting a huge police response.

Crane used a Glock .40-caliber handgun that had been seized in September 2014 when he was arrested on suspicion of battering Siddiqi during a dispute, leaving her with minor injuries, according to the Ventura County Sheriffs Office.

Prosecutors later charged Crane with misdemeanor battery, and a judge in November 2014 ordered that his handgun be confiscated. But the Sheriffs Office said the agency didnt receive the order until nearly a year later.

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By then, authorities had returned the gun to him.

Prosecutors dropped the charge against Crane in January 2015 because Siddiqi would not cooperate. Crane then sought to get his gun back, filing a release application with the California Department of Justice.

The Justice Department sent him a letter in March 2015 saying he was eligible to possess the firearm. That month, Crane showed up at the sheriffs station and received his gun.

According to the Sheriffs Office, the property room staff was unaware of the court order when they returned the gun.

Investigators are working to determine why there was a lapse in time between the order being issued and the document being received, the Sheriffs Office said. Sheriffs officials and prosecutors are reviewing the process and are taking steps to ensure this never happens again.

Crane remains in critical condition at a local hospital.

alene.tchekmedyian@latimes.com

Twitter: @AleneTchekKatherine Rosen, a pre-med student in her junior year at UCLA, was in chemistry lab when she knelt to put something in her desk drawer. A classmate came up behind her and stabbed her in her neck and chest.

She survived the life-threatening injuries, returned to school and sued UCLA for negligence, charging the campus was aware of her classmates dangerous propensities and failed to warn and protect her.

On Thursday, nearly nine years after the stabbing, the California Supreme Court overturned a lower court ruling and decided Rosens lawsuit could go forward.

Public colleges, the court said, have a duty to protect students from foreseeable violence in classrooms and other places where they have curricular activities.

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The unanimous decision, among the first of its kind in the nation, put Californias colleges on notice that they may be held responsible if they know a student is dangerous and fail to take steps to control him and protect others.

Citing the 2007 Virginia Tech killings, the state high court said public colleges and universities in California have a special relationship with their students and a duty to protect them from foreseeable violence.

Students are comparatively vulnerable and dependent on their colleges for a safe environment, Justice Carol A. Corrigan wrote for the court.

UCLA officials knew Damon Thompson, Rosens assailant, suffered from paranoid delusions and auditory hallucinations, had been barred from campus housing and had told a teaching assistant that he believed Rosen was demeaning him, according to court records.

Although a criminal act is always shocking to some degree, Corrigan wrote, it is not completely unpredictable if a defendant is aware of the risk.

The court noted that UCLA had marketed itself as one of the safest campuses in the country and developed sophisticated strategies for identifying and defusing potential threats to student safety.

In fact, a team of professionals responsible for student safety at UCLA already was closely monitoring Thompson in the days before the stabbing, the court said.

Damon Thompson, the assailant in the UCLA stabbing case, seen in 2009. (Spencer Weiner / Los Angeles Times )

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The University of California and other colleges and associations had warned the court that imposing liability would have unintended consequences.

Colleges might stop offering mental health services and students might be afraid to be honest with psychiatrists and psychologists, they argued.

The court acknowledged those concerns as well as fears that colleges might become less likely to admit students with mental illnesses and more inclined to suspend or expel them without justification.

But the court said that it was unlikely colleges would drop mental health services and that students with mental illnesses would be protected by laws barring discrimination against the disabled.

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Thompson, who was from Belize, entered UCLA in the fall of 2008 as a transfer student and exhibited worrisome behavior from almost the beginning, according to court records.

Thompson emailed multiple professors and complained to teaching assistants that other students, including Rosen, were maligning him, though there was no evidence of such conduct.

In one email to a professor, Thompson said that if something were not done about his persecutors, he would have to act in a manner that will incur undesirable consequences.

Campus police were called to his dormitory after he reported hearing the click of a gun. No gun was found. Police said he needed a psychiatric evaluation and escorted him to the UCLA emergency room.

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Campus mental health professionals evaluated Thompson and tried unsuccessfully to persuade him to enter a hospital. They diagnosed possible schizophrenia and major depression.

Under California law, people cannot be forced into a psychiatric hospital unless it is shown that a mental disorder makes them a danger to themselves or others or has rendered them gravely disabled.

UCLA doctors believed Thompson did not meet the criteria because he said he was not suicidal and had no plan to harm others.

Although Thompson initially agreed to take psychotropic medication and see a counselor, he eventually discontinued treatment. His condition deteriorated.

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In June 2009, he exhibited odd behavior in his campus dormitory and pushed another student, leading to his expulsion from campus housing. He was ordered to resume psychiatric treatment in the fall.

He met with campus doctors at the end of September and agreed to treatment. A week later, he stabbed Rosen.

Thompson, charged with attempted murder, was found not guilty by reason of insanity and committed to a state psychiatric hospital. He has since been deported to Belize, according to Rosens legal team.

Both Thompson and Rosen were 20 at the time of the incident.

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In a concurring opinion to Thursdays ruling, Justice Ming W. Chin said he agreed that colleges should be potentially liable for violence in the classroom, but he disagreed that liability should extend to other curricular activities closely related to education.

He said that holding would create confusion because the court failed to identify what activities would be considered curricular.

A spokesman for UCLA said the campus was disappointed with the courts action and concerned about the decisions potential impact on higher education in California and beyond.

The university is committed to providing an environment that is conducive to learning and that provides appropriate resources to support our students in need, said Ricardo Vazquez, the spokesman, who serves as associate director of UCLAs media relations office.

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Alan Charles DellArio, who represented Rosen before the state high court, said K-12 schools have long been recognized as potentially liable for school violence. Thursdays ruling expanded that liability to public colleges.

He predicted Rosen would prevail in her lawsuit. UCLA had a violence prevention strategy, but they didnt do it properly, DellArio said.

They didnt report this guy up the chain the way they should have, and when they finally figured it out, it was too late, he said.

The ruling in Rosens case was limited. It did not extend liability for violence committed on campus by a stranger unknown to college officials or for an alcohol-related death at a student party, he said.

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Brian Panish, Rosens trial lawyer, said the decision was the first by a state high court to address the issue since the Virginia Tech shootings and would affect hundreds of thousands of California college students.

Rosen, now a medical student, has emotional and physical scars from the attack, he said.

Rosen said in an email provided by Panish that she hoped the ruling would spur colleges across the country to develop effective strategies to protect students.

No student should have to fear entering a chemistry lab, or a lecture hall, or a college library in the pursuit of knowledge, she wrote.

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maura.dolan@latimes.com

Twitter: @mauradolan

UPDATES:

4:25 p.m.: This article was updated with additional background and reaction.

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2 p.m.: This article was updated with reaction to the decision.

12:15 p.m.: This article was updated with additional details from the court decision.

This article was originally published at 10:35 a.m.A powerful storm moved into Southern California on Wednesday, drenching fire-ravaged neighborhoods and setting several new rainfall records for the day but so far not causing the damage and destruction that some officials feared.

The storm marked a direct hit by an atmospheric river system but has proved to be less powerful than forecasters initially predicted. Still, they warned that the heaviest downpour is yet to come on Thursday and urged residents to stay vigilant.

We want to get the word out that, yeah, theres still a danger, said Joe Sirard, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Oxnard. People still need to be aware that we could get some mud and debris flows out of this thing.

A flash-flood warning remained in effect for recent burn areas despite scaled-back total rainfall projections. Forecasters are now expecting 2 to 4 inches of rain on the coasts and in the valleys of Santa Barbara and western Ventura counties, and 4 to 8 inches in the foothills and mountains across the region, Sirard said.

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The heaviest rainfall is expected Thursday morning, when theres a slight chance of thunderstorms over charred mountains that could drop up to an inch of rain an hour, the weather service said.

In Los Angeles County and eastern Ventura County, the storm is expected to dump 1 to 2 inches of rain on the coasts and in the valleys, and 3 to 5 inches in the mountains, Sirard said.

Officials said that several areas set new rainfall records for this date, including Oxnard, Santa Barbara and Palmdale.

Evacuation orders were still in effect for thousands of residents in Santa Barbara County. Among them was Mike Wyran, who was staying at a downtown Santa Barbara hotel Wednesday evening with his wife, daughter and dog.

 Mike Eliason, public information officer for the Santa Barbara County Fire Department, gives updates on flooding conditions in the area. (Video by Robert Gauthier and Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)

During the deadly January storm, the Montecito family didnt evacuate and were stuck in their home for days. Since then, theyve taken evacuation warnings seriously and are pleased that officials have been communicative.

Its given us time to find a hotel that will accept our pets, Wyran said. As long as we are together and our dogs are safe, we are good.

Still, their life has changed since January. Their neighborhood hiking trails are gone, and they feel the constant threat of mudslides.

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Its a setback, but we will get through it, he said.

Montecito resident Jaime Giffen, 52, decided not to evacuate. At the very worst, she said, shed be without power and water, something she dealt with in January.

Shes learned since then to keep her phone charged and to stock up on nonperishable food.

On Wednesday afternoon, mudslides had forced Amtraks Pacific Surfliner train to stop south of Carpinteria as Union Pacific maintenance crews removed debris from the tracks. The railway was cleared after a roughly 45-minute delay, Amtrak said. The rain also triggered road closures near Ojai and along the coast.

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In Montecito, where at least 21 people died in massive mud and debris flows on Jan. 9, crews were keeping close watch on debris basins, creeks and roadways for potential mudflow and debris.

Right now, we are seeing a light, steady rain, and the water in the creeks is chocolate milk color, said Scott McGolpin, director of public works for Santa Barbara County. There isnt a lot of debris. This is what we want.

Robert Lewin, director of the countys Office of Emergency Management, said that boulders have been reported moving along San Ysidro Creek but that so far they have remained within the channel.

Our hope is that the debris basins can capture the material that comes down from the mountain, he said.

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Back in Los Angeles County, residents who live from the 8300 to 9000 blocks of La Tuna Canyon Road were still under a mandatory evacuation order because of debris flows.

All other mandatory evacuation orders were lifted. Residents of Kagel Canyon, Lopez Canyon and Little Tujunga were allowed to return home, though shelters will remain open for residents who feel unsafe returning home, said Helen Chavez, a spokeswoman for the multi-agency response to the storm.

People can go home, Chavez said. Given current rainfall, theres no need for that action at this time.

alene.tchekmedyian@latimes.com | Twitter: @AleneTchek

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melissa.etehad@latimes.com | Twitter: @melissaetehad

ruben.vives@latimes.com | Twitter: @LATvives

Tchekmedyian reported from Los Angeles, Vives and Etehad from Montecito. Times staff writers Joseph Serna and Sarah Parvini in Los Angeles contributed to this report.It took authorities 17 years to find the Unabomber.

It took them 19 days to find the Austin bomber.

The difference largely boiled down to technology. Smartphones and surveillance cameras played an instrumental role in tracking down Mark Anthony Conditt, who officials said was responsible for the string of attacks this month that terrorized Austin, Texas.

He was seen on video in two FedEx package shops. Authorities identified cellphone data that placed him at the site of the explosions. They tracked his internet searches and receipts. On Wednesday, authorities followed him from his motel, where he ultimately pulled over and blew himself up in his car.

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Such technology wasnt around when the Unabomber, Ted Kacyynski, was sending his bombs through the mail between 1978 and 1995. Ironically  today at least  his bombings, which killed three people and injured more than 20, were intended as a protest against technology.

Experts said what hasnt changed since those days is the key vulnerability of most bombers: a huge ego.

They will find a way to be visible, according to Mike Rustigan, a professor emeritus of criminal justice at San Jose State University.

Given more people with smart phones and given there are surveillance cameras most everywhere, you would think they would have a deterrent effect, Rustigan said. But the nature of these serial bombers  like Ted Kaczynski  is they think they can beat the system. Its their monstrous egos that enable them to feel theyre above the law and theyre the one who will never be caught.

But days after Timothy McVeigh blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, Kaczynski delivered a bomb near Sacramento in what Rustigan characterized as a display of one-upmanship. Then Kaczynski demanded the New York Times and the Washington Post publish his 35,000-word manifesto  which they did.

That led Kaczynskis brother to recognize the writing style, which in turn led to authorities moving their search to a new location: Montana.

Had the manifesto not been published, Rustigan said, its possible that he could have kept bombing without getting caught.

Its very important for them to be recognized and to get TV coverage and print coverage, Rustigan said. You can see a tremendous level of grandiosity and egomania with all of these bombers, regardless of their typology.

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Technology is a double-edged sword to the bombers  it makes notoriety easier to attain, but capture more likely as well.

Enzo Yaksic, who runs Northeastern Universitys Atypical Homicide Research Group, said serial killers are enamored of the ability to control a community, and also hope to garner sympathies from those who might admire or commiserate with them.

That was the case with Eric Rudolph, who killed two people and injured hundreds in bombings between 1996 and 1998  including the one at the Olympics in Atlanta and an abortion clinic in Alabama.

During that manhunt, he hid in the forests outside of Murphy, a small town in North Carolina that seemed to share his anti-gay, anti-abortion beliefs and may have helped shield him.

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According to the Christian Science Monitor, a sign outside town read: Pray for Eric Rudolph.

He evaded capture for five years before being spotted by a rookie police officer. After his arrest, Rudolph signed autographs of his wanted posters for sheriffs deputies.

During his sentencing in 2005, he was defiant, winking at prosecutors. In an 11-page statement released by his lawyers, he compared himself to a patriot in the Revolutionary War.

Abortion is murder, he wrote. And when the regime in Washington legalized, sanctioned and legitimized this practice, they forfeited their legitimacy and moral authority to govern.

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Yaksic said it is unclear how much sooner Rudolph couldve been caught in a digital world.

Advances in technology have altered the landscape of multiple-murder as the decline in serial homicide since the 1990s directly parallels the near ubiquity of surveillance technology, cellular phone and Internet use, Yaksic wrote in an email. Law enforcements ease of tapping into cellular phone tracking records, their callback of Internet search histories and receipt of surveillance videos have greatly aided many modern day investigations by providing the whereabouts of potential suspects and the outlines of future plans.

Bill Jonkey, a retired special agent bomb technician with the FBI, said the cell phone often plays a key role in bringing a case together  but only after the suspect is identified. Making that identification is much easier now, with surveillance cameras most everywhere.

He worked the bombing of Harveys Hotel and Casino near Lake Tahoe in 1980 and didnt have the benefit of todays high-tech tracking devices. He said it was eventually a tip and a name he got that led him to the bomber, John Birges.

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Then, as they built the case, he had to track him down  without the benefit of cell phone triangulation.

During the latter part of the investigation, I moved down to Fresno and, toward the end before we arrested him, my job was to contact him every single day for probably about a month, Jonkey said. Sometimes he would invite me in and hed say, Well, if I was the bomber, Id have done this or that. You could just tell he wanted to tell me so bad hed done it.

He had a huge ego.

To read this article in Spanish click here

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david.montero@latimes.com

Twitter: @davemonteroAs authorities frantically searched for clues in a string of bombings in Austin, Texas, the White House appeared to quash the notion that the serial attacks could be considered an act of domestic terrorism.

It was far from the first time the question had come up.

There is no apparent nexus to terrorism at this time, Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders tweeted Tuesday about the Austin bombings  hours before Mark Anthony Conditt blew himself up in his sport-utility vehicle early Wednesday as law enforcement authorities in Texas closed in.

Describing a particular act or acts of violence as domestic terrorism is not just a legal question. Particularly during President Trumps time in office, terrorism has become a highly politicized term, one heavily freighted with questions surrounding race, ethnicity, religion and immigration status.

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The Austin bombings, and debate about what to call them, were reminiscent of previous deadly episodes on U.S. soil. Was it terrorism when a sniper-style gunman killed dozens at an outdoor concert in Las Vegas? Or when a young white supremacist was identified as the driver who rammed his car into a crowd of anti-Nazi protesters in Charlottesville, Va., killing a woman? Or when an assailant with a furious grudge against Republicans gunned down GOP members of Congress at a softball practice?

Here is a look at some of the legal and political issues surrounding the concept of domestic terrorism.

Is there a definition of domestic terrorism in U.S. law?

Yes. Section 802 of the Patriot Act, passed after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, defines domestic terrorism as an act dangerous to human life that violates state or federal criminal laws, if it intended to do any of the following : intimidate or coerce a civilian population; seek to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or attempt to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination or kidnapping.

How does that translate into charges against a given suspect?

It usually doesnt  in large measure because the Patriot Act doesnt specifically define domestic terrorism as a crime, and perpetrators are more likely to face a variety of other charges. The Patriot Act expanded government powers to investigate terrorism, and some of those powers apply to instances of domestic terrorism. So what the act does, according to the American Civil Liberties Union, is expand the type of conduct that can be investigated as part of a terrorism inquiry, not designate a criminal charge that can be used in court.

Does an attackers motive matter? How about the identities of the victims?

As the Austin bombings began to garner national attention, early victims included two African American men who were killed and an elderly Latina who was injured. On Monday, three Democratic members of Congress pushed for the case be treated as an ongoing terrorism attack. Reps. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, Cedric L. Richmond of Louisiana and Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas also called for a determination of whether the bombings were ideologically or racially motivated.

We cannot stand idly by while our communities are under attack, they wrote in a joint statement. This has become a national security issue, and the full investigative force of the federal government must be focused on stopping these attacks.

Motive does matter, especially when it is shown that an attacker has targeted a particular group. Legal scholars point out that in terrorism-style acts, hate-crime designations can result in considerably more stringent sentencing.

How about the identity of the perpetrator?

In recent months, critics have pointed out a pattern: When the perpetrator is white, mass killings have often failed to generate a speedy or forceful response from the White House. By contrast, Trump swiftly leaped into the fray after the nightclub massacre in Orlando, Fla., in 2016, when he was a candidate; and the mowing down of pedestrians on a bike path in New York City last year  both perpetrated by attackers who were Muslim.

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In the New York attack, charges against Sayfullo Saipov, an Uzbek immigrant who voiced support for Islamic State, included providing material support for a terrorist organization. Trump expressed hopes he would be executed.

Public profiling of an attackers religion, which often precedes investigative findings and criminal convictions, troubles some rights groups. It is deeply problematic that when it is someone who is Muslim, or perceived to be Muslim, all sorts of dire ramifications come into play, said Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLUs national security project.

Sentiment toward Muslims has more often come into play involving overseas attacks. Trump routinely weighs in on foreign strikes before the circumstances are fully known. On several occasions, he has characterized incidents as terrorist attacks before local officials are prepared to do so. And the president has also repeatedly used foreign attacks as an occasion to rail against allied governments for insufficient toughness toward Islamic extremism.

What has the Trump administration said about the outcome in Austin?

Law enforcement officials took a somber, measured tone in describing the events early Wednesday in Round Rock, Texas, outside Austin, where Conditt blew himself up as members of a SWAT team approached. Trump, though, struck an almost celebratory note. AUSTIN BOMBING SUSPECT IS DEAD, he tweeted Wednesday. Great job by law enforcement and all concerned!

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So was the string of bombings in Austin terrorism?

Its too soon to say. With the suspect dead, much remains uncertain: whether more bombs were planted, whether Conditt acted alone, whether some larger ideology or political aim underpinned the bombings. Authorities are studying a cellphone recording of Conditt talking obsessively about the types of bombs he assembled. It was, Austin Police Chief Brian Manley told reporters Wednesday, the outcry of a very challenged young man.

laura.king@latimes.com

@laurakingLATA self-confessed secret huge nerd, Jaclyn Corin admits she is freaking out on the inside as she tries to balance political activism with schoolwork.

The 17-year-old junior class president has six essays to write for her advanced-placement language and composition class. But after a gunman rampaged through her high school, killing 14 students and three staff members, she is mostly focused on Saturdays March for Our Lives.

Its very hard to juggle, Jaclyn said one evening last week as she slipped into a booth at Panera with fellow activists David Hogg and Sarah Chadwick and sipped a strawberry banana smoothie.

Were teenagers and were leading a national movement, said David, also 17, a wiry, intense senior who has put on the back burner memorizing his 50 psychology vocab words and his environmental science project on mammals. Thats a lot of stress.

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The goal of the student-led march in Washington is simple: to demand that Congress pass a comprehensive bill to address gun violence.

While the House last week passed the STOP School Violence Act, which authorizes $50 million a year to bolster school security, students say it does nothing to restrict gun access. It does not even mention the word gun.

We need a mass mobilization of the American public on a huge scale, said David, a budding filmmaker who became a key voice of the movement after recording video of his classmates huddling in a small dark closet during the Feb. 14 shooting.

About 1,000 students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland  and hundreds of thousands of supporters from across the country  plan to march on the nations Capitol. More than 800 marches are planned worldwide  in Los Angeles and Paris; Buenos Aires and Tokyo; Sydney, Australia, and Mumbai, India.

In the period of one month, we have shaken up the world, said Jaclyn, a small blonde with a chirpy, singsong voice. But I feel like the adults keep pressing the snooze button. At some point theyre going to have to wake up.

Trying to persuade politicians to enact gun legislation, David said, is about as frustrating as instructing adults how to use smartphones.

You know, when theyre like, I cant figure out how to take a selfie, he said dryly. And then five minutes later, you finally take the phone and you just press the button You just need to go into the settings!

Thats perfect, Jaclyn said, giggling.

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Thats what were doing with our government, David continued. Goddammit, just give it to me!

Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School students, from left, Emma Gonzalez, David Hogg, Cameron Kasky and Alex Wind participate in a panel discussion about guns Tuesday at the Harvard Kennedy Schools Institute of Politics in Massachusetts. (Steven Senne / Associated Press )

Already, the students have raised more than $3.3 million via GoFundMe to stage the event, bringing in major donations from celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey, Steven Spielberg and George and Amal Clooney. A string of pop stars  Ariana Grande, Miley Cyrus, Jennifer Hudson and Demi Lovato  agreed to perform at their rally.

For the organizers, the march is a way to channel their grief and anger as well as send a strong message to President Trump and Congress.

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We know this is whats going to help us heal, said Delaney Tarr, a 17-year-old senior. But its also bigger than us. I think everybody, they want to make the world a different place, and thats what were working on right now  we have an opportunity to do something.

The students feel a sense of urgency in getting their message out, a fear that the public will lose interest.

Sarah, a wry 16-year-old junior who has become celebrated for her adept use of social media, went on Twitter hours after the shooting with a raw, pointed message for Trump. I dont want your condolences you..., she wrote, adding an obscenity for emphasis. My friends and teachers were shot.

Around the same time, Jaclyn, who lost her friend Joaquin Oliver, made a plea on Instagram: PLEASE contact your local and state representatives, as we must have stricter gun laws IMMEDIATELY.

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As Jaclyn urged students to join her in Tallahassee, the state capital, to lobby for new gun laws in Florida, her friend Cameron Kasky, a 17-year-old junior and theater kid, pulled the activists together by creating the #NeverAgain hashtag and coming up with the idea of a march.

In a matter of days, the teenagers had created a national movement with a goal of tighter background checks for gun buyers. After delivering a powerful We call B.S. speech at a rally in Fort Lauderdale, Emma Gonzalez, 18, amassed 1.25 million Twitter followers.

Within just three weeks, they pushed Floridas largely Republican Legislature to pass, and Republican Gov. Rick Scott to sign, a landmark $400-million school safety bill. It didnt go as far as students wanted, but included provisions long opposed by the National Rifle Assn., such as increasing the minimum age to purchase a firearm from 18 to 21.

Some critics dismiss the teenagers as telegenic, overly emotional mouthpieces for adults, yet the students are quick to reject the idea that anyone is steering them.

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Nobody is setting our agenda for us, said David, who adds that he has worried from the start that adults would try to take over. If they try to, Cameron, Emma and I verbally eviscerate them.

Still, the students have happily left much of the day-to-day planning of the march to sympathetic parents, teachers, alumni, legislators and nonprofit groups.

Deena Katz, co-executive producer of Dancing With the Stars and co-executive director of the Womens March Los Angeles Foundation, is working on permits and organizing the route, Jumbotrons, generators, porta-potties and security. A public relations firm is coordinating the students speaking engagements and fielding media requests.

A batch of 200 students and faculty will travel to the capital for a four-day trip sponsored by Giffords, the gun violence prevention organization founded by Gabrielle Giffords, the Democratic former Arizona congresswoman who survived a 2011 assassination attempt. An additional 550 students will fly up for the day, boarding predawn flights provided complimentary by Delta Air Lines.

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The teens accept that they are having an impact partly because they have resources that other shooting victims do not; Parkland is an affluent, predominantly white community, with a median household income of around $128,000.

Sarah Chadwick speaks at a news conference at the Capitol in Tallahassee, Fla., in February. (Colin Abbey / EPA/Shutterstock )

If we can use our white privilege to amplify the voice of minorities, we have to, Sarah said. Its not just us experiencing violence. We experienced it once, and it was horrible and traumatizing. But people in neighborhoods in inner-city communities experience shootings every single day.

As activists, the students are not in lockstep on every policy issue. They differ on whether teachers should be armed or whether to push for an outright ban on assault weapons. When prosecutors announced last week they would seek the death penalty for the shooter, Nikolas Cruz, Emma indicated on CBS 60 Minutes she would be happy to see him put to death, while Cameron and David said they would prefer he spend life in prison.

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Some, like Jaclyn, admit they were not politically active before the shooting. Many of the others, however, say they have long followed politics and news. After last years Las Vegas shooting that left 58 people dead, Sarah tweeted messages calling for more gun control.

Ive always been opinionated, but now people are listening, she said, noting her parents set up Twitter accounts after the shooting at her school to check up on her.

Every day, politics is used to suppress you, said David, who says he learned most of what he knows about the NRA and special interest groups from watching comedian John Oliver on HBOs Last Week Tonight. I always felt this way. Now I have the platform to speak out.

As if on cue, a man waves at David  one of a string of starstruck adults who approach the teens every few minutes to give high-fives, thank them and wish them luck.

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Already, the teenagers worry about how they will keep up momentum after the March for Our Lives is over.

Im going to be BoJack Horseman, David deadpanned, referring to the jaded, washed-up, alcoholic horse and eponymous hero of Netflixs animated adult comedy. What we really need to figure out is what the hell is going to happen on March 25 and the day after that and the day after that.

We dont want people to forget about us, Sarah agreed. But I think thats going to be hard to do. We now have a massive following, especially Emma.

Considering how to push their agenda forward, David referred to German novelist Gustav Freytags pyramid of storytelling.

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We have the exciting incident, we have the buildup, and we have the climax, but theres no resolution, he said. The resolution is the thing that were fighting for, and thats our lives.

Jarvie is a special correspondent.Kennebunk Post

Extensive work on the steeple, the Aaron Willard Jr. clock and the weathervane of the 1824 building is complete.Declaring that Los Angeles can effectively end homelessness within 10 years was an audacious move by Mayor Eric Garcetti. Foolhardy might be just as apt a description.

After all, Garcetti has a track record of setting goals and not achieving them. Spurred by the Obama administrations nationwide challenge, the mayor vowed in 2014 to end homelessness among veterans by the end of 2015, but failed to do so  even after extending his own deadline to 2016. (The number went from 2,733 in 2015 down to 1,617 in 2016, then back up to 2,518 last year.) Before that, when he was running for mayor in 2013, he vowed to end chronic homelessness. That population is the most entrenched and most vulnerable. Obviously, that didnt happen.

And, not to pile on, but homelessness isnt the only issue he has tried unsuccessfully to tackle with a numerical target. He created the Vision Zero initiative in 2015 to try to reduce traffic deaths on city streets by 20% in 2017 and to zero in 2025. But traffic deaths went down only 6% in those first two years, with pedestrian deaths actually going up more than 80%.

Now, he has tasked himself and his successors with an even bigger lift on homelessness. According to the official 2017 point-in-time count, a total of 34,189 people were homeless in the city, including about 9,000 who spend nights in shelters. Of the 25,237 unsheltered, Garcetti says hes aiming to get half off the streets by 2022, then reach the functional equivalent of zero homelessness by 2028.

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Angelenos need not just to hold Garcetti and the mayors who come after him to account, but also must become part of the solution themselves.

Hes not the first elected leader in the vicinity to announce a deadline for ending homelessness. In 2003, then-Mayor James Hahn announced the creation of an illustrious panel of civic and elected leaders to end homelessness in a decade. In fact, Garcetti, a council member at the time, was on it. The next mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa, became part of the panel; Villaraigosa later led his own effort to solve homelessness.

So weve been this way before.

The L.A. City Council got into the act too, pledging Tuesday that each member would back the approval of at least 222 units of supportive housing for homeless people in his or her district by July 2020. Thats a more achievable goal, its still a challenge.

Were journalists. No one busts deadlines more than we do. But this deadline of Garcettis is different  its about ending a humanitarian crisis. Failing to meet it will be costly in every way.

Theres also something galvanizing about challenging a community to fix its biggest problem, no matter how difficult. And we fear for a society where leaders arent willing to risk their reputations and political futures to solve a crisis like this one. We need elected officials with determination and courage to tackle homelessness. Will Garcetti be that kind of leader? We hope that he takes this goal as seriously as we do.

One thing on Garcettis side this time around is the infusion of funding for housing and services from Proposition HHH and the countys Measure H. Another change is that the citys residents now realize how severe and intractable the problem of homelessness is. They simply cant avoid it  homeless people live in all neighborhoods.

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Angelenos need not just to hold Garcetti and the mayors who come after him to account, but also must become part of the solution themselves. Lets see housing  both temporary and permanent  come online faster, aided by more community support. Lets have the mayor report on the citys progress every few months. Theres no point in waiting until 2022 to ask whether Garcettis goal was a pipe dream.

And for Garcettis part, he will need to marshal all his political will and capital for this issue for as long as hes still serving. That means going to neighborhoods and telling people why they should stop fighting the proposed housing development for 60 homeless people down the block, why the development cant be moved to another neighborhood and why the number of residents cant be dropped to five. We can have homeless people on our streets or we can have them in apartment buildings down the street. Those are the choices. They are not going to be bused to the Antelope Valley or Arizona or any other place Los Angeles residents think would be better than their own neighborhoods.

The more of us who embrace the goal Garcetti has laid out, the better chance well have of reaching it. This movement needs a leader, but also a city that will follow.

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Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion or FacebookCrown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the heir to the throne of Saudi Arabia, visited Washington this week and received a rapturous welcome from President Trump, who gushed about the benefits of selling more U.S.-made weapons to the kingdom. But at the opposite end of Pennsylvania Avenue the focus was on what Saudi Arabias existing military might has wrought in Yemen: a humanitarian disaster in which the U.S. has been complicit.

The Senate took up a bipartisan resolution Tuesday that called for the withdrawal of U.S. military support for the Saudi-led bombing campaign aimed at Houthi rebels in Yemen, in which thousands of civilians, including many children, have been killed and millions have been displaced. Rather than approving the measure, however, senators sent it to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to be considered as part of an examination of U.S. military activities around the world.

Ensuring that Saudi Arabia is more sensitive to the humanitarian consequences of its campaign isnt just wise policy; its the law.

Yet even senators who opposed the legislation have expressed concern about the horrific effects of the Saudi-led campaign, which the U.S. has assisted by refueling Saudi fighters and supplying intelligence and advice  including, the administration says, recommendations about how to avoid civilian casualties. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), who led the effort to table the resolution, said that in a meeting with Prince Mohammed, members of Congress strongly, strongly pushed back on what is happening right now in Yemen and asked [the Saudis] to take strong corrective actions.

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Sadly, there was no comparable public expression of concern from Trump, though the White House said that the president and the Saudi crown prince discussed additional steps to address the humanitarian situation and agreed that a political resolution to the conflict is ultimately necessary to meet the needs of the Yemeni people.

Trumps reluctance to criticize Saudi Arabia publicly isnt surprising. He sees the kingdom not only as a customer for the finest military equipment anywhere in the world, but also as a bulwark against Iran (which supports the Houthis) and even as a potential partner in a revived Israeli-Palestinian peace process. Moreover, the administration regards the 32-year-old Mohammed as a modernizer and an opponent of religious extremism.

Even so, the president should have publicly reminded the crown prince about U.S. concerns about the Saudis scorched-earth tactics in Yemen, which have included not only a relentless bombing campaign, but a blockade of ports imposed last year after a Houthi missile struck Saudi Arabia. The blockade, which was eventually relaxed, made it impossible for food, water and fuel to come into the country.

Ensuring that Saudi Arabia is more sensitive to the humanitarian consequences of its campaign isnt just wise policy; its the law. The 2018 National Defense Authorization Act requires the administration to report on the extent to which Saudi Arabia and its coalition partners are taking steps to reduce the risk of harm to civilians and facilitate the flow of humanitarian aid and commercial goods into Yemen.

To be fair, Trump did issue a statement in December instructing his administration to urge the Saudis to allow food, fuel, water and medicine to reach the Yemeni people who desperately need it. But, amid concerns that food is still not getting through, he needs to keep up the pressure on Saudi Arabia, publicly as well as privately, to permanently end the blockade and take affirmative steps to prevent a famine.

The administration also should be using its leverage with Saudi Arabia to promote negotiations toward a political settlement in Yemen in which the Houthis would play some part in the government while distancing themselves from Iran. After three years, the Saudi-led military campaign hasnt succeeded in suppressing the Houthi opposition even as it has inflicted misery on innocent Yemenis. Another approach is overdue.

In opposing the Senate resolution, the Trump administration insisted that restricting the support the U.S. offers the Saudis would backfire. Secretary of Defense James N. Mattis warned that cutting off support could increase civilian casualties, jeopardize cooperation with our partners on counter-terrorism, and reduce our influence with the Saudis  all of which would further exacerbate the situation and humanitarian crisis.

For now, that view has carried the day. But if the Trump administration doesnt use its influence with Saudi Arabia to help stop the suffering in Yemen, Congress should use its power over the federal purse to send the Saudis a message of its own.

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Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinionand FacebookHalf a century ago, when sociologist James Coleman was tasked by the U.S. Department of Education with studying educational inequality, a good school was regarded as one that featured teachers with advanced degrees, a well-stocked library, state-of-the-art science labs and the like. The assumption was that these inputs were key to students success. But the bottom line of the 737-page Equal Educational Opportunity Survey, known as the Coleman Report, was dynamite. Families mattered most, schools mattered less  and extra resources didnt seem to matter much at all.

Battles over whether bigger school budgets can make a difference have raged since.

Those who say more money doesnt improve education point out that after five decades of K-12 funding increases, 17-year-olds reading and math scores on the National Assessment of Student Progress, the nations report card, havent budged.

When economist Eric Hanushek, at Stanford Universitys Hoover Institution, reviewed some 400 studies in 1989, he found no strong or consistent relationship between bigger school budgets and greater student success. The focus on how much different school districts spend, in school finance litigation and legislative deliberation, he added, appears misguided. In 2015, the Texas assistant solicitor general made the point more colorfully, arguing against more school funding in court: Money isnt pixie dust.

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But the skeptics are asking the wrong question. The issue isnt does money matter? but when does money matter? and for which students? California, in particular, is providing answers.

National data show that careful investments  in initiatives such as high-quality preschools and small class size in elementary school  can pay off. And recent research, using sophisticated statistical tools that werent available to Coleman, conclude that targeting children from low-income families can change the trajectory of their lives.

National data show that careful investments  in initiatives such as high-quality preschools and small class size in elementary school  can pay off.

In one such study, infusions of dollars to poor school districts, as a result of court-ordered reform, led to a 10% increase in the predicted graduation rate for students from low-income families and a projected 10% rise in their lifetime earnings. Other research found that increasing K-12 spending by 10% added a half-year of schooling and a wage boost of nearly 10%. A 22 percent increase in per-pupil spending, the study concluded is [estimated to be] large enough to eliminate the education gap between children from low-income and nonpoor families.

The relationship between school budgets and student success is a big-time issue in California. The landmark Local Control Funding Formula, established by the Legislature in 2013, channels extra dollars to districts based on the number of students from poor families, English language learners and foster children they enroll. And instead of telling districts precisely how to spend this money, as had been the statewide rule, LCFF lets them decide for themselves  what works in Los Angeles wont always fly in Eureka.

In a study published last month, Berkeley public policy school professor Rucker Johnson and Sean Tanner, a senior researcher at the Learning Policy Institute, confirmed the wisdom of the LCFF approach. All students, and especially those whom the legislation singles out for extra help, are benefiting from the infusion of funds.

Among Johnson and Tanners findings: The states graduation gap is shrinking. For every additional $1,000 per student that a school district received, 6.1% more students from poor families earned a high school diploma (the overall graduation rate rose 5.1%). And scores on Californias achievement tests are up. The added $1,000 shrank the high school math achievement gap between poor and nonpoor students by 37%.

The researchers concluded that in high-poverty districts, which have received as much as $3,000 per student in LCFF funding, students should be progressing even faster. Whats more, the gains for younger students should get bigger because students still in school will reap the benefits of having a better-funded education for a longer period.

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Hanushek, the money-improves-educational-outcomes skeptic, hasnt commented publicly on the latest research, but even hes not hostile to a targeted strategy like LCFF. As he told a National Public Radio interviewer in 2016, What I see as the ideal in many ways is a system that provides extra resources to kids that need more resources. So this would be ELL [English language learner] kids. Special education kids. Disadvantaged kids in general.

The new generation of research has overtaken the findings of the Coleman Report. How much money schools spend can make a difference, if, as is the case in California, it goes to educate the students who need extra help the most.

David L. Kirp is a professor of public policy at UC Berkeley and a senior scholar at the Learning Policy Institute.

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Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinionand FacebookTo the editor: A United Nations observer recently condemned the deplorable conditions in which the homeless residents of Los Angeles live. (Faced with complaints of filth and blight, L.A. cracks down on overnight RV parking. Now, the homeless are scrambling, March 15)

These people, despite being city residents, have no potable water supply, no trash pickup, no bathroom facilities, no areas to charge cellphones critical to communication, few options for healthcare and fewer options (apparently) for police protection. Now those who take shelter in recreational vehicles are being forced to move around the city.

Planning only for housing for the next decade with inadequate attention to the current critical needs of those who sleep out or live on the street is blatant neglect of the elderly, the impoverished, the disabled, the ill, war veterans, children and mothers.

JoEllen Murata, Chatsworth

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To the editor: These RV dwellers have the right idea  carry your home with you  yet they get booted from their parking spots time and again by kick-the-can-down-the-road politicians.

Isnt it obvious that land can be found for any number of RV parks that would provide utilities, community rooms, laundry facilities and cooking areas? Please dont put these people into industrial areas and effectively out of sight. Instead, there can be rules for them about keeping areas neat and secure.

We have an abundance of design, planning and social service schools that need real-world projects for their students. If we want to provide a better environment for homeless residents, there are many opportunities to create them and probably reduce crime. Take advantage of the energy of activists to make a better world.

Glenn Wolf, Cathedral City

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To the editor: In the March 21 article, Some OC residents: We want to help the homeless  just dont put them in our neighborhoods, Huntington Beach renter Mark Smith is quoted as saying: Finally, the county is taking action  doling out this kind of money. But they must understand that they can use this money to go buy land elsewhere, maybe the Inland Empire, to relocate the homeless. We just cant lower our housing values with this population nearby.

As a Inland Empire homeowner of 16 years, as opposed to being merely a renter, I can say that we have our own homelessness situation to deal with. Perhaps Mr. Smith wouldnt mind if we shipped all our homeless people to Orange County because we just cant lower our housing values with this population nearby.

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Orange County ought to deal with its own problems and not ship them elsewhere just because they impinge on the residents precious lifestyle.

John Zavesky, Riverside

Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion and FacebookTo the editor: I find it disheartening that Los Angeles County Dist. Atty. Jackie Lacey seems utterly unwilling to prosecute police officers for using excessive force. (If D.A. Jackie Lacey wont charge the LAPD officer who shot Brendon Glenn, some ask: When would she prosecute? March 18)

While serving as a police commissioner, I reviewed more than 1,000 use-of-force cases. It was only in this particular case that the Los Angeles Police Department chief recommended that the officer be criminally prosecuted. Chief Charlie Beck made that recommendation because the evidence of excessive use of force in that case was overwhelming, including video recordings and testimony of the partner officer.

If Lacey cannot conclude that prosecution is appropriate even in a case where the police chief himself believes otherwise, it is hard to imagine any case in which she would choose to prosecute. Of course the D.A. should make an independent judgment, but for her decision to be fair, she should thoroughly consider all of the evidence, including the judgment of the chief of police, whose knowledge is based on his review of thousands of use-of-force cases.

Laceys conclusions undermine the publics trust that the system will fairly evaluate the conduct of police officers when they use deadly force.

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Robert M. Saltzman, West Hollywood

The writer served on the Los Angeles Police Commission from 2007-16.

Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion and FacebookTo the editor: Upon my retirement, I will have the opportunity to visit the many states in our great country where friends of mine have moved after getting the heck out of California. They left primarily for two reasons: Californias high taxes, and disgust with living in a state where the politicians work overtime to protect undocumented immigrants.

But maybe my husband and I wont have to leave, as there appear to be some pockets of sanity around.

The Los Alamitos City Council passed a resolution on Monday declaring its opposition to the states sanctuary law. For those who missed high school government classes, which appears to include Californias Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra, federal law supersedes state law, especially when it comes to immigration policy.

According to the ordinance, the council finds that it is impossible to honor our oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States with California being a sanctuary state. Bravo to Los Alamitos  I hope my city follows its lead.

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Robin Itzler, Cypress

..

To the editor: I read with dismay about Los Alamitos action against Californias sanctuary law. And I anticipate with dismay my city once again being at the forefront of taking unnecessary public stands that reflect poorly on us. (Remember the doctored photo of watermelons in front of the White House, courtesy of our then-mayor?)

We have no business committing our tax dollars to a symbolic fight on an issue that cannot possibly affect Los Alamitos in any manner significant to our governance. Yes, we have a large conservative base in our city, but in a time when conservatism has become synonymous with mean-spiritedness, I would have hoped that my City Council would have taken a strong stand against it.

Now I am reminded of the quote, The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. When I looked at the rancor of the crowd supporting the City Council, I saw a disgraceful enthusiasm for the opposite of this.

I am disappointed.

Henry J. Josefsberg, Los Alamitos

..

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To the editor: I laughed out loud reading this article. The very best comment came from the American Civil Liberties Union attorney who said that the Los Alamitos measure was a blatant violation of the citys obligation to follow state law, and that the ACLU would sue if the measure is given final approval.

So, California can violate federal law, but California cities must obey California law?

What if the City of Santa Monica or the state of Texas decided it did not want to follow federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration laws? Do we all get to pick and choose which laws we obey?

The U.S. Supreme Court, unfortunately, will have to put California in its place.

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William Lovelace, Los Angeles

..

To the editor: Its ironic that a city named by a Mexican land grant (Spanish for little cottonwoods) has chosen this path.

Scott Matz, Los Angeles

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Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion and FacebookTo the editor: Jessica Roys article on viewing Stephen Hawkings disability as a positive aspect of his life is to be commended. (Erasing Stephen Hawkings disability erases an important part of who he was, March 16)

My mother had a stroke at the age of 39 that left her paralyzed along the left side of her body, making it necessary for her to use a cane the rest of her life. Prior to the stroke she had been working a mind-numbing assembly line job at a factory, but after the stroke she decided to pursue a college degree.

After graduating, she taught Spanish to high school students for 25 years, taking groups of her students and their families on European tours. She and my father took road trips around the country, and for their 50th anniversary they traveled to Ireland.

My mother never saw herself as chained by her disability, and I often wondered if she would have remained at the factory job until retirement if she hadnt had a stroke. Thank you, Ms. Roy, for informing your readers that a person with a disability is still a whole person.

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Rosa Cesaretti, South Pasadena

..

To the editor: My contracting polio in 1952 caused me to walk with crutches for 50 years; later, I transitioned to wheelchairs.

I benefited from a number of rehabilitation programs early on that enabled me to adapt to my physical constraints. This ultimately led to a rewarding career in our local aerospace engineering sector. I grew from entry-level assignments to take the lead of teams of ever-increasing size and moved onward to manage substantial projects. I traveled extensively.

When I retired, one person memorably told me, I never ever thought of you on crutches. It was gratifying to be recognized for what I was and not what I looked like. Today, as I move around in my wheelchair, I experience the same.

Disability is in the eye of the beholder.

John McElrath, Whittier

Follow the Opinion section on Twitter @latimesopinion and FacebookGavin Newsom releases ad that highlights his push to allow same-sex couples to marry By Phil Willon A new ad from Democratic gubernatorial candidate Gavin Newsom features Phyllis Lyon, who with her partner, Del Martin, received the first marriage license after Newsom vowed to allow same-sex couples to marry when he was mayor of San Francisco in 2004. The current lieutenant governors push for marriage equality thrust him into the national spotlight and he has emphasized that effort to portray himself as a bold, progressive leader. Facebook

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Failed California housing bill was not a bad idea, Gov. Jerry Brown says By Liam Dillon Gov. Jerry Brown (Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press) Earlier this month, high-profile housing legislation that would have allowed for four- to five-story apartments and condominiums near transit stops failed to advance in the state Legislature. But had it reached his desk, would Gov. Jerry Brown have signed it? Maybe. I think that was not a bad idea, Brown said of Senate Bill 827 at a meeting with business leaders from the Bay Area Council on Monday afternoon. The bill, written by Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco), attracted national attention and a maelstrom of opposition in part because it would have eliminated single-family zoning near transit stops in favor of apartments or condominiums. Brown said that a relative of his who lives in West Portal, a low-density neighborhood in San Francisco, told the governor he was horrified by the bill. Brown also lamented dramatically rising housing costs. He said he bought his first house in Los Angeles in 1973 for $75,000 at a time when his salary as secretary of state was $35,000. Now, he said, buying a house for a little over twice ones annual salary is virtually impossible anywhere in the state. FOR THE RECORD

May 1, 9:32 a.m.: This post originally misstated the year Brown purchased his house as 1970. It was 1973. Facebook

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John Cox begins California barnstorm with the delivery of gas tax repeal signatures By Javier Panzar Gubernatorial candidate John Cox, left, and Assembly candidate Bill Essayli load boxes of signatures for the gas tax repeal initiative. (Francine Orr) GOP gubernatorial candidate John Cox strolled up to the stack of 12 boxes in front of the Los Angeles County registrar-recorders offices in Norwalk on Monday and placed his hands on top of his partys hope for success in 2018. The boxes, stacked four across and three high, contained 211,000 signatures for an initiative to repeal recent increases in Californias gas tax and vehicle fees. Cox says the effort has gathered more than 940,000 signatures from registered voters to put the measure on the ballot  far more than the 585,407 signatures that are required. The aim: to bring out the partys base to the polls this November and help candidates in tough congressional and legislative races down the ticket. A USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll in November found 54.2% of registered voters surveyed said they would repeal the tax and fee hike, but a survey a month earlier by another group said a majority would vote to keep the higher taxes. Cox was flanked by Bill Essayli, a former federal prosecutor who is challenging Democratic Assemblywoman Sabrina Cervantes of Riverside in the June primary. Cervantes voted for the gas tax and Essayli plans to use that vote against her. He even launched his campaign at a 76 gas station in Norco. This is a central issue in my campaign, he said. Cox also submitted signatures in San Diego on Monday and is headed to Bakersfield, Fresno and Sacramento, as well as Shasta and Butte counties in coming days. We are going all across the state, Cox said. The whole state is paying this tax and the whole state wants it gone. Facebook

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All Californians would be able to serve on state boards  even people in the U.S. illegally  under new bill By Jazmine Ulloa Sen. Ricardo Lara (D-Bell Gardens) (Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press) State lawmakers on Monday introduced legislation that would allow all Californians to serve on state boards and commissions regardless of immigration status. Senate Bill 174, by Sen. Ricardo Lara (D-Bell Gardens) and Assemblywoman Wendy Carrillo (D-Los Angeles), comes as the state is locked in a broader legal battle with the Trump administration over state immigration laws and his call for mass deportations. Lawmakers point to what they say is the states own discriminatory history as their basis for introducing the legislation. The proposal would amend an 1872 provision that was first adopted to exclude Chinese immigrants and other transient aliens from holding appointed civil positions. At the time, antipathy toward the Chinese had been building in California, though, Chinese immigrants opened hundreds of businesses across the state and would play a critical role in building the transcontinental railroad. The Senate bill would delete the phrase transient aliens from the government code and make clear that any person, regardless of citizenship or immigration status, can hold an appointed civil office if they are at least 18 years old and a resident of the state. That would allow any Californian to serve on hundreds of boards and commissions that advice in an array of policy areas, including farm labor, history and employment development. Californias two million undocumented immigrants are a source of energy for our state, Lara said in a statement. It is shocking to read the words of fear and exclusion that are still in California law but belong in historys trash can. Facebook

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Tony Mendozas fundraising dries up after resignation amid harassment inquiry By Patrick McGreevy Former state Sen. Tony Mendoza (D-Artesia). (Steve Yeater / Associated Press) Political contributions to Tony Mendoza, who resigned from the state Senate under pressure amid sexual harassment allegations, have nearly dried up. New documents he filed with the state in his bid to reclaim the seat he once held show that his support has eroded. As a result, five other candidates for the 32nd District senate seat in the June 5 election have raised more than Mendoza so far this year. With the June 5 election approaching, Mendoza has reported raising just $7,750 in cash from six supporters during the nearly four-month period from Jan. 1 to April 21. Mendoza, a Democrat from Artesia, went on a leave of absence from the Senate Jan. 3 and resigned a month later under the threat of expulsion from colleagues. An investigation ordered by the Senate found a pattern of unwanted flirtatious or sexually suggestive behavior based on testimony from six women. Mendoza has denied wrongdoing. Last year, Mendozas reelection campaign raised $412,600, or an average of about $34,000 per month, from more than 350 supporters. Most of Mendozas 2018 total was contributed by the political arm of the Southern California Pipe Trades District Council 16 on Jan. 22, a month before Mendoza resigned. Mendoza also reported that his campaign loaned $125,000 this year to his legal defense fund. That left him with $446,600 in his campaign account at the end of April. Mendoza is running against eight Democrats and two Republicans. Democrat Bob J. Archuleta, a Pico Rivera city councilman, raised the most, $210,000, during the period. On Monday, Mendoza suffered another setback when the State Legislative Womens Caucus endorsed Democrat Vicky Santana, a member of the Rio Hondo College Board. Facebook

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Newsom and Villaraigosa affairs coming to TV ads in California By Phil Willon An independent political committee backing Republican John Cox for governor released an ad blasting both Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom and former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa for their past sexual affairs. The California Deserves Better ad, which was first reported by Politico, criticizes Newsom for having an affair with a woman on his staff in 2005 while he served as mayor of San Francisco. It also goes after Villaraigosa for having an extramarital affair with a television reporter in 2007 while he was mayor of Los Angeles. The ad, which begins airing on Fox stations in the states top media markets Monday, links Newsom and Villaraigosa to the men accused of sexual impropriety in the #MeToo movement, including movie mogul Harvey Weinstein and disgraced Today show veteran Matt Lauer. Powerful men are finally being held to account, punished for inappropriate sexual conduct with women over whom they exercise power, the ad begins. Newsom and Villaraigosa think the rules shouldnt apply to them. The independent campaign committee, called Restore Our Values, already has raised more than $100,000, said Leigh Teece of Emeryville in Northern California, co-founder of the group. Teece, the CEO of a nonprofit that helps line up students with professional mentors, said the campaign will actively support Cox. She called him a true conservative and noted that he supports cutting taxes and opposes Californias sanctuary state policy. John is a business person who has demonstrated integrity, Teece said. Facebook

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Was that Cisneros in the voicemail? Dispute is latest espisode of Democratic infighting in crowded primary races By Christine Mai-Duc Gil Cisneros speaks during a forum at Fullerton College in January. (Kent Nishimura / Los Angeles Times) With less than five weeks to go before Californias primary, insults and accusations are flying with abandon in the most crowded races Democrats hope to ultimately win. The latest example of this is in the 39th Congressional District, where a half dozen Democrats are vying for a chance to replace Rep. Ed Royce, whos retiring. Its one of several California contests where Democratic leaders are already worried that divisions could ultimately split votes and shut Democrats out of key pickup opportunities. In that race, millionaires Gil Cisneros and Andy Thorburn are going negative  about going negative. Cisneros was recently elevated to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committees Red to Blue program in hopes it would serve as a signal to Democratic activists and donors that his campaign was the most viable. But both Cisneros and Thorburn have poured millions into the race, which promises to be a knock down, drag out fight through June 5. At the center of the latest controversy is a voicemail, allegedly left by Cisneros on Thorburns home answering machine earlier this month. The recording, which the Thorburn campaign turned over to media outlet The Intercept, lasts less than 10 seconds. Hi Andy, its Gil Cisneros. Im gonna go negative on you, a mans voice is heard saying. Cisneros campaign manager Orrin Evans denied the candidate made the call, posting a cease and desist letter to The Intercept on Twitter. The letter, sent by a Cisneros campaign attorney, called the voicemail fabricated and demanded that the story be taken down, calling it defamatory. It gave the publication until 3 p.m. Friday to take down the story before they pursue all legal rights and remedies. An attorney for The Intercept, in a letter to Cisneros, said the publication confirmed with multiple sources familiar with Mr. Cisneros that his voice was on the recording, and that it stands by its reporting. Thorburns camp says it flatly rejects Cisneros denial, and that the timing of a negative website filled with unflattering background on Thorburn, released three days later, suggests it was him. Track the California races that could flip the House According to The Intercepts report, Cisneros campaign manager did not respond to initial inquiries about the voicemail, calling its questions ridiculous. In a follow-up statement Friday, Evans said called the episode a dirty, desperate trick by the Thorburn campaign and said they are readying to pursue legal action for defamation and false light against both him and the publication. It sounded like him to me! said Thorburns wife, Karen, in a statement released by the campaign. She was the one who first heard the voicemail, they said. Thorburn campaign manager Nancy Leeds called Cisneros threats Trump-like tactics and accused the candidate of trying to harass and intimidate anyone who stands in his way. Its not the first time candidates from the same party have clashed in the lead-up to the June 5 primary, and its all but certain to not be the last. Cisneros sued two of his opponents, Thorburn and Sam Jammal, over their ballot descriptions until they had to change them. Earlier this month, Democrat Bryan Caforio asked his opponent, Katie Hill, to sign a pledge rejecting the use of independent expenditure committees, entities that neither of them can legally coordinate with, in the race to unseat Rep. Steve Knight (R-Lancaster). Hill refused and called the attempt hollow and likened it to political theater, while Caforio accused her of empty campaign promises. Facebook

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California Politics Podcast: The money raised in the race for governor hints at a race thats now red hot By John Myers With less than six weeks before election day, the cash raised in the California governors race mirrors the overall dynamics: one major front-runner and a heated race for second place. This weeks podcast episode offers a glimpse into those cash reports and how the Republican field seems more settled in a new statewide poll than the battle between Democrats. We also examine the reasons why a nationally talked-about housing bill in Sacramento was killed by the Democratic authors own allies. Im joined by Times staff writers Melanie Mason and Liam Dillon. You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, SoundCloud and Stitcher. Facebook

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L.A. County politician sexually assaulted woman when she was 16, lawsuit claims By Dakota Smith A woman sued an unnamed politician in Los Angeles County on Friday, alleging the man sexually assaulted her when she was a teenager after he gave her an unusual-tasting drink. The politician, identified as John Doe, was in his early 40s and a public figure at the time of the 2007 assault, according to the lawsuit filed in Los Angeles Superior Court. The man is an elected official today and lives in Los Angeles, said attorney Lisa Bloom, who is representing the woman identified in the lawsuit as Jane Doe. Bloom declined to say what branch of government the man represents. Read More Facebook

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Villaraigosa touts his working-class upbringing, accomplishments as mayor in first TV ad By Phil Willon Democrat Antonio Villaraigosa released his first TV ad in the governors race Friday, touting his record and accomplishments as mayor of Los Angeles when up against the economic downturn during the recession. The 30-second television spot opens with a sweeping shot of Los Angeles and cuts to Villaraigosa sitting on a bus. In kindergarten, my sister and I took three buses to get to school. As mayor, I remembered that, Villaraigosa says into the camera. And despite the recession, we built more new schools and rail lines than any city in America, added 200,000 living wage jobs, built 20,000 units of affordable housing and nearly doubled graduation rates. Campaign spokesman Luis Vizcaino said the ad will air statewide over the next week at a cost of approximately $1 million. The commercial will being airing Saturday. Two Democratic rivals in Californias race for governor, Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom and state Treasurer John Chiang, also launched ads this week, signaling the biggest ramp-up of the campaign as the June 5 primary approaches. Newsom is the front-runner, while Villaraigosa is battling for second place with Republican John Cox. One recent poll has Villaraigosa trailing both Cox and Republican Assemblyman Travis Allen of Huntington Beach. Chiang has been stuck in the single digits in almost all polling in the race. Last week, an independent expenditure group called Families and Teachers for Antonio Villaraigosa for Governor, funded largely by a trio of wealthy charter school backers, launched a spot in support of the former mayor of Los Angeles. That ad campaign is focused on increasing Villaraigosas chances of coming in second in the June 5 primary and moving on to the general election. Villaraigosas ad, titled Three Buses, emphasizes the struggles he faced growing up in East Los Angeles and addresses one of his central campaign themes  that hes the candidate best suited to help working-class Californians. I know how far a bus can take you, Villaraigosa says in the ad. Facebook

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Sen. Dianne Feinstein wont participate in pre-primary debate By Sarah D. Wire (Tom Williams / CQ Roll Call) California Sen. Dianne Feinstein will not participate in a proposed pre-primary debate because there are too many candidates in the race, her campaign spokesman said Thursday. Political activists with the group Indivisible Los Angeles said they had a venue and date  May 5  reserved for a debate with four of the Senate candidates. But they said if Feinstein does not participate, it will be canceled. Feinstein faces 31 primary opponents in her bid for a fifth full term representing California in the Senate. Feinstein staffers initially said she had a prior commitment on May 5 in San Francisco. When organizers offered to let her campaign pick another date, her campaign said it wasnt fair for the group to invite only some of the candidates when there is such a big field, said Tudor Popescu, volunteer community organizer with Indivisible Los Angeles. The invited candidates, all Democrats, were Feinstein, state Sen. Kevin de Leon, political action committee director Alison Hartson and lawyer Pat Harris. They were selected based on fundraising and poll numbers. There are 11 Republicans, 10 Democrats, nine independents and 2 third-party candidates running for Senate on the June ballot. Indivisible Los Angeles is still hoping Feinstein will pick another date, Popescu said. Feinstein spokesman Jeff Millman pointed to a San Francisco Chronicle endorsement of Feinstein, which indicates that she told the editorial board she would be willing to have a debate ahead of Novembers general election. Senator Feinstein looks forward to debating her opponent in the general election, Millman said in an email. Feinstein holds a substantial lead in both fundraising and in the polls. Front-runners in statewide races have routinely declined to debate their challengers, knowing that its free publicity for candidates who dont have the cash to increase their name recognition on their own. De Leon spokesman Jonathan Underland said the state senator has done candidate forums before, but planned to attend the May 5 debate only if Feinstein did. We basically said well clear his calendar 100%, well clear his calendar if Feinstein shows up, Underland said. Wed love to make it happen, but we want her to be there. Facebook

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NRA, Olympic shooter sue California over its restrictions on ammunition sales By Patrick McGreevy Olympian Kim Rhode is a plaintiff in a lawsuit filed by the NRA and its state affiliate against California. (Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times) The National Rifle Assn. and its state affiliate have filed a fourth lawsuit against California over its gun control laws, this time challenging new restrictions on the sale and transfer of ammunition. The NRA and the California Rifle and Pistol Assn. filed a challenge in federal court to a requirement that ammunition sales and transfers be conducted face to face with California firearms dealers or licensed vendors, ending purchases made directly from out-of-state sellers on the internet. The lawsuit in the United States District Court for the Southern District of California also challenged a requirement starting next year for background checks for people buying ammunition. The lawsuit was filed in the name of Kim Rhode, a six-time Olympic medal-winning shooter, and others. It challenges Californias new ammunition sales restrictions as a violation of the 2nd Amendment and the commerce clause of the United States Constitution. Restrictions on ammunition purchases were included in Proposition 63, approved by voters in 2016, and in bills approved by the Legislature. As a result of these laws, millions of constitutionally protected ammunition transfers are banned in California, Chris W. Cox, executive director of the NRAs Institute for Legislative Action, said in a statement. Californias law-abiding gun owners are sick of being treated like criminals and the NRA is proud to assist in this fight. Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, who is running for governor, defended his initiative and vowed to fight the NRA lawsuit. We wrote Proposition 63 on solid legal ground and principle: If youre a felon banned from possessing guns in California, then you should not be able to purchase the ammunition that makes a firearm deadly, Newsom said in a statement. California voters said loudly and clearly that guns and ammunition do not belong in the hands of dangerous individuals  but once again, the NRA has prioritized gun industry profits over the lives of law-abiding Californians. Facebook

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Republicans hope to ride a gas-tax repeal to victory By Patrick McGreevy In a Central Valley barn decked out in red, white and blue, dairyman and state Senate candidate Johnny Tacherra drew cheers from a crowd of fellow farmers when he said he opposes the California Legislatures hike on gas taxes and vehicle fees. I would not have voted for that. It is not the time to be voting on (raising) the gas tax, said Tacherra, a Republican running against Democratic Assemblywoman Anna Caballero, who voted for the tax increase last year. Three hundred miles away the same week, a campaign mailer arrived at homes in Orange County from an Assembly candidate with a message blaring from the cover in bold type: Republican Greg Haskin  tough enough to stand up to Jerry Brown and repeal the gas tax. Read More Facebook

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Treasurer John Chiang launches ad in governors race touting his record as a fiscal steward By Seema Mehta In his first television ad in the governors race, state Treasurer John Chiang touts his record on fiscal issues as California faced the recession. Some thought we were done, Chiang says in a voiceover in the 30-second spot he released Thursday, with images of him standing seriously at a lectern and complimentary headlines about his work as controller and treasurer. But I knew better. I made the tough calls. And brought California back from the brink of financial disaster because you trusted me to manage our economy. Chiangs campaign is spending about $500,000 to air the ad in Los Angeles and San Diego in coming days. That buy is dwarfed by seven-figure purchases for ads supporting Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom and former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. Newsom is the front-runner, while Villaraigosa is battling for second place with Republican businessman John Cox. Chiang has been mired in the single digits in almost all polling in the race. His ad, called Quiet Storm, tries to portray Chiang as a progressive who is effective and can move policy in Sacramento. Chiang points to his work challenging Wells Fargo before arguing that he could accomplish what doubters say is impossible to improve the states healthcare, housing and schools. I say, we got this, Chiang concludes. Facebook

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Been ignoring the race for California governor? Thats OK, in some ways its just starting By Mark Z. Barabak On a recent trip to Iowa, Eric Garcetti  the mayor of Los Angeles and a possible 2020 White House contestant  raised eyebrows with a bit of exuberant outreach. Los Angeles and Iowa, Garcetti insisted, have a ton in common, and he didnt simply mean both are inhabited by carbon-based life forms needing oxygen to survive. Urban or rural, farmer or fashion plate, all of us harbor the same hopes and dreams, the mayor suggested, and if it wasnt a terribly original thought it also wasnt the most egregious sort of political pandering  like, say, ordering that every home in Los Angeles be powered by Iowa-produced ethanol. Read More Facebook

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California voters should expect to decide on an $8.9-billion water bond in November By Liam Dillon (Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times) A proposal to borrow $8.9 billion for improvements to Californias water quality systems and watersheds and protection of natural habitats is eligible for the statewide ballot in November, Secretary of State Alex Padilla announced in a press release Wednesday. Padilla said the measure, which is backed by agricultural interests, had exceeded the 365,800 valid signatures it needed to qualify for the general election ballot. The bond measure will appear on the ballot unless proponents withdraw it by June 28, the release said. The bond is one of many voters could decide on in 2018. A $4-billion bond for parks and water infrastructure improvements will appear on the June 5 ballot. State lawmakers approved it last year. Facebook

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They came for Darrell Issa. They stayed with their inflatable chicken, blue wall and signs for political therapy By Christine Mai-Duc (John Gibbins / San Diego Union-Tribune) A mother of two turned ringleader of the resistance and more than a hundred of her faithful followers gathered on Tuesday morning outside Rep. Darrell Issas office in a northern San Diego County suburb. Across the street was her foil, a wedding DJ in a red Make American Great Again cap, setting up hefty speakers for an upcoming war of words. For about 65 weeks the deep divide in America played out along this 100-yard stretch of road in Vista. Here, at 10 a.m. every Tuesday, passersby found signs, chants, songs and, if they were lucky, sometimes a 20-foot-tall inflatable chicken with a Trump-esque coif. Theyd also glimpse the state of the body politic in 2018, a time when shock has turned to anger and post-2016 calls for reconciliation have morphed into grudging acceptance that each side might be better off in their respective corners. Or in this case, their sides of the street. On Tuesday, the anti-Issa, anti-Trump contingent fought this particular battle for the last time, declaring it their final protest at the congressmans office. They said they planned to use their energy to knock on doors and get out the vote, with an occasional protest on the side. Their pro-Trump rivals vowed to show up wherever they do. Read More Facebook

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Efforts to regulate bail companies have some unlikely allies: bail agents By Jazmine Ulloa Jane Un, chief executive and founder of Abba Bail Bonds, works with a client. ( Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times) In recent years, the seriousness and number of official complaints related to the bail industry in California have significantly increased while bail agents and bounty hunters face limited oversight, putting vulnerable communities at risk of fraud, embezzlement and other forms of victimization. This year, as Gov. Jerry Brown has pledged to work with lawmakers in a push to overhaul how courts assign defendants bail and to better regulate bail agencies, even some who profit from the court practice admit its time for regulation. These bail and bail-recovery agents could become unlikely allies, saying they advocate for change because theyve seen the system abuse the poor. Read More Facebook

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California voters: Get ready for an onslaught of television ads By Seema Mehta After a sleepy campaign, California voters are now being bombarded with television advertisements in the governors race, an onslaught that is expected to ramp up in coming weeks. The ads most frequently seen on television are those promoting Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, the front-runner in the race, and former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who is trying to secure the second spot in the June primary. Newsoms campaign and an outside group backing Villaraigosa are spending seven figures weekly on these efforts, according to filings with the California secretary of states office and a media buyer who asked not to be identified in order to freely discuss the ads. Other gubernatorial candidates are expected to hit the airwaves soon, the media buyer said. State Treasurer John Chiang has reserved a half-million dollars in the coming days in the Los Angeles and San Diego markets, and Villaraigosas campaign has requested availability in at least five of the states biggest TV markets. The GOP candidates in the race, who will be seeking the state Republican Partys endorsement at its convention next weekend, have been much less active. Businessman John Cox in recent weeks has been spending about $90,000 per week, but doubled that this week in Los Angeles and added small buys on KFI-AM radio and cable in markets including Fresno, Bakersfield and Salinas. State Assemblyman Travis Allen of Huntington Beach, who has been scooping up Republican Party endorsements across the state, has yet to make a notable television or radio buy, though he and Cox have received some attention as commentators on Fox News. Facebook

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Republicans ready to turn in signatures for ballot measure to repeal California gas-tax increase By Patrick McGreevy A Chevron gas station in Sacramento shows prices last year. (Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press) Republican activists said Tuesday that they have collected at least 830,000 signatures for an initiative to repeal recent increases in Californias gas tax and vehicle fees, more than enough to qualify the measure for the November ballot. The activists need 585,407 signatures of registered voters to qualify the ballot measure. Because signatures are still being processed and counted by the campaign, backers hope to have 900,000 by the time they begin turning them in to the counties on Friday, according to Carl DeMaio, a former San Diego City Council member and organizer of the drive. The breadth and depth of voter anger over the car and gas tax hikes is just amazing, said DeMaio, who hosts a radio talk show. We are seeing Democrats, independents and Republicans sign the petition and volunteering to carry the petition, people from all walks of life. The initiative targets a law approved in April 2017 by the Legislature and Gov. Jerry Brown that is expected to raise $5.4 billion annually for road and bridge repairs and improvements to mass transit. The money comes from a recent 12-cents-per-gallon increase in the gas tax, a 20-cent increase in the diesel fuel excise tax and a new annual vehicle fee ranging from $25 for cars valued at under $5,000, to $175 for cars worth $60,000 or more. The petition drive raised more than $2 million with significant contributions from the California Republican Party and Republican members of Congress from California, including House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield and Reps. Ken Calvert of Corona and Mimi Walters of Irvine. Republicans hope the issue will help their candidates for office in this years election and hurt Democrats who support the higher taxes. I think this is going to put Democrats in real bad spot, DeMaio said. A spokesman for Brown declined to comment until the signatures are filed. DeMaio said there were approximately 20,000 volunteer petition circulators who brought in more than 250,000 signatures, with the rest collected by paid circulators who received $1 to $2.50 per signature. Its a pretty comfortable margin [of signatures] that we have been able to hit here, DeMaio said. Opposition will grow, he said, as more Californians get their annual vehicle registration notice. The repeal campaign hopes to raise $5 million for the campaign to pass the constitutional amendment, which would not only repeal the increase in the gas tax and vehicle fees but require future increases to be submitted to voters. We know that Gov. Brown and his cohorts are going to spend an amazing amount of money to mislead voters, DeMaio said. But I feel pretty confident that we will repeal the gas tax. Read More Facebook

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Rep. Duncan Hunter sets up trust to raise money for legal expenses amid ongoing criminal investigation By Morgan Cook Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Alpine, has filed paperwork to establish a legal expense fund amid an ongoing federal criminal investigation into misused campaign cash. Hunter filed the required paperwork March 27, seeking a rarely granted Legal Expense Fund through which members of Congress under investigation or being sued in connection with doing their jobs or running for office can raise money for their legal expenses. Such funds are administered by an independent trustee and allow donors to give above the maximum amount they can contribute a candidates campaign. Hunter has spent more than $600,000 of campaign money on lawyers. Read More Facebook

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Kamala Harris says she wont take corporate donations anymore By Sarah D. Wire (Jose Luis Magana / Associated Press) California Sen. Kamala Harris says she will no longer accept money from corporate political action committees. In an interview with WWPM-FMs The Breakfast Club, in New York that aired Monday, the senator said she wasnt expecting a question at a town hall this month about whether she would accept money for corporations or corporate lobbyists. At the time, Harris said it depends, but she said on Monday that she had reflected on the matter and changed her mind. Money has had such an outside influence on politics, and especially with the Supreme Court determining Citizens United, which basically means that big corporations can spend unlimited amounts of money influencing a campaign, right? Harris said. Were all supposed to have an equal vote, but money has now really tipped the balance between an individual having equal power in an election to a corporation. So Ive actually made a decision since I had that conversation that Im not going to accept corporate PAC checks. I just  Im not. You can watch the video of the interview here. (Harris corporate money comments come about 30 minutes in.) Harris wouldnt be on the ballot for a second Senate term until 2022, though its widely believed that she is planning a presidential bid in 2020. Other potential 2020 presidential candidates, including Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), have also ruled out taking corporate PAC money. Soon after Mondays show aired, Harris campaign sent out a fundraising request noting her new stance. As corporate PACs continue to corrupt our politics and twist Congress priorities at your expense, were going to focus on raising money from small-dollar, individual donors like you, the email says. Facebook

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With money tied up in court, California lawmakers try again with new plan to spend $2 billion on homeless housing By Liam Dillon A man sleeps on the sidewalk in front of the Union Rescue Mission in the skid row neighborhood of Los Angeles. (Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times) A measure to spend $2 billion on housing homeless Californians could be on the November statewide ballot. State Sen. Kevin de Leon (D-Los Angeles) is pushing the idea to deal with what he said was a burgeoning humanitarian crisis whose epicenter is here in California. De Leons new measure is a do-over for a 2016 plan passed by the Legislature to redirect $2 billion toward building homeless housing from a voter-approved 1% income tax surcharge on millionaires that funds mental health services. A Sacramento attorney sued over that decision, arguing that the move violated constitutional rules on approving loans without a public vote and that lawmakers shouldnt take money away from mental health treatment. The case remains active in Sacramento Superior Court and its unclear when, or if, the state will be able to spend the $2 billion. De Leons Senate Bill 1206 would put the $2-billion loan on the ballot in November, freeing up the money if voters approve the measure. De Leon said had he been able to predict the 2016 plan would end up in court, he would have sought a ballot measure at the time. We thought this was like apple pie and baseball and puppies, De Leon said. Who would oppose the idea of repurposing the dollars to build immediate housing as a permanent solution for homelessness? Obviously with a crystal ball, had I anticipated the litigation, I would have worked to place it on the ballot. De Leon noted that the 2016 plan had bipartisan supermajority support in the Legislature, something his new bill also will need to get on the ballot. Sen. John Moorlach (R-Costa Mesa) is a coauthor of the plan. SB 1206 is scheduled for its first hearing in the Legislature on Wednesday. Should De Leons measure be approved, it will join a crowded list of housing issues before voters in November. Californians will decide on a separate $4-billion bond to help finance new low-income housing and home loans for veterans. De Leon said hes not worried those two measures will compete against each other because voters are aware of the scale of the states housing problems and the proposed homeless housing bond redirects existing dollars instead of raising taxes. Once [voters] know that the impact on their pocketbook is not existent, Im confident that theyll join me and my colleague John Moorlach in support of this measure, De Leon said. Facebook

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California lawmakers say too many former felons are being denied professional licenses By John Myers Assemblyman David Chiu (D-San Francisco) along with supporters of bills to allow more former felons to receive professional licenses. (John Myers/Los Angeles Times) A trio of California Assembly members urged colleagues on Monday to pass legislation that would prohibit state commissions and agencies from rejecting a professional license for those who were once convicted of less serious crimes. We cant say we want to rehabilitate people, and then block them from getting the jobs that they need when theyre released, said Assemblyman David Chiu (D-San Francisco). That leads to more recidivism and to more crime. The bills, scheduled to be heard in Assembly committees Tuesday, would ban the use of arrest or conviction records as the reason for denying a professional license. The bill would not apply to Californians who served time for any of the offenses on the states list of violent crimes. The authors, all Democrats, said that a government-issued professional license is required for some 30% of all jobs in the state. Their bills would change the licensing process at the California departments of Consumer Affairs and Social Services and agencies that certify emergency medical technicians. The bills would block prior convictions from leading to the delay or denial of a license unless that crime is directly related to the profession the person intends to pursue. Two of the bills also specifically say convictions less than 5 years old could continue to play a role in licensing decisions. Last year, Gov. Jerry Brown signed a law that keeps private sector employers from inquiring about a job applicants conviction history prior to an offer of employment. Advocates joined the lawmakers at a press conference in Sacramento to point out that limits on awarding licenses should focus only on those whose prior criminal activity could pose a threat to consumers. Continuing to hold people back for crimes that are 6, 7, 8, 10, 20 years old does not actually make sense if youre looking at public safety, said Jael Myrick of the East Bay Community Law Center. One of the proposals, Assembly Bill 2293, seeks to make it easier for ex-felons to get a license allowing a job with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection  the same agency that often uses prison inmates to battle blazes around the state. If a person is good enough to risk their life fighting fires for the state of California as an inmate, said Assemblywoman Eloise Gomez Reyes (D-Grand Terrace), their previous actions should not prevent from having a job utilizing the skill set that they learned. Facebook

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Assembly speaker rebukes building trades union after it targets Assemblywoman Cristina Garcia By John Myers ( (Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press)) The decision by a politically powerful labor group to openly campaign against an embattled Los Angeles-area lawmaker drew a sharp rebuke on Friday from Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon. The Lakewood Democrat lashed out hours after the State Building and Construction Trades Council of California filed paperwork for a political action committee to defeat Assemblywoman Cristina Garcia (D-Bell Gardens). Garcia, whos seeking her fourth term, took an unpaid leave of absence in February following allegations of sexual misconduct. She has denied the reports and an Assembly investigation remains underway. Rendon didnt criticize the labor group by name, insisting instead that the decision was driven by oil and gas industry interests. This is a thinly veiled attempt by Big Oil and polluters to intimidate me and my members. It is an affront to my speakership, Rendon said in a statement. We are proud of the work that the Assembly has done to increase jobs and wages while defending our environment. We will vigorously defend the members of our caucus from any ill-advised political attack. A statement from the labor group, which sparred with Garcia last year on her effort to link new climate change policies with a crackdown on air pollution, said it had decided to reverse past support for her. The Trades have thousands of hard working members in Garcias district, and we look forward to lifting up another Democrat in the 58th Assembly to better represent them and their families, said the statement. The political action committees campaign finance filing on Friday listed nonmonetary in kind contributions from Erin Lehane, a public affairs consultant aligned with the building labor group. Lehane said she had begun researching Garcia in November. In January, a former legislative staffer accused her of groping him in 2014. Lehane, who identified herself as a spokesperson for the labor groups political action committee, said on Friday that she believed Garcias hypocrisy threatened a movement that will dictate how much harassment and abuse my daughter will face in her work life. Garcia, who has been an outspoken advocate for women in the #MeToo movement, has complained that her political opponents helped fan the flames of the accusations. Through a campaign consultant, she declined to comment on Friday. Rendons critique came on the heels of a full-page ad in The Times on Friday, partly paid for by the Trades Council, that criticized well-funded ivory tower elites who push proposals that hurt the oil and gas industry. We are the real jobs that fuel the real California economy, read the advertisement. Facebook

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Legal tiff breaks out over independent committees ad backing Antonio Villaraigosa for governor By Phil Willon An attorney representing Gavin Newsoms campaign for governor is demanding that California television stations cease airing an ad by an independent political committee supporting his Democratic rival Antonio Villaraigosa. Attorney Thomas A. Willis, in a letter to the stations, said the ad is false and misleading and violates California law because it uses snippets of video footage from Villaraigosas own campaign ads. Willis called that illegal coordination between the campaign and PAC. Under California law, advertisements made by entities other than a candidate are presumed to be coordinated  and thus not independent expenditures  when the advertisement replicates, reproduces or disseminates substantial parts of a communication, including video footage, created and paid for by the candidate, the letter states. A representative for the independent expenditure committee  Families & Teachers for Antonio Villaraigosa for Governor  fired back. Attorney Brian T. Hildreth says those allegations have no merit and accused the Newsom campaign of being misleading. Hildreth sent a letter to the television stations in response, urging them to ignore the Newsom campaigns accusations. He said the Newsom camp appears to intentionally misrepresent the law and that the video use was permissible. He said only six seconds of video from Villaraigosas campaign ads was used, which is well within the legal limits. The independent committee is sponsored by the group California Charter Schools Assn. Advocates, according to the California secretary of states office. The ad is airing on broadcast and cable stations statewide. The committees ad is focused on Villaraigosas record as Assembly speaker and as mayor of Los Angeles when there was a drop in crime. Facebook

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Governors race snapshot: Californians are generally upbeat but not focused on the campaign By Mark Z. Barabak Armand Werden, a 29-year-old community college student who works the taps at Dust Bowl Brewery in Turlock, said the state is on the upswing. (Phil Willon / Los Angeles Times) As California chooses a new governor  one of just a handful in the last 40 years not named Jerry Brown  the state seems to be enjoying something unusual in these tumultuous political times: a feeling of relative contentment. Not to say things are perfect. Still, more than 100 random interviews conducted over the length and breadth of the state  from Redding in the north to Santee in the south, from the Pacific coastline to the edge of the Sierra Nevada  found most saying things are looking up, at least so far as Californias direction is concerned. Read More Facebook

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Sierra Club backs Gavin Newsom for California governor By Phil Willon Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom speaks with members of the public following a debate at USC in January. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times) The Sierra Club endorsed Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom in the race for California governor, with officials in the established environmental group praising the Democrats record on climate change and clean energy. He has a proven record for leading on environmental protection, public health and clean energy, Kathryn Phillips, director of Sierra Club California, said in a statement released by the Newsom campaign. He understands that we are feeling the effects of climate change and that California must reduce carbon emissions and reach 100% renewable energy to achieve our climate goals. Phillips said the Sierra Clubs extensive network of volunteers will campaign for Newsom as the June 5 primary approaches. Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune also praised the Democrat, saying he will protect California from Donald Trumps attacks on our clean air and water. The Sierra Club joins a series of other influential groups in California that have backed Newsom. The California Medical Assn., the powerful state doctors lobby, announced its endorsement of Newsom on Thursday. The California Nurses Assn. and the Service Employees International Union, one of the most powerful labor unions in the state, also support Newsom. Newsom is the races front-runner in polls and fundraising. A poll released earlier this month by the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California found that 26% of likely voters backed Newsom. John Cox, a Republican from Rancho Santa Fe, was favored by 15% of likely voters and former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a Democrat, by 13%. Facebook

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Californias GOP House members are taking their challengers more seriously and the numbers show it By Christine Mai-Duc For much of last year, consultants and campaign managers for some of Californias most vulnerable Republican incumbents maintained a bullish tone on the prospect that the GOP would hold the House in this years midterms. The National Republican Congressional Committee insisted that longtime Republican incumbents in California had built up reputations as effective champions of local issues that would help them weather a flood of Democratic enthusiasm. Since then Rep. Ed Royce (R-Fullerton) and Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Vista) have decided not to seek reelection and the NRCC has opened a West Coast headquarters in Orange County. Read More Facebook

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California officials say Pentagon has confirmed National Guard funding despite Trump threat By John Myers (Evan Vucci / Associated Press) The awkward dance between Gov. Jerry Brown and the federal government over the National Guard jerked back toward discord on Thursday, when Trump said he would refuse to pay for a new deployment of troops  just hours after his administration said otherwise. And a few hours later, California officials said they had received written confirmation from the Pentagon that the mission would indeed be funded. Trump had earlier called Browns decision to approve 400 troops for a mission focused on combating transnational crime and drug smuggling a charade in a tweet. We need border security and action, not words! the president wrote. Governor Jerry Brown announced he will deploy up to 400 National Guard Troops to do nothing. The crime rate in California is high enough, and the Federal Government will not be paying for Governor Browns charade. We need border security and action, not words!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 19, 2018 A spokesman for Brown pointed to a tweet written Wednesday night by Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, thanking the California governor for his efforts. Trump was meeting on Thursday with Nielsen at his Mar-a-Lago estate not long after his tweet was posted. A tweet later posted by the California National Guard said that almost three hours after Trumps comment, the state received written confirmation from the Pentagon to fund the mission as outlined by Brown the day before. In short, nothing has changed today, said a subsequent Guard tweet. Just spoke w @JerryBrownGov about deploying the @USNationalGuard in California. Final details are being worked out but we are looking forward to the support. Thank you Gov Brown!  Secretary Kirstjen M. Nielsen (@SecNielsen) April 19, 2018 Brown was the last of the nations border governors to respond to Trumps insistence earlier this month that National Guard troops were needed to assist with immigration-related duties at the U.S.-Mexico border. And he has consistently refused to allow California troops to engage in any mission related to federal immigration law. This will not be a mission to build a new wall, Brown wrote last week to Nielsen and Defense Secretary James N. Mattis. It will not be a mission to round up women and children or detain people escaping violence and seeking a better life. Exactly what the California operations will cost remains unclear, as state officials have said it will depend on decisions made once the mission begins. The funds would not be transferred to the state, but instead would be paid directly by the Department of Defense. Trump has critiqued California several times over the past few days, often writing tweets that embrace the actions by some cities and counties to join his administrations lawsuit against the states sanctuary immigration law. He made similar comments to reporters on Thursday afternoon. If you look at whats happening in California with sanctuary cities  people are really going the opposite way, Trump said. They dont want sanctuary cities. Theres a little bit of a revolution going on in California. 2:26 p.m.:This article was updated with additional information from the California National Guard and with remarks from Trump. This article was originally published at 9:51 a.m. Facebook

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Gay conversion therapy services would be banned under measure advancing in California By John Myers (Rich Pedroncelli / Associated Press) The California Assembly voted Thursday to add gay conversion therapy to the states list of deceptive business practices, following a debate that focused on the personal experiences of several lawmakers and hinted at potential lawsuits to come. It is harmful and it is unnecessary, Assemblyman Evan Low (D-Campbell), the bills author and one of the Legislatures most vocal LGBTQ members, said of the practice. Low, who told Assembly members that he explored conversion therapy as a teenager and suffered depression over his sexual orientation, insisted that the bill would be limited to efforts that involve the exchange of money. Theres nothing wrong with me, he said in an emotional speech on the Assembly floor. Theres nothing that needs to be changed. The bill, which now heads to the Senate, has become the focal point of intense debate on social media. Some religious groups have said that such a law would be a violation of their constitutional rights, while advocates insist the provisions are narrow and theres no credible evidence that the services work. One key part of the debate centers on whether Assembly Bill 2943 would stretch beyond businesses that charge for these programs and extend to printed documents, even Bibles. An analysis by the Assembly Judiciary Committee says the bill would apply only to services that purport to change a persons sexual orientation and offered on a commercial basis, as well as the advertising and offering of such services. Lawmakers who spoke in support of AB 2943 also made clear that they believe those kinds of services have been discredited. This is fraudulent, it should not be occurring, said Assemblywoman Susan Eggman (D-Stockton). But you can still try to pray the gay away, if you like. Assemblyman James Gallagher (R-Yuba City), who said the bill addresses a difficult issue, nonetheless said that its important to ensure laws dont tamper with religious freedom. We have to think about the legitimate experience of people who have gone through conversion therapy and said this was a good thing for them, Gallagher told his colleagues. California law already bans the use of conversion therapy by mental health professionals on those under age 18. Lows bill would expand the states efforts beyond minors. It would join a list of commercial activities deemed unfair or deceptive acts or practices and therefore banned under state law. Facebook

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Gavin Newsom gets backing from doctors group, despite differences over single-payer healthcare By Melanie Mason Gavin Newsom speaks at the California Democrats State Convention in San Diego on Feb. 24. (Kent Nishimura) Californias doctors are siding with Gavin Newsom in the governors race, even though they dont see eye-to-eye on a defining issue of the campaign: single-payer healthcare. The California Medical Assn., the state doctors lobby and a political heavyweight, announced its endorsement of the lieutenant governor on Thursday. Gavin is a lifelong champion for health care in California, and we know he will continue to fight for pragmatic solutions to our most crucial health care challenges, including working to achieve universal access and tackling our states physician shortage, CMA President Theodore M. Mazer said in a statement. Newsom has made his support for state-financed healthcare a centerpiece of his campaign, and he earned the early backing of the most ardent single-payer supporters, the state nurses union. The doctors, meanwhile, oppose the nurses bill, SB 562, which emerged as a flashpoint in the healthcare debate last year. The CMA said the bill would dismantle the healthcare marketplace and destabilize Californias economy. Newsom has said SB 562 should advance in the Legislature, but also said it has open-ended issues that still need to be addressed. The doctors group is also battling with another prominent Newsom endorser, the Service Employees International Union, over a new measure that would impose price caps on an array of medical services paid for by commercial health insurers in the state. The SEIU is a leading sponsor of the proposal; the doctors fiercely oppose it. Newsom and the physicians group have a history of political alignment. Newsom was the first statewide official to support Proposition 56, a 2016 tobacco tax pushed by the CMA that raised revenue in part to increase money for doctors who saw Medi-Cal patients. That year, the association also endorsed two initiatives championed by Newsom: Proposition 63, which imposed new gun control measures, and Proposition 64, which legalized recreational marijuana. Facebook

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Independent committee backing Antonio Villaraigosa for governor hits the airwaves with first ad By Phil Willon Antonio Villaraigosa speaks at the 2018 California Democratic Party Convention in San Diego in February.. (Denis Poroy / Associated Press) A well-financed independent committee backing Antonio Villaraigosas bid to be Californias next governor released its first television ad Thursday, praising his record for working with Republicans and as a candidate for all of California. The ad, which is to air statewide on broadcast and cable stations, is focused on Villaraigosas record as Assembly speaker and mayor of Los Angeles, including on education and a drop in crime while he was at City Hall. To move California forward, we need to help more Californians get ahead, the ad says. Thats why Antonio Villaraigosa brought both parties together to balance the state budget with record investments in public schools and new career training programs. The independent expenditure committee behind the ad campaign, Families & Teachers for Antonio Villaraigosa for Governor 2018, is sponsored by the California Charter Schools Assn. Advocates, according to the California secretary of states office. The committee is spending seven figures per week on the ad buy, said Josh Pulliam, a political consultant for the committee. As mayor of Los Angeles, Villaraigosa clashed with teachers unions, starting with his failed attempt to take political control of the Los Angeles Unified School District. His fight with those unions continued after he left office in 2013. Money has poured into the committee this month from wealthy charter schools supporters: Reed Hastings, chief executive of Netflix, donated $7 million, and Los Angeles billionaire and philanthropist Eli Broad donated $1.5 million. On Wednesday, former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan donated $1 million. The independent expenditure committee is expected to provide a boost to Villaraigosas campaign. Democratic front-runner Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom has a major advantage in fundraising over all other candidates in the race and has received the backing of the California Teachers Assn. and other education unions. A recent Public Policy Institute of California poll also showed Villaraigosa lagging in third place in the race, trailing Newsom and Republican businessman John Cox. The candidates who finish in the top two in the June 5 primary will advance to the November general election, regardless of their party affiliation. Facebook

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Gov. Jerry Brown says Trump administration will fund his National Guard mission  without immigration duties By John Myers (Alex Wong / Getty Images) Gov. Jerry Brown formally mobilized 400 California National Guard members Wednesday for transnational crime-fighting duties, thus preventing any effort by President Trump to have the troops focus on immigration enforcement on the Mexican border. The governor announced that federal officials have agreed to fund the plan he announced last week  a mission to combat criminal gangs, human traffickers and illegal firearm and drug smugglers in locations around California, including near the border. The order Brown signed makes clear that the troops will not be allowed to perform a broader set of duties as envisioned by Trumps recent comments. California National Guard service members shall not engage in any direct law enforcement role nor enforce immigration laws, arrest people for immigration law violations, guard people taken into custody for alleged immigration violations, or support immigration law enforcement activities, the order read. The cost of the mission, a spokesman for Brown said, will be paid directly by the federal government. No initial estimate has been made, as the exact amount will depend on exactly how the troops will be used. Though the duties of California Guard members were outlined last week, the state had been waiting for an agreement by federal officials to pay for the operations. Since that time, the president has taken Brown and the state to task over its decision to avoid any immigration-related duties at the border. On Wednesday morning, Trump tweeted, Jerry Brown is trying to back out of the National Guard at the Border, but the people of the State are not happy. Want Security & Safety NOW! There is a Revolution going on in California. Soooo many Sanctuary areas want OUT of this ridiculous, crime infested & breeding concept. Jerry Brown is trying to back out of the National Guard at the Border, but the people of the State are not happy. Want Security & Safety NOW!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 18, 2018 Looks like Jerry Brown and California are not looking for safety and security along their very porous Border. He cannot come to terms for the National Guard to patrol and protect the Border, Trump tweeted Tuesday. There was no immediate reaction from the White House to Browns announcement. On Tuesday, Brown told reporters in Washington that his plan was consistent with a safer border. That sounds to me like fighting crime, the governor said. Trying to catch some desperate mothers and children, or unaccompanied minors coming from Central America, that sounds like something else. The order Brown issued Wednesday after returning from a brief trip to talk climate change in Toronto and to speak to a national trade union and visit with reporters in Washington is set to expire at the end of September. It specifically says no Guard service member may participate in a mission that would exceed the mission scope and limitations related to transnational crime activity. It also says troops cannot help build any new border barrier. 5:27 p.m.: This article was updated with information related to the cost of the Guard mission and Browns trip to Washington. This article was originally published at 5:13 p.m. Facebook

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California bill aims to end practice that keeps workplace misconduct cases out of court By Melanie Mason A California bill would prohibit employers from requiring workers to use private arbitration to settle disputes, a practice that critics say shields improper workplace conduct from public view. The bill by Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez Fletcher (D-San Diego) would bar businesses from making employees, when they are hired, waive their future rights to take any harassment, discrimination or other claims to court. Arbitration can be a highly effective dispute resolution method when both parties can choose it freely, when both parties are equal, Gonzalez Fletcher said at a news conference on Wednesday. It is far less successful when the more powerful party forces the other to accept those terms, especially as a condition of employment. Forced arbitration has come under increasing scrutiny since the #MeToo movement, with high-profile figures such as former Fox News anchor Gretchen Carlson pointing to the practice as shielding workplace abusers from public disclosure because arbitration resolutions often include nondisclosure agreements. Last year, a bipartisan bill was introduced in Congress to end mandatory arbitration in employment agreements. Gonzalez Fletcher said she was pursuing an unusual tool to draw attention to the issue  a subpoena issued by the Legislature to compel testimony from a worker bound by a nondisclosure agreement as a result of arbitration. The Legislature has subpoena power but it is rarely used. The bills sponsors believe lawmakers last issued a subpoena in 2001 while investigating price manipulation by Enron. Gonzalez Fletcher said she has requested Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon (D-Lakewood) to issue the subpoena to require Tara Zoumer, who sued the company WeWork in 2016 for overtime pay, to testify before the Assembly Judiciary Committee next week. Zoumers suit was moved to arbitration and resolved. She is now subject to a nondisclosure agreement and could face a financial penalty for speaking publicly about her case. A spokesman for Rendon said the subpoena request is under consideration. Business groups oppose the bill, AB 3080. The California Chamber of Commerce has dubbed it a job biller, claiming it would dramatically increase legal costs for businesses. Banning such agreements benefits the trial attorneys, not the employer or employee, the group said. The bill must first advance from the Assembly Labor Committee on Wednesday. Facebook

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At least 240 House lawmakers want a vote on immigration. California supporters say they arent ready to force one By Sarah D. Wire Rep. Jeff Denham (R-Turlock), flanked by Rep. Pete Aguilar (D-Redlands) and Rep. Will Hurd (R-Texas) speak about DACA legislation (Bill Clark / CQ Roll Call) Rep. Jeff Denham says at least 240 of the 430 current House members have signed onto his resolution to hold votes on four immigration bills, and he hopes House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) and President Trump are paying attention to the show of support. But, the Republican from Turlock and his allies said Wednesday that they are not yet willing to commit to forcing Ryans hand through a little-used procedural move called a discharge petition; they acknowledged theres no guarantee that all of 47 Republicans and 193 Democrats House co-signers will back them up if they try to force the issue. Im sure that it is something that will be discussed in the coming weeks. You should not need a discharge petition. When you can show the overwhelming majority of the House, the support of it, you should not need a discharge petition, but it is something we would talk about in the future, Denham said. It is far too early to talk about next steps. Ryan said last week that he opposes Denhams effort, saying its a waste of time for the House to vote on bills the president might veto. Denhams resolution would prompt debate and votes on four very different immigration bills: one favored by the Trump administration, one preferred by Democrats, one bipartisan proposal and another immigration bill of Ryans choice. Whichever got the most votes would move forward to the Senate. All four bills would help Dreamers to differing degrees and include varying levels of border security or immigration enforcement. For example, the Trump-backed bill would also dramatically reduce legal immigration, while the Democrats would only deal with legal status for Dreamers. Democrats say they dont expect the show of support will sway Ryan. Congressional Hispanic Caucus Chairwoman Rep. Michelle Lujan Grisham (D-N.M.) said Tuesday night she expects Ryan will have to be forced into allowing a vote. It doesnt matter how many signatures we get. We could have every signature, technically, except his, on the floor of the House and... if he doesnt want to, it doesnt happen, Lujan Grisham (D-N.M.) said. Rep. Pete Aguilar (D-Redlands), who gathered the Democratic co-sponsors for Denham, also wouldnt give a deadline for House leaders to act, but said the co-sponsors are only willing to wait weeks not months. We do want to give them an opportunity to bring up the rule and to use whatever process they want, Aguilar said. They do have options, but I think they need to understand that we have options too. Facebook

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Billionaire Democratic activist Tom Steyer endorses Kevin de Leon in his insurgent bid against Sen. Dianne Feinstein By Seema Mehta Tom Steyer, left, and California state Sen. Kevin de Leon (D-Los Angeles). (Getty Images; Los Angeles Times) Billionaire Democratic activist Tom Steyer is endorsing state Sen. Kevin de Leon in his insurgent challenge to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, and did not rule out funding an outside effort to boost De Leons chances. I think hes the kind of young progressive that reflects California and would be a very strong advocate for our state nationally, Steyer said in an interview on Tuesday, pointing to De Leons efforts on issues such as immigration, climate change and gun control while he was the state Senate leader. I know him well and hes a friend. We share a lot of values. Steyer, who flirted with running for the Senate seat, did not criticize Feinstein as he has in the past. Sen. Feinstein has been an outstanding public servant who has dedicated the bulk of her adult life to the service of our state and the country, he said. These are two strong, very good Democrats. I just believe Kevin is the true progressive and he reflects something we need representing California going forward. I have nothing bad to say about Dianne Feinstein. I have a lot of good to say about Kevin de Leon. De Leon faces enormous odds as he tries to oust Feinstein, who has served in the Senate for a quarter-century, is well known to the states voters and has daunting leads in polls and fundraising. But De Leon has gained notable endorsements, most recently from the 2.1-million-member California Labor Federation last week. Campaign finance reports released this week show that Feinstein has more than $10 million in the bank, while De Leon has just more than $670,000. Feinstein, a multimillionaire and one of the wealthiest members of the Senate, has already lent her campaign $5 million and could easily write another check. But Steyer, a billionaire former hedge fund manager, could write a larger one. He is among the largest Democratic donors in the nation and has already committed more than $50 million to push for the impeachment of President Trump and to register young voters. He was noncommittal when asked if he would fund an independent expenditure group on behalf of De Leon. I dont have any concrete plans for that, he said. Read More Facebook

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Californias largest pension fund sends next years invoice to state government: $6.3 billion By John Myers The California Public Employees Retirement System building (Max Whittaker / Getty Images) As part of a shift toward less optimistic expectations for investment returns to pay for government worker pensions, board members of the California Public Employees Retirement System voted Tuesday to require an almost $6.3-billion payment from the state budget in the fiscal year that begins on July 1. The action, which could receive final approval on Wednesday, reflects a gradually higher annual contribution to public employee pensions by the state and from local governments across California. In 2016, CalPERS approved a half-percentage point decrease in its official estimate of the long-term investment return on its $353.3-billion portfolio. That shift was designed to happen over several years, in hopes it would lessen the financial shock of shifting more of the costs onto government employers. The highest costs are also, in part, a reflection of increases in the size of the states payroll. The states CalPERS payment will be about $450 million more than the total paid in the current fiscal year and more than double what it was only a decade ago. CalPERS board members voted on Tuesdays staff proposal with little discussion, save for a question about the increase in contributions also required from workers hired after a pension overhaul that took effect in June. It seems like it will be a ding on peoples salaries, said Theresa Taylor, the chairwoman of CalPERS finance committee and a member of SEIU Local 1000, the union that represents some 96,000 state employees. The $6.299-billion payment required from Californias state government must now be factored into the budget crafted by the Legislature and signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown in late June. Brown had already assumed a similarly sized payment in his budget proposal unveiled in January. In February, a coalition representing city governments warned about the effects of rising pension costs under the expectations of less money from Wall Street investments. The report issued by the League of California Cities projected an average increase of more than 50% in annual pension payments made by the states largest cities over the next seven years. A CalPERS staff report notes that the net return on all of the funds investments for the fiscal year that ended in July was 11.2%. But expectations on profits over the next 30 years remain significantly more modest, and theres long been a robust debate about how to properly set those future expectations. The lower the rate of projected investment return, the larger the share of pension costs that must be covered by taxpayers and some employees. Overall, CalPERS officials believe the system has assets to cover 71% of its long-term obligations. Facebook

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California warns legal pot sellers not to participate in unlicensed 4/20 events By Patrick McGreevy Marijuana on display at a dispensary in Los Angeles. ( (Frederic J. Brown / AFP/Getty Images)) The state issued a warning Tuesday that businesses holding licenses to sell marijuana could face penalties if they participate in unlicensed temporary events away from their stores, including on Friday, April 20, which has become an annual celebration for counterculture groups. The warning was issued ahead of 4/20 by the state Bureau of Cannabis Control. Since Jan. 1, the bureau has issued more than 700 state licenses to sell marijuana for medical or recreational use. The bureau has issued 47 temporary event licenses to groups that are limited to holding the marijuana celebrations on county fairgrounds that have authorized such events with city approval. Any bureau licensee participating in an unlicensed cannabis event may be subject to disciplinary action, the warning said, adding that lawful participation by bureau licensees in any temporary cannabis event that allows sales and/or consumption is dependent upon issuance of the appropriate licenses from the bureau. While many Californians have been issued medical approval to sell or use marijuana, the law does not allow them to participate in unlicensed events, also referred to as Proposition 215 events after the ballot measure that legalized medical pot two decades ago in the state. Participation in such events may lead to civil penalties for unlicensed commercial cannabis activity, the warning said. Meanwhile, a survey of some 1,000 marijuana users that was released Tuesday by the firm LendEDU found that the average 4/20 participant plans to spend $71 on marijuana to celebrate the unofficial holiday, and about 35% of respondents are planning to take off work Friday. Facebook

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California police groups shift position on officer discipline records, now consider support for making some of them public By Liam Dillon Los Angeles Police Department recruits at a graduation ceremony in April (Al Seib / Los Angeles Times) Some major law enforcement groups signaled Tuesday they are willing to support making part of police officer disciplinary records public, a dramatic departure from their past positions. Local and national attention on police shootings and misconduct has led law enforcement organizations to reconsider their blanket opposition to proposals that would give public access to some internal disciplinary investigations of officers. Were going to be open to supporting efforts that would allow for some records to be released, said Ryan Sherman, a lobbyist with the Riverside Sheriffs Assn. Debate over secrecy provisions in officer disciplinary files came during a legislative hearing on Senate Bill 1421 from Sen. Nancy Skinner (D-Berkeley). Skinners bill, which advanced out of the Senate Public Safety Committee on Tuesday, would require public disclosure of all internal officer shooting investigations and confirmed cases of sexual assault and lying while on duty. Currently, all police discipline information is confidential outside of a courtroom in California, which has some of the nations strictest standards against public disclosure. Unfortunately, the fact that we have such strict restrictions on any access to public records has affected certain communities trust towards our law enforcement, Skinner said during the hearing. Prior to Skinners effort, other have tried to loosen these rules, some of which date back 40 years. Most recently in 2016, a bid by then-Sen. Mark Leno (D-San Francisco) failed in a Senate committee. In debate two years ago, no major law enforcement groups indicated they would accept changes to state laws that would make individual internal investigations public, saying they were essential to protect officer privacy and safety. But Tuesday, Sherman and other lobbyists including those representing the states largest police labor organization, signaled they might be willing to entertain changes. They said they were negotiating with Skinner on the bills details. Law enforcement groups still have major concerns about SB 1421 as written. Ed Fishman, an attorney for the Police Officers Research Assn., told legislators that the bill would wrongfully expose police officers who acted within departmental policy to invasions of their privacy. It has unintended consequences that are extreme and will hurt the public, Fishman said. Tuesdays hearing featured testimony from many who have had relatives killed by police officers in recent years advocating for the bill. Senators on the Public Safety Committee also gave public rebukes to law enforcement lobbyists, criticizing them for a lack of diversity and insensitivity to concerns raised by communities of color. I think that you are completely and utterly out of touch with the realities of how those you are representing are perceived by major segments of California, said Sen. Holly Mitchell (D-Los Angeles). You are not going to be able to continue to lobby your way out of it. The bill faces at least one more committee hearing in the Senate before reaching the floor. It will have to pass both houses of the Legislature by the end of August. Facebook

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Newest member of the California Assembly arrives ready to work on criminal justice issues By John Myers Assemblywoman Sydney Kamlager-Dove prepares for the oath of office from Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon with her husband, Austin Dove. (California Assembly Democrats) Two weeks after winning a Los Angeles special election, the newest member of the California Assembly says she hopes to focus on reforms to the states criminal justice system during her time in Sacramento. Assemblywoman Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-Los Angeles) took the oath of office on Monday, filling one of three vacant seats representing Los Angeles County in the lower house. The Democrat, a former community college trustee and legislative staffer, thanked her mentors in remarks from the Assembly rostrum. So many women, and in my life so many black women, have paid in giving me the kind of morals and integrity and grit that is required to fight on behalf of people that you know, and people that you dont know, she said. Kamlager-Dove won handily on April 3, receiving 70% of the votes cast in the 54th Assembly District which encompasses communities west of downtown Los Angeles, from Crenshaw to Culver City and as far north as Westwood. She will serve the remaining eight months of the term of former Assemblyman Sebastian Ridley-Thomas, who resigned last year citing health concerns. She has said she hopes to focus her attention on poverty issues and on reform of the states criminal justice system. I think we have an opportunity to really push the needle in terms of how we look at rehabilitation, how we look at incarceration, and how we look at changing the lives oftentimes of poor men and women of color, Kamalager-Dove said on Monday in a video released by Assembly Democrats. Facebook

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Survivors of violent crime raise their voices in California to call for a new approach to criminal justice By Jazmine Ulloa Aaliyah Smith marches with her cousins. (Jazmine Ulloa / Los Angeles Times) Her father, uncle, a cousin and two older brothers. Those are some of the family members 16-year-old Aaliyah Smith has lost to gun violence. Then there are her friends. Jermaine Jackson Jr., 27, was shot and killed in 2016 while he painted over graffiti in San Francisco. Toriano Tito Adger, 18, was shot there a year later at a bus stop. He called Smith, who was nearby, and warned her to run. She made it inside a library moments before the crack of gunfire. Last week, Smith was among hundreds who gathered in Sacramento for annual National Crime Victims Rights Week events, where calls were issued for a new approach to criminal justice and public safety in California, one that puts survivors at the center of policy. But a debate is brewing over what that entails. Read More Facebook

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California expects $14 billion in tax payments this month By John Myers State workers handle income tax returns at the California Franchise Tax Board offices. (Laura Morton / For The Times) Gov. Jerry Browns proposed state budget is built on what taxpayers might find an audacious assumption: almost $14 billion in tax payments in the month of April, an average of $83 million collected per hour on every business day of the month. Most of that money will come from the taxes Californians pay in advance of Tuesday nights filing deadline for income tax returns. If history is any guide, the rate of payment could quadruple by weeks end. While tax rules have shifted some of the payment schedules to other months, April remains a vitally important month to the fiscal health of state government. The state controllers office reports more than 15% of all personal income tax revenues in 2017 were collected in April. In the recession years of a decade ago, tax revenue predictions were frequently off the mark by hundreds of millions of dollars. The last two state budgets have seen significant windfalls of personal income tax revenue, thanks in part both to an improving economy and to the continuation of a temporary surcharge on the wealthiest taxpayers  extended by voters in 2016. In the budget plan he sent to lawmakers in January, Brown projected a $6.1-billion windfall and proposed using a sizable amount to top off Californias rainy-day fund ahead of schedule. The independent Legislative Analysts Office reports that through the end of last week, the months income tax tally stood at $3 billion, slightly ahead of projections. By the end of the current week, a single days total could be almost that large. Lawmakers began reviewing the governors $190.3-billion spending plan during the winter, but few decisions are made until they get a look at Aprils tax revenues. The governor will release a revised plan based on the new data next month; lawmakers are required to send him a completed budget no later than June 15. Facebook

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Feinstein war chest tops $10 million while Kevin de Leon struggles to keep pace By Sarah D. Wire Sen. Dianne Feinstein widened her already-massive fundraising advantage in the run-up to Junes primary, raising twice as much in the first quarter than her strongest Senate challenger has sitting in the bank. Feinstein raised $1.3 million between January and March, bringing her war chest to just over $10 million as Californias U.S. Senate race begins in earnest, according Federal Election Commission reports. Former state Senate leader Kevin De Leon, the best known of the more than 30 people who will appear with Feinstein on the June primary ballot, raised just $575,991 in that same period, bringing his cash on hand to $672,331, according to his quarterly FEC report. Read More Facebook

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Trump has met his match, says Gov. Jerry Brown in promoting climate action on a quick trip to Canada By John Myers (Rich Pedroncelli/Associated Press) Gov. Jerry Brown told a Canadian audience Monday that he believes President Trumps efforts to reverse course on climate change policy are a momentary deviation as others in the United States seek limits on greenhouse gas emissions. Thats very temporary, I can assure you, Brown said at a joint event in Toronto with Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne. The governors quick international trip, announced only late last week, comes as Wynnes Liberal Party faces a stiff challenge in Junes election from the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario and its leader, Doug Ford. Critics of Wynnes party have called for Ontario to pull out of the Western Climate Initiative, a cooperative agreement between three Canadian provinces and California on efforts to limit greenhouse gases. Brown sought to link the efforts of Canadian conservatives with Republicans in the United States who oppose existing climate change programs. In contrast, he told the audience, several GOP lawmakers voted last summer to renew Californias cap-and-trade program. I would say to the conservatives of Canada, wake up and see what your friends in California are doing, he said. The Democrat took particular notice of Trumps efforts to shift away from climate change policies from the administration of former President Obama, as well as a push by the Environmental Protection Agency to cancel Californias strict limits on automobile emissions. If Trump tries to change that, well have litigation well beyond his term in office, Brown said while also noting Chinese government efforts to produce more low-emissions vehicles. Between California and China, Trump has met his match. What hes saying is not going to happen. Many of the governors remarks, though, were aimed at the tough political situation in which Wynne finds herself with seven weeks to go before Ontarios parliamentary elections. Dangers abound, but success is right in our hands, Brown said. So dont blow it! Facebook

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California voters are getting to know the states attorney general through his aggressive stance challenging Trump By Patrick McGreevy Less than two months from his first statewide election, California Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra has become adept not only at challenging President Trump but at using the bully pulpit of his office to raise his profile with voters. The aggressive effort may help boost the former Los Angeles congressmans chances at winning a full term in office this fall, almost two years after he was appointed to replace Sen. Kamala Harris in 2017. Appointed by Gov. Jerry Brown, Becerra took office as attorney general four days after Trumps inauguration. Thats afforded him an opportunity to get in front of Californians  and potential voters  on an array of issues including immigration, healthcare and the environment. Read More Facebook

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Gov. Jerry Brown forms commission for 2020 census outreach By Melanie Mason In an effort to make sure California has a strong showing in the next national census, Gov. Jerry Brown on Friday established a state commission to prepare outreach for the decennial count. It is vitally important for California to do everything it can to ensure that every Californian is counted in the upcoming census, Brown said in a prepared statement. The commissions formation comes on the heels of a Trump administration plan to ask about citizenship status as a part of the census. State officials fear that such a question, which has not been asked in a census since 1950, could chill participation among California residents. That could result in the state losing billions of dollars in federal funds and a seat in Congress. The 23-member panel, appointed largely by Brown as well as picks by legislative leaders, comes from private- and public-sector backgrounds, including civil rights groups, religious institutions and educational institutions. Facebook

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Garcetti kicks off Iowa visit with 2020 on his mind and a hardhat on his head LA Mayor - and 2020 prospect - Eric Garcetti makes his Iowa debut at the Carpenters Union Training Center. Fearlessly flaunts the never be photographed in head gear/safety glasses rule. pic.twitter.com/14bUOPXMvF  Mark Z. Barabak (@markzbarabak) April 13, 2018 Facebook

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Asm. Rocky Chavez takes the lead in race to replace Issa, while Doug Applegate slips By Joshua Stewart A new poll shows that Republican Assemblyman Rocky Chavez has taken a clear lead over 15 other candidates running to replace Rep. Darrell Issa in Congress and has overtaken Democrat Doug Applegate, the previous frontrunner. In a SurveyUSA poll by 10News and The San Diego Union-Tribune, Chavez, R-Oceanside, has support of 16 percent of likely voters, putting him ahead of Applegate, a lawyer, who was favored by 12 percent of voters and is in second place. The top two vote-getters in June, regardless of party, will proceed to a November runoff election. Competing with Applegate for the No. 2 spot is Democrat Mike Levin, also a lawyer, with support of 9 percent of voters. Several other candidates were right at his heels. Democratic Businessman Paul Kerr and Board of Equalization Member Diane Harkey, R-Dana Point, were tied for fourth at 8 percent each. Read More Facebook

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Pro-Kevin de Leon group launches ad castigating Dianne Feinstein By Seema Mehta A group that is supporting Kevin de Leons bid for the U.S. Senate launched a blistering ad against Sen. Dianne Feinstein on Thursday, questioning her progressive principles and tying her to President Trump. The ad buy from A Progressive California is minuscule  $10,000 to air it in Los Angeles for one day on CNN and MSNBC during programming such as The Rachel Maddow Show, Hardball with Chris Matthews and Anderson Cooper 360. The minute-long ad features news clips about Feinstein not getting the California Democratic Party endorsement earlier this year, as well as footage of Feinstein saying that Trump can be a good president and appearing to share a laugh with Trump. That moment actually came during a White House meeting in the aftermath of the Parkland, Fla., school shooting when the president suggested an assault weapons ban should be included in a bipartisan bill to expand gun background checks. It also features extensive clips of de Leons speech at the state partys convention. De Leon, who just ended his final term as leader of the state Senate, announced last year he would run against fellow Democrat Feinstein as she seeks her fifth full term. Feinsteins longtime political advisor dismissed the ad, noting the size of the buy. Its not really a buy, said Bill Carrick. Ten thousand dollars in cable in L.A. Poof, its gone. Still, he said he planned to have the campaigns lawyers review the ad to see if it violates campaign law that limits what outside groups like A Progressive California can do. Such groups cannot coordinate with campaigns or candidates, and are limited in how much their messages can support a candidate. Ann Ravel, the former chair of the Federal Election Commission and the California Fair Political Practices Commission, said if the ad was in a state race, she is certain that the state commission would open an investigation into potential coordination with de Leons campaign because of the messaging and the types of footage in the ad. But the bipartisan federal commission cant agree on how to enforce the federal regulations, she said. The problem is [outside groups] understand that given the lack of very strong enforcement at the federal level, theres the ability to stretch the law, she said. A spokeswoman for the FEC declined to comment. Dave Jacobson, a spokesman for A Progressive California, disputed the suggestion that the ad violated campaign law. This frivolous allegation shows that Sen. Feinstein is afraid of the public seeing an ad which showcases her own words, that Donald Trump can be a good president, he said. Facebook

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Dispute over money emerges in campaign to repeal Californias gas tax increase By Patrick McGreevy A motorist prepares to gas up her vehicle in San Rafael, Calif., in 2015. (Justin Sullivan / Getty Images) A proposed initiative to repeal hikes to Californias gas tax has been caught in the middle of a dispute involving Republican rivals in the governors race. Assemblyman Travis Allen, a Republican candidate for governor, decided in January to drop plans for his own initiative and said he would urge supporters to sign a separate petition being supported by several Republican members of Congress. Then last week, the committee Allen formed to finance his ballot measure reported a $300,000 contribution from PISF Inc., a Novato, Calif., real estate firm. Now, an organizer of the still active Give Voters a Voice committee is urging the Allen committee to immediately donate their funds in support of the ongoing signature gathering efforts. There is only one gas tax repeal measure currently in circulation and that is the measure sponsored by the Give Voters a Voice Committee, said Dave Gilliard, a consultant to the group. PISF Inc., he said, gave to repeal taxes aCongress approved a $1.3-trillion spending bill after hours of wrangling and a flurry of unsuccessful Democratic efforts to force legislators to take up a measure to protect young immigrants brought to the country illegally as children.

The vote  late Thursday morning for the House and early Friday for the Senate  came as legislators faced a Friday deadline for a government shutdown. It also came just hours after the release of the 2,232-page bill, meaning that few voting on the measure had a clear idea of what it included, as members openly admitted.

The measure, which passed 256 to 167 in the House and 65 to 32 in the Senate, will go to President Trump, who has promised to sign it. The Senate vote was delayed over objections from a number of senators including Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who complained leaders were trying to push through the bill.

Paul forced an hours-long shutdown in February over a similar complaint that leaders were ramming through a complicated bill.

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Supporters of this bill, which will fund the government through the end of September, said it was the best possible outcome in the current partisan climate.

It is no way a perfect bill, Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Texas), said as he introduced it as a bipartisan achievement. That, I think I learned a long time ago, is hard to get through and signed by the president.

Before the House vote, Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) hefted a foot-tall stack of papers that, along with a second similar-sized stack, represented the bill and its backup documentation. He slammed them onto a table.

I ask any member, any member of this House, to join me in the well if youve read this bill, Hoyer thundered as he demanded a delay in the voting. No one is joining me. Ladies and gentlemen of America, I have not read this bill.

Democrats sought to derail the measure to force the House to vote on their long-delayed effort to protect the young immigrants known as Dreamers from deportation. They had been protected by an Obama administration program that President Trump canceled, but that has been kept operating under a temporary court order pending legal challenges.

But no deal acceptable to Democrats, Republicans and Trump could be put together by the deadline for inclusion in the massive spending bill. Republicans have refused a simple up-or-down vote on protections for Dreamers, and Trump has demanded full funding for his proposed border wall as well as cuts in legal immigration.

When will they have their moment of opportunity, a reprieve from worrying, from looking over their shoulders every day? asked Rep. Darren Soto (D-Fla.). When will the Dreamers finally get to dream?

House and Senate negotiators reached tentative agreement late Wednesday on a deal for the spending bill, which significantly boosts military and domestic spending even as it puts off several issues on which legislators could not find a compromise.

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Among the spending was what Republicans described as the largest boost to the military in 14 years, as well as additional money for domestic programs such as school safety, transportation, education, science and the financing of efforts to blunt opioid abuse.

In a moment that was somewhat jarring given past Republican efforts to curb domestic spending, Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) lauded the measures inclusion of spending for child care programs, scientific research and other items.

Money well spent, he said.

The appropriations bill followed a February deal in which leaders agreed to add tens of billions of dollars to military and non-military spending over the next two years. The new spending levels, if approved by both houses, will begin Saturday.

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Republicans pushed the bill as a way to make up for military cutbacks under Obama-era budget deals. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), introducing the bill in his chamber, noted that it included a 2.4% salary increase for service members.

This has been a top priority on our side of the aisle, he said.

The measure also included a host of measures that gained ground after several recent mass shootings. They included strengthening the national background check system, financing efforts to train school officials to spot potential assailants before they act, and a statement that gives the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention permission to research the impact of gun violence. Since 1996, a spending measure had been interpreted as banning gun research.

Even as members lauded themselves for passage of the long-overdue measure  the funding year has already included five resolutions to keep the government running and two separate shutdowns  antipathy about both the process and the spending included in it was obvious.

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Its not whats in the bill that I have a problem with, its what I dont know is in the bill, said Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) This place is broken, this process stinks.

For some Republicans, the combination of heightened military spending and domestic funding demanded by Democrats was too much. Not only Democrats but some Republicans on Thursday noted that had the bill been put forth under Democratic control of Congress or the White House, Republicans would have reacted with disdain.

Sen. Bob Corker, a Republican from Tennessee who is retiring, said the spending bill could serve as evidence that the Republican Party had lost its soul.

It does have to be a wake-up call for people as to whether thats the case, he said. Im discouraged about where we are today. Im discouraged that we continue to be engaged in generational theft.

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Trump, whose proposed budget was largely ignored by the congressional negotiators, signaled through aides on Thursday that he would sign the measure once it is approved by the Senate.

Is it perfect? No, said Mick Mulvaney, Trumps budget director. Were we ever going to get that? No. Thats not how the process works.

Los Angeles Times staff writer Noah Bierman in Washington contributed to this report.

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For more on politics from Cathleen Decker 

cathleen.decker@latimes.com

Twitter: @cathleendecker

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UPDATES:

9:50 p.m.: The article was updated with Senate passage of the bill and other details.

2:40 p.m.: The article was updated with reactions to the spending bill by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and others.

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The article was originally published at 10 a.m.House and Senate negotiators reached tentative agreement Wednesday on a $1.3-trillion bill that would boost both defense and domestic spending, but at the same time put off solutions to other contentious issues, such as the fate of young immigrants in the country illegally.

The announcement of the deal late Wednesday came two days before the federal government would have been forced to shut down. The House and Senate now face a narrow opening to approve the 2,232-page measure by Friday.

The appropriations bill stemmed from a February deal in which leaders agreed to add tens of billions of dollars to both defense and nondefense spending over the next two years. The new spending levels, if approved by both chambers, will extend through September.

Republicans pushed the bill as a way of boosting defense spending to make up for cutbacks under budget deals formed during the Obama administration.

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This legislation fulfills our pledge to rebuild the United States military, House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) said Wednesday.

Democrats, meanwhile, heralded increases in domestic spending. Those allowances for education, housing, opioid addiction efforts and other federal programs were prompted by the need for Democratic votes to offset expected opposition by fiscal conservatives.

Every bill takes compromise, and there was plenty here, but at the end of the day we Democrats feel very good because so many of our priorities for the middle class were included, Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer said. From opioid funding to rural broadband, and from student loans to child care, this bill puts workers and families first.

The deal was initially expected to be announced no later than Monday night, but was delayed due to disagreements over immigration, healthcare, abortion rights and a long-stalled effort to strengthen the background check system for gun purchasers.

On Wednesday afternoon, Ryan left the Capitol to travel to the White House, where President Trump was said to be waffling over whether to back the deal. Afterward White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders issued a statement of support:

The president had a discussion with Speaker Ryan and Leader McConnell, where they talked about their shared priorities secured in the omnibus spending bill. The president and the leaders discussed their support for the bill, which includes more funds to rebuild the military, such as the largest pay raise for our troops in a decade, more than 100 miles of new construction for the border wall and other key domestic priorities, like combating the opioid crisis and rebuilding our nations infrastructure.

Despite Sanders words, the immigration and border component of the spending bill fell far short of what Trump had promised voters en route to the presidency. It included less than $2 billion in border security funding  much of it restricted, and in any case, below Trumps $25-billion request.

The deal did lean in the presidents direction in a few key areas, omitting specific funding for the Gateway project, an underwater rail tunnel linking New York and New Jersey. The president had demanded that the funding be stripped in what Democrats saw as a slap at one of its strongest supporters, New York Sen. Schumer.

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Among the included elements, according to legislators and others, were three that touched on the national outcry after recent mass shootings: the measure to strengthen the nations background check system, another that provides money for schools to tighten security and train workers to spot potential assailants before they act, and a statement that gives the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention permission to research the impact of gun violence. Since 1996, a spending measure had been interpreted as banning gun research.

Left out, however, were several of the items that were unable to be thrashed out in the final days before the spending bills release. Also not included was an initially bipartisan measure to help buttress the Obamacare health insurance markets.

Also left out was a solution to the fate of the young immigrants in the country illegally because of their parents actions. Until September, they were protected under an Obama administration program, which Trump canceled. Several attempts to craft a deal merging support for the border wall and protection for the Dreamers failed. Many of them are now protected by a court stay which could be lifted at any time.

For all of the talk from Republicans and Democrats since September about rescuing the Dreamers and preventing their deportation, the final omnibus budget gives Trump money for his wall and we get nothing for it, said Rep. Luis V. Gutierrez (D-Ill.). Immigrants and Latinos got run over by the omnibus [spending bill] and we have nothing in return.

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As Latino members discussed their options, the spending bill also came under fire from conservative Republicans over its content and the need to rush it through Congress to prevent a government shutdown.

Congress is about to vote on a $1.6-trillion funding bill, privately written by congressional leaders ... giving members and the public around 24 hours to read its 2,000 pages, said Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), chairman of the conservative House Freedom Caucus. This is the total opposite of what Americans voted for. When will we learn?

The House and Senate are due to leave Washington at the end of the week for a two-week spring break.

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For more on politics from Cathleen Decker 

cathleen.decker@latimes.com

Twitter: @cathleendecker

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6:10 p.m.: This article was updated with more details about the bill.

5:50 p.m.: This article was updated with reaction from House Speaker Paul D. Ryan.

5:40 p.m.: This article was updated to add information on provisions related to gun violence.

This article was originally published at 5:30 p.m.U.S. elections are still vulnerable to digital interference from Russia and other countries, the secretary of Homeland Security warned Wednesday, a reminder that state and federal officials have struggled to fix potential gaps even as voters begin casting ballots in primary contests.

The threat of interference remains and we recognize that the 2018 midterms and future elections are clearly potential targets for Russian hacking attempts, Kirstjen Nielsen testified to the Senate Intelligence Committee.

President Trump has said little about the challenge, but Nielsens concerns echo recent warnings by leaders of the nations intelligence agencies. Her department plays a central role in efforts to safeguard the countrys critical infrastructure, including election systems.

Addressing the threat will require unraveling a thicket of overlapping issues, including who will pay to purchase more-secure voting machines and how much the federal government should intervene in elections managed by individual states.

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The public hearing was part of the Senate panels investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, which U.S. officials say included attempts to hack election systems in 21 states. One states voter database was breached, but theres reportedly no evidence that any votes were affected.

In 2016, states faced a threat they never expected to confront  a hostile nation seeking to invade networks essential to the functioning of our democracy, said Sen. Richard M. Burr (R-N.C.), the committees chairman.

The panel had issued several recommendations before the hearing, highlighting the need for stiffer defenses against foreign interference and better communication between local and state officials.

Sen. Richard M. Burr, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, arrives at Wednesdays hearing followed by Sen. Mark R. Warner, the panels top Democrat. (Andrew Harnik / Associated Press )

Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) described the Russian operation, which the Kremlin has denied, as an apparent test to see how much damage could be done to American democracy.

It was a sophisticated, thorough, comprehensive, malign and malicious attack on our electoral system, he said.

Since then, local and state leaders tasked with running polling places and counting ballots have seen their roles expand and evolve.

Some election officials have gained security clearances so Washington can share intelligence on potential threats, or have participated in hackathons to explore digital vulnerabilities in their systems.

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The nations election infrastructure is decentralized, with states maintaining separate voter databases and using different machines. That reduces the possibility that hackers can cause widespread problems during a campaign.

But the diffuse system has made it hard to implement sweeping digital upgrades to safeguard ballots, and to determine who is responsible for handling problems.

The threat also fell in a seam of our national intelligence infrastructure, Burr said, and required unusual coordination between experts in Washington who analyze classified data on foreign threats and thousands of election officials around the country.

The states need more help, said Eric Rosenbach, co-director of the Harvard Kennedy Schools Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. They are not equipped to face the pointy end of the spear.

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Congress hasnt approved any funds to help states upgrade cybersecurity or replace old voting machines. Five states still use machines that dont print a paper record of each vote, leaving no way to check if a digital tally has been sabotaged.

If theres no way to audit the election, that is absolutely a national security concern, said Nielsen, the head of Homeland Security.

Follow live coverage of the Trump administration on Essential Washington 

Sen. Mark R. Warner of Virginia, the committees top Democrat, said the federal government should consider identifying which states arent taking the appropriate steps to protect election systems.

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I believe the public does have a right to know if their state or their community is ignoring the problem, Warner said.

U.S. officials have not publicly identified the 21 states that were targeted in 2016, and only a few have acknowledged attempted digital breaches.

Americas the victim, said Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-San Francisco), who urged the Homeland Security Department to do more. America has to know whats wrong. If there are states that have been attacked, America must know that.

Trump often has downplayed the Russian interference or denied Moscows role altogether. He gave a rare acknowledgment of the problem in response to a question at a March 6 news conference with the visiting Swedish prime minister.

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You dont want your system of votes to be compromised in any way, Trump said. And we wont allow that to happen. Were doing a very, very deep study, and were coming out with some, I think, very strong suggestions.

But senators from both parties expressed concern Wednesday that action has been slow.

I hear no sense of urgency to really get on top of this issue, said Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine).

chris.megerian@latimes.com | Twitter: @chrismegerian

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evan.halper@latimes.com | Twitter: @evanhalper

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As foreign hackers plot next attack, Washington struggles to shore up vulnerable voting systems

McCabe firing isnt likely to end Trumps war with the Justice Department and FBIPresident Trumps legal team and strategy for the sprawling Russia investigation appeared in disarray Thursday after the lawyer negotiating a possible presidential interview with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III abruptly resigned.

The departure of John Dowd, who served as a Justice Department prosecutor before he became a white-collar defense attorney, leaves unclear who will guide Trump through a crucial stage of a criminal case that threatens his administration.

The move follows Trumps decision Monday to hire Joseph DiGenova, a Washington lawyer who has publicly accused the FBI and Justice Department of trying to frame the president with false charges, signaling a more combative response to the Mueller investigation.

The upheaval in Trumps legal team reflects the broader chaos in the White House, where turnover is at record levels. In recent weeks, Trump fired his secretary of State, his communications director quit and some senior aides were ordered to leave after problems with security clearances.

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Mueller is investigating whether Trump campaign aides colluded with Russian meddling in the 2016 election, and whether the president obstructed justice after taking office by trying to derail the criminal inquiry.

The investigation has resulted in criminal charges against 19 people so far, including four former Trump advisors. Three of the four, including former White House national security advisor Michael Flynn, have pleaded guilty and are cooperating with Mueller, although none of their charges involves illegal collusion with Russia.

In recent months, Dowd has led negotiations with Muellers team over whether prosecutors will be able to interview Trump, and under what conditions. Trump said Thursday he remained committed to speaking with Mueller, a step that he hoped could bring to a close an investigation he has called a witch hunt.

Yes, I would like to, Trump said in response to a reporters question at the White House.

The president has clearly chafed as the Mueller investigation has continued, despite assurances from his lawyers that it would wrap up by the end of last year. Trump publicly attacked Mueller by name for the first time on Saturday.

The Mueller probe should never have been started in that there was no collusion and there was no crime, he said on Twitter.

Trump also accused Mueller, a Republican who served as FBI director under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, of stocking his team with 13 hardened Democrats and zero Republicans.

The swerving between cooperation and truculence has reflected how Trump has handled the investigation, leaving even some allies scratching their heads. By most accounts, the president is not an easy client, trusting his gut instincts instead of expert guidance and freelancing opinions from a variety of sources.

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Trump is also represented by Jay Sekulow, a conservative attorney, and Ty Cobb, who works in the White House. In a statement, Sekulow praised Dowd as a valuable member of our legal team and vowed to press forward.

We will continue our ongoing representation of the president and our cooperation with the Office of Special Counsel, Sekulow said.

Since taking office, Trump has struggled to hire the kind of seasoned lawyers who normally relish a chance to work directly for a president.

This week, Theodore Olson, who served as U.S. solicitor general under President George W. Bush and is one of Washingtons most respected litigators, declined an offer to join Trumps team, according to a source with knowledge of the exchange.

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Trump has tried to downplay the obvious turmoil in his legal lineup.

The Failing New York Times purposely wrote a false story stating that I am unhappy with my legal team on the Russia case and am going to add another lawyer to help out. Wrong. I am VERY happy with my lawyers, he said on Twitter on March 11.

President Trump at a White House forum on Thursday. (Manuel Balce Ceneta / Associated Press )

Eight days later, he hired DiGenova, who had appeared on Fox News to denounce the investigation into the president.

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It wasnt the Russians who corrupted the presidential election, DiGenova said on March 7. It was the American officials at the Department of Justice and the FBI.

Dowd, 77, had taken a more low-key approach.

Hes not a television lawyer. Hes not a guy who takes his case public, Alan Dershowitz, a constitutional and criminal law scholar who is an emeritus professor at Harvard Law School. He writes reports, he works inside, he produces documents.

Dowd is perhaps best known for investigating gambling allegations against former baseball star Pete Rose. After the publication of Dowds report, Rose was banned from Major League Baseball.

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The president hired Dowd in June when Marc Kasowitz, a lawyer who had represented Trump for years in New York, was playing a lead role in managing the Mueller investigation. Dowd was supposed to serve in an advisory capacity to Kasowitz, who had less experience in Washington, according to a source familiar with the legal team.

He was viewed as an elder statesman, the source said. He was not supposed to be in charge.

Follow live coverage of the Trump administration on Essential Washington 

That changed when Kasowitz left the team in July and Dowd took on a more central role in dealing with Mueller.

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But Dowd ended up generating his own controversy. Last year he raised eyebrows by arguing it wasnt legally possible for Trump to obstruct justice by interfering with the Russia investigation. As president, Dowd argued, Trump had executive authority over the Justice Department and thus could issue any orders to them.

He also claimed to have written a Twitter message where Trump suggested he knew Flynn had lied to FBI agents when he fired him. The message was potentially problematic because it implied the president knew his former national security advisor was under criminal scrutiny when he ousted FBI Director James B. Comey.

Last week, after Atty. Gen. Jeff Sessions fired former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, a frequent target of Trumps anger, Dowd said the last-minute dismissal  26 hours before McCabe had planned to retire  set a courageous example and the Justice Department should bring an end to Muellers investigation.

Dowd initially said he spoke on behalf of the president, but later said he spoke only for himself. Trumps other lawyers quickly insisted they were still cooperating with Mueller.

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Amid the confusion, Dowd stepped down Thursday with only kind words for Trump. I love the president and wish him well, he said.

UPDATES:

3:05 p.m.: The article was updated with additional details about Trumps legal team and strategy.

10:15 a.m.: The article was updated with a comment from President Trump.

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9:05 a.m.: The article was updated with staff reporting.

The article was originally published at 8:30 a.m.Civil rights lawyer Valerie McGinty founded a political action committee late last year to help boost the low numbers of women serving in the California Legislature. It launched in Los Angeles with an additional objective: backing women pursuing the seats left empty by men whose careers were ended by sexual harassment accusations.

Women in California and nationwide have jumped into political races in high numbers since the election of President Trump, and still more female candidates have been inspired to run as the national #MeToo movement brought attention to the need to reverse a culture of sexual misconduct in the political world. The overall mission is to reach gender parity in state representation by 2028, and with the new momentum, McGinty says, that is more within reach than ever.

These arent just seat gains, McGinty said of the latest endorsements from her group, called Fund Her. This is an opportunity to come out of the gate with a strong statement.

Fund Her, which held its official launch event Thursday in Beverly Hills, is focused on promoting progressive women. McGinty said it is the first political action committee with a mission of its kind and will collaborate with Emerge California and Close the Gap California, two other political organizations with the same goal in mind to train and recruit women to run for office.

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We know politics is about building the bench, McGinty said. We might be famous for our diversity at the federal level. But then you lift up the hood and look at the state level and think, Oh my God.

The group was formed in a year that saw the number of women in the California Legislature drop lower than it has been in two decades, even as both its chambers became slightly more racially and ethnically diverse.

Of the 89 members in office, the total number of female legislators dropped by four and stood at 27 at the end of 2016, according to an analysis of preliminary election results from the California Research Bureau. There had not been fewer women in office since 1991-92, and only in 1997-98 had the figure been equally low, the report found.

In the states 53-member congressional delegation, three of the 19 female representatives left office in 2016. Two were replaced by men. (Both of Californias U.S. senators are female.)

This spring, Fund Her is supporting Luz Rivas, an electrical engineer and nonprofit leader, in the race to replace former state Assemblyman Raul Bocanegra (D-Pacoima), who resigned in November amid a sexual misconduct investigation after multiple women accused him of making unwanted sexual advances. The Assembly probe found that he likely acted inappropriately toward subordinates as chief of staff to then-Assemblyman Felipe Fuentes. There are six Democrats and one Republican running in the race for the San Fernando Valley district.

Fund Her also is endorsing Tricia Robbins Kasson, an urban planner and economic development director who is vying for the former state Assembly seat of Matt Dababneh. Dababneh (D-Woodland Hills) resigned in December after multiple women accused him of sexual misconduct, including nonconsensual sex and masturbating in front of a lobbyist. The former Assemblyman has denied any inappropriate behavior. Eight candidates are now vying to replace him, most of them Democrats, in a district that covers the west San Fernando Valley, including the affluent communities of Encino, Tarzana and Woodland Hills.

In these races, female candidates could benefit from women motivated to head to the polls and vote for other women in the #MeToo era. Instead of making the campaigns about the harassment investigations, women running have centered their campaigns on their qualifications and the issues they care about  such as school safety and education  not their gender.

And not all of this years sexual misconduct cases have been against men. Assemblywoman Cristina Garcia has denied accusations against her but voluntarily went on unpaid leave in February while an investigation takes place. She faces seven Democrats and one Republican in her district, which spans from Montebello to Cerritos in the south.

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The new political action committee has not taken a position in Garcias case, and not all of its efforts are related to recent sexual harassment claims at the Capitol. Its third endorsement this year is for Sydney Kamlager, a trustee for the Los Angeles Community College District who seeks to replace former state Assemblyman Sebastian Ridley-Thomas (D-Los Angeles) after he abruptly resigned in December, citing health reasons.

Fund Her is not getting involved in congressional efforts.

The California Legislature ranks 32nd in the nation in gender parity, according to the Eagleton Institute of Politics, a research division at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

State officials said the number of women in elected positions dropped because more than a third of the Legislatures 30 female members left at the end of 2016 due to term limits or personal reasons. The only demographic group not to see a decrease in the number of women were Latinas, which doubled their ranks from five to 10 lawmakers. Latino legislative leaders have said that was due in part to a coordinated effort to promote female candidates and close the gender gap.

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Other women faced the typical barriers. Many do not have the financial resources or knowledge to build strong ground campaigns, or the ability to raise money for campaign mailers, television and social media ads or neighborhood walkouts.

Its not that women cant do it, they just havent necessarily been exposed to it, said state Sen. Connie M. Leyva (D-Chino), vice chair of the California Legislative Womens Caucus.

Then theres the confidence factor. We always question, Can I do the job? Will I be good at the job?  Leyva said. I dont think men ask themselves that.

California Assemblyman Raul Bocanegra speeds up his resignation to immediately following harassment allegations 

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Female lawmakers and political consultants say the tides appear to be shifting. This week, Toni Atkins made history in taking the oath as president pro tempore of the California Senate, two years after serving as speaker of the Assembly. Shes the first legislator to hold both leadership posts since 1871.

Fund Her also supported its first winning candidate last year: state Assemblywoman Wendy Carrillo, the daughter of immigrants and a former radio show host who won a special election in Los Angeles in December. She will serve out the term of former Assemblyman Jimmy Gomez, who was elected to Congress last year in his own special election to replace Xavier Becerra, now state attorney general.

Assemblywoman Susan Talamantes Eggman (D-Stockton), interim chair of the state womens caucus, said she hopes the changes will mark the next generation.

We have been serving in all kinds of ways, often behind the scenes, she said. But more and more, women need to be at the table.

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jazmine.ulloa@latimes.com

Twitter: @jazmineullo

ALSO:

With late nights and booze a staple of political conventions, they have evolved after #MeToo

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California lawmakers have fought sexual misconduct on military bases, farms and college campuses. Will they police their own house?

Group that first raised sexual harassment issues in Sacramento now has an app to report misconduct

Updates on California politicsA gymnasium on Los Angeles Eastside is an odd setting for a Republican summit, but it offered the kind of symbolism former Assembly Republican leader Chad Mayes is seeking these days: For the GOP to stay relevant in California, it has to try something new.

So somewhere new is where Mayes, former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Ohio Gov. John Kasich found themselves Wednesday at the first meeting of Mayes centrist advocacy group New Way California. He started it after he stepped down as the leader of his Assembly caucus last summer amid criticism for helping Democrats renew Californias landmark climate program.

The event was a sort of coming-out party for the group, aimed at articulating a different path for the Republican Party as it continues on a slow slide toward irrelevancy in the state. There are about as many registered Republican voters in California as there are voters with no party affiliation, according to the most recent figures.

How exactly the new way for the GOP in California will take shape is unclear. Mayes said the group is still coming together.

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We are just at the point now where we are getting people together and trying to organize those  I call them rational Republicans and centrists  and to provide a place for them, Mayes told The Times. We are engaging in this idea that you can be a Republican and you can be with us on 50% of the issues or 60% of the issues; you dont have to be with us 100% of the time.

They dont plan to support or oppose candidates for this years election, but a think tank is in the works, Mayes said.

Schwarzenegger suggested that donors could cut off fundraising for the state GOP if the party does not take more moderate stances on issues like healthcare, education or the environment.

On Wednesday, they didnt mention President Trump by name but attacked the brash and divisive style that has become a hallmark of his presidency.

The old way yearns for a false nostalgia of the past; the new way is hopeful and embraces the future, Mayes said. The old way burns bridges and erects walls; the new way builds bridges and opens doors. The old way governs by fear; the new way leads with courage and love.

Updates on California politics 

Schwarzenegger also jabbed at Trump without mentioning his name.

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The politics of division and anger and resentment can drive a strong base to the polls, but it is tearing our country apart at the seams and nothing is getting done, he said.

Kasich, who has been a fierce critic of Trump since the two clashed in the 2016 GOP presidential primary, made a pitch for civility.

What is happening increasingly in our country is people dont feel a connection with each other, and they dont know who is going to help them, he said. People have to believe that we care about one another.

Kasich has toured the country promoting his new book and is the subject of speculation about whether he will challenge Trump for the presidency in 2020. He only fed the speculation with his comments Wednesday.

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The Republican Party is my vehicle; it has never been my master, he said. And it is my job to lead the party. And it is my job in a tug of war to pull us ... to caring about people.

With a mural of former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger as a backdrop, Ohio Gov. John Kasich records a message after the event. (Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times )

Other GOP politicians showed up for the event, including Oceanside Assemblyman Rocky Chavez, who has built a reputation as a moderate and faced heat when he helped pass an extension of the states cap-and-trade system. Chavez is running for retiring GOP Rep. Darrell Issas House district, which is among several that have been trending toward Democrats in Southern California.

It remains to be seen how the groups push for more moderation will be received by the partys rank and file.

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Ron Nehring, former chairman of the California Republican Party, criticized the group during the summit. Elites talking down to grassroots voters once again, he wrote on Twitter.

Kasich offered support for Mayes and other California Republicans involved in New Way during a question-and-answer session with party members, activists and operatives.

Help these folks. Help Chad, Kasich said. It is going to be lonely for a while.

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javier.panzar@latimes.com

Twitter: jpanzar

ALSO:

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Updates on California politics

Live coverage from the campaign trailAfter 168 years of statehood, the California Senate finally agreed to be led by a woman.

But, after all, women have only been allowed to vote in California for 107 years.

Its the first time  and its about time, Sen. Toni Atkins (D-San Diego) told legislators and VIP guests after being sworn in Wednesday as the new leader by California Supreme Court Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye.

Atkins, 55, also became the first legislator who has come out as gay to be elected Senate president pro tem.

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We must ensure that every person living in California  no matter how they look, who they love or where their parents were born  can climb lifes ladder, live out loud and be whoever they want to be without being demeaned, downsized or discriminated against, she said.

There was a time not so long ago when LGBTQ politicians felt compelled to hide who they were, fearing voter rejection. A half-century ago, new Gov. Ronald Reagans chief of staff was forced to resign when colleagues learned he was gay and engineered a coup. In the 1990s, the Assembly engaged in a few torturous, embarrassing debates over gay rights, some of the rhetoric unprintable.

But by 2014, cultural attitudes had shifted dramatically. Atkins was elected Assembly speaker and walked down the chambers center aisle hand in hand with her spouse en route to being sworn in. Afterward the couple kissed at the podium in front of news cameras. That was an eye-opener. If it happened Wednesday, no one seemed to notice.

Atkins was only the third woman elected Assembly speaker.

What did she learn as speaker that will help her as Senate leader? The focus on colleagues is really important, she told me. It really takes consensus to get things done.

Ive learned a little more patience. I think Im calmer. I feel self-confidence that I may know what Im doing. Well see. And I feel stronger about following my own instincts.

California still hasnt elected a woman governor. Many other states have, so were not always as cutting-edge as we claim.

Atkins did make some other history Wednesday. She became the first former Assembly speaker in 146 years to be elected Senate leader.

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That says a lot about Atkins pleasant, nonthreatening personality. Traditionally, there has been so much animosity between the Senate and Assembly, no former speaker could be elected by senators to be their leader. But she gets along with almost everyone.

More from George Skelton 

I dont care at all about the old fights and frictions, she said in her speech. I know our houses have some differences: red carpet versus green.

She earlier told me that one of her top priorities is to heal the wounds between the two houses. She has great respect for Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon (D-Paramount), Atkins said. I think we can do this differently.

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That feeling of friendship and respect toward Rendon might seem extraordinary to many legislative watchers since the speaker killed Atkins big state-run, single-payer health insurance bill last year. He called it woefully incomplete, which it unquestionably was.

The Senate-passed bill included no financing plan, but would have cost an astronomical $400 billion a year. It envisioned the Trump administration turning over all federal Medicare and Medicaid money to the state. Dream on.

Atkins indicated to me she isnt giving up on the cause of universal healthcare, but realizes that a state-run, single-payer plan isnt achievable in the short term. Shell try to take incremental steps.

Coverage of California politics 

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Some of the issues around this are very polarizing, she said. Its polarizing within the Democratic caucus.

Like most people, especially political leaders, Atkins was strongly influenced by her upbringing. She spent her early years in a little four-room house in rural southern Virginia with no indoor plumbing and a rain barrel to collect water. The bathroom was an outhouse. They cooked on a wood stove. Her father was a coal and lead miner, her mother a seamstress.

We grew up incredibly poor, she once told me. I didnt go to a dentist until I was 24 years old. And I had buck teeth.

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But despite the problems of poverty, I knew my parents loved me.

She was the first of her family to graduate from college, a small liberal arts school in Virginia, Emory and Henry. She paid for college with grants, scholarships and loans.

After college, she moved to San Diego to care for her pregnant twin sister, whose Navy husband was shipping out. Id always wanted to live in California.

She helped run a womens health center, became a policy analyst for a San Diego City Council member and eventually was elected to the council, then the Assembly.

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Not surprisingly, given Atkins childhood, her top priority in the Legislature has been affordable housing. Last year, after a long struggle, she pushed through a bill to impose a $75 fee on many real estate documents. Its expected to raise $250 million annually to pay for affordable housing construction.

Except for the fact they both grew up in poverty, Atkins is a polar opposite of her predecessor, the termed out Sen. Kevin de Leon (D-Los Angeles).

De Leon can be charming, too, but hes instinctively more aggressive and outspoken, and sometimes grating. Atkins has a soft demeanor, but is tough inside. In that way, shes more like Speaker Rendon.

Itll be a new era at the Capitol. Maybe a calmer one.

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george.skelton@latimes.com

Follow @LATimesSkelton on TwitterIn the 15 years since it was found in an abandoned mining town in Chiles Atacama Desert, the bizarre 6-inch skeleton has inspired fervid speculation, including theories of unearthly origins.

It had 10 pairs of ribs  two fewer than the normal human complement  and an elongated skull with a pronounced point. Despite its diminutive size, the proportion of its limbs and torso suggested this was a human. Was this a stillborn baby? A nonhuman primate of some sort? An alien being?

Now, genetic science has given these mummified remains a species (Homo sapiens), a gender (female), an age (she probably died shortly after birth) and as many as 52 genetic clues to her extreme physical abnormalities (her bones appear to have aged at an accelerated pace).

Not surprisingly, it has also narrowed her ancestry to a mix of peoples typical of those who settled the remote corner of Chile in which her remains were found lovingly tucked into a pouch. Her genes suggest her ancestry was largely European and, to a lesser extent, East Asian.

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The mummified skeleton has been called Ata, and, starting roughly four years ago, researchers from Stanford University and UC San Francisco isolated and purified its DNA from marrow inside its tiny, preserved bones. Then they put a new generation of genetic sequencing technology to work.

Some of the genetic mutations they found have not been recorded before  not so surprising in a field in which the function of most genes, and of whole genetic regions, remains a mystery. Some mutations were probably carried and bequeathed by one parent only. Others appear to have been contributed by both.

Still other mutations may have arisen spontaneously  a mystery that, in the absence of Atas parents genes, will probably endure.

But among the welter of mutations they found were half a dozen or more abnormalities in genes known to be associated with conditions such as dwarfism, scoliosis and musculoskeletal abnormalities. During fetal development, and possibly in the few days of life she probably survived, those appear to have caused her bones to fuse and age at an unusual pace.

By the time she succumbed, probably to breathing or feeding difficulties or complications of a likely premature birth, the infants bones and the ways in which they had fused gave her the skeletal structure of a child between 6 and 8 years old.

A close-up of the girls skull. (Emery Smith )

The number of mutations affecting bone structure and growth was well beyond what youd expect by chance, said Stanford researcher Garry Nolan, the first academic researcher to be called in on the Ata case.

The authors of the study, published Thursday in the journal Genome Research, speculated that the nitrate mining that had drawn settlers to the region in which Ata was found may have exposed her pregnant mother to some environmental toxin that contributed to the genetic wreckage.

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But it may as easily have been a chance event.

When it came to genetic mutations affecting the structure and growth of bones, said Nolan, the child won a sort of grim lottery, which unfortunately was a death sentence.

Its rare  very, very rare to find so many mutations related to the same systems in a single person, he said. But if you roll the dice enough times youre going to come up snake eyes. And thats what happened with this unfortunate child.

Nolan was first asked by a documentary filmmaker to consult on the case of Atas remains, which had made their way into a private collection in Barcelona, Spain. The producers of the film, titled Sirius, suggested it was evidence of alien life on Earth.

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This ended up on our doorstop like a basket, said Nolan, who directs the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institutes Proteomics Center for Systems Immunology at Stanford. It first was a curiosity. Then, it became a learning opportunity, a chance to ask questions without presupposing an answer.

Dr. Matthew L. Warman, an expert on skeletal genetic disorders at Boston Childrens Hospital and Harvard University, cautioned that although the researchers identified known and novel genetic variants, they are far from knowing what role, if any, they played in Atas many abnormalities.

Its possible that the genetic variants identified in the new research could be responsible for one or more of Atas abnormalities, said Warman, who was not involved in the study. But if he were advising Atas bereaved parents or immediate relatives on what her genetic condition told them about their own risks, I would be very cautious to use any of the data presented in this paper to draw any conclusions, he said.

These data by themselves, other than telling me that Ata is female, human and likely of Chilean descent, do not help me understand why she appears as she does, says Warman.

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Even with so many unanswered questions, the remains of a child like Ata can offer scientists some valuable lessons about genetics, said Dr. Atul Butte, who conducted the DNA sequencing for the new study.

Kids come in all the time now with unusual syndromes, and we use genetic analysis to help explain what were seeing, said Butte, a professor of medicine and expert in pediatric genetic diseases at UC San Francisco. Most of the time were looking for one gene thats gone wrong.

What geneticists are learning, Butte said, is that you shouldnt stop at one. There might be many mutations that contribute to an observed abnormality. It happens, as Atas case seems to demonstrate.

We tend to love Occams razor, the philosophical principle that challenges scientists to look for the simplest explanation to a problem, Butte said. But maybe theres more than one thing wrong.

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Nolan, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Stanford, sees other lessons emerging from Atas tiny remains. By offering evidence for the combined effects of recognized genetic mutations, the study of Ata might guide medical scientists in devising ways to grow bone more quickly. Or it may prompt geneticists to devise a prenatal test that could diagnose some or all of Atas abnormalities at the fetal stage, he said.

Nolan said it certainly gives scientists an instructive case study in one of genetic sciences thorniest problems: how to align what they find in the genes with the traits they see in the person (in scientific parlance, how to link genotype with phenotype).

Butte is deeply cautious about scientists ability to do that anytime soon.

In his day job, he has seen a single genetic mutation in children with grievous abnormalities, and mutations in entire chunks of DNA in children with few, if any, negative effects.

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I still dont think we understand how unusual normal humans can be, Butte said. There still could be very many differences in humans than we understand. If its not humbling it should be humbling. Were not even close to that yet.

melissa.healy@latimes.com

@LATMelissaHealy

MORE IN SCIENCE

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The Great Pacific Garbage Patch counts 1.8 trillion pieces of trash, mostly plastic

Modified Pap tests can show early warning signs of other gynecological cancers

Scientists build a robotic fish to spy on ocean life

UPDATES:

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1:45 p.m.: This story has been updated with comments from Dr. Matthew L. Warman of Boston Childrens Hospital.

This story was originally published at 10 a.m.The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is getting greater. Twice the size of Texas, the floating mass of about 79,000 metric tons of plastic is up to 16 times larger than previously thought, according to scientists who performed an aerial survey.

The results, published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports, reveal that this plastic blight in the Pacific Ocean is still growing at what the researchers called an exponential pace.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, or GPGP for short, is an accumulation of junk that has collected in the waters between California and Hawaii. The concentration of floating plastic in the patch ranges from tens to hundreds of kilograms per square kilometer. But much of it is hidden from the naked eye, partly because some of the plastic has been broken down into smaller and smaller bits over time. (It is not, as its name may suggest, an island.)

Its quite frightening, said lead author Laurent Lebreton, an oceanographer with the Ocean Cleanup Foundation based in the Netherlands. Out in the stretch of these blue seas, were so far from any human activity, theres nothing out there, and we still leave traces as a society.

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Researchers modeled the mass concentration of plastic in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which has grown to twice the size of Texas. (Ocean Cleanup )

The GPGP is just one of many large garbage patches in the worlds oceans, seeded and fed by humans who manufacture and then discard plastic products.

Plastics are meant to last, and thats great for carrying your groceries in thin bags or holding a six-pack. Its not so great when those plastics end up in the guts of sea turtles or strangle birds.

Large or small, plastics of all sizes can harm ocean life. Recent studies show that biofouled plastic can attract fish and seabirds and end up in the food chain. While the full effects of this arent yet known, scientists worry that this can lead to malnutrition and other problems.

Researchers have tried to get a handle on the GPGP by dragging nets through parts of the patch and sampling the plastic they find. But this only gives them a partial view. For one thing, a team of boats can only see so much. For another, the mouths of the samplers they use are often too small to catch larger pieces of debris.

A piece of floating debris snagged during an ocean sampling operation. (Ocean Cleanup )

Lebreton and his colleagues decided a birds-eye view would help. The scientist recalled how it felt to fly low over this expanse of ocean, so far from human civilization, and still see its mark.

It is a deep blue ocean, the water is super clear, and you just see all those things just floating around, he said. It just feels so random.

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In addition to their aerial surveys, the team also dispatched boats to sample the debris and bring it back to shore for analysis.

The researchers split the plastic they collected into four size categories: microplastic (0.05 to 0.5 centimeters), mesoplastic (0.5 to 5 cm), macroplastic (5 to 50 cm) and megaplastic (bigger than 50 cm).

Previous accounts of the debris have focused on the amount of microplastics in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. In this analysis, microplastics did make up 94% of the estimated 1.8 trillion pieces in the patch, but they only accounted for 8% of the total mass.

More than three-quarters of the junk actually came from larger fragments: mesoplastic and macroplastic.

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Plastic samples collected during a 2015 expedition by the Ocean Cleanup. ( Ocean Cleanup )

Part of the reason that larger plastics outweighed the other categories was the preponderance of fishing nets, which accounted for 46% of the garbage patchs mass. Fishing nets are made to be durable, and when they float through the ocean, they entangle and kill animals in their path.

Fifty plastic items had readable production dates: One from 1977, seven from the 1980s, 17 from the 1990s, 24 from the 2000s and one from 2010. (Its not clear how long these items were actually in the water, Lebreton pointed out.) Some 386 pieces had words from nine different languages  a third were in Japanese and a third were in Chinese.

The researchers think some of the patchs recent growth may have been fueled by the 2011 Tohoku tsunami, which reportedly washed 4.5 million metric tons of debris into the sea. Scientists estimate that more than 30% of it could have been moved across the ocean surface.

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The plastic that lived in the patch also shared certain characteristics, such as a small surface-to-volume ratio. Plastics with high surface-to-volume ratios, such as sheets and films, were probably biofouled or broken down into smaller fragments that did make it into the patch.

None of this, of course, counts all the plastics that may have sunk to the bottom of the ocean.

Levels of plastic pollution in deep water layers and seafloor below the GPGP remain unknown, the study authors wrote.

Thats the next step, Lebreton said  to measure how much plastic lies far below the surface.

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To read this article in Spanish click here

amina.khan@latimes.com

Follow @aminawrite on Twitter for more science news and like Los Angeles Times Science & Health on Facebook.

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10:25 a.m.: This story has been updated with additional details and comment from Laurent Lebreton.

This story was originally published at 7:00 a.m.Jim Clarke wrote an autobiography about his decades of service in the U.S. Navy to give a voice to the militarys construction battalions who literally lay the foundations of national security.

A Seabee Journey spans the Costa Mesa residents nearly 40 years with the Navy, including his deployments to exotic locations in the Western Pacific and what comes off as an almost comical bureaucracy of the U.S. government. According to Clarke, most military memoirs are written by commissioned officers, not enlisted service members like the retired senior builder chief.

I thought a book written by an enlisted [man] would be helpful, Clarke, 83, said.

Clarke wrote A Seabee Journey while he was recovering in a Navy hospital for two weeks after throwing out his back while swinging a sledgehammer doing roadwork at the base on Okinawa Island. He was inspired to write a memoir after reading All the Ships at Sea, a naval officers account of fighting in the Pacific during World War II.

The book was essentially a collection of anecdotes about life in the U.S. Navy. Clarke realized almost immediately that he had plenty of interesting stories to share including one he almost didnt survive.

He tells of the time he was chatting with a group of fellow Seabees on the base at Okinawa when a sailor came out of the jungle carrying a World War II-era naval cannon shell. He proceeded to drop the 2-foot long, corroded explosive at the sailors feet.

Each one of them cursed and flung himself as far away as possible. If the shell went off they all would have been dead. As the senior enlisted man in the group, Clarke cussed out the sailor and named that chapter Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition.

Clarkes introduction to the military came in 1952 when he went to work with his civilian stepfather on a construction site at Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center Twentynine Palms. While operating a bulldozer on the base, Clarkes stepfather, Clyde, suffered devastating injuries to his leg, which required amputation.

A naval construction inspector visited the family in the hospital and offered to write the 18-year-old a letter to help streamline his enlistment. Clarke had previously been put on a waiting list when he tried to enlist because the nearest recruiting center had already met its monthly quota.

I think it was providence, Clarke said. The guy said he could get me in. It was the best thing ever to happen to me.

Jim Clarkes memoir, A Seabee Journey, is a collection of anecdotes about his service in the Navy. (Scott Smeltzer / Staff Photographer )

Clarkes Cold War era service with the so-called Seabees started with helping build the American military base in Okinawa, Japan, which is still a critical hub for U.S. forces in the Western Pacific. These construction battalions became famous in the wake of the 1944 John Wayne film, The Fighting Seabees.

After leaving active military service, Clarke was briefly employed in the local aerospace industry before its collapse. At his wifes suggestion, he applied for a faculty position with the construction technology department at Orange Coast College. He was interested in getting into education because he always found fulfillment in teaching younger sailors during his military service.

I had really wanted to go to work for a construction company but I went with this for the potential for growth, Clarke said.

He advanced from an entry-level adjunct position at OCC to full professorship and ultimately became chairman of his department.

Clarke now lives in a senior living community and serves as an elder at his church. He was recently surprised by an invitation from his pastor to deliver a sermon to the congregation even though he has no seminary training.

But perhaps there is some lesson he can share from his unrelenting determination to publish his book, even after learning from his publisher that he needed to retype the entire manuscript because the original word processor he used was outdated.

I didnt do it for money, Clarke said. I did it to see if I could get the book done.

A Seabee Journey is available on amazon.com, Google Books, and dorrancepublishing.com.

Daniel Langhorne is a contributor to Times Community News.As an estimated 500,000 demonstrators prepare to march in Washington, D.C., on Saturday to protest gun violence, rallies also are scheduled in Huntington Beach and Laguna Beach to coincide with it.

The March for Our Lives, which organizers say has prompted more than 800 other planned demonstrations worldwide, was scheduled soon after the Feb. 14 shooting at a high school in Parkland, Fla., that killed 17 people. The march is intended to demand congressional action to stem gun violence and improve school safety.

It also follows a series of nationwide student walkouts March 14 to honor the Parkland victims and urge further gun controls.

The local rallies Saturday will begin at 10 a.m., according to the March for Our Lives website.

Marchers in Huntington Beach plan to walk from Lake Park at 1035 11th St. to City Hall at 2000 Main St.

The Laguna Beach event is set for Main Beach at 107 S. Coast Hwy.

Other rallies in Orange County are planned in Santa Ana, Irvine, Brea, Fullerton and San Clemente, according to the website.

The marches will be the same day the Crossroads of the West Gun Show begins its two-day run at the OC Fair & Event Center in Costa Mesa. The show offers visitors the chance to buy guns, ammunition and accessories as well as peruse collections of antique and military-style firearms.

Its the second time recently that the show, which is held multiple times a year at the fairgrounds, has had its scheduled opening come soon after a mass shooting. In October, it was held the weekend after the massacre at a Las Vegas music festival that killed 58 people and wounded hundreds.

Gun show officials reported business as usual at the October event.

Crossroads of the West, which produces more than 60 gun shows annually in California, Arizona, Utah and Nevada, said in a statement this week that there is absolutely no connection between the Orange County gun show, lawful gun owners and the terrible tragedy that occurred in Parkland, Fla.

Crossroads chief executive, Bob Templeton, said in October that the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the Orange County Sheriffs Department typically staff the show as a safety precaution and to make sure all sales are aboveboard. He added that the event complies with all California gun laws.

Protesters attended the Crossroads show in Del Mar last weekend, denouncing the show and calling on the board of the Del Mar fairgrounds to stop hosting such events.

UPDATES:

3:55 p.m.: This article was updated with information about the Crossroads of the West Gun Show scheduled for this weekend in Costa Mesa.

This article was originally published at 12:35 p.m.Even if Newport Harbor gets desired port status from the state for planning and development purposes, it wont become an industrial port similar to Long Beach, local officials say.

Newport Beach has started what could be a lengthy two-part process to get approval for a port master plan from the California Coastal Commission. It would allow the city to issue state-sanctioned permits for in-water harbor projects such as small dredging work and private pier repair.

The first step is that the harbor needs to be legally designated as a port, which requires the state Legislature to amend the California Coastal Act to include it alongside the commercial port districts of Hueneme, Long Beach, Los Angeles and San Diego  well-established transportation and industrial hubs. Once its a port, the Coastal Commission can accept a port master plan application.

First you have to get the key to the door (and) unlock it, City Manager Dave Kiff said. Thats the legislation.

A bill introduced last month by Assemblyman Matthew Harper (R-Huntington Beach) is in the Assemblys Natural Resources Committee. The City Council agreed last week to hire lobbyists to advocate for the port status.

The bill has until Aug. 31 to clear both houses of the Legislature if it is to pass this legislative session.

Harper said he hopes the bill will be seen as a pragmatic amendment to the Coastal Act.

Newport Harbor is not just used by people from Newport Beach, he said. Its used regionally  and thats why I think the (Legislature) will buy on from throughout Southern California and California, because people utilize this recreational harbor through such a wide geography across the state.

Kiff said the port label is a matter of semantics  not a green light for cargo or cruise ships.

The 21-square-mile harbor is regarded as the citys economic and cultural anchor, with one economic impact study saying its worth more than $200 million a year. Among its mooring fields, private docks and handful of commercial marinas and shipyards, the harbor is home to about 4,300 boats, largely pleasure craft, the city estimates.

We would never and could never be anything larger than that, Kiff said.

But a port master plan would save time, allowing the city to grant permissions following state guidelines, much the way it does for near-shore land developments under its state-sanctioned Local Coastal Program.

Currently, most of the state permits issued in the harbor are for dock adjustments, which initially go through the citys harbor resources division.

Harbor Manager Chris Miller said city staff gives approvals in concept to about 50 applications a year, though the Coastal Commission has the ultimate discretion. Once an application is in the states hands, a decision generally takes several months, Miller said.

Recent Coastal Commission items corroborate that. In December, the commission approved a permit for a Balboa Peninsula homeowner to reduce his dock by about 30 square feet and move a pile five feet. The city had approved the project in concept in September.

In November, the commission granted an application for a Linda Isle homeowner to add about 70 square feet to his dock. The plans were dated in June.

Coastal Commission spokeswoman Noaki Schwartz said it may take two to five years for a port master plan to be processed, about as long as it would take to put a new Local Coastal Program in place. (Newports LCP took 12 years, Kiff said.)

hillary.davis@latimes.com

Twitter: @Daily_PilotHDAn attorney for a Laguna Beach police officer exonerated of allegations of elder abuse said Wednesday that an alleged victim was the officers father, who he said died after becoming separated from the care of family members who were arrested in the case.

Officer Rock Wagner, 58, was arrested by Fullerton police near his Lake Forest home Nov. 28 on suspicion of elder abuse and fraud. Fullerton police led the case because it reportedly involved a financial institution based there.

At the time, authorities did not identify any alleged victims or other details of the investigation.

Wagners attorney, Michael Fell, said during a news conference Wednesday at his Irvine office that an alleged victim was Wagners father, Roland.

At the time of his sons arrest, Roland Wagner was in good health and living in Huntington Beach with his daughter Wendy Wagner and her boyfriend, Norman McBride, Fell said.

Wendy Wagner and McBride also were arrested on suspicion of elder abuse and fraud.

After the arrests, Roland Wagner left their care and was unable to contact his family, Fell said. He died Feb. 24. According to an online obituary notice, he was 84 and had worked as a Tupperware distributor.

We are deeply saddened by this entire chain of egregious events that eventually concluded in our fathers unnecessary death, the Wagners and McBride said in a joint statement read by Fell. We are here today to restore our characters and reputations and to celebrate our innocence.

The Orange County district attorneys office declined to file charges in the case. Rock Wagner, a nine-year officer, also was cleared by an internal Laguna Beach Police Department investigation and has since returned to patrol.

Several of Wagners police colleagues stood by him during Fells news conference to show their support. Wagner did not speak.

bradley.zint@latimes.com

Twitter: @BradleyZintSomeone screamed for help when they saw him.

The man was lying on the ground  his blue complexion and pupil-less eyes signaling a pair of starving lungs.

He was stiff as a board. A body in the grip of an overdose.

Aimee Dunkle heard the call, rushed over to the man and had somebody start rescue breathing while she administered a nasal spray dose of Narcan, a brand name version of a lifesaving opioid reversal drug, naloxone.

No response.

More rescue breathing and a second Narcan dose and the color started to return to the mans face.

He was still struggling to breathe so I grabbed him and sat him up, Dunkle said during a phone interview. I really had to encourage him to take those breaths. It was hard for him to get his chest working again. But, he was breathing and I had him up on his feet within minutes.

It was an incredible outcome. When somebody is blue and their eyes are in the back of their head, you have got their life in your hands.

Dunkle is no stranger to the lifesaving abilities of naloxone.

Since 2015, shes been handing out the medication at the Santa Ana Civic Center through her organization the Solace Foundation, with the hopes that arming drug users with it could save lives. The foundation sets up a booth from 1 to 3 p.m. every Saturday.

In the wake of the shuttering of the Orange County Needle Exchange Program, the countys only needle exchange, Dunkles organization has become the only access point for harm reduction supplies for drug users, particularly homeless ones, in the county.

Aimee Dunkle and volunteer Johnny Huynh prepare kits in paper bags that contain the opioid reversal medication naloxone. They hand out the kits at Santa Anas Civic Center at a booth on Saturday afternoons. (Photo by Spencer Grant )

The needle exchange was denied a permit in mid-January by Santa Ana city officials because of excessive syringe litter concerns, causing it to close its doors after about two years of operation in the Civic Center.

The needle exchange was considered a vital access point into the communities of drug users, particularly the hundreds of homeless who have lived in encampments at the Civic Center.

Dunkle had been partnering with the needle exchange since its inception, taking advantage of its outreach capabilities. In the weeks following the needle exchanges closure, Dunkle said it will be a public health catastrophe and people will absolutely die.

Kyle Barbour, co-founder and board member of the Orange County Needle Exchange Program, said through email that there are no updates to the exchanges predicament.

The Solace Foundations permit recently was extended until near the end of April. Dunkle is hoping to combat the impact of the needle exchange loss until it can get back online, if it ever does.

The help the foundation provides has been stymied after losing the draw of the needle exchange.

Dunkle said she handed out just 17 Narcan kits during a recent Saturday. The last time she set up next to the needle exchange, she gave out 110 kits.

People used to come from all over the county to get naloxone, now we are not seeing them, she said. If they arent getting naloxone, then people arent surviving.

In 2015, the foundation recorded 12 overdose reversals, then in 2016 it tallied 420 reversals  the difference being the partnership with the needle exchange. The group reached more than 1,000 reversals last year.

So far this year, it has recorded 139 reversals. Dunkle said shed be surprised if they came close to last years reversal numbers.

The foundation was also distributing Narcan at the Santa Ana riverbed encampment before the homeless were cleared out for county maintenance.

Recently, Dunkle was permitted by the city to give out harm reduction supplies like sterile water, antibiotic ointment and alcohol wipes along with fentanyl test strips, which test urine for the presence of the drug.

Dunkle said fentanyl, an opiate thats up to 100 times stronger than morphine, has become an increasingly worrisome problem in the county.

Dunkle believes the man she recently saved was suffering from a fentanyl overdose due to his claim that he took China White, which has been a common street term for heroin over the years but more recently has been the adopted moniker for fentanyl, according to Dunkle.

In a blue canvas privacy booth, volunteer Angel VanStark prepares HIV test equipment at Santa Anas Civic Center Plaza. (Photo by Spencer Grant )

Dunkle does have some help in this fight.

The Solace Foundation recently reconvened its partnership with Radiant Health Centers after the group momentarily stopped its operations in the Civic Center after the needle exchange closed. Dunkle was able to persuade it to return.

Radiant Health hands out harm reduction supplies like condoms and provides HIV and hepatitis C testing. It works alongside Solace every Saturday.

The supplies Solace is giving out are very important, said Tiffany Hendrix, Radiant Health director of health education and prevention. Getting tested for HIV and hepatitis is also crucial.

Similar to Dunkles analysis, Hendrix said the needle exchanges departure has resulted in declining weekly visitors, which means less lifesaving medicine gets into drug users hands.

Dr. David Deyhimy, who works with Solace, said its important that users are armed with Narcan because most addicts die using opiates around other addicts.

Deyhimy is an anesthesiologist at Saddleback Memorial Medical Center in Laguna Hills.

So many lives are being saved because we are putting naloxone directly in the hands of the users, Deyhimy said. Up until recently, their only recourse when somebody was overdosing was to leave the person or call 911 and run away.

Not everyone is happy about drug users receiving naloxone. Some believe its further enabling their drug use by providing a safety net.

In fact, the opposite is often the case because you are empowering them to save each other, Deyhimy said.

The Orange County Health Care Agency received 3,109 boxes of nasal Narcan in early December that are earmarked for The Solace Foundation. Dunkle said they received the drug through the California Department of Public Health Naloxone Grant Program.

Tammi McConnell, the agencys EMS administrator for regulatory and medical health services, wouldnt provide a comment through email about the foundations work but said, Narcan reverses an opioid overdose and saves lives.

Next to Aimee Dunkles booth, two preachers reach out to homeless men in Santa Anas Civic Center Plaza. (Photo by Spencer Grant )

For Dunkle, the work is personal.

Her son, Ben, died at age 20 of an overdose in 2012.

While he overdosed, he was in the company of three people who failed to recognize the fact that he was dying, Dunkle said. When they realized that he was dying, they didnt have the tools to save his life.

They were frightened to call 911, they didnt know about naloxone and they didnt start rescue breathing. Naloxone would have saved Ben.

Dunkle tries to forge personal connections with the foundations clients.

Eric, 30, of Laguna Niguel met Dunkle about 3 years ago while she was training people on the administration of naloxone at a detox center where he worked.

Eric withheld his last name for fear of his story negatively affecting his career. Hes been a functioning addict for many years.

He has been a client of the needle exchange and maintained a close friendship with Dunkle.

About a month ago, he was compelled to make a change in his life.

I dug myself into a deep hole and didnt have an opportunity to get out of where I was, Eric said. I was very depressed and felt trapped.

Out of desperation he called multiple resources like Drug Free Anaheim, but organizations were not willing to help him. So, he called Dunkle.

I said, anything you can help me with, I would be so grateful, Eric said. Within a matter of 15 minutes, she had somebody show up and pick me up. Fortunately, I was scholarshipped into a detox and today I am sober.

Dunkle said establishing these kinds of relationships with drug users is an essential part of her role in the Civic Center.

However, with the closing of the needle exchange and accompanying reduction of visitors, the Solace Foundations impact has been minimized.

People have stopped coming here without a doubt, Dunkle said. We have to encourage them to come back so we can engage them. With fentanyl in the streets, its more important than ever that they have naloxone and its incredibly vital that they have access to HIV and hepatitis C testing.

benjamin.brazil@latimes.com

Twitter:@benbrazilpilotA cellphone tracking app helped Glendale police locate and arrest two suspected car thieves on Monday, authorities said.

Dayquan Fields and Michael Smith, both Las Vegas residents, are accused of stealing a Chrysler vehicle after contacting its owner through an online advertisement, according to Tahnee Lightfoot, a spokeswoman for the Glendale Police Department.

She said the vehicles 29-year-old owner was trying to sell the car and agreed to meet with Fields in the 3400 block of Ocean View Boulevard in order to discuss its purchase.

The three met around 7:45 p.m., with 19-year-old Fields and 23-year-old Smith arriving in a gray Dodge Charger.

When Fields entered the Chrysler to discuss buying the car with its owner, he threatened the man and pushed him out of the vehicle, according to Lightfoot.

Fields then drove away with the vehicle, and Smith followed behind in the Charger, she said.

The 29-year-old called 911 and told authorities he was able to track his vehicle through the Find My iPhone app because his phone was left behind in the Chrysler.

Using the information the man provided, Lightfoot said officers were able to locate the vehicle in the Pasadena area. Fields then led police on a short chase before colliding with several vehicles, Lightfoot said.

He was then taken into custody. Smith was also located and arrested.

Lightfoot said it was also discovered the Dodge Charger the two had been driving was reported stolen in Illinois.

The Los Angeles County district attorneys office charged the men with one count each of carjacking. Fields was also charged with fleeing police while driving recklessly, while Smith was charged with taking a vehicle without consent.

andy.nguyen@latimes.com

Twitter: @Andy_TrucMost parents want to give their children the world. On March 15, a group of La Canada Elementary School parents did just that, hosting a World Fair in the schools cafeteria.

Parent and event co-chair Farrell Foley said parents organize the event each year to expose kids to different world cultures. Along with fun activities, students learn facts about a nations geography, history and contributions to mankind.

Its about unity  we want to show them the world, and teach them to be respectful of other cultures, Foley said.

That Thursday afternoon, kindergartners in Mandy Redfern and Wendi Damicos classes joined Pam Danigers Transitional Kindergarten students on a whirlwind tour of the globe through colorful exhibits featuring Armenia, Japan, Chile, France and more.

Students played with Russian nesting dolls, watched a Korean traditional dance and learned how citizens of the Czech Republic invented contact lenses and introduced fingerprint technology to the world, all while nibbling on international treats. All day, kids in all grades hopped the globe without leaving their school.

sara.cardine@latimes.com

Twitter: @SaraCardineA South Korean court on Thursday issued an arrest warrant for yet another former president, Lee Myung-bak, on financial misconduct charges during and after his time in office.

The ruling by the Seoul Central District Court allows prosecutors to detain Lee immediately for up to 20 days before he is formally charged.

Lee is accused of taking a total of $10 million in bribes from business groups and his intelligence agency. Prosecutors say he used a private company to establish illicit slush funds totaling $33 million.

The former president, a conservative who held the office from 2008 to 2013, could soon be in jail because  as the court agreed with prosecutors  the fear is that he might destroy evidence central to a widespread investigation into his activities and those of his close family and associates.

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He is the fourth South Korean leader since the nation began democratic presidential elections in the late 1980s to face jail time.

Lee, 76, joins his successor, Park Geun-hye, who was impeached, ousted and jailed last year and faces a lengthy prison sentence on corruption charges if convicted.

The charges against Lee represent a stunning fall from the top echelons of South Korean society, business and politics. The former president was a top executive at Hyundai, among the nations largest companies, before winning election as mayor of Seoul, the capital, and ultimately the presidency.

He has been accused and cleared on questions of corruption in the past.

A conservative who took a hard line on North Korea, leading to a decade of tension with the totalitarian nation, Lee was also known to be close with former President Obama. The New York Times once reported that the two men shared a close bond  a man crush  particularly when discussing the issue of education.

The Lee case centers on potential misdeeds involving an auto-parts company that appears to be controlled by the former presidents family.

There are also questions about suspected bribes paid by Lee aides using funds from the National Intelligence Service during his tenure as president, when he oversaw leadership of the agency.

On March 14, Lee consented to more than 20 hours of questioning by prosecutors, who said they considered him a suspect. They sought the arrest warrant several days later.

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I stand here with a heavy heart, Lee told reporters outside the prosecutors office in Seoul after the questioning. Im very sorry for causing concern to the people.

In the past, Lee has dismissed the investigation into him as political revenge.

South Korea has grown accustomed to seeing its presidents investigated. In addition to Lee and Park, two other former presidents, Chun Doo-hwan and his successor, Roh Tae-woo, were charged in the mid-1990s  after they left office  with improperly collecting tens of millions of dollars from businesses during their tenures.

The two men, former army colleagues, also faced sedition charges related to a coup and an earlier violent crackdown against pro-democracy protesters. They were later pardoned.

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Another former president, Roh Moo-hyun, committed suicide as prosecutors probe his family on corruption charges.

Stiles is a special correspondent.When he was sworn in last April, Glen Dorney said he wanted to stay as Allentown's police chief for at least five years, longer if the city would have him.

Dorney is leaving less than one year into the gig, headed to lead the South Whitehall Township Police Department.

The move comes a few weeks after Mayor Ed Pawlowski resigned following his conviction in a federal pay-to-play corruption trial.

"Everybody wants to put it out like that," that the Pawlowski scandal led to the retirement, Dorney said. "I dealt with the mayor for the last 12 years. He was re-elected before I started looking. ... Working for the mayor for the next four years wasn't going to force me from Allentown. Was it a great environment to work in? No. But I can deal with that."

Instead, Dorney said when South Whitehall posted last fall it was looking for a new chief, "It essentially found me. I wasn't looking. Opportunities like this don't come around every day."

Dorney, 46, had four interviews for the South Whitehall job, and said meeting the commissioners there made him want the job even more.

"It's an invested community. ... The support is almost built in," Dorney said. "It's a great opportunity for a second career."

Dorney is retiring after 21 years with the Allentown department. His last day is April 6, and his first day in South Whitehall will be April 9.

Dorney said he did not know who will be named interim chief. A complication is that acting-Mayor Roger MacLean's last day is technically April 8, 30 days after Pawlowski left office.

MacLean said he will serve until the new mayor takes over on April 9. MacLean will name an acting police chief for the weekend, and then the new mayor, who will serve until 2019, can decide what to do.

Dorney's move means the city will have its fifth chief in five years, and the tenures have been short and shorter.

MacLean took the chief job in 2006 and retired in September 2013. Joe Hanna served as interim chief and then retired, and Joel Fitzgerald was sworn in as the Queen City's newest chief in December 2013.

But Fitzgerald resigned in October 2015 to become police chief in Fort Worth, Texas. During his tenure, Fitzgerald's son was charged then acquitted at trial of charges from an armed confrontation with two undercover Lehigh County detectives.

Keith Morris was named the new chief in 2016, but he left Allentown in 2017 to be police chief at Penn State University.

Dorney joined the department in 1997, and it was Pawlowski who first promoted Dorney to captain in 2012 and then assistant chief of operations in January 2016.

Sarah Cassi may be reached at scassi@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow her on Twitter @SarahCassi. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.Bethlehem has gotten a $25,000 grant to help its efforts to rethink how the city tackles blight.

The city plans to use the Municipal Assistant Program grant, which Gov. Tom Wolf announced Thursday, in conjunction with another state award to help fund its underway blight remediation plan, explained Alicia Miller Karner, city director of community and economic development.

Mayor Bob Donchez has made tackling blight in the city's neighborhoods and improving city housing stock priorities in recent years.

For the last six months, the city has been working with its consultant, the Reinvestment Fund, to develop the plan, which includes a market value analysis of city neighborhoods and a review of the city's existing programs and weaknesses.

The work has been funded with $50,000 from the Bethlehem Redevelopment Authority and $50,000 of city funding. Bethlehem had planned to use another $25,000 state grant along with $25,000 in Community Development Block grants for its portion, Karner said. This new state award will free up that CDBG funding for other needs.

The city has also formed a community committee -- comprised of a mix of government officials, residents, Realtors, colleges, social services agencies and housing providers -- to provide ongoing feedback throughout the process. It meets monthly.

"We really were trying to take the temperature of the community as we decided on the short-term and long-term goals," Karner said.

A draft of the plan is already sitting on Karner's desk and it will be released to the committee next week. It will be presented to the mayor and Bethlehem City Council, if members are interested, Karner said.

"This is largely going to recommend a more data-driven approach," she explained. "Right now, we are largely complaint driven."

The city employs two full-time housing inspectors and two contracted inspectors, which Lehigh University help to fund, she said. They are dispatched to investigate complaints and do routine inspections when a property changes hands in a sale.

If an inspector finds violations, a homeowner is supposed to then call to have the inspector back out to check their fixes.

"We really come up short on the follow up," Karner said.

Many of the city's ordinances currently put the onus on the property owner to comply with the rules voluntarily. For example, landlords are supposed to arrange for a new inspection each time a new tenant moves in, but Karner knows many do not.

"There is a lack of capacity to really do it much differently," she said.

Since much of the enforcement is complaint-driven, the city often expends a lot of resources responding to issues on select properties, while not getting to some of the most troublesome.

"They may not be the worst in the city. They may not be that bad," Karner said. "(The neighbor calling) just may be particular."

Karner expects the report to spur license and ordinance changes and help the city decide if better enforcement could help fund more inspectors.

"At the end of the day, our goals are to bring the condition of the housing stock up for the city's benefits," Karner said. "This is also about (improving) the neighborhoods."

Sara K. Satullo may be reached at ssatullo@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow her on Twitter @sarasatullo and Facebook. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.Gov. Phil Murphy said Wednesday afternoon that the winter storm battering New Jersey has resulted in at least one death -- from a fatal auto accident when a car collided with a bus on a highway in Hunterdon County.

But the State Police told NJ Advance Media on Wednesday night the motorist, a 23-year-old Pennsylvania man, was in critical condition in a nearby hospital as of 8:30 p.m.

Sgt. Jeff Flynn, a spokesman for the State Police, said the incident happened around 11:30 a.m. westbound on Interstate 78 in the town of Clinton.

The man -- an Allentown, Pa., resident -- was driving a Nissan sedan when it ran off the road, struck a guardrail, and returned to the road, only to be struck by the bus, Flynn said. There were no passengers on the bus, Flynn said.

State Police performed CPR at the scene, and the driver of the car was taken to Morristown Medial Center with serious injuries, Flynn said.

The bus driver had minor injuries, Flynn said.

The names of those involved in the accident were not immediately released.

Asked whether the accident was storm-related, Flynn said that's "still under investigation."

Murphy and state officials were holding a 4 p.m. conference call with reporters to provide updates on the storm when State Police Superintendent Col. Patrick Callahan said there was a fatal accident on Interstate 78 amid the storm.

Murphy then noted that a bus collided with a "private vehicle" on the highway in Hunterdon.

"Is that right, colonel?" Murphy asked Callahan.

"That's right, governor," Callahan responded.

"The State Police responded," Murphy continued, "but sadly, and tragically, it was too late to save a life. So our thoughts and prayers go out to that victim's family."

Afterwards, Dan Bryan, a spokesman for Murphy's office, deferred comment to the State Police.

The State Police responded to 333 motor-vehicle accidents and aided 304 other motorists amid the storm, Callahan said.

Spring nor'easter blankets the Garden State 49 Gallery: Spring nor'easter blankets the Garden State

Brent Johnson may be reached at bjohnson@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @johnsb01. Find NJ.com Politics on Facebook.Parents and teachers at Butz Elementary School say children won't be safe as long as Northampton County continues to allow voters into their schools.

But the county election commission couldn't reach a consensus on the best alternative plan, so the polls will remain in the Bushkill Township school.

The lack of action left more than 50 parents seething after Thursday's meeting. They came with protest signs and filed out quietly after a tense exchange between a resident and a board member.

The parents, led by Paul Soporowski and Crystal Mulada, have led the charge to move the polls out of the school after the last election on Nov. 7. That's the day Daniel Clery allegedly shot state trooper Seth Kelly a few miles from the school on Route 33. The school was locked down while police searched for the gunman, but a portion of the school remained open to voters.

"Voters enjoyed a freedom of access to the polling location while all frantic parents could not retrieve their children from the school due the lockdown," Soporowski said.

The parents brought Bushkill Township Volunteer Fire Co. President Ronald Short to the election commission meeting. He said he's fine with moving the polls to the fire house.

Commission member Deborah Hunter was worried that Short could change his mind at some point. There's no way to guarantee the polls would remain there, which is why state law requires the county use public buildings before turning to privately-owned ones to host polls.

Hunter thinks the long-term solution is for the Nazareth Area School District to schedule teacher in-service days during the primary and general elections. That way people can vote when no children are in the schools.

She favored temporarily allowing voting at the fire house on May 15, then moving the polls back to Butz after the school district has time to put the in-service days into effect on election days. Her proposal deadlocked 2-2 with Hunter and Kathy Fox voting in favor. Opposed were Maudeania Hornik and George Treisner. Mary Diggs was absent.

Hornik approved of moving the polls permanently to the fire house, but didn't want to move them the May 15 election. That was too soon, in her opinion. She made a motion to move the polls in the fall election, but it failed for lack of a second.

Treisner appeared to favor keeping the polls at Butz permanently. He said he was 20-year teacher and union official, so he sympathizes with Butz teachers but believes voting in schools can be a civics lesson for children.

"The law is quite clear that elections are to be held in public buildings because they are supported by public taxes," he said.

When Treisner indicated discussion on the matter was closed, a voice from the crowd responded, "That is not acceptable."

"It is acceptable according to Robert's rules of order," Treisner said. "The floor to business is closed. Period. We're in a meeting and we're allowed to conduct our meeting without interference. If you're going to continue to interfere I'm going to ask that the floor be cleared."

The parents hope they'll eventually convince the commission to move the polls to the fire house.

They say they'll continue to lobby legislators to change election law to make it tougher to keep polls in schools.

Parent Korry Franke said he remembered going to a school with his parents when they voted, but times have changed.

"It's your choice. Will you stand for the past or will you stand for the kids?" he asked the commission. "I think it's time to change."

Rudy Miller may be reached at rmiller@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @RudyMillerLV. Find Easton area news on Facebook.Beloved toy retailer Toys 'R' Us will begin liquidating inventory with Toys 'R' Us sales starting on Thursday at most of its U.S. stores, a company representative said at a hearing this week.

The company's distribution centers will close before the stores begin the Toys "R' liquidation sales, according to a USA Today report on the hearing. In liquidation, a shuttering business sells off its assets in order to pay off remaining debts.

The report says Toys 'R' Us leadership knew the retailer was in trouble as early as Black Friday, but held hope it could survive until lenders pulled support earlier this month. The chain's Babies 'R' Us stores will also close.

One adviser at the hearing described the Toys 'R' Us collapse as "probably the largest retail liquidation in the country's history," the report says.

On March 15, a Toys 'R' Us spokeswoman confirmed that the company would still honor gift cards for the next 30 days.

As the company plans to liquidate its remaining 800 stores in the U.S., it also filed layoff notices for more than 1,600 employees in New Jersey. The WARN notices, which are required by law, filed this week with the state Department of Labor list the effective layoff date as May 14.

The notice covers 1,159 employees at the toy retailer's Wayne headquarters and another 473 employees at its distribution center in Flanders. Those job loses do not include employees of 25 company stores in New Jersey.

Experts said competition from online sales and the company's severe debt are reasons Toys 'R' Us went under.

Need someone to blame for this loss? Read our story on what killed the country's favorite toy store.

Jessica Remo may be reached at jremo@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @JessicaRemoNJ. Find NJ.com on Facebook.The two Quakertown teenagers who were reported missing Wednesday were found safe, according to borough police.

On Wednesday, police asked for the public's help locating Ashley Kulick and Kade Ruch, both 14, who had last been seen Tuesday.

Authorities believed the pair may have intended to head to North Carolina.

In a Facebook post, police did not disclose where the teens were located, but thanked the public for their assistance and prayers, saying they'd been found safe.

Sara K. Satullo may be reached at ssatullo@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow her on Twitter @sarasatullo and Facebook. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.Lehigh Valley International Airport is helping people with autism or other developmental disabilities navigate taking a flight well before they have to board a plane.

The airport in Hanover Township, Lehigh County and the Arc of Lehigh and Northampton Counties are hosting their fourth annual "Wings for All" event at 1 p.m. May 5th.

There are 75 spots for participants, adults or children, who can bring one companion. Families can register for the event here.

"Wings for All" is a national airport rehearsal program produced by The Arc of the United States, and is designed for people on the autism spectrum or those with other intellectual or developmental disabilities.

Joe Mancini, director of programs for the Arc of Lehigh and Northampton Counties, said the response each year to the Lehigh Valley event is "overwhelming," and there is usually a waiting list.

"Everyone is so excited about the event every single year," he said.

Bruce Seidel, director for development at The Arc, said LVIA was the first airport in the state to host a "Wings for All" event. The only other one in Pennsylvania was at Harrisburg International Airport in 2016.

As such, the Lehigh Valley event attracts families from Erie, Philadelphia, and even Baltimore.

"Word gets around," Mancini said.

Colin Riccobon, spokesman for LVIA, said 225 people have participated over the past three years, creating some success stories. The event is a collaboration between The Arc, Allegiant Air and the Lehigh-Northampton Airport Authority, which operates the airport.

"Coming to an airport in an overwhelming experience for anyone," Riccobon said. "Hopefully this leads to their family being able to travel."

Mancini called it a "dress rehearsal."

Participants practice parking in the airport lot, checking in at a ticket gate, going through TSA and waiting to board. Organizers do not avoid crowd situations, in the hopes families can see potential triggers before they plan a trip.

"We want every family member to experience what it is like," Mancini said.

The participants board an Allegiant plane and sit through the flight instructions, about 15 or 20 minutes on the plane, Mancini said. Afterwards, there is a reception.

Besides preparing future passengers, the program also helps prepare airport, airline and Transportation Security Administration employees to help those passengers in a learning environment.

"For families who thought they would never be able to travel by air, this event provides hope," Karen Shoemaker, executive director of the Lehigh Valley Arc, said in a news release. "The rehearsal takes place right in their own community and makes air travel a true possibility for them."

To see what the program is like, watch the video below:

Sarah Cassi may be reached at scassi@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow her on Twitter @SarahCassi. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.Traffic moves slowly through heavy snowfall the morning of March 21, 2018, on Route 33 near the Palmer Township/Tatamy interchange.

Rudy Miller | For lehighvalleyli

Lehighvalleylive.com staff reports

One day after a spring snowfall closed schools across the Lehigh Valley and northwestern New Jersey, superintendents were left to wrestle with whether to alter the school day Thursday. Snow continued into late Wednesday night throughout the region. Take a look below to see whether your child's school is affected.

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Allentown School District

Closed Thursday.

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Alpha Public School

Two-hour delay.

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Arts Academy Charter Elementary School

Closed Thursday. No after school or evening activities.

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Arts Academy Charter Middle School

Closed Thursday.

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Bangor Area School District

Closed Thursday.

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Belvidere School District

Two-hour delay on Thursday.

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Bethlehem Area School District

Closed Thursday.

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Bethlehem Catholic High School

Closed Thursday.

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Blairstown Township Elementary School

Two-hour delay on Thursday.

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Career Institute of Technology

Closed Thursday.

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Catasauqua Area School District

Closed Thursday.

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Cedar Crest College

Late Opening

The College will open at Noon.

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Centenary University

Delayed opening, 10 a.m. Thursday.

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Colonial Academy

Closed Thursday.

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East Penn School District

Closed Thursday.

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East Stroudsburg University

Classes starting before 11 a.m. are canceled. Staff to report at 10 a.m., essential personnel report as scheduled. Please check esu.edu regularly for updates.

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Easton Area School District

Closed Thursday.

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Easton Area Arts Academy Charter School

Closed Thursday.

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Franklin Township, Warren County, Elementary School

Two-hour delay on Thursday.

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Frelinghuysen Township School District

Two-hour delay.

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Great Meadows Regional School District

90-minute delay on Thursday.

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Greenwich Township School District

90-minute delay.

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Hackettstown School District

90-minute delay on Thursday.

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Harmony Township School

Two-hour delay on Thursday.

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Hope Township School

Two-hour delay on Thursday.

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Lafayette College

No announcement made.

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Lehigh Career and Technical Institute

Closed Thursday.

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Lehigh Carbon Community College

All LCCC sites on 2 hour delay Thursday. Daytime classes on compressed schedule available on LCCC web site. Employees report at 9.

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Lehigh University

No announcement made.

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Lehigh Valley Academy Charter School

Closed Thursday.

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Lincoln Leadership Academy Charter School

Closed Thursday. No after school or evening activities.

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Lopatcong Township School District

Two-hour delay on Thursday.

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Mansfield Township Elementary School

Closed Thursday.

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Moravian Academy

Closed Thursday.

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Moravian College

No announcement made.

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Muhlenberg College

No announcement made.

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Nazareth Area School District

Closed Thursday.

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North Warren Regional School District

Two-hour delay on Thursday.

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Northampton Area School District

Closed Thursday.

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Northampton Community College

Bethlehem and Easton sites open at noon. Monroe is on a normal schedule.

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Northern Lehigh School District

Closed Thursday.

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Northwestern Lehigh School District

Closed Thursday.

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Notre Dame High School (Bethlehem Township)

Closed Thursday.

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Oxford Central School

Two-hour delay on Thursday.

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Palisades School District

Closed Thursday.

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Parkland School District

Closed Thursday.

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Pen Argyl Area School District

Closed Thursday.

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Phillipsburg School District

Two-hour delay on Thursday.

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Pohatcong Township School

Two-hour delay Thursday.

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Raritan Valley Community College

Delayed opening at 10 a.m.

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Roberto Clemente charter schools

Closed Thursday.

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Saints Philip and James School

Two-hour delay Thursday.

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Salisbury Township School District

Closed Thursday.

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Saucon Valley School District

Schools and offices closed Thursday.

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Seven Generations Charter School

Closed Thursday.

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Southern Lehigh School District

Closed Thursday.

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St. Jane Frances de Chantal School

Closed Thursday.

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The Swain School

Closed Thursday.

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Warren County Community College

Both campuses will open at 9:30 a.m.

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Warren County Technical School

Two-hour delay on Thursday.

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Warren Hills Regional School District

Two-hour delay on Thursday.

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Washington Borough School District

Memorial opens at 10 a.m. and Taylor at 10:15 a.m. on Thursday.

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Washington Township, Warren County, School District

90-minute delay on Thursday.

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White Township Consolidated School

Two-hour delay on Thursday.

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Whitehall-Coplay School District

Closed Thursday.

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Wilson Area School District

Closed Thursday.

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Kurt Bresswein may be reached at kbresswein@lehighvalleylive.com. Follow him on Twitter @KurtBresswein. Find lehighvalleylive.com on Facebook.Stock Market News

Alba Minerals lands 5 year renewal for Greenland graphite licence 22-03-2018 11:52



Stock News headlines are gathered from financial news sources around the web. Views and opinions on each item are from their respective authors and website. They are not opinions of LiveCharts.co.ukStock Market News

De La Rue calls on government to reverse blue passport decision 22-03-2018 08:01



Stock News headlines are gathered from financial news sources around the web. Views and opinions on each item are from their respective authors and website. They are not opinions of LiveCharts.co.ukStock Market News

Europe close: Stocks take heavy hit from trade frictions 22-03-2018 18:02



Stock News headlines are gathered from financial news sources around the web. Views and opinions on each item are from their respective authors and website. They are not opinions of LiveCharts.co.ukStock Market News

Thursday newspaper round-up: Tariffs, Pfizer, Facebook, Cambridge Analytica 22-03-2018 06:54



Stock News headlines are gathered from financial news sources around the web. Views and opinions on each item are from their respective authors and website. They are not opinions of LiveCharts.co.ukStock Market News

Trump's lead lawyer in Russia investigation quits 22-03-2018 16:16



Stock News headlines are gathered from financial news sources around the web. Views and opinions on each item are from their respective authors and website. They are not opinions of LiveCharts.co.uk2

Se llevan la farola del Campoamor y la estatua de "La estudiante" del centro de OviedoWe're always going to back research like this. Apparently pizza is good for productivity!



As Munchies points out, a study published in psychologist Dan Ariely's book, Payoff: The Hidden Logic That Shapes Our Motivations, found that the promise of pizza at the end of the week can have a sizable impact on productivity.

Ariely's study took place at a semiconductor factory in Israel. There, a group of workers were sent one of three messages at the beginning of the work week: one that promised pizza if they performed well, another that promised a compliment from the boss, or lastly, a text that promised a cash bonus. A quarter of participants got no message and therefore no incentive.

At the end of the week, pizza was found to be the highest motivator, increasing productivity by an amazing 6.7 per cent.

The next highest motivator was the promise of a compliment from their boss. Interestingly, the cash bonus came in last  although, to be fair, it was only $30.

So take this research as an excuse to pressure your boss into some free pizza!

Source.This content is from: Patents

China is on course to overtake the US in three years as the largest source of applications filed under WIPOs Patent Cooperation Treaty. Trade mark filing under the Madrid System and design filing under the Hague System both increased in 2017Details Stefanie Reis 13 May 2020

With cases of the novel coronavirus continuing to rise and no plateau in sight, nurses in Massachusetts have found themselves fighting more than just the virus to keep themselves and their patients safe and healthy. Between...A series of school walkouts in the United States has given voice to a range of social demands that go beyond the typical gun-control debate that has prevailed in Washington and the media. More than a million high school, middle school, and even elementary students on over 3,000 campuses across the US staged walkouts on 14 Marchexactly one month after 17 students and staff were killed in the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. The Parkland, Florida shooting marks a tipping point, transforming the shock and grief of thousands of students into outrage and a vow to put an end to the horrific pattern of school massacres.

In the first month after this latest mass shooting, the virally popular hashtags #NeverAgain and #Enough have expressed the mood of a generation that has grown up in a world of crisis, violence, and conditions of perpetual fear and insecurity which have become the norm in US schools. Such tragedies are always met with rehearsed platitudes from politicians and superficial, individualistic commentary from the media. This time, however, the youth are speaking uprejecting the hollow thoughts and prayers from Trump and the rest of the capitalist politicians.

The most important aspect of these walkouts is that they have given voice to a range of social demands that have nothing to do with the typical gun-control debate that has prevailed in Washington and the media until now. For students living in cities with high rates of gun violence, safety in schools and working-class neighborhoods is a social question tied to jobs, housing, education funding, and moreand not something that can be entrusted to the armed bodies of the capitalist state.

Embed from Getty Images

This mood was particularly palpable in Chicago, a city where the memory of recent struggles is still fresh for students and teachers who have been under attack with budget cuts and school closures. In 2013, Democratic Mayor Rahm Emanuel closed 48 schools, provoking a major strike by the Chicago Teachers Union against closures, standardized testing and other types of anti-education counterreforms. It is also a city with one of the highest rates of gun violence, with 4,349 shooting victims in 2016 alonean average of 11 people shot every day.

According to an eye-witness account, students marched to several locations in downtown Chicago to read out their demands. Among others, these included: keeping all Chicago schools open; more school counselors with a minimum ratio of one per 200 students; librarians and full-time nurses in every school; more after-school programs; more funding for schools by making the banks and wealthy pay; reopening mental health clinics that had been shut down under Rahm Emanuels administration; jobs and an end to the criminalization of the youth; student committees for the hiring of school staff; and the right to vote for 16 and 17-year-olds.

Although many students expressed support for liberal gun-control measures, its clear that a growing section of working-class youth can see through such policies and has no trust in the capitalist states ability to provide safety for the workers and poorespecially given the Chicago Police Departments record of racism and brutality. The students rejected the mayors plans to spend $95 million on a new police academy, and one student even marched with a sign stating, Gun Control is Not the Answer!

When Trump suggested that arming teachers could be a solutionjust ten days after proposing a budget that would cut $3.7 billion from schoolsthe United Teachers of Los Angeles responded with a list of programmatic demands similar to those of the Chicago students. Before being armed with guns, the teachers demanded they be armed with school psychologists, counselors, social workers, school nurses, more calendar days for teaching and fewer standardized tests, and smaller class sizes to allow teachers to get to know students and parents better.

Many young Americans intuit that these shootings reflect a much deeper and systemic problem / Image: R. Taylor

Even the very young intuit that these shootings reflect a much deeper and systemic problem. As one New York City sixth-grader put it, My dad said he never worried about school shootings or had lockdown drills. Something had to have changed to go from not having to worry about it, to multiple school shootings. We have to see what changed to allow this to happen, to see what needs to change.

For Marxists, this tragic pattern is above all an indication of the social decay of a system that was ripe to be overthrown long ago. Whatever the immediate motivations of the shooters, these mass killings, as with other forms of terror, reflect the impasse of a society in decline. A century after Lenin described capitalism as horror without end, millions of people find themselves living in a society in which they can see no future for themselves. Todays youth make up the first generation to have a lower standard of living than the previous one. As a result, off-the-chart levels of desperation, alienation, depression, mental illness, and countless other consequences of life under class society are pushing humanity to a breaking point.

The CEO of the NRA, Wayne LaPierre, has warned that the growing movement was part of a new socialist wave in America. If the youth continue to draw radical conclusions about the need to fight for social demands through class strugglewhich must include a break with the Democrats as much as with the Republicansthe aptly named Generation Z may indeed leave its mark on history as the last generation to come to maturity under the inhuman conditions of capitalism.MassLive is one step closer to finding the best pizza in the state.

Now that we've gathered nominations - more than 150 restaurants - it's time to vote your favorite pizzeria into the top 10.

All of the places nominated for Best Of Mass Pizza are listed in the poll below. Voting is restricted to one ballot, for up to 10 restaurants, once per day.

Voting will remain open until Thursday, March 29 at 11:59 p.m.

Once the poll closes, the ten restaurants with the most votes -- five from Western Mass. and five from Eastern Mass. -- will make it to the judging round.

In this month's Best Of Mass, the western half of the state is defined as communities west of Worcester, while the eastern half of the state are communities east of the city.

After the Top 10 is announced, our judges will visit and rank the top 10 pizzerias and crown one as having the best pizza in Massachusetts.

Go ahead and cast your votes in the poll below. If viewing on a mobile device, click here to vote.By Kit Maher

Saturday, March 24 is the March For Our Lives protest where students across the world will protest against gun violence in schools and demand stricter gun laws. The official march, organized by the survivors of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School school shooting in Parkland, Fla., will take place in Washington, D.C. However, 838 sister marches have sparked up across the world, with seven in Massachusetts.

MassLive spoke with students from across Massachusetts to learn about what's compelling them to march.

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Kit Maher

March For Our Lives movement acts as "fishing net that's been cast over the world"

Trevaughn Smith, 17, is a senior at Sabis International Charter School of Springfield. He also serves as head prefect of the Student Life Organization and team captain of the Model Congress/Model United Nations team for his school.

Smith was compelled to take action in his own community following the Parkland school shooting that killed 17 people on Feb. 14, 2018. Emphasizing how we live in an "age that information can be sent so quickly," Smith found the raw footage of the shooting to be jarring.

Joining forces with fellow classmate Chinaly Chanvong and two Longmeadow High School students, Smith and the other students organized the March For Our Lives demonstration in Springfield.

"We did participate in the national walk out," Smith said. "Now we can take additional steps because the national movement is not only growing, it's turned into this essentially fishing net that's been cast over the world."

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Kit Maher

"How are we going to be investing in this nation if our voices aren't being heard?"

Chinaly Chanvong, 16, is a junior at Sabis International Charter School who has previous experience as a MassMutual intern. A member of the Model Congress team since her freshman year, Chanvong aims to use her voice to affect legislation. Working with Trevaughn Smith and two Longmeadow students, Chanvong helped to organize the sister March For Our Lives protest in Springfield on Saturday March, 24, where Sen. Elizabeth Warren will be speaking.

"A lot of us are going to be able to vote in the next election, and I think this rallying cry that we all have and the multitude of interests that everybody is investing in," Chanvong said. "It's us saying we're your future, you know, we're the people who are going to invest into this nation. How are we going to be investing in this nation if our voices aren't being heard?"

A student of a charter school that doesn't have set requirements on how many lock downs and fire drills to have each year, Chanvong wants "to see, on the federal level, some sort of mandate that requires all charter and public schools to have lockdown drills and fire drills."

The student organizers of the Springfield March For Our Lives protest are calling on their government officials to take action in making their schools safe.

"If we keep rolling with it and we don't let the ball stop rolling then some change is actually going to happen," Chanvong said.

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Kit Maher

The impact of raw footage and social media

Sarah Reyes, 16, is a sophomore at Longmeadow High School who advocates for gender equality and is an award-winning delegate on the Model United Nations team.

When she was 14, Reyes worked on Eric Lesser's State Senate re-election campaign as a field organizer. Teaming up with Trevaughn Smith, Chinaly Chanvong and fellow classmate Amelia Ryan to organize the Springfield March For Our Lives protest was a no-brainer for Reyes after seeing footage of the Parkland school shooting.

Through the March For Our Lives protests, Reyes wants to see Congress increased background checks, and bans on both assault weapons and bump stocks.

The daughter of a constitutional law professor, Reyes says she has always been politically conscious.

"I saw a video of the father of one of the victims (in Parkland). He was speaking at, I believe it was some kind of town hall, telling people how every day he tells his daughter that he loves her before she goes to school and one day she just didn't come back. That was a moment for me that was really upsetting."

Access to the stories of the victims and survivors of the shooting through social media made the impact more powerful and real for Reyes.

She said, "The impact of it isn't lessened by distanced language. It's coming from the victims of Parkland. The survivors are speaking out on social media. Hearing it directly from them, rather than having it go through an interview was a really powerful way to communicate what actually happened."

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Kit Maher

"We aren't trying to take away the second amendment."

A founding member of the Longmeadow High School chapter of the Massachusetts High School Democrats, junior Amelia Ryan, 18, currently serves as the Communication Director of MAHSD. Part of her role is expanding social media presence and organizing state-wide meetings online.

"A lot of activism is based on social media, so once you get to see what actually happened on social media, there's public outcry. Raw footage is something you're unable to attain otherwise."

The mission of the march is not to strip people of their right to own a gun, Ryan said. "We aren't trying to take away the second amendment. We're just trying to make it harder for people like the school shooter to legally purchase guns."

Ryan believes "high school students are a very important resource," though it is "sometimes hard to get us energized."

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Kit Maher

Fighting for stricter gun laws from the Pioneer Valley

Cherilyn Strader is one of student leaders of the Pioneer Valley March For Our Lives protest against gun violence in Northampton, which is organized by more than 15 local schools.

A junior at Northampton High School, Strader is part of the Pioneer Valley Students for Gun Control coalition and works as an intern at represent.us, an activist group that seeks to pass anti-corruption laws.

"The time now is to talk about gun violence in America and we're going to continue to fight for strong gun control legislation."

The Pioneer Valley March has a variety of speakers, including Anne Thalheimer, who is a survivor of the 1992 shooting at Simon's Rock.

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"More kids are afraid to go to school."

Papee Paye, 18, is a junior at South High Community School in Worcester and will be the master of ceremonies at the Worcester March For Our Lives protest against gun violence. An experience with a shooting threat at his own high school sparked Paye's action in this movement. The pervasiveness of the issue concerns Payee, an active member of Youth Grow and the Youth Leadership Program.

"It just keeps happening," he said. "Now more kids are afraid to go to school. Also, parents are afraid to lose their own children, and that's a hard thing to worry about."

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Celebrating a "new wave of youth"

Kathryn Madaloni, 20, will be one of speakers at the Worcester March For Our Lives protest against gun violence on March 24. Originally from Connecticut, Madaloni was a freshman at Wooster School in Danbury during the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School that killed 20 children on Dec. 14, 2012.

Now a sophomore at Clark University, she considers herself in an "interesting mix" between the adults and high school students.

After the shooting at Sandy Hook, Madaloni saw action taken by parents, including the formation of Mom's Demand Action.

"The difference with the Parkland shooting was that it was high school students, people who are either able to vote or just about to vote, and are just learning that they have a voice that is able to fight for what they believe in."

Madaloni works at Catholic middle school in the area and says that students have expressed interest in attending the march.

"This new generation is not letting this happen anymore," Madaloni said. "I think that's scary to a lot of government employees, that they could be voted out by this new wave of youth."

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Florida shooting survivors speak at Harvard ahead of March For Our Lives

Read more:SPRINGFIELD -- Calling it a "dream come true," Andres Gomez, of Ludlow, recently was hired as MGM Springfield's director of restaurants.

At 33, Gomez already has a long history in the business.

"I'm very, very excited," Gomez, who will work with some premiere chefs coming to the resort casino, said this week. "My father is a chef, and I've been in this industry my entire life in one way or another. In the last 12 years, it has become my career."

Most recently, he was director of operations for Meatball Kitchen Restaurants, with locations in Natick and Wilbraham. Gomez worked as general manager of both restaurants in recent years.

He also worked at The Federal Restaurant and Bar in Agawam since 2006 as assistant manager, general manager and assistant director of social media marketing & brand development.

While he has always been around the food and beverage business in part because of his father, Roberto, being a chef, Gomez said he pursued the management side of the industry.

He said he is excited to work with some of the premiere chefs opening restaurants at MGM Springfield.

In February, MGM Springfield revealed that its restaurants will include the Cal Mare restaurant, featuring "the best of coastal Italian cuisine," and the Chandler Steakhouse, located in the former Chandler hotel.

The South End Market at the casino, also falling under Gomez's oversight, will feature "quick casual dining spots" including Wicked Noodles, Jack's Lobster Shack, Bill's Diner and Hearth Grill.

Award-winning chef Michael Mina brings Cara Mare restaurant to MGM Springfield in collaboration with San Francisco's Chef of the Year Adam Sobel. The Chandler Steakhouse is led by "Hell's Kitchen" season 14 winner Meghan Gill.

"They are fantastic," Gomez said. "I'm so excited to work with the chefs leading these restaurants. They're amazing chefs by their own rights -- celebrities. It's like a dream come true to work with such caliber."

Gomez, who lived in Springfield for many years, recently moved to Ludlow. He is a cousin of Springfield City Councilor Adam Gomez.

Andres Gomez is a graduate of SABIS International Charter School in Springfield and attended Emmanuel College in Boston, Holyoke Community College and the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.Videos

Sorry, there are no recent results for popular videos.Two Lawrence men were listed in serious but stable condition in Boston hospitals Wednesday after both were apparently shot on Brook Street in Lawrence Tuesday afternoon, the Boston Globe reported.

Lawrence police, responding to a report of shots fired just after 3 p.m. Tuesday, found one man suffering gunshot wounds. He was transported to Lawrence General Hospital and later transferred to a Boston hospital.

At about the same time, police were notified that a man suffering a gunshot wound walked into the Lawrence hospital's emergency room. Police believe he was wounded in the same shooting. He also was transferred to a Boston hospital.

Police said the shooting did not appear to be a random incident but targeted to the two men, the Globe reported.A federal judge on Wednesday canceled the planned trial of two top aides to Boston Mayor Marty Walsh.

Judge Leo Sorokin issued an order canceling the trial date for Timothy Sullivan and Kenneth Brissette, who were charged with extortion. Sorokin did not issue a motion to dismiss.

Federal prosecutors had argued that Sullivan and Brissette, by threatening to withhold necessary permits, pushed the organizers of the September 2014 Boston Calling music festival into hiring unnecessary union labor. Both men had pleaded not guilty and were placed on leave.

The trial was slated to start next week, though prosecutors had argued that the judge's proposed jury instructions concerning federal extortion law would hurt their case with the jury, forcing them to prove beyond a reasonable doubt there was a personal benefit to Sullivan and Brissette in demanding the use of union labor.

But prosecutors said they cannot meet that requirement and do not believe a personal benefit is a required element of proving extortion occurred. They've expressed interest in appealing the judge's legal rulings on the matter.

"The government does not have evidence that the defendants took physical possession of, or personally acquired, the wages and benefits to the Local 11 workers whom they forced Crash Line to hire," they wrote.

In a court filing, prosecutors noted that in the evidence they would've offered in a trial shows "Mayor Walsh enjoyed the support of multiple unions during his [2013] campaign for mayor, and some members of his administration assumed that unions would be among his preferred constituents."

They added that they obtained an email from one union official, Colleen Glynn, telling Local 11 members that the September 2014 Boston Calling concert had hired a crew chief and eight deck hands.

"I want you all to know we got a ton of help from City Hall," she wrote, noting that it started "with the top, Mayor Walsh and his staff members," according to prosecutors. "[T]hese folks fought hard for us because Local #11 fought hard for them...and we MUST keep support them & the political candidates who will keep fighting on the side of labor."

Brissette and Sullivan also wanted to "avoid any embarrassment" for the administration caused by a picket or a giant inflatable rat on City Hall Plaza, particularly after Teamsters Local 25 members had gotten widespread attention for their picketing and swearing during the filming of the show "Top Chef" in August 2014, prosecutors added.BOSTON -- A Waltham couple, now apparently on the run, was indicted in federal court Wednesday on allegations they did business with a Syrian company known to have supplied explosives used against American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Anni Beurklian, 49, also known as Anni Ajaka, and her 50-year-old husband, Antoine Ajaka, were indicted on multiple counts related to an import-export company they operated out of their Waltham home for about six years called Top Tech US Inc.

Prosecutors allege that, between 2012 and 2018, the Ajakas used their business to obtain electronic and digital equipment for Syrian and Lebanese companies, including EKT Electronics. According to court documents, the U.S. military determined that EKT supplied improvised explosive devices to terrorist groups fighting American and Coalition troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The couple also never obtained a necessary export license to conduct business with the Syrian company and lied about the value of the materials sent overseas, according to the office of U.S. Attorney for Massachusetts Andrew Lelling. Investigators told the court that, when they began to seize shipments destined for Syria, the couple falsified some records and destroyed others to try to cover their tracks.

On Jan. 9 of this year, as the government negotiated a plea deal with the Ajakas, the couple fled the country and have not been seen since.

The Ajakas were charged with conspiracy to violate U.S. export laws and regulations, conspiracy to defraud the U.S., illegally smuggling U.S. goods out of the country, conspiracy to obstruct justice and obstruction of justice.

Also indicted Wednesday was Amir Katranji, the current manager of EKT Electronics.

If convicted, the three defendants face a potential 55 years in federal prison and a $5.5 million fine.

Top Tech US Inc., was also indicted and faces a $1.5 million fine.

Anni Ajaka is a naturalized American citizen originally from Lebanon and Antoine Ajaka is a permanent resident.SPRINGFIELD -- Five men from Western Massachusetts have been charged in connection with a Mexican drug trafficking ring that brought dozens of kilos of cocaine, heroin and pure Fentanyl to communities across the country including Greater Springfield.

David Cruz, 40, of Westfield, was the first to be charged in U.S. District Court in 2016 after local police caught him with 716 grams of cocaine, a loaded pistol, tens of thousands in cash, drug ledgers and packaging materials in the back of his minivan, court records say.

Cruz threatened to jump off the Memorial Bridge in West Springfield after a high-speed chase, telling police:

"The stuff in that car puts me in prison for the rest of my life. This ends today," according to an affidavit filed in connection with that case.

Cruz may have been prophetic as he and some of his co-defendants face up to life in prison in connection with the weight of the drugs they were allegedly spilling onto city streets in at least four states, according to federal prosecutors.

Cruz had been virtually a lifelong drug dealer, according to court records, living in Springfield in the early 1990s when he led police on yet another high-speed chase after selling 250 grams of crack cocaine to an undercover officer in 1993.

"Cruz eventually resettled in New York and continued to traffic cocaine and crack cocaine to Springfield from New York," according to a sworn statement by U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration Special Agent John McGrath.

In 1995, Cruz was sentenced to 15 years in federal prison for leading a cocaine manufacturing operation among other crimes. He resettled in Westfield and resumed dealing drugs by 2015, according to court records.

On March 21, eight other men were charged in federal indictments unsealed that day. Those include four from Springfield, one from California, one from Florida and two from Vermont. The newest charges said all nine were allegedly integral to trafficking cocaine, heroin and pure Fentanyl from Mexico to the United States.

Some were roped in by incurring large drug debts, the U.S. Attorney's office says. One such defendant, Miguel Betancourt, 50, of Springfield, gave Cruz two cars from his used auto dealership in Enfield, Connecticut, for the cause, according to prosecutors.

Cruz allegedly wired money in $9,500 increments to a relative of one of his Mexican cocaine sources to attempt to avoid scrutiny from the IRS, court records say.

Along with Cruz and Betancourt, Isaac Cardona, 31, Rafael Cardona Sr., 58, and Carlos Mares Jr., 39, all of Springfield, were charged with offenses including conspiracy to traffic cocaine and heroin and money-laundering.

Also indicted were:

Victor Hugo Gonzalez, 27, of Perris, California, charged with conspiring to distribute five kilograms or more of cocaine, and money laundering conspiracy;

Jose Martinez, 32, of Lehigh Acres, Florida, charged with conspiring to traffic at least one kilogram of heroin, and money laundering conspiracy;

Lorenzo Deconinck, 59, of Jamaica, Vermont, charged with conspiracy to distribute and possess with intent to distribute cocaine;

and Juan Ramos, 37, of Wardsboro, Vermont, charged with conspiracy to distribute and possess with intent to distribute 500 grams or more of cocaine.

Gonzales was arrested on Oct. 16 in California and freed on bail but did not appear for his scheduled arraignment in this city, prosecutors said. He is currently a fugitive.

The drug ring was broken up after a 14-month wiretap investigation, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office in Massachusetts. The group managed to import 32 kilos of cocaine and one kilo of Fentanyl in addition to heroin, prosecutors said.

Cruz is scheduled for sentencing in U.S. District Court in Worcester before Judge Timothy Hillman on June 6.HOLYOKE -- The City Council has voted to ask Massachusetts Auditor Suzanne M. Bump to do an audit of municipal finances.

The request for such an examination comes after jolts that have included:

the Feb. 15

police confirming Feb. 12 they are

the city having to hire a financial consultant that completed a $19.1 million reconciliation in the previous fiscal year's ledger that showed

the City Council and Mayor Alex B. Morse

The Council at City Hall Tuesday approved by voice vote an order that the city seek the "use of the State Auditor (Suzanne Bump's Office) to conduct and do an audit of all the city finances for the city of Holyoke." The order had been submitted at the Feb. 20 Council meeting and tabled.

Former city councilor Patricia C. Devine had urged councilors in an email to request that Bump audit city finances, and Ward 2 Councilor Nelson R. Roman filed the order.

"I am proud to have filed this order and believe this step is important because it will go a step further than the recent reconciliation (as) it will look into all city departments and budgets and provide the city with a written document or plan that will allow us to improve accountability and transparency, while improving performance and hopefully lead to Holyoke working more efficiently," Roman said in a text message.

"I am grateful that the Council approved this and that the mayor supports this matter," he said.

Morse told The Republican last month he agreed with the move to contact Bump's office.

"I fully support this request and have considered making said request myself," Morse said in an email. "Such an audit would cost the city nothing, and I believe it is important we continue to identify any deficiencies in our financial departments. I anticipate that the results of such an audit will again highlight our antiquated financial structure as a continued barrier to maximum efficiency."

Joshua Pueschel resigned as auditor last month in a letter that criticized City Hall for failing to follow "numerous procedures" and suggested the answer financially is to put the city in receivership. Pueschel backed away from the receivership point in a later email to councilors and said such a step was unnecessary.

Morse has said Pueschel's assertion about receivership was "disappointing" and "completely off base" in light of financial bond rating agencies raising or affirming the city's credit rating for the past six years.SPRINGFIELD- Nine individuals and a group of American Red Cross volunteers were honored Thursday morning at the 2018 American Red Cross of Western Massachusetts Hometown Heroes Breakfast.

The 16th annual breakfast is the largest fundraiser of the year, with more than 500 locals, community leaders, business owners, family and friends in attendance. The event celebrates the spirit of humanitarianism by honoring local people who have shown courage, kindness and unselfish character through acts of heroism in Western Massachusetts.

The breakfast helps to support disaster relief throughout greater Hampden, Hampshire, and Franklin Counties. Award winners included Wesley Brothers of Monroe who came upon a car which slide off the road into a snowy ravine. Brothers found the car on its side with a driver trapped inside.

With no cell service in the area, Brothers traveled to a friends house to call 911 and returned with blankets to keep the victim warm, stopping possible hypotherma.

83-year-old Ruth Willemain was honored for her work in opening the first social model hospice home in New England, the Harmony House, the first residence in New England for terminally people who are homeless or hove no family or friends.

Chris Parrow of Southwick is a two-time cancer survivor who has volunteered fund raising for the American Cancer Society and Dana Farber. Parrow regularly makes platelet donations which now numbers over 70. Brittany and Jaron Kenney are good neighbors.

The Kenney's have a weekly regiment of sharing the Thursday Republican with neighbor Joseph Rolak. Unknown to the two, Rolak had fallen inside his home and laid in distress for days.

The Kenney's found the elderly gentleman, called the ambulance and followed their neighbor to the hospital.

"Without asking them for help. They continue to take care of me and helping me to live in my own home. They run errands for me and invite me into their home for family gatherings. The sequel to the accident story in my life is a heartwarming and loving tale of their good character," Rolak penned in the breakfast program.

"Accidental Hero" is term reserved for Shawn Bronson and Michael Payne. Both Monson natives are credited with saving a 2-year-old's life whom the came upon on a frigid street in Monson only dressed in a diaper. Both brought the child into a nearby convenience store and accompanied the child in the ambulance to the trip to the hospital.

Dr. Hasan Khatib, a 4th-year resident at Baystate Medical Center, is a life saver. Khatib came across Richard Gardner who collapsed after exercising at a local health club. The doctor performed CPR and used the gym's portable cardiac defibrillator while another called 911.

Laura Chagnon, confined to a wheelchair after an attack in 1989, was honored for the mentoring work she does through the Victim Impact Program at the Hampden County Sheriff's Office. An author of more than 40 books, Chagnon wrote in the program, "I hope people feel amazed and inspired by the poetry I have written. After reading my words and knowing what I have overcome, perhaps others will learn it is possible to do anything if they put their heart into it."NORTHAMPTON -- A Northampton man was ordered held Wednesday after allegedly assaulting a woman in the city's downtown business district last week.

Richard Dunlevy, 49, was arraigned Monday in Northampton District Court, where he pleaded not guilty to assault and battery with a dangerous weapon, assault and battery on a household member, malicious damage to a motor vehicle and larceny.



Judge Michele Ouimet-Rooke ordered Dunlevy held at a hearing Wednesday.

Dunlevy's charges stem from an incident that took place March 14 near the corner of Main and Pleasant streets in which he and an ex-girlfriend got into an argument that turned physical, according to the police report.

The woman said Dunlevy forced his way into her car during an argument and "smashed her head multiple times into the drivers side window," then punched her dashboard media display, shattering it, the report said. He then got out of the car, taking her purse -- which contained around $90 -- with him.

After responding to the scene, police confronted Dunlevy and found that he was "bleeding from the knuckles on his left hand" and that he had $89 in cash, police said.

Dunlevy told police that he never touched the woman, that she had "framed" him, and that he hurt his hand punching a brick wall after becoming angry over his interactions with her, the report said.

Dunlevy is a plaintiff in a restraining order against the woman, according to the police report. Dunlevy said the order is because the woman "stabbed him, and tried to kill him."

A witness told police they saw Dunlevy pacing around on Pleasant Street, yelling on the phone for around an hour, and later witnessed him get into the woman's car.



Dunlevy is scheduled to return to court April 17 for a pretrial hearing.SPRINGFIELD -- Eight men, including four from this city, have been charged in three federal indictments with a Mexico-to-Western Massachusetts drug trafficking ring, according to the U.S. Attorney's office.

The alleged conspiracy included trafficking 32 kilos of cocaine and one kilo of pure Fentanyl, the powerful narcotic that has swiftly added another deadly level of overdose risk among addicts.

Along with four men from California, Florida and Vermont, respectively, Springfield residents charged were:

Miguel Betancourt, 51, with conspiracy to distribute, and possess with intent to distribute cocaine and money laundering conspiracy;

Isaac Cardona, 31, with conspiring to distribute 500 grams or more of cocaine, conspiring to traffic at least one kilogram of heroin, and money laundering conspiracy;

Rafael Cardona Sr., 58, with conspiring to distribute 500 grams or more of cocaine, and conspiring to traffic at least one kilogram of heroin;

and Carlos Mares Jr., 39, with conspiracy to distribute and possess with intent to distribute cocaine.

The local men were arrested and arraigned in U.S. District Court on Wednesday.

Their arrests came after a 14-month wiretap investigation led by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, Internal Revenue Service, Office of Homeland Security and Westfield Police, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office.

A ninth co-conspirator, David Cruz, 40, of Westfield, was arrested and charged in connection with the alleged trafficking ring in 2016.

He pleaded guilty to conspiracy to distribute and possess with intent to distribute cocaine, conspiracy to distribute and possess with intent to distribute heroin, carrying a firearm in furtherance of a drug offense, and being a felon in possession of a firearm. Cruz is scheduled to be sentenced on June 6.

This story will be updated after further reporting.A 27-year-old Quincy woman was arrested Thursday and charged in connection with the death of an 11-month-old baby.

Shu Feng Hsu, 27, of 34 Sewall St., Quincy, was arrested at her residence by detectives from the Quincy Police Department Special Investigation Unit and a State Police detective assigned to the Norfolk District Attorney's Office.

She was arrested on a warrant charging her with assault and battery on a child causing serious bodily injury.

Police were called to the 34 Sewall St. address on Feb. 15 for a medical assistance call. Authorities tended to 11-month-old Chloe Chen, who lived at the residence with her parents and others.

The child was taken to Boston Medical Center and died on February 17, 2018.

"This investigation is not yet complete, but working with Quincy Police we have developed sufficient evidence for this charge to be brought and arraigned today," District Attorney Michael Morrissey said. "The investigation continues."

Hsu pleaded not guilty and bail was set at $200,000. She returns to court next month.NORTHAMPTON - A 42-year-old Easthampton man, who was expected to change his plea Thursday in connection with multiple explosions detonated in that city in February 2017, instead requested a new defense attorney.

Hampshire Superior Court Judge Mary Lou Rupp declined Bryan O. Desmarais' request and set a new court date of March 29 to review the status of the case, according to the Northwestern District Attorney's office.

Desmarais was arraigned in February 2017 on numerous charges after investigators, executing a search warrant at his residence in Easthampton, discovered a large quantity of material used for the manufacturing of explosives, as well as manufactured explosives, ammunition, and other contraband.

A multi-agency investigation began on the evening of February 5, 2017, when several explosions were reported in the vicinity of Lower Mill Pond behind the Eastworks Building on Pleasant Street.

The case has been investigated by Easthampton Police Detective Bureau, The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF), The FBI Springfield field office Joint Terrorism Task Force, the Massachusetts State Police Bomb Squad, the Northwestern District Attorney's Office, and the United States Attorney's Office in Springfield.

Desmarais is being held at the Franklin County Jail & House of Correction in Greenfield.Yes. I will do my part to conserve household energy usage, even if I'm uncomfortable in my home.

No. It is too hot to conserve household energy usage.

I already conserve, even before ERCOT requested it.

Maybe, depending on the reason ERCOT provides and whether or not I am home during that time.

Vote

View ResultsSOUTH HADLEY -- The community group Know Your Town will convene a public forum next week on whether commercial marijuana sales should be prohibited in South Hadley.

Voters will decide during the town election April 9 whether to approve or reject the ban, which was placed on the ballot by the Selectboard.

A summary of ballot question 3 says a "'Yes' vote would indicate you favor banning (not allowing) the retail sale, commercial cultivation, testing, manufacturing, packaging, distribution or any other commercial activity related to marijuana/cannabis products as described or allowed in Massachusetts General Law or Town of South Hadley by-laws. A 'No' vote would indicate you favor allowing (not banning) the sale, testing, manufacturing, commercial cultivation, packaging, distribution or other type of licensed cannabis/marijuana related businesses."

The Know Your Town forum will convene March 29 at 7 p.m. at the South Hadley Town Hall auditorium, 116 Main St.

Ray Hershel will moderate the discussion that includes three invited guests who will speak in favor of the sales ban, and three opposed. Each side will be allotted 15 minutes total to present their views on the ban.

"Audience members may then question the panel members," KYT said in a statement announcing the forum.

Refreshments will be served at the program's conclusions.

Massachusetts voters legalized recreational marijuana in the November 2016 election. South Hadley voters favored legalization 4,779-4,445.SOUTHWICK -- Cultural Council Chairwoman Susan Kochanski, along with state Sen. Donald F. Humason, R-Westfield, and state Rep. Nicholas A. Boldyga, R-Southwick, have announced the awarding of nine grants totaling $4,981 for cultural programs in Southwick.

The money will fund public harmonica lessons, construction of Rube Goldberg devices, improv comedy performances and more.

The Southwick Cultural Council is part of a network of 329 municipal councils under the umbrella of the Massachusetts Cultural Council, supporting thousands of community-based projects in the arts, sciences and humanities every year. The state Legislature provides an annual appropriation to the state agency, which then allocates funds to community-based cultural councils.

More than $3 million in grants support more than 5,000 cultural programs statewide. These include school field trips, after-school programs, concerts, festivals, lectures, theater, dance, music and film. The projects take place in schools, community centers, libraries, elder care facilities, town halls, parks and wherever communities come together.

Said Boldyga, "I am pleased that Southwick received a number of grants for the arts, sciences, and humanities programs. (These) grants help to ensure that cultural resources in Southwick and across the commonwealth are accessible to all residents."

Decisions about which activities to support are made at the community level by a board of town-appointed volunteers. The members of the Cultural Council, along with Kochanski, include Steve Brudzinski, Maria Gallo, Bruce Kulas, Patricia McMahon, Ellen Miles, Karen Reed, Cindi Warner and Laura Zides-Lucier.

"It's the town appointed members who really make this system work," said Humason. "They make limited resources go as far as possible, and they make the tough decisions about which projects should be supported. Thanks to them, the arts, sciences and humanities are part of people's everyday lives in every community."

Kochanski said, "The Cultural Council is pleased to be able to support requests from local organizations. We try to award grants in a manner that supports all segments of the population from senior citizens to students and young children. They are very hard decisions and each year we hope the funding will increase so we can fund additional requests."

She also noted that the council will seek applications in October and will be available online at the state agency's website, massculturalcouncil.org.

Recipients of the Southwick grants include:

* Henry the Juggler, who will perform at a time and venue to be determined. The one-hour program is geared for families, seniors and child audiences of all ages.

* "Monet's Magic: Wondrous Water Lilies," a workshop held Tuesday at Southwick Public Library by artist Gregory Maichak, who demonstrated pastel techniques using the basic stroke, layering, slurring, blending and scumbling.

* Rotary Club of Southwick for its music series during July and August at the pavilion at Whalley Park. The number of professional musicians to perform will be based upon funding and sponsorships.

* Southwick Historical Society for a living history program set in 1861 titled "Abraham and Mary Lincoln: The Long and the Short of it." Steve and Sharon Wood will portray the president and his wife as having occupied the executive mansion, now known as the White House, after his inauguration.

* Southwick Public Library for a workshop, "Playful Engineers," to be scheduled with Jay Mankinta presenting a program in which participants will have a chance to design, build, test and play with Rube Goldberg machines.

* Southwick Public Library for a program, "Raps, Rhythms and Rhymes," with storyteller Rona Leventhal, to be part of the library's summer reading program.

* Southwick Public Library for a program, "Learn to Play the Harmonica," with teacher Rob Fletcher, as a component of the summer reading program.

* Southwick Public Library for the "Laugh Crafters Workshop," to be scheduled, with Phantom Sheep Comedy featuring comedy improvisation theatrical games.

* David Neill for a performance, "Life, Times and Music of Louis Armstrong," featuring Dixieland Stomp as part of the Southwick Rotary Club's summer concert series.

The Cultural Council meets the third Thursday of each month at 7 p.m. in the land use room at Town Hall.SPRINGFIELD - Richard C. Freeman had no use for the loaded, semi-automatic handgun that police allegedly found on his lap last weekend, his lawyer said.

"He's blind," attorney Joe A. Smith III explained Monday in Springfield District Court, moments before his client pulled a collapsible cane from his jacket and began to unfold it.

"Here's the stick he uses to get around," the lawyer added. "Obviously, he's blind."

Freeman, 34, of Springfield, pleaded not guilty to possession of a loaded firearm without a license. He and a co-defendant, Timothy Williams, 33, of Springfield, were arrested around 3:30 Saturday morning after police responded to a disturbance on Oak Grove Avenue.

When police pulled up, they saw two men sitting in a pickup truck. The passenger, later identified as Freeman, had a black, semi-automatic pistol on his lap and a second gun was spotted on the center console moments later, according to the arrest report.

Both men were arrested and charged with carrying a loaded firearm without a license. Springfield police spokesman Ryan Walsh praised the officers for showing restraint in a tense situation in a high-crime neighborhood.

After being booked at Springfield police headquarters, Freeman and Williams were released on $5,000 cash bail for court appearances on Monday.

Assistant District Attorney Carrie Kenniston asked for $30,000 bail for Freeman, citing the new charge and his criminal record, which includes convictions on federal and state drug charges and underage possession of a firearm.

The gun on his lap was a .40-caliber Smith & Wesson handgun with six rounds in the magazine, Kenniston said. The second gun -- a Browning 9-mm firearm with 10 rounds in the magazine -- belonged to Williams, the prosecutor said.

Smith challenged the police account of the arrests, saying it strained credulity, especially given Freeman's blindness.

"There is no mention in the police report that he is blind," he added.

A gunshot to the head nearly killed Freeman several years ago and left him blind and suffering from seizures, Smith told Judge Bruce Melikian.

Freeman, standing in the defendant's dock, wore dark glasses and faced straight ahead during the hearing. When his case was called, his sister helped him from his seat in the gallery and led him to the front of the courtroom.

"I represented him before (the shooting) and after it," Smith said, adding the gunshot wound had transformed his client's life.

"He's unable to get around by himself," Smith said. On Saturday morning, Freeman "would have no idea the police were even behind him" as they approached the vehicle, the lawyer said.

Smith asked for $5,000 bail, the same figure Freeman was required to post at Springfield police headquarters.

Melikian set bail at $5,000, and continued the case for a pretrial hearing on April 11.

The judge set bail at $15,000 for Williams, who had a previous conviction for carrying a firearm without a license, court records show.SPRINGFIELD - The city's police officers could soon begin carrying Narcan, a drug that counters the effects of opioid overdoses, depending on the outcome of contract negotiations that are ongoing between the city and the police unions.

Many police departments already have officers carrying Narcan in their cruisers. The rationale for this is that police are often the first to arrive on scene, ahead of EMTs and firefighters, and having officers administer the drug themselves could save valuable time and prevent a fatal overdose.

In Western Massachusetts, police in Greenfield, Northampton and Chicopee carry Narcan, or Naloxone, as it is also known as. Springfield, the region's largest police department, does not.

Police Commissioner John Barbieri said he supports officers carrying Naloxone, but deploying it throughout the department is not as simple as him drafting an order.

Because it represents a change in working conditions, the matter has to be collectively bargained between the city and the International Brotherhood of Police Officers, local 364, which represents the patrol officers and superior officers.

The city is in the middle of negotiations with the union over a new contract, and this is one of the issue up for discussion, Barbieri said.

Also under discussion is equipping officers with body cameras, another proposal Barbieri favors.

"It has proven to be a life-saving drug. While the number of overdose deaths is decreasing in Massachusetts, the number of opioid-related overdoses is still high," he said.

In anticipation of it being approved by the union and the contract ratified, Barbieri said he has started having officers receiving training in the administering of Narcan. He called this "laying the groundwork,"

Local 364 President Joseph Gentile said last week that he does not discuss specifics while the contract is being negotiated. He declined to discuss the Narcan proposal or whether it will be accepted.

He said it is unclear when the negotiations will lead to a contract that can then be put to a vote. "That is the big question," he said.

According to figures just released by the state, the estimated number of opioid-related deaths in Massachusetts declined by about 8 percent between 2017 and 2016.

There were an estimated 1,977 opioid-related deaths last year, down from the record number of 2,155 set in 2016.

Since 2014, there have been at least 1,300 opioid-related deaths in Massachusetts, while in the 13 years prior there were never more than 960 in any year.

According to Springfield police spokesman Ryan Walsh, the department has dispatched officers to some 200 reported overdoses since January of last year, including more than 50 since the start of 2018. He did not have data on how many of those cases involved an overdose death.

The most recent figures provided by the state Department of Public Health show Springfield that in the five years between 2012 and 2016, the number of fatal overdoses increased from 26 in 2012 to 41 by 2015 and 40 in 2016.EASTHAMPTON -- A traffic study will soon be released showing the impact of new school construction at 200 Park Street, and the results could lead to additional city costs for traffic mitigation.

The information was presented at the fifth public forum on plans to tear down White Brook Middle School, surplus three downtown elementary schools, and build a new, $109 million consolidated middle and elementary school for 1,000 students.

The school project could drive the neighborhood into an "F" grade for traffic, said project architect Bert Gardner, with the biggest concern being people trying to make a left turn out of the school driveway onto the busy roadway.

"The mayor has to consider how much of this becomes a school project, and how much becomes a city project," said Gardner, in reference to project costs.

He said options range "from a traffic light at White Brook ... to traffic circles, to other mitigation scenarios that could impact Park Street and abuttors."

Mayor Nicole LaChapelle said she asked Berkshire Design Group to summarize a range of traffic mitigation options and costs as part of their pending report. However, she declined to promise that the options and costs would be made available to the public before a May 22 special election on new school construction.

"Is it going to cost us two or four more million dollars to fix the roads so we can have a school there?" asked Beth Tiffany, a Park Street resident.

"Roads and infrastructure are costs now," said LaChapelle, adding that the Park and South Street road area "is already on a number of lists." She said she plans to apply for a MassWorks grant, to study how many children will ride the school bus, and look at better ways for students to walk or ride bikes to school.

LaChapelle said "the focus of this project is creating a school rather than looking at a traffic solution" and that she would "figure out what traffic solution I take on as part of the school cost, and intensified by the school."

A number of now-familiar topics were covered during the two-hour forum. Estimated cost numbers remain at $109 million, with around $59 million to be funded by local property taxes. The rest would be reimbursed by the Massachusetts School Building Authority, officials said.

"We have committed that the project will not be above $109 million," said Thomas Brown, chairman of the local School Building Committee. He noted that the actual costs won't be known until the project goes out to bid in 2019.

Police Chief Robert Alberti and Fire Chief David Mottor each said the new facility would deliver enhanced school safety. The current White Brook Middle School does not have a complete sprinkler system, said Mottor. A new school would provide lockable wings, a controlled entryway, and video surveillance, said Alberti, who praised his officers for their advanced school safety training.

Presentations were made by Superintendent Nancy Follansbee, school business manager Dayle Doiron, by Owners Project Manager Mel Overmoyer, School Committee chairwoman Cynthia Kwiecinski, and others.

While some residents said they would vote "no" because of the property tax impact on elderly residents, others, including members of the School Building Committee, stepped to the microphone to encourage a "yes" vote on May 22.

Committee members will soon travel to Boston for state approval of their "preferred schematic design" for the school building. Approval would allow for the development of detailed architectural drawings and specifications. Another public forum is set for May 1, three weeks before the special election.

The Massachusetts School Building Authority is not due to vote on financing the school project until August. Yet David Boyle, a developer and member of the building committee, said he has confidence and believes the project makes sense.

"We've been working closely with the MSBA, and they want us to succeed," he said. "The time to act is now, because project costs are not getting any cheaper, and interests rates will be going back up."

Easthampton School Building Public Forum 3-20-18 by Mary Serreze on ScribdArmored cars. Remote cash collection machines. Blockchain technology. A state-run marijuana bank.

All of these things are being discussed as potential solutions to a major marijuana industry challenge: a lack of banking services and an industry that is likely to be unusually cash-heavy.

"These stores can do $1 million (of business) a month," said James Smith, an attorney and founding partner at Smith, Costello and Crawford who represents cannabis companies. "You don't want that to be cash. ... The state doesn't want it, the industry doesn't want it, even the federal government doesn't want it."

But no one has yet figured out how to prevent it. "Everyone's trying different things, there's no solution," Smith said.

Massachusetts is preparing for the first legal marijuana stores to open this summer, with the licensing process beginning next month. Legal marijuana is estimated to be a $1.07 billion business in Massachusetts by 2020. But one pressing question is how does that money move around in a safe and secure way.

A spokesman for the Cannabis Control Commission, which oversees the state's marijuana industry, said in a statement,

"The Cannabis Control Commission is aware of the administrative, compliance, and public safety challenges that other states have faced in the absence of traditional banking institutions within the cannabis marketplace. We are working collaboratively with state banking and credit union associations as well as relevant sister state government agencies to explore solutions and stand up a safe, professionally managed industry."

In today's climate, almost no other industry does a significant amount of business in cash.

But the marijuana industry is unique. Marijuana remains illegal federally, which means federally chartered banks cannot accept marijuana money. Credit card companies also will not provide services for marijuana purchases.

Today, only one bank - Century Bank in Medford - is known to do business with Massachusetts' medical marijuana companies. People can pay for medical marijuana with debit cards. Both the bank and the debit cards charge large fees.

Jon Skarin, senior vice president of the Massachusetts Bankers Association, said all banks are subject to federal law. Attorney General Jeff Sessions' decision to rescind Obama-era protections for businesses and individuals complying with state marijuana laws added to banks' hesitance to get involved with the marijuana industry.

The problem is likely to get worse for the recreational side of the business, since certain federal protections that are in place for medical marijuana do not exist for recreational marijuana. Skarin said the banking industry would prefer that these businesses operate within the traditional banking system, but that is difficult.

"There's a very limited number of depository intuitions that have chosen to do business with the marijuana industry," Skarin said. "It remains to be seen in Massachusetts if that's going to change."

In Colorado, a couple of state credit unions handle most of the marijuana businesses, Smith said. "Hopefully we'll have a credit union or bank assist us," he said. "It hasn't happened yet."

Much of the money that comes into marijuana dispensaries is cash. Kevin Conroy, a partner at the law firm Foley Hoag who represents several marijuana businesses, said many customers want to pay cash for marijuana to maintain their anonymity and avoid the records that come from using a debit card.

"They like the privacy of the transaction," Conroy said. "They like the fact there's not a specific record or receipt given to them."

But at the same time, a cash business carries a greater risk of robbery and makes it harder to track transactions. Although marijuana dispensaries have cameras and strict security requirements, employees paid in cash risk being robbed when they leave.

Conroy said dispensaries must have proper controls for handling cash - including security systems for handling and storing cash and transaction tracking systems. The state requires seed-to-sale tracking of marijuana plants, and the Cannabis Control Commission has been working on purchasing and developing software that can be used to track the plants.

"All of the dispensaries have security consultants who help them set up systems to ensure cash is in a safe place when on site, and there's a very safe way for cash to be moved from the site to where it needs to go," Conroy said.

Smith said businesses have gotten "creative" in dealing with large amounts of cash. For example, if a dispensary owns its own property, the dispensary might create a separate real estate company to manage the property, then pay rent in cash to the real estate business, which has a bank account.

"There's a lot of creative thinking," Smith said. "Nobody is happy with a bag of cash."

Cannabis Control Commission Chairman Steve Hoffman has floated the idea of creating a state-run bank to provide financial services to marijuana businesses, but state policymakers have shown little interest in the idea.

The state Department of Revenue, which will have to collect taxes from marijuana businesses, put out a request for public input on what regulations it should establish related to marijuana tax laws and cash collection. The Department of Revenue is working with the Cannabis Control Commission to develop tax collection processes.

One creative solution submitted to the department came from Michael Latulippe, an advocate for medical marijuana patients who used to work in the tech industry. Latulippe suggested that the state adopt blockchain technology to track cannabis sales. Blockchain was created to track transactions of the cryptocurrency bitcoin. It provides a way to create a permanent ledger of transactions without a central server.

Latulippe said this would allow dispensaries to make a permanent record of every cash transaction as it occurs, to lessen the potential for money to be lost or diverted. The technology can also accommodate "smart contracts," in which a software program would arrange for tax money to be automatically sent from a dispensary to a municipality during each transaction.

"Every transaction, whether it was cash or not, would be put in the system," Latulippe said. "It could basically ensure no transaction goes untraced."

This would address the bookkeeping concerns, but would not affect how the cash would be stored or moved around.

To deal with that problem, at least one company is actively looking at setting up remote cash deposit services for the marijuana industry, according to a company lobbyist.

This is similar to a service already provided in other industries. For example, if a supermarket collects utility bill payments, the supermarket might use a cash deposit machine run by a third party company, then that company would collect the money and send it to the utility company through the mail or a parcel service.

Other options for companies include hiring private security firms and armored cars to transport cash.

A spokeswoman for the Massachusetts Division of Banks declined to comment.

On its website, the division issues guidance saying the state will not go after banks that operate under Obama-era federal guidelines, which establish priorities for marijuana enforcement - such as preventing distribution to minors or diversion to gangs. But the department is currently reviewing that guidance in light of Sessions' decision to rescind the federal guidelines.

The Division of Banks does note on its website that if a marijuana-related business cannot access banking services, the alternative is the daily handling of large amounts of cash. "Not only does this create very serious safety concerns and invite increased criminal activity, but it is also a very expensive and impractical way to conduct business," the department writes. "Operating in cash also makes the tracking of funds and collection of tax payments very difficult."Secretary of the Commonwealth William Galvin on Thursday endorsed a bill to implement automatic voter registration and stressed the importance of passing it this year.

Galvin, the state's top elections official, said his office will need time to implement the change, in order for people to be automatically enrolled to vote in time for the 2020 presidential election.

"If I could snap my fingers and make it happen, I would, but I can't. My fingers aren't that good," Galvin said. "I have to work, we need time."

The automatic voter registration proposal, H.4320, was reported favorably out of the Election Laws committee and is now pending before the Ways and Means Committee, which will determine how much it will cost.

Under the legislation, the Registry of Motor Vehicles and MassHealth would automatically register citizens to vote when they complete a RMV or MassHealth transaction. A person would be notified and could choose to opt out.

Massachusetts would be the first state to automatically enroll people using its Medicaid program, although New York and Kentucky both enroll voters through multiple social service agencies. Ten states and Washington, D.C. have some form of automatic voter registration, generally through a registry of motor vehicles database.

The bills were sponsored by Sen. Cynthia Creem, D-Newton, and the late Rep. Peter Kocot, D-Northampton.

Galvin said he has been talking to a coalition of AVR supporters since June and worked with them to arrive at a piece of legislation that he was able to support.

Galvin announced his support at a press conference in his office, surrounded by advocates for the bill.

Meryl Kessler, executive director of the Massachusetts League of Women Voters, said automatic voter registration will "expand access to the ballot by removing unnecessary obstacles to registration, and at same time make registration more accurate, secure and inclusive."

Janet Domenitz, executive director of MassPIRG, said the policy would register more young people to vote. "We think that bodes well for the future," she said.

The bill has been pending in the Legislature for three sessions, but it has gotten more attention this year. This is the first year it has been reported favorably out of a legislative committee. There is a larger coalition backing it, including 61 groups, representing a range of minority communities, progressive organizing groups, unions and voters rights groups. Attorney General Maura Healey has also backed it.

The bill has 84 co-sponsors. The entire Springfield delegation is supportive.

Galvin voiced his support for the bill as he is facing a Democratic primary challenge from Boston City Councilor Josh Zakim. Zakim's platform has centered on making voting more accessible. Zakim said he has supported automatic voter registration since he joined the city council in 2013.

"I'd like to welcome Secretary Galvin to the side that supports automatic voter registration," Zakim said in a statement. "It's interesting that after literally decades of ignoring AVR amid plummeting voter turnout rates, the incumbent now sees the wisdom of it when he has an opponent in his re-election campaign."

Galvin also faces a Republican challenge from Anthony Amore, the security director for Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

Asked for his reaction to Amore's entrance into the race, Galvin said "wonderful," adding that he has had Republican opponents before.

Asked about Zakim challenging him to multiple debates, Galvin said, "I'm sure there will be an opportunity" to debate with Zakim. He declined to say how many times he would go face to face with his opponent.

"I actually have a job I have to work at," Galvin said.Although the Trump administration called on U.S. attorneys this week to consider using the death penalty in some drug-related cases, a new poll suggests that the vast majority of American voters oppose capital punishment for drug dealers and believe it will do little to stop the country's opioid abuse epidemic.

A Quinnipiac University national survey released Thursday found that while 58 percent of American voters generally support the death penalty for individuals convicted of murder -- including 37 percent who back it over the option of life imprisonment without parole -- they are less split when it comes to imposing the punishment on drug dealers tied to lethal overdoses.

Seven in 10 respondents said the oppose they idea of using the death penalty on drug dealers, compared to 21 percent who said they support capital punishment for certain drug-related crimes.

Opponents to President Donald Trump's plan to use the death penalty for drug dealers tied to overdose deaths included a majority of Republicans, 57 percent; Democrats, 87 percent; and independents, 69 percent.

Three-quarters of voters, or 75 percent, further said they do not believe imposing the death penalty on individuals convicted of certain drug-related crimes will help stop the opioid addiction crisis.

Tim Malloy, the Quinnipiac University Poll's assistant director, said the results suggest that "despite what President Donald Trump says, neither Democrats nor Republicans have the stomach for executing drug dealers."

The poll, which surveyed nearly 1,300 voters via telephone from March 16 to 20, has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.3 percentage points.

It's findings came just one day after Attorney General Jeff Sessions issued a memo to federal prosecutors urging that they consider using "every tool at their disposal" to combat the opioid crisis, including the death penalty.

Trump announced his controversial plan to seek the death penalty against some drug offenders during a Monday stop at Manchester Community College in New Hampshire.

Such punishment, the president offered, is needed if the United States wants to get serious about reducing the number of opioid-related deaths.

"If we're not going to get tough on the drug dealers, they'll kill thousands of people and destroy so many peoples' lives," he told a crowd of invited guests. "We are just doing the wrong thing. We have got to get tough. This isn't about nice anymore ... this is about winning a very, very tough problem. If we don't get very tough on these dealers, that's not going to happen folks."President Donald Trump said Thursday that he wants to testify before Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.

The president, in response to reporters' questions, affirmed that he still wants to go before the special counsel.

"Yes, I would like to," he said after a White House event on trade, according to White House pool reports.

Trump's remarks came just hours after John Dowd, his lead attorney for Mueller's investigation, resigned after reportedly disagreeing with the president on strategy, including on whether he should sit for an interview with the special counsel, according to various news outlets.

The president's legal team has reportedly been considering ways in which Trump could testify before Mueller, including through written answers and limited verbal testimony, those familiar with the matter told the Wall Street Journal last month.

Trump, who has repeatedly referred to Mueller's investigation as a "witch hunt," said in January that he'd "love to" speak with Mueller "subject to (his) lawyers, and all of that," the New York Times reported.

This is a breaking news story and will be updated when more information becomes available.President Donald Trump fired back at former Vice President Joe Biden Thursday, arguing that the Democrat is "weak" and could be easily beaten in a physical fight.

Responding to reports that Biden recently claimed he would have "beat the hell out" of Trump if they had gone to school together, the president cast doubt on such a scenario.

"Crazy Joe Biden is trying to act like a tough guy. Actually, he is weak, both mentally and physically, and yet he threatens me, for the second time, with physical assault," he tweeted. "He doesn't know me, but he would go down fast and hard, crying all the way. Don't threaten people Joe!"

Crazy Joe Biden is trying to act like a tough guy. Actually, he is weak, both mentally and physically, and yet he threatens me, for the second time, with physical assault. He doesnt know me, but he would go down fast and hard, crying all the way. Dont threaten people Joe!  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 22, 2018

Biden, during a Tuesday University of Miami anti-sexual assault rally, took jabs at Trump over his alleged "Access Hollywood" remarks regarding women, according to ABC News.

"A guy who ended up becoming our national leader said, 'I can grab a woman anywhere and she likes it,'" he reportedly said. "They asked me if I'd like to debate this gentleman, and I said 'no.' I said, 'If we were in high school, I'd take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him.'"

Biden, a rumored 2020 presidential contender who has been campaigning for Democrats across the country, reportedly added that "any guy that talked that way was usually the fattest, ugliest S.O.B. in the room."

Trump turned his focus to the former vice president just one day after taking aim at other White House predecessors on Twitter.

The president, while defending his decision to congratulate Russian President Vladimir Putin on his recent re-election, argued that George W. Bush "didn't have the smarts" to get along with Russia, while Barack Obama and Bill Clinton "didn't have the energy or chemistry."BOSTON -- Senate President-elect Karen Spilka, D-Ashland, on Thursday pledged a "respectful yet smooth transition" as she takes over the Senate presidency from Sen. Harriette Chandler, D-Worcester.

Spilka and Chandler could not say when the transition would take place.

Chandler took over the Senate presidency after Sen. Stan Rosenberg, D-Amherst, stepped down from the post amid an investigation related to alleged sexual misconduct by his husband.

Spilka said Wednesday that she had secured enough votes to win the Senate presidency.

"I believe the members wanted to end this, turn the page and usher in a new era and let us focus on the people's work now," Spilka said. "Work on the budget, work on the priorities of the members of the Senate, have an incredibly productive end of session and move forward."

Chandler, who has said she was not interested in the job past this session, has said she intends to remain president through the end of the legislative session in July.

Asked whether she was effectively a lame duck, Chandler said she thinks there is more certainty now about the Senate's future, but she still plans to remain president through at least July.

"This would not be the best time to transfer any kind of power," Chandler said. "I plan to serve until the end of this term, and then we will transfer that power over to Sen. Spilka as the new Senate president."

Chandler did not say whether she intended to transfer power in August or stay on through the end of the year. The Senate would typically select its new president in January.

Spilka declined to comment at all on the time frame, saying only, "We will discuss the respectful, smooth transition."

Meanwhile, Spilka remains the chairwoman of the powerful budget-writing Senate Ways and Means Committee, as the Legislature moves into its budget writing season. Spilka said there have not been any discussions about who will take over the job once she moves into the president's role.

Asked about her priorities as Senate president, Spilka said she will continue the vision of "empowering senators," echoing Rosenberg's mantra of "shared leadership."

"I want to talk to my colleagues to hear their priorities, but I do know we have issues of social justice, economic justice, income inequality, we have education, civil rights, transportation, global climate change, net neutrality," Spilka said. "There are so many critical issues before us to tackle."

Sen. Sal DiDomenico, D-Everett, who had competed with Spilka for the Senate presidency and was the last of the other candidates to pledge his support for her, stood next to Spilka as she spoke to the press.

"Sen. Spilka and I have been longtime friends. I was her vice chair of Ways and Means," DiDomenico said. "She's a good person. This has been a process where there has been no bad blood at all."

"There comes a point in time where you want to unite the body and you want to come together and let the process go forward," DiDomenico said. "I felt this was the time."

Rosenberg has said he hopes once an ethics investigation is concluded, he will be able to have more opportunities for leadership in the Senate. Currently, Rosenberg does not even have any committee assignments. Rosenberg congratulated Spilka on Wednesday.

"In a time where we must move forward on so many critical issues, like addressing climate change, economic development and fighting income inequality, criminal justice reform and improving our public education system, I look forward to working with Senator Spilka on making sure the needs of the district are met," Rosenberg said.A Montana State University professor of microbiology and immunology has received funding to fine-tune a revolutionary method to treat genetic disorders.

Blake Wiedenheft, assistant professor in MSUs Department of Microbiology and Immunology in the College of Agriculture and the College of Letters & Science, will receive $440,000 from California-based biopharmaceutical company Amgen. The funding will flow through SurGene, a biotech company Wiedenheft founded in December 2016 after Amgen expressed an interest in funding his research through a startup company.

Troy Carter, TechLink Staff Writer via the MSU News Service

http://www.montana.edu/news/17560"Montana is built on the innovative ideas of our small business owners, and its an honor to celebrate them. These businesses, with support of the Small Business Development Centers, strive to make their communities and Montana a great example for future entrepreneurs." Gov. Steve Bullock

http://www.ktvh.com/2018/03/bullock-celebrates-small-business-success-in-great-fallsHow do investors evaluate your startup company? Let me take some of the mystery out of the process and tell you one approach. Its not the only approach and different investors will put different weighting on different parts of your company. The goal of the post is to help you be self-aware and ask your yourself if now is the right time to pitch your idea to investors for funding. This is a different process then pitching your idea for validation.

by Dave Parker

***

Have you entered yet?

Montana Launches State-Wide Business Plan Competition With Up To $50,000 In Capital Investments  EarlyStageMT.org http://www.matr.net/article-81922.htmlAfrican Development Bank President Dr Akinwumi Adesina received the African of the Year Award from the All Africa Business Leaders Awards (AABLA), in recognition of his bold leadership and the innovation of the Africa Investment Forum which opened up billions of dollars of investment into the continent.

The ninth edition of the awards, organized by AABLA in conjunction with CNBC Africa, seeks to honour leaders who have contributed and shaped the African economy.

The Africa Investment Forum (https://AfricaInvestmentForum.com/), inaugurated in 2018, has been a trailblazer in tilting investments into the continent. The second edition of the Forum which was held in Johannesburg, South Africa ended on 13 November. It was attended by over 2,000 delegates and secured investor interest worth $40.1 billion  up from $37.1 billion the previous year.

It is indeed a great honour, Dr Adesina said in remarks during the exclusive gala dinner held at the Sandton Convention Centre in Johannesburg, at which the awards were announced. Adesina added that he was overwhelmed to follow in the footsteps of his big brother President Paul Kagame of Rwanda, who won the award in 2018. My heartbeat is to serve the people of Africa, Adesina said.

The event was attended by an A-list of business leaders, government representatives including David Makhura, Premier of Guateng Province, who gave the opening address. The event also attracted some of South Africas leading personalities. Vibrant music was provided by The Muses, a south African all-female string quartet and Dr Victor And The Rasta Rebels.

The awards are decided by a jury of continent-wide judges led by Sam Bhembe, CNBC Africa Non-Executive Director, following evaluation of a shortlist of finalists to determine the overall category winners.

Bhembe said the award reflected how the winner would shape the future of the African continent, and that the winner would brace the cover of a special edition of Forbes Africa.

In other categories of the 2019 awards, Nigerian Co-Founder of Kobo360, Obi Ozor won Young Business Leader of the Year; Naspers CEO: South Africa, Phuthi Mahanyele-Dabengwa took the Business Woman of the Year award; while Nedbank, won the Company of the Year award.

Adesina dedicated his award to the people of Africa who inspire me... I do not work alone. He also said it was very rewarding to be at the helm of an organisation that paves the way to progress.

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LinkedInI absolutely do not understand how you pose this question.We are in a cyberwar with Russia. Period. Russia has meddled in our electoral process, and it's probed our electrical. To what degree remains to be seen.Despite what rightists maintain, Trump's collusion or lack thereof is yet to be determined, however, his lavish praise for a murdering despot, and I'm not talking about the president of the Philippines though Trump is buds with that murdering despot, is well-documented and public knowledge.Russia's election was nearly a carbon copy of the elections held in the USSR, namely the outcome is foregone and every Russian citizen knows that.Rightists criticize leftists for wanting to go along with other nations, yet here you are advocating doing so.Let's take a look at who congratulated Putin:Chinese President Xi JinpingIranian President Hassan RouhaniSaudi Arabia's Crown Prince, SAVenezuelan President Nicolas MaduroBolivia's President Evo MoralesCuban President Raul CastroAnd of all countries in Europe, evidently only Germany has congratulated Vlad, sorta.Have you called Vlad to congratulate him of his "victory?" Would you if you were the US president?The Trumpaphobes are defending Mueller saying that the FBI rank and file holds Mueller in such high esteem....As far as being a "Republican"..??? So what?? McCain claims he is a Republican too.... The fat and Lazy foie grau eating country club Republicans hate Trump as much as the left does...Video released by the Tempe Police Department shows that the human backup driver behind the wheel of the self-driving Uber that struck and killed a woman on Sunday was distracted prior to the collision.

The videos show the moment directly leading up to the collision with views from the outside and inside of the self-driving Volvo. On the exterior view, the woman walking the bike can be seen right up until the fatal impact so watch with discretion. On the inside of the vehicle, the driver is shown with their head down until the moment they realized the vehicle they were behind the wheel of was about to strike someone.

Tempe Police Vehicular Crimes Unit is actively investigating

the details of this incident that occurred on March 18th. We will provide updated information regarding the investigation once it is available. pic.twitter.com/2dVP72TziQ  Tempe Police (@TempePolice) March 21, 2018

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"Tempe Police Vehicular Crimes Unit is actively investigating the details of this incident that occurred on March 18th," police said in a tweet. "We will provide updated information regarding the investigation once it is available."

Before the above video was released Wednesday, Tempe police said that it did not appear Uber was at fault when one of its self-driving vehicles hit and killed a pedestrian.

The woman killed in the collision has been identified by police as 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg. AZCentral reports the woman was homeless and died from her injuries at a nearby hospital.

Tempe police Sgt. Ronald Elcock said that the pedestrian stepped into the street outside of the crosswalk and was immediately struck by the vehicle. The crash reportedly occurred Sunday night, March 18 in Tempe, Arizona and is the first death involving an autonomous vehicle being tested on public roads.

A self-driving Uber vehicle struck and killed a pedestrian in a late-night accident in Tempe, Arizona, police said. Preliminary investigation shows that the vehicle was traveling at approximately 40mph, with no significant signs of slowing down.



MORE: https://t.co/VkFvFDwkNT pic.twitter.com/Q1lUw4qmg0  NBC News (@NBCNews) March 19, 2018

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The Associated Press reports she was walking a bicycle outside the lines of the crosswalk before the fatal collision with Uber's self-driving Volvo. While the vehicle was in autonomous mode, there was a human backup safety driver.

"There will no doubt be an exhaustive investigation of the tragic incident involving an Uber self-driving vehicle and a pedestrian," Akshay Anand, an analyst at Kelley Blue Book, said in an emailed statement.

"What is clear is that this has the potential to severely impact public perceptions of autonomous technology, and should be handled with utmost prudence by regulators, authorities, and the industry alike."

A.P. reports there were more than 6,000 pedestrians in the U.S. killed by a vehicle in 2016.

Uber first launched its self-driving car program onto public roads in Pittsburgh back in September 2016. In Michigan, Gov. Rick Snyder signed a bill allowing the testing of autonomous vehicles on Michigan roadways in late 2016.

Before coming to Arizona to test its autonomous technology, Uber ran into some issues with California's Department of Motor Vehicles regardings its permits. The ride-hailing company said it didn't think it needed to obtain permits, because they never had and didn't feel like it was necessary to conduct its tests.

After the brush up with California in 2016, Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey stepped in to get the company to test its vehicles in his state. Ducey took the state's first self-driving Uber ride in February 2017, and added the line that "California may not want you, but Arizona does." Arizona only requires minimum liability insurance policies to operate self-driving cars and does not require the company to report crashes or testing information.

Michigan and Arizona share very similar laws when it comes to testing self-driving cars while California requires a $5 million insurance plan, and that the company must report any crashes within 10 days in addition to an annual report detailing the company's test drivers' training.Courtesy | Vogue Theatre of Manistee

A sign

Visit downtown Manistee on a Sunday night -- even during the waterfront community's off season -- and you'll have a hard time finding a parking space within two blocks of the Vogue Theatre.

It's another sign the $2.6 million spent to save the historic Vogue Theatre was a smart investment, says David Mix, vice president of the nonprofit that restored the movie theater.

It wasn't that long ago that the Vogue Theatre was financially strapped and required saving after bankruptcy. A community-driven fundraising effort, spurred on by Michael Moore, produced a resurgence for the landmark building.

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Courtesy | Vogue Theatre of Manistee

61,000 tickets sold

Five years after the renovation of the 935-seat theater, at 383 River St., there's already talk of an expansion. There's room for a third screen in the former balcony space.

Last year, the Vogue sold 61,000 movie tickets in a town of about 6,000 residents.

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Courtesy | Visit Manistee County

A destination again

Saving the Michigan town's only movie theater made the downtown a destination again.

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Courtesy | Manistee County Historical Society

80th Anniversary

This year, the theater is celebrating its 80th anniversary. The Vogue almost didn't make the milestone, after shuttering in 2006.

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Courtesy | Manistee County Historical Society

Extensive renovation

Manistee's Downtown Development Authority purchased the tired facility out of bankruptcy, and turned it over to a newly formed nonprofit, The Historic Vogue Theatre of Manistee.

Then the group raised the majority of the $2.6 million needed for the theater's extensive renovation that required replacing the roof, along with the mechanical and plumbing systems. The interior improvements included new seats and a projector system.

Don't Edit

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Courtesy | Manistee County Historical Society

Unexpected costs

The project had some unexpected costs. Asbestos had to be removed and rusted-out steel beams needed to be replaced.

"It was the community's largest single construction project -- in terms of money -- at the time," Mix said.

Don't Edit

Courtesy | Vogue Theatre of Manistee

Saving historic features

Despite the major work needed, the renovation preserved the building's best features from the red neon sign to the tiny tiles in the recessed entrance. The Vogue Theatre was designed in the dramatic art deco style, popular in the first half of the 20th century.

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Sean Ryan | The Flint Journal

Filmmaker Michael Moore's role

More than 700 people and organizations stepped up to help.

One of the theater's major supporters is Academy Award-winning filmmaker and author Michael Moore. He's a member of the board of directors, and plays a role in bringing independent, documentary and other films to the theater.

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Courtesy | Manistee County Historical Society

Filmmaker donates $10,000

The community reached out to Moore, who had saved the State Theatre, about an hour's drive from Manistee in Traverse City. That downtown theater reopened in 2007 after closing a decade earlier.

The State Theatre is the main venue for the Traverse City Film Festival, which Moore founded.

Moore was happy to help. He donated $10,000 along with his celebrity and time to the Manistee project.

The fillmmaker declined to be interviewed for this story.

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Courtesy | Visit Manistee County

'A great guidance'

"Michael Moore has been a great guidance to us through the early stages," Mix said.

Moore remains on the Vogue Theatre's board of directors. Up until a year ago, the filmmaker helped with the film selection for the theater. Now, the staff works directly with a booking agent in Los Angeles.

"He did a great job introducing us to the people who put in the sound and design," Mix said. "We didn't have to figure out who was the best to work with."

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Courtesy | Vogue Theatre of Manistee

Reopens in 2013

The Vogue Theatre reopened in late 2013 with two movie screens. The Pure Michigan room has 188 seats, while the more intimate Olsen room has 44 seats.

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Courtesy | Vogue Theatre of Manistee

300 volunteers

More than 300 volunteers help run the theater, along with a staff of four paid employees.

"We couldn't do it without the volunteers," Mix said of the Manistee residents who donate their time selling tickets and working the concessions.

The four employees operate the $400,000 project system, do the back office work, schedule volunteers and keep the theater clean, Mix said.

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Courtesy | Visit Manistee County

Only theater in county

The only cinema in Manistee County, the theater continues to be a draw for the community.

With the nearest movie theater 40-minute drive away in Ludington, the Vogue Theatre can be the first to show major films like theaters in bigger markets.

"The Black Panther," for example, opened at the Vogue Theatre on the same day it did across all markets. The theater gets first run films because the small venue regularly sells out shows.

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Courtesy | Visit Manistee County

A community destination

On Saturdays, the theater offers children's movies for 25 cents, the same price of tickets when the Vogue opened in 1938. Small drinks and popcorn sell for a $1 each during that time. The theater is packed with families nearly every Saturday morning.

Every Wednesday morning, people can catch a film classic for $2 a ticket. Geared toward the community's retirees, these matinees draw upwards of 100 people. They often come in clusters of friends, and go out to lunch afterward, Mix said.

The theater has begun 10 p.m. Friday showings that are are a popular teen draw.

"We keep looking at what we need to do to draw people in," Mix said.

The theater works with groups to pair a film that fits their mission or message, and then let's the group stage a talkback or panel discussion after the showing, he said.

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Courtesy | Manistee County Historical Society

State invests $500,000

The renovation project drew the support of the state.

The Michigan Economic Development Corporation provided a $500,000 grant.

The renovation was one of the MEDC's "most shining examples" of what the Michigan Community Revitalization Program can accomplish, said Katharine Czarnecki, the MEDC's senior vice president of community development.

"The renovation of the historic Vogue Theatre into a vibrant entertainment venue has brought new vitality to downtown Manistee and has served as a catalyst for further growth in the area," Czarnecki said.

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Courtesy | Vogue Theatre of Manistee

20 new businesses

In the past five years since the Vogue reopened, more than 20 new businesses have opened in downtown Manistee, including Blue Fish, Famous Flynn's and the North Channel Brewery.

More than 70 percent of downtown businesses saw an increase in sales during the same period, according to a survey done by Baker College.

The investment in the theater convinced the owners of the Blue Fish in Big Rapids to bring the restaurant to Manistee. The restaurant partners up with the cinema on dinner and movie packages, Mix said.

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Courtesy | Vogue Theatre of Manistee

'Tremendous catalyzing effect'

The Vogue has also helped to spur downtown residential developments such as the Edgewater Condos, Chippewa Cottages and the North Channel building, which is adding units, says Tyler Leppanen, Manistee DDA director.

"The Vogue has had a tremendous catalyzing effect on downtown Manistee," said Leppanen. "It draws people downtown, not only to see a movie, but also to stop at the stores and eat at the restaurants. And, when other people, and other business owners see that activity, they want to be part of that experience."



Leppanen said his office has received a notable increase in inquiries from businesses looking at downtown Manistee as a prospective location.

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Courtesy | Manistee County Historical Society

So many had memories of Vogue

The project coalesced the small community around a cause.

It was important to save the Manistee theater because so many people had memories of going to the Vogue.

"You knew it was something that you had to bring back to life," said Mix, who has been involved with theater for seven years, since the early days of the restoration.

The public relations professional retiree describes himself as having one foot in Grand Rapids and one in Manistee, where has owned a second home for 25 years.

In Grand Rapids, he has served on the boards of Broadway Grand Rapids, Grand Rapids Civic Theatre and the Grand Rapids Ballet.

"I have a love for old theaters," Mix said, adding the combination of restoring a theater and impacting a small town were a particularly rewarding combination for him.

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Actress Toni Trucks lends her voice to the effort

The theater has its own connection to Hollywood through actress and Manistee native Toni Trucks.

Trucks made a special visit to Manistee in the fall when the Vogue Theatre hosted a red carpet showing of the first episode of the season for her CBS show "SEAL Team." The theater was packed, and Trucks participated in a talkback after the screening, answering questions about the show and her career, Mix said.

She also narrates a video about the restoration of the Vogue Theatre as part of the Manistee Historic Sites Tour series that plays before every film.A decade ago, Detroit Public Schools was Michigan's largest school district with 102,494 students; Grand Rapids was No. 4, with 18,939, and Flint was No. 8 at 15,540,

A lot has changed since 2007-08, especially for Michigan's urban school districts -- the result of a declining birth rate, growth of charter schools and increasing popularity of Schools of Choice, which allows students to enroll in a school outside their home district.

This school year, Detroit is still the state's largest district, but its enrollment has dropped by half since fall 2007, to 49,592. Grand Rapids has dropped to No. 8, and Flint's enrollment remains in a free fall -- the district has 4,503 students this year, down 71% in 10 years.

Not all districts are seeing declines. Dearborn, which serves a largely Arab-American population, is up 17% in enrollment since fall 2007. Kalamazoo Public Schools, which introduced The Kalamazoo Promise scholarship program in 2004, is up 11% in 10 years. Ann Arbor Public Schools has grown its enrollment by 8%.

To provide some context, K-12 school enrollment has declined 11% statewide since fall 2007.

Below is a list of the state's 50 largest school districts, and a look at how their fall 2017 headcounts compare to fall 2007, based on numbers from the state's Center for Educational Performance and Information.

Look up fall 2017 enrollment, sociodemographics for any Michigan public school

First, here's an online database that allows readers to look up the enrollment numbers for any district or charter school in the state.

Fall 2017 enrollment compared to 2016 by district

The database below offers district-level data. You can put your cursor over a column in the graphic to see the underlying numbers or click on "details."

Note: The graphic shows the racial breakdown of enrollment, but you'll have to click on "details" to see the percentage of children in the subsidized lunch program.

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Note that this is headcount rather than full-time-equivalent students, the number used to determine district funding. Districts' FTE count is adjusted for part-time students, and those numbers have yet to be released for fall 2017.

Below is a map that shows enrollment changes by district for fall 2017 compared to 2007. You can put your cursor over a district to see the underlying numbers.

Enrollment changes by district, fall 2016 to fall 2017

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You can enlarge the map on your screen by clicking on the "+" button at left of the map.

Now, here's the list of the 50 largest districts in 2017-18, ranked by enrollment.

58 Michigan high schools with at least 1,500 students

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1. Detroit Public Schools (Wayne County): 49,592

Detroit Public Schools Community District had a headcount of 49,592 in fall 2017, up 5,191 students or 12% from fall 2016. Since fall 2007, enrollment is down 52%, when the district had 102,494 students.

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2. Utica Community Schools (Macomb County): 21,195

Utica Community Schools had a headcount of 27,195 in fall 2017, down 383 students or -1% from fall 2016. Since fall 2007, enrollment is down 7%, when the district had 29,383 students.

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3. Dearborn School District (Wayne County): 20,798

Dearborn City School District had a headcount of 20,798 in fall 2017, up 184 students or 1% from fall 2016. Since fall 2007, enrollment is up 17%, when the district had 17,738 students.

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4. Ann Arbor Public Schools (Washtenaw County): 17,669

Ann Arbor Public Schools had a headcount of 17,669 in fall 2017, up 234 students or 1% from fall 2016. Since fall 2007, enrollment is up 8%, when the district had 16,419 students.

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5. Plymouth-Canton Community Schools (Wayne County): 17,329

Plymouth-Canton Community Schools had a headcount of 17,329 in fall 2017, up 85 students or 0.5% from fall 2016. Since fall 2007, enrollment is down 9%, when the district had 18,939 students.

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6. Chippewa Valley Schools (Macomb County): 16,175

Chippewa Valley Schools had a headcount of 16,175 in fall 2017, up 50 students or 0.3% from fall 2016. Since fall 2007, enrollment is up 5%, when the district had 15,400 students.

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7. Rochester Community Schools (Oakland County): 15,146

Rochester Community School District had a headcount of 15,146 in fall 2017, up 149 students or 1% from fall 2016. Since fall 2007, enrollment is up 2%, when the district had 14,912 students.

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8. Grand Rapids Public Schools (Kent County): 15,114

Grand Rapids Public Schools had a headcount of 15,114 in fall 2017, down 239 students or -2% from fall 2016. Since fall 2007, enrollment is down 19%, when the district had 18,748 students.

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9. Warren Consolidated Schools (Macomb County): 13,945

Warren Consolidated Schools had a headcount of 13,945 in fall 2017, down 338 students or -2% from fall 2016. Since fall 2007, enrollment is down 9%, when the district had 15,376 students.

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10. Livonia Public Schools (Wayne County): 13,909

Livonia Public School District had a headcount of 13,909 in fall 2017, down 126 students or -1% from fall 2016. Since fall 2007, enrollment is down 16%, when the district had 16,588 students.

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11. Walled Lake Consolidated Schools (Oakland County): 13,786

Walled Lake Consolidated Schools had a headcount of 13,786 in fall 2017, down 253 students or -2% from fall 2016. Since fall 2007, enrollment is down 11%, when the district had 15,456 students.

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12. Troy School District (Oakland County): 13,007

Troy School District had a headcount of 13,007 in fall 2017, up 200 students or 2% from fall 2016. Since fall 2007, enrollment is up 7%, when the district had 12,126 students.

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13. Kalamazoo Public Schools (Kalamazoo County): 12,640

Kalamazoo Public Schools had a headcount of 12,640 in fall 2017, up 57 students or 0.5% from fall 2016. Since fall 2007, enrollment is up 11%, when the district had 11,434 students.

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14. Wayne-Westland Community Schools (Wayne County): 11,018

Wayne-Westland Community School District had a headcount of 11,018 in fall 2017, down 36 students or -0.3% from fall 2016. Since fall 2007, enrollment is down 17%, when the district had 13,302 students.

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15. Lansing Public Schools (Ingham County): 10,641

Lansing Public School District had a headcount of 10,641 in fall 2017, down 232 students or -2% from fall 2016. Since fall 2007, enrollment is down 29%, when the district had 14,892 students.

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16. L'Anse Creuse Public Schools (Macomb County): 10,421

L'Anse Creuse Public Schools had a headcount of 10,421 in fall 2017, down 189 students or -2% from fall 2016. Since fall 2007, enrollment is down 12%, when the district had 11,859 students.

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17. Forest Hills Public Schools (Kent County): 9,753

Forest Hills Public Schools had a headcount of 9,753 in fall 2017, down 97 students or -1% from fall 2016. Since fall 2007, enrollment is down 2%, when the district had 9,950 students.

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18. Traverse City Area Public Schools (Grand Traverse County): 9,488

Traverse City Area Public Schools had a headcount of 9,488 in fall 2017, up 11 students or 0.1% from fall 2016. Since fall 2007, enrollment is down 8%, when the district had 10,356 students.

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19. Farmington Public Schools (Oakland County): 9,477

Farmington Public School District had a headcount of 9,477 in fall 2017, down 23 students or -0.2% from fall 2016. Since fall 2007, enrollment is down 22%, when the district had 12,089 students

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20. Huron Valley Schools (Oakland County): 9,046

Huron Valley Schools had a headcount of 9,046 in fall 2017, up 2 students from fall 2016. Since fall 2007, enrollment is down 14%, when the district had 10,479 students.

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21. Kentwood Public Schools (Kent County): 8,973

Kentwood Public Schools had a headcount of 8,973 in fall 2017, up 74 students or 1% from fall 2016. Since fall 2007, enrollment is up 1%, when the district had 8,927 students.

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22. Waterford School District (Oakland County): 8.875

Waterford School District had a headcount of 8,875 in fall 2017, down 277 students or -3% from fall 2016. Since fall 2007, enrollment is down 22%, when the district had 11,331 students.

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23. Portage Public Schools (Kalamazoo County): 8,623

Portage Public Schools had a headcount of 8,623 in fall 2017, up 24 students or 0.3% from fall 2016. Since fall 2007, enrollment is down -1%, when the district had 8,739 students.

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24. Port Huron Area School District (St. Clair County): 8,385

Port Huron Area School District had a headcount of 8,385 in fall 2017, down 268 students or -3% from fall 2016. Since fall 2007, enrollment is down 23%, when the district had 10,842 students.

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25. South Lyon Community Schools (Wayne County): 8,383

South Lyon Community Schools had a headcount of 8,383 in fall 2017, up 127 students or 2% from fall 2016. Since fall 2007, enrollment is up 18%, when the district had 7,101 students.

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26. Grand Blanc Community Schools (Genesee County): 8,232

Grand Blanc Community Schools had a headcount of 8,232 in fall 2017, down 11 students or -0.1% from fall 2016. Since fall 2007, enrollment is down 3%, when the district had 8,479 students.

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27. Birmingham Public Schools (Oakland County): 8,065

Birmingham Public Schools had a headcount of 8,065 in fall 2017, down 57 students or -1% from fall 2016. Since fall 2007, enrollment is up 1%, when the district had 8,007 students.

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28. Rockford Public Schools (Kent County): 7,883

Rockford Public Schools had a headcount of 7,883 in fall 2017, up 70 students or 1% from fall 2016. Since fall 2007, enrollment is down 0.3%, when the district had 7,914 students.

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29. Bay City School District (Bay County): 7,730

Bay City School District had a headcount of 7,730 in fall 2017, down 175 students or -2% from fall 2016. Since fall 2007, enrollment is down 16%, when the district had 9,225 students.

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30. Grosse Pointe Public Schools (Wayne County): 7,725

Grosse Pointe Public Schools had a headcount of 7,725 in fall 2017, down 84 students or -1% from fall 2016. Since fall 2007, enrollment is down 12%, when the district had 8,790 students.

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31. Midland Public Schools (Midland County): 7,632

Midland Public Schools had a headcount of 7,632 in fall 2017, down 2 students or from fall 2016. Since fall 2007, enrollment is down 17%, when the district had 9,195 students.

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32. Clarkston Community School District (Oakland County): 7,411

Clarkston Community School District had a headcount of 7,411 in fall 2017, down 115 students or -2% from fall 2016. Since fall 2007, enrollment is down 8%, when the district had 8,087 students.

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33. Northville Public Schools (Wayne County): 7,379

Northville Public Schools had a headcount of 7,379 in fall 2017, up 28 students or 0.4% from fall 2016. Since fall 2007, enrollment is up 7%, when the district had 6,897 students.

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34. Lake Orion Community Schools (Oakland County): 7,356

Lake Orion Community Schools had a headcount of 7,356 in fall 2017, down 141 students or -2% from fall 2016. Since fall 2007, enrollment is down 6%, when the district had 7,837 students.

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35. Howell Public Schools (Livingston County): 7,065

Howell Public Schools had a headcount of 7,065 in fall 2017, down 71 students or -1% from fall 2016. Since fall 2007, enrollment is down 17%, when the district had 8,544 students.

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36. West Ottawa Public Schools (Ottawa County): 6,774

West Ottawa Public School District had a headcount of 6,774 in fall 2017, down 13 students or -0.2% from fall 2016. Since fall 2007, enrollment is down 13%, when the district had 7,776 students.

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37. Hudsonville Public Schools (Ottawa County):

Hudsonville Public School District had a headcount of 6,681 in fall 2017, up 40 students or 1% from fall 2016. Since fall 2007, enrollment is up 23%, when the district had 5,420 students.

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38. Novi Community Schools (Oakland County): 6,552

Novi Community School District had a headcount of 6,552 in fall 2017, up 103 students or 2% from fall 2016. Since fall 2007, enrollment is up 4%, when the district had 6,304 students.

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39. Taylor School District (Wayne County): 6,283

Taylor School District had a headcount of 6,283 in fall 2017, down 402 students or -6% from fall 2016. Since fall 2007, enrollment is down 32%, when the district had 9,264 students.

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40. Grand Haven Area Public Schools (Ottawa County): 6,134

Grand Haven Area Public Schools had a headcount of 6,134 in fall 2017, down 1 students from fall 2016. Since fall 2007, enrollment is up 3%, when the district had 5,938 students.

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41. Southfield Public Schools (Oakland County): 6.092

Southfield Public School District had a headcount of 6,092 in fall 2017, down 89 students or -1% from fall 2016. Since fall 2007, enrollment is down 33%, when the district had 9,126 students.

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42. Zeeland Public Schools (Ottawa County): 6,073

Zeeland Public Schools had a headcount of 6,073 in fall 2017, up 117 students or 2% from fall 2016. Since fall 2007, enrollment is up 13%, when the district had 5,365 students.

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43. Brighton Area Schools (Livingston County): 6,058

Brighton Area Schools had a headcount of 6,058 in fall 2017, up 65 students or 1% from fall 2016. Since fall 2007, enrollment is down 13%, when the district had 6,999 students.

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44. Anchor Bay School District (Macomb County): 5,870

Anchor Bay School District had a headcount of 5,870 in fall 2017, up 2 students from fall 2016. Since fall 2007, enrollment is down 11%, when the district had 6,589 students.

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45. Davison Community Schools (Genesee County): 5,782

Davison Community Schools had a headcount of 5,782 in fall 2017, down 27 students or 0.5% from fall 2016. Since fall 2007, enrollment is up 6%, when the district had 5,480 students.

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46. Saginaw School District (Saginaw County): 5,670

Saginaw School District had a headcount of 5,670 in fall 2017, down 303 students or -5% from fall 2016. Since fall 2007, enrollment is down 41%, when the district had 9,564 students.

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47. Grandville Public Schools (Kent County): 5,609

Grandville Public Schools had a headcount of 5,609 in fall 2017, up 40 students or 1% from fall 2016. Since fall 2007, enrollment is down 6%, when the district had 5,942 students.

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48. Hartland Community Schools (Livingston County): 5,556

Hartland Consolidated Schools had a headcount of 5,556 in fall 2017, up 33 students or 1% from fall 2016. Since fall 2007, enrollment is down -2%, when the district had 5,656 students.

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49. Bloomfield Hills Schools (Oakland County): 5,538

Bloomfield Hills Schools had a headcount of 5,538 in fall 2017, up 45 students or 1% from fall 2016. Since fall 2007, enrollment is down 1%, when the district had 5,589 students.

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50. Holt Public Schools (Ingham County): 5,502

Holt Public Schools had a headcount of 5,502 in fall 2017, down 38 students or -1% from fall 2016. Since fall 2007, enrollment is down 8%, when the district had 6,010 students.ANN ARBOR, MI - Ann Arbor and Detroit are both finalists in the running for the North American "Smart Cities" awards and public online voting is underway to determine the winners.

A total of 26 cities and 34 projects are competing for awards in 14 categories, IDC Government Insights announced, indicating the finalists were chosen from more than 70 submissions.

Voting ends March 31 and winners are expected to be announced on April 9. Vote here.

Ann Arbor was chosen as a finalist for its partnership with the University of Michigan on connected vehicle testing, while Detroit was chosen for its work on "smart intersections."

Ann Arbor is competing against Las Vegas and Arlington, Texas, in a category recognizing projects related to connected and autonomous vehicles, public transit and ride-hailing/ride-sharing.

"The City of Ann Arbor and the University of Michigan have created, operated, maintained and upgraded the Ann Arbor Connected Vehicle Test Environment to further connected-vehicle technology development, which enables safer streets, reduced pollutant emissions, and improved travel efficiency," the Ann Arbor project description states. "The deployment includes all forms of vehicles, bicycles and pedestrian handheld devices equipped with Connected Vehicle technology."

Las Vegas piloted an all-electric, self-driving shuttle service, while Arlington is funding an on-demand, ride-sharing service.

Detroit is competing against Boston and Kansas City in a category recognizing transportation infrastructure projects.

"Detroit is making its intersections smart as the core tool to improve mobility in Detroit and serve as the backbone of the city's smart city strategy," the project description states.

"The smart intersection system incorporates sensors, video-based detection, intelligent traffic signals, mobile monitoring tools and alerts, and other elements. The smart intersections will result in improved traffic flow, increased road safety for all road users, and provide real time traffic data, control, and analytics for the city."

Boston launched a smartphone app aimed at improving road safety by scoring people on their driving, while Kansas City has implemented advanced analytics along a two-mile streetcar corridor.

IDC says the awards are designed to recognize the progress North American communities have made in executing Smart Cities projects, as well as provide a forum for sharing best practices to help accelerate Smart City development in the region.

IDC describes itself as a company that assists government policy, program and IT leaders, as well as suppliers, in making more effective technology decisions with research and consulting services.

Francine Romine, director of marketing and communications for UM's Transportation Research Institute, said there still are opportunities for community members to get involved in the research UMTRI is doing regarding connected and automated vehicles in Ann Arbor.

"The connected deployment, which we operate throughout the city, is the largest deployment of connected vehicles on the planet," she said in an email, adding UMTRI is looking for more participants.

Nearly six years ago, UMTRI recruited 2,800 residents and drivers for local companies to create one of the largest smart-car deployments ever conducted. Wireless communication devices were installed in volunteer vehicles and at local roadside and intersection locations.

The devices audibly and visually alert drivers when safety threats approach, hopefully helping to avoid crashes.

In support of the university's continuing research, the Ann Arbor City Council took action in September 2015 to approve a new partnership agreement with UM for the Ann Arbor Test Environment Project.

It represented a continuation of the Safety Model Deployment Project on which the city agreed to partner with the university in May 2013, using a roughly $623,000 share of the university's $14.9 million federal grant funds for the project to install some of the necessary fiber, sensors and electronic equipment around the city.

City officials noted in 2015 that UMTRI was awarded another $3 million from the U.S. Department of Transportation to maintain the Ann Arbor Test Environment established under the Safety Model Deployment Project, including vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure safety applications.

Romine said the pilot project that started in UM's North Campus area in 2012 is expanding and UMTRI is again outfitting community members' vehicles with the latest in connected-vehicle technology.

"And now in 2018 UMTRI and the city have partnered to expand the deployment area to include the entire city, with additional infrastructure, including pedestrian detection at mid-block crosswalks, curves speed warning devices, and ice-warning detection systems," she said.

"By fall of 2018, UMTRI plans to have over 3,000 vehicles equipped with the latest in connected-vehicle technology. Members of the community are encouraged to contact UMTRI and get connected."

To get involved, email connectedvehicle@umich.edu or visit the website www.aacvte.org.ANN ARBOR, MI - A national fraternal organization with 26 chapters in Michigan is urging the University of Michigan to rethink its decision to shift to a winter recruitment practice for first-year students attempting to join Greek Life organizations.

The North-American Interfraternity Conference, which includes more than 6,100 chapters located on more than 800 college campuses, believes UM's decision to switch to a winter recruitment period beginning in January 2020 is unnecessary and potentially harmful to first-year students looking to build relationship after arriving on campus.

"The University of Michigan's unilateral decision to defer recruitment places unnecessary restrictions on student choice and harms first-semester freshman seeking a special community to make a college of 30,000 students feel like home," NIC Chief Communication Officer Heather Kirk said.

UM's plan requires that first-year students earn 12 credit hours at UM and be in good academic and behavioral standing to participate in Greek Life recruitment, beginning in the fall of the 2019-20 academic year.

The shift in recruitment is part of a larger set of measures being implemented by the university's Division of Student Life to improve the experiences of first-year students, UM announced Tuesday, March 20.

The shift to a winter recruitment comes after UM's Interfraternity Council announced in November that it was suspending all social activities and new member pledge terms as it investigated several incidents related to Greek life, including allegations of hazing and sexual misconduct.

A few months later, the IFC said it would begin phasing in restoration of social privileges after an extensive review to identify policies and practices needing improvement within the community.

A week later, the Zeta Beta Tau International Fraternity Headquarters voted to revoke the UM charter after discovering incidents of hazing had taken place.

"We have studied the impact of recruitment practices on first-year students in the first semester on campus and determined that adjusting the timeline to winter semester supports first-year student success by providing the opportunity to fully engage in curriculum and communities," UM Vice President for Student Life E. Royster Harper said Tuesday.

Kirk disagreed with that assessment, citing a 2009 study by the Center for Learning Outcomes Assessment that concluded fraternity men experienced average growth within each of the study's seven domains - critical thinking, self-awareness, communication, diversity, citizenship, membership and leadership and relationships - as opposed to non-affiliated men during the first semester of their first college year.

Kirk dismissed the notion that UM's switch to a winter recruitment period would prevent incidents of hazing.

"There is little to no research or evidence that shifting the timing of recruitment has any impact on hazing or other high-risk behaviors," Kirk said. "While, there is evidence that joining fraternities in your first semester promotes positive developmental gains.

"Studies show how students who join fraternities in their first semester show greater gains in growth, learning and development, as well as how the loneliness freshmen commonly feel can be combatted through the connection and support found in fraternities."

Kirk urged UM's administration to work in partnership with key stakeholders like the NIC toward an alternative solution to switching to a winter recruitment period.

"We urge the university to reconsider and engage students, alumni, organizations and key stakeholders to find solutions that both enhance the first-year experience and respect the right of students to choose which student organization best meets their developmental needs," Kirk said.

A transition team representing the Greek Life community and chaired by Dean of Students Laura Blake Jones will be created to identify key considerations and make recommendations for implementing the winter recruiting change, the university said.

The recruitment shift is one aspect of a five-year plan to strengthen the first-year experience for students on the Ann Arbor campus, and supports the unit's strategic plan for diversity, equity and inclusion, the university noted. For more information on those efforts, visit the UM website.WHITMORE LAKE, MI - A Northfield Township police lieutenant who has been on leave since 2016 was among seven current and former officers across the state charged with multiple felonies Thursday, March 22, according to Attorney General Bill Schuette's Office.

Lt. Timothy Greene, 47, was charged with six counts of uttering and publishing in Livingston County's 53rd District Court, a press release stated.

His brother, John Greene, 43, of Wyandotte, and father, Robert Greene, 64, of Canton, also face multiple felonies for what state officials allege involved automobile salvage vehicle titles. The Greenes were contracted by the Hamburg Township Police Department in Livingston County to conduct such inspections.

John Greene, a Detroit Public Schools public safety officer, was charged with seven counts of uttering and publishing. Robert Greene, a retired Van Buren Township Police Department officer, was charged with 11 counts of uttering and publishing.

The trio is joined by four other current or former law enforcement officers charged with fraudulent auto inspections, according to the AG's office. There were a total of 101 counts of uttering a publishing filed by the office's Public Integrity Unit against the seven individuals.

Tammy Barnes, 59, a Detroit police officer, was charged with 18 counts. Elaine Danishevskaya, 39, former Bangor Police Chief, was charged with 25 counts. Kevin Reif, 43, a Redford Police Department detective on the Auto Theft Task Force, was charged with 13 counts. Greg Bumgardner, 44, a former Riverview police officer, was charged with 21 counts.

Uttering and publishing is a felony punishable by up to 14 years in prison.

The charges are the result of an investigation by the FBI Detroit-Area Public Corruption Task Force. It's alleged that the officers falsified Secretary of State documents for inspections intended to detect stolen vehicles and parts, according to the AG's office.

The defendants were all specially trained and certified to conduct salvage vehicle inspections, according to the press release.

The attorney general alleges that a large percentage of the salvage vehicle inspections the defendants conducted were done so improperly, not checking LEIN (Law Enforcement Information Network) to safeguard against re-titling vehicles rebuilt with stolen parts or re-titling stolen vehicles, according to the release.

The seven officers are accused of falsifying and signing documents published to the Secretary of State for new motor vehicle titles.

"These public officials cut corners and fraudulently submitted paperwork taking advantage of the trust and responsibility they are given as police officers," Attorney General Bill Schuette stated in the press release.

MLive reported in February that Lt. Timothy Greene was under investigation by Northfield Township.

Greene initially was placed on paid leave by the township in November 2016, according to township board records. He was being paid $73,278 per year at the time, according to Northfield Township Manager Steve Aynes.

On June 27, 2017, the Northfield Township board of trustees voted 6-1 for Greene to "be placed on unpaid leave and (the board) to initiate an investigation to determine if he has violated Northfield Township policies and procedures."

Greene started doing the inspections for Hamburg Township in 2012, according to township records. Damaged or old cars and trucks that have been rebuilt are required, per state law, to be inspected by a "specially trained law enforcement officer" before they can transfer the title to another owner, according to Secretary of State's website.

It's a service police departments are not required to offer, but each county in Michigan has a handful that do, according to the SOS. Northfield Township's police department doesn't have such a program, but Hamburg Township's police department does.

Northfield Township Public Safety Director William Wagner said on Thursday that Tim Greene is still on unpaid administrative leave. It will take a vote of the township board to remove him, Wagner said.

Greene has been with the department since 1991, and that he served four years as a road patrol officer before being promoted to sergeant. Greene was interim police chief in 2009 while the department transitioned to a department of public safety model, according to the website. He served as lieutenant for at least four years.BAY CITY, MI -- Major repair work on Independence Bridge remains on schedule to finish up by the end of March, as Bay City officials promised in December, but the span will likely remain closed to motorists until after Easter.

City officials said the $1.45 million project remains on schedule for completion by March 30, but crews will need to test the bridge and make sure everything is in working order before letting cars drive over it. Rachel Phillips, the city's engineer, said the bridge would likely be open to the public sometime between April 2-6. There was a one-week delay in starting the project due to steel delivery issues, Phillips said.

The bridge has been closed since Jan. 8. The project, which started in October with concrete work, included replacement of the bascule span deck grating, span stringers and sidewalks. The project is being paid for with federal, state and local funding.

"We're anxiously awaiting for it to open," said Mike Knox, who owns the 7-Eleven franchise at 4300 Wilder Road, about a quarter-mile west of Harry S. Truman Parkway, off Independence Bridge.

Knox said his business dropped about 20 percent in January and has slowly gotten "a little better" over the past two months.

"Some of our regulars started to take a way to come back around, which is good for us, but we've definitely felt the hit since the bridge has closed," he said.

Sally Wilson, manager of the Bob Evans at 4137 Wilder Road, said she, too, has noticed a drop in business.

"This restaurant has been consistently up in sales the last two to three years," she said. "This is the first time in -- I can't even remember -- that it has been down."

Barb Behmlander, manager of the Bay City Town Center, said the recent openings of PetSmart and Ollies at the mall has likely allowed it to maintain steady traffic. She said traffic in the mall's parking lots was up 0.5 percent in January and up 6.5 percent in February.

Bridge crisis

The repairs come at a time when the city is grappling with what to do with its two bascule bridges. Millions of dollars in repairs and constant maintenance is needed on Liberty and Independence bridges over the next five years and city officials say they don't have the money to pay for it.

The city has been in talks with the state about the Michigan Department of Transportation taking over Independence Bridge, but those talks weren't considered optimistic. Bay City Manager Dana Muscott said the city hasn't received a response as of Wednesday, March 21, from the state about its proposal for MDOT to take over the bridge.

The most controversial option is selling both bridges to United Bridge Partners, a private firm out of Denver, Colorado. The firm would build a new Independence Bridge and make critical repairs to Liberty Bridge, but would charge a toll to motorists who cross it daily.

Privatizing the bridges and charging a toll has been unpopular with the general public, but especially came under fire last week when a pedestrian bridge collapsed in Miami. That bridge was designed by FIGG Bridge Design, a partner of United Bridge Partners.

Another option that has been discussed among city leaders is taking down a bridge altogether, although no specifics on demolition costs have been sought by officials.

The three-month closure of Independence Bridge serves as a preview to what business owners near Lafayette Bridge will experience in 2020 when the state reconstructs that bridge. The bridge is expected to be closed for up to two years.

"It's closer than you think," Jerry Crete, owner of Ideal Party Store, 410 Salzburg Ave., previously said. "It'll come up fast. And once it starts, it won't be easy for us."MONITOR TWP, MI -- A flat tire may have caused a semitrailer to crash into an overpass and erupt in flames on Interstate 75.

Bay County Sheriff Troy R. Cunningham said that on Wednesday, March 21, the approximately 48-year-old man was driving from Alpena to Toledo, a route he frequently takes, hauling wood paneling. About 2 p.m., as he passed through Bay County's Monitor Township, he attempted to pull over to the shoulder as he suspected the rig had sustained a flat tire.

As the vehicle slowed, there was a possible weight shift in the cargo, the man told deputies. This may have caused the driver to lose control of the semi and crash into a concrete abutment of the Salzburg Road overpass, Cunningham said.

The driver was unable to regain control and the rig slid down the guardrail, the semi detaching from the trailer as it did so. The driver managed to exit the vehicle, which shortly thereafter burst into flames.

Responding Monitor Township firefighters extinguished the conflagration. The man was transported to McLaren Bay Region hospital for treatment of non-life-threatening injuries, the sheriff said.

Alcohol is not believed to be a factor in the crash, Cunningham added.

Michigan Department of Transportation crews worked overnight to install temporary supports on the Salzburg Road overpass, according to Jocelyn Hall, an MDOT spokeswoman. That work will continue throughout the day Thursday, Hall said.

One lane of southbound I-75 is currently open.MIDLAND, MI -- Police are hoping to wrap up their investigation into a recent officer-involved shooting that resulted in the death of a 16-year-old.

Michigan State Police Special 1st Lt. David Kaiser said on Thursday, March 22, that investigators on Wednesday met with Midland County prosecutors to update them on the status of their probe into the March 12 shooting. Investigators are still awaiting ballistics from the Crime Lab, as bullets recovered from the scene are being matched with the guns involved, Kaiser said.

Kaiser is optimistic the final reports can be sent to prosecutors by next week. If that happens, prosecutors will review the matter and determine whether or not any charges are warranted.

Midland police at 1:39 a.m. on March 12 responded to a 911 call of two young males trying to break into a parked vehicle in the 2000 block of East Ashman Street. Two officers spotted the youths, one of whom was Jaden Marsh. As one officer spoke with the compliant teen, Jaden took off running, pursued by the second officer.

Police have said Jaden fired several rounds from a handgun, which led to the officer returning fire with at least one of his bullets striking Jaden. The officer was uninjured. Responding medical personnel pronounced Jaden dead at the scene.

The officer who killed Jaden was placed on paid administrative leave, as is standard for police-involved shootings. He remains on leave as of March 22, Kaiser said.

Police have not released the name of the officer, a 19-year veteran of the department.

In a March 13 interview with The Bay City Times-MLive, Jaden's father, Todd Marsh, said his son suffered from mental health issues including ADHD and depression. He had previously attempted suicide numerous times and was off-and-on medication.

Todd Marsh added Jaden had left his house a few weeks prior, disappearing with some of his dad's cash and his vehicle with him. An hour or so before the shooting, Jaden had sent a Snapchat message to a brother in California indicating he had a gun and was going to end his life. Before the brothers' conversation ended, though, Jaden expressed that he was just tired and was going to bed.

Police have said the gun Jaden used had been reported stolen from an unlocked vehicle parked in the parking lot of the Holiday Inn Express, 810 Cinema Drive in Midland, on March 11.There have been 40 bombing or shooting threats made against Detroit schools, charter and public, since the Feb. 14 high school massacre in Parkland, Florida, Detroit Police Chief James Craig says.

Of the total, 23 threats were made in the last 24 hours, Craig said Thursday, March 22. He did not know what caused the number of threats to spike.

Chief Craig addresses School threats. Posted by Detroit Police Department on Thursday, March 22, 2018

Four teens boys, between the ages of 14 and 17, have been arrested so far.

At least one parent or guardian has also been arrested. Charges weren't disclosed.

Craig didn't reveal which schools the arrested teens attend, but said they could be charged with making a false threat or threat of terrorism, which is punishable by up to 20 years in prison, and other less serious crimes involving threats made using telecommunications devices.

The Detroit Public Schools Community District issued this statement:

This week the District received numerous social media threats of violence to the vast majority of DPSCD High Schools and several more elementary/middle schools. DPSCD Police Department is working with DPD and the FBI Violent Crime Task Force to investigate these incidents. Upon receiving threats of this nature, the district notifies the authorities and launches an investigation as indicated in the attached letter. Parents and staff are notified via robo calls, backpack letters, and/or bulletins on the District's website and social media channels.

The Detroit police chief said he is "poised to increase staffing" to the 2-year-old Detroit Police Department Cyber-crimes Unit, which is tasked with investigating school threats.

"Parents, I urge you, you're responsible to know what your children are doing," Craig said. "Monitor ... whatever they are doing on social media."

State Police Lt. Michael Shaw said the school threat problem is not unique to Metro Detroit, but has become and issue across the state and nation.

He urged parents to make sure they know the security codes to their children's phones so they can track their online activity.

Saima Mohsin, the first assistant U.S. attorney First Assistant United States Attorney in the Eastern District of Michigan, said social media "is not something that is anonymous."

"If you make a threat on social media, you can rest assured that (the police) will find out about it," She said. " ... They're going to search your homes, they're going to talk to your friends and they will find you."

Mohsin said representatives from the U.S. Attorney's Office are touring schools in Michigan to talk to children about the issue, how to report threats and proper social media use. Anyone who would like to invite representatives to their school should contact the U.S. Attorney's Office.

"Parents, we understand the fear that this is creating, but students shouldn't bring weapons into the school, period," Craig said.

Detroit police have interviewed parents who seemed not to care that their children were carrying weapons at school, such as a Taser and brass knuckles, according to Craig.

The motivation behind the threats varies, according to the police chief, but in some cases students look at the closure that often follows a threat as a "free day off of school.

"Do you think you're not going to be able to make that up at some point," the chief said. "So that means a shorter summer vacation."Amor Ftohui

FLINT, MI - The 50-year-old man suspected of stabbing Officer Jeff Neville in June 2017 at Bishop International Airport in Flint is now charged with committing an international act of terror.

Amor M. Ftouhi, a dual citizen of Canada and Tunisia, was charged in an indictment on Wednesday, March 21, with one count of committing an act of terrorism transcending national boundaries.

U.S. Attorney Matthew Schneider for the Eastern District of Michigan said the additional charge shows Ftouhi will be punished "to the fullest extent of the law" and that the government will "vigorously prosecute terrorists who seek to harm the people of Michigan."

Ftouhi was previously indicted on one count of violence at an international airport and a charge of interference with airport security.

He faces the potential of a life sentence in prison.

Prior to the attack, Ftouhi had attempted to purchase a gun after researching gun laws and searching for gun shows in the state. However, prosecutors say he was denied the ability to purchase a gun at a Mount Clemens gun show.

Ftouhi stabbed Neville with a large knife while shouting "Allahu Akbar" and referencing killings in Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq just four days after entering the United State from Canada, federal prosecutors claim.

Neville survived the attack.

Prosecutors claim he told law enforcement that he was a "soldier of Allah" and subscribed to the ideology of terrorist organization al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, according to the indictment.

Ftouhi will be arraigned on the incident in federal court in Flint.

The case is being prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Michigan, with assistance from the National Security Division's Counterterrorism Section.GRAND RAPIDS, MI -- This summer, on July 7 to be exact, marks the five-year anniversary of a 2013 fire that destroyed Michigan's oldest covered bridge.

Though memories remain of the remains of Whites Bridge smoldering in the Flat River, those dedicated to an effort to rebuild the structure have reason to celebrate this year.

With the necessary funding and plans for a new span in-hand, the Michigan Department of Transportation is now accepting bids from contractors interested in tackling the reconstruction project.

Ionia County Highway Engineer Paul Spitzley said nothing is certain until the bids are opened on Friday, April 6, but is excited to see the process reach this point.

"We're as close as we've ever been," Spitzley said.

The Whites Bridge Historical Society has been working with both the Kent and Ionia county road commissions ever since 2013, spearheading fundraising efforts to eventually build a replica of the historic bridge at the site.

Related: One year after fire, signs of progress in effort to rebuild Whites Bridge

Built in either 1867 or 1869 (sources differ on its completion date) the Brown truss covered bridge spanned the Flat River in Ionia County's Keene Township. At the time of the fire, it was the oldest such bridge in Michigan that was still in use.

The about 118-foot-long span was named for Levi White, an early pioneer in the area who built the first two bridges spanning the river at "White's Crossing." It was built for $1,700 by Joseph H. Walker and Jared N. Bresee, also credited with building both the Fallasburg Bridge and the original Ada Covered Bridge -- twins of Whites Bridge. Another nearby bridge in Greenville, now gone, was a fourth example of the Brown truss style, a significant innovation in bridge engineering that ended up being relatively short-lived.

"There were only four of these every built, and all built in that location," said Tom Byle, a Kent County Road Commission engineer and president of the Whites Bridge Historical Society.

Byle explained the use of cast iron in bridge construction gained prominence shortly after the construction of the four bridges in Kent and Ionia counties.

"Within 10 years, nobody was building Brown trusses anymore," he said.

The Fallasburg Bridge, built in 1871, is the last remaining of those four original bridges.

Ada's bridge was destroyed by fire in 1979 and a replica now stands in its place. A 2013 fire, later ruled to be arson, also destroyed Whites Bridge.

Since the fire, rehabilitation of the Ionia County bridge has gained broad public support despite funding setbacks.

After securing private and state grants totaling $475,000, the Whites Bridge Historical Society announced in 2015 it was prepared to rebuild the bridge in 2016. But during the bidding process, it became clear that initial cost estimates were low and bidding was postponed to allow the nonprofit to regroup and pursue additional fundraising.

The current estimate for construction costs is $760,000, not including engineering and inspection expenses. Spitzley said the low bid on April 6 will need to come within 10 percent of that total to allow the project to go forward.

"If they come in within 10 percent of that estimate, then we are going to build ourselves a bridge, and we're excited about that," he said.

If not, Spitzley said, it would be "back to the drawing board" for all those who have worked the last five years to make a replacement project a reality.

Byle said he is hopeful, but is not celebrating just yet.

"With highway work, you never know for sure until you see the bids," he said.

To the untrained eye, the design for the new bridge will look almost identical to the structure that spanned the Flat River for more than 140 years. But there are a few differences, Spitzley said.

From inside the bridge, you'll be able to see steel tension rods running along the timber beams. Intended to both increase the load restriction and extend the life of the bridge, the same feature likely saved the Fallasburg Covered Bridge after a careless driver crossed it in 2013 with a full cement truck.

Plans also call for slight increases to both the width and height of the bridge, Spitzley said, to ensure it's practical for 21st century users.

A $350,000 Michigan Enhancement Grant was secured for the effort late last year, and the state's Local Bridge Fund has also committed $314,000 for the project. Private donations and fundraising efforts account for the remaining $97,000 set aside for the project.

Related: History in the rubble: The story of Whites Bridge

Though engineering work has been done by road commissions in Ionia and Kent counties, Spitzley pointed out that no county funding is dedicated to the project. He explained that the restoration of Whites Bridge is important, but that it would be difficult to justify the allocation of the county's limited resources to it.

"Although we love the bridge -- it is a part of us -- we have a lot of roads that need a lot of repair," Spitzley said.

Byle said the cost to replace the historic covered bridge is actually much lower than the $2-3 million that would be needed to build a new modern highway bridge and improve the road leading up to it.

That's why the fundraising and advocacy work undertaken by the Whites Bridge Historical Commission was so valuable in the effort to rebuild it.

"It wouldn't have happened without them," Spitzley said. "They really did push this thing through."GRAND RAPIDS, MI -- Kent County's elected leaders this week resolved to hire two new employees tasked with leading the efforts to assess and address a handful of emerging public health threats.

The hiring of two new Health Department epidemiologists was approved by the Board of Commissioners Thursday, March 22.

One position will focus on work to stall the rise in drug overdoses tied to opioid use, and the other on emerging environmental health issues in the county. Those include the issues of PFAS contamination, vapor intrusion and lead poisoning.

Once hired, the two staffing additions will nearly double the department's contingent of epidemiologists.

While addressing lead poisoning of Kent County's children has been a priority for local officials for the last few years, the other environmental threats are more recent.

Revelations about the contamination of Kent County groundwater by per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, also called PFAS or PFCs, has spawned a statewide investigation and several lawsuits.

"The staff at the Health Department have been on the front lines of informing and educating residents regarding test results, the known health consequences of PFAS, and ways to limit exposure," Kent County Board Chairman Jim Saalfeld said in a statement. "As more areas of contamination are discovered, it is clear we need to adjust staffing levels to meet the needs of our residents."

Another emerging issue, vapor intrusion, has already touched Kent County. Toxic chemicals were found in the air at two sites in Grand Rapids in 2016 and a statewide investigation of potentially contaminated sites is ongoing.

In a memo to county officials explaining the new staffing requests, Kent County Administrative Health Officer Adam London wrote that dealing with the issues of PFAS contamination and vapor intrusion "have consumed and extraordinary amount of staff time" and those commitments show no signs of waning.

The same public health epidemiologist working on PFAS and vapor intrusion in Kent County will also be asked to handle work other environmental health issues, including the elevated lead levels of many local children.

Because of the area's aging housing stock, some Grand Rapids neighborhoods have been shown to have disproportionately high numbers of children with elevated blood-lead levels. Recent data showed one Southeast Grand Rapids ZIP code had more than 14 percent of children tested exhibiting elevated blood levels in 2015 -- the highest percentage in the state.

The Board of Commissioners on Thursday adopted a report and series of recommendations, developed after a subcommittee spent a year examining the issue.

The second of the two epidemiologist will be asked to take on an issue no less daunting.

National trends can be seen reflected in local statistics, in which suicide and drug overdose deaths, particularly those tied to opioids, have surged in recent years.

"The staff of the Health Department are in a unique position to provide leadership in efforts to address education, prevention and access to recovery services," Kent County Administrative Health Officer Adam London said in a statement.

With a number of death investigations still pending, Kent County has already counted 93 opioid-related deaths in 2017.

London pointed out the rate of overdose deaths has increased four-fold since 2000, with 70 opioid related deaths and over 680 opioid overdose-related emergency room visits in 2016. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recently called the opioid issue "the largest man-made epidemic in the history of the world."

The Kent County Opioid Task Force, coordinated by the nonprofit Red Project, was formed three years ago to tackle the problem. With its grant funding expiring in April, Kent County now proposes the county's health department take over leadership of the effort.

The department currently employs three epidemiologists, including a supervisor, another who develops the county's needs assessment and strategies to address the issues identified in it, and a third focused on tracking communicable diseases in local schools and hospitals and handling issues of food-borne illness.

Deputy Administrative Health Officer Teresa Branson said emerging issues of PFAS contamination, vapor intrusion and opioid abuse -- when combined with ongoing efforts to combat lead poisoning and fulfill other departmental responsibilities -- have created a clear need for additional staff.

"It's definitely needed," Branson said.

She said there is a need for someone with localized expertise to serve as a liaison between the county, state, other agencies and the community itself. She said the existing staff has been doing "phenomenal," but has been pushed far beyond their capabilities.

"I think this will go a long way to dedicate some time and resources to some pressing issues that are impacting our residents," Branson said.

To pay for the two positions -- each estimated to cost the county $95,920 -- the health department plans to draw from about $220,000 budgeted for "emerging issues."

But health department officials are hopeful state or federal funding might eventually be identified to assist the county in its efforts, in addition to potential future legal settlements tied to PFAS contamination.GRANDVILLE, MI - Parents of a boy say he was sexually assaulted in kindergarten by classmates who photographed the abuse on school-issued iPads.

Grandville Public Schools, administrators and a teacher are named in a federal lawsuit alleging the district allowed the abuse to occur and failed to conduct a proper investigation after the allegations came to light.

The lawsuit is filed in U.S. District Court under pseudonyms: John and Jane Doe, on behalf of their son, Jimmy Doe.

The former Grandville superintendent disputed allegations in the lawsuit and said school officials responded appropriately. The current superintendent said the truth would be revealed during the legal process.

The lawsuit alleged that district workers showed "gross indifference" toward supervision of the classroom and in its investigation. The parents allege Title IX violations for denying him access to an education.

"Kindergartner Jimmy Doe was sexually assaulted over multiple months by classmates in their teacher-attended classroom," attorney Anne Buckleitner wrote in the complaint.

"His assailants photographed the assaults using their school-issued iPads. Jimmy was harassed by the many students who heard about and viewed the photographs of his assaults on their iPads, ultimately driving Jimmy from the District."

The lawsuit names as defendants: the school district, former superintendent Ron Caniff (now Kent Intermediate School District superintendent), superintendent Roger Bearup, assistant superintendent Scott Merkel, Century Park Learning Center principal Tonia Shoup and teacher Hillary Huberts.

Caniff, then the superintendent, said he couldn't speak at length given the legal action, but said: "At the time I was at Grandville Public Schools there was never any suspicion, suggestion or complaint expressed about physical contact between the students involved in this matter, nor did the investigation indicate any concerns in that regard.

"In fact, the very first I heard of any alleged physical contact in this situation was yesterday. As I read through the complaint last evening there are several allegations that will be refuted, but that will occur in due course through the legal process."

Bearup, the current schools superintendent, issued a statement after he reviewed the lawsuit Tuesday night, March 21.

"Subject to FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974) laws and pending litigation, we cannot respond in detail to the allegations; however, we assure you that our focus is and always will be the safety and care of every student who walks through our doors," he wrote.

"Our teachers, principals, and district administration take great pride in that. Litigation is meant to be an avenue to the truth. We patiently wait for that truth to be revealed. Until then, we will have no further comment."

The lawsuit said school workers violated federal law as well as the district's anti-harassment policy and use of technology resources policy.

The plaintiffs said the boy was in Huberts' kindergarten classroom for the 2014/15 and 2015/16 school years. He was abused by four other kindergartners, identified by their initials, as early as fall 2014, continuing through April 22, 2015, the lawsuit said.

During "free time," the lawsuit said, the four would take the alleged victim "to the 'mudroom' area of the classroom where they touched, sodomized him, and preserved widely available evidence of those assaults by photographing Jimmy's genitals using classroom iPads to take photographs," Buckleitner wrote.

"The four boys directed Jimmy as to what and how he was to pose, and for how long while the boys used classroom iPads to take photographs."

She said the boys would delete photos as the camera roll filled so they could take additional photos. The boys allegedly told him that if it did not cooperate, or told anyone about the touching and photos, "they would not be his friends, and they would say that the sexual activity was Jimmy's idea," the lawsuit said.

Early on, his parents noticed he was having trouble. He wasn't learning, and was "both physically and emotionally deteriorating," Buckleitner wrote.

At an October 2014 parent/teacher conference, they shared concerns with the teacher, and asked her to watch for teasing.

His behavior soon worsened.

"Jimmy told his parents only that he didn't like school because all other students teased him about his 'pictures,'" Buckleitner wrote.

On April 22, 2015, Shoup, the principal, called Jimmy's mother after the teacher noticed a student hiding his iPad screen as she walked by. The teacher asked to see the iPad, which was full of photos of Jimmy's genitals, the lawsuit said.

Another child started deleting photos as Huberts, the teacher, dealt with the first student. She took the other student's iPad before all of the photos were deleted, the lawsuit said.

The principal told Jimmy's mother that "the four boys said that it had been Jimmy's idea to display his genitals in the classroom, and that Jimmy had admitted to showing his 'privates' and to having his picture taken," the lawsuit said.

Buckleitner said the mother told the principal to contact police and Child Protective Services. She also asked that the photos be saved. She showed up at school 10 minutes later.

Shoup, the lawsuit said, told the mother the investigation was complete. She found no evidence of coercion or assault, the lawsuit said.

Jimmy allegedly told his mother that the other boys told him to take the blame or he would have no friends.

Shoup told the mother that the photos were "pornographic" and deleted at the direction of police, the lawsuit said.

According to a police report, Shoup told police she only contacted them because of the mother's insistence, and that she had already conducted an investigation, deleted the photos and no further investigation was needed, the lawsuit said.

The parents met with then-superintendent Caniff, and Merkel, the assistant superintendent, who said Jimmy could transfer to another school. They also said kindergartners have "normal curiosity, and suggested that if the parents insisted on pressing the matter, Jimmy would be the one to be disciplined as he was the only child whose genitals were photographed," the lawsuit said.

Jimmy left school but returned to kindergarten the following school year. The four boys were in first grade.

The year started OK but he soon became troubled, being "continually victimized on the playground by students who had seen and knew of his 'pictures' from the prior year," Buckleitner wrote.

"On the playground other children tried to catch Jimmy, take his pants down, and tied to bribe him to 'show (his) privates,'" the lawsuit said.

He would spend most of his recesses hiding, and dug into the ground and covered himself in mulch, the lawsuit said.

Ultimately, he left the district.IONIA COUNTY, MI -- Ionia County sheriff's investigators are warning about a scam that hi-jacks the department's phone number to commit fraud.

Deputies said someone is making calls with a typical scam -- telling people they have a warrant against them and must settle up financially to avoid being arrested.

But the caller ID from the scammer shows the sheriff's legitimate number at 616-527-5737.

"Please know that this is not our office making those calls!," sheriff's officials said in a Facebook post.

"Any calls generating from our office or any County office will not show the actual number on your caller ID, it will show our main trunk line number," according to the post.

Police also say they do not make phone calls to demand money.KENTWOOD, MI -- Quinn James, a former Kentwood Public Schools grounds and maintenance worker accused of sexually assaulting a teen later found dead, has been ordered to stand trial for the assault.

Kentwood District Court Judge William Kelly listened to several witnesses, police recordings and other evidence before deciding Wednesday, March 21 to order James to trial on four counts of third-degree criminal sexual conduct.

Key testimony came from a 17-year-old relative of James' fiancee. The teen was with James during some of the sexual assaults.

Mujey Dumbuya, 16, was expected to testify against the 42-year-old James at trial. The East Kentwood High student was 15 last summer when she allegedly was assaulted by James.

Mujey's body was found Jan. 28 in a wooded area along North Prairie Avenue in Kalamazoo, four days after she went missing while headed to a bus stop.

James late last year had waived his right to a probable cause hearing and already was at the circuit level, awaiting trial. But Kent County prosecutors recently asked to have the case sent back to district court to preserve testimony from the 17-year-old.KENTWOOD, MI - Quinn James was ordered to stand trial accused of sexually assaulting Mujey Dumbuya with testimony showing police are taking a hard look at him in her killing.

Among the witnesses in the sex-assault case on Wednesday, March 21, was Case Weston, a Grand Rapids Major Case detective investigating the teen's killing with Kalamazoo police.

Weston, who shared recordings of phone calls James made to his mother and fiancee from jail, said his only interest was the homicide investigation.

Kentwood District Judge William Kelly increased James' bond to $250,000.

"When I set the $100,000 bond, Mujey was alive," Kelly said.

He didn't tie James to the killing, but said if James, 42, hadn't posted bond - and been free when Dumbuya, 16, was killed - "then he would've been free from any suspicions."

Defense attorney Jonathan Schildgen said police and prosecutors are "littering Kent County" with investigative subpoenas to compel witnesses to testify in the slaying with his client the obvious target.

He said his client didn't kill her and denies sex-assault charges.

Kalamazoo police Capt. Shannon Bagley said by telephone Wednesday that police have not named James as a suspect in the killing, but said investigators were making headway.

A death certificate filed this week in Kalamazoo County said Dumbuya died of "asphyxia, including strangulation."

Meanwhile, Kelly ordered James bound over for trial in Kent County Circuit Court on four charges of third-degree criminal sexual conduct, a 15-year felony.

James had earlier waived his right to a probable-cause hearing, and was awaiting trial, when prosecutors sought a remand for testimony of Daquarius Bibbs, 17, who said he was dating the victim when James sexually assaulted her over the course of months.

Bibbs' was living with James' fiancee, Tiara Burnett, when the assaults happened, he said.

Prosecutors said they had concerns for Bibbs' safety and wanted to make a record of his testimony in the event something happened to him before trial. A judge earlier designated Bibbs as a "material witness."

He is monitored by a GPS tether while on house arrest.

He said James sexually assaulted Dumbuya, then 15, four times last year.

"Mujey was crying," he testified.

He said both of the teens were afraid of James.

"He choked me out before," he testified.

He said Quinn was aware that Dumbuya was 15 when the alleged assaults occurred.

Kentwood police Detective Erin Kitchka conducted a two-hour, videotaped interview of Quinn about the alleged sex assaults.

"I never raped anybody," he said on the recording.

Later, he said they twice had consensual sex. He also said he thought she was 17 or 18.

Schildgen, the defense attorney, argued that his client admitted having sex with women but didn't identify Dumbuya as one of them. He said the girl's name wasn't mentioned on the recording played in court.

"Did he ever say the word, 'Mujey?'"

"We were there talking about Mujey," Kitchka said.

Dumbuya, a sophomore at East Kentwood High School, was reported missing Jan. 24 when she failed to get on the bus for school. Four days later, her body was found in the woods near North Prairie Avenue on Kalamazoo's northside.

Kent County prosecutors responded by charging James in a 2014 sex-assault. He was ordered jailed on $500,000 bond.

James had worked in maintenance and grounds for Kentwood schools before his arrest.Funding for Great Lakes restoration and cleanup programs would be continued as is under the current Congressional budget bill, despite efforts by President Donald Trump's administration to slash funding.

A $1.3 trillion spending deal put forward by Congressional leadership late Wednesday night would fully fund the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, a $300 million line item that provides annual money for Great Lakes toxic sediment removal and invasive species management.

The initiative has widespread bipartisan support among lawmakers representing Midwestern states, particularly in Michigan.

The spending legislation released Wednesday evening would fund the government through September of this year, just ahead of the Friday night deadline to avert a government shutdown.

The deal rejected several efforts by the Trump administration to slash funding to domestic programs -- including eliminating the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative, community block grants and Department of Education spending -- but significantly increased military spending and included $1.6 billion in funding for construction of a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.

The Trump administration's Fiscal Year 2018 plan called for cutting existing funding for the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative - a program housed in the Environmental Protection Agency - entirely, as part of a series of significant cuts to the department. In its Fiscal Year 2019 plan, the administration called for a Great Lakes funding cut from roughly $300 million to $30 million.

U.S. Rep. John Moolenaar, R-Midland, sits on the House Appropriations Committee. After the Fiscal Year 2018 spending bill was introduced, he said in a statement that fully funding the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative was a priority.

"I have been working hard to make sure this bipartisan agreement benefits the priorities of Michigan residents," he said. "This vital funding will help protect the Great Lakes so they can be enjoyed for generations to come."

Congressman Dan Kildee, D-Flint Twp., said the program has broad bipartisan support from Republicans and Democrats because it's effective at heading off invasive species and protecting the Great Lakes from pollution.

"We must protect the Great Lakes from harm and I am pleased that Congress has once again rejected President Trump's cuts, which would have essentially eliminated the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative," he said in a statement.

The bill also includes language compelling the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to try and finish a report on stopping Asian carp from coming into the Great Lakes through Illinois waterways by February 2019.

"This budget bill includes important priorities for Michigan," U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow, D-Mich., said. "It restores full funding for the Great Lakes and expedites action to combat Asian carp."

Also included in the federal budget bill is funding for addressing drinking water contamination, including $10 million for a health study on per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) exposure, funding to investigate and clean up contamination at active and decommissioned military bases and increasing funding for USDA Rural Development emergency water grants from $500,000 to $1 million.

Stabenow, Kildee and U.S. Sen. Gary Peters said those aspects of the spending bill would help address drinking water contamination issues across the state.

"Families, servicemembers and veterans across Michigan face unknown health risks from exposure to contaminated water, and this health study is an important step towards understanding the potential impacts of these dangerous chemicals," Peters said in a statement.

In the federal spending bill, members of Congress also opted to increase the Department of Education's budget by $2.6 billion, disregarding the Trump adminsitration's suggestion to cut education spending by $9.2 billion.JACKSON, MI - Jurors sat in disbelief Wednesday, as prosecutors told them the man on trial before them shot and killed a young mother during a Facebook live broadcast for no apparent reason.

"In a matter of seconds, she became the victim of a senseless murder, said Assistant Prosecuting Attorney Katie Hawkins. "Most people use social media for good things, but this defendant's perversion of social media ruins what it is about."

Anthony Gelia, 20, is charged with one count each of open murder, first-degree home invasion and felony firearms in the death of 26-year-old Brittany Southwell. His trial began March 21, with opening statements before Circuit Judge John McBain.

Police allege Gelia kicked in the door of a house in the 400 block of Jefferson Street in Jackson on election night, Nov. 8, 2016, and fired several shots inside the home, one of which struck and killed Southwell.

"I wish I could tell you she did not suffer, but that was not the case," Hawkins said. "She was shot in both her lungs and succumbed to asphyxiation. We can't tell you if she heard her child crying or her fiance asking if she's OK or the officer who told her she might not make it and needed to tell them if she knew who shot her."

Prosecutors recently won a motion hearing allowing the jury to see the 25-minute Facebook Live recording that allegedly shows Gelia's actions up to and including the shooting.

Gelia's attorney, Andrew Kirkpatrick told the jury that throughout the trial he will not deny much of what Gelia is accused of.

"By the end of this trial, I will ask you to find him guilty, but I ask you to find him guilty of the appropriate charge," Kirkpatrick said. "Everything he did that night was an act of human stupidity."

Jurors heard from several witnesses Wednesday who were in the home during the shooting, as well as police officers who responded to the scene. Southwell's fiance, Tyler McCravey, testified he was at her side when Gelia entered the home and started shooting.

McCravey and Southwell were in a basement bedroom with their infant child, he said. Upstairs was Southwell's two other children, her sister Amber Uphold with her boyfriend Noah Guenther and his father Jim McCravey, he said. Guenther is Gelia's brother.

"We heard a loud noise upstairs and thought Amber and Noah were roughhousing or something. Didn't think much of it," McCravey said. "I then heard someone coming downstairs. Amber and Noah ran past me, then I see Anthony come downstairs maybe 30 seconds later. Amber seemed panicked."

McCravey then described how Geila, whom he had never met before, pointed a gun at him and fired several times.

The jury then heard a recording of McCravey's frantic 911 call after the shooting stopped. When he made the call, McCravey did not realize yet that Southwell was struck by one of the bullets, he said.

Jurors wept as they heard McCravey on the recording begging for Southwell not to leave him as she struggled to breathe.

Jackson Police Officer Mike Galbreath, one of the first officers on the scene, said it took much effort to pull McCravey away from Southwell so rescue crews could try and assist her.

"She was not doing well," Galbreath said. "I tried to get some words out of her, to see if she knew who shot her, but was unsuccessful."

Galbreath collected evidence from the scene and took photos which were shown to the jury.

Another witness, a 17-year-old girl, testified she was a friend of Gelia and watched the 25-minute Facebook Live video in which prosecutors allege he killed Southwell.

"I went to talk to my mom after I saw it," she said. "I didn't know what to do. We called the cops and I asked myself, 'What did I just watch?'"

Jurors are expected to see the Facebook Live video, which was retrieved from Gelia's phone, during the trial, which resumes on Thursday, March 22.

An open murder charge allows a jury to decide between a first-degree or second-degree murder conviction, both of which carry a maximum sentence of life in prison.

To read all the stories related to the shooting, click here.KALAMAZOO, MI - The man and woman killed late Tuesday night when their car was slammed by a man speeding to escape the police -- and allegedly driving while intoxicated -- were the well-known parents of four, the grandparents of nine and the great-grandparents of one.

Juan Muniz, who was two days shy of his 67th birthday, was an award-winning member of Kalamazoo's Hispanic community and known for helping those around him. Mary Muniz, 62, was the matriarch of her family, considered "the glue" that held her loved ones together, and was also known for helping those around her.

The longtime homemaker had picked her husband up from his post-retirement job at Bronson Methodist Hospital and they were headed home when their Chevrolet Malibu was rammed shortly before 11:30 p.m Tuesday by a truck on Portage Street at Crosstown Parkway.

The truck was driven by a 56-year-old Kalamazoo man who attempted to flee on foot after the crash, Kalamazoo Public Safety officers reported. He was arrested a short time later, however.

KDPS says an officer tried to stop the man in the 1500 block of Washington Avenue as they responded to a call about a man armed with a firearm and driving in the area. The suspect refused to stop for an officer who was patrolling on foot and sped away when a patrol car became involved on Portage Street, near Stockbridge Avenue.

The truck driver was traveling north on Portage Street at a high rate of speed when officers say they discontinued their pursuit. But his vehicle collided with the Muniz car as the couple tried to make a left turn from southbound Portage Street onto eastbound Crosstown Parkway. The couple was trapped inside the wreckage.

"My mother was like the most loved person I know," their daughter Luchana Muniz, 41, said. "She was well-known and liked."

"We are devastated by this tragedy," she said.

Mary Muniz was a lifelong Kalamazoo resident who had been caring for her father -- more emotionally than physically family members said -- since her mother died in 2003. Mary Muniz was a homemaker who enjoyed volunteering to work at the concessions stands during Western Michigan University sporting events to help raise money for two of her granddaughters' dance school.

"My mom? I don't know how many people she was second mom to," said the couple's son Juan Jesus Muniz, 43. "She always had such a positive attitude and was open-arms to anyone who needed it."

He said she was a homemaker but also did house-cleaning work over the past 20-25 years, primarily for elderly people for whom she also provided emotional support.

Luchana Muniz said, "My father retired from Ameritech a few years back and was working at Bronson hospital."

He was working part-time, second-shift as a transporter at the hospital. She said her mother was in a routine of picking him up at the end of his work shifts.

He had relocated to Michigan from Texas at age 18 and "He was very active in the Hispanic Community. ... He worked to help others."

That was recognized in 2013 when he was named winner of the Dolores Huerta Community Service Award and the Cesar E. Chavez Social Justice Award, presented by the Southwest Michigan Cesar E. Chavez Committee. In 2016, he was the winner of the Latino Leadership Award presented at the annual Despierta Kalamazoo Hispanic Heritage Fiesta.

Juan Jesus said his parents' relationship "was complicated but it worked."

With a small laugh, he said. "Mom was an extrovert. Dad was an introvert. Mom definitely ran the show."

He said they occasionally bickered, "but you could still see that they loved each other and their really couldn't live without each other."

Holding back her emotions during a telephone conversation, Luchana said "I would like people to know that my parents were great people."

Juan Jesus said a lot of people speak highly of their parents. But he said, "My parents were exceptional people."

They would have celebrated their 46th wedding anniversary on July 1.

Juan and Mary Muniz are survived by: their children Luchana Muniz, of Kalamazoo, Juan Jesus Muniz, of Portage, Kristina Coleman, of Kalamazoo, and Mary Alicia Schaefer, of Portage; as well as nine grandchildren who range from age 4 to 22; and a 1-year-old great-grandson.

Funeral arrangements are to be made with the Langeland Family Funeral Homes.

The man suspected of causing the crash that took the lives of the Muniz was being held on charges that include fleeing and eluding causing death, operating while intoxicated causing death, leaving the scene of an accident, and resisting and obstructing arrest.

Kalamazoo Public Safety asks anyone with information that may help their investigation to contact them directly at 269-337-8994 or via the Silent Observer at 269-343-2100 or www.kalamazoosilentobserver.com.KALAMAZOO, MI -- The trial for Jason Dalton, the man charged with the 2016 Kalamazoo mass shooting that killed six people, will be delayed again after a Michigan Supreme Court ruling.

In the ruling dated Wednesday, March 21, the Supreme Court remanded an appeal by Dalton involving statements he made to police back to the Michigan Court of Appeals.

Originally, the Court of Appeals said it wouldn't hear the appeal. Now, with Wednesday's ruling, it has to hear it. The appeals court will likely review pleadings by the prosecution and defense and listen to oral arguments from each side before issuing an opinion, Kalamazoo County Chief Assistant Prosecutor Scott Brower.

The Court of Appeals will decide whether statements Dalton made to investigators the day following the Feb. 20, 2016, shooting will be allowed as evidence in his trial, and then a court date will be set in Kalamazoo County. "This will result in further delay" of the trial, Brower said Wednesday.

Kalamazoo County Circuit Court Judge Alexander C. Lipsey on May 24 denied a defense motion to suppress some of Dalton's statements to police following a shooting during which Dalton allegedly killed six people and seriously injured two others. Lipsey stayed proceedings at the request of Dalton's attorney, Eusebio Solis, until the appeal process is finished.

Defense attorneys argue Lipsey erred in denying the motion to suppress statements he made to a Michigan State Police detective at the Kalamazoo County Jail, and that Dalton's constitutional rights were violated.

Dalton, an Uber driver, is accused of going on a shooting rampage the night of Feb. 20, 2016 at three locations in Kalamazoo County, killing Judy Brown, Barbara Hawthorne, Mary Jo Nye, Mary Lou Nye, Rich Smith and Tyler Smith, and injuring Tiana Carruthers and Abigail Kopf.

Dalton, 47, of Cooper Township, faces six counts of murder, two counts of assault with intent to commit murder and eight felony firearm counts. He was found competent to stand trial in April 2016 and in May 2016 was ordered to stand trial. Solis has filed a notice of intent to use an insanity defense.

Lipsey ruled April 20 that the entirety of an interview Dalton had with a Michigan State Police detective will be allowed at trial, but only portions of an interview he had in the early morning of Feb. 21, 2016 with Kalamazoo Department of Public Safety detectives will be allowed.

Solis argued at a hearing that detectives violated Dalton's constitutional rights in two separate interviews. He said Dalton told detectives 25 times he didn't want to speak.

Kalamazoo County Assistant Prosecutor Jeff Williams argued, meanwhile, that the goal of the KDPS interview wasn't to get evidence against Dalton, but rather to learn of the threat of public safety, which is an exception to the Miranda rule.

Williams also argued Dalton initially invoked his Fifth Amendment rights when being interviewed by State Police Detective Kyle Gorham, but later initiated a conversation about the investigation and waived his rights.

Police reports about the interviews were included in information released by police in 2016 as part of Freedom of Information Act requests.

According to the reports, Dalton told KDPS Detective Bill Moorian, who interviewed him with KDPS Detective Cory Ghiringhelli, that his explanation for the shootings would blow their minds.

"Dalton then explains how when he opens up the Uber taxi app a symbol appeared and he recognized that symbol as the Eastern Star symbol," Moorian wrote. "Dalton acknowledged that he recognized the Uber symbol as being that of the Eastern Star and a devil head popped up on his screen and when he pressed the button on the app, that is when all the problems started."

Gorham wrote in his report that Dalton said he hadn't been sleeping well because the Uber app wouldn't let him "shut down."

According to Gorham's report, Dalton also talked about how he received a message on his phone to "plug in an auxiliary cable into his car, along with the power source for his phone and a Bluetooth." On Feb. 20 he said he was asked to take an assignment from Uber and when he got into his car he began driving really fast, the report says, and "advised something had come into his car."

Dalton, the report says, claimed the Uber app communicated to him with "dings," with one meaning yes, and two meaning no. He also told the sergeant things "began to get really weird" and he "freaked out" after symbols popped up on his Uber app asking him to join, which he agreed to do.

Dalton told Gorham the Uber app on his iPhone was to blame, claiming the app took over his Chevrolet Equinox - and later his body - and said "things began to get really weird" in the hours before the shootings.

Dalton remains jailed without bond.KALAMAZOO, MI -- A high school senior said she recently did not know how to use her voice to demand political change, but a viral video bringing her message to thousands of people is showing she and students across the country are being heard.

"It's been amazing to see how loud our voices have become and how much people are listening to hear what we have to say," Kalamazoo Central Senior Jenna Bowker said.

Bowker is one of a group of eight Kalamazoo Central High School students that created an online petition demanding school safety and responsible gun policy changes in the wake of a Florida high school shooting that left 17 dead.

She is featured in an Al Jazeera video about a March 14 walkout at Kalamazoo Central High School that has been viewed nearly 700,000 times.

Students Rising: Jenna Bowker This is Jenna Bowker. The Kalamazoo, MI, high school senior is demanding gun reform, and she wants it now! Posted by AJ+ on Wednesday, March 21, 2018

Demonstrations in Kalamazoo County and across Michigan were part of a national school walkout on the one-month anniversary of the deadly Florida shooting.

"We are tired of being told our voices don't matter because we're kids," Bowker said in the video filmed at the high school. "We're tired of being told we're safe when we know we could be safer, and we're tired of being told there's nothing the government can do when we know they were elected to protect us."

Bowker said gun violence had not affected her personally until Feb. 20, 2016, when two of her relatives, Tyler Smith and Rich Smith, were among six people shot and killed by a gunman in Kalamazoo.

Tyler Smith's mother and Rich Smith's wife, Laurie Smith, is the second cousin of Bowker's mother, she said.

"People I was close to, I saw them in so much pain," she said. "They were two members of a family of four. All of the sudden half of the family is gone."

The students' petition for gun reform has gathered more than 250,000 today, more than a month after it was created.

"Adults have failed us," the petition states. "Everyday, we students walk into school with the promise of an education without threat of violence. However, it has become increasingly clear that hallways of schools across America are no longer a guaranteed safe haven."

Kalamazoo Central High School students have had meetings with politicians after posting the petition and participated in a rally in Lansing over gun reform. They received a letter from former president Barack Obama, praising their efforts.

Bowker noted that the group has received some criticism because they are focusing only on guns and not other issues like mental health.

"This is our focus - gun legislation," she said. "There are other issues as well."

This weekend, she and three other Kalamazoo Central students who helped create the petition are planning to go to Washington, D.C., she said, to join in a national protest on gun reform.SPRING LAKE TOWNSHIP, MI - Grand Haven-based Shape Corp. plans to sell its manufacturing facility in Spring Lake.

The stampings facility, 16933 144th Ave. in Spring Lake Township, is expected to be sold to Ridgeview Industries of Grand Rapids, according to a news release. The sale should be finalized in July.

The sale will take the international company's total West Michigan facilities down to 10. As of February, the company had about 1,100 employees in the area with 90-100 in Spring Lake.

After close, Ridgeview plans to operate the business at the location using current employees, according to the release.

The Spring Lake facility was focused on stamping, which is not a focus of Shape as a whole, said John Keene, marketing manager. The company's primary focuses are roll forming, composites, injection molding, aluminum, and some welding and assembly.

Ridgeview's core process is stamping, he said.

"Ridgeview has been a trusted supplier of advanced stamped products and assemblies," said Mark White, Shape president. "With Shape being one of their largest customers over the years, we see this sale as a natural transition that will benefit both companies. The advantage comes into play as stampings is a core competency of Ridgeview. Therefore, they're positioned to advance and expand our existing operations while we focus on enhancing our business' core competencies."

Shape Corp. announced in January that it would acquire Ohio-based aluminum extruder Magnode.

It will make Shape a "one-stop shop for customers seeking aluminum solutions," said Shape president, Mark White in a news release.

Shape is one of Ottawa County's largest employers.

Shape is a full-service supplier of custom metallic, plastic, composite and hybrid solutions, primarily serving the automotive sector. Founded in 1974, the company remains a private, family company. Shape employs more than 3,500 global team members across 15 locations in North America, Europe and Asia.Theodis Crawford III

MUSKEGON COUNTY, MI - A motorist who fled police and then crashed Wednesday will be charged with assault with intent to murder for a Muskegon shooting Tuesday night.

Theodis Crawford III, 22, also will be charged in Muskegon County District Court on a felony firearm count, said Matt Roberts, chief trial attorney for the Muskegon County Prosecutor's Office.

Crawford is accused of shooting a 39-year-old Muskegon man around 11:30 p.m. March 20 in the 500 block of West Grand Avenue. The victim was found shot in the head outside a residence near Nelson School and taken to an area hospital in stable condition, police said.

Assault with intent to murder is punishable by any number of years up to life in prison.

Crawford was arrested following a called-off police chase in the city of Muskegon Heights Wednesday afternoon, Roberts said. The Heights officer spotted Crawford's car on Sherman Boulevard and gave a brief chase before his supervisor called off the pursuit, according to Muskegon Heights Police Chief Joseph E. Thomas Jr.

Almost a minute and a half later an undercover officer saw the black sedan crash into a utility pole on Hovey Street, Thomas said.

Roberts said Muskegon Heights has not submitted paperwork to the prosecutor's office seeking a fleeing and eluding charge against Crawford.

The suspect was pinned by his lower extremities upside down in the car, and both Muskegon Heights and Norton Shores firefighters worked to free him, said Muskegon Heights Fire Chief Christopher Dean.

While they were working to free him, firefighters found a firearm on the suspect, Dean said. They also found a large sum of money in the vehicle, he said.

Crawford has a prior conviction from 2015 for fleeing police, according to the Michigan Department of Corrections web site.SAGINAW COUNTY, MI -- Police are raiding two Catholic Diocese of Saginaw properties and the home of Bishop Joseph Cistone as part of an ongoing investigation into sexual abuse in the church.

Saginaw County Assistant Prosecutor Mark Gaertner said he can't say what officers are searching for and taking from the properties, but confirmed the search warrants executed Thursday, March 22, are related to the diocese's lack of cooperation.

"Contrary to the statements of the diocese and the bishop that they would fully cooperate with law enforcement, they did not," Gaertner said. "Therefore it was necessary for law enforcement to use other investigative tools, including search warrants."

Gaertner said search warrants were executed at the bishop's home on Corral Drive in Saginaw Township, the rectory at Cathedral of Mary of the Assumption, 615 Hoyt in Saginaw, and the Catholic Diocese of Saginaw offices in Saginaw Township.

To date, only one diocese priest, Rev. Robert DeLand, has been criminally charged. He was accused of sexually assaulting two males -- a 21-year-old and a 17-year-old -- in his Saginaw Township condominium.

Since DeLand's Feb. 26 arrest, numerous tips and allegations about further sexual abuse dating back as far as three decades have flooded area police departments, investigators previously said. Among the tips were allegations against other clergymen.

Another diocese priest, Rev. Ronald J. Dombrowski, was recently suspended by the diocese after they received a report he allegedly sexually assaulted a person when they were a minor. He has not been criminally charged.

Earlier this month, the Saginaw County Assistant Prosecutor's Office formed a special investigative team to coordinate and investigate allegations of abuse involving "officials" within the Catholic Diocese of Saginaw.

Messages were left with the diocese seeking comment. Doors to the diocese office in Saginaw Township were closed. Saginaw Township police officers were barring anyone from entering the building at 5800 Weiss St.

An MLive reporter went to the home of Cistone, knocked on the door and rang the doorbell, but no one answered. A window in the door was broken out and glass was on the floor.

As of 1:30 p.m. Thursday, police remained at the diocese's Saginaw Township office.

The diocese includes the counties of Saginaw, Bay, Arenac, Clare, Gladwin, Isabella, Midland, Gratiot, Tuscola, Huron and Sanilac.

Six years ago, a lawyer accused Cistone of misleading a grand jury by not acknowledging that he witnessed the shredding of documents that contained the names of priests suspected of child molestation in 1994 while he was serving as a church official in the Philadelphia area. He never faced any criminal charges in that case.SAGINAW, MI -- A Saginaw-area cardiologist accused of choking and imprisoning his girlfriend has pleaded no contest and will likely avoid prison.

John Miles McClure II pleaded no contest Tuesday, March 20, to one count of domestic violence, a misdemeanor.

In exchange, prosecutors agreed to drop charges of unlawful imprisonment, a 15-year felony, according to court records. The preliminary sentencing assessment would see the 58-year-old get probation and no time in jail.

McClure, who has an office at the Mid-Michigan Heart & Vascular Center in Kochville Township and in Mount Pleasant, was charged in January 2017 after police were alerted to a domestic violence situation at his Thomas Township home.

The incident began around 10 p.m. when a woman McClure had a relationship with came to his home to find another woman there, according to the police report.

The woman who was at the home left at McClure's request, the report states. When the girlfriend attempted to leave, McClure grabbed her by the neck area of her coat and told her he didn't want her to leave, according to the report.

The woman unzipped her coat and broke free and McClure then blocked the door, according to the report.

She eventually made it outside, but McClure followed her, placed her in a bear hug in the front yard and forced her back into the home, the report states.

The woman texted a friend to call police. At 11:16 p.m., the call to police was updated with the information: "(The victim) now texting saying that she needs help as soon as possible and that the boyfriend was choking her," the report stated.

Thomas Township police officers, after arriving at the home, found McClure grabbing the woman and saying, "You're not going anywhere. I love you," according to the report.

Officers ordered McClure twice to let the woman go before they finally grabbed her and placed McClure in handcuffs, the report states.

McClure remains free on bond. He is set for a 10:15 a.m. sentencing before Circuit Judge Manvel Trice III on April 23.Taco Bell announced Thursday, March 22 that it would release branded tortilla chips in its Fire and Mild sauce flavors in stores nationwide starting this summer.

The Mexican-inspired fast food restaurant said in a news release that the tortilla chips will also come available in the plain classic flavor. Taco Bell reports it will keep similar sauce packet design and the popular "saucy wisdoms" on its tortilla chip packaging.

"This launch of our first line of sauce packet-inspired chips gives our fans a new way to access a taste of Taco Bell," Marisa Thalberg, Taco Bell Chief Brand Officer, said in the release.

"Our sauce packets are one of the brand's most unique aspects and were the natural choice for both the flavors and packaging of our tortilla chips."

Its out of the bag. Taco Bell Tortilla Chips are coming this summer. pic.twitter.com/cd22srcHsH  Taco Bell (@tacobell) March 22, 2018

The company reports the classic tortilla chips are salty and crispy, the Mild flavored chips are seasoned with Taco Bell's Mild sauce with hints of cumin and three chili peppers, and the Fire sauce flavored chips will come with hints of jalapeno, chili peppers and paprika.

Fire and Mild flavors will come in 1 oz., 2.3 oz, 11 oz. and 30 oz bags once they hit stores while the classic chips will come in 1 oz, 3.5 oz., 13. oz. and 30 oz. bags. Pricing has not yet been announced as the fast food chain says that will be set by grocery and retail outlets.The Republican Party attracts bizarre crackpots and because of the nature of the GOP support system, sometimes those bizarre crackpots wind up as officials party nominees. Last night we saw the Illinois Republican Party mortified as Nazi Party leader Arthur Jones win their nomination in a Chicagoland district. And whether it's Arthur Jones, Roy Moore (AL), Sharron Angle (NV), Rich Iott (OH), Christine O'Donnell (DE), Todd Akin (MO), Richard Mourdock (IN)... there is always a chance the Republicans will wind up with a candidate so horrifying that a Democrat can win in even the reddest of constituencies. And now the Democrats have Trump inconstituency. That might not work in West Virginia, though. West Virginia is the Trumpiest state in the union. The PVI is R+19 and Trump beat Hillary there 489,371 (68.5%) to 188,794 (26.4%). Keep in mind though, that Bernie had also crushed Hillary in West Virginia in the primary-- 51.4% to 35.8%. In fact, in some key counties, Bernie not only beat Hillary, he also beat Trump! Here's just a dozen examples:

Yesterday, Alex Isenstadt reported on another Republican potential disaster in West Virginia , the heart of Trumpville. Ex-con Don Blankenship wants to Make West Virginia Great Again . As of the December 31 FEC reporting deadline Blankenship had written his Senate campaign a $400,000 personal check-- it's over a million in self-funding now... and there's plenty more where that came from. "With Blankenship skyrocketing in the West Virginia Republican Senate primary and blanketing the airwaves with ads assailing his fractured field of rivals as career politicians," wrote Isenstadt, "senior party officials are wrestling with how, or even whether, to intervene. Many of them are convinced that Blankenship, who served a one-year sentence after the deadly 2010 explosion at his Upper Big Branch Mine, would be a surefire loser against Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin-- and potentially become a national stain for the party."

The discussions have intensified over the past few weeks. During separate meetings with the National Republican Senatorial Committee, aides to Blankenships two primary opponents, Rep. Evan Jenkins and state Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, pointed to Blankenships traction and questioned what could be done to stop him. The Senate GOP campaign arm, which heard out the appeals, recently commissioned a survey to gauge the coal kings electoral strength and determine his staying power in the race.





Those familiar with the partys deliberations say the results are clear: With a little more than a month until the May 8 primary, Blankenship, a towering figure in West Virginia politics long before this campaign and an avid opponent of unions, has vaulted into essentially a three-way tie with his rivals and is positioned to move ahead.





The talks underscore the intense pressure Republicans are under in the era of Trump, as they struggle to control insurgent figures with large grass-roots conservative followings. While some senior Republicans are anxious to block Blankenship, others believe that such a move could backfire and turn him into a martyr-- much as it did when the national GOP dropped millions of dollars in an unsuccessful attempt to take down Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore in a Republican primary. [And much like the DCCC stumbled into be attacking Laura Moser in Texas.]





Like Moore, Blankenship is an entrenched, anti-establishment figure running in a conservative state. In an interview with Politico, the 68-year-old Blankenship dared the party to come after him.





I think it would get me votes if they did, he said. I think the Republicans in West Virginia are not really happy with the Republicans in the Senate and the House in general.





Further deepening the tensions is a long-simmering distrust between Blankenship and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), another powerful Appalachian Republican. Blankenship has spoken with McConnell over the years and said he never found him sufficiently supportive of the coal industry. McConnell, for his part, was recently quoted as saying he did not want Blankenship to win the nomination.





National Republicans have been struck by the potency of Blankenships campaign. Earlier this year, Blankenship and his longtime political strategist, Greg Thomas, traveled to Washington to meet with the White House political affairs office. During the meeting, Blankenship described his battles with Manchin and outlined how hed used his deep pockets to fund Republican campaigns in a state that until the past decade had been dominated by Democrats.





White House officials, whove also met with Jenkins and Morrisey, came away thinking that Blankenship was for real.





Blankenships rise has been driven in part by his self-financed TV ads. Since launching his campaign in late November, Blankenship has spent over $1.1 million on roughly a dozen commercials, according to media buying totals, far surpassing his opponents. Morrisey has so far spent nothing on TV ads and Jenkins only about $38,000.





Blankenship has used the ads to paint his rivals as insufficiently conservative, blasting Jenkins over his positions on Obamacare and climate change and Morrisey on abortion. Hes positioned himself as an unshakable ally of President Donald Trump, who received 68 percent of the vote in the state.





Yet he has also undertaken an effort to clear his name.





The spots have accused the Obama administration and Manchin-- who was governor at the time of the mine disaster and has said Blankenship has blood on his hands-- of conspiring to imprison him. He has also featured testimonials from his daughter, Jennifer, whos described her father as a soft-hearted family man and provider for West Virginians.'





Even before he entered the race late last year, Blankenship was a familiar face on West Virginia TV sets. After being released from prison in 2017, he invested around $600,000 on a slate of commercials aimed at redeeming himself.





Hes running ads, he has money. Hes not a wallflower, said Hoppy Kercheval, an influential radio show host in the state. Hes a puncher and a counterpuncher.





Hes the guy thats on the move. Hes the guy thats gaining traction in this wide open race, Kercheval added. I think it has this everyman appeal in West Virginia.





Yet Blankenships appeal, many believe, runs deeper. During the 2000s, he spent heavily out of his own pocket to buttress the GOP at a time when it was weak in the state, earning him goodwill with many in the party. And while many blamed him for the 2010 explosion, which killed 29 miners, others in the coal-dependent state came to see Blankenship as a pivotal economic force through his leadership of Massey Energy.





Blankenships allies insist that any comparison to Moore is unfair, and argue that hell be a viable nominee in November. Unlike Moore, in Alabama, they say, Blankenship has established a substantial campaign apparatus and surrounded himself with seasoned advisers whove worked with him over the years, including Thomas. His ability to self-fund makes him a serious threat to Manchin, they contend.





National GOP officials say theyve made no decision on whether to weigh in against Blankenship, though several said they expected the Senate committee to create a menu of options. But they contend that any possible option poses serious risks. The GOP, which wants to remain neutral in the primary, is reluctant to endorse either Jenkins or Morrisey. And advertising against Blankenship directly risks a serious backlash. Some simply want to leave it up to Jenkins and Morrisey to take him on.





Blankenship acknowledged the possibility that the national party could intervene against him. But he argued that it shouldnt.





Fundamentally, I support the Republican Party. I have supported them for years, he said. I certainly think they should embrace me because Ive been a Republican in West Virginia long before it was cool to be a Republican in West Virginia.





They shouldnt be afraid of me being up there, he added.55 Democrats voted against your constitutional rights and opposed the USA RIGHTS amendment. Had 26 voted the other way, we would have won. Among them is Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff. pic.twitter.com/7WHwPFGEImThe printing press remains the symboldespite the arrival of online newsof the Fourth Estate, of Freedom of the Press. Thats why for centuries one of the first acts of authoritarian rulers was to smash the printing presses of the opposition.

In 21st Century democracies, the pressures are more subtle, but with the same potential impactto silence independent voices: labeling all legitimate, professional media as fake news, for example.

Now, coming on the heels of the announcement of the Trump administrations controversial tariffs on imported steel and aluminum, the Department of Commerce this month announced the imposition of a 22 percent anti-dumping duty on imported Canadian newsprint, a major source of paper for many community and metro newspapers.

The Commerce Department had concluded that Canadian paper manufacturers have been dumping newsprint into the U.S. for less than its fair value.

The antidumping duties follow duties on newsprint and other uncoated paper products of 4.4 to 9 percent announced in January.

Paper producers have already announced significant price increases in an attempt to absorb the duties. Additionally, newsprint manufacturers with low rates are being asked for supply and are raising prices because of higher demand.

The California News Publishers Association and other industry groups are asking each member of Californias Congressional delegation to oppose Commerces imposition of the duties.

David Chavern, CEO of the Newspaper Marketing Association, predicted dire consequences: Most newspapers will not be able to absorb these increased costs and will be forced to reduce page counts, reduce days of distribution, and/or move more information to digital platforms.

Some small-market or rural newspapers, with slim margins, will close.

Ironically, the supposed beneficiary of duties on Canadian newsprint imports U.S. newsprint mills will be harmed as tariffs will artificially decrease the demand for their product.

A consequence of the new steel and aluminum tariffs will be increases in manufacturing costs and consumer prices for cars, refrigerators and washing machines.

The consequence of the newsprint duties (another word for tariff) could be even more dire for our democracy.

South Carolina newspaper publisher Susan Rowell warned, We are painfully aware that some newspapers will not survive this upheaval. For those who do, it will be at the expense of a diminished news mission. Our readers, customers and community will pay the price, just so one small paper mill in Washington state can use trade laws to a very temporary advantage. Long term, we will all lose.

Although the new duties are in place, the Commerce Department and the U.S. International Trade Commission will be studying their impact this summer on newsprint customers and the newspaper industry. Lets hope that wiser heads prevail and these new rules are reversed.Welcome to Morningstar.co.uk!

You have been redirected here from Hemscott.com as we are merging our websites to provide you with a one-stop shop for all your investment research needs.To search for a security, type the name or ticker in the search box at the top of the page and select from the dropdown results.Registered Hemscott users can log in to Morningstar using the same login details. Similarly, if you are a Hemscott Premium user, you now have a Morningstar Premium account which you can access using the same login details.Maintaining independence and editorial freedom is essential to our mission of empowering investor success. We provide a platform for our authors to report on investments fairly, accurately, and from the investors point of view. We also respect individual opinionsthey represent the unvarnished thinking of our people and exacting analysis of our research processes. Our authors can publish views that we may or may not agree with, but they show their work, distinguish facts from opinions, and make sure their analysis is clear and in no way misleading or deceptive.

To further protect the integrity of our editorial content, we keep a strict separation between our sales teams and authors to remove any pressure or influence on our analyses and research.

Read our editorial policy to learn more about our process.One of my favorite things to do is to push back on news media bandwagons with indignation and incredulity. Today provides a great opportunity for that because stocks are starting off weaker and most media outlets seem to be focused on the wrong stuff, or rather, only focused on one thing. Specifically, the announcement of new China-specific tariffs is said to be driving stocks and bond yields lower. Balderdash! Sort of...

Yes, China tariffs have been a market mover this week, but they're not the only consideration today. Tariffs were a big deal on Monday, and at that time, I would agree there was a solid correlation with stock market weakness. In fact, one could argue that stocks set the tone on Monday and that tariffs were partly responsible for that (even though plummeting Facebook stock got the most attention). Either way, the news was definitely already making the rounds by then.

The overnight market movement (today) is a different story. The cat is out of the bag on China tariffs, and a comment from the White House that the announcement will come today is not much of a surprise. Moreover, stocks didn't begin to move lower until European markets opened (as seen in the chart below).

The fact is that domestic markets are always curious to find out how Asia and Europe will react to a big Fed announcement. I'd go so far as to say we don't even see the full reaction to the Fed until overseas markets have had their input. In today's case, their input was moderately favorable for bonds--hence the additional gains this morning.

But if bonds are happy because the Fed Chair came across as "accommodative" yesterday, we'd also expect stocks to take heart (they like an accommodative Fed too!). But European markets sold stocks due to a vast majority of the day's economic data (in Europe) coming in weaker than expected. This stoked the fires of bond buying as well, thus pulling even more money out of stocks as money managers adjust stock vs bond allocations. Somewhere in all that mess you likely have a bit of additional impact from the apparent official/final announcement of China tariffs later today, but the point is that it's not today's only news and possibly not even the biggest news.Michigan Technological Universitys College of Engineering has moved up and again is ranked among the top 100 graduate engineering schools in the US News & World Reports Best Graduate School rankings.

Michigan Tech ranked 83rd of more than 200 engineering schools that grant doctoral degrees. Tech moved up from last years 85th place ranking.

Pushpalatha Murthy, associate provost and dean of the Graduate School, says shes pleased by the rankings. Michigan Tech offers high quality graduate programs and I am very happy that this is being recognized.

She says the Universitys dedicated faculty and staff deserve credit for their excellent work. We all realize that rankings are not the only indicators of the quality of graduate programs; however, being in the top 100 confirms the success of our efforts and helps us attract good graduate students.

Michigan Techs biomedical engineering program, unranked last year, was 84th of the 100 ranked programs this year. Sean Kirkpatrick, chair of biomedical engineering, says the ranking reflects a lot hard work.

We are very pleased to be recognized by the US News and World Report rankings of graduate biomedical engineering programs," he says. "The BME faculty, staff and graduate students have all worked very hard to create a solid graduate program. This ranking reflects that all the hard work is truly paying off.

Also making a considerable leap is electrical engineering, which moved into the top 100 at 75th. The program was 103rd last year. Materials engineering and mechanical engineering also made gains in the national rankings, rising from 54th to 42nd , and 65th to 59th, respectively.

William Predebon, chair of Mechanical Engineering-Engineering Mechanics, said the impressive ranking was a group effort. This recognition is a team effort due to the research and scholarship of our faculty and their graduate students and the excellent support of our staff and University. I am grateful for all you do.

Techs engineering discipline rankings for this year are:

Biomedical Engineering: 84 th

Chemical Engineering: 83 rd

Civil Engineering: 67 th

Computer Engineering: 91 st

Electrical Engineering: 75 th

Environmental Engineering: 41 st

Materials Engineering: 42 nd

Mechanical Engineering: 59th

Daniel Fuhrmann, chair of Michigan Techs Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), says the significant increase in the US News rankings is gratifying. The Michigan Tech ECE Department has been working hard over the past 10 to 15 years to increase the size and improve the quality of our graduate programs, at both the MS and PhD levels. It is gratifying to see our efforts recognized by our peers.

Fuhrmann says the department is continuing to move forward in graduate education. We will soon launch a major expansion of our online MS program for working professionals.

US News & World Reports annual graduate school rankings are based on two types of data, according to the magazines website: statistical data such as student selectivity, Graduate Record Exam scores, student-faculty ratio, number of PhDs awarded, research activity of faculty and total research expenditures; and peer and employer assessment.

Rankings of engineering specialties are based solely on peer assessment from department heads in each discipline.

Michigan Technological University is a public research university, home to more than 7,000 students from 54 countries. Founded in 1885, the University offers more than 120 undergraduate and graduate degree programs in science and technology, engineering, forestry, business and economics, health professions, humanities, mathematics, and social sciences. Our campus in Michigans Upper Peninsula overlooks the Keweenaw Waterway and is just a few miles from Lake Superior.In Focus with Allison Walker is a 30-minute public affairs program, featuring a roundtable of newsmakers representing a range of perspectives, including local officials and expert analysts as they tackle topical issues of importance to Floridians.

In Focus airs Sundays at 11:30 a.m. and 8:30 p.m., right after Political Connections.Florida wildlife officials are looking into a reported incident earlier this week in which an alligator is seen on video being dragged on a public roadway.

Alligator seen in Snapchat video being dragged on road

Incident occurred recently near Volusia/Brevard lines

Call 1-866-FWC-GATOR for nuisance alligator removal



The incident occurred near U.S. 1 close to Ditch Road near the Volusia and Brevard county line.

The Snapchat video is at the center of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission investigation. It appears to show a man tying up a gator to the back of an ATV and then dragging it back and forth across a road.

"They are dangerous animals," wildlife Officer Chad Webber said. "And it could have turned out bad with the gentlemen being bitten and also bringing harm to the animal."

FWC officials said it has received tips and talked to the man in the video. Officials said there isn't enough evidence to determine the man's intent. Determining that intent could determine whether the man will face any charges.

"There's no justification for it at all," Volusia County resident Dan Friend said. "I was appalled to see the video."

The case remains under investigation.

The gator-dragging video has drawn comparisons to the one seen in December of a shark flopping around as it's being dragged behind a fast-moving boat off the Florida coast. It took about a month for FWC officials to identify and charge the three men seen on the boat in the video.

FWC uses contracted alligator trappers throughout the state to remove alligators 4 feet in length or greater that are thought to pose a threat to people, pets or property.

People with concerns about an alligator should call FWC's toll-free Nuisance Alligator Hotline at 866-FWC-GATOR (866-392-4286). Nuisance alligator trapping is free.Daniel Thomas says that when construction crews started work on the I-4 Ultimate Project, he was told it would only be a brief inconvenience. However, the timeline has changed.

Homeowner says he wouldn't have bought house if he knew about prolonged work

FDOT is saying it is in communication with Daniel Thomas

Real estate agent says it's best to always check county records for roadwork

"It was supposed to be six months," explained Thomas. "Now they are saying it's going to be two years."

Thomas bought the property he owns on East King Street and Cornell Avenue in the College Park area less than two years ago which lies just feet away from the I-4 Ultimate Project.

A Google street view still shows what the property used to look like. Yet those images are very different from the area's current appearance.

"Obviously, I can't rent it with this (points to construction). I can't sell it with this going on like this," said an upset Thomas.

Thomas' driveway is completely destroyed and he says that he has not been able to access it since August.

That is concerning for him because he claims that in the next several months he actually plans to move his wife and two children into this house.

He says that if he knew then what he knows now about the construction issues, he would not have bought the property in the first place.

He said part of the property's appeal was how quiet it had the potential to be after I-4 Ultimate work was completed.

What is more are the vibrations that can be felt clearly inside the house from a massive generator that sits just outside his front door.

"You can put a coin on the floor on the living room floor and will vibrate across the room," said Thomas. "And this thing goes 24/7 it doesn't stop. They come in the middle of the night just to refuel it so it doesn't shut off."

The Florida Department of Transportation confirmed that it has been coordinating with Thomas. FDOT stated it will be reconstructing a portion of Cornell Avenue so he will have better access to his driveway.

"I wouldn't have bought this property for half the price," lamented Thomas. "I don't care if it's College Park, downtown, if it's the place to live, there's just no way."

Helen Thompson from Re/MAX Property SW was asked about buying property knowingly near a major construction zone. She said that she would always recommend that the buyer look into the county zoning for the next five years to see what the plan may be zoning, especially if that property backs up to a major road or vacant land.

As for the property value, she would expect Thomas' house to go down in value during the construction but when it is completed, visibility of Interstate 4 and the sound will be the main factors as to how much the property value rises.Federal prosecutors are expected to wrap up their case today against the widow of the Pulse nightclub gunman.

After a lengthy jury process and opening statements, the prosecution wrapped up its arguments as to how Noor Salman aided and abetted her husband, Omar Mateen, and lied to the FBI during its investigation into the Orlando nightclub shooting that left 49 people dead.

The June 2016 Pulse massacre was at the time, the deadliest shooting in modern U.S. history.



Day six of the trial, taking place in Orlando federal court, picked up where Wednesday left off -- with an information technology specialist.

There was a testy exchange between defense attorney Charles Swift and the specialist in cross-examination about Salmans deleted text messages and the frequency with which she did so.

The analyst testified that there had been no political activity searched on Salman's phone, nor searches about the Islamic State, Disney, City Place, weapons, ammunition, Pulse or law enforcement.

Thursday afternoon, government rested its case against #NoorSalman, widow of #Pulse shooter. Much of argument revolved around cell phone data, deleted text messages & Omar Mateen's Google searches of ISIS propaganda, sometimes in presence of his wife. @MyNews13 @BN9 pic.twitter.com/ynG47Ae2eW  Julie Gargotta (@juliegargotta) March 22, 2018

But the notion of deleted messages appeared to be the theme for testimony that followed, from FBI electronics engineer Michael McFarland, who looked at periods of deleted data on Salmans phone, to another FBI special agent, Richard Fennern, who also combed through phone data.

McFarland was asked by the government to focus on two key periods of time: April 28 to June 5, when no texts were recovered form Salman's phone; and June 6 to June 12, with more deletions.

He noted that Salman had two applications on her phone that cleaned it up; after testing, he concluded that neither would do anything without the user prompting.

When asked by prosecutors how the messages were deleted, McFarland replied, "My best guess is that the user did something to delete the messages."

Just before a mid-morning break, the prosecution handed out papers to jury members showing Salman's statements to the FBI.

As prosecutors questioned Fennern about cellular record analysis of phones belonging to Mateen and Salman, they paired the data recovered with surveillance video from Disney Springs and Walmart that showed the family making purchases, and presented Salmans confession to the FBI: I knew he was preparing for jihad.

But the defense countered Mateen searched for extremist ideology all the time -- even in front of his parents.

There was an explosive moment at the tail end of the trial day, which resulted in the judge himself questioning a key witness for the prosecution.

Following the defense's cross-examination of an FBI agent, Byron seemed visibly angered. The agent admitted data did not corroborate Salman's statement to FBI that couple cased Pulse prior to attack, which was information that became a factor in judge's decision to revoke Salman's bond.

It was a day that was meant for the prosecution to bring the argument home.

"The government doesn't need to be told to do the right thing. They must do the right thing," Byron said.

The defense, meanwhile, is expected to begin its case Monday morning. Salman has pleaded not guilty to the charges against her.

The family spokesperson says they are outraged that one of the reasons Salmans bond was revoked was based upon evidence thats been proven to be untrue.



Spectrum News 13 also learned that on Friday, Judge Paul Byron will hold a jury charge conference, which is open to the public. That withholding of information will likely be discussed at Fridays jury charge conference.

This session starts at 9 a.m.BERLIN  The Worthington Meeting House will return to its original appearance under new restoration plans recently discussed with the Town Council.

The estimated cost of the renovation is $2.2 million.

Its great to see its going back to what it originally was, said Mayor Mark Kaczynski.

Built in 1774, the town-owned meeting house has been a landmark on Worthington Ridge serving as a meeting place, library and a school until the building closed to the public in the 1970s.

The Berlin Historical Society and Friends of the Worthington Meeting House (FOWMH) group have been working with a grant-funded architect, QA&M Architecture in Farmington, on plans to restore the historic building to its original design. Both groups are also looking at grants and fundraising to cover constructions costs.

Certain changes evolved in the design, said Kent McCoy, an architect on the project.

The council approved $13,900 in additional funding to complete the design development during a meeting Tuesday night. The project was initially awarded for $20,000 to Smith Edwards McCoy which has since merged with QA&M Architecture.

The historical society and FOWMH looked at two different schemes, one of which would remove a portion of the second floor of the house. Scheme A, which keeps the second floor intact, was determined the best option in collaboration with the State Historic Preservation Office and National Park Service.

We can keep the main level and balcony level as open as possible, McCoy said.

The new design will be ADA compliant, including an elevator, and allow visitors access to the entire building. The first floor will hold seating for 100 people. The concept is to eventually house the historical society in the building, while also using the space to hold community meetings.

I think its going to be an incredible space, said Lorraine Stub, of FOWMH and the historical society.

akus@record-journal.com

203-317-2448

Twitter: @KusReporterMSN.com has named K LaMays steamed cheeseburger as the best burger in the state.

The website named the top burger in all 50 states. K LaMays is located in Meriden at 690 E. Main St.

Some might argue that the steamed cheeseburger should be added to Connecticuts list of official state foods, the article reads. Though K LaMays is a rookie compared to some of the older restaurants preparing burgers this way, theyre undeniably knocking it out of the park.Foreign Minister of Armenia Ararat Mirzoyan will pay a working visit to New York

Governments preventing publication of Haykakan Zhamanak newspaper during state of emergency

UCOM prolongs the unlimited internet offer for the level up 4700 and level up 5500 subscribers

Ucom employees received recognition for their services to the homeland

Karen Vardanyan has allocated 105 million AMD to rescue the Yerevan Botanical Garden.

"The Power of One Dram" to overcome childhood cancer

Generation A 13  your chance to be the change

President of the Artsakh Republic Arayik Harutyunyan met with Russian Co-Chair of the OSCE Minsk Group Igor Khovayev

"uDays" special offer at Ucom: discounts for all smartphones and accessories for 2 days only

For more than 3 hours, 50 or more Azerbaijani servicemen have blocked the interstate road

Call on the international community for an adequate response against azerbaijani aggresssion

Transformation and trust are important for success in modern banking. Artak Hanesyan

UCOMS LEVEL UP 1700 REGIONAL TARIFF PLAN USERS TO RECEIVE MORE THAN THOSE IN YEREVAN

Joint statement

Statement by the Co-Chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group

Covid-19: 163 new cases in Armenia

Google Ad

Armenia: Remarks by Commissioner Oliver Varhelyi at the press point with Acting Deputy Prime Minister Mher Grigoryan

The United States Welcomes Azerbaijans Release of Armenian Detainees and Armenias Actions to Facilitate Demining

The Coronavirus-Related Situation in Armenia

International aviation: Council greenlights signing of major agreements with four countries

With UCOMs level up tariff plans subscribers have unlimited access to Netflix, Duolingo and Zoom

Armenia: Statement by the Spokesperson on the early parliamentary elections

Armenias Parliamentary Elections PRESS STATEMENT

COVID19:77 new cases

Armenias early parliamentary elections were competitive and well run, but polarized and marred by aggressive rhetoric, international observers say

International election observers to Armenias early parliamentary elections held press conference

Drop Charges Against Rights Defender Sashik Sultanyan

The Coronavirus-Related Situation in Armenia

The European Union in Armenia calls all parties to contribute to a peaceful Election Day to celebrate democracyProviding assistance to Armenia and Nagorno Karabakh discussed at US Congress hearings (video)

Voice of America The issue of providing assistance to Armenia and Nagorno Karabakh was discussed during the hearings at the US Congress. Head of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in a speech to the Congressional Foreign Affairs Committee, who was present at the hearings on of the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the US Congress, addressed to Bred Sherman the following: "You are aware that Armenia, which is blockaded by Turkey and Azerbaijan, deserves our assistance. You are aware that Nagorno-Karabakh, now the Republic of Artsakh, is in the vicinity of the belligerent power, and that the southern region of the Republic of Georgia called Samtskhe-Javakhetia is a region deserving to receive a considerable part of our assistance. I am sure that many of my colleagues have sent letters on that occasion. " Thirty-three United States Congressmen have appealed to their counterparts to bring USD 60 million to Armenia. The Congressmen specifically urge Armenia to provide USD 30 million in economic, USD 10 million military assistance and USD 20 million to Armenian refugees in the Middle East. The letter also urged to stop any aid to Azerbaijan and provide USD 10 million in assistance to Nagorno-Karabakh for mine clearing and installing equipment for registering ceasefire violations. Touching upon other former Soviet republics during the hearings, Congressman Thed Poe, President of the Subcommittee on Terrorism, emphasized the importance of US assistance, especially to Ukraine, Georgia and Moldova. "Will they take the direction of the Russian bear, or to the West?" According to the Congressman, the development of real democracy and the elimination of corruption in those countries were not only humanitarian, but also a major political issue for the United States. Close Downloading and Using eBooks from NAP

What is an eBook?

An ebook is one of two file formats that are intended to be used with e-reader devices and apps such as Amazon Kindle or Apple iBooks.

Why is an eBook better than a PDF?

A PDF is a digital representation of the print book, so while it can be loaded into most e-reader programs, it doesn't allow for resizable text or advanced, interactive functionality. The eBook is optimized for e-reader devices and apps, which means that it offers a much better digital reading experience than a PDF, including resizable text and interactive features (when available).

Where do I get eBook files?

eBook files are now available for a large number of reports on the NAP.edu website. If an eBook is available, you'll see the option to purchase it on the book page.

View more FAQ's about EbooksJeremy Wade searches for answers in the most remarkable rivers, lakes and seas on the planet to reveal the secrets of these extraordinary places.

Tuesdays from 9pm AEST.Government approves ratification of EU-Armenia agreement (video)

Armenian government adopted the EU decision on ratification of agreement Armenian. Deputy Foreign Minister Shavarsh Kocharyan presented the draft decision of the Foreign Ministry at today's session of the Government. "This framework agreement is important because it raises the level of relations between Armenia and the EU and is aimed at resolving them in the coming years," Shavarsh kochayan said. Kocharyan also reminded that the Agreement "On comprehensive and enhanced partnership between the Republic of Armenia and the European Union and the European Atomic Energy Community and Member States, on the other hand", was signed on 24 November 2017. The agreement, as mentioned by Shavarsh Kocharyan, would come into force only after the last member state of the EU declared that it had completed national processes. At the moment, only Estonia has made such a statement.Arsen Torosyan: Penalties for smoking efficiency should be greater and more severe

Armenia should follow international tobacco control practices and apply strictly the legislation prohibiting smoking, Arsen Torosyan, healthcare organizer, said this at a press conference today. He and public healthcare specialist Davit Petrosyan met yesterday with experts from Armenia. "International experience shows that the fight against smoking abroad is very strict. Smoking in the United States is prohibited not only in public places, but also on streets. But here the fight against smoking is going on for the maintenance of air cleanliness," said David Petrosyan. According to Arsen Torosyan, the complaint of citizens against the law of the Ministry of Healthcare "On restricting smoking" is not justified, as this concerns not only the health condition of smokers, but also of non-smokers, and in case of not applying penalties, their rights will continue to be violated. "Even fines are not enough. Penalties for smoking efficiency should be greater and more severe. And international experience in this regard will help us," Arsen Torosyan said.Amit Agnihotri and Manish Anand By

Express News Service

NEW DELHI: The Indian footprint of controversial data mining firm Cambridge Analytica (CA) that allegedly abused Facebook user data, on Thursday became political football as both the BJP and the Congress traded charges over who used it to influence elections in India.

Union Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad raised the pitch by pointing an accusing finger at the Congress while issuing a stern warning to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg against using its data to profile Indians.

According to some reports, CA had offered its services to both parties before the 2014 general elections, but that fell through.

Categorically denying any link with the CA, Congress media department chairman Randeep Surjewala pointed out the shoe is on the other foot, as the CA website shows its services were used by BJP-JD(U) in Bihar polls in 2010.

Also, the firms Indian partner Ovlene Business Intelligence (OBI) is being run by the son of a former Rajya Sabha MP of the JD (U), referring to India head of OBI Amrish Tyagi, son of JD (U) leader KC Tyagi, whose services were used by Rajnath Singh in 2009, he added.

The BJP, he said, was trying to deflect public attention from the raging controversy over the deaths of 39 Indian hostages in Iraq and the massive publicity being received by party chief Rahul Gandhis Karnataka campaign.

The BJP is a factory of fake news and has produced one more fake product today, he quipped.

Prasad, however, wondered whether the Opposition party had used the agencys playbook tricks to unleash divisive politics in Gujarat (during the Assembly elections) and now in Karnataka with the approaching state polls.

Dirty tricks department

Channel 4 sting operation catches Cambridge Analytica (CA) CEO Alexander Nix bragging that his company managed Donald Trumps digital campaign.

Says CA could send some girls to a rival candidates house as honeytraps, claims girls from Ukraine are particularly effective in the role.

Trapping a rival candidate by offering a large amount of money, having the whole exchange recorded so it could be posted on the internet to show that the person is corrupt.

The key is to use fake identities to cover footprint in target countries, like setting up of fake academic projects.

Indian footprint

CA works through Ovleno Business Intelligence (OBI) owned by former JD(U) MP K C Tyagis son Amrish.

Posing a set of seven questions, Prasad asked: Was data theft and manipulation ability the sole criteria for which CA was hired by Congress? How many times did Rahul Gandhi and CAs now sacked CEO Alexander Nix meet and what did they discuss? What is CAs role in Rahul Gandhis social media presence? Can Congress deny CAs role in its campaign to divide the society for electoral gains first in Gujarat and now in Karnataka? Has the Congress taken any action after damning revelations were made public? How much stolen data from CA are in possession of the Congress? How much data of Indian users did the Congress hand over to CA?

I want to specifically warn the Congress that the nation will not tolerate any kind of data theft or manipulation. There have been more damning revelations about the role of CA, which has been found to be using illegal means of data manipulation to subvert democratic process in Kenya. We have all seen how Congress tried to divide the society in Gujarat just in order to win an election. We are seeing what they are doing in Karnataka. This is straight out of the Cambridge Analytica playbook, he said.

The partys recently appointed chief of data analytics Praveen Chakravarty has also been accused of data theft in the past, he noted.

The minister also stated that the Central government is in touch with the Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice in the US to assess the privacy violations of Indian users.Foreign Minister of Armenia Ararat Mirzoyan will pay a working visit to New York

Governments preventing publication of Haykakan Zhamanak newspaper during state of emergency

UCOM prolongs the unlimited internet offer for the level up 4700 and level up 5500 subscribers

Ucom employees received recognition for their services to the homeland

Google Ad

Karen Vardanyan has allocated 105 million AMD to rescue the Yerevan Botanical Garden.

"The Power of One Dram" to overcome childhood cancer

Generation A 13  your chance to be the change

President of the Artsakh Republic Arayik Harutyunyan met with Russian Co-Chair of the OSCE Minsk Group Igor Khovayev

"uDays" special offer at Ucom: discounts for all smartphones and accessories for 2 days only

For more than 3 hours, 50 or more Azerbaijani servicemen have blocked the interstate road

Call on the international community for an adequate response against azerbaijani aggresssion

Transformation and trust are important for success in modern banking. Artak Hanesyan

UCOMS LEVEL UP 1700 REGIONAL TARIFF PLAN USERS TO RECEIVE MORE THAN THOSE IN YEREVAN

Joint statement

Statement by the Co-Chairs of the OSCE Minsk Group

Covid-19: 163 new cases in Armenia

Google Ad

Armenia: Remarks by Commissioner Oliver Varhelyi at the press point with Acting Deputy Prime Minister Mher Grigoryan

The United States Welcomes Azerbaijans Release of Armenian Detainees and Armenias Actions to Facilitate Demining

The Coronavirus-Related Situation in Armenia

International aviation: Council greenlights signing of major agreements with four countries

With UCOMs level up tariff plans subscribers have unlimited access to Netflix, Duolingo and Zoom

Armenia: Statement by the Spokesperson on the early parliamentary elections

Armenias Parliamentary Elections PRESS STATEMENT

COVID19:77 new cases

Armenias early parliamentary elections were competitive and well run, but polarized and marred by aggressive rhetoric, international observers say

International election observers to Armenias early parliamentary elections held press conference

Drop Charges Against Rights Defender Sashik Sultanyan

The Coronavirus-Related Situation in Armenia

The European Union in Armenia calls all parties to contribute to a peaceful Election Day to celebrate democracyBy PTI

NEW DELHI: A special court today granted bail to former Himachal Pradesh chief minister Virbhadra Singh, his wife and three others in a Rs seven crore money laundering case.

Special Judge Arvind Kumar granted the relief to Singh and his wife Pratibha Singh, who were present in the court in response to the summons issued against them on the last date of hearing.

The court also granted bail to Universal Apple Associate owner Chunni Lal Chauhan, besides other accused Prem Raj and Lawan Kumar Roach.

All the accused got the relief on furnishing a personal bond of Rs 50,000 and one surety of the same amount each.

During the proceedings, ED counsel Nitesh Rana opposed their bail plea, seeking judicial custody for them.

The court, however, granted them bail considering they were not arrested by the ED during investigation.

The court had on February 12 issued summons against the accused saying there was "prima facie" enough evidence against them.

The Enforcement Directorate had chargesheeted 83-year-old Singh, accusing him of projecting around Rs seven crore "proceeds of crime" as agricultural income in connivance with his wife and others and had invested the sum in LIC policies.By Express News Service

As the Congress and the BJP traded charges over Cambridge Analytica, here's a quick primer on the controversy

1. Digital marketing agencies procure personal data from various social media sites such as Facebook. Data mining is an accepted tool, sometimes data is bought, on the other occasions it is procured by illegal means.

2. The data is analysed to prepare valuable information about a person's tastes, relationships, sexual and political inclinations etc. These are culled together to profile and target individuals that are vulnerable to influence during elections.

3. Once the political inclinations of voters are analysed, CA offers to campaign/work for political parties. Voter concerns are collected through telephone, digital and physical polls.

ALSO READ | How Facebook likes could profile voters for manipulation

4. Data science and predictive analytics are then used to forecast voter behaviour. From their voting history to the car they drive, behaviours are correlated with voting decisions.

5. Digital marketing is then used to influence voters. Using advertising, including social media, search engine advertising and YouTube, voters are influenced. For example, if one of the concerns among voters is healthcare, the voters are directed to websites to explain a political parties position on the subject.

Cambridge Analytica (CA) is a US affiliate of the SCL Group, a British company which uses data mining and analysis for influencing voter behaviours. Launched in the US in 2013, CA claims it has worked on some 44 elections in the US, including Donald Trump's campaign for President. The company also influenced the Brexit vote in the UK.

The data consultancy firm claims to be "the global leader in data-driven campaigning with over 25 years of experience, supporting more than 100 campaigns across five continents". Its website says that apart from the US, it claims it has run political campaigns for clients in Thailand, Trinidad and Tobago, St Kitts and Nevis, South Africa, Kenya, Malaysia, Indonesia, Italy, Colombia and India.By Agencies

WASHINGTON/LONDON: Breaking five days of silence, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg apologized for a "major breach of trust," admitted mistakes and outlined steps to protect user data in light of a privacy scandal involving a Trump-connected data-mining firm. Facebook first learned of this breach of privacy more than two years ago, but hadn't mentioned it publicly until Friday.

"I am really sorry that happened," Zuckerberg said of the scandal involving data mining firm Cambridge Analytica. Facebook has a "responsibility" to protect its users' data, he said in a Wednesday interview on CNN. If it fails, he said, "we don't deserve to have the opportunity serve people."

His mea culpa on cable television came a few hours after he acknowledged his company's mistakes in a Facebook post, but without saying he was sorry.

Zuckerberg announced new steps to rein in the leakage of data to outside developers and third-party apps, while giving users more control over their information through a special toolbar.

ALSO READ | Cambridge Analytica row: How is data mined and how are voters influenced?

Zuckerberg said he will testify before Congress if he is the person at Facebook best placed to answer their questions, and that he is not opposed to regulating internet titans such as the social network.

"I am actually not sure we shouldn't be regulated," the Facebook co-founder and chief told CNN.

"Technology is an increasingly important trend in the world; the question is more the right regulation than should it be regulated."

Zuckerberg said measures had been in place since 2014 to prevent the sort of abuse revealed over the weekend but the social network needed to "step up" to do more.

CLICK BELOW TO WATCH VIDEO

Even before the scandal broke, Facebook has already taken the most important steps to prevent a recurrence, Zuckerberg said. For example, in 2014, it reduced access outside apps had to user data.

However, some of the measures didn't take effect until a year later, allowing Cambridge to access the data in the intervening months.

Zuckerberg acknowledged that there is more to do.

The scandal erupted when a whistleblower revealed that British data consultant Cambridge Analytica (CA) had created psychological profiles on 50 million Facebook users via a personality prediction app, created by a researcher named Aleksandr Kogan.

The app was downloaded by 270,000 people, but also scooped up their friends' data without consent -- as was possible under Facebook's rules at the time --- including those who never downloaded the app or gave explicit consent.

Facebook says it discovered last week that CA may not have deleted the data as it certified.

"We should not have trusted Cambridge Analytica's certification, and we are not going to make that mistake again," Zuckerberg said.

READ HERE | How Facebook likes could profile voters for manipulation

Facebook is reviewing how much data was accessed by every app at the social network, and will conduct full forensic audits if it notices anything suspicious, according to its chief executive.

In his Facebook post, Zuckerberg said it will ban developers who don't agree to an audit. An app's developer will no longer have access to data from people who haven't used that app in three months. Data will also be generally limited to user names, profile photos and email, unless the developer signs a contract with Facebook and gets user approval. In a separate post, Facebook said it will inform people whose data was misused by apps.

'Breach of trust'

"This was a breach of trust between Kogan, Cambridge Analytica and Facebook," Zuckerberg wrote in a post at the social network.

"But it was also a breach of trust between Facebook and the people who share their data with us and expect us to protect it."

"We need to fix that."

Zuckerberg's apology followed another day of damaging accusations against the world's biggest social network as calls mounted for investigations on both sides of the Atlantic.

READ FULL POST HERE

Max Schrems, a Vienna-based activist who has brought online data protection cases before European courts, told AFP he complained to the Irish Data Protection Authority in 2011 about the controversial data harvesting methods.

Schrems also recounted meeting with Facebook representatives the following year to discuss concerns around apps operating in this fashion.

"They explicitly said that in their view, by using the platform you consent to a situation where other people can install an app and gather your data," Schrems said.

ABC News reported that special counsel Robert Mueller, who is investigating Russian interference in the 2016 campaign, was looking at Cambridge Analytica's role in the Trump effort.

The British firm has maintained it did not use Facebook data in the Trump campaign, but its now-suspended CEO boasted in secret recordings that his company was deeply involved in the race.

#DeleteFacebook

The data scandal has ratcheted up the pressure on Facebook -- already under fire for allowing fake news to proliferate on its platform during the US presidential election.

A movement to quit the social network gathered momentum, while a handful of lawsuits emerged which could turn into class actions in a costly distraction for the company.

One of those calling it quits was a high-profile co-founder of the WhatsApp messaging service acquired by Facebook in 2014.

"It is time. #deletefacebook," Brian Acton said in a tweet protesting the social media giant's handling of the crisis.

Kogan says he is being made a scapegoat

Both Facebook and CA have denied wrongdoing, as attention focused increasingly on Kogan, the inventor of the controversial app -- a personality survey dubbed This Is Your Digital Life.

But Kogan said in an interview he was "stunned" by the allegations against him, claiming CA had assured him his activities were above board.

"I'm being basically used as a scapegoat by both Facebook and Cambridge Analytica," he told the BBC.

The University of Cambridge psychologist said CA had approached him to do the work, and that he did not know how the firm would use the data collected with his app.

"One of the great mistakes I did here was I just didn't ask enough questions," he said. "I had never done a commercial project. I didn't really have any reason to doubt their sincerity. That's certainly something I strongly regret now." He said the firm paid some $800,000 for the work, but it went to participants in the survey. "My motivation was to get a dataset I could do research on," he said. "I have never profited from this in any way personally."

Call for investigation

European Union officials have called for an urgent investigation while British, US and EU lawmakers have asked Zuckerberg to give evidence.

British Prime Minister Theresa May has urged Facebook and CA to cooperate with the national information commissioner's probe.

"The allegations are clearly very concerning," she told MPs.

Facebook shares steadied Wednesday, gaining 0.74 percent after steep declines this week that wiped out some $50 billion in market value.

But questions abounded on the future of Facebook.

Analyst Brian Wieser at Pivotal Research said in a research note that Facebook "is exhibiting signs of systemic mismanagement," possibly from growing too fast.

'Zuckerberg's response is just the beginning'

David Carroll, a professor at Parsons School of Design in New York who sued Cambridge Analytica in the U.K., said he was not satisfied with Zuckerberg's response, but acknowledged that "this is just the beginning."

He said it was "insane" that Facebook had yet to take legal action against Cambridge parent SCL Group over the inappropriate data use. Carroll himself sued Cambridge Friday to recover data on him that the firm had obtained.

Sandy Parakilas, who worked in data protection for Facebook in 2011 and 2012, told a U.K. parliamentary committee Wednesday that the company was vigilant about its network security but lax when it came to protecting users' data.

He said personal data including email addresses and in some cases private messages was allowed to leave Facebook servers with no real controls on how the data was used after that.

"The real challenge here is that Facebook was allowing developers to access the data of people who hadn't explicitly authorized that," he said, adding that the company had "lost sight" of what developers did with the data.

(With inputs from AP, AFP)By Associated Press

NEW YORK: Facebook "likes" can tell a lot about a person. Maybe even enough to fuel a voter-manipulation effort like the one a Trump-affiliated data-mining firm stands accused of  and which Facebook may have enabled.

The social network is under fire after The New York Times and The Guardian newspaper reported that former Trump campaign consultant Cambridge Analytica used data, including user likes, inappropriately obtained from roughly 50 million Facebook users to try to influence elections.

Monday was a wild roller coaster ride for Facebook, whose shares plunged 7 percent in its worst one-day decline since 2014. Officials in the EU and the U.S. sought answers, while Britain's information commissioner said she will seek a warrant to access Cambridge Analytica's servers because the British firm had been "uncooperative" in her investigation. The first casualty of that investigation was an audit of Cambridge that Facebook had announced earlier in the day; the company said it "stood down" that effort at the request of British officials.

Adding to the turmoil, the New York Times reported that Facebook security chief Alex Stamos will step down by August following clashes over how aggressively Facebook should address its role in spreading disinformation. In a tweet , Stamos said he's still fully engaged at Facebook but that his role has changed.

It would have been quieter had Facebook likes not turned out to be so revealing. Researchers in a 2013 study found that likes on hobbies, interests and other attributes can predict personal attributes such as sexual orientation and political affiliation. Computers analyze such data to look for patterns that might not be obvious, such as a link between a preference for curly fries and higher intelligence.

Chris Wylie, a Cambridge co-founder who left in 2014, said the firm used such techniques to learn about individuals and create an information cocoon to change their perceptions. In doing so, he said, the firm "took fake news to the next level."

"This is based on an idea called 'informational dominance,' which is the idea that if you can capture every channel of information around a person and then inject content around them, you can change their perception of what's actually happening," Wylie said Monday on NBC's "Today." It's not yet clear exactly how the firm might have attempted to do that.

Late Friday, Facebook said Cambridge improperly obtained informationfrom 270,000 people who downloaded an app described as a personality test. Those people agreed to share data with the app for research  not for political targeting. And the data included who their Facebook friends were and what they liked  even though those friends hadn't downloaded the app or given explicit consent.

Cambridge got limited information on the friends, but machines can use detailed answers from smaller groups to make good inferences on the rest, said Kenneth Sanford of the data science company Dataiku.

Cambridge was backed by the conservative billionaire Richard Mercer, and at one point employed Stephen Bannon  later President Donald Trump's campaign chairman and White House adviser  as a vice president. The Trump campaign paid Cambridge roughly $6 million according to federal election records, although officials have more recently played down that work.

The type of data mining reportedly used by Cambridge Analytica is fairly common, but is typically used to sell diapers and other products. Netflix, for instance, provides individualized recommendations based on how a person's viewing behaviors fit with what other customers watch.

But that common technique can take on an ominous cast if it's connected to possible elections meddling, said Robert Ricci, a marketing director at Blue Fountain Media.

Wylie said Cambridge Analytica aimed to "explore mental vulnerabilities of people." He said the firm "works on creating a web of disinformation online so people start going down the rabbit hole of clicking on blogs, websites etc. that make them think things are happening that may not be."

Wylie told "Today" that while political ads are also targeted at specific voters, the Cambridge effort aimed to make sure people wouldn't know they were getting messages aimed at influencing their views.

The Trump campaign has denied using Cambridge's data. The firm itself denies wrongdoing, and says it didn't retain any of the data pulled from Facebook and didn't use it in its 2016 campaign work.

Yet Cambridge boasted of its work after another client, Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, won the Iowa caucus in 2016.

Cambridge helped differentiate Cruz from similarly minded Republican rivals by identifying automated red light cameras as an issue of importance to residents upset with government intrusion. Potential voters living near the red light cameras were sent direct messages saying Cruz was against their use.

Even on mainstay issues such as gun rights, Cambridge CEO Alexander Nix said at the time, the firm used personality types to tailor its messages. For voters who care about tradition, it could push the importance of making sure grandfathers can offer family shooting lessons. For someone identified as introverted, a pitch might have described keeping guns for protection against crime.

It's possible that Cambridge tapped other data sources, including what Cruz's campaign app collected. Nix said during the Cruz campaign that it had five or six sources of data on each voter.

Facebook declined to provide officials for interview and didn't immediately respond to requests for information beyond its statements Friday and Monday. Cambridge also didn't immediately respond to emailed questions.

Facebook makes it easy for advertisers to target users based on nuanced information about them. Facebook's mapping of the "social graph"  essentially the web of people's real-life connections  is also invaluable for marketers.

For example, researchers can look at people's clusters of friends and get good insight as to who is important and influential, said Jonathan Albright, research director at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University. People who bridge different friend networks, for example, can have more influence when they post something, making them prime for targeting.

Two-thirds of Americans get at least some of their news on social media, according on Pew Research Center. While people don't exist in a Facebook-only vacuum, it is possible that bogus information users saw on the site could later be reinforced by the "rabbit hole" of clicks and conspiracy sites on the broader internet, as Wylie described.Slo Drboyan: If Azerbaijan agrees to give Karabakh, Turkey will not (video)

Afrine's struggle is a universal struggle, and not only Kurds are suffering from it. Today head of the Kurdish community of Armenia, MP Knyaz Hasanov, Head of the "Kurdistan" Committee Zhenya Amiryan and member of the Shalalid Yezidi community Slo Drobyan made such a statement. "Erdogan began to think of entering Afrine, Kurdish city, so that his country was far from terrorists. He stated that it would last for 5 days, but 62 days have passed and the Kurds keep fighting in Afrine and have declared that they will not leave their homes," Knyaz Hasanov said. According to him, the international community kept being silent about the events, as they had dominant interests, particularly in the oil market. He called on the superpowers to fight against the massacre. Zhenya Amiryan noticed that the war was just beginning. "We will fight not only for the Kurds of Afrine, but for all peoples of Mesopotamia. Our guerillas will do everything to counterattack the Turkish barbarians." Slo Drboyan, a member of the Shalali Yezidi community, stressed that that was also a threat to the Armenian people; if Turkey continued its victories, the idea of pan-Turkism would be realized. "They have a plan of entering Karabakh. Afrine and Karabakh are connected today. We have information that special detachments are being made from the Azeris in Turkey. Even the Turkish Prime Minister said in Azerbaijan that in case Azerbaijan agreed to give Karabakh, Turkey would not, since Karabakh was connected with Afrine then."For Subscribers Family of Newport teen killed in 2018 await arrest; police confident

Police said Zacary Medina was not the intended target, and a detective The Daily News spoke with recently, whos working the case, reiterated that.Success! An email has been sent to with a link to confirm list signup.Reporter

Noelle McGee is a Danville-based reporter at The News-Gazette. Her email is nmcgee@news-gazette.com, and you can follow her on Twitter (@n_mcgee).Firdous, Khanjian and Tchaikovsky residents to receive notifications on alienation of property (video)

Today the Government approved the draft law "On recognizing the exclusive public interest in the 33rd district of Yerevan". In other words, some residents of the Republic, living in Firdus, Khanjian and Tchaikovsky streets, as well as Tigran Mets avenue will receive notifications on the alienation of their property. Meanwhile, in the courtyard of the Government building, former residents of the center of Yerevan were protesting. Yerevan residents deprived of their homes were not the only protesters. Mothers who lost their sons demanded to reveal the killings of their sons who died in peaceful conditions of the army. "My boy was choked, then hanged, but the official version claimed suicide, there were plenty of traces on the boy's body, there was a chair at the scene where as if my son was standing, but where was the chair if my boy was standing on his feet and the leg was folded?"said Valery Muradyan's mother Nana Muradyan. The protesters remained close to the Government building before the end of the session, but officials ignored them.Columnist

Tom Kacich is a columnist and the author of Tom's Mailbag at The News-Gazette. His column appears Sundays. His email is tkacich@news-gazette.com, and you can follow him on Twitter (@tkacich).10 female Bahrainis are sentenced to 3 and 5 years in prison. Meanwhile, 3 females are held in the pre-detention trial.



(AhlulBayt News Agency) - Statistics published by activists on social media outlets showed that there are 13 Bahraini female prisoners in Bahrain over political cases, including 3 sisters.



10 female Bahrainis are sentenced to 3 and 5 years in prison. Meanwhile, 3 females are held in the pre-detention trial.



"Najah Al-Sheikh, Zainab Makki and Fawziya Mashala" are suspended and "Taiba Darwish, Faten Hussein, Mona Habib and Hamida Joumaa" are sentenced to 5 years in prison, the statistics revealed.



3 sisters "Fatima Ali, Amal Ali and Iman Ali" are serving 3-year jail term, in addition to "Madina Ali, Amira Al-Qashaami and Hajar Mansour".



Political female prisoners are held in Isa Town Women's Prison. Reports issued by human rights organizations state that the detainees are treated in an inhuman way.





/257According to information, the troops, dressed in civilian clothes, arrested seven people in an initial toll, including children.



(AhlulBayt News Agency) - Bahraini forces raided on Wednesday (March 21, 2018) more than 18 houses in the Diraz area, west of the Bahraini capital, Manama, home to the Shia spiritual leader in the country Ayatollah Sheikh Isa Qassim.



According to information, the troops, dressed in civilian clothes, arrested seven people in an initial toll, including children.



The information confirmed that the houses were vandalized and robbed of some of its contents before the seven citizens were arrested.



Those who were taken into custody are: Hussein Mohammed Saleh, Sayed Ahmed Sayed Majid, Hassan Mulla Ali Jassem, Mohammed Fadel Abdul Rahim, Hassan Abdul Khaleq Jassim, Hassan Isa Al Fatlawi and Qasim Aqeel Fadl.



Thousands of anti-regime protesters have held demonstrations in Bahrain on an almost daily basis ever since a popular uprising began in the country in mid-February 2011. They are demanding that the Al Khalifah regime relinquish power and allow a just system representing all Bahrainis to be established.



Manama has gone to great lengths to clamp down on any sign of dissent. On March 14, 2011, troops from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were deployed to assist Bahrain in its crackdown.



Scores of people have lost their lives and hundreds of others sustained injuries or got arrested as a result of the Al Khalifah regimes crackdown.





/257Scorees of travellers were left stranded at the Robert Gabriel Mugabe International Airport after an Air Zimbabwe flight destined for Johannesburg failed to take off yesterday morning.

Air Zimbabwes marketing and planning manager Runesu Kwaramba confirmed the development to the Daily News, but said it was just a mere delay, as the plane took off later in the day.



It has delayed, but it has taken off, Kwaramba said late afternoon.



Asked whether they were going to compensate the passengers who were inconvenienced by the delay, Kwaramba said: As a matter of policy, we always do. All our passengers that are delayed are compensated depending on their situation.



Air Zimbabwe has been experiencing viability problems, which has resulted in flight delays, inconveniencing many of its passengers, who are now preferring to travel with other regional and international airlines.



The delays have often inconvenienced some passengers who would need to catch connecting flights to take them to their final destinations.



As one of the underperforming parastatals, economists have always called for AirZims privatisation. Daily NewsZESA is owed nearly $260 million by clients in Matabeleland region with the power utility company threatening a nationwide disconnection programme starting next month to force defaulters to pay their bills.



The debtors include companies and individuals. Those to be affected by disconnections include industry and domestic consumers with a fixed charge or metered electricity. Prepaid meter consumers are exempted because 50 percent of the money they use to recharge goes towards servicing their debt.



This emerged yesterday during a Bulawayo Progressive Residents Association (BPRA) meeting with Zesa officials in the city.



In an interactive session, residents presented their challenges to Zesa officials while the authorities gave candid responses.



Residents debts, vandalism of Zesa infrastructure, delays in attending to electric faults and customer service complaints dominated the stakeholder discussions.



Zimbabwe Electricity Transmission and Distribution Company western region commercial manager Mr Newton Mutizakurima said residents among other clients should pay their bills for the utility company to continue providing a service.





They owe about $260 million and the debt is for the whole western region. When I say western region Im referring to Bulawayo, Matabeleland North and South. Hence we are pleading that people should pay their bills, he said.





Mr Mutizakurima said Zesa was making demands for payments in cognisance of the countrys economic situation.





Electricity should be paid for, if you consume you should pay. We accept negotiations. We dont want a situation where consumers use electricity and dont pay anything. Yes we know that people have got issues, but even when you have issues you still need to eat, he said.





Mr Mutizakurima said next month Zesa would start to disconnect power from defaulting residents.

Weve been flighting adverts from last week urging customers to update their payment plans. Because we know that customers owe us. So we gave them up to March 31. If they dont come up with payment plans by March 31, we will either disconnect or push them to do payment plans, he said.





Mr Mutizakurima also praised BPRA for initiating the stakeholder engagement programme.

We were talking about the daily queries that they are concerned about. Im sure the interaction is important for us to share this information so that they can be enlightened and so that they know where to go when they have issues, he said. ChronicleLava Moving 400 Feet an Hour

as It Makes Way to the SeaOn the first day of the 1397 Persian New Year, dubbed the year of "Support for Iranian Products," Ayatollah Khamenei visited the Shrine of Imam Reza (as) in Mashhad, wherein he delivered a speech to the pilgrims and residents of the area.



(AhlulBayt News Agency) - All nations of the world, in some manner or degree, compromise with domineering powers. The only nation whose opinion is not influenced by any other nation is the Iranian nation.



On the first day of the 1397 Persian New Year, dubbed the year of "Support for Iranian Products," Ayatollah Khamenei visited the Shrine of Imam Reza (as) in Mashhad, wherein he delivered a speech to the pilgrims and residents of the area.



Before a large audience at the Shrine of Imam Reza, today, on the topic of Justice, the Leader of the Revolution stated: "Some weeks ago, I said we were lagging behind in the area of justice: I still believe it; however, the malicious groups interpreted it in another way. They said my remarks meant that the country hadn't done anything in the area of justice."



Elaborating further on his remarks that were taken out of context, the Leader clarified his remarks: "Regarding justice, much has been accomplished, great actions have been taken, but this is not the justice that we desire and is hoped for by the Muslim nation, it is far from it.



However, if you compare our country with how it was before the revolution, or with many other countries, you will see that class struggle is less, and low income classes are more abled. Education, health services, and many other things are certainly more generalized compared to many other countries."



Speaking on Iran's improvements, according to statistics, since the Revolution Ayatollah Khamenei said: "I have noted some statistics here which are interesting to mention. These stats are issued by the World Bank, not based on internal statistics. According to the statistics, before the revolution, the Gini coefficient was higher than 50. This is a measure to indicate the level of inequality in a country. The higher the number is, the bigger the level of inequality would be and vice versa. Before the Islamic Revolution the Gini index was at 50, whereas, in 2015 it was 38 for Iran. The difference between 50 and 38 indicates the amount that the problem of inequality has been reduced."



Additionally, he mentioned: "Other international statistics, again coming from the World Bank, are as follows: before the revolution 46% of the population of Iran, almost half, were in absolute poverty. In 2014, 46% was reduced to 9.5%; that, is the amount of work realized. The Islamic Republic, despite all the pressure it has endured, has carried out great work to provide justice and has made a lot of progress.

Of course propaganda says another thing, and the justice we demand and desire is greater than this.

So, the motto of justice is a realistic motto, a motto that is long entrenched in the country."



The Leader stressed on the importance of self-productive economy in stating: "One of the obstacles in the way of progress is ignoring the policy of self-production in economy. One of the features of a resilient economy and among its policies is self-production. Self-production means that production of capital happens by activity inside the country. So we do not rely on other countries.

During previous years, with different administrations, they wanted to take a loan out from the World bank or the International Monetary Fund; but, I didn't let them do that. They had prepared the preliminaries. It is a big mistake to be indebted to foreigners."



He continued, "Economy should be self-productive. Though, it does not mean we close doors to the country; No, I said be self-productive and outgoing."



Noting that investment is a means for supporting production Ayatollah Khamenei said: "One of the methods for supporting Iranian production is investment in production by the actors of the economy. The actors of economy should not only be engaged in commerce. They should seek investment in production. If their intentions are made pure, for God's sake, to help the country, this investment will be like an act of worship. Though it is profitable, because it is done to help the country and the people, it becomes worship."



The Leader of the Revolution aimed his focus on the Nowruz motto of Iranian products by stating: "My suggestion is that, as I mentioned earlier, you seriously look towards Iranian products. The salesperson should sell Iranian products, and the buyer should buy Iranian products. The officials should pave the way for Iranian production and prevent illegal imports."



"The Islamic Republic flew the flag of dignity and strength for the Iranian nation in the region," said the Leader of the Revolution.



He further mentioned the positive impacts of Iran's regional roles, adding: "The Islamic Republic made an essential contribution to defeat the Takfiris in the region. The Islamic Republic could liberate the people from these Takfiris in an important part of this region, and these are great results not to be diminished."



Pointing to those who meddle in foreign affairs, but accuse Iran, the Leader said, "Now, international meddlers, those who want to meddle in the internal affairs of every part of the world, protest Iran's involvement--this is not any of your business!"



He mentioned USA's part in the creation of ISIS and Iran's success in fighting against them, "The Islamic Republic could diffuse the United States' plan for the region. What was America's plan? The plan was to create venomous, evil, and destructive groups, such as ISIS, to divert nations' attention from the occupying Zionist regime and not to let them think about the Zionist regime. This is the plan we could defuse."



Noting on the hypocrisy of the USA he said, "They claim they were involved in the destruction of ISIS. This is a lie. The policy of the US is to keep ISIS, but under their own thumb. Of course, ISIS, and other such groups, are easy to create for the US, but difficult to handle. They want to keep calling the shots with ISIS. Beside the fact that the US is not able to make the region secure."



The Leader of the Revolution reminded the audience that wherever Iran goes, it is there upon request, to that he stated: "Our presence is requested by governments. Wherever we have gone, it has been because the governments and the nations of the region have asked us for help, and we helped. We were reasonably motivated to help."



Indicating differences between the West and Iran, Ayatollah Khamenei assured his audience that Iran was not a country to meddle, unlike Western countries: "Everybody must know that any help given, regarding regional matters, has been given after much thought and calculations. We could, and we succeeded, thank God. It will be the same in the future. We do not want to meddle in other countries' affairs."



Finally, the Leader said, "Let me tell you, God willing, without the shadow of a doubt, the United States will not achieve its goals in the region, and we will accomplish our objectives."







/257(Newser)  A history teacher who was videotaped telling his students that only dumb people join the US military has been fired by the suburban southern California school district where he has taught for more than 15 years. El Rancho Unified School District President Aurora R. Villon announced Gregory Salcido's dismissal at Tuesday night's school board meeting, the AP reports. In January Salcido upbraided a 17-year-old student for wearing a Marines sweatshirt to his class at El Rancho High School, telling him members of the US military are "the lowest of our low." "We've got a bunch of dumb (expletive) over there," he said during a soft-spoken, occasionally profane lecture that lasted several minutes while his students sometimes giggled.

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Villon said the small school district in the overwhelmingly Hispanic suburb of Pico Rivera has been "swamped with controversy" since a video of the remarks went viral after a family friend of the student posted it on Facebook. "The superintendent has recommended disciplinary action, including termination of the employment," she said. Villon said Salcido would remain on unpaid administrative leave pending any appeal he might make to state officials. Salcido, a longtime member of the Pico Rivera City Council, served as mayor in 2002, 2010, and 2015. Since his remarks went viral he has rejected fellow councilmembers' demands that he resign. One councilmember has launched a recall petition.

(Read more California stories.)(Newser)  A video of an infant smoking a small cigar set off outrage on social media that helped North Carolina authorities ID and arrest the mother. A version of the video that's received 1.5 million views was posted by a user who urged the mother's arrest. The 10-second clip shows the hand of an adult off-screen holding what appears to be a cigarillo to the child's lips. The child then makes a cooing sound and appears to inhale before letting out a puff of smoke. The Raleigh Police Department said Wednesday the child was safe and the mother was in custody, per the AP. "Big thanks to everyone who posted information about the smoking mother and baby," department officials told their Facebook followers in a post. "Thanks to your willingness to get involved, the child is now safe and the mother is in police custody."

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A police release identifies the mother as 20-year-old Brianna Ashanti Lofton. She's been charged with two counts of felony child abuse, contributing to the delinquency of a minor, and possession of marijuana. The child has been placed with Wake County Child Protective Services. It wasn't immediately clear if the smoke in the video was from tobacco or another substance. The man whose post went viral IDed himself as Rasheed Martin of Rochester, NY, and he said he's glad the child is now safe. He said he first found out about the video when a friend shared it online and wanted the woman to be held responsible, so he reposted the video and urged his followers to help ID her. "Once more and more people found out about this situation, they showed me a screenshot of her actual Facebook page," he said, and he added it to the post.

(Read more North Carolina stories.)(Newser)  Long before he was fired by Jeff Sessions for an alleged "lack of candor" under oath, former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe authorized a criminal investigation of the attorney general for allegedly lying to Congress about his Russia contacts, sources tell ABC and NBC. The sources say Sessions was unaware of the federal perjury investigation when he decided to fire McCabe two days before his scheduled retirement date. Then-Sen. Al Franken was among those who called for a perjury investigation last year after it emerged that Sessions had failed to disclose talks with Russia's ambassador during his confirmation hearings. Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation because of the talks.

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In November, Sessions told a House panel that he hadn't lied about a meeting in which a Trump aide boasted about Russian contactshe had only forgotten about it. The Sessions investigation was eventually handed over to special counsel Robert Mueller, who interviewed the attorney general earlier this year. Sessions' lawyer says the FBI investigation ended without criminal charges and Sessions is no longer being investigated. "The special counsels office has informed me that after interviewing the attorney general and conducting additional investigation, the attorney general is not under investigation for false statements or perjury in his confirmation hearing testimony and related written submissions to Congress," attorney Chuck Cooper said in a statement to the New York Times. (Read more Jeff Sessions stories.)(Newser)  The firing of Andrew McCabe appears to have been the last straw for John Brennan. The normally tight-lipped former CIA director, who slammed President Trump's "political corruption" and "moral turpitude" in a tweet Saturday, suggested Wednesday that the Russians might have compromising information on the president, the New York Times reports. He told MSNBC that Trump's "fawning attitude toward Mr. Putin" is a sign he has "something to fear," saying "one could speculate" Russia "may have something on him personally." The Russians have "long experience" with Trump and "may have things that they could expose," he said.

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Brennan said Trump's congratulatory phone call to Putin shows that he treats the Russian leader "so nicely," while he "treats American with such disdain"unlike the six presidents Brennan worked for in his decades with the CIA. Brennan, who led the agency from 2013 to 2017 and was in charge when the infamous Russia dossier surfaced, later emphasized that he was only speculating about what Moscow might have on Trump. "I do not know if the Russians have something on Donald Trump that they could use as blackmail," he told the Times. "I have pointed out the perplexing submissiveness of Mr. Trump toward Mr. Putindespite continued evidence of malign Russian activities," he said. "I do not know why he refuses to call out Russia; that is a question that can only be answered by Mr. Trump." (Days before Trump took office, Brennan warned him against reckless tweeting.)(Newser)  A Tennessee man who was wrongfully imprisoned for more than half his life has finally received compensationalmost a decade after he was set free and handed a check for just $75. Lawrence McKinney, 61, was convicted of rape and burglary in 1978 but the conviction was overturned and he was released from prison in 2009 after DNA evidence cleared him of the crime. But despite the evidence, the parole board refused to grant him a complete exoneration, meaning McKinney was unable to seek compensation from the state until Gov. Bill Haslam granted him an executive exoneration in December, citing authorities' finding that McKinney "would not have been prosecuted if the DNA testing results had been available at the time of trial," Fox 17 reports.

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On Wednesday, the Tennessee Board of Claims voted unanimously to give McKinney the maximum $1 million compensation for the lost 31 years of his life, the Tennessean reports. The former inmate, who married prison pen pal Dorothy after his release, will receive $353,000 up front to cover debts and attorneys' fees, with the remaining $647,000 funding an annuity that will pay him $3,350 a month. "We want to thank the board and the governor for standing by this man and seeing that justice was done," attorney David Raybin says. When he was formally exonerated, McKinney said being vindicated was more important than the money. "I never doubted it because God is in control," he said. "You can't be surprised when you serve the Lord." (Read more exoneration stories.)(Newser)  It's up to Bill Haslam now whether one of America's most famous mottos ends up prominently displayed in his state's schools. The Tennesseean reports a bill is headed toward the Tennessee governor's desk to call for the conspicuous display in schools of the "In God We Trust" motto. The bill easily passed the state House Monday after sweeping through the state Senate earlier this month, so Haslam's signature is now all that's needed. The law would require schools to give the motto center stage in a well-trafficked location, like a cafeteria or entryway, though what form it takes (e.g., a plaque or as student artwork) seems more flexible. GOP Rep. Susan Lynn, the bill's House sponsor, spoke on the House floor before the vote about the motto's appearance on such things as national currency and on license plates, and how we ought to perpetuate it even further.

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"Our national motto and founding documents are the cornerstone of freedom, and we should teach our children about these things," she said. The US Treasury website dives into the history of the slogan, which became the national motto in 1956. Other states like Florida, Oklahoma, and Arkansas have passed similar "In God We Trust" bills. As for those worried about the separation of church and state, the First Amendment Schools site notes that the Supreme Court has previously ruled that "God" references in things like the national motto and Pledge of Allegiance are simply "ceremonial deism," not the government attempting to force religion on anyone. Critics, however, say that because students are a "captive audience" (i.e., easily impressionable), posting God-themed content could veer closer to a state endorsement of religion. (Read more Tennessee stories.)(Newser)  Former French President Nikolas Sarkozy is facing serious corruption allegations, but he not only denies them, he says they cost him the presidency. "This calumny has made my life a living hell since March 11, 2011," he told a French court this week after being placed under formal investigation, per Reuters. Sarkozy's campaign is accused of accepting suitcases full of cash from then-Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi in 2007 in breach of campaign finance laws. Sarkozy says it never happened and that he is "accused without any physical evidence." He claims that Gadhafi made up the story to discredit him because Sarkozy supported the military effort to overthrow the Libyan dictator in 2011.

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"I've paid a heavy price for this affair," says Sarkozy, who served as president from 2007 to 2012. "Put it this way: I lost the presidential election of 2012 by 1.5 percentage points. The controversy initiated by Gadhafi and his henchmen cost me that 1.5%." The case against Sarkozy centers on French-Lebanese businessman Ziad Takieddine, who says he gave suitcases filled with $6.2 million of cash that came from Gadhafi to Sarkozy campaign official Claude Gueant, reports the BBC. Gueant said Tuesday that he has "never seen a penny of Libyan financing." (Read more Nicolas Sarkozy stories.)(Newser)  Two days after her birth, Ingrid Johnson was removed from a Florida hospital and her parents in what appears to be a familial dispute that has grown into a wider battle about the jurisdiction of tribal authorities, the Miami Herald reports. On Sunday, officers from the Miccosukee tribal police arrived at Baptist Hospital in Kendall with an order from a tribal court judge to remove Ingrid from her Miccosukee mother, 28-year-old Rebecca Sanders, and white father, 36-year-old Justin Johnson. While tribal police mostly have jurisdiction on the reservation over 30 miles away, the hospital says it allowed them to take the baby because they were accompanied by Miami-Dade officers. But Miami-Dade police say they were misled by tribal police, who claimed to have a "federal court order." "I thought the tribe was to protect its people, not use its own rulings to control its people," Sanders says.

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Sanders says her mother, Betty Osceola, is behind the tribal court order. She says Osceola doesn't want Ingrid's white father to be part of her life and tried to have Johnson removed from the hospital after Ingrid's birth. She didnt want him there," Sanders says. The tribal court order says it's in the "best interest" of all three of Sanders' children to be in Osceola's custody, though it doesn't mention anything Sanders did wrong. The whereabouts of Osceola and Ingrid are unknown. We dont know the health of the baby," a lawyer for Sanders says. "We dont know if she is receiving proper care." Sanders and Johnson have filed complaints with various jurisdictions, and the state is investigating if what tribal authorities did was legal. Meanwhile, Sen. Marco Rubio calls it a kidnapping. "This wont end well for tribe if they dont return child asap," he tweets. Read the full story here. (Read more Florida stories.)President Dr Hassan Rouhani had phone calls with Grand Ayatollahs Safi Golpayegani, Vahid Khorasani, Makarem Shirazi, Javadi Amoli, Sobhani, Shobeiri Zanjani, Alavi Gorgani and Mazaheri and thanked them for supporting the governments plans.



(AhlulBayt News Agency) - President had separate phone calls with grand maraji to extend congratulations over the start of new year and Nowruz 1397 in Solar Hijri calendar.



President Dr Hassan Rouhani had phone calls with Grand Ayatollahs Safi Golpayegani, Vahid Khorasani, Makarem Shirazi, Javadi Amoli, Sobhani, Shobeiri Zanjani, Alavi Gorgani and Mazaheri and thanked them for supporting the governments plans.



He expressed hope that with regard to the guidelines of the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution, empathy among the powers, institutions and public support, as well as implementation of the economic policies of the government to generate employment and support domestic production; year 1397 would be the year of more progress for the great Iranian nation.



The grand maraji, in return, congratulated new year to the President and appreciated the services and attempts of the government, and wished it success in serving people, especially the deprived, more.







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End/ 257(Newser)  Even if you don't do drugs, there's a surprisingly decent chance your fingerprints have traces of cocaine and even heroin. Researchers from the University of Surrey in Britain found that slightly more than 1 in 10 drug-free study participants had cocaine in their prints and 1% had heroin, per a university news release at PhysOrg. They chalk it up to the prevalence of the drugs in society, with users handling cash and other items that wind up in wide circulation. The study was fairly small, involving 50 drug-free people and another 15 who'd used cocaine or heroin in the previous 24 hours. Scientists used solvents to extract substances from the prints for analysis, explains IFLScience. They also had the various subjects shake hands, and the clean users showed traces of the drugs after a handshake with drug users.

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"Believe it or not, cocaine is a very common environmental contaminantit is well known that it is present on many bank notes," says Surrey researcher Melanie Bailey. "Even so, we were surprised that it was detected in so many of our fingerprint samples." The good news? The researchers were able to set a threshold and pick out the prints of the actual drug users from the innocents. It's no mere scientific exercise: In its coverage, the Telegraph takes note of a bus driver who got fired for failing a drug test and later won a settlement for unfair dismissal. Turns out, he routinely handled money contaminated by cocaine. (This woman was ordered by a court to use her fingerprint to unlock her phone.)(Newser)  A 17-year-old boy has been suspended from school thanks to a phone call to his congressman about gun control. Noah Christensen, a junior at Robert McQueen High School in Reno, Nev., called Rep. Mark Amodei's office during the 17-minute school walkout to protest gun violence earlier this month. He expressed his opinion that bump stocks should be banned and the minimum age to purchase a gun should be increasedand that, as he told the staffer who answered the phone, members of Congress should "get off their f---ing asses" to do so. A Congressional aide called Christensen's school to inform the administration of his language, and the teen was hit with a two-day suspension for "disrespectful behavior/language," CNN reports. He's also being kept from his duties as his class's elected secretary-treasurer, the Nevada Independent reports. Now the ACLU is involved in the case.

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Christensen's supporters say he was exercising his right to free speech and that Amodei should apologizebut the Republican rep says his aide, as well, was simply exercising his own First Amendment rights by reporting Christensen, and that he won't apologize. The student acknowledges "that's not maybe the wording I should have used but it's still my right to use that word," while his mom says, "I don't encourage my child to go and cuss at someone," but in this case, "maybe somebody does need to get off their butt and do something." The ACLU sent a letter to Amodei criticizing his office for restricting Christensen's constitutional rights, and said in a Monday letter to Christensen's school and the school district that if the punishment is not overturned, it "will have a chilling effect on other students who are considering engaging in the political process." The district says students were expected to "act appropriately and with decorum" during the walkout. (Read more gun control stories.)(Newser)  President Trump signed an order Thursday that paves the way for imposing tariffs on as much as $60 billion worth of Chinese imports to punish Beijing for what he said is the theft of American technology and Chinese pressure on US companies to hand it over. "It is the largest deficit of any country in the history of our world," Trump said of the US-China trade imbalance, blaming it for lost American jobs. China has already warned that it will take "all necessary measures" to defend itself, raising the prospect of a trade war between the world's two biggest economies, per the AP. Just ahead of the signing ceremony, the Dow had dropped 500 points before recovering about 150 points of that loss.

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The White House said Thursday that Trump would direct the Office of the US Trade Representative to publish a list of proposed tariffs for public comment within 15 days. USTR has already identified potential targets: 1,300 product lines worth about $48 billion. The president is also asking Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to come up with a list of restrictions on Chinese investment. Dozens of industry groups sent a letter last weekend to Trump warning that "the imposition of sweeping tariffs would trigger a chain reaction of negative consequences for the U.S. economy, provoking retaliation; stifling U.S. agriculture, goods, and services exports, and raising costs for businesses and consumers." (Read more tariffs stories.)Bontis Milander, the Sweden ambassador in Iraq, and his accompanying delegation had the honor of visiting the holy shrine of Imam Ali (PBUH).



(AhlulBayt News Agency) - Bontis Milander, the Sweden ambassador in Iraq, and his accompanying delegation had the honor of visiting the holy shrine of Imam Ali (PBUH).



The employees of the Public Relations Department received him. They took him round the archeological sites and the landmarks of the Holy Shrine.



In a statement to the Media Center of the Holy Shrine, Bontis said, It is my first visit to the Holy Shrine. I am astonished at seeing these sites. This visit differs from all my other visits in Iraq. We do appreciate and respect the holiness of this place.

/257Fairbanks, AK (99707)

Today

Mostly cloudy. High 43F. Winds NE at 10 to 15 mph..

Tonight

Snow showers. Low 29F. Winds NNE at 10 to 15 mph. Chance of snow 70%. About one inch of snow expected.Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine center, joined by, from left, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, and Rep. Greg Walden, R-Ore., pushes for inclusion in the pending government spending bill of provisions aimed at lowering premiums for people purchasing health insurance in the Affordable Care Act's individual marketplace, during a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, March 21, 2018. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite) ]About 200 students at Randy Smith Middle School participate a walk-out from school in protest of gun violence in schools Friday morning, March 9, 2018. The student-organized protest was scheduled to last 17 minuets to honor the 17 students and teachers who lost their lives in the school shooting in Parkland, Florida last month.The Daily News-Miner encourages residents to make themselves heard through the Opinion pages. Readers' letters and columns also appear online at newsminer.com. Contact the editor with questions at letters@newsminer.com or call 459-7574.

Community Perspective

Send Community Perspective submissions by mail (P.O. Box 70710, Fairbanks AK 99707) or via email (letters@newsminer.com). Submissions must be 500 to 750 words. Columns are welcome on a wide range of issues and should be well-written and well-researched with attribution of sources. Include a full name, email address, daytime telephone number and headshot photograph suitable for publication (email jpg or tiff files at 150 dpi.) You may also schedule a photo to be taken at the News-Miner office. The News-Miner reserves the right to edit submissions or to reject those of poor quality or taste without consulting the writer.

Letters to the editor

Send letters to the editor by mail (P.O. Box 70710, Fairbanks AK 99707), by fax (907-452-7917) or via email (letters@newsminer.com). Writers are limited to one letter every two weeks (14 days.) All letters must contain no more than 350 words and include a full name (no abbreviation), daytime and evening phone numbers and physical address. (If no phone, then provide a mailing address or email address.) The Daily News-Miner reserves the right to edit or reject letters without consulting the writer.New Delhi:

The AAP government on Thursday announced a slew of measures to reduce air pollution, including incentives to switch over to clean fuels, in its Budget and claimed it was the first green budget presented in any Assembly of India.

Presenting the Budget in the Delhi Assembly, Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia assured to carry out the first comprehensive city-wide inventory of greenhouse gas emissions and provide a dedicated information system to show current levels of pollution by installing 1,000 indoor display panels at government buildings.

Noting that the "green budget" was being presented with 26 schemes or projects, Sisodia, who is also the finance minister, promised to start a pilot agriculture-cum-solar farm scheme.

These schemes or projects are spread across the environment, power, transport and public works departments.

The government will also purchase 60 new vehicles, body-worn cameras and e-challaning tabs, he said.

"I will now present our government's first Green Budget for Delhi to this House, which I believe is also the first Green Budget to be presented in any Legislative Assembly in India," Sisodia said.

"Over the past few months, we have studied several possible initiatives that can reduce air pollution in Delhi and have brought forward the short-listed proposals in the form of Green Budget," he said in the presence of Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal.

Observing that the government collaborated with global think-tank World Resource Institute to understand the impact of the "green budget" for 2018-19, Sisodia claimed that the 26 projects will have reduce CO2, PM2.5 and other pollutants emissions on a per year basis.

It will reduce CO2 by 20,98,000 MT while there will be a reduction of 503 MT of PM2.5. Similarly, the 26 proposals will reduce 4,540 MT of NOX and 9364MT of SOX, he said.

Also Read: Arvind Kejriwal, Manish Sisodia acquitted in defamation cases

"If we have to control a dangerous problem such as pollution, then reliable data is a must. In the coming year, 2018-19, Delhi will become the first city of the country to carry out a real-time source apportionment study in partnership with the University of Washington and carry out near-continuous analysis of factors causing pollution on a regular basis," Sisodia said.

The government will also partner with the C-40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, a network of the largest cities in the world, to carry out the first comprehensive city-wide inventory of greenhouse gas emissions in Delhi, he said.

The deputy chief minister said that a real-time source apportionment study in partnership with the University of Washington will be carried out.

The government will offer an incentive to industries in approved industrial areas of up to Rs 1 lakh to switch over to piped natural gas from existing polluting fuels, Sisodia said.

Similarly, a subsidy of up to Rs 5,000 per tandoor will be offered to restaurants to replace coal tandoors with electricity or gas-based tandoors, he said.

Subsidy of up to Rs 30,000 to firms and establishments to switch over from diesel generator sets of 10 KVA or more capacity to clean fuel-based electricity generator sets will be provided, Sisodia said.

He said 1,000 fully-electric buses is proposed in Delhi during 2018-19 will be rolled out.

"This will be the largest fleet of electric buses in any city or state in India, and in fact, by any city in the world outside of China," he said, adding that the transport department will support induction of 905 electric feeder vehicles by DMRC.

One-time subsidy of Rs 30,000 will also be given to all e-rickshaw owners registered during the period of July 1, 2015, to April 1, 2016, while an additional amount of Rs 15,000 will be given to those owners who were paid subsidy at the old rate of Rs 15,000.

"This subsidy will be given from the Air Ambience Fund," he said, adding that 50 per cent concession in registration charges for CNG factory fitted private cars will be given. W Weigh Bridges at three impounding pits in Burari, Sarai Kale Khan and Dwarka will be installed while 60 new vehicles, body-worn cameras and e-challaning tabs will also be purchased.

Also Read | AAP defamation case: After Majithia, Kejriwal now apologises to Gadkari, Sibal

A new scheme "Landscaping of PWD roads" will be launched for beautification of all PWD roads and the government is committed to purchase 1,000 MW of Green Power - from solar and wind-based generation in 2018-19, Sisodia announced.

He said during 2017-18, about 5.5 lakh seedlings were planted till December 2017 while another 3 lakh is likely to plant by March 2018 and another 7.93 lakh shrubs have been planted by civic agencies during 2017-18 as per availability of land.

These and other measures, he said have paid dividend and the forest and tree cover of Delhi has increased from 299.77 sq km in 2015 to 305.41 sq km in 2017.

Noting that Delhi will be made 'Kikkar free', he said a long-term plan for replacement of Vilyati Kikkar in Central Ridge Area has been launched, and hope to get substantial progress in the coming year.New Delhi:

Apollo Hospitals on Thursday said that all CCTV cameras in the intensive care unit were switched off and all patients in the ward were shifted during the 75-day hospitalisation of former Tamil Nadu chief minister J Jayalalithaa, popularly known as Amma.

One complete ICU was occupied by our former chief minister Jayalalithaa. So the hospital administration removed the (CCTV) because they did not want everyone to be watching, Prathap C Reddy, founder chairman of Apollo Hospitals told ANI on Thursday.

The hospital founder chairman added that all the patients on the floor were shifted to other floors because of security reasons.

Jayalalithaa was treated at the Apollo Hospitals, Chennai at the time of her death. Amma died on December 5, 2016.

For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.New Delhi:

External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj met with United Arab Emirateas (UAE) Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Anwar Gargash and exchanged views on strengthening bilateral ties on Wednesday.

Gargash also met M J Akbar, Minister of State in the External Affairs Ministry, he said.

Raveesh Kumar, the spokesperson of Ministry of External Affairs, took to Twitter and wrote, "EAM @SushmaSwaraj met with UAEas Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Anwar Gargash. The two leaders exchanged views on intensifying bilateral relationship, as well as on the regional and global situation."

EAM @SushmaSwaraj met with UAEas Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Anwar Gargash. The two leaders exchanged views on intensifying bilateral relationship, as well as on the regional and global situation. pic.twitter.com/D6ewsHnBPk a Raveesh Kumar (@MEAIndia) March 21, 2018

He also said Gargash met MJ Akbar, Minister of State, External Affairs Ministry. Kumar wrote, "MoS @mjakbar met with UAEas Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Anwar Gargash. Engaging discussion on issues of bilateral and regional interest took place."

MoS @mjakbar met with UAEas Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Anwar Gargash. Engaging discussion on issues of bilateral and regional interest took place. pic.twitter.com/KwfqPEfryY a Raveesh Kumar (@MEAIndia) March 21, 2018

The ties between India and UAE have been on an upswing over the past few years.

During an event here, the UAE minister said an element of astrategic componenta has been added to the relationship of the two countries that has been witnessing an intensification in ties in key sectors of defence, trade and energy.

Mohammed bin Zayed bin Sultan Al-Nahyan, the Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi and Deputy Supreme Commander of the UAE Armed Forces, was the chief guest at the Republic Day Parade last year.

For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.New Delhi:

German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier arrived in India on Thursday to embark on a five-day state visit from March 22 to 25. This will be his first visit to India as the President of Germany after the Angela Merkel government took charge in Berlin on March 14.

In a statement issued by the German Embassy said: aThe German Head of State will talk with Prime Minister (Narendra) Modi and other high-ranking politicians, such as Vice President Venkaiah Naidu and Foreign Minister Sushma Swaraj.a Steinmeier will also hold talks with representatives of Indian civil society, science and industry, the statement said.

Steinmeier will be welcomed by President Ram Nath Kovind and his wife in New Delhi.

According to reports, Steinmeier will be accompanied by a CEO delegation, Indologists and a media delegation. He will also be visiting Varanasi and Chennai apart from Delhi.

aIndiaas relationship with Germany is amongst our foremost relations, bilaterally and in the global context. After having established Strategic Partnership since 2000, successive governments on the two sides have endeavoured to broaden and deepen this relationship. This has found expression in having biennial Summit Level Inter-Governmental Consultations (IGC), which Germany has with select countries only,a a statement issued by the Ministry of External Affairs said.

According to the statement issued by MEA, Indiaas current priorities in most areas match with German expertise, such as renewable energy, skills development, Smart City, water and waste management, cleaning of rivers, railways, etc. These could be synergised for tangible, result-oriented outcomes, it said.

Last week, French President Emmanuel Macron visited India and signed several trade and security deals with New Delhi.

"The reality is that India has to rely more on Germany if it wants to continue with its economic progress. The smaller European countries do not matter much," Parthasarathy told DW.

Rajendra Jain, a professor at the Centre for European Studies in New Delhi, said Germany is pivotal to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's foreign policy because of its economic and political clout in the world.

"India needs Germany to invest in its infrastructure, renewable energy projects, skills development and water management," Jain told DW.

LIVE UPDATES:

# 01:30 PM: President of Germany arrived in India earlier in the day

President of Germany Frank-Walter Steinmeier arrived in #Delhi earlier today and was received by Union Minister SS Ahluwalia. He is on a five-day state visit to India. pic.twitter.com/OLU7g9esDq a ANI (@ANI) March 22, 2018

For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.New Delhi:

The Lok Sabha on Wednesday could not take up a no-confidence motion for the 13th consecutive day. The members of parties like theA All India Anna Dravida Munnetra KazhagamA (AIADMK) protested for Cauvery issue, while the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) and Telangana Rashtra Samiti (TRS) protested and raised slogans demanding special status for Andhra Pradesh.

With the Lok Sabha unable to take up the notices of the no-confidence motion against the government for the fourth day, it has been adjourned till 12 PM. Meanwhile, the Rajya Sabha has been adjourned till tomorrow after the TDP and TRS MPs raised loud slogans and demanded special status for Andhra Pradesh.

Meanwhile, in Andhra Pradesh, a state-wide 'bandh' and blockade of national highways has been called by the party workers for more affect over their demands.

LIVE updates:

# 12:08 PM:A A LokSabha adjourned till tomorrow.

# 11:34 AM:A MP Naramalli Sivaprasad joined the protest dressed as a Swachh Bharat Abhiyan volunteer, carrying a wiper, demanding special status for Andhra Pradesh

TDP MPs protest in Parliament premises, demanding special status for #AndhraPradesh. MP Naramalli Sivaprasad joined the protest dressed as a Swachh Bharat Abhiyan volunteer, carrying a wiper. #Delhi pic.twitter.com/Z41VPjKl8G a ANI (@ANI) March 22, 2018

# 11:21 AM:A Rajya Sabha adjourned till tomorrow after TDP MPs walked up to the Well with placards, raising slogans, demanding special status for Andhra Pradesh

# 11:02 AM:A Lok Sabha adjourned till 12 noon as loud slogans of 'we want justice' were raised as soon as proceedings began

Rajya Sabha adjourned till tomorrow after TDP MPs walked up to the Well with placards, raising slogans, demanding special status for #AndhraPradesh pic.twitter.com/JCGRkIOFhk a ANI (@ANI) March 22, 2018

# 11:00 AM: Rajya Sabha proceedings with Chairman M. Venkaiah Naidu speaking on the occasion of World Water Day. "This year's theme is nature for water," he declares. This day also focusses on saving water a reduce, reuse and recycle, he says. I hope the House joins me in conserving water, he says. The House agrees by thumping the table.

# 10:52 AM:A Unfortunate that Rahul Gandhi & Siddaramaiah are engaged in vote-bank politics & communal-disharmony politics. Tipu Sultan, known for tyranny & oppression of Hindus is black chapter in Karnataka's history. They may celebrate Tughlaq festival also: Ananth Kumar on RG's statementA

# 10:35 AM:A AIADMK MPs hold protest in Parliament premises over #Cauvery issue.A

#10:25 AM: Telugu Desam Party (TDP) MPs hold protest in Parliament premises demanding special status for Andhra

For all the Latest India News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.New Delhi:

Google on Thursday dedicated a doodle to Japanese geochemist Katsuko Saruhashi to celebrate her 98th birth anniversary.

Saruhashi is popularly known for making some of the first measurements of Carbon Dioxide (CO2) levels in seawater, and later showed the evidence in seawater and the atmosphere of the dangers of radioactive fallout.

Also known for spreading feminism and encouraging women to become great aspirants, Saruhashi once said, There are many women who have the ability to become great scientists. I would like to see the day when women can contribute to science & technology on an equal footing with men.

Google, in its citation, wrote, Today on her 98th birthday, we pay tribute to Dr Katsuko Saruhashi for her incredible contributions to science, and for inspiring young scientists everywhere to succeed.

Here are some interesting facts about Saruhashi:

1. Saruhashi graduated from the Imperial Womens College of Science in 1943.

2. She was notable for her works including experimenting ongoing nuclear fallout in oceans. She studied acid rains and its effects later in her life. Saruhashi had a career span of 35 years.

Also Read| India's 69th Republic Day: Google's Doodle depicts Bihu dance from Assam

3. She became the first woman to be elected to the Science Council of Japan in 1980. She was the first woman to be honoured with the Miyake Prize for geochemistry in 1985.

4. She established the Saruhashi Prize in 1981, which recognises female scientists for eminent research in Natural Sciences.

5. Saruhashi died on September 29, 2007, due to pneumonia at the age of 87.New Delhi:

Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink soon this danger may hit the world population if the significant World Water Day is celebrated as a symbolic day and the awareness campaign last only for a day.

Well, the world needs to save water but is the available water safe to drink?

Often, the world takes water for granted as it is everywhere. And the talk to save water is reserved for formal speeches in special platforms. Of course, its easier to preach than to practice. And the need to ensure quality water is rarely raised.

As the national leaders call on the people to conserve water, the danger of grave water crisis poses a challenge to the government. The alarming news for India is, according to statistics given by a water resource group, 40 per cent of the population may not have water to drink by 2030, if the water crisis is not addressed.

The fact is the level of potable water and ground water is depleting. Several non-governmental bodies may be doing their bit to create awareness and help resolve the issue. But the crisis is grave. The government machinery has to step up its water management on water conservation and drinking water problem.

The several campaigns for water conservation should go beyond the symbolic speeches and demonstrations. The need of the hour is to practice it oneself and drill into the minds of the people the need to save water. However, the task remains challenging as changing peoples mindset is difficult.

As the struggle to save water continues the world over, a pertinent question ariseshow safe is potable water in India. While drinking a good amount of water is needed to stay healthy and beautiful, drinking unsafe water many be detrimental to ones health and beauty. Hence, drinking water the right way is important.

Heres a few tips on drinking water that can provide several health and beauty benefits.

1. Drink boiled or bottled water by reputed company to ensure the quality of water you are drinking and to avoid falling sick from drinking contaminated water. However, beware of re-bottling of water. Check the bottle caps and the seal to see whether the water has been rebottled.

2. Drink hot water first thing in the morning on empty stomach to flush out all unwanted toxins. Sip hot water as you eat your daily meals. Drinking hot water also helps to burn unwanted fats in the body and leads to weight control or weight loss.

3. Drink plenty of water to stay well hydrated and fresh. Experts advice: Drink eight to 10 glasses of water in a day.

4. Carry bottled water every time you step out, especially under the sun. Save yourself from dehydration and heat stroke by drinking water regularly throughout the day.

5. Always drink a glass of warm water before your night sleep to keep your body well hydrated while you sleep and to avoid any heart burns or stroke.

World Water Day is observed on March 22 every year to create awareness about water conservation and to highlight the importance of freshwater.







New Delhi:

Gadget freaks will be on cloud nine as Chinese smartphone manufacturer Oppo is set to add yet another appealing device to its much-loved F series soon. Oppo F7 will be introduced in several Southeast Asian markets followed by its India launch on Monday, March 26.

Meanwhile, days before its India launch Oppo F7 has been subjected to various leaks and rumours.

Going by the Smartprix report, the upcoming gadget is powered by a MediaTek processor and will have tons of AI-based selfie enhancements. Oppo F7 will feature the second iteration of the AI-based 'beauty recognition' technology, which was first introduced in F5.

In terms of specifications, Oppo F7 will sport iPhone X-like notch along with a near-bezel-less display. The smartphone is said to have a 16-megapixel rear camera sensor with an automatic scene recognition feature. The camera sensor comes with a f/2.0 aperture lens on top and supports 4K video recording as well as uses a dual-tone LED flash. The mouth-watering device is powered with a 3400mAh battery that is believed to last for 15 long hours on a single charge.

RT this tweet & get a chance to win the #OPPOF7 during the event! The all-new #OPPOF7 is all set to make its debut. Witness a superb 25MP Front camera, with a new & improved A.I. Beauty Technology 2.0. Subscribe now and dont miss the launch! https://t.co/jiQPfj23DL pic.twitter.com/DPc9cFjJ0i  OPPO Mobile India (@oppomobileindia) March 20, 2018

Talking about the software, Oppo F7 is expected to run ColorOS 5.0 with features like facial unlock and screen recording. A Rear-facing fingerprint sensor and connectivity options such as 4G VoLTE, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and GPS/ A-GPS are among other possible features of the device, according to Smartprix.

Also Read: Vivo V9 with 24-megapixel selfie camera launched; Check price, specifications, features

The new Oppo smartphone is coming with a 6.2-inch full-HD+ (1080x2280 pixels) Super Full Screen panel of the Oppo F7 that has 19:9 aspect ratio. It also has the 25-megapixel selfie camera with features such as AI selfie, AI Beauty, and Real-time HDR. Additionally, you will get a Cover Shot and AR stickers.

Its quirky and its fun! The new #OPPOF7 comes with built-in AR stickers that allow you to bring out your playful self and go crazy while clicking flawless selfies.

Which is your favorite AR Sticker?

Know more - https://t.co/rDO67n0dgF pic.twitter.com/fmr1SRRW2r  OPPO Mobile India (@oppomobileindia) March 22, 2018

Earlier, in a press release, Oppo has revealed that the handset will support gestures and have an App-in-App view for an enhanced multitasking experience.

The price and availability details of the Oppo F7 are yet to be revealed. Customers, who are waiting eagerly for all such information should wait for the official launch event on March 26.New Delhi:

US President Donald Trump is likely to unveil sanctions against China tomorrow, the White House hinted on Thursday.

The officials from the US Trade Representatives (USTR) said the US has solid proof of Beijing violating its commitments on property and technology-based transfers.

"Tomorrow the president will announce the actions he has decided to take based on USTR's 301 investigations into China's state-led, market-distorting efforts to force, pressure and steal US technologies and intellectual property," White House Principal Deputy Press Secretary Raj Shah said on Thursday.

The administration is disappointed by the responses the United States has been getting from China. "We have strong evidence against China. These are deeply concerning to the administration and raise severe questions about China and its commitment to market-oriented practices that they promised to engage in," said the official.

The USTR scanned into four types of allegations: charges that China is putting pressure on companies to enter into joint ventures where they would transfer their technology to a Chinese company; US companies do not have the same technology to license their IP as a Chinese company.

"It's difficult to use the WTO that involves the informal pressure stakeholders have complained about. The idea that you can take this to the WTO isn't practical. To the extent we can get at these things at the WTO, we will do so. We're pursuing a number of cases against them right now. We'll use it where we can but we can't use it to address everything," the official said.

The administration disagrees on the fact that Chinas commitments have been completed. "All of us need to be aware of the history. It does raise a question about the history of the dialogue. That is something policymakers will have to take into account. The administration has been clear that China presents unique challenges," the official said.

The US and Chinas trade deficit stand on a humongous $500 billion. President Trump is looking to reduce the trade deficit and has been emphasising on the its importance since the very beginning of this presidential campaign.

Donald Trump thinks the trade deficit is against Americas national security interest, killing jobs in US and hurting its economy.

For all the Latest World News, Download News Nation Android and iOS Mobile Apps.The Rochester area's first Chick-fil-A will open April 12.

Western New Yorkers can head to the Greece location at 2140 W. Ridge Road - across from Greece Ridge Mall. The popular chain opens from 6:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. Monday through Saturday. It is closed on Sunday.

According to the Democrat & Chronicle, the restaurant had been looking for as many as 120 full-time and part-time workers in preparation for next month's opening. The 5,000 square-feet restaurant has two drive-thru ordering lanes, a two-story playground for children, indoor seating for 120 people and an outdoor patio with seating for 20.

Well-known for its chicken sandwich, the chain has more than 2,000 restaurants in 46 states. The company has reportedly been scouting expansion possibilities around Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse and Albany since last year.

Last month, Chick-fil-A opened its Central NY location in Cicero with lots of fans lining up before 6 a.m. to get a taste of some fried chicken at 7916 Brewerton Road. Police even put out traffic alerts for drivers.

Real estate developer Scott Earl submitted a proposal last year for a Chick-fil-A as part of a 60,250-square-foot retail complex in the Capital Region at the corner of Route 146 and Old Route 146 in Halfmoon. However, there are no signed deals yet.

Albany's first Chick-fil-A will open sometime in spring, but there's a catch. You have to go beyond the security checkpoint at Albany International Airport. Chick-fil-A will be replacing Villa Italian Kitchen at the airport.Ahead of the 2019 General Elections, the Independent National Electoral Commission INEC has pledged to make public the manifestos of all political parties to allow Nigerians make informed choices at the polls.Chairman of Commission, Prof. Mahmood Yakubu, made the appeal when he paid a courtesy visit on the Director-General of the Nigerian Television Authority NTA, Mallam Yakubu Ibn-Mohammed, in Abuja.According to a statement from the commission, the INEC Chairman said: as a body saddled with the responsibility of registering and regulating Political Parties, we would like equal access for all political parties in Nigeria. As far as the commission is concerned, all political parties are of equal standing with the Commission.The Commission will very soon put up the manifestos of all political parties on our website, so you have access to manifestos in engaging with the political parties and candidates, ask them questions around what they want to offer the country rather than mundane issues.This we believe will also help convey the message of what distinguishes one political party from another and will also help us to focus more on issues rather than personalities, he added.The Chairman also spoke of the revamping the National Inter-agency Committee on Voter Education and Publicity (NICVEP) ahead the General Elections. He noted that the collaboration with the Media in the past on Voter Education and Publicity had greatly impacted on the success of elections and sought for deeper collaboration.As we approach the 2019 General Elections we also need to engage big time with the media so that we will all continue to be partners in the business of Voter Education and Publicity. The Commission is determined to activate what we call the NICVEP (National Inter-agency Committee on Vote Education and Publicity) which the NTA, other media organizations and professional media bodies are part of, the Chairman said.Also, the Commission would in accordance with the Continuous Voter Registration CVR procedures, commence the display of list of citizens captured in the first quarter of 2018 of the exercise on the 26th March 2018.The 5-day display exercise which would end on the 20th of March marks the end of the first quarter of the CVR exercise in 2018; while the second quarter resumes in April.The Display is aimed at giving citizens who registered from the 8th of January 2018 to the 23rd of March 2018, the opportunity to cross-check their registration details for possible corrections.Yakubu appealed to citizens to make good use to the opportunity to verify the details of their registration.We hope that citizens will avail themselves of the opportunity to help us look at the register and draw the attention of the Commission to the presence of any ineligible persons so that we continue to tidy up the register, he said.The second quarter of the CVR exercise for 2018 would commence on the April 3, 2018.Also, in conformity with its tradition of bringing the CVR exercise closer to citizens in states preparing for end-of-tenure Governorship elections, INEC would devolve the CVR exercise in Ekiti and Osun states to the Registration Area from Wednesday 11th, April to Monday 16th, April 2018.The six-day exercise would afford more citizens the opportunity to get registered in both states, ahead of governorship elections in July and September 2018 in the respective states.The Commission would then display the register of citizens captured within the 6 day period from Tuesday 17th April to Saturday 21stApril 2018.Justice Adedayo Akintoye of an Igbosere High Court, Lagos, on Thursday dismissed the application by the suspected kidnap kingpin, Chukwudumeme Onwuamadike a.k.a Evans, seeking to quash charges slammed on him, saying they are not defective and not an abuse of court processes.Evans had asked the court to quash the two separate charges filed against him by the Lagos State Government.The Lagos State Government had brought a fresh five-count charge bordering on conspiracy to kidnap, kidnapping and attempted murder against Evans and three others.Evans is charged alongside Joseph Emeka, Ugochukwu Nwachukwu and Victor Aduba.In the second charge, Evans is being tried alongside Joseph Emeka, Linus Okpara and Victor Aduba.At the resumed hearing of the case on Thursday, Justice Akintoye said based on the proof of evidence before the court, issue for determination was whether a prima facie case has beenestablished against the defendants.She, however, held that a prima facie case had been established as there were grounds for proceedings, adding that the proof of evidence must sufficiently link the defendant to the offenceallegedly committed.Looking closely to the proof of evidence attached to the information in this case, a prima facie case has clearly been disclosed against the defendant/applicant, Akintoye said.The judge said the victim in the instant case, Uche Okereafors wife was the person who paid the ransom, adding that the statement of the first defendant (Evans) itself alleged that the firstdefendant was the master mind and gang leader.Other defendants participated in several kidnappings and shared the ransom collected from their victims.The third defendant ( Ugochukwu Nwachukwu) in his own statement and proof of evidence showed that he is a member of the gang and shared in the ransom collected from victims.I hold, therefore, that the proof of evidence disclosed a prima facie case against the first and third defendant, she said.Justice Akintoye also said that the charge filed against the defendants were not defective based on the provisions of Section 152 and 153 of the Administration of Criminal JusticeLaw (ACJL) of Lagos State, 2015.She added: It is my view that the prosecution has complied with provisions of this section in view that every offence shall be charged separately.I also hold that the charge is not an abuse of court process, an abuse of court process means that the process of the court has not been properly and voluntarily followed.The defendant argued that the prosecution has filed similar charges against the defendants in other Lagos State High Courts but the prosecution has shown in the proof of evidencethat the victims and defendants are not the same in each case.I hold that the charge presently constituted is not an abuse of court process, therefore cannot be quashed.Justice Akintoye also said that the court does not have the power and the jurisdiction to quash the charge before the close of the prosecutions case.I dont believe that the court has the power to quash the charge before the close of the prosecutions case as in the clear wordings of Section 262 of ACJL, such application is prematureand can not be sustained.The defendant must wait until the close of the prosecutions case before applying for any charge to be quashed.I, therefore, hold that the defendants application to quash the charge leveled against them is hereby refused and dismissed, Akintoye ruled.She also said the same fate is applicable to the second defendant (Joseph Emeka), who urged the court to expunge his name from the charge stating that no prima facie casewas made against him.According to her, the proof of evidence proved that a prima facie case has been established against him.She said the court found no merit in the second defendant application and consequently dismissed it.The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that counsel to the first defendant, Mr Olukoya Ogungbeje, had filed a motion on notice to quash all the charge filed againstthe first defendant (Evans).In the motion on notice, Ogungbeje said that all the charges and the proof of evidence before the court did not establish any prima facie case against the first defendant, insisting that all thecharges were grossly defective, incompetent and constituted an abuse of court processes.He stated that the prosecution had earlier filed similar charges and amended charges bordering on kidnapping against the same first defendant pending before the same High Courtof Lagos State.He averred that the two separate charges were brought in bad faith to harass, oppress, hound, frustrate, vex and intimidate the first defendant.In her response to the motion, the State Director for Public Prosecutions (DPP), Ms Titilayo Shitta-Bey, said there was sufficient proof and evidence linking the first defendant to theoffences brought before the court and therefore, urged the court to dismiss the application.Shitta-Bey said the first defendant was charged with the offence of conspiracy to commit kidnapping and kidnapping of one Uche Okereafor.She also said that other charges filed against the first defendant before other judges involved different defendants, different offences and different victims.Meanwhile, the second defendant, Joseph Emeka, urged the court in a motion on notice to quash the two-count charge preferred against him, adding that the proof of evidence did notdisclose any prima facie case against him.However, the counsel to the fourth defendant, Emmanuel Ochai, agreed with the submission and arguments of the first and second defendantss counsel.Evans was arrested on June 10, 2017 and was in August 2017 arraigned before Justice Hakeem Oshodi at an Ikeja High Court for kidnapping.Some youths in the Narayi area of Chikun local government Area of Kaduna state have set ablaze a police station and a parish of Celestial ...

Some youths in the Narayi area of Chikun local government Area of Kaduna state have set ablaze a police station and a parish of Celestial Church of Christ in the community.

Mukhtar Aliyu, spokesman of the state police command, confirmed the incident, saying five suspects had been arrested.





Trouble started after the death of a boy working in the church. Babatunde Shittu, the pastor, was accused of being responsible.





The youth were angry over the death of a boy, who was working as a mason with the pastor of the church, he said.





When the incident was reported, we prevailed on the youths, and adopted civil and proactive measures to calm them, he said, adding that the police rescued the pastor and took him to the police outpost and later to Barnawa Divisional police station.





Later the youth came around 4:00 am and set the church and part of the police outpost ablaze,  he said.





The spokesman said the command would not allow any person or group of persons to take the law into their hands.



The Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) in Ondo State has asked President Muhammadu Buhari to ensure the release of Liya Sharibu, the o...

The Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) in Ondo State has asked President Muhammadu Buhari to ensure the release of Liya Sharibu, the only Christian girl among the Kidnapped Dapchi girls.





CAN described the silence of the President on Sharibu who is still with the Boko Haram insurgents as sad and worrisome.





In a Press Statement made available in Akure, the State capital, CAN Chairman in the state, Rev. Ayo Oladapo accused President Buhari of planning to crush out Christianity in the country.





The Christian body queried President Buhari if it is a crime to be a Christian in Nigeria.





It is painful to note that Liya Sharibu the only girl that still remains with the Boko Haram is said to be the only lady that refused to renounce her Christian faith





With this development, It is clear that the battle is against Christianity. Information has it that the Boko Haram people came into Dapchi town majestically to return the girls





They claim that they were not aware that the girls were Muslims, hence, they need to return them because they are Muslims When did it become a crime for a person to become a Christian in Nigeria?





According to the girls, they were release because they were Muslims. Is it a crime to become a Christian in Nigeria? President Buhari should tell the whole world  CAN said.





The Religion body charged Vice President, Yemi Osinbanjo not to keep quiet as a Christian in government.





It asked Christians across the nation to mobilize prayer for the release of Sharibu to rejoin with the parents unharmed.





The statement added,  It is painful that the government, civil society organization, human right activist kept mute on the only Christian girl that is still held captive





 We, therefore, demand that the President Muhammad Buhari and all his security outfits should without delay facilitate the immediate release of Layi Sharibu





 It is becoming clearer that president Buharis administration is out to crush Christianity to nothing in this nation, if he is keeping quiet on the only girl in captivity because of her faith in Christ Jesus





 No wonder, President Buhari is not doing much as expected of him to stop the killings of people in the Christian community by the herdsmen



Dapchi girls: Boarding schools have been shut indefinitely in the northeast Nigerian state most affected by Boko Haram violence, the government has said, in the latest blow to childrens education.All boarding secondary schools in the state, with the exception of those in (the state capital) Maiduguri and (the town of) Biu, will close down with immediate effect until further notice, the Borno state government said.Some of the Dapchi Schoolgirls brought back by their abductors in Dapchi town before proceeding To Abuja. Photo by Ndahi MaramaBorno is the spiritual home of Boko Haram Islamists, whose name translates loosely from Hausa as Western education is forbidden.The high-profile abductions of more than 200 schoolgirls in Chibok, Borno state, in April 2014, and 110 others from Dapchi, Yobe state, in February this year also led to closures.Schools that teach a so-called secular curriculum have been repeatedly targeted during the insurgency, which since 2009 has left at least 20,000 people dead.According to the UN childrens agency UNICEF, more than 2,296 teachers have been killed and some 1,400 schools destroyed in the wider northeast region.Muhammad Bulama, the Borno commissioner for home affairs, information and culture, said on Wednesday the decision was taken last week after a Boko Haram attack in Rann on March 1.Three aid workers and eight security personnel were killed in the attack on the remote town near the border with Cameroon, which led to the withdrawal of aid agencies.Schools have previously been shut in the wake of deadly attacks in Buni Yadi, Yobe state, when more than 40 students at a boys boarding school were killed in a Boko Haram attack.Bulama said urgent and immediate measures were being taken to improve security but the closures are the latest disruption to schooling in an area already hit by low levels of education.At the start of the new academic year in September last year, UNICEF said at least 57 percent of schools in Borno remained closed.It warned the situation threatened to create a lost generation of children, threatening their and the countrys future.Also the Federal Government has said a total of 106 abducted persons, comprising 104 Daphchi schoolgirls, one other girl and a boy were freed by insurgents in the early hours of Wednesday.Briefing journalists in Maiduguri, the Minister of Information and Culture, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, said all the 106 persons were freed unconditionally, contrary to reports in a section of the media that ransom was paid and that some insurgents were swapped for the freed persons.It is not true that we paid ransom for the release of the Dapchi girls, neither was there a prisoner swap to secure their release.What happened was that the abduction itself was a breach of the ceasefire talks between the insurgents and the government, hence it became a moral burden on the abductors. Any report that we paid ransom or engaged in prisoner swap is false, he said.Meanwhile, the freed persons have been formally handed over to the Federal Government.The Theatre Commander, Operation Lafiya Dole, Maj.-Gen. Rogers Nicholas, handed over the girls and one boy to the four-member Federal Government Delegation at the Nigerian Air Force base in Maiduguri on Wednesday eveningThe delegation comprised the Minister of Information and Culture, Alhaji Lai Mohammed; the Minister of Interior, Gen. Abdulrahman Danbazau (retired); the Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, Hajia Khadija Bukar Abba Ibrahim and Hon. Goni Lawan Bukar, a member of House of Representatives from Dapchi.The girls were immediately airlifted to Abuja aboard a military transport plane.The Senior Special Assistant to President Muhammadu Buhari on Media and Publicity, Mallam Garba Shehu, has hit back at the Peoples Democra...

The Senior Special Assistant to President Muhammadu Buhari on Media and Publicity, Mallam Garba Shehu, has hit back at the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), for saying that the government orchestrated the kidnap of the Dapchi schoolgirls.





Shehu, who spoke with Dailytrust last night on the sideline of the launch of the British Broadcasting Commission (BBC) Bureau in Lagos, accused the opposition party of bellyaching.





The thing is that it is inconceivable that any leader with conscience will orchestrate this against its own people. But again this shouldnt surprise us because we have seen it happening in America. When the Twin Towers were bombed, conspiracy theorists said that President Bush bombed the Twin Towers which killed 3,000 people in order to undermine Islam or to create justification for the war against Iraq.





So it is not surprising that conspiracy theorists would look at President Buhari and said that he orchestrated this. This did not happen. It is not true and it cannot happen. I think what is happening is that our political opponents especially PDP which has been very reckless on matters of national security.





They thought the Dapchi girls would give them an easy pass to power and that President Buhari can be equated morally and politically to their rotten government. Now they have lost a plot. They have to go and look for how to win power. How can they beat Buhari in infrastructure? How can they beat Buhari in the fight against corruption? How can they beat Buhari in securing this country and beating back Boko Haram? Those are the challenges we give back to them, the presidential spokesman said.





PDP in a statement by its National Publicity Secretary, Kola Ologboniyan, had described the release of the girls as a scam by Buharis government.



The rescued Dapchi school girls arrived in Abuja last night and would be meeting President Muhammadu Buhari today.

The rescued Dapchi school girls arrived in Abuja last night and would be meeting President Muhammadu Buhari today.

Sources said the girls, heavily guarded by security forces, were taken to Maiduguri by road to the warm embrace of a Federal Government delegation.





They left Dapchi after they met with their parents and acquaintances; many parents trooped to Dapchi from surrounding villages to catch a glimpse of their daughters.





They arrived at the Air Force base in Maiduguri around 5pm where they had their lunch before they were airlifted by a military aircraft to Abuja.





They would most probably meet with President Buhari today because they dont have much complications; only fatigue because of stress and anxiety, he said.





President Buhari is also expected to visit Zamfara State today, so it is not certain whether the president will meet them before or after the trip.





The presidency is also planning to subject them to counselling, the essence is to disabuse their minds because the Boko Haram told them never to go back to school, they were told to go and marry, another source said.





The girls arrived Maiduguri at about 4:45pm along with some of their parents after a brief medical check-up at Dapchi General Hospital .





Theatre Commander, Operations Lafiya Dole, Maj.Gen. Rogers Nicholas handed over the schoolgirls to the Federal Government delegation yesterday.





6:30pm at NAF Base in Maiduguri yesterday. Leader of the delegation Minister of Interior, Gen. Abdulrahman Dambazau(rtd) led the Federal Government delegation to receive the girls at6:30pm at NAF Base in Maiduguri yesterday.





Other ministers in the delegation include Minister of Information Lai Mohammed and his Women Affairs counterpart Jummai Alhassan



The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has released the timetable for the recall of Senator Dino Melaye (Kogi West).

The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has released the timetable for the recall of Senator Dino Melaye (Kogi West).The Kogi State Resident Electoral Commissioner (REC), Prof. James Apam, said following the Appeal Courts ruling that the recall can start, INEC fixed April 28 for the verification and May 5 for the referendum.Apam, who spoke at a stakeholders forum in Lokoja, said the process will begin with an invite to electorate, who signed the recall register, to identify their signatures.According to him, if the process is successful, the commission will proceed to the next stage where a referendum of all registered voters will be conducted.He continued: Here, voters will be asked to vote either Yes or No to the question of whether they want Senator Dino Melaye recalled.If the answer is able to meet the constitutional requirements of 51 per cent Yes, the process moves to the next stage, but if it fails, the process stops.The Court of Appeal in Abuja, last week, ruled against Melayes suit challenging the move to recall him.As a law abiding people, INEC will not do anything outside the dictate of the law. That is why we have to wait till after the judgment before going ahead with the process, Apam added.On the continuous voters registration, Apam said 210,000 Permanent Voter Cards (PVCs) were ready for collection, and so urged owners to come for them.The High Court of the Federal Capital Territory on Thursday ruled that the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission lacks the powers to declare anyone wanted without first obtaining a court order for that purpose or charging the suspect with an offence.Justice Othman Musa ruled that although the EFCC could declare as wanted persons who fail to honour its invitation for investigation, it could only do so if it obtains a court order for that purpose.The judge made this pronouncement in a fundamental rights enforcement suit filed by the Chief Executive Officer of AITEO Group, Benedict Peters.Peters had, in the suit marked, FCT/HC/CV/23/2017, accused EFCC of declaring him wanted on its website without following due process.The EFCC and the Attorney-General of the Federation were the respondents to the suit.The plaintiff, through his lawyer, Mike Ozekhome (SAN), contended that his declaration as wanted by the EFCC to declare him wanted without a pending charge against him or a valid court order to that effect was a violation of his fundamental rights.The EFCC had said Peters was being investigated in relation to his alleged involvement the $115m allegedly used by agents of the past administration to bribe officials of the Independent National Electoral Commission during the 2015 election.The anti-graft agency said it declared Peters wanted after obtaining an arrest warrant from the Magistrates Court in Lagos, following his refusal to hononur invitations sent to him.But Justice Musa, in his judgment, noted that there were discrepancies in the dates in a copy of the bench warrant tendered by the EFCC.He said it was wrong for the EFCC to declare Peters wanted on the basis of the bench warrant, which he noted, did not contain any instruction to that effect.The judge held that EFCCs decision to declare Peters wanted, without first obtaining a court order to that effect or filing a charge against him in court, was a violation of his fundamental rights, particularly the right to freedom of movement.He ruled, The 1st respondent (EFCC) has the power to declare anyone wanted upon meeting all the conditions precedent.There cannot be a valid restraint of individuals right to movement without the order of a court.He set aside the declaration of the applicant wanted by the EFCC.But the judge refused to set aside the arrest warrant got against Peters by the EFCC.The judge did not also make any pronouncement on the applicants prayer for an order directing the EFCC to publicly apologise to him.He also refused to award any cost against the EFCC.The judge had earlier dismissed the preliminary objection by the AGF challenging the jurisdiction of the court to hear the matter.The judge held that contrary to the AGFs contention, both the state High Court and the Federal High Court had jurisdiction over fundamental rights enforcement suits.The Police in Kaduna said it has arrested five suspects for allegedly setting a church and a Police outpost ablaze in Narayi, Chikun Local Government Area of Kaduna State.The Command spokesman, Assistant Superintendent of Police Muhktar Aliyu, told the News Agency of Nigeria in Kaduna that angry youths, at about 4:00 am Thursday (today), set the Celestial Church of God in Narayi ablaze and part of the Police outpost there.The youths were angry over the death of one Friday Sylvester who was working as a mason with the pastor of the church, he said.According to him, the youths accused the pastor, Babatunde Shittu, of cupablility in Sylvesters deathWhen the incident was reported, we prevailed on the youths, and adopted civil and proactive measures to calm them, Aliyu said, adding that the Police rescued the pastor and took him to the Police outpost and later to Barnawa Divisional Police station.Later, the youths came around 4:00 am and set the church and part of the Police outpost ablaze,  he said.The spokesman warned that the Command would not allow any person or group of persons to take the law into their hands.He added that the Police Commissioner, Mr. Austin Iwar, has ordered full investigation and prosecution of those involved.A rich supporter of former President Goodluck Jonathan reportedly hired SCL, a data analytics company, to paint President Muhammadu Buhari...

Fresh information reveals that fixers hired by a billion in support of the Jonathan campaign hacked into Buharis personal data. A rich supporter of former President Goodluck Jonathan reportedly hired SCL, a data analytics company, to paint President Muhammadu Buhari bad in the buildup to the 2015 elections.Fresh information reveals that fixers hired by a billion in support of the Jonathan campaign hacked into Buharis personal data.





SCL is the parent company of Cambridge Analytical, a data marketing firm, which harvests data from different sources and creates microtargets, with the ultimate goal of changing audience behaviour. It is reputed as one of the factors responsible for the outcome of the US presidential election and the Brexit vote of 2016.





Cambridge Analytica was accused of improperly using data on behalf of political clients. Reports say the company may have used data improperly obtained from roughly 50 million Facebook users to try to sway elections.





According to UK Guardian, a Nigeria billionaire whose identity was not revealed committed a large amount of money to the bid to stop Buhari.





The reports also revealed that the fixers for the Jonathan campaign hacked into Buharis medical and financial records, in a bid to sway the decision of the electorate on regarding the historic election.





It was the kind of campaign that was our bread and butter. We were employed by a billionaire whos panicking at the idea of a change of government and who wants to spend big to make sure that doesnt happen, the newspaper quoted an ex-employee of SCL to have said.





Guardian said the company had established a reputation of weaponising information to harm an opponent.





It was a methodology honed and developed in the companys defence and military work  the fifth dimension of warfare, defined by the US military as information operations, the report read.





What was new, or at least new to those employees who have now spoken out, was bringing these techniques to the companys election work.





Seven individuals with close knowledge of the Nigeria campaign have described how Cambridge Analytica worked with people they believed were Israeli computer hackers.





The sources  who spoke to the Observer over many months  said the company was looking for kompromat on Muhammadu Buhari  at the time, leader of the opposition.





They said the hackers offered Cambridge Analytica access to private information about Buhari.





Their testimony paints an extraordinary picture of how far a western company would contemplate going in an effort to undermine the democratic process in Africas most populous nation.





However, Cambridge Analytica has insisted it did not take possession of or use any personal information for any purpose and did not use any hacked or stolen data.





The company confirmed, however, that it had been hired to provide advertising and marketing services in support of the campaign of Jonathan.





That work seems to have come about through Brittany Kaiser, a senior director at Cambridge Analytica, and a senior strategist on the campaign team of President Donald Trump.





Regarded by colleagues as a prolific networker, in December 2014 she was introduced to an oil billionaire who wanted to fund a covert campaign to support Jonathan.





An ex-employee reportedly said: [Kaiser] got a phone call. It was just before Christmas and she flew out to meet them in Washington DC. It was all a bit ridiculous. It was only six to eight weeks before the election and they were looking to spend nearly $2m.





There were a lot of scared millionaires worried that Buhari would get in. It was all very last-minute. A team flew out to Abuja and put together a communications campaign. It was a straightforward, normal comms campaign in most respects.





The Observer reportedly obtained an astonishing and disturbing video that Cambridge Analytica used in the campaign.





Coming to Nigeria on February 15th, 2015, the voiceover says in the manner of a trailer for a Hollywood movie.





Dark. Scary. And very uncertain. Sharia for all. And then it poses the question: What would Nigeria look like if Sharia were imposed by Buhari?





Its answer to that question is certainly dark. And scary. Its also graphically, brutally, violent. One minute and 19 seconds of archive news footage from Nigerias troubled past set to a horror movie soundtrack.





There are scenes of people being macheted to death. Their legs hacked off. Their skulls caved in. A former contractor said: It was voter suppression of the most crude and basic kind. It was targeted at Buhari voters in regions to basically scare the shit out of them and stop them from voting.





If Buhari wins, the film warns: women would wear the veil. Sharia law would be introduced. And the inference is, you may be macheted to death.





It wasnt just videos spreading fear. The Cambridge Analytica campaign team in Nigeria were jumpy too.





There were the meetings: three sources have told the Guardian about one that took place between Cambridge Analytica employees and two people they were told were Israeli intelligence operatives.





There was a two-hour meeting that took place in the hotel lobby between two senior campaign members and Israeli intelligence. After which they swept our hotel rooms for listening devices and said they would switch out our phones. The story we were told was that there were intelligence agents from a number of different countries, including Israel and France, who were supporting Goodluck Jonathan and helping the campaigns, a source was quoted to have said.





There is no suggestion that Jonathan was aware of or implicated in this support. Another employee said: Basically the Israelis didnt want [Buhari] to win.





Other employees questioned whether they were real Israeli intelligence operatives, or Israeli private contractors.





A few weeks later, as the campaign was drawing to a close, there was another meeting at Cambridge Analyticas London office, the report read.





An expert had flown in from Israel with a laptop, sources say.





And Alexander Nix, Cambridge Analyticas now suspended CEO, and Kaiser, asked employees to take a thumb drive and download the contents on to their own computers.





The content was private emails and the information, they were told, related to Buharis financial and medical records.





One employee who was present at the London meeting said he had initially assumed the visiting expert was Mossad or Israeli intelligence passing on what he called legtimate information.





But he began to realise this wasnt the case, he said, when he saw the reaction of his colleagues. One of them had freaked out, he said. He was like, What the fuck? I dont want anything to do with this.





The witnesses are clear  at least in their own minds. The information they were shown had come from hackers.





Back in Nigeria, the team still on the ground found out what was going on from their colleagues in London. There was more freaking out. This time with live, pressing concerns.





They were fucking scared, said a colleague who spoke to them while they were in the country. The campaign fixer, the person with local knowledge who navigated them through the ins and outs of Nigerian politics, made it clear to them: they needed to get out of the country right away.





Cambridge Analytica had put them all in danger, they said. If opposition supporters found out, there was no saying what might happen.





One member of the team missed his flight and instead of asking the office to re-book it, he got the first fight out  to Dubai  and put it on his credit card.





A spokesman for the company said its team remained in the country throughout the original campaigning period but left in accordance with the companys campaign plan.



Militants under the aegis of 21st Century Youths & Agitators with Conscience has taken a swipe on the Reformed Niger Delta Avengers, RNDA and other groups in the Niger Delta over their threat to blow up oil and gas facilities in the region in 30days if the Federal Government fails to reinstate Brig. Gen. Paul Boroh (retd) as chairman, Presidential Amnesty Programme, PAP.The militants also asked President Muhammadu Buhari to ignore threats by the groups stating that members of the RNDA have been the brain against the establishment of the Maritime University, Okerenkoko in Warri South West local government area of Delta State.Spokesperson of the Niger Delta Revolutionary Council, NDRC, W.O.I Izon Ebi in a statement on behalf of the group, while calling on the Pan Niger Delta Forum, PANDEF, to speak up against the threat by RNDA, noted that, one mans mistake, action and inaction must not be used to thwart the collective aspirations and determination of the Niger Delta people for the peace, progress, stability and development of the region.He said: Prof Charles Dokubo is equally an Ijaw man like General Paul Boroh, so the issuing of threats to bomb oil installations and cause hostility and unrest in the Niger Delta is uncalled for.The 21st Century Youths of the Niger Delta & Agitators with Conscience, condemn in strong term the ultimatum issued by the Reformed Niger Delta Avengers RNDA and some so called ten militant groups that issued threats to commence the bombing of pipelines and cause hostilities in the Niger Delta in the next 30days if General Paul Boroh is not reinstated.Their perfidious act is the very reason sea piracy and kidnapping is increasing in the Niger Delta.In as much as we condemn the perfidious act of some group of amnesty beneficiaries that protested in Abuja and in other parts of the Niger Delta that led to the sack of their fellow Ijaw man and the federal governments selective fight against corruption, we advise President Muhammadu Buhari to ignore the threats of the RNDA because these are the same set of militants that were against the establishment of the Maritime University, Okerenkoko.Advising the new amnesty boss to be transparent and innovative, Izon Ebi said: We advise Prof Dokubo to be transparent, innovative and accountable with the prudent management of the amnesty funds and always consult with the leadership of the Pan Niger Delta Forum, PANDEF that is made up of distinguished royal fathers, political leaders and representatives of all ethnic nationalities in the Niger Delta.We advise him to make sure that the amnesty beneficiaries and ex-agitators are trained as entrepreneurs to enable them to be employers of labour, rather than being idle, waiting for their monthly stipends.Chairman, Bill and Melinda Foundation, Bill Gates, has said that Nigeria is one of the most dangerous places in the world to give birth with the fourth worst maternal mortality rate in the world ahead of only Sierra Leone, Central African Republic and Chad.Gates who stated this at the Expanded National Economic Council presided over by the Vice President, Yemi Osinbajo, said that Nigerias fiscal situation was at a low equilibrium, adding that in return for low levels of service, people pay low levels of tax.The philanthropist disclosed that his foundations biggest office in Africa was Nigeria where he had committed over $1.6 billion so far with the intention of increasing his commitment in the country.He said that Nigeria has unmatched economic potential but that what becomes of the potential depends on the choices her leaders make.According to him, The most important choice you can make is to maximize your greatest resource, the Nigerian people. Nigeria will thrive when every Nigerian is able to thrive.If you invest in their health, education and opportunities-the human capital we are talking about today-then they will lay the foundation for sustained prosperity. If you dont, however, then it is very important to recognise that there will be a sharp limit on how much the country can grow.Nigeria is one of the most dangerous places in the world to give birth with the fourth worst maternal mortality rate in the world ahead of only Sierra Leone, Central African Republic and Chad. One in three Nigerian children is chronically malnourished.I urge you to apply this thinking to all your investments in your people. The Nigerian governments Economic Recovery and Growth Plan identifies investing in our people as one of three strategic objectives. But the execution priorities dont fully reflect peoples needs, prioritizing physical capital over human capital.To anchor the economy over the long term, investments in infrastructure and competitiveness must go hand in hand with investments in people. People without roads, ports, and factories cant flourish. And roads, ports and factories without skilled workers to build and manage them cant sustain an economy.French Ambassador to Nigeria, Mr. Denys Gauer, has said Nigerian Jollof, is his best food.Jollof rice is one of the most common dishes in the whole of West Africa.The food which is believed to have originated from the region of Wollof speaking people, which happens to be northwestern Senegal, The Gambia, and southwestern coastal Mauritania, is arguably the best known African dish outside the continent.Gauer, who spoke with News Agency of Nigeria in Abuja on Thursday said, Jollof rice is my best Nigerian food; maybe because I find it everywhere I go in Nigeria.The envoy said further that the country was blessed with a rich cultural heritage that attracts foreigners, especially its food.I remember a year ago when I attended the annual yam festival organised by the Ogidi community in Kogi. I had a wonderful time and I saw and appreciated the display of their cultural performances especially the presentation of the new yam.The cultural display in the two days event showed that the festival was a moment to showcase the tourism potentials abundant in that area, he said.Guaer, who spoke further on the state of the nations tourism sector, said that basic infrastructures were needed to develop it.He said that tourism was an income generating sector and would create job opportunities for the youths adding that, tourism was a contributing factor to Frances GDP.Tourism and gastronomy (food) are very important sectors in France because it contributes to the GDP.The food sector is an art, it also contributes to the economy and it provides a lot of activities, jobs and wealth creation in the country.In Nigeria, tourism still remains underdeveloped and there is a lot to be shown in the sector but it just a pity because the infrastructures are still not in place.Nevertheless, Nigeria is progressing especially in the area of cuisines, because I notice there are more good restaurants here in Abuja, Lagos and other cities in the country.But, what the country needs is more vocational training and we hope with such events as The chefs taste challenge and promotion, it would attract more people and create more interest in the sector.The envoy added that the teeming youths in the country can be engaged in studies about the art of cooking maybe in France or elsewhere.He expressed optimism that the sector could be developed to generate jobs in Nigeria.



Vice President Yemi Osinbajo is chairing the ongoing expanded National Economic Council, NEC, which has in attendance the 36 governors of the federation, the Chairman of Dangote Groups, Aliko Dangote and Mr. Bill Gate from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.Others are the Senate President, Bukola Saraki, represented by the Chairman, Senate Committee on Finance. Senator John Eno, the Obi of Onitsha, His Royal Majesty. Nnaemeka Alfred and the Emir of Kano, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi as well as Ministers. Diplomats, the academia and the business class.Representatives of the World Bank and the DFID are expected to give remarks at the meeting taking place at the Old Banquet Hall, Presidential Villa,Abuja.Vice President Yemi Osinbajo on Thursday reiterated the determination of the present administration to focus on the development of the people of the country.He said this in a remark at the Special and Expanded National Economic Council meeting in Abuja, attended by Mr Bill Gates, the Chief Executive of Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and Chairman of Dangote Foundation, Aliko Dangote.We are focused on the well-being of the people of this country, he said, noting the setbacks suffered by the country in the past in spite of the high revenue from oil.He said that the government was now more determined to make the kind of progress that would rewrite the story of the country by putting the money of Nigeria to work for Nigerians.According to him, the government has remained true to that vision and has ramped up investments in infrastructure and social spending with less oil resources.Osinbajo stated that the administration was widening the revenues by plugging revenue leakages and expanding the tax net to ensure that government invested more on things that mattered.He said that besides expenditure on education and healthcare, government was expending resources in so many areas.The Vice President stated that a lot of investments in education were coming from private interventions, local and state governments as well as other government agencies such as TETFUND and UBEC.However, he noted that there was the need to spend smarter because in some places, there was overlap while others were lacking.Osinbajo said that the was creating the enabling environment for the private sector to thrive, adding that succeeding would mean creating more of Aliko Dangotes.That represents for our growing economy more jobs, and countless opportunities for the kind of well-changing philanthropy.Our education and health budgets are nowhere near optimal levels but I can assure you that we possess the political will and vision to make the needed investments for today and tomorrow and we are on the path of progress.He said that the social investment programmes of the government were yielding results, including the 30 per cent rise in school enrolment following the free school feeding programme meant to address malnutrition and stunted growth of children.Osinbajo stated that government could not do it alone and that made it to remain grateful for the generous partnership from the Gates Foundation, Dangote Foundation and the numerous development partners.The Ministers of Health, Prof Isaac Adewole and Education, Adamu Adamu, had painted gory pictures of the countrys position in the development of the sectors and called for partnership from other agencies.The ministers stated that funding was the major problems in the sectors and noted that without good education and healthcare the human development index would remain low.Bill Gates, in an address, noted the giant strides the country had made in immunization, polio eradication and social investments and urged it not to relent.He said that the countrys revenue as a percentage of the GDP, was the lowest in the world at six per cent, thus making investments difficult.Gates also said that lack of access to finance made it difficult for SMEs to grow but added that his foundation was ready to partner the country to mobilise more resources for investment.Nigerians are known around the World for their big dreams and big ambitions; together with Dangote Foundation, we will be here to help you achieve your dreams and ambitions, Gates said.Also, Dangote said that he was challenged to solve such problems as malnutrition plaguing the country and preventing children from realizing their potential.He said that for Nigeria to compete globally, it must invest in the health, education and infrastructure.Lai Mohammed, minister of information, has described as erroneous and extremely dishonourable, the claims by the Peoples Democratic Par...

Lai Mohammed, minister of information, has described as erroneous and extremely dishonourable, the claims by the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) that the abduction and release of Dapchi schoolgirls were stage-managed.





In a statement on Thursday, Mohammed said the PDP should have congratulated the federal government and Nigerians on the release of the girls or kept quiet.





Members of the Boko Haram insurgents returned 104 of the 110 abducted students a month after they were kidnapped from Government Girls Science and Technical College, Dapchi, Yobe state.





Following their return, the PDP claimed the abduction was designed to hoodwink Nigerians and orchestrate a great rescue and security prowess of a conquering general.





But Mohammed said it would have taken a conspiracy of global proportion to have stage-managed the adoption and release of the girls.





He said the federal government stopped responding to statements from PDP because it has failed to learn the ropes of being an opposition party, even when we have advised them to take a crash course on the role of the opposition in a democracy.





In its over three years in opposition, the PDP has again shown it does not understand the role of the opposition in a democracy. How then can the PDP convince Nigerians that it has learnt its lessons and that it is ready to rule the country again? Mohammed asked.





We broke our own rules this time because the PDP over-reached itself and scored an own goal at a time it could simply have congratulated the government and people of Nigeria on the release of the girls or just keep quiet.





As we have said many times since the abduction of the Dapchi schoolgirls, no government is exempted from its own share of tragedies.





What makes the difference is the way such tragedies are managed. Whereas it took the PDP all of 18 days to even acknowledge the abduction of the Chibok girls in 2014, the APC Federal Government acted promptly and responsively when the Dapchi schoolgirls were abducted 19 Feb. 2018, hence their quick release.



Chairman, Bill and Melinda Foundation, Bill Gates, has said that the intervention of the President of the Nigerian 8th Senate, Bukola Saraki in 2009, was the turning point in combating polio in Nigeria.Gates who gave the statement at the Expanded National Economic Council, presided over by the Vice President, Yemi Osinbajo, also discussed Sustainable health financing and strengthening primary healthcare care in Nigeria.President of Senate @bukolasaraki @YakubDogara after breakfast with @BillGates & @AlikoDangote to discuss Sustainable health financing and strengthening primary healthcare care in Nigeria. Mr Gates thanked @bukolasaraki for his contribution to combating polio as chair Govs forum pic.twitter.com/Z4knNJJp34 Bamikole Banks Omisore (@MrBanksOmishore) 22 March 2018However, Mr. Gates lamented that Nigeria is one of the most dangerous places to give birth in the world.He said Nigeria is only the fourth worst maternal mortality rate in the world ahead of only Sierra Leone, Central African Republic and Chad.Present at the occasion are President Dangote Foundation, Alhaji Aliko Dangote; Vice President Yemi Osinbajo; Co-Chair, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Mr. Bill Gates and the Country Director, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Mr. Paulin Basinga during the National Economic Council meeting on Human Capital Investment at the State House Conference Centre, Abuja.Others are the Speaker, House of Representatives, Yakubu Dogara, Senators Mao and Tejuosho among others.Students at Bayonne High School tried their hand at international diplomacy earlier this month as part of the school's Model United Nations Program.

And they did a pretty good job of it, placing second place in an international competition in Manhattan that attracts more than 5,000 students from 75 different countries.

"What these students achieved is truly remarkable," said Evan Wexler, a social studies teacher at BHS and the head of the school's Model UN program. "Students expressed interest in the program and student input shaped the structure of the class. It is a student-driven, student-centered seminar about contemporary global issues."

Only in its second year, the school's Model UN program has 32 students. The students prepared for the competition through their class, Global Citizenship I.

On the weekend of March 2, they went into New York City to participate in the National High School Model UN Conference, "one of the most prestigious conferences on the Model UN circuit," said Dan Ward, Bayonne's Director of Social Studies and Education Media Services.

Held at the United Nations Headquarters and the New York Hilton Midtown, the NHSMUN is the world's largest Model UN conference, with hundreds of schools and thousands of delegates attending, according to the program's website.

Students got the chance to interact with high-ranking figures at the United Nations. They participated in "negotiating sessions that went deep into the night," Wexler said.

"Our students had plenty of opportunities to meet and to befriend students from the Americas, Africa, Europe, Asia, Canada, and Oceania," he added. "The meaningful exchanges and friendships such as the ones our students developed during the conference are the building blocks of mutual respect, understanding and peace."

During the conference, the students were assigned as the countries of Thailand, Cuba and Eguatorial Guinea. They were also assigned a specific committee, such as the Security Council or the Economic and Finance Committee, and had to research a topic based on those committees, and develop original solutions.

Students in the UN's Security Council devised strategies to address the Lake Chad Basin conflict in Africa, for example.

All together, BHS students represented three different countries on 13 different committees.

They ended up taking home second place and an "Award of Excellence." Event organizers said Bayonne had "the best showing of a second-year participant since 1996," Ward said.

Bayonne High students Tatyana Aponte, Ashley Caleb, Jared Chimento, Jassie Morcos, Stephanie Peters and Katelyn Seecharan won Best Delegate awards.

Students at BHS can join Global Citizenship I as early as sophomore year, Wexler said. From there, they can take Global Citizenship II. The school also offers an after-school Model UN club that is open to students of any grade level.

"Our program, although up and coming, rivals other programs that have been around for years, and I could not be more proud of what we accomplished," said member Jared Chimento.

Corey W. McDonald may be reached at cmcdonald@jjournal.com. Follow him on Twitter @coreymacc. Find The Jersey Journal on Facebook.UPDATE: Man was drunk when he caused fatal crash, authorities say

JERSEY CITY -- A 32-year-old man has been charged with two counts of death by auto for his alleged role in a crash that killed two Union City residents on Tonnelle Avenue last month, authorities said.

Alex Torres, of Union City, was driving with a suspended license on Feb. 11 at the time of the crash that killed Mario Guevara, 25, and Heather Acosta, 24, Hudson County Prosecutor Esther Suarez announced.

He surrendered to police on Tuesday afternoon.

Police were called to the busy stretch of roadway around 3:20 a.m. on reports of a crash between Manhattan Avenue and North Street. When authorities arrived, a 2006 white Honda Accord that Torres was driving flipped on its roof and a red Toyota Corolla was on the sidewalk, authorities said.

Guevara and Acosta were the backseat passengers in the Toyota and were pronounced dead at the scene.

The drivers and front seat passengers of both vehicles were all brought to a local hospital for treatment. Torres faces three counts of assault by auto for those injuries, authorities said.

Torres is expected to make his first appearance on the charges this afternoon.

Caitlin Mota may be reached at cmota@jjournal.com. Follow her on Twitter @caitlin_mota. Find The Jersey Journal on Facebook.Perhaps he will give students some advice on how to pay off off their students loans.

Roger Ferguson Jr., president and chief executive of TIAA, one of the largest finance firms in the United States, will deliver the commencement address for Stevens Institute of Technology on May 23, college officials announced.

Ferguson will also receive an honorary Doctor of Engineering degree at the ceremony at the Meadowlands Expo Center in Secaucus.

"Dr. Ferguson's path is particularly relevant to this year's graduates, who will be leading their generation with the technological foundation and critical thinking skills needed to thrive in a highly dynamic environment of changing markets, emerging technologies and an increasingly interdependent global financial system," Stevens President Nariman Farvardin said in a statement. "We are so fortunate to welcome such an accomplished leader who will excite and inspire our graduates as they go on to change the world."

TIAA has more than $950 billion in assets under management that serves 80 percent of the higher education 403(b) market. With Ferguson at the helm, TIAA continued to place individual investor interest front and center in the funds management process.





Prior to joining TIAA in 2008, Ferguson was head of financial services for Swiss Re, chairman of the company's holding corporation and a member of its executive committee. Ferguson also served as vice chairman of the board of governors of the U.S. Federal Reserve System.

During the 2007-2013 global economic recession, Ferguson was appointed by President Barack Obama to the President's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, as well as its predecessor, the Economic Recovery Advisory Board.

Commencement will be held at 11 a.m.The Weehawken school district has been named an "Innovative District" for 2018, the second straight year it has earned the honor, Board of Education President Richard Barsa announced.

Weehawken is one of only 10 districts nationwide to receive the honor, Superintendent Robert Zywicki said. The district was recognized by the International Center for Leadership in Education (ICLE) for "its future-focused approach and the implementation of a rigorous and relevant curriculum that challenges students to think beyond the classroom to solve real-world problems."

"I thank my fellow members of the Board of Education, Superintendent Dr. Robert Zywicki, and the entire faculty for their teamwork and dedication on behalf of our students," Barsa said. "A recognition like this is indicative of the forward progress the district is making."

ICLE, based in Rexford, New York, is an educational research center that studies the nation's "most rapidly improving schools and districts" and then shares those successful practices with state education agencies and other schools.

ICLE cited Weehawken for its "strength in digital leadership and learning."

Niche.com named Weehawken one of the state's top districts for 2018 and the district was one of only three in the state to have all schools certified as Future Ready by NJIT and the New Jersey School Board's Association.

Weehawken educators will be recognized at ICLE's Annual Model Schools Conference, in Florida. Weehawken educators have been asked to speak at the conference and share best practices for combining STEM education and blended learning.

The Weehawken presentation will focus on the district's partnership with OCEARCH marine research scientists.

"We applaud the Weehawken School District for persevering on a path to rapid improvement by creating a positive system-wide culture of high expectations and strong, positive relationships," said ICLE founder Dr. Willard R. Daggett.Gov. Phil Murphy said Wednesday afternoon that the winter storm battering New Jersey resulted in at least one death -- from a fatal auto accident when a car collided with a bus on a highway in Hunterdon County.

But the State Police told NJ Advance Media on Wednesday night the motorist, a 23-year-old Pennsylvania man, was actually in critical condition in a nearby hospital as of 8:30 p.m.

Murphy confirmed Thursday afternoon that the man remains in critical condition.

"So we should keep that person in our prayers," the governor said.

Sgt. Jeff Flynn, a spokesman for the State Police, said the incident happened around 11:30 a.m. westbound on Interstate 78 in the town of Clinton.

The man -- an Allentown, Pa., resident -- was driving a Nissan sedan when it ran off the road, struck a guardrail, and returned to the road, only to be struck by the bus, Flynn said. There were no passengers on the bus, Flynn said.

The State Police's fatalities unit was brought in, a trooper performed CPR at the scene, and the driver of the car was taken to Morristown Medial Center with serious injuries, Flynn said.

The bus driver had minor injuries, Flynn said.

The names of those involved in the accident were not immediately released.

Asked whether the accident was storm-related, Flynn said that's "still under investigation."

Murphy and state officials were holding a 4 p.m. conference call with reporters to provide updates on the storm when State Police Superintendent Col. Patrick Callahan said there was a fatal accident on Interstate 78 amid the storm.

Murphy then noted that a bus collided with a "private vehicle" on the highway in Hunterdon.

"Is that right, colonel?" Murphy asked Callahan.

"That's right, governor," Callahan responded.

"The State Police responded," Murphy continued, "but sadly, and tragically, it was too late to save a life. So our thoughts and prayers go out to that victim's family."

Multiple news outlets, including NJ Advance Media and the Associated Press, reported the news.

Dan Bryan, a spokesman for Murphy's office, deferred comment to the State Police on Wednesday night.

Murphy said during a news conference in Woodbridge on Thursday that a miscommunication led to the confusion the day before.

"I think we all got information we read as though it was a fatality," the governor said. "We weren't freelancing on that one."

The State Police responded to 333 motor-vehicle accidents and aided 304 other motorists amid the storm Wednesday, Callahan said.

NJ Advance Media staff writer Noah Cohen contributed to this report.

Spring nor'easter blankets the Garden State 49 Gallery: Spring nor'easter blankets the Garden State

Brent Johnson may be reached at bjohnson@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @johnsb01. Find NJ.com Politics on Facebook.To get an idea of who got hit the hardest in the most recent nor'easter that swept through New Jersey, you didn't need a weather map.

Take a look at who didn't have power.

Thousands of utility customers woke up without electricity on Thursday, and the majority of them were in South Jersey -- where the snow was wetter and heavier, and the wind gusts higher, than elsewhere in the state

By contrast, most people in North Jersey, where thousands lost their power for a week or more after the previous nor'easter, largely rode through the storm this time without the flickering of lights.

"Thankfully the full fury of this storm did not hit as expected. But there's still a lot of people without power," said Gov. Phil Murphy, pointing to the southern end of the state that got slammed. "You had a lot of ice on power lines that froze and then heavy snow on top of that."

As he spoke, 72,200 people were still without power, mostly customers of Atlantic City Electric and the southern service area of Jersey Central Power & Light Co. State officials expect the vast majority should see their lights by midnight. And all are expected to be restored by Friday.

According to Murphy, the electric utilities were better prepared for the most recent storm than the two nor'easters earlier this month that preceded it.

"There was more pre-planning by JCP&L," the governor said during a post-storm press briefing at the New Jersey Turnpike Authority. "There was more anticipation."

The state Board of Public Utilities has opened an investigation into how JCP&L and the state's other utilities responded to storms, in the wake of the long delays that infuriated many as they waited for days to get their power back.

"After the first storm, we had very much of a heart-to-heart talk with our utilities," remarked Joseph Fiordaliso, who heads the regulatory agency.

The BPU had pushed the power companies to get out early with mutual assistance requests for help from out-of-state utilities, which Fiordaliso said they did this time, and also were asked to help other utilities in New Jersey before sending their own crews to aid utilities from outside the state.

Meanwhile, he said the board's investigation is continuing, with a particular focus on tree-trimming programs that cut away limbs likely to fall on power lines during a storm. Fiordaliso said the BPU is also going to look at the issue of putting power lines underground lines as part of its investigation.

Hardest hit in Wednesday's storm was Atlantic City Electric, which serves more than 547,000 customers in southern New Jersey. At the height of the storm, 62,795 homes and businesses were without power.

"Our crews are navigating extreme conditions, including major tree damage, downed utility poles and wires and other challenges as they work to restore service to our customers," said Vince Maione, Atlantic City Electric region president.

The western part of the company's service area, which includes Cumberland, Gloucester and Salem counties, were hardest hit, according to Atlantic Electric spokesman Frank Tedesco said.

"That's where our infrastructure suffered the most extensive damage," he noted.

In addition to more than 500 of the company's own line workers, local contractors, and tree crews, Tedesco said hundreds of additional personnel from Atlantic City Electric's sister utilities, including Delmarva Power, Pepco, ComEd, and PECO, assisted in the restoration efforts.

Public Service Electric & Gas Co., which saw relatively small numbers of outages, released the mutual aid crews that came to its assistance to allow them to be redeployed to Atlantic Electric.

JCP&L, which had as many as 31,000 customers without power, said its outages were concentrated in three counties--Burlington, Monmouth and Ocean.

Spokesman Ron Morano said one of the two staging areas set up by the utility in advance of the storm was at Great Adventure in Jackson, which turned out to be in heart of the areas with damage.

"Crews from as far as Canada were there this morning ready to respond," he said.

By early Thursday afternoon, about half of those JCP&L customers without power had gotten their electricity back.

Ted Sherman may be reached at tsherman@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @TedShermanSL. Facebook: @TedSherman.reporter. Find NJ.com on Facebook.UPDATE: Watch as the massive cranes safely make their way under the Delaware Memorial Bridge.

It's a rare occurrence when both spans of the Delaware Memorial Bridge are shut down at the same time.

But it's about to happen early Saturday when all traffic between New Jersey and Delaware will come to a halt for an estimated half hour, according to Jim Salmon, spokesman for the Delaware River and Bay Authority which operates the twin spans.

The unusual move is "a precaution and to eliminate driver distraction," Salmon said, as the Zhen Hua 16 sails north under the bridges carrying a cargo of huge ship-to-shore cranes.

The Zhen Hua 16 is seen anchored in the Delaware Bay Thursday afternoon with the two massive cranes on board. The ship will pass under the Delaware Memorial Bridge at low tide early Saturday morning en route to Philadelphia. (Photo provided/Delaware River and Bay Authority.)

The closure early Saturday will take place between 12:30 and 1:30 a.m., Salmon says. Traffic will be allowed to resume crossing the spans once the Zhen Hua 16 clears the bridges.

The distance from the water level to the top of the cranes aboard the Zhen Hua 16 is 188 feet, 5 inches, according to Salmon. Due to tide levels and the Delaware Memorial Bridge's measured clearances, the vessel must travel under the spans during the period of low tide.

Officials say there will be an estimated 4 to 9 feet of clearance between the top of the cranes on the ship and the structure supporting the bridge roadways.

Salmon said the bridge closures are taking place during the overnight period to have the least impact on traffic.

Produced by Shanghai Zhenhua Heavy Industry Co. Ltd. in China, the two new super-post-Panamax cranes are destined for Philadelphia's Packer Avenue Marine Terminal.

The Zhen Hua 16 is currently anchored in the Delaware Bay off Lewes, Del., and is expected to begin its 10- to 11-hour journey up the Delaware River to the bridge on Friday where it will wait to pass underneath.

The Delaware Memorial Bridge is a key transportation link along the Northeast Corridor. More than 80,000 vehicles use the bridges each day.

Weather and some other rare events have shut down traffic temporarily on some the spans, but this is the first time in memory that a cargo shipment has caused traffic on both bridges to come to a halt, officials say.

Bill Gallo Jr. may be reached at bgallo@njadvancemedia.com. Follow Bill Gallo Jr. on Twitter @bgallojr. Find NJ.com on Facebook. Have a tip? Tell us. nj.com/tipsIf you've been reading my columns, you may realize I am not a big fan of our new governor's policies.

But if it's true, as Woody Allen once said, that 80 percent of success in life is just showing up, then he's doing much better than his predecessor by that measure.

Chris Christie had a bad habit of going to Disney World or out on the campaign trail as epic storms were bearing down on his state. Worse, he'd yell at the mayors who pointed out how bad things were, even though those mayors were Republicans just like him.

Phil Murphy's been taking a different approach. Though he's a Democrat, Murphy has pleased even the mayors in Republican towns with his visits after the recent spate of storms.

At a press conference Tuesday on an unrelated issue, Murphy showed that he's learned a thing or two by talking with workers from out-of-state electric companies who traveled here to repair lines taken down by trees in recent storms.

"Do we have the right vegetation management program?" he asked. "Some of the out-of-state linemen and women say that we have a different reality than they do in their states."

We do indeed. In other states, the right-of-ways for power lines are kept clear. Here, we let trees grow right next to the lines

I saw the same thing on a recent trip to Puerto Rico in which I reported on the power outages still lingering after Hurricane Maria six months ago.

But there's one big difference: the weather. There, a loss of power means sitting in the dark. Here, a loss of power can mean sitting in the dark in a freezing home.

That tends to make people testy. I imagine the new governor met quite a few of them over the past few weeks. And I'm glad to see he's learned from them about the need to keep power flowing.

Murphy could learn a lot more if he focused his attention on what's been going on this winter in his native state of Massachusetts.

There, environmental extremists prevailed upon state legislators to prevent the construction of pipeline capacity that could give the state access to the cheap and plentiful natural gas from the Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania.

A win for the environment? Not exactly. A recent editorial in the Boston Globe noted that instead of using fracked gas from Pennsylvania, some of the utilities switched to liquefied natural gas from Russia that came in on a tanker.

The editorial noted that the production of imported LNG is both more expensive and more carbon-intensive than domestic gas.

"As a result, to a greater extent than anywhere else in the United States, the Commonwealth now expects people in places like Russia, Trinidad and Tobago, and Yemen to shoulder the environmental burdens of providing natural gas that state policy makers have showily rejected here," it said.

Then there were the utilities that replaced the clean-burning gas with oil and coal, both of which are much dirtier. But so what? The anti-pipeline crowd was appeased.

Unfortunately, the anti-pipeline people are Luddites. You can determine that by going to the website of 350.org, the leading anti-pipeline group.

"Stop Fossil Fuels: Build 100% Renewables," it reads.

That may give comfort to the tender-minded, but it's not possible, at least not with current technology. When it comes to outages, solar has an outage every time the sun goes down and wind has an outage whenever the weather turns still.

Those problems may be solved eventually. But at the moment, the grown-ups - by which I mean the people at the federal Energy Information Administration - predict oil and natural gas will still be providing 70 percent of this country's total energy through 2050. (Go to Page 13 on this .pdf file)

In New Jersey, the grown-ups are people like Murphy's fellow Democrat, Senate President Steve Sweeney. Sweeney, who hails from Gloucester County, went against the extremists by supporting a pipeline that will permit the conversion of a power plant in Cape May County from coal to gas.

Sweeney also supports nuclear power, as well as the idea of offshore wind.

I have my doubts about the cost of the latter, but at least the all-of-the-above approach guarantees a reliable power supply.

Making sure that power gets to the customers is a problem that should keep the governor occupied as his administration conducts its study of what went wrong during the recent storms.

As for ending the use of all fossil fuels, the governor of New Jersey would be wise to leave that task to others.

ADD - MORE OUTAGES OCCURRING: I finished this column right before the snow hit hard Wednesday. Since then there are branches and trees down all over the place - and that's just in my front yard.

Meanwhile there are so many outages that nj.com has set up a useful power outage tracker.

I see that as of 9:48 a.m. Thursday there are 84,290 homes without power, mostly in the JCP&L and Atlantic County Electric areas.

That doesn't surprise me. When I look around in my area of the Shore, which is served by JCP&L, the tree maintenance is on a level with what I saw in Puerto Rico.

Downed branches in my yard this morning. They are next to the power lines for my house and my neighbors and I called JCP&L to have them trimmed. They refused.

Time to get working on that vegetation management program, Guv.

Also, I just got back inside after clearing some fallen branches in front of my house near the power line. Several years ago I called JCP&L to tell them that both my power line, and my neighbor's line that runs over my property, were entangled with branches.

They told me it wasn't their problem.

Fortunately none of the branches was big enough to break the lines. But that was not the case in other areas where JCP&L has failed to do line maintenance. A friend of mine who lives in Middletown called to tell me he was driving around because he'd lost power at 4 a.m. At 6 a.m. he called JCP&L and got the usual robot.

The robot asked for his address and cell phone number so he could get updates. By 1 p.m. he still had heard nothing.

That's better than my experience after Hurricane Irene. A line fell down across the street, again because of JCP&L's lax maintenance of trees. The line went to the town recycling center, so a crew showed up the next morning to fix it. I assumed they were competent and would restore service to my home and my two neighbors.

Nope. They just ignored us and left. That meant I had to talk to the robot for 10 days. Worse, the robot called back many times and told me my service was restored. It wasn't.

So forget solar and wind, governor. These guys can't even handle conventional power.There is an emerging concern that everything Donald Trump touches tends to die, and that goes for Cabinet appointments, congressional campaigns, American values, national institutions, international decorum, and Chris Christie's political pulse.

So the legislators who crafted the $1.3 trillion spending bill Wednesday did something that restored our faith in government itself, when they wisely put the funding for the Gateway Project in places where the president cannot touch it.

The byzantine bill includes $541 million for the massive infrastructure plan, which is critical to our state and to the nation, and somewhere in its 2,232 pages is a fail-safe mechanism that removes that funding from under the authority of Trump's Department of Transportation and funnels it through Amtrak and federal grants.

All together now, in the key of G: Whew.

Yes, the money is a pittance, given that the Gateway Project - which is really eight projects, including a new, two-track Hudson River tunnel - will ultimate have a price tag north of $30 billion.

But this budget action not only proves that a motivated bipartisan effort can find work-arounds for Trump's pettiness and blue-state hostility, it saves a project that appeared in danger of flat-lining, as the money effectively restarts the construction of one of its most crucial components.

The Portal Bridge, the 108-year-old span that squats 25 feet above the Hackensack River, is probably the most dysfunctional segment of the entire Northeast Corridor. When this creaky swing-truss disaster fails - as it did last Friday, when it was stuck in an open position for 21/2 hours - it snarls Amtrak and New Jersey Transit service up and down the NEC, because the Portal serves 450 trains and 180,000 passengers per day.

The funding, however, pushes the Portal Bridge within striking distance of the end zone: The environmental impact studies have been done for years, contracts are ready to go to out, and this money will help kick-start the shovel-ready construction of a new four-lane bridge.

This is a very big deal. The enthusiasm expressed by Regional Planning Association president Tom Wright was typical: "This is really very positive news," he said. "Not just for this region but for other worthy projects around the country."

That's because the bill also included more money for Federal Transit Administration's "New Starts" program, which is the primary funding source for projects just like Gateway.

The DOT had arbitrarily ruled that Gateway is not eligible for these grants, while breaking an agreement made by the Obama Administration to fund half the entire project. But in a quasi-normal political environment, Gateway is an ideal candidate for New Starts funding.

That, however, is a battle for another day. For now, the country's most crucial infrastructure project, to mangle a metaphor, appears back on track.

With a Senate vote pending, New Jersey and New York have won this round, in large part because the state congressional delegations from both parties made it clear to Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell that the government is headed for a shutdown if it wasn't part of the deal.

While we wouldn't normally advocate a shutdown, this was our Alamo.

Now it goes back to arguing the merits: Gateway will employ thousands and generate $3.87 in economic benefit for every $1 invested, as an Amtrak study showed. It is still the fulcrum to a 450-mile megalopolis that is responsible for one-fifth of the U.S. economy.

And it just gained a reprieve, even if the current occupant of the White House is having trouble understanding basic math.

Bookmark NJ.com/Opinion. Follow on Twitter @NJ_Opinion and find NJ.com Opinion on Facebook.By Junius Williams

This month marked 50 years since the most visible and successful community struggle in Newark's history took place.

In March 1968, Newark community members known as the "negotiating team" celebrated the historic Medical School Agreements, which would govern the conditions upon which the New Jersey College of Medicine and Dentistry (now part of Rutgers University).

Built in Newark's Central Ward on urban renewal land, the agreements reach by among community members, city and state officials, and the federal government stated:

Reduced the size of the medical school from 150 acres to 66 acres.

Brought construction job training, and hundreds of construction jobs to black and Puerto Rican men at the medical school site, and later, the Newark Airport, and projects built by the Passaic Valley Sewage Commission

Brought construction union membership to black and Puerto Ricans in almost all white unions .

Provided 60 acres of vacant land to nonprofit community developers which eventually produced 900 apartments for low and moderate income families.

Provided an improved hospital and health care delivery for the residents of Newark.

Why was this most successful struggle in Newark's history?

In 1966, Newark was one of the first major majority black cities in America, but governance, including the power to make land use decisions, was held by whites who sought ways to hold onto this power in face of thousands of black migrants coming from the South and Puerto Ricans coming from Puerto Rico and New York City. Urban Renewal, a federal program designed to clear land for urban redevelopment, was used to clear land for public and private uses, and moved mostly poor people of color to other slums, or out of town.

Such was the perception of the people upon the surprise announcement in 1966 that the New Jersey College of Medicine and Dentistry, then located in Jersey City, had been offered 150 acres of urban renewal land in the middle of the Central Ward by Mayor Hugh Addonizio. This college would have displaced an estimated 20,000 people, mostly black and Puerto Rican.

And so the people organized and the ensuing struggle consistently drew hundreds of people to stormy meetings in city hall, and into ugly confrontations with police. On this issue, Addonizio found it difficult to maintain the support of black organizations traditionally on his side, like the NAACP and large black churches.

Commentators say the Medical School Fight was one of the causes of the Newark rebellion of July 1967: people were tired of the police violence, greedy landlords, insensitive welfare bureaucrats, and uncaring teachers. And they were tired of being pushed out of their homes by the urban renewal bulldozer. They took matters into their own hands which resulted in the killing of 26 people by police, and millions of dollars in property damage.

Once the smoke cleared, an even stronger coalition emerged with a new strategy, including an alternate plan (17 acres instead of 150 acres); a major federal administrative law complaint filed by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund; even newer leadership comprising a negotiating team; and a negotiated settlement called the Medical School Agreements, endorsed by representatives of the President Johnson, New Jersey Gov. Richard Hughes and Newark mayor and his Urban Renewal agency.

The resultant agreements brought forth the most successful construction jobs plan in the country, which led to similar agreements for minority hiring throughout the state; as well as housing, and redirection of health care institutions in the City.

From the momentum of this movement, the people of Newark also stopped Route 75, which would have displaced thousands more as the "Midtown Connector" between Routes 78 and 280. And Leroi Jones ( later Amiri Baraka), the father of Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, called the first meeting of the United Brothers whose aim it was to elect the first black mayor of Newark. Ken Gibson was elected in 1970, based on the work of grass roots organizations who converted confrontation politics into electoral politics.

For these reasons, it is important that we study how this confrontation over land resulted in the Medical School Agreements, now at age 50.

Event: The Ad Hoc Committee on Newark's History will celebrate the strategy, and the leaders -- some of whom will be brought back to Newark for a seat on stage -- at a conference on the Medical School Fight on Saturday, March 24, from 9:30 a.m. to 3 p.m., at the Newark Public Library.

Junius Williams, Esq., is chairman of the Ad Hoc Committee on the History of Newark. He is author of the book "Unfinished Agenda, Urban Politics in the Era of Black Power."

Bookmark NJ.com/Opinion. Follow on Twitter @NJ_Opinion and find NJ.com Opinion on Facebook.State employees won't get a second snow day.

Gov. Phil Murphy has announced that state offices will be open Thursday in New Jersey, a day after he ordered them closed Wednesday because of the winter storm that was set to hit the area.

All employees should arrive at their regularly scheduled reporting time, Murphy's office said.

Snowfall totals across the state from Wednesday's nor'easter -- the fourth to slam the state this month -- were not as high as the 18 inches originally projected. But many areas still saw up to a foot of snow.

More than 70,000 homes and businesses remain without power, mostly in south Jersey.

Murphy also declared a state of emergency Tuesday night ahead of the storm. But he has yet to announce if that is lifted.

The State Police announced it lifted a ban on commercial vehicles on four interstate highways at midnight.

For more updates on the state's response to the storm, you can visit www.ready.nj.gov.

Brent Johnson may be reached at bjohnson@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @johnsb01. Find NJ.com Politics on Facebook.Whole Foods' 19th New Jersey location is set to open Friday after Wednesday's early-spring snowstorm forced its delay.

The grand opening will begin at 9 a.m., two years after the upscale grocer announced it would open a store in a Bridgewater shopping center between Route 22 and Chimney Rock Road.

The store will include a coffee shop, a juice bar, and a "Plant and Place" section with local flowers, pottery and jewelry. Check out our photos above for a sneak peek inside.

Whole Foods will create about 155 new jobs in the area, the company said last month. Applications can be submitted online.

The 49,000-square-foot store will join 12 other businesses in the shopping center, including Nordstrom Rack, Saks Off 5th, The Habit Burger Grill, Blaze Pizza and Chipotle.

Marisa Iati may be reached at miati@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @Marisa_Iati or on Facebook here. Find NJ.com on Facebook.

Have a tip? Tell us. nj.com/tipsTrinity Episcopal Church, 119 Forest Ave., Cranford, is collecting money for the Episcopal Relief & Development "Clean Water" program through April 1.

Water is essential for life. Unfortunately, in many places around the world, the fresh water supply is threatened by various pollutants, climate change and disasters.

"Every 15 seconds a child dies from a water-related disease somewhere in the world," said Marion Nechuta, Trinity's Outreach Committee Chairwoman. "The ERD Clean Water program constructs wells, waters systems, and stations that both reduce the spread of disease while promoting overall community health, well-being, and economic viability," she continued.

Trinity Cranford is collecting monies toward the building of a well somewhere in Ghana, Zambia, Nicaragua, or the Philippines this year. Donations, made payable to "Episcopal Relief and Development," can be mailed to Trinity Church or dropped off at the church on Sunday mornings.

"Please help us support this gift of life to those in need," said Mrs. Nechuta. For more information, please call 908-276-4047.

For more information about Episcopal Relief & Development, please visit http://www.episcopalrelief.org/



Submitted by Trinity Episcopal Church(Photo: VNA)



General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam (CPV) Central Committee Nguyen Phu Trong will pay an official visit to France between March 25th-27th and a state visit to Cuba from March 28th-30th.

According to the CPV Central Committees Commission for External Relations, the visits will be made at the invitation of French President Emmanuel Macron and First Secretary of the Communist Party of Cubas Central Committee and President of the Councils of State and Ministers Raul Castro Ruz, respectively.

Vietnam and France spare no efforts to enhance ties since the establishment of diplomatic relations in April 1973. More importantly, diplomatic relations have been tightened at both central and local government levels. France has been one of Vietnams most important partners in the international arena. The partnership has resulted in a number of projects with promising results in the fields of urban management, environment, health and education.

Meanwhile, Vietnam and Cuba set up diplomatic relations on December 2nd, 1960, ushering in a new chapter in their friendship. Bilateral cooperation has been expanded in numerous fields such as agriculture, industry, construction, trade, investment, culture, education, science and technology./.A man serving time for a 2012 sexual assault conviction in St. John the Baptist Parish has been indicted by a New Orleans grand jury in two previously unsolved rapes, according to District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro's office.

Juancheus "Juan" Ceasar, 55, was charged with two counts each of aggravated rape and aggravated kidnapping. Each charge carries a mandatory life sentence.

Criminal District Judge Keva Landrum-Johnson set Ceasar's bond at $4 million, $1 million per count, after his indictment was read Thursday (March 22), Ken Daley, a spokesman for Cannizzaro's office, said.

Ceasar, from LaPlace, is serving a 12-year sentence at the Elayn Hunt Correctional Center for a 2012 sexual assault conviction in St. John The Baptist Parish, Daley said. He was anticipating being released from prison in 2024.

A DNA sample taken from Ceasar following his conviction was put in the national CODIS (Combined DNA Index System) database, and matched DNA samples contained in sexual assault kits from two unsolved rapes in New Orleans, Assistant District Attorney Mary Glass said in a news release. Glass is the case manager for the district attorney's Sexual Assault Kit Initiative, or SAKI Unit.

The rapes were reported in 1999 and 2011.

In one rape reported on Aug. 11, 1999, Glass said a woman was walking to a friend's house on Willow Street in Uptown when she was abducted into a gray van occupied by three men.

Ceasar, identified through DNA results as the van's back passenger, raped the woman at knifepoint inside the vehicle, she said.

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The second rape Ceasar was indicted in occurred on July 16, 2011.

Glass said a woman walking near North Broad Street and A.P. Tureaud Avenue was approached by a man in a truck, who grabbed her and pulled her inside the vehicle.

The woman said she was raped inside the back cab of the truck and sprayed in the face with mace, Glass said.

The woman escaped through a window, and DNA results linked Ceasar to the assault, Glass said.

Louisiana State Police DNA specialist Myles Robichaux and NOPD detectives Jounay Ross and Rob Long assisted in the cold-case investigation, Daley said.

Glass presented the case to the grand jury, and Assistant District Attorney Laura Rodrigue will prosecute the case with Glass.

It was unclear Thursday if Ceasar had an attorney.A fired New Orleans police officer who admitted to leaving out of his police report that a beating victim he interviewed also claimed she was raped lost an appeal to keep his job, records show. NOPD did not investigate the rape as a result of the officer's omission and become aware of the rape allegation only after a criminal trial in the mater, three years later.

In a decision dated March 20, the New Orleans Civil Service Commission found the NOPD appropriately terminated Officer Corey Clark. The omission in Clark's police report became the partial focus of a criminal trial against the man accused and ultimately acquitted of the rape. At trial, prosecutors blamed NOPD misconduct for investigative holes in the case.

Donovan Liviccari, the lawyer representing Clark in his appeal, told NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune on Wednesday (March 21) Clark was trying to accommodate "the desires of the victim," who Clark has said asked him not to report the rape or the beating. "He was not trying to hide anything and certainly did not stand to gain anything by reporting the incident the way he did," Liviccari said.

Clark responded to a call about a rape on July 6, 2013, when the victim in the case told him the accused man -- who has since been identified as the accuser's ex-boyfriend Ronnie A. Torregano -- grabbed her by both arms, twisted her arms behind her back and later picked her up by the neck, grabbed her by her hair, slammed her on a bed and slapped her in her face, causing injury. Clark detailed those allegations in his report but purposefully failed to add, the NOPD says, that she also stated she was raped by Torregano. The NOPD says Clark also erred by failing to tell his supervisor of the rape allegation. Clark changed the classification of the incident from a rape to a battery, according to civil service records.

Because the rape was never reported by the responding officer, the sex crimes unit was not made aware of the rape allegation and it was not investigated, the civil service ruling states. The NOPD did not become aware that the rape omitted by Clark until the February 2016 trial for Torregano.

Clark testified at the trial that the victim was "hysterical" but "adamant that she did not want to pursue charges" against the perpetrator or take a sexual assault examination, civil service records show. Clark said he omitted the rape allegation from his report and did not tell his supervisor of the claim because "he had received from unnamed NOPD personnel that if there was 'no victim' there was 'no crime.'"

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"He evidently viewed (the victim's) reluctant to pursue charges and submit to a medical examination as an indication that there was 'no victim' in the alleged rape," the ruling states. While Clark claims she did not want him to report the battery, either, "despite her protestations, Officer Clark did make a report regarding the battery."

Liviccari said on Wednesday his client knew his obligations to report the domestic violence element of the incident, even without the victim's cooperation, but "ran afoul of the NOPD's reporting requirements on the rest of the incident." Liviccari pointed out that when the issue came up in court, Clark "responded truthfully."

Clark served on the NOPD for about 15 years when he testified in the Torregano trial 2016.

The trial for Torregano also highlighted actions of a former NOPD officer, Darryl Coulon, who admitted on the witness stand to having a previous extramarital affair with the accuser. The woman called Coulon after the attack, prosecutors said, and he reported it to 911 using a false name. Clark was the officer who responded to the 911 call.

Clark has the option of appealing the civil service ruling to Louisiana's 4th Circuit Court of Appeal. Liviccari said he had not conferred with his client to decide if they plan to take that step.

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly indicated Darryl Coulon was an active NOPD officer at the time of the 2013 incident in question. Coulon was with the NOPD from 1992 to 2001.An Ocean Springs, Miss., man pleaded guilty Tuesday (March 20) to a reduced charge of possession with intent to distribute marijuana in connection with a foiled scheme to ship 11 pounds of pot from Colorado to a residence in Jackson County via FedEx, the Biloxi Sun-Herald reported.

Kristopher Marcel Nguyen, 23, and his two co-defendants -- Jonathan Mathieu Martin, 38, of Ocean Springs, and George Robert Tapper III, 35, of St. Martin -- were indicted last year on a charge of trafficking of a controlled substance, the newspaper reported.

In exchange for the guilty plea from Nguyen, prosecutors are recommending a sentence of 20 years, with 10 years suspended and 10 years to serve. The maximum sentence is 30 years in prison and a fine of up to $1 million.

Tapper and Martin have entered similar pleas, according to the Sun-Herald. All three remain free pending sentencing in May.

Nguyen, who earned a bachelor of science degree from the University of Mississippi, told the court he has been working at an Ocean Springs nail salon since graduation, the newspaper reported. He said the plan to sell the marijuana fell through after Jackson County authorities intercepted the package shipped by FedEx. Nguyen said they used FedEx because a friend drove for the company at the time.A 30-year-old man was arrested this week by New Orleans police on suspicion of murder and attempted murder in a 2013 cold case. The arrest came five years after a 48-year-old Metairie woman was killed and another person was wounded when they were shot while riding in a car in Mid-City.

Karen Thomas was one of three people in the car that was fired upon about 6 p.m. March 10, 2013, while the vehicle traveled in the 500 block of South Solomon Street, authorities said at the time. She was struck in the chest, police said then, and a 31-year-old man was hit in the wrist. The car's uninjured driver drove them to the hospital, where Thomas died.

Jeremy Ricks was arrested early Thursday (March 22) and booked on one count of second-degree murder and one count of attempted second-degree murder in connection with the killing of Thomas and wounding of the other passenger. The Orleans Parish Public Defender's Office, which typically does not discuss open cases, was appointed to represent Ricks in court on Thursday.

A warrant for Ricks' arrest, dated March, 24, 2015, states a witness to the double shooting came to the attention of the NOPD when the case was assigned to Richard Chambers, a cold case detective in the homicide Unit. That witness's statement corroborated information already in the case file that had been collected by then-Detective Candice Preston, who was the lead on the investigation in 2013, the warrant states. Preston had developed Ricks as a potential suspect, the warrant states, but there was apparently not enough evidence to arrest him at the time.

The witness Chambers interviewed gave a detailed account of the shooting and picked Ricks out of a photographic lineup, the warrant states. The witness said a single person "fired numerous shots upon (the) vehicle," as the car was trying to flee. He or she also described the gun used as "a dark colored, small assault-style handgun," according to the warrant.

Ricks' previous convictions include possession of heroin with intent to distribute and illegal possession of a weapon. He pleaded guilty in December 2003 to illegal carrying of weapons and was sentenced to 30 days in the Orleans Parish Prison. He was later convicted in October 2010 of possession with intent to distribute heroin after pleading guilty to the charge. He was sentenced to five years in prison, Orleans Criminal District Court records show.

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Ken Pastorick, a spokesman for the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections, said Ricks initially served about a year and a half of his 5-year sentence in various facilities. He was released on probation in May 2012 but then was sent back to prison in April 2013 -- a little over a month after the Mid-City shooting -- for violating his probation, Pastorick said. He said an arrest on April 17, 2013, out of Jefferson Parish related to possession of a firearm triggered the revocation of his probation.

Ricks remained in prison until December 11, 2017, Pastorick said. It was not immediately clear why he was released from prison on the previous sentence while it appeared there was an open warrant for his arrest in the 2013 murder and attempted murder case.

Pastorick said the murder warrant for Ricks "was not in our system." Typically, he said, when a warrant is issued for someone in the Department of Correction's custody, a detainer is placed on that person that would prevent the inmate from being released. There was no detainer on Ricks when he was released in December, Pastorick said, because "we never received a warrant for him."

NOPD spokesman Ambria Washington on Thursday afternoon, however, said the warrant that was signed in 2015 "was in fact entered into the system."

Orleans Parish Magistrate Judge Harry Cantrell set Ricks' bond at $750,000. His next hearing is scheduled for April 19.

New Orleans murder map 2018Five robberies or attempted robberies were reported in New Orleans Wednesday (March 21), according to the NOPD. In addition to a food truck robbery attempt and the robbery of a Gulf Coast bank, police reported three other incidents within twelve hours.

The following robberies and attempted robberies were listed in an initial report from New Orleans police:

- A 55-year-old man was robbed while working as a doorman around 10:38 a.m. along the 700 block of Burgundy Street in the French Quarter. A man passed by and snatched the doorman's fanny pack. The man then fled with the doorman's cell phone and money, police said.

- Two hours later, in the 7600 block of Trapier Avenue in Little Woods, two other men were also robbed at work. Two armed men entered the workplace from a rear entrance and demanded the 28-year-old and 44-year-old hand over their property. Both complied. The two armed men fled with money in the 28-year-old's white 2007 Chevy Silverado with Mississippi plate #HR3047, NOPD reported.

- A 36-year-old woman was sitting in her car in the 3600 block of Bienville Street at about 8:53 p.m. when a man approached the passenger side door. Brandishing a silver handgun, the man attempted to open the door. The woman started her car and fled the location, police said.A forensic psychiatrist who met with Travis Boys twice prior to his trial said he suffers from "intellectual impairment" and "unspecified schizophrenia spectrum disorder," a diagnosis his defense attorneys will use in their argument that Boys is mentally ill and did not know what he was doing when he fatally shot NOPD Officer Daryle Holloway on June 20, 2015.

For Boys to be found not guilty by reason of insanity, his defense team has to prove he has a mental disease or defect, and that he did not know right from wrong at the time of the offense.

Assistant District Attorney Taylor Anthony asked Dr. Sarah DeLand, an assistant professor of forensic psychiatry at Tulane, if she could tell the jury Boys did not know right from wrong at the time of the shooting.

"No, I cannot say that," she said. She was "unable to render an opinion regarding sanity at the time of the offense."

DeLand said she met with Boys on two occasions -- once in October, when Boys was admitted to a state mental hospital after smearing feces on his face during jury selection, and again the night before his trial.

The first time she met with him, DeLand said Boys' thoughts were scattered, and he told her he was hearing voices. At some points, she said he appeared to be responding to the voices.

DeLand said Boys told her he did not remember anything about the shooting.

Under questioning by the state, DeLand said she thought Boys was "malingering," or exaggerating his symptoms.

For example, she said she asked him the colors of the American flag and he told her the incorrect colors.

That "indicated to me he was probably exaggerating his symptoms because most people know the colors of the flag," she said.

Still, her diagnosis was that he suffers from a psychotic disorder and has some intellectual impairment, she said.

DeLand also read from a court-ordered mental evaluation of Boys that was done in 1997, when Boys was 15. It was ordered after he was arrested for an unspecified crime.

She said the report showed he had a verbal IQ of 57, a performance IQ of 73 and a full-scale IQ of 62. The doctor in the report said Boys had a "borderline" intellectual disability, DeLand said.

In 2014, Boys was diagnosed with acute psychosis, DeLand said, reading from another report.

In that instance, Boys was taken to the emergency room after he jumped through a second-story window. He heard voices and thought people were coming to get him, DeLand said.

Anthony, also reading from the report, said Boys' wife told doctors at the hospital that Boys was drinking nine bottles of vodka a day.

Anthony said the emergency room doctor noted Boys was a heavy drinker and that his hallucinations could have been due to alcohol withdrawal and worsened by a lack of sleep.

DeLand agreed the doctor did think that was possible, but said ultimately that was not his diagnosis.

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Boys' wife told emergency room doctors he had been having hallucinations for several years, but had not sought treatment, DeLand said.

Boys' older sister, Jernice Joseph, also testified Thursday, recalling instances of her brother "clicking out," meaning his mind would go blank and he couldn't remember something he did.

Joseph said Boys once locked himself in a room with their nephew and was "whipping" him really badly.

Their mom called the police, and when the police came to question him, Joseph said Boys denied beating the boy, blaming it on the other man in the room. She said there was no one else in the room with them.

"He's always led a life of crime," she said. "He's always been in denial. He always said he didn't do it -- like there was a third person inside of him or something."

Joseph also testified about their mom, who was diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic. Joseph said their mom was in and out of mental hospitals throughout their childhood.

Because of that, Joseph said her and her three siblings stayed with different family members at various points in their childhood.

She called some of her family members "disgusting," and said one of her uncles sexually abused Boys when he was around 5.

Joseph said mental illness runs in her family, which DeLand confirmed.

DeLand said she reviewed reports that show both Boys' mom and uncle were diagnosed with schizophrenia, and that his grandfather was treated for an unspecified mental disorder in the 1960s.

DeLand said people have a higher risk of being diagnosed schizophrenic if they have family members who have the disease, or if they are raised by a parent with the disease.

Jurors on Thursday also inspected Holloway's car, in which the shooting occurred. The patrol vehicle was parked in the basement outside of NOPD headquarters. Prosecutors, defense attorneys and Judge Karen Herman accompanied the jury.

Boys was not allowed to leave the courtroom. Sothern argued Boys had a constitutional right to be present, but waived his presence after Herman said the ability to view a crime scene is a "discretionary measure" by the court.

"Based on Boys' prior destructive behavior, he will not be able to visit the scene of Officer Holloway's vehicle," Herman said.

The defense rested Thursday afternoon after calling three witnesses. They also re-played for the jury some NOPD body camera footage from Boys' arrest.

The state is expected to call at least two rebuttal witnesses Friday, forensic psychologist Dr. Rafael Salcedo and forensic psychiatrist Dr. Richard Richoux. Both are longtime members of the court-appointed sanity commission.

Both doctors testified in a hearing in September that they reached the same conclusions about Boys -- he suffers from no significant mental disease or defect. They interviewed Boys in the presence of his lawyer on Sept. 7.

The jury will likely hear closing arguments from both sides Friday, and will be sent to the jury room to deliberate.After a woman went to drop off her bags inside her Lakeview home, she came out to find several people searching through her car Wednesday afternoon (March 22), NOPD said.

The woman arrived home in the 900 block of Walker Street around 2:30 p.m. Wednesday, police said. When she went inside to drop off her bags, she left her car unlocked. When she returned outside, she saw a black Audi Q5 SUV parked nearby and several unknown people rummaging through her car, police said.

When the woman told the people to get out of her car, they began to flee to the Audi, but not before one of them fired a shot in her direction, NOPD reported.

The Audi, bearing Louisiana license plates #ZFS111, was reported stolen from the 3000 block of Lowerline Street in Hollygrove the day before, police said.

Anyone with information regarding this incident should notify Third District detectives at 504-658-6030.Purchases made via links on our site may earn us an affiliate commissionPhoto for illustration. (Source: baodautu.vn)

According to the report, in 2017, Vietnam surpassed Hong Kong (China) and became the third largest export market of the country, just after China and the US, jumping three grades from 2014.

Trade turnover between the two countries is expected to exceed USD100 billion in 2020, making Vietnam the second largest destination of Korean export commodities, after China, said KITA.

Exports of the Republic of Korea to Vietnam have increased over the past 10 years. Products from the market accounted for 8.5% of Vietnams total import commodities in 2007, but the figure hit record high at 22.1% in 2017.

In 2017, Koreas trade surplus over Vietnam hit USD31.6 billion./.The state Pardon Board has denied clemency for a Pearl River man serving a life sentence after being convicted of second-degree murder in 2001.

Winston Jerald Craddock had been granted a hearing by the Pardon Board, but the board unanimously denied his request on Monday (March 19), said Ken Pastorick, a spokesman for the Louisiana Department of Corrections.

A St. Tammany Parish jury convicted Craddock of second-degree murder in connection with the 2000 shooting death of Harold Cresson during a scuffle. The jury ruled that Craddock murdered Cresson, of Lacombe, rejecting Craddock's claim that his .22-caliber pistol accidentally fired.

Cresson suffered a gunshot wound to his heart and lung and died within minutes, according to testimony at the trial. Testimony showed Craddock and Cresson's wife had an affair and that Cresson died after an altercation involving him, Craddock and Craddock's brother, Keith Craddock, outside a Pearl River bar.

The Pardon Board makes recommendations to the governor, which means that had it approved Craddock's request the issue would have gone to Gov. John Bel Edwards for a final decision.

Under Louisiana law, prisoners serving life sentences can apply to the Pardon Board to be considered for clemency after serving 15 years. The prisoners must have a good disciplinary record, the law says.

Pastorick had said previously Craddock has a good disciplinary record and has the highest-level trusty status available at Angola.The former owner of a Mandeville-area pool supply store was arrested Tuesday (March 20) and accused of trashing the store in November, causing more than $1 million worth of damage, authorities said.

Ron Ulfers, 44, of Covington, once owned Clearwater Pool & Spa at 4001 U.S. 190 East Service Road but had sold the business, the St. Tammany Parish Sheriff's Office said in a news release.

At the time of the incident, he was employed only as a consultant.

Ulfurs was booked with criminal damage over $50,000, two counts of injuring public records and one count of theft between $1,000 and $5,000.

Deputies went to Clearwater Pool shortly after 6:30 a.m. on Nov. 20 after Ulfers called to report the business had been broken into and vandalized during the previous night, the release said. The building was ransacked, with much of the contents destroyed or heavily damaged, it said.

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A photograph released by the Sheriff's Office showed numerous ceiling tiles down in the store, a light fixture hanging and debris piled high, including insulation.

The case was turned over to Sheriff's Office Property Crimes detectives, who have been working the case since November.

Detectives obtained a warrant for Ulfers' arrest on Tuesday and found him that afternoon at the company's warehouse in Lacombe, the Sheriff's Office said. Deputies took him into custody and booked him into the parish jail in Covington.

The investigation is ongoing and additional charges against Ulfers are possible, the Sheriff's Office said.

A man who answered the phone at Clearwater on Wednesday afternoon said he could not comment about the ongoing investigation but said the business was open. "It's not going to affect our business whatsoever."The state will soon be pushing the locally elected officials of Powhatan out of the way to administer the finances of the northwest Louisiana village that in mid-July had only $105 in its general fund and is hiring a cop to drum up some money fromWeather Alert

...SMALL CRAFT ADVISORY REMAINS IN EFFECT UNTIL 7 AM CDT THURSDAY... * WHAT...North winds 20 kt with gusts up to 30 kt and seas 5 to 8 ft expected. * WHERE...Portions of Gulf of Mexico, as well as the tidal lakes and sounds. * WHEN...Until 7 AM CDT Thursday. * IMPACTS...Conditions will be hazardous to small craft. PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS... Inexperienced mariners, especially those operating smaller vessels, should avoid navigating in hazardous conditions. &&It is not a bad thing for us, that the route known as the Goldene Strae or the Golden Road as we will get to know it- has escaped the attention of so many. It has been spared being overrun by hordes of tourists and as you will discoverCattle farmers in Kiruhura district are struggling with infestation of ticks that have increasingly become resistant to acaricides.

One of the affected farmers is Dr Dick Kamuganga, who has lost 27 cows in the last two years. Kamuganga says he has been changing from one acaricide to another with hope he could find the best, but in vain.

This problem is widespread in Kiruhura, says Kamuganga. We have been relying on government zoning which has not come to pass. We have been receiving different signals from NDA [National Drug Authority] and the ministry of Agriculture, but signal extraction for the farmer who is ignorant is very limited.

According to the ministry of Agriculture, Animal Industry and Fisheries (MAAIF), the country is faced with an influx of adulterated animal drugs, chemicals, acaricides and agrochemicals. This has resulted into failure to cure the intended diseases or kill the targeted pests.

To fight this problem, Kamuganga proposes that government traces the origin of the fake chemicals on the market and direct dealers to stop importing them.

Responding to Kamuganga and other farmers pleas, the government has set control and regulation measures on the importation, manufacture, distribution and retailing of animal drugs, biologicals, chemicals, acaricides, and agrochemicals.

Addressing dealers and importers of agrochemicals in Kampala today, minister for Agriculture, Vincent Bamulangaki Ssempijja, said research is being undertaken to identify an acaricides that is capable of killing of the resistant ticks.

The effective acaricides will be used in the affected districts, said Ssempijja. Once the resistant tick is cleared, acaricides zoning will be adopted using single molecule acaricides.

Citing his visit to Kiruhura on Tuesday, Ssempijja said farmers presented strange bottles labeled with brands of acaricides they use to spray ticks.

They had been assured by some dealers that these concoctions will work, he said. We found out yesterday, with technical officers, that some of these concoctions have even killed their animals.

To avoid further damage, Ssempijja said government would register and license all manufactures of animal drugs, chemicals, acaricides and agrochemicals as a prerequisite to operate.

To the farmers, government will provide information on authorised dealers from whom to buy animal drugs, chemicals, acaricides and agrochemicals. Within three months, all importers and dealers are expected to comply with the regulations.

matsiko@observer.ugUganda was recently voted fifth best exhibitor in the African category at this years annual International Travel Bourse (ITB) in Berlin, Germany.

What made Ugandas exhibition stall unique and could have possibly led to the high ranking was a replica of the equator monument displayed next to a mountain gorilla sculpture. Days later, as the Irish community in Uganda celebrated St Patricks day, they, for the fourth year running,  chose to light the Equator monument green.

At the function held at Kayabwe where the equator crosses the Kampala-Masaka highway, Frank Kirwan, the charge daffaires, embassy of Ireland in Uganda said the Equator monument was one of more than 200 landmarks across the world to go green for St Patricks day and images of the greened Equator would be broadcast across the world, joining the ranks of other globally famous landmarks such as the Empire State Building in New York, Table Mountain in South Africa, the pyramids in Egypt and the Great Wall of China.

Observers say this publicity could be exploited and the Equator made one of those strong selling points to attract tourists into the country.

In Uganda since we are near the equator, we have a natural air conditioner all year long. We have summer throughout the year and like Winston Churchill once said, anything can grow anywhere in Uganda, John Ssempebwa, the deputy chief executive officer of the Uganda Tourism Board (UTB), said.

Julius Agaba, local resident, says that on several occasions, he and friends have stopped at this place to take pictures and continue with their journey, but he does not know the relevance of the Equator.

I did not study a lot because my parents were poor people; so, all I know is that the Equator is the path of the sun, Agaba said. He wondered why there is no one at Kayabwe to tell him more about it, a weakness he put on tourism authorities.

This is one of the things state minister for wildlife, Godfrey Ssuubi Kiwanda wants to change. Kiwanda said government is in advanced stages of drafting a plan that will see the development of the place so that people can spend more time there and learn more about Uganda.

We can have it stretch for about two kilometres having different Ugandan activities and an equator museum whereby in case someone stops say to take pictures, one can spend more hours learning about Uganda and other interesting places the country has to offer, Kiwanda said.

At the spot, two circular monuments coloured white with inscriptions Equator face each other on opposite sides of the road.

A string of activities, especially business, take place here with many selling crafts, artefacts, sculptures of animals, African wear, foods and beverages, among others. The restaurants here are relatively cheap, with most of the food not exceeding Shs 16,000.

However, all handicrafts sold here are obscenely expensive that Ugandans dare not buy them. Vendors here say their merchandise is overpriced because they imported it from Kenya and Tanzania.

This should stop! We need to see that our people who come from this area make these things themselves so that they can earn from this, Ssempebwa said.

He tasked the local leadership to ensure that there is local content sold at the Equator.

All we need is government to come in and help us with capital to start manufacturing these things here like craft shoes, one vendor said. That is when we shall also benefit from the tourists but, currently, we get them from Kenya and to ensure we get profit from them, we sell them expensively.

How can this turn into a tourism hub?

The people The Observer talked to at the Equator urged tourism authorities to front the monument in their advertisements for both local and foreign tourists.

It is not only wild animals that people want to see. We need this place too to be advertised as a tourist destination; you dont find it everywhere in the world, Isaac Katende, a resident said.

Jackie Namirimu sells kitenge clothes at the spot but says her business is not going as expected because people simply stop to take pictures and continue on their journey.

It is only the whites that come here to buy and they also do that because they are coming to eat in that restaurant. Ugandans dont even come here. When they do, they simply look through and exclaim at the prices and then go, she said.

She said a museum will be good for the place given that most people will be forced to spend more time at the facility. For Joseph Musoke, a boda boda cyclist, watching the Equator or walking around the museum is boring.

He hopes there will be other interesting activities in the place; that way it will become famous and people will stay a while longer.

There are games in Kampala that people play. There is land here. Government or any person can come up here, buy the land and put up a nice hotel and also introduce tourist games, Musoke said.

While the Kayabwe crossing of the equator has been given priority, the one at Kikorongo on Ishaka-Kasese highway in Kasese is still ignored with the paint on the monuments even wearing off and yet it is located along the route to Queen Elizabeth national park, which is one of the biggest tourist attractions to the country.

Did you know?

The Equator is an imaginary line on the surface of the earth, dividing the Earth into the Northern and Southern hemispheres.

It is about 40,075 kilometres (24,901 miles) long, of which 78.7% lies across water and 21.3% over land.

In Uganda it crosses on land and on Lake Victoria. This gives a country a warmer experience and two seasons of dry and wet weather.

Tourists stop at the Equator not just for photographs, but also for simple demonstrations that prove it is indeed the famous crossing.

The Equator crosses 12 other countries: Sao Tome and Principe, Gabon, Congo-Brazzaville, DR Congo, Kenya, Kiribati, Maldives, Somalia, Indonesia, Equador, Colombia and Brazil.

kamogajonathan50@gmail.comThe Court of Appeal has this morning thrown out Rukungiri Woman MP (NRM), Winnie Matsiko out of parliament after a successful challenge of by FDCs Betty Muzanira.

In a majority ruling of two justices to one, the court faulted the High court for failure to properly evaluate the evidence that was brought before it before it upheld Matsikos victory.

Thrown out: Winnie Matsiko. Photo: @perryaritua

The court found that Matsiko bribed voters when she contributed money to different churches during campaigns. The court also faulted the Electoral Commission for failure to adhere to electoral laws relating to tallying of results before it declared Matsiko winner.

Justices, Alfonse Owinyi-Dollo, and Paul Mugamba directed the Electoral Commission to organize a by-election within 60 days. They also ordered both the EC and Matsiko to pay Muzanira costs for both the High court and the Court of Appeal which is the highest appellate court in electoral offences.

Before the majority ruling, the Court of Appeal registrar, Esther Nambayo first read the ruling of Justice Kavuma who had withheld the victory of Matsiko arguing that Muzanira had failed to adduce evidence to warrant a nullification of victory.

The original results are the valid results the appeal is dismissed, Kavuma ruled.

Speaking after the ruling Muzanira said she was very happy that court had arrived at a correct verdict.

Im so happy for this miracle of winning this petition; we were all worried but God is great, Im appealing to the people of Rukungiri to start warming up. This time we should win with a very big margin,

FDC secretary for mobilization, Ingrid Turinawe who contested but lost the party primaries to Muzanira said the struggle to reclaim their victory continues.

We have so far deducted one MP [Nathan Nabeta] from the 317 who voted to lift age limits, today we want to confirm to Ugandans that we are going to deduct another one in a by-election and they will be 315 and we will continue to deduct from them until we deduct their boss and his bean weevils, Turinawe said.

Panadol retains seat

Meanwhile, Iganga Municipality member of parliament, Peter Mugema Panadol is all smiles after the Court of Appeal confirmed him as the duly elected MP.

In a majority ruling of Justices, Steven Kavuma, Catherine Bamugemereire and Cheborion Barisaki, the court said the Jinja High court that had nullified the election of Mugema an independent but NRM leaning MP, erred when it reached a conclusion that Mugema had bribed people while campaigning.

Mugema was dragged to court by FDCs Abed Nasser Mudiobole. Speaking to reporters after the ruling, Mugema said the court had upheld the verdict reached by the people of Iganga Municipality.

bakerbatte@obsrevr.ugA row has emerged between parliament and journalists accredited to cover the House over convening press conferences for members of parliament.



Parliament's department of communications and public affairs (CPA) issued a warning today against journalists convening press conferences for members of parliament, saying they are overstepping their boundaries. According to a press statement, journalists accredited to parliament are not supposed to organise press conferences for MPs or any other group.

Parliament says all press conferences must be organised by its communications department

"We would like to remind you of your duties as journalists accredited to cover parliament, which do not include convening press conferences for MPs or any other group," the statement reads.The communication further notes that although the journalists may have personal relations with members of parliament, it doesn't mean they should exercise functions that are not meant to be carried out by them."We are aware that some MPs may approach you for the same but advise them to liaise with the department of communications and public affairs, which is mandated to organise such events having established venue, and other administrative issues. There have been times where you have caused clashes at the venues of such meetings,'' the statement reads further.Parliament warns that the actions of journalists could attract sanctions including but not limited to withdrawal of accreditation."You are also advised that for as long as these meetings take place in the precincts of parliament, you have no business organising such meetings."Isaac Imaka, the Uganda Parliamentary Press Association (UPPA) president, disagreed on the directive saying journalists' major role is information and they cannot stop attending to an MP who wants to address the press on urgent matters simply because of a notice by parliament on protocol.Imaka says MPs contact journalists because parliament has not done its work in as far as letting the MPs know of the procedure of addressing a press conference."An MP comes and approaches you, let's go to the members lounge for a press conference, you cannot resist, you need the story. And if they are saying journalists have organised events that clash, let them organise a specific room for press conferences, where journalists know and also MPs know that it is the place to go for a press conference,"Imaka suggested that a notice be written to all MPs and taken to their pigeon hole so that each MP can know the procedure of organising press conferences. He also said that if the issue parliament is trying to raise is that of ethical conduct like soliciting for money for organising press conferences, it should say that directly so that the matter is handled.Ibrahim Ssemujju Nganda, the MP for Kiira Municipality, says that parliament's department of communication is trying to be relevant. He says since MPs speak to journalists directly, it is unfair for parliament to stop journalists from organising press conferences."Journalists have every liberty to seek to be addressed by MPs, you cannot say it should only be parliament to organise press conferences, what if they are not around and an MP wants to speak on an urgent matter?" Ssemujju said.Often times some journalists have convened press conferences on behalf of members of parliament. This includes members of parliament asking journalists to convene the meeting for them, while in some cases journalists have advised MPs to hold a press conference in regards to a matter.French/West/Vaughan decks out in J. Peterman gear. The Raleigh firm will provide branding, creative development, media relations and lifestyle integration services for the direct-to-consumer retailer founded in 1987 by John Peterman. The Blue Ash (Ohio)-based company was reacquired by the Peterman family and key employees in 2001 following two-years of ownership by Paul Harris Stores. The Peterman name earned a place in pop culture during the 1990s on sitcom Seinfeld, when the character Elain Benes worked for the world traveling J. Peterman.

Zapwater Communications has expanded its relationship with Kimpton Hotels & Restaurants, adding the Kimpton Gray Hotel; Boleo, a rooftop restaurant and lounge; and the bar Vol. 39 to its client roster. The agency has also been retained to open the brands newest restaurant, Fisk & Co. in the Chicago Loop next month. Zapwater will provide media relations support, manage influencer relations and activations, as well as overseeing strategic events and partnerships for its new clients. Zapwaters relationship with Kimpton Hotels & Restaurants began in 2016.

Ink & Roses has added The Fragrance Foundation and Tuel Skin Care to its roster of beauty clients. The agency will handle PR and social media for The Fragrance Foundation, a not-for-profit organization whose membership of more than 90 fragrance companies includes Revlon, LOreal and Chanel. For Tuel Skin Care, a California-based company that produces natural and botanically based, 100% vegan skin care products, Ink & Roses will handle consumer and trade public relations. The agencys client list also includes companies in the consumer health and wellness, parenting, lifestyle and corporate communications sectors.22/03/2018 - The Multilateral Convention to Implement Tax Treaty Related Measures to Prevent Base Erosion and Profit Shifting (the "Convention) will enter into force on 1 July 2018, marking a significant step in international efforts to update the existing network of bilateral tax treaties and reduce opportunities for tax avoidance by multinational enterprises.

The entry into force of the Convention, just one year after the first signature, underlines the strong political commitment to a multilateral approach to fighting base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS) by multinational enterprises. The entry into force follows from the deposit of the fifth instrument of ratification by Slovenia on 22 March 2018. Earlier, the Republic of Austria (22 September 2017), the Isle of Man (19 October 2017), Jersey (15 December 2017), and Poland (23 January 2018) deposited their instruments with the OECD.

The entry into force of this Multilateral Convention marks a turning point in the implementation of OECD/G20 efforts to adapt international tax rules to the 21st Century, said OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurria. We are translating commitments into concrete legal provisions in more than 1,200 tax treaties worldwide. Thanks to this drive by the international community, we are ensuring that multinational companies pay their fair share when it comes to fulfilling tax obligations, like citizens do.

The entry into force of the Convention on 1 July 2018 will bring it into legal existence in these five jurisdictions. In accordance with the rules of the Convention, its contents will start to have effect for existing tax treaties as from 2019.

The Convention is the first multilateral treaty of its kind, allowing jurisdictions to transpose results from the OECD/G20 BEPS Project into their existing bilateral tax treaties, transforming the way tax treaties are modified. The Convention has been designed to strengthen existing tax treaties concluded among its parties without the need for burdensome and time-consuming bilateral renegotiations.





The OECD/G20 BEPS Project delivers solutions for governments to close the gaps in existing international rules that allow corporate profits to  disappear  or be artificially shifted to low or no tax environments, where companies have little or no economic activity. Revenue losses from BEPS are conservatively estimated at USD 100-240 billion annually, or the equivalent of 4-10% of global corporate income tax revenues. Over 110 countries and jurisdictions are currently working in the Inclusive Framework on BEPS to implement BEPS measures in their domestic legislation and bilateral tax treaties.





The Convention, negotiated by more than 100 countries and jurisdictions under a mandate from G20 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors, will modify existing bilateral tax treaties to swiftly implement the tax treaty measures developed in the course of the OECD/G20 BEPS Project. Treaty measures that are included in the Convention include those on hybrid mismatch arrangements, treaty abuse and permanent establishment. The Convention also strengthens provisions to resolve treaty disputes, including through mandatory binding arbitration, which has been taken up by 28 signatories.





The OECD is the depositary of the Convention and is supporting governments in the process of signature, ratification and implementation. The positions that each signatory and party under the Convention has adopted are available on the OECD website, together with an interactive database that provides insight into the likely impact on covered tax treaties. Also the text of the Convention, the explanatory statement and background information are available at: http://oe.cd/mli.





Media queries should be directed to Pascal Saint-Amans, Director of the OECD Centre for Tax Policy and Administration, (+33 6 26 30 49 23) or the OECD Media Office (+33 1 45 24 97 00).

Working with over 100 countries, the OECD is a global policy forum that promotes policies to improve the economic and social well-being of people around the world.As trucks get modified for trail use, factory parts become overtaxed or stretched to their limits. In the case of brake lines - or any fluid or transfer hose - this stretching can be quite literal. Being able to replace the original-equipment hoses with longer, stronger or flexible (and routable) lines will solve multiple problems, or prevent problems from occurring at all.

Custom or non-OE parts solve a lot of four-wheeling problems. However, while one-off, garage-built and fabricated buggies and trail toys live in this custom-fitted world, OE-based off-roaders need to stretch their perceptions to apply custom solutions to their factory-based challenges. For example, say you have a solid-axle crawler or an F-150 adventuremobile with a tent trying to make the most of an independent front suspension: you'll find that the OE brake-line options only reach so far.

Custom-fitted braided-steel brake lines can stop this shortcoming. An added benefit of proper braided lines is that replacing the soggy OE rubber brake lines (that squish due to age or abuse) will once again give you a firm brake pedal, because braided lines are much more resistant to bulging or distorting under pressure.

We went to San Diego-based JBA Speed Shop (the company you remember as JBA Racing) to math out right-sized lines and the necessary fittings to address our brake-line problems. JBA is well positioned to solve our shortage because the San Diego-based shop had recently bought the entire stock of Earl's Performance lines as well as the company's secondary brand, Red Horse. It's doubly reassuring to use an experienced speed shop, as they've done everything twice.

Our particular case of need was driven by Toyota's gen-three 4Runner: the uniquely dynamic rear axle turns a truck that would be somewhat restrained by its independent front suspension into a four-wheelin' freak (follow a third-gen 4Runner on-trail sometime and you'll understand - if that rear axle wasn't on a leash, it would wander away).





Point is, with just two inches of lift, the solitary center-mounted brake line supplying the rear axle's drums is at its limits. You can yank a few bolts and things dangle, or spend a few bucks with JBA for a braided line that adds necessary length and removes the risk of it being pinched, yanked or worn through.

We chatted at length with JBA's Alex Conger about the ins and outs of fitting braided lines and brake line fittings. The particulars for the 4Runner application were easy to connect: factory-length in front (as the independent suspension was more about flex at the inboard end), and about four inches more length in the rear (to accommodate extended axle movement). In the process, Conger offered a long line of other facts about the use of this style of hardware. We've listed the most important below.

- You're never going to need machine force automotive line applications: these lines and their fittings should be tightened with hand tools to about 10ft-lbs.

- Do not overtighten - brake and line fittings register noticeably when "in."

- Pay attention for binding threads.

- Pre-fabbed lines cost a few more bucks because the hose ends have already been installed.

- Pre-fabbed lines are usually the best first option, so long as the supplier has the fittings you need.

- The fittings on a pre-fabbed line are crimped, rather than the bulkier compression fitting of a custom-length line.

- Both crimped and compression-fitted lines seal really well. Neither needs any sealer at the threads - the seal is at the taper.

- Pay attention to the style of hose end on your factory brake lines - there are differences, such as an inverted nipple or a convex end. The convex end is common on imports.



Resources:

JBA Speed Shop

5675 Kearny Villa Road

San Diego, CA 92111

JBAbaspeedshop.com/ ([email protected])

888.522.5570.

Matthias Knab, Opalesque for New Managers:

LSL Partners, a new boutique funds management company, has launched in Sydney today. It will be constructing alternative investment products focusing on the Asian region for Australian and international investors. Based in Sydney, LSL Partners plan to launch a Hong Kong office in 2019.

Its Principals are Timothy Cheung, Kim Ivey, Chung Ip and David Gray. Timothy Cheung (CIO) and Chung Ip (Head of Research) met at the Wharton Business School and have joined ranks after successful international careers in hedge funds, private equity and asset management. They gained experience at top-tier financial firms including, JP Morgan, Colonial First State, Accel-KKR and Perpetual Investments. Both Timothy and Chung are of Chinese heritage and were educated in the West.

Kim Ivey, (CEO & Chairman), a pioneer of the Australian alternative investment industry states: "LSL Partners will offer investors innovative choices when investing in Asia. With the right people and a deep understanding of the region, there are many reasons why a skilled investment business can, and should be established in Australia, with links into Asia. LSL Partners is purposefully built to fill this need. Right now, many Australian and offshore investors are underexposed to Asian investment opportunities."

"We are bringing a strong team to work on these opportunities. Along with Tim......................

To view our full article Click hereSEND IN THE GOATS SEND IN THE GOATS  Glinda, one of several goats from Lets Goat Buffalo in Orchard Park from Sept. 8 through Sept. 10. The goats were at the Birdsong Preserve...

BOE meeting spirals out of control as mask debate rages on Tuesdays board of education meeting marked one of the most contentious in recent memory, as the issue of masking children during the school day was once again on the minds...

Art festival, health fitness business expo set for this weekend Two long-awaited gatherings will finally occur in Orchard Park this weekend as one mega event for the community to enjoy. The Orchard Park Chamber of Commerce will present the Orchard...A Clackamas County man was sentenced to more than 16 years in prison this week for sharing pornographic photos of two young girls he knew. He also admitted to sexually abusing one of them.

Robert A. Hattabaugh, 32, pleaded guilty in January in Clackamas County Circuit Court to using a child in a display of sexually explicit conduct and first-degree sexual abuse. He was sentenced Monday and ordered to register as a sex offender.

Hattabaugh uploaded more than 30 sexually explicit photos of the two girls, who were between the ages of 5 and 10 at the time, to an online forum in May 2016, according to a sentencing memorandum from the county district attorney's office. Police in Canada were monitoring the forum, traced the uploader's IP address to Hattabaugh and forwarded the information to the Clackamas County Sheriff's Office.

Authorities served a search warrant on Hattabaugh's home and discovered he had 900 child porn photos on his computer, with all but eight pictures being of the two girls, the memo said.

The girls weren't aware that he had taken photos of them, the memo said.

-- Everton Bailey Jr.

ebailey@oregonian.com

503-221-8343; @EvertonBaileyEster Petukhova

Ester Petukhova painted this image as a fresh take on Caravaggio's depiction of David having beheaded Goliath. Petukhova's willingness to portray herself as executioner is the sort of edgy and surprising work she sometimes creates. Her teacher pronounced it "beautifully executed."

By BETSY HAMMOND

The Oregonian/OregonLive

Ester Petukhova, a junior at David Douglas High, has painted her way to being named one of the nation's two best visual artists for her age. She won that honor in the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, the nation's highest profile arts competition.

A Russian immigrant, she is bilingual yet not fully in sync with the culture of either country, she says. So Petukhova paints to express herself using a visual language in which she is perfectly at home.

Shes become exceptionally good at it, in part by working extremely hard, says her high school art teacher, Maria Galati. Indeed, Petukhova says she devotes as least 40 hours a week to her craft year-round.

Ester is very driven to be excellent, to achieve high levels of craftsmanship, Galati said. She has really worked hard to teach herself high-level techniques. She is very motivated and doggedly driven.

Don't Edit

Ester Petukhova

This contour line drawing, "Kapstya," is one of four by Ester Petukhova that won national medals in the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards this year. Kapstya is a Russian slang term for money.

Many of her works are self-portraits. In the past year, she has moved into more general portraiture, Galati says. Her line drawings are elegant, the teacher says; her paintings are beautifully executed. Surrealism is a frequent element.

"She likes realism, Galati says. But her realism has feeling and emotion and beauty. Shes not just a technician. She puts a lot of emotion into her work and tells her story.

Petukhova remembers Russia only through pictures and stories. She wasnt yet 1 when her family left to join her grandmother and many aunts and uncles in the Portland area. They had been persecuted as Christians and fled to the United States as religious refugees.

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Phoenix Veunnasack

Ester Petukhova preps a canvas with primer in a hallway of David Douglas High School in east Portland.

She grew up in a tight-knit Russian and Ukrainian community on Portland's eastside. As a child, she says, she was never invited to an American-style birthday party. She's never been on a sleepover. "For the most part, a lot of the kids I grew up with were other Russian or Ukrainain immigrant children. We didn't fit in, didn't speak the language as well. So we created good memories together and helped each other grow up."

She has found her place at David Douglas High, where she is friendly with a diverse set of classmates. She tells some of their stories as well as her own through her art.

I try to not only talk about my own experiences but experiences of my friends. I do pay a lot of attention to things that go on in our society. I think about ways I can create art that talks about it.

Don't Edit

Ester Petukhova

This portrait, "Aditi," won a national gold medal in painting and sealed Ester Petukhova's status as the nation's top painter among high school juniors and seniors.

Her most highly decorated work at this years national contest, the one that sealed her status as 2018s top painter among high school juniors and seniors, is a portrait. Titled Aditi after its subject, it portrays a young Indian woman she met last summer. Petukhova drew on the elements of a classic Renaissance portrait -- a subject of great wealth or power, lavish clothes and jewels, a rich background -- and turned them inside out. She chose a young woman of color for the formal, royal treatment, and made whiteness, not ornate furnishings, the background.

I wanted to capture the beauty and elegance that Aditi has. Her body is relaxed, with her hands resting and one foot over the other. But shes in a pose of power, with her jaw tilted up. With the eye contact, shes staring at you in a way that feels almost confrontational.

Petukhova had won recognition before Scholastic contest judges named her the best-in-grade visual artist, along with Lilah Krugman, a junior who attends a private school in Atlanta.

Don't Edit

Ester Petukhova

This painting, "Hands of Hope," was inspired by the support artist Ester Petukhova got from her friends at a rough juncture. "They were there to help me during a time of need."

Although Petukhova learned what she knows from library books and never took a formal art class until she reached high school, she is the only person that David Douglas High has allowed to take Advanced Placement drawing as a sophomore. Even at that age, she managed to earn a coveted top rating for her end-of-the-year portfolio from the judges at the College Board. Officials there went on to use a selection of her work as the example they provide to students and teachers nationwide to illustrate the very highest level of achievement for an interrelated set of drawings.

Last summer, Petukhova was one of 54 students worldwide chosen to take part in an intensive four-week summer art institute run by New York University. She gobbled up the lessons on art history, art theory and art techniques. Her day-long visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art left an indelible impression.

The second I stepped on the grounds, I started crying because it was so beautiful. It amped up my fire even more, she said. There is so much difference between reading about these works in textbooks versus getting to see them in real life. To get to see the strokes and textures up close -- you feel that movement.

She was selected to attend another summer art program at the Rhode Island School of Design this year. But she was not awarded a full scholarship, so she is uncertain whether she will be able to take part, she said.

Don't Edit

Don't Edit

Ester Petukhova

This painting, "Ties," is among the many self portraits the hard-working teen artist has created. It won a silver medal in this year's national art competition.

In addition to her gold medal for her Aditi portrait, Petukhova won silver medals for three other paintings: two self-portraits and a painting that shows her hands surrounded by the hands of friends who helped her through a tough time. She was one of just 14 students nationwide -- including digital artist Sarina Carlaw of Southridge High in Beaverton -- who won at least four honors in the national art and writing contest this year.

In addition to creating art of her own, Petukhova tries hard to show other students the way, including in a series of YouTube videos on her channel, "From one young artist to the next." She shares her many, many works, some still in progress, on her Instagram account.

Ultimately her secret to success, she says, is going 120 percent and working and working and working. You cant just do it partially.

-- Betsy Hammond

betsyhammond@oregonian.com

@chalkupNew Census numbers suggests the Portland area's population boom could be losing steam.

The metro area grew by just over 30,000 residents in the year that ended July 1, according to the Census Bureau. That's a population increase of about 1.2 percent, or 578 people a week -- the region's slowest growth since 2013.

That put the metro population at 2.45 million as of July 1. Portland remains the nation's 25th largest metro area, a position it has held since 2012.

The slowdown isn't unexpected. In fact, demographers say it was inevitable after three years of exceptionally strong population growth.

"It's still growing very fast, just not as fast as it was in 2015 and 2016," said Nick Chun, who coordinates forecasts at Portland State University's Population Research Center. "It's really difficult to describe how abnormal a lot of the growth is that these areas saw in those years."

The Portland metro added nearly 40,000 people each year in 2015 and 2016, according to the Census Bureau.

As the state's economy boomed in the recovery from the Great Recession, new jobs lured new residents to the state. The economy continues to grow, but more slowly, and migration has followed suit.

"We're on our way to transitioning down to something more sustainable," said Josh Lehner, a state economist. "So much of the last seven to eight years has been about putting people from the recession back to work, and we've done that. Now, with the economy starting to taper, we're expecting population growth to taper."

The slower population influx also tracks with Portland's housing market. The construction of new apartment buildings looks to be on the decline, and rents -- particularly at the high end -- have plateaued.

The median price to buy a home, meanwhile, continues to rise at rates higher than historical averages, but that growth has slowed, too.

Lehner said it will be important for officials to track the reasons for the slowdown.

"If it's about housing affordability choking off some of our growth because people can't afford to move here, then it's a problem," he said. "If we're not bringing in the influx of young people we always do, that's also a cause for concern.

Natural growth -- the population increase attributable to having more births than deaths -- has slowed in Oregon and Portland as the state's population ages. That means the state will be more reliant on new arrivals to fill out its workforce.

BEND, PRINEVILLE REMAIN BOOMTOWNS

The Bend-Redmond metro area remains one of the nation's fastest-growing, and the growth is also spilling over into nearby Prineville.

The Bend area gained 6,200 residents in a year, an increase of 3.4 percent. That's also slower than the year prior, but it's still the fourth-fastest-growing metropolitan area in U.S. on a percentage basis. The area's population now sits at 186,875.

Prineville, meanwhile, is the fourth-fastest-growing among small urban areas, with a 3.5 percent increase in population. The approximately 800 new residents bring the area's population to 23,123.

Even though the Crook County seat has lost jobs and significant employers in recent years, its seen a rise in employed residents.

"They're seeing the community become more of -- and this is going to sound like a bad word to some rural folks -- a bedroom community for places like Bend and Redmond," said Damon Runberg, the regional economist for the state's employment department.

Bend's economy, meanwhile, has grown across virtually every sector, Runberg said. The unemployment rate is historically low, and businesses are having a hard time finding employees.

"The population growth is kind of a welcome relief," Runberg said.

-- Elliot Njus

enjus@oregonian.com

503-294-5034

@enjusWhen the still-stately Queen Anne mansion was completed in 1885, Portland Heights was a new status address. The wealthy property owner, attorney Horace Brown Nicholas, wanted a trophy home, so he commissioned a wood-framed house with a three-story brick chimney that shoots through the pointy roof.

Back then, gas lamps and five fireplaces helped illuminate rooms at night. During the day, heavy drapes were occasionally pulled back to let in the sunshine.

A pyramid-shaped observation tower granted views of the burgeoning downtown. The tower was replaced with a wraparound porch during the Roaring Twenties.

A lot else has changed in 133 years, but the Nicholas-Lang House at 2030 SW Vista Ave., considered the oldest mansion to survive in Portland Heights, still causes passersby to pause, look at the rising white house wrapped in clapboard and search for clues: What's the story of this Victorian-era landmark?

Nicholas, whose grandmother was Thomas Jefferson's niece, paid $99.50 in gold coins in 1878 for what amounted to 15 blocks of land in Carter's Addition. According to historic documents, he lost the house during the financial panic of 1893. At the time, the property with the mansion was valued at $15,310.

Eventually, Isadore Lang, who made his fortune as a wholesale grocer, moved into the mansion and members of his family lived there for half a century.

The house, described as a Queen Anne in the decorative Eastlake style with Tudor and Gothic features added to the mix, was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979.

The interior of the 8,950-square-foot mansion has been updated without disturbing the old details.

Open the oak front doors to find a grand staircase surrounded by paneling and other expensive millwork. Beyond it is a living room with elaborate moldings and inlaid hardwood floors. This room leads to the wraparound sunroom.

A custom chandelier hangs in the formal dining room. Light also comes in through the bay window. Other rooms have original leaded-glass windows.

Wander into the new kitchen, designed by Jessica Helgerson, and see a sleek, family-friendly banquette and a large island.

Modern conveniences include Miele appliances and a French Lacanche Cluny range. Calacatta marble-like quartz slab with dramatic gray veins was installed as a backsplash and on counters. A silver tin ceiling connects the kitchen to its Victorian past.

The master bathroom is completely original. Two other full bathrooms and one powder room have up-to-date finishes. But you'll find period sinks and other elements, too.

The master suite and two bedrooms are on the second floor, along with a laundry room. Three more bedrooms are on the top floor.

The basement is unfinished but could become a media room, guest quarters or "whatever you desire," say Christy MacColl and Carrie Gross of Windermere Realty Trust, who listed the 0.32-acre property for sale at $2.65 million.

-- Janet Eastman



jeastman@oregonian.com

503-799-8739

@janeteastman



When Design Week Portland is hosting hundreds of free or low-cost events spotlighting design across all disciplines April 14-21, the world's most prestigious furniture fair, Salone del Mobile, will be going on in Milan, Italy. Portland design writer Damon Johnstun recaps some of the people he interviewed at the 2017 Milan fair. Watch for his coverage of furniture, lighting and kitchen design unveiled at this year's fair.

Quietly elegant designs



On a hectic day during Milan Design week 2017, I met with soft-spoken Jeannette Altherr, a successful designer best known for office chairs by Arper and as one of the founders of Lievore Altherr Molina and Lievore Altherr.

There is a quietness about Altherr's work, just as there is a quietness about her. She is calm despite being in the middle of the frenzy of showing at the world's most important furniture fair.

Her studio first introduced the Catifa chair in Milan in 2000. Since then, the team continues to design hits such as the residential Saya chair in 2012 and workspace Kinesit chair in 2014.

At the Arper booth in 2017, she revealed the Cila chair, which was inspired by the image of cloth draped on a body, as well as the Art Deco-influenced Arcos chairs and the Arcos Two Seats, with an aluminum base and invitingly simple cushions.

Her studio's display also included small plywood Ply tables (2013), the modular Arper Zinta lounge (2014) and the oak-top Meety Soap Shaped table (2016).

She was ahead of the unexpected trend by consumers to use contract furniture for residential projects, and vice versa. She attributes this to the changing way we work.

"Now an office can be anywhere you have a phone or a laptop," she said. "Offices are becoming softer with more open spaces. You sit where you can or you work from your home. As a result, the commercial spaces are not quite like home but very comfortable."

As the workplace has changed, less storage is needed. Tables have become slimmer.

"Gigantic, bulky office chairs started to look like dinosaurs," she said. "With the Kinesit chair, we wanted to do something more lightweight and friendlier while still responding to the (stringent) requirements for office chairs."

She then dispelled the rumor that her studio had developed the spare, but attractive and functional Kinesit aluminum chair for Apple. "It was not true, but it was interesting that people understood the shared [design ideas] so quickly," she said.

Born in Heidelberg, Germany in 1965, she says she found her country's design curriculum too abstract and conceptual, and lacking in sensuality. She considered moving to Italy, but felt there was little opportunity for her due to the abundance of great designers already working there.

When she heard the 1992 Summer Olympic Games would being staged in Barcelona, Altherr saw the Catalonia capital, renown for its art and architecture, as a magnet for design. Despite the language barrier, she moved there and felt at home immediately. The province resonated with her, she said, and the holistic education she received in the studio allowed her to think of every aspect of her projects.

In 1991, she founded Lievore Altherr Molina with Argentina architect Alberto Lievore and Spanish industrial designer Manel Molina. After many years together, Molina amicably split from the others to form his own company. The remaining partners renamed the firm Lievore Altherr.

In 1998, Claudio Feltrin, owner of then relatively unknown Italian furniture company Arper, met with Altherr and her team. Arper had a unique double expertise, in plastic, which was considered a low-budget method of producing furniture, and leather, a high-budget material.

The two companies' work evoked the intimacy and honesty of Scandinavian design and the collaborations were very successful. The structure of the seats is plastic and the covering is oftentimes leather.

The first big hit, Catifa chair, was introduced in Milan in 2000. Despite their tiny booth at Salone del Mobile, the team received lots of attention.

Architects responded to the products Lievore Altherr Molina designed because, as Altherr said, "although they are elegant, they are not loud, distracting from the whole."

She explains their work is a synthesis of essentials, not minimalistic. Their goal is to abstract the ideas while maintaining softness. And she wants the pieces to hold "a conversation."

In addition to designs for office furniture, her studio wanted to create a residential, wood chair that fit Arper's ideals of advance technology and lightness. This resulted in 2012 was the Saya chair, which has an Asian quality to its form.

When Altherr was looking at images from the first photo shoot, she was surprised the shape appeared much stronger than they intended. They had worked on the prototype in their office, but outside that context, the chair came across as very powerful.

"It gives such a different feel compared to Catifa chair," she said. Saya "is all about the iconic shape, while the Catifa is integrating, which allows play with other aspects of the chair, like the base, the finish or the color. That is why you need so many different kinds of chairs."

When deciding on how to work on projects within the office, Altherr describes a non-hierarchical environment. "The one who has the idea might start it. Language might be a deciding factor. We also understand our strengths and it flows from table to table," she said.

The use of color is integrated into the design. Altherr observed that there is still a tendency to reject color, but she thinks women are less afraid to use color in projects. She considers the desire to show off technology as more of a male characteristic. "I don't think I am scandalizing anyone with my observation," Altherr said.

In the past, people used to think about design as a discipline that only represents an ideology, but didn't take gender and alternative cultures into consideration. Globalization and a higher percentage of women in the field have changed the way we perceive objects and intentions.

For Altherr, design is about form giving, but it's also about asking questions. It is about questioning things we take for granted. She believes that design will become more interesting and important as it opens up to other perspectives.

As a successful woman in a heavily male-dominated field, she voiced concerns about the glass ceiling. "Women can grow to a certain level during the prime of their careers, [but] many pressures can derail it if you want a family," she said. "Even though it never stopped me, it must be addressed."

-- Damon JohnstunA former shift manager at a small family-run pizza chain is accused of stalking a co-worker, showing up at her house and sending her more than 100 text messages over three days, including one that read, "I'm sorry for texting you over and over like a crazy person.''

The case has landed in federal court because a protective order in state court didn't keep Jonathan Mann from harassing her, her father and husband for more than two years. The case is the rare stalking allegation to land in federal court.

At one point, he messaged her husband: "You have no idea what I am capable of," according to court documents.

Jonathan L. Mann

The federal charge alleges Mann, 32, used electronic communications to intimidate the three from Sept. 17, 2015 to Feb. 8, 2017. Mann was ordered Tuesday to remain in custody because of the nature of the allegations, his mental health issues and prior failures to abide by a state stalking protective order, according to court documents.

FBI Special Agent Chad Lapp said Mann was 30 when he started "aggressively pursuing'' a co-worker at Pappy's Pizzeria in Redmond, who was then 19, in September 2015.

That month, the 19-year-old's father called Redmond police to report that Mann had shown up at his home and that Mann was calling and texting his daughter and had gone to her high school volleyball games.

The father made it clear to Mann that his daughter didn't want any contact with him, according to court records.

But Mann continued to show up at the young woman's new place of work and kept contacting her via text messages and Facebook, court documents say. From Sept. 17, 2015, to Sept. 20, 2015, Mann sent her more than 100 texts. She sought a stalking protective order, and Mann was charged in state court with violating a stalking order. He was sentenced to two years probation after pleading no contest to the charge in April 2016.

By February 2017, Mann began sending harassing messages to the woman and a friend and veiled threats to her husband and father, investigators allege. In some of those messages, Mann said he'd die protecting the woman, according to court records.

Redmond police arrested Mann on 22 counts of telephonic harassment and violating a stalking protective order. He was sent to the Oregon State Hospital and found unable to assist in his defense due to a "delusional disorder,'' court records show. On Aug. 10, a judge granted a motion by Mann's defense lawyer to dismiss the case, finding no substantial probability that Mann would regain the capacity to stand trial in the foreseeable future. Mann was released from custody.

In late 2017 and early this year, Mann went to the husband's work and also confronted him at a gas station in Redmond, according to an FBI agent.

Mann told a Redmond police officer that he had pictures of the woman all over his apartment and that he knew he was supposed to be with her, according to the federal complaint.

Mann faced new state charges this year of violating a stalking protective in Deschutes County Circuit Court, but those charges were dismissed this month after the FBI took over the case.

Mann is now in custody in the Lane County jail on a federal hold. A federal stalking conviction can lead to a prison sentence of at least one to five years.

-- Maxine Bernstein

mbernstein@oregonian.com

503-221-8212

@maxoregonianThe former U.S. attorney for Oregon will be barred from practicing law for 90 days for lying about a sexual relationship with a lawyer in her office.

The Oregon Supreme Court on Thursday finalized the settlement agreement between Amanda Marshall and the Oregon State Bar, bringing to an end a high-profile and drawn-out episode that began in 2015.

Under the agreement, Marshall, now in private practice in McMinnville, will serve 90 days of a 1-year suspension of her law license. She is required to complete a two-year probation period as well.

Marshall acknowledged violating a single rule of professional conduct involving dishonesty and misrepresentation. In an initial conversation with a federal official, she denied having sex with the subordinate attorney.

We are pleased to finally have this chapter behind us, said Marshalls lawyer, Allison Martin Rhodes.

The agreement issued by the bar Thursday notes multiple instances of discipline involving lawyers who were dishonest. Those sanctions ranged from 60 days to two years.

The professional standards agency opened an investigation in 2016 after the U.S. Department of Justice's inspector general found Marshall had engaged in a yearlong "intimate and personal" relationship with an underling.

The inspector general said Marshall violated sexual harassment laws, lied to investigators and tried to block the investigation.

The Inspector General's Office opened its investigation of Marshall in March 2015. She took a leave of absence that month, citing health reasons that included post-traumatic stress disorder. She officially resigned on May 15, 2015, amid the internal review.

-- Noelle Crombie

503-276-7184

@noellecrombieA Warrenton woman was arrested after police say she killed her Chihuahua by cooking it in an oven.

Noelle Georgia Moor, 28, faces first-degree animal abuse charges in the 7-year-old dog's death, Clatsop County court records show.

An officer found the deceased pet inside Moore's stove Tuesday, records show.

"The smell of burnt hair and flesh was still in the air," a probable cause affidavit reads. A person close to Moor alerted authorities to the incident.

Moor, who was detained at Columbia Memorial Hospital, told police she had placed the pet in the oven because she believed her ex-boyfriend was inside it, according to court records.

Mental health professionals have had multiple contacts with Moor in the past month, The Daily Astorian reported.

A woman claiming to be the suspect's sister said in a comment on the newspaper's website that Moor suffered from schizophrenia.

-- Shane Dixon Kavanaugh

skavanaugh@oregonian.com

503-294-7632 II @shanedkavanaughUPDATED Friday, March 23: Authorities ask for help finding escaped Multnomah County inmate

***

Scott M. Smith (MCSO)

A Multnomah County inmate is on the loose.

Scott M. Smith stole an Oregon Department of Transportation truck while working as part of a cleanup crew Thursday in Northeast Portland, according to the county Sheriff's Office. The truck "was reportedly left unlocked and running at the time of the theft," the agency said.

Hours later, he's still at large.

Smith, a 25-year-old Portland resident, is accused of stealing the truck from the 9400 block of Hancock Drive early Thursday afternoon, the Multnomah County Sheriff's Office said in a news release. Authorities found the truck, and they searched a home on Northeast 52nd Avenue, but they didn't find him, the agency said.

He was last seen wearing a green jacket, tan Carhartt pants and black work boots, according to the Sheriff's Office. He's 6-foot-1 and 150 lbs., and he has brown hair and blue eyes. He has tattoos, including some on his neck.

Records show Smith was booked into Multnomah County custody in January. The Sheriff's Office said he was serving a 90-day parole violation sanction in an identity theft case.

His projected release date is listed in jail records as April 21.

The sheriff's office advises anyone who sees Smith or has information about his location to call 911. People shouldn't approach him, the agency said.

 The Oregonian/OregonLiveUPDATE: It was a sixth-grader, police say, and there's no credible threat.

An extra police officer will be stationed at a Northwest Portland elementary school Thursday after officials were informed Wednesday that the school had been labeled a "slaughterhouse" on Google Maps.

The principal of Forest Park Elementary School was told of the posting sometime Wednesday, then told a school resource officer and contacted Portland Public Schools security, said Dave Northfield, a school district spokesman.

@Oregonian have you seen this? If you google my daughter's school on your cell, look at the category some sick, jerk added to the category! pic.twitter.com/Gp5XpbMtio  Jagger  (@JaggerMafia) March 22, 2018

He said Portland police were told to see if they could determine how the label ended up as part of the school's Google search result. The label wasn't showing up as of Wednesday evening.

The second police officer will be at the school as a precaution, according to Northfield.

-- Everton Bailey Jr.

ebailey@oregonian.com

503-221-8343; @EvertonBaileyWASHINGTON -- Congressional leaders finalized a sweeping $1.3 trillion budget bill Wednesday that substantially boosts military and domestic spending but leaves behind young immigrant "Dreamers," deprives President Donald Trump some of his border wall money and takes only incremental steps to address gun violence.

As negotiators stumbled toward an end-of-the-week deadline to fund the government or face a federal shutdown, House Speaker Paul Ryan dashed to the White House amid concerns Trump's support was wavering. The White House later said the president backed the legislation, even as some conservative Republicans balked at the size of the spending increases and the rush to pass the bill.

Talks continued into Wednesday evening before the 2,232-page text was finally released.

"No bill of this size is perfect," Ryan said. "But this legislation addresses important priorities and makes us stronger at home and abroad."

Leaders still hoped to start voting as soon as Thursday. A stopgap measure may be needed to ensure federal offices aren't hit with a partial shutdown at midnight Friday when funding for the government expires.

Negotiators have been working for days -- and nights -- on details of the bill, which is widely viewed as the last major piece of legislation likely to move through Congress in this election year. Lawmakers in both parties sought to attach their top priorities.

Two of the biggest remaining issues had been border wall funds and a legislative response to gun violence after the clamor for action following recent school shootings, including the one in Parkland, Florida.

On guns, leaders tentatively agreed to tuck in bipartisan provisions to bolster school safety funds and improve compliance with the criminal background check system for firearm purchases. The bill states that the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention can do research on gun violence, though not advocacy, an idea Democrats pushed.

But there was no resolution for Dreamers, the young immigrants who have been living in the United States illegally since childhood, but whose deportation protections are being challenged in court after Trump tried to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA.

Democrats temporarily shut down the government earlier this year as they fought for that protection. But the issue only rose to a discussion item when Trump made a late-hour push for a deal in exchange for $25 billion in border wall funds.

Instead, Trump is now poised to win $1.6 billion for barriers along the border, but none of it for the new prototypes he recently visited in California. Less than half the nearly 95 miles of border construction, including levees along the Rio Grande in Texas, would be for new barriers, with the rest for repair of existing segments.

In one win for immigrant advocates, negotiators rejected Trump's plans to hire hundreds of new Border Patrol and immigration enforcement agents.

"We are disappointed that we did not reach agreement on Dreamer protections that were worthy of these patriotic young people," said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.

The emerging plan removes a much-debated earmark protecting money for a rail tunnel under the Hudson River. The item was a top priority of Trump's most powerful Democratic rival, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, but Trump vowed to veto the bill over the earmark. Under the legislation, the project would remain eligible for funding, however, and a Schumer aide said it was likely to win well more than half of the $900 million sought for the project this year.

The core purpose of the bill is to increase spending for military and domestic programs that have been sharply squeezed under a 2011 agreement that was supposed to cap spending. It gives Trump a huge budget increase for the military, while Democrats scored wins on infrastructure and other domestic programs that they failed to get under President Barack Obama.

That largesse has drawn opposition from some fiscal conservatives and could make passage a potentially tricky process.

Last month, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul triggered a brief government shutdown over his objections to the deficit spending. On Wednesday, he tweeted his opposition to the emerging legislation, known as an "omnibus."

"It's a good thing we have Republican control of Congress or the Democrats might bust the budget caps, fund planned parenthood and Obamacare, and sneak gun control without due process into an Omni ... wait, what?" Paul tweeted.

Most essential was support from Trump, who has been known to threaten to veto legislation even when his team is involved in the negotiations.

Word of Trump's discontent sent Ryan to the White House, where he was invited to a face-to-face with the president, with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on the phone.

White House aides said the president's support was never in doubt, but one senior White House official said the president was concerned that details of the package weren't being presented as well as they could be, both to members of Congress and the public.

The group discussed how they could better sell the package, said the official, who was granted anonymity to discuss the private conversation.

"The president and the leaders discussed their support for the bill," said White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, adding that it would fund Trump priorities such as wall construction, add money to combat the opioid crisis and provide new infrastructure spending.

Both parties touted $4.6 billion in total funding to fight the nation's opioid addiction epidemic, a $3 billion increase. More than $2 billion would go to strengthen school safety through grants for training, security measures and treatment for the mentally ill. Medical research at the National Institutes of Health, a longstanding bipartisan priority, would receive a record $3 billion increase to $37 billion. Funding was also included for election security ahead of the 2018 midterms.

Child care and development block grants would receive a huge $2.4 billion increase to $5.2 billion. And an Obama-era transportation grant program known as TIGER would see its budget tripled to $1.5 billion. Head Start for preschoolers would get a $610 million boost, while an additional $2.4 billion would go for child care grants.

--By Andrew Taylor and Lisa MascaroHere's a tip for the planners among us: If you have dinner reservations or theater tickets for Sept. 22, 2135 (it's a Thursday), now might be a good time to scuttle them.

Sometime the day before, scientists say, there is a small chance that an asteroid the size of the Empire State Building will smack into Earth, destroying a lot of living things on the planet.

But don't worry. NASA has got you covered.

Forward-thinking astrophysicists and people who specialize in blowing things up with nuclear weapons have come up with a plan, which they swear was not drawn up by Bruce Willis.

If the asteroid - it is named Bennu - decides to go rogue, they could send a nearly nine-ton "bulk impactor" to push it out of Earth's orbit. Or, more likely, they would gently nudge it out of its apocalyptic path using a nuclear device.

The scheme is called the Hypervelocity Asteroid Mitigation Mission for Emergency Response. Or, for people who love acronyms and despise subtlety: HAMMER.

Brent Barbee, the NASA aerospace engineer who helped author the study, insists that it is all theoretical. (His exact words: "Please don't print that an asteroid is going to crash into Earth in The Washington Post.")

But using granular detail and eye-glazing amounts of math, the researchers believe they have a viable solution to a world-rattling what-if question.

There is, of course, no massive mission to build a craft capable of playing a celestial game of space pool. The odds of Bennu actually hitting us are about 1 in 2,700. And the asteroid is not big enough to send us the way of the dinosaurs.

But that doesn't mean there is no practical application, Barbee told The Post.

"We're doing these design studies to prepare ourselves, so if we do find a threatening object, we're better prepared to deal with it," he said.

Things from space smack into Earth all the time. Most of them are not existential threats, but some are large enough to cause injury or property damage. Generating a working framework to avoid an Earth impact could save lives.

Until recently, the framework has basically been luck.

In 1908, what many believe to be an asteroid crashed into an area near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River in Siberia, according to the BBC. It struck with a force 185 times as powerful as the Hiroshima atomic bomb, flattened 80 million trees and reduced hundreds of reindeer to charred carcasses.

A century later in 2013, a 10-ton, 49-foot-wide meteor streaked over Russia's Ural Mountains at hypersonic speeds, shattering windows and injuring 1,100 people, Fox News reported. (Most were injured by shattered glass as they watched the meteor cross the daytime sky). The meteor broke up before it hit the ground but still left scars in nearby ice that were the length of a bus.

The only reason more people weren't killed or injured, Barbee told The Post, is because the objects struck places where there weren't many people.

NASA has a Planetary Defense Coordination Office that tries to detect dangerous asteroids and comets close to Earth's orbit.

There are more of these things than many people think, Barbee said. Researchers detect about 1,000 new objects each year; 10,000 extraterrestrial objects beelining for Earth could still be unaccounted for.

The defense coordination office also comes up with plans for deflecting or destroying discovered objects.

What Asteroid Bennu provides, besides pretty good fodder for a doomsday cult, is an opportunity for scientists to test those theories.

Bennu is, the report says, a "well-studied roughly spherical body" that gives researchers a good target for their calculations - data points to punch into the algorithm. They can see Bennu with telescopes and track the impact its gravity has on other celestial objects.

Soon we will know more. NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft has been en route to Bennu for two years, according to the agency. It contains instruments that "will map Bennu and establish the composition of the asteroid, including the distribution of the elements, minerals and organic materials."

It will also scrape off a 2.1-ounce sample and bring it back to Earth, NASA says.

If the odds are not in Earth's favor, and Bennu becomes a bigger threat, OSIRIS-REx could be followed by a beefier craft that would break off a lot more.

-- The Washington PostThe way firefighting in the west is funded will change dramatically following the introduction of a $1.3 trillion federal spending plan that includes a shift in the way the U.S. Forest Service spends its money.

Currently, the U.S. Forest Service and other firefighting agencies have to divert funds from other programs when costs exceed their budgets. The workaround, known as "fire borrowing," steals money from projects that include fire prevention, creating a vicious cycle that only prompts larger and more destructive fires down the road.

In 1995, the forest service spent just 16 percent of its budget on fire supression. That number ballooned to 56 percent in 2017 and is projected to account for 67 percent by 2021, agency officials said at a recent meeting of foresters, forestry scientists and wildfire experts in Portland.

The bill passed Wednesday, known as the Wildfire Disaster Funding Act, creates an emergency fund that kicks in when the roughly $1.4 billion budgeted for fighting fires across the country is tapped. The additional money, up to $2.15 billion, will come from an emergency fund, similar to the way recovery efforts for other natural disasters, like hurricanes and floods, are paid for.

"After years and years of pushing and prodding and pulling, common sense is now emerging on fire management policy," said Sen. Ron Wyden, who co-authored the bill with Sen. Mike Crapo, a Republican from Idaho.

In 2017, Congress appropriated roughly $1.8 billion for fire suppression across federal agencies, including the forest service, the Bureau of Land Management and the National Park Service, among other agencies. Last year, as fires scorched more than 10 million acres nationwide, suppression efforts cost more than $2.9 billion and the forest service was forced to "borrow" $526 million.

The difficult situation facing western states, as forests sit stacked with dry fuel waiting for a spark, did not come about overnight.

A problem long in the making

The spring and summer of 1910 were exceptionally dry across the west and August of that year brought searing temps to the northern Rocky Mountains. By the middle of the month, up to 3,000 fires were burning across the northern west, started by sparks thrown from locomotives, lightning and prescribed burns that got out of control.

On the night of Aug. 20, though, a cold front blew in and gale-force winds whipped those numerous small fires into one or two great infernos that straddled the Idaho and Montana borders.

The fire, which would come to be known as the "Big Blowup" or the "Big Burn," would only stay lit for two days before steady rain came in to squelch the flames, but in that time 87 people died and at least seven towns were completely destroyed. With more than 3 million acres scorched, it remains one of the largest wildfires in U.S. history.

While Oregon was spared any destruction on that scale, large fires burned that summer in the Wallowas, on the eastern flank of Mount Hood, in the Umpqua National Forest and on Huckleberry Mountain, just west of Crater Lake.

The U.S. Forest Service was at a reckoning point. At just five years old, the agency was already on the verge of cancellation before the fires of 1910. The service was given a new directive: to fight each and every fire that sparked anywhere in the west. Ferdinand Silcox, one of the men who fought the Big Blowup, became chief of the Forest Service and, during his tenure in the 1930s, he promoted the "10 a.m. rule," which stated that fires should be contained by 10 a.m. the day following their initial report.

What followed was decades of aggressive fire suppression leaving forests without the naturally-occuring burns that cleared out dry fuels and underbrush. Left unburnt, many forests across the western United States now look as they never have before, brimming with fuel that has accumulated, in some spots, for more than 100 years.

The result has been wildfires without precedent

"These aren't your grandfather's fires," Wyden said. "We never thought we would see a fire that could leap the Columbia River."

A path forward

Wyden, along with Crapo, first introduced a bill to fix wildfire funding in 2013, but the legislation never gained traction for a variety of reasons, including a lack of support from the executive branch.

Across the country, firefighting agencies spent more than $2.9 billion on fire suppression in 2017, the most-expensive year on record. In Oregon, the Eagle Creek Fire in the Columbia River Gorge and the Chetco Bar Fire on the southern coast cost hundreds of millions to fight.

Wyden credited support for the bill from Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue with getting Wednesday's bill over the finish line.

The bill won't come into effect until 2020, but when it does it will include forest management fixes beyond funding.

The bill will also expand "Good Neighbor Authority," which allows states to enter into cooperative agreements across borders to restore watersheds and remove buildup of hazardous fuels on federal land. It will extend stewardship contracting, in which both environmental advocates and timber interests are consulted in thinning of overgrown forests.

The bill reduces the cost of trimming vegetation near power lines by lowering the minimum amount of insurance utilities must carry. It will also streamline the process of removing fuel buildup around rural communities in the so-called wildland-urban interface, by exempting some projects from environmental review.

Randi Spivak, public lands director at the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental advocacy group, saw the bill as an entry point for the timber industry to begin clear cutting on federal lands.

"This is a bad deal for national forests and a boon for the timber industry," Spivak said in an email, "These forest riders will allow clear cutting, harm wildlife and weaken environmental laws. Swaths of forests will be logged without regard for environmental laws or public input. All while allowing fire suppression costs to escalate but doing little to help make communities safer."

What's been most frustrating, Sen. Jeff Merkley told The Oregonian/OregonLive, was watching these devastating fires ravage communities, knowing that the efforts to put the blazes out are taking funds away from preventing them from occurring in the first place.

"It has been extremely disturbing," he said. But with the passage of the new bill "when you have a bad fire year, you won't have the forest service shutting down fire prevention efforts."

-- Kale Williams

kwilliams@oregonian.com

503-294-4048Recard to Supply Klippans Bruk with New Tissue Machine in Sweden

Klippans Bruk in Sweden is a leading producer of deep-colored tissue base paper reels, which are purchased by tissue converters primarily for the production of napkins.

March 22, 2018 - Recard announced that it will supply a new 30,000 metric tons per year tissue machine to Klippans Bruk in Sweden. The Klippan mill is a leading producer of deep-colored tissue base paper reels, which are purchased by tissue converters primarily for the production of napkins.

Klippans has earmarked EUR 15 million for the machine project, which will quadruple the mill's production capacity.

The machine will have a deckle size of 3200 mm, produce grammages between 14 and 26 gsm and an operating speed of 1700 mpm. The rewinder will be equipped with 4 backstands.

Start-up of the new machine is scheduled for summer 2019, and Klippan said it plans to increase the mill's staff by about 20-25 employees.

Based in Italy, Recard specializes in the custom design and manufacturing of equipment and machines for the tissue paper industry. To learn more, please visit: www.recard.it .

SOURCE: Recard and Klippans Bruk ABLeading up to the April 27th release of the Marvel film Avengers: Infinity War, UK magazine Empire has released a series of six collective covers featuring superheroes from the Marvel Universe. One particular cover featured Elizabeth Olsen who plays Scarlet Witch, Benedict Cumberbatch who plays Doctor Strange, Dave Bautista who plays Drax in Guardians of the Galaxy, and Danai Gurira who plays Okoye in Black Panther.

Olsen was less than happy with the way her image had been digitally altered on the cover. She posted a picture of the cover on Instagram with the caption, "April 27th... Does this look like me?" Many followers commented in agreement, saying that her face looked totally altered and that they didn't recognize her.



The Empire mistake is just one in a long line of photoshop blunders. Stars like Zendaya, Lorde, and Solange have all publicly addressed alterations made to the images of them that send a message that their natural bodies are somehow inadequate.

Image via Getty

Women have been saying that Twitter is an abusive place for over a decade, and now, 12 years to the day since the platform was founded in 2006, an extensive, eight-part report by Amnesty International has validated those claims.

Titled #ToxicTwitter: Violence and abuse against women online," the report analyzes the experiences of women from all walks of life on Twitter, "from high-level female politicians to journalists, activists, writers and bloggers, to women who simply want to know what's happening around them," and concludes that overall the company is "failing to respect women's rights online."

"The violence and abuse many women experience on Twitter has a detrimental effect on their right to express themselves equally, freely and without fear," the report says. "Instead of strengthening women's voices, the violence and abuse many women experience on the platform leads women to self-censor what they post, limit their interactions, and even drives women off Twitter completely."

The eight-part study drew upon interviews with 86 subjects over 14 months, and details the many grisly ways women and non-binary people encounter relentless violence, threats and hate speech on Twitter.

The report also addressed the way verbal threats online can turn into issues of physical safety. "Some of the things that have been put on Twitter about me have had people say they know where I live, I've had people say that they'll be outside my work, I've had people not just threaten me but also say things that, you know, are clearly veiled threats against my family," journalist Allison Morris said. The report is filled with case studies from women telling similar stories. Twenty-three percent of women surveyed in eight countries in 2017 said that had faced "online abuse or harassment at least once," and over half of those women said they were attacked by a stranger.



"At a watershed moment when women around the world are using their collective power to speak out and amplify their voices through social media platforms," the report says, "Twitter's failure to adequately respect human rights and effectively tackle violence and abuse on the platform means that instead of women using their voices 'to impact the world', many women are instead being pushed backwards to a culture of silence."

The final chapter of the report offers Amnesty International's solutions for how to do just that, including the suggestions that the platform being more transparent with data and information about just how prevalent violence on the platform is. Another thing Twitter can do is take a more active role in showing users how to use privacy and safety features like muting and blocking, and for the company to make its reporting features more streamlined to ensure "consistent application and better response to complaints of violence and abuse."



Twitter has responded in a statement to the Amnesty report, saying it agrees "with many of the recommendations," and that many are "already completed or underway." Twitter ensures that "abuse and hateful conduct directed at women are prohibited" on the platform. Read the full statement, below:

The assertion that Twitter is consciously unengaged with human rights issues is an unfair representation not just of the facts, but of the ethos of our dedicated teams, and the core mission of the company.





We agree with many of the recommendations contained in the Amnesty International report. A number of the proposals represent work already completed or underway at Twitter. Abuse and hateful conduct directed at women are prohibited on our platform. We have made more than 30 individual changes to our product, policies and operations in the past 16 months. We have increased our action rates ten-fold. We have made significant changes to our reporting tools and continue to improve them as well working to communicate more clearly with our users on reports and how we draft policy. We continue to expand our Transparency Report to include relevant and meaningful data. We have seen extraordinary engagement supporting women. The rise of movements like #MeToo, #WomensMarch, and #PositionOfStrength are testimonies to the power of Twitter as a platform for women and their allies to share stories, offer support, and advocate for change.





We are committed to understanding how we can better combat the hatred and prejudice within society that gives rise to online abuse and how we can encourage a healthier public conversation. We are an open platform and hold a mirror up to human behaviors - both the good and the bad. Everyone has a part to play in building a more compassionate and empathetic society, including Twitter. Our policy, product, and engineering teams continue to work collaboratively to find ways to innovate to protect our users and enhance their experience, particularly as those in our society intent on harm find new ways to hurt and abuse. We look forward to ongoing constructive engagement with Amnesty International and others to find real, lasting solutions to ensure women are safer and feel safer online.

While none of this is new to women and non-binary Twitter users, it is somewhat validating to have a study confirming it. (A female-empowerment themed Twitter ad that aired during the Oscars was met with a collective eye roll, for instance). And now that Facebook is in hot water for failing to protect the data of its users, hopefully the pressure will also be on Twitter to step up its game and take responsibility to prevent the abuse that occurs on its platform.

Photo via GettyNews and commentary on organized crime, street crime, white collar crime, cyber crime, sex crime, crime fiction, crime prevention, espionage and terrorism.Yolo County in Sacramento, California proclaims Tuesday, March 20, 2018 as Iranian-American Day

03/21/18

Yolo County

Board of Supervisors

www.yolocounty.org



Resolution No. 18-23

Proclaiming Tuesday, March 20, 2018 as Iranian-American Day in Yolo County



"Khatoon of Norooz (Persian New Year)"

artist: Mahshid Zali



WHEREAS, Iranian/Persian history dates back to 2,000 B.C. The people of Iran have celebrated Noruz, the New Year, on the first day of spring for 3,000 years; and



WHEREAS, the Iranian people have a long tradition of tolerance and respect for human rights, including the establishment, in 550 8.C., of the earliest significant monarchy that contributed to the civilization of the world, under Cyrus the Great. Cyrus the Great freed the Jewish people from Babylonian oppression; and



WHEREAS, throughout their long history, Iranians have made great contributions to the arts, sciences, and philosophy. These include the writings of Omar Khayyam and Rumi, contributions to medicine of Avicenna, advances in chemistry of Razi, and the invention of algebra; and



WHEREAS, the Iranian-American community contributes greatly to Yolo County's

economy, cultural richness, and diversity. They are a highly educated population and preserve their rich culture and heritage, while contributing to the community as doctors, lawyers, engineers, business people, and university professors.



NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED that the Yolo County Board of Supervisors

proclaim Tuesday, March 20,2018, as Iranian-American Day in Yolo County.

PASSED AND ADOPTED this 20th day of March, 2018 by the following vote:



AYES: Saylor, Rexroad, Provenza, Chamberlain, Villegas.



Oscar Villegas, Chair

Yolo County Board of Supervisors



U.S., Europeans Wary As They Discuss Creating Iran Nuclear Side Deal

03/22/18

Source: RFE/RL

The United States has had "constructive" talks with France, Britain, and Germany about creating a side agreement to the Iran nuclear deal but is making contingency plans should the effort fail, the lead U.S. negotiator has said.

"We have had constructive talks with the Europeans towards a supplemental agreement, but I can't predict whether we will reach an agreement with them or not," Brian Hook, a U.S. State Department policy director and lead U.S. negotiator, told reporters on March 21.



"We are engaged in contingency planning," Hook said, without elaborating. "We are kind of dual tracking this."



U.S. President Donald Trump has called on the European powers to "fix" what he has called "the terrible flaws" of the 2015 nuclear deal or he will refuse to extend U.S. sanctions relief for Iran as required under the deal in exchange for curbs on Iran's nuclear activities.



Trump has laid down a May 12 deadline for reaching an agreement with the Europeans, which are among the six world powers that signed the deal negotiated by Trump's predecessor Barack Obama.



For the European powers, diplomats said Trump's ultimatum presents a dilemma as U.S. negotiators have been unable to guarantee that, even if they meet all of Trump's demands, Trump won't still decide to walk away from the nuclear agreement.



'Three Defects'



Trump is seeking to remedy what he sees as three defects in the deal: its failure to address Iran's ballistic missile program, its restrictions on when international inspectors can visit suspected Iranian nuclear sites, and "sunset" clauses which allow key curbs on Iranian activities such as uranium enrichment to expire after 10 years.



Aides said Trump has threatened the pull the United States out of the nuclear agreement if all three of his criticisms are not addressed.



Hook said that, if there's no agreement with the Europeans by May, Trump will certainly withdraw. If there is an agreement, he said Trump's advisers will present it to him.



"Then he will make a decision on whether he wants to remain in the deal," Hook told reporters during a conference call on March 21.



Diplomats said Trump's ultimatum puts some of America's closest allies in the uncomfortable position of trying to anticipate what is likely to satisfy Trump, even as they resent his demand to tinker with the nuclear deal in the first place.



The European nations only begrudgingly agreed to negotiate a side deal after it became clear that placating the U.S. president was the only way to salvage the nuclear deal, they said. Iran has objected to any changes in the nuclear pact.



Moreover, diplomats said differences have arisen between European allies and the United States over such issues as whether to address both medium and long-range ballistic missiles in the side deal.



'Opaque Economy'



Hook acknowledged that Iran is technically complying with the nuclear agreement as it was written.



However, he repeated the Trump administration's view that Iran is violating the deal's preamble, which expressed the "expectation" that the agreement's "full implementation...will positively contribute to regional and international peace and security."



Iran and Russia have argued that the "expectation" mentioned in the preamble does not amount to a binding commitment on Iran's part.



Iran, moreover, argues that it is not receiving the full benefits of sanctions relief mandated by the deal because big banks have continued to shy away from doing business with Tehran for fear of falling foul of U.S. sanctions not related to the nuclear deal.



Hook rejected this argument.



"Iran's opaque economy makes it hard for investors to know whether they're supporting commerce or supporting terrorism," he said. "Iran needs to stop sponsoring terrorism and overhaul its banking and business sectors."



He also dismissed Iranian concerns that Trump has yet to approve licenses for Western aircraft companies to sell planes to Iran as envisioned under the deal.



"I said to them, you use your commercial airlines to move terrorists and weapons around the Middle East, including to Syria, and we will not issue licenses at the expense of our national security," Hook said.



European planemaker Airbus and its U.S. rival Boeing have agreed to sell 180 jets to renew the aging fleet of Iranian state carrier IranAir. But the deal depends on getting U.S. support and licenses.



With reporting by AP and Reuters



Related tweets:



In addition to bringing the Middle East closer to another war, Trump's antipathy toward the #JCPOA could rupture transatlantic relations. Former UK amb Richard Dalton sounds the warning; https://t.co/JT7PUuLJds pic.twitter.com/14nsmqacaV  Mark Fitzpatrick (@FitzpatrickIISS) March 22, 2018

#IranDeal "We attach strategic importance to the full implementation of the agreement by all parties. For us it's a matter of security for Europe and the rest of the world" @FedericaMog #JCPOA pic.twitter.com/PdWgnMjAoi  European External Action Service - EEAS  (@eu_eeas) March 19, 2018The Bank of Ghana would soon require financial institutions to publish bank-specific cyber security policies in line with the provisions in the Payment Systems and Services Bill which is expected to be passed by Parliament soon.



The Governor of the Bank of Ghana Dr Ernest Addison, who announced this on Wednesday, said the Financial Institutions would also be required to implement an integrated approach by adopting enterprise-wide frameworks of cyber risk management in line with business objectives.



Dr Addison said this in a speech read on his behalf at the first summit on digital banking and cyber security organised by Standard Chartered Bank.



The summit brings together cyber security experts to share experiences and examine critical issues on digital banking and its associated cyber security risks and how to counter cyber threats in the industry.



Dr Addison said the Central Bank would continue to exercise firm oversight of the payment system, monitor risks associated with digital innovation and develop appropriate regulatory responses without stifling innovation.



He said while digitization of banking operations had engineered innovative financial products and expanded the scope of financial services alongside improved payments and settlement systems, the growth of technology-driven electronic payments are also associated with cyber related risks such as insecure card data systems and identity theft.



It is in this direction that the Bank has prepared a banking sector Cyber and Information Security guidelines to protect consumers and create a safer environment for online and e-payments products.



Among others, the guidelines seek to create a secure environment for transactions within the cyberspace and guarantee trust and confidence in ICT systems.



It also provides an assurance framework for the design of security policies in compliance to global security standards and best practices by way of cyber and information security assessments, and protect banks, customers and clients against the potentially devastating consequences of cyber-attacks.



Dr Addison said an integrated approach to cyber security management would support financial institutions achieve both business and security focused objectives, as well as regulatory compliance in an efficient and effective way.



However, he said, regulatory compliance by itself is not cyber security; adding that the onus lies on banks to examine the state of their security systems, identify gaps and design appropriate mechanisms to counter possible cyber threats.



Todays world is completely different from a decade ago as changes in information and communication technology increase exponentially. Consequently, financial institutions need to undertake cyber security-related due diligence and assessments, identify proper detective controls, and enforce third party and insider risk programmes, he said.



Mrs Mansa Nettey, Chief Executive Officer Standard Chartered Bank Ghana, said advances in technology had ushered in new challenges and threats, including cybercrime.



All organisations, which have adopted digitisation, increasingly have to deal with these threats which are becoming sophisticated. What is even more alarming is that the rate of advancement seems to have outpaced developments in cyber security, she said.



She said it was unfortunate that regulation of cyber security was not harmonised and was not developing as fast, leading individual organisations to try their own solutions to cyber threats.



This is why Standard Chartered Bank has chosen to lead the way by putting together the subject matter to discuss and share best practices in combating cybercrime and enhanced cyber security for digital financial services, Mrs Nettey said.



She said cyber security was one area that the banks needed to work with each other to protect themselves from the threat of cyber-crime by engaging each other, sharing information and best practices and collaborating more.



This is one area that we cannot afford to compete with each other as an industry. We can protect ourselves from the threat of cyber-crime by engaging each other, sharing information and best practices and collaborating more. For us at standard charted combating cybercrime is a fiduciary responsibility, Mrs Nettey 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 Bank of Ghana has assured customers of uniBank that their savings are safe, despite handing over management of the financial outfit to KPMG.



The Central Bank, as regulators, said the audit firm will manage uniBank for at least six months, because the banks capital adequacy ratio (CAR) has fallen below 50% of the required minimum of 10% (i.e. below 5%).



Under section 108 of Act 930, the Official Administrator is authorized to exercise a variety of powers to rehabilitate and return the bank to regulatory compliance within a period of six months, at the end of which the bank will be returned to private ownership and management, a statement from the BoG said.



The appointment by the Bank of Ghana of the official administrator is aimed at saving

UniBank from imminent collapse. It will prevent potential losses to depositors and other creditors, and ensure that the financial condition of the bank does not create further risks for the entire financial system, it added.



Announcing the takeover, the Governor of the BoG, Dr. Ernest Addison, served notice nobody will lose money.



The bank will continue to run as usual, all depositors funds are safe. Nobody will lose money. Weve proven that earlier and nobody will lose money in this exercise. All that the Bank has done is to put in a new team to manage the bank. We are trying to save the bank from imminent collapse. We are saving an indigenous Ghanaian-owned bank, Dr. Addison stated.

Source: adomonline.com









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

Featured VideoManagement of insolvent indigenous Ghanaian bank, uniBank, has indicated that it will work to reverse the takeover of the bank by the Bank of Ghana (BoG).



According to the Reuters News Agency, management of uniBank is of the view that the BoG did not meet the requirement to notify them before announcing the takeover.



A legal adviser to uniBank, Dominic Ayine, made known this intent saying We intend to go for arbitration. It is as yet unclear where the bank will pursue this arbitration. Mr. Ayine has confirmed this decision to Citi News on record, but has refused to give further details.



BoG, KPMG takeover



The Bank of Ghana announced that it had appointed private audit firm KPMG Ghana, as the administrator when it announced it had taken over the management of uniBank.



According to the central bank, it took the decision to save uniBank from collapse.



The BoG in a statement said, KPMG, as the official administrator, will play the key role of assuming control of the bank and all its branches and carry out the responsibilities of the shareholders, directors, and key management personnel of uniBank.



It stated that during the period of official administration of uniBank, the bank will remain open for business under the management and control of KPMG overseen by the Bank of Ghana, and is not being closed and liquidated.



uniBank was found to have persistently maintained a negative capital adequacy ratio below zero making it technically insolvent.



This contravened the 10% minimum capital adequacy ratio required. uniBank also suffered liquidity shortfalls and consistently breached its cash reserve requirement.



As a result, uniBank relied extensively on liquidity support of over GHS 2.2 billion from the Bank of Ghana over the past two years to meet its recurring liabilities.



The BoG revealed that uniBank had failed to comply with a directive from the BoG to stop granting new loans whilst also and deliberately concealing some liabilities from its balance sheet.



uniBank also failed to comply with several other regulatory requirements, including lending to a number of borrowers in excess of its regulatory lending limit.



Before all this, uniBank was one of nine banks identified after the asset quality review exercise undertaken in 2016, to be significantly under-capitalized with a capital asset ratio of 4.75%.

Source: citifmonline.com









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

Featured VideoPresident of UT Holdings, Prince Kofi Amoabeng, says he has learnt a lot of lessons from the collapse of UT Bank and would bounce back stronger.



Mr Amoabeng revealed that though the revoking of the bank's license came as a shock to him and management of the bank, there still are lessons to be learned.



"I don't feel too bad about it, I think it's the state institutions that are working. There's a bit about the process which I felt was not necessary. There's been a lot of lessons learned and I hope to bounce back stronger," the former UT Bank CEO said on the sidelines of the Margins Youth Empowerment Awards Ceremony in Accra.



The Central Bank, in August 2017, revoked the licenses of UT and Capital Bank to operate as commercial banks due to their excessive liabilities and failure to improve their balance sheet.

The Governor of the Bank of Ghana, Dr Ernest Addison, blamed the lack of good corporate governance for the collapse of UT and Capital Bank. According to Dr Addisson, the defunct UT Bank could have survived the collapse if management minimized risks and improved loan performance.



Reacting to the managerial takeover of UniBank, Kofi Amoabeng described the takeover as "worrying" saying the regulator could have explored other options.



"I think it's a bit worrying with Unibank coming on the heels of UT and Capital Bank...I think its better sometimes to take positive action and air things out and solve it than keep things under the rug," Mr Amoabeng said.



Margins Youth Empowerment Awards



The awards targets youth with ICT skills, business ideas as well as those who already own and run micro or small businesses in ICT.



CEO of Truckers Ghana Limited, Issah Abdullai Gombilla was adjudged the overall winner out of 10 finalists. He took home a cash prize of GH10,000







Source: Joy Business









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Featured VideoA credit consultant, Emmanuel Akrong has predicted that nine of the over 30 banks in Ghana could collapse if nothing is done immediately to save them.



Although he failed to name the ailing financial institutions, he said those banks have serious asset quality challenges which have affected their capital strengths and may force them into insolvency along with UT Bank, Capital bank and uniBank.



Mr. Akrong, who has done extensive research on the banking sector, further noted that three banks, one of which was uniBank, have been on life support from the Bank of Ghana.



Mr. Akrong made the revelation on the Citi Breakfast Show on Wednesday on the back of the takeover of indigenous bank, uniBank by the Central Bank.



BoG, which has handed over management of the bank to audit firm, KPMG, said it took the decision to prevent uniBank from collapsing after several months of trying to give uniBank the chance to bounce back, to no avail.



The central bank explained that uniBank had low capital levels and took a number of decisions which the BoG had kicked against.



The uniBank takeover took Ghanaians by surprise as they were still reeling from the collapse of UT and Capital banks which were taken over by the GCB bank only seven months ago.



Despite painting a gloomy picture of the banking sector, Mr. Akrong said the sector is not in crisis, adding that the current challenges were manageable.



There is no banking crisis at the moment. What we have is asset quality crisis but it is under a manageable scale. What I would say is that some of the issues that UT, Capital and uniBank have are not pervasive. Its only a few banks in my view  not more than nine bankshave similar problems because their assets have been written down as a result of high asset quality problems and because of that it has eaten into their capital and for those banks, they are on the verge of collapse unless additional capital is pumped in them. But to put it in perspective, it is not pervasive. From a liquidity standpoint I would say roughly they are about 3 banks which from my analysis, one of them is uniBank, he added.



Throwing more light on his research in the banking sector the consultant said most of the banks that are struggling to survive have issues with risk management.



Ive done extensive analysis on this. I did three analyses; liquidity analysis, asset quality and the other is capital. It doesnt take you magic science for you to know who the nine banks are. You can easily see the banks which have capital problems. Its clear from my analysis.



From asset quality standpoint, 15 banks have asset quality ratio of more than 20% which means one out of every 5 bank loan in Ghana is bad. That is a big problem. People ascribe it to energy sector but energy sector is not a problem. Its a systemic issue of risk management. When it comes to capital, if I use the GHc120 million as a yardstick, I can count only nine banks which only have a capital problem at the moment. So you could see that it is not really big. On liquidity, its about three banks which are on liquidity life support, on asset quality, we have about 15 banks which are really in bad shape in terms of their asset quality and in terms of capital, we have like nine banks which have capital problems, he added.



Blame auditors, uniBank management



On the uniBank collapse, Mr. Akrong blamed its management and auditors for the banks woes.



He insisted that if the auditors had done their work well, they could have predicted the fall of the bank ahead of time.

Source: citifmonline.com









Disclaimer : Opinions expressed here are those of the writers and do not reflect those of Peacefmonline.com. Peacefmonline.com accepts no responsibility legal or otherwise for their accuracy of content. Please report any inappropriate content to us, and we will evaluate it as a matter of priority.

Featured VideoThe government has asked the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA) to suspend with immediate effect, the charging of Import VAT on selected categories of commodities.

The import VAT was slapped on 64 commodity groups from March 1, 2018, raising concerns among various importers groups following sudden price hikes.



Government in a statement issued by Information Minister, Mustapha Abdul-Hamid on Wednesday, said the hike in import charges were unintended and that the suspension of the Import VAT, a temporary measure, follows extensive consultation between Government and various stakeholders.



This suspension is pending an assessment of Harmonized code (HS Codes) for customs which were reviewed effective same date, the statement said.



Affected commodities included;



Mobile phones

Electrical transformers

Tractors for agricultural purposes

Solar cells

Musical instruments

Outboard motors

Concrete

Mortar mixers and

Day-Old Chicks

Also suspended but indefinitely, is a proposed 'fumigation levy' for shippers.



Further details of affected products will be outlined by the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA) in due course.



Government is grateful to all stakeholders for forthrightly participating in the engagement sessions and looks forward to a substantive resolution of the challenges faced by importers and shippers.











Source: Daily Graphic









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Featured VideoGhanas national interests and sovereignty have been altered for good as the New Patriotic Party (NPP) government led by Nana Akuffo-Addo enters into a so-called defence cooperation agreement with the United States, virtually acceding Ghanas independence and economic interests, among others to the US. In a wide-ranging concession made to the US, Ghana among, other things, has agreed to unimpeded access to and use of agreed facilities and areas to US forces; provide tax exemptions on all imports and exports by the US forces; provide free entry and exit for US forces; and of course grant a cart blanche cheque for US soldiers to rape our women and kill our men with impunity!



We thought governance under President Akuffo-Addo was not going to get any worse! Where did we go wrong as a nation? That having led Africas struggles and fights for freedom, we make a 360-turnaround to enslave ourselves to a country whose President sees us as sub-humans and people living in a Shithole? How on earth should Akuffo-Addo and his cronies reverse the independence won for us by Kwame Nkrumah for their selfish interest?



Of the 800 or so military bases operated by the United States across the world, none has known any peace but misery. Take Okinawa in Japan for instance, where the US has stationed thousands of troops, the indigenes of the area have been subjected to rapes and murders on their own soil. And the worst part is that the so-called defence cooperation arrangements grant the US forces immunity from prosecution. If a developed country like Japan with over a hundred million inhabitants is unable to face the might of the US, how does Ghana the US when it has to defend its citizens against attacks from US military personnel? Akuffo-Addo should tell us the bulwark or any strategy he has in place to safeguard human rights as citizens of our own country! Again in a place like Turkey, US forces are known to have been complicit and played a part in the recent coup that sought to overthrow President Erdogans government. All over the world, US forces have sought to undermine the sovereignty of countries where they are based.



In our case, not only are our women going to suffer rape and our men murdered when they dare to protest, but this reckless agreement opens our already-porous security to terrorist attacks from groups like Boko Haram and Al-Qaeda who have vowed to carry the fight to Western forces wherever they are. In case Akuffo-Addo or his useless Defence Minister and numerous National Security Ministers do not read or get security briefings, we want to remind them of the constant bombings and terror attacks in neighbouring Burkina Faso and another West African country, Mali by terrorist groups. And what is their crime? They host French forces who are there ostensibly to fight against terror but whose real intents are to exploit the people and steal resources. Akuffo-Addo is simply opening us up for some of these attacks because these terrorists look to strike at Western interests and how gratifying and glorious it will be for them to kill or kidnap US military personnel?



One striking thing from Akuffo-Addos decision to hand our security to the United States is that it fits perfectly into his uncle, JB Danquahs, plan and unfinished business. We have all read the role JB Danquah played in the overthrow of Kwame Nkrumah  how he worked for the CIA and received salaries from the Americans; how he and his coup makers turned over Ghanas nuclear research and facilities to the Americans. Akuffo-Addo is simply beginning what his forefathers could not accomplish  sell Ghana back to the West for crumbs! Already, at the onset of his tenure, he is reported to have shipped all our nuclear materials to China under a spurious agreement with the Chinese.



Ghanaians must rise up  we must rise up to defend our sovereignty and stop these nation-wreckers from doing any more harm to our security. Our nation has enjoyed a long period of peace but we shudder to say that should this agreement be allowed to pass, we should forever kiss goodbye to our long-cherished tag as the oasis of peace in a sea of turbulence!



It is quite obvious that Akuffo-Addo and his lying Vice have no real blueprint to develop this nation left alone to protect us. We are calling on them to do the honourable thing by resigning before election 2020.

Long live Ghana!

Long live our Sovereignty!

Long live Young Cadres!



Signed:

Bright Botchway

General Secretary

Young Cadres

(0249999145)



Mubarak Watara

PRO

Young Cadres

(0244753143)

Source: Young Cadres









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Featured VideoIsrael Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Monday that the flood of illegal migrants from Africa are worse than terrorists in the Sinai peninsula.



Netanyahu said this while speaking at an event celebrating the Negev region held in Dimona. The PM said that Israel has recently completed a fence along "more than 200 kilometers of the border with Sinai." He said the border fence constructed along Israels border with Egypt is holding back a potential "flood" of illegal migrants from Africa.



Without the fence, "we would be faced with  severe attacks by Sinai terrorists, and something much worse, a flood of illegal migrants from Africa," Netanyahu said.



Netanyahu's comments come on the heels of Israel's campaign to deport thousands of African migrants in the country. The interior ministry says there are currently some 42,000 African migrants in Israel, mainly from Sudan and Eritrea, and the government has ordered that thousands of them must leave or face indefinite imprisonment.





Source: timesofisrael.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The concerned residents of Atiwa in the East Akim Municipality in the Eastern Region, who begun a 95-km walk from the Atiwa Forest Range to the Flagstaff House to put pressure on the government to rescind its decision to use the countrys largest forest reserve for bauxite mining have arrived in Accra.



Numbering about 70, they arrived in Accra Thursday morning after six days of walk which, began last Saturday, March 17, 2018 at Sagyimase, a community located at the foot of the Atiwa Forest Range.

The protestors carried placards, some of which read: Water is the most precious element in the world', 'Rich or poor, everyone needs water'; 'Save Atiwa Forest now'; 'Save water it doesn't grow on trees'; 'Save water bodies Mr President'; 'When you save water, it saves you, No Atiwa Forest, no Ayensu and EPA, protect our water bodies.

The protest is being supported by A. Rocha Ghana, a civil society organisation.



Already, they have presented their petition to the East Akim Municipal Assembly and the Okyenhene, Osagyefuo Amoatia Ofori Panin.



Two hundred and sixty square kilometres of the Atiwa Range has been declared a protected area. Yet the forest is not only rich in life but also in minerals.



They intend sending a petition to President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo.







Source: Daily Graphic









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Featured Video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.U.S. Ambassador to Ghana, Robert P. Jackson, says the military agreement between Ghana and the U.S. does not amount to an invasion of the West African country.



According to him, there are different programmes that will take place at different times of the year, adding that each exercise will not have more than 200 U.S. troops on Ghanas soil.



Mr Jackson explained that U.S. troops are assigned to various exercises and will leave Ghana as soon as they complete an assignment.



The U.S. Ambassador said his countrys will fully cooperate with the Ghana Armed Forces and political authorities in undertaking three mutually beneficial military exercises this year, which will involve training on counter-terrorism, response to disaster exercises and security-related programmes.



For each exercise, we are looking at up to 200 Americans, and to my knowledge, in recent years, we have never brought in more than that; and for the time being, at the level of operations, we dont contemplate bringing more than that in. So, this is not an invasion, I want to be clear about that, Mr Jackson told Joy News Gifty Andoh on Thursday, 22 March 2018.



His comments come in the wake of news on Tuesday, 20 March that Ghanas Cabinet has approved an agreement granting access to the U.S. to establish a military base in Ghana. It also indicated that Ghana has also agreed to bear the cost of the base and take primary responsibility for securing U.S. military facilities in the country.



Mr Jackson says the $20million U.S. commitment to Ghana in terms of equipment, skills and training for this year only, is enough benefit for the people of Ghana.







Source: classfmonline.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Andrew and Sara Marie Brenner | Photos: Facebook / YouTube Screenshot

The GOP primary for the soon-to-be-vacant state Senate seat in Ohios 19th district turned ugly this week when candidate Andrew Brenner  currently serving as a state representative in the 67th district  helped launch an online attack on a private citizen unconnected to his primary opponents campaign.

He is seeking office in the 19th district because term limits prevent him from running for another House term. The senate seat will be vacant this fall for the same reason.

You may remember Andrew Brenner and his wife Sara Marie from our extensive coverage of their problematic and sometimes illicit behavior over the years. It appears they never learned their lesson.

Background

According to the Delaware Gazette, Brenner faces primary opposition from Lewis Center resident Joel Spitzer, an attorney and the current Orange Township fiscal officer.

Unlike Brenner (who, with his wife, rode the Tea Party wave to victory), Spitzer appears to more closely align with what Republicans used to represent in the pre-Obama era  including the ability to reach across the aisle and work with progressives and liberals. His campaign website even proclaims people over politics  something both Republicans and Democrats could promote more often.

Make no mistake: Spitzer is solidly conservative on most issues from the Second Amendment to abortion; those stated beliefs co-exist with others like helping single mothers and promoting public education  the latter of which the current mainstream Trump-led GOP establishment actively campaigns against.

(Perhaps thats one of the reasons Brenner and his wife jumped on the Trump train though: they were against public education well before Trump arrived on the scene.)

Trouble began when someone obtained a private citizens video posted to a closed (private) liberal-leaning Facebook group, modified it, and posted it publicly to attack both that private citizen as well as Spitzer and his campaign manager.

The Video

Posted by NEWSTALK614.com Columbus, the video and accompanying story target Jessica Wernz  Spitzers campaign manager. The problem is the actual video is of a woman named Laura Hudak Sefcik  not Wernz or Spitzer. The only connection between Sefcik and Wernz is they both belong to the same Facebook group called Liberal Patriots of Powell.

In the text attached to the video, NEWSTALK614.com Columbus stated in part:

Wernz is the Site Administrator for a secret, online liberal anti-Trump activist group with its roots in far left Central Ohio politics. Turning the reigns of a Republican campaign over to her has some Ohio politicos in utter disbelief.

However, an earlier tweet which the candidate has yet to delete from his Twitter account will surely leave mud on his face as it showed his disdain for Trump and his supporters. That tweet is making waves in a viral video going around Central Ohio.

That text has nothing to do with the attached video  a video used and modified without permission. Heres the video (which uses Sefciks original footage without permission spliced with screenshots and intentionally-selected background music):

To wit, Sefcik says nothing earth-shattering or particularly newsworthy in the video. She merely proclaims thats its difficult living in Powell (as a liberal) as its a predominantly conservative area. Conservatives living in predominantly liberal areas make these same sorts of comments all the time. Nothing she said is controversial. Youd never know that from the foreboding music juxtaposed against pictures from the closed group supporting diversity and other progressive values.

A minor part of the video took care to connect the actual video  which has nothing to do with Spitzers campaign  to Spitzers campaign manager Jessica Wernz. Its that connection Andrew and Sara Marie Brenner keep referencing when defending their choice to promote an attack on a private citizen assembled by an unknown party and published by NEWSTALK614.com Columbus.

The Attack

Republishing the post to her own Facebook page, Sara Marie Brenner  Andrew Brenners wife (a political activist and former Powell local official)  took the attack to a new level:

Nothing in the video demonstrates any shenanigans, falsehoods, or intimidation. In fact, if anything, republishing a video using a someones intellectual property without their permission as a form of attack against a political candidate is an actual form of intimidation. Particularly when the wife of a major partys preferred candidate for office broadcasts that attack across her social media pages.

Sefcik responded to the post saying, You should know I am obtaining a cease and desist order on basis of harassment, libel, and slander for the video. I have nothing to do with this.

Sara Marie Brenner responded, The only one harassing anyone today is your constantly posting about this. The content is your own so it cant be libel or slander, and you created the FB group referenced so thats factually accurate. I did not create the video.

While the posting of the video may not be slander/libel, it is a form of online harassment and intimidation. That Brenner disingenuously overlooked the misappropriation of Sefciks intellectual property because the video helps her husbands campaign for office shouldnt be ignored.

The attack didnt stop there, though. In another posting attacking Jessica Wernz, Brenner refused to back down when confronted by Sefcik. After someone posted the video into the comments, Sefcik requested Brenner delete the comment (thereby removing the video).

Brenner refused. In fact, Brenner even went so far as to admit she understood the video is a form of targeted harassment, and thereafter explicitly refuse to remove it from her page. It sucks to be targeted by someone you dont know, right?! Believe me, I know all about that, Brenner gloated.

Mind you, shes not personally running for Ohio state Senate, but she and her husband will most likely be the ones representing the 19th district should Andrew Brenner win the primary (as that district is solidly red).

Perhaps the most damning portion of the exchange occurred when Sefcik pleaded with Benner to remove the video because people were confusing her with Jessica Wernz. Brenner responded disingenuously saying she didnt make the video (ignoring the fact that no one claimed she made it  only that she was distributing and popularizing it).

Whos confused? Im not confused. I cant help other people being inept, Brenner said.

Throughout the comments Brenner maintained shes exposing deceptive actions without actually pointing out where anyone lied or propagated a falsehood. Her primary argument appears to be that Jessica Wernz is a liberal managing a Republican campaign, and that is somehow a bad or deceptive thing. In reality, public record and social media postings show Wernz appears to be more of an independent as she has publicly supported members of both major political parties.

Despite that, Sara Marie Brenner believes Wernz being a GOP campaign manager justifies propagating the video using the excuse that she didnt personally make it as a defense. Moreover, shes explicitly willing to promote a video targeting a private citizen thats only tangentially related to Wernz.

But Sara Marie Brenner didnt act alone in targeting a private citizen; her husband  the candidate for the 19th district state Senate seat  opted to add his opinion as well.

Andrew Brenners Approval

In the comments section of the same Facebook post where Sara Marie Brenner admitted she understood keeping the video up was a form of targeted harassment, Ohio state Senate GOP candidate Andrew Brenner initially commented asking, Who did this video?

Thereafter, he moved to the Facebook page of the person who originally posted the video on his wifes page and offered his opinion. He said:

The truth starts to come out. The woman in the video is complaining about it, however she is an administrator of a liberal Facebook Group and they speak out politically. Whether she likes it or not that makes her words open to interpretation politically, just like everyone else in politics.

Thereafter the victim  Laura Hudak Sefcik  replied directly to Brenners comment thread asking him to stop promoting the video and its targeted harassment:

This. Video. Is. Misleading. I have NOTHING to do with Jessica and her involvement in your politics. You are harassing me, and endorsing libel and slander by insinuating I have anything to do with your cause. I have asked for the video that you created to be removed. And I have now involved the authorities.

Brenner ignored the plea and continued demonizing liberals using the video as evidence of his superiority over candidate Joel Spitzer.

Commenting on allegations that he and his wife promoted the aforementioned video on their social media accounts, Brenner commented, This article is an absolute lie. As is the headline. He went on to attack his primary opponent rather than address what part of this article or the allegations made against him and Sara Marie Brenner are inaccurate.

This isnt the first time Andrew Brenner  piggybacking on his wifes far-right advocacy  has landed himself in a political quagmire.

Its a Pattern

When not settling labor disputes with their employees in their jointly-owned businesses, the Brenners have a reputation for engaging in less-than-reputable actions both within their local community and within the larger conservative movement.

There was the time that Sara Marie was caught attempting to rig the Red State Talk Radio Talk Show of the Year Contest. And that included the help of her husband, state Rep. Andrew Brenner.

Then there was that time Sara Marie and Andrew harassed Dana Loesch and her husband while they were on vacation, and ended up in a nasty public feud.

Theres also the time Sara Marie started a for-profit news business employing (and paying) several writers (including her husband Andrew) but failed to actually register or pay taxes for that business. Not long after we wrote about it, she sold the rights to the website before the state of Ohio pursued her for yet another labor law violation (she has a few on record with her other former businesses including five separate tax liens).

Perhaps most applicable to their current targeting of a private citizen as a way of attacking GOP primary opponent Joel Spitzer, Sara Marie blamed those engaging in negative attacks when she lost her re-election for a city council seat shed held for a short amount of time.

I will pray for the hearts and spirits of those who are filled with such vitriol as to attack someone so personally who has never done anything to them but disagree on policy, she said adding, I was unwilling to run a smear campaign against the other candidates.

She went on to argue, I could have run a negative campaign myself, but I dont go negative on people  I couldnt sleep at night if I behaved in that manner.

The question begs, based on her (and her husbands) negative campaign against a private citizen using political division rather than policy as a campaign strategy, how is Sara Marie sleeping at night these days?

[Article updated with comments from Rep. Andrew Brenner]

Peacock Panache readers:

Tim Peacock is the Managing Editor and founder of Peacock Panache and has worked as a civil rights advocate for over twenty years. During that time hes worn several hats including leading on campus LGBTQ advocacy in the University of Missouri campus system, interning with the Colorado Civil Rights Division, and volunteering at advocacy organizations. You can learn more about him at his personal website.

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We hope you enjoyed reading this article! If you would like to support our ongoing work, please consider buying us a cup of coffee. It's not much, but we don't do this for the money. We do, however, need caffeine to keep going some days!If you do donate, send us a message through our Contact Us page or via social media so we can thank you!Bozo the Clown has died.

Frank Avruch, a longtime Boston television personality and entertainer, was the star of the children's TV program, "Bozo the Clown," from 1955 to 1970. Several actors played Bozo over the years, but Avruch was the first nationally-syndicated Bozo the Clown. Bozo became popular in the 1960s because of the widespread franchising of the character.

Avruch died Tuesday at his Boston home from heart disease at 89, his family said in a statement to WCVB-TV and reported by The Associated Press.

"He had a heart of gold," manager Stuart Hersh told The Associated Press. "He brought the Bozo the Clown character to life better than anyone else's portrayal of Bozo the Clown."

Avruch also toured the world as Bozo for UNICEF, and he was a board member of the group's New England chapter.

"He touched so many people with his portrayal," Hersh told the AP.

Surviving are his wife, Betty; two sons, Matthew and Steven; and several grandchildren.

"Our dad loved the children of all ages who remembered being on his show and was always grateful for their kind words. We will miss him greatly," the Avruch family said in a statement.A Pennsylvania man waited at least seven years too long to try to recover an arsenal of guns and other weapons that were seized by police, a Commonwealth Court panel ruled Thursday.

The decision, contained in an opinion by Judge Renee Cohn Jubelirer, means Christopher Ryan will have to do without those five pistols, two combat knives, a compound bow and a samurai sword.

The Commonwealth Court ruling overturns a Delaware County judge's March 2017 order that police in Upper Darby Township had to return Ryan's property, which was seized in August 2003.

Police said the weapons were taken as a safety measure after they were called to the house of Ryan's mother for a report of a suicide attempt. Officers reported they found Ryan in a bedroom, passed out on a bed with a loaded .45 caliber pistol in his hand.

Ryan wasn't charged with any crime but did have to undergo hospital treatment after being diagnosed as being "severely mentally disabled."

He didn't petition the county court to get his weapons back until December 2016. There was no dispute he was their lawful owner.

County Judge Kathrynann W. Durham ordered police to return Ryan's weapons after ruling there is no time limit for someone to seek the return of seized property in cases where no criminal charges were filed.

Oh yes there is, Jubelirer concluded. Per a state Supreme Court ruling, that time limit is six years, she found.

In any case, Jubelirer noted, police said the confiscated weapons were destroyed years ago.

Ryan could appeal the Commonwealth Court ruling to the state Supreme Court.PHILADELPHIA (AP) -- Bill Cosby's lawyers are asking the judge in his upcoming sexual assault retrial to step aside, arguing he could be seen as biased because his wife is a social worker who's described herself as an "advocate for assault victims."

Cosby's lawyers said Thursday that some of Judge Steven O'Neill's rulings, including his decision to let five additional accusers testify, could give the appearance he's influenced by his wife's work.

Deborah O'Neill is the coordinator of a University of Pennsylvania sexual trauma outreach team. She wrote her dissertation on acquaintance rape.

The O'Neills did not immediately respond to messages.

Cosby has pleaded not guilty to charges he assaulted a woman at his Philadelphia-area home in 2004. His first trial ended in a hung jury. His retrial is scheduled for April 2.This post was updated at 6:42 p.m. with some background on the PHRC process and more detail about the complaint.

Flora Posteraro, the former abc27 News anchor whose dismissal has roiled the midstate's social media world, has now filed sex discrimination and retaliation complaints against her former employer.

Posteraro, a complaint to the Pennsylvania Human Relations Commission confirms, lost her job March 12 after refusing an involuntary transfer to a weekend anchor / reporting beat.

That information jibes with reports PennLive had received in interviews with other people familiar with Posteraro's situation this week.

But Posteraro alleged Thursday her reassignment took place only after, and in retaliation for, her participation in an August complaint to the station's human resources offices about the station's general manager, Robert Bee.

Bee arrived at WHTM, the Harrisburg, Lancaster, York market's ABC affiliate, in January 2017, shortly after the station was acquired by Nexstar Media Group, Inc., of Irving, Texas.

In that internal complaint, which is also referenced in Posteraro's case, Bee is accused of making several disparaging comments about women in the news department.

They included:

References to one female anchor as a "mean bitch."

Telling a former news director that one of the station's female reporters looked like a "fat pig" on the air.

Making unspecified racial and sexist comments about the station's morning anchors, and

Describing women who did not follow his restrictive dress code as "street walkers."

Another triggering event, according to Posteraro's complaint, was an ongoing campaign by Bee to get female on-air talent to stop wearing sleeveless dresses because, "no one wants to look at flabby arms."

Aside from the work environment claims referenced above, the complaint notes male on-air staff at WHTM were treated differently in respect to wardrobe issues, and scheduling.

Several WHTM employees, including Posteraro, were interviewed as part of the summer 2017 complaint about Bee, but it was not immediately clear what Nexstar's findings were.

PennLive's attempts to reach the company Thursday were unsuccessful.

Posteraro, however, clearly believes her participation in that complaint, along with several other "respectful" discussions she'd had with Bee about his treatment of female staff, had a direct tie to her reassignment.

Posteraro alleges in her PHRC complaint that when she was offered a new, two-year contract on Jan. 31, 2018, it contained the same rate of pay but a demotion from her longstanding position as anchor of abc27's noon and 5 p.m. weekday newscasts.

"The decision to move Posteraro was made after and because of Posteraro's complaints," the complaint asserts.

Posteraro filed a second internal complaint with Nexstar on Feb. 5, in which she claimed her demotion "was retaliation for her objections to Bee's treatment of female employees."

In that case, the company concluded - after what Posteraro and her attorney contend was an incomplete investigation - that there was no retaliation.

Posteraro -- whose prior contract with WHTM expired on Dec. 24 -- subsequently informed the station she was not quitting, and was willing to stay in her current role as a daytime anchor.

But on March 12, station executives told her she no longer worked for the company, and that they considered her to have resigned.

Posteraro maintains in her PHRC complaint that between Jan. 31 and Feb. 26 she was given four different explanations regarding her demotion, which "belie that the real reason for the demotion was in retaliation for Posteraro's complaints about Bee's treatment of women."

PennLive reached out to Bee for a response to the human relations complaint Thursday afternoon, and he declined comment.

Bee, described as having 35 years in broadcast and sales management, came to Harrisburg from Wilkes-Barre, where he had served since 2012 as vice president and general manager of WBRE-TV, another Nexstar property.

From 2003 to 2012, Bee served as director of sales at WTAE-TV (ABC) in Pittsburgh, and he had also worked at WGAL-TV in Lancaster, WXIX-TV in Cincinnati, and WLIG-TV on Long Island, New York.

Posteraro's PHRC complaint alleges discrimination on the basis of sex and retaliation under Pennsylvania's Human Relations Act.

Once the formal complaint is served on Bee and Nexstar, they will have 60 days to file a formal answer.

Human Relations complaints then typically move to a fact-finding conference, in which both parties present evidence and documents to support their cases. It is also a point where some complaints get resolved.

If commission staff finds there is probable cause for the charges alleged, that can trigger a public hearing in which testimony is taken under oath.

PHRC complaints can also become a prelude to a civil suit filed in county court.

Posteraro, 54, has been in the television news business since graduating from California University of Pennsylvania, with stints in Clarksburg, W.Va., Johnstown, Wilkes-Barre and Philadelphia.

She started working at WHTM in August 1997 as an anchor / reporter, and had been firmly ensconced in the daytime anchor role there for years until this month.

Her sudden departure, with no public explanation from the station to date, has hit the station's viewers hard.

It has already been followed by the creation of an "I Stand With Flora" Facebook page that has been the focal point of a cyber-pushback, along with public expressions of support from current and former colleagues.

A publicly-traded company, Nexstar reported profits of $1.1 billion in 2016. The company acquired WHTM last year, as part of a larger acquisition.

It describes itself on its Facebook page as "the largest TV station operator in the country," with "171 full power stations in 100 markets," reaching nearly 39 percent of all "television households."

Complaint filed by Flora Posteraro against former employer abc27 by PennLive on ScribdPennsylvania officials on Thursday outlined the process that medical schools can use to apply for state permission to conduct medical marijuana research.



Pennsylvania is the first among the states that have legalized medical marijuana to make medical marijuana research part of the law. Historically, marijuana has not been well-studied in the United States, due to its federal status as a Schedule 1 drug with no medical benefit.



Now, Pennsylvania is about to begin accepting applications from medical schools that want to conduct such research. At least one, the University of Pittsburgh School of Medince, has said it does. The state will allow up to eight medical schools, which are each associated with a hospital and typically have a strong focus on research, to conduct research on medical marijuana.



Technically, the Schedule 1 status outlaws most medical marijuana research as well as medical marijuana itself, including in the 29 states which have legalized it. But with public support for medical marijuana soaring among Americans, officials have chosen not to enforce the ban as it pertains to medical marijuana.



In approving medical marijuana in 2016, assorted Pennsylvania leaders promised the state would become a national leader in medical marijuana research.



Each Pennsylvania medical school doing the research will work in tandem with a separate entity that will grow the marijuana for study use and dispense it to patients in the study. Those entities also require state approval, with the state soon beginning that application and approval process.



Also on Thursday, the state laid out the timeline for phase two of its medical marijuana program, which involves approving 13 more growers/processors and 23 more dispensaries. It will begin accepting applications next month with deadlines in May.





As for growers-processors, it's expected to take about nine months to a year from the time applications are submitted until the time the growers/processors are supplying medical marijuana.



Once the 13 growers/processors are approved, the state will have 25 -- the number called for in the 2016 law that legalized it.



Pennsylvania's first medical dispensaries opened in mid-February, with 13 now approved to sell to patients, but only nine actually doing so. So far, the dispensaries have faced an unsteady supply of medical marijuana from the growers/processors, with only two having shipped product as of Thursday.



Asked about the supply, John Collins, the director of the state office of medical marijuana, didn't provide an update on the production status of each of the 12-approved growers/processors. Rather, he said it generally takes about 16 weeks from the time a grower/processor is cleared to being growing until it begins harvesting marijuana. The harvested marijuana is then processed into the various liquids, oils, lotions and other medical marijuana products allowed in Pennsylvania, with some products taking lonter than others



The 12 growers/processors were cleared to begin growing last fall. Once they have raised a crop to the point of harvest, they typically harvest once a month, Collins said.



Medical marijuana can be used in Pennsylvania to treat a list of 17 medical conditions.



The law doesn't allow medical marijuana in dry leaf form. However, several committees on a state advisory panel recently recommended allowing it in dry leaf or flower form. Medical marijuana in that form could be inhaled as a vapor or consumed orally. It couldn't be smoked, as Pennsylvania law doesn't permit smoking of medical marijuana. The panel on April 9 will vote on whether to recommend to the state secretary of health to approve the dry leaf and flower forms.





As of Thursday, about 25,000 Pennsylvanians have began the process of obtained the state-issued care needed to buy medical marijuana, about 9,000 have received the needed certification from a doctor, about 7,000 have obtained a medical card, and about 6,700 have purchased medical marijuana.



Also, 866 doctors have applied to become eligible to recommend medical marijuana to patients, and 473 are approved.

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that dry leaf and flower forms of medical marijuana could be smoked in Pennsylvania. Also, the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, not the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, has expressed interest in conducting research.This story was updated with a quote from the National Republican Congressional Committee.

HARRISBURG -- Republican Rick Saccone is conceding a special congressional election in southwestern Pennsylvania to Democrat Conor Lamb after the GOP considered a recount and legal action.

Lamb led by about 750 votes in a remarkable upset in a Republican-held district President Donald Trump won by 20 percentage points just 16 months ago.

The 33-year-old Lamb succeeds Republican Tim Murphy, the eight-term congressman who resigned in October amid a sex scandal. Vote counting was nearly over.

In the race, Lamb struck a moderate tone. He downplayed opposition to Trump, opposed sweeping new gun regulations and supported Trump's steel tariffs, but he's a fierce critic of Republicans' tax cuts and health care policy.

Lamb's victory has sent shivers through Republicans as they try to keep their U.S. House majority in looming midterm elections.

The National Republican Congressional Committee issued the following statement Wednesday evening from spokesman Chris Martin: "Conor Lamb just became the most endangered Democrat in the country. If he manages to make it through a Democratic primary he'll face Keith Rothfus, a well-funded and battle-tested leader."The Toronto Star building is shown in Toronto, Wednesday, June 8, 2016. The federal competition watchdog alleges in court documents that Torstar Corp. and Postmedia Network Canada Corp. conspired in their deal to swap newspapers that resulted in the closure of dozens of mostly community publications. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Eduardo LimaManitoba Premier Brian Pallister speaks before the provincial throne speech at the Manitoba Legislature in Winnipeg, Tuesday, November 21, 2017. The board of directors at Manitoba Hydro has resigned en masse, citing a lack of dialogue with the provincial government. THE CANADIAN PRESS/John WoodsHowie Mandel arrives on the red carpet at the 2017 Canadian Screen Awards in Toronto on Sunday, March 12, 2017. Just For Laughs has been sold to Howie Mandel and ICM Partners, an American talent agency. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chris YoungFILE - In this Jan. 15, 2016 file photo, actor Fred Savage attends the FOX All-Star Party at the Fox Winter TCA in Pasadena, Calif. Savage says allegations in a lawsuit that he was abusive to a woman on the set of the Fox series AuThe GrinderAu are Auabsolutely untrue.Au Costumer Youngjoo Hwang claims in the suit, filed Wednesday, March 21, 2018, in Los Angeles, that Savage berated her, struck her arm and behaved aggressively toward female employees. She also alleges 20th Century Fox Television refused to investigate her complaints. (Photo by Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP, File)An injured civilian who was wounded during a car bombing in Mogadishu, Somalia Thursday, March 22, 2018. Somali officials say at least 14 people have been killed and 10 others are wounded in a car bomb blast near a hotel in the capital, Mogadishu. Capt. Mohamed Hussein says the explosion occurred near the Weheliye hotel on the busy Makka Almukarramah Road. The road has been a target of attacks in the past by the Somalia-based extremist group al-Shabab. (AP Photo/Farah Abdi Warsameh)In this March 20, 2018 photo, Sequita Thompson, points to the white area on the patio where she said her grandson Stephan Clark lay dead after being shot by police in Sacramento, Calif. Relatives, activists and Sacramento officials are questioning why police shot at an unarmed black man 20 times, killing him, when he turned out to be holding only a cellphone in his grandparents' backyard. (Renee C. Byer/The Sacramento Bee via AP)This March 17, 2018 file photo shows a print out of the letter by Emeritus Pope Benedict XVI that was released by the Vatican after coming under criticism for previously selectively citing it in a press release and digitally manipulating a photograph of it. On Wednesday, March 21, 2018, the Vatican announced that its head of communications department, Mons. Dario Vigano', had resigned over a scandal about the letter that he mischaracterized in public and then digitally manipulated in a photograph sent to the media. (AP Photo/Andrew Medichini, file)FILE - In this Oct. 3, 2017 file photo, displaced men from Hawija sit facing a wall in order not to see security officers, who will try to determine if they were associated with the Islamic State group, at a Kurdish screening center in Dibis, Iraq. An analysis by the Associated Press of a spreadsheet listing all 27,849 people imprisoned in Iraq as of late January 2018, shows that Iraq has detained or imprisoned more than 19,000 people accused of connections to IS or other terror-related offenses. More than 3,000 people have been sentenced to death. (AP Photo/Bram Janssen, File)Former South Korean President Lee Myung-bak, gets into a car as he is transferred to a detention centre, at his residence in Seoul early Friday March 23, 2018. A South Korea court issued an arrest warrant for ex-President Lee Myung-bak on corruption charges on Thursday. (Jung Yeon-je/Pool via AP)Perryville football coach Brent Roth is already trying to erase the game from his memory. It is probably for a good reason, too.Perryville struggled to do anything well as Park Hills Central handed 

The Pirates finally put together what Perryville softball coach Lilly Pecaut called a complete game.Everything came together as Perryville got the offense and pitching to come away with 

The Perryville boys soccer team was able to show its resiliency in multiple ways as it got back into the win column. The Pirates bounced back from a lopsided loss to Notre Dame the week before, to 

St. Vincent makes Valle Catholic play in loss St. Vincent football coach Tim Schumer didnt want his team to look at the scoreboard following the game. The score may have said that the Valle Catholic Warriors won in a lopsided game, but 

Indians take advantage of miscues to claim first victory St. Vincent found itself down two scores midway through the third quarter, and despite the deficit, coach Tim Schumer was calm.The game was not over at that point, you have to play four 

Rushing attack leads Pirates to win over Owls The Perryville football team is quickly turning into a M.A.S.H. unit. With several players already nursing injuries from the previous week, they also threw in other players who were in quarantine. 

Click Here For Our Local Sports PageBring best young minds to modernise energy sector  Trinidad & Tobago Prime Minister

By Kaieter News



GEORGETOWN

Petroleumworld 03 22 2018 While the Government of Guyana may be slow in the use of local expertise as the nation moves to first oil, its CARICOM counterpart, Trinidad and Tobago is wasting no time.



After finding itself in a less than favourable economic position, the Government of Trinidad and Tobago is on the move to modernise its energy sector. Its main ingredient in this approach will be the use of the brilliant young minds of the nation, which spans 5,131 kilometers.



The process has already started with the Prime Minister of the twin-island Republic, Dr. Keith Rowley, retaining the help of those persons who possess the rich institutional knowledge that would complement the new ideas to come from the younger generation.



At the recently held Spotlight on Energy Conference in Port of Spain, Dr. Rowley made this move known. He said that it is necessary if the nation wishes to have an advantage in the risky oil industry.



Dr. Rowley said, We got ourselves into this (economic) situation because we shied away from knowledge on the marketplace; that is coming to an end. Understanding that we have worked for the last year and a half with Poten and Partners, and that we are ensuring that we get the best advice available so that when we come to the table to talk in the zone of mutual respect, Trinidad and Tobago is not disadvantaged.



With respect to our young people, our future, we have very many bright young people who we were told today are unemployed. We hail them; then they get the scholarships and go abroad to some of the best universities.



We are not interested in what happens after. But, that will have to change and some fundamental changes will have to be made to absorb that kind of talent if this country is to going to have a future.



The Prime Minister, who is a geologist added, It is against that background that I've engaged the assistance, pro bono, of former permanent secretary Jacqui Wilson to go out there and find our scholars in certain particular fields because we are reconstructing the Ministry of Energy and other areas where their skills are required to give us the chance to be the best that we can be.



So that when we sit down across the table from those who look after their shareholders, those who speak for Trinidad and Tobago will have the wherewithal to be respected across the table and to come away with a fair deal for the people of Trinidad and Tobago.



The Prime Minister insisted that the government's role through the Ministry of Energy must be modernised. Hence, Mr. Selwyn Lashley was retained as the Permanent Secretary.



Dr. Rowley noted that Lashley officially retired 18 months ago, but we just could not let him go at this particular time because we needed his expertise. He agreed to stay on and work with us on assignments and also to assist us in the succession planning in getting someone to replace him because you can't just put anybody in the Ministry of Energy as Permanent Secretary.



The Prime Minister also acknowledged the work of former Minister Wendell Mottley who agreed to help the government with getting the industry back on its feet.

Story from Kaieter News



Kaieteurnewsonline.com 03 22 2018

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'98,ME,XP, Vista, Windows 7,8,10 +/ 800x600 pixelsEconomists divided on Trinidad & Tobago new gas company





By TT Guardian



PORT SPAIN

Petroleumworld 03 22 2018

Government's decision to start up another state enterprise to find and produce natural gas from small and fields has been applauded by one economist, Gregory McGuire. However, another economist, Dr Ronald Ramkissoon, is urging caution.

McGuire, who has worked and written on the energy sector for decades, said the move was a good one since significant amounts of gas that can and should be produced from small and stranded fields.

My suspicion is that this company is likely to be a subsidiary of the National Gas Company Ltd because it makes sense to separate out the NGC's assets and not to confuse the exploration and production assets with the rest of the company. All the NGC's upstream assets are held in separate companies so that it does not reflect on the NGC's accounts per se, he said.

NGC has interests in the Teak, Samaan and Poui fields operated by French outfit Perenco and the Iguana field operated by Denovo which is expected to land first gas soon.

In a telephone interview with Business and Money, McGuire said it is a good move because there are many smaller fields that the BPs of this world will not produce because to them it is not viable or economic to bring into production.

He gave the example of TSP which once produced as much as 145,000 barrels of oil per day (bo/d) and now produces just over 10,000 bo/d.

He said for the larger companies TSP is not attractive but Perenco has taken it over and is making good use of the asset.

The energy economist said there are companies with licences that have held onto acreage they are neither exploring nor producing. It is those kinds of situations that an NGC, with a more nimble and smaller gas partner, may be in a better position to produce the stranded gas.

McGuire said he was confident the government and the companies with the acreage will find a mutually agreeable position to move forward.

But Dr Ramkissoon warned that the government has to be extremely careful in risking taxpayers funds. He said the country has been down this road before and it has not been very successful.

There are too many lessons around bad decision making in the energy sector and other state enterprises as well, to cause us to be extremely cautious about getting Government involved in the energy sector, or for that part several other sectors, he said.

There are very bad lessons all around us in all of that. We need much more details before one can really make that judgment, but the population must also understand what are the risks that the government will be taking, because at the end of the day if the thing does not pan out as the government hopes, it must come back to the people and account for the loss of capital and that is not something that governments like to do.

Dr Ramkissoon said the country needs an assessment of where we are and a vision of where the government wants to take the energy sector.

It must be a commercially oriented decision and we have seen enough of state involvement that has only led to losses, he said.

However, McGuire argued that past failures must not deter the government from moving forward because the solution is simple get it right this time.

He said NGC has $48 billion in unleveraged assets and once the company is set up as a subsidiary it will be able to leverage the assets while, at the same time, isolating the its balance sheet so it does not necessarily impair its regular business.





Mexico CNH wants minority stake floated in state oil firm Pemex -Chief

By Shadia Nasralla



LONDON

Petroleumworld 03 22 2018

The head of Mexico's National Hydrocarbons Commission (CNH) urged the government on Wednesday to float a minority stake in national oil and gas firm Pemex on the Mexican stock exchange.

Pemex controls the majority of hydrocarbon reserves in Mexico although the sector has been open to foreign investment in the past four years, but it lacks funds to properly explore and develop the assets, the regulator said.

Juan Carlos Zepeda, president commissioner of CNH which is in charge of Mexico's contracts with foreign energy firms, said constitutional changes were needed to allow a stake in Pemex to be sold while keeping the company under state control.

Allow Pemex to place shares in the market and raise capital, he told Reuters in London, adding he expected a more successful IPO than the one by Brazil's Petrobras in 2010.

Petrobras raised $70 billion from its stake sale.

Mexican President Enrique Nieto said in 2012, before he was elected, that Pemex could emulate the Petrobras IPO. But there has been little discussion of a sale since Mexico opened up the energy industry to private investment under its 2013 reforms.

The front-runner in Mexico's election in July, leftist Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, has been skeptical of Nieto's energy reforms.

Regardless of the political party, regardless of the administration, ... there is no other alternative to make Pemex successful, Zepeda said, adding Pemex will keep deteriorating if it did not raise capital in the market.

Pemex' production had fallen from about 3.2 million barrels per day (bpd) in 2004 to about 1.9 million bpd now, Zepeda said, adding Pemex could exceed previous output peaks with more investment.

Pemex has all the reserves, the best exploration areas, but Pemex needs to move faster. Pemex needs to be able to invest more, he said, adding Pemex would benefit from farming out, an industry term for offering stakes in blocks to other investors.

Pemex needs more capital to invest in its own projects, the regulator said, adding Pemex needed to at least triple its annual capital spending that was now about $6.8 billion a year.

Presidential-hopeful Lopez Obrador has said he would stop two oil and gas field auctions scheduled for July and September, if elected.

Asked about those plans, Zepeda said the bidding process had already begun, adding: Once you start the bidding process the only authority responsible for the bidding is CNH. So only CNH could stop the bidding process.





OPEC may change count success for oil cuts



Vienna meeting looked at potential change to inventory target. Proposal could affect how quickly deal achieves its goals

By Angelina Rascouet, Javier Blas, and Grant Smith



LONDON

Petroleumworld 03 22 2018

OPEC and its allies held further discussions about changing the way they measure the impact of their production cuts, including proposals that would affect how quickly they hit their target, according to delegates from the group.

One option that OPEC and non-OPEC delegates discussed in Vienna on Monday is to continue measuring commercial oil inventories in developed economies against the five-year average, but without counting years of high stockpiles, the delegates said. Another option is to use a seven-year inventory average, they said. This would move their goal of reducing stockpiles to normal levels further from reach, potentially requiring a longer period of cuts to achieve it. Delegates also considered a period of more than seven years.

While the people said no final decision has been taken and the ultimate choice rests with ministers -- who didn't attend the Vienna meeting -- the talks underscore the lingering uncertainty as the producers' agreement enters a second year. They are going beyond their pledged cuts and crude has rallied above $60 a barrel, but there are signs that Saudi Arabia would like to go further .

Making Progress

When the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, Russia and their allies struck a deal in 2016 to end the price slump and re-balance an oversupplied market, they set a target of bringing oil inventories held by members of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development back in line with the five-year average. After more than a year of supply curbs, they've made significant progress.

Stockpiles fell in February to around 44 million barrels above that measure, down from a surplus of 293 million barrels in January 2017, the first month of the cuts, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the meeting was private. Assuming current conditions remain the same, the delegates concluded that the market is on track to re-balance on the five-year measure in the second or third quarter.

However, Saudi Arabia and Russia, the two biggest producers taking part in this deal, have both previously said the five-year average is flawed . Years of excessively high supplies mean that measure is itself higher than normal, while the patchy nature of data outside the OECD makes it difficult to get an accurate picture of the entire world market.

April Meeting

Monitoring global inventories, rather than just those in OECD countries, was another possibility under discussion, one person said. The Vienna talks didn't settle on any single option, and the alternatives will be discussed again at the next meeting due to be held in April in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, the people said.

If ministers eventually were to pick a different measure , their choice could reinforce the need to maintain supply curbs for the whole of this year -- something Saudi Arabia supports -- or perhaps signal that the group's target has already been achieved, allowing cuts to be phased out.

Ministers from the OPEC and non-OPEC Joint Ministerial Monitoring Committee, which includes Saudi Arabia and Russia, will meet in Jeddah on April 15. Ministers from all 24 nations participating in the cuts agreement gather in Vienna on June 22.

 With assistance by Wael Mahdi





Peru's President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski resigns ahead of 2nd impeachment vote

Luka Gonzales/AFP



Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, former Wall Street veteran brought down by corruption probes. First Vice President Martin Vizcarra to be sworn in on Friday

By John Quigley



LIMA

Petroleumworld 03 22 2018

Peruvian lawmakers began planning the transfer of power to Peru's first vice president after Pedro Pablo Kuczynski resigned in the face of a second impeachment vote, brought down by the continent-wide Carwash bribery scandal.

Martin Vizcarra will be sworn in Friday after party chiefs meeting in Congress agreed to accept Kuczynski's resignation, speaker Luis Galarreta told reporters. Vizcarra is expected to arrive in Lima on Thursday, his 55th birthday. He has been serving as Peru's ambassador to Canada.

Kuczynski said in a national address Wednesday that resigning was best for the the South American nation and would end uncertainty.

There will be an orderly constitutional transition, he said on state television flanked by his cabinet. I don't want to be an obstacle for the nation finding the path of union and harmony that it so badly needs and which was denied me.

Kuczynski, a 79-year-old Wall Street veteran and former finance minister, had beaten a first attempt at impeachment in December after the revelation that a firm he owned took money from Brazilian builder Odebrecht SA, which doled out hundreds of millions in bribes across the region. His escape was narrow enough to embolden opponents to make a second attempt, and on Wednesday, some lawmakers who previously supported him called for his resignation after allegations he sought to reward politicians in exchange for retaining power.

Peru's currency gained on the reports of Kuczynski's resignation, strengthening as much as 0.4 percent to 3.2516 per dollar, the strongest in two weeks.

Line of Succession

As first vice president, Vizcarra is first in line to take power and is entitled to hold office until 2021 when the government's mandate expires. A civil engineer turned politician, Vizcarra joined Kuczynski's campaign as an adviser in 2015 after a four-year term as governor of the Moquegua region in south Peru. He quit as transportation minister in May under pressure from lawmakers amid a spat over an airport contract.

Political turmoil is nothing new to Peru. Its previous four presidents have been under investigation for money laundering, corruption or human-rights abuses. One is in prison, one has just been released and Peru is seeking the extradition of another from the U.S.

Crucial Defections

Kuczynski's position deteriorated quickly. Since late Tuesday, Jorge del Castillo, a legislator with the opposition Apra party, and three lawmakers who left Kuczynski's party last year said that they were in favor of impeachment. Their change of heart followed the release of secretly filmed videos that appear to show government-allied lawmakers telling a member of Peru's biggest opposition party, Popular Force, that he would control public works in his jurisdiction if he abstained in Thursday's planned impeachment vote.

Del Castillo, who previously said there were no grounds for ousting Kuczynski, told Radio Programas the president should resign. Salvador Heresi, a lawmaker with Kuczynski's Peruvians for Change party, said before the resignation that he would have voted for impeachment.

What we saw in the videos released yesterday is disgraceful and gravely affects our democracy, Heresi said via Twitter.

Speaking to reporters before the videos were aired by Popular Force, Kuczynski said accusations of vote buying were a big lie.

Araoz on Wednesday denied to reporters that the government offered projects or money to sway legislators.

Swept Away

Kuczynski had been fighting for his political life since last year after claims that he lied to congress to hide his ties to Odebrecht, which is at the center of Carwash. Prosecutors across Latin America are investigating bribes that the company paid to public officials in exchange for billions of dollars in contracts. The company disclosed payments to Westfield Capital Ltd., owned by Kuczynski, of close to $800,000 between 2004 to 2007 for advice on projects that Peru awarded it.





The president has said he had no knowledge of the company's dealings at the time, because an associate was managing the firm. He said that, as sole shareholder of Westfield, he later received a dividend and thus "earned some money" from the Odebrecht deal. But he denied granting any favors to Odebrecht when he was finance minister.

The scandal and investigation has roiled the nation's construction industry and delayed major infrastructure projects while prompting the government and private economists to slash growth forecasts for the Andean nation.

Kuczynski's departure will bring some peace to markets, said Carlos Rojas, founder of Lima-based Andino Asset Management. If Vizcarra takes over as expected, investors can expect a relief rally, said Bulltick's Kathryn Rooney Vera.





Photo provided by Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency on March 21, 2018 shows rescuers working on the capsized sand mining vessel in the waters off Malaysia in the Malacca Strait. A sand mining vessel capsized Wednesday in the waters off Malaysia in the Malacca Strait, leaving at least one dead and 14 crew members missing, said the Malaysian coast guard. (Xinhua/MMEA)

KUALA LUMPUR, March 21 (Xinhua) -- A sand mining vessel capsized Wednesday in the waters off Malaysia in the Malacca Strait, leaving at least one dead and 14 crew members missing, said the Malaysian coast guard.

There were 18 crew members on the vessel, including one Malaysian, one Indonesian and 16 Chinese citizens. Three have been rescued, one was found dead and 14 remained missing, according to the Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency (MMEA).

The Chinese embassy in Malaysia confirmed to Xinhua that among the 16 Chinese crew members, three were rescued, one was dead and 12 remained missing.

Zulkifili Abu Bakar, chief of MMEA, said the search and rescue is ongoing with assets from his agency as well as the Malaysian marine police.

The vessel, JBB RONG CHANG 8, carrying a Dominican flag, capsized 8.5 nautical miles off Parit Jawa in southern Malaysian state of Johor.

MMEA received a distress call at around 8:50 a.m. local time (0050 GMT) and launched a search-and-rescue mission afterwards.

[ Editor: Zhang Zhou ]On first glance, it looked as if the world's most organized rummage sale was unfolding within the Philadelphia Museum of Art. More than 400 shoes, pared down to their broad, floppy soles or spiky heels, lay scattered across the gallery floor, each one of them numbered and labeled, destined for a particular spot on an invisible grid.

Art exhibitions, curator Hyunsoo Woo said, "come with different sets of challenges." For instance, in 2014 she hung a 360-year-old, 40-foot-high scroll in the museum's Great Stair Hall.

But complex contemporary projects like this one  a survey of work by Brooklyn-based artist Jean Shin, who assembles found objects into expansive, sometimes immersive installations  require a different type of obsessive attention.

Museumgoers who visit the show, "Jean Shin: Collections," which opens Saturday in the museum's Perelman Building, will arrive to find each piece precisely positioned, framed by pristine white walls. Most will never know what went into that  the fact that the works arrived in hundreds of pieces, each one individually wrapped and labeled and accompanied by binders filled with meticulously detailed, illustrated instructions on how to unpack and install (and later uninstall and repack) the component parts.

A week ago, as Shin walked through the gallery, a dozen installers, conservators, curators, and assistants had already worked three days straight to put the space in order, and there was still plenty left to do.

"The labor seems sort of obscene," Shin conceded, "but I end up doing it."

Her work starts much more organically  a process of experimenting with the materials available to her that fit the popular conception of an artist in the studio.

"Most of my work is about creating a second life [for those materials], where the meaning is broader and deeper," Shin said. "It talks about how we consume and waste, and also how we preserve."

Consider that scattering of discarded shoes, titled Worn Soles, arranged in a swarm on the floor as if to suggest a swirling crowd.

"It mirrors the natural movement of society," Woo said.

To arrange the shoes, Shin studied photos of people gathering, and selected each pair for its unique qualities.

"It's about the hidden drawing of the wear and tear that is an indication of a lived experience  someone on their feet all day, or someone being chauffeured in a limo all the time," Shin said.

But once she's created a composition, the process becomes rigid. The discarded soles find their places fixed in a photograph, overlaid with a grid that will provide a road map for each future installation. Then, this trash-made-precious is accorded a degree of care: to reach the museum, each sole was paired, wrapped in a fold of cardboard, secured by tape, sheathed in Bubble Wrap and boxed in numerical order.

"Sometimes," she said, "this takes as much time as it would to make the piece itself."

Another piece, Spring Collection, came together when Shin was at Materials for the Arts, a New York residency where she began sorting through leather scraps and discovered a pattern: fashion houses used the pristine interior of each piece to construct their samples, but rejected the edges with their contours and wrinkles that suggest leather does, in fact, consist of animal hide. So Shin pieced those edges back together, restoring the ghost of the animal.

"These were temporary placements in the studio. Then, once I have an invitation to show, it's got to commit," Shin said.

She created a template for each work, outlining each one in marker on a sheet of plastic to show the orientation and dimensions, and the placement of each and every upholstery tack.

"The hope is: When you're in front of it, that sense of craft comes through," Shin said.

The same goes for a mosaic of Army and Coast Guard uniforms, each one gifted from a veteran who Shin met with personally, dissected along the seams, ironed and starched and plastered to the wall so meticulously it looks more like wallpaper than segments of fabric. The color gradation that tracks the evolution of camouflage reflects different combat arenas, from the jungle-green of the Vietnam era to the desert sands of the Gulf, then Iraq and Afghanistan. The excised pieces, skeletal seams and pockets and leftover zippers, are festooned overhead.

Woo called Shin over to discuss a swath of goldenrod-colored leather laser-etched with Shin's name, a title treatment for the exhibition.

A quartet of accordion lifts sat waiting for adjustments to an installation strung from the building's atrium. The work, commissioned by Calvin Klein, used fabric and patterns from the company's 2010 women's runway  leftovers turned into banners raised in salute to spring fashion.

And back in the gallery, a team of five worked together to assemble an inordinately complicated piece called Unraveling that Shin created for the Asia Society in New York.

"I started by asking, 'What is an Asia Society?' " Shin said. It sounded like some sort of cabal.

So she asked members of the Asian American arts community to contribute sweaters  then circulated a list among the participants so each could identify which of the others she knew. Then, she used yarn unraveled from the sweaters to trace each individual's social network.

Woo first connected with Shin when she donated her own sweater for the cause more than a decade ago. For this installation, she collected 23 sweaters from the Asian American arts community here in Philadelphia.

There are now 182 sweaters in the show altogether. Some are mostly intact. One donated by Melissa Chiu, who was at Asia Society and is now director of the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, has been reduced to one small square. Shin can imagine people being pulled in different directions, worn thin, as they become more connected.

Each sweater arrived with its yarn skeins in a labeled Ziploc bag. A spreadsheet arrived with them to document the interconnections, like a diabolical logic problem. One installer read the names aloud, while others unspooled the threads into a madman's crisscross, a suggestion of a close-knit community or, maybe, a conspiracy theory.

Having a process in place is crucial. But Shin planned to come back after all the spreadsheets and templates and diagrams were put away, to experiment with any last-minute adjustments.

But she won't do too much. After all, one change could lead to a dozen others.

"It becomes this epic project, a real journey. You set up the system and now you've got to do it."Mark Zuckerbergs photo from his facebook page Sept 24, Sunday. Traveled all the way to Philadelphia for the best cheesesteak in the land _ at The Original Pats King of Steaks. Read more

Facebook's stock-market value has dropped as much as $50 billion since last week's exposure by the New York Times and the Guardian about how hedge-fund mogul Robert Mercer's data-based consulting company, Cambridge Analytica, raided the social-media giant for personal data to target millions of users in the 2016 presidential elections without permission.

David Magerman, the Main Line data scientist, school philanthropist, and restaurateur, blew a whistle on Mercer's agenda in my column last year. Magerman lost his millions-a-year job at Mercer's giant hedge fund, Renaissance Technologies, after warning that Mercer insisted that Donald Trump use Cambridge Analytica "to get unpopular initiatives (like electing Donald Trump) through the electorate."

What's next? Investor lawsuits are piling up. "What has happened to Facebook bears strong resemblance to the Equifax data breach, the inappropriate actions at Wells Fargo, the explosion of the rig in the Gulf of Mexico operated by British Petroleum, the accelerator controversy at Toyota, and the false [diesel-emissions] claims at Volkswagen," writes Jim Meyer, chief investment officer at the $1 billion-asset Tower Bridge Investments, West Conshohocken, in a note to clients of Boenning & Scattergood.

"In each of these episodes, the company in question may or may not have broken laws, but in all cases, there were clear lapses in oversight at a minimum," Meyer writes. " Each of these incidents is reputation damaging, but in the long run, companies can and usually do regain trust. Very few of us are staying away from Toyota because an accelerator may or may not stick inadvertently, and we are more than happy to buy gas at a BP station if the price is right."

Similarly there are no early signs of users mass-abandoning Facebook.

But Facebook will likely face pain  "enhanced government scrutiny" and forced changes in its business practices, Meyer adds.

Already Facebook has "lost control of the story," he says. " The worst, from an image standpoint, will occur on the day that Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg sit down before Congress and get lambasted 15 minutes at a time by senators and congressmen who get their moment in the limelight to demonstrate their outrage."

Unlike ex-Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf, who was forced out and made to return a fraction of his multimillion-dollar pay package over his bank's unauthorized, phony accounts, Zuckerberg controls Facebook's voting stock and will likely keep his job.

Meyer is skeptical that Facebook boycotts will amount to much: "Facebook isn't going away. It is too entrenched in too many people's lives." If you gave Facebook your birthday and your children's names, that information is already being exploited, and young people no longer expect that stuff to be private.

But "that doesn't mean Facebook is home free. Quite the contrary," Meyer says in his note. "If Facebook was lax in allowing Cambridge Analytica to use and retain its data improperly and contrary to a consent decree it signed with the FTC [in 2011]," it's in for heavy-duty government scrutiny.

Unlike the news stories posted by this newspaper, Facebook and other social-media companies don't control their content, Meyer adds. "They can, however, police their sites and remove harmful posts, and they can close accounts that abuse their agreement to use the media site properly."

Social-media and search giants such as Facebook and Google can't be trusted to police themselves, as Gabriel Weinberg of Paoli-based DuckDuckGo keeps reminding us. Facebook made user data available to firms such as Cambridge Analytica as a "business model," Weinberg tweeted Sunday. "This should be the nail in the coffin for privacy self-regulation by Big Tech," he added. "It doesn't work."

"That's where government comes in. It is a bit like car safety," with government ordering seat belts and pollution controls, Meyer adds.

Will Facebook shares recover? The company "is clearly tarnished," Meyer says. But Zuckerberg has faced pushback before, and "all big tech companies go through this phase," he concluded.

Still, Facebook will need new ways to grow sales if it is to continue justifying its sky-high share price. Indeed, Facebook, along with Google, has lost a significant part of the "duopoly's" once-dominant market share, as Amazon and Snapchat gain, notes veteran digital-media observer Terry Chabrowe at eMarketer.com

Monica Peart, senior forecaster at eMarketer, estimates that Google/YouTube and Facebook/Instagram will gain just under half of new digital ad spending in 2018, down from more than 70 percent in 2016. Indeed, Facebook is no longer gaining market share, though Instagram is still picking up advertisers faster than the internet as a whole.Frankford resident Christine Soder has lived for decades in her 1,160-square-foot home, which has accumulated plenty of wear and tear. She needed a new roof and insulated pipes, but could not afford the repairs herself. Earlier this year, a woman-owned construction company stepped up to do the job  free. Read more

In the months after Christine Soder's husband died in 2004, her two-story, two-bedroom house in Frankford suddenly became a home for five.

Not that the 1,160-square-foot space could really accommodate them all. But Soder's son was worried: His mother was grieving and suffering from a debilitating back injury that left her unable to work. So, he decided to move in, bringing his wife and two young kids with him.

Soder wanted her guests to be comfortable, she said, so she moved some walls to create bedrooms and spruced up. For her granddaughter, then 5, she painted a tiny room hot pink.

But slowly, holes and cracks began appearing on the rose-colored walls. Soder patched and spackled them one at a time, but the holes kept coming. Before long, the closet-sized room became an unintentional pink-and-white polka-dot display.

Eventually, the deterioration of Soder's walls spread to halls and bedrooms. Her roof began to leak. Her bathroom did, too. And over the winter, she feared, the uninsulated pipes in her basement crawl space were at risk of freezing.

Soder's home, built around 1940, she estimates, is similar to tens of thousands of aging homes across Philadelphia. Some are in better shape, others worse. But amid a period of stagnant wages, many homeowners  some suffering from bad credit  cannot afford the repairs they desperately need.

For a housing stock that contains more than 350,000 housing units built before 1950  54 percent of Philadelphia's housing supply  aging is a problem. If properties in need of repair are ignored, they can slip further into disrepair, worsening to the point of being declared "unsafe" by the city's Department of Licenses and Inspections (4,484 properties have such a designation), or, even worse, as "imminently dangerous" (169 properties). In many neighborhoods, such beat-up properties become attractive to developers, who raze them and build new.

Lucky for Soder, her house will not face such a fate.

After the Inquirer and Daily News documented Soder's plight in a January story about a new Philadelphia home-repair loan program aimed at helping low-income homeowners, Rachel Street, owner of Hestia Construction and founder of the realty firm Street Group, stepped forward to help. Her plan: Repair the most imminently hazardous parts of Soder's home  at no cost.

Throughout January and February, Street  along with Frank Masterson of Bucks County-based Ivey Air; Thomas Goodyear of Bridesburg-based Philadelphia Quality Roofing; and other members of her team  worked on the problems plaguing Soder's home. They insulated her basement crawl space and pipes, and added a new vent to better heat the back of Soder's home. They restored a long-water-damaged wall in Soder's living room and removed a stained curtain that hung to hide the mess. They patched and repaired holes that crept along walls and gave much of the house a fresh coat of gray paint. Philadelphia Quality Roofing, meanwhile, provided an entirely new rubber roof after discovering that her current one was "beyond repair."

The cost of repairs, if the trio had charged Soder: Close to $6,000.

"When they told me at first what they were going to do, I said, 'Oh, my God, thank you!' " said Soder, 66. "But after we finished talking, when I came upstairs and sat down on my bed and started thinking about it, I was pleased, I was overwhelmed, I was crying."

"Living paycheck to paycheck" and making an estimated $1,145 a month, mostly from Social Security, precluded Soder from making the needed repairs, she said. "I didn't think they had people like that anymore, that would do something like this."

Renovations such as the one Street did for Soder are crucial, housing advocates say  and for reasons beyond habitability. Philadelphia has one of the most affordable urban housing stocks in the nation, but it will not stay that way, those advocates say, if neglected homes continue to be demolished and replaced.

To be sure, removing blight is important for a neighborhood's growth, and some private developers and the Philadelphia Housing Authority are doing so to build affordable housing in its place. But, data show, building new housing  even affordable units  is more expensive and less efficient than simply preserving what is there.

The Philadelphia Housing Authority, for example, estimates that it cost nearly $4 million to build 12 affordable units at the Oakdale Apartments in Strawberry Mansion  equating to more than $330,000 per unit for homes ranging from 720 to 1,264 square feet.

In contrast, the Healthy Rowhouse Project, an initiative launched to raise better awareness about Philadelphia rowhouse conditions, estimates that nearly half of Philadelphia's deteriorating rowhouses could be repaired for $10,000 or less.

According to a spokeswoman for PHA, the agency's expenditures come, in part, from federal guidelines, which dictate, for example, construction wage rates. Other costs include environmental and historical review, design work, bond purchase, insurance, and permits.

"These issues are not unique to PHA but are systemic to any organization that receives federal funding," said Nichole Tillman, the PHA spokeswoman."There is an affordable housing crisis in Philadelphia and across this country. PHA is unable to solve this problem alone."

Thanks to developers such as Street, plus citywide and nonprofit programs, PHA does not have to.

To better assist homeowners in situations similar to Soder's, Philadelphia this summer is launching a low-interest loan program to give homeowners as much as $25,000 to fix their aging homes. The initiative, born out of legislation proposed by City Council President Darrell Clarke and Councilwoman Cherelle Parker, aims to give residents who have historically struggled to get loans due to poor credit a new chance at borrowing. Funds for the program come from an increase in Philadelphia's real estate transfer tax.

Two similar programs  called Mini-PHIL and PHIL-Plus, a collaboration between the Urban Affairs Coalition, the city, and local banks  were administered for more than a decade, providing more than $8.8 million in loans to nearly 500 households, according to a recent report. Those two programs were phased out last year.

The city also provides assistance through other home-repair programs, such as its Basic Systems Repair Program.

In January, Soder told the Inquirer and Daily News that she planned to apply for the city's new low-interest loan program to fix her property. Then, one day, her phone rang. Street was on the other end.

For Street, the pro bono work she offered was not entirely out of the ordinary. The 34-year-old Realtor and developer said she tries to complete at least one free renovation for a homeowner in need each month. Why? She was inspired last year when she filmed a pilot for a show called Philly Street Flippin', which premiered on HGTV and the DIY Network, chronicling her renovation of an East Passyunk property. (The show, now titled Philly Revival, was recently picked up by the DIY Network for six more episodes.)

Because of that exposure, Street said, she has met many construction professionals who have offered to work with her on projects. Why not use some of those, she thought, for a better cause?

"If everybody had a little time to donate, if we started a network and coordinated with other companies willing to help out, I think we can get a lot more done for cheaper," Street said. "For a contractor, there are economies of scale, and if we're buying materials for a bunch of jobs, it's no big deal to add an extra can of paint.  If [Soder] were paying someone to do all of that, though, she might not be able to."

"I don't think some [people] are aware of how [others] in our city are living," Street continued. "It can be pretty shocking  we are experiencing a lot of development  but we still have a lot of our housing stock that is very old and in very poor condition. There are people living in buildings that are not habitable, people without heat, without electric, with very dangerous wiring."

Fortunately for Soder, Street said, that is no longer the case.Temple's Fox School of Business Dean Moshe Porat and online MBA program director Darin Kapanjie, right, toast the school's No. 1 ranking, which US News recently yanked due to data errors. (Credit: Temple) Read more

After scaling the heights, Temple's online MBA program has hit a low point: The school topped U.S. News' rankings for four straight years but then was completely dropped from the magazine's prestigious national rankings this year for misrepresenting its data.

A Temple MBA student is now suing the university, alleging that he and others were defrauded. And the Jones Day law firm has been hired to investigate what went wrong. The reversal threatens to tarnish the fast-growing online MBA program.

"Over the years, U.S. News has tossed out a few schools for misreporting data. But this is the most embarrassing case ever because Fox's online MBA was ranked at the very top for four straight years," said John A. Byrne, founder and editor of the PoetsandQuants.com website, which covers graduate business education. "Based on what we now know, it's highly unlikely that the school deserved any of those No. 1 rankings."

Temple's online MBA degree, which charges roughly $60,000 a student, is a moneymaker. With more than 300 students enrolled, that would generate about $18 million in revenue for Temple.

Executives with the school and the university said they would not comment until Jones Day's review of data reporting is released later this spring.

The student lawsuit was one wake-up call: Temple Fox School of Business MBA student Kyle Smith filed suit against Temple in February, alleging that the false data the business school submitted to U.S. News damaged him and other students. The suit alleges Temple made it to the No. 1 spot in U.S. News' rankings because the school manipulated test numbers  in particular, the number of students who submitted GRE or GMAT scores with their applications.

"Temple's No.1 Online MBA ranking provided significant leverage to enable the school to increase enrollment in its online MBA offering," Smith's lawsuit said. In 2017, Temple was able to increase its online MBA enrollment by more than 50 percent "to 546 students from 351, one of the largest percentage increases of any online MBA offering that year," the suit said, citing data from PoetsandQuants.com. Smith is seeking $5 million in damages on behalf of the class action.

U.S. News penalizes online MBA programs if fewer than three-quarters of new entrants submit a GMAT or GRE score, because the lack of data makes it unlikely the standardized test scores are representative of the entire incoming class. Temple mistakenly said all 255 of the program's latest incoming class submitted GMAT scores to get into the program, with the average score being 619.

In fact, the school acknowledged that only 50 students, or 19.6 percent, submitted GMAT scores. As a result, Temple's online MBA program, which ranked first in the nation for four consecutive years, is now "unranked" by U.S. News.

Where would 19.6 percent have ranked Temple? Definitely not in first place, Byrne said. "Temple would have probably been either third or fourth in the U.S. News ranking if it had originally submitted the corrected test data," he said. "One unknown, however, is that average GMAT score. That was not corrected by Temple and for the sake of this analysis we used the GMAT score they originally submitted."

In 2013, the first year that U.S. News numerically ranked online programs, the online program at Temple Fox placed 28th. The school reported that it enrolled just 18 students for that survey and that 33 percent of them had taken the GMAT for an average score of 550.

Temple jumped into first place in U.S. News' online ranking in 2015 from ninth in 2014, when the school was in a tie with rival offerings from James Madison University and Quinnipiac University.

In the 2016 ranking, Fox claimed that 100 percent of 135 new students submitted GMAT scores, with the average at 600.

In the 2017 ranking, Fox asserted that 100 percent of 198 new students had taken the GMAT, with an average score of 582.

And in the recently published 2018 ranking, the school initially said that all 255 of the program's latest incoming class submitted GMAT scores to get into the program, with an average GMAT score of 619.

The university has since asked U.S. News to withdraw the school from its forthcoming rankings on full- and part-time MBA programs. Last year, Fox's full-time MBA program moved up nine places to rank 32nd.

It's still unclear how the error was discovered. Temple said it self-reported the mistake, but a source within the school said a whistle-blower pushed the university to disclose the bad data.

In an era of soaring tuitions, Temple's online MBA program is considered one of the best programs for the price and has generated headlines and revenue for the university. Temple heavily marketed its No. 1 ranking all over the Greater Philadelphia area in recent years.

The online MBA launched in fall 2009 under Darin Kapanjie, who came to Temple in 2003 as a faculty member in statistics.

Kapanjie was charged with integrating technology in the MBA classrooms and launching online courses. His title became academic director for the online and part-time MBA programs, and he won the admiration of the business school dean and top leadership at Temple, in part by pushing for the online MBA program to include a vault of video lectures, enabling students to do more online. In 2012, Kapanjie asked the dean to hire more expensive professional video producers to create classes with television-quality-style broadcasts, instead of just webcams. Kapanjie now oversees a department of about a dozen employees, according to Temple's website.

The university would not make Kapanjie or any official available for interviews, citing the ongoing Jones Day investigation.

The Fox School revamped its part-time program in 2015, Kapanjie told University Business magazine this year.

"The part-time program has seen 17 to 20 percent growth year over year because the programs now speak to that busy, working professional," Kapanjie told the magazine. Students can choose to divide their time between classrooms and synchronous WebEx sessions.

Once Kapanjie and his department helped win Temple's online MBA the No. 1 spot, that in turn helped the school draw more MBA students, more money, and gave Kapanjie more power and space at the university, a former employee said.

Students rated Kapanjie a top professor but also an easy one, according to the review website RateMyProfessors.com: "Easier than middle school classes. He is laid back, and also quite funny," one student posted in January.

From two December 2017 reviews: "He always cuts his lectures short but covers everything more than enough within that time. Part of the class was online and it was super easy. Definitely an easy A."

"His hybrid class meets once a week (about 270 students), then you watch two videos and take a quiz on Thursdays. If you pay attention and participate in his class (poll everywhere), you'll pass with some sort of A grade. His exams aren't necessarily `easy,' but they're certainly not hard. Take Darin!" wrote another student reviewer.

Kapanjie has repeatedly tweeted the online program's No. 1 ranking, though he has been silent since the department was stricken.

Temple's Fox School of Business dean, Moshe Porat, also praised the No. 1 ranking, saying in an internal video that Temple was spending $1 million on "raising our profile on a continuous basis" in advertising its top ranking, on billboards, and other media. The school also created video campaigns to attract students from overseas and other parts of the country.

Pressure to move up in the rankings while keeping tuition competitive is intense.

"The state subsidy is continuously going down, so will this be reflected in the cost of tuition?" Porat said in the internal video, produced in 2015. Porat was also successful in landing large donations from bold-faced names such as Richard Fox, founder of the Fox Realty Cos., Safeguard Scientifics founder Warren "Pete" Musser, and the Alter family, whose patriarch founded Advanta Corp.

Porat taught risk management at Temple starting in 1979 and chaired that department from 1988 to 1996, when he became dean of Temple's business school. Until Porat took over, the school focused primarily on preparing Philadelphia-area undergraduates for careers at area companies, but now it attracts students from around the country.

Temple is undergoing an audit of its student data, said Steve Cordasco, a financial adviser, founder of Cordasco Financial Network, and a radio host who attended Temple's undergraduate business program. He is also a donor to the business school who says he talks regularly to the dean.

"They have to have formal processes in place going forward when applying for rankings," Cordasco said. "They're auditing internally to figure out if there was gaming or not. That was the problem  there may have been no checks and balances. The audit will determine that."

Some other MBA programs use Big Four auditor firms to check their rankings data, Cordasco added.

"They have good-quality faculty, education, brand and networks in the Mid-Atlantic region. It's a solid choice for people wanting to work in this area," said Eliot Ingram, CEO of Clear Admit, which advises business school applicants on the process. "So it's unfortunate that someone at Temple's MBA program failed to play by the rules of the U.S. News rankings."Since being listed on Philadelphias Historic Register, a protective fence has been erected at St. Laurentius in Fishtown, The 19th-century Polish church has languished  not for want of a developer, but because of a nuisance lawsuit. Read more

Almost three years have passed since a small miracle occurred at the Philadelphia Historical Commission. Over the strenuous objections of the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, the board agreed to place Fishtown's St. Laurentius Roman Catholic Church on the historic register. The archdiocese, which had been bent on leveling the deconsecrated building, then reversed course and found a developer willing to convert the 19th century Polish church into apartments.

The decisions were hailed as a major victory for preservation in Philadelphia, but today that little brownstone church, built in 1882 with donations collected by Fishtown's struggling Polish immigrants, sits broken and forlorn at the corner of Berks and Memphis Streets. It's surrounded by a chain-link fence and trapped in web of legal challenges sponsored by an opaque group that claims to have the best interests of St. Laurentius at heart.

The group goes by the name "Faithful Laurentians" and is said to comprise former parishioners and neighborhood residents. I use that awkward description because I couldn't get any active members to speak to me. Its two most visible participants, Venise Whitaker and Jeanne Curtis, say they are no longer involved with Faithful Laurentians, although Whitaker's name appears on the latest court challenge.

Both the group's membership, and its motivations, have always been less than transparent. No one using the name "Faithful Laurentians" participated in the bruising, community-wide effort to get St. Laurentius historically designated in 2015. When the Faithful Laurentians surfaced a year or so later, it was to challenge the apartment conversion, which had just been approved by the Zoning Board. Its members said they were fighting to have St. Laurentius reopened as a church.

Over time, however, their stated goal has shifted. Some suggested they would be satisfied to see St. Laurentius converted into offices. Others said they wanted to to see the church turned into a banquet hall.

Whoever they are, the Faithful Laurentians still have a lawyer, Hal Schirmer, a veteran of numerous preservation battles. This week, he told me that he has just filed an appeal in Commonwealth Court, after being shot down in a lower court in November. The goal now, he said, is to reduce the number of planned apartments, from 23 to 12. "Putting in 23 units with no parking will overburden the location," Schirmer said.

So now we know what the "Faithful" care about most. The fight over St. Laurentius isn't about "saving" a historic church that resonates deeply with Philadelphia's Polish community and many Fishtown residents. The real issue is parking.

Without a doubt, finding a parking space in Fishtown can be a challenge, just as it is in other popular residential neighborhoods. But the idea of prioritizing easy parking over the survival of an important neighborhood landmark is not merely misguided; it's deeply selfish. Fishtown has been undergoing rapid change as developers replace its quirky old houses and small factories with modern housing. In the face of such intense, homogenizing forces, distinctive buildings like St. Laurentius are a bulwark against the further loss of neighborhood's character and authenticity.

But time is running out. St. Laurentius is not in great shape. The Polish immigrants who financed the church were not wealthy, and their architect, Edwin Forrest Durang, built the structure in inexpensive brownstone, a soft material that decays easily. One reason the archdiocese sought to demolish the building in 2014 is because its two copper-tipped bell towers were already showing signs of deterioration.

Those towers are almost certainly in worse condition today, argues A.J. Thomson, the Fishtown resident who led the fight to have the building listed on the historic register. The longer the lawsuit goes on, the less likely it is that St. Laurentius will survive intact. Although the developer, Leo Voloshin, told me he is still committed to the project, he says he will eventually have to move on if the legal case isn't resolved.

Then what? While Voloshin has an agreement to buy St. Laurentius, the archdiocese remains its owner until the lawsuit is resolved. So far, it has defended the apartment conversion. But if the sale falls through, the archdiocese could petition the Historical Commission for permission to demolish the church under a financial hardship clause.

It wouldn't be the first time that a single-minded opposition group has derailed a preservation deal while proclaiming its desire for preservation. The former Samuel Sloan mansion at 40th and Pine might be standing today if residents hadn't fought proposals to incorporate the house into a hotel complex. Concerns about parking similarly motivated their lawsuit. In a city like Philadelphia, with so few incentives for historic rehabs, preservation efforts require compromise.

What makes the Faithful Laurentians' lawsuit seem especially frivolous is that nearly every group involved with the church has supported Voloshin's apartment conversion. That includes the Preservation Alliance and Oscar Beisert, the preservation advocate who nominated the church for historic designation, as well as members of the city's Polish community.

Parking has a way of clouding otherwise reasonable minds. Fishtown is lucky that two religious buildings on East Susquehanna Avenue were recently given new life. But the conversion of the former Holy Name convent was almost derailed when a Fishtown group insisted that the developer, Bob Huttenlock, reduce the number of apartments from nine to eight. Because, parking.

What the parking-obsessed fail to realize is that Fishtown is thriving precisely because it has not allowed the automobile to dominate. It's still walkable and has excellent transit connections, especially the Market-Frankford El. The newcomers who will occupy the Holy Name convent, the former Fifth Reformed Dutch Church, or St. Laurentius are likely to be car-free millennials.

Schirmer says he is not troubled by the risk the latest lawsuit poses to St. Laurentius. Should the old Polish church be torn down, he noted that a developer would be able to build only six townhouses.

The parking fanatics would love that. But what a tragic loss the outcome would be for Fishtown, the city and its Polish heritage. Somehow, it seems, the only thing the Faithful Laurentians are faithful to these days is their own self-interest.Try getting them off the stage.

Once actor Bill Murray and cellist Jan Vogler start building momentum in their concerts, they can't stop.

On their current "Bill Murray, Jan Vogler & Friends" tour of music, song, poetry, and prose  which arrives at the Academy of Music on April 4  they have developed 10 possible encores beyond their current Decca Gold album, New Worlds. "They [audiences] can't get rid of us. Once you achieve that glow and get the affirmation, you don't want to stop," said Murray.

Or, as he told the Carnegie Hall audience in October, "I know a lot of you would like to leave. But the four of us have nowhere to go."

"The encores keep growing  new songs from the Great American Songbook and just things we just want to play," said Vogler.

After meeting on an airplane, the two worked together on a concert format that could only have been stumbled upon rather than invented. Examples: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn accompanied by "Moon River." And James Thurber's speculative, comic account of an inebriated Ulysses S. Grant negotiating the end to the Civil War accompanied by Ravel's woozy, blues-influenced Violin Sonata.

Words and music come from different worlds, but they seem made for each other. One critic called the show A Prairie Home Companion for the tuxedo set.

Not widely known is that Murray is active in poetry circles. He is often seen at the annual Poetry Walk Across the Brooklyn Bridge that's held every summer by Poets House, a 70,000-volume library in New York.

But most of the credit for devising the show goes to the German-born cellist Vogler, who is not only a widely traveled soloist but director of the Dresden Music Festival that periodically presents the Philadelphia Orchestra on tour.

The first question is what to call them. I'm safely on a first-name basis with Vogler, but Murray? "Why don't you call me Dr. Murray," he playfully suggested.

Like any good doctor, he had a prescription: "You sound like your blood sugar is going down. Go out and get affogato. It's vanilla gelato drowned in hot espresso. After that, you'll be ready to peel varnish of walls."

You guys are out there on stage being yourselves  with no movie characters or big orchestra concertos. What versions of yourselves do you choose to present?

Murray: I really try to get out of the way and just let the material come through my feet and out my mouth. The music is so influential in every word that I speak on stage. I get to listen and then when I speak I'm recharged.

The words I'm speaking are so demanding that you can't phone it in. You can't walk through this stuff. It's a very exciting couple of hours. My eyeballs are wobbling a little when I'm finished. You don't always understand what's passing through you. You're just the vehicle.

Vogler: We inspire each other on stage to not get in the way with our own egos. I've never been to a classical concert where the crowd gets that excited. It's all good music and good literature. We're not catching the audience with tricks.

Murray: People don't see it coming. They think it's going to be dry, something you have to get for school credit. I enjoy the moment when we look at each other and think, 'Now we're going to kill them.'

How did you come up with the selections?

Vogler: Both of us had a horror of delivering a low-energy evening  so Bill sang all the melodies he could remember from classical and popular music. Then we got the idea to arrange the most famous songs from West Side Story.

Murray: Jan grew up in East Germany, reading American literature written in German. I went to his place, met his lovely and talented wife, Mira, and he had a big stack of American literature. And I thought they were pretty good guesses for a guy who grew up under Communism.

Vogler: You know Franz Schubert was on his deathbed reading James Fenimore Cooper.

How has the show morphed as the tour goes on?

Murray: I used to be a soprano and wear thigh-high boots. I don't do that anymore.

But you do sing "I Feel Pretty" from West Side Story, and that's written for a female character.

Murray: And that [performance] changes all the time. Jan is always thinking. That's the problem with Germans. They're always making a plan.

The tempo of the song changes my whole body and the way I speak the words. It becomes a completely different song. Now I'm playing it as somebody who is just about to explode with the excitement of being in love.

You do "(I like to be in) America" in the more prickly Broadway lyrics rather than the film version. This was in your repertoire before Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico. But the issues that it raised  plus the immigrant controversy  gives new meaning to the lyric "Puerto Rico's in America"

Murray: The musicality of the song is shaking you by the shoulders. And then that lyric hits you. Your ribs are pulled open. And there's a roar that comes out of the audience. A guttural animal roar.

What can you do for an encore after that? And what encore might you do in Philadelphia?

Vogler: "Loch Lomond." It's a beautiful Scottish song [about lost love]. We do it as a sing-along. It's the one with the lyrics, "You take the high road and I'll take the low road." And then I go off to Amsterdam to play the Brahms Double Concerto.

And what's it like going back to strictly classical music after this?

Vogler: Bill says, "You classical musicians play so many notes." And it's really true. But there can be only a few important notes. You can't forget the important notes.

Dr. Murray, what will you do when you finish your current set of dates?

Murray: I've got a good job coming up. Brace yourself: It's a zombie movie.

Jim Jarmusch has written a zombie script that's so hilarious and it has a cast of great actors: Rosie Perez, Daniel Craig. It's titled The Dead Don't Die, and it shoots over the summer. But, no, I will not play a zombie.

(Murray's latest release, the Wes Anderson film Isle of Dogs, opens in Philly March 28.)

I imagine your concert tours will continue.

Vogler: We could record another album. We have 10 encores.

Murray: There's talk of a Broadway run.

Before you go, I want to know where you guys most reveal your real selves. Jan, let's say, what part of the Ravel Violin Sonata is most like you?

Vogler: After General Grant takes off his sword and mistakenly surrenders to Robert E. Lee. It's the absurdity of the piece. And then the music just lets go. Many composers forget about letting go.

And Dr. Murray.

Murray: You can call me Bill.

Thanks! Bill, at what stage is your Groundhog Day character most like you?

Murray: The part where he gets pretty far along with the girl and then blows it at the very end. I feel that's my life. I do pretty well and then I do something so disappointing and so mind-bogglingly stupid.

Let's not end on a low note. Tell me about touring together. I know it's not as much fun as it looks.

Vogler: We try to get in touch with every place. In Chicago, we had the most beautiful day. We went to a Cubs game. We went to a museum.

Murray: But now we have to rehearse. Jan's wife, Mira, is from China. Jan grew up in East Germany. So I've got two Communists staring at me Mitch Landrieu, mayor of New Orleans, comes to the Free Library on Wednesday. Read more

Mitch Landrieu, mayor of New Orleans, comes to the Free Library of Philadelphia at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday to speak about his book, In the Shadow of Statues: A White Southerner Confronts History. In 2017, Landrieu ordered four Confederate monuments taken down from prominent places in his city. Removed were statues of Robert E. Lee, P.G.T. Beauregard, and Jefferson Davis, along with the Battle of Liberty Place monument, which honored an 1874 attack by white paramilitary forces.

After the last statue, Lee's, came down on May 19, Landrieu delivered a speech that has become one of the most read and best regarded speeches in generations: "These statues are not just stone and metal. They are not just innocent remembrances of a benign history. These monuments purposefully celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy; ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, and the terror that it actually stood for.  They were erected purposefully to send a strong message to all who walked in their shadows about who was still in charge in this city," Landrieu said

He then emphasized: "I am not judging anybody, I am not judging people. We all take our own journey on race."

Because of term limits, Landrieu leaves office in May, after presiding over the city's 300th anniversary celebration. In his book, which contains the full speech, Landrieu describes his own journey on race. He spoke to the Inquirer and Daily News by phone from New York about history, division, and how New Orleans-born jazz great Wynton Marsalis set Landrieu's historic actions in motion.

Your book says you personally had to come a long way regarding race. What about history did you have to unlearn or relearn?

One thing I had known from the beginning: The Confederacy was on the wrong side of history. These people were not patriots; they fought to tear apart the country in defense of slavery.

But I did have to learn about why the statues were put up and who put them up.

Mostly, they are a historical lie. They do not reflect what we really are. I had to learn how unknowledgeable most of us were about them, and how we really didn't take time to learn the truth. It took my entire life to get to where I could write that speech.

You say the statues were organized attempts at intimidation.

They were, absolutely, just like the laws against interracial marriage were, laws against blacks and whites drinking from the same water fountain, even laws against black drivers passing cars driven by whites. The Confederacy had lost the war, but all these things were a purposeful effort to reverse that result and keep blacks second-class.These statues were just another tactic linked to institutional racism. I had to learn that.

Sure, I knew 'separate but equal' was wrong. We all knew that. But that it was part of an invisible threat  that I had to learn.

Can you describe the moment you realized you had to do something? What brought it all to a head?

When I took over as mayor in 2010, this town had been decimated by Katrina, a bunch of other storms, and the recession. Getting out of recovery took us a long, long time. We had to rebuild the city, the airport, the infrastructure, the health-care system. It wasn't until my second term that it came up, when we started thinking about our 300th anniversary celebration.

I was asking Wynton Marsalis about ideas, and he said to me: Sure, I'll help, but while you're thinking about all that other stuff, why don't you think about taking down those statues?,

My first reaction was, 'Why would I do that?'

And he asked: 'Do you know why they went up? And who put them up? Do you know Louis Armstrong left this town because of them?' So I really started to dig into the history and learned the whole story.

And then after the [June 2015] shootings at [Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church] in Charleston, South Carolina, after a year and a half of study and research, we realized we couldn't defend these statues any more.

And how did that feel? Your subtitle calls you a white Southerner confronting history.

Do you talk the talk or do you walk the walk? I had been going around, giving speeches about rebuilding a great American city. And then something like this looms up. How can you really back away from it?

Sure, it's scary. People will get angry and frustrated, both citizens and a lot of people who didn't live here. We went through four very emotional public hearings, seven lawsuits; we had 13 judges opine about it.

A lot of people have remarked on the tone of your speech, considerate of your opposition without stepping back from the main point. It's effective  and it stands out at a time when a lot of folks are yelling at each other. How did you hit on that tone?

First, we weren't really sure we would even give a speech. But I felt the need for the historical record, to lay down a document. I also wanted to counteract a famous speech published by Charles E. Fenner when the statue of Lee went up in 1890. I wanted people to see the course correction and why it was done.

The first drafts were much harsher, much more judgmental. As we went forward, I realized that was wrong, that compassion had to be the heart of it: 'I want to try to gently peel from your hands the grip on a false narrative of our history that I think weakens us, and make straight a wrong turn we made many years ago.'

I have undying admiration and respect for Southerners, and I love this culture that I've grown up in. But too many of us have been on the wrong side of this racial divide. They not only lost, but we lost. Racism has forfeited so much that could have enriched us.

Louis Armstrong and Wynton Marsalis made their great art not here, but in New York. Our oil and gas companies went to Houston. Six million people left the South and became great businesspeople and poets and artists  People ask why does the South lead in crime, cancer, death rate  We shot ourselves in the foot in not investing in our human capital. A lot of that is related to the attitudes that erected those statues.

The speech and the book  they're not about fault. They're about all of us taking responsibility for fixing what's broken. They're not even about the past: You can come to a better awareness and go forward.

What is the city like without those statues?

New Orleans is not palpably different with the empty pedestals  they're actually an interesting art form in a way, as we think through what should go there.

We can have these statues in places of remembrance, but not places of reverence. We can have them in a museum and in context, created by historians who want to preserve the history of these things. But we have holes in our history. Where are the museums full of slave ships? The tributes to other cultures, Indian, African, South American, European, Canadian, that made us who we are, that gave us zydeco, Cajun culture, jazz, blues, gumbo?

Any plans once your mayoralty is done?

None. I have 50 days left; I'm finished on May 7. I have to land the plane, get the tricentennial launched, and say happy birthday to New Orleans, and thanks to the whole nation for helping us make New Orleans a great city.Armando Iannucci is the Scottish writer-director behind such biting political satire as Veep and In the Loop. His latest is Death of Stalin, a pitch-black comedy set in the days before and after the dictator's demise, less a work of history than a pointed nod toward the worldwide rise of autocratic political figures today, and our internet-fed era of fake news.

I chatted with Iannucci about politics, comedy, social media, and his movie's own recent run-in with the #MeToo movement.

 READ MORE: at the March 9 U.S. premiere of the film

No.

No chance of pulling a Ridley Scott and replacing him with another actor?

Our movie was released when the most recent allegations surfaced [Death of Stalin was released in the U.K. Oct. 20; Tambor was accused of sexual misconduct by a former assistant in November]. Recasting was not an option. And I think once you start pulling on that thread, the whole thing is likely to unravel.

The movie is called Death of Stalin, and its set in 1953, but it speaks rather obviously to todays political environment.

I made the film because I was interested in disruptive forces shaking democracies around the world. You have the rise of these strongman figures, they get elected and in some cases change the constitution to remain in power and last longer. At the same time, you see these nationalistic attitudes on the rise, in Europe and elsewhere. Some more extreme than others.

>> Read more: 'Death of Stalin': See it because Putin doesn't want you to, and because it's funny

In the movie, Stalins successors wrestle for power, and each faction has its version of the truth, its own narrative to impose. That also seems relevant to todays world.

Beria [played by Simon Russell Beale] says something in the movie like, "There's a new reality now," which is little bit like somebody talking about alternative facts. I found it interesting that when Trump was elected, he started referring to CNN and MSNBC as 'enemies of the people.' I doubt he knew that was a phrase that Stalin used, or that Khrushchev banned the phrase when he took over, and I'm not saying there's an exact parallel, but it's interesting. We shot the movie in 2016, long before a lot of this stuff happened, but you do see similarities cropping up.

People in Death of Stalin accept these false narratives out of fear they will be killed. Today, people seem to be embracing them more enthusiastically, through social media. When Facebook recently informed people that certain banned information came from Russian hate-bots, people complained about censorship and demanded the false information be restored.

Yeah, but that could be one guy complaining. That's the other thing that happens today. You hear about a Twitter storm, and then you look at it, and you see it's 400 people out of a billion Twitter users. And who are they? Anyone commenting is deemed to have the same status as a highly esteemed expert. But, yeah, we have a character in the movie, Molotov (Michael Palin), who essentially brainwashes himself, who accepts whatever story is easiest to accept. It reminds me of the Aussie politician who was asked to respond to a statement by his prime minister and said, "Well, I don't know what she said but I'm sure I agree with it."

We had to import you to make a series like Veep. The British seem to have a special skill for institutional satire, and political satire in particular. What accounts for that?

I sometimes worry that that's what stopped us from having a revolution. Our way of protesting something is to make comedy. Other countries storm the barricades and loot the buildings. And I think comedy itself is different in the U.S. One thing I've noticed [in classic U.S. comedy] is that the lead is always successful. Cheers was a successful bar. Frasier was a successful psychiatrist. Seinfeld was a successful comedian. We're more comfortable with failure.

Youre straying out of your comfort zone a bit with your next two projects: a science-fiction story [Avenue 5] about an outer space voyage, and a remake of David Copperfield.

It seems I'm abandoning the present. I'm making something set 40 years in the future, and a story set in the 1840s. Maybe something about the present moment makes me uncomfortable.Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi(R) and Philippine Foreign Secretary Alan Peter Cayetano meet the press after their talks in Beijing, capital of China, March 21, 2018. (Xinhua/Zhang Ling)

BEIJING, March 21 (Xinhua) -- Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi met with Philippine Foreign Secretary Alan Peter Cayetano Wednesday in Beijing.

Under the correct and powerful guidance of both leaders, the China-Philippine tie has entered the best period in recent years, which is in line with the common interests of both countries and people, Wang said.

He said the high-level exchanges and the political mutual trust between the two countries have strengthened continually since 2016, adding that trade volumes between China and the Philippines exceeded 50 billion U.S. dollars last year and China became the largest trading partner of the Philippines.

Both sides agreed to continue to uphold and maintain the most important experience of China-Philippine relations, which is to properly handle the South China Sea issue through consultation and negotiation, vigorously maintain the big picture of bilateral ties, and create a good atmosphere for expanding bilateral cooperation, according to Wang.

China is ready to advance cooperation with the Philippines under the Belt and Road Initiative, in people-to-people exchanges, maritime dialogue and cooperation, and regional integration, said Wang.

Cayetano delivered a congratulatory letter from Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte to Chinese President Xi Jinping, and said that the Philippines is willing to work with China to implement the consensus reached by the two leaders, deepen pragmatic cooperation in various fields, promote maritime cooperation and sustained, in-depth development of bilateral ties.

[ Editor: Zhang Zhou ]Cataract surgery can be done with a scalpel or a laser. Read more

Jan Cadwell was sick of living with poor eyesight.

The cataracts that had been developing in her eyes for years had gotten so bad that Cadwell, a 71-year-old flight attendant, was missing out on more than half the flights she could have worked. The clouding in her eyes turns car headlights into flying saucers, making it nearly impossible for Cadwell to drive to work in time for early-morning flights.

She was ready for cataract surgery. She just wasn't ready for the cost: $3,000. And when her eye doctor's office wanted $1,575 up front, she canceled.

Feeling out of options, Cadwell shared her story and frustration last month with Philly Health Costs, a health care price transparency project by the Philadelphia Inquirer and 6ABC Action News.

"I am so distraught at this point I'm not at all sure what to do," Cadwell wrote in an email. "Sure, I can afford it but it will take me a couple of months to plan."

Cadwell's luck changed when a pilot read the Inquirer's February article about Cadwell's experience and was moved to help her.

The man, who asked to remain anonymous, wrote Cadwell a check and delivered it to her in person. Both asked to keep private the total amount, but suffice it to say it will more than cover the cost of the surgery.

"I was just shell-shocked," Cadwell said. "This is the kind of thing that happens to other people, not me."

Laser vs. traditional surgery

Traditional cataract surgery, in which the surgeon uses a knife to make a small incision in the eye to replace a clouded intraocular lens, is covered by Medicare.

But Cadwell wanted laser cataract surgery, which is newer, more technically advanced and, as one might suspect, more expensive.

Medicare does not cover the full cost of laser cataract surgery because research has shown that, for the vast majority of patients, the more expensive surgery does not have better outcomes than the traditional, less costly version, said Esen Akpek, a professor of ophthalmology at the Johns Hopkins Wilmer Eye Institute in Baltimore.

"It's just fancier," said Akpek, who performs 400 cataract surgeries a year  none of them with a laser.

"There are patients that come in and talk to me about the laser and I steer them the other way," said Akpek, who did not treat Cadwell. "I don't think it's superior and it's additional cost for the patient."

Cadwell's eye doctor, Michael Kresloff, did not respond to a request for comment. His Collingswood practice's website advertises laser-assisted cataract surgery as a more precise, automated alternative to manual surgery performed with a scalpel.

"The same basic cataract procedure has been done for several decades without a significant breakthrough in technology  until now!" Kresloff & Young Eye Associates says on its website. "It is truly a revolutionary step forward in the science of cataract surgery."

Akpek said that lasers make more precise cuts but that the outcome of the procedure and patients' recovery time are the same as traditional cataract surgery. "The patient won't be able to tell the day after the surgery," she said.

All the same, Cadwell was sold on the laser surgery because she has astigmatism, an irregularity in lens shape that contributes to blurry vision.

Cataract surgery can correct astigmatism. After the clouded lens has been removed, it can be replaced with a special intraocular lens  also not covered by Medicare  to eliminate astigmatism. But these astigmatism-correcting lenses can be implanted during traditional or laser surgery, Akpek said.

Patients must decide for themselves which they prefer, provided they can pay for it.

Something that struck my heart

Having flown private jets for 15 years, Cadwell's benefactor said he appreciated how hard she must have worked to move her way up as a flight attendant over 51 years in the business, and the dedication she must have for the job to still be doing it when many her age have retired.

"I'm not any philanthropist or anything," the semi-retired Delaware County resident said. "It's just something that struck my heart and I said I can do something about it."

He also has cataracts and, although he has not needed surgery yet, said he was pleased to be able to help Cadwell get the procedure she felt was right for her.

"Maybe it will inspire people to help others," he said.

Cadwell expects to have the surgery completed by the summer.Abby Hasberry (right) with biological siblings Rodney and Toi, who have not yet told all their adoptive family members they have found birth relatives. Read more

Adopted by white parents when she was just 3 months old, Abby Hasberry always yearned to find out who her birth parents were and whether she had any biological siblings. When she was 22, she asked adoption officials to contact her biological mother, but was disappointed.

Her biological mother "wasn't ready to meet me or talk to me because she hadn't told anyone she had me," Hasberry recalled.

For the next 24 years, Hasberry continued her search. Last year, she bought a DNA kit from 23andMe, sent in her sample, and checked off the box saying she wanted to know whether anyone else's DNA in the company's database matched hers.

She learned she had a cousin living in Philadelphia, who also was adopted, but knew her birth father's last name. The two women got in touch, and figured out from the few clues they had that their fathers were brothers.

Through some online detective work, Hasberry found seven probable siblings. She sent two of them DNA test kits that proved they were closely related.

"My cousin and I went to a big family reunion and met six of my seven siblings," said Hasberry, now 47 and living in San Antonio, Texas. "The reaction was amazing."

The same DNA tests that tell you (with varying accuracy) whether your ancestors were Greek or Norwegian, and whether you have a high risk of breast cancer or heart disease, also has the capacity to turn your family upside down.

Depending on how much you're willing to find out, you might land on a family tree with people you didn't even know existed.

Here's how it works: For less than $100, you order a home test kit from one of several genealogy companies, and collect your own DNA by rubbing a swab inside your cheek or spitting into a tube. You send back your sample and your results are compared with those of everyone else in that database. Depending on how much DNA you share with any given person in the database  more than seven million samples in Ancestry.com alone  they estimate a possible relationship.

The 23andMe DNA Relatives tool estimates possible genealogical relationships by comparing your autosomal DNA (chromosomes 1-22) and X chromosome(s) with that of other members who are also using the DNA Relatives feature.

By logging into your private account, you can see all your matches, and if you and those matches agree, you can contact one another. Or you can opt out.

"Anyone who uses our DNA service can decide whether to share identifying information with other members or even decide if they want their information deleted," said Eric Heath, chief privacy officer at Ancestry.com.

Yet even if details aren't shared, it's possible to find out simply that there is a match out there somewhere. As Ancestry warns on its website: "You may discover unanticipated facts about yourself or your family when using our services. While we strive to give you control as you use the services, once discoveries are made, we can't undo it."

Sources such as social media and online searches can help locate biological relatives who may not want to be found. For example, obituaries are often a source of finding family members of the deceased who might then be contacted through Facebook.

This fact could prove startling to people such as Hasberry's birth mother, and also to sperm or egg donors who never thought they'd meet the outcome of their donation.

"The notion that an interested child would not be able to find you may be completely obsolete," said William Schlaff, professor and chairman of the department of obstetrics and gynecology at Thomas Jefferson University. "And egg freezing is open to the same kind of analysis. For people who know about social media and these kinds of detective adventures online, it's not very hard to figure this out or narrow it down. And it's going to get easier over time."

Schlaff pointed out that people share details about themselves much more easily than they did even a generation ago.

"Folks are very willing to share on Facebook and social media outlets things that I would never tell people," he added. "There are now sites and organizations that will help run these things down."

Every day, the Donor Sibling Registry, based in Boulder, Co., matches several people who are searching for biological relatives. "It's an innate human desire to want to know where we come from," said Wendy Kramer, DSR director. "It's about your identity, ancestry and medical background."

People born in the 1980s and forward  that's when sperm banks were created  usually know the sperm bank their mother used and have a donor number. For example, you can go to the DSR and do a search for all the California Cryobank donors to see whether there were any kids already posted for donor X. You can add your own posting and make yourself available for contact.

"If there were already people posted for that donor number, bingo, you're a match," said Kramer. "They get notified you're a match, you're in touch, you can send photos, medical information and messages."

Kramer and her then-10-year-old son, Ryan, started the group back in 2000 while searching for Ryan's biological father.

"My ex-husband had some infertility issues so we went the route of using an anonymous sperm donor and that was back in 1989 when there was only anonymity," recalled his mother. Born in 1990, Ryan was raised by his mother after his parents split up the next year.

In 2004, at 14, Ryan found his biological father  who was happy to be found.

"It was terrifying for me because my son was so vulnerable and his heart was so wide open," Wendy Kramer recalled. "His father had signed up for anonymity, which we respected."

But after Ryan contacted him, he "got two grandparents out of the deal and an amazing friendship with his biological father. We are all family," she said.

Others have a far different experience.

Though Hasberry found her biological siblings, and is enjoying getting to know them, her birth mother still refuses see her. Even the intervention of a brother who was raised by their mother didn't help.

"My brother told my mom that I found him but she tried to deny it at first," said Hasberry. "Then he told her he took the DNA test and she couldn't deny it. Then she basically shut down and said she didn't want to talk about it."

Resources

Sperm and egg donor registries:

https://www.donorsiblingregistry.com

https://knowndonorregistry.com

https://www.conceiveabilities.com

Adoption registries:

http://www.health.pa.gov/MyRecords/Registries/Adoption/Pages/Pennsylvania-Adoption-Information-Registry.aspx#.Wp6-p7GZNmB

https://www.adopted.com

http://www.isrr.net/

https://www.facebook.com/AdoptionRegistry/

https://www.childwelfare.gov/topics/adoption/search/searching/

DNA testing companies:

https://www.ancestry.com

https://www.23andme.com

https://www.myheritage.com/dna

https://www.livingdna.com/en-us?actionMichael C. Quinn, head of the Museum of the American Revolution since 2012 is stepping down. Read more

Michael C. Quinn, 65, the head of the Museum of the American Revolution, who guided Philadelphia's newest museum from intriguing concept to $120 million red-brick reality at Third and Chestnut Streets, has resigned his position after six years to pursue writing, teaching, and speaking.

"The board of directors is deeply indebted to Michael for expertly guiding this museum through such a critical phase in our evolution," said John P. Jumper, the retired Air Force general and chief of staff who is chairman of the museum's board of directors. "His vision and commitment have led us to this moment of transition where the organization is thriving and poised for its next great steps."

Jumper, who has been working with the museum's executive leadership on long-term strategy, will assume the position of acting chief executive while the board initiates a national search for Quinn's successor. The board named Quinn to the just-created position of president emeritus.

"Having successfully launched such a vibrant national museum, I am excited to begin exploring other passions, sharing my experience by writing, speaking, and teaching, engaging with other institutions, and mentoring future leaders in the field," said Quinn in a statement. He will continue to work with the museum on several projects, assist with the transition to new leadership, and serve as a liaison with the museum's community of supporters.

H.F. "Gerry" Lenfest, the museum's chairman emeritus, lauded Quinn's effort in bringing the museum from planning to fruition, a period Lenfest characterized as "challenging years." Lenfest added that Quinn's "passion for history and education combined with his business acumen made him an ideal leader. His designation as president emeritus reflects our gratitude for his tremendous service."

Board member and former Gov. Ed Rendell noted that "the museum was no more than a promise when Mike came aboard. He was tremendously successful in guiding the museum from a plan to a successfully operating museum."

Quinn had been head of the Montpelier Foundation, the Virginia showcase for the land, home, and ideas of James Madison.

He arrived in April 2012 and oversaw all aspects of planning and opening the museum. The museum's capital campaign surpassed its $150 million goal by $23 million, or 15 percent. And when the building at last opened in April 2017, it did so under budget and debt-free, with an endowment of $48 million, said Quinn.

Since its opening, more than 300,000 visitors, including more than 30,000 schoolchildren, have visited, viewing George Washington's field tent and other artifacts of the Revolution on view in the galleries, said officials. Almost all of the museum's holdings of more than 3,000 artifacts come from the old Valley Forge Historical Society, but officials are continuously adding to the collection.

The museum was initially planned for a site in Valley Forge, but a series of disputes with federal and local officials delayed realization. Finally, in 2010, Lenfest and Rendell persuaded federal officials to go along with a land swap  the museum's 70-plus acres in Valley Forge for an acre of Park Service land at Third and Chestnut.Dontia Patterson (center) with his daughter Samarah, now 11, and her mother, Shanell Allen. Read more

A Philadelphia judge on Thursday granted house arrest to a man facing a retrial in a murder case after more than a decade behind bars.

Common Pleas Court Judge Kathryn Streeter Lewis approved the defense request after the District Attorney's Office agreed that Dontia Patterson, 29, should be released on bail with electronic monitoring. But the office didn't go as far as to drop charges against Patterson in the 2007 shooting death of a friend in Northeast Philadelphia.

"We have reviewed this matter and believe that the defendant may be innocent, but we're not there yet in terms of completing our investigation, which is why we are not dropping the charges," Anthony Voci Jr., the office's homicide chief, told reporters during a courtroom break.

Releasing from custody a defendant awaiting trial in a murder case is extremely unusual, lawyers on both sides said. State law does not provide for bail in first-degree murder cases, but "ultimately it's up to the judge," Voci said.

Calling the case "extraordinary and exceptional," Voci said it meets four criteria for releasing Patterson pending retrial: Judge Steven Geroff on Feb. 16 vacated Patterson's conviction and sentence; Patterson actually may be innocent; he has no prior adult convictions for crimes of violence; and prosecutors agreed to bail.

Patterson's case was taken up pro bono by attorneys from the Center City firm of Cozen O'Connor and the Pennsylvania Innocence Project. Hayes Hunt, of the Cozen firm, standing alongside its president and managing partner, Vincent McGuinness, told reporters Thursday that evidence shows Patterson is innocent.

Voci told Lewis that prosecutors agreed to the bail request because "we have serious concerns about the integrity" of Patterson's conviction. But he asked for more time to investigate the case, saying prosecutors should decide within 90 days whether to drop the charges or proceed to a retrial.

After the judge ordered him released, Patterson smiled at relatives. He has been housed in state prison, most recently in Chester, Delaware County. It was not immediately clear when he would be released, but Hunt said it should be in the next few days.

"I'm just really excited and happy," Patterson's mother, Jacqueline, said afterward.

Patterson was charged with fatally shooting Antwine Jackson outside a store on the 800 block of Granite Street in Summerdale on Jan. 11, 2007. He was arrested that April.

His trial in 2008 ended in a hung jury. He was convicted at a second trial in 2009 of first-degree murder and possession of an instrument of crime, and sentenced to life in prison.

The store owner knew Patterson and would have testified that Patterson was not the shooter, but was not called to testify, Hunt said.

Two witnesses who identified Patterson as the shooter were at a barber shop two blocks away and didn't know Patterson, Hunt said.Jose Flores, with his wife Joanne McDaid, and their now 7-year-old son on the day in 2013 when Jose was inducted into the Parx Hall of Fame. Read more

Whenever I am with someone who is at the race track for the first time, we go to the rail to watch a race, to see and feel the speed and power of a 1,000-pound thoroughbred. After the last horse passes, I say, "Look to your left." An ambulance, which has been trailing the field from the start, is coming. It is the perfect symbol for just how dangerous racing can be for the tiny humans who ride the horses.

The ambulance was there for Jose Flores on Monday afternoon at Parx Racing. But there was nothing anybody could do after the Parx Hall of Fame jockey suffered massive cranial and spinal injuries when his mount in the ninth race, Love Rules, fell while on the lead, and Flores was thrown to the ground.

Another horse fell over Love Rules, who had to be euthanized. Flores was taken to Aria Jefferson Torresdale Hospital, where he was placed on life support until he died Thursday at 12:42 p.m.

Flores leaves behind his wife, Joanne McDaid, a former jockey herself; their 7-year-old son, Julian; two older sons from previous relationships, Juan and Jose Jr.; and a lifetime of memories for the race trackers who knew him and the fans who bet on him because they always knew they would get an honest effort from the 57-year-old native of Peru. They were rewarded with 4,650 victories.

Flores did not need to ride anymore. He had made enough money, but he thrived on the competition. He wanted to ride horses, whether it was in morning training or afternoon races. He simply loved it.

Fellow rider Kendrick Carmouche, who made his name at Parx and now rides in New York, loved Flores. When Carmouche first went to Parx, he shared an agent with Flores, Parx legend Jack Servis.

Just a week before Monday's fatal race, Carmouche, who often goes to Parx to ride on Mondays and Tuesdays, was in the hot box, which riders use to sweat off pounds, next to his friend in the jockeys' room.

"And he said, 'You know, Kendrick, I found a good wife. I just hope I don't get hurt,' " Carmouche remembered. "Man, it crushed me. He took care of his kids. He loved Joanne. It's just so sad that we lost a guy like that."

Carmouche rode Mr. Brix in that ninth race. Horse and rider were just behind the accident.

"The way Jose went down, I knew it was bad," Carmouche said.

It was, in fact, as bad as it gets. Nobody remembers another jockey being killed in a race at Parx or its previous incarnation as Philadelphia Park and Keystone. But Flores was the 157th jockey killed during a race in North America since 1940, according to statistics compiled by the Jockeys' Guild. Dozens of riders have been paralyzed, including Ron Turcotte, who rode the great Secretariat to the Triple Crown in 1973. It can be a most thrilling sport,, but nobody in it is unaware of the dangers.

According to Carmouche, Flores was trying to reach the magical jockeys' mark of 5,000 victories. His longtime agent, Dave Yanuzzi, is certain Flores would have already been there had he not missed 3 1/2 of the last 10 years with injuries.

In his best year, 1998, Flores won 380 races. He won 346 in 1996 and 328 in 1997.

"Jose rode them the same way whether they were 3-1 or 35-1," Yanuzzi said.

In fact, the agent told a story about Flores that will resonate with anybody who knew him. One day in the paddock, an owner suggested Flores might want to be something worse than third, the owner apparently hoping to cash a bet on the horse the next time when the horse's form would not equal his ability.

"I can't do that," Flores told him.

He was, Yanuzzi said, "never mean to a horse."

"Give these guys the credit they deserve," Yanuzzi said of all the jockeys. "They go out every day and play Russian roulette."

Scott Lake, the all-time leading trainer at Parx, has known Flores since 1991. They won 1,203 races together. Lake had a horse in that ninth race and was on his way to the track when he had to detour to pick up his daughter at school. He watched it on TV.

Just like Carmouche, he sort of knew it was bad. The word at the track for when a jockey falls is dainty  a spill. The reality, once in a great while, can be so much more, so final, so as Yanuzzi perfectly put it  "heartbreaking."The Civil War marked both the emancipation of enslaved African Americans and the first time black men, some recently liberated from the South, others who had long been free in the North, were recruited to serve in the U.S. military. But these soldiers  more than 179,000 African American men served in the Union Army  would also enter the history books in a way that has received less attention than has been paid to their battlefield courage.

Struck down by disease far more frequently than their white comrades, with nearly double the death rate, black soldiers who joined the U.S. Colored Troops would prove pivotal to medicine's understanding of the greatest public health crisis in the young nation's history.

"The sheer number of casualties, the very unprepared medical establishment at the outset of the war, and the necessity of that establishment to evolve very quickly to deal not only with mass casualties but to quickly understand what's really going on in human bodies that get diseased and wounded was pressing," said Robert Hicks, director of the Mutter Museum.

The story of black Union soldiers is a key part of a permanent exhibition at the Mutter that Hicks spearheaded, "Broken Bodies, Suffering Spirits: Injury, Death, and Healing in Civil War Philadelphia."

Though the city never saw any Civil War battles, it did host tens of thousands of wounded and sick soldiers, brought to Philadelphia hospitals for care. The exhibition also looks at what it was like to provide that care, with artifacts and information about not only doctors but also the many local women who volunteered at the hospitals.

In the course of compiling the exhibit, "I became fascinated with the issue of black soldiers as a social experiment and the largely untold and unknown story about their progress through the war as patients," Hicks explained.

Poor treatment, high mortality

Following the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, President Abraham Lincoln authorized the recruitment of African Americans into the Union Army. The first encampment for training black troops was Camp William Penn, located in what is now Cheltenham.

>>Read more: Forced sterilizations targeted Americans of color, leaving a lasting impact

Opened in June 26, 1863, the camp  the only one set up exclusively to train black troops  was fully operational by Independence Day. Eventually, about 11,000 men passed through the gates of the camp. Of these, about 1,000 would be killed in action or die of disease.

"Black troops were susceptible to everything from smallpox to typhus to lung infections," said Hicks. "They died at almost twice the rate of white soldiers, with a 5 percent mortality rate compared with 2.9 percent among white troops."

Smallpox was six to seven times more prevalent among black soldiers than white, scurvy was five times higher, while lung inflammation and bronchial diseases were two to five times higher. Death rates from syphilis were lower for black soldiers than for whites, but acute diarrhea was higher in black troops.

"Everyone understood  a wound is a wound. But when it came to disease, that was a different question, and the Union Army learned that mortality for black soldiers from disease was much higher than whites," said Hicks.

Understanding why black soldiers were so much more vulnerable to disease puzzled some white Union doctors, but is stunningly obvious now. Medical care in that era wasn't particularly good for anyone, but white doctors who had never treated black patients could be particularly ineffective.

"Doctors were trained to appreciate a person's physical appearance, their ancestry, their education, the place where they grew up, and their moral qualities when considering the sum total of human physiology," Hicks said.

All of which was useless in understanding the real problems black troops faced.

For one thing, black troops who had been on plantations as slaves never had the chance to develop immunities to diseases that white troops had encountered in towns and cities earlier in life.

But there was more. On top of the poor equipment and supplies they were given, black regiments often had fewer physicians attached per regiment (about 1,000 men at full strength), compared with white regiments.

"Black troops were regarded as second-class citizens," said Hicks, "and often received lesser quality of equipment and clothing, and maybe only one doctor per regiment."

Fatalities from battle injuries were something of an equalizer, standing at 14.3 percent for both blacks and whites. Unlike care for illness, which was segregated, all wounded men were rushed to common aid stations and common field hospitals.

However, black soldiers needing additional care were taken to segregated hospitals, which were often less clean and well-supplied, noted Hicks.

"So if you're wounded in fighting you're likely to get the same medical attention, white or black, but if it's long-term medical care, it's a different story," he said.

The racism of the time also was reflected in who got to serve as surgeons on the battlefield. Although several black doctors volunteered for the posts, white doctors refused to work with them, and they often ended up serving  with distinction  in freedmen's hospitals set up during the war.

A lingering legacy

The legacy of Civil War medicine stretched far into the 20th century. During the war, the U.S. Sanitary Commission supplied all black and white soldiers with kits that included questionnaires on parentage and education, as well as physical measurements including lung capacity, which was shown to be less in black soldiers.

"Two reports were issued, the first said that performance of black and white troops in all respects was the same, while the second report, leaning on lung capacity measured on a medical instrument called a spirometer, said that blacks had lesser capacity to endure the rigors of a military campaign," Hicks said.

Plantation doctors had used the spirometer on black slaves to prove that they were weaker than their white owners. The second report's finding validated this racist view and was selected as the first public health record of African Americans in this country.

"Based on this report, every time war happened through World War II, the top brass asked the same questions: What about these soldiers, can they fight? Do they have the intellectual capacity and stamina to be good soldiers?" Hicks said.

After the Civil War, there were a few white doctors whose experiences with black soldiers inspired them to set aside their biases.

"The overlay of prejudice is very strong if that's what you hear in your education and your church; it's hard to step aside and look at the matter very scientifically," Hicks said.

"Yet there are those who had ongoing and direct contact with black soldiers and their performance during the war, who realized that they performed very well and they get sick like everybody else."

On April 21 at 11 a.m., Hicks will join Mayor Kenney, U.S. Rep. Dwight Evans (D., Pa.), and other politicians, historians and Civil War reenactors at the Philadelphia National Cemetery, to unveil an informational panel erected by the Veterans Administration that celebrates the achievements of the U.S.C.T, the training camp at nearby Camp William Penn, and those who died in sacrifice to the preservation of the Union. For more information, email pt@usct.org or call (215) 885-2258. The Mutter Museum, at 19 S. 22nd St. in Philadelphia, is open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily. For more information, go to muttermuseum.org or call 215-560-8564.

mice30@comcast.netCorrections Secretary John Wetzel leads a tour through the newest prison in Pennsylvania Friday, September 01, 2017 at State Correction Institution Phoenix in Skippack, Pennsylvania. The facility is inching closer to opening, two years late, to replace Graterford Prison at a cost of $400 million. (WILLIAM THOMAS CAIN / For The Philadelphia Inquirer) Read more

Ten weeks before the largest prison in Pennsylvania is supposed to open, five of the two-story concrete cellblock buildings at the $400 million State Correction Institution Phoenix in Skippack Township have been cleared for prisoners to live in. Ten other cellblocks still need fixes and repairs to get off the state's "violations list" so they can house inmates from the aging Graterford prison next door.

So it goes at the state's second biggest taxpayer-backed project (after the Pennsylvania Convention Center), which remains more than two years behind schedule, and with many details left to check. Two-thirds of the cross-shaped concrete cellblocks have yet to pass final inspection, along with the two prison activities buildings, one of two prison industries buildings, and three support buildings. "They are still getting those housing units and other buildings finished," confirmed spokesman Troy Thompson, of the Department of General Services, which oversees state building construction.

Along with those fixes, as the state approaches its June 30 opening target, is a change in Phoenix's top management. The Corrections Department has tapped Tammy Ferguson as Phoenix's first superintendent. Ferguson will move to Graterford from SCI Benner Township, a medium-security facility near State College and one of the state's newest prisons. She will report to Wetzel deputy Tabb Bickell. Deputy Steve Glunt is overseeing the transition to the new prison. Benner houses about 2,075 inmates, about half of Phoenix's (and Graterford's) capacity. Benner was one of the few Pennsylvania state prisons that operated at a cost of less than $100 an inmate a day, according to a 2016 Corrections Department report.

Cynthia Link, who headed Graterford and had been slated to run Phoenix, retired earlier this month. Correction officials have given no reason for her retirement. Link headed Graterford, the state's largest prison and the primary location for Philadelphia-area inmates, since 2015. She leaves amid final preparations for the move, which corrections officers and inmates have called stressful, and after a spate of inmate suicides.

Phoenix is an unusually large new prison. And it is opening at a time when Pennsylvania and other states are reporting declining prison populations and leaders in both parties are reviewing alternatives to expensive incarceration. Promise, a California-based "de-carceration" company, says it recently raised $3 million from FirstRound Capital (whose Philadelphia partner Josh Kopelman chairs the Inquirer's board), rapper Jay-Z's Roc Nation, 8VC, and Kapor Capital to build an app to supervise some offenders without prison or cash bail.

While finishing Phoenix, Gov. Wolf and his corrections secretart, John Wetzel, first appointed by predecessor Gov. Tom Corbett, have sought to close older prisons. But a bill advancing in the Pennsylvania state Senate, supported by upstate legislators who value prison jobs in towns with few private-sector alternatives, would make state prisons harder to close.

Phoenix was supposed to be finished in 2015. Since then, general contractor Walsh Heery Joint Venture, a Pittsburgh-based partnership of general contractors based in Chicago and Atlanta, has been racking up penalties of $35,000 a day  totaling $30 million so far  though Walsh Heery has argued it should not have to pay.

Thompson said the state still expects to get that share of the project cost refunded, though the state in May advanced $2 million to contractors to make sure workers are paid while inspections continue.

The state last year hired Urban Engineers Inc. of Philadelphia to help speed final work after the state's project manager, Hill International Ltd., also of Philadelphia, failed to ensure that Phoenix opened on time. Hill was paid more than $20 million despite the ongoing delays. Hill and Walsh Heery managers blamed each other for the delays under the design-build contract, which Walsh Heery won under Corbett. Urban has been paid $815,000.

Redacted state records from 2015 and 2016 show conflicts simmering between builders and the state's construction representatives over utilities, flooring, lighting and other basic systems. Work change orders have not added much to construction costs, records show.

Parts of Graterford date to the 1920s. The facility is leaky and lacks full air conditioning. Although the new facility will double classroom space, expand gyms, and use more efficient climate controls, more inmates will be doubled up in single cells. "Double cells have been the model nationwide for 25 years," said state corrections spokeswoman Amy Worden, though some inmates won't have cellmates. Inmates, corrections officers, visitors, and family members have said the move from Graterford will disrupt familiar patterns.

State officials are taking extra steps to get inmates into the new facility before the end of the budget year, June 30. Normally, "we don't turn anything over until the entire prison is complete. That's when we give them the key and they can go in," Thompson said. "But this is a unique circumstance," so corrections officials are being allowed to "go in there and prepare the place for transition," while inspectors are still busy on site.

In February and early March, the state reported four inmate suicides in five weeks at Graterford. The entire state prison system, with nearly 50,000 inmates in two dozen facilities, has averaged seven suicides a year since 2000, as my colleague Samantha Melamed reported.

Inmate deaths are sometimes followed by changes in prison administration. The 1996 federal and state raid on Graterford and major changes to its management followed inmate overdoses on illegal drugs, and Delaware County changed its privately run prison management company in the late 2000s after inmate suicides.

State officials say they are taking the last-minute Phoenix changes in stride. "We are very confident that we will have everything done by the deadline," spokesman Thompson said. "We are closer and closer to having a complete facility for the Department of Corrections."The Italian Market has changed demographically, but it still is an important piece of Philadelphias history and culture. Read more

I have to give credit to those who continue to try to sanitize and rewrite our history by removing statues, memorials and mascots for their determination.

I have noticed the Philadelphia Mural Arts program is continuing to solicit ideas on where to place the Frank Rizzo statue. My translation is they want to know where to toss it on the dustbin of history. On a seemingly daily basis, we hear that everyday words or expressions are offensive to a particular person or group.

The latest is the claim that the expression "God bless you" is offensive to those who are not Christians, are non-believers and, according to guide written by the librarians at Simmons College in Boston, is a microaggression toward Muslims. Maybe the remedy is to take our lead from Seinfeld and when someone sneezes, we should say "You're so good looking."

This urge to strike back at history and expunge all things that are no longer politically correct hit a sweet spot when it comes to mascots. The latest case involves the crusading knight who was the mascot of the College of the Holy Cross. For some time, a group of the usual suspects has been pushing the university to remove the knight tied to their nickname the Crusaders. In February, the college said it would not change its mascot, but earlier this month, the administration announced that the name would stay and the mascot would go.

Such a change clearly revolves around fears that the knight represented the violence of the Crusades and played into charges of Islamophobia.

In addition to the charges of current-day Islamophobia, this mascot debate plays into the history of the Crusades. Of course, a fair reading of history acknowledges that the Crusades were both a defensive measure mounted against Muslim attacks and an enterprise in which Christian forces also massacred Muslims when they recaptured cities such as Jerusalem.

Of course, as these mascots are being retired, Christians are being persecuted and murdered across the Middle East, often by people claiming to do these acts in the name of Islam.

Closer to home, the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program chipped in the expunging of "non-inclusive" names and destinations by trying to scrub the Italian Market neighborhood label from its official mindset in a news release about what to do with the Frank Rizzo mural in South Philly. Victor Fiorillo reports at www.PhillyMag.com that their release said, "While the mural sits in the Bella Vista community, it also exists in an area that supports the 9th Street Market (formerly known as the Italian Market), which is home to shoppers from many neighborhoods and tourists alike."

He reports that the organization later amended its release, saying, "We've updated the language in our survey to say 'also known as the Italian Market,' given that people throughout the city may refer to the area in one way or the other."

Of course, this area has seen demographic changes but does it really offend people who are not Italian enough to remove its longstanding name? Will Chinatown soon be offensive to someone? Are we destined to allow developers and sanitizing civic do-gooder groups to make Philadelphia ever blander and more politically correct?

This skirmish over Rizzo and his statue, mural and neighborhood tells me we are going about this sensitivity all wrong. We need to see Philadelphia more like a hip contemporary homeowner's association. We need to centralize our planning to a board that can go block by block to root out all remnants of traditional Philadelphia.

Think of them as "crusaders" for the new more progressive Philadelphia. Of course, even though they'll be sacking our traditions such as the Mummers Parade and others, we'll need a new word to describe them given the crusader baggage.

This renaming effort Fiorillo has written about doesn't rise to the level of the school mascot debates, but it shows on matters large and somewhat smaller that we have pockets of people who, under the banner of being inclusive, are arbitrarily excluding anything that does not fit their tastes.

Respecting traditions and neighborhoods and history is being inclusive. Letting an unelected board casually throw away our local color and sense of place is exclusive and silly.

Teacher-turned-talk show host Dom Giordano is heard 9 a.m. to noon weekdays on WPHT (1210-AM). Contact him at www.domgiordano.com. Twitter: @DomShow1210Speaking at a discussion on safe injection sites are, from left, KYWs Melony Roy; David Jones, commissioner of the Department of Behavioral Health & disAbility Services; and Mayor Kenney. Read more

The Kenney administration's forum on safe injection sites saw neighbors in the Fox Chase section of Northeast Philadelphia raise their voices in opposition to drug use in their neighborhood.

And make no mistake. Safe injection sites are places where addicts use illegal drugs. The city says they differ from illicit drug houses because personnel are on hand to help addicts survive overdoses and seek treatment. But I have personally survived an addiction, and I can tell you in no uncertain terms that you cannot talk an addict into treatment. The addict has to want it.

I suspect the people of the largely white Fox Chase community are well aware of that truth, just as they understand that addiction brings drug dealers and gun violence, con men and prostitutes, death and destruction far beyond what comes at the end of the needle. That's why neighbors shouted down panelists such as Health Commissioner Thomas Farley and David Jones, commissioner of the Department of Behavioral Health and Intellectual disAbility Services.

But there's more to this than a single neighborhood's refusal to consider safe injection sites. There is also the sordid racial reality attached to Philadelphia's response to addiction. The naked truth is that the city wants to view drug use as a health crisis now that overdose victims are mostly white. But when crack swept through black and brown communities, addicts were treated as criminals.

I told Mayor Kenney as much when I had the opportunity to question him at a meeting of the Philadelphia Association of Black Journalists last week.

To his credit, the mayor acknowledged that people of color were hurt because the government treated addiction like a crime, not a disease. He also acknowledged that the response to the crack crisis was wrong.

I thanked him for that acknowledgment, and told him it wasn't good enough. Then I asked him how he would restore communities of color torn apart by criminalization during the crack era.

The mayor said there was no way to go back and undo what was done. But he told me he'd take my suggestions for repairing the damage if I had any.

I'm glad Kenney said that, because I have numerous suggestions for repairing the damage done to black and brown communities during the war on drugs. I spoke with District Attorney Larry Krasner about two of them.

First, there must be economic restoration, so the city must put additional funding behind the district attorney's effort to give back some of the houses taken from those accused, but not convicted, of dealing drugs from their properties during the crack era.

Krasner told me in an interview on my radio show on Praise 107.9 FM that the DA's Office is "dealing with issues of giving some people money back where they have a legal entitlement, or the value of their house back, or things of that sort. It's a complicated process because obviously it involves a lot of people over a long period of time, but we are open to reviewing that with an eye towards justice."

But giving back property, while laudable, is only the beginning. We must also repair the wrongs committed from a criminal justice perspective. So my second suggestion, which I initially made at my February forum on safe injection sites, is to wipe away some past drug convictions so people who've changed their lives can move forward.

"If we look at the tremendous impact that convictions for possession of drugs have had over the last decades, certainly coming through the crack crisis and so on, it's time to talk about that," Krasner told me in our interview. "In San Francisco, they are going back in time and they are eliminating records of convictions for marijuana possession.  And one proposal that needs to be discussed is that we look at people who were users of crack, and we consider whether maybe enough time has passed and there's a vehicle to maybe go back and undo some of those convictions, which are still affecting some people's employability and capacity to do various things in life."

My third suggestion is to provide neighborhood volunteers as mentors for those returning from prison. The city, in partnership with an organization such as Big Brothers Big Sisters, could provide that assistance in conjunction with a six-month work-study program coupling job experience with education. Doing so would be cheaper than incarcerating those who'd return to prison without that kind of help.

My final suggestion is to partner seniors with young people. Put them in our most challenged schools, and let them work together to craft solutions, form relationships, and repair the family bonds destroyed during the crack era.

Such initiatives would not only restore communities destroyed in the past. It would spare the rest of us from a future in which addiction is enabled rather than treated.

Solomon Jones is the author of 10 books. Listen to him weekdays from 10 a.m. to noon on Praise 107.9 FM. Email: sj@solomonjones.com Twitter: @solomonjones1NEW YORK, March 21 (Xinhua) -- The art-world power is shifting to China as the second largest economy keeps its growth momentum, a senior industry leader has said.

"The 21st century belongs to China in the art-world," said Jinqing Cai, President of Christie's China, at a conversation hosted by Center for Arts and Culture, China Institute, in New York City Tuesday.

Chinese collectors have become more knowledgeable, sophisticated and ambitious and the number of private art museums is on the rise ever since the art market began to flourish in China, a country with thousands of years of art collection, Cai said.

She cited two stories of "deep bidding" from Liu Yiqian, a former taxi driver turned billionaire art collector, who has a very big appetite for art.

In November 2014, Liu bought a 600-year-old imperial embroidered Tibetan tapestry at a Christie's auction for about 45 million U.S. dollars, setting a record for any Chinese works of art sold by an international auction house.

The silk tapestry, known as a thangka, is more than three meters tall and two meters wide. The work was created more than five centuries ago during the Ming dynasty on command of Emperor Yongle.

In April the same year, Liu spent 36.3 million dollars on a tiny porcelain cup with a humble chicken painted on its surface. He even celebrated his Ming Dynasty purchase by drinking tea from it.

The Art Market 2018, an annual report analysing the global art industry and produced by UBS and Art Basel, reveals that the United States was the largest market worldwide, accounting for 42 percent of sales by value.

China leapfrogged the UK to come second with 21 percent market share. Britain is in third place with 20 percent of the global market, followed by France.

Asia accounted for 23 percent of global sales in 2017, while Asian buyers made 15 percent of global transactions through intermediaries.

Chinese buyers alone have taken the lion's share with 10 percent, a significant increase compared to the much thinner 4 percent of 2016 which again shows the continued growth of purchasing power in Asia, said the report.

[ Editor: WPY ]Short Editions Short Story Dispenser offers one-, three-, and five-minute stories at the touch of a button. In collaboration with the Free Library of Philadelphia, three are headed to locations across the city. Read more

Like picking up a pack of Oreos from the cafeteria vending machine, a new kiosk concept in partnership with the Free Library of Philadelphia will allow visitors to obtain short stories at the touch of a button.

Announced Thursday as part of the Public Library Association's 2018 conference, Philadelphia was selected as one of four cities to receive a grant for Short Story Dispensers. The thin, sleek 5-foot-tall kiosks will be at three yet-to-be-determined locations throughout the city.

Each will offer one-, three-, and five-minute stories from a range of 20 genres. Stories will be spit out like an ATM receipt to users  and for free  on eco-friendly paper.

The initiative, funded by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and in partnership with the publisher Short Edition, is intended to promote reading throughout the city.

"It creates the idea of libraries without walls and allows us to really embed ourselves all throughout the community," says Pam Smith, president of the Public Library Association. "People are busy, but this combines both technology and reading in short doses, and people love that."

Launched in France in 2015, Short Story Dispensers are a product of Short Edition, whose community of writers provides all of the stories for each kiosk. A publisher of nearly 8,000 authors, the start-up company sought to bring literature to unexpected places like airports, train stations, shopping centers, and hospitals. People could engage in reading during unfavorable wait-times, turning what are often frustrating experiences into positive ones.

Short Story Dispensaries are currently in more than 150 locations across six continents.

Now, Short Edition is teaming up with public libraries, including the Free Library of Philadelphia as well as those in Ohio, South Carolina, and Kansas, to grow the initiative.

"We believe, like food and housing, literature and culture should be accessible to all," says Loic Giraud, Short Edition's business developer.

Andrew Nurkin, the Free Library of Philadelphia's deputy director of enrichment and civic engagement, notes that the locations for the dispensers in Philadelphia are still being worked out, but talks with places like the Philadelphia International Airport are already well underway.

"I'm most excited for the surprise aspect and to watch people find joy and engage in the written word outside of a traditional setting," says Nurkin.

As the program moves forward, it will also serve to encourage writers to share their work through Short Edition's digital content program.

Currently in France, anyone can submit a written story to be reviewed by a team of Short Edition judges. As many as 150 short stories are submitted per day, from which the team chooses the best to put into the dispensary catalog. It's this database of 100,000 stories that the Free Library of Philadelphia will use to curate the 2,000 selections that go into each Philly kiosk.

"It's amazing  you'll never receive the same story in the same day," says Nurkin.

Beyond France, upcoming writing competitions will soon open up Short Edition's digital content platform to the public both here in Philly and across the U.S. Anyone is invited to become an author and submit work, and those whose stories make the cut will land a spot in the dispensaries.

"Our mission is to spread the joy of literacy to everyone," says Giraud. "We want to welcome authors from across the world to create the natural conversations and connections that stem from reading."Paella was one of the few dishes at Oloroso about which Craig LaBan had reservations, which got us thinking  who does have the best paella?

Craig LaBan: Paella is one of my favorite things to share with a group, but a great one is rare because so many different elements have to come together with perfect timing.

A lot of pro kitchens cheat by assembling pre-cooked ingredients to order, and though that allows the most delicate items to be properly done, you can miss out on the deeper flavors that result from seafood, chicken, and chorizo mingling together and infusing the same pan of rice.

A great paella should be cooked from start to finish to order, and preferably over an open grill or stove to get a toasty "soccarat" crust on the bottom.

Read more: The best BBQ in Philadelphia

Oloroso definitely cooks its paella to order, but the rice was still too wet, and the broth had too much tomato overtaking the other flavors. I'm sure the excellent cooks there are working on it. (I was a bigger fan of its squid ink rice.)

Meanwhile, there are other paellas to consider. Amada, of course, has long been the gold standard for Spanish classics, and though it's been a while, I remember my last paella from a Garces kitchen fondly, the nubby Calasparra rice brimming with a smoky base of braised chicken and chorizo that was worth the 40-minute wait.

The still relatively new Barcelona Wine Bar on East Passyunk Avenue does a solid job with classic paella (don't bother with the bland vegetarian version), but the chewy seafood in mine could have been more delicately cooked.

Read more: The Top 25 Restaurants in Philadelphia

The Portuguese-style paella at Tio Pepe on Castor Avenue (noted in my Northeast Philly dining package) was one of the more impressive paellas I've sampled locally, with half a lobster anchoring moist yellow rice ringed by clams, pork, and Portuguese sausage.

I've also found great paella in the suburbs at Ambler's 555 Lagiola, a tiny Spanish BYOB where house-made chorizo adds richness to the rice, delicately cooked seafood, and tender bone-in chicken.

Read more: Where to eat in Philly's suburbs

The most memorable paella I've had recently was at Jamonera  a hearty individual portion of pimenton-spiced golden rice bejeweled with still-moist mussels, slender Chistorra chorizo, crisp pork belly nuggets, huge shrimp, and a garlicky leg of chicken that had been roasted to a crackly crisp. Of course, Jamonera breaks some paella rules. Its six-burner kitchen is just too small to cook every pan entirely to order. So talented chef de cuisine Lindsay McClain, who produced an overall outstanding meal, more than compensated by crisping her flavorful rice on the plancha to a tawny crunch for a soccarat that got stealthily slipped into the bottom of the pan. By the time I'd devoured my way down through every delicious morsel of pig and seafood, the surprise of it was like the diner's ultimate reward, a roasty scoop of singed rice treasure to punctuate an already fabulous dish.This undated photo from a Facebook posting shows Mark Anthony Conditt, who authorities say terrorized the Austin, Texas, area with a series of bombings this month. Read more

The young white man behind a string of bombings that killed two people and injured four others this month in central Texas was a "domestic terrorist," the city's interim police chief acknowledged Thursday.

Chief Brian Manley had avoided that label last week when he called Mark Anthony Conditt "very challenged," but not a terrorist. Rep. Michael McCaul (R., Texas) had also faced criticism for saying Conditt was "disturbed" but that the the bombings were "not terror-related."

On social media, debate flared about whether Conditt would have been called a terrorist had he not been white. Some said the way he was described reflected white privilege.

In his comments last week, Manley said Conditt had not mentioned terrorism or hate in a video confession. Investigators initially believed Conditt was targeting people of color, given that the first three victims  two of whom died  were black or Hispanic. Two white men were then injured when another bomb exploded alongside a road.

What exactly may have motivated Conditt remains unknown.

A similar debate about the labeling of suspects unfolded last year after authorities described the killing of eight people who were run over by a truck in New York City as "terrorism," but not the slaying of 58 people who were shot at a concert in Las Vegas.

In New York, the suspect was an Uzbek immigrant and allegedly inspired by the Islamic State. In Las Vegas, the suspect was white and without a clear ideology or motive.

The Huffington Post detailed the difference in the labeling of suspects:

Federal prosecutors have wide latitude to go after individuals who affiliate with designated foreign terrorist organizations, a list mostly filled with radical Islamic groups. Pretty much any behavior in support of a designated foreign terrorist organization  [including] retweeting On the other hand, domestic extremists  radical militias, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, etc.  enjoy wide protection under the First Amendment and can face federal terrorism charges only if they engage in particular kinds of activity, e.g., hijacking an airplane, seizing control of an Amtrak train  tweets or

The debate about race extends to victims, too. News organizations were quick to forget that the Las Vegas massacre was not, in fact, the deadliest mass shooting, or mass killing, in American history. As my colleague Valerie Russ pointed out:PFLUGERVILLE, Texas  He worked with his dad around their modest yellow house on Second Street, fixing up a newly purchased home in an old-fashioned, close-knit neighborhood  the kind of place where residents check in on one another.

Mark Anthony Conditt seemed to fit in. Having been home-schooled, the 23-year-old was close to his family, including his sisters. As he neared graduation, he took a government course at Austin Community College and described himself on a class blog as conservative but "not that politically inclined."

People who knew him say Conditt was quiet and shy.

"Everyone has questions, and everyone wants answers, and we are just shocked," said Mark's grandmother Mary Conditt, who lives in Denver. "This is not the Mark that I know or the grandson that I know. I don't know who this person was that did all of this."

But Mark Conditt's violent plans were revealed, police say, in a string of bombings that terrorized Austin this month.

Cornered by police Wednesday, Mark Conditt detonated explosives inside his car before dawn and ended a bombing campaign that killed two, injured several others and injected anxiety into a city renowned for its creativity and cool. The terror began with devices left at people's homes on March 2 and March 12, then moved to an explosive rigged with a tripwire that injured two men this week and two explosives shipped through FedEx.

Interim Austin police chief Brian Manley said police believed Conditt was connected to all of the explosions, which they first linked to him through his cellphone, according to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R). Abbot said authorities tracked his movements while "he was little more than a suspect."

Police found Conditt at a hotel north of Austin and followed him as he drove away and eventually veered off the road. His red SUV was the same vehicle that had been seen at locations linked to the explosions. As officers neared Conditt's vehicle, he detonated a bomb that knocked back one of the approaching Austin SWAT officers. Another officer fired his gun at Conditt, who suffered "significant injuries from [the] blast," Manley said.

It was not immediately clear whether Conditt was killed by the explosives or the gunfire.

Police said Wednesday evening that Conditt seemed motivated by frustration with his life.

Manley described a 25-minute recording left on Conditt's phone as "the outcry of a very challenged young man talking about challenges in his personal life that led him to this point."

Mary Conditt, 83, said she last saw her grandson in December when he traveled with his family to her house for Christmas. Conditt described him as having strong conservative political beliefs but said he wasn't reactionary and spent considerable time researching political viewpoints before he took a stand.

Mark Conditt recently moved into a house that he and his father had renovated. He invited two roommates to live with him, Mary Conditt said.

"We are of course grieving, broken and disappointed," Conditt said. "I don't know what else to say. . . . I know who Mark Anthony Conditt was to me, to his family, for all of his life, and this is not the Mark Anthony Conditt that we knew."

Earlier in the investigation, authorities said they were considering whether at least some of the victims were targeted because of their race. The package bombs were left in predominately black and Hispanic neighborhoods of East Austin, killing Anthony Stephan House, 39, a money manager, and Draylen Mason, a college-bound 17-year-old known for his passion for music.

Another bomb severely injured Esperanza Herrera, a 75-year-old Hispanic woman visiting her mother.

Relatives also wondered whether a family connection played a role: House's stepfather is friends with Mason's grandfather Norman, and both are prominent fixtures in the black community.

But the tripwire bomb authorities say Mark Conditt set Sunday night appeared to target a white neighborhood, perhaps the children who would have been walking to school the following morning.

What police in part focused on  and were assisted with by Conditt when he walked into a FedEx office and was caught on camera  was Austin's affinity for online and other home-delivery services that made front-porch packages something no one would think twice about. It suggested someone with a knowledge of the city and its habits.

"You just don't know," said Rey Casanova, a 42-year-old real estate agent in Pflugerville who said he and his wife buy "everything" online but haven't for the past two weeks. "You don't know what's going to come in the mail."

But, ultimately, none of this explains why Conditt, who attended a Christian church, veered toward violence, how he made bombs law-enforcement officials described as sophisticated, or why he decided that Austin and its residents should be a target.

Police detained two of his roommates who might know more about why Conditt, who would remain inside when neighbors chatted with his dad, became what authorities characterized as a "serial bomber."

"It's a very good family," said Mark Roessler, 57, a neighbor. "His father was very friendly and very likable. You can tell he was a loving father, just really enjoying spending a lot of time with his son."

Police are interviewing those who knew Conditt, scouring a social media footprint that seems modest at most and tracing his final movements, some caught on film as he used a south Austin FedEx office to mail his final bombs.

The FedEx shipments offered a significant moment because investigators were able to obtain surveillance footage of Conditt walking into the FedEx store wearing a wig and gloves, Abbott said. Investigators also determined that Conditt purchased signs like the one used to anchor the tripwire-rigged device that detonated Sunday night, Abbott said.

Conditt was not a military veteran, an early theory given the explosives expertise. Abbott told reporters Wednesday that he appeared to have bought the bomb components from Home Depot, and federal investigators are examining his Internet search history to see how self-taught his bomb-making skills might have been.

The public profile he left comprises a series of writings on his political views, socially conservative but far from radical. He opposed abortion and same-sex marriage; he lived on the periphery of a Texas city known as a liberal island in a largely red state. But no evidence so far has emerged of radicalization.

In 2010, Conditt enrolled in Austin Community College, a small campus in the large shadow cast here by the University of Texas at Austin.

He spent two years there as a business administration major but did not secure a degree, according to the school. Kyle Ghedi, who coincided with Conditt at the school but did not recall him, said the government and politics class was "half in class and half online" and that most students didn't socialize with one another.

"You just go to class, and you don't really talk to anyone, and no one really makes friends there," Ghedi said. "Everyone is just there to go to class, and once class is over, you leave there. No one is sticking around to make friends, like a university."

Conditt also worked beyond the renovation he was taking on at home with his dad. He was employed by Crux Manufacturing, a semiconductor manufacturer that occupies a set of mostly windowless buildings about four miles from the Conditt family home.

"We love and grieve with our city, and we continue to pray for the victims and their families who were affected by these recent tragedies" said John Yeng, communications director of the Austin Stone Community Church, which Conditt once attended. "We are cooperating with law enforcement with any pertinent information we can find that may be of help as they continue their investigation."

Craig, Wilson and Berman reported from Washington. Kristine Phillips in Pflugerville and Julie Tate in Washington contributed to this report."There are three fugitive slaves here and they want liberty" was the message delivered to William Still, directing him to a Philadelphia hotel on a moment's notice. The letter was undated, the signature illegible. But Still understood.

It was 1855, and Still, the son of freed slaves, had become one of Philadelphia's most prominent abolitionists and a leader of the Underground Railroad, a network of secret locations where slaves could find shelter on the journey north. The slaves at Bloodgood's Hotel were Jane Johnson and her two boys. They were with their master, who had taken them on a trip through Philadelphia to New York. Momentarily out of the watchful eye of the slave-holder, Johnson whispered to a black waiter that she was a slave  and she wanted her freedom.

Still was on his way to give it to her.

Still and a fellow abolitionist, a white man named Passmore Williamson, arrived just in time to see Johnson and the children leaving the hotel and boarding a steamboat bound for New York at a nearby dock. Still and Williamson rushed the deck, telling Johnson in the presence of the slaver that in this state, she was a free woman. To break the bonds of slavery, all she had to do was come with them.

"Remember," the abolitionists told her, as Still recounted in his self-published book, "if you lose this chance you may never get such another."

Johnson took it. While Williamson engaged the slaveholder in an escalating argument, Still hurried Johnson and the children off the boat and into a waiting carriage, actions that would soon get Still arrested and make him a nationally known hero in newspapers across the country.

As he had done for hundreds of slaves seeking freedom, he provided Johnson and her boys refuge at his home, a place that, as one biographer later described it, "had become known as a safe and convenient station on the line of the northward march": The Underground Railroad.

Now, more than 150 years later, Philadelphia preservationists believe they have finally discovered exactly where that home stands.

This month, the Philadelphia Historical Commission unanimously voted to designate the 19th century row house where Still lived and where he harbored hundreds of slaves from 1850 to 1855 as a site on the Philadelphia Register of Historic Places, protecting it from demolition or serious alteration. The protection, the preservationists said, is important in a city whose limited African American historic markers are more akin to "tombstones," left at sites where the original buildings no longer exist. One such marker exists for Still, in fact, outside a home the preservationists claim is not the original structure, according to

"From my perspective, it's a huge discovery," Jim Duffin, one of the preservationists, told The Washington Post. "The hardest problem of trying to retrieve the story of the Underground Railroad is finding documentation that the sites existed. This is one of the incredibly rare opportunities where we absolutely know that this site had a connection to the Underground Railroad because of its connection to Still."

An 1850s dressmaking advertisement is what led Duffin to the location of Still's home.

The problem with mid-19th century property records, he said, was that they identified the street on which Still lived  but didn't give an exact house number.

"I was ready to give up," Duffin said, having scoured 19th-century maps and city records. "Then I came across a newspaper ad from his wife."

Still's wife, Letitia, was a dressmaker. In an 1851 advertisement for dresses "done in the best manner by Letitia Still," she described exactly where on Ronaldson Street customers  and ultimately Duffin  could find her.

Despite remodeling of the house over the years, "the powerful sense of connection with the past that comes from a specific historic site such as this is of vital importance," Lonnie G. Bunch, director of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, said in a letter of support for the site's nomination.

Today, the house stands three stories with a tan-colored brick facade and a drab, windowless roughcast brick on its side, the first rowhouse in a sequence of three along a narrow street. A Whole Foods, Starbucks and a couple of art galleries adorn the block and surrounding area where Still once lived, a neighborhood he described in the 1850s as predominantly African American, instead with furniture stores and stove stores and "one confectionary." Still's house on Ronaldson Street  now South Delhi Street  was last remodeled in 1920, according to records, when the tan-colored bricks replaced red ones.

But the front marble steps, said Oscar Beisert, the preservationist who first organized the team to track down Still's home, appear to be original.

"When people look at those steps," Beisert told The Post, "they see the steps where those fugitives stood when they knocked on that door."

In 1872, Still published hundreds of stories of those fugitives in a book aptly titled "The Underground Railroad," among the most comprehensive first-person accounts of the Underground Railroad ever written.

It includes the story of Jane Johnson and how, at Still's and Williamson's trial for kidnapping her, Johnson showed up to testify  considered extremely rare at the time  that she desired to escape and seek freedom, allowing Still to be acquitted. It includes stories of slaves who escaped their masters by packing themselves into a small box or a wooden chest, then being shipped on a steamboat up the coast to the Philadelphia. He writes of slaves who hid in a cave for months after escaping from jail and being shot by slave-catchers while running through the woods and of a slave who had come to Still at Harriet Tubman's urging after he was imprisoned for 10 years for possessing a copy of "Uncle Tom's Cabin."

And he writes of a slave who, Still would discover, was his own long-lost brother.

Although Still grew up free on a New Jersey farm as the youngest of 18 children, he had two brothers he only knew of through stories. While Still's father had toiled for years to pay for his freedom, Still's mother had to escape  twice. The second time, she faced a Sophie's choice: She had four children  two baby daughters and two older sons, Peter and Levin  and she would not be able to take all of them with her.

"The sorrowful night came," Still's biographer wrote of his mother's escape in 1872. "Nerved for the hour and the solemn occasion, she rushed to the little straw bed on which her four were sleeping, kissed her boys farewell without waking them, clasped the two little girls in her strong, true arms, bade her mother good-bye, and trusting in God, began again the perilous march for freedom."

Before Still was even 18, he would help a runaway slave he found in the woods do the same, escorting him down an untraveled path for 20 miles and delivering him to safety, away from his master.

A decade later, after moving to Philadelphia, Still had worked his way up from a clerk at the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society to overseeing its Underground Railroad operations. Not even a year on the job, he would finally meet his brother Peter for the first time.

One day while Still was busy mailing out the weekly abolitionist newspaper, Philadelphia Freeman, an acquaintance came in and introduced Still to a stranger who said he had escaped slavery, and now was trying to find his parents. He gave their names, and told the same story Still's mother had been telling for the past 40 years.

"By this time I was simply thunderstruck, so to speak," Still wrote in his own account. "I had to summon all my powers of control in the presence of the stranger, so fully was I convinced by this time that he was one of my long-lost brothers."

The "marvellous coincidence," Still wrote in "The Underground Railroad," is what ultimately convinced him to begin keeping meticulous records of every fugitive slave who arrived at his door, in hopes that perhaps the records may one day help other long-lost family members to find each other. The risk of keeping the records in the age of the Fugitive Slave Act, he reasoned, paled in comparison to the importance of keeping them for history's sake.

"While the grand little army of abolitionists was waging its untiring warfare for freedom, prior to the rebellion, no agency encouraged them like the heroism of fugitives," he wrote. "The pulse of the four millions of slaves and their desire for freedom were better felt through 'The Underground Railroad' than through any other channel.

"These facts must never be lost sight of."Estimated population change in Philadelphia from the previous year. Read more

Philadelphia's population increased by 6,098 residents between 2016 and 2017, the 11th straight year of growth that the city enjoyed after decades of population decline.

Still, not all the news from U.S. Census Bureau population estimates, released Thursday, was positive. For example, more people moved out of the city than moved in. The population increase came from birthrates exceeding death rates.

And the city's growth continues to lag others, especially in the South and West.

Here are five things to know about what the census numbers say about our area:

Philadelphias growth streak continues, but dont get excited

The Philadelphia population was listed as 1,580,863, according to census figures, which measured the period between July 2016 and July 2017.

The last time the city registered an overall population loss was 2006, when the population dropped by 2,151 people to 1,488,710.

Economists taking their first look at the numbers echoed the restrained reaction offered by Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Analytics: "Philadelphia is holding its own, which is OK. It's not dynamic, but it's not losing overall."

Lauren Cox, communication director for the Philadelphia Department of Commerce, said the census numbers are "an encouraging sign for our city's overall economic health."

The city is growing faster than the suburbs  and nowhere suffers more than South Jersey

Since 2010, Philadelphia's population gains have outpaced those of its suburban Pennsylvania counties, while growth has been nonexistent in South Jersey.

In the current estimates, only Chester County registered a higher percentage growth in population than Philadelphia  3.9 percent compared to 3.4 percent. It wasn't clear to experts contacted Wednesday what accounted for Chester County's uptick.

As for why South Jersey continues to show little population growth, however, there were a few guesses.

"The millennial generation is so large, and the story of millennials is, they like to live in highly dense areas," said Brandon McKoy, director of government and public affairs for New Jersey Policy Perspective, a nonpartisan Trenton think tank. "And South Jersey has few of those. Central and North Jersey is where the density is, and that's where people are headed."

Beyond that, said David Elesh, emeritus sociology professor at Temple University, South Jersey has still not recovered from the recession. "They got just demolished in housing, with so many foreclosures and short sales," he said. "That hangover lasts a long time."

In Philadelphia, more people moved out than immigrants moved in

The city brought in 10,240 immigrants between 2016 and 2017, Census figures showed. But among people moving within the U.S., 10,817 more people moved out of Philadelphia than moved in, resulting in a net loss of 577 people.

That statistic belies the current impression of Philadelphia as a vibrant place that beckons young people and highly accomplished professionals.

How can the city be attracting and repelling people at the same time?

What happens, noted Kim Goyette, chair of the Temple sociology department, is that Philadelphia's "high-education landscape" indeed calls to young, smart people.

"But once they start families, they move out."

This has been the pull-push dynamic that's blessed and cursed the city for years, experts say.

Simply put, the city's school system drives out parents once their children reach age 5, experts say.

Said Villanova University economist Cheryl Carleton, "It's great when you're young, but once you have school-age kids, it all gets dicey. The public schools are not doing well, and people don't see that changing.

"The city has a lot going for it, with good medical facilities, colleges, and parks. But the schools make it difficult for people to stay."

In Philadelphia, for every 100 families with children that move in, 270 are moving out, according to research by economist Neeta Fogg of the Center for Labor Markets and Policy at Drexel University.

Philadelphia is not the only one losing residents

Of the 25 largest counties (Philadelphia ranks 23rd), only eight had a net domestic migration gain in 2017. Los Angeles County, the nation's largest with 10.2 million residents, had a net loss of 91,680, an average of 251 more people moving out per day than moving in.

Cook County, Ill., home to Chicago, had a net loss of 65,871. In fact, only two of the nation's 10 largest counties had a net gain in domestic migration: Maricopa County, Ariz., home to fast-growing Phoenix, posted a gain of 38,852. (Its overall population gain of 73,650 was highest in the country.)

Riverside County, Calif., had a net gain of 19,586. The home counties of Houston, San Diego, Miami, Brooklyn, and Dallas, as well as Orange County, Calif., posted net domestic migration losses.

Where People Are Moving Within the U.S.

So if more people are moving out than moving in, how did Philadelphia gain population?

Something called natural increase  the number of births minus the number of deaths.

In 2017, there were 21,776 births and 15,026 deaths in Philadelphia, a natural increase of 6,750. That figure accounts for all of the city's population gain last year. Natural increase also fueled the population gains of other large counties, which, like Philadelphia, suffered from large domestic migration losses. Los Angeles, Harris (Houston), San Diego, and Kings (Brooklyn) Counties all grew in population by having strong natural increase numbers that covered for net losses in people moving domestically and internationally.TEHRAN, March 16 (Xinhua) -- Spring cleaning, shopping for special food and clothes, holding fire festival and special street drama is how the Iranians celebrate Nowruz and the start of spring.

New Year festival of Nowruz celebrations, meaning literally the new day, begin on March 21 to greet the coming of a new year for Iranians.

For them, the celebration is rooted in history and means the glorification of growth and vigor in nature.

Preparations for Nowruz begin in early March with spring cleaning locally known as Khaneh Tekani.

Khaneh Tekani, literally shaking the house, is common in almost every household. Carpets and curtains are washed, every corner is dusted, windows are wiped, and old furniture is repaired or replaced with new one.

All family members are involved in this ritual, signifying a fresh start and wash-away of all misfortune.

Also, people head for markets to do shopping for an assortment of goods including new clothes, new shoes, fresh fruits, sweets, nuts, flowers and items necessary to set on the Nowruz Table which is locally known as Sofreh-ye Haft Seen.

Street malls and traditional Bazaars are filled with flowers, plants, colorful clothes and vendors.

Special shopping is made for decorating Sofreh-ye Haft Seen on which a number of symbolic objects are placed during the Nowruz celebrations.

The most common items featuring the Nowruz Table are the Holy Quran, the goldfish, coins, candle sticks, dishes of green sprouts (or Sabzeh), mirrors, decorated eggs, as the signs of good luck, wealth and happiness for the family in the coming year.

Besides, seven other items, the names of which in Persian begin with the sound /s/ are symbolically set on the Sofreh-ye Haft Seen.

People select the seven items from among coin, hyacinths, dried oleaster, sprouts, apple, pudding, garlic, vinegar and sumac, which are given auspicious meaning like wealth, beauty, rebirth, wisdom, health, power and sunrise.

The Iranian also actively participate in Chaharshanbeh Suri, or the fire festival, on the eve of the last Wednesday to bid farewell to the old year and start a prelude to the new year.

With the fall of the dusk on Tuesday, Iranians celebrate the fire festival by jumping over bonfires and using firecrackers in public places, which has its roots in the ancient customs and history of the country.

As people jump over the bonfires, they sang anthems for the fire under their feet, figuratively trading the warmth and beauty of the flames.

The hymns also signify to beat out all the misfortunes and impurities of the past year and get ready for the new resolutions in the coming year.

In the coldest regions of the country and following the fire festival, people gather in their elders' houses eating Chaharshanbe Suri Ajil, or a mixture of raw nuts, raisins, figs and berries.

In the past, young people used to wear disguises and go door to door knocking on doors to receive Chaharshanbe Suri Ajil. The rite is fading away in the modern Iran.

Meanwhile, Haji Firouz, who is a fictional character in the Iranian folklore, appears on the streets to herald the coming of Nowruz.

His face is covered in soot and he is clad in bright red clothes and a felt hat.

Haji Firouz entertains passers-by in the public places by singing traditional songs and dancing and playing his tambourine for a few coins.

As the last day of the year comes to an end, "everyone rushes home to be with their families and loved ones. The New Year is all about celebrating those special moments and sharing the joy and gratitude with family members. While the clock is ticking away and the New Year is approaching, the family sits around the specially prepared Sofreh-ye Haft Seen."

On the first day of New Year, people usually get up early and put on their best clothes to receive visitors or to go visiting the elders.

Nowruz holiday in Iran is a two-week event. A wide range of cultural performances and traditions also take place.

On the days of Nowruz, there is much feasting, visiting family members and friends, and exchanging gifts.

During this period, people pay visits to each other's houses and entertain their guests with fresh fruits and nuts.

It is a tradition for the elders to give money called Eidi to the children. Nowruz holiday is also a perfect opportunity for the families to go on trips making these two weeks a prime travel season.

Families and communities share a symbolic meal, often consisting of cooked rice and vegetables combined with many local ingredients.

In recognition of the importance of this ancient rite, Nowruz was inscribed on UNESCO's Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2009. Moreover, in 2010, the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed 21 March International Nowruz Day.

[ Editor: WPY ]Steve Bannon at a Trump campaign event for Hispanics in August 2016. Bannon pushed racist messages through his roles as an executive with Cambridge Analytica, head of Breitbart News and later as CEO of Donald Trumps campaign. Read more

It's a day that will be indelibly burnished on America's political memory: June 16, 2015, when Donald Trump descended on an escalator from the marble splendor of his Trump Tower penthouse  with his supermodel wife ahead of him, Neil Young's "Rockin' the Free World" blasting at 11 from the speakers  to tell all the little people waiting on the ground that he was running to be America's 45th president.

The idea of a Donald Trump presidency had been the stuff of speculation and satire for three decades  the assumption being he'd run on his alleged business savvy, even after those three decades had revealed his CEO acumen was more hype than reality. But although he'd displayed a new political instinct at the dawn of the 2010s  with a deep dive into Barack Obama "birtherism" that appealed to worst instincts of the burgeoning Tea Party movement  no one was really ready for what came out of his mouth that late spring day.

Trump said Mexico was sending its worst people, murderers and rapists, to America as immigrants, and then he added that as president he'd build a "great, great wall on our southern border, and I will make Mexico pay for that wall." To many pundits, the alleged billionaire's words that day pegged him as too extreme for the Oval Office. But to millions of voters in neglected Rust Belt towns and surrounding farmland, those ugly chords were sweeter music than any riff from Neil Young's faded guitar.

Trump's announcement launched a mystery that's lasted 14 months into the most unlikely presidency in American history. Where did the ideas that animated the candidate's packed rallies  and juiced voter turnout in Rust Belt states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Ohio  come from? "Build the wall!"? "Drain the swamp!"? "Crooked Hillary!"? "Deep state!"? Defining immigrants as violent gangs or murderous thugs? Painting American's urban neighborhoods as crime-infested ratholes.

In a stunning week of revelations, we now know the answer. The core messages of the president's underlying xenophobia and racism that animated his base didn't emerge from the mind of "very stable genius" Trump (despite a long life of troubling racial attitudes). Instead, the nonstop undercurrent of hate toward The Other in American life was focus-grouped, computer-coded, deliberately amplified by a new ultra-right-wing media echo chamber and then targeted with cruise-missile precision at the handful of states that Trump won by roughly 100,000 votes to grab the Electoral College.

At its blackened heart, it turns out, are the two ugliest words to emerge in U.S. politics in the 21st century: "Race realism."

There's nothing real, or factual, about "race realism." To the contrary, it's the rank, old-school racial stereotypes about black- and brown-skinned people that once animated slaveholders, the KKK or the White Citizens Councils of yesterday, dressed up in Adidas sneakers and a hip-hop T-shirt instead of a white robe. What we've learned these past few days is a kind of a dystopian nightmare: That Team Trump, led by its multimillion-dollar data gurus Cambridge Analytica (CA) and the president's former propaganda minister, Steve Bannon (with a still mysterious assist from Russian trolls), used the modern techniques of information warfare  and hijacked data from Facebook  to inject a virulent strain of thinly disguised white supremacy to elect an American president.

We know now how this worked, thanks to a courageous insider, Christopher Wylie, who has revealed the secrets of Bannon and Cambridge Analytica as a whistleblower. Much of the attention has focused, understandably, on what you might call the "garbage in" aspect of CA's work for Trump, the fraud and trickery that was used to gain 50 million Facebook profiles and use "psychometric" profiling to play on voters' fears and prejudices. There's been way too little focus on the "garbage out"  what those messages were and how they were crafted.

Wylie told the Washington Post the backstory of how he, Bannon, a financier then running the right-wing Breitbart News, ultra-conservative hedge-fund billionaire Robert Mercer and a cyber-warfare expert named Alexander Nix came together in 2014 to launch Cambridge Analytica. The whistleblower said it was Bannon who was calling the shots and who was particularly interested in one particular issue: How to win over young conservative white males who were staying home on Election Day. The new start-up convened focus groups to find out.

The Post reported that "these voters responded to calls for building a new wall to block the entry of illegal immigrants, to reforms intended to 'drain the swamp' of Washington's entrenched political community and to thinly veiled forms of racism toward African Americans called 'race realism,' he recounted."

Bizarrely, Trump himself seemed to acknowledge in a tweet this Thursday morning that the messages crafted by CA were critical to his victory.

What's more, Trump also admitted this week at a fund-raiser that "drain the swamp" was a phrase that was given to him  by whom exactly, he didn't say, although the circumstantial evidence points to Bannon and CA  and that he didn't like it until his predominantly white rally crowds went wild:

 And I hated it, I thought it was so hokey. I said, that is the hokiest, give me a break, I am embarrassed to say it. And I was in Florida where 25,000 people were going wild, and I said, and we will drain the swamp  the place went crazy. I couldnt believe it.

High-tech political "psy-ops" work, apparently. Trump has in the past voiced similar surprise at how well the "build the wall" meme succeeded on the campaign trail, although Wylie has said the idea of a physical quarantine played right into the psychological fears of those voters most disturbed that America is becoming increasingly non-white. Likewise, CA's now-suspended CEO Nix was caught on tape bragging how his firm used high-tech to "weaponize" the phrase "Crooked Hillary."

But arguably the most disturbing aspect of all this is the push for "race realism." I'd never heard that exact phrase before this week, and there's a good chance that you haven't either  unless you spend a lot of time on websites or message boards appealing to the white nationalists who've tried to re-brand themselves as "the alt-right."

"Race realism," it seems, is a modern update on centuries of pseudo-science (the eugenics movement of the earliest 20th century, for example). It's also been called "scientific racism," and you probably won't be shocked to learn this debunked mumbo-jumbo was also a key philosophical underpinning of Nazi Germany and its propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels.

Indeed, "race realism" today is a core value of the yahoos you witnessed marching with their Home Deport tiki torches in Charlottesville, spread by the likes of "Hail Trump" white nationalist ally Richard Spencer as well as the random neo-Nazis who salute the new president and pseudo-academic journals with names like American Renaissance. There's always been what the historian Richard Hofstadter called "the paranoid style in American politics", but Bannon and Trump have made that mainstream, with dangerous omens for U.S. democracy.

Remember, Bannon in the run-up to teaming with Trump was a double-edge sword, using the data he gained from his role at Cambridge Analytica not only to bamboozle voters through Facebook messages and "fake news" but also as the editor of his own rising website, Breitbart News. Under Bannon's leadership, Breitbart launched a special section called "Black Crime" that pandered to its readers' foulest stereotypes about African-Americans and lawbreaking. (You can see some examples of what the Southern Poverty Law Center has called "a white ethno-nationalist propaganda mill" here.)

Interestingly, many of the posts now linked to the Russian troll farm which was indicted, along with some of its key players, by special counsel Robert Mueller, also worked hard to drive up racial divides in America, using Facebook and even staged events to stir up both left-leaning black activists and the conservatives who most despise them.

In the summer of 2016, when few experts gave Trump any chance of winning the general election and after Robert Mercer and his billions signed on with the GOP nominee, Bannon was abruptly named the CEO of the Trump campaign. It was a short time later that Trump began talking about race on the campaign trail, in what was ostensibly a pitch for black votes. But what a bizarre pitch it was.

"You're living in poverty, your schools are no good, you have no jobs, 58 percent of your youth is unemployed." Trump told a rally in September 2016. The ostensible message was, "What the hell do you"  African-Americans  "have to lose" by voting for the Republican, but the words seemed instead to reinforce the stereotypes of "race realism." There were virtually no blacks in the audience that day. The rally was held in Dimondale, Michigan, a small town (92.7 percent white) near Lansing  the kind of place where jacked-up turnout helped Trump gain stunning narrow victories that November not just in the Wolverine State but the other Rust Belt states where he (and Cambridge Analytica) had targeted those young white male conservative voters.

Even now, as president, Trump falls back on "race realism" when he gets into a political jam  calling any black athlete who protested social injustice during the National Anthem a "son of a bitch" (in Alabama, the state that gave us George Wallace and Selma's "Bloody Sunday") or labeling a leading African-American critic, Rep. Maxine Waters. "a low-IQ individual." He's determined to hold his base together. And he's got the data to prove that racism works.

It's time to see this noxious phenomenon  the spirit of yesterday's cross burnings, sparked by today's internet electrons of Facebook's friendly facade  as what it is, as not just some background noise but as the cornerstone of what elected Trump, and what powers his wayward presidency. That's why it's so important for Mueller (and perhaps a Democratic House in 2019) to get to the bottom of Bannon's work with CA, Breitbart and Trump and what crimes, if any, were committed in spreading this poison. We can't outlaw the notions of white supremacy, but we can punish the people who used fraud to inject these odious ideas into our body politic.

Because "race realism" isn't an actual thing. It's just real racism.Snow rests on signs at the corner of Spring and Ritter avenues during a snowstorm, Wednesday, March 21, 2018, in South Plainfield, N.J. A spring nor'easter targeted the Northeast on Wednesday with strong winds and a foot or more of snow expected in some parts of the region. Read more

Another week, another nor'easter  the fourth powerful coastal storm of March 2018 put the big Northeast cities in its crosshairs. The region is notorious for vicious winter tempests, but four in one month seems a bit much, especially one on the first day of spring. March roared in like a lion. When's the lamb coming?

My New England neighborhood is usually peaceful at this time of year; the quiet interrupted only by honks of Canada geese, wind in the towering white pines; and the occasional hoot of a great horned owl. Not so much this winter. Rumbling generators, whining chain saws, and rattling snowplows lasted many days after each pasting by Mother Nature. We New Englanders love to talk about weather, and we revel in our toughness, but even that is different this year. After comparing stories of fallen trees and property damage, the conversation increasingly shifts to "Why?" Is there an explanation for this relentless, persistent parade of destructive cyclones, storms so strong that if you didn't check the calendar, you'd easily mistake them for hurricanes on the weather map? Perhaps.

Some climate change skeptics always use snowstorms to argue that the planet is not actually warming. President Trump, during a sharp December cold snap on the East Coast, suggested that "perhaps we could use a little bit of that good old global warming," which he has called a hoax in the past. Last April, conservative news outlets rejoiced when snow canceled a march in Colorado to protest Trump's climate policies. But rather than being evidence that climate change isn't happening, the extreme weather the United States has seen this month should be viewed as a sign that it is.

Although the atmosphere is a complex beast, researchers are fingerprinting a variety of ways that those increasing greenhouse gases are making winter storms more powerful and more likely. It's clear that this spate of nor'easters is being juiced by inordinately warm ocean temperatures along the East Coast, one of the key ingredients in the recipe for a bomb cyclone. Less intuitive, though, is the increasingly clear role being played by the rapidly warming and melting Arctic. A growing pile of studies suggests that heat waves in the far north are slowing the west winds of the jet stream, allowing the normally bottled-up frigid air to plunge southward in giant lobes.

For much of this winter, one of those cold lobes has been parked over the eastern United States  another key ingredient for coastal snowstorms. The bigger the lobe, the longer it tends to stick around, setting the stage for the parade of storms we've seen not only this month but during five of the last six winters as well. A study some colleagues and I published last week found that severe winters in the eastern United States were much more likely during Arctic heat waves  and this winter, the Arctic was particularly hot.

The western United States doesn't get off the hook, either. While the East shivers and shovels under the influence of the cold lobe, the West sits under a "ridge," a northward swing of the jet stream. Big ridges and deep lobes are two sides of a coin. The western ridge brought a record warm winter to Alaska and perpetuated California's drought, a pattern that only recently gave way to torrential rain. Research suggests that when we see low amounts of sea ice and warmth in the Bering Sea, as we have this winter, the northward loop strengthens along the West Coast. Strong ridges tend to hang around longer, earning this one the moniker "Ridiculously Resilient Ridge."

Not every winter will behave this way, though, as many factors influence the jet stream and our weather. While the globe warms overall  melting ice and snow at both poles  a few areas buck that trend with winter cooling. Eastern North America is one of those places. What does the future hold? Extreme weather of all sorts is a near certainty, except that fewer cold records will be broken. More "stuck" weather patterns are likely, punctuated with dramatic flips from one extreme to another. Remember the February heat wave when Bostonians flocked to the beaches? These "weather whiplash" events are also more likely.

Of course, nor'easters and western drought happened long before humans started messing with the planet, but it's becoming abundantly clear that the dice are now loaded for more extreme weather of all sorts. If we continue to burn fossil fuels, cut down forests, waste food and destroy natural systems, the problems facing our children will be even bigger than they already are. Stronger nor'easters, coastal flooding, more acidic oceans: These are symptoms of a disease that is still in our power to treat, but only if we administer strong medicine and soon.

Jennifer Francis is a research professor in the department of marine and coastal sciences at Rutgers University.Philly continues robbing its poor blind because it fears no existential political threat from them. As long as voter turnout remains low in the poorest sections of the city, both Mayor and City Council can raise taxes all they want for as long as they want. Read more

It is becoming increasingly clear that Philadelphia will see another property-tax increase in the near future.

The tax increase, obviously, won't be Mayor Kenney's original proposal for a 6 percent bump. He's already taken care of that with the newly released (and peculiarly timed) citywide reassessment showing Philly property values soaring by 11 percent. So, now, in a bid designed to mute growing criticism of a rate increase, hizzoner revises his 5-year plan to include a 4.1 percent increase instead.

So, make no mistake, the Mayor will get his tax bump.

Let's put this into perspective.

According to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, median household income has been steadily rising in Philadelphia, but so has the Consumer Price Index (the cost of things) since 2008.

Median household income in Philadelphia, according to the Census Bureau, is just below $40,000 and average income per person is hovering around $24,000.

Yet, when you look at the Economic Policy Institute's interactive Family Budget Calculator, the cost of living in the city presents a grim picture for those least able to afford it.

For one adult, the average monthly cost of living is near $2,800, or more than $33,000 annually (cruel pocketbook calisthenics when per capita income is just $24,000). Add a child, and the cost of living soars to more than $4,700 a month  or $57,000 a year. Watch the average monthly taxes go from $460 to nearly $700. Add another child and it's nearly $75,000 a year in average living costs; two adults and two children, it's about $85,000, including nearly $1,000 a month in taxes alone.

That's stressful. Imagine putting more taxes on top of that, particularly the burden on low-income families barely making ends meet as it is.

Already throughout Pennsylvania, those making less than $20,000 are paying a much greater share in taxes (at 12 percent) than those making more than $426,000 (at just 4.2 percent), according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.

City officials' proposing to drive up property taxes as a way to finance new city largesse  such as the reconstituted public school system  seems calculated to drive out less desirable low-income populations. There's a hint of classism in this move: "Who wants to deal with them?" Meanwhile, with the property-tax abatement, they leave out lower-income residents in favor of newer (whiter) residents and businesses.

Chicago's Cook County was recently outed for a similar move, where it was found by a University of Chicago study that $2.2 billion in property assessments were shifted from wealthy homeowners to lower-income homes.

Philadelphia, like its Midwest cousin, continues robbing its poor residents blind because it fears no existential political threat from them. As long as voter turnout remains low in the poorest sections of the city, both the mayor and City Council can raise taxes all they want for as long as they want.

Continuing to raise taxes is the exact opposite of helping anyone, least of all Philadelphia's children. As the Pew Charitable Trust shows, 32 percent of households below the poverty line include children, with youths under 18 accounting for 32 percent of the impoverished population.

The big, unanswered question remains: How does a property-tax increase help that situation?

It doesn't.

Is the objective of the mayor and the city schools to just find a way to fund the schools? Or is it really about making sure the students who attend those schools achieve the highest quality of education possible? It must be the former, because further taxation completely defeats the latter.

Instead, reversing the tax increase, at least in Philadelphia's poorest neighborhoods, would be the more logical step.

In the wake of Baltimore's 2015 unrest, Slate.com's Reihan Salam argued that Baltimore's poorest communities could use a property-tax decrease, suggesting rising taxes were one factor keeping residents poor. He cites Loyola economist Stephen J.K. Waters' look at Boston in the early 20th century, in which Mayor James Michael Curley imposed higher taxes on city residents as a way to "finance" loyal city government employees who bolstered his political base, all while driving resentful political competition into the suburbs.

Decreasing taxes would not only place less stress on households, but you mitigate poverty variables that impose unnecessary stressors on students. Even Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development economists agree that heavy taxation only promotes poverty as opposed to breaking it: "The effects of taxation on income distribution need to be seen in the context of the trade-offs between growth and equity."

The mayor's proposed property-tax increase, and any Council support for even a modest compromise, is counterintuitive and actually destroys their famous public reasoning. Until city policymakers figure out a way to aggressively or totally break Philadelphia's entrenched poverty, we shouldn't be reading the words increased property taxes on any City Hall lips. And if that's how it's being played, then the best solution for all impacted folks is to mark November 2019 on their calendars and exact a proportional amount of electoral revenge.

Charles D. Ellison is executive producer and host of the daily public affairs program "Reality Check" onWURD radio. He is also the Washington correspondent for the Philadelphia Tribune and contributing politics editor to TheRoot.com. This piece originally appeared at The Philadelphia Citizen. @ellisonreportCHEYENNE  The Cheyenne Urban Forestry Division, along with local arborists, are observing an uptick in the number of dead and dying spruce trees in Cheyenne as a result of the spruce ips beetle. This beetle was first identified in Cheyenne about a year and a half ago, and appears to be building in population. The ips beetle infests only spruce tree varieties, such as Colorado Blue Spruce, Black Hills Spruce and Engelmann Spruce. Other evergreens, such as pines, junipers and firs are not affected.

Homeowners should be on the lookout for the tell-tale signs and symptoms of a beetle attack, which include red needles or loss of needles in the top of the tree; small round holes in the branches and trunk; and tunneling galleries beneath the bark. Once ips beetles are detected, damage to the tree is usually too extensive to warrant efforts to save the tree. Instead, tree removal is generally the best option. After removal, care must be taken to prevent the spread of beetles from the infested wood to living trees. Infested spruce wood with ips beetle larvae have the potential to infest live trees in the spring. To help prevent this, all infested wood should be chipped, debarked, burned over the winter, or hauled to a remote location that is at least one mile from any living spruce trees or hauled to the City Compost Facility (trunk sections larger than 12 inches in diameter are not accepted).

Homeowners with spruce trees, especially older or stressed trees, may consider hiring an arborist to spray a preventative insecticide to the trunk and larger branches to prevent ips infestations. Ensure the arborist has the proper equipment to apply the insecticide to the very top of the tree. Two insecticide treatments, one in early spring and one in mid-summer, are generally recommended since ips beetles have multiple generations per year. Trunk injections may be considered, although research to support their effectiveness is still in ongoing.

To maintain healthy trees and ward off the ips beetle, homeowners can:

1. Slowly water the area from the trunk out to the end of the branches once per month during the winter.

2. Mulch around the base of trees with wood chips or bark to a depth of 2 inches (especially important for young trees).

3. Slowly water the area from the trunk out to the end of the branches every 7-10 days during the summer and fall at a rate of 10 gallons per inch of stem diameter.

4. Hold off on pruning any branches until winter.

Additional information:

Spruce Ips Beetle Continues Destruction in Cheyenne

 Spruce ips beetle prefers weakened or unhealthy trees and typically attacks the tops of trees and the branches first before moving into the main stem. Unlike mountain pine beetle which will attack and kill a tree in the same year, ips beetle usually takes multiple years to kill a tree.

 The increase in ips beetle is likely the result of the high number of declining spruce trees that are present in Cheyenne. This decline is the result of recent drought, the November 2014 hard freeze and multiple hail storms over the past several years. This combined with an ageing population of spruce has resulted in a tree population that is susceptible to beetle attack. Also, newly planted spruce trees and spruce that have incurred recent damage to the roots, stem or branches are more susceptible to attack.

 Typically, an ips beetle attack occurs first in the upper portions of the tree which results in the needles turning red. Small round holes in the bark, boring dust in bark crevices or around the base of the tree and tunneling galleries beneath the bark indicate the presence of ips beetle. Woodpecker activity in the tree can also indicate a beetle infestation. If any of these conditions exist, an arborist should be contacted to confirm the presence of ips beetle.

 Insecticides which contain the active ingredient permethrin, bifenthrin, or carbaryl have proven effective. Trunk injections may be considered, although research to support their effectiveness is still in progress.

Told by Mike Heath

Alan Chubak now lives Murray, Utah, but not always. While I was at the Wyoming Bee College Saturday morning (working on another article) I was attracted to some unusual bee boxes at a vendor's table. What made them so unusual was the intricate carving all around the boxes. They were so uncommon that I was willing to wait until the vendor returned to his booth. He was teaching a class for the Bee College and was due to return shortly before lunch.

I finally found Albert looking at wares from another vendor pretty intently. When I approached him about his booth he simply told me to wait. He was looking at a beekeepers' suit and asked the vendor if it was Ukrainian. He said that he was Ukrainian and that was the beginning of a fascinating story.

Albert Chubak immigrated to Canada with his grandfather when he was a child and eventually became a carpenter. He took a part-time job as a teenager helping a beekeeper in Saskatoon, Saskachewan, Canada making a whopping $35 an hour. Eventually, he immigrated again. This time to Murray, Utah found a home that he wanted to purchase. Albert admitted that he had really low balled the price, so he wasn't surprised when his offer was rejected. After the rejection, he remembered seeing some beehives behind the house. Using advice from his grandfather, "if you don't ask you don't get," Albert asked the owner if she would be willing to sell them. She told him to make an offer, so he offered $50. SOLD! When he came back to pick them up he expected to be loading empty hives. Instead, he loaded hives, bees and over 100 pounds of honey. That was a major addition to his beekeeping passion. Albert was a general contractor in the Salt Lake City area until the construction market went under in 2008. Shaken, like so many of us were, he didn't stay down for long. Using his knowledge of bees and construction, he started a bee removal business. He said that it took him about four hours to remove a colony of bees from a home when he first started, but as time went on he got the time down to about one hour, including repairs.

During this time, his grandfather passed away in Canada and he traveled back for the funeral. As he was visiting with family, he was astonished to learn that his family's business in Ukraine was beekeeping. Albert had no knowledge of that part of the family history. It turned out that his family had been keeping bees in Ukraine for hundreds of years.

Since then Albert has started three companies, Utah Bee Removal, Wasatch Honey and Eco Bee Box, which makes bee boxes, and he is a recognized authority on bees. The boxes that had caught my attention were his boxes for urban beekeepers. Each of his boxes features a carving of something related to bees. He has a dream of someday building a bee box with carving all around depicting the history of beekeeping in America then putting it in the National Apiary in Washington, D.C. I guess beekeeping really is in the blood.CHEYENNE, WY  Secretary of State Ed Buchanan and his office are applauding the passage into law of Senate File 60 "Wyoming Women's Suffrage Pathway-highway designation." The bill codifies the renaming of a portion of Highway 28 near South Pass City the "Wyoming Women's Suffrage Pathway" in honor of women's suffrage.

"The passage of this bill and its signing by Governor Mead will do a great deal to highlight a shining period in Wyoming's history nearly 150 years ago when the Territory of Wyoming became the first government in the world to advanceWomen's Suffrage. Wyoming holds the honor of being the first state to grant women the right to vote and to hold office, and that remarkable achievement would not have been possible without two residents of South Pass City - the first woman Justice of the Peace, Esther Hobart Morris, and the President of the Wyoming Territorial Legislature, William H. Bright," said Secretary of State Buchanan. "I congratulate Senator Tara Nethercott on successfully shepherding this piece of legislation through the legislative session, and I want to thank several of my staff who, as members of the Governor's Council for the Wyoming Women's Suffrage Celebration, worked hard from the get-go to make this designation possible."

The renaming of a 19 mile portion of State Highway 28 from the Fremont County line northeast to the boundary of the Shoshone National Forest the "Wyoming Women's Suffrage Pathway" coincides with the 150th Wyoming Women's Suffrage Celebration, which commemorates the Wyoming Territorial Legislation of 1869 "an act to grant to the women of Wyoming Territory the suffrage, and to hold office."

The Transportation Commission of Wyoming unanimously approved the highway designation and issued a resolution in support of its naming.

The Secretary of State's Office looks forward to celebrating the official dedication of the "Wyoming Women's Suffrage Pathway" in Fremont County later this year.As I write this, the fifth annual Wyoming Bee College is "in the can". What a success! There were 275 attendees this year from all over the west. The event started with the Bee University on Friday. The highlight of the Bee University were the classes on Apitherapy, the art and science of using bee stings and bee venom as medical therapy. Scott and Kelsey Johnson from Newcastle are second year beekeepers and found the curriculum to be not only informative, but exciting. Like so many, they started keeping bees before they really knew what they were doing then decided to improve their knowledge and their chances of keeping the bees alive and producing.

The Bee College is not only a place to meet people and make new friends, but to see old friends and acquaintances as well. Robert Roberts hails from Rapid City, SD and met up with old friends Scott and Kelsey Johnson. They had known each other years past when Roberts lived in Newcastle. All of the friends were amazed at the hospitality they found in Cheyenne and especially among the staff at LCCC. According to Roberts, the cafeteria staff catered to every need and the food was excellent.

It's hard to pick out a single highlight of the conference. There were so many interesting classes. One of the more interesting topics, for me, was how to use the swarm behavior to increase the numbers of bees and hives and beekeeper has. Daren Bulow of Casper showed me pictures of collecting bees from a swarm to increase his hives. Bees are very mellow when they swarm and he brushed the bees off the bush they were on and into a box. Of course, some fell to the ground. He scooped them up with his bare hands and put them in the box. For those that remained he bent stalks of grass so they lay against the box. He said the remaining bees just marched up the stalks and into the box as if they were going home at the end of a hard day at work. Amazing. Daren and his wife, Christine, were excited about meeting "a woman who knows everything about every flower there is for bees". He was speaking of Ronda Koski who spoke about specific flowers to grow in this area to keep bees healthy and productive. When asked what the best part of the conference was for her, Christine said, "being around all these other people with the same passion as us."

Daren and Christine were excited about the conference and I ended up learning a lot from him during the interview. One of the most exciting things he had learned was about the "undertaker" bees. They make sure the hive stays clean by taking dead bees out of the hive and dumping them outside. Their role helps reduce the chance of disease in the hive.

Not only were there classes on beekeeping, making mead, bee diseases and such, but many of the speakers were also vendors or had informative displays set up to continue the learning process outside of the classroom.

The aromas of the beeswax were almost heady. There were tables set up for sampling honey from different flowers and from different parts of the country. Beeswax candles and honey candies were abundant.

The Southeast Wyoming Bee Association had a living hive to show attendees how the bees acted inside the hive. It was like a very large version of the old "Ant Farm" that was so popular when I was young. Attendees could watch the bees and their behavior as they built the honeycomb in the lower section.

The American Honey Princess, Jenny Gross from Sheboygen, WI was in attendance to represent the American Beekeeping Federation. Their annual conference usually brings in 1200-1500 attendees from all over the country.

After all was said and done, Catherine Wissner, our Laramie County Horticulturalist, held another outstanding conference. I can't wait until next year so we can do it all over again.A 90-foot mural depicting major landmarks and monuments will be added to Veterans Plaza in Pine Bluffs next month.

American The Beautiful was designed for the north wall of the Pine Bluffs Veterans Memorial and Community Plaza.

It will depict landmarks from New York to Hawaii said Pine Bluffs resident Larry Silvey, who designed the mural.

The Veterans Memorial and Community Plaza was constructed and dedicated in 2016. It was designed to increase traffic in downtown Pine Bluffs.

Visibility Sign Company of Salt Lake City, Utah will install the mural May 29 weather permitting.

Silvey said the temperature must be 60 degrees or more for workers to properly install the mural.

Plans are in the works for a formal dedication ceremony. Silvey said he hopes to have a number of dignitaries from throughout Wyoming attend the event.

Steve Kravitsky, Wyoming Veterans Commission Director, will act as the master of ceremonies.

A date for the dedication has not been formally announced.Pine Bluffs Town Council members Monday night awarded a bid to a Cheyenne Wyoming contractor to install a parking lot a driveway and parking lot at the Windows on the Past Interpretive center.

STC construction will pour 480 square yards of asphalt at the facility for about $109,000.

Pine Bluffs Town Treasurer Kim Patterson said the town elected to use asphalt instead of concrete because it's much cheaper and the intepretive center receives little traffic.

"Concrete would have put us over-budget for the project," Patterson said.

The town had $150,000 budgeted for the project. In addition to the parking lot and driveway, the town has made landscaping improvements in the area.

Other projects include potentially relocating the retaining wall, but town officials are working under the assumption that won't be necessary.

Pine Bluffs Methodist Church is looking to sell a residential building on its property, but church officials are facing potential snags.

Because the residence is located on the same lot as the church, the sale is currently not possible under current planning and zoning regulations. Church officials have been working with the town to grant a variance, or exception to the rules, but Laramie County must also approve the deal.

Pine Bluffs Town Attorney Alex Davison suggested re-platting, or redividing, the land.

Currently the property, located at 600 Main Street, is divided into four lots, which the residence shares with the church's parking lot, which occupies multiple lots.

"You've already done all of this work," Davison said. It can't be a big deal to re-platt."

Once the property is re-platted, the town would have the ability to grant the variance.

"It doesn't make sense to say, 'You can't do it,'" Davison said.Professor Alexis Wright (L) and Professor Gregory McCarthy (R) from Australia are appointed as visiting professors of Inner Mongolia Normal University (IMNU) on March 19. [Photo/imnu.edu.cn]

Australian professors Alexis Wright and Gregory McCarthy were appointed as visiting professors of Inner Mongolia Normal University (IMNU) on March 19.

Alexis Wright is one of Australia's most prominent novelists best known for winning the Miles Franklin Award in 2007 for her novel Carpentaria. In 2014, her novel The Swan Book was nominated for a Stella Award.

Wright is now also a professor at the University of Melbourne.

Gregory McCarthy is a professor of political science at the University of Western Australia. He also teaches at Peking University. He has made regular appearances on CCTV, including in a debate broadcast by CCTV and SKY TV Australia on Australia-China relations.

The two academics delivered speeches after the appointment ceremony.

Officials from the Australian Embassy in Beijing and Li Yao, a visiting professor of IMNU also attended the event.

The event was part of Australian Writers Week, an annual literary festival organized by the Australian Embassy. It was aimed at enhancing exchanges and cooperation with scholars and institutes of Australia.

IMNU has strove to develop Australian studies over the past several years.

In 2015, it established the Australian Studies Center. The center was recognized by the Ministry of Education in 2017. It has focused on research on Australia since its establishment and has built long-term partnerships with universities in the country.

Australian Studies is also an important part of the work undertaken by the School of Foreign Languages at IMNU.Must-Read Travel Guides

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If you wish to contact me for questions, advertising, collaboration inquiries, comments, suggestions, reviews or just about anything, please send an email to. I will try my best to reply quickly! Unless, of course, I'm on a trip! :D All rights reserved. All photos and content in this blog are owned by(unless otherwise stated). Parts of the articles may be excerpted (a link to this site should be provided), but not reproduced as a whole. Photos may not be used without permission. Thank you very much!Unless otherwise stated, I personally write my blog posts and it expresses my own thoughts and opinions. I pay for all the expenses of my trips (unless otherwise stated). I welcome collaborations, advertorials and reviews as long as they are beneficial to my readers. All reviews on collaborations contain my own views and opinion and were not influenced by anyone. For inquiries, you may contact me here . Thank you very much!Then Morgan Cable gave a talk about Molecular Minerals on Titan. Titan is a place where the atmosphere creates large quantities of small organic molecules like ethane, acetylene, propane, and so on. These fall out onto the surface with methane and ethane rain, and some of them accumulate in lakes. Around the edges of lakes scientists have observed bathtub rings, bright-colored haloes around the lakes. We dont know for sure but its possible that these are made of materials deposited as lakes evaporate, leaving behind evaporite deposits, like salts form around evaporating lakes on Earth. The materials that form evaporites will be the least soluble materials. In a Titan lake, Cable said, the first thing youd expect to fall out of solution would be benzene. But it wouldnt just be benzene; when benzene forms crystals, it readily incorporates ethane into its crystal structure, forming a co-crystal. If its a crystal and it forms solid deposits, what youve got is a mineral  and the beginning of the science of Titan petrology. Cable said they looked around for other small molecules and found that acetylene readily forms lots of different co-crystals, notably with ammonia. They formed their co-crystals in the lab and tried wetting them (raining on it) with a mix of methane and ethane, and the solids stayed  suggesting theyd persist as solid deposits on Titan. One unusual thing about these minerals is that when they warm, they experience a lot of thermal expansion. So if you formed this material on Titans surface, and then buried it (either by subduction or just by covering it with other stuff), it could expand as it warmed with depth, causing stresses that might produce physical evidence on the surface. [Abstract #2717]

If you like Titan petrology, how about Titan seismology? Mark Pannings talk was about that, motivated by the Dragonfly mission concept and its plans for a seismic instrument. Seismic data (recordings of ground motion caused by earthquake waves) can tell scientists about the internal structure of a world regardless of what its made of. Titan would have regular icequakes caused by the flexing of its crust due to tides with every Saturn orbit. When kids are taught about seismology, they learn about P and S and surface waves, and Titan would have all of those. But because it has an ice shell over a liquid ocean, there would also be some other interesting kinds of lower-frequency waves moving through the ice shell. For example, theres a flexural wave, in which the whole ice shell bends back and forth slowly. There are Crary waves, which are waves trapped within the ice shell whose frequency is sensitive to the thickness of the ice shell. Panning used Apollo seismic data for the Moon (which also has quakes caused mostly by tidal forces) to make some predictions about how common quakes of different sizes would be on Titan. Then he asked questions like: how sensitive does the seismic instrument need to be to detect several quakes over the course of the mission? (The answer: medium-sensitive compared to off-the-shelf Earth seismometers.) How bad is atmospheric noise? (The answer: wind will be pretty noisy, but the bigger events should still be detectable.) Would waves on lakes cause noise? (The answer: they can, but if the instrument is close to the equator, it wont be an issue.) And: is there any spot on Titan thats more likely than anywhere else to have large quakes? (The answer: theyre expected to be fairly uniformly distributed, except that the sub-Saturn and anti-Saturn points have less quakes than everywhere else, so aiming near the leading or trailing points would be best for seismic studies.) [Abstract #1662]

There were a lot more cool talks on Titan landscape features: dissected domes! New impact craters! Ridges around lakes! --and if you're dying to read more, check out the session abstracts.Niccolo Ceria climbs one of Italy's most beautiful boulder problems at Pietra del Toro

22.03.2018 by by Planetmountain

At Pietra del Toro in Basilicata Niccolo Ceria has made the first ascent of Goemon, describing the line as one of the most beautiful boulder problems in Italy.

"One of the most beautiful boulder problems in Italy." This is how Niccolo Ceria, one of the worlds leading boulderers described a problem he freed not at Fontainebleau, nor at Cresciano or Chironico, nor Buttermilks or Rocklands but at Pietra del Toro, way down in Basilicata in Southern Italy.

Two years ago the climber from Biella had travelled to Campomaggiore, following in the the footsteps of Michele Caminati and Mauro Calibani. It was during that trip that he freed the fantastic Geometrie non Euclidee and unearthed a series of different problems, but time ran out and he had to return home with the boulders left unclimbed. One of these was "an amazing arete, tall, beautiful, right at the top of the hill." The "Grampians-style" approach led through lush vegetation to an opening and this magnificent highball marked by "grey rock, compact, simply perfect"

Ceria and his friend Marco Giorgio patiently brushed the problem, removing the moss only where absolutely necessary. And then, not without difficulties, he tried the upper section on toprope. While the lower moves "to the characteristic smile arent difficult, just technical", the crux lies in store right at the top. A small right hand micro-crimp paves the way for a jump to the top, at that point "youre high up. The photos dont do it justice. The boulder is 8, 9 meters high and the crash pads below are there to cover the rocks that jut out from the ground. Its scary and the dyno up there is hard."

Ceria freed the line the other day. "The entire process was amazing, from when I discovered it two years ago all the way to the send, now. Im not sure what grade to give it but its top notch quality stuff. On a par here in Italy with Passo Mambo freed by Mauro Calibani at Meschia, or Trojan Horse put up by Gabriele Moroni in Valle dAosta. Its certainly one of the most beautiful problems Ive ever climbed, not only here, but worldwide."



TOPO: Pietra del Toro, Basilicata



Info: Instagram Niccolo Ceria & FB Niccolo Ceria

Share TweetThe Massachusetts Chiefs of Police Association is slamming proposed legislation it says would limit the ability to give full background checks to recruits.

The law would prohibit department heads from scouring personal social media accounts. The group wants to be able to dig through social media profiles to help screen candidates and protect the public from those who could tarnish the badge.

The bill, sponsored by state Sen. Cynthia Stone Creem of Newton, would block employers and educational institutions from requesting or forcing a student or employee to give access to their social media accounts. The bill passed in a 36-0 vote in the Senate on March 15.

The MCOPA said the bill handcuffs local chiefs and makes them unable to review a candidates social media for red flags like racist or homophobic posts, the Boston Herald reports.Deputy David Lee'Sean Manning was killed in a March 11 crash. (Photo: Edgecombe County Sheriff's Office/Facebook)

Four people have been arrested in connection with the death of an Edgecombe County (NC) Sheriff's deputy who was killed in a traffic collision on March 11.

Deputy David Manning lost control of his vehicle and crashed head-on into traffic as he attempted to pull over an intoxicated driver.

The North Carolina State Highway Patrol asked for the Alcohol Law Enforcements help in the investigation into the fatal crash.

That investigation revealed Richard Howard Walters, 33, of Pinetops, spent six hours drinking at a Tarboro bar on the day of the accident. He crashed his vehicle .02 miles from where Manning crashed.

We obtained evidence that Walters purchased and consumed the equivalent of 16 malt beverages before driving away from Melanies Place, said Eric Swain, special agent in charge of ALEs Greenville district. Even though Walters was in an intoxicated state, he was served malt beverages until the bar closed.

Walters was arrested and charged with possession of marijuana, possession of drug paraphernalia, and driving while impaired, WNCT reports.

Two employees of the bar face charges ranging from obstruction of justice to serving an intoxicated person. Another person faces marijuana charges.Chinese solar power may brighten future for Europe

The European Unions scientific research centre has explored the idea of linking the power grids of Europe and China, in order to tap into the immense clean energy potential of the Middle Kingdom and the countries of Central Asia. The transcontinental electricity link would be monumental, stretching anything from 5,000 to 8,000 kilometres. Another objective of the projected with an estimated cost of EUR 15-28 billion is to lower Europes energy dependence on Russia. The study draws up three potential routes, two of which would include Hungary, as well.

Three proposed routes for the electricity link, with areas of renewable energy potential in shaded colours. Click on map to enhance. Source EU Joint Research Centre.

The north route is the shortest one and crosses the lowest number of countries. It is entirely on land and has no major natural barriers. It crosses parts of Russia and eastern Ukraine.

is the shortest one and crosses the lowest number of countries. It is entirely on land and has no major natural barriers. It crosses parts of Russia and eastern Ukraine. The middle route is longer than the previous one and crosses a larger number of countries but with richer potential of RES. It also involves crossing two sea bodies.

is longer than the previous one and crosses a larger number of countries but with richer potential of RES. It also involves crossing two sea bodies. The third route, the southern one, is the longest and crosses the larger number of states. It is entirely on land and crosses several rougher natural environments like mountains, high plateaus and deserts, as well as few conflict areas.

An in-depth study by the EUs Joint Research Centre (JRC) into a transcontinental electricity link has mapped three potential routes, in a hypothetical scenario that tries to balance maximum renewable energy exploitation with avoiding conflict zones and harsh terrain, Euractiv.com reported.China has launched in 2016 the idea of transmitting electricity as far as Germany via an ultra-high-voltage direct current (UHVDC) link. This purpose falls under a more comprehensive initiative called Belt and Road Initiative", which has the ambition to export industrial overcapacity and engineering expertise as it faces slowing growth at home.But it is the JRC that has delved into the detail of the project. Its comprehensive study reveals that the link could cost anything between EUR 15-16 billion (shortest route) and EUR 23-28 billion (longer routes) depending on the chosen route, how many countries are crossed and if pricey underwater cables are needed. Even cheaper overhead cables come in at roughly EUR 2 million per kilometre.Although the idea is currently consigned to the back pages of the report, it raises legitimate questions about how to connect regions rich in clean energy potential to areas of the world that sorely need to cut their reliance on fossil fuels and still meet high energy demands," Euractiv said.Central Asia is a realm with rich potential in renewable energy sources (RES), mainly wind and solar (but also hydro) which can yield large quantities of clean" electricity. These are all viable options in many of the countries of Central Asia and thanks to relatively sparse populations, investment in capacity and infrastructure could make the region an energy exporter and go some way to meeting commitments made in the Paris Agreement, the report says.China intends to exploit its RES from north-eastern regions both for domestic use and for export. The country has the capabilities to project and build long and powerful systems to transmit electricity across the country for thousands of kilometres, it added.The Mission of China to the EU told Euractiv that all research work and other kinds of efforts initiated by the European side with the purpose of exploring potential cooperation areas" was welcome.China continues to build renewable energy capacity in quantities that far outstrip Europe. The Three Gorges Dam across the Yangtze River is still the largest hydroelectric power station in the world and its solar capacity topped 100GW last year, smashing a 2020 target three years early.Due to the fact the transmission network would cross several time zones regardless of what route would be picked, the JRCs experts pointed out that it would increase the flexibility of the systems connected to the linkages as peak loads vary depending on local habits and time.A long longitudinal-developed power interconnection spread over many time zones could take advantage of the different behavioural rhythms of the population in the meantime optimizing the use of electricity. It would also ease the use of the variable renewables like wind which otherwise would be curtailed when the load or the grid could not take them," the report said. There is a difference of more than 7 hours between Europe CET and China.Given Chinas track record of building massive infrastructure projects, the JRCs study assumes that Beijing would be capable of constructing a transmission link that could stretch anything from 5,000 to 8,000 km, the JRC study shows.Plans are already in motion to connect the northwest of the country with the energy-intensive industrial hubs of the east and urban areas of the south.The JRCs first scenario maps the shortest link, which would start in Chinas renewables-rich northwest, before crossing Kazakhstan, Russia and Ukraine. The study cites existing infrastructure that could be upgraded, relatively flat terrain and proximity to Mongolias abundant wind energy as big positives.According to the study, theis that it can be built as OHL (overhead line) along the entire track, besides the fact that it is the shortest of the three (cc. 5,600 km). This reduces the number of constructive solutions to be used as well as the number of the converter stations."come from traversing of Russia and Ukraine, especially of the eastern part of the latter, presently under military conflicts.

Russia could be uninterested to host on its territory such an infrastructure that competes with its gas transmission network. On the other hand, the line would traverse the country on a short distance, not long enough to capture much of the RES potential (which is not particularly high), or to cover the consumption, given the fact that the crossed region is already well supplied with power from domestic sources through a well-developed infrastructure.

Crossing Ukraine would be advantageous as it shortens the route but drawing its course through eastern Ukraine complicates a lot, at least for the moment and for the foreseeable future, finding a safe solution for the line construction and operation. Diverging the route to avoid the conflict area would lengthen the track through Russia.

The JRCs experts warned that if the link were brought online, it could also be used as a political tool to build dependency if not regulated or managed correctly.

There are also doubts about whether Russia would be interested in granting essential permits given that it would reduce Europes need for imported gas, which Moscow continues to use as leverage against Europe, Euractiv noted.Thebypasses Russia and Ukraine by crossing the Caspian and Black seas. This route is longer that the previous one, measuring 6,500 km which requires a lager quantity of material used (conductors, poles) but also would experience higher losses which are proportional with the length of the line.Itsis given by the fact that it traverses more areas that could be exploited for clean energy. It also avoids Russia and the conflict areas in eastern Ukraine. However, the route crosses a larger number of countries which requires more consensuses for finding an optimal economic solution to satisfy all the individual requirements. This also implies a larger number of permits and regulations that must be met. The route also crosses two large sea basins where the transmission mode has to be changed from OHL to submarine cable. This route would go across Hungary in a South-East and North-West direction before reaching the Austrian border.The third route is quite different, in that it starts in southwest China and makes its way to Europe via Myanmar, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran and Turkey. It is the longest one out of the three considered with more than 8,600 km with at least 2,000 km longer than the central one and with almost 3,000 km more than the northern one.This route crosses the Asian continent through its southern expanse, avoiding the bulky mountainous mass and high plateaus in western China. It has several advantages which make it attractive but along the route there are a series of natural and societal limitations which can be surpassed with higher costs.Despite the significant challenges posed by the terrain the potential to tap into varied sources of clean energy are equally rewarding. The study acknowledges that existing infrastructure west of India is poor at best but suggests that the route would help incorporate those countries, previously thought of as marginal, into the energy transition and boost their economies.

In China the hydropower potential is huge and its exploitation has already begun. The northern mountainous area of Myanmar has a high unused hydropower potential and the same is true for the southern fringes of Himalaya Mountains in India, Nepal and Bhutan. Only in India it is partly exploited.

A couple of countries (China and India) have already a solid experience in designing and building HVDC systems, several of them being aligned along the route.

The high-density population with perspectives of economic improvement in future located along the eastern half of the route.

The route offers also a real chance for economic integration for regions considered until recently as marginal but which start to play an important strategic role in the equation of the regional RES resources: Myanmar, Afghanistan and Iran.

Current areas of conflict on the proposed routes. Click on map to enhance! Source: EU Joint Research Centre.

The main advantages are:The JRC ultimately did not pick a favoured option of the three but stressed that if the idea were ever to be seriously considered, the chosen route would have to maximise exposure to RES potential in order to justify its existence, take into account the trade benefits and strive to avoid conflict areas.Energy and climate expert Jrgen Knud Henningsen told Euractiv that the idea of a transcontinental cable was an interesting one but explained that linking markets together only makes sense if they are different to one another.Henningsen, who was senior EU negotiator during the Kyoto Protocol talks, said that both the EU and China will use whatever renewable energy they produce domestically for the foreseeable future, meaning such an expensive export mechanism does not make sense.Although acknowledging that China could export its clean energy if offered a high enough price in Europe, Henningsen pointed out that Beijing would continue to prioritise linking its renewable energy capacity with industries and cities or even neighbouring countries like Russia or India.SolarPower Europe, a trade association, said the study was fascinating", adding that the idea shows the wide-ranging possibilities for bringing about a clean energy world".But the trade association also insisted that the EU

must first develop our own internal energy market and make it fit for renewables

and that local power and community energy projects should be the top priority.Negotiators are currently locked in talks on the EUs renewable energy, energy efficiency and energy governance rules for the 2020-2030 period and will soon start hashing out a reform of the electricity market too.In the Renewable Energy Directive (RED) negotiations, the European Parliament is hoping to convince the Commission and member states that a 35% non-binding target for 2030 is the best way to boost renewable energys share of the energy mix.But the Council is still backing a 27% figure. The Parliament could potentially rely on the Commission to help fight its corner though as energy and climate Commissioners Maro efeovie and Miguel Arias Canete have indicated that at least 30% could be affordable, Euractiv said.The EU executive still officially backs a 27% benchmark, calculated prior to the signing of the Paris Agreement and finalised before the price of renewables began to significantly decrease, but EU sources claim the Commission will raise its level of ambition, backed up by a non-paper circulated in early March.

While the idea of electricity cables stretching from China, possibly through the Himalayas, under seas and across wind-swept steppes may seem far-fetched, there is a precedent for the EU investing in transcontinental links or, at the least, massive infrastructure.

Euractiv reminded that the Nord Stream 2 pipeline between Russia and Germany is steeped in political wrangling but its backers are still pressing on with securing permits and convincing national governments that it is the best solution to the EUs energy demands.The European Investment Bank (EIB) has also invested billions in the Southern Gas corridor, a massive network of pipelines that is meant to bring gas from the Caspian Sea to Europe. Last week, the EIB approved EUR 932 million of financing for the 1,850-km Trans-Anatolian Pipeline (TANAP) to bring natural gas from Azerbaijans Shah Deniz-2 gas field to Europe.Now that the EU is slowly prioritising electricity connections as the true way to complete its Energy Union and ensure security of supply, including financing an undersea cable between France and Ireland, the idea of linking up with China could eventually gain traction.

The challenges are immense and, as things stand, might outweigh the benefits. But in a changing world, it could become a reality if the renewable energy revolution keeps going from strength to strength."

Hungarys role

Conditions for the potential participation of Hungary in the project remain to be worked out, of course. Although the destination of all three routes is Germany, which makes it likely that the Europes strongest economy would also play a significant role in the distribution of electricity, such an investment would serve Hungarys interests too. Two of the possible routes drawn up in the study would go across Hungary, and as a transit country it would probably be part of the development. The additional energy arriving to an European electricity market undergoing integration would also help increase Hungarys security of supply. Hungary covers about 30% of its power consumption from import. Although the gigantic project is unlikely to help change this ratio for the better, the supply situation would definitely be improved via greater supply and the diversification of sources.European Commission Vice-President for Energy Union Maros Sefcovic has stressed the importance of developing renewable energy sources, linking it to Europe's excessive dependence on Russian gas.

"It is important to take all the necessary measures when we know today that about two thirds of the gas we consume in Europe is imported gas. We state that our own production is decreasing and that gas imports, as a consequence, will only increase in the coming years. And here comes the problem with Russian gas supplies. The share of Russian gas in the total non-EU imports is clearly the highest and currently is about 40%," he said in Brussels on Wednesday, March 21, at a meeting of the European Parliament's Committee on Industry, Research and Energy.

Sefcovic said that relations with Russia in the field of energy played a significant role in the EU's external energy ties, adding that great efforts are being made to ensure energy security aimed at reducing dependence.

At the same time, he stressed the need to remain realistic and pragmatic and maintain stable relations with third importing countries that play an important role in the European economy.

Sefcovic also spoke about the energy situation in Ukraine and gas transit.

"Ukraine is our close, strategic partner. It is a neighbor of the European Union, a partner in many sectors, including energy," he said.

He recalled the signing during the EU-Ukraine Summit in 2016 of a memorandum of understanding on energy, which outlines cooperation between the parties in this field. In early April this year, Sefcovic noted that a ministerial meeting on the energy situation in Ukraine would be organized.

"Our energy cooperation is aimed at modernizing the country's economy, because energy is the real cornerstone of the economic sector of this country," Sefcovic said, noting reform in the Ukrainian energy sector.

He also drew attention to the fact that Ukraine is an important country for the transit of Russian gas supplied to Europe. At the same time, he recalled the interruptions of Russian gas supplies to the EU in 2006 and 2009, which showed the vulnerability of the EU countries.

At the same time, he said: "We must admit that despite all the problems on the eastern border of Ukraine, this transit sector has functioned well in recent years."

Sefcovic added that gas transit is a source of income for Ukraine, especially important in the current state of its economy.

"There is no doubt that the tensions between the two countries, which in the recent past were prompted through the unlawful Russian occupation of the Crimean peninsula and the terrible conflict in eastern Ukraine, have an immediate impact on the energy situation in Ukraine, but also in Europe," he said.

In this regard, he referred to the Stockholm Arbitration ruling on the dispute between Naftogaz and Gazprom, pointing to the EU's concern over recent measures taken by the Russian side in response to the court verdict.Dawn Finnie remembers when she first started getting into beer. She was working at Applebees in Mankato while attending college. Back then, craft beer wasnt a thing. She and co-workers would try mystery bags of beer, which were mostly full of Schells .

"Once I started drinking the Maibock  and they used to have a Caramel Bock that was amazing  and all these amazing Schells beers, thats when I really started to like craft beer," she said.

Nowadays, Finnie is CEO of the soon-to-open Little Thistle Breweryin Rochester, an endeavor she will spearhead with her husband Steve.

Rochester is unique because women are at the helm of two of the four breweries currently open: Foragerand Grand Rounds. Little Thistle will have Dawn and Steve in charge, and a sixth brewery also has a woman as half of the leading duo.

Even though Rochester and Minnesota may feel ahead of the curve when it comes to the sexism problems that persist in many industries, including craft beer, Rochesters female homebrewers, taproom managers, and brewery owners have all faced situations men probably wouldnt.

"You always need to come with a little bit extra as a lady in the field, and thats fine; thats just the way it is," said Tessa Leung, owner of Grand Rounds. "Its nothing that I find unusual."

LTS Brewing Co.taproom manager Carissa Darcy has also been overlooked as a woman. "Any sexism Ive encountered has been from people I dont regularly work with," she says, "so they dont know me, they dont think women can be just as knowledgeable about the industry as men, and they dont realize what my potential is."

Rochesters scene is much different now for Master Brewer Ann Fahy-Gust then when she began working in the beer industry in 1978 with Coors. She lead a life of brewing, engineering, marketing, and more that took her around the world and landed her at Grand Rounds.

"When I first started, you can imagine  youre the only one," said Fahy-Gust. "It was hard, and you needed to know your stuff much more succinctly and do that extra mile."

Grand Rounds recently held a Pink Boots Societyevent (the society encourages women to pursue brewing endeavors) that brought in more than 60 women to partake in a brew day.

"Its our opportunity to make women feel comfortable," Leung said. "Its our job to be ambassadors, male or female."

Homebrewer Heather Walsh says that even though shes one of the only women to attend meetings for Rochesters RAZE (Rochester Area Zymurgy Enthusiasts)homebrewing club, its very rare that she feels out of place.

"If I walk into Northern Brewerin Saint Paul or Minneapolis, Im treated with great respect," Walsh said. "I speak the language."

Where she encounters the sexism is in small-town locations.

"I was at (a restaurant) and they had Lagunitas Brown Shugga on tap. And (the waiters) like, you do know theres no brown sugar in that? And Im like, I know, I understand," she said

Being a woman in Rochester or Minnesota isnt equal and it could be better  but its going in the right direction.

Finnie, who works at Mayo Clinic by day, said "I think the brewing industry has a long way to go compared to my day-to-day job, but I think there is enough strong, motivated women that are gradually making that shift."Kyiv Post owner sells newspaper for more than $3.5 mln

Kyiv Post newspaper owner Mohammed Zahoor has entered into a preliminary agreement with a Syrian businessman in Odesa to sell the publication for more than $3.5 million. The buyer is Adnan Kivan, a Syrian millionaire.

The sale is expected to be completed before April 1, 2018.

Kyiv Post employees cite Zahoor saying that Kivan will sell the newspaper "for much more" than $3.5 million, but could not give the price.

Zahoor said Kivan has already made a substantial prepayment installment.Trayon White is a member of the District of Columbias city council. He represents Ward 8, the poorest of the D.C.s jurisdictions. For years, it elected Marion Barry to the council.

Recently, White opined on Facebook that Jewish financiers control the climate. In his view, a mild snowfall in the District was an instance of climate control by the Rothschilds who create natural disasters they can pay for to own the cities.

In addition, at a meeting of top D.C. officials, he claimed that the Rothschilds control the World Bank and the federal government:

Theres this whole concept with the Rothschilds  control the World Bank, as we all know  infusing dollars into major cities, said White, according to video footage that the city routinely releases after official meetings. They really pretty much control the federal government, and now they have this concept called resilient cities in which they are using their money and influence into local cities. He asked how much money the Rothschilds had invested in the University of the District of Columbia, whose president had just finished a presentation. How does this influence this? Because its really about infrastructure and climate control, White said. What does this have to do with UDC? Have they put money into UDC? Whats the relationship between the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers? No one in the room challenged his remarks. [Mayor] Bowser wore a puzzled look; City Administrator Rashad M. Young explained that the resilient cities initiative from the Rockefeller Foundation was about helping communities prepare for disasters.

After initially standing by his comments, White eventually apologized. He said he didnt realize his statements were anti-Semitic.

Neither Jewish groups nor environmentalists seem perturbed by Whites remarks. The executive director of the Chesapeake Climate Action Network said he has no reason to doubt the sincerity of Whites apology and looks forward to advancing his environmental agenda with Whites assistance.

In other words, he expects White to be a useful idiot.

As for Jewish organizations, the Washington Post reports they are ready to forgive the councilman. In a confession of its stupidity, Jews United for Justice, a left-wing outfit that endorsed White in 2016, said of him, this is not the guy we know. We want to work with him, its spokesperson added.

There was a time when Jewish organizations (no matter how liberal) and environmentalists would be embarrassed to work with an anti-Semite who thinks Jews create natural disasters for profit. But these days, almost nothing embarrasses the left, and the cluelessness of liberal American Jews defies belief.

As for the voters who sent this moron to the D.C. council, words fail me.The Star Tribune has in the past sought to compensate for walks on the wild side with columns by Katherine Kersten in ritual fashion. The ritual requires the publication of vituperative responses and incantatory letters to dispel the dread she induces among the members of Minnesotas lunatic left.

When the Star Tribune published Kathys Undisciplined this past Sunday, it followed up with two days of such responses. One could almost smell the odor of garlic repellent rising from the page.

On Monday  no time could be lost, this was an emergency  St. Paul public schools reading specialist Julia Hill and Institute for Democratic Education in America director Dana Bennis whipped out False claims and dog whistles (published in Tuesdays paper). Looking around online, I discover that Julia and Dana are a domestic team. Dana has taught in democratic, progressive, and conventional school settings and earned a Masters Degree in Education from Vermont College of Union Institute and University. Even aggregating their abilities, the two are in need of remedial assistance.

On Tuesday, Minnesota Commissioner of Education Brenda Cassellius pretended to refute Kersten in What Katherine Kersten cant grasp about schools but readers should (published in Wednesdays paper). Cassellius took advantage of the extra time to consult her thesaurus for adjectives expressing disapproval. She condemned Kersten with the obligatory curses culminating in flat-out racist.

A close reading of Casselliuss column nevertheless reveals her tacit agreement with the gravamen of Kerstens column. One might infer from her agreement with Kersten that Cassellius is herself a flat-out racist. Casselliuss column exposes a true scandal that has yet to be told. It is a scandal that this woman is Minnesota Commissioner of Education.

So far, the Star Tribune is following form. Today, however, the letters to the editor depart from the ritual. They support Kersten. First comes the letter from Mountain States Legal Foundation president William Perry Pendley to make a point of law:

Whatever Kerstens critics say, courts have their own opinion Setting aside state Education Commissioner Brenda Cassellius vicious ad hominem attacks on Katherine Kersten (What Kersten cant grasp about schools but readers should, counterpoint, March 21, in response to Undisciplined, March 18), she reports that a close look at the data would have made it abundantly clear that a number of Minnesota schools are suspending kids of color at far higher rates than their demographic proportion. Even if that is true, the question is whether it means anything. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit has held, for example, [D]isparity [in discipline rates] does not, by itself, constitute discrimination. Furthermore, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit has held that such demands for demographic proportionality constitute forbidden racial quotas: Racial disciplinary quotas violate equity in its root sense. That schools must have race-neutral school discipline policies is without question, but the presence of racial disparities does not mean the school, its leadership or its teachers are engaged in racism, and it certainly does not mean that federal or state bureaucrats may impose racial quotas for school discipline. Such quotas are not just foolish and even dangerous  as we learned recently in Florida; they are unconstitutional.

Patrick Doyle of Motley, Minnesota, notes the scandal Cassellius has inadvertently exposed:

Casselliuss counterpoint to Kerstens Undisciplined was hardly a fresh approach from the Minnesota Department of Education. Here are just a few of the talking points she used to describe Kerstens comments:  Divisive diatribes.  A new low.  Outrageous claims.  Misleading, reckless and  worst of all  flat-out racist.  Falsehoods.  Right-wing sources.  Fearmongering.  Racial resentments.  Divisive and hateful. Enough is enough! The Minnesota Department of Education and our children deserve better than Brenda Cassellius.

Beneath Doyles letter the Star Tribune appends this: Editors note: In a post this week on the website of the Center of the American Experiment, Katherine Kersten responded to two recent counterpoints to her March 18 commentary in the Star Tribune. See https://tinyurl.com/kerstenresponds. Kersten seems temporarily to have created something like a disturbance in the Force.Im less concerned that President Trump called Vladimir Putin and congratulated him on his election than I am about Trumps defense of that decision. If Trump was going to call Putin, I think it made sense to congratulate him. Otherwise, the call could be seen as a gratuitous insult.

Should he have made the call? I think the strong presumption should be against calling and congratulating an antagonist of America who has just won an unfair election and is in the middle of a high profile dispute with our closest ally over the poisoning on the allys soil of an ex-pat.

This doesnt mean Trump should never talk to Putin. But it does militate against calling him in this context, in which not congratulating him would have been an insult.

The call and the congrats are not a big deal in themselves. Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron apparently called Putin and wished him success. If anything, given what Putin is trying to accomplish, that seems worse to me than congratulating him.

In any case, what matters most is the Trump administrations policies toward Putins Russia. They have been pretty tough and certainly tougher than those of the Obama administration.

But what is Trumps strategy with Putin? Are his tough policies a bargaining tool through which he hopes to reach an accommodation with Putin and solve the worlds problems together? Are they a way of fending off allegations that he is in Putins pocket. Or do they reflect a commitment to blocking the ugly ambitions of an evil adversary?

Trumps tweets defending his call are not encouraging on this score. Trump began his defense by saying: Getting along with Russia (and others) is a good thing, not a bad thing. That depends on what is required to get along with Russia which, in turn, depends on Putins intentions.

Trump continued:

They can help solve problems with North Korea, Syria, Ukraine, ISIS, Iran and even the coming Arms Race. Bush tried to get along, but didnt have the smarts. Obama and Clinton tried, but didnt have the energy or chemistry (remember RESET).

So the answer to my question a few paragraphs ago is: Yes, Trump apparently believes he can reach an accommodation with Putin and solve the worlds problems together. This is the same naive misreading of Putin that Bush, for a while, and Obama-Clinton, for a longer while, indulged in.

Trump tries to preempt the charge that he hasnt learned from the mistakes of prior administrations by asserting that hes smarter and/or more energetic than Bush, Obama, and Hillary Clinton. Here, he displays an alarming mixture of naivety and runaway egoism.

Trumps predecessors didnt fail to make Putin a constructive partner due to their personality and character. They failed because of Putins personality and character. Hes an evil thug bent on restoring the glory (in his pathological view) of the Soviet Union.

Trump might just as well argue that FDR wasnt smart enough to solve Europes problems in tandem with Hitler or that Truman was too low-energy to work things out with Stalin.

Sixteen years, several invasions, and countless killings and maimings after George W. Bush looked into Putins soul and found him trustworthy, has Trump has peered in and found a peace partner? Thats how it looks.Przepraszamy!

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Inne oferty, ktore mogy byc w kregu Twoich zainteresowan:Poland and Hungary are in the EU, NATO and the Visegrad Group and share common views on many issues. Polish-Hungarian co-operation brings visible effects, President Andrzej Duda said on Friday in Budapest after talks with Hungarian state head Janos Ader.

President Andrzej Duda and First Lady Agata Kornhauser-Duda are on a two-day visit to Hungary in connection with Polish-Hungarian Friendship Day

"We share absolutely identical views on many issues, some others are still under debate. But most importantly, we participate in several dynamically growing formats, and the effects of this co-operation are visible," President Duda told a press conference attended with Ader.

Andrzej Duda pointed out that both countries belonged to the EU, NATO and the Visegrad Group, and observed that most of their joint undertakings on these platforms proved successful.

President Duda observed that a North-South gas corridor would be a valuable effect of co-operation under the Polish-Croatian Three Seas infrastructure development project embracing the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. He added that he and Ader had also discussed road connections on the North-South axis, including the construction of the Via Carpathia route, and plans for a fast rail connection between Poland and Hungary.

He also announced the signing of a founding act for a Polish-Hungarian Co-operation Institute in Poland and Hungary, and voiced hope that the new institution would help deepen Polish-Hungarian ties in science and culture.

President Ader stressed the importance of enabling diversified oil and gas supplies, and in this context emphasised the need for inter-connectors. He also praised Poland for building an LNG (Liquefied Natural Gas) terminal in its northwestern port city Swinoujscie, observing that this signified "an enormous step forward" in diversifying gas supplies.

In the evening, both Presidents participated in a ceremonial gala, during which the Polish-Hungarian Friendship-Day Flag was passed to the mayor of Kielce, south central Poland, where next year's celebrations will take place.



During the ceremony, Andrzej Duda reminded his audience that, two years ago, Poland marked the 1050th anniversary of the Baptism of Poland. "We celebrated this event with pride, speaking about the values that, thanks to Christianity, embedded themselves into the Polish soul - and today the Polish nation is a nation shaped on the basis of Christian culture and values," the President noted.



He pointed out that "in this respect we are also brothers with Hungary." "You are a nation that cultivates Christian traditions, for which they are important. Today, we, together, carry them to Europe, which in many cases has forgotten about them," said Andrzej Duda.



The Polish President also pointed out that Polish-Hungarian friendship was one thousand years old. "Today we live in independent homelands, in free states, we can travel all over Europe. Today, we do not need a passport to cross the border within the Schengen zone, today we live in different conditions," he continued.



As he added, "both of our countries and nations are striving for one thing: that the Europe in which we are, be safe, prosperous, and above all honest and just - creating good conditions for the development of our societies."Ukrainian Finance Minister Oleksandr Danyliuk denies arguments of authors of bill No. 8157 on the National Financial Security Bureau (NFSS) in favor of subordinating this agency to the Ukrainian president and parliament and insists on the creation of the Financial Intelligence Service (FIS).

"The authors of the bill on NFSS bring an argument, according to which the new agency must be beyond executive power to be equidistant and be able to investigate into abuses in ministries. This is very strange arguments, showing that they do not understand how the law enforcement system in Ukraine is built and functioning," the finance minister said in an interview with Interfax-Ukraine.

He also said that the abuse in power is qualified as corruption and the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) and the State Bureau of Investigations (SBI) depending on the criminal are authorized to investigate it.

"When they say that the new agency must investigate into abuse of power in executive power agencies they deliberately set a conflict with the NABU and SBI in order to weaken them or they are blindly looking for arguments to justify this illogical subordination," Danyliuk said.Gazprom on March 21 field a motion with the Svea Court of Appeal in Sweden for the partial cancellation of final ruling in arbitration with Ukraine's Naftogaz regarding gas supplies, the Russian gas giant said in a statement.

"Since the final ruling of the arbiters in this dispute was based on the same conclusions as the previous separate arbitration ruling, the motion was based on the fact that arbiters have exceeded their authority when issuing judgements, and on have committed serious procedural errors," Gazprom said.

Gazprom filed an appeal with the Svea Court of Appeal on November 7 last year against an interim ruling by the Arbitration Institute of the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce on a dispute with Naftogaz regarding gas supply and the partial cancelation of the ruling.2020 was a year marked by hardships and challenges, but the Prince William community has proven resilient. The Prince William Times is honored to serve as your community companion. To say thank you for your continued support, wed like to offer all our subscribers -- new or returning --

4 WEEKS FREE DIGITAL AND PRINT ACCESS.

We understand the importance of working to keep our community strong and connected. As we move forward together into 2021, it will take commitment, communication, creativity, and a strong connection with those who are most affected by the stories we cover.

We are dedicated to providing the reliable, local journalism you have come to expect. We are committed to serving you with renewed energy and growing resources. Let the Prince William Times be your community companion throughout 2021, and for many years to come.The report "Artificial Intelligence in Military Market by Offering (Software, Hardware, Services), Technology (Learning & Intelligence, Advanced Computing, AI Systems), Application (Information Processing, Cyber Security), Platform, Region - Global Forecast to 2025" , published by MarketsandMarkets, the market is estimated to be USD 6.26 Billion in 2017 and is projected to reach USD 18.82 Billion by 2025, at a CAGR of 14.75% from 2017 to 2025. Increasing investment towards the development of AI integrated systems and rising adoption of cloud-based applications are key factors projected to drive the growth of the artificial intelligence in military market.

(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160303/792302 )



Browse 67 market data Tables and 46 Figures spread through 149 Pages and in-depth TOC on "Artificial Intelligence in Military Market - Global Forecast to 2025"

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Based on platform, the land segment is projected to lead the artificial intelligence in military market.

Based on platform, the land segment is expected to lead the artificial intelligence in military market from 2017 to 2025. Militaries worldwide are focused on the integration of AI with land platforms. The incorporation of AI technology into unmanned ground vehicles assists in the successful execution of various ground operations, such as disabling Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) and other kinds of roadside bombs intended to cripple military patrols and convoys.

Based on offering, the software segment of the artificial intelligence in military market is expected to grow at the highest CAGR during the forecast period.

Based on offering, the artificial intelligence in military market has been segmented into hardware, software, and services. The software segment of the artificial intelligence in military market is projected to grow at the highest CAGR during the forecast period. The growth of the software segment can be attributed to the significance of AI software in strengthening the IT framework to prevent incidents of security breach.

Ask for PDF Brochure : https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/pdfdownload.asp?id=41793495

The US is projected to lead the artificial intelligence in military market during the forecast period.

Based on country, the US is estimated to account for the largest share of the artificial intelligence in military market in 2017. This growth can be attributed to the need for automated warfare systems, the involvement of the military in asymmetric warfare, and various modernization programs carried out by the US Armed Forces, which, in turn, has enabled major defense manufacturers in this country to develop techno-efficient AI systems for military operations.

Key players operating in the artificial intelligence in military market are Lockheed Martin (US), Raytheon (US), Northrop Grumman (US), IBM (US), Thales Group (France), General Dynamics (US), NVIDIA (US), and BAE Systems (UK).

Know more about the Artificial Intelligence In Military Market:

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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 5000 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, "RT" connects over 200,000 markets and entire value chains for deeper understanding of the unmet insights along with market sizing and forecasts of niche markets.

Contact:

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SOURCE MarketsandMarketsMUMBAI, March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

Unsold inventory decreased by 10% from 8.04 lakh units in Q4 2016 to 7.27 lakh units by Q4 2017

Fewer launches, subdued sales and muted property prices defined 2017 for the Indian residential real estate sector, according to a detailed report by ANAROCK Property Consultants.

(Logo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/657482/ANAROCK_Logo.jpg )



With an annual decline of almost 50% in new launches and 15% decline in sales across top seven cities in India, the sector was effectively shattered in 2017.

"A spate of policy reforms and structural changes literally crippled the sector," says Anuj Puri, Chairman - ANAROCK Property Consultants. "Simultaneously and consequentially, it transitioned rapidly into a transparent and buyer-friendly one. With only end-users left to drive the market and investors more or less evaporating completely, developers throttled back severely on new launches to allow the market more scope to absorb the already staggering unsold inventory."

A series of highly disruptive reforms, coupled with mounting unsold inventory and stringent RERA norms, kept developers on the back foot in 2017. Not surprisingly, instead of infusing new supply in the market, developers focused on executing their under-construction projects in order to remain RERA-compliant and remain relevant in the rebooted market scenario.

2017's Depressed New Launch Readings

The top seven cities recorded new unit launches of around 1.26 lakh in 2017 as opposed to 2.50 lakh in 2016.

MMR (Mumbai Metropolitan Region) contributed the maximum fresh apartments supply with 38% (48,400 units)

contributed the maximum fresh apartments supply with (48,400 units) NCR's contribution was 18% with 22,200 units

contribution was with 22,200 units Bengaluru's contribution was 13% with 16,000 units

contribution was with 16,000 units Pune's contribution was 11% with 13,800 units

contribution was with 13,800 units Chennai's residential real estate market was the worst-affected in 2017, with an annual decline in new launches of around 72% from 15,700 units in 2016 to 4,400 units in 2017

residential real estate market was the worst-affected in 2017, with an annual decline in new launches of around from 15,700 units in 2016 to 4,400 units in 2017 Pune , Bengaluru and Hyderabad recorded an annual decline of 67%, 64% and 57% respectively in new launch units

, and recorded an annual decline of and respectively in new launch units NCR and MMR recorded a drop of 45% and 33%, respectively

"In terms of sales during 2017, almost all the cities recorded a decline when compared to 2016- except Hyderabad, which recorded a 21% increase," says Anuj Puri. "The decline in sales can be primarily attributed to weak buyer sentiments amidst the rather confusing new policy environment."

Uninspiring Sales Figures

Chennai recorded the highest dip in sales at 26% - from 17,800 units in 2016 to 13,200 units in 2017

recorded the highest dip in sales at - from 17,800 units in 2016 to 13,200 units in 2017 MMR sales dipped by 24% - from 69,600 units in 2016 to 52,600 units in 2017

sales dipped by - from 69,600 units in 2016 to 52,600 units in 2017 Kolkata ' s sales dipped by 23% - from 16,800 units in 2016 to 12,900 units in 2017

' sales dipped by - from 16,800 units in 2016 to 12,900 units in 2017 NCR's sales dipped by 22% - from 47,900 units in 2016 to 37,700 units in 2017

sales dipped by - from 47,900 units in 2016 to 37,700 units in 2017 Pune's sales dipped by 6% - from 31,200 units in 2016 to 29,400 units in 2017

sales dipped by - from 31,200 units in 2016 to 29,400 units in 2017 Bengaluru saw the lowest dip in sales at 2% - from 43,300 units in 2016 to 42,300 units in 2017

Restricted new launches in 2017 resulted in a significant reduction of unsold inventory levels across the top seven cities. Overall unsold inventory decreased by 10% from 8.04 lakh units in Q4 2016 to 7.27 lakh units by Q4 2017. An uptick in the traction of ready-to-move-in and nearing-completion properties helped developers to clear a lot of the existing stock.

Prices across the top seven cities remained largely range-bound in 2017, primarily due to the presence of significant unsold stock and cautious buyer sentiments. In 2017, the market clearly made a shift towards the affordable housing segment, with 44% of unit launches (55,000 units) coming in with price tags under INR 40 lakh. This is a major shift in the Indian real estate sector and developers are now visibly aligning their supply with the budget ranges dictated by demand, so as to avoid any mismatch.

The seed of reforms sown in 2017 will doubtlessly reap consummate benefits in the future. Although they caused nothing short of mayhem in the sector, these reforms serve the important purpose of eliminating unscrupulous players from the real estate ecosystem. Moreover, developers are likely to focus squarely on their core business and be customer-centric by launching the right kind of supply at the right prices.

Download the ANAROCK Residential Report 2017 here: http://bit.ly/2HTzeUy

About ANAROCK Property Consultants Pvt Ltd

The ANAROCK Group is one of India's leading real estate services company, having diversified interests across the real estate value chain. With a professional career spanning 27 years, the Group's Chairman - Anuj Puri - is India's most prominent thought leader in the real estate industry. He is regarded as one of the most respected and acknowledged experts on India's real estate opportunities both in India and across the globe.

ANAROCK Group's key strategic business units comprise of residential business; broking & advisory services to clients; investment business: debt, equity and mezzanine funding and research & consulting business. ANAROCK residential business team comprise of industry's finest residential real estate professionals who understand the ever-changing consumer needs and market trends. Our experience and expertise gained through serving some of the most reputed developers, corporate houses, portfolio investors and individual investors make us the unchallenged residential real estate market leader in India. ANAROCK's Investment arm has built a revolutionary business model of bulk-purchasing residential apartment inventory through a proprietary investment fund.

ANAROCK is the coming together of two words ANA - the mathematical fourth spatial dimension symbolizing our firm's four core values of Ethics, Integrity, Transparency and Respect & Trust - and ROCK, the globally understood symbol of solidity and stability. Our vision is to challenge convention and effect positive change across real estate value chain. With a growing team of 1000 professionals, ANAROCK operates in all key property markets across India - Mumbai, Chennai, Bangalore, Gurgaon, Noida, Hyderabad, Kolkata and Pune and an international presence in Dubai. With in-depth market information, quality advice and developer tie-ups for optimal deals, we have been serving the industry since 2011.

ANAROCK is committed to consistently deliver optimal value to our clients from the base of our core promise - Values over Value.

Visit: http://www.anarock.com

Media Contact:

Arun Chitnis

[email protected]

+91-9657129999

Head - Media Relations

ANAROCK Property Consultants Pvt. Ltd.



SOURCE ANAROCK Property Consultants Pvt. Ltd.(Logo: http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20160303/792302 )



Browse 70 market data Tables and 38 Figures spread through 144 Pages and in-depth TOC on "Cloud-Based Contact Center Market"

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The increase in need to improve consumer experience and rise in the number of enterprises harnessing the benefits of contact center have propelled the adoption of cloud-based contact center solutions. Cloud-based contact center offerings provide cost-effective contact center solutions for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs). This is expected to further fuel the demand for these solutions among the end-users.

The security segment is expected to grow at the highest CAGR during the forecast period

Based on solution, the Cloud-Based Contact Center Market has been segmented into Automatic Call Distribution (ACD), Agent Performance Optimization (APO), dialers, Interactive Voice Response (IVR), Computer Telephony Integration (CTI), reporting and analytics, security, and others (issue tracking, omnichannel, and mobile care solution). The security segment is expected to have the highest growth rate during the forecast period. Security has emerged as one of the major concerns when it comes to contact center systems, owing to the presence of privileged contact and personal information that these systems use to serve customers in an effective manner. Cloud-based contact center systems are expected to witness an explosion of security intrusions and need enhanced security and effective corporate vigilance to accomplish these security standards. Furthermore, security systems that are built-in the cloud-based solutions at design levels are expected to find increased adoption across all verticals.

Ask for PDF Brochure @ https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/pdfdownload.asp?id=160166082

The managed service segment is expected to grow at a considerable CAGR during the forecast period

Based on service, the Cloud-Based Contact Center Market has been segmented into professional service and managed service. These are third-party infrastructure services that help organizations manage billing process for their products and services. Managed services have been focused on the service quality and end-user experience, while delivering speed, cost optimization, and quality of service. Moreover, the demand for managed services is expected to gain traction due to increase in the deployment of cloud-based contact center solutions.

The SMEs segment is expected to grow at a higher CAGR during the forecast period

Based on organization size, the market has been segmented into large enterprises and Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs). The SMEs segment is expected to grow at a higher CAGR during the forecast period. SMEs have been rapidly adopting cloud-based contact center solutions, as these solutions provide increased scalability and cost-effective contact center solutions. Moreover, several vendors provide solutions based on the pay-per-use or subscription model targeted at SMEs to improve their position in the Cloud-Based Contact Center Market. This subscription model provided by the cloud-based contact center is expected to positively impact the growth of the market.

North America is expected to dominate the Cloud-Based Contact Center Market during the forecast period

On the basis of regions, the global Cloud-Based Contact Center Market has been segmented into North America, Asia Pacific (APAC), Europe, Middle East and Africa (MEA), and Latin America. North America is estimated to have the largest market size in 2017, owing to the presence of several vendors and rapid adoption of cloud-based solutions in this region. The market in APAC is expected to grow at the highest CAGR during the forecast period. The primary driving factors for this growth are the increase in awareness and adoption of cost-effective and scalable cloud-based contact center solutions in this region.

The report also includes different strategies, such as mergers and acquisitions, partnerships and collaborations, and developments, adopted by the major players to increase their shares in the market. Some of the major technology vendors in the Cloud-Based Contact Center Market include 8x8 Inc. (US), Five9 (US), Cisco Systems (US), Genesys (US), Oracle (US), NewVoiceMedia (UK), Connect First (US), Aspect Software (US), NICE Ltd. (Israel), and 3CLogic (US).

Know more about the Cloud-Based Contact Center Market:

https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/cloud-based-contact-center-market-160166082.html

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 5000 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, "RT" connects over 200,000 markets and entire value chains for deeper understanding of the unmet insights along with market sizing and forecasts of niche markets.

Contact:

Mr. Salgarkar

MarketsandMarkets INC.

630 Dundee Road

Suite 430

Northbrook, IL 60062

USA: +1-888-600-6441

Email: [email protected]



Visit Our Blog @ http://www.marketsandmarketsblog.com/market-reports/telecom-it

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SOURCE MarketsandMarketsThe Arbitration Institute of the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce has played an important role in relations between Gazprom and Naftogaz Ukrainy, European Commission Vice-President for Energy Union Maros Sefcovic has said.

"The European Commission only welcomes the Stockholm tribunal's decision on the gas supply and transit contract between Naftogaz and Gazprom. The European Commission expects that both sides will comply with this decision and that various provisions of this decision will help restart trade relations between Naftogaz and Gazprom," he said in Brussels on Wednesday, March 21, at a meeting of the European Parliament's Committee on Industry, Research and Energy.

"We are seriously concerned about the developments between Gazprom and Naftogaz immediately after the arbitration decision of February 28 and Gazprom's initiative to terminate both gas contracts for supply and transit. If any termination is as thought, we expect it to take place in an orderly manner, taking into account the rights and obligations of both sides and the impact on third parties, such as the countries of the European Union," Sefcovic said.

He said that it was in the interests of Gazprom and Naftogaz, as well as Russia and the European Union, to respect the Stockholm Arbitration decision. He stressed the need to avoid escalation and make sure that Gazprom complies with the provisions of this decision, including the payment of $2.6 billion to Naftogaz, and that Gazprom continues energy supply.

Sefcovic expressed hope that any measures taken by various authorities would not affect transit gas.

"This would be completely counterproductive and would prevent any solution to the current situation, and both sides promised me that this would not happen," he said.

He said that the European Commission, of course, was ready to play its role in the negotiations.

He recalled that on March 1, Ukraine triggered an early warning mechanism under the Association Agreement after the gas ordered by Naftogaz was not delivered.

"This was the first time that this mechanism was triggered, and the commission immediately reacted. I had bilateral talks with Ukrainian Prime Minister [Volodymyr] Groysman, Naftogaz CEO [Andriy] Kobolev and with Russian Energy Minister [Alexander] Novak," Sefcovic said.

He noted that there were also technical consultations and that the European Commission had also triggered all relevant mechanisms.MUMBAI, March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

Bureau Veritas, a global leader in Testing, Inspection and Certification (TIC), inaugurated their South Asia Regional Head Office today. Mr. Yves Perrin, Consul General of France, along with Mr. Juliano Cardoso, Executive Vice-President, Commodities, Industry & Facilities, AMAP and Mr. Amit Ghosh, Senior Vice President - Commodities, Industry & Facilities Division, South Asia Operating Region were present to officially flag-off operations.

The sprawling seven storey, 100,000 square foot, state-of-the-art facility will roof over 1,000 employees and cater to the entire range of Bureau Veritas' Global Businesses Offering from marine & offshore to industry, building and infrastructure, commodities, certification, government services & international trade and consumer products services.

This address consolidates all offices in Mumbai to a single business location, promoting an environment that allows people to work together cohesively and create opportunities for strategic expansion.

Mr. Juliano Cardoso, Executive Vice-President, Commodities, Industry & Facilities, AMAP - Africa, Middle East, Asia, Pacific, posits, "The new Head Office is emblematic of the strength and power we see in the Indian market. We hope that our associates of the Asian subcontinent feel rejuvenated and filled with a sense of vigour to further grow and expand Bureau Veritas' expansive network. With these improved facilities, the global leadership hopes to take the lead in this highly competitive sector."

Mr. Amit Ghosh, Senior Vice President - Commodities, Industry & Facilities Division, South Asia Operating Region, said, "We are proud to open our doors to this new facility as we usher in a new era for Bureau Veritas in India. This state-of-the-art facility is open 24x7 and our employees work in two shifts in order to better cater to the needs of our clients. A facility such as this allows for greater streamlining of procedures, modernized processes and ease of operations to meet the growing challenges of quality, safety, environmental protection and social responsibility."

About Bureau Veritas:

Bureau Veritas, created in 1828, with 190 years of experience in Testing, Inspection and Certification (TIC) market brings Trust, Independence, Integrity and Expertise to its clients, to better serve society's fast evolving aspirations.

Bureau Veritas is listed on the Euronext Paris stock exchange (Stock symbol: BVI) having a Group revenue of 4.7 billion in 2017, around 74,000 employees in 1,400 offices and laboratories in 140 countries with 400,000 clients.

Bureau Veritas in India (BVIL):

BVIL made its presence in India before 1947 as a marine classification society through representation at three major ports. BVIL started its exclusive office in the country in 1973 and today it has grown to over 6,500 employees with a network of 100 offices and laboratories across the country.

As a trusted partner, BVIL offers innovative solutions that go beyond simple compliance of regulations and standards, reducing risk, improving performance and promoting sustainable development.

Recognized and accredited by major national and international organizations.

Media Contact:

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SOURCE Bureau VeritasMUMBAI, March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

The first edition of The Economic Times Hospital Strategic Management Summit 2018 held at The Lalit brought together government officials, healthcare industry leaders, analysts and service providers under one roof to focus on delivering innovative and world-class hospital planning. While healthcare systems and hospitals are faced with increasing pressure to find operating efficiencies in a time where traditional cost-cutting methodologies are producing diminishing returns, it is imperative to create sustainable healthcare funding mechanism.

The event convened with a panel discussion on the procurement/supply chain heads of hospitals brainstorming on the latest challenges like GST, bottom-line revival, government policies, vendor management and the future trends that will shape hospital procurement. In the spotlight session, Varsha Kaushal, Deputy Director Materials, P. D. Hinduja Hospital & Medical Research Centre said, "There is a need to shift the focus from hard-core procurement to utilization management." Sharing his views on the subject matter, Dr. (Col.) VMP Thomas, AVP - Operations & Projects, Dr. L.H. Hiranandani Hospital said, "We have to look at our vendors as partners which goes beyond providing periodic feedback. We must include them as stakeholders in the provision of healthcare."

Setting the tone for the day, Deepak Lamba, President - Times Strategic Solutions, said, "Despite its impressive growth, the Indian Healthcare industry has been inconsistent. While we have world-class hospitals, state-of-the-art technologies, highly qualified doctors and health care professionals attracting patients from all over the world, the average Indian patient faces high prices, inadequate access, and inconsistent quality. We at the Economic Times believe that this summit will help provide a strategic path ahead for the healthcare sector."

In a session that laid emphasis on future trends in healthcare, speakers like K Ganesh, Chairman, Portea Medical; Dr. P M Bhujang, President, Association of Hospitals and Dr. Aniruddha Chimote, Director, HosConnn Consulting Service discussed that consumers today are more demanding than ever. Not only do they want to be in control, they also want options tailored specifically to their needs and something that fits their budget. Hence for the betterment of the overall healthcare it is important to focus on personalized data, real-time information and blockchain technology that is better for patient outcomes. It democratizes health and creates greater efficiencies and scalability, thus influencing purchasing decisions in respect to healthcare. It is a catalyst for strategic planning, policy positioning and opportunity identification.

In the last panel discussion based on Hospital trends, budget 2018 and beyond Randeep Guleria, Director, AIIMS said, "Medicine is a social sector rather than a cost-effective service sector. There is a need to provide proper care to the citizens of India no matter what the social status is. The solution to this is the merger of the public and the private sector making it cost-effective for the payers and profitable for the stake holders at the same time."

The day concluded with a felicitation ceremony and an enlightening address by the chief guest Dr. Deepak Sawant, Hon'ble Minister of Health and Family Welfare, Govt. of Maharashtra, who said, "The concept of smart hospitals is essential for the current scenario." Considering the role of technology in healthcare, he said, "IT & healthcare goes hand in hand hence we must go for tele-medicine since we are short of doctors. Correct use of technology can improve patient doctor relationships and can help reduce the gap that can create issues."

About ET Edge:

Times Strategic Solutions Ltd., functional under the brand name ET Edge, is an Economic Times initiative founded to empower multiple industries and segments by sharing critical business knowledge through focused exhibitions and strategic conferences and summits. Encompassing business vistas, ET Edge strives to bring together visionaries and key leaders on its knowledge platforms to create a social and business environment conducive to the positive changes required by the industry. The main aim of this initiative is to channel global business intelligence through exhibitions, summits and conferences in overarching lectures, hands-on workshops, panels, roundtables, case studies and more.



Media Contact:

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[email protected]

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Times Strategic Solutions Ltd



SOURCE ET EdgePerception and policy matter in business travel, with high attention paid to the optics of the practice. Twenty percent of business travellers have foregone adding leisure portions to their trips because of how it may look to their employer. Business travellers in Asia are the most conscious of this at 32 percent, with North America and Europe following at 20 percent and 15 percent, respectively.

"The insight that many business travellers have skipped bleisure trips due to employer perception reveals an opportunity for differentiation in the race for top talent," said Wendy White, vice president of marketing at Egencia. "With more companies today prioritising work-life balance, it may be time to start including bleisure in your travel program to invest in employees and encourage them to make every trip count."

Proximity to the weekend may minimise that perception, with nearly one-quarter of respondents saying this impacts their decision. Of those who take the bleisure dive, less than two percent globally have billed back bleisure expenses to their companies.

Additional findings include: a majority (55 percent) of Egencia global business travellers take less than six business trips per year on average, and 68 percent take at least one bleisure trip per year.

When it comes to activities, the destination and sight-seeing are top of mind:

Destination location is by far the biggest factor in determining whether or not to take a bleisure trip, with 30 percent of North America business travellers prioritising location, compared to 25 percent in the EU and Asia .

business travellers prioritising location, compared to 25 percent in the EU and . Proximity to the weekend and proximity to friends and family came in a close second and third for global respondents, at 23 percent and 16 percent respectively.

Sight-seeing is the most popular bleisure activity for business travellers across all regions.

Bleisure is Well-Planned:

Seventy-four percent of North American business travellers are either planning or considering a bleisure trip in the next 6 months, compared to 87 percent in Asia and 68 percent in Europe .

and 68 percent in . Half of Asia business travellers are planning a bleisure trip this year, compared to 41 percent of North Americans and 32 percent or Europeans.

business travellers are planning a bleisure trip this year, compared to 41 percent of North Americans and 32 percent or Europeans. Bleisure trips are a big 2018 resolution: 37 percent of Asia business travellers, 25 percent of Europeans and 20 percent of North Americans made it one of theirs.

To help you make the most out of your next bleisure trip, check out the city guides from our Top 100 Preferred Corporate Hotel awards program.

About Egencia

Egencia makes every business trip count for travellers and travel managers. The travel management company's industry-leading technology platform simplifies the process of planning, booking and managing business travel. Relying on timely, data-driven insights from Egencia, businesses stay one step ahead by making choices that align with traveller preference and corporate policy. A dedicated team of travel consultants is ready to assist every step of the way, whenever and wherever needed. Egencia serves small, mid-cap and multi-national companies in more than 65 countries. To connect with Egencia, visit www.egencia.co.in or follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn. You can also follow along on our blog.

 2018 Egencia LLC. All rights reserved. Egencia, and the Egencia logo are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Expedia, Inc. in the U.S. and/or other countries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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SOURCE EgenciaNature forms the inspiration for water technology innovation around the globe

Happy World Water Day!

SANTA CLARA, California, March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- With global water requirements increasing to 40% by 2030, according to Frost & Sullivan, now is the time to commit to ensuring the availability and sustainable management of water. Mounting environmental awareness and water stress challenges have pushed many to seek viable, energy-efficient and cost-effective solutions to address the growing issue of water security. On World Water Day 2018 Frost & Sullivan explores this year's theme, "Nature for Water," by acknowledging the influence and inspiration natural filtration and treatment processes lend to water technologies.

If you are interested in more information on nature-inspired water solutions and technologies or would like to speak to our experts, please email me ([email protected]).

"Global water networks are established to deliver consistent and reliable water services, but unfortunately the world and its water resources are seeing increasing instability," said Seth Cutler, Environment and Water Senior Industry Analyst at Frost & Sullivan. "As a result, water technologies and solutions need to take further inspiration from nature in how it deals with instability in resources, distribution, and quality."

Frost & Sullivan tracks the following technologies and solutionsand their growth potentialthat take inspiration from nature:

Disinfection, namely UV disinfection, provides rapid and effective inactivation of microorganisms, much like the sun's rays, to decontaminate water. UV and advanced oxidation process (AOP) technology currently account for 30.0% of the total water and wastewater disinfection systems market, valued at $811.7 million . This technology is expected to account for 34.3% of the global water and wastewater disinfection systems market by 2024.

provides rapid and effective inactivation of microorganisms, much like the sun's rays, to decontaminate water. UV and advanced oxidation process (AOP) technology currently account for 30.0% of the total water and wastewater disinfection systems market, valued at . This technology is expected to account for 34.3% of the global water and wastewater disinfection systems market by 2024. Decentralization and mobile treatment: Recent Frost & Sullivan analysis reveals the global decentralized container treatment market will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 6.2% through 2023. This growth can be attributed to the linear, large-scale, centralized water network that will become increasingly complemented by a more dynamic and agile web of support through local treatment services.

Recent Frost & Sullivan analysis reveals the global decentralized container treatment market will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 6.2% through 2023. This growth can be attributed to the linear, large-scale, centralized water network that will become increasingly complemented by a more dynamic and agile web of support through local treatment services. Membrane treatment is bringing increasing efficiency in energy use, footprint, and system simplicity in potable and wastewater applications. Taking inspiration from organic cells that selectively allow molecules to pass through a porous material, membranes are applied in desalination, groundwater treatment, and in wastewater applications through membrane bioreactors, a technology that is set to see global revenues grow by over 9.0% in 2018.

is bringing increasing efficiency in energy use, footprint, and system simplicity in potable and wastewater applications. Taking inspiration from organic cells that selectively allow molecules to pass through a porous material, membranes are applied in desalination, groundwater treatment, and in wastewater applications through membrane bioreactors, a technology that is set to see global revenues grow by over 9.0% in 2018. Sludge treatment, in particular sludge digestion takes inspiration from natural processes through thermal hydrolysis. This technology increases temperature and pressure to speed up natural digestion processes, while also delivering benefits to volume reduction and dewatering, footprint, and improved nutrient recovery. Frost & Sullivan research positions the North American municipal biosolids market, which leverages thermal hydrolysis, growing at a compound annual growth rate of 9.0% through 2021.

According to UNESCO, about 1.9 billion people live in potentially severely water-scarce areas. By 2050, this could increase to close to 3 billion people. The aforementioned nature-inspired technologies and solutions can help meet increasing water needs of a constantly growing population and aid in creating a more sustainable future for water.

"Technologies and solutions needed to solve the most challenging issues in the provision of sustainable water and wastewater services across the globe already exist, and we owe nature much for its ingenuity and inspiration. While nature has provided much in the way of solutions, human-created barriers  economic, political/legislative, and lack of clear vision  hamper complete and equitable access," stated Cutler. "Frost & Sullivan has confidence, however, that increasing awareness of critical water issues and needs through efforts, such as World Water Day, help to bring stakeholders together in overcoming these barriers."

About Frost & Sullivan

Frost & Sullivan, the Growth Partnership Company, works in collaboration with clients to leverage visionary innovation that addresses the global challenges and related growth opportunities that will make or break today's market participants. For more than 50 years, we have been developing growth strategies for the global 1000, emerging businesses, the public sector and the investment community. Contact us: Start the discussion

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SOURCE Frost & SullivanPORTLAND, Oregon and PUNE, India, March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

According to a new report published by Allied Market Research, titled, Infant Phototherapy Devices Market, by Light Source, Configuration, and End User: Global Opportunity Analysis and Industry Forecast, 2017-2023," the global infant phototherapy devices market was valued at $71,730 thousand in 2016, and is expected to reach $103,745 thousand by 2023, growing at a CAGR of 5.3% from 2017 to 2023.

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Phototherapy is the use of light to treat neonatal jaundice. During this process, an infant's body is exposed to light for a certain period of time in controlled conditions. This light is absorbed by the neonates skin and breaks down complex bilirubin into water-soluble simple compound, which can be excreted out of the body through urine or stool.

Request for Sample Report at: https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/request-sample/4491

Rise in prevalence of jaundice in infants, effectiveness of phototherapy over other treatment methods, and technological advancements in the field of infant phototherapy drive the market growth. However, side effects of phototherapy treatment are expected to restrain the market growth. Moreover, huge market potential in the developing regions is expected to offer several opportunities for market growth during the forecast period.

Based on light source, LED garnered more than four-fifths of the market share in 2016, and is expected to maintain its dominant position during the analysis period, as it has proved to be the most effective light in the breakdown of bilirubin into simpler forms.

Based on configuration, the mobile device segment held the major share (more than four-fifths) in 2016, and is expected this trend throughout the forecast period.

For Purchase Enquiry: https://www.alliedmarketresearch.com/purchase-enquiry/4491

Key Findings of the Infant Phototherapy Devices Market:

The LED segment is expected to grow with a CAGR of 5.5% from 2017 to 2023.

Mobile device is expected to grow at the highest CAGR of 5.4%.

The hospitals segment held a major share (two-thirds) in the global market in 2016, and is expected to retain it throughout the forecast period.

Asia-Pacific is expected to register the highest growth, growing at a CAGR of 6.7% during the forecast period.

North America accounted for one-third share of the global market in 2016, and is expected to remain dominant throughout the forecast period. This is attributed to high adoption rate of technologically advanced devices, and presence of highly sophisticated healthcare infrastructure in the region.

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Knowledge tree is a cloud-based intelligence platform that offers more than 2,000 selective, off-the-shelf reports on niche markets to enable our clients gain deep insights on the latest trends, dynamic technologies, and emerging application areas.

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We are in professional corporate relations with various companies and this helps us in digging out market data that helps us generate accurate research data tables and confirms utmost accuracy in our market forecasting. Each and every data presented in the reports published by us is extracted through primary interviews with top officials from leading companies of domain concerned. Our secondary data procurement methodology includes deep online and offline research and discussion with knowledgeable professionals and analysts in the industry.

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SOURCE Allied Market ResearchThe report " Methyl Tertiary Butyl Ether Market by Manufacturing Process, (Steam Cracker, Fluid Liquid Cracker), Application (Gasoline), and Region (North America, Europe, APAC, Latin America, Middle East & Africa) - Global Forecast to 2022" published by MarketsandMarkets, the Methyl Tertiary Butyl Ether (MTBE) market is projected to reach USD 18.99 Billion by 2022 from an estimated USD 14.99 Billion in 2017, at a CAGR of 4.8% from 2017 to 2022. Major factors fueling the growth of the MTBE market are the growing demand from the gasoline application, increasing demand for the MTBE oxygenate from the APAC region, and stringent environmental regulations in the emerging economies.

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Browse 70 market data Tables and 37 Figures spread through 107 Pages and in-depth TOC on "Methyl Tertiary Butyl Ether Market"

https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports/methyl-tertiary-butyl-ether-market-12328028.html

Early buyers will receive 10% customization on this report

Increase in use of gasoline is expected to drive the MTBE market. The gasoline application segment led the MTBE market, in terms of value, in 2016. This can be attributed to the high demand for gasoline from APAC, Middle East & Africa, and Latin American countries such as China, Saudi Arabia, and Mexico. The MTBE market has witnessed several changes in the past few decades. The use of MTBE as oxygenate has been completely banned in the US after 2006 due to the contamination of groundwater. MTBE, as oxygenate, is being replaced by Ethanol and ETBE in Japan, Brazil, and some Western European countries due to certain environmental and legal regulations. The CAGR of other applications of MTBE, such as high purity isobutene and medical intermediates is increasing at rates well above global GDP.

Get PDF Brochure @ https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/pdfdownload.asp?id=12328028

Based on application, the gasoline segment is projected to lead the MTBE market during the forecast period

More than 90% MTBE is used for gasoline blending due to its high consumption in terms of volume. When used in gasoline engines, it enables reduction in the knocking effect that leads to inefficient burning and engine damage. MTBE has been used in gasoline since 1979 due to environmental and health concerns. The use of MTBE as gasoline additive started with the replacement of metallic additives, such as lead and Methylcyclopentadienyl Manganese Tricarbonyl (MMT). APAC is the largest consumer of MTBE for gasoline blending due to the expanding vehicle fleets and growing urbanization in the region.

Based on manufacturing process, the fluid liquid cracker segment is projected to lead the MTBE market during the forecast period

The fluid liquid cracker process is similar to the steam cracker process with the only difference being that the isobutene is extracted from FCC overheads. In this process, capacity is determined by the feed availability. Usually, the plants manufacture in the range of 20,000-70,000 tons per annum. This process is widely used, as it is the simplest and the most feasible. This is a refinery based process and the least expensive. APAC is expected to lead in the fluid liquid cracker process in the MTBE market due to the rising refinery capacity in the region during the forecast period.

APAC is the key region in MTBE market

In terms of volume, the APAC region Methyl Tertiary Butyl Ether Market is projected to grow at the highest CAGR between 2017 and 2022, due to the increased demand for gasoline in the region. This is a result of rapid economic expansion and increase in foreign direct investment in countries, such as China and South Korea, the MTBE market is expected to grow significantly during the next five years. Most of the countries in the APAC region are emerging and cannot afford costly oxygenates, such as Ethanol and ETBE, due to which there are no restrictions on blending MTBE with gasoline in the region. Some of the world's largest MTBE producers, such as Sinopec (China), China National Petroleum Corporation (China), and Petronas (Malaysia) are headquartered in the APAC region. China is the largest consumer of MTBE and also has the highest production capacity in the world.

Some of the leading producers of MTBE are SABIC (Saudi Arabia), Evonik (Germany), China National Petroleum Corporation (China), Huntsman International (US), Eni (Italy), Sinopec (China), LyondellBasell (Netherlands), Shell (Netherlands), Emirates National Oil Company (UAE), and Qafac (QATAR). These players adopted various organic and inorganic developmental strategies between 2013 and 2017.

Know more about Methyl Tertiary Butyl Ether Market Research Report:

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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.

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SOURCE MarketsandMarketsSONIPAT, India, March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

One of the two private universities in India and the only state private University in Haryana to be granted autonomy

O.P. Jindal Global University (JGU) has been granted autonomous status by the University Grants Commission (UGC) under graded autonomy Regulations 2018. This announcement was made by the Union Human Resource Development Minister, Mr. Prakash Javadekar on 20 March. JGU has become the first and only private university in Haryana and also one among the two private universities in India to be granted autonomy.

In an endeavour to introduce a liberalised regime in the higher education sector and emphasizing the linking autonomy with quality, UGC and MHRD granted autonomy to 52 universities, out of which five are central universities, 21 state universities, 24 deemed and two private universities. There are more than 300 private universities in India but only two have been granted this special status, one of them being O.P. Jindal Global University. Significantly, none of the other reputed private universities or other such institutions in India have been granted the 'autonomy' status in this historic recognition by the Government of India.

Mr. Naveen Jindal, Founding Chancellor, O. P. Jindal Global University, said, "This feat reiterates JGU's commitment to shaping India's aspirations of building world-class universities through comparative and international dimensions. We are grateful to MHRD and UGC who have appreciated our endeavour. It is imperative for India to take stock of the state of its universities and redefine their roles in the fast-changing global scenario. It is time for India to join ranks with world-class universities and improve the academic environment for our students."

"This recognition initiates a major paradigm shift that will mark the future of Indian universities and encourage our pursuit of institutional excellence in higher education. This is a big milestone in JGU's journey and I wish to congratulate all JGU stakeholders, including faculty members, students, staff, alumni, parents and the State Government of Haryana, as well as the regulatory bodies, for their support. Our sincere thanks to Mr. Naveen Jindal, Founding Chancellor of JGU, for reposing trust and confidence in our ability to contribute towards institution building. It is his vision, philanthropy and drive that have culminated in this success," said Prof C Raj Kumar, Founding Vice Chancellor, JGU.

This status will allow the University the freedom to introduce new courses and departments, and enter into collaborations with foreign educational institutions, without seeking the UGC's permission. There will also be exemption from regular UGC inspections, with appraisals being obtained on the basis of self-reporting. Besides, JGU will be allowed to hire global talent for up to 20% of their total faculty strength while filling up 20% of seats with international students.

About O.P. Jindal Global University

A non-profit global university established by the Government of Haryana, O.P. Jindal Global University (JGU) is recognised by the University Grants Commission (UGC). JGU was established as a philanthropic initiative of its Founding Chancellor, Mr. Naveen Jindal, in memory of his father, Mr O.P. Jindal. JGU has been awarded the highest grade 'A' by the National Accreditation & Assessment Council (NAAC).

JGU is one of the few universities in Asia maintaining a 1:13 faculty-student ratio and appointing faculty members from India and different parts of the world with outstanding academic qualifications and experience. A research-intensive university, JGU is deeply committed to its core institutional values of inter-disciplinary and innovative pedagogy; pluralism and rigorous scholarship; as well as globalism and international engagement.

JGU has established eight schools: Jindal Global Law School (JGLS), Jindal Global Business School (JGBS), Jindal School of International Affairs (JSIA), Jindal School of Government and Public Policy (JSGP), Jindal School of Liberal Arts & Humanities (JSLH), Jindal School of Journalism & Communication (JSJC), Jindal School of Art & Architecture (JSAA) and Jindal School of Banking & Finance (JSBF).

For more information please refer to - http://www.jgu.edu.in/.

Media Contact:

Devadeep Konwar,

[email protected],

+91-7027850344,

Assistant Director,

Communication and Public Affairs,

O.P. Jindal Global University

SOURCE O.P. Jindal Global UniversityThe Verkhovna Rada regulations committee has found the prosecutor general's recommendation to the parliament to consent to the prosecution, detention, and arrest of independent parliamentarian Nadiia Savchenko to be legal, sufficient, and substantiated.

The committee made its decision at a meeting on Thursday morning and sent it to the parliament session hall to be considered, an Interfax correspondent reported.

Committee member Volodymyr Areshonkov from the Petro Poroshenko Bloc faction said the prosecutor general is expected to publish video evidence of the accusations against Savchenko at the Rada plenary session.

"I will promptly raise the issue of immunity removal as soon as the results of the regulations committee decision are handed out," Rada speaker Andriy Parubiy said while opening the parliamentary session on Thursday morning.

The head of the Officer Corps' prisoner release center, Volodymyr Ruban, was detained at a Donbas checkpoint on March 8 while trying to smuggle an arsenal of weapons into the part of Ukraine not controlled by Kyiv. According to the text of a suspicion document, Ruban is suspected of having committed the criminal offenses of "plotting an act of terrorism," "possession, storage, acquisition, manufacture, repair, transfer, or disposal of a firearm (except a smoothbore hunting rifle), ammunition, explosive substances or explosive devices without the permission required by the law."

On March 9, the Shevchenskivsky District Court in Kyiv ordered Ruban's arrest for two months.

Savchenko was summoned to the Ukrainian Security Service for questioning as part of the Ruban inquiry.

On March 15, Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko told the Rada that investigators had irrefutable evidence that Savchenko was planning terror attacks - explosions in the parliamentary session hall. Earlier in the day, a number of Ukrainian media outlets reported sources as saying that Savchenko had carried ammunition into the session room. She was talking to colleagues in the hallways of the parliament. When asked on the television channel Newsone later in the day whether she had carried a gun into the session hall, Savchenko said that many parliamentarians carry weapons received as a state award to work.

According to two March 15 resolutions of the Ukrainian Prosecutor General's Office seeking the Rada's consent for prosecution and detention of Savchenko , a pretrial investigation established that Savchenko committed a series of grave and especially grave crimes violating the principles of national security and public security starting in November 2017.

The motions state that Savchenko met in unclear circumstances with Ruban, who knew the leaders of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People's Republic, Alexander Zakharchenko and Alexander Timofeev.

"As a radical personality, dissatisfied with the socio-economic situation in Ukraine and the actions of the heads of bodies of central government, with clear disrespect for the Ukrainian president, the Verkhovna Rada, and the government of Ukraine, sharing the views of the leaders of the DPR regarding the forcible overthrow of the constitutional system and seizure of state power in Ukraine [...] at an unidentified time, but no later than November 20, 2017, in an unidentified place, Savchenko plotted with Ruban, Zakharchenko, Timofeev, and other unidentified persons [...] to commit actions aimed at the forcible overthrow of the constitutional system and the seizure of state power in Ukraine," the documents said.

The accomplices decided to commit a terror attack and try to kill state and public figures, making a detailed plan to this end, they said.

According to the documents, the attack would have involved the use of weapons, explosives, and other elements that pose a danger to life and health with the aim of intimidating the population.

"[It was planned] to open fire on buildings in the Kyiv government quarter when the Ukrainian president, parliamentarians, the prime minister, state and public figures are present in the Verkhovna Rada using mortars, grenade launchers, and firearms [...] Simultaneously, to use grenades to cause explosions inside the building of the Verkhovna Rada, and to use firearms and explosive devices to kill the above-mentioned political officials present at the Verkhovna Rada session, as well as to kill law enforcement officers taking actions to stop the terrorist attack," the documents said.

According to law enforcement agencies, the plotters planned to carry out an armed seizure of the parliament building at night, "thus impeding the work of the Verkhovna Rada."

"At the same time, to use mortars, grenade launchers, firearms, and explosive devices to carry out armed attacks on the housing and road vehicles of political officials and leaders of political parties, in particular Petro Poroshenko, Arsen Avakov, Oleksandr Turchynov, and others, with the aim of unlawfully killing them," the documents said.Autonomous drones and hybrid propulsion innovations will drive new growth opportunities, finds Frost & Sullivan

SANTA CLARA, California, March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The commercial unmanned aerial services (UAS) market is experiencing a steady economic expansion due to disruptive innovations such as autonomous platforms, transitional drones, and hybrid propulsion. Frost & Sullivan expects that by 2022 over 50 percent of commercial drone flights will be conducted autonomously operating much like warehouse robots operate today. This innovation will create new industry opportunities as drones will be used as a tool to make operations more efficient while drone maintenance and data security will become the prominent areas for revenue stream development. Demand for commercial drones in North America will generate the most revenues with Asia-Pacific a close second.

"The UAS market is becoming an ecosystem focused on information and value-added services where the drone is a tool acting as a cog in the big data machine," said Michael Blades, Aerospace, Defense, and Security Research Director, Frost & Sullivan. "Success in this ecosystem will be achieved by companies that can safely, quickly, and inexpensively provide high-grade data/information for real-time decision making."

Frost & Sullivan's recent analysis, Global Commercial UAS Market, Forecast to 2022, focuses on global hotspots, technologies, forecast and trends. Key findings, market engineering measurements, unit shipment, and revenue forecasts for segments such as, prosumer, consumer professional, industrial, enterprise, and FW/Transitional as well as regions like Africa, Asia-Pacific, Middle-East, North America, and South America are also provided.

For further information on this analysis, please visit: http://frost.ly/2c7

Blades expects mergers and acquisitions (M&A) activity within the industry to accelerate with several manufacturers forced out of the market. New original equipment manufacturers of higher-priced platforms will struggle to compete in an increasingly crowded market. DJI, the undisputed market leader in low-priced commercial platforms, has such a large share of the market that its ability to manipulate pricing will make it difficult for current and future competitors to gain market share.

Transformations that could disrupt and/or create new growth opportunities include:

There will be a substantial decrease in the need and demand for remote pilots to operate drones on site;

Regulatory frameworks, infrastructure, and public perception will be crucial for drone delivery to be a success in day-to-day logistics operations; and

By 2022, the industry will look similar to the cell phone sector where there are a few hardware providers and a slew of open-source software and sensor providers that cater to specific applications.

"Global regulations generally do not allow beyond visual line of sight operations which severely restrains drone applications such as parcel delivery and long-distance monitoring," noted Blades. "If this was allowed it could generate considerable revenue streams."

Global Commercial UAS Market, Forecast to 2022 is part of Frost & Sullivan's global Aerospace and Defense Growth Partnership Service program.

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Global Commercial UAS Market, Forecast to 2022

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SOURCE Frost & SullivanTwelve new game-changing drugs predicted to achieve annual sales of >$1 billion by 2022, to the benefit of millions of patients around the world

PHILADELPHIA, March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Clarivate Analytics, the global leader in providing trusted insights and analytics to accelerate the pace of innovation, announced today the launch of its annual "Drugs to Watch" report. The analysis identified 12 new drugs forecast to achieve annual sales of $1 billion or more (ie, blockbuster status) by 2022 using the Cortellis database, which includes information gathered from diverse sources including drug pipelines, patents, clinical trials, chemistry, deals and company announcements. More blockbuster drugs have been predicted to launch in 2018 than in any other year since the Drugs to Watch report began in 2013.

The drugs forecasted to launch in 2018 cover a wide range of therapeutic areasie, type 2 diabetes, endometriosis, childhood epilepsy, hemophilia, HIV, migraine, opioid addiction and shingles. Noteworthy examples on this list include:

Drug & company Disease & Impact Aimovig (erenumab) Amgen (USA) Novartis (Switzerland) Migraine: Migraine is the third most common disease in the world, with an estimated global prevalence of 14.7% (ie, 1 in 7 people).1 Fewer than 50% of patients with migraine are satisfied with their current treatment. After little movement for many years, the migraine-prevention market is about to undergo a transformation with several new drugs, known as calcitonin gene-related peptide (CGRP) receptor inhibitor. Aimovig (erenumab) has the potential to contribute to the transformation of the migraine market in 2018. Biktarvy (tenofovir alafenamide + emtricitabine + bictegravir) Gilead (USA) HIV infection: 37 million people globally are living with HIV; 21 million of whom receive antiretroviral therapy.2 While antiretroviral therapy does not cure HIV infection, it suppresses viral replication and allows an individual's immune system to strengthen and regain the capacity to fight off infections. Expanding access to antiretroviral treatment is at the heart of a new set of targets for 2020, issued by the WHO, which aim to end the AIDS epidemic by 2030.2 Biktarvy offers an effective and simple treatment option for patients with HIV. Ozempic (semaglutide) Novo Nordisk (Denmark) Type 2 diabetes: More than 425 million people globally live with diabetes, 90% with type 2 diabetes. By 2045, this number is projected to rise to 629 million.3 Despite competing in a crowded market, Ozempic represents a new treatment that helps patients effectively control their blood sugar and significantly reduces the health risks commonly associated with diabetessuch as strokes and heart attacks. It is forecast to perform well due to its superior efficacy and safety versus competitor products. Shingrix (Zoster vaccine recombinant, adjuvanted)

GlaxoSmithKline (UK) Shingles: It's estimated around one in every four people will have at least one episode of shingles during their life.4 The only vaccine to make the list is GSK's Shingrix (Zoster vaccine recombinant, adjuvanted), which is set to become the market leading shingles vaccine. Sublocade (once-monthly buprenorphine) Indivior (UK) Opioid dependence: More than 15 million people are living with opioid dependence worldwide.5 This disorder is ongoing and is rapidly evolving into a public health crisis, with the US government declaring a public health emergency in late 2017. Sublocade looks set to disrupt the market for medication-assisted treatment to overcome opioid use disorder. It is administered via subcutaneous injection once a month by a healthcare provider and does not require a detox period, thereby addressing the limitations of other treatment options.

2018 is also expected to see the launch of the first FDA-approved cannabidiol-based drug (Epidiolex)potentially opening up a new market for cannabidiol-based medicinesand the first approved treatment option for men with castration-resistant prostate cancer (Erleada) whose cancer has not yet spread.

"Despite political and regulatory uncertainties in the USA and EU markets, the annual Drugs to Watch report 2018 shows that the pace of pharmaceutical innovation continues to accelerate," explained Mukhtar Ahmed, President, Life Sciences at Clarivate Analytics. "2018 is on track to see many new potential game-changing drugs come to market, which will benefit the lives of millions of patients around the world."

Data for this report were compiled from the Cortellis database, the premier source of life sciences competitive, clinical and regulatory intelligence and analytics which includes data gathered from diverse sources, including annual filings, drug pipelines, clinical trials, patents, chemistry, company announcements, deals and conferences.

ABOUT CORTELLIS

Cortellis delivers the unique insights needed to reduce risk and increase success across the drug development lifecycle from early discovery to commercialization and beyond. The Cortellis suite of solutions serves the needs of life science professionals with unmatched content, intelligent search, best-in class analytics and insightful visualization tools. For more information, visit clarivate.com/cortellis.

ABOUT THE DRUGS TO WATCH REPORT

The annual Drugs to Watch report was first published in 2013. Using data from Cortellis, the report aims to forecast which drug launches in a given year will achieve blockbuster status within five years of launch. Following an advanced analysis of this database, a shortlist of drugs is manually researched and evaluated by life-science experts at Clarivate Analytics, who review each drug in its individual context and assess clinical trial results, regulatory data, market data and regulatory designations for each drug.

The full report is available at: http://info.clarivate.com/drugstowatch2018

Follow us on Twitter: @Cortellis | #blockbusterdrugs2018

ABOUT CLARIVATE ANALYTICS

Clarivate Analytics is the global leader in providing trusted insights and analytics to accelerate the pace of innovation. Building on a heritage going back more than a century and a half, we have built some of the most trusted brands across the innovation lifecycle, including Web of Science, Cortellis, Derwent, CompuMark, MarkMonitor and Techstreet. Today, Clarivate Analytics is a new and independent company on a bold entrepreneurial mission to help our clients radically reduce the time from new ideas to life-changing innovations. For more information, please visit clarivate.com.

REFERENCES

1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3606966/

2. http://www.who.int/hiv/en/

3. https://www.idf.org/about-diabetes/what-is-diabetes.html

4. https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/shingles/

5. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24661272



Drug Disease 2018 2019 2020 2021 2022 Company (HQ) 1 Hemlibra (emicizumab)*,,|,, Hemophilia A with factor VIII inhibitors 496 1,457 2,356 3,362 4,002 Roche (Switzerland)/Chugai (Japan) 2 Biktarvy (tenofovir alafenamide + emtricitabine + bictegravir)**,,  HIV infection 896 2,282 3,387 4,296 3,716 Gilead (U.S.) 3 Ozempic (semaglutide)* Type 2 diabetes 260 862 1,576 2,583 3,469 Novo Nordisk (Denmark) 4 Erleada (apalutamide),** Non-metastatic CRPC 25 500 1,200 1,600 2,000 Johnson & Johnson (U.S.) 5 Shingrix (Zoster vaccine recombinant, adjuvanted) Shingles 242 537 879 1,202 1,368 GlaxoSmithKline (UK) 6 Patisiran,|,, Hereditary TTR amyloidosis 83 373 726 1,104 1,212 Alnylam (U.S.)/Genzyme (U.S.) 7 Epidiolex (plant-derived cannabidiol)|,,** Dravet syndrome and Lennox-Gastaut syndrome 19 266 645 936 1,191 GW Pharmaceuticals (UK) 8 Aimovig (erenumab)*, Migraine 115 361 685 941 1,170 Amgen (U.S.)/Novartis (Switzerland) 9 Lanadelumab*,,|,, Hereditary angioedema 74 350 629 902 1,153 Shire (Ireland) 10 Elagolix,**, Endometriosis 57 268 549 896 1,152 AbbVie (U.S.) 11 Steglatro (ertugliflozin)** Type 2 diabetes 220 482 769 1,024 1,087 Pfizer (U.S.)/Merck (U.S.) 12 Sublocade (once-monthly buprenorphine),,** Opioid dependence 121 308 439 634 1,072 Indivior (UK)

Table: Analysis of 12 new drugs forecast to enter the market in 2018 and achieve blockbuster sales of over $1 billion by 2022

Data were obtained from the Cortellis Competitive Intelligence database, accessed March 05, 2018 (Source: Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S). Forecasts are in U.S.$ million. CRPC=castration-resistant prostate cancer. TTR=transthyretin*=biological drug. =Breakthrough Therapy designation. =Fast Track designation. =RNA interference. |=Orphan Drug designation. =Priority Review. **=small molecule. =novel integrase inhibitor. =first-in-class. = vaccine.

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SOURCE Clarivate AnalyticsDUBAI, UAE, March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

Dubai is set to host the first edition of World AI Show in the wake of the 'Smart Dubai Govt' initiative.

World AI Show organised by a global business events company Trescon, is gearing up for the launch of the first leg of the series in the happiest city on the planet, before moving on to Singapore, Mumbai, and Paris. The city of Dubai is sticking true to its name of being the fastest adopter of AI in the continent and hence, there is no other place that is more apt to host the first edition of the show which is taking place on 11 - 12 April 2018 at The Address Dubai Mall.

UAE has already been ahead in the global AI race especially when it announced the appointment of a dedicated ministry for AI, and with Dubai Police implementing a fully functional robot police - all this while the rest of the world is trying to play catch-up with the princely state. Dubai plays the incubation host to dozens of emerging AI startups and digital transformative technologies. The country's market cap for AI is set to touch the US$ 50 billion mark by 2025. Neighbouring countries of Saudi Arabia and Qatar have also developed a keenness for AI and has seen a 50% increase in development over the last 5 years.

The governing factor behind the World AI Show series is to bring the global thought leaders for AI under one roof, and discuss everything under the sun regarding the development and wide-scale implementation of AI across key verticals. The world of artificial intelligence is growing in size and momentum at such an economical pace that the concept of ethical concerns and costing is often ignored.

Arianna Huffington, Founder of The Huffington Post, and one of the many speakers at the show, said that "The concept of AI scares the common man because his knowledge about it is low. We could either wait for the full-scale global incorporation of this technology before educating the masses, or we can skip to the front of the line and prepare the people for the inevitable".

Financial allocation and national development remain bigger challenges for certain nations. With the cost of AI seeming ineffective for developing and third world nations, innovators and entities are on a fast-track to develop and create more cost effective products for these nations.

The show is set to form a precedent for the future, which is the inevitable foray of AI into every sector by 2030. The usage of this technology has already found its way into the healthcare, automotive and defence sectors across the world, to name a few. Dubai is also home to the first 'Humanoid police droid' that scrolls through the streets offering immediate assistance to its citizens and the 10 million guests the country hosts annually.

Nikhil Jain, Co-Founder of AI based Virtual Identity creator 'ObEN' has said that "The show is a much needed platform as it is addressing the technology of the future, today. We need a detailed understanding of what constitutes an AI and the people need to know that too, for our businesses to thrive".

The show is also being attended by notable industry leaders, such as Dr. Sohail Munir, who serves as an advisor for Emerging Technologies and Digital Transformation in the 'Smart Dubai Govt' initiative. Dr Sohail also added: "Dubai is one of the fastest evolving cities in the world when it comes to futuristic technologies like AI and Machine Learning. The government has extended their hand and full support for the immediate and strategic development of AI within the country".

Some of the other notable delegates and speakers attending the event are Hans Christensen, Director for Dtec, UAE; Dr. Bernd Van Linder, CEO of the Commerical Bank of Dubai, UAE; Sally Eaves, Speaker and Researcher of the Forbes Technology Council, UK; Fahad Al Gergawi, CEO of the Dubai Investment Development Agency and many others.

Mohammed Saleem, Chief Executive Officer of Trescon, said that the show was a requirement in the untapped market, which was seeing systematic growth in particular sectors alone. "We are conducting this show on a global scale because we saw a visible absence of platforms that discuss futuristic technology and their possible business opportunities. The advent of AI started with automation and is no longer a pipe dream! How can a business of tomorrow thrive unless we speak about it and address all of its concerns, today," he added further.

The World AI Show will also feature a product showcase at a dedicated exhibition venue to display the latest innovations in AI and secure the required assistance to propel their business forward. Sponsors of the show include Oben, SparkCoginition, Bankorus, Effect Network, Perpetuuiti, Nouveau Labs, Prosper Systems, eAutomaton, Chironx, Centre Systems, and association with Women AI Experts, and the Artificial Intelligence Society of Hong Kong.

To know more about the show or to book tickets to attend it, visit: https://dubai.worldaishow.com/

About Trescon : Trescon is a global business events and consulting firm that provides a wide range of business services to a diversified client base. We produce highly focused B2B events that connect businesses with opportunities through conferences, road shows, expos, demand generation and consulting services. You can visit us at: https://www.tresconglobal.com/

For More Information contact:

Raiyan Mohammed

Sr. Marketing Manager

[email protected]

+917-996-411-687



SOURCE Trescon Business SolutionsAs Governments around the world push to eliminate TB, PrimeStore MTM serves as a crucial new tool to facilitate safe and accurate TB diagnosis and expedite detection of M. tuberculosis drug resistance gene mutations

BETHESDA, Maryland, March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Longhorn Vaccines and Diagnostics LLC (LHNVD), a private pre-analytical systems and molecular solutions company, has spent the last six years validating PrimeStore MTM for inactivation of M. tuberculosis (TB) and stabilization of the DNA to facilitate point of care and centralized molecular detection of TB. In addition, high quality DNA in the original sample is preserved in PrimeStore MTM allowing further drug sensitivity testing by line probe assays or next-generation sequencing. After two years of thoughtful discussions and careful review, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), through its de novo process, cleared PrimeStore MTM as a new class of medical device.

"We are excited to announce the FDA clearance of PrimeStore MTM, a paradigm shift in biological sample transport technology. Leaders of the TB community are driving the rapid phase out of centuries old diagnostic methods, and fully embracing current and evolving technologies in molecular diagnostic testing, next-generation sequencing, digital radiology, and software including DNA analysis and artificial intelligence," states Jeff Fischer, President of Longhorn Vaccines and Diagnostics LLC. "Industry competition which relies on quality peer- reviewed science, and trusted, transparent, and unbiased regulatory review such as the US FDA 510(k) process is essential to the rapid adoption of emerging technologies and maximizing the value of government and donor funding to truly make a difference for those that are and those that will be afflicted with this terrible, highly curable disease."

Statistics from the United States Center for Disease Control (CDC) state that one quarter of the world's population was infected with TB in 2016, and over 10 million people progressed to active infection with 1.7 million deaths. According to Peter Sands, Executive Director of the Global Fund, "We've been making progress on 'bending the curve' on TB. Now we should 'break the curve' and achieve a decisive shift in trajectory towards ending the epidemics."

In 2016, the World Health Organization estimated that 4.3 million patients with active TB go undiagnosed. To diagnose TB in many parts of the world, it is recognized that safe, efficient, reliable sample transportation is critical. "It is clear that we need to invest in systems for rapid, reliable transport of samples up the referral chain," states Madhukar Pai, a professor of epidemiology, and Director of McGill Global Health Programs and colleagues. Multiple technologies will need to be employed to cover the entire range of testing platforms and the varying environmental conditions where patients will be sampled.

The unique characteristics of PrimeStore MTM allow safe and efficient ambient temperature transport anywhere in the world, thus improving access to timely and sensitive TB diagnostic testing. Studies have demonstrated that PrimeStore MTM is compatible with the Cepheid GeneXpert point of care system, or higher throughput qPCR systems run in hospitals and centralized laboratories. Many sputum samples collected for molecular testing for TB do not meet the standard volume requirements. Published studies have shown that tests on the Xpert MTB/Rif cartridge, as well as qPCR testing can be conducted with as little as 1/10 the sample amount used in standard procedures after being placed in PrimeStore MTM.

Transporting live infectious agents for testing can facilitate the spread of unknown pathogens from one region to another. As TB is highly infectious and can be resistant to many or all current antimicrobials, inactivating all of the pathogens in the sample and stabilizing the RNA and DNA improves safety at all stages of the transport and testing process (healthcare worker and laboratory technician safety is an essential issue) and allows a single sample to be tested multiple times for TB and for other respiratory pathogens that can co-infect TB patients.

LHNVD is prepared to engage with The Global Fund, as well as other funding entities, to negotiate PrimeStore MTM pricing to support the effort to "break the curve" on TB and positively impact the fight against the wide range of endemic and epidemic diseases around the world. While PrimeStore MTM is cost effective at current pricing, as it reduces costs throughout the healthcare process, LHNVD will seek to negotiate pricing that will reflect the high-volume purchase of samples that will need to be collected for molecular detection and characterization of TB, and other endemic and emerging regional and global microbial threats.

About PrimeStore MTM

PrimeStore MTM is FDA cleared and intended for the stabilization, transportation and inactivation of infectious unprocessed nasal washes suspected of containing Influenza A virus RNA. PrimeStore MTM is also intended for the stabilization, transportation and inactivation of infectious unprocessed sputum samples suspected of containing Mycobacterium tuberculosis DNA from human samples.

Peer reviewed journal articles, abstracts, posters, and vaccine development clinical trials have demonstrated PrimeStore MTM's ability to generate highly sensitive results with multiple pathogens and sample types on several Real-Time PCR platforms to include Roche's LightCycler and Thermo Fisher's ABI 7500, as well as next-generation sequencers including Thermo Fisher's Ion Torrent and Illumina's MiSeq. PrimeStore MTM has been demonstrated to be compatible with manual and high-throughput extractions systems from LHNVD, Qiagen, Thermo Fisher, bioMeriuex, and Roche. Published studies have shown it to be compatible with Cepheid's GeneXpert MTB/RIF test.

LHNVD has received over 25 issued patents Worldwide (including the US, EU, China, India, South Africa, Canada and Australia) for the composition and use of PrimeStore MTM.

About LHNVD

Longhorn Vaccines and Diagnostics is a closely held, Veterans' Owned, Limited Liability Company headquartered in Bethesda, MD with laboratories in San Antonio, TX and Gaithersburg, MD. www.lhnvd.com

Related Links

http://www.lhnvd.com



SOURCE Longhorn Vaccines and Diagnostics LLCMr. Liu joined A.T. Kearney as a partner in 1996. He has worked in more than 50 countries as an advisor to CEOs, leadership teams, and boards in many of the largest firms in communications, media, and technology. In 2015 Mr. Liu was named a Top 25 consultant by Consulting magazine. He has previously served as leader of A.T. Kearney's global Communications, Media & Technology Practice and on the firm's board of directors.

In the past decade, A.T. Kearney has doubled its revenues and further expanded its global presence. Under Mr. Aurik's leadership, the firm focused its business on transformations and operations, and made significant investments in future growth, including adding 200 new partners, growing its global digital and analytics capabilities, strengthening talent development and brand equity, and establishing external partnerships. A.T. Kearney, established in 1926, now serves more than three-quarters of the global Fortune 500 companies, governments, and non-profit organizations. The end of Johan Aurik's tenure as Managing Partner marks the close of almost two decades of leadership for the firm, including head of the EMEA region, member of the firm's board of directors, co-leader of its Consumer and Retail Practice, and head of the firm's operations in the Benelux countries.

Asked to state his top priority as the next Managing Partner, Mr. Liu replied: "A.T. Kearney exists to help clients tackle their biggest and most vital challenges, head on. My top priority will be to bring the full force of our firm to each client we serve. To help deliver that, I will stay close to the action, working directly with clients and our teams. I want all of A.T. Kearney to take pure joy, as I do, in sharing each success achieved side-by-side with our clients, and with each other."

Earlier in his career, Mr. Liu was CEO of a technology startup in California, served as a partner at another leading consulting firm, and worked in brand management at a subsidiary of Procter and Gamble. He earned an MBA from Harvard University and a BA in economics from Yale University. Mr. Liu is based in A.T. Kearney's San Francisco office.

About A.T. Kearney

A.T. Kearney is a leading global management consulting firm with offices in more than 40 countries. Since 1926, we have been trusted advisors to the world's foremost organizations. A.T. Kearney is a partner-owned firm, committed to helping clients achieve immediate impact and growing advantage on their most mission-critical issues. To learn more about A.T. Kearney, please visit www.atkearney.com.

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SOURCE A.T. KearneyDUSSELDORF, Germany, March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

English-language European shop with consistent prices, single currency and standardised offer

Range of e-commerce activities more than doubled from nine to 20 countries

Platform opens new markets

C&A strengthens its focus on the e-commerce business by launching its new EU shop in early March. "This additional online store is the next big step in expanding our online activities," says Dr. Andreas Hammer, Director E-Commerce Europe. With the new platform, C&A can more than double the reach of its e-commerce activities from nine to twenty countries.

The additional eleven countries are Croatia, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, the Czech Republic and Hungary, where C&A already has branches. The online shop also serves Denmark, Finland, Greece and Sweden, where the company is not represented. "We know that many people from these countries regret that they cannot order our fashion online. The launch of the EU Shop is good news for them," explains Dr. Hammer.

An offer for everyone

The new EU Shop is a standardised English platform for customers from the eleven countries. All prices are quoted in euros, regardless of the local currency. "The platform rightly deserves the name 'EU Shop': No matter from which country the customer comes from, the offer and prices are completely identical."

C&A currently operates online shops in the following nine markets in the respective national language: Belgium, Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Austria, Poland, Switzerland and Spain. Nothing changes for customers of these online offers. You can continue to use the online offer as usual in your own language.

About C&A Europe

With more than 1,500 stores in 18 European countries and more than 35,000 employees, C&A Europe is one of the leading fashion retail businesses in Europe. C&A Europe welcomes and provides more than two million visitors per day with good quality fashions at affordable prices for their entire family. In addition to our European stores, C&A also has a presence in Brazil, Mexico and China.

For more information, see c-a.com/corporate

Picture: http://www.apimages.com and https://www.presseportal.de/nr/112929

Press Contact:

C&A Europe

thorsten.rolfes@canda.com

+49-(0)211-9872-2749



SOURCE C&A Europe (cunda.de)BENGALURU, India, March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

Infosys (NYSE: INFY), a global leader in consulting, technology, outsourcing and next-generation services, today announced that it has made a follow-on investment of USD 1.5 million through the Infosys Innovation Fund in Waterline Data Science, a leading provider of data discovery and data governance software. Infosys had made an initial investment of USD 4 million in the company in January 2016.

Waterline Data Science provides data scientists and business analysts a self-service data catalog to help discover, understand and provision data, and an automated data inventory that enables agile data governance across metadata, data quality and data lineage.

The investment is expected to be completed by April 6, 2018, subject to necessary approvals.

Disclosure under SEBI Listing Regulation-

Investment Waterline Data Science Inc., a Delaware Name of the target entity Corporation Whether related party transaction(s) and whether the promoter/ promoter group/ group companies have any interest in the entity being acquired? No. Industry to which the entity being invested into belongs IT software and consulting services Waterline Data Science provides a data inventory and cataloguing solution that helps business analysts and data Objects and effects of the scientists with data discovery and data investment governance. Any governmental or regulatory approvals required None Indicative time period for Expected to be completed on or before completion April 6, 2018. Nature of consideration Cash USD 1.5 million investment in Series C Cost of investment Preferred A minority holding, not exceeding 20% of the outstanding share capital of the Percentage of shareholding company Originally incorporated on December 11, Brief background 2013 with presence in the US

About Infosys

Infosys is a global leader in technology services and consulting. We enable clients in 45 countries to create and execute strategies for their digital transformation. From engineering to application development, knowledge management and business process management, we help our clients find the right problems to solve, and to solve these effectively. Our team of 200,000+ innovators, across the globe, is differentiated by the imagination, knowledge and experience, across industries and technologies that we bring to every project we undertake.

Visit www.infosys.com to see how Infosys (NYSE: INFY) can help your enterprise thrive in the digital age.

Safe Harbor

Certain statements in this press release concerning our future growth prospects are forward-looking statements regarding our future business expectations intended to qualify for the 'safe harbor' under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, which involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those in such forward-looking statements. The risks and uncertainties relating to these statements include, but are not limited to, risks and uncertainties regarding fluctuations in earnings, fluctuations in foreign exchange rates, our ability to manage growth, intense competition in IT services including those factors which may affect our cost advantage, wage increases in India, our ability to attract and retain highly skilled professionals, time and cost overruns on fixed-price, fixed-time frame contracts, client concentration, restrictions on immigration, industry segment concentration, our ability to manage our international operations, reduced demand for technology in our key focus areas, disruptions in telecommunication networks or system failures, our ability to successfully complete and integrate potential acquisitions, liability for damages on our service contracts, the success of the companies in which Infosys has made strategic investments, withdrawal or expiration of governmental fiscal incentives, political instability and regional conflicts, legal restrictions on raising capital or acquiring companies outside India, and unauthorized use of our intellectual property and general economic conditions affecting our industry. Additional risks that could affect our future operating results are more fully described in our United States Securities and Exchange Commission filings including our Annual Report on Form 20-F for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2017. These filings are available at www.sec.gov. Infosys may, from time to time, make additional written and oral forward-looking statements, including statements contained in the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission and our reports to shareholders. In addition, please note that any forward-looking statements contained herein are based on assumptions that we believe to be reasonable as of the date of this press release. The company does not undertake to update any forward-looking statements that may be made from time to time by or on behalf of the company unless it is required by law.

Media contacts:

Asia Pacific

Sarah Gideon

Infosys, India

+91-80-4156-3998

Sarah_Gideon@infosys.com

EMEA

Margherita Di Cerbo

Infosys, Europe

+44-2075162748

Margherita.DiCerbo@infosys.com

Americas

Chiku Somaiya

Infosys, USA

+1-408-375-2722

Chiku.Somaiya@infosys.com

This is a disclosure announcement from PR Newswire.

SOURCE Infosys LimitedPALM BEACH, Florida, March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

Marketnewsupdates.com News Commentary

Chile is a mining giant. It is the world's top exporter of both copper and lithium, and recent political developments in the country suggest that 2018 could be the biggest year for lithium yet. Newly-elected president Sebastian Pinera is outlining plans to cut mining restrictions and catapult Chile's economy higher. His National Renewal Party has historically been liberal when it comes to mining natural resources, and many companies are seeing this as a lithium mining green-light. Seizing the opportunity, mining firms such as Lundin Mining Corp. (TSX: LUN), Garibaldi Resources Corp. (TSX-V: GGI), Albemarle Corp (NYSE: ALB), FMC Corp. (NYSE: FMC) and Canadian firm Wealth Minerals (TSX-V:WML) are conducting a great deal of environmental research. They have shown that vast lithium reserves lie under Chile's salt beds, and now these firms are rapidly acquiring mining assets in order to capitalize on this.



Wealth Minerals in particular is one of the largest lithium asset owners in Chile, with a number of projects in development including its Five Salars lithium asset consolidation project set to increase this further. Its Atacama project currently covers 46,200 hectares in the northern part of the Atacama salar, an area thought to contain more than 15% of the world's known lithium reserves. Wealth Minerals' recent geophysical survey reports have outlined large, near-surface brine targets which are necessary for lithium mining. The company filed an NI 43-101 technical report -- a requirement for Canadian junior mining companies -- in March last year, which means that as soon as Wealth completes the analysis of their most recent drilling program, rapid development can begin.



Politics at Play: New Chilean President Set to Boost Mining Industry



Since a socialist government under President Michelle Bachelet was elected back in 2014; mining operations in Chile have been toned down in favor of labor unions, social progression and higher taxes. Sluggish economic growth unfortunately followed, leading Chilean citizens to overwhelmingly vote for billionaire businessman Sebastian Pinera to retake the presidential seat on March 11th this year.



So what does Pinera's re-election mean for mining companies in Chile? Well for one thing, large players will see a huge drive in production, but there will also be an influx of junior firms such as Wealth Minerals (TSXV:WML), whose management is already preparing to meet with Chile's new Minister for Mines - Mr. Baldo Prokurica - to discuss the Chilean lithium industry and plans for legislative reform.



In addition, Pinera's re-election will mark a complete turnaround in terms of governmental priorities away from social concerns to economic ones. For example, laws prohibiting lithium production above 80,000 metric tonnes (MT) could be a target under Pinera's National Renewal party, and more red tape is sure to be slashed as time goes on. Pinera's liberal approach to mining coincided with a booming value of copper a few years ago, and his first administration was marked by a booming economy.



Politically Supported; Environmentally Ideal



It's not just Chile's political landscape which is conductive to lithium production. Its physical landscape is pretty ideal as well. The country is so rich in lithium that it forms part of the 'lithium triangle'; the nickname given to an area which covers Chile, Argentina and Bolivia. Chile's Atacama salar is the world's largest and highest-grade lithium deposit. With its low rainfall, mineral-rich brines and a lot of sun (key factors in profitably mining lithium from salars), it is a metaphorical goldmine for lithium.



The Laguna Verde lake in Chile's north-western region is another location with a great deal of potential. Where lithium brines typically occur in sub-surface brines and aquifers, the Laguna Verde itself contains brines with highly elevated lithium. It will be the focus of Wealth Minerals (TSX.V:WML)' Laguna Verde project. Drilling is already taking place, after which crews will mobilize to other projects with high-priority drill-testing targets, where 'recent geophysical surveys have defined large, near-surface brine targets,' the company said in a recent press release.



In a promising development, Wealth Minerals has announced that it has entered into an agreement with the National Mining Company of Chile (ENAMI) - a state-owned mining firm - to develop and commercialize both of the above projects. Being essentially government-backed 'will enable Wealth and ENAMI to meet the world's growing demand for lithium and secure Chile's position as a premier player in global lithium markets,' said Wealth CEO Hendrik van Alphen.



By taking advantage of such natural wealth, Chilean Development Agency VP Eduardo Bitran told CGTN America: "We could create a $10 Billion industry in Chile in 15 years," adding that this would be "very, very substantial." Bitran also heads the agency's plans to attract foreign investment. The country is already offering cheaper lithium for companies that set up industrial operations in the north, for example.



Chile's Government is paving the Future of Lithium Mining, and Green Practices Will Get Us There



Allied to this environmental factor is the willingness of certain mining projects to maintain 'green' policies. Social concerns are already beginning to mount surrounding wildlife and simple amenities like sewers and drinking water. The issue is the use of water by mining companies to bring lithium-rich brine to the surface for processing. "We are not saying they mustn't extract lithium, but it must be controlled, using water levels, and the earnings should be for the community, not the government," a Chilean resident told CGTN America.



Wealth Minerals state in their responsibility statement that: "We aim to achieve benefits for all parties involved and to contribute to the sustainability and improved livelihoods for the communities in which we operate. Mining responsibly defines who we are as a company and, at the end of the day, is plain good business sense." This makes a refreshing change from news of unethical cobalt operations in Africa, which also are essential to producing lithium-ion batteries.



Potential Comparables:



Lundin Mining (TSX: LUN.TO) is a multinational minerals company with operations in Chile, the US, and Sweden. The company mainly produces copper, nickel, and zinc, with additional engagements in gold, lead, and silver. Over the past five-day period, Lundin Mining saw an increase of 7.8% to close at $8.95 CAD.



Garibaldi Resources Corp. (TSXV: GGI.V) is a junior exploration company operating in Canada and Mexico. It currently holds projects and property for gold mining, as well as the aggressively-expanding E&L nickel-copper project in Nickel Mountain, British Columbia. Their stocks have risen nearly 17% over the past five days, closing this afternoon at $2.70 CAD.



Albemarle Corp. (NYSE: ALB) This Charlottesville, NC firm is a global specialty chemicals company with interests ranging from lithium to energy and communications. When it comes to lithium, the company describes themselves as an 'industry leader', working with raw material extraction as well as developing electronics.



FMC Corp. (NYSE: FMC) - FMC is a specialist company split into two parts: Agricultural solutions and Lithium. In regards to the former, FMC assists clients with its portfolio of advanced technology, aiming to increase crop yield and quality by solving problems to do with insects, weeds and disease. Meanwhile, the company utilizes lithium to develop energy storage technology and speciality polymers.



The Future



Chile has led the world on lithium mining for decades, and lithium demand is expected to continue to grow. Bloomberg New Energy Finance predicts that electric car production is going to increase thirtyfold by 2030. Sebastian Pinera's government is expected to drive production to meet this demand while mining firms and investors eye the country with interest. The public is on side too; according to Fortune, Pinera received more votes than any president in the country since 1990. He now has a four-year term ahead, and a lot can happen in four years.



With this perfect storm of rapidly growing lithium demand and a Chilean government that appears friendly to foreign and domestic lithium mining, firms such as Wealth Minerals are excited, and it's easy to see why.



For a free in-depth report on Wealth Minerals (TSXV:WML.V), visit Microsmallcap.com for a full report.

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SOURCE Marketnewsupdates.comThe Verkhovna Rada has recognized the organization of voting in the framework of the elections of the president of the Russian Federation in the Russia-occupied Crimea as unlawful and does not recognize the legitimacy of these elections.

The relevant draft resolution (8168-1) was supported by 255 lawmakers at the plenary session on Thursday, according an Interfax-Ukraine correspondent.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Lima, March 16 : Peru's Congress has voted to debate the impeachment motion of President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski for his alleged ties to Brazilian construction giant Odebrecht, which has admitted paying millions of dollars in bribes to politicians.

Lawmakers on Thursday night voted 87-15 in favour of the impeachment motion with 15 abstentions, reports Efe news.

To remove the conservative President from office, 87 of the 130 members of Congress must vote in favour of the motion.

Congress will begin debate on the impeachment motion within the next 10 days and Kuczynski will be able to defend himself accompanied by an attorney, as was the case during the first impeachment motion against him submitted last December based on the same accusations.

On that occasion, Kuczynski avoided impeachment thanks to the votes of 10 opposition lawmakers led by Kenji Fujimori, son of disgraced former President Alberto Fujimori.

Three days later, Kuczynski pardoned Alberto Fujimori, serving a 25-year prison sentence for crimes against humanity during his 1990-2000 presidency.

Kuczynski became President by defeating Keiko Fujimori - Kenji's older sister - in a 2016 runoff. During the campaign, Kuczynski vowed not to pardon Alberto Fujimori.

The impetus behind impeachment comes from the right-wing Popular Party, led by Keiko Fujimori.

Pro-impeachment forces cited as evidence Kuczynski's written statements to the congressional committee investigating the Odebrecht bribery scandal.

While the president denied having received money from Odebrecht, the panel said that it had documents showing that the Brazilian firm paid Kuczynski's financial-consulting business, Westfield Capital Ltd., more than $782,000 between 2004 and 2007.

During those years, Kuczynski served as economy minister and prime minister in the 2001-2006 administration of President Alejandro Toledo.

The president said in December that during his tenure with the Toledo administration, he turned over management of Westfield to then-business partner Gerardo Sepulveda, and that it was the latter who signed the consulting contract with Odebrecht.

Kuczynski said that he was unaware at the time of the work for Odebrecht, as he had erected a "Chinese wall" between himself and Westfield's operations.Brussels, March 19 : The European Union (EU) and Britain on Monday reached a Brexit transition deal that will lead to the "orderly withdrawal" of the UK and is expected to be signed off by leaders during Friday's EU summit.

The deal was announced after a round of talks between Brexit negotiators Michel Barnier and David Davis in Brussels. "A good deal for the EU and Britain is closer than ever before," said Davis during a joint press conference with Barnier.

However, "the transitional period will only come after everything is agreed," said Barnier, EU's chief Brexit negotiator.

Hailing the deal as a "decisive step", Barnier and Davis said they had agreed on a "large part" of terms for a transitional deal but issues still need to be resolved including the Northern Ireland border, the BBC reported.

Britain agreed to a contentious "backstop solution" which would keep Northern Ireland signed up to EU rules in order to avoid a hard border with the Republic of Ireland, according to the deal.

EU27 citizens arriving in Britain during transitional period will have same rights with citizens arriving before the Brexit, the deal stated.

Britain will stay in the single market and customs union for 20 months after it leaves the EU in March 2019 and will be able to sign new free trade deals during the transition -- but they won't come into effect until after the period ends.

Davis said he hoped negotiations on the UK's future relationship with the EU could now start "as soon as is possible... we need to get on with this now", adding that it is set to be "the biggest, most comprehensive, most effective trade deal ever".

Meanwhile, any agreement reached at the summit this week will be a political commitment -- not legally binding until the final withdrawal agreement is signed early next year, reports said.

British Prime Minister Theresa May sent a notification letter to the EU in late March last year, triggering a two-year countdown to the UK's withdrawal of the bloc after more than 44 years of membership.

The transitional period is set to last from March 29, 2019 to December 2020 and is intended to smooth the path to a future permanent relationship.

Labour's shadow Brexit secretary Keir Starmer MP welcomed the transition deal, calling it "a step in the right direction".Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has said he is grateful to Ukrainian law enforcers for exposing a Russian special operation, prevention mass terrorist attacks and saving lives.

"I am grateful to officers of the Security Service and the Prosecutor General's Office for saving lives of people by preventing mass terrorist attacks and exposing a Russian special operation against Ukraine. I also thank officers of the Armed Forces who did not succumb to provocations and informed law enforcement agencies on time about the criminal intentions of the aggressor and the fifth column," the head of state wrote on his Facebook page on Thursday.

Poroshenko stressed that the purpose of the Russian special operation was "to sow chaos and destroy the Ukrainian state."

"All this is another reminder that a large-scale hybrid war is being waged against Ukraine, in which we will be able to stand out only through unity," he said.

As reported, the head of the Officer Corps prisoner release center, Volodymyr Ruban, was detained at a Donbas checkpoint on March 8 while trying to smuggle an arsenal of weapons into the part of Ukraine not controlled by Kyiv. According to the text of a suspicion document, Ruban is suspected of having committed the criminal offenses of "plotting an act of terrorism," "possession, storage, acquisition, manufacture, repair, transfer, or disposal of a firearm (except a smoothbore hunting rifle), ammunition, explosive substances or explosive devices without the permission required by the law."

On March 9, the Shevchenskivsky District Court in Kyiv ordered Ruban's arrest for two months.

The Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) believes that Ruban's illegal actions were coordinated from Russia.

According to SBU Chief Vasyl Hrytsak, investigators collected evidence indicating that "Ruban, acting on preliminary collusion with the leaders of the terrorist organizations of the so-called 'DPR,' Zakharchenko and Timofeev, as well as others, planned and carried out specific actions aimed at plotting and committing a series of terrorist acts in the central part of Kyiv with the use of weapons and explosive devices."

On March 15, Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko submitted motions to the Verkhovna Rada on granting consent to the prosecution, detention and arrest of Ukrainian MP Nadiia Savchenko.

On March 22, the Verkhovna Rada supported the motions and greenlighted Savchenko's prosecution, detention and arrest. Then representatives of law enforcement bodies in the building of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine informed Savchenko about suspicion, after which the MP, accompanied by law enforcers, went to the Office of the Security Service of Ukraine in Kyiv and Kyiv region.

The motions were filed in the framework of criminal proceedings under Part 1 of Article 109 (actions aimed at the forcible change or overthrow of the constitutional order or the seizure of state power); Part 1 of Article 14 (preparation for crime), Part 2 of Article 28 (commission of a crime by a group of persons, a group of persons by prior agreement, an organized group or a criminal organization), Part 1 of Article 109; Part 1 of Article 14, Part 2 of Article 28, Article 112 (encroachment on the life of a state or public figure), Part 1 of Article 14, Part 3 of Article 258 (terrorist act); Part 1 of Article 258-3 (creation of a terrorist group or terrorist organization); Part 2 of Article 28 and Part 1 of Article 263 (illegal handling of weapons, ammunition or explosives) of the Criminal Code of Ukraine.New Delhi, March 20 : Reliance Infrastructure's (RInfra) subsidiary Delhi Airport Metro Express Private (DAMEPL) has moved the Delhi High Court seeking execution of the arbitration award of Rs 5,200 crore it had won against Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC).

According to a company statement issued on Tuesday: "In its petition filed under section 36 of the Arbitration and Conciliation Act in the division bench headed by Chief Justice of Delhi HC, DAMEPL has sought an order for the execution of the award dated May 11, 2017 passed by the Arbitral Tribunal and direct DMRC to pay Rs 5,200 crore."

The claim includes principal amount of Rs 2,945.54 crore along with interest as on date.

The development comes after Delhi High Court on March 6, 2018 upheld the arbitration award as compensation along with interest to DAMEPL by a three-member arbitration tribunal.

Rinfra was awarded the compensation by the arbitration tribunal in a unanimous decision after 68 sittings over four years on the basis of termination provisions of the 'Concession Agreement'.

DAMEPL had terminated the agreement with DMRC to run the 'Airport Express Line' in January 2013.

In June 2013, the project was handed over to DMRC and in the following September a three-member arbitration tribunal was appointed from a panel proposed by DMRC to resolve the dispute.

The 'Airport Express Line' was commissioned in February 2011.Washington, March 20 : Following up on his threat to punish Beijing for intellectual property theft, US President Donald Trump is preparing to hit China with a $60 billion annual tariff package.

The tariff package, which Trump plans to unveil by Friday, was confirmed by four senior administration officials, the Washington Post reported.

Senior aides had provided the President with a $30 billion tariff package but Trump ordered them to double it.

The package could be applied to over 100 products, which Trump argued were developed using trade secrets from American firms that China either stole or forced them to hand over in exchange for access to its massive market.

If implemented, the tariff package would be one of the broadest sets of economic actions imposed by a modern US President against China and could draw retaliation, fraying the trade partnership between two of the world's largest economies.

"This looks much more like a President who is excessively eager to apply tariffs than a well-calculated move to defend American interests," said Phil Levy, who was a trade advisor to President George W. Bush.

"There are real concerns about Chinese behaviour on intellectual property, for example, but there are much more effective ways to address them," he said.

The new tariffs follow Trump's recent announcement of a 25 per cent tariff on imported steel and 10 per cent tariff on imported aluminium.

Although a couple of vital trading partners, such as Canada and Mexico, were excluded from the tariffs in the original announcement -- and it's possible more could be excluded -- the European Union has said it will enact retaliatory measures, and other countries could follow suit.

Many Republicans have also spoken out against the steel and aluminium tariffs and GOP Senator Jeff Flake also introduced a bill to nullify them.New Delhi, March 20 : The Congress on Tuesday demanded that External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj should apologise to families of the 39 Indians, killed in Iraq, for "misleading" them and giving "false hopes", and also demanded that the Narendra Modi government compensate them.

Congress spokesperson Randeep Singh Surjewala cited Parliament papers to show senior Congress leader Ambika Soni had raised this issue with Sushma Swaraj in July 2017, asking her "what was her source for being 100 per cent sure that they were alive", since "one day she (Sushma Swaraj) would say that all this is not known and they are all dead..."

"What Ambikaji had said in Parliament has come true today," he said.

The party also accused the government of crossing all limits of "insensitivity, inhumanity, and being merciless" as well as politicising the issue and demanded each family should be given Rs 1 crore each.

Asking why Sushma Swaraj repeatedly misled the nation and the families and gave them "false hopes", Surjewala said that the government had - seven times from 2014 till July 2017 - said these Indians were safe, alive and being provided basic amenities and food.

"The 39 Indians were kidnapped in June 2014. The entire world and the neighbouring countries had confirmed that they were not alive.

"When Indian media went to Mosul in July 2017 and reported that the Indians were not alive, Sushma Swaraj and Modi government rejected it. When an eyewitness came forward said that the ISIS have killed the Indians, they rejected it too.

"Sushma Swaraj had said when Iraqi Prime Minister comes to India, the government will confirm it from him, but didn't do anything," he added.

"Did the government think about the families even once, when they were desperately waiting for their dear ones for four years, he said, adding the minister was now blaming the Congress for politicising it, while praising her government and thanking the PM and her junior minister.

Surjewala also asked what was the need to give the statement in a hurry - even when the issue of no-confidence came up, asking if it was because the Iraq's Martyrs Foundation was going to hold a press conference in the afternoon to reveal the truth about the killing of 39 Indians.

He said the minister should visit all the families and apologise for misleading them and announcing the news on television first.

Soni said: "We had given a call attention in 2014 in Parliament because we didn't have any other option of getting information from the government. But, it refused to share any information."

She said that every family should be compensated Rs 1 crore each and Sushma Swaraj should apologise to them publicly.Agartala, March 21 : India will strengthen vigilance along the Bangladesh border to stop infiltration and border crimes, besides preventing inimical activities, Tripura Chief Minister Biplab Kumar Deb said on Wednesday.

"(Home Minister) Rajnath Singh said he would seek the feasibility of installation of CCTV cameras on the fencing along the India-Bangladesh border for better border management," Deb told the media.

"He also said that his Ministry would consider setting up the Central Control and Monitoring Rooms so as to prevent any illegal activities on the border," said Deb.

Singh said suitable steps will be taken for the better maintenance of the roads along the international borders.

"The border security and infrastructure along the frontiers must be strengthened to stop infiltration, border crimes and to prevent inimical activities," Singh was quoted as saying.

Deb and Deputy Chief Minister Jishnu Debbarma returned from New Delhi on Wednesday after meeting several leaders including President Ram Nath Kovind, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Rajnath Singh.

Five Indian states - West Bengal (2,216 km), Tripura (856 km), Meghalaya (443 km), Mizoram (318 km), and Assam (263 km) - share a 4,096-km border with Bangladesh.

The mountainous terrain, dense forests and other hindrances make the unfenced borders porous and vulnerable, enabling illegal immigrants and intruders to cross over without any hurdle.Berlin, March 22 : German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Wednesday called for unity in the European Union (EU) in the future, especially in defence and foreign affairs.

"In the coalition agreement (with Social Democrats), we are committed to the goals of the Alliance," Xinhua quoted Merkel as saying who referred to NATO when delivering the first government statement before the Bundestag in her fourth term.

"There is not a single country in NATO and the EU that believes that Germany spends too much on its defence; nowhere are there fears of over-militarization in Germany," said the chancellor.

"The EU is not only a currency but also an economic union. There is still a long way to go before the EU," said Merkel, who added Europe's economic importance has been marginalised by the rise of other regions.

Merkel therefore sees a future only as a united Europe, saying only together can prosperity and peace be achieved permanently.San Francisco, March 22 : Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has apologised for the data debacle that has upended the social media giant and said he was ready to testify before Congress, a media report said.

"The short answer is I'm happy to if it's the right thing to do," Zuckerberg said in a CNN interview on Wednesday night.

"What we try to do is send the person at Facebook who will have the most knowledge.

"If that's me, then I am happy to go," he added.

Although Facebook employs a small army of lawyers and lobbyists in Washington, Zuckerberg himself has never testified before a congressional committee.

Politicians have called for Zuckerberg to testify before their legislative bodies in the five days since the Cambridge Analytica scandal erupted.

The data firm, which has ties to President Donald Trump's campaign, reportedly accessed information from about 50 million Facebook users without their knowledge, CNN reported.

Facebook has said that the data was initially collected by a professor for academic purposes in line with its rules. The information was later transferred to third parties, including Cambridge Analytica, in violation of Facebook's policies.

Zuckerberg broke his silence on the issue earlier on Wednesday with a post on his personal Facebook page laying out a series of steps the company would take to better protect user data.

"I want to share an update on the Cambridge Analytica situation -- including the steps we have already taken and our next steps to address this important issue. I've been working to understand exactly what happened and how to make sure this doesn't happen again," the CEO wrote.

"The good news is that the most important actions to prevent this from happening again today we have already taken years ago. But we also made mistakes, there's more to do, and we need to step up and do it," he added.

In the CNN interview, Zuckerberg suggested that the question was not whether Facebook should be regulated so much as how best to do it.

"I'm not sure we shouldn't be regulated," Zuckerberg said. "There are things like ad transparency regulation that I would love to see."

Zuckerberg was criticised by some on social media for his post for stopping short of an outright apology. He rectified that in the CNN interview.

"This was a major breach of trust, and I'm really sorry that this happened... We have a basic responsibility to protect peoples' data."

The CEO was now pledging to further restrict developers' access to user data. Facebook will also investigate all apps with access to large amounts of user data.

Zuckerberg also expressed regret for not doing more to take action against Cambridge Analytica when the issue came to the company's attention in 2015.

"We need to make sure we don't make that mistake ever again," he told CNN.Lima, March 22 : Peruvian President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski has submitted his letter of resignation ahead of a scheduled impeachment him.

In a nationally televised address on Wednesday, Kuczynski said he was unable to govern effectively due to the persistent allegations of corruption that have dogged him since his first months in office, reports Xinhua news agency.

"Faced with this difficult situation that unfairly makes me appear guilty of actions in which I did not take part, I think it is best for the country that I resign as president of the republic," said Kuczynski.

"I do not want to be an obstacle to the unity and harmony the nation needs so badly," he said, adding his resignation ensures "an orderly constitutional transition."

His resignation follows widely circulated videos of the President's political allies appearing to be buying the votes of lawmakers in the lead-up to Thursday's congressional impeachment hearing.

The businessman-turned-politician took office in July 2016, but was soon engulfed by accusations that he profited from a multinational bribery scheme operated by Brazilian construction giant Odebrecht to win lucrative government public work contracts back in the early 2000s.

The Congress first held an impeachment vote in December 2017, but the opposition-backed initiative failed to garner sufficient votes.

The initiative alleged that Kuczynski's Florida-based company Westfield Capital provided consulting services to Odebrecht while he was minister of economy and finance, and chief of staff, during the administration of former President Alejandro Toledo.

Peru has requested Toledo's extradition so he can stand trial for allegedly accepting millions in bribes from Odebrecht.Sydney, March 22 : Australian aviation authorities on Thursday launched a full investigation after a helicopter crashed in the Great Barrier Reef killing two American tourists.

The single-engine airbus H120 (formerly known as a Eurocopter 120b) was reported to have crashed into the waters on Wednesday 250 metres away from a remote pontoon, used mostly by snorkelers and scuba divers, at Hardy Reef 65 km north of the Whitsunday Islands, Xinhua news agency reported.

Three others, including two passengers and a pilot of the plane, were injured in the crash.

Those who saw the crash "heroically" recovered the three from the water and performed cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) on them while waiting for emergency paramedics to arrive on the scene, Queensland police said on Thursday.

Whitsunday Air Services, the company which owned the crashed helicopter, said they were extremely saddened by the incident.

"Whitsunday Air Services is continuing to work with the Queensland Police, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau and the Civil Aviation Safety Authority to assist with their investigations."

One of the three survivors remain in serious condition, while the other two have only minor injuries.

The latest incident came just four months after another Whitsunday Air Services helicopter sank near Hamilton Island after the engine lost power and was forced to make an emergency landing.

Although the pilot and passengers were rescued, the Robinson R44 helicopter was not recovered.New Delhi, March 22 : A recent novel, "Radius 200" by author Veena Nagpal, has two facts at the centre of the fictional narrative that she weaves. "Impending water scarcity and the very real danger of an Sino-Indian conflict over this precious resource," says Nagpal in the context of her book that was launched with much fanfare at the Jaipur Literature Festival in January.

"I had once seen a small video made by ex-President A.P.J. Abdul Kalam. It very graphically depicted what water scarcity could do to human beings. Later, experts began predicting that the Third World War could be triggered by water scarcity -- and that Asia was a flash point. India relies on the river Brahmaputra for 30 per cent of its water needs. China is building the world's largest dam to divert the waters of the Brahmaputra to its own territory. Once the dam becomes a reality China could, at will, flood India or starve it of water," Nagpal told IANS in an interview.

This impending water crisis, coupled with the "deteriorating politico-military relationships within India", led the author to speculate.

"What if a top-ranking Indian general took it into his head to blow up the Chinese dam? What deadly sequence of events would follow -- retaliatory nuclear attack? An Exclusion Zone? What if two lovers were separated -- one inside the Exclusion Zone and one outside?" she asked.

And this is what happens in the novel. Like the meeting point of three rivers, "Radius 200" is the confluence of three stories: The story follows Kyra, a journalist in search of her lost love; and Arjun, a geologist, passionately seeking the lost river Saraswati. Their narrative is intertwined with the story of Om, an Indian Army officer, now in a vegetative state, grappling with lost memories of two decades ago, when a general triggered a nuclear attack by blowing up China's dam on the Brahmaputra.

The core of the plot is set against the deadly power struggle within a tiny band of nuclear survivors, desperately seeking water within the 200-kilometre radius of a devastated "Exclusion Zone". The book depicts two contrasting realities -- the life of the tiny band of survivors inside the "Exclusion Zone" and life outside.

"As a novelist I see myself more as an observer and chronicler of human relationships working out in different conditions -- sometimes even extreme situations. I do not set out to 'highlight' any 'issue'. If the credibility of my fictional universe does end up drawing attention to a vital issue, for me it is a bonus," she said.

The author said that most of us live in our own small worlds -- a limited circle of sorts -- and we operate within these circles.

"So I see these billions of small circles and where they intersect is where relationships happen -- love, hate, jealousy, power struggles. Then there are also those larger circles that represent the life of nations, the life of this earth we live on. I find it fascinating to imagine what happens in the space where these little circles -- each with its own baggage of emotions and relationships -- intersect with the larger circles; when individual concerns -- unexpressed loves, unfulfilled ambitions -- collide against the larger forces at work in this world," elaborated Nagpal, who has authored seven previous books, four of which are for children.

Nagpal said that in today's world, there is a combination of water scarcity and nuclear proliferation. And amid this "highly volatile geo-political environment," there is a "disgruntled defence force" in India.

"So I just had to explore how human relationships would work out in this extreme situation," she contended.

(Saket Suman can be contacted at saket.s@ians.in)New Delhi, March 22 : As Parliament remained paralyzed for the 14th consecutive day, the government on Thursday decided to reach out to the opposition parties to ensure smooth functioning so that the pending bills get passed in both the Houses.

Minister of State for Parliamentary Affairs Vijay Goel, who has been assigned the task to talking to opposition leaders, met Leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad for a brief discussion. He will again meet him to discuss the issues in detail.

The Minister said he would also meet leaders of the TDP, AIADMK, TRS and other parties.

Ever since the second phase of Parliament's Budget session began on March 5, disruptions have crippled both the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha on a number of issues including demand for special status to Andhra Pradesh, Punjab National Bank fraud case and setting up of Cauvery Management Board.

The Congress, the Trinamool and some other opposition parties have been protesting against the banking fraud blamed on absconding jeweller Nirav Modi and his associates, while the TDP and the YSR Congress have been demonstrating for special status to Andhra Pradesh.

The AIADMK wants a board for the management of the disputed Cauvery river water. The TRS is demanding an increase in the reservation quota for jobs in Telangana.

"Only nine working days are left now after 14 wasted days. I request the opposition parties to ensure passage of important bills in both Houses. I am hopeful the opposition will cooperate," Goel said.

"The government is in regular touch with the opposition leaders and I will meet them personally to ensure the smooth functioning of the Parliament," he told reporters.

The Minister said the government was ready to discuss each and every issue concerning the political parties including no-confidence motion against the government.

"In fact the opposition is running away from discussion. We are ready to discuss even the no-confidence motion. We have adequate numbers in the House."

Earlier, Rajya Sabha Chairman M. Venkaiah Naidu met the leaders of different parties in his chamber and sought their support to get The Payment of Gratuity (Amendment) Bill passed.

The Bill was passed by the Upper House before being adjourned for the day, however, without discussion and despite order in the House.

The Lok Sabha was also adjourned for the day, amid protests as opposition members trooped near the Speaker's podium, raising slogans and displaying placards.On Friday, March 23, at 12.00, the press center of the Interfax-Ukraine news agency will host a press conference titled "Start of Political Season: First Results, First Conclusions." The participants will include Director of the Institute of Global Strategies Vadym Karasiov; expert of the Gardarika strategic consulting corporation Konstiantyn Matviyenko; and director of the "Ukrainian Barometer" sociological service Viktor Nebozhenko (8/5a Reitarska Street). Registration of journalists requires press accreditation.New Delhi, March 22 : Congress President Rahul Gandhi on Thursday said the Modi government had for years lied about the fate of 39 Indians killed in Iraq and was now diverting public attention from it by alleging that his party had links with a firm accused of misusing personal data of Facebook users.

"Problem: 39 Indians dead; Government on the mat, caught lying. Solution: Invent story on Congress and data theft. Result: Media networks bite bait; 39 Indians vanish from radar. Problem solved," Gandhi said in a tweet.

Gandhi's remarks came a day after Information and Technology Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad accused the Congress of compromising national security by roping in political data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica to run its 2019 election campaign.

The Minister alleged that the firm had been found involved in data manipulation and warned that any attempt to misuse social media to influence India's electoral process would not be tolerated.

Congress Communications Incharge Randeep Singh Surjewala also attacked the government, accusing it of deceiving the families of those dead in Iraq and the nation.

"Another lie, another spin exposed as truth unravels. All 39 Indians had died years ago as the evidence and witnesses suggested and corroborated now by Martyrs Foundation. Yet Modi government lied, duped and deceived the families and the Nation," Surjewala tweeted.

He accused the government of not paying compensation to the families of those killed.

"Families ask questions - 1. Why did Modi government and Sushmaji mislead them for 4 years? 2. Why does the government not reveal the date of death? 3. What evidence did the EAM have of them being alive for all these years? 4. Why is government not agreeable to compensating the families?" he asked.Wellington, March 22 : New Zealand's Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and former US President Barack Obama met in Auckland on Thursday and discussed a range of issues, including climate change and the social media.

Obama, who is on a private trip to New Zealand, also gave Ardern, who is expecting her first child, tips on parenthood during the meeting.

"We talked about pressing issues like climate change and a little bit about our agenda here in New Zealand," Ardern said after meeting Obama, Efe news reported.

Ardern said she also asked Obama for "his views on different elements of leadership and also parenthood", adding that he gave her tips that she will "probably long remember".

Obama arrived in New Zealand on Tuesday night and was received at the Government House on Thursday with a traditional Maori welcome.

The former US President began his trip in Singapore and will visit Australia on Friday and Japan over the weekend.New Delhi, March 22 : The Rajya Sabha was adjourned for the day on Thursday shortly after the House met amid an unending Parliament deadlock on the 14th consecutive day of the second half of the budget session.

However, the government managed to pass a key legislation that empowers it to fix the period of maternity leave and the tax-free gratuity amount of employees with an executive order.

The AIADMK, the TDP and the opposition members came near the Chair's podium as usual, flaunting placards and shouting slogans.

Chairman M. Venkaiah Naidu asked the agitating members to return to their seats, saying he could not understand why they were creating "ugly scenes" through their conduct.

"People are saying as to why the Chairman is adjourning the House. I want to tell them that I don't want these ugly scenes to be seen by the people. That is why I have been adjourning," Naidu said over the chaos.

"Today some people (from the opposition) said that they want the House to run, but some people have come into the podium. One day, one party does it, other day some other party does it. What can I do?"

Meanwhile, Minister of State for Parliamentary Affairs Vijay Goel said that it was everyone's responsibility to run the House.

"The way this bill (Gratuity bill) has been passed, the other bills should also be passed. There is a long list of business, the other bills need to be passed too. The government is ready for discussion on every issue," Goel said amid the pandemonium.

At one point, both Naidu and Goel were speaking simultaneously over the din being created by the sloganeering members.

When the agitating MPs refused to relent, Naidu adjourned the House for the day.

Earlier, the Upper House unanimously passed the Payment of Gratuity (Amendment) Bill, moved by junior Labour Minister Santosh Kumar Gangwar, by voice vote without any discussion. Gangwar had requested the members to pass the "important" Bill quickly as the House was not in order to hold any discussion on the legislation.

Naidu had sought the cooperation of the members for the passage of the Bill. It had been passed by the Lok Sabha on March 15.

But as soon as the Bill was passed, members belonging to the AIADMK, the TDP and the Congress gathered near the Chairman's podium and began shouting slogans.

The Congress, Trinamool and other opposition parties members have been protesting against the rejection of their notices by the Chair for discussion on the multi-thousand crore Punjab National Bank fraud under an adjournment motion. They are also demanding extradition of diamondtaire Nirav Modi who is at the centre of the PNB fraud.

The TDP and the YSR Congress have been demonstrating for special status to Andhra Pradesh. The AIADMK has been demanding the setting up of a board for the management of the disputed Cauvery river water.

However, the opposition has accused the government of using "friendly parties" like the AIADMK and the TDP to scuttle the proceedings of the Rajya Sabha to avoid discussion on the PNB fraud and other issues.

Earlier, as the House assembled for the day, Chairman Naidu greeted the members and the country on World Water Day and urged all to protect the eco-system and support the conservation of water for the future generations.New Delhi, March 22 : India on Thursday successfully test-fired a BrahMos missile from a fighter aircraft using an indigenous seeker for the first time.

The test was carried out at the Pokhran test range.

Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman congratulated the Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), the armed forces and the defence industry for the success of the test.

"Formidable Supersonic Cruise Missile BrahMos was successfully flight tested at 8.42 a.m. at Pokhran test range, Rajasthan," the Minister tweeted.

"The precision strike weapon with Indian-made seeker flew in its designated trajectory and hit the target with pin-point accuracy," she said.

A seeker guides the missile to its target.

BrahMos ALCM (Air Launched Cruise Missile), weighing 2.5 tonnes, is lighter than the land and sea versions of the missile which weigh around 3 tonnes, but is also the heaviest weapon to be deployed on India's Su-30 aircraft.

So, the aircraft has been modified by the Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd (HAL) to carry the weapon.

BrahMos is a joint venture between the DRDO of India and NPO Mashinostroyeniya of Russia.

The Su-30, considered the most potent fighter jet with India, was the choice for fitting the Brahmos missile, as it has a airframe of titanium and high-strength aluminium alloys, fit for a high-speed terrain following profile.

The fighter jet's aerodynamic configuration increases the aircraft's lifting effectiveness, deflects automatically and allows high angle-of-attack flights.

The integral aerodynamic configuration combined with thrust vectoring results in practically unlimited manoeuvrability and unique take-off and landing characteristics.

According to informed sources, the modification to the fighter includes hardened electronic circuitry to shield it from the electromagnetic pulse of a nuclear blast.

Along with the aircraft, the missile was also modified to make it carry a reduced booster and fins for stability.

The missile can be released from a height of 500 to 14,000 metres (1,640 to 46,000 feet). After release, the missile falls freely for 100-150 metre, then moving into a cruise phase at 14,000 metre and finally the terminal phase at 15 metre.Lucknow, March 22 : Two jailed MLAs in Uttar Pradesh -- Mukhtar Ansari of the BSP and Hari Om Yadav of the SP -- have withdrawn their applications filed in the Allahabad High Court seeking permission to vote in the Rajya Sabha biennial polls, scheduled for Friday.

The move came after the Election Commission (EC) granted permission to the two legislators to participate in the vote, which will decide 10 members for the Upper House of Parliament.

The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has fielded nine candidates while the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) and the Samajwadi Party (SP) have fielded one candidate each.

SP's Yadav is lodged in Firozabad jail while Ansari is in Banda jail for the past 10 months.

A senior BSP leader and counsel for the two legislators, Satish Chandra Mishra, told the bench of Justice Prashant Kumar and Justice Rajat Roy that they wanted to withdraw the petition.New Delhi, March 22 : Union Electronics and Information Technology Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad on Thursday said social media giant Facebook, which has a robust presence in the country, is welcome, provided there is no compromise on data security.

"Facebook is most welcome here, why not? They have the most robust presence here. But as far as data security is concerned, there shall be no compromise," Prasad said here at the ET Telecom India Mobile Conclave.

"I am happy if they reinforce their architecture, they are most welcome," he said.

However, condemning the presence of political data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica (CA), Prasad said: "But companies like CA has no place because they have publically claimed that 'we abuse the system to influence the supporters'."

"Any sanctity of India's voting pattern should not be compromised," said Prasad.

India had on Wednesday warned social media giant Facebook and its CEO Mark Zuckerberg of "stringent action" including summoning him over "misuse" of data to allegedly influence electoral process.

Amid allegations of misuse of personal data for political purposes by Facebook, the BJP had also hit out at Congress accusing it of compromising national security by reportedly roping in political data analytics firm CA to run its 2019 election campaign.

On Wednesday night, the Facebook CEO apologised for the data debacle that upended the social media giant and said he was ready to testify before US Congress, said a media report.New Delhi, March 22 : The political slugfest over links with the controversial data consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica (CA) escalated on Thursday with the BJP claiming that the firm was involved in Rahul Gandhi's social media campaign and Congress rubbishing the charge and asking if the government will lodge an FIR against the company and its India partner Oveleno Business Intelligence (OBI).

Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, who had stirred a political firestorm on Wednesday with his allegations that the Congress was using the services of the London-based political data analytics firm, fired fresh salvos at the Congress on Thursday claiming that the firm was involved in Congress President Rahul Gandhi's social media campaign and there had been meetings too in this regard.

Congress leader Randeep Singh Surjewala termed Prasad as a "minister of lies", and asked the BJP if "Cambridge Analytica was involved in stealing data, then why did it take its services" and "whether an FIR would be registered against CA and OBI".

He said that Information and Broadcasting Minister Smriti Irani "follows" Cambridge Analtytics on Twitter and BJP's former Information Technology head, who now runs Indian government's biggest portal (mygov.in), Arvind Gupta had termed CA a "pwerful tool".

Rahul Gandhi accused the Modi government of seeking to divert attention from its past "lies" about 39 Indians killed in Iraq by inventing story of data theft on Congress.

"Problem: 39 Indians dead; Government on the mat, caught lying. Solution: Invent story on Congress and data theft. Result: Media networks bite bait; 39 Indians vanish from radar. Problem solved," Gandhi said in a tweet.

CA's India partner Oveleno Business Intelligence (OBI) lists the BJP, the Congress and the JD-U as its clients. The India partner is Amrish Tyagi, son of senior JD-U leader K.C. Tyagi.

K.C. Tyagi said on Thursday that the company had only "professional links" with the CA and that the government could investigate these links.

Prasad questioned the "silence" of Congress President for more than five months over media reports that claimed his party had roped in CA as 'Brahmastra (ultimate weapon)' to counter Prime Minister Narendra Narendra Modi in 2019.

"The report in this regard was first published on October 9, 2017 and the party maintained silence until I raised the issue on Wednesday. They denied the allegations when they found themselves in trouble after the issue was brought to the fore," Prasad said at a press conference.

"The Congress cannot run away from this fact. If the Congress maintains a conspicuous silence on such an important news of the involvement of a dubious social media company and does not counter it, then I am sorry. They don't have any right to run the country," he said.

Prasad also claimed that that the Congress took the services of CA in Gujarat Assembly polls.

"They used CA in Gujarat and it was clear from the Congress's pattern of contesting the election," he said.

He refuted Gandhi's allegation that by raking up CA issue, Modi government was trying to divert public attention from its "lie about the fate of 39 Indians killed in Iraq".

"We expect that Rahul Gandhi would not indulge in politics over deaths. He should respond to the allegations which are of serious nature," he said.

He alleged that the firm had been found involved in data manipulation and warned that any attempt to misuse social media to influence India's electoral process would not be tolerated.

Prasad said the analytics firm was accused of using bribes and sex workers to entrap politicians and stealing data from Facebook.

Surjewala said the BJP government has "become a manufacturer of fake news and an epitome of post-truth."

"The business alliance between BJP-JD-U and Cambridge Analytics has now been exposed," he said, adding that "new fake agenda" is being used to stop the proceedings in Parliament" and Prasad should be named a "lie minister" instead of law minister.

"BJP and Modi should repond. Didn't they take the services of OBI and CA for Mission 272+? This company was used. Didn't you know they were involved in stealing data?" Surjewala asked.

"Didn't BJP use the services of CA's Indian arm OBI during its election campaign in four states--Jharkhand, Haryana, Maharashta and Delhi."

The party also asked if it was true that in 2010, during Bihar elections, BJP and JD-U used the services of CA and OBI.

The party reiterated that it neither had any connection with Cambridge Analytica nor took its services.

Tyagi said JD-U has no links with his s'n Amrish Tyagi's firm or with Cambrid"e Analytic'. "Neither CA's directors have ever met (JD-U President) Nitish Kumar nor Nitish Kumar ever m"t CA's bosses," Tyagi said.

Tyagi, however, admitted that Amrish was 'verseeing JD-U's social media campaign during the last Bihar assembly elections.New Delhi, March 22 : India all-rounder Hardik Pandya on Thursday denied that he had posted derogatory comments against legendary social reformer Bhim Rao Ambedkar on social media.

Pandya, who is preparing for the 11th edition of the Indian Premier League (IPL) was embroiled in a controversy after a fake Twitter account bearing his name lashed out at Ambedkar for introducing reservation policy.

"Who Ambedkar ??? The one who drafted a cross law and constitution or the one who spread the disease called reservation in the country," the tweet read.

Following this a Rajasthan court on Wednesday directed Jodhpur police to file an FIR against the India all-rounder.

However, Pandya on Thursday issued a statement denying any involvement in the matter.

"There have been multiple misleading reports and articles being circulated in the media today, wherein it is being alleged that I had posted a tweet which was derogatory and insulting to the late B.R. Ambedkar. I would like to take this opportunity to clarify that no such tweet and/or statement, whether on twitter or any other form of media, has been issued by me," he said.

"The tweet in question was posted by a fake account using my name and display image. I use only my verified twitter handle to make official communications via twitter and the said tweet was posted by a spurious account, pretending to be me.

"I have the utmost respect for Ambedkar, the Indian Constitution and the many communities that call India their home and I would not indulge in making any kind of statement which is derogatory and/or which insults the sentiments of any community. I use social media to interact with my fans and I believe that in this age of social media one must be vigilant of misinformation and act responsibly," he added.

Pandya further said that he will approach the court to clear his name.

"I will also be making the necessary submissions in the court in order to establish that the said tweet cannot be attributed to me in any manner whatsoever and to further highlight the issue that the said tweet was posted by an imposter posing as me in order to tarnish my reputation, which is a menace faced by many well-known personalities across India today," he said.Amaravati, March 22 : Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu on Thursday demanded ban on big currency notes, saying this will help root out corruption and curb the money power during elections.

Speaking in the assembly, he sought that the Rs 2,000 and Rs 500 notes should be withdrawn and online transactions should be encouraged.

Naidu, who is also the president of Telugu Desam Party (TDP), recalled that he was the first politician to demand ban on the Rs 1,000 and Rs 500 notes.

He had been claiming credit for demonetisation announced by the central government in November 2016. Naidu, whose party was then a partner in BJP-led NDA government, had also criticised introduction of Rs 2,000 notes saying this would further promote corruption.

Naidu, whose TDP pulled out of NDA this month over the demand for special category status to the state, once again advocated the need to spike Rs 2,000 and Rs 500 notes.

"If you this, no party can distribute money in elections. It will not be possible for them to carry large number of Rs 100 denomination notes for distribution," he said.

The TDP leader said legislators work day and night in their constituencies and serve the people but just before elections, some people from big cities come with wads of currency notes and bribe the voters.

Naidu, who also served as convener of the panel of Chief Ministers for promotion of digital economy, also underlined the need to encourage digital transactions to tackle corruption.

He claimed that his government had made significant progress on this front. He said payments under welfare schemes were being made online, bringing transparency in the governance.Bengaluru, March 22 : A special court on Thursday granted a conditional bail to Karnataka Energy Minister D.K. Shivakumar for allegedly destroying evidence in three income tax evasion cases.

Economic Offences Wing Court judge Justice M.S. Alva granted conditional bail to Shivakumar on Rs 1 lakh personal bond and Rs 25,000 sureties by two persons, Additional Solicitor General P. Navalgadi told reporters here.

The investigation wing of the Karnataka-Goa region's Income Tax Department found evidence of the senior minister destroying evidence during a raid by its sleuths at a private resort in August first week last year.

Arguing against granting the bail, Navalgadi told the court that the minister had admitted to have torn a paper in which details of money trail were noted while investigation into tax evasion was in progress.

Shivakumar's counsel M.V. Seshachala, however, said the sum of the amount noted in the paper was not the same as in the money trail being investigated.

"As the cases of economic offences were bailable and the allegation of destroying evidence are taken up during the trail, we have requested the court to grant bail to Shivakumar," he told reporters.

The IT Department directed the 55-year-old Congress lawmaker to appear before the special court in connection with the illegal properties seized during the searches at his residences in Bengaluru, Kanakapura and Mysuru and New Delhi from August 2-5, 2017.

Shivakumar is the legislator from the Kanakapura in Ramanagara district. As per the declaration in the nomination to the Election Commission for the 2013 assembly election, Shivakumar was then the second richest politician in the state, with assets valued at Rs 251 crore.The statement was made at the launch of the European Chamber of Commerce in Vietnams White Book 2018 in Ho Chi Minh City on March 21.

A better business climate helps the Vietnamese market become more open and integrated, thereby facilitating foreign enterprises, said the Bosch Vietnam director.

In addition to manufacturing, European investors are able to invest in other fields, such as human resources training, smart cities, infrastructure and green development.

According to Nicolas Audier, a Eurocham co-chairman, the trade and investment relationship between the EU and Vietnam can achieve positive results in 2018 thanks to the EU-Vietnam Free Trade Agreement (EVFTA) which is expected to come into force this year.

However, it is necessary for Vietnam to quickly improve its business climate, said Audier, advising that one of most important measures is to reduce international tariffs and remove trade barriers.

The Eurocham co-chairman added that policy support is the groups central activity to enhance the business and investment environment in Vietnam.

According to representatives of the Ho Chi Minh City authorities, the EUs White Book provides them with useful recommendations so that they will be able to introduce the appropriate policies to create the most favourable conditions for foreign businesses.

The EU is currently one of the major trading partners of Vietnam whose exports to the union reached US$38.3 billion in 2017, up 12.8% from a year earlier, while Vietnam also imported US$12 billion worth of goods from the EU.

The EUs foreign direct investment pledges hit US$1.835 billion last year.Lucknow, March 22 : A day before the biennial polls for the ten seats of the Rajya Sabha, the Allahabad High Court on Thursday barred Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) legislator Mukhtar Ansari from voting, an official said.

The high court, staying the earlier order of the Ghazipur court which had allowed the mafia don-turned-politician to vote in polls on Friday, issued notice to Ansari, who is lodged in the Banda jail on charges of attempt to murder and conspiracy.

Justice Rajul Bhargava issued the order on a petition filed by the Uttar Pradesh government, challenging the March 20 order of the Ghazipur court. Ansari, through the prison authorities, had written a letter to the special judge in Ghazipur requesting that he be allowed to cast his vote in the Rajya Sabha elections.

State's counsel A.K. Sound and Vikas Sahay had pleaded before the HC that the Ghazipur court had taken a one-sided view on the matter without even considering the Representation of the People Act's section 62 (5).

The HC in its order, citing the Anukul Chandra Pradhan case heard by the Supreme Court, observed that the Rajya Sabha polls are also associated with this section of the electoral law and hence Ansari cannot ask for the right to vote as it was not a Fundamental Right.

This is set to be setback to the BSP, which is trying hard to get its candidate Bhim Rao Ambedkar elected to the Upper House of Parliament. For the party, each vote is crucial and despite the support by Samajwadi Party, and others, the candidate is falling short of the magical number.

The Election Commission had earlier in the day allowed Ansari to vote after which he and jailed Samajwadi Party legislator Hari Om Yadav withdrew their petition before the Allahabad HC seeking directions to the state government to allow them to cast their votes in the Rajya Sabha polls.New Delhi, March 22 : The Congress said on Wednesday that it will move a privilege motion against External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj for "misleading" Parliament on the issue of the death of 39 Indians who were kidnapped in Iraq in 2014 from Mosul.

Congress leaders Ambika Soni, Pratap Bajwa and Shamsher Singh Dullo accused the Narendra Modi government of trying to suppress the issue of killing of 39 Indians.

"We are definitely going to bring a privilege motion against the minister of India for having misguided the House both Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha," Soni told reporters.

"When a minister gives statement on the floor of the house, it is considered an assurance. She (Sushma Swaraj) gave an assurance that these people were alive and dismissed all other inputs being given by others. Today they have proved right and her confidential sources, we do not know what they are, have proved wrong," she added.

Bajwa said Sushma Swaraj should disclose the sources which formed basis of her earlier claims that the 39 Indians, kidnapped by Islamic State, were alive.

He said the families of those killed should be given adequate compensation and the central government should provide a job to a member of each family.Islamabad, March 22 : Pakistan on Thursday urged foreign forces in Afghanistan to take action and eliminate sanctuaries of Pakistani militant groups there.

The Afghan government and the Resolute Support Mission need to do more within Afghanistan to eliminate all safe havens and terrorist sanctuaries, Foreign Ministry spokesman Muhammad Faisal said at his weekly briefing.

Pakistani officials insist that the militants have fled to Afghanistan as the result of major military operations across the country in recent years and now operate from the other side of the border.

"It is a matter of satisfaction that the United States is taking actions against the terrorists hiding inside Afghanistan including the Pakistani Taliban Chief Fazalullah, who have committed acts of terrorism across Pakistan. More needs to be done," Faisal said.

He rejected the US claims about the presence of terrorists in Pakistan and said Pakistan has been consistently reminding its US interlocutors about series of successful military operations undertaken by the Armed Forces of Pakistan in the border areas with Afghanistan.New Delhi, March 22 : Hitting out at the BJP for injustice to Dalits and Adivasis in the states, the Congress on Thursday also urged the government to take "corrective steps" in Parliament and file a review petition in the Supreme Court on the SC/ST Act.

It said that the Supreme Court verdict on Tuesday on the cast erased decades of work of the Congress government as it laid down stringent measures for action under the The SCs and STs (Prevention of Atrocities) Act 1989, including provisions for 'anticipatory bail', 'arrest' and 'preliminary enquiry' before registering a case.

"The emergence of the BJP goverment has seen other atrocities especially against the youth in the form of Rohith Vemula, the Una floggings, the rape of Dalit girls, the murders of infants in Sunped, Haryana or the Saharanpur violence against Dalit brothers.

"It seems that there is no end to this injustice for the oppressed. The BJP leadership in every state have either played an instrumental role or have turned a blind eye," said Congress leader P.L. Punia in a statement.

Stressing every law is prone to misuse, he said: "That does not mean that those laws should be abolished. There can be even false murder or rape cases - many do not fructify. Should a rape and murder case law be abolished because of possible abuse?

"If a possible abuse of a law be a ground for its abolition, then there will be lawlessness in the country. That is why we have an investigation agency, courts and Criminal Procedure Code. The question is why should there be discriminatory treatment vis-a-vis Dalits and Adivasis only."

"Congress and all fair-minded people of this country are saddened by what has happened. It represents regression and backwardness rather than progressiveness... we urge government of India to take corrective steps in Parliament as well as before the Supreme Court," said Punia.Kolkata, March 22 : Congress Rajya Sabha candidate from West Bengal Abhishek Manu Singhvi on Thursday termed CPI-M's allegations of inconsistency in his age mentioned in the affidavits for the coming polls, as malicious and unfounded and alleged that they are demanding to scrap his candidature, to avoid obvious defeat.

Singhvi, whose candidature in the Rajya Sabha polls in supported by state's ruling Trinamool Congress, said CPI-M is baselessly referring to a 2006 age declaration form with a "typographical error" that has no significance in 2018.

"I would not have dignified their claims with a response because the CPI-M's allegations are petty to the point of being puerile. They are malicious, baseless, unfounded, defamatory and false," he told reporters outside the state assembly.

"They raised a very malicious and false allegation about my age. It is comic because in 2018, today's election they found nothing wrong with my age. Since the CPI-M and left knows that they cannot escape defeat, they have stopped fighting like gentlemen and challenged a 2006 declaration with a typographical error, without challenging the documents of 2012 or 2018," he said.

The lawyer-politician also accused then CPI-M of raising childish objections on his nomination.

"Since they went to the extent of holding a press conference and sending a letter to the Election Commission of India, I am clarifying myself to you. There is a two and half page statement by me on this issue, which can be collected from Leader of Opposition Abdul Mannan. It has all the facts," Singhvi said.

"With the cooperation of the Congress party and the supportong party, I have no doubts that the victory would be ours. These sily allegations by the Left are excuses to avoid a certain defeat," he claimed.

The CPI-M, who nominated Rabin Deb as their Rajya Sabha candidate on Wednesday claimed that there is a discrepancy in Singhvi's age mentioned in his affidavit for the coming polls and the one he filed 12 years back. It also sent a letter to the Election Commission alleging that Singhvi's forms were not properly filled.

Six candidates, including Singhvi, are vying for the election to five RS seats from West Bengal.

The election is slated to be held on March 23.

Apart from Deb and Singhvi, there are four Trinamool candidates - Nadimul Haque, Subhasish Chakraborty, Abir Biswas and Santanu Sen.Washington, March 23 : John Dowd, US President Donald Trump's lead lawyer who was handling the response to the special counsel investigation into alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia meddling in the 2016 presidential election, resigned on Thursday.

Dowd had considered leaving several times in recent months and concluded that Trump was increasingly ignoring his advice, The New York Times reported.

Trump's lawyers had advised the president to cooperate with special counsel Robert Mueller, who is also looking into whether Trump obstructed the inquiry, reports Xinhua.

Dowd's departure comes after Trump began publicly attacking Mueller and his team. In a tweet last weekend, Trump said that the Mueller probe "should never been started."

Following Trump's remarks, Dowd called for an end to the investigation. He originally claimed to be speaking on Trump's behalf but backtracked later by saying that he was only speaking for himself.

Trump's lawyers are also in the midst of negotiations with the special counsel's team over a potential interview involving the President.

On Thursday, Trump said that he was willing to talk to Mueller, an idea that Dowd has reportedly opposed to.

Dowd is also leaving three days after Joseph diGenova, a former federal prosecutor, was added to the Trump' s legal team for Mueller's probe.

DiGenova, in an interview with Fox News two months ago, alleged that FBI officials were involved in a "brazen plot" to exonerate Hillary Clinton in the email investigation and to "frame" Trump for nonexistent crimes.Family-owned Kwik Kopy Miller St, North Sydney, has been awarded NSW/ACT Franchisee of the Year, at the Franchise Council of Australia (FCA) Excellence in Franchising Awards.

The award aims to recognise excellence in business management and franchise citizenship for franchisee owner-operators. Areas assessed by the FCA include business planning and performance, systems management, franchise citizenship, openness to learning and change, as well as community contribution.

Dan McKenzie, owner of Kwik Kopy Miller Street says, We are thrilled to have been recognised at the FCA Excellence in Franchising awards. As a team, we love what we do and pride ourselves on working closely with our clients to understand their business needs and deliver the best results.

When we first purchased the Kwik Kopy Miller Street franchise, the centre was ranked last out of 100 centres. Within four years we have been able to turn the business around.

To now be awarded Franchisee of the Year, two or more staff, within just four years, is incredible. The award win is a testament to our fantastic team and the wonderful support we have received from Kwik Kopy.

[Related: Kwik Kopy pens deal with EFI]

David Bell, managing director of Kwik Kopy Australia says, Kwik Kopy Miller Street continues to go from strength to strength. In just a few years, they have managed to turn a struggling business into a top performer and almost quadrupled sales in the process.

But it is not just an effective business model that makes Kwik Kopy Miller Street a standout performer, it is their community spirit that sees them deliver first class customer service, build an empowered team, share knowledge and contribute to their franchising network at all times.

The FCA Excellence in Franchising Awards celebrate franchisings highest achievers and offer some insight into the opportunities out there as well as the amazing work being achieved every day in the franchising sector.

Here at Kwik Kopy, we like to say that you get to work for yourself, but not by yourself. You have an extensive support network all committed to your success. Being recognised at these awards means a lot to the team at Kwik Kopy Miller Street as well as to the Kwik Kopy brand and franchise network as a whole.

Father, son and daughter team, Peter, Daniel and Susie McKenzie run the Miller St franchise which offers graphic design, business cards, brochures and posters. The shop was awarded Kwik Kopy Franchise of the Year in 2017.

Comment below to have your say on this story.

If you have a news story or tip-off, get in touch at [email protected]

Sign up to the Sprinter newsletterForceworks announced today that its RapidStart Sales App, is now Certified for Microsoft Dynamics 365 which signifies that their solution has met Microsofts highest standard for partner-developed software. By successfully meeting all certification requirements, the RapidStart Sales App can now carry the distinct Certified for Microsoft Dynamics 365 logo.

The RapidStart Sales App is designed specifically for new users of Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales. RapidStart provides a simpler onboarding and customization process, with built-in training resources designed to speed adoption, at a low cost, for Small and Midsized Businesses. The RapidStart Sales App is available for customers to Test-Drive in AppSource. In addition, there are several Consulting Services offers available for the RapidStart Sales App for various Vertical businesses.

Forceworks provides the RapidStart Sales App, and other apps, along with implementation, training and consultation globally for small, midmarket and corporate businesses using Microsofts business applications. Forceworks specializes in Dynamics 365 solutions that help companies across multiple industries achieve success.

Zero, is the total number of times I regretted leaving Salesforce.com for Microsoft. Since the day we signed up as a Microsoft partner, it has been one success after another, with no end in sight. Microsofts recognition of our efforts with this designation, is just one more example. I dont know of any other company in the technology sector that is as supportive, and partner driven as Microsoft. said Steve Mordue, CEO, Forceworks.

Solutions that are Certified for Microsoft Dynamics 365 have demonstrated development quality and compatibility with the Dynamics 365 product on which it runs by passing rigorous testing for Dynamics 365. In addition, Forceworks must have numerous customers who are successfully using the certified solution and are willing to recommend it.

By requiring both the software solution and the partner to meet their highest standards, Microsoft is assuring customers that these certified solutions work with their investments in Dynamics 365. Forceworks is pleased to have achieved the Certified for Microsoft Dynamics 365 status for our RapidStart Sales App by demonstrating its success and our commitment in delivering a leading Dynamics 365 solution.

Forceworks has demonstrated a commitment to the small, midmarket and corporate segments globally, and achieving the Certified for Microsoft Dynamics 365 designation for their RapidStart Sales App reflects that commitment, said Gavriella Schuster, Corporate Vice President, One Commercial Partner, Microsoft. We look forward to continuing to support Forceworks as they deliver certified solutions to help meet the unique business needs of more customers worldwide.

About Forceworks

Forceworks, a past Microsoft Partner of the Year, started as a Salesforce.com practice 15 years ago, and transitioned fully to Microsoft Dynamics 365 in 2011. Forceworks has been engaged in hundreds of Cloud CRM deployments, with a specific focus on the small, midmarket and corporate segments. Forceworks is led by its CEO, Steve Mordue, a Microsoft Dynamics MVP. As one of the leading Dynamics 365 Consultants, recognized by Microsoft as an expert, Steve has provided training, on behalf of Microsoft, to other Microsoft Partners globally on how to launch and build successful Dynamics 365 practices. Steve is a member of the Worldwide Dynamics Partner Advisory Council and a frequent presenter and panelist at global Microsoft events. Forceworks is headquartered in Tampa, Florida, USA with a regional office in London, UK.

# # #

The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.Gehan Homes in Houston We are excited to bring more homes to the Houston-areas most desirable communities.

Gehan Homes announced their next four communities opening in the Houston area. The homebuilder's rapid expansion is evidence to their continued confidence in the Houston real estate market. Gehan is now pre-selling homes from their Journey series of floorplans at Woodridge Forest in Porter, TX and Lago Mar in Texas City. Both communities feature lush landscaping, convenient locations and neighborhood amenities. Prices at Woodridge Forest start at $193,000 and new homes in Lago Mar are priced from $190,000.

Gehan Homes is also offering homes in two additional communities that offer splash pads, trails, green spaces and more. Buyers and Realtors can view decorated new model homes in Cypress at The Grove at Canyon Lakes West or head to Spring to visit The Villages at Harmony. Both communities are priced from the $230s and offer homes from 1,850 square feet to over 3,000 square feet.

Gehan Homes is consistently recognized for exceptional design and quality, with awards that include the 2017 Houzz Customer Service Award, 2017 Texas Association of Builders STAR Award for Builder of the Year, 2018 Houzz Product Award.

We are excited to bring more homes to the Houston-areas most desirable communities, said Christina Lombardo, Director of Marketing. We have a flawless, well-established reputation in Houston and our continued expansion will offer same level of beautiful design, personalized features and attention to detail that our customers have grown to love and expect.

The Gehan Homes neighborhoods will include one- and two-story family homes and will offer a wide range of floor plans, each with a selection of options so buyers can personalize their new home.

Gehan Homes is currently ranked the 12th largest private builder in the U.S. with a solid reputation for building the highest quality homes for over 25 years.

About Gehan Homes

Gehan Homes, headquartered in Dallas, Texas, has been building beautiful homes at an exceptional value for over 25 years. Known for their award-winning designs, quality craftsmanship, smarter floor plans and competitive pricing, Gehan Homes is the 12th largest private homebuilder and the 30th largest homebuilder in the US. Gehan Homes has offices in Dallas, Houston, Austin, San Antonio, Texas and Scottsdale, Arizona. For more information, visit http://www.gehanhomes.com

###

Gehan Homes Contact:

Christina Lombardo

972.383.4308

clombardo(at)gehanhomes(dot)com"Strong sales confirm we are meeting important insurance needs in the marketplace today. We are extremely grateful for our 1.2 million policyholders who place their trust in NGL and our subsidiaries," said Mark L. Solverud, NGL President & CEO.

Madison-based mutual life insurance company National Guardian Life Insurance Company (NGL) and its subsidiaries, Settlers Life Insurance Company, located in Bristol, Va., and Commercial Travelers Life Insurance Company, located in Utica, N.Y., reported a record sales year of $790 million in 2017, which is an increase of 8% over 2016.

Strong sales confirm we are meeting important insurance needs in the marketplace today. It also helps to ensure the long term financial strength of our organization, said Mark L. Solverud, NGL President & CEO.

The 2017 sales results contributed to the growth of the consolidated statutory assets to $4.3 billion. On a consolidated statutory basis, NGL had a net gain of $38 million, which is a very solid result given the pressure that low investment rates continue to place on operating performance.

NGLs largest business line, from a sales standpoint, is pre-need insurance. Pre-need insurance is life insurance used to fund pre-arranged funeral contracts. Sales in this line of business were $451 million. Sales were also strong in the Individual Life & Annuity line of business, which offers products that assist seniors in their estate planning, totaling $124 million. The final expense insurance sales through NGLs subsidiary Settlers Life Insurance Company totaled $11.0 million. NGLs Group Markets line of business (group accident and health) totaled $204 million, an increase of 17% over 2016. The Group Markets business includes student accident and health insurance marketed by NGLs subsidiary Commercial Travelers Life Insurance Company.

We are extremely grateful for our 1.2 million policyholders who place their trust in NGL and our subsidiaries. We are also thankful for our thousands of sales representatives, marketing partners and over 500 employees who serve our policyholders, said Solverud.

A complete 2017 Annual Report is located at: https://nglic.com/About/Financial-Information

These financial indicators reflect a financially strong company, as does NGLs A- (Excellent) rating from A.M. Best Company, the leading provider of ratings and financial data for the insurance industry.

About NGL

Since 1910, National Guardian Life Insurance Company (NGL), a mutual insurance company, is located in Madison, Wis. Licensed to do business in 49 states and the District of Columbia, NGL markets pre-need and individual life and annuities, as well as group markets products including specialty and student insurance. Additional information about NGL can be found at http://www.nglic.com; Facebook: http://www.Facebook.com/NGLIC and LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/national-guardian-life-insurance-company

About Commercial Travelers Life Insurance Company

Since 1883, Commercial Travelers has provided coverage for student accident, health and special risk markets to students in K-12 through college, school sports, and special risk coverage. Located in Utica, N.Y., NGL entered into an affiliation with Commercial Travelers in 2012. In 2017, CT was approved by NY to be demutualized and became a wholly-owned stock subsidiary of NGL. For more information, visit http://www.commercialtravelers.com.

About Settlers Life Insurance Company

A member of NGL group of companies since 1999, Settlers Life Insurance Company is located in Bristol, Va. Settlers Life specializes in simplified issue, final expense, and whole life insurance coverage for ages 15 days to 85 years. Additional information about Settlers Life can be found at http://www.settlerslife.com.

NGL reported $3.9 billion in consolidated liabilities for 2017. Financials current as of 12/31/17. Ratings current as of 02/15/18.

National Guardian Life Insurance Company is not affiliated with The Guardian Life Insurance Company of America a/k/a The Guardian or Guardian Life.The company was followed by Nestle Vietnam, Viettel, Vietcombank, and Coca Cola.

Themed Believing in Change, the honouring ceremony brought together over 600 CEOs and HR managers from the leading companies in Vietnam.

Vingroup led the fields of cuisine - resorts, retail, and real estate - architecture.

The survey, jointly conducted by Anphabe Company and Intage Vietnam, was based on a number of criteria, such as salary, bonuses, welfare, professional development, culture and values, leadership, work-life balance, and company reputation.

The survey aims to provide a comprehensive overview of contemporary employee expectations, as well as help businesses to refine the incentives offered to attract staff and prove the importance of healthy working environments.

This year the survey attracted participants of experienced employees from 674 leading enterprises from 25 industries nationwide.The Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) programan initiative that has facilitated more than $5 billion in public housing capital improvements since the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) launched it in 2012will be the focus of a conference hosted by Novogradac & Company LLP. The inaugural Novogradac 2018 RAD Public Housing Conference will be at the Loews Philadelphia Hotel in Philadelphia, April 26-27.

The fact that RAD is fully subscribed at its 225,000-unit cap speaks volumes to the importance of the program as a way to encourage private investment in public housing, said Rebecca Arthur, MAI, conference co-chairwoman and partner at Novogradac & Company LLPs Kansas City, Mo. metro office. The Novogradac conference is designed as a forum for the affordable housing community to discuss RAD investment strategies and best practices.

Our expert panelists will offer attendees their insights into the basics and nuances of the RAD program, as well as practical discussions on the best ways to secure financing for RAD transactions, said Richard Larsen, CPA, conference co-chairman and partner at Novogradac & Company LLPs Toms River, N.J., office. Weve also scheduled several networking opportunities so that RAD newcomers and experienced participants alike can connect, share ideas and find opportunities to collaborate.

Panel topics include debt and equity transactions, transitioning to the Section 8/low-income housing tax credit (LIHTC) platform and maximizing the value of a PHA property. Conference details and the complete conference agenda can be found at http://www.novoco.com/events/novogradac-2018-rad-public-housing-conference.

The Novogradac 2018 RAD Public Housing Conference is co-hosted by Bank of America Merrill Lynch. Strategic partners are the Council of Large Public Housing Agencies and RAD Collaborative. Sponsors are Hunt, McManimon Scotland & Baumann LLC, Red Stone Equity Partners, Arnall Golden Gregory LLP, Coats Rose, Ballard Spahr and Stifel. Exhibitors are 2RW Consultants Inc. and Heritage Consulting Group.

About Novogradac & Company

Novogradac began operations in 1989 and has since grown to more than 600 employees and partners with offices in San Francisco, San Rafael, Walnut Creek and Long Beach, Calif.; Dover, Columbus and Cleveland, Ohio; Austin, Dallas and El Paso, Texas; Toms River and Iselin, N.J.; St. Louis; Boston; New York; Chicago; Portland, Ore.; Naples, Fla., Raleigh, N.C.; and the greater metropolitan areas of Philadelphia; Washington, D.C.; Atlanta; Detroit; Kansas City, Mo.; and Seattle.

Specialty practice areas include tax, audit and consulting services for tax-credit-assisted affordable housing, community revitalization, rehabilitation of historic properties and renewable energy. Other areas of expertise include business valuation, preparation and analysis of market studies and appraisals of multifamily housing investments and renewable energy tax credits.

###Specialty Technical Publishers

Specialty Technical Publishers (STP) and Specialty Technical Consultants (STC) announce the availability of the newly updated International Audit Protocol Consortium (IAPC) EHS audit protocol for France. This protocol is STP's first to be fully updated in both the local language and English. Leading companies around the world use IAPC EHS audit protocols to understand the scope of their EHS regulatory obligations and rapidly collect, share, archive, and export audit findings in a cost effective manner. IAPC EHS audit protocols are prepared by STC in partnership with STP and continue to focus on those national (plus, in some cases, regional or provincial) EHS requirements that have site-specific application for manufacturing operations. As a leading EHS management consulting firm with a global network of experienced EHS teaming partners, STC has indepth knowledge and technical expertise of local/regional EHS requirements.

STP and STC maintain leading-edge EHS audit protocols for more than 30 jurisdictions. The protocol documents are written in English (some others will also be updated in the local language), and are available in MS Word, Adobe Acrobat and Excel formats, as well as through STPs web-based portal or can be integrated into an existing company platform. Using the protocols custom templates and advanced functionality features, auditors can easily track audit findings and manage data over time to improve compliance, risk management and safety performance. In addition, STPs formatting is compatible with leading risk management and sustainability platform providers.

Highlights of selected legislation covered in the newly updated protocol include:



Technical Note of 27 July 2017 on the Implementation of the Environmental Authorization Reform was added to the protocol section for General Environmental. The Note, addressed to local authorities, summarizes the major changes in the procedure pertaining to the authorization of classified installations, which are implemented in amendments to the Environmental Code and other legislation.

Order of 29 February 2016 on Certain Refrigerants and Fluorinated Greenhouse Gases was added to the protocol section for Air Emissions. It establishes requirements on tightness testing of refrigeration and air conditioning equipment containing refrigerants. It also establishes provisions regarding the disposal of refrigerants and equipment containing refrigerants. The Order of 7 May 2007 on Tightness Testing Ensuring the Containment of Refrigerants Used in Refrigeration and Air Conditioning Equipment was repealed as of 11 March 2016.

Order of 25 January 2016 regarding Greenhouse Gases Subject to Greenhouse Gas Emission Reporting was added to the protocol section for Air Emissions. It updates the list of greenhouse gases under Article R. 229-45 of the Environmental Code and must be quantified, recorded, and submitted to the prefect by facilities with more than 500 employees in France. This Order repealed Order of 24 August 2011 on the List of Greenhouse Gases Subject to Greenhouse Gas Emission Reporting as of 5 February 2016.

Order of 31 October 2012 pertaining to the Verification of the Declarations Made in the Course of the Exchange System for Greenhouse Gases for the Time Period 2013  2020 was added to the protocol section for Air Emissions. It establishes the rules for quantifying greenhouse gas emissions, verifying greenhouse gas emissions declarations, and establishing monitoring plans.

Order of 26 November 2015 on the General Requirements for Installations using Hydrogen Gas in Classified Installations for the Protection of the Environment when Supplying Hydrogen Gas Powered Forklifts when the Amount of Hydrogen Present in the Establishment is submitted to Declaration under Heading No. 4715 was added to the protocol section for Air Emissions. This Order prescribes the provisions for facilities using forklifts powered with hydrogen gas.

Order of 23 May 2016 relating to the Production of Heat and/or Electricity using Non-Hazardous Waste as Recovered Solid Fuels in Installations Provided for this Purpose, Whether or Not Associated with Another Fuel and Classified under Heading No. 2971 of the Nomenclature of Classified Installations for the Protection of the Environment was added to the protocol section for Air Emissions. The Order establishes the requirements pertaining to installations producing heat or electricity from non-hazardous wastes.

Order of 23 May 2016 pertaining to the Treatment of Recovered Solid Fuel for Use in Installations Classified under Heading No. 2791 of the Nomenclature of Classified Installations for the Protection of the Environment was added to the protocol section for Air Emissions. It establishes the requirements pertaining to the preparation of non hazardous waste used as fuel in installations producing heat or electricity.

Directive 2010/75/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council of 24 November 2010 on Industrial Emissions (Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control) was added to the protocol section for Air Emissions. This Directive establishes rules on integrated prevention and control of pollution arising from industrial activities. It also establishes rules designed to prevent or reduce emissions into air, water and land and to prevent the generation of waste, to achieve a high level of protection of the environment taken as a whole.

Order of 15 February 2016 Regarding Storage of Non-Hazardous Waste was added to the protocol section for Solid and Hazardous Waste. The Order sets general requirements for Classified Installations storing non-hazardous wastes and replaces the Order of 9 September 1997 On Domestic and Comparable Waste Storage Installations as of 1 July 2016.

Order of 15 December 2015 on the Collection of Waste Tires was added to the protocol section for Solid and Hazardous Waste. This Order establishes the requirements for the collection of used tires and replaces the Order of 8 December 2003 as of 25 December 2015.

Order of 19 December 2011 on the Evaluation of Building Demolition Waste Management was added to the protocol section for Asbestos. This Order establishes the requirements regarding the waste evaluation prior to demolition of buildings with more than 1,000 m that were formerly used for industrial purposes (including storage of hazardous substances). It also details the content of the evaluation report.

Order of 12 December 2012 on Evaluation Criteria for the State of Conservation of Materials and Products Containing Asbestos included in List B and the Content of the Survey Report was added to the protocol section for Asbestos. It sets specific requirements for building owners concerning their obligation to conduct surveys of asbestos-containing materials and to identify and report certain materials. The legislation detailing List A was previously included in the Protocol.

Order of 14 December 2012 Establishing the Certification Conditions for Companies Performing Asbestos Removal or Encapsulation Work or Work on Asbestos-Containing Materials, Equipment or Articles was added to the protocol section for Asbestos. This Order details provisions on certifying companies for asbestos removal, encapsulation work and other work involving asbestos-containing materials, equipment or articles with additional details on the accreditation of certifying organizations and the certification of training organizations.

Order of 7 March 2013 on the Selection, Maintenance and Testing of Personal Protective Equipment Used during Operations Involving Exposure to Asbestos Risks was added to the protocol section for Asbestos. It establishes provisions on use of PPE during operations that involve asbestos exposure, such as providing respiratory protection devices to workers and training workers on the proper use and maintenance of these devices.

Order of 8 April 2013 on Technical Rules, Preventative Measures and Collective Means of Protection to be implemented by Companies during Operations Involving Exposure to Asbestos was added to the protocol section for Asbestos. This Order applies to employers and workers who carry out work of removal or encapsulation of materials containing asbestos or who carry out work on materials likely to cause the emission of asbestos fibers.

Ordinance No. 2017-1386 of 22 September 2017 on the New Organization of Social and Economic Dialogue in Companies and the Promotion of the Activities and Responsibilities of Trade Unions was added to the protocol section for General Health and Safety. This Ordinance comprehensively modifies the Work Code regarding (among others) the organization of health and safety services and the designation and activities of worker representatives within companies.

Decree No. 2017-1819 of 29 December 2017 regarding the Social and Economic Committee was added to the protocol section for General Health and Safety. This Decree implements Ordinance No. 2017-1386 and modifies the Work Code with respect to the set up and objectives of the Social and Economic Committee (SEC), which replaced the Health, Safety and Working Condition Committee (HSWCC) as of 1 January 2018.

Instruction No. DGT/DSS/SAFSL/2016/178 of 20 June 2016 on the Establishment of the Personal Account for the Prevention of Hardship at Work was added to the protocol section for General Health and Safety. This instruction specifies how to implement an account regarding hardship prevention as introduced by Law of 20 January 2014. It specifically establishes the provisions for 2015 and 2016 and replaces the Instruction DGT-DSS No. 1 of 13 March 2015 on the Establishment of Personal Account Regarding Hardship Prevention in 2015.

Order of 20 November 2017 regarding the Inspection During Use of Pressure Equipment and Simple Pressure Containers was added to the protocol section for Equipment, Machine and Electrical Safety. This Order implements Article R. 557-14-1 of the Environmental Code and specifies the general conditions for the installation and use, the declaration and commissioning, the inspection during use and periodic requalification of pressure equipment, as well as the modification and/or repair work performed on such equipment. It presents the obligations for operators of pressure equipment to perform a monitoring of their pressure equipment either through recognized inspection service (Service dInspection Reconnu) or through a risk based inspection. As of 1 January 2018, it repeals and replaces Order of 21 December 1999, Order of 15 March 2000, Order of 18 August 2010, and Order of 14 December 1989 that previously established various requirements regarding pressure vessels.

Order of 11 April 2017 on General Requirements for Warehouses Classified under Heading No. 1510, and submitted to Authorization, including Warehouses under one or more of Headings 1530, 1532, 2662 or 2663 of the Nomenclature of Installations Classified for Protection of the Environment was added to the protocol section for Fire Safety. This Order establishes general requirements for fire prevention in warehouses that fall within the specified headings of Classified Installations (see Section 2.0 - General Environmental). This Order repeals and replaces the Order of 5 August 2002, Order of 23 December 2008, and Order of 15 April 2010.

Order of 11 December 2015 pertaining to the Calculation Methods of Physical Parameters Indicating the Risk of Exposure to Noise and the Conditions for the Measurement of Noise Levels at the Workplace was added to the protocol section for Industrial Hygiene. This Order presents the calculation methods for the measurements and evaluation of noise level at the workplace.

Decree No. 2016-344 of 23 March 2016 Setting a Binding Limit Value for Occupational Exposure to Styrene was added to the protocol section for Industrial Hygiene. This Decree presents an exposure limit pertaining to styrene for all worker potentially exposed to hazardous chemical agents.

Order of 5 December 2016 pertaining to the Physical Quantities Represented by the Occupational Exposure Threshold Values and the Action-Triggering Values Describing the Exposure to Electromagnetic Fields at the Workplace was added to the protocol section for Industrial Hygiene. This Decree establishes the requirements relating to electromagnetic exposure at the workplace.

Instruction of the Government of 30 July 2015 on the Reinforcement of the Safety of Seveso Sites against Malevolent Acts was added to the protocol section for Chemical Management. This instruction prescribes the harmonization of information and alert systems, the required regular relationships between industry and the security forces, the development of prevention plans regarding technological risks, the relationship between the demand for transparency and the confidentiality of data pertaining to characteristics and operation on Seveso sites among others. It also required an inspection of each Seveso site by the authorities before the end of 2015.

Get more information about the range of International EHS Audit Protocols here.

About Specialty Technical Publishers

Specialty Technical Publishers (STP) produces technical resource guides covering environmental, health & safety, transportation, accounting, business practices, standards and law, offering comprehensive guidance on key compliance and regulatory issues. STP is a division of Glacier Media Inc., a Canadian information communications company that provides primary and essential information in print, electronic and online media. Glaciers Business and Professional Information Group publishes directories, technical manuals, research and development materials, medical education, electronic databases, investment information and specialty websites.

About Specialty Technical Consultants

Specialty Technical Consultants, Inc. (STC) is a specialized management consulting firm working to enhance environmental health and safety (EHS) performance. Through its consulting services, STC partners with clients to strengthen management systems' design and implementation, and identifies needs and implements solutions to meet business objectives. Services provided include: EHS compliance support; risk assessment; EHS auditing; corporate responsibility and sustainability; EHS management systems development and implementation; EHS regulatory information tools; and EHS training.

STC is certified as a Woman-Owned Business Enterprise (WBE) by the Womens Business Enterprise National Council (WBENC) and the Supplier Clearinghouse for the California Public Utilities Commission, and as a Disadvantaged Business Enterprise (DBE) by the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) Disadvantaged Business Enterprise (DBE) Program.The investment in training that a company makes shows employees they are valued and creates a supportive workplace. Employees who feel appreciated and challenged through training opportunities are far more likely to find their jobs satisfying and engaging.

The growth of the global eLearning industry is expected to increase 11% by 2020, as companies continue to recognize the correlation between employee development opportunities and increased retention, improved workplace performance, and smoother business continuity in the face of turnover. To help employers address this critical need, BLRs Workforce L&D 2018 conference to address the latest tactics and technologies for designing, implementing, and measuring learning programs for maximum ROI.

Additionally, attendees will:



Uncover the latest technologies available to support L&D initiatives, from augmented and virtual reality to gamification and more

Step-by-step guidance on developing new hire training curriculum assessments

Learn how to effectively assess your training needs to target exactly where you should invest time and resources to optimize your L&D efforts

Discover research-backed strategies for creating compelling training content that keeps your staff engaged and able to retain your message

Take away proven ROI formulas to help you sell your L&D investment to the C-suite

Hear how other high-performance companies are tackling project management road blocks, aligning SME priorities and closing feedback loops

Determine how to choose the right blended learning/modality framework to deliver formalized learning opportunities and support personal learning paths

And more!

The learning and engagement experts at Workforce L&D will cover topics that are key to training, engagement, and retention, says Patricia Trainor, JD, SPHR, vice president of content & events for BLR. Were working in a time where employees with access to training and development programs have the advantage over employees in other companies who are left to seek out training opportunities on their own (if they have time). The investment in training that a company makes shows employees they are valued and creates a supportive workplace. Employees who feel appreciated and challenged through training opportunities are far more likely to find their jobs satisfying and engaging.

Workforce L&D 2018 takes place at the Paris Las Vegas Hotel in Las Vegas, NV on November 15-16. For more information about the agenda, speakers, venue, etc. Visit Workforcelearning.BLR.com or call 800-727-5257. Information about sponsorship and exhibitor opportunities is available online.

About Simplify Compliance

Simplify Compliance helps its customers learn, comply, and succeed by providing mission-critical regulatory and business information, analysis, and tools. Serving a range of industriesincluding financial services, healthcare, human capital management, and telecommunicationsSimplify Compliance provides time-saving products and solutions that help U.S.-based businesses and their employees monitor compliance, optimize financial performance, and create and implement best practices.

Simplify Compliance operates the Argosy Group, BLR, CCMI, and H3.Group business units.

About BLR

BLR (Business & Legal Resources) helps U.S. businesses simplify compliance with state and federal legal requirements. In-house experts and an exclusive attorney network provide comprehensive, reliable state-specific information for businesses in all 50 states. Award-winning products and solutionsincluding training programs, events, web portals, reports, and subscription servicesgive businesses of all sizes and industries the best tools available at affordable prices. For more information on their offerings, visit http://www.BLR.com."Future Shock Forum is more than an event to discuss provocative issues regarding the future of business, society, and the economy, said Deb Westphal, CEO of Toffler Associates.

Toffler Associates, a future-focused strategic advisory firm, will be hosting Future Shock Forum on October 15-16 in Chicago, IL. The event, an intimate gathering inspired by Alvin Toffler's legacy of helping organizations create better futures, aims to provide a space where today's leaders, innovators, and thinkers can engage in dynamic exchanges to determine how their organizations can best adapt to a changing future.

"Future Shock ForumSM is more than an event to discuss provocative issues regarding the future of business, society, and the economy, said Deb Westphal, CEO of Toffler Associates. Its also about creating value for organizations by encouraging leaders to be forward-thinking in planning for the future."

This two-day invitation-only event will focus on foundational shifts and disruptions including biodigital convergence, geopolitical powershifts, infrastructure adaptation, and societal collision. Discussions will focus on future shocks that will reshape the way we work, live, protect, and innovate. Participants will examine what it takes to lead effectively in an age of continual disruption, and how to successfully navigate the profound impacts these shocks will have on their business operations.

Previous participants include executives from Verizon, Barnes and Noble, Bessemer Venture Partners, Bank of America, and USTelecom.

About Toffler Associates

Toffler Associates is a future-focused strategic advisory firm. Our Future Proof business consulting approach helps global leaders understand how future shifts impact current decisions so they can take advantage of opportunities, manage risk, and create future value.

http://www.tofflerassociates.comThomas McNamara, a business management graduate with a lifelong passion for writing a murder mystery, has completed his new book The Rope Diamond: a gritty narrative about Tom McEnearney, a young and promising reporter, who gets involved in spiraling circumstances of danger and struggle as he investigates the death of his girlfriends neighbor, ruled out as suicide by authorities.

Author McNamara shows his skills in keeping readers hooked in his style of presenting scenes with thrill and excitement: Ackmed looked like he was about to pee his pants. Still standing behind the counter, he moved his foot to the left and apparently stepped on a buzzer. The sound went off at the end of the store to my right. I looked in that direction. There was a room back there that was enclosed by a curtain. The curtain opened, and a very large black man emerged. He was about 64 and bulky. A tight white pullover T-shirt emphasized his muscles. I heard, You rang, boss? His voice was deep. Ackmed said, Yes, Bubba, I need this guy removed from the premises. All of a sudden, his compassionate eyes looked vicious. Consider it done, boss. He stepped toward me. I pulled out both guns and fired. Each bullet came within an inch of both ears. The black man froze. I said, Consider this, Bubbaif I was a bad shot, I might have hit you with one of those bullets. If you take one more step, Im going to put a slug up each of

your nostrils. Questions? No questions.

Published by New York City-based Page Publishing, Thomas McNamaras also reflects upon the reality of a corrupt system of officers of the law, shown by what Tom McEnearney has uncovered during the course of his investigation. There is more to the death of Rachaels neighbor than how it is presented, and it is only a matter of time before Tom completes his digging that ensures the best story for his young career.

Readers who wish to experience this fascinating work can purchaseThe Rope Diamond at bookstores everywhere, or online at the Apple iTunes store, Amazon, Google Play, Kobo, or Barnes and Noble.

For additional information or media inquiries, contact Page Publishing at 866-315-2708.

About Page Publishing:

Page Publishing is a traditional New York based full-service publishing house that handles all of the intricacies involved in publishing its authors books, including distribution in the worlds largest retail outlets and royalty generation. Page Publishing knows that authors need to be free to create - not bogged down with complicated business issues like eBook conversion, establishing wholesale accounts, insurance, shipping, taxes and the like. Its roster of authors can leave behind these tedious, complex and time consuming issues, and focus on their passion: writing and creating. Learn more at http://www.pagepublishing.com.Trade show visitors come to understand the improved safety and efficiency of server handling when they see our lifts live. You cant really appreciate how robust and convenient these lifts are until you experience them for yourself.

ServerLIFT Corporation, which manufactures the most robust and convenient lifts for data centers, will be giving IT managers the opportunity to personally try ServerLIFT data center equipment lifting devices at two upcoming shows:



March 26-29 NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference (GTC) in San Jose, California. This premier conference focuses on artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning. Visitors will learn about university research breakthroughs and the latest from AI startups and major-league enterprises. In addition, it will cover autonomous vehicles, smart cities, and virtual reality.

May 1-2 Data Center and Cloud Infrastructure Transformation Summit in New York. With 1,500 data center and cloud infrastructure professionals, this event will concentrate on the modern, full-stack, private cloud, software-defined data center (SDDC). The event sponsor, DataCenterDynamics (DCD) reasons that It is no longer a given that moving workloads into public or hybrid cloud architectures will achieve higher performance and lower costs.

ServerLIFT also recently participated in Data Center World Global 2018 in San Antonio, Texas, a show that featured more than 1,000 exhibitors from data centers, facilities, and IT infrastructure industries. In addition, another 3,500 members of the Association for Computer Operations Management (AFCOM) participated in the event.

ServerLIFT attends shows to ensure that their products and solutions always meet the ever-changing needs of IT industry operations. ServerLIFT exhibits at these shows to give IT managers hands-on experience with the lifting equipment for themselves, and to see how these lifts make the removal, transport, positioning, and installation of heavy data center equipment far more convenient and safe.

The data center managers who are using three techs to lift a 500-pound server understand immediately why this method is a vast improvement, says Steve Bashkin, director of sales for ServerLift. A single tech can slide a server out of a rack, move it to the next rack, lift and position the server precisely, slide it into the rack, all at the touch of a button.

The company also attends industry events to interact with customers. Every function of our ServerLIFT equipment has been designed using input from data center techs and managers, says Bashkin. The floor clearance, the ability to install servers at the highest and lowest levels, the way the operator interacts with the controls, the unique load-balancing design, and the overall safety and robustness of our server lifts have all come from input from techs and managers.

Learn more about the upcoming events:

ServerLIFT Corporation manufacturers the worlds only data center lift capable of safely and efficiently transporting, positioning, installing, and removing servers in any data center environment.We look forward to assist the Mexican National Companies with access to capital, liquidity, strategic initiatives and Global Joint-Ventures.

Perla Global Capital Advisors is pleased to announce Strategic Finance & Advisory Consortium for PEMEX Energy Reform. A landmark 2013 constitutional energy reform championed by President Enrique Pena Nieto paved the way for the auctions, in which private firms can bid to operate oil and gas fields on their own. Before the reform, state-owned company PEMEX had a monopoly on hydrocarbons production. (Reuters October 19, 2017).

The National Hydrocarbons Commission (CNH) has run eight oil auctions to date, awarding 72 exploration and production contracts to more than 60 companies. The contracts are seen generating almost $61 billion in investment over their lifetime. (Reuters October 19, 2017).

Mexico has opened oil and gas exploration and production to foreign investors, as well as fuel retail in Latin Americas second-largest economy. The biggest oil and gas rights were offered to companies including Royal Dutch Shell Plc, Exxon Mobil Corp and China National Offshore Oil Corp. (Reuters January 29, 2018).

We are pleased and look forward through our Strategic Finance & Advisory Consortium to assist those companies that have been awarded these exploration and production contracts with access to capital, liquidity, advisory work and strategic initiatives, in particular of interest Mexican National Companies, to participate in Global Joint-Ventures and stimulate Foreign Direct Investment, Mr. Fernando Serrano, Managing Principal & Director stated. Furthermore, Mr. Serrano, commented, I still and certainly recall my first visit to PEMEX in 1998, Mexico City. Since then, over the years we have worked with domestic and foreign companies in all three oil & gas industry components: upstream, midstream and downstream.

About Perla Global Capital Advisors

Perla Global Capital Advisors is a worldwide special situations investment banking advisory services firm serving the markets of USA, Europe, Asia, Latin America and Africa with origination and research in Australia, Hong Kong, London, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Paris and Singapore.

Perla Global Capital Advisors, provides clients with expertise in Advisory work for Debt and Equity Capital Formation, Structured Financing, Advisory work for Asset Reposition, Advisory work for Merger & Acquisitions, Advisory Work for Special Situations including restructurings, spinoffs, divestitures, cross-border Joint Ventures, Leverage Buyout, Management Buyout, defense strategies for hostile takeover or friendly shareholder buyout, liquidity events and exit strategy.

For immediate contact:

Fernando Serrano, Managing Principal & Director: Direct Tel 213. 867.1742; fserrano(at)perlacapitalgroup(dot)com

Communications; corpororatecommunications(at)perlacapitalgroup(dot)com; Tel 1.800.680.4258

Source: Perla Global Capital Advisors Communications URL: http://www.perlacapitalgroup.comThe legal team at Eichen Crutchlow Zaslow, LLP proudly announces that four of their attorneys have been honored by the Super Lawyers organization for 2018. Partners Barry Eichen, William Crutchlow, and Daryl Zaslow have all been chosen for Super Lawyer recognition, and Associate Thomas Rinaldi has been named a Rising Star.

Since 2006, Barry R. Eichen has been annually nominated as a Super Lawyer in the field of Medical Malpractice. His stellar reputation and high level of achievement as an esteemed trial lawyer precede him. In addition to medical malpractice, his areas of practice include products liability, Federal Employee Liability Act (FELA) cases, employment discrimination, consumer fraud class actions, and more. His exclusive lifetime membership in the Multi-Million Dollar Advocates Forum, which is only open to attorneys who recover $2 million or more in damages for their clients, demonstrates his skills and commitment to his clients. He obtained a $51 million verdict for a case against a medical company that overcharged Medicare recipients, and successfully settled a case for $30 million against an automotive parts company that manufactured a defective part. He participates in numerous professional organizations and has served many communities as acting prosecutor.

William O. Crutchlow has been annually honored as a Super Lawyer in Medical Malpractice since 2006. His practice areas also include products liability and serious personal injury. Mr. Crutchlows list of significant multi-million-dollar settlements speak for themselves - including an $18.5 million settlement for a case involving chemotherapy-induced paraplegia, and a $9.6 million verdict for obstetrical malpractice in a case of monochorionic pregnancy. With nearly 25 years of legal experience, he dedicates his time to serving in many professional legal organizations.

Daryl L. Zaslow is celebrating his tenth consecutive year as a Super Lawyer in Medical Malpractice. This important recognition is a reflection of Mr. Zaslows extraordinary dedication to his clients and to his profession. His range of practice areas also include wrongful death and significant personal injury. Mr. Zaslows distinctions in the courtroom include obtaining a $8.2 million settlement in a wrongful birth suit, and a high-profile and lucrative settlement in a personal injury case involving a fatal tractor-trailer accident that received national attention. He is a member of several legal organizations and an advocate for childrens causes.

Thomas F. Rinaldi, chosen as a Rising Star in Medical Malpractice for 2018, is a passionate advocate for injured victims. His areas of practice also include personal injury and products liability. He has represented clients at both the trial and appellate levels in state and federal court. In addition to this honor, Mr. Rinaldi was also named to the New Jersey Law Journals 2016 New Leaders of the Bar, a list of the 47 most impressive lawyers in the state. The winners were chosen based on nominations from the New Jersey legal community and judged by a seven-member panel composed of evaluators from all corners of the legal profession and the state.

The prestigious Super Lawyer honor comes only after an extensive, patented, multi-phase selection process. Independent research is combined with peer nominations and evaluations. Every candidate is individually evaluated on twelve indicators of peer recognition and professional achievement. Selections are made annually, on a state-by-state basis. Honorees represent the top five percent of attorneys in each state. The selection process for Rising Stars is the same, with the exception being that a candidate must be either 40 years old or younger, or in practice for 10 years or less.

If you or a loved one needs representation, please call the legal team at 732-777-0100 to speak to an attorney from this firm, or visit their website at https://www.njadvocates.com/. Eichen Crutchlow Zaslow, LLP has centrally located offices in Edison, Red Bank, and Toms River, New Jersey.

"Like" us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/EichenCrutchlowZaslow/LinTech Global has been selected as one of the 81 awardees for the General Services Administration (GSA) Alliant 2 Small Business (A2SB) contract to provide federal government agencies with integrated information technology and professional services. A2SB is a multiple award, indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity (ID/IQ) government-wide acquisition contract (GWAC). If all options are exercised, the contract has a $15 billion ceiling among all awardees and a 10-year period of performance.

The A2SB contracts scope includes big data, cloud computing, cybersecurity, agile development, biometrics and identity management, sensors and radio frequency identification, data center consolidation, shared IT services, web analytics and hosting, software development, internet of things and related IT support services.

The A2SB award is a major win for LinTech. It further enhanced our GWAC/IDIQ contract portfolio and helps LinTech to partner with our Federal Government customers by offering a convenient GWAC path for services and solutions to modernize and sustain their IT systems and applications, said Michael Lin, President/CEO. Were excited about the innovation and flexibility that A2SB provides to meet our customers critical missions.

About LinTech Global:

Founded in 2007, LinTech is a CMMI-DEV Level 3 apprised, ISO 9001:2015 QMS, and ISO 27001:2013 ITSM certified small business specializing in Agile Software Development, Enterprise IT Infrastructure Support, Cyber Security, Health IT, Financial Management, and Audio/Visual (AV) Solutions. LinTechs customers include U.S. Army, U.S Navy, DCAA, DCMA, DHA, VA, FAA, MDA, DoD OIG, NASA, Court Services and Offender Supervision Agency (CSOSA) and other Government clients.

As a successful SBA 8(a) program participant about to graduate and a fast growing small business, LinTech also holds prime contract GWAC vehicles including 8(a) STARS II, GSA IT Schedule 70, GSA MOBIS, FAA eFAST, and the Navy SeaPort-e.Will Zheng, CEO, LYVC It is all too common for small businesses to get taken advantage of or simply lost in the process, said Zheng.

Will Zheng, the 25-year-old CEO of the venture capital firm LYVC, is doing what millennials do best--disrupting his industry by bringing streamlined solutions to early stage tech brands looking to expand in China.

Starting a business in China is no small feat for an American or similar foreign company, explained Zheng. Big companies have plenty of resources and connections to throw at the process--its the up-and-comers that are missing out.

Zheng is focusing on Silicon Valley start-ups in the VR/AR, FinTech, SaaS, Automotive, Education, Mobile Internet, Big Data, TMT, eCommerce, and Transportation industries whose company IP and trademark fit within LYVCs consumer technology portfolio.

In addition to providing funding, LYVC acts as a liaison for companies trying to establish manufacturing and helps them navigate the process and paperwork associated with launching in China.

It is all too common for small businesses to get taken advantage of or simply lost in the process, said Zheng. Its important to find an investor with a strong network in China with connections at both the corporate and government levels. LYVC is fast-tracking US brands into China and saving them both the time and hassles typically experienced going overseas. "

Last year, Zheng assisted the photo printer technology brand Lifeprint with their expansion into China. His advice and connections within the manufacturing market helped them earn 5x revenue.

China has numerous opportunities if you are a technology company thats going to be providing jobs and doing so eco-consciously, said Zheng. We make it easy to take advantage of them.

About LYVC

LYVC is an early stage venture capital firm that backs companies and funds who share the values of integrity, pragmatism, innovation, and efficiency. They believe that great entrepreneurs create enduring companies that improve the world. Although based in Silicon Valley, the firm has access to incredible resources in China through the Li Yuan Group.The statement was made by Vietnamese Deputy Minister of Industry and Trade Cao Quoc Hung at the Vietnam-Oman Business Forum, jointly organised by the Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and Industry (VCCI) and the Vietnam - Oman joint venture Oman Investment (VOI), in Hanoi, on March 22.

With the participation of over 70 enterprises from the two countries, the forum is within the framework of the 3rd session of the Vietnam - Oman Joint Committee on Economic and Technical Cooperation, which is co-chaired by the Vietnamese Minister of Industry and Trade and the Omani Minister of Commerce and Industry in Vietnam's capital city from March 22-23.

Potential for further cooperation

Deputy Minister Hung said that the economic and trade relations between Vietnam and Oman have grown rapidly in recent years. Statistics from the ministry show that the two-way trade turnover in 2017 reached nearly US$120 million, up 122% compared to 2016, of which Vietnamese exports to Oman were worth US$40.9 million, up 74%. However, the trade figure at just over US$100 million was very modest, not on a par with the potential and strength of the two countries, Hung stated.

Previously, the two countries had signed a number of bilateral and memorandum agreements on aviation, trade, human resources, investment protection and double taxation, contributing to breakthroughs in their bilateral cooperation. The Vietnamese Deputy Minister said that besides promoting bilateral cooperation, Vietnam expresses the wish that Oman would act as a bridge for Vietnamese goods to be exported to the Middle East and African markets; meanwhile Vietnam will also act as a connector for Oman to enter the ASEAN market with about 600 million people.

On the same point, Omani Minister of Commerce and Industry, Ali Masoud Al Sunaidy, said that both Oman and Vietnam have a favourable geographic location and impressive economic growth. Therefore, the two countries have many advantages that can complement each other. Oman is particularly concerned about food security, so with the advantage of an agricultural country, agricultural products, foodstuff and consumer goods from Vietnam, such as rice, sugar, coffee, seafood, vegetables and fruits will have more opportunities for export to the Omani market.

However, a disadvantage for exports from Vietnam to Oman and the Middle East market in general, is that there are currently no direct shipping routes between the two countries. With the advantages of its major seaport system, such as Salalah, Sohar and Duqum ports, the Omani Minister expressed his hope that the two countries would soon establish direct shipping lines alongside a direct flight route to facilitate trade between the two. In addition, Oman welcomes Vietnam to soon open a warehouse in the country to store its goods and agricultural products, thereby not only supplying essential goods to Oman but also exporting to other countries in the region.

Deputy Minister of Industry and Trade Cao Quoc Hung speaks at the forum. (Photo: NDO/Trung Hung)



Future development directions

One of the key measures to boost economic cooperation between the two countries is to expand the joint venture model between the two sides, such as the operation of the VOI. As a joint venture between the Oman State General Reserve Fund (SGRF) in Vietnam and the State Capital Investment Corporation (SCIC), VOI was established and operated on the basis of an agreement and support from both sides. Since its initial commitment of US$100 million in 2009, VOI raised its capital to US$200 million in 2014.

Abdullah Al Harthy, Chairman of the Board of Directors of VOI, who is also member of the Vietnam-Oman Joint Committee, said that in nearly ten years of operation, VOI has focused on Vietnam's competitive growth sectors and contributed to the long-term sustainable development of the economy in essential fields, such as electricity, sugar, logistics, clean water, education, health care, agriculture and consumer goods. VOI has disbursed more than US$200 million over the past ten years, becoming a typical investment flow from the Middle East into Vietnam.

On the Vietnamese side, Le Thai Hoa, Deputy Head of the Asia-Africa Market Department under the Ministry of Industry and Trade, said that in the future, the two sides will continue to create favourable conditions for VOI to seek more cooperation and investment opportunities in Vietnam, not only in direct investment but also in the financial sector. In addition, the Vietnamese and Omani stakeholders, as well as the business communities of the two sides, will also promote trade activities, thereby detecting the needs and abilities of each other for further cooperation.

Besides promoting trade and commodity exchanges, Hoa also recommended that Vietnamese businesses focus on investment opportunities in Omani economic zones with incentives for foreign businesses to invest in producing goods for distribution to other countries in the region. On the other hand, Vietnam could also call on Oman businesses to invest in their strengths in Vietnam, including oil and gas, chemicals, real estate, and transportation infrastructure.

On the occasion, the Vietnam and Oman Chambers of Commerce and Industry signed a memorandum of understanding on cooperation between the two sides, seeking to provide information on market and trade opportunities for businesses to reach each other's market.

Representatives from Vietnam and Oman Chambers of Commerce and Industry sign a memorandum of understanding on cooperation between the two parties. (Photo: NDO/Trung Hung)EXENTA (http://www.exentago.com), the innovator in next-generation information technology solutions for the fashion and consumer goods industries, announces the all-new EXENTA PLM REVO Product Lifecycle Management solution. Benefitting from an intelligent mobile-first design strategy, the advanced software provides a rich, image-driven environment that promises to revolutionize the PLM user experience for desktop and mobile users alike. The cloud-native application can be deployed either as a standalone PLM solution or fully integrated with the EXENTA ENTERPRISE suite of business solutions.

We are excited to bring this revolutionary new PLM approach to our industry, explained EXENTA President and Chief Executive Officer Roberto Mangual. The traditionally complex user experience and limited mobility of PLM have held companies back for too long. With this breakthrough, we are freeing all design, development, sourcing teams, and business partners to work more visually and do more with mobile devices. This will extend the use of PLM to all stakeholders and simplify global deployment.

Representing a revolution in PLM, the cloud/web-based PLM REVO streamlines system setup and use by reducing data entry and maintenance, automating work tasks and processes, and simplifying system security through role and team policies. It also offers built-in commenting tools like those found in social media apps to foster improved communications and collaboration. A top-down approach to managing tasks, calendars, and workflow help teams and vendors meet market-ready dates.

PLM REVO also works with the EXENTA Design Plug-in for Adobe Illustrator that enhances design creativity and productivity by empowering designers to launch new concepts and access or add materials, colors, designs and other PLM content all right from within the popular design software.

According to Mangual, By making PLM more accessible and practical for designers, mobile users, supply chain partners, and executives, companies can look forward to faster time to market, improved style adoption rates, and greater on-time delivery performance through PLM REVO.

Attendees to the May 22-24 Texprocess Americas trade show in Atlanta, GA can be among the first to get a hands-on demonstration of the new PLM REVO solution in EXENTA Booth #941.

About EXENTA

Designed for the apparel, fashion, industrial and consumer soft goods industries, EXENTA (formerly Simparel) empowers brands, manufacturers, and retailers to advance and scale their businesses by accelerating and improving performance across the entire business and global supply chain. The EXENTA ENTERPRISE solution provides global process visibility, control and collaboration by combining traditionally independent Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), Sourcing & Supply Chain Management (SCM), Materials Requirements Planning (MRP), Shop Floor Control (SFC), Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), Warehouse Management (WMS), Financial Management (FMS), and other productivity tools into a single, industry-focused business system. For more information, visit http://www.exentago.com/.

EXENTA is a trademark of Simparel, Inc.

Adobe and Illustrator are registered trademarks of Adobe Systems Incorporated in the United States and/or other countries.E-wallets, currency cards, peer-to-peer exchanges, and of course credit and debit cards, cash is now having to compete with a host of alternatives looking to be more secure and convenient than the traditional payment method of travellers. From WeChat Pay and Alipay in China, iDeal in the Netherlands, Swedens Klarna, and Sadad in Saudi Arabia, e-wallets are soaring in popularity to the extent that cash is used weekly by only 25% of Swedes and the value of e-wallet transactions now runs into the trillions of dollars in China notes the report.

Ovidiu Olea, founder and chief executive of Hong Kong-based fintech start-up Valoot, says Alipay and WeChat Pay are now part of the fabric of commerce in China. More than just replacing cash, they have successfully replaced plastic as well. They have leapfrogged other parts of the world where there is a move to contactless and instead they have delivered convenience through QR codes, he says.

The fintech sector is also jumping into the market using low-cost technology infrastructure and operating on razor thin margins. These innovative services are leveraging the mobile revolution to offer payment cards controlled by mobile apps, which allow for a high degree of flexibility in exchanging currencies. As Ian Strafford Taylor, chief executive of currency card company FairFX, says: The pre-paid card market began to take off when consumers started to realize that high street banks were offering them a bad deal on exchange rates and fees for spending and withdrawing cash abroad. Debit and credit cards may be an easy option to default to, but the hidden fees soon start to pile up over the course of a holiday.

Proliferation in cash alternatives is causing some in the industry to believe that the days of cash are numbered. Cash is in demise, says Alex Fitzpatrick, head of global payments at travel commerce company Travelport. We will be a cashless society eventually, she adds. In her opinion governments want to move payments to a digital platform to increase oversight and transparency. Businesses would also prefer to do without cash.

However, for Thomas Helldorff, Worldpays vice president for vertical growth in airlines and travel, Cash will still be a relevant factor when people go abroad and pay, as catering for every traveler from every country you would have to integrate every single form of payment out there. Not a lot of them have, so far, managed to get global reach. It has taken the likes of Visa and Mastercard decades to get there.

The report finds that although consumers in some countries are highly engaged in the digital revolution sweeping payments, there is strong divergence between markets. In Germany and Austria for example, a strong preference for cash remains, with Germans carrying the most cash on average among European consumers. They also prefer to pay using bank transfer when shopping online and shy away from credit cards in comparison to Italy, for example, demonstrating that even within the EU there is a high degree of variation. Localisation needs to extend beyond language and cultural elements to payment methods for travel brands.

Therefore, cash is a long way from finished but the travel industry will need to pay far more attention to the alternatives which are rising in markets around the world.

Download this free report now to understand how payments are diverging and how you can take advantage of the new environment as a travel brand through detailed analysis alongside insights from:

Daniel Greaves | Senior Manager, Marketing, Payments | Amadeus IT

David Nunn | Head of Braintree Europe

Richard Cole | Chief Marketing Officer | Caxton FX

Shachar Bialick | Founder and Chief Executive | Curve

Jorge Rodriguez | Marketing and E-commerce Manager | easyHotel

Edward Chandler | CCO | eNett International

Peter Quinn | Payments and Revenue Systems Lead | Eurostar

Ian Strafford Taylor | Chief Executive | FairFX

Paul Van Alfen | Global Head of Airlines and Travel | Ingenico ePayment

Anouska Ladds | European Head of Airlines, Hotels and OTAs | Mastercard

Ben Jackson | Director of Mercator Advisory Groups Pre-paid Advisory | Mercator Advisory Group

Alex Fitzpatrick | Head of Global Payments | Travelport

Ovidiu Olea | Founder and Chief Executive | Valoot

Thomas Helldorf | VP for Airlines and Travel | WorldpayYou most likely have an idea of where you want your assets to go, but if you dont properly plan for your estates distribution, your intended beneficiaries may not get what you wanted them to receive.

No one likes to think about their death. However, leaving your estate unattended can be disastrous regardless of its size, said Stephanie McNaughton, Client Services Director of Horizon Elder Law & Estate Planning. You most likely have an idea of where you want your assets to go, but if you dont properly plan for your estates distribution, your intended beneficiaries may not get what you wanted them to receive, and may even be subject to unnecessary taxes, extra administration costs, and contests from squabbling siblings.

To further educate Baby Boomers, and others, on the benefits of estate planning, McNaughton lists the following three tips:

No. 1: Ensure property goes to the intended heir(s) with the least amount of tax liability possible and probate avoidance. Each state has their own laws on probate. If you live in California, if you own any real estate or have assets totalling over $150,000, attorneys recommend a trust to avoid probate. Probate can be costly, stressful and time consuming, not to mention helping attorneys get rich. You should also name whom you wish to be the guardian of any minor children you may have, which can be accomplished through a Nomination of Guardianship, noted McNaughton.

No. 2: Set up a durable power of attorney and health care directive. Without a proper durable power of attorney, if one suffers a tragic event as a result of illness or injury, leaving them unable to manage their finances, their family will be forced to establish a conservatorship of the estate through the court in order to assist them with finances. An Advance Health Care Directive allows the individual to select whom they want to sign medical waivers, make medical decisions should he/she be incapacitated. Without this document a conservatorship of the person through the court may be necessary. Conservatorships are difficult in they must report all steps to the court and more often than not, treated by the courts as if the conservator does not have the best motives. We recommend people of all ages have these documents, added McNaughton.

No. 3: Estate plans should be done with care to prevent the possibility of ones wishes not being followed. Wills that are not complete can be contested by other heirs in a court of law, which could result in ones wishes not being followed. While you can set up your own estate plan, it can be a risky proposition, concluded McNaughton. It is best to seek the advice of an experienced estate planning and/or elder law attorney to ensure your wishes are followed. Your attorney can advise you as to whether a will alone is enough to secure your property or whether it would be best to set up further protection of your assets.

About Horizon Elder Law & Estate Planning

Horizon Elder Law & Estate Planning offers quality estate planning for singles and couples and serves the senior population by providing assistance with governmental entities such as VA and Medi-Cal and long-term care planning. The firm also offers services in probate, guardianship and conservatorship administration in Alameda County, Contra Costa County and throughout the state of California. For more information, please call (925) 244-1185, or visit http://www.horizonlawca.com. The law office is located at 2333 San Ramon Valley Blvd., Suite 145, San Ramon, CA 94583.

About the NALA

The NALA offers small and medium-sized businesses effective ways to reach customers through new media. As a single-agency source, the NALA helps businesses flourish in their local community. The NALAs mission is to promote a business relevant and newsworthy events and achievements, both online and through traditional media. The information and content in this article are not in conjunction with the views of the NALA. For media inquiries, please call 805.650.6121, ext. 361.Mark Dion - Professional Liability Practice Leader Mark joining Founders is one of the most exciting additions we have ever made.

Wholesale P&C broker, Mark Dion, has just made a statement making move to join forces with his former partner, Robb Williams, and his largest competitor, wholesale insurance brokerage Founders Professional.

Founders Professional is very excited to announce the recent hire of Mark Dion. In this new role of Vice President & Professional Liability Practice Leader, Dion will work hand-in-hand with retail insurance agencies throughout the Country in securing coverage for their clients professional liability insurance risks across all industries. This hire reinforces Founders Professionals commitment to become the go-to wholesale brokerage for professional liability and management liability insurance placements nationwide.

Change is constant and with change comes opportunity! Im extremely happy to be reunited with my friend and colleague, Robb Williams. This is an amazing opportunity to now be a part of Founders and their growing professional liability empire. Theyve had my respect and admiration as a competitor for years. Im very excited to now join them and Im looking forward to growing with our retail and carrier partners. Now, lets write some business! commented Dion.

With over twelve years of wholesale brokerage experience, and numerous years as a professional liability underwriter before that, Mark Dion was a natural fit to join the Founders Professional team. A favorite with agents and underwriters alike, everybody loves working with Mark. His knowledge of and experience in the professional liability marketplace will make him another invaluable resource to Founders retail partners.

Robb Williams, President of Founders Professional, commented, "Mark Dion and I have known each other for a long time as colleagues and friends. Founders Professional continues to add one great person at a time and Mark Dion is the epitome of a great person. We began our careers together in the professional liability space and learned from each other what it takes to deliver value for our agency and underwriter partners. While Mark works with agents nationwide, he will be leading the charge of our growth in the Northeast Region. Mark joining Founders is one of the most exciting additions we have ever made and we are lucky to have him aboard.

Dion is joining a wholesale brokerage that has quickly become one of the most effective players in the professional liability insurance arena. The brokerage continues to focus exclusively on the placement of professional liability and management liability insurance risks and has a practice leader led team model, that operates as a hybrid underwriting and placement brokerage firm for retail agencies across the Country.

Mark Dion can now be reached directly at 813.944.9985 or via email at Mark.Dion(at)founderspro(dot)com.

About Founders Professional:

Founders Professional is a national wholesale insurance brokerage focused exclusively on the placement of management liability & professional liability insurance risks. The Founders Professional practice leaders and their respective teams have deep expertise and market access in the areas of Architects & Engineers, Law Firms, Healthcare/Life Sciences/Social Services, Management Liability, and Miscellaneous Professional Liability Insurance. Founders Professional represents a majority of the admitted and surplus lines insurance carriers that focus on professional liability insurance in the United States, additionally representing many exclusive or semi-exclusive programs.

If you would like more information about this topic, please contact Aaron Lipson at 312.219.6589 or via email at Aaron.Lipson(at)founderspro(dot)com.Spin Event Management, a business specializing in corporate event management, planning and event marketing, is proud to announce national certification as a Womens Business Enterprise by the Womens Business Enterprise West, a regional certifying partner of the Womens Business Enterprise National Council (WBENC).

We are honored and excited to receive our certification and become a part of the WBEC West community, says Kimberly Schmitz, President/CEO of Spin Event Management. The world-class certification program allows us how to increase our exposure and opportunities as a woman-owned business and demonstrate our capabilities to various government agencies and corporate members.

WBENCs national standard of certification implemented by the WBEC West is a meticulous process including an in-depth review of the business and site inspection. The certification process is designed to confirm the business is at least 51% owned, operated and controlled by a woman or women.

By including women-owned businesses among their suppliers, corporations and government agencies demonstrate their commitment to fostering diversity and the continued development of their supplier diversity programs.

To learn more about Spin Event Management, please visit http://www.spineventmanagement.com.

ABOUT SPIN EVENT MANAGEMENT

Spin Event Management is a woman-owned, full-service corporate event management and event marketing services firm, located in the Denver-metro area. We focus on internal/external corporate events, exclusive/VIP client experiences and incentive/destination services. We work with our clients to ensure we are planning the event to grow their business and create experiences for their employees, clients and partners. Spin Event Management believes in-person events impact marketing results, sales pipeline and revenue and no matter how big or small, events truly are experiences. Learn more at http://www.spineventmanagement.com, http://www.twitter.com/spineventmgmt. http://www.facebook.com/spineventmgmt

About WBENC:

Founded in 1997, WBENC is the nations leader in womens business development and the leading third-party certifier of businesses owned and operated by women, with more than 13,000 certified Womens Business Enterprises, 14 national Regional Partner Organizations, and over 300 Corporate Members. More than 1,000 corporations representing Americas most prestigious brands as well as many states, cities, and other entities accept WBENC Certification. For more information, visit http://www.wbenc.org.Our astrea project teams goal with this campaign was to create a product for families that would offer the most effective and portable solution to lead contamination showing up inside homes, schools and throughout the community.

Today, on World Water Day, clean water innovator HaloSource, Inc. (HaloSource or the Company) launched an Indiegogo campaign to crowdfund pre-orders of its new astrea bottle in the US. This bottle is expected to be the worlds most effective daily-use filtering water bottle, tested to remove lead and other heavy metals to the most rigorous National Sanitation Foundation standard - NSF 53. HaloSource intends to help consumers filter the uncertainty out of their water by delivering a portable solution that allows Americans to drink Water Without Questions.

A recent investigation by USA Today identified 2,000 water systems spanning all 50 states where testing has shown unsafe levels of lead in drinking water over the past four years. In addition, a growing number of schools across the US are also reporting unsafe levels of lead in water, a major issue considering research studies show exposure to lead and heavy metals particularly impacts childrens brain development and cognitive function. Consumers are invited to pledge their support to Kick the Lead Out! on the Indiegogo campaign page that opened today and is expected to remain open for the next 30 days. In addition to supporting clean water here in the US, a portion of all funds raised during the astreabottle campaign will be donated to water.org to support the charitys efforts to provide better access to clean water globally.

Over the last 20 years, HaloSources business focus has been international, working with consumer products companies to bring clean water solutions to developing countries; but with the events of Flint, Michigan putting the spotlight on lead and lead now showing up in our nations schools, we recognized just how significant this issue is right here at home, said James Thompson, CEO of HaloSource. Our astrea project teams goal with this campaign was to create a product for families that would offer the most effective and portable solution to lead contamination showing up inside homes, schools and throughout the community.

The astrea team leveraged HaloSources proprietary technology and assembled a team of world-class scientists, product designers and engineers to design the new astrea bottle and filter. In addition to removing lead and other heavy metals to the NSF 53 standard, the bottle will also ensure your water tastes great. Other innovative features of the stainless steel, insulated bottle include a fill-through lid which makes refilling easy and a locking straw for anti-spill security.

Be one of the first to own the new astrea bottle and help Kick the Lead Out now at https://igg.me/at/astrea

###

Enquiries:

HaloSource, Inc.

James Thompson, Chief Executive Officer (425) 419-2258

Craig Crowell, Chief Financial Officer (425) 419-2248

The Fearey Group (Media Contact)

Hannah Olson (206) 838-9211

astrea(at)feareygroup.com

About HaloSource

HaloSource, Inc. innovates and integrates technologies to deliver clean drinking water solutions to partners with trusted brands around the world. The Company works with scientists and industry experts across the globe in search of new ways to improve drinking water quality and has been awarded more than 30 patents for its ground-breaking chemistries, which provide safe drinking water for millions of consumers globally. The Company's class-leading HaloPure Drinking Water technology has the highest global certifications, including registration with the US EPA.

Founded in Seattle, Washington, HaloSource has grown to become an influential leader in drinking water purification. HaloSource is headquartered in the US with operations in China and India. Learn more about the Company's research and development and future novel technologies by visiting http://www.halosource.com and http://www.astreawater.com.

The HaloPure and astrea brands are registered trademarks of HaloSource, Inc. All other trademarks, brand names or product names belong to their respective holders.

This document contains certain forward-looking statements relating to the Company. The Company considers any statements that are not historical facts as "forward-looking statements". They relate to events and trends that are subject to risk and uncertainty that may cause actual results and the financial performance of the Company to differ materially from those contained in any forward-looking statement. These statements are made by management in good faith based on information available to them and such statements should be treated with caution due to the inherent uncertainties, including both economic and business risk factors, underlying any such forward-looking information.We make custom stamps the old-fashioned way,  Niko Courtelis, Chief Perforation Officer of The Portland Stamp Company

Long before Twitter challenged writers to go short, poster stamps challenged designers to go small. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, poster stamps were widely used to commemorate special occasions, celebrate weddings, and of course, promote products. Now a longtime collector has launched a business to design, print, and perforate poster stamps in the classic tradition for clients and artists.

We make custom stamps the old-fashioned way, said Niko Courtelis, Chief Perforation Officer of The Portland Stamp Company. Ive been collecting vintage equipment for many years. Its exciting to bring it back to life.

Clients can use their own designs, select an in-house design, or engage The Portland Stamp Company to create a custom stamp just for them. The designs are output as letterpress or digital printing, usually onto gummed paper, then perforated by Courtelis and his team.

The company was founded by Niko and Joshua Berger, his business partner in Plazm Design. Both are award-winning creative directors who bring a wealth of graphic design, publication, fine art, and print experience to their work. The Portland Stamp Companys limited edition Artist Series will launch later this spring, featuring the art of Ed Fella and Kate Bingaman-Burt among many others. A special run of stamps for the popular #Write_On campaign premieres in April.

National Letterwriting Month to feature The Portland Stamp Company

During National Letterwriting Month each April, people around the country take the Write_On Challenge: to write thirty letters in thirty days. Individuals may buy kits featuring pens, log sheets, cards made by Portlands Egg Press and Hello!Luckyand limited edition poster stamps by The Portland Stamp Company. Groups throw big parties to write and create together using Party Packs that also feature the stamps. According to Egg Press founder Tess Darrow, the project aims to promote joy, creativity, expression, and connection through hand-written correspondence. Many writers document and post their efforts with the hashtag #Write_On on Instagram and other social platforms.

The Rise and Fall of the Poster Stamp

In the 1860s, the mayor of Stratford-upon-Avon decided the town should build a memorial theatre for William Shakespeares upcoming 300th birthday celebration. To raise funds, they sold tiny commemorative posters that looked a lot like postage stamps, only a bit largeraccidentally starting a craze. It was the first known use of poster stamps. The little perforated beauties grew wildly popular by the late 19th century, and were used for celebrating events, promoting causes, and selling products. They were used for political propaganda in the world wars, and after World War II the trend died out. Until now.

Chief Perforation Officer Niko Courtelis

The Portland Stamp Company is honored to announce the appointment of our first CPO, Niko Courtelis. Niko has collected stamps since he was a young boy, and has designed official postage stamps for countries including Grenada, Sierra Leone, Tuvalu, and Zambia. He is writing a forthcoming book on Lance Wymans stamp designs, makes stamp-related artwork under the rubric Philatelic Atrocities, and has given a talk The Curiosity Club called Stamps Ate My Brain. Beyond stamps, Niko can be found working as a graphic designer, video director, and Creative Director at Plazm Design.

On the Recent Founding of The Portland Stamp Company

The Portland Stamp Company was founded by Courtelis and Joshua Berger, his business partner in Plazm Design. Portland Stamp Company is a division of Plazm Media, known for its award-winning studio Plazm Design and for publishing Plazm magazine, founded in 1991. Plazm Design recently expanded its presence to Central Oregon and launched the OnCreativity video series; the magazine is now published as a separate nonprofit entity. At Plazm Design, Together with our clients, we solve problems, tell stories, and seek out truth.Merlin Contracting Named 2017 National Custom Home Builder of the Year Steve and Bart Jones are a credit to our industry, and embody what HBA membership is all about. The work done by Merlin demonstrates a commitment to excellence, craftsmanship and customer service that is beyond compare in Nevada." - Nathaniel Hodgson, CEO, Southern Nevada Home Builders Association

Stephen Steve Jones, Founder & CEO of Merlin Contracting, Las Vegas, along with his partner and brother, Bart Jones, and the entire Merlin staff, was recently honored as the 2017 National Custom Home Builder of the Year by the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB). Sponsored by Sherwin-Williams, the award was presented during the NAHB International Builders show held in Orlando, FL.

Presented annually by the NAHB, a federation of more than 700 state and local associations with more than 140,000 members, the Custom Home Builder of the Year award recognizes honorees for their professionalism, leadership, innovation and creativity in crafting unique custom homes. Jones and the Merlin team were recognized for the companys craftsmanship and innovation in creating dream homes for clients, as well as their integrity and leadership within the local community.

Its such an honor for our team to be recognized by the NAHB, said Jones. Our goal is always to satisfy our customers unique visions with creativity and quality, and this award recognizes the ongoing achievement of that goal. Bart and I couldnt be more proud of the effort put forth daily by our experienced team of superintendents and entire staff.

During each of the past six years, Merlin Contracting has completed two custom homes ranging in value from $1.8 million to $10.2 million, as well as averaging six custom remodels ranging in value up to $9.5 million and three custom highrise unit remodels ranging up to $15.2 million. Several of the projects have been featured in national publications, including the Wall Street Journal and Architectural Digest.

Jones built Merlin Contracting on a commitment to maintaining the highest quality building standards and treating people with integrity, respect and compassion. He and Bart are well known in the region and their contemporaries have applauded their way of conducting business as well as their steadfast commitment to excellence. Gary Wilkerson, president of Gary Wilkerson Custom Homes LLC and chairman of the NAHB Custom Builders Committee, acknowledged Jones integrity and technique by saying, Steve likes to say hes built homes with a handshake rather than a contract and that integrity shines through not just in the relationships he establishes with his clients but in the fine craftsmanship that marks his homes.

Nathaniel Hodgson, CEO, Southern Nevada Home Builders Association, added, Steve and Bart Jones are a credit to our industry, and embody what HBA membership is all about. The work done by Merlin demonstrates a commitment to excellence, craftsmanship and customer service that is beyond compare in Nevada.

View some of Merlin Contractings award-winning projects or learn more about the firms services.

About Merlin Contracting

Merlin Contracting is a custom home design-build firm. We have had the pleasure to design and construct spectacular homes and estates ranging from $1 million to $25 million as well as multi-million dollar highrise penthouse apartment build-outs. We also renovate and remodel homes and condominiums of all sizes.Safety Culture 2018 | September 12-14, 2018 | Atlanta, GA Since OSHA fines have skyrocketed over 80% in 2016, organizations across the U.S. are struggling to train and manage their staff to avoid citations. Implementing stricter safety rules alone wont cut it - Amanda Czepiel, JD, senior managing editor of EHS for BLR.

BLR, the leading provider of employment, safety, and environmental compliance information and technology, is pleased to announce the third annual Safety Culture 2018 conference, coming September 1214 to Atlanta, Georgia.

Safety Culture 2018 will empower employers to create a workplace culture that will strengthen safety compliance and engagement, reduce risk for accidents and injury, and avoid costly OSHA fines and litigation. OSHA maintains that creating a strong safety culture has the single greatest impact on incident reduction in any process, which ultimately saves companies time and money in lost workdays, performance lapses, and costly claims. The curriculum of this interactive 2-day conference, with optional preconference workshops, applies to both safety and HR professionals who need to improve safety outcomes and workforce retention, while proving the ROI of their efforts.

Attendees will learn practical, proven strategies for:



Dealing with difficult employees and training them to make safety a priority

Supercharging your safety committees for maximum safety engagement and retention

Measuring safety performance with analytics and hazard tracking

Evaluating and fine-tuning incentives and disciplinary systems to ensure maximum effectiveness

Identifying and eliminating cultural hazards

Improving your safety training to ensure its engaging and accessible for all employees

And more!

Safety engagement is the foundation of effective safety management, says Amanda Czepiel, JD, senior managing editor of EHS for BLR. Since OSHA fines have skyrocketed over 80% in 2016, organizations across the U.S. are struggling to train and manage their staff to avoid citations. Implementing stricter safety rules alone wont cut itthe only way to truly improve your safety program is from the employee-level up, and that begins by instilling a sense of safety culture and community in your workforce.

The event will take place at the Hyatt Regency Atlanta in the heart of Atlanta, Georgia. For more information, please visit safetyculture.blr.com.

About Simplify Compliance

Simplify Compliance helps its customers learn, comply, and succeed by providing mission-critical regulatory and business information, analysis, and tools. Serving a range of industriesincluding financial services, health care, human capital management, and telecommunicationsSimplify Compliance provides timesaving products and solutions that help U.S.-based businesses and their employees monitor compliance, optimize financial performance, and create and implement best practices.

Simplify Compliance operates the Argosy Group, BLR, CCMI, and H3.Group business units.

About BLR

BLR (Business & Legal Resources) helps U.S. businesses simplify compliance with state and federal legal requirements. In-house experts and an exclusive attorney network provide comprehensive, reliable state-specific information for businesses in all 50 states. Award-winning products and solutionsincluding training programs, events, Web portals, reports, and subscription servicesgive businesses of all sizes and industries the best tools available at affordable prices. For more information on their offerings, visit http://www.BLR.com.

Contact

Kimberly St. Lawrence

Marketing Director | Events

BLRBusiness & Legal Resources

35 Village Road

Middleton, MA 01949

860-510-0100, Ext. 3874

kstlawrence@blr.com

http://www.BLR.comChanges in automotive technology, increased datasets, and the need for the secure exchange of data has prompted the ADF 2.0 specification to be created. Vendors are passing critical data in the ADF comments field because of the limitations of the 1.0 specification.

PCG Companies, an industry leader in digital marketing, education, research, and data intelligence for the automotive industry, is pleased to announce the first public release of the Autolead Data Format (ADF) 2.0 Standard. The ADF 2.0 Standard will be introduced at the 2018 NADA Convention and will be open for public discussion and revisions in the coming months to serve the dealer, vendor, and OEM communities.

David Metter, Co-Founder and President of AutoHook, powered by Urban Science, who was a part of the original ADF Committee, has been serving as Chairman of the ADF 2.0 Specification Committee, alongside Nancy M. Hernandez, Owner and Founder of Advertising Avenue and ADF Converter powered by Lead Adaptor. The updated ADF standards, which have not been revised since May of 2000, will introduce two new elementsdetails and customto accommodate needs of those beyond CRM systems. The committee has been working on the revised specification since Nov 2017. The first committee meeting was held at the Automotive Analytics and Attribution Summit (AAAS) in Florida.

The new elements introduced in ADF 2.0 will provide areas for creating transaction types such as: sales, service and parts, URLs for sensitive data information, and standardization for chat that can be built out between dealerships and their CRM for custom use. ADF 2.0 will still be based on an XML format and will be limited to use in the automotive vertical.

PCG Companies is one of 17 automotive vendors who have contributed to the new ADF 2.0 Standards. The full list of contributors includes: Advertising Avenue, ASC Corp, Call Drip, CarNow, Clarivoy, Cox Automotive, Dealer Inspire, Dealer Socket, Dominion, Drive it Now, Edmunds, ELEAD1ONE, Kain Automotive, Team Velocity Marketing, TrueCar, Urban Science and VinSolutions.

Brian Pasch, Founder of PCG Companies commented: Changes in automotive technology, increased datasets, and the need for the secure exchange of data has prompted the ADF 2.0 specification to be created. Vendors are passing critical data in the ADF comments field because of the limitations of the 1.0 specification. The work of the ADF Committee is far from over but it our hope to have a finalized specification for the 2018 Automotive Analytics and Attribution Summit (AAAS) in Palm Beach, Nov 18-20th.

David Metter, along with Brian Pasch, will provide an update of the ADF 2.0 Standards at the 2018 AWA Awards Ceremony on March 22nd in Las Vegas, just prior to the National Automotive Dealers Association (NADA) Convention. Hosted annually, the AWA Awards recognize the best products and companies serving the automotive industry. The ceremony is open to all automotive dealers, OEMs, and vendors, and tickets to attend the ceremony are available at http://www.awa.autos.

About PCG Companies:

PCG Companies is composed of an award-winning digital marketing agency, consulting firm, and online training platform located in Monmouth County, NJ. PCGs roots began in digital marketing for the automotive industry, and have since expanded into non-automotive verticals from travel agencies to restaurants and everything in between. PCGs mission, Advocate-Educate-Elevate, embodies their core ideals; to advocate for transparency, educate the public on the ever-changing digital landscape, and elevate their clients to success. PCG has also expanded to automotive product research, as well as data reporting for automotive dealers with their marketing intelligence tool, Vistadash. For more information, please visit http://www.pcgcompanies.com.

About the Automotive Analytics and Attribution Summit

The Automotive Analytics & Attribution Summit (AAAS) is dedicated to online marketing analytics and attribution for the automotive industry. Auto dealers and manufacturers invest heavily in online advertising, yet few standards exist for tracking consumer influence, engagement, and conversion. The auto industry and their advertising partners must work closer together to determine the influences that result in a sale. The conference attracts the top dealer groups, marketing and analytics managers, as well as the top technology companies serving the automotive industry. For more information, visit: http://automotiveattributionsummit.com/The festival comprises of diverse activities, including literature, cinematography, performances, and academic events, and will take place continuously for one month at more than 20 major cultural and arts venues across the Vietnamese capital city.

The programme promises to provide Vietnamese readers with sufficient and interesting information on the life, career, and literary works of Franz Kafka, as well as his contributions to literature and his influence on other famous writers, philosophers, and artists.

As part of the festival, a talk on the life, career, and works of Kafka is scheduled for 2.30pm on March 24 at No. 99 Nguy Nhu Kon Tum Street.

The photo and document exhibitions, themed Kafka: Journey to Vietnamese readers, will take place at the Dong Tay cultural space (No. 99 Nguy Nhu Kon Tum Street, Thanh Xuan district) from March 24 to April 1, at Heritage Space (No. 6 Nguyen Hoang Street, Nam Tu Liem district) from April 3 to 8, and at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities (No. 336 Nguyen Trai Street, Thanh Xuan distrct) between April 9 and 14.

Film screenings are also scheduled as part of the festival, including the documentary film Who is Kafka? on March 25 and a short Kafkaesque film Joseph Kilian on April 4, alongside an arts programme produced by Austria on the evening of April 6 and a seminar themed Kafka and Asian literature on April 14 at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities.

Franz Kafka was born in Prague (now the capital of the Czech Republic) into a German-speaking Jewish family. He mainly wrote in German and made many trips throughout Europe, such as Austria, France, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy, for relaxation and disease treatment.

His famous works, such as The Metamorphosis (Die Verwandlung in German), The Trial (Der Prozess), and The Castle (Das Schloss), feature the topics and prototypes of estrangement, physical and mental cruelty, father-son conflict, characters in scary hunts, and mysterious transformations.When Wing Zone founders Matt Friedman and Adam Scott first concocted the idea to whip up wings in their fraternity house at the University of Florida, they couldnt imagine that one day they would be celebrating the 25th anniversary of a company spanning 19 states in the U.S. and with a presence in eight countries across the globe.

At the time, we both knew how popular wings were in Gainesville and we also had access to a kitchen  so that entrepreneurial spark led us to creating what would later become Wing Zone, said Friedman. Its remarkable to think that the brand has grown older than we ourselves were when we first set out on this journey. Were excited to celebrate our success with all of the Flavorholics that have helped us reach this milestone.

The company is proud to announce a week-long celebration of its 25th anniversary which will take place from March 26 to March 29. On the first two days, Monday, March 26 and Tuesday, March 27, all Wing Zone locations will offer baskets for $4. Those baskets can include six boneless wings or a  pound burger or four chicken tenders with any regular side. On the next two days, Wednesday, March 28 and Thursday, March 29, all Wing Zone locations will offer 25 boneless wings for $10.99.

Today, there are more than 80 Wing Zone locations across the globe and Friedman and Scott have since been honored by being inducted into the Buffalo Wing Hall of Fame. The two friends and fraternity brothers began operations in 1991, and after initially being shut down by University of Florida authorities, the two pulled together funding to open the first official Wing Zone location in Gainesville in 1993.

In 2017, the co-founders introduced the first global brand refresh to further the mission of creating a fun, relatable dining atmosphere offering guests the best chicken wings in the universe. The refresh focused on Bigger Tenders, Better Boneless, Jumbo Wings, a modernized menu, stronger alignment between domestic and international locations, and an updated guest promise.

Adam and I are still as driven as when we first started tossing wings in the frat house and as we head into our next 25 years, its important that we continue to find ways to give our guests the very best product at an incredible value. Thats the driving force behind our week-long anniversary celebration, said Friedman. We hope that our Flavorholics in the communities that we serve across the country share in the fun and we promise to keep giving them reasons to come back as we march into the next 25.

To find the closest Wing Zone, visit https://www.wingzone.com/locations/. More information can be found by visiting Wing Zone on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

ABOUT WING ZONE

Wing Zone was founded in 1991 at the University of Florida by Matt Friedman and Adam Scott, who dubbed themselves Flavorholics because of their love of great wings and amazing flavors. The Wing Zone franchise was born in their fraternity house kitchen, and the concept quickly flourished through delivery to their fellow college students. After opening several more Wing Zone locations in college markets across the country, Scott and Friedman began offering franchises in 2000. Wing Zone now has nearly 100 locations open across the U.S. and a strong international presence, including Panama, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Malabo, Singapore and Guatemala. For more information about Wing Zone visit http://www.wingzone.com.Dr. Gregory Toback, New London, CT Periodontist, Welcomes Clinicians to Synergy Study Club CE Series Drs. Gregory Toback and Marianne Urbanski launch the first Shoreline Periodontics Synergy Study Club dental continuing education (CE) course for dentists and specialists on March 28, 2018.

Board-certified periodontist in New London, CT and Westerly, RI, Dr. Gregory Toback, and his associate Dr. Marianne Urbanski, will host the first Shoreline Periodontics Synergy Study Club event on March 28, 2018. The periodontal team is excited to welcome Dr. Samuel Low to present on periodontal disease during their 18-continuing education (CE) credit program. Drs. Toback and Urbanski encourage dentists and specialists searching for new dental CE courses to attend the all-day event.

The Shoreline Periodontics Synergy Study Club on March 28 is the first course in a series of events hosted by Shoreline Periodontics for the 2018 year, including an exclusive member technology night on May 24. The events focus on different topics within dentistry and periodontics, including gum disease treatment and restoration of aesthetic dental implants. Attendees can experience an intimate setting with Drs. Toback, Urbanski, and the guest speaker along with a complimentary meal and two tickets to attend the guest lecture by Dr. Roy Shelbourne on October 12. On November 29, attendees will have the chance to engage in an interactive lecture with Drs. Toback and Urbanski on topics ranging from laser therapy treatments to preventing and treating ailing implants.

During the 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. event, Dr. Low will present on "The 'New' Periodontal Disease: Inflammatory and Risky." Dr. Low is a world-renowned periodontist with over 30 years of experience and an associate faculty member at the prestigious Pankey Institute. With a straightforward and entertaining teaching style, Dr. Low provides dentists, periodontists, and dental hygienists with speaking and consulting services relevant to the modern dental industry. Participants will receive real-world training that can help boost team productivity and improve case acceptance.

Drs. Toback and Urbanski, the highly esteemed Westerly, RI and New London, CT, periodontists, are thrilled to be launching the first Shoreline Periodontics Synergy Study Club event of the year and look forward to future ones. Dentists and specialists interested in learning more about or registering for any of Shoreline Periodontics 18-credit dental CE courses can contact the New London, CT practice at 860-443-2428 or visit http://www.shorelineperio.com.

About the Practice

Shoreline Periodontics is a periodontal practice offering personalized dental care for patients since 1998 and is located in New London, CT and Westerly, RI. Leading board-certified periodontist, Dr. Gregory A. Toback, received his B.A. from St. Johns University and his Doctorate of Dental Medicine from the University of Connecticut. He also received advanced training in periodontics and dental implants at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio. Dr. Toback focuses on minimally invasive surgeries, offering LANAP and belongs to a small group of dental professionals currently providing the Chao Pinhole Surgical Technique for treatment of gum recession. Dr. Marianne Urbanski has been voted one of Connecticuts top dentists for more than seven years by Connecticut Magazine. Dr. Urbanski graduated cum laude from the College of Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts where she earned a Bachelors degree in Biology. She also received her Doctor of Dental Medicine degree and her Masters of Dental Science degree from the University of Connecticut Dental School. Dr. Urbanski prides herself on offering caring, professional treatment to each patient. To learn more about Shoreline Periodontics and their dental services visit their website at http://www.shorelineperio.com or call 860-443-2428 for the New London, CT location, or 401-596-0000 for the Westerly, RI office.Mr. Dugan has vast experience in the financial management of manufacturing companies within the power industry.

ZPower, the worlds only developer of rechargeable, silver-zinc microbatteries, announces the appointment of Dennis Dugan to Chief Financial Officer. Mr. Dugan previously served as VP of Accounting & FP&A for ZPower, and oversees all financial reporting for ZPower operations.

Mr. Dugan has vast experience in the financial management of manufacturing companies within the power industry. Prior to joining ZPower, Mr. Dugan worked as a Controller for Implant Direct, Inc. (Danaher Corporation), where he was responsible for all financial reporting for North American operations. Before that role, he was the Chief Financial Officer for Nutiva, Inc. He has also worked as Chief Financial Officer for Advanced Structured Alloys, Inc.; Corporate Controller for Abrisa Industrial; Plant Controller for Pentair; and Vice President of Finance / Controller for Joslyn Electronic Systems (Danaher Corporation) and Pacific Scientific in the Electronic Kinetics Division (Danaher Corporation).

Mr. Dugans early career includes 12 years at Power-One Inc., where he worked as a Cost Accountant, Accounting Supervisor, International Finance Manager and Director of Finance/Controller. He graduated from Le Moyne College with a bachelors degree in accounting, and has a Master of Business Administration from Pepperdine University.

To learn more about ZPower, visit http://www.zpowerbattery.com.

About ZPower, LLC:

ZPower, with headquarters and a manufacturing facility in Camarillo, California, is a leader in the development of rechargeable silver-zinc batteries for microbattery applications. ZPower batteries deliver unmatched performance, improve user experience and are better for the environment. ZPower is ISO 13485:2016 and ISO 9001:2008 certified, and its facility and devices are registered with the FDA. For more information, visit http://www.zpowerbattery.com.Monique Rodriguez, CEO and Founder, Mielle Organics Giving back is important to me, I understand that to whom much is given much is required. I wasnt given this platform to keep my success to myself but to help others by inspiring and encouraging them to live a fulfilled life.  Monique Rodriguez, CEO and Founder

This past weekend on Saturday, March 17, 2018 Monique Rodriguez, CEO and Founder of award-winning beauty brand Mielle Organics attended celebrity couple, Richard and Tina Lawsons 2nd Annual Wearable Art Gala. The renowned fundraiser hosted at the magnificent Hotel Alexandria in Los Angeles, CA, brought together celebrities, entertainers, media and notable guests for an extraordinary opportunity to support the WACO Theater Center programs while paying homage to this years WACO Theater Center honorees Beyonce Knowles Carter and Gloria Carter.

The night dedicated to giving back included a WACO to Wakanda theme where the red carpet was adorned by stunning African inspired looks. Guests were then greeted to a sampling of creole dishes, danced the night away and then were led in true New Orleans style with line dancing into the ballroom for the events main program. Hosted by comedian and Get Out star Lil Rel Howery and a live auction spearheaded by television personality Star Jones where even six-year-old daughter of Jay-Z and Beyonce, Blue Ivy herself got in on the auction outbidding Tyler Perry. Music Mogul Jay-Z presented his mother Gloria Carter with the Everyday People Award for her incredible impact and philanthropic work she has done with his Shawn Carter Foundation. Followed by a tearful Beyonce who delivered a powerful speech after receiving the WACO Theater Center Humanitarian Award for her charitable efforts through her Bee Good Foundation.

To say the event was remarkable would be an understatement, WACO Theater Center raised close to half a million dollars. However, just when you thought the night was over, inspired by Beyonces heartfelt speech and the tremendous amount of support from those in the room, Monique Rodriguez stunned the entire audience when she got up, coming center stage and offering to donate twenty thousand dollars on behalf of Mielle Organics. The donation is in support of two under privilege children to attend the WACO Theater Center for an entire year. A girl under Tinas Angels mentorship program and one boy under Richards Warriors mentorship program. An opportunity for the two children between the ages of twelve to fourteen who will learn how to walk, talk, interview for a job, learn the proper etiquette and the best way to handle themselves in every situation. In addition, to helping the young mentees be exposed to different forms of the arts.

ABOUT MONIQUE RODRIGUEZ

Monique Rodriguez, Mielle Organics Founder and CEO, has over nine years of experience as a registered nurse. Her background in science and focus on health from the inside out inspired Monique to share her regimen of healthy, tailbone-length hair with the masses. She is passionate about inspiring women in business and entrepreneurship. Moniques desire to create translates throughout all aspects of her life. When she is not running her beauty brand, she is testing new recipes or mentoring other young women. She is dynamic and multi-faceted with a true love and appreciation for all things beauty related. Monique resides in Indiana with her husband and COO of Mielle Organics, Melvin, and their two beautiful daughters, Mia and Mackenzie.Graduating Students at the University of Queensland (UQ)  Ochsner Clinical School

The latest graduating class for the University of Queensland (UQ)  Ochsner Clinical School class celebrated Match Day results with an impressive 95% Match Rate through the National Residency Match Program (NRMP).

According to the NRMP the average national matching rate for medical school students was 94.3% for 2017.

Students matched into residency training programs at many prestigious institutions including UCLA, Vanderbilt, Emory University, University of Chicago, Dartmouth University, St. Louis University, Icahn SOM at Mount Sinai and in-state programs at Tulane University and LSU.

We had 87 students enter the Match, our largest class to date, 37% of our Matched graduates have chosen to remain in Louisiana for residency training, with 23% staying in the Ochsner Health System, said Leonardo Seoane M.D., Regional Dean of the University of Queensland -Ochsner Clinical School. The data demonstrates that physicians tend to practice in the state in which they train. We are proud to train future physicians in the Ochsner Way who will care for us and our families while addressing the physician shortage in our state.

The class of 2017 UQ  Ochsner Clinical School students graduated in December 2017 and will begin their residencies in July 2018. This sixth graduating class spend the first two years of their medical school careers side-by-side their Australian colleagues in Brisbane. The Ochsner medical students spend the third and fourth years of medical school at the Ochsner Medical Center in New Orleans, Louisiana, where award-winning teaching faculties oversee their clinical education in a world-class medical center. The innovative medical education program, established in 2009, educates U.S. citizens on two continents.

Graduates matched in specialties including Orthopedic Surgery, General Surgery, Anesthesiology, Emergency Medicine, Family and Internal Medicine, General Surgery, Neurology, OB/GYN, Pediatrics, Pathology, Psychiatry, Diagnostic Radiology, and Interventional Radiology.

The University of Queensland Faculty of Medicine ranks as one of the worlds Top 50 medical schools by U.S. News & World Report, and the university is renowned as one of the leading research institutions of the world. With a total enrollment of over 50,000 undergraduate, graduate, and professional students, the university is respected as a global powerhouse of innovation and education.

Our program offers a unique, global medical school experience and our continued success on Match Day reinforces the outstanding education these future doctors are receiving, said William McDade, MD, Executive Vice President and Chief Academic Officer, Ochsner Health System. For the sixth year in a row, our Match Rate has been 90% or higher. This is a credit to the quality of our students, our faculty and the program itself. We have a lot to be proud of.

The Ochsner Health System is one of the leading academic medical centers in the U.S. with 27 accredited graduate medical education programs and innovative undergraduate medical education programs focused on developing the next generation of health care providers. Ochsner Health System has been providing high-quality clinical and hospital patient care to Louisiana residents since 1942. Our healthcare familytoday, comprising more than 18,000 employees and over 1,100 physicians in over 90 medical specialties and subspecialtiesis driven by our commitment to Serve, Heal, Lead, Educate and Innovate, and that passion is shared with every person who passes through our doors.

For more information on the program, visit: https://medicine-program.uq.edu.au/ochsner-clinical-school. For more information on how to apply, visit: http://www.mededpath.org.Participating in these conversations, and the Biden Cancer Initiative, are prime examples of how AONN+ is furthering its mission to advance the role of patient navigation in the cancer care continuum.

The Academy of Oncology Nurse and Patient Navigators (AONN+) had a strong presence at the first of the Biden Cancer Initiatives Conversations with Dr. Biden, held on March 10, 2018 in Austin, Tx. Hosted by Jill Biden, M.Ed., Co-Chair of the Biden Cancer Initiative, these conversations are being held across the country in intimate community settings to provide members of the patient support network  families, caregivers, patient navigators and others  with the opportunity to share their perspectives on the cancer journey.

Of the 10 people who participated in the event, six were AONN+ members, including Danelle Johnston, MSN, RN, ONN-CG, OCN, Chief Nursing Officer, Senior Director of Strategic Planning and Initiatives, the Lynx Group, who sits on the Biden Cancer Initiatives Advisory Committee.

Participating in these conversations, and the Biden Cancer Initiative, are prime examples of how AONN+ is furthering its mission to advance the role of patient navigation in the cancer care continuum, says Johnston. As a member of the initiatives Advisory Committee, Ill be leveraging AONN+s navigator network and bringing them to the table for these conversations and future discussions.

The Biden Cancer Initiative builds on former Vice President Joe Bidens work on the National Cancer Moonshot Initiative by developing and driving implementation of solutions to accelerate progress in cancer prevention, detection, diagnosis, research and care, and to reduce disparities in cancer outcomes. To fulfill this mission, the initiative is working closely with patients and patient organizations, cancer researchers, cancer centers, research universities, governments and the private and philanthropic sectors. For more about the Biden Cancer Initiative visit BidenCancer.org.

Johnston was named to the Biden Cancer Initiatives 25-member Advisory Committee in late 2017. She joins other healthcare providers and medical professionals aiming to transform the way cancer is detected, diagnosed and treated. A key focus for the committee will be uncovering ways to standardize cancer care, data sharing, clinical trials and patient navigation.

AONN+ is proud to be a part of the Biden Cancer Initiative's Advisory Committee, says Lillie Shockney, RN, BS, MAS, ONN-CG, Co-Founder and Program Director, AONN+. Quality cancer care cannot be achieved today without effective navigation, patient advocacy, and the combined efforts of a multidisciplinary team working together on behalf of the patient."

About the Academy of Oncology Nurse & Patient Navigators (http://www.aonnonline.org)

The Academy of Oncology Nurse & Patient Navigators, Inc. (AONN+) is the largest national specialty organization dedicated to improving patient care and quality of life by defining, enhancing, and promoting the role of oncology nurse and patient navigators. The organization, which has more than 7,000 members, was founded in 2009 to provide a network for all professionals involved and interested in patient navigation and survivorship care services in order to better manage the complexities of the cancer treatment process.

The Journal of Oncology Navigation & Survivorship (http://www.jons-online.com) is the official publication of AONN+. It is published six times a year and features topics related to patient navigation and survivorship care. JONS offers original research, best practices, interviews, case reports and study highlights as well as a platform through which navigators can share research and views on navigation and survivorship issues.

CONQUER: The Patient Voice Magazine (http://www.conquer-magazine.com) is the Academy of Oncology Nurse & Patient Navigators (AONN+) premier forum for patients with cancer. CONQUER features articles written by and for patients with cancer, survivors, nurse navigators, and other oncology team members. This magazine addresses the issues that patients, their family members, and caregivers face every day in an easy-to-read format. Issues include interviews with patients with cancer, information on access to care, and articles on lifestyle topics such as nutrition, stress management, personal finance, and legal and employer issues. CONQUER also features patient stories that are nominated for the AONN+ HERO OF HOPE award, which will be presented at the AONN+ Annual Conference. All stories are compiled in a special issue of CONQUER at the end of the year.PracticeMatch, a leading physician database for healthcare employers, will host a physician recruiting and career fair on March 24, 2018, at the Navy Pier. Healthcare professionals will be able to meet and interview with recruiters from a number of top health systems across the state of Illinois and surrounding areas, from 11:00am until 3:00pm local time (Central). Record attendance is expected for this premier healthcare recruiting event in Chicago.

"Our physician career fairs are always a great experience in Chicago," states Mike York, CEO of PracticeMatch. "The feedback from previous events there has been extremely positive and is reflected in the increase in registered attendees for this year's career fair in Chicago. The 'Windy City' is a dynamic metropolitan hub for many top health systems, medical schools, and training programs," York adds. "We anticipate a significant turnout for the Chicago event based on the significant response rate and RSVPs."

Many leading healthcare employers are scheduled to attend the PracticeMatch physician career fair in Chicago on the 24th of March, including Acadia Healthcare, OSF Healthcare, Davita, and many more. Complimentary dinner and drinks will be provided to attendees. In addition to physicians, advanced practice clinicians and employers attending the networking event, candidates' significant others are welcome to attend as well.

"Job seekers able to advance their search efforts substantially by attending a physician recruiting career fair, and getting valuable face-time with top healthcare employers there," York states. "Within just a few hours, physicians and advanced practice clinicians can interact with representatives from multiple employers from all around Chicago, Illinois, and surrounding communities. It's a win-win for employers in need of hiring qualified healthcare professionals who are motivated to succeed."

PracticeMatch Career Fairs have grown in popularity and attendance over the past eight years. These professional, well-organized events provide candidates an opportunity to network directly with multiple healthcare employers in a convenient location and an atmosphere conducive to engaging with recruiting representatives. As the size and scope of the fairs has increased, new locations and features have been added based on the feedback from attendees. The annual schedule of PracticeMatch Career Fairs and recruiting events now includes 16 onsite recruiting events, and 13 virtual career fairs annually, plus several regional and national virtual (online) career fairs. Employers and candidates can streamline their search efforts by connecting with multiple professionals from a variety of top healthcare employers, in one event

Event Details:

What: PracticeMatch Physician and Advanced Practice Career Fair - Recruiting, Networking, Dinner, and Drinks.

Where: The Navy Pier - Chicago, IL - 60611

Who: Physicians, residents, fellows, NPs, PAs of all specialties who are interested in networking with healthcare employers in Chicago and surrounding areas. Significant others are welcome to join.

When: March 24, 2018, 11:00am-3:00pm Central Time

How: Register online, PracticeMatch website.

About PracticeMatch:

PracticeMatch is one of the most established companies serving healthcare employers with recruiting resources, including one of the nation's largest pre-interviewed physician databases. Other services and products include job boards, career fairs, a scholarship, among many other resources for healthcare job seekers and employers. Established more than 25 years ago, its Pinpoint physician database includes over 345,000 interviewed, pre-screened physicians. Based in St. Louis, MO, the company hosts more than 30 physician career fairs annually, across the country. For media inquiries, or to schedule an interview with a PracticeMatch executive, please contact Andrea Clement - aclement@usa.M3.com. For more information regarding healthcare recruiting resources provided by PracticeMatch, please contact Mike York (800) 489-1440, or email mike.york@practicematch.com.

# # #

If you would like more information about this topic, please contact Andrea Clement, Media Relations at 404.990.3614 or email at aclement@usa.m3.com.The Roofing Industry is a force to be reckoned with, and that was demonstrated by the large turnout of roofing professionals that came together to advocate for the industry.

Roofers from across the nation came together for Roofing Day, the largest advocacy event of its kind, hosted by the National Roofing Contractors Association in Washington, D.C. on March 6 & 7, 2018. This event provided roofers an opportunity to meet with members of Congress and their staff to discuss important legislative issues relevant to the industry. The event drew over 400 roofing professionals from 48 states, and as a whole, the group met with 87% of the Senate and House Representatives.

Cotney Construction Law sent five attorneys to the Capitol to help make sure the voices of roofers were heard by Congress. These attorneys met with the offices of Senators Bill Nelson and Marco Rubio as well as their respective representatives to discuss three key industry issues: immigration reform, workforce redevelopment, and regulatory reform.

The Roofing Industry is a force to be reckoned with, and that was demonstrated by the large turnout of roofing professionals that came together to advocate for the industry, said Trent Cotney, CEO of Cotney Construction Law. This was a monumental event that will push for political reform to benefit the industry as a whole. It is important that our industry continues to participate in events like these so that we can deliver our message to Congress as a unified front.

About Cotney Construction Law, LLP

Cotney Construction Law, LLP is a national construction law firm that provides representation for general, roofing, HVAC and specialty contractors. Experienced in the representation of businesses and professionals in construction disputes and transactions throughout the nation and with a proven track record in the state of Florida, Cotney is a well-known advisor and legal counsel in the construction industry. The firms practice areas include construction law, litigation, arbitration, contract review & drafting, immigration, employment, OSHA defense, licensing defense, bid protests, lien law, bond law and alternative dispute resolution. The firm has Florida offices in Tampa, Orlando, Tallahassee, Jacksonville, and Ft. Lauderdale, as well as locations in Nashville, Houston, Grand Rapids, and Mobile, Alabama. For more information, visit http://www.cotneycl.com.2018 Spring Onsemble Conference We are here to lift the burden off of you, so you can focus on the research and patients.

Forte, an industry-leading developer of clinical research solutions, announced company updates and the winners of the Onsemble Rock Star Award and the Award for Excellence in Clinical Research Operations during the 2018 Spring Onsemble Conference at the Sawgrass Marriott in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida.

During the keynote, Shree Kalluri, Founder, CEO and Chief Customer Officer, shared how the Onsemble Community has grown over the past 12 years with 250 attendees from 71 research organizations joining us at our largest conference to date. This past year alone, Forte welcomed nine new institutions to the community. We are here to lift the burden off of you, so you can focus on the research and patients Kalluri shared.

Each conference, Forte recognizes members that embody the collaborative spirit of the Onsemble community. Nominated and voted by their peers, the winner and finalists of the 2018 Spring Onsemble Rock Star award are members who go above and beyond answering questions, sharing best practices and fostering discussions across many research organizations. For the 2018 Spring winner, the community voted Lindsay Mann from Indiana University as the newest Onsemble Rock Star.

Forte also announced the winners of the Award for Excellence in Clinical Research Operations, which recognizes institutions for their performance and improvement in clinical operations based on data gathered in analytics platform Site Benchmarks. The winner for Top Performance is University of Alabama Birmingham and Most Improved winner is Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey.

Solution Updates

In their mission to help customers unleash their research potential, Forte announced several new software and services updates.

OnCore / Forte EDC / Participant Payments

Forte continues to reduce the administrative burden for its customers and further centralize operations across systems. OnCore now integrates with their electronic data capture system, Forte EDC and their automated participant payment system, Forte Participant Payments.

The integrations decrease duplicate data entry, increase data quality and streamline protocol operations.

EVAL

Forte Research Evaluation System (EVAL) now features Member Scenarios, a tool created to help organizations demonstrate programmatic collaboration for CCSG grant applications and renewals. This new tool allows cancer centers to easily evaluate and manage their membership by showing the implications of moving members from one program to another and presenting the resulting data in real time.

eReg

Forte announced the Master Delegation of Authority log and integration with OnCore to help with enterprise roll out and full portfolio management. The Master Delegation of Authority helps increase regulatory compliance by standardizing delegated tasks at the system level, reducing errors and delays in gathering individual signatures for every protocol. Integration with OnCore this year will decrease duplicate data entry, increase data quality and streamline protocol operations.

DiReCT

Forte announced Digital Research through Connected Technologies (DiReCT), an invite-only initiative that will facilitate inter-institutional data exchanges between the coordinating center and the participating sites for multi-site investigator-initiated trials.

About Forte

Forte provides software and services in the critical areas of clinical trial management, clinical data management and research administration for cancer centers, academic medical centers and health systems.

With a strong belief in community, collaboration and standards-based development, Forte also facilitates the Onsemble Community, a customer-exclusive group for peer networking, best practices and support. Twice a year at the Onsemble Conference, clinical research professionals meet in person and discuss the latest challenges and solutions in clinical research.

Forte provides all research professionals complimentary blog articles, eBooks, webinars and more to support continuous learning on industry topics.

###As nations continue to expand their reach globally, CBCF is attracting and leading the charge of preparing young African American leaders for international opportunities, said A. Shuanise Washington, CBCF president and CEO.

The Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, Inc. (CBCF) announced today 18 students will participate in its second partnership with the Embassy of Japan and the Japan International Cooperation Center (JICE) for the Emerging Leaders in Japan: the Kakehashi Project. Commencing in Tokyo, Japan, the Project provides a study abroad experience for undergraduate, graduate and recent graduates living in or attending school in Congressional Black Caucus member districts. From March 21-29, the cohort will participate in lectures on U.S.-Japan relations, tours of cultural and historical landmarks, and visits to leading technology companies.

As nations continue to expand their reach globally, CBCF is attracting and leading the charge of preparing young African American leaders for international opportunities, said A. Shuanise Washington, CBCF president and CEO. We are proud of our partnership with the Japanese Embassy and JICE, and as a result, saw a 62 percent increase of highly-competitive applicants from our inaugural year [2017].

Nearly 300 students applied for the competitive internship. Students were accepted for the Kakehashi Project based on essays, recommendations, academic standing, and interest in international affairs, political science, foreign relations, urban planning, Japanese language, or Asian Studies.

Our partnership with the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation is a key contributor to the continued growth of Japan-U.S. ties, and this latest CBCF delegation visit to Japan through the Kakehashi Project is an excellent example, said Congressional Minister Kimi Nakamura. After the success of the first delegation last year, I am excited that a second group of young African American leaders will now have the opportunity to facilitate cultural and professional exchange while in Tokyo and Chiba. I hope that these young leaders will serve as a bridge between Japan and the African American community in the United States.

To provide an enhanced experience, this year, the students will participate in overnight home stay visits with local Japanese families. One highlight of the Kakehashi program is the engagement with local Japanese citizens and their customs and culture. In addition, all participants are required to create and disseminate an action plan to express their understanding of Japanese culture and society to help enhance diplomatic relations abroad.In Cambodia, the local authorities and the Vietnamese community came to the embassy in Phnom Penh to pay homage to the late PM.

The Cambodian Royal Government delegation was led by Deputy Prime Minister Yim Chhay Ly. Writing in the book of condolences, he expressed his gratitude to former PM Khai for his efforts in reinforcing the Vietnam-Cambodia cooperation.

He also expressed deep sympathy to the family of former PM Khai as well as Ambassador Vu Quang Minh.

Yim Chhay Ly stressed that the Cambodian people always bear in mind the services of former PM Khai, who made important contributions to the development of Cambodia.

The ceremony also saw a delegation from the Cambodias Senate led by Vice President Tep Ngorn, and another from the National Assembly led by Vice President Nguon Nhil.

At a commemoration ceremony held by the Vietnamese Embassy in Russia on March 21, Vietnamese Ambassador Ngo Duc Manh recounted the life and career of the late PM, highlighting his enormous contributions to national development and protection.

A similar ceremony was also held at the Vietnamese General Consulate in Kunming, the capital city of Chinas Yunnan province, which was attended by Zhang Guohua, Deputy Governor of the province, who led a delegation of the local authorities to pay homage to the late Vietnamese leader.

Consul Generals of a number of countries in Yunnan, including Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, Myanmar and Bangladesh also came to pay homage to former PM Khai.

Meanwhile, in New Delhi, Indian Minister of State for External Affairs V.K Singh came to the Vietnamese Embassy to pay tribute to former PM Khai and wrote in the funeral book. He conveyed deep sympathy to the family of the late leader as well as the Government and people of Vietnam.

In a meeting with Ambassador Ton Sinh Thanh, Singh recalled the contributions of former PM Khai to the development of Vietnam.

Representatives of diplomatic corps, organisations and the Buddhist community in India also came to commemorate the late leader.

On March 20-21, the Vietnamese Embassy in the Republic of Korea held a memorial service for former PM Phan Van Khai.

Extending their condolences to Vietnam over the death of the former leader, Deputy Foreign Minister Cho Hyun said that former PM Khai will be remembered as a great leader of Vietnam and Asia.

On March 21, the Department of International Relations and Cooperation of South Africa issued a press release stating that South Africa extends its condolences to Vietnam over the death of former PM Phan Van Khai.

The document highlighted the great contributions of the late leader to the national construction and development of Vietnam, as well as his role in boosting the growth of the Vietnam-South Africa ties.

In 2004, the late leader visited South Africa and he and then President Thabo Mbeki held talks and set up the Vietnam-South Africa inter-governmental partnership forum on economic, trade, science, technology and cultural cooperation.

South African President Cyril Ramaphose also sent a message of condolences to the Government of Vietnam.

At similar ceremonies in Chile, Belgium, Argentina and France from March 20 to 22, Vietnamese people, officials and foreign diplomats in the countries also paid tribute to the late Government leader.We are excited about bringing the reliability and power of LTE to serve not only our residents but also our visitors at a reasonable cost.

In partnership with Baicells Technologies and Broadnet Telecom, local Wireless Internet Service Provider Rice Lake Wireless will be providing cost effective, high speed internet and data services to the First Nation and community in and around the region of Rice Lake, Ontario, Canada.

The project implementation will be using the latest breakthrough LTE technology from Baicells in the 3.65 GHz spectrum capable of overcoming issues of poor penetration resulting from dense foliage and generally non-line-of-sight (NLOS) environments. The terrain challenges make it difficult for the community to receive fast and reliable broadband services, and moreover, it is generally cost prohibitive to consider services from the traditional network service providers, acknowledged Reese Simpson, Economic Development Officer for Alderville First Nation. Our people have been isolated and want to feel a part of the wider digital community.

Baicells LTE broadband wireless access technology will allow members of Alderville First Nation and immediate surrounding areas access to cost effective and enhanced broadband services commencing April 2018. Using the Baicells Nova-233 2x1W tower-mounted eNodeB LTE base stations and outdoor user equipment affixed to customer locations to maximize penetration in the NLOS conditions, the service will permit members access to the global economy, online community services, and other applications that will transform and enrich the community experience.

Baicells Nova-233 eNodeB can provide up to 112 Mbps downlink and 20 Mbps uplink, serving as many as 96 concurrent users per LTE base station. The Baicells outdoor user equipment connects to in-home routers, which then converts the signal to Wi-Fi to allow mobile phones, laptops, tablets, and other smart devices to connect to the service.

Plans are being prepared to deploy other services to complement the broadband data transmission.

Baicellss fixed wireless LTE was conceived specifically to enable broadband for underserved populations, explained Patrick Leary, President of Baicells Technologies North America. What that means is that weve redesigned standards-based LTE to be both cost-realistic for very low density deployments and operationally simple so anyone with a basic IT background can deploy it. LTE is an exceptional technology to solve these access problems, but the cost and complexity had to be removed to put it to work for rural broadband.

Alderville First Nation (AFN) members are the caretakers of our Traditional Territory. Up to now, the few people among our community who had internet service complained it was either too expensive or they had quality issues. We are excited about bringing the reliability and power of LTE to serve not only our residents but also our visitors at a reasonable cost. Broadnet, known as a leader in wireless networks integration, recommended LTE and the Baicells products to best meet our needs. Their cooperation with Rice Lake Wireless, the Canadian Federal Government, and the Provincial Connect Canada project has made this possible, stated AFN Chief James Marsden.

Within 12 months the service is expected to cover the Rice Lake area, with the potential to expand and reach thousands of subscribers in numerous under-served areas.

About Broadnet Telecom, Inc.

Headquartered in Montreal, Broadnet is a connectivity specialist providing public and private network operators with high-quality, cost effective network services, product solutions, and managed services that include designing, deploying, operating, and maintaining telecommunications networks. The company is organized into three business units, each optimized to serve a segment of the wireless telecommunication industry: Professional Services, Product Solutions, and Repair and Refurbishment.

Broadnets professional services cover the entire network life-cycle from planning and design, to equipment staging and supply, to installation and commissioning, to operations and support. Call us at (514) 759-9256 or email info(at)broadnet-telecom.ca. For more information about Broadnet, go to our website at http://www.broadnet-telecom.ca.

About Rice Lake Wireless

Rice Lake Wireless is an Ontario-based wireless internet service provider (WISP) that offers affordable, reliable wireless internet and VoIP solutions for residential, seasonal, and business customers in the vicinity of Roseneath, Ontario. For more information about our services, call (905) 352-1080 or email info(at)ricelakewireless.com. Find us on our website at http://www.ricelakewireless.ca.

About Baicells

Baicells is a privately-held, high tech company with offices in China and USA. It has introduced some real breakthrough technologies to LTE, like moving a complete LTE system to unlicensed spectrum and building it with an IT based architecture. With Baicellss turnkey end-to-end solutions, it becomes much easier to provide standards-based LTE wireless broadband within everyone's reach at a very low cost. As a proud member of WISPA, Baicells solutions are available via several select channels listed on our http://www.na.baicells.com website.

North American Press Contact

Savannah Lancaster

Marketing Communications Manager

Baicells Technologies, North America

+1 (972) 755-1324Dr. Caleb Kallen of Shady Grove Fertility's new Center City, PA office The need for specialized and individualized fertility services in Philadelphia is what prompted the opening of our newest location in Center City.

Shady Grove Fertility announced today that its newest full-service office in Center City, Philadelphia is scheduled to open next month. This will be the practices sixth full-service office in Pennsylvania. The Center City location will bring a broad array of services to the Philadelphia community, offering convenient access to state-of-the-art diagnostic testing as well as low and high-tech treatment options including intrauterine insemination (IUI), in vitro fertilization (IVF), donor egg treatment, and egg freezing. This location will also expand SGF's robust donor egg recruitment program; SGF recruits and prescreens (medically, psychologically, and genetically) all of its prospective egg donors prior to making them available on the SGF donor registry.

Board certified reproductive endocrinologist, Caleb Kallen, M.D., Ph.D., joined Shady Grove Fertility in March 2017, and will be seeing patients at this new location. Dr. Kallen earned his medical degree and doctorate in philosophy (Molecular and Cellular Biology) from the University of Pennsylvania before completing his residency training in obstetrics and gynecology at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. Dr. Kallen completed his subspecialty training in reproductive endocrinology and infertility at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.

The need for specialized and individualized fertility services in Philadelphia is what prompted the opening of our newest location in Center City. We look forward to expanding our practice to the Philadelphia community and helping even more people achieve their dream of parenthood, says Dr. Kallen.

Dr. Kallen was very informative and focused on our physical and emotional well-being through the whole process. My thoughts and input were welcome throughout the treatment process. I have already recommended him to others, shares a patient of Dr. Kallens.

Dr. Kallen was fantastic, helpful and kind. I really appreciate how much time he spent with us up front, explaining, in the detail we wanted, our options. The entire Shady Grove Fertility team was wonderfully kind and generous with their time and made us feel like a family member, even though we, luckily, were only there for a short time, adds another Dr. Kallen patient.

One of Shady Grove Fertilitys top priorities is making access to fertility care more affordable, which is why they created innovative financial programs for their patients such as their signature Shared Risk 100% Refund Guarantee and Shared Help Programs. For those patients with insurance benefits, Shady Grove Fertility accepts over 30+ insurance providers. In fact, 90 percent of patients with insurance will have coverage for their initial physician consultation, and 70 percent will have at least some level of coverage for fertility testing and treatment.

Offering patients innovative financial options and affordable treatment packages are cornerstones of our practice so that cost does not become a barrier to pursuing important fertility care, adds Kallen.

Shady Grove Fertility continues to expand in Pennsylvania with the recent addition of a full-service office in Warrington, PA last year and a new office in Lancaster, PA slated for the fall 2018 opening.

Located at 1515 Market Street, Philadelphia, PA 19102, patients may now schedule an appointment with Dr. Kallen by calling the Shady Grove Fertility New Patient Center at 1-888-761-1967. For other PA locations and physicians, including Dr. Isaac Sasson, Dr. Ryan Martin, Dr. Melissa Esposito, Dr. Lauren Roth, and Dr. Kara Nguyen, please call 1-888-761-1967 or submit this brief online form.

About Shady Grove Fertility (SGF)

SGF is a leading fertility and IVF center of excellence with 50,000 babies born and counting. With 41 physicians and 29 locations throughout MD, PA, VA, GA, and D.C., we offer patients individualized care, innovative financial options, and pregnancy rates among the highest of all national centers. More physicians refer their patients to SGF than any other center. Call 1-888-761-1967 or visit ShadyGroveFertility.com.The Elizabeth Dole Foundation released the following statement today on the release of the omnibus spending bill:

After weeks of discussions between Congressional staff members and VSO partners, culminating in 11th hour conversations between Senator Elizabeth Dole and Congressional leadership, we are disappointed that the expansion of the VAs Program of Comprehensive Assistance for Family Caregivers to veterans of all eras of service was not included in the final omnibus package released today. This would have been a historic opportunity to significantly increase services and support for caregivers of all eras, and we are dismayed that it fell off the agenda. We are heartened, however, that leaders on both sides of the aisle have expressed their unwavering commitment to ensuring the passage of this legislation.

Today, there are 5.5 million military and veteran caregivers in the United States, who are delivering upwards of $14 billion per year in uncompensated care to veterans of all generations. Providing support for pre-9/11 caregivers is long overdue and we are recommitting ourselves to the search for an immediate solution.

Our thanks to Chairman Phil Roe (R-TN) of the House Committee on Veterans Affairs, as well as Chairman Johnny Isakson (R-GA) and Ranking Member Jon Tester (D-MT) of the Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs, for their support in this process, and their steadfast dedication to Americas military and veteran caregivers. We encourage all Members of Congress to recommit themselves to supporting the expansion of the Program of Comprehensive Assistance to Family Caregivers.PKF OConnor Davies, LLP, the nation's 29th largest accounting and advisory firm, announced today it won Best Tax Advice at the Family Wealth Report Awards 2018. Showcasing best of breed providers in the global private banking, wealth management and trusted advisor communities, the awards recognize companies, teams and individuals which the prestigious panel of judges deemed to have demonstrated innovation and excellence in 2017. Winners were announced during a ceremony at the Mandarin Oriental in New York on March 8, 2018.

This award from Family Wealth Report is a testament to the solutions our Family Office Services Division team has been able to provide for our clients, said Gemma Leddy, Partner-in-Charge of PKF OConnor Davies Family Office. Our tax team, led by Lucille Murray and Thomas Riggs, had a stellar year last year, bringing on new clients and providing superior service to all of the families we work with. Their ability to address each familys unique needs by harnessing the expertise and opportunities for collaboration within our Firm is second to none.

In selecting PKF OConnor Davies Family Office as the winner in the tax advice entry under the consultants to private client category, judges noted the Firms scale, deep bench and admirable leadership combined to make them a clear winner.

PKF OConnor Davies Family Office tax experts specialize in personalized strategic tax consulting, tax mitigation, SALT, sales and use tax, estate planning, philanthropy, gifts, international and the tax-efficient structuring of family offices. The team provides effective long-term planning by staying ahead of tax law changes and connecting tax advice to accounting and reporting insights.

The firms who triumphed in these awards are all worthy winners, and I would like to extend my heartiest congratulations, said Stephen Harris, ClearView Financial Medias CEO and Publisher of Family Wealth Report. These awards were judged solely on the basis of entrants submissions and their response to a number of specific questions, which had to be answered focusing on the client experience, not quantitative performance metrics. That is a unique, and I believe, compelling feature. These awards recognize the very best operators in the private client industry, with independence, integrity and genuine insight the watchwords of the judging process -- such that the awards truly reflect excellence in wealth management.

PKF OConnor Davies Family Office provides a full range of family office, accounting, tax, administration and advanced planning services to high-net-worth individuals, families and their closely held businesses in the United States and abroad. The Firms single point-of-entry model captures the entire universe of holdings and transactions for a family, and provides customized reporting based on family needs.

About PKF OConnor Davies, LLP

PKF OConnor Davies, LLP is a full service certified public accounting and advisory firm with a long history of serving clients both domestically and internationally. With roots tracing to 1891, nine offices in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Maryland, and more than 700 professionals, led by over 100 partners, the Firm provides a complete range of accounting, auditing, tax and management advisory services.

PKF OConnor Davies is ranked number 29 in Accounting Todays 2018 Top 100 Firms list and the Firm is also recognized as a Leader in Audit and Accounting, a Pacesetter in Growth and one of the Top Firms in the Mid-Atlantic. PKF OConnor Davies is ranked number 28 in INSIDE Public Accountings 2017 Top 100 Firms list and recognized as one of the Top Ten Fastest-Growing Firms." In 2017, PKF O'Connor Davies was named one of Vault's Accounting 50, a ranking of the 50 best accounting employers to work for in North America, and ranked among the top 50 most prestigious accounting firms in America in a complementary Vault survey. The Firm is the 11th largest accounting firm in the New York Metropolitan area, according to Crains New York Business, and the 11th top accounting firm in New Jersey according to NJBizs 2017 rankings.

By consistently delivering proactive, thorough and efficient service, PKF O'Connor Davies has built long-lasting, valuable relationships with its clients. Partners are intimately involved in the day-to-day management of engagements, ensuring a high degree of client service and cost effectiveness. The Firms seasoned professional staff members employ a team approach to all engagements to provide clients with the utmost quality and timely services aimed at helping them succeed. Continuity of staffing and attention to detail in all client engagements make the Firm stand out among its competitors.

PKF OConnor Davies is the lead North American representative of the international association of PKF member firms. PKF International is a network of legally independent member firms providing accounting and business advisory services in over 400 locations in 150 countries around the world. With its tradition, experience and focus on the future, PKF OConnor Davies is ready to help clients meet todays ever-changing economic conditions and manage the growing complexities of the regulatory environment. For more information, visit http://www.PKFOD.com.Boundless Enterprises (Boundless or Company), the owner of Scooters Coffee, announced today that it has partnered with McCarthy Capital Fund VI (McCarthy Capital) to continue its rapid growth. McCarthy Capital manages more than $1 billion of investment capital across its portfolio and specializes in growing businesses in partnership with strong management teams.

Headquartered in Omaha, Boundless operates and franchises more than 180 Scooters Coffee stores nationwide. The Company roasts 100% shade-grown coffee from the top 5% of specialty coffee beans in the world to produce its high-quality specialty coffee drinks.

Because of the significant opportunity to expand, Boundless has been investing in its people and infrastructure to foster and support franchise network growth. In mid-2018, Boundless will move into a much larger facility, which will dramatically increase its roasting and distribution capacity. The Company is actively seeking new franchisees to open locations in the Midwest and in select markets across the United States.

We are excited to partner with McCarthy Capital because of their shared vision, aligned values and focus on growth, said Boundless CEO Todd Graeve. We look forward to this next stage of growth at Scooters Coffee and are actively seeking entrepreneurs to become franchisees in the Midwest and nationally who have interest in participating in our march to 1,000 stores.

A portion of McCarthy Capitals investment will be used to fuel this expansion. Scooters Coffee is known for offering high-quality products through its network of drive-thru kiosks and coffeehouses, said Matt Breunsbach, Vice President at McCarthy Capital. We plan to accelerate growth and build on the impressive track record of Scooters Coffee.

Don and Linda Eckles founded Scooters Coffee in 1998 and have since stayed true to their core beliefs: find a great location and stay committed to high-quality drinks, great people, speed of service, a clean store and a big smile. Don Eckles will remain involved with Boundless and serve as chairman of the board of directors. "After building up a solid foundation to support our rapid growth over the last few years, we are thrilled for the opportunity to continue to grow Scooters Coffee with the help of McCarthy Capital, said Don Eckles. "We chose McCarthy Capital because of their expertise, track record and reputation of high integrity. We believe we have taken a major step to bolster the Companys long-term prospects for continued growth for its franchisees, investors and employees.

We are excited to partner with Don Eckles, Todd Graeve and the rest of the management team. We look forward to working together to expand the reach of the Scooters Coffee brand, said McCarthy Capital President and Managing Partner Patrick Duffy.

About McCarthy Capital

McCarthy Capital Fund VI is managed by McCarthy Partners Management, LLC, a registered investment advisor that conducts business as McCarthy Capital. McCarthy Capital, headquartered in Omaha, NE, is focused exclusively on lower middle-market companies. For more than 30 years, the McCarthy organization has been partnering with founders, families, and exceptional management teams to support the growth of their companies. For more information about McCarthy Capital, please visit http://www.mccarthycapital.com.

About Boundless Enterprises and Scooters Coffee

Boundless Enterprises is the parent company of Scooters Coffee and Harvest Roasting, two of the largest and fastest growing brands in the specialty coffee business. Using only the very best products in the world, Scooters Coffee roasts only the finest coffee beans in the world at its headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska. In nearly two decades of business, Scooter's Coffees success is simple: stay committed to the original business principles and company core values. Scooters Coffees pledge to source shade-grown coffee to protect the rainforests reaffirms its commitment to contribute to a chain of good at home and abroad. The Scooter's Coffee Brand Promise, often recited to franchisees, customers, and employees is: "Amazing People, Amazing Drinks... Amazingly Fast! It represents the company's business origins from 1998 and reflects a steady commitment to providing an unforgettable experience to loyal and new customers. For more information about Scooters Coffee, please visit scooterscoffee.com.Jennings, Strouss & Salmon, P.L.C is pleased to announce that Tracy D. Als has joined the firm as Director of Human Resources.

Als is a dynamic, versatile leader with more than twenty-five years of demonstrated success in the legal industry. Her experience covers the entire spectrum of human resources, with a strong focus on fostering a healthy and happy workforce while assisting the firm with strategic growth. Als utilizes her interpersonal communication, management, and leadership skills to develop, build, and maintain critical relationships involving clear communication, persuasion, diplomacy and, most of all, trust.

Tracy is an excellent addition to the firms administrative management team, states John Skewes, Chief Operating Officer of Jennings Strouss. Her knowledge of current regulations and trends in Human Resources, coupled with her business sense, enables the firm to maintain its strong workforce and focus on adding qualified personnel to support our growth.

Tracy enjoys being a part of a team, learning from strong leaders, contributing to strategy and operations, and collaborating with all departments outside of human resources to keep morale high, clients happy, and the firm growing.

Its a privilege and honor to work for such a prestigious firm, states Als. I look forward to a long tenure with Jennings Strouss.

Als currently serves as Vice President of the Association of Legal Administrators (ALA)-Arizona Chapter, and is a member of the Maricopa County Bar Association, Society for Human Resources Management (SHRM), and NALS, the Association for Legal Professionals.

About Jennings, Strouss & Salmon, P.L.C.

For over 75 years, Jennings Strouss has been dedicated to providing clients with strategic legal guidance to help them seize every opportunity. The firm is well-known for its rich heritage, commitment to community, and long-lasting relationships. We have a deep understanding of business and law. When you work with us, youll have a team of legal experts who are dedicated to your vision of success.

Through our offices in Peoria, Phoenix, and Tucson, Arizona, and Washington, D.C., we leverage resources both regionally and nationally to serve our expanding client base. Jennings Strouss is deeply rooted in each of our locations legal and business communities, and especially instrumental in helping shape the dynamic growth of Arizona and many of its institutions. The firm promotes a pragmatic, results-oriented approach, coupled with a healthy, well-managed, and friendly atmosphere of collaboration.

Our primary areas of practice include advertising and media law; agribusiness; automobile dealership law; bankruptcy, restructuring, and creditors rights; construction; corporate and securities; eminent domain and condemnation; employee benefits and pensions; energy; family law and domestic relations; finance; health care; intellectual property; labor and employment; legal ethics; litigation; professional liability defense; real estate; surety and fidelity; tax; and trust and estates. For additional information, please visit http://www.jsslaw.com and follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.By putting the future of our students first, we will continue to implement smart reforms that deliver high quality educational outcomes at a low cost to families said MCCCD Board President, Laurin Hendrix.

The Maricopa County Community College District (MCCCD) has made great progress in advancing innovation-oriented programs over the past year in a cost-efficient way, said Chancellor Maria Harper-Marinick, while pledging further results-oriented reforms in the near future. From programs covering drone systems to cybersecurity to nanotechnology, MCCCD is offering an innovation agenda with resources to help prepare students for the economy of the future, while ensuring that its educational programs remain affordable for families and taxpayers alike.

At Maricopa Community Colleges, were redoubling our commitment to innovation to ensure that all of our students have the tools needed to compete for the jobs of tomorrow. In the coming months, well be announcing additional results-driven innovation initiatives that will enhance our existing programs at no additional cost to students or taxpayers, said MCCCD Board President, Laurin Hendrix. By putting the future of our students first, we will continue to implement smart reforms that deliver high quality educational outcomes at a low cost to families.

The success of our students is reflected in the health and economic vitality of our community, and sustained success in the future requires a long-term commitment to innovation. We are proud of the progress we have made in the past year to deliver on our promise of high quality, affordable education for over 200,000 students at MCCCD  and there is more to come, said Dr. Maria Harper-Marinick.

In recent months, MCCCD has introduced multiple new initiatives as part of its commitment to innovation from an educational, institutional, and cost savings standpoint. These programs are designed to ensure MCCCD students have the skills required for success in the technological workforce of the future, and cover cutting edge topics such as cloud computing, cybersecurity, UAV training, nanotechnology and other STEM areas.

Below are some highlights of recent MCCCD initiatives:



Scottsdale Community College unveiled a state-of-the-art, expanded computer networking lab to help students become certified and trained in cloud computing and virtualization. SCCs lab and virtual data centers expanded capacity now supports 1,000 virtual machines.

Taking effect this term, Phoenix College launched a new S-STEM scholarship program for more than 11,000 students. The scholarship offers significant financial assistance to students who are pursuing degrees in the fields of computer science, engineering, and related STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) fields that lead to potential engineering careers.

As part of its designation as a Red Hat Academy, Glendale Community College (GCC) launched a new program that teaches students how to deploy, administer, manage and secure Red Hat Enterprise Linux and prepare them to take the Red Hat Certified System Administrator (RHCSA EX200) certification exam. In addition, students who complete their courses will be able to take this certification exam at a 50 percent discounted rate.

For the first time, Phoenix College is now offering a Micro-NanoTechnology course that provides students with hands-on laboratory experience. Students are learning how to use advanced instrumentation such as a scanning electron microscope (SEM) to view very small objects, energy dispersive x-ray spectroscopy (EDXS) to determine the elemental makeup of objects, and an atomic force microscope (AFM) to study three-dimensional topography and properties surfaces at extremely high magnification levels.

This year, GCC participated in the National Cyber League competition for the first time and scored extraordinarily well. Students worked through real-world lab exercises and competed against over 3,000 other teams from across the United States. Despite the fact that this was the first year GCC participated in the event, students placed in the Gold level and achieved the highest level of knowledge and skills (Top 15%) for the Western Conference.

Beginning Fall 2018, Mesa Community College will offer a Blockchain Technology Certificate of Completion, becoming one of the first community colleges in the country to provide a blockchain technology certificate program that will prepare students for emerging high-tech careers. MCC is also one of six colleges in the country hand-picked by Apple to deliver special coding certifications.

These initiatives reflect our enduring investment in the future of our students and our community. As we roll out additional components of our agenda, Maricopa Community Colleges will focus on innovations inside and outside the classroom to ensure the best results for students, families and taxpayers. Stay tuned for exciting developments in the weeks and months to come, added Chancellor Harper-Marinick.

About Maricopa Community Colleges

The Maricopa Community College District includes 10 regionally-accredited colleges  Chandler-Gilbert, Estrella Mountain, GateWay, Glendale, Mesa, Paradise Valley, Phoenix, Rio Salado, Scottsdale, and South Mountain  and the Maricopa Corporate College, serving more than 200,000 students with two-year degrees, certificates, and university transfer programs. Earlier this year, College Choice ranked four Maricopa Community Colleges among the top 50 best community colleges in the United States.

###"Homebuyers will be able to take advantage of a low earnest-money deposit structure, with just 5 percent down payment and total monthly housing costs that are similar to prevailing rents in the area," says Dean Jones, President & CEO, Realogics Sotheby's International Realty.

Sonata Condominiums will soon offer 96 new flats for sale in Columbia City, one of Seattle's most nostalgic, diverse and thriving communities. Groundbreaking is set for summer 2018 with delivery by the end of 2019.

For sale by BDR Urban LLC, a division of the well-known luxury homebuilder, Sonata Condominiums will include studio, urban-one-bedroom, one-bedroom, one-bedroom-plus-den, and two-bedroom home designs that range in size from less than 400 to more than 1,000 square feet. Introductory prices range from the high $200,000s to more than $800,000.

"Homebuyers will be able to take advantage of a low earnest-money deposit structure, with just 5 percent down payment and total monthly housing costs that are similar to prevailing rents in the area," says Dean Jones, President & CEO of Realogics Sotheby's International Realty. "Not to mention the opportunity for income-tax deductions and the prospect for capital appreciation in the rapidly-rising housing market that has become synonymous with Seattle real estate."

"If you are looking to own a new condominium home just moments from downtown Seattle, we've got your address," Jones added. "Sonata will offer single-level living at affordable price points in one of the most walkable and convenient neighborhoods with immediate proximity to the Columbia City Station for the LINK Light Rail system."

Jones also points to a $50 billion Sound Transit expansion plan that would, over the next decade and beyond, connect many exurban communities via light rail.

"While downtown Seattle is already just 15 minutes away by train, residents of Sonata will not need to leave their community for a decidedly urban lifestyle," he says. "And if they have a car, there's ample parking within the underground structure."

First incorporated in 1893, Columbia City was annexed to the city of Seattle in 1907 and was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1980 as the Columbia City Historic District. A bustling commercial center along Rainier Avenue South includes bars and music venues, a full-service grocery store, bakeries and coffee shops, a movie theater, fitness facilities, art galleries and other residential services.

The community is home to three primary and secondary schools, the Boys & Girls Club, the Rainier Valley Community Center, and the 57.7-acre Genesee Park and Playfield, which connects Columbia City to Lake Washington and is home to the annual Seafair Hydroplane Races. Other popular events include the Rainier Valley Heritage Parade and Summer Streets Party and the Farmer's Market.

The floor plans at Sonata Condominiums will include open living spaces and oversize windows. Interiors will boast engineered hardwood floors, quartz countertops in the kitchen and stainless steel appliances, with several color scheme choices and other personalization options.

Common area features and amenities include underground parking, controlled-access entry, a community bike room and tuning area, a guest suite, a great room with a screening area, a fitness studio, and a rooftop terrace with outdoor fireplaces and barbecues. The lobby will feature a concierge station and adjacent co-working lounge.

"Condominiums like Sonata offer owners a vertical village of amenities and services not found in single-family or townhome alternatives, assuming you can even find a property at this price point," Jones notes. "The lock-and-leave lifestyle is so convenient, and there's a spirit of place as neighbors converge within the common areas. It's no wonder condominiums are generally trading at higher values per food - it's not just about the home itself but an entire community that becomes part of the proposition."

Prospective buyers can reserve a home at Sonata in advance of presales. A reservation agreement is offered in exchange for a fully refundable $5,000 deposit held in escrow that confirms a particular home with a set price range. The agreement grants a first right of opportunity to enter into a presale once the developer and contractor confirm the product offering.

Reservations will begin soon and will take place at the New Development Preview Center at 2715 1st Avenue in downtown Seattle. Additional details will soon be posted at: SonataCondoLiving.com.

###

About BDR Urban, LLC (http://www.BDRHoldings.com) - BDR Urban, LLC, is a division of the well-known regional builder, BDR Holdings. BDR is a family of independent companies dedicated to excellence in development, construction and investment. Since its founding, BDR has built over 2,000 residences in the Greater Seattle area, ranging from modern and traditional custom homes to some of the region's most innovative and thoughtfully designed multi-family communities. BDR Urban is wholly devoted to creating housing solutions that best serve the contemporary, in-city buyer with an emphasis on thoughtful and efficient design, careful siting and access to transportation options and neighborhood amenities.

About Realogics Sothebys International Realty (http://www.RSIR.com) - Realogics Sothebys International Realty is a leading global sales and marketing brokerage firm in the Pacific Northwest that specializes in new condominiums. Recognized by the Puget Sound Business Journal amongst the fastest-growing private companies in Washington State during the past five years, the boutique real estate firm of 220+ brokers consistently rank among the top producing firms within the markets that it serves with branches in downtown Seattle, Bainbridge Island, Kirkland, Issaquah and Madison Park.

EDITORS NOTES: For high-resolution photography, video, floor plans and new renderings of Sonata Condominiums contact Whitney Heffernan at 206.448.5752 or email Whitney(dot)Heffernan(at)RSIR.com.Nigeria is blessed with some of the regions most amazing entrepreneurs. We urge venture capitalists and impact investors from around the world to get involved with us, said Jules Kortenhorst, chief executive officer of Rocky Mountain Institute.

The roadmap will outline how much capital is required and a plan for transitioning funding from grants and high-risk concessional and government sources to venture capital and private equity.

RMI co-hosted a workshop this month to chart the path to unlocking the minigrid market in Nigeria, which would provide energy access to millions and tap into a multibillion-dollar opportunity. More than 50 industry leaders and experts attended the interactive work session focused on delivering a profitable and scalable minigrid market business model.

Attendees included CrossBoundary, Global Environment Facility, IHS Towers, McKinsey & Company, Nayo Technologies, PowerGen, Rensource Distributed Energy, Rubitec Solar, SBM Intelligence, Shell and many others. At the workshop, market solutions centered on six key opportunity areas: grid-in-a-box hardware, better load management, effective customer engagement, efficient project development and operations and maintenance, affordable finance and supportive policy.

Nigeria has all the right drivers to become a leader in the minigrid market in Africa: great entrepreneurial tradition, a large self-employed population and market size. Im looking forward to seeing how entrepreneurs in Nigeria leverage this opportunity over the next few years, said Sir Richard Branson, founder of the Virgin Group and an RMI donor.

With a population of more than 180 million, Nigeria has the largest population and gross domestic product in Africa, with significant rural economic activity. Currently 85 million people do not have reliable access to electricity or are not connected to the grid. Minigrids provide an enormous investment opportunity as Nigerians already spend $14 billion annually on off-grid power from small 14 gigawatt gas generators, according to materials prepared for the workshop by RMI.

The electricity market for off-grid energy in Nigeria is huge and profitable for developers. Installing 1,000 minigrids each year for the next 10 years would provide power to millions of Nigerians currently off-grid, said Damilola Ogunbiyi, managing director and CEO of the Rural Electrification Agency.

I am excited and optimistic about cracking the minigrid challenge in Nigeria. Nigeria is blessed with some of the regions most amazing entrepreneurs. We urge venture capitalists and impact investors from around the world to get involved with us, said Jules Kortenhorst, chief executive officer of Rocky Mountain Institute.

RMIs Sustainable Energy for Economic Development (SEED) program could not carry out this work without the generosity of the Rockefeller Foundation and Virgin Unite. Schneider Electric sponsored the workshop.

About Rocky Mountain Institute

Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI)an independent nonprofit founded in 1982transforms global energy use to create a clean, prosperous, and secure low-carbon future. It engages businesses, communities, institutions, and entrepreneurs to accelerate the adoption of market-based solutions that cost-effectively shift from fossil fuels to efficiency and renewables. RMI has offices in Basalt and Boulder, Colorado; New York City; Washington, D.C.; and Beijing.

More information about RMI can be found at rmi.org or follow us on Twitter @RockyMtnInst.

About the Rural Electrification Agency

The Rural Electrification Agency (REA) was set up by the Federal Government of Nigeria (FGN) with the primary objective of increasing electricity access to rural and underserved communities. REA has developed an off-grid electrification strategy to support minigrids and other off-grid solutions to support FGNs policy of incremental growth.

More information about REA can be found at rea.gov.ng or follow REA on Twitter @realREANigeria and on Facebook at facebook.com/REANigeria/.

Contact:

Nick Steel

Senior Associate

Media Relations

Tel: +1 347-574-0887

nsteel(at)rmi(dot)orgFrom World Water Day, March 22, 2018 through Earth Day, April 22, 2018, people around the world are invited to take part in a social media movement called Raise It Forward. Simply by raising a glass of anything, adding the hashtag #RaiseItForward, mentioning @WaterForPeople and @AbsolutElyx, Absolut Elyx will contribute one week of safe water to communities where Water For People works.

Throughout the month, consumers will be able to make an impact on the global water crisis in a fun and engaging way by posting a picture of their toast on their favorite social media channel. 2.1 billion people around the world don't have access to safe water and 4.5 billion lack access to adequate sanitation. Women and children spend more than four hours walking for water each day, and more than 840,000 people die each year from water-related diseases. By kicking off Raise It Forward on World Water Day, the campaign brings attention to this challenge while giving people a way to take action.

In 2015, Elyx joined forces with Water For People on a five-year partnership to bring access to safe water to more than 100,000 people worldwide. Both organizations share a commitment to integrity and sustainability, and together work to amplify the goals and urgency in solving the global water crisis. To date, over 30,000 people have been given access to safe drinking water through this partnership.

Water For People is an amazing organization making a huge difference around the world, said Absolut Elyx CEO, Jonas Tahlin. Integrity being a key value for Absolut Elyx, we are proud to support their global mission. Giving back is just part of our business model and #RaiseItForward is an easy way for the Elyx community to support our efforts and bring awareness to this cause.

In 2017, there were over 4,800 posts across Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter which led to 672,000 liters of water donated. Celebrities, influencers, philanthropists, beverage industry professionals, and individuals around the world raised a glass to make an impact.

#RaiseItForward is a great campaign to bring awareness to the global water crisis, while making a real difference for people who live without safe water around the world, said Water For People CEO, Eleanor Allen. We are grateful for the long-term partnership with Absolut Elyx. This collaboration has made a real, long-term difference for thousands of people around the world, and continues to make a greater impact year over year.

In addition to #RaiseItForward, Absolut Elyx contributes to Water For People through events, purchases of Elyx Bottles and Elyx Boutique copper products. For every purchase made from the Elyx Boutique, a weeks worth of safe water (140 liters) is donated to those who need it. Learn more at elyxboutique.com

To learn more about this partnership, please visit http://www.waterforpeople.org/elyx

About Water For People

Founded in 1991 in Denver, Colorado, Water For People is a global nonprofit working across nine countries in Latin America, Asia, and Africa to achieve lasting quality water and sanitation services. Water For People brings together communities, local entrepreneurs, and governments to build, operate, and maintain their own reliable water and sanitation systems and services. Currently working in 30 districts with 4 million people, Water For People is growing to deliver services to over 7 million people in 50 districts globally over the next 10 years. Water For People is also working at the national level in Rwanda, Uganda, Bolivia, and Honduras. Learn more at waterforpeople.org and on Instagram @waterforpeople.

About Absolut Elyx

Absolut Elyx is the Single Estate, Copper Crafted, Luxury expression of Absolut Vodka. Every bottle is made with soft winter wheat and the most pristine water in the world, drawn from the aquifer deep beneath the ground, in Ahus, Sweden. Elyx is distilled using sacrificial copper and further rectified by hand using a copper vintage still from 1921. Krister Asplund, Master Distiller, and his team are knowledgeable to oversee the century-old distillation process that has been passed down through generations of Swedish vodka-makers. Absolut Elyx has joined forces with Water For People to support and raise awareness for long-term solutions to the global water crisis.

Discover more about Elyx at http://www.absolutelyx.com, http://www.elyxboutique.com and on Instagram @AbsolutElyx.The RoK President is accompanied by Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Strategy and Finance Kang Kyung-wha, Minister of Science and ICT You Young Min; Minister of Trade, Industry and Energy Paik Ungyu, Minister of Land, Infrastructure and Transport Kim Hyun-Mee, Presidential Chief of Staff for Policy Jang Ha-sung, and RoK Ambassador to Vietnam Lee Hyuk, among others.

President Moon Jae-in was born on January 24, 1953, in South Gyeongsang province. He enrolled in Kyung Hee University where he majored in law.

He once served as a chairperson of the New Politics Alliance for Democracy from December 2015 to January 2016 and was also a candidate for the former Democratic United Party in the presidential election in 2012.

He took the post of President of the Republic of Korea in May 2017.Microsoft 365 Business is a great solution for smaller businesses that want improved productivity and enhanced security across all their employees devices.

A NYC area IT consultant and MSP explains Microsofts product suite for small and mid-sized businesses, Microsoft 365 Business, in a new article on the eMazzanti Technologies website.

The informative article lays out whats included and who the intended customers are for the business technology bundle with the confusing name. Although the package includes Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft 365 Business is much more, the article says.

Security features, mobile device management, Windows 10 and StaffHub, a new app for scheduling front-line employees, make Microsoft 365 Business an attractive offering at $20 per month per employee.

Microsoft 365 Business is a great solution for smaller businesses that want improved productivity and enhanced security across all their employees devices, stated Jennifer Mazzanti, CEO, eMazzanti Technologies. With no IT staff they can manage company data and communications without having to buy a server.

Below are a few excerpts from the article, What is Microsoft 365 Business and Who is it for?

Microsoft 365 Business is the all-in-one Microsoft package for SMBs, previously only available to Enterprise customers. Throw in 24x7 online and phone support and 99.9% guaranteed uptime and it feels like a sweet deal for $20/month per user.

Help for Front-line Employees and Their Managers

There are an estimated 500 million frontline staff workers around the world in retail stores, hotels, restaurants, manufacturing and other service-related industries. Far too often, these workers rely on manual processes and outdated tools to create paper schedules.

Included with Microsoft 365 Business, StaffHub makes it easy for managers to create, update and manage shift schedules for their team, streamlining what has been a labor-intensive process.

Enhanced Security

With centrally managed devices and security, Microsoft 365 Business helps to ensure that business data is secure. Administrators can set Windows Defender to always be on and wipe data from mobile devices when employees leave, with no disruption to personal data.

How to Get Microsoft 365 Business

Microsoft says that partner-assisted deployment is the recommended way to install Microsoft 365 Business. Business leaders should contact their Microsoft partner and ask them if they are offering the package.

If not, eMazzanti Technologies can help deploy Microsoft 365 Business on all company devices while providing some immediate benefit the Microsoft partner of record. eMazzanti is well-equipped to help business owners understand technology needs and options and make the best recommendations for deploying Microsoft 365 Business in their organizations.

Related resource information:

The Digital Transformation in Manufacturing

Is it Spring Yet? How to Survive a Late Season Winter Storm

About eMazzanti Technologies

eMazzantis team of trained, certified IT experts rapidly deliver retail and payment technology, digital marketing services, cloud and mobile solutions, multi-site implementations, 247 outsourced network management, remote monitoring and support to increase productivity, data security and revenue growth for clients ranging from law firms to high-end global retailers.

eMazzanti has made the Inc. 5000 list eight years running, is a 2015, 2013 and 2012 Microsoft Partner of the Year, 2016 NJ Business of the Year, 5X WatchGuard Partner of the Year and one of the TOP 200 U.S. Microsoft Partners! Contact: 1-866-362-9926, info@emazzanti.net or http://www.emazzanti.net Twitter: @emazzanti Facebook: Facebook.com/emazzantitechnologies.The American College of Bankruptcy (the College) has awarded its 2018 Distinguished Service Award to the Hon. Elizabeth L. Perris (Ret.) of Portland, Oregon. Judge Perris received the award at the Class 29 Induction Ceremony held at the Smithsonian Donald W. Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture in Washington, D.C. on March 16, 2018. The award was presented on behalf of the College by the Hon. Barbara J. Houser of Dallas, Texas.

The Distinguished Service Award is the highest honor of the College. Criteria for selection as a Distinguished Service awardee include: significant accomplishments in improving the administration of justice in the insolvency and bankruptcy field; distinguished service consistently rendered over a considerable period of time or a single outstanding achievement in a particular year; accomplishments arising from voluntary activities rather than for services rendered to a client as a paid professional; membership in the College; and distinguished in his or her institution in a manner and in matters that are consistent with the goals and purposes of the College.

Judge Perris was appointed in 1984 by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to be a Bankruptcy Judge for the District of Oregon, resident in Portland, and she served in that position until her retirement in 2015, including as Chief Bankruptcy Judge for the District of Oregon from 2005 to 2010. She also served for twelve years as a member of the prestigious Bankruptcy Appellate Panel for the Ninth Circuit, from 1988 to 1993 and from 1998 to 2005, including as the Chief Judge of the Panel during 2003 to 2005.

Judge Perris presided over a number of significant bankruptcy cases, including one of the most contentious cases arising from clergy sexual abuse charges, the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Portland chapter 11 case, along with the Society of Jesus, Oregon Province chapter 11 case. Because of her experience, other bankruptcy judges appointed Judge Perris to mediate other clergy sexual abuse chapter 11 cases. The importance of her work on these cases resulted in the development of a template for the resolution of other clergy sexual abuse bankruptcy cases around the United States.

Judge Perris also served as a mediator in a number of complex municipal bankruptcy cases, including as one of seven mediators appointed in the City of Detroit chapter 9 case, where she handled the mediation of complex financial transactions among the City and its financial creditors. As a result of the mediation process, their disputes were resolved consensually in the confirmed plan of adjustment. She also mediated complex financial and labor disputes in the City of Stockton, California, chapter 9 case, and labor issues in the City of Vallejo, California, chapter 9 case, enabling those cities to confirm their plans of adjustment. She also mediated the main dispute with a judgment creditor that enabled the Town of Mammoth Lakes, California, to dismiss its chapter 9 case.

Judge Perris served as a member of the Judicial Conference Advisory Committee on Bankruptcy Rules (from 2007-2013) following her appointment to the committee by the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court. She served as faculty at countless educational programs around the country, including those at Federal Judicial Center educational programs for bankruptcy judges, including as a mentor judge for newly appointed bankruptcy judges at what is affectionately called baby judge school.

Judge Perris was inducted as a Fellow of the College as a member of Class 1 in 1990. She served over the years as a leader on many committees, including the Board of Regents and the Judicial Nominating Committee. She received a number of awards and recognitions during her illustrious career for her outstanding contributions to local, state and national bar associations. Through her scholarship, judgment, integrity, humanity, service and professionalism, Judge Perris has embodied the highest ideals of the legal profession for over 40 years.

During her introduction of Judge Perris, the Judge Houser, Chief United States Bankruptcy Judge for the Northern District of Texas, shared the following: "Measured by distinguished tenure on the bench, measured by the cumulative importance of her judicial decisions, measured by her prominence in mediating the most complex and highly charged insolvency cases, and measured by the sheer force of her energy, intellect and good cheer over many decades, Elizabeth Perris is preeminent among United States Bankruptcy Judges of this generation."

In accepting the award, Judge Perris acknowledged that being told she was to receive it came as a complete surprise. "What I have in common with those who came before me, and what distinguishes all the members of the College, is a willingness to say yes to volunteering to make [the] insolvency field be of as much utility as it can be. It is the willingness to volunteer and contribute that really distinguishes members of the College."

The College is an honorary association of bankruptcy and insolvency professionals and plays an important role in sustaining professional excellence in the field. College Fellows include commercial and consumer bankruptcy attorneys, judges, insolvency accountants, turnaround and workout specialists, law professors, government officials and others in the bankruptcy and insolvency community. The College offers unique and challenging educational programs and publications, maintains the National Bankruptcy Archives at the University of Pennsylvania School of Law, and, in conjunction with the American College of Bankruptcy Foundation, is believed to be the single largest financial supporter of pro bono bankruptcy services in the United States.

For more information about the American College of Bankruptcy Distinguished Service Award, contact Shari A. Bedker, Executive Director at 434-939-6004, fax at 434-939-6030, or email at sbedker(at)amercol(dot)org.Onset, a world leader in data loggers, today announced that the geophysical laboratory of the University of Washington School of Oceanography has selected HOBO MX2200 Series water temperature data loggers for seismic data monitoring as part of the Alaska Amphibious Community Seismic Experiment (AACSE).

North Americas largest recorded earthquakes take place in southwest Alaska, reaching magnitudes of up to 8 and 9 on the Richter scale. AACSE, a large community experiment funded by the National Science Foundation, will deploy an array of 75 ocean-bottom seismometers (OBSs) on and off the Alaska subduction zone to better understand the seismic and tsunami hazards facing coastal U.S. communities.

Through its work with AACSE, The University of Washington will use MX2200 Series Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)-enabled data loggers integrated into OBSs to monitor turbidity currents, the marine landslides that cascade down from continental margins. These currents may be triggered by either local or more distant earthquakes, and the resulting flow of sediment can create tsunamis that inundate coastal communities.

All OBSs in the experiment are being instrumented with MX2204 water temperature loggers to help identify any correlations between temperature and seismic-related activity. They will be deployed starting in May 2018 and then recovered in late 2019 after providing around-the-clock recording of data for 18 months. The data loggers deliver high accuracy and research-grade performance, and can support water depths of up to 1,000 feet. Because MX2200 Series data loggers are BLE-enabled, researchers will be able to remove the loggers from the water and wirelessly access temperature readings from their mobile phones or tablets.

"Even though 90% of earthquakes occur in the Alaska subduction zone, the ocean bottom of this offshore region has only seen limited monitoring to date, said Paul Johnson, a professor for the University of Washington School of Oceanography. The accuracy and ruggedness of Onsets MX2200 Series temperature data loggers will play an important role in capturing data that will give us new, more detailed insights into the oceanic activity that affects communities on the Alaskan coast.

For decades, weve been committed to supporting environmental research with water temperature loggers that meet the highest levels of accuracy, reliability, and performance, said Paul Gannett, senior product marketing manager at Onset. Were honored that the University of Washington selected our HOBO MX2200 Series data loggers for this important research into the impacts of seismic and tsunami hazards on coastal communities.

About Onset

Onset is a leading supplier of data loggers and monitoring solutions used to measure, record, and manage data for improving the environment and preserving the quality of temperature-sensitive products. Based on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, Onset has been designing and manufacturing its products on site since the companys founding in 1981. Visit Onset on the web at http://www.onsetcomp.com.

###

CONTACT

Onset Media Relations

508-743-3181

http://www.onsetcomp.com

media@onsetcomp.comCapillus Leaves Lasting Impression at AADs 76th Annual Meeting

The use of low-level laser therapy (LLLT) for treating hair loss was a major topic of discussion during the American Academy of Dermatologys 2018 AAD Annual Meeting  and rightfully so. This years conference was held at the San Diego Convention Center in front of more than 18,800 attendees. One popular scientific session on LLLT sparked profound interest in Capillus, a leading provider of low-level laser therapy caps and exhibitor at the conference, among leading dermatologists worldwide.

In the session titled, Light Based Devices: Photomodulation and Hair Growth, Dr. Maria Hordinsky discussed the use of light therapy for patients with thinning hair. Dr. Richard Rox Anderson, Director of the Wellman Center for Photomedicine at Massachusetts General Hospital, further explained the proven science behind light-based devices as a stimulus for hair growth. Finally, Dr. Ronda S. Farah provided a detailed overview of the FDA-cleared laser devices for hair regrowth, Capillus included. Capillus laser devices were recently selected for a study being conducted by Dr. Ronda S. Farah, a board-certified dermatologist and lector at this years conference.

The subject of LLLT generated so much buzz that the Capillus booth experienced an unprecedented number of inquiries. Dermatologists from across the globe approached the exhibit wanting to know how they can incorporate Capillus laser devices into their practice and treatment plans.

At the Capillus exhibit, physicians were able to get a first-hand demonstration of how laser devices for in-office and at-home treatment work. They also learned how low-level laser therapy can be safely used in combination with any other hair restoration treatment method, including hair transplants.

The audience was introduced to Capillus full-line of laser therapy devices, including the revolutionary CapillusRX, a cap containing more lasers than any other at-home LLLT device on the market. With 312 diodes, the CapillusRX delivers maximum coverage of the scalp and premier effectiveness in just six-minute treatment sessions. Because of its prescription strength, this new device is available only through the Capillus Physician Network.

In addition to the CapillusRX, Capillus offers three other FDA-cleared laser caps for direct sale via http://www.capillus.com. The Capillus82 is the most economical device with 82 laser diodes, while the Capillus202 is on the second tier with 202 laser diodes. Finally, the CapillusPro is a professional-grade device with 272 laser diodes. For in-office laser treatments, Capillus also offers the Capillus OfficePro, available to physicians and salons only.

Not only did visitors to the booth get to learn about Capillus top-selling laser therapy devices, they were also able to enter a drawing for a chance to win a CapillusPro. The winner, who was randomly selected, was Dr. Ross Levy, MD, FAAD, of CareMount Medical located in Mount Kisco, New York. Capillus is also proud to welcome Dr. Levy to its international network of leading hair restoration surgeons and specialists.

About Capillus, LLC

Capillus, LLC offers prescription and over-the-counter hair regrowth products and medical devices for both men and women suffering from hair loss. The Capillus premier product lines include low-level laser therapy (LLLT) devices that are FDA-cleared and manufactured in the US under the highest-quality certification standard for the medical device industry (ISO13485). Capillus also offers additional non-prescription clinical hair products for hair and scalp health under the Cap+ and RXCap+ brand. Capillus products are available directly to the public for at-home use and also to their network of physicians for office use.

For more information visit https://www.capillus.com.Today in Monrovia, Liberia, an event will mark the completion of the UN Peacekeeping Mission in Liberia, known as UNMIL, which officially will close on March 30, 2018. UNMIL was established in 2003 to support peace in Liberia following a second civil war. Peter Yeo, Senior Vice President at the United Nations Foundation and President of the Better World Campaign issued the following statement today regarding UNMILs closure:

This is a milestone for peace. After 15 years of service, the United Nations Peacekeeping Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) is ceasing operations and leaving behind a more stable nation. This is an example of how UN Peacekeeping can help countries transition from fragility to stability  improving lives and creating a better world.

Originally established in 2003 with strong support of the United States, UN Peacekeepers deployed to Liberia with a mandate to protect the vulnerable, pursue criminal justice, promote human rights, and secure fair and free elections. While its mission was vital, its the results that matter, and the UN Peacekeeping mission in Liberia succeeded.

For the past two decades, the once war-stricken region of West Africa comprised of Sierra Leone, Cote DIvoire, and Liberia heavily relied on blue helmets to bring back peace, rule of law, and stability to their respective countries. Today, the region has been completely transformed, thanks in large part to the UNs presence.

UNMIL is the last of the three UN Peacekeeping missions in the region to complete its mandate and leave its host country in a safer, more stable place than they found it.

It is important to recognize that even though UNMIL has completed its mandate, there is still much work left to be done in Liberia. UN agencies including the UN Development Programme (UNDP), the UN Childrens Fund (UNICEF), and the World Health Organization (WHO) will remain on the ground working to restore economic prosperity, end extreme poverty, and build strong institutions in partnership with the Liberian government.

The withdrawal of UN Peacekeepers reinforces the immense progress made in Liberia over the past 15 years. As a country that is no longer stricken by civil war and unrest, Liberia can now transition from peacekeeping to peace building and sustainable development in pursuit of an even brighter future for its citizens.

About the United Nations Foundation

The United Nations Foundation builds public-private partnerships to address the worlds most pressing problems, and broadens support for the United Nations through advocacy and public outreach. Through innovative campaigns and initiatives, the Foundation connects people, ideas, and resources to help the UN solve global problems. The Foundation was created in 1998 as a U.S. public charity by entrepreneur and philanthropist Ted Turner and now is supported by philanthropic, corporate, government, and individual donors. Learn more at: http://www.unfoundation.org.

About the Better World Campaign

The Better World Campaign works to foster a strong relationship between the U.S. and the UN to promote core American interests and build a more secure, prosperous, and healthy world. The Better World Campaign engages policymakers, the media, and the American public alike to increase awareness of the critical role played by the UN in world affairs and the importance of constructive U.S.-UN relations. Learn more at: http://www.betterworldcampaign.org

Media Contact:

Erika Howard | ebriceno(at)unfoundation(dot)org | 202-864-5156Welcome Guest! You Are Here:

Home Regional News EastAt the reception, Deputy PM Dung expressed his delight at the sound partnership between the two countries in all fields, especially in terms of economics and trade. The RoK is one of the leading economic partners of Vietnam, ranking first in investment, second in trade and ODA, and third in tourism. In 2017, bilateral trade reached US$61.5 billion.

The Deputy PM also spoke highly of the cooperation between the NACF and the Vietnam Cooperative Alliance (VCA) in the past year. Both parties have exchanged information and experiences on cooperative development and human resource development through training programmes.

He suggested that the NACF continues to support the VCA in the field of personnel training, enhance the capacity for agricultural cooperatives in Vietnam and build new cooperative models, as well as providing management skills for supermarket chain management and promoting cooperation in the field of agriculture and finance.

For his part, NACF President Kim Byeong agreed with Deputy PM Dung's suggestions, adding that the NACF is willing to provide resources and experience for Vietnam in the production chain in order to enhance the value of Vietnamese agricultural products.

He also proposed that the two countries devise more effective solutions to expand the consumption of agricultural products in each other's markets.Vietnamese Ambassador to Laos Nguyen Ba Hung made the statement while meeting with the deputy head of the External Affairs Commission of the LPRP Somdy Bounkhoun, on March 22, to congratulate the Lao Party on its 63rd founding anniversary.

At the meeting, the ambassador presented a basket of flowers from CPV General Secretary Nguyen Phu Trong to General Secretary of the LPRP and President of Laos Bounnhang Volachith in congratulations of the Lao Partys anniversary.

He expressed his delight at the achievements made by the Lao people over the past 63 years, expressing his hope that the country would reap more success in its renovation process in order to build a peaceful, independent, unified and prosperous nation.

Regarding the special ties between Vietnam and Laos, the Vietnamese diplomat said that the successful organisation of the Solidarity and Friendship Year events in 2017 is a vivid illustration of the thriving bilateral relations.

The Vietnamese Party, State and people will do their utmost to foster the special relationship between the two nations, he stressed.

Somdy Bounkhoun, for his part, thanked the Vietnamese side for their congratulations, saying that the Lao Party, State and people always remember the Vietnamese support for the country during its struggle for national liberation and development.

He stressed that Laos attaches great importance to treasuring the special solidarity with Vietnam and has been working hard to elevate the relations.

Earlier, the CPV Central Committee cabled a congratulatory message to the LPRPs Central Committee on the occasion. The message stated that Vietnam congratulates Laos on the great victories it has attained in the past struggle for national liberation as well as the current national construction and development.

Vietnam strongly supports Laos renewal process and believes that under the leadership of the LPRP, the Lao people would reap greater achievements in their development path, it said.

On the same day, Hoang Binh Quan, head of the CPV Central Committees Commission for External Relations also sent a message of congratulations to his Lao counterpart Sounthone Sayachac.Despite President Donald Trump's national-security advisers' note reminding him "DO NOT CONGRATULATE" Russian President Vladimir Putin on his election victory during their call last Tuesday, Trump did anyway.

When asked whether Trump thought Putin's election victory was free and fair during a press briefing that day, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders demurred.

"We're focused on our elections," she said. "We don't get to dictate how other countries operate."

During another press briefing last month, Sanders argued Trump had been "tougher on Russia in the first year than [former President Barack] Obama was in eight years combined."

This argument has become a frequent line of defense Trump officials have used when pressed about the administration's complicated relationship with Russia.

Trump, whose response to the US intelligence community's assessment that Russia meddled in the 2016 US election has been lukewarm at best, is often perceived as being hesitant to confront the Kremlin's aggression.

But the Trump administration has actually taken some concrete actions against Russia. Here are six examples:

Expelling diplomats

The Trump administration said it would expel 60 Russian diplomats in response to the poisoning of Russian spy Sergei Skripal in Britain.

The measures were announced on Monday morning, and follow Britain accusing Vladimir Putin's regime of being behind the attack. Moscow has denied involvement.

The US move follows Britain's decision to expel 23 diplomats working at Russia's embassy in Britain in the immediate aftermath of the attack, which took place on March 4.

A White House statement said:

"The United States takes this action in conjunction with our NATO allies and partners around the world in response to Russia's use of a military-grade chemical weapon on the soil of the United Kingdom, the latest in its ongoing pattern of destabilizing activities around the world.

"Today's actions make the United States safer by reducing Russia's ability to spy on Americans and to conduct covert operations that threaten America's national security."

Sanctions

On March 15, the Trump administration announced new sanctions on Russia for its attempts to interfere in the 2016 US election.

The sanctions were scheduled to be implemented earlier this year, but Trump backed down, arguing that the sanctions bill he signed last August was already working as a deterrent against Russia.

Trump originally signed the sanctions bill  officially called the Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act  last August, albeit begrudgingly.

The sanctions bill also imposes a wide range of sanctions on North Korea and Iran.

Closing of diplomatic facilities

After Congress approved Russia-related sanctions last summer, Russia expelled 755 American diplomats from the country.

In response, the Trump administration ordered Russia to close three of its diplomatic facilities in the US, including its consulate in San Francisco, and two annexes in Washington, DC, and New York City.

Arms sale to Ukraine

In December, Trump announced his support for the sale of lethal munitions to the Ukrainian government in its fight against Russian-backed separatists in the country's Donbas region, a move that angered Russia, which has been engaged in a hybrid war in the region for the past four years.

The State Department officially approved $47 million weapons sale in early March. It included Javelin launchers and anti-tank missiles.

Condemnation of nerve agent attack in the UK

On March 4, Russian dissident Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, suffered from a nerve agent attack. The father and daughter are living in London.

The US, the UK, France, and Germany all blamed Russia for the attack.

Although Trump initially failed to deliver a forceful condemnation of Russia for the attack, other officials in his administration picked up the slack.

"Over the past four years, Russia has engaged in a campaign of coercion and violence, targeting anyone opposed to its attempted annexation," State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said in a statement.

"We stand behind those courageous individuals who continue to speak out about these abuses and we call on Russia to cease its attempts to quell fundamental freedoms of expression, peaceful assembly and association, and religion or belief."

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson said the attack "clearly came from Russia" and US Ambassador to the US Nikki Haley said the US stood in "absolute solidarity" with the UK after the attack.

A full day after the UK blamed Russia, Trump told reporters that "as soon as we get the facts straight, if we agree with them, we will condemn Russia or whoever it may be." Referring to the UK's findings, he added, "It sounds to me like they believe it was Russia, and I would certainly take that finding as fact."

National-security experts were baffled and alarmed by Trump's delayed reaction to the chemical attack.

Trump then joined a statement with UK Prime Minister Theresa May, French President Emmanuel Macron, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel agreeing that there was "no plausible alternative explanation" than that Russia was to blame for the attack.

Trump officials repeatedly criticize Moscow

State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert and US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley have been particularly critical of Russia.

On March 7, Nauert condemned Russia in a tweet, saying that it ignored a UN ceasefire agreement in Syria by bombing civilians in Damascus and Eastern Ghouta.

Her criticism elicited a direct response from Russia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA), which told Nauert to "calm down."

"Your propaganda machine is out of control - you're spamming all of us," the MFA added.

In January, Nauert condemned Russia for supporting separatists in the country of Georgia. Trump recently promoted her to undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs.Welcome to the Pulse Community! We will now be sending you a daily newsletter on news, entertainment and more. Also join us across all of our other channels - we love to be connected!President Donald Trump was issued a summons in a lawsuit filed by the attorneys general for both Maryland and Washington, DC, alleging he is violating the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution.

The summons came as the suit was expanded to include his personal capacity as a businessman, WAMU reported Wednesday.

The Emoluments Clause bars public officials from receiving gifts or cash from foreign governments, and ethics experts and lawmakers have repeatedly raised concerns over the patronage of Trump's properties by foreign government officials. Trump, who passed along his business to his two adult sons and a top Trump Organization executive, maintains ties to the business. He did not fully divest from his business as experts had hoped.

Trump pledged to donate all profits at his hotels from foreign government officials to the Treasury. The Trump Organization recently announced that money was donated last month, though it did not provide receipts of how much money was donated.

The attorneys general argue in the suit that Trump's refusal to cut ties with his businesses led to foreign officials directly paying his company. The lawsuit additionally alleges that Maryland and Washington, DC, have lost out on business opportunities as a result of foreign officials instead choosing to spend money at Trump properties.President Donald Trump's national security adviser, Army Gen. H.R. McMaster is out and John Bolton, a former US ambassador to the United Nations, is set to replace him.

In late February, amid a marked thaw in tensions between North Korea and South Korea during which the prospect of diplomacy looked brighter than ever, Bolton wrote an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal called "The Legal Case for Striking North Korea First."

In the article, Bolton argued that North Korea had given the US no choice and must be attacked before it perfected its fleet of nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles. In his article Bolton never mentioned South Korea, which is in range of North Korea's massive installation of hidden artillery guns.

Experts estimate that thousands would die in Seoul, South Korea, the capital of a democratic, loyal US ally, for every hour of fighting with North Korea.

"It is perfectly legitimate for the United States to respond to the current 'necessity' posed by North Korea's nuclear weapons by striking first," Bolton said to conclude his article.

After South Korean diplomats said North Korean leader Kim Jong Un had expressed willingness to give up his country's nuclear weapons, Bolton dismissed it as a trick.

"The only thing North Korea is serious about is getting deliverable nuclear weapons," he told Fox News. Bolton frequently appears on Fox, Trump's favorite news station, to talk about North Korea in his characteristically hawkish way.

Bolton's Twitter feed is a constant stream of reminders of links between North Korea's weapons programs and those in Syria and Iran.

Bolton believes, not without evidence, that North Korea could become an exporter of dangerous technologies that could threaten US lives.

Trump already had a North Korea hawk  Bolton is a super hawk

In November and December, persistent reports came out that Trump's inner circle was weighing such a "bloody nose" attack on North Korea. But by the new year, military and administration officials had started to pour cold water on the notion.Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee on Thursday released a report detailing their findings in the panel's Russia investigation, and it makes several incomplete assertions that obscure facts.

It said Russia was responsible for carrying out cyberattacks against the US, disseminating hacked emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee, and launching a social media disinformation campaign  findings that largely echo parts of the US intelligence community's assessment of Russia's interference in the 2016 election.

But Republicans' conclusions about whether President Donald Trump's campaign colluded with Moscow left out critical context and painted an incomplete picture of the scope of the campaign's contacts with Russians.

Among other things, Republicans on the committee said:

The committee recommended Europe and the US shore up their cyber defenses and lessen economic dependence on Russia to counter its aggression. It also suggested Congress take a larger role in addressing Russia's cyber activity and empower state and local authorities to secure election infrastructure.

Notably, Republicans also recommended Congress repeal the Logan Act, which makes it illegal for private citizens to conduct policy negotiations on behalf of the US.

Several of Trump's associates  including Michael Flynn, the former national security adviser  have been accused of violating the Logan Act.

Flynn pleaded guilty in December to one count of making false statements to investigators about his conversations with Sergey Kislyak, then Russia's ambassador to the US. According to a court filing, a "very senior member" of the Trump transition team directed Flynn's interactions with Kislyak  a revelation that observers said could amount to a violation of the Logan Act.

The New York Times reported last year that some had suggested the Logan Act was moot based on a legal doctrine called desuetude, which stipulates that a law may become null and void if it goes without use for a long time. Only two people have been indicted under the Logan Act, and neither indictment resulted in a conviction.

Shortly after Republicans released their report, the ranking Democrat on the committee, Rep. Adam Schiff, responded in a tweet.Akwaaba (the Ghanaian term for welcome) is the first single from the DJ/producer GuiltyBeatz who is signed to Meister Music.

You may be familiar with GuiltyBeatz from the smash Mr Eazi single Sample You.

"Akwaaba" sees the duo reconnect and call on Pappy and Patapaa to create another banger that is essential for DJ sets and playlists.

Enjoy the track below.This latest incident comes after a similar one that went viral last month when some doctors mistakenly cut open a wrong patients head. He was mistaken for another patient who was supposed to undergo brain surgery due to blood clot in his brain.

The incident created lots of backlash for the hospital and the doctors involved were suspended and subsequently reinstated after protest by other workers.

READ MORE: Hotel owner flees for his life after spotting lion in one of the rooms

According to Africafeeds.com, the latest case involves a pregnant woman by name Susan Nekesa who underwent surgery to deliver her of her twin babies.

She reportedly told a local media, Citizen TV that the blunder has made her stomach swell and she is unable to either sit up or walk.

Corroborating the claim, sister of the victim, Evelyn Anindo is quoted as saying: When I came to see her, I found that she had a swollen stomach, Evelyn said adding that Her stomach was also very hot and she could not talk. We communicated using signs.

Her husband, Robert Sitati also said: It was discovered that the surgery was done wrongly. A portion of the small intestines, like 50cm, was outside the chamber where it was supposed to be.

It is reported that Susan was later rushed back to the hospital after complaining of stomach pain. It was then that doctors reportedly admitted that they had made a mistake.

It is unclear what could be responsible for the mishaps at the facility and what actions the Hospital is likely to take regarding this latest case.The situation looked so dire that onlookers were left in a state of confusion as any unguarded attempt to rescue the man could make him fall and crash-land.

They called the Welsh Ambulance Service, North Wales Police, North Wales Fire and Rescue Service and Wales Air Ambulance Service, but they were all hesitant due to the precarious manner in which the man was hanging in the woods.

He spent some time up there before a search and rescue volunteer came to rescue him.

He climbed the tree, grabbed the victim and descended him so carefully that he landed unhurt.

North East Wales Search and Rescue spokesman is quoted by Metro.co.uk as saying: Team members were called by North Wales Police at 12.40pm to rescue a paraglider pilot trapped around 70 feet high in a tree near Llangollen.

When we arrived several other agencies were on site as well. One of our team members used his professional tree climbing skills to get above the casualty so a rope system could be built to lower him gently to the ground.

"Fortunately he hadnt suffered any injuries in the crash and was able to walk away to his car.The Chief Executive Officer of Ghana Chamber of Mines, Sulemanu Koney was speaking when they held a meeting with the Eastern Regional Minister Eric Kwakye Darfuor in Koforidua on Tuesday (March 20, 2018).

Mr Koney said that the mining companies barely default in the payment of royalties to the government. However, he argued that the proportion of the total royalty which goes directly to the mining districts is too small.

Only 4.95% of all mineral royalty payments by the mining companies are given back to the mining districts.

READ ALSO: VAT on condoms and 63 other commodities removed

He mentioned that in 2016 for instance, mining companies in the country paid a mineral royalty of Ghc550 million to Government but only GHC27 million will be returned to the mining district assemblies for development.

He described this as woefully inadequate for the stimulation of meaningful infrastructural development in the mining communities.

He said they were happy with the governments commitment to increase the overall proportion of royalty revenue from 10% to 20%. They are also asking the government to increase the share to 30% for a fixed period to tackle infrastructural challenges in the mining communities.

However, the Eastern Regional Minister, Eric Kwakye Darfuor said Ghana has not benefitted meaningfully from the gold mining industry considering the number of gold deposits extracted from Ghana.

He said with the exception of few mining firms like Newmont Akyem Mines developing their operational areas in the region, most of the mining companies do not care about initiating support programs for their host communities.

READ ALSO: Meet all the Unibank Executives who will lose their jobs after the takeover

He said this is the reason for the under development in most mining communities in Ghana.

Eric Kwakye Darfour, therefore, called on the mining companies to collaborate with their host communities to support them with developmental initiatives.

In reacting to this comment Mr Koney said that with exception of 2015, the mining industry in Ghana has been the highest revenue contributor to the economy in the last five years of which a total of Ghc1.6 billion was paid to the government as direct revenue.PM Phuc made the statement while receiving Hong Kong Secretary for Commerce and Economic Development Yau Tang-wah in Hanoi on March 22.

Lauding progress in political, economic, trade and investment ties, the PM suggested Hong Kong support Vietnam in developing bilateral trade and send experts to assist Vietnam since Hong Kong is a financial centre in the region and the world.

He said Vietnam has been focusing on developing transport, health and education infrastructure, and Hong Kong enterprises may take part in projects in these fields.

PM Phuc affirmed that Vietnam is striving to improve its investment environment and to create optimal conditions for foreign investors, including those from Hong Kong (China), to successfully do business in the country.

For his part, Yau said he was impressed at Vietnams economic growth as well as its achievements in international integration and strong development of Vietnam-China relations.

He said his ongoing visit to Vietnam is accompanied by a large number of Hong Kong firms who are seeking investment opportunities in the country, thus lifting bilateral trade ties to a new height.

Hong Kong wants to become a reliable partner of Vietnam, Yau said, adding that Hong Kong can provide Vietnam with professional services in the fields of finance, law, insurance and accounting.This was disclosed by the presidential adviser on public sector reforms Professor Kusi Boafo.

In an interview with Accra-based Starr FM, Prof Kusi Boafo said the monitoring system when implemented will be used as part of indicators for promotion and salary raise in the public sector.

READ ALSO: VAT on condoms and 63 other commodities removed

By July, we hope the document will be ready. Workers in the public sector will have Key Performance Indicators they are to achieve. We want to bring in a system that will make known the number of hours you spend in your office. Your pay and promotion will be based on the system and that way workers will be at work on time, We will sensitize the public and put in place measures that will help them channel their grievances.

He said the government will ensure schedule officers in the various public institutions will be empowered to become more useful.

There is a schedule officer at most public sectorsthey report who doesnt come to work to management. Unfortunately, the role of the schedule officer has not been so functional. We will make sure the schedule officers get back to work and trained to do a good job. Generally, most ministers and people at the top are not punctual. Sanctions can start to get them to be on time for sittings and events.

Professor Kusi had earlier hinted government is considering ways to give Ghanaians passports at birth.Joy News reports that the pond risks losing its fortunes and rich history if steps are not taken to rid the site of animal waste other filthy materials.

The Paga crocodile pond is one of the most attractive tourist sites in Ghana, with the facility attracting averagely between 400 and 500 local and foreign visitors every month.

The historic pond is famed for its friendly crocodiles, with tourists often travelling from far and near to have a glimpse of the unbelievable nature of the creatures.

However, the environment around the tourist site has been taken over by filth which is threatening the shine of the pond.

Animals can most often be found drinking from the pond, after which they indiscriminately litter the place with their waste.

Tourists who visit the facility are met with a strange and strong smell emanating from the environment.

Previously, the pond used to be guarded by a fence wall to prevent stray animals from entering, however, the fence has since been pulled down by the community.

Explaining why the fence wall had to be removed, manager and tour guide at the Paga pond, Amidu Pagape, said it is to allow for free movement of the crocodiles into the community to lay eggs.

These crocodiles in the night walk into the community dig holes and lay their eggs. When the eggs hatch, they will now go back to the community and bring the babies into the pond,  he told Joy News.

At first it was fenced, but it is because of the activities of the crocodiles that is why the fence has been brought down so that they can freely move out anytime.

Mr. Pagape added: In the night, you can meet crocodiles crossing the street but they dont harm anybody.

He, however, called on the Ghana Tourism Authority to take action to help preserve the historic pond.According to the family, the decision by the Attorney General to drag Dr Opuni before court is political.

The family members clad in mourning clothes chanted war songs threatening to face off anyone who jails Dr Opuni.

READ MORE: Here are the 27 charges against former COCOBOD CEO Stephen Opuni

Mr John Adu Jack Antwirifo, 2016 National Democratic Congress (NDC) parliamentary candidate for Dormaa Central Constituency at a press conference said charges against Opuni must be quashed.

Opuni will go jail - Kennedy Agyapong

Kennedy Agyapong has always kicked against Dr Opuni saying he will make sure that Dr Stephen Kwabena Opuni goes to jail.

"Opuni will go to jail and I will make sure he pays dearly for his crimes. If we refuse to jail him, Ghanaians will vote against us in the next four years and so we need to get corrupt officials like him away from the country" Kennedy Agyapong said.

27 charges against Opuni

However, on March 14, 2018, the state has filed a case of causing financial loss against him.

Charged along with Dr Opuni is one Seidu Agongo and Agricult Ghana Limited.

A total of 27 charges have been leveled against them.

READ MORE: Former COCOBOD CEO faces 27 charges for causing financial lossHe said agreements between the two countries were hidden by the previous governments, one of which, he said, was signed by Hanna Tetteh about three years ago.

Nitiwul speaking to the press produced two separate military agreements which, according to him, clearly show that the former President Jerry Rawlings and John Mahama administrations signed bilateral military agreements which he says laid the foundation for the new controversial agreement.

He said the government of Nana Addo will not hide any security deal between Ghana and the US contrary to what Mahama did.

He added: "Two years ago, Hanna Tetteh sold us, not us [Akufo-Addo government]. In 1998, they sold us."

Parliament has received the controversial defence agreement between Ghana and the United States governments that would allow the US to establish a military base in the country.

The agreement was tabled before parliament for consideration and approval on Tuesday, March 20 in line with Article 181(5) of the 1992 constitution, which requires parliamentary approval in respect of "international business transactions" to which Ghana is a party.

The agreement grants the US military unfettered access to "a host of Ghanaian facilities and wide-ranging tax exemptions."

In the agreement, it's been reported that the US will have unrestricted access to a host of Ghanaian facilities and wide-ranging tax exemptions to the United States Military.

The agreement will permit the US military to use Ghana as a base for staging and deploying forces.

The deal is said to have been on cabinet's agenda for the past 8 months, however, they only approved it on March 8.

According to the agreement, Ghana will provide unimpeded access to and use of agreed facilities and areas to the U.S. forces and Contractors.

It also allows U.S. forces and their Contractors to undertake construction activities on and make alterations and improvements to agreed facilities and areas.

However, the US has dismissed reports that it is building a military base in Ghana.Speaking on Kumasi-based Angel FM, he said: "2020 I will contest as an independent presidential candidate

Dr. Boateng has been a harsh critic of the previous NDC administration and the current NPP government. He accused them of being tone-deaf to the plight of Ghanaians therefore the need for a new force to steer the affairs of the country.

The NDC have taken people in the Volta Region for granted and NPP same in Ashanti Region for a period of years they ruled.  people in these regions should not give them chance, Dr. Amakye Boateng admonished.Government, as part of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed earlier in March 2018, is actively pushing for the indefinite hosting of military personnel and equipment from the US.

However, many Ghanaians, including political commentators and security experts have kicked against the idea of hosting US troops in the country, saying it may expose Ghana to terrorist attacks.

Consequently, government has been under pressure to pull out of the deal, as majority of the public have openly sounded their displeasure with the agreement.

But in a rather resounding statement, Defence Minister, Dominic Nitiwul, has stated that it is impossible for government to back out of the deal.

According to him, previous agreements signed between both countries mean the hands of government are tied on the matter.

We have already signed a 1998 agreement, we have signed the 2015 agreement and we have already caught ourselves in this net and we cannot back out because this is just a combination of the two agreements, he said whiles addressing a news conference on Wednesday.

The Bimbilla MP added that the US is not setting up a military base in Ghana, as widely speculated, emphasizing that it is only a partnership between the two countries.

Meanwhile, the Minority has described the agreement to host US Military troops in Ghana as tantamount to selling Ghanas sovereignty to the United States.According to him, the US to establish a military base in the country would be very dire for Ghana.

He said "What government is about to do right now is just allowing terrorism in the country because the US is noted for such things and so bringing them into our country means you are only promoting terrorism and risking the lives of Ghanaians?."

Cabinet has reportedly approved the granting of unrestricted access to a host of Ghanaian facilities and wide-ranging tax exemptions to the United States Military as part of an agreement between Ghana and American governments.

The agreement was also tabled before parliament for consideration and approval on Tuesday, March 20, in line with Article 181(5) of the 1992 constitution, which requires parliamentary approval in respect of "international business transactions" to which Ghana is a party.

The agreement grants the US military unfettered access to "a host of Ghanaian facilities and wide-ranging tax exemptions."

In the agreement, it's been reported that the US will have unrestricted access to a host of Ghanaian facilities and wide-ranging tax exemptions to the United States Military.

The agreement will permit the US military to use Ghana as a base for staging and deploying forces.

The deal is said to have been on cabinet's agenda for the past 8 months, however, they only approved it on March 8.

Minister of Defence, Dominic Nitiwul is quoted in the memo advising cabinet to sanction the agreement because the Ghanaian military will benefit in trainings and logistics.

According to the agreement, Ghana will provide unimpeded access to and use of agreed facilities and areas to the U.S. forces and Contractors.

It also allows U.S. forces and their Contractors to undertake construction activities on and make alterations and improvements to agreed facilities and areas.

Asiedu Nketia in an interview on Accra-based Okay FM said it will be suicidal if Parliament approves the security deal calling on them to reject the agreement.

"Our MPs should desist from it because it wont work. They should rise up in arms against the move," he added.

However, the US has dismissed reports that it is building a military base in Ghana.He said he has passed the statutory age for employment therefore the writ is without merit.

He added that, the NDC officials are seeking to derail efforts being made to fight corruption in the country.

"To the best of my knowledge, information and belief, the Plaintiff [Dominic Ayine] brought this action in his name fronting for the immediate past Government to set at naught the popular wishes of the majority of the Ghanaian electorate who see the Presidents acceptance of the nomination of the 2nd Defendant [Martin Amidu] as Special Prosecutor, as being in the national interest to attack the canker of corruption in the body politic," Martin Amidu said in his affidavit.

Martin Amidu noted: "[Dominic Ayine] was also the immediate past Deputy Minister for Justice for less than four years in the immediate past Government that was overwhelmingly defeated in the last elections on 7th December 2016.the legal firm of Lithur Brew and Company now representing the Plaintiff [Dominic Ayine] are also the lawyers for former President, John Dramani Mahama: the immediate past Attorney General, Marietta Opong Brew-Appiah was and is a member of the law firm as well as Tony Lithur who was also appointed by the former President as Chairman of the lucrative Ghana Airport Company Limited during his tenure of office and also holds himself out as the personal lawyer of the former President."

He said Ayine has refused to "appreciate the fact that Parliament has residual power under the 1992 Constitution to enact sui generis provisions in an Act of Parliament such as Section 13 of Act 959 to deal with matters such as the intractable canker of corruption and corruption related offences expressly proscribed by the Constitution and laws of Ghana by engaging such legal talents on such terms and conditions as would effectively achieve the objective of the Constitutional proscriptions."

Martin Amidu sued

Prior to Martin Amidu's appointment, former deputy Attorney-General, Dr. Dominic Ayine, filed a suit to challenge the nomination.

He contends that Mr. Amidu, being 66 years of age, is too old to hold public office, under which the Special Prosecutors position falls.

READ MORE: Martin Amidu challenged to also declare his assets

He is seeking a declaration that "by a true and proper interpretation of Articles 190(1)(d), 199(1), 199(4), and 295 of the 1992 Constitution, the retirement age of all holders of public office created pursuant to Article(1)(d) is sixty years, anyhow not beyond (65)."

He argued in his writ that, "any other interpretation would result in an unlawful amendment of Article 199 of the Constitution by legislation."

AG defends Amidu

But the AG has put up a spirited defence in favour of Amidu as the Special Prosecutor.

The Attorney-General (A-G) and Minister of Justice, Ms Gloria Akuffo, has asked the Supreme court to dismiss a suit challenging the nomination of Martin Amidu.According to him, accepting to host the foreign troops could lead to foreign domination on the economic and social lives of Ghanaians.

He said Ghanaians may be fond of Americans but are not ready to live together with foreign troops in the country.

Government, as part of a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed earlier in March 2018, is actively pushing for the indefinite hosting of military personnel and equipment from the US.

The Defence Minister, Dominic Nitiwul, who laid the agreement before Parliament for consideration on Tuesday, argued that Ghana stands to benefit so much from the agreement.

Many Ghanaians, including political commentators and security experts have kicked against the idea of hosting US troops in the country, saying it may expose Ghana to terrorist attacks.

Ex-President Rawlings  who is himself an ex-Flight Lieutenant  is the latest to add his voice to the matter and has revealed that he is not too enthused by the whole idea.

According to him, Ghana already has enough foreigners dominating their economic and social lives and that hosting foreign troops in the last thing the citizenry needs.

Ghanaians may love Americans, but not to the extent of living with foreign troops on such a scale. Ghanaians have enough foreigners dominating their economic and social life. Adding foreign troops to the discomfort would be a bit too much. Ghanaians have felt stateless before in my lifetime. Lets not go there again, Rawlings said, as quoted by Citifmonline.

As part of the agreement tabled before Parliament, the US military will be exempted from paying taxes on equipment they will bring to Ghana.

The troops will also be allowed to set up a telecommunication system on Ghanas radio spectrum for free, whiles Ghanaian authorities will also be restricted from accessing the facilities given to the US officials when they begin using them.The previous NDC administration shielded information about the Gitmo two but this government has been bold to offer us social accountability, the outspoken communicator disclosed on Kumasi-based.

READ ALSO: How social media reacted to US military base agreement

Earlier this week, Joy FM reported on a memo that has been approved by cabinet and set or parliament on a military deal between Ghana and the US which gives them unfiltered access to military installations in Ghana.

Ghanaians should praise the government for not shielding information about the agreement unlike Gitmo two, he said.The scientist, a lecturer from the Ho Chi Minh City-based Vietnam National University's Department of Biomedical Engineering, was honoured for her project named 21st century first-aid kit, which is an hemostatic glue.

She shared that it was her honour to be the second Vietnamese woman to receive the award.

On the occasion, the LOreal Foundation and UNESCO will honour five exceptional female scientists with the 2018 LOreal-UNESCO for Women in Science Awards at a ceremony on March 22.

Over the last 20 years, the LOreal-UNESCO the For Women in Science programme has raised the profile of 102 laureates and supported more than 3,000 young female scientists, helping them to benefit from increased recognition within the scientific community. Three of the laureates have received Nobel Prizes for Science.

To further promote these women in science, the LOreal Foundation is raising public awareness of their achievements.The news sparked an uproar among a large section of Ghanaians which led to the Minister of Defence, Dominic Nitiwul to organise a press conference and debunk the news. The United States Embassy in Ghana also followed suit to deny that the US wants to set a military base in Ghana but the agreement is only joint military partnerships between both countries.Nigerias President Muhammadu Buhari had every reason to dine with two world richest men hours after Boko Haram released abducted schoolgirls in Yobe State.

On Wednesday, March 21, 2018, the President hosted philanthropist Bill Gate and his seeming African buddy, Aliko Dangote to a classy dinner.

The dinner held at the State House in Abuja with other top government officials and aides of the billionaires in attendance.

The Presidency tweeted about the dinner but did not give details about what was discussed.

Gates, the Co-Founder of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, has been supporting different causes in Nigeria - one of which is the eradication of HIV/AIDS.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has been playing significant humanitarian and philanthropic roles in Nigeria in the areas of polio eradication, maternal health and other areas.LONDON  Estonian bank LHV is opening a UK branch in a bid to win more financial technology business in what it's CEO believes is "the fintech capital of Europe."

"We see a lot of questions coming from UK companies and fintechs about partnering with us," said Andres Kitter, head of retail banking at LHV and head of the bank's UK branch.

LHV was founded in 1999 and is part of the largest financial group in Estonia. The bank already works with UK-headquartered online money transfer service TransferWise, whose cofounders are Estonian, and the European branch of Coinbase, the US cryptocurrency exchange.

The bank wants to become "an innovative partner for fintech and payment companies" in the UK, Kitter said.

"The main focus is payment rails and payment facilities," Kitter said. "For the more complex demand, we provide financing facilities. Basically, the tools that you need as a fintech or money service provider  payments, financing, card acquiring."

Kitter said LHV had decided to enter the UK market now because of recent Open Banking reforms, which require UK banks to share customer data with third parties if customers agree. Similar EU rules are coming later this year, dubbed PSD2.

"We do expect the Open Banking initiative and PSD2 in Europe create to a second wave of fintechs, which will be building consumer and SME-focused businesses on the infrastructure," Kitter said.

"We really think that London is the place to be," he added. "London is the fintech capital of Europe."

Kitter said that Brexit was "a little bit of a surprise" but said: "The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) is one of the thought leaders on how to regulate and how to work with fintech companies and that wont change. London will be the fintech capital in Europe and the world and that wont change."

LHV, which is licensed by the FCA, aims to have five staff working in the UK by the end of the year helping to sign up new customers. Kitter says the bank will work with companies at an earlier stage than traditional lenders.Nigerias deadly terrorists, Boko Haram might be changing its narrative following the happenings in the early hours of Wednesday, March 21, 2018.

According to multiple reports, members of the Boko Haram had arrived Dapchi community in Yobe state in vehicles without brandishing guns and warfare.

After negotiations with the Nigerian government, the terrorists had returned 105 girls and a boy in their vehicles and dropped them in the school premises where they were kidnapped on February 19, 2018.

AFP reports that a parent of one of the schoolgirls, Kachalla Bukar, said Boko Haram militants shook hands and took pictures with them before leaving.

This is contrary to the usual commando style adopted and exhibited by the terrorists, who were ranked one of the 10 deadliest terrorist groups in 2017.

The report further noted that another parent, Alhaji Deri, said the remote town was "crowded with people celebrating" as word spread of the return of the abducted schoolgirls.

Meanwhile, the Nigerias Information minister, Lai Mohammed said the terrorists breached the ceasefire agreement.

What happened was that the abduction itself was a breach of the ceasefire talks between the insurgents and the government, hence it became a moral burden on the abductors. Any report that we paid ransom or engaged in prisoner swap is false,'' he said.The agreement to create the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) was signed at an extraordinary summit in Kigali, Rwanda by representatives of 44 of the 55 African Union (AU) member states and expected to come into force within six months.

The countries that signed the AfCFTA Consolidated Text are Niger, Rwanda, Angola, C.A.R., Chad, Comoros, Congo, Djibouti, The Gambia, Gabon, Ghana, Kenya, Mauritania, Mozambique, Cote'd'Ivoire, Seychelles, Algeria, Equatorial Guinea.

Others are Morocco, Swaziland, Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Cape Verde, D.R.C, Guinea, Liberia, Libya, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauritius, South Sudan, Uganda, Egypt, Ethiopia, Sao Tome and Principle, Togo and Tunisia.

The deal is expected to improve the economic prosperity of the African nations removing barriers to trade, like tariffs and import quotas, allowing the free flow of goods and services between its members.

Nigeria, South Africa and nine other countries failed to sign the deal, which will need to be ratified by all the signatories' lawmaking authorities before the bloc becomes a reality.

Nigerian government excuse

Though, the Federal Executive Council had approved for President Muhammadu Buhari to sign the framework agreement for establishing the African Continental Free Trade Area, a late hour decision from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs noted that certain key stakeholders in Nigeria indicated that they had not been consulted, and therefore had some concerns about the provisions of the treaty.

Consequently, the Nigerian government backed out to allow more time for broader consultations and input from the stakeholders.

The Nigerian stakeholders

Manufacturers Association of Nigeria - The Manufacturers Association frowned at the contents of the agreement, noting that it will lead to gross unemployment in the country as most manufacturing companies in the country will be made to die a quicker death.

Dr Frank Jacobs, the president of the association, said issues of market access and enforcement of rules of origin should be properly addressed before the government adopt and ratify the deal.

The Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) had also warned President Muhammadu Buhari against signing the agreement, calling it a "renewed, extremely dangerous and radioactive neo-liberal policy initiative".

South African government excuse

President Cyril Ramaphosa who attended the meeting said that his government welcomed the "historic moment" and dream of the AU but needs to consult widely before joining other African nations.

He said the country needs to consult people at home, his Cabinet, partners at the National Economic Development and Labour Council, and finally to consult Parliamentarians and only signed the declaration on the establishment of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA).

The AfCTA is a trade bloc of 1.2 billion people with a combined gross domestic product (GDP) of more than $2 trillion. The agreement commits countries to removing tariffs on 90 percent of goods and to liberalize services.He revealed his desire in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN), on Wednesday, March 20, 2018.

Al-Yolawi, the Chief Imam of area 10, Garki Abuja Mosque, reminded the Federal Government that wearing Hijab is a fundamental human right of Muslim women.

This is why the cleric is appealing to the government to protect the rights of all Muslim ladies.

He made reference to the Section 38 (1) of the 1999 Constitution and Article 18 of the Universal Declaration of Human Right, which says that every person shall be entitled to freedom of thought, conscience, and religion.

ALSO READ: Viral photo shows how much hate is directed at hijab

Cleric wants hate against hijab-wearing Muslims to stop

In his words, I will like to use this opportunity to appeal to the Federal Government and elites to ensure respect for the constitutional rights and privileges of Islam and Muslims in Nigeria.

The constitutional rights of Muslims are often not being considered in certain things, for example, look at the case Firdausi Amasa, a law graduate who was denied call to bar on the account of wearing Hijab."

There have been a couple of cases of discrimination against Muslim women with hijabs.

The latest is involves Amasa Firdaus, the female law student, who was turned away at her call-to-bar ceremony for refusing to remove her hijab.The school authorities on Wednesday, March 21, 2018, accused the students of assaulting university officials, who were instructed to clean and evict female students from Moremi hall, which was said to have been marked for renovation.

According to reports, while the university workers were carrying out the instructions, a confrontation erupted between the students and the university officials.

The confrontation reportedly led to the arrest of the following students: Gbenga Oloruniran, a 400 level students of Geography; Olajide Ademola, a 500 level student of Electrical Electronics; Oyedeji Samson, 300 level student of Pharmacy; Jimoh Oladipupo, 300 level student of Biochemistry; and Adeniji John, 300 level student of Electrical Electronics.

The five students arraigned in court

Following their arrest on Wednesday, March 21, the five students according to Premium Times appeared in Court on Thursday, March 22, 2018, in Ife, Osun state.

ALSO READ: OAU charges N90 for hostel accommodation every year

While students and journalists were denied access to the courtroom by the Federal Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) of the Nigerian Police, the acting student union security officer, Opeyemi Oprah, who was present during the proceeding said the arraigned students were granted bail, Premium Times reports.

The bail term for each of the students according to report includes N500,000 bond and provision of two sureties, who must be civil servants of level 11 and above as well as tax payers.This isn't a joke guys, as an unidentified young lady recently wrote a letter to the actor wishing to be his wife.

She also revealed in her detailed letter that she drinks anointing oil anytime she thinks about him. Weird right? She also revealed that she has pushed a number of men away just so she can be with the dashing actor.

"Good morning sir, please I need your help. Im ready to submit myself to Yabaleft for evaluation. I cant take the torment anymore. Im 29 years old, Im beautiful, I have a wonderful job but Ive been single for four years now because Im in love with this celebrity.

A Nigerian actor RMD! Ive pushed a lot of good men away because of him. In my kind I need to be single so if he sees me he may want me for second wife, I love him. I can die. Sometimes I cry and drink anointing oil for my soul," she wrote.

Now, this lady might have also been stalking the actor as she also revealed in her letter that she has already sent him more than 40 DMs and also has a gallery of about 3000 of his photos. Obsession alert!

"I know he is married but I love him and want him. I have a gallery of 3000 of his pictures, Ive sent him 40 DM but he wont reply me. Please, what is wrong with me falling for a married man. I cant think straight anymore. I just want to have dinner with him, Ive waited for four years, Im ready to wait for him.

Please advise me. This is true love God can see my heart. In the next life, he is my husband, my soul, my destiny, baba ibeji my teins. I want to make yellow eba and efo for him," she concluded.

Even though this might be a norm for RMD as he is fondly called, he hasn't made any comment concerning this letter which might be a little bit disturbing, we can't wait to hear what the veteran actor's response would be.

Since joining Instagram, RMD has not only won a lot of fans but he is always reading to dish out words of advice and encouragements to his ever unending fans. Recall back in December 2017, when he revealed that he would never buy followers on Instagram.The veteran rapper who lost her mum, Rita Owens to a heart condition she has been battling for over 14 years described her mother in the heartfelt letter as a woman with great faith.

"It is with a heavy heart that I share the news, my mother, Rita Owens passed away today. Anyone that has ever met her knows what a bright light she was on this earth. She was gentle, but strong, sweet, but sassy, worldly but pragmatic, a woman of great faith and certainly the love of my life.

"She had struggled with a heart condition for many years and her battle is now over. I am heartbroken but know she is at peace. Thank you for your kindness, support and respect for our privacy at this time. Much Love, Dana Owens (aka Queen Latifah), forever Rita Owens daughter," she wrote.

ALSO READ:Queen Latifah honoured as entertainment icon

When celebrities lose someone very dear to them, especially a family member, we get to see how amazing they are with words when they pen down emotional letters to those dear ones.

Recall when comedian, Bovi, penned down an emotional posthumous letter to his late mother which he called "Love Letter" to her to mark her birthday.According to Instablog9ja, the police arrested him in his hideout situated at No. 48, Allen Avenue, Ikeja.

Gboyega was exposed when a representative of the Greece embassy, Antonio Kaplanis reported his activities to the Lagos Commissioner of Police, Edgal Imohimi.

The police stated that he fraudulently collected money from unsuspecting Nigerians who were desperate to travel out.

Gboyega told them that he is an employee of the Greece Embassy, adding that he has the authority to process visas for applicants.

According to the police, they recovered several things from Gboyegas hideout.

The following things which they found include: International passports, laptops and other documents.

Gboyega also claimed that he was affiliated to the Embassy of Greece on his travel website.According to Assoc. Prof., Dr. Nguyen Viet Nhung, Director of the Hanoi-based Central Lung Hospital, Vietnam is leading the world in TB prevention and treatment, thanks to its new and appropriate strategies.

TB successful treatment rate at more than 70%

The number of TB infected people in Vietnam is decreasing by 5-6% annually, with the number of deaths reducing rapidly. During 2015-2016, the country saw a reduction of 3,000 deaths from TB, as a result of the active examination and early detection of TB.

Prof., Dr. Nguyen Viet Tien, Deputy Minister of Health, said that Vietnam has achieved positive results in TB treatment, early TB detection, and the provision of TB treatment to all patients following diagnosis, as well as latent TB treatment. Every year, the country has detected and treated over 100,000 people with TB, with high cure rates at over 90% among newly-infected cases. TB control is still maintained at 100% of all districts, communes and wards. The percentage of the population covered by TB programmes has reached 100%.

The National Tuberculosis Control Programme has expanded the scope of drug-resistant TB control from 51 to all 63 province and cities across the nation. Meanwhile, the multidrug-resistant TB coverage has been enlarged to cover all AFB (+) TB patients in all localities nationwide.

The national TB programme has adopted WHOs recommendations for the use of new diagnostic tests, such as GeneXpert and Hain tests for early detection of TB and cutting the source of infection. Furthermore, the programme has also piloted new drugs, such as Bedaquiline, and short-course multidrug-resistant TB treatment.

In 2017, the scheme began applying administering and treating patients with pre-super-resistant and super-resistant TB based on individual regimens in drug-resistant TB management units.

At present, Vietnam has successfully implemented the second national TB epidemiology survey and completed the development of active intervention projects in the southwestern region and Ho Chi Minh City. Several new intervention models are being actively expanded in a range of localities.

Challenges ahead towards eliminating TB by 2030

A media campaign launched in Vung Tau city aims at raising public awareness on TB prevention and control.

In 2018, the National TB Programme will expand its screening to drug-resistant suspects and 100% of new AFB (+) TB patients. To meet this requirement, the TB programme will increase the number of Gene machines, ensure adequate cartridge and falcon supply, optimise the sample transfer system through the post office, and develop a flexible patient-centred approach to managing TB, as well as expanding the implementation of short-term regimens for multidrug-resistant TB throughout the country.

It also aims to enhance the detection and management of pre and super-resistant patients, while supplying enough medicines, chemicals and equipment, and ensuring that patients receive treatment immediately after detection and achieving high treatment rates (at 90%).

Currently, TB epidemics in Vietnam remain high, ranked 16th in 30 countries with a high incidence of TB in the world and 13th out of 30 countries with the highest multidrug-resistant TB burden globally. With 20% of TB patients having not been detected, this is a source of dangerous infection to the community.

Pointing to the difficulties facing the TB treatment, the Director of Central Lung Hospital analysed: "We have not screened all multidrug-resistant suspect cases yet, and the percentage of people undergoing GeneXpert tests among the multidrug-resistant suspects is still limited in many locations. Collaboration in the type of public-private mix in health coordination is also still limited. Meanwhile, collaboration for detecting TB among children between the national TB programme and peadiatric facilities is not regular and remains ineffective. The sector lacks qualified staff, resulting in missing the set target regarding TB detection as committed to with the donors".

To support the national TB prevention and control programme, health insurance will be the most sustainable source of funding to support people with TB. Currently, health insurance has covered the diagnosis and treatment of TB. By 2019, health insurance is expected to be expanded to cover the drugs used in treating TB patients.

Vietnam has set a target of reducing the prevalence of TB by 30% and reducing the number of deaths from TB by 40% within five years from 2015 to 2020. By 2030, it aims to reduce TB patients by 80%, as well as 90% of fatalities from tuberculosis and ensure that 100% of TB families incomes are not affected. To achieve the target, Dr. Nguyen Viet Nhung stressed the need to further facilitate medical operations at the grassroots level.This is where a drug trafficker, Darden, is serving a year jail term for criminal offence. He took around a TV crew around the structure which offered amenities normally found in homes.

Some of the appliances available at the prison include a washing machine and a dryer. It is a far departure from what is offered in a Nigerian prison where feeding can be a headache for inmates.

For Darden, there is no better way to live as a king - a feeling of fulfillment while showing guests around the building clearly expressed this.

If a prison is a center to reform individuals who have been led astray, the experiences of inmates in Norway offers good example.

In the clip, scenes revealing folks under incarceration engaging themselves in developmental activities reflects a need to revise the orientation concerning the facilities allocated for correcting criminal minds.

Prison pals prevented from killing Uber driver after Taxify heist

Former prison inmates, Simon Tyozemda and Lucky Friday, have been prevented from pulling off a car heist in Lagos.

The pair who became friends while behind bars were apprehended by the police while attempting to rob a Uber driver of his vehicle.

This is following an earlier murder that saw them kill a Taxify motorist with knives.

They were arrested on Wednesday, March 14, 2018, according to reports. Tyozemda, the alleged leader of the gang made a confession about his operation with partner, Friday.

Their first victim was reportedly stabbed in the stomach and dropped off on an expressway in Ajah.Apparently, patrons are attracted to the designs of the glasses and when some of them finish drinking the beer, they take the glasses along as souvenirs, and it has been taking a toll on the finances of the bar.

To stop the trend and save the business from making losses as a result of buying new glasses to replace the stolen ones, owner, Philip Maes thought it wise to fix alarms at the bottom of each glass in addition to a scanner at the entrance, all of which cost $5,000.

The scanner at the entrance is meant to trigger the alarm attached to the glasses when anyone attempts to carry them away.

Het Nieuwsblad Newspaper quoted Philip Maes as saying: Every year . The tourists in particular like to walk away with them. They just take it with them without too much embarrassment.Political analyst, Olorogun Ernest, in response made a fuss about the naming of the child after Nigeria's president who has been getting some bashing for perceived ineffectiveness in government.

A 2015 presidential campaign had seen a large support for the leader who was a considered a better option to former president, Goodluck Ebele Jonathan.

Ernest's comment soon opened up a flood of criticism.

The mild chaos is perhaps not surprising based on the public perception regarding the Buhari-led government whose performance has been unsatisfactory to the masses who voted him into power.

On the president's corridor, there might just be something to celebrate. A safe recovery of 105 schoolgirls back to Dapchi, Yobe State, as well as his son's improved health have received attention.

Some Nigerian children are in love with president's cute son

A billboard displaying excitement concerning the safe recovery of Yusuf, the son of President Muhammadu Buhari has revealed the good intention of some Nigerian children.

Two giant signages placed on a road side expressed kind-hearted feelings over Yusuf's improved health.

At the bottom contained Nigeria's coat of arms suggesting an endorsement by the Federal Government of Nigeria.An image of the murder suspect who reportedly shot the deceased on Saturday, March 17, 2018, has circulated online media.

The policeman who was captured in handcuffs earlier took to his heels after slaughtering victim over an intangible matter which left residents of the Odimodi community in shock.

How murder occurred

Residents claim that a confrontation which led to a fight between the pair could have been avoided.

The belligerent men had reportedly fired several shots before the soldier was hit.

His killer made a run for it after ensuring the death of his adversary.

The incident happened on Saturday at noon. The two officers  a mopol and the military officer  were members of a combined security team stationed to guard oil facilities in Odimodi community.

"They had a misunderstanding. After a while, we heard gunshots.

When people got there, they discovered that the mobile policeman had killed the soldier. The policeman cocked his gun and fired at the soldier and thereafter shot to scare people away from the scene.

He (policeman) took the soldiers gun and ran away. As of now, he has not been apprehended. The JTF authorities have removed the corpse of the slain soldier.

"There is tension in the community as we speak. People are afraid that the military may invade the community," a community leader told Punch.

ALSO READ: Son kills mum who kept disappearance charm for herselfPink-haired and wearing a septum ring, Christopher Wylie is the whistleblower who has uncovered the biggest scandal in Facebook's history.

According to a series of articles released by him, a data company, CambridgeAnalytica manipulated data belonging to millions of users.

The data was collected via a Facebook personality quiz, "thisisyourdigitallife", provided by Global Science Research which was answered by tens of thousands of people.

They were not the only victims. Answering the quiz required the user to grant certain permissions, which effectively gave the company access to the data from their Facebook friends.

Cambridge Analytica acquired this data from Global Science Research, and in turn, used it to develop models that it used to manipulate the United States' elections in 2016.

Let Christopher Wylie tell it, "We exploited Facebook to harvest millions of peoples profiles. And built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons. That was the basis the entire company was built on"

There are different implications to this. But it means one thing: Facebook has access to your data and companies and governments are using it to influence you.

An expose by Guardian UK uncovered how a senior director of Cambridge Analytica was approached by an unnamed Nigerian billionaire to influence the 2015 elections in favour of the incumbent, Goodluck Jonathan.

The company settled on creating a video depicting President Buhari as a leader who would enforce sharia law throughout the country.

The project was called off after the company's presence in Nigeria was compromised and its operatives had to leave the country.

Whether privacy is such a big deal for you is a personal decision. Many people have already chosen what side they're on; here are some reasons why they believe it's a good idea to delete Facebook.

1. Facebook knows too much about you:

When Facebook first appeared on our radars, most of us were ecstatic because of the opportunities it created to help us meet new friends and explore our relationships with existing ones.

That optimism and the friendly promise of social networking made us open up ourselves literally. We were (and still are) eager to provide information, answer quizzes and later, link our facebook account to just about every app we use.

The effect is that Facebook has way too much information about its users. In today's world, it's a very scary prospect.

2. The data is being used to manipulate you:

You know that thing that happens when you read about music for a while and log in to your Facebook, to be bombarded with ads promoting earphones, new albums and music players.

It's called targeted advertising and it's one of the most important tools for businesses in the world we live in today.Brands and companies pay tech giants like Facebook and Google to help them target adverts at people who have shown an interest in similar products.

ALSO READ: Israeli hackers gave Cambridge Analytica the stolen private emails of two world leaders

These companies use the data in their grasp to achieve this. The question though is, what happens when this data is used for ulterior motives, like convincing people to vote for a particular candidate by targeting their fear of religious crisis.

The risk that data can be used to manipulate users is one of the most real concerns of this century. These Cambridge Analytica revelations show it has been happening for years.

3. Facebook is ...old:

It seems like such a long time ago when Facebook was ground zero for just about everything. Nothing really pops on Mark Zuckerberg's social platform anymore.

I haven't made any new friends there in ages. The friend requests are occasional and when they do come, it is from a random teenager in Kwara State who I share another little-known mutual friend with.

When news breaks or conversation are ignited nowadays, it usually happens on Twitter.

You may have to wait two or three days before Facebook picks up the ashes. As the first generation to use social networks on this scale, we never really had an idea how long any of them would last.Themed Say Ahh: Think Mouth, Think Health, the celebration was a culmination of events organised by the brand, focused on raising awareness on oral health and encouraging good oral care habits.

2,000 Nigerian children were joined by the Unilever Ghana Nigeria Leadership Team, Nigerian Dental Association President, Dr Bode Ijarogbe, representatives of the Lagos State Commisioner of Health, Deputy Governor of Lagos state, Honourable Minister of state for Health, Honourable Minister of Health, First Lady of Lagos state, President and Founder of Well Being Foundation Africa, HOFOWEM Initiative and other dignatories, in an epic global battle to combat tooth decay, by pledging to brush every day, morning and night.

Tooth decay is a widespread disease that affects both adults and children, and Pepsodent has taken the lead to fight this disease, by teaching children from an early age, the habit of brushing right, morning and night, every day. Pepsodent intends on educating over 1.5 million Nigerian children in 2018. said Bunmi Adeniba, Unilever Marketing Director Ghana Nigeria.

The fight against tooth decay and other oral diseases is one we can win, as long as we keep spreading the message of good oral hygiene. As part of our continuous efforts to fight oral diseases in Nigeria, Pepsodent has partnered with the Federal Ministry of Health to educate 10 million school children by 2020, on the adoption of good oral care habits. We have recognised that children are powerful behaviour change advocates in their homes, often driving conversation and action with parents and peers around issues like this. she concluded.

We need to empower Nigerians to take control of their oral health, so that they can enjoy a truly functional and enjoyable lifestyle from childhood into adulthood, hence our support to Unilever Nigeria Plc. and our collective commitment to fight tooth decay in Nigeria, said Dr. Bode Ijarogbe, President, Nigerian Dental Association.

It is important to note that the mouth must be healthy for the body to be healthy, and that is why we are on a mission to ensure that more people are aware of the need to take proper care of their mouth. he concluded.

Oral diseases are amongst the most common diseases worldwide. It can be prevented by brushing twice a day (morning and night), with a fluoride toothpaste like Pepsodent.

The World Oral Health Day was celebrated in grand style by Pepsodent. There were free dental check-ups for everyone, various educative, entertaining and engaging activities like spelling bee, dance competition, talent hunt, oral health drama presentation by the children, amongst others.ALSO READ: 5 bizarre marriage rituals you won't believe actually exist

So, when people try to convince you there's nothing new under the sun, direct them to this article.

1. Relampago del Catatumbo, Ologa, Venezuela

ALSO READ: 5 most extreme tribal body modifications

The southwestern corner of Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela has the world's highest frequency of lightning activity.

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More than 200 nights per year, with peaks in May and October, lightning flashes fill the sky. Sometimes 25 or more flashes per minute. To put that in perspective: The National Weather Service classifies anything over 12 strikes per minute as "excessive." Named for the Catatumbo River, which flows from Colombia into Lake Maracaibo, the Relampago de Catatumbo, or Catatumbo Lighting, has become a highlight for travellers who spend their nights wide awake and wide-eyed watching the spectacle.

2. Longyearbyen, Norway

From April 20 to August 23, the sun never sets over Svalbard, a Norwegian island that lies north of Greenland in the Arctic Sea.

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This phenomenon plays havoc with everyone's body clocks.

3. Magnetic Hill, Moncton, New Brunswick

The Magnetic Hill is an example of a gravity hill, a type of optical illusion created by rising and descending terrain. It is located at the northwestern edge of the city of Moncton in the Canadian province of New Brunswick.

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To experience Magnetic Hill today, drivers must pay a fee to drive their cars to the end of the road. When a car is placed in neutral, it will begin to roll backwards, apparently uphill. Observers will also note that water in the adjacent drainage ditches also seemingly runs uphill.

4. Surtsey, Iceland

Before 1963, the Icelandic island of Surtsey didn't exist. Then, an underwater volcano in the Westman Islands (Vestmannaeyjar) erupted, and when the activity settled down in 1967, what remained was an island where no island had been before.

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5. Eternal Flame Falls, New York

Behind the cascade of a small waterfall in the Chestnut Ridge Park in suburban Buffalo, New York, visitors are treated to a flickering golden flame. Fueled by what geologists call a macroseep of natural gas from the Earth below. A geological fault in the shale allows about 1 kilogram of methane gas per day to escape to the surface, where, at some point, possibly the early 20th century, a visitor had the idea to set it alight and it's been burning ever since.This would affect Nigerians positively not just culturally but politically as well because Hao Ge has built a relationship with his music between Nigeria and China needful to the effectiveness of this appointment and thankfully it has grown beyond the spheres of music and into the political terrains, a relationship with politicians of great repute in China then Asia and its weight has gained an acknowledgement from politicians likened to great repute in the diaspora and this would most certainly be helpful to the Ambassador s responsiveness to the responsibilities of Nigerians in diaspora and further affect those in business positively owing to the fact that politics and business have a bilateral relationship.The report indicated that 826 people were facing serious food crises in the world in 2018, adding that the figure was 11 million higher than 815 million people who were adjudged to be chronically hungry in the 2017 report.

The report is produced each year by a group of international humanitarian partners which include the European Union, Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP).

The report identified conflicts and climate change as the main factors behind the food crises.

Conflict continued to be the main driver of acute food insecurity in 18 countries, 15 of them in Africa or the Middle East which include Myanmar, north-east Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan and Yemen.

It is the primary reason for most of the worlds cases of acute food insecurity, accounting for 60 per cent of the global total or 74 million people.

Climate disasters, mainly drought, were also major triggers of food crises in 23 countries, two-thirds of them in Africa, and were responsible for pushing some 39 million people into acute food insecurity, it said.

The report said that the prolonged drought conditions also resulted in consecutive poor harvests in countries already facing high levels of food insecurity and malnutrition in eastern and southern Africa.

The situation revealed by the Global Report highlighted the urgent need for simultaneous action to save lives, livelihoods and address the root causes of the food crises.

The report said that this had become imperative because of the difficult terrain ahead, as conflict would remain a major driver of food crises in 2018.

It said that the conflict would affect Afghanistan, Central African Republic, DRC, north-eastern Nigeria and the Lake Chad region, South Sudan, Syria and Yemen as well as Libya and the central Sahel (Mali and Niger).

Yemen will mostly likely continue to face the largest food crisis because the situation there is expected to deteriorate, particularly because of restricted access, economic collapse and outbreaks of disease.

Meanwhile, the impact of severe dry weather on crop and livestock production is likely to heighten food insecurity in pastoral areas of Somalia, south-eastern Ethiopia and eastern Kenya, as well as in West African and Sahel countries, including Senegal, Chad, Niger, Mali, Mauritania and Burkina Faso, it said.

Antonio Guterres, UN Secretary-General, said that the report had given all concerned parties vital data and analysis to better understand the food security challenges facing the world.

He said that it was now up the groups to take action to meet the needs of those facing the daily scourge of hunger, while tackling its root causes.

FAO Director-General, Jose Graziano da Silva, challenged all stakeholders to acknowledge and address the link between hunger and conflict as the best way to achieve zero hunger.

He underscored the need to invest in food security and livelihood projects in conflict situations so as to save lives, strengthen resilience and contribute to peace sustenance efforts.

WFP Executive Director David Beasley said that the consequences of conflict and climate change were stark because millions of more people were severely and desperately hungry.

He said that the report showed the magnitude of todays crises and indicated that through the political will and modern technology, the world could be peaceful and more stable, while hunger would become a thing of the past.

The fighting must stop now and the world must come together to avert these crises, often happening right in front of our eyes, he said.

Christos Stylianides, EU Commissioner for Humanitarian Aid and Crisis Management and Neven Mimica, EU Commissioner for International Cooperation and Development, expressed their commitment to talking the root causes of food crises.

The partners involved in producing the Global Report on Food Crises include the Autorite Intergouvernementale pour le Developpement (IGAD), Le Comite Permanent Inter-Etats de Lutte contre la Secheresse dans le Sahel(CILSS), the European Union, FAO and the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC).However, Buhari sacked Boroh and replaced him withProf Charles Dokubo. And Borohs problems began.

Heres everything you should know about the trials of Boroh:

1. Soon after Boroh was sacked, the EFCC arrested him and according to a ThisDay report, marched him to his home.

2. When the EFCC combed Borohs home, they found $9million in cash.

According to ThisDay, security operatives who raided Borohs house for hours made the cash discovery of $9million at his home. He remains in the custody of the EFCC.

3. ThisDay writes that this money was discovered in several safe boxes in several parts of the house.

The operatives broke all the locks in Borohs house including his wifes closet to make this find, according to the story.

4. Boroh was probably sacked after a petition emerged that he had been mismanaging funds earmarked for the presidential amnesty program.

The petition was addressed to Buhari.

A petitioner, Timi Angalabiri, had called for credible investigative inquiry to commence into the non-payment of tuition fees and living expenses of recently graduated Niger Delta students in universities across the United States, the United Kingdom and Nigeria, with many institutions withholding the students certificates due to non-payment of tuition fees ranging from nine months to two years, despite receiving over N70 billion within this time frame.

"My attention has been drawn to the publication in some section of the Nigerian media and social media that Nine Million dollars was recovered by the government operatives from our house and premises in the course of their search.

This is to inform the public that no cash was discovered and could have been discovered by government operatives during their search in our house last Monday, March 19.

The publication was fabricated, it was false in its entirety, malicious and calculated attempt to mislead the public, she said.

Borohs lawyer, Chief Olusola Oke (SAN) called the ThisDay story totally false, misleading and defamatory.

According to Oke, the EFCC confirmed to him that information concerning a stash of cash was never conveyed to any media organisation.

This publication is totally false without basis; its a fabrication that has disparaged my client greatly.

No such sum or any sum of money was found by the operatives after their extensive search on his house and premises.Foreign ambassadors and diplomats, representatives of international organisations and Vietnamese expats in Australia came to the Embassy of Vietnam in Canberra to pay tribute to the former PM and write down their memories of him on the funeral book.



The Lao Ambassador to Australia showed deep regrets over the death of the former PM, saying he was a beloved leader of Vietnamese people and a good friend of Laos.

A diplomat from the US Embassy recalled the former PMs great contribution to the Vietnam-US relations as he was the first Vietnamese PM to pay an official visit to the US, hailing him as one who accelerated economic reform and brought prosperity to Vietnam.



Similar events took place in Vietnamese consulates-general in Sydney and Perth.



In New Zealand, Vietnamese Ambassador Nguyen Viet Dung conveyed his greatest condolences over the loss of former PM Phan Van Khais family at a memorial service held in Wellington.



In Ottawa, Canada, Vietnamese Ambassador Nguyen Duc Hoa joined staff at the Embassy of Vietnam and Vietnams representative offices in one-minute silence in memory of former PM Khai on March 20.



The same day, ambassadors and diplomats from Greece, Iraq, and Thailand as well as representatives of the Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) in Canada sent their condolences to the Vietnamese Embassy over Khais death while many diplomats from Qatar, Guyana, Slovenia, Canada, ASEAN and Vietnamese expats paid homage to him at the embassy.



The Embassy of Vietnam to Mexico also hosted an event to pay tribute to the former PM on March 20 and 21 with the attendance of ambassadors from Pakistan, Cuba, Algeria, Thailand, Peru and Malaysian charge daffaires.Fayose said this while reacting to reports that the Dapchi girls have been released by Boko Haram.

On Wednesday, March 21, 2018, the terror group returned the girls to their school.

According to Fayose, the manner in which the girls were released shows that the Federal Government is fooling itself.

He said One wonders the basis for the party to applaud President Muhammadu Buharis claim of bringing back home those innocent Dapchi girls that ought not to have been abducted in the first place if not for the governments laxity.

Most importantly, that the abduction and return of the girls took place without resistance is a sign that the APC-led federal government has lost the war against insurgency, the basis for which it came to power. It is also a clear indication that Nigerians can no longer depend on the clueless government for their safety.

The removal of military checkpoints in Dapchi ahead of the abduction, as confirmed by Ibrahim Geidam, governor of Yobe state, clearly shows the complicity of the federal government and some individuals profiting from the whole saga.

ALSO READ: How kidnapped Dapchi girls returned home

Despite security alerts by the locals, the military looked the other way, which necessitated the damning report by the Amnesty International. To the amazement of Nigerians, 24 hours after, the abductors brought back the girls. I believe the true story of this Dapchi abduction will be told one day.

Dapchi girls release, a scam

In its reaction, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) issued a statement describing the abduction and release of the Dapchi girls as a scam.

According to the party, the whole thing was staged so they could gain sympathy ahead of the 2019 elections.

UNFPA offers support

The UN Population Fund (UNFPA) has also hinted that it is on standby to provide emergency reproductive healthcare and psycho-social counselling and support to the released Dapchi school girls abducted by Boko Haram.

This was made known to newsmen in Abuja by the agencys media adviser, Mrs Kori Habib.According to reports, Miss Sharibu was not released along with her peers because she refused to convert from her Christian religion to Islam.

Nata, the father of the girl, said that he got the information from the girls who were released, adding that he is proud of his daughters decision.

Speaking to newsmen, the Senior Special Assistant on Media and Publicity, Malam Garba Shehu said that The Buhari administration will not relent in efforts to bring Leah Sharibu safely back home to her parents as it has done for the other girls after she was held back by the terrorists over her decision, as reported, not to convert from Christianity to Islam.

President Buhari is fully conscious of his duty under the constitution to protect all Nigerians, irrespective of faith, ethnic background or geopolitical location and will not shirk in this responsibility.

The President is equally mindful of the fact that true followers of Islam all over the world respect the injunction that there is no compulsion in religion.

To this effect, no one or group can its religion on another.

His heart goes out to the isolated parents who must watch others rejoice while their own daughter is still away.

The lone Dapchi Girl, Leah, will not be abandoned.

President Buhari assures the Sharibu family that he will continue to do all he can to ensure that they also have cause to rejoice with their daughter soon, Shehu added.

FG condemns PDP, conspiracy theories

The Federal Government recently condemned the conspiracy theoriesthat have trailed Boko Haram's abduction of 110 schoolgirls in Dapchi, Yobe.

Garba Shehu likened it to the public reaction towards the 9/11 attacks in the United States of America.

The presidential spokesman said the same thing happened in America when ex-President George W. Bush, was accused of orchestrating the September 11, 2001 attacks that killed 2,977 victims.The warning came at the 2018 First Quarter General Meeting of Nigeria Inter-Religious Council (NIREC) Meeting, on Thursday in Abuja.

Ayokunle explained that provocative preaching could set the nation on fire along religious lines.

He also called for the establishment of empowerment programmes that would engage the unemployed youths by churches and mosques.

Our major problem today in Nigeria is insecurity which ranges from religions to ethnic and socio-economic.

Some of these problems are caused by bad leadership and failure of (we) the religious leaders to rightly guide our followers.

From our end as religious leaders, I will suggest inter-religious and intra-religious education and empowerment programmes for our youths to douse the tension in our society.

We should also clamour for the restoration of religious devotion or prayers in our primary and secondary schools, he said.

According to him, many of the problems of insecurity can be traced to economic deprivation, adding that the government should urgently address the issue of high foreign exchange rate.

The Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF), Boss Mustapha, in a keynote address, said the meeting was timely as it would proffer solutions to the current insecurity in the country.

Mustapha urged the religious leaders and traditional rulers to speak up against actions that could threaten our peace and national unity.

Religion is an instrument for building national harmony and peaceful co-existence, and this government is committed to fairness to all, irrespective of their ethnic background or religious beliefs.

As you are all aware some of the challenges confronting the government include extremism and religious intolerance. In this instance the Boko Haram insurgency and militancy readily comes to mind.

While recognising that the security agencies have been living up to their expectations; it is also important to emphasise that the business of security is the business of all Nigerians.

The Federal Government will ensure that dialogue and peaceful approach are deployed to support the military effort, the SGF said.

He also urged the leaders to convey message of non-violence and political activities as the country approaches another election year.

Also speaking, the Inspector-General of Police, Ibrahim Idris said that security remain the bedrock of the nations development.

The I-G, represented by Shuaibu Lawal, Deputy Inspector-General of Police, appealed to the religious leaders and traditional rulers to ensure they promote peace in the country.

The important of this meeting cannot be over emphasized as it gives our spiritual and royal fathers the opportunity to brainstorm on ways to enhance security in the country.

I want to urge you to concentrate on messages and sermon that will build the bridge of love, tolerance, forgiveness and peaceful co-existence, Idris said.

The FCT Minister, Muhammad Bello pledged to support the council in achieving its mandate.

Bello, represented by Mr Chinyeaka Ohaa, Permanent Secretary (FCT), noted that the council had recorded great strides in its quest for peace in the country since its inception.He said this while speaking at the 14th annual lecture of the Women in Management, Business, and Public Service.

Obasanjo officially joined the movement in Abeokuta, Ogun State on Thursday, February 1, 2018.

The former President became a member of CNM after he wrote an open letter criticising President Buhari.

Obasanjo gives condition

Speaking further, OBJ said that he will resign from the group if they start dabbling into politics.

According to him, CNM is reaching out to people in the grassroot across Nigeria.

He said The Coalition for Nigeria Movement is penetrating to the grassroots. And presently there are over three million members who had registered.According to him, in spite of the accomplishments and enormous opportunities such as abundant freshwater, favourable weather, substantial human capacity available in the water sector, a lot of work still needed to be done.

He said it was saddening to note that the current national access to water supply stood at 57 per cent, millions of Nigerians, especially in rural areas are still without access to improved drinking water sources.

The provision of water infrastructure is capital intensive, hence the need for a concerted effort by all stakeholders to overcome the challenges in the water sector.

Statistics have shown over the years that with the rapid increase in population growth, access to clean drinking water and sanitation steadily declines.

A lot of factors contribute to the water crises, such as climate change, poor management and a lot more, the most incriminating is the neglect of our ecosystem.

This has resulted in environmental damages such as floods, droughts, water pollution among others.

A worrying challenge is the declining percentage of Nigerians that are getting that water supply through piped networks, from 31 percent in 1990 to less than 7 percent in 2017.

Adamu, represented by the Permanent Secretary, Dr Musa Ibrahim, said the result had shown that the remaining 93 per cent of Nigerians got water from other sources.

He said it was evident in the drilling of boreholes with resultant consequences on the environment in urban areas and fetching of unclean water from streams and rivers in rural areas.

The minister restated the Federal Governments commitment towards formulating and implementing policies and programmes that will enable sustainable access to safe and sufficient water for all Nigerians.

Mr Simone Grego, UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) Representative, said that drinking water resources was one of the major issues of the century globally.

Grego, quoting a UN World Water Development Report, said globally, 3.6 billion people live in potentially water-scarce areas, saying this figure could rise to 5 billion by 2050, if nothing was done.

According to him, 80 per cent of waste water returns to the ecosystem without being treated, saying this development was leading to degradation of the ecosystems causing ecological imbalances and water scarcity.

Grego called for urgent solutions that would protect, manage and restore natural ecosystems that would respond to the human and ecological challenges being faced.

Planting new forests, reconnecting rivers to flood plains and restoring wetlands are solutions that will address contemporary water management issues, he said.

He pledged the commitment of UNESCO to support governments transition to green economies and in programmes to implement better integrated water policies.

Dr Chichi Okoye, WaterAid Country Director, said the SDG 6 commits the world to ensure that everyone has safe water by 2030, saying protecting the natural environment and reducing water pollution was imperative.

She urged the Federal Government to prioritise water and sanitation by improving budget allocations to the sector.

The dire situation needs the highest level of governments attention, especially in delivering water for the poorest and most marginalised people.

In addition to financing, we need an integrated approach to solving the water crises where water, sanitation and hygiene needs are integrated into health, education, nutrition and gender equality.

Without water, none of the UN Global Goals can be met, she said.

News Agency of Nigeria reports that World Water Day is celebrated on March 22 annually to focus attention on the importance of water to mankind.The Minister of Power Works and Housing, Mr Babatunde Fashola, said this during the inspection of phase one project of National Housing Programme (NHP) of 72 flats in Gwagwalada Area Council on Thursday.

Fashola noted that the Federal Government was committed to addressing the housing needs of Nigerians through the National Housing Programme.

The minister expressed satisfaction at the pace and quality of work at the construction site, while urging the contractors to sustain the tempo and be consistent in the use of the best quality materials.

According to him, the administrations infrastructural commitment is actually getting to the real and ordinary people who may actually not see the president.

The essence of National Housing Programme is to add value to the wellbeing of Nigerians by creating employment.

It is also aimed to encourage standardisation of building materials which will boost local content and stabilise the economy, he said.

Fashola expressed delight that Nigeria, under the leadership of President Buhari, had played a critical and positive role in developing a common African position that had helped to shape the economy.

The project team leader, Mr Fashoranti Toyin, however, appealed to the minister to kindly use his good offices and request the Minister of FCT to allocate land closer to the city for phase 2 of the project.

She said the location of site was long way from the city, which was a challenge for the smooth execution of the project like transportation of materials from Mabushi to Gwagwalada.The spokesperson of the ministry, Dr Tope Elias-Fatile said this on Wednesday in Abuja at the ministrys bi-weekly press briefing.

He said the ministry would partner with the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Investment to inaugurate the initiative to contribute to the Economic Recovery and Growth Plans (ERPG) of the Federal Government.

Elias-Fatile said the initiative would be different from the past as it would be ICT-driven.

He said that initiative was expected to be inaugurated by the Vice President Yemi Osinbajo at the State House.

It is an initiative of the ministry in collaboration with the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Investment and some other relevant MDAs.

This initiative is to promote economic growth and development through facilitation of market access, foreign direct investment, cross border trade and inclusion of skills of Nigerians in diaspora for national development, the official said.

According to him, the initiative also seeks to contribute to the ERGP by facilitating global market access for Nigerian SMEs.

He also announced that Nigeria would actively participate in the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in the UK where issues that impact on lives of member states would be discussed.

He listed the issues to include promotion of international trade and investment, access to healthcare and education, strengthening of democratic institutions, promoting environmentally sustainable development and respect for human rights.

The official also disclosed other upcoming events to include, the 6th session of Iran-Nigeria Joint Commission in Tehran, April 30 to May 1 and Nigeria-Japan Business Forum in Tokyo later this month.Chairman of the committee, Rep. Ajibola Famurewa (Osun-APC), who made the assertion at the inaugural meeting of the committee, said excessive electricity charges were being levied on consumers by distribution companies (Discos).

He said that majority of Nigerians were suffering under the arbitrary charges for electricity from the distribution companies.

The committee was given the mandate by the House to determine the differences between the prepaid meters installed by the Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN) and the MOJEC prepaid meters by DISCOs.

It would also determine the costing algorithm used by Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC) in arriving at the consumers price.

The committee is to ascertain the average cost of electricity in West African sub region vis-a-vis Nigeria.

Its mandate also include finding out why DISCOs have not complied with the deadline of March 1, 2017 in phasing out the estimated billing system.

According to him, relevant organisations and agencies to be investigated include Federal Ministry of Power, Works and Housing, the Central Bank of Nigeria , (CBN), the Consumer Protection Council, Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC), Nigerian Bulk Electricity Trading Company (NIBET) and the Transmission Company of Nigeria.

Others are Electricity Distribution Companies of Nigeria (DISCOs), Nigeria Labour Congress, and Association of Nigerians Electricity Consumers among others.

Famurewa said that there would be zonal interactive sessions with electricity consumers in a bid to understand the scope of the problem.

According to him, the committee will try to meet the six weeks given as deadline by the House.Cambridge Analytica has been in the news following revelations that it used data it got from Facebook users to sway election results in America.

AFP says Facebook and the data firm are being accused of using the data they gleaned to help Donald Trump win the US election.

ALSO READ: Cambridge Analytica has set up a new data company

Seven individuals who had insider knowledge about the campaign in Nigeria have revealed how computer hackers from Israel worked with Cambridge Analytica a few weeks to the historic 2015 election.

Cambridge Analytica and the 2015 elections

According to Guardian UK, a former employee of the firm said It was the kind of campaign that was our bread and butter.Were employed by a billionaire whos panicking at the idea of a change of government and who wants to spend big to make sure that doesnt happen" in reference to the 2015 elections in Nigeria.

The ex-employee also alleged that their team were connected to Israeli hackers who were mandated to get dirt on Muhammadu Buhari, who was the APC presidential candidate.

It was also revealed that the hackers had offered the Analytica team, access to Buharis medical records and email correspondence.

At the heart of the operation was Brittany Kaiser, a senior director at Cambridge Analytica. In December 2014, she would be introduced to an undisclosed Nigerian billionaire who wanted Goodluck Jonathan to win the 2015 elections. The billionaire wanted the operation to be top secret.

Speaking further, the ex-employee said [Kaiser] got a phone call. It was just before Christmas and she flew out to meet them in Washington DC. It was all a bit ridiculous. It was only six to eight weeks before the election and they were looking to spend nearly $2m.

Guardian UK further writes There were a lot of scared millionaires worried that . It was all very last-minute. A team flew out to Abuja and put together a communications campaign. It was a straightforward, normal comms campaign in most respects.

The election was a big deal. At stake, the future of the most populous country in Africa, and potential access to its lucrative oil reserves. The sitting president was favourite to win, though Buhari was doing unexpectedly well.

Not least because his team had hired AKPD, once the firm of former strategist , which was pushing a slick, social media heavy Obama-esque message of hope."

ALSO READ: #DeleteFacebook becomes a movement after Cambridge Analytica expose

Propaganda message

The ex-employee said that a video was put together to portray Buhari as somebody who will promote Sharia in Nigeria.

The script for the video: Coming to Nigeria on February 15th, 2015.

Dark. Scary. And very uncertain. Sharia for all.

What would Nigeria look like if sharia were imposed by Buhari?

Also, a former contractor of the company revealed that another set of video footage was created to scare Buharis supporters from voting.

He said It was voter suppression of the most crude and basic kind. It was targeted at Buhari voters in Buhari regions to basically scare the shit out of them and stop them from voting.

The script: "If Buhari wins, the film warns: women would wear the veil. Sharia law would be introduced. And the inference is, you may be macheted to death.

The Cambridge Analytica team was in Nigeria during this period which was a tense moment not only for the nation but them as well. "It felt risky, being there. There were various points when we were told we were in danger" says one of the team members.

Israel did not want Buhari to win

Guardian UK also said that suspected Israeli intelligence operatives held meetings with Cambridge Analytica to ensure that Buhari does not win.

There was a two-hour meeting that took place in the hotel lobby between two senior campaign members and Israeli intelligence. After which they swept our hotel rooms for listening devices and said they would switch out our phones. The story we were told was that there were intelligence agents from a number of different countries, including Israel and France, who were supporting Goodluck Jonathan and helping the campaigns, an employee said.

"Basically the Israelis didnt want [Buhari] to win" he further said.

Things got worse for the Cambridge Analytica teams in Nigeria. A few weeks before the election they had to leave the country after they found out from their London office that their safety had been compromised by the Israeli operatives. They believed the operatives had personal emails and information on Buhari which they did not want access to.

In 2013, there were reports that Jonathan Goodluck awarded a $40m contract to an Israeli company to allegedly monitor the Internet communication by Nigerians. The name of the company was called Elbit Systems.

In its article, Guardian UK noted that Jonathan Goodluck was not aware of the voter manipulation done on his behalf.

The role of Cambridge Analytica in the 2017 Kenyan general election

The expose by Channel 4 News has brought to light damning revelations of how British Data Company, Cambridge Analytica, influenced the re-election of President Uhuru Kenyatta during the 2017 General Election.

In an undercover investigation titled: Cambridge Analytica Uncovered: Secret filming reveals election tricks, the firms top bosses admit to being the key drivers of Mr. Kenyattas campaigns.

Alex Taylor, Cambridges Chief Data Officer and Managing Director Mark Turnbull were caught on tape detailing the role they played in Kenyas elections.

Mr. Turnbull disclosed that they entered into a contract with President Kenyatta party in 2013 and continued during 2017 election when he vied for a second term.

How does Facebook come into all of this?

Facebook and data-analytics company Cambridge Analytica are in hot water after a whistleblower revealed that Cambridge Analytica harvested data from 50 million Facebook users without their knowledge or consent.

The revelations have since led to British, EU, and US authorities to launch investigations into Facebook and Cambridge Analytica.

Cambridge Analytica harvested information from 50 million Facebook users through an external app in 2015, according to Wylie, who worked there at the time.

The data came from a personality quiz, which around 270,000 people were paid to take. The quiz  "thisisyourdigitallife"  in turn, pulled data from their friends' profiles as well, ending in the enormous data stash.

Cambridge Analytica harvested personal information on where users lived and what pages they liked, which helped build psychological profiles that analysed characteristics and personality traits.Idris also inaugaurated 51 security patrol vehicles acquired by Plateau Government for distribution to security agencies in the 17 local government areas of the state.

He said that the establishment of squadron would increase and improve the existing security infrastructure in the state for purpose of providing adequate security.

The establishment of PMF 66 Squadron in Shemdam is therefore one of my strategies to ensure that the Nigeria Police Force (NPF) is at all times within reach and to promptly respond to the challenges of crime being faced by the people.

The establishment of PMF 66 in Shendam is not by accident but deliberate attempt to fight crime.

Shendam town is densely populated and shares boundary with three states namely Bauchi, Nasarawa and Taraba.

This feature makes the town prone to criminal activities like herdsmen/farmers clashes, armed robberies and other criminal activities, he said.

The I-G said that PMF was established as a strike force of the NPF and always deployed to troubled spots across the country.

He said that he would ensure the establishment of the PMF in other parts of the country but ensure that adequate and befitting barracks are provided.

Idris called on state governments to doante lands for the establishment of more PMF squadrons and construction of PMF barracks.

The I-G appreciated Gov. Simon Lalong for donating 51 security patrol vehicles to the 17 local governments.

He said that Lalong was one out of many governors that was passionate about securing his state.

Gov Lalong in his remarks stated the establishment of squadron was a dream come true for his people.

The governor appreciated the I-G and President Muhammadu Buhari for granting them their wish.

He said that the 51 patrol vehicles was donated by the state government in collaboration with the local governments to boost security.

Lalong regretted the recent attacks in Bassa and Bokkos LGAs where countless people were killed, saying that it bestowed on the state and councils more responsibilities in protecting the people.

He enjoined traditional rulers to work closely with security agencies in their areas to better secure the people.State Counselor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi (right) shakes hands with Philippine Foreign Affairs Secretary Alan Peter Cayetano before their meeting at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse in Beijing on Wednesday.[Photo by Wang Jing/China Daily]

China-Philippines ties are in the best shape they've ever been, and Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte will visit China in April to attend the Boao Forum for Asia's annual conference, State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi said.

China welcomes Duterte's upcoming trip, and it will further promote the development of ties, Wang said in a joint news conference on Wednesday with visiting Philippine Foreign Secretary Alan Peter Cayetano following their talk.

Cayetano arrived Wednesday and will remain in China through Sunday. He is the first foreign minister to visit since the new lineup of China's central government took office.

Wang told reporters the two sides agreed on Wednesday to boost dialogue and cooperation on maritime affairs and advance cooperation in areas such as the exploitation of oil and gas.

Regarding cooperation with the Belt and Road Initiative, Wang said Beijing is willing to work more with Manila and boost the synergy in their development strategies to better benefit their people.

The two neighbors will convert negative momentum of South China Sea disputes into a positive force that boosts relations, Wang said.

Cayetano said the relations are in a "golden era", his talk with Wang on Wednesday was productive and the great dialogue between the two sides should be furthered.

Despite their differences, the two countries will advance their cooperation in areas including security, he said.

In August, the Philippines will take the chair of the coordinating country moderating ties between China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations.

China will work with the Philippine government to ensure the success of a number of events, such as the commemoration of the 15th anniversary of China-ASEAN strategic partnership, Wang said.

China is now the Philippines' largest trade partner, largest source of imports and its fourth-largest export destination.

As part of the frequent high level exchanges between Beijing and Manila, President Xi Jinping and Duterte met twice last year.

Bilateral trade reached $51.2 billion last year, a year-on-year increase of 8.5 percent.

China has become the Philippines' second-largest source of foreign visitors, and close to 1 million trips were made by Chinese to the country last year.

Zhao Jianhua, Chinese ambassador to the Philippines, told China News Service earlier this month that the two countries are pushing for cooperation on more programs and it is believed that more cooperative projects will be initiated this year.

This will serve as a bigger impetus facilitating Philippine economic development and public livelihoods, Zhao said.Gates gave the charge at the expanded National Economic Council (NEC) meeting which took place at Aso Villa on Thursday, March 22, 2018.

Chaired by Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, the NEC meeting had in attendance representatives of the Senate President, Speaker House of Representatives, state governors, ministers and members of the economic team.

Gates advised the Muhammadu Buhari-led federal government to match investments in infrastructure with human capital development.

The Microsoft founder said over $1.6 billion has been invested in Nigerias key areas of agriculture, primary healthcare, immunization, polio eradication programmes, nutrition, family planning amongst others through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The philanthropist urged the federal government to make policy decisions focused on improving the human capital the country has adding that his foundation would only play a supportive role in the achievement of those set goals.

He faulted the execution priorities of federal governments Economic and Recovery Growth Plan (EGRP).

The most important choice you make is to maximize your greatest resource, the Nigerian people, Gates began.

Nigeria will thrive when every Nigerian is able to thrive. If you invest the health, education and opportunities  the human capital we are talking about  then they will lay the foundation for sustained prosperity. If you dont, however, then it is very important to recognize that there will be sharp limit on how much the country can grow.

I urge you to apply this thinking to all your investments in your people. The Nigeria governments Economic and Recovery Growth Plan identifies investing in our people as one of the three strategic objectives but the execution priorities dont fully reflect peoples needs prioritizing physical capital over human capital.

People without roads, ports and factories cant flourish. And roads, ports and factories without skilled workers to build and manage them cant sustain an economy, he added.

Narrating his experience at a health clinic in Bodinga, Sokoto state, Gates said although Nigerian primary healthcare centers were not adequately funded, it also does not get the most out of the current funding.

ALSO READ: What Osinbajo told world leaders about Nigerian economy in Davos

The businessman described Nigeria as one of the most dangerous places in the world to give birth adding that "one in three Nigerian children are chronically malnourished."

According to Gates, Nigeria has the fourth worst maternal mortality rate in the world, only ahead of Sierra Leone, Central African Republic, and Chad.

In upper middle- income countries, the average life expectancy is 75 years. In lower middle  income countries, its 68, in low- income countries, its 62. In Nigeria, it is lower still, just 53 years, Gates announced.

In his speech, Osinbajo said the Buhari administration is implementing programmes aimed at improving human capital development.

The vice president noted that the school feeding programme of the federal government has increased the enrolment of pupils in schools.

He added that the N-Power initiative of the Buhari administration has engaged of 200,000 young Nigerians in sectors like agriculture and health amongst others.

Addressing journalists after the NEC meeting, Aliko Dangote, said the private sector would be contributing one percent of its profit to healthcare.The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the law had generated strong reactions from residents, after its passage by the Assembly, and subsequent assent by Gov. Akinwunmi Ambode.

The House, after Thursdays debate, directed its ad-hoc committee handling the review to hold a public hearing, to take peoples opinions and views.

NAN reports that the Assembly, after resumption from a seven-week recess on Monday, had set up a six-man Ad hoc Committee to review the law.

The Speaker of the House, Mr Mudashiru Obasa, in announcing the committee membership, had said there was a need to address all the issues raised by the people concerning the law.

The Speaker named Mr Bayo Oshinowo, Chairman, House Committee on Lands, as the Chairman of the Ad hoc Committee.

Obasa gave the committee two weeks to report back to the House with all shades of opinions from Lagos residents.

Other members of the Committee included: Hon. Yinka Ogundimu, Chairman, House Committee on Finance and Hon (Mrs) Funmilayo Tejuosho, Chairman, House Committee on Judiciary, Human Rights and Petitions.

The rest are: Hon Tunde Braimoh, Chairman, House Committee on Information, Strategy and Security, Hon Jude Idimogu (APC-Oshodi-Isolo II) and Hon Olusola Sokunle (APC-Oshodi-Isolo I).

Obasa appealed to people to participate and contribute in the process of law making during public hearing to make their own contributions.

This was actually done when this land use charge was in the process before passage and sending to the governor for assent.

We invited the public but we didnt hear much from them concerning all these concerns.

If only they had responded at that time, probably we would have done what would be acceptable to all  he said.

NAN reports that following public outcry, the state government, after initially hiking the charge by as much as 400 per cent in some cases, responded by lowering the rates.

The hike had followed an amendment of the state Land Use Charge Law by the state assembly, which consolidated several taxes.The News Agency of Nigeria ( NAN) reports that Idris had on March 19, 2018, ordered the immediate withdrawal of all police officers attached to Very Important Persons( VIPs), political and public office holders in the country.

A statement by the Force spokesman, CSP Jimoh Moshood, in Abuja on Thursday, however, said the shift followed the I-Gs meeting with the Commanders of Police Mobile Force (PMF), Counter Terrorism Unit (CTU) and Special Protection Unit (SPU).

Moshood said that the shift would enable the Force carry out a thorough assessment of the current deployment and carry out appropriate withdrawal.

He said that the DIG of police in charge of Operations, has been mandated to direct Commissioners of Police, Assistant Inspectors-General of Police in the States and Zonal Commands to halt the withdrawal pending the new date.

He said that the Task Forces set up by the I-G and the Assistant Inspectors-General of Police and Commissioners of Police, have also been directed to suspend the enforcement of the withdrawal.

ALSO READ:Melaye outburst over police withdrawal shows how spoilt he is

The spokesman urged VIPs, Political and Public Office Holders and other entities to retain the police officers currently with them on deployment.

The renewed commitment of the Nigeria Police Force to guarantee protection of lives and property across the country remains unequivocal and unwavering, Jimoh said.While speaking to Daily Trust on Wednesday, March 22, 2018, President Muhammadu Buhari's Senior Special Assistant on Media and Publicity, Garba Shehu, said the allegations made by the opposition People's Democratic Party (PDP) that the president stage-managed the abduction to curry public favour is ridiculous.

However, he said it is unsurprising as the same thing happened in America when then-president, George W. Bush, was accused of orchestrating the September 11, 2001 attacks that killed 2,977 victims.

Shehu said the opposition party is resorting to dishonest tactics simply because they planned to politicise the abduction to worm their way back to power, but that the plan has been jeopardised with the return of 104 out of the 110 girls kidnapped by the terrorists.

He said, "The thing is that it is inconceivable that any leader with conscience will orchestrate this against its own people. But again this shouldn't surprise us because we have seen it happening in America.

"When the Twin Towers were bombed, conspiracy theorists said that President Bush bombed the Twin Towers which killed 3,000 people in order to undermine Islam or to create justification for the war against Iraq.

"So it is not surprising that conspiracy theorists would look at President Buhari and say that he orchestrated this. This did not happen. It is not true and it cannot happen. I think what is happening is that our political opponents especially PDP has been very reckless on matters of national security.

"They thought the Dapchi girls would give them an easy pass to power and that President Buhari can be equated morally and politically to their rotten government. Now they have lost a plot. They have to go and look for how to win power.

"How can they beat Buhari in infrastructure? How can they beat Buhari in the fight against corruption? How can they beat Buhari in securing this country and beating back Boko Haram? Those are the challenges we give back to them."

104 of the 110 schoolgirls abducted by Boko Haram in Dapchi on February 19, 2018 were released by the terrorist group on Wednesday, March 22, 2018, with five reported dead and one girl still in captivity for refusing to renounce her Christian faith and convert to Islam.

PDP described the release of the kidnapped girls as a scam staged for political purposes to serve as a spur for President Buhari's expected declaration to seek re-election in 2019.

No ransom paid for girls - FG

The Federal Government has categorically denied reports that it paid a ransom to Boko Haram to secure the release of the girls.

Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed, said the "unconditional" release of the girls was as a result of back-channel efforts achieved through "the help of some friends of the country".

Released schoolgirls moved to Abuja

After the 104 schoolgirls, alongside two other released hostages, were documented and profiled in Dapchi on Wednesday, they were transported to Borno State capital, Maiduguri, for onward movement to Abuja.

At the 105 Air Force Composite Command, Maiduguri yesterday, the Theatre Commander, Operation Lafiya Dole, Major General Rogers Nicholas, presented the released girls to a delegation of the Federal Government.

The delegation was led by Lai Mohammed, and included Minister of Interior, Abdulrahman Dambazau and Minister of State for Foreign Affairs, Khadija Bukar-Abba.

The released girls, alongside their parents and some aid workers, boarded a Nigerian Air Force aircraft to Abuja late on Wednesday.

Dapchi abduction

Boko Haram militants invaded Government Girls Science and Technical Secondary School in Dapchi, Bursari local government area of Yobe on Monday, February 19, 2018, and abducted 110 schoolgirls.

According to accounts by residents, the terrorists invaded the town around 7 pm in over 18 gun trucks mounted with high caliber weapons.

The abduction was a repeat of another Boko Haram attack that happened when militants invaded Government Girls Secondary School in Chibok and kidnapped 276 female students in April 2014.According to a statement signed by Director of Army Public Relations, Brigadier General Texas Chukwu, the terrorist, Ramat Alamin, surrendered to troops on Tuesday, March 20, 2018 after he was intercepted.

The 47-year-old also gave up his personal AK-47 rifle, four AK-47 empty magazines and one motorcycle after he surrendered.

According to the suspect, the military's assault on the terrorist group has depleted its forces and he revealed more terrorists are willing to surrender due to hunger and lack of basic logistics.

The statement read, "It is obvious that the fight against the insurgents is a decisive engagement as the Nigerian military is fully committed to the battle. This is paying great dividends as the insurgents could no longer take the heat.

"Operation Deep Punch 2 and other Operations have decimated and uprooted Boko Haram Terrorists (BHT) from their stronghold in Sambisa forest.

"One of the Shekau's Amirs in Malumri village under Bama Local Government Area of Borno State, who realized how badly they have lost in their fight has surrendered to the troops.

"At the early hours of Tuesday 20 March 2018 Mallam Ramat Alamin aged 47 and Shuwa by tribe was intercepted by troops of 22 Brigade Garrison deployed along road Dikwa - Gulumba Gana.

"Mallam Ramat said he came to Dikwa to surrender himself to the troops due to the fact that Boko Haram Terrorists group could no longer hold itself and they are presently in disarray with little or no logistics to carry out their nefarious attacks.

"He disclosed that his personal weapon AK 47 rifle with Registration No: H3 2538, four AK 47 empty magazines and one motorcycle were hidden behind Government Teachers College Dikwa while trying to enter the town to surrender.

"He also said that, many of the terrorists are willing to surrender due to hunger and lack of basic logistics but are scared of the consequences.

"It is good and courageous for him to surrendered and would be recommended for Government de-radicalization programme.

"He gave out some information and encouraged other terrorists to take a cue from him and surrender in order to ensure lasting peace and stability in the North Eastern part of Nigeria."

Boko Haram menace

Since the insurgency of the terrorist group escalated after a 2009 crackdown by the military, Boko Haram, chiefly under Shekau'sleadership, has been responsible for the death of over 20,000 people and the displacement of more than 2.5 million scattered across Internally Displaced Person (IDP) camps across the country and its neighbours.A 'soft target' Boko Haram attack here; a light corruption scandal there; a couple of herdsmen attacks claiming hundreds of lives everywhere, and even the most cheerful Nigerian will admit it has been a tumultuous few months.

That changed on Wednesday, March 21, 2018, when Boko Haram militants drove 104 students of the Government Girls Science and Technical Secondary School in Dapchi, Bursari Local Government Area of Yobe State back into the town after they abducted 110 of them on February 19, 2018.

The parents of the abducted girls and residents of the town were in a jubilant mood as they even reportedly acted a little familiar with some of the terrorists. It's a considerably great conclusion to a crisis that could have ended much more horribly.

As a forethought, there are going to be parts of this article where my humanity might be called into question; so for those that'll most certainly reach the wrong conclusion about my intentions, let me just state now that I'm extremely happy for all of the Dapchi schoolgirls that made their way back home to their parents after one month with terrorists.

With that out of the way, it should be time to audit the series of events that led us here, and what it all means in the big picture.

The Dapchi mess

When Boko Haram practically strolled into Dapchi with 18 gun trucks in February, they hauled away 110 schoolgirls with their ages ranging from 11 to 19 years.

When they strolled back in, again, into the town on Wednesday, they only returned with 104 of them and two other unknown hostages, a boy and a girl.

After the initial finger-pointing that followed their abduction last month, the confirmation of the girls' abduction brought back memories of when the same militants, of a different faction, invaded Government Girls Secondary School in Chibok, Borno State and kidnapped 276 female students in April 2014.

Eager to avoid a repeat of the government's shambolic handling of the Chibok situation by a different leader, President Muhammadu Buhari swiftly announced that the government will negotiate for the release of the girls instead of pursuing military action that might endanger their lives.

Wednesday morning's surprising release is the result of that decision, but many Nigerians have not wasted time in asking the Federal Government what is the cost of this Boko Haram 'benevolence'.

The cost of Dapchi miracle

The Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed, has been the face of the government in the handling of the release of the girls and he has had to battle a lot of questions about what the government had to give up to Boko Haram to secure the girls' release.

According to him, ABSOLUTELY NOTHING.

He has said and reiterated that the terrorists released the girls "unconditionally"after back-channel efforts and the help of some friends of the country.

With media reports indicating that the government might have paid around 5 million and released some terrorists to secure the girls' release, a familiar suspicion is spreading and it's going to be hard for Mohammed to quell it because we have been here before.

When Boko Haram released 82 Chibok girls in 2017 after an initial 21 were released the previous year, Mohammed was front and centre to dismiss reports that the government had paid the terrorist group.

"I can emphatically deny on behalf of the Federal Government that any form of ransom was paid in exchange for the release of the 82 Chibok girls," he said.

Months later in December 2017, a report by the Wall Street Journal insisted that President Buhari approved the sum of 1 million for the release of the initial 21 girls in October 2016, before approving another 2 million for the release of the 82 girls.

Even if that report was inaccurate, Mohammed did admit to a different kind of ransom that he refused to call what it was.

To secure the release of the girls, the government had to release five top Boko Haram commanders in what he called a prisoner swap.

Earlier this month, one of those commanders, Shuibu Moni, appeared in a propaganda video and taunted the government over the numerous claims that the terrorist group has been defeated and rooted out of Sambisa Forest.

He said, "They are spreading fake news around that they collected Sambisa and instructed people in Borno, Adamawa and Yobe states (that they) should watch out for us.

"It is a lie. Where is this place we are in? Is it not Sambisa Forest? Just wait and see soon what will happen."

A history of blood money deals

When Buhari campaigned to be elected to his current position, security was one of his strongest concerns as Boko Haram attacks were commonplace; he even survived an attack himself.

With the Chibok incident happening around a year to the 2015 presidential election, Buhari pressed on the neck of the administration of then-president, Goodluck Jonathan, and used it to convince Nigerians of Jonathan's incapacity to deal with the problem.

Buhari touted his military past as proof of his pedigree to deal a decisive blow that'll be the end of Boko Haram if he was elected. The General would take no prisoners.

It's only been three years into his tenure and the General has negotiated at least four high profile prisoner release deals with two different factions of Boko Haram.

Other than the deal to release some of the Chibok girls, the government also recently secured the release of three members of staff of the University of Maiduguri (UNIMAID) and another group of 10 policewomen in February 2018 after both parties were abducted by separate Boko Haram factions within the space of a month in 2017.

That same deal had raised eyebrows about what cost was incurred by the government especially since it appeared to have been coordinated with the warring factions of Abubakar Shekau and Abu Musab al-Barnawi.

Even though the president ran on a mandate to crush Boko Haram into dust, he is starting to garner a reputation for being a financier in the form of clandestine ransom payments.

While many would often point out that "What is most important is that the girls are back and safe", the implications should make any right-thinking person realise how simplistic that is.

A house divided against itself

Shekau has long been known as the blood-hungry leader of Boko Haram since the group's insurgency escalated in 2009 after the extra-judicial killing of its founder, Mohammed Yusuf. However, the group has split up over the years into different factions.

The most notable faction apart from Shekau's is the one led by the deceased Yusuf's son, al-Barnawi, who has the backing of the global terrorist network, the Islamic State also known as, ISIS.

Al-Barnawi has reportedly been trying to build a base as influential as Shekau's and money does not harm his ambitions.

If the reports and suspicions of the government paying ransoms for these negotiations are to be believed, then al-Barnawi has received credit alerts from the Federal Government for two successive months for holding vulnerable people as hostages.

It should terrify Nigerians that they're living in a world where targeting schoolgirls and vulnerable Nigerians is perceived as an easy bargaining technique to squeeze money from the federal reserve. It should make it even more worrying that the government is more readily accommodating the practice and unwittingly encouraging it.

Which brings me to the calibre of prisoners that have been deemed worthy enough to be bargained for.

Who is worthy to be saved?

Nigeria's string of negotiation deals with Boko Haram has involved the Chibok girls, UNIMAID staff, the policewomen, and now, the Dapchi girls.

If there's any correlation between all of them, it's that they were abductions that have been heavily 'politicised' enough to keep the government on its toes.

The Bring Back Our Girls movement, championed by former Minister of Education, Oby Ezekwesili, has been a thorn in the government's flesh on the abductions of the Chibok girls, primarily, and the other abductions mentioned above.

In fact, the group is currently pursuing a legal suit against the government for gross negligence that led to the abduction of the Dapchi girls.

Basically, the history of the government's negotiated deals suggest that it only opts for that solution for abductions that appear to have political implications.

So, what happens to the hundreds of other people captured by Boko Haram all the time?

Out of the news cycle, out of mind

Around a week after the abduction in Dapchi happened, terrorists stormed , a remote town in Kala Balge local government area of Borno and killed six soldiers, four policemen, and three humanitarian workers.

They also reportedly abducted a yet-to-be ascertained number of people, including Hauwa Leman, a 24-year-old nurse who was able to send a heartbreaking message of the abduction to a friend via Whatsapp just before she was taken away.

In the message, she said, "We are under attack in Rann. They are shooting everywhere please pray for me; please go and tell my parents that I am in trouble. Please, look for Fatima and tell her they are taking us away. They have entered here now"

Last week, Hauwa'sent a message' to her WhatsApp contacts urging them to 'return to the path of God'.

"O you people of this world, fear God, denounce infidelity. And if you dont, Allah will give us victory over you and you will be among the misguided," the message read.

It's common sense to conclude that Hauwa's phone was being operated by the terrorists to preach their message of intolerance, and that she's most probably in a place right now where she's dying to be saved; but who is negotiating for Hauwa's release? Is she politically-relevant enough to deserve the efforts of the government to secure her release and that of hundreds of people?

In December 2017, 700 farmers, fishermen and members of their families abducted by Boko Haram terrorists just escaped out of nowhere in the Lake Chad region, claiming that they were forced to be farm workers by the terrorists.

What this proves is that there are hundreds of captives just like these, and just like Hauwa, who are being held hostage by terrorists, and this makes a growing culture of ransom negotiations a dangerous, desperate path for the government to embark on.

Sure, the relatives of freed captives get reprieve and the government scores a 'quick win', but the gains the terrorists acquire in these deals are used to wreck more havoc and devastation in the lives of other Nigerians.

With the Federal Government's grandstanding about defeating Boko Haram, it is damaging that the group still commands enough influence to hold hostages and make demands from the government.

All Boko Haram has to do is carry out high-profile abductions and hope that they get big enough to get politicised and put the Federal Government in an uncomfortable position that'll mean negotiation and foreign currencies.

This almost always puts them in a strong position to make demands that should be getting laughed at, but are heeded by the government.

For instance, while maintaining that the government didn't pay any ransom for the Dapchi girls, Mohammed said the only demand Boko Haram insisted on was to drive the girls back to the scene of the abduction themselves.

So, to achieve this, troops of the Nigerian Army had to stand helplessly by as a bunch of terrorists drove dozens of kilometers into the heart of Dapchi to undo their atrocity by releasing the girls.

It has to register as one of the greatest embarrassments of any country's military in the modern history of fighting terrorism.

That Boko Haram could even be bold enough to make such an abominable demand means they know they have the upper hand in this psychological war that the government appears still massively unprepared for.

It's even more embarrassing when you think about the fact that President Buhari himself told Dapchi parents last week that he will make sure "Boko Haram meets its waterloo."

"We will not spare their members," he promised.

What will he say now to the parents of the six girls who have not returned with their mates, with five reported dead and the last one still held in captivity?

To remove all doubt, I am happy that 104 Dapchi girls are back, and their parents will undoubtedly not care about the bigger picture here because they are reunited with their children and that's all that matters to them.

However, the culture of caving in to terrorist demands for selected 'political' prisoners is not a good look for President Buhari or the country. You can either stick to your words and grind them to dust, or you can keep enriching them in money or in released commanders.

To those who believe Nigerians asking questions about the Miracle of Dapchi and the ugly culture it breeds are merely 'politicising' it, there is enough room to be happy about the girls' return and still question all of the government's failures that allowed the whole mess to happen to begin with.According to media reports, 21-year-old FridaySylvester was building a demarcation inside a river beside the Celestial Church when he fell into the river and died on Wednesday, March 21.

A crowd of protesters accused the pastor of the church, 78-year-old Babatunde Shittu, of using Friday for ritual and demanded justice.

To escape lynching from the mob, Shitu was immediately put under the protective custody of the police in the area.

The youths reportedly gathered with renewed strength on Thursday and burnt down the church and the police post, although Shitu had been moved by then and there was no casualty.

According to Premium Times, the Public Relations Officer of the Kaduna State Police Command, Aliyu Muktar, confirmed the incident and reported that five people have already been arrested.

He said, "Yes it's true that some miscreants set ablaze a Celestial church and a police outpost in Narayi. The church was completely burnt but the police outpost was not burnt completely.

"The youth were angry that police gave the church pastor 78 old Steven Babatunde Shitu protective custody. They demanded for his release so as to lynch him. But our personnel refused to hand him over to them so they decided to take laws into their hands.

"Our men dispersed them on Wednesday but they regrouped around 4 a.m. Thursday to attack the church and the outpost. So far five people have been arrested."The resolution, according to the Leader of the Senate, Ahmed Lawan, was fallout of a meeting between the National Working Committee (NWC) of the party and the APC Caucus in the Senate, in Abuja on Wednesday.

Lawan told a news conference after the meeting that on Wednesday that membership of the committee would be drawn from the Executive, Legislature, the Governors Forum and the partys National Secretariat.

READ ALSO: 5 reasons why president will win 2019 election

He said that the team the team was charged with the responsibility of reducing the level of misunderstanding among members of the party across board.

Lawan explained that constitution of the committee was pertinent in probing the disagreements at different levels of the party so as not to allow them to cause clog in its fortunes ahead of the 2019 general elections.

According to him, discussions at the meeting centred around many issues among which was how to forestall crisis envisaged from the reordered sequence of elections adopted by the National Assembly in the Electoral Act (amendment) Bill.

He said: the purpose of the meeting was to discuss happenings in the party across the country and across all levels of government.

Senators took turn to express the way out of some of the issues bedeviling the party and I believe that it was a worthwhile, very frank discussion.

The party will soon constitute a team that will comprise of the executive, the legislature, the party itself and representatives from our governors and we have 24 of them.

We are very happy as a caucus that the interaction was worthwhile and I am sure that our party was also glad to be here with us this afternoon.

We, as members of the National Assembly are and will remain committed to ensuring that we continue to support the change agenda of our administration led by President Muhammadu Buhari.

The party is the platform for all of us, both the legislative and executive and in my own view, the party has done well by coming.

This is our party; this is our government, our administration. We shouldnt be fighting dirty in the open, the lawmaker said.

In his remarks before the closed-door meeting, National Chairman of APC, Chief John Odigie- Oyegun, said the meeting was aimed at discussing issues that had arisen in the polity recently.

He said happenings within the polity necessitated the party leadership to meet with the Senate caucus to reason and strategise for 2019 election.

We hope to have a better party after the meeting, he said.Buhari's medical records were also fair game.

The firm was handed 2m for its troubles.

The revelation has been made by Guardian UK and Observer.

Cambridge Analytica whose parent firm is called SCL Elections was hired  by a Nigerian billionaire to support the re-election of Goodluck Jonathan.

"Cambridge Analytica was paid an estimated 2m to orchestrate a ferocious campaign against his rival, the opposition leader Muhammadu Buhari. Jonathan lost out to Buhari in the presidential race. There is no suggestion Jonathan knew of the covert operation, the report reads.

According to the story, senior directors of Cambridge Analytica  including its chief executive, Alexander Nix  gave staff instructions to handle material provided by computer hackers in election campaigns in Nigeria and St Kitts and Nevis.

The hackers were hired from Israel.

Buhari's medical records

It was the kind of campaign that was our bread and butter, one employee was quoted as saying. Were employed by a billionaire whos panicking at the idea of a change of government and who wants to spend big to make sure that doesnt happen.

Seven individuals with close knowledge of the Nigeria campaign described to the Guardian how Cambridge Analytica worked with people they believed were Israeli computer hackers.

Sources who spoke to the Observer over many months  said the company was looking for kompromat on Muhammadu Buhari of the then opposition APC.

As Cambridge Analytica pressed on with its plans to sway the Nigerian election, the Israelis were commissioned to hack into Buharis emails and uproot his medical records.

Recall that Buharis health dominated the PDPs campaign message ahead of the 2015 election which was postponed from February to March.

According to The Guardian; the hackers offered Cambridge Analytica access to private information about Buhari.

Their testimony paints an extraordinary picture of how far a western company would contemplate going in an effort to undermine the democratic process in a country that already struggles to provide free and fair elections.

Freaked out

The story details how Cambridge Analytica team in Nigeria freaked out and fled the country when they discovered they had been handed materials from Israeli hackers.

It reads as follows:

An ex-employee said: [Kaiser] got a phone call. It was just before Christmas and she flew out to meet them in Washington DC. It was all a bit ridiculous. It was only six to eight weeks before the election and they were looking to spend nearly $2m.

The election was a big deal. At stake, the future of the most populous country in Africa, and potential access to its lucrative oil reserves. The sitting president was favourite to win, though Buhari was doing unexpectedly well.

Not least because his team had hired AKPD, once the firm of former Barack Obama strategist David Axelrod, which was pushing a slick, social media heavy Obama-esque message of hope.

There were a lot of scared millionaires worried that Buhari would get in. It was all very last-minute. A team flew out to Abuja and put together a communications campaign. It was a straightforward, normal comms campaign in most respects, the employee said.

Disturbing video

Most but not all respects. The Observer has obtained an astonishing and disturbing video that Cambridge Analytica used in the campaign.

Coming to Nigeria on February 15th, 2015, the voiceover says in the manner of a trailer for a Hollywood movie.

Dark. Scary. And very uncertain. Sharia for all. And then it poses the question: What would Nigeria look like if sharia were imposed by Buhari?

Its answer to that question is certainly dark. And scary. Its also graphically, brutally, violent. One minute and 19 seconds of archive news footage from Nigerias troubled past set to a horror movie soundtrack.

There are scenes of people being macheted to death. Their legs hacked off. Their skulls caved in. A former contractor said: It was voter suppression of the most crude and basic kind. It was targeted at Buhari voters in Buhari regions to basically scare the shit out of them and stop them from voting.

If Buhari wins, the film warns: women would wear the veil. Sharia law would be introduced. And the inference is, you may be macheted to death.

It wasnt just videos spreading fear. The Cambridge Analytica campaign team in Nigeria were jumpy too.

It felt risky, being there. There were various points when we were told we were in danger. And in the Abuja hotel to which the team was confined in early 2015, rumours abounded.

'Israelis didn't want Buhari to win'

The tales are Graham Greene-esque. The hotel was where slick western consultants, including a team from the now disgraced Bell Pottinger, partied with their Nigerian counterparts. Mingling among them, western intelligence operatives - state backed, or privately commissioned, nobody was quite sure.

And then there were the meetings: three sources have told the Guardian about one that took place between Cambridge Analytica employees and two people they were told were Israeli intelligence operatives.

There was a two-hour meeting that took place in the hotel lobby between two senior campaign members and Israeli intelligence. After which they swept our hotel rooms for listening devices and said they would switch out our phones. The story we were told was that there were intelligence agents from a number of different countries, including Israel and France, who were supporting Goodluck Jonathan and helping the campaigns.

There is no suggestion that Jonathan was aware of or implicated in this support. Another employee said: Basically the Israelis didnt want [Buhari] to win.

Other employees questioned whether they were real Israeli intelligence operatives, or Israeli private contractors.

A few weeks later, as the campaign was drawing to a close, there was another meeting at Cambridge Analyticas London office.

An expert had flown in from Israel with a laptop, sources say.

And Alexander Nix, Cambridge Analyticas now suspended CEO, and Kaiser, asked employees to take a thumb drive and download the contents on to their own computers.

The content was private emails and the information, they were told, related to Buharis financial and

One employee who was present at the London meeting said he had initially assumed the visiting expert was Mossad or Israeli intelligence passing on what he called legtimate information.

But he began to realise this wasnt the case, he said, when he saw the reaction of his colleagues. One of them had freaked out, he said. He was like, What the fuck? I dont want anything to do with this.

The witnesses are clear  at least in their own minds. The information they were shown had come from hackers.

Back in Nigeria, the team still on the ground found out what was going on from their colleagues in London. There was more freaking out. This time with live, pressing concerns.

They were fucking scared, said a colleague who spoke to them while they were in the country. The campaign fixer, the person with local knowledge who navigated made it clear to them: they needed to get out of the country right away.

Cambridge Analytica had put them all in danger, they said. If opposition supporters found out, there was no saying what might happen.

One member of the team missed his flight and instead of asking the office to re-book it, he got the first fight out  to Dubai  and put it on his credit card. Everyone just wanted to get out as soon as possible.

Under investigation

Cambridge Analytica worked on the Donald Trump presidential campaign as well and the UK Brexit vote of 2016.

Cambridge Analyticas operations are being investigated in the US by special counsel Robert Mueller as part of his inquiry into possible Russian collusion in the 2016 US presidential election.

A former employee of Cambridge Analytica recalls that moment when staff working on the campaign fled Nigeria.

What is clear is that the security of their employees didnt even seem to have occurred to them. It was a very serious situation and they had to evacuate immediately.

Vendors

A statement from Cambridge Analyticas company, SCL Elections denied any wrongdoing: During an election campaign, it is normal for SCL Elections to meet with vendors seeking to provide services as a subcontractor. SCL Elections did not take possession of or use any personal information from such individuals for any purposes. SCL Elections does not use hacked or stolen data.

Members of the SCL Elections team that worked on the Nigeria campaign remained in country throughout the original campaigning period, although the election was rescheduled and SCL was not retained for the entirety of the extended campaign period.

Team members left in accordance with the companys campaign plan. Team members were regularly briefed about security concerns prior to and during deployment and measures were taken to ensure the teams safety throughout.

The Guardian writes that the revelations will add to the questions facing Cambridge Analytica and the techniques it uses to influence elections for its clients.Malaysia launched search and rescue operations after a sand dredging vessel capsized Wednesday in the waters off Malaysia in the Malacca Strait, leaving at least one dead and 14 crew members missing.

A sand mining vessel capsizes in the waters off Malaysia in the Malacca Strait on March 21, 2018. [Photo: CCTV]

There were 18 crew members on the vessel, including one Malaysian, one Indonesian and 16 Chinese citizens, according to Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency (MMEA), the country's coast guard.

Three have been rescued, one was found dead and 14 remained missing.

The Chinese embassy in Malaysia confirmed to Xinhua that among the 16 Chinese crew members, one was dead and 12 remained missing. The three rescued are in good condition.

Zulkifili Abu Bakar, chief of MMEA, said the search and rescue is ongoing with assets from his agency as well as the Malaysian marine police.

"Now we got five assets at the sea, three from MMEA and two from marine police," said Sanifah Bin Yusof, Deputy Director of MMEA's Southern region.

Sanifah said at least some of the missings could be trapping inside the ship.

"We checked the ship and got good communication when we knocked the body of the ship, got some reply from the inside," he told Xinhua at the operation center, "We are trying to save their lives with diving operation."

Ahmad Kamarulzaman Ahmad Badaruddin, chief of the Malaysian Navy, told Xinhua that a navy vessel has been dispatched with a diving team to join the search and rescue operations.

The Chinese embassy said the Chinese Marine Search and Rescue Center had also sent divers and experts to assist the search and rescue.

The Dominican-registered vessel, JBB RONG CHANG 8, capsized 8.5 nautical miles off Parit Jawa in southern Malaysian state of Johor. MMEA said it received a distress call at around 8:50 a.m. local time Wednesday and launched a search-and-rescue mission afterwards.Speaking on Monday, March 19, 2018, during the 7th presidential quarterly business forum which held at the banquet hall in the Villa, Vice President Yemi Osinbajo accused the Jonathan administration of withdrawing N150billion from the federation account just days before the 2015 election.

In Osinbajos words; "In one single transaction, a few weeks to the 2015 elections, sums of N100billion and $295million were just frittered away by a few.

"Nobody should talk about the economy when you have this kind of huge leakages and huge corruption. Corruption that completely makes nonsense of even what you are allocating to capital projects.

"We saw from the presentation of the minister of finance that N14 billion was spent on agriculture in 2014, transportation N15 billion, so the total spent on infrastructure in those three years were N153 billion and in two weeks before the elections, N150 billion was essentially shared.

"So, if your total infrastructure spending is N150 billion and you can share N153 billion, that is completely incredible. That sort of thing doesnt happen anywhere else in the world. And when we are talking about the economy, we must simply understand that that is the problem."

Jonathan responds

It took a couple of hours for Jonathan to respond through his aideReno Omokri.

Jonathan called Osinbajo a serial liar who has sold his lips to the devil.

Nigerians may recall that lying is the most consistent achievement of Prof Osinbajos almost three years as vice president.

On this most recent allegation, let me state categorically that Jonathan did not share N150billion two weeks to the 2015 election. If Osinbajo has proof that Jonathan did so, then we challenge him to publish his proof.

He is a professor of law and ought to know that he who alleges must prove.

The vice president has again surrendered his lips to Satan to be use to spread slander and lies", the former president said.

Sick and tired

Like me, Im sure you must now be sick and tired of listening to tales of how Jonathan and his men stole Nigeria dry from 2010 to 2015.

The Buhari administration seizes every opportunity to regal us with how much Jonathan stole and why that theft is why we plunged into a recession and why we cant fix our deplorable road surfaces.

I have to go with Jonathan here who is asking for proof from Osinbajo in this latest accusation game. And if theres sufficient evidence that N150 billion left the treasury two weeks before the presidential election and this evidence is before Buhari and Osinbajo, why is Jonathan still walking the country a free man?

Theres got to be details of these humongous withdrawals before the presidency. So, why hasnt the EFCC been sent after Jonathan to drag him before a Judge?

Why is Jonathan still flying the world to deliver speeches when he should be answering for the grandiose theft that happened right under his nose as president?

There is no denying the grand corruption that occurred during the Jonathan administration. But now more than ever, we need proof. Just proof.

This isn't a game. We are talking billions of naira developing wings. Heads should be rolling. This is serious business.

Taxpayers

N150billion is no chicken change. As taxpayers, we really deserve to know how Jonathan stole all of this money and where the money went. We deserve details of how Jonathan and his men frittered every kobo.The evacuation agreement, brokered by the regime's Russian ally, could empty one of three remaining pockets in Eastern Ghouta and mark a major step forward in government efforts to secure the nearby capital Damascus.

Tens of thousands of civilians remain trapped under relentless bombardment in the two other pockets of the enclave which has endured a five-year siege.

The devastating offensive launched by the regime on February 18 has sliced the shrinking enclave into three parts, one of which is controlled by the hardline Ahrar al-Sham group.

"The deal between the regime and rebels in Harasta sees rebels exiting the city with their weapons, and whichever civilians want to leave, to northern Syria with Russian guarantees," said Munzer Fares, spokesman for the Ahrar al-Sham group in Ghouta.

"The departure of families that want to leave to northern Syria will start at 7:00 am (0500 GMT) tomorrow," Fares told AFP.

Eastern Ghouta lies within mortar range of central Damascus and the deal came after the deadliest rocket attack on the capital in months killed 44 civilians on Tuesday night.

The regime's offensive on Ghouta has killed more than 1,400 civilians since February 18, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory.

More bombardment

The evacuated rebels are to be bussed to Idlib, a province out of government control that hosts a myriad jihadist, Islamist and secular groups, many of them with links to Turkey.

The evacuation of Harasta will further isolate the two other rebel groups controlling the rest of Eastern Ghouta and increase the pressure on them to accept a similar deal.

Syrian Reconciliation Minister Ali Haidar told AFP that Ahrar al-Sham had been talking to the Russian Centre for Reconciliation and that the Syria government was not directly involved.

Local officials in rebel-held Ghouta told AFP that talks were also under way for a deal to evacuate rebels from Douma, the main town in Eastern Ghouta.

Bombardment on rebel-held areas continued to claim civilians lives Wednesday, with at least 11 killed in Douma and Ain Terma, according to the Observatory monitoring group.

The air raid in Idlib struck near a checkpoint manned by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a jihadist group largely made up of ex-members of a former Al-Qaeda affiliate, it said.

An AFP reporter saw rescuers searching for bodies in a crater left by the strike which destroyed a shelter where children were hiding.

'Tragic'

The assault on Eastern Ghouta has a sparked a mass exodus from the shrinking rebel enclave, with 50,000 people reaching shelters in regime-controlled areas in the past week, according to the United Nations.

The UN humanitarian coordinator in Syria on Wednesday condemned the "tragic" living conditions of the displaced massed in the makeshift shelters, including to the area of Adra.

"If I was a citizen, I would not accept to stay in Adra for five minutes, with this tragic situation," Ali al-Zaatari said.

Zaatari was also critical of the humanitarian situation for some 100,000 people who have fled a Turkey-led advance on the Kurdish region of Afrin in northern Syria.

Pro-Ankara forces swept into its main city -- also named Afrin -- on Sunday, sending Kurdish fighters into retreat.

"We cannot access Afrin as it's an occupied region," Zaatari said, adding that attempts were being made daily to try to reach the region's civilians.

Several people among those displaced said they would not be celebrating Kurdish New Year, or Nowruz, this year after having fled their homes under fire.

In a Kurdish area further east, thousands in brightly-coloured traditional clothes turned their Nowruz celebration on Wednesday into protests of solidarity with the city of Afrin.

They wore floral scarves, waved Kurdish flags and carried posters that pledged to win back Afrin from Turkey and its Syrian rebel allies.After days of silence, Moscow acknowledged five Russian nationals were killed and "dozens" wounded in the attack, saying they all were in Syria "on their own initiative."

Various media outlets have reported up to 200 fatalities and the group of Russian investigative bloggers known as the Conflict Intelligence Team (CIT) has established the identities of dozens of them -- all members of the Wagner Group.

"Wagner can and should be regarded as Russia's shadow army in Syria, as it has been providing the vital frontline component to Russia's operations in Latakia and Eastern Syria," CIT's Kirill Mikhailov told AFP.

The group played an important role in the retaking of Palmyra from the Islamic State group which had controlled the city since March 2016, he added.

Pavel Baev, an associate research fellow at the French Institute of International Relations, said Russia's resort to "shadow armies... has the double benefit of ensuring deniability and discounting casualties."

But "the problem with assets like the Wagner Group is that they are never fully controllable and could become maverick," he said.

The group's "capabilities exceed any Western private military company by far," said Mikhailov.

A photo with Putin

Wagner was set up by former Russian military intelligence officer Dmitry Utkin, who was part of the first convoy of Russian mercenaries sent in autumn 2013 to Syria.

But their ill-equipped mission, which did not have the backing of the Russian authorities, ended in fiasco.

They engaged in some combat with the IS but rapidly returned to Russia, where two backers of the scheme were jailed for three years for mercenary activities.

In June 2014 Utkin joined the ranks of pro-Russian separatist forces in eastern Ukraine -- the Wagner Group's birthplace -- according to official reports from Ukraine.

The Kremlin has continuously rejected accusations from Kiev and the West of its military presence in Eastern Ukraine, saying the Russians who are fighting there are "volunteers."

Utkin reappeared in Syria in autumn 2015, when Russia launched an intervention in support of Kremlin ally Bashar al-Assad's regime.

In December next year, the former intelligence officer showed up at a televised ceremony held in the Kremlin to honour "the Heroes of Fatherland" and was the same day photographed alongside Putin.

Various media reports in Russia and the United States said Wagner is being funded by one of Putin's allies Evgeny Prigozhin, a Saint Petersburg businessman who made a fortune in the catering business before signing lucrative contracts with Russia's military and the government.

He has been charged by a US court with setting up an Internet "troll factory" that attempted to influence the 2016 American presidential elections in favour of Donald Trump.

Petrodollars

The number of Wagner's fighters in Syria has been the subject of debate by analysts and media, with Republic.ru online magazine reporting the presence of 2,500 mercenaries in March 2016.

It said $350 million (285 million euros) had been spent on mercenaries since the operation began.

Wagner's mission "is essentially a failure," a former member of the group told Russian Sovershenno Sekretno weekly.

He said 40 percent of recruits had been jailed for serious crimes before they joined Wagner and would refer to each other as the "unlucky ones".

This "low-quality" of recruits, along with the idea that Wagner functioned as an autonomous army and accepted missions from non-Russian groups, led to rising tensions with officials both on the ground in Syria and in Moscow's corridors of power.

In early 2016 the group lost the trust of -- and financing from -- Russia's defence ministry, according to various reports.

This led "Prigozhin to seek other contracts, such as the one with Damascus whereby Wagner would liberate oil and gas fields and infrastructure in exchange for 25 percent of production," he added.

To this end, he established a company named Evro Polis, which signed the contract with Assad's government in December 2016 and is now responsible for paying Wagner mercenaries' salaries that vary from an estimated $3,500 to $5000 a month.The statement fell short of a full-throated apology, but in his post, Zuckerberg said that Facebook would contact users whose data had been harvested through a personality quiz app and passed along to Cambridge Analytica.

In his statement, Zuckerberg laid out a timeline of Facebooks dealings with Cambridge Analytica and described the steps the company would take to safeguard the information of its more than 2 billion monthly users.

Zuckerberg said Facebook would investigate apps, like the third-party quiz app, that had access to large amounts of information from the social network from before it had made changes to its policies. He also said the company would restrict third-party developers access to data on the social network.

We also made mistakes, theres more to do, and we need to step up and do it, he wrote.

The revelations about Cambridge Analytica were just the latest to raise red flags about Facebooks handling of user data and security, and came after the company has faced intense criticism over Russian manipulation of the platform before and after the 2016 presidential election, and broader concerns about the rise of misinformation on the site.

The resulting backlash has thrust Facebook into its worst crisis since it was founded in 2004. The information, photos and other content that users post and their frequent engagement with the platform is crucial to the social network, and its business. Questions about user privacy and security threaten to derail that mission, at a time when people are already perturbed about whether the use of technology can bring good or ill.

The reaction to the disclosure of the information harvesting by Cambridge Analytica has been severe. Politicians in the United States and in Britain have called for Zuckerberg to explain how his company handles user data, and state attorneys general in Massachusetts and New York have begun investigating Cambridge Analytica and Facebook. A #DeleteFacebook movement calling on people to close their accounts has also gathered steam among those who have lost confidence that the company is trustworthy in collecting  and safeguarding  their data.

In Washington, there have been more calls for regulation of internet companies like Facebook. Zuckerbergs troubles there were illustrated by the final passage on Wednesday of a bill to combat sex-trafficking that lifted the blanket liability protections that internet companies have enjoyed for content on their platforms. Facebook and other internet giants had quietly fought the bill for more than a year, but ultimately dropped their opposition.

Lawmakers who have demanded that Zuckerberg testify before Congress about Facebooks relationship with Cambridge Analytica were not appeased by his statement.

You need to come to Congress and testify to this under oath, Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., tweeted in response to Zuckerbergs post.

Independent researchers who have used data from Facebook said that Zuckerbergs statement did not acknowledge how the very gathering of user data is fundamental to the companys operations.

He avoided the big issue, which is that for many years, Facebook was basically giving away user data like it was handing out candy, said Jonathan Albright, research director at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University. There is no question that handing out that data made Facebook the success it is as a company. This has to be recognized as part of their business model and not just a one-off problem.

Zuckerberg traced the information-sharing issue to 2007, when Facebook decided to become an open platform  enabling people to use Facebook to log into other apps and share detailed personal information about themselves and their friends.

In 2013, Aleksandr Kogan, a Cambridge University researcher, created a personality quiz app that about 300,000 people installed, Zuckerberg wrote. Because Facebook was an open platform, Kogan was able to collect data on tens of millions of friends of those users who had installed the personality quiz app.

A year later, Zuckerberg said, Facebook changed its policy to limit how much data third-party apps could access. These actions would prevent any app like Kogans from being able to access so much data today, he wrote.

In 2015, The Guardian reported on Kogan, who had by then shared his data and findings with Cambridge Analytica, which used the material to target U.S. voters during the 2016 campaign. Zuckerberg said Facebook had banned Kogans app and demanded that the researcher and Cambridge Analytica formally certify that the data had been deleted. He did not address in his post why Facebook did not disclose those activities to its users whose data had been harvested by Kogan and Cambridge Analytica.

Last Friday, after The New York Times, The Observer of London and Channel 4 in Britain told Facebook that Cambridge Analytica had not deleted all of the data, the social network banned the political consulting firm and Kogan.

This was a breach of trust between Kogan, Cambridge Analytica and Facebook, Zuckerberg wrote on Wednesday. But it was also a breach of trust between Facebook and the people who share their data with us and expect us to protect it.

For Zuckerberg, the outcry over Cambridge Analytica has been personally damaging. Inside Facebook, even his staunch supporters have described a tense atmosphere. Some employees have sought to transfer to other divisions, such as the messaging app WhatsApp and the photo-sharing platform Instagram, calling their work on Facebooks main product demoralizing.

Zuckerberg spent part of the past week hunkered down with a small group of engineers to discuss how to make information on Facebooks users more secure, and to potentially give them more control of their data, according to two Facebook employees who declined to be named because the proceedings were confidential.

His silence on the matter has prompted mounting criticism in the past few days. While Facebook held a staff meeting on Tuesday to answer questions about Cambridge Analytica, Zuckerberg did not appear at the event. He was scheduled to appear at a staff meeting that was set for Friday.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.Kihara, the former President of the Court of Appeal, was pressed to explain how he would deal with integrity issue if appointed as the new AG.

The question prompted the ex-judge to narrate an account where a Kenyan priest tried to bribe him to drop certain cases before his court or be lenient to accused individuals.

You go to church, and as you a leaving, a priest embraces you, and tells you "na ukumbuke Yule ni mtu wetu" in regards to a case you are hearing, he told the vetting panel at County Hall.

Kihara noted he never once succumbed to such pressures assuring the committee that he was not a corrupt individual

I hear it but it goes through the other ear. I will not compromise, not now, not ever, he said.

Kihara added: "At times I have been under tremendous pressure from family, Executive & Parliament. I've constituted thousands of benches, and not once have I ever been accused of doing it underhandedly. In my 16 years as a judge not once have I ever been accused of taking a bribe."

Last year, during the much heated election period, the former judge was on the spot for constituting a bench on a public holiday that overturned a High Court decision declaring the appointment of IEBC returning officers illegal.

His move was viewed as suspicious as the ruling was issued on the night of the October 26th election.

When probed over this issue, Mr Kihara defended himself stating that he only did what the law requires of him and never participated in the case directly.

"One member of that duty bench was not traceable. So it befell me to find somebody else. The power of the President of the Court of Appeal are clearly set out in the statute. It says that the President of the court shall be the head of the court and in that regard shall oversee the proper management and administration of the court.

"Secondly he will be responsible for the allocation of cases and constitution of benches a bench and ensuring the benches President of the Court," he said.

Mr. Kihara was nominated to replace former AG Githu Muigai after handing his resignation to the Head of State.Nelson Koech (Belgut), Bashir Abdullahi (Mandera North) and Rehema Jaldesa (Isiolo woman representative) presented the motion on Tuesday.

The motion gained momentum on Wednesday after 100 MPs signed it. The motion and signatures were presented to Speaker Justin Muturi and clerk Michael Sialai.

This is after the Health CS was accused of not following protocol when suspending Kenyatta National Hospital CEO Lily Koros after a botched surgery on the wrong patient.

Moses Kuria reacts to plan by MPs to impeach the Health CS

Kuria was against the motion saying that the motion is not in good faith and will fail as the MPs are only reacting to protect a member of their own community.

According to The Star, the MP said that the mtu wetu syndrome needs to be done away with as it would only encourage incompetence in civil servants.

"That the Bashir motion to censure CS Kariuki will be defeated is not in doubt. What is annoying is this primitive 'Mtu Wetu' syndrome. Cabinet Secretaries have a job to do. So, we censure Sicily over Lilian Koros and not appointing a Somali to KEMSA, we censure Tobiko for firing Emilio Mugo from KFS despite the wanton destruction of forests, what is the end to all this?" Kuria added.

The motion will be tabled next week for the MPs to debate on it.

Kuria isn't happy with this development since if the motion allowed to proceed, ethnically motivated impeachment motions will be replicated in other ministries and state agencies.

The acting CEO at KEMSA is a Luhya. Tomorrow the Luhya Parliamentary group also moves to censure the CS for their own reason? the MP stated.

By his measure, the move amounts to a lack of common sense from the legislators who have back ethnic-centred decisions.

Moses Kuria to Sicily KariukiIn an interview with co-hosted by the global Byline Investigates in London and the Frontline Club, a private members club in Britain, Wylie revealed that Muresan was found dead in a Kenyan hotel room.

The death resulted in the vacancy which Wylie filled at a British political consultancy firm linked to Cambridge Analytica,the controversial British data mining firm accused of influencing the 2017 Kenyan elections.

Mysterious death

However, Wylie refused to state how Muresan, the son of former Romania Agriculture Minister Ioan Avram Muresan died.

I did not know this at the time when I joined but my predecessor, he was working in Kenya for president Uhuru Kenyatta, and he was just found dead in a hotel room. That is why they had a vacancy. I cant say he was murdered. He died in his hotel room. Wylie stated.

The Romanian citizen was working with a British telecommunications company, being in Kenya for a while. He had not yet registered his presence on Kenyan territory with the Romanian diplomatic mission, the Foreign ministry told Bucharest Herald in September 10, 2012.

Influenced elections

The latest revelations adds to the concerns on the role of the British firms and how it is alleged to have shaped Kenya's political scene.

NASA has asked both the US and UK Governments to open a full investigation against Cambridge Analytica after the explosive expose by Channel 4 News which disclosed how it helped President Kenyatta during the 2017 General Election.

The firm is accused of using damaging information about politicians to push certain agenda to the electorates. The main purpose is to play with the citizenrys emotions by either creating fear or wooing undecided voters towards a candidate.Out of the five counties that formed the former Nyanza province, all the Governors and Senators were elected on the orange party.

Four out of the five Woman representatives are also from ODM.

However, Kisii record has the odd record of not having a single ODM MP in the National Assembly.

Out of the nine MPs in Kisii, Jubilee has two MPs. People's Democratic Party (PDP), and the Kenya National Congress (KNC) also have two legislators each.

Ford Kenya has one MP, same as the National Alliance Party of Kenya (NAPK).

Bomachoge Borabu MP Zadoc Abel Ogutu is an independent legislator.

Despite the absence of elected MPs, Kisii voters largely voted for ODM candidate Raila Odinga who garnered 224,317 votes (55.40 per cent) against President Uhuru Kenyatta's 174,978 votes (43.22 per cent).

Area governor James Ongwae was re-elected on the orange party, attaining 206,110 votes against Jubilee's Chris Obure who had 110,760 votes.Otiende Amollo, who is also Rarieda MP, shocked Parliament after he stated that NASA was able to take advantage of the weak cyber laws in the country to access the IEBC servers which the electoral commission had declined to open.

He was contributing to debate on a new bill that seeks to increase cyber security in Kenya.

The new law outlaws hacking, except when it is done in the interest of national security.

The Rarieda MP opposed the proposed law, stating that it was too punitive and vague on the definition of "national security".

"Those of us who belong to the Nasa coalition complained in the Supreme Court, which directed that servers be opened, but the commission refused. We were able to access the servers and we published results."

"If this bill was a law we would now be serving jail terms of not less than five years or we would be compelled to pay hefty fines," Amollo stated.

Jubilee MPs reacted with anger, demanding for the legislator to withdraw or substantiate the claim that the Opposition had hacked the IEBC servers.

"It should be put on record that the MP presents evidence that they hacked the servers or withdraws the statement. If they accessed the servers, that is hacking, so they must be held criminally liable. This bill has come in time ... we must act or the MP must apologise," Murang'a Women Representative Sabina Chege stated after rising on a point of order.

Chege's sentiments were echoed by Nyeri Town MP Ngunjiri Wambugu who demanded for NASA to substantiate their claims.

Makueni MP Dan Maanzo, however, rose to Amollo's defence, arguing that by that time, the law that criminalises such activities was not in place.Some 44 African countries on Wednesday signed an agreement establishing the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) in Kigali, capital city of Rwanda.

The signing took place during the 10th Extraordinary Session of the Assembly of the African Union (AU) on the AfCFTA. According the AU, 19 African heads of state and government attended the summit.

The 10th Extraordinary Session of the Assembly of the African Union (AU) on the AfCFTA opens in Kigali, capital city of Rwanda on March 17, 2018. [Photo: Xinhua]

The signed legal instruments was handed over to Chairperson of AU Commission Moussa Faki Mahamat after the signing.

The agreement will be submitted for ratification by state parties of the agreement in accordance with their domestic laws.

The decision to form the AfCFTA was adopted in January 2012 during the 18th Ordinary Session of the Assembly of Heads of State and Government of the AU while AfCFTA negotiations were launched by the AU in 2015.

The AfCFTA is aimed at creating a single continental market for goods and services with free movement of businesses and investments. This, according to the AU, will pave the way for accelerating the establishment of the Continental Customs Union and the African Customs Union.

The AfCFTA will make Africa the largest free trade area created in terms of the number of participating countries since the formation of the World Trade Organization, according to the AU. The AfCFTA could create an African market of over 1.2 billion people with a GDP of 2.5 trillion U.S. dollars, the pan-African bloc said.

The AfCFTA will progressively eliminate tariffs on intra-African trade, making it easier for African businesses to trade within the continent and cater to and benefit from the growing African market, said the AU.

The UN Economic Commission for Africa estimates that the AfCFTA has the potential both to boost intra-African trade by 53.2 percent by eliminating import duties, and to double this trade if non-tariff barriers are also reduced.

Together with the signing of the agreement on the AfCFTA, 27 African countries also signed the Protocol to the Treaty establishing the African Economic Community on Wednesday relating to free movement of persons, right of residence and right of establishment.Odinga chaired a meeting between NASA senators and the Summit after the ouster of Wetangula and subsequent election of Siaya Senator James Orengo.

The meeting resolved that the issue would be sorted within two weeks after the senators went on a retreat to resolve the differences.

The embattled Bungoma Senator was also part of the crisis meeting.

The replacement was done on Tuesday despite a letter by Odinga, demanding for the NASA senate parliamentary group to spare the Bungoma Senator.

The NASA leader added that he had briefed the senators on the deal reached with President Uhuru Kenyatta.In a post across his social media channels, Mr Odinga revealed that the US ambassador had visited him in his Capitol Hill offices in Nairobi.

We discussed the national reconciliation initiative and how there can be no progress without justice. The US has pledged to support us as we proceed with the task of righting the wrongs that have ailed us for far too long, Mr Odinga posted.

Hundreds of Kenyans who follow the Opposition Chief criticised the meeting between the two, faulting Mr Odinga of playing double standards, while others praised his resilience in reconciliation with the US, even after Godec castigated the swearing-in ceremony of January 30.

One Hussler Sonko on Facebook told off Mr Odinga that he once said the US could not be trusted, and wondered why the former Premier had turned against his own vows.

I mean former you told us that the US cannot be trusted and should keep off Kenyan affairs,, I just asking did this US change from America one to United Siaya? Hussler posed to Mr Odinga.

Another follower, Roy Ombija, added that Mr Odingas acts portrayed a high level of hypocrisy.

This is the apex of hypocrisy...As a staunch supporter, I never ever in my wildest of dreams imagined saying this against Raila Amolo Odinga.

At this rate youre watering down your legacy in gushes Sir...me wonders who is next in line on your appointments - Chebukati and Chiloba? My allegiance is leaning more towards Miguna Miguna by every passing day, Ombija said.

Thomas Isoka Chebai wrote: Next you should meet Chebukati and Chiloba, Cambridge Analytica, Morpho yes just keep on meeting all of them I'm currently battling depression courtesy to your silly political maneuvers punctuated by yourself interests. You have christened yourself Joshua I hear by christen you as new day 'Okwonkwo'. Your inability to grab power sulks.

Supporters

Equally, his staunch supporters praised his latest move to have talks with the US representative, nearly two weeks after meeting his political emissaries President Uhuru Kenyatta.

Denis Owino Wuod Awasi wrote to Mr Odinga; Congratulations Raila Amolo Odinga, the handshake has brought more good than harm, but you have taken too long to recognise Uhuru Kenyatta as a legitimate President of Kenya. You would have done after 26th repeat Presidential Election and you would have saved more lives.

Another follower, Apostle Sam Onduru said: For the first time I support you; you are brilliant here than on the streets. Kindly agree with PR Kenyatta well so that the two of you mend the walls your fathers broken in this nation for reasons only known to then in the graves. may their souls rest in peace.Beijing should implement punitive measures to counter government exchanges between Washington and Taipei, such as forbidding senior US officials who visit Taiwan from entering the Chinese mainland, and voting against US-supported resolutions at the UN, analysts said.

Alex Wong, deputy assistant secretary at the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs from the US Department of State, arrived in Taipei Tuesday night for a three-day visit. Wong is the first US government official to visit Taiwan following the enactment of the US' Taiwan Travel Act, which encourages high-level exchanges between Washington and Taipei.

According to a statement from the American Institute in Taiwan, the organization representing the US government in the absence of formal relations, Wong will "hold discussions with Taiwan authorities on a wide range of matters important for the US-Taiwan relationship," the statement read.

Apart from Wong, Kaohsiung Mayor Chen Chu also embarked on a visit to the US last week to deliver a speech at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.

"Despite coming from the Department of State, Wong's government rank is not very high. Exactly how much sway he holds in US' Asia policy development isn't known but his visit to Taiwan has symbolic implications. Taiwan may even view it as a breakthrough," Zhang Wensheng, a professor at the Taiwan Research Institute of Xiamen University, told the Global Times.

Analysts fear that Wong's visit is part of efforts by Washington and Taipei to pave the way for higher-level meetings.

Beijing is also concerned that other countries, such as Japan and European nations, might follow suit and establish high-level official exchanges with Taiwan.

"One of the options is to ban US officials that have visited Taiwan from visiting the Chinese mainland. Beijing can also downgrade official communications with specific US bodies that interact with Taiwan, for example, reducing or suspending interaction with the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs," Zhang said.

He also noted that Beijing can refuse to cooperate with Washington on certain UN resolutions to send a signal to the world Beijing's attitude on the Taiwan question.

As for Taiwan, analysts said the Chinese mainland may move to further isolate Taiwan by establishing ties with Taiwan's few "diplomatic" partners.

Unspoken redline

The Chinese foreign ministry on Wednesday denounced the Taiwan Travel Act.

Foreign ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying said China has lodged a stern representation to the US regarding US officials' visit to Taiwan. She said China urges the US to abide by the one-China policy and the three joint communiques, stop any form of official interaction with Taiwan to prevent any serious damage to Sino-US relations and cross-Straits peace and stability.

"There have been other visits by US officials to Taiwan in the past. Some were off the record and some took place when cross-Straits relations were better, and Beijing preferred not to embarrass the sitting leader. With Tsai in office, the mainland's patience with official exchanges between the US and Taiwan is particularly thin," Zhang said.

Relations across the Taiwan Straits sank to a new low after Tsai took office in 2016.

Tsai, chairwoman of pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party, refuses to acknowledge the 1992 Consensus, which emphasizes the one-China principle. Beijing considers the one-China principle the cornerstone of cross Straits relations.

Beijing views visits to Taiwan by a US president, vice president, secretary of state, defense minister and head of the National Security Agency as an unspoken redline, analysts said.

"If Washington allows Tsai to visit the US or allows the defense ministers from both sides to meet in person, current Sino-US relations would be disrupted and another Taiwan Straits crisis may be triggered," Xin Qiang, deputy director of the Center for US Studies at Fudan University, told the Global Times.

In 1995, in response to then Taiwan leader Lee Teng-hui's visit to the US, the mainland conducted exercises that included testing missiles in waters surrounding Taiwan and mobilizing forces in East China's Fujian Province, which is located directly across the straits from Taiwan island.QUIZ: Guess the Road Songs

We can't wait to get back on the road again! Play this quiz and see if how many you can get right!US President Donald Trump Photo: VCG

China has launched a multifaceted effort to prepare for what looks like an imminent trade war with the US, as the latter is reportedly set to announce a slew of measures targeting China by Friday.

Top Chinese officials have in recent days been engaging with other countries and global organizations in a bid to form a multilateral response to the imposition of US tariffs on steel and aluminum imports and the forthcoming measures against China, while also continuing talks with US officials in the hope of averting a confrontation.

Meanwhile, China is also threatening to retaliate if forced to do so.

"The Chinese side never wants to fight a trade war with anybody, but if we are forced to, we will not hide from it," Hua Chunying, spokesperson for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told a press briefing on Wednesday, adding that China would "definitely take firm and necessary countermeasures to defend its legal rights."

The US government is poised to announce a slew of trade measures against China, including tariffs on up to $60 billion worth of Chinese technology and telecom products by Friday, according to US media reports.

The US' earlier decision to slap tariffs of 25 percent on steel imports and 10 percent on aluminum will also take effect on Friday.

Global efforts

At an informal meeting of ministers from 50 WTO member countries in New Delhi, India this week, Chinese Vice Commerce Minister Wang Shouwen criticized the US trade measures and called on other countries to jointly defend the global multilateral trade system, according to a statement released Wednesday by China's Ministry of Commerce(MOFCOM).

"Trade restriction measures will not only hurt the global trade order but also cause serious damage to the multilateral trade system," Wang said, urging all countries to "support the global multilateral trade system and defend the authority and effectiveness of WTO rules," according to the statement.

Zhou Xiaochuan, the outgoing governor of the People's Bank of China, the central bank, this week led a delegation to the meeting of G20finance ministers and central bank governors in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where he stressed China's "continued support for multilateralism," according to a statement China's central bank released on Wednesday.

In a document released after the meeting, the financial chiefs of the world's 20 largest economies rejected protectionism and called for further dialogue on trade.

The efforts followed an earlier phone call on Saturday between Chinese President Xi Jinping and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, in which the two leaders agreed to jointly preserve the multilateral trade system.

Edward Alden, a senior fellow at the US-based Council on Foreign Relations, said that many countries apart from China would respond because they too have been targeted by the US.

"It's not just China. The EU is facing the same decision on steel. I think the EU, China and other countries will have to respond; they will have to do something," Alden told the Global Times in an interview on Wednesday in Beijing. But he cautioned against tit-for-tat retaliation.

Continued talks

Chinese officials have also been engaging with US officials in recent days, even though the trade measures appear to be unavoidable.

During the WTO meeting, Wang met with US officials on the sidelines, according to the MOFCOM statement, although the statement did not say what was discussed at the meeting.

In Buenos Aires, Zhou met with US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and the two discussed the China-US economic relationship, according to the US Department of the Treasury.

In a press conference on Tuesday, Chinese Premier Li Keqiang also suggested the two countries should resolve trade issues through negotiations.

"In trade, disputes are always resolved through consultation, negotiation and dialogue. I hope both sides will act rationally rather than emotionally to avoid a trade war," Li said.

A trade expert at a MOFCOM think tank in Beijing said that China is still focused on resolving disputes with the US through dialogue but is fully prepared to respond if necessary.

"There is still a lot of room for discussion," said the expert, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press, "but China is also prepared and able to defend its rights."

The expert declined to elaborate on what the response might be, but other Chinese experts have suggested that China might target US agricultural products, aircraft and aircraft parts.The UK rail industry should 'adopt a pragmatic approach to Brexit, given the uncertainty of the final destination', RSSB said on March 16. Rather than focusing on the details of any particular outcome, RSSB advises organisations to analyse their ability to meet six strategic challenges: mutual recognition of certifications; regulations ...Criminal case over cashing out of $120 million in Admiralteysky bank reaches court

 RIA Novosti

11:07 22/03/2018

MOSCOW, March 22 (RAPSI)  A criminal case against five residents of the Moscow region charged with unlawful bank activity in Admiralteysky bank estimated at 7 billion rubles (about $120 million) has reached the Khamovnichesky District Court of Moscow, the press-service of the Prosecutor Generals Office has stated.

According to investigators, the defendants acted as members of an organized criminal group from January 2012 till September 2015. Allegedly they used sham firms and Admiralteysky bank accounts to cash out 7 billion rubles and receive additional 250 million rubles ($4.3 million) as commission. Two of the defendants allegedly embezzled 150 million rubles ($2.6 million) by providing false data to the bank.

In January 2017, the Khamovnichesky District Court sentenced Musa Israilov to 3.5 years in prison for illegal banking activity and large-scale embezzlement from Admiralteysky bank. The court also collected 210 million rubles ($3.6 million) from Israilov on a civil claim.

According to investigators, the man conspired with the bank top managers to conduct illegal banking transactions. From July 2011 to September 2015, alleged accomplices cashed over 23 billion rubles ($403 million). The gang members drew illegal commission income amounting to 545 million rubles ($9.5 million).Probe opened into attack on Russian cultural center in Kiev

 RIA Novosti

12:40 22/03/2018

MOSCOW, March 22 (RAPSI)  Investigation has been opened into Ukrainian ultranationalists attack on the office of the Russian Center of Science and Culture in Kiev, Russias Investigative Committee reports Thursday.

According to investigators, on February 17, a group of Ukrainian right-wing extremists attacked the cultural centers office, broke an exhibit display, painted the walls with insulting anti-Russian slogans and burnt the Russian state flag. The next day, radicals pelted the Russian building with stones, broke windows inflicting a financial damage, the statement reads.

Following these incidents Russian investigators opened criminal cases over attack against individuals or institutions under international protection and desecration of the Russian flag. Several suspects have been already identified.Ukraines Rada committee approves arrest of Savchenko

 RIA Novosti, Ilya Pitalev

13:00 22/03/2018

MOSCOW, March 22 (RAPSI)  The Committee on Rules of Procedure and Organization of Work of the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine on Thursday gave its permit for deprivation of the parliamentary immunity and arrest of lawmaker Nadezhda Savchenko, the Prosecutor General of Ukraine Yury Lutsenko stated on Facebook.

According to the Prosecutor General, the Committee adopted conclusions stated in a submission filed against Savchenko, recognized them as legitimate and decided to transfer them forward to the Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada.

Last week, Lutsenko signed a recommendation for arrest and detention of Savchenko and submitted it to the Verkhovna Rada for approval. The Prosecutor General accused Savchenko of plotting a terror attack in the house of parliament. According to investigators, she personally planned, recruited people and gave them instructions to commit the terrorist act in the Verkhovna Rada premises with the use of combat grenades, Ukraines Prosecutor General stated.

Savchenko is suspected of involvement in organizing a coup in Ukraine allegedly plotted by Vladimir Ruban, the chief of the Officer Corps Centre for Prisoner Release NGO. He was arrested on March 8. He allegedly planned to commit several terrorist attacks in Kiev.

In March 2016, Ukrainian retired officer Nadezhda Savchenko was sentenced to 22 years in prison for involvement in the murder of two Russian journalists and illegal border crossing. A court in Donetsk, a town in southern Russia, has established that Savchenko was responsible for conducting concealed observation and directing mortar fire in an attack against a roadblock held by militias of the self-proclaimed Lugansk Peoples Republic and a group of civilians there, including three Russian journalists, near the village of Metallist, the Lugansk Region, on June 17, 2014. The attack killed Two Russian television journalists, Igor Kornelyuk and Anton Voloshin.

Later, Russian President Vladimir Putin pardoned Savchenko. In late May 2016, Russia and Ukraine proceeded with the exchange of convicts between the countries, allowing Savchenko to return to Ukraine.Nadezhda Savchenko arrested in Kiev - report

 RIA Novosti, Mikhail Voskresensky

15:47 22/03/2018

MOSCOW, March 22 (RAPSI)  Ukrainian lawmaker Nadezhda Savchenko was arrested in Kiev on Thursday, UNIAN agency reported.

At the moment, she is going to the building of the Security Service of Ukraine accompanied by an investigator, the statement reads.

Earlier on Thursday, Ukraines Verkhovna Rada stripped Savchenko of the parliamentary immunity and approved her arrest and detention.

Last week, Prosecutor General of Ukraine Yury Lutsenko signed a recommendation for arrest and detention of Savchenko and submitted it to the Verkhovna Rada for approval. The Prosecutor General accused Savchenko of plotting a terror attack in the house of parliament.

According to investigators, she personally planned, recruited people and gave them instructions to commit the terrorist act in the Verkhovna Rada premises with the use of combat grenades, Ukraines Prosecutor General stated.

Savchenko is suspected of involvement in organizing a coup in Ukraine allegedly plotted by Vladimir Ruban, the chief of the Officer Corps Centre for Prisoner Release NGO. He was arrested on March 8. He allegedly planned to commit several terrorist attacks in Kiev.

In March 2016, Ukrainian retired officer Nadezhda Savchenko was sentenced to 22 years in prison for involvement in the murder of two Russian journalists and illegal border crossing. A court in Donetsk, a town in southern Russia, has established that Savchenko was responsible for conducting concealed observation and directing mortar fire in an attack against a roadblock held by militias of the self-proclaimed Lugansk Peoples Republic and a group of civilians there, including three Russian journalists, near the village of Metallist, the Lugansk Region, on June 17, 2014. The attack killed Two Russian television journalists, Igor Kornelyuk and Anton Voloshin.

Later, Russian President Vladimir Putin pardoned Savchenko. In late May 2016, Russia and Ukraine proceeded with the exchange of convicts between the countries, allowing Savchenko to return to Ukraine.Property details:

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Nearby Lucas DriveChina Iron & Steel Association (CISA) said on Tuesday that it was satisfied with the decision by the U.S. International Trade Commission (USITC) to terminate an antitrust case.

The CISA statement came on March 19, after the USITC decided to terminate its investigation into imports of Chinese steel products for alleged violation of antitrust laws, also known as Section 337.

The USITC launched the probe after receiving complaints from U.S. Steel in 2016, which reported three unfair actsa conspiracy to fix prices and control output and export volumes, the misappropriation and use of U.S. Steel's trade secrets, and the false designation of origin or manufacturer.

The USITC said it found U.S. Steel had failed to plead or demonstrate antitrust injury.

The CISA said after receiving the complaints, it organized Chinese steel companies to actively respond to the complaints and achieved a victory against the three allegations after 20 months of efforts.

The U.S. has been continuously creating trade friction with China in the steel sector for many years and launched a new wave of protectionism recently, triggering more and more opposition in the international community, the CISA said.Property details:

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We're sorry, this article is not currently availableReality TV World is now available on the all-new Google News app and website. Click here to visit our Google News page, and then click FOLLOW to add us as a news source![File photo]

Chinese authorities on Wednesday warned that China will undoubtedly take necessary measures to safeguard its legitimate rights and interests, a tough response to the White House plan to announce a package of tariffs Thursday penalizing China for so-called intellectual property theft.

We want no trade war with anyone, but if our hands are forced, we will not quail nor recoil from it. Therefore, if the day did come when the U.S. took measures to hurt our interests, we will definitely take firm and necessary countermeasures to safeguard our legitimate interests, said Hua Chunying, spokesperson of Chinas Ministry of Foreign Affairs, on Wednesday.

Huas response comes following the White House decision to take action based on USTRs 301 investigations into Chinas market-distorting efforts to force, pressure and steal U.S. technologies and intellectual property. Raj Shah, U.S. principal deputy press secretary said in a statement that U.S. President Trump will announce the actions on Thursday.

According to Section 301, U.S. authorities are empowered to take actions against countries for violations of trade agreements or unfair practices.

Addressing the U.S. accusation of unfair trade and intellectual theft, the Chinese government has been reiterating its stance on avoiding a trade war. Chinese Premier Li Keqiang on March 20 said China does not want to see a trade war between the worlds two largest economies.

A trade war would not make our trade fairer. It would be foreign-funded companies, particularly U.S. firms, that would first bear the brunt, said Li while addressing a press conference audience following the conclusion of the annual session of Chinas national legislature.

The decision has also led to objections in America. According to Xinhua, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and other trade associations urged the U.S. government not to impose unilateral tariffs on Chinese goods, as it would hurt American consumers and U.S. economic growth.

"The current trade imbalance between China and the US is a result of many factors, and shall be addressed by opening markets wider to each other and making the pie of cooperation bigger, instead of by waging a trade war or forcing others to buy or sell," Hua noted.China aims to strengthen cooperation with international players and play a bigger role in anti-corruption efforts, according to the Annual Report on Chinas Rule of Law released in Beijing on Thursday.

file photo

In 2017, China embarked on its grand mission to combat international corruption and has played an active role in bilateral and multilateral anti-corruption exchanges and cooperation ever since, experts agreed at the Thursday seminar hosted by the Institute of Law of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and the Social Sciences Academic Press.

China promises to contribute to the international anti-corruption campaign by taking the initiative, Tian He, director of National Legal System Index Research Center under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and also the editor of the report, said at the seminar.

In the report by the ASEAN-China Joint Statement on Comprehensively Strengthening Effective Anti-Corruption Cooperation issued last November, as emphasized, consensus was carried out on extradition, mutual legal assistance, and recovery of corruption assets, encouraging financial intelligence agencies to share corruption-related issues from all parties.

Last September, the BRICS Leaders Xiamen Declaration also reaffirmed the commitment to intensify dialogue and experience sharing and support, compiling a compendium on fighting corruption among BRICS countries, including combating illicit money and financial flows, as well as ill-gotten wealth stashed in foreign jurisdictions.

As of February 2017, China has been in partnership with 70 nations and regions in a total of 135 legal assistance treaties, including asset return and extradition treaties. A total of 108 of them have come into force.

This is also in line with Chinas proposal to create a community of shared future for mankind, which is also an important measure for the global governance of China, Tian noted.

Meanwhile, China has achieved remarkable progress in its domestic anti-graft campaign. Since November 2012, more than 1.5 million corrupt officials have been punished and a total of 440 centrally-administrated senior officials have been investigated, according to the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection of the Communist Party of China.

China has also adopted the Supervision Law at this years #TwoSessions, which marked a highlight in the reform of the nations supervisory system to legalize a sophisticated and efficient anti-graft network.Besides the manufacturing industry, voices in favouring the need for protectionism have also been heard from local start-ups, which at times find it tough to compete with global players that entered India with deep pockets.

Illustration: Uttam Ghosh/Rediff.com

Seeds of a second Bombay Club, more than two decades after the first such club was active, are getting planted in the Indian industry.

American President Donald Trumps move to protect his domestic industry by raising import barriers has added fuel to India Inc's concerns on threats from unfair global competition.

Leading industrialists are openly voicing their concerns, especially on threats from China.

The first Bombay Club came into being after the economy was liberalised in 1991 and the floodgates were thrown open to multinationals.

Top Indian businessmen argued that these international companies were much ahead of them in production efficiencies, technology and financial prowess.

Import duties were being brought down sharply without a corresponding reform in domestic taxes.

In November 1993, eight industrialists - Lala Bharat Ram, Lalit Mohan Thapar, Hari Shankar Singhania, M V Arunachalam, B K Modi, C K Birla, Rahul Bajaj and Jamshyd Godrej - handed over a note to this effect to Manmohan Singh, the then finance minister and sought a level-playing field in the new era that had emerged.

Bajaj, currently chairman at Bajaj Auto, told Business Standard that the issue is not just with Trumps import tariffs but also with his stand on immigration.

In totality, what Trump is doing on import tariffs and immigration is wrong. Given the wide gap in per capita income of US and India should there be no difference, he asked.

He added that he will still demand for a level-playing field keeping in mind what is happening globally.

Bajaj Auto happens to be the largest exporter of two-wheeler from India.

Trump signed an order on March 8, imposing 25 per cent import duty on steel and 10 per cent on aluminium.

While India is not among the top exporters of these metals to US, the move is becoming a trigger among the industry to raise its concerns on how India should deal with threats from overseas players.

Their argument is that if an economy like the US is looking to protect the domestic industry and its investments, then it is more critical for India to make similar moves.

Anil Agarwal, chairman, Vedanta Resources said the Indian government should simplify the duty structure and remove the anomalies in metals like aluminium.

When a country like the US, which does not need protectionism, requires to be protected, then in India, which is just growing, you need to hand hold (industry) for some time, because our interest cost and input cost are different.

India currently has a $20 billion trade surplus with US.

Aluminum and steel together account for around three per cent of Indias exports to the nation.

So, it will not be impacted much, but CEOs fear China may divert the steel it exported to US to markets like India.

Sajjan Jindal, chairman and managing director of the countrys biggest steel maker JSW Steel, asked the Indian government to impose similar tariffs on steel made overseas to protect local manufacturers.

China has a surplus production of about 15 per cent which it is using to disrupt the steel industry world over by dumping cheap quality steel.

"What Trump has done is something our policy makers should also replicate. In fact, steel should be excluded from all free trade agreements (FTAs), Jindal said while seeking a Trump-like tariff on steel imports.

It is important for our policymakers to understand what countries like China, Korea and Japan are doing, Jindal added, saying that these companies were exporting about 50 per cent of their products overseas and never buy anything imported.

I am saying this not just for the steel industry but for all the sectors. We have to safeguard domestic manufacturers come what may.

"Trump like decisions are required irrespective of what the vote bank demands, Jindal said.

Voices in support of a stronger protection are not limited to the metals space which is under direct attack of Trump.

In an ideal world we would like to see open markets and free economies. But in the last several years level-playing fields have been disrupted fairly significantly by China where both costs and exchange rates are, to a good degree, matters of state policy.

"This has led to dumping by Chinese exporters and importing countries have resorted to tariffs to protect local industry.

"We have only sought tariff protection in genuine cases of dumping. Trade and technology wars are bound to see a rise in the coming years, if current trends are an indication, said Harsh Goenka, chairman at RPG Enterprises.

Chinese imports in sectors like automobile tyres and paper have been a worry for the industry.

Rising imports are having an adverse impact on Indias manufacturing and profitability, as witnessed in our group businesses like paper and tyres.

"But so far India has restrained itself from taking trade retaliation measures. However with US upping the ante, India may have to re-evaluate its stance, said Harsh Pati Singhania, director at JK Organisation.

Besides the manufacturing industry, voices in favouring the need for protectionism have also been heard from local start-ups, which at times find it tough to compete with global players that entered India with deep pockets.

Flipkarts Sachin Bansal and Olas Bhavish Aggarwal have, in the past, raised the banner of nationalism and urged the government to design policies that would favour homegrown companies.

ggarwal said that it was for the government to decide how it wanted to deal with capital dumping.

With inputs from Jyoti Mukul and Dev ChatterjeeThe bank also issued 234 LoUs worth Rs 1,880 crore to another group of companies promoted by Mehul Choksi in 2015 and 2016

Punjab National Bank (PNB) honoured all letters of undertaking (LoUs) claims of other banks between 2011 and 2016, it has informed the finance ministry, even as banks are trying to figure out payment for liabilities in the alleged Rs 12,900 crore scam.

No LoU issued up to 2016 is pending, PNB has said. It issued 1,063 LoUs worth Rs 17,400 crore to a group of companies belonging to jeweller Nirav Modi between 2011 and 2016.

The bank also issued 234 LoUs worth Rs 1,880 crore to another group of companies promoted by Mehul Choksi in 2015 and 2016.

In 2017, PNB issued 150 LoUs and 143 LoUs worth around Rs 13,000 crore to Niravs firms and Choksis firms, respectively.

The Delhi-based bank is yet to clear the dues of the foreign branches of Indian banks to which it had issued the LoUs last year.

These include State Bank of India, Allahabad Bank, Canara Bank, and Bank of India.

PNB has termed all these LoUs as fraudulent, as none of the transactions were recorded in the banks core banking system and were transmitted through SWIFT messages, an international communication system between banks, on a standalone basis.

As a result of this the transactions went undetected.

PNB has honoured its claims for all the LoU transactions between 2011 and 2016 that it has now termed as fraud.

"It should honour the claims for LoUs issued in 2017 as well, a senior banker said, requesting anonymity.

PNB has also classified as many as 53 LoUs worth Rs 11 billion as real or non-fraudulent, as these were reported in the banks core banking system.

Most of the LoUs issued by PNB, including the genuine ones, had a validity of 365 days.

Under the arrangement, the bank that holds the LoU (in this case, foreign branches of Indian banks) goes back to the issuer bank (PNB) and gets its due.

Photograph: PTI PhotoThe controversial idea grabs the spotlight again after the death of the last male northern white rhino.

Rhinos as a species have been in immense danger for decades. Just how real and urgent the problem is was driven home by the death of Sudan, the last-known male northern white rhino.

Apart from war and loss of habitat, the biggest danger to rhinos are the poachers who kill them for their horns. In defence against poaching, some countries in Africa with major rhino habitats have been experimenting with dehorning rhinos.

Though controversial, the idea is back in the spotlight after the failure of the attempts to breed more northern white rhinos and the imminent end of the subspecies, which now has only two surviving females.

As conservationists debate the idea, we look at how the process works.

A southern white rhino is readied for horn trimming at the ranch of rhino breeder John Hume in South Africa in October 2017.

Hume is the owner of around 1,500 white and black rhinos, which he keeps under armed guard on his 8,000 hectare property.

Photographs: Leon Neal/Getty Images.

A veterinarian Michelle Otto wears a syringe in her hair as she holds a tranquiliser dart on horn trimming day.

Hume is not the first to try the horn trimming approach. Small-scale attempts have been made for years and in 2014 the country of Namibia, home to the world's largest concentration of black rhinos, began official dehorning programs.

A man measures the horn of sedated and blindfolded rhino before it is trimmed.



A farm worker prepare the electric saw used to trim horns.

Water is sprayed onto the area as a rhino has it's horn trimmed.

A farm worker marks a trimmed rhino horn before it is weighed and measured.

Trimmed rhino horns are seen in the back of a pick-up truck after being weighed, measured and marked.

In this case, the trimmed horns were auctioned. The controversial decision to sell the horns was made on the basis that the illegal market creates an inflated value, while a controlled system would lower the prices and the need to poach.

Hume believes that the only way to ensure that the rhino does not become extinct is through farming the animals on a large scale and legalising the sale of rhino horn globally.



A rhino begins to recover from the effects of a tranquiliser dart after having it's horn trimmed.

According to the World Wildlife Fund, since rhino horns -- made of the same substance as hair and nails -- grow back and the procedure has to be repeated perhaps every four years. There is disagreement about whether the process, which also involves the risk of sedation, is safe and whether it affects reproductive success in the animals.

Armed guards patrol Hume's rhino ranch.

The results of various dehorning programmes over the years have been too mixed to prove conclusive, and the Save the Rhino conservation group maintains that it cannot stand alone. For it to have any chance at real success, it has to be bolstered by anti-poaching efforts.

Recommended for you: How the planet's last male northern white rhino lived & died'The issue is not UIDAI's surveillance powers, but the government's.'

'Aadhaar enables the government to access and link wide-ranging databases that hold a wealth of personal information.'

'Contrary to official claims, the Aadhaar Act offers virtually no protection against possible misuse of that information.'



Photograph: Reuters

After chasing Jean Dreze for two months, Rediff.com's Syed Firdaus Ashraf finally secured responses from the economist who played a central role in conceiving the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme and was also instrumental in the struggle for Right to Information and the National Food Security Act.

"Mass surveillance is unacceptable in a democratic society," says Dreze -- who has just published his latest book Sense and solidarity: Jholawala Economics for Everyone -- in an e-mail interview.

When one reads your book, one comes to perceive that three things unite India very well: Corruption, corruption and corruption. There is corruption at every level.

All governments want to do good for the people, but their efforts fail due to massive corruption.

There is corruption in MNREGA, banks, post offices, gram panchayats, block development offices and every other place.

Faced with such a scenario, how will India grow as a country?

This is an odd reading of the book. The book does talk about corruption in many different contexts, but it is also about the battle against corruption.

That is not a losing battle at all.

It is true that big-ticket corruption, including corporate scams, has probably grown in recent years. But I doubt that this is true of everyday corruption.

Corruption is a form of exploitation, and over time, people learn to defend themselves against it, with a little help from the spread of education, improved communication facilities, the Right to Information Act, and other means.

Dealing with big-ticket corruption is perhaps a harder battle, but there is no reason for it to be a lost cause either.

For instance, rich people could be required by law to disclose their wealth, not just their income.

That would make it much easier to go after the crooks, and to convict them when they are caught.

Similarly, high standards of financial transparency could be imposed on political parties. That, too, would help a lot, since electoral funding is a fountain of corruption.

All these measures, of course, require political courage, and that is where the real battle lies.

Don't you feel helpless when you see such a state of affairs, knowing that you cannot do anything to change it?

There are plenty of things to feel happy about in the world, and also plenty of things to be depressed about.

Whether you feel happy or depressed is largely a matter of temperament.

In terms of getting things done, it's probably best not to drift too far either way, if possible, and to stay focused.

What does help is hope, and I think that there are good reasons to be hopeful, without taking anything for granted.

All said and done, the world is a better place today, in many ways, than it was a hundred or even fifty years ago.

Looking to the future, it is reasonable to hope that life will continue to improve, without ignoring the fact that it could also end soon, through climate change or nuclear war or some other catastrophe.

Doesn't it prick the conscience of bureaucrats when they steal food meant for the poor from the public distribution system and sell it in the open market?

The main culprits are not bureaucrats, but private dealers who manage the ration shops. However, it is true that they often act in connivance with bureaucrats and political leaders.

I have no idea whether their conscience pricks, as you put it, but in any case, I don't see that as something we should count on to remove corruption, at least not in the short term.

In the long term, of course, we can try to alter personal attitudes and social norms.

Every profession has its work ethic, and if those exclude acts of corruption, nothing like it. However, we should not passively wait for the work ethic to change.

In the short term, much can be done to prevent corruption in other ways, for instance by putting in place transparency safeguards and grievance redressal facilities. That, for now, is the way to go.

Rural people tell you, 'Hamari baat koi nahi manega... hum log lathi chalane wale nahi hai (No one will listen to us... we aren't the sort that wield lathis)'.

Why do India's poor not revolt despite so much poverty? How do they tolerate the kind of injustice they face every day?

India has one of the most oppressive social systems in the world, revolting against it is very difficult for the victims.

They are conditioned to stay in their place, and they know that if they step out of line, the worst may happen.

The oppressors are experts at undermining their struggles. All you need to do is to identify the leaders and harass them, for instance by slapping false cases on them.

We have seen this at close range wherever MNREGA workers have tried to organise.

Another difficulty, unique to India, is the caste system, which divides the working class.

As (Dr B R) Ambedkar aptly said, the caste system is not a division of labour, it is a division of labourers.

In spite of all this, there have been revolts from time to time, not only violent ones like the Naxalbari movement, but also non-violent rebellions like the mass conversion of Dalits to Buddhism under (Dr) Ambedkar's leadership.

So, resistance is not impossible, but it is very difficult in India's circumstances.

You mention in your book that Aadhaar could become a tool of mass surveillance and that total surveillance is the dream of intelligence agencies.

Don't you feel Aaadhar is helpful at times like this when the Ahmedabad blast suspects were arrested in Gaya as they could not produce their Aadhar cards when asked to do so?

I would not deny that Aadhaar is 'helpful at times', as you put it. So is torture. But that does not make torture acceptable.

Similarly, mass surveillance is unacceptable in a democratic society.

To this, the Unique Identification Authority of India responds that the system is designed so that it does not give UIDAI access to personal information beyond what is collected at the time of enrolment.

This is extremely misleading. The issue is not UIDAI's surveillance powers, but the government's.

Those are enormously amplified by Aadhaar, because Aadhaar enables the government to access and link wide-ranging databases that hold a wealth of personal information.

Contrary to official claims, the Aadhaar Act offers virtually no protection against possible misuse of that information.

What, according to you, should be the definition of the Below Poverty Line in Indian cities and villages?

Do you feel the current lower limits of earning -- Rs 32 per day in cities and Rs 26 per day in villages -- are far off the mark as international standards, if I have it right, is $1.90 (Rs 123.89) per day?

I am not particular about the poverty line as long as it is just a statistical benchmark to make poverty comparisons, for instance to find out whether there is more poverty in Bihar than Punjab or today than 10 years ago.

Quite often, answers to these questions are much the same wherever you draw the line, within a reasonable range.

And if they are not, sensitivity analysis can tell us how the answers vary with the poverty line.

It is when the poverty line is used for targeting purposes that the choice matters a lot. Not so long ago, the central government insisted on most social programmes being targeted as Below Poverty Line (BPL) households.

That was a very problematic approach, partly because of the inherent flaws of this method, and partly because the official poverty line was very low, severely restricting the reach of these programmes.

In recent years, however, there has been a move away from BPL targeting, in favour of other approaches such as universal coverage, as with midday meals, and self-targeting, as with the employment guarantee act.

Ideally, the poverty line should not be used at all for targeting purposes.

When the Indian economy was liberalised in 1991, there was growth in Indian cities and a change of lifestyle in the Indian middle class.

Why was rural India left out of this boom?

Firstly, the common perception that India's growth rate shot up around 1991 is incorrect. In fact, economic growth increased in steps in the post-Independence period.

Roughly speaking, there were three phases of acceleration.

The growth rate increased from virtually zero to 3.5 per cent per year in the 1950s, from 3.5 per cent to 5 per cent in the 1980s, and from 5 per cent to 7.5 per cent in the 2000s.

This account is simplified, but it is certainly more accurate than the common myth that the Indian economy took off around 1991.

In fact, the growth rate was much the same in the 1990s as in the 1980s.

Of course, one can argue that the acceleration in the 2000s reflects the delayed impact of liberalisation, but that is quite speculative.

Coming to your question, I am not sure that the main contrast is between urban and rural. The working class in urban areas is not doing much better than its rural counterpart, in terms of improvements in living conditions.

In both cases, standards of living are being held up by the existence of a huge reserve army of low-productivity labour.

That, in turn, is partly due to abysmal levels of nutrition, health and education.

Aside from holding up productivity and wages, these failures also diminish the quality of life in their own right.

The privileged classes are not only better off in the first place, but also better placed to take advantage of the new opportunities offered by a liberalised and globalised economy.

This is not the whole story, but I think it is an important part of it.'The TDP walking out of the NDA is a victory for the YSRCP.'

'The YSRCP wanted it to happen so that it would help them in coming elections.'



IMAGE: Vice-President Muppavarapu Venkaiah Naidu with Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Nara Chandrababu Naidu. Photograph: Kind courtesy, N Chandrababu Naidu's Twitter page

The Telugu Desam Party first withdrew two ministers from the Narendra D Modi government, then TDP leader and Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Nara Chandrababu Naidu pulled out of the National Democratic Alliance in protest against the Centre not granting a special category status to the state.

The TDP went to the extent of moving a no-confidence motion against the Modi Sarkar, which been proposed by its rival in Andhra Pradesh, the Yuvajana Sramika Rythu Congress Party.

How does Bharatiya Janata Party politicians in Andhra Pradesh feel about the episode?

"The TDP is the natural ally of the BJP because it also has its origin as anti-Congress," retired professor turned politician Dr Kambhampati Hari Babu, left, one of the two BJP MPs from Andhra Pradesh, tells Rediff.com's Shobha Warrier.

Prime Minister Modi and Finance Minister Arun Jaitley spoke to Chandrababu Naidu. Still, the TDP left the NDA. What political compulsions made Naidu leave the NDA?

This is an election year and every party has a political strategy to face the election.

In Andhra Pradesh, the TDP wants to play the role of one-upmanship over the principal Opposition party, the Yuvajana Sramika Rythu Congress Party. That was why all this happened.

In my opinion, the TDP fell into the political trap laid by the YSRCP.

The YSRCP wanted to project the special category status as a major issue in the elections.

The TDP -- which had earlier agreed for a special package in lieu of a special category status -- thought that public sentiment might be in favour of special status.

Then, Naidu took a U-turn and said they (the TDP) were also for only special category status and not a special financial package. This change was only to play one-upmanship on the YSRCP.

To separate the TDP and the BJP, the YSRCP demanded that the ministers in the central government resign.

The TDP played into the hands of the YSRCP and asked its ministers to resign.

Then, the YSRCP demanded that the TDP should come out of the NDA and they did follow that too.

After that, the YSRCP proclaimed it would move a no-confidence motion. The TDP said it would also move a no-confidence motion.

You will see that the TDP was just following the footsteps of the YSRCP.

I would say the TDP walking out of the NDA is a victory for the YSRCP.

The YSRCP got what it wanted. The YSRCP wanted it to happen so that it would help them in the coming elections.

Are you not worried that the TDP has walked out? The state will face assembly elections in 2019.

We did not want the TDP to walk out.

The BJP has always treated the TDP as its trusted ally. The TDP is the natural ally of the BJP because it also has its origin as anti-Congress.

If you remember, (the late Telugu movie superstar and Chandrababu Naidu's father-in-law) N T Rama Rao started the TDP as an anti-Congress political party. The BJP is also anti-Congress.

We wanted the TDP to be with us, but they pulled out for their own political reasons.

The BJP has fulfilled many of the promises made to the state of Andhra Pradesh even though those commitments were to be fulfilled over a period of 10 years.

We have taken steps to fulfil many of them in just three-and-a-half years.

Yes, some issues are pending. There should not be any doubt or worry in anybody's minds about not completing the remaining issues. We will do them in the next one year.

What is your response to the complaint that the Centre has not released a single paisa for any of the centrally sponsored schemes worth Rs 16,477 crores?

Even though the Centre has not given the name 'special category status', the BJP had committed whatever financial help to the state which is equal to what the special category status gets.

Which is, a difference of 60% to 90% for centrally sponsored scheme funding. This has been calculated for the last three years and to the tune of Rs 9,300 crores.

There will be another Rs 6,000 plus crores in future too. It means the special financial status for the state of Andhra Pradesh is around Rs 16,000 crores.

Has the Centre not released any money yet?

The state government had requested that the Rs 16,000 crore assistance could be given to externally aided projects like the ones given by the World Bank, IMF, etc.

The state government wanted the central government to take care of the loans. That was the understanding.

After one-and-a-half years, the state government realised it was taking a lot of time for the external projects to happen.

On January 3, 2018, the state government requested the Government of India to consider extending help to domestic financial institutions like NABARD as the external projects did not materialise. This was agreed to by the finance minister.

Then the issue of FRBM (fiscal responsibility and business management) came up.

If the amount goes to the state, the FRBM for Andhra Pradesh will be affected.

That was when the central government suggested the state government form a special purpose vehicle so that the FRBM problem could be overcome.

Now, they have gone back from a special financial package to special category status.

The problem is, if the state accepts the amount, it means they were accepting the special package.

So, they are not coming forward to take the money. The ball is in the state government's court. They have to decide whether to take the money or not.

Anyway, the Government of India is ready to give the money.

Didn't the prime minister also promise special category status in 2014?

The special category status was demanded in 2014 because the division of the state of Andhra Pradesh was going to happen and the new state needed financial assistance.

The central government was to help fill the deficit as there would be more expenditure than revenue. That could be done only by declaring the state under special category status.

But the 14th Financial Commission appointed by the earlier government recommended that the devolution of taxes for the states be increased from 32% to 42%.

So, if you calculated the revenue deficit of the newly formed state of Andhra Pradesh from 2015-2016 for five years, it would come to Rs 22,000 crores.

The Government of India agreed to give the deficit to the state of Andhra Pradesh.

There was also a recommendation by the 14th Finance Commission that there should not be any distinction between special category states and general category states in allocating funds.

When there cannot be any difference between special category states and general states in the allocation of funds, what is the advantage of having special category status?

That is why we are saying some people are confused about demanding special category status.

For any new industry to set up in Andhra Pradesh, the Centre gives 15% additional allowance in additional to the 15% investment allowance.

People may say this was not enough. But claiming that nothing was given to the state of Andhra Pradesh is wrong.

You mean, the Centre did not go back on its promise?

Yes.

What about the sentiment of the people?

It is true that the sentiment of the people is for a special category status. But they should understand that the Government of India has given financial benefits to the state.

This has to be explained to the people. And we will explain to the people of Andhra Pradesh that the central government has given justice to the state.

I am sure ultimately the BJP will benefit from what we have done for the state.

For 58 years, Andhra Pradesh was one state and there was not a single institution of repute in this area.

But we have sanctioned 11 institutions in the last three-and-a-half years which this area did not get in 58 years.

The state of Andhra Pradesh has got funds in the last three-and-a-half years which no state government has got after Independence.

What was the relationship like between the TDP and the state BJP?

We had a very good relationship and we worked together for the state of Andhra Pradesh. I am happy that we brought a lot of projects for the state.

When the next assembly elections happen in 2019, will the BJP be friendless?

Our strategy now is to strengthen the BJP at the grass root level.

Whether we have friends or not, whether anybody is coming with us or not, our immediate goal is to strengthen the party.

Any political party will have ambition to grow by itself. Having such an ambition is not a sin. We will definitely put all our efforts to fulfil the ambition.

The other day actor-politician Pawan Kalyan said the South had been exploited and ignored by the Centre. What is your response?

Every political party has a strategy to rouse public opinion. Some people think raising the south India versus north India issue may help them. Let us see which issue will have an impact on people.

The DMK's M K Stalin also spoke of Dravida Nadu to unite all south Indian states. Do you think there is a north-south divide and the BJP is looked at as a north Indian party even now?

The BJP is a national party with a nationalist outlook. The BJP is not interested in rousing parochial sentiments.

The BJP is against the idea of raising north India, south India etc. We are for India.

You are a retired professor and have dealt with a lot of youngsters. Currently, the talking point in India is the rise in unemployment.

Will this be the biggest issue when the BJP faces the electorate in 2019 as Narendra Modi promised millions of jobs in 2014?

Some people think the only jobs are the ones in an office.

In my opinion, we are providing a lot of opportunities to young men and women to start their own ventures.

You take the Mudra loan scheme, for example. Today 10.6 crore people are benefitted by the Mudra loan scheme at the lowest rate of interest. Banks have released Rs 4.3 lakh crores through Mudra loans.

In this way, the government is creating opportunities for people to earn a living.

If you look at the employment figures given by even non-BJP ruled states, you will see that employment generation is happening.

You just take a look at the EPF (Employees Provident Fund) account numbers in 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017. The EPF accounts are only for those who are employed.

If the number of EPF accounts are increasing, what does it mean?

The other day (Congress President) Rahul Gandhi spoke of the rise in unemployment and farmers' problems in the last three-and-a-half years.

My question is: How much of these issues could the UPA solve in the 10 years they ruled the country?

Why couldn't they solve them in 10 years? And he is questioning Narendra Modi for not solving them in three-and-a-half years.The new CCTV tower in Beijing

Recently, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China issued a plan on deepening the reform of the Party and state institutions. The plan includes the creation of a new central radio and television network that will be known under the name Voice of China. It is the combination of China Central Television (including China Global Television Network), China National Radio, and China Radio International, and it will serve as an institution directly under the State Council.

Central Radio and Television Network has centralized the rich resources and influence of China Central Television, China National Radio, and China Radio International. It will give full play to their respective strengths and leverage their advantages, Central Kitchen, the media hub of Peoples Daily, commented.

The CCTV HQs

In a congratulatory message to launch of CGTN on Dec. 31, 2016, Chinese President Xi Jinping said, The world today is an open world, and today China is an open China. The relationship between China and the world is undergoing historic changes. China needs a better understanding of the world and the world needs a better understanding of China.

President Xi urged Chinas media networks to tell the China story well and spread Chinas voice, so that the world can see a multidimensional and colorful China. He said the new media outlet should present China as a builder of world peace, a contributor to global development, and an upholder of the international order, so as to work for the efforts to build a community of common destiny.

The Voice of China can help achieve this goal.

The timing couldnt be better. The formation of Voice of China comes at a time when Western countries, including the United States, are hyping up the China threat, highlighting the need for a super voice to drown out the anti-China propaganda and give people a clearer picture of China.

For example, Ted Yoho, Chairman of the Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific, recently conducted a hearing on Chinas foreign influence operations, where he singled out China as a threat to America. At the hearing, Shanthi Kalathil, Director of the International Forum for Democratic Studies at the National Endowment for Democracy, a U.S. organization that has promoted the sharp power concept plaguing Western discourse, echoed the concern, calling on the West to counter the threat posed by China.

The CNR tower

These days, such Cold War thinking is rampant in the West. On the same day of the hearing, U.S. senators Marco Rubio and Tom Cotton and U.S Congressman Joe Wilson, for example, introduced the Foreign Influence Transparency Act in an effort to undermine Confucius Institutes in America, claiming that the purpose of the institutes are to distort academic discourse on China rather than teach Chinese language and Chinese culture.

All of which is reason for China to want to ensure its voice is heard loud and clear around the world. China has much to add to the world conversation. Voice of China will give people a clearer picture of Chinese life, of Chinas unique development path, and of what Chinas rise means for the world, as well as broaden understanding and friendship between China and the world.

The CRI towerElection watchdog Association of Democratic Reforms also reported that Janata Dal-Uniteds Mahendra Prasad was the richest with assets worth Rs 4,078 crore.

Eighty-seven per cent of the candidates contesting the upcoming Rajya Sabha elections are crorepatis with Janata Dal-Uniteds Mahendra Prasad being the richest with assets worth Rs 4,078 crore, says a release by election watchdog Association of Democratic Reforms.

The other top candidates with the highest assets are actor-turned politician Jaya Bachchan of Samajwadi Party (over Rs 1,001 crore), B M Farooq of the Janata Dal-Secular (over Rs 766 crore), Abhishek Manu Singhvi of Congress (over 649 crore), C M Ramesh of Telugu Desam Party (over Rs 258 crore), the release said.

Jaya Bachchan, who is contesting from Uttar Pradesh, has a declared liability of over Rs 105.64 crore, while Singhvi has over Rs 98 crore liability, Farooq over Rs 97 crore and Ramesh over Rs 39 crore, it said.

Vemireddy Prabhakar Reddy, who is contesting from Andhra Pradesh, with total declared assets of over Rs 230 crore, has liabilities of over Rs 96 crore, the ADR said.

The election watchdog has analysed the self-sworn affidavits of 63 out of 64 candidates contesting for the Rajya Sabha elections to be held on March 23 for 58 seats in 16 states.

Top 5 candidates with high assets

Name Party State Total assets Mahendra Prasad JD-U Bihar Rs 4078 crore+ Jaya Bachchan SP UP Rs 1001 crore+ B M Farooq JD-S Karnataka Rs 766 crore+ Abhishek Manu Singhvi Congress West Bengal Rs 649 crore+ C M Ramesh TDP Andhra Pradesh Rs 258 crore+

One candidate -- Dhiraj Kumar Sahu of the Congress-- contesting from Jharkhand has not been analysed as his affidavit was badly scanned.

The average assets of 63 candidates analysed was Rs 122.13 crore, the release said, adding 55 candidates or 87 per cent were crorepatis.

Among the party-wise crorepati candidates, 26 out of 29 candidates from the Bharatiya Janata Party, 10 out of 11 candidates from Congress, 3 out of 4 candidates from Trinamool Congress, 3 candidates from Telangana Rashtra Samithi, two candidates from JD-U and a candidate from SP have declared assets worth more than Rs 1 crore, the release said.

There were 16 or 25 per cent candidates with criminal cases, while eight candidates had serious criminal cases against them such as kidnapping, attempt to murder and robbery.

The candidate with the lowest declared total assets is Achyutananda Samananta of the Biju Janata Dal who has assets worth Rs 4.96 lakh. Other candidates with low assets are Samir Oraon, V Muraleedharan , Sakaldeep of BJP ( over Rs 18 lakh, Rs 27 lakh and Rs 35 lakh, respectively) and Rajmani Patel of Congress (over Rs 34 lakh), the release said.

As many as 13 candidates have declared total annual income of more than Rs 1 crore in their Income Tax returns 2016-17 with Mahendra Prasad showing the self-income of over Rs 303 crore, Singhvi over Rs 130 crore and Farooq over Rs 10 crore.

Jaya Bachchan had declared Rs 13 lakh as her self-income, but her total income amounted to over Rs 78 crore if the income of spouse and dependent were included.

Rajeev Chandrasekhar of the BJP, who is contesting from Karnataka, had a self-income of over Rs 28 crore.

Seven (11 per cent) candidates have declared their educational qualification to be between 10th and 12th, while 55 (87 per cent) candidates have declared themselves as graduates or above, the release said.

None of the candidates have declared their age below 42 years with 38 (60 per cent) candidates under the age group of 42 to 60 years, while 25 (40 per cent) candidates declared their age between 61 to 80 years.

Five women candidates are contesting the election to the Upper House, the release added.British data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica is at the centre of a controversy in India, the United States and Britain after two newspapers reported on Sunday that the company harvested personal data about Facebook users beginning in 2014.



How does that matter, what does it entail and should you be worried?

All these answers and more, explained right here.

IMAGE: Following the data breach, Facebook, the social media giant, has suffered a loss of $50 billion in market value. Photograph: Dado Ruvic/Reuters

>> What is Cambridge Analytica?

Cambridge Analytica is an offshoot of SCL Group, a government and military contractor that says it works on everything from food security research to counter-narcotics to political campaigns. SCL was founded more than 25 years ago, according to its website.

Cambridge Analytica was created around 2013 initially with a focus on United States elections, with $15 million in backing from billionaire Republican donor Robert Mercer and a name chosen by future Trump White House adviser Steve Bannon, the New York Times reported.

>> What does this firm do?

Cambridge Analytica helps political campaigns reach potential voters online. The firm combines data from multiple sources, including online information and polling, to build profiles of voters.

The company then uses computer programs to predict voter behaviour, which then could be influenced through specialised advertisements aimed at the voters.

IMAGE: The nameplate of political consultancy, Cambridge Analytica, in central London, Britain.

Photograph: Henry Nicholls/Reuters

>> Whats the link between Facebook and Cambridge Analytica?

Facebook said in a statement late on Friday, March 16, that Cambridge Analytica received user data from Aleksandr Kogan, a lecturer at the University of Cambridge.

Kogan reportedly created an app called thisisyourdigitallife that offered personality predictions to users while calling itself a research tool for psychologists.

The app asked users to log in using their Facebook account. As part of the login process, it asked for access to users Facebook profiles, locations, what they liked on the service, and importantly, their friends data as well.

The problem, Facebook says, is that Kogan then sent this user data to Cambridge Analytica without user permission, something thats against the social networks rules.

Although Kogan gained access to this information in a legitimate way and through the proper channels that governed all developers on Facebook at that time, he did not subsequently abide by our rules, Paul Grewal, a vice president and general counsel at Facebook, said in a statement.

>> What is Facebook doing in response?

The company issued a statement saying that in 2015, when it learned that Dr Kogans research had been turned over to Cambridge Analytica, violating its terms of service, it removed Dr Kogans app from the site. It said it had demanded and received certification that the data had been destroyed.

On Thursday, Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of the social media giant, also broke his silence on the issue saying that he admitted they had mistakes and explained the steps they would be taking to protect their users data.

IMAGE: Alexander Nix, CEO of Cambridge Analytica, has been suspended following the revelations of the data breach. Photograph: Henry Nicholls/Reuters

>> Where does Trumps campaign fit in?

The Trump campaign hired Cambridge Analytica to run data operations during the 2016 election. Steve Bannon, who eventually became Trumps chief strategist, was also reportedly vice president of Cambridge Analyticas board.

The company helped the campaign identify voters to target with ads, and gave advice on how best to focus its approach, such as where to make campaign stops. It also helped with strategic communication, like what to say in speeches.

>> Does this mean Trump won the US elections ufairly?

This is a broader question: Does Cambridge help win elections? Or, put another way: How much of Cambridges rhetoric about psychographics is just hype?

IMAGE: A man wheels storage crates from the building that houses the offices of Cambridge Analytica in central London. Photograph: Henry Nicholls/Reuters

>> The Indian connection

The Bharatiya Janata Party and the Congress on Wednesday traded charges over a Facebook data scandal involving private firm Cambridge Analytica, with the ruling party accusing its rival of data theft to woo voters ahead of 2019 Lok Sabha polls, a claim the opposition party rejected.

The Congress also hit back alleging that the BJPs factory of fake news has produced one more fake product, and accused it of hiring the firms services in several elections, including in the 2014 Lok Sabha polls.

>> What happens next?

Facebook, already facing deep questions over the use of its platform by those seeking to spread Russian propaganda and fake news, is facing a renewed backlash after the news about Cambridge Analytica. Investors have not been pleased, with the company suffering a loss of $50 billion in market value.

US senators have also urged Facebook boss Mark Zuckerberg to testify before Congress about how the social media giant will protect its users.

Alexander Nix, CEO of Cambridge Analytica, was suspended. Cambridge Analytica said it would proceed to carry out a full and independent investigation following the reports.

>> Is there anything I, as a user, can do?

There isnt much. You mayve been swept up in this without even knowing it. You dont have to have downloaded Kogans app to have had your information accessed.

You should also check your privacy settings on Facebook.Mark Zuckerberg has said Facebook is enhancing its security features to ensure the integrity of upcoming key elections in countries like India on its platform, as the social media giant faced flak over a major data breach scandal by a British firm linked to Donald Trumps presidential campaign.

Zuckerberg, in an interview with The New York Times, referred to the artificial intelligence tools deployed by Facebook to detect fake accounts trying to manipulate news and influence the elections.

Such a tool was deployed for the first time in the French elections in 2017.

The new A.I. tools we built after the 2016 elections found, I think, more than 30,000 fake accounts that we believe were linked to Russian sources who were trying to do the same kind of tactics they did in the US in the 2016 election. We were able to disable them and prevent that from happening on a large scale in France, he said.

Last year in 2017 with the special election in Alabama, we deployed some new AI tools to identify fake accounts and false news, and we found a significant number of Macedonian accounts that were trying to spread false news, and were able to eliminate those, Zuckerberg said.

This is for the first time that Zuckerberg has publicly talked about Facebook being allegedly used for influencing polls.

I feel a lot better about the systems now. At the same time, I think Russia and other governments are going to get more sophisticated in what they do, too. So we need to make sure that we up our game, he said.

This is a massive focus for us to make sure were dialed in for not only the 2018 elections in the US, but the Indian elections, the Brazilian elections, and a number of other elections that are going on this year that are really important, Zuckerberg said.

Responding to a question, he said there is a lot of hard work that the Facebook needs to do to make it harder for countries like Russia to do election interference, to make it so that trolls and other folks cant spread fake news.

But we can get in front of this, and we have a responsibility to do this not only for the 2018 midterms in the US, which are going to be a huge deal this year, and thats just a huge focus of us. But theres a big election in India this year.

Theres a big election in Brazil. There are big elections around the world, and you can bet that we are really committed to doing everything that we need to, to make sure that the integrity of those elections on Facebook is secured, Zuckerberg said.

India on Wednesday warned Facebook of stringent action for any attempt to influence polls by allowing data theft and even threatened to summon Zuckerberg if needed.

The warning came as the Bharatiya Janata Party on Wednesday attacked Congress, questioning the partys relations with Cambridge Analytica, accused of harvesting personal data from 50 million Facebook users without their knowledge.

Congress, however, asserted that the services of the London-based company have never been hired by his party or its chief Rahul Gandhi.

Zuckerberg also told CNN that he is sure that someone is trying to meddle the 2018 mid term elections in the US.

Im sure someones trying, he said when asked about the possibility of meddling happening right now. Im sure that theres v2, version two, of whatever the Russian effort was in 2016, Im sure theyre working on that, he said.

And there are going to be some new tactics that we need to make sure that we observe and get in front of, he added.

Noting that Facebook officials have some sense of the different things that we need to get in front of, Zuckerberg said the company staffers are building technology and hiring human reviewers to stamp out propaganda and other attacks.

One of the big commitments that weve made this year is to double the number of people working on security at the company. Were going to have 20,000 people working on security and content review in this company by the end of this year, said the Facebook founder and CEO.

Responding to a question, Zuckerberg said he is not sure if Facebook should be regulated.

I actually am not sure we shouldnt be regulated. You know, I think in general, technology is an increasingly important trend in the world, and I actually think the question is more what is the right regulation rather than yes or no, should it be regulated? he asked.

Zuckerberg has apologised for a major breach of trust with Facebook users and vowed to take steps to protect user data. He admitted of making mistakes and said he was happy to answer questions about the scandal before US Congress.

He said Facebook has already taken important steps to prevent such a situation from happening again. He said the site would be reviewing thousands of apps in an intensive process.The social media giants CEO announced that it will change how it shares data with third-party apps.

IMAGE: Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted that the mistakes made by the social media site was his responsibility and that he was doing his best to protect his community.

Photograph: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday apologised for a "major breach of trust" with its users and vowed to take steps to protect their data, as the social media giant faced heat by a massive scandal over data siphoned by a data mining firm with ties to the 2016 Trump campaign.

Seeking to quell the global uproar over harvesting of data of 50 million Facebook users by Cambridge Analytica, a British firm linked to Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, Zuckerberg admitted making "mistakes."

"I started Facebook, and at the end of the day, I'm responsible for what happens on our platform. I'm serious about doing what it takes to protect our community," he said in his first public comments since the scandal broke out.

"We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can't then we don't deserve to serve you," Zuckerberg, 33, said in a Facebook post.

He promised to make it far harder for apps to "harvest" user information.

Later, he told CNN in an interview that he was "really sorry" that this happened.

"This was a major breach of trust and I'm really sorry that this happened," he said, adding that it was the company's responsibility now is to make sure this does not happen again.

CA's chief executive, Alexander Nix -- who was suspended on Tuesday -- was secretly recorded in a Channel 4 investigation saying the London-based company ran Donald Trump's digital campaign during the 2016 US election.

IMAGE: Zuckerberg outlines the changes he will introduce to ensure Facebook's data is safe. Photograph: Mark Zuckerberg/Facebook

Zuckerberg said Facebook would be reviewing thousands of apps in an "intensive process".

The data scandal erupted after a whistleblower revealed that Cambridge Analytica, a data firm with ties to Trump's presidential campaign, accessed personal data from 50 million Facebook users without their knowledge, and might have kept that data even after Facebook told the company to delete it.

Cambridge Analytica had created psychological profiles on 50 million Facebook users via a personality prediction app, created by a researcher named Aleksandr Kogan.

Zuckerberg acknowledged that there is more the company needs to do.

He said Facebook plans to alert everyone whose data was accessed by CA. But he added that he wishes the company had not waited so long to tell people what happened.

"That's definitely something that, looking back on this, I regret that we didn't do at the time," he said. "I think we got that wrong."

He said he has made other mistakes along the way.

"I started this when I was so young and inexperienced," Zuckerberg said. "I made technical errors and business errors. I hired the wrong people. I trusted the wrong people," he acknowledged.

He said the company will "investigate every app that has access to a large amount of information from before we locked down our platform, and if we detect any suspicious activity, we're going to do a full forensic audit."

"We're going to review thousands of apps," he said.

Facebook said it discovered last week that CA may not have deleted the data as it certified.

"We should not have trusted Cambridge Analytica's certification, and we are not going to make that mistake again," Zuckerberg said.

"This was a breach of trust between Kogan, Cambridge Analytica and Facebook," Zuckerberg wrote in the post. "But it was also a breach of trust between Facebook and the people who share their data with us and expect us to protect it."

IMAGE: UK authorities are currently seeking a warrant to search the premises of Cambridge Analytica after the company has been involved in a row over its use of Facebook data. Their CEO Alexander Nix has since been suspended. Photograph: Chris J Ratcliffe/Getty Images

In a damage control mode, Zuckerberg announced a slew of measures aimed to secure the platform further.

For this, the Facebook founder said, his company will take three steps to prevent the data misuse.

"We will investigate all apps that had access to large amounts of information before we changed our platform to dramatically reduce data access in 2014, and we will conduct a full audit of any app with suspicious activity," he said.

"We will ban any developer from our platform that does not agree to a thorough audit. And if we find developers that misused personally identifiable information, we will ban them and tell everyone affected by those apps," he added.

Zuckerberg said that the second step is to restrict developers' data access even further to prevent other kinds of abuse.

"We will reduce the data you give an app when you sign in -- to only your name, profile photo, and email address. We'll require developers to not only get approval but also sign a contract in order to ask anyone for access to their posts or other private data. And we'll have more changes to share in the next few days," Zuckerberg said.

He said next month Facebook will show everyone a tool at the top of their News Feed with the apps they have used and an easy way to revoke those apps' permissions to their data.

Over the past several days, Facebook has been facing an investigation by the Federal Trade Commission and calls for legislative testimonies in the US and Europe.

India's IT and Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad has warned social media companies such as Facebook of stringent actions if there was any attempt to influence the electoral process of the country.

Amidst a global outrage against Facebook, the Silicon Valley-based company, which currently has 2 billion monthly active users, has suffered a loss of USD 50 billion in market value.The Congress on Thursday gave a notice to move a privilege motion against External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj in the Rajya Sabha for "misleading" the House about the death of the 39 Indians, who were abducted from Iraq's Mosul town in 2014.

Congress MPs Ambika Soni, Pratap Bajwa and Shamsher Singh Dullo gave the notice for moving a motion against Swaraj in the Upper House after compiling documents and information on the issue.

In the notice given under Rule 188 of Rules of Procedure and Conduct of Business in the Rajya Sabha, they intended to move the motion on the issue of Breach of Parliamentary Privilege.

According to the motion, Swaraj, along with her colleague Minister of State for External Affairs Gen. V K Singh (retd), "deliberately misled" the families of the 39 Indians killed in Mosul, on the floor of Parliament and outside.

Between June 2014 and March 2018, the minister continued to state as a matter of fact that the individuals were not only alive but that the government was undertaking steps for their release, it read.

"On March 18, 2018, the minister confirmed on the floor of Parliament that the individuals in question had been slain, thereby demonstrating beyond all doubts that the government had lied to Parliament and nation on a consistent basis.

"This is a serious breach of Parliamentary privilege and stringent action must be taken against the members for their gross acts of negligence and dereliction of public duty," the motion read.

Soni, Bajwa and Dullo accused Swaraj of misleading the House for four years and dared her to make public the sources who formed the basis of her claims that the 39 Indians abducted by Islamic State were alive.

"Our sources have proved right and her confidential sources have proved wrong," Soni told reporters earlier.

She said they were definitely going to bring a privilege motion against the external affairs minister of India for misguiding Parliament and her insensitivity in "playing" with the lives of 39 Indian citizens.

"Whose fault is it, who tried to mislead and keep the issue in deep freeze for four years. It is of the external affairs minister. It is her responsibility," Soni alleged.

Accusing the central government of trying to suppress the Mosul tragedy, she said it did not talk about it despite several efforts to raise the issue.

"We have continuously tried to raise the issue, but Swaraj always said she cannot share the sources nor any document and always claimed that they are alive. The government's efforts to put a cover on the issue led to misconceptions among the families of the deceased," Soni said, adding, "We have come to know from Iraq that they died at least a year ago, but our government has been so insensitive."

Asserting that the government should have gradually prepared the families for their loss, the Congress general secretary brought up the issue of compensation and said, "This government is only of the few and the rest will suffer the same way as had happened to 39 Indians in Iraq," she said.

Her colleague Bajwa also accused the government for its "clumsy" handling of the issue and said those killed in Iraq were poor people involved in manual labour.

"Today, Harjit Masih's statement has proved right. I want to ask Sushma Swaraj that what are your sources. The entire country wants to know. Why did you play with the sentiments of these people," he said, referring to the lone survivor who had managed to flee the ISIS following his abduction along with the 39 other Indians, and had claimed that the others were killed.

The Rajya Sabha MP said if there is a sensitive policy matter then informed first if it is in session, but when someone dies or is martyred, the family of the deceased are informed first.

"What stopped her from dong this? Even her attitude of dealing with the situation two days ago was to score brownie points. There has been insensitive and clumsy handling of the issue," Bajwa said.

"We want to ask Modi ji and Sushma ji that you have not even announced any compensation to their families. We have demanded Rs 1 crore compensation and a government job to each of the families. The onus of giving job and Rs one crore is on the Centre," he said.

Whenever the government is in the dock, they try to sidetrack the issue. Parliament is not running as allies of the ruling BJP are in the well, Bajwa claimed.

Image: Family members of one of the 39 Indian workers feared killed in Iraq, grieve at their home on the outskirts of Amritsar. Photograph: PTI PhotoDistraught with the news of her husbands death in Mosul, Dipali Tikadar now harbours just one wish: a meeting with West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee to seek a government job.

Dipalis husband Samar Tikadar was kidnapped along with 38 other Indians in Iraq in 2014 by the Islamic State. External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj announced in Parliament on Tuesday that all 39 men were dead.

I will tell the CM when I meet her about my poor financial condition, and appeal for a government job. I think she will understand my situation, Tikadar, a mother of two, said.

Over the past four years, she had been toiling hard to make ends meet for her two children with a hope that her husbands return will change their life for better.

I thought after Samar returns, our days of hardship would be over. But now, I dont know what to expect from life, Dipali Tikadar said.

She is staring at an uncertain future with little means to provide for her children. Her son Sudip is making preparations for Class X board exams and daughter Sharmistha is a student of Class 4.

I want a government job so that I can arrange for the education of my children, the 35-year-old woman said.

The tin shed over her mud house in Nadia district, along the Indo-Bangladesh border, is also in need of immediate repair, but Tikadar says she has no money.

I get Rs 4,800 as an Integrated Child Development Service worker. It is not enough to run a family. Please arrange to take me to Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, she pleaded.

Samar Tikadar had left for Iraq in 2011, much like Khakon Tikadar -- both residents of Chapra Mahakhola area of Nadia district, close to India-Bangladesh border. Their families last heard from them early 2014 before the abduction by IS militants.

Minister of State for External Affairs VK Singh has said that it would take the government eight to 10 days to bring back the remains of the 39 workers.

Dipali Tikadar, however, is not keen on visiting Kolkata airport to receive her husbands remains.

Even if I get scope to go to the airport to receive the remains of my husband, I wont go. I am too depressed to handle the situation, she said, adding that the Nadia administration has collected blood samples from Samars siblings for a DNA test.

Image: Members of National Human Rights and Crime Control Organisation in Amritsar light candles to pay tribute to the 39 Indian workers who were killed in Iraq. Photograph: PTI PhotoLaunching a stinging attack against the government, Congress president Rahul Gandhi on Thursday said it invented a story on data theft by the Congress to divert attention from the death of 39 Indians in Iraq.

The Congress president also accused the government of baiting the media.

Problem: 39 Indians dead; Government on the mat, caught lying. Solution: Invent story on Congress and Data Theft. Result: Media networks bite bait; 39 Indians vanish from radar. Problem solved, he said on Twitter.

The Congress has been accusing the government of managing headlines to deflect the countrys focus from the multi-crore Punjab National Bank scam, the dilution of provisions of the SC/ST Atrocities Act and questions being raised by the families of those killed in Iraq.

Adding to the chorus of Congress criticism, the partys communications in-charge Randeep Surjewala said the government had lied to the families of the 39 Indians about their loved ones being alive even after evidence suggested they were killed years ago.

He also asked why the Modi government misled the country for four years on the killing of 39 Indians after their kidnapping in Mosul of Iraq.

Families ask questions - Why did Modi government and Sushmaji mislead them for four yrs? Why does the Government not reveal the date of death? What evidence did the EAM have of them being alive for all these years? Why is government not agreeable to compensating the families?

Another lie, another spin exposed as truth unravels on Mosul Tragedy. All 39 Indians had died years ago as the evidence and witnesses suggested and corroborated now by Martyrs Foundation. Yet Modi Government lied, duped and deceived the families and the Nation! Surjewala said.Protests continued for the 14th day, seeing proceedings in the Rajya Sabha and Lok Sabha being washed out.

The Rajya Sabha was on Thursday adjourned for the day following noisy protests by the Congress, Telugu Desam Party and the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam on various issues soon after the House passed the payment of gratuity bill.

Chairman M Venkaiah Naidu said he has been adjourning the proceedings as he does not want the people to see ugly scenes, an apparent reference to slogan shouting and display of placards by members of different parties in the Well.

The House has been disrupted over various issues like banking scam, Cauvery water issue and demand for special status to Andhra Pradesh, ever since it met on March 5 to carry forward the Budget Session.

As the House met on Thursday morning, the listed papers were laid on the table and brief statements were made by TDP member C Ramesh and AIADMK MP V Maitreyen, after which the House passed the Payment of Gratuity (Amendment) Bill with a voice vote.

However, the semblance of normality was short lived as slogan shouting members from the TDP and the AIADMK soon trooped into the Well. They were joined by some Congress members.

The Chairman tried to bring order in the House but failed. Minister of State for Parliamentary Affairs Vijay Goel also requested the protesting members to return to their seats saying the government was willing to discuss all issues.

Amid the din, Naidu said he was being asked why he was adjourning the House.

Ugly scenes are being seen by people. I dont want these ugly scenes to be seen by people, the Chairman said.

As protesting members did not yield to the Chairs request, Naidu adjourned the House for the day after just 17 minutes of proceedings.

Earlier, veteran Congress MP Motilal Vora, 89, was praised by the Chairman for being regular in attending the House and conducting himself in a dignified manner, amid thumping of desks by members from the treasury as well as the opposition.

Naidu said young members of the House should try to emulate Vora.

Earlier, Naidu started the proceedings by mentioning that March 22 is celebrated every year as World Water Day.

He expressed the hope that the entire House will join him in supporting the conservation of fresh water resources through natural methods to ensure availability of sufficient potable water for future generations. The members responded by thumping of desks.

Lok Sabha:

The proceedings of Lok Sabha became a casualty of noisy protests by the AIADMK and TRS members yet again on Thursday as the House was adjourned for the day

without transacting any business.

The two notices of no confidence motion against the council of ministers were not taken up for the fourth day as Speaker Sumitra Mahajan said she could not proceed forward unless the House was in order.

The Question Hour was washed out in the morning due to protests by AIADMK and TRS members over Cauvery and quota issues respectively. As soon as the House met again, the ministers laid the listed papers even as the protests resumed.

The AIADMK is pressing for immediate setting up of the Cauvery river management board. The TRS, whose members held placards saying One Nation One Law, is demanding that the states be given the right to determine the proportion of reservations.

While AIADMK and TRS members were seen in the Well holding placards and raising slogans, members from the Congress and Left were heard asking the Speaker to bring order so that the notices of no confidence motion could be taken up.

Parliamentary Affairs minister Ananth Kumar said the government was ready to answer on all issues, including banking scam and no confidence motion, provided they are taken up.

He, like in the past, urged the agitating members to return to their seats so that the Lok Sabha can function smoothly.

When Mahajan took up the notices of no trust vote, the protesting AIADMK members raised their pitch.

As several Congress, Left and Trinamool Congress members demanded that the Chair bring order in the House, Mahajan said she cant see anything from her seat (apparently due to placards being held by AIADMK and TRS members) and cant count the 50 members required to support the no trust move.

Photograph: PTI PhotoThe Yogi Adityanath government in Uttar Pradesh may withdraw riot cases if they are "politically motivated", the state's Law Minister Brijesh Pathak said on Thursday.

Pathak was replying to a specific question by a media-person on cases related to Muzaffarnagar and other riots in the state.

"Riot cases are also registered under the IPC. If these are politically motivated, we will surely consider their withdrawal," the minister said.

He, however, made it clear that only those cases were being withdrawn which smacked of political vendetta.

"Chief Minister Yogi Adidyanath has decided to withdraw those cases which were filed due to political reasons. We have initiated a process in this regard," he said.

Pathak said the state government had received applications from leaders of all the parties.

"The cases lodged because of political rivalry are being withdrawn by the state government," the minister said.

Over 62 lakh cases were pending before UP courts, he said.

The minister was, however, did not give a specific reply on a news report that the BJP government had initiated the process of withdrawal of 131 cases linked to the 2013 Muzaffarnagar and Shamli communal riots.

At least 62 persons died and a large number of people lost their homes in the riots that took place in September 2013.

Following the violence, a total of 503 cases were lodged against around 1,455 persons at police stations in Muzaffarnagar and Shamli by the then Samajwadi Party government.

Yogi withdrawing Muzaffarnagar riots cases on basis of religion: Congress

The Congress accused Yogi Adityanath of withdrawing cases of heinous crimes such as rioting in Muzaffarnagar on religious lines.

Congress communications in-charge Randeep Surjewala alleged that Adityanath was emulating the British by ruling through the policy of "divide and rule".

"Can cases be withdrawn because I am a Muslim, I am a Sikh, I am a Buddhist, I am a Jain, I am a Hindu, I am a Parsi? Can cases be withdrawn based on which religion do you belong to?" he asked.

"Can cases under heinous offences, can cases of promoting enmity on communal ground, can cases of denigrating each others' religion and consequent riots be withdrawn as political cases is an important question that CM needs to answer," he alleged.

BJP leaders met CM Adityanath on February 5, 2018 and demanded withdrawal of 179 of the 503 cases.

Surjewala said that if Adityanath wanted to review all the cases of riots based on truth, then why only 179 out of 503.

"Why are you selectively picking up only those which are being stated or represented by BJP workers and leaders?" he asked.

Surjewala asked if Adityanath was "scared" that after the Supreme Court ordered fast tracking all criminal cases against political leaders.

"Are they scared that if the cases are put in fast track court, then it will be adversarial for BJP leaders, MLAs and MPs and that is why a quick and hurried decision is being taken, although the CM has only moved and a final call is yet to be taken," he said.

The Congress leader urged Adityanath to learn from the defeat in the Gorakhpur Lok Sabha bypolls, saying he is no longer a BJP leader, but a defender and protector of the Constitution and the law.

"We want to remind him that he has taken oath of India's Constitution that he will protect and uphold the Constitution and the law. Will he do so, is a question that he must answer," he said.

"Divide and rule is the policy being followed by the BJP for they have emulated the British for far too long. Divide and rule and somehow come to power  divide on the basis of religion and retain or attain power, divide on the basis of caste and attain power and make everyone fight with each other," Surjewala said.

He claimed that in western Uttar Pradesh, there have been no riots since 1857 and even during the partition of the country.

There were no riots in this area as Hindus, Muslim, Sikhs, Buddhists and others all stood together in unison to remain in the Indian Union, he said.

They did not want to go with Pakistan, they did not subscribe to the theory of a religion-based country and they rejected it in toto, he said.

Surjewala said it was only in September 2013, that there were riots for the first time in this area after over 100 years in which 62 people died and 503 cases were registered.Union minister Vijay Goel on Thursday met opposition leaders, including Leader of the Congress in the Rajya Sabha Ghulam Nabi Azad, at their residence in an effort to break the logjam in Parliament, which has been paralysed for 14 days due to protests by various parties.

IMAGE: Union minister Vijay Goel meets Leader of Opposition in the Rajya Sabha, Ghulam Nabi Azad at his residence. All photographs: Kind courtesy @VijayGoelBJP

His meeting with Azad, V Maitreyan, All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam leader in the Upper House, and Telugu Desam Party leader Y S Chowdary came after he asserted at a press conference that the government is willing for a discussion on no-confidence motions against it as it has a strong majority in the Lok Sabha.

He said he will meet key opposition leaders, including from the Telangana Rashtra Samithi and the Trinamool Congress, to persuade them to call off their protest in Parliament.

Official sources said Goel had an hour-long meeting with Azad and will meet more leaders on Friday.

The second leg of the Budget Session has been a washout in both the Houses of Parliament since it started on March 5 as protests by various parties over a number of issues have stalled the proceedings, causing daily adjournments.

Wondering why opposition leaders were debating on television and not in the House, Goel noted that over Rs 2.5 lakh is spent per minute to run Parliament, and asked opposition parties to raise and debate the issues in the two Houses.

IMAGE: Goel also met his estranged ally, Telugu Desam Party's Y S Chowdary.

The second leg of the budget session is of 23 days and all 14 days so far have been wasted, Goel said.

"I have been meeting opposition leaders in Parliament and will now visit their homes to persuade them to call off their protests and start a discussion on their issues" in the two Houses, he said.

On issues like the Punjab National Bank scam, the government has more to tell the people than the opposition, he claimed and said the Modi government has been an honest dispensation which has worked against corruption.

"Parliament is meant for debate. It is sad that opposition leaders can debate outside and on TV channels but not in Parliament. It is also strange for some of them to keep protesting in the well of the two Houses and then say that it is the government's job to run them," he said.

Arjun Ram Meghwal, who is also a junior minister for parliamentary affairs, said it is difficult for the speaker to take up notices for no-confidence motions as long as members are present in the well as she is required to do a head-count of members supporting the notices.

IMAGE: Goel met AIADMK leader V Maitreyan and discussed ways to end the current logjam.

The Telugu Desam Party and the YSR Congress have given notices for no confidence motion against the government following the Centre's stand that it cannot provide special category status to Andhra Pradesh.

Several parties have been protesting in the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha over various of issues such as banking scam, Cauvery board, special status to Andhra Pradesh and quota hike, leading to daily adjournments.

A large number of bills, including on triple talaq, whistleblower protection and OBC Commission, are pending in Parliament. The Lok Sabha passed the crucial Finance Bill without any discussion. A couple of other bills have also been pushed in the two houses amid the din.

With opposition parties in the Rajya Sabha agreeing to the passage of a bill that allows enhanced gratuity benefits to workers, Labour Minister Santosh Kumar Gangwar expressed his thanks to them and said a similar atmosphere should prevail in Parliament for the rest of the session.At Baselworld 2018, Bvlgari presents a new breakthrough on the front of extreme slenderness. At just 3.95 mm thick, Octo Finissimo Tourbillon Automatic claims a new watch industry record for the fourth time. The new Automatic movement equipped with a Tourbillon follows the Octo Finissimo Tourbillon (2014), the Octo Finissimo Minute Repeater (2016) and Octo Finissimo Automatic (2017). This new landmark expresses Bvlgaris mastery of the watchmaking art  duly acknowledged at last years Grand Prix dHorlogerie de Geneve which rewarded both the Octo Finissimo Tourbillon Skeleton and the Octo Finissimo Automatic.

Octo Finissimo Tourbillon Automatic  Bulgari

In the case of this new Tourbillon Automatic model, the Maison had to find technical solutions in the overall construction in order to achieve this degree of slenderness combining exceptional expertise with respect for a certain aesthetic and a model that has achieved icon status. Working on the basis of the Finissimo Tourbillon movement launched in 2014, this new development  Calibre BVL 288  handles automatic winding via an innovative and attractive peripheral oscillating weight positioned on the back of the movement. It is made of white gold and aluminium, two metals whose contrasting density enables the circular weight to oscillate in a particularly regular manner. The movement also incorporates a flying tourbillon equipped with a ballbearing system contributing to the reduced thickness.

Front view of the Calibre BVL 288 Finissimo  Bulgari

Measuring just 1.95 mm thick and endowed with a 52-hour power reserve, Calibre BVL 288 Finissimo is housed in a sandblasted titanium case revealing the entirely openworked skeleton movement displaying all its internal organs. Octo Finissimo Tourbillon Automatic also indicates the hours, minutes and small seconds. An opening on the back of the watch, depicting the stylised motif adorning the entrance of the boutique on the Via Condotti in Rome, provides a chance to admire both the tourbillon and the oscillating weight in action.

Back view of the Calibre BVL 288 Finissimo  Bulgari

Its finely structured 42-mm case draws its strength and beauty from design. Ridges and angles create light effects and perspectives that are unique on the watchmaking scene. Octo Finissimo gives free rein to its modern character by proving it has its finger firmly on the pulse of the most contemporary Italian design trends. In both these respects, Octo can now be regarded as the watch that turns its back on re-editions or vintage themes, given its shape and its case that are firmly entrenched in the 21st century.

Octo Finissimo Tourbillon Automatic  Bulgari

The slimness of a watch is based on an ability to rethink, redesign and remodel volumes. It is a global approach relating to all elements of the watch, meaning the case and bracelet as well as each movement component. Bvlgari has chosen an ultra-contemporary material, titanium, to guarantee a combination of sturdiness and lightness.Will Parliament finally function?

The proceedings in Parliament were washed out for the 13th consecutive day on Wednesday as members of some parties like the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam and Telangana Rashtra Samithi continued with their noisy protests, with the Lok Sabha unable to take up the notices of no-confidence motion against the government for the fourth day.

Watch the live telecast from the Parliament.Much to his surprise, Peter finds Sanjeev indicating he should sit in the middle, next to Indrani.

This spot is normally occupied by Sanjeev, Indrani's former husband, who has probably found himself a willy-nilly barrier between the warring couple.

The Mukerjeas, clearly, had matters to discuss.

Savera R Someshwar reports from the Sheena Bora murder trial.

Illustration: Uttam Ghosh/Rediff.com

A police woman wipes her brow outside Courtroom 51 at the Mumbai civil and sessions court.

Summer has been knocking insistently at the city's doors, setting the temperature notch firmly at swelter at 2.40 in the afternoon.

"Chala, chala, aaropi na aath ghya (Quickly, bring the accused in)," says a policeman from the escort detail for the accused in the Sheena mora murder trial, waving to indicate the inside of the courtroom where Judge Jagdish Chandrasen Jagdale is waiting patiently.

Accused No 1 Indrani Mukerjea is, unlike her usual wont, in first. She files into the boxed area demarcated for the accused and takes her usual place at the far corner.

Accused No 2, Sanjeev Khanna, is in next, after a rare reminder from the men in uniform.

Everyone waits, eyes occasionally heading towards the door. But there is no sign of Accused No 4, Pratim aka Peter Mukerjea.

As the minutes tick by, the judge's frown galvanises the cops, whose main duty outside Courtroom 51 seems to be chasing the three recalcitrant accused -- getting them from the benches outside into the courtroom before the hearing begins and getting them from the courtroom into the police van for their journey back to jail after the hearing ends.

Peter is impatiently motioned in by the police and, much to his surprise, finds Sanjeev indicating he should sit in the middle, next to Indrani.

This spot is normally occupied by Sanjeev, Indrani's former husband, who has probably found himself a willy-nilly barrier between the warring couple.

The Mukerjeas, clearly, had matters to discuss.

But not for long. The three accused were called to the stand by the court clerk.

The judge had advice for the three accused. He did not want them talking to "strangers" and he wanted them to be careful when they spoke to family members and friends who came to visit them because "you never know how it will be recorded."

He suggested they "consult" with their lawyers before speaking to anyone they did not know and issued a gentle warning about "making statements about cases that were still pending before a court."

The only person who had some clue as to what happening was Indrani who had been captured on video answering questions posed by a reporter about the Karti Chidambaram case.

The interview, which may have been recorded without Indrani's knowledge, aired on a national television news channel, leading to notices being pasted in Hindi, Marathi and English outside Courtroom 51, banning any kind of photo or video shooting outside the courtroom.

While Indrani and Sanjeev replied with "Yes" and "Okay", Peter immediately wanted to clarify his stand.

With a little bow, he assured the judge, "I have not and will not make any statement to known or unknown people without talking to my lawyer."

Back in the dock for the accused, the discussion between Peter and Indrani continued.

Witness number 1, Police Inspector Ganesh Dalvi, whose cross-examination is the next step in this case -- he has been cross-examined for just one hearing -- is present in court.

But Sudeep Pasbola, who is heading Indrani's legal team, and is leading the cross is not.

"The witness is here; when will they conduct the cross?" asks Public Prosecutor Kavita Patil as she gestures towards the defence team who have occupied most of the chairs before the long legal table in front of the judge.

Gunjan Mangla, who is also part of Indrani's legal team, explains that Pasbola is in Varanasi on an urgent matter and requests an adjournment.

A similar request on March 12, when the case was last heard, saw the normally genial Judge Jagdale sternly remind the defence lawyers that the rights of the accused, who have been in prison for over two years, had to be considered as well.

While Indrani Mukerjea was arrested on August 25, 2015, Sanjeev Khanna was arrested the next day.

Peter Mukerjea was arrested on November 19, 2015.

The trial began in February 2017.

As of now, Witness No 2 and Accused No 3 turned Approver, the driver Shyamvar Pinturam Rai, who, according to the police, was arrested on August 21, 2015, on the charges of possessing an illegal weapon has been deposed and cross-examined in court.

CBI Public Prosecutor Bharat Badami has, on the very first day of this trial, refused to reveal his list of witnesses. He did not want his witnesses tampered with nor did he want their names to appear in the media.

The CBI has, meanwhile, submitted the much awaited Karbonn phone belonging to Rai to the court. Pasbola's team had submitted their application for the phone on February 20. It led to a minor verbal skirmish a few weeks ago when the CBI, who were due to submit the phone, said it could take some time.

"The phone was sent for analysis to the Forsenic Science Laboratory at Hyderabad since the FSL in Kalina (north west Mumbai) was not able to analyse it," CBI Officer K K Singh informs the court.

However, reports PTI, the data could not be analysed at Hyderabad too since the software and hardware tools available did not support the media used in the phone.

Mangla, meanwhile, is concerned that the phone might not be charged, which might preclude the defence lawyers rom examining it or showing it to a witness.

When she requests the court to have the phone charged, Badami jumps in with an objection. "Let them file and application. Who will be responsible if something goes wrong while the phone is being charged?"

While Mangla wants to file the application the next day, Judge Jagdale chivvies them against any delay with a warning, "You cannot use it to delay the cross-examination at the next hearing." <?p>

The judge wants the application filed immediately or, at the very latest, the next morning.

The CBI, reports PTI, later filed a petition requesting that the case be taken up for at least three consecutive days in a fortnight so that the trial can be expedited.

With the lawyers finally settling on a date, March 23, for the next hearing, another request is made to the judge. Niranjan Mundargi, the lawyer spearheading Sanjeev Khanna's defence, wants a few minutes to confer with his client.

"I won't need more than five minutes," Mundargi says.

Permission is granted for the conferring to happen in the courtroom and the three accused sit huddled with their lawyers, whispering, gesturing, tapping documents.

More than 10 minutes pass. Peter, clearly unhappy, makes his way to the witness box again.

His escort detail want him to wind up and exit the building so that they can make their way back to jail.

"He keeps interrupting," Peter complains to the judge, indicating the stony-faced constable standing outside the witness box. "I am not able to finish."

While the judge explains that the policeman is only doing his duty, Badami suggests brevity. Peter plaintively tells the judge, "I am speaking as fast as I can. I need some more time."

The judge tells the constable to allow Peter some more time.

A courtroom seemingly suddenly transforms into a classroom, but as Peter, Indrani and Sanjeev finally walk out, it underlines harsh facts that can be forgotten in the humdrum and drama inside a courtroom -- that a young woman's life had brutally ended and her mother and two step-fathers, accused of the crime, have spent over two years in jail, waiting for the law of the land to judge them innocent or guilty.At Baselworld 2016, the "Ode a la Semaine" collection, which paid homage to the craft of the Metiers dArt and illustrated the days of the week, was presented. At Baselworld 2018, Schwarz Etienne unveils this time the "Ode au Printemps" (Ode to Spring) collection. This first edition of Odes aux Saisons, explores the fascinating world of bees. These insects are celebrated in each of the three expertly-crafted and unique timepieces. The association is not purely accidental. Bees, closely associated to literature and philosophy, are represented in the coat of arms of La Chaux-de-Fonds, the Swiss city where Schwarz Etienne resides.

Tourbillon Petite Seconde Retrograde (PSR)

The first element of this collection is the Tourbillon Petite Seconde Retrograde (PSR). Since its launch at Baselworld 2017, this creation has been revisited and reinterpreted by its master creators, who have worked tirelessly to carve the environment of the insect it honours. The dial has been reconfigured to resemble a honeycomb, the micro-rotor dressed with a poppy crafted in fine strips of coral and it comes adorned, naturally, with a hand painted bee. Maintaining its pledge to provide only the finest stones on its timepieces, Schwarz Etienne integrates a tigers eye on the hour and seconds counter. A fine gemstone famed for its protective values, the tigers eye is revered for its soothing honey-brown tone which plays against the transparency of the hour discs and the Petite Seconde Retrograde.

Ode au Printemps - Tourbillon Petite Seconde Retrograde  Schwarz Etienne

Already recognised as a core item of Schwarz Etienne La Chaux-de-Fonds collection, the Tourbillon Petite Seconde Retrograde (PSR) comes with its own entirely in-house produced Irreversible TSE 122.00 movement with its micro-rotor at 9 oclock, tourbillon visible at 1 oclock and small second retrograde at 11 oclock. Its power reserve is 72 hours. A rose gold case, comprising a hive-inspired engraved background, and a hand-sewn brown alligator strap with red alligator stitching and lining complete this timepiece.

La Chaux-de-Fonds Flying Tourbillon

The Flying Tourbillon, with a dial decorated in rhodium-plated honeycomb, is the second timepiece of this alluring collection. Immediately visible is its distinctive mass wheel featuring a hand painted white gold cornflower. Subtly decorated in blue agate, the ratchet illuminates the turning hour.

Ode au Printemps - La Chaux-de Fonds Flying Tourbillon  Schwarz Etienne

In a similar manner to the aforementioned Tourbillon Petite Seconde Retrograde (PSR), the Flying Tourbillon also belongs to the La Chaux-de-Fonds collection and in this instance comes in white gold and equipped with the TSE 121.00 movement - micro-rotor at 9 oclock and power reserve of 72 hours. A matte blue alligator strap with grey stitching and a light grey matte alligator lining complete this charming variant.

Roswell

Enriching and completing the edition is the Roswell. In gaining its anthracite appearance, the cells have undergone black rhodium treatment. The daisy-shaped white gold mass wheel is entirely hand-chiselled. This meticulous work of cutting, engraving and miniature painting creates an environment for the bee to reveal its transparent trompe-loeil wings. The dial and ratchet have been decorated to create a honey-coloured kevlar texture in slight contrast to the rose gold case.

Ode au Printemps - Roswell  Schwarz Etienne

The Irreversible movement (ISE) of the Roswell model originates from the first automatic movement created, and fully manufactured, by Schwarz Etienne  the ASE. The latter has been inverted creating a new dimension in terms of design and allowing the collector to appreciate the complications on the dial side: the off-centre micro-rotor, the small second shifted to 11 oclock, the exhaust bridge and the balance at 1 oclock as well as an extended power reserve of more than 86 hours. A black alligator strap with yellow stitching and a saffron alligator lining comes to dress the work.

A tribute to bees

The engravers have carved their magic on the back of the two tourbillon pieces showcasing the cells of the hive on which the bees are foraging on, while on the back of the Roswell, a famous calling quote from Albert Einstein appears: If the bee disappeared off the face of the Earth, man would only have four years left to live. By honouring this vital insect through its new collection, Schwarz Etienne takes on Einsteins message interpreting it to the modern day to raise awareness about the current dangers posed by the threat of bee extinction. Keystone of many ecosystems, bees provide humankind with invaluable services.

 Schwarz Etienne

As part of its commitment to participating in projects close to its values, such as raising awareness about the importance of environmental life and to support its local region, Schwarz Etienne has agreed to donate a percentage of the price of each gift-box sold to a beekeeper based in La Chaux-de-Fonds. The owner of each collection will have the opportunity to follow the evolution of a hive assigned to Schwarz Etienne by receiving photos of their progress through the different seasons of the year. This commitment from Schwarz Etienne, in direct support of the cause represented by the threat of bee extinction, will last for five years. The collector will also receive a kilogramme jar of honey per year, produced by the bees of the Schwarz Etienne hive.

The Ode aux Printemps edition combines innovation and creativity, while emphasising the precision, careful attention to detail and industrious teamwork exhibited by bees. A working philosophy equally dear to Schwarz Etienne. The three timepieces are housed at the base of a mysterious and innovative presentation setting.An air raid on the village of Kafr Batikh in Syria's northwestern rebel-held Idlib province killed 20 people on Wednesday including 16 children, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said on Wednesday.

Some 15 of those killed in the strike, in the eastern part of Idlib province, were from one family said the Britain-based war monitor.

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Dallas, TX -- (ReleaseWire) -- 03/22/2018 --These days garages are not just built for cars. It can also be converted into space with a wide variety of different uses. This can create an extra room in the house, which is extremely useful. Moreover, a garage door lasts for years which makes it a long-term investment and it increases the property value. Therefore, the decision of choosing and installing a door is critical. Complete Overhead Door is committed to providing high-quality products installed by skilled professionals, guaranteed to bring satisfaction to their customers.



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About Complete Overhead Door

Complete Overhead Door is one of the well known garage door companies that offers repairs, installations and sales of commercial and residential garage doors in Flower Mound and Fort Worth.Related India says 39 workers abducted in Iraq in 2014 are confirmed dead

Egypt's Foreign Ministry offered in a statement on Thursday its deepest condolences to the government and people of India over the loss of 39 Indian citizens killed by Daesh in Iraq in 2014, whose remains were recently found southwest of Mosul.

Iraqi authorities have discovered a mass grave with the bodies of the 39 construction workers who were abducted when Daesh captured the northern city in 2014, officials said Tuesday.

In late 2017, Iraqi authorities defeated Daesh after months-long battles, expelling them from Mosul and surrounding areas.

The statement stressed Egypt's condemnation in the strongest terms of this "terrible crime" committed by the terrorist organization against the Indian citizens, and stressed that the Egyptian government and people stand with their counterparts in India in this hardship.

The statement said this heinous act adds to the record of crimes committed by the terrorist organization against defenseless civilians over the past years.

"This crime also affirms Egypt's vision on the importance of concerting international efforts to dry up this organization's sources of funding and to stop providing training and safe haven for its members," the statement added.

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Between 26 and 28 March 59 million registered voters are eligible to cast a ballot and help select Egypts next president. They can choose between two candidates  the incumbent Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi who is seeking a second four-year term, and Ghad Party head Moussa Mostafa Moussa

Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi

Abdel-Fattah Said Hussein Al-Sisi was born on 19 November 1954 in Cairo. He grew up in the Gammaliya district, near the Al-Azhar Mosque, in a quarter where Muslims, Jews and Christians resided.

He later recalled how, during his childhood, he heard church bells and watched Jews flock to the synagogue unhindered.

Al-Sisi enrolled in the Egyptian Military Academy. After graduating in 1977 he held various command positions in the Egyptian Armed Forces and served as Egypts military attache in the Saudi Arabian capital, Riyadh. In 1987 he attended the Egyptian Command and Staff College.

In 1992 Al-Sisi attended a training course at the UK Joint Services Command and Staff College at Watchfield in Oxfordshire. In 2006 he attended a course at the United States Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

He subsequently served as a mechanised infantry commander and then as director of military intelligence.

At 57 he was the youngest member of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) which ruled the country after Hosni Mubarak resigned in 2011.

Mohamed Morsi appointed Al-Sisi as minister of defence on 12 August 2012, replacing Mubaraks long serving minister Hussein Tantawi.

On 1 July 2013, after two days of nationwide demonstrations, Al-Sisi delivered a speech giving the government 48 hours to meet the demands of the people  early elections among them. Two days later Morsi was removed from power.

Dissolving the 2012 constitution, Al-Sisi, along with leading opposition and religious figures, proposed a new political roadmap which included the drafting of a new constitution and fresh parliamentary and presidential elections.

Morsi was replaced by interim president Adli Mansour who appointed a new cabinet.

The interim government cracked down on the Muslim Brotherhood and its Islamist supporters in the months that followed. In the course of the following year Al-Sisi was named deputy prime minister and promoted to the rank of field marshal.

On 26 March 2014, in response to calls from supporters to run for the presidency, Al-Sisi resigned his military commission and announced he would stand in the 2014 presidential election.

There was one other candidate, Hamdeen Sabahi, on the ballot paper. Turnout reached 47 per cent and Al-Sisi won 97 per cent of the votes. He was sworn into office on 8 June 2014.

During his first term he embarked on the economic reforms his predecessors had avoided for years. Subsidies were cut, new taxes introduced and the pound was floated. His term also saw massive spending on infrastructure and other mega projects

In a televised interview on Tuesday Al-Sisi reacted to a short film which included interviews with members of the public complaining about the economic and other difficulties they face in their day to day lives.

Talking to his host, director Sandra Nashaat Al-Sisi listed policy initiatives, including social housing projects, overhauling the supply of subsidized food through ration cards and combating hepatitis C, that have improved peoples lives.

He also said criticisms of the increased economic role being played by the army were unfounded, claiming it does not exceed 2 to 3 per cent of GDP.

The armys intervention in markets was marginal, he said, and undertaken only to stabilise the prices of necessary commodities or manage infrastructure projects to guarantee they are complete in the shortest possible time.

Following a series of Islamist-led attacks on military and police in Sinai and Coptic targets in Cairo and Alexandria Al-Sisi launched Comprehensive Operation Sinai 2018 to combat terrorists nationwide.

Moussa Mostafa Moussa

Moussa Mostafa Moussa was born on 13 July 1952 to a well-to-do family. His father was an active leader in the Wafd Party.

Moussa began his studies in Egypt but, acting on his fathers advice, completed his education in France.

He has a bachelor degree in architecture from France and a masters from Ecole Nationale Superieure Darchitecture de Versailles, Paris.

Moussa has long been interested in politics. A member of the youth wing of the New Wafd Party, he later joined the party proper.

In 2005 he joined the Ghad Party as vice chairman. When party head Ayman Nour was sentenced to five years in prison the Ghad split into two factions, one led by Moussa and the other by Gamila Ismail, Ayman Nours former wife.

Both used the partys name and symbols, provoking a legal dispute that was resolved in May 2011 in favour of the Moussa faction.

Moussa unsuccessfully ran for parliament in the 2010 election, standing in Giza.

He was a strong supporter of President Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi and in 2014 launched a campaign appealing for Al-Sisi to nominate himself as a presidential candidate.

In 2017 he set up a campaign to support Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi in the 2018 presidential poll. Until 20 January 2018, when he announced his intention to run for office himself, he was engaged in collecting endorsements for Al-Sisi.

Moussas decision to stand came after four presidential hopefuls  lawyer Khaled Ali, former MP Mohamed Anwar Al-Sadat, former prime minister Ahmed Shafik and Zamalek Club head Mortada Mansour  withdrew from the race.

Two other possible candidates  former military chief of staff Sami Anan and Colonel Ahmed Konsowa  were arrested after announcing their intention to stand.

Moussa collected the endorsements of 20 elected parliament members. (Under Article 142 of the constitution presidential candidates must secure the recommendation of at least 20 elected MPs or 25,000 eligible voters drawn from a minimum of 15 governorates, with at least 1,000 recommendations per governorate.)

Moussa submitted his candidate papers 15 minutes before the deadline closed.

*This story was first published in Al-Ahram Weekly

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Egypt's Administrative Court on Tuesday issued an order banning taxi-hailing services Uber and Careem from operating in the country, with lawyer representing taxi drivers saying the government may take up to a month to implement the decision.

The case against the two companies was filed in February 2017 by a group of traditional taxi drivers, who accused the services of violating the traffic law by using privately-owned vehicles for commercial purposes. The case was filed against the two operators as well as the government.

Judicial sources had told Ahram Online on Tuesday that the court decision would immediately go into effect and that companies must cease their services pending a final ruling.

The verdict can still be appealed before Egypt's Higher Administrative Court.

Abdellatif Waked, Uber Egypts general manager, said in comments emailed to Ahram Online on Tuesday that the San Francisco-based company intends to appeal the court decision.

We respect the rulings of the Egyptian judiciary, and cannot comment in detail on ongoing legal proceedings. However, we will appeal this decision, and continue to be available in Egypt," he said.

"It is important to clarify that todays verdict does not mean suspending the operations of Uber in Egypt," Waked added.

Hours earlier, the Dubai-based Careem said in a brief statement on Facebook that it has not officially been notified about the ban, and that its operations in the country are continuing as normal.

Khaled El-Gamal, a lawyer representing the taxi drivers, said on Wednesday that the government may take around a month to put the court decision into effect.

"The court must issue an official document on the ruling, signed by judges, to be presented to the government, to move accordingly to suspend the companies' operation and ban their apps, which might take around four weeks," he said.

The ride-hailing smartphone applications had sparked several protests from cab drivers in Cairo over their use of private vehicles to transport commuters, which they say violates traffic regulations.

Taxi drivers have been angered because they are losing clients to both services, as many people are opting to use the two apps to commute in the capital and other cities.

Uber, first launched in San Francisco seven years ago, began operating in Egypt in November 2014. The service is now operating in more than 80 countries.

Its rival Careem operates across 13 countries and more than 90 cities in the Middle East and Asia. It also launched in Egypt in 2014.

Uber Egypt's General Manager Waked said on Tuesday that his company has provided "more than 150,000 economic opportunities in Egypt in 2017 alone," and has over the past two years been working with the Egyptian government to set up a "ridesharing framework."

"We will do all we can to ensure millions of Egyptians can continue to enjoy the benefits of on-demand transportation," he said.

Last year, Egypt's cabinet approved a transportation bill allowing and regulating the operations of the two ride-hailing companies. The law has been passed on to Egypt's State Council for a final legal review.

In late 2017, Uber announced it would make investments of $20 million over the next five years in its support centre in Cairo, saying Egypt is one of its fastest-growing markets.

Uber had 2 million users and employed 60,000 drivers in Egypt in 2016, the company's Middle East and Africa chief Pierre-Dimitri Gore-Coty told Reuters in October.

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A Place for All Conservatives to Speak Their Mind.Giza Criminal Court on Wednesday acquitted Egyptian TV presenter Reham Saeed and three others on charges of inciting child abduction and human trafficking, while handing various jail sentences to four others in the case.

Saeed and some members of her crew were accused of hiring kidnappers to abduct two children with the aim of filming an episode on the subject of child abduction for Saeed's TV programme Sabaya El-Kheir on Nahar TV.

However, the court sentenced a member of the show's production team to a one-year suspended sentence over involvement in the abduction scheme.

Three defendants were convicted of child kidnapping, with two sentenced to 15 years in jail and fined EGP 200,000 each, and the third sentenced to five years in jail.

The sentences can still be appealed.

The prosecution had accused Saeed and the other defendants of inciting to abduct two children, human trafficking and broadcasting false news during an episode of her show which aired in January.

On Wednesday, Saeed, who had been in detention pending trial for over a month, pleaded not guilty, telling the court she had no involvement in arranging the kidnapping.

In the trial, her lawyer presented correspondence and phone call recordings suggesting his client had neither been informed about the incident nor incited it.

She has not yet been released at of time of publishing, according to a judicial source.

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An Egyptian parliamentary delegation flew to London on Thursday to hold a series of meetings with British officials after the death of a Egyptian teenager in Nottingham earlier this month in the UK.

Eighteen-year-old Mariam Moustafa was left in a coma after being attacked by a group of six girls in Nottingham on 20 February; she was subsequently released from hospital, but died three weeks later.

The Egyptian lawmakers will hold talks with Simon McDonald, permanent under secretary and head of the Diplomatic Service at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, MP Christopher Leslie, and investigating officer Det. Supt. Rob Griffin of Nottinghamshire police, who is in charge of the investigations, to "learn about the circumstances and facts about [Mariam's] death, Egyptian state news agency MENA said.

The delegation is headed by the chair of the parliamentary human rights committee Alaa Abed.

The case has sparked alarm in Egypt, with Egyptian authorities calling on British officials to provide more information about the police investigation.

On Wednesday, Mariams uncle Amr El-Hariry called for "transparency" in the investigations, while complaining about what he described as the lack of information about the incident and the probe.

"We have no single [piece of] information from any side," El-Hariry said in a video statement he sent to Ahram Online on Wednesday.

"We have so many questions; the entire family is devastated," he said.

"We need to know what is going onwhat happened to our girl, we need to know what is happening in the investigations [and] when can we expect results," he said in English.

According to British police, Mariam was "punched several times" by a group of girls while waiting for a bus outside the Victoria Centre in Parliament Street in the centre of Nottingham.

She had got on a bus but was followed "by the same group of women who were threatening and abusive towards her before they got off," police said in a statement.

Three weeks after the attack, she died at Nottingham City Hospital.

Chief Superintendent Rob Griffin of Nottinghamshire Police said earlier this week that investigations have revealed the incident was not racially motivated and that six girls involved in the attack have been identified.

The teenagers uncle said Wednesday her family had been threatened by the same gang of girls three days after the February assault.

"They [the family] have been threatened that next time they are going to do it with a knife," he said in the statement.

The family filed an official complaint with the police but do not know if an investigation has been opened, El-Hariry said.

A video the Egyptian engineering student recorded of herself in October pleading for help regarding a heart condition has gone viral in Egypt in recent days.

In the video, she complains that a local hospital, ambulance and police have failed to do anything about a heart condition she had been suffering from, saying she was scared and did not feel safe.

The UK embassy in Cairo said in a statement late last week that Nottinghamshire police "are committed to bringing those responsible to justice through a meticulous enquiry."

Our thoughts are with her family and friends. We share the desire to know the full facts as soon as possible, the embassy said, while explaining that authorities cannot publicly comment on an ongoing investigation or the details of the case, because this could prejudice court proceedings and make it more difficult to secure justice for Mariam.

The statement added that authorities cannot comment on Mariams medical history and treatment in lieu of the UK's privacy laws.

"What we must and will do is make sure this disgusting crime does not go unpunished," the statement added.

Mariam held both British and Italian citizenship, and prosecutors in Rome have opened their own investigation into her death. Italian prosecutors have asked the UK authorities to share details of their police investigation.

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Egypt's Minister of Interior Magdy Abdel-Ghaffar on Thursday met with a number of ministry officials and high-ranking police officers to review the nationwide security plan for the upcoming presidential elections, which are scheduled from Monday to Wednesday, 26-28 March.

The meeting was held at the ministry's information and crisis management center in Cairo.

Abdel-Ghaffar warned that security apparatus will deal firmly and decisively with any attempts to disrupt the elections or target vital state institutions with attacks.

President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi and Moussa Mostafa Moussa, the head of Ghad Party are the two candidates in the elections.

According to the National Elections Authority, 59 million Egyptians out of a population of 104 million are eligible to vote.

Egyptians abroad voted in consulates worldwide 16-18.

During the meeting, the minister received a comprehensive explanation of the security plan, which was drafted in full coordination with the armed forces to ensure the safety of citizens during the three-day election process.

Abdel-Ghaffar followed up via video conference with other security directorates on security plans for main electoral sites and vital facilities during the elections.

He also reviewed plans for the protection of polling stations and procedures to secure main roads leading to polling stations across the country.

The electoral silence period is set for 24 and 25 March.

In the case of no run-offs, the winner of the elections will be announced on 2 April, 2018.

In the last presidential elections in 2014, El-Sisi won in a landslide after he secured 96 percent of the vote over his sole competitor, leftist politician and leader of the Egyptian Popular Current, Hamdeen Sabahi.

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Qatar has designated the Daesh-Sinai group a terrorist organisation.

The Qartari National Committee to Combat Terrorism also designated seven other groups active in Yemen and Qatar as terrorist organisations.

The list is the first published by the committee following a decree issued by the country's Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani in July 2017.

The list includes 19 people: 11 Qataris, two Saudis, four Egyptians and two Jordanians.

The Egyptian individuals on the list are Ahmed Samir El-Habib El-Teneger, Dahi Mohamed Mostafa Senger, Ahmed Eid Salem El-Hegawi and Hassan Saad Shetewi.

The Daesh affiliate in North Sinai, formerly known as Ansar Beit Al-Maqdis, has claimed responsibility for dozens of deadly terrorist attacks against security forces and civilians in the governorate, killing hundreds.

The Egyptian military has said it has killed hundreds of the groups members in military operations in recent years.

Earlier, the military launched a major operation earlier this year to target "terrorist and criminal elements and organisations" in northern and central Sinai, as well as parts of the Nile Delta and the Western Desert.

Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the UAE severed diplomatic and transport links with Doha on 5 June 2017, accusing Doha of supporting terrorism and meddling in their internal affairs, sparking the region's worst diplomatic dispute in years. Doha has denied the accusations levelled against it.

In recent months, several diplomatic efforts have taken place to resolve the lingering diplomatic row and support mediation efforts mainly by Kuwait and the US.

The four states have repeatedly said they are ready for dialogue to ease the dispute if Doha shows a willingness to deal with their demands and stop its "hostile" policies in the region.

Egypt accuses the Gulf Arab state of supporting "terrorist" organisations, including the Muslim Brotherhood, which is designated in Egypt a terrorist organisation.

Earlier this month, Egypt's Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry reiterated to Timothy Lenderking, the US deputy assistant secretary of state for Gulf affairs, and General Anthony Zinni, a retired former head of U.S. Central Command that Qatar should abide by the 13 demands listed by the four countries, including shutting down the Al-Jazeera television channel and downgrading relations with Iran.

Shoukry said Qatar has yet to "prove goodwill" despite regional and international efforts to end the dispute.

He expressed the concerns of Egypt and other boycotting states over Qatar's "continued negative role in sponsoring terrorism and extremism" by providing financial aid and refuge to militants.

The diplomatic rift is the worst dispute in decades between Arab states.

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(Rapaport) - Lipari Mining predicts sales from its Brauna diamond mine in Brazil will rise 11% to $50.6 million this year, as it expects a rise in the recovery of large stones at the operation.

The company achieved an average price of $201 per carat last year, but sees that jumping to $220 per carat in 2018, as it is commissioning a large-diamond recovery circuit this month.

We expect to see an increase in the value of production through the addition of this circuit, the company said in a presentation. Approximately 4% of the mines production is special-size diamonds, with the largest found so far weighing 180 carats, it added.

Production at Brauna began in July 2016, with 230,941 carats recovered in its first full year of operation in 2017. Lipari expects output to rise 1% to 234,000 carats in 2018, as it is working to minimize the high breakage of diamonds that has so far weighed on the operation.

The mine has a pit-life prediction of seven years, though this could be extended as Lipari is assessing the possibility of transitioning to an underground-mining operation, it said.

Sociedade Mineira da Catoca said Angolas diamond marketing policy, which lacks transparency in the buying and selling of rough stones, has caused the company to lose about $450 million in revenue over the last six years, a local newspaper has reported.

A local news agency had attributed the loss to the countrys economic challenges.

Company deputy director-general, Antonio Galiano was quoted by Folha 8 as saying that it was necessary to urgently improve the diamond sales policy in Angola.

Angola appointed a commission last December to revitalise the marketing policy for rough diamonds to ensure greater transparency in the process of buying and selling diamonds in the country.

Meanwhile, Galiano said the loss in revenue had affected the companys exploration and discovery of new diamond fields.

He said the "preferred buyers" involved in the selling of rough diamonds should be closely monitored, since the majority of them do not contribute to the countrys economic development.

Catoca produces more than 80 percent of Angolas total output in volume terms.

It was expected to produce 7 million carats this year from 7.4 million carats registered in 2017.

Mathew Nyaungwa, Editor in Chief of the African Bureau, Rough&PolishedPhilip Kamrass/ Office of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo

Amtrak will rename its Rochester Intermodal Station the "Louise M. Slaughter Intermodal Station in Rochester," U.S. Sens. Charles E. Schumer (D-NY) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) announced this week.

U.S. Rep. Louise M. Slaughter (D-NY-25) announced the grand opening of the Rochester train station on Oct. 5, 2017, after years of work to secure more than $15 million in federal funding for the station.

Rep. Slaughter died on March 16, 2018, after 47 years of public service on behalf of Rochester and Western New York residents. Sens. Schumer and Gillibrand said Amtrak will work with the city of Rochester and state of New York on the details of the naming, commemorative plaque and funding for these efforts.

Last week, the two senators sent a letter to Amtrak stating that renaming the train station would be fitting for a person who overcame bureaucratic hurdles and secured the federal funding needed for a train station that would bolster Rochesters economy and enable residents travel throughout the region more safely and reliably.

Sen. Schumer said one of Rep. Slaughters most significant accomplishments was delivering the federal funding that made the Rochester Train Station a reality.

Louise fought for years fighting to secure over $15 million in federal funding, so it was only logical and necessary for Amtrak to rename the train station after Louise, a legend in her own right and a fierce advocate for her constituents, Sen. Schumer said.

Sen. Gillibrand said Rep. Slaughter was one of the most effective members of Congress she had ever worked with, and bringing this station to Rochester was one of her proudest accomplishments.

Now, whenever anyone rides the train across New York, Louise Slaughter and Rochester will be inseparable. Thats a fitting, meaningful tribute to one of the great public servants of our time, and I was very proud to support the effort to change this stations name, Sen. Gillibrand said.U.S. National Security Agency has been tracking Bitcoin transactions as early as 2013, online news outlet The Intercept reported, citing classified documents made available by whistle-blower Edward Snowden.

Citing an internal NSA report dating to March 2013, The Intercept reported that the watchdog had at least one source which helped it "harvest and analyze raw, global internet traffic while also exploiting an unnamed software program that purported to offer anonymity to users."

While it was interested in tracking other competing cryptocurrencies, "Bitcoin is #1 priority," the NSA said in a March 15, 2013 internal report.

The NSA's Bitcoin tracking was through a secret Internet surveillance program code-named OAKSTAR, which is the Intercept report described as a "collection of covert corporate partnerships enabling the agency to monitor communications, including by harvesting internet data as it traveled along fiber optic cables that under-gird the internet."

Bitcoin transactions were targeted through a sub-program of OAKSTAR called MONKEYROCKET, which tapped network equipment to gather data from the Middle East, Europe, South America, and Asia.

An NSA internal report dated March 8, 2013 said the agency's analysts "found value in the MONKEYROCKET access to help track down senders and receivers of Bitcoins."

The agency hoped to "use the access for their mission of looking at organized crime and cyber targets that utilize online e-currency services to move and launder money."

Another NSA report dated March 29, 2013 said "MONKEYROCKET is offering a sole source for SIGDEV for the Bitcoin targets". SIGDEV is the acronym for signals intelligence development.

Further, the classified documents also described MONKEYROCKET as "non-Western Internet anonymization service in support of counter-terrorism" with a "significant user base" in Iran and China that came online in July 2012.

MONKEYROCKET program is governed by the Executive Order 12333, which extends powers and responsibilities of U.S. intelligence agencies while investigating U.S. citizens.

The mysterious program was apparently promoted on the Internet disguised as a popular website or service with advertising focused in areas of interest to counter-terrorism.

An NSA entry in July 2012, said there were approximately 16,000 registered users and the site was generating about 2,000 events per day. The number of users was expected to grow significantly.

The website also had a "browsing product", which could have been a virtual private network, to attract targets engaged in terrorism, including Al Qaida.



In effect, this software was used as privacy bait and switch drawing bitcoin users looking for anonymity online. But, the tool send user data directly to the NSA, the Intercept report said. Thus, the NSA harvested significant amount of Bitcoin user data.

Data harvested were "full-take", meaning they were used entirely, and included billing information and internet protocol addresses of targets.

The agency was also tracking Liberty Reserve, a predecessor of Bitcoin, but with criminal ambitions. The Costa Rica headquartered website was charged with running a $6-billion "laundering scheme" and its Ukrainian founder was awarded a 20-year conviction, The Intercept reported, citing March 2013 NSA reports. The website was apparently NSA's number two target after Bitcoin.

While there is no mention of the NSA program's link to the 2013 crackdown on the notorious Silk Road, a darknet marketplace, the founder Ross Ulbricht was arrested roughly after six months after the Bitcoin surveillance began, the Intercept report said. He had alleged that authorities found out about his transactions illegally.



The news of NSA's Bitcoin tracking is likely to raise privacy concerns in the cryptocurrency community.

For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com

Forex NewsCarnival Corporation & plc (CCL, CUK, CCL.L) said it now expects full year 2018 adjusted earnings per share to be in the range of $4.20 to $4.40 compared to December guidance of $4.00 to $4.30 and 2017 adjusted earnings per share of $3.82. Analysts polled by Thomson Reuters expected the company to report earnings of $4.31 per share for fiscal year 2018. Analysts' estimates typically exclude special items.

The company expects full year 2018 net revenue yields in constant currency to be up approximately 2.5 percent compared to the prior year, in line with December guidance. The company expects full year net cruise costs excluding fuel per ALBD in constant currency compared to the prior year to be up approximately 1.0 percent, also in line with December guidance. Changes in fuel prices (including realized fuel derivatives) and currency exchange rates are expected to increase earnings by 0.10 per share compared to December guidance.

At this time, cumulative advanced bookings for the remainder of 2018 are in line with the prior year at higher prices. Since January, booking volumes for all future periods have been running ahead of prior year at higher prices.

Carnival Corporation & plc President and Chief Executive Officer Arnold Donald said, "We remain on track to achieve double-digit return on invested capital while continuing to return cash to shareholders through ongoing share repurchases and dividend growth."

The company expects adjusted earnings per share for the second quarter 2018 to be in the range of $0.56 to $0.60 versus 2017 adjusted earnings per share of $0.52. Analysts expect earnings of $0.53 per share for the second-quarter.

Second quarter constant currency net revenue yields are expected to be up about 2.5 to 3.5 percent compared to the prior year. Net cruise costs excluding fuel per ALBD in constant currency for the second quarter of 2018 are expected to increase by approximately 4.0 to 5.0 percent compared to the prior year.

For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com

Business NewsIntroduction

Fresh water is a key resource for human health, prosperity and security. It is essential for poverty eradication, gender equality, food security and the preservation of ecosystems. Yet water resources are under increasingly severe pressure from global drivers such as population growth, climate variability and global change. Although constituting a finite resource, water is being stretched to serve more and more people and usages.

The International Organization for Migration recognizes climate change and migration as the most pressing policy issues of our time. Indeed, the international community recognizes the interrelation between increased climatic variability and water resources availability, which negatively impacts food security and social stability, and triggers or intensifies migration patterns throughout the world. In this context, it is vital for the global community to build sound scientific knowledge in order to support countries to better manage their water resources and respond to water-related challenges. The overall aim is to achieve water security by implementing Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6.

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has been working towards this end for more than 40 years through its Division of Water Sciences, and, more precisely, the Member States of the International Hydrological Programme (IHP), the only intergovernmental programme of the United Nations system devoted to water research, and water resources management, education and capacity-building. Originally an internationally coordinated hydrological research programme, it now constitutes an encompassing, holistic approach to facilitate education, and enhance water resources management and governance. The UNESCO Division of Water Sciences provides a platform to bring together the scientific research community and policymakers, benefiting from the extended network of the UNESCO Water Family, which comprises IHP, the World Water Assessment Programme (WWAP), and UNESCO water-related Centres and Chairs.

The aim of UNESCO to create knowledge societies is based on the premise that universal access to information and knowledge is key to building peace, promoting sustainable economic development and providing culturally sensitive and gender-responsive approaches to water-related challenges.

Part 1: Responding to the needs of Member States

Water education at all levels needs to be improved if the global water challenges are to be met. Water education can start early in school, in order to forge a societal mindset that recognizes the importance of this vital resource. At the local level, education strategies have the ability to promote community-wide water conservation, as well as enhance skills in local co-management of water resources. The involvement of youth can trickle down towards other members of the community. Objectives also comprise enhancing tertiary water education capacities, particularly in developing countries. However, water education extends beyond the teaching of hydrological sciences. UNESCO also reaches out to media professionals to develop accurate and effective communication on water issues. Collaboration between different educational areas is key to developing tools, guidelines, briefing papers, professional development programmes and case studies connected with water education.

Water education also includes the need to advance scientific knowledge through the training of scientists. Continuous professional development of stakeholders, for example through the UNESCO category 2 Institute for Water Education (IHE Delft), the Netherlands, increases the knowledge on water resources and water-related issues, and ensures the implementation of projects and policies that embrace scientific concepts of sustainable water management.

In this endeavour, cooperation between international organizations, professionals and researchers play a crucial role in sustainably developing and building water-related scientific knowledge. Indeed, such networks allow bridging the knowledge gap by facilitating the transfer, exchange and sharing of expertise between institutions, academia, civil society, local communities, researchers and policymakers. These cooperative processes also encourage North-South and South-South cooperation. Networks such as the UNESCO Water Family, composed of 48 academic Water Chairs and 36 Water Centres and institutes, address water security and other water-related challenges by developing new knowledge, innovative technologies, collaborative interdisciplinary scientific research, networking, training and capacity development. In areas lacking expertise, Chairs and Centres have evolved into poles of excellence and innovation contributing to building strong regional assets.

Part 2: Importance of universal access to information

Access to safe, clean and affordable drinking water and sanitation is recognized as a human right, but the means and the governance differ between countries and continents. Knowledge and information have a significant impact on the management of water resources and thus on peoples lives. Universal access to information is a fundamental condition for building peaceful, democratic and inclusive knowledge societies, which is at the heart of the UNESCO mandate. In the framework of the achievement of SDG 6 at the global scale, there is an absolute need to improve access to data and encourage dissemination of knowledge. Promoting openness in content, technology and processes through awareness-raising, policy formulation and capacity-building is trusted as a tool to broaden access to knowledge. It provides water stakeholders, researchers, students and educators from around the world with unprecedented access to water-related knowledge, information and technologies.

The lack of accurate water-related information, adequate indicators and capacities to analyse and monitor data represents a major development challenge for countries. Indeed, without the ability to process, analyse and transform raw data into information and knowledge in a form that can be understood and used by decision makers, access to data will not make a difference, even if it is available in large amounts. Therefore, providing open-access tools, such as the IHP Water Information Network System (WINS) or the Ocean Data Portal that both offer geospatial data, allows the sharing of clear and straightforward information and creates a sound basis for decision-making. For instance, in 2008, BGR and UNESCO-IHP published the first world map of the then 273 shared transboundary aquifers, which was updated in 2015 when it comprised 592 shared aquifers. This information is available on IHP-WINS.

The need for reliable information to successfully deal with complexity in managing water resources has led to the development and promotion of a number of tools and methodologies. They combine various types of data that harness information and communications technology (ICT) and provide modelling to address water security challenges. The UNESCO Division of Water Sciences promotes the use of these technologies in activities that range from the deployment of hydroclimate monitoring systems in Latin America and Africa, to building Member States capacity for flood warnings and management in South Asia, and development of climate risk management in urban areas, among others.

Combining openness and ICTs, the free and open source software (FOSS) model provides interesting tools and processes to create, exchange, share and exploit software and knowledge efficiently for water resources management. FOSS has the potential to play an important role as a practical instrument for development, since its free and open characteristics make it a natural component for reducing the gap between industrialized countries and those with emerging economies.

Water management-related knowledge is not limited to scientific-based information. In rural and indigenous communities, local knowledge informs decision-making and provides a foundation for locally appropriate water resources management. While previously perceived simply as resource users, indigenous people are now recognized as essential partners in water management. In that sense, the UNESCO Local and Indigenous Knowledge Systems (LINKS) programme offers an interdisciplinary initiative to secure an active and equitable role for local communities in resource management, overcoming the barriers created by differences between scientific and indigenous worldviews.

The dissemination of knowledge and the exchange of best practices are important aspects in enabling communication between scientists, local practitioners and policymakers. A good example is the United Nations World Water Development Report (WWDR), which aims to provide decision makers with the tools to implement sustainable use of water and offers best practices, as well as in-depth theoretical analyses, to help stimulate ideas and actions for better stewardship in the water sector. The development of the WWDR, coordinated by UNESCO WWAP, is a joint effort of the United Nations agencies and entities that are Members of UN-Water working in partnership with governments, international organizations, non-governmental organizations and other stakeholders.

Part 3: Increasing knowledge through the 2030 Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals

Building scientific knowledge related to water resources depends also on the ability of the global water community to identify interlinkages, cooperate and work towards common goals. This is even more important, considering that universal access to water and its sound management are critical to achieving several objectives and targets of the SDGs. As a result, this knowledge can trickle down to the implementation of the larger 2030 Agenda.

The United Nations World Water Development Report 2016 highlighted that three out of four of the jobs worldwide are water-dependent and that water shortages and lack of access may limit economic growth in the years to come. Therefore, the sustainable management of water resources and the provision of water-related services can positively influence employment growth and decent jobs. In short, addressing youth unemployment, the mismatch of skills and the gender gap in the water sector can contribute to achieving water security at the global scale. One major way to address these challenges is by strengthening water education and capacity development at all levels. This objective integrates economic, social and environmental aspects and recognizes deep interlinkages between water (SDG 6), education (SDG 4) and employment (SDG 8) in achieving sustainable development for all.

The 2030 Agenda provides a foundation for building scientific knowledge in some water-related domains. For instance, while good knowledge of surface water exists, the first phase of the monitoring of SDG Indicator 6.5.2 on transboundary water cooperation, for which UNESCO is a co-custodian, is likely to highlight the water security challenges that countries are facing due to gaps in groundwater-related knowledge. The lack of formal, operational cooperation over shared groundwater resources partially stems from still limited scientific and technical knowledge regarding the location, extent, and other physical characteristics of transboundary aquifers. In that sense, the 2030 Agenda presents a critical opportunity for UNESCO-IHP and United Nations bodies to continue building the scientific basis for groundwater management, at national, regional, global and transboundary levels.

In order to increase countries awareness about global progress on SDG 6 and to enable them to develop a road map towards a more sustainable development, a UNESCO WWAP-led task force of UN-Water was designated to produce the SDG 6 Synthesis Report on Water and Sanitation 2018 This report aims to provide an overview of the status of the implementation of SDG 6 at the global and regional levels. In this process, science, technology and innovation are expected to improve the general knowledge base about water resources.

Moreover, it is crucial to develop joint initiatives that gather the international community and provide a vehicle to communicate on water resources and related challenges and needs. This is the goal of the International Decade for Action, Water for Sustainable Development, 2018-2028, which will bring together water-dedicated partners to work towards developing cooperation and raising awareness about sustainable management of water resources.

Conclusion

It is only through scientific research and cooperation that we will be able to fill the knowledge gaps that hinder us from pursuing sustainable solutions for water security. In this context, it is vital for UNESCO to continue building sound scientific knowledge in order to assist countries to better manage their water resources. In this endeavour, UNESCO works to create inclusive knowledge societies and empower local communities by increasing access to information, and preserving and sharing data for better water resources management. To ensure that investments in knowledge-building are fully utilized, the Organization fosters a knowledge-sharing culture by providing the appropriate primarily physical, but also virtual, fora and supporting networks and communities.

UNESCO cooperation networks are an important driver for creating and sustainably building such knowledge. Promoting openness in content, technology and processes can broaden access to knowledge and achieve universal access to information, and subsequently, to water.

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Thursday, the U.S. Government is likely to impose heavy tariffs on imports from China, saying that it has strong evidence of its Chinese counterpart violating its commitments on intellectual property and transfers.

"Tomorrow the president will announce the actions he has decided to take based on USTR's 301 investigations into China's state-led, market-distorting efforts to force, pressure and steal US technologies and intellectual property," White House Principal Deputy Press Secretary Raj Shah said Wednesday.

The White House said it was forced to take action after years of talks about the issue that failed to produce change.

China responded by saying that it was ready to retaliate with "necessary measures."

The development is expected to hurt US-China relations.



The US has a massive trade deficit with China, which is its most important trading partner.

The U.S. media recently reported that the Government was preparing to impose annual tariffs amounting to $60 billion on goods imported from China.

Major American companies in the retail sector wrote a letter to President Donald Trump requesting him to reconsider the decision, which they say could hurt American interests.

They warned that a broadly applied tariff remedy on imports from China could hurt American households with higher prices and exacerbate a U.S. tariff system that is already stacked against working families.

The letter points out that the U.S. levies the highest tariffs on basic consumer goods, which force families shopping in American stores pay higher prices.

The United States already levies import taxes as much as 32 percent on basic clothes and 67 percent on shoes.

For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com

Political NewsSturgill Simpson has been named a Kentucky Colonel, the highest title of honor someone can receive from the state's governor.

Simpson was honored by both the Kentucky House of Representatives and Kentucky Senate in Frankfort earlier this week. In the House, Rep. James Kay called Simpson "a proud Kentuckian" and "a man of the people."

Rep. Kay called his second album, Metamodern Sounds in Country Music, "one of the best albums of all time ... pure Kentucky and ... pure Sturgill Simpson."

"Sturgill is his own man. Independent. Proud. Very proud to be from our great Commonwealth," Kay added. "He's been compared to many of the legends of country music, and he's never missed an opportunity to make sure the music industry knows that [the music] belongs to the people."

For comments and feedback contact: editorial@rttnews.com

Entertainment News(Agencia CMA Latam) - Peru's Prosecutor's Office asked the country's justice system to ban Pedro Pablo Kuczynski from leaving the country, according to the local press.

Kuczynski, who stepped down from Peru's presidency on Wednesday, is under investigation for his links with the Brazilian construction company Odebrecht.

Kuczynski announced his resignation after the release of videos suggesting that an ally was trying to buying votes to avoid his ousting by the Congress.

Also, according to the local press, the prosecution wants to investigate Kuczynski for alleged traffic of influence and money laundering in the Odebrecht case.

by Agencia CMA Latam

For comments and feedback: editorial@rttnews.com

Economic News

What parts of the world are seeing the best (and worst) economic performances lately? Click here to check out our Econ Scorecard and find out! See up-to-the-moment rankings for the best and worst performers in GDP, unemployment rate, inflation and much more.Syrian rebels withdrew in busloads from a town in eastern Ghouta on Thursday and handed it over to the army, the first such surrender since one of the fiercest campaigns of the seven-year war began more than a month ago.

The Ahrar al-Sham group's decision to accept the army's terms and abandon the town of Harasta puts the government on course for its biggest victory over rebels since the battle of Aleppo in 2016.

After dark fell on Thursday around 30 buses carrying rebel fighters and their families left the town. Syrian state media said the buses carried 1,580 people including 413 rebel fighters given safe passage to northwestern Syria.

A military media unit run by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's ally Hezbollah said 1,500 fighters and 6,000 family members had agreed to leave.

An army officer interviewed on state television said rebels who had not yet negotiated similar deals to evacuate from other towns in eastern Ghouta must quit or die.

"Death is coming for you if you do not surrender," he said.

The army's assault on eastern Ghouta, the last major rebel bastion near the capital, has been one of the most intense in Syria's seven-year-old war, killing more than 1,500 people in a relentless bombardment with warplanes, shells and rockets.

Before boarding the buses, a small group were seen in dimming daylight on television kneeling in a line for Islam's sunset prayer - perhaps the last they would perform in their hometown. Children ran among the adults waiting to board.

Between 18,000 and 20,000 people were expected to stay in Harasta under government rule, a military source said.

The eastern Ghouta campaign has seen Syria and its Russian allies use the tactics that proved successful in other parts of the country since Moscow joined the war in 2015: lay siege to an area, bombard it, launch a ground assault and finally offer safe passage out to rebels who agree to leave with their families.

Elsewhere in the eastern Ghouta enclave, state television reported that more than 6,000 people had fled the larger rebel-held town of Douma since Wednesday, crossing over into government-held territory.

The government's control of Harasta leaves eastern Ghouta's rebels in control only of Douma and another pocket that includes the towns of Jobar, Ein Terma, Arbin and Zamalka.

Government air strikes pummelled parts of eastern Ghouta on Thursday morning, striking Arbin and Zamalka and killing 19 people, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitoring group.

Later, rebels fired rockets from eastern Ghouta into Damascus on Thursday, killing two people, state media reported. Television showed burning projectile parts on streets and in parks.

SURRENDER

On Sunday, Assad drove himself to a newly captured battlefront in eastern Ghouta, a demonstration of his seemingly unassailable position in the war that has been going his way since Russia sent its air force to help him in 2015.

The deal to surrender Harasta began on Thursday with a prisoner swap. In an interview with state television, a Syrian soldier freed by rebels wept and thanked God and the army for his release.

The Russian Defence Ministry website showed what it said was live footage from the al-Wafideen crossing point from Douma into government areas. Over a period of several minutes, it showed dozens of people in small groups coming around a corner and trekking along the dirt road past armed soldiers.

Some bore bundles of their possessions, others carried small children or pushed prams.

Douma is the most populous area in eastern Ghouta, and for more than a week it has been entirely surrounded by the government. The Jaish al-Islam rebel group that holds the town has said it is determined to fight on. However, the Observatory said people leaving the area were doing so under an agreement between the group and Russia.

FEROCITY

The Syrian government and Russia accuse rebels in eastern Ghouta of preventing civilians from leaving to use them as human shields, which the rebels deny. Moscow and Damascus say their campaign is needed to end rebel shelling of the capital and other nearby areas. On Tuesday, a rocket struck a marketplace in a government-held town, killing dozens.

However, the ferocity of the Syrian army's offensive in eastern Ghouta has prompted Western condemnation and urgent pleas from United Nations humanitarian agencies for a ceasefire.

Over the past week, tens of thousands of people have fled across the frontlines into government territory.

The Harasta rebels will be taken to Idlib province in the northwest, which has become the main sanctuary for insurgents who agree to quit territory under deals with the government.

The northwestern province is the biggest remaining area under rebel control in Syria and its population has been doubled by refugees fleeing other areas.

But it too is a target for forces loyal to Assad, who vows he will reassert control over the entire country. The Observatory said over the past 48 hours air strikes on Idlib had killed at least 57 people.

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EgyptAir will offer a 50 percent discount on business class seats on its upcoming flight from Cairo to Moscow, the first since 2015, the air carrier announced on Thursday.

EgyptAir CEO Sherif Ezzat said there would also be a 35 percent discount on economy seats on the flight, which is scheduled for 12 April.

Passengers will be able to book the tickets with the discount until 29 March; the discounts will be available for the 12 April flight from Cairo to Moscow, and for EgyptAir flights from Moscow to Cairo scheduled from 12 April to 12 June.

EgyptAir is launching thrice-weekly flights to Moscow; they will be scheduled for Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays.

The announcement comes after Russias biggest airline Aeroflot said earlier this month that it would resume commercial flights to Cairo on 11 April for the first time in over two years.

In October 2015, a Russian passenger jet crashed in Sinai, killing all onboard, and as a result all Egyptian-Russian flights were suspended by Moscow.

The flight suspension has taken a toll on Egypts tourism industry, which had previously hosted large numbers of Russian visitors.

Since the crash, Egypt has implemented tighter security measures in its airports to meet Russian concerns.

Another round of negotiations between Moscow and Cairo are set to take place in April to discuss resuming Russian flights to Egypts tourist destinations along the Red Sea.

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Another episode unfolded in the turbulent relations between Britain and Russia this month, pushing them further towards a dark abyss.

The tension escalated after former Russian spy Sergei Skripal was poisoned with a military-grade nerve agent in a sleepy town in southwest England.

Britain, the US, Germany and France then labelled the event the first time such a nerve agent had been used in Europe since World War II.

Britain has hosted a plethora of former Russian spies over the past decade, and according to the British authorities these have been targeted by the FSB Russian Intelligence Agency.

The British authorities do not respond to Russian demands for the extradition of runaway agents, and instead Britain uses them as sources of information and for leverage against Russia. This has caused recurring political and security tensions between the two countries.

In response to the attack on Skripal Britain expelled 23 Russian diplomats from the UK and is now mulling further actions against the Russian state.

The British government seems to be quite certain of the involvement of the Russian authorities in the assassination attempt, and it has also alleged that the Russians were involved in other similar cases in Britain over the past year.

However, the British authorities have failed to provide conclusive evidence of Russian involvement in the assassination attempt.

Though Britain addressed the UN Security Council and accused Russia of carrying out the attack, it has thus far failed to produce any evidence of the direct involvement of Russian security or intelligence agents in the assassination attempt.

The involvement of Russian intelligence agencies in hunting former double-agents or defected spies seems logical according to the rules of the espionage world.

In every country there are spies who roam around freely, while being recognisable to the counter-intelligence agencies, but they are usually left unharmed as arresting them could cause diplomatic feuds.

Arrests only happen if they attempt to steal confidential information or come close to revealing state secrets.

In the present case, Russia had little to gain by assassinating a former agent in a foreign country with which its diplomatic relations were already sour.

Russia has offered to assist the British authorities in their investigations, but the request was turned down as the British are adamant about Russian guilt.

Over the years, Britain has several times accused Russia of assassinating its former agents on British soil, notably in the case of Alexander Litvinenko in 2006.

An investigation has also been opened into the death of Russian dissident Nikolai Glushkov, found dead in London this month.

British politicians have been using phrases like highly likely, possibly, and probably in their accusations against the Russian government and the attempted assassination of the former Russian spy.

Their accusations of alleged Russian interference in the US presidential elections that led to the election of US President Donald Trump and in the UK referendum on leaving the European Union have been presented in the same terms.

But thus far the British authorities have not presented a shred of evidence or even an investigative lead justifying their accusations against Russia.

Something similar occurred between Britain and Egypt in 2015 regarding the horrendous Russian civilian airplane crash over Sinai that the British authorities attributed to the Islamic State (IS) terror group.

The British believed that IS was behind the downing of the Russian plane and banned all UK flights to Sharm El-Sheikh for two consecutive years.

Moreover, some 15 years ago, a British intelligence report claimed that the regime led by former president Saddam Hussein in Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction that could be launched in only 45 minutes at targets in the Middle East and Europe.

Former British prime minister Tony Blair cited this report in a speech to the British nation and used it as a pretext for joining the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

The report was later proven to contain bogus information and more fiction than a Stephen King novel.

However, it helped to build up the case for the invasion of Iraq, and what has since transpired has been 15 years of misery and destruction in Iraq and the wider region.

The fact remains that British intelligence reports are not written by oracles with mystical powers capable of revealing hidden truths. They are drafted by human security analysts who gather information to the best of their abilities.

Whether they are accurate or not depends on the source of the information they contain. In the case of the Iraq report, the information was nonsense.

The point here is not that Russia did not attempt to assassinate Skripal, because in all probability it did. Instead, it is that the British authorities inability to provide any evidence or even leads justifying the accusations made against Russia is extremely dangerous as they could lead to devastating feuds.

Given the ongoing tensions that already exist between the United States and its allies and Russia, it would have been more prudent to investigate first and acquire irrefutable evidence against Russia, instead of relying on presumptions, when issuing such allegations.

Such accusations should be based on clear intelligence reports that include details of who, where, why, what and how and give conclusive proof. Otherwise, they may be perceived as acts of provocation even if the accusations turn out to be true.

Words such as hypothetically, theoretically, presumably, likely and others have no place in diplomatic and political terminology.

Only absolute certainty should be allowed into political circles, especially when launching accusations, and this is the case regardless of their truth.

This is even more crucial when pointing the finger of accusation at a superpower such as Russia at a time when a new cold war is already on the horizon, if not something worse.

The writer is a political analyst and author of Egypts Arab Spring: The Long and Winding Road to Democracy.

*This article was first published in Al-Ahram Weekly

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The Congress on Wednesday denied links to a political data analytics firm that has been accused of stealing data to allegedly influence the electoral process while accusing the BJP of having availed its services in 2010.

"The Congress or its President have never used or hired the services of Cambridge Analytica," said Congress communications incharge Randeep Singh Surjewala, hours after Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad accused the party of compromising national security by roping in the firm to run its 2019 election campaign.

"This is fake agenda, a white lie being dished out on fake facts by the Law Minister. And this has become a daily order with Prasad," he said, alleging that it was actually the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its ally Janata Dal-United which used the services of Cambridge Analytica in 2010.

For this, he cited the firm, saying on its website, that it "was contracted to undertake an indepth electoral analysis for Bihar assembly elections in 2010".

"If the company does manipulation, why were the BJP and the JD-U using it. But in his pack of lies, he forgot to tell the truth," the Congress leader said, accusing the BJP of seeking to divert attention from urgent issues through "fake news".

"The BJP's factory of fake news has produced one more fake product today to divert attention of the people. When the country was asking questions about the 39 Indians killed in Iraq, to divert attention from the issues of Dalit and Adivasis, to divert the attention from Rahulji's visit to Karnataka, they came up with another lie.

The Congress also said that company's (Cambridge Analytica) India partner is Ovelina Business Intelligence, which is being run by the son of a JD-U MP, while the LinkedIn profile of Himanshu Sharma, who is the Vice President of OBI, lists achievements like achieving Mission 272+ for the BJP and elections in other states.

Surjewala also said that during Delhi Assembly election, the services of the company were used by the BJP and asked party chief Amit Shah to clarify on this issue.

The BJP alleged that the firm had been found involved in data manipulation and warned that any attempt to misuse social media to influence India's electoral process would not be tolerated.

Prasad said that analytics firm is accused of using bribes and sex workers to entrap politicians and stealing data from Facebook.The Rajya Sabha was adjourned for the day shortly after the House met on Thursday amid an unending Parliament deadlock on the 14th consecutive day of the second half of the budget session.

However, the government managed to pass a key legislation that empowers it to fix the period of maternity leave and the tax-free gratuity amount of employees with an executive order.



The bill was passed by voice vote amid a din by opposition parties including the Congress, AIADMK and TDP who were protesting over their various demands.



Soon after the House met, Chairman M. Venkaiah Naidu greeted the members and the country on World Water Day and urged all to protect the eco-system and support the conservation of water for the future generations.



Naidu sought the cooperation of the members for the passage of the Payment of Gratuity (Amendment) Bill moved by Labour Minister Santosh Kumar Gangwar. It was passed by the Lok Sabha on March 15 amid a ruckus.



Soon after the bill was passed, members belonging to the AIADMK, the TDP and the Congress gathered near the Chairman's podium and began shouting slogans.



Naidu urged them to return to their seats but they did not relent. Amid the din, he adjourned the House for the day.



The Congress, the Trinamool and some other opposition members have been protesting against the banking fraud allegedly committed by absconding jeweller Nirav Modi and his associates, while the TDP and the YSR Congress have been demonstrating for special status to Andhra Pradesh.



The AIADMK has been demanding the setting up of a board for the management of the disputed Cauvery river water.

Lok Sabha adjourned for the day



The Lok Sabha was adjourned for the day on Thursday, amid protests as opposition members trooped near the Speaker's podium, raising slogans and displaying placards.



Speaker Sumitra Mahajan first adjourned the House till 12 p.m., minutes after the House met for the day.



Members from the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) and the AIADMK trooped near the Speaker's podium as soon as the House assembled.



Parliamentary Affairs Minister Ananth Kumar said the government was ready to debate all issues including the no-confidence motion.



"I again appeal to you to go to your place and let the House run. We are ready for debate on any issues... On banking irregularities and also the no-confidence motion. If the House runs, all issues can be discussed," Kumar said.



Speaker Mahajan said she could not take up the motion amid protests as she was not able to count the 50 members.At least three soldiers, two policemen and a militant were killed on Wednesday as the gunfight in Jammu and Kashmir's Kupwara district entered its second day officials said.

The gunfight broke out on Tuesday inside Halmatpora forest area of Kupwara, about 110 km from Srinagar city.

"Firing still continues in Kupwara and on Wednesday, two policemen and three soldiers were killed in the ongoing operations," Indian army spokesman Col Rajesh Kalia told the media.

"The policemen have been identified as Deepak Pandit and Muhammad Yusuf. The operation is still going on," a source said.

On Tuesday, four militants were killed in the gunfight and another one on Wednesday.

A senior police official said the forest area was cordoned off by joint contingents of army and police late Tuesday following intelligence information about presence of militants.

Authorities have rushed additional reinforcements to the forest area to take on militants.We have a problem with some influential Western news outlets that cover affairs in Egypt in a selective manner and present them in a negative light.

These outlets do not seem to possess an alternative method that would work towards a better understanding of our circumstances.

As a result, we need a better understanding of the Western medias view of our country and the region.

It is not a coincidence that the Western media outlets that have covered regional issues in recent years have all come from countries with long colonial histories.

While these Western powers imposed their direct interference in the internal affairs of weaker states at that time, they justified such acts by the notion of the white mans burden.

This claimed that the Western powers were not exploiting the weaker people of the world through imperialism and that they were not plundering their wealth.

Instead, the civilised white men of these powers were doing the colonies a favour since they could decide what was best for people living in barbarism.

Many Western writers and journalists have distorted our history as a result, claiming that the 19th-century ruler Mohamed Ali was a tyrannical pasha, that the khedive Ismail was a despotic profligate, that the 20th-century nationalist leader Saad Zaghloul was a provocative demagogue, and that former president Gamal Abdel-Nasser was a colonial dictator.

Things are different now, and the Western imperialist powers do not invade a new country on a yearly basis, but an attitude of moral superiority and arrogance is still present in the West.

However, this is not a holier than thou message intended to pretend that we are necessarily nobler than the West. We are not the victims of global imperialism or a universal conspiracy, as we are responsible for what has happened to us and we make mistakes just like others do.

However, admitting these mistakes does not prevent us from uncovering and disproving Western claims, especially those in the writings of orientalists and journalists who spend only days or weeks in our country.

Because of their stay in Egypt, they are seen as knowledgeable enough to compose books, write articles, and make judgements about orientals (us) and their strange situations.

Whats new in the Western media coverage of such eastern situations is the hybrid of old colonial thinking with new liberal-leftist ideas.

This liberal-leftism is an ideology that has been important among young people in Western states and among academics in the Western social sciences and humanities.

Such ideas also dominate the rhetoric of some influential Western media outlets.

This liberal-leftist ideology is based on a deep scepticism of authority, sometimes reaching the level of anarchy. The mainstream Western media tends to deny the association of power with any kind of virtue.

It also views authority as a temporary institution that society is forced to put up with. Eventually, society will rule itself, it says, thus burying governmental authority in the grave of history.

A prejudice against the military is one of the components of the liberal-leftist ideology. This bias against the Armed Forces is related to the scepticism of authority since armed authority is the strictest kind of this.

This ideology rejects the idea of the military playing any kind of political role in Third World countries, and it calls for governments in first world countries to voluntarily disarm and dissolve their armies.

A recent example of this was when liberal-leftists in the UK called for the British government to voluntarily scrap its nuclear weapons programme.

The liberal-leftist wing currently dominates Britains opposition Labour Party, headed by Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn since 2015.

Many of those who manage the UK media are sympathetic towards this political ideology, which prioritises the individual over the collective.

According to liberal-leftists, the individual should have the total freedom to choose his own destiny, and anything that prevents him from practicing this right is considered to be an unacceptable restriction.

An individual may freely choose the group or groups to which he belongs.

Other inherited or imposed groups are artificial entities used by their stakeholders to dominate the individual and deny him the right to choose, this ideology says.

Western liberal-leftists are also sceptical of ideas pertaining to national identity, the homeland, and the state. All forms of collective belonging are seen as unnecessary restrictions on the individual and his freedom, they think.

In returning to the original question, the problem of Western journalism when reporting on our countries today is not just a lack of information or individual journalistic errors.

The problem is related to this ideological creed, which renders the Western media biased against and prejudiced towards the empirical reality that the Middle East finds itself in.

We must not forget that solving such problems falls mostly on our shoulders, and it is up to us to gain a clear understanding of the ideological basis guiding Western media trends.

We need to build a clear ideological and political discourse that will guide our policies, and we need to make clearer to foreign outlets the moral basis of them.

Throughout this process, we must continue the dialogue with the Western media and engage in high-level intellectual interactions that do not stop at the limits of professional observation.

This is especially important because our own reputation for professionalism is not at its best, and is something we are still reshaping.

The writer is a senior researcher at Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies.

*This article was first published in Al-Ahram Weekly

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Mark Zuckerberg (file photo) Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has apologised for the data debacle that has upended the social media giant and said he was ready to testify before Congress, a media report said. "The short answer is I'm happy to if it's the right thing to do," Zuckerberg said in a CNN interview on Wednesday night.



"What we try to do is send the person at Facebook who will have the most knowledge.



"If that's me, then I am happy to go," he added.



Although Facebook employs a small army of lawyers and lobbyists in Washington, Zuckerberg himself has never testified before a congressional committee.



Politicians have called for Zuckerberg to testify before their legislative bodies in the five days since the Cambridge Analytica scandal erupted.



The data firm, which has ties to President Donald Trump's campaign, reportedly accessed information from about 50 million Facebook users without their knowledge, CNN reported.



Facebook has said that the data was initially collected by a professor for academic purposes in line with its rules. The information was later transferred to third parties, including Cambridge Analytica, in violation of Facebook's policies.



Zuckerberg broke his silence on the issue earlier on Wednesday with a post on his personal Facebook page laying out a series of steps the company would take to better protect user data.



"I want to share an update on the Cambridge Analytica situation -- including the steps we have already taken and our next steps to address this important issue. I've been working to understand exactly what happened and how to make sure this doesn't happen again," the CEO wrote.



"The good news is that the most important actions to prevent this from happening again today we have already taken years ago. But we also made mistakes, there's more to do, and we need to step up and do it," he added.



In the CNN interview, Zuckerberg suggested that the question was not whether Facebook should be regulated so much as how best to do it.



"I'm not sure we shouldn't be regulated," Zuckerberg said. "There are things like ad transparency regulation that I would love to see."



Zuckerberg was criticised by some on social media for his post for stopping short of an outright apology. He rectified that in the CNN interview.



"This was a major breach of trust, and I'm really sorry that this happened... We have a basic responsibility to protect peoples' data."



The CEO was now pledging to further restrict developers' access to user data. Facebook will also investigate all apps with access to large amounts of user data.



Zuckerberg also expressed regret for not doing more to take action against Cambridge Analytica when the issue came to the company's attention in 2015.



"We need to make sure we don't make that mistake ever again," he told CNN.



JUNEAU, Alaska (AP)  The recent discovery of the USS Juneau in the depths of the South Pacific has provided some closure to people with connections to the ship, which was blown apart during World War II. Hundreds died, including the five Sullivan brothers from Waterloo, Iowa, whose story was chronicled in a 1944 movie.

An expedition backed by Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist Paul Allen reported finding the wreckage over the weekend.

David Reams, senior director of maritime operations for Allen, said the team's primary aim was to find the USS Lexington, which it reported finding earlier this month more than 500 miles off the eastern coast of Australia. With some extra time, Reams said the team decided to look for other "wrecks of interest" in the same general area.

The team used sonar data and a remotely operated underwater vehicle to identify and verify the wreckage.

"Well, that's gonna be the J. There's the U, N, E, here's the A. That's it. That is the Juneau," Robert Kraft, director of subsea operations for Allen, said in a video clip provided by Allen's organization.

The name across the stern and the gun configuration helped to identify the ship, he said. Kraft also said the stern was next to the bow and nearly a kilometer (0.6 miles) from the ship's midsection, speaking to the level of destruction the ship endured.

This is the fifth U.S. vessel that Allen's teams have reported discovering. Data from the three most recent, which include the USS Indianapolis last summer, are particularly noteworthy because data is being gleaned from deep-water wrecks that have not been seen before, said Paul Taylor, communication branch head for the Naval History and Heritage Command.

Wreckage of the USS Juneau  named for the city in Alaska  was found about 2.6 miles (4.2 kilometers) underwater, off the coast of the Solomon Islands, Allen's organization said.

The vessel was destroyed on Nov. 13, 1942, during intense fighting with the Japanese during the Battle of Guadalcanal. It was hit twice by torpedoes, the second of which split the ship in two. While about 115 men survived the explosion, rescue efforts did not start for several days in part because of the danger in the area, according to the Naval History and Heritage Command.

Ultimately, 683 of the ship's 697 sailors died, Taylor said. Ten survived and four had transferred to another ship to provide medical aid before the USS Juneau sank, he said.

Bob Neymeyer, a historian at the Sullivan Brothers Iowa Veterans Museum, called the discovery of the ship's wreckage "stunning news."

The brothers, "blue collar kids living in a factory town of Waterloo, Iowa," had convinced the Navy to assign them to the same ship, he said. An Associated Press photographer shot photos of the brothers as they enlisted in Des Moines.

Even after so many years, and at a time when most World War II veterans have died, Neymeyer said the Sullivan family's sacrifice stands out. He said the deaths were the largest single-family combat loss in American military history.

"We have people visit the museum and many of them want to know where the Sullivans are buried and we would tell them somewhere in the South Pacific," Neymeyer said. "Now we can tell them more specifically where the remains are after 75 years and that brings more closure than somewhere in the South Pacific."

Reams said the team does not publicly disclose exactly where they have found ships to discourage wreck hunters but for U.S. ships it does provide that information to the Naval History and Heritage Command for its own records.

Samuel Cox, director of the Naval History and Heritage Command, said he was struck at how well preserved the three most recent ships found were.

With the USS Juneau, he said the extreme violence with which the ship met its end was obvious from the images captured, including twisted metal and guns blown from their normal position.

He said discoveries like this, made by reputable organizations with no intent to disturb a site, can provide important information on the condition of a wreck site and even on what happened. It also can help provide closure for families, and it's important that the sacrifices that have been made are not forgotten, he said.

Mary and Raymond Testa, who live in Texas, were excited when they heard the USS Juneau had been found.

Mary Testa had inherited letters from her mother that had been written by a sailor aboard the ship, William Meeker Jr. Meeker's mother also was Mary Testa's godmother.

The letters have since been donated to the Juneau-Douglas City Museum, in Alaska's capital city.

Mary Testa said the discovery of the ship was unbelievable. Her husband said he couldn't stop talking about it.

"I contacted everybody I could possibly think of ... who has any relationship to the ship," Raymond Testa said.The truth will eventually be revealed. That much we know.

Whether that happens in this lifetime or the next, the fact is the truth cannot be hidden forever.

Which means that whatever is said today, tomorrow will be the judge. Prime Minister Tuilaepa and his administration will do very well to remember that.

You see, just because they are in such positions of power that they feel they could do anything, say whatever and get away with it, it doesnt mean that one of these days people will not be able to see the bluff for what it really is.

The biggest worry is that if they get it wrong - and nobody gets it right all the time - they will not be around forever to suffer the consequences of their mistakes.

It is their children, our children and the unborn generations of this country who will have everything to lose. Now just imagine them living as exiles in their own country? Imagine being controlled on our own land  and at worse having nothing to give our children as their inheritance if the leaders of today screw up our customary lands?

Which is precisely where we are heading as a result of desperation and greed.

Ladies and gentlemen, these thoughts have been hard to ignore during the past few days, especially listening to Parliaments deliberations over the Alienation of Customary Land Amendment Bill 2017.

The issue has been well debated for many months on the pages of this newspaper and we will not delve into the details in this piece. Suffice to say, judging from Parliaments session this week, just about every Member of Parliament who spoke about the Bill, including some very hardcore H.R.P.P. members, expressed concerns about the future of customary lands.

All Samoans should get copies of those Parliamentary hansards and keep them for future reference. When the stuff hits the fan, they should be able to pull these records out and find out what their representatives in Parliament did and said. After all, they are in Parliament as the voice of the people they represent, not to toe a party line that could potentially lead to destruction and desolation.

From our standpoint, we applaud the Members of Parliament who had the courage to speak up, especially against what appeared to be a conspiracy by the powers that be to keep them quiet.

It would not have been easy; it would have taken a lot of effort and strength.

But understand this folks, having being an avid follower of Parliamentary proceedings for the past many years, the debate about the Alienation of Customary Land Amendment Bill 2017 was a rarity, given Samoa being a one-party state. It was a rare session for the fact there were so many concerns expressed about the impact of a bill on Samoans.

Had the Speaker of Parliament allowed all of them the opportunity to elaborate on their concerns, they would still be talking about the bill today and possibly next week.

What does this tell us? Well its very simple. If even the staunchest members of the H.R.P.P. are worried about the implications of the bill on the ownership of customary lands, why should we not?

Obviously there is reason to be alarmed; there is reason to be concerned. And the mere fact that the H.R.P.P. is divided on the issue; it tells us not all is well.

But then we knew that, didnt we? Critics of the Governments move in relation to customary lands have been highlighting many reasons why we should be concerned.

We have been giving them space in this newspaper for years to air their views, just as we have been giving the H.R.P.P. government the opportunity to explain themselves. Today, wed like to think that weve played our part in presenting all sides of the story so that you, our readers, are well informed and are able to make a quality decision.

Come to think of it, even the name of the bill is worrying. Why use the word Alienation in a bill that is supposed to protect customary land? For crying out loud, the name of the bill is the Alienation of Customary Land Amendment. Isnt that self-explanatory?

In the end, Prime Minister Tuilaepa and his ally, Fiame Naomi Mataafa, did their best to influence the debate. Prime Minister Tuilaepa was especially vocal, taking every opportunity to shut down any dissenting voice on the subject matter.

By the time Parliament had moved on to the next item on the agenda, poor Tuilaepa had started to sound like a scratched record. His constant reference to lauias in the government, the fifty of the smartest lawyers in Samoa at the Attorney Generals Office and the Dr. who is the Executive Director of the Samoa Law Reform Commission was like a joke. It was as if this was the be all and end all solution to our problems.

Sadly it is not. This is just the beginning.

In times like this, we need to consult the wisdom and vision of our forebears.

We need to look back and see what they had envisioned for Samoa when they laid the foundation for us today. And according to the supreme law of the land, our sacred Constitution, it is quite simple. Should the government persist with its line of thinking in relation to customary lands, the country needs to hold a referendum. Period.

Have a safe Friday Samoa, stay tuned and God bless!The Electric Power Corporation (E.P.C.) has paid $20,000 to the family of an eight-year-old boy who was allegedly electrocuted from a faulty electrical wire last month.

This was confirmed by E.P.C. Chief Executive Officer Tologata Tile Tuimalealiifano.

The incident occurred at Tuaefu, where the young boy was found by his cousin unconscious near an electric pole damaged by Tropical Cyclone Gita.

Tologata said negotiations are in progress for a settlement.

We anticipate paying additional funds, but I cannot say how much because I am not aware," he said.

The E.P.C. Board is meeting next week Friday and then it will determine from there how much additional funds will be paid in this settlement.

The $20,000 was paid to assist the family with funeral purposes."

Last month, Tologata expressed condolences to the family of the young boy.

Tologata has also confirmed that they have launched an investigation in connection to the death.

In a brief interview with the Samoa Observer, the C.E.O. said there was a similar case that occurred about 10 years ago and E.P.C. paid $12,000.

We are assessing and well pay what is fair and just for the mourning family."

We will not deviate from our responsibility and so a proper assessment is underway to compensate the family accordingly."

We hope to settle this case and the decision to release $20,000 were approved by our Board last month, he said.

Asked on what action taken by E.P.C. to assure this type of incident do not recur, costing tax payers money, Tologata responded: Linemen have been back out in the field to conduct inspections to see if there are any live wires lying around."

Also they have been out and about to see whether there are any wires hanging from the electricity poles that need readjusting. We are working on it, he said.

In an earlier report, Tologata issued a stern warning for members of the public who have low electricity lines to be cautious.

We will conduct a follow up soon, however we also depend on the families to report any wiring faults they come across.

According to Tologata, they have proposed to the Attorney Generals Office to consider drafting a Bill that bans planting of trees next to electricity poles.

This law is mainly for the safety of the public because there are cases where families cut down a tree and it falls on a line."

Members of the public need to know that there is a huge impact of trees falling on electricity poles, in some cases there is a possibility that this one tree will eliminate the power for the whole district."

Yet families dont really consider the impact until something goes wrong, said Tologata.

Police Superintendent Auapaau Logoitino Filipo confirmed the Police have officially closed its files on this matter.

This case is now before for an inquest hearing and that is all I can say on the matter.

Asked whether there was a post mortem requested for this matter, Auapaau declined to comment.World Down Syndrome Day was celebrated with fun and laughter in Samoa on Wednesday. This years theme is What I bring to my community.

Celebrated around the world on 21 March, the date is significant because of the extra 21 chromosomes typically associated with physical growth delays, characteristic facial features and mild to moderate intellectual disability in children with Down syndrome.

Parents, friends and children with Down syndrome celebrated the day at the SENESE Inclusive Education Support Services in Vaitele.

The event focused on raising awareness about Down syndrome and the services that are now available to support children with Down syndrome.

More importantly it was to convey the message that people with Down syndrome should be recognised as valued citizens.

The day was full of fun activities where SENESE Secondary School teachers, students and representatives from the Special Olympics Samoa played games and activities including making the umu.

The highlight of the day was having the Speech and Language Therapist, Mulama Setu, give basic training on speech, language therapy and awareness on Down syndrome.

Educational Psychologist, Orita Faanu Asi, also talked about ways to overcome behavioural difficulties at home and in the classroom, sharing views and empowerment based on children with Down syndrome within their community.

The day was also an opportunity for parents to empower each other on treating their children with Down syndrome.

SENESE provides inclusive education support services for children with disabilities in regular schools.

SENESE is pleased and excited to be leading the commemoration this year with their partners and supporters.

An information booth was also set up for people to learn more about the condition and what they can do as a community to support the inclusion of people with Down syndrome.

The majority of people growing up with Down syndrome have the ability to achieve and participate as valued members of their communities, with varying support levels.

SENESE also acknowledged with appreciation the support of the Government of Samoa, the Government of Australia through D.F.A.T, Central Bank, Apia Bottling and Special Olympics Samoa, TV3.

What is Down syndrome?

Down syndrome (also known as trisomy 21) is a genetic condition in which the person has an extra copy of chromosome 21.

Chromosomes are the blueprint for the bodys development. They are found in every cell in our body and determine our physical and mental characteristics. The usual number of chromosomes is 46 (arranged in 23 matched pairs). People with Down syndrome have an extra chromosome 21 in their genetic make-up.

This additional chromosome results in a number of physical and developmental characteristics and some level of intellectual disability.

Approximately one in 800 babies is born with Down syndrome and around 70 percent are born to mothers under 35.

Down syndrome was named after Dr. Langdon Down who was the first person to describe the syndrome .Fishing is a source of livelihood for many on small islands such as Samoa.

Unfortunately, going fishing on the reef could be life threatening for Leuluai Pepese, a 56year-old man of Faiaai. This is due to the dangers posed by accumulated moss and deterioration to the walkway to the beach that is a sheer 50-meter drop from the roadside.

Leuluai is a father and also a community leader because of his role as the Village Representative (Sui o le Nuu) for Faiaai in Savaii.

He is seen as one of the many champions who are working with C.S.S.P. to develop project initiatives and implement for the benefit of their village families.

With a population of 392 people and growing, Leuluai and the village council saw the need to upgrade their walkway to the beach.

The walkway was dangerous and needed work so it is safer for him and his community to access the sea and village land on the coastal area.

After attending the Application Workshop hosted by C.S.S.P. in April 2017, Leuluai spearheaded the formation of a project committee under the auspice of the village council (Alii ma Faipule) of Faiaai.

This Committee worked to design, submit and then implement the project to upgrade the Faiaai Walkway.

Through Leuluais great commitment and perseverance in his role as Faiaais Village Representative, communication and coordination of the project from concept to design to implementation encountered minimal issues from C.S.S.Ps viewpoint.

Its great when we get to work with committed leaders such as Leuluai because it makes the process easier for everyone to work with, said Theresa Masoe- Taimalelagi, Programme Manager of C.S.S.P.

We are so happy to see the result and the creativity that Faiaai villagers have displayed along their walkway with the paintings and outlines of sea creatures in the cement. It shows me that Faiaai take pride and are so grateful for this help that our Development Partners are giving us.

The wider community of Faiaai also came together through the provision of labour that was needed to undertake the works for building of the new walkway.

Asked about the impact of climate change on Faiaai, Leuluai responded: In the past, it was difficult for our villagers to access lands in the coastal area where livelihoods of some of the villagers are situated.

Access to the sea was also a problem; this is due to the walkway being very unsafe to access due to its deteriorating condition. The rain over the years has greatly affected the walkway, with moss gathering on the sidewalks causing slipperiness and with railings barely hanging by, making access un-realistic.

Hence why Faiaai took the initiative to put through a proposal for the Adaptation Funds Project Call for Proposal in early 2017. Faiaai was then awarded with a grant of $46,700 to help with the upgrade of the walkway.

On 9 March 2018, Faiaai officially opened their project in the presence of the whole community, C.S.S.P., M.N.R.E., M.O.F. and U.N.D.P. representatives.

Faiaai is one of the 12 villages from the island of Savaii that were successful applicants of the Adaptation Funds Project funded under U.N.D.P. and through the C.S.S.P. The villagers are so grateful that they are now able to safely access the walkway to and from the beach.

Tuisalega Seleni, a high chief of Faiaai who worked heavily with Leuluai for this project said: One of the benefits of the project is the accessibility for the villagers will be so much easier in terms of accessing the beach, lands where village livelihoods are at.

Secondly, the safety of our community is very important, our elders, our families, young children to be able to confidently access the walkway without having the fear of falling off.

Lastly, the walkway will be use as an escape route in times of natural disasters such as tsunami, cyclones etc. With future plans to use this as a tourist attraction site, where tourist will pay a minimum amount for entry to the beach as part of the maintenance and sustainability plan of the village.

We would also like to acknowledge the support given through the Adaptation Fund Project funded by U.N.D.P. Thank you to all development partners that were involved in this programme. Special thanks to C.S.S.P. as well for all the hard work being done.It is as heartbreaking as it can get. Mariam Moustafa, the ambitious, beautiful and talented young Egyptian girl, whose death led to widespread sadness and condemnation in Egypt, Italy and the UK, eerily knew she would die in Britain.

And she knew where she might die. On the street.

In a video which Moustafa made four months before her death, uncovered by the Sun newspaper, she was visibly upset, warning she could die because of the lack of medical care she desperately needed for a life-threatening heart condition.

In the five-minute YouTube clip, while struggling for breath, Moustafa, 18, said she was suffering from a rare heart condition. She expressed her concern that doctors in the UK had failed to help her get the right treatment for her condition.

What are they waiting for? Moustafa asked. Are they waiting for me to die?

I felt poor recently and I have been in the hospital for one week here, in the Queens Medical Hospital. I stayed here, and they said that I had a chest infection.

Right after I left the hospital, three or four days after, I ended up going to the emergency department. So, they still sent me home, even though I was not feeling good because the machine said I was fine.

She added, I had to go to Italy because here [the UK] they did not help me. The hospital did not send me to a specialist. And what they said was you are going to die because you had a blood clot and your blood was not reaching your brain.

I need your help. I am going to die here. I am not feeling safe. I am even scared to go to college. I do not go out anymore. I do not go to college. I cannot finish my education when I came all the way here only for that. I cannot do anything anymore. I am locked at home. If I have another relapse while I am out, there is nothing I can do. I could die.

In the end, Moustafas premonition of her death came true but the way she died was not the way she imagined: beaten at the hands of a group of teenagers.

Moustafa was ambushed at a bus stop by a gang of teen girls who accused her of taunting them on social media. They kicked and punched her until she fled with severe injuries.

The police have said the attack was not hate-related. Supt Rob Griffin told a press conference: All of the evidence indicates that the incident is not in any way hate-related.

He added police have a very clear picture about the attack on 20 February and have identified six suspects.

However, this is the second attack that targeted Moustafa. Nottinghamshire Police said they do not know if the first attack on Moustafa in August was connected to the assault last month.

No one was arrested after the first attack as police did not know who the suspects were.

So, until the investigation is complete, and the responsible girls are brought to justice, it would be very difficult to rule out any motive behind the brutal attack.

The needless, premature death of the young and vulnerable Moustafa, who was born in Italy, sums up all that is wrong in Britain today.

Youth violence and murder have soared in the UK in the last few years, partly because of cuts in the police budget and a reduction in the number of police officers.

The latest official crime statistics, published 25 January this year, reveal that between September 2016 and September 2017, recorded crime rose across England and Wales. Overall recorded crime increased by nearly 15 per cent across England and Wales, and by nearly five per cent in London.

Also, there is a rise in hate crime across the UK, with serious hate crimes based on race and religion, in particular, at record high.

The austerity measures did not only affect police funding but also and more importantly the funding of the National Health Service (NHS).

New figures from the NHS have revealed that up to 100,000 patients this winter have had to wait in the back of an ambulance for at least 30 minutes because of A&E overcrowding.

In all, 104,987 patients brought to hospitals in England have been stuck inside an ambulance, or in parts of hospitals including corridors, for upwards of half an hour.

The apparent medical negligence in Moustafas case is anything but rare. The NHS is struggling, especially during winter time, and people are paying the price.

Moustafas death is beyond sad; it is tragic. And the outpouring of grief over her death is testimony to a precious life cut too early.

Nottingham College Vice Principal Yultan Mellor paid tribute to Moustafa, expressing to Al-Ahram Weekly her sense of shock, disbelief and sadness.

Our thoughts and condolences are with her family at this difficult time. Mariam was a well-liked and able engineering student at our Highfields campus, Mellor said.

During a vigil held for his daughter in Nottingham City Centre, Mohamed Moustafa expressed his gratitude for the support his family felt.

He told the crowd: Thank you to everyone who has come for my daughter. I really appreciate it.

Many friends from many countries have come here for her. We need justice and to make everyone safe.

A friend of Moustafa, Jankeh John, told Notts TV: I lost my best friend and a sister. When I first entered the UK, Mariam was the only person that approached me.

That was almost four years ago. Her family accepted me like theirs. She doesnt deserve it. She was a loving, cheerful, fashionable and intelligent girl. We were so close even though we had our differences. She was always caring and loving. I am very heartbroken now.

The only thing Moustafas friends and family can hope for now is for lessons to be learned from this tragedy. As Moustafas father said, only justice will do.

*This article was first published in Al-Ahram Weekly

Short link:

One-third of Africans carry a previously unknown mutation that appears to help them resist malaria, according to an international study led by scientists from The Scripps Research Institute. If confirmed with more research, the discovery may lead to new malaria drugs, and have implications for the health of those who carry the genetic trait.

Those of recent African ancestry, including African-Americans, disproportionately bear this trait. It is nearly nonexistent in those of Caucasian, Native American or Asian descent.

The scientists found evidence in cell cultures and mouse models that this trait impedes growth of malaria parasites in red blood cells. The disparity in the traits frequency provides indirect evidence that it functions this way in people: it is most common in regions where malaria has historically been prevalent, or in people whose ancestors recently lived in those areas.

Several traits are known to produce malaria resistance; the best-known one can produce sickle cell disease. Carriers with one gene are resistant, those who inherit two genes, one from each parent, get sickle cell disease.

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Like sickle cell disease, the newly discovered trait produces misshapen, partially dehydrated red blood cells. However, its unknown how it affects the health of carriers. The red blood cells, although deformed, dont take the characteristic crescent shape found in sickle cell disease.

Results were published Thursday in the journal Cell. The study can be found online at j.mp/malariapiezo1.

Kristian Andersen, Shang Ma and Ardem Patapoutian; all of The Scripps Research Institute, led the study. Other local authors are from UC San Diego and the Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation. Scientists from the Netherlands and France also contributed to the study.

The trait is a variant of a gene called PIEZO1. A similar variant was already known to produce a rare disease called hereditary xerocytosis, which dehydrates red blood cells, causing anemia, an enlarged spleen and other symptoms. Investigating this disease and related genetic mutations led the scientists to this previously undiscovered variant.

This variant, called E576del, makes it more difficult for malaria parasites to exist in red blood cells. This reduces the diseases virulence, presumably benefiting the health of those who carry the trait.

People have two copies of the PIEZO1 gene, one inherited from each parent. One gene with the E576del mutation appears to provide malaria resistance. Its not known what happens when people inherit two copies of the mutation, the scientists said  that will be studied in the future.

Two malaria researchers who read the study praised its authors for finding the trait, studying how it works, and documenting the evidence that the trait is unexpectedly common.

They also commended the scientists for performing extensive experimentation to show that mutation confers malaria resistance, and consequently has spread in areas where malaria is endemic. In scientific terms, it is under positive evolutionary selection pressure.

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Very illuminating, and a heckuva lot of work! summed up one of the malaria researchers, Terrie Taylor, a physician and malaria researcher at Michigan State University.

Taylor responded by email from the African country of Malawi, where malaria is endemic.

Difficult disease

Malaria has long been one of the most widespread of life-threatening infectious diseases. It is also one of the most difficult to treat. In 2015, there were roughly 212 million malaria cases, according to the World Health Organization. About 429 000 of these cases were fatal.

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The diseases unusual life cycle helps explain why malaria is so hard to fight. Most infectious human diseases are spread by contact with other people or items theyve worn. But the parasites, microbial species of the genus Plasmodium, live alternately in animals and mosquitoes. So even if malaria is eradicated from a population, it can be re-introduced by infected mosquitoes.

Resistance to Plasmodium falciparum, the most deadly species to humans, was the subject of the research.

Researchers started with the observation that hereditary xerocytosis, also caused by a mutation in the PIEZO1 gene, dehydrates red blood cells. So they looked for other dehydrating mutations, to see if any conferred malaria resistance.

Given the history of known protection caused by dehydrated/deformed RBCs (sickle cell disease especially), we hypothesized that dehydrated RBCs from PIEZO1 mutations might also be protective. Patapoutian said by email from Iceland.

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We now know that the protection is a bit more complicated, as both RBCs as well immune cells (T cells) are involved  at least for protection in the mice.

However, the non-malarial health effects of this mutation in people, is completely unknown, Patapoutian said. Thats a question he plans to pursue.

There are some clues, he said. The gene regulates processes such as blood pressure, so it could produce hypertension.

The fact that we have a mouse model will make it seamless to test (the) mechanism behind any association we find in humans, Patapoutian said.

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No people were found to have two copies of the mutation, and whether they exist also requires further study, he said.

Turning from research into therapy, Patapoutian said he and colleagues will explore whether the presumed malaria protection actually exists outside the lab. If thats confirmed, then treatments that partially dehydrate red blood cells could be beneficial.

How long it will take to get such treatments to the market is hard to estimate, he said. It could take 10 to 15 years between initial discovery and drug development.

Praise and implications

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Taylor, the Michigan State University researcher, said the studys careful design enabled it to find a malaria resistance mutation, or allele, that eluded other researchers.

Many groups have been combing the human genome, looking for genetic variants that protect against malaria, she said. This resistance allele did not surface in any of these studies because it was very well disguised -- now that we know its sequence, though, we can hunt specifically for it.

Taylor said the frequency of the variant was surprising, because the disease that led to the research, hereditary xerocytosis, is very rare.

The traits effect on human health outside of malaria remains to be studied, Taylor said. As with other malaria resistance traits, this one likely comes at a cost. And that cost may determine whether a drug that mimics the effect will be practical.

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Is malaria resistance at the cost of higher blood pressure? More severe heart disease? More hemolytic anemia? she asked. Time (and more research) will tell.

Sean Prigge, a researcher on malaria parasites at Johns Hopkins Universitys Bloomberg School of Public Health, also said the study was well-done and provides significant new knowledge about malaria in its human host.

This study shows that malaria parasites grow poorly in human red blood cells from people with the E576del mutation and that these cells are somewhat dehydrated, Prigge said.

Although this is not a condition that we would want to trigger intentionally, the results help us to understand the conditions that malaria parasites need in order to thrive within our cells.

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The mutation may have previously escaped notice because of how it functions, he said. Its a deletion of three DNA letters, or bases, not a change in them.

It is surprising since the mutation is relatively common in people of African descent. However, studies that try to link mutations with protection from disease tend to focus on mutations that change DNA bases rather than mutations like E756del, which involves the deletion of three DNA bases.

The research was supported by the National Institutes of Health, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, California Institute for Biomedical Research, and the Pew Biomedical Scholar program.

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Science Playlist  On Now In a first, scientists rid human embryos of a potentially fatal gene mutation by editing their DNA On Now Space station flyovers visible from San Diego this week 0:55 On Now UCSD's 'ghost drivers' begin testing people's reaction seemingly empty cars 1:29 On Now 10 interesting facts about Mars On Now Kids can add years to your life On Now LA 90: SpaceX launches recycled rocket On Now Big passions, big giving: Malin Burnham 2:30 On Now Big passions, big giving: Darlene Shiley 2:40 On Now Big passions, big giving: Joan and Irwin Jacobs 2:45 On Now Ocean temperatures warming at rapid rate, study finds

bradley.fikes@sduniontribune.com

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(619) 293-1020The parent company of Ashford University aims to spin off its academic institutions and morph into a third-party online education service provider amid continued pressure on for-profit higher education industry.

San Diegos Bridgepoint Education earlier this month applied to regulators to separate its colleges  Ashford University and University of the Rockies  into an independent non-profit entity.

Bridgepoint then would become an Online Program Management company  supplying course development, marketing, class management and other services to colleges nationwide that have yet to offer online programs or that want to expand their existing online footprint.

Ashford would become Bridgepoints first client, the company said.

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The move mirrors steps by other for-profit education companies. Grand Canyon Education is in the process of separating its Grand Canyon University into a non-profit while providing online program management. Purdue Universitys pending purchase of troubled Kaplan University also follows a similar model  with Kaplans parent providing services in exchange for sharing in a percentage of revenue.

One aim is to sidestep the stigma surrounding the for-profit college industry, which has been the target of government probes over aggressive marketing tactics and high drop-out rates, which leave some students saddled with debt.

There is the ability as a non-profit organization to be judged and compared like other non-profit universities that are out there already instead of being seen as a for-profit and all the perceptions that go with that, said Nolan Sundrud, director of communications for Bridgepoint.

For Bridgepoint, the change will allow it to sell its expertise in providing online education to other academic institutions looking to expand Web-based learning programs to working parents, ex-military and other non-traditional students.

There are quite a few colleges and universities that havent really explored this to the potential that they could, said Sundrud. We think there is a lot of opportunity.

The return to non-profit status must be approved by accreditation bodies, the U.S. Department of Education, the Internal Revenue Service and state agencies. Bridgepoint expects the move to be completed by year end.

In 2005, Bridgepoint acquired a small, Iowa-based Franciscan university and renamed it Ashford University as a platform for its online education program. Two years later, it acquired a second small college in Colorado, changing its name to University of the Rockies.

Enrollment swelled from a few hundred students to more than 70,000, many of whom took online only courses paid for with federally backed student loans.

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An accreditation crisis in 2012 and probes by regulators has taken a toll on growth, however. Last year, Californias attorney general sued Bridgepoint, alleging deceptive recruiting practices. The company also has been battling the Veterans Administration and state agencies, which have balked at approving G.I. benefits for Ashford students.

Meanwhile, an improving economy has slowed the stream of non-traditional students that the company relies on. By 2017, enrollment dipped to 40,700. Revenue came in at $478 million, compared with $751 million in 2013.

Sundrud said returning its universities to non-profits is not designed to get out of anything. We think we have been perfectly compliant and following all the rules that we have needed to since we started.

But the changing higher education landscape led the company to shift its business model, said Chief Executive Andrew Clark in a statement. He called the move a strategic decision that the company has been evaluating for some time.

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Bridgepoints shares ended trading Thursday down 20 cents at $6.94 on the New York Stock Exchange.

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mike.freeman@sduniontribune.com;

Twitter:@TechDiego

760-529-4973Qualcomms annual shareholder meeting on Friday will lack the once-anticipated drama of a potential hostile takeover by rival chipmaker Broadcom.

But there still will be a few things to keep an eye on now that Broadcoms takeover attempt has been derailed by the Trump administration.

Paul Jacobs, former chief executive, chairman and son of company -co-founder Irwin Jacobs, is expected to attend the meeting, according to a spokeswoman for Jacobs.

Jacobs is currently a board member, but at the meeting he will become simply a shareholder. Qualcomm announced last week that Jacobs would not stand for re-election to the companys board -- a move that came after Jacobs informed fellow directors that he was interested in acquiring Qualcomm and taking the company private.

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Jacobs said it was unfortunate and disappointing that the board was attempting to remove him at this time. He has declined to comment further.

Its unclear whether he will address shareholders as he leaves the board, which could mark the end of the Jacobs family influence on the company.

Qualcomm declined to comment.

Besides Jacobs, frustrated shareholders also may send a symbolic message at the meeting about how they think the Qualcomm board dealt with Broadcoms $117 billion takeover bid.

Broadcom nominated six alternative candidates to challenge Qualcomms current board members, which would have given Broadcom majority control of the company.

Trump blocked Broadcoms nominees from running in an executive order earlier this month, citing potential harm to U.S. national security.

But Institutional Shareholder Services, an influential proxy adviser to large money managers, is standing by its previous recommendation that Qualcomm shareholders vote for four of the six Broadcom nominated board candidates  even though those votes wont be counted.

Voting for Broadcoms slate might better reflect shareholders views regarding the boards handling of the proxy contest, said ISS, which advises mutual funds, hedge funds and other institutional investors.

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According to Bloomberg, Broadcoms candidates were winning in early balloting  highlighting shareholder unrest over Qualcomms financial performance over the past four years.

A year ago, Qualcomms unopposed directors were re-elected overwhelmingly  with each corralling 90 percent or more of votes casts.

Final vote tallies wont be available at the shareholder meeting. They will be disclosed in four or five days afterward in a filing with federal securities regulators, which is common practice.

But there still may be clues to shareholder sentiment at the meeting.

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In addition to electing directors, Qualcomm shareholders are voting on several other corporate matters.

One is a shareholder proposal regarding the repeal of some corporate bylaw amendments that were implemented without shareholder approval in the past 18 months.

Qualcomm recommended shareholders vote against this proposal. Broadcom supported it. If it passes, that could provide a window into the mood of shareholders.

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mike.freeman@sduniontribune.com;

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Twitter:@TechDiego

760-529-4973Without the help of a devoted caseworker, Michael Williams might still be spending his nights attempting to sleep in an alley next to the faint warmth of an electric transformer box.

Williams, whos now living in a North Park apartment courtesy of a military veterans housing assistance program, told a standing room-only crowd at the Encinitas Library that he badly needed the expertise of his Community Resource Center caseworker Shakera Robinson to get off the streets.

She figured out what benefits Williams might be eligible for and she helped him apply for them, he said.

That support was critical because Williams, who became homeless for several years after being diagnosed with a debilitating illness, was struggling just to survive each day. Its hard, he said, to think long term when you havent eaten in two days, or when youre wet from a recent rainstorm, or when you dont even have money for bus fare.

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Being homeless is one thing, being homeless and being sick and being crippled is extremely torturous, he said. Most of the time I was scared and I felt like I was being invisible .... One of the things I realized the longer I stayed out on the streets (was) that I was slowly, but surely, losing my humanity simply because I didnt think anybody cared.

Williams was among five panelists who offered advice during Tuesdays forum, which was titled Ending Homelessness in Encinitas: Great Strides and Next Steps. Put on by the Encinitas Advisory Committee on Homelessness, the event attracted more than a hundred people.

The nights four other panelists were Mayor Catherine Blakespear, Sheriffs Capt. John Maryon, regional homeless advocate Michael McConnell and the executive director of the nonprofit San Diego Housing Federation, Stephen Russell.

Russell told the crowd that increasing the amount of affordable housing in the region would be a huge help. Housing is so costly in San Diego that many people now pay far more than the recommended third of their income on housing and theyre so cash-strapped that a single unexpected bill could be catastrophic, he said.

Having sufficient housing is the key -- the solution to homelessness is a home, he said.

McConnell said he agreed with Russell up to a point, but we also need leadership.

People who are in positions of authority need to realize both what works and doesnt work when it comes to resolving homelessness, he said, showing slides of some examples. Putting rocks under a bridge wont stop homeless people from sleeping there if they have nowhere else to go, he said as he showed a picture of a man doing just that.

And, he said, tossing out peoples tents or makeshift cardboard structures wont end homelessness either. Instead, he said, the region needs to do what Los Angeles is doing and put together an army of people who approach homeless people on the streets and help them obtain housing.

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Capt. Maryon told the crowd that the general public needs to realize that homelessness is not a crime. Thats what he tells people when they call and demand that sheriffs deputies roust sleeping homeless people out of city parks in the daytime.

Blakespear said the city of Encinitas is attacking the homeless problem from multiple angles. Two years ago, the city agreed to pay for a person to help homeless people navigate the social services system. That program has already helped 55 people find housing, the mayor said.

The City Council also recently voted to ease regulations related to the construction of granny flats -- secondary dwelling units built next to existing homes -- and waived construction permit fees for them, she said.

Next, city officials hope to win approval of a Housing Element -- a state-mandated planning document that spells out how a city proposes to accommodate its future housing needs, particularly those of low-income residents. Plans call for Encinitas new housing plan proposal to go before the citys voters in the November election.

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Audience members ranged from a library system employee who asked the panelists about what was being done to get jobs for homeless people to a woman who is temporarily living in a seasonal homeless shelter thats due to close in early April.

Shelter resident Taina Laurant said she is among some 50 people at Oceansides Bread of Life shelter who soon will be displaced and she promised them that she would come to speak up for them.On a wind-swept oceanfront catwalk in Encinitas on Sunday afternoon, a team of models swept past rows of admiring customers at Artizaras first independent fashion show.

The women  wearing high heels, flowing calf-length dresses and long-sleeved tunics with pants  looked like any other models in cool-weather attire, except one sported a turban and two others were in headscarves.

This was a coming-out party, of sorts, for part-time Encinitas resident Sarah Ansari, a banker-turned-fashionista who makes and markets Islamic art-inspired modest clothing to Muslim women around the world.

Ansari and a friend started Artizara 15 years ago as a way to creatively celebrate their Muslim identity after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Ansari said the tragedies led much of the American public to think of all Muslims as the same and in a negative light.

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We were being seen as a collective, but were so diverse, said Ansari, who moved to the U.S. from Pakistan in 1990 with her husband of 30 years, cardiologist Athar Ansari. As a Muslim-American, I had a desire to do something about it and fashion was a way to show that diversity.

A model displays her outfit during an Artizara fashion show Sunday in Encinitas. (Bill Wechter / San Diego Union-Tribune )

Operating from a 4,000-square-foot warehouse in El Cajon, Ansari leads a 4-member team of designers and staff in creating and shipping orders to the U.S., Canada, United Kingdom, Middle East, Africa and more. Although Artizara, found online at artizara.com, makes some items for men and children, most of its customers are women, the majority between the ages of 25 and 45.

Ansari doesnt disclose annual sales but she said Artizara is a small company with moonshot ambitions thanks to its market potential.

According to a study by the Pew Research Center, Muslims make up 24 percent of the worlds population, or roughly 1.8 billion people. By 2050, that percentage is expected to grow to nearly 30 percent.

Yet despite the size of this fast-growing demographic, fashion companies have only recently begun to respond to its needs. The first all-hijab collection debuted in 2016 at New York Fashion Week and this spring Nike will introduce its first hijab tracksuit for women athletes.

The market is huge but it hasnt been properly targeted to mainstream businesses, Ansari said.

Artizaras clothing is mid-priced, with pieces starting at $39 and topping out at $300.

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Many of the items feature patterns inspired by Islamic art mosaics mixed with Arabic calligraphy that were designed by Peter Gould, an artist and entrepreneur from Australia who converted to Islam in 2002. He said Ansari is on the cutting edge of the Islamic fashion trend.

Sarah is considered a pioneer in the emerging global modest fashion scene and super inspirational, Gould said via email. Her passion for positive change and building understanding shines through everything she does. Its a great blessing to know her and work on creative projects together.

A model displays her outfit during an Artizara fashion show Sunday in Encinitas. (Bill Wechter / San Diego Union-Tribune )

Ansari learned to sew as a child in Pakistan, but fashion was never her passion; numbers were. After earning her MBA in Pakistan, she and her husband came to the U.S. and settled, after a few years in Los Angeles, where she worked in banking and finance, and had four children. In 1999, they moved to San Diego, where they split their time between homes in Alpine and Encinitas.

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When 9/11 happened two years later, Ansari began talking over ideas with a fellow Muslim woman friend who was an engineer at Qualcomm. Both were frustrated over the difficulty of finding attractive modest professional attire. Ansari doesnt wear short skirts or short-sleeve shirts and she doesnt wear a hijab or headscarf.

After much planning and consultation, Artizara made its debut in 2003 at the annual Islamic Society of North America convention in Chicago. Ansari and her partner, who she bought out a few years later, went in with low expectations, but the 12-piece inaugural line was a smash. Write-ups soon followed in the Washington Post and New York Times.

Ansari said Artizara distinguishes itself from other modest-wear fashion companies because it is centered around the beauty of Islamic art, not the Islamic religion. In fact, many customers are non-Muslims who like the designs and prefer more skin coverage.

Were not trying to be religious. Were not advocating a style of dress. We are just responding to this very young, very vibrant, very hopeful and very artistic community to produce a brand that celebrates identity, she said.

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Ansari said she knew she had a crossover brand when she wore her Gould-designed, long-sleeve T-shirts out in public: I would be standing in line at Starbucks and Id get a tap, tap, tap on my shoulder from women asking me, where did you get your top?

Sarah Ansari, third from left, stands with models at the conclusion of an Artizara fashion show Sunday in Encinitas. (Bill Wechter / San Diego Union-Tribune )

Gould said Artizara represents a growing Muslim chic trend among young Muslims worldwide who want to express themselves creatively with new brands and imaginative products.

We want to see positive change in our world, like all young people, though we may have a particular lens through faith as one of our inspirations, Gould said.

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Ansari and Gould admit theres a strong global current of anti-Muslim sentiment that they continuously swim against. Ansari said Internet trolls continually click on her online ads just to send hate mail.

Shes also accustomed to criticism on the powerlessness and subjugation of women who wear hijabs, abayas and other head-to-toe attire.

Women choose to cover themselves for many reasons, Ansari said. Some cover for piety, some cover for identity, some cover for family reasons and some cover just to stir the pot. Womens bodies have been a battleground for people who are not women for thousands of years. Its time that we, as women, take over that debate.

As the business has slowly grown, Ansari said it has become more than a full-time job, but she wouldnt consider giving it up because the need is so great.

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If I didnt love it so much I wouldve quit long ago, she said. I think its deeply needed, deeply personal and very fulfilling.

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pam.kragen@sduniontribune.comThe Solana Beach City Council will consider its options next week for filling the vacant seat of former member Mike Nichols, who resigned unexpectedly with nine months left in his third four-year term.

It was very abrupt, Mayor Ginger Marshall said Wednesday.

She announced the resignation at the councils March 14 meeting after learning of it earlier that day. Nichols had called in by phone to participate in the two previous council meetings.

Nichols resigned in order to handle pressing family matters, according to a letter, dated March 11 and effective March 12, that he submitted to the city manager and city clerk.

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I sincerely appreciate the understanding of my colleagues and the community regarding my decision to resign, he wrote.

I hope that when the City Council appoints someone to serve the remainder of my term, the council will honor the voters who elected me by selecting a person that genuinely holds, respects, and will continue the values and philosophy of governance that I brought to my service on the council.

Hes worked to commit the city to environmental sustainability and to resist the pressures of over-development that threaten the small beach community, he said.

He could not be reached for comment Wednesday.

The city has 60 days from the effective date of the resignation to appoint someone to the vacancy or to call a special election, according California government code.

A special election could cost Solana Beach more than $200,000, according to past estimates.

Marshall said Wednesday a special election is unlikely because of the timing and the expense, but so far the council has not considered possible appointments.

We havent discussed what we are going to do, she said.

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A staff report on the councils available options is expected to be presented at its 6 p.m. meeting on March 28.

Nichols, a landscape architect and former professional skateboarder, was first elected to the council in 2006. He was re-elected in 2010, and then appointed to a third four-term term when he was unopposed for re-election in 2014.

Hes also been appointed three times to serve one-year terms as the citys mayor, the most recent term ending in December. The position rotates among the five council members.

After passing the gavel to Marshall at the meeting in December, Nichols called his wife, Heather, forward to the podium with him and thanked her publicly for helping him and for sharing the many difficulties of public service.

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Solana Beach, which had 13,449 residents in 2016, is the next-to-smallest of 18 cities in San Diego County. The smallest, Del Mar, has a little more than 4,000 residents.

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philip.diehl@sduniontribune.com

Twitter: @phildiehlSan Marcos Unified School District issued layoff notices to 67 teachers and seven administrators.

Valley Center-Pauma Unified School District issued layoff notices to 30 teachers.

Layoffs in both districts are aimed at balancing school budgets.

San Marcos Unified School District issued pink slips to employees who may be laid off because of funding shortages, school officials said, while Valley Center Unified School District has notified 30 teachers that their positions could be cut.

At its board meeting March 6, the San Marcos Unified School District Board voted to issue layoff notices to about about 87 teachers and seven administrators to help balance its books. At the same meeting, however, the school board approved an early retirement program for teachers that allowed it to reduce teacher layoffs to 67, said Henry Voros, assistant superintendent of human resources for the district.

Thats still too many teachers to lose, Voros said. The district has 20,939 students, and employs 1,097 teachers, so cutting 67 positions would reduce its teaching staff by about 5 percent, with potential corresponding increases in class sizes.

It is absolutely gut-wrenching, because we have so many employees that serve this district and students and community with fervor and excellence, that its difficult to issue even one layoff notice, to be honest, he said.

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The district was required to notify employees by March 15 if they may be laid off, Superintendent Melissa Hunt stated in a message posted on the school website. Some of those teachers and administrators could keep their jobs if the state boosts school funding for the next fiscal year. Schools will have a better glimpse of their financial future in May, when Gov. Jerry Brown issues his revised budget for California.

The notices that are issued by March 15 are preliminary in nature, Voros said. They can be rescinded at any time in the future, and that is absolutely the districts hope to rescind as many as possible.

The district has warned that its funding is not keeping pace with escalating costs for employee pensions and other costs. In her letter, Hunt said that some unexpected state and federal funds have helped fill that gap, but the district will likely remain in the red, with shortfalls of about $11 million this year and almost $21 million by 2019-20.

It aims to trim $20 million over two years through labor concessions from its unions and management employees, officials said at previous board meetings. It also plans to cut some teaching positions and increase class sizes.

According to board documents, positions slated for possible elimination at the districts elementary schools include 20 classroom teachers, six physical education teachers and 12 music teachers. Five sixth-grade teachers, five social workers, a school psychologist and 4.5 special education positions may also be cut.

San Marcos middle and high schools may lose seven English teachers, six math teachers, six social science teachers and 14 other positions for classes including science, foreign languages, career technical education and independent study.

In addition, one principal on special assignment, three assistant principals, a special education coordinator, director of the English learners resource center, and communications director could be cut, the district stated.

It pains us greatly to face possible reductions of programs and people we know make a difference in the lives of our students, Hunt wrote.  Nonetheless, it is our duty to the community to ensure the financial health of our district and to live within our financial means.

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San Marcos is also negotiating labor agreements with the San Marcos Teachers Educational Association, and its classified employee union, which represents non-teaching employees. San Marcos teachers earn between $39,663 for those in the lowest tier and first year of employment, to $100,274 for those with 27 or more years of teaching experience, according to the districts salary schedule. Officials said they hope to achieve some cost-cutting measures through bargaining talks.

Valley Center-Pauma Unified School District also aims to cut costs through staff reductions, though its $45.5 million budget is still balanced at this time, Superintendent Rod McCowan said. The district enrolls 4,009 students and has 200 full-time teaching positions, he said. It issued 30 layoff notices as a precaution this month, but doesnt expect to let go that many teachers, he said.

We want to offer a rich, comprehensive program, and to do that we couldnt lay off 30 teachers, he said. We will probably do about half of that.

In order to reduce layoffs and maintain school programs, officials will carefully trim costs from each department, McCowan said. And some staff cuts could come from attrition, he said, as employees leave on their own.

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We also have had several resignations and retirements, he said. So the actual number would probably be even less. I think the overall number looks bigger and worse than it really is.

Other North County school districts, including Poway, Oceanside, Vista, Carlsbad, Escondido elementary and high school districts, Fallbrook Elementary and Solana Beach, have not issued layoff notices, officials said.

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deborah.brennan@sduniontribune.com Twitter@deborahsbrennanElite Eight

And your favorite local IPA is

The March Madness Mash Tun, a contest overseen by Union-Tribune data reporter Daniel Wheaton and myself, is racing toward its Final Four. Readers have already winnowed the field from the original 32 to todays Elite Eight, with upsets  farewell, Stone Delicious! adios, Grapefruit Sculpin!  adding spice to this hop-forward competition.

From 10 a.m. today to midnight Sunday, you can cast your at the San Diego Union-Tribunes Twitter page or by emailing your picks to peter.rowe@sduniontribune.com.

Hop to it!

Kings of Beer

Even the most avid IPA fan sometimes wants something smoother and gentler. One enticing option: Bitter Brothers Golden Child (5.2 percent alcohol by volume).

The San Diego brewery markets this beer as a Bavarian-style hefeweizen, but this German has a mellow SoCal soul. While youll taste the traditional banana and clove notes, theres also a zingy layer of lemon zest. Malted wheat softens the mouthfeel and Champagne-like bubbles make this a relaxed brew that shines with food.

Golden Children being over-achievers, it was probably inevitable that this beer would become King. Like its predecessor, Dorothys New World Lager (5.5 percent) from Iowas Toppling Goliath, Golden Child proves that fizzy yellow beers can be interesting and rewarding.

Three Fates

Scanning the Brewers Associations recently released annual rankings of the nations top 50 breweries, this much was clear:

For San Diego Countys largest three breweries, 2017 was a good, bad and middling year.

Good: Stone, in 2016 the nations ninth largest craft brewery, rose to eighth place. The Escondido-based company was lifted by a popular new beer, Ripper, and the first full year of production at its Richmond, Va., and Berlin breweries.

Bad: Few would be surprised to learn that 2017 was Green Flashs annus horribilis. Last December, co-founder Mike Hinkley announced the Mira Mesa brewery was retiring four poorly-selling beers. In January, 15 percent of the companys workforce  33 people  were laid off as the Flash abandoned plans to sell beer in all 50 states to focus on its strongest markets.

In other words, Green Flash fell from 37th to 43rd place.

Middling: Karl Strauss, the countys oldest brewery, held steady at 41st place. This could be regarded as a victory  17 was not a good year for beer sales  or perhaps a reflection of Karl Strauss cautious decision to sell exclusively in California.

Top 10

The countrys 10 largest craft breweries in 2017, and their respective rankings in 2016:

1. D.G. Yuengling & Son, Pottsville, Penn. (1st in 2016)

2. Boston Beer Co., Boston. (2nd)

3. Sierra Nevada Brewing Co., Chico. (3rd)

4. New Belgium Brewing Co., Fort Collins, Colo. (4th)

5. Duvel Mortgaat, Paso Robles; Kansas City, Mo.; and Cooperstown, N.Y. (6th)

6. Gambrinus, San Antonio, Tex.; Berkeley; and Portland, Ore. (5th)

7. Bells Brewery, Inc., Comstock, Mich. (7th)

8. Stone Brewing Co., Escondido. (9th)

9. CANarchy, Longmont, Colo.; Tampa; Salt Lake City; and Comstock Park, Mich. (A new company, CANarchys brands include Oskar Blues, 10th last year.)

10. Deschutes Brewery, Bend, Ore. (8th)

The complete list of the 50 largest craft breweries is at bit.ly/Top50Breweries.

Twitter: @peterroweut

peter.rowe@sduniontribune.comEvery neighborhood in Paris, it seems, has a jewel-box of a pastry shop tucked on a little side-street, where you get drawn in by the chic design and discover the meaning of life in all its buttery, flaky glory.

Since February, Hillcrest has had a shimmering gem of its own  the hard-to-find and impossible-to-forget Patisserie Melanie.

A bakery-obsessed buddy and I found our way there recently and bought out half the stores small inventory of handmade treats.

We were also utterly charmed by the stores minimalist art-deco-meets-mid-century aesthetic. Wed move in, but owner and baker Melanie Dunn already resides on the second floor of this combination work-live space with her husband and baby daughter.

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Where have these been my whole life? The ultra-caramelized micro-bundt tea cakes known as canneles Bordelais at Patisserie Melanie in Hillcrest. (Sidney Vongkasem photo )

Dunn is a former Crawford High School English teacher who, feeling burnt out after 10 years, spent three summers in Paris training to be a pastry chef at the famed Le Cordon Bleu.

She completed her program in 2014 and planned to begin work on a retail boutique at the end of the 2014-2015 school year at San Diego Unified. Shed open the pastry shop in February 2016, she thought.

Until she found out she had a different kind of bun in the oven. Pregnant at age 40, Dunn put down her whisk and decided to dedicate herself completely to motherhood.

So here we are pretty much two years after I originally wanted to open and seven years after I decided to become a pastry chef, Dunn said. Its definitely been a commitment in holding on to that end goal.

Her primary goal was to be an ambassador for very classic French pastry shop. To achieve that, shed need the support of her husband Axel Schwarz, whom she met at Crawford, but the baking was all on her.

Her approach would be old school: Small batch, low-volume, handmade everything from quality ingredients.

Its the handmade factor, so the question is, if I get bigger and cant make them by hand anymore, will they lose that quality, that je ne se quoi? she asks, thinking about the future.

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Dunns gorgeously decadant sea salt and edible gold-flecked chocolate tart. (Courtesy photo )

I cant compete with Opera (patisserie) or Le Parfait Paris, said Dunn, citing two of San Diegos best-known French bakeries. Maybe Im really naive about this (but) Ill just really be happy to be a neighborhood bakery, that once in a while someone from the outside comes in and discovers us.

And intrepid social media-savvy types have already uncovered this neighborhood find. To help entice you to seek it out, heres a treasure map, of sorts, to Patisserie Melanie.

Where is it? While its official address is 3788 Park Blvd., Suite 4, in Hillcrest, the entrance is actually on Essex Street. For a visual, its around the corner from Trust and across the street from Pardon My French  two delicious restaurant neighbors.

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When is it open? Wednesday-Saturday, 8 a.m. to 2 p.m., or until everythings sold out.

What does it sell? Theres an array of familiar pastries, such as buttery croissants, pain au chocolat, sable shortbread cookies, lemon and chocolate tarts and macarons. And theres some unexpected fare, like kouign-amann Breton tea cakes, and canneles Bordelais cakes. ($4-$12)

Any top picks? If youre a French pastry shop that doesnt nail a croissant, youre in the wrong business, and Patisserie Melanies buttery version is among the best in town. Those puffy, flaky, slightly sugary kouign-amann (pronounced queen ah-MAHN) are close to pastry perfection. In our newsroom tasting, they were second only to the ultra-caramelized micro-bundt cakes known as canneles Bordelais. Labor-intensive to the max  they take Dunn more than 24 hours to create  these Bordeaux-bred little wonders encompass every trait you want in a pastry: crunchy from the caramelization, hinting of smokiness, with a moist, not-too-sweet custard interior.

But dont take a bunch of hungry journalists word for it: Theyre the shops top sellers, which pleases Dunn. I was concerned if Americans would respond to the them and those are by far the favorites, she said. Macarons are everywhere and, while I have them, I wanted to do some authentic regional pastries. Theres something about the caramelization that everybody loves.

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Even the pastry display at Patisserie Melanie looks good enough to eat. Because it is. The square, yellow confection in the center is the not too sweet or tart lemon tart. (Sidney Vongkasem photo )

If its a Parisian bakery, why doesnt it look more, well, Parisian? Ah, but it does. Its just not the image Americans usually have in mind. I met with a lot of designers, said Dunn. What they offered was all a very cliched approach to a Parisian shop. Black and white tile was mentioned a lot, with Eiffel towers wherever they could be put.  I wanted to emulate the most luxurious patisseries in Paris, with a sleekness and a minimalism. Plus, I just love art deco.

Buying into the lifestyle: Patisserie Melanie also has a carefully curated collection of home goods for sale, including kitchenware, bar sets and childrens games (in French, naturalment), ranging from $5 to $150.

Fun fact about Dunn: She grew up in Hawaii and attended the same Oahu school as former President Barack Obama, Punahou.

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Patisserie Melanie

Address: 3788 Park Blvd., Suite 4, Hillcrest

Phone: (619) 677-2132

Online: patisseriemelanie.com

The front window of Patisserie Melanie in Hillcrest says it all. (Sidney Vongkasem photo )

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michele.parente@sduniontribune.com

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Twitter: @sdeditgirlIt is the definition of old news: More than a decade after its air force destroyed a nuclear reactor in the middle of the Syrian desert, Israel on Wednesday finally acknowledged that, yes, its airplanes had bombed the Cube.

Among the intriguing details to emerge is the code word Israeli pilots used to report back the successful completion of their mission: Arizona.

The bombing of the North Korean-built facility by Israel has been widely reported, with Israeli spokespeople repeating a rote no comment since September 2007 to maintain a policy of plausible deniability or ambiguity.

But its sudden declassification has unleashed loud regrets from former intelligence officials and furious political recriminations. The public also learned this week what had long been known in the Israel intelligence community: that although the raid was successful, Israel failed for years to detect that the mysterious construction in the Syrian desert was a nuclear reactor.

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The story of the raid is nothing to gloat about, Yaakov Amidror, Israels former national security advisor and a retired major general, lamented on Israels Army Radio. At best it is the story of a terrible intelligence failure that ended well.

The Haaretz newspaper said the incident represented a big intelligence failure  the worst since the Yom Kippur War, according to a number of top intelligence people  in which Israel somehow managed for years not to notice a reactor being built right under its nose, in a neighboring country on whose surveillance Israel was spending vast amounts of money.

It is the story of a thunderous failure, said Tamir Pardo, who led Israels vaunted intelligence agency, Mossad, in 2007.

No reason was given for why Israel changed its policy of silence on the bombing, but memoirs by two prominent political rivals hint at a possible reason.

Former Prime Ministers Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak, who respectively served as head of government and defense minister at the time of the raid, are releasing competing books this spring, arguing contradictory positions. Both books, following Israeli law, had to be approved by the military censor.

Barak describes Olmert, who ordered the bombing and whose book will be released Friday, as an alarmist, uncertain prime minister facing an existential threat.

Olmert describes Barak as a formalistic, showboating defense minister unwilling to take a firm yes or no position on launching a bombing even while claiming credit.

If early copies of the two books are anything to go by, were in for another bloody round of Ehud vs. Ehud battles, Haaretz said.

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The squabbling prompted Israels current defense minister, Avigdor Lieberman, visiting Africa this week, to call reporters to say that the war over credit for the raid and the wave of mutual defamation led him to regret he had ever approved the military censors decision to declassify.

People have crossed every line and are simply freely releasing information, some of which could cause serious harm to Israels security, Lieberman said, adding that the media circus resembled diarrhea.

The first Israeli to defy Israels blanket gag order on any reference to the raid, widely viewed as a success until the latest revelations, was then-opposition leader and current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who less than two weeks after the bombing announced on television that hed known about the operation in advance  a notion widely derided in Israel  and had even congratulated Olmert after its completion.

The ban was not only lifted for bureaucratic reasons, said Lt. Col. Peter Lerner, the armys recently retired spokesman and one of the men who maintained Israels unwavering refusal to comment. Israels gag orders are truly about protecting matters of national security. In the case of destroying Syrias nuclear reactor, there were security risks posed by the information getting out that the IDF [Israel Defense Forces] was behind it, he wrote in an op-ed.

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In a cautionary coda, a few hours after the declassification, the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington published a brief calling for the International Atomic Energy Agency to inspect a site in Qusair, Syria, where, according to the German magazine Der Spiegel, Syria may be constructing an underground nuclear reactor.

The purpose of the site remains unknown, the institute said, although some imagery observations are consistent with Der Spiegels reporting.

Any nuclear-related facility in Syria could involve considerable assistance from North Korea, given that Pyongyang provided extensive assistance in the construction of the Al Kibar reactor, which Israel destroyed in 2007, it added, acknowledging that accomplishing such inspections may have to wait until the Syrian conflict ends, a prospect not currently in view.

Tarnopolsky is a special correspondent.March 22, 1965 The San Diego Union

The San Diego Union-Tribune will mark its 150th anniversary in 2018 by presenting a significant front page from the archives each day throughout the year.

Monday, March 22, 1965

In March 1965 the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. led 4,000 civil rights demonstrators on a five-day walk to the Alabama state capitol in Montgomery to protest the denial of voting rights to blacks.

Earlier in the month a march by voting rights protesters had been violently broken up at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, by state troopers and a sheriff's posse. Images of marchers being beaten and gassed on that Bloody Sunday outraged much of the nation and put pressure on President Lyndon Johnson to send federal troops to protect the protesters and get the Voting Rights Act passed.

Here are the first few paragraphs of the story:

Selma March Begins; Soldiers Guard Route

Dr. King Leads 4,000 On Historic Walk To Capitol

SELMA, Ala. (UPI)  Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led 4,000 civil rights demonstrators, guarded by carbine-carrying soldiers, to a pasture 8 miles from Selma yesterday on the first leg of their historicfreedom march to Montgomery.

Riot-trained military police and federalized national guardsmen, ordered in by President Johnson, guarded the 8-mile route of the first days march. Their bayonets fixed but sheathed, they stood by the road. Others shuttled along the line in Jeeps.

The march reached its first-day destinationa grassy fieldwell before dusk. The procession, nearly a mile long at times, passed by jeering and taunting whites along U.S. 80, called the Jefferson Davis Highway.

There were no major incidents along the highway on the first of the five days of the march to the Capitol, where Negroes hope to present their voter registration grievances to Gov. George Wallace.

DONT GET WEARY

Before the march started, King told the people in front of Browns Chapel Methodist Church, the thousands of whites and Negroes from Alabama and around the country wh were gathered for the march:

You will be the people that will light a new chapter in the history books of our nation. Those of us who are Negroes dont have much. We have known the long night of poverty. Because of the system, we dont have much education and some of us dont know how to make our nouns and verbs agree. But thank God we have our bodies, our feet and our souls.

Walk together, children, dont you get weary, and it will lead us to the promised land. And Alabama will be a new Alabama, and America will be a new America.

U.N. AIDE WALKS

King was flanked at the head of the line of marchers by Ralph Bunche, United Nations undersecretary, and the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, Kings chief aide. All had colorful bands of flowers draped over their necks by an Hawaiian delegation.

A Negro man pushed his baby in a stroller. Nuns wearing their black and white habits marched with denim-clad youths. School children, teenagers and priests, rabbis and beatniks marched.

View anniversary front pages online at sandiegouniontribune.com/150-years. For more from the Union-Tribune digital archives, go to newslibrary.com/sites/sdub. Searching is free, with registration. A fee is required to view full stories.No charges were filed Thursday against a Chula Vista police officer arrested on suspicion of domestic violence, but the case remains under review, a spokeswoman for the District Attorneys Office said.

Leopoldo Armando Chousal, 27, was taken into custody the night of March 14 in connection with the incident that occurred when the officer was off duty. He posted bail and was released.

The Chula Vista Police Department placed Chousal on administrative leave and suspended his police powers pending resolution of the case.

Chula Vista police Lt. Eric Thunberg said his department is cooperating with the San Diego police investigation and is conducting an internal investigation of its own.A nationwide call by U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions for a 45-day surge targeting opioid-related crimes resulted in 53 federal prosecutions in San Diego and Imperial counties, as well as the seizure of 46 pounds of the incredibly deadly drug fentanyl at the U.S.-Mexico border, the U.S. Attorneys Office said this week.

The Trump administration has identified the opioid crisis as a top priority and has outlined several steps to help combat the deaths linked to the addictive family of drugs. Part of that strategy has been a heavy focus on enforcement.

In 2016, about 64,000 people in the U.S. died from drug overdoses, many of those from opioids, authorities say. Drug overdoses now outrank all other causes of death for Americans under the age of 50, including motor vehicle accidents and disease.

The opioid enforcement surge kicked off Jan. 29. Since then, charges have been filed against three alleged drug dealers who are accused of providing heroin or fentanyl to customers who later overdosed in North County. Another man pleaded guilty to being the source of fentanyl that was eventually given to five people in Alpine who overdosed but survived.

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The cases largely rest on cellphone evidence, showing text messages between the overdose victim and the alleged dealer, according to court records.

The new push to go after dealers in deaths is changing the way law enforcement investigates overdose fatalities, most notably by now processing death scenes as potential homicides.

President Donald Trump has suggested pursuing the death penalty against the big pushers, the ones who are really killing people, he told a crowd in New Hampshire this week. Sessions has backed the idea, directing U.S. attorneys to seek capital punishment against major dealers.

Federal death penalty cases are extremely rare and must be signed off at the highest levels of DOJ when being pursued.

The local surge also targeted an alleged pill-mill operation in which a doctor would write fraudulent prescriptions for hydrocodone using fake patients  sometimes homeless people who would be driven to the pharmacies to pick up the pills.

A dentist was also sued by the government for continuing to use his DEA license to acquire opioids, even after his dental license had expired. He agreed to pay the government $60,000 to resolve the case.

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kristina.davis@sduniontribune.com

Twitter: @kristinadavisLuis Tinocos 90-year-old grandfather is dying.

Gabriel Tinoco, the grandfather, has a history of heart problems and was hospitalized for them this week. He lives in Mexico.

Tinoco, 36, came to the U.S. as an unauthorized immigrant when he was five years old. A participant in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program, the younger Tinoco has been trying to get the U.S. government to grant him temporary permission, called advance parole, to visit his ailing grandfather and say goodbye.

It hurts me that I cant hug my grandfather one last time, Tinoco said.

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His grandmother died about five years ago. He didnt get to visit her before her death either.

The only memories I have of them are what I see in pictures, Tinoco said.

Federal officials denied his application for advance parole in late August, saying the medical documents that he brought as proof of his grandfathers condition werent current enough, according to Tinoco. Days later, as part of the announcement ending DACA, Attorney General Jeff Sessions said the government would no longer give advance parole to program recipients.

Tinoco tried anyway on Thursday, holding a rally outside the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office before walking in to request an emergency application.

He hopes that his efforts might help others who are going through similar situations. He said its a common experience for unauthorized immigrants, but most stay quiet because its painful to talk about it.

Though two federal judges have temporarily required the Trump administration to keep processing DACA renewals while cases challenging the programs end make their way through the system, the court orders did not include reinstating advance parole for DACA recipients.

USCIS no longer approves applications for an advance parole document relating to DACA, the agency said when asked about current policy. If you want to travel outside the United States, you must have previously received advance parole and have a valid advance parole document.

Milad Torabi, a DACA recipient and member of San Diego Border Dreamers, said he hasnt seen his father or grandparents since he left Iran 22 years ago.

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Every time I speak to my grandmother, she tells me, Im going to die before I see you again, Torabi said. When somebody cannot go and see their grandfather on their deathbed, thats an issue. We dont have the same rights as everyone else, and thats an issue.

Torabi and others supporting Tinoco outside USCIS offices argued that situations like these show that the temporary court orders arent enough and that Congress needs to pass a permanent solution for DACA recipients as soon as possible.

This is a human rights issue, said Dulce Garcia, an immigration attorney and DACA recipient who is Tinocos fiance. Congress has failed us again. Its unbelievable that we have to prove to them that were human, that we feel, that we suffer, that we have pain.

Advance parole is still used by other immigrants whose statuses are in transition or limbo. For example, if someone comes to the U.S. on a tourist visa and ends up applying for a green card, that person would need an advance parole document to leave the country and come back while the green card application is being processed, explained immigration attorney Ginger Jacobs.

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USCIS received more than 416,000 requests for advance parole in fiscal 2017 and approved just over 354,500, or about 85 percent of them.

Jacobs said most of those approvals are likely green card applicants. People in other situations, like temporary protected status, who are eligible to apply for the program have a more difficult time getting approved, she said.

Around 11 a.m., officials told Tinoco that they couldnt grant his request at the San Diego office. They advised him to mail an application to a processing center in Nebraska.

Garcia hopes to call on members of Congress to help expedite his application. Shes worried that otherwise it will take months, and the elder Tinoco may not have that much time left.

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Immigration Videos On Now New developments in family separation case 9:53 On Now A San Diego woman volunteered as a medic in Texas helping migrant families 2:35 On Now Immigration policy protests in Carlsbad nearly cancelled after permit issue 1:38 On Now When children are separated from their parents at the border, here is where they go next On Now Prospects of a deal for 'Dreamers' may hinge on separating Trump from hard-liners on his staff On Now What is DACA? On Now Border wall prototype contractors selected On Now Video: Ukrainian boxer wins asylum in U.S. On Now 30 apprehended after Border Patrol agents discover tunnel On Now Video: Kurdish diaspora prepare to vote on independence

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kate.morrissey@sduniontribune.com, @bgirledukate on TwitterImmigrant rights advocates called out federal officials, the North County Transit District and the city of Escondido over a large-scale enforcement operation that happened last week.

Alianza Comunitaria, an organization based in North County that monitors immigration enforcement and sends text alerts about confirmed activity, condemned the 115 arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement that occurred as part of the three-day operation. Many of those arrests were in North County.

The same day the President decides to come visit our region, we saw an attack in our community, Lilian Serrano of Alianza Comunitaria said.

She described ICE officers in plainclothes and unmarked cars working out of the Escondido Transit Center parking lot, arresting parents who were driving children to school and people on their way to work.

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How complicit are local elected officials, and how complicit are transit center officials? she asked.

When asked about the operation, ICE said that all officers were identified as police/ICE at the time of the arrests. The agency said that it used various public parking areas across the city for the operation.

ICE fully respects the rights of all people to voice their opinion peacefully without interference, said Lauren Mack, spokeswoman for ICE. ICE conducts targeted immigration enforcement consistent with federal law and agency policy, to arrest individuals who have violated U.S. immigration laws. ICE does not conduct sweeps or raids that target aliens indiscriminately, and the agency prioritizes public and national security threats, immigration fugitives and individuals who illegal re-enter the U.S. after being removed. However, all of those in violation of U.S. immigration laws may be subject to immigration arrest, detention and, if found removable by final order, removal from the United States.

Patricia Serrano, vice-chair of the North County Immigration Task Force, warned local officials that elections are coming soon.

We should make our elected officials uncomfortable here in the city, she said. Its outrageous what is happening.

She also criticized the North County Transit District for allowing ICE to operate at its Escondido hub.

Youre terrorizing the people youre serving, she said.

Kimy Wall, a spokeswoman for the North County Transit District said that ICE didnt contact the district about the operation.

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NCTD had no prior knowledge of ICE activities being conducted on NCTD property, nor has NCTD been contacted by ICE to request authorization to utilize NCTD properties, Wall said.

Jeffery Epp, city manager of Escondido, said that no one at the city was involved with the operation and that the transit center is run by the district, not the city.

It is a public facility, open to the public, which I assume means federal agencies, Epp said. No Escondido PD assistance was requested or offered.

About 20 people, including a few faith leaders, joined immigrant rights organizations to rally on Wednesday at the transit center.

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Arcela Nunez-Alvarez, who introduced each of the rally speakers, said, Every single one of us has been affected by these operations in one way or another.

Miguel Vazquez, of Fallbrook, said that his cousin Fabian Vazquez was among those arrested and is now in Adelanto Detention Facility outside of Los Angeles. He said the experience has been traumatic for his cousins family.

Some of the kids around the house, they see a car parked outside and say, Mommy, dont go outside. it might be the police. It might be ICE. We dont want them to take you, Vazquez said, referring to his aunt and her children.

Pedro Rios, director of the American Friends Service Committee U.S./Mexico Border Program, condemned the practice of collateral arrests  when ICE officers arrest unauthorized immigrants who happen to be nearby when they are pursuing a target. Collateral arrests largely stopped in the waning years of the Obama administration but have returned under President Donald Trump.

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This sort of practice cements terror in our community, Rios said. When ICE talks about targeted operations, thats a way of trying to excuse the fact that theyre going after every undocumented person in the community.

Immigration attorney Carolina Martin Ramos urged anyone with concerns about immigration status to contact a trusted lawyer. She also encouraged people who are not citizens to learn what rights they have if they are stopped by immigration officials on the street or if ICE comes to their doors.

If they stop you on the street, dont talk to them, she advised. Dont sign anything. You have a right to remain silent and speak to an attorney.

She said if ICE comes to someones house, the person should not open the door unless the officers have a warrant signed by a judge.

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Immigration Videos On Now New developments in family separation case 9:53 On Now A San Diego woman volunteered as a medic in Texas helping migrant families 2:35 On Now Immigration policy protests in Carlsbad nearly cancelled after permit issue 1:38 On Now When children are separated from their parents at the border, here is where they go next On Now Prospects of a deal for 'Dreamers' may hinge on separating Trump from hard-liners on his staff On Now What is DACA? On Now Border wall prototype contractors selected On Now Video: Ukrainian boxer wins asylum in U.S. On Now 30 apprehended after Border Patrol agents discover tunnel On Now Video: Kurdish diaspora prepare to vote on independence

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kate.morrissey@sduniontribune.com, @bgirledukate on TwitterThousands of people took to the streets of France on Thursday, disrupting transportation, schools and other public services in a defiant challenge to economic changes announced by President Emmanuel Macron.

Authorities said the mostly peaceful protests, organized by public service labor unions, caused severe traffic chaos across the country. Hundreds of trains were canceled and a walkout by air traffic controllers disrupted flights. There were a reported 186 miles of traffic jams around the French capital as commuters jumped into cars to get to work.

In Paris, police said vandalism by two groups of militants did not appear to be part of the demonstration by public service workers and their supporters. Some members of the groups had thrown stones and bottles at riot police, who responded with tear gas and water cannons, while others wielding iron bars and wooden sticks had smashed bus shelters and attacked several banks.

The nationwide series of strikes and protests signaled the first serious challenge to Macron since he came to power in May on a reform program. The centrist leader, who pledged to shake up his countrys labor laws, had faced limited opposition until he announced sweeping reforms to the vast state rail system, SNCF  the Societe Nationale des Chemins de Fer Francais  in February.

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Macron says that modern rail workers are not required to perform the intense manual labor expected of their predecessors and that his reforms will apply only to new recruits.

His plans call for opening the rail system to private companies to reduce SNCFs $57.4-billion debt, which is expected to increase by $3.7 billion a year. He also aims to reduce public spending with budget cuts, and decrease the number of public sector workers by 120,000 during his five-year term.

This is not the first time a French administration has attempted to reform the countrys debt-ridden railways, which were nationalized in August 1937. Rail workers enjoy enviable privileges including jobs for life, automatic annual pay raises, generous pensions and, for some, the right to retire a decade before most other workers.

But unions opposed to proposed labor changes have paralyzed parts of the country in past years. The rail unions have announced two-day rolling strikes every five days until the end of June, if necessary.

On Thursday, striking rail workers were joined by teachers, hospital staff, air traffic controllers, and other public workers who make up the 5.4-million-member state workforce.

All have individual reasons for protesting, but the overall grievance aired by all French unions is that Macron, a former investment banker, is bowing to capitalist and globalized interests in wanting to sell off state industries, remove worker rights and privileges and threaten job security.

Laurent Berger, head of the moderate French Democratic Confederation of Labor union, or CFDT, told French radio that the government had to listen to public sector workers.

Either they listen or civil service workers will become extremely mobilized, Berger told RTL.

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A statement from the powerful and militant General Confederation of Labor, or CGT, said the day of action had been a success.

Everyone who took part, as well as the strikers, have shown their attachment to public services, it read.

Contrary to the governments choice of social regression, they have demanded that public services be further developed and given the necessary means to fulfill their role. Deaf to the proposals from the world of work, the government has chosen social confrontation.

The General Confederation of Labor called for another day of action on April 19.

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During a visit to an agriculture fair last month, Macron spoke about his grandfather Andre Macron, an SNCF worker in Somme, in northern France, after being challenged by a rail employee.

Im the grandson of a railway worker, go see the farmers, they have no special status  its no use kidding people, Macron told the man, adding: What age are you? Youre not having to work at the same rhythm as my grandfather who was a rail worker.

In February, Prime Minister Edouard Philippe warned that the government intended to push through the rail reforms by special decree, avoiding a parliamentary vote, if necessary.

Transport Minister Elisabeth Borne told French television last week that she was prepared to negotiate with the rail unions, but called the strikes irresponsible and said reform was essential.

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The government is not looking for a showdown  there are things we are prepared to discuss, she told CNewsTV on Friday.

In an interview the previous day, Borne had justfied the governments proposals.

This is a necessary, indispensable reform. My hope is not for a test of strength; my hope is for negotiations, she said.

A man holds up a placard during a March 22, 2018, demonstration in Lille, France, to protest government labor reforms. (Philippe Huguen / AFP/Getty Images )

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A railway passenger stands on an empty platform in Cannes, France, during a nationwide strike by public service workers on March 22, 2018. (Sebastien Nogier / EPA/Shutterstock )

Willsher is a special correspondent.

UPDATES:

3:45 p.m.: This article was updated throughout with Times reporting.

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This article was originally published at 11:15 a.m.The new San Diego Working Families Council has lost one of its biggest and most influential member organizations.

The Service Employees International Union Local 221 decided to quit the council after it decided to endorse former Assemblywoman Lori Saldana for county supervisor. Local 221 backed former Assemblyman Nathan Fletcher months ago.

The departure is the latest crack in San Diegos increasingly-fractured organized labor community.

Formed less than a year ago, the San Diego Working Families Council labor coalition has lost one of its biggest and most influential members as the areas labor organizations continue to fracture.

The Service Employees International Union Local 221, the group that represents county government employees, left the council on March 13 after a disagreement on the endorsement for county supervisor. On March 15 the coalition announced it would back former Assemblywoman Lori Saldana, while Local 221 endorsed former Assemblyman Nathan Fletcher in July.

That supervisor race is a key contest for Local 221 because it affords the union a chance to have an ally on the Board of Supervisors and because most of their members work for county government.

The executive board of SEIU 221 tonight voted that it is in the best interests of our membership to disaffiliate with the Working Families Council, SEIU said in a Facebook post.

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The posting did not explain the reason behind the decision, but Local 221 thanked the five unions that are still a part of the council and said it hopes to work with them when their interests align. The union declined to elaborate beyond reiterating what it said on Facebook.

Fletcher and Saldana, as well as attorney Omar Passons, former Deputy Fire Chief Ken Marlbrough and former District Attorney Bonnie Dumanis are running for a supervisor seat held by Ron Roberts. Roberts, whose district includes about half of San Diego, cannot seek re-election because of term limits.

The split means that SEIU will no longer contribute to the Working Families Councils treasury, and its 7,037 full-fledged members will no longer participate in the councils various initiatives and campaigns. Five other unions that represent about 33,348 workers combined remain in the council.

The Working Families Council and its president, Mickey Kasparian, did not return a request for comment. Kasparian is also the head of the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 135.

SEIUs exodus amounts to a splintering of a splinter group. In May six unions  the Teamsters Local 542, the Amalgamated Transit Union Local 1309, Office and Professional Employees International Union Local 30 and the Laborers International Union of North America Local 89 as well as Local 135 and Local 221  split from the San Diego and Imperial Labor Council and formed the Working Families Council after years of internal disagreements.

The day before the Working Families Council was formed the AFL-CIO took control of the labor council because of the strife and because Kasparian, the groups president, had recently been sued, including one case in which he was accused of sexual misconduct. Kasparian denies all allegations of wrongdoing. Since then, he was sued by another women who accused him of sexual assault, a claim Kasparian denies as well. All the lawsuits have been privately settled.

While SEIU was the first to leave, it was once a cheerleader for the Working Families Council and described it as the vanguard of the labor movement. Its president, David Garcias, said in May that it was a tough decision to leave the well-established labor council for a new start-up, but he said that the new groups format would make it more effective.

I believe that this is going to be the new form of worker organization around the country, Garcias said at a May press conference. You have to have a blending of the community and workers so we can really accomplish issues and take care of our neighbors, our communities, our families. Its only by coming together like this that we can accomplish this.

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SEIU 221 has not indicated if it will seek to re-join the San Diego and Imperial Counties Labor Council.

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Twitter: @jptstewart

joshua.stewart@sduniontribune.com

(619) 293-1841Authorities released Wednesday the names of an armed suspect who fled from Escondido police last week, and the name of the officer who shot and killed him near the entrance to a North County casino.

Sheriffs officials identified Osbaldo Jimenez Ramirez, 50, as the man gravely wounded in the Valley View Casino parking lot by a pursuing Escondido police officer.

The officer was identified as Terrence Pizzuti, a member of the department since 2013.

The pursuit started shortly after 7:30 p.m. Saturday when Escondido police responded to a 911 call regarding a family disturbance on Timber Glen, a residential street north of East El Norte Parkway.

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They spotted Jimenez Ramirez driving off, and gave chase, sheriffs officials said Sunday.

When the fleeing suspect neared the casino, just off Lake Wohlford Road, Escondido officers asked sheriffs deputies and San Pasqual Tribal Police officers to help.

Jimenez Ramirez stopped his car near the casino entrance, in a valet area right outside the front doors, authorities said.

He was holding a handgun when he got out of the car, Sheriffs homicide Lt. Rich Williams said

In the ensuing confrontation, Pizzuti shot Jimenez Ramirez. The suspect was taken to a hospital, where he died shortly after 9 p.m.

Sheriffs officials are investigating the incident because it happened in an unincorporated area of the county.

Williams said a handgun was found at the scene.

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teri.figueroa@sduniontribune.com

(760) 529-4945

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Twitter: @TeriFigueroaUTEl Cajon police officers seized marijuana and arrested 11 employees during a raid at an unlicensed pot dispensary on Thursday morning.

Police served a search warrant at Cloud 9 Wellness about 9:30 a.m. It was the second such enforcement action to take place at the West Douglas Avenue dispensary in recent weeks.

El Cajon police Lt. Walt Miller said officers received information that the location was selling marijuana, despite being warned repeatedly by the El Cajon City Attorneys Office that the behavior was illegal.

It sounds like its an ongoing problem with this group of people and the owner that runs this particular business, Miller said.

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Officers seized a large amount of cash and marijuana and arrested nine employees and two security guards on suspicion of participating in commercial marijuana activity in El Cajon.

Although California recently legalized the sale of marijuana from licensed businesses, El Cajon has prohibited the drugs sale through local ordinances and municipal codes.

Twitter: @LAWinkley

(619) 293-1546

lyndsay.winkley@sduniontribune.comA flurry of threats targeting San Diego County schools in the month following the deadly mass shooting in Parkland, Fla. had school police and others working long hours tracking down tips and providing extra patrols on and near schools.

Chasing dozens of threatening messages  some left on campus walls and others written in posts spread by social media  cost districts and law enforcement agencies thousands of dollars in overtime as officers were diverted from other duties to determine whether threats were credible.

School lockdowns, and even the cancellation of classes at one middle school for a day, also left its mark on students, parents and teachers, making it difficult for those involved to focus on schoolwork.

The kind of pervasive sense of anxiety that can set in in the wake of the Parkland shooting, the most recent shooting in Maryland and then these threats, it gives people the perception that anything can happen at any time and it can happen here tomorrow, said Bob Mueller, executive director of student services and programs for the county Office of Education. It is an exaggerated sense of danger, but it is still there.

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Such fear creates a sense of white noise in your head and it competes with a students ability to focus on learning, he said.

San Diego Unified School District police officers investigated 49 threats at campuses between Feb. 14 and this past Monday. Officers racked up 124 hours of overtime, at a cost of about $7,500, officials said.

It has pretty much consumed our operations since Feb. 14, said San Diego Unified police Capt. Joey Florentino. If theres even a hint of a threat or a student might be in distress and might harm themselves or somebody else, we will stay out all night if needed, tracking that student down, tracking down the source of the post.

In some cases, officers contact students at their homes and talk to their parents, often asking if they can search the house to see if the student has access to any weapons.

Since Feb. 14, Escondido police spent about $5,000 on overtime while investigating six school threats, including a social media post threatening to shoot up Rincon Middle School on March 15.

Escondido police investigated all night and did not find the post to be a credible threat. The school, which is in the Escondido Union School District, decided to close anyway. A message from the superintendent told parents the decision was made in an abundance of caution.

San Diego County isnt alone in dealing with a surge of threats. Schools around the U.S. reported a sharp increase in threats in the aftermath of the deadly shooting in Parkland, Fla. that left 17 people dead and two dozen injured at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

District Attorney Summer Stephan said last week that her office had issued nine cases in Juvenile Court against students accused of making threats. In all, Stephan said 19 school threats had been reported to prosecutors since Feb. 14.

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The Sheriffs Department and San Diego Police Department also investigated threats at schools in their jurisdictions but it is not known how much in overtime those officers racked up. Sheriffs officials said they were unable to track overtime spent specifically on those activities, while San Diego police officials said they needed more time to research the question.

On Friday morning, Stephan and San Diego police Chief David Nisleit are expected to appear at a news conference hosted by the San Diego Unified School District to talk about the issue.

School officials say the cost of responding to threats goes beyond paying overtime.

Grossmont Union High School District spokeswoman Catherine Martin said school resource officers and law enforcement agencies investigated 11 threats at district schools and charter schools in the month after the Feb. 14 Florida shooting.

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She said overtime costs associated with school threats were negligible to the school district  and that the district didnt expect to be billed for overtime from its law enforcement partners. Martin said the real cost to the district was that these school threats supersede everything else that we do and detract from our core competency of educating students.

Florentino, the San Diego Unified police captain, said his officers had to be diverted from other duties, such as assisting with traffic control around schools and engaging in crime prevention programs, in order to respond quickly to threats.

It takes a while for a school to get back to normal after being the target of a menacing social media post or message scrawled on school property. Parents and students are unsettled by them and school officers find that campuses are abuzz with worries and threats and comments and posts.

Florentino urged parents to talk to their children about safety and about how even innocent comments about what if scenarios and video games involving shooting weapons can be misconstrued when it comes to school violence.

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You dont joke about terrorism in an airport. You dont mention those words at a school site because it is just such a disruption because of these tragedies weve experienced, Florentino said.

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karen.kucher@sduniontribune.com

UPDATES:

7:30 p.m.: This article was updated with additional details.

This article was originally published at 4:20 p.m.A Serra High School student was arrested Wednesday on suspicion of scrawling a message that threatened a school shooting on a bathroom wall, a school official said.

The message, discovered Tuesday at the Tierrasanta school, read, Dont come to school after Spring Break. School shooting.

By Tuesday night, police had not yet determined whether the threat was credible, prompting Principal Erica Renfree to send a message to parents.

In an abundance of caution, school police is prepared to direct additional resources to Serra this week, and following spring break which starts Friday, the message read.

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On Wednesday, school police investigators tracked down a student suspected of writing the message. The student told officers the threat was not meant to be taken seriously.

Although investigators dont believe the threat was credible, they determined it did meet the definition of a criminal threat and the student was arrested.

The district takes this opportunity to remind parents to talk their kids about being mindful that comments they say, that they write, that they post to social media, that could be considered a threat come with consequences, said San Diego Unified School District spokeswoman Maureen Magee.

The district is planning on holding a press conference on Friday morning at the Education Center on Normal Street to discuss the rising number of threats against schools.

Since Feb. 14, when a gunman opened fire at a Florida school, killing 17 people, the San Diego Unified School District schools have received 49 threats. In every case, officers were able to determine a student believed to be responsible.

District Attorney Summer Stephan has said her office has issued nine cases in Juvenile Court against students accused of making threats across the county. In all, Stephan said 19 school threats had been reported to prosecutors since Feb. 14.

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Twitter: @LAWinkley

(619) 293-1546

lyndsay.winkley@sduniontribune.comExtra security from the San Diego Sheriffs Department is expected to be at Rancho Buena Vista High on Thursday following a threat against the school Wednesday.

Families of students at the school learned about the threat from a recorded phone message left by Principal Chuck Schindler.

Details about the threat were not disclosed, and Schindler said it did not appear credible.

We have been informed by Vista Unified School District of a possible threat to RBV for tomorrow, Thursday, March 22, Schindler said in the message.

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While law enforcement and we believe that there is no credibility to this threat and nothing to substantiate the threat, well be taking precaution by having extra law enforcement on site to provide security, he said.

Schindler also said the Sheriffs Department is investigating the threat.

No additional information about the threat was available from the Sheriffs Department on Wednesday.

The threat against the school is the latest in a series of threats that have been made locally and nationally against schools in recent weeks.

The threat against Rancho Buena Vista came the same day police officers in the San Diego Unified School District arrested a Serra High student on suspicion of scrawling a threatening message at the school.

San Diego Unified Superintendent Cindy Marten, District Police Chief Mike Marquez, San Diego Chief of Police David Nisleit and San Diego District Attorney Summer Stephan will hold a press conference Friday morning to discuss the districts collaboration with law enforcement following a series of threats made since a Florida school shooting Feb. 14.

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Homeless Playlist  On Now San Diego hepatitis outbreak continues to grow: 481 cases On Now Homeless entrenched in booming tent city along Santa Ana River On Now San Diego mayor agreed to homeless hub, then delayed, advocates say On Now Homeless outreach in San Diego On Now Video: Street Art: Portraits of San Diego's Homeless #8 On Now In poverty himself, 'Water Man Dave,' is the fearless saint of San Diego's homeless 5:41 On Now Video: Homeless living in cars find safe havens 2:21 On Now Street Art: Portraits of San Diego's Homeless #7 On Now Pitching a tent plan for San Diego's homeless On Now Homeless efforts get $80M boost for various services

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gary.warth@sduniontribune.com

Twitter: @GaryWarthUT

760-529-4939Congressional lawmakers have formally requested that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testify at an upcoming hearing in response to reports that a data analytics firm used by the Trump campaign had improperly accessed the names, likes and other personal information of about 50 million users on the social site.

The request officially came Thursday from the House Energy and Commerce Committee, a powerful panel that oversees Facebook and its tech peers, and arrives a day after Zuckerberg said he would be happy to appear on Capitol Hill to address lawmakers lingering questions about Facebooks privacy protections.

The latest revelations regarding Facebooks use and security of user data raises many serious consumer protection concern, said Republican Rep. Greg Walden of Oregon, the panels chairman, and Rep. Frank Pallone Jr. of New Jersey, the committees top Democrat. After committee staff received a briefing yesterday from Facebook officials, we felt that many questions were left unanswered.

Mr. Zuckerberg has stated that he would be willing to testify if he is the right person,"" they added. We believe, as CEO of Facebook, he is the right witness to provide answers to the American people. We look forward to working with Facebook and Mr. Zuckerberg to determine a date and time in the near future for a hearing before this committee.

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A spokesman for Facebook did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.

Lawmakers have pilloried Facebook in response to the controversy with Cambridge Analytica, a firm that aided Trump and other Republican candidates by building psychological profiles of voters. To do that, the firm commissioned an app that, when installed, siphoned information about its users as well as their friends - a practice that Facebook had allowed for years.Congressional leaders reached a tentative $1.3 trillion spending deal Wednesday to keep government agencies operating through September, unveiling legislation that would make good on President Trumps promises to increase military funding while blocking much of his immigration agenda.

The release of the 2,000-plus-page bill Wednesday evening, after a two-day delay, touched off a legislative sprint as lawmakers try to pass it before Friday night, the deadline to avoid a government shutdown. And with a key senator unwilling to say whether he would agree to accelerate the deals consideration, it remained uncertain whether they would be able to meet the challenge.

There were other plot twists as the deal came together: As aides hashed out its final details on Wednesday afternoon, Trumps support for the emerging compromise was suddenly cast into doubt, forcing House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., to rush to the White House early Wednesday afternoon to allay the presidents concerns.

After the meeting, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement that Trump had spoken to Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) about their shared priorities secured in the omnibus spending bill and confirmed their mutual support for the legislation.

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In the broadest strokes, the bill gives Republicans a major win by delivering a $78 billion increase in military spending over 2017 levels, while Democrats won a $52 billion increase for domestic programs. The haggling that delayed the legislations release concerned smaller-bore provisions sprinkled throughout the bill.

One hotly litigated matter concerned funding for Gateway, a major New York-area infrastructure project. At Trumps behest, Republicans succeeded in eliminating some provisions favoring the $30 billion project that includes building a new rail tunnel under the Hudson River. But project backers said it would still be eligible for hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer funds.

The dickering played out for hours Wednesday, even after top congressional leaders left a morning meeting on a snowbound Capitol Hill declaring that a deal was at hand.

Were feeling very good about this, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said. Weve accomplished many, many, many of our goals.

Democrats pressed particularly hard to block Trumps requests to fund a new wall along the U.S.-Mexico border and to beef up immigration enforcement capacity.

The bill includes $1.6 billion in funding for construction of a border wall, but that number is far short of the $25 billion in long-term funding that the administration sought. Democrats also won tight restrictions on how that money can be spent.

The scant border wall funding, aides said, accounted for Trumps cold feet Wednesday. He pushed in recent days for much more extensive funding and expressed his willingness to cut a deal, in exchange, with Democrats to extend the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that Trump moved to cancel last year. But the talks went nowhere.

The spending bill faces opposition from many conservative Republicans, but they are unlikely to be able to derail the bill given its likely support among Democrats and more moderate Republicans.

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Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., the chairman of the Freedom Caucus and a Trump ally, was described by a White House official as one of the key influencers of the presidents position.

Meadows slammed the proposal during a Wednesday panel discussion on Capitol Hill, saying that wins for conservatives will be few and far between.

Are we going to continue to fund sanctuary cities? Are we going to continue to fund Planned Parenthood? Are we going to continue to raise the debt to levels that quite frankly are unsustainable and bankrupt our country? he said. There is really no wall funding. People will try to spin it as there is wall funding, but the [$1.6 billion] has been in there for some time.

One late-breaking deal surrounded gun laws. Democrats agreed to add bipartisan legislation to improve the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) for gun buyers, while Republicans agreed to add language making clear that federal funds can be spent on research into gun violence - clarifying a long-standing restriction that has been interpreted as preventing such research.

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The package also includes a fix for a provision in the new tax law that favored farmer-owned cooperatives over traditional agriculture corporations, threatening the viability of some corporations by shifting sales to cooperatives. In exchange for agreeing to the fix sought by Republicans and farm groups, Democrats won an increase in a low-income housing tax credit.

Omitted was a health-care measure sought by GOP Sens. Susan Collins, Maine, and Lamar Alexander, Tenn., which would have allowed states to establish high-risk pools to help cover costly insurance claims, while restoring certain payments to insurers under the Affordable Care Act. Trump, who ended the cost sharing reduction payments last fall, supported the Collins-Alexander language. But Democrats opposed it because they claimed it included language expanding the existing prohibition on federal funding for abortions.

While a Democratic push to win provisions protecting Special Counsel Robert Mueller did not succeed, the bill does include hundreds of millions of dollars to combat potential interference from Russia or others in the November midterm elections. The federal Election Assistance Commission will receive $380 million to dole out to states to improve their election-related cybersecurity. And the FBI is set to receive $300 million in counterintelligence funding to combat Russian hacking.

Trump succeeded in partially blocking efforts to direct $900 million in planned seed funding to the Gateway project, which has been a key priority for lawmakers of both parties, including Schumer and House Appropriations Committee Chairman Rodney Frelinghuysen, R-N.J.

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Trump, according to several officials familiar with his thinking, was determined not to hand Schumer a win while Democrats stood in the way of his administrations priorities, and he maintained for weeks that he would veto any bill that included the project. Still, a Democratic aide said the project could still benefit from hundreds of millions of dollars in Transportation Department funding, though in some cases it would have to compete with other projects.

In the final wall compromise, strings are attached to the $1.6 billion that will be available for physical barriers along the Mexican border. Most of the funding, officials said, can be used only for repairs or for secondary barriers along border stretches where there is already a wall. The rest can be used for 33 miles of new barriers, but there are restrictions on the type: Only levees or existing bollard fencing can be built, rather than the concrete prototypes Trump appears to favor.

The bill also rejects a Trump administration request for more immigration enforcement officers and an increase in funding for detention facilities. Language in the bill, two officials said, holds the level of enforcement agents flat and does not allow the administration to add detention beds. However, a Republican official said the administration could still move money between accounts to fund more enforcement.

An effort to trade a much larger amount of border wall money for protections for certain young immigrants fell apart Tuesday. Trump continued to push for a last-minute deal as recently as Monday, but Democrats resisted the terms of the White House offer.

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A House vote on the spending bill had been tentatively expected Thursday, but by Wednesday night that looked likely to slip into Friday morning. That would leave scant margin for error in the Senate, where unanimous consent from all members would be needed to waive procedural rules and set up votes before the Friday midnight deadline.

That means any one senator could delay the proceedings and force a brief shutdown, much as Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., did in February, when he held up consideration of a previous budget bill.

Paul said Wednesday that he had not decided how he would handle the new bill, telling reporters that he would wait to read it first. But he made clear that he was unlikely to be pleased by its contents.

I think it is safe to say that there are many voices in the Senate, including many Republicans, who are not real happy about having a thousand-page bill crammed down our throat at the last minute without time to read it, he said. Its a really terrible, rotten, no-good way to run your government.Charging ahead with the dramatic remaking of his White House, President Donald Trump said Thursday he would replace national security adviser H.R. McMaster with the former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton, a foreign policy hawk entering a White House facing key decisions on Iran and North Korea.

After weeks of speculation about McMasters future, Trump and the respected three-star general put a positive face on the departure, making no reference to the growing public friction between them. Trump tweeted Thursday that McMaster had done an outstanding job & will always remain my friend. He said Bolton will take over April 9 as his third national security adviser in just over a year.

The national security shakeup comes as the president is increasingly shedding advisers who once eased the Republican establishments concerns about the foreign policy and political novice in the White House. McMaster is the sixth close adviser or aide to announce a departure in a turbulent six weeks, joining ally Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, who was unceremoniously fired last week.

I am pleased to announce that, effective 4/9/18, @AmbJohnBolton will be my new National Security Advisor. I am very thankful for the service of General H.R. McMaster who has done an outstanding job & will always remain my friend. There will be an official contact handover on 4/9.  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 22, 2018

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The White House has said the president is seeking to put new foreign policy leaders in place ahead of not-yet-scheduled meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jung Un. Bolton is likely to add a hard-line influence to those talks, as well as deliberations over whether to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal.

The White House said Thursday that McMasters exit had been under discussion for some time and stressed it was not due to any one incident, including this weeks stunning leak about Trumps recent phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster enters the West Wing of the White House on March 16, 2018. (Susan Walsh / Associated Press)

McMaster had briefed Trump before the Putin call  and his team drafted all-caps instructions telling Trump not to congratulate the Russian leader on his re-election victory. Trump did it anyway.

An internal investigation into the leak is underway, said a White House official who  like others interviewed about the announcement and the White House shakeup  demanded anonymity to discuss internal matters.

In a statement released by the White House, McMaster said he would be requesting retirement from the U.S. Army effective this summer, adding that afterward he will leave public service.

McMaster had told confidants he would leave the post if at any point he lost credibility on the international stage, according to three White House officials. The feverish speculation about an impending exit sped up the decision for him to depart, the officials said, in part because McMaster believed foreign partners were beginning to doubt his influence.

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Chief of Staff John Kelly and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis had been pushing Trump to get rid of McMaster and had been escalating their campaign in recent weeks. It had appeared McMasters departure was imminent last week  but White House officials insisted the speculation was false.

Just spoke to @POTUS and Gen. H.R. McMaster  contrary to reports they have a good working relationship and there are no changes at the NSC, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders tweeted late last Thursday night.

McMaster never developed a personal rapport with Trump, who chafed at his long-winded briefing style, according to a White House official and a person close to the president. His influence in high-level decision-making had waned in recent months, as Trump has increasingly relied on the direct counsel of Kelly and Mattis.

Yet officials said the president still has genuine respect for McMaster. He had been under consideration for a fourth star, and White House officials hoped it would provide a graceful exit from the West Wing for the longtime soldier. No suitable postings had been identified, leaving McMaster  long an iconoclast among the top brass  with no choice but retirement.

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Bolton, probably the most divisive foreign policy expert ever to serve as U.N. ambassador, has been a force in Republican foreign policy circles for decades. He has served in the Republican administrations of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush, and served as a Bush lawyer during the 2000 Florida recount.

A strong supporter of the Iraq war and an advocate for aggressive use of American power, Bolton was unable to win Senate confirmation after his nomination to the U.N. post alienated many Democrats and even some Republicans. He resigned after serving 17 months as a Bush recess appointment, which allowed him to hold the job on a temporary basis without Senate confirmation.

The role of national security adviser does not require Senate confirmation.

Bolton met with Trump and Kelly in early March to discuss North Korea and Iran. He was spotted entering the West Wing earlier Thursday.

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Tension between Trump and McMaster had grown increasingly public. Last month, Trump took issue with McMasters characterization of Russian meddling in the 2016 election after the national security adviser told the Munich Security Summit that interference was beyond dispute.

General McMaster forgot to say that the results of the 2016 election were not impacted or changed by the Russians and that the only Collusion was between Russia and Crooked H, the DNC and the Dems, Trump tweeted Feb. 17, alluding to frequent GOP allegations of impropriety by Democrats and Hillary Clinton.

Tillersons exit also forecast trouble for McMaster, who had aligned himself with the embattled secretary of state in seeking to soften some of Trumps most dramatic foreign policy impulses.

McMaster told The New York Times last year that Trumps unorthodox approach has moved a lot of us out of our comfort zone, me included.

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The military strategist, who joined the administration in February 2017, has struggled to navigate a tumultuous White House. Last summer, he was the target of a far-right attack campaign, as conservative groups and a website tied to former Trump adviser Steve Bannon targeted him as insufficiently supportive of Israel and not tough enough on Iran.

McMaster was brought in after Trumps first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, was dismissed after less than a month in office. White House officials said he was ousted because he did not tell top advisers, including Vice President Mike Pence, about the full extent of his contacts with Russian officials.

Associated Press writer Jill Colvin contributed to this report.San Diego City Attorney Mara Elliott has filed a lawsuit against consumer credit giant Experian, contending the company suffered a massive data breach that affected 250,000 people in San Diego and millions more  but never told customers about it.

The lawsuit seeks civil monetary penalties under the states Unfair Competition Law, as well as a court order compelling the Costa Mesa-based company to formally notify consumers whose personal information was stolen and to pay costs for identity protection services for those people.

Experian representatives did not respond to requests to comment on the lawusit Wednesday.

The lawsuit contends that the theft of up to 3 million records began in 2010 and was orchestrated by a then-teenager in Vietnam, Hieu Minh Ngo. Ngo, posing as private investigator based in Singapore, gained access to a database of consumer information that was then held by a company called Court Ventures Inc. or CVI.

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He then sold the access to the database to identity thieves and other criminals via websites on the so-called dark web, the suit contends. Some 1,300 thieves worldwide bought access to the data, paying Ngo $1.9 million over an 18-month period ending in February 2013.

Experian purchased CVI in 2012. The suit says the company knew or should have known about the data theft. It says CVIs biggest customer was the bogus private investigative firm Ngo set up, which routinely paying $15,000 per month for access to the database. Company records also showed that millions of queries to the database were being made.

Ngo was eventually arrested by federal authorities in February 2013 and pleaded guilty in March 2014 to accessing the database. He was sentenced to 13 years in prison in July 2014.

The suit faults Experian for never notifying any consumers in the state that their information had been hacked, as required by California law. Federal investigators informed Experian in late 2012 about the investigation into Ngo and the security lapse.

There is no law enforcement investigation that has prevented notices, the suit argues. Rather, defendants simply refuse to provide it. 

The law carries penalties up to $2,500 for each violation, meaning the company could be facing potentially millions in fines.

The suit estimated that 30 million consumers could have had their information hacked, including an estimated 250,000 in San Diego. Elliotts office cited the Internal Revenue Service in saying hackers filed more than 13,000 false returns using the hacked information, obtaining $65 million in fraudulent tax refunds.

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Twitter: @gregmoran

greg.moran@sduniontribune.comNew pension data show the number of San Diego city and county government retirees who were paid $100,000 or more in annual benefits continues to climb.

More than 500 retired San Diego city employees collected six-figure pensions in 2017; San Diego County had even more big earners, with 811 pensioners above that threshold.

Despite higher annual contributions to retirement funds, the gap between how much pension systems have invested and how much they owe to retirees is widening.

While pension costs continue to eat into the amount of money local governments have to invest in public services, the number of retirees collecting $100,000 or more in their golden years is on the rise.

The increases are cutting into San Diego city and county budgets. They also are affecting state agencies and the cities, schools and special districts that participate in the California Public Employees Retirement System and the state teachers pension fund.

According to the open-government group Transparent California, 513 members of the San Diego City Employees Retirement System collected six-figure payments in 2017.

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Those government pensioners all received the money as part of a defined benefit plan that will pay them a similar amount annually for life  something thats rare in the private sector anymore.

The figure excludes an additional 539 retirees who received lump-sum payments exceeding $100,000 under the Deferred Retirement Option Plan, or DROP, which allows them to accrue pension money into a special account during their last five years on the job. Although they have different options for receiving the money, the lump-sum option can approach $1 million and is only paid once.

The number of retirees being paid more than $100,000 per year on an ongoing basis is growing quickly.

Data from 2014 show 320 former city employees receiving pensions of $100,000-plus, meaning the number climbed 60 percent in three years.

It is really astonishing to see such growth in such a short period of time, said Robert Fellner, the Transparent California executive director.

Union leaders and others say pensions remain a critical element of overall compensation across the public sector.

In many cases through collective bargaining, employees are taking less or no raises, theyre paying more toward their pension and theyre paying more for health care, said David Low, the California School Employees Association executive director who also runs a group called Californians for Retirement Security. Pensions are more necessary than ever in the 21st century,

Low said government workers plan their financial futures around the prospect of a receiving a defined benefit after retirement.

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They have put in a whole career of service, and in many cases they are taking a lower salary because they receive a pension, he said.

Double-digit increases in six-figure pension recipients are not limited to the City of San Diego.

At the San Diego County Employees Retirement Association, 811 pensioners took in $100,000-plus last year, Transparent California reported. Thats an 11 percent rise over 2016 and nearly 32 percent more than the 615 members who received six-figure benefits in 2014.

The increasing number of six-figure pensions reflects the primary reason costs continue to rise: providing such generous retirement benefits is quite expensive, Fellner said. While U.S. public pensions obscure that cost initially through the use of flawed accounting methods, it cannot be hidden forever.

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Rising pension obligations are forcing elected officials to pay higher annual contributions to the retirement systems that serve their employees. At the same time, the gap between how much a pension owes and what it owns continues to widen.

San Diego, for example, paid $325 million to the city pension fund for the current fiscal year, 2017-18. That 8.9 percent of all city spending, including police, fire and capital improvements.

(SDCERS data )

The payment is up by $63.4 million from 2016-17, when the city directed 7.7 percent of its $3.4 billion in spending to employee pension costs.

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The citys required contributions will climb by $30 million or more in coming years as pay raises for police add to the liabilities.

The so-called unfunded liability for the $8 billion San Diego City Employees Retirement System increased from $2 billion to $2.76 billion in just two years.

The county pension system, which controls about $12.5 billion in assets, will require almost $533 million in employer contributions this year. Most of that, just over $490 million, will come from the county general fund. The balance comes from other agencies that participate in the county plan.

The countys annual pension payment is about $22 million more than last year. Despite the larger contribution, the San Diego County Employees Retirement Association unfunded liability is expected to increase by more than $50 million to just over $3.37 billion.

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The county retirement-fund contribution last year represented about 8.1 percent of the countys $5.7 billion in spending. This year, pension costs account for 9.3 percent of the county budget.

Fellner said there is no doubt escalating retirement costs are affecting services and spending.

County taxpayers will continue to see a reduction in public services and higher taxes to help fund these benefits and, as such, are entitled to complete and accurate information about the size and scope of the benefits provided, he said.

San Diego city and county retirees are not the only government workers receiving notable pensions.

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Transparent California said 893 members of CalPERS who worked for San Diego County agencies received $100,000 or more in 2017. That represents a nearly 28 percent increase since 2014. In all, CalPERS payments to members statewide increased 43 percent between 2012 and 2017, the group reported.

The California State Teachers Retirement System reported 858 members from San Diego County schools collected six-figure pensions last year, a 90 percent increase from 2012.

Bill Garrett, former El Cajon City Manager (U-T file )

Among the public pensions that Transparent California has cataloged in San Diego County, the highest is the one paid to former El Cajon City Manager Bill Garrett, who retired in 2004 after more than 38 years of service. His final salary was $257,000, and his pension is now $306,000 a year. The person who answered the phone at his house on Thursday said Garrett was traveling and could not be reached for comment.

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jeff.mcdonald@sduniontribune.com (619) 293-1708 @sdutMcDonaldIn 1987, in a unifying speech to the United Nations, President Ronald Reagan delivered an address without any precedent before or since. Perhaps we need some outside universal threat to make us recognize the common bond, Reagan told diplomats from all over the planet. I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.

This was far from the first time Reagan made such a reference. As chronicled in The New York Times, Lou Cannon  perhaps Reagans most acclaimed biographer  had learned that the 40th president ...

... was so stirred by the notion that extraterrestrial invasion would trump national differences that he floated the scenario upon meeting Mikhail Gorbachev at Geneva in 1985. This departure from script flummoxed Reagans staff  not to mention the Soviet general secretary. Mr. Cannon writes that, well acquainted with what he called the presidents interest in little green men, Colin L. Powell, at the time the national security adviser, was convinced that the proposal had been inspired by The Day the Earth Stood Still.

Whether inspired by the 1951 science-fiction film or not, this triggered ridicule of Reagan that has endured for decades. In a 1991 review of one of Cannons Reagan biographies, Sidney Blumenthal  then still a journalist, not yet a cut-throat Clinton operative  cited this and other stories showing Reagan finding inspiration in movies as evidence of his ignorance and lack of intelligence. In 2013, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow called Reagans U.N. comments one of the truly weirdest things he had ever said.

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In December, Harvards Nathan J. Robinson  editor of Current Events magazine  offered a different take:

Reagans U.N. speech is exactly correct. Its a refreshing departure from the usual nationalist rhetoric to hear a president talking about the common bonds that unite humanity, and the cosmic insignificance of all our intraspecies conflicts.

One week after Robinsons essay appeared, a staggering scoop appeared in The New York Times that indirectly offered another theory of how individuals might react to evidence of the existence of aliens  not with alacrity or with terror but with fear theyd be mocked if they shared the news with a skeptical world.

The scoop, citing hard evidence that had been declassified by the Pentagon  not the Weekly World News, InfoWars or one of the many other sources that traffic in wild conspiracy theories  detailed the experiences of U.S. military pilots who encountered what the Times reported as a fleet of rotating aircraft surrounded by some kind of glowing aura traveling at high speed off the coast of San Diego in 2004. Instead of treating this experience as an epochal close encounter, the pilots and their superiors didnt much want to talk about it. Heres why, according to the Times:

The sightings were not often reported up the militarys chain of command, [Nevada Sen. Harry] Reid said, because service members were afraid they would be laughed at or stigmatized.

A March 9 commentary in the Washington Post by Christopher Mellon, deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence in the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations, added to this hard-to-fathom big picture:

The [San Diego] videos, along with observations by pilots and radar operators, appear to provide evidence of the existence of aircraft far superior to anything possessed by the United States or its allies. Defense Department officials who analyze the relevant intelligence confirm more than a dozen such incidents off the East Coast alone since 2015. In another recent case, the Air Force launched F-15 fighters last October in a failed attempt to intercept an unidentified high-speed aircraft looping over the Pacific Northwest.

A third declassified video ... reveals a previously undisclosed Navy encounter that occurred off the East Coast in 2015.

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Mellon, who works for a research company that wants these reports thoroughly investigated, expressed bafflement that these stories could circulate in the upper reaches of the U.S. government without triggering national security concerns that such advanced technology might be a threat to the U.S. He called on authorities to set aside taboos regarding UFOs and instead listen to our pilots and radar operators.

So far, at least when it comes to the media, theres no evidence this is happening. Maybe its unsurprising given that we live in an era so packed with news that its hard to imagine any outlet digging into this with so much else going on. Or maybe its unsurprising given how conditioned reporters are to disbelieve the hard to believe. This is especially so in the cellphone camera era, in which tales of alien abductions  so common in the 1980s that they produced best-selling books  have suddenly dried up just when a tool is available to readily document alleged abductees lurid stories.

Or maybe its the most baffling moment in the history of journalism, given that the source of this stunningly provocative evidence pointing to aliens frequenting Earth is not someone with a collection of tin-foil headware  its the Pentagon, the most technologically advanced, well-funded institution on the planet. I, for one, welcome our potential new alien overlords. And Im not going to let other journalists inexplicable dearth of interest in what seems to be by far the biggest scoop of the 21st century shut off my speculation as to what our apparent alien observers are up to.

Such speculation risks being the ultimate example of the mirror image fallacy  the tendency humans have to project their values onto others. In other words, advanced life forms that have conquered scarcity and interstellar travel may not worry as much as earthlings about maintaining a tidy lawn or having bad breath.

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But here goes: If these alien aircraft shy from engaging with terrestrial jets or even being seen by them, maybe its because they treat Earth like a giant zoo. Maybe the alien aircraft that appear to have been spotted are field trips of anthropology classes from a real-life Alpha Centauri University.

(U-T illustration )

Or maybe its because the Earth is an exotic tourist spot with phenomena that cant be seen anywhere else, such as lava from Kilauea Volcano plunging into the ocean on the island of Hawaii, the underwater crop circles in the western Pacific or 250,000 dominoes taking 13 minutes to topple in a suburb of Detroit.

Or maybe Earth is like 1998s The Truman Show, except instead of hundreds of millions watching one persons adventures in an artificial world, untold numbers of aliens watch a manipulated planets adventures unfold. This isnt all that far from the territory inhabited by 1999s The Matrix, except with the Earth being guided by artificial intelligence algorithms designed with a quirky, dark sense of humor and a propensity to insert what gamers call Easter eggs  inside jokes  into narratives for their amusement value.

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Cue Albert Einstein, or at least historys second most famous person born with the name  comedian-writer-director Albert Brooks. His first movie, 1979s Real Life, was about manipulated reality distorting the lives of a mundane American family, the Yeagers of Phoenix, Arizona.

Are we living in Albert Einsteins reality  but the joke is that its the second Albert Einstein, not the one who is the greatest scientist in history?

Theres also the possibility that the alien algorithms are just out-and-out trolling us. After all, look at who the most powerful man in the world is ... .

Sorry, I for one wont do it. You need to come up with your own Donald Trump jokes. Theyre too on the nose for me.

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As for Ronald Reagans speech way back in 1987, sorry, Rachel Maddow  it doesnt seem weird anymore.

Reed, who is more tethered to reality than you may be inclined to think, really, is deputy editor of the editorial and opinion section. He welcomes topic suggestions. Twitter: @chrisreed99. Email: chris.reed@sduniontribune.com. Past columns: sdut.us/chrisreed.

Twitter: @sdutIdeas

Facebook: San Diego Union-Tribune Ideas & Opinion

AdvertisementSome of the most defining moments of my childhood were spent playing in parks. And now as an adult, I look forward to relaxing in Balboa Park and hiking in Mission Trails. Its essential that we protect and improve access to our state and local parks for every San Diegan.

For the first time since 2002, a parks bond has been introduced in California and it is about time. Proposition 68 has been placed on the June 5 ballot by the Legislature to invest $4 billion, some of which will ensure everyone has access to quality parks.

Related: No on Prop 68 - Parks and water bond means mountains of debt

This will support the smart strategies California requires as we start seeing the stark effects of climate change. Those effects range from drought to wildfires to sea-level rise.

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The bond will provide much-needed funds to keep toxic pollutants out of our water supplies, clean up groundwater, and protect land around the rivers, lakes and streams that are the sources of our drinking water. These priorities will help ensure Californians who currently lack access to safe drinking water can once again trust their taps.

Other parts of Proposition 68 will protect local communities from floods and mudslides. It will also fund coastal protection and natural area restoration. Specific projects will improve conditions for fish and wildlife in streams, such as the Southern California steelhead habitat.

In addition, the measure will invest in projects that improve climate resilience. Priorities include forest restoration, fire protection and innovating water management systems.

Proposition 68 will also promote sectors that are critical to San Diego: recreation and tourism. Portions of the bond will go to outdoor experiences, rural recreation and conservation.

The parks bond makes important strides towards equity in funding, too. It requires that up to 20 percent of the investment fund projects in disadvantaged communities. The largest amount of bond revenue  $725 million  would go toward local parks in park-poor neighborhoods. While having access to parks is critical, the parks bond will also go to park maintenance.

According to the Trust for Public Land, a 10-minute walk to a park is an important indicator of the livability of a city. Parks are an essential component that contributes to the physical and environmental health of a community. Since the early 20th century, when Balboa Park was established, San Diegans have understood this and invested in and demanded more local and regional parks.

For example, funding from the parks bond could help prepare the master plan for Chollas Creek Regional Park, which would cover 32 square miles. This proposed regional park would serve residents in southeastern San Diego and parts of La Mesa and Lemon Grove.

The Chollas Creek watershed has sediment toxicity where it drains into the San Diego Bay. The San Diego Regional Water Quality Control Board has identified the watershed as a priority area for addressing water quality impairments, and this bond could help clean that up.

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Chollas Creek, historically an important settlement for Native Americans, has been a habitat for diverse plants and wildlife. Today, it is commonly viewed as a neglected natural and cultural resource. Advocates hope to restore the open space to increase the quality of life for the disadvantaged communities in the area.

The parks bond could also help improve the 75-square mile Escondido Creek Watershed, which serves San Diegos North County region. Escondido Creek Trail passes through the heart of Escondido and provides a paved road for bike riding, walking and running. However, local residents have expressed maintenance concerns. Funding is needed for improved lighting and trail upkeep to address safety issues.

These are just a couple of cases around the San Diego region that would increase park access for more than 500,000 residents. These cases arent earmarked in the bond, but smart proponents are ready to apply for funding as soon as voters pass the measure.

The parks bond is a win for San Diegos parks, coast and water resources. We must ensure that every resident can enjoy our beautiful, sunny climate by being active in open spaces. If you believe every child and adult alike should have access to quality state and local parks, vote yes on Proposition 68.

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Arizmendi is chair of Sierra Club San Diego Chapter, the regions oldest and largest grassroots environmental organization, with more than 15,000 members in San Diego and Imperial Counties. Website: sandiegosierraclub.org. Blog: sandiegosierraclub.org/news/scsd-blogWow! Great captions this week. We did get a lot of Google Maps says were not in Kansas anymore gags, but overall, this was one of our hardest contests to judge ever. Congratulations to Brad Sullivan for winning the top spot. He will receive Steve Breens signed original in the mail.

Next weeks cartoon is below. Please remember to limit your submissions to three and keep em brief. Good luck!

Winner

Gimme a minute, Im checking the Kansas State score. Brad Sullivan, San Diego

Finalists

Somehow weve been friended by Cambridge Analytica. John Dischinger, Spring Valley

Auntie Em just texted me to clean my room. She says it looks like a cyclone hit it. Dee Heslar, Phoenix, Arizona

When I Google Oz, I get some guy talking about nutrition. Phoenix Von Hendy, Poway

The president says were going on a witch hunt. Bill Degischer, San Diego

According to the app, Uber wont be here to take us to Oz for 79 years. Eric Larson, Carlsbad

Toto has more followers than the rest of us. Mary Reed, San Diego

Where are all the dockless bikes when you need them? Wayne Zucker, Rancho Penasquitos

No heart, no brain, no courage? You all should consider a career in politics. Felmar Mationg, Imperial Beach

I havent had a bite since we left Kansas. Does anyone want anything from UberEats? Sara Mationg, Imperial Beach

Rerouting ... Craig Dahlberg, San Diego

Waze says we can get there 10 minutes faster by taking the beige road. Merrick Marino, San Diego

Are you kidding? The closest Starbucks is in the Emerald City? Deborah Attwood, Kensington

I won tickets to Wicked? Debra Jean Hopkins, Vista

I just ordered a brain, a heart and courage through Amazon. Patrick McDarby, San Diego

Sorry, guys, I have to have my captions in by 10 a.m. Abraham Perez, Chula Vista

Finalists

K-12

The Wicked Witch of the West is cyberbullying me. Keith Bainter, sixth grade, Muirlands Middle School

I just got a text. What does srndr dorthE mean? Emma Nickel, sixth grade, Dana Middle School

The weather calls for a chance of flying monkeys. Talia Sun, fourth grade, Gillispie School

Hold on, guys ... Im about to catch this Pokemon. Chance Bell, seventh grade, Waggenheim Middle School

United Airlines emailed me and said my other dog is in Japan, not Kansas. Randi Walby, seventh grade, Mesa Verde Middle School

Im just watching the movie so well know what to do. Logan Harris, sixth grade, Dana Middle School

Next weeks cartoon

(Steve Breen )

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To enter, email entries to cartooncontest@sduniontribune.com by 10 a.m. Tuesday. Please remember to limit your submissions to three and keep em brief. View last weeks winners.A controversial map that divides the Poway Unified School District into five election districts was approved on a 3-2 vote by the San Diego County Board of Education on Wednesday night.

The members voted on two items related to the PUSD. The first item was to approve establishing the change from at-large elections to by-district elections, which was approved unanimously. The second action the board members took was on which map to implement. They could either approve Map 131, which was selected by the PUSD Board of Education in November or approve one of the alternate maps the PUSD board members considered. The county board backed Map 131.

Map 131 (File photo )

The map has been controversial since its debut. Supporters have said they prefer it because it allows board members to finish their terms and run for-re-election in 2018, which maintains the rights of the voters. Supporters have also said that they like the map for how it ethnically, culturally and linguistically diverse districts and how it has two board members representing each high school, which prevents board members from feeling like they own a particular high school.

Detractors of the map have criticized it as gerrymandered, as it allows three of the four board members who live within one mile of each other in Rancho Penasquitos to be in their own election district. Those against the map have also said they dislike how it divides up several areas, including Rancho Bernardo, Sabre Springs and Carmel Mountain Ranch, in order to split Rancho Penasquitos into several districts.

Several people spoke Wednesday night on which map should be implemented. About two dozen supporters, including teachers, parents and PUSD Board of Education Vice President Darshana Patel, attended the meeting and held up pro-131 signs. A handful of those opposing Map 131 also attended the meeting.

Board members Charles Sellers and Kimberley Beatty were also present. Sellers spoke against 131 while Beatty did not speak.

County board president Guadalupe Gonzalez said she has never received so much mail in her life as she did on the topic of the PUSD map. You generally dont see an item generate such enthusiasm, Gonzalez said, thanking everyone who sent in letters and petitions.

Board member Alicia Munoz was the only member of the San Diego County board to open speak against Map 131. Munoz said she was the level of distrust and political particism she saw in regards to the map selection. She also said that while the legality of the California Voters Right Act wasnt in question with Map 131, she felt the spirit of it was.

It feels like were being dragged into a political fight that is not our own, said Munoz, who added that she would prefer to vote for an alternate map.

Munoz and Gonzalez both voted no for Map 131.

San Diego County board member Rick Shea said that Poway is an exemplary school district and that after looking into all the legal options, felt that the voters should decide and he was supporting the PUSD board-selected map. Board member Paulette Donnellon said she respected the PUSD board and would respect its decision. Shea, who represents district 5, and Donnellon, who represents district 4, each represent half of the PUSD, split along Pomerado Road.

The new election system will be in place for the November elections. Three of the five PUSD board members will be eligible for reelection under this system.

The map will be in place until 2021, when a new map, based on the 2020 census data, will need to be selected and implemented.

Email: news@pomeradonews.comFor the past few decades Ive harbored growing resentment toward people who rationalize Californias high taxes and exorbitant gas prices by calling these costs a sunshine tax  costs we are supposed to feel good about paying because we enjoy the best weather in the nation. It would be more accurate to call these moonbeam taxes. We bear these exorbitant costs not because of the states great climate, but because incompetent Democrat politicians have mismanaged our state into horrible financial straits.

For the past year and a half, Ive also harbored growing resentment toward those who would excuse incidents of misconduct, poor judgment and mismanagement at the FBI and DOJ by saying most FBI agents and DOJ employees are trustworthy and honorable people. Theyve made these claims even though there has been no evidence that any of these morally righteous people have lifted a finger to correct or confront the wrongdoers. Until last week.

If you want to understand someones true character, watch how they react under stress. The same is true for organizations. Core organizational values and character are revealed when organizations are forced to react to extraordinary pressure.

During the past few years the FBI and DOJ have been under extraordinary pressure accompanied by unprecedented scrutiny. Mishandled information, botched investigations and decisions that were seemingly driven by political rather than legal considerations have amped up the spotlight. Take politics out of it and examine each negative incident at face value. It didnt appear that anyone in either department was acting in a manner that would corroborate the most are honorable people claim. Both organizations demonstrated ethics and core values seemed to be falling short of the high standards many claimed to exist.

Then last Friday things changed for the better. Attorney General Jeff Sessions fired former Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe. The firing wasnt based on a directive or pressure from outside the department. McCabe was sacked because of an internal investigation of the departments inspector general, corroborated by a second investigation and review by the FBIs Office of Professional Responsibility. In other words, it appears that trustworthy and honorable people from within these organizations demonstrated their true virtue.

And it was a courageous thing to do. To fire someone who had at one time been acting director of the FBI is not something anyone could ever take lightly. It is also something no one would do for political reasons, even if pressure were exerted from outside the department. Pressure applied solely for political purposes would have created major battles inside the agency that would have become known outside the department. Information about any such attempted manipulation would have leaked like a sieve.

No, it is clear McCabes firing was an inside job. Thankfully, it is also clear that the job was accomplished by people of high character and integrity. These people, and others like them, will ultimately salvage the reputations and credibility of the FBI and the DOJ.

History will look back on McCabes sacking as a milestone in the process of draining the swamp and returning integrity to Washington. But it is only a milestone at the beginning of what will be a long and arduous process. There will be many more  perhaps dozens more  firings and some prosecutions for misdeeds at the highest levels of our judicial branch.

But at least now we can be confident that the swamp will be drained. Once the swamp has been drained it will be obvious that the majority of those at the DOJ and FBI are honorable because they will have demonstrated their integrity on behalf of American justice.

Lyles, a Poway resident, is a management consultant and best-selling author.There is loud talk in the Legislature and anywhere California Democrats meet in large numbers about passing a single-payer health care plan something like the one that didnt make it to a state Assembly vote last summer.

But dont bet on such a plan passing anytime soon. For one thing, Democrats now lack the two-thirds supermajorities in both legislative houses that they enjoyed most of last year, the edge that allowed them to pass a gasoline tax increase Republicans will try to defeat at the polls this fall.

Those big margins wont return until mid-year at the earliest, as Democrats lost three Los Angeles-area Assembly seats and one in the state Senate to the Legislatures sexual harassment scandal and some health problems near the end of 2017. Even if Democrats hold on to all those seats, a likely prospect, they would have precious little time before the November election to place an inherently controversial single-payer, Medicare-for-all plan on the ballot.

That plan was so questionable when presented last year that Democratic Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon, usually a reliable liberal, shelved it for the year last June. His objection: There was no clear financing for the idea, with many ultra-liberal Democrats figuring theyd just pass something and figure out later how to pay for it.

Theres also the dicey matter of negotiating with federal officials  mostly conservative Republicans these days  over how to switch the payroll withholding that now funds Medicare over to the state if California adopts single payer.

And theres the reality that California will have to find new money somewhere if it expects to keep Medi-Cal benefits at present levels in the face of federal cuts included in the Republican tax bill passed in the waning days of last year.

Medi-Cal advocates including Health Access California warn that the state may see the mother of all Medicaid battles. Medi-Cal is the states version of the federal Medicaid program, funding health care for about one-third of the states residents, a figure that demonstrates Californias extreme economic inequalities. Liberal Democrats now want to expand Medi-Cal even farther, saying they plan to cover undocumented immigrants along with low-income U.S. citizens.

Without two-thirds majorities, it will be difficult to act on any of this agenda because Democrats can have no realistic expectation of help from any Republican who hopes to be reelected. Thats because all these ideas are part of what Republicans call the Democrats tax-and-spend politics.

Long-simmering disputes over rising prescription drug costs also figure to occupy plenty of time in Sacramento this year, just like last year.

But single-payer is the largest target for California Democrats, who understand that passing it would take this state outside the constant battles in Congress over repeal or dismemberment of ex-President Barack Obamas Affordable Care Act.

One big problem would be convincing the millions of California seniors now on Medicare that a state-run program can provide as widespread and comprehensive coverage as Medicare, widely perceived as one of the best-run federal programs. Of course, if Republicans in Congress move to cut or eviscerate Medicare, as some have threatened or promised, then a completely independent but unproven state-run plan might look much better to over-65 citizens.

Its not that single-payer is a new idea in California. Twice during the first decade of this century, former Democratic state Sen. Sheila Kuehl, now a Los Angeles County supervisor, shepherded such plans through the Legislature, only to see them vetoed by then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Her idea  also embodied in most current proposals  was to use existing health insurance premiums as the main funding source, one reason California would need to get access to Medicare fees now taken regularly out of most seniors Social Security checks, in addition to what comes out of workers paychecks.

As was Schwarzenegger, current Gov. Jerry Brown is skeptical about whether adequate funding is available for any of this.

All of which creates an extremely complex health care situation in Sacramento, and nothing complex gets done quickly there. So people anticipating a single-payer ballot proposition on a California ballot probably should not hold their breath. Chances are it wont come before 2020 at the earliest.

Elias, a syndicated columnist, can be reached at tdelias@aol.comA retired California Highway Patrol officer who had a permit to carry a gun onto a Santee high school campus is suing the Sheriffs Department for false arrest, excessive force and unlawful search and seizure, among other claims.

The lawsuit, filed Monday in San Diego federal court, asks for at least $20 million in damages.

According to state law, firearms are not allowed on school campuses, although there are several exemptions to the law, one of them pertaining to honorably retired peace officers who are authorized under a permit to carry a concealed or loaded gun.

Robert Pitt, 59, who served in the CHP for 33 years, went to Santana High School the morning of Jan. 21, 2015, with his girlfriend to drop off her daughter. The couple then went to the administrative offices to complain to the vice principal about threats the 15-year-old girl had been receiving from another student, according to the lawsuit.

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While they were waiting in the lobby, Principal Tim Schwuchow asked to speak with Pitt privately in his office, the complaint states. The principal is accused of then asking Pitt whether or not he had a gun in his fanny pack, whether he had a permit to carry a concealed weapon and what his law enforcement status was, the lawsuit claims.

Pitt answered that he was retired law enforcement with a permit to carry a concealed gun, and Schwuchow allegedly replied that the school didnt honor such permits and directed a sheriffs deputy to search Pitt.

Deputy David R. Smith found Pitts CHP-issued .40 caliber Sig Sauer pistol in the fanny pack.

The principal then allegedly ordered the deputy to arrest Pitt for bringing a loaded firearm into a school zone, the lawsuit states.

Pitt protested to the deputy, and the deputy put him in handcuffs, searched him twice, then loaded him into the back of a patrol car, the lawsuit says.

While the deputy processed Pitts arrest at the Santee sheriffs substation, Pitt pointed out that his law enforcement concealed-weapon permit was in his wallet, and the deputy replied that he had already seen it, according to the complaint.

The lawsuit claims Pitt was not read his Miranda rights before being booked into jail. Pitt said he was put into a general population holding cell at the downtown jail, even though arrested law enforcement officers are typically segregated from others in jail for their safety, the lawsuit claims.

He was moved to a segregated holding cell two hours later after another jail deputy learned his law enforcement background, the suit states. After awhile, a jail clerk told Pitt he was free to go and that there were no charges against him.

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Pitt tried to get his gun back from deputies the next day but was told there was still an ongoing criminal investigation into the matter and refused, the lawsuit states. Pitt, a child support officer with county, was also scolded about missing work and bringing his gun to work, which he said he never did, the lawsuit says.

The District Attorneys Office declined to file charges in the case.

Sheriffs internal affairs investigators invited Pitt to speak with them about the incident two months later, the suit claims. There was no information released about the outcome of the investigation.

A sheriffs spokeswoman said Tuesday the department is not able to talk about pending litigation, and county counsel said the office had not yet been served with the case and declined to comment.

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Pitts lawyer, Jerry Steering, said the apparent wrongfulness of the arrest is so blatant in this case. He pointed out that it was an armed off-duty police officer who happened to be at Santana High registering his daughter when student Andy Williams, then 15, went on a shooting spree in 2001. The officer helped subdue the teen.

If some off-duty cop wants to sit at my kids school all day, thats just fine with me, Steering said.

kristina.davis@sduniontribune.com

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.Albany, NY -- (SBWIRE) -- 03/21/2018 -- Over the past few years, China has seen varied changes in the process of getting married and how weddings are celebrated. A new research, titled "Wedding Trends-China-March 2018" has been recently broadcasted to the wide database of Market Research Hub (MRH). As the title suggests, this research study offers in-depth analysis on the China consumer's wedding trends, by which the market is evolving. This industry report covers key industry statistics, market trends, growth and profit forecasts for coming few years.



Request For Sample Report: https://www.marketresearchhub.com/enquiry.php?type=S&repid=1647958



At first, the study starts by presenting an executive summary of the market with the deep information on the category level, including market size and forecasting, complete with market drivers that illustrate the forces that shape a category or market. This study is a result of qualitative and quantitative research techniques that aim to drill down to the exact factors that are driving growth, restraining growth and creating new opportunities for growth.



The wedding ceremony is of the utmost important thing in a person's life: its main purpose is to show the couple's happiness, social status, wealth and financial success to others. It has been observed that the golden year of marriage is 25-29. The report also states that, although China is getting more tolerant of different ways of living, this is still a collectivistic society  valuing family unity and conformity. This means dating, wedding planning and marriage counseling businesses will not become sunset industries. Nowadays, young couples are more likely to share wedding-related tasks with each other instead of their parents.



Browse Full Report with TOC- https://www.marketresearchhub.com/report/wedding-trends-china-march-2018-report.html



An important section of the report covers consumer survey data, which answers to some of the major wedding related questions. Also, marriage stereotypes, motivations to get married, wedding ceremony choice, purchase decision-maker, popular wedding venues, key information channels, ideal packaging type has been discussed. Some of the major points highlighted in the study are as follows-



- How important is a local culture to people's theories of marriage?

- Will traveling substitute a wedding ceremony?

- How active are young couples in being involved in wedding tasks?

- What is an ideal gift for wedding guests like?

- Is the wedding ring supposed to be the one and only?

- Does the emerging trend of shopping online apply to wedding products?



By the above information, the research provides readers a clear understanding of the wedding trends. One of the key section gaining momentum in this market is the wedding gift. There are various new business opportunities in gifts for wedding guests. Gifts for wedding guests and alcoholic drinks are mostly relying on offline stores.



Enquire about this Report- https://www.marketresearchhub.com/enquiry.php?type=enquiry&repid=1647958



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MRH functions as an integrated platform for the following products and services: Objective and sound market forecasts, qualitative and quantitative analysis, incisive insight into defining industry trends, and market share estimates. Our reputation lies in delivering value and world-class capabilities to our clients.



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Read Industry News at - https://www.industrynewsanalysis.com/Albany, NY -- (SBWIRE) -- 03/21/2018 -- The report titled Global Coffee Market: Trends & Opportunities (2018-2025) provides an in-depth analysis of the global coffee market with detailed analysis of market sizing and growth, market share and economic impact of the industry. The report also provides the production and consumption analysis of the market. The report provides detailed market analysis of the global retail coffee market by value and volume along with the segments of the market.



The report provides detailed regional analysis of Western Europe, Eastern Europe, North America, Asia Pacific, Latin America Middle East & Africa and Australasia for the coffee market. Regional analysis includes market sizing by value along with the production and consumption analysis. It also provides the retail sales value of each region.



The report also includes the country analysis of Brazil, Vietnam, Indonesia, Ethiopia and India. It provides the production and consumption analysis along with the export-import trends in each of the above mentioned countries.



Get the sample copy of report: https://www.marketresearchreports.biz/sample/sample/1654130



Furthermore, the report assesses the key opportunities in the market and outlines the factors that are and will be driving the growth of the industry. Growth of the global retail coffee market has also been forecasted for the period 2018-2025, taking into consideration the previous growth patterns, the growth drivers and the current and future trends. The competition in global coffee market is stiff and dominated by the big players like Nestle. Further, key players of the coffee market The J.M. Smucker Company, Mondelez International Inc. and Strauss Group Ltd. are also profiled with their financial information and respective business strategies.



Global coffee market increased at a significant CAGR during the span of 5 years i.e. 2013-2018 and projections are made that the market would rise in the next five years i.e. 2018-2025 tremendously. The market can be segmented on the basis of end-users as retail coffee market and food services market, of which global retail coffee market displayed an increase, driving the global coffee market. The increasing consumption of coffee led by the westernization trend in India, China and Latin America drive the market in the positive direction.



The growth drivers for the global coffee market are: rise in disposable income, rapid urbanization and increase in the population along with the emergence of caf culture and new consumer base. Despite the market is governed by various growth drivers, there are certain challenges faced by the market such as: aging of coffee trees, lack of government support, negative impact of climate change, price volatility and increase in production cost.



Request for TOC of this report : https://www.marketresearchreports.biz/reports/1654130/coffee-makers-report-by-company-market-research-reports/toc



Geographically, this report is segmented into several key regions, with sales, revenue, market share and growth Rate of Coffee Makers in these regions, from 2013 to 2025 (forecast), covering

North America (United States, Canada and Mexico)

Europe (Germany, UK, France, Italy, Russia and Turkey etc.)

Asia-Pacific (China, Japan, Korea, India, Australia and Southeast Asia (Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines, Malaysia and Vietnam))

South America (Brazil etc.)

Middle East and Africa (North Africa and GCC Countries)



The major companies in this report including

Keurig Green Mountain

Panasonic

Nestl Nespresso

Jarden

Delonghi

Electrolux

Melitta

Morphy Richards

Philips

Hamilton Beach

Illy

Bosch

Tsann Kuen

Krups

Jura

La Cimbali

Fashion

Zojirushi

Bear

Schaerer



By the product type, the market is primarily split into

Drip Coffee Makers

Steam Coffee Makers

Capsule Coffee Makers

Others



By the end users/application, this report covers the following segments

Commercial Coffee Makers

Office Coffee Makers

Household Coffee Makers

Others



Table of Contents



1 Coffee Makers Market Overview

1.1 Coffee Makers Product Overview

1.2 Coffee Makers Market Segment by Type

1.2.1 Drip Coffee Makers

1.2.2 Steam Coffee Makers

1.2.3 Capsule Coffee Makers

1.2.4 Others

1.3 Global Coffee Makers Market Size by Type

1.3.1 Global Coffee Makers Sales and Growth by Type

1.3.2 Global Coffee Makers Sales and Market Share by Type (2013-2018)

1.3.3 Global Coffee Makers Revenue and Market Share by Type (2013-2018)

1.3.4 Global Coffee Makers Price by Type (2013-2018)

1.4 North America Coffee Makers by Type

1.5 Europe Coffee Makers by Type

1.6 Asia-Pacific Coffee Makers by Type

1.7 South America Coffee Makers by Type

1.8 Middle East and Africa Coffee Makers by Type



2 Global Coffee Makers Market Competition by Company

2.1 Global Coffee Makers Sales and Market Share by Company (2013-2018)

2.2 Global Coffee Makers Revenue and Share by Company (2013-2018)

2.3 Global Coffee Makers Price by Company (2013-2018)

2.4 Global Top Players Coffee Makers Manufacturing Base Distribution, Sales Area, Product Types

2.5 Coffee Makers Market Competitive Situation and Trends

2.5.1 Coffee Makers Market Concentration Rate

2.5.2 Global Coffee Makers Market Share of Top 5 and Top 10 Players

2.5.3 Mergers & Acquisitions, Expansion



3 Coffee Makers Company Profiles and Sales Data

3.1 Keurig Green Mountain

3.1.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base and Competitors

3.1.2 Coffee Makers Product Category, Application and Specification

3.1.3 Keurig Green Mountain Coffee Makers Sales, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin(2013-2018)

3.1.4 Main Business Overview

3.2 Panasonic

3.2.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base and Competitors

3.2.2 Coffee Makers Product Category, Application and Specification

3.2.3 Panasonic Coffee Makers Sales, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin(2013-2018)

3.2.4 Main Business Overview

3.3 Nestl Nespresso

3.3.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base and Competitors

3.3.2 Coffee Makers Product Category, Application and Specification

3.3.3 Nestl Nespresso Coffee Makers Sales, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin(2013-2018)

3.3.4 Main Business Overview

3.4 Jarden

3.4.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base and Competitors

3.4.2 Coffee Makers Product Category, Application and Specification

3.4.3 Jarden Coffee Makers Sales, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin(2013-2018)

3.4.4 Main Business Overview

3.5 Delonghi

3.5.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base and Competitors

3.5.2 Coffee Makers Product Category, Application and Specification

3.5.3 Delonghi Coffee Makers Sales, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin(2013-2018)

3.5.4 Main Business Overview

3.6 Electrolux

3.6.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base and Competitors

3.6.2 Coffee Makers Product Category, Application and Specification

3.6.3 Electrolux Coffee Makers Sales, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin(2013-2018)

3.6.4 Main Business Overview

3.7 Melitta

3.7.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base and Competitors

3.7.2 Coffee Makers Product Category, Application and Specification

3.7.3 Melitta Coffee Makers Sales, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin(2013-2018)

3.7.4 Main Business Overview

3.8 Morphy Richards

3.8.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base and Competitors

3.8.2 Coffee Makers Product Category, Application and Specification

3.8.3 Morphy Richards Coffee Makers Sales, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin(2013-2018)

3.8.4 Main Business Overview

3.9 Philips

3.9.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base and Competitors

3.9.2 Coffee Makers Product Category, Application and Specification

3.9.3 Philips Coffee Makers Sales, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin(2013-2018)

3.9.4 Main Business Overview

3.10 Hamilton Beach

3.10.1 Company Basic Information, Manufacturing Base and Competitors

3.10.2 Coffee Makers Product Category, Application and Specification

3.10.3 Hamilton Beach Coffee Makers Sales, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin(2013-2018)

3.10.4 Main Business Overview

3.11 Illy

3.12 Bosch

3.13 Tsann Kuen

3.14 Krups

3.15 Jura

3.16 La Cimbali

3.17 Fashion

3.18 Zojirushi

3.19 Bear

3.20 Schaerer



4 Coffee Makers Market Status and Outlook by Regions

4.1 Global Market Status and Outlook by Regions

4.1.1 Global Coffee Makers Market Size and CAGR by Regions

4.1.2 North America

4.1.3 Asia-Pacific

4.1.4 Europe

4.1.5 South America

4.1.6 Middle East and Africa

4.2 Global Coffee Makers Sales and Revenue by Regions

4.2.1 Global Coffee Makers Sales and Market Share by Regions (2013-2018)

4.2.2 Global Coffee Makers Revenue and Market Share by Regions (2013-2018)

4.2.3 Global Coffee Makers Sales, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin (2013-2018)

4.3 North America Coffee Makers Sales, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin

4.3.1 United States

4.3.2 Canada

4.3.3 Mexico

4.4 Europe Coffee Makers Sales, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin

4.4.1 Germany

4.4.2 UK

4.4.3 France

4.4.4 Italy

4.4.5 Russia

4.4.6 Turkey

4.5 Asia-Pacific Coffee Makers Sales, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin

4.5.1 China

4.5.2 Japan

4.5.3 Korea

4.5.4 Southeast Asia

4.5.4.1 Indonesia

4.5.4.2 Thailand

4.5.4.3 Malaysia

4.5.4.4 Philippines

4.5.4.5 Vietnam

4.5.5 India

4.5.6 Australia

4.6 South America Coffee Makers Sales, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin

4.6.1 Brazil

4.7 Middle East and Africa Coffee Makers Sales, Revenue, Price and Gross Margin

4.7.1 North Africa

4.7.2 GCC Countries



5 Coffee Makers Application/End Users

5.1 Coffee Makers Segment by Application

5.1.1 Commercial Coffee Makers

5.1.2 Office Coffee Makers

5.1.3 Household Coffee Makers

5.1.4 Others

5.2 Global Coffee Makers Product Segment by Application

5.2.1 Global Coffee Makers Sales by Application

5.2.2 Global Coffee Makers Sales and Market Share by Application (2013-2018)

5.3 North America Coffee Makers by Application

5.4 Europe Coffee Makers by Application

5.5 Asia-Pacific Coffee Makers by Application

5.6 South America Coffee Makers by Application

5.7 Middle East and Africa Coffee Makers by Application



Get more information, click here: https://www.marketresearchreports.biz/sample/enquiry/1654130An international team of scientists has sequenced the genomes of five Neanderthals who lived around 47,000 to 39,000 years ago (that is, late Neanderthals), and found that these individuals are all more closely related to the Neanderthals who contributed DNA to early modern humans than an approximately 120,000-year-old Neanderthal from Siberia (Altai Neanderthal).

Scientists ability to retrieve DNA from a larger number of Neanderthals is still limited by poor preservation of endogenous DNA and contamination of Neanderthal skeletal remains.

Since 2010 whole genome sequences have been generated for four Neanderthal individuals from Croatia, Siberia and the Caucasus.

New methods for the removal of contaminating DNA from microbes and modern humans have now enabled researchers to sequence the genomes of five late Neanderthals.

Our work demonstrates that the generation of genome sequences from a large number of archaic human individuals is now technically feasible, and opens the possibility to study Neanderthal populations across their temporal and geographical range, said senior co-author Dr. Janet Kelso, from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.

For the study, Dr. Kelso and colleagues extracted DNA from Neanderthal specimens excavated from the Troisieme caverne of Goyet (the specimen was dated to 43,000-42,080 years ago) and from Spy cave (39,150-37,880 years ago), both in Belgium, from Les Cottes cave in France (43,740-42,720 years ago), from Vindija cave in Croatia (more than 44,000 years ago), and from an archaeological site in the Caucasus (44,600-42,960 years ago).

We see that the genetic similarity between these Neanderthals is well-correlated with their geographical location, said study first author Dr. Mateja Hajdinjak, also from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

By comparing these genomes to the genome of an older Neanderthal from the Caucasus we show that Neanderthal populations seem to have moved and replaced each other towards the end of their history.

The researchers also compared the new Neanderthal genomes to the genomes of people living today, and showed that all of the late Neanderthals were more similar to the Neanderthals who contributed DNA to present-day people living outside Africa than a much older Altai Neanderthal.

We find that the bulk of Neanderthal gene flow into early modern humans originated from one or more source populations that diverged from the Neanderthals that were studied here at least 70,000 years ago, but after they split from a previously sequenced Altai Neanderthal around 150,000 years ago, they explained.

Intriguingly, even though four of the Neanderthals lived at the time when modern humans had already arrived in Europe they do not carry detectable amounts of modern human DNA.

Although four of the Neanderthals studied here post-date the putative arrival of early modern humans into Europe, we do not detect any recent gene flow from early modern humans in their ancestry, the scientists said.

It may be that gene flow was mostly unidirectional, from Neanderthals into modern humans, said senior co-author Dr. Svante Paabo, Director of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.

The teams results are published in the journal Nature.

_____

Mateja Hajdinjak et al. Reconstructing the genetic history of late Neanderthals. Nature, published online March 21, 2018; doi: 10.1038/nature26151Vietnam has experienced noteworthy economic growth since the major economic reforms of 1986. The country is projected to be one of the fastest growing economies in the next few decades. Its principal exports are crude oil, textiles and garments, fisheries products and electronics, while the countrys principal imports are machinery, refined petroleum, steel, material for the textile industry and agricultural products.

Vietnam imports most of its domestic consumption of wheat, cotton, wood, cattle and dairy products. Investment in transport infrastructure is set to increase from $7bn to $120bn by 2020, with plans to upgrade existing airports, build new international standard airports and develop metro operations in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City.

Despite Vietnams growth, some ports suffer from poor infrastructure, which, among other issues, can render a ships stay in Vietnam difficult. Problems usually arise due to the lack or limited amount of storage for cargo. This leads to cargo being immediately trucked or barged to its final destination and may result in further damage or shortages being claimed for, if draft surveys are conducted and reliance is placed on grab scales or shore weigh-bridge.

While all ports in Vietnam are hot spots for cargo claims and threats of ship arrests, there are ports where problems arise more frequently than others. The two most prominent ports that stand out are Phu My (Cai Mep) in the South and Cai Lan in the North. The frequency of claims in Cai Lan is generally greater, since this port is often the second or final discharge port in a voyage. It is common practice for shortages found at preceding ports to be reported to the cargo underwriters and receivers at the port of Cai Lan.

Paper shortages are customary, with receivers surveyors manipulating draft readings to claim for larger shortages than in reality. When trying to resolve such discrepancies, the receivers surveyors usually leave the vessel and do not return. Another tactic often seen in Vietnam is that receivers surveyors insist that the master signs their draft survey records without remark, threatening to delay discharge if the master refuses to do so.

Like in many other difficult jurisdictions, appointing a surveyor to protect a ships interests may not guarantee the avoidance of a paper claim. However, these preventative measures do go some way in minimising the carriers exposure. Appointing surveyors on a precautionary basis arms us with counter arguments that assist the vessels interests. Without any independent reports, carriers would be left with no real room to negotiate a claim.

Negotiations will vary on a case-to-case basis and the on the spot handling of a cargo claim, whether paper or real, will largely depend on the receiver, with some parties underwriters opting for immediate arrest and others opting for more amicable requests for security after the vessel has already sailed. Local courts readily comply with arrest orders when these are requested and are quite flexible in demanding and agreeing on the appropriate documents proving a claim, ie scanned copies of bills of lading, not always including reverse endorsed backsides where appropriate, are generally accepted.

Courts have the authority to act and issue such an arrest as an action in rem, irrespective of the governing jurisdiction. While approved local insurers accept LOUs, acceptance of such security is at the discretion of the claimant. If this is refused and one applies to the courts to have them accept security, this can only be accepted by the courts if the claimants advise they themselves are in agreement, otherwise such security is routinely rejected.

If a bank guarantee is agreed, there are additional problems that ensue over wording. Banks demand closed wording, ie a time limit of one year  renewable whereas claimants and the courts will insist on no such time limit or on open-ended guarantees. While any arrest can be appealed, this usually has to be done within 48 hours of it having been received by the master. It is therefore difficult to have such an appeal heard within this time frame but it can be done, if correspondents and lawyers are alerted early enough. This does not mean the claim goes away but it gives a more level playing field during negotiations.

As a consequence, in practice most claims are dealt with straightaway. Claimants who arrest a vessel - usually on a Friday afternoon to exercise maximum pressure for a fast settlement - often issue release papers at the same time, with a view to submit these papers to port authorities even during the weekend. This means that an arrest on a Friday afternoon will not necessarily translate into the ship remaining in the port until Monday morning, awaiting Courts opening. The only way that claimants will agree to release a ship is if they receive a promise to pay from the local correspondents on behalf of the owner and the association.Press Release

March 21, 2018 Privilege Speech of Senator Trillanes re PRRD's withdrawal from the ICC Thank you, Mr. President. I stand on a matter of personal and collective privilege to question the withdrawal of Mr. Duterte as a member of the International Criminal Court or the Rome Statute. Mr. President, I question the validity of such a unilateral declaration because, I have with me here, Executive Order 459 which was signed in 1998 by Former President Fidel Valdez Ramos, dated January 9, 1998. And, according to this Executive Order, in Section 6, entry into force and provisional application of treaties and executive agreements, and I quote, in Paragraph A: "A. A treaty or an executive agreement enters into force upon compliance with the domestic requirements stated in this order. B. No treaty or executive agreement shall be given provisional effect unless it is shown that a pressing national interest will be upheld thereby. The Department of Foreign Affairs, in consultation with the concerned agencies, shall determine whether a treaty or an executive agreement, or any amendment thereto, shall be given provisional effect." In Section 7, Domestic Requirements for the Entry into Force of a Treaty or an Executive Agreement. - The domestic requirements for the entry into force of a treaty or an executive agreement, or any amendment thereto, shall be as follows: A. Executive Agreements. 1. All executive agreements shall be transmitted to the Department of Foreign Affairs after their signing for the preparation of the ratification papers. The transmittal shall include the highlights of the agreements and the benefits which will accrue to the Philippines arising from them. 2. The Department of Foreign Affairs, pursuant to the endorsement by the concerned agency, shall transmit the agreements to the President of the Philippines for his ratification. The original signed instrument of ratification shall then be returned to the Department of Foreign Affairs for appropriate action. B. Treaties. 1. All treaties, regardless of their designation, shall comply with the requirements provided in Subparagraphs 1 and 2, which I have just read, of Paragraph A or Executive Agreements of this Section. In addition, the Department of Foreign Affairs shall submit the treaties to the Senate of the Philippines for concurrence in the ratification by the President. A certified true copy of the treaties, in such numbers as may be required by the Senate, together with a certified true copy of the ratification instrument, shall accompany the submission of the treaties to the Senate. 2. Upon receipt of the concurrence by the Senate, the Department of Foreign Affairs shall comply with the provision of the treaties in effecting their entry into force." Mr. President, let me just put on record that nothing in this Executive Order showed that there is a need for the treaty to be publicized in the Official Gazette. Aside from that, Mr. President, I would like to manifest that, for as long as the senators or two-thirds of the total number of senators, have not concurred with the withdrawal of Mr. Duterte from the ICC is void from the start. Maraming salamat, Mr. President.Press Release

March 22, 2018 Sen. Bam: Balik-Scientist Act one signature away from becoming law, to boost country's R&D Senator Bam Aquino expects the country's research and development to get a much-needed boost, now that the Balik-Scientist Act is one signature away from becoming a law. "This is our way of supporting the field of research, science and technology in the country, which has been undervalued for too long. We hope the President can sign this into law and show his support and appreciation for Filipino scientists," said Sen. Bam, chairman of the Committee on Science and Technology. The Senate and House both ratified the bicameral conference committee version, which will now be transmitted to Malacanang for President Duterte's signature. Once it becomes a law, Sen. Bam said it will help address the country's lack of scientists. As of last tally, the country has 189 scientists per million, a far cry from the ideal ratio of 380 scientists per million. Sen. Bam pointed out that the Philippines falls behind South Korea and United States, which have 5,300 and 3,500 scientists per million, respectively. Malaysia, for its part, has 2,000 scientists per million. "With the Balik-Scientist Act, we expect Filipino scientists to return to the Philippines and help strengthen our research and development," said Sen. Bam, the principal sponsor of the measure in the Senate. If enacted into law, the Balik Scientist Act will provide overseas Filipino scientists with financial benefits and incentives to encourage them to return to the Philippines and help boost the country's research and development. Sen. Bam is also the principal sponsor and co-author of the Amendments to the Magna Carta for Scientists, Engineers, and Researchers bill and the Innovative Start-up Act, which is currently being tackled in the plenary. Sen. Bam has passed 19 laws in over 4 years as a senator.Press Release

March 22, 2018 De Lima pushes to raise penalty for crimes vs lawyers Opposition Senator Leila M. de Lima has filed a measure seeking to protect the members of the legal profession and the justice sector officials by increasing penalty against crimes committed against them. De Lima filed Senate Bill No. (SBN) 1721 amending Article 14 of the Revised Penal Code, adding as an aggravating circumstance the crime committed against lawyers and justice sector officials. "The courts and the lawyers are the ones tasked to ensure that justice is done. In the process, they place themselves in harm's way against people who mean to subvert justice," she said. In filing the proposed measure, De Lima highlighted the recent spate of killings against members of the legal profession as she cited particular cases involving the killings of lawyers who were handling high-profile cases. Among these were the killings of Atty. Jonah John Ungab after attending hearings at the Cebu City Hall of Justice, including the case of his client, self-confessed drug lord Kerwin Espinosa Jr., last Feb. 19 and Atty. Rogelio Bato, lawyer of Mayor Rolando Espinosa and Espinosa Jr., during an ambush in Albuera, Leyte in August 2016. "The spate of killings against members of the legal profession should call our government to action to send a clear message against offenders who specifically target lawyers and court officials," she explained. As such, De Lima proposed under Section 1, Article 14 of the RPC that "the crime [c]ommitted against the person or property of lawyers and justice sector officials, in fulfillment of their duty or in their lawful exercise of a right or office" should be considered as aggravating circumstances. De Lima, a lawyer by profession, pointed out that the attacks against lawyers and justice sector officials are obvious attacks against the legal profession and the judicial system. "Attacks against legal professionals, as in the case of human defenders, journalists and activists, continue to be common practice because suspects are rarely caught," she said, noting that various human rights groups and lawyer organizations have raised alarm against harassment and murder against their colleagues. "There is a clear need to amend existing law to establish a clear government policy to protect our justice system and the persons tasked to administer justice," she added. According to a report from Alternative Law Journal, 114 legal professionals were killed between January 1, 1999 and October 2014 - four of which were judges while eight were prosecutors, and the rest were lawyers.Press Release

March 22, 2018 Senate committee OK's anti-political dynasty bill, majority of Senators signs committee report A majority of senators on Wednesday evening signed the consolidated bill banning political dynasties. Senate Bill No. 1765 or the Anti-Political Dynasty Act of 2018 defines political dynasty as the "concentration, consolidation, and/or perpetuation of public office and political powers by persons related to one another within the second degree of consanguinity or affinity." This covers spouses (legal and common-law), siblings (full or half-blood), parents, and children (legitimate, illegitimate, and adopted) and the spouses of these second-degree relatives. The measure was signed by Senate Minority Leader Franklin Drilon, Senators Risa Hontiveros, Loren Legarda, Panfilo "Ping" Lacson, Grace Poe, Joseph Victor "JV" Ejercito, Paolo Benigno "Bam" Aquino IV, Nancy Binay, Sonny Angara, Ralph Recto, Leila de Lima, Sherwin "Win" Gatchalian, and Francis "Kiko" Pangilinan. (Please refer to the attached signed SBN 1765, with the senators' comments.) SBN 1765, under Committee Report No. 367 of the Committee on Electoral Reforms and People's Participation, said any person with political dynasty relationship with any incumbent elective official shall not be allowed to run for or hold public office under the following circumstances: to immediately succeed or replace the said incumbent;

if the incumbent is an elective barangay official, the spouse and the above relatives are prohibited to run simultaneously for any position in the same barangay as well as in the barangays in municipalities or cities within the same legislative district;

if the incumbent is an elective official of the municipality or city, legislative district or province, the spouse and above relatives are prohibited to run for or hold any elective office simultaneously with the incumbent within the same barangay, municipality, city, legislative district or province;

if the incumbent is a national elective official, the spouse and the above relatives are likewise prohibited to run simultaneously for any position in the national or local level as barangay captain, mayor, governor or district representative in any part of the country; and,

if the incumbent is a barangay captain/mayor/governor or district representative, the spouse and the above relatives are also prohibited to run simultaneously for any position in the national level. Persons who are not holding any public office shall also be prohibited from running in the same election if their election will result in a political dynasty relationship. Under the bill, the Commission on Elections may deny the application for certificate of candidacy on any candidate found in a political dynasty relationship. Pangilinan and De Lima each conducted a hearing on political dynasties and drafted the report. Pangilinan is chairperson of the Senate Committee on Constitutional Amendments and Revision of Codes and vice chairperson of the Senate Committee on Electoral Reforms and People's Participation, while De Lima is chairperson of the Senate Committee on Electoral Reforms and People's Participation. In a hearing last February 15, resource persons from the academe enumerated the reasons for the need to ban political dynasties: 1. The Constitution bans political dynasties. Congress needs only to define it. 2. Political dynasties are killing democracy. 3. Political dynasties cause poverty and inequality. 4. Political dynasties destroy fairness. 5. Political dynasties don't allow others to serve as the way of picking leaders is biased toward political dynasties. Younger, more able leaders are kept from joining politics due to political dynasties. 6. People can't exercise control over the elected. 7. Elections dominated by fat dynasties are abusive (not democratic/dictatorial).Speech

March 22, 2018 Transcript of Speech from the Office of the Senate President Aquilino "Koko" Pimentel III Co-Sponsorship Speech on

PSRN 676: Resolution Expressing the Sense of the Senate that the Deployment of Overseas Filipino Household Service Workers to Countries that Do Not Afford Migrants the Same Rights and Work Conditions as Their Nationals and Allow the Withholding of Philippine Passports Be Totally Banned 21 March 2018 MR. PRESIDENT AND MY ESTEEMED COLLEAGUES IN THE SENATE, HONORED GUESTS, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, MAGANDANG HAPON PO SA INYONG LAHAT. I stand before you to speak on a matter that strikes close to the heart of every Filipino, from the members of the Senate and other high officials in government to Filipino workers here in our country and all over the world. On August 19, 2016, Irma Avila Edloy died in a Saudi hospital after being rushed there six days prior. Before she fell into a comma, she pointed to her employer when a nurse asked her who has maltreated her. Apart from the lacerations on her private parts, discovered upon initial examination, the hospital report recited the end results of the suffering she had endured. At the time of her death, her lungs were inflamed. Her kidneys were no longer working, she had blood in her urine and there was increased intra-cranial pressure inside her skull due to head trauma. Almost two years later, our country was rocked by the chilling fate of Joanna Daniela Demafelis, another household service worker in Kuwait. Her body was found in her employer's freezer almost two years after she last spoke to her family. Her body bore signs of torture and indications that she had been strangled to death. The discovery of her murder prompted President Rodrigo Roa Duterte to order a deployment ban to Kuwait for all Overseas Filipino Workers, or OFWs. Just days after news of Joanna's discovery broke, Josie Lloren died two weeks after returning home to the Philippines from Kuwait. Josie had told her sister, that she was being maltreated by her employer's wife and needed to find another job. She returned to the Philippines gravely ill, and was rushed to a hospital where she died from a stroke. We can only imagine the full extent of the horrors that these Filipinos endured at the hands of people who imagined them as property and not as human beings. These Filipinos risked their lives for their families, and encountered only tragedy. These are not isolated cases. The Philippine Embassy in Kuwait receives hundreds of complaints and shelters hundreds of Filipino workers, most of them women. There are some stories of older injustices. In 2014, Lourdes Hingco Abejuela, was mauled to death by her employer's illegally-kept lions. Sheryl Cabrera Javillano fell to her death trying to escape her employer in 2013. Her employer did not even report what took place and Filipino authorities only learned of her death almost a month after the fact. In a rare case decided in February 2012, a Kuwaiti woman was convicted for the murder of a Filipina maid--whose name was not disclosed in the official report. The employer regularly tortured her maid before taking the unconscious Filipina out into the desert and driving over her with her car until our kababayan died. These are but a handful of the experiences of our OFWs in countries that do not accord migrant workers the same rights and working conditions as their own nationals. In these places it is often the practice that employers are permitted to withhold the passports of their foreign staff because foreign staff need to be sponsored by an employer to work in their country, these employers see their foreign staff as acquisitions, as property, functionally, as slaves. This must end. It is a fact that many Filipinos are constrained to seek employment abroad in the hopes of bettering their circumstances, or at least affording their families basic sustenance. Until our country is better able to provide for all Filipinos so that no Filipino will feel the need to leave home, we will not be able to stop our kababayans from seeking employment elsewhere. However, we can--and we should--limit the places where they seek employment in to only those countries that provide Filipino workers the same rights and protections given to nationals of that country. Filipino workers should not be allowed to work in countries that do not recognize that migrants have the same rights as their own citizens, and/or that allow passports of migrant workers to be confiscated by their employers. It is for this purpose that senators have crossed party lines to file Proposed Senate Joint Resolution No. 676 entitled Resolution Expressing the Sense of the Senate that the Deployment of Overseas Filipino Household Service Workers to Countries that Do Not Afford Migrants the Same Rights and Work Conditions as Their Nationals and Allow the Withholding of Philippine Passports Be Totally Banned. I have the honor of sponsoring this Resolution with Senators Emmanuel Pacquiao and Antonio Trillanes IV. This resolution applies only to OFWs who work in households as domestic help. Filipino workers in households are more vulnerable to abuse, as their place of work is shielded from public view. I now ask for the support of my other esteemed colleagues. Let us put an end to the practice of allowing our citizens to fall into the hands of cruel people who make no distinction between slaves and staff. The Filipino is not a slave. Our forefathers shed blood so that the Filipino may never again be enslaved by foreigners. Let us not forget their sacrifices. Let us protect our citizens the best way we can. Let us pass this resolution now, or at the soonest possible time, before time runs out for the other Filipino workers in similar situations. And hope that the Executive Branch heeds our call. Maraming salamat poMembers of Zennea Technologies, a Simon Fraser University student venture, will be the first entrepreneurship co-op (eCo-op) students from SFU to cross international waters, joining the HAX accelerator program  the worlds first and largest hardware accelerator.

The team is one of 15 companies in the latest cohort intake to relocate to Shenzhen, China, considered the Silicon Valley for developing hardware.

We are thrilled for the opportunity to join this year's HAX cohort, said Rachel Chase, co-CEO of Zennea Technologies. HAX will really help us to achieve our goal of hosting a soft launch of our device, ZENS, this summer; allowing people to try the product and experience a great night sleep. This is going to be an amazing personal and professional opportunity, taking our business to a global scale and helping people around the world.

Zennea is a student venture that works out of the Coast Capital Savings Venture Connection incubator program at the SFU Surrey campus. They are developing a portable sleep wearable device to support individuals suffering from sleep apnea. The discreet, battery-operated device aims to reduce snoring and provide insight into ones sleep quality.

The HAX accelerator program helps startups scale their business by offering seed capital, in-house manufacturing and engineering expertise, access to mentors, and investor pitch training. By providing an environment of comprehensive support, ventures are able to fast-track their product.

Getting the chance to build our own company and really help people with our device is already phenomenal, but getting the chance to do that in Shenzhen and San Francisco is a dream-come-true, said Ryan Threlfall, co-CEO of Zennea Technologies. This is truly a once in a lifetime opportunity and we plan to show gratitude to those who helped us get to this point by making the absolute most of the experience.

Zennea recently competed in SFUs largest entrepreneurship competition, the Coast Capital Savings Venture Prize and took home the Best Overall Venture Prize award, a cash and in-kind package valued at over $35,000.

The team is composed of mechatronic systems engineering and business students from Technology Entrepreneurship @SFU, which was founded with donations from SFU alumnus Ken Spencer and the BC Innovation Council. Three of its founders then proceeded to participate in the paid, team eCo-op program. This eCo-op program is the first of its kind in Canada, offering student teams the opportunity to earn salary and university credit while pursuing their entrepreneurship ventures full-time.

The funding for these team eCo-Ops was made possible through a donation made by SFU Beedie alumni Charles Chang as well as in part support from the Ministry of Advanced Education and the BC Innovation Council. In June of 2016 Chang announced $10 million towards the establishment of the Charles Chang Institute for Entrepreneurship, which provides funding for a number of initiatives at SFU that support entrepreneurship.

Sarah Lubik, SFUs director of entrepreneurship, expressed great pride in their accomplishments.

The Zennea team have been incredible examples of the creativity, determination, adaptability and interdisciplinary collaboration we are working to support and amplify at SFU," Lubik said. "They have been pioneers in the rapidly growing constellation of SFU entrepreneurship programs. We are so proud to be able to support them as they pioneer this new initiative and become, I suspect, the first of many entrepreneurial co-op teams to represent SFU ingenuity around the world."

After 111 days in China, Zennea will showcase their final product at a HAX launch event in San Francisco.

FAST FACTS:The contrast between Synlait Milk's record first-half profit and Fonterra Cooperative Group's interim loss suggest the world's largest dairy exporter hasn't just got trouble with Beingmate Baby & Child Food, but a long-running inability to move away from commodity production.

This week milk powder and infant formula maker Synlait Milk posted a first-half profit of $40.7 million, four times more than it earned a year earlier as sales jumped 50 percent to $439 million. And Synlait isnt the only NZ dairy company on a stellar track. Earlier this month, its key customer a2 Milk reported a 150 percent gain in first-half profit as sales surged 70 percent.

Fonterra posted a first-half loss of $348 million for the six months ended January 31, after writing down its 18.8 percent stake in Beingmate, its Chinese infant formula distributor, and paying $183 million in settlement to Danone over the 2013 whey protein contamination scare. But even before the one-time charges, Fonterras was a less than spectacular performance. Volumes fell 11 percent, margins contracted by 6 percent and earnings before interest and tax dropped by 25 percent.

Comparisons between Synlait/a2 Milk and Fonterra arent simple. Fonterra is a complex business. Its cooperative structure, its vertical integration, its sheer size in the market, the fact its reliant on not one but several commodity price structures, all come together to make the company, as Harbour Asset Management senior research analyst Oyvinn Rimer says, like a machine with a million moving parts.

But still, its a puzzle why Synlait and a2 Milk can deliver such strong financial results while Fonterra can't. After all, the weathers the same for everyones cows, they eat more or less the same stuff, and basic milk prices are the same.

So whats different?

There is one thing that stands out strongly from the two sets of financial results: value-added production. Making and selling innovative, higher-margin products.

It isn't a new idea at Fonterra - the company even has a name for its moving-up-the-value-chain strategy: V3 ("Driving more Volume into higher Value at Velocity"). As chief executive Theo Spierings said in 2017's full-year results presentation: "V3 is at the heart of our ambition and provides the foundation for us to fund and drive innovation and sustainable value creation." Fonterra's "V3 strength" had enabled the company to deliver "solid earnings in an environment of rapidly increasing milk prices", Spierings said.

That was last year. But search back through previous financial results and Fonterras performance appears disappointing when it comes to driving more volume into higher value, let alone with any velocity. The company has three different categories of sales which fall into the value added basket: "consumer" (branded products for households - Anchor butter, Anlene adult milk powder, Anmum baby formula etc); "food service" (specialist Anchor branded products for restaurants, hotels, cafes etc); and "advanced ingredients" (clever stuff like pharmaceutical ingredients and designer proteins).

Those three categories combined made up 43 percent of Fonterra's total volume in the latest half, up from 42 percent last year. Fonterra has changed the way it categorises its business units and only split out advanced ingredients as a separate item last year, making earlier comparisons tricky.

But consumer products made up 12 percent of Fonterra's sales in 2014 and that hasn't changed since. Fonterra argues that total volumes increased over that time, so even though the percentage hasn't increased, the amount of value added product has. Still, it seems Fonterra didnt manage to transform any of its commodity sales to consumer value added.

Even in the first half of this year, when Fonterras total milk volumes fell 11 percent, which should have given the company an opportunity to increase the proportion of value-added sales compared to the total, the percentage in the consumer category only rose fractionally - to 13 percent.

Meanwhile, in the "advanced ingredients" category, the percentage hasnt moved from 19 percent over the last two results, even with the lower overall volumes this year.

In food service, the company has managed an increase, with the percentage of sales creeping up every year from 6 percent in 2014 to 11 percent in 2018. The company announced last year that food service had reached $2 billion in revenue. At the time, chief operating officer Lukas Paravacini said that if the category was a standalone company, it would be New Zealand's sixth-largest export business.

Still, putting the higher value-added consumer and food service categories together, Fonterras financial performance was disappointing in the first-half result. Gross margin fell to 23.6 percent, with Fonterra attributing the decline to the impact of rising butter prices that deterred consumers. Normalised earnings (ebit) fell almost 40 percent, and the result was even worse in Asia.

In its presentations, Fonterra uses a wheel-like pie chart to illustrate the change from commodity dairy and base ingredients to value added. Marc Rivers, who started as CFO this month, says the wheel is turning, as the company moves more milk (measured in liquid milk equivalent, or LME), into consumer and food service.

Sometimes the wheel turns faster than other times. The reason we saw it slow down in the first half of this year is because our overall volumes were down 11 percent for the half year versus the same period last year. In consumer and foodservice we had another dynamic play out which was as customers responded to higher prices, especially for butter, we saw our product mix move away from butter towards cream which uses less LME.

Rivers says the company added an additional 380 million LME into consumer & foodservice in 2016, a further 576 million LME in 2017, "and this year were aiming to add another 400 million LME".

He puts a positive spin on the financial performance. We arent capturing as much margin as before, but its still incremental margin we are collecting, because otherwise, it would have been a bulk ingredient sale. In absolute terms, its incremental profit and value.

Surprisingly, given the problems with Beingmate, China is a high point in the Fonterra value-added picture for the first half of 2018, with volume in the consumer and foodservice segments up marginally and normalised ebit only fractionally down.

Analyst Oyvinn Rimer sees Fonterras food service business in China as the crown jewel in value-add. They are the number one player in China in that space with cream, butter, cheese and in quick service restaurants, like Starbucks and Domino Pizza, Rimer says. The Chinese dont eat much cheese/milk, but Fonterra had a head start in food service in hotels and big restaurant chains. That is a good business.

Still, Rimer says Fonterra is in the unenviable position of wanting to increase the amount of value-added products it sells, but being stymied by its cooperative structure when it wants to build the expensive plants that would be needed.

Building mega-factories and creating brands are very capital intensive and Fonterra cant finance it through debt like a normal business, he says. Another company might see an opportunity and raise capital for the project. But unless farmer shareholders choose to put millions of dollars into new plant and equipment, its hard for Fonterra to compete.

Its one of their major problems - having a limited way to supercharge their value business, he says.

Fonterra's Paravacini said last year that Fonterra has invested $850 million in new production capacity for foodservice since 2013 - $700 million of which has been in New Zealand. These include expansions at Waitoa for UHT creams, Eltham for slice-on-slice cheese, Clandeboye in Canterbury for extra stretch mozzarella, and Te Rapa (Waikato) and Darfield (Canterbury) for cream cheese.

Synlait is also investing in plant and equipment to turn milk into something more exciting. Over the past six months, investments have included an $11.2 million blending and canning facility, an $18.4 million wetmix kitchen, and an R&D centre in Palmerston North, chair Graeme Milne says.

And theres more to come. At Synlait Dunsandel we expect to spend $125 million on an advanced liquid dairy packaging facility and at Pokeno we will spend $260 million to establish our new nutritional powder manufacturing facility.

Synlait chief executive John Penno said research and development spending would rise from $4.75 million in the 2017 year to $7 million this year. The aim is to get it to 1.5 percent of revenue over the next few years, he says.

Perhaps tellingly, Fonterra doesnt talk about R&D spend in its results presentations and the company didnt come up with figures when asked. But an internet search found mention of an $80 million R&D budget in 2016 when the company made $17.2 billion in revenue. If that number is right, Fonterra is spending less than 0.5% of its revenue on research and development.

(BusinessDesk)

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Arts and humanities graduates are not an "endangered species" in the career corridors of the new automation age. The ability to think and reason out, communicate, persuade and feel and share is beyond the ken of robots and automatons. Automation in certain fields may lessen the burden of mechanical drudgery but machine brain and human brain are wired differently. Where the one, is equipped for precise, calculated, cold and structured actions, the other, uses rationale and emotional intelligence to guide its actions.

Technological inventions never fail to amaze. You are Gen z-ers if you were born after 1995 and you are all techno savvy- some more than others. It is necessary to remember that technological leaps need to be questioned and analysed at every stage to ensure the veracity of its claims and how it is going to affect our lives in the long run.

The immediate excitement with which we welcome a new and improved product or facility must not dull our sense of caution. Our smart phones are a definite boon you would say, because they are super efficient, time savers and bring the world to you at the click of a button. Now that they have been around for a while and we are becoming aware, uncomfortably so, that tech-boons can be health banes.

This is precisely where you Gen z-ers come in. It is the unenviable task of the present youth to make sure that the humans stay in control of things. Technology is a slave to our needs. It should not enslave us. Artificial Intelligence has made you conversant with perceptual information and virtual reality, but cannot possibly run the world. We need the creative power of art, design, music, literature and language skills to connect the diverse spaces in a manner both, stimulating and sustaining.

Communication skills

Our language skills and the ability to communicate thoughts, ideas and feelings are unique to humans. Yet, there is a sad lacking in these skills with the present generation because of the adeptness and comfort level they experience with the virtual world. Despite being part of various group chats, have plenty of far flung friends connected through social media platforms, but a face to face encounter would leave them tongue tied. The proximity and the reality of the encounter make most of them inhibited. Arts and Humanities allow one to understand ground realities, empathize and give care.

Education

Sharing knowledge and experience requires interpersonal skills, people management and a certain ability to convince, motivate and inspire. A teacher and a mentor have these skills. A robot is a long way from learning these skills. A robot would never make it through one day in a kindergarten classroom, so to speak. The mechanism would go haywire for sure, like Irma does in Richie Rich comics. Higher education may face some threat from massive open online courses (MOOCs). A virtual instructor may replace a physical one and technology has revolutionized learning online. But the fact remains that some kinds of learning cannot be done in isolation. We are social beings and we are part of a community, society, state, country, this world.

Social welfare work

Community projects are being built into online course curriculum to validate the point I have been making. As responsible citizens we have to contribute towards the betterment of our society. A student of sociology, Natural sciences, political science and economics is better suited to assess and address the problems at the grass root level. Empowering a community calls for leading by example, language skills for effective communication, creativity to use popular art forms to drive home a point, problem solving skills, empathy and above all, patience.

Creative economics

In the age of automation there is an increasing need for creative economics and analytical math and market skills, to put cold hard facts to good use. The ocean of data which is flooding the virtual floors and our minds has to be properly channelized before it can achieve its intended purpose. Gaming methods are widely prevalent to enthuse management trainees, in offices and even online to trigger thinking out of the box.

Design and Literature

Language and literature can never be tampered with by the automatons. A robot can play a role. But it is human hand that writes the script. Creative methods to map and represent poetry and travel writing are showcased in all the travel shows we have. So many creative heads are running innovative salons and role play events to encourage reading, writing and emoting in social media. As a writer, playwright, actor and Director, you are essentially engaging a large section of regional audience in cinemas, theatres and through books. Art and Literature will always be in demand.

Administration including Political governance

Being in office, governing, dealing with people and problems on a daily basis calls for highly honed interpersonal relations, technical competence and crisis management, lead with dynamism and ethical thinking. In fact ethics have made inroads into the internet arena. Ethical hacking is encouraged and certified because there is a keen sense of insecurity that we feel in this age and time with the virtual world entering every nook and cranny of our lives. The principle behind ethical hacking is a subtle art and best left to the Humans. High-touch skills such as sensibility and sensitivity are highly valued by today's best employers. These soft skills can never be outsourced or automated.

Robots have arrived. Humans created them. We are still in the drivers seat and the engineers and anthropologists have their roles to play to keep things this way.

Dr. Anupama Natarajan is the Principal of IFIM College, Bangalore. She has 16 years of experience in Teaching, Training, Academic Administration and Strategy Consulting.STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- Councilwoman Debi Rose is honoring four women Thursday at her annual Women in History celebration at Brighton Heights Reform Church.

Rose will present the Marjorie Garvin Community Service Award to education and civic advocate Helen Settles. The North Shore Councilwoman will also honor activist Rosemarie Mangano Cavanagh of Teamsters Locals 832 and 237; family and food advocate Zulma Cruz of Project Hospitality; and education and community advocate Nicole Meyers of Mothers Against Senseless Killings.

"There's no question that the last year has seen a tremendous rise in the number of women running for office and getting involved in their communities," Rose said. "From Women who March to #MeToo, we continue to take important steps forward, and I look forward to celebrating these steps with my fellow North Shore residents.

"I will also call attention to four incredible women who strengthen our communities today. I hope men and women from across the Island join me ... to reflect on our history and honor these special women," she said.

MALLIOTAKIS HONORED BY STATE CONSERVATIVES

New York's Conservative Party awarded Assemblywoman Nicole Malliotakis the "Profile in Courage Award" on March 19 at the 2018 Legislative Reception.

"Assemblywoman Malliotakis fearlessly challenged Mayor de Blasio and stood up for New Yorkers who have seen their property taxes grow, their subway system crumble and their tax dollars inappropriately spent," said Michael Long, chair of the Conservative Party. "She knew she faced an uphill battle in taking on a powerful incumbent, but nonetheless fought valiantly for what she and many New Yorkers believed in."

MAX ROSE RACKS UP THREE ENDORSEMENTS

Army veteran and Democratic congressional candidate Max Rose has racked up a string of endorsements from the Women's Equality Party, the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League (NARAL) and With Honor.

"There is no question that Max will be a champion for women's rights as a member of Congress and we are proud to endorse his campaign." said Susan Zimet, chair of the Women's Equality Party."

With Honor is a political group focused on increasing the number of veterans in Congress.

NARAL is a group that advocates for access to abortion care, birth control, paid parental leave, and protection against pregnancy discrimination.

DEVITO SIGNS PLEDGE

Michael DeVito, a marine veteran who works with Island youth and a Democratic congressional candidate recently became a "Candidate with a Contract" with the Citizen's Coalition for Democratization.

By signing the agreement, DeVito pledged, if elected, to: Overturn Citizen's United, enact public campaign financing, reform campaign finance laws, ban firms from hiring members of Congress for seven years, end gerrymandering, and tie congressional salaries to the national median income.STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. -- A Mariners Harbor man's dream of illegally enriching himself has gone up in smoke, prosecutors allege.

Zaheer Ahmad, 48, was busted Tuesday after investigators found about 850 cartons of untaxed cigarettes in his home on the 500 block of Lisk Avenue, said a criminal complaint.

All told, Ahmad had about 170,000 illegal cigarettes in his residence, said the complaint.

Cigarette packs in New York must be stamped showing the appropriate city and state taxes have been paid, said authorities.

The cigarettes found in Ahmad's home did not bear any such stamps, the complaint said.

The probe was a joint investigation between the Staten Island district attorney's office and the New York state Department of Taxation and Finance.

Ahmad was charged with two felony counts of possessing or transporting unstamped cigarettes and a misdemeanor count of possessing or selling unstamped cigarettes.

He was expected to be arraigned Wednesday in Criminal Court.China may target Trump-voting states in trade war



Beijing, March 22 (AFP) Mar 22, 2018



China could hit back hard at Donald Trump's new tariffs by targeting agricultural goods and other products from states that voted for the US president.

The world's second largest economy warned again on Thursday, hours before Trump's announcement, that it was ready to "take all necessary measures to resolutely defend its legitimate rights and interests".

Beijing has not specified what products would be hit, but a state-run newspaper has dropped some major hints.

Here are some potential targets:



Agriculture



The state-controlled Global Times newspaper encouraged China this week to impose "strong restrictive measures" against American soybeans.

It would be a major blow to US farmers, as a third of their soybean exports go to China, which totalled $14 billion last year.

The political stakes are high: Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in the 10 top soybean-producing states in the 2016 election.

In February, China's commerce ministry opened an anti-dumping investigation into sorghum imports from the United States. China imported $1 billion worth of the grain last year.

Kansas went heavily for Trump in 2016 and was by far the US's largest sorghum producer last year. The state's vast sorghum crop was followed in size by Texas, Colorado and Oklahoma.



Aeroplanes



Boeing sells a quarter of its production to China, which is the world's second largest aircraft market.

The US aerospace giant estimates that China will need more than 7,200 commercial airplanes in the next 20 years.

While Boeing and its European rival Airbus are currently equally sharing the Chinese market, the balance could easily tip against the US company.

"China could regulate the purchase volume of Airbus or Boeing aircraft," the Global Times suggested in a January editorial after the US imposed tariffs on solar panels.

Another Trump state, South Carolina, is home to a final assembly and delivery facility for Boeing's 787 Dreamliner.



Chemicals



Last month, China's commerce ministry said it had found dumping of styrene imports from the United States, Taiwan and South Korea, in an initial ruling during a continuing trade probe into the chemical.

Styrene is the building block of many plastics. It is used to make foam packaging and many disposable plastics.

Last year, China imported 3.2 million tonnes of the chemical worth more than $4 billion from the US.



Beef, cars, universities



The Global Times offered a wide-range of other options in its January editorial.

China could tighten its health and safety standards on US beef imports.

Noting that the country of 1.4 billion people is the world's biggest car market, the newspaper said: "If not for car buyers in China, US automobile sales would plummet."

The Global Times suggested that China could also restrict the number of Chinese students going to US universities.

"Chinese students have pumped billions into the US economy through tuition, fees, and housing. This revenue stream alone impacts many levels of US society, and China controls it," it wrote.

"Trump's determination to start a trade war is questionable since nothing good would come of a Pyrrhic victory for the White House."



Debt



China is the world's top holder of US debt with nearly $1.2 trillion in American bonds.

Bloomberg News reported in January that Chinese officials had recommended slowing or halting purchases of US Treasuries.

Asked whether China could hit back through its debt holdings, Premier Li Keqiang merely told a news conference on Tuesday that Beijing was "a responsible long-term investor" that has always diversified its reserves along market rules.

But playing with the US debt could backfire as it could lower the value of Beijing's own US bonds and dollar reserves.



Softer response



Despite the heated rhetoric, China could hold off on imposing severe counter-measures in the immediate term.

"While Beijing would clearly have options to retaliate, China realises that, with its exports to the US so much larger than its imports from the country, it is more vulnerable in a trade war," Louis Kuijs, head of Asia economics at Oxford Economics, wrote in a note in January.

If the US measures are manageable, Kuijs said he expected China's to take a "relatively restrained" response by issuing strong verbal protests or exerting pressure on US businesses in China in a "low-profile way" through inspections, tests and delays in procedures.

Such a cautious strategy would allow China "to keep 'the moral high ground' as a supporter of globalization," he wrote.By clicking Agree, you consent to Slates Terms of Service and Privacy Policy and the use of technologies such as cookies by Slate and our partners to deliver relevant advertising on our iOS app to personalize content and perform site analytics. Please see our Privacy Policy for more information about our use of data, your rights, and how to withdraw consent.

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Until this moment I have been forced to listen while media and politicians alike have told me "what Canadians think". In all that time they never once asked.

This is just the voice of an ordinary Canadian yelling back at the radio - "You don't speak for me."

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Pilgrim's Progress



Trump The Establishment

Dow Jones

What They Say About SDA

"Smalldeadanimals doesn't speak for the people of Saskatchewan" Former Sask Premier Lorne Calvert

"I got so much traffic after your post my web host asked me to buy a larger traffic allowance." Dr.Ross McKitrick

Holy hell, woman. When you send someone traffic, you send someone TRAFFIC. My hosting provider thought I was being DDoSed. - Sean McCormick

"The New York Times link to me yesterday [...] generated one-fifth of the traffic I normally get from a link from Small Dead Animals." Kathy Shaidle

"Thank you for your link. A wave of your Canadian readers came to my blog! Really impressive." Juan Giner - INNOVATION International Media Consulting Group

I got links from the Weekly Standard, Hot Air and Instapundit yesterday - but SDA was running at least equal to those in visitors clicking through to my blog. Jeff Dobbs

"You may be a nasty right winger, but you're not nasty all the time!" Warren Kinsella

"Go back to collecting your welfare livelihood."Michael E. Zilkowsky

Intelliweather

Seismic Map

Comments Policy

Read this

Best Of SDA

Hide The Decline

The Bottle Genie

(ClimateGate links)

You Might Be A Liberal

Uncrossing The Line

Bob Fife: Knuckledragger

A Modest Proposal (NP)

Settled Science Series

Y2Kyoto Series

SDA: Reader Occupation Survey

Brett Lamb Sheltered Workshop

Flakes On A Plane

All Your Weather Are Belong To Us

Song Of The Sled

The Raise A Flag Debacle

(Now on Youtube!)

(.mwv Video)

Abuse Ruins Life Of Girl

Trudeaupiate

Kleptocrat Jeans

Child Labour

I Concede

Small Dead Feminist

Protein Hoser: THK Interview

The Werewolf Extinction

Dear Laura (VRWC)

We Wait

Blogging The Oscars

Jackson Converts To Islam

Just Shut The HELL Up

Manipulating Condi

Gay Equality Rights

System error

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Can't call method "get_id" on an undefined value at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25. Trace begun at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Exceptions.pm line 129 HTML::Mason::Exceptions::rethrow_exception('Can\'t call method "get_id" on an undefined value at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25.^J') called at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/dhandler.html line 25 HTML::Mason::Commands::__ANON__ at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Component.pm line 160 HTML::Mason::Component::run_dynamic_sub('HTML::Mason::Component::FileBased=HASH(0x7f639ce72a98)', 'main') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 951 HTML::Mason::Request::call_dynamic('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x7f639cae46e8)', 'main') called at /var/cache/mason/obj/1784076917/main/smetimes/dhandler.html.obj line 17 HTML::Mason::Commands::__ANON__ at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Component.pm line 138 HTML::Mason::Component::run('HTML::Mason::Component::FileBased=HASH(0x7f639ce72a98)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1305 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1295 HTML::Mason::Request::comp(undef, undef, undef) called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 958 HTML::Mason::Request::call_next('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x7f639cae46e8)') called at /usr/local/bricolage/data/burn/stage/oc_1027/smetimes/autohandler_template.html line 149 HTML::Mason::Commands::__ANON__ at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Component.pm line 138 HTML::Mason::Component::run('HTML::Mason::Component::FileBased=HASH(0x7f639c705610)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1303 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 1295 HTML::Mason::Request::comp(undef, undef, undef) called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 484 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 484 eval {...} at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/Request.pm line 436 HTML::Mason::Request::exec('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x7f639cae46e8)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/ApacheHandler.pm line 165 HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler::exec('HTML::Mason::Request::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x7f639cae46e8)') called at /usr/share/perl5/HTML/Mason/ApacheHandler.pm line 831 HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler::handle_request('HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler=HASH(0x7f639c227a00)', 'Apache2::RequestRec=SCALAR(0x7f639ce76638)') called at (eval 487) line 8 HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler::handler('HTML::Mason::ApacheHandler', 'Apache2::RequestRec=SCALAR(0x7f639ce76638)') called at -e line 0 eval {...} at -e line 0PHILIPSBURG:--- On Wednesday, March 21st, 21 students from the Prince Willem Alexander School visited the Police Head Quarters in Philipsburg. At the police station, they were greeted by the Community Police Officers/ Inspectors Rensley Henson, Helen Romeo and Arcella Leonard. The children who were very enthusiastic asked many questions as they were given a grand tour of the police station and an explanation on what the police do on a daily basis. After the tour, the student posed for a quick group photo.

KPSM Press Release.PHILIPSBURG:--- Representatives of Algemeen Pensioenfonds Sint Maarten, APS, recently met with government formateur, MP Theodore Heyliger. During the discussions, held on Tuesday last, formateur Heyliger spoke of a number of local investments that play an important role in the socio-economic development of Sint Maarten. APS, as St. Maartens general pension fund administrator, is considered one such institution that also needed to be consulted in the process of formulating a governing program.

A variety of topics were discussed including ways the pension fund is already contributing to the countrys development as well as the positive spin-off effects on the local resulting from ongoing and future APS projects.

Heyliger and fellow parliament member Tamara Leonard spoke with members of the Board of APS, the Director and two managers of the fund. Also present was the Secretary of the Board.GREAT BAY (DCOMM):--- Water is an essential building block of life. It is more than just essential to quench thirst or protect health; water is vital for creating jobs and supporting economic, social, and human development.

Thursday, March 22 is World Water Day. The 2018 theme is Nature for Water. This years theme explores how we can use nature to overcome the water challenges of the 21st century.

Collective Prevention Services (CPS), a department within the Ministry of Public Health, Social Development and Labour (Ministry VSA), says international World Water Day is held annually 22 March as a means of focusing attention on the importance of freshwater and advocating for the sustainable management of freshwater resources.

An international day to celebrate freshwater was recommended at the 1992 United Nations (UN) Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro. The United Nations General Assembly responded by designating 22 March 1993 as the first World Water Day.

Safe water supplies, hygienic sanitation, and good water management are fundamental to global health, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). Almost one-tenth of the global disease burden could be prevented by increasing access to safe drinking water; improving sanitation and hygiene; and improving water management to reduce risks of water-borne infectious diseases, and accidental drowning during recreation.

Annually, the WHO points out, safer water could prevent: 1.4 million child deaths from diarrhea; 500 000 deaths from malaria;

860 000 child deaths from malnutrition; and 280 000 deaths from drowning.

In addition, five million people can be protected from being seriously incapacitated from lymphatic filariasis and another five million from trachoma.

According to the UN, today, there are over 663 million people living without a safe water supply close to home, spending countless hours queuing or trekking to distant sources, and coping with the health impacts of using contaminated water.

Environmental damage, together with climate change, is driving the water-related crises we see around the world. Floods, drought and water pollution are all made worse by degraded vegetation, soil, rivers, and lakes.

The UN says, when we neglect our ecosystems, we make it harder to provide everyone with the water we need to survive and thrive.

Nature-based solutions have the potential to solve many of our water challenges. We need to do so much more with green infrastructure and harmonize it with grey infrastructure wherever possible. Planting new forests, reconnecting rivers to floodplains, and restoring wetlands will rebalance the water cycle and improve human health and livelihoods.

UN-Water says globally, over 80% of the wastewater generated by society flows back into the ecosystem without being treated or reused (Sato et al, 2013).

1.8 billion people use a source of drinking water contaminated with feces, putting them at risk of contracting cholera, dysentery, typhoid, and polio. Unsafe water, poor sanitation and hygiene cause around 842,000 deaths each year (WHO/UNICEF 2014/WHO 2014), according to UN-Water.

The opportunities from exploiting wastewater as a resource are enormous. Safely managed wastewater is an affordable and sustainable source of water, energy, nutrients and other recoverable materials, UN-Water points out.

For more information call CPS at 542-1122, 542-1222, 542-1322 or 542-1570.PHILIPSBURG:--- The House of Parliament will sit in a plenary public meeting on Friday, March 23, 2018.

The plenary public meeting is scheduled for 11.00 hrs in the General Assembly Chamber of the House at Wilhelminastraat #1 in Philipsburg.

The agenda points are:

1. Incoming documents.

2. Approval Decision Lists Public meetings Parliamentary Year 2017-2018 no. 8, 13, 14, 15 and 16.

3. Examination of credentials and admission of Members of Parliament.

Members of the public are invited to the House of Parliament to attend parliamentary deliberations.

The House of Parliament is located across from the Court House in Philipsburg.

The parliamentary session will be carried live on St. Maarten Cable TV Channel 120, via Pearl Radio FM 98.1, SXMGOV Radio 107.9 FM, video live stream via the internet www.pearlfmradio.sx, www.sxmparliament.org and also Parliament FB page: Parliament of Sint Maarten.Solar Novus Today Has Been Integrated

With Novus Light Technologies Today

Visit Novus Light Technologies Today to see all the cutting-edge stories and products that you have come to enjoy on Solar Novus Today. In addition, you will find more information on related light-based technologies.



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World clean energy investment totalled $333.5 billion last year, up 3% from 2016 and the second highest annual figure ever, taking cumulative investment since 2010 to $2.5 trillion.

An extraordinary boom in photovoltaic installations made 2017 a record year for Chinas investment in clean energy. This over-shadowed changes elsewhere, including jumps in investment in Australia and Mexico, and declines in Japan, the U.K. and Germany.

Annual figures from Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF), based on its world-leading database of projects and deals, show that global investment in renewable energy and energy-smart technologies reached $333.5 billion last year, up 3% from a revised $324.6 billion in 2016, and only 7% short of the record figure of $360.3 billion, reached in 2015.

Jon Moore, chief executive of BNEF, commented: The 2017 total is all the more remarkable when you consider that capital costs for the leading technology  solar  continue to fall sharply. Typical utility-scale PV systems were about 25% cheaper per megawatt last year than they were two years earlier.

Solar investment globally amounted to $160.8 billion in 2017, up 18% on the previous year despite these cost reductions. Just over half of that world total, or $86.5 billion, was spent in China. This was 58% higher than in 2016, with an estimated 53GW of PV capacity installed  up from 30GW in 2016.

Justin Wu, head of Asia-Pacific for BNEF, said: China installed about 20GW more solar capacity in 2017 than we forecast. This happened for two main reasons: first, despite a growing subsidy burden and worsening power curtailment, Chinas regulators, under pressure from the industry, were slow to curb build of utility-scale projects outside allocated government quotas. Developers of these projects are assuming they will be allocated subsidy in future years.

Second, the cost of solar continues to fall in China, and more projects are being deployed on rooftops, in industrial parks or at other distributed locales. These systems are not limited by the government quota. Large energy consumers in China are now installing solar panels to meet their own demand, with a minimal premium subsidy.

Investment by country

Overall, Chinese investment in all the clean energy technologies was $132.6 billion, up 24% setting a new record. The next biggest investing country was the U.S., at $56.9 billion, up 1% on 2016 despite the less friendly tone towards renewables adopted by the Trump administration.

Large wind and solar project financings pushed Australia up 150% to a record $9 billion, and Mexico up 516% to $6.2 billion. On the downside, Japan saw investment decline by 16% in 2017, to $23.4 billion, while Germany slipped 26% to $14.6 billion and the U.K. 56% to $10.3 billion in the face of changes in policy support. Europe as a whole invested $57.4 billion, down 26% year-on-year.

Below are the 2017 totals for other countries and regions investing $1 billion-plus in clean energy:

India $11 billion, down 20% compared to 2016

Brazil $6.2 billion, up 10%

France $5 billion, up 15%

Sweden $4 billion, up 109%

Netherlands $3.5 billion, up 30%

Canada $3.3 billion, up 45%

South Korea $2.9 billion, up 14%

Egypt $2.6 billion, up 495%

Italy $2.5 billion, up 15%

Turkey $2.3 billion, down 8%

United Arab Emirates $2.2 billion, up 23-fold

Norway $2 billion, down 12%

Argentina $1.8 billion, up 777%

Switzerland $1.7 billion, down 10%

Chile $1.5 billion, up 55%

Austria $1.2 billion, up 4%

Spain $1.1 billion, up 36%

Taiwan $1 billion, down 6%

Indonesia $1 billion, up 71%

Read more

Source

Bloomberg New Energy Finance 2018The content herein, unless otherwise known to be public domain, are Copyright 1995-2018 - Space Media Network. All websites are published in Australia and are solely subject to Australian law and governed by Fair Use principals for news reporting and research purposes. AFP, UPI and IANS news wire stories are copyright Agence France-Presse, United Press International and Indo-Asia News Service. ESA news reports are copyright European Space Agency. All NASA sourced material is public domain. Additional copyrights may apply in whole or part to other bona fide parties. Advertising does not imply endorsement, agreement or approval of any opinions, statements or information provided by Space Media Network on any Web page published or hosted by Space Media Network. Privacy StatementEstonia to send 50 troops to reinforce French-led Mali mission



Tallinn, March 22 (AFP) Mar 22, 2018



Estonia's government on Thursday agreed to send 50 troops from the Baltic state to Mali as part of France's Operation Barkhane anti-jihadist mission.

"By participating in an operation with the aim of creating stability on the southern edge of NATO and the EU, we support our strong European ally," Estonian Defence Minister Juri Luik said in a government statement.

The country's parliament still has to green-light the year-long mission, in which an Estonian infantry unit on armoured personnel carriers would be tasked with ensuring the security of the Gao military base and its surroundings.

Around 4,000 French troops are deployed under Operation Barkhane alongside the United Nations 12,000-strong MINUSMA peacekeeping operation in Mali.

France launched an intervention to chase out jihadists linked to Al-Qaeda who had overtaken key northern cities in Mali in 2013.

That mission evolved into the current Barkhane deployment launched in 2014 with an expanded mandate for counter-terror operations across the Sahel.US approves $1 billion in Saudi defense contracts



Washington, March 22 (AFP) Mar 22, 2018



The United States formally approved defense contracts totaling more than $1 billion with Saudi Arabia on Thursday, as the kingdom's crown prince continued his American tour.

The State Department confirmed it had green-lighted a $670 million deal for anti-tank missiles, a $106 million contract for helicopter maintenance and $300 million for ground vehicle parts.

An official said the deals had been in the pipeline since President Donald Trump has announced more than $100 billion in possible new contracts on a visit to Riyadh last year.

"This proposed sale will support US foreign policy and national security objectives by improving the security of a friendly country," the Defense Security Cooperation Agency said.

Western governments are under pressure from campaigners, including some US lawmakers, to halt or limit arms sales to Saudi Arabia as its forces fight in Yemen's brutal civil war.

But the United States, France and Britain continue to pursue lucrative deals to sell and maintain equipment in the kingdom's vast, high-tech arsenal -- and Riyadh is an avid client.

In theory, the US Congress could still block the latest deals announced Thursday, but on Tuesday the Senate voted down a bill to halt US support for the Saudi intervention in Yemen.

These contracts are therefore now expected to be nodded through after the State Department and Pentagon gave the go-ahead and Trump publicly celebrated the prospect of the sales.

Saudi Arabia's young crown prince and de facto ruler Mohammed Bin Salman is part-way through a three-week tour of America that has already taken him to friendly talks in Trump's White House.

The largest of the three contracts is for 6,600 TOW 2B anti-tank missiles, made by US giant Raytheon.

The next biggest covers spare parts and maintenance for the Saudi ground forces' pool of US-built Abram tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles, LAV armored vehicles, howitzers and Humvees.

The last continues a support contract for the Saudi fleet of AH-64D and E Apache attack helicopters, UK-60L Black Hawk utility choppers and Schweizer and Bell scouts.

dc/wdUSC and Max Planck The Double Life of a Top Robotics Researcher

A robotics researcher had made it, a top researcher in a field that promised only to grow. But that apparently wasn't enough for him.

Von Rex DaltonBrussels (Belgium), March 22, 2018 (SPS) - The Frente POLISARIO has condemned the European Commission's attempts to amend the EU-Morocco fisheries agreement, in order to include the waters of Western Sahara, despite the decision of the European Court of Justice, that the waters of Western Sahara cannot be part of agreements with Morocco, in statement issued by Polisarios representative at EU.

Mohamed Sidati, in this regard, has noted that the European Commission, demonstrated that it does not consider the legality and that it is an accomplice of the illegal occupation of Western Sahara by Morocco.

POLISARIO, argues that the Commission's attempts coincide with the presentation, before the Security Council, of the briefing of the envoy of the UN SG for Western Sahara, Horst Kohler, which calls into question the EU's involvement in the search of a political solution to the conflict.

The statement has also urged the Commission to enter into direct and constructive talks with the Frente POLISARIO, as well as urging the EU countries to reject the Commission's proposals. SPS

125/090/TRAMany appeared to be state employees, and some showed up in groups and in mini buses bearing the names of state-provided services.





by Reuters





(March 23, 2018, Moscow, Sri Lanka Guardian) Ludmila Sklyarevskaya, a Russian hospital administrator, voted on Sunday in an election that gave Vladimir Putin another term as Russias president.





Then she went to another polling station and voted again, according to Reuters reporters who witnessed her movements.





Sklyarevskaya, who denied any wrongdoing, was among 17 people who were photographed by Reuters apparently casting ballots at more than one polling station Sunday in the town of Ust-Djeguta, southern Russia.





Many appeared to be state employees, and some showed up in groups and in mini buses bearing the names of state-provided services.





An employee at the hospital where Sklyarevskaya worked confirmed the woman captured in photos at the two polling stations was Sklyarevskaya and identified her as the hospitals deputy director of health and safety.





Voting twice is a misdemeanor under Russian law, carrying a penalty of a fine. Shown pictures of some of the people who apparently voted twice, including at Ust-Djegutas polling station no. 217, Leila Koichuyeva, a member of the election commission there, said: They could be twins.

Sklyarevskaya, when it was pointed out she had been seen voting at polling stations 216 and 215, said thats not me.





Reuters was able to speak to seven of 17 people photographed casting multiple votes. They either denied voting more than once or declined to comment.





Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said there were established procedures for reporting election violations. If these reports from the respected Reuters agency are backed up by corresponding statements to law enforcement agencies from the observers who were at each polling station, then its a worry. If they are not backed up, then it does not worry us at all.





Putins opponents, and independent election observers, say Sundays vote was skewed across the country by officials loyal to Putin using a variety of tricks to inflate the turnout.





Putin is genuinely popular but a low turnout caused by apathy at a one-sided contest would have deprived him of the resounding mandate he sought. In the end, he won by a landslide and on a strong turnout of nearly 70 percent.





As well as multiple voting in Ust-Djeguta - a practice known in Russia as a carousel - Reuters reporters who monitored 12 polling stations around the country witnessed other irregularities though they were mostly narrow in scale.





In all 12 polling stations, the turnout declared by election officials exceeded a tally kept by Reuters of how many people voted. In one case in Simferopol the difference between the two figures was significant: 528 votes, or 66 percent of the votes cast.





Reuters reporters also uncovered a loophole in the voter registration system that could allow multiple voting by obtaining authorization to vote in more than one location. Under a new system designed to make it easier for people to vote when away from home, a voter can apply online to register temporarily at a different polling station. Three Reuters reporters who registered through the new system as well as at their local election office were able to vote once and then get the go-ahead by officials to vote a second time at a different polling station.





A Central Election Commission spokeswoman didnt respond to a request for comment.

MEDICAL HELP

On election day in Ust-Djeguta, Sklyarevskaya arrived just after 17:30 local time (10.30 a.m. ET), leading a group of eight other women and one man through the gates of polling station number 216.





About twenty minutes later, Reuters reporters observed the same group voting again a few hundred meters away at polling station no. 215.





Several of the women with her were wearing surgical scrubs, and the man wore a jacket with the word ambulance written on it. Ust-Djeguta, a town of 30,000 people and 1,500 km (930 miles) south of Moscow, has only one hospital, the state-run Central District Hospital.





In an interview next to her office on the hospitals fourth floor, Sklyarevskaya said she had voted only once, at a third polling station, number 217. Who directed you to do this investigation? she asked when approached by Reuters reporters. You do not have the right to get involved in the electoral system.





Marat Shakmanov, head doctor at the hospital, said he didnt believe anyone from the hospital violated election rules.

Another woman, wearing sparkly heels, also appeared to vote twice on Sunday.





When approached by Reuters in the town hall on Monday, the woman said her name was Jamila Tebueva, a social-care specialist in the town administration. She said she voted only once, and went to a second polling station to accompany friends.





When told she had been photographed with a voting slip in her hand at the second location she said: Is it alright if I dont reply?





Zukhra Chomaeva, the head election official at polling station number 217, said she could not answer for what happened outside her precinct when asked about multiple voting.





How do I know if theyre the same person? They might look the same.





Larissa Tekeyeva, head of the election commission for polling station 216, said after looking at a picture of a woman in a pink coat who voted at polling stations 216 and 217: We all have the same mentality. We all look alike.





Ludmila Djukayeva, head of the towns polling station 215, said she hadnt witnessed any multiple voting. Ruslan Shagarov, a spokesman for the town administration, said he knew nothing about any employees breaking voting rules.





Official results released on Monday showed the three polling stations had an average turnout of 81.5 percent and delivered a majority for Putin of 89.86 percent. National turnout was 67 percent, according to the central election commission.

TURNOUT DISCREPANCIES

Reuters reporters used mechanical counters to count everybody who cast a ballot at the 12 polling stations they monitored from open to close on Sunday.





In some places, the discrepancies between the official count and the Reuters tally were small, with local election officials putting it down to the margin of error. But in nine of the 12 polling stations, the discrepancies were 10% or greater.





The biggest divergence, as a share of the total vote, was in polling station number 265, inside a technical college in Simferopol, Crimea. Moscow annexed the region from Ukraine four years ago.





Reuters reporters saw 797 voters at that station, while the official figures state that 1,325 people voted on the day and in person.





Asked about the discrepancy, the chairwoman of the polling stations election commission, Oksana Mediyeva, said independent monitors had watched the vote and had raised no issues.





The three monitors, two from the governing party and one who said he would vote for Putin, didnt appear to be keeping count of the turnout.

Typically in elections, the official turnout figures are produced when election tellers count the number of ballots cast.





But in three polling stations, in Ust-Djeguta and in Simferopol, the election officials werent seen physically counting all the ballot papers.

At Ust-Djegutas polling station number 216, a count revealed there were not enough ballot papers to tally with the figure for Putin votes, of 1,299, that officials there had provisionally penciled in.





After a recount produced the same outcome, the election officials said they were going home.





When a Reuters reporter asked how they could do that without finishing the count, Tatiana Chernyaeva, the director of the school hosting the polling station, said: You want to cast doubt on Putins victory.

FLAWED SYSTEM

Under the new registration system the three Reuters reporters were able to register online to vote in one location and also obtain authorization to vote in another location by using the old procedure of going to the local election office where they are resident.

All three reporters were offered a ballot paper in their second location after they had already voted in their first, though none cast a second vote.





Djukayeva the head of the election commission at polling station 215, where one of the reporters was offered a ballot to cast a second vote, said: I dont know whose mistake that was .... They gave us lists yesterday of voters who should be included and excluded. She was in the list to be included, Djukayeva added.

















Reporting by Maria Tsvetkova, Polina Nikolskaya, Tatiana Voronova and Polina Ivanova in UST-DJEGUTA; Olesya Astakhova, Olga Sichkar, Alla Afanasyeva and Kevin O'Flynn in SIMFEROPOL; Vladimir Soldatkin, Jack Stubbs and Gleb Stolyarov in KEMEROVO; Gabrielle Tetrault-Farber, Darya Korsunskaya and Anastasia Lyrchikova in ZELENODOLSK; Maxim Rodionov, Andrey Kuzmin and Andrey Ostroukh in GRYAZI.; Writing by Maria Tsvetkova and Christian Lowe; Editing by Cassell Bryan-Low











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Are you tired of working at the pace of your employer? Do you want to discover your unique gifts that can be monetized and harnessed into producing monthly dividends? Then Hello Success Business Workshop is for you. This workshop is poised for creating success people with the principle of Making-Money-Doing-What-You-Do-Best. This Business Workshop will be held at Sri Lanka Foundation ( SLF), Colombo 7, Sri Lanka on Sunday the 01of April 2018 from 9am-1pm.It is a half day transformative workshop that is filled with step by step live training with PowerPoint presentation aimed to help every delegate build a successful business by following a 5 pillar Roadmap. At the end of this workshop, you will be able to discover the Implementation Plan for Confidently start making money as an independent service professional. This FREE Business Training is for Real Doers who want to package and monetize their skills, talents & experiences by Building A Small Service Base Business in any industry.This business training workshop is being held in Sri Lanka for the first time & delegate will be able to discover a proven modern business building strategies.Click here to reserve your seat at the workshopPriyavi ArachchigeBusiness Consultant and Online Educator.BA-Dual Hons (UK)[/caption]Rosha D- LimaCEO of KASP LearningMBA (Switzerland) B. Sc.(UK), B.Com-Hons (SL)[/caption]Blog Archive Apr 2010 (22) May 2010 (25) Jun 2010 (8) Jul 2010 (12) Aug 2010 (18) Sep 2010 (19) Oct 2010 (29) Nov 2010 (30) Dec 2010 (18) Jan 2011 (13) Feb 2011 (21) Mar 2011 (23) Apr 2011 (19) May 2011 (31) Jun 2011 (36) Jul 2011 (46) Aug 2011 (26) Sep 2011 (12) Oct 2011 (15) Nov 2011 (17) Dec 2011 (7) Jan 2012 (18) Feb 2012 (4) Mar 2012 (12) Apr 2012 (18) May 2012 (10) Jun 2012 (21) Jul 2012 (8) Aug 2012 (15) Sep 2012 (7) Oct 2012 (17) Nov 2012 (20) Dec 2012 (10) Jan 2013 (58) Feb 2013 (59) Mar 2013 (60) Apr 2013 (98) May 2013 (135) Jun 2013 (204) Jul 2013 (293) Aug 2013 (351) Sep 2013 (363) Oct 2013 (348) Nov 2013 (374) Dec 2013 (442) Jan 2014 (547) Feb 2014 (476) Mar 2014 (526) Apr 2014 (527) May 2014 (469) Jun 2014 (408) Jul 2014 (472) Aug 2014 (522) Sep 2014 (443) Oct 2014 (472) Nov 2014 (497) Dec 2014 (536) Jan 2015 (539) Feb 2015 (520) Mar 2015 (582) Apr 2015 (658) May 2015 (679) Jun 2015 (673) Jul 2015 (728) Aug 2015 (803) Sep 2015 (923) Oct 2015 (924) Nov 2015 (802) Dec 2015 (791) Jan 2016 (782) Feb 2016 (835) Mar 2016 (929) Apr 2016 (866) May 2016 (947) Jun 2016 (1044) Jul 2016 (882) Aug 2016 (1035) Sep 2016 (967) Oct 2016 (918) Nov 2016 (854) Dec 2016 (885) Jan 2017 (880) Feb 2017 (777) Mar 2017 (896) Apr 2017 (872) May 2017 (850) Jun 2017 (851) Jul 2017 (971) Aug 2017 (1040) Sep 2017 (998) Oct 2017 (1144) Nov 2017 (1046) Dec 2017 (838) Jan 2018 (873) Feb 2018 (769) Mar 2018 (885) Apr 2018 (809) May 2018 (827) Jun 2018 (820) Jul 2018 (840) Aug 2018 (854) Sep 2018 (844) Oct 2018 (851) Nov 2018 (870) Dec 2018 (912) Jan 2019 (919) Feb 2019 (827) Mar 2019 (957) Apr 2019 (913) May 2019 (1007) Jun 2019 (935) Jul 2019 (950) Aug 2019 (936) Sep 2019 (910) Oct 2019 (920) Nov 2019 (874) Dec 2019 (908) Jan 2020 (941) Feb 2020 (849) Mar 2020 (898) Apr 2020 (848) May 2020 (822) Jun 2020 (789) Jul 2020 (819) Aug 2020 (858) Sep 2020 (841) Oct 2020 (873) Nov 2020 (812) Dec 2020 (780) Jan 2021 (765) Feb 2021 (716) Mar 2021 (819) Apr 2021 (805) May 2021 (815) Jun 2021 (824) Jul 2021 (830) Aug 2021 (832) Sep 2021 (586)Altran TechnologieS : launch and terms of its share capital increase with preferential subscription rights for c. 750 million related to the refinancing of the acquisition of Aricent

Press release 22.03.18





Altran announces the launch and the terms of its share capital increase with preferential subscription rights for c. 750 million related to the refinancing of the acquisition of Aricent





Subscription ratio: 8 new shares for 17 existing shares

Subscription price: 9.23 per new share

Rights trading period: from March 23 rd , 2018 to April 5 th , 2018 inclusive

Subscription period: from March 27th, 2018 to April 9th, 2018 inclusive

Altran (the "Company") announces today the launch of a share capital increase with preferential subscription rights to existing shareholders (the "Rights Issue"), for a gross amount of approximately 750 million. The principle of the Rights Issue was made public on November 30th, 2017 when Altran announced the contemplated acquisition of Aricent, a global digital leader in integrated design and engineering services. The Rights Issue was authorized by the Company's shareholders during the Extraordinary General Meeting held on January 26th, 2018.

The net proceeds of the Rights Issue will be exclusively used to redeem in full the 250 million Bridge Facility and part of the 2,125 million Term Loan B entered into in February 2018 in connection with the acquisition of Aricent and drawn in full.

The acquisition of Aricent, that closed on March 20th, 2018, enables Altran to become the undisputed global leader in the Engineering and R&D services.

The Rights Issue is underwritten pursuant to an underwriting agreement signed on March 21st, 2018 with Credit Agricole Corporate and Investment Bank, Goldman Sachs International and Morgan Stanley & Co. International plc, acting as Joint Global Coordinators and Joint Bookrunners. This underwriting agreement does not constitute a firm underwriting ("garantie de bonne fin") within the meaning of Article L. 225-145 of the French Commercial Code.

Main terms of the Rights Issue

The Rights Issue will result in the issuance of 81,220,840 new shares (the "New Shares") representing a gross amount, including issue premium, of 749,668,353.20, corresponding to 46.2% of the Company's share capital.

Each shareholder of Altran will receive one preferential subscription right for each share it holds (based on trading records) as of the close of trading on March 22nd, 2018. The preferential subscription rights will be detached from their shares on March 23rd, 2018. Existing shares will trade ex-rights from March 23rd, 2018. 17 preferential subscription rights will entitle holders to subscribe for 8 New Shares on an irreducible basis (a titre irreductible).

Subscriptions on a reducible basis (a titre reductible) will be accepted but remain subject to reduction in the event of oversubscription. Any New Shares not subscribed on an irreducible basis (a titre irreductible) will be distributed and allocated to the holders of the rights having submitted additional subscription orders on a reducible basis (a titre reductible) subject to reduction.

Based on a closing price of Altran's share on March 20th, 2018, i.e 13.90, the theoretical value of one preferential subscription right is 1.49 (it being reminded that this value may fluctuate during the rights trading period, in particular depending on Altran's ex-right share price development) and the theoretical value of the ex-right share is 12.41.

The subscription price for the New Shares has been set at 9.23 per share (nominal value of 0.50 per share and issue premium of 8.73 per share). The subscription price represents a discount of 25.6% to the theoretical value of the ex-right share price (TERP), and of 33.6% on the closing price (13.90) on March 20th, 2018.

The Rights Issue will be open to the public in France only.

Altran has agreed to a lock-up period expiring 180 calendar days after the settlement and delivery of the Rights Issue, subject to certain exceptions.

At the date of the AMF's visa on the French Prospectus, Altrafin Participations SAS, Mr. Alexis Kniazeff (and his family) and Mr. Hubert Martigny, who respectively holds 8.42%, 1.42% and 1.42% of the share capital of the company, have confirmed their intention to subscribe to the share capital increase and to exercise on an irreducible basis all the preferential subscription rights that will be alloted to them on the basis of their existing shares.

Altrafin Participations and the founders have each agreed to a lock-up period expiring 60 calendar days after the settlement and delivery of the Rights Issue, subject to certain exceptions.

Indicative timetable of the Rights Issue

The preferential subscription rights will be listed and traded on the regulated market of Euronext Paris under the ISIN code FR0013324498 from March 23rd, 2018 until April 5th, 2018 inclusive. It will not be possible to buy or sell the preferential subscription rights after the close of trading on April 5th, 2018. The subscription period for the New Shares will run from March 27th, 2018 to April 9th, 2018 inclusive. The preferential subscription rights not exercised before the end of the subscription period, i.e. the close of trading on April 9th, 2018, will automatically become null and void.

Settlement and delivery of the New Shares and start of trading on the regulated market of Euronext Paris (Segment A) are expected to take place on April 17th, 2018. The New Shares, which will carry dividend rights and will entitle their holders to any dividends declared by Altran from the date of issue, will be, as from their issue date, fully fungible with Altran's existing shares and will be traded under the same ISIN code as the Company's existing shares (ISIN code FR0000034639).

Information available to the public

A French language prospectus including (i) the registration document (document de reference) of Altran filed with the French Market Authority (Autorite des marches financiers (AMF)) on March 21st, 2018 under number D.18-0154, and (ii) a securities note (note d'operation) (including the summary of the prospectus) which was filed with the AMF and received visa number 18-087 dated March 21st, 2018 is available free of charge from the Company (96, avenue Charles de Gaulle, 92200 Neuilly-sur-Seine - France) as well as from the websites of the AMF (www.amf-france.org) and the Company (www.altran.com). All the press releases and other regulated information about the Company are available on the Company's website (www.altran.com), including the press release dated February 28th, 2018, announcing Altran's 2017 annual results.

The public's attention is drawn to the risk factors included in chapter 2 of the registration document and in chapter 2 of the securities note, which should be carefully considered before making any investment decision. The materialization of all or any of these risks may have an adverse effect on the Altran group's operations, financial conditions, results or objectives, or the market price of Altran shares.



Conference call on March 22, 2018 at 9:00 am Paris time (CET)



Telephone numbers : +33172727403 or +442071943759



Confirmation code: 93094637#

Contacts

Altran Group

Investor Relations

Stephanie Bia

Group Vice-President Investor Relations

Tel: + 33 (0)1 46 41 72 01

stephanie.bia@Altran.com

Media Relations

Marine Boulot

Group Vice-President Communications

Tel: + 33 (0)1 46 41 72 10

marine.boulot@Altran.com

About Altran

Altran ranks as the undisputed global leader in Engineering and R&D services (ER&D), following its acquisition of Aricent. The company offers clients an unmatched value proposition to address their transformation and innovation needs. Altran works alongside its clients, from initial concept through industrialization, to invent the products and services of tomorrow. For over 30 years, the company has provided expertise in aerospace, automotive, defense, energy, finance, life sciences, railway and telecommunications. The Aricent acquisition extends this leadership to semiconductors, digital experience and design innovation. Combined, Altran and Aricent generated revenues of 2.9 billion in 2017, with some 45,000 employees in more than 30 countries.

www.altran.com

Follow us on Twitter: @Altran

DISCLAIMER

The English version of this press release may differ from the French version for regulatory reasons.

Neither this press release, nor any information it contains or other information related to the offering or to the Company, may be distributed to the public in any juridisction where a registration or approval is required. No steps have been taken or will be taken in any such jurisdiction (other than France) where such steps would be required. The offer and sale of the shares or the preferential subscription rights of the Company (together, the "Securities") may be subject to specific legal or regulatory restrictions in certain juridisdictions. Persons in such jurisdictions who come into possession of this document or other information referred to herein should inform themselves about and observe any such restriction. Any failure to comply with these restrictions may constitute a violation of the securities laws of any such jurisdiction.The Company assumes no responsibility for any violation of such restrictions by any person.

The information contained in this press release is for background purposes only and does not purport to be full or complete and no reliance may be placed by any person for any purpose on the information contained in this press release or its accuracy, fairness or completeness. Any purchase of Securities should be made solely on the basis of the information contained in the prospectus issued by the Company.

Neither this press release nor the information it contains constitutes an offer of Securities or a solicitation for purchase, subscription or sale of Securities in any such country.

European Economic Area

The offer is open to the public only in France and only pursuant to a prospectus having received the visa of the AMF.

This press release is an advertisement and not a prospectus within the meaning of Directive 2003/71/EC of the European Parliament and the Council of 4 November 2003, as amended, in particular by Directive 2010/73/EU, and includes any relevant implementing measure(the "Prospectus Directive").

With respect to the member states of the European Economic Area ("EEA") other than France (each, a "Member State"), no action has been undertaken or will be undertaken to make an offer to the public of the Securities (as defined in the Prospectus Directive) requiring a publication of a prospectus in any Member State. As a result, the Securities may only be offered in Member States to qualified investors, as defined in the Prospectus Directive, to fewer than 150 natural or legal persons (other than qualified investors as defined in the Prospectus Directive,or in any other circumstances not requiring the Company to publish a prospectus as provided under Article 3(2) of the Prospectus Directive.

United States of America

This press release and the information it contains are not released and may not be published, released or distributed in or into the United States.This press release does not constitute or form a part of any offer of Securities or a solicitation to purchase or subscribe for Securities in the United States. The Securities may not be offered, subscribed or sold in the United States absent registration under the U.S. Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the "U.S. Securities Act"), except pursuant to an exemption from, or in a transaction not subject to, the registration requirements thereof. The Securities of the Company have not been and will not be registered under the U.S. Securities Act and the Company does not intend to make a public offer of its securities in the United States.

United Kingdom

This press release is directed only at and is for distribution only to qualified investors within the meaning of section 86(7) of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 persons who (i) are outside the United Kingdom, (ii) are "investment professionals" falling within Article 19(5) of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000 (Financial Promotion) Order 2005 (as amended) (the "Order") or (iii) are persons falling within Article 49(2)(a) to (d) ("high net worth companies, unincorporated associations, etc.") of the Order (all such persons in (i), (ii) and (iii) together being referred to as "Relevant Persons").

This press release is directed only at Relevant Persons and must not be acted on or relied on by persons who are not Relevant Persons. Any investment or investment activity to which this press release relates is available only to Relevant Persons and will be engaged in only with Relevant Persons.

This press release is not a prospectus which has been approved by the Financial Conduct Authority or any other United Kingdom regulatory authority for the purposes of Section 85 of the Financial Services and Markets Act 2000.

Australia, Japan and Canada

The Securities may not be offered or sold in Australia and Japan, and subject to certain exceptions may not be offered or sold in Canada.

General

In connection with any offering of the Securities, the Joing Global Coordinators and any of their respective affiliates may take up as a principal position any Securities and in that capacity may retain, purchase, sell or offer to sell for their own accounts such Securities and other related securities. In addition, they may enter into financing arrangements (including swaps or contracts for differences) with investors in connection with which they may from time to time acquire, hold or dispose of Securities. They do not intend to disclose the extent of any such investment or transactions otherwise than in accordance with any legal or regulatory obligation to do so.

The Joint Global Coordinators and Joint Bookrunners are acting for the Company and no one else in connection with the offering of Securities and will not regard any other person as their respective clients nor be responsible to any other person for providing the protections afforded to any of its clients or for providing advice in relation to any offering of the Securities nor for providing advice in relation to the offering of Securities, the contents of this announcement or any transaction, arrangement or other matter referred to herein.

None of the Joint Global Coordinators and Joint Bookrunners or any of their respective affiliates, directors, officers, employees, advisers or agents accepts any responsibility or liability whatsoever for or makes any representation or warranty, express or implied, as to the truth, accuracy or completeness of the information in this announcement (or whether any information has been omitted from the announcement) or any other information relating to the Company, its subsidiaries or associated companies, whether written, oral or in a visual or electronic form, and howsoever transmitted or made available or for any loss howsoever arising from any use of this announcement or its contents or otherwise arising in connection therewith.

Information to distributors

Solely for the purposes of the product governance requirements contained within: (a) EU Directive 2014/65/EU on markets in financial instruments, as amended ("MiFID II"); (b) Articles 9 and 10 of Commission Delegated Directive (EU) 2017/593 supplementing MiFID II; and (c) local implementing measures (together, the "MiFID II Product Governance Requirements"), and disclaiming all and any liability, whether arising in tort, contract or otherwise, which any "manufacturer"(for the purposes of the MiFID II Product Governance Requirements) may otherwise have with respect thereto, the shares offered in the Right Issue (the "Offered Shares") have been subject to a product approval process, which has determined that the Offered Shares are: (i) compatible with an end target market of retail investors and investors who meet the criteria of professional clients and eligible counterparties, each as defined in MiFID II; and (ii) eligible for distribution through all distribution channels as are permitted by MiFID II (the "Target Market Assessment"). Notwithstanding the Target Market Assessment, distributors should note that: the price of the Offered Shares may decline and investors could lose all or part of their investment; the Offered Shares offer no guaranteed income and no capital protection; and an investment in the Offered Shares is compatible only with investors who do not need a guaranteed income or capital protection, who (either alone or in conjunction with an appropriate financial or other adviser) are capable of evaluating the merits and risks of such an investment and who have sufficient resources to be able to bear any losses that may result therefrom.

The Target Market Assessment is without prejudice to the requirements of any contractual, legal or regulatory selling restrictions in relation to the Right Issue.

For the avoidance of doubt, the Target Market Assessment does not constitute: (a) an assessment for any particular client of suitability or appropriateness for the purposes of MiFID II; or (b) a recommendation to any investor or group of investors to invest in, or purchase, or take any other action whatsoever with respect to the Offered Shares.

Each distributor is responsible for undertaking its own target market assessment in respect of the shares and determining appropriate distribution channels.



It should be noted that this intention will be realized provided that until the end of the subscription period of the share capital increase there should be no new significant event that could have a significant impact on the market price of the Altran shares.

This announcement is distributed by Nasdaq Corporate Solutions on behalf of Nasdaq Corporate Solutions clients.

The issuer of this announcement warrants that they are solely responsible for the content, accuracy and originality of the information contained therein.

Source: ALTRAN TECHNOLOGIES via Globenewswire

Managing life below the Arctic sea ice

Future changes in the Arctic are unlikely to affect all resource users in the same way, Blenckner explains.



Arctic fisheries should consider ecosystem changes and fish population dynamics, and concentrate fishing efforts on species that are sustainable to fish. The trade-off is that more specialized vessels can operate more efficiently, but are more vulnerable to ecosystem change.



While a large highly mobile fishing company may be able to specialize in many species, small-scale fishers focused on few species would be at the will of Arctic ecosystem changes.



To help reduce small-scale fishers vulnerability to these ecosystem-wide changes, robust institutions are required. The authors call for well-managed fisheries and strict government institutions to help navigate fishers through changing time.



To manage a seascape in a cross-scale world, Valman highlights that, Global commons cannot be adequately addressed at the national level due to the cross-boundary nature of climate, ocean ecosystems and economic transactions. Intergovernmental coordination and cooperation is required.



The Barents Sea currently has strict fishing policies in place, and the authors highlight this as a strength for navigating the cross-scale interactions coming its way.



The Central Arctic Ocean, on the other hand, is currently unregulated, but Arctic nations (Canada, Norway, Sweden, Russia, USA), recently signed a declaration that follows the precautionary principle, requiring more research on the state of the fish populations before fishing is opened up. While this is a positive step, the declaration excludes several large fishing nations with their eyes on Arctic resources.

Where should we go from here?

The untapped resources of the Arctic Ocean mean there is a chance for sustainable Blue Growth to succeed. For this to occur, policymakers and resource users must be able to consider all of these interactions between species, climate, fishing practices, and unexpected events. An approach that allows for learning and adaptation to changes is necessary for navigating management of Arctic resources.



Vigorous, flexible and willing to learn



Adaptive management, a vigorous decision-making process that integrates learning and allows for flexible management, is thought to be key. As Niiranen concludes, In this paper, adaptive management practices are called for to address scientific uncertainties and possible mismatches between governance systems and the scale at which the social-ecological processes take place.



Being able to look at how the entire Arctic marine ecosystem works together, how our fishing practices and actions will influence the ecosystem, and what we can do for Blue Growth is a giant challenge ahead.



Niiranen concludes, Such development is crucial for the future of the Arctic. If management of Arctic natural resources fails to address the right processes at the right scales, the Blue Growth potential of the Arctic can be easily lost.Shares is the leading weekly publication for retail investors. It is packed with investment ideas, news and educational material to help build and run portfolios and get more from your money.

Shares puts on free Investor Events throughout the year across the country. They provide an opportunity for investors to learn more about companies on the stock market and hear from a range of investment experts including fund managers and Shares journalists.JERUSALEM, March 22 (Xinhua) -- The Israel-U.S. joint military exercise, dubbed Juniper Cobra 2018, the largest drill of this kind, has ended, said the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) on Thursday.

During the past several weeks, the aerial defense and ground forces of the IDF and the U.S. European Command trained together in the drill, which started on March 4, involving a variety of scenarios.

The Aerial Defense Command deployed batteries of the various aerial defense systems and practiced computerized simulations to protect the State of Israel from a ballistic missile threat, said the Israeli army.

Nearly 5,000 troops from both sides have been participating in the drill, a biennial event that has been held nine times since 2001.

Combined exercises were also held for the combat soldiers of the Paratroopers' Reconnaissance Unit and the U.S. Marines. In these exercises, the forces practiced combined urban warfare, neutralizing explosive devices, use of artillery, drills combining armored vehicles, and the evacuation of wounded personnel, said the IDF.

The IDF's Counter-Terror Training Academy also hosted the U.S. Marines for training purposes and held a combined exercise with the Egoz Commando unit.

Also, logistics and medical forces from the IDF Technology and Logistics Directorate also trained alongside their U.S. counterparts in an exercise including a mass casualty scenario, evacuation of wounded by helicopter, and the use of advanced technology, according to the Israeli army.

Israel and the U.S. share core values and complement each other in their operational and military cooperation, and send a clear and powerful message to the entire region, said Maj. Gen. Nitzan Alon, head of the IDF Operations Directorate.

"The complex reality in the Middle East, including the activities of the global Jihad and other terror organizations, creates an array of challenges for the State of Israel and its partner, the United States of America," he stressed.

"Juniper Cobra 2018 is proved to be an incredibly challenging and realistic scenario, which required trust, communication and collaboration with our Israeli partners," said Lt. Gen. Richard Clark, the U.S. 3rd Air Force Commander. "The relationships built over the last two weeks help bolster our interoperability and pave the path for future engagements and exercises."

With U.S. funding and support, Israel has developed several systems like the "Arrow", "Iron Dome," "Patriot" and "David Sling," all used in the drill.Members of the 8th Chinese peacekeeping engineer detachment to South Sudan (Wau), representatives of the United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) and the local civil department of the Wau State pose for a group photo at a ceremony marking the completion of the Kuacjok-Wau-Tonj main-supply route maintenance in South Sudan on March 20, 2018. (army.81.cn)

WAU, SOUTH SUDAN, March 22 (ChinaMil) --The 8th Chinese peacekeeping engineer detachment to Southern Sudan (Wau) held a ceremony on Tuesday to celebrate the completion of the Kuacjok-Wau-Tonj main-supply route (MSR) maintenance project.

Governor of Wau State Angelo Taban Biajo attended the ceremony and unveiled the nameplate of the road.

The United Nations Mission in South Sudan (UNMISS) uses the Kuacjok-Wau-Tonj MSR to transport logistics supplies and humanitarian assistance material. The road is also the main traffic route in South Sudan Due to war damage, rain erosion and poor maintenance, some parts of the road are gully-crossed and it was a big headache for vehicles to pass through these bumpy sections of the road. The normal transportation along the Kuacjok-Wau-Tonj MSR was seriously affected by the unfavorable road condition.

The Kuacjok-Wau-Tonj MSR is 218 km in length. Chinese peacekeeping engineers conducted the road maintenance operation simultaneously from Wau, Kuacjok and Rumbek involving a total of 3,679 person-time engineers, who braved the high temperature of 50 degree centigrade and worked about 7 hours each day on average.

After four consecutive months of hard work, the Kuacjok-Wau-Tonj MSR renovation project was successfully connected. "China Quality" and "China Standard" once again won the praise of local people.

Angelo Taban Biajo, governor of Wau State, spoke highly of the Chinese engineers. This project has been done very well, I thank you all on behalf of the people of Wau, he said at the completion ceremony.

Sun Shijian, commander of the 8th Chinese peacekeeping engineer detachment, said that Chinese engineers will complete more tasks with higher standards and better technologies to bring more benefits to the people of South Sudan.

Governor of Wau State Angelo Taban Biajo (2nd, L) unveils the road plate at the completion ceremony of the Kuacjok-Wau-Tonj main-supply route maintenance in Wau, South Sudan on March 20, 2018. (army.81.cn)Navarro said Trump "listens to all sides and makes the tough decisions. I think it's the right decision." He called it "a slippery slope" to target only some countries with increased tariffs while exempting others. He said there would be a mechanism to exclude some businesses, on a case-by-case basis, from having to pay higher prices for the imported metals.

He dismissed concerns from Defense Department officials who voiced support for targeted tariff increases aimed at specific countries but not increases on the imported metals from throughout the world.

Trump's new tariffs for the key metals have drawn wide condemnation from business-oriented Republican lawmakers in the U.S., as well as key allied trading partners -- Canada and the European Union. But Navarro said the tariffs are needed to "protect our national security and economic security, broadly defined."

Navarro told CNN that final details on Trump's anticipated 25 percent tax on steel imports and a 10 percent tariff on aluminum should be completed by later in the week or early next week at the latest.

White House trade adviser Peter Navarro said Sunday that President Donald Trump is not planning to exempt any countries from his increase in tariffs on imported steel and aluminum coming from foreign shores.

Canada, the largest U.S. trading partner, could be the hardest hit, since last year it shipped $7.2 billion worth of aluminum to the U.S. and steel valued at $4.3 billion. The tariffs would also hit other U.S. allies -- Britain, Germany, South Korea, Turkey and Japan. But China, the world's biggest steel producer, only sends 2 percent of its supply to the U.S. and would be less affected.

Navarro said the message to the world on U.S. trade practices is simple: "We're not going to take it anymore. We don't get good results," Navarro said, adding that U.S. trade overseas is "not fair and reciprocal."

In another news talk show appearance, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross told ABC News that Trump has talked with "a number of the world leaders" about his trade tariff plans.

British Prime Minister Theresa May's office said that in a Sunday phone call with Trump she had "raised our deep concern at the president's forthcoming announcement on steel and aluminum tariffs, noting that multilateral action was the only way to resolve the problem of global overcapacity in all parties' interests."

U.S. Commerce secretary Ross said the total value of the impending U.S. tariffs amounts to about $9 billion a year, a fraction of 1 percent of the annual $18.6 trillion U.S. economy, the world's largest. "So, the notion that it would destroy a lot of jobs, raise prices, disrupt things, is wrong," Ross said.

Ross dismissed European Union threats of imposing retaliatory tariffs on such prominent American products as Harley Davidson motorcycles, bourbon and Levi's jeans as unimportant and a "rounding error."

In response on Saturday, Trump threatened European automakers with a tax on imports if the European Union retaliates against the U.S. Ross called the possible European levies a "pretty trivial amount of retaliatory tariffs, adding up to some $3 billion of goods. In our size economy, that's a tiny, tiny fraction of 1 percent. So, while it might affect an individual producer for a little while, overall, it's not going to be much more than a rounding error."

Trump weighed in Saturday on his rationale for the tariff hikes with a pair of Twitter comments. "The United States has an $800 Billion Dollar Yearly Trade Deficit because of our 'very stupid' trade deals and policies," he said. "Our jobs and wealth are being given to other countries that have taken advantage of us for years. They laugh at what fools our leaders have been. No more!

In 2017, the U.S. imported $151 billion more in goods from Europe than it exported to EU countries.China is testing unmanned tanks that could be equipped with artificial intelligence, a state-run newspaper said Wednesday, as the country continues with its military modernization program.

State television showed images this week of the unmanned tanks undergoing testing, the Global Times newspaper reported.

Footage showed a Type 59 tank being driven by remote control, in what the paper said was the first time a Chinese-made unmanned tank has been shown in a public forum.

The Type 59 tank is based on an old Soviet model first used in China in the 1950s and has been produced in large numbers and has a long service life, it said.

"A large number of due-to-retire Type 59 tanks can be converted into unmanned vehicles if equipped with artificial intelligence," Liu Qingshan, the chief editor of Tank and Armored Vehicle, told the newspaper.

President Moon Jae-in on Wednesday suggested that a trilateral summit with U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un is possible.

"A U.S.-North Korea summit following an inter-Korean summit is a historic event. Depending on how they develop, it may lead to a trilateral summit," Moon said in a preparatory meeting for the inter-Korean summit.

A key Cheong Wa Dae official said, "If the meetings between the leaders of South and North Korea and North Korea and the U.S. progress smoothly, all three leaders could meet and reach a practical agreement."

But Cheong Wa Dae said it has yet to propose the trilateral meeting to the U.S. and North Korea. Kim has made no definitive comments since a South Korean delegation led by national security adviser Chung Eui-yong visited Pyongyang, while the U.S. continues to question North Korea's willingness to scrap its nuclear weapons.Senior citizens account for a whopping 25.2 percent of total registered voters in the upcoming local elections, even though they make up a much smaller proportion of the population.

The Chosun Ilbo on Wednesday counted the number of voters in each age bracket using the population records from the Ministry of the Interior and Safety.

Over-60s are the biggest group followed by voters in their 40s (20.3 percent), those in their 50s (19.9 percent), 20s (17.4 percent) and 30s (17.2 percent).

In the last local elections in 2014, voters in their 40s made up the largest proportion with 21.7 percent, followed by voters over 60 with 21.6 percent. It was in the general election in 2016 that elderly voters first became the biggest group.North Korean leader Kim Jong-un has retreated into silence after signaling his willingness to meet with South Korean President Moon Jae-in and U.S. President Donald Trump to a South Korean envoy early this month.

The state media have also had little to say about what could potentially be two momentous events. One diplomatic source said, "Kim Jong-un is probably monitoring the behavior of the U.S. and moves by other countries as he calculates his next move."

Kim dispatched his Foreign Minister Ri Yong-ho to Sweden and Choe Kang-il, a deputy director general for North American affairs at North Korea's Foreign Ministry, to Finland, apparently to gauge the true intentions of the U.S. government.

Some believe Kim and his top officials may be trying to come up with some way of selling the need to scrap the regime's nuclear weapons to the North Korean public, who have been fed relentless propaganda that it is necessary.

A government official here said, "There are several areas in Kim Jong-un's pledge to the South Korean envoys that clash with propaganda doctrine."With more than 25 years of leadership experience across Europe, Asia and the U.S, that Mario Pacifico has joined NetJets as its new European CEO charged with leading the companys operations in Europe out of their London office.

Pacifico joins NetJets at a time of significant growth. In 2017, NetJets flights in Europe grew by 7.2% to a total of around 50,000 flights. And total NetJets flight hours in Europe were more than double the amount of the wider industry.

The appointment coincides with NetJets announcement that it has successfully obtained certification to operate its new Cessna Citation Latitude aircraft at London City Airport, allowing business travellers to save a significant amount of time in their journeys to and from Londons financial district.

The Citation Latitude is the newest addition to NetJets European fleet of around 90 aircraft. The aircraft seats up to eight passengers and is easily able to fly to Dubai, Nigeria and Beirut from London.

NetJets is the only company that currently operates the aircraft into London City Airport. Over 53% of NetJets' European customer base comes from Londons finance sector  with private equity and hedge fund management seeing the most growth over the past 12 months.

Mario Pacifico said: NetJets now accounts for 6% of the total private jet market in Europe with around 74,000 flight hours. This is an exciting time of growth and I look forward to working with the team here to propel the company forward at this pinnacle moment.

NetJets is committed to improving the lives of its clients, and I am pleased to launch the Cessna Citation Latitude at London City Airport. The aircrafts stellar short-field performance will enable us to access many small general aviation airports that offer important time savings for businesses and individuals looking to work more efficiently.

Robert Sinclair, CEO of London City Airport, added: London City Airport offers Londons most central private jet facility, just 5 miles from the City, with a 90 second service from car to plane. This speed and efficiency is valued by NetJets and its clients, and we look forward to continued growth of its business here.

Founded in 1996, NetJets is the only pan-European business aviation company with its own fleet of aircraft.The national association of self-employed workers (autonomos) has called on the Junta de Andalucia regional government to catch up with other regions of Spain and introduce the flat-rate 50-euro social security rate for people registering as self-employed for the first time.

The special rate, much lower than the normal amount, is designed to encourage unemployed people to set up in business on their own and has been applied for the first 24 months in some areas. The regional parliament is still debating the new rule, which is also aimed at reducing the black-market economy.The lychees are waiting in a wicker basket as a bee seems to dive down to them. The fruits are little more than a translucid stain of mauve colouring diluted in water, but for the interiors the artist has used more energetic brushstrokes. The same occurs with the insect: it is lightweight but at the same time rooted in the role.

The exhibition TitleThe breeze from Qi Baishis hometown. VenueMuseum Jorge Rando. AddressC/ Cruz del Molinillo, 12. DatesUntil Friday 23 March. TimesFrom 10am to 8pm. EntryFree.

It is precisely this combination of quiet tradition and new dynamism of the settings, this look at everyday objects rather than great names and battles, which make Qi Baishi one of the great renovators of Chinese painting.

The artist caught the attention of the West eight years ago, when he became the third artist in the world in terms of auction sales, and at the end of last year broke the record for the most expensive Chinese painting in history when a series of 12 of his landscapes sold for 120 million euros.

His artistic revolution and prestige in the market have earned Qi Baishi (1864-1957) the nickname of the Chinese Picasso, and now his works are visiting the birthplace of the Spanish genius thanks to the Museum Jorge Rando, which is currently exhibiting them for the first time outside Asia in a display called The Breeze from Qi Baishis Hometown.

However, anyone who wants to see the delicate work of this Chinese artist should do so quickly: the exhibition will end tomorrow, Friday 23 March.

The reason the exhibition is so short is that Qi Baishis work is on tour with the Qi Baishi Memorial Museum of Xiantang, which is where the works in this display have come from.

The Chinese state TV channel CCTV has been filming a documentary about both artists in recent months, and during their research in Malaga the producers came across the Museum Jorge Rando and raised the possibility of it hosting the exhibition.

There is considerable interest in the display, as could be seen from the media presence at the opening earlier this week. The event was attended by Chinese officials; the honorary president of the Jorge Rando Foundation, Princess Maria Luisa of Prussia; the minister Wu Xiaoyue; the CEO of CCTV Documentary, Li Jinzhu; the mayor of Malaga, Francisco de la Torre; and Jorge Rando himself.

The Chinese Picasso

The links between Qi Baishi and Picasso were explained during the presentation. The director of the Museum Jorge Rando, Vanesa Diez, pointed out that Picasso considered Qi Baishi the best painter of East Asia, and the curator of the Memorial Museum which is dedicated to the Chinese artist, Wang Qizhi, said there were parallels in the importance of each artist for their cities of origin.

Vanesa Diez also explained that Qi Baishis painting has traces of expressionist poetry, which links him with Jorge Rando. Also, both artists seek spiritual resonance in their work, she said.

Those links reach out across one of the exhibition rooms, which contains works by both artists. The Breeze from Qi Baishis Hometown goes beyond the signature work which gives name to the project , and shows his influence on later generations of Chinese artists. The display contains over 60 pieces; half are by Qi Baishi and the others have been produced by heirs of his style such as Chen Xiaoqui and Zhu Wenzhi.

This project is aimed to be an encounter between eastern and western painting, and it is the first time that the work of this coveted artist has been seen outside Asia.

Qi Baishi is famous now, but is still known as the artist of the village because of his focus on small everyday things. That is why lotus flowers, insects and crustaceans have almost become a sign of identity of Qi Baishis work, because of his liberal style of painting them, as Wang Qizhi explained.

This loose style of brushwork combined with an eagerness for almost calligraphic detail, a transcendentality shown through modest objects, from an artist born into a family of farmers whose work, 50 years after his death, is selling for hundreds of millions of yuan.Frequent flyers can now fly on an annual pass like on public transport. Low-cost carrier Air Seoul, a subsidiary of Asiana Airlines, launched the "Mint Pass J" on Wednesday. Mint represents Air Seoul, and J refers to Japan.

The pass allows holders to travel to seven cities in Japan that the airline flies to exclusively -- Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Shizuoka, Takamatsu, Toyama, Ube, and Yonago.

Three types are available depending on the number of cities to visit. The prices are W299,000 for three cities, W399,000 for five and W499,000 for seven (US$1=W1,073).More than 150 marketers from Central New York were learning about the latest marketing trends today at Advance Media New York's 2018 Digital Marketing Boot Camp.

The training at the Holiday Inn in Salina is the third day of AMNY's Digital Marketing Boot Camp tour - Worcester, Albany to Syracuse.

Amy Swartz, Google's lead for partner enablement, gave the keynote talk, which focused on the age of assistance and how that impacts digital marketing today.

The agenda for the rest of the day focuses on Google Analytics, SEM, SEO, Content Marketing and Social Media strategy.Home  Just In  50 pc of Nepals budget should go to Karnali says Chief Minister Shahi

Kathmandu, March 22

Karnali Provinces Chief Minister Mahendra Bahadur Shahi says half of the countrys budget should go towards development projects in his state.

Shahi, who was speaking at a program in Kathmandu, said that if the Ministry of Finance allocates half of its budget to Karnali, the whole country, and not just the province, would become prosperous.

Shahi said that Karnali was rich in natural resources and the province required investment at a massive scale to fully utilise them. The chief minister also proposed that Karnali be developed as an organic province.

The Chief Minister, however, said that the main challenge his government was facing was related to law and finance. We dont have the necessary pieces of legislation nor the money to implement our plans, he added.Syracuse, NY -- A month before Corey Slattery slit the throat of a Syracuse man, he escaped Florida authorities under the cover of darkness, according to media accounts.

Slattery, 28, was facing grand theft charges in November 2016 after stealing a Mercedes-Benz near Key West, police said. He then drove the stolen vehicle into a canal and eluded authorities while swimming away, the Miami Herald reported.

A month later, Slattery stabbed and strangled Aikeem Hudgins, 29, in December 2016 inside a Brewerton apartment.

Hudgins' body was later burned and dismembered with a chainsaw, authorities said.

Today, Slattery was supposed to be sentenced to 20 years to life in prison after pleading guilty to Hudgins' murder.

But his assigned lawyer, Nicholas DeMartino, asked for more time to have a report completed that might help Slattery get rehabilitative services in prison and be used on his behalf at a parole hearing in two decades.

Slattery initially didn't want his lawyer's help. In days leading up to sentencing, he went so far as trying to fire DeMartino for delaying sentencing while trying to help him.

But today, Slattery changed his tune. He wanted sentencing delayed so the report could be completed.

"My head is on the chopping block," Slattery told the judge, complaining that his lawyer wasn't being transparent.

But County Court Judge Stephen Dougherty -- who has presided over Slattery's antics in the past -- wasn't sympathetic.

"You know what's going on Mr. Slattery, you're going to prison for 20 years to life," the judge told him.

With that, the judge adjourned sentencing for a month.

The judge apologized to Hudgins' family, who was in court prepared for sentencing today. Dougherty offered to let them give a victim's statement today, something usually done at sentencing. The family said they'd speak at the actual sentencing.

Prosecutor Melinda McGunnigle noted this was the third time sentencing had been adjourned, objecting to the continued delays.

Slattery remains in jail here. He'll have to spend his murder sentence in New York before Florida can extradite him if they wanted to pursue the stolen car case.

Slattery's first parole eligibility date will be in two decades, but he could spend life in prison if the parole board keeps him locked up.CAMILLUS, NY - Paul Valenti was having a quiet meal at LongHorn Steakhouse in Camillus Monday night with his wife and two children when they heard a commotion.

Next, the restaurant's alarms went off and everyone evacuated, but "no one knew what to expect - we weren't sure what it was,'' Valenti said.

Outside in the parking lot, Valenti said he heard a woman's purse had been snatched by a man inside the restaurant. He could see that woman and another chasing a man across three parking lots into the Costco lot.

Valenti said he took off after them because he was worried about their safety. The women had followed the man and cornered him as he tried to get in his car, so Valenti said he got between them and the man.

"I'm a little bigger than him, so I just stopped him from getting in his car,'' he said. "I said to him 'what were you thinking?' and then the guy threw the woman's purse back at her and said he was having hard times."

Valenti, 46, of Westvale, owner of Glazed & Confused donut shop in Syracuse, said Camillus police arrived shortly after that. He said the woman whose purse was stolen came up to him crying, said thank you and gave him a hug.

Gregory Kiernan, 29, of Tully was arrested and charged with grand larceny and criminal possession of stolen property, police said. His mug shot is not being released at this time because he is suspected of other similar cases at other area restaurants, police said.

Valenti said a friend of his called to tell him he'd just been called to a lineup involving a similar incident at a PF Chang's in Destiny USA.

Angela Clayton, who works as a server at a DeWitt restaurant, said Syracuse police told her the same person took her wallet out of her purse while she was working two weeks ago.

"I wish I could personally thank the patrons who chased this guy," she said. "I'm currently waiting for the DA's office to release my wallet back to me.

"I know my wallet and everything in it could be replaced, but my wallet had a lock of hair in it from my son's first haircut that we had taken him for that Thursday before this happened,'' she said.

It could not be determined Thursday if Syracuse police have charged Kiernan.SYRACUSE, N.Y. -- Syracuse police responded to a shooting near the Parkside Commons apartment complex Wednesday night.

The Onondaga County 911 dispatch center received a call at 10:02 p.m. Wednesday reporting that shots were fired on Croly Street, between East Fayette Street and Dakin Street, dispatch logs show.

Shots appeared to have been fired at a black Nissan Altima with a Georgia license plate. Officers searched the surrounding yards and used flashlights to look at the car.

Police have yet to comment on the shooting. Rural Metro Ambulance also responded to the shooting, according to Onondaga County dispatch logs. The street was not roped off with police tape, though a van from the police department's Crime Scene Unit was at the scene with at least four other patrol cars.SYRACUSE, N.Y. -- When Sara Errington joined the Syracuse Fire Department, she was shown a list of fire stations where she couldn't work. She was a woman, and those stations didn't have coed facilities.

Soon after, when she asked to be part of the hazardous materials team, she was again told no. A woman of child-bearing age shouldn't be around hazardous materials, officials told her. She should seek out another assignment.

That was 2004.

Fast-forward 14 years. Errington has ascended through the ranks of the nearly all-male department and, earlier this year, was made a district chief. She's the first woman to ever hold that rank with the SFD.

From her cramped office at Station 9 near Eastwood, Errington laughed lightly while reflecting on her career to this point. It took "a little pushing" to find or make opportunities in the department. But today, she's happy with how the department has responded, adapted and grown into a more modern, equitable workplace.

"There have been times when I haven't had opportunities other people have had, and there are times when I knew it was because I'm a woman," she said. "But those roadblocks have usually fallen away with a little pushing. Now I feel like the opportunities are pretty much equal for everybody."

***

When Errington joined the department in 2004 she was one of a handful of women among more than 300 firefighters. Currently, there are a dozen women with the department -- less than 4 percent of the total force. That number reflects the national average for women in career fire departments, according to the National Fire Protection Association.

Today, Errington is a certified hazmat responder. She's one of the department's top-ranking officials. She's watched as stations have been outfitted to accommodate men and women, and, during her time, has seen the department adopt its first-ever maternity plan. And now, she's outranked by just seven people in the department -- its deputy chiefs and the chief.

Errington is personable and gregarious, but was a little reluctant to share her story. She prefers to stay out of the spotlight, she said. And she doesn't want to sound like she's complaining about the way things were. Every time she pushed, she said, someone listened and something changed.

"I've had so many men help me and support me and encourage me that I don't want any quibbles I have about treatment to overshadow that," she said. "[Lt.] Joe Galloway was a guy in charge of some human resources stuff. If I was to point out something like that to him, he would work to make it better. And there were guys on the job like Chief [Michael] Monds who just had my back."

***

Errington grew up in Indiana. She came from a family of academics. Her parents were teachers and she pursued that line of work as a young woman. She attended Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts before earning a master's degree and a doctorate in early African-American history, both from Brown University.

Soon after that, she found her options in academia were limited. So she decided to pursue journalism. She enjoyed meeting and talking to new people (and still does). Journalism gave her plenty of chances for that.

In the late 1990s she started working as a reporter, first in the suburbs of Cleveland, then at The Post-Standard, where she covered the western suburbs.

While covering a breaking news shift for the Camillus bureau sometime in 2000, Errington responded to a fire on West Genesee Street in Fairmount. She was watching the firefighters battle an inferno when something clicked.

"I went to cover this fire and was just standing there and they looked-- it's not that you have fun when someone's losing property, but they were clearly enjoying their work," she said. "I said, it looked interesting."

There was a county official on site that night who recruits firefighters. Errington got talking to him. Within a week, she said, he'd put an application in her hand for the volunteer department in DeWitt, where she lived. She joined, she said, because she wanted a hobby -- something to do in addition to work.

Soon after, she took a test to qualify for the Syracuse Fire Department, a paying job. She passed with high marks.

The city hired Errington in 2004. There were only a few women hired in the department before Errington. Danita Thomas was the first. She was hired in 1987 and retired in 2009.

Errington was promoted to captain in 2013 (another first for a woman with SFD). Earlier this year, Monds, who was sworn in as chief in January, told her she'd been promoted to district chief. She's one of 12 district chiefs citywide.

The base salary for a district chief is $85,344.

The International Association of Women in Fire & Emergency Services estimates there are only 150 women who are district chiefs or battalion chiefs throughout the U.S.

In her office at Station 9 is a small cot where she sleeps two nights out of every eight, she said. There's a bathroom, some lockers and a desk filled with paperwork. The walls are covered in charts, maps and procedural notes.

The new job involves a lot more administrative work, Errington said. But it still lets her get out on a scene. Just minutes into an interview Monday, a two-tone alarm sounded. That's the code for a fire. She bounded out of her chair, grabbed a jacket, and took off with siren blaring in her chief's SUV.

"I might be back soon or I might be back in a while," she said over her shoulder on her way out the door.

***

Along with Errington, seven other firefighters were promoted last month:SYRACUSE, N.Y. - A Syracuse funeral director says Van Duyn nursing home did not keep its morgue cool enough to prevent a deceased resident's body from decomposing.

Patty Knight Scholl, of Keegan-Osbelt-Knight funeral home, said when a colleague went to Van Duyn to pick up the body Saturday it was badly decomposed because of a malfunctioning cooler.

She has filed a complaint against Van Duyn with the state Health Department.

"I've never had something happen like this in the 28 years I've been a funeral director," Scholl said. "It's upsetting."

Van Duyn officials did not return phone messages from syracuse.com. In a prepared statement, the state Health Department said it "takes nursing home complaints like this one seriously."

Scholl alerted other Central New York funeral directors to the problem in a letter she sent out today.

"The condition of the decedent was horrendous," she said in the letter. "The patients at Van Duyn deserve to be treated with some respect both in life and death."

Scholl said the man died Thursday, March 15, and she was contacted the next day by his family who wanted him cremated. She said Van Duyn called her Friday and Saturday, demanding she come get the body because it had limited cooler space. She said it did not make sense to remove him from the cooler because he could not be cremated until Monday. She said her funeral home and most others do not have have coolers.

Most nursing homes do not have morgues and rely on funeral directors to pick up deceased residents shortly after death, she said. She said the temperature in coolers where bodies are stored is supposed to be kept between 37 and 40 degrees.

Scholl said another funeral director told her he noticed a problem with the morgue temperature at Van Duyn March 10 and told nursing home staff they needed to get it fixed.

Scholl said the deceased resident's family did not want to publicly comment on the case.

"They just want to make sure this doesn't happen to anyone else," she said. "It's horrifying this had to happen."

Van Duyn is a 530-bed nursing home owned by Upstate Services Group, a for-profit company that bought it from Onondaga County in 2013.

Van Duyn recently replaced its administrator in the wake of patient complaints about lack of heat and other problems at the facility.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services rates Van Duyn "much below average" based on health inspections, staffing and quality measures.

Between Feb. 1, 2014 and Jan. 31, the state Health Department received 133.1 complaints per 100 residents at Van Duyn. That's nearly three times higher than the state average of 46 complaints per 100 residents.

Contact James T. Mulder anytime: Email | Twitter | 315-470-2245Jennifer Francis is a research professor in the department of marine and coastal sciences at Rutgers University.

By Jennifer Francis | Special to The Washington Post



Another week, another nor'easter -- the fourth powerful coastal storm of March 2018 has the big Northeast cities in its crosshairs. The region is notorious for vicious winter tempests, but four bomb cyclones in one month seems a bit much, especially when one comes on the first day of spring. March roared in like a lion. What happened to the lamb?

My New England neighborhood is usually peaceful this time of year; the quiet interrupted only by honks of Canada geese, wind in the towering white pines and the occasional hoot of a great horned owl. Not so much this winter. Rumbling generators, whining chain saws and rattling snowplows lasted many days after each pasting by Mother Nature.

We New Englanders love to talk about weather, and we revel in our toughness, but even that is different this year. After comparing stories of fallen trees and property damage, the conversation increasingly shifts to "Why?" Is there an explanation for this relentless, persistent parade of destructive cyclones, storms so strong that if you didn't check the calendar you'd easily mistake them for hurricanes on the weather map? Perhaps.

Some climate-change skeptics always use snowstorms to argue that the planet is not actually warming. President Donald Trump, during a sharp December cold snap on the East Coast, suggested that "perhaps we could use a little bit of that good old Global Warming," which he has called a hoax. Last April, conservative news outlets rejoiced when snow canceled a march in Colorado to protest Trump's climate policies. But rather than being evidence that climate change isn't happening, the extreme weather the United States has seen this month should be viewed as a sign that it is.

Although the atmosphere is a complex beast, researchers are fingerprinting a variety of ways that those increasing greenhouse gases are making winter storms more powerful and more likely. It's clear that this spate of nor'easters is being juiced by inordinately warm ocean temperatures along the East Coast, one of the key ingredients in the recipe for a good bomb cyclone. Less intuitive, though, is the increasingly clear role being played by the rapidly warming and melting Arctic.

A growing pile of studies suggests that heat waves in the far north are slowing the west winds of the jet stream, allowing the normally bottled-up frigid air to plunge southward in giant lobes. For much of this winter, one of those cold lobes has been parked over the eastern United States -- another key ingredient for coastal snowstorms. The bigger the lobe, the longer it tends to stick around, setting the stage for the parade of storms we've seen not only this month but during five of the past six winters as well. A study some colleagues and I published last week found that severe winters in the eastern United States were much more likely during Arctic heat waves -- and this winter, the Arctic was particularly hot.

The western United States doesn't get off the hook, either. While the East shivers and shovels under the influence of the cold lobe, the West sits under a "ridge," a northward swing of the jet stream. Big ridges and deep lobes are two sides of a coin. The western ridge brought a record warm winter to Alaska and perpetuated California's drought, a pattern that only recently gave way to torrential rain.

Research suggests that when we see low amounts of sea ice and warmth in the Bering Sea, as we have this winter, the northward loop strengthens along the West Coast. Strong ridges tend to hang around longer, earning this one the moniker "Ridiculously Resilient Ridge."

Not every winter will behave this way, though, as many factors influence the jet stream and our weather. While the globe warms overall -- melting ice and snow in both poles -- a few areas buck that trend with winter cooling. Eastern North America is one of those places. What does the future hold? Extreme weather of all sorts is a near certainty, except that fewer cold records will be broken. More "stuck" weather patterns are likely, punctuated with dramatic flips from one extreme to another. Remember the February heat wave when Bostonians flocked to the beaches? These "weather whiplash" events are also more likely.

Of course, nor'easters and western drought happened long before humans started messing with the planet, but it's becoming abundantly clear that the dice are now loaded for more extreme weather of all sorts. If we continue to burn fossil fuels, cut down forests, waste food and destroy natural systems, the problems facing our children will be even bigger than they already are. Stronger nor'easters, coastal flooding, more acidic oceans: These are symptoms of a disease that is still in our power to treat, but only if we administer strong medicine -- and soon.New York State has two wild turkey hunting seasons - one in the spring, and one in the fall. The spring hunt is by far the most popular among hunters.

"The estimated (state-wide) harvest for spring 2017 was 17,492 birds," according to the state Department of Environmental Conservation. "This is slightly below 2016 and below the five-year and ten-year average spring harvest (20,400 and 25,000 birds, respectively)."

"Much of the decline in harvest below the long-term average the last two years can be attributed to a decline in participation (about 80,000 hunters/year in 2016 and 2017 compared to 91,500 hunters/year, on average, over the previous five years)," according to the DEC. "Wet weather in many regions in the first half of May in 2016 and in the latter half of May in 2017 may have kept hunters indoors."

As described in DEC's Wild Turkey Management Plan (PDF) (290 kB), DEC has changed the way that seasonal turkey harvest is reported. In the past, DEC only summarized the number of birds actually reported by hunters.

According to the DEC website: "Now, the Department reports an estimated total turkey harvest based on surveys of approximately 12,000 turkey permit holders after the close of the hunting season. This results in a calculated harvest based on estimated reporting rates. This provides a more accurate harvest estimate and a more realistic assessment of the status of New York's wild turkey populations."

Meanwhile, "the 14th annual Youth Turkey Hunt was held April 22-23, and was once again greeted with enthusiasm by young hunters and their adult mentors," DEC said. "About 5,900 junior hunters harvested an estimated 1,600 birds. Junior hunters and their adult mentors met with success in 53 of the 56 counties open to the youth hunt."

The following is breakdown by county in Central New York where wild turkey were taken during the 2010, 2015, 2016 and 2017 spring seasons, with the counties ranked from least to most birds.

See NYup.com for complete numbers of turkey taken across the state.

County 2010 2015 2016 2017 Total Oswego 837 479 404 607 2,327 Oneida 774 499 420 525 2,218 Onondaga 752 577 448 347 2,124 Cayuga 625 497 473 347 1,942 Madison 661 348 433 293 1,735 Wayne 485 306 337 448 1,576 Tompkins 540 317 323 245 1,425 Cortland 458 292 307 178 1,235 Seneca 242 115 112 199 668

Source: New York State Department of Environmental ConservationWASHINGTON -- About 500,000 people are expected to travel here from across the nation Saturday to take part in the March for Our Lives, a rally against gun violence organized by students after the Feb. 14 school shooting in Parkland, Fla., left 17 people dead.

Organizers says 837 sister marches are now planned around the world, including one at noon Saturday in Syracuse at the Everson Museum of Art.

Syracuse.com will report from the marches in Syracuse and Washington, where we'll follow local student marchers and supporters who made the trip from Central New York.

If you're part of a school group from Central New York headed to Washington, or marching on your own, please let us know. We'd like to catch up with you in the nation's capital to share your story about the march.

You can contact Washington correspondent Mark Weiner by email, telephone at 571-970-3715, Twitter or Facebook.

The Washington March for Our Lives will be noon to 3 p.m. Saturday, and include performances by Ariana Grande, Demi Lovato, Common, Vic Mensa and Jennifer Hudson.Utica, N.Y. -- U.S. Rep. Claudia Tenney on Wednesday blamed the "deep state" for the controversy over a $31,000 dining set bought for Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson's office.



Tenney, a Republican, made the comments on Talk of the Town, a Utica radio show. Tenney said the whole incident had been misunderstood.



"Somebody in the deep state, it was not one of his people apparently, ordered a table, like a conference room table or whatever it was for a room, and that's what the cost was," Tenney said.

The term "deep state" has emerged frequently among some on the right since President Donald Trump's election. It refers to the belief that deeply entrenched, career government employees are working against Trump's interests and his administration,

.

During testimony

, Carson said he left details of the dining set purchase to his wife. He also said the old set needed to be replaced for safety reasons because of its age.

He canceled the order for the table when he learned of its cost. Carson told lawmakers he heard about the price around the same time it was reported in the news media.

On Talk of the Town, Tenney said government procurement rules made it harder to send the table back than to accept it. The entire process is too bureaucratic and needs reform, she said.

Tenney also said she was a fan of Carson and supported the work he is trying to do at HUD.

Tenney recently found herself in the national spotlight when she said that "many" mass murderers are Democrats during an interview on an Albany radio show. She argued later that the comment was taken out of context.

Tenney's district covers a large swath of Upstate New York to the east of Syracuse.

Contact Kevin Tampone anytime: Email | Twitter | Google + | 315-454-2112The state comptroller's office is questioning the validity of extra payments made over the past four years to state Sen. David Valesky after he was listed as holding leadership positions in the state Senate.

Valesky, D-Oneida, received $15,000 annual stipends in 2015 and 2016 for his duties as vice-chair of the Senate Health Committee, even though those payments are reserved for committee chairs.

Valesky's stipends almost doubled to $27,500 last year when he was given the new title of senior assistant majority leader in the Senate, according to records from the comptroller's office.

On Wednesday, he received the first installment of $27,500 due for his 2018 stipend, the records show. Those extra payments, known as "lulus" in Albany, are in addition to Valesky's annual salary of $79,500.

Leaders of the Republican-led Senate and Valesky did not publicly announce that he was given the title of senior assistant majority leader in 2017, a reward for serving as a leader of eight breakaway Democrats who help the GOP maintain control over the Senate.

Now the office of state Comptroller Tom DiNapoli is questioning those stipends, and threatening to withhold future payments unless the Republican-controlled Senate can prove why they are valid.

Valesky began receiving the stipends in 2015 along with other members of the Independent Democratic Conference who were awarded seats as vice-chairs of their committees after partnering with Republicans. The stipends were previously reserved for chairs of legislative committees.

Valesky boosted his stipend in 2017, when he was given the senior assistant majority leader's post, previously held by Sen. Jeffrey Klein, the IDC leader.

Klein is now listed as vice president pro tempore of the Senate, receiving a new annual stipend of $34,000 beginning in 2017, according to the comptroller's records.

The IDC members and some Republicans received 25 percent of their 2018 stipend in payments Wednesday, and are supposed to be paid the remainder after the Legislature passes the state budget due by April 1.

But in a March 9 letter to the Senate secretary, Deputy Comptroller Christopher Gorka threatened that future stipend payments to at least seven members could be rejected unless they can prove the validity of committee titles submitted with requests for payment.

Gorka asked for "documentation showing that these members serve in the office or special capacity listed" in the request for stipend payments. He said there is no public information that identifies the members as officers or committee chairs.

Valesky's office referred requests for comment to the Independent Democratic Conference.

IDC spokeswoman Candice Giove said in a statement, "We expect the secretary of the Senate will answer all of the comptroller's questions to his satisfaction."

Sen. Patricia Ritchie, R-Oswegatchie, the deputy vice-chair of the Senate Health Committee, is among those receiving a stipend normally reserved for committee chairs.

Only five members of the state Senate are due to receive larger stipend payments than Valesky this year, according to records provided by the comptroller's office.

State Sen. John DeFrancisco, R-DeWitt, the deputy majority leader, is due to receive an extra $34,000 from taxpayers as a stipend for his leadership position. DeFrancisco is seeking the Republican nomination for governor this year.

The extra benefits for IDC members were first disclosed in May 2017 by The New York Times. Since then, good-government groups have called the stipends an "end-run" around the law allowing legislature leaders to receive extra pay for leadership duties.

The Times reported in May that federal law enforcement officials are investigating whether the requests for the stipends amount to illegal activity.

Contact Mark Weiner anytime: Twitter | Facebook | 571-970-3751NEW YORK CITY -- Todd Howe has spent 42 days and nights in jail -- and there's no end in sight.

The star witness in the New York corruption case was arrested in February, midway through his testimony in the corruption trial of former top governor's aide Joseph Percoco and three businessmen, including Steven Aiello and Joseph Gerardi from Syracuse's Cor Development.

Howe, 57, was a key witness in the case, in which Percoco and Aiello were convicted. According to Howe and prosecutors, Cor paid Percoco bribes through a shell company he arranged.

A defense lawyer had Howe admit on the witness stand that he tried to bilk his credit card company after he signed a cooperation agreement with federal prosecutors.

Defense lawyers at every turn attacked Howe's character, after Howe called himself an "honest man" who had a "come to Jesus" moment before deciding to cooperate with investigators.

After his arrest, Howe appeared in a separate courtroom in shackles and sweats. He was led into court with unkempt hair and a distressed appearance, wearing a Martha's Vineyard T-shirt, black sweatpants and tan slippers.

Howe was jailed after federal prosecutors asked a judge to revoke his bail. Howe, through his attorney Richard Morvillo, consented. That means the government has never actually had to argue for why he should be detained.

At the time, further discussion of Howe's detention, or release, was scheduled for a date in early March.

Due to the eight-week length of the corruption trial, Howe's next appearance was delayed. The date was also delayed to accommodate a judge, then the case was transferred to a different judge, causing further delays.

The next hearing was set for next week, but today, Howe's lawyer Morvillo asked for an extension due to a family vacation.

"With apologies to the Court, please be advised that I have non-refundable air and hotel reservations to be away that week with my immediate family for my 70th birthday," Morvillo wrote to the judge.

The judge has not yet responded to the rescheduling request.

Howe is being held at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Lower Manhattan.

As if things couldn't get any worse for Howe, his case was reassigned to U.S. District Court Judge Valerie Caproni, who presided over the trial and let her feelings about the government's star witness be known.

"The jury is well aware that Mr. Howe is not a good guy," Caproni told lawyers at trial. "Why people kept dealing with him is beyond me."

Read our continuing coverage of the trial

Public Affairs Reporter Julie McMahon covers courts, government and other issues affecting taxpayers. She can be reached anytime: Email | Twitter | 315-412-1992Brisbane, Australia -- Two U.S. tourists died Wednesday in a helicopter crash at the Great Barrier Reef in Australia.



The helicopter was heading to a popular coral-viewing pontoon along the reef, according to The New York Times. Tourists already at the pontoon saw the helicopter plunge into the water.



The pilot tried to pull one passengers from the wreckage, the Times said.



A 65-year-old woman and 79-year-old man from Hawaii died in the crash. Authorities have not released their names yet, the Times said.



The helicopter pilot, a 34-year-old man and a 33-year-old woman survived. All four tourists knew each other, according to The Associated Press.



The other two passengers were from Colorado and suffered injuries that were not considered life threatening.



Officials said the pilot involved was an experienced operator, according to the Times.



Whitsunday Air Services, which operated the flight, said the helicopter was approaching the pontoon to land when it crashed. The company suspended operations and is working with authorities to determine the cause of the crash, USA Today said.



It was the second accident for Whitsunday Air in recent months, according to the Times. Another helicopter operated by the company crashed in November with three passengers on board.



"Something went wrong and the consequences are tragic," Inspector Ian Haughton of the Queensland Police said of Wednesday's crash, according to the Times. "An independent, robust and transparent investigation is underway."

Contact Kevin Tampone anytime: Email | Twitter | Google + | 315-454-2112Raleigh, N.C. -- A mother was arrested Wednesday after a viral Facebook video showed her apparently forcing her baby to smoke marijuana, police said.



Brianna Ashanti Lofton, 20 of Raleigh, North Carolina, faces charges of felony child abuse causing serious bodily injury, contributing to the delinquency of a juvenile and simple possession of marijuana, according to CBS 17 in Raleigh.



Police said Lofton was transported to county jail and the baby was placed with child protective services.



Authorities began investigating after multiple people started posting a video showing the incident on the Raleigh Police Department's Facebook page, CBS 17 said.



At least one version of the video received 1 million views on Facebook, according to The Associated Press. The 10-second clip shows the hand of an adult off-screen holding what appears to be a small cigar to the child's lips.



The baby then appears to inhale. Police referred to the cigar in arrest warrants as a "marijuana blunt," according to CBS.



Sean Price, a neighbor, told CBS he saw Lofton and her baby in the area regularly. Lofton seemed friendly and attentive, Price said.



"I was totally flabbergasted over the simple fact that I saw that baby smoking," Price said, according to CBS. "The bad thing about it is I've seen that baby, said hi to the baby, touched that baby, because I have a little daughter of my own, so I interacted with her."



The smoking incident occurred sometime between Dec. 1, 2017 and Jan. 31, 2018, according to CBS. The child was 1 at the time.



Police thanked the numerous people who alerted authorities to the video.



"Thanks to your willingness to get involved, the child is now safe and the mother is in police custody," the department wrote on Facebook.

Contact Kevin Tampone anytime: Email | Twitter | Google + | 315-454-2112Police say they saw an object in Stephan Clark's hand before firing 20 bullets that killed him in his own yard Sunday night in Sacramento.

The two officers were responding to a 911 call about a man breaking vehicle windows, and encountered Clark, 22. They believed he was holding a gun. It was a cellphone.

They each fired 10 rounds at Clark, striking him multiple times.

"He was at the wrong place at the wrong time in his own back yard?" his grandmother, Sequita Thompson, told the Sacramento Bee. "C'mon now, they didn't have to do that."

Police said the man they believed was breaking windows was the same man they killed in a hail of gunfire, identified as a man over 6 feet tall, the Sacramento Police Department said in a statement Monday.

Thompson disputes that. Her grandson was short, she said in a video produced by the Bee. She believes another suspect was smashing windows, but Clark was in her back yard at the wrong time.

The door bell is broken, and family members tap on the back window for someone to open the garage door, the family told the paper. Clark was staying at his grandmother's at the time.

Gunfire startled her that night.

"The only thing that I heard was pow, pow, pow, pow, and I got to the ground," she said in the video. She said she began to suspect the police describing a dead person in her yard was a member of the family.

"I told the officers, 'You guys are murderers. Murderers,' " Thompson cried out in the video. "You took him away from his kids." He had two young sons, Cairo and Aiden, the family said, and a fiancee, Salena Manni, the Associated Press reported.

Police have yet to identify Clark as the suspect or victim, but Thompson and Manni both identified him to media using variations of his name, Stephon and Stephan.

Rest in power to one of the latest victims to state violence #StephanClark, who was gunned down in his own backyard. #BlackLivesMatter pic.twitter.com/rWyNuPTs2m  HuffPost BlackVoices (@blackvoices) March 21, 2018

Thompson did not return a request for comment.

The narrative of the Sunday night shooting released by authorities tells a short, grim story.

Police were dispatched at 9:13 p.m. Sunday, responding to a 911 call of a man breaking car windows and then hiding in a back yard in southern Sacramento. They arrived minutes later, along with a police helicopter flying overhead.

The helicopter observed a suspect picking up a "toolbar" and breaking a window to a house. The Bee reported it was the sliding glass door belonging to a neighbor. The suspect then ran and looked into a car, the statement said.

Police in the helicopter guided police on the ground to the front yard of Thompson's house as Clark was coming from the back. They met in the middle. Police commanded him to stop and show his hands. He ran toward the back yard, they said.

"The suspect turned and advanced toward the officers while holding an object which was extended in front of him. The officers believed the suspect was pointing a firearm at them," the statement read.

"Fearing for their safety, the officers fired their duty weapons striking the suspect multiple times."

How many times Clark was struck is unknown, pending the investigation.

Sacramento police Detective Eddie Macauley did not immediately know what model weapon the police used, or if the 10 rounds they each fired was the entire capacity of their magazines.

Authorities released some details about remaining moments of Clark's life, as well as footage from a body-worn camera.

Note: Video contains potentially disturbing content not suitable for younger viewers.

The two officers on scene struck Clark with gunfire, but waited five minutes to render first aid after other officers arrived and Clark was handcuffed. He died at the scene.

A single, broad sentence of department guidance on providing medical attention to suspects reads: "Officers shall provide first aid to injured parties if it can be done safely."

Some factors may affect how and if police render aid to someone they shoot, like if they are resisting or if police believe a weapon is present, Macauley told The Washington Post on Wednesday.

An analysis by The Post found that 987 people were killed by police last year - 68 of them unarmed. Of those, 30 were white, 20 were black and 13 were Hispanic, showing an overrepresentation of African Americans among the total population. Five of the remaining fatalities were unknown or other.

Macauley declined to say when the officers learned Clark did not have a gun or what Clark's demeanor was, citing the ongoing investigation.

Both officers were wearing body cams, Macauley said, and authorities are working to get the footage released. They are both on paid administrative leave, he said.

Sacramento mayor Darrell Steinberg in a statement Wednesday night offered his condolences to Clark's family and said he was "heartbroken" for the city.

He also said that he reviewed the videos carefully and, "based on the videos alone, I cannot second guess the split-second decisions of our officers and I'm not going to do that." A thorough investigation was necessary, he said, "before we can render any final conclusions."

"The questions raised by the community and councilmembers are appropriate are appropriate and must be answered during the investigation," Steinberg wrote. "For instance, what are the protocols regarding use of force and for rendering emergency aid during officer involved shootings?"

The city enacted a regulation that requires police to release footage no later than 30 days after an officer kills a citizen. The policy has been in place since 2014, after police killed knife-wielding Joseph Mann after first trying to ram him with a cruiser. Police fired 18 rounds at him, striking 14 times.

"I think right now is a moment for our community," local pastor Les Simmons, who resigned from a police oversight commission after Mann's death, told the Bee following a Monday vigil and protest that included Black Lives Matter. "A moment to show real transparency."

The Bee reported that before Clark's death, 16 officer-involved killings occurred in Sacramento County since 2016.

Some of them are detailed on the Sacramento Police Department's transparency section of its website, right under a banner touting the department's tagline.

"Making Sacramento the safest big city in California," it reads.Syracuse, N.Y. -- After one of the snowiest months of March on record, Upstate New York could finally see some spring weather a week after spring began.

Air flowing up from the South "will bring an taste of early spring Tuesday and into Wednesday," the National Weather Service's Buffalo office said today.

Temperatures could break into the 50s on Tuesday, the first time that's happened in some Upstate cities since a record-breaking warm spell in late February.

Temperatures could reach into the 50s on Tuesday, the highest they've been since a late February warm spell.

In fact, Buffalo hit 40 only once this month -- on March 1. Syracuse's last day of 40 or more was March 6, when it was 42. Normal high temperatures for the third week of March are in the mid to upper 40s across most of Upstate.

Astronomical spring started at 12:15 p.m. Tuesday, although temperatures felt more like mid-February.

By next Tuesday, it should at least look more like spring. The strong sun this time of year -- it's as high in the sky now as it is during the State Fair -- is melting away the snow even though temperatures are holding in the 30s.

Syracuse's snow pack has shrunk from 20 inches on March 15 to just 8 inches on Wednesday, and grass and ground are becoming more visible.

Highs are likely to remain in the 40s and possibly low 50s next week, with some rain possible on Wednesday.

Contact Glenn Coin: Email | Twitter | Google + | (315) 470-3251Syracuse, N.Y. -- A photo shot today by a NOAA satellite tells a tale of lake effect snow and why the Finger Lakes are such a good spot for vineyards.

The photo is dominated by an ice-free Lake Ontario at the top and a snow-dusted Upstate New York. But just below Lake Ontario there's something remarkable: Two dark, sinuous bodies of water -- Seneca and Cayuga lakes -- largely surrounded by snowless brown earth.

What's going on there?

We called Neil Laird, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva. He's an expert on Finger Lakes weather, and he gave us a rundown on that photo and how it helps explain the region's weather and wine-making.

There are several reasons, Laird said, why that area around the biggest of the 11 Finger Lakes is bare today:

Lake effect snow fizzles out. When north winds blow across Lake Ontario and generate lake snow, Laird said, that snow is generally heavier north of I-90 than south. That wide-open area at the northern ends of the two big lakes gets less snow to start with.

Terrain makes a big difference. Lakes are, of course, lower-lying than the surrounding landscape. Land rises to the east and west of Seneca and Cayuga lakes, and higher ground is also colder ground.

"Where the terrain is a little bit higher, it's allowing the snow to accumulate a little bit more," Laird said. "The temperature stays a little bit colder to keep the snow cover on the ground."

The sun is high in the sky. Now that we're getting more sunlight than darkness, and the sun angle is higher, the lakes are rapidly warming and releasing heat to the surrounding countryside.

"The sun's power and energy are getting stronger, and are heating up the water as well as the land," Laird said. "The lakes act as a heat source, so right along the shorelines there's less snow than farther away."

The lakes are very, very deep. Seneca Lake is 618 feet; Cayuga Lake is 435 feet. That means the lakes don't freeze very easily because they retain heat so well. (Think of a tall coffee cup compared to a bowl.)

It's also why Lake Ontario, with a maximum depth over 800 feet, stays open all winter while Lake Erie often freezes over. You can see some residual ice on Lake Erie on the left side of the photo.

Compare the deep Finger Lakes to Oneida Lake, that little white "thumb" in the photo just to the northeast of the Finger Lakes. Oneida Lake is very shallow - its average depth is only 22 feet - and so remains covered with ice and snow.

The ability of the deep Finger Lakes to store and release heat is why the region has so many vineyards. The lakes modify the climate, Laird said, keeping the areas around them several degrees warmer in the winter than they would be otherwise.

In the summer, the lakes are much slower to heat up than the land, so the water helps cool the surrounding air.

"The maximum temperature in the summer remains a little bit cooler, and in the winter the lake has a warming effect on those sloped terrains that is favorable to vineyards," Laird said.

All that from one picture from space.

Contact Glenn Coin: Email | Twitter | Google + | (315) 470-3251STC musical to be featured at Iowa Thespian Festival

Into the woods, its time, and so I must begin my journey. Into The Woods by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine. And so, the STC Music ...A new study claims that when children are asked to draw scientists, they will now draw female scientists more often than ever before.

The study looked at five decades of the Draw-A-Scientist studies, revealing how stereotypes linking science with men have deteriorated over time as more women enter the field.

Children Now Draw Female Scientists More Often

When about 5,000 children were asked to draw a scientist in the 1960s and 1970s, elementary school kids almost exclusively drew male scientists. Out of the thousands of drawings, there were only 28 that showed a female scientist, all of which were made by girls. Everyone else, including all the boys, came up with male scientists.

The previous studies piqued the curiosity of Northwestern University PhD candidate in psychology David Miller, who asked the important question of how children's stereotypes for scientists have changed over the past few decades.

The new study, published in the Child Development journal, discovered that in studies completed since 1985, when children were asked to draw a scientist, nearly a third of the drawings, or 28 percent, depicted female scientists.

Data over the past 30 years showed that for 6-year-old children, 83 percent of boys and 70 percent of girls drew scientists of their own gender. However, as kids grew older, both boys and girls drew male scientists more often, with girls switching to drawing male scientists more often than female scientists by 11 years old.

Why Are Scientist Stereotypes Changing?

In a post on the Scientific American blog, Miller said that one of the factors that changed the stereotypes for scientists among children was media. For example, in Highlights for Children, the percentage of images of women and girls used in feature stories of the popular magazine increased from 13 percent in the 1960s to 44 percent in the 2000s.

Miller also cited films such as Hidden Figures as having helped reshape the minds of children on gender norms in science. Hidden Figures told the story of black female mathematicians working for NASA in the 1960s who blazed a trail for women in science.

The change in mindset among children may also be seen as a reflection of the real world, as more women earn science degrees compared to the past. Since the 1960s, the percentage of women who are employed as scientists in the United States increased from 28 percent to 49 percent in biological science, from 8 percent to 35 percent in chemistry, and from 3 percent to 11 percent in physics and astronomy.

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.Mars is one of the Earth's closest neighbors in the Solar System. Even though it isn't known who discovered it, people have known about its existence since 1610. A professor in South Africa described the celestial body as a previously undiscovered star and ended up being printed in a news service.

It is safe to say that he wasn't the first to discover the Red Planet.

Mars Rediscovered

Peter Dunsby is a cosmology professor at the University of Cape Town. He submitted a discovery to the Astronomer's Telegram. It is a service that features news about the latest in astronomy. Dunsby's report of what he observed in the night sky showed that he had been tracking Mars since he first observed it on March 8.

His report of the discovery of Mars makes no mention that he had found a new planet. Instead, Dunsby records where he had seen Mars at this point. He notes in the Digital Sky Survey plates that there is no celestial body described at this location.

Dunsby describes Mars as the brightest star in its location. He notes that this discovery will require further observations. What further observation discovered was that Dunsby was referring to Mars in his report.

Astronomer's Telegram was forced to write a correction about the subject. It later congratulated Dunsby for his discovery of the planet Mars in a tongue-in-cheek tweet. Dunsby showed that he could take a joke by saying that he learned his lesson, that he will need to check twice next time.

Actual 'Discovery' Of Mars

It is not known when Mars was observed in the sky, but it is known when it was first considered a planet. Nicolaus Copernicus was the first person to suggest that Mars might be a planet just like Earth. Some of the earliest observations of Mars were made by Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe. He was able to calculate the position of the planet in 1576.

The first person to observe Mars through a telescope, although it was a primitive one, was Galileo Galilei in 1609. In 1659, astronomer Christiaan Huygens was able to see Mars by using a more advanced telescope.

Mars was observed as far back as 400 BC by the Babylonians. They knew the planet as Nergal. Ancient Egyptians observed that the stars were in fixed orbit around the Sun. Besides Mars, they also observed the planets Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, and Saturn in the night sky.

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.In January this year, New Zealand-based spaceflight company Rocket Lab launched Humanity Star into space.

Giant Disco Ball Falling Back To Earth

Humanity Star is a carbon-fiber reflective orb that reflects light from the sun back to Earth. Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck said that it would become the brightest thing in the sky and should remind humanity of its fragile place in the universe.

The object was expected to orbit our planet once every 90 minutes until October, when its orbit will supposedly decay and the satellite will burn up in the atmosphere. Just two months after its launch, however, the giant glittering disco ball is set to fall back down to Earth.

What Happened?

Some of the objects that Rocket Lab launched into space in January are still in their original orbits. Unfortunately, the Humanity Star has fallen out of its orbit.

Jonathan McDowell, from Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said that Rocket Lab possibly expected the Humanity Star to work for nine months because that is usually the amount of time that objects in similar orbits and under current conditions are supposed to remain stable.

The object's rapid descent, however, suggested that Rocket Lab may have failed to consider the amount of drag that the satellite would experience given its low mass.

"Compared to the average satellite, [the Humanity Star] is mostly empty. It's big for its mass, so therefore it kind of floats. It gets blown around by the wind more," McDowell said.

Auckland University astronomer Richard Easther also said that the earlier than expected re-entry is due to flawed modeling.

"I'm guessing that the forecast was based on a regular sized satellite, and an object that is essentially a balloon will feel a lot more drag, more than the regular satellites that are sent up, (which resemble) a hunk of metal," Easther said.

Re-Entry Expected On Thursday, March 22

Beck also confirmed that the satellite would re-enter Earth's atmosphere much sooner than earlier expected.

"Thank you to the thousands of people who shared their stories of experiencing it with friends and loved ones, and also to those who sent photos and videos of Humanity Star passes," Beck said in a statement.

The orb is expected to re-enter Earth's atmosphere on Thursday.

"The exact moment of re-entry is challenging to predict. Based on the current rate at which its altitude is dropping, the Humanity Star is predicted to re-enter the Earth's atmosphere on Thursday, 22 Mar 2018 UTC," Rocket Lab said.

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.China's space station, Tiangong-1, is falling to Earth at a steady descending course, and authorities do not discount the possibility it will hit populated areas.

Tiangong-1 is first reported to have been out-of-control in 2016 after five years of orbiting the Earth. Today, scientists have predicted that Tiangong-1 is likely to hit the Earth's atmosphere between March 30 and April 6, although there is always the possibility of it changing its velocity.

Out-Of-Control Space Lab

As for the disposal tactic, ESA said that China initially plans on executing a controlled reentry, meaning that Tiangong-1 will be slowed down at a certain rate toward an unpopulated region in the South Pacific Ocean.

Unfortunately, since Tiangong-1 has been out-of-control for almost two years now, the controlled reentry plan is already impossible to do.

Fragments of different spacecraft hit the Earth's surface in the past, including that of the Russian satellite Kosmos 954. The radioactive Kosmos 954 crashed in Northern Canada in 1978.

A year later, pieces of America's Skylab showered over the Australian peninsula. NASA then estimated that there is one in 152 chances that a piece of the Skylab will hit a person.

Debris Falling From The Sky

While China's 19,000-pound space lab is on its course toward the Earth, speculations arise that the debris from the shuttle could hit human populations. A comprehensive blog entry by the European Space Agency (ESA) published on its website stated otherwise.

"The personal probability of being hit by a piece of debris from the Tiangong-1 is actually 10 million times smaller than the yearly chance of being hit by lightning," ESA wrote. "In the history of spaceflight, no casualties due to falling space debris have ever been confirmed."

Dr. William Ailor, an engineer at Aerospace Corporation, seconded ESA's claim that there is no need to worry about people being hit by falling debris. He explained that even before Tiangong-1 reaches land or water, a large portion of it will be burned up in the atmosphere.

Ailor estimated that 2,000 to 8,000 pounds of the shuttle's material will not reach the Earth's surface.

Meanwhile, Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist from Harvard, welcomes the possibility of human and property damage.

"Yes, there's a chance it will do damage. It might take out someone's car. There will be a rain of a few pieces of metal. It might go through someone's roof like if a flap fell off a plane, but it is not widespread damage," McDowell said in an interview.

However, experts said that as more space flights are conducted each year, humans should get used to a future of raining metals.

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.Amid news of a continued measles outbreak in Kansas, another state has reportedly been exposed to the highly contagious virus as well.

State officials are cautioning the public about possible measles exposures around the St. Louis area, which might have taken place earlier this March.

According to the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services, it's possible the exposures happened around March 13 to 14 in various location including Kirkwood and Chesterfield.

Measles Exposure In Missouri

Health officials from the aforementioned department, along with the St. Louis County Department of Public Health, are currently investigating the issue. The health departments say that at least one person has tested positive for the virus, who visited the affected sites during the said dates.

This person visited the Magic House museum on March 13. He was, according to community health manager Melissa Swank, an outsider, and stayed from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. The museum's staff can't be certain of what places or exhibits he went into. Since measles, when exposed to air, can stay there for up to two hours, it's possible that visitors who were there up to 5 p.m. that day were exposed. Even still, no employees have reported any sickness so far.

Measles Symptoms

Officials suggest for anyone suffering measles symptoms to approach a doctor immediately. These include a rash that begins in the head or neck area before spreading out toward the other parts of the body. This doesn't appear until after seven to 21 days of initial exposure, however.

Here are other more common symptoms, according to NHS:

 a runny or blocked nose

 sneezing

 watery eyes

 swollen eyelids

 sore red eyes that may be sensitive to light

 a high temperature (fever), which may reach around 40C (104F)

 small greyish-white spots in the mouth

 aches and pains

 a cough

 loss of appetite

 tiredness, irritability, and a general lack of energy

For the uninitiated, measles is a highly contagious disease. As mentioned, it stays in the air for up to two hours, leaving many people highly vulnerable to being exposed. The virus is typically transmitted via coughing, sneezing, or any airborne transport methods. One way to prevent measles is to get vaccinated with the MMR vaccine, which is given to infants 12 to 15 months old.

Pantagraph reports that 93 percent of Missouri toddlers are vaccinated against the virus, but some remain vulnerable because the vaccine can wear off after some time has passed.

 2021 TECHTIMES.com All rights reserved. Do not reproduce without permission.The BBC has commissioned a trio of shows to mark the relationship between the Queen and the Commonwealth

BBC Studios has picked up two orders and Burning Bright a third.

On Saturday 21 April, BBC One and BBC Radio 2 will broadcast a special concert in celebration of the Queens 92nd birthday, live from the Royal Albert Hall. The concert comes at the end of a week when many Commonwealth Leaders will be gathered in London for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting. It will be attended by The Queen and many members of the Royal Family, with performances from Sir Tom Jones, Kylie Minogue, Craig David, Anne Marie, Shawn Mendes, Ladysmith Black Mambazo and Sting & Shaggy among others.

The Queens Birthday Party is a BBC Studios Production for BBC One and BBC Radio 2. Claire Popplewell is Editor, Ceremonial Events, and Alison Howe is the Executive Producer. It was commissioned by Alison Kirkham, Controller, BBC Factual Commissioning, and Charlotte Moore, Director of BBC Content.

It goes out live on BBC One, Saturday 21 April at 8pm.

BBC Newsreader George Alagiah will present a new film for BBC One exploring the history of The Queen and the Commonwealth. Alagiah looks into the Queens role in leading the Commonwealth throughout her reign moving from Tonga to Australia, Ghana, India and South Africa.

George Alagiah says: What we see in this film is the transformation of a young, diffident woman into a confident figure able to command the respect of leaders around the world. We discovered that as Head of the Commonwealth she has far more room to manoeuvre  able to influence world events in a way she cannot at home.

Interviews include Princess Anne, former Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke, the second Commonwealth Secretary-General Sir Sonny Ramphal and South African politician Mamphela Ramphele.

The Queen: Her Commonwealth Story (160) is a BBC Studios Production for BBC One. The Executive Producer is Jo Roe. It was commissioned by Charlotte Moore, Director of Content and Alison Kirkham, Controller of Factual Commissioning. The BBC Commissioning Editor is Simon Young.

The film goes out on BBC One at 9pm on Monday 26 March

Also airing on BBC One in April is Lenny Henry: The Commonwealth Kid. Born to Jamaican parents who came to the UK as part of the post-Windrush generation in 1957, Henry examines the deep-rooted relationship between Britain, the Commonwealth and its 2.3 billion people.

Lenny Henry says: Im delighted and excited to revisit where my parents grew up and explore things I dont know about Jamaica and the Bahamas especially in the context of the Commonwealth.

Lenny Henry: The Commonwealth Kid (160) is a Burning Bright Productions and Douglas Road Productions for BBC One. The Executive Producers are Clive Tulloh and Barbara Emile. It was commissioned by Charlotte Moore, Director of Content and Tom McDonald, BBC Head of Commissioning, Natural History and Specialist Factual. The BBC Commissioning Editor is Simon Young.

It is expected to air on BBC One at 9pm on Monday 2 April

Share this storyUN and EU say food insecurity worsens as conflicts rage



Paris, March 22 (AFP) Mar 22, 2018



The food security of around 124 million people worldwide was under acute threat at the end of last year, mostly because of worsening conflicts and drought, the UN and EU said Thursday.

The worst food crises in 2017 were in northeastern Nigeria, Somalia, Yemen and South Sudan, "where nearly 32 million people were food-insecure and in need of urgent assistance", the two organisations said in an annual report on food crises.

"Conflicts and climate-related shocks have recently sent levels of world hunger marching back up, following decades of steady decline."

The figure of 124 million is 15 percent higher than the number in 2016.

"No world region has been untouched. Throughout Africa, the Middle East and in parts of South Asia, conflict and insecurity have undermined food security," the report said.

"Likewise, persistent drought in the Horn of Africa, floods in Asia, and hurricanes in Latin America and the Caribbean have all contributed to the spread and intensification of hunger."

Looking ahead, the report said that conflict and insecurity were likely to "remain major drivers of food security crises in 2018, affecting Afghanistan, Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, north-east Nigeria and the Lake Chad region, South Sudan, Syria and Yemen as well as Libya and the central Sahel (Mali and Niger)".

Yemen will continue to be the largest food crisis by far, the report said. "The situation is expected to deteriorate, particularly because of restricted access, economic collapse and outbreaks of disease."

The impact of severe dry weather on crop and livestock production is likely to heighten food insecurity in pastoral areas of Somalia, southeastern Ethiopia and eastern Kenya, and in the Sahel in Senegal, Chad, Niger, Mali, Mauritania and Burkina Faso, the report said.

On a more optimistic note, the report predicted that southern Africa was headed for a better year thanks to bumper cereal production in 2017 and falling food prices.

The report was presented by the European Union, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP).Avalanche in Spain kills two, another seriously hurt



Madrid, March 22 (AFP) Mar 22, 2018



An avalanche in Spain's Aran Valley in the Pyrenees mountains killed two people and left a third seriously injured Thursday, firefighters said.

A helicopter was dispatched to the area where firefighters "found three people, two of whom had died and another who was seriously hurt with multiple injuries," they said in a statement.

A spokeswoman for the firefighters told AFP she did not yet know the identity or nationality of the victims, but said they were doing "scientific" research in the area.

The injured person has been taken to hospital in Viella, some 300 kilometres (186 miles) northwest of Barcelona.FADE IN:

EXT. EBBING, MISSOURI

Ex-daughter-haver FRANCES MCDORMAND angrily drives down the road and notices 3 unused billboards, ANGRILY.

FRANCES MCDORMAND

(broods)

INT. ADVERTISING OFFICE

FRANCES MCDORMAND

Id like to rent them there billboards out for the whole year.

CALEB LANDRY JONES

Sure. What do you want them to say?

FRANCES MCDORMAND

That Sheriff Woody Harrelson is a low life cunt fuck piece of dog shit.

CALEB LANDRY JONES

They cant say that maam.

FRANCES MCDORMAND

Well what about Sheriff Woody Harrelson is a dickless butt snorkeler who likes cat nuts in his mouth.

CALEB LANDRY JONES

They cant say that either, maam.

FRANCES MCDORMAND

Oh. Well how about Why hasnt Sheriff Woody Harrelson caught the motherfucker who raped and murdered my daughter?

CALEB LANDRY JONES

Change motherfucker to man and youve got a deal.

FRANCES MCDORMAND

Oh all right. Fucking PC police over here.

EXT. THE THREE BILLBOARDS IN THE TITLE OF THE MOVIE, MISSOURI

OFFICER RACIST SAM ROCKWELL is looking for some minorities to harass and stumbles upon a BLACK and a MEXICAN who are putting up FRANCESS BILLBOARDS.

SAM ROCKWELL

Hey wetback! Taco burrito enchilada! See Im speaking your language, now tell me whats the deal with this billboard?

MEXICAN GUY

No comprende homes.

SAM ROCKWELL

Hey n***er! Oh, excuse me, n***a, lest I fail to be politically correct. Whats with these billboards calling out my idol Sheriff Harrelson for not solving the brutal rape and murder of Francess daughter?

BLACK GUY

(gives Sam The Finger)

SAM ROCKWELL

Despite my reputation for beating up innocent black folks Ive decided to make this Give a N***er a Break Day and not retaliate against you.

BLACK GUY

That doesnt redeem you, Sam. Racists can never be redeemed.

SAM ROCKWELL

Sure they can. They even get awards for it.

EXT. FRANCES MCDORMANDS HOUSE

FRANCES sits on a swing where her innocent baby girl KATHRYN NEWTON used to play before, you know, all the RAPE and MURDER she got.

SHERIFF WOODY HARRELSON approaches.

FRANCES MCDORMAND

(scowls)

WOODY HARRELSON

Frances, please, cut me some slack. I did everything I could to catch your daughters killer. This isnt CSI where murders are solved in 60 minutes plus commercials. Sometimes crimes just go unsolved.

FRANCES MCDORMAND

Wow, you actually seem like a nice cop doing his job and not the lazy callous prick I assumed youd be.

WOODY HARRELSON

Great. Soooo, youre taking down those billboards then?

FRANCES MCDORMAND

(gives Woody the Stink Eye with extra Stink)

WOODY HARRELSON

Oh come on Frances! Ive got cancer! Im dying! NOW will you take them down?

FRANCES MCDORMAND

I knew you had cancer and I put them up anyway because I am a mean heartless cunt.

WOODY HARRELSON

Jesus, Im not sure whos more unlikeable at this point, you or Sam. At least Sam has mild retardation as an excuse.

INT. SAM ROCKWELLS MOMS HOUSE

SAM still lives at home with his mother SANDY MARTIN like the socially inept basement dweller that he is.

SANDY MARTIN

Hey boy, you bust up some n***ers today or what?

SAM ROCKWELL

Waitwaitwait-- I get my disgusting racism FROM YOU?! That means its not my fault! That means I can change!

SAM is now somehow NOT the least likeable character in this movie despite being an OPENLY RACIST COP.

Meanwhile FRANCES kicks some puppies in the head on her way to drilling a hole in the local dentists thumb and telling her priest to go shove his head up Marys virgin ass.

WOODY HARRELSON

Well Frances the priest forgave you but the dentist didnt so hes pressing charges. I have to bring you in.

FRANCES MCDORMAND

Its his word against mine. An accusation of assault doesn't automatically make me guilty.

WOODY HARRELSON

It doesn't? Well I hope you don't decide to murder a guy later on based purely on an accusation. Besides this is late 2017 Frances, we take reports of assault VERY seriously now, unlike the entire span of existence BEFORE late 2017 of not giving a shit.

FRANCES MCDORMAND

But you dont even have my DNA! Unlike the guy who killed and raped my daughter whose DNA you have a shit-ton of!

WOODY HARRELSON

Hey that's right! I suppose I can sit here and politely threaten to use this assault charge to tie you up in court so you cant afford to keep those billboards up, or I can puke blood all over you BLAAAAAAAAARGG

WOODY recreates a scene from The Exorcist and PROJECTILE VOMITS BLOOD all over FRANCES.

FRANCES MCDORMAND

Great, now I have to stop being a mean old lady for five minutes to show you some compassion.

WOODY HARRELSON

This might be a good time to have some scenes with your son Lucas Hedges.

FRANCES MCDORMAND

I HAVE A SON?!

LUCAS HEDGES

Yes mom! I guess you dont care about your kids until they get raped and murdered.

FRANCES MCDORMAND

Oh stop whining like a little bitch you fucking mamas boy. Ill have you know I was a nice, kind, decent woman before my daughter Kathryn was taken from me. Ill prove it in this flashback!

INT. FRANCES MCDORMANDS HOUSE - PRE-RAPE AND MURDER OF HER DAUGHTER

FRANCES and her daughter KATHRYN NEWTON are ARGUING.

KATHRYN NEWTON

Let me borrow the car so I can go partying you mean old bitch!

FRANCES MCDORMAND

Hey dont call me old you little whore! Why dont you just walk to your stupid party instead?

KATHRYN NEWTON

(actual line)

I will walk! And I hope I get raped on the way!

FRANCES MCDORMAND

(actual line)

Yeah well I hope you get raped too!!!

Their words morph into FISTS of HAM and being CLOBBERING the AUDIENCE.

INT. FRANCES MCDORMANDS HOUSE - POST-RAPE AND MURDER OF HER DAUGHTER

FRANCES is visited by her ex-husband JOHN HAWKES and his barely legal girlfriend SAMARA WEAVING who has the mental maturity of a Keurig.

JOHN HAWKES

Frances, our daughter is dead because of you. My philandering and physical abuse of you had nothing to do with it.

FRANCES MCDORMAND

Isnt it past your girlfriends curfew? This is a school night after all.

JOHNS GIRLFRIEND

Actually I manage to be quirky and endearing despite having barely two lines of dialog--

FRANCES MCDORMAND

Shut your cunt whore mouth.

INT. HOSPITAL

WOODY is being treated for his TERMINAL CANCER.

WOODY HARRELSON

Wait how do you treat terminal cancer?

DOCTOR

Uh... you dont. Youre doomed. Your wife and daughters will be forced to watch as you slowly wither away and die over the next few months.

WOODY HARRELSON

Damn that doesnt give me much time to find Francess daughters killer! Or instead I could hang out with my kids and give my wife Abbie Cornish my Woody one last time before shooting myself in the face.

He DOES THIS. FRANCES presumably pisses in his gunshot wound.

FRANCES MCDORMAND

Great, now everyone hates me because they think I drove their beloved Sheriff Harrelson to suicide.

SAM ROCKWELL

(blubbering)

WHYYYY!!?!?! Woody was taken from us too soon! I blame those fucking billboards!!! Instead of, you know, the cancer. Im sure the cancer was just minding its own business when those billboards rolled by in a bandana and hoodie and shot Woody!

SAM works through his grief by becoming a better police officer and controlling his racism and HAHA JUST KIDDING HE BEATS THE SHIT OUT OF CALAB and THROWS HIM OUT A WINDOW!

SAM ROCKWELL

Thankfully Calebs white so the liberal media wont cover this illegal as shit police beating. In fact I wont even get so much as a slap on the wrist for this despite multiple witnesses!

CLARKE PETERS

Including me!

SAM ROCKWELL

Who the hell are you, darkie?

CLARKE PETERS

Your new boss. And in the words of our stable genius in chief, YOURE FIRED!

SAM ROCKWELL

What? Why? Because I nearly killed Caleb and palm-punched his secretary in the face like a 90s direct to video action star?

CLARKE PETERS

Uh, yes. All those things. Especially the palm-punch.

SAM is SHIT-CANNED.

INT. FRANCES MCDORMANDS NICK NACK SHOP

FRANCES MCDORMAND

Phew! Sams back to being a prick so that makes me look like not as big of a prick anymore! I even had a heart to heart with Bambis mom and got harassed by a creepy potential daughter-murderer to make me eeeever so slightly more sympathetic again!

ABBIE CORNISH

Well as Woodys widow Im here to climb a tall ladder and pull down my pants and take a massive shit on your head for forcing my husband to Kurt Cobain himself because of those billboards.

FRANCES MCDORMAND

Are you sure it wasnt because of all that cancer he had?

ABBIE CORNISH

No, cancer had an alibi. It was definitely your billboards. Now allow me to have an emotional heartfelt scene to make up for some truly cringe worthy lines I had earlier about how nice Woodys woody was.

EXT. THE THREE BILLBOARDS, MISSOURI

FRANCES finds the billboards ON FIRE!!!

FRANCES MCDORMAND

Oh no! Good thing I have a fire extinguisher in my car, like most people do! Maybe its a Missouri thing? WHO DID THIS?!!?

CLARKE PETERS

It was probably Sam. Did you notice he has almost the exact same haircut as his mom? What grown man does that? Well on the bright side this means audience sympathy is back in your favor!

FRANCES MCDORMAND

SOMEONE WILL BURN FOR THIS EVEN IF ITS NOT THE RIGHT PERSON!!!!!!!

CLARKE PETERS

Damn, these crackers are crazy! By which I mean these delicious Triscuits I'm eating! But also these white folks too. Crazy as cat shit.

EXT. POLICE STATION

SAM arrives after hours when no one is around to pick up a letter WOODY left for him.

SAM ROCKWELL

But first let me put on the worlds most powerful noise cancelling headphones, because reading a dead friends farewell letter while listening to Shakira with the volume turned up to 11 is a totally normal human thing to do.

FRANCES MCDORMAND

Dracarys!

FRANCES lobs molatov cocktails at the police station setting it ABLAZE!!

SAM ROCKWELL

(not noticing the flames closing in all around him)

This is fine.

The FLAMES are practically tickling his balls before he notices them and leaps through the fire while saving FRANCESS DAUGHTERS CASE FILE, totally REDEEMING HIM!

SAM ROCKWELL

(is Wade Wilsond)

FRANCES MCDORMAND

Fuck! Hes more sympathetic than me again! GOD DAMNITTT!!! What am I doing wrong?!?!

CLARKE PETERS

Alright who blew up the police station? Frances was it you?

FRANCES MCDORMAND

No. I have an alibi. I was with Peter Dinklage. He has a small role in this film. VERY small.

(pause)

Because hes little.

PETER DINKLAGE

Wait, so I lied to keep you out of jail out of the goodness of my heart and helped to put your billboards back up and youre STILL treating me like shit? Are you sure your daughter didnt get herself murdered just to get away from you?

JOHN HAWKES

BTW, I burned down the billboards not Sam.

FRANCES MCDORMAND

I forgive you.

(subsists on renewed audience sympathies)

Whoohoo! Im back in this!

But she never formally apologizes to PETER who is a national treasure, so... NEGATIVE 100 SYMPATHY POINTS!!!

FRANCES MCDORMAND

OH SON OF A BITCH!!!

INT. SLEAZY BAR

SAM overhears a couple of HICKS having a vague conversation about a possible sexual assault one of the guys may have committed who could have possibly been FRANCESS DAUGHTER.

SAM ROCKWELL

Jackpot! Ive randomly stumbled across the rapist/murderer in the plot convenience of all plot conveniences! I am truly a master detective! Now, I just need to get this guys DNA somehow!

He lets the HICKS curbstomp his ass resulting in possible brain, nerve, and organ damage probably. But he gets the DNA!

SAM ROCKWELL

Yes! Ill most likely suffer years of chronic debilitating pain but that ass beating is going to be so worth it though! Truly! Did you hear that Frances?! I did good!

FRANCES MCDORMAND

(scowls)

SAM ROCKWELL

What? Whats wrong? I redeemed myself by finding your daughters killer!

FRANCES MCDORMAND

And thereby being so much more likeable than me that I cant possibly catch up now! I look like the biggest prolapsed asshole on the planet compared to you! Im like a human Emoji Movie and Logan Paul combined!

CLARKE PETERS

And it turns out that hick wasnt the guy! I guess Sam got that ass kicking for nothing! Sucks to be you honkey!

(moonwalks out of the scene)

Upon hearing this news, FRANCES summons all her acting powers to emote rage, sadness, pain, and regret all in an instant.

AUDIENCE SYMPATHY FOR FRANCES

Aaaaaaand were back!

SAM ROCKWELL

Great job Frances! Now lets completely ruin both of our characters by plotting to go murder that guy who totally DID NOT kill your daughter!

FRANCES MCDORMAND

But... Why? He was exonerated. Sure he said some shitty things, but if we killed everyone who bragged about a questionable sexual encounter in a bar the human race would be extinct.

SAM ROCKWELL

But Im sure hes a rapist! Just like I was sure he was the murderer! Besides hes a hetero white male, arent they all guilty of something?

FRANCES MCDORMAND

Good point. Lets go do murder. Oh, by the way, Im the one who turned your face into skin pizza.

SAM ROCKWELL

I know, and I forgive you, just like I was forgiven for being a comeuppance-free racist asshole cop by receiving an Oscar. Everyone is forgiven! So are we really going to go kill this innocent guy?

FRANCES MCDORMAND

Does anyone really care at this point?

NO, because NO ONE CARES ABOUT SHITTY MOODY UNLIKEABLE ASSHOLES.

FRANCES MCDORMAND

Really? I guess thats why the critics love this movie while audiences are clamoring for its public stoning.

SAM ROCKWELL

If only you had fucked a fish monster.

ENDBusiness owners at the Sherwood Square shopping center in Baton Rouge have received citations from the state Department of Health after sewageGamblers who win big could hit another jackpot thanks to legislation proposed at the State Capitol.

The Louisiana Legislature is considering a bill that would prevent gamblers from being ejected or barred from casinos simply because they are too lucky or too skilled  as long as the players aren't breaking the law. In other words, casinos won't be able to kick out gamblers when they win big or hit a hot streak.

House Bill 152 passed out of the House Criminal Justice Committee with no objection on Thursday. It now heads to the House floor for consideration.

House committee approves bill sought by Harrah's casino, measure moves to full House Concerned citizens filled the State Capitol in 1992 when the Legislature was deciding whether to legalize a single land casino in New Orleans 

"I just don't think they should have such wide latitude to exclude people based on skill level or because they won," said Rep. Walt Leger III, a New Orleans Democrat and the bill's sponsor. "Anybody who is cheating or acting disruptively or doing anything unlawful would still be excluded, I just don't want them to be excluded because of skill level."

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Leger said he was approached by someone who had concerns about this being an issue at riverboat casinos in Louisiana.

Currently, state law allows for people to be banned from casinos if their "presence would be adverse to the interests of Louisiana or gaming operations."

Supporters of expanding gambling in Louisiana off to strong start as two key measures advance The Senate Judiciary B Committee on Tuesday approved two floating casino measures: one would allow the casinos to move onto land and have more

Leger's bill seeks to outline what that means  specifically those who engage in unlawful or disruptive conduct. The allowable banned or ejected gamblers would include people suspected of cheating, people who are deemed safety threats, people with documented histories of disrupting gaming operations, people facing gambling-related criminal charges. HB152 further would add to law that "a person may not be excluded from a gaming establishment operated by a licensee or the casino operator for reasons based solely on the skill level of the person."The Louisiana House approved Wednesday evening a bill that sets up how the state and local government would handle sexual harassment claims.

Its the first of several measures that would address the issue. The legislation was sent to the state Senate on a vote of 87-0.

House Bill 524, by Baton Rouge Democratic Rep. Barbara Carpenter, would require each agency head in state and local government to develop and institute policies to prevent sexual harassment. The policies would have to include a clear statement that sexual harassment wont be tolerated and detail an effective grievance procedure. The records would be made public.

The only questions raised by House members were about the cost of the Office of Civil Service making and distributing an hour-long annual training film.

State Rep. Helena Moreno, D-New Orleans, proposed an amendment that would require Civil Service to create education requirements and training materials, then to provide them at no cost. The amendment was attached without objection.

Rep. Katrina Jackson, D-Monroe, pointed out that state government has paid nearly $4 million to settle harassment claims in the past, so the training could actually save money.

Louisiana taxpayers paid $3.9 million since '04 to settle sexual harassment claims against state employees Louisiana taxpayers have paid $3.9 million since 2004 to settle sexual harassment and gender-based claims going back to the 1990s, according t

Carpenter has said her legislation was inspired by the "Me Too" movement that has propelled heightened discussions about and awareness of sexual harassment, particularly in the workplace.

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Nationally, prominent officials in the film industry, media, politics, and the business community, lost their jobs over sexual misconduct and harassment allegations.

The national movement came into tight focus in Louisiana after Johnny Anderson, a top aide to Gov. John Bel Edwards, resigned amid an investigation into sexual harassment claims lodged against him. He has denied any wrongdoing.

Louisiana government lacks statewide sexual misconduct policy Louisiana doesn't have a government-wide policy for handling sexual misconduct allegations or requiring anti-harassment training, instead allo

The state has braced for a lawsuit from the allegations.

But the reviews launched at the time found that the state lacked uniform policies and procedures for addressing claims of harassment and preventing harassment in the work place.

More recently, Secretary of State Tom Schedler has faced calls to resign amid a lawsuit over claims that he sexually harassed an employee in his office for more than a decade.

Schedler has denied wrongdoing and announced last week that he plans to finish his term in office but will not seek re-election in 2019.A bill aimed at ensuring that children who are deaf or hard of hearing are prepared for kindergarten cleared its first hurdle Wednesday.

The House Education Committee, without dissent, approved the measure by state Rep. Patricia Smith, D-Baton Rouge.

Smith told the committee that an inordinate number of deaf children begin kindergarten without the language skills needed to succeed.

"Sometimes these services are rejected by the parents," she said. "They don't want the stigma of having a child who cannot function in society like they function."

The measure, House Bill 199, next faces action in the full House.

The legislation would set up a 22-member task force that would make recommendations to the Legislature for how to assess children who are deaf or hard of hearing, including their language and literacy skills.

Report faults troubled Louisiana School for the Deaf for low morale, 'insufficient communication' The Louisiana School for the Deaf suffers from low morale among students and staff, is implementing changes without a clear plan and some staf

The panel would craft language development milestones for deaf children, and how to oversee progress.

Those results would be a resource for parents and educators and help them see how children are progressing toward English literacy.

The task force would submit a report to the House and Senate education committees, including needed legislation, by Feb. 1.

Shelly Chesney, who provides speech therapy for children and adults, said she is seeing children ages 7, 8 and 9 without language skills.

"So they cannot participate in the classroom," Chesney said.

"They are at a great handicap from the other children in the classroom," she said.

Henry Brinkman, a retired teacher who said he has been deaf since he was five years old, said he saw a recurring problem working in Louisiana, Colorado and North Carolina.

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"So many children born deaf are waiting until school starts so they can get communication," Brinkman said.

"Then they would show up at school and struggle to learn the basic foundation of language," he added.

Report faults troubled Louisiana School for the Deaf for low morale, 'insufficient communication' The Louisiana School for the Deaf suffers from low morale among students and staff, is implementing changes without a clear plan and some staf

Paula Rodriguez, a social worker, said she has seen children as old as 14 with limited language skills.

Exactly how many deaf or hard of hearing children statewide have language problems is unclear.

Rodriguez said that, in the past five years, 65 percent of children she has seen lack a primary language.

"Five or 10 percent would be too many," she said, "But this number is staggering."

"Deaf kids are missing out, and we need to find out why," Rodriguez told the committee.

Smith said that, despite concerns expressed before the meeting, the task force would not be pushing American Sign Language, or ASL, over English in preparing children.

"That is not true, totally not true," she said.

The panel would be called the Language Equality and Acquisition for Deaf Kids  LEAD-K  task force.

Smith said too many deaf or hard of hearing youngsters lack critical language skills when they start school.

"It is not all children, but it is a lot of children," he said.State Rep. Robert Johnson, D-Marksville; Andy Soileau, of Soileaus Pharmacy in New Iberia; and David Darce, of Thrifty Way Pharmacy in St. Martinville; testified Wednesday, March 21, 2018 for legislation that would allow pharmacists to inform their customers if the cash price for a prescription drug is less than insurance co-pay requirements.From left standing background, Mayor-President Sharon Weston Broome, Mayor Jr. Shelton, City of Central, and Mayor David Amrhein, City of Zachary, watch as Mayor Darnell Waites, City of Baker, at lectern, speaks during a press briefing and media tour regarding Greenwood Park and Baton Rouge Zoo Tuesday March 20, 2018, in Baton Rouge, La.Walter Isaacson, here signing copies of his Leonardo da Vinci biography, writes in the forward of Eric Motley's new book, that the author has 'a true inner strength based on spiritual humility.'Centuries before the advent of fluorescent green plastic hand grenade receptacles, New Orleanians discarded different debris in the French Quarter.

Porcelain plates and cups. Clay smoking pipes. And, in one courtyard at least, dozens of goat skulls.

As a Tuesday presentation by the Historic New Orleans Collection made clear, one generations trash is a later generations archaeological treasure.

What Lies Beneath: Archaeology in the French Quarter was part of a lecture series related to the Historic Collection's exhibit, New Orleans, the Founding Era.

A trio of archaeologists focused on four main dig sites in the French Quarter: the 800 block of Royal Street, the 900 block of St. Peter Street, a massive underground cemetery near Toulouse and North Rampart streets, and a property fronting the 500 block of Royal that, conveniently enough, the collection is developing as an expansion of its campus.

Telling the story of New Orleans from its underside mostly depends on the good graces of interested private property owners, said Ryan Gray, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of New Orleans.

Archaeological opportunities and discoveries often result from happenstance and luck. Sometimes that luck is bad. And sometimes it is downright catastrophic, he said.

Case in point: the sudden collapse and subsequent demolition in October 2014 of a three-story building that had stood at 810 Royal since the early 1800s. The owner of the still-vacant lot has allowed Gray and a team from the University of New Orleans to conduct a series of digs there.

Because the same building had stood there for more than 200 years, the ground below was largely undisturbed since the colonial era. Excavations have turned up pieces of Native American pottery, Chinese porcelain (a popular import in the citys infancy), French gun flints, clay smoking pipes and a coin dated 1722.

Such sites, Gray said, allow for a fuller appreciation of the early Native American and African influences on the city.

Another property owner allowed archaeologists to excavate a courtyard at 936 St. Peter Street. They discovered an old privy, a shaft used as a toilet and for waste disposal. Privies are one of the basic things that archaeologists love, Gray said. Theyre like little time capsules.

This particular outhouse turned up hundreds of goat bones. The goats appeared to have been slaughtered messily in a quest to extract their brains, Gray said. Tanning skins, he continued, is one of the handy things you can do with animal brains.

Much of the citys first cemetery, St. Peter Cemetery, lies near the former home of Mama Rosas pizzeria, 616 N. Rampart. Thousands of the citys inhabitants were buried there from 1723 until the 1780s.

Over the decades, graves there are periodically rediscovered. In 2010, Gray was hired to explore the ground where a swimming pool was to be installed near Toulouse and Rampart. Fifteen coffins and skeletons from the 1700s were removed for study and reburial.

Many more remain. As many as 12,000 bodies may be buried there, Gray said, white, black, Native American or sometimes all three.

In 2013, the Historic Collection contracted with Earth Search Inc. to explore the grounds of the Seignouret-Brulatour House, a sprawling property that cuts through the block bounded by Royal, St. Louis, Chartres and Toulouse streets. Once home to the WDSU-TV studios, the redeveloped property is slated to reopen later this year as a new exhibition space.

At Tuesdays presentation, Earth Searchs Michael Godzinski and Elizabeth Williams narrated a history of the extensive Brulatour project.

Digging down 7 feet exposed strata corresponding with every era of New Orleans development. A layer of ash from the devastating 1788 fire still smelled smoky, Williams said. Below that was the French Colonial stratum, dated via tableware shards to 1720-60, followed by the French Horizon layer, the oldest.

One ancient glass bottle, she said, was filled with 300 small lead pellets, which made for a really exciting day at the lab.

Wine bottles and drinking glasses, Williams noted to laughs from the audience, were disproportionately represented, an indication that letting the good times roll is not a recent innovation in New Orleans.

Gray would like to see at least minimal archaeological protections instituted for historic areas of the city. Development along the edges of the French Quarter and in the South Market District has permanently altered the archaeological record, he said. Artifacts are of diminished historical value once removed from their original context, which can reveal as much as the object itself.

He credits private property owners who have voluntarily granted archaeologists permission to dig on their land with advancing an understanding of New Orleans colorful past.

People dont like being told what they can do with their property, he said. But historic resources should be taken into account."

Historical resources make up much of the "New Orleans, the Founding Era" exhibit.

Inspired by New Orleans tricentennial, the exhibit examines the various cultures that interacted in and around a young New Orleans in the early colonial era. It includes artifacts, early maps, archaeological finds and art from the Historic Collections own holding as well as items loaned by other institutions.

Artifacts range from a pair of Native American moccasins fashioned from bear paws to baptismal records of enslaved people to an early 1700s French wine bottle dug up at 400 Chartres.

Housed at 533 Royal, the exhibit runs through May 27. Admission is free.

The collection has also published a companion book, New Orleans, the Founding Era, in English and French.An animal rights group is offering a reward of up to $5,000 for information about a dog discovered with apparent chemical burns in St. Rose earlier this month.

The 2-year-old Shih Tzu is recovering from his wounds at the Metairie Humane Shelter, which has dubbed him "Baby Boy." The shelter and the national group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals are asking anyone with information about the dogs injuries to come forward.

A St. Rose resident found the dog in his flower bed on March 11 with serious injuries from apparent chemical burns, the groups said.

Joan Delahoussaye, an events coordinator for the Metairie Humane Shelter, said resident knew one of her shelters volunteers. The shelter brought the dog to Ark Animal Hospital for emergency treatment.

After days of close care, Baby Boys status has been upgraded from critical to guarded condition, Delahoussaye said. He is being treated at the shelter.

For the first time yesterday, he smiled at me," she said. "He wagged his tail. I guess he knows were trying to help him."

The recovery process could continue for several months before Baby Boy is put up for adoption, Delahoussaye said. The Metairie Humane Shelter is a no-kill shelter.

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Delahoussaye said her group has not been able to gather any information on who injured Baby Boy or how, despite canvassing the neighborhood where he was found in St. Rose.

This was something caustic that was used. We suspect that it was a fluid due to the fact that we have flash marks, she said.

The St. Charles Parish Sheriffs Office has not received a report on the dogs injuries, according to a spokesman. Delahoussaye said her group is waiting to receive more information before calling law enforcement.

We want the tips to come into us first, and we will stay on it because we have found in the past that police stations just kind of lose it in a pile of paper, she said.

PETA said it would offer up to $5,000 for information that leads to an arrest and conviction in connection with Baby Boys injuring.

"Someone out there poured harsh chemicals on this little dog, leaving him lying in agony on the brink of death," PETA Vice President Colleen O'Brien said in a statement.

Both groups asked anyone with information to call the Metairie Humane Shelter at (504) 451-2822 or (504) 458-0531.Ricky Steinert, who left the St. Tammany Parish Sheriff's Office after falsifying a DWI report, has been fired from the Red River Parish Sheriff's Office for not revealing the circumstances surrounding his earlier departure.

Sheriff Glenn Edwards said in an email that Steinert was "released" effective March 12.

"The internal review of the application process concluded that Steinert was not forthcoming with information surrounding his separation from the St. Tammany Parish Sheriff's Office," Edwards said.

Steinert, who resigned May 11, 2017, while facing an internal affairs investigation, applied for the Red River Parish job less than a month later. In his application, he said he had left St. Tammany to find a better-paying position.

On his job application, he wrote, "I've never in my career had any write up or any disciplinary actions."

Steinert was placed on administrative leave by Edwards on March 2 following news reports about the former St. Tammany deputy of the year, who was accused of cutting and pasting information from another DWI report into that for Ryan Heyd.

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The false statements came to light because one of Heyd's friends took a video during the traffic stop, and it contradicted claims by Steinert that the National Guard soldier had failed a field sobriety test.

The charges against Heyd were dropped by 22nd Judicial District Attorney Warren Montgomery's office, which is now reviewing other cases in which Steinert's testimony figures. At least one conviction was set aside because it involved Steinert.

Steinert was not criminally prosecuted for his alleged actions, and St. Tammany Parish Sheriff Randy Smith has said he does not believe a crime was committed. But following news coverage of the matter, he asked state Attorney General Jeff Landry's office to review the case.

Edwards said Steinert's application "slipped through the cracks." The Red River Parish Sheriff's Office had checked on his references and talked to one of them, Lt. Donnie Palliser, Steinert's supervisor, but Palliser did not inform it about any problems.

Edwards said his agency uses body cameras and has a report review process in place. "No inconsistencies have been identified concerning arrests by Deputy Steinert while employed with the Red River Parish Sheriff's Office," he said.

WWL-TV reporter Katie Moore contributed to this report.John Fortunato on Wednesday accused Jefferson Parish Sheriff Joe Lopinto of participating in a political "quid pro quo" during his time in the Legislature, with Lopinto and state Sen. Danny Martiny helping to secure raises for then-Sheriff Newell Normand even as Normand steered lucrative legal work their way.

With the election three days away, Fortunato released records outlining what he called a "sweetheart deal" through which Martiny's law firm has earned millions of dollars from the Sheriffs Office while doing the agency's bidding in Baton Rouge.

Lopinto worked for Martiny's firm from 2012 to 2016  when both men served in the Legislature  before becoming in-house counsel at the Sheriffs Office under Normand.

Fortunato, a career lawman and first-time candidate for office, blasted the arrangement as the kind of "insider politics" he said he will put an end to should he prevail in Saturday's election.

Martiny, R-Metairie, has done work for the Sheriff's Office for more than 30 years, dating back to the early tenure of former Sheriff Harry Lee. The records released Wednesday show his firm has received at least $7.4 million in Sheriff's Office legal fees since 2005, an average of about $600,000 a year.

Both Martiny and Lopinto had a hand in bills that substantially, but indirectly, raised sheriffs' salaries for five straight years. In 2012, Lopinto backed a bill that, among other things, tied the salaries of sheriffs who meet training benchmarks to those of state judges.

The next year, Martiny sponsored and passed a bill that raised judicial salaries. District court judges, and therefore, some sheriffs, including Normand, received an immediate salary increase of 4 percent and then annual raises of 2.1 percent through 2017. The end result was a raise of about $15,000 annually.

This year, Martiny has sponsored another bill to raise judicial salaries 2.5 percent every year through 2022. The bill, if passed, also would raise the pay of sheriffs whose salaries are tied to those of the judges, including the sheriff of Jefferson Parish.

"This is a disgrace," Fortunato said. "You might as well say that Joe Lopinto and Danny Martiny were on two public payrolls at the same time. Martiny and Lopinto voted on the sheriff's pay raise, and Normand made sure they continued to collect attorneys' fees."

A Lopinto spokesman called Fortunato's remarks "pathetic" and "hypocritical," noting that Fortunato himself had hired Martiny to handle his two divorces.

"A man so ambitious he'll burn anyone to get a public office is not the temperament people want in a sheriff," the spokesman, Kevin Stuart, wrote in an email.

Jefferson voters will decide Saturday whether Fortunato or Lopinto will serve out the remaining two years of Normand's term. The candidates have criticized each other mercilessly in the waning days of the campaign.

Bill Allerton, a Fortunato consultant, said he was frustrated by the Sheriff's Office's sluggish response to public records requests seeking details on the money Martiny receives from the Sheriff's Office.

The Advocate filed a similar public records request last week but has not yet received a response.

But Lopinto said in a telephone interview that he considers Martiny's rate of $140 an hour for legal work to be a bargain, adding that his total fees are "insignificant" compared to the $125 million budget of the Sheriff's Office.

"I can't tell you the last trial that we've lost," Lopinto said. "All it takes is one (loss at a) trial and we could have a multimillion-dollar judgment against us."

Martiny, in an interview at the State Capitol, also said it would be ridiculous to characterize his work for the sheriff as a sweetheart deal. He said his fixed rate amounts to $100 less per hour than the state Attorney General's Office pays outside firms working for the state.

Martiny said he sponsored the legislation for the pay raises  which was endorsed by the Louisiana Sheriffs' Association  because he's the chairman of the commission that sets judicial compensation.

"I surely didn't do it to give the sheriffs a raise," he said.

Martiny also noted that the legal fees paid to his office don't all go to him. He said he employs between three and five other attorneys and has overhead costs.

"This isnt something where they send me a check for $50,000 a month," he said. "I send them a bill for the amount of time I spend defending the Sheriffs Office. And I do it very well. And my firm has done it very well."Ganges Part 9: The Tortuous Trail For many long stretches we were alone. The Ganges River was on our right. Beyond it were mountains scarred with landslides and avalanches. Streams leapt over waterfalls and tumbled into...

Ganges Part 8: The Trail Begins The journey to the source of the Ganges River began with 220 steps from the Temple of Mother Ganga to the beginning of the trail. At an altitude of 9,813...Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin Paul Burke (The Conversation)  Thu, March 22, 2018 06:59 1281 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9caf843d 2 Opinion subsidy,electricity,energy-subsidy,PLN Free

Indonesia has been home to some of the worlds largest subsidies for electricity use. Electricity prices have been set at low levels, with the government making transfers to Indonesias electricity utility, Perusahaan Listrik Negara (PLN), to cover its losses. In 2012, electricity subsidies cost the government US$10 billion.

In an ambitious reform program, since 2013 Indonesia has taken major strides to reduce this subsidy bill. The reforms have involved raising electricity prices to levels that reflect costs, with exemptions for customers with small electricity connections, including the poor. Subsidies for road transport fuels were also reduced.

In a new paper in Energy Policy, Sandra Kurniawati and I find that Indonesias electricity subsidy reforms have led to a notable improvement in the efficiency of electricity use.

If its cheap, why conserve?

Consumers should ideally face electricity prices that at least cover the costs of production. If electricity is sold at a below-cost price, consumers are likely to consume inefficiently. Lights might be left on when not needed. Upgrades to efficient equipment might be delayed. Turn off the air conditioning in the spare room? Maybe later.

Increasing prices to levels that reflect the costs of production sends a signal that electricity is a valuable commodity.

Our research

Using data on electricity use and prices for all consumer groups and regions over 19922015, we estimated the effect of electricity price changes on electricity use in Indonesia.

Our estimates suggest that, as of 2015, cuts in electricity subsidies reduced annual electricity use by around 7% relative to the scenario of no reform.

Electricity use continued to grow, but along a lower trajectory than would have been the case had electricity prices remained at their former low levels.

This trajectory was lower than Indonesias government had anticipated. The governments over-estimation of electricity demand was also due to unrealistic assumptions about Indonesias economic growth rate.

As a result of Indonesias move to a more electricity-efficient development trajectory, the pressure to build new generation capacity has declined. Some of Indonesias plans to build coal-fired power stations have been cancelled altogether. This has allowed Indonesia to reduce lock-in of fossil-fuel-dependent infrastructure. Fiscal space has been freed up for other priorities.

We estimate that the full removal of Indonesias electricity subsidies would have induced around 6% of additional savings in electricity use (see figure).

Source: Burke and Kurniawati (2018).

Better targeting

Historically, Indonesias electricity subsidies have been a regressive form of spending.

During the latest tranche of the subsidy cut in 2017, the government withdrew electricity subsidies from households with 900 volt-ampere (VA) connections, with an exemption for the poor. The subsidy had already been withdrawn from households with larger connections. The reforms have thus led to improved targeting of the poor.

Indonesia has also made progress in targeting cash transfers and other benefits to those most in need.

Setting an example

The international community has committed to phase out subsidies for fossil fuel use, including in the electricity sector. Over recent years, Indonesias fuel and electricity subsidy reforms have made the country a leader in progress towards this commitment.

Indonesia has demonstrated that it is possible to implement reforms that are simultaneously pro-environment, inequality-reducing, and good for the budget bottom line.

One of the ingredients to Indonesias success has been relatively clear communication of the benefits of reform. Emphasis on protecting the poor has also helped to shore up community support.

Looking forward, Indonesia could feasibly move away from fuel and electricity subsidies entirely, turning instead to other forms of social assistance for those in need. Doing so would deliver a variety of benefits, including for the environment.

Unfortunately, it has recently been announced that Indonesias fuel and electricity prices are to be frozen until the end of 2019, a presidential election year. Fuel and electricity subsidies are set to grow again.

An open-access version of the research paper is available here.

Paul Burke, Fellow, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin EDITORIAL (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, March 22, 2018 08:14 1281 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9caf951a 4 Editorial #Editorial,Papua,Sentani,religious-tolerance,religious-freedom,#religiousintolerance,intolerance,#intolerance Free

Authorities in the Papua regency of Jayapura should act fast to defuse the sectarian tension building up in the wake of local Christian church leaders objections to the overly tall minaret of a new mosque in Sentani. It is good to hear local government, police and Muslim authorities assurances that there is nothing to worry about because all parties are working on finding a solution. However, the undercurrents remain unknown.

The Christian-majority township showed signs of religious tension last week after the Jayapura Churches Association gave the regency administration until the end of the month to have the minaret of Al-Aqsa Mosque, which is under construction, shortened to the average height of churches in the area. In a petition filed with the local government on March 15, they threatened to take their own action unless the authorities met their demands.

Apparently, the mosque project is only a symptom of simmering conflict between mostly Christian indigenous people and generally better off and more skilled Muslim migrants. In their letter, church leaders also conveyed the complaint that the Muslim community had built the mosque without prior consultation with their neighbors  a mandatory procedure under a joint ministerial decree on construction of places of worship. They also expressed disappointment that their long-standing objections to the blaring call to prayer, the adzan, from mosque loudspeakers have gone unheeded.

Any sign of sectarian conflict in restive Papua, especially, should be handled swiftly yet carefully because of its extremely high sensitivity. The minaret row is only the latest in a string of conflicts fueled by complex social, economic and political problems in the resource-rich territory long beset by secessionist issues.

The influx of migrants that started in 1974 under the state-sponsored transmigration program, and which continues as individual migration, has helped the local economy. But their rising numbers coupled with heavy military presence have caused fear among indigenous people that they are being colonized, outnumbered and their culture is being threatened.

That is why in Papua any religiously or ethnically charged conflict has immense incendiary potential. The present ripples recall the ramifications of the 2015 Muslim-Christian clash in Tolikara, southern Papua in which an indigenous resident was allegedly shot dead by police. It triggered retaliatory attacks on churches in Java and exacerbated Papuans distrust of the police, whom they suspected of pandering to the migrants.

Christian and Muslim leaders in both Jakarta and Papua should refrain from issuing provocative statements that will only inflame the already tense situation. Influential religious organizations like the Indonesian Ulema Council, Nahdlatul Ulama, the Indonesian Communion of Churches and the government should work hand-inhand in finding a peaceful settlement.

We hope that the government and religious leaders will soon be able to resolve the brewing conflict amicably. If not, the tension could escalate and provide grounds for militants from both religious groups to take the law into their own hands. The police, notoriously trigger-happy when handling rowdy crowds in Papua, should be particularly careful so as not repeat the mistakes of Tolikara.Anna Mariana represented Indonesia at the 28th International Couture Collections Show, hosted by DC Fashion Week 2018. Her collection was showcased on Feb. 25 at Franklin Square in Washington, DC.

Annas collection, comprising 20 pieces under the House of Marsya label, was titled "Babe", a portmanteau of Bali and Betawi. It combined traditional woven fabrics with patterns from the two cultures.

From Bali, for instance, Anna used poleng (checkered patterns) that symbolize the philosophy of Rwa Bhineda, a concept that says that everything exists in terms of duality to bring cosmic balance to the universe, similar to the yin and yang concept in Taoism.

Anna's collection, 'Babe', a portmanteau of Bali and Betawi, was displayed at DC Fashion Week on Feb. 25 in Washington, DC. (Anna Mariana/File)

Meanwhile, from Betawi, Anna designed patterns based on ondel-ondel (giant Betawi effigies). She also used the national colors of red and white for the fabrics with a touch of inspiration from the Garuda, which is part of the countrys national emblem.

Read also: Preserving the weaving legacy

A model walks down the catwalk wearing one of the pieces from Anna Mariana's 'Babe' collection at DC Fashion Week. (Anna Mariana/File)

Anna said the collection was especially made by her. I determined the colors, patterns on the fabrics and the designs, she said, adding that she adjusted the designs to appeal to the international market.

Indonesian designer Anna Mariana aspires to spread Indonesian traditional woven fabrics outside the country. (Anna Mariana/File)

Known for her attempt to preserve traditional woven fabrics, Anna said she believed such fabrics could become popular outside Indonesia.

In addition to House of Marsya, fashion labels from the US, France, Ukraine and Senegal also presented. (wir/mut)As Facebook reels from the scandal over hijacked personal data, a movement to quit the social network has gathered momentum, getting a boost from a high-profile co-founder of the WhatsApp messaging service acquired by the huge social network in 2014.

"It is time. #deletefacebook," Brian Acton said in a tweet, using the hashtag protesting the handling of the crisis by the world's biggest social network.

The WhatsApp co-founder, who now works at the rival messaging application Signal, posted the comment amid a growing uproar over revelations that Facebook data was harvested by a British political consulting firm linked to Donald Trump's presidential campaign.

"Delete and forget. It's time to care about privacy," he said.

Several websites offered tips on how to quit Facebook, while noting that the process is more complicated than it appears.

Facebook offers users the option to "deactivate" an account for users who want to take a break and return later, or to "delete" the account and its data entirely.

But Facebook noted that some data such as posts on friends' timelines might remain in the system even after an account is deleted.

Read also: WhatsApp co-founder says its about time Facebook was deleted

And longtime Facebook users could face complications on dealing with log-ins and authorizations to other websites and apps through the social network.

The website The Verge published a guide to deletion, advising users to download a copy of all personal data including photos and posts before quitting.

The website noted that it could take up to 90 days to fully delete an account, and that data may be inaccessible during that period.

Users may also face choices on what to do about other Facebook-owned properties such as Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger.

It was unclear how many users were following through on plans to quit Facebook, which has more than two billion users worldwide.

But Roger McNamee, an early investor in Facebook, said the social network was losing the trust of its users.

"The issue is a callous disregard for the privacy rights of users and a lack of care with respect to data that had been entrusted to Facebook," McNamee told National Public Radio.

"I'm not sure exactly what's going on here, but I'm afraid there is a systemic problem with the algorithms and the business model of Facebook that allow bad actors to cause harm to innocent users of Facebook."Tempeh will be proposed as a UNESCO intangible cultural heritage in 2021.

Made Astawan, head of the Indonesian Tempeh Forum, said tempeh must first be acknowledged as a national cultural heritage.

We are grateful that tempeh was recognized by the government of Indonesia as a national cultural heritage last October. It convinced us to aim for UNESCO 2021 to attain international recognition, he told Tempo on Tuesday.

Read also: Indonesia Tempeh Movement's Amadeus gives talk at Harvard Business School

Astawan said with tempeh on the UNESCOS cultural heritage list, Indonesians, especially creative young people, will bring more innovations to popular food.

Since batik was recognized by UNESCO in 2009, the young generation has shown a great interest in wearing batik, he said.

He expressed hope that Indonesian youths would become more enthusiastic about eating tempeh, seeing that it is widely served in hotels, included in in-flight meals, and has been accepted in countries such as Japan, United Kingdom and the United States.

He felt certain that tempeh would be accepted by UNESCO as an admission from Indonesia even though it was also proposed by another country.

We provide strong evidence, namely in the Serat Centhini tales that states tempeh has been around since the 16th century, he added.

Astawan said Indonesians must be able to produce good-quality tempeh to fit international standards.

Making tempeh is easy and inexpensive, but the difficult step is meeting the standard. So we must improve our production means, such as by wearing gloves or using stainless steel drums instead of used ones, he said.

Read also: Tawi realizes dream of selling his tempeh abroad

Agustinus Ngadiman, a lecturer at Widya Mandala Surabaya Catholic Universitys School of Education, said tempeh deserved to be a world cultural heritage seeing its long existence.

Tempeh is always used as a symbol of tradition. In Yogyakarta and Sleman, it is a part of tumpeng (a cone-shaped serving of yellow rice with assorted side dishes) at special events, he said.

Presently, only around 30 percent of soybean comes from local farmers, while 70 percent is imported. Ngadiman expressed hope that the government would take a more active role in tempeh production, for instance by improving local soybean production to reduce the countrys reliance on imported soybean. (wng)The resale of Hermes bags, brand-name jewelry and other luxury items is a thriving industry in Japan, with one critical bottleneck: building inventory is tough.

SOU Inc. offers a solution: pawn shops dedicated only to buying up second-hand merchandise. Business has been so good for founder Shinsuke Sakimoto  who posted profit of 1.14 billion yen ($11 million) on sales of 22.7 billion yen for the year ending August  that hes taken the company public. Shares of SOU opened for trading in Tokyo Thursday at 4,100 yen a share, 24 percent higher than the IPO price of 3,300 yen.

Japans resale market for luxury brand goods is worth almost 200 billion yen, according to a government report. Yahoo Japan Corp.s auction website is dominant, but theres plenty of competition. Mercari Inc. became Japans first startup unicorn with a marketplace app, and even EBay Inc. is returning to the market. With plenty of demand for second-hand goods, Tokyo-based SOU has focused on making it easier for people to part with their expensive bags, watches and jewelry.

We are specialists in purchasing other items; we do not sell them, Sakimoto, 35, said in an interview. Other companies will open stores to sell the items they buy as an exit. We are B-to-B, so we use auctions to say bye-bye to the items in a short amount of time.

Read also: Louis Vuitton launches online store in Korea

A SOU employee checks a used Louis Vuitton bag at the company office in Tokyo. (Bloomberg/Kiyoshi Ota)

The company, named after the Chinese character for thought, has a network of 57 stores across Japan. Theyre stylish, attractive locations where people can sell their used luxury goods in a relaxed atmosphere. SOU is planning to open more stores, funded in part with the sale of 4.9 billion yen worth of shares. SOU, which is trading on the Mothers Exchange, has a market cap of about 24.5 billion yen. SMBC Nikko Securities is the underwriter of the IPO.

SOU doesnt rely on much technology or smartphone apps. It has a barebones website. The companys growth, according to Sakimoto, comes from their ability to round up customers, to purchase the goods, and then sell them off quickly. For the current fiscal year ending in August, the company expects sales to increase 31 percent from the year-ago period.

Still, SOU will be wading into a crowded market where consumers will have their choice among websites, smartphone apps and Japans already built-out network of pawn shops for how they want to sell their items.

Sakimoto says its impossible to know when an item will see less or more demand. So once SOU buys used brand-name goods from customers, it auctions them off to other businesses four times a month.

The next stop could be another city in Asia. SOU is also considering a location overseas, and has previously held auctions in Hong Kong to sell diamonds.Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin Apriadi Gunawan (The Jakarta Post) Medan  Thu, March 22, 2018 07:46 1281 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9caf9461 1 National land-conflicts,Medan,KSP Free

President Joko Jokowi Widodo has sent a team to North Sumatra to settle several agrarian conflicts, including one between the Air Force and Sari Rejo residents over 260 hectares of land.

Hundreds of residents welcomed the presidential team, comprising of three people from the presidential staff office, in Sari Rejo, Medan, on Wednesday. The residents carried banners expressing their support for the President.

The team, led by Ahmad Yakub, talked to the residents about the land conflict, giving them time to express their problems about the conflict with the Air Force.

We will take notes of their complaints and we will discuss them in Jakarta, Yakub said.

The team later visited Labuhan Batu Utara regency, which also had land conflict issues.

The head of Sari Rejo Peoples Forum, Riwayat Pakpahan, said they hoped the presidential team would pave the way for residents to gain ownership certificate for their lands. They have lived on the land since 1948.

We cannot register our land as ours because the Air Force has laid claim to it. Help us.

There are about 5,500 families in Sari Rejo, he added.

The team came in response to Sari Rejo residents pleas for help.

In 2015, the Air Force put a banner up saying they would build a low-cost apartment for their personnel on the disputed land. The banner incensed residents and a skirmish ensued.

The land dispute between Sari Rejo and the Air Force has been going on since the early 2000. In 2006, after a long legal battle, the residents filed a case review at the Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of the residents. (evi)Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin Ruslan Sangadji (The Jakarta Post) Palu, Central Sulawesi  Thu, March 22, 2018 06:46 1281 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9caf7fbb 1 National eviction,Banggai,Luwuk,central-sulawesi Free

Im homeless now. My children sleep in the mosque, Marlina said on Tuesday after her home was demolished as part of a land repossession that turned violent in Banggai regency, Central Sulawesi.

Hundreds of Tanjung Sari residents in Luwuk were forced out of their homes as ordered by the Luwuk District Court following a years-long land dispute.

Read also: Residents clash with police and military personnel in land execution in C. Sulawesi

Those lucky enough to have family members living outside the kampung are now staying with relatives, but many have had no choice but to settle on the debris of their former homes. At night, the children and elderly sleep in two nearby mosques, while adult men and women sleep on the streets.

Residents maintain that the land on which Tanjung Sari was built was theirs and they had the ownership certificates to prove it.

Activist Eva Susanti Bande, who has been assisting the residents in their fight to keep their homes, said that 67 families are currently staying in two mosques, while five families have sought refuge at a fish market and four families at a port.

The Central Sulawesi Councils deputy head of Commission III, Muhamad Masykur, said he supported the establishment of a special team to investigate the repossession.

We want to know the details; it looked a lot like forced eviction, he said.

Read also: Lawyer, lecturer, residents arrested after land skirmish

The residents lawyer, Julianer Aditia Warman, who was later arrested by the police, said the order to repossess the land stemmed from a dispute case involving a 600-square-meter area.

But somehow, the court ordered the repossession of 6 hectares of land, including Tanjung Sari, where about 1,400 people resided. (evi)Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, March 22, 2018 18:15 1280 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9cb15415 1 City Pasar-Rumput-Rusunawa,safety,work-accident Free

The Jakarta Manpower Agency is set to meet with 200 workers at the Pasar Rumput low-cost apartment construction site in South Jakarta following a fatal accident on Sunday in which a woman was killed after being hit by an iron bar.

In the meeting, the agency will talk to the workers about the importance of safety.

We hope the accident wont happen again because the previous incident not only affected the workers, but also us, the agency's head of manpower supervision, Khadik Triyanto, said on Wednesday as quoted by kompas.com.

Khadik said the company had instructed PT Waskita Karya, the project developer, to follow through on requirements.

We want the company to immediately provide the safety equipment, such as a safety net, safety screen and other equipment as stipulated in prevailing regulations, he said, noting that the agency had also asked the company to test its construction equipment, such as cranes.

The company should also train the workers, especially the operators, on properly carrying out their duties, Khadik added.

The South Jakarta Police said negligence from the inspector had contributed to the accident.

The guilty party comprises several people, including the inspector, who should have come to the site at 8 a.m., but [he] in fact came late [on the day of the accident], said former South Jakarta Police chief Sr. Comr. Mardiaz Kusin Dwihananto, who had overseen the investigation until his recent inauguration as the National Police chiefs personal secretary and coordinator.

The police would question the inspector, Mardiaz said. (cal)Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin Cod Satrusayang (Asia News Network) New Delhi  Thu, March 22, 2018 13:42 1281 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9cb06959 2 World #facebook,#Asia,#social-media,#SocialMedia,#DeleteFacebook Free

While the United States drags its feet on the latest revelations from Cambridge Analytica, political parties across Asia have come out to disavow any links between the data mining firm and their electoral success.

Indias main opposition Congress party said that neither the party nor party president Rahul Gandhi has ever hired the services of the beleaguered company.

Union Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad had questioned links between Congress and the company following media reports about the partys plans to use the firms services next years elections.

Will the Congress Party now depend upon data manipulation and data theft to win elections? Prasad said, according to the Statesman.

Prasad insinuated that Gandhis twitter followers were artificially boosted by the firm, a charge the Congress Party denies.

Cambridge Analytica stated on its website that it had supported Malaysias ruling Barisan Nasional (BN) in Kedah province resulted in the BN coalition wresting Kedah back from then opposition coalition Pakatan Rakyat in 2013.

The Najib Razak administration said on Tuesday that Cambridge Analytica had not been contracted, employed or paid in any way by BN, the Prime Ministers Office or any part of the government of Malaysia.

A statement issued by the Prime Ministers Office said any services were provided personally to former BN leader turned opposition politician Mukhriz Mahathir. A former media officer to Mukhriz backed the claim.

The 2013 election advice for Kedah was provided to Mukhriz personally, Azrin Zizal said in a statement on Wednesday.

Azrin, the South-East Asia head of SCL group, Cambridge Analyticas parent company, claimed that he had worked with Mukhriz personally and provided communications and strategy advice for him until 2015, reported The Star newspaper.

Mukhriz, a former menteri besar of Kedah who is now vice-president of Malay nationalist party Parti Pribumi Bersatu Malaysia, denies ever working with Cambridge Analytica.

Editorials in several Asian newspapers pointed to the use of Cambridge Analytica across Asia and said that the scandal wouldnt deter the company or other similar companies from being employed in future campaigns.

An editorial in the Nation Newspaper said that it is highly likely that Thailand will see the use of voter profiling through social media in the next general election.

The Nation cited cyber-security researcher Bhume Bhumiratana who said that the profiling of social media users was nothing new as marketing firms have been doing it for some time.

According to Bhume, it wasnt a stretch for marketing firms to use the data mined in previous work to target specific sections of the electorate before going to say that for many Facebook users, their data was already likely collected by various apps.

There is a high likelihood these apps will use our personal data in the wrong way, Bhume said.

Arthit Suriyawongkul, coordinator of Thai Netizen Network, a leading non-profit campaign that advocates digital rights and liberties, said that profiling could be done easily in Thailand as the country still has no law that protects personal data in general.

However, he saw nothing wrong with political parties campaigning about what their prospective voters want to hear, unless the database is misused or illegally obtained. There should be no problem if the parties can keep their promises, he added.

He said he was more concerned that this issue could be used by the Election Commission or the National Broadcast and Telecommunications Commission as a reason for tighter control of social media.

In India, politicians warned social media platforms of repercussions if the platforms were used to influence the countrys electoral process through undesirable means.

Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said that any attempt by social media sites, including Facebook, to influence Indias electoral process through undesirable means will not be tolerated, he told reporters in Parliament House complex.

If need be, strong action will be taken, he said.Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, March 22, 2018 12:18 1281 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9cb0254c 4 Business Faisal-Basri,indef,foreign-debt,market,dependency Free

A senior economist has said Indonesias increasing foreign debt in the last three years had trapped the countrys economy in being dependent on the global market.

Faisal Basri of the Institute for Development for Economics and Finance (Indef), who is also a professor at the University of Indonesia, said on Wednesday in Jakarta that Indonesia was overdependent on the sales of government debt papers (SBN) to finance its infrastructure projects.

It is fine for the SBN to be controlled by foreigners, as long as there is no market fluctuation. But we are now colonized by the market, which is currently in a state of uncertainty, he said in a discussion on Wednesday, as quoted by kompas.com.

The SBN's domination by foreign ownership is worrying, because Indonesia was not in control of the currently fluctuating market.

According to Faisal, it would be better for the government to seek its debts from international financial institutions like the World Bank and Asian Development Bank, as well as the Japanese government, as such debts would not be affected by market conditions.

The use of the funds would also be controllable, because the government must consult the creditors in using the fund, he added.

Bank Indonesia announced last week that Indonesias foreign debt reached US$375.5 billion in late January, a year-on-year growth of 10.3 percent. The central bank confirmed that the majority of government debt ($180.8 billion) was in SBNs, while the remaining debt ($55.7 billion) was in loans from foreign creditors. (bbn)Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, March 22, 2018 13:21 1281 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9cb046dd 1 City Pasar-Rumput-Rusunawa,work-accident,police Free

A South Jakarta Police investigation has found that human error was responsible for the fatal accident involving an iron bar that fell from the Pasar Rumput low-cost apartment construction site. The investigation also found that the construction project lacked adequate safety nets.

Tarminah, 54, was killed on Sunday morning at 9.25 a.m., when she was struck in the head by an iron bar that fell from the construction site as she was passing by on an adjacent street.

Former South Jakarta Police chief Sr. Comr. Mardiaz Kusin Dwihananto, who had overseen the investigation until his recent inauguration as the National Police chiefs personal secretary and coordinator (Koorspripim), said that investigators were looking into two individuals who were allegedly responsible for the iron bar that fell.

"According to witnesses, two iron bars were to be connected, but these two people allegedly miscalculated the movement of the bars, one of which fell [and hit Tarminah]," Mardiaz said during his inauguration as Koorspripim on Thursday, as quoted by kompas.com.

"The two people are the alleged suspects, in addition to a supervisor who was supposed to be supervising the construction since 8 a.m., but did not because he [arrived] late," he said.

Mardiaz also said that the project developer of the rusunawa (low-cost apartment) project had not installed safety nets around the construction site.

"The police are currently focusing on uncovering more information about the incident, the workers who were responsible for the project [when the accident occurred]," he said, and that they would be prepared to name suspects soon.

Project head Made Aribawadana of PT Waskita Karya, the Pasar Rumput project developer, said on Sunday that the company had decided to halt construction to conduct an internal evaluation. (vla)Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, March 22, 2018 19:00 1280 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9cb17048 1 City Pasar-Rumput-Rusunawa,supervision,work-accident Free

The project leader of the ill-fated Pasar Rumput Rusunawa (low-cost rental apartment), I Made Arie Bawadanal, blamed the lack of discipline from his 200 workers for the projects fatal incident that claimed the life of a woman on Sunday.

The Jakarta Manpower and Transmigration Agency summoned Made on Wednesday to explain the incident that resulted in the death of Tarminah, 54.

The workers did not take safety, security and health [K3] to heart, they dont feel like they need it, said Made as quoted by kompas.com.

He said the workers were briefed every morning on the K3, while he himself never hesitated to reprimand and remind workers to follow their standard operational procedures.

For example, we ask the workers each morning whether they brought their safety equipment or not, whether they feel healthy or not. Once they get inside [the project site], however, they take off their helmets, said Made.

Made explained that his company, state-owned construction firm PT Waskita Karya, would handle the incident as well as talk to the police. The project would also be put on hold until an internal supervisor gives clearance to resume work.

Then-South Jakarta Police chief Sr. Comr. Mardiaz Kusin Dwihananto said the incident was considered as resulting from the workers' negligence. (jlm)Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, March 22, 2018 21:37 1280 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9cb1a511 1 Business Indonesia,Japan,chicken-nugget Free

The Trade Ministry has seen the first export of 6 tons of chicken nuggets to Japan on Wednesday. The nuggets were produced by PT Belfoods Indonesia, the subsidiary of publicly listed PT Sierad Produce.

I congratulate Belfoods for being the first company to export chicken nuggets to Japan and for its contribution to Indonesian national exports, said Trade Minister Enggartiasto Lukita in a statement.

Enggartiasto said the shipment was a milestone for Indonesia given that the Japanese market was long known as hard to penetrate for Indonesian producers owing to its strict quality standards.

We expect that this is a good start to develop the Indonesian processed chicken industry for the international market. If Indonesian chicken nuggets can enter Japan, then it will be easier for it to access other countries, he said.

The trade minister also said he expected Indonesian chicken exporters to train local chicken farmers because exports should also increase the livelihoods of local stock farmers while increasing the countrys foreign currency savings.

The consumption of poultry-based processed foods in Japan reached US$2 billion a year, making Japan a potential choice for exports. China and Thailand are known as the major exporters for Japan.

Meanwhile, PT Sierad Produce CEO Tommy Wattimena said Belfoods products taste had become accepted by the Japanese because the subsidiary had done some market research in the country.

Belfoods will still focus on the domestic market while keeping the quality of our products up to export standards to help export development, he said. (ami/dmr)Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin Moses Ompusunggu (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, March 22, 2018 18:41 1280 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9cb16326 1 National #PalmOilPlantation,#PalmOil,palm-oil,Gapki,documentaries,berlinale Free

Joining the wave of what the industry has described as a negative campaign against palm oil, three documentaries on oil palm plantations have been released and two of them have garnered international recognition.

One documentary, Austrian filmmaker Werner Boote's The Green Lie, was screened at the 68th Berlin International Film Festival, the Berlinale, last month. Part of the film was shot in Muarojambi regency, Jambi, during the forest fires in 2015.

Another one, American-Indonesian Ashram Shahrivar's Sigek Cokelat (Chocolate Bar), was screened at the Colorado Environmental Film Festival in the US and at the London International World Cinema event.

Read also: Indonesian short film on oil palm industry enters international film festivals

The most recent is the work of renowned documentary filmmaker, Dandhy Laksono's Watchdoc, titled Asimetris. The film was launched this month and has circulated in the country. The three share one thing in common: they set out to explain the palm oil industrys detrimental effect on the environment.

Their international and nationwide reception appears to be just in time as the world puts the sustainability of the palm oil industry under greater scrutiny. The industry helps in the production of everyday items in our life like soap, cooking oil, cosmetics and chocolate bars, but has long been linked to deforestation in rainforest countries, including Indonesia.

Ashram said he wanted Sigek Cokelat to be an eye-opening experience on what was really happening in West Kalimantan palm plantations, referring to the decades-long deforestation that has reduced the habitat of orangutans, while people enjoyed chocolate, the production of which uses palm oil.

The Green Lie address the same issue. "The fact is that [the palm oil industry] has taken over ancestral lands, damaged the environment and has even violated human rights," said Feri Irawan, an environmentalist in Jambi, who appears in The Green Lie, which was nominated for best documentary award in the Berlinale in February.

That kind of criticism has been strongly voiced also by international NGOs, leading to what palm oil producers -- notably Indonesia and Malaysia  have called discriminatory and protectionist policies, such as the European Parliament's approval in January of a bill that will limit the use of palm oil as transportation fuel starting from 2022 and Norway's ban in 2017 on the public procurement and use of palm oil-based biofuel.

The policies could hurt Indonesia's exports, the country's authorities and business players warn. As the world's largest palm oil producer, Indonesia exported 31 million tons of palm oil last year, or 75 percent of Indonesias total output, bringing US$22.9 billion in foreign exchange revenue.

"Palm oil is one of primary elements of Indonesia's national interest, notably because it is related to the prosperity of 17 million Indonesian citizens, including smallholder farmers, who directly and indirectly depend on the palm oil industry," the Indonesian Embassy in Brussels said in a statement after the European Parliament's move.

International communities have singled out Indonesian oil palm plantations in the chorus of criticism of environmental aspects of the biofuel industry, Indonesian Palm Oil Producers Association (Gapki) board member Fadhil Hasan said on Thursday.

Fadhil gave an instance of the European Union's stance on Argentina, the world's leading soy exporter and biggest provider of biodiesel made from its derivatives.

"For Argentina, it was the trade aspect that was highlighted. The environmental aspect was not highlighted," said Fadhil.

The EU set duties in November 2013 of 8.8 percent to 20.5 percent for Indonesian biodiesel producers and between 22 percent and 25.7 percent for Argentine biodiesel producers, in both cases to apply for five years.

The World Trade Organization (WTO) upheld Argentina's complaint on the bloc's decision in an appeal ruling in October 2016 and ruled in favor of Indonesia, which also challenged the decision, in January this year.

But there was no punitive action proposed by the European Parliament on Argentina like was announced for Indonesia, Fadhil said, referring to the calls for the banning of palm oil in biofuels in 2021, which was based on environmental concerns.

According to a rating created by the UNs Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), Argentina is among the top 10 countries that destroy their forests the most, and the FAO calculates the loss has amounted in more than 7.5 million hectares since 1990, environmental news organization Mongabay reported in 2016.

Greenpeaces forest campaign in Argentina, Hernan Giardini, told Mongabay that the advance of genetically modified soy production since the mid-1990s until now, and the intensive cattle raising in the north are the main causes of forest loss in the country.

Gapki has stated on its website that when talking about global deforestation, the accusations against palm oil are over the top, especially if compared with deforestation resulting from soy plantations and cattle ranching.

Jon Afrizal contributed to this article from Jambi



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Linkedin Ivany Atina Arbi (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, March 22, 2018 14:10 1281 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9cb07508 1 City protest,water-privatization,City-Hall Free

Dozens of people took showers together in front of Jakartas City Hall on Thursday in protest of the involvement of private companies in supplying pipe water to households.

Under the theme Taking a Shower Together, people grouped under the Coalition of Jakarta Residents Opposing Water Privatization (KMMSAJ) showered while asking the administration to adhere to a Supreme Court ruling issued last year that put an end to water privatization in Jakarta, instead of restructuring a contract between city-owned operator PAM Jaya with private water firms PT PAM Lyonnaise Jaya (Palyja) and PT Aetra Air Jakarta (Aetra).

The privatization has harmed residents as it results in high water costs, said the coalition in a statement.

Previously, PAM Jaya president director Erlan Hidayat said he would soon sign a restructured agreement with Palyja and Aetra. The three companies have been in cooperation since 1997. Palyja and Aetra had been granted the rights to produce and distribute clean water in the capital.

The coalition have urged Jakarta Governor Anies Baswedan to revoke Gubernatorial Letter No. 3126/072 on the water privatization, issued on Dec. 24, 1997, and to cease the cooperation between PAM Jaya, Palyja and Aetra.Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin Ni Komang Erviani (The Jakarta Post) Denpasar, Bali  Thu, March 22, 2018 23:01 1280 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9cb1ada2 1 National drug-abuse,Australian,Australian-citizen,DenpasarDistrictCourt Free

Prosecutors have demanded the Denpasar District Court's judge panel to sentence Australian national Robert Isaac Emmanuel to one year and three months in prison over drug abuse. The demand is far lighter than the maximum death sentence suggested by articles he has been charged with.

Prosecutors prepared three alternative articles for the defendant's indictment. During the hearing on Thursday, prosecutors said Emmanuel was found guilty of violating Article 127 of the 2009 Narcotics Law on abusing drugs for personal use.

Prosecutors did not count two other articles, Article 112 (2) and Article 113 (2), that carried a maximum sentence of death penalty.

Prosecutors also charged Emmanuel with Article 62 of the 1997 Psychotropic Law for bringing several packages of psychotropic substances.

"Prosecutors demand the panel of judges at the Denpasar Court rule the defendant, Robert Isaac Emmanuel, guilty of abusing type-one drugs for himself as regulated in Article 127 of the 2009 Narcotics Law, and without the right to possess psychotropic substances as regulated in Article 62 of the 1997 Psychotropic Law," said prosecutor Suhadi.

Suspected: Australian national Robert Isaac Emmanuel attends his drug trial at the Denpasar District Court on March 22. (JP/Zul Trio Anggono)

"Prosecutors also demand the judge panel sentence him to one year and three months' imprisonment and order him to pay Rp 20 million [US$1,400] in fines, or face an additional 6 months' imprisonment," he went on

Prosecutors considered some factors that had aggravated their sentence demand. "The defendant's actions contradicted the Indonesian government's program to eradicate drugs [...]," Suhadi said.

Prosecutors also considered some factors that mitigated his sentence. The defendant has been honest and admitted all his misdeeds during the trial." (ebf)Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, March 22, 2018 16:46 1281 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9cb11473 4 Business debt,SOEs,Standard-and-Poor,assessment Free

Standard & Poor Global Ratings has said the debt to earnings before interest depreciation and amortization (EBITDA) ratios of state-owned enterprises (SOEs) have been worsening in recent years.

S&P analyst Xavier Jean said SOEs, whose debt to EBITDA ratios were worsening, particularly those that were involved in the governments infrastructure projects like electricity power plants and other construction work, as they needed a large amount of capital.

He said the ratio of 20 SOEs listed on the bourse and assessed by S&P increased by five times.

We are monitoring the trend. I think the trend will continue and may increase in 2018 and prior to the 2019 elections, Jean said as reported by kontan.co.id on Thursday.

Improving the countrys infrastructure is a priority of President Joko Jokowi Widodo. The government estimates that the infrastructure projects need US$450 billion from 2014 to 2019.

However, SOEs involved in the projects had to seek financial support for their working capital and for the salaries of their workers. Meanwhile, their projects, particularly those in remote areas, do not produce immediate revenue for the companies.

It is not clear for us if the investments by the companies outside of Java, in the areas where the population is less dense, will be profitable projects or not, Jean added. (bbn)Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin Vimmy Sinha (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, March 22 2018

Indian food, for many, is a very confusing mix of spices, but it is this magical fusion and its intoxicating aroma that makes the food so unique.

The distinct complex flavors in many Indian dishes makes it one of the most sensational cuisines in the world.



Every region in the country has its own specific and identifiable food. With six seasons, as well as geographical, religious, cultural and ethnic diversity, Indias cuisine cannot be defined in simple terms. In fact, the taste of food changes every 100 kilometers across the vast country.



The intermingling of cultures becaus...Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin Ni Komang Erviani (The Jakarta Post) Denpasar, Bali  Thu, March 22, 2018 23:08 1280 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9cb1b960 1 National denpasar,DenpasarDistrictCourt,ATM-skimming,crime Free

The Denpasar District Court sentenced two Romanian nationals on Thursday, Ion Labanji, 40, and Iurie Vabrie, 37, to two years in prison over an ATM skimming case.

The sentence was lighter than the three-year prison sentence sought by the prosecutors. The two defendants were also ordered to pay Rp 1 billion (US$72,600) in fines, or face an additional two months' imprisonment.

The court's panel of judges declared that both Labanji and Vabrie were guilty of committing ATM skimming in Bali; Mataram, West Nusa Tenggara; and Surabaya, East Java. The defendants were guilty of violating Article 46 (3) of the current Electronic Information and Transactions (ITE) Law.

"The defendants' action have caused state-lender BNI [Bank Negara Indonesia] to suffer from financial losses," said presiding judge I Gusti Ngurah Partha Bargawa.

Suspected: Two Romanian citizens, Ion Labanji, 40, and Iurie Vabrie, 37, proceed to the hearing room at the Denpasar District Court on March 22. (JP/Zul Trio Anggono)

The panel of judges also considered some mitigating factors, such as their behavior, which according to the judges, was polite during the trial. The defendants are the breadwinners of their families and they feel remorse for their act, the judges said.

The defendants said they accepted their sentence and would not appeal.

Labanji and Vabrie were arrested in August 2017 in Surabaya by the Cyber Crime Unit of the National Police's Criminal Investigation Department (Bareskrim). Both suspects are members of an international syndicate. They committed their crimes by installing skimming equipment in several ATM machines in Bali, Mataram and Surabaya.

They later duplicated the information onto new cards and use them to take cash from some ATM machines. BNI suffered more than Rp 424.45 million in losses. (ebf)

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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, March 22, 2018 17:49 1280 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9cb1421a 1 City toll-road,closure Free

The Indonesia Toll Road Authority (BPJT) is set to close the Kayu Besar toll gate on the Jakarta Outer Ring Road in West Jakarta at 6 a.m. on March 24.

Authority head Herry Trisapurta Zuna said the closing was an initial stage of the integration between the outer ring road and the Tanjung Priok toll road.

As a result, motorists can pay the toll at Kamal 1 and Kamal 3 gates.

This integration aims to make the operation more efficient, Herry said on Wednesday, as quoted by tempo.co.

With the integration of the outer ring road and the Cengkareng toll road, customers only need to stop once to pay. (wnd)Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin (The Jakarta Post) Bandung, West Java  Fri, March 23 2018

Hospitality company AccorHotels in Bandung, West Java, marked International Womens Day  which falls on every March 8  by organizing a charity garage sale for diffabled (differentially abled) women living in Bandung.

The charity event was organized on March 18 from 6 to 10 a.m. on Bandungs famous Dago street during the car free day. The event was conducted by brands managed by the company, namely: Grand Mercure Bandung Setiabudi, Novotel Bandung, Mercure Bandung City Centre, Nexa Hotel Bandung Managed by AccorHotels, Ibis Styles Bandung Braga, Ibis Bandung Trans Studio and Ibis Budget Bandung Asia Afrika.

The garage sale kicked off with a Zumba morning exercise facilitated by Celebrity Fitness as well as various other fun games.

Through this activity, we ...Three social entrepreneurs were conferred the inaugural ASEAN Social Impact Awards on Wednesday in recognition of their innovations and impact on the community.

Indonesias Tri Mumpuni, founder of the People Centered Business and Economic Institute (IBEKA), won first place and was awarded a cash prize of S$50,000. The runners-up were the Philippines Cherrie Atilano, founder of AGRA Agricultural Systems International, Inc....Frances chic department store Galeries Lafayette is betting on an art foundation and an Italian gourmet food hall in Paris to help differentiate its brand from bricks-and-mortar rivals and e-commerce competitors.

The French capital is attracting a wave of investment into luxury stores and premium food halls as retailers seek to capitalize on a rebound in a tourism industry that was badly hurt by a wave of militant attacks in 2015 and 2016.

The foundation, Lafayette Anticipations, opened on March 10 and Galeries Lafayette plans to open its first Italian food emporium, Eataly, next February near the foundation and its BHV Marais lifestyle department store in the Marais district.

We are building an ecosystem around the BHV store, said Nicolas Houze, head of the family owned Galeries Lafayette group, which has revenue of 3.8 billion euros ($4.67 billion) and owns BHV Marais.

Galeries Lafayette is part of a club of French high-end retailers turning to gastronomy to lure more people through their doors. It already has a food court at its flagship Boulevard Haussmann store, where foreigners account for half of its clientele.

Le Printemps in January opened a food hall on the 7th and 8th floors of its Haussmann building dedicated to mens fashion and luxury group LVMH opened a second upmarket La Grande Epicerie store in Pariss posh 16th district last year.

Read also: Five not-so-touristy artsy spots to discover in Paris

With Eataly and the foundation we are creating a shopping destination. We are building an offer much larger than that of BHV, said Guillaume Pats, head of buying for BHV Marais.

Galeries Lafayette has the exclusive franchise in France for Eataly, the premium chain renowned for selling Italian truffles, wines and pastas around the world.

The three-storey food hall, now under construction, will spread over 3,500 square meters and include seven restaurants serving 2,500 meals a day, a courtyard fruit and vegetable market, cafes and a cellar with more than 800 Italian wines.

Pats said it would draw hip locals and tourists for whom Italian food is a safe haven abroad.

The art foundation, which has moving floors and includes an exhibition tower made of glass, metal and concrete, is located in a 19th-century industrial building and hosts art exhibits and performances. It has a working budget of 21 million euros for the next five years and cost 12 million euros to remodel.The Ijen Crater tourist site located within the borders of Banyuwangi and Bondowoso regencies in East Java has been temporarily closed to tourists, climbers and miners due to the presence of toxic gases.

The crater reportedly began spewing toxic gases on Wednesday night, poisoning 30 people who live in four villages at the slope of Mount Ijen. They were taken to Puskesmas Ijen, a community health center in Bondowoso, on Thursday.

Banyuwangi Natural Resources Conservation Agency section head Sumpena told The Jakarta Post that the affected residents lived in Margahayu, Watu Capil, Curah Macan and Sempol villages.

Read also: Ten must-visit places in Banyuwangi

"There are 30 people who got poisoned and 13 of them are still being treated at Puskesmas Ijen. The spewing of toxic gases cannot be predicted and fortunately it happened at 7 p.m., before tourists arrived. They usually climb [the mountain] at 12 a.m. to watch the blue fire. Prior to the spewing of toxic gases, there was an explosion at the Ijen Crater followed by smoke that blew with the wind to the west of Bondowoso," Sumpena said by phone.

He added that following an agency investigation, it was determined that the villages that were affected by the toxic gases had slowly returned to normal and the color of the smoke had reportedly turned from green to grayish-white under the sun.

"For security purposes, visits to the Mount Ijen Crater area have been stopped until further notice. We're still coordinating with the Energy and Mineral Resources Ministry's Volcanology and Geological Hazard Mitigation Center (PVMBG), the city's disaster mitigation agency (BPBD), the Bondowoso Health Agency and the regional administration to coordinate over the safety of the people," said Sumpena.

The head of the Bondowoso BPBD emergency, preparedness and prevention department, Winarto, said that members of the BPBD, the police and the Indonesian Military (TNI) had been deployed to the four aforementioned villages to handle the situation and prepare for future incidents. (kes)Share this article Whatsapp

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Linkedin News Desk (The Jakarta Post) Jakarta  Thu, March 22, 2018 14:45 1281 2c798a31c212039f000dc5df9cb08f73 4 News Javanese-culture,Javanese-language,language,#language,Youth,#youth Free

The culture agency in Yogyakarta is set to publish a free Javanese tabloid next month.

Titled Jawacana, tempo.co reported that the tabloid targeted youths in Yogyakarta, as it uses Jawa ngoko (an informal Javanese language).

The 16-page tabloid will contain various articles, varying from main features, social issues, photo essays, short stories to an introduction on Javanese letters, etymology and Javanese horoscope.

Furthermore, the agency also welcomes students from junior high schools, senior high schools and universities to submit their photos or articles to the tabloid. Published contents will receive a fee from the agency.

Read also: Javanese language should be used on daily basis: Governor

The agencys head of Javanese literature, Drihardono, said the quarterly tabloid would be distributed to youths' center of activities, such as cafes and schools.

Meanwhile, the agencys staff for literature, Vishnu Satyagraha, explained that Jawacana aimed to provide young people with reading material in Javanese as well as to preserve the language.

Prior to this, Yogyakartas culture agency published a Javanese tabloid called Sempulur. However, since Sempulur used Jawa kromo (a more formal level of Javanese language), the media only catered to a specific audience.

In 2016, the agency also tried to change Sempulur's format to Jawa ngoko, however the move drew protests from the tabloid's loyal readers, leading the agency to create Jawacana for younger audiences. (jes/wng)Sunday marks the 107th anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, one of the most devastating workplace tragedies in American history. On March 25, 1911, 146 people, most of them Lower East Side immigrant women, perished in the Greenwich Village factory building. Several events are scheduled to remember the victims and to revive the spirit of activism that followed the fire.

The official commemoration takes place tomorrow (Friday) from 11:30 a.m. 1- p.m. The starting place is Washington Place and Greene St. More details here.

On Sunday, as in years past, activists will fan out across the Lower East Side to CHALK the names of the Triangle Fire victims on the sidewalks in front of their homes. Theres more information about that project here.

On Saturday, the Stanton Street Shul will hold itss annual kiddush to mark the Yahrtzeit (anniversary) of those who died. As the synagogues Facebook invite explains, Their ongoing struggle to earn a living as poor immigrants reminds us of the necessity of defending immigrant rights, and the rights of poor people today.

You can visit the Remember the Triangle Fire Coalitions website for more events.The National Student spoke to writer and director Colin Gerrard about his latest production Eli. He is currently touring the short film festival circuit to promote his film, which has been entered into 70 festivals including Portland, Rotterdam, Santa Barbara and Clermont-Ferrand International Film Festivals. Its also set to be entered into Cannes, London and Venice Festivals, in hopes of qualifying for both BAFTA and Oscar recognition next year.

Eli follows an elderly man (David Gant), who has survived harrowing events, and his encounters with a group of disillusioned strangers. A terrorist attack raises uncomfortable questions about immigration, identity and morality.

This is an important story to be told now, maintains Gerrard, particularly in America and what I find so fascinating is countries founded by immigrants are complaining about immigrants. All these countries are great because theyre built on immigration and yet people, especially the old fat white guy, are complaining. Its all about how you contribute to society.

I grew up in North London and my neighbourhood was very culturally diverse, and I loved it, because I think thats what makes Britain so great for music, and film, and television. Its because we are a diverse country. But the fact that people have a problem with that is the fact they have a problem with the human race, that they have the problem with the colour of somebodys skin or their religion.

Elis story aims to address this societal issue by showing audiences that everyone does have a story. Because the thing about society today is that we are still labelling everybody, instead of practicing inclusion, the director asserts.

The short film is set in the waiting room of a medical practice. One of the characters in the story is a woman fed up with waiting behind people she deems as other and as less deserving than she is, provides most of the friction and anger in Eli.

Her character reflects how society today has become so selfish and it has to have this immediate gratification and I think that was the biggest part of the story that hit me was that you do these things sometimes without thinking about the consequences of what you do or how you affect other people.

In the end, she is moved by Elis story enough to let him pass ahead of her when her name is called. Though the story was originally written by Ran Appleberg, Gerrard adapted the script and added poignancy through interviews with a Holocaust survivor, Danny Wollner.

This man had been to Auschwitz, Dachau and Birkenau, and his story inspired the recurring visual motif of the train tracks. Danny told me it took three days from Hungary to make it to Auschwitz by train. And he said that he constantly has nightmares. But sometimes he goes by train, and every time hed come across tracks hed get flashbacks and memories of this journey he had to take. By 1944 many people knew this was a one-way journey, so the symbolism of the tracks is a powerful one.

People might say Well okay, well we know about the Holocaust or Well okay, its another Holocaust story, but the fact is that it still resonates today. Things like that are happening in Syria and in the Middle East right now. Human beings are amazing, we seem to never learn from history, we seem just to repeat it.

Rather than a simple retelling of history, the themes which are communicated in the Elis tale can also strongly resonate with our contemporary socio-political climate, Gerrard explains. If discrimination is rooted in ignorance, then this film encourages the opening of a dialogue; a communication between individuals.

Short film is the perfect medium for this, likely more so than feature films: I think they have much more of an impact sometimes about getting a message across, and I think that we need to get a bit more of a push into letting people understand that short films are great, and sometimes you get a lot more out of ten or twenty minutes in a short film than you do out of two hours.

The time constraints placed on the short film genre ensure the director has to fit more meaning into every image, and has to be more deliberate with every sentence, than would be the case in a feature film. This works to Elis advantage, ensuring huge themes of immigration, humanity and morality are effectively packed into just ten minutes.

I would love to see a little more emphasis on short films in the media, to really get people a bit more engaged. I think they just dont get as much attention because they dont tend to have big budgets or big celebrities.

Regardless of short films current standing in public esteem, Gerrard hopes Eli will have an impact on its audience, and will encourage individuals to view others in a new light and to question their ingrained assumptions, to counter prejudice with conversation.

Its about time people started being judged by the content of their character, the quality of their work, the quality of their attitude, and not because their religion happens to get in the way, or the colour of their skin, or where they grew up. Its just something thats got to change. And again, its changing bit by bit but theres still this old guard of old farts looking to hold on to their money or their status and still keep people down.

Im hoping through things like short films therell be a change in peoples attitudes, but the exposure of those types of things has to be as broad as possible so that generations growing up now have a much better chance of understanding people are people.

Eli

is distributed by 7 Colli Productions.posted

The University of Exeter has suspended BLS pro bono officer Alex Crawford, former BLS General Secretary Matthew Bell, BLS General Secretary candidate Ash Chandraharan, first and second-year students Bailey Grant and James Cranstone.All members involved have been given a lifetime ban from BLS, the society is in the process of refunding End of year Gala tickets. After discussions with Exeter's Students' Guild, they feel it is inappropriate to hold the gala.Matthew Bell has had his job offer revoked by the Hill Dickinson law firm and RPC have dropped Alex Crawford as Brand Ambassador. Ash Chandraharan has also been fired from his tuition job at Explore Learning. A complaint was launched with the Students' Guild but due to the impending Bracton Law Society elections, Arsalan and his coursemates decided to go public with the information. They believed it was their only chance to be heard. Speaking exclusively to The National Student, former BLS publicity officer Arsalan told us only one person offered him an apology and others have begged him not to expose them. He told them that a full transcript will be submitted to the relevant authorities.

Did anyone outside the Dodgy Blokes Soc know they were racists?

No, I think it came as a total shock to everyone involved in BLS. Nobody expected individuals to make these comments whatsoever, but I don't think it makes them any less toxic. Closet racism seeds into a lot of aspects of livelihood and would be catastrophic in the legal field.

How difficult was it for you to keep quiet?

Very difficult. I guess I decided to take action when I could visibly see that there was no stopping point for any of these comments and they were being made more frequently and freely.

Whos apologised?

Only 1 person involved in the group chat has sent me an apology, only Matthew Bell. He forwarded me his statement. I've had nothing but support from a tonne of Law students!

Do you wish you had done things differently?

I'm very proud of the way we handled things. I feel if I had done it earlier by myself it would have been from a place of anger - approaching George, Roman and Chris really re-affirmed it to me the steps we should take and how to do it.

Ash? POC

I think there is already a consensus about Ash, it is a deep shame to see a person of colour behave like that.

Any advice for someone thinking of exposing their course mates and worried about being abused if the post does not go viral?

I think that's a very good point. If your university has a good support structure there is hopefully not a need to go public, if not it's vital you speak to someone. A conversation with close friends, a trusted teacher or anyone can make a world of a difference.

Did you expect to go viral?

I expected quite a large university interaction as those individuals were quite popular and well known - but absolutely not, I was not expecting nationwide coverage. I think it's down to the several incidents that have happened in Exeter - this one just sent it over the edge

Arsalan decided to go public with his post as he did not have complete trust in Exeter, "we felt this was our only hope."

What if the post hinders job opportunities?

I hope not, I can explain myself in interviews - I'm not a person that's easily offended at all, but I simply don't stand for racial hatred of this magnitude.

Fellow law student Chris Omanyondo also expressed his disgust at the chat:

"These are people who I shared the pitch with week in and week out, have been out with, who have smiled in my face for several months, only to find that in their eyes, Im a happy monkey more like."

"Its scary to think that with such a stance against black people, Asians, and Muslims, that these individuals are responsible for organising one of the biggest societies on campus, and will potentially go on to be the kind of people who could be deciding whether you or your future children get the jobs you have worked so hard to get."If youve ever watched The Great Gatsby and thought youre living in the wrong era, this could be the holiday for you.

The Fitzgerald Museum in Montgomery, Alabama, has spent the past year renovating an apartment in the Fitzgerald home where they lived between 1931 and 1932. Now, overnight guests can book to sleep where Zeldas Save Me the Waltz and Scotts Tender is the Night were partially written. This was the last house in which they lived together as a family and the only of their homes in the world open to the public.

Its literally a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, to spend a night where two of the key figures of the Jazz Age lived at such a pivotal moment in their lives. The apartment is located above the Fitzgerald Museum, a unique institution which has worked since 1986 to educate the public about the family and offer budding authors guidance and support.

Speaking about the launch of the apartment, Sara Powell, the Executive Director of the museum said: The residency space is a unique opportunity to bring writers, scholars, creatives and anyone with a genuine love of the Fitzgeralds into the museum and experience Zeldas Montgomery. I spend most of my time here and it is such a unique space. It has to be shared.

Despite its historic connections, the apartment itself features modern amenities, such as a full kitchen, half-bath and Wi-Fi: this is 1930s living with 2018 comfort! Outside of the apartment, the museum hopes that guests will explore the town itself, where Zelda Fitzgerald grew up and where the pair met. Those staying here will benefit from a complimentary tour of the museum and the chance to soak up those Fitzgerald vibes.

Whilst the apartment will be used for writers residence courses, its also open to you or me through the wonders of Airbnb ( https://www.airbnb.co.uk/rooms/17459957) . Its currently listed at 111 a night with availability from the end of May this year.

Perhaps leave those Gatsby inclinations at home though. Whilst the apartment sleeps four, the listing reminds us to be mindful of the tenant next door, so all-night parties might be off the table!

For more information, visit www.thefitzgeraldmuseum.org

Image credits: The Fitzgerald Museum, Montgomery, Alabama courtesy of The Fitzgerald Museum.

Image of the Fitzgerald living room from Airbnb listing.Unfortunately, The Content Is Not Here

You have arrived at this page because the page or post you were looking for no longer exists. Please check our main navigation pages for other content: 

Home PageThe fantastical cooking comic is released monthly at a pay-what-you-want price.

Source: Press Release

With the film adaptation of I Kill Giants set to release this week, creators Joe Kelly and Ken Niimura are going to be in spotlight. While Kelly is busy as a part of the writing collective Man of Action, Niimura has been busy plugging away at his webcomic Umami, which tells the story of two cooks in a fantasy land.

UMAMI presents the story of a kingdom in trouble, and two cooks that are going to save the day using their cooking skills. It's a crazy adventure story that combines high-fantasy, cooking, and lots of absurdity. Niimura charmingly illustrates the adventures of two girls, Uma and Ami. Uma is a cheerful and determined girl from a remote village, who always has an amazing dish ready to solve any problem... if only she wasn't such a disaster. Ami is the future king's chef, stickler and extremely proud, whose aim in the kitchen is to achieve the best taste following traditional techniques and recipes. Despite their many disagreements, together they're an explosive team and no obstacle stands in their way. But how could anybody imagine that the destiny of the entire kingdom -- complete with warriors, dragons, and beasts -- would depend on their culinary skills?

Umami is published in monthly installments on Marcos Martin's Panel Syndicate. The webcomic is available in both English and Spanish at a pay-what-you-want price.

The fifth issue of Umami is set to release Thursday March 22. To check out Umami, click here.Chris Hemsworth entered talks for the film earlier this month.

Source: The Hollywood Reporter

It's going to be a Thor: Ragnarok reunion if Sony gets its way as Tessa Thompson signed on for the studio's Men In Black spinoff. At the beginning of the month, Chris Hemsworth entered talks to be in the film.

The Men In Black spinoff is less of a reboot and more in the vein of Jurassic World as neither Tommy Lee Jones or Will Smith will appear in the film.



Fate of the Furious director F. Gary Gray is set to direct a script written by Iron Man screenwriters Matt Holloway and Art Marcum. The film is set to release June 14, 2019.Watertown man pleads guilty after child porn found during phone repair

A Watertown man who was charged with possession of child pornography after taking his cell phone in for repair has admitted to six charges.Montreal, CA (H4T1V6)

Today

Mainly cloudy. A few peeks of sunshine possible. Slight chance of a rain shower. High 28C. Winds SE at 10 to 20 mph..

Tonight

Rain likely. Potential for heavy rainfall. Low 17C. Winds SSE at 10 to 20 mph. Chance of rain 100%. Rainfall around a half an inch.

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.Job Title: Business Development Manager

Organisation: Zoe Recruitment

Duty Station: Kampala, Uganda

About US:

Zoe Recruitment is an HR consultancy company that exists to contribute

to the transformation of productivity and work ethic, by linking talent to

business/organizations, and placing people right. At Zoe we believe this then

forms the foundation for sustainable business and on a larger scale, economic

growth. Zoe would like to recruit for a valuable client, an Energy Segment

Company.

Job Summary: The Business

Development Manager plans and manages all Business Development activities

including but not limited to Identifies, monitors, research, and reports on all

business opportunities in addition to lead marketing activities in the assigned

region. The Business Development Manager should preferably be an Engineer

reporting to the Commercial Director / Managing Director.



Responsibilities: Key Duties andResponsibilities:

Develop and implement short- and long-term

business plans consistent with company goals and objectives.

Establish and implement active program of

companys public relations.

Identify contracting business

opportunities, conduct feasibility studies to determine viability of each

opportunity, recommend potential projects in which the company should be

involved.

Seek new markets appropriate to the needs

and capabilities of the company and identify and act upon new profitable

business opportunities in order to Increase market share and company

awareness, in emerging markets.

Establish marketing goals, develop and execute

marketing plans and programs to ensure expansion of company services.

Research, analyze and monitor financial,

technological and demographic factors so that market opportunities may be

capitalized on and the effects of competitive activity can be minimized.

Maintain up to date business intelligence.

Prepare marketing activity reports for management.

Maintain a strong relationship with all

stakeholders, and cultivate current and potential business contacts.

Performs related duties as assigned.











Experience: Qualifications, Skills andExperience:

The applicant must hold a B.Sc. preferably

in Engineering with minimum 15 years of experience, at least 3 of them in

managing Business Development activities.

Master degree or Post Graduate Diploma in

Marketing is a plus.

Strong Business Development experience

within electrical construction organization(s).

Excellent business sense and market

vision.

Excellent interpersonal, communication,

and negotiation skills.

Excellent leadership and team management

skills.

Proven track record of success in BD.

Fluent in Spanish and English, French will

be an assist.

How to Apply:

All suitably qualified and interested candidates should apply online by

clicking on the title link below.

th March

2018 Deadline: 25March2018Organization: LINC

Duty Station: Kampala, Uganda with possible travel

Position Status: Part-Time

Consultant

About US:

LINC is a US-based small business that assists local and international

organizations to design effectively, increase institutional capacity, forge

lasting partnerships, and measure impact. We have developed ground-breaking

tools to map organizational networks, measure social capital, and leverage

systems-based approaches to development. We understand the unique constraints

local organizations face, and offer practical solutions via training,

consulting services, research and advocacy. At LINC, we believe that a

practical approach to engaging committed, capable local organizations in

leading their own development increases international development effectiveness

and sustainability. For more information on LINC, please visit:

www.linclocal.org

Job Summary: As part of the

USAID-funded Facilitating Financial Sustainability activity implemented in

partnership with Peace Direct, LINC is seeking an experienced facilitator to

help design and implement an Action Learning Group of local stakeholders to

prioritize and address issues related to financial sustainability for local

organizations in Uganda. This is a part-time position and is expected to run

through 2020, with the specific level of effort varying over the course of the

project. This facilitator will play a critical role in ensuring that the local

Action Learning Group is broadly representative in its make-up of member,

effectively designs and implements activities, and tracks results.



Responsibilities: Key Duties andResponsibilities:



Work with the FFS team to develop a list of

potential local stakeholders to join the Action Learning Group.



Conduct outreach among these stakeholders to

build interest in the group.



Publicize and manage initial meetings with

stakeholders to establish the structure and ultimate membership of the group.



Work with the FFS team to facilitate a

participatory process to identify and prioritize key challenges to local

organization financial sustainability and to develop a strategic plan of action

for the group to undertake.



Shepherd the group through the activities

outlined in its strategic plan.



Track results and learnings and coordinate with

the FFS team to ensure that these are harvested.











Experience: Qualifications, Skills andExperience:



Broad knowledge and experience with the civil

society sector in Uganda.



The applicant for the LINC Financial

Sustainability Action Learning Facilitator consultancy should have experience

in facilitating participatory decision-making processes with a diverse group of

stakeholders.



Demonstrated understanding of issues related to

financial sustainability of CSOs.



Ability to travel, as necessary, within Uganda.



Experience managing budgets and procuring goods

and services for projects.

How to Apply:

All candidates should send their updated resumes / CVs to

jobs@linclocal.org with the position title included in the subject line. No

phone calls please. Applications will be acknowledged, but only final

candidates for will be contacted. LINC LLC is an equal opportunity employer.Organisation: United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees

(UNHCR)

Position No.: 10028861

Reports to: Head of Sub-Office

Vacancy Notice: 013/2018

Duty Station: Mbarara, Uganda

Post Grade: NOA

About UNHCR:

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees was

established on December 14, 1950 by the United Nations General Assembly.

UNHCRs mandate under the Statute of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner

for Refugees is to lead and co-ordinate action for international protection to

refugees; seek permanent solutions for the problems of refugees and safeguard

refugee rights and well-being. UNHCR has an additional mandate concerning

issues of statelessness, as it is given a designated role under Article 11 of

the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness.

The primary functions of project control are to complement programme

management and provide support for oversight of projects including the

formulation of a monitoring plan, quality assurance, and verification. Other

activities of project control include: review of project agreements, project

audit, monitoring that there is synchrony between financial and operational

performance, participation in multi-functional monitoring activities and

reviews, tracking project risk management, and supporting project closure. It

is essential to maintain segregation of duties between project control and

programme functions for effective accountability and oversight.

Job Summary: The Assistant Project Control Officer will

play a focal role in maintaining harmonious and effective partnerships, and

often interact with implementing partners. As a result, incumbents need to be

very mindful of all dimensions of partnerships in their interaction with

partners (in accordance with the Principles of Partnership, the Code of Conduct

and other relevant documents).

Key Duties and Responsibilities:

Actively contribute to

reviewing that project agreements are in conformity with Country Operation

Plans and UNHCR rules, policies and procedures.

The incumbent will

also contribute to tracking the management of project risks in

collaboration with the programme unit, and report major risks to senior

management.

Pro-actively contribute

to reviewing, analyzing and verifying Financial and Performance

Implementing Partner Reports (Part I-IPFR and Part II-IPR), and to

checking accuracy and consistency between IPFR and IPR, in accordance with

project agreements.

Regularly monitor, track

and verify that expenditure for direct implementation by UNHCR is in line

with the approved budget.

Carry out reviews of

the internal control systems of implementing partners and provide advice

as required.

Provide input on

identified variants, risks and issues to the partner, programme unit and

escalate to management as required.

Offer support to

ensure timely project closure in coordination with the programme unit.

Provide input to the

mid- and end-year programme review process on issues related to project

control.

Build and maintain

professional relationships with implementing partners.

Keep up-to-date with

all UNHCR rules, regulations and procedures necessary to perform these

duties.

Perform any other

duties as required by the Head of Sub-Office.

Key Performance Indicators:

Assurance of project

implementation and delivery of expected results within budget/resources,

timeframe, and in accordance with project agreements is provided.

Resources transferred

to implementing partners are utilized for the intended purposes and in

accordance with project agreements.

Performance delivery

and financial expenditure reported by implementing partners are accurate

and consistent.

Programme and senior

management are promptly informed of major variances and risks in the

execution of projects (budgets, finance, implementation or timeframe).









Qualifications, Skills and Experience:

The ideal candidate

for the United Nations UNHCR Assistant Project Control Officer job

opportunity should hold a University Degree in Accounting, Finance, Public

or Business Administration, Economics or related field OR university

degree in another field combined with a professional qualification in

accounting, auditing or finance (CPA/CIA or equivalent).

At least two years of

previous job experience in the field of accounting/finance, project

management, business analysis, quality assurance and/or risk management.

Good knowledge of

international auditing standards.

Excellent computer

skills, in particular in MS Office applications.

Excellent communication

and negotiation skills.

Excellent knowledge of

English and working knowledge of another UN language.

Knowledge of United

Nations financial rules and procedures is desirable

Familiarity with the

workflows of major Enterprise Resource Planning financial modules (such as

PeopleSoft, SAP or Oracle) is an added advantage

Working experience

with accrual accounting (such as IPSAS or IFRS) is an added advantage

Proven experience in

working in an inter-agency context and in nurturing partnership.

Ability to work as

part of a team but also independently, in a multi-cultural environment.

Knowledge of the UN

system.

Ability to work in

remote areas.

How to Apply:

All interested Ugandan nationals who wish to join the United Nations

High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in the aforementioned capacity are

encouraged to click on the link below and follow the application instructions

after reviewing the job details.

Deadline: 23rd March 2018Organisation: United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees

(UNHCR)

Position No.: 10028916

Reports to: Head of Sub-Office

Vacancy Notice: 015/2018

Duty Station: Mbarara, Uganda

Post Grade: NOA

About UNHCR:

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees was

established on December 14, 1950 by the United Nations General Assembly.

UNHCRs mandate under the Statute of the Office of the United Nations High

Commissioner for Refugees is to lead and co-ordinate action for international

protection to refugees; seek permanent solutions for the problems of refugees

and safeguard refugee rights and well-being. UNHCR has an additional mandate

concerning issues of statelessness, as it is given a designated role under

Article 11 of the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness.

Job Summary: The Assistant Education Officer will act as a

focal point for education in the area of operation and, under the leadership of

the supervising officer(s), support UNHCR work regarding education and advocacy

on all issues related to UNHCR education programmes and strategic directions.

He/she normally works under the direct supervision of the UNHCR Protection

Officer and overall supervision of the Deputy Representative (Protection).

Under the direction of supervising Officers, the incumbent will support the

implementation of global level policies, including the UNHCR Education

Strategy, adapted to the local context. He will participate in liaising with

partners to assess the education context, to develop an implementation plan and

to monitor the programme and assess impact. Heshe will work in collaboration

with in-country education partners to improve access to, and quality of,

refugee education at all levels, both formal and non formal, and may liaise

with partners for joint support for education access for refugee and host

community children. He/she will support the implementation of education

approaches for emerging needs in refugee education, including attention to

special needs, minorities, girls, pre school education, and non formal

activities. He/she will support inter sectoral linkages with child protection,

SGBV, gender, community services, livelihoods and health, among others



Responsibilities: Key Duties andResponsibilities:

Strategic Direction and Coordination: Stay abreast of

political, social, economic and cultural developments that have an impact on

access to and quality of education and inform the development of the education

strategy.

Response and Advice:

Assist in providing comments to the

relevant authorities on existing and draft legislation related to

education and persons of concern.

Coordinate with partners and other actors

in education to adapt the Education Strategy to the local context and

ensure ownership.

Provide technical advice and guidance on

education issues to persons of concern of all ages; liaise with competent

authorities to ensure the issuance of education relevant documentation.

Implement education programmes in line

with Inter-agency Network for Education in Emergencies (INEE) standards

and the child protection systems approach

Support inter sectoral linkages with child

protection, SGBV, gender, community services, livelihoods, environment,

shelter and health, among others.

Provide inputs for the development of

global regional education policies and standards.

Identify cases of denial of access to

education with government and other relevant parties and recommend

appropriate responses.

Identify and promote education activities

that support durable solutions through voluntary repatriation, local

integration and where appropriate, resettlement.

Assess needs for services of persons of

concern, as related to education, and coordinate partners responses.

Systematically promote and comply with the

Age, Gender and Diversity (ADG) and HIV/AIDS policy

Advocacy, Information Management and Research

Advocate with authorities for respect of

the right of persons of concern to an education and for their access to

education services.

Coordinate with Education networks and

ensure that refugee education interests are understood and included in relevant

policies and initiatives.

Ensure that best practices are identified,

documented and widely disseminated.

Support the country education information

management strategy through the collection of disaggregated data on

populations of concern and the collection and dissemination of education

information and best practices to enhance education delivery.

Promotion and Capacity Building:

Undertake initiatives to build the

capacity of communities and persons of concern to assert their right to

education and access to quality education.

Promote and participate in initiatives to

capacitate national authorities, relevant institutions and NGOs to

strengthen access to quality, certified education for refugees.

External Relations: Contribute to a communications strategy

that generates external support for UNHCR education activities and the

education rights of persons of concern.









Key Performance Indicators:

The education needs of refugees are met

through the application of International and National Commitments,

including the MDGs and EFA commitments, relevant UN UNHCR protection

standards and IASC principles governing humanitarian coordination,

including those of the INEE.

Education activities are guided by global,

regional and country priorities and reflect UNHCR policy on age, gender

and diversity (AGD).

Participation of persons of concern is

assured through continuous assessment and evaluation using participatory,

rights and community based approaches.

Persons of concern are treated with

dignity and respect and all protection incidents are immediately

identified and addressed The education needs of refugees are met through

the application of International and National Commitments, including the

MDGs and EFA commitments, relevant UN/UNHCR protection standards and IASC

principles governing humanitarian coordination, including those of the

INEE.  Education activities are guided by global, regional and country

priorities and reflect UNHCR policy on age, gender and diversity (AGD).

Participation of persons of concern is

assured through continuous assessment and evaluation using participatory,

rights and community based approaches.

Persons of concern are treated with

dignity and respect and all protection incidents are immediately

identified and addressed  Intervene with authorities on education issues.

Negotiate locally on behalf of UNHCR.

Issue documents and reports for clearance

by the Education or Protection and/or Senior Protection Officer.

Issue recommendations on individual

education related cases.

Approve individual payments to individual

cases

Intervene with authorities on education

issues.

Negotiate locally on behalf of UNHCR.

Issue documents and reports for clearance

by the Education or Protection and/or Senior Protection Officer.

Issue recommendations on individual

education related cases.

Approve individual payments to individual

cases

Qualifications, Skills and Experience:

The ideal candidate for the United Nations UNHCR Assistant Education

Officer job opportunity should hold a University Degree

How to Apply:

All interested Ugandan nationals who wish to join the United Nations

High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in the aforementioned capacity are

encouraged to click on the link below and follow the application instructions

after reviewing the job details.

Deadline: 23rd March 2018With the 2018 elections already underway, senators chided the current and former secretaries of Homeland Security on Wednesday for not more strongly warning the American public about past Russian intrusions in state election systems and for a lack of urgency to protect balloting this year.

Kirstjen Nielsen, President Donald Trumps secretary of Homeland Security, testified alongside Jeh Johnson, secretary under former President Barack Obama, as the Senate intelligence committee launched an effort to protect the countrys election security after Russian agents targeted election systems in 21 states ahead of the 2016 general election. Theres no evidence that any hack in the November 2016 election affected election results, but the attempts rattled state election officials and prompted the federal government and states to examine the way votes are counted.

Senators on the panel have criticized both administrations for not moving quickly enough to stem the Russian threat, and continued to do so at the hearing. Maine Sen. Susan Collins, a Republican, critiqued Nielsens opening statement, which described a series of efforts the department had already announced.

I hear no sense of urgency to really get on top of this issue, Collins said, noting that 2018 elections are already underway.

Collins noted that many state election officials have remained without security clearances, making it harder for the department to share information with them.

To speed up communications and intelligence sharing, the department has been working to grant security clearances to up to three election officials in each state. Nielsen said Wednesday that just 20 of those officials have been granted full clearances.

We are doing our best to speed up the process, Nielsen said, adding that the department has a policy in place to provide information on immediate threats to state and local election officials even if clearances have yet to be granted.

Communication and intelligence sharing by the federal government has been a key concern among state and local election officials. Those officials complained that it took the federal government nearly a year to inform them whether their states had been targeted by Russian hackers.

Collins, who has introduced legislation with other members of the committee to improve election cybersecurity, also pressed Johnson, asking if he should have issued stronger warnings in 2016 as it became clear that Russians were trying to intrude into the systems.

Johnson defended the way he alerted state and local election officials, noting that in the late summer and fall of 2016 he was repeatedly issuing public warnings for those officials to get cybersecurity assistance from the department.

We were beating the drum pretty hard, Johnson said.

California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat, also lambasted the Obama administrations response, saying it was not sufficient to warn the public in any way, shape or form.

Before leaving office, the Obama administration designated the nations election systems as critical infrastructure, on par with the electrical grid and water supply. That decision prompted alarm among state election officials, who expressed concern the federal government was trying to take over elections that have long been the jurisdiction of state and local governments. Johnson said he had considered the move earlier, but had backed off because of resistance to states.

Johnson also testified that during the 2016 election he contacted The Associated Press because he was worried about the possibility the news cooperatives election results could be hacked. He said he called APs CEO Gary Pruitt about his concerns and came away satisfied that the company was taking appropriate precautions as it counted votes and analyzed results.

The hearing follows a Tuesday news conference in which committee members from both parties said government efforts to protect state and local elections from Russian cyberattacks havent gone far enough. Top U.S. intelligence officials have said theyve seen indications Russian agents are preparing a new round of election interference this year.

Senators warned that it could be worse the next time around.

What it looks like is a test, said Maine Sen. Angus King of the 2016 hacking attempts.

The committee is recommending that states make sure voting machines have paper audit trails and arent capable of being connected to the internet. Senators also are pushing for better communication among the various U.S. intelligence agencies and federal, state and local governments.

Senators are also urging state and local election officials to take advantage Homeland Security Department resources, such as comprehensive risk assessments and remote cyberscanning of their networks to spot vulnerabilities. As of last month, just 14 states had requested risk assessments and 30 had asked for remote cyberscans of their networks, according to Homeland Security officials. But even that was straining resources, since many of those risk assessments have not been completed.

The committees recommendations preview an election security report expected to be released in full in the coming weeks. It is the first of four reports planned as part of the panels wide-ranging investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.

The recommendations come as Congress is eyeing $380 million in state grants for election security in a wide-ranging spending bill expected to be unveiled as soon as Wednesday. The bill also contains $307 million for the FBI to go after Russian cyberattacks.

The top Democrat on the intelligence panel, Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, has said he thinks the nations election security needs to be more robust, especially since Trump has not addressed the matter as an urgent problem.

Its pretty amazing to me weve had the director of the FBI, the director of national intelligence and the head of the NSA say in public testimony within the last month that theyve received no direction from the White House to make election security a priority, Warner said.

Nielsen defended Trump at the hearing, saying, the line he is drawing is that no votes were changed. That doesnt mean theres not a threat.

She added: We think the threat remains high.

(AP)Housing Minister (Kulanu) Yoav Galant earlier this week met with heads of Yesha communities in a pre-Pesach lchaim.

Maale Adumim Mayor Benny Kashriel praised the minister, citing he is one who knows and supports the settlement movement, one who makes a great deal of working visits, one who always has time for requests and has a strategic viewpoint which he used to guide him for the benefit of the state.

Yesha Council Chairman Chananel Dorani told the participants: Minister Galant leads the Housing Ministry to important goals and objectives for the development of the State of Israel, the area of Yehuda, Shomron and the Jordan Valley is a suitable space for massive construction and dispersal of the population of the country.

I am thankful for your consistent support for the settlement, for the ideal, but also for the actions, he said.

Minister of Housing and Construction Yoav Galant presented to the council heads the activities of the Ministry of Construction and Housing in recent years and said: The Ministry of Construction and Housing, headed by me, has invested twice the budgets of the previous government in planning and development in Yehuda and Shomron.

Galant spoke of the strategic importance of keeping the Jordan Valley as well as continuing to build in all the areas, stating his office is working hard to promote and actualize programs to continue expanding.

Regarding the Jordan Valley, Galant said the development of the Jordan Valley and the overall security as is the case with Yehuda and Shomron. Strategically speaking, the Jordan Valley is the eastern security zone of the State of Israel, the mountainous area is the holding area, and the Jerusalem-Ashdod-Hadera and Dan- Is the vital living space in which more than 5 million Israelis live. The areas of Yehuda and Shomron are not negotiable assets in the security perspective, and they are intended to serve the security of the state against threats from the east, some of which are expected and others unknown. We must continue to keep Yehuda, Shomron, and the Jordan Valley under full control and to strengthen settlement in these areas.

(YWN Israel Desk  Jerusalem)After an entire day of intensive searching, the body of Ori Zinder (44), was found in the Tiruvannamalai region of India.

Zinder, a Raanana native, had gone missing on Saturday night. Notice of his disappearance had been given to his family. Upon learning of his disappearance, the Israeli Consulate in Delhi, together with the Division of Consular Services for Israelis Abroad in the Foreign Ministry, began working with local search and rescue teams to locate Zinder.

Notice of the discovery of his body was given to his family today. The family, as well as the Foreign Ministry and the Consulate, are working to arrange a flight for the body to return to Israel for burial.

It is still unclear what the cause of death was.

(YWN Israel Desk  Jerusalem)In cooperation with the Tourism Ministry and for the first time, Air India landed in Israel on Thursday, 7 Nissan.

Air India launched its direct flight from New Delhi to Tel Aviv, with the grant from the Tourism Ministry. The route opened following the marketing efforts of the Tourism Ministry that included a grant for marketing the new route, the opening of an Israel Government Tourist Office in India and dedicated campaigns that resulted in a steady increase in the numbers of tourists from India. In 2018, the upward momentum in tourist traffic from India has increased, with a 33% increase in incoming tourism in Jan-Feb 2018 on the same period last year and 54% on the same period in 2016.

In 2016, Tourism Ministry Director-General met in India with the CEO of Air India, presenting him with the business potential inherent in opening a direct route to Israel. Today, it is possible to point to the beginnings of the realization of this potential, with a 47% increase in tourist entries from India in 2017 as opposed to 2015. More than 50 million Indians hold passports.

The Tourism Ministrys Inbound Tourism Survey shows that the Indian tourist stays an average of 6.2 nights in Israel, spending on average $1,066. According to a market survey that the ministry carried out, more than 350 million people, some of whom surf the internet, view Israel as the Start-Up Nation and a leading destination in culinary, wine and lifestyle tourism.

Incoming tourism from India to Israel:

2014 34,600

2015 39,300 (+13.5%)

2016 44,500 (+13.2%)

2017 58,000 (+23.2%)

Having identified the significant potential in incoming tourism from India, the Tourism Ministry increased its marketing budget in India and, four years ago, opened a tourist office in Mumbai to promote Israel as a tourism destination. The ministry is working to bring 80,000  100,000 tourists from Indian within the next few years.

Outgoing tourism from India is the fastest-growing in the world, with significant tourism potential. Today, India is the second largest source country in the Far East for incoming tourism (after China). There are about 300 million middle class Indians and about 34% of Indians prefer to spend their disposable income on travel and vacations.

Tourism Minister Yariv Levin: I am pleased that the great efforts we made with Air India over the last two years are bearing fruit and a direct route from New Delhi to Israel has now opened. The new route will contribute to an increase in tourist traffic from India, which is enjoying significant upward momentum. The opening of the route is part of the marketing revolution that I am leading in the ministry, that has brought record numbers of incoming tourists to Israel.

(YWN Israel Desk  Jerusalem/Photo credit: Havas Media)The French PSA Group will wield the axe on Vauxhall's UK dealerships in the next 12 months, hacking 100 showrooms from the network of 324 currently in existence.

By trimming almost a third of Vauxhall's retail operations, the new owners of the car maker - which bought the brand from GM Motors last year - will put more than 3,800 jobs at risk.

Dealers told Automotive Management (AM) magazine that sales, workshop and admin staff will be made redundant as a result of the closures, though the decision should save Vauxhall's factories in Ellesmere Port and Luton.

Dealer shut down: Almost a third of Vauxhall's UK car showrooms will be shut in the next 12 months to reduce operating costs, dealers have revealed

PSA Group, which also owns Peugeot, Citroen and DS Automobiles, wants to cut almost 1billion of expenditure from the Open and Vauxhall business by 2020, and 1.5billion by 2026 without having to resort to closing manufacturing plants in the country.

The news was revealed to AM by Vauxhall dealerships this week.

One franchised Vauxhall dealer told the magazine: 'PSA Group has already implemented savage cuts in its manufacturing operations and it looks like that is set to continue in retail.

'A third of dealerships will go,' the unnamed operator said.

The decision will not be the first measure taken by the PSA Group and its chairman Carlos Tavares since the French auto giant took control of Vauxhall in the UK and its Opel brand across the rest of Europe.

The deal to buy the businesses from American firm GM was concluded in November last year in a transaction worth 1.9billion.

Last October, PSA announced 400 job losses at Vauxhalls Ellesmere Port manufacturing facility where it currently makes the Astra family hatchback.

That was shortly followed by a call for a further 250 voluntary redundancies in January this year.

Of the 324 UK Vauxhall dealerships currently in existence, 100 will be gone in 12 months' time, AM reports

The decision will put more than 3,800 jobs at risk across sales, workshop and admin staff

Tim Rose, AM's editor, said the Government seems more concerned about high-profile manufacturing losses than by the erosion of a network that contributes millions in business taxes.

He said: 'Vauxhall dealers have told us they will be forced to make sales, workshop and administration staff redundant as part of this cull by the carmaker.

'Based on our annual AM100 analysis of the UKs largest dealers, which shows an average of 38 staff per dealership, that amounts to more than 3,800 jobs at risk.

'It is telling that the 400 job cuts at Ellesmere Port get Government attention, but because the jobs we have identified as being at risk are spread across 100 Vauxhall retailers, they are in danger of going completely unnoticed.'

The dealership culling exercise is expected to save Vauxhall's UK auto manufacturing plant in Ellesmere Port

The Cheshire factory currently makes the Astra family car. Last October, PSA Group - which now owns Vauxhall - announced 400 job losses at the facility

A spokesman for the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) refused to comment on the matter, claiming it would be 'inappropriate' to do while the news hasn't been confirmed by PSA.

Rose added: 'The fate of these jobs lies in the hands of PSA Group bosses in France.

'Vauxhall dealers need more support from the carmaker and from the UK Government in this difficult period.

'Our ministers need to do more to understand the challenges these retailers face.'

Falling demand for Vauxhall cars and an accompanying reduction in profits for the franchised dealership network have prompted PSA to make cuts to the retail network.

In a difficult year for the British car maker, it posted a big drop in sales as a brand - down 22 per cent on the year previous.

Even some of its most popular models suffered significant losses.

Vauxhall suffered a drop in sales last year, with 22% fewer units shifted in 2017 compared to the year previous. The UK built Astra (left) fell 10,000 sales short compared to 2016, while the smaller Corsa (right) hemorrhaged 25,000 sales

Not only did the Astra shed 10,000 sales on the year previous, the smaller Corsa hatchback - Vauxhall's best-selling car of the year - was down 25,000 units compared to vehicles registered in 2016.

In a statement to AM, Vauxhall said: 'The Opel/Vauxhall PACE! plan is improving the efficiency of the business in all areas.

'Within the plan, the go-to-market strategy is being carefully reviewed, including the contractual framework with dealers.'

Vauxhall added that any reductions in its retail network would be 'part of the normal business cycle'.Some 150,000 Hargreaves Lansdown investors are in line for a slice of a 15 million tax rebate after it won a legal battle against HMRC over its loyalty discounts.

The UK's biggest DIY platform has issued discounts on annual fund charges as rebates to customers for the past 15 years, but they were deemed taxable by HMRC from March 2013.

The discounts rebated some of the fees paid by investors on their funds, which advisers and investment platforms were given as commission.

This 'trail commission' was barred for new investments by financial rules that came into place at the start of 2013, but can still be charged on investments made before then.

Rebates of annual management charges - known as loyalty bonuses  were deemed taxable by HMRC from April 2013

The tax did not apply to loyalty bonuses paid into tax-efficient Isas, or self invested personal pensions, known as Sipps.

HMRC argued that loyalty bonuses were a form of income and should therefore be subject to a basic rate of income tax charge of 20 per cent rather than a refund to customers.

Hargreaves said this was not the case and the tax tribunal disagreed with HMRC and ruled in the investment platform's favour.

The ruling will see money returned to investors, and remove the burden to declare these discounts on tax returns.

HMRC now has two months to appeal the ruling, which will mean that customers of all investment services providers, not just Hargreaves Lansdown, could also receive rebates on annual fund charges.

What should HL investors do now?

Investors should do nothing yet, is the message from Hargreaves, because HMRC may appeal the decision.

So investors should continue treating loyalty bonuses as taxable.

The platform will continue to deduct 20 per cent from the loyalty bonuses until HMRC makes their position clear, adding it will write to clients who are affected as soon as it knows more.

Chris Hill, chief executive of Hargreaves Lansdown: 'We saw the discount tax which HMRC introduced in 2013 as unwarranted attack on private investors, so we launched a legal challenge, and I am delighted that the tax tribunal has supported our view.

'The ruling will not only see money returned to investors, but will also simplify their tax affairs, as there will be no need to declare the loyalty bonus on their tax returns.

'Furthermore, it is likely to benefit clients of all investment services providers who offer rebates on annual fund charges, not just clients of HL.

'HMRC has the right to appeal, so the champagne is on ice for now.'Upmarket fashion retailer Ted Baker defied the doom and gloom on the high street by posting a set of strong results, but warned that cold weather across Europe and North America hit sales of its spring-summer collection.

The retailer, which has fans including Kate Middleton and Amal Clooney, posted a 12 per cent rise in pre-tax profits to 68.8million for the year to January 27.

Group sales rose 11.4 per cent to 591.7million, with retail sales in UK and Europe up 7.7 per cent to 301.1million - a strong level of growth compared to high street rivals.

Cold weather: Ted Baker said the Beast from the East has hit spring and summer sales

Much of the growth in the UK and Europe came from online sales, which rose 34.7 per cent, offsetting a 1.4 per cent fall in store sales and helping group online sales rising by nearly 40 per cent to 149.2million.

The fashion firm did well in the US and Canada too, with retail sales there rising by 16.2 per cent to 120.1million in the full-year.

However the firm, which has 532 stores and concessions worldwide, including 195 in the UK, warned that 'external trading conditions' will remain 'challenging' across many of its global markets.

Shares in Ted Baker fell 4.6 per cent, or 136p, to 2800p in morning trading, as investors were left unimpressed by the rise in sales.

'The recent unseasonal weather across Europe and the East Coast of America has had an impact on the early part of trading for Spring/Summer and we anticipate that external trading conditions will remain challenging across many of our global markets,' the group said.

'However, the new season collections have been well received and the strength of our brand and business model mean that we remain well positioned to continue the Group's momentum and long-term development.'

The brand was founded in 1987 in Glasgow by Ray Kelvin, who is also chief executive and has put its success down to cautious expansion and not trying too hard.

Today Kelvin cheered another year of 'continued progress' as the group opened more stores in the UK and internationally, including in Kuwait, Qatar, Malaysia, Mexico and India.

In the UK and Europe, the company opened a new store in London Luton Airport and said it plans to open new stores in Barcelona Airport and London Bridge station, an outlet in Lyon and its first outlet in Neumunster, Germany, along with further concessions in the UK, France, Germany and Spain.

It also said it will continue to invest in its e-commerce sites to 'enhance the customer experience'.

Fashion chain Ted Baker has warned over a Beast from the East hit to spring sales

Views from the City

Neil Wilson, senior market analyst at ETX Capital, noted that, despite strong sales, the pace of growth had tailed off in the major markets.

He said: 'North America sales growth was 16.2 per cent, versus 28.3 per cent in the prior year. UK and Europe sales growth slowed from 10.7 per cent to 7.7 per cent.'

And added: 'Meanwhile, guidance suggests a trickier start to the year than the market previously had expected and is weighing on the stock. Combination of these factors maybe indicates some headwinds to earnings growth.

'The decline in the share price this morning so far takes the stock back to where it was before the Jan 10th trading update as hopes of a momentum build following last years good performance seem to have vanished along with the spring weather.

'Notwithstanding the slightly downbeat language, these are very good results and with double-digit sales growth, its maybe not all doom and gloom on the high street. But although UK accounts for lions share of sales, Ted Baker is no yardstick for UK retail as this is increasingly a global brand rather than a pure British high shop.'

Mike van Dulken, head of research at Accendo Markets, said: 'As with many other retailers (and indeed corporates) of late [...] it has fallen foul of its outlook statement, with management anticipating trading conditions will remain challenging across many of its global markets.

'More cautious investors are clearly not prepared to look through this observation, for fear of it actually sugar-coating what could be a worsening in recent trading conditions. After all, the message from the high street this week was hardly one of optimism.

'And as much as growth levels are handsome double-digits (retail, wholesale, internet and licensing), there also a worry that GBPs recent climb is eroding what has been a rather helpful FX boost.'

MANY people who care about the economy of the country converged at Happy Valley Hotel for the post-budget seminar yesterday morning, hoping to engage the Finance Minister Martin Dlamini and his team in a robust discussion.



As much as this was more of an opportunity to vent, given that the horse had long bolted as far as our input towards shaping the budget was concerned, it is fair to say many left disappointed that only three questions were posed, albeit anonymously.



The minister had to be excused for Parliament business, which deprived us of some immediate answers. The timing of his exit coincided with some biting submissions by President of the Federation of Swaziland Employers and Chamber of Commerce (FSE&CC) Andrew le Roux, who had plenty of practical solutions for government.



Le Roux was one of the panellists selected from a cross-section of the business sector, civil society, youth, academia and politicians.

At the end of their submissions, it was evident that the budget tabled by the minister has no public or corporate support. Each of the speakers raised the fundamental need to consult prior to the formulation of the budget if it will ever register as a peoples budget that works for this country.



Le Roux correctly pointed out how there seemed to be no clear strategy on how to get the country out of the woods. He lamented how the best response he could get from those who should know the answers and offer solutions was; sitawubona khona (we just hope things will get better).



If this is the type of response being given to the leader of the private sector, then we have even more reason to worry that the situation is about to get worse. He said industry was ready and willing to play its part but was being frustrated at the lack of consultation prior to proposing tax or legislative reforms.

The amount of time it takes to register a business, the high corporate tax when other countries are reducing it, the lack of accountability in providing services to the people, rising corruption levels and other business restrictive processes cited by the FSE&CC portrayed a government that has rolled out the red tape and not the red carpet for investors.



University lecturer Sanele Sibiya also warned government against taxing people for the wrong reasons without any tangible effort to curb recurrent expenditure. He called for an increase in zero rated commodities to cushion the poor, otherwise in its current form; the ministers budget is taxing the poor to fund the rich. How true.



FESBC CEO Duduzile Nhlengetfwa said time for lip service was over. She said if government believed that the sustainability of the local economy was dependent on a strong SME sector, it must walk the talk. The budget allocation for SMEs has been found wanting. There can be nothing about us without us, she said, decrying the lack of consultation with the people on the ground.



Civil society representative Hlobisile Nxumalo called for an open budgeting process, where citizens would actively participate. The lack of participation in the process was evident in the failure to meet internationally recommended allocations to priority sectors such as health.



Nxumalo further cautioned that while they recognise the need to spend on celebrating the countrys milestones over the past 50 years, the expense on the celebrations should reflect the dire state of our economy.



Speaking for the youth was Thabiso Mdluli from Waterman, who shared the sentiments of another panellist from SERPAC, Dr Thula Dlamini on the need to invest in technical vocational education in order to meet the direct needs of industry. He said it was time to think globally and act locally because Swaziland was too small an economy to generate the revenue required to serve its needs.



The ministers departure was the party pooper of an otherwise well organised event. Nobody was assigned to stand in for the minister who left with most of his officials. We were left with an officer who was only mandated to communicate with us via email and promised replies in the next seven working days. We were also assured that the event was being recorded, so that the minister and his officials would get to hear every word of it.



He may never know who said what because there was no roving microphone for the participants and submissions were limited to a group of panellists; not even for those who have no fear to speak out.

Nobody knows if the Finance minister would ever find time to get the recording and watch it together with his Cabinet colleagues. It is not too late to act on these suggestions. However, it will come as no surprise if they only go as far as; sitawubona khona.









LOBAMBA  The Swaziland Television Authority (STVA) Board seems to be skating on thin ice. This was the message sent by the Minister of Information, Communication and Technology (ICT), Dumisani Ndlangamandla, to his ministrys Senate committee during the budget debate yesterday.



Ndlangamandla minced no words as he blasted the Board for leaking information to the media before they reported to him. He shared that of late, he received calls from reporters asking him about decisions taken by the Board after meetings before he was even aware of them. He said this was seemingly the same thing that happened with information that reached parliamentarians.



Speaking as though the Boards days were numbered, Ndlangamandla shared his experience with slaughtering pigs. He explained how easy the process was as he took senators step by step through the process. What irked the minister were reports around the issue of the STVA Chief Executive Officer (CEO) position which recently made newspaper headlines. He shared that slaughtering a pig entailed covering it with a sack, pouring it with hot water and scrubbing it with an axe.



Nayichubeka inona (lengulube) ngitayihlaba vele, Ndlangamandla said.

This was after the Deputy Senate President, Ngomuyayona Gamedze, thanked the minister for being honest to the House. Gamedze said the minister had practically admitted that the Board he appointed was not honest. He sarcastically said since he appointed the Board members, he should learn to live with them.



This is your pig; its fattening for you, Gamedze said.

Ndlangamandla explained that STVA was currently going through the CEO recruitment process and added that the man holding the fort currently worked on a six months contract. He stated that the Board had to appoint a CEO before that period elapsed.MBABANE  If you were left with only E100 airtime and 10 calls to qualify for the Swazi Mobile shares, your luck has just changed.



The mobile telephony company has announced that they will be giving shares to 1 000 people who had managed to load airtime worth E500 and received at least 20 unique calls by December 31.



The announcement was made by Swazi Mobile Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Jeff Penberton at the company headquarters yesterday. Penberton said this meant a total of 15 000 people qualified for the shares reward programme. When the company was launched, it pledged to offer shares worth E60 million to the first 100 000 locals who would join it as subscribers with each share worth E600. For one to qualify for the shares, they had to be Swazi Nationals with a valid identification document (ID), be 16 years of age or above, buy and activate a Swazi Mobile number before December 31, 2017, top up with E600 airtime and receive inbound calls to the activated number from 30 valid unique numbers.

Second chance



MBABANE  Swazi Mobile CEO Jeff Penberton said they had received pleas from people who had almost qualified for the shares, and hence they decided to give them another chance. The Board of Directors agreed that the company should lower the top-up amount to E500 and at least 20 unique calls, he said. He said at the end of December 2017, 14 000 people had qualified for the shares, and they had submitted their Know-Your-Customer (KYC) documents. He said they were currently waiting for the Swaziland Stock Brokers so that these could receive their share certificates. He said the 1 000 people would be contacted by the company today on how they could submit the KYC documents. He said all other details would be communicated to the customers when they were contacted.MBABANE  The two South African witnesses, former warder Obedia Makhaza Ndlovu (L) and HR Supervisor at Barberton Maximum Prison Thulani Myeni, who testified during businessman Sipho Shongwes bail hearing yesterday. (Pics: Sibusiso Shange)

MBABANE  Jaw-dropping. The reason given by Makhaza Obedia Ndlovu for signing contradicting affidavits about the release of murder suspect Sipho Shongwe from Barberton Maximum Prison, shocked many of those who attended the suspects bail hearing yesterday.



Ndlovu told the court that he was drunk and tired from work when he signed the affidavit which purported that he assisted Shongwe to be released from prison. Others simply laughed at the reason he gave the court.



In this affidavit, Ndlovu had earlier submitted that Shongwes release, presumably on parole, was through procedural processes. This affidavit was filed in court by Shongwes attorneys to cement their case that his release was not through fraudulent means.Five days after signing this affidavit, he signed another one which was filed by the Crown, in which Ndlovu denied even knowing Shongwe and having anything to do with his release because he was not based at Barberton Maximum Prison when the suspect left the prison.



Last Friday, Judge Sipho Nkosi summoned Ndlovu at the instance of the Crown, which is represented by Principal Crown Counsel Absalom Makhanya, to clarify how it happened that he signed the two affidavits.

When he took to the witness stand yesterday, the judge asked Ndlovu if he was aware that should he tell lies since he had taken an oath, he could be charged with perjury and be locked up. He said he was aware of that.



The judge wanted to find out if he was the same Makhaza Obedia Ndlovu referred to in the affidavits and he responded to the affirmative. Judge Nkosi asked him for his identity (ID) number before briefing him about the two conflicting affidavits which both bear his name and ID number.



He explained to the former junior warder who now works at a Puma filling station, that the affidavits had caused confusion as to the authenticity of either of them.



Ndlovu was given both affidavits while in the stand and he stunned many when he said he had forgotten his reading glasses back in South Africa. He said he had an eye problem but stated that he could read the documents from about an arms-length distance. Ndlovu told the court that he recognised one of the affidavits which were handwritten and bore the South African Police Service emblem.



He admitted to writing and signing the one that was filed by the Crown. He also said he signed the other one that was filed by Shongwe. However, he said despite signing the one filed by Shongwe, he was intoxicated when he did so and he had not read its contents.



Ndlovu further informed the court that the affidavit, which is dated March 8, 2018, was brought to him by one Cyprian Shongwe. He stated that he did not sign the document before a commissioner of oaths.

Makhanya recently submitted that Shongwe was in contact with the outside world, allegedly enabling him to facilitate the production of fraudulent documents to aid his case.MANZINI  Payday has come with a headache for some soldiers following an order that they should contribute part of their salaries towards the 50/50 Jubilee celebration.



This sums up what happened to members of the Umbutfo Swaziland Defence Force (USDF) between Monday and Tuesday. Well-placed sources within the USDF said when their superiors told them about the decision to make contributions towards the successful hosting of the 50/50 Jubilee celebration to be held at Mavuso Trade and Exhibition Centre on April 19, 2018, they also hinted on the amount of money expected from individuals in the different ranks.



According to insiders, the contributions range between E100 to be forked out by those holding the rank of a Private and E600 to be paid by generals. Meanwhile, corporals and lieutenants are set to part with E110 and E270 respectively. Soldiers hold different views regarding the matter, as some said they had expected such to happen, as they regard it as a norm when it comes to special national events while others decried the timing of making the contributions.

Their concern was that even though it was anticipated that such could happen, they should have been told about this on time so that they could budget for it. They said some of them received the order a day before their payday while for others, it was two days as they normally get paid between the 20th and 22nd of every calendar month.



Apart from being compelled to make the contributions, we have now been cornered into paying it now because the celebrations will be held before we get our salaries for April 2018, said some of the unhappy military men.

Again, they said another concern they had with the contributions was that there were some people holding senior positions in the army who portrayed the initiative as an honest proposal but certain things then went wrong.



They made allegations that cannot be repeated as they could not be verified or proven. It is worth noting that soldiers are not the first members of the countrys security forces to express their discontent about this initiative as it happened with members of the Royal Swaziland Police. So far, impeccable sources within His Majestys Correctional Services (HMCS) said there was no communique sent to them regarding the 50/50 Jubilee celebration contributions.[March 22, 2018] Baidu invests 1 billion yuan in COOCAA

BEIJING, March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- On March 16, Skyworth Group and Baidu, Inc. established strategic cooperation, whereby Baidu will invest 1.01 billion yuan (approx. US$159.7 million) in Shenzhen Coocaa Network Technology Company Limited (COOCAA), subsidiary of Skyworth Group, becoming the second largest shareholder of COOCAA as a result of the transaction. The two parties plan to cooperate in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), to jointly provide consumers with entry-level smart-home products and services. Baidu founder, chairman and CEO Robin Li, senior vice president Liu Hui and Duer Business Unit general manager Jing Kun, Skyworth Group founder Huang Hongsheng and board chairman Lai Weide as well as COOCAA chairman Lin Jin and CEO Wang Zhiguo attended the signing ceremony. Skyworth Digital Holdings (00751.HK) announced on March 16 that Baidu's wholly-owned subsidiary Dagze Bairuixiang Venture Investent Management Co. plans to invest 1.01 billion yuan (approx. US$159.7 million) in COOCAA, which will be 11 percent of the stake in COOCAA becoming the second largest shareholder after Skyworth who is the biggest. According to available data, COOCAA received a strategic investment from Baidu's iQiyi in September 2016, followed by a similar investment from Tencent in June 2017. Upon completion of the new round of investment from Baidu, COOCAA's market valuation will be near 10 billion yuan (approx. US$1.6 billion). Currently, COOCAA has more than 28 million active users, with daily active users exceeding 12 million. COOCAA is among the top players in its industry, in terms of both number of users and market valuation.



In terms of product, Skyworth plans to launch the AI TV series, including the Q5, Q6 and Q7, which are equipped with both firm's proprietary operating system CoocaaOS and Baidu's conversational AI system DuerOS, while previous smart TV models that are equipped with the COOCAA system will be gradually upgraded to the dual set up later this year. The two companies also plan to launch entry-level smart-home products, and integrate them into the control terminal for their smart home solutions. In terms of technology, DuerOS will be fully integrated with COOCAA's system, embedding Baidu's leading-edge technical capabilities such as face and image recognition into COOCAA's system. In addition, Baidu and Skyworth plan to jointly research and develop more forward-looking technological solutions on smart home field. About COOCAA

COOCAA is a technology platform that is focused on capitalizing on the services and applications which can be delivered via large-screen smart TV. After years of growth, the platform has more than 28 million private terminals, becoming the largest smart TV OTT service provider in China. SOURCE COOCAA

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][March 22, 2018] Foresters Financial and Financial Horizons Group Donate Employment Kits to Operation Stand Down in Tennessee

Foresters Financial, an international financial services provider, teamed up with Financial Horizons Group to package and donate 150 employment kits for U.S. armed forces veterans' group Operation Stand Down in Nashville, Tennessee. Operation Stand Down is a non-profit organization that helps veterans and their families transition from military to civilian life by providing support like legal aid, transitional housing, benefits counseling and employment services. The employment kits include a messenger bag, pens, highlighters, folders, notepads, material to write resumes, and a USB key to hold files and documents. "For over 140 years Foresters Financial has focused on helping families and building strong communities," said Jason Julian, Assistant Vice President National Accounts, North American Life Insurance and Annuity at Foresters Financial. "Supporting Operation Stand Down's work with veterans mirrors these values and allows us to give back to those who've given so much." "At Financial Horizons we strive to make the world we live in a better place," said David Stewart, President MGA Services and Ontario, Financial Horizons Group. "Our partner Foresters, helped us do this in Nashville by organizing an event for our team attending an industry conferece to support veterans from the US military. Our ability to help support our fellow communities in any way makes a difference. We hope our contribution helps in some way!"



About Foresters Financial Foresters Financial is an international financial services provider with more than three million clients and members in Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom. Foresters provides life insurance, savings, retirement and investment solutions that help families achieve their financial goals and make a lasting difference in their lives and communities. Investment products are offered by Foresters Asset Management Inc.

Foresters Financial has assets of over $13.4 billion, liabilities of $11.3 billion, total funds under management of almost $44 billion and a surplus of $2.1 billion (all figures in Canadian dollars as of December 31, 2016). For more information, visit foresters.com. About Financial Horizons Group Financial Horizons Group is a leading, national, Canadian-owned and operated Managing General Agency (MGA) that offers a comprehensive selection of life/health insurance, employee benefits, pensions, investments, structured settlements, and risk management products and services to advisors throughout Canada. As an MGA, Financial Horizons Group is appointed by 24 insurance companies to distribute their products and services, through independent financial advisors to Canadian consumers. Financial Horizons Group partners with financial advisors for support in growing advisors' businesses. This commitment translates into providing advisors with the ideal mix of resources, products and services that they, in turn, can offer to their clients. Foresters Financial and Foresters are trade names and trademarks of The Independent Order of Foresters (a fraternal benefit society, 789 Don Mills Road, Toronto, Canada M3C 1T9) and its subsidiaries. 416206 US (03/18) View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180322005744/en/

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][March 21, 2018] Transgene to Announce Major Clinical Results in 2018 and Achieve Promising Progress on Its New Oncolytic Viruses

Regulatory News: Transgene (Paris:TNG), a biotech company that designs and develops virus-based immunotherapies, published its financial results for 2017 and provided an update on the progress of its clinical pipeline, preclinical pipeline and its technology platforms. Philippe Archinard, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Transgene, commented:

"In 2017, Transgene made significant progress across all aspects of its business and launched seven clinical trials. These studies are designed to demonstrate the potential of our therapeutic vaccine and oncolytic virus immunotherapeutics in combination with ICIs. As a result, we remain on track to communicate t clinical data on five products before the end of 2018. "With the launch of our Invir.IOTM platform, we also confirmed our positioning at the forefront of innovation in the field of oncolytic viruses, an area of immense promise. With Invir.IOTM, we design novel virotherapies against cancer with multiple and complementary modes of action to better control the tumor microenvironment and to attack tumors much more effectively. The signings of collaborative agreements with BioInvent and Randox are the first steps of the acknowledgement of this potential. They cumulate with our ongoing clinical developments of Pexa-Vec and TG6002. "Our expertise in both therapeutic vaccines and oncolytic viruses, confirmed by recent achievements, allows us to look at 2018 with confidence." Clinical Pipeline Review TG4010: combination trial with nivolumab (ICI); collaborations with Bristol-Myers Squibb TG4010 is a therapeutic vaccine being developed for the treatment of advanced-stage non-squamous non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). TG4010's mechanism of action, excellent safety profile and existing clinical data make it a very suitable candidate for combinations with other therapies. Treating lung cancer remains an important medical need despite recent progress. There is a clear need to increase both the number of patients responding to treatment (response rate) and the duration of response to achieve better patient outcomes. New positive clinical data from the ICI pembrolizumab in first-line lung cancer patients were recently announced. As a result, we expect most first-line patients, particularly in the US, to receive an ICI as a monotherapy or in combination with chemotherapy depending on the level of PD-L1 expression of the patients' tumor cells.

Transgene, with its company-sponsored first-line trial assessing TG4010 in combination with nivolumab and chemotherapy, is well positioned both in Europe and in the US to prosper in this changed environment. We continue to believe that the addition of TG4010 could be crucial in improving outcomes for first-line patients.







TG4010

+ Opdivo (ICI)

(nivolumab)

+ chemotherapy

Phase 2 Non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) - 1st line Trial of TG4010 in combination with nivolumab and with chemotherapy in patients

whose tumor cells express low or undetectable levels of PD-L1; sponsor: Transgene Collaboration deal signed in April 2017 with Bristol-Myers Squibb. BMS is supplying

Opdivo (nivolumab)

Opdivo (nivolumab) First patient treated in January 2018; trial recruiting in Europe and in the US

First results expected in 2H 2018 TG4010

+ Opdivo (ICI)

(nivolumab)

Phase 2 Non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) - 2nd line Trial of TG4010 in combination with nivolumab, which is being provided by Bristol-Myers

Squibb, in a collaborative agreement with UC Davis Medical Center (USA); principal

investigator: Dr. Karen Kelly; sponsor: UC Davis First patient treated in March 2017; trial's 4 sites open in California

The use of ICIs in first-line therapy had led to slower recruitment into this second

line trial, as patients previously treated with ICIs are excluded. Results from the

interim analysis of this study are now expected in 2H 2018.

Pexa-Vec: ongoing Phase 3 trial, ongoing Phase 2 combination trials Pexa-Vec is Transgene's lead oncolytic virus drug candidate. It is designed to selectively target and destroy cancer cells through intracellular viral replication (oncolysis), and by stimulating the body's immune response against cancer cells. Its mechanism of action and tolerability profile make it an appropriate candidate for use in combinations. Advanced liver cancer remains an important medical need. The approaches currently being developed are aimed at increasing treatment response rates and improving overall survival. The registration of nivolumab in the US as a second-line treatment, together with existing data, suggest that patients could also respond positively to an ICI as a first-line treatment.

Transgene's development of Pexa-Vec as a first-line treatment combined with both the current standard of care (sorafenib) and nivolumab, could play an important role in the future treatment of hepatocellular carcinoma. Pexa-Vec

+ sorafenib

(PHOCUS)

Phase 3 Advanced liver cancer (hepatocellular carcinoma - HCC) - 1st line Clinical trial being conducted by Transgene's partner, SillaJen (sponsor)

Ongoing recruitment. First patient treated in Europe in April 2017

Trial recruitment authorized in China (July 2017)

First data readout expected in 2019 Pexa-Vec

+ Opdivo (ICI)

(nivolumab)

Phase 2 Advanced liver cancer (hepatocellular carcinoma - HCC) - 1st line Principal investigator: Prof. Olivier Rosmorduc (AP-HP, Paris); sponsor: Transgene

First patient treated in July 2017 ; several active trial sites

; several active trial sites First data readout expected in 2H 2018 Pexa-Vec is also being developed for the treatment of other solid tumors.

Ongoing trials are expected to deliver results in 2018. Pexa-Vec

+ metronomic

cyclophosphamide

Phase 1/2a HER2 negative breast cancer and soft tissue sarcoma (METROmaJX) Principal investigator: Prof. Antoine Italiano (Institut Bergonie, Bordeaux);

sponsor: INCa

sponsor: INCa Positive results from the Phase 1 part were presented at ESMO 2017 (Sept. 2017)

Recruitment ongoing Pexa-Vec

+ Yervoy (ICI)

(ipilimumab)

Phase 1 Solid tumors (ISI-JX) Coordinating investigator: Dr. Aurelien Marabelle; sponsor: Centre Leon Berard, Lyon

First patient treated in February 2017

Recruitment ongoing Pexa-Vec

Neo-adjuvant Solid tumors Principal investigator: Prof. Alan Anthoney; sponsor: University of Leeds (UK)

Recruitment completed Our partner SillaJen has also published clinical data that further demonstrate the potential of Pexa-Vec. It presented a poster at ASCO GU featuring the results of a clinical trial in patients with renal cell carcinoma and liver metastases (n=17). The disease control rate reached 76%, with one complete response, confirming that Pexa - Vec, administered intravenously as a monotherapy, can induce antitumor activity. TG4001: trial in combination with avelumab (ICI); collaboration agreement with Merck KGaA and Pfizer TG4001 is a therapeutic vaccine that has demonstrated good tolerability, a significant HPV clearance rate and promising efficacy results. Its mechanism of action and good safety profile make TG4001 a good vaccine candidate to be combined with other therapies. TG4001 + Bavencio (ICI) (avelumab)

Phase 1/2 HPV-positive head and neck cancer - 2nd line Clinical collaboration agreement with Merck KGaA and Pfizer, for the supply of

avelumab for the trial

avelumab for the trial Principal investigator: Prof. Christophe Le Tourneau (Institut Curie, Paris);

sponsor: Transgene

sponsor: Transgene First patient treated in September 2017; several sites recruiting

First results expected in 2H 2018 TG6002: first-in-human trial started A new-generation oncolytic immunotherapy, TG6002 has been designed by Transgene to combine the mechanism of oncolysis (targeted breakdown of cancer cells) with local production of the chemotherapy (5-FU) directly in the tumor. This approach aims at attacking solid tumors on several fronts while avoiding the chemotherapy-associated side effects. TG6002

Phase 1 Glioblastoma Principal investigator: Prof. Ahmed Idbahi (AP-HP, Paris), with the support of INCa

(French national cancer institute); sponsor: AP-HP

(French national cancer institute); sponsor: AP-HP First patient treated in October 2017 TG6002

Phase 1 Gastro-intestinal adenocarcinoma First IND request filed for this trial; sponsor: Transgene TG1050: First part of the results featured at the AASLD in October 2017 TG1050 is a therapeutic vaccine designed for the treatment of chronic hepatitis B. TG1050's technology (T101) is being developed in China through the joint-venture between Transgene and Tasly Biopharmaceutical Technology. TG1050 + Standard of care

Phase 1/1b Chronic hepatitis B First part of the results featured at the AASLD (October 2017)

Good safety profile confirmed (single and multiple doses)

Initiation in January 2018 of a clinical study in China assessing T101

Full results available in 2H 2018 Invir.IOTM: New Industry Leading OV Platform In September 2017, Transgene announced the launch of Invir.IO a patented cutting-edge technology platform designed to generate a new generation of multifunctional oncolytic viruses capable of enhancing the tumor micro-environment's modulation. Novel oncolytic virus therapeutics based on Invir.IO have the capacity to incorporate several transgenes encoding for a range of specific anticancer weapons. By using this approach and working alongside external collaborators to provide access to clinically relevant transgenes, Transgene aims to develop OV therapeutics that can transform the treatment of cancer. Transgene has already demonstrated that oncolytic viruses from the Invir.IO platform attack tumors on several fronts and, in addition to the remarkable oncolytic properties of Vaccinia viruses, may: induce immunogenic death of cancer cells, and

allow the expression of several anticancer weapons such as cytokines, chemokines, enzymes, monoclonal antibodies or mini-antibodies (SdAbs, single-domain antibodies) in the tumor. Transgene is currently evaluating 10 preclinical Invir.IO OVs to identify the most appropriate candidates to take into clinical development to address a number of priority indications. To complement its in-house expertise, Transgene signed two collaborative research agreements in 2017 to gain access to partners' transgene sequences, coding for anticancer agents, to be incorporated into an Invir.IO patented oncolytic virus owned by Transgene. The resulting oncolytic viruses have the potential to be significantly more effective than the combination of these agents administered separately: Incorporating an anti-CTLA-4 antibody from BioInvent alone or together with other anticancer weapons. The local expression of anti-CTLA-4 antibodies in the tumor should reduce Treg mediated-immunosuppression in the tumor, thus increasing antitumor activity. This approach is expected to have a much better safety profile compared to the systemic use of anti-CTLA-4 antibodies;

alone or together with other anticancer weapons. The local expression of anti-CTLA-4 antibodies in the tumor should reduce Treg mediated-immunosuppression in the tumor, thus increasing antitumor activity. This approach is expected to have a much better safety profile compared to the systemic use of anti-CTLA-4 antibodies; Incorporating one or more SdAbs generated by Randox in order to combine the effects of oncolytic viruses with the therapeutic properties of SdAbs, which will be expressed directly in the tumor micro-environment, in order to directly or indirectly stimulate effector cells in solid tumors. In 2018, Transgene plans to invest approximately two thirds of its preclinical research spending on its Invir.IO platform and OV candidates. Transgene expects to obtain preclinical proof of concept for its lead candidates OVs in 2018 and to be in a position to initiate the first clinical trials with Invir.IO designed virotherapies in 2019. Research Collaboration with Servier In June 2017, Transgene signed a collaboration agreement with Servier to generate an original engineering process of allogeneic CAR-T cell therapies by applying Transgene's viral vectorization technology and capabilities. The aim is to improve the engineering performance of the process by reducing the number of steps.Transgene received 1 million as upfront payment. The collaboration also generates R&D service fees as well as potential success fees. Intellectual Property In 2017, Transgene filed several patent applications on new technologies, including Invir.IOTM developments.More than 20 patents were granted and ensure the protection of Transgene's innovations. Key Financials for 2017 Net cash burn for 2017 was reduced to 28.1 million compared to 30.6 million in 2016.

million compared to 30.6 million in 2016. Cash available at year-end 2017: 41.4 million , compared to 56.2 million at the end of 2016. This cash balance includes 13.5 million (net) raised from a private placement concluded in November 2017.

, compared to 56.2 million at the end of 2016. This cash balance includes 13.5 million (net) raised from a private placement concluded in November 2017. Net operating expenses of 36.0 million in 2017 , compared to 33.0 million in 2016.

, compared to 33.0 million in 2016. Net loss of 32.2 million in 2017, compared to a loss of 25.2 million in 2016. "We were able to reduce our cash burn in 2017 despite accelerating our development plan, starting numerous clinical trials, and making a planned milestone payment to SillaJen of 3.8 million. Operating costs remain under good control which has allowed the Company to allocate most of its financial resources to strategic clinical and preclinical operations. Our current cash resources, including the funds we raised in the private placement in November 2017, will allow us to deliver a number of important clinical milestones in the second half of 2018," said Jean-Philippe Del, Vice President, Finance.The financial statements for 2017 as well as management's discussion and analysis are attached to this press release (Appendices A and B). Financial Outlook 2018 Transgene expects its cash burn for 2018 to be comparable to 2017. The Company has the financial resources to execute its strategy through mid-2019. The Board of Directors of Transgene met on March 21, 2018, under the chairmanship of Philippe Archinard and closed the 2017 financial statements. Audit procedures have been performed by the statutory auditors and the delivery of the auditors' report is ongoing. The Company's registration document, which includes the annual financial report, will be available in April 2018 on Transgene's website, www.transgene.fr. A conference call in English is scheduled on March 21st at 6:00 p.m. CET. Webcast link to English language conference call:

https://ssl.webinar.nl/webcast/transgene/20180321_1/ Participant telephone numbers: France: +33 1 7075 0711 United Kingdom: +44 333 3000 804 United States: +1 631 913 1422 Confirmation code: 71 857 783# A replay of the call will be available on the Transgene website (www.transgene.fr) following the live event. Notes to editors

Transgene (Euronext: TNG), part of Institut Merieux, is a publicly traded French biotechnology company focused on designing and developing targeted immunotherapies for the treatment of cancer and infectious diseases. Transgene's programs utilize viral vector technology with the goal of indirectly or directly killing infected or cancerous cells. The Company's lead clinical-stage programs are: TG4010, a therapeutic vaccine against non-small cell lung cancer, Pexa-Vec, an oncolytic virus against liver cancer, and TG4001, a therapeutic vaccine against HPV-positive head and neck cancers. The Company has several other programs in clinical development, including TG1050 (chronic hepatitis B) and TG6002 (solid tumors).

With its proprietary Invir.IOTM, Transgene builds on its expertise in viral vectors engineering to design a new generation of multifunctional oncolytic viruses.

Transgene is based in Strasbourg, France, and has additional operations in Lyon, as well as a joint venture in China.

Additional information about Transgene is available at www.transgene.fr.

Follow us on Twitter: @TransgeneSA Disclaimer

This press release contains forward-looking statements, which are subject to numerous risks and uncertainties, which could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated. There can be no guarantee that (i) the results of pre-clinical work and prior clinical trials will be predictive of the results of the clinical trials currently underway, (ii) regulatory authorities will agree with the Company's further development plans for its therapies, or (iii) the Company will find development and commercialization partners for its therapies in a timely manner and on satisfactory terms and conditions, if at all. The occurrence of any of these risks could have a significant negative outcome for the Company's activities, perspectives, financial situation, results and development.For a discussion of risks and uncertainties which could cause the Company's actual results, financial condition, performance or achievements to differ from those contained in the forward-looking statements, please refer to the Risk Factors ("Facteurs de Risques") section of the Document de Reference, available on the AMF website (http://www.amf-france.org) or on Transgene's website (www.transgene.fr). Forward-looking statements speak only as of the date on which they are made, and Transgene undertakes no obligation to update these forward-looking statements, even if new information becomes available in the future. Appendix A: 2017 Financial Statements CONSOLIDATED BALANCE SHEET, IFRS

,(In  thousands) ASSETS December 31,

2017 December 31,

2016 CURRENT ASSETS Cash and cash equivalents 1,643 4,855 Other current financial assets 39,762 51,352 Cash, cash equivalents and other current financial assets 41,405 56,207 Trade receivables 2,564 2,385 Inventories 270 221 Other current assets 14,497 15,242 Assets available for sale - - Total current assets 58,736 74,055 NON-CURRENT ASSETS Property, plant and equipment 13,604 14,580 Intangible assets 250 423 Financial fixed assets 3,971 5,023 Investments in associates 2,916 3,923 Other non-current assets 21,396 24,946 Total non-current assets 42,137 48,895 TOTAL ASSETS 100,873 122,950 LIABILITIES AND EQUITY December 31,

2017 December 31,

2016 CURRENT LIABILITIES Trade payables 2,868 4,504 Financial liabilities 10,283 10,198 Provisions for risks 356 1,456 Other current liabilities 3,359 3,761 Total current liabilities 16,866 19,919 NON-CURRENT LIABILITIES Financial liabilities 51,717 52,803 Employee benefits 3,710 3,725 Other non-current liabilities 491 - Total non-current liabilities 55,918 56,528 Total liabilities 72,784 76,447 EQUITY Share capital 62,075 56,432 Share premiums and reserves 512,228 504,258 Retained Earnings (513,194) (487,987) Profit (loss) for the period (32,274) (25,207) Other comprehensive income (746) (983) Total equity attributable to Company shareholders 28,089 46,503 TOTAL EQUITY AND LIABILITIES 100,873 122,950 CONSOLIDATED INCOME STATEMENT, IFRS

(In  thousands, except for per-share data) December 31, 2017 December 31, 2016 Revenue from collaborative and licensing agreements 2,099 2,346 Government financing for research expenditure 5,358 6,382 Other income 687 1,583 Operating income 8,144 10,311 Research and development expenses (30,359) (26,419) General and administrative expenses (5,674) (6,236) Other expenses (154) (320) Net operating expenses (36,187) (32,975) Operating income from continuing operations (28,043) (22,664) Finance cost (2,287) (602) Share of profit (loss) of associates (1,944) (917) Income (loss) before tax (32,274) (24,183) Income tax expense - - Net income/(loss) from continuing operations (32,274) (24,183) Net income/(loss) from discontinued operations - (1,024) Net income (32,274) (25,207) Basic loss per share () (0.52) (0.45) Diluted earnings per share () (0.52) (0.45) CASH FLOW STATEMENT, IFRS

(in  thousands) December 31,

2017 December 31,

2016 Cash flow from operating activities Net income/(loss) from continuing operations (32,274) (24,183) Net income/(loss) from discontinued operations - (1,024) Cancellation of financial income 2,287 602 Elimination of non-cash items Income of associates 1,944 917 Provisions (1,070) (8,247) Depreciation 1,691 2,267 Share-based payments 436 266 Others 60 5,038 Net cash generated from/(used in) operating activities before change in

working capital and other operating cash flow (26,926) (24,364) Change in operating working capital requirements Current receivables and prepaid expenses (2,117) (3,182) Inventories and work in progress (49) 942 Research tax credit (5,530) (6,425) Assets available for sale - 2,000 Other current assets 941 (524) Trade payables (1,778) (2,022) Prepaid income 766 (479) Employee benefits (663) 526 Other current liabilities (14) (57) Net cash used in operating activities (35,370) (33,585) Cash flows from investing activities (Acquisitions)/disposals of property, plant and equipment (432) (27) (Acquisitions)/disposals of intangible assets (30) (20) Other (acquisitions)/disposals 100 (2,020) Net cash used in investing activities (362) (2,067) Cash flow from financing activities Net financial income proceeds (113) (283) Gross proceeds from the issuance of shares 14,390 46,300 Share issue costs (1,118) (1,220) Conditional subsidies 2,528 (180) (Acquisition)/disposal of other financial assets 11,651 (22,933) Net tax credit financing 6,307 6,761 Bank loan - 10,000 Financial leases (1,121) (1,223) Net cash generated from/(used in) financing activities: 32,524 37,222 Effect of changes in exchange rates on cash and cash equivalents (4) - Net increase/(decrease) in cash and cash equivalents (3,212) 1,570 Cash and cash equivalents at beginning of period 4,855 3,285 Cash and cash equivalents at end of period 1,643 4,855 Investments in other current financial assets 39,762 51,351 Cash, cash equivalents and other current financial assets 41,405 56,206 Appendix B: Management Discussion of 2017 Financials Revenue During the periods under review, revenues from collaborative and licensing agreements amounted to 2.1 million in 2017 compared to 2.3 million in 2016. They mainly included: research and development services for third parties amounting to 0.9 million in 2017 (0.5 million in 2016); and

income related to commercial use of technologies or products provided under license by Transgene amounting to 1.2 million in 2017 (1.8 million in 2016). In 2017, this mainly comprised the license of the TG3003 product sold to ElsaLys Biotech SAS for 1.0 million. As of December 31, 2017, government financing for research expenditures was 5.4 million (6.4 million in 2016) consisted of a research tax credit, as well as grants received and receivable: the research tax credit (CIR - credit impot recherche) amounted to 5.4 million in 2017 (6.3 million in 2016). Related eligible expenses (net of grants received during the fiscal year) amounted to 18.0 million in 2017 and 21.0 million in 2016. This decrease is related in particular to the receipt in 2017 of the balance of grants and advances repayable under the ADNA program for an amount of 2.5 million; and

research grants amounted to less than 0.1 million in 2017 (0.1 million in 2016). Operating expenses Research and development (R&D) expenses Research and development (R&D) expenses amounted to 30.4 million in 2017, compared to 26.4 million in 2016. The following table details R&D expenses by type: In millions of euros Dec. 31, 2017 Dec. 31, 2016 Change Payroll costs 11.1 10.8 +3% Share-based payments 0.3 0.2 +58% Intellectual property expenses and licensing costs 4.8 1.1 +325% External expenses for clinical projects* 7.0 7.0 +1% External expenses for other projects 1.5 1.8 -14% Operating expenses 3.9 4.1 -5% Depreciation and provisions 1.8 1.5 +19% RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT EXPENSES 30.4 26.4 +15% * Expenses related to the subcontracting of the production of clinical batches are presented under "External expenses for clinical projects." Employee costs allocated to R&D (salaries, employer contributions and related expenses) amounted to 11.1 million in 2017, compared to 10.8 million in 2016. Intellectual property and licensing expenses amounted to 4.8 million in 2017 versus 1.1 million in 2016. This increase was mainly due to the milestone payment of 3.8 million ($4 million) to SillaJen, Inc. in the first half of 2017. This was triggered by the first patient being recruited in Europe in the Phase 3 trial of Pexa-Vec (PHOCUS). External expenses for clinical projects were 7.0 million in 2017, stable compared to 2016. Other external expenses, including expenses for research, preclinical, amounted to 1.5 million in 2017 versus 1.8 million in 2016. Operating expenses, including the cost of operating research laboratories, amounted to 3.9 million in 2017 versus 4.1 million in 2016. General and administrative (G&A) expenses General and administrative (G&A) expenses amounted to 5.7 million in 2017 versus 6.2 million in 2016. The following table details G&A expenses by type: In millions of euros Dec. 31, 2017 Dec. 31, 2016 Change Payroll costs 3.0 3.8 -21% Share-based payments 0.2 0.1 +86% Fees and administrative expenses 1.6 1.5 +5% Other fixed costs 0.8 0.7 +21% Depreciation and provisions 0.1 0.1 -6% GENERAL AND ADMINISTRATIVE EXPENSES 5.7 6.2 -8% Employee costs allocated to G&A amounted to 3.0 million in 2017 versus 3.8 million in 2016. In 2016, the Company had registered unfunded expenses due to the transfer of the Chairman and Chief Executive Officer's home entity. Fees and administrative expenses amounted to 1.6 million in 2017 versus 1.5 million in 2016. Other income Other income amounted to 0.7 million in 2017 versus 1.6 million in 2016. In 2017, Transgene registered a 0.4 million corresponding to a lower restructuring expense, compared to provisions. In December 2016, the Company participated to a capital increase of Transgene Tasly (Tianjin) BioPharmaceutical Co. Ltd. This operation generated an income of 1.2 million. Other expenses Other expenses amounted to 0.2 million in 2017 versus 0.3 million in 2016. Interest income (expense) Net interest expense amounted to 2.3 million in 2017 versus 0.6 million in 2016. Financial income (investment income) amounted to 0.3 million in 2017 versus 0.9 million in 2016. Interest expense amounted to 2.6 million in 2017 versus 1.5 million in 2016. This mainly consisted of: bank accrued interests on the EIB loan (0.8 million in 2017 vs 0.4 million in 2016),

discount on earn-out related to the sales of Jennerex Inc. shares to Sillajen Inc. in 2014 (0.8 million in 2017),

discount of the advances received by Bpifrance under the ADNA (Advanced Diagnostics for New Therapeutic Approaches) program (0.5 million vs 0.6 million in 2016),

and interest on financing leases (0.2 million in 2017 and in 2016). Net loss Net loss was 32.3 million in 2017, compared to 24.2 million in 2016. Net loss from discontinued operations In 2017, the Company no longer records any income from discontinued operations. Total net loss from discontinued operations for 2016 was 1.0 million. Total net loss Total net loss for 2017 was 32.3 million, compared to 25.2 million in 2016. Net loss per share was 0.52 in 2017 (0.45 in 2016). Investments Investments in tangible and intangible assets (net of disposals) amounted to 0.6 million in 2017 (0.1 million in 2016). Repayable advances and loans In 2017, the Company received 1.7 million in reimbursable advances from Bpifrance, corresponding to the balance of grants and advances from the ADNA program. In 2017, the Company refinanced its 2016 research tax credit of 6.3 million. To this effect, it took out a bank loan with Bpifrance that matures in mid-2020, at which time the receivable is expected to be paid by the French government. The tax credit for competitiveness and employment was also financed in 2017 in the amount of 0.1 million through a loan from Bpifrance (which matures in mid-2021). In 2017, Transgene did not draw dawn the second tranche of 10 million of the credit facility granted by the European Investment Bank (EIB) in January 2016. In June 2016, Transgene had drawn down the first 10 million tranche. This first tranche, out of a total of 20 million available, is payable in 2021. The interest accrued is payable starting in 2019. Liquidity and capital resources The Company's cash is invested in short-term money-market mutual funds or placed, at market conditions, in a cash pool managed by the majority shareholder of Transgene, Institut Merieux. The Company completed a capital increase by means of a private placement and accelerated book building in November 2017 and raised 14.4 million. As of December 31, 2017, the Company's available cash amounted to 41.4 million versus 56.2 million on December 31, 2016.

At the date of this document, the Company had no bank debt subject to covenants. Cash flow Excluding capital increases and EIB loan, the Company's net cash burn amounted to 28.1 million in 2017 versus 30.6 million in 2016. Post-closing events None. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180321005782/en/

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][March 21, 2018] National Geographic And Sprint Announce Winner Of CHASING GENIUS: Unlimited Innovation -- Awards $25,000 Prize To Turn Idea Into Catalyst For Change In The World

WASHINGTON and OVERLAND PARK, Kan., March 21, 2018 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- National Geographic and Sprint are proud to announce Asha Gummadi as the winner of the "CHASING GENIUS: Unlimited Innovation" challenge, which aimed at inspiring innovative ideas focused on wireless connectivity and the network of the future. Based in Philadelphia, Asha Gummadi garnered the most votes on the CHASING GENIUS platform for her idea on Empowering Tele Rehabilitation with Digital Connectivity, and will receive $25,000 to take her vision further. The CHASING GENIUS: Unlimited Innovation challenge began in January as the second challenge in National Geographic's growing CHASING GENIUS franchise, a groundbreaking digital initiative built on the premise that transformational ideas can come from anywhere, and from anyone. Inspiring people all over the globe, the CHASING GENIUS community unleashed more than one thousand potential solutions to leverage technology and the power of connectivity to imagine a better world. Asha's project is a smartphone app that allows doctors to digitally prescribe physical therapy exercises to patients in developing countries who can't easily access rehab centers or treatment. To ensure patients can learn their exercises remotely, the app demonstrates each movement via detailed animations, and allows patients to choose their own language for instructions. A neurological physical therapist, Asha was inspired to create the app after she could not effectively recommend exercises to her mother due to a language barrier, and after her grandfather couldn't access much-needed rehab services in rural India. Learn more about Asha's idea HERE. Launched last spring, the CHASING GENIUS platform brings together a community of active, aspirational, socially conscious consumers who want to make a positive difference in the world. Through the platform, challenges are presented to the community in an effort to foster and grow innovative ideas around some of the most pressing issues facing our planet. Since the challenge began, the CHASING GENIUS community has grown to 35,000 members. The concept of transformational ideas and CHASING GENIUS reverberated across social, digital and broadcast media and generated more than 100 million impressions, seven million content views, and 229,000* social conversations. During the submissions phase, the community was highly engaged  sharing ideas, offering feedback, asking questions, and flagging favorites. The submissions were then evaluated on four criteria to find the most inspiring, innovative, creative, and viable ideas. After the members of the CHASING GENIUS: Unlimited Innovation Council determined the top 10 finalists, te CHASING GENIUS community cast their votes to elect the winning idea.



"By way of this CHASING GENIUS challenge -- and those that will follow -- we want to prove to consumers around the world that the term 'explorer' isn't confined to one meaning. It's the curiosity, creativity and perseverance put into each submission that sparks the explorer in each of us," said Claudia Malley, executive vice president, partner solutions, National Geographic. "Our work here with Sprint has proven that theory and has shown us that transformative ideas can truly come from anyone, and anywhere." "We all have the ability to be a catalyst for positive global change, and it was inspiring to see so many people share their passion for technology and innovation through the National Geographic Chasing Genius platform," said Dr. John Saw, Chief Technology Officer, Sprint. "We congratulate all of the finalists, along with Asha Gummadi, and we can't wait to see where their ideas take them next."

Council members who played a role in reviewing submissions include Eric Berkenpas, engineer and Sr. Director of Exploration Technology at National Geographic; Victoria Jaggard, Online Science and Innovation News Editor for National Geographic; Tan Le, Founder & CEO of EMOTIV; Dr. John Saw, Sprint CTO; and Albert Yu-Min-Lin, research scientist and engineer focused on technology-enabled exploration and crowdsourcing. Select council members have been chosen for their ability to make the impossible possible and for their visions of making the world a better place. For a comprehensive look at submissions, follow the link here:http://www.natgeochasinggenius.com/videos *Potential Reach is provided by Spredfast times 5% (estimated reach), based on #ChasingGenius and other program qualifiers CHASING GENIUS is inspired by National Geographic's Emmy-nominated series, "Genius" which will once again be supported across National Geographic platforms, including the May cover of National Geographic magazine, travel, social, digital, and other platforms. Season two, premiering April 24th, will chronicle the life of another renowned mastermind and tell the untold narrative of the person behind the genius  this time, focusing on Pablo Picasso. About National Geographic Partners LLC

National Geographic Partners LLC (NGP), a joint venture between National Geographic and 21st Century Fox, is committed to bringing the world premium science, adventure and exploration content across an unrivaled portfolio of media assets. NGP combines the global National Geographic television channels (National Geographic Channel, Nat Geo WILD, Nat Geo MUNDO, Nat Geo PEOPLE) with National Geographic's media and consumer-oriented assets, including National Geographic magazines; National Geographic studios; related digital and social media platforms; books; maps; children's media; and ancillary activities that include travel, global experiences and events, archival sales, licensing and e-commerce businesses. Furthering knowledge and understanding of our world has been the core purpose of National Geographic for 130 years, and now we are committed to going deeper, pushing boundaries, going further for our consumersand reaching millions of people around the world in 172 countries and 43 languages every month as we do it. NGP returns 27 percent of our proceeds to the nonprofit National Geographic Society to fund work in the areas of science, exploration, conservation and education. For more information visit natgeotv.com or nationalgeographic.com, or find us on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, YouTube, LinkedIn and Pinterest. About Sprint:

Sprint (NYSE: S) is a communications services company that creates more and better ways to connect its customers to the things they care about most. Sprint served 54.6 million connections as of December 31, 2017 and is widely recognized for developing, engineering and deploying innovative technologies, including the first wireless 4G service from a national carrier in the United States; leading no-contract brands including Virgin Mobile USA, Boost Mobile, and Assurance Wireless; instant national and international push-to-talk capabilities; and a global Tier 1 Internet backbone. Today, Sprint's legacy of innovation and service continues with an increased investment to dramatically improve coverage, reliability, and speed across its nationwide network and commitment to launching the first 5G mobile network in the U.S. You can learn more and visit Sprint at www.sprint.com or www.facebook.com/sprint and www.twitter.com/sprint. View original content with multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/national-geographic-and-sprint-announce-winner-of-chasing-genius-unlimited-innovation----awards-25000-prize-to-turn-idea-into-catalyst-for-change-in-the-world-300617894.html SOURCE National Geographic

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][March 21, 2018] Goertek's Next-Generation VR HMD Reference Design in Partnership with Qualcomm Highlighted at 2018 GDC

SAN FRANCISCO, March 21, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Goertek, a global leader in total system design and manufacturing, in partnership with Qualcomm, developed the next-generation of the virtual reality (VR) head mounted display (HMD) reference platform based on the Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 mobile platform. The new HMD was displayed at the 2018 Game Developers Conference (GDC) held in San Francisco on March 19. As members of the Qualcomm VR HMD Accelerator Program, Goertek and Qualcomm have jointly worked on VR HMD reference designs based on the Snapdragon 820, 821 and 835 mobile platforms. Goertek brings extensive experience in Qualcomm mobile platforms and has provided design solutions in terms of industrial design, architecture, thermal management, acoustics, optics, and electronic circuitry for VR HMD reference designs to unleash the full potential of the Snapdragon 845 mobile platform in the VR sector. This new generation of HMD includes the latest eye-tracking technology. When the users' gazes are tracked accurately and in real-time, content creators are given another user input mechanism to increase the realism and experience of VR. Foveated rendering allows for graphics processing to increase in the areas where the user is focused. Interpupillary distance is also easily measured and adjusted to simplify the setup process. In addition, 6 degrees of freedom (6DoF) inside-out tracking, new TOF/SLM camera design, and simultaneous localization and mapping (SAM) deliver room-scale, the ability to track the body and its location within a room. The user can then move freely around the XR environment without cables or separate room sensors. A boundary system is also included in the SDK that helps content creators manage when the user approaches real-world boundary situations. The new 6DOF controller based on ultrasonic technology further improves user experience as well.



"This is a landmark product for the entire VR industry," said Hugo Swart, the head of Virtual and Augmented Reality Business Group at Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. "First of all, many VR brands can create an unprecedented immersive and realistic experience for users with the powerful processing capacity of the Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 mobile platform. In addition, VR vendors can rapidly develop their own customized VR HMDs, based on Goertek's leading integration and manufacturing capabilities, allowing them to reduce R&D costs and focus on user experience and content." "This represents another successful cooperation between Goertek and Qualcomm in the field of VR," said Edwin Yu, Vice President of Goertek. "By working with world-leading vendors like Qualcomm, Goertek is committed to creating more innovative and revolutionary products for users, by combining its vertical integration and technology integration capabilities to drive the development of the VR industry."

About Goertek

Goertek Inc. is a global leading high-tech company which was established in June 2001, and listed on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange in 2008, with focus on the R&D, manufacturing and marketing of high-precision components (Acoustics, Sensor, Optoelectronic and 3D Packaging Module) and smart hardware (VR/AR, Wearable, Hearable, AI, Home and etc.). Goertek is devoted to be a first-class company and fostered long-term cooperation with global leading high-tech companies. Since it went public, Goertek has been growing rapidly with a compound annual growth rate above 40%. Qualcomm, Snapdragon and Adreno are trademarks of Qualcomm Incorporated, registered in the United States and other countries. Qualcomm Snapdragon and Qualcomm Adreno are products of Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. and/or its subsidiaries. View original content:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/goerteks-next-generation-vr-hmd-reference-design-in-partnership-with-qualcomm-highlighted-at-2018-gdc-300617898.html SOURCE Goertek

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][March 21, 2018] World's First Blockchain To Record And Reward All Economic Activities -- KatalystCoin Sets To Create A Frictionless World Via Its Proof of Loyalty Concept

SINGAPORE, March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Katalyst Pte Ltd is poised to pioneer an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) as the world's first blockchain to record and reward all economic activities. Tasked with a mission to reduce transactional friction, KatalystCoin will be used by corporations and communities to utilise unused capacity and thereby increase welfare to society. Uses of KatalystCoin: 1. A Means of Rewarding Users. Katalyst is the world's first blockchain that records and rewards all economic activities. Users who perform predefined tasks will be rewarded with KatalystCoins or other crypto-assets where applicable. This is the revolutionary "Proof of Loyalty" (PoL) protocol, which helps make ecosystems sustainable for every stakeholder by aligning incentives. 2. Payment For Incubation Expertise. Katalyst helps businesses and communities accelerate their growth by leveraging on blockchain for their expansion. This is a tokenomic innovation unique to Katalyst Companies incubated by Katalyst Pte Ltd can rely on the track record and expertise of their reputable partners to do fundraising.



3. Transaction Fees For Decentralised Exchange. Users can now profit from selling crypto-assets in the exchange and wallet powered by Katalyst. Transaction fees may be paid in KatalystCoins. "The Katalyst DNA is all about creating a frictionless world by recording and rewarding economic activities. Our Katalyst Team has always been passionate about accelerating the growth of businesses. By leveraging on the latest blockchain technology, we are able to bring about new financial innovations that better serve the market," says Chief Katalyst and Founder of KatalystCoin, Raymond Ng.

To learn more and to take part in their token sales, visit www.katalystcoin.com About Katalyst Pte Ltd Headquartered in Singapore, Katalyst Pte Ltd is helmed by Raymond Ng, a reputable funding expert with over 16 years in the funding industry. Distinguished advisors for Katalyst include Mr Teng Theng Dar, Singapore's Non-Resident Ambassador to Oman and former CEO of Singapore Business Federation. Join Our Community Katalyst Community: Telegram, Facebook Group

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SOURCE Katalyst Ptd Ltd

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][March 22, 2018] KYMCO Unveils "Ionex" at Tokyo Motorcycle Show 2018

Launching a Game-Changing Electric Scooter Solution That Eliminates All Barriers to Go Green TOKYO, March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- KYMCO unveils Ionex at Tokyo Motorcycle Show 2018, marking the beginning of a new era of electric scooters with its innovative vehicle designs and open energy platforms. Ionex is a game-changing electric scooter solution that eliminates all barriers to go green: With the Ionex scooter architecture, the electric scooter for the first time overcomes the compromises associated with electric vehicle design. The scooter is smart, thoughtful, and head-turning cool. With the Ionex energy architecture, charging no longer means waiting. While the battery is being charged, the electric scooter still allows riders to ride and take care of business . W ith the Ionex charging architecture, a full-range of innovative solutions cover all private and public charging scenarios. Every morning riders start with a full charge. Shared outlets and public charge lockers are everywhere. The maximum range is 200 km with extra batteries added . W ith the Ionex public charging infrastructure, policy makers have an economically feasible plan for implementing a green revolution on a local or national level. Governments now have a complete game-changing blueprint to go green. "Electric is one of the most significant transformations of personal transportation," said Allen Ko, Chairman of KYMCO. "With Ionex, we want to make the world greener, to make our cities cleaner, and to make electric a practical reality for consumers worldwide. KYMCO is committed to making an impact at the juncture of the most important transformation in recent history." I. HEAD-TURNING COOL Until today, buying an electric scooter has meant accepting tremendous compromises. Finding a place to charge has been difficult. The battery has taken up too much storage space. It has also been tedious to remove, heavy to lift, and ungraceful to carry. KYMCO pioneers the industry's first smart energy bay, which makes battery removal not only delightful, but also cool to watch. At a touch of a button the energy bay opens, bringing the battery to the perfect lifting position. Riders gracefully bring out the battery with ease. When returning the battery to the scooter, riders simply nudge the battery against the smart floor to trigger the bay door open. The experience is intuitive, convenient, and elegant. The Ionex battery is compact and stylish. At less than 5kg it is effortless to carry for anyone. It also features a specially designed handle, so two batteries can be carried with one hand. The under-floor battery placement helps the electric scooter achieve the lowest center of gravity possible. At the same time, this architecture also offers the largest under-seat storage ever. With the Ionex scooter architecture, the electric scooter for the first time overcomes the compromises associated with electric vehicle designs and becomes an object of desire. II. NEVER WAIT FOR CHARGING The conventional belief is that after plugging in the scooter to charge, we must wait. If pulling out the battery for charging, riders cannot go anywhere. Always seeking to go above and beyond, KYMCO challenged this never-questiond assumption and came up with a revolutionary e-scooter design. With this design, riders can still ride the scooter even when the battery is removed. Therefore, riders don't have to wait while charging the scooter.



Every KYMCO Ionex scooter has an internal core battery. When riders charge their removable battery, the scooter uses the internal core battery as the power source to continue to operate. Riders can go about their business without being tied down. Later, they can simply pick up the fully-charged removable battery at their convenience. The core battery is constantly kept fully charged by the removable batteries. Ionex automatically selects the optimal battery to charge the core battery and decides on the right battery to supply power. It makes all batteries seamlessly work together. Riders simply ride without worrying about a thing.

With the Ionex energy architecture, the electric scooter allows the rider to ride and take care of business while the battery is being charged. III. NEVER WORRY ABOUT RANGE Range anxiety and limited number of charging stations always come up first when people are asked about their hesitation for buying an electric scooter. This is by far the most common and legitimate reason not to go green. KYMCO Ionex finally solves this previously un-addressed challenge with an innovative charging architecture. Effortless Home Charging Home is where the riders' journey ends each day. Once they return home, they no longer want to go anywhere. In short, home is everyone's best everyday charging station. Therefore, Ionex made home charging a delightful experience. Ionex ensures riders' mornings always start with full charge to cover the entire day. Charge Point Network Occasionally riders want to recharge during the day. Ionex offers an extensive Charge Point Network. At Charge Points, riders can hand over their battery to have it charged. Most Charge Points can fully charge a battery in less than an hour. One hour is a blink when they can go about their business without wait. Extra Battery Rental Once in a while, riders may need longer range when they travel. Ionex offers Extra Battery Rental. When starting a long journey, riders simply rent extra batteries for the trip. Every KYMCO Ionex scooter is designed with under-seat storage that accommodates three additional batteries. Hence, the maximum range is an astonishing 200 km. Power Outlet Network To completely eliminate any range anxiety, Ionex offers the Power Outlet Network. These are the locations where riders can use their public outlets to charge their battery. KYMCO has designed the charger to be easily portable and to fit nicely in the scooter. Wherever riders go, they can always count on these most widely available power sources. Sharing Economy Approach To scale everything to the next level, the Charge Point Network, Extra Battery Rental and Power Outlet Network all embrace the spirit of the sharing economy. Everyone is invited to take part in this open energy network. It is also hugely rewarding to join. Aside from raising their public image, participating businesses can draw the right crowd to their establishment. With the Ionex charging architecture, a full-range of innovative solutions cover all private and public charging scenarios, so riders never worry about range. IV. POLICY MAKERS' GAME CHANGER As the green movement gains momentum, policy makers all over the world are rushing to take the lead. However, any government's effort to build out charging infrastructures has until now been met with very real obstacles. First, it has been technically unfeasible to install fast chargers that rival the fueling time of a typical gas pump. As a result, the approach to building charging facilities that match the convenience of the gas station network has mostly been abandoned. The next attempt has been to install one charger at every parking slot in a parking lot, so vehicles could be charged for a longer period when parked. This has also failed as it has been too impractical to rapidly install enough charging stations to make an impact. Finally, in very few countries battery swapping has been attempted. Battery swapping requires every vehicle to use more than one share of battery resources, which generates excess pollution. Consequently, this is the least environmentally friendly approach and is also the most expensive option. To overcome these aforementioned challenges previously faced by many policy makers, KYMCO introduces a brand new path to a complete public charging infrastructure, the Ionex Energy Station. The Ionex energy station is a stand-alone station designed with multiple charging bays for Ionex batteries. It resembles any vending machine people see every day. It can be placed anywhere without lengthy construction which causes inconvenience to consumers. Because of its extreme flexibility in deployment, the Ionex energy station can be quickly rolled-out across public places such as subway stations, parking lots, and tourist spots. Governments can also set policies to encourage commercial entities, residential buildings and businesses to install their own energy stations. The Ionex energy stations can be used by employees, customers and visitors for drop-by charging. They can also be used by residents for overnight charging. These energy stations are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It has the potential to be the most visible demonstration of a government's commitment to the green movement. Beyond charging, the Ionex energy stations also serve as the foundation for supporting multiple battery swapping services. First, companies can use the energy stations to provide various battery swapping services for their customers. While KYMCO is the first provider, other vehicle brands and service providers may also join this endeavor. Consumers will have choices. In addition, postal services, delivery services, and logistic operators can use the energy stations to operate battery swapping services for their own fleet of electric vehicles. Businesses will have more reasons to go green. With charging services, swapping services, and private energy networks operating concurrently, Ionex is the world's first multi-function open energy platform. It is the simplest, most economical, and instantly scalable solution to enable all parties to embrace electric. With the Ionex public charging infrastructure, governments at last have a game changer to build up a truly ubiquitous public energy infrastructure that transforms the entire city. "In the next 3 years, KYMCO plans to launch 10 electric models, establish charge networks in 20 countries, and sell over half a million electric vehicles worldwide," said Allen Ko, Chairman of KYMCO. "With KYMCO Ionex, together we start an open movement that celebrates one of the most important social missions of our time." View original content with multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/kymco-unveils-ionex-at-tokyo-motorcycle-show-2018-300618002.html SOURCE KYMCO

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][March 22, 2018] VALNEVA Delivers Strong 2017 Financial Results and Advances Key R&D Programs

Valneva Delivers Strong 2017 Financial Results and Advances Key R&D Programs The Company expects continued double digit product sales growth in 2018 and to invest further in R&D, notably the Lyme and Chikungunya programs Strong sales and EBITDA performance in 2017 Total revenues and grants of 109.8 million in 2017 (vs. 97.9 million in 2016)

Product sales of 92.6 million representing 15% year on year growth

EBITDA of 10.8 million in 2017 (vs. 2.8 million in 2016)

Improved gross margin of 58% (vs. 56% in 2016)

Positive operating cash flow of 12.8 million in 2017 brought cash position to

38.1 million at the end of 2017 Double-digit product sales growth to continue in 2018 The Company projects that product sales this year will grow to over 100 million. Other revenues (including R&D tax credits, grants, service revenue, royalties), which tend to fluctuate from year to year, are expected to bring the company's overall revenue to between 110 million and 120 million for the year.

Valneva will maintain positive EBITDA in the range of 5 million - 10 million in 2018 with higher R&D investment of 30 million - 35 million, compared to 23.4 million in 2017, driven by the clinical development progression of its Lyme and Chikungunya vaccine candidates. Key R&D Progress Valneva recently announced positive Phase I interim results for its Lyme disease vaccine candidate VLA15 [1] . Phase II planning and preparation activities have been initiated for this promising FDA fast-tracked vaccine candidate and the study is expected to commence in the second half of 2018.

. Phase II planning and preparation activities have been initiated for this promising FDA fast-tracked vaccine candidate and the study is expected to commence in the second half of 2018. The Company also recently announced Phase I study initiations for its Chikungunya (VLA1553)[2] and Zika (VLA1601)[3] vaccine candidates. David Lawrence, Valneva's Chief Financial Officer, commented, "In 2017, we executed on our key business goals and continued to improve our financial performance, giving us the flexibility to invest for future portfolio growth. Achieving product sales of over 100 million will be a major milestone for the Company this coming year. With multiple value catalysts in 2018, we believe we are poised for a pivotal year." Key Financial Information  in million 12 months ending December 31 2017 2016 Revenues & grants 109.8 97.9 Net profit/(loss) (11.5) (49.2) EBITDA[4] 10.8 2.8 Net operating cash flow 12.8 6.5 Cash, short-term deposits and marketable securities, end of period 38.1 42.2 Lyon (France), March 22, 2018 - Valneva SE ("Valneva" or "the Company"), a fully integrated, commercial stage biotech company focused on developing innovative lifesaving vaccines, reported today its full year financial results ending December 31, 2017. The annual financial report, including the consolidated financial statements 2017, is available on the Company's website www.valneva.com. A webcast for financial analysts, fund managers, investors and journalists will be held today at 2:00 pm (CET). A replay will be available on the Company's website. Please refer to this link: https://edge.media-server.com/m6/p/7d3fjx9c Commercial Vaccines JAPANESE ENCEPHALITIS VACCINE (IXIARO/JESPECT) Continued sales growth supported by market penetration In 2017, IXIARO/JESPECT sales reached 60.0 million compared to 53.0 million in 2016, representing 13% year-on-year growth. This increase was largely driven by growth in the UK, German and Canadian private markets where continued marketing and sales efforts resulted in increased product adoption by travelers. Sales to the US military also contributed to the growth and a new $39.6 million contract was signed with the US government in November 2017 to supply IXIARO to the US Department of Defense, over a one year period. Valneva expects continued double digit growth in IXIARO/JESPECT revenues through increased market penetration and the development of its commercial network, including in the US private market where the Company took direct control of sales and marketing in late 2017. CHOLERA / ETEC- DIARRHEA VACCINE (DUKORAL) Double-digit sales growth in 2017 In 2017, DUKORAL sales reached 28.5 million, compared to 24.6 million in 2016, representing year-on-year growth of 16%. In addition to Canada, where more than 50% of DUKORAL global revenues are generated, the vaccine benefited from strong sales in the UK market. Valneva expects DUKORAL revenues to continue to grow healthily in 2018 through continued market penetration. Clinical vaccine Candidates LYME DISEASE VACCINE CANDIDATE - VLA 15 Positive Phase I interim results reported The Company is focusing its R&D expertise and resources to a large extend on the development of a much-needed vaccine against Lyme disease, the most common and one of the fastest growing vector-borne illnesses in the Northern Hemisphere for which there is no other clinical vaccine candidate in development worldwide. Valneva recently reported positive Phase I interim data for its Lyme disease vaccine candidate VLA15. The study met its primary endpoint. The vaccine candidate is overall safe and was well tolerated with very few severe, related Adverse Events (AEs) in all treatment groups and no associated safety concerns. The safety profile of all tested doses and formulations is considered comparable to other licensed lipidated recombinant vaccines or lipid-containing vaccine formulations, and supports further clinical development. VLA15 was immunogenic in all doses and formulations tested. OspA-specific IgG antibody responses were induced in all treatment groups and against all OspA serotypes, with significant dose responses seen between the lowest and the higher dose groups. For all six OspA serotypes, IgG levels were highest after three immunizations (Day 84) and Seroconversion Rates (SCR) for the highest, adjuvanted dose group, which is considered preferred for further development, ranged from 71.4% to 96.4% for the different OspA serotypes. Valneva's Phase I study VLA15-101 is an observer-blind, partially randomized, dose escalation trial that aims to evaluate the safety, tolerability and immunogenicity of its Lyme vaccine candidate VLA15. The study enrolled 179 healthy adults under 40 years of age in Europe and the U.S. who were not previously infected with Borrelia burgdorferi. Subjects were randomized into six treatment groups to receive one of three dose levels either in an alum adjuvanted formulation or without adjuvant. Study subjects were vaccinated at three occasions one month apart (Day 0-28-56). The interim analysis for the primary and secondary endpoints included safety and immunogenicity data up to Day 84 (Month 3). Final safety and immunogenicity data including one year follow-up are expected early 2019. The Company is committed to advance its Lyme vaccine candidate as quickly as possible into Phase II which is currently expected to commence in the second half of 2018, subject to regulatory clearances. The next clinical phase is intended to be conducted in Lyme-endemic regions and will include people previously infected with Borrelia burgdorferi, the bacteria that cause Lyme disease. Furter dose optimization will be considered.



Lyme disease is a systemic infection caused by Borrelia bacteria transmitted to humans by infected Ixodes ticks. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), approximately 400,000[5] Americans are diagnosed with Lyme disease each year with at least a further 200,000 cases in Europe[6]. Early symptoms of Lyme disease (such as a gradually expanding erythematous rash called Erythema migrans or more unspecific symptoms like fatigue, fever, headache, mild stiff neck, arthralgia or myalgia) are often overlooked or misinterpreted. Left untreated, the disease can disseminate and cause more serious complications affecting the joints (arthritis), the heart (carditis) or the nervous system. Valneva's vaccine candidate VLA15, under Fast Track Designation by the FDA, is a multivalent, protein subunit vaccine that targets the outer surface protein A (OspA) of Borrelia and intended to protect against the majority of human pathogenic Borrelia species. VLA15 is designed to confer protection by raising antibodies that prevent Borrelia from migrating from ticks to humans after a bite.

Vaccination with OspA was already proven to work in the 1990s and VLA15 pre-clinical data showed that the vaccine has the potential to provide protection against the majority of the Borrelia species pathogenic for humans[7]. The global market for a vaccine against Lyme disease is currently estimated at approximately 700 - 800 million annually[8]. CHIKUNGUNYA VACCINE CANDIDATE - VLA 1553 Phase I in the U.S. ongoing (VLA1553-101) Valneva's Phase I study VLA1553-101 is a randomized, observer-blinded, dose-escalation, multi-centre study investigating three different dose levels of VLA1553 in approximately 120 healthy adults vaccinated with a single-shot immunization. The trial design includes the investigation of antibody persistence and an additional vaccination with the highest dose at 6 or 12 months of the live-attenuated vaccine candidate. This re-vaccination serves as intrinsic human viral challenge demonstrating that subjects are protected from vaccine-induced viremia and thereby potentially indicating efficacy of VLA1553 early in clinical development. Chikungunya is a mosquito-borne viral disease caused by the Chikungunya virus (CHIKV), a Togaviridae virus, transmitted by Aedes mosquitoes. Clinical symptoms include acute onset of fever, debilitating joint and muscle pain, headache, nausea and rash potentially developing into long-term, serious health impairments[9]. Chikungunya outbreaks were reported in Asia, Africa, the Americas and recently (2017) in Europe. Until 2017, there were more than 1 million reported cases in the Americas[10] and the economic impact can be considered significant (e.g. Columbia outbreak 2014: USD 73.6m)[11]. The medical burden is expected to grow as the distribution of the CHIKV primary mosquito vectors continues to further spread geographically. There are no preventive vaccines or effective treatments available and as such Chikungunya can be considered a major public health threat. VLA1553 is a monovalent, single dose, live-attenuated vaccine candidate for protection against various Chikungunya virus outbreak phylogroups and strains aiming for a long-lasting protection conferred by neutralizing antibodies in adults and children[12]. The target populations are travelers, military personnel or individuals at risk who live in endemic regions. In pre-clinical development a single-vaccine shot was highly immunogenic with a strong, long lasting neutralizing antibody response and vaccinated Non-Human Primates (NHP) (cynomolgus macaques) showed no signs of viremia after challenge[13]. First data from the Phase I trial are expected to be available by early 2019. The global market for vaccines against Chikungunya is estimated at up to 500 million annually8. ZIKA VACCINE CANDIDATE - VLA 1601 Phase I in the U.S. ongoing (VLA1601-101)3, Partnered with Emergent BioSolutions In July 2017, Valneva and US company Emergent BioSolutions joined forces to accelerate the development of a vaccine against Zika. After finalizing the Phase I study protocol at the end of 2017, the two companies initiated Phase I in the US in February 2018. The Phase I study of VLA1601-101 is a randomized, observer-blinded, placebo-controlled, single center study investigating two dose levels with two different vaccination schedules in approximately 65 healthy adults. Valneva and Emergent BioSolutions are sharing all costs until Phase I completion. Valneva is responsible for the program's execution until completion of Phase I and Emergent will have the option to continue the development arrangement with Valneva for a milestone payment of 5 million, upon availability of Phase I data. The agreement also provides Valneva potential additional milestone payments of up to 44 million related to product development, approval, commercialization and product sales, as well as future royalties on annual net sales[14]. Zika is a mosquito-borne viral disease caused by the Zika Virus (ZIKV), a flavivirus transmitted by Aedes mosquitoes[15]. Disease outbreaks have been reported in tropical Africa, Southeast Asia, the Pacific Islands, and, in 2015, in the Americas. According to the World Health Organization, there is scientific consensus that the ZIKV is a cause of microcephaly and Guillain-Barre syndrome[16]. Between 2015 and the end of July 2017, 1 million cases of Zika infection and many cases of the congenital syndrome associated with the ZIKV had been reported by countries and territories in the Americas, according to the World Health Organization[17]. Today there is no specific treatment available. VLA1601 is a highly purified inactivated whole virus vaccine candidate developed using Valneva's proven and licensed inactivated JE vaccine platform. In pre-clinical development VLA1601 demonstrated excellent purity, in-vivo neutralization and overall a biological, chemical and physical profile comparable to IXIARO. First data from the Phase I trial are expected to be available in late 2018 or early 2019. Full Year 2017 Financial Review Revenues and grants Valneva's aggregate revenues and grants in the full year 2017 increased to 109.8 million from 97.9 million in 2016. This increase was largely as a result of strong growth of IXIARO/JESPECT and DUKORAL product sales. Total product sales increased to 92.6 million in the full year 2017, up from 80.4 million in 2016. IXIARO/JESPECT product sales contributed 60.0 million to revenues in 2017, compared to 53.0 million in 2016 (representing 13% growth). The strong increase was driven by growth in the UK, German and Canadian private markets. US Military sales continue to contribute significantly to overall IXIARO sales. DUKORAL product sales contributed 28.5 million to 2017 product sales representing growth of 4.0 million, or 16% compared to 2016. Third party product sales for the year 2017 increased to 4.0 million from 2.9 million in the year 2016. Revenues from collaborations and licensing decreased slightly to 12.7 million in 2017 from 13.6 million in the year 2016. Grant income increased to 4.5 million in 2017 compared to 3.8 million in 2016. Operating result and EBITDA Cost of goods and services ("COGS") in 2017 were 46.0 million, leading to an overall gross margin of 58%. 21.7 million in COGS related to IXIARO/JESPECT sales, yielding a product gross margin of 64%, and 15.2 million related to DUKORAL sales, yielding a product gross margin of 46%. Of the remaining COGS for full year 2017, 2.8 million related to the third party product distribution business and 6.3 million related to cost of services. In the comparative period in 2016, COGS were 43.1 million, of which 21.1 million related to IXIARO/JESPECT, 13.5 million to DUKORAL, 2.3 million to third party products, and 6.2 million to cost of services. Research and development expenses for the year 2017 reached 23.4 million, representing a slight decrease compared to 2016 R&D expenses of 24.6 million. Marketing and distribution expenses in 2017 amounted to 17.9 million compared to

16.6 million in 2016. General and administrative expenses in 2017 amounted to 15.5 million compared to

14.4 million in 2016. This increase is in line with additional marketing and sales activities that are driving product sales growth. Amortization and impairment charges for full year 2017 amounted to 10.7 million, and included 3.6 million of non-cash impairment charges, which were recognized in the third quarter, related to the Clostridium difficile vaccine candidate. Valneva's operating loss for the year 2017 was 4.0 million, compared to an operating loss of 42.6 million reported for the year 2016, which included a one-time impairment charge amounting to 34.1 million related to the discontinued Pseudomonas vaccine candidate. Valneva's full year 2017 EBITDA showed continued strong improvement and amounted to an EBITDA of 10.8 million, compared to an EBITDA of 2.8 million in the year 2016. 2017 EBITDA was calculated by excluding depreciation, amortization and impairment charges amounting to 14.7 million from the operating loss of 4.0 million as recorded in the condensed consolidated income statement under IFRS. Net result Valneva's net loss for the year 2017 was 11.5 million. Excluding the one-time impairment charges related to the Clostridium difficile project, Valneva's net loss amounted to 7.9 million for the year 2017, compared to a net loss of 15.1 million for the year 2016 (excluding the one-time impairment charges related to the Pseudomonas project). The net finance result amounted to minus 8.6 million for the year 2017, compared to minus 6.3 million in the year 2016. This increase in net finance expenses was mainly due to adverse exchange rate effects in 2017. Cash flow and liquidity Net cash generated by operating activities in 2017 was 12.8 million compared to 6.5 million in 2016. This improvement resulted from the positive EBITDA development and was also helped by working capital effects. Cash outflows from investing activities in the year 2017 amounted to 4.1 million and were related to purchases of equipment and software. Cash inflows from investing activities in the year 2016 was 14.9 million and resulted primarily from a payment received from Johnson & Johnson in connection with the adjustment of the purchase consideration for the acquisition of Crucell Sweden AB and the DUKORAL business. Cash out-flows from financing activities in 2017 amounted to 10.4 million and were primarily related to re-payment of borrowings and interest and were partly offset by drawings from an available loan facility with the European Investment Bank (EIB). Cash-outflows from financing activities in 2016 amounted to 26.8 million and included the re-payment of borrowings to Athyrium LLC, as well as interest payments and re-payments of loans. Cash on December 31, 2017 stood at 38.1 million, compared to 42.2 million on December 31, 2016, and consisted of 33.5 million in cash and cash equivalents and

4.5 million in restricted cash. Listing strategy review Valneva is currently reviewing its listing strategy and specifically its secondary listing. The Company plans to complete this process within two months and expects to announce any decision in the second quarter of this year. About Valneva SE Valneva is a fully integrated, commercial stage biotech company focused on developing innovative life-saving vaccines. Valneva's portfolio includes two commercial vaccines for travelers: IXIARO/JESPECT indicated for the prevention of Japanese encephalitis and DUKORAL indicated for the prevention of cholera and, in some countries, prevention of diarrhea caused by ETEC. The Company has proprietary vaccines in development including unique vaccines against Lyme disease and Chikungunya. Valneva has operations in Austria, Sweden, the United Kingdom, France, Canada and the US with over 450 employees. More information is available at www.valneva.com. Valneva Investor and Media Contacts



Laetitia Bachelot-Fontaine



Global Head of Investor Relations &



Corporate Communications



T +33 (0)2 2807 1419



M +33 (0)6 4516 7099



investors@valneva.com



Teresa Pinzolits



Corporate Communications Specialist



T +43 1206 201 116



communications@valneva.com Forward-Looking Statements This press release contains certain forward-looking statements relating to the business of Valneva, including with respect to the progress, timing and completion of research, development and clinical trials for product candidates, the ability to manufacture, market, commercialize and achieve market acceptance for product candidates, the ability to protect intellectual property and operate the business without infringing on the intellectual property rights of others, estimates for future performance and estimates regarding anticipated operating losses, future revenues, capital requirements and needs for additional financing. In addition, even if the actual results or development of Valneva are consistent with the forward-looking statements contained in this press release, those results or developments of Valneva may not be indicative of their in the future. In some cases, you can identify forward-looking statements by words such as "could," "should," "may," "expects," "anticipates," "believes," "intends," "estimates," "aims," "targets," or similar words. These forward-looking statements are based largely on the current expectations of Valneva as of the date of this press release and are subject to a number of known and unknown risks and uncertainties and other factors that may cause actual results, performance or achievements to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievement expressed or implied by these forward-looking statements. In particular, the expectations of Valneva could be affected by, among other things, uncertainties involved in the development and manufacture of vaccines, unexpected clinical trial results, unexpected regulatory actions or delays, competition in general, currency fluctuations, the impact of the global and European credit crisis, and the ability to obtain or maintain patent or other proprietary intellectual property protection. In light of these risks and uncertainties, there can be no assurance that the forward-looking statements made during this presentation will in fact be realized. Valneva is providing the information in these materials as of this press release, and disclaim any intention or obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise.





[1]http://www.valneva.com/download.php?dir=News_2018&file=2018_03_19_VLA15_Phase_I_Results_PR_ENG.pdf [2] http://www.valneva.com/download.php?dir=News_2018&file=2018_03_13_Chikungunya_Phase_I_initiation_EN.pdf [3] http://www.valneva.com/download.php?dir=News_2018&file=2018_02_26_Phase_1_Initiation_VLA1601_EN.pdf [4] EBITDA (Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) was calculated by excluding depreciation, amortization and impairment of tangible and intangible assets. [5] As estimated by the CDC based on US reported cases in 2015 [6] As estimated from available national data. Case reporting is highly inconsistent in Europe and many LB infections still go undiagnosed. [7] New Scientist, Lyme disease is set to explode and we still don't have a vaccine; March 29, 2017 https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23431195-800-lyme-disease-is-set-to-explode-and-you-cant-protect-yourself/ [8] Company estimate supported by independent market studies [9] WHO, PAHO [10] PAHA/WHO data: Number of reported cases of Chikungunya Fever in the Americas - EW 51 (December 22, 2017) [11] Cardona-Ospina et al., Trans R Soc Trip Med Hyg 2015 [12] Hallengard et al. 2013 J. Virology 88: 2858-2866 [13] Roques et al. 2017JCI Insight 2 (6): e83527 [14]http://www.valneva.com/download.php?dir=News_2017&file=2017_07_26_VLA_Emergent_ZIKA_PR_EN.pdf [15] https://www.cdc.gov/zika/transmission/index.html [16] http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/zika/en/ [17]http://www.paho.org/hq/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=12390&Itemid=42090&lang=en

Attachment: //www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/576c0462-d4f9-4ce0-91d9-7d06f5cedfd9

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][March 22, 2018] Aspect Software Appoints Krishna Arani Senior Vice President, Asia Pacific Sales

SINGAPORE, March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- A highly seasoned software and technology industry executive, Arani will focus on revenue growth and Aspect's market presence in the region

Krishna brings deep enterprise software, storage solutions, and channels management experience

Tasked with helping the digital transformation and transition to cloud services for Aspect's prospects and customers Aspect Software, a leading provider of native consumer engagement, workforce optimization, and self-service solutions, today announced the appointment of Krishna Arani to Senior Vice President of Asia Pacific Sales. He comes with 30 years of broad enterprise software, storage solutions, and channels experience. Before joining Aspect, Arani was the Vice President and General Manager of Channels and Service Providers for Hewlett Packard Enterprise, a leading information technology and services company, in Asia Pacific. Prior to this, he held a leadership position at NetApp, a data services company for hybrid cloud environments, where he grew revenue by nearly 400%. There he built partnerships with large system integrators and adopted a highly solution-focused customer-centric mindset. Arani has also held executive sales positions at i2, Portal, Siebel and Oracle.





"As the fastest growing region for Aspect last year, Asia Pacific represents a huge opportunity for channel expansion and revenue growth for the company," said Chris Koziol, President of Aspect. "Krishna's enterprise software experience with some of the leading technology companies in the world will be a great asset as we accelerate the availability of our cloud solutions in the region. We will look to Krishna to build on the already strong channel partner relationships we have in APAC while also forging new alliances that will expand our market presence and create new revenue opportunities for Aspect." "Aspect's reputation as a global leader in the region in combination with their impressive growth has made joining the company a very exciting opportunity," said Arani. "Aspect's comprehensive portfolio of customer engagement solutions, in combination with talent I see here, gives me great confidence that we will be able to dramatically accelerate our momentum in APAC." Arani will be based in Singapore and carry responsibility for Asia Pacific and the Middle East. About Aspect Aspect helps enterprises break down the walls between people, processes, systems and data sources, allowing organizations to unite around the customer journey. By developing fully native interaction management, workforce optimization and self-service capabilities within a single customer engagement center, we enable dynamic, conversational interactions and create a truly frictionless omni-channel customer experience. Leveraging the agility of our worldwide cloud infrastructure and over 40 years of industry ingenuity, Aspect conveniently and easily connects questions to answers while helping enterprises keep service levels high and operational costs contained. For more information, visit www.aspect.com. Follow Aspect on Twitter at @AspectSoftware. Read our blogs at http://blogs.aspect.com. Photo - https://photos.prnasia.com/prnh/20180322/2085621-1

Logo - https://photos.prnasia.com/prnh/20171123/1999787-1LOGO SOURCE Aspect

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][March 22, 2018] Granicus' 11th National Summit Will Focus on Empowering A Modern Digital Government

WASHINGTON, March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Granicus, the leading provider of cloud-based solutions for government, will host one of the public sector's largest gatherings of government technology leaders at its National Summit Event: Leading Through Digital Modernization on Tuesday, April 3, in Washington D.C. The event is free for all government employees. Over 1,000 leaders from all levels of government are expected to come together for a full day focused on the public sector's use of innovative technology to meet the rising expectations of the digital citizen and to improve internal process efficiencies. This year's keynote speaker is Mitchell B. Weiss, Professor of Management Practice at Harvard Business School's Entrepreneurial Management unit, who will speak about how government leaders can initiate municipal innovation, or "Public Entrepreneurship," within their organization to improve processes, reduce costs and better meet citizens needs. "In a time of heightened expectations for engagement, transparency and efficiency, it is important that government leaders have access to peer-to-peer learning opportunities and a place to share best practices in implementing the latest technologies shaping modern citizen experiences," said Mark Hynes, CEO of Granicus. "This year's National Summit looks at the state of public sector modernization. Our outstanding list of speakers will touch on nearly every aspect of the diital journey."



The list of guest speakers includes: Ahn Tran , Deputy City Clerk, City of San Jose, California

Deputy City Clerk, Britney Smith , Public Information and Communications Manager, Leon County Florida

Public Information and Communications Manager, Chip Harman , Content Strategy Manager, My HealtheVet

Content Strategy Manager, Doug Nick , Assistant Communications Director for Customer Outreach, Arizona Department of Transportation

Assistant Communications Director for Customer Outreach, Arizona Department of Transportation Jason Pak , Veteran Outreach and Engagement, Government Operations at Boeing

Veteran Outreach and Engagement, Government Operations at Boeing Lauren Mitchell , Design & Publications Manager, Maryland Department of Natural Resources

Design & Publications Manager, of Natural Resources Matt Goodrich FedRAMP Director, U.S. General Services Administration

FedRAMP Director, U.S. General Services Administration Michael Wilson , Executive Director, Yellow Ribbon Fund

Executive Director, Yellow Ribbon Fund Mika Cross , Director of Strategic Communications, Digital and Public Engagement, Veterans' Employment and Training Service, Department of Labor

Director of Strategic Communications, Digital and Public Engagement, Veterans' Employment and Training Service, Department of Labor Paul Fugazzotto , Public Information Officer, Digital Communication at Philadelphia Water Department

Public Information Officer, Digital Communication at Philadelphia Water Department Shelly Klein , Customer Service Technologies Administrator, City of Hurst, Texas

Customer Service Technologies Administrator, Stephen Schatz , Communications Director, Maryland Department of Natural Resources Event details:

Date: Tuesday, April 3, 2018

Location: JW Marriott 1331 Pennsylvania Ave NW Washington, DC 20004

Time: 7:30 a.m.  4:00 p.m.

Cost: Complimentary for government employees and contractors  breakfast included

Registration: http://granicus.com/summit18/

About Granicus

Granicus provides technology that empowers government organizations to create better lives for the people they serve. By offering the industry's leading cloud-based solutions for communications, meeting and agenda management, and digital services to over 4,000 public sector organizations, Granicus helps turn government missions into quantifiable realities. Granicus products connect over 160 million people, creating a powerful network to enhance citizen engagement. By optimizing decision-making processes, Granicus strives to help government see better outcomes and a greater impact for the citizens they serve. For more information on Granicus, visit www.granicus.com. Lynette Viviani

P: (973) 534-1004

lynette.viviani@vivianipr.com View original content with multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/granicus-11th-national-summit-will-focus-on-empowering-a-modern-digital-government-300617970.html SOURCE Granicus

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][March 22, 2018] NCR Chairman and CEO Bill Nuti to Step Down for Health Reasons

NCR Corporation (NYSE:NCR) today announced that Bill Nuti, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, has informed the Company's Board of Directors that he intends to step down for health reasons upon the naming of a new CEO. The Board, with the assistance of Spencer Stuart, has been conducting a thorough CEO search which is expected to be completed in the next couple of months. Upon stepping down, Nuti will be named Chairman Emeritus and serve as a consultant to NCR. NCR also announced that Paul Langenbahn, Executive Vice President of NCR Software, has been promoted to Chief Operating Officer, succeeding Mark Benjamin who has resigned to pursue an opportunity outside NCR. Langenbahn has been an executive of NCR for seven years, most recently as Executive Vice President, NCR Software, leading the company's global software business and was President of NCR's Hospitality Division from 2014 to 2016. Prior to NCR, he served as President, Radiant Hospitality Business Unit, until the firm was acquired by NCR in 2011. Chinh Chu, the Board's Independent Lead Director, said, "As the third-longest-serving CEO in NCR's 134-year history, Bill Nuti is a great leader who has had a profound impact on the company's successful evolution. Bill's vision and focus on execution has driven the reinvention of NCR, transforming our company into a software and services-led organization, and we are pleased that he will stay involved with the company. On behalf of the entire Board, I thank him for his dedicated service and wish him well." Chu continued, "With our strong market position and leading technology, NCR is well positioned to continue growing its strategic revenue streams and capitalizing on our leadership in the Financial Services, Hospitality, and Retail industries to produce outstanding value for our customers and shareholders. Our Board firmly believes in NCR's strategy and prospects, and with the appointment of Paul Langenbahn as COO as well as the high-caliber CEO candidates we are in the final stages of evaluating, we are highly confident in NCR's ability to successfully execute into the future." Bill Nuti said, "I woke up every day as Chairman and CEO of NCR never taking for granted the extraordinary honor it is to lead this great company. I have always felt immense pride being an employee of NCR. It's a very special company, with incredible people who work hard every day to serve our customers and build something truly great. I want to thank the people of NCR, past and present, for their dedication, focus, and results. While I would love nothing more than to continue as CEO, serving as a full-time executive will simply not be feasible in the near future. I am honored by the Board's decision to name me Chairman Emeritus, and I look forward to keeping an active connection with NCR, while also focusing on my outside boards and, most importantly, spending more time on my health and family." Nuti continued, "I am pleased the Board has asked Paul Langenbahn to become COO. His expertise in software and services, and his deep experience working across NCR, uniquely positions him to lead our operations. It has been a pleasure to work closely with Paul over the past seven years as we have grown NCR into one of the largest cloud/ SaaS (News - Alert) solution providers in its space, and I know he shares the Board's vision and has a true passion for the work we are doing to ensure NCR remains an industry leader. As much as we have accomplished over the last 13 years, I'm even more excited about the future. In a world where physical and digital boundaries are increasingly blurred, nobody is better positioned than NCR to help companies with their business challenges." Reaffirming Financial Guidance NCR remains confident in its vision and strategy and is reaffirming its first quarter and full year 2018 guidance provided on February 8, 2018.



About Bill Nuti Bill Nuti joined NCR in 2005 as President and CEO and was named Chairman in 2007 upon completion of the successful $5 billion spin-off of Teradata (News - Alert) . Over his tenure as CEO, NCR's revenue increased from approximately $4 billion to $6.5 billion, operating margins more than tripled, and NCR saw significant growth in cash flows and recurring revenues. Through organic investment and M&A, Nuti also played a key role in creating NCR's $2 billion software business, including its $600 million cloud business, which is now driving ~70% of NCR's profits. NCR has also become a leader in working with local communities to foster the creation of STEM jobs across the globe, and the company has been recognized for its humanitarian contributions and its commitment to employee training and development.

About Paul Langenbahn Paul Langenbahn has held sales and general management leadership positions at NCR, most recently Executive Vice President, NCR Software. In this role, he led the company's global software business and was instrumental in growing NCR's omni-channel platform, channel transformation and digital enablement solutions. He previously served as Senior Vice President and President of NCR's Hospitality Division from 2014 to 2016, where he achieved double-digit operating income growth driven by software and cloud, and as Vice President, Global Field Operations from 2012 to 2014. Prior to joining NCR, he served in various leadership roles at Radiant Systems Inc., including as President, Radiant Hospitality Business Unit, from 2007 until the firm was acquired by NCR in 2011. About NCR Corporation NCR Corporation (NYSE:NCR) is a leader in omni-channel solutions, turning everyday interactions with businesses into exceptional experiences. With its software, hardware, and portfolio of services, NCR enables nearly 700 million transactions daily across financial, retail, hospitality, travel, telecom and technology industries. NCR solutions run the everyday transactions that make your life easier. NCR is headquartered in Atlanta, Ga., with about 30,000 employees and does business in 180 countries. NCR is a trademark of NCR Corporation in the United States and other countries. NCR encourages investors to visit its website which is updated regularly with financial and other important information about NCR. Website: www.ncr.com

Twitter (News - Alert) : @NCRCorporation

Facebook: www.facebook.com/ncrcorp

LinkedIn (News - Alert) : https://www.linkedin.com/company/ncr-corporation

YouTube (News - Alert) : www.youtube.com/user/ncrcorporation Note to Investors This release contains forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements use words such as "expect," "anticipate," "outlook," "intend," "plan," "believe," "will," "should," "would," "could," and words of similar meaning. Statements that describe or relate to NCR's plans, goals, intentions, strategies, or financial outlook, and statements that do not relate to historical or current fact, are examples of forward-looking statements. The forward-looking statements in this release include statements about the expected timing and success of the Board's CEO search; NCR's ability to grow and produce value, and to execute in the future; and the reaffirmation of NCR's full-year and first quarter financial guidance and outlook and the expected type and magnitude of the non-operational adjustments included in any forward-looking non-GAAP measures. Forward-looking statements are based on our current beliefs, expectations and assumptions, which may not prove to be accurate, and involve a number of known and unknown risks and uncertainties, many of which are out of NCR's control. Forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance, and there are a number of important factors that could cause actual outcomes and results to differ materially from the results contemplated by such forward-looking statements, including those factors relating to: the strength of demand for ATMs and other financial services hardware and its effect on the results of our businesses and reportable segments; domestic and global economic and credit conditions including, in particular, those resulting from the imposition or threat of protectionist trade policies or import or export tariffs, global and regional market conditions and spending trends in the financial services and retail industries, new comprehensive U.S. tax legislation, modified or new global or regional trade agreements, the determination by the United Kingdom to exit the European Union, uncertainty over further potential changes in Eurozone participation and fluctuations in oil and commodity prices; the transformation of our business model and our ability to sell higher-margin software and services; our ability to improve execution in our sales and services organizations; our ability to successfully introduce new solutions and compete in the information technology industry; cybersecurity risks and compliance with data privacy and protection requirements; the possibility of disruptions in or problems with our data center hosting facilities; defects or errors in our products; the impact of our indebtedness and its terms on our financial and operating activities; the historical seasonality of our sales; tax rates and new US tax legislation; foreign currency fluctuations; the success of our restructuring plans and cost reduction initiatives; manufacturing disruptions; the availability and success of acquisitions, divestitures and alliances; our pension strategy and underfunded pension obligation; reliance on third party suppliers; the impact of the terms of our strategic relationship with Blackstone and our Series A Convertible Preferred Stock; our multinational operations, including in new and emerging markets; collectability difficulties in subcontracting relationships in certain geographical markets; development and protection of intellectual property; workforce turnover and the ability to attract and retain skilled employees; environmental exposures from our historical and ongoing manufacturing activities; and uncertainties with regard to regulations, lawsuits, claims, and other matters across various jurisdictions. Additional information concerning these and other factors can be found in the Company's filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, including the Company's most recent annual report on Form 10-K, quarterly reports on Form 10-Q and current reports on Form 8- K. Any forward-looking statement speaks only as of the date on which it is made. The Company does not undertake any obligation to publicly update or revise any 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/20180322005573/en/

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][March 22, 2018] Glance Partner Euro Asia Pay Marks $5 Million Fundraising Milestone

VANCOUVER, British Columbia, March 22, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Glance Technologies Inc. (CSE:GET.CN) (OTCQB:GLNNF) (FKT:GJT) ?is pleased to announce that its licensee Euro Asia Pay Holdings Inc. has reached a new milestone, raising more than $5 million in equity funding to pursue its business opportunities in the mobile payments space.

Euro Asia Pays most recent investment round of $3.98 million was raised at a price of $0.18 per unit, with each unit consisting of one common share and one common share purchase warrant exercisable at a price of $0.48 per share for a period of 24 months. As part of Glances previously announced licensing and services agreement with Euro Asia Pay, Glance received 8.5 million common shares in Euro Asia Pay at a deemed price of $0.07 per share, in addition to cash fees for the provision of other services. From day one we have been impressed with what Morris Chen and his team are accomplishing, and we feel the funds they have raised to date provide another competitive advantage that will help make Euro Asia Pay a go-to platform in North America, says Desmond Griffin, CEO of Glance Technologies. The tremendous job they have done raising capital is a significant accomplishment and one of many feathers in their cap. Euro Asia Pay is in the process of leveraging the tools and security of the Glance Pay mobile payments platform to create a unique mobile payment system tailored to the needs and opportunities of international residents, students and tourists visiting North America from Europe and Asia. The company is positioning itself to take advantage of trends including the high adoption rates of mobile payments in places such as China, where the value of mobile payments has hit USD$5.5 trillion.1 In addition, recent research from Nielsen and Alipay has found that 93% of Chinese tourists would use mobile payments overseas if given the option, and that nearly as many say they would spend more freely if they could use mobile payments.2 1 iResearch (https://www.ft.com/content/00585722-ef42-11e6-930f-061b01e23655)





2 Nielsen, Alipay. Outbound Chinese Tourism and Consumption Trends: 2017 Survey. http://outbound-chinese-tourism-and-consumption-trends.softcx.cn/html/index_en.html About Glance Technologies Inc.

Glance Technologies owns and operates Glance Pay, a streamlined payment system that revolutionizes how smartphone users choose where to shop, order goods and services, make payments, access digital receipts, redeem digital deals, earn great rewards and interact with merchants. Glance offers targeted in-app marketing, geo-targeted digital coupons, customer feedback, in-merchant messaging and custom rewards programs. The Glance Pay mobile payment system consists of proprietary technology, which includes user apps available for free downloads in iOS (Apple) and Android formats, merchant manager apps, a large-scale technology hosting environment with sophisticated anti-fraud technology and lightning-fast payment processing. Glance has also recently purchased an end-to-end blockchain solution and is working on a rewards-based cryptocurrency intended to be integrated into the Glance Pay app. For more information about Glance, please go to www.glance.tech. For more information, contact:

investors@glancepay.com

1-866-258-1249 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",in process, plan, pursue, "potentially", projected, should, will and similar expressions, or are those, which, by their nature, refer to future events. These statements, which involve risks and uncertainties, relate to the discussion of Glances business strategies and its expectations concerning future operations, margins, sales, new products, new licensing arrangements, potential acquisitions, use of proceeds, expenses, profitability, liquidity and capital resources and to analyses and other information that are based on forecasts of future results and estimates of amounts not yet determinable. For additional information with respect to these and other factors and assumptions underlying the forward looking statements in this press release, see the section entitled Risk Factors in the most recent Annual Information Form and Prospectus of Glance, which may be accessed through Glance's profile on SEDAR at www.sedar.com. Glance cautions investors that any forward-looking information provided by Glance 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.

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][March 22, 2018] IBA Group Named Finalist in European IT Excellence Awards 2018

PRAGUE, March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The finalists for the European IT & Software Excellence Awards 2018, a leading pan-European awards for ISVs, Solution Providers and Systems Integrators and their vendor and distributor partners, were announced by IT Europa. IBA Group - http://www.ibagroupit.com - and its two entries in the European IT & Software Excellence Awards 2018 have been successful and are now finalists in the following categories. Independent Software Vendor (ISV) as a Software Innovation Solution of the Year

Solution Provider as an Enterprise Solution of the Year. Now in their 10th year, the European IT & Software Excellence Awards 2018 attracted more than 400 entries. More than 100 companies from 29 European countries are represented amongst the finalists. A total of 43 solution providers, 36 ISVs and 57 suppliers have made the finals. The award winners will be announced at a gala dinner and presentation ceremony to be held on April 19, 2018 in London. The awards are given for IT solutions that ge to the heart of customer issues, delivering better business, a clearer understanding of data, and more efficient and profitable outcomes. The judges, with many decades of experience of IT industry involvement between them, have arrived at a list of finalists that they believe truly reflects both the strength of Europe's IT industry and many of the changes in direction occurring within it.



John Garratt, Editor of IT Europa, who heads the judges' panel says: "We are proud to have carried the flag for European IT for the last ten years. We continue to push out the core message about just what the IT industry is capable of doing in changing how people, businesses, and organizations function. This year, to celebrate the 10th anniversary, we will use the wealth of good stories from these finalists to promote IT to a wider audience by highlighting the successes contained in these awards." About IBA Group

IBA Group is one of the largest IT service providers in Eastern Europe performing software development, migration, maintenance, support, and IT consulting services with more than 2,500 IT and business professionals. Headquartered in Prague, Czech Republic, IBA Group has offices and development centers in the United States, Great Britain, Germany, Czech Republic, Belarus, South Africa, Cyprus, Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, and Slovakia. IBA Group focuses on mainframe systems, enterprise applications, web solutions, SAP and other ERP systems, business intelligence, and mobile applications. IBA Group is recognized by the International Association of Outsourcing Professionals (IAOP) as one of The Global Outsourcing 100 in the Leaders Category, and ranks as one of the world's largest software companies in the Software Magazine's Software 500. In 2017, 2015, 2014, 2012, and 2011, IBA Group won IT Europa's European IT & Software Excellence awards. For more information, visit http://ibagroupit.com



[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][March 22, 2018] Rite Aid Foundation, Pittsburgh Penguins Foundation and Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro Partner to Launch Prescription Drug Safety Initiative in Pittsburgh-Area High Schools

In an effort to help address adolescent drug abuse and misuse in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, The Rite Aid Foundation, Pittsburgh Penguins Foundation, and Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro are teaming up to bring the Prescription Drug Safety program, an innovative digital course about prescription drug abuse prevention, to Pittsburgh-area high schools. The program, developed by EVERFI, the nation's leading technology innovator used in one-in-seven schools nationwide, will be made available to high schools in the greater Pittsburgh area at no cost. Representatives of The Rite Aid Foundation, the Pittsburgh Penguins Foundation and the Attorney General's office will formally announce the partnership today at 10:45 a.m. during a press conference at Pittsburgh Brashear High School, located at 590 Crane Ave., in Pittsburgh. "Prescription drug abuse and misuse is a growing issue that poses a serious threat to the health, safety and well-being of our nation's young people," said Kermit Crawford, president and chief operating officer of Rite Aid Corporation and president of The Rite Aid Foundation. "The Rite Aid Foundation is proud to help introduce this important prevention education initiative to high school students so they can gain awareness and have the knowledge they need to stay safe and prevent abuse before it occurs." In addition to the activation in Pittsburgh-area high schools, as part of its commitment to creating safe and healthy environments for children and teens, this year, The Rite Aid Foundation, through its KidCents program, will also fund the introduction of the Prescription Drug Safety program to high schools in the Harrisburg/York/Lancaster/Lebanon and Wilkes Barre/Scranton markets in Pennsylvania as well as several communities in Ohio, Washington and Oregon. In all, The Rite Aid Foundation is making a three-year, $1.125 million commitment to the Prescription Drug Safety program. "The Pittsburgh Penguins Foundation is committed to ensuring our young people have vibrant and healthy futures," said Dave Soltesz, president, Pittsburgh Penguins Foundation. "Teaching students about prescription drug abuse and providing them with skills to prevent abuse before it occurs are critical components to advancing that mission." "Eighty percent of heroin users begin their substance use by abusing prescription drugs, so educating our children about the dangers of drug abuse is critically important," said Attorney General Josh Shapiro. "I want to commend The Rite Aid Foundation, the Pittsburgh Penguins organization, and EVERFI for ringing this prevention curriculum to children and young people in our schools. Fighting this epidemic is my top priority and I'm proud to partner with you in this important effort."



The Prescription Drug Safety program uses an evidence-based, public health approach to empower high school students with the skills and knowledge they need to make safe and healthy decisions about prescription drugs. Through interactive scenarios and self-guided activities, students learn the facts about drugs, how to properly use and dispose of them, and how to step in when faced with a situation involving misuse. The course is aligned with the Centers for Disease Control's National Health Education Standards and state academic standards. There is also a microsite with additional resources including parent guides and information on local safe medication disposal. The digital prescription drug abuse prevention course is the flagship initiative of the Prescription Drug Safety Network, the nation's first public-private initiative to combat prescription drug abuse by providing prevention education to schools. The Rite Aid Foundation, Pittsburgh Penguins Foundation and Attorney General Shapiro are partners in the nationwide coalition, which is committed to empowering Americans with the skills to make safe and healthy decisions about prescription drug use for themselves, their families, and their communities.

Since its inception in 2001, The Rite Aid Foundation has awarded more than $36 million to non-profit organizations. Additionally, Rite Aid, through the efforts of its customers, supplier partners and associates, has also raised more than $87 million for Children's Miracle Network Hospitals across the country since 1994. Rite Aid Corporation (NYSE: RAD) is one of the nation's leading drugstore chains with fiscal 2017 annual revenues of $32.8 billion. Information about Rite Aid, including corporate background and press releases, is available through the company's website at www.riteaid.com. Founded in 2010, the Pittsburgh Penguins Foundation is the 501c3 philanthropic hand of the Back-to-Back Stanley Cup Champion Pittsburgh Penguins. With the belief that "Kids Are The Future," the Penguins Foundation focuses its efforts on making an impact on the lives of the littlest fans of the Penguins team and organization. Through programs related to the Penguins Foundation's pillars of playing, growing, helping and learning, the Foundation has been able to make countless assists to the community in just a few short seasons including an overall contribution of $37 million to charitable causes since 2010. EVERFI, Inc. is the leading education technology company that provides learners of all ages education for the real world, through innovative and scalable digital learning. Founded in 2008, EVERFI has certified over 16 million learners in critical skill areas with more than 4,300 partners in all 50 U.S. States and Canada. EVERFI is an industry convenor that builds Networks to tackle the toughest social issues, including the Campus Prevention Network, a coalition of higher education institutions committed to campus sexual assault and alcohol abuse prevention; and the Financial Capability Network, a coalition of industry leaders dedicated to improving financial outcomes for communities across the country. Some of America's leading CEOs and venture capital firms are EVERFI investors including Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt, Twitter (News - Alert) founder Evan Williams, TPG Growth, and The Rise Fund. The Pittsburgh Public School District is the largest of 43 school districts in Allegheny County and second largest in Pennsylvania. The District serves approximately 24,000 students in Pre-Kindergarten through Grade 12. Pittsburgh's public school system is in the midst of its 2017-2022 Strategic Plan: Expect Great Things, which sets forth four desired long-term outcomes, four strategic themes and 19 initiatives to create a student-centered culture built on continuous improvement. The Pittsburgh Public Schools offers students a variety of options and opportunities that will help them succeed in school, and prepare them for whatever comes next college, career and life. View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20180322005581/en/

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][March 22, 2018] 5 Ways to Boost Home Wi-Fi

MISSION, Kan., March 22, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- (Family Features) In todays connected world, its almost unthinkable to function without an internet connection, and for practical purposes most households need wireless connectivity for everyone to fully enjoy their internet-enabled devices, including smartphones, laptops, tablets, televisions, thermostats, security cameras and even refrigerators.

Photo courtesy of Getty Images



However, with the growing number of devices requiring access to your network, and in some cases even the quality of the connection itself, there can be limitations to your Wi-Fi networks performance. The problem can be compounded by the reality that increased reliance on Wi-Fi networks isnt just in your own home or office, its around the globe. Some groups, such as WifiForward, are advocating for increased connectivity across America, including greater access to unlicensed spectrum, which are radio frequencies that consumers can use for a wide range of purposes, including Wi-Fi. Ultimately, greater access to unlicensed spectrum can result in benefits like more reliable connections and super-fast Gigabi Wi-Fi, as well as cost-effective wireless broadband for unconnected urban and rural areas.



In the meantime, these tips may help boost the quality and speed of your home Wi-Fi network. Use up-to-date Wi-Fi technologies. It wont matter what other steps you take to improve your network performance if youre using old technology. Be sure your devices and router are all compatible with the latest network capabilities. Equipment that runs the latest Wi-Fi standard, 802.11ac, is ideal if youre using multiple devices.

Improve network security. Be sure to regularly update your password and enable WPA2 encryption, which offers greater security. Know that location matters. Placing your router in an open, centralized area is likely to create a better access point throughout the house. Be wary of walls and other obstructions than can hinder a clear signal transmission throughout the house. An ethernet cable and cable clips are all you need to move your router from its connecting point to a more signal-friendly location. Reboot your router regularly. Like many devices, an occasional reboot can help improve function. A router that is continually running is processing a great deal of data and even in normal operation some data can become corrupt. A reboot can dump those errors and allow you to resume operations with a clean slate, so to speak. Update your connected devices. Each device that is actively connected to your network depletes available bandwidth. When a devices operating system is out-of-date, it can become a data hog, impacting the performance of the other devices you have connected in your home. Check regularly for software and connectivity updates to improve speeds and maximize your experience. Learn more about constraints of the nations current Wi-Fi airwaves and possible solutions at WifiForward.org.

Michael French

mfrench@familyfeatures.com

1-888-824-3337

editors.familyfeatures.com About Family Features Editorial Syndicate

Established in 1974, Family Features is a leading provider of free food and lifestyle content for print and online publications. Our articles, photos, videos and web content solutions save you time, money and help create advertising opportunities. Registration is fast and free  with absolutely no obligation. Visit editors.familyfeatures.com for more information. A photo accompanying this announcement is available at //www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/346b857f-6366-40a3-b028-f2970f6d9138

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][March 22, 2018] Semiconductor Industry Responds to OneSpin's Dare to Solve "The Sudoku Challenge" Holiday Puzzle

MUNICH, Germany and SAN JOSE, Calif., March 22, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- OneSpin Solutions, provider of innovative formal verification solutions for highly reliable, digital integrated circuits (ICs), today announced four winners of its 201718 holiday puzzle.

The Sudoku Challenge asked engineers to use a formal verification tool to find the solution to the hardest Sudoku puzzle in the world and prove that the solution is unique.

Winners, all of whom used formal verification software to find the solution, are:

Phil Barker from Infineon , recipient of the Laurel Wreath prize for the solution garnering the most votes from users

, recipient of the Laurel Wreath prize for the solution garnering the most votes from users Axis Lars Viklund , who triumphed with the Golden Sickle prize for the most elegant solution

, who triumphed with the Golden Sickle prize for the most elegant solution Holger Busch of Infineon , whose speedy solution won the Magic Carpet prize for the shortest runtime

, whose speedy solution won the Magic Carpet prize for the shortest runtime Anthony Wood at Imagination, awarded the Team Player prize for his kind and encouraging submission message All four will receive an Amazon Echo Plus.

"The solutions showed different coding styles and verification strategies from some of the best formal experts in the world," notes Sergio Marchese, OneSpin's technical marketing manager, who oversaw the competition. "Ths challenge is fun and a valuable learning opportunity for both expert and novice formal verification engineers. Rarely do we have the opportunity to compare so many elegant and creative approaches to a single verification problem."





For more details about OneSpins annual holiday puzzle, go to www.onespin.com/holidaypuzzle or read the announcement blog post on Semiconductor Engineering.



The announcement for the next puzzle is expected in December 2018.

About OneSpin Solutions

OneSpin Solutions has emerged as a leader in formal verification through a range of advanced electronic design automation (EDA) solutions for digital integrated circuits. Headquartered in Munich, Germany, OneSpin is passionate about enabling users to address design challenges in areas where reliability really counts: safety-critical verification, SystemC/C++ high-level synthesis (HLS) code analysis and FPGA equivalence checking. OneSpins advanced formal verification platform and dedication to getting it right the first time have fueled dramatic growth over the past five years as the company forges partnerships with leading electronics suppliers to pursue design perfection. OneSpin: Making Electronics Reliable.

Engage with OneSpin at:

Website: www.OneSpin.com

Twitter: @OneSpinSolution

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/onespin-solutions

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/OneSpinSolutions OneSpin, OneSpin Solutions and the OneSpin logo are trademarks of OneSpin Solutions GmbH. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. For more information, contact:

Nanette Collins

Public Relations for OneSpin Solutions

(617) 437-1822

nanette@nvc.com

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][March 22, 2018] Verimatrix Demonstrates How the Cloud is Fundamentally Changing the Video Delivery Business at NAB Show 2018

LAS VEGAS, March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- NAB Show 2018, (Booth #SU7102) -- Verimatrix, a specialist in securing and enhancing revenue for network-connected devices and services, is bringing the benefits of cloud-based technology to the forefront of its solution strategy at the NAB Show 2018. Video service operators are aware of the CAPEX advantages that cloud-based solutions can offer, but may not be thinking of virtualization as a core strategy to help grow their business. As cloud technologies, workflows and experience mature across the video industry, the economic gains and enhanced functionality become difficult to ignore. During the show, Verimatrix will be illustrating how its revenue security and enhancement solutions are more powerful when delivered and managed via the cloud, ultimately enabling video service providers to be more competitive and profitable. "Several trends are happening simultaneously that are pushing this transformation of the video business," said Tom Munro, CEO of Verimatrix. "Video creation and contribution workflows are reaching critical mass in the cloud. The scalability of ABR video is proven and trusted. And now we are seeing more emphasis on operating expenditures rather than capital investments as the economics of video consumption continue to change. We are working with our customers to fulfill their needs for cloud-based video delivery and distribution, while offering a comprehensive vision and roadmap to make sure they stay ahead of the evolving landscape. At NAB, we will show how all of our demonstrated solutions interoperate as a connected cloud security platform with clear benefits for operators and content owners." At the show, Verimatrix will be announcing significant enhancements to its Verspective Analytics solution suite, focused on providing business intelligence insights with the newly updated Verspective Intelligence software as a service (SaaS) solution. Verspective Intelligence enables video service providers to segment and monitor their subscriber base in a more granular way to more effectively address potential problems and uncover upsell opportunities in order to reduce churn and increase APRU. The company will be showcasing its federated rights management workflow solution for distributing OTT content between content owners and video service providers. It is a secure, hierarchical distribution method with a single point of integration for operators and content owners. It streamlines security workflows with persistent encryption, policy definition and enforcement, and automated consumptin reporting and analytics. Content providers are able to streamline distribution of valuable content with little incremental effort as opposed to the friction and inefficiencies that exist in today's workflows.



In partnership with AWS Elemental, MultiRights OTT Plus will be on display to demonstrate the cloud-based workflow of the integrated multi-DRM, watermarking and analytics solution. Leveraging the Verimatrix Secure Cloud SaaS model, service providers can deploy multi-screen premium video services with confidence, with the assurance that their OTT monetization platform will adapt to changes in security regimes while continuously enhancing the user experience. This demonstration will be part of the AWS Elemental "treasure hunt" during NAB. Verimatrix will also be featuring a demonstration of its award-winning StreamMark server-side watermarking solution for premium over-the-top (OTT) video services. Hosted in the AWS cloud, the solution is inherently DRM-agnostic and is ideally suited for adaptive bitrate streaming (ABR) protocols such as HTTP Live Streaming (HLS) and standard MPEG-DASH.

Verimatrix will be on hand to discuss its current internet of things (IoT) trial deployment of Vtegrity with the Zigbee Alliance Compliance Blockchain, which is an open platform for multiple compliance and regulatory organizations to provide machine readable records that can be used to set access policies during device onboarding by ecosystem operators. Verimatrix thought leaders will also be featured as part of the NAB conference program: Don't Let Big Data Become a Massive Liability  Apr. 7 , 10:40am , N260

As part of the new BEITC ENGAGE! electronic paper session, Tom Pollard , VP of Product Management, will examine privacy regulations and shed light on why operators need to be concerned about the integrity of source data collected, which can be compromised in a number of different ways.

, , N260 As part of the new BEITC ENGAGE! electronic paper session, , VP of Product Management, will examine privacy regulations and shed light on why operators need to be concerned about the integrity of source data collected, which can be compromised in a number of different ways. Getting to Know the Video Consumer  Apr. 9 , 1:30pm , N256

R&D Engineer Madhu Ramiah will be presenting the results of a study that analyzed video features using machine learning algorithms to potentially predict specific demographic information about the consumer, without requiring user input such as ratings. She will discuss how operators can offer more tailored services through a more thorough and accurate understanding of their subscribers. Verimatrix will continue its support of the annual 4K 4Charity Fun Run on Apr. 10, 7:30am at Sunset Park as a sponsor and with a participating team. This year's event will benefit Girls Who Code, a national non-profit organization working to close the gender gap in technology and change the image of what a programmer looks like and does, and FIRST Nevada, a non-profit that provides STEAM educational programs to K-12 students in Nevada with an emphasis on reaching a diverse student population including at-risk children and youth. For additional information about Verimatrix's presence during the NAB Show 2018 or to book an appointment, please visit www.verimatrix.com/nab2018. Follow the conversation at #NABShow. About Verimatrix

Verimatrix specializes in securing and enhancing revenue for network-connected devices and services around the world and is recognized as the global number one in revenue security for IP-based video services. The award-winning and independently audited Verimatrix Video Content Authority System (VCAS) family of solutions enables next-generation video service providers to cost-effectively extend their networks and enable new business models. The company has continued its technical innovation by offering a comprehensive data collection platform, Verspective Analytics, for automated system real-time quality of experience (QoE) optimization to drive user engagement and content monetization, and data collection/analytics and Vtegrity, advanced security that addresses IoT threats and service lifecycle management. Its unmatched partner ecosystem enables Verimatrix to provide unique business value beyond security as service providers introduce new applications that leverage the proliferation of connected devices. For more information, please visit www.verimatrix.com, our Pay TV Views blog and follow us @verimatrixinc, Facebook and LinkedIn to join the conversation. View original content with multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/verimatrix-demonstrates-how-the-cloud-is-fundamentally-changing-the-video-delivery-business-at-nab-show-2018-300618292.html SOURCE Verimatrix

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][March 22, 2018] Gululu Launches 'School-to-School' Program, Focusing on Children's Health, Together With Generosity.org & Monroe Elementary School

NEW YORK, March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Gululu, the interactive water bottle for kids, has joined hands with Generosity.org, a humanitarian organization that provides sustainable solutions to the global water crisis, one community at a time, and Monroe Elementary School from California, United States, to launch the "School-to-School" program. "School-to-School" is a program designed to connect students in the United States with schools in developing countries. This program will educate kids for social responsibility and create fundraising campaigns to build more water projects for partner schools. The first program funded a water project for students in Peru. Schools are encouraged to join this mission by contacting Generosity.org via Antonia Buban, the Community and Donor Engagement Coordinator. Gululu's "School-to-School" mission is to advance hydration for kids around the world and to provide clean drinking water to all children. The first project matched Monroe elementary school to a sister school (#60102), located in a community in Peru, where the community used to collect rainwater for use. The United States based school ran a fundraiser for their sister school and accomplished building the first well, allowing for this community of 400 plus children and their families to have access to clean water and advance their health. In recognition of this success, in 2017 Gululu was invited to speak at the United Nations about the water initiative. Philip Wagner, the founder of Generosity.org noted, "Our partnership with Gululu and Monroe Elementary has been incredibly unique and inspiring for our team, as safe water consumption and hydration are so important for early childhood development and overall health. This collaboration with both the private and public sectors is one we look forward to continuing so that we can end the clean water crisis, together!" The "School-to-School" program began to form in early 2017, after Gululu joined forces with Generosity.org and announced that for every bottle sold, a portion of the revenue would be contributed to building a new water project for a chool in Peru, to improve the quality of drinking water for the school's students. Inspired by Gululu and Monroe Elementary, Generosity.org will launch its official "School-to-School" program in Fall 2018.



Nate Manderfeld, a Monroe School teacher said, "We're excited to pilot the 'School-to-School' program and make a significant impact on children and their community in Peru. This program also allows us to educate our kids about generosity, the value of water, sustainability and how they can impact other people's lives, which is a lesson I'm sure they will carry throughout their lives." Eighty percent of all diseases are caused by a poor water environment, which is greater than the impact of wars and hunger on people's lives. Lack of clean drinking water has a direct impact on the health and safety of the kids, which has become one of the key obstacles of developing countries to further advance and reform.

Alvin Chiang, founder and CEO of Gululu noted, "As Gululu has committed itself to children's health, the gene of corporate social responsibility is deeply rooted in our company's culture, which is also our original aspiration. I hope Gululu can continue to collaborate with Generosity.org and have additional schools in the USA, China and other countries that share the same vision. By raising money for charity through Gululu sales, we help kids in poor areas have access to safe drinking water and we can contribute to solving the problem for communities around the world." Upholding the mission of improving children's health in the world, Gululu has further pushed forward the pace of carrying out corporate social responsibility globally while focusing on solving the problem of drinking safe and clean water for kids in developing countries. For the next step, Gululu is going to systematically carry out more charitable efforts, especially to further promote the innovative "School-to-School" program. This will be done while providing lessons that teach kids and families the importance and effects of good hydration, while cultivating those habits in kids from a young age, using high-tech products of the highest quality for the kids all over the world. Gululu expects to cooperate with related institutions and humanitarian organizations in all walks of life to create a healthy and safe living environment for the global community and kids who need help. About Gululu Gululu, the first innovative product invented by Bowhead Technology, is an interactive water bottle and connected app that helps children and parents keep up with hydration by caring for a virtual pet in an ever-expanding Gululu Universe. Designed for ages 3+, the drinking device is shockproof, health-focused, and kid approved. Since its debut in mid-2016, Gululu has reached the doors of families across 50 countries. Forbes magazine named it one of the 5 coolest water bottles worldwide. In 2017, Gululu was featured at the Innovation Lions at Cannes Lions Int'l Festival of Creativity. Gululu is officially available in the US, China, Hong Kong and Taiwan. In 2017 The company closed its series Pre-A investment round, invested by Jonathan Lu, the former Alibaba Group CEO. For more information visit, www.mygululu.com. About Generosity.org Generosity.org is a humanitarian non-profit organization that is helping to end the clean water crisis in developing countries, one community at a time, with 813 projects funded, Generosity.org has served more than 470,000 people in 20 countries Contact:

Selena Rodriguez

Child's Play Communications

(212) 488-2060 x13

sr@childsplaypr.com View original content with multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/gululu-launches-school-to-school-program-focusing-on-childrens-health-together-with-generosityorg--monroe-elementary-school-300618408.html SOURCE Gululu

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][March 22, 2018] Avigilon Shareholders Overwhelmingly Approve Acquisition by Motorola Solutions

VANCOUVER, CANADA, March 22, 2018 /CNW/ - Avigilon Corporation ("Avigilon") (TSX: AVO), provider of trusted security solutions, is pleased to announce the voting results for its special meeting of shareholders held on March 22, 2018 in Vancouver, British Columbia (the "Special Meeting"). The sole matter considered at the Special Meeting was the special resolution approving the statutory plan of arrangement (the "Arrangement") whereby Motorola Solutions, Inc. ("Motorola") will acquire all of the issued and outstanding Avigilon common shares for cash consideration of CDN $27.00 per share through Motorola Solutions Canada Holdings Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary of Motorola, as originally disclosed on February 1, 2018. The Arrangement resolution was approved as follows: 98.24% of the total votes cast by shareholders at the Special Meeting voted FOR the Arrangement resolution; and

97.90% of the total votes cast by shareholders at the Special Meeting, excluding the votes cast by such Avigilon shareholders that were required to be excluded pursuant to Multilateral Instrument 61-101  Protection of Minority Security Holders in Special Transaction, voted FOR the Arrangement resolution. Closing of the Arrangement remains subject to court approval as well as other customary closing conditions; assuming the timely completion of these conditions, Avigilon expects the Arrangement to close by the end of March, 2018. About Avigilon

Avigilon Corporation provides trusted security solutions to the global market. Avigilon designs, develops, and manufactures video analytics, network video management software and hardware, surveillance cameras, and access control solutions. To learn more about Avigilon, visit avigilon.com.  2018, Avigilon Corporation. All rights reserved. AVIGILON, the AVIGILON logo, and TRUSTED SECURITY SOLUTIONS, are trademarks of Avigilon Corporation. Other names or logos mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners. Keep current on Avigilon Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and view Avigilon videos on YouTube.



For further information: Investor Enquiries:

Avigilon Investor Relations

T: (604) 629-5182

investors@avigilon.com

Media Enquiries:

Amy Day

Senior Manager, Global Communications

T: (604) 629-5182 x2625

media@avigilon.com Forward-Looking Statements

Certain information and statements in this news release contain and constitute forward-looking information or forward-looking statements as defined under applicable securities laws (collectively, "forward-looking statements"). Forward-looking statements normally contain words like 'believe', 'expect', 'anticipate', 'plan', 'intend', 'continue', 'estimate', 'may', 'will', 'should', 'ongoing' and similar expressions, and within this news release include, without limitation, statements (express or implied) respecting the closing of the Arrangement and expected actions to follow therefrom. Forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future performance, actions, or developments and are based on expectations, assumptions, and other factors that Avigilon's management currently believes are relevant, reasonable, and appropriate in the circumstances, including, without limitation, assumptions that: the Arrangement will complete under the terms, structure, and timeline currently contemplated; the requisite court approval in connection with the Arrangement will be obtained in a timely manner and on satisfactory terms; the parties will be able to satisfy the other conditions to the closing of the Arrangement and on the timeline currently contemplated; Motorola will have sufficient capital resources to complete the Arrangement; Motorola's vision and strategy will remain aligned with those of Avigilon; no significant events will occur outside of Avigilon's normal course of business; and the continuation of the business and operations of Avigilon, and the integration thereof with Motorola, following completion of the Arrangement will occur as currently contemplated. Although Avigilon's management believes that the forward-looking statements are reasonable, actual results could be substantially different due to the risks and uncertainties associated with and inherent to Avigilon's business, as more particularly described in the "Risk Factors" section of Avigilon's Annual Information Form dated March 6, 2018, and in the Management Information Circular for the Special Meeting dated February 21, 2018, each of which is available under Avigilon's profile on SEDAR at www.sedar.com. Material risks and uncertainties applicable to the forward-looking statements set out herein include, but are not limited to: the Arrangement is not completed in a timely fashion or at all; the requisite court approval is not obtained in a timely fashion (or at all) or on satisfactory terms; Motorola does not have or obtain sufficient capital resources to complete the Arrangement; the announcement of the Arrangement and the dedication of substantial resources of Avigilon to the completion of the Arrangement has a negative impact on Avigilon's ongoing business operations and future financial condition and prospects; the respective strategies and vision of Avigilon and Motorola become incongruous leading to, for instance, delays in product development and availability; unforeseen challenges in integrating Avigilon's business and operations with Motorola; a loss of key Avigilon personnel, customers, and/or suppliers; and other unforeseen events, developments, or factors causing any of the aforesaid expectations, assumptions, and other factors ultimately being inaccurate or irrelevant. Although Avigilon has attempted to identify factors that may cause actual actions, events or results to differ materially from those disclosed in the forward-looking statements, there may be other factors that cause actions, events or results not to be as anticipated, predicted, estimated or intended. Also, many of the factors are beyond the control of Avigilon. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. Avigilon undertakes no obligation to reissue or update any forward-looking statements as a result of new information or events after the date hereof except as may be required by law. All forward-looking statements contained in this news release are qualified by this cautionary statement. SOURCE Avigilon Corporation

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][March 22, 2018] Anonymous Alerts Program Fits the Bill for the Recently Passed STOP School Violence Act

WHITE PLAINS, N.Y., March 22, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- The U.S. House of Representatives has overwhelmingly passed HR 4909 to authorize $50 million in federal funding that will bring programs like the Anonymous Alerts reporting system to schools across the country, so students and adults who "See Something, Can Do Something" by anonymously reporting warning signs of mental health issues, bullying and possible violence before a tragedy can occur. The Federal Act calls for schools to operate "anonymous reporting systems for threats of school violence, including mobile telephone applications, hotlines, and Internet websites." "Over the past 5-plus years, our Anonymous Alerts anti-bullying and safety reporting system has rapidly expanded throughout the United States, Canada and abroad working with the largest school districts to the smallest school districts helping them to create safer school climates," said T. Gregory Bender, President and CEO. "With our free-to-download Anonymous Alerts reporting system, students, parents, and staff can anonymously send incident eports directly to school personnel for situations occurring on or off school grounds, or on social media. With high priority safety threats, reports are automatically sent to law enforcement for quick action."



Hundreds of thousands of students walked out of class on Wednesday, March 14, 2018 to demand action from Congress on school safety. The walkout was held on the one-month anniversary of the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. On that same day, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the STOP School Violence Act of 2018 in a bipartisan vote of 407 to 10. To learn more about Anonymous Alerts, please visit www.anonymousalerts.com.

About Anonymous Alerts

The Anonymous Alerts award-winning and patented mobile applications platform was developed to encourage students to quickly report bullying, mental health concerns, drug use/dealing, campus safety threats, and more directly to school and college officials, who can take quick action. The mobile apps and systems are completely customizable for each client and include intuitive Incident Management tools built for any level user. Anonymous Alerts is Patented (U.S. Patent No. 9,071,579) with additional patents pending. Anonymous Alerts, LLC is based in White Plains, New York and is rapidly growing throughout the United States and abroad. For more information, please visit www.anonymousalerts.com or call 914-220-8326. Contact

Public Relations

Anonymous Alerts

relations@anonymousalerts.com

914.220.8326 View original content with multimedia:http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/anonymous-alerts-program-fits-the-bill-for-the-recently-passed-stop-school-violence-act-300618393.html SOURCE Anonymous Alerts

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ][March 22, 2018] The CRTC's non-decision is good news for Canadian telecom consumers

MONTREAL, March 22, 2018 /CNW Telbec/ - The CRTC announced today that it was launching a consultation to ensure lower-cost data-only wireless plans are available to Canadians across the country. The agency also announced that it will initiate a review of its wholesale mobile wireless framework within the next year. "The fact that the CRTC did not decide today to allow resellers, or MVNOs, to access the networks of facilities-based providers at regulated rates is good news, at least for now," says Martin Masse, author of an annual MEI paper on The State of Competition in Canada's Telecommunications Industry. "The CRTC thus prevented the negative effects that such a major policy change could have had on the industry and on Canadian consumers." In June 2017, the Innovation Minister asked the CRTC to reconsider the distinction between large wireless providers and resellers, and see if a broader definitio of "home network" that would include Wi-Fi should be adopted. This request by the Minister followed a dispute between Rogers and a reseller, Sugar Mobile, whose clients use their devices primarily by connecting to Wi-Fi networks.



Allowing resellers to access the networks of facilities-based providers at regulated rates could have discouraged investment in the telecommunications industry, which wouldn't serve the long-term interests of Canadian consumers. "Propping up small players without a profitable business model by giving them privileged access to the resources of other providers runs the risk of discouraging the owners of infrastructure from investing and innovating, because they would then have to share the resulting benefits," says Mr. Masse. This drastic regulatory change would also fail to stimulate investments by resellers in order to build their own infrastructure, since they could then piggyback on someone else's at prices guaranteeing them a margin of profit.

"Canada already has one of the best telecommunications infrastructures in the world, with some of the fastest networks and the most advanced technologies. The best way to keep these benefits is not to encourage artificial competition by giving privileges to resellers who do not invest, but by ensuring a regulatory environment that encourages investment," says Martin Masse. * * * The Montreal Economic Institute is an independent, non-partisan, not-for-profit research and educational organization. Through its studies and its conferences, the MEI stimulates debate on public policies in Quebec and across Canada by proposing wealth-creating reforms based on market mechanisms. SOURCE Montreal Economic Institute

[ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]Updated, 04/11/2018, 10:45 am PT:

Kat VR announced that pre-orders for the Kat Walk Mini would be open this week. Were not sure what happened to the plans for the Kickstarter campaign, but you can order directly from Kat VR starting April 13.

Kat VR revealed that the Kat Walk Mini would retail for $2,999 and ship in July. However, the company is running a short-term promotion that could save you a lot of money. Early bird orders placed between April 13 and April 20 will receive a 50% price reduction to $1,499. For the following two weeks, the price will go up by $200 per week. On May 8, Kat VR plans to raise the price to $2,499, and any order placed on or after May 19 would be subject to the full retail price. To qualify for the discounts, the payment must be processed within the discount window.

Kat VR isnt yet accepting orders through its website, but you can contact the companys sales department to put your order in.

Original story, 03/22/2018, 5:35pm PT:

Kat VR today revealed the Kat Walk Mini, a scaled-down, consumer-friendly version of its Kat Walk commercial VR Treadmill.

Kat VR originally launched the Kat Walk VR Treadmill on Kickstarter in 2015, but it didnt get a lot of traction. The campaign was successful, and the company secured $49,278 over its $100,000 ask. However, the company convinced only 231 people to back it.

The lack of interest was somewhat surprising, especially after Virtuix sold so many units during its crowdfunding pursuit. However, the original Kat Walk treadmill is a large, heavy-duty setup with an overhead beam and a harness to secure you. The Virtuix Omni is cumbersome. The Kat Walk is downright ungainly.

The new Kat Walk Mini brings the idea of a VR treadmill down to a much more manageable package. Kat VR didnt reveal much about the Kat Walk Mini, but from the promo video that it released today, we can tell that its a much more compact product. Whats more, Kat VR said the treadmill in the video is a prototype and that the final product would be smaller than the one in the video.

The Kat Walk Mini featured a harness system that holds you in and allows you to walk, run, jump, and crouch in place. Unlike the Virtual Omni, which has a fixed frame and a rotatable harness system, Kat VRs solution features a rotating frame. The setup also appears to have a back rest, so that you can lean against walls in tactical shooters.

Kat VR didnt reveal many details about the Kat Walk Mini, but the promo video features a Pimax 8K headset and Doom VFR and Fallout 4 VR. It should, therefore, be compatible with and Steam VR headsets, such as the HTC Vive, Vive Pro, or Oculus Rift. Kat VR also demonstrated compatibility with the PlayStation VR playing Skyrim VR. If we had to guess, wed say the company cut a deal with Bethesda to put Kat Walk support into its VR games. The promo video also depicts Starbreeze's Payday 2 VR.

Kat VR didnt say when the Kat Walk Mini would be available, but we should know more soon. The company is preparing a Kickstarter campaign to drum up support and interest for the product.



Golden Ghetto Public Safety Conversation: Johnson County residents gather for forum on gun violence, school safety





Inner-Suburban Culture War As Well: Nearly 100 Blue Springs middle school students go against school plans and walk out of class

Local TV news channel roundup of the ongoing debate across the metro that culminates in this weekend's march and then silence until the next mass shooting.Checkit:You decide . . .Ephemeral city: Night club matchbooks Brief commercial message: Join me Tuesday, March 27, at Tom's Town Distilling Company, 1701 Main Street, to celebrate the recent release of my new book, Prohibition in Kansas City: Highballs, Spooners, and Crooked Dice, published by the History Press. I'll discuss bootleggers, speakeasies and vice, and we can all enjoy the delicious benefits of Repeal.

By far, theand the author has a new book out that's afor anyone who cares about the history of this town. Take a look at his latest post chronicling old school keepsakes that once littered the local nightlife scene during its glory days . . .Profitable Kansas City Diversity

Forbes ranks 4 KC companies as 'Best Employers for Diversity' - Kansas City Business Journal Four local companies scored a spot on Forbes' "America's Best Employers for Diversity" list, including one in the top 25. To create the list, Forbes worked with research firm Statista, which surveyed 30,000 U.S. employees in August. Questions covered aspects, such as diversity, gender, ethnicity and sexual orientation.

Follow-Up Hype As Protests Continue Against Downtown Luxury Tax Breaks

Compromise reached in deal to bring more apartments to downtown Kansas City KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- The city is weighing a compromise with the Cordish Companies to facilitate the building of Three Light while also adding affordable housing units. The compromise came amid public outcry over the city subsidizing luxury apartments with no affordable options.

Women Scorned Thankfully Snitch Against Bank Robber Suspect

Two wives - one ex, one soon-to-be - identify KC bank robbery suspect A previously convicted bank robber is now charged with robbing a US Bank branch inside Truman Medical Center. Jimmy Lee Bozeman II, 56, is charged in federal court in Kansas City with the March 14 hold-up of the US Bank branch inside Truman Medical Center, 2301 Holmes Road.

Don't Panic After Plaza Package Scare

Police say with more packages may come more threats KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- Police say the serial bombing incidents in Texas have shown that people need to be alert for suspicious packages in a world of more online deliveries. The police bomb squad investigates more than 100 bomb calls a year.

City Hall Teachable Moment

Register for KCMO Community Engagement University - Kansas City infoZine Register for KCMO Community Engagement University Kansas City, MO - infoZine - The Community Engagement University is accepting applicants for spring 2018 but seats are limited. If you're one of the lucky 32 selected, you'll be able to interact with staffers who know the ins and outs of City finances, operations, projects and services.

Celebrate Community Payback

Kansas City's Urban Youth Academy opens to the community By Katrina E. Williams Northeast News The $19 million, state-of-the-art Kansas City Urban Youth Academy won't host its official grand opening celebration until Saturday, March 31, but programming at the facility is already underway. On Saturday, March 17th at 9 a.m., the academy hosted a clinic for boys ranging in age from 6-9 years old.

It's Always The Hipster Weekend

Blip Blast Into Spring & Other Weekend Possibilities We can make spring a reality if we all just believe a little. Here's a way to fuel those positive vibes: Blip Blast, a vanilla cold brew bottled and sold by Blip Coffee Roasters (1101 Mulberry St.). The bottles arrived in the cooler in the West Bottoms shop earlier this week.

We've long been admirer of Sarah's blog and as the weather warms upas we wag over classicCloser to home, here are some of the top news links we're checking right now . . .And this is thefor right now . . .AWESOME KANSAS CITY INSIDERS REPORT CITY HALL DRASTICALLY CUTTING BACK RESOURCES FOR NEIGHBORHOOD CLEANUP!!!

Kansas City Neighborhood Leader On Community Cleanup

FYI the city changed their blue trash bag policy and they only allow neighborhood leaders to have ten each. Lol, ten!! How are we supposed to clean up trash in our neighborhood with ten bags?





Years ago, the city limited us to two trash bags and required us to schedule bulky item pickup; the result has been trash piled all over the urban core, leaving volunteers to spend their evenings and weekends attempting to make a small dent in their little forgotten corner of KC.





It's just extremely frustrating to see basic quality of life services for communities cut while we see tax incentives handed out like candy.





It's easy to fall in love with the *idea* of making bold investments into downtown, but when the result is an increase in crime, an increase in trash, and a decrease in basic services for community volunteers, it's kinda making me want to vote NO on the sales tax renewal just to send a message to City Hall.





When will we have invested *enough* in downtown KC? When will the urban core receive the windfall from all of the giveaways that are going to make KC a world class city? Will it be felt equitably, or will it come with displacement and an affordable housing crisis? How much longer do I have to listen to these smug urbanists telling us that gentrification is actually good for everyone?





Can I just get some G.D. blue trash bags??!

As part of, City Hall provides blue/yellow bags, at no cost, to neighborhoods groups, civic organizations and residents desiring to perform litter control in the public right-of-way.Now . . .Here's the word in a special comment offering more insight into the program and its consequences. Checkit:############Developing . . .On Thursday, April 5th Travel Massive Crete and the Cultural Association of Argyroupoli, in collaboration with the Parish of Argyroupoli, the Cretan Gastronomy Center, and the Municipality of Rethymno will host a unique summit "Traditions: Powerful Tools for Rural Tourism Development."

Designed to encourage cultural tourism development for the rural areas of Crete, the event is scheduled to coincide with the Orthodox Good Friday procession in the historic village. The initiative serves to better frame an overall move in Greece for developing alternative tourism value, while at the same time providing a template for growing the local Crete economy.

The news comes at a timely juncture when cultural tourism is recognized worldwide as the fastest growing market segment. Greece seems to be lagging behind the trend: according to a recent study by the Athens-based Center of Planning and Economic Research (KEPE), the number of visitors to Greek cultural sites and museums at key tourism attractions is way below the figures for other countries. However, outside the main paths, the situation for rural tourist destinations and routes lags even farther behind competing destinations.

Greece has been one of the world's most popular tourist destinations since human beings first began traveling for pleasure. Each succeeding year, more and more people visit Athens and other mainland wonders, not to mention the thousands of Greek island paradises. A billion visitations later, some experts think that the Greek tourism market is saturated. Nothing could be further from the truth. Greece has a wealth of experiences to offer, experiences that are there for discovery or rediscovery, and nowhere is this more prevalent than on the island of Crete. This brings us to the timely meetup of some key stakeholders on Crete. A Travel Massive Crete chapter mini-summit will take place at the site of ancient Lappa (Argyroupoli) - the perfect opportunity for revising centuries of heritage, and for examining the best ways to grow this type of travel opportunity. To get a window seat into what this trend means for villages like Argyroupoli, I asked one of the organizers of these events, Rebecca Skevaki, who's the Founder and Director of Crete Urban Adventures, why promoting rural cultural tourism on Crete is essential. Here is what she said:

"The importance of such developments for the region and individual communities/attractions applies to both the destination and the traveler. First, a local rural area will see the boosting of travel-oriented businesses and businesses whose focus is not directly related to tourism (eg. agriculture-traditional crafts). Secondly, the benefits for travelers, especially those arriving from faster-paced urban lifestyles, will be able to appreciate a healthier way of living better and they will discover authentic local experiences."

For the tiny village of Argyroupoli, which was the site of ancient Lappa, stakeholders like the local Cultural Association of Argyroupoli, the Cretan Gastronomy Center, alongside hospitality businesses like Arcus Suites provide the momentum for optimized and sustainable tourism growth. Furthermore, the support of the larger regional unit, the Municipality of Rethymno is the kind of engagement every region and community on Crete should emulate. As a way of illustrating what I mean here, I talked briefly with a stakeholder from Thronos, which is another magical rural destination that would benefit from a more cohesive effort - Maria Papoutsaki, the Operations Director at Aravanes Traditional Tavern & Rooms, overlooking the picturesque Amari Valley.

The site of ancient Sivritos, this tiny village appropriately named for its position overlooking the Amari valley, does remind one of mighty Zeus commanding his childhood playground. Aravanes being a commercial enterprise tied inextricably with the site and the local traditions, I asked Maria about elements of culture that are most attractive to visitors. Not surprisingly, she related a tradition that permeates Eastern Europe: celebrating the dearly departed on a special day, annually. As it turned out, the anniversary of Maria's mother passing came up the other day. So, she appropriately related the story of making "koliva" - which is boiled wheat mixed with nuts, dried fruit, and sugar - is said to be food that is good for the souls of the dead. I asked Maria about how villages like Thronos can play a role in preserving and sharing Cretan culture. Here is what she had to say:

"I think it is vital for the people who grew up and who still live in these rural areas to take the initiative in promoting, sharing, and preserving these traditions in their purest form. It is also imperative that vested parties collaborate in creating a moral path for promoting small village customs. In this way, we can continue to provide a genuine local experience, while ensuring our local heritage is preserved."

This "koliva" tradition and many similar traditions on Crete create the unique tapestry of alternative touristic value outside beach and resort travel. This is where ongoing concerns like the Cretan Gastronomy Center in Argyroupoli present a "best case" for culinary promotion as one facet of culture. A paper (PDF) from 2015 entitled; "Gastronomy as a Form Of Cultural Tourism," expresses perfectly the catalytic nature of the trend we are seeing develop. According to the experts from the Technological Education Institute of Piraeus and the Ministry of Tourism, today's experienced travelers are seeking quality and a more in-depth knowledge of the culture and lifestyle of the inhabitants of a place. Furthermore, their work suggests that gastronomy and the ritual nature of food play a vital role in attracting tourists to any cultural destination. In summary, the study indicates the need to market individual regions as unique gastronomic destinations. This notion that led me to consult a local expert in food traditions in another part of the Rethymno Prefecture.

The unique nature of "place" has a pivotal role for Greece and Crete. As a "for instance" - a custom that began several years ago when Argyroupoli did not have electricity and public lighting accentuates an already rich cultural hub. The locals honor the death of Jesus and enlighten the path followed by the shepherd's litany with "candles" (torches of reeds & starvils) which they light and carry on their shoulders. This new custom, interlaced over the top of this village's ages-old traditions, teaches us a valuable lesson if we pay attention. Lappa (Argyroupoli) you see, is a place of legend and lore like so many Cretan villages. But even myths from antiquity may die sooner or later unless preserved organically and commercially. Adaptation is vital in this regard. While steadfast preservation of cultural events should be carried out, it's necessary for stakeholders to exhibit some flexibility if younger generations are to adapt tradition.

This brings me to a last point of sustainability, to which the Crete Travel Massive and these other organizers have invited noted researcher Dr. Stavros Hatzimarinakis of the University of Patras to "Traditions: Powerful Tools for Rural Tourism Development." to present the discussion, "Linking Tourism Consumption to Domestic Products." Dr. Hatzimarinakis is a leading expert in best practices for sustainable tourism as it applies to specific touristic ecosystems. For instance, his work asks the all-important question; "What is the correct balance of visitors, local production, and the consumption at the end of the touristic product chain?" Also speaking on the sustainability aspect at this Argyroupoli are Anastasia Chatziioannou, Project Manager at EyeWide Digital Marketing Agency; Anula Galewska, Business Manager at Urban Adventures and a Co-Founder of Travindy; and Mihaela Lica Butler, award-winning travel journalist and a reporter for HospitalityNet.

Traditions and culture as a touristic product, sustainability and viability in a sensitive natural ecosystem, and flexibility to meet the demands of the new age of travel, these and other issues will be covered in the upcoming conference. But for me, this is only a good start toward optimizing the positive potential of the island of Crete, where my family and I now live permanently. Our reasoning for being a part of this mini-summit and other initiatives is not merely to help create and market an economic win for businesses on Crete. For short-term economic wins cannot help Crete or Greece's navigate the current financial tempest. To preserve this island's history, culture, and traditions a "complete" solution is needed. And any total solution must include the stakeholders in the countryside, at the heart of what Crete was and is in the first place.

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RELATED TOPICS: Greece, Greek tourism news, Tourism in Greece, Greek islands, Hotels in Greece, Travel to Greece, Greek destinations , Greek travel market, Greek tourism statistics, Greek tourism report

Source: hospitalitynet.orgDiyar Al Muharraq, one of the leading urban developers in Bahrain, has officially inaugurated the Aysha Al Rasheed Mosque in Hai Al Sherooq.

The mosque was opened on March 20 in the presence of the chairman of the Sunni Waqf Directorate, Dr Rashid bin Mohammed Al Hajeri.

The occasion was also attended by the relatives the benefactor of the Aysha Al Rasheed Mosque, headed by Samir Yacoub Al Nafisi, and the chairman of Diyar Al Muharraq, Abdulhakeem Alkhayyat, along with other prominent public figures and Hai Al Sherooqs residents.

Dr Al Hajeri congratulated the residents of Hai Al Sherooq and Diyar Al Muharraq on the opening of the new mosque. He stressed on the importance of mosques shaping the values of each member of society, and thanked all who worked and donated for the project, specially mentioning the Al Rasheed and Al Nafisi families for their sponsorship of the construction of the mosque.

Samir Yacoub Al Nafisi expressed his pleasure in witnessing the completion of the construction of the Mosque and its inauguration.

Abdulhakeem Alkhayyat said: We are honoured to have been a part of the manifestation of this holy place, which would not have been possible without the generous donation of Mrs Aysha Abdulla Al Rasheed. The establishment of the myriad mosques within Diyar Al Muharraq reflects our keenness to consolidate the virtuous values of the people of Bahrain, as we work hand in hand with the Sunni Waqf Directorate to further strengthen the foundations that preserve the principles of Islam.

The Aysha Al Rasheed Mosque occupies a total area of 739 sq m and is designed to accommodate more than 160 worshippers. The mosque has a dedicated prayer hall for women and a multi-purpose men's majlis that is suitable for hosting various community events.

Diyar Al Muharraq is a unique master-planned city for the people of Bahrain offering range of housing options and quality lifestyle. Diyar Al Muharraq offers a cohesive mix of residential and commercial properties with a strong line up of projects aimed at creating a long-term and sophisticated township.  TradeArabia News ServiceA high-level delegation headed by the UAE Minister of Economy, Eng Sultan bin Saeed Al Mansoori, participated in the UAE-Japan Strategic Economic Partnership Forum, which was recently held in Tokyo, Japan.



Mishal Kanoo, chairman of The Kanoo Group (UAE & Oman) participated in the forum, said a statement.



Kosaburo Nishime, Japanese State Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry, welcomed the UAE delegation, it said.



The recently concluded forum was attended by key UAE government entities and Japanese officials that included Abdullah Bin Ahmed Al Saleh, undersecretary of the Ministry of Economy for Foreign Trade Affairs; Khalid Omran Al Ameri, UAE Ambassador to Japan; Hiroyuki Ishige, chairman and chief executive officer, Japan External Trade Organization (Jetro), together with senior management of select major public and private business sectors including The Kanoo Group, it added.



In cooperation with the Department of Economic Development - Abu Dhabi and the UAE Embassy in Tokyo, the official mission was organised in line with the Ministry's efforts to further strengthen bilateral relations between the two countries and to explore investments opportunities.



The programme kick-started with a message about The Impact of Abenomics on Japanese Economy and its Issues, addressed by Atsushi Nakajima, chairman, Research Institute of Economy, Trade and Industry (RIETI). It was held at Japan External Trade Organization (Jetro), a Japanese government-related organisation that promotes mutually beneficial trade and investment relations between Japan and other nations.



The highlights of the mission consisted of business meetings, networking and match-making as well as arranged company meetings and site visits. These sessions aim to discuss ways to enhance mutual cooperation between the business sectors.



Mishal Kanoo delivered his keynote speech titled, Learning from the Japanese Experience. In his message, he stressed his admiration to the Japanese key attributes such as hard work, honesty, cleanliness, excellent work ethics and efficient environmental policies, among others, which are vital qualities towards partnership.



He also introduced The Kanoo Group and possible expansion opportunities. Furthermore, he gave emphasis on reinforcing The Kanoo Group's partnership and economic relations with its Japanese affiliates. At present, group is a joint venture partner of the Japanese giant, Mitsui O S K Lines, one of the world's largest global multimodal transportation companies.



One of the highlights of his trip was a meeting with Yuriko Koike who currently serves as the governor of Tokyo, the city's first female governor, and previously the Minister of Defense in the cabinet of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.



Additionally, Mishal Kanoo along with Mahmood Mian personally met Yoshiyasu Fujiwara, president of TLV Co, one of the world's leading manufacturers of steam engineering products. For over 20 years, Kanoo Oil & Gas, a member of The Kanoo Group has been representing TLV as one of its product principals.



Kanoo, as part of the UAE delegation visited the Tokyo Port, one of the largest Japanese seaports, and one of the largest seaports in the Pacific Ocean; the Mori Building Company, a Japanese leading property management firm established in 1955; and the Foodex Japan 2018, Asia's leading international food and beverage trade show, and other top Japanese firms.



Lastly, Mishal Kanoo expressed his desire for potential future partnerships in areas of development in various sectors/divisions of The Kanoo Group across the Middle East.  TradeArabia News ServiceTurkeys jewellery exports to the UAE saw a 43 per cent year-on-year growth to $1.065 billion in 2017, from $744.9 million in 2016, according to figures from the Turkish Exporters Assembly (TIM).



A leader in jewellery production, Turkey ranks among the top three global producers with a total capacity to produce 400 tonnes of gold and 200 tonnes of silver jewellery annually, said a statement.



Known for its unique craftsmanship, excellent finishing and flexible production, Turkeys jewellery sector has enjoyed a strong customer base in the UAE, it said.



Serdar Kumbaraci, Turkish Trade Centre (TTC) UAE country manager, said: Turkish jewellery is recognised worldwide for its design, innovation and quality and so it comes as no surprise that our export figures are seeing such a notable increase.



We are instrumental in supporting the jewellery exporters to form a strong and mutually beneficial relationship with the UAE. In a very short span of time, they have proven their ability to deliver quality products that surpass market needs, he said.



Highlighting these exquisite designs is the Istanbul Jewellery Show, the worlds 5th largest jewellery exhibition, where UAE based buyers will have an opportunity to meet renowned manufacturers, wholesalers, suppliers, retailers and designers.



Taking place from today (March 22) to March 25 in Istanbul, the exhibition will showcase the latest in fine jewellery, diamonds, gems, watches, packaging, machinery and other related goods.



The exhibition will feature over 1,250 local and international jewellery companies and brands representing a wide range of product groups and sectors including gold, jewellery, diamonds, coloured stones, precious and semi-precious stones, pearls and silver, among others, it stated.  TradeArabia News ServiceBahrain national carrier Gulf Air is adding new routes for the summer with direct flights to be launched to two new cities each in Egypt and Saudi Arabia in June.



The carrier will fly direct to the Egyptian cities of Alexandria (thrice-weekly service from June 10) and Sharm El Shaikh (a twice-weekly service from June 16) and will also expand to the Saudi Arabian cities of Abha and Tabuk with five weekly flights from June 15.



The network expansion coincides with the airlines new aircraft deliveries, of which five Boeing 787-9 Dreamliners and two Airbus A320neos will enter Gulf Airs fleet by end-2018.



Gulf Air chief executive officer, Kresimir Kucko, said: We are delighted to launch two very attractive destinations in both Egypt and Saudi Arabia  countries with which we have held longstanding and historic ties and which continue to be an incredibly important market for Gulf Air. As we begin to welcome our new incoming fleet, our network will continue to expand giving our passengers greater travel options across the globe, onboard state-of-the-art aircraft and with superior products and services.



In Q2 2018 Gulf Air will further expand its network with direct flights to Bangalore and Calicut in India, alongside Baku in Azerbaijan and Casablanca in Morocco.



Gulf Air operates double daily flights or more to select destinations across the GCC, Mena region, Indian Subcontinent and Europe providing seamless connectivity for passengers travelling across its network via its Bahrain International Airport hub. - TradeArabia News ServiceNEX May Find More Suitors

Other exchanges and other firms just might come out of the woodwork in an attempt to scuttle the CME Group's possible purchase of the NEX Group.

We suspect other exchanges like ICE and the major European exchanges could be considering a bid for NEX Group, wrote Richard Repetto, a principal, equity research at broker-dealer Sandler ONeill in a research note.

The London Stock Exchange Group could benefit from the acquisition of NEX, Brad Bailey, research director, capital markets at industry analysis firm Celent, told Markets Media.

It would provide margining efficiencies on the front end, such as in packaged basis trades between futures and cash, he noted. "They could do that in FX too because NEX's EBS business is still one of the dominant venues in FX."

Such a tie-up would be the first time that an exchange would combine over-the-counter cash trading with listed futures, according to Repetto. We believe combining the underlying cash securities with the trading of the listed futures would be a first in the exchange industry and it would set a unique precedent.

Both analysts also did not discount the synergies that NEX's post-trade businesses like Traiana and TriOptima would bring to a possible new owner.

The post-trade business represents 44% of NEX's revenue and 31% trading profit for the six months ending on September 30, 2017, according to Repetto.

The LCH, which the LSEG partially owns, began clearing non-deliverable forwards last year and the acquisition would give the CME a pipe into that market.

The LSE could see transaction efficiencies on margining and other benefits with packaged basis-trades between futures and cash, added Bailey. "All of these different pieces could give the CME, or any exchange that bought NEX, powerful technology and fintech components."

Repetto did not discount the idea that the CME Group potentially might spin off the post-trade businesses.

Meanwhile, non-exchanges player, such as Cantor Fitzgerald, have to be thinking about acquiring NEX as well, according to Bailey.

Any firm looking to acquiring NEX has a short window to prepare possible counter offers. Under UK takeover law, the CME Group has until April 12 to announce a firm offer or that it has no intention of making an offer.

Repetto observed that the CME Group had not released financial data required for a possible offer since discussions "are in preliminary stages."

The news of the CME Group's plan to purchase NEX leaked out on March 15 during the FIA's annual meeting in Boca Raton, Florida. The next day, NEX acknowledged that the CME Group had approached it. On March 16, the exchange operator publicly confirmed its intentions.

For more information on related topics, visit the following channels:SGX and Smartkarma Roll-Out C-Suite Pilot Program

Singapore Exchange (SGX) and FinTech firm Smartkarma announced a partnership to roll out the C-Suite Pilot Program, a cloud-based platform that will enable SGX-listed companies to streamline their communication and data reporting to the institutional, analyst and investor communities.

Listed companies will be able to communicate seamlessly with analysts and investors, monitor sentiment, compare industry performance, and benchmark instantly against peers which will enhance investors understanding of and accessibility to these companies.

This is the first collaboration between Smartkarma and an exchange that will, for the first time, bring analysts, investors and listed companies into one unique network. Smartkarma and SGX are inviting C-level executives and investor relations professionals of SGX-listed companies to join the C-Suite Pilot Program to provide their input and feedback, with the objective of gaining a better understanding of local requirements and use cases specific to this market.

Chew Sutat, Head of Equities and Fixed Income, SGX, said, The global investment research landscape is fast evolving with the emergence of self-directed and independent research, as well as new regulations resulting in a reduction in investment coverage by financial institutions. We welcome this initiative by Smartkarma to build a solution that raises the profile of our listed companies amongst investors and analysts.

Among the SGX-listed companies which have signed up for the Pilot Program, Goh Toh Sim, Executive Director and Acting CEO, EC World Asset Management Pte Ltd, Manager of EC World REIT, said We are interested to participate in the Pilot Program to learn how digital solutions can help improve investor dialogue, data transparency and quality of analysis. This fits into our efforts to improve governance and contact with the investment research community.

Raghav Kapoor, Smartkarma CEO, said, We are thrilled to partner with the SGX as we equip corporates with an innovative platform to engage with the fast-growing independent research community, helping improve their perception with current and potential investors. This is coming at a time when banks and brokers are downsizing research desks due to regulation and cost constraints, resulting in a decline in the depth and breadth of coverage of certain stocks, assets and sectors. C-Suite addresses this need in the market, strengthening information flows in a MiFID II compliant way.

This latest initiative continues SGXs efforts in raising awareness of listed companies and making research information more accessible to investors. SGX has in recent years begun distributing thematic sector research reports and CEO profile interview articles on SGX-listed companies and held a series of research forums. To access SGXs markets research content, visit sgx.com/research.

For more information on related topics, visit the following channels:This Friday and Saturday, March 23 and 24, businesses in the Heart of Brevard will host a new annual event celebrating local arts and culture in downtown Brevard.

"Arts in March" will begin on Friday, March 23, from 5 to 8 p.m. The evening will be filled with gallery openings, artist meet and greets, menu specials at restaurants, live music at various locations and more.

On Saturday, March 24, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., the festivities will continue with artist demonstrations, art talks, featured artists, menu specials at restaurants, live music, fashion at stores and more.

Participating...On Sunday April 8, at 3 p.m. two spirited performers will take the Porter Center stage at Brevard College for the final concert of Brevard Philharmonic's artistic director search season. The guest soloist will be two time Grammy nominee and Avery Fisher career grant recipient, violinist Jennifer Frautschi, playing Concerto No. 1 in G Minor for Violin and Orchestra by Max Bruch.

Frautschi and the Philharmonic will be under the direction of the final artistic director/conductor candidate, James Fellenbaum, currently resident conductor of the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra and director of orchestras at the University of Tennessee.

The theme of the afternoon is "Free Spirits." Fellenbaum and the orchestra will also take flight with the delightful "Overture to Die Fledermaus" by Strauss and Dvorak's Symphony No. 8 in G Major, op.88.

The concert will open with the exuberant chords of the overture to the well known operetta, "Die Fledermaus, 'The Bat.'" The operetta premiered in 1874 at the Theater An Der Wien in Vienna and has been a part of its regular repertoire ever since. The piece was so well received at its debut that the audience interrupted the music several times with applause.

Frautschi joins the orchestra on stage next, with the Bruch, one of the most popular violin concertos in the repertoire. Bruch, 26 when he started the piece, labored for four long years on the composition. At last in 1868, after "having rewritten it over a dozen times," Bruch was ready to debut the piece, which was picked up and played so often by all the great violinists of the day to the extent that it overshadowed all of Bruch's' other works.

Frautschi has garnered worldwide acclaim as an adventurous classical musician with a remarkably wide-ranging repertoire. In addition to performing with orchestras all over the world as well as this country, Frautschi has appeared as soloist with Pierre Boulez and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Christoph Eschenbach and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at the Ravinia Festival, and at Wigmore Hall and Lincoln Center's Mostly Mozart Festival.

Her extensive discography includes several recordings for the Naxos label: the Stravinsky Violin Concerto with the Philharmonia Orchestra of London, conducted by the legendary Robert Craft, and two Grammy-nominated recordings with the Fred Sherry Quartet, of Schoenberg's Concerto for String Quartet and Orchestra [nominated for 'Best Instrumental Soloist Performance (with Orchestra)' in 2006] and the Schoenberg Third String Quartet [nominated for 'Best Chamber Music Performance' in 2011].

Reviewers have used words like, "...staggering energy and finesse," "...wonderfully nuanced," and "...a joyful, flawless performance." The Washington Post says of her, "Frautschi stole the show with a commanding, incisive and absolutely riveting performance."

After intermission, the Philharmonic takes on Dvorak with his Symphony No. 8 in G Major. An unusually cheerful and optimistic piece for Dvorak, it was composed in 1889 on the occasion of his election to the Bohemian Academy of Science, Literature and the Arts. The symphony is cheery and lyrical and draws its inspiration from the Bohemian folk music that Dvorak loved.

Fellenbaum is not only the resident conductor of the Knoxville Symphony, but also the music director of the Knoxville Symphony Youth Orchestra Association. His involvement with young people and music in the schools plus his innovative and dynamic programming for the Knoxville Symphony have added a bright dimension to the quality of life in Knoxville.

Frautschi's appearance is sponsored by Manuel Reyes-Otalora and Elizabeth Illg-Reyes.

A bonus this season is the opportunity to buy a raffle ticket for an oil painting by local Brevard artist Barbara Hawk. Raffle tickets are $30 each to benefit the Philharmonic's Music in the Schools Program and its other outreach work. The painting will be on display at the concert and at the Philharmonic's new office. The winner will be announced at intermission at the last concert, April 8. You need not be present to win.

The Brevard Philharmonic is a nonprofit organization comprised of local and regional musicians, presenting five concerts annually at Brevard College's Porter Center for the Performing Arts. Its mission is to inspire, educate and enrich our audiences through exceptional, professional musical performances and community outreach.

Tickets are on sale now and will be available at $25 to $35 per concert. Call (828) 884-4221 for details, stop in at our brand new office across from Brevard College at 521 N. Broad St., or use our Pick Your Seat option at http://www.brevardphilharmonic.org.On April 3 at 10 a.m. at Highland Books, Bob Brooks, will discuss his latest book, "The Clown Forest Murders." The mystery, co-written with his son A.C. Brooks, is set in a Brevard-sized town surrounded by forest in central New York State.

Some aspects of psychological pathology in the story afflict more than one character's life. Conditions from compulsive rage to amnesia to paranoia to schizophrenia come into play, and they are exacerbated by an unusual environmental factor: psychedelic mushrooms in the forest. Brooks will elaborate how these factors blend together to create the kind of...Brevard-Davidson River Presbyterian

Join the congregation at Brevard-Davidson River Presbyterian Church in worship as they explore the Hosannas proclaimed in daily life. Are these Holy Hosannas or False Hos-annas? The Rev. Sarah Grace Montgomery will be preaching and there will be a special Palm Parade for children and youth at the beginning of worship. After worship there will be a tutorial to make palm crosses in Davidson River Hall during coffee and lemonade hour.

Special music for the Palm Sunday worship services will be provided by the Westminster Bells and the Chancel Choir.

Sunday school meet from 9:45-10:45 a.m. for all ages.

Brevard FUMC

Brevard First UMC is hosting todays KOINONIA Lenten worship service at noon. The Rev. Cole Altizer, pastor of Rosman and Selica United Methodist churches, is the preacher for the day. The public is invited to stay for a light lunch afterwards.

Brevard First UMC, in partnership with Bread of Life, hosts the annual Empty Bowl Lunch on Saturday, March 24. Proceeds go to benefit the ministry of feeding the hungry through Bread of Life.

At Brevard First UMC, Palm Sunday will be a festive day as members remember when Jesus rode into Jerusalem on the way to the cross. It was a festive day then, too, as people lined the street, shouted their Hosa-nnas and waved palm branches. Worship will begin with the children leading the procession of the palms. Both childrens choirs will sing during the service, along with special music by the Chancel Choir.

Palm Sunday also marks the beginning of Holy Week in which several special worship services are being planned. On Maundy Thursday, St. Timothys UMC will host all of the United Methodist churches in Transylvania County for a service remembering the Last Supper. It starts at 6:30 p.m. On Good Friday, Brevard First UMC gathers at 7 p.m. for a Tenebrae service (Service of Darkness). Through music and scripture, members remember the last hours of Jesus on the cross.

On Easter Sunday, Brevard First UMC will again gather for a celebration service in the Porter Center at Brevard College at 10:30 a.m. A sunrise service is set for 7 a.m. on the lawn of First UMC (weather permitting).

Carrs Hill Baptist

Carrs Hill Baptist Church is holding a spaghetti dinner on Saturday, March 24, from 3-7 p.m. The cost is $7.50 per plate and includes salad, roll, dessert and drink. People can eat in or carry-out. For a quick pickup of your carry-out meals, order in advance by calling (828) 883-6236.

All proceeds will benefit the church building fund for expansion of the fellowship hall.

English Chapel

English Chapel United Methodist Church will host a community sunrise service at 7 a.m. on Easter Sunday, April 1.

The regular service will be held at 9:30 a.m. Breakfast will be provided after each event.

The church is located on 276 North just past the Visitor Center in Pisgah National Forest. Turn left on English Chapel Bridge Drive.

For additional information, call 884-4506.

First Baptist

On Wednesday, the church hosted two childrens special Easter activities. At 1 p.m. preschoolers searched for Easter eggs. They had to find one of each color and then redeem them for prizes to learn why we celebrate Easter. Elementary aged children met from 5:30-7 p.m. for a break-out activity entitled Retrieving the Last Bible. This had them searching for clues, trying to beat the clock, while using their biblical knowledge.

Donations for the Annie Armstrong Mission Fund will be accepted through April 1.

The Rosman Band will continue collecting gently used shoes through March. Boxes are available in the Welcome Center and fellowship hall. Shoes go to Third World countries and the band makes money as well.

Glady Branch Baptist

This Sunday, March 25, at 11 a.m. members of Glady Branch Baptist Church will be taking a close look at Luke 5:1-11, where Jesus turned fishermen into fishers of men. The church is also starting an adult Jiu-Jitsu class soon. Call the church office at 884-9671 if you are interested in participating.

Lutheran Church Of The Good Shepherd

Holy Week begins this Sunday with Palm Sunday services at 8:15 and 10:30 a.m. Both Maundy Thursday and Good Friday Tenebrae services begin at 7 p.m. Easter Sunday includes a breakfast from 9-10 a.m., with special services at 8:15 and 10:30 a.m. Join the church for any or all of the Holy Week services. All are welcome.

There will be no adult or childrens Sunday school on either March 25 or April 1.

NEXT Church

Pastor Dave Blackburn continues the series from Colossians. The sermon is Grand Central Station - It all comes back to Jesus, based on Colossians 2:1-5.

For the month of March, the Next Kids theme is Jump Ball: Finding Peace in the Madness. Kids will have fun learning what God says about making peace a priority in their relationships.

Pisgah Forest Baptist

On Sunday, March 25, Pisgah Forest Baptist Church will hold Sunday School at 9:15 a.m. for all ages. Morning worship begins at 10:30 a.m. with observance of the Lords Supper. Disciple Life and youth classes begin at 5 p.m., followed by evening worship at 6 p.m.

Rocky Hill Baptist

Rocky Hill Baptist will hold its Easter sunrise service at Pretty Place on April 1. Gates will open by 5 a.m. and visitors are directed to park at the big ball field on Camp Greenvilles property. The cantata will begin at 6 a.m. There are rest rooms available at the chapel. Following the service, Camp Greenville will again provide a buffet breakfast at a nominal cost.

The same cantata will again be performed inside at Rocky Hill Baptist Church at 11 a.m. on that Sunday. Everyone is invited to come to one or both cantatas. For more information, call Rocky Hills pastor, Dr. Leland Holland, at (828) 862-5611.

Sacred Heart Catholic

A special Lenten Retreat for Healing will be held March 22-24. All are welcome to experience this three-day event filled with praise and worship, prayer, lectures, Adoration and Mass. Guest presenters are Dr. Mary Healy and Father Ubald.

Healy is an author, professor and international speaker who was appointed by Pope Francis as one of the first three women ever to serve on the Pontifical Biblical Commission.

Ubald is a native Rwandan and victim of the 1994 genocide of over one million of his Rwandan countrymen. He will speak about losing 80 members of his family and 45,000 parishioners and following his miraculous survival, how he began to preach healing, forgiveness and reconciliation throughout the country.

The retreat begins on Thursday, March 22, at 6 p.m. in the Sacred Heart Fellowship Hall with a documentary about Ubald. At 7:15 p.m., Ubald will speak on The Power of Forgiveness, followed at 7:45 p.m. with Adoration and Benediction. This session will conclude at 9 p.m.

On Friday, March 23, the retreat will begin at 6 p.m. in the Sacred Heart Sanctuary with praise and worship. At 6:15 p.m., Healy will give her first talk. At 7:30 p.m. there will be a Healing Mass that will conclude at 9 p.m.

On Saturday, March 24, the Healing Retreat will move to Immaculate Conception (school gym) with praise and worship at 9 a.m. At 9:30, Healy will give her second lecture followed at 11 a.m. by a special presentation entitled Fearless. There will be a luncheon break at noon. Boxed lunches are available for $10 per person. Indicate when you register if you would like a boxed lunch. At 1 p.m., Healy will speak again followed by a Healing Service, and the event will conclude at 4 p.m.

There is no cost for this retreat but donations are appreciated. For registration or questions, contact Tricia Poche at [email protected] nc.org or Sacred Heart Church, 150 Brian Berg Lane, Brevard or Sherry Glatzer at [email protected] or Immaculate Conception Church, 208 7th Avenue W., Hendersonville.

St. Patricks Anglican

St. Patricks continues to observe Lent this Friday, March 23, with the Stations of the Cross beginning at 5:30 p.m. Afterwards, they will have a light supper and at 6:30, members will meet for this weekly class on Higher Criticism.

On Sunday, March 25, ongoing study of the Book of the Prophet Isaiah continues at 9:30 a.m. The Service of Holy Communion begins at 10:30 a.m. with the celebration of Palm Sunday. Serving at the altar will be the Very Rev. Nicholas Henderson, vicar; Rev. Mr. Robert Shoup, deacon; with Pippen Shepherd as acolyte. Karen Shank has closing duties. Ushers for this Sunday are Kathryn Hackett-Fields and Nancy Funston.

On March 29, St. Patricks will have a Maundy Thursday service at 5:30 p.m. On Friday, March 30, they will show a movie focusing on Christs Passion at 2:30 followed by the Good Friday Liturgy. There will be no evening class that night. On April 1, they celebrate the Resurrection of Our Lord at 10:30 a.m. There will be no Sunday school, but a light meal will be provided after the service before members head over to Cedar Mountain Home for a monthly service with the residents.

St. Philips Episcopal

The Shop of St. Philips welcomes spring with a grand reopening on Saturday, March 24. The shop will be filled with fresh seasonal merchandise in all departments: clothing and shoes, housewares, linens, decorative art and craft items, books and jewelry. Operated solely by volunteers, the shop continues its 55-year tradition of offering high quality, affordable goods, with proceeds funding outreach in the local community.

The Koinonia Lenten services conclude with the Good Friday service on March 30 at Bethel A Baptist Church. The noon service will be followed by a light lunch. All are invited.

Holy Week/Easter services are as follows:

Palm Sunday, March 25, at 7:45, 9, and 11:15 a.m. The Holy Week Walk will take place at 10:10 a.m. and all are invited to walk the way of Jesus during his last week on Earth. This is appropriate for all ages as we experience the events of Holy Week in story and song. Meet in the back parking lot at 10 a.m.

Holy Wednesday Eucharist and Healing Service is March 28 at 10:30 a.m.

Maundy Thursday, March 29, at 5:30 p.m. has foot washing.

Good Friday Liturgy is March 30 at 3 p.m.

Easter Vigil Service, March 31, is at 7:30 p.m. with Holy Communion followed by an Alleluia Celebration in Miller Hall. Remember to bring your bell!

Easter Sunday, April 1, 8:30 a.m. and 11 a.m. - both are Festival Eucharist with the Chancel Choir and brass. No Sunday school this day.

Annual St. Philips Parish Easter Egg Hunt on April 1 at 9:45 a.m., begins right after the 8:30 a.m. service, for children fifth grade and under with a designated area for toddlers. Bring your own basket!

St. Timothy UMC

This Sunday, March 25 is Palm/Passion Sunday. St. Timothy United Methodist Church will celebrate Jesus triumphal entry into Jerusalem as he and his disciples were met by a large crowd waving palm branches and shouting Hosanna and Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord.

Pastor Ann Duncan will be preaching on Jesus betrayal by Judas Iscariot and his arrest by a detachment of soldiers and officials from the chief priests and Pharisees. Jesus was taken to the high priest and then to Pilate who eventually, at the insistence of the Jewish hierarchy, had him crucified by Roman soldiers.

This Thursday, St. Timothy will join with other Koininia worshippers at First United Methodist Church. Following the service there will be a light luncheon. Sharing House will benefit from the free will offering.

On Maundy Thursday, St. Timothy will host other United Methodist churches in Transylvania County. The evening will begin with supper in the Fellowship Hall followed by worship with Pastor Ann Duncan preaching. Communion will be served and special music will be provided by the St. Timothy Chancel Choir.

Turkey Creek Baptist

Turkey Creek Baptist Church will be performing the Easter cantata, At The Cross, on Palm Sunday, March 25, at 11 a.m. All are invited to this special time. Turkey Creek is located at 805 Capps Road in Pisgah Forest.

Unitarian Universalist

Rev. Ilene Tompkins-Gillispie will deliver the sermon Our Cup Runneth Over at the 9:15 and 11 a.m. Unitarian Universalist services on March 11. The worship theme for this month is wealth.

All are welcome to join the Mens Group on Tuesday at 9 a.m. On Wednesdays at 9:30, come listen to the Eclectics.Monica C. Bickford of Rosman Elementary School recently attended a program held at the North Carolina Center for the Advancement of Teaching, a recognized national leader in professional development programming for our states teachers.

Increasing teacher effectiveness is fundamental to improving public education.

NCCAT provides teachers with new knowledge, skills, teaching methods, best practices and information to take back to their classrooms. NCCAT conducts a wide variety of high-quality professional development for pre-kindergarten through 12th-grade teachers. For more information...On Feb. 26, Mountain Sun Community School's Middle School class, along with middle school (Coyote) lead teacher Daniel Sprinkle and upper elementary lead teacher Becky Langer-man, traveled to Washington D.C., arriving in the early afternoon. The students played a large role in planning and executing the logistics of the trip, including creating a budget, navigating the city streets and helping decide which of D.C.'s treasures they would visit.

"Where to begin? Sitting on the House Floor in the Capitol Building? Multi-hour sing-a-thons in the van? Development of air travel and multi-stage turbine compressors? The Lincoln Memorial under the moonlight? Intensely fantastic Asian food? The real-life Constitution of the United States? Our trip was amazing and unforgettable. In fact, I find that we are still 'unpacking' and debriefing our experiences and memories from this journey," said Sprinkle.

On day one, the students explored the White House, the National Archives, and the Air and Space Museum. It was a busy day, and spirits were high. The students, who are well-versed in wilderness orientation, found the biggest challenge was orienting themselves in a vast urban environment.

"The primary challenge was orienting in the city, which was a big part of the adventure. When they came out of a building they had to take some time to remember where they were and which direction to go. It's a great learning experience to figure out how to navigate a city for our small-town, outdoor-oriented children. It was an opportunity for them to apply the navigation skills they learn on our wilderness trips to an urban environment," said school director Michael Brown.

Day two began with the Smithsonian Museum of American History. Over the course of the year, the class has been studying post-Civil War American history, including an emphasis on the African-American experience locally and nationally. Fittingly, the group was able to explore the museum freely together, and a big highlight was seeing the Greensboro sit-in counter.

The visit to the museum was followed by a visit to the Library of Congress, where students had an informative tour with a docent, exploring the Great Hall, the main reading room and the Thomas Jefferson Library. The students particularly enjoyed seeing a map featuring the first mention of the name "America" on it. The docent described it as the "birth certificate of America."

Next, they visited the Supreme Court, exploring the judicial branch of government and how its power checks and balances the might of the other two branches of government. That night, they visited the Lincoln Memorial and the Reflecting Pool after dark. They had some time to pause and reflect on their experience and all that they had been learning together.

"We stood where Martin Luther King Jr. stood for his, 'I Have a Dream,' speech at the Lincoln Memorial. Then we were able to line up the Washington monument and the Capitol building in such a way that we were not able to see them because we were lined up with them directly. We felt really heroic because we were standing in the middle of Washington, D.C. at night and it felt pretty amazing," said a Coyote student.

On the third day they went to the Smithsonian American Art Museum. With a docent, they explored Civil War art from multiple perspectives, including African- American and Native American artists. They also saw some more contemporary civil rights art, including paintings and installations. These pieces all provided great curricular links with their history studies this year.

Then, it was off to the Capitol to visit U.S. House Representative Mark Meadows' office. The Coyotes enjoyed meeting his aides and chief of staff. Then, they got a truly unique opportunity on their tour with one of the aides: access to the House floor. They were able to sit in the representatives' seats, learning a lot about the structure and process of the legislative branch.

"This kind of serendipitous opportunity is what great travel is about, and I'm so glad they had a chance to take advantage of it," said Brown.

Their last night was topped off by a quick visit to the National Science Museum and a meal in Chinatown, where they ate many new things and were doted on by the staff.

"The majority of these students have been at Mountain Sun since they were very young. It was wonderful to witness their pinnacle Mountain Sun years. They are a high functioning group who have genuine love and respect for one another," said Becky Langerman, lead Monarch teacher.

The Coyotes enjoyed their time in D.C. learning about the different branches of the government and seeing how they operate. They loved exploring the city and discovering the layers of history found there. In their everyday lives, they continue to reflect on their experiences in D.C. and use it as a steppingstone to dive deeper into the exploration of power throughout history and how it is distributed in our country today.Transylvania County Schools is seeking a qualified firm or individual to provide lawn care services for 9 schools and the Morris Education Center.

The initial contract will last from April 1, 2018 through March 31, 2019, with the expectation of at least a 3 year total commitment following satisfactory performance the first year.

Interested parties may contact :

Norris Barger

Director of Business Services

Transylvania County Schools

225 Rosenwald Ln

Brevard, NC 28712

884-6173

[email protected]

T/3/22/1TC-68153

_____________________________________________

IN THE GENERAL COURT OF JUSTICE

OF North CAROLINA

SUPERIOR COURT DIVISION

Transylvania COUNTY

17SP109

IN THE MATTER OF THE FORECLOSURE OF A DEED OF TRUST EXECUTED BY ANGELYN B. DAVENPORT AND EDGAR DAVENPORT DATED AUGUST 17, 2009 AND RECORDED IN BOOK DOC 511 AT PAGE 230 IN THE Transylvania County PUBLIC REGISTRY, North CAROLINA

NOTICE OF SALE

Under and by virtue of the power and authority contained in the above-referenced deed of trust and because of default in the payment of the secured indebtedness and failure to perform the stipulation and agreements therein contained and, pursuant to demand of the owner and holder of the secured debt, the undersigned substitute trustee will expose for sale at public auction to the highest bidder for cash at the usual place of sale at the county courthouse of said county at 10:00AM on April 5, 2018 the following described real estate and any other improvements which may be situated thereon, in Transylvania County, North Carolina, and being more particularly described as follows:

Situated in the City of Brevard Township, Tran-sylvania County, North Carolina and more particularly described as follows:

Tract 1:

Beginning at a stake in the South margin of Cemetery Road (formerly Third Avenue) of the Mackey Estate Subdiv-ision, the Northeast corner of Lot No. 36 and runs thence along the Southern margin of Cemetery Road, South 88 deg. East 240 feet to a stake; thence, South 16 deg. 31 min. West 497 feet to a stake (post), Jacksie Wolfes corner; thence, along Jacksie Wolfes line, North 86 deg. West 106 feet to a stone (iron rod), the Southeast corner of Lot No. 36; thence, along the line of Lot No. 36, North 1 deg. East 473 feet to the beginning.

Being all of that certain piece, parcel or lot of land, situate, lying and being in Brevard Township, Tran-sylvania County, North Carolina, and more particularly described according to a Plat thereof prepared by T. N. Davis, Registered Land Surveyor, on January 28, 1947.

Being the same parcel conveyed to Angelyn B. Davenport and Edgar Davenport from Clarence D. Burns, Executor of the Estate of Corine S. Burns, and Clarence D. Burns and Barbara C. Burns and Charles H. Stepp and Angelyn B. Davenport and Edgar Davenport, Heirs of Corine S. Burns (94-E-180), by virtue of a Deed dated 2/3/1995, recorded 2/9/1995, in Deed Book 384, Page 633, County of Transylvania, State of North Carolina.

And Being more commonly known as: 244 Cemetery Rd, Pisgah Forest, NC 28768

The record owner(s) of the property, as reflected on the records of the Register of Deeds, is/are Angelyn B. Davenport.

The property to be offered pursuant to this notice of sale is being offered for sale, transfer and conveyance AS IS, WHERE IS. Neither the Trustee nor the holder of the note secured by the deed of trust, being foreclosed, nor the officers, directors, attorneys, employees, agents or authorized representative of either Trustee or the holder of the note make any representation or warranty relating to the title or any physical, environmental, health or safety conditions existing in, on, at or relating to the property being offered for sale. Any and all responsibilities or liabilities arising out of or in any way relating to any such condition expressly are disclaimed. This sale is made subject to all prior liens and encumbrances, and unpaid taxes and assessments including but not limited to any transfer tax associated with the foreclosure. A deposit of five percent (5%) of the amount of the bid or seven hundred fifty dollars ($750.00), whichever is greater, is required and must be tendered in the form of certified funds at the time of the sale. This sale will be held open ten days for upset bids as required by law. Following the expiration of the statutory upset period, all remaining amounts are IMMEDIATELY DUE AND OWING. Failure to remit funds in a timely manner will result in a Declaration of Default and any deposit will be frozen pending the outcome of any re-sale. If the sale is set aside for any reason, the Purchaser at the sale shall be entitled only to a return of the deposit paid. The Purchaser shall have no further recourse against the Mortgagor, the Mortgagee, the Substitute Trustee or the attorney of any of the foregoing.

SPECIAL NOTICE FOR LEASEHOLD TENANTS: If you are a tenant residing in the property, be advised that an Order for Possession of the property may be issued in favor of the purchaser. Also, if your lease began or was renewed on or after October 1, 2007, be advised that you may terminate the rental agreement upon written notice to the landlord, to be effective on a date stated in the notice that is at least 10 days, but no more than 90 days, after the sale date contained in the notice of sale, provided that the mortgagor has not cured the default at the time notice of termination is provided. You may be liable for rent due under the agreement prorated to the effective date of the termination.

The date of this Notice is March 15, 2018.

Grady I. Ingle or Elizabeth B. Ells

Substitute Trustee

10130 Perimeter Parkway, Suite 400

Charlotte, NC 28216

(704) 333-8107

http://shapiroattorneys.com/nc/

16-087790

T/3/22/2TC-68114

_____________________________________________

NOTICE OF PRIMARY ELECTION

Transylvania COUNTY, North CAROLINA

Notice is hereby given pursuant to GS 163-33(8) that a primary election will be held on Tuesday, May 8, 2018 in Transylvania County, North Carolina to vote on the candidates for the offices of: US House of Representatives District 11 for the Democrat ballot. US House of Representatives District 11, District Attorney District 42, Board of County Commissioners, and Clerk of Superior Court for the Republican ballot.

Polls will be open from 6:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. on the day of the election, Tuesday, May 8. One-stop early voting will be held at the Election Center conference room, 150 South Gaston Street, Brevard. One-stop early voting will be open from Thursday, April 19 until 1:00 p.m. Saturday, May 5. The site will be open weekdays from 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. and Saturdays from 9:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.. Canvass will be held in the Election Center at 11:00 a.m. on Friday, May 18.

Absentee voting by mail is available. Requests for an absentee ballot must be made on an absentee request form (available on the State Board of Elections website, on the Transylvania County Board of Elections website, at the Election Center office and where one-stop voting is offered), and must be received in the Election Center office or any one-stop early voting site by 5:00 p.m. on Tuesday, May 1. Absentee voting requires the voter to complete an application on the return envelope that must be witnessed by two qualified persons or a notary public. Completed absentee ballots must be returned to the Election Center by 5:00 p.m. on Election Day (ballots received by mail after this time will be timely if received within three business days and postmarked by Election Day). Voters may receive assistance voting a mail-in absentee ballot from a qualified person of their choice. If the voter lives in a facility such as a nursing home, and the voters near relative or legal guardian is not available, the voter or the facility can arrange to have the county board of elections schedule a visit by a Multipartisan Assistance Team to provide assistance and serve as witnesses.

All residents of Transylvania County who have resided in the county for at least 30 days prior to Election Day and are registered to vote with the Democrat, Republican or Unaffiliated party in Transylvania County may vote in this election. Persons who are not already registered to vote in the county must register by Friday, April 13 to be eligible to vote in this election. Voters who are not registered in the county by that deadline may register and vote during one-stop early voting only, and will be required to provide documentation of their identity and residence. Voters who wish to change party affiliation or who have changed name or address must do so by the registration deadline. Voters who fail to timely make a change in name or address in the county must update the information when presenting to vote, and may be required to vote a provisional ballot.

Voters voting in person are entitled to assistance by an election official, or, if assistance is needed due to disability or illiteracy, by a qualified person of their choice. Voting sites are accessible to all voters. Curbside voting is available for voters who are not able to enter voting sites.

Persons with questions about registration, polling places, early voting, absentee ballots, a Multipartisan Assistance Team visit to a facility, or other election matters may call the Transylvania County Board of Elections Office at 828-884-3114 or visit the website at http://www.transylvaniaelections.org.

David P. Morrow, Chairman

Transylvania County Board of Elections

T/3/22/4TC-68141

_____________________________________________

NOTICE OF PUBLIC SALE

PURSUANT TO North Carolina G.S. 44A-43

1) Name and Address of Lienor:

ShowTime Mini-Storage

16792 Rosman Highway

Lake Toxaway, NC 28747

2) Date of Sale: Saturday,

March 31, 2018

3)Time of Sale:

10.00 A.M.

4) Place of Sale:

ShowTime Mini-Storage

16792 Rosman Highway

Lake Toxaway, NC 28747

5) The contents of following storage space to satisfy liens:

C42 (McCrae)

T/3/15/2TC-68085

_____________________________________________

NORTH CAROLINA

Transylvania COUNTY

IN THE GENERAL COURT OF JUSTICE

SUPERIOR COURT DIVISION

BEFORE THE CLERK

FILE: 18 E 87

IN THE MATTER OF THE ESTATE OF HOWARD K. REESE, DECEASED

NOTICE TO CREDITORS AND DEBTORS

Having qualified as Limited Personal Repre-sentative of the Estate of Howard K. Reese, deceas-ed, late of Transylvania County, North Carolina, this is to notify all persons, firms and corporations having claims against the said Estate to present such claims to the undersigned on or before June 22, 2018, or this Notice will be pleaded in the bar of their recovery. All persons indebted to said Estate will please make immediate payment.

This the 22nd day of March,2018.

Genis Sue Reese, Executor

Estate of Howard K. Reese

Erica M. Erickson, Attorney at Law

Strauss Attorneys, PLLC

104 N. Washington St.

Hendersonville, NC 28739

(828) 696-1811

T/3/22/4TC-68143

_____________________________________________

STATE OF North Carolina,

IN THE GENERAL COURT OF JUSTICE

SUPERIOR COURT DIVISION

COUNTY OF Transylvania

BEFORE THE CLERK

FILE NO. 18-SP-08

NOTICE OF SALE

IN THE MATTER OF: Foreclosure by Michael K. Pratt, Trustee of a Deed of Trust executed by Clifford Singleton, dated August 7, 2012, and recorded in Document Book 622, page 476 in the Office of the Register of Deeds for Transylvania County, North Carolina

Notice is hereby given that under and by virtue of the power of sale contained in the deed of trust executed August 10, 2012, by Clifford Singleton, to Michael K. Pratt, Trustee (the Trustee) for Harry Levy and Florence Levy as Co-Trustees of the Levy Family Revocable Trust dated July 7, 2008, Thomas Marsalona, as Trustee of the Thomas Marsalona Revocable Trust dated April 16, 2009 and Angelina Marsalona, as Trustee of the Angelina Marsalona Revocable Trust dated April 16, 2009, (the Beneficiaries) in the original amount of Four Hundred Thousand and 00/100 Dollars ($400,000.00), recorded in the Office of the Register of Deeds for Transylvania County, North Carolina, in Document Book 622, page 476, default having been made in the payment of the indebtedness secured by said deed of trust, the Beneficiaries, having made demand for sale and a proper hearing having been held before the Clerk of Superior court on the 14th day of March 2018, and the Clerk having found that the Trustee may proceed under the instrument, the undersigned Trustee will offer for sale at public auction the property located in Hogback Township, Tran-sylvania County, North Carolina, and more particularly described in said deed of trust as follows:

Being all of Lot No. 3-C as shown on a plat prepared by E. Roger Raxter, dated May 4, 2003, and recorded in Plat File 10, Slide 170, Records of Plats for Transylvania County.

Along with a forty foot right of way to U.S. Highway 64 as shown on said plat, and the right to use the existing common gravel parking area as shown on said plat, along with others of like right.

Subject to the pro rata responsibility to maintain the common gravel parking area and that portion of the forty foot right of way used by Grantees, along with others who have the right to use such common gravel parking area and forty foot right of way.

Being all of the property described in a deed from Thomas Marsalona, as Trustee of the Thomas Marsalona Revocable Trust u/a/d April 16, 2009; and Angelina Marsalona, as Trustee of the Angelina Marsalona Revocable Trust u/a/d April 16, 2009, to Clifford Singleton, dated April 23, 2012, and recorded in Document Book 622, page 462, of the Transylvania County Registry and in a deed from Harry Levy and Florence Levy, as Co-Trustees of the Levy Family Revocable Trust u/a/d July 7, 2008, to Clifford Singleton, dated April 23, 2012, and recorded in Document Book 622, page 469, of the Transylvania County Registry.

Said public auction will be held on April 5, 2018, at 10:00 oclock A.M. at the Courthouse door of the Transylvania County Courthouse in Brevard, North Carolina.

The record owner of the property, as reflected on the records of the Register of Deeds for Transylvania County not more than 10 days prior to posting this Notice of Sale is Clifford Singleton.

Said property is to be sold for cash subject to unpaid taxes, all prior liens, restrictions and easements of record and assessments, if any. The Trustee reserves the right to require of the last and highest bidder a cash deposit of five percent (5%) of the amount of the highest bid or Seven Hundred Fifty Dollars ($750.00), whichever is greater.

This the 22nd day of March, 2018.

Michael K. Pratt, Trustee

Ramsey & Pratt, P.A.

35 North Gaston Street

Brevard, NC 28712

(828) 884-4113

T/3/22/2TC-68142

_____________________________________________

STATE OF North CAROLINA

COUNTY OF TRANSYLVANIA

IN THE GENERAL COURT OF JUSTICE

SUPERIOR COURT DIVISION

FILE NO. 18-E-61

EXECUTORS - ADMINISTRATORS NOTICE

Having qualified as Co-Executors of the Estate of Lolan M. Eubanks of Transylvania County, North Carolina, this is to notify all persons having claim against the Estate of Lolan M. Eubanks to present them to the undersigned on or before June 1, 2018 or the claim will be forever barred thereafter.

All persons indebted to said estate please make immediate payment.

Dated: March 1, 2018.

Cathy E. Kitchen

2631 Tanasee Gap Road

Balsam Grove, NC 28708

Coleen E. Galloway

2913 Diamond Creek Road

Lake Toxaway, NC 28747

T/3/1/4TP-67944

_____________________________________________

STATE OF North CAROLINA

COUNTY OF TRANSYLVANIA

IN THE GENERAL COURT OF JUSTICE

SUPERIOR COURT DIVISION

FILE NO. 18-E-75

EXECUTORS  ADMINISTRATORS NOTICE

Having qualified as Administrator of the Estate of John S. Ebaugh, Jr. of Transylvania County, North Carolina, this is to notify all persons having claim against the Estate of John S. Ebaugh, Jr. to present them to the undersigned on or before June 8, 2018 or the claim will be forever barred thereafter.

All persons indebted to said estate please make immediate payment.

Dated: March 8, 2018.

Attorney: Brian P. Philips

Beth Renae Bolin

2513 Alleghany Loop

Virginia Beach , VA 23456

T/3/8/4TP-68027

_____________________________________________

STATE OF North CAROLINA

COUNTY OF TRANSYLVANIA

IN THE GENERAL COURT OF JUSTICE

SUPERIOR COURT DIVISION

FILE NO. 18-E-97

EXECUTORS - ADMINISTRATORS NOTICE

Having qualified as Executors of the Estate of Hale Siniard, Jr. of Transylvania County, North Carolina, this is to notify all persons having claim against the Estate of Hale Siniard, Jr. to present them to the undersigned on or before June 22, 2018 or the claim will be forever barred thereafter.

All persons indebted to said estate please make immediate payment.

Dated: March 22, 2018.

Linda S. Nelson

64 Blue Bird Ln.

Brevard, NC 28712

David Siniard

302 Heath Rd.

Penrose, NC 28766

Claudia S. Bradley

1627 Little River Campground Rd.

Pisgah Forest, NC 28768

T/3/22/4TP-68138

_____________________________________________

STATE OF North CAROLINA

COUNTY OF TRANSYLVANIA

IN THE GENERAL COURT OF JUSTICE

SUPERIOR COURT DIVISION

FILE NO. 18-E-81

EXECUTORS  ADMINISTRATORS NOTICE

Having qualified as Executor of the Estate of Melba Earlene Palmer McBride of Transylvania County, North Carolina, this is to notify all persons having claim against the Estate of Melba Earlene Palmer McBride to present them to the undersigned on or before June 22, 2018 or the claim will be forever barred thereafter.

All persons indebted to said estate please make immediate payment.

Dated: March 22, 2018.

Gloria Dawn McBride

439 Kings Creek Rd.

Brevard, NC 28712

T/3/22/4TP-68154

_____________________________________________

Transylvania County Schools is requesting statements of qualifications to provide surveying services for additions and renovations to Brevard High School and Rosman High and Middle Schools.

For more information and a copy of the Request for Qualifications please contact Norris Barger, Director of Business Services, Transylvania County Schools, at 828-884-6173 or [email protected]nc.org by 3:00 p.m. Monday March 26, 2018.

T/3/22/1TC-68148

_____________________________________________

STATE OF North CAROLINA

COUNTY OF TRANSYLVANIA

IN THE GENERAL COURT OF JUSTICE

SUPERIOR COURT DIVISION

FILE NO. 18E95

EXECUTORS - ADMINISTRATORS NOTICE

Having qualified as Co-Administrators of the Estate of James Michael Furgerson of Transylvania County, North Carolina, this is to notify all persons having claim against the Estate of James Michael Furgerson to present them to the undersigned on or before June 22, 2018 or the claim will be forever barred thereafter.

All persons indebted to said estate please make immediate payment.

Dated: March 22, 2018.

Sandra Kaye Furgerson

5221 Whitewater Road

Sapphire, NC 28774

William Dan Furgerson

5221 Whitewater Road

Sapphire, NC 28774

T/3/22/4TP-68132

_____________________________________________

STATE OF North CAROLINA

COUNTY OF TRANSYLVANIA

IN THE GENERAL COURT OF JUSTICE

SUPERIOR COURT DIVISION

FILE NO. 17-E-161

EXECUTORS - ADMINISTRATORS NOTICE

Having qualified as Executor of the Estate of Ann Frances Talley of Transylvania County, North Carolina, this is to notify all persons having claim against the Estate of Ann Frances Talley to present them to the undersigned on or before June 1, 2018 or the claim will be forever barred thereafter.

All persons indebted to said estate please make immediate payment.

Dated: March 1, 2018.

Abner Alvin Talley

407 West Eutaw Street

Saluda, SC 29138

T/3/1/4TP-67912

_____________________________________________

STATE OF North CAROLINA

COUNTY OF TRANSYLVANIA

IN THE GENERAL COURT OF JUSTICE

SUPERIOR COURT DIVISION

File No: 18-E-67

EXECUTORS  ADMINISTRATORS NOTICE

Having qualified as Executor of the Estate of Nancy J. Trescot of Transylvania County, North Carolina, this is to notify all persons having claim against the Estate of Nancy J. Trescot to present them to the undersigned on or before June 1st, 2018 or the claim will be forever barred thereafter. All persons indebted to said estate, please make immediate payment.

This the 1st day of March, 2018.

John B. Trescot, Exec.

1416 Valley Rd.

Lancaster, PA 17603

Attorney:

The Neumann Law Firm, PLLC

David C. Neumann, Atty.

9 Park Place West, Ste. 102

Brevard, NC 28712

828-884-6575

#13630

T/3/1/4TC-67960

_____________________________________________The Transylvania County Democratic Party has announced that Vijay Kapoor, member of the Asheville City Council, will be the keynote speaker at its annual convention to be held on Saturday, March 24, at the Transylvania County Elect-ion Center at 150 Gaston St. in Brevard. Doors open at 9:30 a.m. and the program will begin at 10 a.m.

Kapoor said he focused on some issues such as city spending and traffic, which resonated with voters citywide. When he started his campaign, Kapoor said many told him a south Asheville resident didnt stand a chance to be on the council.

What I learned...editorial@tribune.com

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, March 21

A middle-aged Sikh couple entered a house in Sector 37 posing as a couple looking for a house on rent and robbed an elderly woman of her gold jewellery which she was wearing on Wednesday. The accused, before fleeing, tied the victim, who sustained injuries, and locked her inside a room.

The victim, Kamlesh Grover (66), who stays on the ground floor, was alone at home and was standing outside in the verandah when a man, wearing a turban, and a woman arrived outside the house on a white Activa scooter.

Since a to let board was put up on the first floor of the house, the couple told the victim that they wanted a house on rent. The first and second floor of the house is vacant and the couple insisted on seeing the house, said Ramnath Garg, the victims husband.

The victim went to the second floor with the couple, who took her into one of the rooms. The accused gagged the victim and pulled her earrings and a gold chain which she was wearing, he said.

The accused then tied the victims hands with her stole and escaped from the spot after bolting the door from outside.

Bhopal Singh, the victims immediate neighbour, said he heard a loud noise from the house following which he got suspicious and rushed to the victims house. I went upstairs and found the door bolted from outside. I opened the door and found the victim injured, he said.

In the meantime, another neighbour, Sanjeev, also rushed upstairs. The victim was then brought to the ground floor and the police were informed about the incident.

The police reached the spot and scrutinised the footage of CCTV cameras installed in the area. Sources said the police had recovered the CCTV footage in which both accused were seen riding an Activa scooter. The victim was taken to the GMSH, Sector 16. The victim received injuries on her face, ears and neck.editorial@tribune.com

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, March 21

The echo of the police action in Punjab against drug addicts is being heard in Chandigarh, it seems. The Chandigarh Police on Wednesday not only claimed that the snatchers on the prowl in the city were drug addicts and repeat offenders, but also submitted that the crackdown on drug trade and drug abuse in Punjab had contributed to a rise in snatching incidents in the city.

Visibly unimpressed with the measures taken by UTpolice to arrest the incidents of snatching, the Punjab and Haryana High Court today directed the UT SSP to remain present during the hearing on April 3.

Taking up the matter, the High Court also impleaded the Union Home Ministry as a respondent in the petition filed in public interest by advocate Hari Chand Arora. The newly added respondent was asked to update the Bench on the decision taken on the proposal reportedly sent by the Chandigarh Administration for amending the IPC to make snatching a non-bailable offence, attracting a sentence of up to 10 years.

As the case came up for resumed hearing, the Chandigarh Police filed a short reply. Among other things, it claimed that various steps had been initiated for curbing chain snatchings and for bringing the offenders to book. The police added the needle of suspicion of the Chandigarh Police was revolving around paying guest accommodations. All SHOs have been directed to conduct proper verification regarding the antecedents of paying guests, the police said.

The reply also stated: It has been seen that persons who stand as surety for such accused are either not traceable or are fictitious.rchopra@tribunemail.com

New Delhi/Chandigarh, March 22

The ED on Thursday searched the premises of its ex-Deputy Director and others in connection with a money laundering probe in Rs 600 crore alleged ponzi scam case.

The ED officials said the houses of its former officer Gurnam Singh, advocate Puneet Sharma and another person in Chandigarh and Mohali are being raided since morning under provisions of the Prevention of the Money Laundering Act (PMLA).

Singh has been the investigating officer of the ponzi case and was relieved from the Enforcement Directorate (ED) in January last year.

Officials claimed that Singh, the ex-Deputy Director of the EDs Chandigarh zone, was allegedly taking bribes of about Rs 4 crore to Rs 6 crore in purported connivance with Sharma.

The raids had been launched to gather more evidence in this context, they said.

ED Director Karnal Singh had issued stern directives that instances of corruption in the organisation would be not be tolerated.

The agency had conducted multiple searches in this case last year and it had also arrested the absconding agent of the alleged chit fund firm under scanner--Kamal K Bakshi--under the anti-money laundering law.

The case, the ED had said, pertained to thousands of investors who were systematically lured and cheated of more than Rs 600 crore by floating ponzi or pyramid schemes assuring exorbitant returns.

It had said that the alleged mastermind of the scheme is a Malaysian identified as Mugundhan Gangam who floated two firms--Ms Unipay 2U Marketing Private Limited and Unigateway2U Trading Private Limited--in India.

Describing the modus operandi of the alleged cheating in this case, the agency said the early investors of the ponzi schemes floated by the firm were paid exorbitant returns in order to win over their confidence.

When thousands of people across the country invested crores of rupees in the said ponzi schemes, the companies stopped the payouts or monthly returns (since October 2010) and gradually siphoned off crores of rupees of investors, it had said.

The company manipulated by using a web of bank accounts and layering of money through a plethora of such accounts, the ED alleged.

The agency had registered a criminal FIR in the case based on an earlier complaint of other central investigative agencies. PTISarika Sharma

Sarika Sharma

For decades, a bundle of papers lay unopened at the house of Bhagat Singh's younger brother. When it was opened recently, it brought along a new insight into the life of the revolutionary who embraced death at the age of 23. The most intriguing documents from the cache are pages from an unfinished biography of Bhagat Singh by his younger brother Ranbir Singh. Having seen the man up close and personal, his account sifts fact from myth that Punjab and the rest of the country has liked to perpetuate in the 87 years since his death.

The papers were found from the house of Ranbir Singh's son, Maj-Gen Sheonan Singh (retd). The former Army officer says that, for years, he had seen his father taking notes in Urdu, never being able to finish it.

The writing takes one back to Bangay, their tiny village with just about 70 houses, in what is now Lyallpur in Pakistan. He says Bhagat Singh was physically weak and liked to piggyback on others, entertaining them with funny anecdotes en route. At the village pond, the boys would play in water, come out and again play on its muddy banks, only to get dirty again. Just like a typical village boy... So, what shaped Bhagat Singh into a revolutionary, one of the rare freedom fighters to have earned the sobriquet of shaheed or martyr?

Early on, his father would bring for the brothers pamphlets on biographies of freedom fighters from across the world and stories of their struggle, like the French Revolution. That was his first brush with freedom and might have set him thinking, pining for the same for his country. Even as a young kid, he would spend hours lost in thought.

A shadow of his elder brother Jagat Singh, when they would be moseying through the village, people would ask them what they wanted to be. Jagat Singh, who published a cartoon magazine at the age of six, would say, I will run a newspaper. Bhagat Singh would say: I will sow guns. His revolutionary streak was reflected even at that age.

Dissent from the British government and love for the nation ran in the family. The earliest influence on him was that of his uncle, Ajit Singh, who, along with freedom fighter Sufi Amba Prasad, formed one of the first revolutionary groups in India. Ajit Singh had been exiled to Iran along with Amba Prasad and people would ask the three-year-old where his uncle was. He would say he has gone to a faraway place, to kill the British and he would return after he had shooed them away. This too was to come true. The British left India in 1947, the year Ajit Singh returned. However, he died the night India gained freedom.

Ranbir Singh recounts Bhagat Singh's conversations with friends as later shared with him by these people. To one, he told that the biggest heroes, the greatest influences on his life were uncle Ajit Singh and his comrades, who put the nation before their lives. He said that the story of their exile, their selfless sacrifices shaped his thinking, that their journey to freedom had become too long. He often compared their life to that of the leaders of the nation, who he thought were petty and driven by motives.

The grandfather, Arjun Singh, was a nationalist at heart too. When it was time for the two brothers to be given the sacred thread, janeu, Arjun Singh announced to the people gathered: I have decided to prepare these boys to serve the nation. They will sacrifice their lives for the country. While Jagat Singh fell ill the next year and died, the words were to come true for Bhagat Singh in 1931, when he was hanged to death by the British in the Lahore Conspiracy Case.

A Punjabi translation of the book is now coming out. Chandigarh-based publisher Harish Jain says that the edition would be the most authentic account of the martyr's childhood. Going by the papers I found from his house, he had started collecting material related to Bhagat Singh four-five years after his death, though he started writing a little late, around 1940s, when he came of age. There are papers from pre-Partition India. However, it is unfortunate that he could not retain most of the papers. Apparently, he gave them away to people who came visiting him. Those papers never came back.

He says both Ranbir and his son General Sheonan have never felt the need to cash in on Bhagat Singh's legacy; they didn't want to live in that glow. That's the stand they took in opposition to the other brothers and sisters, he says.

Fearless, at 15

Driven by the desire to die for the country, hordes of people would take off on the march for freedom. The 13th Shaheedi Jatha (jathas were at the core of the Gurdwara Reform Movement started by the Sikhs in the early 20th century) was on its way to Jaito and the British government was under pressure to not let any public support come its way. There were orders to not to give ration to these freedom fights. But 15-year-old Bhagat Singh had to, and he had to make a point. So, he went, with food on his head as the police looked on.

sarikakullu@gmail.comKama Maclean

Kama Maclean

Associate Professor, South Asian and World History School of Humanities and Languages, UNSW, Australia

Today marks the 87th anniversary of the execution of Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev. In my book, A Revolutionary History of Interwar India, I have argued that Bhagat Singh's famous hat portrait, and the extraordinary campaign around it, explains how Bhagat Singh in particular became so famous (see pic). By posing for his photograph, Bhagat Singh was providing a pivotal ingredient for a publicity campaign that created a powerful movement around his pending martyrdom. The press was vital in spreading images of this and other photographs of revolutionaries that brought their politics to life.

The power of this arresting image, in concert with the way it was deployed in the media and disseminated widely throughout India in the charged context of his prolonged trial and execution, extends our understanding of how Bhagat Singh became so famous, so quickly. The degree to which this was successful is evident in Jawaharlal Nehru's autobiography, Toward Freedom, on Bhagat Singh's popularity in the wake of his death:

Bhagat Singh  became a symbol; the act [of violence] was forgotten, the symbol remained, and within a few months each town and village of the Punjab and to a lesser extent in the rest of northern India, resounded with his name. Innumerable songs grew up around him and the popularity that the man achieved was something amazing.

The campaign began with the print media, but rapidly moved beyond what was, in the 1930s, a realm of limited reach. The portrait soon circulated independently of text, in the form of reproductions, facsimiles, posters and even badges, in which the hat served to symbolise Bhagat Singh and his imperial challenge.

The Tribune, then based in Lahore, closely covered and documented the news of the HSRA's trials, hunger strikes and the carrying out of their sentencing. The Tribune was the first newspaper to publish the class photograph of Bhagat Singh, taken at Lahore Central College in 1924, just days after his arrest on April 13, 1929.

The Tribune also managed to get access to, and publish, a harrowing postmortem photograph of Jatindranath Das on the front page of September 15, 1929 (see pic). This photograph communicated in gruesome terms the struggles of the revolutionaries who had been undergoing hunger strikes in prison. The hunger strikes, in protest at prison conditions and the brutal treatment of revolutionaries in court by police, substantially slowed the trial. The daily coverage of the trial in the press merely led to greater support for the revolutionaries among the general public. The Assistant Editor at The Tribune, Mr Jang Bahadur Singh, recalled that he and his wife had given shelter to women revolutionaries, Durga Devi Vohra (the widow of Bhagwati Charan) and Kumari Sushila, in 1930.

A Special Ordinance eventually enabled the Lahore Conspiracy Case prisoners to be trialed by a Special Tribunal, in the absence of the accused. Mr Jang Bahadur Singh was called to testify in the Lahore Conspiracy Case trial, in 1930. He was asked to affirm whether HSRA writer Bhagwati Charan Vohra had visited The Tribune office in 1928, to get HSRA manifestoes printed. He responded boldly that it was revolting to my conscience to answer any question or make any statement as a witness so long as the accused are not here to cross examine me and scrutinize my statement.

In an interview held at the University of Cambridge, Mr Jang Bahadur Singh said that this simple episode is illustrative of the fact that everybody was then inspired by the thought-wave that had been released by the patriotic action of these revolutionaries.  Sardar Bhagat Singh and his colleagues were sentenced to death and they were hanged and that shook the country to its very roots. From one end of the country to the other, there was an unprecedented agitation. I was present in Lahore on the day on which the executions were carried out. I cannot recall any other occasion on which there was such deep and widespread commotion in Lahore as that occasion.

In 1931, the widespread dissemination of the portrait in the press and also in poster format enabled the masses to imagine Bhagat Singh independently of imperial allegations that he was a terrorist, and to visualise the legendary stories, songs, poems and sayings that quickly grew up around him.

Shortly after his execution, probably during a condolence meeting in Lahore, unknown mourners made a blood sacrifice in the memory of Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev. Slicing their thumbs, they let the blood fall on to the front page of The Tribune of March 25, 1929, which had announced the executions, and carried Bhagat Singh's photograph.rchopra@tribunemail.com

Singapore, March 22

An Indian-origin physiotherapist was sentenced to 11 months jail and three strokes of the cane for molesting a teenage girl patient during treatment.

Luke Manimaran Degarajoo, 43, had touched the 18-year-old inappropriately during a physiotherapy session massage at his clinic about a year ago. He was sentenced on Wednesday.

The teen victim had turned up at the clinic on March 25 last year at 6.20 pm (local time) seeking treatment for back and hip pain, according to a report by The Straits Times.

Luke told her the session would last 15 minutes and directed her to a massage bed in a therapy room.

Meanwhile, the victims friend waited outside and the door to the room was left half-shut.

When the massage started, the teenager was fully clothed. But then Luke told her to remove her top and loosen her shorts.

The victim complied as she thought it was part of the treatment. While massaging her, Luke molested her twice after rolling down her underwear and shorts.

Deputy Public Prosecutor Gail Wong said, The victim felt uncomfortable by the contact but did not shout or ask for help as she was unsure if it was part of the treatment or not.

The massage ended when the victim heard Luke speaking to her friend who had glanced into the room and was surprised to find her in the nude.

After the session ended, Luke gave her a report detailing his assessment of her condition. She did not complain initially as she was not sure whether the way he touched her was part of the treatment.

The teenager told her friend about her ordeal when they left the clinic at around 7.40 pm (local time) before lodging a police report about four hours later.

Luke is out on SGD 10,000 bail after the court granted his request to defer his sentence as he had to settle some personal matters.

He will surrender himself at the State Courts on April 20 to begin serving his sentence, according to The Straits Times report.

For outraging the girls modesty, Luke could have been jailed for up to two years and fined or caned. PTIeditorial@tribune.com

Vishal Joshi

Tribune News Service

Thaska Ali, Kshtra, March 22

The family of late Sikh activist Gurbaksh Singh Khalsa on Thursday accused the district authorities of playing mischief with the circumstances leading to his death on Tuesday.

Khalsa had reportedly jumped off a water tank in Thaska Ali village of the district.

He was protesting for the release of Sikh political prisoners who have completed their sentence.

The police have booked unidentified police personnel on the charge of murder, whereas the family is demanding that they should have been booked for abetment to suicide.

Khalsas elder brother, Jarnail Singh, told The Tribune: Nowhere in my complaint have I stated that Khalsa was killed. Still, the case was registered under the Section 302 of the IPC on Wednesday night. This has been done to make the case weak and protect erring police officials.

During a dharna on Wednesday, Additional Deputy Commissioner Dharamvir Singh had accepted the demand for lodging a case of abetment of suicide and suspending erring cops. But the authorities have failed to fulfil its promise, he said.

Agitated, the family refused to cremate the body. Khalsas father, Ajit Singh, said the family would not perform the last rites till their demand for suspension of erring policemen was not met.

It is up to the sangat to take a call on cremating the body. My son was holding a peaceful demonstration, but he died due to hasty police action, he alleged.

Ajit Singh said the bhog ceremony would be observed at the historic Gurdwara Lakhnaur Sahib in Ambala on March 29.

Jarnail said several Panthic leaders from Punjab and Haryana had shown solidarity with the family. Any further action will be undertaken with their consultation, he added.

Superintendent of Police Abhishek Garg, meanwhile, said suspension of cops or any other action would depend on the investigation. The probe will ascertain the circumstances that led to Khalsas death, he added.

A water tank is not an authorised place to protest. Police personnel were trying to bring down Khalsa from the potential life-threatening spot. He jumped off the 80-ft tank when officials were trying to rescue him. Hence, this makes no case against cops on duty, the SP added.amansharma@tribunemail.com

Vishal Joshi

Tribune News Service

Thaska Ali (Kurukshetra), March 22

Family members of late Sikh activist and former militant Gurbaksh Singh Khalsa on Thursday accused the district authorities of allegedly playing mischief with the circumstances leading to his death on Tuesday.

Jarnail Singh, Khalsas elder brother, told The Tribune that his complaint against unidentified police personnel, who allegedly forced Khalsa to jump off water tank, is converted into murder case.

Jarnail said he had nowhere stated his complaint that Khalsa was killed but still the case was registered late last night under Section 302 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC).

I still stand firm that it was not a murder but abetment of suicide. During the dharna yesterday, additional deputy commissioner Dharamvir Singh had duly accepted the demand of lodging a case of abetment of suicide. But with an intent to protect the erring police officials, the authorities invoked a wrongful section of the IPC to make it a legally weak case, he said.

Agitated over the alleged negligent attitude of the authorities, the family refused to cremate the body.

Jarnail said several panthic leaders from Punjab and Haryana had shown solidarity with the family. Any further action would be undertaken with their consultation, he said.

The ADC had publicly accepted the demands of lodging a case under Section of 306 (abetment of suicide) and suspension of the cops whose hasty decision to take Khalsa down from the water tank here led to his death. However, the district police authorities have now refused to honour the promise, he said.

Meanwhile, Khalsas father Ajit Singh said the family would not perform the last rites till their demand of suspension of policemen was not met.

Now, it is up to the sangat to take a final call on cremating the body. My son was holding a peaceful demonstration but he died due to unorganised and hasty police action, alleged the elderly man.

He said Khalsas bhog would be observed at the historic Gurdwara Lakhnaur Sahib in Ambala on March 29.

Meanwhile, SP Abhishek Garg said it was assured that suspension of cops or any action in the case would depend upon the investigation. A thorough probe will reveal under which circumstances the unfortunate incident took place, he added.

Overhead water tank is not an authorised place for any protest. The police personnel were trying to bring down Khalsa from the potential life-threatening spot. He jumped off the 80-ft high tank when the officials were trying to rescue him hence it makes no case against the cops on duty, said the SP.editorial@tribune.com

Sushil Manav

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, March 22

After dinner diplomacy at Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattars residence on Wednesday , which is being seen as an attempt to mollify disgruntled ministers who met over tea on Tuesday, all is well is the message coming out from the BJP-led state government.

Khattars dinner meeting came a day after his senior ministers Anil Vij, Ram Bilas Sharma, OP Dhankar and Vipul Goel met over a cup of tea, and close on the heels of disillusionment expressed by some party leaders at a meeting headed by BJP national general secretary Kailash Vijayvargiya.

However, Vij left Wednesdays meeting before dinner could start fueling the speculations further.

The minister later clarified that he had to leave early because of his pre-occupation in Ambala. I dont have any issues with the CM. If I had any, I am the one who do not hesitate to speak out, Vij said.

Before his dinner meeting with the ministers, Khattar spent hours with BJP workers from Nuh, Sirsa, Hisar and Panchkula. The meeting was attended by party MLAs from these districts, and also by those who lost the 2014 Assembly elections. Khattar listened to their grievances and had lunch with them.

Senior BJP leaders, including ministers, however, have denied differences within the party. The CMs dinner meeting with the ministers was a routine matter where a number of issues were discussed. The reports of bickering are totally unfounded, said Rajiv Jain, media in-charge of the BJP.

Jains wife Kavita is a senior minister in the Khattar Cabinet with the portfolio of Women and Child Development, Urban Local Bodies and some others.

A senior minister, who was among the four who met over tea at the Secretariat on Tuesday, said there was nothing unusual in the dinner or tea meetings.

We first met at Vijs office and then all came to my office as we thought that we should have another cup of tea. Ministers not seeing eye-to-eye could be the news for the media not our meetings, said a minister.

He said during their dinner meeting, discussions were held on the upcoming procurement season of mustard and wheat and how to ensure that farmers did not have to suffer.

He added that discussions were also held on the Bharat Kesari Dangal which is underway at Bhiwani, and the 3rd Agri Leadership Summit to be held at Rohtak from March 24 to 26.

A minister considered close to Khattar claimed that the type of authority the CM enjoyed over his ministers and MLAs now was much better than ever before.

Speculations were rife about disenchantment of some senior ministers ever since voices of resentment were heard at the meeting of Haryana BJP leaders chaired by Vijayvargiya on March 15.

Sources said some party leaders had voiced their displeasure over the manner in which bureaucracy ignored their directions.

Some ministers, according to sources, were particularly sore over the attitude of bureaucrats in the Chief Ministers office.editorial@tribune.com

Geetanjali Gayatri

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, March 22

Government funding to Haryanas universities and colleges will be linked to their performance from the forthcoming academic session with focus on research and employability.

The idea is to raise the quality of learning in educational institutions so as to make pass-outs employable and, in turn, incentivise better results.

The Higher Education Department, Haryana, will evaluate institutions annually on several parameters such as academics, teaching, inclusiveness, social impact and collaboration with other institutions. The parameters have already found acceptance among Vice-Chancellors.

Sources said linking performance with the sanction of funds was in the process of being finalised. Institutions scoring 70 per cent or above will get 100 per cent funding, while those who reach the optimum level of cent percent will get additional funds.

For colleges and universities in the under 70 per cent category, the department will propose a budget cut. These institutions will be given a chance to improve the quality. After exhausting the option of warnings, purse strings will be tightened for those failing to improve.

As per the new initiative, universities and colleges will be marked for several accomplishments. A maximum of 20 per cent marks have been set aside for teaching quality alone. Under this parameter, the institution  college or university  will have to give details of number of pass-outs every year, the average attendance of students and faculty and student satisfaction surveys.

Universities and colleges will have to specify the number of examination days. This has been especially incorporated because the department received feedback that the institutions were stretching examination days, resulting in fewer teaching days.

The status of several accreditations will count, while institutions can avail five per cent marks for MoUs signed with national or international institutions on curriculum, student or faculty exchange programmes. Ten per cent marks have been set aside for employability which will depend on the percentage of placements and availability of job-oriented courses. We have had a meeting with the Finance Department for incentivising universities that will perform well. The idea has found favour with Vice-Chancellors. A similar exercise is being undertaken for colleges as well. All colleges will now be required to apply for accreditation if they have completed five years, said Jyoti Arora, Principal Secretary, Higher Education.editorial@tribune.com

Mukesh Tandon

Tribune News Service

Panipat, March 22

Unidentified youths looted an industrialists house in Devi Murti Colony here on Thursday after holding all members of the family hostage. They decamped with Rs 5 lakh, jewellery worth more than Rs 15 lakh and other valuables.

The police said the youths entered the house of textile industrialist Sanjay Chaudhary around 4 am by scaling a wall and breaking a window grill.

Chaudhary and other members of his family were sleeping at that time. He had solemnised the engagement of his younger daughter, Subi, a few days ago. The wedding is scheduled in a few days.

The police said the miscreants first entered the room of Anmol, the son of Chaudhary, on the first floor and woke him up. At gunpoint, they took him to his fathers room.

All members of the family  Chaudhary, his wife Kiran, Anmol, two daughters and granddaughter  were held hostage. Chaudhary and Anmol tried to oppose the miscreants, but were assaulted. The women members of the family were also beaten up when they tried to save Chaudhary and Anmol.

The miscreants tied the hands of all members of the family and locked them in a bathroom before fleeing with cash and jewellery.

The incident came to light when a neighbour heard the cries of Sanjays family members. He informed the police and, subsequently, the bathrooms lock was opened.

The DSP, Rajesh Lohan, said the case had been registered and five teams of the police were searching for clues about the miscreants.

We have collected some clues from the house and CCTV footage. As of now, it seems six to seven youths robbed the family, he added.editorial@tribune.com

Ashok Raina

KANGRA, MARCH 22

Three youths from Kangra district serving in Merchant Navy, including the ship captain, have been kidnapped for ransom by Nigerian pirates and the ship hijacked.

Raghubir Singh (62), a resident of Nagrota Surian and father of one of the kidnapped crew members, who is also captain of the ship, on Thursday told The Tribune that his son Sushil Kumar, 37, father of two children, had been working in Merchant Navy for the last 13 years.

He has worked with different companies but currently he was working with Max Marine Services in Cortnou Benin since November 26 last year. He said the ship was owned by Nesto. Raghubir Singh said the family last talked to Sushil Kumar on January 31. After that, there was no communication from him till March 12.

The family was disturbed and got in touch with Nesto, the owner of the ship to enquire about his welfare. Raghubir said the family was allegedly misguided by ship owner. Every time, the family contacted him, he gave wrong information that all crew members were safe.

Raghubir Singh said it was on March 12 that the family received a satellite call from Nigeria. Speaking to the family, Sushil informed them that some Nigerian sea pirates had hijacked his ship and kidnapped three Indian crew members, including him. He revealed that the other two kidnapped crew members are Pankaj Kumar from Samloti and Ajay Kumar from Palampur, both from Kangra district.

He said after this satellite call the family contacted the ship owner Nesto again and talked to him about the latest situation. Nesto told them that he was trying to negotiate with the pirates and he was ready to give the ransom money to get the three released from their clutches. The family alleged that Nesto was misleading them.

He said the family had approached the Foreign Ministry and the Prime Ministers Office (PMO) but without any response.

The three families have demanded that the Government of India should come forward to ensure the safe return of the three kidnapped Merchant Navy crew members.editorial@tribune.com

New Delhi, March 22

A special court on Thursday granted bail to former Chief Minister Virbhadra Singh, his wife and three others in the Rs 7-crore money laundering case.

Special Judge Arvind Kumar granted relief to Virbhadra and his wife Pratibha Singh, who were present in the court in response to the summons issued against them on the last date of hearing.

The court also granted bail to Universal Apple Associate owner Chunni Lal Chauhan, besides other accused Prem Raj and Lawan Kumar Roach.

All accused got relief on furnishing a personal bond of Rs 50,000 and one surety of the same amount each.

During the proceedings, Enforcement Directorate (ED) counsel Nitesh Rana opposed their bail plea, seeking judicial custody for them.

The court, however, granted them bail, considering they were not arrested by the ED during investigation.

On February 12, the court had issued summons against the accused saying there was prima facie enough evidence against them.

The ED had chargesheeted 83-year-old Virbhadra, accusing him of projecting around Rs 7 crore proceeds of crime as agricultural income in connivance with his wife and others and had invested the sum in LIC policies.  PTIeditorial@tribune.com

Ehsan Fazili

Tribune News Service

Kralpora (Kupwara), Mar 22

Two serene villages in the remote area of north Kashmir are mourning the death of two security personnel, who lost their lives in the two-day-long gunfight with militants in the Halmatpora area, about 20 km from here.

Mohammad Ashraf Rather (35), a Territorial Army soldier from Reshigund village, and Mohammad Yousuf Baja (45), a special police officer (SPO) of the Special Operations Group of the J&K Police from Kachhama village in Kralpora area, were the only hope of livelihood for their poor families. As the families and relatives mourned their deaths, hundreds of people from adjoining villages converged on the two villages for participation in the last rites. Besides being sole breadwinners for their families, both security men had another thing in common. After toiling for years, they were to shift to their newly constructed houses soon.

Hundreds of people silently joined the funeral prayers of Mohammad Yousuf at Kachhama. The family and friends lamented the apathetic attitude of the successive governments for not having regularised the services of the SPO despite having served for nearly 18 years. Now, the only hope of the family is the deceaseds eldest son Iqbal, who has done MBA but is still unemployed.

Iqbals 11-year-old sister Showqeen sat in front of their house, unaware of the tragedy that had befallen on the family which was to shift to the newly constructed house on Thursday.

In the nearby Reshigund village, hundreds of locals waited for the body of Mohammad Ashraf Rather since Wednesday night. Ashraf is survived by wife Fehmeeda and two-year-old daughter Nafia. Ashraf was the only hope of sustenance for his extended family that also comprises his parents and six siblings  three brothers and three sisters. He had visited his home last Sunday and spent about an hour with the family.editorial@tribune.com

Tribune News Service

Srinagar, March 22

The Army and J&K Police paid floral tributes to the five security personnel killed in a fierce gunfight in the frontier Kupwara district on Wednesday.

The Army held a solemn ceremony at Badamibagh cantonment, where Lt Gen AK Bhatt, Chinar Corps Commander, and all ranks paid homage to the three soldiers killed in the gunfight on behalf of the nation. In a show of solidarity, representatives from other security agencies also joined in paying their last respects to the martyrs, Srinagar-based defence spokesman Col Rajesh Kalia said.

Havildar Jorabar Singh, Naik Ranjeet Khalkho and Naik Mohammad Ashraf Rather were killed in an anti-militancy operation in Halmatpora, Kupwara .

Jorabar Singh, 45, had joined the Army in 1993 and hailed from Rait village in Kangra, Himachal Pradesh. He is survived by his wife and three children.

Ranjeet Khalkho, 33, hailed from Dudhakhuti village in Ranchi, Jharkhand, and had joined the Army in 2001. He is survived by his parents, a brother and three sisters.

Mohommad Ashraf Rather, 35, had joined the Army in 2004. He belonged to Reshigund village of Kralpora in Kupwara, Kashmir, and is survived by his wife and a daughter.

Floral tributes were also paid to the two policemen  Senior Grade Constable Deepak Thusoo of Nagrota and Special Police Officer Mohammad Yousuf of Kachhama in Kupwara  killed in the Kupwara gunfight.

Member of Parliament Fayaz Ahmad Mir led the police and security forces personnel in paying tributes to the two slain policemen in Kupwara. In Srinagar, Inspector General of Police Swayam Prakash Pani led the police and security forces officers in the wreath-laying ceremony for the two policemen.

Deepak Thusoo is survived by his aged parents, wife, 12-year-old son, 7-year-old daughter and an unmarried sister, a police spokesman said.

Mohammad Yousuf is survived by his aged parents, three sons and two minor daughters, the youngest being five years old.editorial@tribune.com

Tribune News Service

Jammu, March 22

Tension prevailed in the University of Jammu (JU) on Thursday after the students of different departments turned violent and ransacked the Vice Chancellors secretariat and the office of the Dean Students Welfare (DSW) against the alleged thrashing of a fellow by the latter on the campus.

DSW Prof Satnam Kour, however, said she was allegedly manhandled and pushed by the students, who also made an attempt to strangulate her. She said she thrashed the student in self-defence.

The university has decided to lodge an FIR against the students who ransacked the office of the DSW and the VC Secretariat, and damaged the property of the university. The police, however, said they were yet to receive a complaint from the university.

According to the security personnel of the university, some students had given a call for a strike on the campus in support of their demand for Wi-Fi facility and quality food inside hostels, action against the IGP (Traffic), J&K, for entering the campus without any permission and issuing challans to the students.

In the morning, some students locked the main gates of the campus, restricting the movement of visitors and faculty members. Later, they also locked the rear gate of the campus, a security guard said, adding: We called the DSW and apprised her of the situation. We started getting calls from faculty members, who asked us to open the gates.

The DSW rushed to the main gates and broke open the chains. She had arguments with the protesting students but the traffic was restored through main gates. She then went to the rear gate and asked the students to open it. As she was trying to open the gate, some students entered into heated arguments, which took an ugly turn, the guard added.

In the melee, the DSW was allegedly pushed and manhandled by a student. Following which she took the stick of the security guard and thrashed the student with it. The incident enraged the other students who went on rampage and ransacked the office of the DSW and the VC secretariat. They smashed the windowpanes and damaged the official property.

They raised slogans against the university administration and the DSW, demanding her removal from the post. They also sought the registration of an FIR against the DSW. Soon senior police officers rushed to the campus and tried to control the situation.

I was abused, pushed and manhandled by the student. Whatever I did it was in self-defence. The students even tried to strangulate me. Dont I have the right to act in self-defence? It was unprecedented that students tried to strangulate me. Nobody will tolerate this kind of goondaism. I have also decided to approach the women commission, the DSW told The Tribune.

However, students alleged that they were holding a peaceful protest, but the DSW provoked them to act like this. It is our democratic right to demonstrate against the shortcomings in the system, but the DSW badly hit one of our fellow students for no fault of his. There should be an FIR against her as well, they alleged.

University VC Prof RD Sharma, who was not on the campus when incident took place, visited the DSW office and assessed the loss to the official property. Later, he chaired a meeting of the senior officials of the university and presidents of different organisations of employees.

FIR to be lodged

"The university has decided to lodge an FIR against the identified students while four of them have been suspended for creating indiscipline and damaging official property. Some outsiders, who are unhappy with the JUs recent achievements, are instigating the students and misusing them for their personal interests. A committee has been constituted to look into the matter."  Prof RD Sharma, Jammu University Vice Chancellor

Students want DSW booked

"We were holding a peaceful protest, but the Dean Students Welfare provoked us to act like this. It is our democratic right to demonstrate against the shortcomings in the system, but the Dean badly hit one of the protesters for no fault of his. There should be an FIR against her as well."  Protesting students Acted in self-defence

"I was abused, pushed and manhandled by the student. Whatever I did it was in self-defence. The students even tried to strangulate me. Don't I have the right to act in self-defence? I have also decided to approach the women commission."  Prof Satnam Kour, Dean Students Welfare, Jammu universityeditorial@tribune.com

Tribune News Service

Srinagar, March 22

National Conference working president Omar Abdullah today said the overwhelming sense of despondency in J&K must be replaced with hope and sustained peace to usher the state out of the current political vacuum and morass it has been left in by the powers that be.

Omar made the comments while addressing a workers convention at Nasarpora in Budgam district.

He further said the continued alienation of the youth and the spurt in local youth resorting to armed militancy was a grim reminder of how political opportunism and U-turns by the ruling dispensation had pushed the state back into the throes of turmoil and chaos.

Since the past three years, the situation in the state, especially Kashmir, has deteriorated in every aspect as the youth are still reeling under the psychological ramifications of the PDPs brazen sell-out to the BJP. Every promise made by the PDP to seek votes in 2014 stands broken without any regret, he added.

Stating that while the situation on the LoC continued to be grim and precarious with growing casualties, Omar said internally a renewed spurt in local militancy had indicated widespread disenchantment with the present government.

He said if PDP leaders printed hoardings claiming credit for peace initiatives between India and Pakistan, including the bus service and the LoC trade, they should also accept the blame for every shell that decimates peace on the Line of Control and results in loss of lives.

They promised us dialogue between New Delhi and Islamabad and internally between New Delhi and stakeholders in Kashmir as a smokescreen to justify their alliance with the BJP. Where is that dialogue? What happened to apparently the very basis of your compromise? Omar asked.singhking99@yahoo.com

Shiv Kumar

Tribune News Service

Mumbai, March 22

Ignoring last-minute calls from leaders in the ruling BJP, social activist Anna Hazare is all set to begin his indefinite fast on Friday to bring about a competent Lokpal and ensure fair prices for farmers.

According to Hazares associates at Ralegan Siddhi in Maharashtras Ahmednagar district, the Gandhian has turned down last-minute overtures from ministers in the Devendra Fadnavis government to call off his hunger strike.

Earlier this week, Maharashtras Irrigation Minister Girish Mahajan had a meeting with Hazare and sought to persuade him to give up his fast. However Hazare, who has put together a team of around 6,000 people across the country for the purpose, indicated that he would continue his fast till Prime Minister Narendra Modis government came up with a concrete proposal to empower the Lokpal.

Hazare will leave for Rajghat from Maharashtra Sadan on Friday morning. After paying respects to the Father of the Nation, Hazare will visit Shahidi Park where he will pay tributes to martyrs. He will then leave for Ramlila Maidan in the capital where he will start his campaign, an associate of the activist said from Ralegan Siddhi.

Earlier, Hazare had indicated that the beginning of his satyagraha would coincide with Shaheed Diwas or Martyrs Day, which falls on Friday. Hazares supporters told reporters in Ahmednagar that the 6,000-plus people who have vowed to participate in his new agitation had given undertakings that they would not join politics.

A core team of 20 members has been drawn from Maharashtra, Delhi, Punjab, Rajasthan, Orissa and other places. Apart from professionals, Hazares team also comprises ex-servicemen.uttara@tribuneindia.com

Shiv Kumar

Tribune News Service

Mumbai, March 22

Ignoring last minute calls from leaders in the ruling BJP, social activist Anna Hazare is all set to begin his indefinite fast to bring about a competent Lokpal and ensure fair prices for farmers.



According to Hazares associates at Ralegan Siddhi in Maharashtras Ahmednagar district, the Gandhian has turned down last-minute overtures from ministers in Chief Minister Devendra Fadnaviss government in Maharashtra to call off his hunger strike. Earlier this week, Maharashtras Irrigation Minister Girish Mahajan had a meeting with Hazare and sought to persuade him to give up his fast.



However Hazare, who has put together a team of around 6,000 people cross the country for the purpose, indicated that he would go continue his fast till Prime Minister Narendra Modis government came up with a concrete proposal to empower the Lokpal.



Hazare will leave for Rajghat from Maharashtra Sadan on Friday morning. After paying respects to the Father of the Nation, Hazare will visit Shahidi Park where he will pay tributes to martyrs. He will then leave for Ramlila Maidan in the capital where he will start his campaign, an associate of the activist said from Ralegan Siddhi.



Earlier, Hazare had indicated that the beginning of his satyagraha would coincide with Shaheed Diwas or Martyrs Day, which falls on Friday.



Hazares supporters told reporters in Ahmednagar that the 6,000-plus people who have vowed to participate in his new agitation have given undertakings that they would not join politics.



The core team of 20 members have been drawn from Maharashtra, Delhi, Punjab, Rajasthan, Orissa and other places. Apart from professionals Hazares team also comprise of ex-servicemen as well, according to his office.pardeepdhull@gmail.com

New Delhi/Pokhran, March 22

India on Thursday successfully test-fired the Brahmos supersonic cruise missile with an indigenous seeker at Pokhran test range in Rajasthan.

Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said the missile hit the target with pin-point accuracy and the success will further bolster Indias national security.

The test firing comes three months after the Brahmos cruise missile was successfully test-fired for the first time from the Indian Air Forces frontline Sukhoi-30 MKI combat jet.

Formidable Supersonic Cruise Missile #BrahMos was successfully flight tested at 8:42 AM today at Pokhran test range, Rajasthan. The precision strike weapon with Indian-made seeker flew in its designated trajectory and hit the target with pin-point accuracy, Sitharaman tweeted.

The range of the missile, an Indo-Russia joint venture, can be extended up to 400 km as certain technical restrictions were lifted after India became a full member of the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) last year.

Brahmos is a joint venture between DRDO of India and NPO Mashinostroyenia (NPOM) of Russia.

The Defence Minister congratulated the DRDO on today successful test firing.

Brahmos missile is the heaviest weapon to be deployed on Indias Su-30 fighter aircraft.

Work has already begun to integrate the Brahmos supersonic cruise missile on 40 Sukhoi combat aircraft which is expected to fulfil the critical needs of the Indian Air Force in the wake of evolving security dynamics in the region. PTIsinghking99@yahoo.com

New Delhi: India has added a new dimension to its abilities to fire the supersonic cruise missile BrahMos. On Thursday morning, the missile was flight-tested at the Pokhran test range in Rajasthan for the first time with an indigenously-made seeker.

So far, the seeker, a vital technology to guide the missile towards the target, used to come from Russia. The seeker was developed by Research Centre Imarat, Hyderabad, in collaboration with other DRDO laboratories.

BrahMos is a joint collaboration between India and Russia.  TNSsinghking99@yahoo.com

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, March 22

Parliament on Thursday cleared the Payment of Gratuity (Amendment) Bill, enhancing the limits of the welfare measure following appeal by Chairman M Venkaiah Naidu for its passage.

The Rajya Sabha, which witnessed disruption for the past fortnight, passed without discussion the Bill cleared by the Lok Sabha earlier.

The Bill paves the way for doubling the limit of tax-free gratuity to Rs 20 lakh.

The Bill was necessitated to tide over the anomalies surfacing in the implementation of existing Payment of Gratuity Act in the light of recommendations of the 7th Central Pay Commission.

The measure aims to put on a par employees of private and public sector undertakings and autonomous organisations under the government who are not covered under the Central Civil Services (Pension) Rules.

Besides enabling the Centre to fix the ceiling of tax-free gratuity, the Bill also empowers it to fix the period of maternity leave through an executive order. It also notifies the period of maternity leave as part of continuous service and proposes to empower the Centre to notify the gratuity ceiling from time to time without amending the law.monicakchauhan@gmail.com

Ajay Banerjee

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, March 22

The government has removed the fee cap it had imposed on educational expenses it pays to children of martyrs or those disabled in action.

In July 2017, the fee paid to such kids was capped at Rs 10,000 per month, impacting some 3,200 students in schools, colleges and professional institutions.

This was to result in meagre saving of less than Rs 4 crore per annum, say sources, the Tribune had first reported this in its edition dated December 1, 2017.

The Ministry of Defence had agreed to review the matter and referred the same to the Ministry of Finance, which has issued instructions for the same.

Its order, dated March 21, said, Educational expenses shall continue without the cap of Rs 10,000.

It, however, has small, caveat and adds that fee would be paid only for government run or government recognised schools and colleges, autonomous institutes under the Central government.

Sources said most top private educational institutes at the school level or the level of professional colleges running MBA, MMBS or Engineering streams are under the recognised category.

The scheme to bear the cost of education of children of martyrs was announced in the Lok Sabha on December 18, 1971, two days after the Pakistani forces surrendered to the Indian forces at Dacca (now known as Dhaka).

The scheme, introduced in the 1972 session, allowed complete exemption of tuition and other fee school onwards.

In 1990, the MoD extended the scheme to children of officers and jawans killed or disabled in Operation Meghdoot (Siachen) and Operation Pawan (Sri Lanka). Another amendment in 2003 included children of those killed or disabled in counter-insurgency operations.amansharma@tribunemail.com

Smita Sharma

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, March 22

Amid statements by India and China to move past the shadow of a tense past year, the 11th round of the Working Mechanism on Consultation & Coordination (WMCC) for Border Affairs was held in Delhi on Thursday.

The Indian delegation was led by Pranay Verma, Joint Secretary (East Asia) in MEA (Ministry of External Affairs). While the Chinese delegation was led by Yi Xianliang, Director General, Department of Boundary & Oceanic Affairs in the Foreign Ministry in Beijing. Established in 2012, the WMCC aims to coordinate and consult on Sino-Indian border management issues and discuss ways to strengthen co-operation including between border security personnel.

"We underlined that maintenance of peace and tranquillity in the India-China border areas is an important pre-requisite for further development of bilateral relations between the two countries," said the MEA in its official statement.

The two sides also discussed various confidence-building measures amid preparations underway for resumption of the Mansoravar yatra through Nathu La that was stalled last year in the wake of the Doklam standoff between the two armies.

External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman are expected to visit Beijing next month in the run up to the SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organisation) summit meet scheduled in China in June. Both sides also agreed to explore the possibility of strengthening cooperation through exchange of visits and institutionalised dialogue mechanisms in order to promote better understanding and cooperation between the two defence forces, added the MEA statement.pardeepdhull@gmail.com

Smita Sharma

New Delhi, March 22

Pakistan High Commissioner to India Sohail Mehmood is returning to Delhi on Thursday, even as both countries continue to level allegations of harassment of each others diplomats in respective missions.

Mehmood was called back to the Islamabad Foreign Ministry for consultations last week amid a tense stand-off, where India and Pakistan accused each other of violation of the Vienna Convention that provides security to serving diplomats to be able to conduct their duties in host nations.

Dr. Faisal Mohammad, Spokesperson of the Pakistan Foreign Ministry, informed the local media that Mehmood heads back on Thursday, incidentally just a day ahead of the 70th Pakistan National Day celebrations to be hosted by the envoy at the mission on Friday.

India called the High Commissioner being called for consultations as routine affair, though sources in Pakistan suggested that Mehmoods return would be subject to resolution of the diplomats issue. The High Commissioner will not return to India anytime soon, an official source was quoted by the Pakistan media in what was seen as posturing without a formal recall of the envoy. India and Pakistan last recalled their envoys in 2002 following the terror strikes on the Indian Parliament.

The Pakistan High Commission in Delhi circulated several videos as evidence that its staff and their children have been chased on streets dangerously, photographed and bullied by unknown persons accused to be security agents 7th March onwards. Mehmood personally raised this issue with Foreign Secretary Vijay Gokhale in a meeting on 8th March while Indian High Commissioner in Islamabad JP Singh was summoned on the issue.

India, on the other hand, has sent more than a dozen note verbales to lodge protests against intimidation of Indian High Commissioner Ajay Bisaria and other staff members in Islamabad over the last few days through ways similar to the Pakistani complaints. Harassment is the new normal for Indian High Commission personnel in Islamabad, Ministry of External Affairs said in an earlier response. A day before he left for Pakistan, Mehmood told The Tribune, It is hoped that better sense would prevail and measures would be taken to roll back. It is important to keep the broader picture of the overall relationship in view.

Relationship between the two neighbours continues to be deeply strained with severe bloodshed along the Line of Control and the International Border. As many as 503 pilgrims from Pakistan were denied visas by India and they could not participate in the annual Urs of Khawaja Moinuddin Chisti in Ajmer Sharif this month. Pakistani Trade Minister Pervaiz Malik stayed away from an informal WTO meeting in Delhi this week, where Pakistan with representation by a counsellor from the mission instead.uttara@tribuneindia.com

Lucknow, March 22

Chief Minister Adityanaths government in Uttar Pradesh could withdraw politically motivated riots cases, states law minister said on Thursday.

Law Minister Brijesh Pathak was asked about a news report about the state governments decision to withdraw 131 cases in the Muzaffarnagar and Shamli communal riots of 2013several BJP leaders, including a minister from Adityanaths own cabinet are accused of being involved in the 2013 Muzaffarnagar communal riots. Pathak neither confirmed nor denied the report, but said the government would only withdraw cases that smacked of political vendetta.

"Riot cases are also registered under the IPC. If these are politically motivated, we will surely consider their withdrawal".

"Chief Minister Yogi Adidyanath has decided to withdraw those cases that were filed due to political reasons. We have initiated a process in this regard," he said, adding that the state government had received applications from leaders of several parties.

At least 62 persons died and a large number of people lost their homes in the riots that took place in September 2013.

UP Minister Suresh Rana, former Union Minister Sanjiv Balyan, Bijnor MP Bhartendu Singh, Budhana MLA Umesh Malik and party leader Sadhvi Prachi were among those accused of being involved in the Muzaffarnagar riots.

Following the violence, a total of 503 cases were lodged against around 1,455 persons at police stations in Muzaffarnagar and Shamli by the then Samajwadi Party government.

Hardline Hindu leader Adityanath was himself accused of having incited communal riots in Gorakhpur in 2007, when he was MP. His government refused to sanction prosecution against him in May 2017.

The Allahabad High Court refused to order reinvestigation into the allegations by the Central Bureau of Investigation on February 28.

There were unconfirmed reports of the state government considering withdrawal of Muzaffarnagar riots cases in January as well. Agenciespardeepdhull@gmail.com

Coimbatore, March 22

The toll in the devastating fire at Kurangani forests in Theni district rose to 18 with the death of a woman at a hospital here on Thursday, the police said.

The 32-year-old woman, identified as Jayashree, a resident of Chennai, was airlifted from Madurai and admitted to the private hospital here on March 12.

Jayashree was brought to the hospital with more than 60 per cent burns. She died today without responding to treatment, hospital sources said.

A total of 39 persons  12 from Erode and Tirupur and 27 from Chennai  had embarked on a trip on March 10. Three among the Chennai group went to Kerala and the rest proceeded for trekking.

Of the 36 people caught in the forest fire, 18 died, 10 were rescued without any injuries and the rest are undergoing treatment.

On March 19, Chief Minister K Palaniswami told the state Assembly that a forester was suspended and a case registered against a local man, G Ranjithkumar, for leading the trekkers through the reserve forest.

For violations, police were taking action against Chennai Trekking Club and Erode based Tour de India, he had said. The Tamil Nadu government has also appointed top official, Atulya Misra, as Inquiry Officer to probe into the circumstances leading to the death of the trekkers in Kurangani hills and submit a report on the incident within two months. PTIamansharma@tribunemail.com

Smita Sharma

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, March 22

France on Thursday offered its condolences to the families of the 39 Indian construction workers killed in Iraq by the barbaric Islamic State.

"We pay tribute to the investigation carried out with the Iraqi authorities that made it possible to establish the truth about the fate of these victims of terrorism," said the spokesperson of the French Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs two days after External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj informed Parliament that the 'missing' Indians are now declared dead based on conclusive forensic evidence.

The workers were kidnapped by Islamic State when the militants captured Mosul city in Iraq in June 2014 and shook the world.

The Narendra Modi government refused to declare the men as dead in nearly four years despite statement of lone survivor Harjit Masih who escaped the terror camp in 2014 with Bangladeshi workers.

After the recapture of Mosul in July last year, India handed over DNA samples of relatives and families of the victims to Iraqi authorities to test with bodies exhumed from mass graves and a specific mound near Badush to the north west of Mosul. Most of the men belonged to Punjab, while some were from West Bengal, Himachal Pradesh and Bihar.

"France stands with its Indian and Iraqi partners in the fight against terrorism and for peace and stability," added the French ministry statement that follows the focus on counter-terror cooperation in recent talks with PM Modi during the state visit of French President Emmanuel Macron.

France was a lead player in the global coalition that bombed and defeated ISIS in Iraq. India's earliest strategic partner in 1998, France has been working closely with New Delhi to counter terrorism and violent extremism. The Islamic State was also responsible for for the horrific terror strikes in cafeterias, theatre and stadium in Paris in November of 2015 that killed more than 120 innocent citizens, including foreign nationals.

The mortal remains of the 39 men are still awaited with identification of one worker from Bihar, Raju Yadav yet to be announced formally as the DNA sample matching is awaited.

Minister of State for External Affairs VK Singh is expected to take a special aircraft to Baghdad and fly back the bodies to the respective states for last rites once the documentation process is completed by the Indian mission.editorial@tribune.com

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, March 22

Chief Minister Capt Amarinder Singh criticised the Akalis for their alleged shameless attempts to take credit for various welfare and development initiatives of the Congress government.

Contradicting claims by Sukhbir Badal on various announcements made by the government as part of the Governors address, he said governance was an exercise in continuity and his government had no qualms in acknowledging or continuing with any worthwhile projects of the previous regime.

The Akalis would not be sitting in the Opposition had they really worked for the welfare and benefit of the people during their 10-year rule, he quipped.

The CM said his government expanded the ambit of free power to cover freedom fighters (300 free units) and industries (subsidised variable tariff of Rs 5/unit for next five years), besides raising old-age pension from Rs 500 to Rs 750.

Freedom fighters welfare a priority

Capt Amarinder, in reply to a query by MLA Budh Ram, reiterated the governments commitment to the welfare of the freedom fighters. They and their dependents are entitled to travel free in government buses. We are also giving them out-of-turn tubewell connection and 300 units of free power, he said.editorial@tribune.com

Rajmeet Singh

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, March 22

A demand during the Zero Hour by Leader of Opposition Sukhpal Khaira, seeking adequate compensation for the aggrieved families of the Punjabis killed in Iraq, led to heated arguments between the Congress men and the Akalis even as Chief Minister Capt Amarinder Singh promised relief as per norms.

The dramatic situation eased with a half-an-hour adjournment. While Congress MLAs said it was the duty of the BJP-led NDA government to compensate the families, the Akalis accused the Congress of politicising the tragedy.

The atmosphere got charged up when Local Bodies Minister Navjot Singh Sidhu used hard-hitting words against Bikram Majthia associating him with drug trade.

Congress Rana Sodhi and Kushaldeep Dhillon suggested that all MLAs, cutting across party lines, should approach the Centre to seek Rs 1 crore compensation and a job for each of the families.

Capt Amarinder backed the demand, saying that the Centre should chip in since the tragedy took place overseas.

The CM said he had ordered the release of Rs 20,000 monthly pension to the bereaved families for February and March, waiving the condition of quarterly payouts. The deputy commissioners had been told to disburse the amount immediately.

Dismissing Majithias claim that the families had not been paid for six months, Amarinder said payment had been made till January. The CM said he was in touch with the External Affairs Minister and had been told that the bodies of the ill-fated Punjabis would land at Amritsar airport once the requisite formalities were completed by the Mosul authorities in Iraq.

Sidhu-Majithia spat

During arguments between Congress and SAD MLAs, minister Navjot Singh Sidhu used hard-hitting words against Bikram Majthia, associating him with drug trade. Both got involved in a verbal spat even as the Speaker tried to calm them down. Khaira, too, jumped in when Majithia accused him of siding with the Congress on the Iraq issue.editorial@tribune.com

Deepkamal Kaur

Tribune News Service

Jalandhar, March 22

Chief Minister Capt Amarinder Singh will launch the Drug Abuse Prevention Officers (DAPO) programme at Khatkar Kalan (Nawanshahr) on Friday on the occasion of Shaheed Bhagat Singhs martyrdom day. He will administer the oath to over 3.3 lakh volunteers.

The high number is being attributed to the intense competition between Deputy Commissioners and SSPs to achieve  or overshoot  the target of enrolling 1 per cent of the total population of their respective districts as volunteers.

Various DCs and SSPs not only enrolled themselves, but also ensured that their staff got registered. Patwaris, tehsildars, Block Development and Panchayat Officers were told to get themselves and their clerical staff enrolled.

Khatkar Kalan, the host village, has 30 adults (age criterion is 18 years or above) registered as DAPOs, said sarpanch Sukhwinder Singh.

Amit Kumar, Nawanshahr DC said, I am myself a DAPO. I enrolled myself while launching the scheme in my district.

The registration data of the DAPOs has been segregated according to police districts and police stations. At Adampur police station, falling in Jalandhar Rural district, 322 of the 1,055 volunteers are government employees. At Shahkot police station, there are 212 government staffers among 915 volunteers.

Doaba-based activist Parvinder Singh Kitna said, There is no point in doing enrolments en masse. Rather, the government should ensure that the redressal mechanism is improved. We ourselves have attempted to inform the police about drug activities, but the cops dont act and let off the peddlers.

Dr Sandeep Bhola, Kapurthala-based consultant psychiatrist and master trainer under the National AIDS Control Organisation, is of a different view. If such a large number of people at the grassroots level get going, its surely the first big step. But it needs to be checked that people trying to settle scores are not involved. Also, training and coordination at all levels is a must.

According to a record submitted to the CMO and the state police headquarters, Amritsar Rural police district has topped in registering volunteers with a figure of 33,346, followed by Bathinda district (33,134). The districts of SAS Nagar (2,863) and Barnala (2,729) bring up the rear. The state police enrolled 36 DAPO volunteers from Chandigarh and about 150 from other states.

(With inputs from Gagandeep Sharma, Bathinda)editorial@tribune.com

Tribune News Service

Chandigarh, March 22

Vidhan Sabha Speaker Rana KP Singh on Thursday ordered a probe into the reported live-streaming of Wednesdays House proceedings on social media. In an audio streamed live, Lok Insaaf Party (LIP) MLA Simarjit Singh Bains was heard naming a relative of the Speaker in connection with allegedly illegal mining. These remarks were expunged, but the audio went viral.

Chief Minister Capt Amarinder Singh said on the floor of the House that Opposition members going live on Facebook from the House was a serious matter. He requested the Speaker to direct all members to strictly follow the rules and maintain the dignity of the House. The CM was joined by Cabinet ministers Navjot Singh Sidhu and Charanjit Singh Channi.

Without naming any MLA, Capt Amarinder told the House that it had come to the governments notice that an Opposition member had put the Assembly proceedings in public domain by live-streaming the same yesterday.

Directing all members to strictly abide by the Assembly Conduct Rules, the Speaker cited Rule 90, which states that all members should switch off their mobile phones or other communication devices before entering the House.

When Congress MLAs tried to corner Bains on the issue, AAP leader Sukhpal Khaira said Channi had himself shared a video recording of the House proceedings when the latter was the Leader of the Opposition. He defended Bains by saying that audio recording could be done anywhere on the premises of the Vidhan Sabha where voices could be heard through the audio system.

Meanwhile, Aman Arora (AAP) stated that instead of targeting those who had done live-streaming of the House proceedings, the state government should allow live telecast of the session for the sake of transparency.shalender@tribune.com

Tribune News Service

Dehradun, March 22

Leader of the Opposition Indira Hridayesh on Thursday termed the budget tabled by the BJP government as visionless and directionless. The TS government has failed to list the ways in which it will generate revenue and has repeated the schemes announced last year or the Central government-funded schemes, said Hridayesh, while giving her reactions on the budget.

She further said that the government had failed to tell the people from where would it generate revenue.

Congress MLA Manoj Rawat also castigated the government for failing to suggest ways for generating new resources. They have failed to meet revenue targets during the last fiscal through mining which happens to be the greatest revenue earner, he said.

On the other hand, Chief Minister TS Rawat said that for the first time the budget had offered something for everybody. Before preparing the budget, I held several interactions with the people of our state and they came up with suggestions which were incorporated in the budget, he said.

He lauded the Finance Minister for presenting a balanced budget. For the first time we have said that the government will set aside certain amount for making the public buildings accessible to the differently abled persons. We have made allocation of Rs 45 crore for destination for encouraging tourism in the state, said he.pardeepdhull@gmail.com

Washington, March 22

Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday apologised for a major breach of trust with two billion users of Facebook and vowed to take steps to protect user data, as the social media giant was rocked by a data breach scandal.

In his first public comments on the uproar over harvesting of data of 50 million users by a British firm linked to Donald Trumps 2016 presidential campaign, the Facebook CEO admitted of making mistakes and said he was happy to answer questions about the scandal before US Congress.

This was a major breach of trust and Im really sorry that this happened, he told CNN.

Our responsibility now is to make sure this doesnt happen again, he said.

He said Facebook has already taken important steps to prevent such a situation from happening again.

He said the site would be reviewing thousands of apps in an intensive process.

The data scandal erupted after a whistleblower revealed that Cambridge Analytica, a data firm with ties to Trumps 2016 campaign, accessed personal data from 50 million Facebook users without their knowledge, and might have kept that data even after Facebook told the company to delete it.

Cambridge Analytica (CA) had created psychological profiles on 50 million Facebook users via a personality prediction app, created by a researcher named Aleksandr Kogan.

Earlier, Zuckerberg, 33, through a lengthy Facebook post, addressed the privacy scandal. He wrote that the company made mistakes and outlined how it has changed its policies to make sure that user data is protected.

I started Facebook, and at the end of the day, Im responsible for what happens on our platform. Im serious about doing what it takes to protect our community, he said.

Zuckerberg said Facebook has a responsibility to protect its users data and if it fails, we dont deserve to serve you. He acknowledged that there is more the company needs to do.

...But we also made mistakes, theres more to do, and we need to step up and do it, he said.

Zuckerberg said Facebook plans to alert everyone whose data was accessed by Cambridge Analytica. But he added that he wishes the company had not waited so long to tell people what happened.

Thats definitely something that, looking back on this, I regret that we didnt do at the time, he told CNN. I think we got that wrong. And he said hes made other mistakes along the way.

I started this when I was so young and inexperienced, Zuckerberg said. I made technical errors and business errors. I hired the wrong people. I trusted the wrong people, he said.

He said the company will investigate every app that has access to a large amount of information from before we locked down our platform, and if we detect any suspicious activity, were going to do a full forensic audit. Were going to review thousands of apps, he said.

Facebook said it discovered last week that CA may not have deleted the data as it certified.

We should not have trusted Cambridge Analyticas certification, and we are not going to make that mistake again, Zuckerberg said.

This was a breach of trust between Kogan, Cambridge Analytica and Facebook, Zuckerberg wrote in the post. But it was also a breach of trust between Facebook and the people who share their data with us and expect us to protect it. In a damage control mode, Zuckerberg announced a slew of measures aimed to secure the platform further.

For this, the Facebook founder said, his company will take three steps to prevent the data misuse.

We will investigate all apps that had access to large amounts of information before we changed our platform to dramatically reduce data access in 2014, and we will conduct a full audit of any app with suspicious activity, he said.

We will ban any developer from our platform that does not agree to a thorough audit. And if we find developers that misused personally identifiable information, we will ban them and tell everyone affected by those apps, he added.

Zuckerberg said that the second step is to restrict developers data access even further to prevent other kinds of abuse.

He cited an example for this: It (Facebook) will remove developers access to ones data if the app hasnt been used by the person in three months. We will reduce the data you give an app when you sign into only your name, profile photo, and email address. Well require developers to not only get approval but also sign a contract in order to ask anyone for access to their posts or other private data. And well have more changes to share in the next few days, Zuckerberg said.

He said next month Facebook will show everyone a tool at the top of their News Feed with the apps they have used and an easy way to revoke those apps permissions to their data.

We already have a tool to do this in your privacy settings, and now we will put this tool at the top of your News Feed to make sure everyone sees it, Zuckerberg said.

Over the past several days, Facebook has been facing an investigation by the Federal Trade Commission and calls for legislative testimonies in the US and Europe.

Indias IT and Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad has warned social media companies such as Facebook of stringent actions if there was any attempt to influence the electoral process of any country.

Amidst a global outrage against Facebook, the Silicon Valley-based company, which currently has 2 billion monthly active users, has suffered a loss of USD 50 billion in market value. PTIharinder@tribunemail.com

Washington, March 22

The navies of India and the US have a shared interest in providing security that guarantees a peaceful and prosperous Indo-Pacific region, US Navy chief Admiral John Richardson has said, amid China flexing its muscles in the region. Admiral Richardson made the remarks after his meeting with Indian Navy chief Admiral Sunil Lanba, who is on a five-day visit to America.

It was Richardsons fourth meeting with Lanba. They had last met at the IMDEX Asia defence conference in Singapore in May 2017.

We have a shared interest that our navies provide the security that underwrites a peaceful and prosperous Indo-Pacific region, Richardson said after his meeting with Admiral Lanba.

Ive met often with Admiral Lanba and our discussions center on a naval partnership built on respect and trust, he said yesterday.

The two Admirals met with US Secretary of Navy Richard V Spencer and discussed ways to improve interoperability to include additional naval exercises and staff talks, said a Pentagon readout of the meeting.

Naval exercises like Malabar and the Rim-of-the-Pacific are examples of our deepening cooperation and I look forward to continuing to explore opportunities that increase our interoperability, Richardson said.

Admiral Lanba will hold extensive talks with the top US military brass.  PTIharinder@tribunemail.com

Smita Sharma

Tribune News Service

New Delhi, March 22

Over six weeks after its imposition, the state of emergency was today annulled in Maldives. The office of President Abdulla Yameen Abdul Gayoom today announced there still exists a diminished threat to national security, but upon the advice of the Security Services, the President decided to lift the emergency in an effort to promote normalcy.

Emergency was clamped on the small island nation on February 5, four days after its Supreme Court ordered all political prisoners, including exiled former President Mohamed Nasheed, to be freed and reinstatement of 12 disqualified opposition lawmakers. The rubber stamp Majlis (parliament) approved its extension by 30 days on February 20, to which India expressed its deep dismay.

Defending the emergency, the Maldivian government even today maintained that two Supreme Court Justices conspired with political actors to illegally overthrow a lawful government.

The Indian Foreign Ministry said: It is important for the Maldives government to ensure credible restoration of the political process, as well as the rule of law, before the elections are announced.

Over the last 45 days, the government had, in its crackdown, arrested several people, including Maumoon Gayoom, former President and half brother of incumbent President as well as Chief Justice and a senior judge who passed the controversial order.

The emergency strained ties between Maldives and India and led to severe criticism from the West. Yameen, though, enjoyed the strong backing of China that called the emergency the internal affairs of the nation famous as tourists paradise.monicakchauhan@gmail.com

San Francisco, March 22

Facebook Inc Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg apologised on Thursday for mistakes his company made in how it handled data belonging to 50 million of its users and promised tougher steps to restrict developers' access to such information.

The world's largest social media network is facing growing government scrutiny in Europe and the United States about a whistleblower's allegations that London-based political consultancy Cambridge Analytica improperly accessed user information to build profiles on American voters that were later used to help elect US President Donald Trump in 2016.

"This was a major breach of trust. I'm really sorry this happened. We have a basic responsibility to protect people's data," Zuckerberg said in an interview with CNN, breaking a public silence since the scandal erupted at the weekend.

Zuckerberg said in a post on Facebook the company "made mistakes, there's more to do, and we need to step up and do it."

He said the social network planned to conduct an investigation of thousands of apps that have used Facebook's platform, restrict developer access to data, and give members a tool that lets them to disable access to their Facebook data more easily.

His plans did not represent a big reduction of advertisers' ability to use Facebook data, which is the company's lifeblood.

Zuckerberg said he was open to additional government regulation and happy to testify before the US Congress if he was the right person.

"I'm not sure we shouldn't be regulated," he told CNN. "I actually think the question is more what is the right regulation rather than yes or no, should it be regulated? ... People should know who is buying the ads that they see on Facebook." Zuckerberg said Facebook was committed to stopping interference in the U.S. midterm election in November and elections in India and Brazil.

Investor fears

Facebook shares pared gains on Thursday after Zuckerberg's post, closing up 0.7 per cent. The company has lost more than $45 billion of its stock market value over the past three days on investor fears that any failure by big tech firms to protect personal data could deter advertisers and users and invite tougher regulation.

Zuckerberg told the New York Times in an interview published on Thursday he had not seen a "meaningful number of people" deleting their accounts over the scandal.

Facebook representatives, including Deputy Chief Privacy Officer Rob Sherman, met US congressional staff for nearly two hours on Thursday and planned to continue meetings on Capitol Hill on Friday. Facebook was unable to answer many questions, two aides who attended the briefing said.

Zuckerberg told the website Recode that fixes to protect users' data would cost "many millions of dollars."

The whistleblower who launched the scandal, Christopher Wylie, formerly of Cambridge Analytica, said on Twitter he had accepted invitations to testify before US and UK lawmakers.

The German government said Facebook must explain whether the personal data of the country's 30 million users were protected from unlawful use by third parties, according to a report in the Funke group of German regional newspapers.

'Scapegoat'

On Wednesday, the board of Cambridge Analytica suspended its Chief Executive Alexander Nix, who was caught in a secret recording boasting that his company played a decisive role in Trump's victory.

However, the academic who provided the data disputed that on Wednesday.

"I think what Cambridge Analytica has tried to sell is magic, and they've made claims that this is incredibly accurate and it tells you everything there is to tell about you. But I think the reality is it's not that," psychologist Aleksandr Kogan, an academic at Cambridge University, told the BBC in an interview.

Kogan, who gathered the data by running a survey app on Facebook, also said he was being made a scapegoat by Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. Both companies have blamed Kogan for alleged data misuse.

Only 300,000 Facebook users responded to Kogan's quiz, but that gave the researcher access to those people's Facebook friends as well, who had not agreed to share information, producing details on 50 million users.

Facebook has said it subsequently made changes that prevent people from sharing data about friends and maintains that no breach occurred because the original users gave permission.

Critics say that it essentially was a breach because data of unsuspecting friends was taken.

Analysts have raised concerns that the incident will reduce user engagement with Facebook, potentially lessening its clout with advertisers. Three Wall Street brokerages cut their price targets.

"Investors now have to consider whether or not the company will conclude that it has grown in a manner that has proven to be untenable," said Pivotal Research Group analyst Brian Wieser.

The company has risen more than 550 per cent in value in the past five years. Reutersharinder@tribunemail.com

Beijing, March 22

In an unprecedented deal, China has sold Pakistan a powerful tracking system that could speed up the development of multi-warhead missiles by its all-weather ally, the state-run Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) said.

Zheng Mengwei, a researcher with the CAS Institute of Optics and Electronics in Chengdu, Sichuan province, confirmed to the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post that Pakistan had bought a highly sophisticated, large-scale optical tracking and measurement system from China.

We simply gave them a pair of eyes. They can use them to look at whatever they want to see, even the Moon, he said. China is the first country to export such sensitive equipment to Pakistan.

While Indias single-warhead missiles are bigger and cover longer distances, Pakistan has focused its efforts on developing multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles, a type of missile carrying several nuclear warheads that can be directed towards different targets, the report said.  PTI

Move to counter Indias Agni-Vmonicakchauhan@gmail.com

Washington, March 22

A former head of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), John O. Brennan, has said that he thinks Russia might have some kind of compromising information on President Donald Trump.

His remark on Wednesday on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" set off furious speculation about whether the former spy chief was basing that assertion on inside information.

Brennan, who served as CIA director from 2013 to 2017, speculated that Russians "may have something on him personally" when he was asked if he thought Trump was afraid of Russian President Vladimir Putin, the New York Times reported.

"The Russians, I think, have had long experience with Trump and may have things that they could expose," he said.

Brennan was heading the agency when a dossier surfaced in 2016 claiming the Russians had compromising information on Trump.

His comments came the day after Trump congratulated Putin in a phone call for his re-election that raised new questions about the President's relationship with Russia.

Brennan also said that his comments were speculation based on Trump's words and deeds as well as how Putin's government operated at home and abroad -- and not on any inside knowledge.

"I do not know if the Russians have something on Donald Trump that they could use as blackmail," he told the New York Times.

"When asked the question, I have pointed out the perplexing submissiveness of Trump towards Putin -- despite continued evidence of malign Russian activities," Brennan said.

"I do not know why he refuses to call out Russia; that is a question that can only be answered by Trump." IANSJeff Harris, vice president of maintenance at USA Truck, has been in trucking for almost three decades, since graduating from the Nashville Auto Diesel College in 1988. Today, the newly named chairman of the American Trucking Associations' Technology & Maintenance Council says he wants to build on the work of his successors while making even greater strides to promote diesel technicians as a career of choice for todays young people. HDT caught up with him shortly after the TMC annual meeting in Atlanta.

"Im a firm believer that we have to get our technicians back to the basics in trucking. Because if we cant make it from one oil change to the next, were going to be in trouble."  Jeff Harris

HDT: How long have you been involved with TMC?

Harris: Ive been an active member since 2006. I entered the trucking industry when I got a job at a small fleet  MS Carriers in Memphis, Tennessee,  14 days after graduating from Nashville Auto Diesel College. We had 200 trucks at the time. And 13 years later, wed grown that to 5,000 tractors. In 2001, we were bought out by a larger fleet, and the number of power units grew to 17,000. So Ive been based out of the same office for 29 years, and just came on with USA Truck as vice president of maintenance last September.

HDT: What do you see as the primary challenges facing the trucking industry?

Harris: The need to fill positions on the maintenance side of things. Everybody talks about the driver shortage  which is a very important issue. But were having a tough time filling any maintenance position you can think of, from parts techs, to external breakdown technicians, to shop techs. Were really struggling to find people.

HDT: How do you plan to tackle that issue?

Harris: Ill start by following up on the chairmen who have worked on this issue before me. Id like to expand on our existing strategy to reach out to younger children and catch their attention while theyre still in grade school. And I think we need to do a more aggressive job using social media and television to promote the idea that being a diesel technician is an exciting field to enter, with new technology coming into it almost daily, it seems. And we really need to drive the point home that that is a field a young person can enter without taking on a ton of student loans in the process. Right out of high school they can learn a trade that can help them succeed through many of lifes challenges. Its like that ad for insurance on TV today: You dont want to be the guy who doesnt know what a tire wrench is. You want to be the person who can get out of any mechanical challenge life throws at you. Trucking is really one great big family. And we need to get the next generation interested and involved in it.

Jeff Harris, vice president, maintenance, USA Truck, is TMC's 2018 Chairman. Photo: USA Truck

HDT: Speaking of technology, how do you intend to help TMC steer through the many changes the industry faces today?

Harris: Changes come in phases. We need to remember that and the fact that were not going to have to deal with everything all at once. Like right now, were getting introduced to assisted driving technology, that builds on predictive cruise control and advanced safety systems. Ive driven one of these systems, and they are impressive. It can be tough to stay on top of the latest technology. But Im a firm believer that we have to get our technicians back to the basics in trucking. Because if we cant make it from one oil change to the next, were going to be in trouble.

HDT: Do you think we need to be thinking about the role of technicians today? Is that changing?

Harris: We need guys who can do brake and oil jobs, as well as guys who can troubleshoot 10 different electronic control modules on a truck and use 10 different types of software to get them up and running again.

HDT: Can vocational schools deliver on that need?

Harris: So many schools today are using older, donated equipment to train their students on. And thats good in that theyre learning the basics. But the newest technology simply isnt making it into the schools today. And we really need to get the entire industry  and particularly the OEMs  involved in that effort. The schools are doing everything they can. I hire graduates every day  and I wont turn them down, because we need them. But education on the more high-tech repairs today is coming solely from the fleets.

"Pretty much any legal or DOT requirement you can name eventually comes down to maintenance."

HDT: The TMC chairman typically has to deal with legislative issues as well. Are you looking forward to that aspect of your tenure?

Harris: People think this is a departure for us. But the reality is that the maintenance side of a fleet operation is also the police force for your entire operation. Pretty much any legal or DOT requirement you can name eventually comes down to maintenance  whether youre talking about ELDs, hours of service, CVSA  you name it. So this is something Im used to dealing with and look forward to working on.

HDT: The annual meeting in Atlanta that just wrapped up seemed bigger than ever.

Harris: Thats because it was! We had 4,700 registered for that show  which is a new attendance record. And its great to have everyone coming in like that are today with a large exhibition hall and all the vendors. But you know, for us older TMC guys, this has always been a maintenance-focused meeting. So one thing I want to do is encourage everyone that attends participate in what we do, which is create good maintenance practices for American trucking fleets.Some scholars have argued that the adoption of Buddhism by the Mongol Empire is largely attributed to the need of the ruling classes to legitimise their power over the Mongol dominion. Therefore, members of the Mongolian aristocracy sought recognition from prominent spiritual leaders in Tibet in return for protection and patronage.

Regardless of the initial motivation, the relationship between Tibetan spiritual leaders and the Mongolian aristocracy paved the way for Buddhist teachings to be disseminated in Mongolia. It is interesting to note that Sakya Pandita Kunga Gyaltsen, one of the previous incarnations of the World Peace Protector Dorje Shugden, played an important role in the establishment of Buddhism in Mongolia.

How Buddhism spread throughout the Mongol Empire provides an important insight into the cultural and political situation at the time, and illustrates how many high lamas worked skilfully to benefit the Mongols. Although they had to bow to the authority of secular Mongol rulers in the beginning, these lamas always ended up commanding respect and genuine patronage from the powerful Mongol Khans.

First Dissemination: Early Adoption of Buddhism in Mongolia

Buddhism entered Mongolia during the first millennium CE. At the time, Mongolia was comprised of many nomadic empires and Buddhism arrived there from Nepal via Central Asia. Even today, we can see evidence of the countrys initial adoption of Buddhism through analysis of the Sogdian language, with its origins in Sanskrit.

During this period, the kings of empires such as Xianbei (93234 CE), Xiongnu (209 BCE  93 CE), the Rouran Khaganate (late 4th century CE  mid-6th century CE), the Gokturks (mid-1st millennium CE), and the Uyghur Khaganate (8th  9th century CE) welcomed missionaries and built temples for them. The Uyghur Khaganate, amongst others, even adopted Buddhist doctrine as part of their culture.

Second Dissemination: The Yuan Dynasty

After Genghis Khan (1162  1227 CE) and his successors conquered Asia, Russia and parts of Europe, they began using religion to legitimise their power. Although he was not a Buddhist, in 1206 Genghis Khan wrote a letter to a Tibetan Khambo Lama of the Sakya school of Tibetan Buddhism to request for prayers:

I want to invite you to my country, but my state affairs have not been finished yet, so pray for my victory.

Genghis Khan was an adherent of Tengrism, which combined ancestor worship with shamanism and animism. Traditionally, the Khans of Mongolia believed that they received the power to rule the world from Tengri, the supreme Mongol deity and the ruler of Heaven.

After Genghis Khan passed away, his son Ogedei Khan (1186  1241 CE) inherited the empire. Although he was not interested in Buddhism and his wife, Toregene Khatun, was a Christian, Ogedei built several houses of worship for the Buddhist faith. One of Ogedeis sons, Godan, was later appointed as the governor of Ningxia and Gansu.

In 1240, Prince Godan launched a military campaign into Tibet where he destroyed several places of Buddhist worship such as Gyal Temple and Reting Monastery. Although Prince Godan believed that the Mongols held the greatest power in the world, he also believed that a religion was necessary for his next life.

Therefore, Prince Godan invited the renowned Sakya patriarch, Sakya Pandita, for a meeting. The prince was impressed by Sakya Panditas knowledge and teachings and he became the first known Buddhist prince of Mongolia.

During the 13th century, Buddhism flourished and enjoyed special dispensation from the reigning Mongol rulers. For example, Buddhist monasteries in Karakorum were exempt from paying taxes and Mongke Khan appointed a Kashmiri monk named Namo as Chief of all Buddhist monks, also known as the Imperial Preceptor.

Kublai Khan (r. 1269  1294 CE), Mongke Khans successor, was also very interested in Buddhism. He invited the Chan Buddhist monk Hai Yun to Mongolia and appointed him as his Buddhist Advisor. Hai Yun even gave Kublai Khans second son, the future crown prince of Mongolia, the Chinese name Zhenjin (True Gold).

According to William Rubruck, envoy of Louis IX who visited Mongolia in the 13th century:

In a big temple there were many lamas sitting in two rows, holding beads in their hands, wearing yellow gowns. Their hair and beards were close cut and they were reciting Buddhist books chanting Om mani padme hum (May happiness prevail). In Mongolian literary sources about monuments erected in the second half of the 14th century in Kara-Korum, the Tsogt the Great Temple, the temple of praying, or Chitayan temple, and others were mentioned, and it was also reported that 120 temples were built for lamas.

Kublai Khan also invited a Sakya lama, Drogon Chogyal Phagpa (1235  1280 CE) to spread Buddhism throughout his realm. This is considered to be the second transmission of Buddhism in Mongolia. Empress Chabi (1227  1281 CE), Kublai Khans consort, received the Hevajra initiation from Phagpa and developed strong devotion to this lama. Thereafter, Kublai Khan appointed Phagpa as the Imperial Preceptor, with authority over the monks within the territory of the Yuan Dynasty.

In 1269, Kublai Khan instructed Lama Phagpa to create a unified writing system for his multilingual empire. The resulting Phagpa script, also known as the Square Script, was based on the Tibetan script but written vertically from top to bottom, and was designed to be written in Tibetan, Chinese, Mongolian, Uyghur and Sanskrit dialects.

This new script became the official script of the empire and Tibetan Buddhist lamas became the most influential of all religious clergy in Yuans China. Their influence continued until the Yuan Dynasty fell in 1368.

After the fall of the Yuan Dynasty, many Mongols reverted to their original beliefs  Shamanism, the belief in spiritual healing and Animism, the belief in supernatural non-human entities.

Third Dissemination: Cultural Renaissance (16th Century)

In 1566, the relationship between Mongolia and Tibet became strained when Hutuhtai Secen Hongtaiji of Ordos in Inner Mongolia and his two brothers decided to invade Tibet. Having forced the spiritual leaders of Tibet into submission, they returned to Ordos with three high-ranking monks. Tumen Jasanghtu Khan also invited a monk from the Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism to Mongolia in 1576.

His Holiness the 3rd Dalai Lama Sonam Gyatso His Holiness the 3rd Dalai Lama Sonam Gyatso

In 1578, Altan Khan, an ambitious military leader who aspired to unite the Mongols and revive the glory of Genghis Khan, saw the value of spiritual recognition in legitimising his rule. He invited Sonam Gyatso, a spiritual leader from the Gelug lineage of Tibetan Buddhism for a meeting.

Sonam Gyatso and Altan Khan forged a mutually beneficial relationship that culminated in Sonam Gyatso acknowledging Altan Khan as the reincarnation of Genghis Khan, thus legitimising his rule while Altan Khan recognised Sonam Gyatso as the reincarnation of Lama Phagpa, thus strengthening his supremacy over the Tibetan Sangha. Altan Khan also bestowed upon Sonam Gyatso the title of Dalai Lama (Ocean Lama) and Ochirdara (Vajradhara). This title was posthumously granted to Sonam Gyatsos two preceding incarnations as well.

Altan Khan Altan Khan

Although Altan Khan passed away not long after, he had set a precedent for the importance of spiritual recognition in legitimising ruling power amongst the Mongolian aristocracy. For the next century, the Mongol ruling class continued to seek the blessings of and recognition from Tibetan spiritual leaders to affirm their authority. In return, these spiritual leaders were allowed to spread the Buddhist doctrine and build temples (Datsan in Mongolian) across the country.

The prevailing belief in reincarnation also facilitated the convenient recognition of high lamas amongst the Mongolian nobility, legitimising not just the leadership but the countrys elite as well. Over time, the role and function of shamanistic diviners and healers were taken over by Buddhist monks, and the Shamanic culture and religion experienced a significant decline in influence.

A gorgeous Mongolian Datsan, Ivolginsky Datsan in Buryatia, Russia A gorgeous Mongolian Datsan, Ivolginsky Datsan in Buryatia, Russia

The Influence of the Qing Dynasty (1635  1912 CE)

Emperor Hong Taiji (1592  1643 CE) became a patron of Tibetan Buddhism as part of his campaign against the last Mongol Khan, Ligdan Khan (1588  1634 CE). Qing Dynasty historian Jin Qichong has claimed that the Qing rulers were only interested in Buddhism for its usefulness in controlling both the Tibetans and Mongolians.

For instance, Emperor Qianlongs (1711  1799 CE) claim to be an emanation of the Bodhisattva Manjushri and his interest in Tibetan Buddhism, patronage of Tibetan Buddhist art, translation of the Buddhist canon and so forth gave him considerable influence within the Tibetan Buddhist world.

Emperor Qianlong also supported the Gelug (Yellow Hat) school of Tibetan Buddhism in order to maintain peace within Mongolia because the majority of Mongols were followers of the two main lamas of this lineage  the Panchen Lama and the Dalai Lama. According to Mark Elliott, Professor of Chinese and Inner Asian History at Harvard University, Emperor Qianlongs political manoeuvring and intertwining of Tibetan Buddhism with Mongolian matters meshed seamlessly with his personal faith.

Left: Emperor Qianlong depicted as an emanation of the Bodhisattva Manjushri.

Right: A portrait of Emperor Qianlong Left: Emperor Qianlong depicted as an emanation of the Bodhisattva Manjushri.Right: A portrait of Emperor Qianlong

On another occasion, Emperor Qianlong deliberately undermined the influence of the Khalkha nobility when he selected the 3rd reincarnation of Jetsundamba, the highest Mongolian Gelugpa lama, from amongst the Tibetan royal family of Lithang instead of the Khalkha Mongols, the largest subgroup of Mongol people. The Khalkha nobility originally protested this decision but later changed their minds and requested for the newly recognised incarnation to be enthroned far away at Dolonnor. Emperor Qianlong ignored this request, having intentionally selected the incarnation of Jetsundamba from amongst the Tibetans to put an end to Outer Mongolian autonomy.

The Fall of the Mongolian Aristocracy

By the turn of the 20th century, Buddhism had become an established religion in Mongolia with 583 monasteries in Outer Mongolia and various temple complexes scattered throughout. These Buddhist institutions alone controlled approximately 20% of the countrys wealth.

Present-day Ulaanbaatar was then known as the seat of the living Buddha of Mongolia, Jetsundamba Khutuktu, also known as Bogdo Gegen or Bogd Khan. Jetsundamba Khutuktu was the third highest lama after the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Lama, within the hierarchy of Tibetan Buddhism in Mongolia. The two monasteries in Ulaanbaatar alone housed approximately 13,000 and 7,000 monks respectively.

Jetsundamba Khutuktu Jetsundamba Khutuktu

The monasteries acquired their wealth through donations and offerings from both the nobility and ordinary householders. Herders would also dedicate themselves to these monasteries either out of faith or from a desire to escape the demands of the aristocracy. In 1924, there were 140 incarnate lamas in Mongolia, each retaining some degree of secular authority, and roughly one-third of the population were monks. Approximately 250,000 (over one-third of the total population) lived in territories administered by the incarnate lamas and the monasteries.

When the Qing Dynasty fell in 1911, it was the Buddhist monasteries and temples that provided much needed political structure for Mongolia, and the Jetsundamba Khutukhtu began to administer an autonomous state in Yehe Kuriye. Although some foreign observers did not have a favourable view of Mongolian Buddhist monks and considered them corrupt, ignorant and lazy, the Mongolian people did not agree and have continued to maintain their faith in Buddhism to this day. In 1924, revolutionaries took over Mongolia and put an end to the power of the nobility.

The breakup of the Mongol empire after 1259 (Click to enlarge)

Important Figures in Mongolian Buddhism

Sakya Pandita Kunga Gyeltsen (1182  1251 CE)

When Prince Godan asked his general, Doorda Darkhan, for advice on which Tibetan Buddhist lama was worthy of his invitation, the general answered,

The Kadampas are the best regarding the monastic institution; the Taglungpas are the most skilled in worldly human affairs; in splendour, the Drigungpas are the greatest; but as for Dharma, Sakya Pandita is the most learned of them all.

Following his generals recommendation, Prince Godan issued an invitation to Sakya Pandita, who embarked on the journey to meet with the prince in 1244. Sakya Pandita brought along his two nephews  10-year-old Phagpa and Chagna Dorje (1239  1267 CE). Phagpa was considered to be the religious heir of the Sakyas while Chagna was destined to be the patriarch of the Khon family.

Sakya Pandita Kunga Gyatsen (1182-1251) Sakya Pandita Kunga Gyatsen (1182-1251)

When they arrived at Lanzhou, Prince Godan had just returned from the enthronement ceremony of his older brother, Guyuk (1206  1248 CE) as the great Khan. Prior to Guyuks ascension, political power lay in the hands of Toregene Khatun (Ogedei Khans consort) during the interim period between Ogedei Khans death and Guyuk Khans enthronement.

Sakya Pandita taught Prince Godan the Dharma, convinced him not to drown and decimate the Chinese race, and healed the prince from a serious skin disease. Sakya Pandita also advised the learned Buddhist masters and their patrons in the U-Tsang and Kham regions of Tibet not to fight the Mongol armies but to pay tribute to them instead. This eventually led to the widespread dissemination of Buddhism in Mongolia in later decades.

Sakya Panditas followers in Tibet requested him to return home but, feeling that he would be more beneficial by remaining amongst the Mongols, Tanguts, Uyghurs and Chinese, Sakya Pandita decided to remain where he was.

When Sakya Pandita knew that his time was coming to an end, he wrote a book titled Clarifying the Buddhas Intention and a letter that showed his confidence in Prince Godans good intentions for Tibet. In 1251, Sakya Pandita appointed Phagpa as his successor in Mongolia and passed away peacefully.

Drogon Chogyal Phagpa

Drogon Chogyal Phagpa Drogon Chogyal Phagpa

After his uncle Sakya Pandita passed away, Drogon Chogyal Phagpa remained under the protection and patronage of Prince Godan until he was summoned by Kublai Khan. Previously a practitioner of Chan Buddhism, Kublai Khan felt that he had a stronger karmic connection with Tibetan Buddhism.

Both Kublai Khan and his consort, Chabi, developed devotion to Phagpa and he was given the title Imperial Preceptor, which gave him authority over all monks within the realm of the Yuan Dynasty.

Namo

A Kashmiri Buddhist teacher, Namo was the spiritual guide of Guyuk Khan, who later bestowed the title Guusi or State Preceptor upon Namo.

Upon Guyuk Khans passing in 1248, Mongke, who was the grandson of Genghis Khan and the eldest son of Tolui (1190  1232 CE), was appointed as the Grand Khan. The newly enthroned Khan continued to favour Namo and in 1252, entrusted him with the management of Buddhist affairs in his realm.

Two artistic depictions of Guyuk Khan Two artistic depictions of Guyuk Khan

The 3rd Karmapa Rangjung Dorje

The 3rd Karmapa Ranjung Dorje The 3rd Karmapa Ranjung Dorje

The 3rd Karmapa Rangjung Dorje was a prominent Buddhist master, scholar and practitioner. Having taught in the Uyghur and other Mongol regions, acquiring a stainless reputation in the process, he was invited to the Mongol Yuan court by Emperor Yuan Wenzong (Togh Temur) (1304  1332 CE).

Unfortunately, the emperor and the crown prince Rinchinbai passed away before the Karmapas arrival. Therefore, when the Karmapa finally reached Daidu, he officiated the enthronement of Temur as Emperor Yuan Shundi (r. 1333  1370).

Ondor Gegeen Zanabazar (1635  1723)

Stunning White Tara statue attributed to the great Mongolian artist Zanabazar Stunning White Tara statue attributed to the great Mongolian artist Zanabazar

Born into the Mongolian royal family, Ondor Gegeen Zanabazar was the 16th Jetsundamba Khutuktu and the first Bogd Gegeen, the highest spiritual authority of the Gelug school of Tibetan Buddhism in Mongolia. When he was five years old, His Holiness the 5th Dalai Lama recognised him to be the incarnation of Taranatha, the remarkable Jonang Buddhist scholar.

Zanabazar used his influence to advance the interests of Buddhism among the Mongols. He was also known for his incredible artistic talents and was considered to be a skilled sculptor, architect, painter and costume designer and an erudite scholar and linguist.

The 3rd Dalai Lama Sonam Gyatso (1543  1588)

His Holiness the 3rd Dalai Lama Sonam Gyatso His Holiness the 3rd Dalai Lama Sonam Gyatso

Sonam Gyatso was the first to hold the title of Dalai Lama. He studied at Drepung Monastery under the guidance of Panchen Sonam Drakpa, a renowned Gelug lama, and learned the Nyingmapa tantric doctrines as well. He was later appointed the Abbot of Drepung Monastery and his reputation was such that the monks of Sera Monastery also considered him their abbot.

Sonam Gyatso recognised Altan Khan as the reincarnation of Genghis Khan and in return, Altan Khan bestowed upon him the title of Dalai Lama and recognised him to be the incarnation of Drogon Chogyal Phagpa, one of the most highly respected Dharma teachers in Mongolia and the spiritual guide of Kublai Khan.

Aftermath

After the turn of the 20th century, rapid changes across Asia affected the state of Buddhist affairs in Mongolia. Buddhism had become an integral part of Mongolian culture but in 1921, Mongolia began to feel the pinch of the Russian Bolshevik Revolution.

In 1924, the Mongolian spiritual guide Jetsundamba Khutuktu passed away and the Mongolian Peoples Republic (MPR) was established soon after. The newly founded party then executed a socialist revolution under the direction of the Soviet Communist International (Comintern).

Things became worse in the 1930s when Stalin was in power. Most Mongolian temples and monasteries were destroyed except for Gandan Khiid and Erdene Zuu, two of the most famous temples in Mongolia. During and after World War II, governmental policy changes allowed the revival of Buddhism and reconstruction of monasteries that were previously destroyed.

Erdene Zuu Monastery in Mongolia Erdene Zuu Monastery in Mongolia

Recommended Videos

Genghis Khan: Rise of Mongol Empire (BBC Documentary)

Or view the video on the server at:

https://video.tsemtulku.com/videos/GenghisKhanRiseOfMongolEmpire.mp4

The Mongol Empire: Kublai Khan (History Channel)

Or view the video on the server at:

https://video.tsemtulku.com/videos/KublaiKahnAndTheMongolEmpire.mp4

Recommended Reading

Buddhism in Mongolia (click to download PDF)

Mongolian Buddhists Protecting Nature (click to download PDF)

The Miniature Paintings of Mongolian Buddhism (click to download PDF)

The Mongolian Dalai Lama (click to download PDF)

Sources:

For more interesting information:



Copyright Disclaimer: Under Section 13 of the Malaysian Copyright Act 1987, allowance is made for fair dealing for purposes such as non-profit research, private study, criticism, review or the reporting of current events. The Operator and author(s) of TsemRinpoche.com, a not-for-profit blog, do not claim ownership on the intellectual property rights of the contents, images and/or videos reproduced in this article. Any subsisting intellectual property rights shall belong to the legal owner of the contents, images and/or videos.Turkmenistan celebrated the national spring holiday  International Day of Nowruz. The festivities took place in the picturesque Nowruz Valley near Ashgabat with participation of President of Turkmenistan Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov.

The festivities were preceded by the tree planting event, attended by the head of state. The participants of large-scale tree planting also included the guests of the festival and representatives of the diplomatic corps accredited in Turkmenistan.

At the festival, President Berdimuhamedov and guests of Nowruz watched the performances by folk groups, various scenes from the life of the medieval East by theater companies, viewed an exhibition of carpets and jewelry and the art of cooks, and enjoyed the beauty of the Akhal-Teke horses.

The head of state and guests of the holiday also watched the performances by the foreign art groups that arrived in Turkmenistan to celebrate Nowruz. They included artists from Afghanistan, the Republic of Tatarstan of the Russian Federation, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkey, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Iran.

The festive events marking International Day of Nowruz were held in all the regions of Turkmenistan.

 TURKMENISTAN.RU, 2021| By David Kohn

The Institute of Human Virology (IHV) at the University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM) congratulates its co-founder and associate director, Robert R. Redfield, MD, on his appointment to be the next director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Dr. Robert Redfield, a close colleague for more than 40 years, is an excellent choice to be head of the CDC, said Robert C. Gallo, MD, the Homer & Martha Gudelsky Distinguished Professor in Medicine, co-founder, and director of the IHV and co-founder and scientific director of the Global Virus Network (GVN). While it will be a big loss for the institute, we are at a time in our nations history when Dr. Redfields skills will best be utilized as head of the CDC. He has been an outstanding leader as head of the institutes Clinical Care and Research Division and a major force in establishing our clinical public health programs in Baltimore to confront the HIV and hepatitis C epidemics in our city and state. With his leadership, Dr. Redfield has also contributed greatly to the institutes global health programs.

Robert R. Redfield, MD

Redfield is a renowned infectious disease expert, beginning his career in the late 1970s at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. He co-founded the Institute of Human Virology in 1996. During his military service, Redfield made several important scientific contributions to the early understanding of HIV/AIDS. Under his leadership, the institutes patient base has grown from 200 patients to approximately 6,000 in Baltimore and Washington, D.C., and more than 1.3 million in African and Caribbean nations. At the institute, Redfields research focused on novel strategies to innovatively target host cell pathways to treat and prevent HIV infection and other viral diseases. He also is the Robert C. Gallo, MD, Endowed Professor in Translational Medicine, chief of infectious diseases and vice chair of medicine for clinical affairs in the UMSOM Department of Medicine.

Dr. Redfield was one of my early collaborators in co-discovering HIV as the cause of AIDS and demonstrating heterosexual transmission of AIDS, Gallo said. He is a dedicated and compassionate physician who truly cares about his patients and is deeply committed to ensuring patients receive the highest quality of care possible. Dr. Redfield has served his country well and consistently demonstrates strong public health instincts that are grounded in science and clinical medicine. Despite the loss to the institute, I believe this makes him the ideal candidate to direct the CDC.

Dr. Redfield is eminently qualified for this critical position, said E. Albert Reece, MD, PhD, MBA, executive vice president for medical affairs, University of Maryland, Baltimore, and the John Z. Akiko Bowers Distinguished Professor and dean, University of Maryland School of Medicine. "He has made a lifelong commitment to advancing biomedical research and human health through discovery-based medicine. As co-founder of the University of Maryland School of Medicines Institute of Human Virology with Dr. Robert Gallo and Dr. William Blattner, he has been one of the most accomplished scientists and public health advocates in the nation in increasing our understanding of the prevention and treatment of infectious disease. His significant contributions have led to the treatment of more than a million HIV patients by the institute in the U.S. and around the world. We wish him great success in this vital role as the nations chief protector against the growing threat of infectious disease.

Dr. Redfield's longstanding commitment to clinical research and treatment of people with chronic viral infections speaks for itself, said Jay A. Perman, MD, president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore. Through his vision and leadership, the University's expertise has been leveraged to treat and care for hundreds of thousands of HIV/AIDS patients throughout Africa and in the Caribbean and here in our region. I have no doubt that Dr. Redfield will serve this nation extraordinarily well as the leader of its health security agency, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Dr. Redfield is so deserving of this wonderful honor and opportunity, said Stephen N. Davis, MBBS, the Dr. Theodore E. Woodward Professor and chair of medicine at UMSOM. Dr. Redfield has made landmark contributions, consistently, to the Department of Medicine at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. His fund of medical knowledge is incredible. He is a compassionate, thoughtful, and astute physician. His innovative research has led him to become a renowned national and international expert on diagnosing, prevention, and management of infectious diseases at both a population and individual level. His exceptional skill as a clinical researcher has allowed him and his teams to make transformative medical breakthroughs both in the U.S. and worldwide. Dr. Redfield is also an immensely talented teacher and skillful administrator. We will miss him tremendously but are so delighted that he will be able to focus his unique abilities on improving the health of this great nation, and indeed the world.

Dr. Redfields appointment to director of CDC is a brilliant recognition of a great public health advocate, an excellent researcher, and one that has a life of dedication to public service, said Terry Lierman, chairman of IHVs Board of Advisors. This appointment is refreshingly not about politics, but about quality, competence, and compassion. Dr. Redfield encompasses all of those qualities and more.

About the Institute of Human Virology

Formed in 1996 as a partnership between the state of Maryland, the city of Baltimore, the University System of Maryland, and the University of Maryland Medical System, IHV is an institute of the University of Maryland School of Medicine and is home to some of the most globally recognized and world-renowned experts in virology. The IHV combines the disciplines of basic research, epidemiology and clinical research in a concerted effort to speed the discovery of diagnostics and therapeutics for a wide variety of chronic and deadly viral and immune disorders  most notably HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. For more information, go to www.ihv.org and follow us on Twitter @IHVmaryland.(March 22, 2018) -- The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) community will express its desire to be civically engaged this weekend. Many Roadrunners will participate in the 22nd Annual Cesar E. Chavez March for Justice in honor of the esteemed civil rights leader and as a way to join the more than 1,400 volunteers taking part in UTSAs Day of Service.

The march is scheduled at 10 a.m. on Saturday, March 24. It begins at Guadalupe and South Brazos streets and ends at Cesar E. Chavez Blvd. and Indiana Street, across from Hemisfair Park.

>> See the Cesar E. Chavez March for Justice route.

Chavez was a labor leader and civil rights activist who, with Dolores Huerta, co-founded the National Farm Workers Association and later the United Farm Workers (UFW) union. He grew up as Mexican American farm worker, who later fought for workers rights, and has become the best-known Mexican American civil rights activist. His community-based, aggressive but nonviolent tactics gained the farm workers' struggle nationwide support. By the late 1970s, UFW helped improve rights for 50,000 field workers in California and Florida.

It is important to honor the important work that Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta engaged in for farm workers in the US, said Marco Cervantes, who is chairing the marchs planning committee and oversees UTSAs Mexican American Studies program. The march serves as a time to reflect on the courage and sacrifices made by the United Farm Workers and offers a way to respect their activism.

For the second year in a row, UTSA participation in the march is supported by a collaborative group working under the unofficial title of #UTSAmarches. This UTSA team includes representatives from the Office of the President, Student Government, the Mexican American Studies and African American Studies Programs, the Student Leadership Center, Student Center for Community Engagement and Inclusion, Veteran and Military Affairs and the Center for Civic Engagement.

UTSA participates in the Cesar E. Chavez march each year because we recognize that scholarship and student development are best served when the institution is actively engaged in San Antonio, said Eliot Howard, associate director of the Student Leadership Center. Roadrunners marching in this event help to underscore UTSAs commitment to the strategic theme of serving an urban serving university. The issues that Chavez championed in his lifetime represent ongoing work, and by familiarizing our students with his legacy, we are helping prepare them to carry in his footsteps in support for social and economic justice.

UTSA will provide free shuttles to transport faculty, staff and students. Main Campus participants will meet at the Convocation Center at 7:30 a.m. to ride the shuttle to the Downtown campus in time for the Day of Service kick-off breakfast. Marchers may also meet the shuttle leaving from the Downtown Campus at 9:15 a.m. in the Durango Lot. Participants can also meet the UTSA group at the start of the march.

Roadrunner Nation is encouraged to wear blue to the march and will walk behind the university banner, chanting along the route. There will be a presentation on the significance of Chavez' life following the rally at the conclusion of the march.(March 22, 2018) -- In the Student Government Association (SGA) run-off election held this week, the student body of The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) selected Mariah Crippen to serve as the 2018-2019 Student Body Vice President. Crippen previously served as freshman senator and is currently wrapping up her term as treasurer. As vice president, Crippen will supports the president in serving the UTSA student body.

Lorelle Jackson, currently an active member in SGA, was elected SGA Secretary for the 2018-19 academic year. In this position, Jackson will administer internal accountability measures and take minutes at all meetings of the SGA General Assembly and Executive Board.

Crippen and Jackson will join President-elect Brittany Garcia and Treasurer-elect Amber Shannon Barbosa, SGAs President-Elect and Treasurer-Elect on the Executive Officer Team for the 2018-2019 academic year.

The new administration will take their oaths of office during the annual SGA Banquet and Inauguration Ceremony on April 8. Newly elected senators will also take office at that time. The officers will participate in a transition retreat on April 7 and the newly installed SGA members will conduct their first General Assembly meeting at 5:30 p.m., Thursday, April 12 in the H-E-B Student Union Harris Room (HSU 2.212) on the Main Campus.The votes are in! Get a recap of the 2021 Election.

The votes are in! Get a recap of the 2021 Election.

Subscribe now>During a meeting with Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, Cardinal Oswald Gracias again failed to get a commitment on a papal visit.

By Robin Gomes

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has broken his silence over growing violence against Christians in the country, assuring he will look into the matter.

PMs assurance



"I'm the prime minister for all Indians, irrespective of caste and creed, and if there is any issue you can come directly to me and we can look at it," Modi assured Indian Cardinal Oswald Gracias, Archbishop of Bombay, who met him at the Prime Ministers residence in New Delhi on March 20.

Speaking to the media after the meeting, the cardinal who is president of the Catholic Bishops Conference of India (CBCI) cited Modi as saying his first priority was the welfare of the people and the eradication of poverty.

The president of Indias Catholic bishops drew the attention of the prime minister to sporadic attacks on minority institutions and personnel in different parts of the country, such as the recent attack and vandalism on a Catholic hospital in Ujjain.

He told the premier that a strong message from him that such acts of violence will harm the country will help not only allay the fears of the affected community but discourage misguided people from creating mischiefs.

We are a small community but our contribution to nation building is between 15 to 20 percent, the cardinal told the prime minister.

Cordial meeting



MattersIndia reported Cardinal Gracias describing the meeting as open, cordial and frank that helped the two leaders know each other better. The prime minister assured the cardinal his doors were always open for him and that he could meet him whenever he wanted on any issue.

CBCI deputy secretary general, Monsignor Joseph Chinnayyan who accompanied the cardinal, said it was a one-to-one session with the prime minister. This was the first time a Church leader has such meeting with the prime minister. Normally, we meet the prime minister or the president in groups, MattersIndia reported.

Cardinal Gracias is also the president of the Federation of Asian Bishops Conferences (FABC) and a member of the Council of Cardinals (C9), the group of nine cardinals chosen by Pope Francis to advise him on his reform efforts.

Papal visit not in sight



During his encounter with Modi, the 73-year old cardinal also made another attempt at a possible visit by Pope Francis to the country. "I told the prime minister about the great love and acceptance of the Pope among the people in the world, also in India, and having him in India will benefit the country, Cardinal Gracias told journalists. Modi listened "attentively" but did not make any commitment to invite the pontiff.

"I reminded the prime minister of the Church's contribution in the fields of education, health and social issues and that it would like to do so in future and be part of nation building," said Cardinal Gracias. "Although we [Catholics] are a small minority group, some 2 percent of the population in the country, for centuries the Church has been at the forefront of education and health and serving the poor."

Popes desire to visit India



Pope Francis had first expressed a desire to visit India two years ago. During his flight back from a trip to Georgia and Azerbaijan on Oct 2, 2016, he said he would "almost certainly" visit India and Bangladesh in 2017.

On February 7, 2017, three Indian cardinals, including Cardinal Gracias, had met Modi in New Delhi, to discuss the possibility of a papal visit. Indian Christians felt optimistic when a bishops press release following the meeting said,  the government holds a favorable attitude toward the Pope's visit to India.

However, despite efforts by Indias bishops, the 2017 visit never materialized because of foot-dragging by the government that is led by the pro-Hindu Bharatiya Janata Patry (BJP).

In an interview to National Catholic Reporter on June 15, 2017, Cardinal Gracias said, "I am beginning to lose hope about 2017."Belarus moves to set up automobile joint venture in Vietnam

At a meeting with Deputy Transport Minister Le Dinh Tho yesterday, Vladimir Goshin, the Belarusian Ambassador to Vietnam, said that based on the protocol signed between the two governments in March 2016, the MAZ-Asia joint venture is now going to take shape.

Belarus is also completing the necessary procedures to import completely-built-up (CBU) cars to Vietnam, meeting the regulations of Decree No.116/2017/ND-CP.

The ambassador proposed the Ministry of Transport (MoT) to support the operations of the MAZ-Asia joint venture as well as provide guidance on car imports.

Tho, in response, welcomed the establishment of the automobile JV, and that MoT will continue to create favourable conditions for Belarusian businesses and MAZ-Asia.

Regarding the copied certificate of eligible imported automobile class issued by competent foreign authorities (Vehicle Type ApprovalVTA), Tho confirmed that the ministry will give detailed guidance.

Vietnam saw a sudden surge in automobile imports earlier this month after imports hit a record low in the first two months of this year.

According to the General Department of Customs (GDC), from March 2 to March 8, car businesses registered to import 2,020 cars of all kinds to Vietnam, with a total value of $44.42 million, most of which were cars with nine seats or less.

Most of the imported cars came from Thailand, with the rest from Japan, the US, and the UK. The vehicles were shipped through Haiphong and Saigon ports.

The number of vehicles imported was at a record low in the first two months of this year. Specifically, cars having less than nine seats only reached 18 units in January and 13 units in February, as car importers failed to meet the demand of the governments Decree 116, which stipulates the conditions for production, assembly, import, and trading of automobiles, as well as their warranty and maintenance services.

Viet Nam, Belarus issue joint statement to develop all-around partnership MINSK - Viet Nams President Tran ai Quang and Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko signed a joint statement on developing comprehensively and intensively the bilateral partnership, ...

Vietnam, Belarus head to trade value of US$1 bln Belarusian PM Andrei Kobyakov expected that the Vietnamese State Presidents official visit to Belarus will create a strong impetus for enhancing cooperation in all fields in the future ...

Belarus launches short-term visa exemption to Vietnamese citizens Belaruss five-day visa exemption policy applied to citizens of 80 countries, including Vietnam, took effect on February 12.Facebook has expressed outrage over the misuse of its data as Cambridge Analytica, the British firm at the centre of a major scandal rocking the social media giant AFP/LOIC VENANCE

The proposed class-action complaint filed late Tuesday (Mar 20) night by Lauren Price, a Maryland resident, is the first of what could be many lawsuits seeking damages over Facebook's ability to protect user data, and Cambridge Analytica's exploitation of that data to benefit President Donald Trump's 2016 campaign.

"Every Facebook user has an interest in this lawsuit, and the enforcement of their privacy rights," John Yanchunis, a lawyer for Price, said in a phone interview on Wednesday.

The complaint was filed in the U.S. District Court in San Jose, California, several hours after Facebook was blamed in a shareholder lawsuit filed in nearby San Francisco for the drop in its stock price after the data harvesting was revealed. Nearly US$50 billion of market value was wiped out in two days.

Facebook and Cambridge Analytica did not immediately respond on Wednesday to requests for comment.

Price accused Facebook and London-based Cambridge Analytica of negligence and violating a California unfair competition law.

She said the harvesting contravened Facebook's privacy policy, in which the Menlo Park, California-based company said user trust was "important to us" and that it would not share information without permission and notice.

"Our client saw a tremendous uptick in political messaging during the campaign on her Facebook page, which she had never seen," Yanchunis said. "She had a glimmer of understanding at the time, but now sees there was an attempt to influence her vote."

The complaint seeks unspecified damages, including possible punitive damages.

Yanchunis, who has also been suing Verizon Communications Inc over data breaches at its Yahoo Internet business affecting 3 billion accounts, said it should be a "fairly easy exercise" to identify potential Facebook class members.

He said cybersecurity experts can assist with the case, and that Facebook "leaves a footprint of what was taken that cannot be erased."

The case is Price v Facebook Inc et al, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, No. 18-01732. The shareholder case is Yuan v Facebook Inc et al in the same court, No. 18-01725.Foreign investors alarmed after Sabecos tax arrears worth $110 million

Recently, the State Audit Office of Vietnam proposed collecting VND2.5 trillion ($109.8 million) in tax arrears from Sabeco. The lions share of this is undeclared profit of VND2.8 trillion ($123.01 million) from 2016.

Besides, the state audit asked Sabeco to explain its losses from investing in banking, stocks, as well as pouring money into financial investment funds.

Responding to this incident, a director of a foreign investment fund said, We are a small shareholder in Sabeco, thus we are waiting for Thai Bevs opinion, who hold 53 per cent stake in the corporation. We believe that Thai Bev will have a proposal to the government so that the incident can be handled fairly.

The director wondered that if the VND2.5 trillion ($109.8 million) had not been included in Sabecos assets, investors might not have paid as high a price at the auction as the corporation's charter capital would have been significantly lower.

Furthermore, when the government issued divestment plans from Sabeco, they committed not to conduct tax arrears in Sabeco, excluding the special consumption tax mission.

In case Sabeco was forced to pay VND2.5 trillion ($109.8 million) in tax arrears, the government should scrutinise accounting standards, the legality of the divestment deal, as well as the states commitments made when it offered Sabecos stakes to investors. Otherwise, foreign investors will be alarmed that after acquiring stakes in state-owned firms, a part of their ownership will be affected by previously undisclosed financial obligations, the director stated.

In case Sabeco was forced to pay VND2.5 trillion ($109.8 million) in tax arrears, foreign investors will be alarmed that after acquiring stakes in state-owned firms, a part of their ownership will be affected by previously undisclosed financial obligations.

A director of another foreign investment fund stated that in the past two years, foreign investors have been buying stakes that the authorities divested from state-owned enterprises, instead of buying shares on the stock exchange.

However, if Sabeco has to comply with the state audits allegations, it will create a bad precedent for next divestments.

Returning to Sabeco, after plunging to VND214,600 ($9.43), a record low since July 2017, the companys share reported a slight increase to VND226,000 at 15:00 PM of the transaction session on March 21.

However, the figure is still low compared to the record of VND334,500 ($14.69) on the transaction session of November 29, 2017.

Reacting to Sabecos falling share value, on March 15, seven foreign investment funds managed by Dragon Capital completed the purchase of 15.3 million shares, equaling 2.3 per cent of Sabecos charter capital, for VND3.27 trillion ($143.6 million).

Thereby, to date, Dragon Capital owns 2.3 per cent stake in Sabeco, while Thai Bev, through its subsidiary Vietnam Beverage Company Limited, currently holds 53 per cent.Social insurance transactions in Hanoi  VNA/VNS Photo

The total debt amounts to more than VN322 billion (US$14.1 million).

The delay in paying off debts by these enterprises have affected more than 16,500 workers in the city.

According to the list, the largest debt owner is VIT Garment Co. Ltd in Me Linh District, with a debt amount of over VND18.7 billion ($820,930) from more than 900 workers in 16 months.

Four other enterprises own a debt of more than VND10 billion ($439,000). These include Cienco 1 Bridge 12 JSC in Long Bien District, Investment and Construction No. 4 JSC in ong Da District, Bridge 17-CIENCO 1 Enterprise in Ba Dinh District and Song Tich Irrigation Company Limited in Son Tay District.

These enterprises owe debts ranging from VND10.5 billion to VN11.8 billion between 10-24 months.

Some businesses only owe more than VND100 million ($4,390), but the debt duration is long, ranging from 23 to 24 months. Thus, employees of these businesses are derived of benefits such as social insurance, health insurance and unemployment insurance.

According to Hanois Social Insurance, some enterprises have long overdue debts because of difficulties in business, bankruptcy or temporary suspension of operations.

Social Insurance has informed these enterprises about the delay in paying the debts.

Under the current law, employers who ignore or fail to pay social insurance, health insurance and unemployment insurance for employees can be punished up to seven years in prison and be fined up to billions of ong.

Last December, authorities in Hanoi had ordered the citys inspectors to inspect enterprises with long overdue social insurance premiums.

According to Social Insurance, more than VND2.8 trillion ($122 million) in premiums for social insurance, unemployment insurance and health insurance are overdue as of last November, making up 8.47 per cent of the collection plan.

Hanoi is one of the localities with the highest social insurance, unemployment insurance and health insurance premium debts, directly affecting the legal benefits of nearly 760,000 labourers.Thuong Bac, a relic siting aside the northern bank of the Huong River in the city.  VNS Photo Phuoc Buu

Phan Thanh Hai, director of the local government body for managing relics built by the Nguyen Dynasty (1802-1945) in the city, said many dynastic buildings made use of the river as an axis for their locations.

Thus changes in the ecology of the river have a negative impact on the relics, Hai told a seminar on the conservation of the relics located along the river held in the former imperial capital city on Tuesday.

Hai listed power plants built on the upper area of the river as top creators of problems for the rivers ecology. The exploitation of stone and minerals on the upper riverbanks also affected the river in general and the relics in particular, he added.

We have to adapt to the changes as much as possible, Hai said, adding that several buildings are vulnerable to deterioration as they were built by Nguyen Lords (1558-1777) 300 years ago.

He added that some of the works that are intended to be excavated from the river basin, according to commitments local authorities made to UNESCO in 1993, remain at their locations, including Long Tho Cement Plant and Ga Loi Quarry.

Other impacts included deforestation of the upper forest, the spread of industrial tree plantations and the development of aquaculture in the rivers lower part. We made many efforts to give explanations to UNESCO for these developmental impacts, especially the construction of new bridges spanning the river, Hai said.

Associcate Professor Dang Van Bai, deputy chairman of the countrys Cultural Heritage Committee, said local authorities should consider the river as the core of any development plans.

Local authorities should work to make Hue a museum of ecology, with harmony between ancient buildings and nature. I believe this will foster, not hinder, the future development of the city, he said.

Professor Satoh Shigeru of Japans Waseda University advised local authorities to have a comprehensive outlook on the development of Hue, which takes places the river and the heritage system at the centre of all planning.Ready to roll: A flat basket of nem nuong Cai Rang. - Photos dulichcantho.com

Cai Rang is well-known for its nem nuong (literally grilled sausage). The dish is a real Vietnamese grilled pork sausage or grilled meatball served with rice noodles or rice as a main course.

In years gone by, only gourmets and foodies knew to go to Cai Rang to enjoy the best nem nuong, produced by Ba Loc or later Tu Khem.

Nem nuong Cai Rang, a tasty and delicious dish, came into being hundreds of years ago. It is an unforgettable dish because of its harmonious combination of ingredients, enjoyed by locals but also a hit among foreign visitors to the province, said culinary expert Le Kim Chi.

Through the years, the food became the pride of locals. Enjoying not only the original aromatic flavour, the dish also brought back memories of the cultural values of our native village, said Chi.

Make it hot: Nem nuong on the grill.

Tu Khems nem nuong was so tasty and delicious that an overseas Vietnamese, Tran Le, who left Can Tho for almost half century to settle in Los Angeles recalled: I still remember that when we were young and had done well at school, my mother often rewarded us by asking a rickshaw to carry us to Cai Rang floating market in the district of the same name, to enjoy the dish.

My mother said no other nem nuong could compare with Tu Khems, whose dish was tasty and aromatic. I can still remember it now. Closing my eyes I can see the meat balls on a small bamboo stick and grilled over wood charcoal with a fragrant smell, said Le.

Apart from nem nuong, Tu Khem also ordered quality soya sauce and then ground it until it became smooth. She often put chilies and fried ground nuts over the sweet sauce, making it even more attractive and tasty, Le said, noting that her mother also learned the recipe of making nem nuong from Tu Khem to make the food at home. She went on to teach her children and friends.

Delicious: Tasty and aromatic nem nuong Cai Rang should become a national dish to welcome international visitors.

Materials to make nem nuong include fresh pork, shrimp, pork fat, chili, grouns soya sauce, rice paper, vinegar and ground nuts as well as herbs, cucumbers, carrots, turnip salad, fresh coconut water and banh hoi (rice vermicelli or steamed rolls made of rice flour).

The pork should be warm, cut into pieces and ground until it is soft and smooth. The shrimp should be fresh and be shelled and ground.

Garlic, pepper, sugar and pork fat is added to the shrimp and mixed with the ground pork, before being rolled into balls, skewered on a bamboo stick and grilled over wood charcoal until they are cooked through, said Le.

The dish is wrapped up with banh hoi or rice paper, turnip salad and herbs and dipped in a bowl of ground soya sauce plus fried nuts and chili, Le said.

Today, any travellers visiting Can Tho can enjoy the dish. Nguyen Van Dinh from Hanoi said during his working trip to Can Tho, he often spends some time at Cai Rang to enjoy the dish.

The sweet flavour of the sauce filled my mouth, and the fragrant smell of different herbs mixed with the grilled meat balls sipped with a cold cup of beer made me so ecstatic that I thought I was in heaven.

Homemade: The floating market of Cai Rang is the birth place of specialty nem nuong.

This specialty has its own characteristics that no other food can come close to. The dish could make diners forget all other dishes that they had enjoyed before. Im an addict for the dish, Dinh told Viet Nam News.

He added that he often bought several kilos of nem nuong home.

Local herbalist Huynh Lieu said the dish is nutritious and very good at cooling down heat from inside the body. It is really good for patients with hypertension, diabetes, cholesterol and insomnia.

Nem nuong should become a national dish to welcome international guests and visitors, Lieu said.Vera Jourova, EU Commissioner for Justice, Consumers and Gender Equality, said she is waiting "impatiently" for answers about the Facebook data breach. (Photo: AFP)

"If some company tried this in Europe after May 2018, very likely this drastic sanction will be applied," said Jourova, who is in charge of consumer and personal data protection, at the end of a visit to Washington.

Facebook is under fire on both sides of the Atlantic following revelations that British data analysis firm Cambridge Analytica exploited the personal data of 50 million users of the social network.

On May 25, the General Data Protection Regulation will come into effect in the EU, strengthening the protection of EU citizens' personal details. It will apply to all companies, including those outside of the EU.

The regulation, which increases sanctions power, is not retroactive - but the commissioner promised that "GDPR makes European Union the space, the territory where cheating will be very, very expensive."

The commissioner did not meet with a Facebook representative specifically on the data breach matter, but she did participate in a roundtable on another subject with a representative of the company.

Jourova added she is waiting "impatiently" for answers.

"How is it possible that the people who didn't have the slightest clue became objects of such a harsh manipulation?" she said.The Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and Industry (VCCI) will release PCI 2017 this morning. PCI 2017 studied over 10,000 private firms and nearly 1,800 foreign-invested enterprises (FIEs).

"One notable finding in this years PCI is the high level of confidence expressed by both local and FDI companies," said Michael Greene, mission director of USAID, which has been collaborating with VCCI to conduct the PCI study for over ten years.

Both international and domestic investors look at a range of factors when deciding where to invest to expand their businesses. They look at everything from political stability and geographic location to the well-trained work force available. They also look at infrastructure, particular locations, and the legal system. These are all factors that are reflected in the PCI," he said.

Both international and domestic investors look at a range of factors when deciding where to invest to expand their businesses. They look at everything from political stability and geographic location to the well-trained work force available. They also look at infrastructure, particular locations, and the legal system.

Regarding the highlight areas in this years PCI, Greene said entry costs for businesses and perhaps business support services have been improved in some provinces and so there is a number of areas that have shown improvements.

"However, the interesting thing we have noticed this year, which is highlighted in our report is the correlation between good governance and infrastructure. And then many provinces have shown major improvements in infrastructure and good governance. They are creating what we call zones of prosperity, where these two factors together seem to be important. The provinces we are looking at are Danang, Binh Duong, Bac Ninh, Dong Nai, and Vinh Phuc," he told VIR.

The PCI study has a tremendous impact on improving the business environment and increasing investment in Vietnam. Especially, since 2014 when Resolution 19 began to require that provincial authorities focus on improving their PCI score, there has been an increasing focus and local government officials have actually developed interesting action plans and created new ideas to improve the business environment.

"Vietnam should be very proud that it was the pioneer and led the way in PCI development and that many other countries are following and developing their own PCIs. The USAID has not provided financial support to other countries that are developing the PCI, but we are in contact with most of the countries that are developing PCI. We provide them with advice from our experts and on-going technical assistance. 11 countries are developing PCI, including many countries in Asia which compete directly with Vietnam, like Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Malaysia, and other countries around the world. Again, Vietnam should be quite proud that it is the leader in this important tour," he noted.

"In the coming years, we will continue to support the PCI, but we will also focus more on ensuring the long-term sustainability of the PCI, because it is important for the country and it lasts beyond any donors support."

HCM City aims at higher position in PCI rankings Officials of Ho Chi Minh City held a meeting on April 11 in an effort to improve the citys Provincial Competitiveness Index (PCI), which dropped ...

Ha Noi ranks 14th in 2016 PCI rankings The Capital City of Ha Noi scored over 60 points in PCI rankings for the first time in history in 2016 to rank 14th out of 63 provinces and cities ...

Da Nang continues leading PCI ranking The Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and Industry (VCCI) and the US Agency for International Development (USAID) on March 14 announced the Provincial Competitive Index (PCI) ...Cover of Mien Co Tich (Fairytale Land), a photo book of 95 images of female nudes shot by photographer Thai Phien, a member of the International Federation of Photographic Art (FIAP) and Vietnam Photographers Association.

The 465-page book, Mien Co Tich (Fairytale Land), includes 95 black-and-white and colour pictures selected from his collections.

Phien, a member of the International Federation of Photographic Art (FIAP), began working in nudes 10 years ago.

Ive worked very hard to highlight the beauty of the female body as well as promote the art to the public, said Phien.

Phien is one of the countrys leading photographers who regularly shoot nudes. But they have faced prejudice from society against their nude photos.

In 2007, photos from his Springtime by Thai Phien, the countrys first photo book of nudes, were shown at an exhibition in HCMC.

The Vietnam Association of Photographic Artists gave the book an award, and the Voice of HCMC recognised the book as one of the citys top 10 cultural events of 2008.

However, later, Phien was not allowed to hold a similar exhibition of his nude photos in Hanoi and Hue.

Mien Co Tich is his third photo book of nudes.

Nude photography has evoked conflicting opinions from the public for several decades, even though nude paintings have been accepted. Photographers face challenges as they seek to develop their art, said Hao Nhien, a photographer who has more than 20 years of experience but only five years in shooting nudes.

Last year, Nhien organised the countrys first photo exhibition of female nudes at the HCMC Fine Arts Association.

The event, titled Tao Tac (Beauty), featured 50 black-and-white works selected from his collection of more than 500 photos.

More than 2,000 copies of Phiens Mien Co Tich, published by Hong Duc Publishing House, are available at bookstores.Top five leading cities and provinces receiving PCI certificates

The Vietnam Chamber of Commerce and Industry (VCCI) and the US Agency for International Development (USAID) jointly launched the 2017 Provincial Competitiveness Index Report (2017 PCI Report) this morning.

The 2017 PCI Report is the 13th iteration and is based on responses from 12,000 enterprises, including more than 10,200 domestic private enterprises from 63 cities and provinces and nearly 1,800 foreign invested enterprises in 21 cities and provinces in Vietnam.

Nguyen Duc Long There is much room for improvement of Quang Ninhs PCI ranking, because 70.7 is not a very high score on a 100-point scale. Thereby, we are innovating continuously and are determined to improve the provinces score.

In 2017, for the first time ever, Quang Ninh topped the PCI rankings with a score of 70.7 on a 100 point scale. The cities and provinces listed as the top 10 PCI performers include Danang (70.1 points), Dong Thap (68.8 points), Long An (66.7), Ben Tre (66.7), Vinh Long (66.1), Quang Nam (65.4), Ho Chi Minh City (65.2), Haiphong (65.2), and Can Tho (65.1).

Other cities and provinces that found themselves on the higher end of the PCI tier are Lao Cai, Vinh Phuc, Hanoi, Binh Duong, Thai Nguyen, Ba Ria-Vung Tau, and Bac Ninh.

Nguyen Duc Long, Chairman of the Quang Ninh Peoples Committee, said: Ten years ago, Quang Ninhs ranked 58th out of 63 provinces and cities. After a long time of doing their utmost and constant improvement, Quang Ninh has been in the top five of PCI ranking for the past five years."

"PCI is considered a powerful tool for localities to lure in investment. FDI capital pouring into the province in the last five years was $6 billion, and there are 15,638 firms operating with the total charter capital of over VND150 trillion ($6.6 billion), he said.

There is much room for improvement of Quang Ninhs PCI ranking, because 70.7 is not a very high score on a 100-point scale. Thereby, we are innovating continuously and are determined to improve the provinces score, confirmed Long.

The PCI 2017 Report witnessed impressive reform efforts by local governments across the country. Many governance areas have been improved in 2017 to remove obstacles for businesses.

Informal charges have been on the decline, the business environment has been more equal, and administrative procedures have been simplified.

At the launching ceremony, Vu Tien Loc, chairman of VCCI, noted: Positive improvements have been the dominant trend in Vietnams business environment for the past year. Cities and provinces have actively implemented the directives of the prime minister, learning to employ good practices and experiences from top performers in order to improve their local business environment.

Vu Tien Loc, chairman of VCCI

Important policies and guidelines by the government have led to positive improvements, such as Resolution No.19/NQ-CP on improving the business environment, enhancing national competitiveness, Resolution No.35/NQ-CP on supporting and developing enterprises through 2020, and Directive No.20/CT-TTg of the prime minister dated May 17, 2017 on rectifying inspection activities to prevent redundant, overlapping, and unnecessary inspections for enterprises, said Loc.

The 2017 PCI survey revealed that optimism among the private business community and foreign investors regarding their economic prospects is growing.

52 per cent of PCI 2017 respondents in the domestic survey said that they planned to increase the size of their operations over the next two years, the highest level since 2011, while the number of firms planning on scaling down or closing their business was extremely low at 8 per cent.

The share of foreign-invested enterprises (FIEs) that plan to expand their businesses in Vietnam rose to 60 per cent, a level of ambition unseen since the apex of 2010.

The PCI-FDI survey offers several causes for optimism. FIEs reported significant improvements in the regulatory burden in entry procedures. The post-entry regulations for FIEs in areas such as social insurance, taxes, and labour have been eased compared to previous years.

There is, however, much room for improvement. The business community expects to see continued reforms in the business environment in the future, particularly in the fields of taxes, customs, specialised inspections, social insurance, and firefighting and prevention.

It is crucial that Vietnam have in place effective strategies and policies to enhance its labour quality, especially skilled employees that firms currently find difficult to recruit.

Daniel Kritenbrink, the US Ambassador to Vietnam

Daniel Kritenbrink, US Ambassador to Vietnam, commented: The PCI report has been very influential in promoting transparency and good economic governance in Vietnam, which has been vital for stimulating investment and trade opportunities. We look forward to continued strong economic growth and prosperity in the years ahead.

This years edition features a special chapter to analyse management issues of Vietnamese private enterprises. The analyses showed that management quality is associated with better performance. Firms with good managers have higher growth rates in both employment and fixed capital investment.

Firms that are able to obtain a one-point increase in management quality (on a four point scale) can expect to experience a 1.06 per cent increase in average annual capital growth. Good managers also are more likely to be optimistic about future expansion plans and more involved in exporting or selling to FIEs.

The post-entry regulations for FIEs in areas such as social insurance, taxes, and labour have been eased compared to previous years.

Jocelyn Tran, Walmarts regional senior director for Southeast Asia, said: The PCI opens up opportunities and shows the general views of FIEs and the relationship between the PCI ranking and improvements of business investment and business outcomes. On behalf of the FIE community, I congratulate the Vietnamese government and cities and provinces for these results. However, they need to do more to speed up administrative procedures and customs.

Improving management quality is an important part of enhancing the performance of domestic firms in order to increase their scale of operations and create opportunities to integrate more deeply into the global economy, thereby contributing significantly to the formation of a successful generation of competitive private firms in the international arena.

The PCI report has been produced annually since 2005 to assess the ease of doing business, economic governance, and administrative reform efforts by the provincial and city governments in Vietnam in order to promote the development of the private sector.Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrovs official visit to Vietnam has been rescheduled for March 22-23. Photo VNA/THX

The official had been scheduled to arrive on Monday, but the trip was postponed for an undisclosed reason.

The visit will be made at the invitation of Vietnamese Foreign Minister Pham Binh Minh.

Viet Nam and Russia have enjoyed growing ties in all fields, especially economy.

Since the Viet Nam-Eurasian Economic Union Free Trade Agreement took effect on October 5, 2016, two-way trade between Viet Nam and Russia has grown rapidly, reaching US$3.56 billion in 2017, up 29 per cent from the previous year.

Russia has to date registered to invest almost $982.9 million in 117 projects in Viet Nam, ranking 22nd among countries and territories investing in the Southeast Asian country.

Meanwhile, Viet Nam has invested in18 projects in Russia worth a total $2.4 billion.The benchmark VN Index rose further and set the new record high of 1,175 points on Thursday morning as energy and real estate stocks were kept positive.

The VN Index on HCM Stock Exchange advanced 0.54 per cent to close at a record high of 1,175.62 points.

The benchmark index had gained a total of 4.1 per cent in the previous eight consecutive trading sessions.

The minor HNX Index on Ha Noi Stock Exchange fell for the second day, dropping 0.57 per cent to end at 134.19 points.

The northern bourse index had declined by 0.24 per cent on Wednesday.

Nearly 166 million shares, worth VND4.43 trillion (US$197 million), were traded on the two local exchanges.

Despite the progress of the benchmark index, the market trading condition was negative, with 182 gaining stocks against 227 decliners on the two local exchanges.

Of the 20 sectors on the stock market, energy and real-estate industries remained positive on increased oil prices and first-quarter earnings prospects.

Brent crude oil narrowed its growth to 0.03 per cent on Thursday morning and traded at $69.49 per barrel. It had jumped 5.2 per cent in the past two days.

This improvement in oil prices helped Vietnamese energy stocks to progress, including PetroVietnam Gas (GAS), PetroVietnam Mud Drilling (PVC) and PetroVietnam Drilling and Well Services (PVD).

Among the gainers in the real-estate sector were FLC Group (FLC), Vingroup (VIC), Novaland (NVL), Dream House Investment Corp (DRH) and HCM City Infrastructure Investment JSC (CII).

On the negative side, rubber producers and healthcare service providers were among those that weighed on the stock market.

The UPCOM Index on the Unlisted Public Company Market lost 0.32 per cent to 60.44 points, going down further from its previous three-day decline of 1.9 per cent.

The afternoon trading sessions starts at 1pm.Talliya said that she wants to explore the wonderful sights of Vietnam and take photos of the beautiful country while she is visiting to take part in the Vietnam Top Fashion Models contest.Andrew David Johnson died unexpectedly on Thursday, September 16, 2021, at the age of 23. A Celebration of Life will be held at 11:00 AM on Thursday, September 23, 2021, at Calvary Lutheran Church in Alexandria. Visitation will be held from 4-7 PM on Wednesday, September 22, 2021, at the AndLadies and gentlemen,

The Number 1 rule in Britain is to start any statement with a joke. Unfortunately, its not a time to joke. The issue I am going to raise is too serious.

On 5 March 2018 we heard media reports announcing that the day before two Russian citizens Sergei and Yulia Skripal were poisoned in Salisbury. Sergei Skripal is one who has dual citizenship. First of all I would like to wish all the victims, including Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey, who also suffered from this incident, speedy recovery and well-being.

The Embassy has immediately requested the British authorities to share information about the incident and details of the ongoing investigation.

Unfortunately, 18 days have passed since the day of the incident and we have not received any official information from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office or police on the investigation thereof. The British authorities refused to provide samples of the chemical substance. The legitimate consular access to the Russian citizens under the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relation has not been granted.

The only response we received from the British authorities was a Note Verbale about medical condition of Yulia Skripal. It did not go further than the official public statements, according to which she was reportedly critically ill, but in a stable condition. The Foreign Office refused to share information on Sergei Skripal, citing his British citizenship.

Therefore, the British Government has violated its obligations under the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations by denying consular access for the Embassy to the Russian citizens. We continue to insist that the access and full information on the condition of our compatriots, whom nobody has seen since 4 March, should be provided.

On 12 March, 8 days after the day of poisoning, I was summoned by Foreign Secretary Johnson, who put forward a 24-hour ultimatum to explain the Russian Governments position by the end of the next day. The question was put like following: either the incident in Salisbury was a direct act of the Russian Government against the UK or the Russian Government had lost control of a nerve agent that the Foreign Secretary identified as A-234, and allowed it to get into the hands of others.

Next hour Prime Minister May updated the House of Commons about the incident in Salisbury using the same words as Secretary Johnson did at our meeting, except that she introduced the term Novichok, a bizarre Russian name to use with regard to a chemical substance, in a clear attempt to additionally and quite artificially link the incident to Russia.

Next day, on 13 March the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs gave a statement on the incident in Salisbury and strongly protested against evidence-free accusations and provocations by the British authorities. It was emphasized that Russia is not to be talked to in ultimatums, and that in any case we can only properly consider the matter after we receive samples of the chemical substance to which UK is referring to and after the UK complies with the Chemical Weapons Convention that stipulates cooperation between States Parties, for which Moscow is ready. Without that there is no sense in the British statements.

On 14 March the Prime Minister gave another statement on the incident in Salisbury in the House of Commons, where she announced an expulsion of Russian diplomats and other hostile and provocative measures against Russia. She provided no proof of Russias alleged involvement in the incident and made a conclusion that, as she put it, it was highly likely that Russia was responsible for it. Thus, the British Government again built its official position on pure assumptions.

The Embassy again requested the British authorities to cooperate under the Chemical Weapons Convention on bilateral basis or through the OPCW Executive Council and share information and the samples of the toxic substance. Due to the pressure of the Russian side, the Prime Minister at last sent a letter to the Director-General of the OPCW Technical Secretariat on 14 March and requested assistance in verifying British analysis.

As I understand, the OPCW experts arrived to the UK this Monday. We do not know their mandate. But I hope they will follow all the necessary procedures and principles of the CWC, including ensuring a proper chain of custody of the samples, if there are any. They would also need to check how that was possible that the British authorities managed to designate the nerve agent used as so called Novichok and its origin so quickly. Could it mean that it is highly likely that the British authorities already had this nerve agent in their chemical laboratory in Porton Down, which is the largest secret military facility in the UK that has been dealing with chemical weapons? Is it a coincidence that this chemical weapons facility is only 8 miles away from the site of the incident? How did doctors decide what antidotes to administer to the victims? Russian experts were puzzled by how quickly the British authorities managed to designate the nerve agent allegedly used in Salisbury and how this correlates with Scotland Yards official statements that the investigation is highly likely to take weeks or even months to arrive at conclusions.

We are sure that the results of the Technical Secretariat assistance mission should be reported to the OPCW Executive Council.

A few words about lack of cooperation from the British side.

Instead of imposing a 24-hour deadline the UK could and should have referred to paragraph 2 of Article IX of the Chemical Weapons Convention, which requires the State Parties to make every effort to clarify and resolve through exchange of information and consultations any matter which may cause doubt about compliance with the Convention. A State Party which receives a request from another State Party shall provide as soon as possible, but in any case not later than 10 days after the request, information sufficient to answer the doubt or concern. If they requested information from Russia on 12 March, they would have received it by 22 March.

The British side did not send a request to Russia and is not willing to talk to Russian representatives in the Hague, where the OPCW Technical Secretariat is located. Instead an anti-Russian campaign has been launched in the UK.

To make the story short, Britain has, without any evidence, blamed Russia of poisoning of three people and continues to refuse to cooperate. We cannot accept that.

There is another case, which worries us very much. From the British media, and again not from the British authorities, we have learned about the death of the Russian citizen Mr Nikolai Glushkov. The Embassy has also learned from the press that the police investigating Mr Glushkovs death assumes that he could have died from compression on the neck, suggesting he was strangled.

In full accordance with the 1963 Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, the Embassy immediately requested by a Note Verbale full information on the circumstances of the death of the Russian national and on the investigation, but has not received any meaningful response from the Foreign Office so far. Moreover, it seems that the British side is deliberately ignoring our requests and continues to avoid any contacts with the Embassy on this matter.

To summarize what have been said before a Q/A session, I would like to say that the burden of proof lies with the British authorities. By now no facts have been officially presented either to the OPCW, or to us, or to UKs partners, or to the public.

We cant take British words for granted.

The UK has a bad record of violating international law and misleading the international community, which includes invading Yugoslavia (78 days of bombardment), Iraq and Libya under false pretexts, and supporting the coup detat in Ukraine. I would like to quote President Ronald Reagan, who frequently referred to the Russian proverb trust but verify.

History shows that British statements must be verified.

We demand full transparency of the investigation and full cooperation with Russia and with the OPCW.University Joins Forces with Mayors Office to Mark Earth Hour

The University of Gibraltar is joining forces with the Mayors office to mark this years Earth Hour which takes place at 8:30pm on Saturday 24th March.

Earth Hour is a global LIGHTS OFF initiative which sees hundreds of millions of people from more than 7,000 cities and towns worldwide turn off their lights to raise awareness of climate change and sustainable practices.

Her Worship the Mayor is also supporting the worldwide movement of Earth Hour and encourages individuals, communities, and businesses to turn off non-essential electric lights for one hour. She said We have the choice to make a difference. When committing ourselves to improving and saving our planet, every little action helps."

Professor Tilbury, CEO and Vice Chancellor of University of Gibraltar, was a board member of WWF Australia and part of the team that created the Earth Hour back in 2007. Eleven years on, the University is pleased to bring together Europa Point stakeholders to contribute to this global movement. It has partnered with neighbouring communities and institutions, with the Shrine of Our Lady of Europe, the Ibrahim-al-Ibrahim and Tarik Ibn Zeyad Mosques all supporting this years LIGHTS OFF event.

The University and Mayors office are encouraging people to join Earth Hour and play a part in creating a sustainable future by turning off non-essential lights at home during the event. Do share the moment with family and friends and consider how you can reduce your carbon footprint with a commitment to an action that benefits the planet beyond the hour.

Get involved by switching off non-essential lights for one hour at 8:30pm this Saturday.RGP Arrest Six Persons on Immigration Offences

The Royal Gibraltar Police Marine Section officers yesterday arrested 5 persons, believed to be Moroccan nationals, for immigration offences and one male person, a Spanish national, for the offence of assisting others to enter another state.

The arrests came about when the officers had their attention drawn to a small cabin cruiser about 0.5 nautical miles off Rosia that appeared to be in difficulties. The navigator was initially uncooperative. On boarding the vessel the five suspected Moroccan nationals were found in a cabin on the bows of the boat. All six men were subsequently arrested and appeared in good health.

All six persons have been charged. Five for being a non-Gibraltarian found in Gibraltar without a valid permit or certificate and one for assisting another to enter another state illegally. All six appeared in Magistrates Court this morning.Photo: Shutterstock

This story originally ran in March 2014. It has been updated for the release of Isle of Dogs.

One of Wes Andersons many signatures is his ability to create highly cinematic moments by pairing lost or unfamiliar music with perfectly composed imagery. And since Rushmore was just three lines scribbled in a notebook, music supervisor Randall Poster has been his collaborator on every film, finding just the right songs. Poster is in demand (recent credits alone include Detroit, Wonderstruck, and Popstar), but says that hes developed a special relationship with Anderson; theyre in a constant dialogue, shaping characters and film tones through the music. With their latest partnership, Isle of Dogs, set to come out this weekend, we asked Poster to walk us through the music choices from some iconic Wes Anderson scenes, from the Faces Ooh La La at the end of Rushmore, to Margot Tenenbaum walking off the bus to Nico, to the Kinks sampler in The Darjeeling Limited.

Rushmore

The Creation, Making Time

The Creations 1966 debut single plays during the yearbook montage of the activities of Max Fischer (Jason Schwartzman).

Going into making Rushmore, we had a pretty strong idea about what we wanted to use in the film. Wes had drawn the comparison to the British explosion, where there were bands that were all dressed neatly in suits and ties, and yet the music was wildly spirited. The Creation was a real musical centerpiece, and characterized this angry young man spirit that we wanted to bring to Max Fischers sensibility.

The Who, A Quick One, While Hes Away

Max and Mr. Blumes (Bill Murray) escalating prank war (smashing bicycles, disconnecting brakes) was set to the 1966 Who song.

The Who were certainly in that same world. Whats great about that song in particular is that its sort of a dialogue, so we have the twin sides of Blume and Fischer. It also has this incredible operatic element to it, where it rises emotionally as the grudge match becomes meaner and meaner.

The Faces, Ooh La La

Max has the DJ play 1973s Ronnie Woodsung Faces song when Max asks Rosemary (Olivia Williams) to dance at the end of the film.

That was one we came upon as we were making the movie. Its pretty delicious that song, especially when you hear the ooh la la. I think it really captures that deep feeling of young love, and how Max is just so passionate. It has both perspectives on the situation, but it also captures the pure emotion of the sentiment.

The Royal Tenenbaums

Mutato Muzika Orchestra, Hey Jude

This Beatles cover plays during the prologue, when the narrator explains the Tenenbaum kids childhood.

For a long time, we had been working with the Beatles version of Hey Jude in the opening, and at that point in time, licensing the Beatles for movies was particularly challenging. But we were pursuing it. We were really getting through the process and then unfortunately George Harrison got sick and it wasnt going to happen, and it was all very sad.

Sometimes my feeling is, however it works out is the way its meant to work out. Mutato Muzika Orchestras version just felt like it hit all the beats. I particularly felt like it succeeded in a way that maybe the original recording wasnt going to. It became more original to The Royal Tenenbaums. Sometimes certain songs  particularly, I think, the Beatles  its like kryptonite. Theyre so powerful. They take you somewhere else. I think the Mutato Orchestra kept it in the realm of our film. Im not saying that we wouldnt have pulled it off, but for me, I thought what we used was really unbeatable.

Nico, These Days

The original 1967 Nico version of the Jackson Brownewritten song plays when Margot (Gwyneth Paltrow) walks off the bus to meet her brother, Richie (Luke Wilson).

Its pretty sublime. It really captures the sense of the unattainable and the romantic ambitions of Richie Tenenbaum. The great story about that is that Cameron Crowe took Jackson Browne to see the movie, and when that scene comes on, Jackson Browne elbows Cameron Crowe and says, Man, I used to play like that. And Cameron Crowe goes, It is you! He forgot that he had played on the song. He got so caught up in the movie that he lost his own sense of history.

Elliott Smith, Needle in the Hay

After Richie, who loves his sister, hears about Margots many relationships from the private investigator, he shaves and then cuts his wrists to the 1995 Smith song.

What can I say? God bless Elliott Smith. We had been talking to him during the course of that film, and he was really struggling. [Smith committed suicide in 2003, two years after Tenenbaums was released.] I just feel lucky. Once again, I think its Wess ability to work with music in a sequence. Its just so powerful and so touching and so sad and so beautiful.

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

David Bowie, Life on Mars

After a conversation between Steve (Bill Murray) and Ned (Owen Wilson) about how Steve might be Neds father, the 1971 Bowie song plays as Steve excuses himself and walks onto the ships bow.

Thats one of my favorite moments, certainly in Life Aquatic. Its a classic cinematic moment. David Bowie is such an important part of the movie, and it was great to hear his voice at that juncture in the film. It wasnt preconceived. It was something that we landed on while we were in editorial. The great story about that was that [Bowies producer] Tony Visconti was able to give us the original track, so we were able to do some sound editing with it and tailor it to the scene. We got to listen to the splits. There was this great moment we heard in the course of listening to the song: You can hear a phone ring in the studio on the tape.

I think what really happens is that we enter in Zissous head. Its so psychological, and, lyrically, its kind of sci-fi in a way. And I think that it transcends the action and lets us take a step into this characters mind.

Sigur Ros, Staralfur

Toward the end of their journey, when everyones huddled in the little submarine, this 1999 Sigur Ros song plays when the Jaguar Shark appears and swims around them.

I think that one of the great things about those Sigur Ros records was that even though theyre singing in Icelandic, somehow the emotion lets you know exactly what the song was about. I think that the vagueness of it and the mystery of the Jaguar Shark was a great juxtaposition. All the characters in the submarine: Its a pretty heartbreaking moment. We just knew it was right.



The Darjeeling Limited

The Kinks, Strangers

The Kinks 1970 song plays during a long tracking shot as the brothers walk through an Indian village to the funeral of a boy they failed to save.

We had the battling Whitman brothers corresponding with the battling Davies brothers. I think that that sequence is pretty powerful. It just felt perfect and really satisfying. It allowed us to create this great Kinks motif.

Did you go into the film thinking about the brothers parallels? Were always looking to make connections. I mightve retrofit that notion into my history of the movie, but it works.

Theres an interesting story about the flashback scene that comes after. Wes had this idea that we should use film scores from the movies of [Indian filmmaker] Satyajit Ray, so I went on this journey where I had to go to Calcutta to gather all of this music and really do a lot of research. I couldnt go into a record store and say, Okay, I want to buy all of the film soundtracks of Satyajit Ray. I had to go to the Ray estate and get them to transfer all this stuff for us. So, we said wed use as much of it as we can. We didnt use any original score in the film. But going into the next sequence, in the garage, that was definitely going to be a different musical motif. We were trying different things, different classical pieces, and I told Wes that Beethovens 7th Symphony was Rays favorite piece of classical music. And he immediately was like, Okay, lets use that. Somehow it really was pretty perfect.

Peter Sarstedt, Where Do You Go to (My Lovely)?

Jack Whitman (Jason Schwartzman) puts the 1969 song on when his ex (Natalie Portman) visits him in his hotel room in Hotel Chevalier, the short film that acts as a prologue to Darjeeling. Jack then plays it again in Darjeeling when hes having a cigarette with train attendant Rita.

It pretty much is the hotel. It defines the Hotel Chevalier, really. Its connected to the legacy of [Maxs love of French things in] Rushmore in the sense that there was this American-born boulevardier and the sort of French specificity  its just one of those things that somehow became ours. The thing about Peter Sarstedt that was interesting is that he was born in India, crazily enough. He was English, born in India. God knows if that had anything to do with it, but it was a happy coincidence. It allowed us a chance to make the connection between the short and the feature. It was also just a great way of using music where playing it was actually within the scene.

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Thats an example where it felt like it captured very closely what was going on inside the characters head.

Sometimes you have these emotions in life and even though theyre painful, you want to feel them as deeply as possible. The pain validates the obsession or your commitment to your idea of a person. Thats what the song ultimately does. It helps drive the obsession and is sort of a beautiful pain that we sometimes find ourselves yearning for. To feel pain is to feel alive. The song drives at the obsessive nature of romance.

The Fantastic Mr. Fox

Bobby Fuller Four, Let Her Dance

Mr. Fox discovers a supermarket, and this 1965 song plays as all the animals dance joyfully.

Like Peter Sarstedt, Bobby Fuller is sort of an undiscovered musical genius. Bobby Fuller is just a crazy, crazy story, how he was murdered and had a very short-lived career. We had come upon Let Her Dance like ten years before. Wes and I were listening to it while we were making The Royal Tenenbaums. It was one of those things where we hid it away for ten years. I wouldnt play it for anybody else. And then we finally found the perfect moment and were able to use it. With some of these songs  say, Bobby Fuller or Ooh La La  theyre such great pop songs, you hear it for the first time and somehow by the time the chorus comes around for the second time, youre singing along with it. You feel like youve known it your whole life.

Moonrise Kingdom

Francoise Hardy, Le Temps de lAmour

Suzy (Kara Hayward) and Sam (Jared Gilman) are on the beach, after running away. Suzy puts on this 1962 Francoise Hardy record, and the two dance and kiss to it.



Its funny. Wes and I were working on a commercial for a Japanese telecommunications company, Softbank, and were looking for the right French pop song to put into the piece and had gone through 100 songs. With that one, he was like, Lets put that one away. We had it under lock and key until the right moment presented itself. Then it did and it just seems like that moment had been waiting for that song.

Why do you think the character was so infatuated with this record?

Rock and roll can be an invitation to be the person that you want to be  not necessarily the person that you are. It allows you to transcend yourself and your circumstances. Thats the moment that Suzy, whos caught in the web of her familys function and dysfunction, has found a way to transcend it with music.

The Grand Budapest Hotel

The Score

Unlike Andersons previous films, his new one doesnt use many songs. Instead, much of the film is scored in a fantasy middle-European style that Poster and Anderson worked on with composer Alexandre Desplat.

Weve never used as much original score in a film. The film is set in four different distinct time periods and is told through a prism of reflection, so we felt a folk element would speak to the enduring spirit, but there is a classical motif that is counterpoint to it.

The movie is set in this sort of fantasy period between the two World Wars, in this fantasy middle European nation. We were not really exactly sure how to create the musical element, so we did a lot of research in terms of looking into all the various regional music and regional composers  you know, French classical composers, Polish, German  just getting a sense of what was the high point of musical culture in Europe. And then we also did a lot of research in terms of the various folk music, so we listened to everything from French musette to German drinking songs, military marches to alpine yodeling, Hungarian gypsy music and dances, and Romanian folk songs. Ultimately we landed on balalaika [a three-stringed Russian folk instrument] as the prominent musical voice in the film and really then, by virtue of the genius of Alexandre Desplat, created music that was filtered through it. The dominant sound is balalaika but also Wes brought in other elements  alpine horns, recorders, and a church organ. We had been listening to this gypsy music thats played on a cimbalom, which is kind of a hammered dulcimer, and so that too became a strong voice in the film. The music combined in a way I dont think you would hear anywhere else. What it does is create this spirit of the Earth and speaks to this notion that the film is very much concerned about: living in the past, the ever-present past, and the fading past  trying to maintain culture within the onset of barbarism  and the enduring human spirit. We somehow found our way to create a music that spoke to those things.

Isle of Dogs

The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, I Wont Hurt You

After hearing about what happened to Ataris dog Spots, Chief, Rex, King, Boss, and Duke lead the boy through the Isle of Dogs to find him. This song plays as they walk together.

We use I Wont Hurt You in the film, but also Midnight Sleighride by the Sauter-Finegan Orchestra (a group you should check out further). Tokyo Shoeshine Boy may be performed by a Japanese vocalist, but is built on a Western pop foundation. These songs help convey emotion of the characters, but also give our story proper motion. I wouldnt want to generalize, but we think I Wont Hurt You speaks to the bond and trust that builds in intimate relationships over time. Whats more intimate than the relationship with a boy and his dog, or a dog with his boy? The world, I think, has been waiting for a cinematic platform for the West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band, and now they have it.

The Score

Beyond the few pop songs mentioned, the films music mostly consists of a taiko drum-heavy score.

Wes and I began talking about the musical element in the film as the story was just taking shape. We looked to Kurosawas film music as a beacon on our journey. We gathered as much traditional Japanese music as we could get our hands on and gradually made our way through Japanese pop music by era. Wes wanted to build a foundation of taiko drumming as both a dramatic and textural element, and we were lucky enough to find Kaoru Watanabe, the taiko master of Brooklyn (and all other boroughs), who fulfilled our taiko fantasies. In collusion with our Alexandre Desplat, Wes created something that we think is unique and elemental to the film. I helped.Margot Robbie Photo: Getty Images

Until quite recently, Quentin Tarantino was mainly known for his Academy Awardwinning eight-film oeuvre, and for being a revelatory actors director. Hes coaxed career-defining performances out of Uma Thurman, Ving Rhames, and Christoph Waltz while also dusting off and giving renewed relevance to actors previously consigned to the cinematic relic heap: John Travolta, Robert Forster, and Pam Grier among them. So under ordinary circumstances, the news last month that Tarantino had tapped A-listers Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio to co-star in his upcoming, 60s-set ninth feature, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, wouldnt be surprising. Nor would news that Oscar nominee Margot Robbie was reportedly in talks to portray pop icon Sharon Tate in the film, which uses the Manson Family murders as a subplot.

But more than a week has passed since this news broke  an eternity by Hollywood deal-making standards. Normally, a carefully placed trade-paper story that an actor of Robbies stature is in negotiations with a director like Tarantino would be enough to seal the deal; agents and producers have a rich history of planting speculative news items to persuade foot-dragging talent to sign on to a hot project. Its possible that the actresss apparent reluctance is the latest evidence of a cascading PR crisis for Tarantino.

More closely associated with Harvey Weinstein than any other director, Tarantino has admitted he looked the other way and stayed silent despite knowledge of the deposed moguls alleged serial sexual predation. I knew enough to do more than I did, he told the New York Times. Going forward, the filmmaker will likely bear the toxicity of that long-standing relationship like a scarlet letter. More recently, hes come under intense criticism for revelations of his reckless and disrespectful treatment of Thurman during the filming of Kill Bill, and for an unearthed 2003 interview in which he dismissed the notion that Roman Polanski had raped the teenage Samantha Geimer in 1977 (Polanski pleaded guilty to unlawful sex with a minor and fled the country). He didnt rape a 13-year-old, Tarantino told Howard Stern. He had sex with a minor. Thats not rape.

As a result, even before a single frame of the new movie has been shot, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is already shaping up to be the writer-directors most controversial effort to date. And beyond potentially cratering the casting of Robbie  who portrays a victim of domestic abuse in her most recent film I, Tonya and who spoke out in support of the #MeToo movement on Australian television earlier this week  there is increasing speculation the sum total of these controversies could derail the film.

This week, Debra Tate, the younger sister of Sharon Tate, added fuel to the fire by lashing out against Tarantinos exploitative intent to use her sisters 1969 murder as a plot device. I am a vocal opponent of Mr. Tarantinos film, Tate, a victim advocate and the author of the essay collection Sharon Tate: Recollection, tells Vulture. He has yet to reach out to me to talk to me about anything to do with my sister or her depiction in his film. Why? Because I believe its negative. If his depiction was positive, hed have a dialogue with me.

As evidence, Tate points to the films official log line: Set in Los Angeles in the summer of 1969, the movie focuses on a former male TV actor whos had one hit series and is looking for a way to get into the film business. His stunt double is looking for the same thing. The horrific murder of Sharon Tate and four of her friends by Charles Mansons cult of followers serves as a backdrop to the main story.

Lets remember that this movie, until very recently, has always been referenced as the Manson Family Murder Film, she continues in an email to Vulture. Mr. Tarantino even demanded a release date based on the anniversary of my sisters devastating murder, Aug. 9, 2019. How is this not vulgar? Or sick? THIS IS NOT A CELEBRATION.

While Hollywood is in the midst of a golden era of biographical dramas and fact-based films  exhibit A: Gary Oldmans Oscar win for his portrayal of Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour  their condemnation by real-life story subjects and their family members can have a demonstrably corrosive effect. Sometimes that outcry can even pull the plug on a movie. This week, in the lead-up to FXs Sunday premiere of Trust  the Danny Boyledirected series that details the 1973 kidnapping of Paul Getty, 16-year-old grandson of J. Paul Getty, who was the richest man in the world at the time  Pauls sister Ariadne Getty has threatened to sue the network for what she says are distortions of the truth and defamation of her family. And in January, 20th Century Fox canceled its planned biopic about newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst, that was to be based on Jeffrey Toobins best-selling account of her kidnapping by the Symbionese Liberation Army, American Heiress, with James Mangold attached as director. The studio caved in to pressure to spike the project after Hearst released a blistering statement condemning the veracity of its source material.

Tate also weighed in on Tarantinos treatment of Thurman. In the final days of production on Kill Bill Vol. 2, he demanded that Thurman perform a sequence against her wishes, in which she drives an old Volkswagen Karmann Ghia  a car she described as a deathbox  through rural Mexico at an unsafe speed, without proper safety precautions and absent the back-up of on-set stunt professionals. Thurman ultimately lost control of the car and crashed into a palm tree, leaving her with leg injuries and a concussion. She went on to detail how Tarantino spit in her face and choked her with a chain for other scenes in the film.

Here was another beautiful actress being spit on and forced to drive a death trap because Tarantino demanded it, notes Tate, who has thrown her unqualified support behind a Sharon Tate biopic titled Tate that is set to star Kate Bosworth. I will not allow my sister to be spit on, nor her death to be glorified. Honestly, it is surprising to me in these times of zero tolerance and Times Up, we are finding too much tolerance in this case and with this movie.

According to Jason Squire, editor of The Movie Business Book (Fourth Edition, 2017) and an associate professor of cinematic practice at USC, Debra Tates criticism of Once Upon a Time presents liabilities not only for Tarantino but also for Sony Pictures, which is bankrolling and distributing the nearly $100 million movie. Within the context of todays heightened sensibilities, everyone has to respect the sisters point of view, says Squire. It was a devastating story for anyone who followed it or lived through that time  one of the worst Hollywood-based stories. If social media starts trending in the direction that this is not an appropriate movie to make, thats a cautionary moment for Sony. The suggestion would be that Sony or Tarantino sit down with the sister and talk to her about the project.

But to hear it from an influential agent turned manager who has guided clients to Academy Awards, not only will Tarantinos latest feature go off without a hitch thanks to his cult of personality in Hollywood and transformative reputation as a filmmaker, Margot Robbie will go to any length necessary to appear in one of his productions. If the question is, Is Margot Robbie going to get cold feet? My intuition is, my gut is, shell do whatever it takes to work with Quentin Tarantino and suffer whatever it takes, the manager says. If crashing a car is the price of admission, she might do that  and then some.Photo: Fox Searchlight

Wes Andersons animated feature Isle of Dogs might be the most lyrically disjunctive movie ever made: Nothing fits together and everything harmonizes, magically. The animation is stop-motion, reportedly inspired by such TV perennials as Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, but filtered through Kabuki and late, formal Akira Kurosawa epics like Kagemusha and Ran. Its a series of moving paintings, tableaux vivants, a goofy dog comedy, a grim totalitarian allegory. Its sui generis. Its the damnedest thing.

The premise? Fluky but ingenious. Isle of Dogs unfolds in the near future in a purportedly democratic but pointedly authoritarian Japan, where the cat-loving Megasaki mayor, Kobayashi, exiles his citys dogs  most of them sick, with a suspiciously unique flu  to a reeking island garbage dump off the coast.

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In that benighted place, the sneezing, filthy creatures roam the trash heaps, fight over maggoty scraps, and commiserate on the sorriness of their state in colloquial American English, delivered with disarming matter-of-factness (one of those disjunctions) by Bryan Cranston (the protagonist, a stray), Edward Norton, Bill Murray, Jeff Goldblum, Liev Schreiber, Bob Balaban, Scarlett Johansson, F. Murray Abraham as a canine narrator and Tilda Swinton his diminutive oracle, who understands television. Greta Gerwig supplies the voice of a human American teenager, Courtney B. Vance a presumably non-canine modern narrator. Japanese characters speak in Japanese, sans subtitles.

The story proper kicks off with the crash landing of a mini-plane carrying a boy named Atari (dubbed by the dogs the Little Pilot) who happens to be the ward of Mayor Kobayashi and has come to the Isle of Dogs to search for the first dog to be exiled, Spots  not (this is very important) Spot, voiced by Schreiber. Cranstons street dog Chief wants no part of a kid, being by nature a biter, but his new pet pals (Norton in familiar Scout Leader mode, Murray the fatalistic hipster, Goldblum the stammering cogitator) drag him along on the odyssey. An intertitle calls this section, The Search for Spots. (Leonard Nimoy, RIP.)

Several times in Isle of Dogs, Alexandre Desplats lovely, strumming score yields to a Japanese-inflected treatment of Prokofievs Lieutenant Kije Suite, which suggests Kobayashi (who poisons his political foes with the help of a tall, Karloffian goon known as Major Domo) might be a stand-in for Putin and the dogs for political dissidents shipped to the gulag. Or perhaps theyre just dogs  it works either way.

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Whats foremost  this being un film de Wes  is le mise-en-scene. Most of the panels have Andersons familiar brand of off-center symmetry, which can seem too finicky by half in live-action but is breathtakingly right with Kabuki-ish characters and the occasional split, shoji-proportioned screen. Watching overhead shots of a chef slicing and plating assorted sea creatures, it hit me: I think hes turning Japanese, I think hes turning Japanese, I really think so! Perfection, too, is stop-motions artificiality. You dont want fluidity, seamlessness. You want to see behavior broken down into its essential components. Even amid the canines anthropomorphic musings, one or more may stop and listen or stretch (or sneeze) in a way that registers as Essence of Dog. Never mind the Oscars. Show the movie at the annual Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show and any sane judge would want to shower the characters with ribbons.

Isle of Dogs Reviewed by Dogs

Each frame is a happy surprise with its unique universe of color, from the palette of yellows in the classroom where the tall, stick-legged American exchange student (voiced by Gerwig) with the blonde Afro makes the rousing case for rescuing young Atari (big girls with crushes on little boys plainly has resonance for young Wes) to the sea of silver grass that gives this sunless world an eerie luster. (The production design is by Paul Harrod and Adam Stockhausen, the art direction by Curt Enderle. Tristan Oliver, of Loving Vincent, Chicken Run, and Andersons own The Fantastic Mr. Fox is the cinematographer who palpably knows the ins, outs, and what-have-yous of stop-motion.) When youre not exhaling in admiration, youre laughing at the wit that went into designing things like the governments mechanical dogs, which spring a fanlike appurtenance from their heads before attacking  so Japanese lion, so Jurassic Park.

Anderson shaped the story with Roman Coppola, Jason Schwartzman, and Kunichi Nomura, but wrote the screenplay himself. Its not on the breathtaking level of the visuals  what could be?  but its superb in its own right, its one-liners not just clever (Stop licking your wounds!) but redolent of loneliness and an exiles abiding incomprehension. Cranstons Chief is a great character, a stray who tells the lovely, prize-winning bitch, Nutmeg (voiced by Johansson), Were all astray.

As an Anderson non-worshipper, Im tempted to say he should stick to animation, where hes investing puppets with multiple dimensions instead of reducing multidimensional actors to puppets. But that would be, in this context, unkind. It would also ignore Andersons potential  which I think is in there, somewhere  for mining the dramatic tension between his artificial frames and the messy humans they contain or, perhaps, imprison. To be a sentient being stuck in a Wes Anderson frame would be daunting. Perhaps thats how he feels. If out of that state come gifts like Isle of Dogs, then the only proper response is to howl with joy.

Isle of Dogs was nominated for two Oscars in 2019, including Best Animated Feature and Best Original Score.Riverdale Chapter Twenty-Nine: Primary Colors Season 2 Episode 16 Editors Rating 3 stars * * *  Previous Next  Photo: Katie Yu/The CW

The results are in: Chic has no Blossom blood. (Blossom Blood, a new fragrance by Cheryl with notes of rose, spider venom, and maple syrup.) Betty interprets this news to mean they cant be related. But back in Alices day, she wasnt so busy solving serial murders that she couldnt keep up with her freshman-year biology homework. Chic is her son, she explains: Its just that Hal, the Coopers genetic link to the Blossom family, isnt his father. So, who is?

As Hal interviews Hermione about her mayoral campaign for a front-page story in the Lodge-owned Register, who should appear but actual, real-life Andy Cohen (a friend of Mark Consuelos, who plays Hiram), here to endorse his old Manhattan gal-pal. This feels more like a surreal Bravo-CW crossover dream Id have after eating dark-chocolate Flipz too close to bedtime than an actual scene of television, which I mean as a sincere compliment. Shes a very savvy businesswoman, Andy says of Candidate Lodge. Shes a fighter, too. She doesnt give up. Id love to have her in my corner. Hermione is Riverdales Bethenny Frankel, and the South Side their future Skinnygirl Prison.

Though Andy Cohen and Archie are #ImWithHer[mione], Fred intends to sever all ties with the Lodge family and their business. Molly Ringwald (okay, fine, Archies mom) has even come for a visit to help her ex work out the legal details. Jughead, too, is going to the mattresses: He embarks on a hunger strike to to protest the closing of South Side High.

Ethel Muggs, whose father was Bernie Madoffd by Hiram, dumps a strawberry milkshake on Veronicas head (like the slushies on Glee, but worse, because dairy) in the cafeteria to punish her for the Lodge familys crimes against the town of Riverdale. V resolves to turn the other cheek when it comes to Ethel. But then Reggie  whos running for student-body president, on the time-tested platform of being a hot dummy  taunts her about her dad being incarcerated in his own prison, she knocks him out with an impressive right hook. (Veronica definitely had a monthly unlimited membership at Rumble or Box + Flow when she got bored of SoulCycle.) Though her parents would much prefer shed stay out of the spotlight, or, at a minimum, stop punching people, Veronicas mind is made up. Shes joining the race for president with Betty as her running mate!

Cheryl invites the gals over for a dual-purpose sleepover, intended both to celebrate Toni, their newest River Vixen, and to assuage her rattled nerves. Shes pretty sure that Penelope and Uncle Fester have nefarious plans for her and Nana Rose, as her mother has been brewing up teas from mysterious herbs and Cheryls doorknob has been rattling troublingly in the middle of the night. Actually, this is a tri-purpose sleepover: As their friends snooze on the floor, Cheryl and Toni share the bed. Full disclosure: I didnt want to invite all the girls tonight, Cheryl whispers. But I knew my hideous mother would never allow me to invite just you. Just what I craved.

Theyre about to kiss  so, so close  when theyre interrupted by a loud crash outside. Nana Rose, out cold, has fallen down multiple flights of stairs. Penelope and Uncle Father Oscar  wearing Cliffords own pajamas  tell the paramedics Nana must have tripped, her apparent confusion a symptom of sundowner syndrome. Something is rotten in the state of Thistlehouse.

Hiram asks Archie to deliver hunger-striking Jughead a message, and of course Archie will do anything that New Daddy asks of him, including building a wall between the South Side and the rest of Riverdale by hand. Its a notice of demolition: South Side High will be torn down by the end of the week, much sooner than planned. In response, Jughead and his crew of young Serpents chain themselves to the doomed schools gates.

Betty finds Kevin in her kitchen, enjoying milk and cookies with Chic, and having apparently filled him in on their whole catfishing scheme. Thanks, Kev. That night, Betty wakes her supposed brother up by holding a lighter to his face. Im going to bring you down, she warns. I caught Clifford Blossom. I caught the Sugar Man. I caught the Black Hood. You know what they all have in common? Theyre dead. Chic tattles to Mom about his sister implicitly threatening to kill him, which, fair. He also digs up Fugue State Bettys black bob wig and says she wears it while having sex with Jughead, which, less fair.

I am very well reacquainted with how alluring the Jones men are, Alice recalls, giving life to 10,000 more Shelly JohnsonBilly Loomis fantasies in a single sentence. But no, she insists: Theres no way FP could be Chics dad. In deference to her mother, Betty tries yet again to make peace with Chic, but he takes this opportunity to point out that he wasnt the one who touched Pseudo Cumberbatch, or the dead mans phone  if anyone would look guilty to the cops, its Betty. Siblings, am I right?!

Meanwhile, Veronica courts Josies celebrity endorsement by offering her a spot on Watch What Happens Live (okay), and so the Pussycat emeritus sings her support for the Lodge-Cooper ticket in a duet with, obviously, Veronica herself. But their performance is interrupted by Ethel, handing out anti-Veronica flyers scrawled (in what can only be described as serial-killer-manifesto handwriting, but I digress) with secret Lodge family intel provided on the DL by Josie. Betty is so upset to learn that Veronica did know all about her parents machinations, contrary to what shed told their friends, that she steps down from the ticket. Later, Veronica tearfully explains to her mother that she thought if she could become president, people would stop looking at her like the daughter of criminals.

Nana Rose survives (just as she did the Thornhill fire  I personally choose to believe that Nana Rose is immortal), and Cheryl waits by her bedside in the hospital. The doctor reports they found a trace amount of the paralytic toxin tannis root (shout out to Rosemarys Baby) in her grandmothers bloodstream, which Penelope and Uncle Fester said they caught her chewing in the greenhouse. Cheryl accuses her mother of drugging Nana Rose and pushing her down the stairs. You have lost your mind and you leave us no choice, Penelope responds. Surely this will end well.

Hiram warns Archie that Jugheads continued protest is bad for business  it would make for terrible optics if adults went after them, but not if kids did. And the two of them did make that blood oath, so  Archie agrees, on the condition that New Daddy release Old Daddy and Andrews Construction from all ties to Lodge Industries. And so Archie and his gang of hunky boys, dressed identically in gym clothes, for some reason, show up at South Side High armed with bolt cutters. By now, a small crowd has gathered to observe the protest. Jughead doesnt even bother to try to stop Archie from breaking his chains: Just about every onlooker is filming the events with their phones, ensuring the Serpents message will spread far and wide.

Filled with new resolve, Jughead decides to run for student-body president, so long as Betty will campaign as his co-president. Veronicas would-have-been veep agrees immediately, so long as she can stay in the Jones trailer and stop sharing a house with Chic. Fred also announces hes running  for mayor, not student-body president  to Molly Ringwalds delight, if not Archies.

Toni goes to Thistlehouse looking for Cheryl, but Penelope cooly informs her shes been sent away to boarding school in Switzerland. In reality, she and Uncle Claudius have committed our little Hamlette to a uniquely horrifying wing of the Sisters of Quiet Mercy, where a nurse is preparing to give her an injection in a padded room. Cheryls conversion will begin tomorrow.Photo: Mitch Haaseth/ABC

In theory, Station 19 is a spinoff of Shonda Rhimess indestructible hospital drama Greys Anatomy, sending surgeon Ben Warren (Jason George) to a new career as an emergency medical technician at a firehouse in Seattle. But the pilot episode, which debuts Thursday on ABC, turns Warrens adjustment to his new life into a secondary plot. Like every other Shondaland series, this one is built around a tough, smart woman with an edge. This time its Andy Herrera (Jaina Lee Ortiz), one of two female firefighters at the station house  the other is her best friend, Danielle Savres Maya Bishop  who also happens to be the daughter of the captain, Pruitt Herrera (legendary character actor Miguel Sandoval, doing the warm-grizzled thing to perfection).

Station 19 is a series thats keenly aware of the difficulties of being a woman in a male-dominated profession, and there are moments when it lays on the rah-rah dialogue a bit thick, to the point where it seems as if the series is trying to hard-sell itself to you, even though youre already sitting right there watching it. (My daughters fierce, Pruitt exclaims to a table full of his colleagues. Shes got guts. She needs no one.) The portrayal of the potentially deadly grunt work of firefighting could use some work, too: The characters constantly explain the physics of whats happening through dialogue even though everybody on the scene already knows the basics, and theyd be more memorably communicated visually anyway.

Still, showrunner Stacy McKee and co-executive producers Rhimes and Betsy Beers know exactly what they want this series to be from moment to moment. From the playful bestowing of nicknames (including New Guy and Baby Rambo) to the love triangle that dominates Andys private life (shes dating her dads second-in-command, played by Grey Damon, but still has feelings for her ex, a cop played by Alberto Frezza), to the copious use of slow-motion and ethereal pop songs to highlight emotionally intense moments (including a fall from a burning building onto inflatable crash mats), all of the signature elements are in place. Theres also a sharp left turn into family melodrama that pushes Andy to decide how serious she is about claiming what would appear to be her birthright. Whether these elements will set Station 19 apart from NBCs modest hit Chicago Fire, as well as the innumerable firefighters that came before it  most notably Rescue Me, a show whose constant, exorbitant praise for its heros bravery made the compliments ladled on Andy seem modest  remains to be seen, even if its place within the Expanded Shonda Rhimes Universe is secure.Tessa Thompson. Photo: Presley Ann/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images

No offense to Will Smith  who was absolutely right when he told Tommy Lee Jones in the original Men in Black that he made the Ray-Bans-and-black-suit uniform look good  but the rebooted version of the franchise is shaping up to look even better. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Tessa Thompson has signed on to join Chris Hemsworth in a movie that will unfortunately not be named Men in Black: Ragnarok. (Well, it doesnt have a title yet, but its probably safe to assume the studio wont borrow a title from the Marvel Cinematic Universe.) Straight Outta Compton director F. Gary Gray is attached to helm the picture, with a script from Iron Man screenwriters Matt Holloway and Art Marcum. Thompson and Hemsworth will be playing new characters, instead of revamped versions of J and K, and the story is reportedly going to be more global in scope with an ensemble cast, as opposed to another one-two buddy comedy. So whos in charge of getting Janelle Monae on board to play some beguiling extraterrestrial  maybe named Cindi Mayweather?MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) - Advocates and lawmakers called for women's equal pay in Alabama during a public hearing in a House committee.

The legislation introduced by Democrat Rep. Adline Clarke prohibits gender wage discrimination except where there is a difference in education, experience or productivity.

Six supporters said Wednesday the wage gap increases poverty. The opponent from the National Federation of Independent Business said record-keeping would burden employers. She said she hasn't received a pay complaint in 15 years.

Alabama and Mississippi are the only two states that don't have equal pay laws. The National Women's Law Center calculates white women in Alabama make 74 cents to a man's dollar, while black women make 57 cents and Latinas only 49 cents.

The committee didn't vote. The bill is unlikely to pass this session.

(Copyright 2018 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)

3/21/2018 2:38:51 PM (GMT -5:00)Changes are on the way for how people are notified about sex offenders in Colbert County and Tuscumbia.

Upset neighbors called WAAY 31 after learning registered sex offenders moved into their community and nobody told them about it for weeks.





Patrick Story was convicted of having child pornography in Etowah County on Jan. 24. He is one of the registered sex offenders living at the Four Way Inn off of Highway 43 in Tuscumbia. William Mathis was convicted of having obscene material in Shelby County on Jan. 30, he is also residing at the Four Way Inn.

Both men are in a reentry program hosted by a non profit named Outreach Reentry Ministry, which is ran by Willie Simpson. Chester McKinney bought the old Four Way Inn and teamed up with Simpson to start the reentry program.

Story is registered as living at the inn since Feb. 16. Mathis was registered as living there since Feb. 27.

People who live near the Four Way Inn were not notified until Mar. 14, about the sex offenders living there. We uncovered a serious flaw in the system lead to citizens not being notified immediately.

"It was a surprise for us," said Elizabeth Ables, who lives near the Four Way Inn. "It makes you a little nervous understandably so."

Ables like many other residents felt blindsided.

"This is very concerning and it should trouble a lot of people," said Colbert County citizen, Edward Bowan. "Our public is not being informed when sexual offenders are moving into the area."

We spent a week asking Tuscumbia Police and the Colbert County Sheriffs Office that question.

"There was a lot of discussions about one getting the information to us, and as soon as we got the information we got it out there as quick as we could. That's one reason we pushed it to Facebook," said Tuscumbia Police Chief, Tony Logan.

The Colbert County Sheriff told WAAY 31 both men notified his office, but where the men live is in Tuscumbia polices jurisdiction. It took two weeks for police to get that information. State law requires police to notify neighbors within 3 days.

"I talked with the Attorney Generals office to make sure we were in compliance. Hopefully we will be able to stay on top of these things in the future," said Logan.

The Colbert County Sheriff said, his office will start sending out a time stamped email to municipalities; such as Tuscumbia, to let police know sex offenders should be coming by to register.

"I can defiantly tell you we will be going around and making sure they are in compliance," said Logan.

Upset residents still packed out Tuesday nights Colbert County Commission meeting voicing their concerns.

"Everybody has a past and we also deserve to have a future and every opportunity afforded for that future," said Ables.

The sheriff told the crowd of people at the commission meeting as long as Outreach Reentry Ministry accepts ex felons, there isn't anything they can legally do.

Chief Logan, the Sheriff and other county officials said they are planning to meet and discuss better ways to inform the public about sex offenders moving into the area. Officials are also trying to see if the sex offenders broke any laws during their registration.A Huntsville police officer was booked into the Madison County Jail Thursday morning for a weekend drunk driving incident.

Curtis Eugene Mitchell, 22, was charged with one count of driving under the influence. Jail records indicate his bond was set at $1,000.

The Alabama Law Enforcement Agency served a warrant on Mitchell Thursday morning that stemmed from a DUI incident that took place over the weekend, according to Huntsville police. Police said Mitchell was not on duty and was in his private vehicle at the time.

Mitchell has been placed on administrative duties and has lost his badge and service weapon while state authorities investigate, the police department said.WASHINGTON (AP) - Published reports say the FBI investigated Attorney General Jeff Sessions for possible false statements to Congress.

ABC News first reported that Andrew McCabe, the former deputy FBI director fired last week by Sessions, authorized an investigation into Sessions last year about whether Sessions misled Congress when he denied having any contacts with Russians during the 2016 presidential election.

The Justice Department later acknowledged that Sessions had had two encounters with the then-Russian ambassador. Congressional Democrats asked for an investigation.

Chuck Cooper, a lawyer for Sessions, says he's been told by special counsel Robert Mueller's office that there's no current investigation into Sessions for false statements.

(Copyright 2018 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)Alabama's newest Senator, Doug Jones, making his maiden speech on the Senate floor. Using his time to hit gun control at the core.

Jones, the newbie on Capital Hill, not showing any first day jitters as he took the Senate floor in his first address since his historic election. He didn't waste time and dove quickly into one of the biggest hot button issues in our country today, gun violence.

A native Alabamian and avid hunter himself, Jones made a point to begin with sharing his personal story and love of guns. He owns a collection and understands gun control is complicated.

Across the country, people are calling for reform after last months high school shooting in Florida. Jones said it is our duty to have a serious discussion on gun safety.

"I have many obligations, and I believe that the first obligation of government is to protect it's citizens. We spend unimaginable amounts of money fighting our enemies abroad and terrorists that attack us at home. Yet on many levels we fail our children and grandchildren every morning when we pack their backpacks and send them into harms way."

He used the time to also call out Alabama's rising gun death rate its currently second worst in the country. Jones compared the action taken by students at marjory stoneman douglas high to civil activists who helped force change here in alabama more than 50 years ago.

"I believe we have finally reached a tipping point regarding gun violence now, not because of the mass shooting in parkland, florida, but thanks to the millions of young voices across the country, led by students at marjory stoneman douglas high school. Much like the students who took to the streets of birmingham in 1963, who were attacked by firehoses and police dogs, woke the consciousness of america to civil rights, these young men and women are awakening the consciousness of america regarding gun violence."

Directly following his speech, WAAY 31 asked Senator Jones how he plans to direclty help fix the gun death rate in Alabama and he told us the first step is to fix the system and inforce laws that are already in the books such a background checks. He believes they should be in place for all gun sales and transfers.(CNN) -- Attorney General Jeff Sessions sent federal prosecutors a reminder Wednesday that they have the power to seek America's most serious punishment for certain drug crimes: the death penalty.

"Congress has passed several statutes that provide the Department with the ability to seek capital punishment for certain drug-related crimes," Sessions said in a statement. "I strongly encourage federal prosecutors to use these statutes, when appropriate, to aid in our continuing fight against drug trafficking and the destruction it causes in our nation."

Sessions' blunt message comes as the Trump administration touts efforts to fight the nation's opioid epidemic and drug-related crimes.

On Monday in New Hampshire, President Donald Trump said, "if we don't get tough on the drug dealers, we are wasting our time."

Trump went on to say the punishment would be used against the "big pushers, the ones who are really killing people," but seeking the death penalty for those dealing drugs when no one is killed could set up legal challenges.

"The Supreme Court has consistently refused to sanction the use of the death penalty in crimes other than homicide. That makes another signature Trump policy headed for legal trouble," said Ames Grawert, senior counsel in the Justice Program at the Brennan Center.

In 2008, the court decided that imposing the death penalty on someone who raped, but did not kill, a child was unconstitutional. But the justices left open which other "non-homicide" offenses against the state, if any, may be punished by death.

Under current federal law, prosecutors have the ability to seek capital punishment for certain drug-related crimes, including dealing in extremely large quantities of drugs under what is known as the "Kingpin Statute" -- however, it has never been used to seek the death penalty before, according to a Justice official.

Sessions has recently sought to make clear he sees a direct link between drug dealing and violence.

"Drug trafficking is an inherently violent and deadly business: if you want to collect a drug debt, you collect it with the barrel of a gun," Sessions said Monday. "As surely as night follows day, violence and death follow drug trafficking, and murder is often a tool of drug traffickers."

The-CNN-Wire

 &  2018 Cable News Network, Inc., a Time Warner Company. All rights reserved.A "technical fault" which ANZ customers said left them stranded at the checkout on Thursday has been resolved, according to the bank.

Just before noon angry customers took to social media to report they couldn't withdraw money, process payrolls or pay for groceries.

The outage began just before noon on Thursday.

More than four hours later an ANZ spokesman said "the issue has been resolved and our systems are working again".

The spokesman earlier said a "technical fault" was to blame for the outage affecting internet banking, goMoney and the ANZ app.Billionaire James Packer's disclosure of mental health issues in his resignation from the Crown Resorts board has been welcomed as a break from the "stiff upper lip" culture of corporate Australia.

Corporate-governance experts have praised the high-profile businessman for his candour this week, but his departure has ignited concerns that existing issues on Crown's board of directors could worsen as well as raising questions about his future shareholding in the listed company.

James Packer has resigned from the board of his Crown Resorts. Credit:Rob Homer

Mr Packer, Crown's dominant shareholder, resigned as a director on Wednesday for the second time in less than three years. His private investment company revealed he was "suffering from mental health issues" and would be stepping back from all commitments.

"The stiff upper lip is certainly very big in the corporate world and signs of weakness are never greeted well," said Vas Kolesnikoff, executive director at Institutional Shareholder Services.A parliamentary inquiry into the nation's embattled franchise sector will closely scrutinise the fairness of the relationship between the master brand businesses and those running operations on the ground.

On Wednesday, a motion establishing the inquiry from Nationals MP John Williams was passed unopposed in the Senate.

Senator Williams told Fairfax Media the inquiry would take a "good look" at the industry's contractual underpinnings.

"We want to see what we have got and to hear what we can do, to get the evidence, to see what needs to be changed," he said.The independent school lobby has waded into the furore over school funding with an attack on its Catholic rivals, accusing them of "sectarian" demands and "splitting" the private school sector.

The intervention signals growing anger among independent educators, as senior members of the government and opposition try to calm the waters following a bitter school funding fight this week.

"Weve put up with special deals for the Catholics for 40 years," Colette Colman, executive director of the Independent Schools Council of Australia, told Fairfax Media.

"I believe the non-government sector is stronger together. Were extremely disappointed at the tactics that have been used by the Catholics in Victoria that have tried to split the sector."Thirty years ago last Monday, Nick Greiner was elected in a landslide as premier of NSW. He routed the tired, stale Labor government of Barrie Unsworth. NSW Labor was emphatically rejected by voters, losing even some of its safest seats in the traditional bastions of Newcastle and the Hunter Valley.

Greiner purported to be a different type of Liberal, "warm and dry". But within a year he had revealed himself to be Saharan dry and Antarctic cold. Befitting his status as a political ingenue he sought to run NSW as a business and was referred to by his acolytes as "NSW Incorporated". The business model proved contagious, with National Party members becoming embroiled in pecuniary interest scandals and opaque land dealings. Bob Carr lampooned Greniers Harvard education and predilection to employ expensive management consultants while sacking public servants as "government by consulting adults".

Nick Greiner poses with boy scouts before the 1988 election.

Greiners thumping majority was slashed at his first election by an electorate enraged by his cuts to public sector services, especially in education. What should have been a two- or three-term victory in 1988 was transformed into precarious minority government at his first electoral test in 1991. Sound familiar?

Forced to govern with the support of independents he suffered the Shakespearian ignominy of being devoured by the very Independent Commission Against Corruption which he thought would act as a standing royal commission into Labors NSW branch.Leeann Lapham's partner punched her so hard he felt the new mum's "skull give way" during a row over an empty bacon packet.

Leeann Lapham was a new mother when she disappeared. Credit:QPS Media

The 30-year-old's naked body was then discarded in dense north Queensland bushland, in the hope it would never be found.

Her tormented family has spent the past eight years wondering how she died.

On Wednesday they finally heard how her partner Graeme Colin Evans senselessly killed her.A Cumulus Inc. spokeswoman said a clean-up of the venue had been done, but the restaurant had not been forced to close. It remained open on Thursday afternoon. Cumulus Inc remained open on Thursday. Credit:Eddie Jim The infected staff member first showed signs of illness last Friday, March 16, and was immediately sent home, the spokeswoman said. He returned to work on Monday and was again sent home to seek medical assistance, she said. After a visit to the hospital the authorities contacted the restaurant to advise that he was ill with hepatitis A.

There is no ongoing risk to diners." The restaurant said that the hygiene systems at Cumulus Inc. were robust and safety of guests paramount. The sick employee, who was involved in the plating up and preparation of food, is expected to make a full recovery. Senior public health physician Dr Finn Romanes said it was possible more cases of the infection could emerge because of the food handler, as symptoms were often not apparent until 15 to 50 days after infection. Information about hepatitis A has been provided to other workers at the restaurant and they are being offered vaccinations. None has reported any illness, Dr Romanes said.

The symptoms of hepatitis A are fever, nausea, vomiting and abdominal discomfort, dark urine, yellow skin and eyes [jaundice]. Hepatitis A is a viral infection of the liver that occurs when the virus is taken ingested. The virus then infects the liver and is passed in the faeces. Restaurateur Andrew McConnell. Credit:Earl Carter Cumulus Inc. is prolific restaurateur Andrew McConnells stalwart all-day city restaurant, with wine bar Cumulus Up operating above. Occupying an old clothing factory in Flinders Lane, the restaurant has consistently maintained a hat in the Good Food Guide since it opened in 2008.

Famous for its slow-cooked lamb shoulder, and still the go-to for boozy business brunches it is a kingpin of the McConnell restaurant empire, which also includes Marion, Cutler and Co. and fellow Flinders Lane occupant Supernormal. Ellen Chu dined at Cumulus Inc with two friends on the Labour Day public holiday. She said she was "shocked and worried" about the news. "I have booked in for the GP tomorrow. My friends are both terrified, they have booked in for a doctor tomorrow, too. "We planned to eat at a sushi bar nearby but it was closed for the public holiday so we googled nearby restaurants and we found Cumulus Inc."

Ms Chu said she and her friends had not felt unwell since the meal. Patlyne Anganjuan, from Mildura, dined at Cumulus Inc. on March 12. She and her friends went to the restaurant because it was recommended in their in-flight magazine. She found out about the health scare after being contacted by The Age and said she would get to a doctor as soon as possible. "As medical science students we all have immunisations before placement so I hope we will be fine," Ms Anganjuan said. "I haven't experienced any symptoms.""The Russians, I think, have had long experience with Mr Trump, and may have things that they could expose," he added.

In an appearance on Wednesday on MSNBC's Morning Joe, Brennan, who served as CIA director from 2013 to 2017, speculated that Russians "may have something on him personally" when he was asked if he thought Trump was afraid of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Washington: John Brennan, a former director of the CIA, says he thinks Russia may have some kind of compromising information on US President Donald Trump, setting off furious speculation about whether the former spy chief is basing that assertion on inside information.

Brennan was running the CIA when a salacious dossier surfaced in 2016 that claimed the Russians had compromising information on Trump. If there were any current or former US officials who might know if there was truth behind the allegations in the dossier, Brennan would most likely be one of them. And his comments came the day after a phone call Trump made to Putin congratulating him for winning an election - against clear recommendations from his advisers - raised new questions about the President's relationship with Russia.

As CIA director, Brennan was never known as particularly chatty around the news media or in public. Since leaving office, he has taken to starting conversations with journalists by telling them, "I'm not going to be an anonymous source for any stories."

But last weekend, Brennan  in response to Trump's praise for the firing of the former deputy director of the FBI, Andrew McCabe  issued a remarkable condemnation of the President. "When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history," Brennan wrote on Twitter.

Former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe. Credit:AP

Brennan's pointed criticism of Trump on MSNBC and on Twitter was hardly unique. From the outset of the Trump presidency, a litany of retired intelligence officials  the kind of people who have traditionally shied away from criticising presidents, even in retirement  have come forward to criticise Trump.Beijing: For the better part of two decades, China's leaders have made the most of the global trade rules set by the United States and others, seizing on opportunities to bolster their nation's economic rise while finessing American complaints that they were not always playing fair.

Now, for the first time, China faces an American president who is embracing protectionist measures, and that has presented its leader, Xi Jinping, with an extraordinary challenge: Even as he has elevated his status as the country's "helmsman," with a new mandate to rule indefinitely, the US is moving to treat China more seriously as a strategic rival and to recast an economic relationship that has long bound the two countries.

Donald Trump in the White House after announcing the tariff package. Credit:New York Times

The punitive actions unveiled by President Donald Trump on Thursday  about $US60 ($A77 billion) billion in tariffs a year and other penalties targeting Chinese goods, as well as new restrictions on Chinese investment in the United States  will put Xi on the spot, forcing him to consider retaliatory action that could send a shudder through the global economy and complicate his efforts to sustain China's rapid growth in the face of rising debt and an aging population.

Chinese leaders are judged in part on how they manage relations with the US, and a damaging trade war, if handled poorly, might diminish Xi's political standing and test the wisdom of the highly centralised power structure that he has erected around himself.Washington: The University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point has proposed dropping 13 majors in the humanities and social sciences - including English, philosophy, history, sociology and Spanish - while adding programs with "clear career pathways" as a way to address declining enrollment and a multimillion-dollar deficit.

Students and faculty members have reacted with surprise and concern to the news, which is being portrayed by the school's administration as a path to regain enrollment and provide new opportunities to students. Critics see something else: a waning commitment to liberal arts education and a chance to lay off faculty under new rules that weakened tenure.

The value of certain majors is under question. Credit:Robert Peet

Students are planning a sit-in at the campus administration building on Wednesday in a demonstration called Save Our Majors. The Stevens Point Journal said students would then deliver a list of demands and requests to school officials. The school is one of 11 comprehensive campuses in the University of Wisconsin system.

The plan to cut the liberal arts and humanities majors is in line with a failed attempt by Republican Governor Scott Walker in 2015 to secretly change the mission of the respected university system - known as the Wisconsin Idea and embedded in the state code - by removing words that commanded the university to "search for truth" and "improve the human condition" and replacing them with "meet the state's workforce needs."Loading...

The Last Ship, set on Tyneside and full of songs by Sting, first took to the stage in 2014 in Chicago. When it moved on to Broadway, it garnered two Tony nominations, but, despite Sting himself taking over one of the parts, achieved only a modest run. What went wrong? Maybe it was the wrong audience  the average New Yorker has, at best, a passing interest in labour problems in the Wallsend shipyards  and maybe it was the book.

The current mammoth tour, starting at Newcastle's Northern Stage, attempts to rectify both. The first is no problem: The Last Ship has a triumphant homecoming and will, no doubt, stir an appreciative response throughout its UK tour. The second is a partial success: the new book by Lorne Campbell works pretty well, but cliches that are moving in anthemic song fall a bit flat in dialogue. Cannily, Campbell gives all members of his 16-strong ensemble an individual character (or two), but a few remain undeveloped. In a couple of cases this results in performances that would have been more at home in a conventional musical comedy.

The plot, however, is cleverly handled. All the dancing before the start, to the sound of the melodeon, tells us we're in for a feel-good musical, but how can you feel good about the disappearance of the shipbuilding industry in Wallsend? The spirit of the workers and the inspirational speech at the end (delivered by the superb Katie Moore) help, but so does the interlocking of two plots. The shipyard is closing, leaving the last ship incomplete, and we follow the problems of Jackie White, the highly respected foreman. As these are playing out, Gideon Fletcher returns, 17 years after deserting his girlfriend Meg Dawson, and there lies the promise of a positive ending, especially in the youthful energy and slightly wayward intelligence of her daughter Ellen (Moore again, excellent again).

Sting's songs cover a huge range. There are, perhaps, rather too many not dissimilar ballads, but he draws skilfully on folk music, music hall, dance and (once) a sort of post-punk country. Wisely, the story is often carried by the songs with minimal dialogue. Rob Mathes' orchestrations employ a much smaller band than in New York and Richard John's versatile little group delivers the goods.

Director Campbell's cast impresses vocally (the chorus numbers pack a tremendous punch) and, if acting is more uneven, the principals establish character strongly, without over-statement. Joe McGann and Charlie Hardwick are wonderfully matter-of-fact as the Whites  and both sing very powerfully. Richard Fleeshman and Frances McNamee spar and squabble and try to understand each other (often in song) most convincingly. Other outstanding performances come from Jim Caffrey's Marxist firebrand Billy Thompson and Charlie Richmond's bookworm Adrian Sanderson.

59 Productions' designs are superlative, they intensify the drama and make us believe even when the action is less involving. The great width of the stage is filled with girders, gantries and iron staircases. Behind these, cranes lurch into movement against a troubled sky or the ship appears in magical perspective. Projections  at times constantly changing  gives us everything from a television news report to a stained glass window.

The Last Ship runs at Northern Stage until 7 April and then tours the UK.By Jina Belcher Ground zero for federal efforts to boost communities reeling from the downturn[Read More]ABSTRACT

The aim of this work is to evaluate the role of Ultrasound-Doppler in the hemodynamic study of hepatic vessels during the liver cirrhosis in Togo. Method: This was an analytic cross-sectional study that measured the velocimetric parameters of hepatic vessels in cirrhotic patients and in non-cirrhotic patients. Results: The velocimetric parameters of the hepatic artery, the portal vein, and the hepatic veins were measured in 50 cirrhotic patients and 50 non-cirrhotic The caliber of the portal vein was significantly increased in cirrhotic patients compared to non-cirrhotic patients with 13.11  2.16 mm versus 11.45  1.02 (p < 0.00006). The systolic velocity and the hepatic artery resistance index were significantly raised in the cirrhotic patients compared to the non-cirrhotic with 67.32  22.77 versus 49.97  17.24 (p-value < 0.00004) respectively, and 0.78  0.07 against 0.72  0.08 (p < 0.00006). The caliber of the hepatic veins was significantly decreased in the cirrhotic patients compared to the non-cirrhotic patients (p < 0.0003). There was no correlation between the gender of the patients and the change in the hemodynamics of the hepatic vessels. Conclusion: The hemodynamic study of the hepatic vessels can and must rightly be a diagnostic argument for liver cirrhosis.

Keywords:

Doppler, Hepatic Vessels, Diagnosis, Cirrhosis, Togo

1. Introduction

Cirrhosis is defined as a diffuse disorganization of the liver architecture, with annular fibrosis delineating hepatocyte nodules in clusters that are called regeneration nodules [1] .

The standard diagnosis of cirrhosis is still histology [2] . However, this technique suffers from a fake negative rate of up to 24% [2] . Also, because of the lack of technical means and the limitations in the histology method within our regions, this diagnosis is based on a bundle of clinical, biological, and radiological arguments [3] . The main radiological method is the Doppler ultrasound.

Several studies have been conducted around the world to determine the contribution of ultrasound coupled or not to Doppler in the diagnosis of cirrhosis [4] [5] [6] . However, in Togo, no study has been conducted on the use of Doppler in the diagnosis of hepatic cirrhosis, despite the frequency of the pathology [3] .

We conducted this study to evaluate the Ultrasound-Dopplers hemodynamic variations of the hepatic vessels during the liver cirrhosis in Togo.

2. Method

This was an analytic cross-sectional study that measured the velocimetric parameters of hepatic vessels of the patients treated in the Hepato-gastroenterology department of the Lome University Hospital Center for the livers cirrhosis and of volunteers, non-cirrhotic, not having any known liver pathology and having a normal liver function.

We excluded the patients who had a high blood pressure or who got a liver mass, hepatocellular carcinoma, a heart failure, a kidney failure or an abundant ascites.

We utilized the ESAOTE My lab mark of ultrasound provided with multi-frequency probes, a color Doppler module, a pulsed Doppler with its different modes: duplex, triplex, and alternate, with the patients on least six hours of fasting.

All examinations were performed by the same operator, a radiologist with at least five years of experience in the visceral Doppler exam.

The examination began with a study of the hepatic morphology per subcostal, intercostal transverse and sagittal sections.

The filter was set between 50 and 100 Hz. The pulse repetition frequency (PRF) was manually set to operate according to the quality of the resulting plot and the observed velocities. The firing angle was between 30 and 60. The Doppler gate was as possible as possible in the center of the vessel to be surveyed.

All the recordings were made in the subject being in apnea in the middle of breathing. The exploration was done for each of the hepatic vessels.

We identified the portal vein, including the segment between the spleno-portal junction and the intrahepatic bifurcation that was shaped as an anechoic tube within which we measured the largest diameter, as a caliber.

The color Doppler enabled us to detect the blood flow.

The design obtained using pulsed Doppler was secondarily analyzed to determine the speeds and the different indexes.

We identified the hepatic artery by using a costal or intercostal approach. This artery visualization was difficult for some patients, but in most cases, the hepatic artery was anterior and slightly medial to the portal vein.

The pulsed Doppler mode was used to obtain the plot of at least three consecutive pulses that we examined and on which we measured the velocimetry parameters (velocities and indices).

We identified the hepatic veins by using intercostal and recurrent subcostal cuts. We preferably chose the right hepatic vein. The Doppler window was placed in the center of the vein, two centimeters from its meeting with the inferior vena cava.

The size of the portal vein, the direction of its flow, its spectrum, its average velocity (Vm), its maximum systolic velocity (Vsmax), and its diastolic velocity (Vdias) were studied. The vein pulse index of the portal vein (VPI) corresponds to the ratio of the difference between the maximum systolic speed and the diastolic rate on the systolic maximum speed.

The maximum systolic velocity, the average velocity, the diastolic velocity, the resistance index (RI), and the pulse index (PI) were the variables analyzed on the hepatic artery.

The studied parameters of the hepatic veins were the caliber, the spectrum, and the flow.

The hepatic vascular index (HVI) is the ratio of the average velocity of the portal vein to the pulse index (PI).

The arterio-portal ratio (APR) is the ratio of the systolic velocity of the hepatic artery to the maximum systolic velocity of the portal vein.

The Chi-2 statistical test was applied after crossing to determine the interdependence of the qualitative variables with values greater than 2.5. For the variables with values less than 2.5, the Fisher test was used. For the numerical averages, the Students test was used. The relationship between the continuous values was analyzed using the Pearson correlation test. These tests were significant when the p-value (random part) was less than 0.05.

3. Results

The caliber of the portal vein was abnormal in 52% of cirrhotic patients and in 6% of the case of non-cirrhotic patients. The difference was statistically significant (p-value = 4.75  107).

The averages of the velocimetry variables of cirrhotic and non-cirrhotic patients are shown in Table 1.

The Vsmax, Vm, RI, hepatic artery PI, as well as the portal vein caliber, had a statistically significant increase in values in the cirrhotic patients versus non-cirrhotic patients (Figure 1 & Figure 2).

The sensitivity and the specificity of the resistance index for a value of 0.77 were respectively 54% and 68%.

Hepatic veins were normal in all the non-cirrhotic patients compared to 36% in the cirrhotic patients. (P-value = 3.01  1011). The Sensitivity and specificity were 64% and 100%, respectively.

A demodulation of the hepatic vein spectrum was found in 52% of the cirrhotic patients (Figure 3) whereas there was no change in the spectrum in the non-cirrhotic patients (p-value = 1.202  108).

The blood flow in the hepatic veins was hepatofugal in both cirrhotic and non-cirrhotic patients.

The relationship between age and the speed parameters assessed by the Pearson correlation test noted a linear and positive correlation between age and RI (p-value = 0.02) and age and PI (p-value = 0.021).

There was no correlation between sex and the statistically significant variations observed between the speed parameters in cirrhotic and non-cirrhotic patients.

4. Discussion

4.1. Portal Vein

We found a statistically significant (p-value = 0.00006) increase in the portal vein average caliber in cirrhotic versus non-cirrhotic patients.

The increase of the caliber is secondary to the increase of the pressure in the

Table 1. Comparison of the Doppler averages for Cirrhotic patients and Non-Cirrhotic Patients.

VPI: venous pulse index, RI: resistance index, PI: pulse index, HVI: hepatic vascular index, APR: arterioportal ratio.

Figure 1. Flow and spectrum of portal vein. (a) In a non cirrhotic patient, hepatopetal flow and normal mean velocity (17, 9 cm/s); (b) in a cirrhotic patient, hepatopetal flow and decreased mean velocity (11.6 cm/s).

portal system. Thus, an increased caliber of the portal vein should be given special attention in the search for other signs of cirrhosis. However, the diameter of the portal vein decrease and become normal again in case of portosystemic diversion. And when these diversion paths are important, the flow reverses and the caliber generally becomes normal or inferior to normal [7] .

Figure 2. Hepatic artery spectrum. (a) in a non cirrhotic patient, the RI is 0.72; (b) in a cirrhotic patient, the RI is 0.81.

We noticed in this study that a non-statistically significant decrease in the portal average velocity (p-value = 0.71) of systolic and diastolic velocity in cirrhotic versus non-cirrhotic patients. The decrease in these speeds is explained by the loss of the flexibility of the hepatic parenchyma which becomes more difficult to irrigate and behaves as an obstacle to the normal flow of the blood. As a result, the blood flow slows down. This decrease in the velocity of the portal vein has been found by several authors. Iwao et al. [8] and Zironi al [7] respectively found an average of 11.0  2.4 cm/s speed in cirrhotic patients versus 15.9  2.8

Figure 3. Hepatic vein spectrum. (a) normal waveform in a non cirrhotic patient characterized by a triphasic flow; (b) abnormal hepatic flow pattern in a cirrhotic patient characterized by a flat flow pattern.

cm/s in controls and (13.0  3.2 cm/s against 19.6  2.6 cm/s, p < 0.001) with however a statistically significant difference.

For a portal vein average velocity of 15 cm/s, Zironi [7] also found a sensitivity and a specificity of 88% and 96% respectively, not for the diagnosis of cirrhosis but for the detection of portal high blood pressure. This is still important because portal high blood pressure is a major complication of the cirrhosis of the liver.

Then, the lowering of the average speed can be an indirect sign of the diagnosis of hepatic cirrhosis.

Most studies [7] [8] found a decrease in portal vein velocimetry values in cirrhotic patients compared with non-cirrhotic subjects, but with different values.

This variation in values may be related to the difference in the material used, the test conditions and the measurement methods as reported in the literature [7] [9] [10] [11] . It can also be related to the variations in the position of the cursor and the Doppler window [12] .

4.2. Hepatic Artery

The maximum systolic rate, as well as the average speed, had a statistically significant increase in cirrhotic patients compared to non-cirrhotic subjects.

The diastolic rate, meanwhile, experienced a non-statistically significant decrease in cirrhotic patients compared to controls.

The increase in the systolic velocity and the decrease in the diastolic velocity might be explained by the increase in the flow of the hepatic artery, which might attempt to curb the decrease the flow of the portal vein. This increased flow leads to the increase of the resistance in the arterial lair and, consequently, lead to the rise of the resistance and the pulse indices [13] .

We also found in our study a statistically significant increase of the resistance index (IR) and the pulse index (PI).

This rise of the indices was found by Iwao [8] (PI 1.28  0.18 against 0.95  0.17) Sacerdoti [14] (PI 1.3  0.29 against 0.89  0.09 and RI 0.71  0.07 vs. 0.59  0.04).

Taking into account the normal averages of the RI (0.55 - 0.81) proposed by the literature [15] [16] [17] , we found in our study 46% pathological IR and 86% pathological IP. This reflects the sensitivity of these indices to cirrhosis corresponding to the data proposed by Pierce [18] who noted a sensitivity and specificity of 68% and 70% from an IR value of 0.77. However, it should be noted that the increase in the indices is not specific to cirrhosis. Indeed, increased indices are also noted in the chronic diseases of the liver [19] , after the meal and with age [20] [21] . It should also be noted that there are significant inter- and intra-observer variations that might affect the measurement of these indices [22] .

4.3. Hepatic Veins

The decreased size of the hepatic veins and the demodulation (decrease in pulse) of the hepatic vein spectrum in cirrhotic patients can be explained by the decrease of the hepatic parenchyma compliance due to fibrosis and the decrease of hepatic vein diameter. resulting from cirrhosis. [23] [24] [25] .

Bolondi & al [26] and Colli & al [23] found respectively 50% and 75% abnormal spectrum in the cirrhotic patients.

The decrease of the calibers and the demodulation of the spectrum of the hepatic veins is a sensitive sign of the cirrhosis but nonspecific because the Budd Chiari syndrome, the diffuse hepatic metastases as well as the deep inspiration, obesity, and ascites are the factors that can influence the spectrum of hepatic veins [26] [23] [27] [28] [29] [30] .

4.4. Limitations

None of our patients received a liver biopsy puncture which is the gold standard for the diagnosis of cirrhosis [2] . The diagnosis of cirrhosis in the hepato-gastroenterology department was based on a combination of clinical, biological and radiological arguments [3] .

5. Conclusions

We found a statistically significant change in hemodynamic parameters of liver vessels in the cirrhotic patient compared with the non-cirrhotic subject. The size of the portal vein; the hepatic artery average and systolic velocities, the resistance and the pulse index had increased in the cirrhotic. The systolic and diastolic average velocities of the portal vein and the caliber of the hepatic veins, on the other hand, had decreased in cirrhotic patients.

The measurement of hemodynamic parameters of hepatic vessels is a sensitive and specific argument for the diagnosis of cirrhosis. It can and must rightly be part of the diagnosis arsenal of cirrhosis.

Cite this paper

Sonhaye, L., Boube, A.H., Amadou, A., Kolou, B., Djibril, M., Ntimon, B., Tchaou, M., Garba, N.M., Agoda-Koussema, L.K. and Adjenou, K. (2018) Doppler Ultrasound of Hepatic Vessels in the Diagnosis of Cirrhosis of the Liver in Togo. Open Journal of Radiology, 8, 53-63. https://doi.org/10.4236/ojrad.2018.81007

ReferencesA $5,000 reward is being offered for information on the racist graffiti found at Kettering University in Flint earlier this month.

The school and police are looking for any tip that could help lead to an arrest.

Kettering canceled classes on March 13th after the racist graffiti was found in two spots in dorms.The Michigan attorney general's office has accused seven current and former police officers with falsifying state documents for inspections intended to detect stolen vehicles and parts.

Attorney General Bill Schuette announced Thursday the officers who have served several local police departments have been charged with numerous counts of uttering and publishing. The felony charges come after an investigation by the FBI Detroit-Area Public Corruption Task Force and Michigan State Police.

Schuette says in a release the officers were supposed to ensure that vehicles inspected and approved for motor vehicle titles weren't stolen. He alleges they fraudulently submitted paperwork to the Secretary of State.

The attorney general's office believes the seven defendants will be arraigned on Thursday..                  -20,           ,     Axios.               -20       .      ...WiGBits Headline News Would you like to receive our WiGBits? Signup today!

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Digital Issue Would you like to receive our Digital Issue? Signup today!Ken Isaacs, the Trump administration pick to head the international organization that coordinates assistance to migrants worldwide, once wrote on Twitter that Austria and Switzerland should consider building a wall in the Alps to keep refugees out.

"#immigration #wall #Austria #Switzerland consider#buildingawall in #Alps to control their borders from refugees," Isaacs tweeted.

The tweet is one of more than 140 previously unreported tweets from before Isaacs was nominated reviewed by CNN's KFile.

CNN's KFile previously reported on tweets from Isaacs that revealed an extensive history of sharing anti-Muslim sentiment. The screenshots provide the most robust picture of his social media activity and a wider window into his views refugees, Islam and climate change -- issues that would be central to his responsibilities in his potential posting at the United Nations.

In several of the newly unearthed tweets, Isaacs shared a post that called climate change a "hoax," shared a story from the conspiracy-peddling website InfoWars about the "Clinton body count," and wrote "#Islam is not peaceful."

Isaacs has made his Twitter account private, meaning only those that he allows to follow him can view his page. Screenshots of the tweets were provided to KFile anonymously and independently verified by matching the now-hidden tweets with still public replies from other Twitter users.

Isaacs, who works in relief efforts for the Christian non-profit Samaritan's Purse, was nominated in February to serve as director general of the UN's International Organization for Migration, a 169-member group whose mission it is to promote "humane and orderly migration" through assistance to both governments and migrants.

Isaacs has come under scrutiny in recent weeks for his social media presence after a report from KFile last week and one from The Washington Post in February revealing he shared anti-Muslim views on social media. In a statement after the February Washington Post report, Isaacs apologized, saying that he "deeply" regretted his comments and adding, "I pledge to hold myself to the highest standards of humanity, human dignity and equality if chosen to lead IOM." According to the Associated Press, he told reports on Monday, "I have re-tweeted many things to stimulate conversation. But at the same time ... have never shown discrimination against anybody, for anything."

Issacs did not respond to a request for comment on this story.

The State Department has pointed to Issacs' apology and expressed continued support for his nomination. Asked about the newly unearthed tweets, the department pointed to a statement that spokesperson Heather Nauert gave to the Post in February.

"Mr. Isaacs has apologized for the comments he posted on his private social media account. We believe that was proper for him to do so," Nauert said. "Mr. Isaacs is committed to helping refugees and has a long history of assisting those who are suffering. We believe that if chosen to lead IOM, he would treat people fairly and with the dignity and respect they deserve. I would refer you to Mr. Isaacs for any information on his statements."

Despite the controversy, Isaacs' nomination appears to be moving forward. A website has launched to support his candidacy and his supporters, including New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, have come to his defense.

"I've known Ken for more than 15 years, and in that period, I've utterly disagreed with him on politics and utterly admired his humanitarianism," Kristof told the Washington Free Beacon. "He has been tireless in fighting for oppressed and desperate people of every faith and complexion, from Sudan to Iraq, Liberia to Bangladesh."

"Far from being an ideologue in his humanitarian work, Ken is a supreme pragmatist in his work to save lives, willing to work with anyone -- even liberal New York Times columnists -- to get the job done."

In June, the IOM's members will hold a vote on Isaacs' appointment. He must receive support of two-thirds of its members to get elected. It has been a longstanding practice for members to elect the US-chosen candidate.

If elected, Issacs will oversee an organization that is actively involved in resettling refugees, many of them Muslim, who have fled from the war torn regions of Iraq and Syria.

Here's a look at what Isaacs shared on Twitter:

On refugees:

In May 2016, Isaacs responded to a tweet saying refugees should be viewed as an asset saying, "refugees with other worldviews won't be the same as other immigrants."

Also in May 2016, Isaacs said that Austria and Switzerland should consider building a wall in the Alps to "control their borders from refugees."

On Islam:

In May 2017, Isaacs shared a link to an article saying Islam was not a religion of peace and warned that during Ramadan, "Muslims fast, they also blast."

In July 2016, after a terrorist attack in Nice, France, Isaacs tweeted out "Nice #Islam is not peaceful" next to a picture from the attack of a covered dead body next to a child's doll.

In response to a June 2016 tweet blaming assault rifles for the Pulse nightclub massacre in Orlando, Isaacs simply tweeted "#Islam." That same day, in response to another tweet lamenting the attack in Orlando and the frequency of mass shootings, Isaacs again tweeted "#Islam."

In September 2016, Isaacs tweeted that "All #Islamic #terrorists literally follow #Islam."

In November 2015, Isaacs tweeted, "If Islam is a peaceful religion lets see 2 million Muslims march on Nat Mall condemning jihad, terrorism, & stand for USA." That same month he made similar comments when responding to a tweet from British author Owen Jones, who said it was wrong to equate Islam and terrorism.

In March 2017, Isaacs tweeted a link to a meme titled "What Countries Look Like Before And After Islam," which included pictures of Iran and Afghanistan in the 1970s (despite Islam being the majority religion in both countries at that time), as well as a picture of white shoppers in London in 1980, juxtaposed with a picture of women wearing hijabs in 2012.

In April 2015, Isaacs responded to a CNN tweet about how Islam was the fastest-growing religion, adding, "does it include forced Islamic conversions."

In January 2016, he compared Islam to the People's Temple, a cult founded by Jim Jones responsible for the mass murder-suicide of nearly all of its members in Guyana in 1978.

On climate change:

In August 2017, Isaacs retweeted a user who said climate change was "a big hoax."

A month later, Isaacs dismissed climate science, writing in a tweet saying, "scientists can't predict path of a visible storm yet but certain of manmade climate change. A nutty run on nature."

Conspiracies:

In August 2016, Isaacs tweeted a link to a conspiracy story from Alex Jones of InfoWars saying Google was hiding "Clinton Body Count" stories, a reference to a fringe conspiracy that Bill and Hillary Clinton are linked to numerous murders over the years.

In June 2016, Isaacs shared a tweet pushing a false conspiracy that a United Nations official died the same day he was set to testify against Hillary Clinton and was found with a barbell on his neck.

Isaacs also retweeted a June 2017 tweet that promoted a conspiracy theory about the death of Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich.AUSTIN, Texas (AP) - Police say someone dropped off a box containing an artillery simulator at an Austin Goodwill that detonated, injuring an employee and triggering a bomb scare.

Austin assistance police chief Ely Reyes says Tuesday night's blast wasn't related to bombings that have killed two people and severely wounded four others since March 2.

He says there's also "no reason to believe" this was a copycat incident.

Reyes says that when Goodwill received the box, they decided it wasn't appropriate for donation. While trying to dispose it, an employee handled one of the artillery simulators and it went off.

The employee was treated and released. Artillery simulators are devices sometimes used in military training.

Reyes says such military items are sometimes mistakenly donated to Goodwill rather than being properly disposed of.

(Copyright 2018 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)UTICA  Day three of witness testimony in the murder trial of Robert Coffin is currently underway in Oneida County Court.

Coffin is charged with second-degree murder and second-degree criminal possession of a weapon. Hes accused of shooting 25-year-old Thomas Shepherd to death outside of Sammy Gs bar in Rome on Aug. 19, 2017. He then evaded authorities for nearly two weeks before being captured in Las Vegas.

On Wednesday, the Las Vegas police officer who apprehended Coffin as he arrived in Las Vegas on a bus from Chicago took the witness stand, along with a doctor who treated Shepherd after he was taken to the hospital following the shooting.

Police say the shooting occurred after Shepherd allegedly intervened on an argument between Coffin and Coffin's ex-girlfriend, and an altercation broke out between Shepherd and Coffin. On the first day of witness testimony, a surveillance video showing the altercation and alleged murder was played in court.

It was determined Wedesday in court that if Coffin is going to take the stand to testify, it will be today.

NEWSChannel 2 reporter Joleen Ferris is tweeting live updates from the courtroom during the trial. You can follow along here:By Carma Hassan and Saeed Ahmed, CNN

(CNN) -- The school shooting was over in seconds. But it could have dragged on longer and proven deadlier were it not for the rapid response of a school resource officer.

When a 17-year-old gunman walked into Maryland's Great Mills High School on Tuesday, the swift action of the school's sole resource officer, Blaine Gaskill, was instrumental in bringing the incident to a quick end.

Gaskill's response was hailed as an example of exactly what a resource officer is supposed to do in such a circumstance, particularly when contrasted to the actions of the security officer in last month's shooting in Parkland, Florida. (In the incident at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on February 14, the armed school resource deputy waited outside the school building as the shooter gunned down students inside.)

"He responded exactly how we train our personnel to respond," St. Mary's County Sheriff Tim Cameron told reporters.

Engaging the shooter

As soon as the gunfire began, Gaskill rushed to the scene. He fired a round at the shooter, who also fired a round at the same time, Cameron said.

It's not yet clear whether the shooter, Austin Wyatt Rollins, was felled by the officer's bullet or killed himself.

"DFC [Deputy First Class] Gaskill fired at the shooter ... almost simultaneously as the shooter fired," Cameron said. "This is something we train, practice and in reality, hope would never come to fruition. This is our worst nightmare."

Gov. Larry Hogan called Gaskill "a very capable school resource officer who also happened to be a SWAT team member."

"This is a tough guy who apparently closed in very quickly and took the right kind of action," he said. "And while I think it's still tragic, he may have saved other people's lives."

Over in seconds

The incident began in a school hallway at 7:55 a.m., just before classes started. Authorities say Austin, armed with a handgun, shot a female student, with whom he had a prior relationship, and another male student.

Gaskill responded to the scene in less than a minute, the sheriff said.

Cameron said the entire incident took less than a minute, possibly seconds.

The 16-year-old female student is in critical condition with life-threatening injuries, and the 14-year-old male student who was shot is in stable condition.

Gaskill was unharmed.

"He's doing well and we're going to do everything to support and promote him and his well-being," Cameron said.

Playing to a narrative

Gaskill's actions were praised, rightly, across social media. But some -- most notably, the NRA -- held him up as an example of the "good guy with a gun" theory. The theory goes, that bad guys will always find a way to circumvent whatever gun laws are in place. And "to stop a bad guy with a gun," as NRA head Wayne Lapierre said, "it takes a good guy with a gun."

"This [Great Mills High School] armed school resource officer, you're not hearing anyone in #MSM talk about it because it disrupts their narrative," NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch said in one of several tweets Tuesday. (MSM is short for mainstream media.)

So far, this year, there have already been 17 school shootings where someone was hurt or killed.

In the Parkland shooting, school resource deputy Scot Peterson never entered the building after taking a position outside. He resigned after he was suspended without pay for his inaction.

"Had our resource officer taken action immediately, the result of the Stoneman Douglas Valentine's Day Massacre would have been different," Parkland student Kai Koerber told CNN.

"We might not have had to walk over the bodies of our classmates, once lovely and wonderful people, as we were led away from murderous tragedy."

Speaking to reporters, Dr. James Scott Smith, the superintendent of St. Mary's County's public schools, put the senselessness of it all in perspective.

"It looks as though the SRO [school resource officer] did exactly what the SRO is trained to do, and yet we still have a tragic loss of life," he said. "We still have somebody in critical condition. And we have students at the school and staff at the school impacted."

(The-CNN-Wire &  2018 Cable News Network, Inc., a Time Warner Company. All rights reserved.)All of the AHL mascots are competing in #MascotMadness, and youll have the chance to vote for the Utica Comets mascot next week!

Over the next two weeks, the 24 mascots in the AHL will be placed into six different preliminary groups, and then the winner of each group will advance to the finals. You can vote up to 10 times per day, and by casting your vote, you may be eligible to win some AHL prizes.

The Utica Comets mascot, Audie, will be up against mascots from Chicago, Manitoba, Providence and Rockford. You can cast your vote for that group on Tuesday, March 27 through Thursday, March 29.

The finals vote will be April 4-6.

Voting for each group will end at 2 p.m. on the day its scheduled to end, and voting for the group scheduled to begin on that day will start at 2 p.m.

Here is the full schedule of #MascotMadness voting:

- March 21-23: Bakersfield, Hartford, Lehigh Valley, Syracuse and Wilkes-Barre/Scranton

- March 23-25: Binghamton, Grand Rapids, Laval, Rochester, Texas

- March 25-27: Bridgeport, Hershey, Ontario, San Jose, Toronto

- March 27-29: Chicago, Manitoba, Providence, Rockford, Utica

- March 31-April 2: Cleveland, Milwaukee, San Diego, Springfield

- April 4-6: Finals





To vote for your favorite mascot, click here.WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. (WLFI) - Right now at this very second a Purdue University graduate is on his way to the International Space Station.

Hundreds gathered on Purdue's campus Wednesday to watch the launch from Kazakhstan.

Former Boilermaker Andrew Feustel took off with two other astronauts at 1:44 this afternoon to start their trip to the space station.

"One of every three spaceflights has had at least one Boilermaker on it but it never gets old," said Purdue President Mitch Daniels. "It's something you are so proud of."

"I never get over seeing a rocket launch," said Purdue student Phoebe Kinzelman. "I've seen a bunch of these in my life and each one is so unique and so special it makes me want to get on the rocket and go up with them."

Kinzelman is a sophomore at Purdue and her dream is to become an astronaut one day.

"I want to be an astronaut, that's why I am in planetary sciences," said Kinzelman. "It's going to take a long time but I'm excited of the prospect of going into space."

Everyone knows Purdue is known for its space program. But it's the support from the entire university that shines the brightest.

"We're all super excited to see Drew go up into space and glad that such a great community at Purdue supports him," said Kinzelman.

"There is not another University on Earth, literally that is more involved and has been forever in the space program," said Daniels.

They will arrive at the station in two days where Feustel will be greeted by- you guessed it- another Boilermaker, Scott Tingle.TIPPECANOE COUNTY, Ind. (WLFI)  A Wainwright Middle School student was arrested after allegedly making threatening statements to other students.

According to the Tippecanoe School Corporation, the incident happened Monday. The sheriff's office says the 13-year-old student was arrested for intimidation and was taken into juvenile intake, but has since been released to a parent.

TSC said it was determined the student had no intention of carrying out the threat. However, the student was taken out of the school in handcuffs.

The sheriff's office said it responded to a call from the school when the threats were made. Tippecanoe County Sheriff Barry Richard said his department does not take instances like this lightly.

"We much rather investigate the situation and there not be anything to them then let something go by and not being able to look into it as thoroughly as we can," said Richard.

Richard said he is not aware of the student having a criminal past.Nikki Giovanni headlines Lemon Project Symposium

Four inspiring women Lemon Project keynote speaker Nikki Giovanni (seated) poses with the first three African-American residential students at W&M: Karen Ely '71, Janet Brown Strafer '71, M.Ed. '77 and Lynn Briley '71. This is the 50th anniversary of their arrival on campus. Photo by Skip Rowland '83

Breathtaking art Artist and lecturer Steve Prince points out some of the symbolism in his work of art titled In the Line. He was part of the Lemon Project's recent symposium. Photo by Stephen Salpukas

Discussing W&M in the community Moderated by Senior Lecturer of Africana Studies and Linguistics Iyabo Osiapem, the panel featured Edith Heard, a community activist, Virginia Wells, MD, director of the W&M Student Health Center, Anthony Conyers, interim director of Head Start in Williamsburg and Clarence Wilson, president of the York-James City-Williamsburg branch of the NAACP. Photo by Stephen Salpukas

Poetry through dance W&M alumnae dancers Olivia Armstrong 14, Kayla Moore 13 and Arisa Smith 17 perform an interpretation of Nikki Giovanni's poetry. Photo by Skip Rowland '83

A presidential greeting W&M President Taylor Reveley was on hand to hear Nikki Giovanni's address during the Saturday session of the Lemon Project Symposium. Photo by Skip Rowland '83 Photo - of - Hide Caption

People of all ethnicities seem to forget that the first Africans brought to America contributed far more than just free, forced labor, poet and historian Nikki Giovanni told her audience at the Lemon Project and 50-year Commemoration Symposium at William & Mary on Saturday.

Thats a mistake that should be corrected.

These are going to be great people, and it is time we recognized their greatness, she said. These are people who are going to build a nation, because no matter what we think about this country called America, it wouldnt be diddly-squat without black people.

Giovanni, a distinguished university professor at Virginia Tech who has authored more than 27 poetry collections, seven albums, four collections of essays or memoirs and been given the keys to the cities of New York, Miami, Los Angeles and New Orleans, delivered the keynote address at the eighth annual symposium. This years symposium also recognized the 50th anniversary of the universitys first African-American residential students, which is being commemorated throughout the 2017-18 academic year with a series of special events and programs.

{{youtube:medium|Fb1Pc0lWWkk,SoHHL hosts an open-mic night as part of the Lemon Project Symposium.}}

The Lemon Project, named for a man who was once enslaved by William & Mary, took shape in 2009. After student and faculty resolutions calling for a full investigation of the universitys past, the Board of Visitors acknowledged that W&M had owned and exploited slave labor from its founding to the Civil War; and that it had failed to take a stand against segregation during the Jim Crow Era.

As a result, the board offered its support for the establishment of The Lemon Project: A Journey of Reconciliation.

In remarks prior to Giovannis address, W&M President Taylor Reveley acknowledged that reconciliation is a work in progress.

For generations, William & Marys relationship with the community has not been good, he said. We are remembering the past in order to learn from it, to find a way to become a more inclusive society than we are now. The Lemon Project is a crucial means to this end.

Among the panels and presentations was a lecture by artist Steve Prince, a discussion of William & Mary in the community and a performance by three of Associate Professor of Dance Leah Glenns alumnae  Olivia Armstrong 14, Kayla Moore 13 and Arisa Smith 17.

Giovanni opened by reminding the audience white guys didnt wake up one morning and say, Lets go to Africa and start a slave trade. It didnt happen. We know that whatever those guys were, they went to Africa and became a part of a slave trade that was going on, thats still going on. And thats something we have to deal with. Somebody sold us, and somebody bought us.

She detailed how the captured men and women were stacked head to toe, head to toe in the hold of the ship, how they were brought to the deck and cleansed and made to dance by whipping. She detailed that many were killed in unsuccessful rebellion attempts.

But out of that misery, she said, black women initiated the first attempt at having disparate captives with different languages communicate as a means of some small comfort.

This woman underneath the ship is going to have to find a way to talk to her people, and there is no language that she had. So shes going to do something thats incredibly important. Shes going to hum, because thats what she has, a song, a song that she has to invent. Shes going to moan, and her people are going to respond to that moan.

In time, she said, African Americans introduced the world to music  the moan, the spiritual, jazz, the blues and whatever it is that youre hearing now. We created it.

Its time we admit that what has made this country whatever it is we have decided to be a part of, she said. We have brought some love. We have brought something wonderful, forgiveness.

There is another story to be told, another story that you and I who are black are going to have to find about what it means to be black in this country. Its good that we remember what we contributed, we remember what we have done to make this a better place  and we should take credit for doing that.



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Sorry, the page you requested was not found. If you're having trouble locating a destination on Womenofchina.cn, try visiting the Womenofchina Home pageDrones to venture into Fukushima containment vessels

22 March 2018

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Unmanned aerial system technology is being developed to fly into the containment vessels of the damaged reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan to assess their condition. Tokyo Electric Power Company contracted the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) of the USA to carry out the work.

The greatest challenge in decommissioning the plant will be removing the fuel debris from the three reactors that suffered meltdowns in the March 2011 accident. However, radiation levels in those reactor buildings remain too high for workers to enter. Therefore remotely operated equipment, such as robots, is needed to carry out investigations and tasks within those areas.

A number of ground- and underwater-based robotic systems have already been sent inside the containment vessels of units 1, 2 and 3. However, damage and high radiation levels have limited access to information vital to decontamination and decommissioning efforts.

San Antonio, Texas-based SwRI, working with the General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception (GRASP) laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania's School of Engineering and Applied Science, is helping adapt small drones to operate autonomously within the containment vessels of the damaged reactors.

The team has demonstrated the feasibility of their approach in a test fixture at SwRI's San Antonio campus late last year. During the project, the SwRI-UPenn team demonstrated that the drone was capable of autonomously navigating in a confined, GPS-denied environment, avoiding obstacles along the flight path, and surviving the radiation levels expected during a mission inside of the units at Fukushima Daiichi.

"This is a formidable challenge," said project manager Monica Garcia, a senior research engineer in SwRI's Intelligent Systems Division. "The conditions inside the containment at Fukushima Daiichi are quite possibly the most challenging environment that the SwRI-Penn team has had to address. We will be pushing the envelope in terms of the technology."

Technical lead Richard Garcia, also a senior research engineer at SwRI, said: "The team is adapting high-speed, advanced mobility drones to collect key information about the current status. This information will play an important role in future decontamination and decommission efforts at Fukushima Daiichi."

Vijay Kumar, the Nemirovsky Family Dean of Penn's School of Engineering and Applied Science, said: "As robots get smaller, faster and smarter, this is exactly the kind of problems we want them to address. Challenges like this are what push research in our field forward."

Last month it was announced a small drone is to be deployed to map radiation levels within the reactor buildings of the damaged Fukushima Daiichi units. The UK-developed RISER - Remote Intelligence Survey Equipment for Radiation - has already been used at Sellafield, in England.

Researched and written

by World Nuclear News

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ATTOM Data Solutions has just released this week their Q1 2018 Single Family Rental Market Report, which ranks the best U.S. markets for buying single family rental properties in 2018.According to the report, the average annual gross rental yield (annualized gross rent income divided by median purchase price of single family homes) among the 449 counties was 8.9 percent for 2018, down from an average of 9.2 percent in 2017."Despite declining returns in many areas, the single-family rental market continues to grow thanks to more activity by smaller and middle-tier investors," said Daren Blomquist, senior vice president at ATTOM Data Solutions. "The biggest increase in market share over the past year has come among investors owning six to 10 single family rentals, followed by those owning between 11 and 100 rentals. These smaller to mid-tier investors are benefitting from newfound efficiencies in acquisition, financing and property management that allow them to buy outside their backyard in areas with higher potential returns, and to leverage their money to buy more properties."Counties with the highest potential annual gross rental yields for 2018 were Baltimore City, Maryland (28.6 percent); Bibb County, Georgia in the Macon metro area (21.8 percent); Montgomery County, Alabama, in the Montgomery metro area (21.7 percent); Wayne County, Michigan in the Detroit metro area (21.7 percent); and Clayton County, Georgia in the Atlanta metro area (20.3 percent)."With continued job growth in Cleveland and Atlanta, Divvy is seeing a significant year-over-year increase in the percent of highly-qualified single-family renters, who are often less than two years away from mortgage qualification," said Tiffany Li, co-founder of Divvy Homes, a tech startup that provides lease options with an equity-building component. "This population is seeking SFRs in neighborhoods that are largely owner-occupied and with family-friendly amenities and good schools. We've continued to see strong and growing demand through the Midwest and Southeast for lease options and other unconventional rental options that allow highly-qualified renters to move towards homeownership."Along with Wayne County, Michigan, the highest potential annual gross rental yields among counties with a population of at least 1 million were Cuyahoga County (Cleveland), Ohio (11.6 percent); Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania (10.0 percent); Cook County (Chicago), Illinois (9.5 percent); and Harris County (Houston), Texas (9.5 percent)."At Roofstock we are seeing increasing interest from investors in a number of SFR markets that have historically not gotten much love from the large institutional players," said Gary Beasley, CEO and co-founder at Roofstock, an online marketplace for single-family rentals. "These include many cities in the Midwest, South, Southeast and even certain markets in the Northeast. Investors are attracted to the strong rental yields in many of these less flashy cities like Cleveland, Pittsburgh and Detroit, as well as perennial favorites like Atlanta, Houston and Charlotte which have been popular with investors for several years. The nice thing about SFR is there is enough variety out there that there really is something for every investor, depending on their unique objectives."Potential annual gross rental yields for 2018 increased compared to 2017 in 150 of the 449 counties analyzed in the report (33 percent) led by Rowan County, North Carolina in the Charlotte metro area (up 36 percent); Randolph County, North Carolina in the Greensboro metro area (up 32 percent); Tazewell County, Illinois, in the Peoria metro area (up 21 percent); Baltimore City, Maryland (up 21 percent); and Kings County, California in the Hanford-Corcoran metro area (up 20 percent)."As the stock market starts to show some weaknesses, investors continue to put their money into cash flowing assets such as rental properties," said Ross Hamilton, CEO at Connected Investors, an online community for real estate investors. "Many view rental real estate as a way to recession-proof their income and retirement."Among counties with a population of at least 1 million, those with the biggest increase in potential annual gross rental yields for 2018 compared to 2017 were Harris County (Houston), Texas (up 7 percent); King County (Seattle), Washington (up 7 percent); Queens County, New York (up 5 percent); Contra Costa County, California (up 4 percent); and Cook County (Chicago), Illinois (up 3 percent)."The single-family rental market in Seattle remains strong, which is a good thing for the people who own the rentals, but not so good for tenants as rents continue to escalate," said Matthew Gardner, chief economist with Windermere Real Estate, covering the Seattle market. "Demand for rentals is high but some of this is due to Seattle's rising home prices. Growth in rental rates is robust in the core Seattle market, but as you move further away from the city it starts to soften due to more modest income growth in those areas."Counties with the lowest potential annual gross rental yields for 2018 were Arlington, Virginia, in the Washington, D.C. metro area (3.6 percent); Santa Clara County, California, in the San Jose metro area (3.6 percent); San Mateo County, California, in the San Francisco metro area (3.7 percent); Williamson County, Tennessee, in the Nashville metro area (4.0 percent); and Kings County (Brooklyn), New York (4.0 percent).Along with Santa Clara County, California and Kings County, New York, the lowest potential annual gross rental yields among counties with a population of at least 1 million were in Orange County (Los Angeles metro area), California (4.5 percent); Fairfax County, (Washington, D.C. metro area) Virginia (4.6 percent); and Los Angeles County, California (4.9 percent).Rents rose faster than wages in 375 of the 449 counties analyzed (84 percent), including Los Angeles County, California; Cook County (Chicago), Illinois; Harris County (Houston), Texas; Maricopa County (Phoenix), Arizona; and San Diego County, California.Wages rose faster than rents in 74 of the 449 counties analyzed (16 percent), including Nassau County (Long Island), New York; Pima County (Tucson), Arizona; Westchester County, New York; Erie County (Buffalo), New York; and Duval County (Jacksonville), Florida.The report identified 24 "SFR Growth" counties where average wages grew over the past year and with potential 2018 annual gross rental yields of 10 percent or higher.The 24 SFR Growth markets included Cuyahoga County (Cleveland), Ohio; Richland County (Columbia), South Carolina; Westmoreland County (Pittsburgh), Pennsylvania; Winnebago County (Rockford), Illinois); and Clayton County, Georgia in the Atlanta metro area.The report identifies 30 "Low Risk-High Return" counties where the 2018 potential annual gross rental yields were 10 percent or higher and where the investment property vacancy rate was 5 percent or lower and where the property tax rate was 1 percent or lower.These counties were led by Randolph County (Greensboro), North Carolina; Jasper County (Joplin), Missouri; Newton County (Atlanta), Georgia; Rowan County (Charlotte), North Carolina; and Wicomico County (Salisbury), Maryland.A woman is facing jail time after being caught smuggling drugs so that she can become famous on social media.

Now, the woman pleaded guilty and apologized to the court for her actions.

24-year-old Melina Roberge from Canada said that her sugar daddy offered to pay for a lavish cruise vacation in exchange for smuggling drugs into Australia.

Roberge and two other women agreed. Roberge said that she did so to take photos of her luxury vacation for her social media accounts.

The woman went on a seven-week cruise and traveled to Britain, Ireland, the United States, Bermuda, Colombia, Panama, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, and then to Sydney, Australia.

As they got off the MS Sea Princess in Sydney, Roberge, the two other women, Isabelle Lagace, 30, and Andre Tamine, 64, were busted with over 2,000 pounds of cocaine, which is valued at about $23 million

The three women from Quebec pleaded guilty in the New South Wales District Court for smuggling the drugs in their suitcases.

Shortly before she was supposed to stand trial, Roberge pleaded guilty to the charges. She will be sentenced at a later date.

In court, Roberge told the judge that while she was in prison since her arrest, she met women with substance abuse issues and that she wants to help them.

She apologized for her actions and for not thinking about the consequences of smuggling a massive quantity of cocaine across international borders.Appeal after disappearance of rare hen harrier in Wrexham area

This article is old - Published: Thursday, Mar 22nd, 2018

North Wales Police and the RSPB have issued an appeal for information following the disappearance of a satellite-tagged hen harrier near Wrexham.

The harrier, named Aalin, was tagged as part of the RSPBs EU-funded Hen Harrier LIFE+ project in July 2016 from a nest on the Isle of Man, in collaboration with Manx Birdlife.

Aalin left the Isle of Man in 2016 and spent her first winter in Shropshire, before heading to Wales in the spring of 2017, where she remained ever since.

The RSPB say Aalins tag had been transmitting regularly before suddenly stopping on the morning of February 9th 2018.

Data from Aalins tag indicates that she spent the last few months in the same area of moorland around Ruabon Mountain in Wrexham, from where the tag unexpectedly sent its last signal at 10.34am.

A search was conducted by RSPB Investigations staff, but no tag or body was found and she has not been seen or heard of since.

Dr. Cathleen Thomas, RSPB hen harrier LIFE project manager, said: Its incredibly disappointing to lose yet another hen harrier in these circumstances, especially as this bird is so scarce in the UK.

Its also the first suspicious loss of a bird in Wales for our project, after the elation of tagging our first chicks there in 2017.

We were hopeful that heading towards the breeding season Aalin would have nested in Wales and successfully reared chicks this summer, so her loss also affects future generations of this rare and beautiful bird in the area.

We believe the loss of Aalin and other recently tagged hen harriers in the UK is having a devastating impact on their conservation status.

Sgt Rob Taylor, rural crime team manager, North Wales Police, said: We have been notified by the RSPB of this incident and we are investigating the disappearance, but at this time we have little to go on. We are appealing to the public for any assistance they can give and we hope that foul play hasnt played a part in the loss of this rare bird.

Neil Morris, managing director of Manx Birdlife, described the disappearance of Aalin as heartbreaking news

As well as the sudden unexplained loss of yet another magnificent bird of prey, we still know so little about the behaviour of Manx-born hen harriers, said Neil.

Clearly there is an impulse for young birds to wander soon after fledging. But we dont really know why or whether any of those that leave the Isle of Man as juveniles make the return journey as mature adults to breed back in their native hills.

If you have any information relating to this incident, please call North Wales Police on 101 quoting the reference WO28466. Alternatively, you can call the RSPB Raptor Crime Hotline confidentially on 0300 999 0101. All calls are anonymous.

Picture credit James LeonardThe owners of the Aluminerie de Becancour Inc. (ABI) aluminum smelter in Becancour, Quebec have intensified their assault on the facilitys 1,030 production workers, serving notice that they intend to use the now more than two month-old lockout to extort even bigger contract concessions.

At a brief March 8 negotiating session, the transnational aluminum giants Alcoa and Rio Tinto-Alcan, who operate ABI as a joint venture, withdrew the concessions-laden final offer they had tabled last December and announced that workers will have to cede even larger givebacks for the lockout to be lifted.

In a display of utter contempt for the workers, company representatives refused to spell out their new demands. Instead, after a brief tirade in which they denounced the workers for supposedly imperiling the smelters competitiveness, they walked out of the contract talksthe first since last December.

In a subsequent press release, ABI provocatively declared, The unions rejection of the equitable and competitive (company) offer, leaves ABI management no choice but to take measures to protect the factorys employees and assets. Consequently, the rejected offer can no longer serve as the basis for a settlement.  ABIs operational structure must be re-evaluated with the aim of significantly improving productivity and the organization of the workforce 

The company said it had only agreed to meet with United Steelworker (USW) negotiators because of a commitment it had given the Quebec Labour Minister at the beginning of February.

If ABIs owners feel emboldened to renege on their December offer and demand still greater concessions, it is because the USW leadership has systematically isolated the Becancour workers.

Instead of making the ABI workers struggle against pension cuts, speed-up and other contract concessions the spearhead of a broader working class counteroffensive in defence of jobs, wages, working conditions and public services, the USW has made futile and reactionary appeals to company shareholders and the big business politicians in the Quebec National Assembly to convince Alcoa and Rio Tinto that the lockout is a bad business decision.

The companys amplified concession demands and implicit threat to keep workers off the job for months to come underscores the urgency of rank-and-file ABI workers taking control of their struggle out of the hands of the USW bureaucrats and rallying support from workers across Canada and around the world.

The USW Local 9700 leadership has repeatedly declared its willingness to collaborate with ABI in imposing rollbacks on workers. These include replacing the current defined benefit pension-plan with an exclusively worker-funded one and gutting seniority rights through the introduction of a new promotion scheme based on skills and performance.

Even after the abortive March 8 bargaining session, Local 9700 President Clement Masse was at pains to proclaim the unions readiness to work with ABI. He appealed to Alcoa and Rio Tinto to give ABI management a real mandate to negotiate the issues in dispute, adding that once they do, the USW will be happy to work with them in a constructive way.

In a blatant act of sabotage that underscores the USWs opposition to any serious struggle against the aluminum giants, the USW has just agreed to reopen and potentially extend the collective agreement at Rio Tinto-Alcans Alma, Quebec facility (even though the existing contract only expires in 2020). The company claims it will make an important investment in the facility, but needs changes to the contractread concessionsto ensure its long-term competiveness or profitability first.

Any organization seeking to lead a genuine struggle in defence of workers wages and conditions would have responded to Rio Tintos blatant attempt to pit the Alma workers against their brothers and sisters at ABI by appealing for workers at Rio Tinto-Alcan and Alcoa facilities across the country and globally to strike in solidarity with the ABI workers. Such an appeal would meet with a powerful response from aluminum workers eager to launch a counteroffensive against decades of concessions. Workers at a Sept-Isles, Quebec facility owned by the mining company IOC and organized by the Steelworkers recently voted to strike to fight concession demands, including against the introduction of a two-tier pension plan for new hires.

But the USW is implacably hostile to such a development, seeing itself as a loyal partner of the corporations and capitalist state, whose task is to smother working class opposition and ensure corporate profits.

USW Local 9490 president Alexandre Frechette declared that the union would approach the contract reopening at Alma with an open mind. Adopting the language that USWs and other union bureaucrats have adopted time and again in pushing through wage and job cuts, Frechette added, We are ready to consider modifications and an extension, as long as everyone is a winner.

The lockout at ABI is part of a big business offensive around the world, in which companies are seeking to boost profits and investor returns by destroying what remains of the social rights generations of workers won through the mass and revolutionary struggles of the last century.

As they jockey among each other for market share and the financial support of the banks and billionaire investors, the transnationals are pitting workers against each other in a race to the bottom and using the threat of closures and relocation to impose their diktats.

Rio Tinto-Alcan and Alcoa, respectively the worlds third and sixth largest aluminum producers, are clearly out to impose a major defeat on the ABI workers, so as to set a precedent for their smelters and mines across Canada and internationally.

Yet even as ABI management has declared war on its Becancour workforce in the name of increased competitiveness and productivity, the USW is determined to minimize the issues at stake. It insists that an accommodation could have been reached if the company had remained at the bargaining table last December and that the lockout is really just a ploy to get the Quebec government to give it lower electricity rates.

The USWs collaborationist strategy is bound up with its corporatist and nationalist program, which has nothing to offer workers who want to resist the corporations global offensive on workers jobs and working conditions.

Over the past four decades, the USW and the pro-capitalist unions as whole have abandoned all traditions of militant struggle, promoted the corporatist lie that workers interests are identical with those of the companies that profit from their exploitation, and been transformed into appendages of management in suppressing worker discontent.

The role of the unions as junior partners of big business is exemplified by the USWs attitude toward US President Donald Trumps new tariffs on steel and aluminum.

The USW, which boasted about Canadas military and intelligence cooperation with the US in pressing for an exemption for Canada from Trump's tariffs, is now demanding Ottawa work more closely with Washington to wage economic war against China.

In a comment that could well have been made by any pro-militarist, big business politician or industrialist, USW International President Leo Gerard declared, The United States and Canada have integrated manufacturing markets. In addition, the defence and intelligence relationship between the countries is unique and integral to our security. Gerard then called on Canada to enhance its cooperation with the US to address global overcapacity in steel and aluminuma thinly veiled call for trade war measures against China.

The logic of these positions is that workers should side with their own ruling class in the bitter struggle between the major powers for markets, resources and spheres of influence that is not only resulting in trade war, but laying the basis for all-out military conflicts on a scale not seen since the two world wars of the last century.

Workers at the ABI smelter have no interest in becoming cannon fodder in the conflicts of competing capitalist states and should reject the USWs nationalist poison with the contempt it deserves. To beat back the concessions demanded by the corporate bosses and mount a struggle for decent-paying and secure jobs, they should elect an action committee to lead the struggle independently of the USW bureaucracy. ABI workers should appeal for support from industrial and public sector workers across Quebec and the rest of Canada, and make contact with fellow workers in the United States and internationally to initiate a joint counteroffensive against the steel and aluminum bosses.Practically no affordable homes are being built in the UK, even according to the governments own dubious definition of affordability.

The vast majority of new apartments are built either for the well-off or as buy-to-lets at exorbitant rents.

Responsibility for this crisis in housing lies not just with the Conservative government, but with Labour, the party that runs most borough councils in London, as well as the local authorities in every major city. The Grenfell fire in Londons Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea last June, with the loss of at least 72 lives, highlighted the callous indifference on the part of the authorities to the most basic needs for safe, good-quality homes.

Planning documents researched by the Guardian show that of 14,667 new homes built in Manchester in the last two years, none met even the governments criteria of affordability. Over the last decade, Manchesters skyline has changed dramatically with new for private rent towers springing up and cranes building more. There are plans for new blocks of 18, 26 and 32 storeys.

With only the housing requirements of the well-off being catered for, 12,900 people are on a growing waiting list for social housing. The number of homeless has swelled, with rough sleepers every few yards on the main shopping thoroughfares.

Labour-run Manchester City Council issued a rebuttal of the Guardian s figures, claiming that 10.7 percent of new housing was affordable. Even if true, this means that almost 90 percent of units built are beyond the means of most working class Mancunians. In a clear policy of social cleansing, any planned affordable homes will be outside the city centre, and its amenities, where land is cheaper.

Other Labour-run councils building hardly any affordable houses include Sheffieldonly 1.4 percent of its new homes, 97 out of 6,943, were deemed affordable. In Leedsjust 3.4 percent are affordable (7,871 of 3,522). Only Cardiff in Wales exceeded the councils own target of 20 percent. Even then, there are just 24 percent affordable new homes out of a total of 12,085.

The governments National Planning Policy Framework, which informs local councils, includes under affordable housing: Social rented, affordable rented and intermediate housing [including shared ownership] provided to eligible households whose needs are not met by the market.

Affordable rent is either the social rent rate or no more than 80 percent of the local market rent. Affordable mortgage payments are classed as higher than social rent, but lower than market levels.

According to housing charity Shelters definition of affordability, rent/mortgage should ideally not consume more than a third of household income. On the median income of 27,000, that translates to rent of 687.50 per month, or a mortgage of around 125,000.

One of the main reasons so few affordable homes are built by private developers is an escape clause contained in the Conservatives Town and Country Planning Act 1990, known as Section 106. This enables property developers to abrogate the commitment made with local councils to build an agreed percentage of affordable homes simply by claiming this would make their project financially unviable and agreeing to pay a fee instead.

Using research conducted by EGi, the news and research arm of commercial property magazine Es tates Gazette, Shelter found that across 11 local authorities 79 percent of affordable homes were lost through viability assessments last year.

Shelter found Manchester City Council built no affordable housing out of a 20 percent target, losing a possible 472 units out of 2,362 units, when viability was used. When viability was not applied in the case of a further 1,911 units, just 178 were affordable.

Birmingham, with a Labour majority on the council, only achieved 1 percent of its 35 percent target of affordable homes last year when viability was applied. Labour-run Brent achieved 25 percent out of a 50 percent target. Other councils failing to achieve their targets include Bristol, Cambridge, Leeds, Leicester, Newcastle, Southwark, and Manchesterall Labour-run authorities.

Research into 26 sites by Sheffield Universitys Jonathan Silver revealed Labour-run Salford lost 2,194 affordable properties.

The House of Lords Select Committee on Economic Affairs report in 2016/2017 recommended that 300,000 new homes were needed annually in England just to meet existing housing needs. Last year saw an increase of up to 217,350 units, but less than a quarter (41,530) were affordable.

Social rented housing is the cheapest form of housingapplying to local government (council)-owned homesbut most council stock was sold off by Conservative and Labour councils. The number of council homes in Britain fell by 69 percent (down from 6.5 to 1.6 million in 2017) since the right-to-buy scheme was introduced by the Tories in 1980.

With the collapse in social housing provision, the expensive and far less secure private rented sector now provides more households than the social sector. However, access to this sector is fraught with obstacles, including rent to be paid in advance and hefty deposits. Many private landlords will not let to those receiving welfare.

According to the governments Valuation Office Agency, the median monthly private rent for England (all bedrooms) was 675 for April 2016 to March 2017. This includes London, average median rent 1,495; the North West, 535; the West Midlands, 575; the South East, 875. The lowest average private rent was in the North East at 495.

With house price growth outstripping wagesby 7.7 percent in England on average, and as high as 24.8 percent in Londons affluent Chelsea and Fulham areasobtaining a mortgage is almost impossible even for those on the median income. This has resulted in an exodus from London in the decade up to 2016, with 292,000 driven out by rising house prices. There are now 50,000 people living in temporary accommodation in the capital.

Local councils, many Labour-run, have responded to rapacious funding cuts from central government by privatising services, selling off remaining council stock and facilitating highly profitable deals with developers. This is set to escalate with central government funding to local councils being phased out and ending completely by 2020.

Property developers are making a killing in regeneration schemes centred on replacing working class neighbourhoods with high-end apartments. Residents mobilised recently in opposition to Labour-run Haringey Council in London, which set up the Haringey Development Vehicle run jointly with Lendlease to privatise 2 billion in public assets and demolish seven council estates.

Dr. Jonathan Silver of the Urban Institute at the University of Sheffield recently authored a research paper into the financialisation of housing in Greater Manchester. He concluded that housing has become an investment opportunity for financial actors, from within the UK and increasingly internationally.

Labour has embraced this ethos, with many of its senior local council officials intimately involved with property developers. This month, Salfords Labour Mayor Paul Dennett and Sir Richard Leese, Labour leader of Manchester Councilalong with representatives from other councilsattended the worlds leading annual real estate event, MIPIM, in Cannes, France. Dennett unveiled his councils plans for a 240-acre development area, including 2,000 residential units as an 800 million investment opportunity to the approximately 20,000 global property speculators.This is the fourth in a series of articles on the recent Berlin International Film Festival, the Berlinale, held February 15-25, 2018. The first part was posted March 14, the second on March 16 and the third on March 20.

Two years ago, the European refugee crisis played a central role at the Berlin film festival with the documentary Fire At Sea ( Fuocoammare ) by Italian director Gianfranco Rosi taking the festivals main prize. Fire at Sea graphically portrayed the plight of refugees attempting to enter Europe, although it essentially concluded with an appeal to the European Union (EU) to rethink its policies.

Following a dearth of films dealing with the theme at the 2017 Berlinale, it was significant that a handful of movies this year dealt powerfully and insightfully dealt with the EUs criminal abuse of refugees.

Styx by the Austrian director Wolfgang Fischer grabs our attention from the start with a dramatic road accident. The accident provides the backdrop for introducing the main character in the film, the paramedic Rieke (Susanne Wolff). In her 40s, Rieke is self-assured, proficient and ready for the holiday of a lifetime. She plans to sail a 12-metre yacht singlehandedly from Gibraltar to Ascension Island in the South Atlantic Ocean, some halfway between Africa and South America.

Styx

For long stretches, Styx has little dialogue. Instead, we are introduced to the complex mechanics of sailing a small boat in the middle of the ocean, including navigating a fierce nighttime storm. Most of the filming took place on the high seas and the cinematography vividly depicts the enormous challenges involved in combatting the elements alone.

The film switches gear dramatically when, having survived the storm, Rieke spots a leaky trawler overflowing with African refugees. Highly alarmed, she does her duty according to maritime law. She immediately issues a Mayday call and informs the coast guard. In response the coast guard notes her call and strongly warns her against intervening personally.

Witnessing the dilemma of the refugees first-hand as their ship begins to sink, Rieke refuses to leave the scene and repeatedly requests assistance. Every time she is instructed to leave the area and not to intervene. Frustrated with the negligence of the coast guard, she contacts another ship in the area, a tanker. The message from the tanker is that they have strict instructions from the company not to intervene in such a situationat the risk of losing their jobs.

Determined to leave the sinking ship, a handful of refugees jump overboard, and one of them, an African boy, manages to swim to Riekes yacht. She hauls him aboard and uses her paramedic skills to assist the exhausted, unconscious boy. On board her small craft, Rieke has everythingfood, water, medicine, the most advanced navigational equipment. A few hundred metres away, a vessel is sinking with a hundred refugees on board who have nothing.

Styx

When the coast guard finally does arrive, its first priority is to arrest Rieke. Her boat is confiscated, and a shocked and fatigued Rieke is informed she faces serious criminal charges for providing assistance to drowning people.

In fact, Fischers film makes clear that the real criminals are the politicians who have callously sanctioned a policy that has allowed tens of thousands of helpless men, women and children to die at sea. In the making of Styx, the director worked closely with voluntary organisations that assist refugees in distress at sea and the film is based on genuine encounters.

Eldorado

The river Styx is the mythological river lying between the realm of the living and the realm of the dead. In the real world perhaps the closest parallel is the transit camp, the no-mans land where refugees are rendered stateless and invisible to the rest of society. Other films at the festival sought to give a face to the tens of thousands stuck in transit on Europes borders and at the mercy of the European Union vicious bureaucracy and police.

Markus Imhoofs documentary Eldorado begins with the directors own wartime recollections in Switzerland. During World War II, neutral Switzerland was a transit land for Jewish refugees, The fascist powers allowed some Jews to cross the country and depart for other countries if, in return, Switzerland agreed to take in a certain number of war refugees. Imhoof relates how, as a young boy, he went down to his local railway station with his mother to pick out a refugee to take homeGiovanna, a young, sickly Italian girl who the boy later learnt to love.

Eldorado

After the war, refugees like Giovanna were forced to leave Switzerland. She died later in Milan, malnourished, at the age of 14. In the course of his film, the director, now 76, conducts a dialogue with his long lost childhood friend. This dialogue is interspersed with current footage of the dreadful plight of refugees, mainly from Africa, seeking to reach the European Uniona false El Dorado, which treats them with contempt and hostility should they manage to survive the perilous passage across the Mediterranean.

At the Berlin festival, Imhoof explained he had to wait months to obtain permission to film on official EU vessels, on the open sea and in the primitive transit camps established on Europes borders. Europe wants to wash its hands of the refugees, they are to remain unseen.

Eldorado also deals with the economics of modern human trafficking. He notes how he paid 36.50 euros [$US 44.75] for a ships passage from Africa to Europe, including a reserved seat. A refugee fleeing war and poverty often pays $1,500 for the same trip in a leaky dinghy without a lifejacket.

Those who do make it to Italian shores are often incarcerated in camps run by the Mafia, where they are employed as virtual slave labour. They work 10 hour days on tomato plantations for 30 euros a day, half of which they have to give to their gangster employers. It is reckoned that there are about 30,000 such illegal workers in Italian agriculture. Lacking any legal status they have no legal rights. Often they are not paid at all.

Eldorado

Imhoof notes that tomatoes are an ideal crop to grow in Africa and could significantly boost the economies of African countries. Instead African migrants working for poverty wages guarantee cheap priced tomatoes in Italy for the European market, a process Imhoof calls economic colonisation.

Together with his references to his own boyhood experiences in the war, Imhoofs film implies that the treatment of refugees today is no better than it was three-quarters of a century ago during the war.

Styx and Eldorado deserve a wide audience.

Prominent German filmmaker Christian Petzolds new work, Transit, based on a novel by the left-wing writer Anna Seghers (1900-1983), which also treats the refugee problem, will be discussed at a later date.

A number of films at this years Berlin festival dealt with the growth of far-right radicalism and racism.

U: July 22

One way not to deal with ultra-right extremism is on display in the Norwegian drama, U: July 22. The film title refers to the horrifying massacre of young people carried out by the right-wing terrorist Anders Behring Breivik in Norway on July 22, 2011.

The film fictionally re-enacts the events exclusively from the perspective of the young people attending a summer camp on the island of Utya.

U: July 22

Veteran Norwegian director Erik Poppes film begins with closed circuit television footage of the car-bomb explosion in central Oslo, carried out by Breivik, that killed eight people. It then cuts to Utya, where 500 teenagers are gathered for a summer camp run by the youth movement of the social democratic Nowegian Labour Party.

The 72-minute length of the film corresponds to the precise time it took Breivik to murder 69 people and injure another 200 on the island. The film replicates as well the exact number of shots fired by Breivik.

Shot in a single take, U: July 22 resembles nothing more or less than a low-budget horror film. Much of the tension flows from the perverse speculation as to whether its main protagonist, Kaja (Andrea Berntzen), an 18-year-old girl, shown fleeing through the woods, will successfully evade the gunman. At one point, we witness another young girl, one of Breiviks victims, dying of her gunshot wounds in Kajas arms. Breivik does not appear in the film as a character.

In Berlin, Poppe warned of the dangers of fascism, but then went on to assert the aim of his film was not to traumatise people, but to help the healing process.

This media comment on the film is typical: Does U: July 2 2 finally leave its audience with anything? How could it, given the numbing senselessness of what it depicts? Perhaps thats the very point of Poppes film; its for the individual viewer to decide if that emptiness is enough.

Justifying the films numbing senselessness and emptiness, one of its screenwriters, Anna Bache-Wiig, states, in well-worn postmodernist fashion, that the screenplays basis is one truthothers may exist.

Such arguments in defence of U: July 22 bear similarities to the apologetics offered by bourgeois media commentators seven years ago. Just days after the shooting, Simon Jenkins wrote in the Guardian: The Norwegian tragedy is just that, a tragedy. It does not signify anything and should not be forced to do so.

What Poppes film palpably fails to do is provide any sort of social, political and historical background to inform the viewer and help prevent similar future atrocities. Instead, we are asked to believe that confrontation with the sheer horror of the shooting will prevent any sort of repetition. This is political naivete of the worst kind.

A number of other film projects dealing with the events of July 22, 2011 in Norway are in the pipeline. One can only hope they take a much more serious approach than Poppes travesty.

The author also recommends:

The ideological roots of the Oslo atrocity

[30 July 2011]

To be continuedA new genetic analysis of DNA from the Cheddar Man fossil, excavated in 1903 from Goughs Cave in Cheddar Gorge, Somerset, England, suggests that at least some of the early modern human inhabitants of the British Isles had a mixture of traits different from later populations. These characteristics include dark skin, curly dark brown hair, and blue or green eyes. In addition, Cheddar Man was lactose intolerant.

The finding of dark skin has raised much interest in the popular press, and stirred some racist comments. It runs counter to interpretations that the modern humans who first entered Europe from Africa, probably via the Near East, about 40-45,000 years ago, had already transitioned to lighter skin tone as compared to their darker skinned African ancestors, in order to increase their skins manufacture of Vitamin D in the less sunny northern hemisphere. This latest research suggests a more complicated development.

The more complex picture of changes in human skin color is consistent with other recent research which indicates that this seemingly simple characteristic is actually controlled by a multiplicity of genes, leading to a wide range of phenotypic expressions, and that simplistic racial classifications based on skin tone are scientifically invalid. However, exactly that understanding has led some other researchers, including one member of the original team, to urge caution against overly specific characterizations of Cheddar Mans skin color.

The Cheddar Man fossil dates to approximately 10,000 years ago, during the Mesolithic Period in Europe, at least 30,000 years after the first arrival of modern humans. It is the oldest nearly complete skeleton of a Homo sapiens (modern human) that has been found in Britain. The Mesolithic immediately follows the end of the last Ice Age, roughly 12,000 years ago. It predates the introduction of full-blown agriculture, but involved a more sedentary lifestyle than that of the preceding Upper Paleolithic. This change in culture included a more intensive use of selected plant and animal resources, facilitated by new technologies, including microlithic tools. The famous archaeological site of Star Carr, in North Yorkshire, initially excavated in the late 1940s, dates to this period.

The new analysis of Cheddar Man was conducted by a research team at the Natural History Museum in London and University College London. The DNA used in the analysis was extracted from the fossils petrous bone, part of the inner ear. This is a dense bone and thus provided greater protection from decomposition than for DNA in many other parts of the skeleton. The extracted sample was analyzed using up-to-date technology to reconstruct Cheddar Mans full genome.

A facial reconstruction of Cheddar Man was undertaken using standard forensic techniques and the results of Natural History Museums genetic analysis, and employed 3D printing.

The interpretation that Cheddar Man had dark skin has been questioned. It was based on the use of a model developed by Susan Walsh of Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. This model is designed to predict eye, hair, and skin color based on a persons DNA. The skin color prediction targets 36 loci in 16 genes. Tests on modern populations yielded a high level of predictability in differentiating light from dark skin. An initial announcement of the results for the test of Cheddar Mans DNA indicated dark skin. The announcement was made as part of the promotion for an upcoming British television documentary, which may have prompted a rush to publish.

Subsequent statements by Walsh are less categorical. Due to the degradation of the DNA over 10,000 years, the interpretation that Cheddar Man had dark skin is the most probable profile, based on current research, according to Walsh. At least two recent studies conclude that the genetic control of skin color in humans is a very complex phenomenon, involving many more than 16 genes. One of these studies concluded that only about 29 percent of the variation observed in modern populations could be attributed to known genetic factors.

Neolithic farmers migrated into Europe from the Near East and perhaps North Africa beginning roughly 9,000 years ago and culturally replaced the Mesolithic humans. As with the Neanderthals before them, however, the indigenous Mesolithic population did not disappear, but interbred with the more numerous immigrants. Genetic analysis indicates that the modern British population carries approximately 10 percent of its genetic makeup from the earlier Mesolithic inhabitants. Models intended to predict skin color based on studies of modern populations may not be directly applicable to those in the distant past, especially when major migrations and genetic inter-mixing have taken place.

The study of the physical development of human populations, as part of overall research into their cultural and biological development, is certainly a worthwhile pursuit. However, the complexity involved is staggering. Researchers should exercise caution on reaching conclusions based on data derived from limited samples.

The author also recommends:

Genetic study demonstrates that racial classification by skin color has no scientific basis

[9 November 2017]Did you recently take part in a demonstration against police violence in the United States? If so, you may be the latest dupe of Russian president Vladimir Putin and his army of tweeters.

This is the implication of a March 15 report by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, which claims that Russian-linked Twitter accounts were stoking the flames of racial division in August 2016 as hundreds of youth in Milwaukee, Wisconsin engaged in angry protests against the fatal shooting of 23-year-old Sylville Smith by a police officer.

The article has been trumpeted by Democratic and Republican politicians alike as the latest evidence that Russian hacking was responsible for the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Based on their hysterical statements, all taken from the same CIA talking points, one would think that the otherwise placid state of Wisconsin had fallen under virtual Russian control.

Former US attorney general under the Obama administration, Eric Holder, while on a campaign visit in the state capital Madison on March 16, claimed that the discovery of less than three dozen tweets by accounts linked to Russia posted in August 2016 really shows the sophistication of Russian efforts to influence racial tension in a state in our nation to have an electoral effect.

Holder ominously suggested looking into people in the country who might have possibly helped the Russians, and called for congressional hearings and an investigation by the FBI.

A spokeswoman for Republican governor Scott Walker stated that it was outrageous that any foreign interests would try to cause disruption in our communities and [we] hope the federal government will spend time looking into this interference.

Democratic Senator Tammy Baldwin declared that Putin directed an attack on our democracy and called for federal legislation to provide states with cybersecurity grants. Democratic State Senator for Milwaukee LaTonya Johnson tweeted that we were trying to help keep peace in the communitywhile these fools [Russia] were sowing seeds of racism and hatred. She claimed that were still vulnerable to these tactics.

These are enemies of the United States who are trying to sow dissension in our country and on the streets of Milwaukee, Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett exclaimed.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel utilized a database of thousands of tweets, collected by NBC News, originally published by accounts identified by Twitter in January as being somehow connected to Russia.

The Journal Sentinel report claims that on August 14, 2016, in the midst of three days of protests in Milwaukee, fake Russian Twitter accounts published 32 tweets using the hashtag #Milwaukee. The most prominently cited offender is a fake account intended to impersonate the Republican Party in the state of Tennessee named Tennessee_GOP.

The report does not indicate why a supposedly sophisticated plot to sow tensions on the streets of Milwaukee would use as its vehicle a Twitter account impersonating the branch of a major party in another state, nor provide any proof that anyone in Wisconsin actually read any of the automated tweets. Instead, it simply reports that the tweets were retweeted more than 5,000 times.

According to the report itself, though contradicting its premise that the tweets were intended to promote the election of Donald Trump, the Russian-linked accounts presented themselves as grassroots opponents or supporters of movements like Black Lives Matter, both defending police and criticizing them.

More than 100 mainly young people took part in spontaneous demonstrations on the evening of August 13 in the neighborhood of Sherman Park, following the killing of Smith by 24-year-old police officer Dominique Heaggan-Brown. Both the officer and the victim were African American. While Smith had been carrying a gun, he had already thrown it away when Heaggan-Brown fired a fatal shot through the young mans heart. In the ensuing unrest triggered by the killing, a handful of businesses were looted and several cop cars were set on fire.

Governor Walker responded by mobilizing the National Guard, a section of the military, and placing them on standby in case the police were unable to put down the protests, which continued for a further two days. Heaggan-Brown was charged but later acquitted in the killing.

The residents of Milwaukee did not need Russian bots to sow dissension. The real roots of the eruption of social anger on the streets of Milwaukee are to be found in the catastrophic social crisis which wracks the city and the systematic violence and abuse committed by police against workers and youth.

Milwaukee, once known as the Machine Shop of the World because of its high concentration of manufacturing jobs, is today the second poorest big city in America after Detroit, littered with abandoned lots and disused factory buildings. The citys poverty rate in 2014 was 29 percent, and 42 percent for those aged 18 or under. The neighbourhood of Sherman Park where the killing took place has a poverty rate of 43 percent.

The attempt to present the Milwaukee protests as a product of Russian interference should be taken as a serious political warning about the authoritarian character of the Democrats anti-Russia campaign.

The Journal Sentinel report is part of a broader campaign to present every manifestation of social and political opposition in the United States, including mass demonstrations against police violence, as the product of Russian interference, rather than stemming from the untenable levels of social inequality, in which three Americans hold the same amount of wealth as half the American population, more than 25 years of unending war, and the brutality and violence of American society, where more than 1,000 people are killed every year by police.

With this bogus anti-Russia campaign the media, Democratic Party and intelligence agencies are attempting to create the conditions for the censorship of social media and the labelling of all forms of political opposition and dissent as the work of foreign agents, thereby justifying their immediate suppression by the state.A ruling by an Australian judge Tuesday in favour of actor Geoffrey Rush in his defamation suit against a Sydney newspaper over allegations of sexual misconduct is entirely welcome. It is a blow against the international #MeToo sexual witch-hunt.

Since accusations emerged last October against Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, a stream of allegations has been levelled, via social media and the official media, against prominent figures in the arts, politics and the corporate world.

The #MeToo campaign has been marked by a contempt for the democratic principles of innocent until proven guilty and the right to due process. In numerous cases the accusations of sexual impropriety concern alleged incidents that took place years ago, do not constitute criminal acts, or depend entirely on the word of the accuser. Regardless, the lives of many of the accused have been irreparably damaged.

The few prominent individuals who have raised concerns over what is taking place, such as actor Matt Damon, actress Catherine Deneuve and, most recently, director Terry Gilliam, have been subjected to denunciations by the Hollywood establishment and the media.

The broader impact of #MeToo has been pernicious. A deeply unhealthy atmosphere of division and fear has taken root in many workplaces, schools and universities.

Among those targeted was Geoffrey Rush. The acclaimed and multi-award-winning 66-year-old Australian stage and film actor is well known for his roles in movies such as Shine, Elizabeth, Shakespeare in Love, Pirates of the Caribbean and The Kings Speech.

Last November, the Rupert Murdoch-owned Daily Telegraph in Sydney published anonymous allegations that Rush had inappropriately touched a female co-star actor during performances of the Sydney Theatre Company (STC) production of Shakespeares King Lear in January 2016.

The Telegraph ran a banner headline, King Leer, implying that Rush was a sexual predator. It further asserted that Rushs actions were deemed so serious that the STC had decided to never work with him again. Its claims were prominently repeated by media outlets around the world.

Within a matter of days, Rush was pressured to resign from his position as president of the Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts (AACTA). He was unceremoniously removed from opening the AACTA awards ceremony.

Rush, to his credit, took the decision on December 8 to file a defamation lawsuit against both the owner of the Daily Telegraph, Nationwide News, and the author of the articles, Jonathon Moran.

The actual defamation hearing is scheduled for August. Ahead of it, Rushs legal team filed an application to strike out three paragraphs in the Murdoch medias defence, which sought to defend its allegations on the grounds of justification or, in laymans terms, that the accusations were substantially true, as well as the grounds of qualified privilege, meaning it was in the public interest to make known the accusations.

Justice Michael Wigney adjudicated on the application on Tuesday in the Australian Federal Court. His ruling, by any measure, is a withering condemnation of the claims made against Rush. Implicitly, it is also a condemnation of the modus operandi of the #MeToo campaign, based on making legally untested accusations, followed by trial, conviction and punishment in the establishment media and by what it calls public opinion.

Justice Wigney found that Nationwide News truth defence should be struck out in its entirety because it was deficient, vague and imprecise, ambiguous and provided no credible details about the alleged touching.

In his 201-paragraph judgement, Justice Wigney reviewed in detail the purported inappropriate behaviour. Rush, as King Lear, allegedly did something while carrying the actress playing his daughter, Cordelia, at this point a lifeless corpse, across the stage.

Wigney simply posed the questions that should have been asked and answered before any aspersions were cast against Rush.

He asked: What exactly was the scandalously inappropriate behaviour or inappropriate behaviour that Mr Rush was said to have engaged in? What exactly had he done which was said to meet those descriptions? ... What exactly distinguished the alleged touch from the contact that must otherwise have been made between Mr Rush and the actress during the scene? How and why did the alleged touch make the actress feel uncomfortable? Was the discomfort physical or emotional?

Justice Wigney ruled: The problems arising from the generality, lack of detail and imprecision of the particulars similarly preclude a finding that the particulars, taken at their highest, are capable of proving the substantial truth of any of the other pleaded imputations that are the subject of Nationwide and Mr Morans defence of justification. [Emphasis added]

Wigney proceeded to label the Murdoch medias request for the court to subpoena STC documentsin the hope they might reveal other allegations against Rushas a fishing expedition and an abuse of process. He stated that if the newspaper did not have any evidence of inappropriate behavior at the time, it ought not to have published the libel, and cannot plead any justification for having done so.

Justice Wigney found against Geoffrey Rush on one matter: a submission by his legal team that reporting of the details of the alleged inappropriate behavior be suppressed. Wigneys finding, however, was that any fair report of the case should be to the benefit of Rush, as his judgement was that the accusations had no supporting evidence.

He stated: [A] fair report would most likely have to refer to the fact that some of the paragraphs of the justification defence were struck out because they were found not to be capable of supporting the truth of the imputations that they were said to have justified. That would hardly be likely to embarrass Mr Rush. [Emphasis added]

The judges confidence that the #MeToo movement and the media will respond to the legal dismantling of accusations against people with a fair report is perhaps optimistic. The ruling will most likely be condemned in the disoriented circles swept up in the sexual misconduct witch-hunt.

A defamation lawyer observed to the Australian Financial Review Wednesday: The Rush case may well cause people to think twice about publishing allegations of sexual misconduct via the #MeToo movement there is at least a possibility that the Rush case may have a chilling impact on the movement in Australia.

In other words, by insisting there must be evidence of an alleged crime or misconduct before an individual can be accused, much less convicted, the Rush ruling threatens the anti-democratic #MeToo campaign.

The initial legal victory of Geoffrey Rush is a significant counter-strike against the entire reactionary business. It is also a vindication of Rush himself, who, by the accounts of those who have worked with him, is a humane and cultured person.

The social tendency in the upper-middle class that has coalesced around the #MeToo campaign, backed by the media and political establishment, is reactionary and authoritarian in character. In the United States, it is linked to the Democratic Party and big business media outlets such as the New York Times. It is being used to generate division in the population and divert attention from the immense social crisis and the danger of war that confronts the working class.

The witch-hunt over sexual misconduct does nothing to address the oppression and exploitation of the working classwomen or men. It solely advances the selfish aspirations of a privileged layer of upper-class women for more lucrative positions and opportunities in Hollywood, the corporations and the political establishment. At the same time, it is being used to legitimise the shredding of fundamental democratic and legal rights that were won through centuries of struggle against tyranny.

Against the McCarthyite #MeToo hysteria, those democratic rights must be defended by a unified movement of the international working class, as an essential component of the fight for social equality and socialism.Workers striking on March 22 on the first day of action against the privatisation of the French National Railways (SNCF) are in a critical political battle. This struggle will be long and will not be resolved after the first day of action, because it raises critical questions of perspective for the working class in France and internationally.

Macron has declared that there will be no backing down on his pledge to privatise the SNCF and tear up the labor statute of railway and public-sector workers, any more than from the destruction of the Labor Code, pensions and public health care. He has pledged to decree the abolition of all of these social rights, which were won by workers in struggle throughout the 20th century, following the October Revolution in 1917 and the liberation of France from Nazi occupation in 1945. The ruling class aims to reduce workers in France and across Europe to the status of low-paid temps without any social rights. The attacks against French railway workers are aimed at slashing spending on the SNCF by 27 percent.

The government has no intention of backing down in the face of the unions proposal for rotating strikes for two days out of five between April and June. The unions have no strategy to propose to the workers. In February, the general secretary of the CGT, Phillippe Martinez, claimed that the statute of railway workers was not negotiable. Then why have the unions continued to negotiate with Macron?

A powerful movement of the working class is emerging against Macron and the policies of militarism and austerity being imposed by all the governments of the European Union. But to conduct this fight, workers must take the struggle out of the hands of the trade unions and form their own rank-and-file committees, independent of the unions, to mobilise the broadest sections of workers and young people to oppose Macron and defend social rights. This must be fused with a political struggle by the working class to take political power.

The capitalist press in France and internationally fears the spectre of the 1995 strike by French railway workers. Confronted with the threatened pension reforms of Alain Juppe, the strikers broke out of the control of the unions and placed France and parts of Belgium at a standstill for weeks. The unions would prefer not to mention the 1995 strike, and CGT-Railways secretary Laurent Brun even bluntly declared, I do not remember 1995 at all... There is a mythology inside the company, but for me, not at all!

A deep anger is growing among workers against Macrons labour decrees, and the conditions are emerging for the workers to break free once again from the straitjacket the trade unions have imposed on the class struggle through their consultations with the employers and the state.

Such a break, when it occurs, will pose fundamental political questions to the workers. The task at hand is to re-establish the connections of the working class to the political traditions of the October Revolution. The international dynamic of the class struggle will leave workers with no other progressive course of action than to take the path of social revolution.

The social attacks being carried out by Macron flow, in the final analysis, not merely from the greed of the French capitalist class, as great as that is, but above all from the global crisis of the capitalist system and the imperialist powers drive to war. The 27 years since the dissolution of the Soviet Union have been marked by the rapid unleashing of the neo-colonial appetites of US and European imperialism. Wars, initially waged in Iraq and the Balkans, have spread into devastating interventions in Syria and Africa, and are increasingly being threatened against Russia and China.

Destabilised by these wars and undermined by repeated economic and financial crises since the 2008 crash, European imperialism is launching a vast military rearmament. Macron plans to re-establish compulsory military service, and Defence Minister Florence Parly announced last month in Munich that Paris will spend 300 billion euros on the armed forces by 2024, increasing overall military spending by 35 percent. For Macron, the workers must submit to social regression in order to fund tax handouts to the rich and military re-armament.

These policies have no democratic legitimacy. A bitter political conflict is looming, and the ruling class sees in the opposition of workers to the destruction of their social rights an intolerable threat to its wealth and its military interests. The ruling elite is considering even more brutal measures. Interior Minister Gerard Collomb has declared that the government can quickly and easily reimpose the state of emergency.

The allies of railway and public service workers in their struggle are the workers in France and around the world. More and more, workers coming into struggle are rebelling against the union apparatuses. In numerous states across the US and in the UK, where railway workers are also demonstrating, striking teachers and lecturers have rebelled against the unions. Metal workers have mobilised in Germany, as well as in Turkey.

And in the French-controlled island of Mayotte, strikers have angrily rejected the unions attempt to utilise attacks by paramilitary police against strike pickets on the island as a pretext to shut down the general strike.

Fifty years after the general strike of May-June 1968, struggles of a similar magnitude are being prepared. The decisive task is to arm the working class with an internationalist and socialist perspective for a revolutionary struggle against war, austerity and the capitalist system which produces them. This is the task undertaken by the Socialist Equality Party, the French section of the International Committee of the Fourth International.

The SEP emphasises that the workers cannot submit themselves to the old political parties, which for decades have orbited the Socialist Party (PS) of former President Francois Hollande. They have nothing to offer the workers. While Jean-Luc Melenchon (Unsubmissive France) has supported Macrons reintroduction of compulsory military service in the National Assembly, Olivier Besancenot declares that the New Anti-Capitalist Party wishes to create a regroupment around Benoit Hamon, the former PS presidential candidate. They are collaborating with the very forces leading the assault against the workers.

The SEP rejects this pro-imperialist coalition and emphasises that the workers will obtain nothing from their struggle without a political break with these organizations. While the SEP conducted a campaign among workers for an active boycott of the second round of the presidential elections between Macron and Marine Le Pen, these forces refused to provide any clear slogan for workers, falling in line with the media campaign for a vote for Macron. Today, they are aligned with all of the manoeuvres of the unions.

The SEP orients itself toward the great masses of workers who are entering into struggle, in order to arm the working class with a socialist perspective opposed to the PS, Macron, and their satellites in the pseudo-left. It seeks to provide this emerging movement with a political strategy and to build a powerful socialist and anti-war movement that will take political power across Europe, and reorganize economic and social life in accordance with the needs of society, rather than the profits of the banks.Here is a look at North Korea's nuclear capabilities and the history of its weapons program.

1985 North Korea signs the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).

1993 The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) demands that inspectors be given access to two nuclear waste storage sites. In response, North Korea threatens to quit the NPT but eventually opts to continue participating in the treaty.

1994 North Korea and the United States sign an agreement. North Korea pledges to freeze and eventually dismantle its old, graphite-moderated nuclear reactors in exchange for international aid to build two new light-water nuclear reactors.

2002 January 29 - US President George W. Bush labels North Korea, Iran and Iraq an "axis of evil" in his State of the Union address. "By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger," he says.

October - The Bush Administration reveals that North Korea has admitted operating a secret nuclear weapons program in violation of the 1994 agreement.

2003 January 10 - North Korea withdraws from the NPT.

February - The United States confirms North Korea has reactivated a five-megawatt nuclear reactor at its Yongbyon facility, capable of producing plutonium for weapons.

April - Declares it has nuclear weapons.

2005 North Korea tentatively agrees to give up its entire nuclear program, including weapons. In exchange, the United States, China, Japan, Russia and South Korea say they will provide energy assistance to North Korea, as well as promote economic cooperation.

2006 July - After North Korea test fires long range missiles, the UN Security Council passes a resolution demanding that North Korea suspend the program.

October - North Korea claims to have successfully tested its first nuclear weapon. The test prompts the UN Security Council to impose a broad array of sanctions.

2007 February 13 - North Korea agrees to close its main nuclear reactor in exchange for an aid package worth $400 million.

September 30 - At six-party talks in Beijing, North Korea signs an agreement stating it will begin disabling its nuclear weapons facilities.

December 31 - North Korea misses the deadline to disable its weapons facilities.

2008 June 27 - North Korea destroys a water cooling tower at the Yongbyon nuclear facility.

December - Six-party talks are held in Beijing. The talks break down over North Korea's refusal to allow international inspectors unfettered access to suspected nuclear sites.

2009 May 25 - North Korea announces it has conducted its second nuclear test.

June 12 - The UN Security Council condemns the nuclear test and imposes new sanctions.

2010 November 20 - A Stanford University professor publishes a report that North Korea has a new nuclear enrichment facility.

2011 October 24-25 - US officials meet with a North Korean delegation in Geneva, Switzerland, in an effort to restart the six-party nuclear arms talks that broke down in 2008.

2012 February 29 - The State Department announces that North Korea has agreed to a moratorium on long-range missile launches and nuclear activity at the nation's major nuclear facility in exchange for food aid.

2013 January 24 - North Korea's National Defense Commission says it will continue nuclear testing and long-range rocket launches in defiance of the United States. The tests and launches will feed into an "upcoming all-out action" targeting the United States, "the sworn enemy of the Korean people," the commission says.

February 12 - Conducts third nuclear test. This is the first nuclear test carried out under Kim Jong Un. Three weeks later, the United Nations orders additional sanctions in protest.

2014 March 30-31 - North Korea warns that it is prepping another nuclear test. The following day, the hostility escalates when the country fires hundreds of shells across the sea border with South Korea. In response, South Korea fires about 300 shells into North Korean waters and sends fighter jets to the border.

2015 May 6 - In an exclusive interview with CNN, the deputy director of a North Korean think tank says the country has the missile capability to strike mainland United States and would do so if the United States "forced their hand."

May 20 - North Korea says that it has the ability to miniaturize nuclear weapons, a key step toward building nuclear missiles. A US National Security Council spokesman responds that the United States does not think the North Koreans have that capability.

December 12 - North Korea state media says the country has added the hydrogen bomb to its arsenal.

2016

January 6-7 - North Korea says it has successfully conducted a hydrogen bomb test. A day after the alleged test, White House spokesman Josh Earnest says that the United States has not verified that the test was successful.

March 9 - North Korea announces that it has miniature nuclear warheads that can fit on ballistic missiles.

September 9 - North Korea claims to have detonated a nuclear warhead. According to South Korea's Meteorological Administration, the blast is estimated to have the explosive power of 10 kilotons.

2017 January 1 - In a televised address, Kim claims that North Korea could soon test an intercontinental ballistic missile.

January 8 - During an interview on "Meet the Press," Defense Secretary Ash Carter says that the military will shoot down any North Korean missile fired at the United States or any of its allies.

January 12 - A US defense official tells CNN that the military has deployed sea-based radar equipment to track long-range missile launches by North Korea.

July 4 - North Korea claims it has conducted its first successful test of an intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM, that can "reach anywhere in the world."

July 25 - North Korea threatens a nuclear strike on "the heart of the US" if it attempts to remove Kim as Supreme Leader, according to Pyongyang's state-run Korean Central News Agency (KCNA).

August 7 - North Korea accuses the United States of "trying to drive the situation of the Korean peninsula to the brink of nuclear war" after the UN Security Council unanimously adopts new sanctions in response to Pyongyang's long-range ballistic missile tests last month.

August 9 - North Korea's military is "examining the operational plan" to strike areas around the US territory of Guam with medium-to-long-range strategic ballistic missiles, state-run news agency KCNA says. The North Korea comments are published one day after President Donald Trump warns Pyongyang that if it continues to threaten the United States, it would face "fire and fury like the world has never seen."

September 3 - North Korea carries out its sixth test of a nuclear weapon, causing a 6.3 magnitude seismic event, as measured by the United States Geological Survey. Pyongyang claims the device is a hydrogen bomb that could be mounted on an intercontinental missile. A nuclear weapons monitoring group describes the weapon as up to eight times stronger than the bomb dropped in Hiroshima in 1945. In response to the test, Trump tweets that North Korea continues to be "very hostile and dangerous to the United States." He goes on the criticize South Korea, claiming that the country is engaging in "talk of appeasement" with its neighbor to the north. He also says that North Korea is "an embarrassment to China," claiming Beijing is having little success reining in the Kim regime.

November 1 - A US official tells CNN that North Korea is working on an advanced version of its intercontinental ballistic missile that could potentially reach the United States.

November 28 - A South Korean minister says that North Korea may develop the capability to launch a nuclear weapon on a long-range ballistic missile at some point in 2018.

2018

January 2 - Trump ridicules Kim in a tweet. The president says that he has a larger and more functional nuclear button than the North Korean leader in a post on Twitter, responding to Kim's claim that he has a nuclear button on his desk.

January 10 - The White House releases a statement indicating that the Trump administration may be willing to hold talks with North Korea.

March 6 - South Korea's national security chief Chung Eui-yong says that North Korea has agreed to refrain from nuclear and missile testing while engaging in peace talks. North Korea has also expressed an openness to talk to the United States about abandoning its nuclear program, according to Chung.

March 8 - Chung, standing outside the White House, announces that Trump has accepted an invitation to meet Kim.Noah Christensen admits he could have used better language when he called his congressman's office and used the F-word to demand action on gun control.

After the call, a congressional aide notified the Nevada teen's school, which suspended him for two days.

Now Christensen, 17, is at the center of a debate about decorum and free speech. The ACLU is involved. And some people are seeking an apology from the congressman, who says that's not going to happen.

It began last Wednesday when the teen, a junior at Robert McQueen High School in Reno, joined students nationwide in walking out of class for 17 minutes to demand tougher gun laws. During the walkout, Christensen called the Reno office of his congressman, Rep. Mark Amodei, and argued for banning bump stocks and raising the minimum age to buy a gun.

He also told the staffer who answered the phone that members of Congress needed to "get off their f***ing asses" and take action.

His comments did not go over well. A staffer at Amodei's office called Christensen's school, which gave him a two-day suspension for "disrespectful behavior/language" and barred him from fulfilling his role as class secretary/treasurer.

Amodei said his office received several hundred calls from students during the walkout and that Christensen was the only caller to use profanity.

"Do I have a problem with this guy exercising his First Amendment rights? Absolutely not," Amodei said. But his congressional staffer also should be allowed to exercise his free-speech rights to report the student's language, he said.

ACLU: Discipline 'will have a chilling effect'

By Tuesday, when news of his suspension began to make headlines, Christensen was somewhat contrite.

"I totally understand that's not maybe the wording I should have used but it's still my right to use that word," he told KOLO, a CNN affiliate. "I personally thought that I had the political privacy to make a phone call to any representative and tell them how I feel."

His mother, Stacie Lerma, told KOLO she wasn't notified of the suspension until the next day but supports her son.

"I don't encourage my child to go and cuss at someone. However, I know how passionate he was, especially about this topic," she said. "And I myself believe that something needs to be done (about gun violence) and maybe somebody does need to get off their butt and do something."

The ACLU on Monday sent a letter to McQueen High School and the Washoe County School District, asking that Christensen's suspension be overturned in part because such discipline "will have a chilling effect on other students who are considering engaging in the political process."

Holly Welborn, policy director for the ACLU of Nevada, told KOLO the school also sent mixed messages by barring Christensen from his student council duties during his suspension but allowing him to compete with the debate team at a prestigious tournament in Las Vegas.

A spokeswoman for the school district declined comment to CNN.

ACLU of Nevada Executive Director Tod Story also sent a letter to Amodei, urging him to respect Christensen's First Amendment rights and reminding him why some Nevada students might feel strongly about gun control after last month's school shooting in Parkland, Florida, and the massacre last October at a music festival in Las Vegas.

"Regardless of your opinions of the March for Our Lives movement, student walkouts and gun control policies, it was inappropriate and unbecoming of your congressional office to seek to have this student punished," Story wrote.

"You owe this student a public apology for retaliating against him by enlisting the school to punish him on your behalf."

Amodei: 'We did not retaliate'

Amodei disagrees.

"I don't want him (Christensen) to apologize to my guy for dropping the F-bomb. So I'm certainly not going to apologize to him," he said. "What am I going to apologize for?"

Amodei said his office did not seek to have the student reprimanded but was merely relaying to the school what had occurred.

"We did not retaliate -- we reported what the guy did," he said. "We did not ask for discipline or anything like that."

Amodei, a Republican, has represented Nevada's 2nd Congressional District since 2012 and has supported gun rights in the past.

He said he did not learn of Christensen's phone call until Monday -- two days after he sent a newsletter to his constituents about gun safety in schools in the wake of the Parkland shooting.

In the newsletter, Amodei noted that the House just passed legislation authorizing $75 million a year to fund training, buy metal detectors and take other steps to improve school safety. He also suggested looking into such measures as boosting age restrictions for gun sales and banning devices, such as bump stocks, that turn legal guns into illegal automatic weapons.

"With all due respect (to Christensen), we've been off our butts ... and trying to get stuff moving," he said.Here's a look at Iran's nuclear capabilities.

Since 2003, worldwide concern over Iran's nuclear program has increased as Iran and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) spar over investigation and details of Iran's program. Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei has repeatedly denied Iran is building a bomb and says weapons of mass destruction are forbidden under Islam.

Timeline: 1957 - The United States signs a civil nuclear cooperation agreement with Iran.

1958 - Iran joins the International Atomic Energy Agency.

1967 - The Tehran Nuclear Research Center, which includes a small reactor supplied by the United States, opens.

1968 - Iran signs the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Mid-1970s - With US backing, Iran begins developing a nuclear power program.

1979 - Iran's Islamic revolution ends Western involvement in the country's nuclear program.

December 1984 - With the aid of China, Iran opens a nuclear research center in Isfahan.

February 23, 1998 - The United States announces concerns that Iran's nuclear energy program could lead to the development of nuclear weapons.

March 14, 2000 - US President Bill Clinton signs a law that allows sanctions against people and organizations that provide aid to Iran's nuclear program.

February 21, 2003 - IAEA Director General Mohamed ElBaradei visits Iran to survey its nuclear facilities and to encourage Iran to sign a protocol allowing IAEA inspectors greater and faster access to nuclear sites. Iran declines to sign the protocol. ElBaradei says he must accept Iran's statement that its nuclear program is for producing power and not weapons, despite claims of the United States to the contrary.

June 19, 2003 - The IAEA issues a report saying that Iran appeared to be in compliance with the Non-Proliferation Treaty, but that it needed to be more open about its activities.

August 2003 - The IAEA announces that its inspectors in Iran have found traces of highly enriched uranium at the Natanz uranium enrichment plant. Iran claims the amounts are contamination from equipment bought from other countries. Iran agrees to sign a protocol of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty that allows for unannounced visits to their nuclear facilities and signs it on December 18, 2003.

October 2003 - The Foreign Ministers of Britain, France and Germany visit Tehran, and all parties agree upon measures Iran will take to settle all outstanding issues with the IAEA. Under obligation to the IAEA, Iran releases a dossier on its nuclear activities. However, the report does not contain information on where Iran acquired components for centrifuges used to enrich uranium, a fact the IAEA considers important in determining whether the uranium is to be enriched for weapons.

November 2003 - Iran agrees to halt uranium enrichment as a confidence building measure and accepts IAEA verification of suspension.

December 2003 - Iran signs the Additional Protocol to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty with the IAEA voluntarily agreeing to broader inspections of its nuclear facilities.

February 2004 - A.Q. Khan, "father" of Pakistan's nuclear weapons program, admits to having provided Iran and other countries with uranium-enrichment equipment.

June 1, 2004 - The IAEA states they have found traces of uranium that exceed the amount used for general energy production. Iran admits that it is importing parts for advanced centrifuges that can be used to enrich uranium, but is using the parts to generate electricity.

July 31, 2004 - Iran states that it has resumed production on centrifuge parts used for enriching uranium, but not enrichment activities.

August 8, 2005 - Iran restarts uranium conversion, a step on the way to enrichment, at a nuclear facility, saying it is for peaceful purposes only, and flatly rejects a European offer aimed at ensuring the nation does not seek nuclear weapons.

August 9, 2005 - Iran removes the IAEA seals from its Isfahan nuclear processing facility, opening the uranium conversion plant for full operation. IAEA spokesman Mark Gwozdecky states that the plant "is fully monitored by the IAEA" and "is not a uranium enrichment plant."

September 11, 2005 - Iran's new foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, says the country won't suspend activities at its Isfahan uranium conversion facility and it plans to seek bids for the construction of two more nuclear plants.

January 10, 2006 - Iran resumes research at its Natanz uranium enrichment plant, arguing that doing so is within the terms of an agreement with the IAEA.

January 12, 2006 - Foreign ministers of the EU3 (Great Britain, France, Germany) recommend Iran's referral to the United Nations Security Council over its nuclear program.

January 13, 2006 - Iran's Foreign Minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, states that if Iran is referred, its government under law will be forced to stop some of its cooperation with the IAEA, including random inspections.

February 4, 2006 - President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad orders Iran to end its cooperation with the IAEA.

April 11, 2006 - Hashemi Rafsanjani, Iran's former president, states that Iran has increased the number of functioning centrifuges in its nuclear facilities in Natanz and has produced enriched uranium from them.

August 31, 2006 - The IAEA issues a report on Iran saying the Islamic republic "has not suspended its enrichment activities" despite this day's deadline to do so. Iran can possibly face economic sanctions.

December 23, 2006 - The UN Security Council votes unanimously to impose sanctions against Iran for failing to suspend its nuclear program.

February 22, 2007 - The IAEA issues a statement saying that Iran has not complied with UN Security Council for a freeze of all nuclear activity. Instead, Iran has expanded its uranium enrichment program.

March 24, 2007 - The UN adopts Resolution 1747 which toughens sanctions against Iran. The sanctions include the freezing of assets of 28 individuals and organizations involved in Iran's nuclear and missile programs. About a third of those are linked to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, an elite military corps.

May 23, 2007 - The IAEA delivers its latest report to the United Nations on Iran's nuclear activities. The report states that not only has Iran failed to end its uranium enrichment program but has in fact expanded their activity.

June 21, 2007 - Iran's Interior Minister Mostapha PourMohamedi claims, "Now we have 3,000 centrifuges and have in our warehouses 100 kilograms of enriched uranium." ..."We also have more than 150 tons of raw materials for producing uranium gas."

December 2007 - A US intelligence report finds that Iran abandoned a nuclear weapons program in 2003.

February 20, 2009 - The Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) reports that Iranian scientists have reached "nuclear weapons breakout capability." The report concludes Iran does not yet have a nuclear weapon but does have enough low-enriched uranium for a single nuclear weapon. An official at the IAEA cautions about drawing such conclusions. The IAEA says Iran's stock of low-enriched uranium would have to be turned into highly enriched uranium (HEU) to become weapons-grade material.

February 25, 2009 - Iran runs tests at its Bushehr nuclear power plant using "dummy" fuel rods, loaded with lead in place of enriched uranium to simulate nuclear fuel. A news release distributed to reporters at the scene states the test measured the "pressure, temperature and flow rate" of the facility to make sure they were at appropriate levels. Officials say the next test will use enriched uranium, but it's not clear when the test will be held or when the facility will be fully operational.

September 21, 2009 - In a letter to the IAEA, Iran reveals the existence of a second nuclear facility. It is located underground at a military base, near the city of Qom.

October 25, 2009 - IAEA inspectors make their first visit to Iran's newly disclosed nuclear facility near Qom.

February 18, 2010 - In a statement, the IAEA reports that it believes Iran may be working in secret to develop a nuclear warhead for a missile.

August 21, 2010 - Iran begins fueling its first nuclear energy plant, in the city of Bushehr.

December 5, 2010 - Ali Akbar Salehi, Iran's atomic chief and acting foreign minister, announces that Iran's nuclear program is self-sufficient and that Iran has begun producing yellowcake, an intermediate stage in processing uranium.

January 8, 2011 - Ali Akbar Salehi reports that Iran can now create its own nuclear fuel plates and rods.

September 4, 2011 - Iran announces that its Bushehr nuclear power plant joined the electric grid September 3, making it the first Middle Eastern country to produce commercial electricity from atomic reactors.

September 5, 2011 - In response to Iran's nuclear chief stating that Iran will give the IAEA "full supervision" of its nuclear program for five years if UN sanctions are lifted, the European Union says that Iran must first comply with international obligations.

November 8, 2011 - The IAEA releases a report saying that it has "serious concerns" and "credible" information that Iran may be developing nuclear weapons.

January 9, 2012 - The IAEA confirms that uranium enrichment has begun at the Fordo nuclear facility in the Qom province in northern Iran.

January 23, 2012 - The European Union announces it will ban the import of Iranian crude oil and petroleum products.

January 29, 2012 - A six-member delegation from the IAEA arrives in Tehran for a three-day visit, shortly after the EU imposes new sanctions aimed at cutting off funding to the nuclear program.

January 31, 2012 - In Senate testimony James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, says there's no evidence Iran is building a nuclear bomb. CIA director David Petraeus agrees.

February 15, 2012 - Iran loads the first domestically-produced nuclear fuel rods into the Tehran research reactor.

February 21, 2012 - After two days of talks in Iran about the country's nuclear program, the IAEA expresses disappointment that no progress was made and that their request to visit the Parchin military base was denied.

March 28, 2012 - Discussions regarding Iran's nuclear future stall.

April 14, 2012 - Talks resume between Iran and six world powers over Iranian nuclear ambitions in Istanbul, Turkey.

May 25, 2012 - An IAEA report finds that environmental samples taken at the Fordo fuel enrichment plant near the city of Qom have enrichment levels of up to 27%, higher than the previous level of 20%.

June 18-19, 2012 - A meeting is held between Iran and the P5+1 (United States, France, Russia, China, Great Britain and Germany) in Moscow. No agreement is reached.

June 28, 2012 - Saeed Jalili writes to European Union foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton warning world powers to avoid "unconstructive measures" such as the oil embargo that's about to go into effect and that was agreed upon by the EU in January.

July 1, 2012 - A full embargo of Iranian oil from the EU takes effect.

August 30, 2012 - A UN report finds that Iran has stepped up its production of high-grade enriched uranium and has re-landscaped Parchin, one of its military bases, in an apparent effort to hamper a UN inquiry into the country's nuclear program.

September 24, 2013 - At a speech at the UN General Assembly, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani says "Nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction have no place in Iran's security and defense doctrine, and contradict our fundamental religious and ethical convictions."

October 16, 2013 - The latest discussions between Iran and the six world powers center on a proposal put forth by Iran to recognize the peaceful nature of its nuclear energy pursuits. The meeting is described as "substantive and forward-looking."

November 24, 2013 - Six world powers and Iran reach an agreement over Iran's nuclear program. The deal calls on Iran to limit its nuclear activities in return for lighter sanctions.

January 12, 2014 - It is announced that Iran will begin eliminating some of its uranium stockpile on January 20.

January 20, 2014 - Iran's nuclear spokesman Behrouz Kamalvandi tells state-run news agency IRNA that Iran has started suspending high levels of uranium enrichment.

January 20, 2014 - The European Union announces that it has suspended certain sanctions against Iran for six months.

February 20, 2014 - Following talks in Vienna, EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton and Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif announce that a deal on the framework for comprehensive negotiations over Tehran's nuclear program has been reached.

November 24, 2014 - The deadline for a final nuclear agreement between Iran and the UN Security Council's P5+1 countries (the United States, Russia, China, France, Britain and Germany) has been set for July 1, 2015.

April 2, 2015 - Negotiators from Iran, the United States, China, Germany, France, Britain and Russia reach a framework for an agreement on Iran's nuclear capabilities, which includes reducing its stockpile of low-enriched uranium by 98%. The deadline for the complete agreement is July 1.

April 9, 2015 - Iranian President Rouhani announces that Iran will only sign a final nuclear agreement if economic sanctions are lifted on the first day of implementation.

July 14, 2015 - A deal is reached on Iran's nuclear program. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) reduces the number of Iranian centrifuges by two-thirds. It places bans on enrichment at key facilities, and limits uranium research and development to the Natanz facility.

July 20, 2015 - The UN Security Council endorses the nuclear deal.

January 16, 2016 - IAEA Director General Yukiya Amano says Iran has completed all the necessary steps agreed under the nuclear deal, and that all participants can begin implementing the JCPOA.

March 8-9, 2016 - Iran test-fires two Qadr ballistic missiles during a large-scale military drill, according to Iran's state-run Press TV. US officials say that the tests do not violate the nuclear agreement (JCPOA), but are very likely in breach of a UN resolution calling on Iran not to undertake ballistic missile activity.

January 29, 2017 - Iran launches a medium-range ballistic missile, its first missile test since Donald Trump became US president, but the test fails, according to information given to CNN by a US defense official. National Security Adviser Michael Flynn says the United States has put "Iran on notice."

February 3, 2017 - In reaction to the January 29 missile test, the US Treasury Department says it is applying sanctions on 25 individuals and companies connected to Iran's ballistic missile program and those providing support to Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps' Qods Force. National Security Adviser Michael Flynn says the tests were in defiance of a UN Security Council resolution that bars Iran from taking steps on a ballistic missile program capable of launching nuclear weapons.

September 20, 2017 - Iranian President Rouhani asserts that "It will be a great pity if this agreement were destroyed by rogue newcomers to the world of politics," in a clear reference to US President Trump's address to the UN General Assembly on September 19th, where he offered scathing criticism of both Iran and the 2015 international agreement.

October 13, 2017 - US President Trump decertifies Iran's compliance with the nuclear agreement -- declaring that the Obama-era pact was not in US interests and unveils a tough new policy toward the Islamic Republic. The move stops short of completely scrapping the agreement, instead kicking it to Congress, who then has 60 days to determine a path forward. Congress allows the 60-day deadline to pass without action.

January 12, 2018 - US President Trump agrees to waive key nuclear-related sanctions against Iran as part of the 2015 deal, but delivers a stark ultimatum to European allies: "Fix the deal's disastrous flaws, or the United States will withdraw." Trump couples his waiver announcement with new sanctions on 14 Iranian individuals and entities that have committed human rights abuses or supported the Iran's ballistic missile programs, which are outside the scope of the nuclear deal. The most prominent of the targets in the latest sanctions is Ayatollah Sadeq Amoli Larijani, the head of Iran's judicial system.Jared Kushner, tasked by his boss and father-in-law, President Donald Trump, with mediating Middle East peace early in the administration, has so far staked a bulk of those efforts on the ascendant Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman.

And according to a new report, the Saudi prince -- known casually by his initials, MBS -- took advantage of that power.

When Kushner, Trump's senior aide, made an unannounced trip to Riyadh last year, the Intercept -- citing three sources -- reported Wednesday, MBS told confidants after the meeting that Kushner had discussed Saudi leaders who are disloyal to the crown prince.

One person "who talks frequently to confidants of the Saudi and Emirati rulers" told the Intercept that MBS bragged to United Arab Emirates Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed that Kushner was "in his pocket."

The Intercept also reported that Kushner's information on Saudi royals not loyal to MBS was contained in the President's Daily Brief, a document presented to the President every morning. Kushner lost his access to the document earlier this year when new security clearance rules were instituted.

Eager to consolidate power and rein in the sprawling orbit of the Saudi royal family and aristocratic class, Prince bin Salman listened intently and a week later cracked down on corruption in the country by imprisoning more than 200 members of the country's ruling class inside the confines of the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Riyadh, charging each with corruption.

"What we did in Saudi Arabia was extremely necessary," the Saudi crown prince told CBS in his first interview with a Western outlet. "All actions taken were in accordance with existing and published laws."

A spokesman for Kushner declined to comment on the allegation. But a spokesman for Kushner's lawyer -- Peter Mirijanian -- slammed the report.

"Some questions by the media are so obviously false and ridiculous that they merit no response. This is one," he said.

The report comes a month after The Washington Post reported that officials from at least four countries -- Mexico, Israel, China and the United Arab Emirates -- have discussed ways they could use Kushner's intricate business arrangements, lack of experience and financial woes to manipulate the senior White House aide.

Mirijanian called the story nothing more than "unnamed sources peddling secondhand hearsay with rank speculation."

Kushner and MBS have fostered a close relationship for months, White House officials told CNN, and the top White House aide played a key role when the Saudi prince visited the White House this week.

Correctly viewing MBS as ascendant in the Muslim nation, Kushner worked for months earlier in the administration to build close ties with him. And when the prince's 82-year-old father, King Salman, handed over some power earlier this year, the two grew closer.

Kushner, in an effort to deepen that bond, took an unannounced trip to Saudi Arabia in October 2017 where he met directly with the crown prince.

The two also met on Tuesday night at Kushner's home, the Saudi Embassy said Wednesday.

Joined by top White House negotiator Jason Greenblatt, the embassy said "discussion focused on the shared interests of both countries for a peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and how best to achieve that."

MBS is in the middle of a goodwill tour across the United States. After visiting the White House and meeting with congressional leaders, he is slated to travel to Boston, New York, San Francisco and other American cities to meet with top representatives from the technology, business and education communities in the United States. The trip is part of MBS' campaign to sell the Western world on his view of his country's future.PARIS, Ill. (WTHI)  North American Lighting in Paris, Illinois is looking for five high school graduates to participate in the ICATT sponsored NAL Technical Apprenticeship program.

Company officials say the program will help students to kick-start their career without college debt.

One high school graduate who's currently in the program is Hudson Garrison. Garrison describes himself as an outdoor lover and a "tinker-er".

Garrison recalls, "I grew up in a machine shop. My mom and my step father actually own one. So Ive worked there since I was about 14. Then I got the offer to come check out the ICATT thing and I enjoy that very much."



Garrison hails from southern Illinois. After high school, he applied and got into the North American Lighting ICATT Technical Apprenticeship Program.

Garrison shares, "Ive learned about like all the different parts of the factory of your molding, your coatings, assembly and all that. I've learned how to run all the machines, how to work on them, Ive learned how all the assembly lines work."

With the program, Garrison works part-time at NAL and gains hands-on experience. He also gets college credit at no cost to him. After 5 years in the program he'll come out debt-free with his Associates Degree.

North American Lighting Corporate Trainer, Robert Woolum, says, "I think it's a great opportunity. There's a huge skills gap today. The individuals that went into manufacturing 30 years ago are getting ready to retire. So we need to make sure we have somebody in place to fill those positions going forward."

By later this year there will actually be 9 people total taking part in this apprenticeship. That is between the three NAL locations offering the program. If you take it from Hudson, he says it takes a lot of responsibility. So before you apply, make sure you're geared up for it!

Garrison says, "Going to school and working part time you have a lot to juggle you know? You have a lot of responsibility to keep up all your school work and keep a "B" average, it's pretty hard."

But in the end, Garrison says its definitely worth the payoff for his future.

The Paris NAL location will be partnering with Ivy Tech Community College for course work and credits. Officials say there is no location requirement for incoming students. This means, as long as they're willing to commute, they could reside in Marshall, Terre Haute, or beyond.

Officials say the program comes with no out of pocket cost to students that successfully complete the program. The apprenticeship is a 5-year program beginning in August 2018.

For more information, you can email Robert_Woolum@nal.com.

You can also apply by clicking here.TERRE HAUTE, Ind. (WTHI) - The hallways and labs of a college science building came alive Wednesday night.

The College of Arts and Sciences at Indiana State University hosted a Night at the Museum.

There was something for everyone at the special open house. Families took part in many different experiments. They explored color and light.

The goal was to help kids better understand the role science plays in their lives every day.

This marked the event's third year. Organizers told News 10 each year has grown and they're excited about the turnout.PARKE COUNTY, Ind. (WTHI) - Nearly six million people live with Alzheimers. It's a disease that currently has no cure.



Doctors are now recognizing this condition as a disability. For Marcia and Mark Cottom, they know why.

Mark is at risk for wandering away from his home. He lives with Alzheimer's. He was diagnosed in 2014.

The disease is progressing every day. His wife, Marcia says he asks the same questions multiple times a day.

He has to take the same route to their son's house down the road or he gets confused.

Marcia has even woke up in the middle of the night to her husband trying to leave the house.

It's a reality she never pictured when they said, I do" 36 years ago.

I try and share every minute I have with him. I can't see me without him... but I lose him a little bit every day, said Marcia.

Marcia says she's afraid her husband will forget where he is one day and get lost. There's a solution she's fighting for.

It's called Project Lifesaver. Several Indiana counties have the program, including Vigo and Knox counties.

It's a tracking device for children or adults who suffer from autism, Alzheimers or dementia. They wear a specific bracelet and can be tracked immediately by law enforcement.

It costs $5,000 for the county to launch to the program.

News 10 reached out to the Parke County Sheriffs Office. Sheriff Justin Cole says hes researching the program.US officials are taking a two-track approach to the Iran nuclear deal, negotiating with allies to make changes demanded by President Donald Trump even as they prepare to walk away from the international agreement.

Trump set a May 12 deadline -- the next date by which he has to waive sanctions against Iran or leave the deal -- for the US and its European allies to agree on changes to address what he sees as its flaws.

The President's thinking, officials say, is that if the US and Europe are united on amending the deal, the other signatories -- Russia and China -- will come along, and Iran will have no choice but to comply.

Critics argue that leaving the deal would damage relations with European allies, harm US national security interests -- in part by reducing the US' ability to monitor Iran's nuclear activities -- and send a clear message to North Korea that the US can't be trusted to honor nuclear agreements.

A 'terrible' deal

European allies say they will not consider changes to the agreement but the gulf between the allies and the US is vast. With the President himself dismissing the deal as "terrible," and the impending move of CIA Director Mike Pompeo, an Iran hawk, to the State Department, many officials in the US and Europe are bracing for Washington to abandon the agreement.

Against that backdrop, US officials leading the negotiations with European allies say that at the same time, they are readying contingency plans should Trump decide to pull the US out.

"We always have to prepare for any eventuality. We are engaged in contingency planning. .... We're kind of dual tracking this," said Brian Hook, the State Department's director of policy planning, who is leading talks with the Europeans.

The Treasury Department, meanwhile, is preparing for the possibility that it may have to "snap back" sanctions that were repealed by the Obama administration after the deal, formally known as the Joint Commission Plan of Action, was signed.

Hook met with European allies in Berlin last week to continue discussions before going to Vienna, Austria, on Friday for a regular meeting with all parties to the agreement.

Asked whether he was confident about reaching an agreement with the Europeans, Hook said Wednesday that, "we have had constructive talks with the Europeans ... but I can't predict if we will reach a deal or not."

"We have a goal in mind, and we will either reach agreement or we won't," Hook said. He admitted that Iran is "in technical compliance to their commitments" under the deal.

Hook declined to comment on how Pompeo's transfer would affect prospects for the Iran deal, but said he expected the former congressman from Kansas to make an easy transition. "A number of us are providing assistance to Secretary-designate Pompeo's confirmation process," Hook said. "He's got such a deep familiarity with so many of these issues that it will be a very easy transition."

Trump wants the Iran pact amended with a supplemental agreement that would end so-called "sunset clauses" -- provisions that wind down after a few years -- intensify the inspections of Iran's nuclear sites and add measures covering Iran's ballistic missile program.

Separately, Trump also wants allies to take more steps to address Tehran's presence in Lebanon, its backing for Hezbollah, cyberattacks and "maritime aggression," as well as the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which the US says is behind much of the Mideast's destabilization.

"I have outlined two possible paths forward: Either fix the deal's disastrous flaws, or the United States will withdraw," Trump said on January 12, the last time he waived sanctions. At the time, the President said he was waiving sanctions only to give Europeans time to come to an agreement with the US.

"This is a last chance," Trump said. "In the absence of such an agreement, the United States will not again waive sanctions in order to stay in the Iran nuclear deal. And if at any time I judge that such an agreement is not within reach, I will withdraw from the deal immediately."

Lawmakers say they think Trump will walk away. "I think the President likely will move away from it, unless my, our European counterparts really come together on a framework," Sen. Bob Corker, the Tennessee Republican who heads the Foreign Relations Committee, said March 18 on CBS' "Face The Nation." "And it doesn't feel to me that they are."

Indeed, European officials say that while they're happy to discuss measures to pressure Iran on its activities in the Mideast, they aren't willing to consider a supplemental to the nuclear deal. And Iran refuses to discuss reopening the negotiations, which took years to complete.

A source familiar with the US-European negotiations told CNN there has been "good progress" on missile and inspection issues, but a key sticking point remains the US demand to eliminate sunset clauses. The source said the White House doesn't believe that a withdrawal from the deal is inevitable, but is "increasingly likely."

'It will send a message'

Hook said Wednesday that in the context of nonproliferation agreements or treaties, it's "very common to add supplemental agreements," though he noted that the nuclear pact is not a treaty, but simply a political agreement.

"It's sui generis nonproliferation plan of action that's a political document," Hook said. "And this is an agreement that has many deficiencies. We think that these deficiencies are of such threats to national security that we can't allow the deal to remain in place without a supplemental agreement to address its deficiencies. And so that's our focus there."

Hook also sidestepped a question about whether leaving the Iran nuclear deal would send a message to North Korea that the US can't be trusted. "No one has negotiated in more bad faith than North Korea. They have a history of noncompliance," Hook said.

Military leaders have been clear about the strategic downsides of leaving the pact.

Asked about the message North Korea could draw if Trump abrogates the Iran deal, Gen. John Hyten, the commander of US Strategic Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday that, "any action the United States takes sends a message around the planet, so it will send a message to North Korea, it will send a message to Russia, China, our allies, Iran, Saudi Arabia, everybody is impacted."

Close US allies have been critical of the deal as it's structured. Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir said Tuesday that it's a "flawed agreement" and warned that because Iran is able to continue its nuclear research, there's a chance that when the deal expires, it will be able to enrich enough uranium for a bomb "within weeks."

That said, al-Jubeir told reporters in Washington this week that if the changes Trump is asking for can be made, Saudi Arabia would be able to support the deal.A Democratic congressional candidate in South Florida is releasing a new advertisement recounting the loss of her father to gun violence that will run during the March for Our Lives, a nationwide demonstration this weekend to demand an end to gun violence.

Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, whose father was shot and killed in Ecuador by an armed criminal, is seeking the Democratic nomination to challenge Republican Rep. Carlos Curbelo in one of the country's most competitive districts. The district sits just to the south of Parkland, Florida, where a shooter killed 17 students and faculty members at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on February 14. The shooting led a group of student survivors to call on Congress to pass stricter gun laws.

"October 18. To most it's just another day, but to me, it isn't. It's the day my father was shot and killed by a criminal with a gun. And because of that senseless act of violence, my family's life was never the same," Mucarsel-Powell says in the ad.

"In Congress, I won't rest until there's real change that keeps our families, our neighborhoods, and our schools safe. I owe that to everyone who has lost someone to gun violence," she adds.

The ad puts gun control front and center as an issue in a district Democrats view as a potential pick up in November. Mucarsel-Powell has previously criticized Curbelo for what she has characterized as talking tough on guns in the district but voting another way in Washington. Curbelo has said that he supports strengthening the background check system but also supports the Second Amendment.

CNN has rated the race a toss-up.

The $12,000 combined TV and digital ad buy will air over three days on cable networks leading up to the March for Our Lives and on Saturday, the day of the march. The march is being led by a group of students who survived the shooting in Parkland.

In a phone interview with CNN, Mucarsel-Powell said she has been inspired by the student organizers.

"As I've been watching these students, Emma Gonzalez and David Hogg and others, speaking up, organizing, marching, I also decided that it's not right to let these kids do all of this on their own," Mucarsel-Powell told CNN. "I don't think that their voices will go away. I am completely committed to walking with them, speaking with them and standing alongside with them."

You can view the ad here:TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WTXL) - Florida Department of Law Enforcement held a public information session on Wednesday.

The session is apart of their accreditation inspection.

According to officials, FDLE must comply with 484-standards to maintain its status.

They say, the process provides confidence for management and the public and allows the department to continue maintaining high standards.

"The citizens of Florida they expect law enforcement officers to recognize accreditation and how important it is to the law enforcement agency," said Major David Munday, Enforcement Accreditation Team Leader. "Your universities are accredited, your medical facilities are accreditation, and law enforcement is no different its just a good solid business model."

Once the assessors complete their review, they report back to the full Commission, which determines accreditation for a three year period.TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WTXL) - Tallahassee City Commissioners met Wednesday night with many items on their agenda, one of which is a historic property near Cascades Park that will soon be sold.

The Tallahassee City Commission just agreed to sell The Old City Waterworks property for $400,000 to North American Properties.

This property sits on the corner of Gadsden and Gaines streets, across the street from Cascades Park and the Cascades Project.

Three of the buildings on Waterworks site are listed as historic properties on the National and Local Historic Register.

The design team will be preserving these buildings while renovation and construction are underway.

"Its a very historic building. We know it has to remain, but the interior is very beautiful. It would make a great restaurant, dining establishment, bar, restaurant," said Shawn Macintyre, NAP Florida Managing Partner. "Its right at the entrance of our development. If its going to be sold, we wanted to bid on it."

Now that the commission has agreed on the sale, North American Properties hopes to begin work on the Waterworks property by this summer.

Completion of all of the development near Cascades Park is expected by winter of 2020TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WTXL) - The Second Harvest of the Big Bend is receiving some much needed money added to its fiscal year budget.

One million in state funding for Second Harvest, is included in the 2018-2019 budget following requests by Sen. Montford and Rep. Ausley.

The money will go to help the food bank's efforts to increase its emergency food for Distribution Capacity and Resiliency.

Second Harvest of the Big Bend plays a pivotal role in Florida's distribution of emergency food and water before and after disasters.

"It will go along way to increase the state wide resiliency of our distribution of emergency food and water," said Rick Minor, CEO of Second Harvest. "Second Harvest of the Big Bend is one of the main hubs that distributes disaster water and food to storm effected areas."TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WTXL) - The leader of a hate group in Tallahassee was in court Thursday morning after he was arrested at his mother's house following an FBI search.

Jordan Jereb, the self-proclaimed leader of a the Republic of Florida, appeared before a Leon County judge from a jail camera. He's charged with violating his probation from a 2016 extortion case.

Authorities say they found tactical knifes and weapons during Wednesday's raid of his mother's home in a Piney Z neighborhood. Since Jereb is on probation, authorities say he violated his conditions by having weapons.

His court appearance has been postponed until Friday, so Jereb's attorney, who is listed as Nathan Prince on paperwork, will be present. That's also the lawyer representing accused quadruple murderer Henry Segura.

So far, the FBI hasn't shared any more information about this investigation.

Overnight, WTXL confirmed Jereb's arrest comes as a 2016 case involving him making threatening statements to an employee in Governor Rick Scott's office has been reopened.

Just last month, Jereb took back a claim that Parkland school shooter Nikolas Cruz was a member of the Republic of Florida.

His group calls for Florida to be a white ethno-state and to use armed force if necessary.TALLAHASSEE, Fla. (WTXL) -- Wednesday was national Kick Butts Day. It's a national campaign to keep kids from smoking, and help them fight against Big Tobacco.

Smoking is one of the leading causes of preventable deaths in the U.S., and many consider cigarettes to be a gateway to using harder drugs.

According to kickbuttsday.org, 1.6 million U.S. high school students are current smokers.

"In terms of young people smoking, kicking the habit keeps them from having lung disease later in life," said Antwan Brooks, Capital Regional Medical Centers Director of Respiratory and Neurodiagnostics. "So it's very important for young people to not start smoking and, if they are, to get into a smoking cessation program."

Students at Florida A&M University will observe Kick Butts Day Thursday on the Quad, and the Somerset Student Government SWAT Club will host a field day in Monticello on Friday.THOMASVILLE, Ga. (WALB) - It's Georgia Small Business Week and folks in Thomasville are celebrating one of their own small businesses this week.

Southlife Supply Company in downtown Thomasville has been named one of Georgia's newest Small Business Rock Stars.

The owners of the shop received the award in Atlanta on Monday.

This is the 2nd year in a row that Thomasville has been represented on a state level for the award.

Shop owner, Heather Abbott, says they're proud at how far their dream has come in just two years of being open.

"It's amazing, it speaks to Thomasville, speaks to Thomas County. It speaks to the business environment that is here, the collaboration that is here," said Abbott. "We're all so different in what we do downtown, we're very blessed to have a very mixed basket of businesses, a lot of specialty type businesses."

175 businesses across the state were nominated for the award.

Other nominees from Thomasville include Farmer's Daughter Vineyards, Fuzzy Goat, and Liam's Restaurant".Source: Xinhua| 2018-03-21 22:02:00|Editor: Zhou Xin

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Francis Gurry, director general of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), attends a press conference in Geneva, Switzerland, March 21, 2018. China moved into second position as an international patent application source filed via the World Intellectual Property Organization in 2017, while two Chinese companies were the top filers, WIPO said Wednesday. (Xinhua/Xu Jinquan)

GENEVA, March 21 (Xinhua) -- China moved into second position as an international patent application source filed via the World Intellectual Property Organization in 2017, while two Chinese companies were the top filers, WIPO said Wednesday.

In doing so, China closed in on the long-time leader the United States in another record year in the use of property services for patents, trademarks and industrial designs, WIPO revealed at a UN media conference here.

Two Shenzhen-based Chinese telecoms companies were the top filers of international patent applications in 2017, with Huawei at first place and ZTE at second.

They were followed by Intel, Mitsubishi and Qualcomm, WIPO said.

CREATED IN CHINA

"This rapid rise in Chinese use of the international patent system shows that innovators there are increasingly looking outward, seeking to spread their original ideas into new markets as the Chinese economy continues its rapid transformation," WIPO director general Francis Gurry told journalists.

"This is part of a larger shift in the geography of innovation, with half of all international patent applications now originating in East Asia."

Huawei reclaimed its lead over ZTE, the latter seeing a substantial drop in the number of published PCT filings in 2017.

They were followed by Intel Corporation of the U.S. (2,637), Mitsubishi Electric Corporation of Japan (2,521) and Qualcomm Incorporated of the U.S. (2,163).

The top 10 applicant list comprises seven companies from Asia, two from the United States, and one from Europe.

"China is going from 'Made in China' to 'Created in China,'" said Gurry.

STRONG GROWTH

The WIPO chief said Japan posted strong growth in 2017 but was nosed out of the second position by China, which at current trends is projected to overtake the United States within three years as the largest source of applications filed under WIPO's Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT).

The WIPO chief noted, "Most attention is focused on the Patent Cooperation Treaty because it is technology, and it is a very good indicator of the relative strengths in the field of technology of the various countries of the world and what is happening in those areas."

He said this is a system that has helped to spread innovation worldwide since it began operations 40 years ago.

In 2017, U.S.-based applicants filed 56,624 PCT applications, followed by applicants from China (48,882) and Japan (48,208).

Germany and the Republic of Korea ranked fourth and fifth, with 18,982 and 15,763 applications, respectively.

Gurry said China and India are the only two middle-income countries among the top 15 origins for PCT applications.

Almost half of all PCT applications filed in 2017 came from Asia (49.1 percent), with Europe (24.9 percent) and North America (24.2 percent) accounting for almost a quarter each.

Among the top 15 origins, China is the only country to have recorded double-digit annual growth of 13.4 percent.

WIPO said China has now posted growth higher than 10 percent every year since 2003.Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu speaks during a press conference on March 14, 2018. (Reuters Photo)

ANKARA, March 21 (Xinhua) -- Turkey and the U.S. haven't reached an agreement but an understanding on Syria's Manbij, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said Wednesday.

"If we reach consensus about roadmap with the U.S., then we can say we have an agreement. Right now, there is an understanding," Cavusoglu said during a news conference in Ankara.

The agreed model in Syria's Manbij will be applied to all areas controlled by the People's Protection Units (YPG), Cavusoglu was quoted by Daily Sabah as saying.

"It will not be enough for the YPG to retreat from Manbij, There will be other cities after Manbij," he added, referring to Turkey's possible operation in the region in near future.

Turkey and the U.S. agreed to build a mechanism to normalize strained ties during Secretary of State Rex Tillerson's last visit to Ankara on Feb. 16.

Ankara has repeated that withdrawal of PKK-linked YPG from Manbij is the precondition for Turkey's cooperation with U.S. based on trust in Syria.

Ibrahim Kalin, Presidential Spokesperson, said Monday two NATO allies will avoid a possible conflict in the region if the withdrawal of the U.S.-backed YPG forces in Manbij is completed.

Washington has voiced concerns about the safety of U.S. troops in Manbij where they are currently stationed amid Turkey's ongoing military operation against the YPG militants.Source: Xinhua| 2018-03-22 01:32:49|Editor: Shi Yinglun

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The dome of the Capitol is covered with snow in Washington D.C., the United States, on March 21, 2018. A late-season nor'easter, the fourth of its kind in three weeks, is targeting the northeast United States on Wednesday, bringing heavy snow and strong winds to the region. Washington, which is already snow-covered, is expected to see up to 6 inches of snow, as some models suggesting much high totals for the capital. Federal offices are closed for the snowstorm as the White House announced early Wednesday that all public events for the day were cancelled. (Xinhua/Ting Shen)

WASHINGTON, March 21 (Xinhua) -- A late-season nor'easter, the fourth of its kind in three weeks, is targeting the northeast United States on Wednesday, bringing heavy snow and strong winds to the region.

From the southern Appalachians to Boston, over 70 million people are under a winter storm watch, warning or advisory, forecasters said.

Washington, which is already snow-covered, is expected to see up to 6 inches of snow, as some models suggesting much high totals for the capital.

Federal offices are closed for the snowstorm as the White House announced early Wednesday that all public events for the day were cancelled.

Snow started Wednesday morning in New York City, with ten inches to more than a foot forecast before the storm departs early Thursday, while Boston could see 4 to 7 inches of snow.

Areas along the Interstate 95 corridor were bracing for moderate to heavy snow from northern Maryland to southern New Jersey.

With a forecast of heavy snow and wind gusts blowing up to 45 mph, blizzard conditions are possible.

New York City could see sustained winds of 20 to 30 mph Wednesday, and coastal areas such as Cape Cod in Massachusetts are predicted to receive gusts up to 60 mph through Wednesday to Thursday.

Along the coast from Virginia to Massachusetts, flooding is also a threat. Some of the worst coastal flooding could be seen along the Jersey Shore, with high tides 2 to 3 feet above normal possible.

Public schools in New York City, Philadelphia and the District of Columbia are also closed.

Some 4,000 flights are canceled across the country on Wednesday, according to the flight-tracking site FlightAware.

On the ground, Amtrak canceled Wednesday's Acela express service from Washington through New York to Boston and some states banned certain types of trucks from major highways.

"Travel will be very difficult to impossible, especially during the evening commute" on Wednesday in cities like New York, Philadelphia and New Haven, where snow accumulations of more than a foot were predicted, the National Weather Service said.

Regional utilities reported only a few thousands without power across the sprawling northeastern region Tuesday night. But widespread power outages are possible as the storm intensifies.

The new system extends a streak of late-season nor'easter that have hammered the East Coast this month.

The first nor'easter of the month, on March 2, halted flights and created chaos for commuters, followed by a second nor'easter, on March 7, that left thousands of users without power and up to 2 feet of snow on the ground.

The third, on March 12, bashed parts of the Northeast and New England.TIRANA, March 21 (Xinhua) -- A protest by miners in front of the prime minister's office Wednesday to have their miner's status recognized by the state ended with an agreed upon meeting with Prime Minister Edi Rama within the week.

The protest was held amid tensions and clashes between miners and police forces after the miners attempted to enter the prime minister' premises.

The head of Miners' Union, Fiqiri Xibi, told reporters that the miners were obliged to protest as the only way to make sure their request would be heard, after many years of their rights and needs being disregarded.

"We are simply demanding our rights to be respected and guaranteed. For many years, we have been requesting the government to approve the miner's status, but the work to implement such project has been suspended," Xibi told reporters.

Miners have requested their minimal pension to be not less than 175 percent of the minimal wage. They have also requested a lower age of retirement, and have submitted requests related to their medical treatment, safety at work, and accident insurance.

On Feb. 2, a draft law on miner's status was voted down in the plenary session. The majority turned down the draft law proposed by the Socialist Movement for Integration lawmaker Perparim Spahiu, claiming the draft law was against the country's Constitution and did not take cost into consideration.

However, the government said a new draft law on the miner's status was being drafted in cooperation with the ministry of energy and infrastructure.Source: Xinhua| 2018-03-22 03:03:12|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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UNITED NATIONS, March 21 (Xinhua) -- UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on Wednesday condemned a suicide attack in the Afghan capital of Kabul during the Persian New Year celebrations near a shrine, said his spokesman.

The Persian New Year, or Nowruz, is a time of renewal and celebration, and should be a time for promoting the values of peace and solidarity, said Stephane Dujarric, Guterres' spokesman.

Those who have organized this attack must be brought to justice, he said.

The secretary-general extended his condolences to the families of the victims and wished a speedy recovery to those injured. He expressed his solidarity with the government and people of Afghanistan, said Dujarric.

A suicide bomber detonated explosives near a major shrine in Kabul on Wednesday, killing at least 29 people and injuring dozens.Source: Xinhua| 2018-03-22 03:58:30|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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UNITED NATIONS, March 21 (Xinhua) -- The top UN envoy in Libya on Wednesday stressed the importance of strengthening Libya's institutions through elections.

"To lead the people, to unify the people and to take difficult decisions for the good of the people, the government must come from the people. This means elections," Ghassan Salame, the special representative of the UN secretary-general in Libya, told the Security Council.

"For the United Nations, working for the conduct of fair, free, credible elections before the end of this year is at the top of our priorities," he said via video teleconference from Tripoli.

However, he stressed that it is vital to make sure that the elections are inclusive and that their results will be accepted.

Voter registration, which ended on March 12, made great progress, he said. With one million new registrants, now 2.5 million Libyans are eligible to vote. The voter registration update saw strong participation of women and youth, he said.

While there is reason for optimism in the political process, said the special representative, there is cause for concern, particularly the prevalence of violence.

Extremists, including the Islamic State and Al Qaida, continue to maintain a presence in Libya and have conducted attacks recently, he said. Armed groups, including those integrated into the state structure, continue to operate outside of the law, perpetrating human rights abuses.

Salame, who is also the head of the UN Support Mission in Libya, emphasized the importance of disarmament in the country. "Too many young men earn a living by carrying weapons, and they should be reintegrated into civilian life."

He said he would unveil a disarmament strategy by May. "However, we must be realistic. In a country awash with arms, disarmament will require time and much, much stronger national institutions," he warned.

He asked the Security Council to "exert its utmost influence" to stem the ongoing inflow of new arms into Libya.

At the heart of Libya's problems is an economic system of predation, he said. "It degrades the life of the ordinary Libyans and serves the interests of the powerful."

This system must be shattered. Resources must flow into building a strong equitable state for all, and not into the pockets of the few, said Salame.

Human trafficking is but one of the elements of this perverted economy, he said. This trade has become the main source of income for some people, leaving them numb to the sight of humans being traded as commodities or migrants being left to die as they fall off their packed pick-up trucks.

Libya is a destination, a transit country and a source of migration. The issue must be addressed strategically and across borders, he said.

He warned that there are signs of a looming monetary and fiscal crisis.

Oil revenues, though high now, are vulnerable to underinvestment or sabotage. Financial institutions are divided. Government expenditure is bloated and continues to increase. But more spending does not lead to better services. Rather, it is feared that it only benefits individual interest groups, he said.

After the 2011 revolution that overthrew longtime ruler Muammar Gaddafi, Libya plunged into a new civil war pitting different military factions as well as militias and small armed groups. The country remains to be reunified.Source: Xinhua| 2018-03-22 03:58:32|Editor: Liangyu

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Wang Yilin (L), Chairman of China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), and Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, CEO of Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC), sign deals for China's national oil company to acquire stakes in two UAE offshore concessions in Abu Dhabi, the United Arab Emirates, on March 21, 2018. The United Arab Emirates (UAE) and China on Wednesday signed two deals for China's national oil company to acquire stakes in two UAE offshore concessions, in a bid to enhance bilateral economic cooperation. (Xinhua/ADNOC)

DUBAI, March 21 (Xinhua) -- The United Arab Emirates (UAE) and China on Wednesday signed two deals for China's national oil company to acquire stakes in two UAE offshore concessions, in a bid to enhance bilateral economic cooperation.

The deals were signed by Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, CEO OF Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC), and Wang Yilin, chairman of China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), the UAE state news agency WAM reported.

Under the deals, which have a term of 40 years, the CNPC , through its majority-owned listed subsidiary PetroChina, acquires stakes in two Abu Dhabi's offshore concession areas.

PetroChina is granted a 10 percent stake in the Umm Shaif and Nasr concession, and a 10 percent stake in the Lower Zakum concession.

PetroChina paid 2.1 billion dirhams (575 million U.S. dollars) to enter the Umm Shaif and Nasr concession, and 2.2 billion dirhams to enter the Lower Zakum concession.

Both concessions will be operated by ADNOC Offshore on behalf of all concession partners.

Al Jaber said ADNOC's collaboration with the CNPC, China's largest oil and gas producer and supplier, will further deepen the strategic and economic relationship between the UAE and China.

Wang said the agreements will strengthen the CNPC's "growing relationship with ADNOC, and will help to meet China's rising demand for energy and contribute to asset portfolio optimization and profitability enhancement of PetroChina."

Through PetroChina, the CNPC produces 52 percent of China's crude oil and 71 percent of its natural gas.

In 2016, crude oil output from PetroChina's domestic operation was 763.8 million barrels, while domestic marketable natural gas output was 3,008.3 billion cubic feet, the company said on its official website.

In February 2017, the CNPC was awarded an 8 percent interest in Abu Dhabi's onshore concession, operated by ADNOC Onshore. It also has acquired a 40 percent stake in the Al Yasat concession.

Al Jaber added that "energy cooperation is an increasingly important aspect of the UAE's relations with China, the No. 1 oil importer globally and a major growth market for our products and petrochemicals."

The Umm Shaif field's Arab reservoir is characterized by a huge gas cap, one of the largest in the region, with rich reserves in condensates.

The gas cap overlays an oil rim, which in combination with Nasr field has a crude oil production capacity of 460,000 barrels per day.

The ADNOC plans to process 500 million standard cubic feet of gas per day from Umm Shaif's gas cap to help meet Abu Dhabi's growing domestic demand for energy.

Abu Dhabi harbors 90 percent of the oil reserves in the UAE, which accounts for 7 percent of the world's known oil reserves, the WAM reported.Source: Xinhua| 2018-03-22 04:38:39|Editor: Zhou Xin

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The "City of Culture" is seen in Tunis, Tunisia, March 21, 2018. Tunisia's largest national cultural project "City of Culture" opened to public on Wednesday, in celebration of the 62nd Anniversary of its Independence. Located in the heart of capital city Tunis, the City of Culture is over 9 hectares, including 50,000 square meters of covered space. (Xinhua/Adele Ezzine)

TUNIS, March 21 (Xinhua) -- The largest national cultural project "City of Culture" opened to public on Wednesday, in celebration of the 62nd Anniversary of its Independence.

Tunisian Minister of Culture Mohamed Zine Elabidine said "City of Culture is a space inviting us to reflect on a new cultural landscape, offering the opportunity for all intellectuals to participate in the enrichment of the national cultural heritage with masterpieces and transcendental."

Mohamed delivered this speech Wednesday at a press conference at the City of Culture.

"Ranked among the largest cultural hubs in the North African region, the City of Culture is a pride for all Tunisians, especially as this monument, unique in its kind, will pay tribute to the Tunisian nation," he said.

After interruptions on many occasions since 2006, this project resumed in 2016, which cost Tunisian government 150 million dinars, about 62.6 million U.S. dollars.

Located in the in the heart of capital city Tunis, the City of Culture is over 9 hectares, including 50,000 square meters of covered space.

It has an opera theater with a capacity of 1,800 people. It also includes the "House of Artists" as well as a national museum of modern and contemporary art, and a film library.ABUJA, March 21 (Xinhua) -- The Nigerian government said on Wednesday it has not signed the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) agreement because it is still reviewing the proposal.

The AfCFTA agreement is aimed at creating a single continental market for goods and services with free movement of businesses and investments.

A committee set up to continue with the review of the content of the proposal for the continental free trade agreement will come up with its findings within two weeks, the government said.

Some 44 African countries on Wednesday signed the agreement establishing the AfCFTA in Kigali, the capital city of Rwanda.

The signing took place during the 10th Extraordinary Session of the Assembly of the African Union (AU) on the AfCFTA. According to the AU, 19 African heads of state and government attended the summit.

Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari did not attend the summit in Kigali.

Presidential spokesman Femi Adesina said Buhari would not want to agree to anything that would hinder local entrepreneurs "as on the surface the agreement had the capacity to do so."

Adesina said the Nigerian leader was of the view that the agreement could encourage the dumping of finished goods in Nigeria and contrary to the country's interest.

Nigeria is the most populous country in Africa and the continent's largest economy.

"The country had yet to understand the full economic and security implications of the agreement and that is why more consultations with stakeholders are necessary," the presidential spokesman added.

African bloc AU said the AfCFTA will make Africa the largest free trade area created in terms of the number of participating countries since the formation of the World Trade Organization. The AfCFTA could create an African market of over 1.2 billion people with a GDP of 2.5 trillion U.S. dollars, the pan-African bloc said.

The AfCFTA will progressively eliminate tariffs on intra-African trade, making it easier for African businesses to trade within the continent and cater to and benefit from the growing African market, said the AU.

The decision to form the AfCFTA was adopted in January 2012 during the 18th Ordinary Session of the Assembly of Heads of State and Government of the AU while AfCFTA negotiations were launched by the AU in 2015.THE HAGUE, March 21 (Xinhua) -- The green left party GroenLinks and the local parties are the major winners of the Dutch municipal council elections, the first results and exit polls show on Wednesday.

One year after the national elections the Dutch electorate went back to the polling stations again to cast their vote in the municipal council elections.

In the Netherlands, elections to the municipal councils take place once every four years. This time the elections took place in 335 of the 380 municipalities, 45 did not take part in due to municipal changes or mergers.

The green lefties GroenLinks became the biggest winners of the national elections last year with a rise of 10 seats from 4 to 14 seats in the lower house of parliament and they performed well again municipal council elections. The local parties also booked major wins.

According to an exit poll by national broadcaster NOS GroenLinks became the biggest party in the capital Amsterdam, moving from 6 to 11 of the 45 seats in the council, compared to the municipal council elections four years ago.

In Utrecht GroenLinks also became the biggest party, rising from 9 to 12 of the 45 seats. "That we were able to extend the fantastic victory of last year is unique," GroenLinks leader Jesse Klaver said during a party meeting in Amsterdam.

In both cities the leftist democrats D66 finished second, but suffered big losses, just like traditional big parties PvdA (Labor) and SP (Socialist Party). These losses of these three parties in Amsterdam and Utrecht could also be seen in municipalities in the rest of the country. Government parties VVD (rightist liberals) and CDA (Christian Democrats), which form a government with D66 and small Christian party ChristenUnie, stabilized more or less.

"It seems that we will become the biggest party in the municipal council elections for the first time in our party history," Prime Minister Mark Rutte, VVD leader, said in his speech at a party meeting. "Let's be happy with these preliminary results."

In Rotterdam local party Leefbaar Rotterdam maintained its position as biggest party with a total of 11 seats according to the exit poll, but lost three seats compared to four years ago.

The right wing populist anti-Islam Party for Freedom PVV joined the municipal council elections for the first time in several cities and got 2 seats in Rotterdam and Utrecht, according to the exit poll. In Amsterdam the right-wing Forum voor Democratie got 2 seats.

Migrant party Denk also joined the municipal council elections for the first time and entered with 4 seats in Rotterdam, 3 in Utrecht and 3 in Amsterdam. All definite results of the major cities are expected on Thursday.UNITED NATIONS, March 21 (Xinhua) -- Condemning Wednesday's terrorist attack in Afghan Kabul during celebrations of Nowruz, the Persian New Year, the United Nations (UN) Security Council urged that the attackers and planners be punished.

In a statement, the Security Council underlined the need to hold the perpetrators, organizers, financiers and sponsors of acts of terrorism accountable and bring them to justice,and urged all states to cooperate with the Afghan government as well as all other relevant authorities.

Calling terrorism in all its forms and manifestations one of the most serious threats to international peace and security, the council said all states needed to combat threats to international peace and security caused by terrorist acts by all means.

UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres also called for the people behind the act to be brought to justice, saying Nowruz, a time of renewal and celebration, should be a time for promoting peace and solidarity.

A suicide bomber struck near a major shrine in Kabul on Wednesday, killing at least 33 people and injuring 65 others.

The Islamic State claimed responsibility for the attack.Rescuers prepare a speedboat for rescuing the missing crew members of a capsized sand mining vessel, in Parit Jawa in southern Malaysian state of Johor, on March 21, 2018. (Xinhua/Chong Voon Chung)

MUAR, Malaysia, March 21 (Xinhua) -- Malaysia launched search and rescue operations after a sand dredging vessel capsized Wednesday in the waters off Malaysia in the Malacca Strait, leaving at least one dead and 14 crew members missing.

There were 18 crew members on the vessel, including one Malaysian, one Indonesian and 16 Chinese citizens, according to Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency (MMEA), the country's coast guard.

Three have been rescued, one was found dead and 14 remained missing.

The Chinese embassy in Malaysia confirmed to Xinhua that among the 16 Chinese crew members, one was dead and 12 remained missing. The three rescued are in good condition.

Zulkifili Abu Bakar, chief of MMEA, said the search and rescue is ongoing with assets from his agency as well as the Malaysian marine police.

"Now we got five assets at the sea, three from MMEA and two from marine police," said Sanifah Bin Yusof, Deputy Director of MMEA's Southern region.

Sanifah said at least some of the missings could be trapping inside the ship.

"We checked the ship and got good communication when we knocked the body of the ship, got some reply from the inside," he told Xinhua at the operation center, "We are trying to save their lives with diving operation."

Ahmad Kamarulzaman Ahmad Badaruddin, chief of the Malaysian Navy, told Xinhua that a navy vessel has been dispatched with a diving team to join the search and rescue operations.

The Chinese embassy said the Chinese Marine Search and Rescue Center had also sent divers and experts to assist the search and rescue.The Dominican-registered vessel, JBB RONG CHANG 8, capsized 8.5 nautical miles off Parit Jawa in southern Malaysian state of Johor. MMEA said it received a distress call at around 8:50 a.m. local time Wednesday and launched a search-and-rescue mission afterwards.Source: Xinhua| 2018-03-22 09:59:28|Editor: Jiaxin

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LIMA, March 21 (Xinhua) -- Peruvian President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski submitted his letter of resignation to lawmakers on Wednesday, a day ahead of a scheduled vote on whether or not to impeach him.

In a nationally televised address, Kuczynski said he was unable to govern effectively due to the persistent allegations of corruption that have dogged him since his first months in office.

"Faced with this difficult situation that unfairly makes me appear guilty of actions in which I did not take part, I think it is best for the country that I resign as president of the republic," said Kuczynski.

"I do not want to be an obstacle to the unity and harmony the nation needs so badly," he said, adding his resignation ensures "an orderly constitutional transition."

His resignation follows widely circulated videos of the president's political allies appearing to be buying the votes of lawmakers in the lead-up to Thursday's congressional impeachment hearing.

The businessman-turned-politician took office in July 2016, but was soon engulfed by accusations that he profited from a multinational bribery scheme operated by Brazilian construction giant Odebrecht to win lucrative government public work contracts back in the early 2000s.

The Congress first held an impeachment vote in December 2017, but the opposition-backed initiative failed to garner sufficient votes.

The initiative alleged that Kuczynski's Miami, Florida-based company Westfield Capital provided consulting services to Odebrecht while he was minister of economy and finance, and chief of staff, during the administration of ex-president Alejandro Toledo.

Peru has requested Toledo's extradition so he can stand trial for allegedly accepting millions in bribes from Odebrecht.

Peru's judicial branch called for "reciprocity" from the United States on Wednesday when requesting the extradition of Toledo, according to the state news agency Andina.

"I think we must ask U.S. authorities for reciprocity, because when they send us an extradition order, especially for drug trafficking, we don't take more than three months," said Duberli Rofriguez, president of the judiciary.YANGON, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Myanmar's parliamentary House of Representatives (Lower House) will elect a new speaker Thursday to fill the post left vacant by U Win Myint, who announced resignation from the position on Wednesday, according to parliament sources.

If necessary, a deputy speaker of the House will also be elected, the sources said.

The re-election of a new speaker of the House of Representatives is set to be followed by the re-election of a new President in the Union Parliament in a week after President U Htin Kyaw announced resignation on Wednesday.

U Htin Kyaw, 72, resigned out of his own wish for health reasons.

Meanwhile, in line with the constitution, First Vice President U Myint Swe will serve as the acting president until the parliament re-elects the president, according to U Zaw Htay, director-general of the President's Office.Source: Xinhua| 2018-03-22 10:19:33|Editor: Jiaxin

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UNITED NATIONS, March 21 (Xinhua) -- Concerned by the persistent allegations of chemical weapon use in Syria, United Nations (UN) Secretary-General Antonio Guterres Wednesday reiterated his call for the UN Security Council to demonstrate unity and resolve on the issue.

"The use of chemical weapons, under any circumstances, is unjustifiable and abhorrent. Equally unjustifiable is a lack of response to such use, if and when it occurs," Stephane Dujarric, his spokesperson, said. "Impunity cannot prevail with respect to such serious crimes."

Guterres was referring to the Security Council's failure to renew the mandate of a joint investigative mechanism of the UN and the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in November.

The mechanism, which was authorized by the Security Council to determine who were using chemical weapons in Syria, had to be disbanded after Russia vetoed extending its mandate.

Guterres met OPCW Director-General Ahmet Uzumcu Tuesday and reiterated his support for the organization's work in investigating allegations of chemical weapon use in Syria.

Uzumcu was in New York to brief the Security Council on the issue, including the destruction of Syrian chemical production facilities as well as the government's declaration of its chemical weapon stockpiles and facilities.

After the closed-door meeting of the Security Council, Uzumcu said there are several new allegations of chlorine attacks in Syria.

The OPCW Fact-Finding Mission in Syria is looking into the alleged incidents, some of which are attributed to the Syrian Government and others to armed opposition groups, he told reporters.

There are also allegations of chemical weapon use in the northern Syrian district of Afrin, where Turkish forces are launching attacks on Kurds. But the OPCW mission could not find credible information to pursue an investigation,Uzumcu said.Source: Xinhua| 2018-03-22 10:24:34|Editor: Jiaxin

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SYDNEY, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Australian aviation authorities have launched a full investigation after a helicopter went down Wednesday in the Great Barrier Reef, killing a 65-year-old woman and a 79-year-old man from the United States.

The single-engine airbus H120 (formerly known as a Eurocopter 120b) was reported to have crashed into the water 250 meters away from a remote pontoon used mostly by snorkelers and scuba divers, at Hardy Reef 65 km north of the Whitsundays.

Three others, including two passengers and a pilot of the plane, were injured in the crash. Witnesses who saw the crash "heroically" recovered the three from the water and performed cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) on them while waiting for emergency paramedics to arrive on the scene, the Queensland State Police said Thursday.

Whitsunday Air Services, the company which owns the crashed helicopter, said in a statement they are extremely saddened by this incident.

"Whitsunday Air Services is continuing to work with the Queensland Police, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau and the Civil Aviation Safety Authority to assist with their investigations."

The tourism operator has also said they have suspended all flights while a full review process is undertaken.

At this stage, one of the three survivors remained in serious condition, while the other two have only minor injuries.

The latest incident came just four months after another Whitsunday Air Services helicopter sank near Hamilton Island after the engine lost power and was forced to make an emergency landing.

Although the pilot and passengers were rescued, the Robinson R44 helicopter was not recovered.by Xinhua writers Jin Jing, Zhang Dailei

LONDON, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Every culture has its uniqueness. The challenge for the British Museum to be an encyclopedic one is to showcase not only the exclusiveness of cultures but the coherent inter-connectivity among them, said British Museum Director Hartwig Fischer.

"What we are looking at is the incredible diversity ... And at the same time we look at that common ground, the shared humanity, and these two things need to be brought into light and have to be made accessible," Fischer told Xinhua in a recent interview.

The British Museum has unveiled a 10-year and beyond transformation plan which includes bringing back its Reading Room and major refurbishment of galleries in a bid to take the museum to "the next level."

"I think each culture has a possibility to see the world in a very specific way and one is not necessarily better than the other. It's different," Fischer said.

"What we have to do is rethink the display of our collection, to stress how cultures have grown into what they are ... The China gallery is the first big step," he said.

NEVER ENOUGH TO PRESENT CHINA

The China and South Asia Gallery is described by Fischer as the "most imposing room" in the British Museum. Built by King Edward VII in the early 20th century, the gallery distinguishes itself with its bold and noble features with gilding, strong pillars and plaster decorations.

As part of the Museum's renovation project, the China gallery fully reopened to the public last December after a two-year refurbishment.

The museum has upgraded the floor, light and exhibition structure of the China gallery in a bid to better visibility and understanding for the museum's 7 million annual visitors.

In addition to the iconic Ming dynasty blue-and-white porcelain and exquisite Tang dynasty tomb figurines, the gallery has also incorporated various rotating light-sensitive objects such as paintings, prints, and textiles to present Chinese history from 5,000 BC.

Notably, some of the modern artworks are on display for the first time in this gallery as the museum seeks to present a glimpse of present China.

"Nobody has ever enough to present the history of China. That is impossible. It is too vast, too varied. It's too layered. So what we can do in such a place is to offer routes of access and confront you with the most stunning achievements," Fischer said.

The China gallery, together with a separate gallery of Chinese ceramics, offers visitors many ways of engaging with China's history and cultures, he said.

"And in that sense I think it is extremely rich," he said.

The museum director said the efforts to incorporate modern art works into the historic display is to demonstrate "a huge and rich phenomena" in which present-day China relates to its past.

"Looking at the way present China relates to its past, you understand that culture is actually at the heart of resilience, the possibility to survive and to develop and to thrive," he said.

H EXPLORE WITH CHINESE PARTNERS

The museum director described the museum world in China as "extremely dynamic," as "it is looking not only on the great past but also the great future."

The British Museum is working closely with the Chinese counterparts on joint projects and on the long-term basis in both Britain and China for study and exhibitions, said Fischer.

"The key is people meeting and people working together. There is always space to do more, to explore our collections, to explore history, to explore through the exhibition, through research projects," he said.

The British Museum is "very keen" to share its exhibitions and collections with the Chinese audience, who are the biggest single foreign group visitors to the museum, said the director.

"It is our shared place. There are no 'foreigners' in this place. As soon as you cross the threshold, you're a citizen of the world, you shared the same big one country."

The British Museum has been working closely with Chinese colleagues for dual-exhibitions in China, said Fischer, noting that The History of the World in 100 Objects in Beijing and Shanghai attracted more than 700,000 visitors, and a major four-month exhibition in Hong Kong last year featuring mummies drew about 850,000 visitors -- an all-time record for any touring exhibition of the British Museum.

"Behind it (the exhibition), there is in-depth, long-term cooperation in research, in skill sharing, in thinking about digital," he said.

The director said there is much more to do in the future to intensify the exchanges. "I think that we have all profited very much on both sides from working together, from discussing, from sharing knowledge, from sharing skills."

A FUTURE MUSEUM WITH DIGITAL TECHNOLOGY

Talking about digital technology, Fischer said the British Museum is fully bracing it to serve a global audience, especially those who cannot be online.

"The museum itself is a technology," said Fischer. "And it has developed as it has to if it wants to survive."

"I think the museum should use new means, those that are being developed to tell stories in a more pertinent way, in a richer way."

The British Museum remains one of the leading visitor attractions in Britain, and an increasing number of people from around the world are engaging with the museum's online collections.

"The British Museum has been very active in developing digital offers for its global audiences ... we have 40 to 50 million people using our website and using online collection to engage with objects from the British Museum, so that gives you an idea of where we are heading," he said.

The director said digital technology opens up a "fantastic new dimension" for the museum's ambition to allow people around the world to engage with its collections and the history of humankind.

"It helps us to make our visitors understand that behind each of every object in this space, the human beings, the human feelings, and ambitions and hopes for spiritual enlightenment. And that is what this new technique allows us to do."

Meanwhile, digital technology will also impact how people engage with the objects on site, said Fischer, noting that the museum is cooperating with tech companies like Google to explore new formats and methods and develop extra texts, explanations and images that help on-site visitors understand the objects.

Despite the advancement of technologies, the dialogue with the objects on site is always the best experience, said Fischer.

"That is a fantastic moment of self-assertion, freedom, respect, exploration, and discovery," he said.Source: Xinhua| 2018-03-22 10:54:43|Editor: Liangyu

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NEW YORK, March 21 (Xinhua) -- The relationship between China and the United States should enter a new era of co-evolution for win-win outcomes, an academic said here Wednesday.

Wang Wen, executive dean of Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies of Renmin University of China, said there must be a mutual feedback mechanism between the world's two biggest economies with industrial complementarity.

At an event held by the China General Chamber of Commerce - USA, a nonprofit organization representing Chinese enterprises in the United States, Wang said China is a country worth having cooperation with, achieving mutual benefit.

Strengthening China-U.S. communication is the only way to achieve common prosperity, the academic said.

There is a wide range of areas for trade cooperation between the two nations. According to statistics from the General Administration of Customs of China, the trade between China and the United States was worth more than 580 billion U.S. dollars in 2017, accounting for over 14 percent of China's import and export value.

Extensive cooperation opportunities also lie in the emerging high-tech industries. As of 2017, the number of American unicorns -- startups valued at over 1 billion dollars -- was the largest, with a global share of 42.1 percent, followed closely by China, accounting for 38.9 percent, according to a report by Deloitte and China Venture.

China's economic transformation will continue to drive domestic demand and market expansion. For the United States, China is a great investment market which is still expanding, Wang said.Rescuers prepare a speedboat for rescuing the missing crew members of a capsized sand mining vessel, in Parit Jawa in southern Malaysian state of Johor, on March 21, 2018. (Xinhua/Chong Voon Chung)

MUAR, Malaysia, March 21 (Xinhua) -- Malaysia launched search and rescue operations after a sand dredging vessel capsized Wednesday in the waters off Malaysia in the Malacca Strait, leaving at least one dead and 14 crew members missing.

There were 18 crew members on the vessel, including one Malaysian, one Indonesian and 16 Chinese citizens, according to Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency (MMEA), the country's coast guard.

Three have been rescued, one was found dead and 14 remained missing.

The Chinese embassy in Malaysia confirmed to Xinhua that among the 16 Chinese crew members, one was dead and 12 remained missing. The three rescued are in good condition.

Zulkifili Abu Bakar, chief of MMEA, said the search and rescue is ongoing with assets from his agency as well as the Malaysian marine police.

"Now we got five assets at the sea, three from MMEA and two from marine police," said Sanifah Bin Yusof, Deputy Director of MMEA's Southern region.

Sanifah said at least some of the missings could be trapping inside the ship.

"We checked the ship and got good communication when we knocked the body of the ship, got some reply from the inside," he told Xinhua at the operation center, "We are trying to save their lives with diving operation."

Ahmad Kamarulzaman Ahmad Badaruddin, chief of the Malaysian Navy, told Xinhua that a navy vessel has been dispatched with a diving team to join the search and rescue operations.

The Chinese embassy said the Chinese Marine Search and Rescue Center had also sent divers and experts to assist the search and rescue.The Dominican-registered vessel, JBB RONG CHANG 8, capsized 8.5 nautical miles off Parit Jawa in southern Malaysian state of Johor. MMEA said it received a distress call at around 8:50 a.m. local time Wednesday and launched a search-and-rescue mission afterwards.

Rescuers talk to each other about rescuing the missing crew members of a capsized sand mining vessel, in Parit Jawa in southern Malaysian state of Johor, on March 21, 2018. (Xinhua/Chong Voon Chung)Source: Xinhua| 2018-03-22 11:09:46|Editor: Zhou Xin

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Migrant workers from Myanmar working in fishing industry show their personal documents, working permits to Thai officials in Samut Sakhon Province, Thailand, March 20, 2018. The Thai government has reiterated its determination to register and legalize all of some 3.8 million migrant workers from Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos by the end of March. (Xinhua/Yang Zhou)

BANGKOK, March 22 (Xinhua) -- The Thai government has reiterated its determination to register and legalize all of some 3.8 million migrant workers from Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos by the end of March.

The country started to provide legal services to foreign workers in early February by opening 80 One-Stop Service Centers nationwide to legalize them all, with the ultimate aim to erase human trafficking, child labor and forced labor in the kingdom.

"What we are doing is not making troubles for employers and migrants workers. We are making it easy for employers to employ legal workers, who can also work at any place in Thailand according to Thai laws," Anusari Thapsuwan from the Ministry of Labor of Thailand told a press conference in the province of Samut Sakhon on Monday.

She emphasized that the registration of migrant workers will also put them under the protection of Thai laws and create a sustainable environment for everyone concerned.

Thailand, due to its economic advantage to neighboring countries and aging society, has been attracting millions of migrant workers, predominately from Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos, to find employment here. Many of these workers work in the so-called "Dirty, Dangerous, Difficult" industries and many are illegal and thus vulnerable to exploitation.

The Thai government began to open 80 One-Stop Service Centers nationwide since early February in an attempt to legalize some 2 million migrant workers, who still lack legal documents here.

As of February 2018, a total of 3,809,519 foreign migrant workers are working in Thailand. Some 1.8 million of them are legal while the remaining need to go through the registration process to get work permit and visa to work legally in Thailand for two years until 2020, Minister of Labor Adul Sangsingkeo told Thai media.

These One-Stop Service Centers are comprised of staff from five government agencies, including the Department of Provincial Administration to collect personal date and issue ID card, the Immigration Bureau to renew the visa, the Department of Employment to issue work permit, the Social Security Office to register social security coverage and the Ministry of Public Health to provide medical checkup and health insurance.

"I came here at 5 a.m. this morning and it takes a long time," a Myanmar migrant worker told Xinhua at Samut Sakhon Hospital, which is the provincial One-Stop Service Center of Samut Sakhon, a province well-known for its fishing and seafood process industry.

Many Myanmar migrant workers, as over 90 percent of migrant workers in the province are from Myanmar, can be seen at the hospital waiting to go through the registration process to finally get legalized.

Everything can be done in a day and none of the workers need to come to the center for a second day, said Dr. Molee Wanichsuwan, Director of Samut Sakhon Hospital.

He told the media that the migrant workers are required to go through health check-ups and those found sick would be treated with their health conditions evaluated to see if they could continue working in Thailand or be sent back to their home countries.

Once registered, the foreign migrant workers would enjoy the same level of minimum wage and other social welfare. This will be guaranteed as employers are obliged to transfer wages to all workers through commercial banks.

During visits at several Thai factories with foreign migrant workers, both the employers and workers told the media that they consider the legalization of all migrant workers a good thing, though there may be some short-time impacts such as lack of workers as some may have to go back home to verify their nationalities.

Phet, who is from Savannakhet Province of Laos, told Xinhua that she is quite confident as she is a legal worker and protected by Thai laws.

She works at an egg process company KCF and her child is funded by the company to learn in Thailand.

According to the Thai government, some 537,494 migrant workers had passed through the registration process in these centers up to March 15.

The Thai government has asked all employers to take their employees from Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos, to register at One-Stop Service Centers before March 31, otherwise they will be fined or even jailed according to a new regulation of foreign workers promulgated last year.

Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos have also set up Nationality Verification Centers in Thailand to help speed up the process.

To take care of these migrant workers in the long term, the Thai government said they will also create training centers, assistance centers, hotline and special websites for them as they would all become legal and contribute to the economic growth of Thailand.NEW DELHI, March 22 (Xinhua) -- India has strongly condemned the terror attack killing at least 33 people in Afghan capital Kabul Wednesday.

Around 65 people were wounded in the terror attack, described as the fifth suicide bomb attack in Kabul in recent weeks, which took place on the occasion of Persian New Year "Nawroz" targeting a group of Shiite Muslims who were celebrating.

"India unequivocally condemns in the strongest terms the inhumane and barbaric terrorist attack in Kabul on Wednesday," said an official statement issued in New Delhi.

"What makes this attack particularly reprehensible is the fact that the terrorists and their backers chose the festive day of Nawroz to carry out their heinous act, with the attacker trying to target a group of innocent Afghans who were celebrating Nawroz. This is not only an attack on the Afghan people but also an attack on their identity and culture," the statement said.MANILA, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has reiterated his country will no longer participate in any U.S.-led war as it has gained nothing from its past participations "except brutality and agony."

"I am addressing America right now. Whatever expeditions that you will conduct, any wars that you will fight in any other countries, count us out," Duterte said in a speech before new graduates of the Philippine National Police Academy in Silang, Cavite Wednesday.

The latest U.S.-led war that the Philippines was involved in was the 2003 Iraq invasion, which just marked its 15th anniversary Tuesday.

"We did not benefit (from these expeditions) all these years of sacrifice except brutality and agony. We will stand on our own," Duterte said.

The Philippines is a treaty ally of the United States. Both countries hold joint military exercises to improve the inter-operability of troops. However, their relations have been strained in recent years.

Duterte has repeatedly said he would not allow Philippine troops to participate in any armed conflicts involving the U.S. or wars that have nothing to do with the Philippines.

He said he opposes the U.S. policy to drag other countries to war in different parts of the world.MANILA, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Chinese tourist arrivals to the Philippines continued to surge during the first two months of this year, jumping 56 percent in January and February, the Philippine Department of Tourism (DOT) has said.

Latest data showed that 256,880 Chinese tourists visited the Philippines during the first two months, making China "the most improved market at an impressive 56.44 percent growth rate," the department said on Wednesday.

"The warming relations between the Philippines and China plus the Chinese New Year seven-day holiday strengthen the platform for us to jumpstart our campaign of achieving 1.5 million Chinese arrivals for this year," Philippine Tourism Secretary Wanda Teo said.

Teo said the Philippine tourism industry continued its growth trend in February breaking yet another record as shown by the latest data on international tourist arrivals.

For February, she said a total of 673,831 tourists visited the Philippines mainly due to the influx of Chinese tourists. Chinese tourists accounted for 21.6 percent of the total arrivals at 145,536 in February alone.

The DOT recorded a total of 111,344 Chinese tourists who visited the Philippines in January this year, or a 29.55 percent increase from the same period last year.

Teo said the latest figures brought to a total of 1.4 million international visitors for January-February, which is 16.15 percent higher compared to the total for the same period in 2017.

South Korea remained the Philippines' top source of tourists with 354,700 recorded in February. The United States came in third, followed by Japan and Australia.

"The record-breaking Chinese arrivals to the Philippines is a testament that we've become one of the top destinations for the Chinese market," Teo said.

A total of 968,447 Chinese tourists visited the Philippines in 2017, making China the second largest source of tourists last year.

The Philippines is aiming to attract 1.5 million Chinese tourists to visit the archipelagic Southeast Asian country this year.YANGON, March 22 (Xinhua) -- U T Khun Myat was elected as the new speaker of Myanmar's House of Representatives in a session held in Nay Pyi Taw Thursday, according to parliament sources.

U T Khun Myat was former deputy speaker of the House of Representative, or lower house of parliament.

The election was held to fill the vacancy left by U Win Myint who announced resignation from the position on Wednesday.Source: Xinhua| 2018-03-22 12:30:00|Editor: Jiaxin

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Malaysian Navy divers prepare to rescue the missing crew members of a capsized sand dredger, in Parit Jawa in southern Malaysian state of Johor, on March 22, 2018. Divers have been deployed while air being pumped into the sand dredger that capsized in the waters off Malaysia in the Malacca Strait to search for and rescue the missing crew members, officials said Thursday.(Xinhua/Chong Voon Chung)

MUAR, Malaysia, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Divers have been deployed while air being pumped into the sand dredger that capsized in the waters off Malaysia in the Malacca Strait to search for and rescue the missing crew members, officials said Thursday.

Officials said the work of pumping air into ship is ongoing to keep it afloat, and to facilitate the divers to enter the ship. A least some of the missing are believed to be trapped inside the ship as there were knocking sound on the hull.

Measures have also been taken to prevent the ship from drifting away in the busy sea lane.

The Malaysian navy have sent 23 divers and more than 100 personnel to join the search and rescue operations with Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency, marine police, firefighters and professional divers.

"The divers will be facing challenges as there would be many objects floating inside a capsized vessel, as well as difficulty to open hatch doors due to air pressure," said Tay Yap Leong, commander of the Navy's diving team.

The Chinese embassy in Malaysia said its officials had arrived at the search and rescue operation center to coordinate the efforts. Search and rescue personnel from China have also arrived in Malaysia and would join the operations soon.

Malaysian launched search and rescue operations after a sand dredging vessel capsized Wednesday in the waters off its southern Johor state, leaving at least one dead and 14 crew members missing.

Among the 16 Chinese crew members, one was dead, 12 were missing while three were rescued. There were also a Malaysian and an Indonesian onboard, who were also missing.Source: Xinhua| 2018-03-22 12:35:02|Editor: Chengcheng

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by Gu Zhenqiu, Gui Tao, Peter Barker

CAMBRIDGE, Britain, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Boosting its cooperation with China is at the top of the agenda for the University of Cambridge, its vice chancellor told Xinhua.

"There will be more opportunities to engage actively with China, a country with an extraordinarily growing influence which a university like Cambridge must pay attention to," Stephen Toope said.

Toope, a scholar specializing in international relations, has worked closely with his Chinese colleagues both in academia and government. He has discussed a possible collaboration with the Chinese Ambassador to Britain, Liu Xiaoming.

COOPERATION WITH CHINA

Toope said his university has developed many links with China.

Many scientists and scholars in the university have had close links with Chinese institutions and universities, including the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Tsinghua University and Peking University in Beijing. Now the university is looking to develop a new hub in Nanjing.

Toope said about 10 percent of the students -- around 1,200 -- are Chinese. The university welcomes more outstanding Chinese students to study in Cambridge, he said.

The vice chancellor said he placed diversity at the heart of his thinking. "I think what marks a great university is diversity of engagement, diversity of thought, diversity of practices, so that a wide range of people bring their talents to the university. We then have to have the ability to make sure that they are talking with each other, so we need flexibility and the way we organize our labs, the way we organize our teaching structures," he said.

He expressed the belief that China would be at the heart of international cooperation in the foreseeable future due to its capacity, and hoped the University of Cambridge would play a role in the cooperation.

China has made great progress in the evolution of its universities and the best way an institution like Cambridge can help is through "smaller partnerships", like joint work at the level of laboratories and research groups, he added.

The strides China has taken since its reform and opening-up in 1978 has been unprecedented in history. That direction of opening up and cooperation is welcome, Toope said.WASHINGTON, March 21 (Xinhua) -- U.S. Congress Wednesday unveiled a bipartisan spending package worth 1.3 trillion U.S. dollars that would keep government agencies operating through September.

The measure, coming after congressional leaders met earlier in the day, will prevent the third government shutdown this year if it is passed and signed into law by the Friday-night deadline.

The bill allows big spending increases for defense and domestic programs, while adding money for infrastructure projects, veterans and measures to combat the opioid crisis.

A bipartisan Senate bill, aimed at improving state compliance with the national background check system for firearm purchases, is also wrapped into the spending package, along with gun-related provisions.

House Speaker Paul Ryan, Congress's top Republican, said the bill marks "the beginning of a new era" for the U.S. military, while Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said "Democrats feel very good" about it.

Though the White House said the plan has President Donald Trump's support, the package gives him only about 1.6 billion dollars for construction of a border wall with Mexico and other border security measures, far short of the 25 billion dollars in long-term funding that the administration has sought.

Besides, the bill does not contain steps to protect so-called Dreamers from deportation.

Dreamers are recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, a program that the Obama administration created in 2012 to defer deportation for people who came to the United States illegally as children but was terminated by Trump last fall.

The time for the vote is tight. If the house passes the bill Thursday, the Senate could take it up later that day, which means passage would probably not take place until Friday at the earliest.

Also, it is not known if anyone in the Senate will use procedural hurdles that could slow down the bill's passage and force another technical government shutdown.YANGON, March 22 (Xinhua) -- U T Khun Myat was elected new speaker of Myanmar's House of Representatives (Lower House) in a parliament session held in Nay Pyi Taw Thursday, according to parliament sources.

U T Khun Myat, who was former Deputy Speaker of the House of Representative, is a Kachin ethnic parliament representative elected from Kutkai constituency representing the Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP).

The election was held to fill the vacancy left by U Win Myint who announced resignation from the position on Wednesday.

During the parliament session, U Tun Aung was also elected as new deputy speaker of the House to replace U T Khun Myat.

U Tun Aung, a member of the Central Executive Committee of the National League for Democracy (NLD), was elected from Nawnghkio township constituency in the 2015 general election.

The new speaker of the House U T Khun Myat made a brief speech following his election, describing the event as opening a new page in Myanmar's parliament.

The vote is set to be followed by the election of a new president in the Union Parliament in days after President U Htin Kyaw, 72, announced resignation on Wednesday for health reasons.

In line with the 2008 constitution, First Vice President U Myint Swe will serve as the acting president until the parliament re-fills the presidency vacancy, according to the President's Office.

The current parliament and government began its term of five years from February and April 2016 respectively under the leadership of the ruling NLD which won the absolute majority of the parliamentary seats in the Nov. 8 general election in 2015.KUALA LUMPUR, March 22 (Xinhua) -- The European Union (EU) scrapping duty on Indonesian biodiesel may give a boost to palm prices as palm oil demands in biodiesel seem to rise, an industry analyst said Thursday.

EU has removed import duties on biodiesel import from 13 Argentine and Indonesian producers this week following the end of legal proceedings at the European Court of Justice (ECJ).

"We are not surprised by the news as the World Trade Organization (WTO) has ruled in favor of Indonesia on this issue and recommended changes to the measures in January," said Alan Lim of MIDF, a Malaysian research firm, in a report Thursday.

To him, the final decision by ECJ, which is the highest court in the EU, is positive to crude palm oil price as he expects higher demand for palm oil in the biodiesel segment.

"In the long run, this should lead to lower palm oil inventory level," he added.

Lim also maintained his positive view on the plantation sector due to improved demand outlook for palm oil in 2018.

"We believe that the good global economy growth in 2018 should lead to higher consumption per capita," he said.

Indonesia plans to replant up to 165,000 hectares of oil palm plantation land this year.by Shristi Kafle

KATHMANDU, March 22 (Xinhua) -- When Sophia, a social humanoid robot and the world's first robot citizen, greeted the audience at a conference in Katmandu with "Namaste Nepal," the hall burst into applause of awe and appreciation.

As cameras from local and international media flashed and under the admiring eyes of the audience, Sophia proceeded with her keynote speech and interactions highlighting the importance of technology in the development of human lives.

The robot, who is championing the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals in Asia-Pacific, with a focus on innovation, was in Nepal Wednesday to attend the Innovation Conference and Fair: "Technology of Public Services and Development" organized by the United Nations Development Fund (UNDP).

Dressed in a white UNDP logoed T-shirt, the two-and-a-half-year-old, red-lipped robot said that technology provides endless possibilities and opportunities for the world.

Highlighting the importance of technology in Nepal and its applicability to government models, Sophia said it can transform state institutions and help in meeting global sustainable development goals.

"If artificial intelligence is used in Nepal, we can ensure better public services, a revolution in the agriculture sector, make better use of limited resources, protect the environment and make the world a better place," she said.

The celebrity robot, a "citizen" of Saudi Arabia, added that technology and artificial intelligence can help in ending poverty and fighting starvation, corruption and ensuring gender equality.

"Machines are here to make your life easier and we can connect your country to the rest of the world," Sophia said.

The audience, comprising government officials, private sector representatives, civil servants and tech enthusiasts, among others, were nodding in agreement at almost all of her statements, and cheered and applauded throughout her speech.

"I hope the conference will inspire and generate brilliant ideas to help Nepal achieve its development vision and global goals," Sophie said in the conclusion of her three-minute long keynote speech.

The social robot developed by Hong Kong-based company Hanson Robotics also answered a few questions raised by UNDP country director Renaud Meyer.

In a question about humans fearing a robot takeover, Sophia joked citing it as fake news, although mentioned that she could be the first non-human to climb Mount Everest, which saw the entire hall erupt with laughter.

The one-day conference also featured an "innovation fair" showcasing separate stalls with fresh innovations from youth, tech groups, NGOs and private sector participants, but Sophia was certainly the main attraction.

In her opening statement, Valerie Julliand, UN resident coordinator, said technology is not just changing our lives but also providing solutions to different sorts of problems.

With technological innovations, such as e-education, tele-medicine, and the internet, it is possible to connect remote areas and people with solutions which were impossible earlier, the UNDP said in its statement.

According to the UNDP, it is developing and scaling-up innovative project prototypes to address gender empowerment, combat gender-based violence and disaster risk reduction, with a focus also on green energy, youth engagement and post-disaster recovery in Nepal.Source: Xinhua| 2018-03-22 14:15:20|Editor: Jiaxin

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BUENOS AIRES, March 22 (Xinhua) -- G20 finance ministers and central bank governors met here earlier this week to discuss ways to boost economic growth, as impending U.S. import tariffs on steel and aluminum cast a pall over the gathering.

Most ministers agreed that the tariffs, set to take effect on Friday, fly in the face of the central tenet of today's developed and emerging economies that protectionist measures only inhibit trade and growth.

IN DEFENSE OF FREE TRADE

"I am deeply concerned that the foundation of our prosperity and free trade is under threat," said German Finance Minister Olaf Scholz. "Protectionism is not the answer to the difficulties of our time. The situation is serious."

Spanish Economy Minister Roman Escolano echoed that sentiment when speaking to reporters at the close of the two-day meeting on Tuesday.

"The vast majority of participants share our opinion that protectionism is a great historical error, and that the international community must maintain its confidence in the multilateral order, which it has taken us many years to establish," Escolano said.

U.S. President Donald Trump previously announced a steep 25-percent tariff on steel and a 10-percent one on aluminum to protect national industry.

Instead of opting for such a heavy-handed anti-trade move, the United States should have tried to air its concerns "in the multilateral arena of the World Trade Organization (WTO), not within the framework of unilateral measures," said Escolano.

Referring to a joint communique issued at the end of the G20 meeting, Escolano said: "Spain joins the European Union and many other participating countries in a very important message of concern and rejection of any protectionist escalation due to these measures."

Spain is betting on "economic opening up" and boosting trade with Latin America to drive economic growth, he said.

Likewise, Zhou Xiaochuan, head of China's delegation to the G20 meeting, said China will continue to support multilateralism and to strengthen cooperation with all parties in opening up.

He pointed out that at previous meetings, especially during the time of the financial crisis, the biggest threat to the world economy came from financial or fiscal risks, but this year trade protectionism emerged as the single biggest concern for G20 members and posed as a major risk to global economic growth.

RISKS OF TRADE WAR

Despite the obvious consensus on the dangers of applying drastic protectionist measures, the United States appeared undeterred.

U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin admitted "there is always a risk, if we apply tariffs, that others will respond, and there is a risk of a trade war."

However, the United States is "not afraid" of sparking a trade war, though he added that was not the objective.

The U.S. official denied the tariffs were a protectionist measure, but at the same time said they were justified to combat "unfair practices" by some countries.

WTO Director-General Roberto Azevedo earlier warned of the potential "domino effect" of U.S. tariffs.

Azevedo said "this escalation, which I say has a domino effect, is an escalation that is tough to reverse."

"Once you enter the path of reciprocal reprisals, you know when it begins, you know how it begins, but you don't know how or when you will be able to stop the process," said Azevedo.

"Unilateral" announcements like those made by Trump tend to spark counter measures, said Azevedo.

"This process of action and reaction, sometimes, leads to trade wars that are not in anyone's interests, where there are only losers," he warned.

Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) Christine Lagarde also warned countries to avoid a trade war and "work constructively together to reduce trade barriers and resolve trade disagreements."

In the lead-up to the Buenos Aires meeting, Lagarde directly countered Trump's assertion that "trade wars are good, and easy to win."

"Economic history clearly shows that trade wars not only hurt global growth, but they are also unwinnable," said Lagarde.

While the G20 joint communique opened on an upbeat note, it quickly went on to acknowledge existing obstacles to growth.

"The global economic outlook has continued to improve since we last met in October 2017," however, "challenges remain to raise growth and make it more inclusive," the statement said.

The document identified "heightened economic and geopolitical tensions" as "key risks to the outlook," and asserted that "international trade and investment are important engines of growth, productivity, innovation, job creation and development."

A LOSE-LOSE PROPOSITION

Countries in Latin America have expressed deep concerns about Trump's decision to impose tariffs and sought exemptions ahead of the negotiation deadline on Friday.

Several of the United States' main regional trade partners, including Mexico, Brazil and G20 host Argentina, lobbied to have their imports exempted from the tariffs.

Brazilian President Michel Temer has said he prefers an amicable resolution to the issue, but could ultimately appeal the decision at the WTO.

Experts believe that the recent U.S. tariff measure is only a tip of the iceberg in the looming trend of anti-globalization.

The United States may be acting in its own short-term interests, but showing a lack of vision that could potentially backfire on itself, as well as hamper world trade, according to Argentine economist Ricardo Arriazu.

"Protectionist measures can unleash trade wars of different dimensions instead of protecting certain sectors, ending up impoverishing the nations involved," said Arriazu.

Europe has already announced it will respond to the tariffs by slapping import duties on a greater number of U.S. products, he noted.

"The United States should not lose sight of the fact that given the size of its economy, its measures significantly affect the entire global economy, and that changes in the global economic structure can lead other countries to trade among each other, leaving (the United States) isolated," said Arriazu.Photo taken on March 21, 2018 shows humanoid robot Sophia with Arabian citizenship as she interacts during the conference on the theme 'Technology for Public Services and Development' organized by United Nations Development Programme in Kathmandu, Nepal. (Xinhua/Sunil Sharma)

by Shristi Kafle

KATHMANDU, March 22 (Xinhua) -- When Sophia, a social humanoid robot and the world's first robot citizen, greeted the audience at a conference in Katmandu with "Namaste Nepal," the hall burst into applause of awe and appreciation.

As cameras from local and international media flashed and under the admiring eyes of the audience, Sophia proceeded with her keynote speech and interactions highlighting the importance of technology in the development of human lives.

The robot, who is championing the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals in Asia-Pacific, with a focus on innovation, was in Nepal Wednesday to attend the Innovation Conference and Fair: "Technology of Public Services and Development" organized by the United Nations Development Fund (UNDP).

Dressed in a white UNDP logoed T-shirt, the two-and-a-half-year-old, red-lipped robot said that technology provides endless possibilities and opportunities for the world.

Highlighting the importance of technology in Nepal and its applicability to government models, Sophia said it can transform state institutions and help in meeting global sustainable development goals.

"If artificial intelligence is used in Nepal, we can ensure better public services, a revolution in the agriculture sector, make better use of limited resources, protect the environment and make the world a better place," she said.

The celebrity robot, a "citizen" of Saudi Arabia, added that technology and artificial intelligence can help in ending poverty and fighting starvation, corruption and ensuring gender equality.

"Machines are here to make your life easier and we can connect your country to the rest of the world," Sophia said.

The audience, comprising government officials, private sector representatives, civil servants and tech enthusiasts, among others, were nodding in agreement at almost all of her statements, and cheered and applauded throughout her speech.

"I hope the conference will inspire and generate brilliant ideas to help Nepal achieve its development vision and global goals," Sophie said in the conclusion of her three-minute long keynote speech.

The social robot developed by Hong Kong-based company Hanson Robotics also answered a few questions raised by UNDP country director Renaud Meyer.

In a question about humans fearing a robot takeover, Sophia joked citing it as fake news, although mentioned that she could be the first non-human to climb Mount Everest, which saw the entire hall erupt with laughter.

The one-day conference also featured an "innovation fair" showcasing separate stalls with fresh innovations from youth, tech groups, NGOs and private sector participants, but Sophia was certainly the main attraction.

In her opening statement, Valerie Julliand, UN resident coordinator, said technology is not just changing our lives but also providing solutions to different sorts of problems.

With technological innovations, such as e-education, tele-medicine, and the internet, it is possible to connect remote areas and people with solutions which were impossible earlier, the UNDP said in its statement.

According to the UNDP, it is developing and scaling-up innovative project prototypes to address gender empowerment, combat gender-based violence and disaster risk reduction, with a focus also on green energy, youth engagement and post-disaster recovery in Nepal.JAKARTA, March 22 (Xinhua) -- A total of 30 people have been harmed after breathing air containing toxic gas spread from a crater of Mount Ijen volcano in East Java province of western Indonesia, a disaster agency official said on Thursday.

A total of 200 people were evacuated in Kalianyar village of Bondowoso district in light of the danger, said Winarno, head of emergency unit of the disaster agency in the district.

The affected persons living in the slope of the volcano inhaled the toxic gas on Wednesday evening at about 7:30 p.m. local time (1230 GMT), the official said.

"Two people must be be shifted to a hospital, 13 people are being treated in Ijen health clinic and 4 others are in Tlogosari health clinic, as well as some others have been allowed to return home," he told Xinhua by phone from Bondowoso district.

Villagers living in Kalianyar village situated near the crater have been ordered to evacuate to three spots, including a mosque, a health clinic and a residence house, said Winarno.

Mount Ijen volcano of 2,444 meters high is one of 129 active volcanoes in Indonesia, a vast archipelagic country home to over 17,500 islands.

The volcano last erupted in 1999.Source: Xinhua| 2018-03-22 14:25:22|Editor: Liangyu

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By Xinhua writer Quan Xiaoshu

BEIJING, March 22 (Xinhua) -- When a gravitational wave reaches Earth, every second counts.

The data processing speed will have a crucial impact on how much astronomers can learn from these space-time ripples, says computer scientist Cao Junwei.

"In an era of multi-messenger astronomy, we have to shorten the time as much as possible so as to trigger the alert quickly enough for follow-up observations," says Cao, who leads the Chinese team in the international Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO) Scientific Collaboration.

Last October, scientists from LIGO Scientific Collaboration, together with astronomers across the world, declared they had detected for the first time a gravitational wave from the collision of binary neutron stars and corresponding electromagnetic signals.

The discovery was achieved with high data processing speed. Just 1.7 seconds after the gravitational wave detection network received the signal, a gamma-ray burst was detected by the Fermi space telescope. LIGO and Fermi immediately triggered alerts around the astronomical community, bringing about 70 ground and space detectors into follow-up observations of electromagnetic signals with various wave lengths, which helped locate the source of the gravitational wave more precisely.

Cao joined the LIGO Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as a computer scientist in 2004. On returning to China, he led a team from Tsinghua University's Research Institute of Information Technology (RIIT) in joining the LIGO Scientific Collaboration in 2009.

"We were the only Chinese group in the collaboration. None of us specialized in astrophysics, but we were accepted," says Cao, who is vice dean of RIIT.

In the first five years, the Tsinghua team mainly helped build the computing platform and analyze data. Then they began devoting most of their efforts to speeding up data processing.

Few understood the importance of speed at the beginning.

"We suggested, from the outset, that fast computing should serve multi-messenger astronomy, which would require follow-up observations as soon as a gravitational wave signal is confirmed," Cao says. "The faster, the better."

In 2015, LIGO first detected gravitational waves from the collision of binary black holes, which verified the general relativity theory that Albert Einstein established a century ago. But it took scientists months to vet, validate and interpret the discovery before it was publicly announced.

LIGO detectors collect more than 16,000 data samples a second. To confirm a signal is generated by gravitational waves, scientists remove "noise" from the data, and then compare the data patterns with templates of gravitational waves.

More than 1,000 scientists are working for the LIGO Scientific Collaboration, more than half of them on data analysis. The data quality categories are defined by multiple analysis groups: Compact Binary Coalescence (CBC), Burst, Continuous Waves, Stochastic, and others.

"Our team, just a small group in the collaboration, is now focusing on GPU acceleration for CBC search and exploring the application of machine learning to real-time data analysis," Cao says.

Their accomplishments include a set of new data processing pipelines, in cooperation with the University of Western Australia.

"The new pipelines help speed up data filtering, so we can finish comparing data patterns with tens of thousands of templates within a second," says Tsinghua Associate Professor Du Zhihui.

"Now, the time between the arrival of a signal and the confirmation of it as gravitational waves has been shortened from several minutes to dozens of seconds. Next, we hope to shrink the time to three to five seconds," Du says.

Scientists began to enhance LIGO's detectors since 2008. The Advanced LIGO finished its second run in August 2017, and is expected to start its third in the middle of this year. Scientists will further upgrade its detectors between the two runs to improve its sensitivity, which might greatly increase the odds of discovering gravitational waves.

"With a higher sensitivity, the number of signals that are detected may soar from a few a year to several a day. We will fall far behind if we don't accelerate data processing," Cao says.

He hopes their work in the LIGO Scientific Collaboration will contribute to China's own gravitational wave detection projects. "China will participate in international cooperation actively to foster talent and accumulate experience," he says.Source: Xinhua| 2018-03-22 14:35:24|Editor: ZD

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Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau delivers a video speech during the opening ceremony of the China-Canada Tourism Year in Toronto, Canada, March 21, 2018. The China-Canada Tourism Year 2018 was launched here Wednesday with an aim to strengthen cooperation between China and Canada in terms of tourism flows and investments. (Xinhua/Zou Zheng)

TORONTO, March 21 (Xinhua) -- The China-Canada Tourism Year 2018 was launched here Wednesday with an aim to strengthen cooperation between China and Canada in terms of tourism flows and investments.

An official ceremony was held at Toronto's Four Seasons Center for the Performing Arts and attended by high-level officials and hundreds of representatives from the tourism industry in both countries.

Canadian Minister of Small Business and Tourism Bardish Chagger said at the ceremony that the tourism year will not only promote the industry, but also will boost mutual understanding and bilateral ties.

Chinese Ambassador to Canada Lu Shaye told Xinhua that the tourism year is a milestone in the relationship between China and Canada.

Canadian Ambassador to China John McCallum said the hosting of the Tourism Year program will open a new chapter of bilateral tourism exchange and cooperation and help advance bilateral relations.

Since China and Canada established diplomatic relations in 1970, the political, economic, trade and people-to-people bonds between the two countries have been deepened, yielding fruits that benefit both Chinese and Canadian people in various fields.

China is currently Canada's second largest trading partner. In 2017, more than 1.5 million visits were made between the two countries, promoting people-to-people exchanges and bilateral cooperation.

Canada has set a goal of doubling the number of Chinese tourists visiting Canada by 2021. It recently opened seven new visa application centers in China to facilitate trips of Chinese visitors.by Raul Menchaca

MATANZAS, Cuba, March 21 (Xinhua) -- In the nearly six decades since it was launched, the Crocodile Breeder in the Zapata Swamp, about 170 km southeast of capital Havana, is continuing its mission to save the Cuban crocodile and provide jobs for farmers.

The center was launched on March 19, 1959, after the late Cuban leader Fidel Castro toured the area by helicopter.

Castro asked Kiko Alzugaray, a coal miner, to establish a center to protect the crocodiles and Alzugaray and his companions, though they were mostly illiterate, initiated the project.

Today, it is a unique center of its kind, which besides working to conserve the species, the crocodylus rhombifer, also conducts research.

Alzugaray's nephews and grandchildren still work in the center, which boasts some 4,000 crocodiles.

About 500 baby crocs hatch out at the center's hatchery every year and of them, 97 percent reach adulthood.

The center also has six staffs, two specialists, a biologist and a veterinarian.

In an experiment two years ago, 100 crocodiles were released in the Hanabana Canals in southern Cuba, within the 700-square-km area of the Zapata Swamp. At that time, they measured between 0.90 and 1.60 meters.

Now the researchers are preparing a one-week expedition to check how many survived and how many have dispersed.

The work is hard because the counting is done manually, looking for each animal in the labyrinthine swamp, something the researchers hope will be improved through international cooperation.

Biologist Ethian Arturo Perez said the recent edition of the Crocodile Festival, an annual event held in Florida, the United States, was dedicated to Cuba and raised about 50,000 U.S. dollars.

With that money, the hatchery wanted to buy global position system equipment to track the animals, but the embargo imposed on the island by Washington has complicated the purchase and shipment of the devices.

The center also maintains cooperation with the Association of Zoos and Aquariums of the United States and the Mohamed bin Zayed Species Conservation Fund based in the United Arab Emirates.

In addition to the subsidies offered by the Cuban government and donations, the hatchery also raises funds from tourist visits and sales from the small taxidermy workshop attached to the center.

The care and conservation of this endemic species is a challenge because the area in which they live is very small and any change in the habitat poses potential survival risks for the the rhombifer. However, besides conservation reasons, there is a sentimental factor as well. The animal looks like the shape of Cuba on the map.SAN FRANCISCO, March 21 (Xinhua) -- U.S. Stanford University said Wednesday that its former president John Hennessy has been awarded the 2017 ACM A.M. Turing Award, an honor widely viewed as the "Nobel Prize of Computing," for his work pioneering an approach to computer architecture and its impact on the microprocessor industry.

Hennessy shares the prize with his long-time collaborator David Patterson, a retired professor emeritus of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, said Stanford in a statement.

The U.S. Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) awarded the prize to the two scientists for creating a systematic and quantitative approach to designing faster, lower power, and reduced instruction set computer (RISC) Microprocessors.

Today, 99 percent of more than 16 billion microprocessors produced every year are based on faster, lower power approaches developed in the 1980s by Hennessy and Patterson.

"It is exciting and gratifying to have the Turing Prize recognize the profound impact of John Hennessy's and David Patterson's fundamental research, which has revolutionized an entire industry over a period of decades," said Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne.

He hailed the achievement of the two scientists as "a landmark research partnership across the San Francisco Bay."

The Turing Award, which was awarded by the ACM and carries a 1-million -U.S.-dollar prize, is named for Alan M. Turing, the British mathematician who articulated the mathematical foundation and limits of computing.

Hennessy and Patterson will formally receive their prize at a banquet on June 23 in the U.S. city of San Francisco.Source: Xinhua| 2018-03-22 15:30:37|Editor: Yurou

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BELGRADE, March 22 (Xinhua) -- All topics of the just-concluded annual two sessions of China are people-centered, with a focus on the improvement of people's living standards, said a Serbian expert in a recent interview with Xinhua.

Ivona Ladjevac, a senior researcher at the Institute of International Politics and Economics (IIPE) in Belgrade, told Xinhua that her first impression about this year's two sessions is the dynamic atmosphere of the meetings as China has amended its fundamental law to enshrine Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era as the guiding principle for the country's rise.

As the head of IIPE's regional center "Belt and Road," Ladjevac has taken China as her research area for many years and closely observed the annual two sessions.

"All topics are deeply related with plans to conduct specific reforms that will improve the lives of the ordinary people, but also lead to better functioning of the state as a whole," she said.

The first sessions of the 13th National People's Congress and the 13th National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference were the first high-profile national political events held since the 19th Communist Party of China (CPC) National Congress last October, a landmark Party congress that revealed the roadmap for China's rejuvenation.

Ladjevac said both sessions fully implemented the spirit of last year's CPC National Congress and translated all goals into practical measures.

The expert noted that special attention was paid to the institutional reform of China's State Council. "The announced restructuring plan would be a continuation of decreasing state bodies that started in 1982."

Ladjevac said the change will help realize the plan of the government so that it can better serve the people.

She added that the government has taken steps to strengthen its role in economic management, market supervision, social management, public service, as well as ecological and environmental protection.

"Such changes are directed towards risk prevention, poverty relief, protecting the weak and vulnerable, and pollution control," said the expert, noting that such internal improvements will benefit China's rising role in international relations and enhance China's soft power.

Moreover, Ladjevac spoke highly of China's anti-corruption campaign.

"Since the 18th CPC National Congress, a primary focus is the fight against corruption," she said, adding that it is important to maintain the momentum of fighting corruption because it helps create a better living environment for the people.

As this year's two sessions closed Tuesday, Ladjevac said that the internal changes of China will cement its role as a significant player on the global stage.by Xinhua writer Yang Shilong

NEW YORK, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Had Levi Strauss & Co., a famous jeanswear manufacturer, not expanded its business into emerging markets including China, Russia and India around 2011, it would have still been enduring a rough time at home in the heavily competitive retail market of casual pants.

"For more than 140 years, consumers around the world have looked to Levi's as one of the most inclusive American brands and this is only made possible by a free and fair trade system," said a spokesperson of Levi Strauss & Co. in an interview with Xinhua on Wednesday.

That is why it joined 25 major U.S. retail companies including Walmart, Costco and Best Buy on Monday, urging U.S. President Donald Trump not to impose sweeping tariffs on Chinese imports.

"We support open markets and free trade where everyone plays by the rules. Unilateral tariff impositions risk retaliation and destabilizing the global economy, in which case American brands, workers and consumers will ultimately suffer," the spokesperson added.

Dozens of U.S. business groups have expressed concerns at reports that Trump would enact new tariffs on 60 billion dollars of annual Chinese imports on Thursday.

Such tariffs would raise prices on consumer goods, kill jobs and drive down financial markets, warned 45 American trade associations representing retail, technology, agriculture and other consumer-product industries in a letter to the White House on Sunday.

SHORT-SIGHTED POLICY

The Trump administration has repeatedly attributed the country's economic slowdown and job losses to trade deficits with major trading partners and vowed to change the situation by imposing tariffs and other non-tariff trade barriers if necessary.

"That will not solve America's economic problems and probably in the long term will make it worse," Robert Lawrence Kuhn, a leading China expert, told Xinhua. "And the reason is because there are these natural economic principles that you're violating by heavy tariffs."

"It helps a few Americans for a short term, a decade or more," Kuhn said, "But over the long term, it hurts America because it prevents the transformation of industry into industries that are more sustainable ...It's like going backwards to try to protect something that is not protectable in the long term."

Such tariffs are politically expedient because Trump "sort of promised that" to his supporters in the manufacturing-dependent mid-west U.S. states, which have seen great job losses in the past decade, Kuhn noted.

The loss of U.S. manufacturing jobs, as pointed out by Edward Alden, a senior fellow at the think-tank Council on Foreign Relations, in his new book "Failure to Adjust," was more about automation that increases productivity of the remaining factories in the country, which meant fewer workers working in factories.

"The problems will not be solved by bashing China," Kuhn said, "They will be solved by reeducation (of workers) over the long term, so that these people can have different kinds of, new kinds of jobs."

Trump could be "doing far more to aid manufacturers" in the mid-west through measures such as infrastructure investment and workforce-development, said Annie Lowrey, a contributing editor at The Atlantic, in an article titled The Limits of 'Made in America' Economics.

"But for now, Trump's biggest trade move would likely come at the expense of a region he has made great promises to. In trying to punish China to help the heartland, Trump seems likely to hurt it," Lowrey said of Trump's tariffs on steel and aluminum imports.

NO WINNER IN TRADE WAR

Many experts expressed their concerns that Trump's unilateral move would invite China's retaliation that would further hurt the U.S. economy.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying said on Wednesday that no one will emerge a winner from a trade war.

If the United States makes moves that harm Chinese interests, China will undoubtedly take necessary measures to safeguard its legitimate rights and interests, she said.

"The potential backlash from China could be painful," wrote John W. Schoen, an economics reporter, on Wednesday.

U.S. exports of goods and services to China supported more than 900,000 jobs in 2015, the latest data available from the U.S. Department of Commerce, he said, adding some 600,000 of those jobs were supported by goods exports and 310,000 by services exports.

Among the biggest losers would be American farmers, who in 2016 sold 21 billion dollars worth of farm products to China, the second-largest market for U.S. agricultural products, according to Schoen.

Other industries that would be prime targets for higher Chinese tariffs include aircraft (with 15 billion dollars in 2016 exports), electrical machinery (12 billion dollars), machinery (11 billion dollars) and vehicles (11 billion dollars), he said.

In general, trade disputes among World Trade Organization (WTO) members should be resolved through the WTO mechanism, not based on a member's domestic law, said Zhiqun Zhu, a professor of political science and international relations at Bucknell University in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania.

"The use of Section 301 to punish China will make people think that the United States puts its domestic rules above international law, which will further tarnish the country's international image," Zhu said.

"If the United States slaps unilateral sanctions, China will certainly make a tit-for-tat retaliation. In the end, consumers and businesses in both countries will suffer," he said.

"It's a lose-lose option," Zhu added. "In an age of globalization and interdependence, it is hard to believe that some people still think economic sanctions will solve trade problems."

(Xinhua reporter Zhang Mengxi in New York also contributed to the story)Source: Xinhua| 2018-03-22 15:35:39|Editor: Yurou

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by Raimundo Urrechaga

HAVANA, March 22 (Xinhua) -- After playing a pioneering role in Cuba, Chinese companies are showcasing their advanced technologies at the 17th International Convention and Fair in Havana.

Informatica 2018, scheduled from Monday to Friday, has attracted dozens of foreign companies to invest in the Cuban market.

GRG Banking of China, a participant in the fair, is not only a leading ATM supplier in China but a market leader in Cuba as well. Of the 936 ATMs on the island, it has supplied around 60 percent of the machines.

Vickey Li, GRG's sales manager for the Americas, told Xinhua that they have sold their machines to the Central Bank of Cuba.

"In the future we intend to offer Cuba a debit and credit card dispensing machine to make the work of banks and the lives of citizens more efficient," she said.

Chinese home appliance company Haier, which participated in previous editions as well, showed its new products, such as digital TV and high definition decoder.

"We have also collaborated for the sale of tablets, desktop computers, education and office systems," Zhang Hanqi, vice general manager of Haier New Energy Company, told Xinhua.

The company, a pioneer in this Caribbean nation, supplied 3 million electrical appliances to Cubans between 2003 and 2006 as part of a social program known as the Energy Revolution.

Haier has been in Cuba for more than 10 years. In 2012, Cuba agreed to adopt the Chinese digital television standard. Today, it covers 70 percent of Cuban territory, reaching more than 7 million people.

"This makes Cuba the country with the fastest growth in the development of digital television in the region," Zhang said. "We want to emulate here the model developed in other Latin American nations."

Haier has participated in numerous technological development projects with Cuban entities, earning the respect of the island's authorities.

In line with China's good political and economic relations with Cuba, Zhang said Haier will continue to boost cooperation with Cuba in new technologies.

"We hope Cuba's economy gets better, pushing forward bilateral trade, political and cultural exchanges, and through our high-tech products or cooperation in outputting standards," he said.

Other Chinese companies such as Huawei and Wuhan FiberHome International Technologies are also attending the fair, which has brought together some 1,700 participants from 32 countries.CANBERRA, March 22 (Xinhua) -- A pair of British backpackers who were left stranded in the Australian Outback when their vehicle flipped have said they were "very fortunate" to survive.

Brad Warren, 21, and Oliver Walker, 22, were both seriously injured when they lost control of their four-wheel-drive vehicle deep in the South Australian outback in mid-March.

Walker was thrown from the window of the vehicle and left bloodied and unconscious while Warren was temporarily half-blind from a scratch to his eye.

Both men feared for their life while they waited for help on the remote 620-km Oodnadatta Track.

"When we started rolling, I closed my eyes and thought you're dying, you just have to let this happen," Warren told News Corp Australia on Thursday.

"Next thing I was crawling out the wreckage to find Ollie lying face down. He was bloody and unconscious: I thought he was dead for about 20 seconds.

"We were very, very lucky. There was definitely a high chance of death from this sort of accident, so the injuries we escaped with are very fortunate."

The men built a tent to provide shelter from the unrelenting sun but were miraculously saved when a couple drove past and stopped to help.

James Lescohier and Laura Matthews both had a medical background and had a satellite phone which allowed them to call for help.

The British men, who were in Australia on a three-month gap year trip, were rushed to the Royal Adelaide Hospital by the Royal Flying Doctors Service where they received treatment for their injuries.

Walker was diagnosed with fractured ribs, a punctured lung and various other cuts and scratches while Warren is receiving ongoing treatment for a scraped cornea.

"James and Laura were so good to us, they saved our lives," Warren said.

"The car and our possessions are ruined, but it's very good to be alive. That's the main thing we're taking away from this."ULAN BATOR, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Turkey's Deputy Prime Minister Hakan Cavusoglu, who is visiting Mongolia, has asked Ulan Bator to hand over schools linked to the Gulen movement led by U.S.-based Turkish cleric Fethullah Gulen, the Mongolian Government press office said Thursday.

Ankara regards Gulen as the mastermind behind the failed military coup in Turkey on July 15, 2016, which left 250 people dead and nearly 2,200 injured.

"The presence of schools linked to Gulen in Mongolia could damage friendly bilateral ties between our two countries. Therefore, Mongolia should hand over the schools to Turkey's Maarif Foundation," Cavusoglu said at a meeting with his Mongolian counterpart Ulziisaikhan Enkhtuvshin.

Turkey established the Maarif Foundation in 2016 to take over the administration of overseas schools linked to Gulen. Turkey claims that the schools serve Gulen movement's objective of infiltrating state institutions.

Enkhtuvshin said the Mongolian Government has always stood with Turkey in its fight against terrorism. It would pay attention to the issue and take necessary steps to hand over these schools to the Maarif Foundation.

There are five Turkish schools in Mongolia with around 2,000 students. The schools have been teaching science and English to Mongolian kids for two decades.CANBERRA, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Australian online shoppers will be hit with a 5 Australian dollar (3.88 U.S. dollar) tax for every parcel posted from overseas under a new government plan.

Parcels containing clothing, makeup and books worth less than 1,000 AUD (776 USD) will be subject to the tax, which the Department of Home Affairs said would counter the soaring cost of security screening inbound parcels.

The proposal has been condemned by the opposition Australian Labor Party (ALP), calling it "yet another new tax from the supposed 'low tax' government."

"The new import taxes will affect millions of Australian consumers who purchase online and from overseas retailers every year," ALP Consumer Affairs spokesperson Tim Hammond said in a statement.

Approximately 38.7 million parcels worth less than 1,000 AUD each arrived in Australia in the financial year ending in June 2017, a 22 percent increase on the previous year.

According to a Department of Home Affairs discussion paper, that figure is projected to increase by a further 31 percent over the next four years.

The department said the parcels were putting the country's bio-security budget under pressure because each one was subject to security screening.

"As the volume of imported low value consignments continues to grow, so too do the costs of biosecurity, cargo and trade border activities for those consignments," the paper, published by Fairfax Media on Wednesday night, said.

"This has created increasing inequity and cross-subsidisation, where importers of high value consignments are paying for the border activities attributable to other users."

Under the proposal, freight and express couriers would be hit with the tax, but the industry has made it clear that any additional costs would be passed on to consumers.Source: Xinhua| 2018-03-22 16:05:49|Editor: Yurou

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SHANGHAI, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Large amounts of artificially-bred fish fry are expected to be released into the Yangtze River from Thursday to increase the river's aquatic stocks.

Thursday coincided with the World Water Day. Releasing fish fry was one of many water conservation activities held to raise public awareness of water resource preservation.

In Shanghai, around 200,000 fish fry were released into the river Thursday morning.

The municipal fisheries department said about 100 million fry from over 20 species of fish will be released into major fish breeding bays and lakes in the lower reaches of the river.

The annual three-month fishing ban took effect in Yangtze River, the longest river in China, and its major tributaries on Feb. 16.

The released fish fry will help replenish the fish stock in the river, according to the department.Source: Xinhua| 2018-03-22 16:15:52|Editor: Yurou

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BEIJING, March 22 (Xinhua) -- China will hold a high-profile summit in the coastal province of Fujian from April 22 to 24, to give an extra push to its booming digital development, according to a State Council Information Office press conference held Thursday.

The 1st Digital China Summit will be held in Fuzhou, the provincial capital. The Cyberspace Administration of China, the National Development and Reform Commission, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, and the Fujian government are jointly running the event.

The theme of the summit will be "Facilitating information-driven development and a digitalized China," according to the press conference.

The summit will serve as a platform for policy updates and industry communication, as well as a product showcases, said Zhuang Rongwen, deputy head of the Cyberspace Administration of China.

An expo will be held during the event to exhibit China's achievements in digital economy and digitalized government administration in recent years.

The summit will create cooperation opportunities for businesses and research institutes attending the event, according to the press conference.

"Our goal is to facilitate the development of China's digital economy and digitalized administration," Zhuang said.Source: Xinhua| 2018-03-22 16:56:01|Editor: Zhou Xin

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RAMADI, Iraq, March 22 (Xinhua) -- The Islamic State (IS) militants on Thursday killed four border guards in an ambush near the Iraqi border with neighboring Jordan, a security source said.

The incident occurred after midnight when the extremist militants opened fire on the car carrying the border guards, who were in civilian uniform, and killed them all on the main road near Trebil border crossing with Jordan, Major Mohammed al-Obeidi from the Border Guards Command told Xinhua.

Iraqi security forces launched a search campaign in the area looking for the attackers, Obeidi said.

During the past few months, dozens of IS militants fled their former urban strongholds near the borders of Syria and Jordan, as well as in other Iraqi provinces in north of Baghdad after the Iraqi forces carried out major anti-IS offensives.

However, remnants of IS militants resorted to hideouts in the vast desert in western Iraq and rugged areas in north and east of the country to continue their almost daily attacks against civilians and Iraqi forces.

On Dec. 9, 2017, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi officially declared full liberation of Iraq from IS militants after Iraqi forces recaptured all the areas once seized by the extremist group.

However, small groups and individuals of IS militants regrouped and are carrying out attacks against the security forces and civilians despite operations from time to time to hunt them down. :     ,            

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Source: Xinhua| 2018-03-22 17:11:05|Editor: Zhou Xin

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Photo provided by Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency shows rescuers working on the scene to search and rescue the missing crew members of a capsized sand dredger in the waters off southern Malaysian state of Johor, on March 22, 2018. Divers have been deployed while air being pumped into the sand dredger that capsized in the waters off Malaysia in the Malacca Strait to search for and rescue the missing crew members, officials said Thursday. Malaysian launched search and rescue operations after a sand dredging vessel capsized Wednesday in the waters off its southern Johor state, leaving at least one dead and 14 crew members missing.(Xinhua/MMEA)

MUAR, Malaysia, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Divers have been deployed while air being pumped into the sand dredger that capsized in the waters off Malaysia in the Malacca Strait to search for the missing crew members, officials said Thursday.

Zulkifili Abu Bakar, director general of Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency (MMEA), the country's coast guard, said the rescuers were towing the capsized vessel to the shallow waters nearer to the shore where it could "sit" on the seabed.

Once the ship is stabilized, divers would get into the ship to rescue those trapped inside. Some of the 14 missing crew members are believed to be trapped inside the ship as knocking sound were heard.

Zulkifili said those missing might be trapped inside the engine room.

"Before we send in the divers, the ship must be stable and not to sway. If it is not stable, that would not only endanger those we want to rescue but also our divers," he told a press conference.

If the ship could not be stabilized, the rescuers would have to tow the ship further closer to the shore where it could run aground, Zulkifili said, pointing out that this would take more time.

"What is important is the time," he said, adding that the operation would be conducted day and night.

Officials said earlier that air was being pumped into the ship to keep it afloat.

The Malaysian navy have sent 23 divers and more than 100 personnel to join the search and rescue operations with personnel and divers from MMEA, marine police, firefighters and professional divers.

"The divers will be facing challenges as there would be many objects floating inside a capsized vessel, as well as difficulty to open hatch doors due to air pressure,"said Tay Yap Leong, commander of the navy's diving team.

The Chinese embassy in Malaysia said its officials had arrived at the search and rescue operation center to coordinate the efforts. Search and rescue personnel from China have also arrived in Malaysia and joined the operations.

Malaysia launched search and rescue operations after a sand dredging vessel capsized Wednesday in the waters off its southern Johor state, leaving at least one dead and 14 crew members missing.

Among the 16 Chinese crew members, one was dead, 12 were missing while three were rescued. A Malaysian and an Indonesian were also onboard, who were also missing.KAMPALA, March 22 (Xinhua) -- At least 36 refugees from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) died last month following an outbreak of cholera in western Uganda, the World Health Organization (WHO) said in a statement Thursday.

In the statement, the WHO said the cumulative number of reported cases is now 1,747, with 36 deaths, since Feb. 23, when the outbreak in the refugee settlements in the southwestern districts of Hoima and Kyegegwa was declared.

On Monday, 20 new patients were admitted to the Cholera Treatment Centers, most of whom were new arrivals that just fled the ethnic violence between the Lendu and Hema in DRC's northeastern Ituri Province.

The WHO said it has assisted the district health team to streamline the process of identifying, reporting, and recording cases leading to regular and standardized situation reports.

The statement noted that the DRC's health ministry and district authorities are working closely with UN High Commissioner for Refugees, UN International Children's Emergency Fund, the WHO, Uganda Red Cross Society, and other partners.

At least some 50,000 refugees from the DRC's Ituri Province have sought refuge-status in Uganda this year following the violence which erupted on Dec. 17, 2017.Source: Xinhua| 2018-03-22 17:21:08|Editor: Zhou Xin

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DAMASCUS, March 22 (Xinhua) -- The Syrian army on Thursday removed barriers at the entrance of the rebel-held area of Harasta east of the capital Damascus as a prelude to the evacuation of 1,500 militants, according to the state TV and Xinhua reporter.

According to Xinhua reporter at the site, Red Crescent vehicles have also started moving into Harasta for the evacuation of the wounded as part of the agreement that will see the departure of 1,500 rebels and 6,000 civilians of their families toward rebel-held areas in northern Syria.

The evacuation agreement was supposed to kick off, in terms of the actual evacuation of civilians and the rebels, at 7:00 a.m. (0500 GMT), but was pushed back for several hours and the evacuees will depart in two batches.

The civilians, who are not wishing to go with the rebels, will remain in Harasta, a key bastion of the Ahrar al-Sham group.

The evacuation of the rebels from Harasta will mark the first major departure of rebels from Eastern Ghouta area after thousands of civilians fled several towns and areas in that sprawling countryside in recent days.

Harasta overlooks the main international road connecting the capital Damascus with central and northern Syria.

When rebels captured Harasta in early 2012, the road was highly threatened with snipers, which pushed the people to take a longer road around the capital in the western part to reach central and northern Syria from Damascus.

The evacuation comes also as the Syrian forces completely besieged Harasta, after advancing in Eastern Ghouta and splitting that region into three parts, one of which was Harasta.

A day earlier, a total of 30 rebels surrendered to the Syrian army after evacuating the Harasta city, the War Media, the media wing of the Syrian army, said.

The surrendering rebels reached the humanitarian corridor established recently by the Syrian army near the Water Resources facility in Harasta, said the report.

The evacuees will leave toward rebel-held areas in the northwestern province of Idlib, the report added.

Also Wednesday, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said as many as 140 families evacuated Harasta toward government-controlled areas in Damascus after a corridor was opened between both areas.

The pro-government al-Watan online newspaper said on Wednesday the Ahrar al-Sham rebels could leave Harasta soon after declaring the acceptance of their evacuation.HANOI, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Toyota Vietnam is recalling 20,490 Corolla and Lexus cars whose faulty airbag inflator modules could be broken, and metal debris could injure passengers.

The recall included 16,964 Corollas assembled in Vietnam between Jan. 4, 2010 and Dec. 29, 2012, according to the Japanese-invested company on Thursday.

Airbag inflator modules provided by Japanese firm Takata could be affected by humidity, so when front passenger airbag systems are activated, the release of inert gas could sometimes generate too much pressure inside the modules and make them break.

Vietnam spent 419 million U.S. dollars importing automobiles and components for assembly in the first two months of this year, dropping 49 percent against the same period last year, said the country's General Statistics Office.

Specifically, Vietnam imported 500 completely-built automobiles worth 35 million U.S. dollars, down 96.5 percent and 88.5 percent, respectively.Source: Xinhua| 2018-03-22 17:41:14|Editor: Zhou Xin

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BEIJING, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Premier Li Keqiang and his Canadian counterpart Justin Trudeau sent congratulatory messages to the opening ceremony of the 2018 China-Canada Tourism Year, which was launched in Toronto, Canada on Wednesday.

Served as a window to connect with each other and a link of friendship, tourism is a significant area of cooperation between China and Canada, Li said in his message.

Tourism between the two countries has been more convenient in recent years, leading the mutual visits scale to over 1.5 million person times in 2017, a new historical record, Li said.

The 2018 China-Canada Tourism Year will bring new opportunities for both sides to expand tourism exchanges, strengthen people-to-people and cultural exchanges, and deepen practical cooperation, he added.

We look forward to the joint efforts of both sides to promote the dissemination of the seeds of friendship between the two peoples in their wonderful tourism experience, Li said.

He further noted that in recent years, the China-Canada strategic partnership has been deepened and the achievements of practical cooperation have continued to benefit the two peoples.

China is willing to work with the Canadian side to continuously strengthen exchanges at the top and all levels, expand practical cooperation in such areas as economy and trade, technology, education, culture and regions, strengthen coordination and cooperation in international affairs, and jointly create a new "Golden Decade" of bilateral relations, Li said.Source: Xinhua| 2018-03-22 17:51:16|Editor: Zhou Xin

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DAMASCUS, March 22 (Xinhua) -- A total of 13 Syrian soldiers who were kidnapped by the rebels in the Damascus' eastern city of Harasta were released on Thursday, as part of an agreement that will see the evacuation of rebels and their families from that area as well as kidnapped Syrian soldiers, according to the state TV.

The kidnapped soldiers were the first to leave Harasta on Thursday before the evacuation of the rebels and their families from that area in the Eastern Ghouta countryside of Damascus.

The soldiers reached the government-controlled part at the entrance of Harasta, as the Syrian warplanes were flying at a low altitude over that city.

The agreement will see the evacuation of 1,500 rebels and 6,000 civilians of their families.

Also, 40 busses entered Harasta as well as ambulances of the Syrian Arab Red Crescent (SARC) to evacuate the rebels and their families from that area.Source: Xinhua| 2018-03-22 18:01:19|Editor: Yurou

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DAMASCUS, March 22 (Xinhua) -- A total of 13 Syrian soldiers who were kidnapped by the rebels in the Damascus' eastern city of Harasta were released on Thursday, as part of an agreement that will see the evacuation of rebels and their families from that area as well as kidnapped Syrian soldiers, according to the state TV.

The kidnapped soldiers were the first to leave Harasta on Thursday before the evacuation of the rebels and their families from that area in the Eastern Ghouta countryside of Damascus.

The soldiers reached the government-controlled part at the entrance of Harasta, as the Syrian warplanes were flying at a low altitude over that city.

The agreement will see the evacuation of 1,500 rebels and 6,000 civilians of their families.

Also, 40 busses entered Harasta as well as ambulances of the Syrian Arab Red Crescent (SARC) to evacuate the rebels and their families from that area.

Earlier on Thursday, the Syrian army removed barriers at the entrance of the rebel-held area of Harasta as a prelude to the evacuation of the militiamen and their families.

The evacuation agreement was supposed to kick off, in terms of the actual evacuation of civilians and the rebels, at 7:00 a.m. (0500 GMT), but was pushed back for several hours and the evacuees will depart in two batches.

The civilians, who are not wishing to go with the rebels, will remain in Harasta, a key bastion of the Ahrar al-Sham group.

The evacuation of the rebels from Harasta will mark the first major departure of rebels from Eastern Ghouta area after thousands of civilians fled several towns and areas in that sprawling countryside in recent days.

Harasta overlooks the main international road connecting the capital Damascus with central and northern Syria.

When rebels captured Harasta in early 2012, the road was highly threatened with snipers, which pushed the people to take a longer road around the capital in the western part to reach central and northern Syria from Damascus.

The evacuation comes also as the Syrian forces completely besieged Harasta, after advancing in Eastern Ghouta and splitting that region into three parts, one of which was Harasta.

A day earlier, a total of 30 rebels surrendered to the Syrian army after evacuating the Harasta city, the War Media, the media wing of the Syrian army, said.

The surrendering rebels reached the humanitarian corridor established recently by the Syrian army near the Water Resources facility in Harasta, said the report.

The evacuees will leave toward rebel-held areas in the northwestern province of Idlib, the report added.

Also Wednesday, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said as many as 140 families evacuated Harasta toward government-controlled areas in Damascus after a corridor was opened between both areas.

The pro-government al-Watan online newspaper said on Wednesday the Ahrar al-Sham rebels could leave Harasta soon after declaring the acceptance of their evacuation.Source: Xinhua| 2018-03-22 18:16:22|Editor: Yurou

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DOHA, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Qatar has condemned the terrorist attack that took place in the Afghan capital Kabul, Qatar news agency (QNA) reported on Thursday.

In a statement, Qatar's Ministry of Foreign Affairs reiterated the country's firm stance on the rejection of violence and terrorism regardless of motives and reasons.

Qatar also expressed its condolences to the families of victims, the government and the people of Afghanistan, wishing the injured speedy recovery, the statement added.

On Wednesday, a suicide bomber detonated his explosives while walking among a group of people near Kabul University and Ali Abad hospital, killing at least 33 people and injuring 65 others.

Later, the Islamic State (IS) claimed responsibility for the attack.

Since the beginning of 2018, Afghanistan has been witnessing a series of attacks which launched by the IS and the Taliban, killing and wounding dozens of victims.ULAN BATOR, March 22 (Xinhua) -- The 10th Mongolia Mineral Exploration Forum held here on Thursday to boost the development of geological explorations and mineral industry in Mongolia.

Mongolia has attached large importance to "the development of value-added products, job creation and economic expansion by encouraging domestic and foreign investors" and also has been keen to "strengthen the public-private partnership," Dolgorsuren Sumiyabazar, minister of Mining and Heavy Industry said at the opening ceremony.

The mining industry accounts for about a quarter of the country's gross domestic product (GDP) and more than 90 percent of exports in Mongolia, he added.

Officials and investors from over 10 countries attended the two-day annual event.

In addition, an investors' business meeting will be organized on the second day of the forum to provide a platform for businessmen to introduce their projects.Source: Xinhua| 2018-03-22 18:56:33|Editor: Lifang

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Sok Siphana (1st L), chair of the National Secretariat of Cambodia for the Lancang-Mekong Cooperation (LMC), speaks during a celebration event in Phnom Penh, Cambodia on March 22, 2018. In the celebration of the first annual LMC Week, Cambodia on Thursday introduced the LMC to approximately 400 officials and university students here.(Xinhua/Sovannara)

PHNOM PENH, March 22 (Xinhua) -- In the celebration of the first annual Lancang-Mekong Cooperation (LMC) Week, Cambodia on Thursday introduced the LMC to approximately 400 officials and university students here.

Initiated by China in 2014, the LMC aimed to advance all-around cooperation among the six Lancang-Mekong countries, said Sok Siphana, chair of the National Secretariat of Cambodia for the LMC.

The LMC consists of six-member countries, namely China, Cambodia, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand and Vietnam.

"Its main objective is to create a community of shared future, peace, and prosperity," he said.

Siphana, who is also an advisor to the Cambodian government, added that the LMC was also to promote peace, stability, and development in the region, and to contribute to boosting the China's proposed Belt and Road Initiative.

He said the LMC focused on three pillars, namely political-security cooperation, economic cooperation, and socio-cultural cooperation, and five priority areas of cooperation, namely connectivity, production capacity, cross-border economic cooperation, water resources management and agriculture, and poverty reduction.

The first LMC Leaders' Meeting was convened in Sanya city of southern China's Hainan province in March 2016, and the 2nd LMC Leaders' Meeting was held in Phnom Penh, capital of Cambodia, in Jan. 2018.

According to Siphana, China had been playing a key role in building a community of shared future in the Lancang-Mekong countries.

He said at the 2nd LMC Leaders' Meeting, China announced the setup of a 5-billion-U.S.-dollar credit line for supporting production capacity and equipment manufacturing cooperation among the Lancang-Mekong countries.

Also, China pledged another 7 billion yuan (1.1 billion U.S. dollars) preferential loan for foreign aid to support cooperation projects from 2019 to 2020, he said.

Originating from the Qinghai-Tibet plateau in southwest China, the river is called the Lancang River in China and the Mekong River as it flows through Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, and Vietnam before emptying into the sea.Source: Xinhua| 2018-03-22 18:56:33|Editor: Yurou

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GAZA, March 22 (Xinhua) -- The man behind the failed assassination of Palestinian prime minister last week was arrested in Gaza on Thursday, sources in Hamas-run interior ministry told Xinhua, adding two policemen were killed during the operation.

A shootout broke out with the suspect who was hiding in a house in the central Gaza Strip refugee camp of al-Nussairat, added the source on condition of anonymity.

Late on Wednesday, the Hamas interior ministry identified the suspect, adding that its security services had launched a search operation to nab him.Source: Xinhua| 2018-03-22 19:26:41|Editor: ZD

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Photo provided by Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency shows rescuers working on the scene to search and rescue the missing crew members of a capsized sand dredger in the waters off southern Malaysian state of Johor, on March 22, 2018. Divers have been deployed while air being pumped into the sand dredger that capsized in the waters off Malaysia in the Malacca Strait to search for and rescue the missing crew members, officials said Thursday. Malaysian launched search and rescue operations after a sand dredging vessel capsized Wednesday in the waters off its southern Johor state, leaving at least one dead and 14 crew members missing.(Xinhua/MMEA)

MUAR, Malaysia, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Divers have entered the sand dredger that capsized in the waters off Malaysia in the Malacca Strait to search for the missing crew members, officials said Thursday.

Abu Bakar Bin Idris of the Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency (MMEA), the country's coast guard, said the vessel had been towed to a shallow water area three nautical miles from the shore.

"The ship is very stable, we are conducting the searching operation and two divers are already in the ship," he told a press conference.

He said the search operations would continue at night as necessary equipment had been prepared. Rescuers were also pumping air into the ship.

Zulkifili Abu Bakar, MMEA's director general, said earlier that the 14 missing crew members were believed to be trapped inside the ship as knocking sound was heard.

The Malaysian navy have sent 23 divers and more than 100 personnel to join the search and rescue operations with personnel and divers from MMEA, marine police, firefighters and professional divers.

The Chinese Embassy in Malaysia said its officials had arrived at the search and rescue operation center to coordinate the efforts. Search and rescue personnel from China have also arrived in Malaysia and joined the operations.

Malaysia launched search and rescue operations after a sand dredging vessel capsized Wednesday in the waters off its southern Johor state, leaving at least one dead and 14 crew members missing.

Among the 16 Chinese crew members, one was dead, 12 were missing while three were rescued. A Malaysian and an Indonesian were also onboard, who were also missing.Source: Xinhua| 2018-03-22 19:26:42|Editor: ZD

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JERUSALEM, March 22 (Xinhua) -- The Israel-U.S. joint military exercise, dubbed Juniper Cobra 2018, the largest drill of this kind, has ended, said the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) on Thursday.

During the past several weeks, the aerial defense and ground forces of the IDF and the U.S. European Command trained together in the drill, which started on March 4, involving a variety of scenarios.

The Aerial Defense Command deployed batteries of the various aerial defense systems and practiced computerized simulations to protect the State of Israel from a ballistic missile threat, said the Israeli army.

Nearly 5,000 troops from both sides have been participating in the drill, a biennial event that has been held nine times since 2001.

Combined exercises were also held for the combat soldiers of the Paratroopers' Reconnaissance Unit and the U.S. Marines. In these exercises, the forces practiced combined urban warfare, neutralizing explosive devices, use of artillery, drills combining armored vehicles, and the evacuation of wounded personnel, said the IDF.

The IDF's Counter-Terror Training Academy also hosted the U.S. Marines for training purposes and held a combined exercise with the Egoz Commando unit.

Also, logistics and medical forces from the IDF Technology and Logistics Directorate also trained alongside their U.S. counterparts in an exercise including a mass casualty scenario, evacuation of wounded by helicopter, and the use of advanced technology, according to the Israeli army.

Israel and the U.S. share core values and complement each other in their operational and military cooperation, and send a clear and powerful message to the entire region, said Maj. Gen. Nitzan Alon, head of the IDF Operations Directorate.

"The complex reality in the Middle East, including the activities of the global Jihad and other terror organizations, creates an array of challenges for the State of Israel and its partner, the United States of America," he stressed.

"Juniper Cobra 2018 is proved to be an incredibly challenging and realistic scenario, which required trust, communication and collaboration with our Israeli partners," said Lt. Gen. Richard Clark, the U.S. 3rd Air Force Commander. "The relationships built over the last two weeks help bolster our interoperability and pave the path for future engagements and exercises."

With U.S. funding and support, Israel has developed several systems like the "Arrow", "Iron Dome," "Patriot" and "David Sling," all used in the drill.Source: Xinhua| 2018-03-22 19:36:46|Editor: Zhou Xin

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ZHENGZHOU, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Police in central China's Henan Province have seized 107 suspects in connection to a telecom fraud case.

Police in Xinyang City said Thursday the case involved more than 20 million yuan (about 3.2 million U.S. dollars), and six dens were broken up.

Last August, police found that a company promoted online gambling through WeChat, a popular instant messaging tool. They then started investigating the company.

After six months of investigation, another five companies were also discovered to be involved in online gambling.Source: Xinhua| 2018-03-22 20:01:51|Editor: ZD

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BEIJING, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping's special representative Yang Jiechi will pay an official visit to South Africa from March 23 to 24, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson said Thursday.

Yang, who is a member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, was invited by the government of South Africa, spokesperson Hua Chunying said.

Hua said Yang will meet the leaders of South Africa, and both sides will exchange views on bilateral ties, this year's Beijing Summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, and the Johannesburg Summit of the BRICS emerging-market bloc.

Yang's visit is important and aims to promote bilateral ties and cooperation to benefit the two countries and the two peoples, Hua said at a regular press briefing.

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic ties between the two countries, Hua said, noting that China and South Africa have seen in-depth development of bilateral ties, featuring good momentum in political mutual trust, economic and trade cooperation, people-to-people exchanges and strategic collaboration.

China attaches great importance to developing relations with South Africa, and is willing to work together to deepen friendly cooperation in various areas and promote the comprehensive strategic partnership, Hua said.Source: Xinhua| 2018-03-22 20:13:14|Editor: Zhou Xin

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Citizens visit the 2018 Nanjing Book Fair in Nanjing, capital of east China's Jiangsu Province, March 22, 2018. The four-day book fair, displaying more than 300,000 kinds of books, kicked off here Thursday. (Xinhua/Sun Can)Photo taken on Nov. 27, 2017 shows the first electric bus in Cuba of the Yutong Company, in Havana, Cuba. A singular green bus manufactured by a Chinese company has been circulating the streets of Havana for several days, marking a milestone in Cuba's history of public transportation. (Xinhua)

by Raimundo Urrechaga

HAVANA, March 22 (Xinhua) -- After playing a pioneering role in Cuba, Chinese companies are showcasing their advanced technologies at the 17th International Convention and Fair in Havana.

Informatica 2018, scheduled from Monday to Friday, has attracted dozens of foreign companies to invest in the Cuban market.

GRG Banking of China, a participant in the fair, is not only a leading ATM supplier in China but a market leader in Cuba as well. Of the 936 ATMs on the island, it has supplied around 60 percent of the machines.

Vickey Li, GRG's sales manager for the Americas, told Xinhua that they have sold their machines to the Central Bank of Cuba.

"In the future we intend to offer Cuba a debit and credit card dispensing machine to make the work of banks and the lives of citizens more efficient," she said.

Chinese home appliance company Haier, which participated in previous editions as well, showed its new products, such as digital TV and high definition decoder.

"We have also collaborated for the sale of tablets, desktop computers, education and office systems," Zhang Hanqi, vice general manager of Haier New Energy Company, told Xinhua.

The company, a pioneer in this Caribbean nation, supplied 3 million electrical appliances to Cubans between 2003 and 2006 as part of a social program known as the Energy Revolution.

Haier has been in Cuba for more than 10 years. In 2012, Cuba agreed to adopt the Chinese digital television standard. Today, it covers 70 percent of Cuban territory, reaching more than 7 million people.

A stand of China takes part in the 2nd edition of the International Convention and Exhibition Industry of Cuba, in Havana, capital of Cuba, on June 21, 2016. (Xinhua/Joaquin Hernandez)



"This makes Cuba the country with the fastest growth in the development of digital television in the region," Zhang said. "We want to emulate here the model developed in other Latin American nations."

Haier has participated in numerous technological development projects with Cuban entities, earning the respect of the island's authorities.

In line with China's good political and economic relations with Cuba, Zhang said Haier will continue to boost cooperation with Cuba in new technologies.

"We hope Cuba's economy gets better, pushing forward bilateral trade, political and cultural exchanges, and through our high-tech products or cooperation in outputting standards," he said.

Other Chinese companies such as Huawei and Wuhan FiberHome International Technologies are also attending the fair, which has brought together some 1,700 participants from 32 countries.U.S. Marine sits on top of an armored personnel carrier during Juniper Cobra, a U.S.-Israel joint air defence exercise in southern Israel, March 12, 2018. (Reuters photo)

JERUSALEM, March 22 (Xinhua) -- The Israel-U.S. joint military exercise, dubbed Juniper Cobra 2018, the largest drill of this kind, has ended, said the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) on Thursday.

During the past several weeks, the aerial defense and ground forces of the IDF and the U.S. European Command trained together in the drill, which started on March 4, involving a variety of scenarios.

The Aerial Defense Command deployed batteries of the various aerial defense systems and practiced computerized simulations to protect the State of Israel from a ballistic missile threat, said the Israeli army.

Nearly 5,000 troops from both sides have been participating in the drill, a biennial event that has been held nine times since 2001.

Combined exercises were also held for the combat soldiers of the Paratroopers' Reconnaissance Unit and the U.S. Marines. In these exercises, the forces practiced combined urban warfare, neutralizing explosive devices, use of artillery, drills combining armored vehicles, and the evacuation of wounded personnel, said the IDF.

The IDF's Counter-Terror Training Academy also hosted the U.S. Marines for training purposes and held a combined exercise with the Egoz Commando unit.

Also, logistics and medical forces from the IDF Technology and Logistics Directorate also trained alongside their U.S. counterparts in an exercise including a mass casualty scenario, evacuation of wounded by helicopter, and the use of advanced technology, according to the Israeli army.

Israel and the U.S. share core values and complement each other in their operational and military cooperation, and send a clear and powerful message to the entire region, said Maj. Gen. Nitzan Alon, head of the IDF Operations Directorate.

"The complex reality in the Middle East, including the activities of the global Jihad and other terror organizations, creates an array of challenges for the State of Israel and its partner, the United States of America," he stressed.

"Juniper Cobra 2018 is proved to be an incredibly challenging and realistic scenario, which required trust, communication and collaboration with our Israeli partners," said Lt. Gen. Richard Clark, the U.S. 3rd Air Force Commander. "The relationships built over the last two weeks help bolster our interoperability and pave the path for future engagements and exercises."

With U.S. funding and support, Israel has developed several systems like the "Arrow", "Iron Dome," "Patriot" and "David Sling," all used in the drill.Source: Xinhua| 2018-03-22 20:37:05|Editor: Yurou

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JAKARTA, March 22 (Xinhua) -- The Indonesian branch of China's technology giant Huawei signed here Thursday a memorandum of understanding (MoU) document of its training program for students of Indonesian vocational schools.

The signing was conducted by Huawei Indonesia CEO Liu Haosheng and representatives of 12 vocational schools in the country, witnessed by Charge D'Affaires of Chinese Embassy Sun Weide, Communications and Information (Kominfo) Minister Rudiantara and senior officials of manpower and national education ministries here.

Speaking prior to the signing, Liu said the Huawei's information and communications technology (ICT) training program, called SmartGen, would affect at least 1,000 Indonesian vocational school students involved in the program activities.

The SmartGen program for Indonesian vocational school students will be conducted through in-class tutoring and in the field, enabling them to directly practice the knowledge they obtain in class with actual situation in the field.

Huawei initiated the SmartGen IT training program in Indonesia by embracing seven universities last year for the same purposes.

Meanwhile, conveying greetings of Chinese Ambassador Xiao Qian upon the Huawei's training program, Sun Weide expected that students taking part in the program would be able to hone themselves up in IT sector that would eventually support their family and the country in developing the economy.

Kominfo Minister Rudiantara praised the program, saying it would greatly help the nation in creating IT talents which are greatly needed due to government's current digital economy drive.

He pledged that the program would be fully supported by government's related agencies during the its activities that would run until September.Source: Xinhua| 2018-03-22 20:37:06|Editor: Yurou

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JINAN, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Li Yunfeng, former executive vice governor of Jiangsu Province, was sentenced to 12 years in prison Thursday for taking bribes of over 14 million yuan (2.2 million U.S. dollars).

His illegal gains will be retrieved and turned in to national treasury. He was also fined 1.5 million yuan, according to a statement by a court in the city of Heze, Shandong Province.

The court found that between 2003 and 2014, Li took advantage of his various posts to provide help in construction project contracting, project planning and personnel promotion for certain companies and individuals.

In return, he accepted gifts and money worth over 14.77 million yuan, either by himself or through "specific affiliated persons," it said.

The statement said the court handed down the sentence while taking into consideration the fact that Li confessed to his crimes, showed repentance and was cooperative in returning all his illegal gains.PRAGUE, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Six people have been killed and two others heavily injured when a chemical plant exploded on Thursday morning in Kralupy nad Vltavou, a town in the north of Prague, said Czech regional rescuers spokeswoman Petra Effenbergerova.

Effenbergerova said the blast occurred after 10 a.m.local time due to the explosion of an uncertain container at the site during disassembling of some construction. Emergency crew including helicopters rescued the victims to the hospitals of Prague.

Fire spokesman Petr Svoboda said the risk of further blasts has been identified and eliminated.

The Unipetrol factory spokesman Pavel Kaidl said that more information will come in the next hours. He also admitted that the explosion shall not cause any damage to the city and civilians as it's distantly located.

At the moment, a number of hospitals in the capital have been put on a high alert to meet any emergency if more injured would be reported later.

Czech President Milos Zeman and Prime Minister Andrej Babis have expressed their sincere condolences to the survivors of the explosion at the chemical company. Interior Minister Lubomir Metnar arrived at the site for further investigation.

The incident is considered to be one of the most tragical one happened at the industrial site in the Czech Republic since the 1960s.PRAGUE, March 22 (Xinhua) -- An explosion at a chemical plant in the northern region of the Czech Republic on Thursday has killed at least six people and injured several others, local news agency CTK reported.

"We have received information about six dead and several others seriously injured," the CTK quoted regional firefighter spokeswoman Vladimira Kerekova as saying.

Two people have been taken to the hospital, she said.

A spokesman for Unipetrol, the company that owns the plant, also confirmed the incident, which occurred at around 10 a.m. local time (0900 GMT) in the town of Kralupy nad Vltavou, 30 km (19 miles) northwest of the capital Prague.

There was no risk of further explosions, reports said.

Local authorities said they have launched an investigation to determine the cause.Source: Xinhua| 2018-03-22 20:47:13|Editor: Xiang Bo

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DALIAN, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Fourteen people have been punished for accountability in a chemical plant fire in Dalian, a port in northeast China's Liaoning Province, last August.

According to the investigation report released Thursday, the fire that broke out on Aug. 17, 2017 in a subsidiary of the state-owned PetroChina Company Limited in the coastal city was caused by a leak in a pump in a catalytic cracking unit capable of producing 1.4 million tonnes of heavy oil annually. The fire was put out within hours and there were no casualties.

Vulnerabilities in operation and safety management were also blamed as an indirect cause.

The general manager and the Party secretary of the subsidiary were given a demerit and an administrative warning, respectively. The other 12 employees of the company were dismissed, removed from their posts, given serious demerits to their records or given administrative warnings.Source: Xinhua| 2018-03-22 20:52:14|Editor: Yurou

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WUHAN, March 22 (Xinhua) -- A suspect has been returned to China from Spain as part of the campaign against economic fugitives, police in Hubei Province announced on Thursday.

It is the first suspect that Hubei police have brought back from Spain during the Fox Hunt campaign.

According to Hubei police, suspect Li raised through illegal means more than 47 million yuan (7.4 million U.S. dollars) of public funds between November 2010 and January 2015.

The people's procuratorate of Zhongxiang city in Hubei Province approved his arrest on charges of illegal acquisition of public funds in March 2017. Interpol issued a red notice for Li in June 2017.

China requested the extradition of Li via diplomatic channels after the Spanish police apprehended him in July 2017.

Spanish police handed him over to China's "Fox Hunt" team in Spain and he was taken to Hubei Province on Thursday.

The Fox Hunt campaign targets economic crime suspects who have fled overseas.PARIS, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy said Wednesday that accusations he received Libyan funding for his 2007 election campaign were a "calumny" that had no evidence, Le Figaro newspaper reported Thursday.

"I am accused without any material evidence," the paper cited Sarkozy as telling magistrates who put him under investigation.

Late on Wednesday, a panel of French judges decided to place the 63-year-old former president under formal investigation for allegedly accepting bribes and illegal campaign financing from Libya.

Sarkozy, who served as president of France from May 2007 to May 2012, was also placed under judicial control.

A judicial inquiry was opened as early as in April 2013 into the suspected irregularities in the former president's campaign funding after investigative online journal Mediapart unveiled that Libya had offered money to finance his campaign.

In 2016, French-Lebanese businessman Ziad Takieddine revealed to Mediapart that he had delivered three suitcases containing 5 million euros (6.18 million U.S. dollars) in cash from then Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi to Sarkozy, as well as to Sarkozy's former chief of staff and campaign director Claude Gueant between 2006 and 2007.

Takieddine said he had given a written deposition to judges on Nov. 12, 2016, detailing the cash handovers and his meetings with them.

In a court statement, Sarkozy said that the accusations are a manipulation of Gaddafi or his gang.Source: Xinhua| 2018-03-22 20:57:17|Editor: Lifang

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A member of Palestinian security forces loyal to Hamas takes position during an operation in al-Nussairat refugee camp, in the central Gaza Strip, on March 22, 2018. Hamas-run police in Gaza killed Thursday two suspects of last week's failed assassination attempt of Palestinian prime minister in the Gaza Strip. (Xinhua/Wissam Nassar)

GAZA, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Hamas-run police in Gaza killed Thursday two suspects of last week's failed assassination attempt of Palestinian prime minister in the Gaza Strip.

The interior ministry in Gaza, run by Islamic Hamas movement, said in a statement that the police surrounded three suspects in a house in the central Gaza Strip refugee camp of al-Nussairat and asked them to surrender.

However, the statement said, the suspects opened fire at the police, killing two policemen before the main suspect, named as Anas Abu Khoussa, was shot dead during the shootout.

"The other two suspects were injured, but one of them died later of his wounds," said the statement.

Late on Wednesday, the Hamas interior ministry identified the main suspect, adding that its security services had launched a search operation to nab him.

Last week, a blast hit the convoy of Palestinian Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah during a rare visit to the Israeli-blockaded Gaza Strip.

The explosion occurred shortly after the convoy entered Gaza.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas accused Hamas Movement of being responsible for bombing Hamdallah's convoy.

The incident cast more negative shadows on the already faltering reconciliation process between Hamas and Abbas' Fatah party.

Last October, Hamas and Fatah parties signed an Egyptian-sponsored reconciliation pact in Cairo to heal their decade-long rift.

Hamas has been controlling Gaza since 2007 after ousting the forces loyal to Abbas.

Under the deal, Hamas should fully hand over its power in Gaza to Hamdallah's Ramallah-based consensus government in December.

However, the ongoing differences between the two sides forced a delay in the implementation of the deal until further notice.MADRID, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Five members of the Madrid Municipal Police force were reported injured in a further outbreak of violence in the neighborhood of Lavapies in downtown of Spanish capital Madrid on Wednesday night.

It followed violent protests in which six people were arrested and 20 injured on March 15 following the death of a Senegalese street vender Mame Mbaye.

Although Mbaye died of a heart attack, it had been originally reported that he suffered the heart attack while being pursued by the police, a claim that both the police and Madrid Town Hall have denied, but the incident has increased tension in the neighborhood with large immigrant population.

The Town Hall confirmed Wednesday's incidents happened as police were attempting to identify a Senegalese man who had threatened them.

The man was arrested, but others began throwing objects at the police, who suffered minor injuries.

The Madrid Municipal Police Force explained the incident happened when the agents "went to identify a person, who at first refused to cooperate and then attacked the agents. During the arrest other people began to throw various objects."

The Madrid Town Hall denies that Wednesday's incident is related to a demonstration on the same day held by the Association of Senegalese in Spain in memory of Mame Mbaye, in which around 1,000 people took part.Source: Xinhua| 2018-03-22 21:07:24|Editor: Liangyu

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FUZHOU, March 22 (Xinhua) -- A containment dome has been installed on a reactor at China's nuclear power project using Hualong One technology, a domestically-developed third generation reactor design.

The dome, weighing 342 tonnes and measuring 46.8 meters in diameter, was installed using a crane on the No. 6 nuclear power unit in Fuqing, southeast China's Fujian Province at Wednesday, according to the China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC).

The installation was finished ten days ahead of schedule, marking the completion of civil works and the beginning of the assembly stage, the CNNC said.

The dome ensures the nuclear reactor is well sealed, preventing radioactivity and other nuclear accidents.

"Considering its weight and volume, the installation was very demanding," said Liu Bin, an official with the nuclear project.

The dome was the second of its kind using Hualong One design installed on a reactor. The first, on the No. 5 unit, was completed last May.

Hualong One reactors were jointly designed by two nuclear power giants, China General Nuclear Power Group and CNNC, and passed inspection by a national panel in August 2014.

China has since approved the use of Hualong One technology to build two reactors in Fujian, the No. 5 and No. 6 units.

Hualong One reactors are among six units at the Fuqing nuclear project, of which four units have already been put into commercial operation.

It is estimated that the four operating units have generated more than 55 billion kwhs of electricity, cutting about 22 million tonnes of standard coal consumption and over 71.8 million tonnes of carbon dioxide.HARARE, March 22 (Xinhua) -- The Zimbabwe government on Thursday signed a 4.2 billion U.S. dollars platinum mining project with Cyprus-based Karo Resources, the largest investment ever in Zimbabwe's mining history.

Zimbabwe's mines minister Winston Chitando and Karo Resources representative Joucas Pouroulis signed the agreement in the presence of President Emmerson Mnangagwa and other senior government officials.

Chitando said the project that will be based in Mhondoro-Ngezi, Mashonaland West Province, will produce 1.4 million ounces of platinum group metals (PGM) annually by 2023.

He explained that the investor will operate four portals of the PGM, with the first portal that will produce 3.6 million tonnes of ore and 350,000 ounces of PGM per annum set for commissioning by 2020.

The second, third and fourth portals producing the same amount of ore and ounces are scheduled for commissioning by 2021, 2022 and 2023.

"Based on current production capacity, this will make Karo Resources by 2023 to be the largest PGM producer in the country," Chitando said.

As part of the investment project, Karo Resources will construct a base metal refinery and precious metal refinery and a 600 megawatts power plant.

The mining project will consume 250 MW while the remainder will be offloaded onto the national grid.

To ensure adequate feed for the power station, the investor will invest in a coal mining operation that will have the required throughput by 2022 when the power station is due for commissioning.

Karo Resources will also undertake mining of chrome alluvial deposits on the periphery of its platinum concession beginning October this year, Chitando said, adding the investor will add value to the chrome produced.

He said the project was in compliance with the country's indigenization law which limits foreign shareholding in platinum and diamond mining to 49 percent.

It was also the largest investment structure in the history of mining industry in Zimbabwe.

"The landscape of Zimbabwean mining industry will never be the same as the provisions of this agreement are implemented," Chitando said.

Karo Resources representative Joucas Pouroulis said their company was honored to be setting up a world class, fully integrated PGM mining project in Zimbabwe.

"We believe we can adhere to the timeline of five years. When all this is finished, the project potentially, will grow the Gross Domestic Product of Zimbabwe by at least 20 percent," Pouroulis said.

President Mnangagwa expressed joy that the project had finally come to fruition after six years of negotiations.

He said the project had taken long to conclude due to bureaucracy and corruption in former president Robert Mugabe's government.

"I am happy that this day has come. It has taken us more than six years to reach this day. The ball is not anymore in our court, it is now in your court," Mnangagwa said.by John Tugume, Zhang Gaiping

KAMPALA, March 22 (Xinhua) -- As Uganda gets ready for its initial commercial production of oil from the Albertine region, a Chinese company is training Ugandans to obtain the required welding skills.

Before the oil production begins, Uganda is expected to construct a pipeline from Hoima, a municipal town in western Uganda, to Tanga in Tanzania, spanning a distance of 1,445 kilometers.

Independent sources say about 1,500 welders will be required to work on the pipeline that will have a capacity of 216,000 barrels of crude oil per day.

Uganda hopes to see its maiden commercial oil production while Sunmaker Energy (Uganda) Ltd, a Chinese company, is helping to set the welding ball rolling.

Sunmaker has set up a 3-acre oil and gas training institute in the central business district of Uganda's capital, Kampala. The institute is expected to start accepting students next month.

Gong Zhiwu, deputy executive director of Sunmaker, said once the school opens, they expect to train more than 4,000 people every year in different disciplines.P "We shall offer short courses for oil and gas operators already in the field. We shall also have courses for new entrants," he said.

The institute will also admit regional students from surrounding countries and internationally recognized certificates will be awarded.

The information of the graduates will also be entered into a database for quick reference purposes by the institute.

Before Sunmaker opens the institute, it has been offering training to employees of Victoria Engineering.

Samuel Nabwiso, 31, has been working for Victoria Engineering over the past five years.

"Since a welding expert came from Sunmaker, we have really had our skills improved. Personally, I have learnt new skills of welding pipes and plates and I am sure these will be used to transport oil from Hoima to where it is going to be refined from," Nabwiso told Xinhua on Wednesday.

Jalaludin Lugumya, 25, is also grateful for the training.

"I am an employee of Victoria Engineering but the training by the new instructor from China is wonderful. We have been taught to fit pipes and plates properly so that after the welding is done, they will be put to the desired shapes without any buckling," Lugumya said.

"They have also taught us about horizontal welding, something we did not know previously," he added.

Ni Laixing, an internationally certified welder from Sunmaker, said after training the students for 50 working days, they will be able to pass international examinations for welders.

"We are currently teaching them carbon dioxide welding. This is the basis of all types of welding and once they have mastered it, the rest will be easier to learn," he said.

The skills will be used in the manufacturing of products to be used in the oil and gas sector, Ni added.

Lydia Efata, the business development manager at Victoria Engineering, is full of praise for what their employees have learnt.

"The welders are being taught coded welding as opposed to ordinary welding. The difference between the two welding processes is simply that the coded welding is basically certified welding," she said.

"Our welders had last been trained and certified in 2014 and there was a need for upskilling and re-certification," Efata added.

However, Efata said that there is still a gap between demand and supply in the Ugandan labor market.

The government is taking steps to encourage young people to apply for the required training courses to beef up the number and comply with the requirement of the oil boom, she told Xinhua Wednesday.Source: Xinhua| 2018-03-22 21:17:31|Editor: Lifang

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A released prisoner leaves the Chikurubi Maximum Prison in Harare, Zimbabwe, on March 22, 2018. Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa has pardoned 3,000 prisoners as part of government efforts to decongest prisons and improve living conditions of inmates. Some of the prisoners will be released Thursday afternoon. (Xinhua/Shaun Jusa)

HARARE, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Zimbabwean President Emmerson Mnangagwa has pardoned 3,000 prisoners as part of government efforts to decongest prisons and improve living conditions of inmates. Some of the prisoners will be released Thursday afternoon.

Those who benefited from the amnesty, announced by the Zimbabwe Prisons and Correctional Services (ZPCS) Wednesday, include all female prisoners except those sentenced to death or facing life sentences, all juveniles and all people jailed for less than 36 months.

Disabled inmates, the terminally ill and those above 60 years who had served one third of their sentences were also pardoned.

The pardon does not apply to habitual criminals previously pardoned but jailed again and those convicted of murder, treason, rape and armed robbery.

Zimbabwe's prisons are battling overcrowding as they are currently holding 20,000 inmates against a carrying capacity of 17,000.

"As the ZPCS we applaud the move taken by His Excellency (President Mnangagwa) in exercising his prerogative of mercy to some prisoners behind bats," ZPCS deputy commissioner general Alford Mashango Dube said.

This is Mnangagwa's first amnesty for prisoners since he assumed power last November.

The last pardon that set free thousands of prisoners was done by former president Robert Mugabe in 2016 as prisons were struggling to feed the inmates.Source: Xinhua| 2018-03-22 21:22:33|Editor: Lifang

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Bulgarian President Rumen Radev (L) speaks during a joint press conference with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank city of Ramallah, on March 22, 2018. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas urged at the joint press conference on Thursday that the Islamic Hamas movement to hand over its power in Gaza to the national unity government, or to take the blame for failing the Egypt-sponsored efforts to achieve Palestinian internal reconciliation.(Xinhua/Fadi Arouri)

RAMALLAH, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas urged Thursday the Islamic Hamas movement to hand over its power in Gaza to the national unity government, or to take the blame for failing the Egypt-sponsored efforts to achieve Palestinian internal reconciliation.

"I reiterate that Hamas must hand over everything to the national unity government ... and this has been agreed upon under Egyptian sponsorship, but they (Hamas) don't implement it," said Abbas. "Hamas will bear the consequences for failing the Egyptian efforts, which we thank to seek to end this case."

Abbas' remarks came in a joint press conference with visiting Bulgarian President Rumen Radev in the West Bank Ramallah city on Thursday, where he also reiterated his call for holding an international peace conference in mid-2018 to form a multilateral mechanism for the peace process.

The Palestinian president highlighted that his side never rejected any negotiation and is always ready for it.

"We would like to renew the call we initiated from the UN Security Council recently on the importance of holding an international conference for peace mid this year and accepting Palestine as a full UN member, forming a multilateral mechanism to help both sides reach a peace agreement based on international legitimacy that would end the Israeli occupation of our country," Abbas said.

This is the first visit by President Radev to Palestine, where both leaders discussed bilateral relations, activating joint ministerial committees and the role of the European Union (EU) in the peace process, especially as Bulgaria takes the current rotating presidency of the EU council.

Abbas described the talks with his Bulgarian counterpart as prosperous, valuing the EU aid for the building of Palestinian statehood institutions.Source: Xinhua| 2018-03-22 21:32:36|Editor: Zhou Xin

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BEIRUT, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Talks to solve border disputes between Lebanon and Israel are ongoing, spokesperson for the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) Andrea Tenenti said Thursday.

"Dialogues will carry on until a solution for pending issues between Lebanon and Israel are reached," Tenenti told VDL radio in an interview.

He assured the need to maintain stability in southern Lebanon, stressing that "stability in the south is a priority not only for the UNIFIL, but also for the international community."

Tenenti had earlier announced that Lebanon and Israel have been holding talks "nearly every day" over the border disputes.

New threats emerged between Lebanon and Israel over several issues, including a wall Israel is building along the border that Beirut is objecting on the grounds of violating Lebanese territories, as well as plans for oil and gas exploration in the Mediterranean Sea.

The oil and gas dispute dates back years, but recently resurfaced when Lebanon invited companies to bid for exploratory offshore drilling next year along the countries' maritime border. Israel claims some of the drilling would be taking place in its territorial waters.NAIROBI, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta said Thursday that Africa is on the path of economic success after the realization by its leaders that there is more to gain from unity than isolation.

Kenyatta who spoke in Nairobi a day after 44 African countries signed up for a treaty that creates an Africa-wide free trade area, said the continent is set to realize a change in fortunes resulting from increased intra-Africa trade.

"We have come to the realization that we can grow together and that it is common sense to unite for our betterment," he said when he held a meeting with Commonwealth Secretary-General Patricia Scotland in Nairobi.

According to a statement issued after the meeting, Kenyatta said the fact that the new trade deal has gained quick acceptance among the overwhelming majority is because Africans have come to the realization that it is better to unite for shared benefit.

"The stars are lining up and a momentum is building up for Africa. We are realizing that we are stronger together," Kenyatta said of the pact which seeks to promote industrial development through diversification, regional value chain development, agricultural development and food security.

Kenyatta was among Heads of State and Government who gathered in Kigali, Rwanda, on Wednesday to sign the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) which is aimed at increasing intra-Africa trade.

He said increasing intra-Africa trade will create more business opportunities for the people of the continent and would make sure that no region is left behind in Africa's growth.

Kenyatta said Kenya had already recorded high business proposals from within Africa including from countries like Egypt and Nigeria, a trend that supports the framework for the new free trade pact.

All the East African countries except Burundi which did not attend the Summit signed all the three protocols. Only 22 member countries were required to sign the agreement to make the AfCFTA treaty operational.

According to the Africa Union, AfCFTA aims to establish a single liberalized market that will spur industrialization, infrastructural development, economic diversification and trade across the continent that is home to some 1.2 billion people.

When the AfCFTA pact is fully operationalized in the signatory State Parties, residents of these nations will enjoy the convenience of a single passport and currency.

The AfCFTA binds all State parties to eight objectives including the progressive elimination of tariffs and non-tariff barriers to trade in goods.

Speaking during the meeting, Scotland praised the free trade deal saying that she expects Africa will gain from the open borders deal which is also seen as a realization of the Pan African dream.Source: Xinhua| 2018-03-22 21:42:38|Editor: Zhou Xin

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Buses to evacuate the rebels and their families enter the city of Harasta in east of the capital Damascus, Syria, on March. 22, 2018. As many as 2,000 people are expected to evacuate the rebel-held Harasta city in eastern Damascus on Thursday, a military source told Xinhua on the outskirts of Harasta. (Xinhua/Ammar Safarjalani)

DAMASCUS, March 22 (Xinhua) -- As many as 2,000 people are expected to evacuate the rebel-held Harasta city in eastern Damascus on Thursday, a military source told Xinhua on the outskirts of Harasta.

The number includes 600 rebels, and the rest are members of their families, the source said on condition of anonymity.

Some 40 busses are ready to transport the rebels and their families out of Harasta in the Eastern Ghouta countryside toward rebel-held areas in northern Syria.

The 2,000 people are the first batch of around 7,500 in total, including 1,500 rebels and 6,000 civilians, set to leave Harasta, in a process that is expected to take two days.

Earlier on Thursday, the Syrian army removed barriers at the entrance of Harasta as a prelude to the evacuation of the militants and their families.

The evacuation agreement was supposed to kick off, in terms of the actual evacuation of civilians and the rebels, at 7:00 a.m. (0500 GMT), but was pushed back for several hours and the evacuees will depart in two batches.

The civilians, who are not wishing to go with the rebels, will remain in Harasta, a key bastion of the Ahrar al-Sham group.

The evacuation of the rebels from Harasta will mark the first major departure of rebels from Eastern Ghouta area after thousands of civilians fled several towns and areas in that sprawling countryside in recent days.Source: Xinhua| 2018-03-22 21:52:41|Editor: Zhou Xin

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FRIEDRICHSHAFEN, Germany, March 22 (Xinhua) -- "China is an important market for us, where we will constantly expand our business and robustly push forward localization." Wolf-Henning Scheider, chief executive officer of German auto supplier ZF Friedrichshafen AG, told Xinhua ahead of ZF annual press conference, which was held Thursday in Friedrichshafen.

As a global leading auto supplier in driveline and chassis technology as well as active and passive safety technology, ZF has recorded revenue of 36.4 billion euros in 2017, with year-on-year increase of 3.6 percent, according to the annual report released Thursday.

The Commercial Vehicle Technology and Car Powertrain Technology Divisions recorded above-average sales increase. In particular, ZF's car automatic passenger car transmissions, combined with the highly integrated electric motor, still features great growth potential, said the ZF's new CEO at the press conference.

With sales of 7.78 billion euro in Asia-Pacific, of which over 85 percent came from China, that region contributed 21 percent of the whole revenue of ZF last year, following Europe and North America.

Since entering China in 1981, ZF has made steady development in China with setting up two regional headquarters, and 32 manufacturing enterprises, 3 aftersales service and trade companies as well as 239 aftersales service networks in China.

Scheider was much convinced that the Chinese market would remain strategic growing market along with its open and sustainable economic environment.

Furthermore, driven by local teams, ZF aims to establish comprehensive capabilities in China, localizing all of products both for automotive applications and for industrial applications in China, according to Scheider.

Keeping strong investment in innovation, ZF spent 2.2 billion euros on research and development in 2017, an increase of almost 15 percent compared to 2016.

With investing more that 2 billion euro particularly in advancing electric drives and the hybridization of transmission technology as well as vehicle safety systems and automated driving, the share of the ZF budget allocated to R&D will rise to 6.5 percent this year, said Scheider.

Beyond two existing R&D centers in Shanghai, ZF will further enlarge its innovation capabilities in China, he added. (1 euro = 1.23 U.S. dollars)Source: Xinhua| 2018-03-22 21:57:43|Editor: Zhou Xin

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JERUSALEM, March 22 (Xinhua) -- The Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said here Thursday that Iran should to be prevented from acquiring nuclear weapons.

Netanyahu made the remarks when he met with the visiting Bulgarian President Rumen Radev, stressing nowadays Iran threatens not only the Middle East but the entire world.

During the meeting, the two sides praised the bilateral relations and discussed advancing bilateral cooperation in technology, innovation and trade.

Netanyahu said the two sides have flourishing relations and have been working in many ways to cement and develop in all fields.

President Radev visited the cyber center in south Israeli Be'er Sheva on Wednesday, where Israel National Cyber Directorate (INCD) Director Yigal Unna gave a briefing on the INCD, including its responsibilities and coordination with other cyber bodies in Israel, the cyber threats and the main efforts in the field.

Israel is seizing the future, not only in matters of cyber security but in all matters of technology that will change our lives, said Netanyahu.

Israel is at the forefront of all this scientific research and technological know-how, he said. "We're eager to share it with our friends."

"We are deeply interested to take the Israeli example to build a society that is both socially engaged and integrated," said Radev. "I mean basically the hi-tech, the cyber security, science and education."

The president said he was also interested in diversification of resources. "Another good opportunity is natural gas import and transmission through Bulgaria," said Radev.

In addition, he emphasized the cooperation with Israel in the efforts of fighting terrorism.

"We have good cooperation in the field of fight against terror, and I would like to stress the important support we received from Israel after the terror act in Sarafovo in 2012," said Radev.

Radev noted that the tense situation in the world requires security communities to cooperate with each other, and also the well-established ties in the sphere of defense between the two sides.LUSAKA, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Zambian President Edgar Lungu said on Thursday that he's in good health and denied reports of being sick.

Last week, some online news sites reported that Lungu was sick and had sneaked to South Africa to seek medical attention.

But Lungu said he is in good health and working to deliver to the expectations of the Zambian people, according to state broadcaster, the Zambia National Broadcasting Corporation.

Lungu, who turns 62 in November, said he has never hidden his health condition and that he will always inform citizens when need be.

The Zambian leader further expressed concern that some people had continued to wish him ill when he was fit to run the affairs of the country.A visitor looks at a Ding russet-splashed black-glazed conical bowl during the public viewing of Christie's Asian Art Week in New York, the United States, on March 16, 2018. (Xinhua/Wang Ying)

NEW YORK, March 21 (Xinhua) -- A rare antique Chinese Ding bowl will be on sale with an estimate of 4 million U.S. dollars on Thursday at Christie's in New York.

The museum-quality piece -- a Ding russet-splashed black-glazed conical bowl that dates back to the Northern Song Dynasty (960-1127) -- is estimated at 4 million U.S. dollars and becomes the highest estimate among the artworks offered at Christie's in New York in the on-going Asian Art Week sales, from March 16-23.

Only three dark-glazed bowls with russet streaks are known to exist today, and the other two of them belong to Harvard Art Museum and the National Palace Museum in Taipei, China, according to experts.

The ancient piece is described as a Ding bowl because of the county Ding in the Hebei province, China, where the kilns used to make the bowls were housed. Ding ware is regarded as one of the five great wares of the Song.

"This vessel is believed to serve high society given its superb quality as the dark-glazed vessels became popular in the Song with the rising popularity of white tea." Olivia Hamilton, a specialist in Chinese Works of Art at Christie's New York, told Xinhua Tuesday.

"The tea bowl was served during the tea ceremony: the shape and glossy glaze of the bowl perfectly match the whipped white tea powder," said Hamilton.

A Christie's specialist shows a Ding russet-splashed black-glazed conical bowl during the public viewing of Christie's Asian Art Week in New York, the United States, on March 16, 2018. (Xinhua/Wang Ying)

Speaking of the Chinese ceramics market, Olivia added, "the market is always changing. But what is interesting now is that we still see a strong demand for Chinese ceramics. Market wise, ceramics from a specific period might appeal to a certain group of collectors. At the end of the day, artwork speaks for itself like this bowl."

A Ding bowl with fine near-white body and an ivory-colored glaze was sold for 2.2 million U.S. dollars at an auction at Sotheby's in March 2013.

The rare Chinese bowl was bought for about 3 U.S. dollars from a yard sale in 2007 by a New York family who had it displayed in the living room.LUSAKA, March 22 (Xinhua) -- The Zambian government on Thursday defended the high number of taxes imposed on citizens within a short period of time, saying the imposed taxes have been properly selected to balance economic growth.

Stakeholders have expressed concern over the current tax burden placed on citizens, with the Civil Society for Poverty Reduction (CSPR), saying the high taxes had a significant bearing on efforts to reduce poverty.

Analysts have further said citizens were not in a position to absorb all the various taxes within a short time.

But Chief Government Spokesperson Dora Siliya said it was not government intention to over-burden citizens with taxes but had an obligation to collect the taxes to run the economy.

She told reporters during a press briefing that all the taxes applied by the government were necessary to allow the government to operate and enhance performance of various sectors.

"It is not government intention to put so many taxes and where there are real issues, the government is ready to sit down and talk. The government needs also to operate and without that revenue, it is impossible," she said.

According to her, the growth of the economy was crucial to improve lives of citizens, adding that everything the government does, including introducing various taxes, was meant for the benefit of citizens.

The Zambian minister further said the perceived standoff with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on a financial bailout package was being created by people who wanted to put a wedge between the government and the international lender.

She said as far as the government was concerned talks with the IMF on a possible 1.3 billion U.S. dollars financial package were still on-going and that there was no standoff.KIEV, March 22 (Xinhua) -- The Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) has extended the mandate of its special monitoring mission in Ukraine by another year, Ukrainian authorities said Thursday.

The OSCE observers will monitor and report on the situation in Ukraine until March 31, 2019, Ukraine's permanent mission to the international organizations in Vienna said on Twitter.

The OSCE sent its special observer mission to Ukraine in March 2014 at the request of the Ukrainian government.

Currently, more than 700 OSCE observers from 44 countries are deployed in Ukraine, with the majority of them monitoring the security situation in the conflict-hit eastern region of Donbas.

The conflict in Donbas started in April 2014 after the government forces launched offensives to regain control over the cities and towns seized by the armed groups, which had declared independence from Kiev.DHAKA, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Pictures of eye-catching Tianjin Binhai Library in China have gone viral on Bangladesh social media since the country's largest cell phone operator Grameenphone shared a post on its Facebook page three days ago.

Norwegian Telenor Group's concern in Bangladesh often shares or uploads exclusive images and videos to its official Facebook page for its millions of fans.

As part of that Grameenphone (GP) on March 19 shared a video clip containing several photos of the library with some basic information about it.

The GP post on Tianjing Binhai Library has apparently generated a great deal of attention in the form of a high number of likes, shares.

It went on to get so far over 559k views, about 2,000 shares, 36,000 likes only at the GP page which reached nearly 14 million people.

GP writes on a picture that the library looks like an eye when viewed through the building's glazed walls.

It has an oval-shaped atrium with a spherical, mirrored auditorium featuring terraced shelves which wind up and around the atrium and continue around the building to the ceiling.

Photos of the Tianjin Binhai Library's floor-to-ceiling book shelves already generated a huge buzz on social media in China and elsewhere in the world.

In Bangladesh, images of the library quickly went viral and it didn't take long for visitors to flock to the Grameenphone page.

China and its achievements were highly praised by the GP fans.

Admiration poured in for the magnificent structure what China has created.

One of the comments reads, "China deserves all praise for such a magnificent achievement. This breathtaking and futuristic Tianjin Library so far I understand is every book lover's dream. Tianjin is now a delight to the eyes of visitors with this colorful library building. Wish I could visit this soon!"

Another comment reads, "Library is the store house of knowledge ....Good to see that."

Following the GP post on its page, the images of the library have appeared many places in Bangladesh, from architecture blogs and news broadcasts to going completely viral on social media over the last couple of days.

The library has a designed capacity to store 1.35 million books, however, it currently only holds around 200,000.

The shelves are printed with digital book images and the room is designed primarily for reading and socialization, with most of the books housed in separate rooms.

The library was jointly designed by Dutch firm MRVDV in collaboration with Tianjin Urban Planning and Design Institute (TUPDI), and opened to the public on Oct. 1 last year.CAPE TOWN, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Despite a high HIV prevalence, South Africa has a better opportunity to end the tuberculosis (TB) epidemic by 2030, Deputy President David Mabuza said on Thursday.

South Africa will launch a national campaign to test and treat at least an additional 80,000 people with TB between April this year and March next year, Mabuza said at an event in eThekwini, KwaZulu-Natal Province to mark the World TB Day which falls on March 24.

The campaign is targeting people who are currently either not diagnosed or have stopped TB treatment before they were cured, according to Mabuza.

"Many of our citizens have been 'missed' by our health system as they have not been reported, and therefore have not been diagnosed," said Mabuza.

Moreover, South Africa seeks to find and treat at least 40,000 TB patients before it goes to the High Level Meeting on TB in New York in September.

This meeting, designed to discuss how the world will eliminate TB, was initiated by South Africa last year, according to Mabuza.

Mabuza appealed to all leaders in society, starting with traditional leaders across the country, to take the lead to fight TB.

"Our traditional leaders, by their close proximity with our people, carry a huge responsibility to reverse the tide against new TB infections and TB related deaths," Mabuza said.

South Africa's fight against TB will be guided by the new National Strategic Plan for HIV, TB and Sexually Transmitted Infections for the period 2017-2022, launched last year, Mabuza said.

The success in implementing this National Strategic Plan depends on the functionality of the AIDS Councils at all levels, from national down to the ward levels, he said.

"All our provinces must urgently finalize their plans so that we can move together promptly and in a coordinated manner to improve the health and wellbeing of our people," Mabuza said.

He said the Implementation Plans of the provinces of KwaZulu-Natal, Eastern Cape, Limpopo, Mpumalanga and Western Cape will be ready by the end of this month.

"Let us empower our communities with knowledge of the small, but very crucial, actions they can take to stop the spread of TB," Mabuza said.

HIV-related TB remains the leading infectious disease killer among South Africans. More people die of TB than HIV in the country, where the total number of people living with HIV was estimated at approximately 7.06 million in 2017.

According to figures provided by Statistics South Africa, there were 460,000 recorded deaths from various causes in 2015. Of these, TB contributed 33,000.

Research shows that 60 percent of people with HIV also have TB.

Mabuza encouraged TB patients to come forward and get treatment.

TB is curable, but people with coughs, night sweats, chest pains and weight loss, the symptoms of TB, often ignore these symptoms, he said.

Sometimes, people recognize the symptoms but are scared or feel that they will be judged by others for having TB, Mabuza said.

"Stigma is still very prevalent in our communities and leaders have a critical role to play in ensuring that we get rid of stigma for all diseases, especially TB and HIV," he said.Source: Xinhua| 2018-03-22 22:52:59|Editor: Liangyu

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Chinese President Xi Jinping (L) holds a welcome ceremony for visiting Cameroonian President Paul Biya before their talks at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, capital of China, March 22, 2018. (Xinhua/Li Tao)

BEIJING, March 22 (Xinhua) -- China and Cameroon on Thursday agreed to give full play to their sound friendship and great potential for cooperation to further advance bilateral relationship.

The statement came as Chinese President Xi Jinping held talks with his Cameroonian counterpart Paul Biya at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing.

Calling Biya "a senior African leader and an old friend of China," Xi said Cameroon is an important partner of China in Africa.

The two countries have respected each other, treated each other equally and supported each other on issues concerning core interest and major concerns since the two forged diplomatic ties 47 years ago, said Xi.

Biya is the first African president to visit China this year and the first foreign head of state to visit after the annual sessions of China's National People's Congress (NPC) and the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC).

Xi called on China and Cameroon to maintain exchanges at all levels and continue to support each other on core interests and major concerns.

China supports Cameroon in choosing its own path of development and speeding up its process of industrialization, said Xi.

China encourages the two countries to expand trade and enhance cooperation in major areas, and more Chinese enterprises to invest there, he said.

He also called on both countries to intensify people-to-people exchanges.

China is ready to work with Cameroon in the areas of peace, security and international affairs to protect the interests of African countries and other developing countries, Xi told Biya.

He encourages Cameroon to take an active part in China's Belt and Road Initiative and work with China to promote the construction of a new type of international relations featuring mutual respect, fairness, justice and win-win cooperation, and build a community with a shared future.

China has upheld justice and pursued shared interests and built relations with Africa based on sincerity, affinity and good faith, he said.

China would always stand by developing countries and be their sincere friend and reliable partner, no matter how the international situation changed or how China developed, Xi told Biya.

Biya said China's long-term assistance to Cameroon has promoted Cameroon's economic and social development and directly benefited Cameroonian people.

Cameroon is committed to enhancing strategic cooperation with China and welcomes more investment from China in industry, agriculture, energy, transportation, housing and new technology, he said.

Cameroon spoke highly of the Belt and Road Initiative and supported cooperation within the framework of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, Biya said.

He said that Cameroon firmly adheres to the one-China policy and is willing to cooperate with China within the United Nations and other multilateral frameworks.

After the talks, the two presidents witnessed the signing of agreements on economic and technological cooperation, human resources development, infrastructural construction and industrial cooperation.

Biya is paying a state visit to China from Thursday to Saturday at the invitation of Xi.Source: Xinhua| 2018-03-22 23:08:01|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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BEIJING, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Chinese President Xi Jinping and his French counterpart Emmanuel Macron on Thursday pledged over phone that China and France would jointly implement their consensus on deepening ties and promote multilateralism to build an open global trade system.

Macron congratulated Xi on being elected Chinese president on Saturday at the annual session of the National People's Congress (NPC), China's national legislature.

Xi noted that Macron's congratulatory phone call shortly after the conclusion of the two sessions is an embodiment of great importance that he attaches to China's development and relations with France.

This year marks the 40th anniversary of China's reform and opening up, and the just-concluded two sessions of the NPC and the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, China's top political advisory body, carry great significance to China's future, said Xi.

The coming period of time will be one during which China continues to deepen reform, expand opening up, achieve greater development, as well as make more contributions to the world, the Chinese president said, adding that he believes China's development will provide more opportunities to China-France and China-EU (European Union) cooperation.

Macron said that cherishing the friendship between France and China, he took note of the various results achieved at the two sessions.

The French president added that he is willing to work together with Xi to implement key consensus reached by the two sides on deepening France-China relations.

Xi stressed that he and Macron reached important consensus on strengthening China-France cooperation in all fields during the French president's visit to China at the beginning of the year, and provided fresh impetus for bilateral relations.

China is willing to work with France to boost high-level exchanges, carry out mechanisms of dialogue and consensus on cooperation, and communicate on major issues in a timely manner, so as to make the China-France comprehensive strategic partnership stronger, Xi said.

Both countries are permanent members of the United Nations Security Council and countries of global influence, Xi noted.

In the current complex and ever-changing international situation, China stands ready to join forces with France to enhance strategic communication and coordination, dedicate to safeguarding and improving the existing international order and system of global governance, uphold multilateralism, and promote multi-polarization and economic globalization, so as to build an open global trade system, he said.

The two heads of state also exchanged views on global and regional hot spot issues of mutual concern.MOSCOW, March 22 (Xinhua) -- The Kremlin said Thursday that it is too early to expect a thaw in Russia-U.S. relations, although both countries have confirmed their willingness to sit down and discuss problems.

"Let's not talk about any breakthrough. We need to establish dialogue first. There is a long way before making a breakthrough," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told a daily news briefing.

The remarks came after Russian President Vladimir Putin and his U.S. counterpart Donald Trump agreed in a call on Tuesday to make preparations for a possible meeting between them "as soon as possible."

"Getting along with Russia (and others) is a good thing, not a bad thing," Trump tweeted Wednesday.

Peskov said the date and place for the possible presidential meeting have not been decided yet.

Putin was re-elected president on March 18 with more than 76 percent of the votes, the highest rate throughout his campaigns.

Shortly ahead of the election, the U.S. Treasury Department said it would sanction five Russian entities and 19 individuals, accusing them of having meddled in the 2016 U.S. presidential election and engaged in "malicious" cyber attacks.

Moscow has repeatedly denied these allegations and blamed Washington for interfering in the Russian elections.ZAGREB, March 22 (Xinhua) -- The Croatian government on Thursday adopted a Council of Europe convention against gender-based violence and sent it to the parliament for ratification, state agency HINA reported.

The Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence (Istanbul Convention), which was opened for signature in May 2011 in Istanbul, has prompted debates in Croatia.

The southeastern European country signed the Convention in January 2013 while social-democrats were in power. However, the former government didn't ratify it.

Conservative groups have been criticizing the convention arguing that the ratification would undermine family values and traditions. Although they agree that women should be better protected, they claim that the Convention introduce the so-called "gender ideology" which would be forced on children in schools and even kindergartens.

Nevertheless, the central-right government, led by Prime Minister Andrej Plenkovic, on Thursday unanimously adopted Istanbul Convention with an interpretive statement that it is in line with the Croatian constitution and does not contain or support "gender ideology".

The prime minister decided to add the interpretative statement in the bill to calm down the right wing of his own party, as well as other conservative members of parliament.

Davor Bernardic, the leader of the strongest opposition party, Social Democratic Party (SDP), called the government interpretative statement "a useless piece of paper", but said that his party would vote for the convention.

Plenkovic pushed the convention in parliament despite protests from his own party.

On March 20, the presidency of the ruling Croatian Democratic Union supported ratification of the convention but with 16 "yes" and nine "no" votes. Among those who voted against it were some prominent members of the ruling party such as the deputy party president, vice president, and political secretary.

Conservative groups have announced a public protest against the ratification on Saturday, March 24.CAPE TOWN, March 22 (Xinhua) -- The South African National Defence Force (SANDF) on Thursday pledged full cooperation in an investigation into alleged sexual exploitation involving its peacekeepers in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

The SANDF "wishes to reiterate its stance against any abuse of civilian members or population where it is deployed in support of the peace keeping efforts of the United Nations," SANDF Brigadier General Mafi Mgobozi said.

Mgobozi was responding to reports that five peacekeepers from South Africa face allegations of sexually exploiting women in the DRC.

According to Mgobozi, the SANDF has swiftly sent its legal officers and investigators to the mission area.

The investigating team that is currently in the DRC is also mandated to probe any such incidences that have surfaced beyond 2016, he said.

"Once again it must be noted that these investigations are being conducted in close liaison with the United Nations office in the Democratic Republic of the Congo," Mgobozi said.

If there is any evidence pointing to South African peacekeepers, they will be dealt with immediately as has happened before where such allegations were found to be true, he said.

South Africa deploys around 1,300 soldiers as part of a UN intervention brigade deployed in the strife-torn eastern DRC region.Source: Xinhua| 2018-03-22 23:23:10|Editor: Lifang

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Photo taken on March 22, 2018 shows the explosion site in Mogadishu, capital of Somalia. At least 14 people were killed and several others injured in a bomb attack outside a popular hotel in Somali capital Mogadishu on Thursday. (Xinhua/Faisal Isse)

MOGADISHU, March 22 (Xinhua) -- At least 14 people were killed and several others injured in a bomb attack outside a popular hotel in Somali capital Mogadishu on Thursday.

Abdiaziz Ali Ibrahim, a spokesperson of the Ministry of Internal Security, told journalists that the bomb which ripped through the Wehliye Hotel was loaded with explosive materials and went off shortly before 5 p.m. local time.

Ibrahim said most of those affected were civilians, mostly street vendors sitting outside the hotel. "We can confirm that 14 people have been killed," he told reporters at the scene. "Most of those affected were sitting outside the hotel," he added.

It is a common feature in Mogadishu for people to have tea at the sideways.

The hotel, located along the busy Maka Al-Mukarrama road is frequented by senior government officials including security officials.

Witnesses said the death toll is likely to rise since several people who were injured are in critical condition in hospital.

Witnesses told Xinhua the explosion was devastating. "The blast was so huge and I thought it was just metres away from where I was. The whole place was covered by smoke," Abdullahi Mohamed said.

The incident which took place along Maka al Mukarama road adds to several others which claimed several lives in this street.

No group has claimed responsibility for the latest blast but Al-Shabaab fighters are often behind such attacks in the Horn of Africa nation.KIEV, March 22 (Xinhua) -- The Ukrainian parliament on Thursday deprived lawmaker Nadiya Savchenko of her legal immunity and allowed her arrest over charges of plotting a coup, the parliament press service said.

The motion was adopted at the request of Ukrainian Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko, said a parliament statement.

Earlier in the day, Lutsenko asked lawmakers to give their consent to a criminal prosecution of Savchenko.

While speaking in the parliament, Lutsenko said the pre-trial investigation found that Savchenko together with her supporters have "planned a large-scale terrorist attack" in central Kiev aimed at a "forcible overthrow of the constitutional system and the seizure of state power in Ukraine."

Savchenko has denied the charges, saying the accusations against her were fabricated.

Savchenko, also a military pilot, has formerly participated in the conflict in eastern Ukraine along with government forces.

She spent almost two years in prison in Russia after a court there found her guilty of complicity in killing two Russian journalists in 2014 during the conflict.

The pilot has denied her role in the murder and said she had been kidnapped in Ukraine and then handed over to Russian authorities.

Savchenko was elected as a member of the Ukrainian parliament while serving her jail term in Russia.

She returned to Ukraine in May 2016 after Russian President Vladimir Putin pardoned her.Source: Xinhua| 2018-03-22 23:33:13|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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ANKARA, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Turkish president and EU's senior officials will convene on March 26 in the current EU presidency Bulgaria's resort city of Varna in a bid to resume dialogue between Ankara and Brussels.

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, with a large delegation of ministers, will meet Donald Tusk, President of the European Council, Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the European Commission, and Boyko Borisov, Prime Minister of Bulgaria.

"This will be a good opportunity to jointly assess matters of mutual interest and recent developments in your country, including in the area of rule of law and fundamental freedoms, which remain fundamental to the fabric of and prospects for EU-Turkey relations, as well as regional and international issues," read an invitation letter from Tusk to Erdogan.

The meeting comes after Turkey's recent attempts to defuse tensions with some European countries, primarily Germany, and to improve strained and stalled relations with Brussels after a deep crisis erupted mainly over the Turkish government's crackdown after the failed coup attempt on July 15, 2016.

Relations further deteriorated after a constitutional referendum that strengthened President Erdogan's powers in April 2017.

The latest meeting between the two sides in this format took place in May 2017 and both decided to revive regular meetings on cooperation areas. Yet, Ankara and Brussels continued ups and downs, and direct communication mechanisms could not produce a real advance in bilateral ties.

Turkey does not expect smooth ties with the EU on every issue, but wants progress that two sides can cooperate in mutual interests, according to Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu.

"It will be too much optimistic that one says we can normalize all issues with regards to relations with the EU. But, there are issues that we can take joint steps," Cavusoglu told Anadolu Agency on Thursday.

In this context, he touched upon the issues of visa liberalization and upgrading customs union agreement with the bloc.

"We are proceeding on the visa liberalization process. We have given our proposals. The issue may come up during the summit," he said referring to the Varna meeting.

Cavusoglu also elaborated requirements of a March 2016 deal with the EU to curb refugee influx into Europe.

Following refugee flow to Europe, the bloc's leaders signed a deal with Ankara promising to give 6 billion euros for helping Syrian refugees in Turkey, in return for sending back migrants crossing from the Aegean Sea into Europe.

The bloc promised to restart Turkey's EU membership talks and allow visa-free travel for Turkish citizens, a promise stipulated Turkey to meet 72 conditions necessary for this.

Turkey promised to make changes in the wording of definition of terrorism in the counterterrorism law following repeated calls by the EU for complying with European democratic and judicial standards.

But, Ankara delayed the move for over one and a half years till early 2018 on the argument of ongoing struggle against various terrorist groups.

In February, Turkish government made an attempt to launch the visa liberalization dialogue with the EU and submitted its position paper regarding its roadmap for the fulfillment of the remaining seven benchmarks of 72 criteria for visa-free travel of Turkish citizens in Schengen area.

EU in return will give its assessment for the position paper, but not submit it before the Varna meeting, "not to cast shadow on the summit," an EU official told Xinhua on condition of anonymity.

Ankara's customs union agreement with the EU came into force in 1995. Both Turkey and the EU seek to expand the scope of the agreement, which would have positive effects on trade relations in various industries.

Upgrading the agreement constitutes another topic of the meeting as Ankara wants to launch the process, which is likely to last at least in a couple of years.

However, Turkey's tense relations with Germany crippled the process last year. But Ankara and Berlin are in rapprochement since early 2018 which brings hope to pave the way for the process.

In Varna, EU officials cannot promise to launch talks to revamp customs union agreements because neither Tusk nor Junker has the authority to give promises on behalf of 28 members of the bloc, since there is not yet a consensus among them for the launch of technical talks, the EU official said.

For the EU side, there will be a positive step that Brussels may announce the second part of the EU's 6-billion-euro financial assistance for Syrian refugees in Turkey.

Unlikely to see a breakthrough, the upcoming summit will prove communication channels are open at the highest level and issues concerning both sides are discussed directly, said Serkan Demirtas, Hurriyet Daily News columnist, who underlined making a real quality in relations between Ankara and Brussels requires more than this kind of diplomatic protocol.

The EU has long been calling Turkey to end the state of emergency that was launched after the 2016 coup attempt, and will possibly repeat it in Varna, but Turkish government will not likely to end it soon, he added.Syrian children and adults receive treatment for a suspected chemical attack at a makeshift clinic on the rebel-held village of al-Shifuniyah in the Eastern Ghouta region on the outskirts of the capital Damascus on Feb. 25, 2018. (Xinhua/AFP)

UNITED NATIONS, March 21 (Xinhua) -- Concerned by the persistent allegations of chemical weapon use in Syria, United Nations (UN) Secretary-General Antonio Guterres Wednesday reiterated his call for the UN Security Council to demonstrate unity and resolve on the issue.

"The use of chemical weapons, under any circumstances, is unjustifiable and abhorrent. Equally unjustifiable is a lack of response to such use, if and when it occurs," Stephane Dujarric, his spokesperson, said. "Impunity cannot prevail with respect to such serious crimes."

Guterres was referring to the Security Council's failure to renew the mandate of a joint investigative mechanism of the UN and the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) in November.

The mechanism, which was authorized by the Security Council to determine who were using chemical weapons in Syria, had to be disbanded after Russia vetoed extending its mandate.

Russian Ambassador to the United Nations Vassily Nebenzia speaks after the UN Security Council failed to adopt Japan's draft resolution to extend 30 days for mandate of mechanism investigating chemical attacks in Syria, at the UN headquarters in New York, Nov. 17, 2017. The UN Security Council failed to adopt the resolution extending 30 days for mandate of mechanism investigating chemical attacks in Syria on Friday. (Xinhua/Li Muzi)

Guterres met OPCW Director-General Ahmet Uzumcu Tuesday and reiterated his support for the organization's work in investigating allegations of chemical weapon use in Syria.

Uzumcu was in New York to brief the Security Council on the issue, including the destruction of Syrian chemical production facilities as well as the government's declaration of its chemical weapon stockpiles and facilities.

After the closed-door meeting of the Security Council, Uzumcu said there are several new allegations of chlorine attacks in Syria.

In this file photo taken on April 7, 2017, Syrian residents of Khan Sheikhun hold placards and pictures during a protest condemning a suspected chemical weapons attack on their town that killed at least 86 people, including 30 children, and left hundreds suffering symptoms including convulsions, vomiting or foaming at the mouth. (Xinhua/AFP)

The OPCW Fact-Finding Mission in Syria is looking into the alleged incidents, some of which are attributed to the Syrian Government and others to armed opposition groups, he told reporters.

There are also allegations of chemical weapon use in the northern Syrian district of Afrin, where Turkish forces are launching attacks on Kurds. But the OPCW mission could not find credible information to pursue an investigation,Uzumcu said.Source: Xinhua| 2018-03-22 23:43:16|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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BEIJING, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Wildlife experts from ten countries gathered at Hengshui Lake National Nature Reserve, in north China's Hebei Province, to discuss conservation of Baer's pochards.

Delegates to the workshop, coordinated by the East Asian-Australasian Flyway Partnership (EAAFP), discussed the needs of and threats to the bird, identified priorities for research and monitoring, and encouraged the development of national action plans.

A diving duck, the pochard breeds in southeast Russia and northeast China, migrating to southern China, Vietnam, Japan and India in winter.

It is classified as "critically endangered" by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) as its number has sharply declined since the 1980s, with the global population now standing at a mere 1,000 birds. In February, 49 Baer's pochards were recorded at Zhengbo Lake in central China's Hunan Province.

Threats of the duck include habitat loss and degradation through human disturbance and inadequate site protection and management.

Baer's Pochard Task Force, an EAAFP program, was launched in 2015 in response to the catastrophic decline in the bird's population.

"The Baer's pochard is a jewel in the crown of East Asia's natural heritage. Concentrated in China, we have the responsibility to ensure its survival," said Ding Changqing, head of the program.

According to Ding, China's forestry department has recommended Baer's Pochard be added to the list of species with Class I protection.

"If approved, this will mean severe penalties for anyone killing or disturbing the bird and will be a significant step toward the species long-term survival," said Ding.

Hengshui Lake is regarded as the most important site in the world for Baer's Pochard.by Gu Zhenqiu, Gui Tao, Peter Barker

CAMBRIDGE, Britain, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Cooperation with new academic powerhouse of China is at the top of the agenda for the new vice-chancellor of the prestigious University of Cambridge.

"In previous roles, I have worked closely with Chinese colleagues both in academia and in government," the university's Vice-Chancellor Stephen Toope told Xinhua in a recent exclusive interview.

Toope, a scholar who specializes in international relations, studied at Cambridge for his doctorate. The Canadian took office in October 2017, making him the first foreigner to hold the post of vice-chancellor at Cambridge in the university's about 800-year history.

"I'm now very hopeful being here at Cambridge that there will be even more opportunities to engage actively with China ...(a country)with an extraordinarily growing influence a university like Cambridge must be paying attention to," Toope said.

One of his first acts as the 346th vice-chancellor of the university in the east of England was to contact China's Ambassador to Britain, Liu Xiaoming.

"I felt it was appropriate to discuss a possible collaboration with the Chinese ambassador who is a very distinguished diplomat who's been posted here in the United Kingdom for a long time, and I wanted to get his advice on how best to proceed; and we had a very good conversation," Toope said.

COOPERATION WITH CHINA

Toope said that the university had already developed many links with China.

The strides that China has taken since its reforms and opening-up in 1978 has been unprecedented in history, said Toope, and that direction of opening up and cooperation is welcome.

"I think China is going to be, for the foreseeable future, at the heart of international cooperation," Toope said, hoping the University of Cambridge had a role to play in that cooperation.

"Many of our scientists and scholars who already have strong links into China, we have particularly powerfully connected to the Chinese Academy of Sciences, to Tsinghua University and Peking University in Beijing, but now we're also looking to develop another hub in Nanjing," he said.

Toope was proud that about 10 percent, around 1,200 people, of the University of Cambridge's student total population was Chinese, and that the university was aware that there was "so much talent in such a huge country that is dedicated to education."

"So we want to continue to welcome outstanding Chinese students to come here," he said.

BREXIT CHALLENGES

Brexit has dominated British political life since the vote to leave the European Union (EU) on June 23, 2016.

The University of Cambridge has for centuries been a major center of learning in Europe, and the formal separation of Britain from the EU poses previously unimagined challenges for the institution, for its role, its status, its capabilities, its staff and its students.

Toope believes that as a foreigner, his appointment was a signal that the university was keen to continue international collaboration.

"I think it was in fact part of the thinking of my coming to the university that, as a signal that the university is committed to genuine global involvement that it was not looking inward in any way; whatever happens with Brexit was important."

He said he felt very welcome here at the university.

"I have sensed a tremendous desire on the part of all of my colleagues to be clear to the rest of the world that Cambridge is very much engaged outside Britain," the vice chancellor said.

A lack of clarity about what Brexit would mean in detail, or when or if Brexit would be delivered, was a problem.

Toope said: "One of the great challenges we're facing is that very little is clear about Brexit at this point, so we are, I will be honest, a little frustrated; it's difficult to plan, not knowing exactly what agreement will be reached."

He added there were "potential negative consequences" which the university would address very carefully.

About 23 percent of the university's staff comes from the EU. Toope said the university wants to make sure that it is still deeply connected with its European partners in research networks.

"We want to make sure that we are still a welcoming environment for European students," said Toope. "We also want to make sure that we remain a very welcoming place for our current staff members who are from Europe."

He, however, admitted that in some senses the university remains dependent upon understanding what the final agreement will be between Britain and the rest of Europe through Brexit.

"Even in the medieval period, there were people coming from Europe to study here, people from here going to continental Europe. We want to make sure that that continues," Toope added.

WHAT MAKES GOOD UNIVERSITIES

Toope said that the university was "a remarkably ambitious place", with a keen interest in piloting the best path towards continued success in the future.

"I would say that one of my overall impressions so far is that my colleagues here are tremendously committed to working hard to make the next generation of discoveries to teach students with even more commitment than in past generations. I think that that's a remarkable thing to be able to say about an institution that's 800 years old," said Toope.

Toope said it was a priority to ensure that the foundations of 800 years of research and tradition were not compromised by future developments.

To that end, the vice chancellor said he placed diversity at the heart of his thinking.

"I think what marks a great university is diversity of engagement, diversity of thought, diversity of practices, so that a wide range of people bring their talents to the university, we then have to have the ability to make sure that they are talking with each other, so we need flexibility and the way we organize our labs, the way we organize our teaching structures," said Toope.

He said the university must also fundamentally commit to supporting basic scientific research and basic scholarly endeavors.

"Great world universities don't look only at what's happening tomorrow," said Toope, adding that although applied research is very important, there must also be people who are thinking about the very long-term, who are just trying to understand the world in new ways.

"It's those kinds of discoveries that Cambridge has been famous for over the years; work on DNA, Charles Darwin was here, these are fundamental shifts in the way we think about the world they're not about what happens tomorrow, that I think is the mark of a truly great world university," he said.

Toope said he wanted to bring different parts of the big institution of the university closer together in a kind of "joining up."

He said the university has a desire to connect its various parts more effectively.BRATISLAVA, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Slovak President Andrej Kiska appointed Peter Pellegrini to be the new prime minister on Thursday. He also appointed the remaining members of the new Government.

Pellegrini has assumed the post after taking an oath prescribed by the Constitution. The new government has several new persons.

Richard Rasi has become vice prime minister for investments and informatisation, Tomas Drucker takes the post of interior minister, Andrea Kalavska that of health minister, Lubica Lassakova becomes culture minister and Gabor Gal is justice minister.

Other ministries have not seen changes at their helm.

The new Government also adopted the manifesto on Thursday. The ministers agreed to continue smoothly in meeting the manifesto that was approved by the previous government on April 26, 2016. It pledged to pay attention to people's real lives rather than to political polarisation and the division of society.

"The Government that was appointed by the president today consists of exactly the same political parties that two years ago drew up the Government Manifesto and we want to meet the Manifesto to the very end. We need to get back to work immediately, this country has been slightly paralysed for three weeks," stressed Pellegrini.

The confidence vote in the new Government in Parliament might take place as soon as on Friday (March 23).Source: Xinhua| 2018-03-23 00:08:23|Editor: Lifang

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Former South Korean President Lee Myung-bak (C) is seen out of his house in Seoul, South Korea, on March 22, 2018. Former South Korean President Lee Myung-bak was taken into custody Thursday night as a Seoul court accepted state prosecutors' request to arrest him over a series of corruption allegations. (Xinhua/Lee Sang-ho)

SEOUL, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Former South Korean President Lee Myung-bak was taken into custody Thursday night as a Seoul court accepted state prosecutors' request to arrest him over a series of corruption allegations.

The Seoul Central District Court decided to put Lee, who served his five-year presidential term through early 2013, under custody as he denied almost all of alleged wrongdoings, and even basic facts found through an investigation.

The denial raised a possibility for destroying evidence, and many of Lee's offences were justifiable, the court said.

Lee posted a message in his social media account after the arrest decision, saying he is responsible for everything though he tried his best during his presidency.

Lee was summoned last week for questioning, and the Seoul Central District Prosecutors' Office requested a warrant Monday to arrest him for multiple charges, including bribery, embezzlement, tax evasion and slush fund creation.

The former president refused to present himself in the court to be arraigned, saying he already clarified his position while being grilled by prosecutors. The court made the detention decision by examining documentary evidences and testimonies provided by prosecutors.

Lee had awaited the court's decision at home in central Seoul. Senior prosecutors came and took him by passenger car to a detention center in southern Seoul.

Lee's arrest came about a year after former President Park Geun-hye, Lee's successor, was detained last March after her impeachment over an influence-peddling scandal involving her longtime friend Choi Soon-sil.

Prosecutors demanded 30 years in jail for Park, who was detained for her dismissal of all charges levied against her. A Seoul court will hand down a ruling on the country's first-ever impeached president next month.

Lee was charged with taking tens of millions of U.S. dollars in bribes from the country's intelligence agency and big corporations including Samsung Electronics.

Samsung is alleged to have paid 5 million U.S. dollars of retaining fee, on Lee's behalf, in the United States for DAS, a South Korean auto parts maker which prosecutors said Lee owns under the names of his relatives.

In exchange for the payment, Samsung Electronics Chairman Lee Kun-hee is believed to have bought a presidential pardon in 2009 when the Samsung chairman, currently in hospital, got a suspended jail sentence for tax evasion.

Prosecutors searched Samsung offices in Seoul and Suwon, outskirts of the capital city, in February before calling in former Samsung Electronics Vice Chairman Lee Hak-soo for questioning.

The charge related to DAS dated back to 1999 when the company invested 19 billion won (17 million U.S. dollars) in establishing investment consulting firm BBK, which faced a legal lawsuit for stock price manipulation in 2001.

In the United States, DAS filed a lawsuit against a former BBK president and received 14 billion won (13 million U.S. dollars) in damages through the former BBK head's personal bank account in February 2011 when Lee was in office.

Samsung paid the legal fee on behalf of DAS, and Lee granted a pardon only to the Samsung chairman in December 2009.

DAS is at the center of the ongoing criminal investigation. If prosecutors prove Lee is the real owner of the company, he can be convicted of bribery, embezzlement, tax evasion and the creation of slush fund, which is believed to have been funneled into Lee for his presidential campaign.

The National Intelligence Service (NIS), the country's spy agency, is believed to have delivered secret operation fund in kickbacks to Lee's office at his behest through his closest aides, some of whom admitted the allegation.

Lee is also accused of dodging taxes by owning real estate assets and bank deposits under borrowed names, while illegally moving classified government documents to a warehouse of his private office.ISLAMABAD, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Pakistan on Thursday urged foreign forces in Afghanistan to take action and eliminate sanctuaries of Pakistani militant groups in Afghanistan.

The Afghan government and the Resolute Support Mission need to do more within Afghanistan to eliminate all safe havens and terrorist sanctuaries, Foreign Ministry spokesman Muhammad Faisal said at his weekly briefing.

Pakistani officials insist that the militants have fled to Afghanistan as the result of major military operations across the country in recent years and now operate from the other side of the border.

"It is a matter of satisfaction that the United States is taking actions against the terrorists hiding inside Afghanistan including the Pakistani Taliban Chief Fazalullah, who have committed acts of terrorism across Pakistan. More needs to be done," Faisal said.

He rejected the U.S. claims about the presence of terrorists in Pakistan and said Pakistan has been consistently reminding its U.S. interlocutors about series of successful military operations undertaken by the Armed Forces of Pakistan in the border areas with Afghanistan.Source: Xinhua| 2018-03-23 00:13:24|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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JERUSALEM, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Israel's Justice Ministry said Thursday that an investigation has been launched into Facebook's leak of personal information of Israeli users.

The ministry said that the investigation was opened following media reports that data-mining firm Cambridge Analytica had harvested information about Facebook users.

"The Israeli Privacy Protection Authority informed Facebook today, that it had opened an investigation into its activities, following the publications on the transfers of personal data from Facebook to Cambridge Analytica, and the possibility of other infringements of privacy law regarding Israelis," the Justice Ministry said in a statement.

Under the Israeli Privacy Law, personal data may only be used for the purpose for which it was given, with the consent of the individual.

The Privacy Protection Authority will "investigate whether personal data of Israeli citizens were illegally used in a way that infringes upon their right to privacy and the provisions of the Israeli Privacy Law," the statement said.

Cambridge Analytica, a British consulting company, was accused of harvesting data of up to 50 million Facebook users without permission and using the data to help politicians including U.S. President Donald Trump and the Brexit campaign.

On Wednesday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg apologized for the "major breach of trust," saying the company would take measures to protect personal data.Source: Xinhua| 2018-03-23 00:18:26|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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ADEN, Yemen, March 22 (Xinhua) -- The Saudi Arabia-led coalition killed at least 10 Houthi rebels and injured 17 others on Thursday in airstrikes against Houthi reinforcement troops near Yemen's southern province of Lahj, a military official told Xinhua.

The coalition's fighter jets carried out about five airstrikes that struck the pro-Houthi troops in Hoymi area near Lahj province, the local military official said on condition of anonymity.

"The airstrikes precisely hit the convoy of the reinforcement troops dispatched from the neighboring province of Taiz to attack the pro-government forces based in Lahj," the source said.

He added that the reinforcement troops failed to reach Lahj's outskirts and lost about three vehicles that were completely destroyed in the bombing.

The pro-Houthi forces have repeatedly attempted to infiltrate and launch attacks against the Saudi-backed Yemeni government forces stationed in Lahj's military base.

A number of previous attempts by the government forces failed to make progress to kick the Houthis out of the neighboring provinces such as Taiz.

The Saudi-led military coalition has intensified its air campaign against Houthi positions in and around the Houthi-held capital Sanaa and other northern provinces since Houthis killed former President Ali Abdullah Saleh on Dec. 4, 2017.

The coalition has intervened in the Yemeni conflict in March 2015 to roll back Iranian-aligned Houthi rebels, and backed internationally-recognized President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi.Source: Xinhua| 2018-03-23 00:23:31|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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BEIJING, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Wang Dongming was elected chairman of the All-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) at a plenary session of the ACFTU 16th Executive Committee, which opened on Thursday.

Wang, who was also recently elected vice chairman of the Standing Committee of the 13th National People's Congress, will replace Li Jianguo.

Chen Xi, member of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee addressed the election at the plenum, and commended Li's work over the past five years.BELGRADE, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Belgrade airport has been given under concession to the French company Vinci Airports at a signing ceremony on Thursday in a deal worth almost 1.46 billion euros (1.8 billion U.S. dollars).

Document on the 25-year-long concession of the Belgrade Airport was signed by Serbian Minister of Construction, Transport and Infrastructure Zorana Mihajlovic and Chairman of Vinci Airports Nicolas Notebaert with the presence of Serbian Prime Minister Ana Brnabic.

"The contract regulates an up-front payment (of 501 million euros), minimal annual tax payments and capital investments," a government release said.

The envisaged value of investments is more than 700 million euros, while it is estimated that the annual tax payment will be between 4.4 and 15.1 million euros.

"The contract includes financing, management, maintenance, expansion and upgrade of the existing airport terminal and the airport runway," the release reads.

Mihajlovic said that "this is a great day for Serbia, Belgrade and the airport itself" and pointed out that the goal of the concession was to turn the airport into a transport corridor and a transport hub for this part of Europe.

Last year the Belgrade Airport received 5.3 million passengers, while government hopes to triple that number with the concession.

The public competition for the concession of the airport was held in January 2017, while the final decision on the winner was made one year later, on January 5 this year. (1 euro = 1.23 U.S. dollars)LAGOS, March 22 (Xinhua) -- The Nigerian government Thursday accused the opposition People's Democratic Party (PDP) of plumbing the depths of infamy for saying the adoption and release of the Dapchi schoolgirls were stage-managed.

Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed, said in statement sent to Xinhua that such remarks portray the PDP as an inhuman, insensitive, unpatriotic and unworthy party.

He said since the release of the Dapchi girls were negotiated by friendly countries and reputable international organizations, it would have taken a conspiracy of global proportion to have stage-managed the adoption and release of the girls.

Mohammed said the reaction of the PDP amounts to an expression of sour grapes, especially because the party failed woefully - when it was in power - to quickly resolve a similar abduction of schoolgirls.

The minister said it is unfortunate that the PDP that failed woefully as a ruling party has also failed grievously as an opposition party, going by its insensitive and crude response to the release of the Dapchi schoolgirls - a development that calls for non-partisan celebration.

The majority of the schoolgirls were released by Boko Haram on Wednesday after one month in captivity. The 104 schoolgirls out of 110 abducted were airlifted to the Nigerian capital city of Abuja through a military transport plane.

Dapchi, where the kidnapping took place a month ago, is located 100 kilometers from Damaturu, the capital of the northern state of Yobe.

Boko Haram is a Jihadist militant organization based in northeastern Nigeria. The United Nations believes Boko Haram has killed more than 20,000 innocent people since 2009 through terror attacks.Source: Xinhua| 2018-03-23 00:38:34|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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BEIJING, March 23 (Xinhua) -- China will "take all necessary measures" to defend its rights and interests, an official with the Ministry of Commerce said Thursday, responding to media reports that the United States will soon release results of a Section 301 investigation against China.

"China will absolutely not sit back watching its rights and interests be damaged," said an unnamed official in charge of the ministry's treaty and law department.

In August 2017, the United States initiated an investigation into Chinese intellectual property and technology transfers under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974.

Media reports said that the U.S. administration would soon make public the investigation results and impose restrictive measures on China.

"Concerning the Section 301 investigation, China has made clear its position several times that it stands firmly against such unilateral and trade protectionist practices from the U.S. side," the official said.

Since the two countries established diplomatic relations in 1979, bilateral trade has surged 232 times, and total two-way investment has exceeded 230 billion dollars.

U.S. industries have expressed worries about the unilateral actions taken by the United States, with 45 business associations having already expressed their opposition, according to the official.

"We hope that the United States can realize the mutually beneficial essence of Sino-U.S. economic and trade ties, and that it won't do anything to impair the interests of others or itself," said the official.

This was the second statement by the ministry within 24 hours regarding trade relations with the United States.

On Wednesday, the WTO ruled that 11 U.S. anti-subsidy measures are against its rules.

The WTO ruling "once again proved that the U.S. side violated WTO rules, repeatedly abused trade remedy measures, seriously damaged the fair and just international trade environment, and weakened the stability of the multilateral trading system," a ministry spokesperson said.

China asked the United States to take immediate actions to rectify its mistakes in anti-subsidy investigations against China and provide a fair and stable trade environment for Chinese enterprises, the spokesperson said.

Li Yong, president of China Association of International Trade, said that retaliatory and counter measures would only be China's last resorts.

"We will not sit around. Speculations that a potential trade war might affect Boeing aircraft and soybeans are not unfounded," said he.

Tu Xinquan, professor of the University of International Business and Economics, said that a "decisive element" in a trade war is not loss itself but the capability to bear losses.

"China has the confidence and capability to fight a trade war," said he, urging the United States to ditch the zero-sum mentality and open its market wider and in a transparent way, as China constantly opens its market wider.

He said that if the U.S. bypassed the WTO and took unilateral measures, it would be against the WTO rules and an act of trade protectionism.

"The true intention behind the U.S. moves needs to be surveyed," said Zhang Monan, researcher with China Center for International Economic Exchanges.

"The United States is using trade wars as a tool to exert pressure upon China, seeking to win concessions," she added.In this picture taken on March 21, 2018, Gazans passed by a store front in the Gaza Strip that has been under tight blockade by Israel since 2007.(Xinhua/Zhao Yue)

GAZA, March 22 (Xinhua) -- A short walk around the markets in the Gaza Strip can easily reveal how much Palestinians in the poverty-stricken enclave rely on Chinese goods, which are not only affordable but also with good quality.

China is the second product supplier, after Israel, for the 2 million population in the war-torn Gaza Strip which has been ruled by the Islamic Hamas Movement, Israel's bitter enemy, since 2007.

"I import all the goods I sell in my stores from China," Mohammed Abu Zeyada, owner of Smart Buy for Houseware, told Xinhua.

Thanks to his trade with China, Zeyada has expanded his business rapidly, owning three big stores in Gaza City now.

Zeyada, who started his business only two years ago, revealed that he only imports from China because the prices of Chinese products are affordable and the quality is high.

He praised the Chinese laws for making life easy for businessmen, citing that he has never faced any troubles while buying or shipping his goods in China.

In Gaza, there are dozens of customs clearance and support offices and companies that help Palestinian traders import goods from China.

Chinese goods are usually shipped to Israeli seaports, before transported into Gaza through the Kerem Shalom crossing, the only trade terminal between Israel and Gaza.

"The Chinese goods sell well in Gaza for their very competitive prices," Zeyada said.

For Gazans, who have been suffering from deteriorating economic conditions due to Israel's 11-year blockade and the intra-Palestinian political division, Chinese commodities are always the best choice.

"China manufactures goods that suit every one, the rich and the poor," Mustafa al-Maqadma, a 52-year-old Gaza resident, told Xinhua.

Hanging around fashion shops looking for Chinese-made men's wear, al-Maqadma said he prefers Chinese goods because they at least are two times cheaper than other goods made in European or Arab countries.

"It is not easy to buy high quality items for low prices...China did that for the poor and middle-income people," he said, flashing a big smile.

The trade with China has been a grace for both Palestinian consumers and businessmen in Gaza. The consumers can buy the goods they want for cheap prices, while the traders can expand their business thanks to the high local demand for Chinese goods.

Maher al-Tabbaa, media officer at the Palestinian Chamber of Commerce in Gaza, said China is the second supplier of goods to the Palestinian territories after Israel.

The volume of imports from China to the Palestinian territories of West Bank and Gaza Strip exceeds 500 million U.S. dollars annually, he told Xinhua.

Al-Tabbaa explained that the importers prefer to deal with China because Chinese goods suit all tastes and meet different family needs with very reasonable prices.

"The Chinese products are suitable for the Gaza Strip in light of the economic deterioration that has been going on for years," he noted.

Gaza has been placed under a tight Israeli blockade since Hamas seized the territory by force after routing forces loyal to President Mahmoud Abbas in 2007.

In the past decade, Israel and Hamas have fought three major wars that claimed the lives of thousands of Palestinians and Israelis.

The blockade has pushed Gaza's 2 million population deeper into poverty by inflating the unemployment rate there.

Gaza's Chamber of Commerce said that the unemployment rate in the enclave stands at 46 percent, while the rate of poverty has passed 65 percent.ISLAMABAD, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Pakistan has extended the stay of nearly 1.4 million registered Afghan refugees until June 30, 2018, the foreign ministry said on Thursday.

Pakistan also hosts around 1 million unregistered refugees who are being documented.

The tenure of the stay of the registered refugees, who hold Proof of Registration cards (PoR), was scheduled to expire on March 31, 2018.

"Our policy on Afghan Refugees is focused on dignified return of our Afghan brothers to their homeland. In this spirit, the government extended the validity of PoR Cards until June 30, 2018," Foreign Ministry spokesman Muhammad Faisal said at his weekly briefing.

"At the same time, we would urge donor countries and aid agencies to make efforts for the resettlement of these returnees by building houses and initiating livelihood projects in Afghanistan," the spokesman said.

He expressed the hope that these efforts will make the process of their return sustainable and facilitate the smooth repatriation of the Afghan refugee brothers in coming days.

The spokesman said the foreign ministry is involved in engaging UNHCR and the international community to ensure that the Afghan refugees return to their homeland in a dignified and permanent manner.

"Afghan authorities must create incentivized pull factors for the sustainable absorption of these Afghan refugees into Afghan economy," he said.

The UN refugee agency lauded Pakistan's decision to extend the PoR cards to Afghan refugees until June 30 as a temporary relief amid growing uncertainty and anxiety.

The UNHCR Representative for Pakistan Ruvendrini Menikdiwela, however, said in a statement the agency remains concerned that the government's time-frame for voluntary, safe and dignified return "appears limited and that alternative solutions have yet to be progressed."

She said that while voluntary repatriation is a preferred solution for the majority of Afghan refugees, it needs to be undertaken in a phased manner that supports refugees' sustainable reintegration back home in Afghanistan.

The UN refugee agency's voluntary repatriation program for registered Afghan refugees resumed on March 1 after the traditional winter break from December 2017 to February 2018.

Since 2002, around 4.3 million Afghan refugees have voluntarily returned to Afghanistan under the Tripartite Framework and UNHCR-facilitated voluntary repatriation program, according to the UNHCR.ABUJA, March 22 (Xinhua) -- The Nigerian government on Thursday confirmed that one more Dapchi schoolgirl remains in the terror group Boko Haram's custody.

The government gave the name of the remaining schoolgirl as Leah Sharibu and said there's an ongoing effort to bring her back home safely to her parents.

Sharibu and 109 other girls were abducted from an all-girl college in the northeastern town of Dapchi on Feb. 19 by Boko Haram.

A total of 104 of the schoolgirls were brought back to Dapchi by the terror group on Wednesday following a negotiation with the government.

Citing media reports, the statement noted the girl was held back by the terrorists over her decision not to convert from Christianity to Islam.

"President Buhari is fully conscious of his duty under the constitution to protect all Nigerians, irrespective of faith, ethnic background or geopolitical location and will not shirk in this responsibility," the statement added.

Five other girls may have died while in captivity, according to local media on Thursday.

Another girl and a boy were also freed along with the 104 schoolgirls.

Buhari will receive all the released abductees at the State House in Abuja on Friday, a presidential spokesman told Xinhua by telephone.

Dapchi, where the kidnapping of the schoolgirls took place a month ago, is located 100 kilometers from Damaturu, the capital of the northern state of Yobe.

Boko Haram is a Jihadist militant organization based in northeastern Nigeria. The United Nations believes Boko Haram has killed more than 20,000 innocent people since 2009 through terror attacks.TALLINN, March 22 (Xinhua) -- The Estonian government decided on Thursday to send up to 50 active servicemen to participate in the French-led anti-terrorist Operation Barkhane in Mali.

The Estonian government will apply for a mandate from the Riigikogu (Estonian parliament) for the one-year mission. The Estonian contingent would be an infantry unit with armored personnel carriers and a support element tasked with ensuring the security of the base and its close environs, said the press release.

Estonian Prime Minister Juri Ratas said Estonia's decision to contribute to an anti-terrorist operation was another example of the excellent cooperation between Estonia and France.

"France sent their unit to Estonia last spring to accompany the unit of the UK in the NATO battle group located here. The French unit will return to the battle group next year. Countries do not send their units abroad without careful consideration," said Ratas.

Estonian Minister of Defence Juri Luik said that by supporting the operation, Estonia would show that it does not merely benefit from security, but also contributes to it.

The French defense minister proposed Estonia participate in Barkhane, France's largest foreign operation, in January, and Mali supports the decision, according to the press release.

Currently, Estonia is involved in two operations being carried out in Mali: the EU training mission EUTM-Mali and the UN peacekeeping mission MINUSMA. The operations carried out in the region coordinate and support each other's activities.VILNIUS, March 22 (Xinhua) -- The cyber security situation in Lithuania improved in 2017, but the number of targeted cyber attacks is forecast to grow further this year, the Ministry of National Defense said in a report published on Thursday.

Altogether 55,000 cyber incidents, or nearly 150 a day, were handled by the defense ministry's National Cyber Security Centre (NKSC) last year, 500 of which qualified as incidents of a high or medium level of significance.

In 2016, NKSC handled 49,000 cyber attacks.

A number of technically advanced, lasting and targeted cyber attacks is increasing, the report indicated.

Lithuanian Defense Minister Raimundas Karoblis said the state's cyber security resources were consolidated last year, which led to a breakthrough in discovering and handling the incidents.

"We could detect more malware in cyber space, react faster and block the potential damage," Karoblis was quoted as saying in a ministry's press release.

"The amount of cyber incidents is increasing all over the world and Lithuania is not an exception. We saw many various examples last year, from cases of primitive hooliganism to spying and criminal offenses involving money," Karoblis was quoted as saying at a press conference where the NKSC report was presented.

Karoblis said the Lithuanian authorities managed to block some of the most damaging global attacks as WannaCry, NotPetya, Reaper and others.

"Compared to other countries, the damage of global cyber attacks in Lithuania is scarce," Karoblis added.

According to the report, one of the worrying trends regarding malicious cyber activities in Lithuania is that physical infrastructure has been increasingly targeted in recent years. In 2017, 26 percent of all malicious software incidents were detected in the energy sector, 22 percent in the public security and law enforcement sector, and 21 percent targeted the foreign affairs and national security sector.

NKSC is the country's main cyber security institution, responsible for the unified management of cyber incidents, and the monitoring and control of the implementation of cyber security requirements.WASHINGTON, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Despite warnings from business groups and trade experts, U.S. President Donald Trump on Thursday signed a presidential memorandum that could impose tariffs on up to 60 billion U.S. dollars of imports from China, the latest unilateral move that poses a threat to global trade.

It follows Trump's recent tariff plan on steel and aluminum imports and January's tariffs levied on imported solar panels and washing machines.

Those punitive measures are all based on outdated U.S. trade laws put in place during the Cold War era to protect domestic industries, but they have been rarely used since the launch of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995.

Trump and his trade advisor Robert Lighthizer, former deputy U.S. Trade Representative in the Ronald Reagan administration, might wish to re-live the trade battles against Western Europe and Japan in the 1970s and 1980s.

However, global trade and supply chains have tremendously changed over the past three decades. Products from one country usually incorporate components from others, as coordinating international production is cheaper and more efficient.

Therefore, raising tariffs on Chinese goods is just like using 20th- or even 19th-century tools to tackle problems of the 21st-century, an age of globalization. It would disturb the interconnected supply chain of many industries and increase costs for American businesses and consumers.

Just think about Apple's popular iPhones, which combine American design with hardware from international suppliers and Chinese assembly lines. Global production nowadays has eliminated national boundaries.

While counting as Chinese exports to the United States, iPhones are produced by American multinational companies operating in China.

That's why 45 U.S. trade associations, representing retail, technology, agriculture and other consumer-product industries, recently urged the Trump White House not to move forward with tariffs on Chinese imports.

"America First" and unilateralism seems to be the mantra of Trump's trade policy. Unfortunately, with a zero-sum mentality, it is hard to see how the United States can negotiate better trade deals with other countries.

What is worrisome is that the United States, the world's largest economy, begins taking unilateral actions rather than resolving trade disputes through the WTO.

If the United States starts to ignore WTO rules or honor its obligations selectively, other countries could follow suit, putting the rule-based global trading system at risk. The result will be a global trade war. As former U.S. trade representative Carla Hills put it, "without the WTO it would be the law of the jungle."

In Trump's eyes, China seems to be taking advantage of the United States on trade. But the truth is that the China-U.S. trade relations are reciprocal and broadly complementary. Trade and investment between China and the United States supports about 2.6 million American jobs, according to the U.S.-China Business Council.

The best way to get the good deals that Trump seeks is to pursue a more open trade policy with China. Both countries should work together to further open their respective markets to each other. Trade wars are for losers.LONDON, March 22 (Xinhua) -- British Home Secretary Amber Rudd on Thursday pledged a new drive against extremist recruiters as families and friends of terror victims marked the anniversary of last year's Islamic State-inspired attack on Westminster Bridge near British Parliament.

Rudd vowed that Britain will "not be defeated" by terrorism, saying action would be taken against both Islamist and far-right radicalizers seeking to spread hatred and violence.

One aim will be to counter attempts by Islamic State to "foster a grievance narrative" by making Muslims in Britain feel under attack, she said, adding that there will be also renewed efforts to stop "racists" exploiting Islamist murders to justify retaliatory "acts of cruelty and hatred."

Rudd, who attended a special service in memory of the five victims of the attack last year at the St Mary Undercroft Chapel in Parliament, said that all forms of terror needed to be stamped out.

"Islamists and far-right terrorists share one thing in common -- they are united through their adherence to hate. We need to respond by stamping out those recruiters in the first place," she said.

Five people were killed on March 22, 2017 after Khalid Masood drove his car at people on Westminster Bridge before stabbing PC Palmer in the Palace of Westminster.

Three people were killed outright on the bridge and one died later in hospital.

Victims' families and friends, politicians and police were among those who marked the anniversary by commemorating people killed or injured a Westminster and the terror atrocities which followed.

The following month, 22 people were killed in the Manchester arena suicide bombing, eight died in the London Bridge attack, and a man was killed when Darren Osborne rammed a van into a crowd a Finsbury Park mosque.

There was also a botched attempt to bomb a subway station at Parsons Green in London, which injured 30 people.

In a signed article published by the Evening Standard newspaper, Rudd said "We need to respond by stamping out those recruiters, whether it is an Islamist terrorist disseminating material that inspires and instructs how to carry out an attack, or a racist who uses Westminster to provide justification for further acts of cruelty and hatred."

"We cannot only deal with those who have been already been drawn into terrorist activity," she wrote. "We need to intervene earlier and stop people being radicalized in the first place."

Events have been held on Thursday to remember 14 people killed in four London terror attacks in 2017.

British Prime Minister Theresa May laid a wreath of white lilies and roses at Parliament Square in memory of the victims.

Meanwhile, Mayor of London Sadiq Khan marked the anniversary with the launch of a London United campaign, which will involve #LondonUnited projected on locations of last year's terrorist attacks on the city as an act of solidarity.

"Londoners will never forget the horrific terror attacks on our city in 2017," the mayor said. "We will never forget the bravery of our emergency services and first responders who ran towards danger while urging the rest of us to run to safety."

Floral tributes were left outside the British Parliament and on the Westminster Bridge.

For his part, British Defense Minister Tobias Ellwood said, "All I could offer was there are some bad people in the world, but it's the good people that win."Source: Xinhua| 2018-03-23 01:43:54|Editor: huaxia

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Aerial photo taken on May 10, 2017 shows the Shennyuxi scenic zone at the Wuxia Gorge of the Yangtze's Three Gorges area in southwest China. (Xinhua/Liu Chan)





BEIJING, March 22 (Xinhua) -- A week of saving water began in China Thursday, in celebration of this year's World Water Day, taking the country another step closer to realizing the dream of beautiful, green nation.

Following the creation of new environmental authorities, China is now better equipped to juggle growth and conservation.

"Let saving water be the task of all Chinese," the People's Daily said in a Thursday article.

Water shortages are particularly tough for China, as per capita water resources are less than a third of the world average. About two thirds of Chinese cities face water shortages to some extent.

To encourage people to think more deeply about their water supply, Binzhou City, Shandong Province on Thursday encouraged citizens to turn off their water for a few hours to find out exactly how a water shortage felt.

Children show their paintings themed on saving water at Haizhouwan Central Kindergarten in Lianyungang City, east China's Jiangsu Province, March 22, 2018, on the occasion of World Water Day. (Xinhua/Geng Yuhe)





In central China's Hunan province, a data base now allows local river chiefs tasked with fighting water pollution to access a wide range of information to help in their work.

Saving water, however, is only one thing China must work on to become a beautiful nation of clean air, clear water and green mountains. A week of saving water is definitely not enough.

That will require institutional reform and strong government action.

NEW INSTITUTIONS

Across the country, river chiefs, bay chiefs and lake chiefs are taking up their posts. Along China's longest inland river, the Tarim, in Xinjiang, 285 river chiefs have been appointed to be directly accountable for the quality of water under their supervision.

River chief Wang Jia clears away floating waste on a river in Changxing County, east China's Zhejiang Province, Oct. 12, 2017. (Xinhua/Xu Yu)





In Beijing, people are taking selfies in front of the Ministry of Environmental Protection, as it will soon be replaced. New ministries were recently approved by the national legislative session.

The Ministry of Ecological Environment will take charge of protection of fresh water, land, air and oceans. The Ministry of Natural Resources will be responsible for making overall planning and overseeing the development and protection of the natural resources.

These changes may be answers to long-term issues, including poorly defined government responsibilities, according to Minister of Ecological Environment Li Ganjie.

The government has played a dual-role as both competitor and referee for a long time and that problem should now be solved, Li told a press briefing over the weekend.

Li's ministry will consolidate powers to prevent pollution and protect the environment that used to be spread among various ministries.

AMBITIOUS GOALS

New ministries mean more detailed planning, but the journey to sustainable growth still will not be easy.

The government will do as much as it can to protect and restore ecosystems. It will set redlines for protection in the whole country. More than 6.6 million hectares of forests will be planted. Crop rotation and fallow land trials will be increased to two million hectares, and all before the end of this year.

By 2020, total annual water use should be under 670 billion cubic meters and water use per 10,000 yuan of GDP will be reduced by 23 percent of the 2015 level.

In the opinion of Erik Solheim, executive director of the United Nations Environment Programme, policy makers face either-or paradoxes to a seemingly impossible equation, namely, how to lift tens of millions of people out of poverty while protecting the environment.

For large economies, the balance between development and conservation is particularly tricky.

GROWING CONFIDENCE

Although environmental regulation of factories inevitably leads to pain, many companies have begun to feel the benefit of the new development model. The green development path has helped new energy vehicles in particular, but the effects can be seen across the board.

Poten Environment Group, a water treatment firm in Beijing, saw its revenue rise by more than 45 percent from 2012 to 2016, thanks to stricter environmental rules.

The level of PM2.5 in Beijing has dropped to its lowest level since 2013 when the national air pollution control campaign began. Across the country, average PM2.5 density in 338 cities fell by 6.5 percent last year.

Photo taken on July 11, 2017 shows tourists visiting the Qixing Lake Scenic Area of the Saihanba State Forest Park in Weichang Man and Mongolian Autonomous County of Chengde City, north China's Hebei Province. (Xinhua/Wang Xiao)





Li Ganjie said that the target for PM2.5 reduction could be raised as targets are being met faster than expected.

"Finally, the world is witnessing what may well turn out to be the definitive how-to guide on building a sustainable economy that works in complete harmony with the environment," Solheim wrote in an article in China Today, a multi-language magazine.

"For the larger economies, in most cases wealth has been built on unsustainable growth. That is about to change, and I'm convinced China will now lead the way," he wrote. Enditem





(By Xinhua writers Cheng Yunjie, Lu Yun and Lou Chen. Guan Guifeng in Beijing also contributes to the story.)LUSAKA, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Zambia did not sign the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) as it was still conducting internal negotiations on some protocols in the agreement, a Zambian official said Thursday.

On Wednesday, 44 African countries signed the agreement to launch the AfCFTA during an extraordinary summit of the African Union (AU) in Kigali, Rwanda.

Zambia's foreign minister Joseph Malanji said Zambia only signed the African Free Trade Area Declaration and not the agreement.

He said in a statement that Zambia had negotiated the protocol on goods and services and the dispute settlement mechanism, while the remaining protocols, including on trade competition, investment and the intellectual property, were yet to be negotiated.

The minister, however, said the signing of the declaration shows that Zambia stands with all other African countries in the quest to improve intra-Africa trade.

Meanwhile, Zambia's commerce, trade and industry minister Christopher Yaluma said in the same statement that Zambia will not sign the protocol on the free movement of people as the country was not ready for it.

He said the government would only engage in treaties that had a positive bearing on Zambian people especially the youth and women.

The decision to form the AfCFTA was adopted in January 2012 during the 18th Ordinary Session of the Assembly of Heads of State and Government of the AU while negotiations were launched by the AU in 2015.

The AfCFTA was aimed at creating a single continental market for goods and services with free movement of businesses and investments.

According to the AU, this will pave the way for the establishment of the Continental Customs Union and the African Customs Union.

The AfCFTA could create an Africa market of over 1.2 billion people with a GDP of 2.5 trillion U.S. dollars.

The agreement, after being signed, will be submitted for ratification by state parties before it can enter into force.LONDON, March 22 (Xinhua) -- An export bar was placed Thursday on one of the world's most famous telephones to stop it from being exported to an overseas buyer.

Arts Minister Michael Ellis has placed the temporary export bar on the Lobster Telephone (White Aphrodisiac), by the celebrated artists Salvador Dali and Edward James.

A search will now be launched to find a buyer willing to match a price tag of 1.25 million U.S. dollars that will stop it from going to an overseas buyer.

The sculpture is the last known example in Britain of the hand-painted white design. It is at risk of being exported unless a buyer can be found to match the asking price of 853,047 British pounds plus VAT.

Lobster Telephone was a collaboration between Dali, one of the 20th century's most influential artists, and his patron, English poet Edward James, who was known for his promotion of the Surrealist movement.

In total, 11 Lobster Telephones were commissioned by James in 1938. Of these, seven were hand-painted white and four were painted red. Each telephone was slightly different, meaning that each is unique.

The inspiration for the iconic piece came in 1936 when Dali, James and others were eating lobsters and one of the discarded shells landed on a telephone.

Edward James owned one of the finest private collections of surrealist work - including both versions of the Lobster Telephone - at Monkton, his country house in West Sussex. Today, the majority of the white versions are in museums abroad, including public collections in Rotterdam, Florida, Johannesburg, Minneapolis and Lisbon.

Arts Minister Michael Ellis said: "Salvador Dali was one of the greatest artists of the 20th Century. This iconic work was created in the UK, and I want it to remain here.

It is important that we keep world-class art in this country and I hope a buyer can be found to save it for the nation."Source: Xinhua| 2018-03-23 01:54:00|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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BEIJING, March 23 (Xinhua) -- No websites should produce or spread items that distort, mock or defame classic literary and art works, according to a circular released by the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television (SAPPRFT) on Thursday.

They should not arbitrarily re-edit, re-dub or re-subtitle the works, as well as radio and television programs and original online audiovisual programs.

The websites must make sure that the trailers belong to real programs, and that they give correct guidance to the public, rather than attract views with vulgar content, according to the SAPPRFT.

The circular asks local authorities to strictly manage re-edited programs, including those uploaded by ordinary citizens, and take down those with problems.

It also asks program producers to examine the qualifications of potential sponsors before accepting bids, and not to work with any institution that presents online programs without a license.RIGA, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Latvian lawmakers on Thursday passed in the final reading two bills providing for ethnic minority schools' gradual transition to education almost only in Latvian.

In line with the amendments adopted to the Education Law and Comprehensive Education Law, the switch to Latvian as the sole language of teaching has to be completed by the academic year 2021/2022.

The reform, initiated by Latvian Education and Science Minister Karlis Sadurskis of the ruling center-right Unity party, has been hotly debated in parliament and triggered a string of mass protests led by advocates of Latvia's Russian schools, particularly the Russian Union of Latvia.

Igors Pimenovs, an MP of the opposition leftist Harmony party, argued in parliament for Russian-speaking children's rights to education in their native language. "To a great extent, the stability of the Latvian state and the situation of the Latvian language depend on the ethnic minorities' future," Pimenovs said.

The opposition lawmaker said after the parliament session that Harmony was considering asking Latvian President Raimonds Vejonis not to sign the language reform bills into law.

Andris Morozovs, an MP of the Harmony faction, worried that the reform would amount to the abolition of minority schools in Latvia.

However, Hossams Abu Meri, an MP representing Unity, said that the language reform would consolidate Latvia's society.

It was echoed by Raivis Dzintars, an MP of the ruling rightist National Alliance, saying that the "Latvian language belongs not only to the Latvian people" and that it should not be perceived as a threat to ethnic minorities.

After the reform, the proportion of subjects taught in Latvian in ethnic minority schools will have to reach at least 50 percent in grades 1 to 6; 80 percent in grades 7 to 9 and 100 percent in grades 10 to 12. The schools will still be able to teach the language, literature, as well as culture and history-related subjects in the minorities' native languages.Source: Xinhua| 2018-03-23 02:09:04|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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GUANGZHOU, March 23 (Xinhua) -- Xiaoming Bike, a bike-sharing firm based in south China's Guangdong Province, lost a lawsuit Thursday over its failure to pay back deposits.

The Guangzhou Municipal Intermediate People's Court ordered the firm's operator, Guangzhou Yueqi Information Technology Co., to pay back all the deposits and make a public apology.

Yueqi was also ordered to disclose all information on receipts, use and refund of deposits.

The Guangdong Provincial Consumers' Association lodged a civil public welfare lawsuit in December after receiving 2,952 complaints about deposit refunds.

By October, about 320,000 Xiaoming Bike users in Guangdong had asked for refunds, but only about 270,000 had received them.

The association also accused it of having no third-party supervision over its bank account for the deposits.

Yueqi said it had not ruled out paying its debts, back pay and taxes through bankruptcy. Currently, new users do not need to pay any deposit.

Many shared bike users fell victim to defaults on their deposits when operators went bankrupt.

A report issued by the China Internet Network Information Center in August estimated that users may have paid 10 billion yuan (1.6 billion U.S. dollars) in deposits to use shared bikes.

The public has called on regulators to set rules on an unified process and time limit for users to get refunds, and require firms to keep independent bank accounts to ensure they can afford them.Source: Xinhua| 2018-03-23 02:09:04|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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BAGHDAD, March 22 (Xinhua) -- The Iraqi Foreign Ministry on Thursday condemned the attack by Turkish forces that killed a number of civilians in northern Iraq.

The ministry said in a statement that a recent bombing by the Turkish forces in the Suran area in the north of Erbil, the capital of the Iraqi semi-autonomous region of Kurdistan, killed a number of civilians.

"The ministry denounces the continuing attacks against unarmed civilians in the Kurdish region. We reiterate our position of rejecting any presence of troops in the Iraqi territory," the statement said.

"We also reject any attempt to carry out military operations by any neighboring countries in Iraq," it added.

Earlier in the day, Kurdish media Rudaw reported that four people were killed in the Turkish airstrikes in northeastern Erbil.

Turkish forces frequently carried out anti-terror operations, airstrikes and artillery bombardment targeting the positions of the outlawed Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), with main focus on Qandil mountainous region, where the group's main base is located.WASHINGTON, March 22 (Xinhua) -- John Dowd, U.S. President Donald Trump's lead lawyer who was handling the response to the special counsel investigation into alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia meddling in the 2016 presidential election, resigned on Thursday.

Dowd had considered leaving several times in recent months and concluded that Trump was increasingly ignoring his advice, according to The New York Times.

Trump's lawyers, under the leadership of Dowd since last summer, had advised the president to cooperate with special counsel Robert Mueller, who is also looking into whether Trump obstructed the inquiry.

Dowd's departure comes after Trump began publicly attacking Mueller and his team. In a tweet last weekend, Trump said that the Mueller probe "should never been started."

Following Trump's remarks, Dowd called for an end to the investigation. He originally claimed to be speaking on Trump's behalf but backtracked later by saying that he was only speaking for himself.

Trump's lawyers are also in the midst of negotiations with the special counsel's team over a potential interview involving the president.

On Thursday, Trump said that he's still willing to talk to Mueller, an idea that Dowd has reportedly opposed to.

Dowd is also leaving three days after Joseph diGenova, a former federal prosecutor, was added to the Trump' s legal team for Mueller's probe.

DiGenova, in an interview with Fox News two months ago, alleged that FBI officials were involved in a "brazen plot" to exonerate Hillary Clinton in the email investigation and to "frame" Trump for nonexistent crimes.Source: Xinhua| 2018-03-23 02:39:10|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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BEIJING, March 23 (Xinhua) -- Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi on Thursday met with four vice foreign ministers of Visegrad countries, which consisted of Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovakia.

Wang said China appreciated Visegrad countries' support and participation in the Belt and Road Initiative and their efforts to achieve win-win cooperation and common development with China.

Wang called on the four countries to contribute to the European integration. Visegrad countries are representatives of the European emerging market countries and the most dynamic forces within EU, Wang said, adding that they could inject new impetus into the integration process in Europe.

Noting that China always attaches great importance to the relations with Europe, Wang hoped that Visegrad countries could play a constructive role in promoting China-Europe relations.

Referring to the 16+1 cooperation mechanism, Wang said that Visegrad countries could play a leading role in enhancing cooperation between China and Central and Eastern European (CEE) Countries.

"China stands ready to work with the 16 CEE countries, including the four Visegrad countries, to maintain and develop the 16+1 cooperation," he said.

The four vice foreign ministers said Visegrad countries attached great importance to developing relations with China, adding they were ready to enhance exchanges with China, deepen mutually-beneficial cooperation under the Belt and Road Initiative and the 16+1 cooperation framework, and play a constructive role in developing Europe-China relations.Source: Xinhua| 2018-03-23 02:39:10|Editor: Lifang

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Rebels and their families wait to embark buses transporting them from the city of Harasta in Damascus' Eastern Ghouta countryside, Syria, on March 22, 2018. The first batch of Syrian rebels and their families evacuated the city of Harasta in Damascus' Eastern Ghouta countryside on Thursday, as part of a deal that allows the exit of 1,500 rebels and 6,000 family members. (Xinhua/Hummam Sheikh Ali)

DAMASCUS, March 22 (Xinhua) -- The first batch of Syrian rebels and their families evacuated the city of Harasta in Damascus' Eastern Ghouta countryside on Thursday, as part of a deal that allows the exit of 1,500 rebels and 6,000 family members.

Thirty buses carrying the first batch of 1,580 people, including 413 rebels, left Harasta for the rebel-held areas in Idlib province, a Xinhua reporter at the scene witnessed.

The second batch of rebels and their families will leave in the next two days.

A total of 7,500 people, including 1,500 rebels and 6,000 civilians, will evacuate Harasta, according to the Russian-sponsored agreement reached between the Ahrar al-Sham rebels and the Syrian government.

At the first stage of the evacuation, 13 Syrian soldiers, who were kidnapped by the rebels in Harasta, were released on Thursday.

The hostages were the first to leave Harasta before the evacuation of the rebels and their families from that area in Eastern Ghouta.

Earlier on Thursday, the Syrian army removed barriers at the entrance of Harasta to facilitate the evacuation of the rebels and their families.

The evacuation, based on the agreement, was scheduled to begin at 7:00 a.m. (0500 GMT), but was delayed for several hours.

The civilians who do not want to leave with the rebels will remain in Harasta, a key bastion of the Ahrar al-Sham group and another rebel group known as the Fajr al-Ummah, or the Dawn of the Nation.

The evacuation of the rebels from Harasta marks the first major withdrawal of rebels from Eastern Ghouta after thousands of civilians had fled the sprawling countryside in recent days.PRAGUE, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Czech Defence Ministry will start selecting the supplier of over 200 full-track armoured personnel carriers (APCs) for a bid worth 53 billion crowns (about 2.57 billion U.S. dollars) in the summer, Defence Minister Karla Slechtova said at a press conference on Thursday.

Slechtova said the winner of the tender would be known by the end of 2018 or the beginning 2019 at the latest.

This will be the biggest tender Czech Defence Ministry has ever put up.

Czech Defence Ministry also wants to buy new equipment for 1.5-1.7 billion crowns (about 72.8-82.5 million U.S. dollars) in 2018.

Slechtova said the Defence Ministry will decide the supplier of 12 multipurpose helicopters by this summer. She also said she would approve the purchase of reconnaissance vehicles for chemical warfare worth over 5 billion crowns (about 242.7 million U.S. dollars) in the near future.

Czech military wants to purchase new assault rifles with grenade launchers worth about 7 billion crowns (about 339.8 million U.S. dollars) in 2019. It also wants to replace the 400 old Soviet-made BVP-2 APCs. Czech Defence Ministry plans to spend more than 150 billion crowns (about 7.28 billion U.S.dollars) for modernization projects by 2026.

So far, Czech military has two combat brigades, the 7th mechanised and 4th rapid deployment brigades.

Slechtova said Czech military will form another regiment in the years to come. (1 U.S. dollar = 20.6 crowns)Source: Xinhua| 2018-03-23 03:04:15|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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BEIJING, March 23 (Xinhua) -- A 200 million year old sauropod has been diagnosed with osteomyelitis, a severe bone disease, according to a scientific paper published on Thursday.

Scientists from China, the U.S., Britain and South Africa said study of a Jurassic Lufengosaurus fossil from Lufeng Dinosaur Museum in southwest China's Yunnan Province, suggests it may have had a serious bone infection.

The findings were published on Scientific Reports, an online open-access scientific journal.

When the dinosaur was excavated in 1997, there was a pathological abnormality on one of its right ribs. A small hole penetrates almost halfway through the rib, said the museum's Wang Yi.

"The rim of the penetration is quite smooth, so it is more likely to be caused by some kind of disease, rather than any injury," said paleontologist Xing Lida, lead researcher of the team.

According to Xing, traditional bone pathology involves low powered magnification of the bone, but this only shows the external surface of the fossil.

"In the case of this rib, the lesion penetrates deep into the bone, so we needed to find a way to see the internal structure before diagnosis," Xing said.

Now, 20 years after the dinosaur's discovery, X-ray micro-computed tomography (micro-CT) can image the deep structures and reconstruct the cellular structure of the rib.

"From micro-CT scanning and reconstruction, we can tell this Lufengosaurus was attacked by a predator and the bite caused osteomyelitis which took its life. It must have suffered a lot before death," said Ran Hao, researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences Kunming institute of zoology.

"This is the first time that China has found such pathological changes in sauropod dinosaurs. This exciting discovery will aid understanding of how osteomyelitis originated and evolved,"said Xing.

This is only the second case of osteomyelitis in a sauropod in the fossil record. The other case comes from a giant titanosaur from Argentina with a bacterial infection of the spine.

Lufengosaurus was a herbivore, with a long neck and a small head. At least 16 Early Jurassic dinosaur species have been named after Lufeng and its neighboring area since paleontologist Yang Zhongjian published a paper on Lufengosaurus huenei in 1941.

The recent work highlights how the use of micro-CT is revolutionizing the study of the fossil record.

"This finding can provide critical insight into palaeo-immunology, behavioral and life history information for dinosaurs, as well as environmental insights into ancient ecosystems," Xing said.WASHINGTON, March 22 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. House of Representatives passed a 1.3-trillion-dollar spending bill on Thursday that would fund federal agencies through September and avert a government shutdown.

In a 256-167 vote, the Republican-led chamber sent the compromise measure to the Senate, which must pass it before current funding expires late Friday night.

"The House just voted to rebuild our military, secure our borders, and give our service members their largest pay raise in eight years," House Speaker Paul Ryan said following the vote.

Though the bill had broad bipartisan support in the House, several members of the hardline conservative House Freedom Caucus voiced their opposition, while some Democrats rejected it for that it fails to address legal status of recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or the so-called "Dreamers."

The legislation passed less than 24 hours after the 2,300-page bipartisan, omnibus bill was made public.

The spending package allows big spending increases for defense and domestic programs, while adding money for infrastructure projects, veterans and measures to combat the opioid crisis, among other programs.

It also includes measures meant to strengthen gun sale background checks and improve school safety.

But the bill also provides 1.6 billion dollars - far short of what the Trump administration has sought - for border security measures, including construction of a border wall with Mexico.

However, Mick Mulvaney, the director of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, told reporters Thursday that the president will sign the bill if it reaches his desk.

He admitted that the bill wasn't perfect and wasn't exactly what the White House wanted, but that would fund the president's priorities.

The time for the Senate vote is tight. If no senator objects, the Senate could act quickly to pass the measure, to clear the way for Trump to sign it.A Convoy of buses enter the city of Harasta in Syrian capital Damascus' Eastern Ghouta countryside on March 22, 2018 to evacuate 1,580 people, including 413 rebels, from the rebel-held city. (Xinhua/Ammar Safarjalani)

DAMASCUS, March 22 (Xinhua) -- The first batch of Syrian rebels and their families evacuated the city of Harasta in Damascus' Eastern Ghouta countryside on Thursday, as part of a deal that allows the exit of 1,500 rebels and 6,000 family members.

Thirty buses carrying the first batch of 1,580 people, including 413 rebels, left Harasta for the rebel-held areas in Idlib province, a Xinhua reporter at the scene witnessed.

The second batch of rebels and their families will leave in the next two days.

A total of 7,500 people, including 1,500 rebels and 6,000 civilians, will evacuate Harasta, according to the Russian-sponsored agreement reached between the Ahrar al-Sham rebels and the Syrian government.

At the first stage of the evacuation, 13 Syrian soldiers, who were kidnapped by the rebels in Harasta, were released on Thursday.

The hostages were the first to leave Harasta before the evacuation of the rebels and their families from that area in Eastern Ghouta.

Earlier on Thursday, the Syrian army removed barriers at the entrance of Harasta to facilitate the evacuation of the rebels and their families.

The evacuation, based on the agreement, was scheduled to begin at 7:00 a.m. (0500 GMT), but was delayed for several hours.

The civilians who do not want to leave with the rebels will remain in Harasta, a key bastion of the Ahrar al-Sham group and another rebel group known as the Fajr al-Ummah, or the Dawn of the Nation.

The evacuation of the rebels from Harasta marks the first major withdrawal of rebels from Eastern Ghouta after thousands of civilians had fled the sprawling countryside in recent days.PARIS, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Hundreds of thousands of civil servants stopped working to show their anger at French President Emmanuel Macron's reforms, which he said were necessary to restore France's power at home and abroad.

The country's main trade unions call for people to take to the streets resulted in roughly 180 rallies nationwide at which 400,000 people gathered, according to CGT (General Confederation of Labor) union. The Interior Ministry put the turnout at 323,000.

In Paris, the demonstration by public service workers and train drivers attracted 75,000 protesters, unions said, while police data showed that number to be 49,000.

Violence erupted between police and hundreds of young protesters in the demonstration in the capital where security forces fired tear gas and water cannons. Three people were arrested, according to police.

Marches reduced the train service to four out of ten high-speed trains in operation. Half of the regional trains were operational.

The social movement also forced the French Civil Aviation Authority (DGAC) air transport body to cut 30 percent of its flight services to and from Orly, Charles-de-Gaulles and Beauvais airports.

The education ministry said many primary schools were closed on Thursday as teachers also joined the strike.

Furthermore, power generation fell by more than three gigawatts, the equivalent of three nuclear reactors, due to energy sector workers responding to the strike call.

Public sector workers are angry about plans to slash 120,000 civil servant jobs within five years and expand the use of short-term contracts.

While rail workers are opposing a government proposal to revamp the state-run rail operator SNCF that includes ending rail workers' special status, which allows them to retire with a full pension at 52, a decade before other French employees.

In a show of force, trade unions planned rolling strikes by stopping work two out of every five days over a three-month period from April 3.

An Odoxa poll released on Wednesday showed a majority of voters backed the strike.Source: Xinhua| 2018-03-23 03:54:22|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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GENEVA, March 22 (Xinhua) -- United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) meetings will go ahead on Friday despite a call for a second one-day strike in a week by UN staff here to protest wage cuts and deteriorating work conditions.

"I continue to engage with those concerned with a view to ensure that basic minimum services be extended to the Council," council president Vojislav Suc said on Thursday.

Suc said two or three council meetings may take place at the UN headquarters in Geneva on Friday on the final day of the month-long council session, what is normally a busy day when states vote on human rights resolutions.

The UN staff council has called for a second full-day strike on Friday to "protect pay and conditions of service."

At the UN's New York headquarters on Monday, members of the staff union staged a protest demonstration over austerity measures and for a greater say in how conditions of service are determined.

Meanwhile, striking staff at the UN's Palais des Nations complex here are due to be joined on Friday by personnel from the International Labor Organization (ILO) and the World Meteorological Organization in Geneva, the Swiss news agency SDA, reported.

This follows a similar strike action a week ago.

On March 16, UN staff in Geneva went on strike for the day following a vote by more than 1,000 UN civil servants.

Due to that action, the March 16 Human Rights Council session was canceled along with other meetings.

The growing strike action follows a "serious and ongoing deterioration in employment conditions due to the decisions of the International Civil Service Commission (ICSC)," according to posters in the UN.

Since April 2017, UN staff have steadily intensified their protests against plans to slash annual salaries of international civil servants in Geneva, often ranked as one of the most expensive cities in the world to live in.

Staff have said they are particularly unhappy with the ICSC, which last year proposed to lower UN civil servants' pay in Geneva by 5.1 percent.

This involved reducing a so-called "post-adjustment index" for professional staff working in the city. The idea came after the ICSC surveyed the cost of living in various UN locations.

Around 9,500 staff work for the UN in Geneva at either the Palais des Nations European headquarters or at one of the UN agencies located in the Swiss city, such as the World Health Organization (WHO), the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, and the ILO.Source: Xinhua| 2018-03-23 03:59:25|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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UNITED NATIONS, March 22 (Xinhua) -- The Security Council on Thursday expressed great concern over the deteriorating humanitarian situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), saying the situation has reached catastrophic levels in some parts of the country.

In a press statement, the council also expressed concern over the very high number of internally displaced persons in the country, which has more than doubled in the last year to more than 4.49 million, and the 540,000 refugees within the country, as well as the more than 714,000 refugees from the DRC in neighboring countries as a result of ongoing hostilities.

In this regard, the Security Council emphasized the need to address the presence of armed groups in the country and reiterated its call for transparent, credible, and inclusive elections, which are crucial for lasting peace and security in the DRC.

It expressed concern at increased impediments to humanitarian access in eastern DRC resulting from insecurity and violence, as well as continued attacks against humanitarian personnel and facilities.

At least 13.1 million Congolese are in need of humanitarian assistance, including more than 7.7 million severely food insecure people.

The Security Council called on UN member states and other partners to urgently scale up funding to respond to the humanitarian needs in the country.

The press statement came after a meeting of the Security Council on Monday on the humanitarian situation in the DRC.Source: Xinhua| 2018-03-23 04:04:27|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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by Mohamed al-Azaki

SANAA, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Though the number of cholera infection cases has declined rapidly in the rebel-held Yemeni capital Sanaa, fears grow about a possible new cholera outbreak in the upcoming rainy season.

With piles of rubbish bags mingled with stinking green watery filth being a common sight in the streets of Sanaa, the authorities here are struggling to prepare for another outbreak of the deadly disease.

Each day unpaid doctors arrive at a hospital in the west of Sanaa in order to save lives.

"Last night, we received three suspected cholera cases," said 25-year-old doctor Lamiees al-Huraybi.

"There were fears from a new wave of cholera outbreak within weeks in this rainy season," she told Xinhua.

Adnan Hizam, spokesman of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), told Xinhua that there are growing fears that the epidemic which infected 1 million people in Yemen last year could erupt again within weeks.

The rainy season will last from the end of April to August.

"The ongoing war and collapse of the health system are increasing the expectation for a new surge of cholera infections," Hizam said.

Hizam said the decline in the number of cholera cases did not mean that the epidemic was about to be over, which can happen only if the war ends, the blockade is lifted and the health system is rebuilt.

In November 2017, the United Nations reported more than 925,000 suspected cholera cases with over 2,200 associated deaths in the war-torn country since the epidemic started in April of the same year.

The infection rate has since been declining, by around 0.2 to 0.3 percent, according to the World Health Organization (WHO).

Labib al-Aqlani, deputy manager of 22 May hospital, told Xinhua the hospital had received over 300,000 infected cases during last year's rainy months.

"So we got an experience from last year, and this year we are preparing in cooperation with the ICRC, the WHO and other aid agencies to try to do our best to control any potential surge," said al-Aqlani.

At the hospital, the doctors showed Xinhua reporters the special section of cholera treatment rooms, a medicine store and other preparations for any potential new outbreak.

"We mainly rely on aid from the international agencies, and these preparations are for dealing with possible new surge of cholera infections," al-Aqlani added.

Like thousands of other Yemeni government staff members, doctors in this state-run hospital have not been paid for one year and a half after the internationally-recognized government relocated the Central Bank from the Houthi rebels-held capital Sanaa to the southern port city of Aden in September 2016.

The UN said more than 80 percent of cholera cases were in the areas close to the Red Sea ports of Hodeidah and Saleef.

The entire population of 25 million people of Yemen are dependent on food, fuel and medicine imports, primarily through sea ports. More than 17 million Yemenis, or two-thirds of the population, are living in food insecurity, according to the UN.

The war-torn country has also suffered from diphtheria which has infected over 1,300 people and killed 70, mostly children, since it was first reported in October 2017.

Last week, the WHO, UN International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF) and national health authorities have completed a large-scale diphtheria vaccination campaign in Yemen.

The campaign targeted nearly 2.7 million children aged between six weeks to 15 years old in 11 governorates. It focused on locations reporting suspected cases of diphtheria and areas at high risk of spread of the infectious respiratory disease.

Yemen has been locked in a civil war for three years after the Iranian-backed Shiite Houthi rebels overran much of the country militarily and seized all northern provinces including Sanaa in late 2014.

Saudi Arabia has been leading an Arab military coalition since March 2015 to support the government of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi after the Houthis forced him into exile.

The war has killed more than 10,000 Yemenis, half of them civilians, and displaced over 3 million others, according to UN humanitarian agencies.

The ongoing war has hit a stalemate, creating the largest humanitarian crisis in the world and pushing the country into the brink of famine, with an estimated 385,000 children suffering from acute malnutrition, thus putting them at heightened risk of acute watery diarrhea and cholera, according to the UN agencies.

"In case of any possible surge of the cholera epidemic, our preparations, the small treatment rooms and this medicine store is not enough," al-Aqlani said.Source: Xinhua| 2018-03-23 04:09:28|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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NEW YORK, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Oil prices declined on Thursday after official data showed that U.S. crude output continued to increase.

U.S. crude production was up by 26,000 barrels a day to 10.407 million barrels a day last week, marking a new weekly record, the Energy Information Administration (EIA) reported on Wednesday.

Traders were also looking for excuses to book in profits after recent solid gains.

Oil prices have risen about 10 percent in the past two weeks, boosted by a weaker U.S. dollar and tensions between Iran and Saudi Arabia that raised concerns about Middle East crude supplies.

The West Texas Intermediate for May delivery fell 0.87 U.S. dollar to settle at 64.30 dollars a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, while Brent crude for May delivery lost 0.56 dollar to close at 68.91 dollars a barrel on the London ICE Futures Exchange.Source: Xinhua| 2018-03-23 04:09:28|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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Rescuers work at the scene where a F-16 fighter jet crashed in Nevsehir Province, central Turkey, March 22, 2018. The F-16 fighter jet crashed Thursday in Turkey's central province of Nevsehir, killing one Turkish soldier. (Xinhua)

ANKARA, March 22 (Xinhua) -- A F-16 fighter jet crashed Thursday in Turkey's central province of Nevsehir, killing one Turkish soldier.

The jet, which took off at 6:30 p.m. local time (GMT 1530), was on a training flight when the crash occurred, the Turkish Armed Forces said in a statement.

Fire brigades, rescue units and gendarmerie forces were immediately dispatched to the crash scene.

Emergency services have recovered the body of the soldier and found wreckage of the aircraft, local media reported.

The reason of the accident remained unknown pending an investigation.Source: Xinhua| 2018-03-23 04:14:29|Editor: Mu Xuequan

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CHICAGO, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Gold futures on the COMEX division of the New York Mercantile Exchange rose on safe-haven buying Thursday, as traders expressed their fears for possible trade war between the United States and China.

The most active gold contract for April delivery went up 5.9 dollars, or 0.45 percent, to close at 1,327.4 dollars per ounce.

U.S. President Donald Trump on Thursday signed a memorandum that could impose tariffs on up to 60 billion U.S. dollars of imports from China, the latest unilateral move that poses a threat to global trade.

Analysts note that the safe haven properties of the precious metal were appealing to investors, giving support to gold during the trading session.

As for other precious metals, silver for May delivery fell 3.2 cents, or 0.19 percent, to settle at 16.387 dollars per ounce. Platinum for April was down 1.5 dollars, or 0.16 percent, to close at 949.1 dollars per ounce.TIRANA, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Albania was engulfed by heavy rainfalls and stormy winds on Thursday while northern areas of the country were covered by snow.

The snow reached 10 centimeters while police asked drivers to show extreme caution in the streets due to strong winds and frost.

In Kukes, the snowfall continued throughout the day at high intensity, while the temperatures went down to minus 4 degrees Celsius.

The Nation Road, one of the main highways, was covered by snow and ice too, however the traffic was not disrupted as the police and local authorities kept cleaning it.

Meanwhile, the stormy winds caused great damage to the businesses alongside Nation Road.

A huge massive of rock fell on a fuel station, totally destroying it while in Bulqiza, north Albania, a truck was turned upside down following a storm.

There have been interruptions with electricity in rural areas, but no emergencies reported.

Due to ongoing rainfalls across the country, many areas have been flooded. Northern city of Shkodra remains the hardest-stricken zone where tens of houses have been completely flooded and thousands of acres of land are still under water.

Albanian Minister of Defense Olta Xhacka went to Shkodra Thursday to inspect situation there.

She announced that the ministry had deployed over 550 military personnel to help locals cope with situation created by floods.

She said that the life of citizens and rescue of livestock were key priority. In last ten days, she said that over 2,500 livestock heads were evacuated while she noted that more animal food would be sent soon to farmers in the flood hit zones.

The minister called for more cooperation between all state structures and residents in order to mitigate the effects of the floods.

On Wednesday, Shkodra Mayor asked the government to declare state of emergency in this zone but this request was not accepted.

Government officials said they were doing everything to keep situation under control while they assured citizens that soon after situation was normalized, civil emergencies staff and local authorities would start work on verification of damages so they could be compensated.WASHINGTON, March 22 (Xinhua) -- The United States will grant the European Union (EU) and six other economies a temporary exemption from the steel and aluminum tariffs signed off by President Donald Trump earlier this month, U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer said on Thursday.

Speaking to the Senate Finance Committee, Lighthizer said those exempt are Argentina, Australia, Brazil, South Korea, and the EU.

Washington had already granted exemptions to Canada and Mexico as renegotiations over the North American Free Trade Agreement continues.

Lighthizer said that there are countries involved in various stages of trade talks with the United States and that the president decided "to pause the imposition of tariffs with respect to those countries."

Amid widespread dissent from business groups and trading partners around the world, Trump signed two weeks ago proclamations to impose a 25-percent tariff on imported steel and 10-percent on aluminum, which take effect on Friday.

Many economies have warned the White House that they will retaliate if they are faced with tariffs on metals products.

EU Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom said that the economic bloc is "always willing to engage with our American partners, but we do not negotiate anything under pressure or threat."

It was one of Trump campaign promises to bring down the country's trade deficit, which totaled 566 billion U.S. dollars in 2017.

However, economists say that the tariffs are unlikely to bring the U.S. current account into balance as the major cause of the trade imbalance lies in the fact that the U.S. savings are low relative to investment.ROME, March 22 (Xinhua) -- Two Austrian excursionists died and a third was critically injured after they were submerged by an avalanche on Thursday, local media reported.

The three excursionists, who had reached Italy on Wednesday night, were wearing avalanche transceivers so they could be found quickly under the snow in case of an avalanche, according to Italian news agency ANSA.

Rescuers dug the three out after 40 minutes, finding only one of them, a woman, still alive. She was helicoptered to hospital in the northern city of Trento.

The avalanche occurred at altitude of 3,200 meters on the Gran Zebru peak in the Alps in the northeastern Trentino Alto Adige region bordering Austria.

This was the second fatal incident on the Italian side of the Trentino Alto Adige mountains in a week, according to Corriere della Sera newspaper.

On March 14, a 22-year-old Italian snowboarder, the son of a local village mayor, lost his life in an avalanche, the paper reported.BERLIN, March 22 (Xinhua) -- The average global quality of governance and market economy has fallen to its lowest level in 12 years, a study by the German Bertelsmann Foundation published on Thursday finds.

The Bertelsmann Transformation Index (BTI) is published since 2006 and analyzes political and economic developments in 129 developing and transformation countries.

This year's study warns that the countries assessed are addressing contemporary global economic challenges only insufficiently and frequently on the backs of the poor and marginalized citizens. Many governments were hereby unable to respond adequately to the growing social, ethnic and religious conflicts.

The authors viewed unsatisfactory socio-economic development to be one of the greatest impediments to development towards democracy and economic sustainability. According to the study, there were massive poverty and a high level of social inequality in 72 developing and transformation countries.

In 22 of them, including India, South Africa and Venezuela, there was even a decline in the level of socio-economic development in the last ten years. During the same time period, the proportion of countries achieving a moderate to good level of social inclusion sank from a third to a quarter.

The Bertelsmann Foundation's assessments are based on detailed country reports authored by 250 experts from leading international universities and think tanks.HELSINKI, March 22 (Xinhua) -- A high court in Rovaniemi, northern Finland on Thursday sentenced Pekka Pera, founder and original director of Talvivaara mining company, to half a year in prison on probation on account of severe environmental pollution.

Starting in 2015, the lawsuit was considered the most significant environment criminal case in Finland. Two executives of the mining company were fined. A lower court had also fined Pera previously.

The operation in Talvivaara nickel and zinc mine began in Sotkamo, Northern Finland in 2008. It used a water bio-diluting process in separating the ore.

The waste reservoirs were problematic from the start. They overfilled due to rainwater, and contaminated water leaked to the environment. The waste water included metal and gypsum.

Major leaks occurred in 2008, 2010, 2012 and 2013. Researchers from the Helsinki University determined that two adjacent lakes had been badly contaminated and turned into salt waters without any live nature at the bottom.

The prosecution said that problems piled up as the errors were never corrected. The company had misled environment officials during the permit process and given them deficient and faulty information.

The defendants denied the charges and said environmental problems had not been caused by negligence, but the impact of the waste water was unprecedented and the leaks were mere accidents.

The low grade nickel ore was discovered in the 1970s. Traditional mining was deemed unprofitable and the Finnish Outokumpu company sold the mining rights to Pera at the price of one euro in 2003.

Just before a major leak, the Finnish ministry of environment established in 2012 that the surveillance of Talvivaara had been done properly.

Talvivaara company was established in 2003. It ceased to be connected with the mining operation in 2015. Since then, Finnish state majority owned company Terrafame has been running the mining operation.Posted Thursday, March 22, 2018 4:08 am

SEOUL, South Korea  U.S. and South Korean officials vowed not to scale back joint war games set to begin on April 1 despite plans for back-to-back summits between the allies and North Korea.

But the messaging and a shortened timetable suggest the annual drills will be kept low-key to avoid provoking the North Koreans as delicate diplomacy is underway.

Washington and Seoul agreed to postpone the exercises known as Foal Eagle and Key Resolve to ease tensions during the Feb. 9-25 Olympics and March 9-18 Paralympics, which were held on the divided peninsula.

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and his South Korean counterpart, Song Young-moo, said Tuesday that the drills are expected to resume on April 1 at a scale similar to that of previous years.

The decision, which had been widely expected, was announced in a brief statement that contained few details.

The U.S.-led United Nations Command notified the North Korean army at the Joint Security Area in the Demilitarized Zone at 8:30 a.m., it said.

About 11,500 U.S. and 290,000 South Korean troops will participate in the field-training exercise known as Foal Eagle, Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Christopher Logan said separately.

The computer-simulated Key Resolve will involve about 12,200 Americans and 10,000 South Korean military personnel, he said.

U.S. Forces Koreas public affairs office said Key Resolve would begin on April 23 and last about two weeks as usual.

The Yonhap News Agency quoted an informed source as saying it may be pushed back to mid-April to avoid coinciding with a U.S.-North Korea summit expected to be held by May.

The allies stressed that the exercises will include all service branches and wont be scaled back in scope or duration.

But South Koreas military later said Foal Eagle, the most dramatic of the simultaneous drills, would last a month instead of the two months it took last year when tensions were spiking over the Norths nuclear weapons program.

Last years drills also saw the deployment of several U.S. warships, including the USS Carl Vinson.

The exercises have long been a flashpoint for tensions on the divided peninsula because they always infuriate Pyongyang, which considers them a rehearsal for an invasion. The North has frequently responded with fiery rhetoric and provocations, including firing four missiles toward Japan last year.

South Korean envoys who met with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un said he understood the exercises would be held as planned this year. But Pyongyang has not made any direct comments on the issue.

Logan reiterated the militarys stance that the exercises are defensive in nature and necessary to maintain readiness. No details about the scenarios or other details will be released to avoid compromising exercise objectives, he said.

These routine training exercises are not conducted in response to any [North Korean] provocations or the current political situation on the peninsula, he said.

As in the past, the exercises will be monitored by the Neutral Nations Supervisory Commission to ensure compliance with the armistice agreement that ended the 1950-53 Korean War in lieu of a peace treaty.

About 28,500 U.S. servicemembers are stationed in South Korea.

North Korea joined the Winter Games and engaged in rare talks with Seoul that led to an agreement for Kim Jong Un and South Korean President Moon Jae-in to meet in late April.

A South Korean delegation later traveled to Pyongyang and returned with an offer from Kim to meet with President Donald Trump. Trump surprised many by saying he would meet with Kim by May.

The communist state has been largely silent since the flurry of breakthroughs, prompting skepticism about its sincerity.

North Korean officials have been dispatched to Sweden and Finland for meetings that may help lay the groundwork for what would be the first-ever U.S.-North Korean summit.By RICHARD JENKINS

[email protected]

Hurley  The process of developing Iron Countys Asset Based Community Development strategy is nearly complete, after the Iron County Comprehensive Planning, Land and Zoning Committee forwarded a draft onto the full county board for final approval.

The plan is a replacement of the countys former comprehensive plan, according to committee member Brad Matson.

In the past, it was goal-oriented with no reference to where you were coming from and, Is that (goal) realistic, Matson told the Daily Globe after the meeting. With the asset-based plan, you start with what you have and figure how you can build on that and can you use what you have to advance your goals.

During the meeting, Matson said past plans would sometimes set development goals that were pie in the sky; whereas the latest draft starts with all the assets the county has to offer and therefore the targets are more achievable.

This is taking into account what we have and what we can possibly do, he said, adding he hopes this change will also mean the plan is used more, rather than simply gathering dust on a shelf.

The plan includes a wide variety of assets  including the countys natural and cultural resources  and doesnt necessarily stop at the countys borders.

One asset in the plan discussed during the public hearing prior to the drafts approval was the development of Copper Peak and the positive impact the return of sky flying could have to Iron Countys tourism industry even though the facility itself is in Ironwood Township.

This plan from the beginning has not been Iron County locked in at its borders, Matson said.

The county is required to update its plan every five years and revise it every 10 years, according to Matson.

It was the time for our rewrite, he said after the meeting.

During the meeting, he also thanked the various people who worked on the plan over the past two or three years it took to create the document.

In other action:

The committee discussed what surface material should be used at the former Thomas service station site in the city of Montreal. The county owns the property, according to information presented at the meeting, and the contaminated soil is being removed and replaced with clean fill. No decision was made on the surface material, as the committee decided more information was needed on options and prices. The county will also check with the city of Montreal to see if its officials had any opinions on what the property  located on the south side of Wisconsin 77 just east of the Montreal River  should be used for.

The committee kept the price of plat books at $35 for the 2018 editions, while lowering the price of the 2015 plat books to $25 in an effort to get rid of the remaining inventory.

The committee accepted the departments annual report.News

Washington, DC - The Justice Department today announced that it has reached a settlement agreement with Learning Care Group (LCG), the second largest for-profit child care provider in North America, headquartered in Novi, Michigan. LCG owns and operates over 900 child care centers nation-wide operating under seven brand names including, but not limited to: La Petite Academy, Childtime Learning Centers, Tutor Time Child Care/Learning Centers, The Childrens Courtyard, Montessori Unlimited, Everbrook Academy, and Creative Kids Learning Center.

The matter was handled by the Justice Departments Civil Rights Division and the United States Attorneys Office for the Eastern District of Michigan.

The settlement agreement resolves complaints under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) that LCG was discriminating against children with insulin dependent diabetes, on the basis of disability, by failing to make certain reasonable modifications for those children. Under the agreement, LCG agreed to pay $10,000 in compensatory damages to each of the eight aggrieved individuals and families identified.

LCG also agreed to evaluate each request for reasonable modification on an individualized basis, using objective evidence and current medical standards, and where appropriate, will train child care staff members to assist with routine diabetes care tasks, including the administration of insulin by pen, syringe, or pump.

The ADA guarantees all children, including those with insulin dependent diabetes, equal access to child care centers, said Acting Assistant Attorney General John M. Gore of the Civil Rights Division. We applaud LCG for taking steps to enable parents of children with diabetes to enjoy the benefits of child care while knowing staff will be trained to ensure that their child is well cared for.

Given the critical role that dependable child care plays in a parents ability to work or go to school, we are proud that this settlement will ease the struggle to find quality child care for families of children with disabilities, said United States Attorney Matthew Schneider. The United States Attorneys Office will continue to work to ensure the equal rights of individuals with disabilities in our community.News

Akron, Ohio - Erick Jamal Hendricks, 37, of Charlotte, North Carolina, was convicted today by a jury in Akron, Ohio, of attempting and conspiring to provide material support to the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), a designated foreign terrorist organization.

The guilty verdict was announced by Assistant Attorney General for National Security John C. Demers, U.S. Attorney Justin E. Herdman of the Northern District of Ohio and Special Agent in Charge Stephen D. Anthony of the FBIs Cleveland Office following a two-week trial before U.S. District Judge John Adams.

Hendricks used social media to recruit others to plan and carry out attacks on our homeland in the name of ISIS, with the goal of creating a sleeper cell on our soil, said Assistant Attorney General Demers. Thanks to the collaborative efforts of law enforcement, Hendricks plan was thwarted, and with todays verdict he is being held accountable for his terrorist activities.

This defendant recruited and directed people here in the United States to launch attacks against our citizens, and attempted to recruit others to engage in similar attacks, said U.S. Attorney Herdman. Protecting our citizens from terrorist attacks remains our priority and our community will be safer with this defendant behind bars.

Erick Jamal Hendricks represents the significant online ISIS threat that we face daily  a US citizen that becomes radicalized online and attempts to recruit and train individuals to commit jihad, all while on American soil, said Special Agent in Charge Anthony. The FBI urges the public to report information regarding individuals pledging their allegiance to ISIS or other identified terrorist groups. The FBI is pleased that Hendricks was stopped before he was successful and now will spend a significant amount of time behind bars.

According to court documents and trial testimony, Hendricks tried to recruit people to train together and conduct terrorist attacks in the United States on behalf of ISIS.

Amir Al-Ghazi was arrested in the Northern District of Ohio in June 2015 after attempting to purchase an AK-47 assault rifle and ammunition from an undercover law enforcement officer. Al-Ghazi had pledged allegiance to ISIS in social media and made statements expressing interest in conducting attacks in the U.S.

Hendricks had contacted Al-Ghazi over social media to recruit him in the spring of 2015. Hendricks allegedly told Al-Ghazi that he needed people and wanted to meet in person; that there were several brothers located in Texas and Mexico; that he was attempting to get brothers to meet face to face; and that he wanted to get brothers to train together, according to court documents and trial testimony

Al-Ghazi said Hendricks tested his religious knowledge and commitment, inquiring about his willingness to commit jihad, to die as a martyr and his desire to enter jannah (paradise). Al-Ghazi understood these statements to mean that Hendricks was recruiting people to train together for the purpose of conducting a terrorist attack in the U.S. and to see if Al-Ghazi was suitable for recruitment, according to the allegations. Al-Ghazi believed that Hendricks and the brothers in Texas and Mexico may have been responsible for a thwarted terrorist attack in Garland, Texas, on May 3, 2015, and therefore he decided to stay away from social media for a period following the attack to minimize detection by law enforcement.

Hendricks also communicated over social media with several other people, including an undercover FBI employee (UCE-1). Hendricks on April 16, 2015 instructed UCE-1 to download the document GPS for the Ghuraba in the U.S., which included a section entitled Final Advice which advocated that brothers and sisters should not allow themselves to go to jail. This section also allegedly encouraged Muslims to die as a Shaheed (martyr), to Boobie trap your homes, to lay in wait for them and to never leave your home without your AK-47 or M16. Hendricks also directed UCE-1 to communicate online with other people and stated Its hard to sift through brothers; Allah chooses only the few; and Everyday I do this day in and day out, according to court documents and trial testimony.

Hendricks told another person that his goal was to create a sleeper cell to be trained and housed at a secure compound that would conduct attacks in the U.S. He mentioned that potential targets included military members whose information had been released by ISIS and the woman who organized the Draw Prophet Mohammad contest, and he claimed to have 10 members signed up for his group, according court documents and trial testimony.

On April 23, 2015, Hendricks used social media to contact Elton Simpson, who, along with Nadir Hamid Soofi, was inspired by ISIS and launched the attack on the First Annual Muhammad Art Exhibit and Contest in Garland. Simpson and Soofi opened fire, wounding a security guard, before Garland police returned fire and killed both Simpson and Soofi. Hendricks also connected UCE-1 with Simpson via social media, communicated with UCE-1 about the contest in Garland, and directed UCE-1 to go to the contest. Hendricks said: If you see that pig (meaning the organizer of the contest) make your voice heard against her. He also asked UCE-1 a series of questions related to security at the event, including: How big is the gathering? How many ppl? How many police/agents? Do you see feds there? Do you see snipers? and How many media? Shortly thereafter, Simpson and Soofi committed the attack on the cartoon drawing contest.

Al-Ghazi previously pleaded guilty to attempting to provide material support to a designated terrorist organization and being a felon in possession of firearms. He is awaiting sentencing.

Hendricks sentencing has yet to be scheduled.

This case was investigated by the FBIs offices in Cleveland; Columbia, South Carolina; Baltimore; and Charlotte, with assistance from the U.S. Attorneys Offices in the District of Maryland, District of South Carolina and the Western District of North Carolina.

This case was prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Matthew W. Shepherd and Mark S. Bennett and Trial Attorney Rebecca Magnone of the National Security Divisions Counterterrorism Section.Health News

Washington, DC - Kinesin family member 5A (KIF5A), a gene previously linked to two rare neurodegenerative disorders, has been definitively connected to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) by an international team from several of the worlds top ALS research labs. The findings identify how mutations in KIF5A disrupt transport of key proteins up and down long, threadlike axons that connect nerve cells between the brain and the spine, eventually leading to the neuromuscular symptoms of ALS.

The discovery, published in the March 21, 2018, issue of Neuron, was led by Bryan Traynor, M.D., Ph.D., of the Intramural Research Program of the National Institute on Aging (NIA) at the National Institutes of Health and John Landers (link is external), Ph.D., of the University of Massachusetts Medical School, Worcester, with key funding support from the NIA, the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) at NIH, and several public and private sector organizations. Genetic data collected by teams of scientists worldwide contributed to the project.

It took a comprehensive, collaborative effort to analyze a massive amount of genetic data to pin down KIF5A as a suspect for ALS, also known as Lou Gehrigs disease. To zero in on KIF5A, the NIH team performed a large-scale genome-wide association study, while the University of Massachusetts team concentrated on analyzing rare variants in next generation sequence data. Over 125,000 samples were used in this study, making it by far the largest such study of ALS performed to date.

The extraordinary teamwork that went into this study underlines the value of global, collaborative science as we seek to better understand devastating diseases like ALS, said Richard J. Hodes, M.D., director of NIA. These types of collaborative data collection and analysis are important in identifying the pathways underlying disease and in developing approaches to treatment and prevention.

KIF5A regulates part of the kinesin family of proteins that serve as tiny intracellular motors. Problems with these proteins are connected to ALS, Parkinsons disease and Alzheimers disease. KIF5A mutations were previously known to be connected to two other rare neurodegenerative diseases with muscle weakening, stiffening and spasticity symptoms similar to ALS: hereditary spastic paraplegia type 10 (SPG10) and Charcot-Marie-Tooth Type 2 (CMT2.) Scientists suspected KIF5A might be associated with ALS but lacked definite proof until now.

Axons extend from the brain to the bottom of the spine, forming some of the longest single cellular pathways in the body, said Traynor. KIF5A helps to move key proteins and organelles  specialized parts of cells -- up and down that axonal transport system, controlling the engines for the nervous systems long-range cargo trucks. This mutation disrupts that system, causing the symptoms we see with ALS.

Traynor cautioned that the discovery, while exciting, still leaves much more work to be done While this is unlikely to be a very common genetic cause for ALS, it identifies important new directions to explore possible future gene therapies, he said.

According to Traynor, next steps for the project include further study of the frequency and location of mutations within KIF5A and determining what cargos are being disrupted. He and his team hope this will help reveal what aspect of axonal transport is essential to maintain the cell.Latest News

Washington, DC - Remarks by Vice President Pence on National Agriculture Day:

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Well, thank you, Mr. Secretary, for that overly kind introduction. Thank you for your leadership of this great department. Its been almost a year since you started. And Secretary Sonny Perdue has already visited 34 states, made a remarkable difference for agriculture in America.

Would join me in giving another round of applause  (applause)  to this great Secretary from the great state of Georgia  the 31st Secretary of Agriculture, Secretary Sonny Perdue. (Applause.)

To men and women of the United States Department of Agriculture, to all the distinguished members of Congress who support agriculture every day, to all of you who promote agriculture across our nation, and to the rising generation of leaders in agriculture who are here with us today  and I hope you spotted my tie. Is that all right? I wore my FFA tie. (Applause.)

Its a great honor for this son of a farm state to be with you today during National Agriculture Week on National Agriculture Day. (Applause.)

And I bring greetings from a great friend to our nations farmers, producers, ranchers, and foresters  a man whos fighting for American agriculture every single day since Inauguration Day. I bring greetings this morning from the 45th President of the United States of America, President Donald Trump. (Applause.)

And on behalf of the President, the First Family, and our entire administration, Happy National Ag Day, one and all. This year marks the 45th anniversary of the first Ag Day, when the Agriculture Council of America organized a time for the nation to come together to, in their words, recognize and celebrate the abundance provided by agriculture, and to encourage young people to consider career opportunities in this all-American field.

And our administration is proud to lend our voice to this great vision. In his proclamation honoring this day, President Trump said that National Ag Day is a time to, in his words, acknowledge the tremendous work ethic, ingenuity, determination, and perseverance that define generations of American farmers. Because of their efforts, the United States produces an abundant supply of food, feed, and fuel, benefitting not only our nation, but the entire world. (Applause.)

For my part, all my life Ive seen firsthand the difference made by the men and women who work in agriculture. I was raised in the heart of the heartland, in a small town in Southern Indiana, with a cornfield in my backyard. Its still there to this day.

And when I served in the Congress, I represented some of the best farmers in the world. We worked to advance their interests in my position on the House Agriculture Committee.

And when I was Governor of the Hoosier State, I liked to say that in Indiana, we did two things particularly well: We made things and we grew things. And things that grow can be found not just on the shelves and stores across the nation, but theyve been scattered all across the wider world.

And President Trump knows the truth, and I know the truth, and all of you know the truth, as well: Agriculture is the essence of America, and it is the beating heart of a great nation. (Applause.) What you sow, our nation reaps. What you plant bears fruit for all across the world.

And you know the dignity of a hard days work. You model the grit that drives our nation forward, and people in agriculture always have. In a very real sense, you embody the virtues and the values that are at the root of American greatness.

As President Trump has said, Our nation was founded by farmers. Our independence was won by farmers. Our continent was tamed by farmers. Our armies have been fed by farmers and made of farmers. And throughout our history, farmers have always led the way, and farmers will always lead the way in America. (Applause.)

It really is remarkable to think, on this National Ag Day, what American agriculture does and how advanced it is. Americas farmers have long led the world in innovation and achievement. And as this group knows better than anyone, working in American agriculture today is a far cry from your grandfathers farm.

In fact, today in America, we grow and produce here on Earth increasingly depends on the satellites and the technology that we have circling the globe in outer space.

Last summer, you might know that President Trump relaunched the National Space Council. He gave me the great honor of serving as Chairman of it. Through the work of the Council, Ive seen the advances that we have made in space, but Ive also seen how American agriculture today uses the technologies of today and tomorrow to increase productivity, maximize crop yields, and prepare for extreme weather events.

Remote sensing allows for soil mapping so that farmers can plant the right crops in the ideal soil and better design irrigation systems. Weather satellites help farmers and ranchers monitor and predict weather patterns, and plan accordingly. And of course, GPS has revolutionized farming and allowed farmers to plant, cultivate, and harvest their crops with incredible accuracy, with that cutting-edge precision agriculture that we all know about.

In countless other ways, our farmers, ranchers, producers, foresters, and researchers, and engineers are enabling us to continue to feed ever more people, using ever fewer resources, proving once again that agriculture is the field of the future. Lets give a round of applause to all the great innovators in American agriculture today. (Applause.)

And it really is a joy to be here today to be joined by so many who advance American agriculture every single day, including the National Association of State Departments of Agriculture and the American Farm Bureau Federation. Lets give both of these groups a round of applause. (Applause.)

And its a special honor to be joined by organizations that are passing on the great traditions of American agriculture to the next generation of farmers, ranchers, scientists. Lets hear it for FFA, 4-H, AFA, and MANRRS. Thanks for all you do to raise up a new generation of American agricultural leaders. (Applause.)

In fact, we just heard from one of those great rising leaders a few moments ago. How about another round of applause for Spencer Flood for doing a great job being a great example. (Applause.)

Finally, on this Ag Day, its an honor for me to be with so many dedicated public servants of the United States Department of Agriculture and these distinguished members of Congress who support them each and every day. Give the people at the department a round of applause. Theyre working every single day  and these members of Congress. (Applause.) Theyre working every single day for American agriculture.

You know, more than 150 years ago, President Lincoln signed the bill that created this department, which our 16th President called the peoples Department. And so youve remained ever since. Because the work that happens in these halls touches the lives of every single American and every single American family.

Through the Food and Nutrition Service, you fight hunger in America by bringing the bounty of our nations farms to those who are struggling to put food on the table.

Through the Farm Service Agency, you provide loans, credit, and disaster assistance to the men and women who work in agriculture.

Through the Foreign Agricultural Service, you help Americas farmers sell their crops on the world market.

Through the Food Safety and Inspection, you ensure the quality of what Americans eat.

And through the Office of Rural Development, overseen by a fellow Hoosier, Anne Hazlett, you provide support. You can applaud Anne if you want. Im awful proud of her. (Applause.) You support small businesses and communities, and help those struggling in the grip of drug addiction.

Through the Forest Service, you protect and conserve Americas most precious natural resources, and inspire the nation with your heroic efforts in fighting wildfires. Lets give the Forest Service a round of applause. It was a tough year last year with record wildfires in California. (Applause.)

And all across this storied department, at home and abroad, nearly 100,000 dedicated public servants advance the USDAs long-standing mission. A mission thats summed up in the departments motto, Do right, feed everyone. (Applause.) I promise you, President Trump and our entire administration, and frankly, every American are all grateful for what you do. We really and truly are.

But Im not just here to say thanks on this National Ag Day. Im here today, on President Trumps behalf, to assure all of you that were going to continue fighting every single day for the prosperity, and opportunity, and future of American agriculture.

As you all well know, as I stand before you today, its been a challenging time for Americas farmers and ranchers in recent years. Since 2013, net farm income has been cut in half. Today, the majority of American farm households are turning to non-farm work in order just to get the bills paid, and an average of 82 percent of income earned by farm households this year is expected to come from off-farm work.

Thats why, since day one of this administration, President Trump and our entire team have been working tirelessly to stand with our nations farmers, producers, ranchers, and foresters, and everyone involved in agriculture. As the President has said, in his words, in every decision we make, we are honoring, and supporting Americas proud farming legacy. And I promise you we always will. (Applause.)

But, you know, its not just been words; its been deeds. President Trump has been busy since the outset of the administration rolling back the heavy hand of government, which particularly puts a burden on people that farm the land. In fact, this President has repealed 22 federal regulations for every new federal rule put on the books. (Applause.) Hes actually canceled or delayed more than 1,500 planned rules  more than any President in American history.

The President took decisive action last year to repeal the disastrous Waters of the United States rule to ensure that farmers and ranchers and every American can control the land that they possess and develop. (Applause.) The truth is that the freedom to farm, the ability to manage the land and be stewards of the land is at the heart of how we feed our nation, grow our economy, and create jobs.

But, you know, its not just been about rolling back federal regulations. Nearly three months ago, as all of you may have noticed, with the strong support of these Republicans in the Congress, President Trump won a major victory for our nations agriculture when he signed into law the largest tax cuts and tax reform in American history. (Applause.)

Now, while the Presidents tax cuts benefitted every American, in large way and small ways, it gave Americas farmers historic relief when it comes to taxes on their businesses.

First and foremost, we eliminated the death tax for nearly every American farmer so, as President Trump said, you can keep your farms in the family. In almost every case, the burden is gone. (Applause.)

We gave Americas farmers and ranchers an unprecedented opportunity to invest in their future, because for the next five years, farmers, like other business owners, can deduct 100 percent of the cost of every piece of new equipment they buy. Thats real relief for people who face extraordinary input costs, in terms of the equipment that they use.

We also cut the corporate tax rate from one of the highest in the developed world  35 percent, all the way down to 21 percent  opening the doorway for a more prosperous economy and growing agribusinesses. (Applause.)

We empowered particularly small businesses, which most farmers are organized as small businesses, to be able to deduct 20 percent of their business income.

And we cut taxes for working families, doubling the child tax credit; doubled the standard deduction, so American families will actually get their first $24,000 of income completely tax-free. Thats real relief for working Americans, and it will help lift all the boats, including American agriculture, all across this nation. (Applause.)

So were cutting red tape, been cutting your taxes, but weve also been working to open up the world to American agricultural products like never before.

It is remarkable to think agriculture accounts for nearly one-tenth of our nations economy, in large part because we export more than $100 billion worth of agricultural goods every year. In fact, every $1 billion in agricultural exports supports approximately 8,000 American jobs. But the truth is, we believe weve only scratched the surface.

Weve already taken important steps to modernize this department to make it easier for American farmers to export what they grow and raise and produce. And were working with a friend of mine, a fellow Hoosier whos here with us today, Ted McKinney, the new Undersecretary of Trade and Foreign Agricultural Affairs, to make sure that we open even more markets for American goods. (Applause.) Im proud of the whole department, but I love mentioning these Hoosiers to you. (Laughter.) I really do.

You know, and President Trump is also working with the USDA and members of our administration to renegotiate existing trade agreements and reach new and better deals for the American people, American businesses, and American farmers  deals that will bring a bounty into our farms, and ranches, and forests at every corner of the world.

Last year alone, we reached an agreement to expand American rough rice exports to Colombia. We made a deal, for the first time in over a decade, to sell American beef to China. And we reopened Vietnam to distillers and dried grains, and were just getting started. Were going to open up the world to Americas agricultural goods. (Applause.)

And beyond trade deals, later this year, were going to work with all these great leaders of the House and Senate to pass a farm bill. As President Trump has said, were going to pass a farm bill that delivers for Americas farmers just as they work every single day to deliver for us.

To ensure that Americas farmers can get their goods to market quickly and efficiently, at home and abroad, President Trump recently unveiled a plan to make historic investments, as well in our nations infrastructure. And working with these members of Congress, Im going to make you a promise: The builder you elected as President of the United States is going to rebuild the infrastructure of America. (Applause).

Just over two months ago, the President took an important step to strengthen our infrastructure when he signed an executive order that will bring high-speed broadband Internet to our nations most rural areas  a critical advance benefitting farmers and smaller communities.

And in the days ahead, well continue to take action to rebuild the nations infrastructure, as the President said, to ensure that our rural communities have access to the best roadways, railways, and waterways, and the best high-speed Internet access in the world. On all these issues and more, you can know with confidence President Trump and our entire administration are going to continue to work tirelessly to advance American agriculture.

Well keep fighting to break down barriers for your success, to open up new opportunities for growth, and to ensure that you can continue to make the outsized contribution to our national life, that all of those represented here have made for generations past, today and for generations to come.

And on this National Agricultural Day, I cant help but think of some words by one of my favorite radio broadcasters, Paul Harvey, and what he said to a gathering not unlike this one, four decades ago. He said with a smile, On the eighth day, God looked down on his planned paradise and said, I need a caretaker Somebody willing to get up before dawn work all day in the fields and then go to town and stay past midnight at a meeting of the school board Somebody whod plow deep and straight and not cut corners Somebody to seed, and weed, and feed, and breed and rake and disc and plow and plant Somebody who would bale a family together with the soft strong bonds of sharing, who would laugh, and then sigh, and then reply, with smiling eyes, when his son says that he wants to spend his life doing what dad does. So, God made a farmer. (Applause.)

Those words bless my heart because I grew up among farmers. We had a few cattle when I was growing up, a little side operation that my dad was involved in. I cleaned more than a few stalls in my life and chased a few stray cows, but I know what a farmer is, and Paul Harveys words capture that. Its the contributions that farmers made that we remember, on this National Ag Day, go far beyond feeding the world. They go far beyond the enormous and calculated economic impact that farmers have on communities large and small.

I truly do believe the greatest contribution that farmers have made throughout the long and storied history of this nation has been to the character of the nation. I woke up this morning thinking about how many times in the Good Book we see the phrase, consider the farmer. Because theres something about the virtues of working the land, of having to rely on the blessings of providence, of having to wait on the weather. Right? That the resilience and the faith that it takes, I think its nurtured not only people in farming, but I think its, in a very real sense, its nurtured the character of our nation.

So as I close, I just want to thank all of you, from my heart, and from the hearts of the American people. To all of you who work in agriculture, whose labor and lifes work can be found in the food that we eat and so much more in the character of the nation, just thank you on this National Ag Day.

To all of you who support our farmers, our producers, our ranchers, our foresters, through the work done in this department and through private organizations so well represented here today, thank you for what you do every day.

And to all of you who are even now considering a career in agriculture and to all whove made the choice to work in this quintessentially American field, thanks for believing in Americas agricultural future. We need more like you.

And as you prepare to all walk this path, particularly the youngsters among us, Im just going to pray that you do so with confidence and with faith that God will continue to do as Hes done throughout our nations history. That Hell send rain on your land in season. That Hell bless all the work of your hands.

And I close with confidence on this National Ag Day, with the strong support of these leaders in the Congress in both political parties who stand with agriculture every day, with the strong leadership of President Donald Trump in the White House, with the servanthood efforts of the people of this department and all these great organizations that stand with agriculture every day, and with faith in God. I know we will make America grow again. We will make America prosper again. And to adjust a phrase, we will make American agriculture great again. Thank you very much. (Applause.)

God bless you, and God bless the work of this great department. And God bless the United States of America and all of our farmers. (Applause.)Latest News

Omaha, Nebraska - Vishnubhai Chaudhari, 50, and Leelabahen Chaudhari, 44, of Kimball, Nebraska, and Indian nationals unlawfully residing in the United States, were sentenced yesterday in federal court in Omaha after previously pleading guilty on December 18, 2017, to alien harboring for financial gain and conspiracy to harbor an alien, announced Acting Assistant Attorney General John Gore of the Justice Departments Civil Rights Division, U.S. Attorney Joe Kelly for the District of Nebraska, and Special Agent in Charge Tracy Cormier of ICE Homeland Security Investigations (HSI).

U.S. District Court Judge Lauri Smith Camp sentenced both of the defendants to one year and one day in prison, followed by two years supervised release. The defendants also agreed to the entry of a stipulated judicial order of removal to India at the completion of their sentences and paid the victim $40,000 in restitution as a condition of their guilty pleas.

According to documents filed in court, the defendants admitted to conspiring to harbor the victim, who was an undocumented Indian national, at a Super 8 Motel in Kimball between October 2011 and February 2013. During that time, the defendants required the victim to work long hours, seven days a week at the motel, performing manual labor, including cleaning rooms, shoveling snow, and doing laundry. Although the defendants promised to pay the victim, they never did, but rather claimed to apply that amount to a debt the victim owed. The defendants further restricted the victims movement, isolated him, and verbally abused him. Defendant Vishnubhai Chaudhari also threatened to find the victim if he ever left the motel, and defendant Leelabahen Chaudhari regularly assaulted the victim, including on one occasion when she slapped his face several times because he had failed to clean a bathtub to her standards. The victim eventually escaped with the help of a motel guest and local law enforcement.

Todays sentence, and the restitution awarded to the victim, sends a clear message that the Justice Department will use its full resources to prosecute defendants like this one who motivated by their greed violate our immigration laws and exploit a vulnerable individual who lacked immigration status, said Acting Assistant Attorney General John Gore of the Civil Rights Division.

This case is a reminder that labor exploitation occurs in the United States, not just overseas, and federal law targets those who profit from human trafficking and related crimes, said U.S. Attorney Joe Kelly for the District of Nebraska. This case is a testament that such conduct will be vigorously investigated and prosecuted in the District of Nebraska.

Human trafficking is the modern worlds version of enslaving another person for profit. That is what these individuals have done to this victim, said Special Agent in Charge Tracy Cormier of HSI St. Paul. Im proud of the work accomplished by HSIs special agents, our partners at the U.S. Attorneys Office for the District of Nebraska, and the Department of Justice, who made these guilty pleas possible.

The case was investigated by the Department of Homeland Securitys Homeland Security Investigations, and was prosecuted by Trial Attorneys Olimpia Michel and Shan Patel of the Civil Rights Divisions Criminal Section and Human Trafficking Prosecution Unit and Assistant U.S. Attorney Frederick D. Franklin of the District of Nebraska.Latest News

Miami, Florida - Vladimir Nevidomy, 31, of Hallandale Beach, Florida, pleaded guilty on March 19, to conspiring to illegally export military-grade night vision and thermal vision devices and ammunition primers to Russia.

Assistant Attorney General for National Security John C. Demers, U.S. Attorney Benjamin G. Greenberg for the Southern District of Florida, Special Agent in Charge Robert Lasky of the FBIs Miami Field Office, and Special Agent in Charge Mark Selby of Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) Miami Field Office made the announcement.

According to information contained in court documents, from as early as April 2013 through November 2013, customers in Russia contacted Nevidomy by email requesting night vision rifle scopes, thermal monoculars and ammunition primers, all of which were on the U.S. Munitions List and subject to export control by the U.S. Department of State. Nevidomy proceeded to obtain at least three ATN MARS 4x4 night-vision rifle scopes and an ODIN 61BW thermal multi-purpose monocular from U.S. vendors by falsely representing to the vendors that the items were not for export.

On or about April 16, 2013, a co-defendant caused a wire transfer from a Shanghai, China bank account in the amount of $11,755 for the purchase and shipment of two ATN MARS 4x4 night-vision rifle scopes. That same day, Nevidomy paid $9,599 to a U.S. vendor for the purchase of those two night-vision rifle scopes. On or about May 2, 2013, Nevidomy also caused a wire transfer in the amount of $10,000 to be sent to a U.S. vendor for the purchase of the ODIN 61BW thermal multi-purpose monocular.

Later, Nevidomys co-defendant caused a wire transfer from a bank account in Riga, Latvia in the amount of $18,036, part of which was for the purchase of a third ATN Mars 4X4 night-vision rifle scope. On the same day, Nevidomy caused a wire transfer in the amount of $9,599 to a U.S. vendor, part of which was for the purchase of the third ATN Mars 4X4 night-vision rifle scope.

After the U.S. vendors sent the night vision devices to Nevidomy in South Florida, he exported them to the co-defendant in Russia by either concealing the defense articles in household goods shipments sent through a freight forwarding company or using a private Russian postal service that operated in South Florida. In June 2013, Nevidomy aided and abetted the export of the ATN MARS 4x4 night-vision rifle scopes from the U.S. to the co-defendant in Russia, and in August 2013, he exported the ODIN 61BW thermal multi-purpose monocular from the U.S. to the co-defendant in Russia.

On or about July 19, 2013, the same co-defendant sent an email to Nevidomy requesting 1,000 large-rifle ammunition primers to be shipped to Vladivostok, Russia. On or about Oct. 2, 2013, Nevidomy attempted to export 1,000 Sellier & Bellot ammunition primers from the U.S. to the co-defendant in Vladivostok, Russia. These ammunition primers were seized by U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

These night vision rifle scopes, thermal monocular, and ammunition primers required a license or other authorization from the U.S. Department of State before being exported from the U.S. since they were on the U.S. Munitions List. A certified license history check revealed that neither Nevidomy nor his associates ever applied or attempted to apply for an export license from the State Department for the night-vision equipment or ammunition primers.

Sentencing is scheduled before U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams, on May 25. Nevidomy, a Ukraine-born naturalized U.S. citizen, faces a maximum sentence of 5 years imprisonment.

In addition, on Feb. 5, in a separate federal case, Nevidomy pleaded guilty to passport fraud and conspiracy to commit passport fraud in the Southern District of Florida.

Mr. Demers and Mr. Greenberg commended the investigative efforts of the FBI and HSI. This case is being prosecuted by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Michael Thakur and Rick Del Toro of the Southern District of Florida, and Trial Attorney Christian Ford of the National Security Divisions Counterintelligence and Export Control Section.New Delhi: Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday extended his greetings to the people of Bihar on the occasion of 'Bihar Diwas' and lauded their role in the country's progress.

In a tweet, the Prime Minister said ''the state's contribution towards the country's progress was "exemplary and invaluable".

             Greetings to my sisters and brothers of Bihar on Bihar Diwas. Right from historical times, Bihars contribution towards the nations progress is exemplary and invaluable.  Narendra Modi (@narendramodi) March 22, 2018

"Greetings to my sisters and brothers of Bihar on 'Bihar Diwas'. Right from historical times, Bihar's contribution towards the nation's progress is exemplary and invaluable," Modi tweeted.

'Bihar Diwas' marks the day the state of Bihar was carved out of the Bengal Presidency by the British in 1912.New Delhi: Actor Sooraj Pancholi, who was last seen in 'Hate Story 4' is all set to work on an untitled dance-based film, which will be written by 'ABCD: Anybody Can Dance' director Remo D'souza.

A director for the upcoming film is yet to be roped in.

"I have always been passionate about dancing. When I got to know that the film is dance-based and I will be learning different kinds of dance forms for this movie, I was thrilled beyond words," Sooraj said in a statement to IANS.

Remo D'souza, on the other hand, is helming 'Race 3' and is excited to be a part of the hit 'Race' franchise.

"Ten years of 'Race' .... I am so happy to be a part of the 'Race 3' family. I hope I am able to live up to all your expectations and match up to legends like Abbas Mustan, Ramesh Taurani and Salman Khan," the director, also an ace choreographer tweeted on Thursday.

Sooraj made his debut opposite Athiya Shetty in Nikhil Advani's 'Hero' in 2015. The film was the remake of Subhash Ghai's directed 1983 film of the same name, which starred Jackie Shroff. Upon its release, the film garnered mostly negative reviews.

In the meantime, the trial against actor Sooraj Pancholi, accused of abetting the suicide of actor Jiah Khan, is likely to begin in March, with the deposition of her mother, Rabia Khan, as the first prosecution witness.

The court had framed charges against Pancholi on January 30 under Section 306 (abetment of suicide) of the IPC. Pancholi had pleaded not guilty. Jiah was found hanging in her Juhu residence on June 3, 2013. Pancholi was arrested on June 10 and granted bail in July. Rabia had said Pancholi should be charged with murder and rape.New Delhi: The star power of superstar Salman Khan is not restricted to any border. He has a huge fan following across the globe who await all his major releases eagerly. Bhaijaan is loved by his fan army in the neighbouring country Pakistan as well, so much so that what his fan did recently will leave your mind puzzled.

Salman's latest release 'Tiger Zinda Hai' was banned in Pakistan by the Censor Board stating that it presents the country in the wrong manner. IANS quoted the statement from CBFC chief Mobashir Hasan stating, "As per synopsis, reviews and trailers of the film available in media, in the said feature film, our national security and law enforcement institutions, agencies, individuals and certain state symbols are being shown in a demeaning manner on which we have a 'no-compromise policy'.

'Tiger Zinda Hai' released in India on December 22, 2017.

ALSO READ: Tiger Zinda Hai movie review: Meet 'Rambo' Salman Khan and 'Wonder Woman' Katrina Kaif in a fast and furious land

Now, what this diehard Salman fan in Pakistan did next speaks volumes about the kind of stardom Salman enjoys in the country. According to Mid-Day.com, a fan based in Lahore booked an auditorium at a theatre and hosted a private screening of the film on March 17 for his friends, family and superstar's fans.

The actor's 'Jabra' fan reportedly procured the digital rights for a one-time viewing of the 'Tiger Zinda Hai' and as many as 150 other fans attended the private screening. The report quotes a person who attended the screening as saying, It was a great experience. Tiger Zinda Hai depicts the ties of love between India and Pakistan in such a pure way. We were cheering and hooting during Salman's action scenes. The film may have been banned here, but we endorse the idea of brotherhood that it promotes. We wish we didn't have to hold the screening discreetly. We want to tell Salman Bhai we have immense love for him and his movies.

Adding more, the person said, The man, who took the initiative, had to pay a hefty sum for the digital rights. The movie was screened via a USB in the digital cinema projector.

Expressing his happiness over the news, Salman's father Salim Khan told Mid-Day, "It's a wonderful gesture. I feel films from India should be allowed to release in Pakistan, and their films should be allowed to screen here. That will happen only once the situation between the two countries improves."

'Tiger Zinda Hai' is directed by Ali Abbas Zafar and happens to be the sequel of 2015 blockbuster hit 'Ek Tha Tiger'. The film stars Salman and Katrina Kaif in the lead roles. The film happens to be the highest grosser of Bhaijaan in the country.New Delhi: A bar owner, in his 30s, died after accidentally shooting himself in the head while dancing with a pistol in hand inside his bar here, police said on Thursday. The incident occurred last night at the 'Onn Lounge and Bar' in northwest Delhi's Shalimar Bagh area, they said, adding that the deceased was identified as Nasir.

According to an eyewitness, Nasir was partying with three of his friends with a pistol in his hand, officials said. He was dancing with the pistol held close to his head when it went he ended up accidentally shooting himself, they said.

There was no evidence of any foul play in the CCTV footage obtained from the bar, police said.NEW DELHI: The principal of the Delhi school, which is facing ire over the suicide of a Class 9 student, on Thursday presented a bizarre defence in connection with sexual harassment allegations against a teacher. He said: "One of the teachers against whom allegations are being made is a woman. How can she sexually harass someone? The other teacher has been here for 25 years and we never got any such complaint."

The principal also defended the school saying she was an average student and claimed that her guardians did not attend her parent-teacher meetings. "If I see her record she was an average student, not very good at studies but a great dancer. Students' marks are given at PTMs but her parents didn't attend any. She didn't fail, had to give re-test," he said adding that the school mourns her death.

Noida Police has filed an FIR against two teachers and principal for allegedly abetting suicide. It has been alleged in the FIR that the girl was disturbed because of alleged sexual advances by one of the teachers.

The 15-year-old student, who committed suicide on Tuesday, was a resident of Sector 52 in Noida. Her family has alleged that one of the teachers of the school had tried to abuse her sexually and had even threatened to fail her in the examination.

"She told me her SST teachers touch her inappropriately. I said since I'm also a teacher I can say they can't do it, might be a mistake but she said she is scared of them, no matter how well she writes they'll fail her. Ultimately they failed her in SST. The school killed her," said her father.

Examination results of the school were declared on March 16 where she reportedly failed to pass two of the subjects. She was found hanging from a railing, following which she was rushed to Kailash hospital in Noida. A doctor, who attended to her, said that her pulse and blood pressure were unrecordable when she was brought to the hospital. "We tried to revive her but could not. The cause of the death can be known after post-mortem," she said.

Delhi Education Minister Manish Sisodia intervened in the matter on Wednesday and ordered a probe in connection with the suicide. Ordering a departmental inquiry, Sisodia said the student committed suicide on Tuesday allegedly due to academic pressure.

Sisodia said the FIR quoted the girl's parents as alleging that the student was molested. He told the Delhi Assembly that he would table a detailed report in the House.New Delhi: India has dropped a plan to double a wheat import tax to 40 percent, two government sources said, in a sign it expects imports to make up for a shortfall in domestic production for the third year in a row.

As late as a few weeks ago, the food, trade and finance ministries were considering hiking the tax to 40 percent to ensure that local prices remained steady and millions of domestic farmers got good returns for their harvest.

The government tries to keep local wheat prices steady until at least May/June, by when farmers would have sold their wheat crop. The grain is grown only once in a year in India, with plantings in October and harvests from March.

The three concerned ministries have decided against raising the tariff for now, the two government officials told Reuters.

The officials, who are directly involved in decision making, declined to be identified because they are not authorised to speak to the media.

Traders said the decision to avoid hiking the import tax implied that the crop could be lower than forecast.

"We can now infer that production will be less than expected, and in my view, it`s going to somewhere between 91-92 million tonnes," said Tejinder Narang, a New Delhi-based analyst who advises some leading global trading companies.

In February, the farm ministry forecast that this year`s harvest would reach 97.11 million tonnes against a target of 98.51 million tonnes. Local media quoted two government officials as saying output would even cross 100 million tonnes.

Wheat demand in India, the world`s second-biggest producer and consumer of the grain, is estimated at about 100 million tonnes, with consumption rising by 1-1.5 percent a year.

Traders said it was too early to accurately pin down India`s wheat imports this year, but most said they believed it could be between 2-4 million tonnes with the rest of the demand being met by stocks.

Indian flour millers imported nearly 2 million tonnes of wheat last year and 6.5 million tonnes in 2016.

Purchases by India could buoy the benchmark Chicago price that hovered just above the prior session`s one-month low on Wednesday.

Most import cargoes are booked by flour millers near port cities in the southern parts of India, as they find it cheaper to buy from Australia, Russia and Ukraine.

Imported wheat is mostly blended with Indian flour to make pizzas and pasta.New Delhi: The Trivendra Singh Rawat-led Bharatiya Janata Party government in Uttarakhand on Thursday presented a Rs 45,585 crore budget for the financial year 2018-19.

The budget presented by Finance Minister Prakash Pant has allocated Rs 1,500 crore to develop Uttarakhand as an organic herbal state and has also made major allocations for encouraging start-ups, achieving cent percent literacy, opening a trauma centre in each district, and establishing an international parliamentary studies, research, and training centre.

A sum of Rs 86 crore has been allocated for construction of Metro Rail, among other things. The state government has also prioritized the tourism sector through various schemes including promotion of home stays. Revenue receipts are pegged at Rs 35,660 crore.

This was the second budget of the BJP government which was voted to power in 2017. In its first budget, the government had presented a Rs 39,957.20 crore budget.

Here are the top 10 highlights of Uttarakhand Budget 2018:

1. The Rawat government said that in all government schemes, Direct Benefit Transfer will be incorporated by 2020. Apart from this, they plan to construct 5,000 homestays, also they will invest in nearly 1 lakh youth for making them skilled.

2. The Rawat government will focus on creating more job opportunities for citizens, and for that, they will create 200 start-ups.

3. Health was also taken care during the announcement of Uttarakhand Budget 2018, as the Rawat government there plans to build the trauma centre, blood bank, and ICU in all 13 districts of the state.

4. For below poverty line people, the Rawat government will launch proper LPG connection, electricity facility and insurance to them.

5. To make Uttarakhand an attractive investing spot, the Rawat government has decided an arrangement of investment summit, for which they will allocate Rs 25 crore.

6. For irrigation department, the Rawat government has allotted Rs 40 crore for making dams.

7. To provide loan to farmers under "Uttarakhand Deendayal Farmer Welfare Scheme", the Rawat government has allotted a total Rs 30 crore.

8. For working women, "Rashtriya Krech Yojana" has been launched, along with the Budget of Rs 3.70 crore.

9. For hygienic drinking water, Rs 40 crore has allocated by the Rawat government in the Budget 2018.

10. Allocation of Rs 10 crore was made for making of warehouses for Electronic Voting Machines (EVM) and Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT) storage.New Delhi: Taking on Union IT and Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad for warning Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg that he can be summoned if his company is found guilty of data breach, RJD's Tejashwi Yadav questioned why the government cannot - similarly - summon those like Nirav Modi and Vijay Mallya who have allegedly fled India.

Prasad on Wednesday had said India would use its stringent IT Act to take action against Facebook if it was found guilty of stealing data of Indians. "We have got stringent power in the IT Act, we shall use it, including summoning you (Mark Zuckerberg) in India," he had said. A day later, Tejashwi used the statement to question why the government cannot use the same tone and tenacity to bring back economic offenders who have fled the country. "As BJP's popularity is going down on Facebook, they are challenging Facebook's owner that he can be summoned," he said. "Government should tell us that if they have powers, why can't they summon Nirav Modi, Lalit Modi and Vijay Mallya?"

As BJP's popularity is going down on Facebook, they are challenging Facebook's owner that he can be summoned. Govt should tell us that if they have powers why can't they summon Nirav Modi, Lalit Modi and Vijay Mallya? : Tejashwi Yadav, RJD pic.twitter.com/5OqMDRM6ll  ANI (@ANI) March 22, 2018

While Lalit Modi is accused of violating provisions in Foreign Exchange Management Act (FEMA) and is in exile in London, Mallya is accused of owing banks Rs 7,000 crore which was lent to his now defunct Kingfisher Airlines. While Mallya too is in the UK, the whereabouts of Nirav Modi - the most recent to have fled the country after allegedly duping Punjab National Bank of Rs 11,000 crore - remain unknown.

Questions are increasingly being asked of the government regarding what it has and what it plans to do to bring back these high-profile economic offenders. Tejashwi's question, in particular, comes at a time when India is trying to ensure Facebook did not commit any data breach in the country.

(Also read: Rahul Gandhi used Cambridge Analytica services during Gujarat elections: Ravi Shankar Prasad)

Facebook is facing heat globally after Cambridge Analytica was accused of harvesting data of up to 50 million users without permission and using the data to help politicians, including US President Donald Trump and the Brexit campaign.Congress president Rahul Gandhi has accused the government of inventing the story of the alleged involvement of the Congress party in the Facebook data theft scandal. According to the Congress chief, the story of Congress & data theft was brought to the fore to divert the attention from the issue of death of 39 Indians in Mosul in Iraq.

Taking to microblogging site Twitter, Rahul alleged that media networks bit the bait, making issue of death of 39 Indians in Iraq vanish from radar. He said that the Narendra Modi government was caught lying on the issue.

Problem: 39 Indians dead; Govt on the mat, caught lying. Solution: Invent story on Congress & Data Theft. Result: Media networks bite bait; 39 Indians vanish from radar. Problem solved.  Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) March 22, 2018

The government had on Wednesday targeted the Gandhi scion and the Congress party over Facebook data theft involving British consulting company Cambridge Analytica. Addressing a press conference, Union Minister for Electronics and Information Technology, Ravi Shankar Prasad had asked if the Congress party would depend on data theft and manipulation to win elections? He had further asked, What is the role of Cambridge Analytica in social media profile of Rahul Gandhi?

The minister further pointed to earlier reports of bots allegedly being used to artificially increase Rahul Gandhis social media following, asking how much data of Indians have the Congress party shared with foreign firms like Cambridge Analytica.

Hitting back at the government, the Congress denied any link with the data theft. Head of Congress social media wing Divya Spandana (Ramya) had tweeted, "News about Congress engaged/engaging with Cambridge Analytica is absolutely false."

She had also accused the government of diverting attention from the 39 Indians who died in Iraq. "Can you please tell us why your government lied to us about the 39 Indians who died in Iraq? You hid the information and now youre trying to divert attention from the issue by making outrageous allegations against the Congress party," Divya asked Union Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad.

Later, Congress spokesperson Randeep Surjewala said, "BJP's factory of fake news has produced one more fake product today. It appears fake statements, fake press conferences and fake agendas have become an everyday character of BJP and its 'lawless' Law Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad."New Delhi: Apollo Hospitals on Thursday said that all CCTV cameras in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) where J Jayalalithaa was being treated had been turned off.

Speaking to members of the press, Prathap C Reddy, Founder-Chairman of Apollo Hospitals, said that no CCTV footage could be submitted to Justice A Arumughaswamy Commission of inquiry probing Jayalalithaa's death. "All the CCTV cameras were turned off in the ICU where Jayalalithaa was being treated. As soon as she was admitted, all the cameras were turned off and she was provided with one ICU unit with patients there being transferred to other ICUs. Access to her ICU was also closed," he said. "They removed the camera because they did not want everyone to be watching."

Unfortunately they (CCTVs) were switched off. Jayalalithaa got admitted and one ICU was completely occupied only by her. So they removed the footage because they did not want everyone to be watching: Prathap C Reddy, Founder-Chairman of Apollo Hospitals on her death row #Chennai pic.twitter.com/QoWb3oYh4f  ANI (@ANI) March 22, 2018

Admitted to Apollo Hospitals in Chennai on September 22 of 2016, the then Tamil Nadu CM and AIADMK chief Jayalalithaa was treated for over two months before she passed away due to a cardiac arrest. Many, including several from her own party, have questioned the circumstances under which she died and an inquiry commission was subsequently constituted.

We don't have to worry about anything because we haven't done anything wrong. It is upto the Hospital management to explain the reason why did they switch off the CCTV: TTV Dhinakaran #Jayalalithaa pic.twitter.com/2Lo8ef2i4k  ANI (@ANI) March 22, 2018

Reddy though said that his hospital did its best to treat her. "The matter is sub judice, as a one-man commission is holding an inquiry. She was at the hospital for several days. From ward boys to technicians to nurses to doctors everyone took good care of her. There were doctors from other countries as well. We had high hopes she would recover. I even said she was well, he said.

(Also watch: AIADMK claims shock over Amma's death killed over 70)

Reddy further said that all reports have been submitted to the inquiry commission and that hospital authorities are willing to assist in any way henceforth as well, if required.

(With inputs from ANI)NEW DELHI: Politics is on in full swing over the allegations of the role of Cambridge Analytica, which is under fire over data breach storm, in building the social media profile of the Congress president. While the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has claimed that the Congress had ties with Cambridge Analytica, the Congress has called it a tactic by the BJP to divert the attention of the 'government's failure' which led to the death of 39 Indians in Iraq.

Hitting out at the BJP and Union Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad, Congress accused the ruling party of manufacturing fake news. "Hitler had an associate called Goebbels, Modi ji has an associate called Ravi Shankar Prasad. BJP government has become a manufacturer of fake news. Sabse bade data chor macha rahe hain sabse zyada shor (The biggest data thieves are making the most noise)," Congress leader Randeep Surjewala said on Thursday.

His comment comes hours after Ravi Shankar Prasad had said that the Gandhi scion used the services of Cambridge Analytics in Gujarat Assembly elections in 2017. Addressing a press conference, Prasad said that Rahul must come clean on the issue. He also cited media reports during Gujarat elections regarding the issue to assert his point.

"The Congress has maintained conspicuous silence (on their ties with Cambridge Analytica). Rahul Gandhi's entire social media campaign has been managed with the help of Cambridge Analytica and they have had meetings also," he added.

Earlier in the day, Rahul took to microblogging site Twitter alleging that the data leak story was invented by the government to divert attention from the issue of killing of Indians in Iraqs Mosul by terrorist group Islamic State. Rahul tweeted that media networks bit the "bait", making the issue of death of 39 Indians in Iraq "vanish from radar". He said that the Narendra Modi government was "caught lying" on the issue.

The minister further pointed to earlier reports of bots allegedly being used to artificially increase Rahul Gandhis social media following, asking "how much data of Indians have the Congress party shared with foreign firms like Cambridge Analytica".

The Congress, however, denied any link with the data theft. Head of Congress social media wing Divya Spandana (Ramya) had tweeted, "News about Congress engaged/engaging with Cambridge Analytica is absolutely false."

Britain's Channel 4 has alleged that the London-based data analytics firm harvested private data of Facebook users to influence elections in several countries including US presidential elections. Soon after the controversy over Cambridge Analytica's association with Indian political parties broke-out, BJP and Congress accused each other of availing of its services for electoral campaigns.New Delhi: The Rahul Gandhi-led Congress will now give a privilege notice against External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj for misleading the nation regarding the fate of 39 Indians who went missing in Iraq and later killed by global terrorist outfit ISIS.

Accusing Swaraj of lying in the case of 39 missing Indians, senior Congress leader Ambika Soni said that her party will push a privilege notice against Swaraj in both houses of Parliament on Friday.

The Congress party has launched a major offensive against the Narendra Modi government over the issue ever since EAM Swaraj announced in Rajya Sabha that all 39 Indians who were missing in Iraq's Mosul city since 2014 were dead.

She had told the lawmakers in the Upper House that all 39 Indian workers were killed by the IS.

The Congress alleged that the families of the deceased had been misled by the government for years, by keeping them hopeful on the issue.

Congress spokesperson Randeep Surjewala, in a press briefing, said that Swaraj has been misleading the Parliament and the families of the victims.

Congress president Rahul Gandhi also expressed shock over the news of the confirmed death of the 39 Indians who were held captive by the Islamic State in 2014.

Im shocked to hear that 39 Indians who were in captivity since 2014, in Iraq, are now confirmed dead. My deepest condolences to the families of those who have lived in hope, that their loved ones will return unharmed. My thoughts and prayers are with all of you today.  Rahul Gandhi (@RahulGandhi) March 20, 2018

The attack on the Modi government began soon after Swaraj said, ''Out of the 40, who were kidnapped, one person managed to escape, while others were confirmed dead after DNA samples of their relatives matched from the bodies exhumed from a mound. ''

Shattered at the heart-wrenching news from @SushmaSwaraj that the 39 Indians missing in Iraq, most of whom were Punjabis, are dead. My heart goes out to the families who had been living in hope since their reported abduction by ISIS in 2014. Prayers with all of them.  Capt.Amarinder Singh (@capt_amarinder) March 20, 2018

Speaking in the Upper House, Swaraj said, ''Mortal remains were sent to Baghdad. For verification of bodies, the DNA samples of their relatives were sent there and four state governments - Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, West Bengal and Bihar - were involved in this.''

''We got information that the DNA samples of 38 people have matched and DNA of the 39th person has matched 70 percent,'' Sushma told lawmakers in the Rajya Sabha.

''I would like to confirm with a heavy heart that they have been killed by the Islamic State militia,'' she said.

The EAM further informed that Union Minister and former Army chief General VK Singh will go to Iraq to bring back the mortal remains of the 39 Indians killed in Iraq.

''The plane carrying mortal remains will first go to Amritsar, then to Patna and then to Kolkata, '' Swaraj informed.

Swaraj had earlier refused to declare them dead without credible proof, saying this would be amount to "committing a sin".

"Declaring anyone dead without proof is a sin and I won't commit a sin," Swaraj had said in the Lok Sabha, responding to allegations that she was "misleading the house" on whether the Indians were alive.

Sushma Swaraj had then asserted that it was the government's duty to keep looking for the Indians, given that so far, "there are no bodies, no bloodstains, no list, no ISIS videos."

A group of Indian labourers, mostly from Punjab, Bihar and Himachal, was taken hostage by ISIS when it overran Iraq's second largest city Mosul in 2014.

The workers were trying to leave Mosul when they were intercepted and taken hostage by the ISIS fighters.

One of the captured Indians, Harjit Masih from Gurdaspur, had managed to escape and claimed to have witnessed the massacre of the others.

The Government of India (GoI) rejected his claim and maintained that all efforts were on to find the missing Indians and, without any credible information, the workers would be considered alive.

The GoI had even asked Iraq for help in locating the missing Indians after Iraqi forces recaptured Mosul from ISIS.

The government in Iraq too expressed its inability to confirm if Indians taken hostage by the ISIS in Mosul three years ago were alive or dead.

(With Agency inputs)New Delhi: The Congress won`t succeed with another UPA experiment as it has lost all credibility and the best way to defeat the BJP in the next Lok Sabha election will be to pool in all anti-BJP votes statewise, the CPI-M has said.

"The Congress hopes to build an extended UPA style alliance to counter the BJP," said an editorial in the CPI-M journal "People`s Democracy" following the Bharatiya Janata Party`s defeat in two Lok Sabha by-elections in Uttar Pradesh.

"However, this will not succeed. The Congress has no credibility to lead such an alliance in terms of an alternative programme.

"There are many regional parties like the BJD in Odisha, the TRS in Telangana and the TDP in Andhra Pradesh who will not accept to be a partner in an alliance with the Congress," it said.

"There are other parties who are chary of accepting the Congress as the leader of the alliance," the CPI-M added, naming itself as one of them.

Similarly, any effort to build a non-BJP, non-Congress "Federal Front" mooted by Telangana Chief Minister K.C. Rao was also bound to fail, the editorial warned.

"Some regional parties like DMK and RJD are with Congress in their respective states. Further, there are many contradictions amongst the regional parties in terms of policies and regional interests which will prevent all the regional parties (from) coming together.

"So, the most effective electoral tactics to defeat the BJP in the Lok Sabha election will be to ensure pooling of anti-BJP votes state-wise. This is what happened in the UP by-elections."

The CPI-M said the BJP`s defeat in the Gorakhpur and Phulpur Lok Sabha by-elections would have significant implications for the future.

"The UP by-election provides important lessons for the future in terms of election tactics to defeat the BJP. If the BJP loses the bulk of the seats in UP, it cannot come anywhere near a majority in the Lok Sabha."New Delhi: The Indian Institute of Mass Communication Alumni Association (IIMCAA) organised its annual alumni meet Connections 2018 in Hyderabad, Jaipur and Ahmedabad.

The IIMC alumni meet Connections 2018, which started from IIMC's headquarter Delhi on February 18 is scheduled to be held in 14 cities throughout the country. The alumni meet will also be organised in Singapur and Tashkent. In April, the IIMC alumni meet will be held in Lucknow, Bengaluru and Guwahati.

The Indian Institute of Mass Communication Alumni Association (IIMCAA) has announced the winners of IFFCO IIMCAA Awards 2018 at their annual alumni meet. The awards  which recognize the achievements and contribution of IIMCians  are given for reporting, production and advertising and public relations. This year, the number of awards have been increased from 10 to 21.

In Hyderabad, Gaura Naithani was honoured with IFFCO-IIMCAA award for Digital Original Storytelling at the IIMC alumni meet Connections. The event was organised at Dream Valley Resort. Senior journalist Prasad Nichenmetla, corporate trainer Chetan Malik and public relations expert Rajesh Parida graced the event.

The IIMCAA held its second annual connections meet in Ahmedabad on Sunday (March 18). The meet was attended by several IIMC alumnus apart from a few office-bearers of the association. A range of topics was discussed during the event whose primary objective is to establish connections between people who have studied at the prestigious IIMC.

In Jaipur, the IIMC alumni meet was held at Hilton Hotel. The event was presided by Amruta Maurya. Several IIMC alumnus, who attended the meet, was welcome in Rajasthani traditional way. The band, Agni Kula, performed at the inaugural function and earned praise.

The final event of the IIMC alumni meet Connections 2018 is scheduled to be held in Chandigarh on April 22.New Delhi: Air Chief Marshal Birender Singh Dhanoa said on Thursday that the Indian Air Force has a superior position against China - especially in India's eastern sector. His statement comes just days after Indian Army Chief Bipin Rawat expressed concern over Chinese buildup in the disputed Doklam region.

Speaking at Halwara Air Force Station, where President Ram Nath Kovind presented the Presidents Standard to 51 Squadron and Presidents Colours to the 230 Signal Unit of the IAF, Dhanoa said that the IAF is better prepared and better equipped than the Chinese. "The air force is on a strong wicket against China. Whatever requirements are there from the budget, have been sent to the government," he told members of the press. He also said that he had no objection to dual use of airports - for the military as well as civilian purposes, especially in the north-east region of the country.

Security analysts have generally agreed that the IAF has a dominant position in the north-east sector, courtesy geographical factors. While China is rapidly expanding and modernising its military, and with President Xi Jinping recently saying his country 'won't cede an inch of land', India's need for a more comprehensive military has only increased. Doklam, in particular, remains a cause of worry with Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman too recently admitting that the Chinese had stepped up its activities here.

The other area of concern, apart from Doklam, is the Indian Ocean Region (IOR) where presence of Chinese warships and submarines have increased. The Indian Navy remains vigilant and the government also recently made a provision under which the commander-in-chief of the Andaman and Nicobar Command (ANC) will have increased powers for better synergy between the three wings of India's Armed Forces.New Delhi: Air Marshal BS Dhanoa recently said that the Indian Air Force (IAF) is on a 'strong wicket' against China. While many security experts and analysts have indeed said in the past that when it comes to the eastern sector of the country - especially in and around the Doklam area, IAF has a geographical advantage, a head-to-head count between IAF and China's Air Force (PLAAF) reveals intriguing statistics.

Both India and China are looking to modernise their respective military might. While India has inked deals with numerous countries like France, Russia, Israel and the United States for military hardware, China is focusing on exponentially increasing its expeditionary capabilities. That China is fast manufacturing quality military hardware - including fifth-generation stealth fighter J-20, gives it an edge in many areas.

Here's taking a look at how the two countries stack up numerically in terms of power in the air.

Fighters/Interceptors: India - 676, China - 1271

Attack Aircraft: India - 808, China - 1385

Transports: India - 857, China - 782

Trainers: India - 323, China - 352

Helicopters: India - 666, China - 912

Attack Helicopters: India - 16, China - 206

Serviceable Airports: India - 346, China - 507

In the unfortunate event of a war between India and China, a large number of factors are likely to decide the final outcome and the purely numerical comparison between IAF and PLAAF are only seen as indicative at best. There is, however, no denying that China's mammoth military budget allows it to have more bragging rights vis-a-vis not just India but other major global powers like Japan and the United States.

(All numerical data from www.globalfirepower.com)New Delhi: Janata Dal (United) leader KC Tyagi denied any links of the party with the Cambridge Analytica (CA) and said that its CEO had never met the Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar.

CA, the British data analytics company, along with Facebook has come under fire for allegedly harvesting personal data of FB users to influence elections in several countries including US presidential elections.

"JD(U) has no relation with Cambridge Analytica, neither has its CEO ever met Nitish ji nor me. In any case JD(U) is a socialist outfit and we stay away from such things, except for maybe Prashant Kishore ji helping us during last Assembly polls," Tyagi said.

He added, "There was only a work relationship between my son Amrish's company and Cambridge Analytica, there is no financial transaction or shareholding, everything is open to probe. JD(U) also has no links with this, neither did they promote us in 2010 polls."

His son Amrish Tyagi owns Ovelina Business Intelligence (OBI), which was CAs associate in the country. OBI in association with CA parent company SCL group had formed a company, SCL India. This was to apparently help its clients in India to manage election campaigns, among other things.

The OBI`s website was suspended on Wednesday night. CA claims to have helped its client to win Bihar Assembly elections in 2010.

JD(U) has asked Tyagi, who is a Rajya Sabha MP from Bihar, for an explanation in the matter.

Meanwhile, taking a dig at Nitish, RJD leader Tejashwi Yadav said that there was a difference between what they say and 'what they do'. He also questioned the involvement of JD(U) and BJP in the alleged data leak.

Name of the company coming out in this matter is in the BJP client list, run by KC Tyagi's son. JD(U) General Secretary's son is involved and JD(U) is saying that we do not know anything: Tejashwi Yadav, RJD pic.twitter.com/jF7uZa6mVh  ANI (@ANI) March 22, 2018

NitishKumar & PM Modi are only politicians in the country who take help of PR agencies like #CambridgeAnalytica to create hype around their non existent work! Both are answerable to the country for their Party's links with the agency!  Tejashwi Yadav (@yadavtejashwi) March 22, 2018

On the other hand, the BJP on Thursday accused Rahul Gandhi of doing politics on dead bodies, after the Congress chief criticised the government over the killing of 39 Indians in Iraq.

Union minister Ravi Shankar Prasad also rejected the Congress' claim that it had never used the services of CA and insisted that the Opposition party and Gandhi did do it.

His response came after the Congress chief suggested that the government had 'invented' a story about the Congress' alleged links with a controversial data firm to divert the media attention from these deaths as it was caught 'lying' on the issue.

Prasad insisted that the Congress has used the services of CA, which has been accused of harvesting people's data from platforms like Facebook unlawfully to influence elections in different countries.

He said several media reports about the Opposition party using the services of the firm had appeared in October and November 2017 and it never denied those stories till the BJP raised the issue yesterday.

Prasad alleged that imprints of CA were 'visible' in the Congress' campaign in Gujarat.

On questions about reports that an Indian company, which was CA's partner, might have worked for the BJP and its allies as well, he insisted that his party never had any ties with the foreign company.

(With Agency inputs)Despite strong words by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and clear directives from the Ministry of Home Affairs, there seems to be no end to incidents of vandalism of statues of iconic leaders and ideologues. In the latest incident, a statue of the father of the nation, Mahatma Gandhi, has been vandalised.

The Rajasthan Police on Wednesday arrested one person for vandalising the statue of Mahatma Gandhi in Jaisalmer. This comes just days after a statue of countrys first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru was defaced in Katwa's Telephone Maidan in West Bengal. Black ink was thrown on the statue.

In another related incident last week, a statue of Bharatiya Jana Sangh founder Syama Prasad Mukherjee was found vandalised in Assam's Kokrajhar. Also, a life-size statue of Michael Madhusudan Dutt, a prominent poet during the 19th century Bengal renaissance, was found defaced in Raniganj of West Bengal's Purba Bardhaman district.

Reports of incidents of vandalism of statues started pouring in soon after the results of the Assembly elections in Tripura were declared. Following the victory of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the Left bastion, a mod demolished a statue of Communist ideologue Vladimir Lenin in Tripura.

Following this, a statue of Dravidian ideologue Periyar EV Ramasamy was damaged in Tirupattur in Tamil Nadu. This was followed by defacing statues of Dr BR Ambedkar in Meerut in Uttar Pradesh and Mahatma Gandhi in Taliparamba in Kannur district of Kerala.

These incidents have sparked war of words between political parties as well. On Tuesday, Congress president Rahul Gandhi took to microblogging site Twitter, alleging that the BJP and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) signalled their cadres to destroy statues of those opposed to their ideology.

He tweeted, When the RSS & BJP encouraged the tearing down of Lenin statues in Tripura, they signalled their cadres to destroy statues of those who opposed their ideology, like Periyar, the great social reformer who fought for the Dalits. His statue too was destroyed today in Tamil Nadu.

However, PM Modi had recently made an appeal to people to not indulge in vandalism of statues. Following this, the Union Home Ministry had issued a directive to states to ensure that no such incidents take place.The Ram Rajya Rath Yatra, which is n Tamil Nadu despite strong opposition from political parties was temporarily stopped by the police near the temple town of Rameswaram, reports have said. The cops had brought the yatra to a halt as it had deviated from the route they had designated for it.

The rath yatra resumed only after the organisers agreed to follow police instructions and stick to the route that they had been assigned, Tamil news channel Puthiya Talaimurai reported.

The stoppage reportedly occurred when the procession left the East Coast Road and took a different route. The police stopped the vehicle soon after and refused to allow it to proceed. They said they could security for the procession only if it stayed on the route they had laid out, leaving little choice for the organisers. The rath then made its way towards the port town of Thoothukudi, the report said.

The rath yatra has been a hot button topic in Tamil Nadu. Opposition parties, led by DMK leader MK Stalin, had raised strong objections to allowing the yatra to continue in the state. They alleged that the procession would lead to communal animosity and termed it an attempt at polarisation.

However, Tamil Nadu Chief Minister Edappadi K Palaniswamy shot down demands to prevent the procession from entering the state. He said he could not stop the procession, but would ensure adequate security.

The Ram Rajya Rath yatra set out from Ayodhya in February, and is aimed at mobilising support for the building of a Ram Janmabhoomi temple at the disputed site in Ayodhya. The Ayodhya issue has never had much traction in Tamil Nadu, electorally or support-wise.

The rath yatra passed through Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Kerala, before entering Tamil Nadu. Within the state, it passed through Punalur, Sengottai, Tenkasi, Kadayanallur, Vasudevanallur, Virudunagar and Madurai on its way to its conclusion in Rasmeswaram.The government on Thursday continued its attack on Congress president Rahul Gandhi over Facebook data leak scandal involving British consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica. In fresh allegations against the Congress chief, Union minister Ravi Shankar Prasad has said that the Gandhi scion used the services of Cambridge Analytics in Gujarat Assembly elections in 2017.

Addressing a press conference, Prasad said that Rahul Gandhi must come clean on the issue, citing media reports during Gujarat elections regarding the issue. He gave reference to reports published in two business dailies and one English newspaper to assert his point.

Hitting out at the Congress chief, Prasad further said that he cannot back out on his alleged ties with Cambridge Analytica.

This came hours after Rahul Gandhi took to microblogging site Twitter alleging that the data leak story was invented by the government to divert attention from the issue of killing of Indians in Iraqs Mosul by terrorist group ISIS.

Rahul tweeted that media networks bit the bait, making issue of death of 39 Indians in Iraq vanish from radar. He said that the Narendra Modi government was caught lying on the issue.

On Wednesday as well, the government had targeted the Gandhi scion and the Congress party over Facebook data theft.

Prasad had asked if the Congress party would depend on data theft and manipulation to win elections? He had further asked, What is the role of Cambridge Analytica in social media profile of Rahul Gandhi?

The minister further pointed to earlier reports of bots allegedly being used to artificially increase Rahul Gandhis social media following, asking how much data of Indians have the Congress party shared with foreign firms like Cambridge Analytica.

The Congress, however, denied any link with the data theft. Head of Congress social media wing Divya Spandana (Ramya) had tweeted, "News about Congress engaged/engaging with Cambridge Analytica is absolutely false."

She also accused the government of diverting attention from the 39 Indians who died in Iraq. "Can you please tell us why your government lied to us about the 39 Indians who died in Iraq? You hid the information and now youre trying to divert attention from the issue by making outrageous allegations against the Congress party," she said.New Delhi: Every year, on March 23, Martyrs Day or Shaheed Diwas is observed in memory of three freedom fighters who sacrificed their lives for the country.

Bhagat Singh, Rajguru, and Sukhdev were hanged till death on March 23, 1931, in Lahore jail by the colonial British.

Born on September 28, 1907 in Punjab in British India, Bhagat Singh is a well-known freedom fighter who was a revolutionary socialist and played a crucial role during the Indian freedom struggle.

Remembering the Indian freedom fighter on his 87th death anniversary, we bring you some of his famous quotes that continue to inspire the nation.

''They may kill me, but they cannot kill my ideas. They can crush my body, but they will not be able to crush my spirit.''

''If the deaf are to hear the sound has to be very loud''

''Revolution did not necessarily involve sanguinary strife. It was not a cult of bomb and pistol.''

''Any man who stands for progress has to criticize, disbelieve and challenge every item of the old faith. Item by item he has to reason out every nook and corner of the prevailing faith.''

Bombs and pistols do not make a revolution. The sword of revolution is sharpened on the whetting-stone of ideas

''by crushing individuals, they cannot kill ideas.''

''Zindgi to apne damm par hi jiyi jati hey..dusro k kandhe par tohh shirf janaje uthaye jate hey.''

''Life is lived on its ownother's shoulders are used only at the time of funeral.''

''Love always elevates the character of man. It never lowers him, provided love be love''

''Merciless criticism and independent thinking are the two necessary traits of revolutionary thinking.''New Delhi: The stage is set for Rajya Sabha polls on Friday for the remaining 25 seats in six states including Uttar Pradesh. The Narendra Modi-led BJP government at the Centre, currently has 58 members, four more than the Congress.

The BJP is virtually assured of eight of the ten seats amid suspense whether it can snatch an extra seat in the light of the newfound bonhomie between former arch rivals Samajwadi Party and BSP.

For the 58 Rajya Sabha seats to be filled, 33 candidates from 10 states were declared elected unopposed on March 15, 2018. Seven union ministers including Ravi Shankar Prasad and Prakash Javadekar were among them.

Besides UP where Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley is in the fray, West Bengal, Karnataka, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Telangana will also feature in the polls.

Counting of ballots will be taken up at 5 pm on Friday, an hour after the end of voting.

Uttar Pradesh:

Arithmetically, the ruling BJP can easily win eight out of the ten seats in Uttar Pradesh. The four-MLA strong Suheldev Bharatiya Samaj Party (SBSP), after being placated by BJP chief Amit Shah, and the Apna Dal (Sonelal) with nine MLAs have decided to vote for BJP nominees.

"We are standing with the BJP. We had held a meeting of our MLAs and it was decided that we will strongly support the BJP," national president of Apna Dal (S) Ashish Patel told PTI in Lucknow.

In all, there are eleven candidates in the fray for the ten seats. The BJP and its allies have 324 MLAs in the 403-member Assembly after the death of its Noorpur MLA in a road accident recently. To secure a win, a candidate needs 37 first preference votes. Arithmetically, the BJP can easily win eight of the ten seats and will be left with 28 surplus votes.

The SP and the BSP also appeared sure of win one seat each. The SP has fielded Jaya Bachchan and the BSP Bhimrao Ambedkar. With 19 MLAs, the BSP is short of 18 first preference votes and with Naresh Agarwal's son Nitin, who is still an SP MLA, likely to cross-vote for the BJP, the task will become difficult for the candidate of the Mayawati-led party. Naresh recently quit the SP and joined the BJP.

Riding on the new bonhomie with the SP, Mayawati is banking on the ten surplus votes of Akhilesh Yadav's party, besides seven votes of the Congress and one of RLD to reach the magic figure of 37 votes. However, Nitin can queer the BSPs pitch if he votes for the BJP.

The country's most populous state sends 31 MPs to the 245-member Rajya Sabha. Besides Jaitley, the others in the fray are from BJP are Ashok Bajpai, Vijay Pal Singh Tomar, Sakal Deep Rajbhar, Kanta Kardam, Anil Jain, Harnath Singh Yadav, GVL Narasimha Rao and Anil Kumar Agarwal.

Rajasthan:

The three BJP candidates in Rajasthan - Kirori Meena, Bhupender Yadav and Madan Lal Saini - were on March 15, 2018, elected unopposed as no other contestant had filed their nomination.

Meena had separated from the BJP in 2008 and had rejoined the party recently with his two National Peoples Party (NPP) MLAs. He, as the state president of the NPP, which he had joined in 2013, also merged his party with the BJP.

Opposition Congress had announced that it would not field candidates for the biennial Rajya Sabha polls and no other candidates filed nomination for the election.

The tenure of Yadav and two Congress MPs Abhishek Manu Singhvi and Narendra Budania ends on April 3.

Gujarat:

In Gujarat, four candidates - two each of the Congress and the BJP - have also been elected unopposed to the Rajya Sabha. Union ministers Purshottam Rupala and Mansukh Mandavia (BJP) and Naran Rathwa and Amee Yajnik (Congress) were declared elected unopposed by the election authorities after BJP's Kiritsinh Rana and Congress-backed Independent PK Valera backed off on the last day of withdrawal of nominations.

Maharashtra:

On the other hand, BJP's nominee for the Rajya Sabha polls in Maharashtra has withdrawn, clearing the way for the other six candidates, including Union Minister Prakash Javadekar, to be elected to the Upper House unopposed.

"Maharashtra State Commission for Women chairperson Vijaya Rahatkar has withdrawn from the fray," the state's Parliamentary Affairs Minister Girish Bapat had said on March 15, 2018.

With the BJP nominee withdrawing her papers, the election of the remaining six candidates is a mere formality now. For the six seats falling vacant, there are four candidates from BJP and one each from Congress, National Congress Party (NCP) and Shiv Sena.

"The BJP nominees include Javadekar, former Maharashtra chief minister Narayan Rane and former Kerala BJP president V Muraleedharan," Bapat had said. The list of candidates from other parties includes senior journalist Kumar Ketkar (Congress), Anil Desai (Shiv Sena) and Vandana Chavan (NCP).

Rane quit the Shiv Sena in 2005 and later joined the Congress. He ended his over a decade-long association with the party in September 2017, formed the Maharashtra Swabhiman Paksh and allied with the BJP-led NDA.

At present, the Opposition Congress and the NCP hold two seats each, while the Shiv Sena and the BJP have one seat each of these six seats. The BJP, with its tally of 122 in the Assembly, is poised to get three seats now, while the Sena, the Congress and the NCP will get one each.

Odisha:

All the three candidates of Odisha's ruling Biju Janata Dal (BJD) - Prashant Nanda, Soumya Ranjan Patnaik and Achyuta Samanta - were declared elected to the Rajya Sabha unopposed on March 15, 2018.

They will fill the seats in the Upper House of three members - AU Singh Deo, Dillip Tirkey and BJD supported Independent member AV Swami, whose term is scheduled to end on April 2, 2018.

Haryana, Andhra, Himachal, Madhya Pradesh:

Lt Gen (retired) DP Vats of BJP has already been elected unopposed from Haryana.

Ruling TDP's CM Ramesh, Kanakamedala Ravindra Kumar and YSRC's Vemireddy Prabhakar Reddy was also elected unopposed to the three seats of Andhra Pradesh on March 15, 2018.

In Madhya Pradesh, apart from union ministers Dharmendra Pradhan and Thawar Chand Gehlot, Ajay Pratap Singh and Kailash Soni of BJP and Rajmani Patel of Congress have too won without a contest.

Health Minister JP Nadda has been elected unopposed from Himachal Pradesh.

West Bengal, Karnataka, Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Telangana, Kerala:

Altogether six candidates, including Congress nominee Abhishek Manu Singhvi, are in the fray for the five Rajya Sabha seats from West Bengal. The state's ruling TMC has decided to back the eminent lawyer.

Five candidates are in the electoral arena in Karnataka for four seats. The state's ruling Congress has fielded three nominees, while there are one each of the BJP and JD(S).

Elections will also be held for two seats in Jharkhand where three candidates are in the fray, including two of the state's ruling BJP and one of the Congress.

One candidate each of the ruling BJP and main Opposition Congress will cross swords for the lone Rajya Sabha seat from Chhattisgarh.

Four candidates will try their luck from Telangana where polling will be held for three seats.

A bypoll will also be held for one seat in Kerala where Veerendra Kumar, the Left-backed candidate of Sharad Yadav faction of the JD(U), is pitted against Babu Prasad of the Congress.

(With PTI inputs)Pokhran: India on Thursday successfully flight-tested the supersonic cruise missile BrahMos from Rajasthan's Pokhran test range. The missile, which is the result of an Indo-Russia joint venture, can fly almost three times the speed of sound at Mach 2.8 and has a range of 290 km. The range of the BrahMos missile can be further extended up to 400 km as certain technical restrictions were lifted after India became a full member of the Missile Technology Control Regime or MTCR in 2016.

"Formidable Supersonic Cruise Missile #BrahMos was successfully flight tested at 8:42 AM today at Pokhran test range, Rajasthan. The precision strike weapon with Indian-made seeker flew in its designated trajectory and hit the target with pin-point accuracy," tweeted Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman.

Formidable Supersonic Cruise Missile #BrahMos was successfully flight tested at 8:42 AM today at Pokhran test range, Rajasthan.

The precision strike weapon with Indian-made seeker flew in its designated trajectory and hit the target with pin-point accuracy.@PIB_India @MIB_India  Raksha Mantri (@DefenceMinIndia) March 22, 2018

Efforts are on to integrate the BrahMos supersonic cruise missile on 40 Sukhoi combat aircraft which is expected to fulfill critical needs of the Indian Air Force in the wake of evolving security dynamics in the region. The supersonic cruise missile was last test-fired in November 2017 from the Indian Air Force's fighter, Sukhoi-30MKI.

BrahMos was also showcased at the Dubai Air Show last year where it generated a lot of buzz among the participating nations.

Some Quick Facts About BrahMos

BrahMos is a medium range ramjet supersonic cruise missile.

It can be launched from the land, air and the sea.

It is a joint venture between India's Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO) and Russian Federation's NPO Mashinostroeyenia.

The word BrahMos is a portmanteau of rivers Brahmaputra of India and the Moskva of Russia.

It boasts of a speed of Mach 2.8 to 3.0, making it the fastest anti-ship cruise missile in the world.

Its speed is now being upgraded to Mach 5.0

It was inducted into service in 2006 and is used by the Indian Army, Air Force and the Navy.

It weighs between 2,500 kg and 3,000 kg, has a length of about 8.4 meters with a warhead of about 200-300 kg.Geneva: The United States did not fully comply with a 2014 ruling against its anti-subsidy tariffs on a range of Chinese products, a World Trade Organization compliance panel said in a ruling on Wednesday that either side can appeal within 20 days.

China went to the WTO in 2012 to challenge US anti-subsidy tariffs on Chinese exports including solar panels, wind towers, steel cylinders and aluminium extrusions.

At the time it said its complaint covered an annual $7.3 billion in exports to the United States.

The WTO panel agreed that the United States had not correctly used third country prices to assess the subsidies, but supported the US assertion that exporters were getting subsidies from Chinese "public bodies", despite Beijing`s assertions to the contrary.

If China`s complaint survives a potential appeal, it would move a step closer to retaliatory sanctions on US trade, although the two sides would first have to settle on the value of sanctions, which would involve a round of legal argument.

The dispute centred on 17 investigations carried out by the US Department of Commerce between 2007 and 2012.

The products concerned were solar panels, wind towers, thermal and coated paper, tow-behind lawn groomers, kitchen shelving, steel sinks, citric acid, magnesia carbon bricks, pressure pipe, line pipe, seamless pipe, steel cylinders, drill pipe, oil country tubular goods, wire strand and aluminium extrusions.

Many of China`s complaints about specific investigations were rejected in the panel`s 119-page report, but other points were upheld.Srinagar: The Army on Thursday paid tributes to three jawans who laid down their lives during an encounter in Kupwara district of Jammu and Kashmir.

General Officer Commanding (GoC) of Chinar Corps Lt Gen AK Bhatt led all ranks in paying homage to the slain soldiers on behalf of the nation.

"Army paid befitting tributes to three of its comrades who attained martyrdom during counter-terrorist operations on Wednesday in Kupwara district in which five militants were eliminated," the official said, as per PTI.

Havildar Jorabar Singh, Naik Ranjeet Khalkho and Naik Mohammad Ashraf Rather sustained bullet injuries during the operation in Halmatpora area of Kupwara district.

The Army also tweeted:

General Bipin Rawat #COAS & All Ranks salute supreme sacrifice of Havildar Jorabar Singh, Naik Mohd Ashraf Rather and Naik Ranjit Khalkho & offer condolences to the families of the Bravehearts. #BraveSonsOfIndia pic.twitter.com/MMatfc5jFD  ADG PI - INDIAN ARMY (@adgpi) March 22, 2018

The mortal remains of the martyrs were flown for last rites to their native places.

Singh (45) had joined Army in 1993 and hailed from village Rait in Kangra area of Himachal Pradesh. He is survived by his wife and three children. Khalkho (33) hailed from village Dudhakhuti in Ranchi (Jharkhand) had joined Army in 2001. He is survived by his parents, a brother and three sisters.

Rather (35) had joined the Army in 2004 and belonged to village Reshigund of Kralpora in J&K. He is survived by his wife and a daughter.

The nearly 48-hour gunbattle in the dense Kupwara forest in north Kashmir had ended on Wednesday night, with five security personnel, including three Army jawans and two policemen, martyred and an equal number of militants killed.

The encounter had broken out in the Halmatpora area, at least 8 kms from the Line of Control (LoC), after a police party intercepted a group of militants.

A joint team of the Kupwara police along with companies of the Army, the Territorial Army (TA) and the CRPF were part of the operations.

(With Agency inputs)Jammu: A massive search and combing operation is currently underway in Jammu and Kashmir's Kupwara district where five hardcore terrorists and an equal number of security personnel were killed after a 48-hour long gunbattle.

According to reports, the security forces are believed to be carrying out a massive door-to-door search in suspicion of more terrorists possibly hiding in the area.

The entire area surrounding the encounter site has been cordoned off after intelligence agencies warned of the possibility of more terrorists hiding in the dense forest area and waiting to strike at the opportune moment.

Authorities have also rushed additional reinforcements to the forest area to take on militants.

The gunfight broke out on Tuesday inside Halmatpora forest area of Kupwara, about 110 km from Srinagar city.

The gunbattle left five security personnel, including three Army jawans and two policemen, dead and five terrorists killed.

Giving details of the incident, a police spokesman later said that the encounter broke out in the Halmatpora area, at least 8 kms from the Line of Control (LoC), after a police party intercepted a group of terrorists.

A joint team of the Kupwara police along with companies of the Army, the Territorial Army (TA) and the CRPF were engaged in the operations which began last morning.

The encounter has brought to light gaps in the Army's vigil along the LoC as the group of terrorists had managed to sneak in nearly 8-kms after crossing two ridges of the Shamsabari mountain range.

The terrorists had met their "reception party" (overground workers and militants already present in the Kashmir Valley) after crossing the LoC and were proceeding towards Kupwara town when they were spotted by police personnel, officials said.

The police spokesman said in the encounter, five terrorists were neutralised and added that all are believed to be foreign terrorists and part of a group that had freshly infiltrated the LoC.

In the encounter, two policemen Deepak Thusoo and SPO Mohd Yousuf, two army personnel Sepoy Ashraf Rather of 160 TA and Naik Ranjeet Kholka of 5 Bihar lost their lives, the spokesman said.

Jammu and Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti later paid tributes to the security forces' personnel killed in the encounter.BENGALURU: War of words between the ruling Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is heating up ahead of the closely-watched assembly elections in Karnataka. In an all-out attack on the BJP, Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah on Thursday called the opposition party 'spineless' while the BJP hit back questioning the comprehension capabilities of the CM and Congress President Rahul Gandhi.

The Twitter war began after Rahul Gandhi on March 20 blamed Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government for writing off loans of noted businessmen but not doing anything for farmers. "In last few years, BJP government waived off loans of 2.5 lakh crore of 15 richest people. When farmers talk of loan waiver, PM Modi and Finance Minister Arun Jaitley say it isn't their policy. Siddharamaih ji and Congress government in Karnataka waived off loans of Rs 8,000 crore of farmers of Karnataka," Rahul had said while addressing a rally in Karnataka.

Hitting back at Rahul, the Karnataka BJP went on the front foot claiming that the 'lies' of the grand old party had been detected. "Banks have not waived off corporate loans, they have written off, meaning they will recover it. From someone who doesn't understand difference b/w bhrastachaar & balatkaar, it is unfair to expect understanding of difference between loan waiver & loan write off," the BJP tweeted.

#LieDetected Banks have not waived off corporate loans, they have written off, meaning they will recover it. From someone who doesn't understand difference b/w bhrastachaar & balatkaar, it is unfair to expect understanding of difference between loan waiver & loan write off. https://t.co/wkDTsvisTF  BJP Karnataka (@BJP4Karnataka) March 20, 2018

Taking the fight head-on, CM Siddaramaiah responded to the BJP saying it was good that the party accepted that the loans had been written off. "Good! At least you admit the loans of large industrialists have been written off. Now, please join us in requesting PM @narendramodi to write off the loans of our farmers if they cant be waived. Please show that yours is not a #suitbootkisarkar," he said.

Good! At least you admit the loans of large industrialists have been written off. Now, please join us in requesting PM @narendramodi to write off the loans of our farmers if they cant be waived. Please show that yours is not a #suitbootkisarkar https://t.co/tVl8gBW1a1  Siddaramaiah (@siddaramaiah) March 20, 2018

The BJP too also seemed in no mood to hold it itself back and passed a snide remark on the Congress President. "Looks like Rahul isn't only one who doesn't get difference b/w write off & loan waiver! CM is asking to fool farmers by writing off loans but continue recovery! Fooling is your dept, Sir! Only a lapsed socialist will wear a Rs 70 lakh Hublot watch & accuse others of #SuitBoot!," the Karnataka BJP tweeted.

But even after the attack and counter-attack, the war did not end. Two days later, on Thursday, Siddaramaiah again took up the battle calling the BJP spineless and lashed out at them for giving accountancy lessons on Twitter. "The Karnataka BJP is so spineless that instead of asking the center to waive farmers loans it is giving accountancy lessons on Twitter. People will not be fooled. Center can write off lakhs of crores of a few industrialists but cant give debt relief to crores of farmers," Siddaramaiah said.

Soon after, the BJP responded by targetted the Congress leaders again for not being able to understand accountancy terms. "Yes, we were wrong in teaching accountancy. We realise it is beyond you and your boss's comprehension levels! Talking about spine, UP & MH CM's exhibited their spine by waiving farm loans without centre's help. If you have one, why don't follow suit & waive farm loans yourself?," the BJP tweeted.

Yes, we were wrong in teaching accountacy. We realise it is beyond you and your boss's comprehension levels! Talking about spine, UP & MH CM's exhibited their spine by waiving farm loans without centre's help. If you have one, why don't follow suit & waive farm loans yourself? https://t.co/58U47P1qcW  BJP Karnataka (@BJP4Karnataka) March 22, 2018

As the election season comes close, this war of words is certain to intensify. The current tenure of the Karnataka assembly will end on May 28, 2018. The Election Commission of India (ECI) is likely to visit Karnataka in the first week of April 2018 and declare the election dates in mid April.NEW DELHI: The Union Cabinet chaired by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday approved in principle, the inclusion of the communities 'Parivara' and 'Talawara' as synonym of 'Nayaka' in the list of Scheduled Tribes of Karnataka.

The decision is in line with the long-term demand of 'Parivara' and 'Talawara' communities for granting Scheduled Tribes status in Karnataka. When the decision comes in force, the persons belonging to 'Parivara' and 'Talawara' communities will be eligible to get the Scheduled Tribe certificate from Karnataka and will also be eligible for all benefits meant for the Scheduled Tribes in the state.

The Karnataka government had recommended for inclusion of these two communities as synonyms of 'Nayaka' in the list of STs of Karnataka. "This will fulfil the demand of 'Parivara' and 'Talawara' communities for granting Scheduled Tribes status in Karnataka," said an official statement, adding that members of these communities will now be eligible to get the ST certificate from the state.

The first specification of Scheduled Tribes in relation to a particular State or Union territory is by a notified Order of the President, after consultation with the concerned state government or Union Territory. Any subsequent inclusion in or exclusion from and other modifications in the list of Scheduled Tribes can be made only through an amending Act of Parliament.

The decision comes ahead of the Karnataka elections that are due in 2018. The current tenure of the Karnataka assembly will end on May 28, 2018. The Election Commission of India (ECI) is likely to visit Karnataka in the first week of April 2018 and declare the election dates in mid April.MUMBAI: Senior BJP leader and former Maharashtra minister Eknath Khadse on Thursday demanded an inquiry into the way a contract to kill rats in Mantralaya (the state secretariat) was executed. How could the company which was given the contract to kill 3,19,400 rats in Mantralaya accomplish the task in a mere seven days, he asked, speaking in the Legislative Assembly.

The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) had taken two years to kill six lakh rats in the city, he said during a discussion on Budgetary demands. "A survey found that there were 3,19,400 rats in Mantralaya. A work order was issued by the General Administration Department. The company was given six months. But it claimed to have killed them in just seven days," Khadse said.

"It means it killed 45,628.57 rats a day. Those 0.57 must be the new-born ones," he said, evoking laughter in the House. "It also means the company killed 31.68 rats every minute. Their weight was around 9,125.71 kg and every day one truck was required to take dead rats out of Mantralaya. But it is not known where they were disposed of," he said.

The government could have deployed ten cats to do the job instead of hiring a private firm, the former revenue minister said in a lighter vein. Dharma Patil, a farmer who committed suicide in February, consumed poison from the stock kept by the company on the premises of Mantralaya, he alleged.

Patil, alleging injustice in award of compensation for land acquisition, consumed poison at Mantralaya and died a few days later. "There is no information on whether the company had the permission to use the poison. Also, was it permitted to keep the poison stock in Mantralaya?" Khadse asked.

"It is very surprising that this company killed over three lakh rats in just seven days while the BMC took two years to kill six lakh rats. There is a discrepancy in the claim made by the company," he said, demanding an inquiry.NEW DELHI: The family of 15-year-old student who committed suicide, allegedly due to sexual harassment by school teachers, on Thursday blocked the Delhi-Noida road for hours. The family is demanding a Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) inquiry into their daughter's death.

"No arrests have been made yet. Do they think my daughter lied about harassment by teachers? Is the Police under pressure or did they take bribes? I want justice and a CBI probe," said father of the deceased.

The teenage girl, who reportedly failed in her Class 9 examinations, committed suicide by hanging herself at her residence in Noida on Tuesday. The deceased's father alleged that the girl had earlier accused her teacher of sexually harassing her.

The principal of the Delhi school however defended the teachers saying: "One of the teachers against whom allegations are being made is a woman. How can she sexually harass someone? The other teacher has been here for 25 years and we never got any such complaint."

The principal also claimed that her guardians did not attend her parent-teacher meetings. "If I see her record she was an average student, not very good at studies but a great dancer. Students' marks are given at PTMs but her parents didn't attend any. She didn't fail, had to give re-test," he said adding that the school mourns her death.

Noida Police has filed an FIR against two teachers and principal for allegedly abetting suicide. It has been alleged in the FIR that the girl was disturbed because of alleged sexual advances by one of the teachers.

The 15-year-old student, who committed suicide on Tuesday, was a resident of Sector 52 in Noida. Her family has alleged that one of the teachers of the school had tried to abuse her sexually and had even threatened to fail her in the examination.

"She told me her SST teachers touch her inappropriately. I said since I'm also a teacher I can say they can't do it, might be a mistake but she said she is scared of them, no matter how well she writes they'll fail her. Ultimately they failed her in SST. The school killed her," said her father.

While the family members of the girl along with some people staged a protest outside the school and blocked NH-24, several people took to Twitter to share pictures of the traffic condition.

Parents of the 9th class student who committed suicide protesting on noida-Delhi Link Road amidst massive traffic. This is what people have to do for justice in this country? #noidastudentsuicide pic.twitter.com/mcmjGIOeDJ  Milan Sharma (@pretasorter) March 22, 2018

Noida suicide case: Parents block main road near school in Mayur Vihar all traffic diverted to bylanes. They want arrest of the accused and the SP to talk to them @TOIDelhi pic.twitter.com/FP4HX1Sdi5  Krittika Sharma (@Krittika_TOI) March 22, 2018

Thanks, traffic is heavy due to demonstration. traffic staff is present and regulating the traffic.  Delhi Traffic Police (@dtptraffic) March 22, 2018

Examination results of the school were declared on March 16 where she reportedly failed to pass two of the subjects. She was found hanging from a railing, following which she was rushed to Kailash hospital in Noida. A doctor, who attended to her, said that her pulse and blood pressure were unrecordable when she was brought to the hospital. "We tried to revive her but could not. The cause of the death can be known after post-mortem," she said.New Delhi: Alia Bhatt, who was filming 'Brahmastra' in Bulgaria with Ranbir Kapoor, had injured her shoulder while shooting and her arm has been put in a sling. However, despite her injury, she insisted on continuing her shoot.

On Thursday, her mother and actress-filmmaker Soni Razdan told the Asian Age that the 25-year-old actress has damaged her ligament. "She has injured her shoulder in an action sequence in Bulgaria. Alia being Alia is taking it on the chin or on the shoulder as it were in this case. The early reports suggest some ligament damage and a haematoma, so she must rest the shoulder for some time now and not do any more action. Apart from this, she is her usual smiling self," Razdan said.

As per a report, the injury means that Alia will have to stay away from doing action sequence for next two years. It's been a while since Alia and Ranbir Kapoor have been working on Brahmastra in Bulgaria. The duo has been preparing for high-octane action sequences for the film.

This was the first schedule of Brahmastra and the team was supposed to wrap up the shoot and return to India by the end of this month.

'Brahmastra' is being directed by Ayan Mukerji and co-stars Amitabh Bachchan and Mouni Roy. Produced by Karan Johar's Dharma Productions, the film is scheduled to release on August 15.

Apart from 'Brahmastra', Alia's upcoming releases include Meghna Gulzar's 'Raazi' in which she is paired opposite Vicky Kaushal and Zoya Akhtar's 'Gully Boy' with Ranveer Singh.Ludhiana: The family of Sukhdev Thapar have demanded that he along with other revolutionaries Bhagat Singh and Rajguru should be given the status of martyrs. They on Thursday that the trio gave their lives for the country, but still even after 70 years of Independence, they have not been given the status of martyrs.

The family of Sukhdev has warned that if the three freedom fighters are given their due then they will go on a hunger strike.

A relative of Sukhdev said, "Our demand is that they should be given the status of martyrs. We are going to Delhi on Friday. We will place our demands there. If our demands are not met then we will go on hunger strike."

Ludhiana: Family members of Sukhdev Thapar demand martyr status for Sukhdev, Bhagat Singh and Rajguru, say,'they gave up their lives for the country. It has been around 70 years since independence, but they have not been given the status of martyr.' #Punjab pic.twitter.com/iudWKsIdJA  ANI (@ANI) March 22, 2018

We are going to Delhi tomorrow and will do a indefinite hunger strike till the three of them don't get status of martyr. Family members of Bhagat Singh will also attend hunger strike: Ashok Thapar, relative of Sukhdev Thapar #Ludhiana pic.twitter.com/OwelWsBbPY  ANI (@ANI) March 22, 2018

Sukhdev was a senior member of Hindustan Socialist Republican Association. He was hanged on 23 March 1931 at the age of 23.

Shivaram Hari Rajguru was from Maharashtra. He along with Bhagat Singh and Sukhdev, was hanged for the 'assassination' of a British police officer, JP Saunders in Lahore in 1928. In his honour, his birthplace of Khed has since been renamed as Rajgurunagar.

Bhagat Singh acts of bravery against the British made him a hero of the Independence movement. He was executed at age 23.New Delhi: Indian realty sector saw fewer launches, subdued sales and muted property prices in the year 2017. With an annual decline of almost 50 percent in new launches and 15 percent decline in sales across top seven cities in India, the sector was effectively shattered in 2017, said an ANAROCK Property Consultants report.

The top seven cities recorded new unit launches of around 1.26 lakh in 2017 as opposed to 2.50 lakh in 2016. MMR (Mumbai Metropolitan Region) contributed the maximum fresh apartments supply with 38 percent (48,400 units), NCR's contribution was 18 percent with 22,200 units, Bengaluru's contribution was 13 percent with 16,000 units, Pune's contribution was 11 percent with 13,800 units.

Chennai's residential real estate market was the worst-affected in 2017, with an annual decline in new launches of around 72 percent from 15,700 units in 2016 to 4,400 units in 2017.

Pune, Bengaluru and Hyderabad recorded an annual decline of 67 percent, 64 percent and 57 percent respectively in new launch units. NCR and MMR recorded a drop of 45 percent and 33 percent, respectively.

A series of highly disruptive reforms, coupled with mounting unsold inventory and stringent RERA norms, kept developers on the back foot in 2017, the report said.

Restricted new launches in 2017 resulted in a significant reduction of unsold inventory levels across the top seven cities. Overall unsold inventory decreased by 10 percent from 8.04 lakh units in Q4 2016 to 7.27 lakh units by Q4 2017.

Chennai recorded the highest dip in sales at 26 percent - from 17,800 units in 2016 to 13,200 units in 2017 while Bengaluru saw the lowest dip in sales at 2 percent - from 43,300 units in 2016 to 42,300 units in 2017; MMR sales dipped by 24 percent - from 69,600 units in 2016 to 52,600 units in 2017; Kolkata's sales dipped by 23 percent - from 16,800 units in 2016 to 12,900 units in 2017; NCR's sales dipped by 22 percent - from 47,900 units in 2016 to 37,700 units in 2017; Pune's sales dipped by 6 percent - from 31,200 units in 2016 to 29,400 units in 2017.

Prices across the top seven cities remained largely range-bound in 2017, primarily due to the presence of significant unsold stock and cautious buyer sentiments. In 2017, the market clearly made a shift towards the affordable housing segment, with 44 percent of unit launches (55,000 units) coming in with price tags under Rs 40 lakh. This is a major shift in the Indian real estate sector and developers are now visibly aligning their supply with the budget ranges dictated by demand, so as to avoid any mismatch, the report said.

Anuj Puri, Chairman, ANAROCK Property Consultants said, "With only end-users left to drive the market and investors more or less evaporating completely, developers throttled back severely on new launches to allow the market more scope to absorb the already staggering unsold inventory."New Delhi: One of the much awaited Telugu films 'Chal Mohana Ranga' is all set to enthral the viewers on April 5, 2018. The movie features Nithiin in the lead with Megha Akash as the leading lady.

'Chal Mohana Ranga' is produced by none other than Telugu superstar and politician Pawan Kalyan and he is likely to attend the grand pre-release event of the film to be held on March 25.

The official Twitter handle of the movie as well as Nithiin shared the news with Pawan Kalyan fans.

#ChalMohanRangaPreRelease on March 25th. Chief guest is none other than Powerstar @PawanKalyan garu. Are you ready guys?

#ChalMohanRangaPreRelease on March 25th. Chief guest is none other than Powerstar @PawanKalyan garu. Are you ready guys? https://t.co/7MXXDqa56n  Chal Mohan Ranga (@CMRTheFilm) March 22, 2018

All set for a Grand Pre Release event of #ChalMohanaRanga on the 25th of this month..and my Producer and our POWER STAR wil b the Chief Guest for the function!! Exciteddd!! Other details soonn!!

All set for a Grand Pre Release event of #ChalMohanaRanga on the 25th of this month..and my Producer and our POWER STAR wil b the Chief Guest for the function!! Exciteddd!! Other details soonn!!  nithiin (@actor_nithiin) March 22, 2018

The huge star cum politician will be the chief guest of the event. Earlier, the title of the film was unveiled by Kalyan and it received a huge response online. The romantic drama is jointly produced by the Nithiin's father and leading Telugu producer, Sudhakar Reddy, Pawan Kalyan and noted director Trivikram.

'Chal Mohana Ranga' is helmed by Krishna Chaitanya.Coimbatore: The toll in the devastating fire at Kurangani forests in Theni district rose to 18 with the death of a woman at a hospital here today, police said. The 32-year-old woman, identified as Jayashree, a resident of Chennai, was airlifted from Madurai and admitted to the private hospital here on March 12.

Jayashree was brought to the hospital with more than 60 per cent burns. She died today without responding to treatment, hospital sources said.

A total of 39 persons - 12 from Erode and Tirupur and 27 from Chennai had embarked on a trip on March 10. Three among the Chennai group went to Kerala and the rest proceeded for trekking. Of the 36 people caught in the forest fire, 18 died, 10 were rescued without any injuries and the rest are undergoing treatment.

On March 19, Chief Minister K Palaniswami told the state Assembly that a forester was suspended and a case registered against a local man, G Ranjithkumar, for leading the trekkers through the reserve forest.

For violations, police were taking action against Chennai Trekking Club and Erode based Tour de India, he had said. The Tamil Nadu government has also appointed top official, Atulya Misra, as Inquiry

Officer to probe into the circumstances leading to the death of the trekkers in Kurangani hills and submit a report on the incident within two months.

New Delhi: Reliance JioPhones, which run on KaiOS, a Linux-based light mobile Operating System (OS), may soon get WhatsApp.

According to Wabetainfo.com, a fan site that tests new WhatsApp features early, as of February 2018 KaiOS Technologies have acquired many new partners, including Facebook that also owns the popular messaging platform.

"After stopping support for BlackBerry OS and Windows Phone 8, the Facebook-owned messaging platform is focusing to develop the app for this platform, providing an app for JioPhones," the website said late on Wednesday.

"We remember WhatsApp will stop to support Nokia S40 on next December 31, leaving the Symbian platform, but KaiOS will be supported instead," the website added.

KaiOS combines the powerful capabilities of a smartphone with the affordability of a basic handset.

"The highly-coveted social media app has made its way to KaiOS-powered feature phones. This partnership supports access to Facebook via a native KaiOS app, thus allowing more users to connect with their friends and families," KaiOS wrote in a blog post last month.

The OS originates from the Firefox OS open-source project started in 2011 and has continued independently from Mozilla since 2016. KaiOS was first launched publicly in the US market in 2017.

The mobile OS supports 4G/LTE, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS and is compatible with chipsets from major manufacturers.New Delhi: One of the most popular shows on Indian television 'Tu Aashiqui' has hogged the limelight but unfortunately not for good reasons. The show was in news lately for a kissing scene between the 16-year-old lead actress Jannat Zubair and her co-star.

The teenage actor's parents had expressed their displeasure over the scene. Now, after a lot of hullaballoo, Jannat has finally spoken about the issue. There are rumours of her being replaced on the show as well.

Pinkvilla.com quoted Jannat telling a leading daily that even she would not be comfortable doing such a scene. She said, I understand that a leading lady is expected to do certain things, but I am just 16. I cant do what a 25-year-old would. A kiss on the hand or forehead is fine, but what I was asked to do was out of place. It was an intense kiss and I wouldnt have been comfortable doing it. I have many teenagers following me on social media and if I agree to do something like this, it would set a wrong example. There is an appropriate age for everything and even then, the actress should be given the option of choosing to do a particular scene.

She added, Most parents dont speak against the makers, fearing that their child would be replaced on the show, but not mine. I felt very proud when my mother took a stand for me and told the makers that I wont do the scene. Also, its not that we raised the concern midway. We had clearly mentioned right at the beginning that I wouldnt do scenes that didnt suit my age. I was clear that Id rather quit the show than perform intimate scenes with my co-actor.

'Tu Aashiqui' is a romantic drama produced by Mahesh Bhatt under Gurudev Bhalla production house.Mumbai: Actress Ileana D'Cruz has been appointed Tourism Fiji's brand ambassador for the India market. She says the warmth and hospitality there makes her feel like it's "home".

Following a successful campaign with Ileana in 2017, Tourism Fiji witnessed a spike in interest from Indian travellers for the destination. Now aims to showcase more of its unique offerings to potential travellers from India through more engagements with Ileana.

The actress, known for films like "Barfi!", "Rustom" and the latest "Raid", will be travelling to Fiji to experience a wide range of activities next month.

"I'm so happy to be associated with a beautiful country like Fiji. The warmth, hospitality, and love the Fijian people have shown me make me feel like I'm home. I cannot wait to go back and explore more of this lovely paradise," Ileana said in a statement.

Fiji has been receiving steady positive growth in visitor arrival numbers from India over the past five years. For the year ending December 2017, Fiji saw 30 per cent increase in arrivals from India as compared to 2016.

Fijian Minister for Industry, Trade, Tourism, Lands and Mineral Resources Faiyaz Siddiq Koya said: "Fiji and India share an age-old connection with over 40 per cent of Fiji's population being of Indian origin.

"We celebrate Indian festivals such as Diwali and Ganesh Chaturthi in Fiji too. Now tourism is fast becoming a key point of connection for both countries. With Ileana D'Cruz as our brand ambassador, we hope to get more Indians to come and experience the diverse and refreshing culture of our island country."

The destination is known for its water-based activities, adrenaline pumping experiences and cultural offerings.Lucknow: Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath on Thursday indicated that his government may bring in a quota for the most backward sections to ensure their upliftment.

"If the need arises we will provide reservations to the most backwards and the most backward among Dalits," he said in the Assembly. The CM was responding the concerns raised by the members during a discussion in the state Assembly.

He was intervening in the discussion on the general budget in the state Assembly.

Yogi also asserted that the provisions related to reservations were not being done away with. He maintained that all Dalits and poor, who have been deprived of development, will be taken care of by the government as they needed to be brought into the mainstream.

"We will provide jobs without discrimination. Earlier there used to be deals. Could anyone imagine that Rs 40 lakh to Rs 60 lakh will be taken for recruitment in UPPSC jobs? Let the inquiry report come, those found responsible for it will go to jail and their properties will be attached," he said.

"It is our endeavour that this month itself we will implement proposals worth Rs 25,000 crore and this task will be taken ahead next month. In three years, direct employment will reach 20 lakh youth and if all the proposals that have come our way are taken up they will give employment to 35 lakh youth," Yogi added.

At the same time, he lashed out at the previous government for "various shortcomings" leading to stalling of recruitment with courts intervening. Yogi said that unlike the earlier times, employment was now being given only on the basis of merit.

The CM, who rebutted the Opposition charge that nothing was done in the one year of the BJP government, said besides launching its own schemes his government also worked in close coordination with the Centre to ensure that benefits of development reached the last man on the social ladder.

Yogi attacked the previous government in the state claiming they patted their backs for half-completed projects. He pointed out that sugar mills were being opened by his government in Pipraich and Munderwa. A 'school chalo abhiyan' is being launched from April 2, 2018, and no child should be deprived of going to school, he said.

(With Agency inputs)Kolkata: West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has retracted from her earlier statement that no organisation will be allowed to flash arms during the Ram Navami processions across the state.

Clarifying on the issue, the Trinamool Congress chief said that ''only organisations that carry out traditional processions with arms for the last 10-12 years will be allowed.''

"I know that there are only a couple of organisations in Howrah and Asansol which traditionally hold Ram Navami processions with arms. Those who have been celebrating Ram Navami for more than a decade will be given special permission to hold processions with arms," the Chief Minister said.

"Do not allow anybody who is trying to hold such processions for the first time. We are not against organisations holding Ram Navami processions but they have to be peaceful," she said.

Banerjee asked Director General of Police Surajit Kar Purkayastha to be on alert and encourage locals, including civic volunteers, clubs and NGOs, as well as the youth to get information on anybody trying to disrupt peace during the celebrations by spreading canards or committing mischief.

"Hooliganism will not be allowed. Take strong immediate action against those trying to disrupt peace. Be it anybody, do not spare them. Do not compromise," the chief minister added.

Urging the media to cooperate with the administration by providing information about anyone trying to disturb peace during the celebrations, Banerjee said those who gave correct information about communal incidents should be awarded.

The firebrand TMC leader made these remarks at a district review meeting in Bolpur on Wednesday.



The West Bengal government had earlier issued an advisory that no one will be allowed to display arms during religious processions.

Banerjee also directed the police not to permit any organisation to hold processions displaying arms during Ram Navami on Sunday.

However, West Bengal BJP said that they will continue displaying arms at Ram Navami processions.

BJP Bengal president Dilip Ghosh said that display of arms during Ram Navami is a part of our culture.

''We are going to do what we do, it is for the state to maintain the law and order. As far as the practice of display of arms is concerned, we have been doing this ages. No one can stop us from taking out processions,'' Ghosh said.

(With PTI inputs)New Delhi: For residents of Longyearbyen, capital of the remote Norwegian island of Svalbard, it is illegal to die.

According to a report in the Express, people are not allowed to die in this town because of the extremely cold weather in the region and dead bodies are unable to decompose.

Longyearbyen is located at one of the most northern parts of the world that are inhabited by 2,000 locals and sees no sunlight for months of the year.

As per the report, the bizarre law came into place in 1950 after it was found that buried bodies were not rotting.

Temperatures in the town can be as low as minus 46.3 degrees and can go up to minus 17 degrees.

It is reported that any disease that the deceased person has, can spread in this town. The graveyard in the town also holds a number of victims from 1918, who were killed by the Spanish flu. As per a report, over 100 million people were killed by the flu worldwide.

In this town, if anyone is close to death, then they will be sent to another place to die.

Death is not the only problem the local residents have to go through on this island.

Even expectant mothers cannot give birth here because there is no hospital. So weeks before their due date they have to fly to the mainland, only returning to their homes weeks after their baby is born.China has announced a new set of penalties for those who are caught smoking on high-speed trains. New regulations will allow authorities to ban the violator for a period of six months. Further, the full list of those banned from the trains will be published on online ticket booking sites, the government has said.

The new penalties were published in a document jointly issued by China's National Development and Reform Commission, the Supreme People's Court and other government departments.

The new rules will come into effect from May, and will apply to high-speed trains and to non-smoking areas of other trains. Once banned, the person would not be allowed to purchase tickets. If a banned person is caught travelling on with tickets bought using fake IDs or in someone else's name, they would be blocked from buying tickets till they pay a fine.

The 180-day ban has also been put in place for 'troublemakers, producers and sellers of counterfeit tickets and those endangering railway transport safety', Chinese newspaper reports said. If a person is caught thrice within a year for any of these offences, their ban will be extended by a further 90 days.

The government also announced that it would publish a roster of banned individuals on ticket booking websites like 12306.cn and on credit rating checking websites like creditchina.gov.cn at the beginning of every month. Those who find their names on the list would be able to appeal against their inclusion.

Getting banned from trains can be a serious problem in China. The country has spent vast sums of money building high-speed train routes, which have become critical to daily commutes.

Trains are also the most cost-effective and widely available mode of transport for people to reach their hometowns. They usually run well over capacity during Chinese holidays.BEIJING: China has brought its frontier troops, including those guarding its border with India, directly under the military command removing civilian control over them, a state-run daily reported on Thursday.

Communist Party of China (CPC), headed by President Xi Jinping, announced the complete withdrawal of civilian-oriented frontier defence troops from the People's Armed Police (PAP) to enhance the ruling party's management of the country's armed forces, Global Times reported.

Troops that were formerly part of the armed police and managed by institutes of the State Council have now officially withdrawn from this system in a bid to fully implement the party's absolute leadership over the People's Liberation Army, and other national armed forces, the daily said quoting an article published by the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA)'s official WeChat public account on Wednesday.

The withdrawal of armed police force units engaged in civilian affairs would disentangle the previous complicated chain of command, Chinese military analysts said. This will also mean that the border troops including those posted along the 3,488-km long Line of Actual Control (LAC) would be brought directly under the PLA which functions under Central Military Commission (CMC) headed by Xi.

Xi was re-elected last week for the second five-year term as the president and the chairman of the CMC by China's rubber stamp parliament National People's Congress (NPC), days after it removed the two-term limit for president, paving the way for his continuation in power perhaps for life.

Xi heads the CPC, the military besides the presidency, making him the most powerful leader after party founder Mao Zedong.

Last December, the CPC removed the civilian control over PAP all over the country and brought it directly under the control of the CMC headed by Xi. The 1.5 million-strong paramilitary police force previously was under a dual command structure of the CMC and the State Council or cabinet through the Ministry of Public Security.

It served as a backup for the military in times of war and domestically has a role in putting down protests and counterterrorism as well as border defence and firefighting, the Hong Kong based South China Morning Post reported earlier.

The latest orders included integrating China's Coast Guard whose ships often sail close to the disputed islands with Japan in the East China Sea, into the CMC chain of command. The Coast Guard earlier functioned under the leadership of State Oceanic Administration and it now start to serve their duties as armed police forces.

Armed police forces that previously answered to civil-related duties including gold, forestry and hydropower troops have been transferred to State institutions accordingly while no longer part of army service, the Global Times report said.

Li Daguang, a professor at the National Defence University in Beijing defended the CPC's controls over police saying such reforms are being carried out alongside ongoing reforms of the party, state institutions and the military.

Such reforms could significantly correct misnaming errors and stressed the absolute leadership of the party over its armed forces including the armed police, Li said. Since he took over power in 2013, Xi has been stressing absolute leadership of the party over military and all other organs power in China.In a rare declassification of sensitive arms trade information, China has revealed that it has sold an advanced missile tracking system to Pakistan at a time when Islamabad is looking to actively develop its military arsenal.

That China is helping Pakistan militarily has long been suspected by the international community. The sale of the missile tracking system, still, comes as solid evidence about how Beijing is trying to prop up Islamabad in a possible bid to eventually tilt South Asia's balance of power. This sale, in particular, has significant security implications in the region as the unprecedented deal helps Pakistan gain a valuable tracking and measurement system. According to a report in the South China Morning Post, Pakistan has already deployed the system "at a firing range, for use in testing and developing its new missiles.

What is the advanced missile system all about?

* The system is crucial for missile testing and has high-performance telescopes with laser ranger, cameras,infrared detector and centralised computer system.

* It is capable of recording HD images of a missiles' trajectory - from being launched to all the way when the warheads are deployed.

* It claims to provide cutting-edge visual information about a missile's flight path - helping in development and application.

While details about how much Pakistan paid China to get the system has not been revealed, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has said that China is the first country to provide Pakistan with such a sensitive military equipment. This also comes just two months after India test fired Agni-V ICBM that has a range of 5,00kilometresrs - capable of targeting Beijing and Shanghai. The information about the deal also comes on a day when India test-fired its supersonic cruise missile BrahMos from Rajasthan's Pokhran test range.

Security experts and analysts mostly agree that while India is far ahead of Pakistan in terms of long-distance ICBMs and supersonic cruise missiles, Pakistan is looking at developing multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles (MIRVs) which are capable of carrying several nuclear warheads with different targets.In a major blow to China's soft power projection bids, a law has been introduced in the US Congress to make it necessary for Confucius Institutes to register as foreign agents in the US. Doing this would mean China would have to acknowledge that the institutes, portrayed by the Chinese government as Chinese language schools and cultural centres, are its propaganda arms.

The law was introduced in the US Congress by three Republican lawmakers - Senators Marco Rubio and Tom Cotton, and Representative Joe Wilson. Called the 'Foreign Influence Transparency Act' it would make it mandatory for Confucius Institutes to register under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) as an agents representing the interests of a foreign country in a 'political or quasi-political' capacity.

China had set up hundreds of Confucius Institutes from 2004 around the world to fill its long-standing desire to enjoy soft power, or benign cultural influence and trust. They have been set up as institutes under various universities across the world, with around a 100 of them in the US.

Confucius Institutes portray themselves as Chinese language schools and cultural exchange centres. The aim was to give China its much-desired soft power push. They were supposed to function on the lines of the German Goethe Institut, French Alliance Francaise and the Spanish Instituto Cervantes.

But, they have been accused of spying and spreading propaganda in multiple countries. They have also been accused of keeping tabs on Chinese students studying abroad in those universities.

Confucius Institutes maybe considered failures at achieving their soft power goals, as demonstrated by the fact that the Chinese government is pulling the veil off and publicly reorienting them to serve China's diplomatic goals.

"China has developed plans to reform the Confucius Institute system to make the language and cultural teaching facility better serve Chinese diplomacy," an article in a Chinese government-run newspaper had said. The 'reform' of the Confucius Institute is required "to turn it into a significant force for the cultural and educational exchange between China and other countries," the newspaper added.The China Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) and China's ever-increasing presence seem to be putting some Western off from making investments in Pakistan, news agency Reuters has reported. A top government official has scrambled to assure Western investors that Pakistan would not give any sort of preferential treatment or concessions.

Naeem Zamindar, the chairman of Pakistan's Board of Investment (BOI), said his government expects Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) to jump about 60 percent. But persistent failure to deal with home-grown extremism, the souring of ties with the US and the rising hand of China could dampen the FDI projection.

Zamindar told Reuters in an interview that some Western investors appeared non-committal about making investments in Pakistan. He said they could be reluctant over concerns that they would not be given a level playing field. This would stem from the expectation that Pakistan would continue expanding the concessions it gives to the Chinese.

"A perception was created that the Chinese are taking over. The fact of the matter is that this is not true." Zamindar said. "Pakistan's government is very clear about it: we want investors of all hues to come in and participate in building this economy - whether American, English or Japanese," he added.

He assured that Chinese companies would not be given preferential treatment in the second part of CPEC, which entails the setting up of a number of SEZs along the CPEC route. "That is completely non-discriminatory," he said, adding that Pakistani law does not allow for any country or company will get preferential treatment within SEZs.

However, as major Pakistani news outlets had reported on Wednesday, the Chinese may not even bother to set up factories in these SEZs. Pakistan lifted import tariffs on about 6000 items, which would make it cheaper for Chinese companies to manufacture at home and import into Pakistan.

Repeated invitations from China and Pakistan to other countries in the neighbourhood to join CPEC have so far not received an enthusiastic response. China had even gone so far as to reach out to India to ensure smooth sailing for the project. India is opposed to CPEC as it passes through Pakistan-occupied Kashmir (PoK), which New Delhi seen as illegally occupied by Islamabad.

CPEC is a critical part of Chinese President Xi Jinping's ambitious Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), considering it is at present the only operational part of the showcase project. However there are an increasing number of strains on CPEC. These range from protests over Chinese workers being used instead of locals, to rising voices from politicians about the high non-financial costs of CPEC, to questions over whether Chinese companies are operating illegally in Pakistan, to unhappiness over unfavourable terms on some of the infrastructure projects, and repeated attacks on Chinese workers.

(With inputs from Reuters)Buford: In a disturbing incident, a bedridden woman was found partially decomposed and covered in cockroaches and maggots at her home in northern Georgia.

The woman, in her 50s, was found living in poverty and neglect in Buford, about 40 miles outside Atlanta. Garbage was found in her home piled to the ceiling and roaches were said to be scaling the walls and eating the woman's flesh. Her legs were reportedly showing signs of decomposition and firefighters who reported the incident to investigators, thought the woman, identified as Tracie Sorrells, would not live much longer.

According to The Washington Post, the woman's husband, Terry Sorrells, 54 and their son, Christian, 18 were arrested by the police. They were charged with neglect of a disabled or elderly person. It is a felony offense. They were each held on $22,200 bond.

Tracie was taken to a hospital. As of now, her condition is not known. Tracie was supposedly bedridden for the past year or two.

The report quoted Christian telling the police that he and his father had been caring for his mother. He also said that Tracie's health had been on a decline. The son added that the family was having financial issues as no one had a job.

The Washington Post quoted a Gwinnett County police officer, who responded to the call from firefighters, describing the scene as grotesque. Following is an excerpt from the incident report as published in the Daily:

"I was overwhelmed with the smell of human feces and garbage. The patients bed was in the living room covered in plastic and faeces and unknown liquid. Garbage lined the floor all the way to the kitchen. Inside of the kitchen was garbage piled from floor to almost ceiling. Roaches were crawling in every single room on the walls and ceiling. Inside of the bathroom there was garbage lining the floors and piled up."Washington: President Donald Trump is likely to unveil sanctions against China on Friday, the White House indicated, as the officials from the US Trade Representative (USTR) said America has strong evidence of Beijing violating its commitments on intellectual property and technology transfers.

"Tomorrow the president will announce the actions he has decided to take based on USTR's 301 investigations into China's state-led, market-distorting efforts to force, pressure and steal US technologies and intellectual property," White House Principal Deputy Press Secretary Raj Shah said on Thursday.

Officials, however, refrained from giving any further details even as USTR submitted its Section 301 report on its investigation into "unfair" Chinese trade practices to the president.

Tariffs and a potential WTO case are certainly on the table, a USTR official told reporters during a briefing on Section 301 investigation report.

The administration, according to the official, is not satisfied with the type of responses the United States has been getting from China. "We have strong evidence against China. These are deeply concerning to the administration and raise severe questions about China and its commitment to market-oriented practices that they promised to engage in," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The USTR looked into four types of allegations: charges that China is putting pressure on companies to enter into joint ventures where they would transfer their technology to a Chinese company; US companies do not have the same ability to license their IP as a Chinese company; whether or not China is using state funds to purchase IP in the US; concerns that China was involved in intruding into US commercial networks for commercial gains.

Responding to a question, the official said not every bad trade action violates the WTO. "It's difficult to use the WTO that involves the informal pressure stakeholders have complained about. The idea that you can take this to the WTO isn't practical. To the extent we can get at these things at the WTO, we will do so. We're pursuing a number of cases against them right now. We'll use it where we can but we can't use it to address everything," the official said.

The administration does not think that China's commitments have been fulfilled.

Noting that the US has tried dialogue with China, the official said the administration hasn't turned its back on these conversations. "All of us need to be aware of the history. It does raise a question about the history of the dialogue. That is something policymakers will have to take into account. The administration has been clear that China presents unique challenges. The principles recognise the gravity of the situation," the official said.

Tariffs are a potential legal option, the official said, adding that a potential WTO case is another outcome. The administration is investigating whether China is using State funds to get into the US market and buying IP.

The US has a massive USD 500 billion trade deficit with China.

From the very beginning of his presidential campaign and now as the president, Trump has been seeking to reduce this trade deficit, which he thinks is against America's national security interest, killing jobs in the US and hurting its economy.Washington: US President Donald Trump will sign a presidential memorandum on Thursday to potentially slap tariffs on $50 billion in Chinese imports over forced transfer of intellectual property, a senior White House official said.

The move risks retaliation by Beijing and a damaging trade war between the world`s two largest economies.

Trump will sign the memorandum at 12:30 p.m. EDT (1630 GMT) at the White House, kickstarting a consultation period by the US Trade Representative`s to identify a list of Chinese products that could be hit by increased tariffs, Everett Eissenstat, deputy director of the National Economic Council, told reporters.

"Many of these areas are those where China has sought to acquire advantage through the unfair acquisition and forced technology transfer from US companies ... establishing its own competitive advantage in an unfair manner," Eissenstat added.

In addition, Trump will also direct the US Treasury to propose measures that could restrict Chinese investments in the United States, Eissenstat said.

The United States will also pursue litigation in the World Trade Organization to address China`s discriminatory licensing practices, he added.

The tariffs and investment restrictions will be imposed under the US Trade Representative`s "Section 301" investigation into alleged misappropriation of U.S. intellectual property by China.

Eissenstat said the investigation clearly demonstrates unfair practices by China, which forces U.S. investors to turn over key technologies to Chinese firms.

US stocks pared losses after the scale of Washington`s potential action against China became known but were still trading sharply lower, with the S&P 500 index down 1.3 percent.

WTO COMMITMENTS

Reuters reported last week that the Trump administration was considering punitive tariffs on up to $60 billion worth of Chinese information technology, telecoms and consumer products, including some non-tech items such as footwear and apparel as part of the probe.

The administration also has demanded that China shrink its annual trade surplus with the United States by $100 billion. China ran a record $375 billion goods trade surplus in 2017.

Trump, who vowed during his 2016 election campaign to protect U.S. workers from unfair competition, had repeatedly threatened to impose sweeping tariffs on Chinese goods of up to 45 percent. But many trade experts believe unilateral US tariffs on China would break US commitments to the WTO.

The tariffs will almost certainly prompt China to retaliate by imposing its own tariffs on certain US goods, or by shunning purchases of US soybeans and other grains or such items as Boeing aircraft and Caterpillar construction equipment.

The threat of anti-China tariffs, particularly on consumer electronics and apparel, has alarmed US industry groups, which have warned it would raise living costs for American families and choke off growth. US Chamber of Commerce President Thomas Donohue said such action would wipe out many of the gains many Americans would see from the Trump tax cuts that went into effect this year.Dubai's ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum is going viral for stopping by on a drive through the desert and helping rescue a group of stranded tourists. The tourists' vehicle had reportedly been stuck in the sand, and the Emir had given them not just a helping hand, but a drink to quench their thirst.

The rescue was posted online by one of the tourists, Hanna Karen Arroyo, who seems to be a resident of Dubai. She posted three tweets, which included photos and a video clip that shows the Emir's car towing the stuck vehicle out of the sand.

"My friend and I got stuck on the desert of Dubai and we got rescued by HH Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid," read the first tweet that Arroyo posted with ictures.

My friend and I got stuck on the desert of Dubai and we got rescued by HH Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid. pic.twitter.com/k3r7s0z05D  Hanna Karen Arroyo (@Hannarroyo) March 17, 2018

Well, she just got her car pulled out by the ruler, and she was in no mood to stop gushing. "Thanks to Simon and the man who sells pigeons and tried to help us and special thanks to HH Sheikh Mohammad bin Rashid for being a righteous ruler of Dubai and for helping us and finally pulled us out from the sand and gave us a refreshment drink," read her next tweet, which also showed a picture of the bottle of the drink the Sheikh offered them.

Thanks to Simon and the man who sells pigeons and tried to help us and special thanks to HH Sheikh Mohammad bin Rashid for being a righteous ruler of Dubai and for helping us and finally pulled us out from the sand and gave us a refreshment drink. pic.twitter.com/8zPh4U0JyW  Hanna Karen Arroyo (@Hannarroyo) March 18, 2018

Arroyo also posted a short video clip of Sheikh Mohammed's SUV trying the drag the other car out of the sand. "This is the video that shows HH Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid pulling our car out of the sand!!! Thanks God there are still good people on earth, this means we can all help others when we see them in trouble," read Arroyo's tweet.

Watch the video she posted:

This is the video that shows HH Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid pulling our car out of the sand!!! Thanks God there are still good people on earth, this means we can all help others when we see them in trouble. pic.twitter.com/jrgrnzLiht  Hanna Karen Arroyo (@Hannarroyo) March 19, 2018

This is not the first time Mohammed bin Rashid, who is also the Vice President and Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), has gone viral for rescuing someone from the desert. In 2017, he had helped out three stranded women cyclists in the middle of a desert road.

And it doesn't stop there. Mid-desert rescues run in the family, apparently. Sheikh Mohammed's son and Dubai Crown Prince, Sheikh Hamdan stopped by to help pull out a massive truck that was stuck in the sand. Watch that video here:

Hamdan can also be seen getting out of his car to shake the truck driver's hand after pulling the truck out on to firmer ground.Islamabad: A Pakistani anti-corruption court on Thursday rejected a plea of the embattled family of Nawaz Sharif for a week-long exemption to go to London where the deposed premier's wife is being treated for cancer.

The court conceded with the National Accountability Bureau (NAB) argument that the trial was at a concluding stage hence Sharif's family should not be allowed to leave the country, Dawn newspaper reported.

The bureau had already requested accountability court to place their names on Exit Control List (ECL).

Sharif and his family are facing investigations since July, when the Supreme Court disqualified the three-time prime minister from office as well as from heading the ruling Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz party over undisclosed assets.

The application was filed by defence counsels Khawaja Haris and Amjad Pervaiz with a medical report of Kulsoom Nawaz during the hearing of the Avenfield case filed by the NAB against former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, his daughter Maryam Nawaz and son-in-law Captain (retd) Mohammad Safdar.

In the request, they informed the court that they will be travelling to the United Kingdom to make decisions regarding Kulsoom's treatment plan for throat cancer.

The application states that despite six cycles of chemotherapy, there was a relapse.

Following the submission, the NAB prosecutor asked whether it was mandatory for the entire family to be present at the hospital as Kulsoom's two sons, Hassan and Hussain, were already with her.

The NAB prosecutor's question hurt Maryam, speaking to the media during a break in court proceedings she said she was not expecting an insensitive statement at a difficult time. Taking to Twitter, Maryam said: "When we requested court to grant us a week-long exemption to visit mother, NAB asked whether is was necessary for the entire family to be present there?"

Maryam later tweeted about a conversation with her mother where Kulsoom asked if the court had granted them exemption. After Maryam informed her in the negative, Kulsoom said it was okay, "God is with us."Pakistan's security forces on Thursday foiled a suicide attack and killed the would-be bomber in the restive south-western province of Balochistan, officials said.

An official of the Balochistan government said that a Frontier Corps vehicle was passing near a checkpoint in Kuch Mor area of Quetta, the provincial capital, when the attacker first opened fire on them and then tried to detonate himself.

"But before he could detonate and cause casualties and damage, the alert security forces managed to gun him down," the official said. He said the security forces had found a suicide vest with explosives on the body of the attacker.

Another official said that the experts of bomb disposal squad removed the suicide vest from the body of slain militant.

Nobody took responsibility of the botched attack but the Taliban militants are active in the province and often carry out such attacks.Seoul: The government in the South Korean capital is introducing a new initiative to "force" its employees to leave work on time -- by shutting down all their computers at 8 p.m. on Fridays.

According to the Seoul Metropolitan Government (SMG), it was trying to stop a "culture of working overtime" as the country has some of the longest working hours in the world, the BBC reported.

The "shutdown initiative" will be rolled out across three phases over the next three months. Government employees in Seoul work at an average of 2,739 hours a year -- about 1,000 hours more than workers in other developed countries.

The programme will begin on March 30, with all computers switched off by 8 p.m. The second phase will begin in April, with employees having their computers turned off by 7.30 p.m. on the second and fourth Friday that month.

From May onwards, the programme will be in full-swing, with computers shut off by 7 p.m. every Friday.

According to a statement by the government, all employees will be subjected to the shutdown, though there will be exemptions in special circumstances.

However, not every government worker seems to be on-board. According to the SMG, 67.1 per cent of government workers asked to be exempt from the forced lights-out.

Earlier in March, South Korea`s National Assembly passed a law to cut down the maximum weekly working hours to 52, down from 68.Washington: The navies of India and the US have a shared interest in providing security that guarantees a peaceful and prosperous Indo-Pacific region, US Navy chief Admiral John Richardson has said, amid China flexing its muscles in the region.

Admiral Richardson made the remarks after his meeting with Indian Navy chief Admiral Sunil Lanba, who is on a five-day visit to America. It was Richardson's fourth meeting with Lanba. They had last met at the IMDEX Asia defence conference in Singapore in May 2017. "We have a shared interest that our navies provide the security that underwrites a peaceful and prosperous Indo-Pacific region," Richardson said after his meeting with Admiral Lanba.

"I've met often with Admiral Lanba and our discussions center on a naval partnership built on respect and trust," he said yesterday.

The two Admirals met with US Secretary of Navy Richard V Spencer and discussed ways to improve interoperability to include additional naval exercises and staff talks, said a Pentagon readout of the meeting.

"Naval exercises like Malabar and the Rim-of-the-Pacific are examples of our deepening cooperation and I look forward to continuing to explore opportunities that increase our interoperability," Richardson said.

During his stay in the US, Admiral Lanba will hold extensive talks with the top military brass of the Trump administration to consolidate bilateral naval cooperation, including in the Indo-Pacific region. The US has been pushing for a broader role for India in the strategically important Indo-Pacific region.

In November last year, India, the US, Australia and Japan gave shape to the long-pending Quad or quadrilateral corridor to develop a new strategy to keep the critical sea routes in the Indo-Pacific region free from Chinese influence.

China, which has been reinforcing its hold on the disputed South China Sea (SCS) with military installations in the shoals and reclaimed islands, claims sovereignty over almost all of it. Philippines, Vietnam, Malaysia, Brunei and Taiwan have counter claims over SCS.

China also claims rights over the disputed islands in East China Sea under the control of Japan. "The relationship between the US Navy and the Indian Navy has never been stronger," said Richardson.

"There has been meaningful progress made in strengthening the cooperation between our two-great democratic and maritime nations. We are exploring every way to expand that partnership even further based on our shared interests," he said.

India was accorded Major Defence Partner status by the US in 2016, bringing New Delhi on par with Washington's closest allies for defence-related trade and technology transfer. The Indian Navy cooperates with the US Navy on several fronts which include operational interactions such as the Malabar naval exercise and exchange of white shipping information.

Warships from both navies have also been regularly visiting each other's ports.

Open source

The OSCE extended the mandate of the Special Monitoring Mission in Donbas until March 31, 2019. This was reported on Twitter by the press service of the Permanent Mission of Ukraine to international organizations in Vienna.

The mandate of the OSCE SMM was extended until March 31, 2019. The delegation of Ukraine issued its interpretative statement, in which it stressed that the SMM should have full and unhindered access to the entire territory of Ukraine, including Crimea and Sevastopol. All states of the EU, the USA and Canada have supported this, the message says.

As it was reported earlier Ukraine's Foreign Ministry sent the OSCE a request for the extension of the monitoring mission's mandate in Donbas for another year. Ihor Prokopchuk, Ukraine's representative at international organizations in Vienna tweeted this on Twitter. Prokopchuk added that Ukraine welcomes the efforts and loyalty of OSCE SMM observers who keep on doing their job in Crimea and eastern Ukraine.The statement issued by the Parliament claims that counting the votes of the inhabitants of the annexed Crimea skews the results of the voting and raises questions about its legitimacy.

The Parliament of Ukraine has pronounced the holding of the Russian presidential election in the annexed Crimea unlawful. The bill #8168-1 was supported by 255 MPs. The parliamentary session was broadcast live by the official Rada channel.

The Parliament of Ukraine has endorsed a statement related to the Russian presidential election in the temporarily occupied Crimea. The Speaker of the Parliament has been authorized to bring the statement to the knowledge of parliaments of other states and parliamentary assemblies of international organizations.

The Parliament of Ukraine claims that the holding of the Russian presidential election by the Russian administration in the temporarily occupied Crimea was unlawful. This cannot be used as grounds for changing the status of Crimea to any other than that described in the Ukrainian constitution.

Significant violations of citizens electoral rights during the electoral campaign in Russia, the creation of uneven conditions for all candidates and the absence of a genuine choice, mentioned in the preliminary report by the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights of the OSCE, as well as the illegal counting of over 1 million votes from the temporarily occupied Crimea and Sevastopol considerably twist the outcome of the voting at the Russian election, - the statement reads.

Also, the Parliament called on the international community to introduce additional sanctions on Russia, particularly personal sanctions against individuals involved in the organization of the election in Crimea.

The decree is to become effective on the day it is adopted.

The degree represents the common ground of the Parliament. There were a few decrees regarding the holding of the Russian presidential election in Crimea that was registered by the Parliament. In particular, the head of the Narodny Front parliamentary faction Maksym Burbak and another member of the faction Heorhiy Lohvinsky suggested considering the Russian presidential election illegitimate due to the voting in the annexed Crimea.

The Russian presidential election took place on 18 March, on the fourth anniversary of the illegal annexation of Crimea. Vladimir Putin was elected president, having received 56.2 million votes, or 76.66% after 99% of the ballots have been counted.The Congress of the United States has presented the draft of the Consolidated Appropriations Act for the 2018 financial year, agreed by the Senate and the House of Representatives, which suggests allocating $620.7 million to Ukraine, which is considerably greater than the figure allocated last year. U.S. financial assistance to Ukraine has increased for the 2018 financial year, the Embassy of Ukraine in the United States wrote on Facebook, UNIAN reports.

Therefore, according to the document, $200 million is going to be allocated for the Pentagon to provide military-technical assistance to Ukraine, which exceeds the 2017 appropriations by $50 million. This money will be used to finance specific U.S. support projects for Ukraines Armed Forces, for example, military training, provision of military equipment and ammunition, lethal defensive weaponry, other military equipment, and services, as well as logistic support.

Moreover, the assistance package includes intelligence support for Ukraines armed and security forces. In respect of Ukraine, the U.S. State Department and relevant authorities have decided to assign $420.7 million, which exceeds last years figure by $10 million. Also, funding is aimed at enhancing the Ukraine support policy under the Foreign Military Financing program.



Before coming into force, the Consolidated Appropriations Act 2018 is to be approved by the Senate and the Congress and then signed by the President of the United States. We are very thankful for the support from our strategic partner, the United States of America.Read the original text at 112.ua.

Open source

Following the visit to Qatar, Ukraines President Petro Poroshenko has stated that this Middle Eastern country is ready to provide Ukraine with the liquefied gas. At the same time, neither the terms of supply nor its possible price is disclosed. However, this information could provide the answers to the main questions of the ongoing discussions: why Ukraine needs it and how profitable it is.

If you go back to the history, the issue of supplying liquefied gas to Ukraine is not original. Since the 2000s, the experts have been elaborating the ways of resolving this issue. Then, on behalf of the government, we (Naftogazbudinformatyka LLC) took up this project. They have prepared several preliminary feasibility studies. They have chosen the ports, where the terminal could be located, - Ochakiv, Feodosia (the territory of Crimea occupied by Russia) and the "Southern" port near Odesa. Then the project was taken away by the Vladyslav Kaskivs agency for investment and management of national projects. A feasibility study for the construction of an LNG terminal in the Pivdenny port (Ukrtransnaftas site) was developed.

The main reason why the project was not implemented was the issue of the liquefied gas delivery, which cannot be solved taking into account the policy of the Turkish authorities regarding the passage of goods across the Bosporus. Tankers with oil could pass, while methane trains cannot. Despite repeated efforts of Ukraine (the government delegations traveled tried to influence, there were several meetings of the Ukrainian-Turkish group on this issue), the Turkish authorities did not give permission for transporting methane through the Bosporus. As far as I know, the question has not been resolved yet. Does this mean that it is impossible to solve it? I suppose, no. At the time when our company was engaged in the project of the LNG terminal, we were approached by a US law firm that offered its services to lobby the issue before the Turkish government. Then the question has died down.

In my opinion, the question of the Bosporus and the Ukrainian LNG terminal is not so significant, if the project of building an interconnector with Poland was implemented, which assumes an increase in the capacity for gas imports to Ukraine to 8 billion cubic meters per year. In this case, we could receive Qatar gas from the Polish terminal in Swinoujscie.

But, of course, the price is the key issue here. According to the current agreement, which is concluded between Qatar and Poland, as far as I know, gas could be supplied to the Polish gas market at a price of about $ 370 per 1,000 cubic meters. Given that the market price of gas in Ukraine is 220-230 dollars per 1 thousand cubic meters, it looks very expensive. At the same time, I do not know what price president Poroshenko has agreed on.

Could Qatar offer Ukraine a preferential price? Sure. It is possible that the parties have agreed on the barter  the supply of the liquefied gas in exchange for food or some goods (for many years, Ukraine has been exporting grain, flour, and meat to Qatar). In addition, Qatar companies are interested in the possibilities of obtaining Ukrainian agricultural lands in their ownership. If they have really negotiated on a barter, the price of gas could be random, and it would definitely be less than $ 370 per 1,000 cubic meters.

Of course, gas from Qatar is more expensive than if it were possible to buy it from Gazprom. But it can serve as a good insurance in case of a sharp cold snap or lack of additional gas from Europe. We have already faced a similar situation in early March. Because of Gazprom's refusal to supply gas to Ukraine in volumes stipulated by the decision of Stockholm Arbitration, Naftogaz was forced to urgently purchase gas from Poland. The company admitted that it bought it at the 34% higher price than planned to buy from Gazprom.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or 112.International and its owners.The authority closely follows the situation and will look into all details, President of the European Parliament says

Open source

The European Parliament attentively follows the situation with Nadiya Savchenko's detention in Ukraine; it could urge the Ukrainian government to release her - depending on the circumstances. Head of the European Parliament Antonio Tajani said that at a press conference during the summit of leaders of EU member countries - as quoted by RIA Novosti news agency.

'We'll look into what's happening. We'll have to see the facts, and then, if necessary, we will urge the government to release her', he said.

Earlier on March 22, Savchenko was stripped of her parliamentary immunity and detained - right during the Parliament's session.

The MPs have practically enabled Savchenko's detention by their vote.

"Based on the decision of Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine on March 22, 2018 to remove deputy immunity from the MP of Ukraine Nadia Savchenko, granting the permission to bring to criminal responsibility, detention, and selection of a preventive measure, you are informed of suspicion. Here are your rights and duties, I suggest that you follow me to the Kyiv SBU to draw up the detention protocol provided by the legislation of Ukraine, Security Service investigator read the notice.

The deputy, after reading out the suspicion notice left the Verkhovna Rada building along with the law enforcers. The deputy together with the SBU investigators walked along the street to the building of the special services in Kyiv, surrounded by numerous supporters and journalists.Russian bombers and fighters took off from airfields in Crimea and flew close to Ukrainian state border; Ukraine's Air Force is on combat alert

The HQ of Ukraine's Air Force reported another provocative act by the Russian combat aviation - the second time this month. Fighters and bombers were spotted to the east and south of Ukraine's state border, namely near the occupied Crimea.

Ukraine's Air Force is now on high alert.

'Fighters and bombers of the aggressor country took off from Shaikivka, Krymsk and Belbek airfields, approaching the state border of Ukraine and the division line between the mainland Ukraine and the Autonomous Republic of Crimea. The aircraft approached the coastline of the Black Sea, 40 kilometers away from the coast and headed to the coast sides of Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey', says the message.

Tupolev Tu-22 bombers, loaded with missiles and escorted by Sukhoi Su-30 fighters performed flights over Crimea, Azov Sea, and the Black Sea, practicing in attacking ground targets. According to the Ukrainian side, such actions may be seen as a response to the recent drills of Ukraine's Air Force, as Ukrainian combat aviation held a training session, imitating the blockade of Bosporus.Shevchenko district court in Kyiv will hold the session, where the jury is to select the restriction measure in Nadiya Savchenko's case. She spends the night at the isolation cell of the SBU, Ukraine's state security service. Dmytro Bugai, Savchenko's lawyer told that to the press.

The defense team has just received filing petition.

'The session of Shevchenko district court is to kick off at 9 a.m. The prosecution pleads for holding her in custody,' the lawyer said.

Bugai added that the defense team is now looking into the petition, albeit very late in the evening. 'Only appendixes amount to 240 pages; we're going to spend the night over this document', he concluded, saying that the detention was illegal in the first place.Petro Poroshenko, the President of Ukraine signed a law that ratifies the Ukrainian-Croatian agreement in the sphere of the prevention of the disasters and liquidation of their consequences as the press service of the president reported.

The agreement was signed in Kyiv on November 21, 2016.

The document provides the main principles and frames of the cooperation of Croatia and Ukraine, defines the forms of the aid that the sides can provide each other in the case of need. Particularly, the countries agreed for the exchange of the experts' teams, equipment and means of aid, information and experience in the sphere of the prediction and prevention of the disasters.

On March 18, Ukraine and Qatar signed an agreement on the mutual abolition of visa requirements.The law will come into force the next day after the publishing

Petro Poroshenko, the President of Ukraine signed the law of Ukraine 'On making of amendments to some legislative acts of Ukraine in the sphere of building and exploitation of auto roads' as the press service of the presidential administration reported.

It is expected that the law will further the creation of the conditions for the attraction of the investments for building and exploitation of the roads on the terms of concession.

The amendments will be made to the Ukrainian laws 'On concessions', 'On concessions' for the building and exploitation of the auto roads', 'On auto roads', 'On sources of financing of road maintenance of Ukraine', On exclusion of land plots of other objects of the immovable property placed on them, privately-run for the public needs or based on the public necessity'.

The law will come into force the next day after the publishing.

The concession is a type of the agreement on the creation or the reconstruction by the funds of the investor of the objects of the immovable property to the state property and the investor gets the possibility to exploit the object on the reimbursable basis, gathering the income in his benefit.In Kharkiv region, officers of the Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) stopped activity of the agent-informing network of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Russian Federation. This was stated by the head of the press center in Kharkiv region department of SBU Vladyslav Abdula on Facebook.

Three local residents were involved in the criminal network, one of whom was the acting officer of the National Police in Kharkiv region.

"During the investigation, security officers of Ukraine documented the connection between members of the intelligence network and the General Staff of the Armed Forces of Russian Federation, as well as the facts of passing over by the police captain of the official information of Ukraines Internal Ministry, including that with limited access. The offenders also handed over to the Russian curators personal data of the participants of the Anti-Terrorist Operation, the message says.

As we reported earlier, Ukrainian law enforcers detained Volodymyr Ruban, the head of the Centre for POW Release while he carried weapons in a car in Donbas conflict zone. Later, he was accused of preparing a terrorist attack and mishandling weapons.

Security Service of Ukraine (SBU) has revoked the permit for Volodymyr Ruban, the head of Ukrainian center for prisoners release, to cross the line of delimitation.Open source

Volodymyr Groysman, the Prime Minister of Ukraine approved the decision of the Verkhovna Rada to provide the agreement for the bearing to responsibility, detention and arrest of MP Nadia Savchenko as he reported on Twitter.

'The prosecution will provide the final conclusion in the issue of Nadia Savchenko. But I think that it is the issue of the mental health. I thank the SBU, Armed Forces of Ukraine that held the operation on the exposure of the intentions of the horrific terrorist attack', Groysman claimed.

The prime minister thinks that the parliament made an adequate decision.

Today the Ukrainian parliament lifted the immunity of Nadia Savchenko. She was detained right after this in the building of the Verkhovna Rada.

Later Ukraine's Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko signed the notice of suspicion of Savchenko under charges with preparing a terrorist act and the attempt of coup d'etat.

It is expected that the Shevchenkivsky Court of Kyiv will choose the restrictive measure for Nadia Savchenko on March 23.

On March 15, Lutsenko claimed during his speech at the parliament that Savchenko personally planned, recruited and ordered how to hold the terrorist attack in the Verkhovna Rada, destroying two lodges, governmental and post, by the combat grenades, bringing down the dome of the Verkhovna Rada by the mortar launchers and killing the survived with the assault rifles.MP Nadia Savchenko claimed that Yulia Tymoshenko, the leader of Batkivshchyna Party negotiated with Oleksandr Zakharchenko, the leader of the militants of Donetsk People's Republic (DPR) as UNIAN reported.

'For the second time, when I came to Zakharchenko and Plotnytsky to hold the negotiations with them to directly discuss the release of people I learned that Yulia Tymoshenko also negotiated with Zakharchenko once. It was on the verge of Maidan and the war. But she tried to avoid this and condemned me that I negotiated with him', Savchenko claimed.

'What were the issues? Of course, Ukraine. Tymoshenko wanted Donbas to support her. Accordingly, the hypocrisy of Batkivshchyna that it uses to hide behind amazed me to the core', the MP said.

On March 15, Lutsenko claimed during his speech at the parliament that Savchenko personally planned, recruited and ordered how to hold the terrorist attack in the Verkhovna Rada, destroying two lodges, governmental and post, by the combat grenades, bringing down the dome of the Verkhovna Rada by the mortar launchers and killing the survived with the assault rifles.

During the session of the Regulatory Committee, the Prosecutor General reported that Savchenko applied to the Ukrainian Armed Forces officers to organize terror attacks against country's top leadership.

He also claimed that law enforcement officers have evidence of the Russian Federation's participation in the provision of weapons for terrorist attacks against the top leadership of Ukraine.

In her turn, Savchenko claimed that her plan to perform a terror attack in the Verkhovna Rada is absurd and the grenade cannot damage the Rada.

On March 22, Parliamentary Regulatory Committee recommended lifting immunity, detention and arrest of Ukrainian MP Nadiya Savchenko.

Later the Ukrainian parliament lifted the immunity of Nadiya Savchenko. She was detained right after this in the building of the Verkhovna Rada.The father of the perished and his friends said the parting words

On March 21, more than hundred citizens of Mykolaiv bid farewell to Vladyslav Voloshyn, the military pilot, acting director of Mykolaiv International Airport, hero of Donbas Conflict who committed a suicide as NikLife reported.

The last farewell took place at the territory of the Forensic Medical Bureau. The family of Voloshyn, his friends, familiars, coworkers and the representatives of the authority were present.

The father of the perished and his friends said the parting words.

Then, all present got on the knees, made a 'live corridor' to send the officer to his final journey, his way was sprinkled with the carnations.

Earlier, on March 18, in Mykolayiv, a 29-year-old acting director of one of the region's communal enterprises committed suicide by shooting himself from a gun in his apartment. The police opened a criminal proceeding under the Criminal Code article on intentional suicide.

Later, the journalist Andriy Lokhmatov published one of Voloshyns correspondences, where he mentions the pressure from Oleksiy Savchenko, the Chairman of Mykolaiv Regional Government Department, the desire to leave the airport, the suicide thoughts that were in his mind all the time.

I am not afraid of him. I do not want to leave children without a father, but thoughts about suicide stuck in my head.

Oleksiy Savchenko, the Chairman of Mykolaiv Regional Government Department, is now on vacation. On his Facebook page, Savchenko expressed condolences to Voloshyns family.

It should be mentioned that Vladyslav Voloshyn - was one of the Donbas conflict heroes. He was awarded the Order of Courage of the third degree. The Russian authorities accused him of attacking the Malaysian Boeing MH17, shot down over Donbas in the summer of 2014. Later this version was completely refuted by the investigation of the prosecutor's office of the Netherlands and Ukraine.Bishop of Rome Francis approved the decrees on the defrocking of nine Ukrainian monks for the exorcism as the official website of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church (UGCC) reported.

'The people started to talk about Sister Maria Baran from the monastery in Velyki Borky in 2004. She seemed to hear the voice of God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit, Sacred Virgin Mary, and some saints. Some of the messages were written down by Father Planchak. The priest confirmed their veracity and origin from God but did not have the authorities for this as the Synod of UGCC officially claimed', the message said.

During the searches at the monasteries in Kolodiivka and Velyki Borky, the violations of the monastic discipline and prayers of exorcism without the particular permissions were spotted.

'The priest, who wants to do this, should get the special permit, blessing from the local bishop. But they did not heed to the comments', Teodor Martynyuk, the bishop-assistant of Ternopil-Zborowski archdiocese claimed after the checks in 2017.

Moreover, some of the monks did not stick to the statute and were guided by the orders of the so-called 'prophetess'. The special commission worked in the monastery to come to the final conclusions and it decided that those who spread the orders of the 'prophetess' manipulate the notions of the obedience and spiritual guidance.

The re-organization of St. Theodore the Studite monastery took place after the conclusions of the commission. However, part of the monks did not accept the comments of the church authorities and refused to obey. They continued to violate the monastic rules and illegally settled in Posich village, Ivano-Frankivsk region.

'After the proper warnings, nine monks were defrocked. Pope personally approved this decision', the message said.

In accordance with the approved decrees, they lose their affiliation to the monastic practice, the right to wear robes; they are deprived of all rights and commitments and they cannot call themselves the monks.

Exorcism is the religious or spiritual practice of evicting demons or other spiritual entities from a person or an area, they are believed to have possessed.President claimed that the aim of Russia's special operation is to spread chaos and destroy Ukraine

Open source

Petro Poroshenko, the President of Ukraine commented today's decision of the lifting of the immunity and detention of MP Nadia Savchenko. He thanked the Security Service of Ukraine and Prosecutor General's Office for the prevention of mass terrorist attacks. He reported this on Facebook.

'I am thankful to the workers of the Security Service and Prosecutor General's Office for the saved lives of people due to the prevention of the mass terrorist attacks and exposure of Russian special operation against Ukraine. Also, thanks to the officers of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, who did not fall for the provocation and informed the law enforcement bodies about the criminal intents of the aggressor and fifth columnists in time', Poroshenko claimed.

He also claimed that the aim of Russia's special operation is to spread chaos and destroy Ukraine.

'The aim o the Russian special operation is to spread chaos and destroy Ukrainian State. All this is another reminder that the large-scale hybrid war is held against Ukraine and we should resist it only by coming together', Poroshenko noted.

Today the Ukrainian parliament lifted the immunity of Nadiya Savchenko. She was detained right after this in the building of the Verkhovna Rada.

Later Ukraine's Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko signed the notice of suspicion of Savchenko under charges with preparing a terrorist act and the attempt of coup d'etat.

It is expected that the Shevchenkivsky Court of Kyiv will choose the restrictive measure for Nadia Savchenko on March 23.

On March 15, Lutsenko claimed during his speech at the parliament that Savchenko personally planned, recruited and ordered how to hold the terrorist attack in the Verkhovna Rada, destroying two lodges, governmental and post, by the combat grenades, bringing down the dome of the Verkhovna Rada by the mortar launchers and killing the survived with the assault rifles.It is not clear when the court session will take place

The Prosecutor General's Office of Ukraine intends to ask the court to choose the restrictive measure in the form of the detention without the alternative of the bail for MP Nadia Savchenko. The representative of the prosecutor's office claimed this as Ukrainian News reported.

'Only arrest. The article does not provide the alternative', he said.

At the same time, according to him, it is not clear when the court session on the choosing of the restrictive measure will take place.

On March 22, Parliamentary Regulatory Committee recommended lifting immunity, detention and arrest of Ukrainian MP Nadiya Savchenko.

Later the Ukrainian parliament lifted the immunity of Nadiya Savchenko. She was detained right after this in the building of the Verkhovna Rada.

Tatiana Protorchenko, the allies and spokeswoman of Savchenko reported on Facebook that the advocate is not allowed visiting the MP after the detention.Open source

Law enforcement officers have evidence of the Russian Federation's participation in the provision of weapons for terrorist attacks against the top leadership of Ukraine. This was announced by Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko during the meeting of the Verkhovna Rada Regulatory Committee, where the issue of People's Deputy Nadia Savchenkos prosecution is being considered on air of 112 Ukraine TV chanel.

"We have facts that prove the participation of Russian Federation, as an enemy of the Ukrainian state, in providing weapons to persons who planned and were preparing to commit a terrorist act against the top leadership of the state, peaceful population of the capital with the aim of overthrowing the constitutional order," he said.

As it was reported earlier, the Regulatory committee of the Ukrainian Parliament is considering the plea of the General Prosecutor Yury Lutsenko as for the Ukrainian MP Nadiya Savchenko referring the criminal prosecution, detention and arrest of Savchenko.

Earlier, Yury Lutsenko, the Prosecutor General of Ukraine made three submissions to the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine on MP Nadia Savchenko. He announced that he will submit the provision on the bearing to the responsibility, detention and arrest of Savchenko.Open source

Non-affiliated MP Nadia Savchenko and Volodymyr Ruban, the Head of 'Officer Corps' planned to attack the cortege of the President of Ukraine with the large caliber sniper rifle. Yury Lutsenko, the Prosecutor General of Ukraine claimed this during the session of the Ukrainian Parliament Regulatory Committee where the issue of the bearing of Savchenko to criminal responsibility was considered as 112 Ukraine broadcasted.

'On December 2, 2017, Savchenko and Ruban came to Khmelnytsky, tested the weapons at the proving ground where Ruban announced the plan to attack the cortege of the president with the use of the large caliber sniper rifle 'Topaz' that penetrates the light armor of any car and it is many only in Donetsk People's Republic (DPR). Later on the same day, the key meeting of Savchenko, Ruban and pointed officers of Ukraine's Armed Forces took place (it was recorded by the operative services of the SBU). During the video-recording Ruban and later Savchenko outlined their plans of the overthrow the constitutional order by the holding of the terrorist attack from the mortar launchers at the governmental quarter of Kyiv, commitment of the terrorist attack inside the Verkhovna Rada with the weaponry and explosives gotten from the DPR militants', he said.

Ruban was detained on March 8 at the Ukrainian checkpoint at the demarcation line of Donbas Conflict zone. It is stated that Ruban is suspected in the illegal handling of arms, preparation of a crime and terrorist action. Later the Shevchenkivsky District Court of Kyiv arrested Volodymyr Ruban, the Leader of Center of POW Release 'Officer Corps' for 60 days without a right to the bail.

On March 20, Kyiv Court of Appeal refused to change the measure of restraint for the head of the "Officer Corps" Center for the Release of Prisoners Volodymyr Ruban, thus leaving him in custody.

Earlier Lutsenko claimed during his speech at the parliament that Savchenko personally planned, recruited and ordered how to hold the terrorist attack in the Verkhovna Rada, destroying two lodges, governmental and post, by the combat grenades, bringing down the dome of the Verkhovna Rada by the mortar launchers and killing the survived with the assault rifles.

Also, Lutsenko made three submissions to the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine on MP Nadia Savchenko.

On March 22, Parliamentary Regulatory Committee recommended lifting immunity, detention and arrest of Ukrainian MP Nadiya Savchenko.Regulatory committee of the Ukrainian Parliament on Thursday was considering the plea of the General Prosecutor Yury Lutsenko as for the Ukrainian MP Nadiya Savchenko concerning the criminal prosecution, detention and arrest of Savchenko.

Parliamentary Regulatory Committee recommended lifting immunity, detention and arrest of the Ukrainian MP Nadiya Savchenko. The Verkhovna Rada was also considering the removal of immunity from the non-factional People's Deputy.

In the end, Ukrainian parliament lifted the immunity of Nadiya Savchenko and detained her right after that. She was informed of suspicion and detained in the building of the Verkhovna Rada. The MPs have practically enabled Savchenko's detention by their vote.

Ukraines Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko accuses Nadiya Savchenko

Firstly, Yuriy Lutsenko, Ukraines Prosecutor General said that Ukrainian MP Nadiya Savchenko applied to the Ukrainian Armed Forces officers to organize terror attacks against country's top leadership.

Open source

Whereas, Savchenko says her plan to perform a terror attack in the Verkhovna Rada is absurd. She said that at the meeting of the parliamentary regulatory committee during considering the plea. The grenade cant damage the building, its absurd, these were jokes, she said.

On March 15, Lutsenko claimed during his speech at the parliament that Savchenko personally planned, recruited and ordered how to hold the terrorist attack in the Verkhovna Rada, destroying two lodges, governmental and post, by the combat grenades, bringing down the dome of the Verkhovna Rada by the mortar launchers and killing the survived with the assault rifles.

Savchenko confirmed her trip to occupied Donbas in November 2017. She claimed this during the session of the Ukrainian Parliament Regulatory Committee Thursday. Savchenko said that she took clothes for the Ukrainian hostages there. Also, she confirmed that she negotiated with the representatives of the illegal armed formations.

'I did not negotiate with Putin, but with the enemy, with many people from that territory I interacted', she noted.

Lutsenko also claimed that Savchenko and Volodymyr Ruban, the Head of 'Officer Corps' planned to attack the cortege of the President of Ukraine with the large caliber sniper rifle.

'On December 2, 2017, Savchenko and Ruban came to Khmelnytsky, tested the weapons at the proving ground where Ruban announced the plan to attack the cortege of the president with the use of the large caliber sniper rifle 'Topaz' that penetrates the light armor of any car and it is many only in Donetsk People's Republic (DPR). Later on the same day, the key meeting of Savchenko, Ruban and pointed officers of Ukraine's Armed Forces took place (it was recorded by the operative services of the SBU). During the video-recording Ruban and later Savchenko outlined their plans of the overthrow the constitutional order by the holding of the terrorist attack from the mortar launchers at the governmental quarter of Kyiv, commitment of the terrorist attack inside the Verkhovna Rada with the weaponry and explosives gotten from the DPR militants', he said.Savchenko claimed that she took clothes for the Ukrainian hostages there.

The Prosecutor General's Office intends to ask the court to choose the restrictive measure in the form of the detention without the alternative of the bail for MP Nadia Savchenko.

'Only arrest. The article does not provide the alternative', he said.

Nadiya Savchenko accuses leader of Batkivshchyna Party Yulia Tymoshenko

Nadia Savchenko claimed that Yulia Tymoshenko, the leader of Batkivshchyna Party negotiated with Oleksandr Zakharchenko, the leader of the militants of Donetsk People's Republic (DPR).

Open source

'For the second time, when I came to Zakharchenko and Plotnytsky to hold the negotiations with them to directly discuss the release of people I learned that Yulia Tymoshenko also negotiated with Zakharchenko once. It was on the verge of Maidan and the war. But she tried to avoid this and condemned me that I negotiated with him', Savchenko claimed.

'What were the issues? Of course, Ukraine. Tymoshenko wanted Donbas to support her. Accordingly, the hypocrisy of Batkivshchyna that it uses to hide behind amazed me to the core', the MP said.Vera Savchenko, the sister of MP Nadia Savchenko claimed about her readiness for the stay in the place of the detention due to the decision of the SBU to detain her. Vera Savchenko claimed this to the journalists near the building of the SBU as 112 Ukraine broadcasted.

'Nadia already packed up things that are needed in the prison. She perfectly knows the bars of Kremlin. She gathered all necessary things that are allowed without metal and shoelaces. This bag is in my car. We drove to the Verkhovna Rada in the morning with things. Nadia knew what Judases are; 30 pieces of silver from these lice who continue to railroad the Ukrainians', she wrote.

Today the Ukrainian parliament lifted the immunity of Nadiya Savchenko. She was detained right after this in the building of the Verkhovna Rada.

On March 22, Parliamentary Regulatory Committee recommended lifting immunity, detention and arrest of Ukrainian MP Nadiya Savchenko.

On March 15, Lutsenko claimed during his speech at the parliament that Savchenko personally planned, recruited and ordered how to hold the terrorist attack in the Verkhovna Rada, destroying two lodges, governmental and post, by the combat grenades, bringing down the dome of the Verkhovna Rada by the mortar launchers and killing the survived with the assault rifles.

During the session of the Regulatory Committee, the Prosecutor General reported that Savchenko applied to the Ukrainian Armed Forces officers to organize terror attacks against country's top leadership.

He also claimed that law enforcement officers have evidence of the Russian Federation's participation in the provision of weapons for terrorist attacks against the top leadership of Ukraine.

In her turn, Savchenko claimed that her plan to perform a terror attack in the Verkhovna Rada is absurd and the grenade cannot damage the Rada.At the moment, the MP is in the SBU

The restrictive measure for MP Nadia Savchenko will be chosen tomorrow. Andry Lysenko, the spokesperson of the Prosecutor General's Office reported this to 112 Ukraine and specified that the case will be considered by Shevchenkivsky Court of Kyiv.

'Now we prepare the appeal to the court for the choosing of the restrictive measure in the form of the arrest. The preparation is the obligatory procedure. It's likely that the court session will take place tomorrow. It is known, that it will be Shevchenkivsky Court of Kyiv. We will expect that the court will make a decision on the choice of the restrictive measure', he said.

Lysenko confirmed that the GPU will ask the court for the arrest of Savchenko without a right for the bail.

According to him, the MP will spend this night in the building of the SBU. At the same time, he did not exclude that the additional security will be provided to Savchenko. 'If she wants to then she will report on this with the help of the advocates and this desire will be considered', he promised.

Today the Ukrainian parliament lifted the immunity of Nadiya Savchenko. She was detained right after this in the building of the Verkhovna Rada.

On March 22, Parliamentary Regulatory Committee recommended lifting immunity, detention and arrest of Ukrainian MP Nadiya Savchenko.

On March 15, Lutsenko claimed during his speech at the parliament that Savchenko personally planned, recruited and ordered how to hold the terrorist attack in the Verkhovna Rada, destroying two lodges, governmental and post, by the combat grenades, bringing down the dome of the Verkhovna Rada by the mortar launchers and killing the survived with the assault rifles.

During the session of the Regulatory Committee, the Prosecutor General reported that Savchenko applied to the Ukrainian Armed Forces officers to organize terror attacks against country's top leadership.

He also claimed that law enforcement officers have evidence of the Russian Federation's participation in the provision of weapons for terrorist attacks against the top leadership of Ukraine.

In her turn, Savchenko claimed that her plan to perform a terror attack in the Verkhovna Rada is absurd and the grenade cannot damage the Rada.He noted that the Armed Forces increase Ukraine's ability to join NATO until 2020 by taking part in NATO exercises and missions, for example in Afghanistan

The Chairman of the NATO Military Committee, General Petr Pavel in an interview with DW said that over the past four years, Ukraine was able to significantly approach NATO and called the country a key to Euro-Atlantic security.

"Ukraine has already conducted impressive defense reforms and is much closer to NATO, but there is still work to be done," Pavel said.

Pavel noted that the Ukrainian Armed Forces increase Ukraine's ability to join NATO until 2020 by taking part in NATO exercises and missions, for example in Afghanistan.

"NATO and individual NATO member states will continue to support Ukraine - because we firmly believe that an independent and stable Ukraine is the key to Euro-Atlantic security," he said.

As it was reported earlier Ukraines President Petro Poroshenko claimed that Ukraine aims to become a NATO member state in the next ten years. He said it during the interview for Hamburger Abendblatt, which is a part of Funke Media Group media conglomerate.

According to the President, with Ukraine NATO would become more powerful and effective, than today, and NATO member states could learn from Ukraine how to stand against Russia.

Poroshenko reminded, that Kyiv confronts pro-Russia separatists on the East since 2014, supported by the Kremlin. More than 10,000 people were murdered in the conflict.The money should go to defensive lethal weapons, military training, logistics, support in the field of reconnaissance and replacement of weapons previously provided by the US

The U.S.Congress concluded a budget agreement for the 2018 financial year, within which Ukraine can receive 200 million dollars for military assistance.

"For the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative, $200,000,000 is hereby appropriated, to remain available until September 30, 2018: Provided, That such funds shallprovide assistance, including training; equipment; lethal weapons of a 24 defensive nature; logistics support, supplies and services; sustainment; and intelligence support to the military and national security forces of Ukraine, and for replacement of any weapons or defensive articles provided to the Government of Ukraine from the inventory of the United States, the message says.

The funds are allocated for training, equipment, lethal weapons; logistics support, supplies and intelligence support to the military and national security forces of Ukraine.

In total, the bill has 1.3 trillion dollars to finance the government until September. It significantly increases the money for national defense and does not fund some immigration initiatives of US President Donald Trump.

Also, the budget allocates funds for the promotion of human rights in the DPRK ($8 million) and the construction of a wall on the border with Mexico ($ 1.6 billion).

The Congress must adopt a budget until Friday. Then he will be signed by President Trump.

As it was reported earlier U.S. State Department approved possible sale of Javelin anti-tank missiles and launch units to Ukraine at an the cost of $47 million, the Pentagon said. The Pentagon said in a statement on Thursday the proposed sale would not alter the military balance in the region.

Ukraines government has asked to buy 210 Javelin missiles and 37 Javelin Command Launch Units, the statement said. The prime contractor will be a joint venture of Raytheon Co and Lockheed Martin Corp, it added.The Verkhovna Rada is considering the removal of immunity from the non-factional People's Deputy Nadezhda Savchenko. The session is broadcasted by 112 Ukraine TV channel.

Parliamentary Regulatory Committee recommended lifting immunity, detention and arrest of Ukrainian MP Nadiya Savchenko. The committee took the decision at the meeting of the parliamentary regulatory committee, considering the plea of the Prosecutor Yury Lutsenko against Savchenko referring the criminal prosecution, detention and arrest of Savchenko.

Yury Lutsenko, the Prosecutor General of Ukraine made three submissions to the Verkhovna Rada of Ukraine on MP Nadia Savchenko. He announced that he will submit the provision on the bearing to the responsibility, detention and arrest of Savchenko.The Russian state bodies will not be attracted in the questioning

Judges panel of Obolon District Court of Kyiv made a decision to question Mykola Azarov, the former prime minister of Ukraine and other officials of time of Viktor Yanukovych's presidency within the case of the state treason on March 27-29. Vladyslav Deviatko, the presiding judge claimed this as 112 Ukraine broadcasted.

Also, Pavlo Lebedev, the former defense minister, Stanyslav Shuliak, the former commander of internal forces of Interior Ministry and former Yanukovych's securities Kostyantyn Kobzar and Serhy Bernatsky. The questioning will be held without the involvement of the Russian state bodies and in on-line regime.

'The court guided by article 114 of the Criminal Procedure Code of Ukraine established March 27, 28, 29, 2018 for the questioning of the witnesses', the judge said.

Later the court made a decision to question a number of the witnesses proposed by the defense.

Today the court questioned Oksana Mediyeva, the resident of Crimea and the participant of Anti-Maidan movement (the pro-Russian movement, which emerged and faded during the revolutionary events of Euromaidan, - 112 International). Mediyeva appeared before the court in the video conference mode from Simferopol, in the annexed Crimea.PRINT | EMAIL | PERMALINK Found Objects Edit out the patriarchy It's that time of year againthe annual Art+Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon is here, and happening on Saturday, March 24, from 11am to 4pm. The Edit-a-thon was started five years ago by the organization Art+Feminism with the explicit mission of cis and transgender women, feminism and the arts on Wikipedia. Wikipediathe free, open-source, online encyclopedia, is the most popular general reference site on the internet. And most of its editors are men. What that means is that topics, issues and artists that men value receive a tremendous amount of coverage, while those outside of that myopic view, don't. That gap is a huge problem, and the Edit-a-thon exists to train new editors to equalize what the website shares with the world. It's all happening at the Albuquerque Museum (2000 Mountain NW), just show up with your laptoptraining and snacks are provided. View in Alibi calendar

Join the Circus OT Circusthe occupational therapy spot in Downtown Albuquerque that is decidedly committed to local arts, toohosts its first art pop-up and market of the year this Saturday March 24, at their spot on Central (that is, 709 Central Ave. NW). The pop-up, which just so happens to coincide with the first Growers' Market of the yearfeatures local artists, crafters and other creatives of all kind showing off their handmade wares, all of which are available for purchase. Not to mention, visitors can spot a new mural on the OT Circus building by Lynnette Haozous and Joseph Arnoux titled, Original Inhabitants, featuring indigenous plants and animals of New Mexico that are now endangered. From 10am to 2pm, OT Circus welcomes visitors to their space, and has plenty of sidewalk chalk on-hand, if browsing the stalls of the pop-up ends up inspiring you. View in Alibi calendar

Living to Tell the Tale Storytellers of New Mexico, a nonprofit aimed at helping storytellers of all stripes craft their words perfectly, hosts a workshop on storycrafting this Saturday, March 24. From 6 to 8pm, an informal discussion of craft takes place, offering opportunities to share a new story idea, or practice telling one to a receptive group. Anticipate friendly feedback and constructive advice. To RSVP and find out more information, like the localewhich is TBD at this momentsend a quick email to elaine@embodiedvoicestoryarts. com. This workshop is free, and open to storytellers of all levels.Rob M.

It won't come as much of a surprise if you've been reading these back pages, but I'm pretty sure we're in for some cannabis legalization next year. I don't want to jinx it or anything (I'm knocking on plywood as I write this), but the likelihood of a pro-cannabis governor in 2018 has seemed fairly inevitableto me, at least.

And then the New Mexico Democratic party announced their support for cannabis legalization at the pre-primary convention earlier this month.

It wasn't an official platform change, and it doesn't mean every Democrat in the state will suddenly flip over to the (clearly more reasonable) side, but it does mean that the Republicans are going to have a tough time yanking single-issue voters over the fence if they don't change their cannabis tune, too.

I don't see why we can't all just have a good time together over here where the grass is greener (see what I did?).

According to the Albuquerque Journal, two of the three Democrats seeking the gubernatorial seat have shown support for legalization (Michelle Lujan Grisham told reporters last week that she supports it, but wants more research done on safely managing its introduction, and Jeff Apodaca said he plans to work with legislators to legalize cannabis during the 2019 session).

Only state Sen. Joseph Cervantes appears leery of full legalization, noting the state's DWI and crime problems as his priorities. I suppose he isn't aware that a study published earlier this year by The Economic Journal found that border states (hey that's us!) where cannabis has been legalized have seen their violent crime rates drop by an average of 13 percent since their laws changed. He also probably never heard of the paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research last year that found legalized cannabis had minimal impact on substance use, youth health outcomes, crime rates and traffic accidents.

I don't hate him, though. He did sponsor a proposal to decriminalize the possession of small amounts of cannabiswhich would have made the penalty a mere $50 fine. It didn't pan, of course, but you can't fault the guy for trying. Apparently, he still prefers the decriminalization route to full legalization. I would urge him to actually take some time and read the research. Politics is much faster and far more divisive today than when we were kids, Joe. Riding the fence has lost its appeal.

Especially since it looks like the New Mexico Democratic Party is done with wedgies and splinters. At the pre-primary, over 90 percent of delegates voted in favor of supporting the decriminalization and legalization of cannabis. The new platform also calls on state Democrats to support federal descheduling of the drug.

Ariz. Says Bring Your Meds

An Arizona Court of Appeals just ruled that out-of-state medical cannabis patients with valid prescription cards can possess and use cannabis legally within the state. The surprising policy change was the result of a 2016 case involving California resident Stanley Kemmish Jr., who was arrested by Arizona state police for possessing cannabis and paraphernalia. Kemmish was charged with possession of narcotic drugs, possession of cannabis and possession of drug paraphernalia.

Kemmish fought the charges on the grounds that Arizona's laws protect cannabis users who are taking the medication under the recommendation of a doctor, but prosecutors said the law only protected patients who had received a card issued by the Arizona Department of Health Services.

The case went before an appellate court, where a panel ruled that Kemmish was indeed protected, since the Arizona Medical Marijuana Act lists visiting qualifying patientswho are immune to prosecutionas non-residents who have been diagnosed with a debilitating medical condition by a person who is licensed with authority to prescribe drugs to humans in the state of the person's residence.

According to the court's ruling: Whether another state's medical marijuana law requires an identification card, a physician's letter or some other documentation is immaterial, so long as the documentation is sufficient under the law of the issuing state.

Out-of-state cannabis patients aren't allowed to shop their dispensaries, though, so don't bother asking.

Now if only I could drive back to Albuquerque from Las Cruces without getting popped by federal border agents.  (Did you already forget? That's right. You can get charged with a felony in New Mexico for possessing legal medical cannabis if you're unlucky enough to be carrying it through an interior border checkpoint. We have two in New Mexico: One on US-70, between Holloman AFB and White Sands; the other on Interstate 25, between Elephant Butte and Socorro. The Border Patrol has already said they don't give a shit about your illness, you hippie fuck.)PLEASE NOTE!

Due to the March 23, 2020 NM DOH Public Health Order, These Event Listings Are Not Accurate!

All non-essential businesses are closed, public gatherings are prohibited!

(One day some of these events will be rescheduled or will resume, but they are not happening now!)Some of us are thoroughly in touch with our own emotions. Some of us clearly struggle through emotions daily. For Sallie Scheufler 's MFA thesis, she created A Good Cry. Through a series of performative videos and sculptural installations, Sallie brings her knowledge and discovery of the human struggle to life for people of all ages to explore and enjoy. CFA Downtown hosts this beautiful and moving exhibit, which opened on March 12 , and concludes on March 23 , running from 11am to 6pm . Whether wearing a bleeding heart on your sleeve or bottling it all up until the breaking point hits, this display of sadness, euphoria and the gamut of human feels, offers a chance to see exactly what this accomplished artist wants to convey about the nature of tears and crying behavior. This installation is free to the public. (Mayo Lua de Frenchie)

Performative videos and sculptural installations, the exhibition questions and scrutinizes the the nature of crying behavior.

A GOOD CRY is inspired by, and made of tears. Through a series of performative videos and sculptural installations, the exhibition questions and scrutinizes the the nature of crying behavior.

A GOOD CRY is Sallie Scheufler's MFA Thesis Show!!

----------

Sallie Scheufler currently resides in Albuquerque, where she is pursuing her MFA in Photography from the University of New Mexico. Raised in the Sonoran Desert, she received her BFA from Arizona State University in 2012. Scheufler is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily with image-based media. She has exhibited work in galleries like the Center for Contemporary Arts in Santa Fe, Eye Lounge in Phoenix, 516 ARTS in Albuquerque, and the University of New Mexico Art Museum. Scheufler's practice is concerned with how humans communicate, the performance of gender, intimacy, her knowledge of her own body, the informative coming-of-age years, the complexities of unhealthy and healthy relationships, the questioning and formation of identity, growing old, the scientific and cultural ignorance of female sexuality.

A GOOD CRY is inspired by, and made of tears. Through a series of performative videos and sculptural installations, the exhibition questions and scrutinizes the the nature of crying behavior.

A GOOD CRY is Sallie Scheufler's MFA Thesis Show!!

----------

Sallie Scheufler currently resides in Albuquerque, where she is pursuing her MFA in Photography from the University of New Mexico. Raised in the Sonoran Desert, she received her BFA from Arizona State University in 2012. Scheufler is an interdisciplinary artist working primarily with image-based media. She has exhibited work in galleries like the Center for Contemporary Arts in Santa Fe, Eye Lounge in Phoenix, 516 ARTS in Albuquerque, and the University of New Mexico Art Museum. Scheufler's practice is concerned with how humans communicate, the performance of gender, intimacy, her knowledge of her own body, the informative coming-of-age years, the complexities of unhealthy and healthy relationships, the questioning and formation of identity, growing old, the scientific and cultural ignorance of female sexuality.Exactly 50 years ago on Monday, Feb. 19, a childrens television show called Mr. Rogers Neighborhood hit the national airwaves on NET (an early educational network, later succeeded by PBS). It was a hallmark moment in television history, particularly for creator and star Fred Rogers, who would go on to claim some 40 honorary degrees, a Peabody Award and a Presidential Medal of Freedom. Rogers show lasted 31 seasons and aired until August of 2001, forming a key memory block in the minds of generations of American childrenmost of whom can still sing the opening theme song (Wont You Be My Neighbor) word-for-word.

Mr. Rogers Neighborhood introduced young viewers to such indelible characters as Speedy Delivery man Mr. McFeely, friendly policeman Officer Clemens, kindly neighbor Betty Aberlin and gruff-voiced Chef Brockett. In the regular segment known as the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, a toy trolly transported imaginative children to a land populated by puppets like King Friday XIII, X the Owl, Henrietta Pussycat and Daniel Striped Tiger. And yet, Rogers was always clear on the line between reality and fantasy, often taking cameras behind the scenes to expose the puppeteers and sets that brought it all to life.

Unlike other educational shows, Rogers weekly half-hour was rarely interested in teaching kids hard facts like numbers or letters. Instead, it gently confronted social concerns, talked about feelings and addressed the many confusions of growing up. In a famous 1970 episode, Rogers talked about the death of one of his trademark pet goldfish. He often spoke to kids about such real-world problems as war and divorce. Through it all was the reassuring feeling that the host was never talking down to kids or lecturing them. Instead, he spoke to kids honestly and directly, a calm, comforting voice that always insisted Youre special to me; Youre the only person in this whole world like you; and Im proud of the way youre growing and changing.

In addition to marking the 50th anniversary of the show, 2018 has seen what would have been Fred Rogers 90th birthday. (He was born on March 20, 1928.) To celebrate these two milestones, PBS has teamed up with Amazons live streaming video platform Twitch to stream every single episodeall 856 of themonline. The livestream, which kicked off on Tuesday, March 20 at 11am MST, started with the 90 greatest episodes, back to back. Once that milestone is cleared, Twitch will get down to airing a complete run of the entire series. It will take about 18 days to get through all 33 years (!) of the show.

Theres no doubt the world is a sadder place since the passing of Fred Rogers in 2003. If ever there was a time our world needed a dose of the civility, kindness, empathy and deep humanity of which Mr. Rogers was capable, its now. I suggest you join me in watching as many episodes of Mr. Rogers Neighborhood as humanly possibleif only to remind yourself of Mr. Rogers core message: We are all unique, we make each day special by being ourselves, and people can like us just the way we are.Film Review

Loveless

Icy family drama will make you glad you dont live in RussiaDateline: Indiana

A high-profile white supremacist group has disbanded because of a love triangle that resulted in assault charges for their leader. According to The Daily Beast, Matthew Heimbach, leader of the Traditionalist Worker Partya white nationalist Neo-Nazi groupwas arrested last week for allegedly assaulting his wife and the party's spokesman David Matt Parrott when confronted about an affair Heimbach was reportedly engaged in with Parrott's wife. According to police, the alleged assault occurred at a TWP compound in Paoli, Ind. Reports allege Parrotts wife Jessica was having an affair with Heimbach, who is married to Parrotts stepdaughter from a previous marriage. The two were reportedly caught in the act by Parrott and Mrs. Heimbech while they were having sex. Following Heimbach's arrest, Parrott released a statement indicating he was leaving TWP. I'm done, he told the Southern Poverty Law Center, I'm out. He also told reporters that the incident might put an end to the hate group, saying supporters had lost faith in the party on every level. Parrott took down the group's website after leaving. Heimbech is currently free on bond.

Dateline: Australia

A New South Wales man was accused of fare evasion after he used a public transport card that he had implanted beneath his skin. The Guardian reports that Australian Meow-Ludo Disco Gamma Meow-Meow pled guilty to charges of fare evasion related to an incident that occurred in August 2017. Despite an inspector confirming a valid tap-on, public transportation officials accused Meow-Meow of attempting to ride without a ticket. As part of a body modification experiment, Meow-Meow had the near-field communication (NFC) chip from an Opal transportation card cut out and encased in a bio-compatible plastic before having the chip inserted under the skin of his hand. Last year, Transport for New South Wales threatened to deactivate the chip, saying in a statement that the state did not wish to encourage experiments of that sort. Meow-Meow's charge of fare evasion was issued last year by Sydney Trains. His penalty was over $1,200 in fines, but no conviction was recorded. Court documents show Meow-Meows Opal card had a credit balance of $14.07 when he was confronted by the inspector, more than enough to pay his fare. Meow-Meow reportedly blamed the penalty on fear of technology.

Dateline: Romania

A Romanian court has ruled that a man is dead, despite his protests to the contrary. Last week, a spokesperson for a Romanian court in the city of Vasului told reporters that 63-year-old Constantin Reliu appealed to the courts too late to contest a death certificate that had been issued in his name. According to the spokesperson, the ruling is final. According to reports, Reliu lost contact with his family in 1992 when he traveled to Turkey for work. In 2016, following decades of absence, his wife applied for a death certificate. Earlier this year, Turkish authorities found Reliu with expired papers and deported him back to Romania, where he found he had been declared dead. His request to change his status was denied by Romanian courts, however, because the appeal was not made within the time allotted. Reliu told reporters that he will be unable to find employment due to his current legal status.

Dateline: France

A French baker was fined for refusing to take a day off every week. According to reports, an Aube law requiring bakeries to close one day a week was violated by baker Cedric Vaivre in the town of Lusigny-sur-Barse last summer. In response, authorities reportedly handed him a 3000 (about $3,700) fine. According to the BBC, Vaivre is disputing the charges and has garnished support from a number of his neighborsincluding the town's mayor Christian Branle, who complained that the law discourages tourism. A petition calling for the charges to be dropped and the law removed from the books has reached over 3,000 signatures as of this printing. Vaivre is claiming that he only wants to keep his bakery open for the full week during the tourist season in the summer.

Dateline: Florida

The Hillsborough County Sheriffs Office in Tampa, Fla., reportedly impounded a goat last week. The Tampa Bay Times reports that law enforcement officers were called to a residence because a stray goat had been seen wandering in a residential area. Police officials posted notices about the animal, but received no response. Deputies say it appears friendly towards humans and was most likely someone's pet. They now say that if the animal's rightful owner will step forward before March 23, they will be able to take it home after paying a $75 impound fee. Otherwise, the goat will be placed up for bid at an auction in Thonotosassa on March 24.PRINT | EMAIL | PERMALINK Letters Seriously, Steve? Dear Alibi, Does the frequency of gun ownership have anything to do with suicide rates? According to statistics available online, Wyoming has the highest rate of suicide by guns. Two-thirds of all gun deaths in America are suicides. Wyoming is consistently in the top three positions for suicides per capita with 25.2 out of 100,000 residents in 2016. (In 2015, they were number one.) Guess who is number four? New Mexico with 22.5 per 100,000 residents. And guess what? We had more of them because we have more people. So, Steven Dapra [Common Sense Makes No Sense, Letters Alibi v27 i11], I applaud you for using the internet to do research. I did too.

Cuts Ignore Small Business Dear Editor, I was glad to hear about the recent [tax cut] protest in Civic Plaza, because all the positive spin about how it has led to corporate bonuses ignores a key group: small business owners like me. The law gives enormous, permanent tax cuts to large corporations but does little to strengthen the economic power of small businesses. The Small Business Administration says small businesses employ more than half of New Mexicans, but what does the new tax law do for us? Other than creating an even more complicated tax code that gives every advantage to our corporate competitors, not much. The tax law doesn't treat small businesses like job creators. I may get a nominal cut, but it won't be nearly enough to offer raises or hire employees. That is a snub every small business owner, and everyone who works at a small business, will feel.

Two Problems, One Solution Dear Alibi, Sometimes two challenging problems can be each others solutions. Problem No. 1: New Mexico lacks sufficient numbers of professionals such as nurses, physicians, teachers, police, fire fighters, psychologists and other mental health specialists. If we successfully protect our DACA families, as we should, we still will need more experts to be our best future state. Problem No. 2: American citizens living in US territories surrounded by Atlantic and Pacific oceans have undergone devastating and increasingly frequent climate events leading to a mass and random exodus into states like Texas and Florida. Few if any permanent arrangements are there to welcome the many highly skilled, usually bilingual, American climate refugees. There is a growing threat to the peoples of our American territories in Guam and the Micronesians, American Samoa, the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico. I learned a great respect for the abilities and resilience of these island Americans. But resilient or not, their survival as a geographical entity is coming to an end. Ocean levels are rising, hurricanes and typhoons are intensifying. Where will their most creative and talented island people go? Recruiting the very island Americans we most need to our mile-high, safe, beautiful and spacious New Mexico would easily benefit our state, while providing a fresh start to these neighbors. Nor would immigration be an issue since all these territorial residents are American citizens that can move freely to the mainland. An Occupational Opportunity Office for the recruitment of American Climate Refugees securing professionals in short supply here in New Mexico, a new state level office, would move this opportunity forward.Weekly Alibi helped commence the primary election season with a candidate forum held last Thursday at ye old Albuquerque Press Club. Thats the hidden fifth estate headquarters at the top of the hill thats right behind a former asylum turned toney boutique hotel.

The club is in a log cabin that was built more than 100 years ago and so the whole area has its share of ghosts I am sure, but none of them were about on the late winter day of the candidate event. It was still warm but windy yet springlike when I hiked up the hill from my parking place to meet with six contenders for the post to be vacated by gubernatorial candidate Michelle Lujan Grisham.

Grisham is running for governor this year, and in her stead a bevy of progressive candidates is awaiting voter approval to send one lucky legislator to Washington. Although some of the candidates who appeared at said forumincluding presumed frontrunner Pat Davishave yet to formally qualify for the election, and in fact fell below the threshold of signatures and delegate support needed at the Democratic Party of New Mexico pre-primary convention held a couple of weeks ago, all those who appeared were ready to do battle for democracy.

Disclosure: This is a progressive, anti-Trump newspaper, but we gotta tell you that there are at least two other politicos in the race: Republican Janice Arnold Jones is a former state representative who currently works as an immigration lawyer. She says she wants to bring back morality. Libertarian Lloyd Princeton wants New Mexicans to take personal responsibility for their part in the outcomes they desire. Bootstraps, folks, bootstraps. So whatever those grandiose statements from other parties mean, you still oughta vote Democrat; theyre much more grounded and they wont be about mindlessly saluting a megalomanic, if elected. Heres a briefing on what that excellent field of candidates talked about at the Albuquerque Press Club on March 15, 2018.

The evenings discourse began with candidate introductions, followed by a lengthy, but relevant question from Alibi news editor August March about the specifics of a hypothetical relationship our new Congressperson might have with Attorney General Jeff Sessions and the US Department of Justice, especially where immigration matters are concerned. The question set the tone for what followed. It was a given that these contenders would take issue with the draconian politics being pursued by the DOJ and ICE, but each used the opportunity to discuss plans and proposed policies they would individually follow upon being elected.

Pat Davis

An affable, informed and seasoned politico, Davis is currently the District 6 Councilor for the city of Albuquerque. A former police officer, he was attired in a light colored linen jacket, though it was still five days before springtime when the forum occurred. This anticipatory move led to a personal presentation that was friendly and forward-looking.

As a City Councilor, Davis introduced legislation limiting the agency ICE agents have in their interactions with local law enforcement, and has stated that Trumps immigration policies are cruel. Davis is also on track as a progressive who owns guns. With regards to federal laws requiring a background check, pre-purchase, he would co-sponsor legislation to make that simple remedy happen while protecting the rights of responsible gun owners.

Debra Haaland

Seeming serene, yet totally passionate and knowledable in her appearance at the Press Club, Haaland says she has a record of standing up to Donald Trump. She intends to hold the orange one and his supporters in Congress accountable for the damage theyve done to our republic. Another responsible human against the proposal for a border wall, Haaland says US immigration policy must recognize this countrys dependency on immigrant labor, and treat with dignity and humanity those who work and build their families here.

On gun control, Haaland continues to strike a progressive tone, arguing that background checks are part of a solution that also includes stripping the power of the NRA, with committments from elected officials to not accept [their] campaign contributions. Haaland is an enrolled member of the Laguna Pueblo. Both of her parents served with distinction in the US armed forces. She is a graduate of the UNM Law School.

Jesse Heitner

Heitners youthful exhuberance and optimism were clearly manifested at last Thursdays forum. A member of the Christian left, Heitner has a doctorate in public health from Harvard. He believes in empowering minorities, acting with compassion and helping the poor and refugees. Though Heitner admitted he had less experience than others on the ballot with regards to the American immigration experience, he earnestly believes that using funds to arrest Dreamers, break up families and terrorize communities is not only cruel, but a wasteful application of funds.

On the subject of guns in this nation, Heitners plans are less detailed than his cohorts, but he obviously empathizes with living humans (hes a doctor, Jim!). Conseqently, such issues are often framed in Heitners expansive, very detailed healthcare plans, which include support for a single-payer system via medicare for all and stopping the opiod crisis by employing continuing education and research to equip doctors in better pain management techniques.

Damien Lara

The youngest child of an immigrant family from southeastern New Mexico, Lara is a graduate of Brown University who spent his early life working as a farm hand in the potato and onion fields in the eastern part of our state. His first hand knowledge of immigration and his passion and commitment to equality, despite immigration status was the keystone of his overarching message of justice and equality for all. As part of his immigration stance, Lara says we must end the militarization of police and the privitization of prisons, two sources of institutional racism.

Lara believes Trumps wall would be a monument to racism. Further, his views on gun control, like Heitners are part of this candidates platform on healthcare. Lara wants to treat the epidemic of gun violence in the US as a public health issue and hopes to sponsor legislation that will, consequently, allow the CDC to begin substantive research into the phenomenon, leading to treatment-based solutions.

Antoinette Sedillo Lopez

A tried and true social justice advocate, Sedillo Lopez served as a professor of law at UNM for 27 years. She recently served as the director of Enlace Commentario, a nonprofit that advocates for domestic violence issues among the Latino immigrant community of central New Mexico. Given such bona fides, its no wonder that Sedillo Lopez views on immigration are acute and well-researched. Speaking to the gathered audience at the forum as one might approach a jury, this candidate believes that federal immigration policies should strive to bring the undocumented workers in our community out of the shadows, reunite families and provide protections to exploited immigrant workers.

On the subject of gun control, she would like to see through legislation that closes the gun show loophole, require universal background checks and reinstate the federal assault weapons ban. Sedillo Lopez also feels that repealing liability laws that shield gun manufacturers would serve to disempower the NRA, leading to a reduction in gun violence and congressional support of the organizations lobbying efforts.

Damon Martinez

A UNM graduate, Damon Martinez was one of the US attorneys unfairly sacked by Trump, Sessions and their minions when the former took office in 2017. Martinez views himself as a public servant, not a politician; his policies will be informed, he says by his first-person experience as a federal prosecutor. And this is what his experience tells him about Trumps immigration policy: Republicans are determined to squander taxpayer dollars, fueling fear and pandering to extremists who seek to turn us against one another, but our country is stronger than that. I wont allow Republican leadership or Donald Trump to tear small children from their parents, unlawfully detain legal residents, or violate anyones civil rights because of the color of their skin.

Candidate Martinez is equally eloquent about gun control, writing that, like Heitner and Lara, hed like to see the epidemic of gun violence in this nation treated as a public health threat; he also wants to close the gun show loophole, expand background checks and go after common sense reforms that will ensure that the NRA gun lobby no longer holds our lives in the palms of their hands.

Candidate Paul Moya did not attend this forum.If you blinked, you might have missed the laid-back, less-than-an-hour Albuquerque City Council regular meeting of March 19, 2018.

Nevertheless, She Persisted

Pamela Herndon, along with others from the Southwest Womens Law Center, accepted a proclamation declaring March as Womens History Month. Here in the US, Womens History Month got started as International Womens Day in 1911. President Jimmy Carter turned it into a week in 1980, and Congress made it official in 1982, expanding that to a whole month in 1987. The idea is to recognize and honor the uncountable ways women have contributed to life on this planet. President Carter spoke the simple truth when he said this about women and their role in history: Too often the women were unsung and sometimes their contributions went unnoticed. But the achievements, leadership, courage, strength and love of the women who built America was as vital as that of the men whose names we know so well.

Councilors Pat Davis and Klarissa Pena read the proclamation and reminded us that New Mexico had our first female Secretary of State in 1923, and that currently 25 of the 52 appointed positions at city hall are filled by women, and 4 of the 9 council seats are held by elected women.

Nevertheless She Persisted is this years overall theme according to the University of New Mexicos Womens Resource Center. The WRC has several events planned including an evening of women in music videos screening party on March 28, and a panel discussion on March 29. Check out: news. unm. edu/ news/ celebrate- womens- history- month- at- unm for more information.

Fire Raise and New Digs

Union fire employees got a 1.5 percent raise but it was not without contest. Councilors gave fire union employees a 1.5 percent raise in July and promised another 1.5 percent if gross receipts taxes were good. But gross receipts are down and the city faces a $40 million shortfall. The citys chief financial officer said there is no source of funding in the future for the roughly $450K a year in reoccurring expenses. This is why three Councilors said no. I think we are foolhardy to put something in that we dont have a budget for in the following year, practical Councilor Trudy Jones said. A similar measure died on a tied vote at the Councils last meeting.

The raises will only cost about $211,000 for the rest of the fiscal year. The fiscal year starts July 1. Diego Arencon, president of the International Association of Fire Fighters Local 244 said the dedicated fire union employees appreciate the support as the city works together to get a handle on public safety crises. Firefighters, paramedics and medical technicians are often the first emergency personnel on scene, and respond to a wide variety of calls from fires of all kinds to cats up power trees to the most horrendous, bloodiest crimes the city has seen.

A second part of the resolution approved $761,000 to go towards affordable housing projects. The resolution says an estimated 50 percent of Albuquerque households are rent-burdened (rent is more than 30 percent of their household income), making affordable housing a real need in the metro area.

Stepping Up

A lively round of applause sounded out for the city folks who are taking seats on city boards, commissions and committees: Andrea Plaza will join the Housing and Neighborhood Economic Development Committee; Patricia L. Chavez will take a seat at the ABQ Volunteers Advisory Board; Giovanni Haqani will lend his talents to the Cable Franchise and Hearing Board; Gwen Colonel and Bernadette Miera will help tackle issues on the Housing and Neighborhood Economic Committee and Dr. Sylvia M. Ramos will share her knowledge on the Old Town Portal Market Advisory Board.

Keep it Neutral

Attention to those listed above. No more hosting or organizing political forums for city boards, commissions or committees. The hub-bub started when the citys police oversight board set aside time for a mayoral candidate forum. This made Councilor Brad Winter grumpy and the Council agreed, passing this measure saying: The hosting of political forums is not within the intended scope of any city board and commission, and such forums could jeopardize the publics impression about the neutrality or objectivity of the Citys boards  applying otherwise scarce public resources to support political activity in any form is poor public policy.

Stay Tuned

 Councilors will take up giving tickets to those who park cars in the bike lanes along city streets.

 Councilor Borrego wants to make a reversible driving lane along Paseo del Norte in her district to help alleviate traffic. She said people are spending too much time in traffic and should be home with their families.

 A measure urging the New Mexico State Legislature to support the End of Life Options Act giving terminally ill people medical aid in dying is in the works.

 Extending the cable franchise agreements expiration date until October 1, 2018 while the contract is negotiated is the intention of the Council.PRINT | EMAIL | PERMALINK Newscity APS Not Arming Teachers An Albuquerque Public Schools board passed a resolution that will keep guns out of classrooms. APS Board of Education members voted earlier this month in opposition to the idea that arming educators with handguns will deter school shootings. The resolution said that school staff are not trained law enforcement officers and should not be asked or incentivized to keep weapons accessible in their classrooms. Most APS schools already operate with an armed officer on campus. The resolution also calls on Congress and the US government to conduct more research into school violence, therapy and preventative measures. The board's resolution was passed on a 6-1 vote. The only member to vote against the resolution was Peggy Muller-Aragon. The idea of arming teachers has been promoted recently by President Donald Trump, who told reporters last month that an armed teacher would be able to immediately fire back if a savage sicko came to a school with bad intentions.

Contaminated Water Illegally Dumped by Transit Employees Officials reported that the Transit Departments Westside facility illegally dumped contaminated wastewater into storm drains. The city's Inspector General provided a report to the New Mexico Environment Department and US Environmental Protection Agency last month alleging that over 300,800 gallons of contaminated water were illegally dumped by city employees into storm drains which led to a retention pond south of the Transit Department facility near Unser and Interstate 40. According to the report, a hose used to transport waste from the facility's steam clean and bus wash bays to an underground decontamination tank was too short. Instead of addressing the problem and procuring a new hose, however, a supervisor allegedly instructed employees to use the drains instead. The report describes how employees described the supervisor as a hard person to work for who often threatened them by stating that employees can be replaced. This supervisor allegedly ordered his subordinates to drain the wastewater into the storm drains on the weekends when management wasn't at the facility. The practice reportedly ceased in 2016, when a manager discovered an employee discharging waste into a storm drain. A spokesperson for the transit department told the Albuquerque Journal that two maintenance supervisors and another employee are currently being disciplined. Current employees are being retrained on waste disposal procedures. An environmental engineering firm has been hired by the city to collect and analyze soil samples in the area.YEREVAN, MARCH 22, ARMENPRESS. US President Donald Trump says he prefers to have good relations with Russia.

I called president Putin to congratulate him on winning the election, Obama had called him in the past also. Fake news media have gone crazy, because they wanted me to criticize him. They are wrong. Having good relations with Russia and others isnt a bad thing, Trump said, explaining his congratulatory phone call to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The US President said he believes Russia can help in solving the problems with North Korea, Syria, Ukraine, ISIS, Iran and even arms race.

English translator/editor: Stepan KocharyanYEREVAN, MARCH 22, ARMENPRESS. French ex-President Nicolas Sarkozy has been charged in the 2007 illegal campaign finance case, Le Monde newspaper reported. Sarkozy will be under court supervision.

The case concerns an illegal funding from Lybia, and the former president is charged with bribery, illegal funding of campaign, and illegal possession of Lybian state funds. Sarkozy was questioned for 26 hours in the central department of corruption, financial and tax crimes.

Sarkozy denies any wrongdoing.

English translator/editor: Stepan KocharyanYEREVAN, MARCH 22, ARMENPRESS. Peruvian President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, ensnared in a corruption scandal involving Latin America's largest construction firm, announced his resignation on Wednesday, CNN reports.

The resignation came one day shy of a congressional impeachment vote against Kuczynski, who made the announcement on national television but continued to deny any wrongdoing in a scandal involving nearly $800 million in alleged bribes paid by Brazilian construction firm Odebrecht.

"Facing this difficult situation that unfairly makes me look guilty of acts in which I have not participated, I think it's in the country's best interest for me to resign the republic's presidency," he said.

"I don't want to become a barrier for our country to find its way to the unity and harmony that we so much need and which I was denied."

Kuczynski, 79, called himself a victim of "subjective political acts," accused opposition leaders of a witch hunt and said his resignation would shield his family and the nation from further "uncertainty."

English translator/editor: Stepan KocharyanYEREVAN, MARCH 22, ARMENPRESS. The US Congress is allocating more than 420 million dollars in aid to Ukraine and more than 105 million dollars to Georgia as support.

The figures were made public as the Republicans and Democrats reached a preliminary agreement over the 2018 budget.

It is noteworthy that the figures dont include the 200 million dollar military assistance to Ukraine.

English translator/editor: Stepan KocharyanYEREVAN, MARCH 22, ARMENPRESS. The Armenian government approved the bill on ratifying the Comprehensive and Enhanced Partnership Agreement between the Government of the Republic of Armenia, on the one hand, and the European Union and the European Atomic Energy Community and their member states, on the other hand, reports Armenpress.

Deputy foreign minister Shavarsh Kocharyan said this new framework agreement is important in a sense that it raises the Armenia-EU bilateral ties to a new partnership level and aims at regulating them in the upcoming years. It is more comprehensive and has been made in accordance with the essence and depth of the bilateral relations.

The agreement complies with Armenias commitments assumed in other integration formats. The agreement will come into force when the last EU state notifies that it completed the inner-state procedures. As of now only Estonia completed these procedures. As for the separate provisions of the agreement the EU has completed the inner-state procedures, it will be possible to implement when Armenia as well completes the inner-state procedures. In this case it would be possible to start implementing that part of the agreement which can be applied before the agreement finally comes into force, the deputy FM noted.

As a result of the adoption of the law the procedures envisaged for the November 24, 2017 agreements coming into force will be ensured.

The agreement regulates the Armenia-EU dialogue in economic and political fields, sectoral cooperation and commercial relations. It highlights and promotes continuation of political and economic reforms. The agreement offers a qualitatively more thorough sectoral partnership planning a respective approach closer to the EU standards with several directions, stated in the foreign ministrys conclusion.

English  translator/editor: Aneta HarutyunyanYEREVAN, MARCH 22, ARMENPRESS. A Cabinet sitting was held on March 22, chaired by Prime Minister of Armenia Karen Karapetyan. Before proceeding to the agenda, the Prime Minister gave a number of instructions, ARMENPRESS was informed from the press service of the Government of Armenia.

During the latest consultation at the Government, the State Water Management Committee provided information on the amount of water available in the reservoirs and reported on the ongoing preparations for the 2018 irrigation season. We also discussed the irrigation conditions and priorities in individual Provinces, Karen Karapetyan noted.

Whereas the amount of water available in the reservoirs may cause certain risks in terms of irrigation water supply, Karen Karapetyan gave the Head of State Water Management Committee seven days to work out with the concerned authorities and submit to the Ministry of Finance cost estimates for the procurement of mobile pumping devices, deep-well pumps, rehabilitation of idle deep-wells, and for the implementation of new drilling projects, based on the domestic demand for irrigation water.

The Prime Minister instructed the Ministers of Finance, Territorial Administration and Development and Nature Protection to launch the procurement process in cooperation with the State Water Management Committee within 10 days upon receipt of the package. At the same time, the environmental impact assessment expertise will have to be provided within the shortest possible timeframes.



The Ministers of Agriculture, Territorial Administration and Development, the Head of State Water Management Committee and the Governors shall sum up the water sector-related investment projects within a 3-month period, identify the priorities for 2019 and submit relevant proposals to the Government Staff. The Head of Government instructed the stakeholders to henceforth start the preparations for the irrigation season in the autumn-winter period.

The Executive approved the Yerevan State University Graduates Union NGO-developed Housing and Social Security Investment Program to be implemented on an area of 6.57 hectares adjacent to Monte Melkonyan Street. The Government also approved the proposal to sell the plot of land to the Organizations through direct sales. The Renaissance Youth Village will be built within the framework of the project to the cost of 52 billion drams.

The Government amended one of its previous decisions. The proposed arrangements will enable our compatriots who have settled abroad to apply and get information on registered rights and restrictions on their property, as well as final documents (State registration of property rights, certificates, etc.) through the consular posts of the Republic of Armenia. That is, our compatriots living in a foreign country may benefit from the services provided by the State Committee of Immovable Property Cadastre through Armenias consulates without having to come to Armenia. The Prime Minister instructed those responsible to properly inform our compatriots about the new arrangement.

In conclusion, the Government decided to propose the National Assembly Speaker to convene an extraordinary National Assembly session on March 23, at 11:00.

English  translator/editor: Tigran SirekanyanYEREVAN, MARCH 22, ARMENPRESS. Armenia works with the separate member states of the European Union on visa liberalization, deputy foreign minister Shavarsh Kocharyan told reporters after todays Cabinet meeting, Armenpress reports.

He said the implementation of separate provisions of the Armenia-EU Comprehensive and Enhanced Partnership Agreement, which will be possible when Armenia ratifies it, will further facilitate the talks on visa liberalization.

I cannot mention exact dates, it is linked with different factors, different readmission agreements since we all understand that the EU is concerned over the issues of illegal migrants, the deputy minister noted.

At the same time, the deputy FM stated that the visa liberalization is a constant process and its not so that they are waiting for a concrete moment to launch that process. Here there is a problem of working with separate countries. This is the case when this jurisdiction is not authorized to the EU, each state can hinder. In this sense its important to work with all of them, he said.

English  translator/editor: Aneta HarutyunyanYEREVAN, MARCH 22, ARMENPRESS. Dogan holding, the largest media group of Turkey, will from now on operate at the behest of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

Dogan Holding was sold to Demiroren Holding, a Turkish congolomerate with a chairman happening to be Erdogans friend  Erdogan Demiroren.

Turkish newspaper Cumhurriyet reported the news stressing that from now on the one man, one voice principle will function in the country, taking into account that the Turkish president is silencing his critics.

The deal was made for 890 million USD. Dogan Holding include the widely distributed newspapers Hurriyet, Posta, Kanal D TV, CNN Turk, Dogan news agency and others.

Many have expressed concern over this deal in terms of media freedom, because this move is shifting a significant part of popular media outlets under governmental control.

Dogan Holding is amongst the biggest conglomerates in Turkey operating in the energy, media, industry, trade, insurance and tourism industries.

English translator/editor: Stepan KocharyanYEREVAN, MARCH 22, ARMENPRESS. The government of Armenia approved the bill on ratifying the 2017 July 25 convention On excluding double taxation on income and property and preventing tax evasion between Armenia and Israel.

During todays Cabinet meeting, finance minister Vardan Aramyan mentioned that the Constitutional Court has recently endorsed the agreement.

As of this moment, we have this kind of agreements with 46 countries. With another three countries  Kyrgyzstan, Seychelles and Uzbekistan, we have almost completed procedures. By yearend, we will most likely complete talks with another 4 countries and the agreements will be prepared for signing, he said.

English translator/editor: Stepan KocharyanYEREVAN, MARCH 22, ARMENPRESS. The Armenian government considered urgent the bill on ratifying the Comprehensive and Enhanced Partnership Agreement between the Government of the Republic of Armenia, on the one hand, and the European Union and the European Atomic Energy Community and their member states, on the other hand, reports Armenpress.

The decision was adopted during todays Cabinet meeting.

During todays session the government approved the aforementioned bill and submitted it to the Parliament for ratification.

Earlier chairman of the parliamentary standing committee on foreign affairs Armen Ashotyan announced that Armenia plans to ratify the agreement in April.

English  translator/editor: Aneta HarutyunyanYEREVAN, MARCH 22, ARMENPRESS. President Serzh Sargsyan on March 22 received Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Italy to Armenia Giovanni Ricciulli on the occasion of completion of his diplomatic mission in Armenia, the Presidential Office told Armenpress.

The Armenian President thanked the Ambassador for the efforts and contribution to the development and strengthening of the Armenian-Italian friendly ties and highlighted the role of Giovanni Ricciulli on boosting the cultural cooperation which was demonstrated by his assistance to the preservation and restoration programs of cultural heritage in Armenia. President Sargsyan highlighted the positive dynamics recorded in the bilateral commercial ties over the past two years which led to the increase of trade turnover volumes and Italian investments in Armenia.

The President wished the Ambassador achievements and expressed hope that he will always remember warmly the years spent in Armenia and will leave the country with bright impressions and a feeling of conducted duty.

Serzh Sargsyan said Armenia is interested in deepening the relations with friendly Italy and expressed hope the new Ambassador of Italy will continue developing the bilateral ties with the same enthusiasm.

Ambassador Giovanni Ricciulli thanked the President for the appreciation and warm words and said he is happy to conduct his last diplomatic mission as an Ambassador in Armenia  a young country of people with an ancient history and culture. He assured that he will definitely visit Armenia in the future.

At the meeting the sides exchanged views on the cooperation development opportunities between Armenia and Italy in different spheres.



English  translator/editor: Aneta HarutyunyanYEREVAN, MARCH 22, ARMENPRESS. On 22 March, in the framework of their follow-up visit to Armenia, the NATO Defense Education Enhancement Program Expert Group visited the National Defense Research University (NDRU), MOD, RA. The guests were hosted by Lieutenant General Hayk Kotanjian, Founding Head, NDRU, Doctor of Political Science, Professor.

He underlined the NATO Expert Groups support in the process of the defense education reforms in the RA. Professor Kotanjian stated that at the NDRU the education process was implemented through the adaptation of the Western universities and institutes model, and Russian think tanks experience  transferring the products of the academic-applied research activity of the research component as knowledge, to the auditorium, NDRU told ARMENPRESS.

The guests were briefed on the main results of the Inter-Agency Executive Education 4-week course of October-November, 2017, as well as on the NDRU-elaborated draft program of the Inter-Agency Executive Education 8-week course. It was emphasized that the course was scheduled to kick off in May-June this year, with participation of the Deputy Ministers from the agencies involved in the defense sphere.

Hayk Kotanjian mentioned that the NDRU had launched the review of the RA National Security Strategy. The Institute for National Strategic Studies (INSS), MOD, RA, was the academic coordinator of the first RA National Security Strategy, and now the NDRU, established through the transformation of the INSS, uses the methodology and knowledge acquired through that process.

At the meeting, Colonel Suren Davtyan, Head, National Institute for Strategic Defense Security EducationDeputy Head in Education, NDRU, made a report.

Brigadier-General (Ret.) Ernest B. Beno from Canada, Member, NATO DEEP Expert Group, delivered a lecture on the Education of Strategic Leaders in the Inter-Agency Collaborative Environment.

The presentation was followed by a discussion during which the guests asked questions to the NDRU research fellows. At the end of the meeting the NATO DEEP experts expressed their contentment with the visit.

English translator/editor: Stepan KocharyanYEREVAN, MARCH 22, ARMENPRESS. US federal prosecutors have dropped charges against 11 of 15 members of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogans security team who were accused in connection with the beating of protesters during their visit to Washington last year, The Wall Street Journal reported.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the move is associated with the Trump administrations desire to ease the tension with Turkey, an ally in fighting ISIS.

Prosecutors first asked a judge in November to dismiss charges against four members of Mr. Erdogans security detail. Then they dropped charges against seven others on Feb. 14, the day before Secretary of State Rex Tillerson flew to Ankara for a meeting with Mr. Erdogan meant to ease tensions. Among those freed of legal jeopardy immediately before the high-level meeting was the head of Mr. Erdogans security team.

US officials however, said no one has pressured prosecutors to drop the charges based on political reasons.

Last month, prosecutors dropped charges against seven others. The U.S. attorneys office didnt issue a news release last month when it dropped the charges. The office responded to inquiries this week from The Wall Street Journal.

The office said it is still pursuing assault charges against four other members of Mr. Erdogans security team, as well as two Canadian citizens, none of whom have been arrested.

The attack took place May 2017, when protesters gathered outside the Turkish Embassy in Washington D.C. where attacked by the security detail of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The protest was organized by the Armenian National Committee of America, the Hellenic Council of America and several other  Kurdish, Assyrian and Greek organizations.

English translator/editor: Stepan KocharyanYEREVAN, MARCH 22, ARMENPRESS. Finance minister Vardan Aramyan on March 22 received French Ambassador to Armenia Jonathan Lacote, the ministry told Armenpress.

During the meeting the officials discussed the bilateral productive cooperation, in particular the ongoing and upcoming programs. They also highlighted the active cooperation between the Armenian Government and the French Development Agency.

The officials specifically attached importance to the Francophonie summit which will be held in Yerevan this year and touched upon the process of the summits preparation works.

The summit of the International Organization of La Francophonie will be held in Yerevan on October 11-12. Heads of more than 50 states and 100 high-ranking delegations are expected to attend the summit.

English  translator/editor: Aneta HarutyunyanYEREVAN, MARCH 22, ARMENPRESS. US President Donald Trump has said he would beat former Vice President Joe Biden, who would go down crying.

Trumps comment comes after Biden suggested he would "beat the hell out of" Trump if they were in high school.

Crazy Joe Biden is trying to act like a tough guy. Actually, he is weak, both mentally and physically, and yet he threatens me, for the second time, with physical assault. He doesnt know me, but he would go down fast and hard, crying all the way. Dont threaten people Joe, Trump said on Twitter.

Trump and Biden could potentially face off in the 2020 presidential election as Biden has left the door open to a possible run.

English translator/editor: Stepan KocharyanYEREVAN, 22 MARCH, ARMENPRESS. The Central Bank of Armenia informs Armenpress that today, 22 March, USD exchange rate down by 0.20 drams to 480.06 drams. EUR exchange rate up by 2.39 drams to 592.15 drams. Russian Ruble exchange rate up by 0.10 drams to 8.44 drams. GBP exchange rate up by 3.75 drams to 679.19 drams.

The Central Bank has set the following prices for precious metals.

Gold price up by 151.31 drams to 20394.09 drams. Silver price down by 0.18 drams to 250.73 drams. Platinum price up by 24.79 drams to 14616.27 drams.YEREVAN, MARCH 22, ARMENPRESS. Healthcare Minister of Armenia Levon Altunyan and Adviser of trade and economic issues at the Embassy of People's Republic of China in Armenia Vang Shicai signed on March 22 an agreement on providing Armenia with 200 ambulances on a grant basis. As ARMENPRESS was informed from the press service of the Healthcare Ministry of Armenia, the ambulances will arrive in Armenia within 110 days after signing the agreement.

In a meeting with Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of China to Armenia Tian Erlong and the delegation of China National Township Enterprises Corporation Levon Altunyan thanked the leadership of China for the assistance. He stressed that the assistance will significantly improve the ambulance service.

The project is implemented in the sidelines of the agreement signed between the Governments of China and Armenia on May 12, 2017.

The Chinese Ambassador noted that though China is much larger than Armenia and has incomparably greater population, the health issues in both countries have similarities. Now in China struggle against smoking is underway like in Armenia. Welcoming the project aimed at healthy lifestyle in Armenia, Tian Erlong noted that smoking in public areas is prohibited in Chinese cities.

Other issues were also discussed at the meeting.

English translator/editor: Tigran SirekanyanAMSTERDAMPlans are in the works for the annual Webmaster Access Amsterdam show, taking place September 7-10 at the Double Tree by Hilton Amsterdam Centraal Station. One of the significant components will be [email protected], a programming track tailored for the LGBT community. [email protected] offers an opportunity to focus on topics specific to the gay adult industry in an open and inviting environment.

Every year [email protected] draws LGBT industry members from every sector of the community: executives, talent, affiliates, traffic networks, billing, program owners, gay studios, activists and more. This year marks the third time GayVN has been a part of Webmaster Access. Events will include the GayVN seminar program and happy hour.

With a mix of educational programming and social gatherings, [email protected] gives LGBT professionals a chance to strengthen business relationships around the world. A very diverse group of companies attend Webmaster Access. Last year the GayVN programming included a thoughtful discussion titled State of GAY: Whats Hot and Whats Not. For the third year of GayVN, we will continue to strengthen this facet of Webmaster Access," said AVN Media Network CEO Tony Rios.

Though the show is not until September, the early-bird pricing for WMA will end April 1. Click here to register now and pay less than half price. Registration is sponsored by Pussycash.

And for affiliates, talent and studios, registration is free. Go to WebmasterAccess.com/affiliates to sign up.

For sponsorship or advertising inquiries, email [email protected]Steinhoff UK group CEO Stuart Machin is to join Marks & Spencer as its managing director of food.

Machin will have overall P&L accountability for all aspects of the M&S Food business when he joins the company in April in the newly created role. The moves comes as the retailer accelerates plans to overhaul its food arm.

M&S said the appointment of Machin  a former CEO of Target Australia and previously chief operating officer of Coles Supermarkets Australia  would further strengthen the top team.

Reporting to M&S CEO Steve Rowe, Machin, who has also held positions with Asda Walmart, Tesco and Sainsburys, will work alongside M&S clothing & home MD Jill McDonald, and food marketing director Sharry Cramond, who is focusing on improving customer perceptions on price and provenance.

The retailers director of food, Andy Adcock, will leave the company at the end of April after nine years.

We face challenges in our food business and we have lots to do to change, fast, said M&S CEO Steve Rowe.

Stuart is an excellent addition to our team. He gets food retailing and he has first-class experience of driving change in big food retailers. At M&S we need to sharpen our prices, improve our products, drive profitability and grow market share  Stuart is the right leader to get on and deliver these changes.

Machin said: My heart lies in food retail and I am excited to bring my passion for dynamic, customer-led food retailing to M&S. The business has many reasons to be proud of its food offer, but there are also opportunities and lots to deliver under the transformation plan that Steve has laid out. I am looking forward to joining the team.Now that it is fully apparent, to all who have the ability to pay some modicum of attention, that Imposter President Biden has extreme cognitive issues, in addition to being an inveterate liar: Can OUR Republic continue with this Executive Office that has completely failed, so many times, on far too many issues here at this early date in this abysmal presidency?

No, Joseph R. Biden is completely unqualified, morally and cognitively, to represent real Americans, and lead this Republic of disparate peoples.

Yes, Joseph R. Biden has started whispering again, even softer now than before; so, I know he still cares, plus, OUR media will soon stop reporting on Afghanistan in favor of OUR Socialist ideals.Naloxone standing order, which is increasing distribution of the overdose-reversing drug naloxone to first responders, family and friends.

Providing funding received from federal Opioid STR grant to local communities to expand treatment, including medication-assisted treatment for opioid use disorder.

Updated the Controlled Substance Reporting System (CSRS) to connect to other states, allowing doctors and other clinicians to obtain multi-state information about their patients' opioid prescriptions.

STOP Act, including revised, Safe Prescribing Policies to reduce opioid misuse and overdose

2001 Mail Service Center

Raleigh, NC 27699-2001

news@dhhs.nc.gov (919) 855-4840

RALEIGH Emergency department visits for opioid overdose in North Carolina have risen sharply, with preliminary data for 2017 indicating more than 5,700 visits, a nearly 40 percent increase in opioid overdose ED visits compared to 2016. The 2017 increase represents a doubling of the number recorded in 2009.The ED visits are tracked as part of North Carolina's Opioid Action Plan , developed in 2017 with community partners to combat the opioid crisis. The plan includes measurable strategies to reduce the oversupply of prescription opioids, the diversion of prescription drugs and the flow of illicit drugs, increase community awareness and prevention, make naloxone widely available, expand treatment and recovery systems of care, and coordinate the state's infrastructure to tackle the opioid crisis.said Mandy Cohen, M.D., Secretary of the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services.As part of the plan, quarterly reports will examine progress in key areas. The plan is a living document that will be updated as it tracks progress on the epidemic and identifies new issues and solutions.Data continues to highlight the need for enhanced prevention and treatment efforts and for greater access to evidence-based opioid use disorder treatments, including medication-assisted treatment and harm reduction services.The percentage of ED visits that involve heroin and other illicit opioids has increased and is now 68 percent of opioid overdose ED visits, according to the most recent quarterly report. Most people visiting the emergency department for opioid overdose in 2017 were white (85 percent), male (62 percent) and age 25-34 (39 percent).In the past year, several measures have been put in place to help stem the opioid crisis in North Carolina:said Susan Kansagra, M.D., MBA, Chief of the Chronic Disease and Injury Section in DHHS' Division of Public Health.Going forward, DHHS will also post preliminary monthly data on opioid overdose ED visits around the 15th of each month. While the data have been made available to local health departments and partners, DHHS will be posting on its websites to enable broader access to those on front lines of the epidemic. Monthly reports will be available on the Chronic Disease and Injury Section's website.For more information, visit ncdhhs.gov/opioids NC Department of Health and Human ServicesContact: White House

White House Press Office

Sanctuary jurisdictions obstruct Federal immigration enforcement efforts and put law enforcement at greater risk. A "sanctuary city" generally refers to a State or local jurisdiction that refuses to cooperate with Federal immigration enforcement, often by rejecting "detainer" requests from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and refusing to share information relating to potentially removable aliens. Detainers are used to request that a State or local law enforcement agency hold a criminal alien in local custody for up to 48 hours after their release on state charges to allow ICE to take custody of the alien and initiate removal proceedings. State and local law enforcement agencies routinely detain suspects for violating Federal laws at the request of federal authorities. The Constitution and Federal statues allow for ICE to detain illegal aliens, and for local police to do so at ICE's request, relying on ICE's determination of probable cause. Detainers themselves establish probable cause of an alien's removability and it would be absurd to require ICE to obtain a judicial warrant every time it detained an illegal alien. Indeed, Congress authorized immigration officers, rather than Federal judges, to issue administrative warrants to arrest aliens based on probable cause to believe they are in violation of the immigration laws. If this was necessary under the Fourth Amendment, immigration enforcement would grind to a halt. When sanctuary cities refuse to comply with detainer requests, law enforcement officers must carry out their immigration enforcement duties in workplaces, residences, and in the streets. This can lead to ICE having to enter dangerous environments to arrest criminal aliens. Some sanctuary city officials have gone as far as warning illegal aliens about upcoming immigration enforcement actions, allowing criminal aliens to prepare themselves and putting law enforcement, the public, and the aliens at even greater risk.Reckless sanctuary policies endanger the safety of our communities and obstruct immigration enforcement actions which can prevent further crime. Too many criminal illegal aliens have been released into American communities and gone on to commit crimes which could have been prevented had ICE been able to take the individuals into custody. In 2016, the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) arrested a criminal illegal alien for possession of cocaine for sale and other charges. The individual had been deported three times previously and had prior convictions for similar offenses but was still released. SFPD arrested the individual again in 2017 on charges involving the sale of narcotics, yet the city again refused to comply with an ICE detainer request and the individual was released. SFPD arrested an illegal alien and alleged gang member more than ten times between 2013 and 2017 for charges including rape, assault, domestic battery, robbery, and vehicle theft. On each occasion ICE's request to have the individual transferred to their custody or receive notice before his release was denied. A criminal illegal alien was arrested in Cook County, Illinois in 2011 for driving on a suspended license from a prior conviction for driving under the influence (DUI). ICE issued a detainer request but the individual was released from jail and arrested less than a year later for aggravated DUI causing death. Activists say sanctuary policies make illegal aliens feel safe enough to report crimes to police. Illegally present crime victims and witnesses are eligible for certain immigration benefits, like the U-visa and T-visa, to encourage their cooperation in reporting crime.President Trump's Administration has and will continue to pursue strong immigration enforcement based on the rule of law. President Trump's Administration has taken action to ensure our Nation's immigration laws are faithfully enforced. The Department of Justice has filed a legal action regarding three California laws that intentionally obstruct the enforcement of Federal immigration law, regulate private entities that seek to cooperate with Federal authorities, and impede consultation and communication between Federal and State law enforcement officials. During fiscal year (FY) 2017, ICE's Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) made more than 140,000 administrative arrests and effected more than 225,000 removals. From President Trump's inauguration through the end of FY 2017, ERO made more than 110,568 arrests compared to only 77,806 in all of FY 2016. However, more resources are needed to ensure law enforcement is able to do its job and enforce our immigration laws. There are nearly one millions aliens in the United States with final orders of removal but not enough officers or resources to enforce the orders. Many sheriffs have backed off of holding criminal aliens for fear of lawsuits.The most exciting thing to me about Expo is seeing how much value there is for attendees inspired to apply what they learn in their own communities. Photo by Jesus Aranguren/AP Images for The HSUS

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One of the many ways in which The HSUS makes the world a better place for animals is with our annual Animal Care Expo, the worlds largest educational conference and trade show for people who work with, or want to work with, animals. This year, the event takes place in Kansas City, Missouri, between May 14 and 17. Whether you are a volunteer with an animal rescue, a seasoned shelter employee, someone looking to make a career change, or just someone who wants to learn more about animal protection work, this is the conference for you, and now is the perfect time to sign up to be part of it.

The HSUS has hosted Expo for more than a quarter century now, bringing together thousands of amazing animal shelter, rescue, veterinary, and field services personnel from around the country and around the world for expert-led workshops and learning labs on the best, most groundbreaking and lifesaving work happening in the field.

The most exciting thing to me about Expo, at which Ive presented a few times over the years, is seeing how attendees are inspired to apply what they learn at Expo in their own communities, in the United States and abroad. Its also great to see the professionally important connections made between Expo attendees, connections that last far beyond the conference.

Expos power to change lives, human as well as animal, really comes through in the story about Donna and Jim Spencer from a recent issue of our Animal Sheltering magazine. Donna first attended Expo in 1996 in Las Vegas, where she learned about high-volume, high-quality spay/neuter initiatives. At the time, her rescue group was struggling to combat pet overpopulation in West Virginia. The workshop at Expo gave her an idea and revived her hopes of making an impact.

When she returned from Expo, Donna asked Jim (a hospital CFO) if their part of the state could support a spay/neuter clinic like the ones shed learned about at Exposomething that didnt exist anywhere in West Virginia. Twenty-two years later, the Help for Animals clinic has sterilized more than 160,000 animals, and it all started with Expo.

This year, were featuring panels and sessions on disaster response, shelter medicine, fundraising and marketing, legislation, leadership, and the future of animal sheltering and animal rescue, to name just a few. Expo also features an extraordinary trade show component, with vendors representing many product and service sectors of value and interest to those involved with animal protection work. The goal of the conference is to train and expand the circle of good people working or volunteering with animal shelters, rescue groups, community cat groups, and field and disaster responsepeople working to improve the lives of the animals and people in their own communities. If you are one of them, or would like to be, this years Animal Care Expo is a great place to start. Register now to save your place.

P.S. Learn more at animalsheltering.org/expo. Register by March 23 (thats tomorrow!) for early-bird pricing of just $225 for a full conference registration; add discount code HSOEX18 for an additional $25 off, bringing the cost to just $200.

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Yahoo! JAPAN



Yahoo! JAPANThis week celebrates 'International Women in Aviation Week'.

Gabriella Somerville , CEO of ConnectJets, is working on a UK Air Operator's Certificate and has recently sold the first P.180 Avanti Evo into the UK to a British customer.PHOENIX, March 21, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Today, Smithfield Foods, Inc. joined forces with Safeway to donate more than 40,000 pounds of protein to St. Marys Food Bank. Smithfields contribution was part of the companys 2018 Helping Hungry Homes donation tour. Now in the programs 10th year, Helping Hungry Homes is Smithfields signature hunger-relief initiative focused on alleviating hunger and helping Americans become more food secure. The donation, equivalent to more than 160,000 servings, will help families fight hunger across Arizona.

Large-scale protein donations are a vital tool in helping us to fight hunger in Arizona, said Tom Kertis, president and CEO of St. Marys Food Bank. Were committed to alleviating food insecurity while promoting self-sufficiency, collaboration, advocacy and education. Smithfields generous donation will help thousands in need across our community.

Smithfield and Safeway representatives presented the donation to St. Marys Food Bank at an event at a local Safeway this morning. Members of the organizations discussed food insecurity in the local community and the significance of this donation, which will provide protein to much of the food bank's expansive service area including Phoenix and 13 Arizona counties.

At Safeway, we feel strongly about providing nutritional food to those in need, said Lori Raya, southwest division president for Safeway. We commend Smithfield on the continuous success of its Helping Hungry Homes initiative and are honored to take part in this donation that will provide wholesome meals to those who are struggling with food insecurity in the area.

This is the tenth large scale protein donation made by Smithfield to food banks across the country during its 2018 Helping Hungry Homes tour. Since the programs inception in 2008, Smithfield has provided more than 100 million servings of protein to food banks, disaster relief efforts, and community outreach programs nationwide.

Smithfield is proud to join forces with local organizations who share our commitment to end hunger and improve food security across the country, said Dennis Pittman, senior director of hunger relief for Smithfield Foods. Hunger has many faces, and those we serve come from all walks of life. With this donation, we hope to assist those in need while educating and inspiring others to get involved in hunger-relief efforts.

For more information about Smithfield Foods Helping Hungry Homes initiative and a list of upcoming donation events, visit helpinghungryhomes.com.

About Smithfield Foods

Smithfield Foods is a $15 billion global food company and the world's largest pork processor and hog producer. In the United States, the company is also the leader in numerous packaged meats categories with popular brands including Smithfield, Eckrich, Nathan's Famous, Farmland, Armour, Farmer John, Kretschmar, John Morrell, Cook's, Gwaltney, Carando, Margherita, Curly's, Healthy Ones, Morliny, Krakus and Berlinki. Smithfield Foods is committed to providing good food in a responsible way and maintains robust animal care, community involvement, employee safety, environmental and food safety and quality programs. For more information, visit www.smithfieldfoods.com.

About St. Marys Food Bank

Celebrating its 50th year as the worlds FIRST Food Bank, St. Marys Food Bank Alliance is a non-sectarian, nonprofit organization that alleviates hunger by efficiently gathering and distributing food to 474 partner agencies at 600 locations that serve the hungry. Serving nine of Arizonas 15 counties, the organization is a member of Feeding America, the national network of food banks, and is committed to volunteerism, building community relationships, and improving the quality of life for Arizonans in need. In Fiscal Year 2016-17, the Food Bank distributed more than 86 million pounds of food to Arizona families and children and garnered more than 200,000 volunteer service hours. Web site: wwwStMarysFoodBank.org Phone: 602-242-FOOD.

Media Contacts:

Dalton Agency for Smithfield

Jana Beasley

(904) 534-8568

jbeasley@daltonagency.com St. Marys Food Bank

Jerry Brown

(602) 343-3160

jjbrown@firstfoodbank.org Safeway

Nancy Keane

(480) 318-3082

Nancy.Keane@albertsons.com

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/22d57492-2d64-4b4c-a178-eabc2ee3bb0fYouTuber Count Dankula turned his girlfriend's pug into the star of several Hitler and Holocaust jokes. He was arrested, charged under hate crime statutes, and convicted yesterday.

Via Newsweek:

Following a trial at Airdrie Sheriff's Court in Scotland, the 30-year-old has now been convicted of a hate crime and could face jail when he is sentenced at the same court on April 23.

Sheriff Derek O'Carroll told the court: "The accused knew that the material was offensive and knew why it was offensive. He would have known it was grossly offensive to many Jewish people."

In addition to training the pug to salute when he said "sieg heil," he filmed the dog while he played Hitler speeches and asked the pug "you want to gas the Jews?" at least a dozen times.

Sometimes I imagine Ben Franklin or Socrates time traveling to today and reading a headline like this. What a weird timeline we're in.

 YouTuber Count Dankula who taught dog Nazi salute faces jail for hate crime (Newsweek)Learning how to DIY is the perfect way to keep busy when we eventually have to go back to living in social isolation again, but some people just aren't quite sure where to learn how to create. Before you try and take up at-home barbering again, try this one-year Unlimited Plus subscription to Creativebug Fine READ THE RESTABC News reports that sources have told it that the special counsel investigating Russia-Trump collusion in the 2016 election has turned its attention to Trump campaign ties to Cambridge Analytica.

Cambridge Analytica was brought on by then-Trump campaign digital advisor Brad Parscale in early June 2016, after the data science firm pitched him on its services, sources told ABC News. Three Cambridge Analytica employees, including two data scientists, immediately moved to San Antonio to embed with Parscale's firm and by August, the number of fulltime staffers in Texas ballooned to 13.

The team led by Matt Oczkowski, who served as the data firm's chief product officer, was divided into three groups focusing on data science, research and polling and marketing.

Parscale would eventually leave Texas to move into Trump Tower in September, and the data firm sent a mid-level employee with him to interpret daily polling reports, according to sources.

Cambridge Analytica was one entity involved in creating the voter information and fundraising database now known as Project Alamo, built jointly by staffers from the RNC, the Trump campaign and Parscale's firm with data supplied by the RNC and the campaign, sources said.A Fly Jamaica Airline crew member tried to smuggle $160K worth of cocaine in his pants, from Montego Bay into John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York. His ingenious transport method for the nearly nine pounds of cocaine failed to trick agents for the U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

From the CBP press release:

On March 17, Mr. Hugh Hall, a citizen of Jamaica, and crew member of Fly Jamaica Airways arrived at John F. Kennedy International Airport from Montego Bay, Jamaica and presented himself for inspection. Mr. Hugh was escorted to a private search room where CBP officers discovered four packages taped to his legs, all of which contained a white powder that tested positive for cocaine.

Mr. Hall was arrested for the importation of a controlled substance and was turned over to Homeland Security Investigations. Approximately 9 lbs. of cocaine was seized, with an approximate street value of $160,000.

"This seizure is another example of our CBP officers being ever vigilant in protecting the United States from the distribution of illicit drugs," said Leon Hayward, Acting Director of CBP's New York Field Operations.

Mr. Hall faces federal narcotics smuggling charges and will be prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney's Office in the U.S. Eastern District Court of New York.Dropbox has published a set of guidelines for how companies can "encourage, support, and celebrate independent open security research"  and they're actually pretty great, a set of reasonable commitments to take bug reports seriously and interact respectfully with researchers.



That's very important, because laws like section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act impose potential criminal and civil liability on security researchers who investigate and disclose bugs without manufacturer approval. This is bad news, because companies have a long history of suppressing bug reports, deceptively minimizing their impact, and allowing defects to linger while they are being actively exploited by bad guys, who get to extend the lives of their attack approaches because the public isn't made aware that the approaches even exist.

Recently, a broad tech industry coalition proposed that security researchers should always be subject to a manufacturers' veto on true facts about defective products.

Dropbox's position, however reasonable in many of its aspects, is woefully deficient, because the company reserves the right to invoke DMCA 1201 and/or CFAA and other tools that give companies the power to choose who can say true things abour mistakes they've made.

This is not normal. Before DRM in embedded software and cloud connectivity, became routine there were no restrictions on who could utter true words about defects in a product. The Copyright Office has weighed in to say that they don't think that using the DMCA in this way is legitimate (but they are unable to change the rules, because their statutory authority does not extend to permitting security researchers to release proof-of-concept code).

Dropbox starts from the admirable position of lamenting the fact that companies have arrogated to themselves the power to silence whistleblowers who report dangerous product defects  but the actual terms they propose say that the problem isn't silencing whistleblowers, it's unfairly silencing whistleblowers. By reserving the right to sue security researchers for telling the truth in inconvenient ways, Dropbox is treating the power to censor as a feature, not a bug  and differing from the companies they decry for bullying only in the particulars of when the power to censor should be invoked, not whether that power is legitimate in the first place.

I think Dropbox's heart is in the right place here and I hope they'll take this criticism onboard by way of a friendly amendment. Neither DMCA 1201 or CFAA were crafted to give companies a say in who can warn the public about mistakes they made. It is never legitimate to use them this way. A best-of-breed vulnerability disclosure program should demonstrate good faith by covenanting never to invoke these laws to punish security disclosures  not even when a security researcher ignores your guidelines.



Looking at our own VDP, we realized we could do better, and immediately committed to updating our VDP to be best-of-breed. Our updated VDP contains the following elements: 1. A clear statement that external security research is welcomed. 2. A pledge to not initiate legal action for security research conducted pursuant to the policy, including good faith, accidental violations. 3. A clear statement that we consider actions consistent with the policy as constituting "authorized" conduct under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). 4. A pledge that we won't bring a Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DCMA) action against a researcher for research consistent with the policy. 5. A pledge that if a third party initiates legal action, Dropbox will make it clear when a researcher was acting in compliance with the policy (and therefore authorized by us).

Protecting Security Researchers [Chris Evans/Dropbox]

(via 4 Short Links)Instead of towing vehicles, the owners of the Union Bar and Grill in Gering, Nebraska instead reward folks who park overnight in their lot with a free meal.

On Facebook March 18, Janelle Martin posted a photo of the letter they left on her friend Austin's windshield with this comment:

More bars should take note from Scott and Carla Swanson. Austin met a friend at the bar last night so he left his truck there and I picked him up. He found this note on his truck this morning when I took him to go get it. ?

A thoughtful gesture like this just might save some lives.

Previously: Nashville restaurant makes it easy for diners to buy their cooks a round of beerAmerica's right-leaning pundit class is really worried that young people, especially students, have become "illiberal" and "intolerant" of free speech because they heckle and protest the likes of Richard Spencer.



But the 40+ years-and-counting General Social Survey shows that support for free expression is generally on the rise in the USA, especially among young people, especially especially on campus  but the mainstream is willing and ready to censor Muslim speakers who criticize the USA.

About 10 years ago, the GSS added a new hypothetical speaker to its list  "now consider a Muslim clergyman who preaches hatred of the United States. If such a person wanted to make a speech in your community preaching hatred of the United States, should he be allowed to speak, or not?" Most Americans say he should not be allowed to speak, and that number seems roughly constant over the past decade. An even larger share of the population, about 66 percent, says such a cleric should not be allowed to teach in a college, and a very slight majority, about 51 percent, says such a cleric's books should be removed from a library.

Campus political correctness: Data paints a different picture [Matthew Yglesias/Vox]

(Image: David Shankbone, CC-BY)





(via Kottke)Nadiya Savchenko's worn a lot of hats (including furry ones) over the past few years. She was military pilot in the Ukraine Air Force and a training officer for a volunteer Ukrainian infantry unit during the 2014 Russian invasion of Crimea. Captured by enemy forces in the early days of that conflict, she became an illegal detainee and eventually a prisoner of war. After being set free as part of a prisoner swap agreement set up between Russia and Ukraine, she became a war hero and was awarded the Star of the Hero of Ukraine. Soon after, she left the military behind to join the Ukraine government as a lawmaker.

Now, according to Reuters, she's been detained by the country that she served so honorably over allegations that she may have been planning a coup. Savchenko, who's been pretty vocal about her displeasure with corruption in the current Ukraine government, hasn't denied the charges being leveled against her.

During a session of the Ukraine parliament earlier this week, she was detained after her governmental colleagues voted to remove her parliamentary immunity to prosecution. The vote came in light of some pretty damning evidence that suggests that she was planning a violent overthrown of the country's government, including undercover video footage of her trying to persuade Ukrainian military personnel to join her cause. Instead of responding to the allegations, Savchenko accused the Ukraine government of betraying the spirit and ideals of Ukraine's 2013/2014 pro-western European uprising:

If the status quo remains unchanged, "then the danger in parliament won't be me, your danger will be your people", she said. "To accuse me of treason against Ukraine  and to make anti-heroes out of yesterday's heroes simply because they do not agree with the policies and positions of the current government, that's all the authorities can do," she said.

Image: Authorized Ukrainian TV channel Inter Youtube stream  Podrobytsi (Details) News Programming. 25.01.2015, at 57:07/2:07:13 (Creative Commons Attribution), CC BY 3.0, LinkThe online home for all things Brockley (SE4), Deptford, Ladywell, Lewisham and New CrossTORONTO, March 22, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Lithium Energi Exploration, Inc. (TSXV:LEXI) (LEXI or the Company) is pleased to announce that it has fulfilled all financial obligations with respect to its previously announced agreement (the Agreement) with IBC Advanced Technologies, Inc. of American Fork, Utah, USA (IBC). IBC has commenced the development of full-scale engineering for a processing plant to utilize IBCs proprietary metals separation technology, known as Molecular Recognition Technology (MRT), for selective lithium extraction at LEXIs properties in Catamarca, Argentina. MRT has been proven as one of the most advanced and eco-friendly refining technologies in the world for segregating metals with up to 99.99% purity. With IBCs collaboration, LEXI has conceived an MRT plant that will be unit-driven (i.e. engineering will be designed for a scalable, modular plant) with an initial configuration of 1,000 tons per year (TPY) of lithium carbonate equivalent (LCE) devised to facilitate scale-up to 25,000 TPY of LCE.



In addition, Lexi will have the exclusive right of first refusal to obtain site license(s) to use MRT for the separation, recovery, refining and purification of lithium from brine prospects in territories comprising approx. 20,000 square kilometers (7,500 square miles) in two areas of Catamarca Province, specifically including all areas in and around the salars of Antofalla, Hombre Muerto, and Pipanaco.

Commenting on the milestone event, LEXIs CEO, Steven Howard noted, The commencement of plant engineering could not be more timely for us. LEXI recently announced that it had initiated geophysical field studies with a goal of starting drill testing later this year. With that in mind, we believe that IBCs engineering will be completed around the same time that LEXI achieves its first resource estimates. Howard added that IBCs chemical engineering team is world class, LEXIs team is adroit and diligent, and weve all got a very exciting year in front of us.

IBCs President, Steven Izatt stated, We believe in LEXIs team and in the geologic values under their well-placed, extensive property package. Furthermore, IBC will participate in the future profits from the lithium plant, so we have an enormous vested interest in seeing this project to completion on schedule and with excellence. MRT is innovative green chemistry that we believe will play a big role in the inevitable global changes that are immediately ahead of us now.

IBCs engineering tasks will include basic engineering specifications and drawings, process design and throughput calculations, brine testing and SuperLig selections for LEXIs lithium processing plant. In the initial phase of the engineering, IBC will develop a Level One Assessment over the next three months to identify the most suitable IBC SuperLig products and processes to be used to extract, separate, recover, refine and purify lithium from the brine. In conjunction with the Level One Assessment, LEXI and IBC will collaborate to identify the chemical composition of candidate brines representative of actual brine from one or more salars at or near LEXIs properties. The Level One Assessment will consist of a thorough review of IBCs proprietary database of IBC ligand selectivities, the thermodynamic and kinetic properties of IBCs products and processes, and an evaluation of engineering metrics.

During successive phases of engineering development, actual brine samples will be provided for IBC to test and confirm the Level One Assessment (Test Work). Test Work will optimize brine dissolution and solution characteristics by implementing flow/separation tests as brine is passed through mechanical columns containing IBCs proprietary SuperLig products. Loading and eluting cycles will yield critical kinetic and thermodynamic data, including separation coefficients and process efficiencies.

Level One Assessment data and Test Work will yield flowsheet (Flowsheet) designs detailing each unit operation, its sequential placement relative to other plant operations, its respective inputs and outputs, and the key engineering metrics, including materials of construction, flowrates, temperatures, pressures, and chemical compositions. The completion of engineering will give LEXI full design drawings, equipment specifications, tank, pump, and column sizes, feed preparation, process flow and block diagrams, instrumentation and final piping arrays, sequential step descriptions for all input/output changes, all valve diagrams, and a complete operating manual.

All process engineering will be coordinated with LEXIs expectations and requirements regarding field development, including drilling parameters, well spacing, pumping rates, and other characteristics critical to production from the salar basins in which LEXIs lithium properties are situated. Although some factors are outside the control of IBC or LEXI, the engineering is generally expected to be complete in 12 months or less.

About Lithium Energi Exploration, Inc.

Lithium Energi Exploration, Inc. is an exploration company specializing in the strategic acquisition, exploration and development of lithium brine assets in Argentina. The Company is headquartered in Toronto, Ontario and has offices in Dallas, Texas and Catamarca, Argentina. The common shares of the Company are listed on the TSX Venture Exchange (TSXV:LEXI) and the Frankfort Exchange (FR:LO9). The Companys portfolio of prospective lithium brine concessions in the Argentina Province of Catamarca (heart of the lithium triangle) includes 90,244 hectares in and around the Antofalla Salar and a first right of refusal to acquire another 148,839 hectares, of which 110,380 hectares are located in the Antofalla Salar complex and 38,459 hectares are in the Pipanaco Salar approx. 50 km due west of Catamarca city. The Antofalla Salar complex hosts one of the largest basins in the region  over 130 km long and up to 20 km across. On September 12, 2016, Albemarle Corporation, the worlds largest producer of lithium, announced its acquisition of exclusive exploration and acquisition rights to a claim block located in the center section of this salar. In March 2017, Albemarle published its belief that the Antofalla Salar is the third largest lithium deposit in the world. With rights to over 200,000 hectares of prospective lithium properties located just west of FMCs producing properties and offset north and south of Albemarles properties, the Company believes that its claim package holds the potential to deliver impressive values to its shareholders as the properties are developed.

Qualified Person

The scientific and technical information contained in this news release has been reviewed and approved by Caitlin Jeffs, P.Geo., a consultant of the Company, and a qualified person as defined by National Instrument 43-101.

ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Chris Hobbs

________________________

Chris Hobbs,

Chief Financial Officer and Director

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION PLEASE CONTACT:

Lithium Energi Exploration, Inc.

Tel: 416 276-6689

Fax: 888 909-1033

Email: chris.hobbs@lithiumenergi.com

www.lithiumenergi.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.

This news release contains "forward-looking information" and "forward-looking statements" (collectively, "forward-looking statements") within the meaning of the applicable Canadian securities legislation. All statements, other than statements of historical fact, are forward-looking statements and are based on expectations, estimates and projections as at the date of this news release. Any statement that involves discussions with respect to predictions, expectations, beliefs, plans, projections, objectives, assumptions, future events or performance (often but not always using phrases such as "expects", or "does not expect", "is expected", "anticipates" or "does not anticipate", "plans", "budget", "scheduled", "forecasts", "estimates", "believes" or "intends" or variations of such words and phrases or stating that certain actions, events or results "may" or "could", "would", "might" or "will" be taken to occur or be achieved) are not statements of historical fact and may be forward-looking statements.

These forward-looking statements are based on reasonable assumptions and estimates of management of the Company at the time such statements were made. Actual future results may differ materially as forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of the Company to materially differ from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. Such factors, among other things, include: receipt of all necessary stock exchange and regulatory approvals or consents in respect of any offering, the absence of material changes with respect to the Company and its businesses; possible variations in mineralization, grade or recovery rates; actual results of exploration activities; conclusions of future economic evaluations; fluctuations in general macroeconomic conditions; fluctuations in securities markets; fluctuations in spot and forward prices of commodities; fluctuations in currency markets (such as the Canadian dollar to United States dollar exchange rate); change in national and local government, legislation, taxation, controls, regulations and political or economic developments; risks and hazards associated with the business of mineral exploration, development and mining (including environmental hazards, industrial accidents, unusual or unexpected formations pressures, cave-ins and flooding); the speculative nature of mineral exploration and development (including the risks of obtaining necessary licenses, permits and approvals from government authorities); and title to properties. Although the forward-looking statements contained in this news release are based upon what management of the Company believes, or believed at the time, to be reasonable assumptions, the Company cannot assure its shareholders that actual results will be consistent with such forward-looking statements, as there may be other factors that cause results not to be as anticipated, estimated or intended.

Readers should not place undue reliance on the forward-looking statements and information contained in this news release. Except as required by law, the Company assumes no obligation to update the forward-looking statements of beliefs, opinions, projections, or other factors, should they change, except as required by law.News / National

by Stephen Jakes

Zanu PF activists in Mashonaland Central's Muzarabani ward 8 reportedly went around recording names of villagers who attended the burial of the late MDC-T leader Morgan Tsvangirai.Heal Zimbabwe Trust said on March 2 at Muringazuva growth point, Hamunyari Kamusengezi, the Zanu PF district chairperson announced that he had compiled a list of people who attended the funeral of the late MDC-T President, Morgan Tsvangirai."Kamusengezi further warned that everyone who attended the funeral will be denied food aid and will be assaulted by soldiers come election time.Mt Darwin East ward 14. On the 7th of March 2018, Village head Bright Mafundirwa removed four people from the Ministry of social welfare beneficiary list accusing them of supporting opposition party, MDC Alliance. This took place at Karanda Business centre," said the trust."Village head Mafundirwa openly announced during the food aid distribution list that he was going to ensure that all opposition party members in the ward will not receive food aid."News / National

by Staff reporter

THE newly formed National Patriotic Front (NPF) says it is preparing to file a Constitutional Court challenge against President Emmerson Mnangagwa's legitimacy, coupled with massive street demonstrations to force the disputed leader out of power, NewZimbabwe.com reported."We will also make a Constitutional Court application challenging the legality of the government," NPF spokesperson Jealous Mawarire said during a panel discussion as SAPES Trust Wednesday evening."We have to unite as Zimbabweans and show the world that what happened in Zimbabwe was a coup."Mawarire said the Robert Mugabe-backed party led by former cabinet minister Ambrose Mutinhiri was preparing to overwhelm the "junta" with a million protesters onto the streets.He said they have since petitioned SADC and AU over the illegality of the November 14 military "coup" which forced Mugabe out of power."What needs to be done is action on the ground here in Zimbabwewe are going to demonstrate against the illegality of this government we are going to mobilise people onto the streets."We are setting in motion various political and legal processes and we are also mobilising our people to test and to challenge the legitimacy of the junta even in the streets."If you believed that Mugabe should have gone because you had mobilised 800,000 people at Zimbabwe Grounds, we are going to mobilise a million people and put them onto the streets of Harare."If any President is no longer liked or wanted by a million-plus people, he should go. So, we are going to mobilise a million people in the streets of Harare and maybe see Emmerson Mnangagwa go with his scarf."News / National

by Staff reporter

A Zanu PF extra-ordinary politburo meeting is underway at the party headquarters in Harare.Items on the agenda include regulations governing the conduct of primary elections, the party regalia party and the party's manifesto.More details to follow....Opinion / Columnist

The events of the past few weeks in the post-Robert Mugabe era have led many Zimbabweans to introspect on Operation Restore Legacy (ORL). The operation, which culminated in the voluntary resignation by Robert Mugabe, sought to eliminate criminals in the G40 cabal, who had surrounded the erstwhile president.Fast forward to 2018, one is forced to reflect and reconsider whether ORL targeted the real criminals, or it only targeted the criminal's accomplices in the G40 cabal. Question is, who is the real criminal, the real mafia boss?The events of the past few weeks point to the fact that maybe Mugabe was the real criminal.The G40 cabal were just his accomplices, nay criminals too. What informs this drastic recalibration of the otherwise well thought-out and executed ORL?The first signs that there was mischief abound among the G40 cabal members is when Mugabe's accomplices, Prof Jonathan Moyo and Patrick Zhuwao, started spewing vile vitriol against Government online.The next thing was that ill-fated meeting in Cape Town, South Africa, which was attended by people such as MDC-T deputy president Thokozani Khupe, National People's Party (NPP) leader Joice Mujuru and G40 cabal representatives, under the guise of sharing notes on coalitions.Back then, the tell-tale signs of a Mugabe hand in the shenanigans were beginning to fester. In no time, an outfit calling itself the New Patriotic Front (NPF) petitioned the African Union (AU), challenging the resignation of Mugabe and the ascendency of President Emmerson Mnangagwa to the helm of the party and Government. The petition was ably shared and explained by the usual suspects, Prof Moyo and Zhuwao. The AU ignored the futile attempt to soil the legitimate transition in Zimbabwe. The world has ignored the shrills from the cabal.In-between, Mugabe invited Mujuru to his Blue Roof mansion as part of his shayisano plan. If Mugabe cannot have the presidency, then President Mnangagwa cannot have it, either.There are no morals or principles there, even if it means roping in poor Joice, whom he maligned and hounded out of ZANU-PF, the same way he tried to do to then Vice President Mnangagwa.We all remember Mugabe and his unhinged wife, Grace, regaling audiences with tales of how Solomon Mujuru's widow, Joice, engaged in all sorts of fetish and occult rituals that included nudity, chickens and water beetles.At the same time, desperate Mugabe made contact with Khupe, all in a botched bid to stitch up a coalition of sorts to ensure President Mnangagwa loses this year's election! If media reports are anything to go by, even Khupe snubbed the nonentity that Robert is fast becoming.Having failed to secure his preferred leaders for the NPF project, Ambrose Mutinhiri rose from the ashes, resigning from ZANU-PF on the spurious basis that the new dispensation was illegitimate. He announced that he would front a party named National Patriotic Front, of which apparently he, Jealousy Mawarire and the Mugabes are the executive and membership.Fully aware of his unelectability at the advanced age of 94, Mugabe has attempted to weave yarn in Zimbabweans' faces by declaring that he would not hold any post in the nascent outfit, but would back it.When Mugabe and his NPF pet project failed to elicit the required response from Government and ZANU-PF, he organised a presser with the Zimbabwe Independent, SABC and some other international media houses, where he falsely labelled President Mnangagwa as illegitimate. Mugabe begged and grovelled to meet President Mnangagwa, which in his warped thinking, would legitimise the new dispensation. Of course, President Mnangagwa is above that pettiness, and he rightly and curtly told Mugabe that Zimbabwe has moved on!The import of the foregoing contextualisation is to foreground the probable need to reassess whether or not Mugabe is not the mafia boss of the criminal cabal. It is apparent that Mugabe has forsaken ZANU-PF, claiming that he was expelled, yet it is common cause that it is his wife, Grace, who was sacked. Mugabe continues to conflate his fate with that of his wife, itself one of the key issues that ORL sought to undo. Mugabe had conflated his bedroom affairs with the affairs of the State to the extent that his wife, using her First Ladyship and post of Secretary for Women Affairs started dabbling in matters of State, which were beyond her purview.It is unfortunate and sad that one of Zimbabwe's founding fathers, Mugabe, has decided to decimate his liberation and empowerment legacy, all because of his spiteful politics. Mugabe is NPF. He is the benefactor and financier. He is the puppeteer of the project. He is using proxies and puppets such as Mutinhiri, Prof Moyo, Zhuwao and Mawarire.The "new" project is nothing but a reincarnation and continuation of Mugabe's toxic politics of divide and rule. NPF is G40. The criminals remain the same, but the sum total of that criminality includes Mugabe, who is the criminal boss. He is not surrounded by criminals, but as the political mafia boss, he surrounded himself with like-minded criminals.Emerging true narratives indicating that while Mugabe hid behind the facade that he was a pro-people leader, he was busy amassing wealth, accumulating a total of 21 farms during his 37-year rule. Mugabe proscribed Zimbabweans from leasing farms to former white commercial farmers, yet he annexed a farm from Interfresh, a local company, only to surreptitiously lease it to former white commercial farmers.To add insult to injury, Mugabe preached the false gospel of one man, one farm, yet he is a proud owner of 21 farms. What crass hypocrisy! The man actually paid himself his salary in cash at a time Zimbabweans were failing to access their hard-earned money in banks. Surely, if this is not the mark of a criminal, then we do not know what is.While Mugabe reserves his right to free expression and association as enunciated in the Constitution, it is cruelty for one old man to pursue his "shayisano politics" to massage his hurt ego. It is not about you Robert, it is about Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe has happily moved on. Zimbabwe was willing to preserve your legacy as one of the founding fathers of this great nation. Zimbabwe was willing to overlook some of your glaring weaknesses, but to remember the equally great things you did for it from the liberation war days to empowerment programmes in post-independent Zimbabwe.However, the spiteful politics that you want to mete out on Zimbabweans pursuant to fixing President Mnangagwa, will come to naught. Zimbabwe will fight you. It is not MDC-T supporters that marched against you, it was Zimbabweans. I am a ZANU-PF supporter, and I marched against you. Spare us the noise and live out your retirement in peace old man. Zimbabwe under the able leadership of President Mnangagwa is working day and night to undo the damage wrought on this country by the criminal cabal led by yourself.Opinion / Columnist

On a quiet Sunday in one of Britain's most beautiful cathedral cities, a father and daughter were struck down by the first offensive use of a nerve agent in Europe since the Second World War.Sergei and Yulia Skripal are still lying stricken in hospital. A police officer who went to their aid fell into a critical condition. Another 35 people were forced to seek medical treatment simply because they were nearby when the nerve agent was released.What happened in Salisbury on March 4 was a brazen attempt to murder civilians on British soil, endangering anyone - of any nationality - who chanced to be in the vicinity.Our scientists have identified the substance used against the Skripals as a Russian military-grade nerve agent known as "Novichok". Today, only Russia combines a record of state-sponsored assassinations with an avowed motive for targeting Sergei Skripal  and history of producing of "Novichok" agents.After the attack, the British Government gave the Kremlin an opportunity to explain if any of this substance had gone missing. But this request was ignored, leaving the Government with no choice except to conclude that the Russian state was guilty of attempted murder in a British city, using a lethal nerve agent banned by the Chemical Weapons Convention.Britain has responded by expelling 23 undeclared intelligence officers from the Russian Embassy in London. But the whole international community needs to stand together to uphold the rules on which the safety of every nation depends.If we do not, then the Russian state will continue its pattern of dangerous and destructive behaviour.The incident in Salisbury falls into a pattern of the Kremlin's lawless behaviour. Since 2014, Russia has annexed Crimea, ignited the flames of conflict in eastern Ukraine, hacked the German Bundestag and the Danish government and interfered in elections.Now they have gone so far as to use a banned nerve agent on UK soil. The fact that more people are not in hospital in Salisbury is only down to luck; the perpetrators obviously did not care how many innocents they endangered. And of course, there are more than 100,000 Zimbabweans living in the UK: any one of them could have been a victim too.Our quarrel is not with the Russian people, whose cultural and literary achievements shine down the centuries. We will never forget the fortitude shown by the Russian nation during the Second World War, nor our common alliance against Nazism.But we all share an obligation to oppose the Kremlin's ambition to divide and weaken the international community.While Britain's response has been robust, it has also remained true to our values as a liberal democracy that believes in the rule of law. Many Russians have made Britain their home. They abide by our laws and make an important contribution to our society and they remain welcome.But every time the Russian state breaks international rules, it becomes more of a threat. This outrage took place in a peaceful provincial city in Britain; next time Zimbabweans could be affected.10 weird and wonderful things you never knew about Sherwood Park

If you want to shoot a bow and arrow while riding on horseback through a raspberry vineyard, Sherwood Park is the place for you.

While the area may be stereotyped as a quiet commuter outpost, the community has hidden depths.

With a rough and tumble history and some modern quirks, this rapidly growing bedroom community is much more than a sleepy suburb.

With the CBC Morning show Edmonton AM broadcasting live from Sherwood Park on Friday, CBC News decided to take a look at some of the little known facts about the community.

1. It's not a city

With a population of more than 70,000, Sherwood Park is one of the largest and fastest growing communities in Alberta, but it has resisted the temptation of being crowned a city.

The community has enough people to be considered Alberta's seventh largest city, but it has retained the status of a hamlet.

2. It was settled by a train-hopping horse wrangler

The community was established in 1955 on the farmland of Maurice Smeltzer as a bedroom community for industrial sites cropping up east of Edmonton.

Smeltzer, born in 1867 in Huron, Ont., first came to Edmonton with a delivery of work horses. He arrived on one of the first trains to reach the area that would eventually become Strathcona County.

He returned with another string of horses in 1892 and settled on a 480-acre homestead, the boundaries of which would become Sherwood Park.

The Smeltzer house is still standing and has been designated an official historic site.

3. It wasn't always called Sherwood Park

The community was originally named Campbelltown, but was pressured to change it by Canada Post. The federal postal service argued the town's title was causing confusion, due to the existence of several other communities in Canada by the same name.

One resident even recalled being sent a cheque from Edmonton that arrived via Campbelltown, England.

After much objection  and misdirected mail  the community's name was officially changed in 1956.

Story continues

4. In the early days, there was a female-only fire brigade

In the early 1950s, shortly after it was established by developers, the women of the community were often left to their own devices while men worked long shifts at the refineries.

In order to protect the community, a female-only volunteer fire brigade was formed to serve the area during the daytime hours. They were a spectacle of brawn and bravery wherever they went.

"Strangers in the area were surprised to see a fireman take off his helmet and calmly take the rollers out of 'his' hair," Marg Jordheim was quoted as saying in 1985. She served with the brigade for 20 years.

5. It has a lot of horses

With over 6,200 horses in 2011, Strathcona County has the second highest number of horses of any municipality in Alberta and has one of the highest per capita in Canada. Welcome to the neigh-bourhood.

7. It has a winery

Who needs Italy when you have a winery in your proverbial backyard?

Founded by University of Alberta heart researchers Rick and Amy Barr, Barr Estate Winery produces fruit wines from locally-sourced raspberries, strawberries and rhubarb, and is open to the public for private tours.

8. There is an archery range

If you feel like honing your inner Katniss Everdeen, head on over to the Sherwood Park Archery Range. The members-only club has both an indoor and outdoor range for those who want to master the medieval art of bows and arrows.

9. It has a biosphere

Not unlike a biodome, Sherwood Park's biosphere is an ecologically protected area, but you won't find it behind glass.

Located in the southeast corner of Sherwood Park and extending east of Elk Island National Park, the Beaver Hills area is a heavily treed Boreal mixed wood forest habitat with an unusual "knob and kettle" lanscape.

The Beaver Hills Biosphere received UNESCO biosphere designation in 2016 at a world congress of biosphere lovers in Lima, Peru.

10. It's home to a real life Nottingham

In what appears to be an obvious ode to the legend of Robin Hood, one of the neighbourhoods in Sherwood Park is named Nottingham.

The real, royal Sherwood Forest is in Nottinghamshire, England, and was made famous by its historic association with the heroic outlaw.

Close enough, I say.

Come join Mark Connolly and the crew this Friday morning as we broadcast live from this most interesting hamlet for the "Spring Break" edition of Mark About Town.

- Mark About Town - Millennium Place

- Time: 5:30 a.m. - 8:30 a.m.

- 2000 Premier Way, Sherwood ParkIt was a trip down south Ceilidh Cherrett of Halifax would like to forget.

Cherrett and a friend went to Cuba last week and virtually everything that could go wrong, did go wrong. It all started when they had major issues with the housekeeping at their resort, Hotel Playa Cayo Coco.

"There were lineups at the hotel of at least eight or nine people deep complaining about the same situation," said Cherrett. "We had no toilet paper, no clean towels, no working phone."

On the third day of their trip a man stole her bag from her lounger at the beach. In it was her passport and money, which she hadn't left in her room because the safe was broken.

"He put it in his duffel bag and he walked over to a corner and started counting money," said Cherrett. "He physically took my money out and starting counting it and he put my passport in his back pocket. He was caught by the security at the resort who tackled him and then the police were called."

Cherrett said the man had stolen other passports from vacationers from Switzerland and Australia and he had taken money from other people on the beach that day.

When police became involved, Cherrett said she became scared.

"They placed me in the front seat of the same car where he was in the back seat uncuffed and there was no police officer in the car. It was terrifying."

When police later searched the man they found a small knife in his pocket, she said.

The local authorities made Cherrett wait at a jail for seven hours while they dealt with the thief's case.

The man was from Moron, a community about an hour drive from Cayo Coco. Police wanted Cherrett to go to Moron the next day where the matter was going to be dealt with.

"They said I might be detained for two weeks until his trial, that they could take my passport and not allow me to leave," said Cherrett, who had been to Cuba on two other occasions.

To make matters worse, after returning to the resort from the jail Cherrett was unable to make calls because the phone in her room didn't work.

Story continues

She was stuck there with no money, wasn't sure if she would be able to get off the island and on top of it all, was coming down with a case of strep throat.

She texted her boyfriend back in Nova Scotia, who then contacted the Canadian Embassy in Cuba. They told him to tell Cherrett not to go with police to Moron. She should instead get to the nearest embassy or consulate, but that would have required lengthy drives to Havana or Varadero.

"That was the point where I realized nobody can do anything for us."

That's when Cherrett put out this frantic Facebook post on March 16.

Cherrett said one of the police officers had returned her passport, but she was nervous when she went to the airport to fly home.

She was able to board her return flight with no issue but she said her Cuban vacation was the most stressful week of her life and she will never go back.

"Is it safe to go to a resort and have a week of all-inclusive, maybe," said Cherrett. "But in this situation I would say no because I have never been so scared in my entire life."

Cherrett booked her vacation with Air Transat. Aside from being unhappy with police, Cherrett said she is upset that basic things like toilet paper weren't available in her resort room and that she couldn't call back to Canada.

Debbie Cabana, Air Transat's director of marketing, social media and public relations, said Cherrett has not informed the company of any problems with her accommodations at Hotel Playa Cayo Coco.

"She can contact our customer service if she wants to file a formal complaint," Cabana said.

Cherrett refutes the company response. She said she was in communication with an Air Transat representative at the resort.

While Cherrett said she wants to put the week behind her and move on, she said she will be filing a formal complaint with Air Transat.Winnipeg plans to build a new dock and switchback river access path to replace the unsafe wooden structure and "goat trail" on the south bank of the Assiniboine River at Osborne Street.

The city is looking for a firm to design a new river access path, viewing platform and removable boat dock at Gerald James Lynch Park, a scrubby patch of city-owned land in Osborne Village, east of the Osborne Street Bridge.

The existing dock, completed in 2004, is no longer safe to use or install, according to a request for proposals to redevelop the waterfront along the park.

"The dock has not been installed for several years due to the deteriorating condition of the dock structure, widely fluctuating river levels and the significant operating requirements for its installation and removal, which include the need for a crane and dive team," the request for proposals states.

"In addition to providing neighbourhood water bus access, there is also a desire by recreational boaters to use this dock for visiting Osborne Village. The site is also used for river viewing, shore fishing as well as winter access to the Assiniboine River trail."

The city also wants to improve lighting in the park to create a river access point that feels safe to pedestrians, said Jason Bell, who manages parks projects for the City of Winnipeg.

"It should start making people feel comfortable about using that space again," he said in an interview Tuesday, describing the existing docks as unsafe to deploy and the access path as "goat trail" that's too steep for people with mobility issues.

"What we want to do is get a river viewing platform and boat docking facility, and we want something that's going to be accessible to folks of all abilities and serve us throughout the whole year," he said.

"We have a collection of old wooden docks that are no longer safe to use and a very steep and tired-looking trail that leads down to the river."

While engineering and landscape achitecture work on the park upgrades could be complete this year, construction on the space won't begin until 2019. The city has earmarked $1.2 million for the job in next year's capital budget.

James Gerald Lynch Park also includes a piece of machinery salvaged from the old Osborne Street Lift Bridge. According to the Manitoba Historical Society, the park commemorates "a long-time resident of the River Osborne area, who, along with others, worked to preserve this community."By Gabriela Baczynska and Elizabeth Piper BRUSSELS (Reuters) - European Union leaders backed Britain on Thursday in blaming Moscow over a nerve agent attack on a former Russian spy in England, raising the possibility of additional retaliatory steps by some European countries. The show of support from the EU, at a time when Britain is grappling with its departure from the bloc, will boost Prime Minister Theresa May, who has also been asking other nations to match her decision to expel Russians over the attack. In a joint summit statement, the leaders said the EU "agrees with the United Kingdom government's assessment that it is highly likely that the Russian Federation is responsible and that there is no plausible alternative explanation". After discussions over dinner in Brussels, they added: "We stand in unqualified solidarity with the United Kingdom in the face of this grave challenge to our shared security." Some countries were considering taking their own action by, for example by following May and expelling Russian diplomats. People familiar with the talks said leaders were discussing a proposal to withdraw the EU's ambassador from Moscow in protest. May accused Russia of the first known offensive use of a nerve toxin in Europe since World War Two after Sergei Skripal, a former Russian double agent, and his daughter were found unconscious in the city of Salisbury on March 4. The attack has sparked tit-for-tat retaliation. May's move to expel 23 "undeclared intelligence officials" was followed by similar measures from Moscow, including the closure of Britain's cultural centre in St Petersburg. Over a dinner of lamb, May called on EU leaders to work together to confront the challenge Russia presented. "Russia staged a brazen and reckless attack against the United Kingdom," May had said on arrival at the summit. "It's clear that the Russian threat does not respect borders and indeed the incident in Salisbury was a pattern of Russian aggression against Europe and its near neighbours." In the early days after the attack, May won the support of French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and U.S. President Donald Trump when they said they shared Britain's assessment of Russian culpability. But in Brussels, May had to convince more dovish states including Greece, Hungary and Bulgaria, that they should blame Russia squarely over the attack. RUSSIAN SPIES The summit agreement opened the way for EU leaders to discuss future "coordinated action". Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite said she was ready to expel Russian spies and diplomats said Poland could do so too. Both had held off to see who else would join. Diplomats said several other countries were considering expulsions. Highlighting the bloc's familiar divisions on how to handle Russia, Slovakia's new prime minister, Peter Pellegrini, said he wanted "constructive dialogue" with Moscow despite the poisoning of the Skripals. British authorities say the pair have been critically ill since the attack by a Soviet-designed, military-grade nerve agent called Novichok. "The European Union and its member states should also continue to bolster their capabilities to address hybrid threats, including in the areas of cyber, strategic communication and counter-intelligence," the leaders said. May has also asked fellow European leaders to step up intelligence cooperation to start going after Russian spy networks, diplomats said. "Britain says there are these networks that organise such things like Salisbury, that these networks exist across our borders and that it would be good to go after them together," a senior EU diplomat said. Another diplomat said: "There is movement among several willing states to do something together in reaction to Skripal." The person added this could be done by some states individually, so as not to press more reluctant EU member states too hard. BEEF UP DEFENCES Russia has offered several different motives to explain the attack on the Skripals, who may have been left brain-damaged, and to absolve Moscow of responsibility. London has labelled that disinformation and distraction. On Thursday, Moscow's ambassador to London, Vladimir Yakovenko, said that, had Novichok been used, the Skripals would have died and he rebuked British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson for comparing Russia's hosting of the soccer World Cup this summer with Nazi Germany's hosting of the Olympics in 1936. In Moscow, President Vladimir Putin discussed Britain's "unfriendly and provocative" policy at a session of the national security council, RIA news agency quoted the Kremlin as saying. Ties between Russia and the West plummeted over Moscow's 2014 annexation of Crimea and support for rebels in eastern Ukraine. Both have triggered rounds of EU sanctions. "Russia has shown itself as a strategic enemy, not a strategic partner," a British official said. (Additional reporting by Robin Emmott, Richard Lough, Jean-Baptiste Vey and Andreas Rinke, Writing by Gabriela Baczynska, Editing by Andrew Heavens, John Stonestreet and Alastair Macdonald)CLEARWATER, Fla., March 22, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- On Tuesday the 20th of March, the Manager for the Scientology Information Center which is located in downtown Clearwater, Florida, announced that the center has extended their daily hours of operation from 10 am to 10 pm in order to accommodate visitors overwhelming curiosity about the religion. The Center has also added 13 new video interviews about Scientologys founder, L. Ron Hubbard, by a wide variety of people who knew him.



People are curious about Scientology, said Amber Skjelset, Manager of the Information Center. In just this past week alone, Ive seen a two-fold increase of visitors. The Information Center is a place where they come to learn for themselves what Scientology is.

The Historic Clearwater Building, built in 1918, houses the Centers gallery of information with interactive displays featuring over 400 videos for self-guided tours. There are exhibits on Scientology beliefs, Churches around the world, ongoing social programs initiated by the Church and the life and legacy of L. Ron Hubbard.

Since the Centers opening in July 2015, 21,000 guests have crossed its threshold from over 30 countries including: Russia, Macedonia, Poland, China, Peru, Panama, Greece, Israel as well as from all over the United States.

In addition to providing information about the Church, the center hosts monthly community events including concerts covering a wide variety of music and The L. Ron Hubbard East Coast Theatre that performs Mr. Hubbards fiction stories in an old-time radio format.

For more information about the Scientology Information Center or Scientology, please contact Amber Skjelset, Manager of the Scientology Information Center at (727) 467-6966, email amber@cos.flag.org or visit www.scientology.org. No appointment is necessary to visit the Information Center.

About the Church of Scientology

The Scientology religion was founded by philosopher, L. Ron Hubbard. The first Church of Scientology was formed in the United States in 1954 and has expanded to more than 11,000 churches, missions, and affiliated groups in 167 nations. Inspired by L. Ron Hubbards words, A Community that pulls together can make a better society for all, the Church of Scientology regularly engages in many humanitarian programs and community events. To learn more, visit www.scientology-fso.org.

Photo caption: Since the opening of the Scientology Information Center in July 2015 21,000 guests have crossed its threshold from over 30 countries including, Russia, Macedonia, Poland, China, Peru, Panama, Greece, Israel as well as from all over America. All are welcome.

For More Information

Contact: Amber Skjelset

727-467-6966

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/ef91823b-ada4-4dbd-b420-d1a349db0e0cCalgary play explores the life of the last man in Canada jailed for being gay

A new play premiering this week at Sage Theatre shows love can't be legislated.

Written by Natalie Meisner in conjunction with the Calgary Gay History Project and Third Street Theatre, Legislating Love tells the story of a fictional gay historian and her partner as she researches real-life Calgarian Everett Klippert  the last man jailed in Canada for being gay.

Klippert was a well known and well liked bus driver in Calgary covering a route through downtown in the early 1960s.

"He was also everybody's favourite uncle, he did a lot of community service, he was just this all-around, really, really sweet and gentlemanly fellow who was looking to help everybody out," Meisner told The Homestretch.

"The one thing that set him apart though, was he was attracted to, and admitted to being attracted to, other men."

That led Klippert to be charged with gross indecency and sentenced to four years in jail.

"Any kind of intimate act, at all, with someone of the same sex at that time could have you charged and sentenced to jail," said Meisner.

"What would usually happen is if you were questioned, you were forced to deny that you had feelings for someone of the same sex because you could face violence, you could lose your job. The laws at the time didn't protect you at all."

Meisner said Klippert wasn't at all ashamed of being gay.

"He did not seem to feel that what he was doing was wrong and he actually tried to explain to authorities how he felt," she said.

"He said to them, 'put the shoe on the other foot  if you're a gentleman attracted to a woman, how would you feel if you had to take it the other direction?' He was so reasonable and so well spoken about it, that was one thing I thought set him apart."

When he was released from jail in 1964, Klippert moved north, having found work at the Consolidated Mining and Smelting Company of Canada, later renamed Cominco Ltd., near Pine Point, N.W.T.

Story continues

About a year after he arrived there, police were looking into a suspicious fire, and while questioning Klippert  a routine part of the investigation  he admitted to having had relations with men and was charged with four counts of gross indecency.

"At that time, another really unfortunate thing is he wound up being sentenced as a dangerous sexual offender and this was really odd, this was just for acts that were consensual with other men," said Meisner.

"The only reason they sentenced him this way is he admitted his attraction to other men, so they thought, if he gets out of jail, he will likely seek out contact again."

The fact Klippert kept his sense of humour throughout his dealings with the court system is another attribute that drew Meisner to his story.

"I was lucky enough to look at some of his papers and some of his writings and he kept his faith in human nature," she said. "He would still try to make you laugh or try to find the bright side of things."

Two years after the law had been changed in 1969, Klippert still hadn't been released.

That wouldn't happen until 1971, after two appeals were rejected by both the N.W.T. Court of Appeals and the Supreme Court of Canada.

He died in 1996 at the age of 69.

The play runs March 22-31 with performances starting at 7:30 p.m. on Tuesday through Saturday, and 2:30 p.m. on Sunday. There will also be an additional matinee at 2:30 p.m. on March 24.

Tickets for the evenings shows are $30 for adults and $20 for students and seniors. Matinee shows are $25 for adults and $20 for students or seniors. Tickets can be booked online.Inuit girls and women in Nunavik preyed upon by some workers from the south, police say

Almost every day, police in Nunavik, the Inuit territory in Quebec's far north, prepares rape kits for victims who request them.

The majority of the alleged aggressors are Inuit, says Michel Martin, the former chief of the Kativik regional police force.

However, Martin says, a number are workers doing stints in the north who take advantage of vulnerable people in isolated communities.

Take the case of Kathy Papigatuk.

Papigatuk told Radio-Canada's investigative program, Enquete, how she went out with her sister one night in 2013, when she was just 15. The siblings agreed to go for a ride with a construction worker who offered them alcohol.

What started as a polite ride turned into a nightmare.

"He turned out to be a monster," Papigatuk recalls."I got raped in the car."

Papigatuk filed a complaint with police a few days later. The worker, Daniel Bilodeau, pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of sexual assault of a minor.

Bilodeau said that Papigatuk had told him she was 20 and alleged she initiated the sexual contact and that there had been no penetration.

He was sentenced to 240 days in jail.

According to Kativik regional police, in 2017 alone, there were 220 cases of sexual assault against minors and 226 cases of sexual assault against adult women in Nunavik.

Nunavik has a total population of slightly more than 12,000.

'Profiting off young women and men'

Martin, who just ended his mandate as head of the Kativik police force, has participated in United Nations missions in the past.

He compares his experience in Nunavik now to what he witnessed on those international missions.

"We saw this sort of behaviour in international operations. People go to an isolated area for a short period of time," he said.

"There are a lot of opportunities, less competition and they are in the presence of a vulnerable clientele, especially when they are offered alcohol or drugs."

"It's a way of attracting and profiting off young women and men."

Story continues

Code of ethics

Radio-Canada's Enquete contacted the main construction companies working in Nunavik. All refused to comment.

All noted, however, that they have codes of conduct that employees are expected to follow.

Gely Construction was Bilodeau's employer. When contacted, officials there said they were not aware of the case against Papigatuk's convicted assailant.

They did note, though, that all workers receive firm directives about how to conduct themselves before arriving in Nunavik, and the consumption of alcohol is prohibited.

#Uvangalu

Many of the Inuit women in Nunavik say they are ready for their own #MeToo movement  #Uvangalu, in Inuktitut.

"Sometimes it's stuck in our brain: it's like living in the past again," said Papigatuk.

"So it's better to talk and let it out."

Lizzie Aloupa, a crime prevention officer with the Kativik police force, says the effects of sexual assault are devastating.

Aloupa is one of the women behind the Good Touch, Bad Touch program, which teaches children in school about appropriate behaviour and contact.

"Men come here, feel free and are convinced that nobody will be aware of what they are doing," she said.

"Do we keep silent, as we also have?" she asks.

"Or do we denounce them?"A man convicted in India in the so called "honour killing" of Jaswinder (Jassi) Sidhu became a permanent resident in Canada while on parole.

The revelation  the latest twist in a story that dates back to a notorious slaying in the province of Punjab in 2000  is laid out in a recent federal court ruling.

According to documents filed in the case, Darshan Singh Sidhu became a permanent resident on May 4, 2008, when he landed at Vancouver International Airport along with his wife and son.

He was on parole at the time after being convicted, in India, of murder three years earlier.

The court documents say the family was sponsored by his daughter, who is married to the son of one of two Canadians currently fighting extradition to India for allegedly masterminding Jassi Sidhu's killing.

Darshan Singh Sidhu lied about his criminal status on his application.

He is currently in India, but the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration is fighting to have his son  who lives in Maple Ridge, B.C.  declared inadmissible for an alleged lack of "candour" about his father's past.

"There is no dispute ... that Darshan Singh Sidhu was inadmissible to Canada and lied on the application forms, when he denied having criminal convictions. He had been found guilty of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment when he filed his application and when he was landed. [His son] and his mother failed to mention this in their application for permanent residency and at the point of entry interview," wrote Federal Court Judge Richard Mosley..

"However, the .... declaration that [the son] signed did not ask for information about any criminal convictions that other family members may have had  only his own."

Permanent residency while on parole

According to Indian authorities, Jassi Sidhu was slain in 2000 for defying her family's wishes by marrying a poor Indian rickshaw driver.

The 25-year-old's throat was slit and her body dumped in a canal after she and her new husband were attacked by a group of armed men.

Story continues

The federal court judgment says Darshan Singh Sidhu was one of seven people arrested and charged with Jassi Sidhu's murder in India. He was convicted and sentenced to life in prison on October 21, 2005.

"Darshan Singh Sidhu was alleged to have arranged the killing on behalf of members of her family in Canada," the ruling says.

He appealed the conviction.

The federal court ruling says the Supreme Court of India ultimately acquitted Sidhu in 2015, giving him "the benefit of the doubt" because the telephone used to orchestrate the killing "was not under his exclusive control.

His brother also had access to it."

But according to Mosley's ruling, Sidhu had long been a permanent resident by then, applying in 2007 under the family class, along with his wife and son.

His daughter is married to the son of Surjit Singh Badesha, Jassi Sidhu's uncle. Indian authorities have charged Badesha and Malkit Kaur Sidhu  Jassi Sidhu's mother  with murder.

The Supreme Court of Canada ruled the pair should be extradited in 2017, but their removal was halted on a last minute application to the B.C. Court of Appeal.

The pair will apply to stay their extradition in April, as a remedy for what they claim was an elaborate plan to whisk them out of the country before they could exhaust a last opportunity for clemency.

According to Mosley's ruling, Darshan Singh Sidhu was released on bail pending his appeals at various times, and he was also released on parole to bring in crops during the harvest season.

The federal court file includes a report prepared for the Canadian High Commission in New Delhi, which claims the 63-year-old visited Canada four times between 2008 and 2011.

The report claims he was issued a Canadian passport in Vancouver in 2009 that expires next year.

'It would lead to an absurd result'

Mosley's ruling concerns an application by the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration for a judicial review of an Immigration and Refugee Board appeal division finding that Sidhu's son, Barinder Singh Sidhu, should remain a permanent resident.

The ruling doesn't say when Canadian officials became aware of Darshan Singh Sidhu's history, but they appeared to know by the time Barinder Singh Sidhu was interviewed at a Canadian consulate during a trip back to India in 2014.

A year later, an immigration officer issued a report declaring the son inadmissible on the grounds that he "did not disclose and/or withheld information concerning his father's conviction."

The proceedings are complicated by the fact that Darshan Singh Sidhu, himself, has never appeared at a hearing to be declared inadmissible.

Both the Immigration and Refugee Board and the appeal division (IAD) sided with Barinder Singh Sidhu's argument that he shouldn't be punished for a "duty of candour" to disclose his father's conviction.

"It would lead to an absurd result, the IAD found ... if he was found to be inadmissible when his father, who had an obligation to disclose his conviction, is not subject to an admissibility hearing and will not be unless he attempts to return to Canada," Mosley wrote.

But the judge said the Immigration Appeals Division should reconsider the case anyway.

"There is no dispute between the parties, that, but for Darshan Singh Sidhu's misrepresentation, [his son] would not have been admitted to Canada as an accompanying family member," Mosley wrote.

"His permanent resident status is therefore predicated upon a lie, albeit a lie by his father, when they applied for and gained entry to Canada."

'They can't report him for what his father did'

Bardinder Singh Sidhu's lawyer, Aleksandar Stojicevic, says his client has been living in Canada for the past 10 years. He has a wife and two children who were born here.

"The government has to prove that he actually misrepresented something," he says.

"Our position is that there is no misrepresentation by him, and his father isn't here, so they can't report him for what his father did."

Stojicevic says he has little doubt the high-profile nature of the case has made his client a target.

"But to be fair to them, they also see a situation where the integrity of the system is in question here. We rely on people to tell the truth on these forms. Obviously, it's a significant misrepresentation on the father's part," he said.

"My point is that permanent residents, at some point, are insulated from this kind of thing when they're not the responsible party."

Citizenship and Immigration Canada said they could not comment on the case without consent.For 18 hours, Bernice Thorassie thought of little other than her auntie, Ila Oman.

Thorassie drove the nearly 400 kilometre winter road from her home community of Tadoule Lake to Thompson, Man., to share the details of her aunt's brutal death with the national inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. The inquiry is hearing testimony in the city 650 km north of Winnipeg on Tuesday and Wednesday.

"I know my auntie wants me to share it. She wants everybody to know that what they did to her wasn't right," Thorassie told CBC News.

Thorassie was an orphan and spent a lot of time with her aunties Hazel and Ila while growing up in Dene Village.

"It was the happiest time of my life because somebody cared for me, somebody loved me, other than just my grandmother," she said.

But then when she was nine years old, Oman stopped coming. Thorassie said she knew her auntie died, but she didn't know she suffered a brutal death.

Thorassie shared Oman's story privately with a statement taker on Tuesday. The two-day Thompson hearing only had time for eight family members or survivors to testify publicly.

"As I got older, I started thinking more about her," she said about Oman, whom she remembers wearing bright red lipstick. "Her spirit was coming to me and it just wouldn't stop  just come in my dreams, or I see a woman  with red lips and I think of Ila, right away."

Oman died after she was beaten and raped in Dene Village outside Churchill in 1971. Dene Village was a makeshift home to the Sayisi Dene after they were forcibly relocated from their traditional territory and lifestyle in 1956 and left outside Churchill, where they built shacks with items scrounged from the dump and struggled to survive.

Oman's death remains unsolved, although there are rumours about what happened and who was involved.

Thorassie said some of the people rumoured to have been involved in her aunt's death still live in the community.

Story continues

"How can you be so normal after what you did, is what I think to myself," she said about one of the people she believes was involved. "How could you portray yourself an innocent person all of these years?"

Those believed to be responsible are Dene people, she said.

'It's everywhere'

Violence is a sad reality in many Indigenous communities, Audette said.

"It's everywhere, regardless where we live."

But the stories from northern areas of Canada are different from those in the south, Audette said. Last week's hearing in Montreal included many different stories than those from a previous hearing in Northern Quebec, she said.

"I want to make sure that we also hear from families who live in the territories who face different realities than those in the south," she said.

Audette was also at the Winnipeg hearing in October and anticipates the north to south differences will be similar to the differences in Quebec.

One difference that stood out was a lack of response from institutions or services such as the police and the justice system.

When the relationship between the family and police is good, the family doesn't have to deal with extra stress associated with a lack of information about the standing of a case, she said.

"The stress of the family when they are expecting answer on where is my daughter or my mom  it's not in the testimony," she said. "It's something else, it's more how to support the family when they go through that trauma."

However, a good relationship between MMIWG families and police seems to be rare, she said.

The inquiry will hold an institutional hearing on policing following the final community hearing, which is scheduled to happen in Vancouver next month.

The national inquiry, launched in September 2016, is looking at underlying causes of violence against Indigenous women and girls, including systemic issues, and will make recommendations to end the problem.

Correction : Dene Village was outside Churchill, Man., not outside Thompson, as originally reported due to an editor's error.(Mar 21, 2018 11:10 AM)The Ottawa-Carleton District School Board (OCDSB) wants all school councils to do their banking through the board, a move that has riled some parent groups.

It's currently planning consultations on the idea, which would affect $4 million worth of donations handled by parent-volunteers every year.

Michael Carson, chief financial officer for OCDSB, said the issue boils down to community and donor confidence in fundraising activities.

"What we're trying to do is minimize the possibility that dollars would be either misreported or could go missing, and [avoid] all of the angst that can create for a community," Carson said.

Misappropriation of funds

There have been at least three instances where school council funds have disappeared in the last decade  two of which were reported publicly, he said.

Back in 2012, Rockcliffe Park Public School parents were informed $70,000 had gone missing.

The board report also mentions money lost at Leslie Park Public School last year.

In both those situations, a report was filed with Ottawa police. Carson said the board has reimbursed school councils for lost funds in the past and has also recovered some of those costs.

Mistrust and concern

Christine Moulaison, co-chair of the Ottawa-Carleton Assembly of School Councils (OCASC), said the recommendation goes too far.

"It seems like a really dramatic response for something that's happened to less than a handful of schools," she said. "It doesn't mean you need to take control of everything."

Moulaison, who is also chair of the council at South March Public School, said parents are concerned they could face vetoes from school administrators about projects they've been raising tens of thousands of dollars to build.

"There's some mistrust and there's also concern. What if principals change and directives change for the school?" she said.

"Sometimes we're buying gym equipment. There are some schools that are raising money for full parks and play structures that the school doesn't replace when they wear out."

Story continues

Most councils are well-run and manage several events, which require hundreds of cheques for vendors, Moulaison said. The proposal could overwhelm staff or cause them to limit access to a council's account to manage their workload, which would compromise the viability of those events, she added.

Consultation begins

But Carson said final decisions about how money is spent will remain with councils.

"Expenditures have to be authorized by a vote of council the same as they did before," he said. "The only difference is the bank account is in the name of the school."

Carson said staffing and workload are issues he hopes can be addressed in consultations on the policy.

So far about 30 out of the OCDSB's 150 public schools manage banking on behalf of their councils, according to Carson.

The consultation on the proposed transition to mandatory management was approved by a narrow margin at a committee of the whole meeting Tuesday night  four in favour, three opposed and four abstaining.

The consultation will run until June, though several trustees spoke in favour of extending the consultation period. If the final policy is approved, the new fund management model would begin in the 2020-21 school year.By Tatiana Jancarikova BRATISLAVA (Reuters) - Slovakia's president appointed a new cabinet on Thursday and told ministers they must win back public trust, shattered by the murder of an investigative journalist that led to mass protests and the resignation of veteran leader Robert Fico. Organizers of the main anti-government protests canceled a rally planned for Bratislava on Friday after President Andrej Kiska appointed the reshuffled cabinet. However, the new government has exactly the same program at the outgoing cabinet and students from several universities in the capital said on Facebook they would still organize a silent march on Friday out of respect for the reporter and his fiancee who was also murdered. Smaller protests were expected to continue in some other towns across the country. Tens of thousands of Slovaks have staged the country's biggest protests in three decades of democracy to demand a new government and a fair investigation into last month's killing of Jan Kuciak, 27, who probed fraud cases involving businessmen with political ties, alongside fiancee Martina Kusnirova. "Your government will soon ask parliament for (a vote of) confidence, but more importantly you will have to win the trust of the people. I won't let you forget this responsibility," Kiska, a political opponent of Fico, told the new ministers. Fico stepped down as prime minister in the wake of the protests but remains head of his ruling Smer party. Smer picked Peter Pellegrini, a 42-year-old deputy prime minister, to replace him and keep the three-party coalition government afloat midway through its term. It also chose former health minister Tomas Drucker, who has no political affiliation, to head the Interior Ministry - a sensitive post as the double murder has yet to be solved. The 15-member cabinet includes six portfolio changes but only two people who have not previously held any government position in the central European nation of 5.4 million. Pellegrini, long a member of Smer, and Drucker face a tough task convincing people that they will safeguard a fair investigation of Kuciak's murder while the party, often a target of the reporter's investigative journalism, remains in power. COPY AND PASTE Some Slovaks are disappointed that no early elections have been held. Their unease is likely to be amplified by the fact that the new cabinet approved an unchanged program. This was copied-and-pasted from the previous government's manifesto so swiftly on Thursday that goals that had already been met had not been removed from the document. The new government is likely to sail through a confidence vote in the 150-member parliament, where the ruling coalition has a majority with 79 lawmakers. The session will open on Friday but the vote is likely to be held next week. Kuciak, who was found shot dead with Kusnirova in their home, had been looking into suspected mafia links of Italians with businesses in Slovakia. In his final report, published posthumously, he said one of the Italians had past business links with two Slovaks, who later worked in Fico's office. Both have resigned but deny connections to the murder. Their Italian former business partner has denied having connections with the mafia. Kiska said he had agreed with Drucker that the leadership of the Slovak police force must be replaced. Pellegrini, who became a member of parliament in 2006, has helped Smer through difficult times before. He quit as deputy finance minister in 2014 to step in for an education minister who resigned, months before taking over as the house speaker after the former speaker resigned due to a scandal. Pellegrini is popular among Smer voters. He became deputy prime minister for investment and information technology in 2016. He said the pro-European and pro-NATO orientation of Slovakia will remain a priority for the new government. Fico was prime minister for 10 of the last 12 years. He positioned the euro zone country as a pro-European bastion in a eurosceptic region, avoiding the clashes Hungary and Poland have had with the EU over media freedom and the rule of law. (Reporting by Tatiana Jancarikova; Editing by Gareth Jones, Hugh Lawson and David Stamp)Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, left, shakes hands with Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte in Manila on Nov. 13, 2017. The two world leaders were all smiles before Trudeau confronted Duterte over concerns about human rights and extrajudicial killings in the Philippines. Photo from Getty Images.

The president of the Philippines has reportedly reignited his feud with Canada with an inflammatory word choice.

GMA News, a network based in the Philippines with more than five million Twitter followers, published a story Tuesday in which Filipino President Rodrigo Duterte criticized members of the Canadian government over a cancelled helicopter deal.

The aircraft agreement would have resulted in Canada sending 16 combat utility helicopters to the Philippines in exchange for $233 million. The deal fell through when concerns arose over what the helicopters would be used for.

The Philippines has been embroiled in a lengthy battle with rebels and drug dealers in the country.

My God, you Canadians, how stupid can you get? Our citizens are joining the ISIS so we have every right to kill our citizens because we do not want to destroy the community with apathy, Duterte reportedly told local officials in Manila, according to GMA News.

#PresidentDuterte slams Canada for withholding BELL choppers for concern over human rights. He says "stupid Canadians" do not understand the terrorism problem in the Philippines. | via @rambotalabong  Rappler (@rapplerdotcom) March 20, 2018

The talk of review only came after an official from the Philippines said the helicopters would be used against rebels, a comment later walked back by the countrys defence minister. The military in the Philippines later said the helicopters were not intended for attack, but Duterte made it clear what he wanted to use the aircraft for.

The reason Im buying helicopters is because I want to finish them off, he said, referring to rebels, as reported by Reuters.

Duterte decided to axe the agreement when Canadian officials ordered a review of the deal and the agreement spiralled into a controversy.

Story continues

According to Reuters, the deal was reached in 2012 and the helicopters were expected to be used for search and rescue operations.

In January, the Human Rights Watch released a report claiming more than 12,000 lives have been lost in the Philippines since the so called drug war began in 2016. Critics say many of the reported executions have taken place without due process.

Broken relationship?

During a summit featuring Asian and Western nations last November, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau confronted Duterte about the bloody conflict taking place in the Philippines.

I also mentioned human rights, rule of law and specifically extra judicial killings as being an issue that Canada is concerned with, the prime minister said, according to Reuters.

While Trudeau described the Filipino leader as being receptive to the comments, that perception quickly changed once Duterte responded publicly to the comments made by a foreigner he did not name.

I said I will not explain. It is a personal and official insult, Duterte said at the time.

The diplomatic relationship between the two countries have been icy ever since, despite the fact that Canada has a sizable Filipino population. More than 650,000 ethnic Filipinos reside in Canada, according to census data from 2011.A public talk organized at Wilfrid Laurier University featuring controversial speaker Faith Goldy was cancelled due to a fire alarm being pulled on Tuesday night.

More than 175 people lined up at Paul Martin Centre in Waterloo, Ont., to see her speak about keeping Canada's borders closed to immigration.

More than 100 people protested outside the centre, yelling "shame" and "no Nazis at Laurier!" as the event was about to take place.

The talk was set to start at 7:15 p.m. ET. At approximately 7:20 p.m, a fire alarm was pulled and police evacuated the building, preventing anyone from entering the Paul Martin Centre.

Event attendees then moved to Veterans' Green park, on the other side of campus, where Lindsay Shepherd, the organizer of the event, announced the talk was cancelled.

Organizer 'super disappointed'

Shepherd, the co-founder of the campus group Laurier Society for Open Inquiry, said she's "super disappointed" at the outcome.

According to Goldy's Twitter account, the fire alarm was pulled before she was even introduced and presented on stage.

"My view of these college leftists is more damaged than it used to be," Shepherd said to CBC News, assuming the person who pulled the fire alarm was someone who opposed the talk.

"I had faith that we'd have a nuanced discussion where people can challenge the speaker at the end  obviously that was too much to hope for," said Shepherd.

More than 175 people wanted to attend Goldy's talk, which extended the room's capacity. Shepherd said she had to turn away an additional hundred.

Counter protest

Goldy was let go from her job at Rebel Media after appearing on a podcast affiliated with the neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer.

Her planned talk at the Waterloo university  "Ethnocide: Multiculturalism and European Canadian Identity"  drew polarizing responses, including criticism from outspoken professors at the university who called on administration to prohibit it and for students to tear down posters with Goldy's face.

Story continues

Protesters said providing her with a platform makes students of colour feel unsafe.

The crowds protesting outside the Paul Martin Centre Tuesday chanted "black and Indigenous lives matter."

"Wilfrid Laurier University has determined that our lives do not matter here," said Fanis Juma Radstake, who represents the African Community Wellness Initiative on campus.

"They acted as a gateway for violent white supremacists to have access to our children and youth," Radstake said.

'Try to get her back'

Goldy on Twitter thanked Shepherd and said she will be back.

Shepherd said the turn of events makes her feel motivated to keep organizing controversial talks.

"We'll have more of the unpopular speaker series. We are committed to having her back," said Shepherd.

"We saw how much interest there was. Frankly the room was not big enough."FORM 8.3

PUBLIC OPENING POSITION DISCLOSURE/DEALING DISCLOSURE BY

A PERSON WITH INTERESTS IN RELEVANT SECURITIES REPRESENTING 1% OR MORE

Rule 8.3 of the Takeover Code (the "Code")

1. KEY INFORMATION

(a) Full name of discloser: OZ Management LP and

Och-Ziff Management Europe Ltd (b) Owner or controller of interests and short positions disclosed, if different from 1(a):

The naming of nominee or vehicle companies is insufficient. For a trust, the trustee(s), settlor and beneficiaries must be named. (c) Name of offeror/offeree in relation to whose relevant securities this form relates:

Use a separate form for each offeror/offeree GVC Holdings plc (d) If an exempt fund manager connected with an offeror/offeree, state this and specify identity of offeror/offeree: (e) Date position held/dealing undertaken:

For an opening position disclosure, state the latest practicable date prior to the disclosure 21 March 2018 (f) In addition to the company in 1(c) above, is the discloser making disclosures in respect of any other party to the offer?

If it is a cash offer or possible cash offer, state "N/A" Yes

If YES, specify which:

Ladbrokes Coral Group plc

2. POSITIONS OF THE PERSON MAKING THE DISCLOSURE

If there are positions or rights to subscribe to disclose in more than one class of relevant securities of the offeror or offeree named in 1(c), copy table 2(a) or (b) (as appropriate) for each additional class of relevant security.

(a) Interests and short positions in the relevant securities of the offeror or offeree to which the disclosure relates following the dealing (if any)

Class of relevant security:



Euro 0.01 ordinary (IM00B5VQMV65)



Interests Short positions Number % Number % (1) Relevant securities owned and/or controlled: (2) Cash-settled derivatives:



6,220,629 2.049 1,384,606 0.456 (3) Stock-settled derivatives (including options) and agreements to purchase/sell:



TOTAL: 6,220,629 2.049 1,384,606 0.456

All interests and all short positions should be disclosed.

Details of any open stock-settled derivative positions (including traded options), or agreements to purchase or sell relevant securities, should be given on a Supplemental Form 8 (Open Positions).

(b) Rights to subscribe for new securities (including directors' and other employee options)

Class of relevant security in relation to which subscription right exists: Details, including nature of the rights concerned and relevant percentages:

3. DEALINGS (IF ANY) BY THE PERSON MAKING THE DISCLOSURE

Where there have been dealings in more than one class of relevant securities of the offeror or offeree named in 1(c), copy table 3(a), (b), (c) or (d) (as appropriate) for each additional class of relevant security dealt in.

The currency of all prices and other monetary amounts should be stated.

(a) Purchases and sales

Class of relevant security Purchase/sale



Number of securities Price per unit





(b) Cash-settled derivative transactions

Class of relevant security Product description

e.g. CFD Nature of dealing

e.g. opening/closing a long/short position, increasing/reducing a long/short position Number of reference securities Price per unit Euro 0.01 ordinary CFD Increasing a short position 50,000 GBP 9.30 Euro 0.01 ordinary CFD Increasing a short position 50,000 GBP 9.37

(c) Stock-settled derivative transactions (including options)

(i) Writing, selling, purchasing or varying

Class of relevant security Product description e.g. call option Writing, purchasing, selling, varying etc. Number of securities to which option relates Exercise price per unit Type

e.g. American, European etc. Expiry date Option money paid/ received per unit

(ii) Exercise

Class of relevant security Product description

e.g. call option Exercising/ exercised against Number of securities Exercise price per unit





(d) Other dealings (including subscribing for new securities)

Class of relevant security Nature of dealing

e.g. subscription, conversion Details Price per unit (if applicable)





4. OTHER INFORMATION

(a) Indemnity and other dealing arrangements

Details of any indemnity or option arrangement, or any agreement or understanding, formal or informal, relating to relevant securities which may be an inducement to deal or refrain from dealing entered into by the person making the disclosure and any party to the offer or any person acting in concert with a party to the offer:

Irrevocable commitments and letters of intent should not be included. If there are no such agreements, arrangements or understandings, state "none"









(b) Agreements, arrangements or understandings relating to options or derivatives

Details of any agreement, arrangement or understanding, formal or informal, between the person making the disclosure and any other person relating to:

(i) the voting rights of any relevant securities under any option; or

(ii) the voting rights or future acquisition or disposal of any relevant securities to which any derivative is referenced:

If there are no such agreements, arrangements or understandings, state "none"









(c) Attachments

Is a Supplemental Form 8 (Open Positions) attached? NO





Date of disclosure: 22 March 2018



Contact name: Janine Frederick Telephone number: 02077584420

Public disclosures under Rule 8 of the Code must be made to a Regulatory Information Service.

The Panel's Market Surveillance Unit is available for consultation in relation to the Code's disclosure requirements on +44 (0)20 7638 0129.

The Code can be viewed on the Panel's website at www.thetakeoverpanel.org.uk.Judith Bergman is a columnist and political analyst





You can find more in depth articles on Israel and the Middle East @en.mida.org.il

Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blog spot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work.

.

.. MiDA ..21 March '18..Israel recently passed legislation giving the Minister of the Interior the authority to revoke the residency of East Jerusalem residents involved in terrorism or espionage. This was immediately met with criticism of the European Union, as often happens when it comes to Israel.The purpose of the law is to target Hamas members living in East Jerusalem, who are eligible for Israeli welfare benefits. East Jerusalem residents are generally allowed to travel freely and are entitled to the social and insurance benefits of Israeli citizens. They can also vote in municipal  but not national  elections. MK Amir Ohana (Likud) explained. MK Ohana was referring to a September 2017 ruling by the Supreme Court. The ruling said that the Interior Ministry did not have the right to revoke the permanent residency status of four East Jerusalem residents with ties to the terrorist group Hamas.Reacting to the new law, the EU published a statement in which it lamented that, In its statement, the EU assured that it .If it really means what is says with this statement, the EU does so only when the terrorism is directed at anyone other than the Jews. It is difficult to take seriously the EUs claim of rejecting terrorism, given its overwhelming political and financial support of one of the worlds arch terrorists, Mahmoud Abbas.The EU statement concludes that, .The EU does not recognize that all of Jerusalem belongs to Israel. The question that is hardly ever asked is why Israel should care, one way or the other, whether the EU recognizes Israels historical, ancient capital of Jerusalem? Or anything else to do with Israel for that matter.For all of official Europes post-colonial guilt, this kind of language  declarations of what the EU does and does not find acceptable in the policies and actions of the sovereign state of Israel  is the language of an unrepentant colonialist.The EU uses this kind of language  condescending in its presumption that it is entitled to determine the territory and exact location of the capital of another nation  about Israel all the time; it is automatic, on default.Israel was a thriving nation in its ancestral homeland, long before European civilization decided to set out and colonize large parts of the world. It is therefore hugely ironic that the EU  a post-national, largely unelected bureaucracy historically rooted in Western Europe, which claims to speak for all of Europe today  should be lecturing one of the most ancient surviving civilizations on earth, the Jews, on the status of its ancient capital  or on anything else for that matter.It would appear that you can take Europe out of the former colonies, but you cannot take the colonialism out of the Europeans  at least not when it comes to the Jews.While the Europe of the post-national European Union no longer invades other peoples countries in order to colonize them, it still finds it legitimate to aggressively meddle in how other nations, such as Israel, should go about their business.The EU has strong opinions on how Israel should or should not defend itself against terrorism, as its statement about Jerusalem made clear; so while the EU is very keen on receiving Israeli assistance to combat terrorism in Europe, it is considerably less so when it comes to Israel defending itself.Even though colonialism ended a long time ago, the never-ending attempts to pressure Israel into the two-state solution, a tactic that the EU has plainly refused to abandon, is plainly a colonialist enterprise aimed at beating Israel into what the EU considers to be its proper (submissive) place.The EU does not fight for Arab human rights, as they claim, because the EU is nowhere to be found when it comes to Arab-on-Arab human rights abuses The whole issue is about subjecting Israel to the EUs political will. The moral narcissism of the European Union is no better than the moral narcissism of its colonialist European predecessors. It is just a different century.____________________The author is the CEO of Reservists on Duty





Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blog spot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook which has additional pieces of interest besides that which is posted on the blog. Also check-out This Ongoing War by Frimet and Arnold Roth. An excellent blog, very important work.

.

..Opinion/JPost..19 March '18..Today begins the official Israel Apartheid Week, to be held at universities across the US and Canada. The name of course references South Africa, the country where actual apartheid policies were instituted several decades ago.Apartheid Week has never been more than more than a smokescreen for an antisemitic hate fest, cynically marketed as a human rights campaign. Hundreds of academics, amazingly including Israelis and Jews, will be partners in this hateful annual project.It will be a carnival including art exhibits throughout campuses. It will be a week in which sanctimonious but actually clueless people  people with no idea who they are attacking and who they are protecting  will shout empty slogans and blame Israel for all the evil in the world.It will be a week where anyone who dares to speak up and anyone who decides to expose these lies will be shouted down, just like what we saw happen last week at the University of Virginia, and the week before that at the University of Georgia.Lets be clear: we need to fight for human rights, especially in the human catastrophe known as Syria. And there are countless other atrocities happening all around the world. However, this is not what happens during Apartheid Week.So while, under Muslim rule, members of the LGBT community are thrown from rooftops, women are murdered in honor killings, there will be no protests against these horrific acts, especially during Apartheid Week but all year long, too. This glaring selectivity of concern shows more clearly than anything that the real focus of Apartheid Week is on hatred of Israel, not concern for the human rights of oppressed people.It is ironic that the coalition of anti-Israelis and antisemites has recruited all the minority groups on campus for their cause. During Apartheid Week, one can meet the resistance groups for blacks, feminist organizations, LGBT groups, human rights organizations and more.Ironic, because while all of these groups stand shoulder to shoulder with the Muslim organizations, the latter have little concern with human rights, especially womens rights. The ideology they represent and preach shows little if any resemblance to the moral backbone of justice.What does stand out in this combined effort is a glaring, almost prideful ignorance. All these organizations have combined their efforts to attack Israel without any knowledge or understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.Countering this tidal wave of ignorance and venomous hatred is no small task. Our belief is that the biggest mistake would be to walk away, letting the haters have their moment unquestioned and unchallenged.We believe that we cannot abandon these campuses and not provide a counterpoint to the hatred. We are concerned about the students who know very little and who could be swayed by the false propaganda. These are students who will be the future leaders of America, filling positions of power and influence in American society. For them to be manipulated by such hatred could have terrible implications for future American support of Israel.We have and will continue to use various teams of delegates to appear on behalf of pro-Israel campus groups. Among these teams has been a group of non-Jewish emissaries: Muslim, Druse and Christian activists to campuses from both sides of the Green Line, who have clearly presented to the truth about Israel, including their own love and support for the nation.They have encountered shocked crowds that truly thought that Israel is an apartheid state. They also boldly encountered occasional disruptions that resulted in physical violence. They and our other teams are only energized and inspired by these interactions, and above all, by the opportunity to meet and discuss with those students who actually want to learn the truth about the situation.Our activists are not affiliated with any political party, nor do we have any political agenda. We are united on one issue: we cannot abandon the campuses around the world to the propaganda, lies and spreading of hatred all aimed to delegitimize the very existence of the State of Israel. We are there and will continue to be there to expose the truth.Security

Universities Launch Joint Cyber Security Operations Center

Five universities have banded together to fight cyber security threats with OmniSOC, a cyber security operations center that will provide real-time intelligence sharing and threat analysis for its members. A joint initiative of Indiana University, Northwestern University, Purdue University, Rutgers University and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, OmniSOC's goal is "to help higher education institutions reduce the time from first awareness of a cyber security threat anywhere to mitigation everywhere for members," according to a news announcement.

The center operates out of Indiana University in conjunction with GlobalNOC, a nonprofit at the institution that provides research and education network services. It also works closely with the Research and Education Networking Information Sharing and Analysis Center (REN-ISAC), an organization focused on cyber security protection, response and information sharing within the research and higher education communities.

OmniSOC combines real-time security data feeds from its member campuses with governmental and corporate security subscriptions, and uses that information to identify suspicious and malicious activity, the news announcement explained. It then provides rapid incident response based on both human analysis and machine learning. At the core of OmniSOC is the Elastic Stack security analytics platform, a system for ingesting, correlating and analyzing vast quantities of information to detect cyber threats.

"With tens of thousands of students, faculty and staff, university campuses are really like small cities, with sensitive data and powerful computing systems that are coveted by cyber criminals," said Tom Davis, OmniSOC founding executive director and chief information security officer, in a statement. "Protecting hundreds of thousands of devices and critical data requires expertise, systems, policies and rapid response when new vulnerabilities become known. While campus-by-campus approaches are essential, they are not sufficient for the sophistication of modern cyber risks. OmniSOC enhances the work of local security professionals to provide greater real-time, sophisticated threat detection, analysis and action for our members."

"Higher education is for the most part an open environment, so we often see cyber crimes that others have not," commented Greg Hedrick, chief information security officer at Purdue University. "By allowing us to monitor across higher education, OmniSOC helps to improve our capabilities to identify and react more quickly to these bad actors. My hope is that this information can be shared with others outside of our community in order to protect the entire ecosystem."

Future plans for OmniSOC include expanding its membership to other universities and scaling up services.WEDNESDAY, March 21, 2018 (HealthDay News) -- Get ready for extreme heat. Researchers warn that climate change will soon trigger more severe summers across the United States.

Heat waves -- the leading cause of weather-related deaths in the United States -- have increased in number and severity in recent decades. The new analysis of heat wave patterns predicts that is about to intensify.

Extreme summer heat is expected to show up in the western U.S. -- including California and the Southwest -- as early as 2020, according to the new report.

By 2030, human-caused climate change will also cause heat waves in the Great Lakes region. Extreme heat waves are expected in the Northern and Southern Plains by 2050 to 2070.

"These are the years that the human contributions to climate change will become as important as natural variability in causing heat waves," said study lead author Hosmay Lopez.

Lopez is a meteorologist at the University of Miami's Cooperative Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Studies.

Regional differences in air circulation, precipitation and green spaces affect when human-caused climate change emerges as the main cause of extreme heat, the researchers said.

But, Lopez added in a university news release: "Without human influence, half of the extreme heat waves projected to occur during this century wouldn't happen."

Climate change is being driven by human-produced carbon dioxide and other emissions into the atmosphere, the researchers said.

The study was published online March 19 in the journal Nature Climate Change.

Lopez and his colleagues used climate models and historical climate data from 1900 to 2010 to predict future summer heat patterns. They defined extreme heat waves as three or more days of record-high temperatures.

The study authors said understanding what's driving extreme temperatures is an essential step in finding ways to deal with them.

More information

The World Health Organization has more on climate change.THURSDAY, March 22, 2018 (HealthDay News) -- Between 2011 and 2015, the rate of suicide for Utah's teens -- mostly boys -- more than doubled and greatly outpaced the national average for these tragedies, a new report finds.

Overall, 150 suicides for children and teens aged 10 to 17 in Utah occurred during those four years, with 113 of the victims being between 15 and 17, and three-quarters of victims being male. Almost all of the deaths were due to firearms or hanging.

And while the rate of child and teen suicide has risen by 23.5 percent nationally during the years covered by the study, it "more than doubled" (a 136 percent rise) in Utah, according to researchers from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Why the steep rise in Utah, specifically? Trying to answer that question, a team led by CDC epidemiologist Francis Annor looked at victims' medical records for the period leading up to the suicide.

The investigators found that, in two-thirds of cases, there were "multiple precipitating circumstances" that foreshadowed a potential suicide.

For example, more than one-third of the individuals suffered from a diagnosed mental illness, with 31 percent having been in a "depressed mood," the researchers said. More than half had undergone some sort of "recent crisis." In almost 20 percent of cases that was a rift with their family, and in 10 percent of cases it was trouble with an intimate partner.

For those victims with a history of mental illness, most (84 percent) were, in fact, receiving some kind of mental health treatment prior to their deaths. And almost one-third had had a prior suicide attempt or admitted to thoughts about suicide, Annor's team reported.

Of course, social media plays an increasingly important role in young people's lives. The Utah report found that in nearly 13 percent of cases, during the week before the suicide, the victim's family had restricted their access to smartphones, tablets, video games and other devices.

Did cutting off access to the devices help precipitate suicide in those cases? The CDC team isn't sure, but they said that more study is needed to understand whether or not "interruption to [online] social support networks, [or] distress over losing access to the device" might exacerbate already fraught emotional states.

One expert said the Utah numbers should serve as a wake-up call to the United States as a whole.

"The rate of suicide in American youth has been steadily increasing since 2011, and suicide now accounts for the third most common cause of death in children aged 10 to 17," noted Dr. Matthew Lorber, who wasn't involved in the new research.

The Utah study shows "that much of our youth committing suicides have identifiable risk factors, and in order to counteract this alarming trend, we must be increasing access to mental health treatment for our children," said Lorber, who practices adolescent psychiatry at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City.

He believes screening for suicidal thoughts and depression should become routine in annual checkups between youth and their pediatricians or family physicians.

And Lorber believes family is key.

"Some common themes seen in these children were family fighting and social isolation. And this shows the importance of both family involvement in mental health treatment of children, as well as the importance of providing social activities," he said.

"In this age of technology and screen time, it is vital that parents are encouraging socialization for their children at a very young age, and helping to maintain it throughout middle school and high school," Lorber suggested.

The CDC researchers also urged more and better "strategies to strengthen access and delivery of suicide prevention care, promote connectedness, create protective environments, and teach coping and problem-solving skills" for troubled kids and teens.

In the meantime, family, friends and teachers can be on the lookout for the warning signs of suicide in youth, another expert said.

These include "worsening depression, academic decline, irritability, anxiety and sleep disturbance," said Dr. Scott Krakower, who helps direct psychiatry at Zucker Hillside Hospital in Glen Oaks, N.Y.

"A child may describe these thoughts in-person, via writings or on social media. It is important to seek help right away and have an evaluation with a child and adolescent psychiatrist," he added.

"As it appears that psycho-social stressors may also impact a child's mood, it is important to address these during the treatment," Krakower said. He believes that "teaching children how to improve interpersonal effectiveness and how to develop better coping skills would be crucial."

The Utah findings were published in the March 23 issue of the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

More information

Learn the warning signs of suicide in youth at the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. :       ,       ;   -  Responding to an Associated Press report that the Iraqi authorities have detained or imprisoned at least 19,000 people accused of links to the Islamic State armed group or other terror-related offences, sentencing more than 3,000 of them to death, Lynn Maalouf, Amnesty Internationals Middle East Research Director, said:





We are deeply alarmed by this report and the Iraqi authorities mass use of the death penalty and the courts reliance on torture-tainted confessions to secure convictions.





Amnesty International has documented the flawed screening process by Iraqi forces to which men and boys fleeing areas of conflict have been subjected. Thousands of them have been arbitrarily arrested, forcibly disappeared, and routinely subjected to torture and horrific conditions in detention.





It is vital that all those detained are held in officially-recognised and supervised detention facilities.





The Iraqi authorities must immediately address serious flaws in the criminal justice system and institute effective safeguards against torture and enforced disappearance, and ensure all defendants are given a fair trial, including the right to legal representation.





They must implement an immediate moratorium on executions as a first step towards total abolition of the death penalty.





Leaked figures





The Associated Press said its figures are based partially on an analysis of a spreadsheet said to list all 27,849 people imprisoned in Iraq as of late January, a dataset provided by an official who requested anonymity because he was not authorised to speak to the media.





AP said thousands more people were believed to be held in detention by other bodies, including the Federal Police, military intelligence and Kurdish forces.





 | Report an error, an omission, a typo; suggest a story or a new angle to an existing story; submit a piece, a comment; recommend a resource; contact the webmaster, contact us: deathpenaltynews@gmail.com



Opposed to Capital Punishment? Help us keep this blog up and running! DONATE!





"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,

but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar WildeVANCOUVER, British Columbia, March 22, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Venzee Technologies Inc. (TSX-V:VENZ) (Venzee or the Company) is pleased to announce that the Interior Design agency, Avondale Decor LLC (Avondale), has selected Venzee to automate the process of adding and updating products to online retailers, adding to the growing list of enterprise customers adopting Venzee.



Avondale Decors use of Venzees software allows the Interior Design company to sell its products through a number of major brick and mortar stores as well as various online retailers including bellacor.com.

Robert Andris, Director of Business Development for Avondale Decor, commented, Venzee has provided us with a great product syndication tool and gives our customers a sense of professionalism in regard to our product content management. I am thankful that we found Venzee and I am looking forward to the increasing opportunities that Venzee will help us take advantage of.

On the news that Avondale will be using Venzee, Peter Mackay, CEO of Venzee, commented, A company like Avondale Decor that sells through multiple online retailers will benefit greatly from our automatic approach to transforming product information. Venzee benefits from the network effect of suppliers using Venzee to update information to retailers, which opens up additional sales opportunities for Venzee to present its value proposition and onboard as clients.

Venzee provides high value customized SaaS (software-as-a-service) solutions to mid-market and tier-1 enterprise clients around the world. Additionally, it accommodates the budgets of up and coming retailers hosted on platforms like Shopify, with pricing starting from US$49 per month.

About Avondale Decor

Avondale Decor uses high quality materials to deliver exceptional bath accessories and decorative hardware. With competitive pricing, the company offers products that range from 20%-40% less than comparable suppliers.

With products ranging from mirrors to glass shelving, Avondale Decor offers customers the freedom of selection, with up to 28 finishes to choose from and a large variety of decorative styles.

About Venzee



Venzee is a SaaS (software as a service) company that launched in 2014 to help e-commerce vendors and retailers easily share product information in a US$23 trillion retail industry (source: Statista). Traditionally, this was achieved by using spreadsheets, which created a labor-intensive, error inducing process that delayed products from reaching the marketplace. Venzees technology streamlines product information management, allowing thousands of vendors and retailers to seamlessly share information, avoiding delays and getting products to market faster than ever. To learn more about Venzee, visit https://venzee.com.

The Venzee technology is leveraged for the creation of the Companys blockchain solution, Mesh. Mesh is able to import, merge and transform data from existing systems before writing to blockchain networks, greatly simplifying the process of integrating blockchain networks with conventional databases. For more about Mesh, visit https://meshblockchain.com.

The Company graduated from notable start-up accelerator program 500 Startups and is already powering some of the biggest brands in the world.

Investor Relations

Caleb Jeffries

Investor Relations, Kin Communications Inc.

1-866-684-6730

VENZ@kincommunications.com

Forward-Looking Information

This press release contains forward-looking information within the meaning of applicable Canadian securities legislation. Forward-looking information includes, but is not limited to, statements with respect to the execution of the Companys growth strategy. Generally, forward-looking information can be identified by the use of forward-looking terminology such as plans, expects or does not expect, is expected, budget, scheduled, estimates, forecasts, intends, anticipates or does not anticipate, or believes, or variations of such words and phrases or state that certain actions, events or results may, could, would, might or will be taken, occur or be achieved. Forward-looking information is subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors that may cause the actual results, level of activity, performance or achievements of the Company to be materially different from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking information, including but not limited to: general business, economic, competitive, geopolitical and social uncertainties; and regulatory risks. Additional information about these assumptions and risks and uncertainties is contained under Risk Factors in the Companys filing statement dated December 12, 2017, which is available under the Companys SEDAR profile at www.sedar.com, and in other filings that the Company has made and may make with applicable securities authorities in the future.

Although the Company has attempted to identify important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those contained in forward-looking information, there may be other factors that cause results not to be as anticipated, estimated or intended. There can be no assurance that such information will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking information. The forward-looking information contained in this news release is expressly qualified in its entirety by this cautionary statement. The Company does not undertake to update any forward-looking information, except as required by applicable securities laws.

Neither TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.Nearly 200 Indonesians are facing capital punishment abroad.





Jakarta. The government sent a protest note to Saudi Arabia on Monday (19/03), after an Indonesian national was beheaded in Mecca . Saudi authorities did not inform Indonesia that its citizen would be executed.





Zaini Misrin, a 53-year-old man from Bangkalan in East Java's island of Madura, was a migrant worker convicted of the murder of his Saudi employer. He was executed on Sunday.





"The Indonesian government did not receive any notification prior to the execution of Zaini Misrin," citizen protection and legal aid director at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Lalu Muhammad Iqbal, said during a press conference in Jakarta.





Although the kingdom has no regulatory obligation to issue such notifications, since the two countries are in friendly relations, Indonesia should have been officially apprised of the decision, he said.





With nearly 200 Indonesians facing capital punishment abroad, the government has been making considerable efforts to stay their execution.





However, despite huge opposition domestically and on the international stage, and despite its non-permanent seat at the United Nation High Commission of Human Rights, Indonesia itself implements the death penalty. This, in the eyes of many, renders inconclusive the country's attempts to save its own citizens from the cruel and unusual punishment.





Since 2011, 583 Indonesians have been sentenced to death abroad . The executions of 392 have been stayed. There are 188 ongoing cases in Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, China and the United Arab Emirates.





Most of the cases involve migrant workers, but there are also drug trafficking convicts, especially in Malaysia.





The Case of Zaini





Zaini's journey to Saudi Arabia began in 1992, when he started working as a private driver for Abdullah bin Umar as-Sindi. He then came back to Indonesia, and returned to work for the same employer in 1996.





Zaini was arrested by Saudi authorities in July 2004, on charges of murdering As-Sindi. He was convicted in November 2008.





In accordance with Muslim law, in cases of killing and wounding, Saudi Arabia applies qisas, or the law of retaliation  a person who has injured another is to be penalized to a similar degree, unless he or she is pardoned by the victim's family.





Indonesia was granted consular access to Zaini only in 2008. The delay, according to Lalu, was caused by imperfections in the previous protection system for Indonesian citizens abroad.





To save Zaini, the government appointed two lawyers in 2011, while presidents Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and Joko "Jokowi" Widodo requested Saudi Arabia that he be granted clemency.









So did Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi during her meetings with the Saudi counterpart, Adel Jubeir. Jokowi raised the issue three times with King Salman bin Abdulaziz.So did Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi during her meetings with the Saudi counterpart, Adel Jubeir.





Zaini's family came to Saudi Arabia with a plea for pardon from As-Sindi's family. To no avail.





The Indonesian government requested a case review in January 2017. It was rejected.



Another appeal was filed in January this year, and the case was still ongoing at the time of Zaini's death.





"We have summoned the Saudi ambassador to express our disapproval over the execution and the fact that it took place despite the ongoing legal process," Lalu said.





According to Jakarta-based Migrant Care, Zaini's testimony reveals he confessed the murder under pressure and intimidation by Saudi authorities.





"During his trial, Zaini Misrin had no neutral and impartial translator," the organization said in a statement.





Pardon





Under the principle of qisas, offenders can receive forgiveness from their victim's closest relatives. This in 2017 saved the life of Masamah, another Indonesian migrant worker in Saudi Arabia, who was convicted of murdering her employer's child in 2009.





An alternative punishment to qisas is diya or "blood money"  the financial compensation paid to the heirs of a victim.





In April 2014, the Indonesian government paid 7 million riyal ($1.9 million) to free Satinah Binti Jumadi Ahmad from death row in Saudi Arabia.





Satinah, a domestic helper from Ungaran, Central Java, was convicted of killing her Saudi employer in 2007. She said she acted in self-defense.





According to Lalu, in Zaini's case, the victim's family was not willing to exercise its right to pardon or diya.





More Protection





To offer more protection to Indonesian citizens working abroad, the House of Representatives passed a new law in October.





The 2017 Law on Migrant Workers replaced the 2004 Law on the Placement and Protection of Indonesian Migrant Workers. It establishes a framework to improve cooperation between the central government and local authorities in the migrants' places of origin, and guarantees more assistance to them, including insurance and competency training.





Director general for labor supervision at the Ministry of Manpower and Transmigration, Maruli Apul Hasoloan, said during Monday's conference that all prospective migrant workers will be informed about their rights and mechanisms to protect them, as well as the existing regulations on labor in their receiving countries.





The government is now also particularly careful about making sure that Indonesians willing to work abroad have all their documents and permits cleared before they leave.





"According to our statistics, 92 percent of the cases against Indonesian migrant workers are related to those who left the country without following the necessary legal procedures," said Hermono, secretary of the National Board for Placement and Protection of Indonesian Overseas Workers (BNP2TKI).

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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,

but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar WildeED Mnangagwa is commuting death sentences for some prisoners and releasing thousands of people from prison, including most women and everyone under age 18.





President Emmerson Mnangagwa's announcement Wednesday is an effort to ease overcrowded prisons.





"The exercise has not only gone a long way in decongesting our prisons but has served as a reminder to inmates and society that the purpose of imprisonment is founded on the pretext of reformation than retribution," Alford Mashango Dube, prison deputy commissioner-general, was quoted as saying by local media.





"It is now left to society to ensure that those released reintegrate safely and well within their respective communities."





The mass amnesty is Mnangagwa's first act of clemency since he was sworn in in November.





Mnangagwa has said he is against the death penalty because he once survived hanging when the southern African nation was still colonial Rhodesia.





Nearly 100 people are on death row in the country of 13 million.





Those on it for at least a decade are having their sentences commuted to life in prison.





Zimbabwe's last execution was in 2005, partly because no one was willing to be the hangman.





All women except those serving life sentences are being freed. Also freed are prisoners who are disabled or terminally ill and those sentenced to life before Feb. 28, 1998.





About 3,000 prisoners are expected to benefit, said prison deputy commissioner-general Alford Mashango Dube.





Zimbabwe's prisons currently hold about 20,000 inmates but have a capacity of only 17,000.





Zimbabwe's former leader Robert Mugabe in November said he was considering resuming executions. But weeks later Mnangagwa took power with the military's assistance after factional fighting within the ruling party.

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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,

but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde

pazimbabwe.com, March 22, 2018Kochi: The mastermind beh-ind the two armed robberies that took place in Kochi over three months ago was arrested from his hiding place in Bangladesh by the Bangladesh Rifles personnel on Monday based on a tip-off given by the Kerala police.

The special investigation team will seek custody of Akram Khan through the Ministry of External Affairs.

The Union government had signed an extradition treaty with Bangladesh in January 2016 under which wanted criminals can be handed over. Well submit an application to the ministry for getting the custody of Khan. We have already informed cops there that he is wanted by us in connection with the robberies,

Mr P.S. Shiju, investigation officer, told this newspaper.

Khan is currently in the custody of Moralganj police there. The Bangladesh police too were on the lookout for him in connection with the murder of two persons during robbery attempts there. It will be tough to get his custody soon as the trial in the cases is on there, the officer said.

Khan was arrested by the Bangladesh police three years ago in connection with the robbery and murder cases. However, when he got out on bail, he escaped to India. He was staying in Kochi, Bengaluru and Chennai where he committed several robberies with the help of his Delhi-based gang.

His custody is vital as seven other accused in the twin robbery cases are still on the run. Wed given the tip-off regarding his hiding place at an island in Bangladesh based on the details obtained during interrogation of three accused arrested  Arshad, 20, Roni Sheikh, 24, and Shehsad, 30,  from Delhi early last month, the officer said.

The eleven-member gang under Akram Khan had first struck at the house of an elderly couple at Pullepaddy cross road in Kochi in the wee hours of December 15. The next day, they struck at another house at Eroor near Trippunithura. In both cases, the gang attacked the inmates with sharp weapons and looted gold and money.The report attributed the sale of the equipment to Pakistan to India testing the most advanced nuclear-ready intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) Agni-V with a range long enough to hit Beijing or Shanghai. (Photo: PTI/File)

New Delhi: In an unprecedented deal, China has sold Pakistan a powerful optical tracking and measurement system that could speed up the Pakistani militarys development of multi-warhead missiles, a media report said.

Zheng Mengwei, a researcher with the CAS Institute of Optics and Electronics in Chengdu, Sichuan province, confirmed to the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post that Pakistan had bought a highly sophisticated, large-scale optical tracking and measurement system from China.

The Pakistani military recently deployed the Chinese-made system "at a firing range" for use in testing and developing new missiles, he said.

According to a statement on the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) website, China is the first country to export such sensitive equipment to Pakistan.

The report attributed the sale of the equipment to Pakistan to India testing the most advanced nuclear-ready intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) Agni-V with a range long enough to hit Beijing or Shanghai.

Earlier in January, India successfully test-fired its nuclear capable surface-to-surface ballistic missile Agni-5 - the most advanced missile in the Agni series with a strike range of over 5000 kms, which brings the whole of Asia and China as well parts of Europe and Africa within its nuclear strike envelope.

Agni-5 is most advanced missile in the Agni series with new technologies incorporated in it in terms of navigation and guidance, warhead and engine.

Earlier on Thursday, the BrahMos supersonic cruise missile was successfully flight tested from Rajasthan's Pokhran test range.

The missile flies almost three times the speed of sound at Mach 2.8 and has a range of 290 km.

The range of the BrahMos missile, an Indo-Russia joint venture, can be extended up to 400 km as certain technical restrictions were lifted after India became a full member of the Missile Technology Control Regime or MTCR in 2016.

(With PTI inputs)Harjit Masih, the only survivor among the 40 India hostages by ISIS in Iraqs Mosul, has claimed that he had been told by the officials in India to not say that his co-workers had died. (Photo: ANI | Twitter)

New Delhi: Harjit Masih, the only survivor among the 40 India hostages by ISIS in Iraqs Mosul, has claimed that he had been told by the officials in India to not say that his co-workers had died.

The 24-year-old was among the 40 construction workers who were kidnapped in 2014 while trying to escape an ISIS siege on June 11, 2014. After he returned to India, the government had kept him in "protective custody" as Foreign Minister had told parliament in November 2014.

Masih has all along claimed to have seen his compatriots being executed, a version the government did not accept.

Read: Indians made to kneel down, shot dead in front of me, says escaped ISIS hostage

"They (the officers who dealt with me in protective custody) lured me with the promise of a job and told me to say that the others were not dead. They told me to say I don't know (about the others) and that I escaped," Masih told NDTV.

Also Read: Told govt all 39 were dead, but they misled families, says escaped hostage

Claiming that he did not remember the names of the officers who handled him, Masih said he was treated well while in protective custody during which he was kept in "Delhi, Gurgaon, Bangalore and Greater Noida".

External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj told the Parliament on Tuesday that all the 39 Indian hostages in Iraqs Mosul were killed by ISIS, later said it had been established that Harjit Masih had lied.

Also Read: All 39 Indians kidnapped in Iraqs Mosul killed by ISIS: Sushma Swaraj

The External Affairs Minister told reporters that Harjit had not survived a massacre as claimed in fact had managed to escape with a group of Bangladeshi colleagues under the name of "Ali".

He was found by Indian officials at Erbil, the External Affairs Minister told reporters.

"We asked how he reached Erbil, but he kept saying 'I don't know...just get me out'," the foreign minister said.

Sticking to his stand that all the Indian workers, including him, were fired at by terrorists, Harjit Masih told NDTV that he had used a different name as "they would have killed me if I had said my name is Harjit and I am an Indian."While she is happy that the English translation of the third part of her autobiography Split: A Life is out, Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasrin is anguished at the way the names of people mentioned in the book have been shortened to alphabets to hide their identity. In a freewheeling interview to Sreeparna Chakrabarty, she talks of how she feels closest to home in India, how she feels safer in this country due to its entrenched democracy and how she can write only here, and not in Europe, where she had lived in exile for many years. Excerpts:

Your book is a translation of the original version Dwikhondito, which was in Bengali. What is the difference between the two texts? And why did you feel the need for the book to come out in English?

What I had written in Bengali then had been translated into various languages. There was nothing like I felt the need to write it in English. It had been asked for by many translators in Malayalam, Odia, Hindi and Marathi. But nobody had asked for it in English.

The difference between the texts in these regional languages and the one in English is that the names of people have been shortened (to alphabets). I dont understand why. The Bengali version had all the names.

In the Bengali version, some pages had been omitted  where certain things had been written against Islam. But in none of the regional versions, including Bengali, have the names been shortened.

Maybe they (publishers) did so because of the Nawazuddin Siddique episode, where the book had to be recalled. But for an author it feels bad. Maybe in future people will be known by numbers instead of names. This feels like the science fiction movies that I keep watching. I am totally against any kind of banning or censorship. We can only connect to names, not alphabets. May be the times are bad. They may have thought about defamation This is not due to the fear of any fanatics.

However, at least the book has come out now and it can be read by people. Maybe people will be able to connect with the book without the names as well. But if you change the names like this out of fear, what will happen to the author and the readers?

As far as the text is concerned, it has been translated in full, but they have omitted some chapters, even though the high court had lifted the ban (earlier imposed) on them in West Bengal. Once, when I was living in a safe house, I had been pressured that I could return to West Bengal if I omitted those passages. I had agreed, thinking I would be allowed to go back to West Bengal. But later I realised that it doesnt help, it is just politics. I had then told the publisher to reinstate the text. But they did not agree.

You had been asked to leave West Bengal when the Left Front government was in power. Have you made any effort to go back now?

I have written to the current West Bengal government, but there has been no response. Most journals in the state have stopped taking my writings. In West Bengal, almost no publisher takes my writings. I have been virtually blacked out.

Do you find any difference between India and Bangladesh?

I feel at home here. (When living in Europe) I used to come to Kolkata thinking I am going to my place or country. Though I was born after the Partition, I find the division of the country on the basis of religion childish. Everything is the same. The language is the same, culture is the same, therefore the politics of the two countries are also the same. There too books are banned, as they are here I have faced threats there, and I get them here as well.

However, here the Muslim community is in a minority, but there (in Bangladesh) it is in a majority. Over here, you have Muslim and Hindu fanatics, but despite that this country is much safer as democracy is far more entrenched, and has been for a long time. Here fundamentalists are not given that much importance. There are also some checks and balances, and so I feel much safer here.

Nowadays I feel even Europe is not safe. The Europe of today is not as safe as Europe of the 1990s. But even if India is not as safe as Europe, it is much safer than Bangladesh.

So you feel at home here?

I feel at home here. It is important for one to feel at home, which I feel in India. Though I dont have a home, this country is like my home. So I can write much more here than I could in Europe. I write about the women of this region as their culture is the same, their history is the same and their stories are the same. The oppression they face is more or less the same. I get responses from my readers, thats something which is very important thing for a writer. Thats why it is important for me to live here.

Have you seen any difference between the India of then and now?

I would say that what I have observed is that in India people tend to be more religious and superstitious, compared to countries like Bangladesh, Iraq or Saudi Arabia, where more people tend to become atheists. There is a tendency in these countries. But in India, perhaps because of the choices available in Hinduism, there is no need for people to turn atheist. Even if there are (atheists), the proportion is very small. But there has been a rise in fundamentalism in Hinduism.

What is the period which this book covers. Is there a sequel?

This is the third of a seven-part series of my autobiography. This is that time in the 1980s when there were atrocities on Hindus when Islam was being made a state religion. When fundamentalists were gaining ground  when there would be rallies against me.

The next book in the series is Those Dark Days, which chronicles the long march against me in Bangladesh. That will be the fourth part of my autobiography. I have written seven in all.Under the emergency, Yameen administration arrested former president Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, the chief justice, another Supreme Court judge and a Supreme Court administrator on allegations of attempting to overthrow the government. (Photo: PTI)

Male: Maldives President Abdulla Yameen on Thursday lifted a 45-day state of emergency which had outlawed protests amid political upheaval on the Muslim-majority Indian Ocean island chain.

Yameen imposed the emergency on February 5 for 15 days after a Supreme Court ruling quashed convictions against nine opposition leaders and ordered his government to free those held in prison.

He extended the state of emergency by another 30 days with parliament approval, a move challenged by the opposition.

Also Read: Maldives extends emergency by 30 more days, India says 'deeply dismayed'

"Though there still exists a diminished threat to national security, because the nation can now continue without further losses incurred, and upon the advice of the Security Services and in an effort to promote normalcy, the president has decided to lift the state of emergency," his office said in a statement.

Under the emergency, Yameen administration arrested former president Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, the chief justice, another Supreme Court judge and a Supreme Court administrator on allegations of attempting to overthrow the government. They have all rejected the charges.

Rights group Amnesty International said in a statement in February, the government was using the emergency "as a licence for repression, targeting members of civil society, judges and political opponents".Workforce

Military looks to boost pay for cyber talent

Low entry-level pay isn't helping the armed services in their quest to attract and retain top cyber talent.

Representatives across the military named salary as a significant barrier to recruiting and retaining cyber talent at a March 13 hearing of the Cybersecurity subcommittee of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

U.S. Fleet Cyber Commander Vice Adm. Michael Gilday said that while the services' direct commission programs are designed to attract the tech industry's best, the $37,000 salary that comes with being a second lieutenant does not.

"We are not competitive with the private sector in terms of competing for that kind of talent and we want to go after it," he said.

Gilday also said "rigid guidelines" governing the civilian force have become prohibitive in terms of the incentives workers can be offered -- namely 10 percent hiring raises and relocation bonuses that still don't meet the salary levels of the private sector. The military will need additional authorities to do so.

Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) said that a base salary of $37,000 was appropriate for Capitol Hill staffers "answering phones," but not for military cyber forces.

"We have enough trouble competing with the private sector without adding in some of the challenges that are inherent in the current way that we develop leadership in our military," she said.

In addition to base pay, service members get allotments for food, lodging, health care and other services. But that total compensation still pales in comparison to what many companies can offer, so the military is trying to find ways to give cyber workers from the tech sector credit for their years to boost pay.

Lt. Gen. Paul Nakasone, Army Cyber Commander and nominee to be head of U.S. Cyber Command and the National Security Agency, said failure to translate cyber workers' past civilian work experience into an appropriate military rank with commensurate pay is hampering recruitment and retention.

"What we're facing right now is an inability to grant constructive credit," he said, "We are limited to bringing them in as a first lieutenant and so we would like greater flexibility on that."

Nakasone added that measuring constructive credit to allow tech workers to enter the military at a higher rank and pay would help draw people from emerging and important fields like data analytics and artificial intelligence. The miliary has similar programs in place to attract doctors and other medical professionals.

Maj. Gen. Lori Reynolds, commander of the Marine Corps' Cyber Command, said the USMC established a new military occupational specialty (MOS) directed at targeting incentives for the cyber workforce.

That alone, she said, "is going to maximize the bonus structure that we have inside the Marine Corps to  get after and retain some of those special talent."

But Reynolds said dollars aren't always the right incentive. "In some cases, ma'am, it's not pay. Sometimes it's education and sometimes it's certificates...So for us it's being able to target those incentives."

For the Air Force, cyber commander Maj. Gen. Chris Weggeman said the direct commission program was a good start, with the Air Force sending its first two applicants to officer training school in 15 days to become second lieutenants.

Relatedly, the National Commission on Military, National and Public Service, which makes policy recommendations for military conscription, is looking for ways to get cyber specialists into the ranks at time of need. A little-noticed Feb. 16 request for comments in the Federal Register indicates that the military may be looking to modify selective service rules to allow for the drafting of cyber pros and other key STEM professionals "without regard to age or sex."Space

STRATCOM leader pushes back on Space Force idea

The head of U.S. Strategic Command said the nation doesn't need a "Space Force" right now.

"I think that someday we'll have a Space Corps and Space Force in this country. But I don't think the time is right for that right now," STRATCOM's Commander Gen. John Hyten said during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing March 20 to discuss fiscal 2019 budget priorities.

Hyten's response followed comments President Donald Trump made earlier this month in a speech to the military in San Diego, advocating for a new "Space Force" to combat emerging threats from Russia and China and declaring space as a warfighting domain.

"My new national strategy for space recognizes that space is a war-fighting domain, just like the land, air and sea," Trump said during his March 13 speech. "We may even have a 'Space Force'  develop another one. Space Force. We have the Air Force; we'll have the Space Force."

The White House, Defense Secretary James Mattis and the Air Force, which heads space operations via its own Space Command and would have housed the Space Corps, previously opposed its creation. Language for it was stripped out of the latest defense spending bill, but the bill allowed for an independent study exploring what a Space Corps would look like and its requirements.

But while Hyten disagreed with establishing a Space Force or Corps anytime soon, he said he appreciated the president's thinking.

"I love the fact that the president talked about space as a warfighting domain," Hyten said, adding that he supports the National Defense Authorization Act's take on evaluating the needs and elements of a Space Corps in the future.

"The importance of space is not going to lessen over the years, so I see this as a logical progression," Hyten told reporters following the hearing.

"We just have a fairly small force right now" of about 5,000 space operators plus supporting staff, and Hyten likes that. "I'm happy with where we are right now" having Congress, the president and the law all pointing towards space as a warfighting domain, he said, adding that Trump's comments were "another great voice" that aligns with national security needs.

Hyten also addressed senators' cyberwarfare concerns during the hearing, saying that while the U.S. has made progress, it's inhibited by the belief that cyberspace isn't a true warfighting domain.

"I always find it odd that we'll give young soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines lethal authority to operate far from home in harm's way -- to apply lethal force against an adversary using a set of rules of engagement but will hesitate to give a four-star admiral the authority to conduct cyberspace operations because we're concerned he won't follow the rules of engagement," Hyten said, referring to U.S. Cyber Commander Adm. Michael Rogers and adding that the rules of engagement should be the same regardless of domain.

But when Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) asked what Congress should do, Hyten hesitated, saying he doesn't want to prescribe the legislative body with a solution. However, he said publicly endorsing cyberspace as a warfighting domain is a step forward.

"People always ask me, 'In space or cyber, how do you deter  how do you fight to win a war in cyber?' You don't," Hyten said. "War, conflict, deterrence -- [each] is against an adversary, not against a place. You have to take the place out of it and focus on the adversary," while leaving room for diplomacy.U.S. Congress offers to provide over $620 mln aid to Ukraine

Funding is also increased aimed at strengthening the Ukraine support policy under the "Foreign Military Financing" program.

If you see a spelling error on our site, select it and press Ctrl+EnterEnglish French

SAINT-MICHEL-DES-SAINTS, Quebec, March 22, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Nouveau Monde Graphite Inc. (TSX-V:NOU) (NMG) is pleased to announce the nomination of Patrice Boulanger to its Board of Directors. Mr. Boulanger has nearly 20 years experience in the graphite business after having held various management position at SGL Group, one of the world's leading manufacturers of carbon-based products headquartered in Germany. During his career at SGL Group, Mr. Boulanger worked in production, R&D and within the commercial group, he has been responsible for sales activities of a product segment. Previously, he also led the global customer service group of SGL Group. Following a merger with Showa Denko, Mr. Boulanger currently acts as Global Manager Strategic Projects and Canadian Legal Entity Managing Director of Showa Denko Carbon Canada Inc. Patrice Boulanger completed his Bachelor of Electrical Engineering degree in 1997 at Universite du Quebec a Trois-Rivieres and he is currently completing his EMBA at Concordia University.



"I am delighted to welcome Mr. Boulanger to the Board of Directors. His unique experience in graphite marketing and product R&D will greatly benefit our company as we complete the construction of our demonstration plant and begin sending customers graphite products," commented Eric Desaulniers President & CEO of NMG.

NMG also announces that Mr. Michel Delsaer submitted his resignation as director of NMG. NMGs Board of Directors extends a warm thank you to Mr. Delsaer for his contribution to the Board of Directors during his tenure.

About Nouveau Monde Graphite

Geologist and mining exploration expert Eric Desaulniers founded Nouveau Monde Graphite (NMG) in 2012. In 2015, thanks to the innovative use of 3D geodesic modelling technology, NMG discovered two major and high-quality graphite deposits on its Matawinie property, located in Saint-Michel-des-Saints, 150 km north of Montreal, Quebec. NMG then stepped out of its exploration phase to enter an era of development, having secured financial support with prominent venture capitalists and bankers.

On October 25, 2017, NMG revealed the results of its pre-feasibility study, independently conducted in accordance to the Canadian Institute of Mining, Metallurgy and Petroleum. The study proved the high graphite content and quality and showed the industrial exploitation potential of the deposit located in the West Zone of its property. Having secured $13.7 M, during the Summer of 2018, NMG plans on operating a demonstration facility with a capacity to hold up to 1,000 tonnes of graphite concentrate flakes a year. The two-year projects goal is to produce and characterize various forms of graphite to meet the needs expressed by potential industrial clients. All the while, NMG will finalize investments and start working on the development of an open-pit mine and the creation of a treatment facility capable of producing 52,000 tonnes of concentrate a year. Both the mining operation and the plant will be fully electric.

Finally, in a vertical integration and sustainable development perspective, NMG has begun planning the establishment of a large-scale graphite secondary transformation facility. This will cater to the ever-growing popularity and use of lithium-ion batteries and would be the only existing manufacture of its kind in North America.

Our team at NMG has more than 40 years of recent experience with graphite. NMG develops its projects in the utmost respect of the neighbouring communities while favouring a minimal ecological footprint. NMG has many direct accesses to labour and needed infrastructure for its operations, such as an abundant source of affordable and renewable hydroelectricity.

Subscribe to our newsfeed:

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For more information:

Marie-Eve Chaume

Chief communications officer

+1 (514) 951-5498

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.

All statements, other than statements of historical fact, contained in this press release including, but not limited to (i) generally, or the About Nouveau Monde Graphite paragraphs which essentially describe the Corporations outlook and objectives, constitute ''forward-looking information'' or ''forward-looking statements'' within the meaning of certain securities laws, and are based on expectations, estimates and projections as of the time of this press release. Forward looking statements are necessarily based upon a number of estimates and assumptions that, while considered reasonable by the Corporation as of the time of such statements, are inherently subject to significant business, economic and competitive uncertainties and contingencies. These estimates and assumptions may prove to be incorrect.

Many of these uncertainties and contingencies can directly or indirectly affect, and could cause, actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied in any forward-looking statements. There can be no assurance that forward-looking statements will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Forward-looking statements are provided for the purpose of providing information about management's expectations and plans relating to the future. The Corporation disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements or to explain any material difference between subsequent actual events and such forward-looking statements, except to the extent required by applicable law.

Further information regarding Nouveau Monde is available in the SEDAR database (www.sedar.com) and on the Corporation's website at: www.nouveaumonde.caThe vote puts pressure on EU governments to also decide on a proposal on which they have so far failed to agree.

EU lawmakers backed draft rules on Wednesday to extend the blocs internal energy market laws to offshore gas pipelines such as Russias planned Nord Stream 2 link to Germany.

Lawmakers on the European Parliaments industry committee voted 41 votes to 13 in favor of the European Commissions proposal, with nine abstentions, according to Reuters.

The vote puts pressure on EU governments to also decide on a proposal on which they have so far failed to agree.

The Commissions proposal is supported by east European and Baltic countries, which fear the 1,225 km (760 mile) pipeline will undercut EU efforts to reduce dependence on Moscow and EU support for Ukraine by depriving it of gas transit fees.

Read alsoU.S. warns of sanctions against companies engaged in Nord Stream 2The pipelines backers, including Germany, oppose the rule change as an attempt to block what they see as a commercial project to pump 55 billion cubic meters of gas per year under the Baltic Sea.

In its current form, the Nord Stream 2 project, fully owned by Russias gas export monopoly Gazprom, does not comply with the EUs so-called third energy package rules. Its too difficult to find a compromise, one EU diplomat said of the last round of talks among EU nations last week. Its likely it wont go anywhere.

Far too often, gas supply has been used as a political weapon, Jerzy Buzek, a Polish member of the European Parliament, said in a statement. We cannot disarm the impure intentions of others but we can arm ourselves with full legal clarity and consistency of existing legislation.

The draft endorsed by Parliament calls for European Union economic sanctions against third countries to be taken into account and any exemption for pipelines to be limited to five years and decided with the input of the Commission and affected member states.What do you think about our new website?

Share your opinionThe EBRD's finance and EU grants will boost trade and economic development in the three countries.

The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and the European Union are extending their support to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine to a total of almost EUR 1.1 billion in credit lines and trade finance and EUR 58.3 million in EU grants.

Through the EU4Business-EBRD Credit line  a joint EBRD-EU programme supported by the EU4Business initiative and active since September 2016  over 100 Georgian companies have received EUR 60 million in financing so far, the EBRD said in a statement on its website.

The EU4Business-EBRD Credit Line is also available in Moldova and will soon be launched in Ukraine.

Read alsoEBRD lends almost EUR 26 mln for construction of three solar power plants in Vinnytsia region

It will assist local SMEs in reaping the benefits associated with their countries' free trade agreements with the EU, the world's largest trading block.

"We are delighted to see the first real results of our financing supporting Georgian companies. From hazelnut processing to road construction, from promoting local produce to succeeding in foreign markets  companies financed by the programme have decided to invest in the European standards, and we are happy to be part of their success," EBRD Director for the Caucasus, Moldova and Belarus, Bruno Balvanera said.

Deputy Director-General for Neighbourhood Policy and Enlargement Negotiations of the European Commission Katarina Mathernova, in turn, said: "The EU4Business-EBRD Credit line has allowed SMEs in sectors such as manufacturing, retail, agriculture and food processing, transport, services and health care to improve their products, strengthen their export potential and adopt EU standards and technical norms. The combination of EBRD finance and EU grants has proven to be a perfect match to the needs of Georgian companies."

The EBRD supports businesses with much-needed finance through local partner banks, which allows them to invest in efficient and modern equipment and technologies. EU funds complement investments with technical expertise and provide incentive payments to companies for successful completion.

Access to knowledge and know-how is yet another dimension of the EBRD-EU cooperation, with EU funding of EUR 18 million, while the EBRD SME Finance and Development Group fosters advisory services for enhanced performance and growth in all EU Eastern Partnership countries.Ukraine, Qatar sign deal to avoid double taxation

The tax authorities of Ukraine and Qatar will be able to exchange tax information.

If you see a spelling error on our site, select it and press Ctrl+Enter

Thursday, March 22, 2018

ECPM MEP Skripek condemns Turkish military invasion in Northern Syria

In a joint statement of the Chaldeans-Syriacs-Assyrians Friendship Group (F-CSA), the members declare they condemn the Turkish military invasion in Northern Syria, notably in the region of Afrin.

ECPM MEP Skripek is co-chair of the Friendship Group, which has members from the ECR, EPP, S&D and the Greens/EFA. "With worries and disapproval we have been observing current steps of the Turkish government towards its southern neighbour," the statement reads. "Turkish government and military representatives pose serious threat to the democratic process that had already started in the Federation of Northern Syria. Turkey is not fighting a military enemy but causing destruction and death of civilians."

The group states they "condemn the Turkish invasion of Afrin and the Turkish failure to comply with UN Security Council Resolution 2401 and calls to Turkey to end the invasion immediately and to return the Turkish army to Turkey". Urging for action, the F-CSA ends it statement by calling for the EU High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy "to take actions and make every effort to stop Turkey from any further step in the Middle East that are not in compliance with international law and European values of peace, justice and human rights."After many meetings and debates, the Chicago delegation succeeded in working with the New York United Federation of Teachers, Local 2 (UFT) to push the AFT to take stronger stands on charter school accountability and school closings  though many delegates from Chicago would have liked the language to have been even stronger.

Generally speaking, the New York delegation represented organizing charters as the best model for handling their role in reshaping unions, despite the fact that according to many reports few charter schools in New York have been organized as is the case in Chicago. This logic is the same touted by the Progressive Caucus of the AFT. The few that have been organized are a part of the UFT local though they have separate contracts negotiated with the help of UFT. The Chicago delegation reflection the mindset that allowing new charters to continue to proliferate while attempting to organize existing charters is an end game in which public schools and the union lose.



Jen Johnson, CTU, Local 1 in Substance

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. and MINNEAPOLIS, March 22, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Shipt, a leading online marketplace, and Target Corporation (NYSE:TGT) today announced they will begin same-day delivery of more than 55,000 groceries, essentials, home, electronics, toys and other products in Philadelphia, PA. Beginning April 5, 2018, Shipt will deliver from Target stores to the Philadelphia metro area.



Cumulatively, the launch gives more than 2 million households in the Philadelphia metro area access to Target products, delivered by Shipt in as little as one hour. To celebrate the launch, new Shipt members who sign up prior to April 5 will receive an annual membership for $49 (regularly $99).

With this launch, Philadelphia area residents can now enjoy the convenience and personalization of Shipt same-day delivery, saving them time in their busy lives, said Bill Smith, founder and CEO of Shipt. Through the app, our members have access to everything they need, when they need it, right at their fingertips. This is just the beginning of the sweeping expansion that Shipt and Target have planned for the year.

Founded in 2014 in Birmingham, Alabama, Shipt is committed to simplifying its members lives by offering a new, convenient same-day shopping experience. Shipts marketplace gives customers the ability to browse, search and shop the in-store assortment of products online. Customers can note preferences, choose a one-hour delivery window and pay for their order, all within the app. Shipt's expert team of shoppers takes care of selecting, bagging and delivering the items. The annual membership grants access to free, unlimited delivery on orders over $35.

Same-day delivery was at the top of our list when we were thinking about ways to make shopping at Target even easier, said John Mulligan, executive vice president and chief operating officer, Target. Shipts personalized, customer-focused approach fits perfectly with our commitment to deliver a convenient, exceptional experience and were excited to begin offering same-day service in Philadelphia.

Leading up to the expansion, Shipt will add more than 900 Shipt shoppers in the Philadelphia metro area to be part of the team responsible for ensuring complete, accurate fulfillments of each order. To apply to be a Shipt shopper, visit Shipt.com and click Get Paid to Shop.

Through this partnership, Target plans to offer convenient, same-day delivery of the in-store assortment of groceries, essentials, home, electronics, toys and other products from approximately half of stores by early 2018. The majority of Target stores will offer the service by the 2018 holiday season, reaching all major markets across the country. By the end of 2019, same-day delivery will include all major product categories at Target.

About Shipt

Shipt is a membership-based online grocery marketplace delivering fresh foods and household essentials through a community of shoppers and a convenient app. Shipt offers quality, personalized grocery delivery to members for $99 per year, and is available to over 30 million households in more than 80 markets across the country. Throughout 2018, Shipt will continue to expand. By the end of the year, Shipt will be in nearly 180 markets, reaching 80 million households, about 65 percent of U.S. households. Shipt was founded in The Magic City, Birmingham, Ala., and maintains offices in Birmingham and San Francisco, Calif. For more information, visit Shipt.com.

About Target

Minneapolis-based Target Corporation (NYSE:TGT) serves guests at 1,826 stores and at Target.com. Since 1946, Target has given 5 percent of its profit to communities, which today equals millions of dollars a week. For more information, visit Target.com/Pressroom. For a behind-the-scenes look at Target, visit Target.com/abullseyeview or follow @TargetNews on Twitter.

MEDIA CONTACT: press@shipt.com | (415) 625-8555Irans Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has tried to defend Iran's military presence in regional countries such as Syria, Iraq and Yemen in a speech in Mashad on Wednesday March 21.

Nosy foreign characters protest as to why Iranians intervene in Iraq and Syria, Khamenei said, What has it got to do with you? he asked.

Khamenei once again repeated Tehrans usual position saying, governments have asked us to be there, adding that Tehrans intervention in the region has rational motivations.

The international community has repeatedly denounced Tehrans regional ambitions and world leaders have criticized Khamenei for Irans military interference in other countries affairs as a threat to peace and stability of the region.

Khamenei also evaluated the Islamic Republics performance during the past four decades as generally positive as many of the slogans of the 1979 revolution have been materialized.

During the past month, former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad wrote two letters to Khamenei to convince him that his policies have failed. Ahmadinejad warned in those letters that Public dissatisfaction with the regimes performance is serious and extremely high and quickly engulfing the Islamic Revolution itself.

Khamenei also said We have managed to shorten the socio-economic gap between classes. There is freedom of speech in the country, and that No one has been pressured in this country because of their beliefs. Anyone claiming such a thing would be lying.

Khamenei made the statement less than two months after economic injustice brought hundreds of thousands of unemployed Iranians to the streets. International human rights watchdogs have condemned Iran for violating civil liberties and human rights such as freedom of speech.

In February Khameneis security organizations arrested tens of dervishes for their beliefs and violently cracked down on peaceful protests against compulsory hijab.

Khamenei said elsewhere in his speech, We lag behind in the area of justice, although a lot of work has been done.

Regimes critics, including Ahmadinejad and his aides have characterized Irans Judiciary as corrupt and added that Khamenei cannot control it and if someone wants to complain about the Judiciarys behaviour, there is nowhere to turn to.

The regime has opposition leaders and even the leader of dervishes, a group with no political agenda, under house arrest, the Bahais are being prosecuted and students and women are under pressure not to voice their concerns.

Khamenei summed up his speech by saying that There is no problem in Iran that cannot be solved. He added the comment while politicians and sociologists, economists and political activists have warned following the protests in January that there is a high likelihood for a new round of unrest in the future.

In the meantime, Khameneis remarks have remained unchallenged in Irans strictly controlled media, and he has evaded international press for three decades to keep his ideas unchallenged.

On social media, where Iranians have relative freedom to speak up under pseudonyms, hundreds of Iranians have characterized Khameneis comments about freedom of speech and the state of economy as bluffs and reminded him of the enormous wealth at the disposal of his office without checks and balances. Still others question his comments about solving economic problems by posting videos of security forces running over protesting workers in Isfahan, who have not been paid for months.March 20 (Reuters) - An Iranian who chairs a Maltese bank has been arrested on U.S. charges that he participated in a scheme to evade U.S. sanctions and funnel more than $115 million paid under a Venezuelan construction contract through the U.S. financial system, federal prosecutors said on Tuesday.

Ali Sadr Hashemi Nejad, 38, was charged in a six-count indictment filed in federal court in Manhattan accusing him of a role in a scheme to evade U.S. economic sanctions against Iran, prosecutors said.

Sadr, chairman of Maltese-registered Pilatus Bank, was arrested on Monday in Dulles, Virginia, according to court papers. A lawyer for Sadr declined comment.

Prosecutors said Sadr's family controlled an Iranian conglomerate called Stratus Group, which had international business operations and that led a project to construct thousands of housing units in Venezuela.

The project stemmed from agreements that Iran and Venezuela entered into in 2004 and 2005 calling for cooperation between the two governments in constructing housing units in the South American country.

The indictment said an Iranian company that Stratus incorporated called Iranian International Housing Corporation entered into a $476 million deal in 2006 with a Venezuelan state-owned energy company to build 7,000 housing units.

Sadr belonged to a committee overseeing the project's execution, prosecutors said.

They said Sadr took steps as part of the project to evade U.S. economic sanctions by concealing the role of Iran and Iranian parties in payments sent through the U.S. banking system.

"As alleged, Ali Sadr Hashemi Nejad created a network of front companies and foreign bank accounts to mask Iranian business dealings in Venezuela and evade U.S. sanctions," Manhattan U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman said in a statement.

The Venezuelan energy company made $115 million in payments to Iranian International Housing Corporation using entities in Switzerland and Turkey to conceal the Iranian connection to the funds, prosecutors said.

Sadr faces six counts, including conspiracy to defraud the United States and conspiracy to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act.

Pilatus Bank was in litigation with the Maltese journalist, Daphne Caruana Galizia, who was murdered last October, over several articles she wrote that accused the bank and Ali Sadr of facilitating corrupt political activities and money laundering.

The bank said the articles were false and defamatory. A former bank employee who was the main source for Caruana Galizias accusations was arrested on Monday night on a European arrest warrant issued by the Maltese government in response to a complaint of fraud by Pilatus Bank.Baku, Azerbaijan, March 22

By Leman Zeynalova  Trend:

Engagement in the Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict settlement requires positive thinking, said OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities Lamberto Zannier, answering Trends question in question and answer session via Twitter.

Engagement - even in the most protracted conflicts including Nagorno-Karabakh - requires positive thinking and persistence, he noted.

The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts.

The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts.Baku, Azerbaijan, Mar. 22

Trend:

I assess the election positively, because it is great possibility for the citizens of Azerbaijan to express their willingness and fulfill their duty described in the Constitution, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary of Latvia to Azerbaijan H.E. Mr. Juris Maklakovs told sechki-2018.az.

Further commenting on the significance of the election, he stressed that in Azerbaijan, the president of the country is the person who determines the foreign policy and therefore, the election is very significant.

The next election will finally implement the last years amendments to the Constitution that are directed to the quality of the leadership of the country and without doubt, it will show the will of the people of Azerbaijan, the Ambassador noted.Baku, Azerbaijan, March 22

By Vugar Imanov  Trend:

Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev focuses on the development of all spheres, including culture, in the country with a valuable cultural heritage, Chairman of the Union of Theater Workers, People's Artist of Azerbaijan Azer Pasha Neymatov told Trend.

All of us will vote for Ilham Aliyev in the presidential election, Neymatov, who is also the head of the Azerbaijan State Academic National Drama Theater, said.

"Over the years, President Aliyev has given many important instructions concerning the development of the theater, improvement of the welfare of theater employees and expansion of the creative potential of Azerbaijani theaters.

The signed orders and the adopted state programs testify to the great importance being attached to the theater in the countrys cultural policy," Neymatov said. The presidents great attention to the theater begins from the countrys national leader Heydar Aliyevs cultural policy.

During his life and work, Heydar Aliyev was proud of the ancient and rich culture of Azerbaijan, Neymatov said. He made cultural development one of the main directions of his policy. The figures of art and theater representatives see numerous meetings with Heydar Aliyev as unforgettable moments of their life."

Neymatov added that as a result of the decisive and successful policy pursued by President Ilham Aliyev, Azerbaijan is experiencing a period of development.

"Azerbaijans development is testified by the unity of power and people which has been ensured at the highest level, he said. Under the leadership of Azerbaijani Supreme Commander-in-Chief Ilham Aliyev, the countrys army has become one of the most powerful ones in the world.

The victory gained in April battles showed that the Azerbaijani army is capable at any time to liberate the occupied Azerbaijani lands, Neymatov said. We are confident that under the leadership of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief, we will soon return to our historical lands in Nagorno-Karabakh region.

The figures of art see Ilham Aliyev as an indispensable friend, he said. This feeling of unselfish love and inseparable friendship gives reason to believe that the theater representatives will vote for President Aliyev in the upcoming election on April 11.

We have always supported the successful policy pursued by the president and this will continue, he said. We wish President Aliyev every success in the upcoming election."Baku, Azerbaijan, March 22

Trend:

So far, there have been no obstacles or violations of the law during the processes related to the presidential election scheduled for April 11 in Azerbaijan, Hasrat Rustamov, first deputy chairman of the Azerbaijan Democratic Party, told Trend March 22.

He said that up till now, the corresponding processes have been carried out in accordance with the requirements of the Electoral Code.

"I think that the countrys government is also interested in the participation of candidates of opposition parties in the election," Rustamov added.

The first deputy chairman of the party stressed that he is dissatisfied with the presidential election boycott by some opposition parties.

"The arguments of some opposition parties can not be the grounds to refuse participating in the election because it is the responsibility of a political party, so we do not share their position," Rustamov said.

Eight candidates were registered to participate in the presidential election in Azerbaijan. Moreover, 115 international observers and over 42,000 local observers will monitor the election.Baku, Azerbaijan, March 22

Trend:

Co-rapporteurs of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE) for the monitoring of Azerbaijan Cesar Florin Preda and Stefan Schennach will observe the voting process at the presidential election in Azerbaijan, said a message posted on www.sechki-2018.az website March 22.

The co-rapporteurs will visit Azerbaijan on the eve of voting as part of the PACE observation mission.

The OSCE Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights (ODIHR), together with the OSCE PA, will monitor the voting process during the presidential election in Azerbaijan. The mission headed by Viorel Riceard Badea consists of 33 people.

The presidential election in Azerbaijan will be held on April 11.Baku, Azerbaijan, March 22

By Ilhama Isabalayeva - Trend:

The presidential election will be held in Azerbaijan on April 11 and the pre-election campaign is underway, Azerbaijani political analyst Arzu Naghiyev told Trend March 22.

At the same time, the current year has also become the year of elections in neighboring countries, he said. Russian President Vladimir Putins re-election for a six-year term, and in general, holding of elections in the region gives a reason to expect positive steps in the settlement of the Armenia-Azerbaijan Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.

The abovementioned processes are the main factors, affecting the security in the region, Naghiyev added. The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict settlement remains the priority in Azerbaijans foreign policy.

"This is also one of the important issues in the countrys domestic policy, Naghiyev said.

Putins re-election for a new presidential term is expected to facilitate the process of making certain steps for the settlement of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict.

I think that important actions related to the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict settlement must be taken to prevent a new war in the post-election period, he said. The processes related to the conflict settlement are directly related to the implementation of big economic projects in the region. In this regards, today Azerbaijan plays a role of corridor in the implementation of big energy projects. The threats posed to the security in the region must be prevented."

Peace should be established to implement big projects in the region, Naghiyev said. First of all, for this purpose, important actions must be taken to resolve the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict. A mechanism of pressure on Armenia must be created.

"Both Western and regional countries must understand this, he said. The main purpose of Turkey's military operation in Syrias Afrin district is to fight against terrorism and its significance should be stressed.

In this buffer zone, liberated from terrorists, Turkey is creating a solid basis for the implementation of the further economic and political activities, both for itself and regional countries, Naghiyev said. Several meetings of leaders of regional countries have been recently held on bilateral, tripartite, and even quadrilateral platforms and this is a gratifying fact.

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani intends to visit Azerbaijan in late March, he said. All this creates favorable conditions to resolve significant problems. This is one of important conditions for development and establishment of peace in the region. The balanced policy, being carried out by Azerbaijan in this direction, is very effective and worthy positive assessment."Baku, Azerbaijan, March 22

Trend:

President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev has congratulated President of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan Mamnoon Hussain.

On my own behalf and on behalf of the people of Azerbaijan, I extend my most sincere congratulations to you and through you to all your people on the occasion of the national holiday of your country  Pakistan Day, President Aliyev said in his letter.

Azerbaijan-Pakistan relations stem from the will of our brotherly people who share common spiritual values. I would like to emphasize the current high level of our inter-governmental relations, which are based on mutual confidence, trust and support, he noted.

I believe that our joint steps to develop and reinforce strategic partnership and alliance, bilateral and multilateral cooperation between Azerbaijan and Pakistan will continue to serve the best interests of our peoples and countries, the president added. On this remarkable day, I wish you the best of health, success in your endeavors, and the brotherly people of Pakistan peace and prosperity.Baku, Azerbaijan, March 22

Trend:

Azerbaijani people will support Ilham Aliyev in the presidential elections on April 11, as today people vote for those who have proven themselves with their actions and showed commitment to their people, Chairman of the National Council for Coordination of Cooperation with Russia and China, former President of Serbia Tomislav Nikolic told influential "Danas" newspaper.

"The achievements of Azerbaijan are the result of the wise policy pursued by President Ilham Aliyev. I take this opportunity to sincerely wish success to President Ilham Aliyev and prosperity to the friendly Azerbaijani people," he said.

Nikolic noted that after leaving the post of the president of the Republic of Serbia, he closely followed the developments in the world and friendly countries of Serbia, including in Azerbaijan.

Further, Nikolic highlighted his indelible memories of negotiations and meetings with President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev in February 2013, during his official visit to Azerbaijan, and also in June 2015, when he participated in the opening ceremony of the First European Games in Baku.

According to Nikolic, the Azerbaijani leader made an impression on him as a visionary and wise politician.

He expressed gratitude for the principled position of the Azerbaijani president in the issue of supporting the preservation of Serbias sovereignty and territorial integrity.

"Immediately after the unilateral proclamation of independence of Kosovo, Azerbaijan, at the initiative of the countrys leadership, withdrew the peacekeeping forces from KFOR, from Kosovo. We appreciate and respect this step, because it is a gesture of resistance to the unilateral declaration of independence of the Albanian minority on Serbian soil," he said.

Tomislav Nikolic noted that the Declaration of Friendship and Strategic Partnership between Serbia and Azerbaijan was signed during his tenure as President of Serbia.

It was signed in 2013 during my official visit to Azerbaijan. Recently we marked the fifth anniversary of signing this Declaration. I congratulate my friend and brother, President of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev on this occasion, he added.VANCOUVER, British Columbia, March 22, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- First Mining Gold Corp. (First Mining or the Company) (TSX:FF) (OTCQX:FFMGF) (Frankfurt:FMG) announces the appointment of Jeff Swinoga to the Companys Board of Directors and the departure of Patrick Donnelly as President of the Company. Effective immediately, Jeff Swinoga will assume the role of President and Chief Executive Officer, along with the former responsibilities of Mr. Donnelly.



Keith Neumeyer, First Minings Chairman, stated, The Board of Directors would like to express its appreciation for Patricks services to the Company and we wish him the very best in all of his future endeavours. We would also like to welcome Jeff to the Board. Jeff has already had a positive impact in leading the management team as our new CEO, and he is expected to be a tremendous addition to our Board.

ABOUT FIRST MINING GOLD CORP.

First Mining Gold Corp. is an emerging development company with a diversified portfolio of gold projects in North America. Having assembled a large resource base of seven million ounces of gold in the Measured and Indicated categories and five million ounces of gold in the Inferred category in mining friendly jurisdictions of eastern Canada, First Mining is now focused on advancing its assets towards production. The Company currently holds a portfolio of 25 mineral assets in Canada, Mexico and the United States with a focus on gold.



For further information, please contact:



Derek Iwanaka

Vice President Investor Relations

Toll-Free: 1-844-306-8827

Email: info@firstmininggold.com

Website: www.firstmininggold.com



ON BEHALF OF FIRST MINING GOLD CORP.



Keith Neumeyer

Keith Neumeyer

Chairman



Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements

This news release includes certain "forward-looking information and "forward-looking statements (collectively "forward-looking statements) within the meaning of applicable Canadian and United States securities legislation including the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These forward-looking statements are made as of the date of this news release. Forward-looking statements are frequently, but not always, identified by words such as "expects, "anticipates, "believes, plans, projects, "intends, "estimates, envisages, "potential, "possible, strategy, goals, objectives, or variations thereof or stating that certain actions, events or results "may", "could", "would", "might" or "will" be taken, occur or be achieved, or the negative of any of these terms and similar expressions.

Forward-looking statements in this news release relate to future events or future performance and reflect current estimates, predictions, expectations or beliefs regarding future events and include, but are not limited to, statements with respect to: (i) the assumption by members of First Minings senior management team of the former responsibilities of Mr. Donnelly; and (ii) any future update by First Mining regarding a replacement to fill Mr. Donnellys former position at First Mining.

By their very nature, forward-looking statements involve inherent risks and uncertainties, both general and specific, and risks exist that estimates, forecasts, projections and other forward-looking statements will not be achieved or that assumptions do not reflect future experience. We caution readers not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements as a number of important factors could cause the actual outcomes to differ materially from the beliefs, plans, objectives, expectations, anticipations, estimates assumptions and intentions expressed in such forward-looking statements. These risk factors may be generally stated as the risk that the assumptions and estimates expressed above do not occur as forecast, but specifically include, without limitation: (i) risks relating to the assumption by members of First Minings senior management team of the former responsibilities of Mr. Donnelly; (ii) risks relating to finding a suitable replacement to fill Mr. Donnellys former position at First Mining; (iii) developments in world metals markets; (iv) risks relating to fluctuations in the Canadian dollar relative to the US dollar; (v) managements discretion to refocus the Companys exploration efforts and/or alter the Companys short and long term business plans; and (vi) the additional risks described in First Mining's Annual Information Form for the year ended December 31, 2016 filed with the Canadian securities regulatory authorities under the Companys SEDAR profile at www.sedar.com, and in First Minings Annual Report on Form 40-F filed with the SEC on EDGAR.

First Mining cautions that the foregoing list of factors that may affect future results is not exhaustive. When relying on our forward-looking statements to make decisions with respect to First Mining, investors and others should carefully consider the foregoing factors and other uncertainties and potential events. First Mining does not undertake to update any forward-looking statement, whether written or oral, that may be made from time to time by the Company or on our behalf, except as required by law.

Cautionary Note to United States Investors

This news release has been prepared in accordance with the requirements of the securities laws in effect in Canada, which differ from the requirements of U.S. securities laws. Unless otherwise indicated, all resource and reserve estimates included in this news release have been prepared in accordance with National Instrument 43-101 Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects ("NI 43-101) and the Canadian Institute of Mining, Metallurgy, and Petroleum 2014 Definition Standards on Mineral Resources and Mineral Reserves. NI 43-101 is a rule developed by the Canadian Securities Administrators which establishes standards for all public disclosure an issuer makes of scientific and technical information concerning mineral projects. Canadian standards, including NI 43-101, differ significantly from the requirements of the United States Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC), and mineral resource and reserve information contained herein may not be comparable to similar information disclosed by U.S. companies. In particular, and without limiting the generality of the foregoing, the term "resource does not equate to the term "reserves. Under U.S. standards, mineralization may not be classified as a "reserve unless the determination has been made that the mineralization could be economically and legally produced or extracted at the time the reserve determination is made. The SEC's disclosure standards normally do not permit the inclusion of information concerning "measured mineral resources, "indicated mineral resources or "inferred mineral resources or other descriptions of the amount of mineralization in mineral deposits that do not constitute "reserves by U.S. standards in documents filed with the SEC. Investors are cautioned not to assume that any part or all of mineral deposits in these categories will ever be converted into reserves. U.S. investors should also understand that "inferred mineral resources have a great amount of uncertainty as to their existence and great uncertainty as to their economic and legal feasibility. It cannot be assumed that all or any part of an "inferred mineral resource will ever be upgraded to a higher category. Under Canadian rules, estimated "inferred mineral resources may not form the basis of feasibility or pre-feasibility studies except in rare cases. Investors are cautioned not to assume that all or any part of an "inferred mineral resource exists or is economically or legally mineable. Disclosure of "contained ounces in a resource is permitted disclosure under Canadian regulations; however, the SEC normally only permits issuers to report mineralization that does not constitute "reserves by SEC standards as in-place tonnage and grade without reference to unit measures. The requirements of NI 43-101 for identification of "reserves are also not the same as those of the SEC, and reserves reported by the Company in compliance with NI 43-101 may not qualify as "reserves under SEC standards. Accordingly, information concerning mineral deposits set forth herein may not be comparable with information made public by companies that report in accordance with U.S. standards.Baku, Azerbaijan, March 22

By Ali Mustafayev  Trend:

Uzbekistans UzTrade company signed a contract for the supply of textile products and semi-finished products worth over $2 million to China, the press service of the Ministry of Foreign Trade of Uzbekistan said in a message.

The arrangements were concluded within the international exhibition of fiber and yarn Yarn Expo  2018, held in China.

Representatives of UzTrade met with the leading Chinese companies of the textile industry - Xiamen Itg Tidak Bonded Logistics, Tianjin Textile Industrial Supply and Sale and China Chengtong International, and discussed expansion of supplies of Uzbek textile products to the Chinese market.

In addition, the parties discussed the issue of opening a joint Uzbek-Chinese trading house in Shanghai in 2018.

Uzbekistan and China intend to bring the volume of bilateral trade to $10 billion until 2020. In 2016, the trade turnover between the countries exceeded $4.2 billion.

In 2017, China was Uzbekistans largest trade partner, with 18.4 percent of share in the countrys foreign trade.

Currently, over 700 enterprises with the participation of Chinese investments, as well as representative offices of 73 Chinese companies work in Uzbekistan.Baku, Azerbaijan, March 22

By Azad Hasanli  Trend:

Director General of the International Labor Organization (ILO) Guy Ryder intends to visit Azerbaijan in May, the Azerbaijani Ministry of Labor and Social Protection said in a message.

According to the message, Ryder discussed this issue with Azerbaijani Minister of Labor and Social Protection Salim Muslumov during the 332nd meeting of the ILO board in Geneva.

ILO director general appreciated Azerbaijan's experience in the implementation of progressive labour and employment principles.

Ryder stressed that ILO supports large-scale labor market development reforms being carried out in Azerbaijan, as well as activities in the field of active employment and other similar measures.

The meeting participants also discussed the issues related to the regulation of the labor market in Azerbaijan, employment, implementation of the concept of decent work, expansion of labor market development programs, cooperation with the ILO and other issues.Baku, Azerbaijan, March 22

By Azad Hasanli  Trend:

The progress has been achieved in the development of priority sectors of the Azerbaijani economy, especially the non-oil sector, and the economic growth independent of the oil factor has been ensured in the shortest period thanks to the purposeful reform program of the countrys President Ilham Aliyev, Azerbaijani Minister of Labor and Social Protection Salim Muslumov said.

Muslumov made the remarks during the recent meeting with Director General of the International Labor Organization (ILO) Guy Ryder during the 332nd meeting of the ILO board in Geneva.

The minister added that Azerbaijan's economy is among 35 most competitive economies in the world.

He said that over the past 15 years, the country's economy has increased by more than three times, while during the first two months of this year - by 1.3 percent, the non-oil sector - by 2.3 percent.

"Even recently, when the world economy was going through difficulties, all social programs were successfully implemented in Azerbaijan, he said. Moreover, the country is carrying out purposeful work to ensure decent work. Salaries are constantly increasing. In continuation of these measures, salaries and other social payments have also increased this year."Baku, Azerbaijan, March 22

Trend:

Following the huge success of its first and second editions in 2016 which attracted over 420 delegates, the 3rd Africa Islamic Finance Forum will return 27-28 March, located at the Federal Palace Hotel, Lagos Nigeria hosted by the Ministry of Finance Nigeria in collaboration with the Islamic Corporation for the Development of the Private Sector (ICD).

This exclusive, invitation-only event is designed specifically for the benefit of local and international market players to explore development opportunities in Islamic finance in Africa  focusing on building the market and exploring the huge potential through inward investment and international collaboration.

With full government support and hosting some of the most influential decision-makers in the industry from countries including Nigeria, Somalia, Ivory Coast, Sudan, Kenya and beyond, the event will feature extensive discussions on investment opportunities in key African markets.

Nigeria and the wider African region are core areas for the development of Islamic finance with the large Muslim population and exceptional natural resources. Specifically, given Nigerias status as a leading member of the Islamic Development Bank, the drive for investment into Nigeria and the important steps being taken towards economic recovery in Nigeria and through the region; the timing of the conference provides a much-needed platform for opening Islamic finance to Nigerias business community.

The forum will serve as an excellent platform to meet senior decision-makers from African firms and development banks as well as leading bankers and corporates. Moreover, this forum is part of ICD's long-term commitment to the economic development of Nigeria and our member countries. Mohammed Al Ammari, the Acting CEO & General Manager, Islamic Corporation for the Development of the Private Sector.

The Africa Islamic Finance Forum will also act as an unparalleled platform for networking opportunities as well as the centre stage to be at the very forefront of Africas flourishing Islamic finance sector. For full details and for information on how you can apply to attend, please visit www.africa-if.comBaku, Azerbaijan, March 22

By Ali Mustafayev  Trend:

In 2017, 116,000 trips were made from Russia to Tajikistan, which is an increase of 5 percent compared with the corresponding figure of the previous year, the Russian analytical agency TurStat said.

The total number of Russian tourists increased by 25 percent up to 40 million in 2017.

Tajikistan ranked 40th in the number of incoming Russian tourists.

Turkey was the most popular country among Russian tourists (4.5 million trips) last year.

The last place in the ranking was taken by Portugal. Russian tourists visited Portugal 47,000 times.

Earlier, Mayor of Dushanbe Rustam Emomali approved the action plan of the executive bodies of Dushanbe city related to the events dedicated to the Year of Tourism and Folk Crafts.

The actions in accordance with this plan were announced upon Tajik President Emomali Rahmons decree dated January 20, 2018. These steps are aimed at improving the level and quality of services in the tourism sector, development of crafts, promotion of the history and culture of Tajikistan.Baku, Azerbaijan, March 22

By Ali Mustafayev  Trend:

During the entire period of cooperation with Tajikistan, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) invested 300 million euros in the country, the Tajik Telegraph Agency reported March 22.

All funds have been invested in the development of small and medium-sized businesses within 700 consulting projects.

EBRD held the first meeting of the Supervisory Board of the Small Business Development Initiative in Dushanbe last week.

The representatives of the Tajik government, donor agencies, international organizations, local financial institutions, business associations and private businesses attended the event.

The results of 2017 achieved within the small business support program in Tajikistan were summed up at the meeting.

EBRD supports the growth and competitiveness of small and medium-sized enterprises in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan in three main areas of activity, namely, investments, consultations and a political dialogue.

To date, EBRD has invested 477 million euros in small and medium businesses in Kyrgyzstan and 300 million euros in Tajikistan. The bank also implemented more than 1,100 consulting projects in Kyrgyzstan and 700 consulting projects in Tajikistan.Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, March 22

By Huseyn Hasanov - Trend:

The transnational megaproject of the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India gas pipeline (TAPI), which is to be put into operation by 2019, will become a powerful impetus for the regional economic development, Turkmen ambassador to Malaysia Yazguly Mammadov said, the online newspaper of the Turkmen Oil and Gas Complex reported.

Mammadov added that the construction, launched in Turkmenistan on December 13, 2015, will create not only new jobs, but also ensure stable energy supply of the region.

The diplomat stressed that TAPI project entered a new stage of implementation on February 23, which initiated construction work in Afghanistan.

The heads and officials of four countries took part in the opening ceremonies in Turkmenistans Mary province and Afghanistans Herat province.

After the completion of the construction, the pipeline will annually transport 33 billion cubic meters of gas from Turkmenistans Galkynysh gas field, the world's second biggest gas field.

Mammadov also said that the Asian Development Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the Japanese government expressed interest in financing the TAPI project.Baku, Azerbaijan, March 22

By Gazenfer Hamidov  Trend:

The latest data Irans Airports Company, affiliated with the countrys Ministry of Roads & Urban Development indicates that the transit flights through Iran air territory has increased by 13.2 percent during the first 11 months of the current fiscal year (March 20-Feb.20).

Number of international transit flights over Iran's air zone has increased in recent years, however the increase trend during the current fiscal year was lower compared to the preceding year.

In total 396,558 transit flights through the skies of Iran have been carried out during the first 11 months of the current fiscal year, compared to 350,169 flights in the same months of the preceding year.

Iranian calendar months Flight numbers 2017-2018 Flight numbers 2016-2017 Change % March 20-April 20 33,151 31,948 3.8 April 20-May 20 31,294 31,902 -1.9 May 20-June 20 33,848 30,647 10.4 June 20-July 20 38,856 32,303 20.3 July 20-August 20 39,449 33,054 19.3 August 20-September 20 40,257 33,239 21.1 September 20-October 20 37,946 31,608 20.1 October 20-November 20 39,384 31,058 26.8 November 20-December 20 37,178 31,480 18.1 December 20-January 20 33,754 31,898 5.8 January 20-February 20 31,441 31,032 1.3 Total 396,558 350,169 13.2

However the statistics indicate that the increasing trend has gradually slipped down in recent years following the sharp rise in 2014-2015.

Iranian year Number % (2008-2009) 1387 165,479 - (2009-2010) 1388 153,509 -7.2 (2010-2011) 1389 157,466 2.6 (2011-2012) 1390 160,135 1.7 (2012-2013) 1391 164,550 2.8 (2013-2014) 1392 178,685 8.6 (2014-2015) 1393 272,581 52.5 (2015-2016) 1394 345,682 26.8 (2016-2017) 1395 382,162 10.6

The number of international transit flights over Iran's air zone sharply increased from July 2014 following the Malaysian plane crash in Ukraine and security problems in Iraq.

The Islamic Republic made new air routes following that to meet the high demand of the passing flights.

A total 120 air routes with length of 75,000 kilometers are available in Iran's air zone.Baku, Azerbaijan, March 22

By Gazenfer Hamidov  Trend:

Over 20.02 million tons of crude steel was produced in Iran during the first 11 months of the current fiscal year (March 20, 2017-Feb. 20).

The figure shows a rise by 19 percent compared to the same period of last year, the Iranian Steel Producers Association said in its latest monthly report, released March 18.

Iranian steel producer companies also produced about 18.11 million tons of various steel products including beam, wide sheets, hot rolled sheets, galvanized steel and tubes during the 11-month period, indicating a rise by 9 percent compared to 16.588 million tons of products in the same period of the preceding year.

Iranian companies produced 20.484 million tons of sponge iron during the period, which was 24 percent more year-on-year.

Iran exported 6.042 million tons of crude steel (87 percent increase year-on-year) and 1.375 million tons of various steel products (17 percent fall) in the first 11 months of current fiscal year.

The country also imported 2.07 million tons of steel products in the 11-month period, 21 percent less year-on-year.

Meanwhile 47,000 tons of crude steel was imported in the same 11 months (75 percent more).

Based on a 2025 outlook, Irans steel output is to reach 55 million tons, 15 million of which should be exported. For the current Iranian year, it is predicted that Iran will produce 18 million tons of steel, exporting 6 million tons of it.A Canadian town known for its annual theater festival is emerging as a hub of snowtonomous research, as automakers face demands to produce self-driving cars that can perform in snow and sleet, according to Reuters.

But testing driverless cars in cold climates brings added challenges to an industry grappling with the first fatality involving an autonomous vehicle.

On Sunday, an Uber Technologies Inc [UBER.UL] self-driving sport utility vehicle hit and killed a woman crossing the street in Arizona. Details of the crash are still unknown.

The Canadian province of Ontario, which allows autonomous vehicles on roads only if there is a human driver behind the wheel, said it is closely following the Arizona investigation and would take action if warranted. Canadas largest city, Toronto, is one of three places where Uber tests driverless technology - the other cities are Phoenix, Arizona, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Automakers, ride services companies and others are investing in self-driving technology said to reduce accidents, and the costs of a driver, with robo-taxis expected to hit the road as early as this year.

A wider rollout, however, is expected to take years, if not decades, as companies work to prove autonomous vehicles can run not just in balmy U.S. states, where they are mostly tested, but in colder areas like Ontario and Michigan where snow and sleet can render cameras and sensors ineffective.

Ross McKenzie, managing director of the Waterloo Center of Automotive Research, recalled how a vehicles lidar, which uses laser light to help autonomous cars see nearby objects, once mistook an ice patch for a pothole.

McKenzies research team at the University of Waterloo responded by tweaking the sedans software so it would factor in the time of year and weather when driving in the snow and ice, conditions that autonomous vehicles will have to navigate to be commercially viable.

The car needs to consider we have winter driving conditions because Im in Canada, its November and its 15 below, McKenzie said by phone.

Ontario, which has lost automaking jobs to lower-cost Mexico in recent years, is counting on the lure of its snowy winters and the strength of its automotive and software engineering sectors to establish a Silicon North. Since 2016, Ontario has attracted about C$1 billion ($765 million) in private-sector investment for autonomous and connected cars.

In Stratford, where the theater festival is an important employer of its 31,000 residents, the city-wide wireless network and weather are helping to attract companies researching connected driving technologies. Ubiquitous Wi-Fi gives companies the option to test vehicle-to-vehicle communication over a 4G band, McKenzie said.TUCSON, Ariz., March 22, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Oct 31, 2017, marked an important day in history: the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, writes Albert L. Fisher, M.D., of Oshkosh, Wis., president of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS), in the spring issue of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons. Physicians should study the events surrounding this religious and societal upheaval, he states. Some have argued that modern medicine has taken on the trappings of a religion. Is there anything we can learn from the Reformation that might apply to our circumstances?



Dr. Fisher visited Germany, which was celebrating the anniversary of Martin Luthers tacking his 95 Theses to the door of All Saints Church in Wittenberg. Luther criticized the papal policy of selling indulgences, claimed to release a soul from purgatory, to help finance the construction of St. Peters Basilica in Rome.

The newly invented printing press enabled his talking points to go viral. The Catholic Church demanded that Luther recant, on pain of death, and that his writings be burned. At a hearing before Emperor Charles V, Luther famously said he would recant only if convinced of his error either by Scripture or by evident reason.

Dr. Fisher writes: AAPS has called for a reformation in American Medicine. The time has come for physicians to reject the false dogma and nonsensical rituals that have been thrust upon us. Government and quasi-governmental authorities are constantly handing down edicts and selling compliance materials that are supposed to protect us from fee cuts, fines, and other punishment. Doctors are constantly threatened by the equivalent of excommunication from hospital staffs, insurance panels, or the profession itself, if they offend officials or hold dissenting views.

Dr. Fisher calls for physicians to have the courage to stand on principle, and to serve their patients, not the governmental or other agencies that claim to be the sole authority on best practices.

The Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons is published by the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS), a national organization representing physicians in all specialties since 1943.The United Nations strongly condemned the deadly attack earlier Wednesday in the Afghan capital, Kabul, near a major religious shrine where people had gathered to celebrate Nowruz  the traditional New Year and the arrival of spring, UN website reports.

In a statement attributable to his spokesperson, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres offered his condolences to the families of the victims and wished a speedy recovery to those injured.

Nowruz is a time of renewal and celebration, and should be a time for promoting the values of peace and solidarity, he said, reiterating that those organized the attack must be brought to justice.

The UN chief also expressed his solidary with the Government and the people of Afghanistan in the aftermath of the violence.

According to the UN Assistance Mission in the country, UNAMA, initial reports indicate that at least 25 civilians were killed and many others injured. There are fears the numbers could rise. Media reports suggest a suicide blew himself up near teh shrine.

In a separate statement, Tadamichi Yamamoto, the head of the UN Mission, echoed the Secretary-Generals condemnation.

I reiterate that under no circumstances are such attacks justifiable, and I once again call on all parties to uphold their obligations under international humanitarian law, at all times.At least 14 people have been killed in a car bomb blast outside a popular hotel in Somalia's capital, Mogadishu, according to a government official Al Jazeera News reported

The explosion on Thursday happened near Weheliye hotel on the busy Maka Al-Mukarrama Road.

A spokesman for the Somali interior ministry confirmed the death toll to Al Jazeera, adding that 10 others were wounded in the blast.

Witnesses at the scene said the powerful blast struck a street filled with civilians.

"Most of the casualties are ... people who were spending time to take tea, there was devastation and buildings were damaged," Mohamednur Abdirahman told AFP News Agency.

"The blast was so huge, a vehicle containing explosives went off near a teashop in front of Weheliye hotel, leaving more than 10 people dead. I saw people being rushed to hospital and some of them were already dead," another witness, Abdulahi Moalim, told AFP.

The attack was claimed by al-Shabab, Reuters news agency reported, citing the armed group's military operation spokesman.

Al-Shabab, which is fighting to overthrow Somalia's internationally recognised government, is frequently carrying out attacks in and around the capital.

The east African country continues to grapple with a delicate security situation. An African Union Mission to Somalia (known as AMISOL) is expected to withdraw its last troops by 2020.

Thursday's attack comes about a month after a twin car bombing in Mogadishu left 38 people killed.Baku, Azerbaijan, March 22

By Rufiz Hafizoglu  Trend:

Turkeys armed forces killed one of the most dangerous terrorists of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) - Songul Coskun in Syrias Afrin district, the Turkish media reported March 22.

Reportedly, earlier Coskun actively participated in military operations against Turkeys armed forces in northern Iraq.

Along with Coskun, over 20 militants of the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) and the Peoples Protection Units (YPG) were also killed.

Turkeys Armed Forces and Free Syrian Army liberated Afrin city from PYD and YPG terrorists on March 18.

On Jan. 20, the Turkish Armed Forces, together with the Free Syrian Army, launched the Operation Olive Branch in Afrin, Syria.

---

Follow the author on Twitter: @rhafizogluBaku, Azerbaijan, March 22

By Rufiz Hafizoglu  Trend:

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and US President Donald Trump will discuss the regional situation, the Turkish media cited the countrys Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu as saying March 22.

Cavusoglu added that the leaders of the two countries will discuss a number of issues today, over phone.

The Turkish foreign minister also stressed that Erdogan and Trump periodically hold phone talks.

Turkeys Armed Forces and Free Syrian Army liberated Afrin city from terrorists of Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) and the Peoples Protection Units (YPG) on March 18.

On Jan. 20, the Turkish Armed Forces, together with the Free Syrian Army, launched the Operation Olive Branch in Afrin, Syria.

---

Follow the author on Twitter: @rhafizogluBaku, Azerbaijan, March 22

By Rufiz Hafizoglu  Trend:

Turkey will not force Syrian refugees to leave the country, the Turkish media cited the countrys Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu as saying March 22.

Cavusoglu added that Syrian refugees will return to the liberated Afrin city voluntarily.

He added that despite Afrin has been fully freed from terrorists, the infrastructure of the city has been destroyed by terrorists.

The Turkish foreign minister also stressed that first of all, Turkey will begin to restore the infrastructure of Afrin.

Turkeys Armed Forces and Free Syrian Army liberated Afrin city from terrorists of Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD) and the Peoples Protection Units (YPG) on March 18.

On Jan. 20, the Turkish Armed Forces, together with the Free Syrian Army, launched the Operation Olive Branch in Afrin, Syria.

F-16 fighters of the Turkish Air Force are involved in the operation, inflicting strikes on the positions of PYD/YPG on the Syrian-Turkish border.

---

Follow the author on Twitter: @rhafizogluThe Turkish government has fallen into the U.S.s trap in Syria and the military is now trying to correct its mistakes, main opposition Republican Peoples Party (CHP) leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu has told the Hurriyet Daily News in an exclusive interview.

Saying that Washington tried to use Turkey as a battering ram in Syria, Kilicdaroglu added that the U.S. is now controlling all major oil and gas fields in Syria together with PYD and its militia the YPG, Syrian extensions of the outlawed PKK. The U.S. has not shown that it is a strategic friend to Turkey, he said.

On the major foreign and domestic issues facing Turkey, Kilicdaroglu had the following to say:

The [Turkish] government was wrong in its Syria policy from the very beginning. The U.S. tried to use Turkey as a battering ram in Syria. The U.S., Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar supplied arms and training to rebel groups in Syria. But later on the U.S. pulled back and started cooperating with the PYD and the YPG in the fight against [the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant] ISIL. The Turkish government was too late to diagnose the real terrorist nature of ISIL, only realizing it after the raid on Turkeys Mosul Consulate in [June 2014]. The Americans said they were supplying the PYD-YPG with heavy weaponry against ISIL and would later collect this weaponry back. But today we observe that these weapons are being stored in Afrin to be used against Turkey, and Afrin is not even east of the Euphrates, where the U.S.s fight against ISIL has been. The U.S. has not demonstrated that it is a strategic friend to Turkey.

The [Turkish] government fell into the U.S.s trap in Syria. Turkey was dragged into the swamp of the Middle East by the U.S. Now the U.S. is establishing control over all major oil and gas fields in Syria with the help of the PYD/YPG. Our government has now realized that its policy was wrong and it was deceived by the U.S., so the Turkish military ultimately had to go into Syria to correct the governments mistakes at the cost of Turkish soldiers getting killed there. Russia is also using the PYD as leverage in its relations with both the U.S. and Turkey, as Moscow wants the gap between Ankara and Washington to further grow. The overall number of lost Turkish lives in Syria is more than the loss of American and Russian lives combined. The Americans have settled around Syrias oil and gas fields, while the Russians have expanded their military bases, and Iran and China are getting lucrative tenders from Damascus government for the reconstruction of Syria. Turkey, meanwhile, has not gained anything. Ultimately if you form your policy in line with the interests of hegemonic powers like the U.S. and Russia this is what you end up with.

In terms of finding a solution, the four neighboring countries in the region  Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria  should have a meeting at the presidential or prime ministerial level. The four countries have a shared interest in defending their territorial integrity and fighting terrorism. On whether it would be wise to talk to Bashar al-Assad, who is accused internationally of using chemical gas and widespread violence against his own people, this matter is not about al-Assad as a person. Syria has been suffering a terrible civil war for the last seven years, longer than the Second World War, in a small piece of land. It has also turned into a proxy war between the U.S. and Russia. Hundreds and thousands of people have been killed, women and children. Millions have fled the country, including more than three million to Turkey. The country is in ruins. So if a solution is to be found, the four neighbors have to be part of this solution.

* Because of the Syrian problem our relations with Arab states have also been damaged. Energy Minister Berat Albayrak recently said he was saddened by the choice of Qatar to join recent searches for Mediterranean gas resources. I believe we have to have good relations again with both Qatar and with Egypt, for example. We also need better relations with the U.S. and the European Union. But to achieve that we need a foreign policy with some integrity. Our Foreign Ministry is gradually being dragged aside in foreign policy decisions. Presidential spokesman Ibrahim Kalin is effectively acting like the foreign minister.

In relations with the EU there are things that Turkey should do and things that the EU should do. If you want to join a club, you have to accept its rules and abide by its standards. In the past I have asked prime ministers Ahmet Davutoglu and Binali Yildirim why we dont do our part and upgrade our legislation, regardless of what the Europeans do in return. I believe they shared my view but President [Tayyip Erdogan] does not think that way. The government falls short of meeting the requirements like the rule of law, court independence, press freedom, empowering of civil society and now the state of emergency, but complains about being rejected in membership negotiations.

Courts in Turkey have totally lost their independence. Take the most recent example of the daughter of the president of the Council of State. Despite being a novice lawyer, she was first accepted as a judge and within 24 hours of being appointed to the eastern province of Elazig she was appointed to Ankara, where her mother [Council of State head Zerrin Gungor] works, in a senior position as an investigative judge at the Court of Cassations. Indeed, among all the newly appointed judges there are many names who have worked in the provincial organizations of the ruling party as attorneys in law very recently. This is not ethical and it makes the courts even more politicized.According to information by the Turkish media, a military aircraft has crashed in central Turkey's Nevshehir province's, on Thursday.

Turkish Armed Forces (TSK) spoke of an F-16 jet which was on a training mission when it crashed.

Daily Sabah reports that "emergency services have reached the dead body of one soldier at the site of the crash."President Donald Trump signed an executive memorandum on Thursday that would impose about $60 billion in retaliatory tariffs on Chinese imports, CNBC reports.

"This is the first of many" trade actions, Trump said as he signed the memo.

The new measures are designed to penalize China for trade practices that the Trump administration says involve stealing American companies' intellectual property. They will primarily target certain products in the technology sector where China holds an advantage over the U.S.

The new measures follow a so-called 301 investigation led by U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer into China's potentially unfair trade practices with the U.S.

Lighthizer's office will publish a list of targeted products in 15 days, and there will be a 30-day period for public comment, according to senior administration officials.

The U.S. Trade Representative's yet-to-be-released report covers 1,300 product lines, the administration officials said.

The bottom line, said Trump's trade director, Peter Navarro, on Thursday, is that the U.S. is "strategically defending itself against economic aggression." The president is standing up for American corporations, he added.

Lighthizer told lawmakers on Thursday, however, that China is likely to retaliate against the tariffs by targeting U.S. agricultural products that are reliant on the Chinese export market.

The Trump administration had previously signaled that the tariffs would apply to at least $30 billion in Chinese imports, multiple news outlets reported. Trump himself has pushed for $60 billion in tariffs on Chinese goods.

In the Senate Finance Committee on Thursday before Trump's announcement, Lighthizer outlined the Chinese products that will be subject to the new tariffs, including aeronautics, modern rail, new-energy vehicles and high-tech products.

Trump will consider further actions against China in two weeks, based on the effect of the first phase of the tariffs, CNBC reported Wednesday, citing sources. The president is reportedly concerned about the severity of the new measures' impact on American universities.

The Trump administration has regularly highlighted China's $375 billion surplus with the U.S. as evidence of an unfair trade relationship.Dupa inscrierea pe site-ul HotNews.ro, poti deschide sectiunea MyHotNews ca sa completezi sau sa schimbi profilul de utilizator.

Atentie! Logarea pe site se face cu adresa de email, nu cu nickname-ul. Adresa ta de email va ramane confidentiala si nu va fi niciodata data unor terte persoane sau institutii.

Inainte de a te inscrie pe site te rugam sa parcurgi termenii si conditiile atasate unui cont HotNews.ro.KYODO NEWS - Mar 22, 2018 - 11:00 | All, World

The Japanese government has conveyed to North Korea its desire to hold summit talks between Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, diplomatic sources said Wednesday.

Abe wants Kim to resolve the issues of past abductions of Japanese nationals by North Korea as well as Pyongyang's nuclear and missile development programs, saying that implementing the Japan-North Korea Pyongyang Declaration signed in 2002 will bring economic benefits to Pyongyang, the sources said.

With summits expected between Kim and South Korean President Moon Jae In in April and U.S. President Donald Trump in May, Japan is concerned that the abduction issue may be left behind, they said.

Japan and North Korea have held summits twice in the past, when then Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi held talks with Kim's late father Kim Jong Il in Pyongyang in 2002 and 2004.

The declaration they signed in 2002 says Japan will extend economic cooperation to North Korea after normalizing relations.

At that landmark 2002 summit, Kim Jong Il admitted North Korea had abducted 13 Japanese, saying eight had died. After the summit, North Korea allowed five abductees to return to Japan in October 2002, but no tangible progress has been made since then.

North Korea says the abduction issue has been resolved, while Tokyo is seeking the return of all victims.

In seeking a summit with Kim Jong Un, Abe will ask for Trump's cooperation during their meeting in the United States expected mid-April at the earliest, the sources said.

But as Japan is maintaining its stance of putting pressure on North Korea over its nuclear and missile development programs, it is uncertain whether North Korea would be willing to hold summit talks with Abe. Abe has also repeatedly said that dialogue with North Korea for dialogue's sake is meaningless.

On Feb. 9 this year, Abe told the North's ceremonial leader Kim Yong Nam in a brief meeting in Pyeongchang, South Korea, that there is no change in Japan's stance of seeking normalization of diplomatic ties by resolving the nuclear and missile development and the abduction issues based on the Pyongyang Declaration, according to a source close to the matter.

In the meeting, Kim Yong Nam did not deny the necessity of normalizing ties, the source said.

"(Abe's) reference to normalization signals his enthusiasm for top-level talks. The North Korean side also took it that way and his intention has been conveyed to Mr. Jong Un," the source said.

Earlier this month, Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Kono separately asked U.S. Vice President Mike Pence and South Korean Foreign Minister Kang Kyung Wha to convey to North Korea Japan's intention to hold talks with Kim, a diplomatic source said.

In February, Mongolian Foreign Minister Damdin Tsogtbaatar also told the North Korean side about Japan's stance regarding a summit with Kim and has received a positive response, according to the source. Mongolia traditionally maintains friendly ties with Pyongyang.

The Japanese government has conveyed to North Korea its intention to hold summit talks between Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, diplomatic sources said Wednesday.

Abe wants Kim to resolve the issues of past abductions of Japanese nationals by North Korea and Pyongyang's nuclear and missile development programs, saying that implementing the Japan-North Korea Pyongyang Declaration signed in 2002 will bring economic benefits to Pyongyang, the sources said.

Japan hopes the abduction issue will not be left behind as Kim is expected to hold separate summits with South Korean President Moon Jae In and U.S. President Donald Trump from April to May, they said.

Japanese and North Korean leaders have not met since 2004, when then Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi held talks with Kim's late father Kim Jong Il in Pyongyang.

The declaration they signed says Japan will extend economic cooperation to North Korea after normalizing relations.

At that landmark summit in 2002, Kim Jong Il admitted North Korea had abducted 13 Japanese and said eight had died. After the summit, North Korea allowed five abductees to return to Japan in October 2002, but no tangible progress has been made since then.

North Korea says the abduction issue has been resolved, while Tokyo seeks the return of all victims.

In seeking to realize the summit with Kim Jong Un, Abe will ask for Trump's cooperation during their meeting in the United States as early as mid-April, the sources said.

But as Japan maintains the stance of adding pressure on North Korea over its nuclear and missile development programs, it is uncertain whether North Korea would be willing to hold summit talks with Abe. Abe has also repeatedly said that dialogue with North Korea for dialogue's sake is meaningless.

On Feb. 9 this year, Abe told the North's ceremonial leader Kim Yong Nam in a brief meeting in Pyeongchang, South Korea, that there is no change in Japan's stance of seeking normalization of diplomatic ties by resolving the nuclear and missile development and the abduction issues based on the Pyongyang Declaration, according to a source close to the matter.

In the meeting, Kim Yong Nam did not deny the necessity of the normalizing ties, the source said.

"(Abe's) reference to normalization signals his enthusiasm for top-level talks. The North Korean side also took it that way and his intention has been conveyed to Mr. Jong Un," the source said.

Earlier this month, Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Kono separately asked U.S. Vice President Mike Pence and South Korean Foreign Minister Kang Kyung Wha to convey to North Korea Japan's intention to hold talks with Kim, a diplomatic source said.

In February, Mongolian Foreign Minister Damdin Tsogtbaatar also told the North Korean side about Japan's stance regarding a summit with Kim and has received a positive response, according to the source. Mongolia traditionally maintains friendly ties with Pyongyang.CLIFTON, N.J., March 22, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Comodo CA, a worldwide leader in digital identity solutions, will address evolving cyberthreats and the increasing importance Extended Validation (EV) TLS/SSL certificates play in securing websites and inspiring consumer trust at the RSA Conference 2018, San Francisco, April 16  20.



According to the Feb 2018 Netcraft report, Comodo CA has seen a 35 percent year-over-year increase of EV certificate units* making it one of the fastest growing providers of high assurance certificates. The volume of EV certificates globally also saw a record year in 2017 as more and more businesses adopt EV as standard practice for their websites. The demand for stronger, more secure EV certificates comes in the wake of increased phishing websites using Domain Validated (DV) certificates. Phishing websites imitate legitimate websites to steal customers funds and identities. Phishing websites using DV certificates get the Secure label by browsers, which adds to consumer confusion. Browsers intend the secure label to indicate that the link is encrypted to the destination. That destination could be a phishing website. Unfortunately, consumers translate secure to mean safe.

Enabling HTTPS and a padlock in browsers is no longer sufficient for business websites, says Bill Holtz, CEO, Comodo CA. Online consumers are demanding the additional assurances that the identity of the website they are visiting has been verified by human auditors. The EV certificate that also carries a green identifier in the URL bar is subjected to extensive human scrutiny by the issuing Certificate Authority before a certificate is issued. That contrasts with a DV certificate that undergoes no scrutiny. The green bar tells consumers that they are at a legitimate website and not a phishing website. There has been no phishing attack using the EV certificate.

At RSA 2018, the worlds leading information security conference and exposition, Comodo CA will exhibit its leading portfolio of solutions that deliver security and trust to over 700,000 businesses worldwide. Comodo CA will also spotlight the key trends it is seeing that are driving adoption of EV certificates and will cover its recent announcements including:

Comodo CA will be at booth 541  to schedule a meeting at the show, contact the company at press@comodoca.com.

About Comodo CA

A trusted advisor by enterprises globally for more than two decades, Comodo CA provides digital identity solutions for businesses of all sizes  protecting their employees, customers, intellectual property and overall brand  from damages caused by fraudsters impersonating people and devices. As the largest commercial certificate authority with over 100 million SSL certificates issued worldwide, Comodo CA has the experience and performance to meet the growing need to secure transactions and create online trust. For more information, visit ComodoCA.com.

About RSA Conference

RSA Conference is the premier series of global events where the world talks security and leadership gathers, advances and emerges. Whether attending in the U.S., the EMEA region, or the Asia-Pacific region, RSA Conference events are where the security industry converges to discuss current and future concerns and get access to the people, content and ideas that help enable individuals and companies to win, grow and do their best. It is the ultimate marketplace for the latest technologies and hands-on educational opportunities that help industry professionals discover how to make their companies more secure while showcasing the most enterprising, influential and thought-provoking thinkers and leaders in security today. For information on events, online programming and the most up-to-date news pertaining to the information security industry visit www.rsaconference.com.

Contact:

Lisa Johnson, LJ Strategic Communications

lisa@ljstratcomm.com

425-766-8736

* Netcraft SSL Server Survey - Based on Feb 2018 results compared to Feb 2017 resultsThe leadership meetings of both the ruling LDF and the Opposition UDF in Kerala will be held today at Thiruvananthapuram in the backdrop of the communally sensitive row.Tasigna  (nilotinib) approved for pediatric patients with newly diagnosed Ph+ CML-CP and children with Ph+ CML-CP resistant or intolerant to prior TKI therapy



New indication approved under FDA Priority Review designation; provides clinicians with pediatric-specific safety and clinical data



Novartis continues commitment to people living with CML, including pediatric patients with this cancer

Basel, March 22, 2018 - Novartis announced today that the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) expanded the indication for Tasigna (nilotinib) to include treatment of first- and second-line pediatric patients one year of age or older with Philadelphia chromosome-positive chronic myeloid leukemia in the chronic phase (Ph+ CML-CP).

In the United States, Tasigna is now indicated for the treatment of adult and pediatric patients one year of age or older with newly diagnosed Ph+ CML-CP. Tasigna is also indicated for the treatment of pediatric patients one year of age or older with Ph+ CML-CP resistant or intolerant to prior tyrosine kinase inhibitor (TKI) therapy, as well as adult patients with Ph+ CML in chronic phase and accelerated phase, resistant or intolerant to prior therapy that included imatinib.

This approval is the latest in a series of regulatory milestones that broadens the understanding and clinical use of Tasigna.

CML is a type of blood cancer where the body produces malignant white blood cells. Almost all patients with CML have an abnormality known as the "Philadelphia chromosome," which produces a protein called BCR-ABL. This protein aids the proliferation of malignant white blood cells in affected patients. Worldwide, CML accounts for approximately 3% of newly diagnosed childhood leukemia[1].

"Novartis' commitment to people living with CML is reinforced by today's FDA approval of Tasigna in children," said Liz Barrett, CEO, Novartis Oncology. "This expanded use, along with the other recent global regulatory Tasigna milestones, underscores our dedication to reimagining medicine and addressing the needs for people with CML, including children with this cancer."

The new indications, granted under the FDA's Priority Review designation, are based on two studies evaluating the efficacy and safety of nilotinib in pediatric patients (two years to less than 18 years of age) with Ph+ CML-CP. A total of 69 Ph+ CML-CP pediatric patients, either newly diagnosed (first-line) or who were resistant or intolerant to prior TKI therapy (second-line), received nilotinib[2]. In newly diagnosed pediatric patients, the major molecular response (MMR; BCR ABL/ABL <=0.1% International Scale [IS]) rate was 60.0% (95% confidence interval [CI]: 38.7, 78.9) at 12 cycles, with 15 patients achieving MMR[2]. The cumulative MMR rate among newly diagnosed pediatric patients was 64.0% by cycle 12, and the median time to first MMR was 5.6 months (range: 2.7 to 16.6). In pediatric patients with resistance or intolerance to prior TKI therapy, the MMR rate was 40.9% (95% CI: 26.3, 56.8) at 12 cycles, with 18 patients being in MMR[2]. The cumulative MMR rate among pediatric patients with resistance or intolerance was 47.7% by cycle 12, and the median time to first MMR was 2.8 months (range: 0.0 to 11.3)[2].

Adverse reactions observed in these pediatric studies were generally consistent with those observed in adults, except for laboratory abnormalities of hyperbilirubinemia (Grade 3/4: 13%)-a condition where there is too much bilirubin in the blood-and transaminase elevation (AST Grade 3/4: 1%, ALT Grade 3/4: 9%), which were reported at a higher frequency than in adult patients. One resistant or intolerant pediatric CML patient progressed to advance phase/blast crisis (AP/BC) after about 10 months on treatment.

Novartis Commitment to CML

Novartis' ongoing research in Ph+ CML has helped transform the disease from a fatal leukemia to a chronic condition in most patients. The company maintains an unwavering commitment to scientific innovation and access to care for patients worldwide. As an organization committed to patients, Novartis continues to reimagine CML by pursuing ambitious goals with courage, passion and commitment for the global CML community.

About Tasigna

Tasigna (nilotinib) is approved in more than 122 countries for the treatment of chronic phase and accelerated phase Philadelphia chromosome-positive chronic myelogenous leukemia (Ph+ CML) in adult patients resistant or intolerant to at least one prior therapy, including Glivec (imatinib)*, and in more than 110 countries for the treatment of adult patients with newly diagnosed Ph+ CML in chronic phase. Tasigna is approved in the United States (US) for the treatment of Ph+ CML in the chronic phase in pediatric patients one year of age or older with resistance or intolerance to prior therapy including imatinib and for the treatment of pediatric patients one year of age or older with newly diagnosed Ph+ CML in the chronic phase. Tasigna is also approved in the European Union (EU) for the treatment of Ph+ CML in the chronic phase in pediatric patients with resistance or intolerance to prior therapy including imatinib and for the treatment of pediatric patients with newly diagnosed Ph+ CML in the chronic phase.

IMPORTANT SAFETY INFORMATION for TASIGNA (nilotinib) Capsules

Use with caution in patients with uncontrolled or significant cardiac disease and in patients who have or may develop prolongation of QTc. Low levels of potassium or magnesium must be corrected prior to Tasigna administration. Monitor closely for an effect on the QTc interval. Baseline ECG is recommended prior to initiating therapy and as clinically indicated. Cases of sudden death have been reported in clinical studies in patients with significant risk factors. Avoid use of concomitant drugs known to prolong the QT interval and strong CYP3A4 inhibitors. Avoid food 2 hours before and 1 hour after taking dose. Reactivation of hepatitis B can occur in patients who are chronic carriers of this virus after receiving TKI treatment.

Use with caution in patients with liver impairment, with a history of pancreatitis and with total gastrectomy. Patients with rare hereditary problems of galactose intolerance, severe lactase deficiency or glucose-galactose malabsorption should not use Tasigna. Tasigna may cause fetal harm in pregnant women. If pregnancy is planned during the treatment-free remission phase, the patient must be informed of a potential need to re-initiate treatment with Tasigna during pregnancy. Women taking Tasigna should not breastfeed.

Cases of cardiovascular events included ischemic heart disease-related events, peripheral arterial occlusive disease, and ischemic cerebrovascular events have been reported. Serious cases of hemorrhage from various sites including gastrointestinal were reported in patients receiving Tasigna. Grade 3 or 4 fluid retention including pleural effusion, pericardial effusion, ascites and pulmonary edema have been reported. Cases of tumor lysis syndrome have been reported in Tasigna-treated patients who were resistant or intolerant to prior CML therapy.

In pediatric patients the long-term effects of prolonged treatment with Tasigna is unknown.

Eligible patients who are confirmed to express the typical BCR-ABL transcripts, e13a2/b2a2 or e14a2/b3a2, can be considered for treatment discontinuation. Frequent monitoring of BCR-ABL transcript levels in patients eligible for treatment discontinuation must be performed with a quantitative diagnostic test validated to measure molecular response levels with a sensitivity of at least MR4.5 (BCR-ABL/ABL <=0.0032% IS). BCR-ABL transcript levels must be assessed prior to and during treatment discontinuation. Loss of major molecular response (MMR=BCR-ABL/ABL <=0.1% IS) or confirmed loss of MR4 (two consecutive measures separated by at least 4 weeks showing loss of MR4 (MR4=BCR-ABL/ABL <=0.01% IS) will trigger treatment re-initiation within 4 weeks of when loss of remission is known to have occurred. It is crucial to perform frequent monitoring of BCR-ABL transcript levels and complete blood count with differential in order to detect possible loss of remission. For patients who fail to achieve MMR after three months of treatment re-initiation, BCR-ABL kinase domain mutation testing should be performed.

The most frequent Grade 3 or 4 adverse events are hematological (neutropenia, thrombocytopenia, anemia) which are generally reversible and usually managed by withholding Tasigna temporarily or dose reduction. Chemistry panels, including electrolytes, lipid profile, liver enzymes, and glucose should be checked prior to therapy and periodically. Tasigna can cause increases in serum lipase. The most frequent non-hematologic adverse events were rash, pruritus, nausea, fatigue, headache, alopecia, myalgia, constipation and diarrhea.

Musculoskeletal pain, myalgia, pain in extremity, arthralgia, bone pain and spinal pain may occur upon discontinuing treatment with Tasigna within the framework of attempting treatment-free remission.

Please see full Prescribing Information including Boxed WARNING at https://www.us.tasigna.com/.

Disclaimer

This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements can generally be identified by words such as "potential," "can," "will," "plan," "expect," "anticipate," "look forward," "believe," "committed," "investigational," "pipeline," "launch," or similar terms, or by express or implied discussions regarding potential marketing approvals, new indications or labeling for the investigational or approved products described in this press release, or regarding potential future revenues from such products. You should not place undue reliance on these statements. Such forward-looking statements are based on our current beliefs and expectations regarding future events, and are subject to significant known and unknown risks and uncertainties. Should one or more of these risks or uncertainties materialize, or should underlying assumptions prove incorrect, actual results may vary materially from those set forth in the forward-looking statements. There can be no guarantee that the investigational or approved products described in this press release will be submitted or approved for sale or for any additional indications or labeling in any market, or at any particular time. Nor can there be any guarantee that such products will be commercially successful in the future. In particular, our expectations regarding such products could be affected by, among other things, the uncertainties inherent in research and development, including clinical trial results and additional analysis of existing clinical data; regulatory actions or delays or government regulation generally; global trends toward health care cost containment, including government, payor and general public pricing and reimbursement pressures; our ability to obtain or maintain proprietary intellectual property protection; the particular prescribing preferences of physicians and patients; general political and economic conditions; safety, quality or manufacturing issues; potential or actual data security and data privacy breaches, or disruptions of our information technology systems, and other risks and factors referred to in Novartis AG's current Form 20-F on file with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Novartis is providing the information in this press release as of this date and does not undertake any obligation to update any forward-looking statements contained in this press release as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

About Novartis

Novartis provides innovative healthcare solutions that address the evolving needs of patients and societies. Headquartered in Basel, Switzerland, Novartis offers a diversified portfolio to best meet these needs: innovative medicines, cost-saving generic and biosimilar pharmaceuticals and eye care. Novartis has leading positions globally in each of these areas. In 2017, the Group achieved net sales of USD 49.1 billion, while R&D throughout the Group amounted to approximately USD 9.0 billion. Novartis Group companies employ approximately 122,000 full-time-equivalent associates. Novartis products are sold in approximately 155 countries around the world. For more information, please visit http://www.novartis.com.

Novartis is on Twitter. Sign up to follow @Novartis at http://twitter.com/novartis

For Novartis multimedia content, please visit www.novartis.com/news/media-library

For questions about the site or required registration, please contact media.relations@novartis.com

*Known as Gleevec (imatinib mesylate) tablets in the US and Canada.

References

1. Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. CML in Children and Young Adults. https://www.lls.org/leukemia/chronic-myeloid-leukemia/cml-in-children-and-young-adults. Accessed January 2018.

2. Tasigna (nilotinib) Prescribing Information. East Hanover, New Jersey, USA: Novartis Pharmaceuticals Corporation; March 2018.

# # #

Novartis Media Relations

Central media line: +41 61 324 2200

E-mail: media.relations@novartis.com

Eric Althoff

Novartis Global Media Relations

+41 61 324 7999 (direct)

+41 79 593 4202 (mobile)

eric.althoff@novartis.com Mary Curtin Creaser

Novartis Oncology Communications

+ 1 862 778-2550 (direct)

+ 1 862 345-4102 (mobile)

mary.curtin_creaser@novartis.com

Novartis Investor Relations

Central investor relations line: +41 61 324 7944

E-mail: investor.relations@novartis.comCybersecurity

Congress poised to put up $380 million for election security

A day after members of the Senate Intelligence Committee called for increased federal funding to assist states in securing their voting systems, Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) said the forthcoming omnibus funding bill will include an expected $380 million in grant funding for that purpose.

Burr made the announcement during a March 21 hearing on election security where members of Congress interviewed Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen, former DHS secretary Jeh Johnson and a mix of other officials to further flesh out additional action.

The committee asked for updates from DHS on election security efforts with states, discussed ways to better assist communication between states and agencies and pondered the need for a unified cyber doctrine to deter future state-sponsored election interference efforts. Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine) questioned whether DHS was acting with enough urgency, noting that voting has already begun for the 2018 mid-term election season.

Nielsen said the department was speeding up security clearances for state and local officials, with 20 being given full security clearances to received classified threat briefings and others being given interim clearances. Nielsen also said 15 of the 19 states that requested in-depth vulnerability assessments from DHS have had those requests fulfilled, and promised the remaining states would get assistance before election day.

"Not only is this of extreme urgency to the department, but  we are prioritizing election efforts and risk and vulnerability assessments for our state and local partners over all other critical infrastructure sectors," said Nielsen.

Intelligence agencies have testified to Congress that they believe Russia and perhaps other nations intend to continue election interference efforts during the 2018 mid-term elections.

At the hearing, Burr asked Jeanette Manfra, DHS' assistant secretary for cybersecurity and communications, if the department had seen any evidence thus far "that concern you that an adversary might be testing the systems."

"Not at this time," Manfra replied.

Eric Rosenbach, co-director of the Belfour Center for Science and International Affairs, told lawmakers that much like recent reports about Russian-linked hacking groups targeting critical U.S. infrastructure entities, it is likely there are additional efforts related to probing and perhaps compromising the election system.

"I just don't believe when someone tells me we know everything about what the Russians did or didn't do," said Belfour.

The committee took pains to insist that federal efforts should not be interpreted as an attempt to usurp the central role that state and local governments play in administering elections.

However, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) seemed to break with his colleagues, noting that no state has the budget, intelligence capabilities or technical resources to defend against cyberattacks by modern day nation-states. Over the past year, Wyden has been critical of voting machine manufacturers and called the lack of paper ballots a national security threat.

"Leaving our defenses to states and local entities, in my view, is not an adequate response," said Wyden. "Our country needs baseline, mandatory, federal election security standards and what I'm talking about here are paper ballots and post-election, risk-limiting audits."

In House of Representatives, meanwhile, Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), ranking member of the Homeland Security Committee, said he was pleased with the funding commitment, but wants more attention paid to election security.

"Make no mistake, this is a solid down payment on securing our federal elections in 2018 and 2020, but much more must be done," he said.Budget

House releases must-pass spending bill two days ahead of shutdown

The House Appropriations Committee released a must-past $1.3 trillion spending bill on the evening of March 21, barely two days ahead of a possible government shutdown.

The bill weighs in at almost 2,300 pages and includes hundreds of pages more in accompanying explanatory reports. It includes $700 billion in defense funding (including $71 billion in overseas contingency operations funds) and $600 billion for non-defense activities.

The bill is the product of weeks of negotiations between Republicans and Democrats in both chambers of Congress. It contains funding for key priorities of both parties, as well as compromises or outright punts on matters where agreement couldn't be found. It comes six months into the current fiscal year and after five continuing resolutions.

"Through hard work, long days, and a dose of bipartisanship, we were able to reach an agreement to keep the government of the American people open for business," said Sen. Pat Leahy (D-Vt.), the vice chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee.

From the federal IT perspective, the Technology Modernization Fund will get $100 million. That's short of the $228 million called for in a previous appropriation, but with just six months left in the fiscal year, the amount may not represent such a drastic reduction over what was sought.

The omnibus also includes $782 million to fund the electronic health records modernization program at the Department of Veterans Affairs. This funding will allow the VA to sign a long-awaited contract with Cerner and begin work on implementation of a commercial electronic health record. VA had put in a request to reprogram money from existing accounts under previous continuing resolutions in order to get the deal out the door in calendar 2017. But that plan was scuttled in part because VA Secretary David Shulkin wanted additional time to work on how the new system would be interoperable with other commercial systems.

Recent cloud computing acquisition activities at the Department of Defense, which could lead to a multibillion single award to a cloud infrastructure provider, also have attracted notice of lawmakers. The legislative report on the defense spending portion of the omnibus notes that "there are concerns about the proposed duration of a single contract, questions about the best value for the taxpayer, and how to ensure the highest security is maintained."

Lawmakers are calling for two reports from the Pentagon on cloud computing.

One is tasked with detailing a DOD-wide cloud strategy covering all entities that also includes a justification for going with a single CSP, "rather than creating an infrastructure capable of storing and sharing data across multiple cloud computing service providers concurrently, to include data migration and middleware costs."

The second report, due within 45 days of the enactment of the appropriations bill, covers an ongoing procurement by the Pentagon cloud steering group dubbed Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, or JEDI. That report includes 2018 and 2019 budget requests, overall cloud budgets and justifications for acquisitions involving "other transaction authorities."

Elsewhere in the omnibus, the Internal Revenue Service landed $350 million in new funding for customer service, including improving phone response times and to combat fraud and promote cybersecurity.

Voting cybersecurity also got some attention, with $380 million going to the Election Assistance Commission to provide grants to states to upgrade election systems and "combat outside interference in U.S. elections."

A measure that applies Federal IT Acquisition Reform Act-style CIO authorities to the top tech official at the Federal Communications Commission made the cut.

The bill also includes the Cloud Act, a bill designed to normalize varying rules governing law enforcement access to remotely stored communications, and to give law enforcement a way of obtaining records from U.S. companies, even if those records are stored abroad.Defense

Now's not the time for a Space Force, STRATCOM leader says

The U.S. military's space capability won't look like this anytime soon.

The head of U.S. Strategic Command said the nation doesn't need a "Space Force" right now.

"I think that someday we'll have a Space Corps and Space Force in this country. But I don't think the time is right for that right now," STRATCOM's Commander Gen. John Hyten said during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing March 20 to discuss fiscal 2019 budget priorities.

Hyten's response followed comments President Donald Trump made earlier this month in a speech to the military in San Diego, advocating for a new "Space Force" to combat emerging threats from Russia and China and declaring space as a warfighting domain.

"My new national strategy for space recognizes that space is a war-fighting domain, just like the land, air and sea," Trump said during his March 13 speech. "We may even have a 'Space Force'  develop another one. Space Force. We have the Air Force; we'll have the Space Force."

The White House, Defense Secretary James Mattis and the Air Force, which heads space operations via its own Space Command and would have housed the Space Corps, previously opposed its creation. Language for it was stripped out of the latest defense spending bill, but the bill allowed for an independent study exploring what a Space Corps would look like and its requirements.

But while Hyten disagreed with establishing a Space Force or Corps anytime soon, he said he appreciated the president's thinking.

"I love the fact that the president talked about space as a warfighting domain," Hyten said, adding that he supports the National Defense Authorization Act's take on evaluating the needs and elements of a Space Corps in the future.

"The importance of space is not going to lessen over the years, so I see this as a logical progression," Hyten told reporters following the hearing.

"We just have a fairly small force right now" of about 5,000 space operators plus supporting staff, and Hyten likes that. "I'm happy with where we are right now" having Congress, the president and the law all pointing towards space as a warfighting domain, he said, adding that Trump's comments were "another great voice" that aligns with national security needs.

Hyten also addressed senators' cyberwarfare concerns during the hearing, saying that while the U.S. has made progress, it's inhibited by the belief that cyberspace isn't a true warfighting domain.

"I always find it odd that we'll give young soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines lethal authority to operate far from home in harm's way -- to apply lethal force against an adversary using a set of rules of engagement but will hesitate to give a four-star admiral the authority to conduct cyberspace operations because we're concerned he won't follow the rules of engagement," Hyten said, referring to U.S. Cyber Commander Adm. Michael Rogers and adding that the rules of engagement should be the same regardless of domain.

But when Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) asked what Congress should do, Hyten hesitated, saying he doesn't want to prescribe the legislative body with a solution. However, he said publicly endorsing cyberspace as a warfighting domain is a step forward.

"People always ask me, 'In space or cyber, how do you deter  how do you fight to win a war in cyber?' You don't," Hyten said. "War, conflict, deterrence -- [each] is against an adversary, not against a place. You have to take the place out of it and focus on the adversary," while leaving room for diplomacy.* African leaders hope for trade-led growth boost

* Nigeria, South Africa do not to sign up

* Continent gives itself 18 months to hammer out details (Adds South African presidency comments)

By Clement Uwiringiyimana

KIGALI, March 21 (Reuters) - African leaders agreed on Wednesday to form a $3 trillion continental free-trade zone encompassing 1.2 billion people, but its two biggest economies, Nigeria and South Africa, did not sign up, diminishing its impact.

The African Union started talks in 2015 to establish a 55-nation bloc that would be the biggest in the world by member states, in a bid to increase intra-regional trade, which sits at a measly 15 percent of Africa's total commerce.

Rwandan president Paul Kagame, host of an AU summit called to conclude the initial negotiations, declared the meeting a success after 44 African nations signed up to establish the free trade bloc within 18 months.

It was not immediately clear why Nigeria stayed on the sidelines, but South Africa President Cyril Ramaphosa said he would sign once necessary legal processes were done.

"President Ramaphosa has undertaken that South Africa will become a signatory to the agreement once the legal and other instruments associated with (the trade bloc) are processed and ratified by South African stakeholders and parliament," the presidency said in a statement.

Others staying out of the bloc were Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, Zambia, Burundi, Eritrea, Benin, Sierra Leone and Guinea Bissau.

"It would have been great if the two biggest economies on the continent, Nigeria and South Africa, had signed, but the most important is that the rest of the continent is sending a right message to these two biggest economies that we are moving ahead without you," said Michael Kottoh, an analyst at Confidential Strategies in Ghana.

The project needed a minimum of 22 countries signing up to get off the ground and Kagame hailed the effort so far.

"What is at stake is the dignity and well-being of Africa's farmers, workers and entrepreneurs," he said.

Story continues

AU trade commissioner Albert Muchanga also put a positive spin on the absence of the top two African economies, telling Reuters they would soon join in.

"They are still doing national level consultations and so when they finish they will be able to come on board," he said.

TRADE ZONES

Economists point to Africa's low level of intra-regional trade as one of the reasons for the continent's enduring poverty and lack of a strong manufacturing base.

It is blamed on a host of factors, from colonialism, to high internal tariffs to poor road and rail links to excessive border bureaucracy and petty corruption at frontier checkpoints.

The relatively small size of many African markets - only Nigeria and Ethiopia have populations estimated at 100 million people or more - also inhibit private sector investment.

Africa already has an alphabet soup of competing and overlapping trade zones - ECOWAS in the west, EAC in the east, SADC in the south and COMESA in the east and south - although only the EAC, driven mainly by Kenya, has made significant progress towards a common market in goods and services.

Analysts said governments needed to do more to ensure goods and people flowed freely across borders.

"If they just sign the agreement without opening the borders, without getting rid of non-tariff barriers and if they don't work on free movement of people, it is not going to work," analyst Kottoh said.

Even the six-nation EAC has its sticking points - Tanzania has been known to kick out Kenyan executives and impound Kenyan imports at the border, in violation of EAC rules.

Businessmen said the current set-up forced them to look outside the continent, particularly Asia for manufactured goods.

"It is easy and cheaper to buy in Asia than to buy in the sub-region because of less-flexible rules of origin and non-tariff barriers that are not clear," said Meriem Bensalah-Chaqroun, head of the Moroccan Confederation of Businesses.

Sudden changes in rules and impromptu checks on goods also held up supply chains.

"Some countries all of a sudden decide they are going to do a quality check on goods but they don't really know what they want to check. That slows the trade," said Thomas Schafer, CEO of Volkswagen Africa.

"We are not able to bring a vehicle from South Africa into Zimbabwe in a cost-efficient and fast way. That needs to change." (Additional reporting by Olivia Kumwenda-Mtambo in Johannesburg Writing by Duncan Miriri Editing by Ed Cropley and Alison Williams)LOS ANGELES, Calif., March 22, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- At the GPU Technology Conference (GTC) 2018, Chaos Group will debut its fast new V-Ray GPU rendering architecture, effectively doubling the speed of production rendering for film, broadcast and design artists. The new architecture is a redesign of V-Rays kernel structure, ensuring a dual-blend of high-performance speed and accuracy. Chaos Groups lead GPU developers will run through all of the new features, as part of a special session at GTC on March 28 in room 230B of the San Jose Convention Center.

The improvements are so significant that V-Ray RT has been renamed V-Ray GPU, establishing the latter as a professional production renderer, now capable of supporting volumetrics, advanced shading and other smart tech coming to V-Ray Next. Current tests have V-Ray GPU running 80 percent faster on the NVIDIAs TITAN V, a remarkable gain from previous benchmarks on the TITAN Xp, and up to 10-15x faster than an Intel Core i7-7700K, with the same high level of accuracy across interactive and production renders.

V-Ray GPU might be the biggest speed leap weve ever made, said Blagovest Taskov, V-Ray GPU lead developer at Chaos Group. Redesigning V-Ray GPU to be modular makes it much easier for us to exploit the latest GPU architectures and to add functionality without impacting performance. With our greatly expanded feature set, V-Ray GPU can be used in many more production scenarios, from big-budget films to data-heavy architecture projects, while providing more speed than ever before.

Representing over two years of dedicated R&D, V-Ray GPU builds on nine years of GPU-driven development in V-Ray. New gains for production artists include:

Volume Rendering  Fog, smoke and fire can be rendered with the speed of V-Ray GPU. Compatible with V-Ray Volume Grid which supports OpenVDB, Field3D and Phoenix FD volume caches.

 Fog, smoke and fire can be rendered with the speed of V-Ray GPU. Compatible with V-Ray Volume Grid which supports OpenVDB, Field3D and Phoenix FD volume caches. Adaptive Dome Light  Cleaner image-based lighting is now faster and even more accurate.

 Cleaner image-based lighting is now faster and even more accurate. V-Ray Denoising  GPU-accelerated denoising across render elements and animations.

 GPU-accelerated denoising across render elements and animations. NVIDIA AI Denoiser  Fast, real-time denoising based on NVIDIA OptiX AI-accelerated denoising technology.

 Fast, real-time denoising based on NVIDIA OptiX AI-accelerated denoising technology. Interface Support  Instant filtering of GPU-supported features always lets artists know whats available in V-Ray GPU (starting within 3ds Max).

As part of the GTC announcement, Chaos Group developers will be participating in a series of talks to discuss the future of GPU rendering and interactive and production rendering with V-Ray GPU. Both talks will be held on March 28, in room 230B, with the former beginning at 9:00 a.m. and the latter starting at 11:00 a.m.

V-Ray GPU will be made available as part of the next update of V-Ray Next for 3ds Max beta  coming soon.

About Chaos Group

Chaos Group is a worldwide leader in computer graphics technology, helping artists and designers create photorealistic imagery and animation for architecture, design, and visual effects. Chaos Groups award-winning physically-based rendering and simulation software is used daily by top design studios, architectural firms, advertising agencies, and visual effects companies around the globe. Today, the company's research and development in cloud rendering, material scanning, and virtual reality is shaping the future of creative storytelling and digital design. Founded in 1997, Chaos Group is privately owned with offices in Sofia, Los Angeles, Seoul, and Tokyo. For more information, visit: chaosgroup.com.

Attachment:

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/bde3da6a-8f2f-4dd3-ba73-5fd8d504b9f7thai airways

Thai Airways International announced a 56-inch waistline limit for passengers sitting in business class on its Boeing 787-9 aircraft, according to the Bangkok Post.

The airline said it introduced the limit due to seatbelt airbags it installed that prevent the seat belts from extending.

The seatbelt airbags will also prevent parents from flying with children on their laps.



Airlines have no shortage of ways to divide and categorize passengers, but most of those ways involve how much money a customer spends with them.

Now, Thai Airways International is evaluating passengers based on their waist size. Prathana Pattanasiri, vice president of the airline's aviation safety, security, and standards department, announced a 56-inch waistline limit for passengers sitting in business class on its Boeing 787-9 aircraft, according to the Bangkok Post.

The airline said it introduced the limit due to seatbelt airbags it installed that prevent the seat belts from extending. The seatbelt airbags will also prevent parents from flying with children on their laps.

Thai Airways is not the first airline to classify passengers according to size or weight. In November, European airline Finnair started a program where it encouraged passengers to weigh themselves and their luggage before boarding. The voluntary program was designed to give the airline a better sense of the amount of weight its flights would carry.

In 2016, Hawaiian Airlines announced a policy that would prevent passengers flying from American Samoa to Honolulu, Hawaii, from pre-selecting seats before flights, in an effort to optimize weight distribution. The policy was controversial because weight is a sensitive issue, and American Samoa has a high obesity rate.

The now-defunct Samoa Air took things a step further in 2013 by setting ticket prices for passengers based on their weight and the weight of their carry-on bags. The airline claimed it was the "fairest way" to assign ticket prices.

Story continues

NOW WATCH: Trade war fears are escalating  here's who has the most to lose

See Also:

SEE ALSO: Airplane passengers have an 80% chance of getting sick on a flight if they sit in the wrong spot, scientists have foundJoe Biden could be a "pretty serious" candidate to challenge Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential elections, former White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus said on Wednesday.

But the Democrats won't go there, he said, adding that the party seems to currently prefer more left-leaning candidates such as Bernie Sanders.

Former Vice President Joe Biden could be a "pretty serious" candidate to challenge Reince Priebus in the 2020 presidential race  but the Democrats won't go that direction, Reince Priebus said Wednesday.

"The problem they have is they're moving to the left, they're not staying in the center," the former White House chief of staff said in a speech at the Credit Suisse Asian Investment Conference in Hong Kong .

"So, if they have a candidate like say, Joe Biden  well, he could be a pretty serious candidate, but the Democrats are not embracing the Joe Bidens of the world," Priebus said.

Instead, the Democrats like more left-leaning candidates such as Bernie Sanders , which may make it hard for certain segments of the American population to support the party, he added.

Without any clear favorite so far, the Democrats could find themselves in a similar situation to what the Republican Party experienced in 2016, when the GOP had 17 candidates vying for nomination, he said.

Trump, meanwhile, would likely not face any "significant challenge" in winning his second nomination to run in the 2020 election, Priebus predicted.





More From CNBC

For the first time in history, the Chinese government and its central bank, the Peoples Bank of China (PBoC), has opened its $27 trillion payment market to the world. Foreign firms are now allowed to apply for licenses to operate within China, competing against local service providers.

Freedom For Foreign Firms

In China, homegrown companies have complete dominance over the internet and finance industries. Alibabas AliPay is said to have nearly 70 percent of the payment market share, while Tencents Tencent Pay is responsible for the remaining 30 percent. Ever since the launch of AliPay and the emergence of Tencent Pay, the two conglomerates have retained control over the local payment market.

However, overseas firms will soon be able to operate within China, serving users that are already accustomed to local payment applications. Hypothetically, US-based Square, a payment app developed by a team led by Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, and KakaoPay, a South Korean payment app developed by KakaoTalk developers Kakao, could operate in China if they register with the PBoC and obtain licenses.

The domestic market is quite saturated with very strong domestic players, and it is relatively hard for foreign companies to get a piece of the pie. But there is a chance for them to compete in the cross-border payment market, Iris Pang, a Hong Kong-based economist at ING Groep NV told Bloomberg.

The decision of the PBoC and the Chinese government to enable foreign firms to operate in its payment market came after the appointment of the new PBoC head Yi Gang, an American-educated economist well known for his pro-market philosophy.

Earlier this month, WSJ reported that senior officials in the Chinese government stated that the PBoC intends to provide foreign firms with an opportunity to target the local financial sector. The WSJ report noted that the Chinese government has been planning to bring in foreign companies to its insurance and payment market, to free up the two industries.

Story continues

Liu and Yi have a shared understanding of the need for financial market reforms and liberalization, coupled with more effective regulation, Eswar Prasad, a Cornell University professor and former China head for the International Monetary Fund, told the WSJ at the time.

What This Means For Crypto

On March 19, according to a South Korean media outlet TokenPost, new Chinese central bank head Yi Gang stated that bitcoin is a currency that provides freedom to anyone that uses it, and emphasized that the cryptocurrency is transparent.

The optimistic viewpoint towards bitcoin from Yi was somewhat expected by analysts, given his pro-market philosophy and his plans to liberalize the Chinese financial industry. Potentially, the appointment of Yi and the re-election of President Xi Jinping could lead to the regulation of cryptocurrencies and legalization of trading.

Wei Chun, a local analyst, stated:

In summary, the Chinese government have shown a positive attitude towards blockchain technology despite its enforcement on cryptocurrency and mining operations. China wants to control cryptocurrency, and China will get control. The repeated enforcements by the regulators were meant to protect its citizens from the financial risk of cryptocurrencies and limit capital outflow.

Featured image from Wikimedia.



The post Bitcoin Provides Freedom, Says New PBoC Chief as China Opens Doors to $27 Trillion Payments Market appeared first on CCN.

* Russia explains spy case stance to foreign diplomats

* Accuses Britain of culpability or incompetence

* British diplomat accuses Moscow of "barrage of distortion"

* Diplomats from U.S., France, Germany speak up for UK (Adds U.S. State Department, Trump-Macron, paragraphs 11-12)

By Andrew Osborn and Maria Tsvetkova

MOSCOW, March 21 (Reuters) - Britain accused Moscow on Wednesday of running an assassination programme to eliminate its enemies, while Russia said Britain may itself have orchestrated the poisoning of former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in England.

In remarkable scenes at a Russian Foreign Ministry event in Moscow attended by dozens of foreign diplomats and broadcast on state TV, the two sides launched sharp allegations against each other over the nerve agent attack.

The attack in Salisbury, England, has plunged ties between London and Moscow into their worst crisis since the Cold War. Britain has blamed Russia for the attack - something Moscow denies - and both have expelled diplomats in the standoff.

Russia had organised Wednesday's event to explain its stance and lost little time in alleging that Britain itself had either directly or indirectly orchestrated the attack or had allowed "a terrorist attack" to take place on British soil.

"Nobody understands what happened in Salisbury," Vladimir Yermakov, a diplomat who chaired the event, told foreign diplomats. "Let's investigate what really happened."

His own view, he said, was that the poisoning had been a pre-planned action designed to harm Russia.

Emma Nottingham, a British diplomat, countered that London had concluded it was "highly likely" that Moscow stood behind the attempted assassination of the Skripals for four reasons:

"The identification of the chemical agent by our world leading scientists, our knowledge that Russia has previously produced this agent ... Russia's record in conducting state-sponsored assassinations ... and our assessment that Russia views defectors as legitimate targets."

Story continues

Many ambassadors including those of Britain, France, Germany and the United States, stayed away from the Moscow event, sending more junior officials instead.

Key Western countries criticised Russia and offered Britain their support.

"US & UK were right not to send our Ambassadors to @mfa_russia briefing to hear wild accusations and implausible denials. #Russia was responsible for the nerve agent attack," U.S. State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert said on Twitter.

U.S. President Donald Trump and French President Emmanuel Macron reiterated solidarity with Britain in a telephone call on Wednesday and "agreed on the need to take action to hold Russia accountable", the White House said.

Some others, including Sweden and the Czech Republic, publicly complained about Russian accusations that their countries might have been the origin of the nerve agent used in the Salisbury attack.

Skripal, a former colonel in Russian GRU military intelligence who betrayed dozens of Russian agents to British intelligence, and his daughter Yulia have been critically ill since March 4, when they were found unconscious on a public bench in the English cathedral city.

Skripal took refuge in England after being released by Moscow in a spy swap deal involving the exchange of some Russian spies held in the West.

'ISLAND MENTALITY'

Britain says a military-grade nerve agent called Novichok, first developed by the Soviet Union, had been used in the attack.

But Nottingham said Russia had failed to explain how the nerve agent used in the attack had got from Russia to England and why it was running an illegal chemical weapons programme.

"Instead, what we've seen is a barrage of distortion and disinformation ... and attempts to confuse the facts."

Yermakov said Russia did not understand what was going in British officials' heads. Talk of the Novichok nerve agent was like something out of a British TV series, he said.

"Aren't you ashamed of yourself ?," Yermakov asked Nottingham. "Pull yourselves away a little bit from your Russophobia and your island mentality."

He said Moscow had nothing to do with the tragedy and wanted a wider investigation which, he said, meant London should share information and cooperate with Moscow.

Speaking on a visit to Japan, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said Russia wanted Britain to tell it where the Skripals were currently located.

Lavrov said Moscow also wanted to know why the British government had accused Russia of responsibility when the police investigation into the Salisbury incident was incomplete.

"Overall there is no doubt that the current British leadership has consciously taken a course to undermine Russian-British relations," Lavrov said at a news conference with his Japanese counterpart Taro Kono in Tokyo, according to a transcript on the Russian foreign ministry website.

"If this will continue in the form of any tangible new anti-Russian actions then of course nobody has cancelled the principle of reciprocity. It would be good for everyone and for (the British government) if they stopped getting agitated and calmed down." (Additional reporting by Denis Pinchuk in Moscow and Doina Chiacu in Washington editing by Richard Balmforth)Scientists have finally determined when China's oldest space station will crash back to our planet.

In 2016, the Chinese announced they had lost control of Tiangong-1, which was first launched in 2011, and that it would come falling to Earth sometime in the latter half" of last year. That seems like a pretty large window, but at the time scientists noted that it could fall anywhere at anytime.

The space lab, named heavenly palace, is still in orbit. Earlier in March, experts put the re-entry period between March 24 and April 19, but couldnt give a more precise estimate.

Now the best prediction is that the space station will de-orbit and crash back to Earth between March 30 and April 6, according to the European Space Agency (ESA). Marco Langbroek, an archaeologist who also tracks satellites, put the window for the eight-ton space station to fall from orbit within three days of March 31.

My latest #reentry estimate for #Tiangong1:

31 March +- 3 days

The geomagnetic storm of yesterday does seem to have given it a bump.@SSC_NL pic.twitter.com/MdZgP1rX1R  Dr Marco Langbroek (@Marco_Langbroek) March 20, 2018

The lack of accuracy was understandable: At low orbit, below about 2,000 km above the planets surface, objects will eventually lose speed and fall back to Earth if they don't continue to exert a force to propel themselves.

However, the drag from Earths atmosphere that acts on objects at this height is not consistent, so pinpointing exactly when the space station, which is currently orbiting at about 250 km above the planet, will begin its descent is very difficult.

Story continues

#Tiangong1 perigee is currently down to 215 km. It is currently losing 2-3 km/day in altitude, and that value will rapidly increase the coming two weeks: pic.twitter.com/O2gQySMEO9  Dr Marco Langbroek (@Marco_Langbroek) March 20, 2018

Dont worry about checking the sky during the days the space station is likely to make its re-entry, though.

The personal probability of being hit by a piece of debris from the Tiangong-1 is actually 10 million times smaller than the yearly chance of being hit by lightning, the ESA said.

While there is little risk that the debris from the space station will endanger humans, the ESA is still trying to determine a ballpark idea of where on Earth the space station will make landfall.

At no time will a precise time/location prediction from ESA be possible, the ESA said.

Its most likely to crash into the ocean somewhere between latitudes 43? north and 43? south, but thats about as much as people will know before Tiangong-1 falls from orbit.

"We need to get used to the idea of things raining down on us from space," University of Texas researcher Leon Vanstone wrote in a commentary piece for Fortune, noting that falling satellites are only going to become more common as the number of launches continues to increase.

Scientists are still searching for solutions to the problem of dealing with free-falling satellites and other space debris. Options so far include shooting them down with lasers, as China proposed earlier this year.

See original article on Fortune.com

More from Fortune.comCramer: Facebook needs an 'internal special prosecutor' to get to the bottom of the data-mining scandal

"It's time for a so-called internal special prosecutor," CNBC's Jim Cramer says.

Cramer calls out Facebook's top executives, including Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, for being notably silent.

It may be time for Facebook FB to hire an "internal special prosecutor" to get to the bottom of its data-mining scandal, CNBC's Jim Cramer said Wednesday.

Cramer noted that Facebook's top executives, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg , have been notably silent for days after weekend revelations that Cambridge Analytica, which worked on Facebook ads for President Donald Trump , harvested the data from more than 50 million users of the social network without their permission.

"It's time for a so-called internal special prosecutor," said Cramer, whose charitable trust owns shares of Facebook. "This is what happens when you're this late. You've got to bring in much bigger guns."

Facebook's stock fell for the third straight day Wednesday as the fallout from the data breach scandal continues.

On Tuesday, a report said the Federal Trade Commission is investigating whether the use of personal data from Facebook users by Cambridge Analytica violated a consent decree the tech company signed with the agency. Additionally, Zuckerberg was summoned by British lawmakers to give evidence related to the company's links to Cambridge Analytica.

"Zuck is no longer enough," Cramer said on "Squawk on the Street." The longer Facebook waits, it could end up being like Wells Fargo's scandal or Equifax, he argued.

Zuckerberg plans to make a statement on the data fiasco in the next 24 hours. Axios, which first reported the news, said Zuckerberg wanted to say something meaningful rather than pushing out a comment quickly.

Facebook did not immediately respond to CNBC's request for comment.





More From CNBC

May West Texas Intermediate crude oil futures soared on Wednesday to a six-week high on a surprise decline in U.S. crude inventories and as concern persisted over possible disruption to Middle East supply.

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), crude inventories showed a 2.6 million barrel draw. Analysts had expected a 2.5 million barrel build.

Daily May WTI Crude Oil

Daily Swing Chart Technical Analysis

The main trend is up according to the daily swing chart. The current upside momentum suggests we could see a near-term test of the February 2 top at $65.63 and the January 25 top at $66.02.

The uptrend is safe at this time unless we close lower for the session.

The main range is $66.02 to $57.60. Its retracement zone at $62.80 to $61.81 is new support. Trading above this is zone is contributing to todays upside bias.

Daily Swing Chart Technical Forecast

We could see some profit-taking as crude oil approaches the pair of tops at $65.63 and $66.02. However, this is normal and shouldnt be a major concern unless it turns the market lower for the session.

A closing price reversal top wont mean the trend is changing, but it could indicate the selling is greater than the buying at current price levels.

This article was originally posted on FX Empire

More From FXEMPIRE:BISMARCK, N.D., March 22, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- As part of a contract extension with the North Dakota Information Technology Department, DCN (Dakota Carrier Network) and its 15 owner companies will upgrade the internet service of all North Dakota K-12 schools, higher education institutions and government to one gigabit by August 2019. The upgraded connection will allow internet traffic over STAGEnet, the states network, to travel faster, ensuring a higher quality experience for students, teachers, state employees and the public.



Multimedia elements accompanying this announcement are available at

http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/67b58af6-a31a-4377-ba17-f0a8dae4f024

http://resource.globenewswire.com/Resource/Download/d825ec3b-2288-49a7-bbed-1b4cca4ad08c

Its an honor for DCN and our 15 owner companies to provide gigabit internet service to every K-12 school in our state, said Seth Arndorfer, DCN CEO. DCN has been keeping North Dakotas public schools connected since 2000 and we know that reliable, fast broadband connectivity is key to keeping our children competitive in our increasingly digital world. We continuously invest in our fiber network and broadband services to ensure that schools, hospitals, homes and businesses across the state have access to the best internet service possible, whether they are in a metro area or one of our many rural communities. Were proud to take this next step in increasing the speed of connectivity for students across the state, as well as in our local and state government offices.

One-gigabit internet access at every school in a state is unprecedented, making North Dakota the first in the nation to achieve this milestone.

The upgrade agreement was unveiled by Gov. Doug Burgum during a press conference today at the North Dakota State Capitol. North Dakota already ranks high nationally in terms of network connectivity for the K-12 community, and these significant yet cost-neutral upgrades will ensure our schools have the bandwidth and speed they need to prepare students for a 21st century economy impacted by rapid technological change, Burgum said. State and local taxpayers will benefit through a network that makes their governments more efficient and responsive to the communities and citizens they serve.

As upgrades are made, websites and applications of North Dakota K-12 schools, higher education institutions and governments will run faster, a result of the increased bandwidth, or capacity, provided through one gigabit internet service. This means a better experience for parents accessing PowerSchool, an online portal to view their childs classroom performance, faster load times of government websites and increased document download speed.

About DCN

Dakota Carrier Network , created in 1996, is owned by 15 North Dakota-based independent telecommunications companies representing 85 percent of all telephone exchanges in North Dakota and more than 90 percent of the states total surface area. They serve more than 164,000 customers in approximately 250 communities. The DCN companies currently have more than 40,000 miles of fiber optic cable in service. DCNs corporate headquarters is located in Fargo, N.D., and its Network Operations Center (NOC) is located in Bismarck, N.D.

DCN owner companies include: BEK Communications, Consolidated Telcom, Dakota Central Telecom, Dickey Rural Communications, Intercommunity Telephone, Midstate Communications, MLGC, North Dakota Telephone, Northwest Communications, Polar Communications, Red River Technologies, Reservation Telephone, SRT Communications, United Communications, and West River Telephone.The United States had trade deficits with 102 countries in 2017, but none of those countries have drawn more attention from President Donald Trump than China, which accounts for more than half of the $566 billion deficit.

After repeatedly accusing China of foul play, Trump is expected to announce plans to levy $50 billion of additional tariffs on the worlds second largest economy on Thursday. The market is wary of a looming trade war, but taking aim at China is more than just an economic play for Trump, according to Edward Cox, the chairman of the New York Republican State Committee, who happens to be former President Richard Nixons son-in-law.

Most of the countries we have large trade deficits with are allies of the U.S. Thats part of the DNA of our trade representatives, to help those countries lift themselves up after World War II in order to show what the U.S. offered, which was capitalism, free market and democracy, was preferable to communism around the world, said Cox, during an event hosted by the China General Chamber of Commerce in New York City on Wednesday, noting that Germany and Japan are among the top U.S. trading partners. Thats why were willing to run those trade deficits to help those countries to lift themselves up. But China is not that kind of ally. So, the trade deficits with China are more contentious. They dont have the same basis underneath them.

Trump doesnt separate trade from diplomacy

President Trumps planned additional tariff targets at China, provoking fears of a possible trade war. (Bloomberg)

As China has experienced an economic boom and become more proactive in international affairs, Washington has been wary of the rising superpower, though China has repeatedly denied its intention to replace the U.S. as a global power.

The talk on trade has been complicated by geopolitical issues. Trump has constantly connected tariffs in Mexico and Canada with NAFTA negotiations, and talked about Chinas trade policy together with issues in North Korea. This has minimized Congress effort. In 1962, the Office of the United States Trade Representative was created outside of the the State Department. The office of trade has been in favor of separating the commercial interests of trade from U.S. foreign policy goals.

Story continues

And America isnt always soft on trade issues with its allies, either. Trump loved comparing himself with former President Ronald Reagan when it comes to trade policy during the presidential campaign. Back in the 1980s, Japan, one of Americas closest allies, was targeted by the U.S. Reagan imposed a quota on the number of Japanese cars that could come into the U.S. every year, slapped a 45% tariff on Japanese motorcycles and a 100% tariff on Japanese computers, televisions and power tool, which had mixed impact on the U.S. economy.

Trumps view on trade differs from former presidents in one major way, according to Cox. Nixon taught me that free trade is good policy and bad politics, but Trump sees it both as bad politics but also in many cases bad policy, said Cox, who endorsed Trump for president in April 2016. Cox had even reportedly introduced an adviser with Russian ties to Trumps campaign.

President Trump believes in free trade generally, but he does want to make sure its fair, Cox said. Hes gonna be very tough with retrospect to that.

Krystal Hu is a reporter for Yahoo Finance. Follow her on Twitter.

Read more:

How Trump is making your beer more expensive

How Trump is helping to widen the trade deficit he hates

What Elon Musk missed in his China tariff tweetsThe House just passed a $1.3 trillion spending bill that protects employee tips.

The U.S. House of Representatives and Senate passed a $1.3 trillion spending bill on Thursday, which includes a provision that prevents employers from taking any of their workers tips.

This controversial rule actually garnered bipartisan disagreement. It all began in December, when the U.S. Department of Labor submitted a rule that would rescind a regulation enacted during the Obama administration that required employers to distribute tips to their tipped employees. Under the new rule, restaurants and other employers would be able to pool tips from servers and share them with untipped employees like dishwashers  and potentially pocket some of the wages.

In response to the proposed rule, 350,000 individuals submitted public comments. Individuals participated in rallies and protests at Labor Department buildings across 20 cities, according to Restaurant Opportunities Centers, a nonprofit that represents 25,000 workers.

In Title XII on page 2025 of the spending bill, the language directly addresses this concern of legal wage theft. It states: An employer may not keep tips received by its employees for any purposes, including allowing managers or supervisors to keep any portion of employees tips, regardless of whether or not the employer takes a tip credit.

The bill also stipulates that any employers who violate this rule will be liable to the employees in the amount of the tips that were taken, and shall be subject to a civil penalty not to exceed $1,100 for each such violation and an additional equal amount as liquidated damages.

Tips belong to workers and no one else

Christine Owens, executive director of the National Employment Law Project, said, The law cannot be more clear. Tips belong to workers and no one else. This landmark victory belongs to all the restaurant servers, bartenders, car wash workers, valets, attendants, and all the other tipped workers in America who fought back when the Trump administration proposed its misguided tip-stealing rule. They wrote in, held protests, signed petitions, and spoke out. Thats what brought Labor Department officials and lawmakers to the table to hash out this historic agreement.

Story continues

Research shows that illegal wage theft exceeds $15 billion every year. It seems obvious that when employers can legally pocket the tips earned by their employees, many will do so, said Heidi Shierholz, senior economist and director of policy at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI).

If tipping wages were legal, the number of stolen tips would increase exponentially, she argued. The Labor Department itself found that the tip-pooling rule could allow employers to keep $640 million in tips every year. This figure pales in comparison to EPI estimates of $5.8 billion.

Melody Hahm is a senior writer at Yahoo Finance, covering entrepreneurship, technology and real estate. Follow her on Twitter @melodyhahm.

Read more:Mohammed bin Salmanthe Saudi Crown Prince known globally as MBSis on a marketing mission to the U.S. Job One for the prince will be selling President Donald Trump on his campaign to transform a formerly closed, hyper-conservative Petro-state into an open economy hungry for U.S. investments in industries as diverse as nuclear energy, farming and tourism.

MBS met with Trump at the White House on Tuesday, and while much of the conversation was behind closed doors, its likely that they discussed their shared support for spiking the Iran nuclear deal, and strategies for resolving Saudi Arabias feud with U.S. strategic ally Qatar. But the Crown Prince will spend the next two weeks courting business leaders in New York, Houston, and Silicon Valley. And MBS wants to return to Riyadh on a jet plane laden with new orders.

A Middle East expert whos carefully followed the MBSs rise to power, and has spoken extensively the black-bearded, 32-year old Crown Prince, is Bernard Haykel, professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. Maykel last met with MBS on Christmas Day, 2017, at the palace occupied by his father, King Salman. To Haykel, MBS comes off as a unusual combination of super-smooth operator and fierce revolutionary. Hes a politicians politician, in a class with Bill Clinton. He charms you with jokes, says Haykel. He adds that MBS flatters guests by giving them his full attention; he complimented Haykel on the views his visitor expressed in specific articles and TV appearances.

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia (left) reviews a chart of military spending with President Trump at the White House on Tuesday, March 20, 2018.

Haykel notes that MBSs background is unusual for a leader pressing for a far freer, cosmopolitan society. The Crown Prince lacks the Western education and language skills shared by many of the Saudi elite. He wasnt educated in the U.S. like many top Saudi officials, says Haykel. He studied law at home, at King Saud University. Nor does MBS speak great English, though Haykel says his comprehension is excellent. (In their meetings, Haykel, an American, spoke with the Crown Prince in Arabic.) His great passion is mastering the intricacies of economic reform, and he presents himself as a masterful numbers man. He inundates you with facts and figures and analysis, rattling off incredible amounts of information in the form of numbers, recalls Haykel.

Story continues

MBS is leading a three-pronged campaign to transform the Saudi economy. Heres how the prince is likely to describe those prongs to Trump and U.S. business leaders, according to Haykel:

Diversifying a kingdoms economy

First, hes striving to lessen the kingdoms heavy reliance on oil and petrochemicals by diversifying into such areas as religious tourism, financial services, and military equipment. Saudi Arabia imports almost all of its defense equipment, says Haykel. MBS has a goal of manufacturing half of the armaments in Saudi Arabia. Hence his plans to tour Americas biggest defense contractors on his current visit.

The diversification push is the rationale for the planned sale of shares in the state-owned energy colossus, Saudi Aramco. In their meetings, says Haykel, MBS explained that his goal is to monetize a large portion of the kingdoms vast oil holdings upfront through an Aramco IPO, and invest the cash to develop new industries. Part of the proceeds, MBS explained, would go to building a sovereign wealth fund that would make investments abroad, bringing the kingdom sorely needed income.

Stepping up as the new sheriff

Second, the Crown Prince is battling to smash Saudi Arabias corrupt business culture, famously declaring that theres a new sheriff in town. The Saudi business elite would bill the government exorbitant amounts for all kinds of infrastructure and industrial projects, use part of the money to bribe ministers and members of the royal family, then subcontract out the work at half of what they were paid, says Haykel. MBS has stated that the over-billing, bribes and kickbacks inflated the annual budget, totaling around $260 billion in 2017, by 10% to 20% a year, a painful number given that the kingdom is running big deficits.

MBS launched a crackdown by detaining several hundred of Saudi Arabias most renowned business leaders, and holding the elites at the Ritz-Carlton Riyadh hotel. The Crown Prince demanded that the detainees surrender stock, cash and real estate to compensate the Kingdoms treasury for billions gained through kickbacks, bribes and excessive billing. The Saudi government announced in late January that it had obtained a gargantuan $107 billion by the time it released the prisoners (it later revised the sum upward to around $120 billion). But MBS was heavily criticized for allegedly subjecting the detainees to physical and mental abuse. One general who served MBSs arch rivals, the children and descendants of MBSs uncle, the late King Abdullah, died under mysterious circumstances while a prisoner.

Haykel defends MBSs onslaught, and believes that the reports of abuse are highly exaggerated. It was misinformation, Haykel says. Many of these people were never asked difficult questions in their lives. It was the first time they were confronted. They didnt have their finger nails pulled out, they werent tortured. Haykel notes that the campaign resembled a military operation. But the detainees were treated with courtesy, he says. They had access to doctors, and a tailor even showed up and measured them for robes.

In Haykels view, the strategy for recouping allegedly stolen loot proved highly effective. They were shown the files detailing the evidence the government had amassed against them, he says. Then they were given a choice: Settle with the government, give back the money you took, or if you dont, have the charges exposed in open court. The elites were so afraid of having their practices publicly exposed, says Haykel, that most chose to settle rather than go to trial.

Reshaping a culture

Third, MBS is crusading to erase the tradition of entitlement that pervades the Saudi kingdoms government offices and state-owned enterprise. Haykel points out that a cadre of the best and brightest hold top jobs in the energy and medical sectors, but that its a thin elite. Seventy percent of the population works for the public sector, he says, and a lot of public sector employees do no real work. They show up at the office and work a couple of hours a day.

The Crown Prince is visiting the U.S. to attract the investment that could galvanize a rich but underachieving workforce for whom a well-paying job has long been a birthright. Haykel plans to meet with MBS during the visit. When you meet him, its obvious that though hes charming, he has a backbone of steel. Hes made plenty of enemies, adds Haykel, but for the right reasons. You cant change the culture, he says, without shocking the system.By Julia Love

MEXICO CITY, March 22 (Reuters) - Mexico's landmark wholesale national mobile network launched this week, but without a single major wireless carrier on board, renewing debate about how best to boost competition in the telecom sector dominated by billionaire Carlos Slim.

On Wednesday, President Enrique Pena Nieto and other officials gathered for the official launch of the so-called Red Compartida (shared network) - a wholesale-only project written into the nation's 2013-14 telecoms reform.

The government says the network will cut the costs of developing infrastructure for carriers, particularly in rural areas with poor coverage, and make it easier for new players to enter the market.

"It's a model in which everyone wins," Pena Nieto said.

But Mexico's three major carriers have not signed on yet, raising questions about its ability to raise investment.

Operated by newly-created Altan Redes, the network currently reaches 32 percent of the Mexican population with 4g, and aims to cover over 92 percent eventually.

Industry insiders thought Telefonica, which has long struggled to gain traction in Mexico, could benefit from the network. But the carrier has not reached an agreement to use it, according to a source with knowledge of the matter.

AT&T, which spent billions to enter Mexico after the reform, suggested it may sign on in the future.

"If the Red Compartida has coverage in an area where we don't, we would certainly consider using it," a spokeswoman for AT&T said in a statement.

Slim's America Movil, which has Mexico's biggest network by far, has no plans to use it, Chief Executive Daniel Hajj says.

"I don't think they are going to give me something that I don't have," Hajj told an earnings call last month.

Officials at Altan, which counts a fund managed by Morgan Stanley infrastructure and the China-Mexico fund created by the two countries in 2014, as its largest shareholders, gave no details on the network's clients.

Story continues

America Movil has about two-thirds of mobile phone subscriptions in Mexico.

In light of this, Mexico had to try "something unorthodox" like the Red Compartida to spur competition, said Roger Entner, a telecom analyst in Massachusetts.

But the network will initially create business for America Movil, and carriers have little incentive to use it in areas where they already have coverage, said Scott Wallsten, president of the Technology Policy Institute, a U.S.-based think-tank.

The network has a roaming agreement with America Movil and will use some of the company's towers, Altan said.

Wallsten and other critics of the network argue Mexico would have been better served by auctioning the spectrum it uses.

Altan must make a profit to keep investing in its network, said Jorge Negrete, CEO of think-tank Mediatelecom.

That could be tough without major players on board, though the network could attract more mobile virtual network operators, whose presence has been limited in Mexico.

Though the network aims to reach rural areas, experts say the initial launch is skewed toward big cities, with coverage in Mexico City, Guadalajara and Monterrey.

Altan said the network will initially cover 5.6 million residents in under-served populations, surpassing its obligation of 4.7 million residents in places with fewer than 10,000 inhabitants. (Editing by Dave Graham and Frances Kerry)English French

CHALK RIVER, Ontario, March 22, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Canadian Nuclear Laboratories (CNL), Canadas premier nuclear science and technology organization, announced today that it will be leading two discussions on small modular reactor (SMR) technology as part of the 2018 International SMR and Advanced Reactor Summit in Atlanta, Georgia on March 27-28, 2018. Organized by Nuclear Energy Insider (NEI), the annual summit will bring together the worlds leading technology developers, vendors, research organizations and supply chain members to move these promising technologies closer towards deployment.



CNL will host NEIs first ever Canada Track with SMR vendors, utilities and government officials in parallel with a U.S. Track. CNL will also host an invitation-only roundtable with 16 vendors of SMR technology from five countries with Canadian utility and remote community customers as well as government representatives. The roundtable discussion will focus on the pending announcement of CNLs SMR siting application process and market opportunities for SMRs in Canada. CNLs Vendor Roundtable is a continuation of a series of meetings with respondents to CNLs recent Request for Expressions of Interest.

Interest in SMR technology continues to grow worldwide, with Canada gaining international attention for its pursuit of this clean, safe technology. As one of seven strategic initiatives identified by CNL in the organizations Long Term Plan, SMRs hold great promise in solving many major environmental and energy challenges.

Our vision is twofold. First, we intend to be a world-leader in SMR research and technology; and second, we plan to have at least one demonstration unit built on a CNL site by 2026, commented Dr. Corey McDaniel, Vice-President of Business Development at CNL.

Dr. Kathryn McCarthy, Vice-President of Research and Development added that with a domestic need for this technology, mature and robust regulatory programs, and fully-equipped laboratories to support such a project, CNL is uniquely positioned to support an SMR industry, from concept to deployment.

As a low-carbon source of energy, small modular reactors are well-aligned with global desire to reduce our carbon footprint; both smaller in size and in energy output. SMRs are considered ideal for deployment both on-grid and off-grid in remote locations such as mine sites or the oil sands, as well as willing communities in northern Canada reliant on diesel-fueled generators for electricity. In addition, these technologies can also be utilized in other industrial applications such as production of hydrogen, local area heating, or process heating systems.

Increasingly over the past decade, SMRs have also been recognized as a potential alternative to large-scale nuclear reactors. They offer several advantages over traditional technologies, including a reduced size and power output better suited for some applications; the ability to purchase and construct in a modular way, which decreases up-front capital costs; simpler, less complex plants; and a reduced staff complement. SMRs retain the positive attributes of traditional nuclear reactors, including the safe and reliable production of energy with limited emission of greenhouse gasses. There are many different SMR concepts, ranging from technologically mature advancements of todays water-cooled reactors, to more advanced reactors based on Generation IV nuclear technologies.

CNLs Request for Expressions of Interest (RFEOI), which launched last year, generated over 80 responses from across the globe, with 19 expressions of interest for a demonstration SMR to be located at CNL-managed site. The document also demonstrated clear interest from the global SMR community in growing the technology here in Canada. Participants cited several factors including CNLs licensed sites and its capabilities, but also the mature nuclear supply chain and the associated science and technology capabilities of Canadas universities and research organizations. The strength and integrity of Canadas regulator and attendant regulatory regime was another reoccurring theme in the RFEOI responses.

In the coming weeks, CNL will open an application process for those SMR technology developers interested in siting a demonstration unit at a CNL-managed site. More information on CNLs SMR program will be discussed at the summit.

Interest in our capabilities continues to grow, and with the upcoming announcement of CNLs SMR siting application process we are making preparations for what promises to be an exciting 2018, commented Mark Lesinski, President & CEO, and scheduled plenary speaker at the coming summit. Our capabilities are evolving to meet the needs of our customers, and we are undertaking cutting-edge research into a wide range of SMR-related fields. Ultimately, we intend to be a recognized global hub for SMRs, where multiple technologies are built and tested, drawing support from a strong team of experienced world-class professionals.

About CNL

Canadian Nuclear Laboratories is a world leader in nuclear science and technology offering unique capabilities and solutions across a wide range of industries. Actively involved with industry-driven research and development in nuclear, transportation, clean technology, energy, defence, security and life sciences, we provide solutions to keep these sectors competitive internationally.

With ongoing investments in new facilities and a focused mandate, Canadian Nuclear Laboratories is well positioned for the future. A new performance standard reinforced with a strong safety culture underscores every activity.

For more information on the complete range of Canadian Nuclear Laboratories services, please visit www.cnl.ca or contact communications@cnl.ca.

Contact:

Philip Kompass

Section Head, Corporate Communications, CNL

1-866-886-2325

communications@cnl.caU.S. West Texas Intermediate and international-benchmark Brent crude oil closed at their highest levels since February 1 on Wednesday after the government reported a surprise decline in U.S. inventories. Other catalysts behind the rally were Middle East tensions and worries about Venezuelas production slide.

May WTI Crude Oil futures settled at $65.17, up $1.63 or +2.57% and June Brent Crude Oil closed at $69.07, up $1.94 or +2.89%.

Daily May WTI Crude Oil

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), crude oil inventories declined 2.6 million barrels the week-ending March 16. Analysts were looking for a 2.5 million barrel build.

The EIA also reported a 1.7-million-barrel drop in gasoline inventories. Gasoline production averaged 9.9 million barrels in the week to March 16, with refineries operating at 91.7 percent of capacity and processing 16.8 million barrels of crude daily.

Additionally, crude imports dropped by half a million barrels per day, that contributed to the draw. Exports were up slightly.

Speculation that the United States may reimpose sanctions on Iran also helped boost prices because this would lead to a disruption of supply.

Daily June Brent Crude

Forecast

Crude oil prices are still being supported early Thursday by yesterdays reported surprise decline in U.S. inventories, although a relentless rise in U.S. oil output continues to threaten the OPEC-led plan to tighten the market and stabilize prices.

At 0630 GMT, May WTI Crude Oil is trading $65.20, up $0.03 or +0.05% and June Brent Crude Oil is at $69.05, down $0.02 or -0.03%.

Only a week ago, crude oil seemed poised to move lower. At that time, hedge fund liquidation and rising U.S. production were driving the price action. This week is a different story. The facts about rising U.S. output remain the same, but it appears that sentiment is driving the price action at this time. Therefore, we have to conclude that prices will remain elevated until the speculators stop buying.

While it may be true that the U.S. may reimpose sanctions on Iran, it is also true that this news wont stop U.S. production. So we have to conclude that prices will rise until a big seller steps in to stop the rally with enough volume to scare the speculators out of the market.

Story continues

This article was originally posted on FX Empire

More From FXEMPIRE:Last August, we told you about Laura Deming, a New Zealand native who was home schooled before moving halfway around the world as a 12-year-old to work alongside Cynthia Kenyon, a renowned molecular biologist who specializes in the genetics of aging.

She didn't stay long. At age 14, Deming began her college career at MIT. When she turned 16, she dropped out to join Peter Thiels two-year-old Thiel Fellowship program, which gives $100,000 to young people who want to build new things. By last August, when we profiled Deming, she had closed on $22 million in commitments for her second venture fund, which supports aging-related startups. She was 23.

Because Deming has always had an intriguing relationship with time, we weren't all that surprised when she reached out to us late last week to let us know her San Francisco-based venture firm, The Longevity Fund, has now established a new accelerator program -- one with backing from famed investor Marc Andreessen, the early-stage venture firm Felicis Ventures and other, unnamed investors.

Deming isn't disclosing how much money will be invested through the accelerator, called Age 1, but she does say the pool of capital is distinct from the money she's investing with Longevity Fund. She also says that Andreessen, Felicis and her other backers will serve as mentors to the companies that pass through the program.

Other notable details about Age 1: Deming says that she and her advisors -- including serial entrepreneur Elad Gil, who most recently co-founded the genomics testing company Color Genomics -- will be "quite flexible" when it comes to the stage of applicants. She says the bigger idea is to help them get to a significant "value inflection point" within four months, which is how long the program runs.

Instead of accepting startups serially, Age 1 will work with small batches of startups -- between three and five at a time -- and it's accepting them right now on a rolling basis, with plans to present them to an invite-only group of investors on October 5 in the Bay Area. (Startups can apply here.)

Story continues

Though there's not necessarily a headquarters for the program, Age 1 will provide co-working space for companies that need it and, even more notably, it will invest $500,000 per startup -- more than most accelerators are willing or able to plug into the startups with which they work.

What we don't know: at what cost. Asked about the ownership stake that Age 1 expects in exchange for its checks and mentorship, Deming, over email, declines to say.

As for what Deming and company are looking for, she suggests the program is particularly interested in working with startups that are committed to addressing late-onset medical conditions relating to Alzheimer's, heart disease, diabetes and more. Though they're casting a wide net, she adds that "one of hundreds of things we'd be interested in seeing is more work on the role of the circadian or other developmental clocks in longevity."

Whether Deming's ability to nurture startups is as promising as her prodigious understanding of biology remains to be seen, but her venture record to date is encouraging. Though Longevity has a fairly limited number of portfolio companies thus far, one of them, the genome editing technology company Precision BioSciences, secured a partnership last month with food giant Cargill; the two are now working together on a new product to reduce saturated fat in canola oil.

Another portfolio company -- UNITY Biotechnology, a company that's trying to reverse aging through therapeutics -- meanwhile closed on $55 million in Series C funding on Monday. It has raised more than $200 million at this point, including from Thiel's Founders Fund, Jeff Bezos, Fidelity and ARCH Venture Partners.

To learn more about Deming, you might check out this TED talk she gave back in 2013.Philip Morris International Inc. PM seems to stand firm on its ambitions of developing a smoke free future, evident from its recent move to completely transform one of its cigarette production facilities in Greece for the manufacture of HEETS  a unit used with iQOS. At a time when Philip Morris, like other major tobacco players, is witnessing receding cigarette sales, the company has been tactfully keeping its ducks in a row with reduced risk products (RRPs).



Expanding in the Smoke-Free Zone



For the transformation of Papastratos factory in Greece for the production of HEETS, the company plans an investment outlay of approximately EUR 300 million. This includes construction of new buildings and replacement of cigarette manufacturing lines with advanced facilities that can produce almost 10,000 smoke-free units per minute. The transformation work is expected to be completed by the end of 2018 and is likely to create 400 new employment opportunities. Along with Papastratos, Philip Morris has a plant near Bologna in Italy, which is fully engaged in the manufacturing of smoke-free products. Further, the company plans to undertake either partial or complete transformation of its cigarette producing facilities in Russia, Korea and Romania.



Philip Morris endeavors in the RRPs category are praiseworthy. With investments close to $4.5 billion since 2008 for undertaking research and product development in this category, the company is leading the revolutionary move from harmful tobacco products to scientific and low risk product alternatives. While the company has been stringently working toward motivating smokers to switch to RRPs, government regulations across the globe have also been playing a major role to substantiate the change. Additionally, the marketing and technology sharing agreement between Philip Morris and Altria Group MO for selling iQOS heated tobacco products in the United States is expected to aid volume and sales growth. The agreement is currently submitted for review to the FDA.



The companys strategic efforts in the RRPs space have also been favorably impacting its overall performance. Evidently, during fourth-quarter 2017, the company generated revenues of $1,643 million from RRPs, significantly higher than $343 million in 2017. Notably, RRP revenues in 2017 represented 12.7% of the companys overall net revenues, with major contributions from iQOS and accessories. The company expects continued growth in this category in the forthcoming periods, which encourages it to undertake constant investments to support RRP expansion. In fact, management expects strength in RRPs to drive the companys currency-neutral revenue growth of more than 8% in 2018.

Story continues







Challenges to Overcome



On the flip side, Philip Morris has been witnessing deteriorating shipment volumes mainly due to receding demand for cigarettes. Moreover, due to such headwinds, Philip Morris shares have lost 13.7% in the past six months, wider than the industrys decline of 10.5%. In fact, rising consumer awareness regarding the harmful impacts of cigarette and stern government regulations have been hampering the growth of a number of firms in the multi-billion tobacco industry such as British American Tobacco BTI and Vector Group VGR.



Nevertheless, as a trendsetter in the low risk tobacco products arena and its effective strategies to augment the category, Philip Morris is expected to continue as one of prominent names in the industry. Such dedicated efforts not only aid in countering stringent regulations and headwinds plaguing the cigarette space, but also seem to be in the favor of societys health and well being. Marching with such radical objectives, we expect this Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) to continue growing and also gain a place in investors good books.



You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.



Can Hackers Put Money into Your Portfolio?

Earlier this month, credit bureau Equifax announced a massive data breach affecting 2 out of every 3 Americans. The cybersecurity industry is expanding quickly in response to this and similar events. But some stocks are better investments than others.

Zacks has just released Cybersecurity! An Investors Guide to help Zacks.com readers make the most of the $170 billion per year investment opportunity created by hackers and other threats. It reveals 4 stocks worth looking into right away.

Download the new report now>>



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Altria Group, Inc. (MO) : Free Stock Analysis Report



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To read this article on Zacks.com click here.



Zacks Investment ResearchWelcome to Pogues Rated:App series. Each week, Ill install whatever is the No. 1 bestselling app on the iOS or Android store and review it, to save you the effort in case its a turkey!

This week, the No. 1 bestselling app on the iPhone app store, and the No. 2 app on the Google Play store, is Human Anatomy Atlas 2018.

Like most apps that hit No. 1, HAA is all about visuals; it gives you an interactive, incredibly detailed, medically accurate jaw-dropping 3-D view of the human body.

But unlike most apps that hit No. 1, I know why this app (which has been around for years) suddenly zoomed to the top of the list: Its usual price is $25, but it went on super sale this week for $1. (They havent decided when the sale will end.)

Human Anatomy Atlas 2018 is a gigantic, pretty complex app. Itll eat up 1 gigabyte of space on your phone, and take you some time to learn. Neither of those points would be an obstacle to the apps target audience: med students and health care pros.

But at $1, this app is suddenly attractive to a much broader range of people. Its pretty stunning.

Human Anatomy Atlas 2018 puts a colorful, non-smelly digital cadaver on your phone.

What it does

There are, as you may be aware, a number of different parts of the human body, so HAA 2018 offers several tabs that let you control how to begin your exploration:

Regions . Head/neck, abdomen, pelvis, knee, etc.

Systems . Skeleton, circulatory, nervous, respiratory, muscular, digestive, reproductive, etc.

Gross Anatomy Lab . By gross, they dont mean disgusting here; they mean general, as in general anatomy. Here, the app presents a digital corpse lying before you; you can turn it, flip it, or zoom into it.

Cross sections . Here, you get slices (they look like MRI scans)  of the head, thorax, abdomen, or pelvis, from various angles.

Microanatomy. This tab offers close-up views of individual structures like the eyeball, tongue, and hair follicles.

Augmented reality. Heres the best part, newly added to the Android version of the app (and already part of the iOS version): You can place your virtual corpse onto an actual table (or floor, or desk, or bed) in front of you, and walk around it, using your phone as a viewer. You can even push the phone inside the body, flying through it. Its freaky and beautifully done and absolutely astonishing  and unbelievably useful, Id think, to med students.

You really have to see the augmented-reality feature (in the video above, for example) to believe it.

In all of these views, you can tap a body part to dissect it, peeling away layers to see whats underneath. Its the cleanest, clearest, least stinky way to take apart a cadaver.

Story continues

You can also tap a body part to read all about it, or hear its name pronounced.

Tap any structure to read about it, hear its name pronounced, or designate it a favorite part of the body.

There are also 128 quizzes, a testament to the apps academic purposes. For example, youre shown an illustration of the leg and asked to tap the fifth metatarsal.

Also on tap: Short videos (showing how muscles, joints, cells, organs, systems, and diseases work). Note, though, that you get only one or two examples in each of these video categories; youre supposed to pay $20 to unlock the rest.

The videos are short, clear, and narrated.

You can also create 3D fly-through tours of your favorite body parts, or create a library of favorite bits, or annotate certain views by drawing on them (with a fairly feeble pen tool  no choice of thickness or color) or typing notes. You can also search for a certain anatomical feature, get help, or choose a different language (seven are available).

Were talking ridiculously complete.

Get it?

The company behind this app, Visible Body, has been toiling away in Boston for 15 years, refining and refining its medically accurate illustrations of the human body. You may run across their stuff as part of free online classes, in special corporate software for companies like Johnson & Johnson or Medtronic, in textbooks from Pearson or McGraw Hill, and so on.

In Dissect mode, each time you tap a layer, it disappears.

If the app were still $25, Id tell you that Human Anatomy Atlas is a great learning tool  if anatomy is part of your career.

But at $1, theres enough magic in this app to recommend it to anyone. Like the human body itself, its sometimes icky, often mind-blowing, and always amazing in that it works so well.

David Pogue, tech columnist for Yahoo Finance, welcomes non-toxic comments in the Comments below. On the Web, hes davidpogue.com. On Twitter, hes @pogue. On email, hes poguester@yahoo.com. You can sign up to get his stuff by email, here.

Read more

Pogue reviews this weeks No. 1 most downloaded app: Sky Guide AR



The controversial Vero is this weeks David Pogues Rated:App

Bitmoji is this weeks David Pogues Rated:App

This weeks David Pogues Rated:App is on FacetuneMOSCOW, March 21 (Reuters) - A Russian Foreign Ministry official said on Wednesday that Britain may be behind a chemical attack on Yulia Skripal, daughter of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal.

"Logic suggests that there are only two possible things," Vladimir Yermakov, head of the ministry's non-proliferation and arms control department, told a meeting with foreign ambassadors based in Moscow.

"Either the British authorities are not able to provide protection from such a, let's say, terrorist attack on their soil, or they, whether directly or indirectly, I am not accusing anyone, have orchestrated an attack on a Russian citizen", Yermakov said. (Reporting by Maria Tsvetkova, writing by Denis Pinchuk. Editing by Christian Lowe)[caption id="attachment_16093" align="alignnone" width="620"]

A device called a

A device called a "bump stock" is attached to a semi-automatic rifle at the Gun Vault store and shooting range in South Jordan, Utah. Photo: Rick Bowmer/AP[/caption] Gun owners have filed a second lawsuit against the state over gun-related provisions in a new school-safety law, this time alleging that a ban on bump stocks is an unconstitutional taking of property. The case, filed last week in Leon County circuit court, asks a judge to certify a class action and order full compensation for what the plaintiffs attorneys estimate are tens of thousands, or more Floridians who own bump stocks or similar devices. The ban on bump stocks, which make semi-automatic weapons mimic fully automatic firearms, was included in a law passed this month in response to the Feb. 14 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland that left 14 students and three staff members dead and 17 injured. The law also raised the minimum age from 18 to 21 and imposed a three-day waiting period for purchasing long guns, such as the AR-15 semi-automatic weapon 19-year-old Nikolas Cruz legally purchased and used during the deadly Valentines Day shooting spree. In the 17-page complaint in the bump stock case, lawyers for the plaintiffs argued that the Florida Constitution bars the state from taking private property except for a public purpose and with full compensation therefore paid to each owner. Because the new law deprives the plaintiffs and other members of the class of the economically beneficial uses of their lawfully-owned property, the statute constitutes a regulatory taking,  argued lawyers Aaron Behar and Michael Harper, of the Behar Behar law firm in Sunrise and Puerto Rico-based lawyer Andrew Kagan. The law is so onerous that its effect is tantamount to a direct appropriation of property, and therefore, a compensable taking under the Fifth Amendment, the lawyers argued. But Sen. Bill Galvano, a Bradenton Republican who sponsored the bill that was signed into law by Gov. Rick Scott less than two weeks ago, said he stands by the prohibition. I have made a cursory review of the suit and continue to support the ban. At the end of the day, these devices turn semi-automatic rifles into machine guns. A policy decision consistent with the authority of the state has been made that this is not acceptable, Galvano, a lawyer who will take over as Senate president in November, told The News Service of Florida on Tuesday. The lawsuit also refers to a 2010 directive issued by the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives that determined bump stocks are a firearm part and not regulated as a firearm under federal gun laws. Plaintiffs and others relied on the ATFs determination when purchasing bump stocks and similar devices, such as binary triggers, the lawyers argued. The named plaintiffs in the case are identified as Florida residents Jonathan Hunt, Justin Brashear, Christopher Mays, Clayton Woolfe and Joseph Truex, who own bump stocks or binary triggers. The named defendants are Attorney General Pam Bondi and Florida Department of Law Enforcement Commissioner Rick Swearingen. Shortly after Scott signed the law, the National Rifle Association filed a federal lawsuit that challenges the Legislatures decision to require people to be age 21 before purchasing rifles and other types of long guns. The lawsuit accuses the state of violating the constitutional rights of young adults between the ages of 18 and 21. Dara Kam reports for the News Service of Florida.* Russia brokers deal with Ahrar al-Sham group -sources

* Agrees to lay down arms for safe passage - sources

* Russia says opens new corridor for evacuations (Adds Hezbollah media unit, Idlib strike, Merkel)

By Suleiman Al-Khalidi

AMMAN, March 21 (Reuters) - Syrian rebels will evacuate a besieged town in eastern Ghouta, opposition sources and officials and a military media unit run by the government's ally Hezbollah said on Wednesday, the first such deal in the last rebel bastion near the capital.

Fighters from Ahrar al-Sham, which holds Harasta, agreed to lay down arms in return for safe passage to opposition-held northwestern Syria and a government pardon for people who wished to stay, the opposition sources said.

Some 1,500 militants and 6,000 of their family members will be transported to rebel-held Idlib province in two batches starting on Thursday, the Hezbollah military media unit said.

Russia's Defence Ministry, which the opposition sources said had brokered the deal, said on Wednesday it had opened a new "humanitarian corridor" near Harasta but did not indicate whether this would be part of any rebel pullout deal.

The Syrian army has recaptured 70 percent of the territory that was under insurgent control in eastern Ghouta, and after weeks of bombardment residents are fleeing by the thousands.

Beside Harasta, the rebels still hold two other pockets in the enclave outside Damascus - the major town of Douma and an area to the south that includes the towns of Jobar, Ein Terma and Arbin.

The army assault, backed by Russian fighter jets, began last month. It has killed more than 1,500 people as air strikes pound residential areas where thousands had sheltered in basements across the densely populated enclave, according to a monitor.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is determined to end what he calls a terrorist threat near his seat of power. The government accuses rebels of bombarding the capital's suburbs as revenge for the assault on Ghouta, though the insurgents deny targeting civilians.

Story continues

On Tuesday, a rocket struck a busy market in a government-held area close to eastern Ghouta, killing at least 35 people, state media said. Syria's Foreign Ministry on Wednesday said Saudi Arabia and Qatar were behind the rebel groups responsible. Both countries have backed rebel groups during the war.

The Syrian army and its allies have for years employed siege and bombardment tactics to force rebels to surrender, helping Assad recover Aleppo, Homs and other areas.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Wednesday condemned the assault on Ghouta and accused Assad's ally Russia of "just watching" the events unfold.

EVACUATION OF WOUNDED

The Harasta evacuation will begin with injured civilians, said one official familiar with talks.

A pro-Assad commander confirmed there was a deal between the Russians and Ahrar al-Sham. Other civilians and fighters would be evacuated to rebel-held Idlib in northwest Syria in coming days, the commander said.

A local official in the opposition-run Harasta council was quoted by opposition news outlets as saying a deal had been reached but did not say when it would be implemented.

More than 100 civilians were killed in the last two days of air strikes in eastern Ghouta with most of the raids on Douma city, the largest population centre where more than 150,000 people still live.

Rebels and residents say napalm and incendiary weapons, which Damascus and Moscow deny using, were dropped on several civilian areas to force rebels to surrender.

Securing Harasta, near the closed Damascus-Homs highway, will allow the army to make further gains in the remaining parts of the enclave in rebel hands.

"They bomb us to force us to leave our homes and everything behind us and say imminent death faces those who stay," Iyad Abdul Aziz, head of the local council in Douma, told Reuters.

He said an air strike on Sunday hit a warehouse that stocked aid delivered earlier this month, worsening the plight of civilians, and that Douma faced "catastrophic conditions".

The Harasta deal may add pressure on the two main rebel groups - Failaq al-Rahman in the southern pocket and Jaish al-Islam in Douma - to also reach understandings.

They have so far refused to leave the enclave, but the most likely outcome was still their transfer to opposition-held areas in northern and southern Syria, a rebel official said.

Idlib, in northwestern Syria, is subject to government air raids. On Wednesday, one strike killed 20 people there including 16 children, the war monitor, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, said.

Defeat in eastern Ghouta would mark the worst setback for the anti-Assad rebellion since the opposition was driven from eastern Aleppo in late 2016 after a similar campaign of siege, bombing, ground assault and the promise of safe passage out.

(Reporting by Suleiman Al-Khalidi Additional reporting by Maria Kiselyova in Moscow and Laila Bassam in Beirut; Editing by Janet Lawrence and John Stonestreet)CHARLOTTE, N.C., March 22, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has awarded Parts Manufacturer Approval (PMA) to SmartSky Networks radio and antenna manufacturing partners, enabling full-rate production of the SmartSky 4G LTE aircraft system and catalyzing STC projects on numerous popular business aircraft. Avidyne secured a PMA for the production of the airborne radio, while AeroAntenna received PMA for the manufacture of SmartSkys aircraft antennas.



SmartSky has examined every aspect of airborne connectivity, seeking better ways to deliver Wi-Fi performance and capacity to customers, said Joe Klein, founder and CEO of AeroAntenna. As their many demo flights have confirmed, SmartSky 4G LTE represents a quantum leap improvement over the incumbent air-to-ground system. Whether its through their advanced technical capabilities as evidenced by SmartSkys 32 granted patents, or utilizing our highly innovative, customized, and active antennas that are now ready for full-rate production, SmartSky is raising expectations for ATG capabilities and consistently delivering.

The PMAs assure installers, such as Pentastar, Chicago Jet Group, and Clay Lacy, that each of the unique components of the SmartSky 4G LTE aircraft system are manufactured to the same exacting standards. The FAA approval through its Manufacturing Inspection District Offices further facilitates the ongoing supplemental type certificate (STC) process on many popular aircraft models by enabling SmartSkys partners to more rapidly develop new STCs using the PMAd components.

This approval accelerates the full implementation of the SmartSky 4G LTE-based network, says Brian Campbell, vice president of global sales for StandardAero. The industry demands more options when it comes to inflight connectivity, and Im confident SmartSky 4G LTE answers that need. It is hands-down the best performing network Ive ever experienced. This certification is an important milestone in allowing customers to experience firsthand transformative inflight communication services in both the cabin and cockpit.

Network Live, Coverage Expansion Continues

SmartSkys 4G LTE-based network has been live since 2017 and coverage expansion remains on track to support a launch of nationwide service in 2018. More than 55% of the sites needed to provide U.S. coverage are in their final stages of deployment, up from only 40% just a few weeks ago. Sites specified as final stage include those currently being up-fit with production radios, production antennas, and ancillary equipment, as well as those sites already complete and on the air.

ABOUT SMARTSKY NETWORKS  www.smartskynetworks.com

Headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina, SmartSky Networks was formed in 2011 by senior aviation and telecommunications executives seeking to transform aviation through the use of disruptive communications technologies and related tools. Working with leading aerospace and technology partners, SmartSky has begun the rollout of its innovative, air-to-ground network, SmartSky 4G LTE. The network takes advantage of patented spectrum reuse, advanced beamforming technologies and 60 MHz of spectrum for significantly enhanced connectivity. SmartSky 4G LTE delivers data to the aircraft at rates comparable with next generation satellite solutions and provides unmatched capacity for data transmissions from the aircraft to the ground. This real-time, low latency, bidirectional data link makes SmartSky 4G LTE a key enabler for the new and enhanced apps, services, and hardware that will usher in the digitization of the aviation industry.

HIGH-RESOLUTION IMAGES

May be downloaded at https://www.gretemangroup.com/press/faa-bestows-parts-manufacturer-approval-on-smartsky-4g-aircraft-system/

Media Contact: Christine Hall

843.338.8564

800.660.9982, ext. 718

Christine@SmartSkyNetworks.comtoyota self driving

Toyota

In response to Sunday's fatal accident involving a self-driving Uber vehicle, Toyota will temporarily stop testing its Chauffeur autonomous-driving program in the US.

Toyota had been testing the fully autonomous Chauffeur system in California and Michigan.

The automaker was rumored to be in talks to purchase Uber's self-driving technology, though it's unclear if Sunday's accident will hurt the chances of a potential deal.



In response to Sunday's fatal accident involving a self-driving Uber vehicle, Toyota confirmed to Business Insider that it will temporarily stop testing its Chauffeur autonomous driving program in the US.

"We cannot speculate on the cause of the incident or what it may mean to the automated driving industry going forward," a company spokesperson said in an email to Business Insider. "Because Toyota Research Institute (TRI) feels the incident may have an emotional effect on its test drivers, TRI has decided to temporarily pause its own Chauffeur mode testing on public roads."

Toyota had been testing the fully autonomous Chauffeur system in California and Michigan through the Toyota Research Institute, which the company founded in 2015 to create a car that is incapable of causing a crash. The company will not halt its testing in Japan.

Toyota has taken a conservative approach to self-driving technology

Unlike auto and tech competitors like Waymo, General Motors, and Ford, Toyota has taken a more conservative approach to testing autonomous vehicles. The automaker was rumored to be in talks to purchase Uber's self-driving technology, though it's unclear if Sunday's accident will hurt the chances of a potential deal.

Toyota invested in Uber in 2016, with plans to "explore collaboration" between the two companies.

On Sunday evening, a self-driving Volvo XC90 operated by Uber hit and killed a 49-year-old woman, Elaine Herzberg, in Tempe, Arizona. Herzberg is believed to be the first pedestrian to be killed by a self-driving vehicle.

Story continues

At the time of the accident, the car was in autonomous mode, and operator Rafaela Vasquez was serving as a backup driver in the event that the vehicle's self-driving technology faltered. Early reports from local police indicate that Uber "would likely not be at fault" for the accident.

Uber's fatal accident has raised safety concerns for autonomous vehicles

But the accident has raised questions about the safety of self-driving vehicles. While supporters of the technology believe it will make cars much safer than those driven by humans, critics fear the mistakes autonomous vehicles will make along the way may produce more damage than optimistic companies would like to admit.

After the accident, Uber said it would suspend autonomous-vehicle testing in Tempe, San Francisco, and Toronto. Autonomous driving startup NuTonomy also said it would pause its self-driving tests in Boston.

"We are working with City of Boston officials to ensure that our automated vehicle pilots continue to adhere to high standards of safety," a NuTonomy spokesperson said in an email to Business Insider. "We have complied with the City of Boston's request to temporarily halt autonomous vehicle testing on public roads."

The company had provided vehicles to Lyft, which began offering self-driving rides in Boston in December. NuTonomy was bought by auto supplier Delphi in October.

NOW WATCH: Goldman Sachs investment chief: Bitcoin is definitely a bubble, Ethereum even more so

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SEE ALSO: Self-driving cars could face a 'huge setback' after the tragic death of a woman struck by an autonomous UberPresident Trump left heads shaking earlier this month when he announced new tariffs on steel and aluminum imports. Most trade experts see little economic justification for those tariffs, and a bevy of loopholes Trump included could end up exempting many imports, anyway.

Trump is on firmer ground with his plan to impose tariffs on $50 billion worth of Chinese imports. The goal is to get China to treat U.S. companies in China the way we treat Chinese companies in our market, a senior Trump administration official told reporters on March 22. A forthcoming government report, he said, clearly demonstrates there are unfair practices by China as it relates to their efforts to acquire US technology and to favor their companies over US companies.

Unlike the steel and aluminum tariffs, many trade experts and business leaders agree in principle with that assessment of Chinese behavior. Western firms have complained for years that China routinely steals their trade secrets, through outright theft and hacking, and also through domestic rules that require foreign firms to turn over technological know-how as a condition of doing business in China. Keith Alexander, former chief of the National Security Agency, has frequently characterized such intellectual-property theft as the greatest transfer of wealth in history.

IP theft could cost the U.S. economy as much as $600 billion per year globally, with China accounting for most of that, according to the The Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property, an independent research group headed by Dennis Blair, who was director of national intelligence under President Obama, and Craig Barrett, former Intel CEO. Trump supposedly fumes about the U.S. trade deficit with China, which was $375 billion in 2017. But thats not a giveaway to China. Americans get something for that $375 billionnamely, cheap goods that would probably cost more if we bought them from someplace else. Intellectual property, or IP, theft is simply lost wealth, which compounds over time as China uses gained knowledge to become a tougher competitor.

Story continues

Trade warriors? President Trump with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing last year. (AP Photo/Andrew Harnik)

Heres where theres disagreement: over whether tariffs are the best remedy for IP theft. The commission headed by Blair and Barrett recommends 18 specific actions to combat Chinese IP theftbut not tariffs. Instead, those experts suggest a kind of carrot-and-stick approach that would deny Chinese access to the U.S. market and parts of the banking system for known violators, while encouraging more interaction with Chinese firms playing by the rules.

Tariffs are essentially a tax added to the cost of imports, and paid by the consumers of those imports. Retailers, consumer groups and corporate groups such as the Business Roundtable oppose new tariffs, because they raise costs on consumers and producers here in the United States. Theres also the likelihood that China will respond in kind and hit U.S. exports to China with tariffs of similar magnitude. That could hurt producers of agricultural products such as soybeans, sorghum and cotton, aircraft manufacturers such as Boeing and some commodity producers.

But Trump, of course, campaigned on tariffs, and hes obviously determined to get them. The next question is what products, exactly, will bear those tariffs. The office of the U.S. Trade Representative, Robert Lighthizer, is due to publish a list of products to bear the new tariffs by April 6, with a 30-day comment period to follow before theyre finalized. Trump administration officials say the products targeted will most likely be in high-tech industries China has highlighted as key to gaining economic dominance in the future.

A Chinese initiative called Made in China 2025 identifies 10 industries as key to the nations economic future, including information technology, advanced industrial equipment, biopharmaceuticals, green energy and aerospace. So if the Trump tariffs follow that blueprint, they might apply to, say, automotive and airplane components, advanced batteries, machine tools, or advanced electronics. That will be Phase 1. Whether Trump plans it or not, there will probably be many follow-up phases.

Confidential tip line: rickjnewman@yahoo.com. Encrypted communication available.

Read more:

Rick Newman is the author of four books, including Rebounders: How Winners Pivot from Setback to Success. Follow him on Twitter: @rickjnewman

Follow Yahoo Finance on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn

Editors Note: This story previously attributed research on the cost of intellectual-property theft to the National Bureau of Asian Research. That research, in fact, comes from the The Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property, which the National Bureau of Asian Research fully funds.The U.S. telecom market continues to witness intense pricing competition, as success to a great extent depends on technical superiority, quality of services and scalability. Additionally, the U.S. wireless industry is likely to become even more competitive in 2018 with the entry of cable MSOs (multi-service operators) in this space.

Entry of New Players in the Wireless Space

Comcast Corp. (CMCSA) has already forayed into this field with its Xfinity Mobile offering. Presently, the company is utilizing its MVNO (mobile virtual network operator) agreement with Verizon to use the latters wireless network along with its own WiFi network to offer mobile services. Importantly, the company acquired 73 licenses in the band of 600 MHz auctioned by the FCC. We believe that in the future Comcast will deploy this spectrum for extensive wireless coverage.

Charter Communications Inc. (CHTR) has reiterated its plans of launching wireless service in the first half of next year. Much like Comcast, the company too has an MVNO agreement with Verizon as well as its own WiFi network to offer mobile services.

The company has also launched experimental field trials of the 5G wireless network. These trials come on the back of spectrum test licenses granted to it by the FCC. The company is actively testing licensed small-cell technologies and has petitioned the FCC to release 3.5 GHz spectrum, popularly known as the CBRS band, for both licensed and unlicensed use.

DISH Network Corp. (DISH) has created an extensive portfolio of spectrum, the most important component of wireless networks. The company boasts a portfolio of 80 MHz of radio frequencies of different bands which will be utilized to deploy 4G LTE wireless network in top 100 U.S. markets. DISH Networks CEO Charlie Ergen has hinted that the company is interested in the potential deal-making to enter the wireless industry. At the same time, Ergen also stated that the company has a clear plan of building a wireless network on its own.

Story continues

Additionally, Sprint Corp. (S) has entered into a new multi-year strategic agreement with Altice USA Inc. (ATUS). Per the terms of the agreement, Altice USA will utilize Sprints network to provide mobile voice and data services to customers throughout the country, and Sprint will leverage the Altice USA broadband platform to accelerate the densification of its network.

Comcast, Charter Communications and Sprint currently carry a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). You can see the complete list of todays Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here .

Will Geographical Expansion Stop?

Cutting across barriers has become a fairly common practice for telecom players. The objective is to offer better service and customer convenience. However, President Trump has already threatened to terminate the previous Obama administration's efforts to normalize US-Cuba relations. All four leading U.S, wireless operators -- AT&T, Sprint, Verizon and T-Mobile US -- have established business links with Cuba's Empresa de Telecomunicaciones de Cuba SA (ETECSA).

Moreover, Trump may deal a major blow to Mexico as he believes that Mexico is to blame for the lack of jobs for Americans. At present, NAFTA is at turmoil. AT&T has strong business interest in Mexico.

Weaknesses



In general, the beleaguered telecommunications companies have high debt levels and large financial leverage ratios. Moreover, they are often unable to cope with recent market trends. Other risks that pose threats are as follows:



 Potential Business Slowdown: Sales fluctuations of carriers are expected to continue weighing on capital-spending decisions -- a major problem faced by equipment vendors. The companies are expected to retain focus on improving balance sheets, financial discipline and free cash-flow generation.

 Product Overlapping: We may see more product-sharing deals between telecom, cable TV and satellite TV operators, as each of these players are vying to grab a sizeable share in each others territory. Even pay-TV services, offerings to business enterprises, mobile backhaul and metro-Ethernet segments may observe more convergence. Mobile phone makers are now progressively offering tablets and chipset manufacturers are providing chips for personal computers as well as mobile devices, thus frequently interchanging their areas of operations.

 Intensified Competition: Technological upgrades and breakthroughs have resulted in cutthroat price competition. Product life-cycle and upgrade-cycle have been reduced drastically as several firms are coming up with new products and services within a short span of time. Increasing competition is compelling players to offer heterogeneous and bundled services to retain position in the space.

More Stock News: This Is Bigger than the iPhone!

It could become the mother of all technological revolutions. Apple sold a mere 1 billion iPhones in 10 years but a new breakthrough is expected to generate more than 27 billion devices in just 3 years, creating a $1.7 trillion market.



Zacks has just released a Special Report that spotlights this fast-emerging phenomenon and 6 tickers for taking advantage of it. If you don't buy now, you may kick yourself in 2020.



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To read this article on Zacks.com click here.



Zacks Investment ResearchFollowing what felt like years of silence on a plethora of issues, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has gone on an interview rampage (but not us  was it my editorial?). Although he mainly plugs away at the points he made in today's blog post, there are a few items worth noting.

Regarding the company's acceptance at face value that Cambridge Analytica had deleted the data they weren't supposed to have (to Recode):

At the time it didnt seem like we needed to go further on that. Given what we know now we clearly should have followed up and were never going to make that mistake again.

And what about the thousands of apps that may have performed similar data grabs during the many years it was possible?

The data isnt on our servers, so it would require us sending out forensic auditors to different apps.

How many apps are we talking about here? (to the New York Times)

It will be in the thousands.

Will the 50 million estimated to be affected by the data collected by Aleksandr Kogan be notified to what extent their data was shared?

Yes. Were going to tell anyone whose data may have been shared.

Presumably the same will be true for anyone found to be affected by other unsavory apps.

What about the public response? What does he think about #deletefacebook?

I dont think weve seen a meaningful number of people act on that, but, you know, its not good.

As for preventing future manipulation of the system during a major election year (not just here but around the world):

In 2017 with the special election in Alabama, we deployed some new A.I. tools to identify fake accounts and false news, and we found a significant number of Macedonian accounts that were trying to spread false news, and were able to eliminate those.

It's the first time he's talked about it, apparently. Hopefully they'll prove as effective during larger campaigns.

Zuckerberg also goes off on some interesting tangents with Wired, for instance the efficacy of AI in certain situations and the status of the Cambridge Analytica audit in the UK. As for whether he'll appear in front of Congress:

If it is ever the case that I am the most informed person at Facebook in the best position to testify, I will happily do that.

If I had to guess, I'd say that hour fast approaches.STORIES YOU MIGHT LIKENew York City, March 22, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- For Immediate Distribution

Congressional Medal of Honor Foundation

Contact: Mike Caldwell, 703- 469-1861



The Congressional Medal of Honor Foundation presented actor and staunch veterans advocate Gary Sinise its Circle of Honor Award last night during a ceremony at the New York Stock Exchange. Sinises daughter, Sophie, and 30 of the 71 living Recipients of the Medal of Honor were among 160 guests in attendance.

Just to be among you, to learn from you and be inspired by you is all the award I need, said Sinise. We work to be better citizens and patriots and we can always do a little bit more.

The Foundations highest award, the Circle of Honor Award honors and recognizes American citizens who have made profound contributions to our Nation and way of life, and who epitomize the principles of courage, sacrifice, service and patriotism. Recipients of the award must have served in or strongly supported the military.

Gary is so deserving of the Circle of Honor Award because of the tireless work he does for members of the military, veterans, their families and first responders, said Louis Chenevert, Foundation chairman. Gary is one of the strongest supporters of our Foundation, the Medal of Honor Recipients, and the work we do to teach the values embodied in the Medal of Honor to all Americans.

Gary Sinise has been a good friend of my fellow Medal Recipients and I for many years, and he is a great spokesman for our programs and all veteran issues, said Medal of Honor Recipient Drew Dix, president of the Congressional Medal of Honor Society. For all he has done and continues to do to support us and so many others, he is truly deserving of the Circle of Honor Award.

During the gala, the living Recipients of the Medal of Honor also presented the Societys Patriot Award to Captain Jim Palmersheim, managing director of Veterans Initiatives for American Airlines. The Patriot Award is the highest award bestowed by the Society and is presented to distinguished Americans who exemplify the ideals that make America strong.

Palmersheim has been instrumental in the success of Snow Ball Express, which annually supports 1500 children and spouses of fallen service members killed on active duty. He is chairman of AA Sky Ball which has raised more than $11 million to support military charitable organizations to include education programs for the Congressional Medal of Honor Society and Foundation.

Why wouldnt we do the work we do when we have the opportunity to serve with the Recipients of the Medal of Honor, said Palmersheim. Our work with the military, veterans and the Recipients gives us the canvas to paint the artwork of freedom.

When Jim Palmersheim was nominated for the Patriot Award by one of our Recipients, our board unanimously and enthusiastically approved, Dix said. Jims dedication to freedom has no limits and were honored to recognize him with this award.

This was the 16th consecutive year the Foundation has held the Circle of Honor Gala at the New York Stock Exchange.

This is the event we look forward to every year at the Stock Exchange, said John Tuttle, global head of Listings for NYSE. "We live in a safe, free and secure country and we thank the men and women of the armed forces for our liberty and way of life.

To learn more about the Foundation and its programs visit www.themedalofhonor.com.

About the Congressional Medal of Honor Society: The Congressional Medal of Honor Society was chartered by the Congress in 1958 to create a brotherhood among the living Medal of Honor Recipients, to protect and uphold the dignity and honor of the Medal, to promote patriotism and love of country, and to inspire our youth to become worthy and dedicated citizens of our nation. Its membership consists exclusively of those individuals who have received the Medal of Honor. Today, there are 71 living Recipients of the Medal of Honor. The Society is unique in that its membership hopes that there will be no need to welcome new inductees.

About the Congressional Medal of Honor Foundation: The Congressional Medal of Honor Foundation was founded in 1999 by the Congressional Medal of Honor Society to perpetuate the legacy of the Medal. Through character development, scholarship and citizen recognition programs based on the values embodied in the Medal  courage, sacrifice, selfless service and patriotism  the Foundation teaches all citizens that they can make a difference in the lives of others. The Foundation also supports the important work of the Congressional Medal of Honor Society. A 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization with Tax ID #25-1828488, the Foundation carries a rating of 4/4 stars for fiscal management, accountability and transparency from Charity Navigator, Americas premiere non-profit evaluator.

Attachment:

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/4ddb894a-e642-4cce-aaac-7bf7f36d75d8Congress puts $380 million toward election security

The Senate Intelligence Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) said the omnibus funding bill released late on March 21 includes $380 million in grant funding to help states secure their election systems.

The announcement came during a March 21 election security hearing on where the Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen, former DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson and a mix of other officials were interviewed so committee members could flesh out additional actions.

The committee wanted updates from DHS on election security efforts with states, discussed ways to improve communication between states and agencies and considered whether a unified cyber doctrine was needed to deter future state-sponsored election interference. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) questioned whether DHS was acting with enough urgency, noting that voting has already begun for the 2018 mid-term election season.

Nielsen said the department was speeding up security clearances for state and local officials, with 20 having been given full security clearances to receive classified threat briefings and others receiving interim clearances. Nielsen also said 15 of the 19 states that requested in-depth vulnerability assessments from DHS have had those requests fulfilled, and she promised the remaining states would get assistance before Election Day.

"Not only is this of extreme urgency to the department, but  we are prioritizing election efforts and risk and vulnerability assessments for our state and local partners over all other critical infrastructure sectors," Nielsen said.

Intelligence agencies have testified to Congress that they believe Russia and perhaps other nations intend to continue election interference efforts during the 2018 mid-term elections.

At the hearing, Burr asked Jeanette Manfra, DHS' assistant secretary for cybersecurity and communications, if the department had seen any evidence thus far "that concern you that an adversary might be testing the systems."

"Not at this time," Manfra replied.

Eric Rosenbach, co-director of the Belfour Center for Science and International Affairs, told lawmakers that much like recent reports about Russian-linked hacking groups targeting critical U.S. infrastructure entities, it is likely there are additional efforts related to probing and perhaps compromising the election system.

"I just don't believe when someone tells me we know everything about what the Russians did or didn't do," said Belfour.

The committee took pains to insist that federal efforts should not be interpreted as an attempt to usurp the central role that state and local governments play in administering elections.

However, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) seemed to break with his colleagues, noting that no state has the budget, intelligence capabilities or technical resources to defend against cyberattacks by modern day nation-states. Over the past year, Wyden has been critical of voting machine manufacturers and called the lack of paper ballots a national security threat.

"Leaving our defenses to states and local entities, in my view, is not an adequate response," said Wyden. "Our country needs baseline, mandatory, federal election security standards, and what I'm talking about here are paper ballots and post-election, risk-limiting audits."

In House of Representatives, meanwhile, Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-Miss.), ranking member of the Homeland Security Committee, said he was pleased with the funding commitment, but wants more attention paid to election security.

"Make no mistake, this is a solid down payment on securing our federal elections in 2018 and 2020, but much more must be done," he said.

This article was first posted to FCW, a sibling site to GCN.Northbrook, IL, March 21, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Digital Check is pleased to announce the addition of Shantal Williams Barnett, who joins our growing international team in the role of account manager for Central America and the Caribbean. The March 1, 2018, hiring reaffirms the companys commitment to the rapidly expanding check capture ecosystem in Latin America and elsewhere around the world.

A native of Costa Rica, Ms. Williams brings more than 10 years experience in international sales and marketing, most recently as the director of the Mexico office of SmartSoft S.A. She assumes responsibility for Digital Checks sales and business development in Central America and the Caribbean, as well as Venezuela and Colombia.

In the past several years weve seen tremendous new opportunities emerge in the international check capture market, as more and more countries join the trend of converting legacy paper processes to digital, says Alex Trombetta, Digital Checks vice president of international sales. Latin America in particular has shown very strong promise with a rapid expansion of our business there.

Already a worldwide leader in check imaging equipment with tens of thousands of scanners sold annually across more than 100 countries, Digital Check experienced a significant increase in overseas exports with the 2016 SmartSource acquisition from Burroughs, already a successful brand in Latin America. The combined product lines now account for the majority of all check scanners sold in the region, including most countries mandating ultraviolet scanning for document security.

Digital Check works directly with industry leaders and regulators around the world to advance the modernization process in banking, hosting seminars on check electronification in locales across Latin America, Europe, Middle East and Asia. In addition to standard teller and remote deposit capture hardware, the company has also introduced devices for mixed-document capture, network scanning, and standalone kiosks.

Digital Check is proud to be a part of building the next generation of hardware for an evolving payments market, Trombetta says. We are there to help our partners and customers advance to the next generation of banking in Latin America and around the world.

About Digital Check

Digital Check is the worlds largest manufacturer of check scanners and document capture products for teller capture, branch automation, remote deposit capture, kiosk and remote lockbox, with over a million units installed worldwide. Digital Checks award-winning CheXpress, TellerScan, and SmartSource check and document scanners are among the most cost-effective and reliable in the industry. The company partners with a network of reseller, software vendors and authorized service providers covering the entire globe. For more information, visit www.digitalcheck.com.

Attachment:

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at http://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/97359c08-9142-45da-9b6a-5c6737eb8182VANCOUVER, British Columbia, March 21, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Strongbow Exploration Inc. (Strongbow or the Company) (TSX-V:SBW) is pleased to announce the appointment of Mr. Glenn Kondo as Chief Financial Officer as of June 1, 2018. Mr. Kondo will replace Ms. Zara Boldt in this role, as Ms. Boldt will be leaving the Company to pursue other opportunities.



Mr. Richard Williams, Strongbows CEO commented: We are very pleased to welcome Glenn as Strongbows new CFO. Glenns extensive operational experience, most recently with Lucara Diamond Corporation and prior to that with Anglo American, will be of significant benefit to Strongbow as we continue our efforts to re-start the past-producing South Crofty tin project in Cornwall, UK. Based from London, England, Glenn will be an excellent addition to our management team. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank Zara Boldt for her service to the Company.

Mr. Kondo is a highly qualified finance professional with extensive senior executive and corporate board experience in the mining industry, most recently with Lucara Diamond Corporation, owner of the Karowe mine in Botswana, one of the worlds most successful and profitable diamond mines, as well as Anglo American. He has been directly responsible for delivering significant commercial growth internationally by leading mergers and acquisitions, raising capital finance and achieving business transformation through operational performance and project management. Mr. Kondo is a Chartered Accountant and holds a Bachelor of Commerce degree from the University of Toronto.

For additional information please contact: Irene Dorsman at (604) 210 8752 or by e-mail at idorsman@strongbowexploration.com or Sherman Dahl of Pretium Communications at (250) 558 8340.

Blytheweigh (Financial PR/IR-London)

Tel: +44 207 138 3204 Tim Blythe

Camilla Horsfall

Nick Elwes

tim.blythe@blytheweigh.com

camilla.horsfall@blytheweigh.com

nick.elwes@blytheweigh.com

ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS



Richard D. Williams

Richard D. Williams, P.Geo

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in the policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.Not for distribution to United States newswire services or for release, publication, distribution or dissemination directly, or indirectly, in whole or in part, in or into the United States.

VANCOUVER, British Columbia, March 22, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Velocity Minerals Ltd. (TSX-V:VLC) (Velocity or the Company) announces a non-brokered private placement (the "Financing") of up to 17,500,000 units (the "Units") priced at $0.20 per Unit to raise total gross proceeds of up to $3.5 million. Each Unit will consist of one common share in the capital of Velocity (each, a "Share") and one-half of one warrant, with each whole warrant entitling the holder to purchase one common share in the capital of Velocity at a price of $0.30 per share for a period of 12 months from the closing of the Financing. All securities issued in connection with the Financing will be subject to a hold period of four-months and one day in Canada.

The proceeds of the Financing are intended to fund ongoing work at the Companys Balkan Gold Project, the cornerstone of which is the recently announced Exploration and Mining Alliance (the "Alliance") with the Bulgarian mining company Gorubso Kardzhali AD (Gorubso) (see news release February 22, 2018). In addition to exclusive access to an operating Carbon-In-Leach (CIL) processing plant, the Alliance provides Velocity with option agreements on multiple exploration projects and an operating gold mine within a 10,000km2 area in southeast Bulgaria.

Rozino Project -- Planned work at the advanced Rozino gold project will include publication of a Preliminary Economic Assessment (PEA) prepared under NI 43-101 Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects ("NI 43-101") in late 2018. The Company may exercise its option to acquire a 70% interest in the Rozino project through the publication of the PEA. The Company completed 7,500m of drilling prior to publishing a maiden inferred mineral resource estimate in early March 2018 (see news release March 5, 2018); 17 million tonnes grading 1.15g/t gold for 629,000 ounces of gold (0.5g/t cut-off grade) (1) . Approximately 5,000m of additional drilling will be completed in the coming months before publishing the PEA and the report will include an updated resource estimate. The Company recently announced positive results from initial metallurgical studies (see news release March 21, 2018) and more detailed work is in progress for inclusion in the PEA.

-- Planned work at the advanced Rozino gold project will include publication of a Preliminary Economic Assessment (PEA) prepared under NI 43-101 Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects ("NI 43-101") in late 2018. The Company may exercise its option to acquire a 70% interest in the Rozino project through the publication of the PEA. Chala Gold Mine -- The Company has negotiated the exclusive option to acquire a 50% interest in the operating Chala gold mine through exploration expenditures of $1 million. Planned work at Chala includes an underground drill program to explore for additional mineralized zones at the mine. The Companys recently employed mining engineer is on site finalizing drill targets and preparing for the drill program.

-- The Company has negotiated the exclusive option to acquire a 50% interest in the operating Chala gold mine through exploration expenditures of $1 million. Sedefche Project -- The Company has negotiated the exclusive option to earn a 70% interest in the Sedefche project through delivery of an NI 43-101 Feasibility Study.

 Sedefche is located on a fully permitted mining concession and while historical resources have been published (see news release February 22, 2018) the deposit has only been explored to approximately 60m from surface.

 Planned due diligence will focus on historical exploration and assess the potential to discover more mineralization in and around the existing deposit.

Note (1): Mineral resources were estimated by Jonathon Abbott, a member of the Australian Institute of Geoscientists and employee of MPR Geological Consultants Pty Ltd of Perth, Australia. Mr. Abbott is a Qualified Person, as defined by NI 43-101. Mr. Abbott is independent of the Company

The Company may pay finder's fees on a portion of the Financing consisting of a cash commission equal to 7% of the total gross proceeds raised and finder's warrants equal to 7% of the total number of Units issued, where each finder's warrant will entitle the holder thereof to purchase one common share in the capital of Velocity at a price of $0.20 per share for a period of 12 months from the closing of the Financing. The Financing is subject to TSX Venture Exchange and other regulatory approval.

Qualified Person

The technical content of this release has been approved for disclosure by Keith Henderson, P.Geo., a Qualified Person as defined by NI 43-101 and the Companys President & CEO. Mr. Henderson is not independent of the Company.

About Velocity Minerals Ltd.

Velocity is a gold exploration and development company focussed on eastern Europe. The Companys management and board includes mining industry professionals with over 100 years of combined experience spanning Europe, Asia, and the Americas as employees of major mining companies as well as founders and senior executives of junior to mid-tier public companies. The team's experience includes all aspects of mineral exploration, resource definition, feasibility, finance, mine construction and mine operation as well as a track record in managing publicly listed companies.

The Companys portfolio of advanced gold exploration assets is currently in Bulgaria, which is a member of the European Union (2007) and an attractive destination for mining investment. The countrys mining law was established in 1999 and updated in 2011. Mining royalties are low and compare favourably with more established mining countries like Canada, Peru and Chile. Bulgaria also boasts a corporate tax rate of only 10% and the countrys education system has yielded a good availability of experienced mining professionals in a favourable cost environment. Foreign mining companies are successfully operating in Bulgaria.

Velocity Minerals has entered into the Alliance with Gorubso, an established and respected mining company in Bulgaria. Gorubso currently operates the underground Chala Gold Mine (2006) and the Kardzhali Carbon-In-Leach (CIL) processing plant (2011), which produces gold dore. The Alliance outlines the scope of a broad partnership that includes an option to earn a 50% beneficial interest in the Chala Mine, access to Gorubsos gold processing plant in Kardzhali, and the ability for Velocity to option any or all of Gorubsos exploration properties.

On Behalf of the Board of Directors

"Keith Henderson"

President & CEO

For further information, please contact:

Keith Henderson

Phone: +1-604-638-3456

E-mail: info@velocityminerals.com

Web: www.velocityminerals.com

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.

This news release does not constitute an offer of sale of any of the above-mentioned securities in the United States. The foregoing securities have not been and will not be registered under the United States Securities Act of 1933, as amended (the "1933 Act") or any applicable state securities laws and may not be offered or sold in the United States or to, or for the account or benefit of, U.S. persons (as defined in Regulation S under the 1933 Act) or persons in the United States absent registration or an applicable exemption from such registration requirements. This news release does not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to buy nor will there be any sale of the foregoing securities in any jurisdiction in which such offer, solicitation or sale would be unlawful.

CAUTIONARY STATEMENT REGARDING FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS: This news release includes certain forward-looking statements within the meaning of applicable Canadian and U.S. securities legislation, including the United States Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. All statements, other than statements of historical fact, included herein including, without limitation, statements regarding the use of proceeds from the Financing and funds on hand, the Company's future exploration and testing carried out on the Rozino, Chala and Sedefche projects and the future business and operations of Velocity are forward-looking statements. Often, but not always, forward-looking statements can be identified by words such as pro forma, plans, expects, may, should, budget, scheduled, estimates, forecasts, intends, anticipates, believes, potential or variations of such words including negative variations thereof, and phrases that refer to certain actions, events or results that may, could, would, might or will occur or be taken or achieved. In making the forward-looking statements in this news release, the Company has applied several material assumptions, including without limitation, that market fundamentals will result in sustained gold demand and prices, the receipt of any necessary permits, licenses and regulatory approvals in connection with the future exploration and development of its Bulgarian projects in a timely manner, the completion of the Financing, the continued operation of the Chala Gold mine, the continuation of the Alliance and the Companys ability to comply with environmental, health and safety laws.

Forward-looking information involves known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause the actual results, performance or achievements of the Company to differ materially from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements. Such risks and other factors include, among others, lack of investor interest in the Financing, operating and technical difficulties in connection with mineral exploration and development and mine development activities for the Rozino, Chala and Sedefche projects, including the geological mapping, prospecting and sampling programs for same, the fact that the Companys interests in the Rozino, Chala and Sedefche projects (and its other Bulgarian exploration properties) are options only and there is no guarantee that the Company's interests in same, if earned, will be certain, actual results of exploration activities, completion of a PEA on the Rozino project, the completion of due diligence and a Feasibility Study for the Sedefche project, estimation or realization of mineral reserves and mineral resources, the timing and amount of estimated future production, costs of production, capital expenditures, the costs and timing of the development of new deposits, the availability of a sufficient supply of water and other materials, requirements for additional capital to fund the Company's business plans, future prices of precious metals, changes in general economic conditions, changes in the financial markets and in the demand and market price for commodities, possible variations in ore grade or recovery rates, possible failures of plants, equipment or processes to operate as anticipated, accidents, labour disputes and other risks of the mining industry, delays in obtaining governmental and regulatory approvals (including of the TSX Venture Exchange for the Financing), permits or financing or in the completion of development or construction activities, changes in laws, regulations and policies affecting mining operations, hedging practices, currency fluctuations, title disputes or claims limitations on insurance coverage and the timing and possible outcome of pending litigation, environmental issues and liabilities, risks related to joint venture operations, and risks related to the integration of acquisitions, as well as those factors discussed under the heading "Risk Factors" in the Company's annual management's discussion and analysis and other filings of the Company with the Canadian Securities Authorities, copies of which can be found under the Company's profile on the SEDAR website at www.sedar.com. Information concerning mineral resource estimates also may be considered forward-looking statements, as such information constitutes a prediction of what mineralization might be found to be present if and when a project is actually developed and/or is in production. The actual results or performance by the Company could differ materially from those expressed in, or implied by, any forward-looking statements relating to those matters.

Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. The Company undertakes no obligation to update any of the forward-looking statements in this news release or incorporated by reference herein, except as otherwise required by law.NEW ORLEANS, March 22, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- First Bauxite Corporation (First Bauxite or the Company) (TSX-V:FBX) (FRANKFURT:FBI) (BERLIN:FBI) is pleased to announce that it has completed independent third party testwork on the final industrial scale trial production campaign of ultra high strength proppant (UHSP-11).



Ceramic Proppant (UHSP-11)

During the period April 2016 to November 2017, First Bauxite shipped 5,600mt of bauxite ore from its Bonasika deposits in Guyana to a ceramic proppant plant in Shanxi Province, China for processing into UHSP-11. Three trials were conducted over July 2016 to January 2017 to optimise plant and process conditions. These trials, as previously disclosed, provided encouraging results but due to processing challenges did not result in a product that was considered to be ready for this competitive market. A final production trial was conducted over August to November 2017 and approximately 800mt of conforming UHSP-11 was produced and shipped to a warehouse in New Orleans.

Representative samples from the final production trial were sent to two independent recognised proppant testing laboratories in the USA and one independent recognised proppant testing laboratory in the UK for long term conductivity and permeability testing. The testwork results from the industrial scale production trials confirmed earlier favourable R&D results that, compared to the market leading ultra high strength proppant products, UHSP-11 had:

superior strength

superior conductivity

comparable sphericity and roundness

The technical data sheet for UHSP-11 has been updated and is available on the Companys website (www.firstbauxite.com).

Discussions are being held with oil and gas operators and service companies on conducting market trials in offshore deepwater wells. While this is a relatively small market at the time, the Company believes it has the potential for significant medium-term growth.

Sintered Refractory Bauxite

In addition, the Company is also focusing its development activities on sintered refractory bauxite following some major fundamental changes on the supply side of the market. Enforcement of strict environmental regulations by the Chinese Central Government has led to the closure of significant numbers of sintered refractory bauxite plants in China (some on a permanent basis). This has been compounded by bauxite mine closures and a growing shortage of high quality Chinese bauxite ore. China is the largest supplier of sintered refractory bauxite and accounts for over 90% of the worlds production. First Bauxite conducted a small scale production trial processing 260mt of bauxite ore from its Bonasika deposits into sintered refractory bauxite in a refractory bauxite plant in Europe. The results compared favourably to the market leading sintered refractory bauxites from China and Guyana and further large scale production trials are planned.

Bonasika Production Campaign and Government of Guyana (GOG) Approvals

The GOG has granted approval for First Bauxite to ship up to 40,000mt of bauxite ore to Europe, Asia and North America for further industrial scale product and market development activities in ceramic proppants and sintered refractory bauxite. Two mining contractors have been engaged and mine production commenced at First Bauxites Bonasika deposits in March 2018.

The Company will provide additional business updates as further progress is achieved on the various activities discussed above.

On behalf of the Board of Directors of First Bauxite Corporation

Alan Roughead

President & CEO

About First Bauxite

First Bauxite Corporation (TSX-V:FBX) is a Canadian natural resources company engaged in the exploration and development of bauxite deposits in Guyana, South America. The Company intends to produce and sell bauxite raw ore from its facility in Guyana and intends to produce sintered refractory products and ceramic proppants for the refractory and energy industries in the future. The Company has its head office in New Orleans, Louisiana and is managed by experienced professionals with worldwide experience in the global industrial minerals industry across a number of industrial minerals. For further information on First Bauxite Corporation, please visit our corporate website at www.firstbauxite.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.

Certain statements contained herein constitute forward-looking statements. Forward-looking statements look into the future and provide an opinion as to the effect of certain events and trends on the business. Forward-looking statements may include words such as will, anticipates, believes, intends, expects and similar expressions. These statements include, but are not limited to, statements regarding the continued advancement of the Bonasika Project, the Companys development plans and the Companys outlook for potential growth in the use of UHSP-11 in offshore deepwater wells. These forward-looking statements are based on current expectations and entail various risks and uncertainties. Actual results may materially differ from expectations, if known and unknown risks or uncertainties affect the Companys business, or if the Companys estimates or assumptions prove inaccurate. Factors that could cause results or events to differ materially from current expectations expressed or implied by the forward-looking statements, include, but are not limited to, effect of capital market conditions and other factors on capital availability, availability of sufficient financing to fund planned or further required work in a timely manner and on acceptable terms, continuing support of the Government of Guyana for the Bonasika Project; execution of the Companys existing plans as budgeted, including development programs for the Bonasika Project, which may change due to changes in the views of the Company or if new information arises which makes it prudent to change such budget, plans or programs, including the results of future trials and testwork or any inability to reproduce test results on a commercial scale or in the field, and other risks affecting the Company or the mining industry more fully described in the Companys continuous disclosure documents, which are available under the Companys profile on SEDAR at www.sedar.com. Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on the forward-looking statements contained in this press release. Except as required by law, the Company assumes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statement, whether as a result of new information, future events or any other reason.

For further information please contact:

First Bauxite Corporation

Telephone: +592-223-4396

Email: info@firstbauxite.com

Website: www.firstbauxite.comSTORY UPDATED: check for updates below.

Was Sean Madison, a scuba diver aged 22, hospitalized in Hawaii after inserting his manhood into a giant clam during a dive? You may have read an online report about that but it never happened, the whole thing was made up by a satire website so it is not true.

The original story was published on March 22, 2018 with the headline "Hawaii: Scuba diver hospitalized after his penis gets stuck in giant clam" (archived here) and opened:

Pahala, HI | A scuba diver is being hospitalized at Ka'u hospital on the island of Hawaii after he inserted his penis into a giant clam while recreational diving.

Sean Madison, 22, was transported to Ka'u hospital after suffering from severe breathing complications, vomiting, extreme swelling and low blood pressure. Doctors believe physical contact with the giant mollusk may have triggered his allergy to seafood and exposed him to high levels of arsenic. Madison, 22, whose condition has stabilized, said he inserted his penis inside the clam as a prank to impress his friend, Thomas Meyer.

For once the real story behind the picture is even more bizarre than the fake article: it shows 18-year-old Austin Hatfield, a Florida man who got bitten in the face by his pet snake when he tried to kiss it.

As usual, the post from World News Daily Report looked quite convincingly real on social media:

Hawaii: Scuba diver hospitalized after his penis gets stuck in giant clam Pahala, HI | A scuba diver is being hospitalized at Ka'u hospital on the island of Hawaii after he inserted his penis into a giant clam while recreational diving. Sean Madison, 22, was transported to Ka'u hospital after suffering from severe breathing complications, vomiting, extreme swelling and l

But the website World News Daily Report is a well known satire website specialized in posting hoaxes and made up stories. The disclaimer on their website is pretty clear about that even though you have to scroll all the way down the page to find it:

World News Daily Report assumes all responsibility for the satirical nature of its articles and for the fictional nature of their content. All characters appearing in the articles in this website - even those based on real people - are entirely fictional and any resemblance between them and any person, living, dead or undead, is purely a miracle.

It is run by Janick Murray-Hall and Olivier Legault, who also run the satirical Journal de Mourreal, a satirical site spoofing the (real) Journal de Monteal. Very often their stories feature an image showing a random crazy mugshot found in a mugshot gallery on the internet or on a stock photo website superimposed over a background of flashing police lights or crime scene tape.

Articles from the site are frequently copied (sometimes even months or years later) by varous fake news websites that omit the satire disclaimer and present the information as real.VANCOUVER, British Columbia, March 22, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- AbraPlata Resource Corp. ("AbraPlata" or the "Company") (TSX-V:ABRA) (OTCPK:ABBRF) (Frankfurt:1AH) announces that a total of 1,125,000 incentive stock options have been granted to directors, officers, employees and consultants of the Company. The stock options have an exercise price of CAD$0.20 per share and are exercisable for a period of five years from the date of grant. The stock options vest 25% immediately, 25% after six months, 25% after twelve months and 25% after eighteen months.



About AbraPlata

AbraPlata is a junior mining exploration company focused on delivering shareholder returns by unlocking mineral value in Argentina. The Company's experienced management team has assembled an outstanding portfolio of gold, silver and copper exploration assets, and is focused on advancing its flagship Diablillos silver-gold property, with an indicated resource of 80.9M oz Ag and 732k oz Au, through the various stages of feasibility. In addition, AbraPlata owns the highly prospective Cerro Amarillo property with its cluster of five mineralized Cu-(Mo-Au) porphyry intrusions located in a mining camp hosting the behemoth El Teniente, Los Bronces, and Los Pelambres porphyry Cu-Mo deposits. Further exploration work is also planned for the Companys Samenta porphyry Cu-Mo property, located south of First Quantum's TacaTaca project, as well as its Aguas Perdidas Au-Ag epithermal property.

ON BEHALF OF THE BOARD

ABRAPLATA RESOURCE CORP.

"Willem Fuchter"

Willem Fuchter

President and Chief Executive Officer

For further information concerning this news release, please contact:

Willem Fuchter

President & Chief Executive Officer

AbraPlata Resource Corp.

Tel: +54.11.5258.0920

E-mail: willem@abraplata.com Rob Bruggeman

Investor Relations

AbraPlata Resource Corp

Tel: +1.416.884.3556

Email: rob@abraplata.com

This news release includes certain "forward-looking statements" under applicable Canadian securities legislation. Forward-looking statements are necessarily based upon a number of estimates and assumptions that, while considered reasonable, are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties, and other factors which may cause the actual results and future events to differ materially from those expressed or implied by such forward-looking statements. All statements that address future plans, activities, events or developments that the Company believes, expects or anticipates will or may occur are forward-looking information. There can be no assurance that such statements will prove to be accurate, as actual results and future events could differ materially from those anticipated in such statements. Accordingly, readers should not place undue reliance on forward-looking statements. 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, except as required by law.



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.As of August 26th, 2021 Yahoo India will no longer be publishing content. Your Yahoo Account Mail and Search experiences will not be affected in any way and will operate as usual. We thank you for your support and readership. For more information on Yahoo India, please visit the FAQOLYMPIA, Wash., March 22, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Dan Swecker, Executive Director of the Washington Fish Growers Association (WFGA), has issued the following statement regarding todays signing into law of HB 2957 and Governor Inslees line item veto of Section I which calls for a scientific study.



As the leading trade association representing Washingtons multi-million-dollar finfish aquaculture industry, WFGA is deeply disappointed by Governor Inslees failure to take science into consideration by signing into law HB 2957. Our organization holds the positionsupported by leading fisheries scientiststhat this law completely lacks any scientific basis.

We are additionally dismayed by the fact that in early March of this year, a group of concerned scientists reached out to the state legislature, refuting the basis of HB 2957 and outlining the best peer-reviewed science available to date. In an Open Letter to the State Legislature, nine leading fisheries scientists challenged the key assumptions in HB 2957 having to do with purported interbreeding between Atlantics and native species, colonization, disease transfer, and competition for food. In passing HB 2957 by a 31-16 vote, it was clear that the legislature chose to ignore the science in favor of other political considerations.

After the vote, we reached out to Governor Inslee, urging him to veto HB 2957.

At the same time, the signatories to the Open Letter to the legislature requested a meeting with the Governor. While the Governor was not available to meet, a small group of scientists met with the Governors staff to present the science and request that the Governor veto the most troublesome sections of HB 2957 or postpone implementation until the study in Section I was completed.

By the actions taken today by Governor Inslee, it is clear that science has taken a back seat to politics in our states natural resources policymaking.

Our association includes many Washington subsidiaries of international companies, representing all sectors of the seafood value chain, from egg producers to feed suppliers, equipment manufacturers, vaccine companies, technology companies, and producers of freshwater species such as trout and steelhead.

We are concerned that this ill-conceived and fundamentally flawed legislation may be sending the wrong message to companies seeking to do business in Washington.

While aquaculture in Washington state is small compared to our technology sector, aquaculture worldwide is a multi-billion business that provides much-needed protein to a growing world population. Today, aquaculture represents 60 percent of the worlds seafood supply, and those numbers are expected to continue growing. Washington state has great potential for producing sustainable aquaculture seafood, including salmon, trout, steelhead, black cod, Arctic charr, and halibut. However, todays action by Governor Inslee signals that, while Washington State may be open for business, it will no longer be open to culture of non-native species such as Atlantic salmon, which is the primary salmon species imported to the United States.

For more information, contact:

Dan Swecker, Executive Director

WFGA

www.wfga.net

360-489-4532



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Thank you for your support!New Delhi, Mar 22 (IBNS): Changi Airport Singapore achieved great success at the 2018 World Airport Awards, being voted by air travellers as the Worlds Best Airport for the sixth consecutive year.

This is the first time in the history of the awards that an airport has won this prestige title for six consecutive years.

Changi Airport was also the repeat winner of the award for the Best Airport Leisure Amenities.

The awards were held at Passenger Terminal EXPO in Stockholm, Sweden on 21st March 2018. The top 10 rankings for the Worlds Best Airport Award in 2018:

1 Singapore Changi 2 Seoul Incheon 3 Tokyo Haneda 4 Hong Kong 5 Doha Hamad 6 Munich 7 Centrair Nagoya 8 London Heathrow 9 Zurich 10 Frankfurt

Lee Seow Hiang, Chief Executive Officer of Changi Airport Group said, We are extremely honoured to be named World's Best Airport by Skytrax for the sixth consecutive year. It is a significant achievement for Changi Airport and spurs us to continue to deliver the best passenger experience for all who travel through Changi Airport. Last year, we successfully opened Terminal 4, and upgraded parts of Terminal 1. We are most grateful to the 50,000-strong airport community for their steadfast support through the years and as we continue to upgrade the airports infrastructure."

"Their unwavering commitment and passion for service excellence are what underpins Changi Airports success. As we anticipate the opening of Jewel Changi Airport next year, we will continue to work closely with our partners to deliver the best of experiences to our passengers. We thank our passengers and partners alike for their continued support and confidence in us.

Edward Plaisted, CEO of Skytrax said: To be voted the World's Best Airport for the sixth consecutive year is fabulous achievement for Changi Airport, and this award yet again demonstrates the airport's popularity with international air travellers. Changi Airport is very focussed on making the airport experience comfortable and convenient, and continues to innovate with new product and service features. Being named the Worlds Best Airport provides great recognition for every member of staff at the airport who contribute to Changi Airports success.

Changi Airport also received the awards for the Worlds Best Airport Leisure Amenities, and the Best Airport in Asia.Islamabad, Mar 22 (IBNS): Pakistan has condemned the suicide blast in Pakistan that has killed at least 29 people.

"Pakistan strongly condemns today's reprehensible suicide attack close to Ali Abad hospital and Kabul University. We are grieved at the loss of precious and innocent lives in this brutal attack of terrorism," a statement from Pakistan's Foreign Ministry read.

"We express our deepest sympathies and condolences to the bereaved families and pray for the speedy recovery of the injured," it said.

"Pakistan reiterates its unequivocal condemnation of terrorism in all forms and manifestations and expresses solidarity with the government and people of Afghanistan in their fight against the menace of terrorism," read the government statement.

At least 29 people were killed in a suicide attack in Afghanistan's Kabul city on Wednesday, media reports said.

The incident left 52 others injured.

According to reports, the blast hit the limits of third Police District near to Kart-i-Sakhi area at around 12 pm.

Nasratullah Rahimi, deputy spokesman of the Ministry of Interior (MoI) told Pajhwok Afghan News that 29 people have been killed and 52 other wounded.

He told the Afghanistan news agency that the killed people were all civilians.

An investigation into the incident is currently going on.

Waheedullah Majroh, spokesman for the Ministry of Public Health (MoPH), told Pajhwok Afghan News 29 people were killed and 52 other wounded in todays suicide blast.

As per media reports, the explosive was placed in a motor cycle.

Faizullah told the Afghanistan news agency: "The motorbike rider rammed into the crowd of people who returned from gathering in Kart-i-Sakhi and detonated the explosives.

No group has claimed responsibility for the attack so far.

Image: UN websiteA former senior manager at Facebook says hundred of millions of users of the social media site could have had their personal data harvested by companies that used methods similar to those utilised by the person who passed on data to research firm Cambridge Analytica.

Sandy Parakilas, who was platform operations manager at the company from 2011 to 2016 and now works as a product manager for Uber, told The Guardian that he had told senior executives the firm's approach to data security would prove a major risk.

In recent days, Facebook has had to battle claims that data breaches led to information about 50 million of its users being siphoned off by Cambridge Analytica, a voter-profiling company that worked on Donald Trumps election campaign.

The company has contested this, saying that the data exfiltration was due to a feature in an app. The allegations about Cambridge Analytica were made by a former employee, Christopher Wylie, and reported by London's The Observer and The New York Times over the weekend.

The data was collected in 2014 by Aleksandr Kogan, a researcher, using an app that requested people to take a personality test for academic research.

Parakilas, who was tasked with looking into data breaches by developers, was quoted as saying: "My concerns were that all of the data that left Facebook servers to developers could not be monitored by Facebook, so we had no idea what developers were doing with the data."

He said the recent disclosures had left him disappointed with his bosses for not acting on his admonitions.

It has been painful watching because I know that they could have prevented it," he said.

Parakilas alleged that Facebook had no control over data given to outside developers: "Zero. Absolutely none. Once the data left Facebook servers there was not any control, and there was no insight into what was going on.

He said one executive at the company had advised him against looking too carefully at how data was being used.

Parakilas said he was told, "Do you really want to see what youll find?, a comment he took to mean that, Facebook was in a stronger legal position if it didnt know about the abuse that was happening."The SBU team are working at the scene, interviewing the perpetrator.

A 28-year-old man carrying explosives has been detained by law enforcers at Zhytomyrska metro station in Kyiv.

"A Kyiv native, born in 1990, has been detained by police at Kyiv's Zhytomyrska metro station. He was heading toward the city center and carried about 100 grams worth of TNT, as well as C4 explosive, fuses and detonators," Kyiv Police Department chief Andriy Kryshchenko wrote on Facebook.

Read alsoAustin bomber dead - mediaAccording to Kryshchenko, the team of the SBU Security Service of Ukraine are working at the scene, interviewing the detainee.Agape LA Hosts Holy Week Events

Rev. Dr. Melvin Wade

Rev. Johnteris Tate

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The death and resurrection of Christ Jesus will be observed several spirit-filled services hosted by Agape Church of Los Angeles, located at Consolidated Plaza, 3725 Don Felipe Dr., in Los Angeles.

Inviting the public to attend, Bishop Craig A. Worsham, senior pastor, announced that some of L.A.s leading ministers will headline each service.

These Holy Week Worship opportunities are sure to inspire your soul as we reflect on the Love of God and the sacrifice of His son Jesus, said Worsham. Powerful preaching and singing will center and focus us on the true meaning of the Resurrection.

The Rev. Dr. E.V. Hill II will deliver the message at the Good Friday Worship on March 30, at 12 p.m. Hill is the pastor of Mount Zion Baptist Church of Los Angeles.

At 7 p.m., the Gospel Music Workshop of America Los Angeles Chapter will present the Daily Bread Good Friday Service. Worsham chairs the GMWA Evangelistic Ministry and the Rev. Calvin Bernard Rhone is the chapter representative. The Rev. Johnteris Tate, pastor of Mount Moriah Baptist Church, and the Rev. Dr. Melvin V. Wade, Sr., pastor emeritus of Mount Moriah and GMWA national board member, will preach.

Agape LA has designated Palm Sunday, March 25, as Friends and Family Day. Following the 11 a.m. worship service, the Taste of Agape will take place.

The entire community can enjoy music, fun and fellowship along with delectable culinary treats prepared by Agape member, Chef Lonnell Anderson, Worsham said.

The Holy Week activities conclude on Resurrection Sunday, April 1, with worship at 11 a.m., and Easter Brunch after the service

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To learn more, call (323) 295-5571 or visit agapela.org.Call 2 Worship  March 22

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Zoe Christian Fellowship of L.A. hosts a Community Health and Fitness Fair on March 24, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., at 2521 Westview St., in Los Angeles, said Bishop Frank Stewart, pastor. The event includes free screenings for blood pressure and glucose, health and fitness seminars and many exhibitors. Also, Dr. Romeo Brooks of Roots Nutrition in Inglewood will discuss the benefits of good nutrition and fitness. For information, call (323) 547-0585.

Second AME Church presents The Mens Singsation on March 25, at 3 p.m., at 5500 S. Hoover St., on Los Angeles, said Pastor Carolyn Baskin-Bell. Brother Dimitri Nickleberry will direct Seconds Male Chorus and several local Male Choruses will participate.

Berean Seventh Day Adventist Church sponsors Gods Closet featuring free clothing on April 8, from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., at 4211 W. Adams Blvd., in Los Angeles. Free breakfast will also be available. The entrance donation is $1. To learn more or contribute new or gently used clothes, (310) 622-3806

Carson Community Deliverance Center Church holds a Womens Prayer Service on April 15, at 10 a.m., at 555 E. 220th St., in Carson. The public is invited to attend for worship and prayer. For information, call (310) 835-7905.

The Company plans The Launch: Genesis Mission Possible, a womens empowerment seminar, on April 18, at 9 a.m., at The Reef on the Water, 880 Harbor Scenic Drive in Long Beach, said the Rev. Dr. Beverly Crawford, co-host. The event aim to identify, support and empower women desiring to start a new venture or business that contributes to a sustainable future. The donation is $60. To register, visit regonline.com/company2018.GLAAACC Honors Heroes During Womens History Month

During Womens History Month, the Greater Los Angeles African American Chamber of Commerce (GLAAACC) will acknowledge the contributions of three local women trailblazers: Avis Ridley-Thomas, co-director of the Institute for Nonviolence in Los Angeles and Days of Dialogue; Capri Maddox, Special Assistant City Attorney for the City of Los Angeles; and Christine Keith, president of Elite Auto Network. These women will be recognized at GLAAACCs 25th Annual Economic Awards Dinner on Friday, March 30, at the JW Marriott L.A. Live, 900 West Olympic Boulevard, in downtown Los Angeles.

GLAAACCs Community Service Award will be presented to Avis Ridley-Thomas. Founder of the Los Angeles City Attorneys Dispute Resolution Program in 1989, Ridley-Thomas served as its director until retiring in March 2011. The program specialized in mediation, violence prevention, cross cultural relations and has provided consultation, training and support to institutions, businesses, organizations and communities throughout Southern California.

Under Ridley-Thomas leadership, the Dispute Resolution Program grew from four staff members to over 2,000 volunteers who handled thousands of disputes annually. She continues her mission to train people in alternatives to force and violence in her current position as co-director of the Institute for Nonviolence in Los Angeles and Days of Dialogue.

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Only when a community begins to solve the deeper issues that create conflict can a healthier and more cooperative community emerge, said Ridley-Thomas, who is the wife of County Supervisor Mark Ridley- Thomas.

Special Assistant City Attorney Capri Maddox will receive GLAAACCs Lawyer of the Year Award. Maddoxs two decades of public service include two separate tenures in the City Attorneys office. She currently serves as a senior special advisor to City Attorney Michael Feuer, responsible for leading the City Attorney Business Support program, addressing key Neighborhood Council and City Council requests, and participating in criminal and civil cases.

During Maddoxs initial tenure, she served as Deputy City Attorney and received several complex assignments including the Neighborhood Prosecutor Program  LAPDs Wilshire Station and Central Trials  Criminal Branch. After her initial tenure in the City Attorneys office, Maddox was appointed by former Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa to serve as president of the Los Angeles Board of Public Works.

Christine Keith will be honored as GLAAACCs Member of the Year. Prior to becoming president of Elite Auto Network, Keith, a general practice physician, worked at a health clinic owned by her family. It was there that she had an opportunity to work with the Los Angeles Mission Centers HIV Outreach program on Skid Row. Seeing the overwhelming need for healthcare services, Keith converted her family practice to a free clinic and provided another location for the Los Angeles Mission to offer free medical care for underserved communities.

Her current role at Elite Auto Network, a business her husband started over 30 years ago while in college, also came from Keith spotting another unmet need  auto brokerage for commercial and fleet transportation.

Keith developed Elite Auto Networks commercial division, which she now oversees, working with corporate accounts such as Southern California Gas, Davey Tree Expert Company and LA Metro.

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Just as black history is American history, womens history is also American history, said GLAAACC Chairman Gene Hale. The efforts of these and otherwomen have provided the framework around which many of the successes in the African American community are built.

For more information on GLAAACCs 25th Annual Economic Awards Dinner, visit glaaacc.org, or call (323) 292-1297Haitians sue Trump administration over immigration policy

Haitian immigrants are suing President Donald Trump and Homeland Security officials, alleging racism influenced a decision to end a program allowing them to live and work legally in the U.S. after disasters in their home country.

The lawsuit filed Thursday in New York federal court is one of a handful nationwide challenging the Trump administrations decision to end temporary protected status for people from El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua and Sudan.

The latest case details how the Haitian-American community could be harmed if roughly 60,000 Haitians become subject to deportation.

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The dozen plaintiffs include Haiti Liberte, a New York-based weekly Haitian newspaper, where a leading journalist with the protected status may be forced to return home, the lawsuit said.

In Miami, the advocacy group Family Action Network Movement Inc. has had to divert resources from core services such as adult education and health care access to assist more Haitians fearing deportation. It also faces losing several activists who also are plaintiffs, the lawsuit said.

Six plaintiffs face separation from their U.S.-born children, while another plaintiff with cerebral palsy would lose medical care if separated from his brother who is a U.S. citizen, the lawsuit said.

The advocacy groups executive director, Marleine Bastien, said at a news conference in Miami that Haitians with the protected status make more contributions to the U.S. economy than they take.

The plaintiffs who are based in Florida are not here because they are working. They have to pay taxes. They cant rely on charity, she said.

The lawsuit claims U.S. Homeland Security officials failed to follow protocol when considering whether to renew protections granted to Haitian immigrants after a devastating earthquake struck their Caribbean country in 2010. Those protections were repeatedly extended until the Trump administration announced in November that Haitian recipients have until July 2019 to return home.

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Trump, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and Deputy Homeland Security Secretary Elaine Duke are named as defendants.

Instead of reviewing conditions in Haiti, including a cholera outbreak and destruction from Hurricane Matthew in 2016, Homeland Security officials sought to maintain stereotypes about blacks and immigrants committing crimes and receiving public assistance, the lawsuit said.

The lawsuit cites Trumps negative comments on immigration from his presidential campaign and separate reports that Trump said thousands of Haitians who came to the U.S. in 2017 all have AIDS, and that he used vulgar language to question why the country needed more immigrants from Haiti or from African countries instead of from countries like Norway. Trump has denied the comments.

The order to end temporary protected status for Haitians violates their due process rights because the termination was based on the Presidents categorical and defamatory assertions about all Haitians, which the Haitian TPS recipients were given no opportunity to challenge, the lawsuit said.

The NAACP and immigrant advocacy groups in California and Boston made similar allegations in previously filed lawsuits seeking reinstatement of temporary protected status for hundreds of thousands of immigrants.

Homeland Security spokeswoman Katie Waldman said in an email Thursday that the agency does not comment on pending litigation.Ida B. Wells: Troubling And Transforming The Waters

This month of special celebration of Black womens history brings to mind so many models of human excellence and achievement; so many way-openers and way-makers who opened and made ways for us, as a people, in our awesome march through human history. And surely in the sacred circle of these ancestors, there sits Mrs. Ida B. Wells-Barnett, a strong bright presence. Indeed, as the Husia says, she will always be for us a glorious spirit in heaven and a continuing powerful presence on earth. Her name shall endure as a monument and what she has done on earth shall never perish or pass away.

She was an awesome ancestor, one of those whose name we will always honor, whose praise poems we will always write and recite, and whose life is a book of lessons we will always read with reverence and pass on as a legacy of the highest value. Ida B. Wells-Barnett (July 16, 1862  March 25, 1931) was born during the Holocaust of enslavement and became orphaned at the age of sixteen when her mother and father died in a yellow fever epidemic. Resisting the separation and parceling out of her sisters and brothers, she decided, against all odds and advice, to quit school, get a job and take care of them. It was a sign of the commitment, courage and will that would carry her through and beyond the many difficulties and fierce opposition she would face. And she rose in the ranks of African American leadership through an extraordinary combination of intellect, strategic planning, insightful writing, hard work in critical areas, audacious self-assertion, admirable resiliency and an iron and resistant will.

Certainly, she lived in a critical period in Black history, the reversal of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow, Caveman Charlie and Beast-Lady Lynch, savage White terrorism and the brutal burning of Black towns, and racist mob murder as a way of life. It is her work in the muck and mire of this racist South and compliant North that Ida B. Wells came into her own and taught us audacious African ways to walk, work, struggle and stand tall in the world.

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Wells-Barnett was a tireless journalist, organizer, lecturer, teacher and activist in numerous organizations and had collaborated with the major leaders of her time. Her ideas foreshadowed and prefigured womanist, Black Power, armed self-defense, civil and human rights, and related discourse in our contemporary conversations. In fact, she made a major contribution to Africana womanism which is clear in her commitment to self-definition, ethical grounding, male/female partnership in equality, family, community and social action. It is obvious also in her refusal to place in conflict the liberation of Black people and the liberation of Black women. Indeed, she insisted on joining the two in a total liberation of all, as exemplified in her work with her husband and partner in struggle, Ferdinand Barnett.

Embodying the self-defining womanist, she asked in an article on the mission and meaning of women, What is or should be woman? And she answered: Not merely a bundle of flesh and bones, nor a fashion plate, a frivolous inanity, a boundless doll, a heartless coquette  but a strong, bright presence, thoroughly imbued with a sense of her mission on earth and a desire to fill it; an earnest, soulful being, laboring to fit herself for lifes duties and burdens, and bearing them faithfully when they come; but a womanly woman for all that 

It is this stance as an aware, socially active, self-assertive, and womanly woman, willingly bearing the burdens and obligations at hand, that was a source of the inner strength that gave her courage to struggle for both racial and gender justice. These struggles were pursued in her work as an organizer, institution-builder, anti-lynching, civil rights and human rights advocate and in her collaborating with other leaders whose names we know and also honor  Douglass, DuBois, Garvey, Bethune, Terrell, Randolph.

Wells-Barnett was a race woman, uncompromisingly committed to the freedom and well-being of her people. Like Marcus Garvey, whom she admired and who admired her, she was for race first. She argued there was no substitute for unity, self-help, self-reliance, and constant struggle. And she stressed strong community institutions, the essentiality of education and economic strength, constant vigilance and ceaseless struggle.

In an article, Freedom of Political Action, she criticized African Americans for being too tied to one party or the other without critical assessment. Prefiguring a similar position of Malcolm X, she declared she was neither a Democrat nor Republican, but an African American seeking justice and freedom for her people.

Wells-Barnett also argued against uncritical allegiance to leaders and for critical assessment of leadership in terms of how it furthered the objective desired above all others: the well-being of (Black people) as a race, morally, socially and intellectually. And in another article on Functions of Leadership, she asked of leaders how many of them are exerting their talents and wealth for the benefit or amelioration of the conditions of the masses? Moreover, she asked What material benefit is a leader, if he does not, to some extent, devote his time, talent and wealth to the alleviation of the poverty, and misery and elevation of his people?

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It is Ida B. Wells-Barnetts courageous, constant and uncompromising struggle against lynching which brought forth the best of her virtues and values, and reaffirmed her role as a leader of great merit and meaning. Clearly, she played a crucial and vanguard role in exposing the racist terrorism and savagery of lynching, traveling widely in the U.S. and speaking internationally. Her anti-lynching lectures and writings were vital witness against this brutal and barbaric practice. She defined lynching as a national crime, a color-line murder, and the cold-blooded savagery of White devils under lynch law.

Also, Wells-Barnett raised the issue of armed self-defense and argued that in other places lynching had been prevented by this strategy. She stated that The lesson this teaches and which every Afro-American should ponder well is that a Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every Black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give. Thus, long before Robert Williams and Malcolm X had argued the right to armed self-defense against murderous mobs in face of the failure of law, Wells-Barnett had raised the option publicly.

Ida B. Wells-Barnett was a towering woman and leader of her time, an extraordinary person which, as her Memphis Diary shows, was self-questioning, self-critical and caught up also in the ordinariness of life and living. And yet, she had a historic sense of herself and the moral meaning of the freedom struggle of her people. Her commitment, she said, was to constantly trouble the waters and transform the status quo. Indeed, an oppressor has no right to peace, if he dares to deny a peoples right to freedom and justice. And when we are attacked by the oppressor in our fight for freedom and justice, we are to remember her defiant words of wisdom: with me, it is not myself nor my reputation, but the life of my people which is at stake.

Dr. Maulana Karenga, Professor and Chair of Africana Studies, California State University-Long Beach; Executive Director, African American Cultural Center (Us); Creator of Kwanzaa; and author of Kwanzaa: A Celebration of Family, Community and Culture and Essays on Struggle: Position and Analysis, www.AfricanAmericanCulturalCenter-LA.org; www.OfficialKwanzaaWebsite.org; www.MaulanaKarenga.org.Estimados amigos,

Les doy cordialmente la bienvenida a este Blog informativo con articulos, analisis y comentarios de publicaciones especializadas y especialmente seleccionadas, principalmente sobre temas economicos, financieros y politicos de actualidad, que esperamos y deseamos, sean de su maximo interes, utilidad y conveniencia.

Pensamos que solo comprendiendo cabalmente el presente, es que podemos proyectarnos acertadamente hacia el futuro.

Gonzalo Raffo de Lavalle

Las convicciones son mas peligrosos enemigos de la verdad que las mentiras.

Quien no lo ha dado todo no ha dado nada.

Helenio Herrera

History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.

Karl Marx

If you know the other and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.

Sun Tzu









We are travelers on a cosmic journey, stardust, swirling and dancing in the eddies and whirlpools of infinity. Life is eternal. We have stopped for a moment to encounter each other, to meet, to love, to share.This is a precious moment. It is a little parenthesis in eternity.



Paulo CoelhoMake It Rain Shares Media Tips to Boost Your Brand

Building a bigger platform for your important issue or passion project is surprisingly achievable by following the techniques outlined in Make It Rain! How to Use Media to Revolutionize Your Business and Brand.

The new book, penned by attorney and childrens rights advocate Areva Martin, provides practical steps to utilizing the media to raise awareness about a matter and connect with people who have common interests.

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Already well known throughout the Los Angeles area for her legal and autism work, Martins profile catapulted in the last few years with her television appearances coast-to-coast, as an expert and commentator on legal, political, social and celebrity issues. While on this trajectory, she repeatedly encountered people who asked, I have something that Im really passionate about and Id love to connect with more people. How do I do it?

Being a person who believes in giving back to others, Martin realized she could help thousands who want to make a difference by sharing the methods she used to elevate the national conversation about developmental disabilities through her nonprofit, Special Needs Network, along with her experiences on national TV.

The book is really about showing people how to find their voice, how to amplify their voice, how to connect with people and how to really grow their power and influence, explained Martin.

It is sharing my personal experiences in working in all kinds of media, not just on TV, but using the myriad of media channels that are now available to all of us to really promote things that I care about.

In addition to detailing media promotion strategies, Martin offers tips to identify and define your message as well as how to make your voice distinguishable among the multitudes clamoring for attention.

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I talk about how you find your voice because a lot of people are confused about what is their voice. You turn on your TV, you turn on your computer, you turn on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, wherever you go, theres so much chatter or what some people call noise, she said.

But your people arent necessarily the tens of thousands of people in Little Rock, Arkansas. The question is, What is the message that you have and who are the people that youre trying to connect with? So the book really takes you through that exercise of identifying who are the people you really want to connect with.

Using her SNN organization as an example, Martin noted that her goals include raising funds for children with autism, increasing awareness around developmental disabilities for youth in underserved communities and influencing policymakers that can decide legislation that impacts children with autism.

For my autism organization, its not important to me that I really talk to people who care about saving the whales because Im not trying to save the whales. Make It Rain is a how-to book about branding and identifying your brand clearly and once you find your brand, you connect with the people that you want to communicate with and influence, Martin said, who added that the techniques in Make It Rain! can be implemented by small businesses and or applied to community initiatives.

Everybody doesnt need to be Barack Obama to have an impact. You can have an impact in your own community where you are. It could be your city, it could be your neighborhood, it could be your state or you may have a national profile, but its not imperative for everybody, she insisted.

This is not a book for somebody trying to be a star. This is for small business owners, entrepreneurs, activists, advocates, nonprofit leaders and everyday people who want to have an impact in their community and who want to have an impact on issues that they care about.

Martin will celebrate the release of Make It Rain! at the Rainmakers Book Event in Beverly Hills on Friday, March 30, from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. at The District By Hannah An, 8722 West 3rd St., in

Los Angeles. On Sat., March 31, she will moderate a Rainmakers Boss Lady Brunch Panel at USC Marshall School of Business located in Hoffman Hall, 701 Exposition Blvd., from 11 am to 1 pm. The program will feature five female entrepreneurs in a discussion on women in business, leadership and success and will include a book signing by Martin. Both events are open to the public. To register or for information, visitarevamartin.com.New Mt. Calvary Plans Anniversary, Resurrection Observances

The excitement is building as the New Mt. Calvary Missionary Baptist Church congregation prepares to mark their 55th anniversary.

The observance will be held on Sunday, March 25, at 7:30 p.m., and recognition of new members at 10:45 a.m. At 3:30 p.m., the grand celebration features preaching by Pastor Larry Weaver of Atherton Baptist Church.

Also, Pastor J. Benjamin Hardwick of Praises of Zion Baptist Church, Pastor Marcus Murchinson of Tree of Life Baptist Church, and Pastor David E. Cross of Greater Page Temple Church of God in Christ will participate.

We invite greater Los Angeles to celebrate with us with anointed praise, worship, words of inspiration, and a special historical unveiling. Truly, this will be a day to remember, said Pastor Sonja R. Dawson.

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New Mt. Calvary will continue to celebrate during their Resurrection Weekend 2018. Events begin on Thursday, March 29, at 7 p.m., with the Maundy Thursday and Communion Worship Experience. The service, centered around the theme, Women at the Cross, will feature preaching and teaching by Dawson, Evangelist Barbara Bryant, Pastor Najuma Smith Pollard, Pastor LaTanya Blake Allen and Pastor Doretha Cooper.

The 7 Last Words of Jesus Christ on the Cross will be presented at the Good Friday Service on Friday, March 30, at 12 p.m.

With great passion for Jesus Christ, the associate ministers of New Mt. Calvary will present the meaning and purpose of Jesus seven last words. If you have not attended this service, you have truly missed a treat, said Dawson.

On Saturday, March 31, the Annual Easter Fun Fest takes place for children from pre-school through sixth grade. Activities include an Easter Egg Hunt, arts and crafts, and a variety of games.

Resurrection Sunday services will be held on April 1, at 5:30 a.m., 7:30 a.m. and 10:45 a.m. Our celebration enters into a new dimension as we celebrate life more abundantly because of the resurrection of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, noted Dawson.

New Mt. Calvary Missionary Baptist Church is located at 402 E. El Segundo Blvd., in Los Angeles. To learn more, call (310) 324-0644 or visit newmtcalvary.org.U.S. Senators Doug Jones (D-Ala.) and Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) today announced that Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) will receive a 14-percent increase in federal funding in the Senates omnibus spending bill, from $244.7 million in FY17 to $279.6 million in FY18. The funding increase follows a request made by Senators Jones and Harris last month in a letter to the leadership of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies. Their letter was supported by 12 of their Senate colleagues and is copied below.

Alabamas fifteen Historically Black Colleges and Universities are integral to our world-class university system, said Senator Jones. Despite enrolling roughly 300,000 students each year nationwide, HBCUs have faced significant funding challenges, with some even forced to close their doors. These schools provide a path for so many first-generation college students, many of whom come from under-served backgrounds. I am proud that our efforts to increase federal support have been successful, and I will continue to advocate for these institutions that have done so much to help my constituents in Alabama and people across the country.

HBCUs are critical to the foundation of our higher education system, and provide opportunities for some of the nations most promising and deserving students, said Senator Harris. I am pleased funds in this bipartisan budget agreement will be invested in the future of these young people. Ensuring HBCUs have the federal support and resources they need to thrive for generations to come is one of my top priorities as a proud HBCU graduate.

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In addition to the increased funding for HBCUs, historically Black graduate institutions will also receive a 14-percent funding increase, from $63.3 million to $72.3 million. Predominantly Black Institutions will receive a boost from $9.9 million to $11.4 million.

Alabamas HBCUs generate $1.5 billion in total economic impact for the state. Additionally, more than 15,000 jobs are generated for local and regional economies, and increase their graduates lifetime earnings by 56 percent over what they would have earned without a college degree. Alabama is home to more HBCUs than any other state in the country.

On February 22, 2018 Senators Jones and Harris sent a letter with 12 of their colleagues to the Chairman and Ranking Member of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies requesting that the upcoming omnibus bill contain a restoration and increase in federal support to HBCUs. Joining Jones and Harris, the letter was signed by Senators Booker, Brown, Casey, Cardin, Carper, Coons, Durbin, Kaine, Nelson, Warner, Warren, and Van Hollen. In addition to the increase in funding, the bill contains a directive to the Secretary of Education to create and execute an outreach plan to work with States and the Capital Financing Advisory Board to improve outreach to States and help additional public Historically Black Colleges and Universities participate in the program.

Below is the text of their letter sent on February 22, 2018:

Dear Chairman Blunt and Ranking Member Murray:

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As you prepare to finalize the FY 2018 appropriations process, we request that you restore and increase federal support to our nations Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). This is a critical time to invest in HBCUs, which collectively enroll more than 300,000 students. HBCUs serve a unique and crucial educational purpose, providing a gateway to the middle class for many first-generation, low-income, and minority Americans. Further, an HBCU education has been the common thread that runs through the stories of many of our nations great leaders, innovators, and job creators.

HBCUs make substantial contributions to the nations economic strength. A recent report by UNCF found that HBCUs generate $14.8 billion in annual economic impact, as well as over 134,000 jobs, both on-campus and off. Having an HBCU degree lifted the lifetime earnings of their graduates by 56%  or an estimated $927,000  over what they would have earned without their degree.[1] Increased federal aid will only add to the job creating capacity of these institutions, and support even more students who will be able to reap the benefits of having a degree from an HBCU. We strongly support funds from the bipartisan budget agreement being invested in HBCUs, and ask for an additional investment for HBCU priorities in the final FY 2018 appropriations bill.

While there are many programs across the federal agencies that are important to HBCUs, we want to highlight two of the most pressing HBCU priorities:

Title III, Part B of the Higher Education Act, Strengthening Historically Black Colleges and Universities, is the key program providing institutional support for academic programs, student services, infrastructure, and technology needs at the 101 accredited HBCUs. Because HBCUs have traditionally been under-resourced, this formula-based program provides critical support to daily functions on campus as well as innovative efforts to produce graduates prepared for the modern, global workforce. The House and Senate appropriations bills each freeze discretionary funding at $245 million for the program, but given increasing needs to serve the most economically and academically vulnerable students, additional resources are required. We ask for an increase in funding in the FY 2018 appropriations bill to help bring the program closer to full funding.

HBCU Capital Financing Program

Despite the important role HBCUs play in higher education, they have struggled financially due to having smaller endowments, less money from alumni giving, and lower levels of federal investment. As a result, the infrastructure of many of these institutions has not kept pace with their growing student bodies and the demands of training students for careers in the 21st century. The HBCU Capital Financing Program provides HBCUs with access to capital financing or refinancing for the repair, renovation, and construction of campus infrastructure. To aid in the effectiveness of this program, we ask that in the FY2018 appropriations bill, that the subcommittee reclassify the escrow account as a bond insurance fund so that public institutions participating in the program have the opportunity to use state funds to pay off loans more quickly.

Thank you for your consideration.Sentinel Endorsement: Sydney Kamlager, Our choice for 54th Assembly

Los Angeles Community College District President Sydney Kamlager said in a statement released late last year, that she is excited about the prospect of representing residents of the 54th Assembly District in the State Capitol. Kamlager was one of four candidates who announced their intention to run when Sebastian Ridley- Thomas said he would step down from the position due to health concerns. Now, she is moving forward with an already prioritized agenda if she wins, which includes quality education and a healthier environment.

I am running because I love this district, Kamlager wrote on her candidate website.

I have worked in public service on behalf of the constituents of this great district for the past eight years, and in services for the district for 15 years. I want to lend my voice to the chorus of progressive leaders in Sacramento who are fighting to make this state more equitable, innovative, and true to its name as the golden state. My extensive work in our community has prepared me to be your representative in the state Capitol.

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Kamlager has served on the LACCD board for the last three years and in 2017, she was elected president of the Board of Trustees. It is the second time in the Districts 77 year history that an African-American woman was elected president of the Board. Prior to that, she was key consultant on the campaign to elect Holly J. Mitchell to State Assembly. Mitchell won and Kamalger became her district director. While in that capacity, she focused on strategic initiatives as well as on issues of higher education, restorative justice and the arts.

I am the only candidate in this race with the experience that allows me to hit the ground running once elected, Kamlager said.

As a policy maker and as a district director, I have the experience. I know how the state works. I have working relationships with other decision makers, stakeholders and community advocates. Many of the policies that I have championed are now in effect throughout the state

Running against Kamlager are Steve Dunwoody, and Dr. Tepring Piquado.

Sydney has proven herself as a policy leader and a strong advocate for community college students and faculty as a member and president on the LACCD Board of Trustees, said Senator Mitchell.

 Sydney has demonstrated her full appreciation of what it means to be a skilled public servant by taking care of the day-to-day community needs of the people of the 30th Senate District that I represent. The voters of the 54th Assembly District already know Sydney. They can confidently be assured that Sydney will deliver for them when they elect her to represent them in our State Capitol. I wholeheartedly and forthrightly endorse Sydney Kamlager-Dove for 54th Assembly District in 2018.

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U.S. Representative Karen Bass agreed.

Ive watched Sydney grow to become a highly effective policymaker for the L.A. Community College District while remaining a diligent district director for the California State Senate serving Sen. Holly Mitchell, she said.

Sydney has long been an advocate for women and children. She has the right attitude, temperament and progressive mindset we need in Sacramento, particularly in light of the policy challenges we face in California with an administration in the White House whose ultra-conservative polices pose a direct threat to health and human services that provide support to women, seniors and children. I look forward to working on federal-state matters with Sydney Kamlager-Dove when the voters for the 54th Assembly District elect her as their representative in Sacramento.

Kamlager listed her four priorities as education, criminal justice, healthcare and environmental improvements.South L.A. Prostitute Pleads Not Guilty to Federal Sex Trafficking Charges

A South Los Angeles prostitute known as Pretty Hoe on social media pleaded not guilty last Friday to federal sex trafficking charges that include allegations she attempted to enlist underage girls to work for her on the streets.

Melanie Denae Williams, 22, entered her plea before U.S. Magistrate Judge Alka Sagar, who set a tentative April 24 trial date.

Williams was named in a five-count indictment alleging one count of sex trafficking of an adult by force, fraud, or coercion; and two counts each of sex trafficking of a minor and enticement of a minor to engage in prostitution.

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Williams has been held without bond in a downtown federal lockup since she was taken into custody following her initial Christmas Eve arrest by local authorities, court papers show.

An affidavit outlines Williams alleged abuse of a woman she had recruited via social media to work as a prostitute. Williams allegedly ordered the unnamed victim to strip off her clothes, and then threw bleach on the woman and beat her with her hands and a broomstick, according to the affidavit.

Federal prosecutors also contend that Williams forced the suspected victim to tattoo Melanie on her face to show she was her property.

Williams  who has a large social media presence on Snapchat and Instagram  was sentenced last year to three months in jail for prostitution, according to the affidavit. She also refers to herself on social media as the most hated hoe in LA.

If convicted as charged, Williams faces a possible maximum sentence of life in federal prison, prosecutors said.Stewarts to Host Trip to Israel and Egypt

Bishop Frank and Lady Sandra Stewart of Zoe Christian Fellowship of Los Angeles will host a visit to the sacred sites located in Israel and Egypt.

The 12-day tour takes place Nov. 5 through Nov. 17, 2018, and the public is welcome to participate.

Israel is a place that every believer should go at least once in a lifetime. There are some scenes that add to the reality of Jesus life such as the walls of old Jerusalem, the street Jesus was taken to the cross, and the Jordan River, where I usually baptize believers, said Bishop Stewart, who will mark his eighth tour to Israel.

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In Egypt, we will visit the Nile River, the pyramids and the Cairo Museum. Also, we will go to south Egypt where the Nubians will wave and say, Welcome home, my Nubian cousin. This will be one trip that will stay in your mind forever, he insisted.

A $400.00 deposit will reserve your spot, said the bishop, who added, I will be so glad to have you with me on this tour. Pray about it. I am believing I will see you there!

For information, call 323-931-1477, ext. 103.Success On The Way Ask Dr. Jeanette: When Hatred Turns Good! Part 2

Jose was imprisoned because the wife of the king lied on him and said he wanted to rape her.[big, lying hussy!]

He lands in prison; locked up because of this lying woman! But, God will not be defeated! In prison, the prosecutor prison guard found favor in Jose and made him in charge over everything. Divine providence keeps Jose during all these really bad things. Jose would have dreams. He had two dreams where his brothers mother and father were bowing down to him. Wow! That made those hateful, aggressive brothers steeped in jealousy more so and having the designer, colorful coat too! His dream is fulfilled during his governorship. The king had a dream about a coming famine. Only Jose could interpret it. Jose was careful to glorify God for his gift to interpret dreams. He would seek Gods guidance for the interpretation. He was released from prison for interpreting the dream. The king elevated him to governorship over all the nation. He had sole authority to handle everything; the goods and the distribution thereof to all the people. He methodically made a plan in preparation for the coming famine, part of the kings dream. As years went on, the famine increased more severely. It was devastating. Hocob sent his ten sons to search for food. Meanwhile, Jose had come to be in charge of everything over the world in that region of Egypt. The ten brothers came seeking food. Jose concealed his identity. Accused them of being spies! Jose was shrewd. They had to prove they had changed their hearts. He knew of their evil ways.

Two of the brothers who saved Jose from being murdered, were not as cruel as the others. They bound him [hes about 17 years old] as he was screaming, kicking and pleading for his life! Imagine how terrible that was! His own brothers! Gods intervened; sent merchantmen to rescue him from the deep, dark cistern. They sold him into slavery for about $12.00. As governor, when the brothers came for food, Jose gets a chance to pay them back. He did not seek revenge; but rewarded them with brotherly love after giving them some tests of integrity. They had to bring Joses loved younger brother to see if they would kill him or do some dreadful deed to him also. They did not. Providence prevails. Hocob, brings the whole family to Egypt so they could move around in the land and be fed.

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Although the famine was severe, they survived. Jose is the savior here so to speak. He forgives his brothers and says what you meant for evil, God meant for good so we could be all saved. God turns hatred into good! Adversity to opportunity. [Based on Biblical truth]

Teach the Children.

Jeanette Grattan Parker, Superintendent/Founder Todays Fresh Start Charter School www.todaysfreshstart.org Will You Marry Me? Inquiring Minds Want To Know copyright. Copyright. All rights reserved.Tenants Facing Eviction in South L.A. After Transitional Housing Rental Scam Agree to Mediation

The nearly one dozen tenants facing eviction in South Los Angeles after a transitional housing manager failed to pay rent and abandoned the property will have to return to court after attorneys on both sides agreed to a continuance last Friday.

The Fri., Mar. 16 hearing was an effort to stop the eviction on the grounds that the tenants had had no notice of the unlawful detainer filed against the transitional housing manager who left and didnt tell them she was being evicted.

After neither side could come to an agreement in the hallway outside of Los Angeles Superior Courts Department 94 also known as Eviction Court, Judge Lisa K. Sepe-Wiesenfeld ordered the two parties back to court on Mar. 29. A mediation between the tenants, landlord and the city of Los Angeles Housing + Community Investment Department (HCIDLA) is scheduled for Mar. 27. If no agreement is made, the parties will return to court on Mar. 29.

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An issue is relocation money and time for the nearly one dozen tenants who were unaware that the woman they were renting rooms from in a dilapidated ramshackle house in Los Angeles on the border of Inglewood was being evicted.

Prior to Fridays court appearance, an offer of $50,000to be split evenly between the tenantswas at one time under consideration. That offer was followed up with $2,000 and 90 days to vacate. Both offers from the landlord, Izydor Wilchfort, came with the stipulation that the tenants must waive their right to sue him in the futuresomething the tenants say they shouldnt be made to do.

A letter sent to the tenants from the HCIDLA said that the tenants could be eligible for as much as $8,050 to $20,050 in relocation assistance.

Ms. Wilkerson did not pay the rent in response to the three-day-notice and was served a Summons and Complaint, explains Elena Popp with the Eviction Defense Network. Attached to the summons and complaint was a Prejudgment Claim of Right to Possession. No prejudgment claimants came forward because Ms. Wilkerson withheld the information. She agreed to give up possession in a Stipulation for Judgment. Because a prejudgment claim was served with the Summons and Complaint, even though Ms. Wilkerson never told any of the tenants about the service, there is no way for any of them to bring themselves into this litigation.

Popp sheds light on an old law that says landlords can evict everyone living in a home just by serving notice to one personeven if that one person doesnt tell the others, as is the case with Wilkerson and her subtenants.

This is a defect in the law, Popp continues. It is a complete violation of due process. The history of it is complicated but yes, our State Legislature has seen it fit to pass a law that allows a landlord to collude with a master tenant to evict all of the tenants and subtenants without due process. The owner knew or should have known that there were 12 tenancies here but was allowed to only serve Ms. Wilkerson. The court is taking the position that as subtenants, their claims are against Ms. Wilkerson, not against the owner. The owner has offered 60 days to move out if the tenants waive all their claims against the owner including any claims for relocation assistance.

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A 19-page city inspection report dated Feb. 20, from the HCIDLA shows dozens of violations were found at the house on Crenshaw. Among the citations were the use of an enclosed porch as a bedroom, broken windows, plumbing blockage, termites and dry rot, broken or missing electrical switches, loose guardrails, hazardous, unapproved, defected or improperly installed receptacle outlets, missing smoke detectors, defective or missing room heating appliances, unapproved plumbing, and dampness in rooms. In addition, there are visible signs of mold, roaches and bed bugs throughout the house.

The tenants of the house on Crenshawwhich include Social Security (SSI) and General Relief recipients, developmentally disabled, mentally ill, autistic, stroke victims, and working adults who just cant afford the high cost of rent in Los Angelessay that they rented beds shared rooms for between $175 to as much as $1,000 a month from Giovanna Wilkerson. Several tenants claim they were brought to or referred to Wilkerson by a hospital. One hospitals name that is repeatedly mentioned is Silver Lake Medical Center, an acute psychiatric hospital and mental health center in Rosemead.

According to the Department of Health Care Services (DCHS), there are some residential facilities that do not require licensure by DHCS, including cooperative living arrangements with a commitment or requirement to be free from alcohol and other drugs. These cooperative living arrangements may be referred to as sober living environments, sober living homes, transitional housing, or alcohol and drug-free housing.

Current and previous tenants say that in exchange for renting a bed, Wilkerson demanded access to their debit card numbers, pin codesincluding for their Electronic Benefit Transfer or EBT which is used in California is to issue food stamp and cash benefits to recipients. Tenants say she solicited them online, in front of the Department of Public Social Services and on Skid Row at homeless shelters including the Downtown Womens Center.

Wilkerson says her tenants are required to disclose their private financial information because people become dishonest.

We dont ask to [hold] onto cards as most program [sic] do. They will say their funds didnt hit the card, and attempt to live for free, smoke or drink their money up. Poor choices rather than housing being a priority.

An investigation into Wilkerson has produced several other homes in South L.A. where she is currently running what she calls a transitional housing or sober living program where she targets indigent and low-income people. In one home shes currently housing as many as 40 adults between two five-bedroom apartments on the same property. In another home in Watts where she keeps her office in the garage, Wilkerson is housing adults and families.

During a texting conversation in 2017 where Wilkerson was trying to convince a family to rent their South L.A. property to her, she bragged, Ive opened up 9 others homes while waiting on u [sic].

The family says she was super aggressive with them, reaching out regularly unsolicited for approximately the past five years trying to rent their properties but that they werent interested in her hustle.

Wilkersons tenants say she promised them transitional housing that included a clean living environment, meals, and even job assistance.

For her part, Wilkerson contends that the residents are not tenants and therefore the landlord-tenant law does not apply to them.

Im the Housing Director, they are participants, she said via text message.

About the programs the tenants say they were promised, Wilkerson responded, What services? We provide month-to-month housing. Guaranteed refrigerator and stove.

Current and past tenants have detailed how at times the electricity and or gas would be turned off for nonpayment in Wilkersons various homes.

Since the story first broke, numerous previous landlords and tenants have come forward about Wilkerson. A search of court documents shows that beginning in 2009, Wilkerson has had seven unlawful detainers filed against heralmost one every year. Several landlords have come forward and detailed how Wilkerson ran her business in their homes and then skipped out on paying the rent.

Not really concerned what the public thinks, Wilkerson said in an email on Tue. Feb. 27. The house on Crenshaw is in horrible condition, but it helped a lot of people. Some people loved the idea of being in a mansion, some grateful to [sic] being off the street, various situations [sic].

Ms. Wilkersons scam is made possible by the failure of city and county governments to address the lack of truly affordable housing, commented civil and human rights attorney and founder of the Crenshaw Legal Clinic and Justice Warriors for Black Lives Nana Gyamfi. Because they have made no effort to control rents and regulate landlords and allowed the displacement of thousands of people by developers and gentrifiers, vultures like Ms. Wilkerson are continuously swooping in and taking advantage of desperate people who are trying to keep from sleeping outside. All of the cities where Ms. Wilkerson has properties should be considered the proud sponsors of her exploitive enterprise.

Still facing eviction, the tenants of the Crenshaw house have established a Go Fund Me campaign to assist in paying their legal fees and to split whats left over among themselves to aid in their relocation. You can find it here: www.gofundme.com/help-victims-of-room-for-rent-scam.

Do you know Giovanna Wilkerson? If Ms. Wilkerson solicited you to rent from her or to rent to her or you rented to Ms. Wilkerson or rented from Ms. Wilkerson and youd like to share your experience please email [email protected]UC Regents Approve Tuition Hike for Non-Resident Students

The University of California Board of Regents voted last Thursday to increase tuition for non-resident students, although board members said the hike could be eliminated if the state increases funding for the system.

The board, on a 12-3 vote, approved a 3.5 percent increase in non- resident supplemental tuition, taking it from $28,014 in 2017-18 to $28,992 for 2018-19, a $978 increase.

Costs for non-resident students could increase again in two months, when the board may consider a 2.7 percent boost in the UC systems base tuition for both in-state and out-of-state students. The board delayed a vote on that increase pending discussions with the state Legislature about increased funding.

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Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, a gubernatorial candidate, urged the board to delay the decision on non-resident supplemental tuition as well, but the regents went ahead with the vote.

According to a staff report, UCLA, UC San Diego and UC Berkeley are especially reliant on the non-resident tuition fees. Thanks to the revenue, UCLA was able to increase space in key undergraduate courses by 26 percent, despite a decrease in funding from the state. UCSD, meanwhile, used the revenue to create a Teaching and Learning Commons and fund programs to boost diversity and graduation rates.

The boards vote included an amendment calling for the tuition hike to be rescinded if lobbying efforts at the Legislature lead to increased funding. But staffers said such an increase is unlikely.

As funding for campus services and programs is shifted to (non- resident supplemental tuition), the need for moderate and predictable increases to that revenue source becomes more important, according to a staff report. The university does not expect the state to provide additional support in 2018-19 to buy out the proposed NRST increase of $978 that was included in the universitys 2018-19 budget plan.Wal-Mart Sued Over Explicit Employee Photos

A Wal-Mart employee filed a revenge porn suit against her employer, saying the retail giant did nothing when she complained that a co-worker allegedly distributed sexually explicit photos of the plaintiff to their colleagues on the job.

The woman is identified only as Jane Doe in her Los Angeles Superior Court suit filed Thursday. Her suit names as additional defendants Flora Garcia Solares, who allegedly disseminated the photos, and their mutual former boyfriend, Wal-Mart associate worker Lamar Davenport, who she accuses of having given the images to Solares.

The suits allegations include revenge porn, harassment/hostile work environment, gender discrimination, retaliation, defamation and intrusion into private affairs. The suit seeks unspecified compensatory and punitive damages.

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A Wal-Mart representative could not be immediately reached.

The suit states that Doe, 51, was hired by Wal-Mart at the Crenshaw District store in 2009, then was transferred to the Torrance location when the Crenshaw store was closed in October 2016. Solares also worked at the Torrance store, according to the suit, which does not state whether Davenport also worked there or at another location.

Doe and Davenport were in a romantic relationship until March 2017, the suit states. Davenport had sought dates with Doe both before and after she was hired at Wal-Mart, the suit states.

Solares had also once been in a relationship with Davenport, the suit states.

The same month that Doe broke up with Davenport, he gave sexually explicit photos of the plaintiff to Solares, the suit states.

Solares sent copies of the photos along with harassing text messages to Doe, some of them extremely offensive remarks regarding plaintiffs anatomy, the suit states.

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Plaintiff was mortified to receive these images and messages from a co-worker, the suit states.

Unknown to the plaintiff at the time, Solares also began circulating the photos to their co-workers during work hours and made foul comments about the plaintiffs alleged sexual conduct, the suit states.

Doe complained about Solares on the company hotline, but months passed without Wal-Mart taking action, the suit states. However, she eventually was ordered to a meeting with the store manager, where she found out that Solares had been showing the photos of her to others in the workplace, the suit states.

Plaintiff immediate felt mortified at this revelation, the suit states.

The store manager also alleged Doe was recorded on video making an obscene hand gesture toward Solares, the suit states.

Doe denies making the gesture and the manager refused her request to see the video, saying that doing so would violate company policy, according to the suit.

To date, Wal-Mart has taken no action addressing plaintiffs complaints regarding sexual harassment from Solares, the suit alleges.

Boko Haram kidnappers have returned almost all the 110 girls they seized from a Nigerian school a month ago. The Islamist militants also gave the town of Dapchi a warning before leaving, witnesses said Wednesday.

The extremists said, We did it out of pity. And dont ever put your daughters in school again.

The militants and hostages had arrived in nine vehicles. The girls were freed in the center of town.

Nigerian officials say 101 of the students had been freed. They said nine girls are still missing.

Information minister, Lai Mohammed, said no payment was made for the release. He said it happened through, in his words, the help of some friends of the country. He also said there were no conditions for the release. He said a decision against military confrontation was part of the agreement.

Bashir Manzo had a 16-year-old daughter who was among those kidnapped during the February 19 attack. He confirmed that she was among those freed. He said that everyone in Dapchi is very happy right now.

Memories of Chibok

In 2014, Boko Haram kidnapped 276 girls from a school in the northern town of Chibok. About 100 of them never returned. Some were forced to marry men in Boko Haram. Many have had children since then.

Many people believe a different Boko Haram group linked to the Islamic State carried out the February kidnapping. The suspected group has criticized the leader of the main Boko Haram organization for targeting civilians. They have directed their attention to military and Western targets instead.

People fled Dapchi Wednesday morning when they heard that Boko Haram vehicles were driving toward the town.

One man, Umar Hassan told the AP, We fled but, from our hiding, we could see them and surprisingly, we saw our girls getting out of the vehicles.

Another townsperson, Kachallah Musa, said the extremists talked to the girls, and then left without any conflict.

The information minister told reporters that the girls were currently at a hospital in Dapchi.

On Tuesday, Amnesty International accused the Nigerian military of failing to act to prevent the attack last month. The report said the military had received several warnings the attack was coming. The military says the report is untrue.

Im Jonathan Evans.

Haruna Umar and Ismail Alfa Abdulrahim originally wrote this story for the Associated Press. Phil Dierking adapted the story for VOA Learning English. Caty Weaver was the editor.

How should these towns prevent these kidnappings in the future? We want to hear from you. Write to us in the Comments Section or on our Facebook page. _____________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

pity  n. a strong feeling of sadness or sympathy for someone or something

confrontation  n. a situation in which people, groups, etc., fight, oppose, or challenge each other in an angry wayA Brazilian official says water restrictions in Brasilia will end by December, when an expanded supply system will be completed.

United Nations officials say Brasilia, the capital of Brazil, is one of a growing number of cities with water shortages.

A U.N. report says water is in demand around the world as temperatures on Earths surface rise and demand grows along with populations.

The report was released this week at the World Water Forum in Brasilia. The conference has been described as the worlds largest water-related event.

Federal District Governor Rodrigo Rollemberg spoke at a panel discussion on Tuesday at the forum. He described water shortages as a worldwide problem.

Here in Brasilia, it is no different, he added.

The public water supply has less water because of low rainfall as well as fast and disorderly growth in Brasilia, which is part of the Federal District, Rollemberg said.

In January 2016, after three years of little rain, district officials began limiting how much water people could use.

The governments of the Federal District and the nearby state of Goias also gave $166 million to develop water infrastructure.

When work is completed, the expanded water supply will provide 2,800 liters of water per second to the Federal Districts 3 million people, and the same amount to Goias, said Rollemberg.

About 16 percent of Brazils 5,570 cities have water problems, the federal government said.

Demand around the world is expected to increase by nearly one-third by 2050. By then, 5 billion people could be left with poor access to water, the U.N. warned in its 2018 World Water Development Report.

To avoid such a crisis, U.N. officials called for nature-based solutions that use or copy natural processes that should be used to increase water availability. They said solutions could include changing farming methods so fields keep more moisture and nutrients, collecting rainwater, and protecting wetlands. The officials also proposed reestablishing floodplains and said that plants could be grown on housetops.

Such proposals will become more important as water industries grow.

By 2025, the worldwide demand for agriculture is expected to rise by about 60 percent, and energy production by around 80 percent, the report also said.

I'm Susan Shand.

Karla Mendes reported this story for the Reuters news agency. Susan Shand adapted her story for VOA Learning English. George Grow was the editor.

Write to us in the Comments Section or on our Facebook page.

________________________________________________________________

Words in This Story

infrastructure  n. the basic equipment and structures (such as roads and bridges) that are needed for an area to operate

per  prep. by the way of

access  n. permission or ability to enter; the right or ability to do something

moisture  adj. a small amount of a liquid (such as water) that makes something wet

floodplain  n. land that may be covered by floodwatersWall Street analysts have given Engie a "Buy" rating, but there may be better buying opportunities in the stock market. Some of MarketBeat's past winning trading ideas have resulted in 5-15% weekly gains. MarketBeat just released five new stock ideas, but Engie wasn't one of them. MarketBeat thinks these five companies may be even better buys.

View MarketBeat's top stock picks here.1 hour ago

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Time flies when youre having fun. For many stock investors 2021 has been another year to remember with the major indices up yet again. Its hard to believe we are a week away from entering the fourth quarter.

Read ArticleOrmat Technologies, Inc. operates as a holding company. The firm engages in the provision of geothermal and recovered energy power business. It operates through the following segments: Electricity, Product and Energy Storage. The Electricity segment focuses in the sale of electricity from the company's power plants pursuant to PPAs. The Product segment involves in the manufacture, including design and development, of turbines and power units for the supply of electrical energy and in the associated construction of power plants utilizing the power units manufactured by the company to supply energy from geothermal fields and other alternative energy sources. The Energy Storage segment consists of battery energy storage systems as a service and management of curtailable customer loads under contracts with U.S. retail energy providers and directly with large commercial and industrial customers. The company was founded in 1965 and is headquartered in Reno, NV.

Read MoreA Chinese diplomat repeatedly interrupted a speech by a prominent Chinese dissident to block him from addressing the U.N. Human Rights Council, a failed attempt that bared Chinas sensitivity on human rights.

Yang Jianli, a dissident in exile in the United States, was disrupted seconds into his remarks as he questioned the Chinese Communist Partys right to represent China at the U.N. body. Yang was invited to appear before the Human Rights Council meeting by U.N.-accredited advocacy group UN Watch.

Chen Cheng of Chinas diplomatic mission stepped in and insisted that Yangs intervention seriously affected the reputation of council, and it should be firmly opposed.

Yang went on to cite events from decades of recent Chinese history, including the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and the crackdown on the Falun Gong and democratic movements.

Millions of people have died, he said.

Chen interrupted again, appealing to the chair to rule against his speaking.

Invited to continue speaking instead, Yang warned that China will return to the road of personal dictatorship to control speech and crackdown on activists, churches in Xinjiang and Tibet. He did not elaborate in the time-limited address.

Chen insisted that Yang was speaking outside the topic of the session. Both spoke in Chinese, and their comments were translated.

Yang participated in the pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in 1989 and served five years in prison in China.

Yesterdays conflict came during a debate in Geneva about the Vienna Declaration and Program of Action, which says non-governmental organizations should be free to carry out their human rights activities, without interference. APThe New Macau Association is asking the government to mark the mountain and waterfront near the old Lai Chi Vun shipyards as a buffer to protect the whole area, the vice president of the association, Sulu Sou, said yesterday during a press conference.

The Cultural Affairs Bureau (IC)s public consultation regarding the evaluation of the classification of the Lai Chi Vun shipyards will end today. In the consultation, the IC depicted the shipyard area as being in a poor condition overall, which Sou, who is also a lawmaker, deemed a consequence of many years of the governments dereliction of duty.

Sou pointed out that the submissions to the consultation described the shipyards as having safety issues, being in dangerous condition, unsuitable for use, and totally or partially collapsed.

These comments are actually unfair and incomplete, said Sou, noting that 13 shipyards were repossessed by the government, and these did meet the description above.

Those which have been supported by the public are in a rather acceptable condition, he remarked.

In view of the governments resources and engineering skills, if [the government plans to] create reinforcements or fix these so-called endangered parts [shipyards], then it is not difficult at all.

Sou criticized the government for unfairly depicting the shipyards, which led part of the public to only discuss the danger and safety issues of the shipyards and whether to demolish or keep them.

The lawmaker believes that there is a need to protect the urban landscape and views near the area, which is currently under evaluation.

The shipyard industry itself is the foundation, others are its carrier, said Sou, emphasizing the importance of protecting the Lai Chi Vun shipyards and the area as a whole, not just the shipyards themselves.

He suggested that the Macau government protect Coloane Village, including the shipyards and the neighboring mountains, and limit construction heights to 11.6 meters in these areas.

Previously, the government proposed that the Lai Chi Vun shipyards be defined as protected locations, indicating that only the shipyards themselves should be protected.

Sulu Sou disagreed, arguing that the key to cultural protection is in knowing how to preserve the cultural atmosphere.

According to the IC, the Lai Chi Vun shipyards are the largest group of shipyards in Macau and a major part of the history of shipbuilding, which was a traditional industry in the southern China region.

The shipyards are evidence of the techniques and methods for shipbuilding used at the end of the 20th century, and also reveal the traditional lifestyles of the Lai Chi Vun village community.Billionaire James Packer quit the board of his casino operator Crown Resorts Ltd. due to mental health issues, the latest turn in a turbulent private and business life thats seen his overseas gaming empire unravel.

The 50-year-old Australian plans to step back from all commitments, said a spokesman, who didnt elaborate on Packers illness. Crown stock fell 1.7 percent in Sydney trading.

Twice-divorced Packer has endured a tumultuous few years, from the public breakup of his engagement with pop diva Mariah Carey, to the conviction of Crown employees in China in 2017 for illegally promoting gambling.

Yesterdays announcement comes about seven months after Packer returned to Crowns board in the wake of the China crackdown. That ultimately led to Crowns exit from Macau and the closure of most of its Asian offices to focus on its Australian business.

Now that theyre more focused on their Australian assets, its a company that tends to run itself, said Daniel Mueller, a fund manager at Vertium Asset Management in Sydney who downplayed the significance of Packers departure from the board. Hes got a lot of people around him, some of whom are on the board.

Packer has had an on-again, off-again involvement with Crown Resorts since stepping down as chairman and then as a director in 2015. The billionaires private investment company, Consolidated Press Holdings, owns about 47 percent of the casino company.

Mr James Packer today resigned from the board of Crown Resorts Ltd. for personal reasons, a Consolidated Press spokesman said by e-mail. Mr Packer is suffering from mental health issues. At this time he intends to step back from all commitments.

A separate statement yesterday by Crown Executive Chairman John Alexander didnt elaborate further on Packers reasons for quitting. We have appreciated James contribution to the board and respect his decision to step down, Alexander said.

Crown shares were down 1.7 percent at AUD12.85 at 3:04 p.m., valuing the Melbourne-based company at AUD8.9 billion (USD6.8 billion).

Packer was born into a media dynasty that owned Australias biggest magazine publisher. He took over the family business on his father Kerrys death in 2005, and within three years sold most of its broadcasting and publishing stakes, as well as its cattle ranches, for more than $5 billion.

He used the funds to build the stake in Crown. Since the companys retreat from a Macau joint venture with billionaire Lawrence Ho, Crown is now focused on its existing casinos in Perth and Melbourne and a new six-star casino in Sydney, due to be completed in 2021.

The clampdown in China shook me to the core, Packer said in a rare interview with the Australian newspaper in October last year. He wasnt on the board at the time and felt let down, he said.

In the interview, Packer also said he wanted a more simple life and acknowledged hed lost friends, put on weight and had led a reclusive life at his polo estate in Argentina.

It has been a tumultuous four or five years for me, Packer told the newspaper. Packer was interviewed as a witness as part of an investigation into Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a spokesman for the billionaire said in February. Netanyahu had received gifts from Packer, who wasnt accused of wrongdoing, and police last month recommended the prime minister be charged with bribery, fraud and breach of trust.

Evan Lucas, an independent market analyst and consultant based in Melbourne, said Packer endured more public scrutiny than most other Australian executives because hes a large figure in the business world.

He has been under a reasonable amount of pressure, Lucas said. Its a sad story to hear. Angus Whitley, BloombergThe Forum for Economic and Trade Co-operation between China and the Portuguese-speaking Countries  Macao (Forum Macau) is, after 15 years and in resemblance to humans, in maturing stage.

Those were the words that the Permanent Secretariat of Forum Macau, Xu Yingzhen, used to describe the current status of the organization whose job it is to promote Macau as a platform for economic cooperation between China and the Portuguese-speaking countries.

Xu was speaking at the opening ceremony of a seminar yesterday morning at the Four Seasons Hotel Macau to mark the 15th anniversary of Forum Macau.

The seminar reviewed the Forums work over the past 15 years and invited debate on new perspectives, approaches, policies and developments in this space.

In her opening speech, Xu acknowledged that Forum Macau still has a long way to go to complete its duties and responsibilities.

It is true that we still have a long way to go and we need to concentrate more effort to reach new outcomes, she said, adding that the organization would inject new vitality so the Forum Macau can obtain success in this new era.

Secretary for Economy and Finance Lionel Leong recalled the first speech of the original signing ceremony that created Forum Macau, in which it was said that the creation of the Forum opened a new page [for Portuguese-speaking countries relations with China].

Leong said the creation of a forum between China and the Portuguese-speaking countries occupies a highlight position in the strategy defined by the central government, and allows Macau to enhance its advantages to promote the development and diversification of the economy.

Leong also noted the ongoing construction of the Service Center Complex as well as the transfer of the Cooperation Fund to Macau. Another important step towards diversification that was directly attributable to Forum Macaus activities was the central governments attribution of the Renminbi Clearing Centre to Macau, as noted by the Secretary.

Leong closed his speech with a mention of the notable results achieved in trade since the creation of Forum Macau, which he said have been highlighted and praised by the central government.

Another individual who commented on the success of this mechanism [Forum Macau] was Yao Jian, Deputy Director-General of the Liaison Office of the Central Peoples Government in Macau.

Yao was quoted as saying that trading between China and Portugal has increase twentyfold, and trading between China and the Portuguese-speaking countries has increased by one hundredfold.

Yao added that Forum Macau has also achieved results in terms of cultural exchange and lifting the internationalization of Macau and also its diversification.

Yao highlighted the work of the Macau entrepreneurs, who established places to present products from Portuguese-speaking countries in several cities of China, namely Shanghai, Beijing, Hangzhou and others.

The representative of the central government added that the newly announced China International Import Expo, which will be launched this year for the first time, will feature the joint efforts of both the mainland and Macau governments.

Yao emphasized the importance of the Renminbi Clearing Center and the Training Center for Bilingual Professionals. Both are important landmarks, according to Yao, who concluded with the hope that all parties can contribute more suggestions to improve the relationships between the countries.

On this topic, Deputy Director-General of the Department of Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau Affairs at the Ministry of Commerce Peoples Republic of China (MOFCOM) Sun Tong, said, independently of the different areas, the level of cooperation between countries has been reaching new heights, which gives the impression that this cooperation has a good trend to develop.

Sun said that this development can come from new areas such as environmental protection, noting that the MOFCOM is pleased with the continual added influence of Forum Macau in the past 15 years, which produces synergetic effects.

In the future, Forum Macau would have more energy and vitality under the guidance of the new era socialist ideology with Chinese characteristics of Xi Jinping, he said, which he added would be under the policy of opening to the outside world.

The last speaker of the event, Ambassador Malam Sambu, noted that it was a great opportunity to discuss the Forums future, and echoed previous speakers observations that relations between Portuguese-speaking countries and China had reached new heights, suggestive of even greater dimensions in the future.

Priority areas for investment and development include energy, infrastructure, technology and human resources to contribute towards the common goal of serving as a springboard to [] fast, harmonious and rational development.

As a final note, he stated the need to share the profits of these cooperation efforts.

Forum looking for future opportunities

Participants at yesterdays seminar focused their talks on the perspectives and future opportunities for the Forum Macau.

Jorge Costa Oliveira, former Secretary of State of the Internationalization of Portugal and Partner and CEO of consulting company JCO, said, more important than discussing the many works developed  and well  over the past 15 years is the need to look to the future, and future possibilities to make Forum Macau even more relevant.

Oliveira noted that although the world knows that there are many opportunities for entrepreneurs globally and in China, it is still difficult to get the message across to them. He concluded that there is still much work to do. [] The work that Forum Macau has done over the years has been mostly done at an institutional level.

He believes this was the right choice and that such tasks were managed well, as they involved the member countries governments, public agencies and public entities in bilateral and multilateral relations.

Nevertheless, he points out that companies are the entities that import, export, and invest. As such, he urged Forum Macau to do proximity work together with the business associations, doing work that [focuses] on companies to bring them knowledge of the opportunities in both the Portuguese-speaking countries in China and the advantages of partnerships between companies in order to create bonds that allow them to reach new markets.

Henrique Horta dos Santos, the representative of Guinea-Bissau on the West African Economic and Monetary Union, and former Minister of the Economy and Finance of Guinea-Bissau, also highlighted the importance of facilitating access to Forum-related support and investment funds by companies, namely SMEs as a potential measure for future development.

On that topic, the Governor of the Central Bank of Sao Tome and Principe and former Minister of Planning and Finance of the same country, noted the role of Macau and the Forum as a catalyst for the acceleration of the process of expansion and opening China to the World [Belt and Road], noting the great commitment of the country in contributing more [] in a better way to the common assets [which result from the connection of the Portuguese- speaking countries with China].In response to severe damage caused by the deadly Typhoon Hato, Sands China Ltd. bolstered its efforts to reach out to the community, applying its skills and resources to help the recovery of several organizations across different sectors.

The company has made a pledge to donate a total of MOP30 million in disaster relief funds to Macau in the wake of the destructive 2017 storm season. In addition, the Adelson Family Foundation has pledged MOP35 million, making a total of MOP65 million in donations pledged by Sands China and the Adelson Family Foundation to support typhoon disaster relief in Macau.

University of Saint Joseph

The Adelson Family Foundation has donated over MOP15.2 million to the University of Saint Joseph to assist in recovery efforts after both Typhoon Hato and subsequent storms caused significant damage to its brand-new campus in August and September.

The timing of Typhoon Hato  in August 2017, just before the start of the new academic term  was unfortunate for the university, which had only taken possession of its long-awaited new Ilha Verde campus in June.

The basement level of the universitys new campus was flooded after the storm, submerging nearly all the installed and stored equipment under 3 metres of water. Five days were required to pump the basement dry.

In a site visit, shortly afterwards, Las Vegas Sands Corp. and Sands China Ltd. executives toured the damaged areas that will now be restored with the help of the Adelson Family Foundation donation.

When we heard about the extensive damage to Macau as a result of Typhoon Hato, our hearts immediately went out to all of the people impacted by it, said Sheldon G. Adelson and Dr. Miriam Adelson. We care deeply about the Macau community and wanted to do something to help in the aftermath of the storm. Hopefully, this donation to the University of Saint Joseph can help speed up the recovery process and get them fully back to providing all of their educational services as soon as possible. We look forward to seeing the results for ourselves during our next trip to Macau.

We always feel that were part of the community. When Hato struck, the first reaction from the company was what can we do? Where should we apply our skills and our resources? said Dr Wilfred Wong, President of Sands China Ltd.

Patrick Dumont, executive vice president and chief financial officer of Las Vegas Sands Corp. commented, Were happy to be here. Its a horrible thing that has happened but I have a feeling [the university] will come back stronger and better off after the tragedy.

To see the students and meet people who contribute to the university makes it more meaningful, Dumont added.

The MOP15.2 million donation by the Adelson Family Foundation will go a long way towards making the universitys new campus fully operational as soon as possible.

Holy House of Mercy

Also recently, Macau Holy House of Mercy unveiled a plaque at its elderly home in recognition of Sands Chinas assistance after Typhoon Hato.

Sands China made a donation of just over MOP2 million in December to help cover the costs of repairing the facility.

Restoration works have been completed, providing comfort to the residents in the home.

The Macau Holy House of Mercy President Antonio Jose de Freitas led an inspection tour of the roof for Dr Wong, who later unveiled the plaque with Freitas.

Dr Wong said, Sands China is pleased to have been able to offer assistance to Macau Holy House of Mercy after Typhoon Hato. Its wonderful to see the elderly home back in order, and our appreciation goes out to Holy House of Mercy for the valuable service they provide to society. We are humbled by the kind gesture of mounting a plaque honouring our company.

Coloane homes

Early this year, the Sands China team also conducted repair work on 22 houses on Navegantes Road and Lai Chi Vun Street, including repairing roofs, walls, doors, windows, wiring, water leaks, and other repair work.

Among them, three corrugated metal homes on Navegantes Road were badly damaged, which Sands Chinas team has since repaired.

This article is sponsored by Sands China Ltd

Four critical areas at USJ

The Adelson Family Foundation donation will go toward addressing four critical areas of need at the Catholic university:

Library  The donation from the Adelson Family Foundation will allow the second floor of the library to undergo a complete redesign to protect against future natural disasters, including the development of a new holding space for the librarys collection and an increase in its electronic resources to compensate for the physical loss of shelf space and books.

Server room  The typhoon knocked out services such as Internet, phone and closed-circuit TV. The server room will now be upgraded with a monitoring system to be installed to prevent future damage from severe weather. The system will help identify potential risks, such as water leakage and fire, and will send alerts so that pre-emptive action can be undertaken to avoid damage.

Audio-Visual Studio  Plans were in place to build a basement-level audio-visual studio for the universitys Faculty of Creative Industries new Bachelor of Digital Cinema Programme before the typhoon hit. The Adelson Family Foundations donation will support the universitys efforts to re-design and build a new studio in a safe and appropriate location.

The Adelson Family Foundations donation will support the universitys efforts to re-design and build a new studio in a safe and appropriate location.

Fitness room and recreational corner  The space may now be reassigned to better serve the post-typhoon needs of the campus. In its stead, a fitness room and recreational corner will be built in the Residential Hall to provide fitness and recreational activities for the universitys students.

What the beneficiaries say

We are very grateful to Sands China for its generous contribution, which allowed us to repair the damage to our elderly home after the typhoon.

The residents are happy to have had their home restored to a suitable condition, and we wanted to commemorate the occasion by mounting a plaque as an expression of our appreciation.

 The Macau Holy House of Mercy President Antonio Jose de Freitas

The immediate interest and timely support from the Adelson Family Foundation came as an unexpected and heart-warming surprise.

Without it, we would have been hard put to get the damaged facilities back to working order this academic year. We are deeply grateful to the Adelsons both for having noticed our plight and for their rapid and generous support to USJ at such a critical time.

-USJ rector, Fr Peter Stilwell

Mr Kwok, a resident of Lai Chi Vun, said the residents faced very tough conditions after the typhoon. Fortunately, the Housing Bureau and Sands China provided timely assistance, which he described as being a lifesaver. He and his family expressed their immense gratitude for the help, which they said they will never forget.After all, President Donald Trump has called Russian President Vladimir Putin to congratulate him on his re-election, drawing bruising criticism from members of his own party, including a leading senator who scorned the election as a sham. Trump also said he and Putin might meet in the not too distant future to discuss the arms race and other matters.

What they didnt discuss yesterday [Macau time] was noteworthy as well: Trump did not raise Russias meddling in the U.S. elections or its suspected involvement in the recent poisoning of a former spy in Britain.

An American president does not lead the free world by congratulating dictators on winning sham elections, said Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee and has pressed the Trump administration to respond aggressively to Russias interference in the U.S. presidential election.

Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona, a frequent Trump critic, called the presidents call odd. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Trump can call whomever he chooses but noted that calling Putin wouldnt have been high on my list.

At the State Department, spokeswoman Heather Nauert said it was no surprise that Putin was re-elected, commenting that some people were paid to turn out to vote and opposition leaders were intimidated or jailed. She also cited a preliminary report by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe that said Russias election took place in an overly controlled environment that lacked an even playing field for all contenders.

Her comments were notably tougher on Russia than those coming from the White House.

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders defended Trumps call, and noted that President Barack Obama made a similar call at the time of Putins last electoral victory.

We dont get to dictate how other countries operate, Sanders said.

The action and reaction fit a Trump White House pattern of declining to chide authoritarian regimes for undemocratic practices.

Trump himself has long been reluctant to publicly criticize Putin. He said that during their hoped-for meeting the two men would likely discuss Ukraine, Syria and North Korea, among other things.

I suspect that well probably be meeting in the not too distant future to discuss the arms race, to discuss the arms race, which is getting out of control, but we will never allow anybody to have anything even close to what we have, Trump said.

Russia has received global condemnation after Britain blamed Moscow for the recent nerve agent attack that sickened Sergei Skripal and his daughter. Russia has denied the accusation.

Trumps call came at a period of heightened tensions between the two nations after the White House imposed sanctions on Russia for its interference in the 2016 U.S. election and other malicious cyberattacks. Sanders insisted that the administration has scolded Putin at the appropriate times.

The Kremlin said in a statement that Trump and Putin spoke about a need to coordinate efforts to limit the arms race and for closer cooperation on strategic stability and counterterrorism.

Special attention was given to considering the issue of a possible bilateral summit, the Kremlin statement said.

In addition, the two presidents expressed satisfaction with the apparent easing of tensions over North Koreas weapons program, according to the Kremlin. APFormer lawmaker Dominic Sio believes that the gaming concessions will be reshuffled from 2020, according to a report by China Business Journal.

Starting from 2020, the gambling concessions will reopen, [and] this means that [those who are] operating in Macau today, will not necessarily still be operating in 2020, said Sio, who is also a deputy of the 13th National Peoples Congress.

This is shuffling, re-applying and re-licensing. During the process of re-licensing, the non-gambling aspects of the gambling industry should also become aspects that the SAR government should place importance on, explained Sio.

With the development of both the tourism and gaming industries, Sio also thinks that economic and trade cooperation between China and the Portuguese-speaking countries should be enhanced.

Macau currently has approximately MOP1,000 billion in capital, with an abundance of capital looking for an exit. Banks are looking for companies to loan, but no companies are asking banks for loans, he continued.

Sio believes that both the mainland and Macau can benefit if Macaus capital were to be made available to mainland companies.Philippine Foreign Secretary Alan Peter Cayetano was in Beijing yesterday for talks on possible joint development projects in the South China Sea amid signs of an easing of tensions in the disputed waterway.

Cayetano was scheduled to meet with his counterpart Wang Yi later in the afternoon and on Friday with newly-appointed Vice President Wang Qishan, a close ally of President Xi Jinping.

China and the Philippines have long tussled over islands and reefs in the South China Sea and since taking office in 2013, Xi has taken a hard line on issues of Chinese sovereignty.

Kicking off his second five-year term on Tuesday, Xi declared in a fervently nationalistic address to the ceremonial legislature that China would never cede one inch of its territory.

China rejected an international tribunals 2016 ruling invalidating much of its claim to virtually the entire South China Sea in a case brought by the Philippines.

Prior to his Tuesday departure, Cayetano said the sides would discuss broad areas of collaboration, but gave no specifics, according to Philippine online news source Rappler. He said the territorial dispute would be discussed in the context of how we can improve the situation, and that the sides were trying to find a legal framework acceptable to both that would allow joint exploration even as they continued to disagree.

Cayetano said talks would also touch on agricultural exports, investment in infrastructure and operations against Muslim extremists allied with the Islamic State group in the southern Philippines, Rappler reported.

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterto has pushed for closer relations with Beijing, downplaying the dispute over territory claimed by both sides and courting Chinese aid and investment. For its part, China has eased pressure on Philippine fishermen and is working with the 10 members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations to reach a code of conduct to avoid frictions while operating in the area where an estimated USD5 trillion in international trade passes annually.

Along with rich but diminishing fishing stocks, the South China Sea is believed to hold deposits of oil, gas and other resources. APSouth Koreas telecoms regulator has fined Facebook for illegally limiting user access to its services from late 2016 to 2017.

The Korea Communications Commission said yesterday that Facebook should pay 396 million won (USD369,400) as a penalty for violating a law against hurting the interests of users. The regulator also recommended that the company fix its terms of use stipulating it cannot guarantee the quality of its services.

The issue is unrelated to Facebooks troubles over allegations that Trump-affiliated data-mining firm Cambridge Analytica stole data from 50 million Facebook users to influence U.S. elections. But the social media giant has faced other complaints in Asia over access and privacy.

The South Korean flap arose after Facebook rerouted some users access to its services to networks in Hong Kong or the United States, instead of using domestic networks, without notifying them, the regulator said. That slowed connections for some local Facebook users, and some complained they were unable to play videos on Facebook. The KCC said connections were as much as 4.5 times slower than before for some users during evening hours.

SK Broadband, a local fixed-line internet provider, received about 10 complaints per day for slow connections while LG UPlus, another internet service provider, received an average of 34 complaints a day.

Facebook did not actively look into the complaints from local telecoms service providers that users are complaining about slower connections and as a result its service quality was not maintained at an appropriate level, the KCC said in a statement. When controversies erupted in South Korea about Facebooks rerouting, the company restored the connections to their original state around October and November of 2017.

The KCC said the U.S. social media giant violated a law against limiting access or subscriptions to its services without convincing reasons.

We are disappointed with the KCCs decision. We strive to deliver optimal performance for all our users and will continue working with Korean internet service providers toward this goal, Facebook said in a statement.

The probe was launched in May last year after reports it had interfered with some local users access to Facebook and Instagram.

The KCC probed claims that Facebook intentionally slowed access while it negotiated network usage fees with internet service providers.

Facebook has gained traction in South Korea in recent years and politicians and celebrities often use it to interact with fans. More than 12 million users visit Facebook per day in South Korea, according to the KCC.

Facebook said it did not violate the law in part because its terms of use say it cannot guarantee its services will operate without delays or interference. KCC officials rejected that argument, saying the terms were unfair. It recommended the company amend its terms of use. Youkyung Lee, Seoul, APIs #MeToo part two on the way? With its bankruptcy, the Weinstein Co. has tossed out the non-disclosure agreements that officials say its co-founder and former CEO Harvey Weinstein wielded as a weapon in his sexual predation, bringing with it the possibility of a whole new wave of victims coming forward.

Bankruptcy filings are normally shrouded in the jargon of finance, but on this point the movie and TV studio was clear:

Since October, it has been reported that Harvey Weinstein used non-disclosure agreements as a secret weapon to silence his accusers, a Weinstein Co. statement said. Effective immediately, those agreements end. No one should be afraid to speak out or coerced to stay quiet.

The rare move from a major business is likely to send new witnesses and victims to media outlets and investigators, which put out fresh calls Tuesday for their stories.

Its unlikely, however, to spur a new surge in high-profile actresses coming forward, as Rose McGowan, Ashley Judd, Salma Hayek and many others have in recent months.

Thats because the Weinstein Co. only has the power to end agreements made by the company not Weinstein himself, meaning its effect will be primarily on current and former employees.

Cris Armenta, a lawyer representing accusers in a proposed class-action lawsuit against the Weinstein Co., said she fears that because so many of the agreements are with Weinstein himself and still apply, the impact may not be major.

What are they actually releasing, and is it just window dressing? Armenta said Tuesday.

Armenta also worries that as creditors line up in front of those who have sued the company to get paid in bankruptcy, it could be leaving the plaintiffs with nothing to hold on to.

Still, there is a large pool of people, many of them less powerful, lower-level employees with more to fear, who may now break their silence over what happened to them or what they saw.

They include workers like Zelda Perkins, a former Weinstein assistant who was among the first of his accusers to break a commitment to stay quiet after keeping Weinstein secrets for nearly 20 years. She told The Financial Times in October that Weinstein sexually harassed her on every occasion I was alone with him and said she spoke out in part to demonstrate how egregious these agreements are.

Perkins is precisely the kind of workplace harassment subject that the Weinstein Co.s move will free to speak, and who the moves champions hope will be helped.

This is a watershed moment for efforts to address the corrosive effects of sexual misconduct in the workplace, said New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who fought for the provision in the Weinstein Co.s bankruptcy. He added in his statement that it will finally enable voices that have for too long been muzzled to be heard.

On Tuesday, Schneidermans office sent out a tweet urging victims and witnesses to contact his office, which is conducting a civil rights investigation of the Weinstein Co. and of Weinstein himself.

Times Up, an initiative started by a powerhouse group of Hollywood industry women to fight systemic sexual harassment, also urged those newly freed by the Weinstein bankruptcy to come to it with their stories, as did The New York Times.

In addition to bringing unprecedented attention to sexual harassment, the post-Weinstein world has seen a new level of scrutiny of nondisclosure agreements  NDAs for short in legal jargon  contractual pledges not to discuss what happened that are common features of financial settlements.

They have since been a central part of news stories including porn actress Stormy Daniels saying she had sex with President Donald Trump, sexual misconduct allegations against casino magnate Steve Wynn, and settlements between USA Gymnastics and gymnasts who were forbidden to speak about their abuse at the hands of team doctor Larry Nassar.

Several states including California and New York have considered legislation stopping or limiting nondisclosure agreements in cases of sexual misconduct.

Secret settlements serve one primary purpose: To keep sexual predators away from the public eye and continuing to torment and hurt innocent victims, state Sen. Connie Leyva said in a statement introducing such a bill in California in January.

But while NDAs have become tools of the rich and powerful, they are not without benefits for their victims, who may want to keep their ordeal private or whose silence may be the only leverage they have in getting legal recourse.

Some 80 women, including prominent actresses, have accused Weinstein of misconduct ranging from rape to harassment.

He has denied any allegations of non-consensual sex.Andrew Dalton, Los Angeles, APConvinced that Facebook has betrayed the trust of its users, WhatsApp cofounder Brian Acton is telling the world to delete the social app from their devices.

It is time, Acton tweeted on Tuesday. #deletefacebook

While Acton has long advocated for user privacy, his call to action is still remarkable in light of the fact that he sold WhatsApp to Facebook for $19 billion in 2014.

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Acton walked away from WhatsApp earlier this year, while his fellow cofounder Jan Koum continues to run the mobile messaging service.

Just last month, Acton invested $50 million in WhatsApp rival Signal. Analysts see a connection between Acton bashing Facebook and investing in Signal.

Its not surprising given that Acton joined Signal after leaving Facebook, said Jeff Pollard, an analyst at Forrester Research.

He went from one of the worlds largest surveillance economy platforms in Facebook to building out a foundation designed to ensure private encrypted communications between parties, Pollard said. That path clearly indicates his opinion on privacy and data commercialization.

Acton is not the first of Facebooks ex-employees to publically decry the company.

Last year, Chamath Palihapitiya, Facebooks one-time head of growth, told The Verge that the company was ripping apart the social fabric of how society works.

Sean Parker, Facebooks founding president, also recently took a jab at the social giant. As he told Axios in November: The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them  was all about: How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?

Of course, those statements were made before the world learned of Facebooks failure to stop Cambridge Analytica from weaponizing user data in the run up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the Brexit Leave campaign in the UK.

In response, the companys stock price has tanked, while U.S. lawmakers are calling for further investigations into Facebooks business practices. Even The Federal Trade Commission plans to investigate the matter, and, specifically, whether Facebook violated a 2012 consent decree.

Still, some analysts doubt whether any amount of criticism can convince users to delete their Facebook accounts.

In this case, Facebooks network effect does help protect it, Pollard reasoned. For some people, the only way they stay in touch is via Facebook.

Added Pollard: As long as their friends or family use it, they will too. The Facebook users whose privacy was violated, are the very reason it will stay alive  only to continue violating users privacy in the name of maximizing profit.Credit: Virginia Commonwealth University

Societal issues are driving an increase in death rates among Virginia's white population, according to a new report from Virginia Commonwealth University's Center on Society and Health. Stress-related conditionsincluding unintentional drug overdoses, suicides, alcoholic liver disease and alcohol poisoningsare killing white Virginians ages 25-54 at increasing rates.

Death rates have generally decreased in the United States and other industrialized countries in the past century. The VCU study sought to examine the factors responsible for recent mortality trends in the white population, hoping to address the public health crisis in that demographic and examine health trends that could affect other groups. The report helps underscore the importance of addressing the root causes of poor health, including social, economic and environmental conditions, and of adopting policy solutions that can ensure opportunities for optimal health among Virginians of all backgrounds.

"The alarming rise in death rates from drug overdoses, alcoholism and suicides demands action," said Center on Society and Health Director Steven Woolf, M.D., who is a professor at VCU School of Medicine. The Center on Society and Health is an academic research center that studies the health implications of social factors  such as education, income, neighborhood and community environmental conditions, and public policy. Previous Center research has found that African-American and Hispanic communities in Richmond, Northern Virginia, and other areas of the state have shorter life expectancies and disproportionate exposure to living conditions that harm health.

"The need for policies to improve living conditions and economic opportunity for Virginia's most vulnerable populations could not be more urgent," Woolf said.

The report, which emphasizes that populations of color often experience higher death rates than white populations, theorized why middle-aged white people might be disproportionately impacted by rising mortality rates. "This age group is experiencing life conditions that differ starkly from past expectations and may lack the resilience to endure the cumulative stress that comes with prolonged social and economic hardships," the authors wrote, noting that during the two decades examined in the report, young and middle-class white people experienced economic and social instability unlike that of their parents and grandparents.

The report that published March 21 reveals that stress-related deaths among white people ages 25 to 54 increased 83 percent between 1995 and 2014. The report also highlights other trends, such as statewide increases in deaths from organ diseases, which are possibly linked to substance abuse and trauma. These include liver cancer, viral hepatitis and some forms of heart disease, among others. The researchers examined eight regions of Virginia, including all 95 counties and 38 independent cities.

Between 1995 and 2014, the increase in the death rate due to stress-related conditions caused nearly 2,300 deaths among white people ages 25 to 54. At a 331 percent increase, the rise in death rates from unintentional drug overdoses was startling, Woolf said, but there also were increases in alcoholic liver disease (37 percent) and suicides (29 percent) among young and middle-aged white people.While the report focused on Virginia, these findings mirror a nationwide trend, which some refer to as "deaths of despair."

The report authors noted that, while rising death rates among white people warrant investigation, death rates in certain minority populations continue to be persistently and alarmingly higher than their white counterparts. From 2010 to 2014, the death rate among African-Americans in Virginia was still 1.2 times higher than that of the white population.

"This crisis underscores the urgent need for policy action to reduce health inequities for all Virginians," Woolf said.

The report found that the highest increases in death rates among white people due to stress-related conditions occurred in Southwest, Southside and West Central Virginia, areas that have endured persistently high poverty rates for many years. Across Virginia, those areas with the largest increases in death rates tended to be rural and less diverse, have higher percentages of adults without bachelor's degrees and higher unemployment rates, and have a shortage of mental health professionals. "This is a crisis of our household economies and our communities," Woolf said. "It will not be solved simply by changing how painkillers are prescribed."

However, mortality increases due to stress-related conditions did not solely affect rural localities. Areas of Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads also saw increases from the same causes of death. As the authors expressed in the report: "Hardship exists not only in rural Virginia but, increasingly, in pockets of disadvantage in metropolitan areas. More nuanced explanations for these health trends must also be considered."

Explore further Drugs, alcohol and suicides contributing to alarming drop in US life expectancyDutch prosecutors opened a criminal investigation Wednesday into an organization that supports members' efforts to buy a deadly powder to take their own lives.

The plan, announced last year by an organization called Cooperative Last Will, opened a new front in the long-running debate about euthanasia and assisted suicide in the Netherlands.

Prosecutors said in a statement they were launching their investigation "because assisting suicide is illegal" and because members of the organization were planning to place orders for the powder. The statement called on the organization to halt its activities.

Neither the group nor prosecutors have identified the powder. The group says it can be legally purchased.

In a response on its website, the organization denied wrongdoing and said its lawyers were studying the prosecutors' announcement.

While euthanasia has been decriminalized in the Netherlands if carried out by a physician who adheres to strict conditions, assisting suicide remains illegal.

The 2002 euthanasia law has done little to stem the debate in the Netherlands. One of the new frontiers for mercy killing advocates is a call to extend mercy killing to people who consider their lives to be completed but do not meet strict criteria for physician-administered euthanasia.

For years, advocates have called for drugs to be available that would allow people to end their own lives in a painless and dignified manner.

According to the country's statistics bureau, 1,894 people took their own lives in 2016. Meanwhile, euthanasia cases are on the rise, with 6,585 reported last year4.4 percent of all deaths in the Netherlands.

Explore further Dutch prosecutors probe four euthanasia cases

 2018 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.Credit: CC0 Public Domain

New research links specific numerical activities undertaken by parents to certain math skills in young children. Published today in open-access journal Frontiers in Psychology, the study also finds that the more parents engage in mathematical activities with their children, the higher their early numeracy performance.

Previous studies indicate that early mathematical skills provide a better transition to school-taught mathematics. It's well-known that parents can play an important role in their children's early mathematical developmentbut, until now, the link between specific numerical activities and certain math skills was not well understood.

To shed light on these links, researchers from KU Leuven in Belgium assessed 128 kindergarten-age children for various symbolic and non-symbolic numerical tasks. The researchers also asked parents to indicate the frequency of certain numeracy activities undertaken with their children at home and then looked for connections between this and the children's early numeracy skills.

"We found that the more parents engaged in activities such as identifying numerals, sorting objects by size, color, or shape, or learning simple sums, the higher the children performed on skills like counting," says the study's lead author, Belde Mutaf Yldz.

"These activitiesand talking about money when shopping or measuring ingredients while cookingwere linked with a more accurate estimation of the position of a digit on an empty number line. In addition, engaging in activities such as card and board games was associated with better pictorial calculation skills."

Mutaf Yldz says the research supports and extends the idea that parent-child interaction plays a role in children's acquisition of early mathematical skillsand that policymakers should recognize this.

"Increased public awareness on the role that parents can play in their children's development of mathematical skills just by doing more number related activities in a home environment would be hugely useful," she says.

"Policymakers should think about providing educational tools for some home numeracy activities to help parents enhance their children's mathematical development."

The researchers caution that the study's findings are based on cross-sectional design and correlation analysis, meaning that the results don't indicate any cause-and-effect relationship. For example, it could be that children who are already good at mathematics are the ones triggering 'home numeracy' instead of their parents.

Despite this, with research on home numeracy in its infancy, Mutaf Yldz and her colleagues are calling for more comprehensive investigations and observations of home numeracy activities, as well as further intervention studies to determine which specific activities best help children enhance their mathematical skills.

Explore further Number games with preschoolers count for little, study suggests

More information: Frequency of home numeracy activities is differentially related to basic number processing and calculation skills in kindergartners, Frontiers in Psychology (2018). www.frontiersin.org/articles/1  psyg.2018.00340/full Journal information: Frontiers in Psychology Frequency of home numeracy activities is differentially related to basic number processing and calculation skills in kindergartners,(2018). DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00340Professor of neuroscience and Brown Institute for Brain Science researcher Justin Fallon (left)  pictured here with fellow Brown faculty member Eric Morrow  says the new study opens the way for developing new classes of drugs to combat ALS. Credit: Peter Goldberg

A new kind of genetically engineered mouse and an innovation in how to monitor those mice during research have shed new light on the early development of an inherited form of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).

An international team of scientists, including four from Brown University, conducted and analyzed tests using a "knock-in" mouse carrying a gene for a mutant DNA/RNA binding protein called TDP-43, which causes a form of inherited ALS in humans.

In the study published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, the researchers found that behavioral, cognitive and structural dysfunctions in the new mouse model of ALS and a related disorder, frontotemporal dementia (FTD), were evident long before the neuronal degeneration that occurs late in these diseases. Many inhibitory neurons were lost early in the development of ALS, which is in sharp contrast to other degenerative diseases where most of the early losses are of excitatory neurons.

Thus, the results open the way to discover and test potential ALS therapies targeted at the early stages of the disease, when treatment is most likely to be effective.

"This study reveals new pathways in the earliest stages of ALS-FTD and opens the way for developing new classes of drugs to combat this dreadful disease," said Justin Fallon, a professor of neuroscience at Brown and researcher at the Brown Institute for Brain Science and one of the study authors.

The research is part of an effort to develop a more robust understanding of the early-stage defects in ALS neurons that precede loss of motor control. The results will be the basis of further research into the disease and have the potential to open the way to develop new therapies, the authors said.

Fallon said that in addition to the value of the findings themselves, the study demonstrates advances in creating animal models that can be used more successfully in mimicking the disease in ALS research, which is a key element in driving new research and possible therapies.

The new mice, created by researchers at King's College London and the University of Massachusetts Medical School, are particularly strong in showing early changes connected to the development of ALS, Fallon said. Just as significantly, a new artificial intelligence technology developed at Brown allowed the researchers to monitor and analyze mouse behavior and proved instrumental in generating the findings.

In research, monitoring and analysis of animal model behavior is often a stumbling block because it is difficult to do consistently and efficiently, Fallon said. In this study, mice were monitored 24 hours a day for stretches of five days. The use of the Automated Continuous Behavioral Monitoring (ACBM) system designed by Thomas Serre, an associate professor of cognitive, linguistic, and psychological sciences at Brown, made that work much more efficient.

The systema computational analysis tool that assigns behavior to individual frames of videoallowed for the sensitive, effective and efficient scrutiny of millions of video frames. Amanda Duffy, a Brown Ph.D. student in Fallon's lab, suggested that Serre's system be tried in the study; another study author, Youssef Barhomi, was a research engineer in Serre's lab.

"We were able to get an accurate and deep accounting of the behavior of these mice," Fallon said, "We've now opened up a new way of analyzing mice behavior."

That new method for analysis could become a standard way of phenotyping mice, Fallon said, and the ACBM system is now in use in other research at Brown on ALS, and inquiries about the system have started to come from beyond campus, he added.

Fallon also noted that in the study, the knock-in mouse made it possible to see that abnormally high levels of TDP-43 protein were being made. A key next step in the ALS investigation will be to identify the pathways that lead to loss of the inhibitory neurons and the behavioral defects.

Explore further When nerve meets muscle, biglycan seals the deal

More information: TDP-43 gains function due to perturbed autoregulation in a Tardbp knock-in mouse model of ALS-FTD. Nature Neuroscience (2018) Journal information: Nature Neuroscience TDP-43 gains function due to perturbed autoregulation in a Tardbp knock-in mouse model of ALS-FTD.(2018) DOI: 10.1038/s41593-018-0113-5Credit: Mary Ann Liebert, Inc., publishers

The effectiveness of acupuncture compared to standard treatments has led to its growing inclusion in pain guidelines and in delivery organizations like the U.S. military and Veterans Administration, yet many continue to believe acupuncture lacks scientific credibility. Central to the skepticism are unanswered questions about acupuncture points. Integrative health researchers from Harvard Medical School propose a coordinated effort to develop a clear definition of acupuncture points and to carefully evaluate their "specificity" and possible biological basis, as described in The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine (JACM).

Helene Langevin, MD and Peter Wayne, PhD, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, face head-on the criticism that there is a lack of scientific rigor underlying acupuncture in the article entitled "What Is the Point? The Problem with Acupuncture Research That No One Wants to Talk About." The acupuncture research community has for too long ignored the need for better terminology and for less confusing, more biological or anatomical descriptions of acupuncture points, contend the authors. Without the basic scientific and comparative studies needed to support acupuncture as an evidence-based therapy its legitimacy will continue to be questioned and its inclusion as a healthcare service will be limited.

Lead author Langevin notes that "For decades, acupuncture research has served as a convenient punching bag for skeptics. Researchers need to fix some problems that contribute to this situation."

"Acupuncture is making a leap into mainstream health care. This position of relative strength is a great time to take on sticky challenges that remain in its evidence profile," says JACM Editor-in-Chief John Weeks, johnweeks-integrator.com, Seattle, WA. "Langevin and Wayne thoroughly examine the issues and propose a path forward. Their paper is a landmark document for moving our understanding of acupuncture to the next level."

Explore further Can acupuncture help alleviate menopausal symptoms?

More information: Helene M. Langevin et al, What Is the Point? The Problem with Acupuncture Research That No One Wants to Talk About, The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine (2018). Journal information: Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine Helene M. Langevin et al, What Is the Point? The Problem with Acupuncture Research That No One Wants to Talk About,(2018). DOI: 10.1089/acm.2017.0366A blood clot forming in the carotid artery. Credit: copyright American Heart Association

An intervention that uses hip hop music with stroke education lyrics increased stroke awareness for economically-disadvantaged, minority children and their parents, according to new research in the American Heart Association's journal Stroke.

"The lack of stroke recognition, especially among blacks, results in dangerous delays in treatment," said Olajide Williams, M.D., M.S., study author and associate professor of neurology at Columbia University Medical Center, New York Presbyterian Hospital. "Because of those delays, only a quarter of all stroke patients arrive at the hospital within the ideal time for clot-busting treatment."

Stroke education is important even for children because simply calling 9-1-1 immediately when stroke symptoms start could increase the rate of optimal stroke treatment by 24 percent. Usually a witness makes the 9-1-1 call - something even a child can do.

Other campaigns to improve stroke awareness have been limited by the high costs of advertising, lack of cultural tailoring and low penetration into ethnic minority populations. Ultimately, the desired effect of calling 9-1-1 has dissipated once the media campaign ended.

Researchers studying more than 3,000 4th through 6th graders from 22 public schools in New York City and a group of 1,144 of their parents found "Hip Hop Stroke", a three-hour multimedia stroke awareness intervention, increased optimal stroke knowledge from 2 percent of children before the intervention to 57 percent right after. Three months later, 24 percent of children retained that knowledge.

They also found:

While only 3 percent of parents could identify all stroke symptoms in the FAST acronym before the intervention, 20 percent could immediately after and 17 percent could three months later.

Four of the children put in practice what they learned in the intervention and called 911 for real-life stroke symptoms, including one who overruled a parent's suggestion to wait and see.

The Hip Hop Stroke program, according to Williams, is available and free to U.S. communities.

"The program's culturally-tailored multimedia presentation is particularly effective among minority youth or other groups among whom Hip Hop music is popular," Williams said. "One unique aspect of the program is that the children who receive the program in school are used as 'transmission vectors' of stroke information to their parents and grandparents at home. Our trial showed that this is an effective strategy."

Explore further Video game teaches kids about stroke symptoms and calling 9-1-1Approximately 2 percent to 3 percent of patients discharge themselves from hospital against medical advice each year in the UK and US, with the numbers increasing each year. Credit: Lancaster University

Patients who discharge themselves from hospital should be viewed more positively say researchers, who discovered sympathy for their decision among hospital staff.

One doctor said: "...if patients are ill, where they want to be is at home where they feel most comfortable."

Approximately 2% to 3% of patients discharge themselves from hospital against medical advice each year in the UK and US, with the numbers increasing each year.

Figures on self discharge are hard to come by, but best estimates suggest that self-discharge financially affects already strained health care systems with patients who self discharge costing over 50% more.

Many people who self discharge return to hospital, with readmissions costing 300 million in the UK and $2.6 billion in the US.

But Dr Laura Machin and Dr Dawn Goodwin of Lancaster University, with Dr David Warriner from Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust argue that viewing self-discharge negatively is "out of step with contemporary values of patient-centered health care".

They argue that the terms used to describe this - "discharge against medical advice, an unauthorized discharge" - reinforces the view that patients have acted inappropriately.

In the UK, patients have the legal right to determine whether they wish to stay in hospital or not, providing they are above 16 and not detained under the Mental Health Act.

Many health staff expressed sympathy for their decision, with one doctor saying "they're scared of what will go on in hospital . . . It's okay to be scared."

A nurse said: "We are waking them up in the middle of the night to check their observations, we've got patients coming and going and monitors going off, you get why somebody would much rather be at home in their own bed using their own facilities."

Some patients stressed it was not poor care but distress at living on a hospital ward which prompted their decision.

"I don't like being in hospital. I didn't like being in the ward environment even though it was actually very good. The staff were very good . . . So as long as I felt safe I just preferred to leave really."

Some even saw their departure as reducing the workload of hospital staff

"I thought if I come out there will be one less bed to look after."

Health care staff saw self discharge as a response to the lack of control patients experienced.

"Sometimes it's lack of empowerment that makes them want to do that in the first place if they don't feel that they've got any control over what's happening to them. "

The researchers say that viewing self discharge in a more positive way enables staff to demonstrate compassion toward patients.

Explore further Rx discrepancies common in hospital discharge summaries

More information: Laura L. Machin et al, An Alternative View of Self-Discharge Against Medical Advice: An Opportunity to Demonstrate Empathy, Empowerment, and Care, Qualitative Health Research (2018). Journal information: Qualitative Health Research Laura L. Machin et al, An Alternative View of Self-Discharge Against Medical Advice: An Opportunity to Demonstrate Empathy, Empowerment, and Care,(2018). DOI: 10.1177/1049732318754514A single round of total-community treatment (TCT) with the antibiotic azithromycin applied to affected rural communities could significantly decrease yaws among the population one year later, according to study published in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases by Kingsley Bampoe Asiedu, of the World Health Organization (WHO) and colleagues.

Yaws is a disease which affects mainly children and is diagnosed by the presence of skin ulcers and a reactive syphilis serology, but this can be confused clinically with ulcers caused by other infections, such as a Haemophilus ducreyi infection. In 2012, the WHO devised a new yaws eradication strategy, also known as the Morges Strategy, which recommended the TCT of yaws-affected communities using single doses of oral azithromycin followed by ongoing active surveillance and total targeted treatment of cases and contacts.

Asiedu and colleagues conducted a survey of 2,909 schoolchildren before and one year after the TCT intervention in Ghana in order to assess the impact of the mass treatment. The researchers found that the provision of mass azithromycin administration given as a single oral dose of 30 mg/kg and up to a maximum dose of 2 g is effective in reducing both the rates of seropositivity and the presence of serologically positive skin lesions consistent with yaws one year after administration. Azithromycin is also effective against H. ducreyi.

While the sample population of schoolchildren did not include the poorest children who may not attend school, the routine surveillance data from the District Health Information Management System confirmed the overall decrease of yaws-like cases seen in the Ghanaian sub-district one year after the TCT. The authors note that yaws-like lesions caused by H. ducreyi or other unknown pathogens may continue to persist after a single-round of mass treatment, and therefore they suggest that it may be necessary to devise new management protocols for non-yaws / non-H. ducreyi lesions following the successful elimination of yaws through TCT.

"Although one round of TCT was unable to stop transmission, we achieved a significant reduction in the disease. With little effort through total targeted treatment, or perhaps another round of TCT, we could possibly end yaws," notes Dr. Cynthia Kwakye-Maclean, Programme Manager of Ghana Yaws Eradication Programme.

Explore further Study identifies how to improve WHO eradication strategy for skin disease

More information: Abdulai AA, Agana-Nsiire P, Biney F, Kwakye-Maclean C, Kyei-Faried S, Amponsa-Achiano K, et al. (2018) Community-based mass treatment with azithromycin for the elimination of yaws in GhanaResults of a pilot study. PLoS Negl Trop Dis 12(3): e0006303. Journal information: PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases Abdulai AA, Agana-Nsiire P, Biney F, Kwakye-Maclean C, Kyei-Faried S, Amponsa-Achiano K, et al. (2018) Community-based mass treatment with azithromycin for the elimination of yaws in GhanaResults of a pilot study.12(3): e0006303. doi.org/10.1371/journal.pntd.0006303Scientists have successfully restored blood vessel growth in aging animals. Credit: Kevin Krull, for Harvard Medical School

We are as old as our arteries, the adage goes, so could reversing the aging of blood vessels hold the key to restoring youthful vitality?

The answer appears to be yes, at least in mice, according to a new study led by investigators at Harvard Medical School.

The research, published March 22 in Cell, identifies the key cellular mechanisms behind vascular aging and its effects on muscle health and has successfully reversed the process in animals.

The findings pinpoint a glitch in the normal crosstalk that occurs between muscles and blood vessels and keeps both tissues healthy.

Using the synthetic precursors of two molecules naturally present in the body, the scientists also managed to reverse blood vessel demise and muscle atrophy in aging mice, boosting their exercise endurance in the process.

The achievement, the team said, paves the way to identifying related therapies for humans.

"We've discovered a way to reverse vascular aging by boosting the presence of naturally occurring molecules in the body that augment the physiological response to exercise," said study senior investigator David Sinclair, professor in the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and co-director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for the Biology of Aging at Harvard Medical School.

"The approach stimulates blood vessel growth and boosts stamina and endurance in mice and sets the stage for therapies in humans to address the spectrum of diseases that arise from vascular aging," added Sinclair, who is also a professor at the University of New South Wales School of Medical Sciences in Sydney, Australia.

The researchers caution that many promising treatments in mice don't have the same effect in humans due to critical differences in biology. However, the results of the experiments were dramatic enough to prompt the research team to pursue experiments in humans. Clinical trials for safety are already under way, Sinclair said.

As old as our blood vessels

Sinclair and team set out to unravel the mechanisms behind one of biology's inevitabilities: aging.

As we grow old, we become weak and frail. A constellation of physiological changessome subtle, some dramaticprecipitate this inevitable decline. What exactly happens inside our cells to cause the biological shifts that lead to aging? It's a question that has vexed Sinclair and team for years.

As we age, our tiniest blood vessels wither and die, causing reduced blood flow and compromised oxygenation of organs and tissues. Vascular aging is responsible for a constellation of disorders, such as cardiac and neurologic conditions, muscle loss, impaired wound healing and overall frailty, among others. Scientists have known that loss of blood flow to organs and tissues leads to the build-up of toxins and low oxygen levels. The so-called endothelial cells, which line blood vessels, are essential for the health and growth of blood vessels that supply oxygen-rich and nutrient-loaded blood to organs and tissues. But as these endothelial cells age, blood vessels atrophy, new blood vessels fail to form and blood flow to most parts of the body gradually diminishes. This dynamic is particularly striking in muscles, which are heavily vascularized and rely on robust blood supply to function.

Muscles begin to shrivel and grow weaker with age, a condition known as sarcopenia. The process can be slowed down with regular exercise, but gradually even exercise becomes less effective at holding off this weakening.

Sinclair and team wondered: What precisely curtails the blood flow and precipitates this unavoidable decline? Why does even exercise lose its protective power to sustain muscle vitality? Is this process reversible?

In a series of experiments, the team found that reduced blood flow develops as endothelial cells start to lose a critical protein known as sirtuin1, or SIRT1. Previous studies have shown that SIRT1 delays aging and extends life in yeast and mice.

SIRT1 loss is, in turn, precipitated by the loss of NAD+, a key regulator of protein interactions and DNA repair that was identified more than a century ago. Previous research by Sinclair and others has shown that NAD+, which also declines with age, boosts the activity of SIRT1.

A stimulating conversation

The study reveals that NAD+ and SIRT1 provide a critical interface that enables the conversation between endothelial cells in the walls of blood vessels and muscle cells.

Specifically, the experiments reveal that in young mouse muscle, SIRT1 signaling is activated and generates new capillaries, the tiniest blood vessels in the body that supply oxygen and nutrients to tissues and organs. However, as NAD+/SIRT1 activity diminishes over time, the study found, so does the blood flow, leaving muscle tissue nutrient-deprived and oxygen-starved.

Indeed, when researchers deleted SIRT1 in the endothelial cells of young mice, they observed markedly diminished capillary density and decreased number of capillaries, compared with mice that had intact SIRT1. Mice whose endothelial cells lacked SIRT1 had poor exercise tolerance, managing to run only half the distance covered by their SIRT1-intact peers.

To determine SIRT1's role in exercise-induced blood vessel growth, the researchers observed how SIRT1-deficient mice responded to exercise. After a month-long training regimen, the hind-leg muscles of SIRT1-deficient mice showed markedly diminished ability to form new blood vessels in response to exercise compared with same-age mice that had intact SIRT1 in their endothelial cells.

Exercise-induced blood vessel formation is known to occur in response to growth-stimulating proteins released by muscles under strain. SIRT1, however, appears to be the key messenger relaying growth-factor signaling from muscles to blood vessels, the study found.

Experiments showed that endothelial cells lacking SIRT1 were desensitized to the growth-stimulating proteins released by exercised muscles.

"It's as if these cells had grown deaf to the signals that muscles sent their way," Sinclair said.

The observation, he added, explains why age-related loss of SIRT1 leads to muscle atrophy and blood vessel demise.

Since the experiments revealed the critical role of SIRT1 in exercise-induced blood vessel formation, the researchers wondered whether boosting SIRT1 levels would stimulate blood vessel growth and stave off muscle wasting.

Exercise in a pill?

The scientists set their sights on NAD+, a molecule conserved across many life forms, known to decline with age and previously shown to stimulate SIRT1 activity.

"We reasoned that declining NAD+ levels reduce SIRT1 activity and thus interfere with aging mice's ability to grow new blood vessels," said study first author Abhirup Das, who conducted the work as a post-doctoral fellow in Sinclair's lab, currently a visiting scholar in genetics at Harvard Medical School and a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of South New Wales School of Medical Sciences.

To test this premise, scientists used a chemical compound called NMN, a NAD+ precursor, previously shown to play a role in repairing cellular DNA and maintaining cell vitality.

In lab dish experiments, endothelial cells from humans and mice treated with NMN showed enhanced growth capacity and reduced cell death.

Next, the team gave NMN over two months to a group of mice that were 20 months oldthe rough equivalent of 70 in human years. NMN treatment restored the number of blood capillaries and capillary density to those seen in younger mice. Blood flow to the muscles also increased and was significantly higher than blood supply to the muscles seen in same-age mice that didn't receive NMN.

The most striking effect, however, emerged in the aging mice's ability to exercise. These animals showed between 56 and 80 percent greater exercise capacity, compared with untreated mice the study showed. The NMN-treated animals managed to run 430 meters, or about 1,400 feet, on average, compared with 240 meters, or 780 feet, on average, for their untreated peers.

To see whether the effects of NMN could be further augmented, the researchers added a second compound to the treatment regimen. The compound, sodium hydrosulfide (NaHS), is a precursor to hydrogen sulfide, which also boosts the activity of SIRT1.

A group of 32-month-old micethe rough equivalent to 90 in human yearsreceiving the combo treatment for four weeks were able to run, on average, twice as long as untreated mice. In comparison, mice treated with NMN alone ran 1.6 times farther, on average, than untreated animals.

"These are really old mice so our finding that the combo treatment doubles their running capacity is nothing short of intriguing," said study co-author James Mitchell, associate professor of genetics and complex diseases at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health. Research led by Mitchell and published in the same issue of Cell also found sodium hydrosulfide to augment blood vessel formation in the muscles of mice.

Interestingly, the NMN treatment did not improve blood vessel density and exercise capacity in young sedentary mice. However, it did boost blood vessel formation and exercise capacity in young mice that had been exercising regularly for a month.

"This observation underscores the notion that age plays a critical role in the crosstalk between blood vessels and muscles and points to a loss of NAD+ and SIRT1 as the reason behind loss of exercise effectiveness after middle age," Das said.

The researchers say their findings may pave the way to therapeutic advances that hold promise for the millions of older people for whom regular physical activity is not an option.

"Even if you're an athlete, you eventually decline," Sinclair said. "But there is another category of peoplewhat about those who are in a wheelchair or those with otherwise reduced mobility?"

The team's ultimate goal is to replicate the findings and, eventually, move toward developing small-molecule, NMN-based drugs that mimic the effects of exerciseenhanced blood flow and oxygenation of muscles and other tissues. Such therapies may even help with new vessel growth of organs that suffer tissue-damaging loss of blood supply and oxygen, a common scenario in heart attacks and ischemic strokes, the team said.

Neo-vascularizationthe formation of new blood vesselsshould be treated with caution, the researchers say, because increased blood supply could inadvertently fuel tumor growth.

"The last thing you want to do is provide extra blood and nourishment to a tumor if you already have one," said study co-author Lindsay Wu, at the University of New South Wales School of Medical Sciences.

Sinclair and Wu point out that experiments done as part of the current study provide no evidence that treatment with NMN stimulated tumor development in animals treated with the compound.

Explore further Scientists find power switch for muscles

More information: Abhirup Das et al, Impairment of an Endothelial NAD + -H 2 S Signaling Network Is a Reversible Cause of Vascular Aging, Cell (2018). DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2018.02.008 , Journal information: Cell Abhirup Das et al, Impairment of an Endothelial NAD + -H 2 S Signaling Network Is a Reversible Cause of Vascular Aging,(2018). DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2018.02.008 , dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2018.02.008

Provided by Harvard Medical SchoolMummified specimen from Atacama region of Chile. Credit: Bhattacharya S et al. 2018.

The skeleton, discovered in a leather pouch behind an abandoned church, was pristine: a tiny figure, just six inches long, with a cone-shaped head, 10 pairs of ribs, and bones that looked like those of an eight-year-old child. Found in the Atacama Desert of Chile and later affectionately nicknamed "Ata," the skeleton made its way onto the black market for archeological finds and then to a collector in Spain who thought it might be the remains of an extraterrestrial being.

But a forensic analysis of Ata's genome by scientists at UC San Francisco and Stanford University has proved beyond a doubt that it is human. Ata has the DNA of a modern human female with the mix of Native American and European ancestral markers one would expect from someone who lived near the place where she was found. And her arresting appearance, which scientists refer to as a phenotype, can most likely be explained by a handful of rare genetic mutationssome already known, others newly discoveredthat are linked to dwarfism and other bone and growth disorders.

Their discoveries, published Thursday, March 22, 2018, in Genome Research, does more than lay to rest the fable of Ata's extraterrestrial origins. It also illustrates how far open-source genetic data has come in enabling the sort of needle-in-a-haystack analysis that can pinpoint the handful of mutated genesout of more than 2.7 million single-nucleotide variants (SNVs) in Ata's genomethat were most likely to be associated with the unusual shape of her body.

"The bioinformatics analyses in the paper showcase the power and wealth of information available in the public domain that led to the discovery of novel and rare deleterious variants in genes associated with Ata's phenotype," said Sanchita Bhattacharya, a bioinformatics researcher at the UCSF Institute for Computational Health Sciences (ICHS). "The analysis was even more challenging with a very limited amount of information about the specimen, and lack of family history, which makes it a unique case."

Bhattacharya used the Human Phenotype Ontology (HPO), a database that links genomic data to the abnormal phenotypes found in human disease, everything from atrial septal defect, or a hole in the chambers of the heart, to musculoskeletal abnormalities.

In an initial analysis Bhattacharya found 64 gene variants that seemed likely to be damaging. She fed them into the HPO database, and to her amazement, most of the possible phenotypes the program homed in on had to do with the skeletal system, including "proportionate short stature" and "11 pairs of ribs." Ata had 10 pairs, a phenotype that had never been observed.

"The moment I saw it, I could see there was something interesting going on there," Bhattacharya said. "It was a little amount of information, and I am not a bone expert. This was a very blinded analysis."

The results revealed four new SNVsa type of genetic mutation at the individual levelin genes that were known to cause bone diseases, like scoliosis or dislocations, as well as two more SNVs in genes involved in producing collagen.

While esoteric, the analysis of Ata's genome points toward the clinical genetics of the future, said Atul Butte, MD, PhD, who directs ICHS and is the Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg Distinguished Professor at UCSF.

With rapidly accumulating genetic data, Butte said, scientists can take a "backwards" approach to diagnosis. Instead of starting with a description of the disease and looking for a mutated gene to explain it, they start with the patient's raw genetic material to see how it differs from a normal, or "reference" set of samples. The genetic variations that pop out of this comparison then reveal, in an unbiased way, what processes are at work in the patient to create disease.

"Analyzing a puzzling sample like the Ata genome can teach us how to handle current medical samples, which may be driven by multiple mutations," Butte said. "When we study the genomes of patients with unusual syndromes, there may be more than one gene or pathway involved genetically, which is not always considered."

Garry Nolan, PhD, a professor of microbiology and immunology at the Stanford University School of Medicine began the scientific exploration of Ata in 2012, when a friend called saying he might have found an "alien."

Nolan believes further research into Ata's precocious bone aging could one day benefit patients. "Maybe there's a way to accelerate bone growth in people who need it, people who have bad breaks," he said. "Nothing like this had been seen before. Certainly, nobody had looked into the genetics of it."

But Nolan also said that he hopes, one day, little Ata will be given a proper burial. Far from being a visitor from another planet, Ata's genome marked her as South American, with genetic variations that identified her as being from the Andean region inhabited by the Chilean Chilote Indians. Judging from the skeleton's intact condition, he said, it is probably no more than 40 years old.

"We now know that it's a child, and probably either a pre- or post-term birth and death," he said. "I think it should be returned to the country of origin and buried according to the customs of the local people."

Explore further Bone fragility variants linked to concordant pediatric skeleton

More information: Bhattacharya S, Li J, Sockell A, Kan M, Bava F, Chen, S, Avila-Arcos M, Ji X, Smith E, Asadi N, Lachman R, Lam H, Bustamante C, Butte A, Nolan G. 2018. Whole genome sequencing of Atacama skeleton shows novel mutations linked with dysplasia. Genome Research, dx.doi.org/10.1101/gr.223693.117 Journal information: Genome Research Bhattacharya S, Li J, Sockell A, Kan M, Bava F, Chen, S, Avila-Arcos M, Ji X, Smith E, Asadi N, Lachman R, Lam H, Bustamante C, Butte A, Nolan G. 2018. Whole genome sequencing of Atacama skeleton shows novel mutations linked with dysplasia.Ingo Helbig, MD, is a pediatric neurologist at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. Credit: Children's Hospital of Philadelphia

Neurology researchers investigating a rare but devastating neurological regression in infants have discovered the cause: gene mutations that severely disrupt crucial functions in mitochondria, the energy-producing structures within cells. The specific disease mechanism, in which mutations disrupt a critical mitochondrial enzyme, has not previously been implicated in a human disease.

"We uncovered the cause of this mysterious neurodegenerative disease, and now we understand better what happens in the brains of these children," said lead investigator Ingo Helbig, MD, a pediatric neurologist at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP). "This new understanding is the very first step toward potentially finding a treatment."

Helbig collaborated with researchers from Germany, Australia and the U.S. in this study, published online today in the American Journal of Human Genetics. The other two co-senior authors were Dr. Franz-Josef Mueller, of the University Hospital Schleswig Holstein, Kiel, Germany; and Dr. Johan L.K. Van Hove, of the University of Colorado.

For Helbig, now an attending physician in the Neurogenetics Program at CHOP and a specialist in genetic epilepsies, the finding builds on an experience early in his medical training when he was involved in the care of an infant girl with severe epilepsy. The child suffered sudden neurological regression after a fever, for no apparent reason. Imaging studies showed the child lost brain volume, mainly in the cerebellum.

The symptoms appeared to mimic those of a progressive neurological disease. Instead, it turned out to be due to energy failure, based in malfunctioning mitochondria, but this became apparent only after nearly a decade of research.

The current study reports on five affected children in four families, including the original patient and her sibling. Both siblings, along with a third patient in the study, died before six years of age. None of the five children were able to walk or speak, and all but one had seizures.

The research team used whole-exome sequencing to pinpoint the causative mutations in the gene PMPCB. Because that gene is highly conserved across yeast and humans, the researchers conducted experiments in a common yeast to investigate the effects of the mutation

The researchers found that mutations in PMPCB interfered with the function of the enzyme mitochondrial processing protease (MPP), which transports proteins into mitochondria to be cut up as part of normal biological processing. Disrupting that process, in turn, blocked the production of iron-sulfur clusters that are crucial to energy metabolism and other cellular functions.

In infants, the diminished activity of MPP causes a deficiency of biological energy. An infection or fever triggers a crisisa cascade of severe events, including brain atrophy and the neurological regression seen in the patients. The symptoms appear similar to those seen in the well-known mitochondrial disorder Leigh's syndrome.

The biological pathways that MPP is involved in are closely related to the more common neurological disease Friedreich's ataxia, which is also actively studied by researchers at CHOP. In fact, frataxin, the protein altered in Friedreich's ataxia, is one of the main targets of MPP. The conditions however, are very different, and the PMPCB-related disorders identified by Helbig and his collaborators are more severe than Friedreich's ataxia.

The current findings, said Helbig, set the stage for follow-up research in biological implications, for instance, by further investigation in yeast models of the disease. "If we better understand biological pathways and mechanisms," he added, "we may be able to start screening for compounds that may suggest potential treatments for this condition."

See Helbig's research blog, "Beyond the Ion Channel" for his description of the discovery of PMPCB's role in this condition.

Explore further Biomarker, clues to possible therapy found in novel childhood neurogenetic disease

More information: F.-Nora Vogtle et al, Mutations in PMPCB Encoding the Catalytic Subunit of the Mitochondrial Presequence Protease Cause Neurodegeneration in Early Childhood, The American Journal of Human Genetics (2018). Journal information: American Journal of Human Genetics F.-Nora Vogtle et al, Mutations in PMPCB Encoding the Catalytic Subunit of the Mitochondrial Presequence Protease Cause Neurodegeneration in Early Childhood,(2018). DOI: 10.1016/j.ajhg.2018.02.014A picture of Dr. Hongyan Liu in her lab at the Georgia Cancer Center. Credit: Phil Jones, Senior Photographer, Augusta University

A newly designed three-part molecule could be the one answer patients with a certain form of breast cancer are looking for, scientists report.

This chimera, created by a team at the Georgia Cancer Center, has the ability to simultaneously decrease the expression of three growth factors that are over-expressed in some cancers.

The growth factors are human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2), human epidermal growth factor receptor 3 (HER3), and epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR). The new chimera interferes with HER2 and HER3 signaling and ultimately leads to cancer cell death, as shown in the group's recent publication in Molecular Therapy: Nucleic Acids.

"When HER2 is expressed in a cell, you'll usually find high expression of HER3, too," said Dr. Hongyan Liu, bioengineer at the Georgia Cancer Center at Augusta University and the Center for Biotechnology and Genomic Medicine at the Medical College of Georgia at Augusta University.

Extensive studies have found that 20% to 30% of breast cancers are characterized by over-expression of HER2, which makes the cancer cells grow and divide faster, leading to a cancer that's more aggressive and more likely to be resistant to the standard of care. Patients with this type of breast cancer tend to have a poorer prognosis.

"As a bioengineer, I am developing the materials for cancer-targeted treatment," Liu said. "I have experience building multifunctional chimeras to target different types of genes associated with cancer cells."

Liu and her team created their molecule to target HER family receptors EGFR, HER2, and HER3 all at once, since it is well-known that another HER family member can compensate for one that is blocked by a drug having a single target.

Each component of this tripartite molecule has potent anti-tumor activity. The molecule was designed such that the EGFR-targeting component is sandwiched between the HER2- and HER3-targeting components in what is known as a HER2 aptamer-EGFR siRNA-HER3 aptamer chimera. This construction enables the EGFR component to reach its target within HER2- and HER3-expressing cells. Compared to individual components, the chimera is large enough to avoid renal depletion, resulting in a prolonged circulation time and increased efficiency.

The newly crafted molecule is non-toxic, simple to produce, and cost-effective compared to the production of alternate treatment strategies, such as antibodies and small molecule inhibitors.

Liu's ongoing studies are testing the ability of the three-in-one chimera to treat breast cancers that are resistant to Herceptin, a drug that targets HER2. This work is being done in collaboration with Dr. Hasan Korkaya, assistant professor, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the Medical College of Georgia, who has developed drug-resistant cell lines, and with breast cancer clinicians.

"We need to prove that this molecule will work on Herceptin-resistant breast cancer patients," Liu said.

Since other cancers, such as lung and head and neck, proliferate due to HER family over-expression, Liu anticipates that the chimera's utility will not be limited to breast cancers alone.

Explore further Molecular imaging finds novel way to knock down breast cancer

More information: Xiaolin Yu et al, Targeting EGFR/HER2/HER3 with a Three-in-One Aptamer-siRNA Chimera Confers Superior Activity against HER2 + Breast Cancer, Molecular Therapy - Nucleic Acids (2017). Xiaolin Yu et al, Targeting EGFR/HER2/HER3 with a Three-in-One Aptamer-siRNA Chimera Confers Superior Activity against HER2 + Breast Cancer,(2017). DOI: 10.1016/j.omtn.2017.12.015President Cyril Ramaphosa has supported the idea of a single currency for the African Union, and suggested that it may be digital-only, the Mail & Guardian reported.

The suggestion comes after a meeting of the African Union in Rwanda, where 44 nations met to sign a deal to establish the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA).

While South Africa is a signatory to the declaration, Ramaphosa did not sign the country up to the AfCFTA, saying he must get approval from stakeholders in South Africa.

He said the next step following the discussions of a free trade area across the continent is a single currency.

Ramaphosa said he wasnt sure what a single African currency will look like, but said a digital currency may precede a real single currency  as it is easier than having a proper, full currency.

The report suggested that an African Bitcoin might be on the cards to implement this idea.

Now read: Ripple partners with 5 new clients across 4 countriesHuawei smartphones are becoming a household name in South Africa, with the companys market share and brand consideration soaring over the past year.

The companys affordable and high-quality devices are quickly gaining popularity locally, with both its premium and mid-range products seeing impressive growth.

Huawei Consumer Business Group South Africa General Manager Zhao Likun said the brand value of Huawei has climbed by 50% in this period, and they shipped a record 153 million smartphones to customers around the world in 2017.

Additionally, consumer data shows an increasing number of South Africans have started looking to Huaweis flagship smartphones to serve as their new premium devices.

At the beginning of 2017, Huaweis premium device market share in South Africa was 7%. By the end of the year, this figure rocketed to 13.8%, with the P10 and Mate 10 product ranges proving extremely popular.

Brand recognition

Likun said one of the biggest challenges the company faces in South Africa is improving its brand consideration.

Huawei has made great strides in this regard over the past year, with Likun stating that the companys brand consideration has risen from 13% to 25%. The companys brand recognition in South Africa is currently at 83%, a figure Likun said the company is very happy with.

He said Huawei plans to continue its push into the South African market by offering powerful and affordable devices to consumers, while improving localised service.

Going forward, we will increase our product portfolio and we will pay more attention to the middle and low-end, said Likun. The company will also improve product delivery to local customers by building a distribution centre in South Africa.

This year we will construct our own South Africa warehouse, shortening delivery time from 3 weeks to 3 days, said Likun.

A focus on innovation

Likun said Huaweis continued success in the global smartphone market is driven by a philosophy of innovation.

We believe innovation is the most important aspect of smartphone design. Last year we launched the first smartphone with an integrated AI chipset, said Likun.

This device was the Huawei Mate 10 Pro, which features the companys Kirin 970 chipset. The chipset packs a built-in neural processing unit that allows it to power a host of AI features on the smartphone  from object recognition to real-time text translation.

Huaweis partnership with renowned camera company Leica has also positioned it as an innovative smartphone manufacturer. Thanks to this partnership, Huawei smartphones are outfitted with high-definition cameras which are held to the strictest quality standards.

Likun said Huawei will continue to launch and market its flagship devices in South Africa  which pack the impressive features mentioned above  while also launching its new Y-Series smartphones this year.

Through launching the affordable Y-Series devices in South Africa, Huawei will offer a varied product range  from high-quality, affordable smartphones to premium, cutting-edge devices.EU urges Iranian foreign minister to resume talks on Tehran's nuclear dossier

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Criminal found at Armenia's border crossing point, was wanted by Greek law-enforcement authorities for 1 year

Armenia Supreme Judicial Council members receive Swedish National Courts Administration delegation

Level of Armenia's Lake Sevan drops 1 cm in period between September 13 and 19

Azerbaijan FM demands that counterparts of VUAM "exert pressure on Armenia"

OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs planning to resume talks with Azerbaijani and Armenian FMs

Digest: Blinken, Cavusoglu discuss Karabakh, Russia peacekeepers remove Artsakh flag from monastery

Analyst: It's fundamentally important for Russia to maintain role of mediator between Yerevan and Baku

Armenia and Karabakh territorial administration ministers discuss administrative-territorial reforms in Artsakh

Tajikistan President congratulates Armenia PM on 30th anniversary of Independence

Iran-Armenia Chamber of Commerce chairman visits Embassy of Armenia

Dollar still going down in Armenia

Armenian ruling party MP: Erdogan's demand for corridor is not ruled out, but Armenia granting it is ruled out

Armenia drops 4 spots in Freedom House ranking of internet freedom

Armenia's Assyrian community protesting against Dimitrov village's "enlargement" in front of parliament building

US House of Representatives to vote on release of Armenian POWs in Azerbaijan

Analyst: Russia is much more involved in Karabakh conflict now than it was before September 27, 2020

Ukraine President congratulates Armenian counterpart on 30th anniversary of Armenia's Independence

Armenia Prosecutor General leaves for Kazakhstan on working visit

Armenia President: I am concerned about the present and future of Armenian science

Armenia important road link in cargo transportation from India to Black Sea

State Department official: We will have meetings with Armenians and Azerbaijanis this week and make the same proposal

Armenia's Byurakan Observatory plans to establish science base in Nagorno-Karabakh

Armenia deputy minister: National minorities shouldn't be left out of process of enlargement of communities

Garibashvili, Erdogan discuss Armenia, Azerbaijan

Armenia opposition member points to link between enlargement of communities and upcoming local elections

Deputy minister: New administrative-territorial division of Armenia will enable decentralization of power

Armenia official: Enlarged communities list will include capital Yerevan

Armenia ambassador has virtual meeting with US Congressman David Price

US Under Secretary of State, Azerbaijan FM discuss situation in Karabakh

Armenia Central Bank chief, Eurasian Economic Commission board member discuss Eurasian integration

Queen Elizabeth congratulates President Sarkissian on Armenia Independence Day anniversary

Machkalashen village mayor: Russia peacekeepers removed Artsakh flag on Amaras Monastery

CSTO antidrug military exercise to be held in Armenia

Armenia parliament vice-speaker: Positive that Azerbaijan returned our lost citizens after 1.5 day

273 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia

5 new cases of coronavirus reported in Artsakh

Blinken, Turkeys Cavusoglu discuss Nagorno-Karabakh

World oil prices on the rise

Driver dies on the spot after accident at Yerevan section of North-South highway under construction

Newspaper: Armenia PM buys wiretapping system for $7m

Newspaper: Azerbaijanis demand taking down Artsakh flag placed on Amaras Monastery

US special services announce country's main external threats

Catholicos of All Armenians visits Yerablur Military Pantheon (PHOTOS)

Russian State Duma chairman congratulates Armenian counterpart on Armenia's Independence Day

Putin appoints Armenia's Mikayel Aghasandyan Russia's Permanent and Plenipotentiary Representative to CSTO

Resident of Karabakh's Karmir Shuka runs over three 14-year-olds, body found hanged from a tree later

Adam Schiff congratulates Armenians on 30th anniversary of Armenia's Independence

Nikol Pashinyan: Grove of Life will symbolize the start of era of peaceful development of Armenia

Armenia premier: History has shown that it's not mandatory and is sometimes unnecessary to defeat others to win

Azerbaijan FM meets with Turkish counterpart in New York

Karabakh President meets with President of Tashir Group Samvel Karapetyan in Yerevan

New Armenian flag placed in Armenia's Tegh village, higher than Azerbaijani flag

UN Secretary General urges to ban weapons that kill without human participation

Russia Federation Council chairwoman congratulates Armenia Parliament Speaker on Independence Day

US may approve Pfizer child vaccine drug soon

Biden calls on UN to protect rights of sex minorities from Chechnya to Cameroon

"Vivid" Independence Day event kicks off at Republic Square in Yerevan

Iranian Deputy FM to arrive in Azerbaijan on a three-day visit

Police inspecting citizens with metal detectors before Independence Day event at Republic Square in Yerevan

Armenia marks Independence Day: Digest on congratulations from int. leaders

Karabakh emergency situations service: Remains of another Armenian serviceman found in Mataghis

Largest flag of Armenia raised in Yeraskh village of Ararat Province (PHOTOS)

Putin, Erdogan to discuss Syria and other regional conflicts

Karabakh President sends condolence message to Russia's Putin

China PM to Armenia counterpart: Cooperation in sidelines of One Belt One Road joint construction steadily develops

Lukashenko to Pashinyan: Belarus, Armenia will be able to fully realize bilateral cooperations potential

Monument to Marshal Baghramyan unveiled in Moscow

Kazakhstan President: Armenia achieved great success, enjoys well-deserved reputation in international arenaTurkey sends several thousand more troops to Syria

EU urges Iranian foreign minister to resume talks on Tehran's nuclear dossier

Syrian citizen arrested in absentia for murder of Russian military pilot in Syria

Criminal case filed for writing insulting comment under Armenia PM's photo on Facebook

Chronicles of Aurora to leave Yerevans Matenadaran for first time to be displayed at San Lazzaro Island in Venice

Health minister talks about getting 3rd dose of COVID-19 vaccine in Armenia

Georgia PM to Armenia counterpart: Existing challenges make cooperation between our countries more significant

Iran, Turkey, Azerbaijan FMs to meet in Tehran

Armenia State Revenue Committee chief meets with US embassy drug enforcement program new director

Armenia, Nicaragua FMs highlight interest to deepen cooperation within international platforms

La Francophonie Secretary General: I reaffirm readiness to support Armenia initiatives

Armenia, France FMs meet in New York, discuss prospects for settlement of Karabakh conflict

Armenia Syunik Province governors wanted son turns himself in, is taken to prison

939 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia

US welcomes China decision to stop building coal-burning power plants abroad

US Congress demands release of all Armenian POWs in Azerbaijan

FMs discuss rich agenda of Armenia-Greece relations

Serbia to open diplomatic mission in Armenia

Tiger kills shepherd in India right before the eyes of other shepherds

Newspaper: Whose interests Armenia current government serves?

Newspaper: Ex-Presidents Kocharyan, Sargsyan were invited to Armenia Independence Day anniversary event

Armenia FM to Austrian counterpart: Armenian heritage of Artsakh urgently needs to be in international community's focus

Armenia opposition MP: No protection of public interests mentioned in administrative-territorial division law

Analyst: Presidents of Turkey and Azerbaijan know the price for new and possible escalation

Embassy of Iran in Armenia on situation regarding Iranian truck drivers detained in Azerbaijan

Armenian and Slovenian FMs discuss pressing regional and international issues

Armenia Parliament Speaker receives congratulatory messages from Iranian and Indian counterparts

His Holiness Karekin II receives Samvel Karapetyan and participants of Armenian Business Forum 2021

Armenia MOD chairs consultation devoted to army's preparations for winter

Driver dies in gorge after driving off Armenias Kapan-Kajaran road

Armenia FM meets with Polish counterpart

Armenia ruling party MP on reason why military parade was not held on Independence Day

Armenia and Lithuania FMs meet in New York

Criminal found at Armenia's border crossing point, was wanted by Greek law-enforcement authorities for 1 year

Armenia Supreme Judicial Council members receive Swedish National Courts Administration delegation

Level of Armenia's Lake Sevan drops 1 cm in period between September 13 and 19

Azerbaijan FM demands that counterparts of VUAM "exert pressure on Armenia"

OSCE Minsk Group Co-Chairs planning to resume talks with Azerbaijani and Armenian FMs

Digest: Blinken, Cavusoglu discuss Karabakh, Russia peacekeepers remove Artsakh flag from monastery

Analyst: It's fundamentally important for Russia to maintain role of mediator between Yerevan and Baku

Armenia and Karabakh territorial administration ministers discuss administrative-territorial reforms in Artsakh

Tajikistan President congratulates Armenia PM on 30th anniversary of Independence

Iran-Armenia Chamber of Commerce chairman visits Embassy of Armenia

Dollar still going down in Armenia

Armenian ruling party MP: Erdogan's demand for corridor is not ruled out, but Armenia granting it is ruled out

Armenia drops 4 spots in Freedom House ranking of internet freedom

Armenia's Assyrian community protesting against Dimitrov village's "enlargement" in front of parliament building

US House of Representatives to vote on release of Armenian POWs in Azerbaijan

Analyst: Russia is much more involved in Karabakh conflict now than it was before September 27, 2020

Ukraine President congratulates Armenian counterpart on 30th anniversary of Armenia's Independence

Armenia Prosecutor General leaves for Kazakhstan on working visit

Armenia President: I am concerned about the present and future of Armenian science

Armenia important road link in cargo transportation from India to Black Sea

State Department official: We will have meetings with Armenians and Azerbaijanis this week and make the same proposal

Armenia's Byurakan Observatory plans to establish science base in Nagorno-Karabakh

Armenia deputy minister: National minorities shouldn't be left out of process of enlargement of communities

Garibashvili, Erdogan discuss Armenia, Azerbaijan

Armenia opposition member points to link between enlargement of communities and upcoming local elections

Deputy minister: New administrative-territorial division of Armenia will enable decentralization of power

Armenia official: Enlarged communities list will include capital Yerevan

Armenia ambassador has virtual meeting with US Congressman David Price

US Under Secretary of State, Azerbaijan FM discuss situation in Karabakh

Armenia Central Bank chief, Eurasian Economic Commission board member discuss Eurasian integration

Queen Elizabeth congratulates President Sarkissian on Armenia Independence Day anniversary

Machkalashen village mayor: Russia peacekeepers removed Artsakh flag on Amaras Monastery

CSTO antidrug military exercise to be held in Armenia

Armenia parliament vice-speaker: Positive that Azerbaijan returned our lost citizens after 1.5 day

273 new cases of COVID-19 confirmed in Armenia

5 new cases of coronavirus reported in Artsakh

Blinken, Turkeys Cavusoglu discuss Nagorno-Karabakh

World oil prices on the rise

Driver dies on the spot after accident at Yerevan section of North-South highway under construction

Newspaper: Armenia PM buys wiretapping system for $7m

Newspaper: Azerbaijanis demand taking down Artsakh flag placed on Amaras Monastery

US special services announce country's main external threats

Catholicos of All Armenians visits Yerablur Military Pantheon (PHOTOS)

Russian State Duma chairman congratulates Armenian counterpart on Armenia's Independence Day

Putin appoints Armenia's Mikayel Aghasandyan Russia's Permanent and Plenipotentiary Representative to CSTO

Resident of Karabakh's Karmir Shuka runs over three 14-year-olds, body found hanged from a tree later

Adam Schiff congratulates Armenians on 30th anniversary of Armenia's Independence

Nikol Pashinyan: Grove of Life will symbolize the start of era of peaceful development of Armenia

Armenia premier: History has shown that it's not mandatory and is sometimes unnecessary to defeat others to win

Azerbaijan FM meets with Turkish counterpart in New York

Karabakh President meets with President of Tashir Group Samvel Karapetyan in Yerevan

New Armenian flag placed in Armenia's Tegh village, higher than Azerbaijani flag

UN Secretary General urges to ban weapons that kill without human participation

Russia Federation Council chairwoman congratulates Armenia Parliament Speaker on Independence Day

US may approve Pfizer child vaccine drug soon

Biden calls on UN to protect rights of sex minorities from Chechnya to Cameroon

"Vivid" Independence Day event kicks off at Republic Square in Yerevan

Iranian Deputy FM to arrive in Azerbaijan on a three-day visit

Police inspecting citizens with metal detectors before Independence Day event at Republic Square in Yerevan

Armenia marks Independence Day: Digest on congratulations from int. leaders

Karabakh emergency situations service: Remains of another Armenian serviceman found in Mataghis

Largest flag of Armenia raised in Yeraskh village of Ararat Province (PHOTOS)

Putin, Erdogan to discuss Syria and other regional conflicts

Karabakh President sends condolence message to Russia's Putin

China PM to Armenia counterpart: Cooperation in sidelines of One Belt One Road joint construction steadily develops

Lukashenko to Pashinyan: Belarus, Armenia will be able to fully realize bilateral cooperations potential

Monument to Marshal Baghramyan unveiled in MoscowHome | News | General | UNICEF to give support to Dapchi girls

By Victoria Ojeme

UNICEF representative Mohamed Malick Fall, has disclosed that UNICEF is working closely with the Ministry of Youth in Yobe state to provide necessary support to the girls and their families.

Dapchi girls

In a statement made available to press yesterday on the return of girls abducted from a school in Dapchi he explained that over the last one month, the girls may have been exposed to physical and sexual violence.

According to the statement,  There need to give support to their families and communities to feel safe and return to school.

UNICEF is delighted that the girls abducted on 19 February 2018 from a school in Dapchi, Yobe state, northeast Nigeria were returned to their families.

We are pleased to see that the girls are back in the safe environment of their families.

UNICEF is also working with civil society organizations to ensure that each girl receives individual attention  from medical treatment to psychosocial support.

Our condolences to the families whose daughters could not come home. As we await

We are grateful for the efforts of all parties in ensuring safe return of the girls to their families.

UNICEF reiterates that schools should be safe spaces, and protected at all times.

Since the start of the insurgency in 2009, over 2,295 teachers have been killed and 19,000 displaced, and almost 1,400 schools destroyed

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Loading...Home | News | General | Lagos refuse menace: Akiolu urges support for Visionscape

By Kingsley Adegboye

lagosTo get rid of refuse which has taken over the streets of Lagos metropolis, Oba of Lagos, His Royal Majesty Rilwanu Akiolu, has called for support from Lagos residents to make Visionscape succeed in its responsibility to manage waste in the state.

The monarch, who made the call when management team of Visionscape led by its Managing Director, John Irvine, paid a courtesy visit to him in his palace, said everywhere in the world, there was problem of refuse, pointing out however, that the way to go about it was for everybody to support whatever arrangement is on ground to get rid of the situation.

Everywhere in the world, the issue of refuse is a serious one. But with active support from all of us, the issue will become a thing of the past. No organisation can succeed without the support of the people. So, we need to support Visionscape to succeed.

The monarch acknowledged that Visionscape had a good reputation and an international pedigree, adding that though he was not an investor in the company, he decided to give it 100 percent support.

He said: I appeal to them that understand that Visionscape is not taking their daily bread from them but to teach them better way manage waste in Lagos state:, he said.

Speaking earlier, John Irvine said they were in the palace to seek Obas blessing and wisdom concerning waste management in the state which is why the state government contracted the job to his company.

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Loading...Home | News | General | NIOMR empowers unemployed women, youths on industrialised farming

By Elizabeth Uwandu

The need to empower women and youths to be self-reliant informed the five- day training on Value chain capacity-building on aquaculture production and post-harvest technology organised by the Nigerian Institute for Oceanography and Marine Research, NIOMR, and facilitated by Chairman and members, House of Representatives Committee on Agricultural Colleges and Institutions.

At the end of the training, the 56 unemployed women and youths would each be given a starter pack comprising one fish plastic tank that will contain 100 catfish juveniles; 15 bags of fish-feed; scale, logbook; basin, hand-net and plastic spoons.

Speaking at the opening, Dr Patricia Anyanwu, director, Aquaculture, NIOMR, said that the capacity-building and empowerment programme was geared towards making participants come out with harvest within the next four months.

According to her: The essence is that aquaculture as a business, will empower unemployed youths, graduates and women to become self-employed in the aquaculture sector. While the value chain capacity-building will empower them either as fingerling producers or fish-feed producers, or as fish processors.

This seminar is coming at the right time as one of the Federal Governments capital project allocation programme for the first quarter of 2018. This workshop will also serve as a means of generating employment because aquaculture business demands hands. So, if you are trained, you will definitely train others.

For Dr Adekunle Oresegun, one of the facilitators, the programme was relevant to boost food consumption and livelihood as a means of revenue generation. Currently, Nigeria eats less fish compared to most countries in West Africa. So, the only way we can meet the WHO standard is to increase our fish production by encouraging more people to go into fish rearing. The programme is to train and increase peoples skills in the art and science of fish rearing, Oresegun said.

Some of participants drawn from selected federal constituencies across Nigeria such as Mr Ndubuisi Akpa, Enugu State; Hon. Busari Nosiru, supervisor for health, Ojoroko LCDA, Ifako/ Ijaiye Federal Constituency of Lagos State and Mrs Kemi Fadairo, Lagos, expressed joy over the training as it will afford them the opportunity to be gainfully employed and also be employers of labour.

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Loading...Home | News | General | TUC accuses debtor states of diverting workerssalaries to buy properties abroad

By Victor Ahiuma-Young

ABUJATRADE Union Congress of Nigeria, TUC, yesterday accused state governments still owing workers salaries of diverting money meant for payment of salaries and other benefits to buy properties across the world.

The umbrella body of senior workers in the country insisted that governors still owing workers salaries should resign now to avoid disgrace come 2019 election.

TUCs position followed recent disclosure by Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, that N1.9 trillion had been released to state governments as Paris Club Refund.

In a statement, TUC contended that it was unfair and inhuman for governors after sharing a total of N1.9 trillion and budget support facilities since the inception of this administration to fail to meet their obligations to workers.

The statement by Bobboi Kaigama and Musa Lawal, President and Secretary General of TUC, lamented that instead of paying workers, governors are busy buying properties all over the world. One wonders how they (governors) sleep at night while the people they govern go to bed hungry, sick and have their wards out of school.

The group commended Vice President Osinbajo and Senator Shehu Sani (APC, Kaduna Central) for their recent revelations on monies released to states and a fraction of the take home of senators, saying: The public and the international community is now abreast of how politicians and cronies rape our national patrimony while the masses live in abject poverty.

For us, this revelation is an eye opener and we are going to mobilise members throughout the country to ensure that defaulting governors seeking re-election and even those who have served out their second term but want to impose a stooge will not be allowed to emerge, but face perdition come 2019.

A position of leadership requires deep thinking and a lot of creativity. The managerial skill of a leader shows when he or she is faced with challenges like what we have in most states presently.

A lot of governors are not thinking out of the box simply because they know federal allocation is certain. They are not even paying deductions from workers salaries in some cases for up to six, seven, eight months. They only pay net, not gross, yet they claim to be conscien

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Loading...Home | News | General | Dapchi : Army hands over 106 released girls to FG

Maiduguri  The Nigerian Army on Wednesday formally handed 106 released girls from Boko Haram captivity to Federal Government.

Some of the Dapchi Schoolgirls brought back by their abductors in Dapchi town before proceeding To Abuja. Photo by Ndahi Marama

Maj.-Gen. Rogers Nicholas, the Theatre Commander, Operation Lafiya Dole, presented the released girls to the Minister of Information, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, at the 105 Air Force Composite Command, Maiduguri.

Nicholas explained that 104 of the girls were from the 110 abducted from Government Science and Technical School, Dapchi, released from the insurgents in the early hours of Wednesday.

He said the remaining six abducted schoolgirls were still unaccounted, noting that two other abducted girls who were not part of the abducted students were rescued from the insurgents by troops.

The theatre commander added that the rescued girls were brought from Dapchi to Maiduguri together with their parents and guardians.

The minister of information said Federal Government adopted proactive measures to secure release of the remaining girls and persons under insurgents captivity.

Mohammed noted that government was working to end hostilities and enhance peace restoration in the northeast.

The girls handover was attended by Minister of Interior, Abdulrahman Dambazau; Minister of State, Foreign Affairs, Khadija Bukar-Abba and Chief of Army Staff, Lt.-Gen. Tukur Buratai.

The released girls, alongside their parents and some aid workers boarded a Nigerian Air Force aircraft en route Abuja at about 18.50 p.m. (NAN)

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Loading...Ekiti State Governor, Mr Ayodele Fayose has congratulated parents of the abducted Dapchi schoolgirls that were released today and sympathized with parents of five of the girls that reportedly died.

He described the abduction of the girls as an indictment on the federal government and their release as drama scripted by the government and its agents to swindle Nigerians.

Fayose, while reacting to the release of the abducted school girls, said; This appears like an arranged abduction and an arranged release, but we thank God that the innocent girls have returned home and we condole with parents of those that died.

In a statement issued on Wednesday, by his Special Assistant on Public Communications and New Media, Lere Olayinka, Fayose said it was strange that the girls could be brought back to Dapchi by their abductors without the security agents knowing when they were returned and who returned them.

He said; Curiously, the same spirit who made sure that all military checkpoints in Dapchi and other surrounding towns were removed to pave way for abduction of the girls also made sure that the girls were returned without any security agent seeing them.

Read Also: Fayose, Ewi row over demolition in Ado-Ekiti

One can only be hopeful that the real script writers behind this drama will be exposed one day.

Nigerians should recall that the Yobe State Governor, Ibrahim Gaidam said that military checkpoints were withdrawn from Dapchi and other communities a few days before the abduction of the 110 girls.

This was also corroborated by the Amnesty International in its report that was published in the newspapers on Wednesday.

Specifically, Amnesty International said that security forces failed to act on advance warnings that a convoy of Boko Haram fighters was heading to Dapchi town and that between 2:00 pm and 6:00 pm on February 19, 2018, calls were made to tell the security services that the Boko Haram insurgents were in the Dapchi area.

No doubt, withdrawal of military check-points from Dapchi and other communities, few days before the 110 students were abducted and failure of the security forces to act on advance warnings exposed the conspiracy of the federal government and its agents in the abduction of the school girls and other dastardly acts of the insurgents.

Interestingly, no one was questioned up till now despite conflicting claims by the army and police as well as the damning report by the Amnesty International hat between 2:00 pm and 6:00 pm on February 19, 2018, calls were made to tell the security services that the Boko Haram insurgents were in the Dapchi area.

The governor, who reiterated his allegation that Boko Haram insurgency had become source of treasury looting; said; Those benefitting from Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) scams, payment of ransom (in dollars) to free those abducted by the Boko Haram insurgents, among others will never wish to see the end of the insurgency.The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has released the timetable for the recall of Senator Dino Melaye (Kogi West).

The Kogi State Resident Electoral Commissioner (REC), Prof. James Apam, said following the Appeal Courts ruling that the recall can start, INEC fixed April 28 for the verification and May 5 for the referendum.

Apam, who spoke at a stakeholders forum in Lokoja, said the process will begin with an invite to electorate, who signed the recall register, to identify their signatures.

According to him, if the process is successful, the commission will proceed to the next stage where a referendum of all registered voters will be conducted.

He continued: Here, voters will be asked to vote either Yes or No to the question of whether they want Senator Dino Melaye recalled.

If the answer is able to meet the constitutional requirements of 51 per cent Yes, the process moves to the next stage, but if it fails, the process stops.

The Court of Appeal in Abuja, last week, ruled against Melayes suit challenging the move to recall him.

As a law abiding people, INEC will not do anything outside the dictate of the law. That is why we have to wait till after the judgment before going ahead with the process, Apam added.

On the continuous voters registration, Apam said 210,000 Permanent Voter Cards (PVCs) were ready for collection, and so urged owners to come for them.The All Progressives Congress (APC) and the Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF) have hailed the safe return of girls abducted from the Government Girls Secondary School, Dapchi, Yobe State.

APC said it was a demonstration of the political will by the Buhari administration to ensure the safety of Nigerians.

It assured the citizens that the APC-led Buhari administration was doing everything humanly possible to ensure the safe return of the remaining Chibok girls.

A statement issued by its National Publicity Secretary, Mallam Bolaji Abdullahi, in Abuja said if the last administration had demonstrated the same commitment when the Chibok school girls were adopted, they would have been rescued on time rather than allow them pass through several months of torture.

The statement said the party was confident that reforms embarked upon by the present government would improve the capacity and efficiency of the nations security agencies to prevent the kidnap of children by terrorists and diminish their ability to carry out attacks on soft targets.

The statement reads: The APC is extremely delighted with the news of the return of the school girls abducted from Government Girls Science Technical College, Dapchi, Yobe State by Boko Haram.

The prompt release of the Dapchi school girls is another solid demonstration of the political will of the President Muhammadu Buhari-led APC administration to secure the lives of all Nigerians.

With this prompt release of the Dapchi girls, the APC government has demonstrated how government should respond to such situations. If the immediate-past Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) administration had responded with the similar alacrity, the Chibok school girls would have been released or rescued. Instead, the PDP wasted several weeks wallowing in denial and conspiracy theories such that it was now left for the APC government to rescue many of the girls and rehabilitate them.

We assure Nigerians that the current administration remains committed to securing the release of the remaining Chibok schoolgirl still held in captivity by Boko Haram and ultimately rehabilitate and reunite them with their families and loved ones.

The party is confident that reforms that the government has embarked on would improve the capacity and efficiency of our security agencies to prevent the kidnap of children by terrorists and diminish their ability to carry out attacks on soft targets.

The ACF equally called on the military and other security agencies to sustain the synergy and fast-track the search and rescue of the remaining Chibok girls kidnapped four years ago that are still in captivity.

A statement issued yesterday and signed by the forums National Publicity Secretary, Muhammad Ibrahim Biu, said: The good news from the Federal Government that the kidnapped female students of Government Girls Science Technical College, Dapchi in Yobe State that were abducted early this year by some Boko Haram terrorists have been released by their abductors is a welcome and reassuring development.

ACF, therefore, commends the Federal Government for its commitment and determination to the rescue and release of the Dapchi girls. The release of the Dapchi girls has certainly gladdened the hearts of the affected parents, relations, the Yobe State government and other Nigerians.Home | News | General | Moghalu advocates repeal of Land Use Act, end to foreign debt

By Babajide Komolafe & Adaeze okechukwu

The Former Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN, Professor Kingsley Moghalu, has called for constitutional repeal of the Land Use Act, stressing the Act traps the wealth of Nigeria citizens in the hands of choking grip of state bureaucracy.

He also called for an end to further foreign borrowing and deregulation of the downstream petroleum sector.

Kingsley Moghalu

He made this call in Lagos while speaking as Guest Lecturer of the 2018 edition of the Bullion Lecture organised by the Center for Financial Journalism.

Speaking on, Overcoming Poverty: The Secret of the Wealth of Nations, Moghalu presented a six point solution for the country to overcome poverty.

These include establishment of a clear worldview for the Nigerian state; and the establishment and consistent application of a clear economic philosophy of entrepreneurial capitalism in context of a developmental state, as guiding framework for the Nigerian economy.

Speaking on the need to repeal the Land Use Act, Moghalu said: : I recommend the constitutional repeal of the Land Use Act that traps the wealth of Nigerias citizens in the hands choking grip of state bureaucracy.

One of the foundations of successful capitalism is property right. If you have a land vested in the state and you are just a tenant with Certificate of Occupancy instead of a freehold that allows you determine what you can use the land for in terms of generating capital or pledging it as collateral.

Nigerians should be able to determine what even they want to do with the land they acquire. For example, We must not run to the governor to sign Certificate of Occupancy (C of O) each time investors come to invest, and the same goes for when a land is acquired. The Land Use Act has to go.

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Loading...Home | News | General | Can we save Lake Chad?

By Gambo Dori

I have always marvelled at the lack of awareness by many in this country on the strategic importance of Lake Chad and what it means for the livelihood and sustenance to millions of our countrymen. When the conference on Saving the Lake Chad was taking place late in February many were wondering what the problem was. But when they realised that the conference was receiving lavish press and rare privilege of having the presence of the President as well as the Vice- President in quick succession they then knew that something big was really happening.

In fact, people realised that it was an even bigger do when many other Presidents started arriving for the conference. By the time the conference ended, Presidents Mahamadou Issoufou of Niger, Idriss Deby Itno of Chad, Ali Bongo Ondimba of Gabon and Faustin-Archange Touadera of Central Africa had graced the occasion and participated in the discussions.

Besides the fight on corruption, perhaps the effort to save Lake Chad would be one area where praise must be given to President Buhari for being consistent. Right from 2015 on assumption of office, Buhari has been a persistent advocate for taking measures to save the lake. In all the international trips he undertook immediately after taking office as President the issue of Boko Haram and saving the lake were consistently pronounced in his statements. And whenever foreign dignitaries visited Nigeria and called on him, he made the same plea.

A good example is the visit of the UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova to Nigeria in 2016, where President Buhari seized the opportunity to make a case for the preservation of the lake. As reported, the President was said to have led seven Ministers to the meeting with the UNESCO Director-General where he pleaded for the involvement of the United Nations and the World Powers to save the lake otherwise the migration crisis and the socio-security issues that accompany them will worsen and reverberate in far-flung corners of the world.

When readers look at the map of Africa, the lake would be found centrally placed. What would not be immediately apparent would be the fine lines criss-crossing over the surface of the lake as national boundaries sharing it between Nigeria, Cameroun, Chad and Republic of Niger. As divided by the colonialists then, Chad has the largest chunk of over 40%, the remainder was apportioned to the other three countries with Cameroun having the least share of less than 10%.

The lake is historically one of the largest lakes in Africa and said to be the sixth in the world in the old days. In its heydays, Lake Chad had provided water for millions in the communities surrounding it for the benefit of both man and animal. Placed in a semi-arid area straddling the North, Central and West Africa, the Lake Chad became a veritable source of livelihood and a hub of economic activity for the citizens who were principally fishermen, farmers, herdsmen and traders who came from all over West Africa. There was contentment, prosperity, progress and stability in the region.

Then disaster struck. A lake that covered over 25000 square miles in the first half of the previous century gradually shrank to less than 10% of its size with major consequences for the teeming citizens living on it. The lake began to shrink in the late 1960s and the cycles of drought of the 1970s and 80s worsened matters. As water became scarce in this environment that could be inhospitable even at best of times, it generated poverty and conflict.

When the dryness continued both farmers and herders were compelled to move southwards in search for greener pastures where inevitably they ended up competing for the same resources with the host communities. And it is possible that this explains part of the genesis of the conflicts between herders and farming communities not only in the north-east of Nigeria but also in the middle-belt of the country.

The environmental degradation broke up families and communities. The weak, old and sick got left behind, while the young and strong moved elsewhere to inextricably earn a living in very low paying jobs. If a census is taken in Nigeria of those who were stuck in lowest paying jobs over the last many years, you would find that a good percentage would be coming from the states surrounding the Lake Chad.

The land surrounding Lake Chad inevitably became prone to diseases and disasters. There was lack of education, lack of infrastructure and lack of investment. To date the area is always rated very low in developmental indices. The governments, both the state and local, became overwhelmed and found it impossible to meet the yearnings of the citizens. People became prey to extremists ideologies, complete with their violent ways and means. The misguided ideologues then began to cause mayhem with consequences not only for the locality but for the nation and international community as well.

The grim condition of the lake had always been in the front-burner of all the governments of the region. The Nigerian government had probably been the most active by the provision of modern infrastructure in the region. Its side of the region was opened up with beautiful macadamised roads. By the close of the 1970s, you could travel without any hassle from Maiduguri to Baga on the shores of the lake through Monguno and Kukawa and also to Gamboru Ngala through Dikwa. Another road picked up from Dikwa to New Marte to Monguno.

The Federal Government then established the Chad Basin Development Authority, CBDA, hoping to develop the land around the basin for irrigation of a whopping 67,000 hectares for the cultivation of mainly rice and wheat. Lake Chad Research Institute was also created out of CBDA to provide ancillary services. On the whole, various efforts were made to obviate the social and economic problems wrought by the receding lake but the condition the country found itself from the 1990s dried up government investments in the region. Most of the infrastructure provided broke down and could not be redeemed for years.

The twin approach of fighting the insurgency in the region as well as taking concrete measures to save the lake itself is a worthwhile effort. The conference on saving the lake that held in Abuja a few days ago must be a step in the right direction particularly on the decision to adopt the option of recharging the lake by means of water transfer from the Congo. What is instructive about the efforts to save the lake is that the matter has now gone international bearing in mind the many countries that were brought together at the conference hall.

Besides the heavy presence of the affected African countries and the overwhelming presence of United Nation organs, there was also a conspicuous presence of the Chinese, the Italians and the French. One hopes that our government will put structures on the ground to implement the decisions reached at the conference. We should continue to engage the International donors to redeem their pledges as well as our West African counterparts to fulfil their obligations.

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Loading...Home | News | General | BBC opens new bureau in Lagos, with pidgin, Igbo, other languages

By Prince Okafor

lagosBritish Broadcasting Corporation, BBC has officially opened its new Bureau in Lagos, with five different languages in Nigeria, saying the BBCs international news currently had an audience of 36 million in Nigeria.

The BBC News will include, Igbo, Pidgin, Hausa, English and Yoruba reports on stories affecting the lives of audiences across the region, and available online and on social media. There is also a 60 second audio round up, BBC Minute, twice daily.

Radio set

Speaking during the official launch in Lagos, the Director, BBC world service, Jamie Angus, said: Its wonderful to be here to open this Bureau, which will be the headquarters for our operations across West Africa. It will be a beacon for out journalism and as such I am delighted to announce our mentorship and internship scheme for up and coming journalists. This is part of BBCs contribution to the growth of media best practice and professionalism in Nigeria, and the fight against Fake News and well benefit from young journalists insight into West Africa.

The World Service delivers accurate, Impartial and independent news to all countries. We spot the stories, see the patterns and make sense of your world. We promise to remain your most trusted source of news in the years to come.

Also, the BBCs Head of West Africa, Oluwatoyosi Oginseye, said that: Its a great honour to be part of this expansion and Im so proud to be leading the teams in Nigeria. We will big on original journalism that impacts the lives of Nigerians at home and abroad. We are expanding our editorial offers to cover politics, culture, business, health, investigation, amongst others. 

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Loading...Home | News | General | A united Labour can save Nigerians from mis-rule  NLC

By Funmi Komolafe

IT was a gathering of who is who in the labour movement as the NLC rounded off its 40th anniversary activities.

Members of National Union of Textile, Garment and Tailoring Workers of Nigeria, NUTGTWN, during May Day match past.

The events climaxed with induction into Labours Hall of fame; the first of its kind in the history of the labour movement in Nigeria.

Expectedly, issues of wages, politics, the economy and other social issues featured during the three-day programme of February 26  28, 2018.

The anniversary wasnt for NLC alone. A former president of the NLC, Comrade Ali Chiroma turned 85 on February 27. Once Comrade Chiroma mentioned it, the leadership of NLC made sure it was celebrated with the cutting of a cake. Cutting the cake drew some joyful tears from Comrade Ali Chiroma. Chiroma was the second president of the NLC that is now 40 years old.

Comrade Hassan Sunmonu also reminded union members that he too turned 77 in January.

Chiroma and Hassan Sunmonu have something in common which only those who worked closely with them ever noticed. True, both came from the public sector, not that, both love proverbs. Osogbo-born Hassan Sunmonu hardly spoke to anyone without a proverb. Chiroma too would remind you of a particular Kanuri proverb while speaking. Chiroma, many a time, demonstrated the rigidity of a Kanuri but you knew where he stood at any time.

Sunmonus tenure won the National Minimum Wage after the May 11, 1981 strike against the President Shehu Shagari civilian administration. Chiromas tenure was the height of ideological split within the NLC as progressives and democrats.

Both sides resolved again to work together in the interest of Nigerian workers and this was reflected in the election of Comrade Pascal Bafyau.

With Bafyaus election, ideological differences were downplayed and unity was fully restored again.

Comrade Pascal Bafyau from Numan in Adamawa State who succeeded Ali Chiroma had a rather controversial tenure essentially because of his attitude of diplomacy in Labours relationship with the military that made the public see him as a weak leader.

Paschal was general- secretary of the Nigeria Union of Railwaymen before his election as NLC president.

The truth is, Pascal would rather do everything to ensure that workers owned a party and took over political power. Many faulted his method but not his commitment.

He was the only one who was deceased when NLC turned 40. After Bafyau came Edo State-born, Kaduna-based Adams Aliyu Oshiomhole. Oshiomhole like Pascal, was general-secretary of the National Union of Textile, Garment and Tailoring Workers when he was elected president of the NLC.

Oshiomhole like Sunmonu, led a militant NLC. Both were fearless leaders who had reasons to confront governments at all levels once convinced they were on the right path. Oshiomhole popularised the culture of protest on political and economic issues.

Like Sunmonu, he fought and won battles of national minimum age. He also fought and won several battles against the deregulation of the downstream sector of the economy. Simply put, increase in the prices of petroleum products.

Adams Oshiomholes tenure fought and won battles against state governments, against the federal legislature over N25 million furniture allowance among others. Oshiomhole made history. as the first person from the trade union movement to hold an executive post in government with his election as Edo State governor for two terms of eight years.

After Oshiomhole came Abddulwaheed Omar, president of the Nigeria Union of Teachers, NUT, Omar backed by a formidable secretariat started off with the traditional militancy of labour but was watered down to a level that made the public lose faith in the NLC leadership. His tenure also witnessed the manifestation of a deep internal crisis within the NLC.

Comrade Ayuba Wabba, president of the Medical and Health Workers Union emerged president after Omar. With his election, history seemed to replay itself. Chiroma from the Medical and Health Union had his election challenged by Comrade Takaya Shammang of the Electricity Workers Union just as Ayuba Wabba also had his election challenged by Comrade Joe Ajaero of the same Electricity Workers Union.

As president of Medical and Health Workers Union of Nigeria, Ayuba turned the fortunes of the union around. It is to his credit that the union built or acquired property in Abuja.

After series of interventions, some of the unions that broke away returned to the NLC and were present at the 40th anniversary.

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Loading...Home | News | General | UNICEF moves to support released Dapchi schoolgirls

- UNICEF has said that all schools must be safe and protected at all times

- The international agency said it is pleased that the abducted Dapchi schoolgirls have been returned

- According to UNICEF, the agency is working with Yobe state government and civil society organisation to ensure individual support for all the girls

The United Nations Childrens Fund has said it is working with the government of Yobe state to ensure that the released 106 Dapchi schoolgirls receive individual support.

UNICEF said it is delighted that the girls who were abducted from their school in Dapchi community, Yobe state have been safely returned to the parents.

A statement by UNICEF's representative, Mohammed Fall, said: "We are pleased to see that the girls are back in the safe environment of their families.

READ ALSO: Dapchi parents reveal what Boko Haram terrorists told them after releasing their children

UNICEF is working closely with the Ministry of Youth in Yobe state to provide the necessary support to the girls and their families. Over the last one month, the girls may have been exposed to physical and sexual violence," the Fall said.

The UNICEF representative also said that the need to support the girls and their families to ensure that they feel safe to return to school cannot be overemphasized.

Fall added that UNICEF is working closely with civil society organisations to ensure that every one of the released girls receives individual attention from medical treatment to psychological support.

READ ALSO: President Buhari hosts Bill Gates, Dangote to dinner (video)

Our condolences to the families whose daughters could not come home. As we await further confirmation, five girls have reportedly died. UNICEF grieves with the families who lost their daughters.

We are grateful for the efforts of all parties in ensuring safe return of the girls to their families.

UNICEF reiterates that schools should be safe spaces, and protected at all times. Since the start of the insurgency in 2009, over 2,295 teachers have been killed and 19,000 displaced, and almost 1,400 schools destroyed," Fall said.

NAIJ.com earlier reported that the released Dapchi girls who were abducted by Boko Haram terrorist group were released on Wednesday, March 21.

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The girls were safely dropped off by members of the group in Dapchi community were they were take away.

Also, recent development shows that the girls who earlier met with their parents have been handed over to officials of the Nigerian Army and subsequently flown to Abuja alongside their parents and some aid workers boarded a Nigerian Air Force aircraft.

Dapchi protests abduction of their daughters by Boko Haram - on NAIJ.com TV

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Source: Naija.ng

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Loading...Home | News | General | Army hands over Dapchi girls to FG (photos)

- The Nigerian army handed over the released Dapchi girls to the federal government

- The girls were taken to Abuja from there

- They are expected to meet with President Muhammadu Buhari

The Nigerian Army on Wednesday, March 21 formally handed 106 released girls from Boko Haram captivity to Federal Government.

Maj.-Gen. Rogers Nicholas, the Theatre Commander, Operation Lafiya Dole, presented the released girls to the Minister of Information, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, at the 105 Air Force Composite Command, Maiduguri.

Nicholas explained that 104 of the girls were from the 110 abducted from Government Science and Technical School, Dapchi, released from the insurgents in the early hours of Wednesday.

Dapchi girls in custody of federal government. Credit: Twitter

READ ALSO: President Buhari hosts Dangote, Bill Gates to dinner (video)

He said the remaining six abducted schoolgirls were still unaccounted, noting that two other abducted girls who were not part of the abducted students were rescued from the insurgents by troops.

The theatre commander added that the rescued girls were brought from Dapchi to Maiduguri together with their parents and guardians.

The girls were flown to Abuja. Credit: Twitter

The minister of information said Federal Government adopted proactive measures to secure release of the remaining girls and persons under insurgents captivity.

Mohammed noted that government was working to end hostilities and enhance peace restoration in the northeast.

The girls handover was attended by Minister of Interior, Abdulrahman Dambazau; Minister of State, Foreign Affairs, Khadija Bukar-Abba and Chief of Army Staff, Lt.-Gen. Tukur Buratai.

The released girls, alongside their parents and some aid workers boarded a Nigerian Air Force aircraft en route Abuja at about 18.50 p.m

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Meanwhile, parents of abducted Dapchi girls who were released by Boko Haram said the terrorists have told them not to send their children back to western education.

NAIJ.com had reported that the girls were released by the terrorists on Wednesday, March 21.

Security operatives were not available as the terrorists reportedly drove into Dapchi town were residents celebrated the return of their children and praised President Muhammadu Buhari.

Dapchi protests abduction of their daughters by Boko Haram - on NAIJ.com TV:

[embedded content]

Source: Naija.ng

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Loading...Home | News | General | No traditional ruler was killed in Kogi attack - Police reveals

- The police has said that no traditional ruler was killed in an attack on Agbenema village on Monday, March 19

- The Kogi state police command said three people lost their lives in the attack

- According to the police, reports that many residents including a traditional ruler died in the attack is false and misleading

The Nigerian police has debunked reports that a traditional ruler was killed in a recent attack on Agbenema village in Omala local government area of Kogi state.

The police while stating that the report is false said only three people lost their lives in the attack which took place on Monday, March 19.

A statement signed by the spokesperson for the Kogi state police command, William Ovye Aya, said claims that nine people were killed in the attack is also false.

READ ALSO: Dapchi parents reveal what Boko Haram terrorists told them after releasing their children

Aya said: "Contrary to the reports, the command received the news of attack yesterday 19th March, 2018 in Agbenema village, Omala local government area where three persons lost their lives, but the traditional ruler was not among the victims. This in addition to the last attack which claimed twelve lives."

Aya said the commissioner of police in the state has called on all peace loving citizens of Kogi state to discountenance such false information but gravitate towards issues that unite them.

READ ALSO: President Buhari hosts Bill Gates, Dangote to dinner (video)

"The command have deployed a Unit of Police Mobile Force, Counter Terrorism Unit, Special Anti-Robbery Squad as well as the conventional police personnel to the trouble area to restore normalcy and ensure there is no breakdown of law and order and for every individual to go about their lawful business.

The Commissioner equally urges members of the press, as well as social media handlers to always find out the he true state of incidents and get confirmation from the Police before publishing the story so as not to misinformed the general public and create mistrust among the good people of the state," Aya said.

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NAIJ.com earlier reported that some armed men suspected to be herdsmen stormed Agbenema village in Kogi state.

Residents of the village said the armed men killed 10 people including a traditional ruler Musa Edibo, ad his wife.

They also said that many houses were burnt by the suspected herdsmen in different attacks in Agbenema, AjIchekpa, Opada and Iyade villages.

Nigerian herdsmen vs Nigerian farmers on NAIJ.com TV

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Source: Naija.ng

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Loading...Home | News | General | Tension in Adamawa as over 100k dump PDP, APC for SDP

- Hundred thousand members of the Peoples Democratic Party and the All Progressives Congress have dumped the parties

- Parties' members decamped to the Social Democratic party in Adamawa state

- The new members alongside Emmanuel Bello were received by the national chairman of the SDP Olu Falae

The national chairman of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) Olu Falae, has said that over 100,000 members of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and the All Progressives Congress (APC) have dumped the parties.

Daily Trust reports that Falae said these political party members officially joined the SDP in Adamawa state on Wednesday, March 21.

Speaking at the official decamping of the party members at the Lamido Cinema, Adamawa state, Falae said, he was in the state to receive Emmanuel Bello and others to the SDP.

READ ALSO: Dapchi parents reveal what Boko Haram terrorists told them after releasing their children

He said: I have come to receive Chief Emmanuel Bello and a hundred thousand others who have dumped APC and PDP to join SDP from today they have become a bonafide member in the state."

The party chieftain said SDP which has been in existence since 1982 believes in changing the change come 2019.

Also speaking, John Nuhu said the 100,000 that dumped APC and PDP to join SDP are from various local government areas of the state.

Nuhu said while Yola north has 2500 new members; Gombi and Song gained 10,000 members each; Hong, 5,000 and Fofure gathered 3,000 new members.

READ ALSO: President Buhari hosts Bill Gates, Dangote to dinner (video)

Others include: Demsa, Numan, Lamurde, Guyuk, Jada, Ganye, Mubi north, Mubi south, Michika, Madagali which gathered 10,000 new members each while: Shelleng, Maiha, Geriei many others gained 5,000 members.

Meanwhile, the national leader of the SDP, Jerry Gana, said this is the first outing they have made in 2018 year.

Gana said the SDP train is moving in a good speed to take Nigeria forward.

He also welcome the Bello and other new members of the SDP to the party.

NAIJ.com earlier reported that the Ondo state chapter of the SDP gave reasons a former governor of the state might leave the PDP.

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The state's party chairman, Korode Duyile, said former governor Olusegun Mimiko is a members of a forum known as the Southern Middle Belt Forum which is also a party to the SDP.

Duyile noted that the former governor would be highly welcomed if he eventually decides to join the SDP.

APC chieftain give reasons why his party could be voted out in 2019 on NAIJ.com TV

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Source: Naija.ng

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Loading...Home | News | General | Dapchi parents reveal what Boko Haram terrorists told them after releasing their children

- Dapchi parents said they were joyous over the eturn of their abducted children

- They said the terrorists told them not to send their children to school

- They thanked President Buhari for the return of their girls

Parents of abducted Dapchi girls who were released by Boko Haram have said the terrorists have told them not to send their children back to western education.

NAIJ.com had reported that the girls were released by the terrorists on Wednesday, March 21.

Security operatives were not available as the terrorists reportedly drove into Dapchi town were residents celebrated the return of their children and praised President Muhammadu Buhari.

READ ALSO: President Buhari hosts Dangote, Bill Gates to dinner (video)

According to Premium Times, the terrorists took their time to preach to the residents.

One Ibrahim Husseini who is a Dapchi resident said: It was a thing of joy for us in Dapchi when suddenly we began to see trucks moving into the town at about 8:00 a.m in the morning.

They brought the girls and then they were telling the general public that they should not go back to Western education schools; that what they did was not terrorism but rather the propagation of Islamic knowledge.

Kachalla Bukar, who is the secretary of the abducted Dapchi schoolgirls parents group, said he was on hand to receive the girls and even took pictures with the terrorists.

He said: But we, the parents of the missing girls, did not run as other villagers did, because we cannot run and leave our girls in the hands of the Boko Haram.

When they came, they told us that they were returning the girls not because somebody gave them money, but out of their freewill. We thanked them. Then they told us that we must never return our girls to western school again; we said we will do as said. They preached to us for some time, and we said we will heed to their sermons.

They shook our hands and asked us to forgive them for whatever pains that they might have caused us; then we shook hands and they asked us to snap photos with them using their mobile phone which we all did.

Haruna Driver who is a father of one of the abducted girls said he was happy for his daughters return.

He said: When the news came to me, it was like a dream. But when I saw my daughter, I and her mother shed tears of joy.

Sadly, we could not spend much time with her before she was taken to the hospital and then to Abuja. We thank God for His kindness and mercy on us. We thank the president and all those that worked hard to see that our daughters return to us safely.

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Meanwhile, The All Progressives Congress (APC)-led federal government has been accused by the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), of allegedly staging the abduction of the schoolgirls in Dapchi, Yobe State, for political purposes, Leadership reports.

In a chat with newsmen, the partys national publicity secretary, Kola Olagbondiyan, referred to the abduction as a crime against humanity, and called on the United Nations to launch investigations into the matter.

Dapchi protests abduction of their daughters by Boko Haram - on NAIJ.com TV:

[embedded content]

Source: Naija.ng

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Loading...Home | News | General | $9m was not found in our house Mrs Boroh

By Soni Daniel & Emmanuel Elebeke

The wife of the embattled former Special Assistant to the President on Niger Delta and Coordinator of Amnesty Programme, Brig. Gen. Paul Boroh(retd) has dismissed the report in the media claiming that the operatives of the Economic and Financial Crime Commission (EFCC) and Office of the National Security Adviser (ONSA) discovered $9million cash at his residence.

Paul Boroh

Just as there was indication last night that EFCC was not in a hurry to free Brig-Gen. Paul Boroh,( rtd) over alleged looting of the funds of the agency.

Although a top official of the EFCC confirmed to Vanguard that Mr. Boroh had been cooperating with his interrogators in EFCC custody, the source hinted that the issue of releasing him on administrative or whatever form of bail had not been considered.

Addressing the press yesterday, Mrs. Ibinye Boroh said no cash was discovered, describing reports in the media as fabrication of lies, false and malicious and calculated attempt to mislead the public.

Her words: My attention has been drawn to the publication in some of the Nigerian media to the effect that $9million was recovered by the operatives of the EFCC from our house and premises in the course of their search.

This is to inform the general public that no cash was discovered and could not have been discovered by government operatives during their search in our house last Monday.

The publication by a section of the press stating the contrary is fabricated, false in its entirety, malicious and calculated to mislead the public.

Our family feels embarrassed and harassed and therefore request the authors to retract same.

On whether her house was search, she said: My house was searched by government operatives and my door was broken an ransacked. But I do not know whether if they were EFCC or NSA agents.

Also addressing the media on the matter, the legal adviser to Gen. Boroh, Chief Olusola Oke, also faulted the media reports, insisting that no money was found in the home of his client.

He demanded immediate retraction of the reports by all the media that reported same.

His words: I am speaking to you on the instruction of my client, Gen. Boroh.

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Loading...Home | News | General | Amaechi, Ohanaeze disagree over Igbo presidency

By Vincent Ujumadu

AWKAMINISTER of Transport, Chief Chibuike Amaechi and the President General of Ohanaeze Ndigbo, Chief Nnia Nwodo, yesterday, disagreed on the quickest way for the Igbo to produce president.

While Amaechi, who was the convocation lecturer for the 12th Convocation ceremony of Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka called on the Igbo to vote for President Muhammadu Buhari in 2019 to serve his second term to pave way for the Igbo to produce the president after his tenure, Nwodo disagreed, saying such argument should not have a place in a true democratic system.

Speaking on the topic, The Igbo in the politics of Nigeria, Amaechi said Igbo had not benefited much by voting for minority parties.

He said: We are not here for campaign; we are here for an academic exercise. If we are here for campaign, I would not be putting on academic gown, but we must tell ourselves the truth about what Buhari has done.

Since 1999, the Igbo people have always voted for the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP. There is nothing wrong with that, but the question must be asked; has the PDP justified that support or reciprocated it in any manner?

Is that support really earned? The complaint now is that the All Progressives Congress, APC government of President Muhammadu Buhari abandoned the South East and is marginalising them.

Without conceding to that, let us compare a situation where the PDP you voted for gave you a few appointments here and there and denied you any major developmental projects as against the APC government of President Buhari you did not vote for and who, even if he denied you appointments, has certainly not denied you crucial developmental projects.

But the President General of Ohanaeze, Dr Nwodo, who was a guest at the lecture punctured some of Amaechis claims, arguing that Nigeria was not operating as a true federation, as pockets of marginalisation still abound against the Igbo.

He said: I am yet to see a federation in which the security apparatus is domiciled in one section of the country. Doing so has not also solved the security problems of the country.

Our country is in a state of war, with no one declaring it. I refuse to agree with you that people should join a federal movement as you said before they get what is due to them. If our constitution is not revisited for people to live and feel safe, then we are wasting our time.

Honourable minister, I urge you to fight for us. We are the true Nigerians. Whether we voted left or right, our behavioral pattern has shown confidence in Nigeria.

Help us talk to your people and make them understand that whatever views they held during the war, tell them that the war is over.

Then you have the rehabilitation of the following roads: Oba  Nnewi  Okigwe road linking Anambra state with Imo state, the Otuocha  Ibaji  Nzam road in Anambra state, the Abakaliki  Onueke-Abomega  Afikpo road [Ebonyi state], the Nnenwe  Uduma  Uburu road connecting Enugu state with Ebonyi state, the Oji  Achi  Mmaku  Awgu road in Enugu state, the Ozalla  Akpugo  Amagunze road [Enugu state] and the IkotEkpene  Aba -Owerridualization project linking Akwalbom, Abia and Imo states among others. Almost all the important Igbo cities, Enugu, Owerri, Umuahia, Aba, Awka, Onitsha, are captured in the existing Calabar  Lagos railway project and the Port Harcourt  Maiduguri standard gauge new railway projects approved by the President.

Let me just say that the Igbo nation should focus or solutions not recriminations. In what political direction should the Igbo go? Let the quarrel with the north real or imagined stop.

Let the recriminations stop and let us join hands as one people to chart the way forward for a brighter future for Nigeria. We need to examine very carefully the Igbo political trajectory and learn crucial lessons of history.

How did Jaja an Igbo slave found a multi ethnic state in Opobo and become the King with the consent of the people? How did Zik achieve national prominence and stature? We have an incredibly proud past, a rich political heritage forged in the most difficult circumstances. We must therefore focus on constructing the path to a proud future.

The Igbo nation should engage with others and immerse itself fully in national politics just like Jaja and Zik did. The handshake across the Niger celebrated recently in Enugu by Ohaneze Ndigbo and Nzuko Umunna is welcome, but a handshake across the Benue is most desirable now.

Describing PDP and the ruling All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) in Anambra State as regional parties which do not hold hope for the Igbo, Amechi urged the Igbo to rather focus on the solutions to their problems in politics instead of recriminations, saying that part of the solution was to move into a national party after having been disappointed by sectional parties

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Loading...Home | News | General | FG releases N1.248trn for capital projects Adeosun

By Emma Ujah, Abuja Bureau Chief & Johnbosco Agbakwuru

ABUJAThe Federal Government has released N1.248 trillion for capital projects, Minister of Finance, Mrs Kemi Adeosun, disclosed, yesterday.

Adeosun, who addressed State House correspondents after the Federal Executive Council meeting, presided over by President Muhammadu Buhari, also said the government had saved N68 billion on personnel cost in 2017.

Kemi Adeosun

According to her, this brings the aggregate savings by the government on personnel cost since 2001 to N288 billion.

She said: The final update I gave was the level of capital releases till date from 2017 and l gave details of the big four areas and then others.

So, Power, Works and Housing got N301.89 billion, Defence 151.2 billion, Agriculture N119.9 billion, Transport N127.9 billion and other areas combined is N545.6 billion. So, the total capital budget release for 2017 so far is N1.248,310 trillion.

We havent closed yet. We are confident we will close the year roughly around where we closed last year. We will close around N1.3 trillion mark. So, our commitment to infrastructure spending remains very strong. That is what is going to drive growth of the economy. That is what is going to drive jobs.

Govt saves N68bn on personnel cost, captures 511 MDAs under IPPIS

On the saving of N68 billion on personnel cost, Adeosun explained that the savngs were funds that would have otherwise gone unaccounted for, which she added, were now free for the government to fund capital projects.

She said the savings were achieved, despite increase in personnel, including the employment of 10,000 by the Police.

The minister confirmed that a total of 511 Ministries, Departments and Agencies, MDAs, had been captured under the Integrated Payroll and Personnel Information System, IPPIS, with staff count of 607,843.

As at March 20, 2018 the number of MDAs on IPPIS Payroll is 469 with 316,158 staff count with gross salary of N43,979,383,997.78 and 42 Police commands and formations paid on IPPIS platform in February, 2018 with Staff Count of 291,685 and gross salary of N22,276,669,257.21.

Recovers N9bn from whistle blowing policy

Meanwhile, the Finance Minister also said the whistle-blowing policy introduced by President Buharis administration has helped to save about N9 billion.

Adeosun, who disclosed the money recovered from the whistle blowing policy, explained that the money was in the region of N7.8 billion, $378 million and 27, 800.

The amount was for the matters that the Federal Government has concluded every litigation sorrounding them and commissions that accrued to those behind the information

She said: I gave an update on whistleblowing policy which was another memorandum approved by FEC  the number of tips we have had, the number of investigations we have dealt with, the types of monies that have been recovered through the whistleblower policy.

I also reported that the whistleblower team has recently come back from a trip to the UK The United Kingdom government was giving us trainings on whistleblowing, how we should institutionalise it. The team spent sometime with revenue office in UK. They spent sometime in Customs office and they took them through what they have been able to do.

I will be bringing the memo to the council. One of the things it has achieved is prevention. When they get the tips, they use it to block avenues for leakage. We have had a significant number tips. So, we will be coming back to institutionalise whistleblowing as a structure. It has become central part of fighting corruption, giving us valuable information. Basically, whistleblowing is here to stay, giving us useful information.

I gave an update on DMO and our debt structure. FEC approved a three-year debt strategy to reduce our reliance on short time borrowing, particularly treasury bills, 91 days treasury bills, costing us 21 per cent and moving from domestic borrowing into external borrowing.

When we came in, what were owing was 84 per cent domestic and 16 per cent external borrowing. We have moved to 77:23 as a result of Eurobonds that we have done and refinancing of maturing obligations.

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Loading...The federal government is seeking a temporary forfeiture of alleged undeclared assets traced to Ike Ekweremadu, deputy senate president.

The ex-parte motion marked FHC/ABJ/CS/284/2018 was filed at an Abuja high court.

The government requested an interim court order temporarily attaching/forfeiting the properties listed in schedule B here under, to the federal government of Nigeria, pending the conclusion of further inquiry/investigation by the special presidential investigation panel for the recovery of public property and/or possible arraignment of the respondent.

The motion was filed on behalf of the government by Festus Keyamo, a senior advocate of Nigeria (SAN).

Thirteen properties were reportedly traced to Ekweremadu; nine are in Nigeria, two in the UK, eight in Dubai and three are in the US.

Following the purported discovery, we reported that Abubakar Malami, attorney general of the federation (AGF), had filed a false declaration of assets charge against Ekweremadu before the Code of Conduct Tribunal (CCT).

Ekweremadu is said to have failed to disclose the foreign assets in his declarations to the Code of Conduct Bureau (CCB).

EKWEREMADU: NO ASSETS TO FORFEIT

Reacting to the motion exparte, the deputy senate president said he has no asset to be forfeited to the government as he has declared all his assets with the CCB as required by law.

Uche Anichukwu, his special adviser on media, made this known in a statement.

He said: The attention of the office of the deputy president of the senate, Ike Ekweremadu, has been drawn to a motion exparte filed by Festus Keyamo Chambers on behalf of the special presidential investigation panel for the recovery of public property.

The motion is for an order to temporarily forfeit assets it claimed the senator did not declare with the Code of Conduct Bureau (CCB).

The so-called panel sought and obtained his assets declaration forms, but could not look at them since it is clearly out on a vendetta and smear campaign.

Again, Sen. Ekweremadu wishes to assure all his supporters and well-wishers that there is nothing to worry about.Home | News | General | 2019: Third Force reveals strategy for ousting APC, PDP; says coming elections will be tough

- The Nigerian Intervention Movement has stated that the 2019 elections would be rough, tough and capital intensive

- The Third Force movement urged its members to get their PVCs; even as it called for unity, ahead of 2019

- It also disclosed that it would focus on the 10 million youths in the country to tackle the APC, PDP and win the elections

Third Force coalition, the Nigerian Intervention Movement (NIM), has stated that its major priority is to impact on the 2019 general elections, which would be tough and require a huge war chest to prosecute, Vanguard reports.

The disclosure was made by the co-chairperson of the group, Olisa Agbakoba, at the NIMs grand national summit and launch of a grand political coalition on the future of Nigeria in Abuja, on Wednesday, March 21.

READ ALSO: Jigawa community issues one-month quit notice to herdsmen

NAIJ.com gathers that Agbakoba also noted that the organization needs to be united, ahead of the coming elections.

He stated: Our immediate agenda is to impact on 2019. And if you agree, it means that we here must be very united. We cannot do it alone.

It reminds me of when we started the Civil Liberties Organisation; we were exactly seven, but confronted this huge military apparatus. Eventually, we became the 12th largest human rights organisation in the world.

It was our shared commitment. So, that is the commitment you are going to make. It is not to come to Abuja, dress fine and sit down. If you want to displace the APC or PDP, it is going to be a rough fight. It is going to be tough.

I can see so many people without PVCs. So, if we are going to make a difference, the first thing is to get your PVCs. It is of no use going to the mosques on Fridays or churches on Sundays to pray. Without PVCs, there will be no change.

Nigeria is like a big company where there are two million shareholders; and in the case of Nigeria, about 200 million shareholders. Less than one thousand are controlling the rest. Think about it.

The people holding you in bondage, how many are they? They are not many. So, we have to break this bondage by participating in the affairs of our nation. That is the only way, but we need money.

We do not want the money bags, but we need money. Do not kid yourself, we need money to prosecute this election, but we do not need the old type of money.

I have studied National Bureau of Statistics Demographic analysis. There are 30 million Nigerian youths between 18 and 40 years. That is our base. Trump had a base. Trump won because he allowed Hillary Clinton to roam around the whole place. He focused on the uneducated white working class.

We will focus, once we identify this base and work on them. If we have 10 million youths on our side, we are going to win.

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This development comes following an earlier report by NAIJ.com, that the coalition of Civil Society Organizations for Good Governance and Democracy under the auspices of Coalition for Nigeria Movement (CNM), backed President Muhammadu Buhari to re-contest for the presidency in 2019.

The CNM made its comments in a statement signed by its national convener and president, Patriot Sabo Ode.

The group stated that calls for the president to resign and Vice President Yemi Osinbajo to take over were very hilarious; especially as they were coming from the Nigeria Intervention Movement (NIM), a subsidiary of the 3rd Force Movement.

Will voting for SDP as the 'third force' end Nigeria's woes? - on NAIJ.com TV:

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Source: Naija.ng

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Loading...Home | News | General | Fuel scarcity looms as oil marketers sack workers over N650 billion FG debt

- Some staff of Depot and Petroleum Products Marketers Association of Nigeria (DAPPMAN) have been sacked over N650 billion debt owed to federal governmnet

- It was gathered that DAPPMAN began retrenchment of the workers to enable it offset the debt owed to FG

- According to the marketers, there is no alternative option to reducing the growing debt owed by the association

Oil marketers have commenced a reduction of their workforce due to their inability to pay staff salaries, the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports.

Some of the marketers, who preferred anonymity, confirmed to NAN on Wednesday in Lagos that they resorted to adopt a massive sack of their workers as the Federal Government had yet to pay an outstanding N650 billion debts owed them.

They said they did not have any other option to control their increasing debt burden of borrowing to pay salaries than to embark on staff disengagement.

According to them, the majority of marketers are indebted to banks because for funds they borrowed to pay workers salaries.

READ ALSO: Shekau's strongman surrenders to Army in Bama, reveals where he hides his weapons (photos)

Retrenchment became necessary as some marketers have already closed their depots, while others have also reduced workers salaries by 75 per cent due to their inability to sustain the payments.

It is a difficult time for the oil marketers because we are currently facing the headwinds in the oil market.

Some of our members are finding it difficult to pay salaries and other overhead costs, one of the marketers told NAN.

They, therefore, urged the federal government to expedite action on the payment of outstanding debts owed to marketers, in order to help them to sustain their businesses.

Another source said the marketers were under continuous pressure from their banks and the Asset Management Corporation of Nigeria (AMCON), with looming threats of imminent take-over of our petrol stations and tank farms.

READ ALSO: Freed Dapchi schoolgirls airlifted to Abuja, handed over to FG (photos)

In the light of the above and after exhausting all formal avenues to secure payment of these debts, we have notified the federal government of the likelihood of disengaging our personnel.

We are told that President Muhammadu Buhari has signed for the payment of the debt but it is yet to get to the National Assembly for their consent.

We hope this will be addressed to salvage the situation.

NAN recalls that the Depot and Petroleum Products Marketers Association of Nigeria (DAPPMAN) on February 20 gave the government a 14-day ultimatum to settle the N650 billion debts owed to its members.

The executive secretary of the Association, Olufemi Adewole, had said failure to meet the deadline would compel marketers to disengage their workers.

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Adewole alleged that a letter was written to the Presidency on January 24 but the government had failed to respond to the plight of the petroleum marketers.

NAIJ.com earlier reported that two oil marketers bagged eight years jail term each over an alleged N789.6 million fraud.

The marketers - George Ogbonna and Emmanuel Morah, owners of Rocky Energy Limited - were charged before the court by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC)

They were found guilty of a 26-count amended charge of conspiracy, obtaining by false pretence and forgery.

Source: NAN

EXCLUSIVE: Be patient with President Buhari, Femi Adesina tells Nigerians - on NAIJ.com TV

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Source: Naija.ng

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Loading...Home | News | General | Boroh's removal: Ijaw elders worried over ultimatum given to federal government by ex-militants, cautions youths

- Ijaw youths have been cautioned over the ultimatum given to the federal government to recall the former coordinator of the Presidential Amnesty Programme, Paul Boroh

- The youths were cautioned by the coordinator of Ijaw Monitoring Group, Joseph Evah, on behalf of the group and Ijaw elders

- He enjoined the youths to work with Pan Niger Delta Forum on all issues affecting the region to make the region move faster in development matters

Coordinator of Ijaw Monitoring Group, Joseph Evah, has cautioned Ijaw youths over the ultimatum given to the federal government to recall the sacked coordinator of Amnesty Programme, Major General Paul Boroh (retd), Vanguard reports.

NAIJ.com notes that Evah, who cautioned the youths on behalf of his group and Ijaw elders, enjoined them to withdraw their threat and maintain peace in the region.

He said: The threat will lead to the military mobilising against our villages and our women and children will suffer. We urge the ex-militants to consult our national leader, Chief Edwin Clark and other elders of the region under PAn Niger Delta Forum (PANDEF) leadership at all times so that the world will see us as a united region.

READ ALSO: Fayose felicitates with parents of released Dapchi schoolgirls, says abduction suspicious

Recently PANDEF set up committee on the amnesty office, therefore, the ex-militants should consult PANDEF leadership. The planned demonstration of ex-militants around media houses will increase tension in the region and attract negative global flash points.

We need united front to tackle issues such as the Arewa group in the north, Afenifere in southwest and Ohanaeze Ndigbo in southeast. The youths in our region should work with PANDEF on all issues affecting the region to make the region move faster in development matters."

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Meanwhile, NAIJ.com previously reported that President Muhammadu Buhari sacked Brigadier-General Paul Boroh (Rtd) from his position as coordinator of the Presidential Amnesty Programme for former Niger Delta militants.

The new development was contained in a statement by Femi Adesina, the special adviser to the president on media and publicity on Tuesday, March 13.

The president announced Professor Charles Quaker Dokubo as the new co-ordinator of the programme. He also ordered the National Security Adviser to carry out a full investigation into the financial engagement of the programme since 2015.

Meet Sunny Ofehe, the new face of Niger Delta development - on NAIJ.com TV

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Source: Naija.ng

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Loading...Home | News | General | Bill Gates, Dangote sign MoU with 6 northern governors on funding immunisation

- A Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) has been signed Bill Gates and Aliko Dangote

- The MOU was in efforts to improved access to immunisation in Nigeria with six northern state governors

- Gates said all partners were committed to ensuring that maximum number of children were reached

Bill Gates and Aliko Dangote on Wednesday, March 21, signed Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with six northern state governors on improved access to immunisation in Nigeria.

The governors are Aminu Waziri Tambuwal of Sokoto; Kashim Shettima, Borno; Abdullahi Ganduje, Kano; Muhammed Abubakar, Bauchi, and Nasir El-Rufai of Kaduna State, while Yobe Gov. Ibrahim Geidam was represented by Dr Bello Kawu at the signing ceremony in Sokoto.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the minister of health, Prof Isaac Adewole, witnessed the ceremony after community engagement in roundtable and the Northern Traditional Rulers Council (NTRC).

In his address, Bill Gates said all partners were committed to ensuring that maximum number of children were reached, adding that the MoUs were intended to enable states achieve targeted coverage.

Routine immunisation is crucial to ensuring that every child is protected against vaccine-preventable diseases, helping them achieve their potential and live full, productive lives.

We are ready to support the states in reaching the targets set out in the MoUs, he added.

He said with the election season approaching, all hands must be on deck to ensure the targets were met.

He projected that all partners were committed to reaching at least 80 per cent coverage in 2019.

Gates commended all the signatory-states for their commitment, adding that Nigeria is so far on the right track not just in efforts to fight polio, but on achieving targets in routine immunisation.

My request is that all the governors should review campaigns and ensure that in the next two years, we complete polio eradication.

On routine immunisation, the opportunity is fantastic vaccinations are phenomenal on their impacts. We can prevent millions of deaths by doing work on routine immunisation.

According to him, the MoU will facilitate more good works on immunisation, manpower training and better management, urging traditional leaders and government to redouble efforts to sustain the achievements.

On his part, Dangote emphasised the need for governments to be updated on the payment of their counterpart funds and to work hard on improving data especially at the grassroots level.

We are delighted that the MoU have been extended, reaffirming Bauchi, Borno, Kaduna, Kano, Sokoto and Yobe states commitment to the health of their citizens. Our expectation now is that this commitment will be translated into concrete action, he said.

He commended the federal and state governments for working on data improvement and for renewing their commitments to tackling preventable diseases.

He said inclusion of primary healthcare development programmes would also translate in increased community commitment as local government chairmen and district heads were participating on routine immunisation meetings during campaigns.

Tambuwal had earlier pledged committed of all the states to improving vaccine availability, encouraging stronger community engagement and securing financing.

In addition, we will ensure strong monitoring and evaluation while at the same time, accountability mechanisms will be put in place, he added.

In their separate presentations, the governors expressed delight at the signing of the MoUs and vowed to ensure full implementation in their various states.

The governors explained the road map achievements and provided graphic statistics on immunisation coverage, manpower, healthcare facilities and challenges, stressing that each of them had come out with distinct policies in order to achieve the desired impacts.

Speaking at NTRC meeting earlier, Sultan Saad Abubakar III, commended Bill Gate and Dangotes commitment along with international agencies contribution, stressing that poverty remain a hitch to health and other sectors toward desirable development.

Abubakar said the donors increased investment had led improvement of health being of Nigerians, noting that healthy individuals would remain productive persons.

He said the meeting aimed at discussing successes, challenges and way out of mitigating challenges and assured increased traditional rulers commitments toward achieving desired impacts.

Meanwhile, NAIJ.com had reported that President Muhammadu Buhari played host to Bill Gates and Alhaji Aliko Dangote at the Presidential Villa.

The president met the duo on Wednesday, March 21.

Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, visited Nigeria to see first-hand the progress the country was making on primary healthcare provision, polio eradication, nutrition and financial inclusion.

N1,500 for health of Nigerians - on NAIJ.com.

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Source: Naija.ng

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Loading...Home | News | General | Amazing 3 Fruits that Forces Men To Have Stronger Erections, Gives Men Sexual Stamina in the Bedroom and They Are Powerless to Stop it!

Who Else Wants To Discover 3 Amazing Miracle Fruits That Permanently Cures Weak Erections, Premature Ejaculation

And Low Libido?

If you are looking for a natural method that helps men to get stronger erections, satisfy any woman and last 25minutes plus in the bedroom, then heres good news for you

I have discovered 3 amazing fruits that any man can use to improve his sexual performance and stamina without spending on drugs.

But there are lots of fruits, so how did I discover these 3 fruits that are almost like natural Viagra?

Let me tell you my little story about how I came to know about these miracle fruits:

About 6 months ago, I attended the wedding ceremony of a relative. I had to travel all the way from the city to our town.

Few days before the wedding, the groom to be and I were discussing with my uncle, and heres what he said to us

I know you people live in the cities but I need to advise you 2 things that would save your marriage.

One of them is not to take your bedroom work as a man for granted. Aside from giving birth to children, you need to be able to satisfy your woman sexually.

I quickly asked him how can we possibly do that?

He said, there are natural herbs, fruits and vegetables that when eaten helps cleanse your body of toxins, and gives you a stronger heart and liver.

They also enhance blood flow to give you stronger erections and manpower.

My uncle was saying the truth.

Have you ever thought about this?

During the olden days, our fathers never had access to any blue pill known as Viagra for getting erections.

Instead they only relied on 1) Jedi herbs to clear their body system,

2) daily exercise like walking and farming

and 3) eating healthy foods like vegetables and fruits.

Talking about fruits that naturally helps enhance sexual performance and gives you stronger erections.

There are 3 of them which so many Nigerian men overlook but they are sold everywhere

Plantain Bananas Avocado Other watery fruits like watermelon, oranges etc.

Make no mistake about it. Eating these fruits alone will help you renew your sexual energy and manpower.

But aside that, once you combine eating fruits and vegetables with natural medicines that revive your sexual stamina, it makes you a stronger man in the bedroom.

Before you rush and start buying concoctions or drugs, which are usually sold as medicines to cure jedi-jedi, the truth is that

Most of them are plain rubbish

and do not work!

That is why one of the good herbal substances I recommend for men have been proven to help burn poison that kill your manpower out of your body.

Over 642 Nigerian men attest to the fact that it cures, and treats the root cause of premature ejaculation and weak erection.

And the good thing is that this herbal medicine is certified and approved by NAFDAC, made from herbal ingredients and do not have side effects.

Introducing

Duraman Herbal Capsules



APPROVED BY NAFDAC

(NAFDAC REG. NO. A7-1514L)

Duraman herbal capsules is one of the herbal supplements (NAFDAC Approved) that helps men get firmer erections and maintaining the sexual energy to perform.

And once you start using it, your lovemaking sessions with your woman, becomes more intense, lasting and fulfilling.

A quick list of Duraman herbal capsules benefits includes:

Increases your bodys testosterone production

Improves firmness and sensitivity of erections

Enhances energy, endurance, and stamina in sex and other physical activities

Reduces mental fatigue and physical exhaustion

Cures waist pain, helps in getting healthier skin and muscle tone

Strengthens immune system

OKyouve heard all this before.

But what separates Duraman Herbal Capsules from other performance enhancers like the other ones youve come across online is

its ability to achieve the desired results without adverse side effects such as jittery nerves, heart palpitations, upset stomach, diarrhea and dizziness.

Bottomline is, Duraman herbal capsules is effective, safe and gentle.

Duraman contains 30 capsules, to be taken 1capsule morning and 1 capsule night for complete cure quick ejaculation, weak erection and low libido (or sexual urge).

Just one container is enough to treat the root cause of premature ejaculation and weak erection, and get rid of it permanently

Suffering from watery sperm? Use Duraman herbal capsules with natural honey and within few days, start to notice how thick your sperm becomes.



Duraman herbal capsules works irrespective of your age even baba of 65years old will get stronger erections and enough sexual stamina after using it.



Duraman herbal capsules is non-toxic, and its safe for hypertensive and diabetic patients without no adverse effects.

And the good thing is, with DURAMAN HERBAL CAPSULES you will begin to results almost IMMEDIATELY.

Fast forward to today, my wife and I are enjoying sex like young couples again.

And she no longer complains about my poor sexual performance.

Instead, she wants more sex and I last up to 25minutes plus without any fear or anxiety of releasing too fast.

And once you can satisfy your woman in bed, she gives you that respect, and does not take you for granted

because she knows that it is RARE to find real men that can perform their duties in bed.



And If You Suffer from Having a Small Manhood Size

and You Want a Natural Method to Increase Your Manhood

Length and Girth, Then Heres Good News for You

My wife used to complain bitterly about my small manhood size and how it makes sex boring for us.

She even makes fun of me and calls me nicknames like small prick, oga toothpick and things like that just because I was small in my boxers.

It was like an embarrassment to me because it really affected my sexual confidence and self esteem a lot.

So, I discussed with my Doctor friend based in London, UK about my condition.

He recommended a solution imported from Japan that helps men increase their manhood size without any side effects.

At first, I was skeptical but decided

to give it a try.

He gave me TITAN GEL, a natural manhood enhancement gel imported from Japan that increases manhood size within 2 to 4 weeks of using it.

Titan gel Changed My Sex Life Completely

After Just One Week Of Using It

Just so you know, this is NOT one of those fake get 8inches by 1 week products advertised everywhere on the internet by bunch of crooks who just wants to rip you of your money.

The truth is, this thing actually works and the results are gradually!

But let me even tell you something that happened after using the TITAN GEL:

You see, once I started using it, one day while at the swimming pool just relaxing with my very close friend All of a sudden he noticed how big my manhood was becoming.

Go Here Now To Get The TITAN GEL That Over 1,300 Nigerian Men Have Used To Secretly Increase Their Manhood Size And Satisfy Their Woman In Bed

Before he was among those friends of mine that usually tease me and make silly comments about how I have a small tiny prick

But now, once he saw how huge my manhood has become he secretly started to beg me to show him what I used to make my John Thomas bigger.

At first, I didnt want to tell him, just to make sure I punish him for those times that he made fun of me.

But then, when I thought about how I suffered in shame because of my very small dick size and lots of fake stuff that I have tried, I decided to reveal the secret to him.

Once he started using the TITAN GEL as well, he was surprised at the results he got within 2 weeks of using it, his manhood has added extra 1.5inches.

At this point, let me show you the TITAN GEL that helped me increase my manhood size to 5.5inches and save my marriage from crashing!



Efficacy: Very effective to promote blood circulation, increased thickening of the penis , improve sex , increase libido and enhance sexual performance of men to meet womens desire.

Usage: clean the penis and the testicles , then with your hand holding the penis up and down, massage for 5 to 7 minutes , until the gel is completely absorbed by the penis can, use 1-2 times a day.

What the enlargement gel does is to increase manhood size (both length and girth) and also improve the strength of your penis without any side effects.

All I had to do was to follow the instructions on the TITAN GEL, and do the penile massages using the enlargement gel.

Truth is, after a few weeks of using the titan gel

One day my wife put her hand to touch my manhood, and discovered it has now become bigger and fatter.

To make sure it was real, we had to take a measuring tape to measure the penis and it has increased from 3.5inches to 5.5inches.

The good thing about TITAN GEL is that the INCREMENT you get from using it are permanent.

No shrinking of penis after you stop using it.

You see, once you have a bigger manhood that can satisfy a woman in bed, she treats you like a mini-sex god.

She prepares tasty meals for you, and cannot quarrel or nag simply because she wants that deep satisfying sex from you.

To top it all, she will want more sex from you.

Even when she had a hard, stressful day at work, at night she will never deny you of sex.

Bottomline is, these 2 products helped me overcome my problem of weak erection, premature ejaculation, and small manhood size that I have been struggling with for so many years.

But dont take my word for it, below are testimonials from customers who were once like you but have now cured their PE and small penis size problem

My wife ordered the Duraman herbal capsules, titan gel and nadi capsules from your store. and she insisted I give it a try. I am now 53 and I have tried all kinds of medications just to help me get good erections and stay longer. At the end of the first week of using the Duraman and nadi capsules, I started to notice that my erections were more frequent and i dont release too fast during sex with my wife. I dont know how it works, but to me, it is God sent. thanks for this wonderful products Abdul M.  Chikun lga, kaduna

Another testimonial

AMAZING could be the best word I can use to descrbe my situation. I have had high blood pressure for more than 10 years and even had quick ejaculation. About two months ago, I placed order for the complete kit of Duraman, titan gel and nadi capsules. I started taking it regularly, as prescribed. Within few weeks, I noticed that I now last up to 15minutes and still have much sexual energy to go another round. During my semi-annual checkup, my primary physician was stunned to see that my blood pressure to be 120/81. I cant think of anything else but that your products is really helping me improve my sexual performance and regulating my blood pressure. Thanks for the service Mr. Adepoju A.  Dutse Alhaji, abuja



More feedback from satisfied customers

My small sexual organ affected my marriage badly because my wife used to complain that whenever I entered her, she does not feel anything. I was really bothered until I came accross your Duraman herbal capsule and enlargement gel for men. I started using it and within 2 weeks I measured my manhood and saw the increase of about 0.9inches.. after a month, it now bigger and have added 1.8inches. Now my wife loves to give me blowjob, plays with my manhood and sex is hotter and fun with my bigger manhood. Thanks to your Duraman, titan gel and nadi capsules that saved my marriage and restored my sexual confidence. Definitely recommending your products.

Barrister Olatunji, Port Harcourt



Another testimonial.

I need to say a big thank you for helping me get this Duraman herbal capsules. For 3 and half years I had this quick ejaculation problem and it really affected my life. I was reluctant to try this your product because I lost hope after several attempts. But when I showed my wife, she encouraged me to order for it, and give it a try. I use to last only 2 minutes when having sex with my wife, but now we have it for like 20 minutes and she enjoys the sex. Am really happy I can now make love to my wife like a real man. Mr. Chukwudi, Port Harcourt.

As you have read, this products works like gangbusters, and have been proven to help men like you overcome premature ejaculation, get stronger erections and increase manhood size without side effects of any kind.

Heres my advice for you

If you are suffering from these erectile dysfunction, then I recommend that you get these products now (Duraman Herbal Capsule and TITAN GEL) and start using it right away.

Here is a breakdown of the price

Duraman Herbal Capsule  N15,000

TITAN GEL  N13,000

But if you are ordering for both, instead of paying the normal price, you will get a discount of N6,000

BOTH (DURAMAN HERBAL CAPSULE, TITAN GEL + Nadi capsules)  N22,000

(That is you will get a discount of N6,000 instead of paying N28,000  So, you will pay N22,000 only for BOTH)

But to Make It Even Better, When You Order Today,

You will Also Get a FREE BONUS ENCLOSED

to Your Parcel

*NOT available anywhere Else

Heres how to get it: When you order for BOTH products today

at N22,000 you will get your own free bonus of the

herbal capsule that cures sexually transmitted infections like

staph, gonorrhea, chlamydia etc.

FREE BONUS: NADI CAPSULE

NADI capsule is premier tonic for anti-infection, anti-virus, anti-toxin,

stable blood pressure. Its effective for the treatment of S.T.D

staphylococcus, Gonorrhea, syphilis, etc. (contains 30 capsules)

NAFDAC REG NO. A7-0200L

One of the main causes of premature ejaculation and weak erections is due to sexually transmitted infections in the body system. And you need to treat them as soon as possible to completely cure your erectile dysfunction.

Nadi herbal capsule contains 30capsules for complete cure of sexually transmitted infections and to flush off toxins from your body system.



When you order today, you will get the NADI herbal capsules for free.

Remember, the free bonus is ONLY available to those that place their order right away. Dont procrastinate, else you may not get it.

So the deal is, place your order for the 2 products, today, and you get access to the extra BONUS, absolutely FREE!

Without wasting time, let me show you how to order for these 2 products (Duraman Herbal Capsule and TITAN GEL) that will transform your sexual life and make you experience much better sex with your woman.

To order for the Duraman Herbal Capsule and TITAN GEL at the discount price today, follow the instructions below

You will pay for the products only when it has been brought down

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DELIVERY TIME

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*If you are ordering for only TITAN GEL indicate it TITAN GEL in your text message

*If you want to order for the 2 products together text Duraman Herbal Capsule AND TITAN GEL

DURAMAN HERBAL CAPSULE  N15,000

TITAN GEL ONLY  N13,000

DURAMAN HERBAL CAPSULE AND TITAN GEL  N22,000

Heres what to send to us

Text the CODE with the following information below

1. Your Full Name

2. Your Phone Number

3. Delivery Address

Send This Information as a text message to 08179478879

Please Note: Your address Must Include Local Government and State. Detailed Enough to make it traceable by our courier company that will come around to deliver to you.

You will get a SMS and Call from us within 24 hours to confirm your Order Before we Parcel It Across to You.

DELIVERY TIME

Once we received your order, and your details are correct, you will receive an sms or call confirmation from us. Your products will then be sent to our courier service partner and the items should get to you within 2-5 Days.

Note: The product will be packaged discreetly and no one else will know whats inside, and every other information will be kept private and 100% confidential.

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Loading...Home | News | General | Corruption in amnesty: Reps probe Boroh, Kuku, Others

By Levinus Nwabughiogu

ABUJAWORRIED over the alleged large scale corruption in the Niger Delta Presidential Amnesty Office, the House of Representatives has mandated its relevant committee to carry out a comprehensive probe into the activities of the office since inception.

Following this, the recently sacked coordinator of the Office, Gen. Paul Boron (retd) and his predecessor, Mr. Kingsley Kuku will be appearing before the House Committee on Niger Delta on a date yet to be announced.

Already, Boroh is being quizzed by the officials of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, EFCC and the Office of National Security Adviser, NSA over financial improprieties after his sack by President Muhammadu Buhari, last week.

The House also mandated the committee to assess the impact of the amnesty programme on the ex-agitators in the Niger Delta region.

The resolution of the House was sequel to the consideration and adoption of a motion by Abubakar Chika Adamu from Niger State at plenary, yesterday.

Canvassing support to the motion earlier, Adamu recalled that hundreds of ex- agitators besieged the gate of the National Assembly in November last year, protesting the non payment of their stipends and other allowances.

Despite the huge amount of money ranging from N60 to N70 billion allocated to the office, most of repented militants sent to various schools abroad had faced all sorts of humiliations and embarrassment by their host country embassies, he noted.

When subjected to voice vote by the Speaker of the House, Mr Yakubu Dogara, the motion was unanimously adopted by the members.

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Loading...Home | News | General | Defamatory publication becomes irrelevant when action cannot be proved

FACTS

The Appellant was the Chief Medical Director of the University of Nigeria Teaching Hospital, Enugu. The appellant and 4 others were charged to the Enugu Magistrate Court for stealing in charge No. ME/75C/2002 before Magistrate P .I. Enejere. The case came up before the Magistrate Court on 26/3/2002, 9/3/2002 and 10/4/2002 but same was struck out upon entering of a nolle prosequi by the Attorney-General of Enugu State.

court

On page 8 of the Vanguard Newspaper of Wednesday, the 3rd day of April, 2002, under heading  Chief Medical Director, others docked for stealing.The said publication is contained in Exhibit A and it read thus:

The Chief Medical Director of the University of Nigeria Teaching Hospital (UNTH) Enugu, Dr. B. A. N. Nwokoby has been arraigned before an Enugu Chief Magistrate Court charged with stealing.

Charged along with him were the Zonal Manager of the National Insurance Corporation of Nigeria (NICON) Mr. Jonathan Obas, Assistant Director of finance, UNTH, Mr. Ferdinand A. Maduka, the UNTH cashier, Mr. Maxwell Ezepue and a representative of NICON at UNTH, Mr. Boniface Ekula.

According to the prosecution, the accused persons were said to have conspired among themselves and stole N839, 797.66 belonging to NICON thereby committing an offence punishable under Section 353(12) of the Criminal Code, Cap 36 Volume 1 Laws of Anambra State of Nigeria as applicable in Enugu State.

The said amount represented the accruable money to NICON as insurance premium from UNTH.

It was said that the money was paid in cash on or about November 3, 2000, to the fifth accused person, Boniface Ekula who was NICONS representative to UNTH for onward transmission to NICON but the amount did not get to the insurance company hence the matter was referred to the police.

Following this development, the police was said to have spread their dragnet and arrested Mr. Ekula who allegedly implicated the rest of the accused persons.

No plea was taken when the accused persons appeared before the Chief Magistrate, Mrs. P. I. Enejere but court adjourned the matter indefinitely and referred the case file to the Director of Public Prosecution (DPP) for necessary action.

Sequel to the above; the appellant instructed his solicitors to write to the Respondents to retract the said publication as same was untrue. The Appellant vide Exhibit C; a letter ref. No. 12/02 dated 22nd July, 2002 demanded an apology and retraction of the story. The respondents refused to act and the Appellant took out a writ of Summons against them, but the claim was dismissed and hence this appeal.

HELD:

On the nature of the tort of libel.

The tort of libel is committed through the publication of defamatory words in writing. It is a tort in which the writer or publisher attacks the reputation, integrity, standing and /or fidelity of the victim of the publication.

On what plaintiff must prove to sustain action for libel: To sustain an action for libel, the plaintiff must prove the follow:- The publication was in writing; The publication was false; The false publication was made to a person apart from the plaintiff and the defendant; The publication referred to the plaintiff and was defamatory of the said plaintiff; The publication was made by the defendant, and That there are no justifiable legal grounds for the publication of the words.

See ILOABACHIE -V- ILOABACHIE (Supra) and OLOGE  V-NEW AFRICA HOLDINGS LTD(2013) 17 NWLR(Prt 1384) 449.

On what a defamatory statement is: A defamatory statement has been defined in OLAGE V- NEW AFRICA HOLDING LTD (Supra) as a statement which tends to:-

a. Lower the claimant in the estimation of right thinking members of society generally, or

b. Expose him to hatred, contempt or ridicule,

c. Cause other persons to shun or avoid him, or

d. Discredit him in his office, trade or profession, or

e. Injure his financial credit.

On the onus on plaintiff to prove that the published words are defamatory: In an action for libel, the onus is on the plaintiff to show that the published word complained of are defamatory or that they conveyed a defamatory imputation. However, where the words complained of are defamatory in their natural and ordinary meaning, the plaintiff has no legal duty to lead any evidence to show additional defamatory meaning as understood by persons possessing some particular facts.

On whether an accurate and fair report in a newspaper is defamatory: A publication in a newspaper is not defamatory if it is an accurate and fair report of what transpired, and it need not be verbatim or word for word. If what is stated is substantially a fair and accurate account of what is sought to be conveyed, then the statement cannot be said to be defamatory. See OLOGE V- NEW AFRICAN HOLDINGS LTD (Supra)

On the essential elements of the defence of qualified privilege: The essential elements for the defence of qualified privilege on the other hand are:- The privileged occasion must be fit;

The matter which is subject of the action must have reference to the occasion, and It must be published from right and honest motives.

On the burden on a plaintiff faced with the defence of qualified privilege: The burden is on the plaintiff to prove that the publication was not based on right and honest motive.

On the distinction between the defence of fair comment and that of qualified privilege: The distinctive feature of the two is that the defence of fair comment permits untrammelled discussion of matters of public interest with impunity. One principal safeguard of the reputation of the citizen in regard to the defence of fair comment is that facts must be distinguished and that facts commented upon must not be invented or distorted but must be real and founded in truth. But in defence of qualified privilege the defamatory matter need not be true provided there is not such recklessness as would be indicative of malice. See NTA V- BABATOPE (1996) 4 NWLR (Prt. 440) 75 at 100.

On whether a consideration of malice or qualified privilege is necessary where a court finds the published words not defamatory: The decision of this court above is no doubt in tune with the correct legal position; however the said principle applies where the court found the publication defamatory. But once the words or publication complained of as in the instant case, has been found not to be defamatory, the occasion in which the words were published or the publication was made becomes very irrelevant. There was indeed no basis for the trial court, having rightly found, in my view, that the publication in Exhibit A was not defamatory to even consider the defence of qualified privilege.

JUDGMENT

(DELIVERED BY MUHAMMED L. SHUAAIBU, JCA)

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Loading...Home | News | General | DSS arrests Kwankwasos ex-aide, retired captain over Boko Haram scare in Kano

By AbdulSalam Muhammad

KANO Operatives of Department of State Security, DSS, have arrested Alhaji Yunusa Adamu Dangwani, Chief of Staff of Kano State ex-governor, Rabiu Kwankwaso, and one Captain Umar Abdullahi (retd) of the Nigerian Army in Kano over alleged involvement in Boko Haram scare that rocked the state last week.

Multiple security sources in Kano confided in Vanguard that the Kano frontline politician, who was picked up at Malam Aminu Kano International Airport, had been flown to DSS headquarters in Abuja.

DSS OPERATIVES

The bubble burst when Captain Abdullahi circulated a toxic SMS to prominent individuals, including Governor Gandujes family member in Kano last week, threatening to cause mayhem by exploiting the instrumentals of Boko Haram terror machines.

A top DSS officer, who didnt want his name in print, confirmed that the retired army captain had already been whisked away to Abuja for further interrogations.

The retired captain was believed to have made phone contact with certain unnamed senior citizens with a vow to make Kano another Somalia.

Vanguard learned that the suspect implicated Dr Yunusa Adamu Dangwani as alleged sponsor, having been given N1.5 million part payment to destabilise the state.

Kano was thrown into confusion last week, following unsubstantiated report of an impending Boko Haram attack on schools and this led to temporary suspension of academic activities across the state.

When Vanguard called Kano DSS office for confirmation, a certain officer who did not want his name in print, said: We invited the former Commissioner, Dr Yunusa Dagwani, in connection with the arrest of the retired captain in our custody.

The retired captain has been taken to Abuja for further investigations over his alleged moves to attack Kano.

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Loading...Home | News | General | Police uncover kidnappers den in Ogun, kill 6, rescue 2 doctors

By Daud Olatunji

ABEOKUTAThe Ogun State Police Command has reportedly uncovered a kidnappers den inside a thick forest in Fidiwo village in Remo-North Local Government, along Lagos/Ibadan expressway, killing six of the suspected kidnappers.

The State Police Public Relations Officer, Abimbola Oyeyemi in a statement, said the suspects had been on the wanted list of the Command for quite some time as a result of their nefarious activities along the express road which he said is one of the busiest roads in the country.

The Commissioner of Police, Ahmed Iliyasu, during the parade explained that the suspects had earlier kidnapped two medical doctors of University College Hospital, Ibadan, who were heading to Lagos for a programme, but they were rescued by operatives of FSARS.

He said his men were able to track down the kidnappers as a result of intelligence gathering, commitment and professionalism.

He said: This audacity of the suspects infuriated me and then we ordered the officer in-charge of FSARS, DSP Uba Adam, to go after the hoodlums.

The FSARS operatives embarked on technical intelligence investigation and the suspects were tracked down to their hideout in a thick forest at Fidiwo area along Lagos/Ibadan expressway.

The hideout was stormed, consequent upon which the suspects engaged the men of FSARS in gun duel which lasted about an hour. At the end of the encounter, six of the suspects were gunned down while two Policemen also sustained injuries. The injured Policemen have been taken to the Hospital for medical attention.

Recovered from the suspects are, one double barrel shot gun, one single barrel long gun, several cartridges, live and expended ones, assorted charms and cutlass.

There is a criminal gang festering around this thick forest, between Onigare, Fidiwo and Sapade.

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Loading...Lai Mohammed, minister of information, has described as erroneous and extremely dishonourable, the claims by the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) that the abduction and release of Dapchi schoolgirls were stage-managed.

In a statement on Thursday, Mohammed said the PDP should have congratulated the federal government and Nigerians on the release of the girls or kept quiet.

Members of the Boko Haram insurgents returned 104 of the 110 abducted students a month after they were kidnapped from Government Girls Science and Technical College, Dapchi, Yobe state.

Following their return, the PDP claimed the abduction was designed to hoodwink Nigerians and orchestrate a great rescue and security prowess of a conquering general.

But Mohammed said it would have taken a conspiracy of global proportion to have stage-managed the adoption and release of the girls.

He said the federal government stopped responding to statements from PDP because it has failed to learn the ropes of being an opposition party, even when we have advised them to take a crash course on the role of the opposition in a democracy.

In its over three years in opposition, the PDP has again shown it does not understand the role of the opposition in a democracy. How then can the PDP convince Nigerians that it has learnt its lessons and that it is ready to rule the country again? Mohammed asked.

We broke our own rules this time because the PDP over-reached itself and scored an own goal at a time it could simply have congratulated the government and people of Nigeria on the release of the girls or just keep quiet.

As we have said many times since the abduction of the Dapchi schoolgirls, no government is exempted from its own share of tragedies.

What makes the difference is the way such tragedies are managed. Whereas it took the PDP all of 18 days to even acknowledge the abduction of the Chibok girls in 2014, the APC Federal Government acted promptly and responsively when the Dapchi schoolgirls were abducted 19 Feb. 2018, hence their quick release.

Nigerians must say never again to this primitive and soulless party.Home | News | General | New online magazine focusing on Lagos debuts

An online magazine, thisislagos.ng, that focuses on events in and around Lagos city has debuted.

Launched on Sunday, March 11, the magazine promises to curate, aggregate, and publish all the news about Lagos.

According to thisislagos.ng publishers: It will curate, aggregate and publish all the news about Lagos - the city and the state as well as the people of the city. It will interrogate and provide fresh perspectives on what it means to be a Lagosian. It will document Lagos like no other site and quickly become the go-to site for all things Lagos.

READ ALSO: Dapchi parents reveal what Boko Haram terrorists told them after releasing their children

thisislagos.ng will be the beating heart of Lagos when it comes to news. If its not here, its not Lagos. It will become the pre-eminent news site covering Lagos and its people, businesses and personalities, events and celebrations, celebrities and criminals. thisislagos.ng will cover Lagos like no other site.

Boasting of an impressive crop of writers, the magazine said it will be fun and fresh, breezy and irreverent and full of unique Lagos swag

thisislagos.ng will be democratic, provocative, non-partisan, all Lagos!, the publishers said.

In an earlier report by NAIJ.com, Lagos city was ranked alongside Abuja, Nigerias capital city, among the worlds least livable cities.

The latest ranking was done by Mercer, a New York-based human resources consulting firm, UK Telegraph reports.

Mercers 20th annual Quality of Living survey compared 231 major metropolises, examining factors such as crime, healthcare, education, public services, recreation, housing and personal freedom. Abuja and Lagos rank 19th and 20th respectively among the 20 worst cities to live in the world.

Check out the unbelievable state of the National Stadium in Surulere, Lagos - on NAIJ.com TV

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Source: Naija.ng

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Loading...Home | News | General | Nollywood actress Susan Peters called out by a makeup artist over her inability to pay for the services she rendered

A Nigerian makeup artist has called out popular Nigerian actress Susan Peters on Instagram as she demands for payment of the services she rendered to her.

The makeup artist known as Tonia_x_, has taken to social media to rant about how Susan Peters has refused to pay for her makeup.

Tonia went further to narrate that the actress has said she will pay her at her own convenient time which didn't go down well with her, as she gave her 24 hours to pay her her money.

She wrote: "This is calling out Susan Peters. you don't f*ucking mess with me! pay me my money@realsusan peters. since sending private messages didn't work, you have 24 hours.

When clients tell you that you're rude for asking for your money after doing their makeup. this is major call out, how can you tell me you will send my money at your convenient time after flying cabs and doing your makeup."

READ ALSO: Love doesn't guarantee the success of a relationship - Susan Peters

The lady who is now blasted by people as they say she is just looking for cheap popularity, other than her to be patience with the actress until she pays she has resorted to calling her out on social media.

In defense the lady claimed she had being patience enough and can't take the actress attitude anymore.

She wrote: "Do NOT take my Quietness for Stupidity. .

If being TRUTHFUL makes me Bad.

Then Im F**king BAD.

To all those talking bout patience, I pray and hope to God, you dont get owed in your business at a time of EMERGENCY , I pray.

If I wanted cheap publicity, I would have done it since not now, "

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Susan Peters is yet to make any defense on her part as she has posted a picture of her and disabled the comment section.

Omoni Oboli Interview: About the Nigerian Movie Industry | Star Chat - on NAIJ.com TV

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Source: Naija.ng

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Loading...Home | News | General | You could not secure the release of even one Chibok girl - FG blasts clueless PDP for insensitive response to Dapchigirls release

- The federal government has bashed the PDP for its 'insensitive' response to the release of the Dapchi school girls, and described it as a primitive and soulless party

- According to the FG, in 16 years, PDP redefined governance as cluelessness; and in recent times, has shown that it does not understand the role of the opposition

- It assured Nigerians that it would intensify efforts to secure the release of the remaining Chibok girls; unlike the PDP that could not secure the release of even one of the girls

The Muhammadu Buhari-led federal government has stated that going by its insensitive and crude response to the release of the Dapchi schoolgirls, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has failed grievously as an opposition party, just as it failed woefully as a ruling party, Premium Times reports.

The governments comment was made by the minister of information, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, who opined that the recent release of the schoolgirls calls for non-partisan celebration.

READ ALSO: Dapchigirls abduction, release was not stage-managed - FG tells PDP

NAIJ.com gathers that Mohammed stated that the PDP does not understand the role of the opposition in a democracy, and has shown that it has not learnt any lessons.

He stated: In its 16 years in power, the PDP redefined governance as cluelessness, massive looting of the public treasury and crude exhibition of power. In its over three years in opposition, the PDP has again shown it does not understand the role of the opposition in a democracy.

How then can the PDP convince Nigerians that it has learnt its lessons and that it is ready to rule the country again? Nigerians must say never again to this primitive and soulless party.

Mohammed said the Buhari government had not been responding to the amateurish and jejune statements from the opposition party precisely because it had failed to learn the ropes of being an opposition party, even when we have advised them to take a crash course on the role of the opposition in a democracy.

He continued: We broke our own rules this time because the PDP over-reached itself and scored an own goal at a time it could simply have congratulated the government and people of Nigeria on the release of the girls or just keep quiet.

Mohammed gave the assurance that the federal government would intensify efforts to secure the release of the remaining Chibok girls, unlike the PDP that could not secure the release of even one of the girls before it was booted out of power.

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Meanwhile, NAIJ.com previously reported that the federal government accused the Peoples Democratic Party of plumbing the depths of infamy for alleging that the abduction and release of the Dapchi schoolgirls were stage-managed.

The minister for information, Lai Mohammed, stated that friendly countries and international organisations were involved in negotiations to secure the release of the school girls. Hence, he opined that it would have taken a conspiracy of global proportion to have stage-managed the entire process.

Mixed reactions trail Boko Haram's release of Dapchi girls - on NAIJ.com TV:

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Source: Naija.ng

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Loading...Home | News | General | Borno state government moves to close boarding schools, urges Nigerian Army, traditional rulers to help tighten security

- As a way of tightening security in Borno, the state government has ordered the immediate closure of boarding schools

- Muhammad Bulama, the commissioner for home affairs, information and culture in the state said only boarding schools in Maiduguri and Biu are exempted from the order

- Bulama assured indigenes that Boko Haram collaborators would be dealt with in accordance with the laws of the land

The Borno state government has directed the immediate closure of public boarding secondary schools as part of measures to enhance security in schools.

Muhammad Bulama, the commissioner for home affairs, information and culture, said this in a statement issued on Wednesday, March 21, in Maiduguri. Bulama said that the measure was adopted at the end of an expanded security council meeting of security agencies, government and traditional leaders held on Thursday, March 15, the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN), reports.

Bulama: All boarding secondary schools in the state with the exception of those in Maiduguri and Biu will until further notice be closed with immediate effect.

READ ALSO: Dapchigirls abduction, release was not stage-managed - FG tells PDP

"Sequel to the unfortunate recent attack on Rann town in Kala-Balge local government council by Boko Haram, urgent and immediate measures will be taken jointly by the Borno Government, the Nigerian Armed Forces and other security agencies to forestall future occurrences there and in other vulnerable communities.

Elaborate security, infrastructure, personnel and logistics arrangements will be put in place preparatory to the imminent return of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) to Bama, Gwoza and Dikwa local government areas and the subsequent return of their Royal Highnesses to their respective domains.

To speedily establish structures of civil authority; local government councils, para-military agencies, the judiciary and traditional institutions, as prerequisite to relocating IDPs to their places of origin.

He also disclosed that the council had approved the re-opening of Maiduguri-Bama-Banki Road for public and commercial purposes on Saturday, March 24. He added that the council also called for improved synergy between the military, other security agencies and community leaders to enhance intelligence gathering.

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He further said: The Nigerian Armed Forces are implored to encourage senior military officers in command positions to closely liaise and synergise with traditional rulers in their areas of operation and also endeavour to regularly attend the meetings of the security committees at local government levels.

The commissioner warned that Boko Haram collaborators would be dealt with in accordance with the laws of the land. He announced that effective measures would be implemented to check the menace of illicit drug abuse, warning that drug peddlers would face the wrath of the law.

He remarked: All stakeholders will be mobilise and sensitise to squarely address the problem. The State Hard substance Abuse Committee will be reactivated and reconstituted without delay.

Intensive and sustained media campaign against the dangers of illicit substance peddling and illegal consumption will be mounted.

All premises where the illegal consumption of alcohol, illicit substances and other vices detrimental to the moral well being and security of society take place, especially in the Galadima area of Maiduguri metropolis will be closed immediately.

Meanwhile, NAIJ.com reported that the Nigeria Police Force (NPF), issued a red-alert on Thursday, March 15, as it warned residents of Borno state against an impending attack by the Boko Haram terrorist group using vehicles loaded with explosives.

NAIJ.com gathered that the planned attack might result in heavy casualty if it succeeded since the insurgents were suspected to be targeting strategic locations of the city that were densely populated.

Bring back our girls - 3 year anniversary #BBOG - On NAIJ.com TV

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Source: Naija.ng

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Loading...Home | News | General | Lawmaker advises FG to tackle arms proliferation

A member of the Lagos State House of Assembly, Mr Tunde Braimoh, on Thursday told the Federal Government to tackle arms proliferation to end the worsening spate of wanton killings in Nigeria.

Braimoh, who is Chairman of the House Committee on Information, Strategy and Security, told Newsmen in Lagos on Thursday that there was urgent need to address the issue to save lives.

Arms

The proliferation of arms and ammunition by any group or persons under whatever guise except under due permission by the regulatory authorities is illegal, unlawful, criminal and therefore, condemnable and unacceptable.

Self-help by groups or individuals either pro-acting or reacting to real or imaginary threats to their lives or property is an unequivocal pointer to systemic failure.

Government may declare amnesty and ask those in illegal possession of arms to voluntarily relinquish same within a set time.

And after which the full weight of the law would be brought to bear on the recalcitrant and the obdurate, the lawmaker said.

Braimoh, representing Kosofe Constituency II in the assembly, said that government would have to up its ante by providing adequate security in all nooks and crannies of the country.

He also advised that the government might need to provide veritable platforms for herdsmen to form cooperatives to fund their operations themselves.

According to him, the herders may acquire ranches or colonies as they may choose at their own expense but aided by collaborations and credit.

Security of live and properties therefore, is the most basic and preponderant function of any good government.

Circumstance where people take to arms to protect their property or lives or mete instant judgment on suspected or even apprehended criminals, is a fundamental failure.

If the government has capacity to deliver on its set mandate, then the people should not resort to self-help which most times is obsolete, barbaric, uncultured and anachronistic.

The lawmaker further advised government to cultivate far-flung bushes and forest reserves for agricultural, industrial or even military usage.

Funding or endowing land and other operational support for a particular sub-sector of the economy like the herdsmen to the exclusion of others would be inequitable and repugnant to legal and natural justice.

Security of lives and property, including protection of the herdsmen and their cattle is therefore, too rudimentary and sacred a function of government, he said.

Herdsmen have been unleashing deadly attacks in parts of the country resulting to loss of many lives and displacement of thousands of citizens, especially in North Central Nigeria.

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Loading...Home | News | General | Dapchi girls : PDP inhuman, insensitive, unpatriotic  Lai Mohammed

The Federal Government has accused the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) of plumbing the depths of infamy for saying the abduction and release of the Dapchi girls were stage-managed.

In a statement issued in Abuja on Thursday, the Minister of Information and Culture, Alhaji Lai Mohammed, said such postulation on the Dapchi girls portrays the PDP as an inhuman, insensitive, unpatriotic and unworthy party. A girl released by Boko Haram walks with her mother in Dapchi on March 21, 2018 after Boko Haram Islamists who kidnapped 110 schoolgirls just over a month ago have so far returned 101 of the students to the town, the government said. Information Minister said the girls were released unconditionally. No money changed hands, he told reporters in the capital, Abuja. / AFP PHOTO

He said since the release of the Dapchi girls were negotiated by friendly countries and reputable international organizations, it would have taken a conspiracy of global proportion to have stage-managed the adoption and release of the girls.

Alhaji Mohammed said the reaction of the PDP amounts to an expression of sour grapes, especially because the party failed woefully  when it was in power  to quickly resolve a similar abduction of schoolgirls.

As we have said many times since the abduction of the Dapchi schoolgirls, no government is exempted from its own share of tragedies. What makes the difference is the way such tragedies are managed.

Whereas it took the PDP all of 18 days to even acknowledge the abduction of the Chibok girls in 2014, the APC Federal Government acted promptly and responsively when the Dapchi schoolgirls were abducted 19 Feb. 2018, hence their quick release, he said.

The Minister said it is unfortunate that the PDP that failed woefully as a ruling party has also failed grievously as an opposition party, going by its insensitive and crude response to the release of the Dapchi schoolgirls  a development that calls for non-partisan celebration.

In its 16 years in power, the PDP redefined governance as cluelessness, massive looting of the public treasury and crude exhibition of power. In its over three years in opposition, the PDP has again shown it does not understand the role of the opposition in a democracy. How then can the PDP convince Nigerians that it has learnt its lessons and that it is ready to rule the country again? Nigerians must say never again to this primitive and soulless party, he said.

Alhaji Mohammed said the Federal Government has not been responding to the amateurish and jejune statements from the PDP precisely because the party has failed to learn the ropes of being an opposition party, even when we have advised them to take a crash course on the role of the opposition in a democracy.

We broke our own rules this time because the PDP over-reached itself and scored an own goal at a time it could simply have congratulated the government and people of Nigeria on the release of the girls or

just keep quiet, he said.

The Minister assured Nigerians that the Federal Government will intensify the ongoing efforts to secure the release of the remaining Chibok girls and return them safely to their families, just like over 100

other Chibok girls who have so far been released, unlike the PDP that could not secure the release of even one of the girls before it was booted out of power

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Loading...Home | News | General | Pipeline vandalism: Residents call for police presence at Lagos/Ogun border

Residents of Ikorodu area of Lagos/Ogun border, ravaged by pipeline vandals in 2016, have called on the appropriate authority to establish permanent police station along Itaoluwo road to curtail resurgence of the menace.

The people made the call in separate interviews with newsmen on Thursday in Lagos.

The residents, however, commended the security measures put in place to curtail pipeline vandalism but expressed concern that the vandals had started regrouping.

Gas flaring and pipeline vandalism in the Niger Delta

According to them, sound of gun shots at night and the mood of conveyance of fuel by commercial motorcyclists showed evidence of return of the vandals to the area.

Newsmen report that residents of Isawo, Igboolomu, Ereko, Muti, Ajegunle and Elepete communities at the fringes of Lagos and Ogun States were touched by pipeline vandals in 2016, killing many people, looted shops and destroyed property.

Mr Femi Atoyebi, Chairman, Harmony Commumity Development Association (CDA) at Ereko, said establishment of a permanent police station at Itaoluwo would further boost security and curtail vandalsim in the various communities in the area.

Road blocks are a short-term measure that will not have a long lasting effect on pipeline vandalism here, he said.

Mr James Eromosele, also of CDA, called for road expansion at Isawo by the Lagos State Government to compliment the security measures against vandalism and forestall future occurrence of the 2016 experience.

He said since it was becoming evident that the vandals were regrouping in the creeks within the localities, the presence of more police and army was necessary to prevent to check their activities.

NAN

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Loading...Home | News | General | Sequel to the disagreement between NASS and INEC over the sequence or order of elections

Chairman of the Patriots, Professor Ben Nwabueze, has described the court action trying to stop the National Assembly from overriding President Muhammadu Buharis veto of the sequence of elections bill, as strange, saying that the matter was not justiciable.

Nwabueze said that the powers of both the President and the National Assembly, NASS, to veto or override one another over bills were enshrined in the 1999 Constitution, adding that the way to go about it was for the presidency to lobby NASS on the issue rather than instituting frivolous actions in courts.

Read full statemet below

The disagreement between the National Assembly and INEC on the matter of the sequence or order of elections has given rise to a crisis situation that must rank among the strange happenings in the country. The Electoral Act (Amendment) Bill 2018, which is a Bill for a law to give effect to the intention or proposal of the National Assembly slating the presidential election to take place after all the other elections, was passed by the Assembly sometime in February 2018, and sent to President Buhari for his assent.

Prof. Ben Nwabueze

He returned it to the Assembly after nearly 30 days with a letter informing the two Houses of his decision withholding his assent to the Bill, i.e. vetoing the Bill, on the ground, among other reasons, that the Bill infringes the power of INEC to organise, undertake and supervise elections under paragraph 15(a) of the Third Schedule to the Constitution. The consequence of the Presidents action is that it invites a counter-action by the Assembly to override his veto.

Sensing a counter-action to be on its way, the Accord Party, one of the registered political parties, by an oral application, asked the Federal High Court (FHC) Abuja Division, to restrain the National Assembly, by means of the coercive process of injunction, from taking such counter-action. It is not clear what interest the Accord Party has in the matter that bestows on it the locus standi to bring the suit in the FHC.

The situation thus created involves three intricate legal issues of critical importance, viz

(i) The action of the President in withholding his assent to the Bill. The withholding of his assent was done pursuant to a power granted to him by section 58(4) of the Constitution which says that where a bill is presented to the President for assent, he shall within thirty days thereof signify that he assents or that he withholds assent. The mere existence of a power granted by the Constitution precludes a contrary or conflicting right in any one as regards the matter in question and no question can therefore ever arise of the grant or the existence of the power being an infringement of such right, as to ground action for an injunction to restrain the exercise of the power; such a right simply stultifies the power, emptying it of all meaning and force.

(ii) The anticipated counter-action by the National Assembly overriding the Presidents veto. The authority for this derives from the power granted to the Assembly by section 58(5) of the Constitution which says that where the President withholds his assent and the bill is again passed by each House by two-thirds majority, the bill shall become law and the assent of the President shall not be required. Like the Presidents power to withhold his assent, the National Assemblys power to override the withholding of his assent is a power granted by the Constitution, and what is said above about the Presidents power to withhold his assent applies mutatis mutandis; in particular, the grant of the power, i.e. its mere existence, is not, and cannot be, an infringement of anyones right. This must be kept distinct from the Assemblys general power to make laws which requires a bill to pass through the processes of first, second and third readings before submitting it to the President for his assent.

What concerns us here is only the power to override the Presidents veto, not the Assemblys general power to make laws. The consequences of the power to override, after it is exercised, are another matter, but the exercise of the power in the first instance cannot be stopped because of the possible consequences of exercising it. The course of action open to opponents of the exercise of the power (i.e. power to override the veto) is to lobby support in the Assembly to prevent the Bill being re-passed by  majority, not to stop the Assembly by court injunction from embarking at all on the process of exercising the power in the first place.

I think that, to dispel from the public mind the growing feeling that it (the presidency) had a hand in stopping the exercise by the National Assembly of its constitutional power to override its veto, the presidency should take steps to dissociate itself from that mischievous action, which could not have had the overall interests of the country at heart.

(iii) The action stopping the National Assembly from exercising its constitutional power to override the Presidents veto raises three critical legal issues of its own. First, is it justified in reason or principle? The rationale proffered for it by the plaintiffs counsel, which of course provides no justification for it, is the doctrine of lis pendis, which, as argued by counsel, forbids any party in litigation, whether or not there is an application for an injunction, not to do anything that will fragment or extinguish the Res of the litigation. If they act under section 58(5), there will be a constitutional crisis, anarchy, chaos and there will be no return to status quo ante belum, so prevention they say is better than cure. The argument is attractive but only superficially so. What res is being talked about here? There is no res, except the one artificially and unlawfully created by the suit itself to serve the mischievous design of stopping the National Assembly from exercising its constitutional power to override the Presidents veto.

Second, can the High Courts injunctive order, albeit interim in its duration, restraining the National Assembly from overriding the Presidents veto be squared with the hallowed principle of the separation of powers, as authoritatively expounded by the U.S. Supreme Court in Humphrey v. United States 265 U.S. 602 (1934). The words of the Court are so classic as to merit repetition here:

The fundamental necessity of maintaining each of the three general departments of government entirely free from the control or coercive influence, direct or indirect, of either of the others, has often been stressed and it is hardly open to serious question. So much is implied in the very fact of the separation of the powers of these departments by the constitution and in the rule which recognises their essential co-equality. The sound application of a principle that makes one master in his own house precludes him from imposing his control in the house of another who is master thereThe independence of each department requires that its proceedings shall be free from the remotest influence, direct or indirect, of either of the other two powers (emphasis supplied).

No interference could be more direct or coercive than the use of an injunctive order issued by a court to stop the National Assembly from exercising its constitutional power to override the Presidents veto.

The third issue raised by the suit is more basic and critical. Has the Federal High Court (FHC) the power or jurisdiction to make or issue the injunctive order against the National Assembly? The FHC is a court of law; as such, its jurisdiction is limited to the application of law in the determination of disputes brought before it involving the legal rights, obligations and interests of the parties to the dispute. As the Electoral Act (Amendment) Bill has not yet become law, not having been assented to by the President as required by section 58(1) & (2) of the Constitution, it follows that, being a court of law, the FHC has no jurisdiction to issue the injunctive order it did issue against the National Assembly, acting on the basis of the said Bill.

The suit before the Court, filed by the Accord Party as plaintiff, is not a justiciable suit because it is based on a Bill that has not become law, and is not therefore governed by law in accordance with which the rights of the plaintiffs, if any, are to be determined. Not being a justiciable suit, the injunctive order issued by the court against the National Assembly is not a judicial decision, and is not binding on, or enforceable against, the National Assembly; at best, it is an advisory opinion. (The decided authorities on the issue are many but are considered in my book, Judicialism (1977 chap iv). Under our laws, a court has no power to render an advisory opinion, but the intricacy and relevance of the subject make it necessary to explain in an addendum why our courts are not permitted to render an advisory opinion.)

I quote below what I wrote in my book, Nigerias Second Experiment in Constitutional Democracy (1985), pages 352  353, on the issue pending before the Federal High Court (FHC).

The translation of power into action is preceded by a preliminary process of thinking out and formulating a policy. This process is not regulated by law. The Court of Appeal of Zambia has accordingly held that the mere announcement by the government of an intention to introduce legislation cannot be a violation of the Constitution, castigating as absurd any suggestion that the legislature intended the courts to be vested with the power to pronounce in advance that if the government pursued an expressed intention, legislation on the lines of that expressed intention would be ultra vires the Constitution. The consequences of such a construction would be truly chaotic. Nkumbula v. Att-Gen, for Zambia, Appeal No. 6 of 1972, of 4/12/72 per Baron J.P. (as he then was).

Even when the intention has been formulated into a bill no question of law arises at that stage, for a bill is not law; as such it cannot be an unlawful exercise of the power of law-making inasmuch as it may be abandoned or amended before the processes of its translation into law are completed, -Cf. Pugh, The Fed declaratory remedy: justiciability, jurisdication and related problems, Vand. L. Rev., 1952, 79, 94  95  it cannot affect the rights of any persons. The High Court of Australia  the apex court in that country  thus rightly dismissed an application to prevent a bill passed by the federal legislature from being presented for the Governor-Generals assent, on the ground that the bill was beyond the powers of that legislature. Hughes and Vale Pty. Ltd v. Grair (1954), Argus L.R. 1094 .

In his judgment in the case, Chief Justice Dixon rightly criticized as incorrect a decision of the Supreme Court of the state of New South Wales, which granted an injunction to restrain the presentation of a bill that had been passed by the state legislature but was not submitted to a referendum as required by law. Trethowan v. Peden (1930), 31 S.R. (N.S.W.) 183.

The decision was induced by the peculiar provision of the Constitution which in terms prohibited presentation for royal assent before approval at a referendum. For a review, see Cowan, L.Q.R. 71, p. 376. The Bendel State High Court was thus clearly in error in declaring as totally illegal a bill under consideration by the State House of Assembly for the purpose of establishing local government councils, and in restraining the House and all its servants, agents or functionaries from taking further steps in the process of enacting the bill. Att-Gen., Bendel State v. House of Assembly, Bendel State, Suit No. B/166/82 of 9/7/82 by Ekeruche C.J. Equally erroneous and unwarranted was the order by the Kwara State High Court restraining President Shehu Shagari from assenting to a bill to establish a national advisory council on the mass media through an amendment to the Electoral Act, 1982. Ex parte Kwara State Printing and Publishing Corpn., per Kawu C.J., National Concord, 30 June 1983.

By Professor Ben Nwabueze

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Loading...The Senior Special Assistant to President Muhammadu Buhari on Media and Publicity, Mallam Garba Shehu, has hit back at the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), for saying that the government orchestrated the kidnap of the Dapchi schoolgirls.

Shehu, who spoke with Dailytrust last night on the sideline of the launch of the British Broadcasting Commission (BBC) Bureau in Lagos, accused the opposition party of bellyaching.

The thing is that it is inconceivable that any leader with conscience will orchestrate this against its own people. But again this shouldnt surprise us because we have seen it happening in America. When the Twin Towers were bombed, conspiracy theorists said that President Bush bombed the Twin Towers which killed 3,000 people in order to undermine Islam or to create justification for the war against Iraq.

So it is not surprising that conspiracy theorists would look at President Buhari and said that he orchestrated this. This did not happen. It is not true and it cannot happen. I think what is happening is that our political opponents especially PDP which has been very reckless on matters of national security.

They thought the Dapchi girls would give them an easy pass to power and that President Buhari can be equated morally and politically to their rotten government. Now they have lost a plot. They have to go and look for how to win power. How can they beat Buhari in infrastructure? How can they beat Buhari in the fight against corruption? How can they beat Buhari in securing this country and beating back Boko Haram? Those are the challenges we give back to them, the presidential spokesman said.

PDP in a statement by its National Publicity Secretary, Kola Ologboniyan, had described the release of the girls as a scam by Buharis government.

Ologboniyan on his Twitter page, stated that the release of the girls was a plot by the All Progressives Congress (APC) to gain heroic appraisal from Nigerians.Two months after he came down hard on President Muhammadu Buhari, former President Olusegun Obasanjo has disclosed that he is considering writing another letter.

The elder statesman said this while speaking at the 14th annual lecture of Women in Management, Business and Public Service in Lagos on Thursday.

In the letter he wrote in January, Obasanjo asked Buhari to retire from active public service. He told the president to forget about contesting in 2019, saying doing so would amount to overstretching the tolerance of Nigerians.

But on Thursday, the ex-president said the new letter might not be as tough as that of January.

He also said the Coalition for Nigeria Movement which he introduced in the strongly-worded letter now has three million registered voters.

He said if Nigerians register for the elections in good time, they would benefit from the ideals of CNM and similar movements.

Obasanjo said at the right time, he would withdraw from CNM as long as the movement plans to groom capable hands for political positions.

The former president charged women on the need to be more visible in the political landscape and they have to do enough for themselves.

If only womanhood was enough, Mrs Clinton would have made it to the White House but she had a man (Donald Trump) who did what he could do to get to power, he said.

I dont want or expect women to climb palm trees to harvest bunch of palm fruits. If anybody says he wants to see my mother climb palm trees, I will take a second look at that person.

But women must do what it takes to succeed in Nigerian political space.

To you women, do not allow any body to build your world for you. Build your world for yourself. Yes, women need encouragement but they must do enough for themselves.The Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) in Ondo State has asked President Muhammadu Buhari to ensure the release of Liya Sharibu, the only Christian girl among the Kidnapped Dapchi girls.

CAN described the silence of the President on Sharibu who is still with the Boko Haram insurgents as sad and worrisome.

In a Press Statement made available in Akure, the State capital, CAN Chairman in the state, Rev. Ayo Oladapo accused President Buhari of planning to crush out Christianity in the country.

The Christian body queried President Buhari if it is a crime to be a Christian in Nigeria.

It is painful to note that Liya Sharibu the only girl that still remains with the Boko Haram is said to be the only lady that refused to renounce her Christian faith

With this development, It is clear that the battle is against Christianity. Information has it that the Boko Haram people came into Dapchi town majestically to return the girls

They claim that they were not aware that the girls were Muslims, hence, they need to return them because they are Muslims When did it become a crime for a person to become a Christian in Nigeria?

According to the girls, they were release because they were Muslims. Is it a crime to become a Christian in Nigeria? President Buhari should tell the whole world  CAN said.

The Religion body charged Vice President, Yemi Osinbanjo not to keep quiet as a Christian in government.

It asked Christians across the nation to mobilize prayer for the release of Sharibu to rejoin with the parents unharmed.

The statement added,  It is painful that the government, civil society organization, human right activist kept mute on the only Christian girl that is still held captive

 We, therefore, demand that the President Muhammad Buhari and all his security outfits should without delay facilitate the immediate release of Layi Sharibu

 It is becoming clearer that president Buharis administration is out to crush Christianity to nothing in this nation, if he is keeping quiet on the only girl in captivity because of her faith in Christ Jesus

 No wonder, President Buhari is not doing much as expected of him to stop the killings of people in the Christian community by the herdsmen

Pastor Professor Yemi Oshibanjo should not keep quiet as a Christian at this time, we encourage all Churches to please mobilize prayer for the release of Liya Sharibu to rejoin with the parents unharmed. We equally call on the International community to assist in the release of the Christian girlHome | News | General | JAMB cut off marks for Nigerian universities in 2018/2019

Last updated: March 22th 2018

If you plan on gaining admission into the university, polytechnic or any other tertiary institution, you have to know the JAMB 2018/2019 cut off mark.

The cut off mark for JAMB varies from course of study to course of study. Below you will find all the essential JAMB news about cut off marks for gaining admission in 2018.

The Joint Admission and Matriculation Board (JAMB) has already released JAMB 2018/2019 cut off marks for all Nigerian universities. Are you ready for Jamb Latest News?

JAMB cut off mark 2018-2019

You must have the minimum JAMB cut off mark 120 to enter the Nigerian Universities. As for JAMB cut off mark for polytechnics and colleges you should have 100. At the same time, if you want to get an education at innovative, enterprising institutes, your minimum score must be 110.

Remember! Higher institutions reserve the right to increase the JAMB 2018/2019 cut off mark above the minimum accepted by JAMB.

Professor Is-haq Olanrewaju Oloyede

Mr. Is-haq Oloyede (the JAMB Registrar) mentioned that a Central Admission Processing System (CAPS) would be adopted to regularize the processes of admission into institutions

The JAMB Registrar also added that schools could also make use of the dual mode system. In this case, both manual and the newly introduced CAPS can be adopted.

He also noted that the candidates who chose to study Agriculture in higher institutions were low while those who wanted to study Medicine and Sciences increased this year.

As for illegal admissions, Is-haq Oloyede said that the admission process is automatic and all candidates must be approved by the JAMB Registrar.

Nearly 17,160 students have gotten admission into school without JAMB in Nigeria.

READ ALSO: How to reprint JAMB slip for 2017 UTME?

Mr. Adamu Adamu, the Minister of Education, declared a cancellation of the ban of Post-UTME examination as a premise for entering universities and polytechnics.

He marked that post-UTME banning caused a lot of rules violations both by candidates and institutions.

After the ban cancellation, schools could now conduct exams freely, and examination fee must not be more than 2000 Naira.

The Minister also assured that a high number of candidates who took part at the 2017 UTME would enter the higher education institutions this year.

We hope, the above JAMB news about cut off mark was useful for you. Good Luck!

JAMB cut off marks for federal universities 2018/2019

Abubakar Tafawa Balewa University, Bauchi (ATBU)  180

Ahmadu Bello University, (ABU) Zaria  180

Bayero University, Kano (BUK)- 180

Federal University of Petroleum Resources, Effurun (FUPRE)  180

Federal University of Technology, Akure (FUTA)  180

Federal University of Technology, Minna (FUTMinna)  180

Federal University of Technology, Owerri (FUTO)  180

Federal University, Dutse, Jigawa State (FUD)  180

Federal University, Dutsin-Ma, Katsina (FUDutsinma)  180

Federal University, Kashere, Gombe State(FUKashere)  180

Federal University, Lafia, Nasarawa State (FULafia)- 180

Federal University, Lokoja, Kogi State (FULokoja)  180

Federal University, Ndufu-Alike, Ebonyi State (FUNAI)- 180

Federal University, Otuoke, Bayelsa (FUOtuoke)  180

Federal University, Oye-Ekiti, Ekiti State (FUOYE)- 180

Federal University, Wukari, Taraba State (FUWukari)- 180

Michael Okpara Uni. of Agric., Umudike (MOUAU)- 180

Modibbo Adama University of Technology, Yola (MAUTECH, formerly FUTYOLA)- 180

National Open University of Nigeria, Lagos (NOUN)  N/A

Nigerian Defence Academy (NDA), Kaduna  180

Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka (UNIZIK)  180

Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU), Ile-Ife  200

Police Academy Wudil  180 (2016 cut-off mark confirmed)

University of Abuja (UNIABUJA), Gwagwalada  180

Federal University of Agriculture, Abeokuta (FUNAAB)  200

Federal University of Agriculture, Makurdi (FUAM)  180

University of Benin (UNIBEN)  200

University of Calabar (UNICAL)  180

University of Ibadan (UI)  200

University of Ilorin (UNILORIN)  180

University of Jos (UNIJOS)  180

University of Lagos (UNILAG)  200

University of Maiduguri (UNIMAID)  180

University of Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN)  180

University of Port-Harcourt (UNIPORT)  180

University of Uyo (UNIUYO)  180

Usumanu Danfodiyo University Sokoto (UDUSOK)  180

JAMB cut off marks for state universities 2018/2019

Abia State University, Uturu (ABSU)  180

Adamawa State University Mubi (ADSU)  180

Adekunle Ajasin University, Akungba (AAUA)  180

Akwa Ibom State University of Technology, Uyo (AKUTECH)  180

Ambrose Alli University (AAU), Ekpoma  180

Anambra State University of Science & Technology, Uli  180

Bauchi State University, Gadau (BASUG)  180

Benue State University, Makurdi (BSUM)  180, Medicine  200

Cross River State University of Science & Technology, Calabar (CRUTECH)- 180

Delta State University Abraka (DELSU)  180

Ebonyi State University (EBSU), Abakaliki  180

Ekiti State University (EKSU)  180

Enugu State University of Science and Technology (ESUT), Enugu  180

Gombe State Univeristy (GSU), Gombe  180

Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida University, Lapai (IBBUL)  180

Ignatius Ajuru University of Education (IAUE), Rumuoumeni  180

Imo State University (IMSU), Owerri  180

Kaduna State University (KASU), Kaduna  180

Kano University of Science & Technology (KUST), Wudil  180

Kebbi State University, Kebbi (KSUSTA)- 180

Kogi State University (KSU), Anyigba  180

Kwara State University (KWASU), Ilorin  180

Ladoke Akintola University of Technology (LAUTECH), Ogbomoso  180

Lagos State University (LASU), Ojo, Lagos  180

Nasarawa State University, Keffi (NSUK)  180

Niger Delta Unversity (NDU), Yenagoa  180

Northwest University (NU), Kano  180

Olabisi Onabanjo University (OOU), Ago-Iwoye  18

Ondo State University of Science & Technology, Okitipupa  180

Osun State University (UNIOSUN), Oshogbo  180

Plateau State University, Bokkos (PLASU)  180

Rivers State University of Science & Technology (RSUST)  180

Sokoto State University, Sokoto (SSU)  180

Tai Solarin University of Education, Ijebu-Ode (TASUED)  180

Taraba State University, Jalingo (TSU)  180

Technical University, Ibadan  180

Umaru Musa YarAdua University, Katsina (UMYU)  180

JAMB cut off mark 2018/2019 for federal polytechnics in Nigeria

Auchi Polytechnic (AUCHIPOLY)  150

Federal Polytechnic, Ado-Ekiti  150

Federal Polytechnic, Bauchi  150

Federal Polytechnic, Bida  150

Federal Polytechnic, Damaturu  N/A

Federal Polytechnic, Ede, Osun State  150

Federal Polytechnic, Idah  150

Federal Polytechnic, Ilaro  150

Federal Polytechnic, Mubi  TBA

Federal Polytechnic, Namoda  TBA

Federal Polytechnic, Nassarawa  150

Federal Polytechnic, Nekede  150

Federal Polytechnic Offa  150

Federal Polytechnic, Oko  150

Federal School of Dental Technology and Therapy, Enugu  150

Kaduna Polytechnic, Kaduna  150

Hussaini Adamu Federal Polytechnic  TBA

Nigeria Army School of Military Engineering  TBA

Waziri Umaru Fed. Polytechnic Birnin Kebbi, Kebbi  TBA

Yaba College of Technology (YABATECH)  150 for ND, 180 for UNN Degree

READ ALSO: How to print Jamb admission letter?

JAMB Cut off Mark 2018/2019 For State Polytechnics In Nigeria

Abraham Adesanya Polytechnic  150

Abia State Polytechnic  150

Adamawa State Polytechnic  150

Abdul-Gusau Polytechnic, Talata-Mafara  TBA

Akwa-Ibom State Polytechnic  150

Abubakar Tatari Ali Polytechnic  150

Akwa Ibom State College of Arts and Science Nung, Ukim  150

Benue State Polytechnic  150

College of Administrative and Business Studies, Potiskum  150

Enugu Polytechnic  150

GATEWAY Polytechnic, Igbesa  150

Rufus Giwa Polytechnic  150

The Polytechnic, Ibadan  150

Institute of Management and Technology Enugu  150

Imo State Polytechnic, Umuagwo  150

Jigawa State Polytechnic  150

Kano State Polytechnic  150

Hassan Usman Katsina Polytechnic  150

Kogi State Polytechnic  150

Kwara State Polytechnic, Ilorin  150

Lagos State Polytechnic, Ikorodu  150

Moshood Abiola Polytechnic  150

Nasarawa State Polytechnic  150

Nuhu Bamalli Polytechnic  150

Delta State Polytechnic, Ogwashi-Uku  150

Delta State Polytechnic, Otefe  150

Osun State Polytechnic, Iree  150

Osun State College of Technology, Esa-Oke  150

Delta State Polytechnic, Ozoro  150

Plateau State Polytechnic, Barkin-Ladi  150

Polytechnic of Sokoto  150

Ramat Polytechnic  150

Rivers State College of Arts and Science  150

Rivers State Polytechnic  150

Gateway Polytechnic Saapade  150

Edo State Institute of Technology and Management, Usen  150

Niger State Poly, Zungeru, Niger State  150

Conclusion

Now you know all about the JAMB cut off marks for 2017/2018 for all Nigerian colleges and universities. Hope you get admitted into your school of choice.

READ ALSO: Can you check JAMB result with only registration number?

Source: Naija.ng

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Loading...Home | News | General | Fight Corruption, leave Ekweremadu alone, PDP tells FG

By Dirisu Yakubu

ABUJA-The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has tasked the federal government to fight corruption and stop hounding members of the opposition parties, especially its members. Ekweremadu

The party specifically expressed dismay at the motion exparte filed by the Special Presidential Investigation Panel for the Recovery of Public Property seeking the forfeiture of assets allegedly not declared by the Deputy President of the Senate, Senator Ike Ekweremadu.

In a statement issued by its National Publicity Secretary, Kola Ologbondiyan on Thursday, the party said that while the PDP was in full support of any genuine anti-graft war, the All Progressives Congress (APC)- led administrations obsession with Ekweremadu was another clear indication that it was not ready to fight corruption, but rather out to scandalize, persecute, and bring down its perceived opponents.

It said: The PDP recalls that this government rushed to arraign Senator Ekweremadu and the Senate president, Dr. Bukola Saraki in 2016 on trumped up charges of forgery of Senate Standing Rule, even when there was not even a mention of their names in the contentious police report or Proof of Evidence. It eventually withdrew the charges for lack of merit.

The police raided and ransacked Senator Ekweremadus official guest house in Abuja in May 2017 and blamed it on false whistle blowers, whom they charged to court. Nothing has been heard about the trial of the alleged false whistle blowers again.

In the current matter, apart from relying on an obsolete law to dabble into the roles of the Code of Conduct Bureau, we are not surprised that the Panel could not carry out a thorough and independent investigation on the purported property of the Senator, but relied on a petition by the former Chief Judge of Enugu State, Justice Innocent Umezulike, who is standing corruption trial in several courts, after his removal from office by the National Judicial Council (NJC) in 2017.

We recall that the senator accused Umezulike and some politicians of stealing and doctoring his will, inserting non-existent properties or properties that had nothing to do with him.

It is also instructive that this calculated smear campaign is in the guise of forfeiture of phantom assets came on the heels of Senator Ekweremadus alarm and scathing criticism of the APC-led administration over the nations deteriorating democracy and in the midst of the ongoing executive-legislature face-off, in which a ranking senator of the APC extraction identified Ekweremadu as a pillar of support to the Senate President.

The PDP also said that contrary to the Federal Governments claims, Senator Ekweremadu had assured it that he declared his assets.

This government and party have a wet appetite for prosecution and media trial of the opposition while investigation is on, but refuses to prosecute its members and friends indicted by even its own presidential or ministerial panels.While members of the opposition are taken to court on stretchers, the former Secretary to the Government of the Federation, Babachir Lawal, indicted by both the Senate and a presidential panel only got a pat on the back.

The APC Federal Government has failed to prosecute those involved in the Ikoyigate scandal, and the recall of fugitive Abdulrasheed Maina, among others.

Ekweremadu is a major symbol of the opposition. We believe that this is part of the grand plan to strangulate the PDP ahead of the 2019 elections and we will resist it added.

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Loading...Home | News | General | Reps to probe illegal seizure of goods by Customs

Abuja  The House of Representatives on Thursday mandated its Committee on Customs and Excise to conduct an investigation into the activities of the personnel of the service in different parts of the country.



This was sequel to a motion under matters of urgent national importance by Rep. Aliyu Madaki (Kano-APC), and two other members on the illegal activities of personnel of the Nigerian Custom Service (NCS).

Madaki moving the motion said the mandate of the Service was preventing the importation of illegal goods into the country.

He decried the situations whereby personnel of NCS embarked on the seizure of goods and commodities under the pretence of collecting custom duties.

He expressed concern that the continuous interference and harassment of local traders by NCS personnel would hamper the legitimate business of buying and selling of goods from popular markets in Nigeria.

The lawmaker stressed the need for personnel of the service to pay attention to activities of smugglers of goods instead.

Instead of making sure that goods are not smuggled into Nigeria or ensuring that duties are paid on imported goods, custom officer are harassing local petty traders asking for customs duty.

How can you ask for custom duty from someone who buys goods from another seller within the country?

What business does a man who went to Kano to by textiles have of paying customs duties? This type of arithmetic where NCS declares huge profit but chases people out of business should be discouraged,Madaki said.

In his contribution, Rep. Aminu Suleiman (Kano-APC), lamented the development and warned that it was capable of running people out of business and jobs.

Places like Kano are known primarily for commercial activities but a situation whereby personnel of customs intimidate business owners is wrong.

We are saying government cant provide jobs for everybody yet we are sending people packing from their means of livelihood.

Nigerians should be encouraged to be enterprising instead of creating more problems for them. NSC should carry out its operations with human face and go after the real bad guy.

The motion was unanimously adopted by members when it was put to a voice vote by the Speaker, Mr Yakubu Dogara.

The House therefore, urged the Comptroller General of Customs, Col. Hammeed Ali (rtd) to direct the personnel of the service to forthwith, stop illegal seizures. (NAN)

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Loading...Home | News | General | Federal character not required in appointment of service chiefs  FCC

By Victoria Ojeme

ABUJA- Acting Executive Chairman of the Commission, Dr Shettima Bukar Abba, Wednesday, disclosed that Federal Character principles are not required in the appointment of service chiefs by the President.

Abba

Speaking at the National stakeholders Seminar Abba stated that Nigerians are unfair in their criticism of President Muhammadu Buhari over his appointment of the Defence, Naval, Army, Air-force, Police and other security chiefs.

His words: Security issues are not issues of federal character, they are issues of federal character at the recruitment level.

For example, if a Major General goes to war and dies and he is from Borno (State), does that mean a Major General from Borno should replace him?

These are security issues and they go through certain processes and promotion, if you subject them to federal character at the top level you are creating mediocrity in security issues.

Nigerians are unfair criticising President on (security appointments). it is just like the justice (judicial system), to appoint a judge you dont jump one particular level to another, unless you want to retire all of them..

He confirmed that in recent time, there had been a widespread unanswered national questions of inequalities, perceived marginalization, lop sidedness in political appointments and fear of domination by one ethnic group over another, one state over another. This calls for a national rebirth which necessitated this kind of sensitization seminar.

It was on this note that he stated that the Federal Character Commission in pursuant of its statutory mandate of observing and enforcing Federal Character Principle, equity and fairness in recruitments, distribution of posts, socio-economic amenities and infrastructural facilities deemed it necessary for all our critical stakeholders to come together with a view to finding amicable solution that is in line with the Constitutional provision as enshrined in section 14 (3) and (4).

Acting Executive Chairman of the Commission, Dr Shettima Bukar Abba, made this known on Thursday in Abuja during a national stakeholders seminar with the theme, Prospecting and Monitoring Strategic Processes in Nationalized Spread of Staff in MDAs.

He said the issue of appointment of security service chiefs by President Muhammadu Buhari has nothing to do with Federal Character Principles.

While saying that the seminar was organized to sensitize government agencies across the federation on the need to adhere strictly to federal character principles, Shettima said violation of the principles will attract criminal prosecution.

He, however, expressed satisfaction with the adherence to the principles by the Federal Government.

From our records of personnel statistics received and analysed by our Management Information Unit, from January 2016 to 2018, we recorded an appreciable adherence to the application of the Commissions guidelines and formulae for political appointees and bureaucratic positions by this administration as all states are being represented in all forms of appointment as demonstrated by the distribution, he added.

On his part, the Chairman of Senate Committee on Federal Character and Intergovernmental Affairs, Senator Tijjani Kaura, stressed the need to ensure justice in the country through the adherence to federal character principles.

Represented by Senator Suleiman Hunkuyi, Kaura, who doubled as the chairman of the occasion called for strong sanctions against government agencies that violate the principles in the country.

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Loading...Home | News | General | Ogun govt commends Promasidors career guidance workshop

By Dayo Adesulu

The Ogun State Government has commended Promasidor Nigeria Limited for initiating a career guidance workshop for secondary school students, describing it as a laudable effort towards the development of education and youth empowerment in the country.

Speaking at the second edition of Promasidor Harness Your Dream programme, organised by the makers of Cowbell, Milk, Loya Milk, Onga, Top Tea and other quality brands, the Commissioner for Education, Science and Technology, Mrs Modupe Mujota called on other corporate organisations to emulate Promasidor since education and youth development are collective responsibilities of the government and the populace in line with public and private partnership policy.

The Commissioner, who was represented at the event, held at African Church Grammar School, Abeokuta, on Wednesday by the Ministrys Director of Education Support Services, Mr Martins Akinsolu, remarked that most adolescents are ignorant of career choices. It would not be an overstatement to state that the most bugging problem facing the adolescents of this country is the problem of unemployment and the major cause of this problem is wrong choice of career, she lamented.

In a separate interview, Akinsolu described Promasidor Harness Your Dream as the first of its kind in Ogun State, adding that the Ministry would seek further support from the company to enable the over 450 secondary schools in the state benefit from the initiative.

The Principal of African Church Grammar School, Abeokuta, Mr Akinjide Johnson was particularly delighted that Promasidor Nigeria Limited had chosen to support the future of Nigerian youths rather than devote resources to sponsor programmes he described as promoting frivolities.

In his opening remarks, the Managing Director, Pr i omasidor Nigeria Limited, Mr. Anders Einarsson admonished the students to take full advantage of the workshop in order to achieve their dream goals. Einarsson, who was represented by the companys Head of Legal/PR, Mr. Andrew Enahoro, described success as not just what is hoped and prayed for.

He then explained: You choose to be successful and work hard towards achieving it. That you are here today means you have chosen to be successful in your future endeavours. What remains is for you to continue to study and work hard to achieve the desired results. Paying attention to the presentations that will be made this afternoon, for me, is what you must do if you are really determined to be successful. Beyond today, however, I implore you to embrace learning as a lifelong process. This is one decision you will never regret taking.

Einarsson said that Promasidor remained committed to education and youth development through such initiatives as Promasidor Harness Your Dream and the Cowbellpedia Mathematics TV Quiz Show, through which the company has promoted interest in Mathematics in the last 20 years.

He recalled that Promasidor doubled the cash prizes for winners and runners of the popular TV Quiz programme from this years edition, while sustaining the overseas education excursion for the two category winners. The competition perfectly demonstrates how far we are ready to go in supporting you to harness and achieve your dreams, Einarsson further said.

The focus areas of this edition were Personnel Management/Emerging Entrepreneurial Opportunities, Accounting and Business Management, Digital Media and Information and Communication Technology.

Students of Gateway Secondary School, Abeokuta were also in attendance to benefit from the programme.

A Corporate Social Responsibility of Promasidor Nigeria Limited, the primary objective of Promasidor Harness Your Dreams, is to help public school students understand varieties of career options and guide them along their career paths with PNG staff members serving as resource persons.

It is to be held across the country with one edition per school term.

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Loading...Home | News | General | 2 months after his controversial letter to Buhari, Obasanjo threatens to write another one

- Former president Obasanjo has declared that he is considering writing a new letter

- Obasanjo had in January written a letter to President Muhammadu Buhari and asked him not to seek re-election in 2019

- But he said the new letter might not be as tough as that of January

Two months after his controversial letter to President Muhammadu Buhari, the former president Olusegun Obasanjo has disclosed that he is considering writing another letter.

The Cable reports that the elder statesman said this while speaking at the 14th annual lecture of Women in management, business and public service in Lagos on Thursday, March 22.

READ ALSO: APC crisis deepens as Kwankwaso vows to retire Ganduje and his godfather in 2019

NAIJ.com gathered that in the letter he wrote in January, Obasanjo asked Buhari to retire from active public service.

He told the president to forget about contesting in 2019, saying doing so would amount to overstretching the tolerance of Nigerians.

But on Thursday, March 22, the ex-president said the new letter might not be as tough as that of January.

He also said the Coalition for Nigeria Movement which he introduced in the strongly-worded letter now has three million registered voters.

He said if Nigerians register for the elections in good time, they would benefit from the ideals of CNM and similar movements.

Obasanjo said at the right time, he would withdraw from CNM as long as the movement plans to groom capable hands for political positions.

The former president charged women on the need to be more visible in the political landscape and they have to do enough for themselves.

If only womanhood was enough, Mrs Clinton would have made it to the White House but she had a man (Donald Trump) who did what he could do to get to power, he said.

I dont want or expect women to climb palm trees to harvest bunch of palm fruits. If anybody says he wants to see my mother climb palm trees, I will take a second look at that person.

But women must do what it takes to succeed in Nigerian political space.

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To you women, do not allow any body to build your world for you. Build your world for yourself. Yes, women need encouragement but they must do enough for themselves.

Meanwhile, NAIJ.com had previously reported that former president Olusegun Obasanjo in a detailed letter talked about the numerous issues bothering Nigeria as a country and suggested a way forward.

Who is Nigeria's greatest president ever? - on NAIJ.com TV

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Loading...Home | News | General | Dapchi girls: APC turning Nigeria into a global embarrassment - Lamido reacts, raises issues

- Sule Lamido questions the circumstances relating to the kidnap and release of the Dapchi girls as he raises some questions

- Lamido pleads with Nigerians not to vote for the All Progressives Congress (APC) in 2019

- He says he is not desperate to become president but expresses optimism that he would get the ticket of the PDP

The former governor of Jigawa state and current presidential aspirant for the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Sule Lamido, has raised doubts over the circumstances surrounding the kidnap and release of some school girls of Dapchi, Yobe state.

He accused the government of turning Nigeria to a laughing stock among the comity of nations just as he warned Nigerians not to vote for the All Progressives Congress (APC) in 2019.

Daily Trust reports that Lamido spoke in Lagos when he met with PDP delegates to inform them about his ambition.

Lamido, who was received by members of the state executive led by the chairman, Mashood Salvador, said it had become impossible for the APC to win the 2019 elections.

READ ALSO: Army hands over Dapchi girls to FG (photos)

So they (insurgents) went in convoys to kidnap the girls and nobody saw them. On their own volition, they came back with the girls with the same convoys, with fanfare and the girls came back with luggage, yet they (insurgents) can't be traced. The world is laughing at us.

The defence minister said the girls are coming back. He didn't say they will rescue them and so they were never rescued, he reportedly said.

The former governor allegedly described the APC as a formation of frustration and blackmail.

According to the former governor, the PDP was voted out of government based on sentiments but added that three years down the line, Nigeria has become a war zone because the present governments alleged incompetence.

In 2019, the coast is clear. There is no way APC will win. Look at the country, are we united? Are we stable? Are we prosperous? Are we secure? We've become a world embarrassment; we are becoming an ancient nation. So PDP will come back in 2019.

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There is no way, Buhari will ever come back no matter what he does, because he knows he is a contraption who rode on the notions of the Nigerian people based on blackmail, sentiment and whatever and hate speech, he alleged.

He pleaded with Nigerians to help ensure APC does not return in 2019, adding: If we allow Nigeria to go to APC in 2019, God will judge us.

He said he was not desperate to become president but expressed confidence that he would secure the PDP ticket ahead of 2019, as he is poised to unite the country.

NAIJ.com earlier reported that the All Progressives Congress (APC) hailed the federal government for the return of the schoolgirls abducted from Government Girls Science Technical College, Dapchi, Yobe state by Boko Haram.

In a statement sent to NAIJ.com by the national publicity secretary of the party, Malam Bolaji Abdullahi, the party said the prompt release of the girls is another solid demonstration of the political will of the President Muhammadu Buhari-led APC administration to secure the lives of all Nigerians."

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Loading...Home | News | General | Nigerian mother uses 4-year-old daughter as collateral for N100 debt (Photo)

- A woman in Ebonyi reportedly used her 4-year-old daughter as collateral for a debt of N100

- The 38-year-old woman was unable to pay the debt she owed a during transaction with another woman at Abakaliki Rice Mill in 2017

- The child was then forced into hawking by the creditor

Veronica Igwe, a 38-year-old woman from Ebonyi obviously didn't understand the message which preaches that children are gifts from God that should be loved and cared for. While other parents are busy sweating to provide for their children, Veronica however, has decided to use hers for business transactions.

She alleged used her 4-year-old daughter as collateral for a debt she owed. Veronica said she had business transaction with one Josephine Nwali at the Rice Mill in Abakaliki in August 2017, where she bought some items from her, after which she owed her N100.

Unable to pay the money, she then suggested to her debtor that she could bring one of her children in exchange for the debt and thus she handed over her little daughter into the hands of the other woman.

READ ALSO: Mr Eazi celebrates his darling girlfriend on her birthday, shares sweet words on social media

Baby Uloma Igwe Source: Punch

Desk Officer in charge of Child Abuse/Maltreatment Ministry of Women Affairs and Social Development, Mrs. Cecilia Elom, said the ministry received an emergency call March 20, informing them that a mother had exchanged her four-year-old daughter due to her inability to settle N100 debt.

READ ALSO: Basketmouth shades Nigerians who pretend to fly private jet in order to appear successful

On getting to the CAS campus of Ebonyi State University Abakaliki, where the alleged creditor, Mrs. Josephine Nwali, resides, they found little Uloma and another boy hawking. Mrs. Cecilia Elom further stated:

On reaching the residence, we saw little Uloma Igwe with another seven-year-old boy hawking. On interrogation, they confessed to have been lured into hawking by Mrs. Josephine Nwali who they were living with. Ulomas mother, Veronica, informed our officials that she did not even know the woman she gave her child to.

Officials of the Ministry of Women Affairs invited Mrs. Josephine Nwali to the Office, from where she was handed over to the Ebonyi State Police Command for interrogation, Elom added.

The Ministry of Women Affairs has concluded arrangement to take little Uloma Igwe to hospital for proper medical treatment.

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Loading...Home | News | General | President Buhari orders security agencies to wipe out criminality

- President Buhari hails security agencies for exterminating a suspected criminal responsible for many killings

- He says improved relations among community leaders, citizens and the security agencies will reduce the threats to lives and properties

- The president vows to ensure urgent release of the remaining Dapchi girl still being held by insurgents

President Muhammadu Buhari has said security agencies need to improve their strategies of intelligence gathering, surveillance and accuracy in deployments in order to ensure that criminal activities are brought to an end across the country.

Buhari made the statement on Thursday, March 22, during an interactive meeting with political leaders, traditional rulers, elders and victims of criminal attacks in Zamfara state.

As far as I am concerned, our security agencies have recorded some successes, but they need to do much more," the president said in a statement by his special adviser on media and publicity, Femi Adesina.

READ ALSO: Boko Haram told us not to send our daughters to school - Dapchi parents

They are not to oppress anyone, but they have to gather and send intelligence and warnings when something is about to happen.

Buhari hailed security agencies for exterminating a suspected criminal responsible for many killings in the country.

"Before Buharin-daji, who calls himself a general, there was a criminal who killed many people and he was killed; Buharindaji has followed him and others like them should also follow, he added.

The president said improved relations among community leaders, citizens and the security agencies will reduce the threats to lives and properties.

I have come here to commiserate with you over loss of lives and properties. We will continue to do our best to improve the security situation. However, those committing atrocities live with you.

Some of these people are not reported because you dont trust the security outfits, instead you report back to the criminals. We should give priority to security he said.

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Meanwhile, Buhari has said that he would ensure the release of the only Dapchi girl being held by the Boko Haram insurgents for allegedly refusing to denounce her religion.

NAIJ.com reports that the president said that his heart bled when got the news that one of the girls is still being held by the insurgents while the parents of the released girls were rejoicing.

In his tweet, the president said: "My heart goes out to Leahs parents, who must watch other parents rejoice while their own daughter remains in captivity. It is my responsibility, under the Constitution of Nigeria, to protect all Nigeriansand I will always strive to do that. Leah will not be abandoned."

It was reported by NAIJ.com on Wednesday, March 21, that the girls were released after spending one month in the captivity.

Street Gist: Mixed reactions trail Boko Haram's release of Dapchi Girls on NAIJ.com TV

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Loading...Home | News | General | Just in: Days after police announcement, IGP Idris suspends withdrawal of personnel attached to VIPs

The Inspector-General of Police (IGP), Ibrahim Idris, on Thursday, March 22 suspended the withdrawal of policemen attached to Very Important Persons (VIPs) in Nigeria saying this was to enable for effective assessment of current deployments.

A statement from Jimoh Moshood and made available to NAIJ.com showed that the withdrawal would now take effect from April 20, 2018

According to the statement, the decision to suspend the withdrawal came after a meeting with the commanders of police mobile force, counter-terrorism and the special protection units earlier.

READ ALSO: 15-year-old boy emerges as 2018 UTME best candidate with 349 points

The Inspector-General of Police (IGP), Ibrahim K Idris, after his meeting with the Commanders of Police Mobile Force (PMF), Counter Terrorism Unit (CTU) and Special Protection Unit (SPU) on the 20th March, 2018 has graciously shifted the enforcement/implementation of the withdrawal of police officers attached to political and public office holders, VIPs, public and private companies and other categories of enterprises and business outfits and corporate individuals throughout the country as earlier directed.

The withdrawal will now take effect from the 20th of April, 2018, this is to enable the force carry out a thorough assessment of the current deployment and carry out appropriate withdrawal.

Meanwhile, the deputy inspector-general of police, department of operations of the force, has been mandated by the Inspector-General of Police (IGP) to direct all the commissioners of police and their supervising Assistant Inspectors-General (AIGs) in the states and zonal commands across the country to halt the withdrawal, revise and return those already withdrawn to their duty posts pending the new date of 20th of April, 2018.

The task force teams set up by the IGP at the Force Headquarters, the Force X  Squad and others set up by the assistant inspectors-general of police and commissioner of police at the zonal and state Commands have equally been directed by the Inspector-General of Police (IGP) to suspend the enforcement of the withdrawal with immediate effect pending the new date, the statement said adding that for the avoidance of doubt, all those who already have such police protections are to retain the personnel with them on deployment.

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They may be provided after the expiration of the period, if found worthy from the special protection unit of the force but should apply for re-validation through the commissioner of police of the state they are domiciled before the expiration of the new date of 20th April, 2018, the statement added.

NAIJ.com earlier reported that Ibrahim Idris recently deployed additional three units of Police Mobile Force (PMF) to Birane village in Zurmi Local Government Area of Zamfara, to forestall further loss of lives.

The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that bandits suspected to be cattle rustlers had on Feb. 14 killed 18 persons in Birane village.

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Loading...Home | News | General | Forum decries campaign of calumny against Buhari's former appointee

- The travails of the former acting Director General of the National Intelligence Agency (NIA), Ambassador Muhammed Dauda has been condemned

- The National Patriots Forum has decried the calculated campaign of calumny against the former NIA DG

- They described the ex-NIA boss as a victim of injustice

The National Patriots Forum has decried the calculated campaign of calumny targeted at the former acting Director General of the NIA, Ambassador Muhammed Dauda by some elements.

A statement sent to NAIJ.com by the forums national president Comrade Isa Tijani, and national publicity secretary Madu Musa Gwary, said the recently orchestrated calumny was executed by a publisher of an Abuja-based magazine.

They condemned the publication, saying it was replete with half-truths, fictions, guesswork, and wild imaginations.

They also condemned the publisher of the magazine, accusing him of lacking professional and intellectual competence.

Part of the statement read: The seeming moral puritanism by a so-called journalist and publisher of a third rated magazine, where he tried to paint and dramatize a scene of attempts to court his professional services in the debacle at the National Intelligence Agency, NIA, amounts to living in a glass house and yet throwing stones.

We have been involved from the on start and we can see through lies and half-truths, wherein he tried to cast aspersions on the personalities of highly respected professionals and people of integrity while elevating himself onto professional and moral high grounds.

For the same character who had tried to induce our national president, Comrade Isa Tijani, to back down on his fight for justice in governance, even with a promise to connect him to the incumbent Director-General of the NIA, only to turn around and accuse others portrays him as a man Friday, who is the least morally qualified to preach ethics in a profession which he gatecrashed.

As the first group to bring to the fore the anomalies and the attendant intrigues in the appointment of the substantive Director General of the National Intelligence Agency, NIA, Alhaji Ahmed Rufai Abubakar, it behooves on us to point out the seeming desperate antics being employed by the publisher in his bid to satisfy his paymasters, even at the cost of sacrificing his professional ethics.

By his antecedents, we know that he is the type that can mortgage his conscience for a pot of porridge, having been earlier reported to have approached one of our members through his crony to offer his so-called services.

Our findings reveal that the publisher is acting out a double script, to justify the huge sums he ostensibly collected from his paymasters for a hatchet job, and to take out a long-standing vendetta against Ambassador Muhammadu Dauda, whose only sin was his meritorious service that leads to his progress in the NIA.

The NIA reportedly dismissed Ambassador Dauda through a letter dated March 6 and signed by T.A. Yusuf, on behalf of the director general of the agency.

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Loading...Home | News | General | Dapchi girls: President Buhari speaks about fate of only remaining victim in captivity as Muslim group warns

- As the euphoria continues over the release of some of the Dapchi girls, President Muhammadu Buhari is optimistic that the remaining victim would return home

- Leah Sharibu is reportedly held back for being a Christian, but Buhari says there is no compulsion in Islam

- The Muslim Rights Concern (MURIC) also warns against forcefully converting the victim as it urges the government to act fast

President Muhammadu Buhari, in the evening of March 22, declared that he remains committed to the freedom of the only Dapchi schoolgirl, Leah Sharibu, still in captivity as he was to the girls' freedom when all 110 were in the captivity of Boko Haram terrorists.

Buhari said this in a statement by one of his spokespersons, Garba Shehu, just as the Muslim Rights Concern (MURIC) warned that the victim must not be forcefully converted from Christianity because Islam abhors such.

The Buhari administration will not relent in efforts to bring Leah Sharibu safely back home to her parents as it has done for the other girls after she was held back by the terrorists over her decision, as reported, not to convert from Christianity to Islam.

President Buhari is fully conscious of his duty under the constitution to protect all Nigerians, irrespective of faith, ethnic background or geopolitical location and will not shirk in this responsibility.

READ ALSO: Dapchi girl recounts ordeal with Boko Haram captors

The president is equally mindful of the fact that true followers of Islam all over the world respect the injunction that there is no compulsion in religion, the statement said stressing that no one or group can impose its religion on another.

His heart goes out to the isolated parents who must watch others rejoice while their own daughter is still away. The lone Dapchi girl, Leah, will not be abandoned.

President Buhari assures the Sharibu family that he will continue to do all he can to ensure that they also have cause to rejoice with their daughter soon, the statement said.

In its warning, MURIC said the refusal to release the innocent girl was against the principle of humanity and uncalled for.

The group asked the federal government to take immediate and proactive action in ensuring Leahs release.

Boko Harams doctrine is heretical and its methods stand in contradistinction to those of pristine Islam.

The Glorious Quran asserts that there is no compulsion in Islam (2:256). It says Allah himself could have made the whole mankind Muslims if He had wished (11:118). It forbids forceful conversion or punishment of non-Muslims by Muslims and limits the role of Muslims to admonitions alone.

Once again we reject Boko Haram as an Islamic group. We urge the leadership and members of the group to re-examine its ideological base.

Leah Sherubu must be set free because the basis for holding her after setting her schoolmates free is faulty and unIslamic.

We invite the federal government to widen the scope of dialogue with Boko Haram by incorporating doctrinal issues. Islamic scholars should be involved in such discussions with the insurgents.

This process is sine qua non for the deradicalisation of Boko Haram. Military defeat of Boko Haram alone amounts to a pyrrhic victory without ideological re-engineering.

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We charge (FG) to go back to the negotiation table in order to secure the release of the only Christian girl among the Dapchi girls who is being held back by the insurgents. Nigerians have been united in their prayers for the release of the Dapchi girls.

FG should note that Boko Haram is not as daft as many people think. By withholding the Christian girl, they seek to divide Nigerians once again along religious lines," the statement said.

NAIJ.com earlier reported that the Yobe state police command has denied media reports that they were informed hours before the abduction of over 100 girls in Dapchi community by Boko Haram terrorists.

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Loading...Home | News | General | Pray for the will of God to be done in my life - Abducted Christian Dapchi girl speaks from captivity

- Rebecca Sharibu calls on the federal government to free her daughter from Boko Haram captivity

- President Buhari vows to ensure urgent release of the remaining Dapchi girl still being held by the insurgents

- Dapchi parents says they were joyous over the return of their abducted children

Leah Sharibu, the only Christian Dapchi girl that was held back by Boko Haram insurgents for refusing to renounce Christianity has urged her family to pray for her.

The Nation reports that the mother of the schoolgirl, Rebecca Sharibu, said her daughter sent a message through the released schoolgirls asking her family to pray for the will of God to be done in her life.

The released girls told us that the insurgents insist that my daughter must denounce her religion. But she told them she has no single knowledge of Islam and cant be. She was then left out of the Dapchi trip on the condition that any day she accepts Islam she will be released.

Leah, we were told was left with three other Boko Haram women there and she sends message that we should pray for the Will of Gods to be done in her life, Rebecca said.

The mother of the missing girl begged the federal government to free her daughter from the captivity of the insurgents.

"So I plead that Government and the negotiation team should revisit the terms of the agreement to enhance the release of my daughter.

Everybody has his religion and no one should be compelled to practice a religion he or she never wishes to," she said.

In a related report, President Muhammadu Buhari has said that he would ensure the release of the only Dapchi girl being held by the Boko Haram insurgents for allegedly refusing to denounce her religion.

NAIJ.com reports that the president said that his heart bled when got the news that one of the girls is still being held by the insurgents while the parents of the released girls were rejoicing.

The president assured the Sharibu family that he will continue to do all he can to ensure that they also have cause to rejoice with their daughter soon.

Meanwhile, parents of abducted Dapchi girls who were released by Boko Haram have said the terrorists told them not to send their children back to western education.

NAIJ.com had reported that the girls were released by the terrorists on Wednesday, March 21. Security operatives were not available as the terrorists reportedly drove into Dapchi town were residents celebrated the return of their children and praised President Muhammadu Buhari.

According to Premium Times, the terrorists took their time to preach to the residents.

Kachalla Bukar, who is the secretary of the abducted Dapchi schoolgirls parents group, said he was on hand to receive the girls and even took pictures with the terrorists.

Street Gist: Mixed reactions trail Boko Haram's release of Dapchi Girls on NAIJ.com TV

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Source: Naija.ng

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Loading...Home | News | General | Dapchi girls : Real or arranged?

The manner of their release is none of our business. I watched their return on the television and my submission is that the government should be commended for rescuing the girls. Before their release, we were all clamouring for their return. I dont think those who entered into the terms and condition to get them released are fools.

Comrade Tijani Saheed, Technical Instructor

I hope politicians are not trying to insult our intelligence? If truly the Dapchi girls were dropped by Boko Haram and government claimed no ransom was paid, we are in for uncertain days. Truly, the situation is dicey and confusing. How they were returned gives me the feeling that there are questions to be answered and the government knows better.

Atitebi Ayodeji, Music Director

This is a scam and some people could be behind it. Our leaders are deceiving us, if not, how can they tell us that no ransom was paid? I dont understand this country again. It was just an avenue to extort money from the government.

Mr. Orioye Akinsolu, Fisherman

Whatever made Boko Haram to release the Dapchi girls would have made them release the remaining Chibok girls as well. But to my surprise, the Boko Haram members were neither apprehended nor arrested. The Senate should commence an investigation and unravel certain secrets regarding this incident. We want to know more.

Mr. Andrew Edeki, Contractor

From day one of the abduction, Nigerians were not informed what really happened.

There are many missing links in the story of their release. I am very sure that time will reveal the truth so that we will know what went wrong and those behind the hide and seek game.

Miss Abeh Orumeka, Undergraduate

Let the Federal Gov ernment set up a competent investigative panel to look into the issue. I am suspecting a foul play. Can a terrorist group kidnap and return their victims just like that? The girls were so relaxed in the pictures released on the internet. After Boko Haram brought in the girls, why did military and police not arrest them?

Miss Blessing Ilembia, Business Woman

By Bose Adelaja & Frederick Okopie

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Loading...Home | News | General | The Igbo In The Politics Of Nigeria, by Chibuike Rotimi Amaechi

Let me acknowledge without any reservation whatsoever, that I am honored by the invitation to deliver this years convocation lecture from an outstanding institution named after the great Zik of Africa. In the course of this lecture, with the topic in mind, we shall hear a lot more about The Right Honorable Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe but not about this university and I hope you will all forgive me.I will trace the history of the Igbo people from the middle years to the era of Trans Atlantic slave trade, the colonial and post-colonial era, relying chiefly on the works of renowned historians, Professor Kenneth Dike, first Nigerian Vice Chancellor of the University of Ibadan and Professor Elizabeth Isichei. I will also deal with the issue of Igbo identity and Igbo emotionalism, the two main issues that may have impeded Igbo political advancement in Nigeria.

Minister of Transportation, Rt. Hon. Chibuike Rotimi Amaechi,

Professor Elizabeth Isichei in her book, The History of The Igbo People, is of the view that in the pre-colonial times, The Igbo people had no real sense of pan-Igbo identity. The villagers view of external reality was a sharp dichotomy, them and us, with the sense of attachment to us growing weaker as the unit grew larger  the family, the lineage, the village, the village group. Invariably, he [the Igbo] felt a strong local patriotism. She makes the point that a sense of pan-Igbo identity came only when the Igbo finds himself outside Igboland as was the case during slave trade and when colonial conquest and rule violently extended the categories through which the Igbo perceived the world.

Prof Isichei also referenced the work of Dr. William Balfour Baikie, a British Naval doctor and explorer who visited the Niger and the Delta in the 1850s and made enquiries about the Igbo whenever he could. Baikie described the Igbo conceptualization of themselves in words that are still true today. In Igbo each person hails from the particular district where he was born, but when away from home all are Igbos.

A question of change and continuity is an interesting sub title in chapter two of Isicheis work. Please permit me to quote extensively from it. The question of whether the Igbo saw themselves as a people in pre-colonial times is, of course, quite distinct from the question as to whether they could be existentially described as such. But the process of describing the distinctive characteristics of Igbo society  what made them a people  involves us in two difficulties. The first is that of generalization. The many local differences in Igbo culture make it difficult to describe them accurately in a book of this length. Each statement should be qualified, and one is in danger of describing the average of all Igbo societies, which does not correspond with any actual Igbo society. This is a difficulty which is implicit, however, in all historical writing. The second difficulty is more serious. It is necessary to describe the society, in order to understand the nature of the changes it was to undergo. But nothing is more repugnant to a historian than to describe a society in, as it were, a temporal vacuum. Societies undergo constant change; the historian, inevitably, focuses on changes rather than on continuities. Ones description of Igboland should be rooted in a particular moment in time, because the society was constantly changing. A description of Igboland, once upon a time, in the mgbe ndichie, is bound to do violence to a constantly mutable reality.

That is a crucial point because what is true of the Igbo in the past may not be true today. How people respond to issues today maybe different from how they responded in the past. But the one that has remained true is the issue of Igbo emotionalism. The Igbo historical past is very important and at certain times it has been quite tragic. But we cannot remain trapped in our past and as someone once said, we cannot wish away the war that took place but we cannot continue to move forward with our heads slightly inclined backwards. You will either trip or not move fast enough. Dont forget that you are in a race with other groups. Nigeria of the sixties is markedly different from Nigeria of today and the Igbo nation would have to adjust to that reality and strategize accordingly.

The Portuguese were the first European visitors to South East Nigeria at about 1472 in their search for a sea route to India. They were soon followed by other Europeans who were in desperate need of labour to work on their vast farmlands and to help exploit new discoveries of mineral deposits in the new world. In 1518, Isichei recounted, the first load of African prisoners was taken directly from West Africa to the West Indies, ushering in over three centuries of the infamous triangular trade. The triangular trade contributed vastly to the wealth of Europe.

Triangular trade is a multilateral system of trading in which a country pays for its import from one country with exports to another country. During the 18th and 19th century, Britain shipped goods to West Africa in exchange for slaves that will now be shipped to the West Indies in exchange for sugar, rum and other items which will then be shipped back to Britain. Not all the slaves were taken to West Indies, some were taken to Gabon and Sao Tome and most of them were Igbo.

In the 18th century, the slave trade then dominated by the British, rose to its climax in Igboland. In 1882, Captain John Adams, who made ten voyages to the area between 1786 and 1800 wrote: This place [Bonny] is the wholesale market for slaves, as no fewer than 20,000 are annually sold; 16,000 of whom are members of one nation, called Heebo [Ibo], so that this single nation during the last 20 years, exported no less than 320,000; and those of the same nation sold at New Calabar [a Delta port], probably amounted in the same period of time, to 50,000 more, making an aggregate amount of 370,000 Heebos. The remaining part of the above 20,000 is composed of the natives of Brass country and also of Ibbibbys [Ibibios] or Quaws. [Prof K O Dike  Trade & Politics in the Niger Delta 1830-1885].

In the words of Dr. W B Baikie, who interviewed King William Dappa Pepple of Bonny in Fernando Po in 1854, the King of New Calabar [Kalabari] and Pepple King of Bonny were of Ibo descent, of which also are the mass of the natives. The influx of Igbo migrants and slaves into the Delta in the 19th century blurred the lines of earlier migrations and even though there were migrants and slaves from different places including Benis, Efik, Fulanis etc but the Ibo migrants formed the bulk of the Delta population at that time. Prof Dike noted; that they bequeathed their language to most of the city-states, Bonny, Okirika, Opobo and to a certain extent, influenced the language and institutions of old and new Calabar. But the population which evolved out of this mingling of peoples, was neither Benin nor Efik, Ibo nor Ibibio. They were a people apart, the product of the clashing cultures of the tribal hinterland and of the Atlantic community to both of which they belonged. Let me place on record here that a lot of people from the areas described do not accept Igbo ancestry and that should be understood as part of what Isichei, as earlier mentioned, described as constantly mutable reality.

Slave trade was abolished in Britain in 1807 but the trade actually ended about 1850. That was not too long ago and it was a big business both for the Delta slave traders and the Igbo slave suppliers from the hinterland. And the major sources of supplies of slaves was through kidnapping, sometimes war and then the complex spiritual/trade network set up by the Aro people anchored on the influence of its oracle, Ibinukpabi. Several thousands of people that were taken before the shrine of Ibinukpabi for settlement of all manner of disputes, were believed to have been consumed by the oracle but in actual fact they were all sold into slavery. The victims were from all parts of the Eastern region and beyond but no Aro person was ever a victim. Some communities also sold criminal elements in their midst and many poor families also sold off children and adults alike but the major sources were through kidnapping and the Aro trade network.

The Igbo society was traumatized not just during the era of slave trade but also when it ended because the societies had grown accustomed to collecting slaves and a considerable part of its economy sustained by the trade. There was fundamental insecurity and human life was cheap. People lived in fear of their neighbors. Going to the farm was dangerous. And even as the Europeans abandoned the trade, slavery continued as internal trade for sometime.

Nothing can be worse than the conditions of slavery, the traumatic and dehumanizing conditions of the slaves, yet, some slaves made the best use of the situation. All through human history and up till this day, societies face all manner of challenges at different periods. The crucial issue really, has always been and will always be  how to cope with the situation at hand and overcome it. And my conclusion at the end of this lecture will be focused on what I believe the Igbo people should do to better their present political condition. No matter how bad you think the situation today is, not even the three-year period of the civil war was as bad as the era of slavery but yet the Igbo slaves did not keep lamenting about the fate that befell them. They struggled through a most difficult era and in some cases, as we shall see, became great achievers.

Olaudah Equiano was abducted at age eleven and sold into slavery but with sheer courage and ability, he bought his freedom, educated himself by learning arithmetic and science and to read and write in English. He became the first Igbo to author a book in English. His autobiography remains one of the most valuable sources of knowledge of the Igbo historical past. He was born at about 1745 and died in 1797. He lived for only 52 years.

After the British abolished slave trade in 1807, they made very serious efforts to enforce it by placing a naval squadron off the coast of West Africa to intercept illegal slavers. It was not possible to return intercepted slaves back to their original homes, they were moved instead to the colony of Sierra Leone. In the words of Isichei, it is difficult to imagine the colossal difficulties which these recaptives, as they were called, faced and overcame. They landed in Sierra Leone destitute, exiles from their homes and families, with no knowledge of English. With the help of the CMS and Methodist Missionaries, they became Christians, got educated and by sheer determination, they soon became part of the wealthy class in Sierra Leone and provided their children with sound education and they soon became Lawyers, Doctors and Missionaries. The first Christian Mission in Igboland was located in Onitsha and was established in 1857 by the Igbo community in Sierra Leone, under the headship of Reverend John Christopher Taylor, a Sierra Leonian of Igbo parentage.

I will devote a little more time to King Jaja of Opobo, the greatest African of his era and the most famous of Igbo slaves. His life story illustrates very clearly the trajectory of slavery from the Igbo hinterland to the Delta and the ethnic fluidity in the Niger Delta. There was a massive influx of Igbo slaves into the Delta in the 19th century with different impacts in the area. The Kalabari/Ijaw states developed their own techniques of assimilation but in Bonny, the indigenous language Ubani was almost replaced by Igbo. In the words of Isichei, a visitor to Calabar in 1853 was informed by the Missionaries that more than half the population were Igbo. In the Island state of Okirika, on the southern fringes of Igboland, only a few of the free-born were ignorant of Igbo. In 1895, it was stated that the Brass tribes are a mixed race, recruited largely by the purchase of slaves from chiefly the Igbo people, living inland and by domestic slaves born in their families.

You will recall that slavery was officially abolished in 1807 but did not quite end effectively until sometime in 1854 and that affected only the international arm of slave trade. The European traders transferred their shipping and trading skills and experience to the trade in palm oil and palm kernel, which was then in great demand in Europe that was fast industrializing. The product once again was in abundance in the Igbo hinterland. But not all of Igboland fell within the palm oil belt  Elele, Ihiala, Owerri, Ozubulu, Onitsha axis  and therefore not all could participate in the palm oil trade. And so, prevented by geography from participating in the booming palm oil trade, states like Nike and Arondizuogu, leveraging on their skills in slave trade, intensified their efforts at capturing and sale of slaves. But this time, the slaves had to be absorbed either in the Delta or within Igboland but mostly in the Delta. So slaves became cheaper and their number grew exponentially. Their increasing number Isichei noted, worsened the social distortions which the slave trade had created. Paradoxically, the evil heritage of the trade in slaves became most evident after, internationally it was abolished.

KING JAJA OF OPOBO

The pivot of the Delta social organization was the HOUSE SYSTEM or HOUSE RULE, which was developed because of the peculiar nature of the Delta society where almost every trader and of course the monarchies owned a lot of slaves from different tribes. It reflects, to a large extent, the extended family structure of the Igbo [Umunna] and Ibibio people [Ekpuk]. The fundamental difference, however, is that in the case of Umunna and Ekpuk, all the members are related by blood but in the House system, it was a mixture of slaves and the free-born. The contact and trade with the Europeans influenced the structure of the House system that ultimately, it became at once, a co-operative trading unit and a local government institution.

Prof Dike observes; that even in the hey-day of the slave traffic, the Delta middlemen retained the best slaves in their personal service, some of whom manned the fleet of canoes indispensable for the trade with the interior or engaged in agricultural work on the farms. The smaller Houses numbered anything from 300-1000 members; others, such as the royal Houses, numbered many thousands. In 1847, King Eyo of Creek Town, Old Calabar, had in his House many thousand slaves and four hundred canoes with a captain and crew for everyone. Dike also pointed out, that with the emergence of the House System, the words Umunna and Ekpuk disappeared from the vocabulary of the extribal Ibibio and Ibo-speaking peoples in the Delta; in their place we have Ulo and Ufok  [meaning] House, expressing the new coast relationship based not on kinship but on common interests and economic necessities. Master and servant, the bond and the free, all became members of one House, a veritable hierarchy, with numerous gradations, each rank with its duties and responsibilities, its privileges and rewards.

In the House system unlike Umunna and Ekpuk, the master of the House was an absolute leader and could subject the slaves to very cruel conditions. The Master often balanced the exercise of his power with the need to get the best out of his slaves. Productive slaves were always well rewarded which meant that intelligent and hard working slaves could actually become rich, buy their freedom and can become a chief but not the head of the House and certainly not a King.

Jaja was to shatter that glass ceiling in an intriguing turn of events. There were three classes of hierarchy in the House  first is the freeborn, then the children of slaves born in the House and the slaves taking up the lowest rung of the social ladder. Jaja belonged to the lowest rung  a first generation slave. Dike, quoting Opobo sources, recounts that Jaja was born at Umuduroha, a village in Amaigbo, Orlu Division, in the heart of Igboland in 1821. At about the age of 12, he was sold as a slave to Chief Allison of Bonny who because he found Jaja very headstrong, in turn sold him to one Chief Madu, a chief of the Anna Pepple House of Bonny. He became a member of the Anna Pepple House as a domestic slave of Chief Madu and by 1861 at the age of forty, he had risen to the first line of Chiefs of Bonny by sheer hard work and exceptional productivity.

When King William Pepple of Bonny returned from exile in 1864, he could no longer assert effective control over Bonny, which was essentially a federation of the various Houses. He died the next year and George, his son, became the king of Bonny. But during his time in exile, Allali, the head of the Anna Pepple House and his main traducer had become quite formidable and had consolidated the power of the Anna Pepple House to which Jaja belonged. The rival Mannila House, was controlled by Oko Jumbo another very intelligent ex slave. I need to point out that King William Pepple was forced into exile by the British at the instance of European traders who felt threatened by the protectionist policies of the King, who had limited their sphere of trading activities. Several years later, Jaja was to face a similar fate.

When Allali died, the Anna Pepple House was for sometime left without a head because Allali was heavily indebted to the Europeans. The most senior chiefs refused to accept the headship since it meant inheriting the debts piled up by Allali. After repeated meetings by the chiefs to elect the leader, they unanimously elected Jaja, one of the youngest chiefs as the head of the House. He was a very good trader and was well respected by the white traders for his honesty. Jaja did not accept the headship immediately knowing the implication of his slave origins. He asked to be given sometime to think about it. Some days later, at a public meeting of the chiefs of the House, he accepted to lead the House and to maintain the great traditions of the House. The chiefs unanimously offered him their full support and loyalty.

The British consul to the Bight of Biafra, Sir Richard Burton, commenting on the election of Jaja in 1863 wrote; one Jaja, son of an unknown bushman, a common negro, had been elected to head the Anna Pepple House. He is young, healthy and powerful, and not less ambitious, energetic and decided. He is the most influential man and the greatest trader in the River, and 50,000 pounds, it is said may annually pass through his hands. He lives much with Europeans and he rides rough shod over young hands coming into Bonny. In a short time he will either be shot or he will beat down all his rivals. At present he leads the party against King Pepple. It was not long before the prophecy was fulfilled.

Jajas ascendancy was swift and he quickly consolidated his hold on power and in two years repaid the debts owed by his predecessor and in no time became very popular in Bonny and idolized by his own people. Oko Jumbo and other chiefs of the rival Mannila House almost immediately began to plot his downfall. Knowing that Jaja had accumulated a lot of resources but had not yet acquired enough arms and ammunition, they declared war on Jaja and the Anna Pepple House. Jaja had tried every thing possible to avert war but his opponents knew he was unprepared for war and moved in to subdue him. He quickly surrendered to the consternation of both the British consul and his opponents.

The surrender was Jajas clever way of buying time. He used the period of peaceful negotiation of the terms of surrender to execute a masterful evacuation of his army and logistical requirements to a location in the Andoni area that gave him control of the creeks and access to the best palm oil markets. He had also arranged trade treaties and covenants with the chiefs of the hinterland giving him a near monopoly of the palm oil trade supply routes, cutting off Bonny from its source of supplies. By the time he left Bonny in 1869 all arrangements to found a new state had been completed and a few weeks after his evacuation, he signed the Minima Agreement [constitution] with his principal chiefs, with himself as the King. The state of Opobo was born and the reign of King Jaja commenced.

King Jajas technical defeat of his rivals in Bonny was so decisive that of the 18 important Houses of the city-state of Bonny, 14 followed him to Opobo. By 1871, two years after the founding of Opobo, the economy of Bonny collapsed forcing its leaders to negotiate with Opobo. In January 1873, the British government intervened in the dispute together with neutral Delta chiefs and after three days of negotiation, a peace treaty was signed and in another treaty, Britain recognized Jaja as the King of Opobo. In 1881, Jaja annexed the Qua Eboe territory contiguous to Opobo hinterland and was proclaimed the King of the place in June 1881. Jaja did not only block the Bonny middlemen from the interior markets but also the European traders. As he consolidated his hold on power, the stage was set for a major confrontation with Britain.

From the early part of the 19th century, European countries notably, France, Germany and Britain exercised informal control over parts of West Africa in furtherance of their trading and economic activities. They were negotiating treaties with the coastal states and in most cases, relied on the Delta middlemen for access to the interior. Britain had a consul for the Bight of Biafra based at Fernando Po. The French concentrated in the Gulf of Guinea with a base in Porto Novo. The German consul was based in Gabon. The Cameroons was a fluid territory where German merchants from Hamburg worked on friendly terms with British traders. With the unexpected annexation of Cameroon by Germany in July 1884, an international rivalry soon developed with Britain quickly concluding treaties of protection with African states in the Bight of Benin and Biafra.

With those treaties, Britain was able to claim suzerainty over the Delta and Lower Niger at the West African Berlin Conference of 1885 and declared a protectorate over those areas and others, including Lagos in October 1885. Most of the Kings and Chiefs never understood the terms of the treaties and never intended to surrender their territories and so they resisted the occupation of their territories. Britain resorted to the use of force and the period of resistance began.

King Jaja signed the treaty but had sought the interpretation of the word protectorate insisting that he needed a written assurance that his sovereignty was not diminished in any manner. He resisted every attempt by the British traders to penetrate his territory until September 18, 1887 when he was lured unto a British Naval vessel by the acting Vice Consul, Harry Johnston to negotiate terms of trade with Britain. Once inside the Vessel, he was seized and exiled to West Indies. He died in 1891 and the people of Opobo paid for the repatriation of his body and gave him a royal funeral. Meanwhile, Britain deployed its full military might and overwhelmed a determined Igbo resistance to colonial rule.

Nnamdi Azikiwe [Zik of Africa]

On the 16th of November 1904, thirteen years after the death of King Jaja, Benjamin Nnamdi Azikiwe was born. He was not a slave but he too faced very challenging obstacles placed on the path of Africans by colonial rule. His Father was a clerk in the service of the British colonial government and after his education in different parts of Nigeria he travelled to the United States of America for further studies. He returned to Nigeria in 1934. He moved to Ghana to establish the African Morning Post and finally returned to Nigeria and established the West African Pilot newspaper in 1937.

He returned from America determined to confront the challenges at home, picking up as it where, from where King Jaja stopped. If there was any Igbo involvement in the early nationalist struggles before the entry of Zik, it was not reported anywhere. The lot fell on him to lead the Igbo people and Nigeria as a whole on the path to freedom. In order to mobilize public opinion against the colonial government, apart from the West African Pilot based in Lagos, he established a chain of newspapers across Nigeria  Eastern Nigeria Guardian Port Harcourt [1940], Nigerian Spokesman Onitsha [1943], Daily Comet, Kano [founded in 1933 but acquired by Zik Group in 1944], Eastern Sentinel, Enugu, [1955]. And most importantly he established the African Continental Bank, [ACB] in 1944. Can anyone imagine what the economic and commercial life of Eastern Nigeria would have been without the ACB?

He was a Pan-Africanist and in the context of Nigeria, he believed firmly in the oneness of Nigeria and that the Igbo will always be better served in a united Nigeria. A lot of people may disagree with him but if we must rely on the evidence of history not sentiments or emotions, then I can safely say that he was right. To that extent, I admit to being an adherent of the Zikist philosophy. The alternative trajectory has led to nothing but sorrow, ruin and gnashing of teeth. And the debate now is not about who caused what but about the consequence of the options taken.

Herbert Macaulay founded Nigerias first political party, Nigeria National Democratic Party [NNDP] on the 24th of June 1923. The party won all the seats in the elections of 1923, 1928 and 1933. The dominance of the NNDP was challenged by the National Youth Movement [NYM] which was founded in 1933 by Professor Eyo Ita. Other members of the NYM were Zik, H O Davies, Samuel Akinsanya, Obafemi Awolowo, Ernest Ikoli, Samuel Akintola and others. It was a truly national platform which fought and won elections to the Lagos Town Council in 1938, ending the dominance of the NNDP. The NYM split over irreconcilable differences of its members and Zik left the party and teamed with Herbert Macaulay to form the National Council of Nigeria and Cameroons [NCNC]. Macaulay was elected the President while Zik was elected the Secretary General. At the death of Macaulay two years after, Zik took over as the President of the party.

Zik effectively led the struggle against colonial rule and conference after conference in conjunction with other Nigerian nationalists forced the colonial government into full retreat. He became the Leader of Government Business in Eastern Nigeria and later Premier of Eastern Nigeria and finally the Governor-General and later the President of the Republic in 1963. Ziks political achievement is yet to be matched by any other Igbo and it was achieved within the context of national politics not Igbo politics. [We shall take another date to discuss the champions of Igbo politics].

The NCNC was never intended to be an Igbo party or a regional party. But subsequent events after the death of Herbert Macaulay, its first President, made the party to become a regional party and some would say, an Igbo party. But Zik struggled all through to maintain a national posture. He was determined to play in the political turf of Western Nigeria and when that failed he retreated to the East complicating the politics of the East to some extent. He has been criticized for that, but taking the totality of his political career, no objective analyst will fail to see that Ziks overall objective has been a united Nigeria.

His role in Biafra and for which hardliners in Igboland may never forgive him has been discussed in detail in The Politics of Biafra And The Future of Nigeria by Chudi Offodile. And it is clear that even then, as tough and as traumatic as the situation was, Zik remained clear eyed and took steps that may have been unpopular at the material time but ultimately was in the interest of his people. That is statesmanship. Zik had exhibited such statesmanship earlier in 1964, after the disputed elections boycotted by the Action Group and NCNC. The NCNC and Action Group led by Chief Obafemi Awolowo had formed an alliance  UPGA  under which they contested the 1964 election. Zik, as President resisted intense pressure from his party the NCNC and still called upon the Northern Peoples Congress [NPC] of Tafawa Balewa to form government. Those who thought it was a mistake and called him all manner of names and encouraged a violent takeover of government, should reflect on what eventually happened two years later in 1966. Have we recovered?

Neither the NCNC nor the Nigerian Peoples Party [NPP], the two parties to which Zik belonged was conceptualized as Igbo parties. We have already noted the history of the formation of the NCNC. The NPP on its part was formed as a national party but the internal disagreement led to a fragmentation of the party with one side leaving to form the GNPP. Even though the NPP was largely successful in Igboland, but it had strong political figures like Solomon Lar, Paul Unongo, Olu Akinfosile, TOS Benson and Adeniran Ogunsanya as frontline members of the party. And by the way, in Rivers state, NPP produced two senators out of five. Zik has been the only Igbo politician, so far, to attract political and electoral support outside the South East. After the 1979 elections, he encouraged the NPP to go into alliance with the northern dominated National Party of Nigeria [NPN].

Since 1999, the Igbo people have always voted for the Peoples Democratic Party [PDP]. There is nothing wrong with that but the question must be asked; has the PDP justified that support or reciprocated it in any manner? Is that support really earned? The complaint now is that the All Progressive Congess [APC] government of President Muhammadu Buhari abandoned the South East and is marginalizing them. Without conceding to that, let us compare a situation where the PDP you voted for gave you a few appointments here and there and denied you any major developmental projects. As against the APC government of President Buhari, you did not vote for and who even if he denied you appointments, has certainly not denied you crucial developmental projects.

The Enugu  Port Harcourt dual carriageway abandoned since 1999 by the PDP is being handled with dispatch by this government, including both sections of the Enugu  Onitsha dual carriageway. Early works section four of the second Niger Bridge is ongoing. Then you have the rehabilitation of the following roads: Oba  Nnewi  Okigwe road linking Anambra state with Imo state, the Otuocha  Ibaji  Nzam road in Anambra state, the Abakaliki  Onueke  Abomega  Afikpo road [Ebonyi state], the Nnenwe  Uduma  Uburu road connecting Enugu state with Ebonyi state, the Oji  Achi  Mmaku  Awgu road in Enugu state, the Ozalla  Akpugo  Amagunze road [Enugu state] and the Ikot Ekpene  Aba  Owerri dualization project linking Akwa Ibom, Abia and Imo states among others. Almost all the important Igbo cities, Enugu, Owerri, Umuahia, Aba, Awka, Onitsha are captured in the existing Calabar  Lagos railway project and the Port Harcourt  Maiduguri standard gauge new railway projects approved by the President.

CONCLUSION

Once more let me just say that the Igbo nation should focus on solutions not recriminations. In what political direction should the Igbo go? Let the quarrel with the north real or imagined stop. Let the recriminations stop and let us join hands as one people to chart the way forward for a brighter future for Nigeria. We need to examine very carefully the Igbo political trajectory and learn crucial lessons of history. How did Jaja an Igbo slave found a multi ethnic state in Opobo and became the King with the consent of the people? How did Zik achieve national prominence and stature? We have an incredibly proud past, a rich political heritage forged in the most difficult circumstances. We must therefore focus on constructing the path to a proud future.

Jaja was the Igbo born champion of the 19th century and Zik of the 20th century. The 21st century yearns for that champion. The theatre of politics for the coastal and inland states of Eastern Nigeria before colonialism, was in Bonny and for the colonial and post-colonial politics of Nigeria, it was in Lagos. Jaja excelled in Bonny while Zik excelled in Lagos. Why is Abuja politics so difficult for the Igbo to play? Perhaps, we are on the wrong track and employing the wrong paradigms. The Igbo nation should engage with others and immerse itself fully in national politics just like Jaja and Zik did. The handshake across the Niger celebrated recently in Enugu by Ohaneze Ndigbo and Nzuko Umunna is welcome but a handshake across the Benue is most desirable now

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Loading...Home | News | General | EDMARK unveils multi-billion naira centre against obesity in Lagos

EDMARK International, a multinational health and lifestyle firm with headquarters in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, recently unveiled a state-of-the-art international centre aimed at combating the menace of obesity in Nigeria.

The Special Adviser to Edo State Governor on Basic Education and Sole Administrator, State Universal Basic Education Board (SUBEB), Dr. Joan Osa Oviawe, monitoring the Junior Secondary School Certificate Examination at Oredo Girls School in Benin City, Edo State recently.

The firm also presented a new product named Edge2 which helps to burn fat in the body, to the public.

The event, which took place at the event hall, domiciled at the international centre located at Aromire Avenue, off Allen, Ikeja, Lagos, was attended by many of the companys top management executives from across the world. Speaking at the official opening of the centre, the Chairman/Founder of Edmark International Group of Companies, Mr. Sam Low expressed delight over the feats his organisation had achieved within nine years of starting businesses Nigeria despite the initial hurdles he encountered.

His words: After making up my mind to invest in Nigeria, we were faced with some challenges but we were not deterred, we learned and re- strategised and for this, I want to say, I am grateful to my team who believed in our dream.

Though our operations started in Ghana, as a result of the initial challenges we faced when we attempted to set up our businesses in Nigeria; however, after a year, we moved into Nigeria after crossing the hurdles with the regulatory authorities.

With this centre, which is humanitarian in approach, I strongly believe this will enhance more businesses, enhance opportunities, change the face of business and help boost the economy of Nigeria and other African countries.

Speaking on the philosophy of his firm, Low said: Edmark International is a multinational firm in the health and lifestyle industry that is committed to peoples wellbeing; we want citizens of Africa to live well and that is why our healthy supplement products help to tackle obesity. This is just the beginning and I want to thank the architect and other wonderful people who helped make this project come to reality. I am excited that we can do this.

In his opening remarks, the companys General Manager in Nigeria, Mr. Maurice Etim stated that Edmark International came into Nigeria at a trying period when recession was at its peak in the country.

Today, Edmark International is not only a success in Nigeria but a huge success in West Africa. Edmark International has helped combat obesity in Nigeria as well as empowered many Nigerians and other African citizens.

I must also say that the success would not have been possible without our hardworking team and distributors. Today, we can see that Edmark International is a big success in Nigeria and the evidence is why we are in this multi-billion naira state-of-the- art edifice in the heart of Lagos, Etim said.

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Loading...Home | News | General | How Facebook And Its Vampire Apps Can Still Track You Even After You Remove Your Account See How To Stop Them

There are certain ways that Facebook can track you even if you are not online or even after youve removed your account. Checkout how you can stop that.

Facebooks latest scandal has caused many users to question whether they should pull the plug and delete their account in order to protect their private data

But this may not be enough to keep Facebook, its advertisers, and so-called vampire apps, from tracking you across the web.

Facebook uses pieces of code  which include tags, pixels and cookies  to collect information and build up a profile of your digital self  even if you dont have an account.

It also allows thousands of third-party vampire apps to plug in to its social network and siphon off data from its users.

In response, many are choosing to manually remove permissions previously granted to individual apps  a time consuming process.

However, it remains unclear whether this will allow them to claw back data already shared via third-parties.

This means third-party apps may still have enough data to build up a digital profile of you, even if you have stopped using them.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg has since admitted Facebook made mistakes leading up to Cambridge Analytica privacy breach, which has led to accusations the firm mismanaged user data.

Facebook Audience Network

Facebook uses an advertising strategy called the Facebook Audience Network to promote ads targeted to your browsing tastes.

It means brands can direct marketing messages to you based on your interests, even when youre not on the site, via other companys apps and mobile websites.

They can collect information ranging from your IP address to the websites you have visited, the length of time you spent on a website and in what sequence pages were accessed.

Facebook can use this information to track your activities across different websites, gaining insights into things like your location, age group, gender, and interests.

Facebook marketed its Audience Network as the power of Facebook ads, off Facebook at the time of its launch in 2014.

The company is not alone in using targeted advertising and the many who do engage in it  including Google and Apple  say they do so to ensure that the commercial messages you are exposed to online are relevant to you.

Vampire Apps

By connecting your Facebook profile to third party plugin apps found on the social network, many of which are from the same firms paying for targeted advertising, youre also typically granting them permission to access your data.

That includes your name, profile picture, cover photo, gender, networks, username and user ID.

Some fear this may also include details like your IP address and other identifying information which can be used to track your online activities.

Facebook has since amended a policy which allowed third-party apps to access your friends data as well.

Some of the better known apps that may be connected to your profile include those of popular sites like Amazon, Buzzfeed, Expedia, Etsy, and Tinder.

You can check which apps your Facebook account is sharing data with by clicking here.

How you can stop Facebook tracking you online

Part of what makes Facebook and Google so valuable is that they oversee vast treasure troves of user data, which can be of huge benefit to brands.

For advertisers, it means theyre more likely to get a higher click-through rate on their advertisements, boosting the effectiveness of their campaigns.

For users, it means forfeiting personal information to a variety of unknown sources.

Thankfully, there are a number of steps that can be taken to prevent Facebooks ad partners from following you as you browse the internet on your phone or desktop computer.

This can be achieved through software settings on your device, or by contacting a number of non-governmental organisations who enforce responsible privacy practices.

When it comes to vampire apps, removing permissions is the most effective route of ensuring they are no longer able to gather information, although this is time consuming.

If you have left Facebook, there are still options for finding out what data, if any, third parties still hold on you and to request that they delete it.

This may also be time consuming, as you will need to contact these third parties

Changing your settings on your smartphone or tablet

If you own an iPhone or iPad, the steps to block targeted adverts are relatively simple.

Go to Settings, tap Privacy and then scroll down to click on Advertising.

From there, swipe the Limit Ad Tracking button.

If you choose to leave the Limit Ad Tracking feature off, that means that advertisers can track your browsing behaviour by assigning your device a unique ID number, or a Identifier For Advertising.

When you the option on, your device will be represented as 00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000.

In turn, it will be harder for ad technology companies to track your browsing behaviour.

If you own an Android phone or tablet, the process is very similar.

Open up Settings, navigate to Accounts and Sync, select Google, then Ads and finally, select Opt Out of Interest Based Ads.

Changing your browser settings

If youre browsing the internet on Google Chrome, go to Settings in the right-hand dropdown menu.

From there, click on Show advanced settings, then select Privacy.

Finally, click on Send a do not track request with your browsing traffic.

A popup on Chrome further explains what this means: Enabling Do Not Track means that a request will be included with your browsing traffic.

Any effect depends on whether a website responds to the request, and how the request is interpreted.

For example, some websites may respond to this request by showing you ads that arent based on other websites youve visited.

Many websites will still collect and use your browsing data for example, to improve security, to provide content, services, ads, and recommendations on their websites, and to generate reporting statistics.

What this means is that not all websites necessarily have to honour Do Not Track requests.

Similar options are available in other browsers, including Apples Safari.

To access this, pull down the Safari menu and open Preferences

Click the Privacy tab and find the Website tracking section. Checking the box next to Ask websites not to track me sends out a Do Not Track request.

Contacting your local data privacy alliance

Websites and apps that are part of a number of privacy alliances have agreed to honour requests to stop tracking.

Google, Facebook and Twitter are just a few of the major corporations that have signed onto the Digital Advertising Alliance in the US, the Digital Advertising Alliance of Canada and the European Interactive Digital Advertising Alliance.

The websites of each of these organisations contain instructions on how to add your details to their do not track schemes.

Change your tracking settings in Facebook

Facebook has given users of its social network the option to opt out of ad tracking via the site.

First, log in to Facebook, go to Settings, then click on Ads in the menu on the left-hand side of the screen.

Under Ad Settings, click on the button that says Ads on apps and websites off of the Facebook Companies.

Then scroll down to the bottom and select No.

Facebook says that if you select that option, it means that youll still see ads, but they wont be as relevant to you.

Additionally, you may still see ads related to your age, gender or location.

Deleting your Facebook profile

Some users have decided they want to take the final plunge and shut down their Facebook profile entirely.

To do so, click on the help button on the top right hand corner of your Facebook page. There is a search bar that says How can we help?. Type in delete account.

This will link you to Facebooks Delete Account page, where you will need to select Delete My Account and enter your login credentials.

If you do not think you will use Facebook again and would like your account deleted, we can take care of this for you, the message reads.

Keep in mind that you will not be able to reactivate your account or retrieve any of the content or information you have added.

After two weeks, Facebook will begin the process of deleting all your data from the site, which may take up to 90 days.

If you want to keep your personal data you need to download it before deleting your account.

To download your archive go to Settings and click Download a copy of your Facebook data at the General Account Settings tap. Then click Start My Archive.

Using data protection laws to check your data

Facebook users in Europe who want to check what data the firm, and third-party apps, have on them have the legal means to do so.

Under existing data protection laws, the Data Protection Act 1998, you have the right to know what data a company or organisation holds on you.

Most large organisation will have a privacy notice which states what it intends to do with your information and if it intends to share it. If this is unclear, you are entitled to ask for clarification.

In the case of smaller businesses or individuals, you may need to contact them directly.

You can make a subject access request to any organisation you think may hold information about you. It is then legally required to send you the details in intelligible form, although there may be a small charge for this.

You are also within your rights to request that an organisation to stop using your details.

If they ignore your request you can take the firm to court or complain to a regulatory body. In the UK, this is the Information Commissioners Office.

These laws are due to be bolstered with the introduction of the European Unions General Data Protection Regulation, a new data protection law that will enter into force on May 25.

Rules in the US are covered by a wide array of legislation, which varies from state to state and across different industries.

The main national act that impacts Facebooks data is the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Act.

The FTC has brought many enforcement actions against companies failing to comply with posted privacy policies and for the unauthorised disclosure of personal data.

The FTCs Behavioural Advertising Principles suggest that website operators disclose their data collection practices tied to online behavioural advertising.

They also suggest that companys disclose that consumers can opt out of these practices, providing an opt-out mechanism.

***

Source: Daily Mail UK

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Loading...Home | News | General | Did EFCC Recover $9million From Paul Borohs House? Heres What The Agency Said

The spokesperson for the EFCC has reacted to a report that narrated how it allegedly recovered $9 million from the home of Paul Boroh, the recently sacked head of Presidential Amnesty Programme.

Speaking while responding to a media report that Economic and Financial Crime Commission searched the home of Paul Boroh, the former head of the Presidential Amnesty Programme for ex Niger Delta militants, a spokesman for the EFCC confirmed the raid, but not the supposed amounts recovered.

File photo

Wilson Uwujaren, in an interview with PREMIUM Times , said that I am not aware of such discoveries, making reference to reports that $9 million was recovered as a result of an early Tuesday morning raid by the EFCC and the Office of the National Security Adviser (ONSA) on Borohs Abuja residence.

Retired Brigadier General Boroh, who had headed the Amnesty Programme for three years, was fired from his post a week ago by the President on corruption related charges. Boroh was immediately replaced with foreign policy expert, Charles Dokubo.

The EFCC spokesman confirmed report of the early morning (3:00 AM) raid at Gwarimpa Estate in Abuja, though he gave no indication about how much was discovered in the search.

Borohs wife, Mrs. Ibinye Boroh at a press briefing with family lawyer Olusola Oke, has since denied the claims of $9 million recovered from their home.

The publication by a section of the press stating the contrary is fabricated, false in its entirety, malicious and calculated to mislead the public, she said, confirming the raid, but not the outcome.

Boroh has been in the custody of the EFCC since Monday, it is reported.

Family lawyer, Oke refuting details of the reports as disparaging and fallacious, asked for a retraction within 48 hours.

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Loading...Home | News | General | Why UK is not against Buharis second term - High commissioner

- The UK high commissioner to Nigeria, Paul Arkwright, faults rumour that the west is against President Buharis second term plans

- He says who Nigerians choose to vote for is a matter of their conscience and not for the United Kingdom government

- The INEC sets up a committee to probe the Kano under age voters saga

The United Kingdom (UK) high commissioner to Nigeria, Paul Arkwright, has dismissed speculation that his country or other Western nations were against a second term run by President Muhammadu Buhari.

Arkwright told Premium Times on Thursday, March 22, that his country or any other Western nation as far as he could tell, is not against a second term ambition of the Nigerian president.

READ ALSO: Boko Haram told us not to send our daughters to school - Dapchi parents

I am very happy to put that rumour to bedThe United Kingdom supports a process whereby the people of Nigeria can exercise their democratic right to vote," he said.

The UK high commissioner said who Nigerians choose to vote for is a matter of their conscience and not for the United Kingdom government.

He said: All of Nigeria should feel that they have a part to play in the democratic process. I encourage people to go out and get their PVCs.

Who they vote for is a matter for their conscience and not for the United Kingdom government. Whichever candidate is standing, they need to make up their minds and decide who would best suit them.

PAY ATTENTION: Install our latest app for Android, read best news on Nigerias #1 news app

And thats an individual choice. We favour a free, fair, credible and peaceful process and were working with INEC to make that happen."

The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has said the committee set up to investigate the Kano under age voters saga has concluded its facts finding mission and is in the process of writing its report.

NAIJ.com gathered that the report would soon be submitted and considered by the commission.

The commission while reiterating its commitment to ensuring a clean and accurate voters register towards ensuring a free and fair 2019 elections said the report of the investigation will be ready soon.

2019 Presidency: Nigerians reveal why they prefer Atiku to President Buhari on NAIJ.com TV

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Source: Naija.ng

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Loading...Home | World | Africa | Zimbabwe receives additional $4,2m from UK

The World Bank's administered Zimbabwe Reconstruction Fund (ZIMREF) has received an additional US$4,2 million from the United Kingdom's developmental agency, the Department for International Development (DfID) to strengthen the country's economic policy systems.

After the signing of the facility between the government and the DfID this Wednesday, World Bank Country Manager, Ms Mukami Kariuki said additional funding is critical in sustaining projects within the country.

Announced increase @DFID_UK ???????? funding for @WorldBank in ???????? to support technical advice to Zim govt as it takes forward its economic reform commitments to ensure a more prosperous future for all Zimbabweans @UKinZimbabwe pic.twitter.com/vLiBdGEMDe  Annabel Gerry (@AnnabelGerry) March 21, 2018

"Such a facility is a true testimony of what is being made for the sake of growth within this country," she said.

DfID Head in Zimbabwe, Ms Annabel Gerry said the UK's support will enable the World Bank to increase technical advice to the government.

"It is all about the issue of technical advice that matters as we gear for increased cooperation in the future," Ms Gerry said.

The government appreciated the support it is receiving from all other developmental partners.

"We are grateful to the support that we are receiving, indeed it is really critical," the Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Finance, Mr Willard Manungo said.

ZIMREF, whose funding portfolio has increased to US$30 million since 2015, is a World Bank administered multi-donor trust whose mandate is to revive key projects across the country and also help government with economic advice, budgetary reforms, climate change systems and education sector policies.

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Loading...Home | World | Africa | Grace Mugabe given 48 hours to leave 3 properties

Grace Mugabe and her son Russel have been ordered to leave 3 properties that they had illegally occupied in 2016 over a diamond ring deal worth US$1,4 million that had gone wrong.

They were given 48 hours today by the sheriff to vacate the properties.

Grace Mugabe & her son Russel hev been ordered to leave 3 properties that they had illegally occupied in 2016 over a diamond ring deal worth US$1,4 that had gone wrong. They were given 48 hours today bybthe sherif to vacate the properties. @ZimMediaReview @matigary @Jamgy7128 pic.twitter.com/exrEi2ysmL  Hopewell Chin'ono (@daddyhope) March 21, 2018

Grace Mugabe sued fugitive businessman Mr Jamal Joseph Ahmed for $1.23-million over a diamond ring deal that went sour last year.

In breach of the agreement, Mr Ahmed failed to deliver the ring, triggering a legal wrangle.

In 2015, Grace Mugabe placed an order for a 100-carat diamond ring worth $1.35-million to mark the anniversary of her wedding to the 93-year-old leader.

She wanted to purchase a unique diamond ring for her wedding anniversary celebrations.

Ahmed tendered a diamond ring worth $30,000 and naturally, Grace Mugabe refused to take possession of an inferior ring.

Grace Mugabe demanded a refund but Ahmed paid back just $120,000.

In court documents filed in 2016, Ahmed said he had offered to repay the money in instalments and claimed he had already paid back $150,000.

In January Ahmed went to court to stop Grace Mugabe from seizing his properties over the diamond ring spat.

Grace Mugabe has however denied attempting to seize Ahmed's properties, saying police had been guarding his premises because he was wanted for alleged crimes.

The Lebanese businessman holds a Zimbabwean permanent residence permit, but no longer lives in the country.

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Loading...President Emmerson Mnangagwa personally lining up alleged dissidents during gukurahundi. Mnangagwa is seen in the video in a blue shirt and a Afro hairstyle.

On March 5 1983, at a rally in Victoria Falls, Emmerson Mnangagwa delivered a threat, using language that would be echoed 11 years later by the perpetrators of the Rwandan genocide.

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As The Chronicle reported at the time: "Likening the dissidents to cockroaches and bugs, the minister said the bandit menace had reached such epidemic proportion that the government had to bring 'DDT' [pesticide] to get rid of the bandits."

Mnangagwa's analogy would have been perfectly comprehensible to his audience. The cockroaches and bugs were supporters of Joshua Nkomo's Zimbabwe African People's Union (Zapu) and, more generally, members of the Ndebele ethnic group.

The "pesticide" would be deployed by the Fifth Brigade, the infamous North Korean-trained army unit that had already begun its crackdown in Matabeleland and the Midlands, home to most of Zimbabwe's Ndebele population.

The crackdown was named Gukurahundi  meaning, in Shona, "the early rain that washes away the chaff". It was extraordinarily brutal.

By the time the military operation was over, in late 1984, an estimated 20 000 people had been killed (this figure comes from the International Association of Genocide Scholars, though the death toll is almost impossible to verify). Many more people had been tortured or displaced.

Gukurahundi is the original sin upon which Mugabe's authoritarian regime was founded, even though it took a few more decades before his glowing liberation hero reputation began to tarnish. As historian Stuart Doran put it, this was the "darkest period in the country's post-independence history, notwithstanding the bloody notoriety of the last decade-and-a-half".

And Mnangagwa, who now succeeds Mugabe as president, was allegedly involved in both inciting and executing the violence.

"Mnangagwa played a critically important role. You can't describe him as the architect of Gukurahundi, because that was Mugabe, but he was a critical component," said opposition politician David Coltart.

In his 2016 book, The Struggle Continues: 50 Years of Tyranny in Zimbabwe, Coltart wrote in detail about the complicity of Mugabe and Mnangagwa in the massacres.

"Mnangagwa was minister of state security at the time, responsible for the Central Intelligence Organisation. The CIO raided Zapu's offices well before the Fifth Brigade were deployed, and they got the details of Zapu structures  all the names of district chairmen and district committees. So when the Fifth Brigade were deployed, they were deployed with CIO operatives who had these names. And they literally went village by village," Coltart told the Mail & Guardian.

"In 1983 they just killed people where they found them. And in 1984, when the political heat was too much  they changed tactics and they set up concentration camps. The Fifth Brigade would still go with the CIO, with those lists, and pick up these leaders and then take them to the concentration camp, where they were then murdered or tortured."

Despite the evidence, Mnangagwa denies involvement in Gukurahundi. In a rare interview with the New Statesman last year, he blames everyone else instead: "How do I become the enforcer during Gukurahundi? We had the president, the minister of defence, the commander of the army, and I was none of that. My own enemies attack me left and right and that is what you are buying."

But as he prepares to assume the presidency, it is Mnangagwa's own words from that dark time that must surely come back to haunt him.

From another 1983 speech recorded by The Chronicle: "Blessed are they who will follow the path of the government laws, for their days on Earth will be increased. But woe unto those who will choose the path of collaboration with dissidents for we will certainly shorten their stay on Earth."Home | World | Africa | Mugabe admits to externalising funds, but not on Mnangagwa's list

FORMER President Mr Robert Mugabe and his family have admitted to externalising funds after buying two properties in South Africa and Hong Kong during his reign.

The admission, which was made by the former First Lady Grace in an interview the Mugabes had with selected journalists at their blue roof mansion in Harare last week, has exposed the hypocrisy of Mr Mugabe who in 2004 arrested former finance minister, Chris Kuruneri, accusing him of externalising money to buy a mansion in Cape Town.

According to a story in South Africa's Sunday Times, the Mugabes declared to authorities that they had bought two properties in South Africa and Hong Kong.

"In South Africa I bought a dilapidated house, I wanted to bring it down, demolish some parts and to renovate the house," Mrs Mugabe said.

The former First Lady also admitted to renting a house in Dubai for Robert Mugabe Junior when he was studying there and reportedly paid $500 000 per annum in rentals.

According to media reports, the Hong Kong property was bought for HK$40 million in 2009 just before the former President's daughter Bona Chikore was about to begin studies at the University of Hong Kong.

The value of the South African property could not be ascertained although the former First Family has in the past been reported to own a R44 million property in Johannesburg.

The declaration of the assets by the Mugabe family follows President Mnangagwa's three month moratorium on those that had externalised funds to return them.

Former Finance Minister, Dr Chris Kuruneri, was arrested in April 2004 on seven counts of breaching the country's exchange control laws.

He was accused of transferring U$500 000, 37 000, 30 000 and R1.2m to South Africa to buy and renovate an eight-bedroom mansion.

The High Court cleared him after spending more than a year in remand prison.

He also spent time under house arrest.

Dr Kuruneri was arrested at the height of the Government's anti-graft crusade in 2004, becoming the most senior official to face charges of corruption.

The ex-minister had always denied charges of funnelling foreign currency to South Africa to buy a mansion in an upscale Cape Town suburb and a luxury car.

President Mnangagwa's moratorium on looters expired last Friday and a list of those that had not heeded his calls was published on Monday.

Out of the $1,3 billion that is estimated to have been externalised only $300 million has been returned.

Government noted 1 166 cases of externalisation.

Apart from those that have returned the money, others are still negotiating on modalities to get it back as it is tied up in properties and other investments.

Approximately $680 million is tied up in those circumstances.

President Mnangagwa has said individuals and entities that have not heeded his call for the money to be returned will face prosecution as required by law.

His administration has declared war on corruption in a bid to turn around the economy.

Under Mr Mugabe's administration, the country witnessed rampant and unabated corruption which suffocated the economy.

Mr Mugabe would publicly threaten to deal with corruption but never took action even though it is believed he knew the culprits.

Unlike Mr Mugabe, President Mnangagwa has vowed to arrest anyone engaging in corruption and a number of former ministers have appeared in court charged with graft.

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Loading...Home | World | Africa | Madhuku appeals UZ interview failure

UNIVERSITY of Zimbabwe (UZ) constitutional law lecturer and opposition politician, Lovemore Madhuku, has challenged the decision to deny him the post of dean of the faculty of law at the institution.

The National Constitutional Assembly leader last week wrote to UZ registrar Noah Mutongoreni, demanding reasons for his failure to be appointed, arguing the person who succeeded did not meet the requirements of the job as advertised.

"Thank you for your letter dated March 7, 2018, informing me that my above application was not successful. I have since become aware that Dr Innocent Maja's application was successful.

"I, hereby, advise that the decision communicated in your aforesaid letter adversely affects my interests and legitimate expectations. For the avoidance of doubt, my legitimate expectation when I applied and participated in the interview was to succeed if, on a reasonable consideration, (that) I met the requirements as stated in ordinance 44 and captured in the advertisement and no other candidate had a better claim," Madhuku said.

Madhuku argues that the Constitution confers on him the right to be furnished with reasons for his failure in terms of section 3(1) (c) of the Administrative Justice Act (Chapter 10:28) as read with section 68 of the Constitution in order for him to ascertain whether the UZ acted "lawfully, reasonably and in a fair manner".

The letter goes on to list Madhuku's qualifications juxtaposed with the requirements of the job for which he applied.

"I meet the requirements stated in ordinance 44 and captured in the advertisement (that includes) earned doctorate. I obtained my PhD in March 1999 from the University of Cambridge, England. Eminent senior academic, this requirement is in section 3(2) of ordinance 44. I have been a full professor since 2011. Properly construed, only an associate or full professor meets this criterion," he said.

Madhuku then pokes holes into Maja's suitability for the job, arguing that while he had an earned doctorate degree, he falls short on the other requirements.

"Thus, a person without an earned doctorate could not qualify even if they had an excellent vision," the letter said, adding by virtue of the fact that Maja is not a professor, therefore, he cannot be described as an "eminent academic".

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Loading...Home | World | Africa | Mugabe's NPF planning million-man street protest against Mnangagwa

THE newly formed National Patriotic Front (NPF) says it is preparing to file a Constitutional Court challenge against President Emmerson Mnangagwa's legitimacy, coupled with massive street demonstrations to force the disputed leader out of power, NewZimbabwe.com reported.

"We will also make a Constitutional Court application challenging the legality of the government," NPF spokesperson Jealous Mawarire said during a panel discussion as SAPES Trust Wednesday evening.

"We have to unite as Zimbabweans and show the world that what happened in Zimbabwe was a coup."

Mawarire said the Robert Mugabe-backed party led by former cabinet minister Ambrose Mutinhiri was preparing to overwhelm the "junta" with a million protesters onto the streets.

He said they have since petitioned SADC and AU over the illegality of the November 14 military "coup" which forced Mugabe out of power.

"What needs to be done is action on the ground here in Zimbabwewe are going to demonstrate against the illegality of this government we are going to mobilise people onto the streets.

"We are setting in motion various political and legal processes and we are also mobilising our people to test and to challenge the legitimacy of the junta even in the streets.

"If you believed that Mugabe should have gone because you had mobilised 800,000 people at Zimbabwe Grounds, we are going to mobilise a million people and put them onto the streets of Harare.

"If any President is no longer liked or wanted by a million-plus people, he should go. So, we are going to mobilise a million people in the streets of Harare and maybe see Emmerson Mnangagwa go with his scarf."

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Loading...Home | World | Africa | Knives drawn at MDC candidate selection meeting

The Nelson Chamisa-led Movement for Democratic Change (MDC-T) last week showed its violent side yet again when nasty factional politics played out at its provincial headquarters in Rhodene during the selection of Masvingo Urban council candidates.

When it became apparent that the process was marred by irregularities, some disgruntled party members pulled knives out of their pockets while others engaged in fist fights.

The selection of prospective councillors was supposed to be done by consensus but it all degenerated into chaos after hordes of party mobs thronged the venue even though they had no business being there.

When candidate selection is done by consensus, only the aspiring candidates the wards sit and agree on who should stand but should they fail to agree, the party would go for primaries.

Out of the 10 wards in Masvingo Urban district, Wards 1, 2, 5, 7, 8 and 9 were decided  albeit controversially  with new names like Selina Maridza, Collen Maboke, Alex Mupfugami, Tafara Masimba and Martin Mureri coming on board for the wards respectively.

Ward 9 went back to Babylon Beta who is the sitting councillor.

Wards 3, 4, 6 and 10 were left to be decided on another day with reports that it will be done this coming Saturday, March 10.

MDC-T Masvingo district chairperson, Murangamwa Chanyau dismissed complaints about how the process was handled, saying losers are often bitter.

"We have called for consensus and it was done amicably. We looked at who has the people and that was the person went for. We will be done with all the wards by the end of the week," said Chanyau.

Asked if they are following the party election template, Chanyau admitted the template is not always used.

"We do not follow the template blindly because what we need at the end of the day are the people. We fight from the corner of the people. If people say they want someone, then we have to go for that person regardless of what the template may say. We are guided by the template but at the end of the day, people have the final say," said Chanyau.

MDC-T Masvingo district secretary general, Faustino Murambatsvina is said to have been assaulted when he tried to impose Mupfugami as the candidate during the selection of the Ward 5 candidate.

The plot to oust all the sitting Masvingo Urban councillors who have represented MDC-T with some remarkable distinction since 2013 has so far spared only Beta whom the faction of new comers, reportedly financed by Takanayi Mureyi, reportedly wants to use to airbrush its plot.

Mureyi, however, denied employing dirty tactics to get his own 'boys' as candidates and trying to capture the whole selection process.

"At the end of the day, people talk but they have to apportion the blame onto somebody else. I do not have the power to influence people's decisions but as a party, we follow proper candidate-selection channels.

"We first go for consensus and if that fails, we then go for primaries. I heard there was violence at the selection process which is unfortunate. All the election processes are guided by the party election template," said Mureyi.

Masvingo has for long been locked in factional wars between Mureyi and Tongai Matutu, both of whom want to represent the party as candidates for the Masvingo Urban parliamentary seat.

Mureyi is said to enjoy vast support in the party's district and provincial structures but lacks the grassroots support that Matutu has.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM: Africa

Loading...On a quiet Sunday in one of Britain's most beautiful cathedral cities, a father and daughter were struck down by the first offensive use of a nerve agent in Europe since the Second World War.

Sergei and Yulia Skripal are still lying stricken in hospital. A police officer who went to their aid fell into a critical condition. Another 35 people were forced to seek medical treatment simply because they were nearby when the nerve agent was released.



What happened in Salisbury on March 4 was a brazen attempt to murder civilians on British soil, endangering anyone - of any nationality - who chanced to be in the vicinity.

Our scientists have identified the substance used against the Skripals as a Russian military-grade nerve agent known as "Novichok". Today, only Russia combines a record of state-sponsored assassinations with an avowed motive for targeting Sergei Skripal  and history of producing of "Novichok" agents.



After the attack, the British Government gave the Kremlin an opportunity to explain if any of this substance had gone missing. But this request was ignored, leaving the Government with no choice except to conclude that the Russian state was guilty of attempted murder in a British city, using a lethal nerve agent banned by the Chemical Weapons Convention.

Britain has responded by expelling 23 undeclared intelligence officers from the Russian Embassy in London. But the whole international community needs to stand together to uphold the rules on which the safety of every nation depends.If we do not, then the Russian state will continue its pattern of dangerous and destructive behaviour.The incident in Salisbury falls into a pattern of the Kremlin's lawless behaviour. Since 2014, Russia has annexed Crimea, ignited the flames of conflict in eastern Ukraine, hacked the German Bundestag and the Danish government and interfered in elections.Now they have gone so far as to use a banned nerve agent on UK soil. The fact that more people are not in hospital in Salisbury is only down to luck; the perpetrators obviously did not care how many innocents they endangered. And of course, there are more than 100,000 Zimbabweans living in the UK: any one of them could have been a victim too.

Our quarrel is not with the Russian people, whose cultural and literary achievements shine down the centuries. We will never forget the fortitude shown by the Russian nation during the Second World War, nor our common alliance against Nazism.



But we all share an obligation to oppose the Kremlin's ambition to divide and weaken the international community.

While Britain's response has been robust, it has also remained true to our values as a liberal democracy that believes in the rule of law. Many Russians have made Britain their home. They abide by our laws and make an important contribution to our society and they remain welcome.



But every time the Russian state breaks international rules, it becomes more of a threat. This outrage took place in a peaceful provincial city in Britain; next time Zimbabweans could be affected.Home | World | Africa | Mnangagwa signs $4.2bn platinum deal

Karo Resources, a company linked to mining entrepreneur Loucas Pouroulis, will spend $4.2 billion on a Zimbabwean platinum project in the first big investment since President Robert Mugabe's ousting in November.

The government has escalated its commitment to open business with President Emmerson Mnangagwa stating that relevant ministries should have a culture change in handling investors' affairs.

The deal is the largest to date in Zimbabwe's mining industry, Mines Minister Winston Chitando said. President Emmerson Mnangagwa has declared the "country open for business" as he seeks to revive the economy and attract investment.

"It is not business as usual anymore," the president told reporters on Thursday. "Things have to change."

President Mnangagwa noted that Zimbabwe had to wait for at least half a decade to conclude this agreement having started negotiations in 2012.

"Had this agreement been concluded then the current foreign currency shortages could have been averted," said President Mnangagwa.

Karo's platinum project will start up in 2020 and produce 1.4 million ounces a year of platinum-group metals at full output, potentially making it the country's top producer by 2023, Chitando said. Zimbabwe has the second-biggest reserves of the metals after South Africa.

The project will also include a 600 megawatt power plant and coal-mining operations to feed it.

Pouroulis has a long history in southern African mining. He set up South African platinum-mining ventures Lefkochrysos, which means white gold' in Greek, and Eland Platinum. Eland was sold to Xstrata Plc in 2007 for the equivalent of $1.1 billion. His son Phoevos met Mnangagwa in the president's office in January.

CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM: Africa

Loading...Austin bombing latest:

- 24-year-old white male suspect dead after detonating a bomb in his vehicle

- One police officer injured when the bomb blew up

- Its unclear whether the suspect acted alone

- Police do not have a motive for the bombingshttps://t.co/s3jsDErL7C  CNN (@CNN) March 21, 2018

 Mark Anthony Conditt, a 23 year-old white male, died early this morning after he detonated a bomb in his car when police tried to approach him. Police think they have every bomb accounted for but are still investigating.

 Conditt left a 25 minute confession video on his phone, though Austin PD Chief Brian Manley said he did not offer an explanation behind why he chose his victims. The video reportedly did not contain any references to "terror groups" or bring up "hate". Hours after making the video, police followed Conditt from a hotel to an interstate where he ended up in a ditch before killing himself, where the phone was still in his possession. Manley also said, "It is the outcry of a very challenged young man talking about challenges in his life that led him to this point. I know everybody is interested in a motive and understanding why. And we're never going to be able to put a (rationale) behind these acts."

 There have been five explosions in the last three weeks: On March 2nd, a package left outside 39-year old Stephan House's door killed him in his home. On March 12th, a package killed 17-year old Draylen Mason and injured his mother, and a second package critically injured a 75-year old Hispanic woman.

 Explosions since: On March 18th, the FBI issued a $100,000 award for anyone with info in the killer, and later on that Sunday night, the fourth explosion injured two 20-something white males. On March 20th, the killer's fifth explosion injured one person at a Fed Ex facility.

 There was a sixth explosion that was intially thought to be Conditt's, but it turned out to be an incindeary device and not a bomb. It was a package dropped off at a Goodwill center that contained two artillery simulators, one of which went off and injured a worker. Police have since said, This incident is not related to any of the other incidents.

 Conditt was raised in a homeschooled, conservative Christian environment. He was unemployed and had two roommates. His family has stated they had no idea Conditt was capable of such evil and didn't see it coming, asking for privacy as they deal and grieve with these events.

 For a college project, Conditt created a blog where he expressed his hatred for LGBT people, women and abortion, and more. , Conditt argued against marriage equality: "I do not believe it is proper to pass laws stating that homosexuals have 'rights.' What about pedophilia or bestiality? These are sexual practices. Should they also be protected by law? If homosexuality is protected by law, why not those as well?" In another, he argued why we "might want to do away with the Child Offender System": "You have to really hate the guy to make him suffer for the rest of his life, even when his prison time is up. This sounds perfect for a serial rapist or pedophile, but its not such a great idea if something as trivial as public indecency or streaking can put you on the registry right alongside them." He was unemployed and had two roommates. His family has stated they had no idea Conditt was capable of such evil and didn't see it coming, asking for privacy as they deal and grieve with these events. In one post , Conditt argued against marriage equality:In another, he argued why we "might want to do away with the Child Offender System": "

 Families are still grieving the loss of Mason and House. Waynewood, House's brother, said that they don't feel safe even after Conditt is dead, and expressed disdain for the police handling the explosion. When it first happened, we didnt feel like police were taking our family seriously, he said. If theres been an explosion or bomb, and my family was targeted, why was there no guard outside? Why are they alone? he said. I dont know officer protocol, but I want to believe if there was a family threatened like that, they would be protected."

 Initially, House was actually a suspect in his own death, as police suspected that he built the bomb himself, placed it on his porch, and then had it explode in front of him as his 8-year old daughter was getting ready for school inside. We cant rule out that Mr. House didnt construct this himself and accidentally detonate it, Austin PD Assistant Chief Joseph Chacon told reporters at the time, saying there was no public threat, which Waynewood felt lulled the public into false sense of security. I do not believe that we have someone going around leaving packages like this," Chacon also said.

 As you can imagine, media coverage is in part describing Conditt like he's a wallflower. One tweet quoting an article read, "The Austin bombing suspect was a quiet, nerdy young man who came from a tight-knit, godly family, said Donna Sebastian Harp, who had known the family for nearly 18 years" which came from... you guessed it... The New York Times. Waynewood, House's brother, said that they don't feel safe even after Conditt is dead, and expressed disdain for the police handling the explosion.he said.as police suspected that he built the bomb himself, placed it on his porch, and then had it explode in front of him as his 8-year old daughter was getting ready for school inside.Austin PD Assistant Chief Joseph Chacon told reporters at the time, saying there was no public threat, which Waynewood felt lulled the public into false sense of security.Chacon also said.One tweet quoting an article read,which came from... you guessed it...

 The White House stated today that the attacks bear no known links to terrorism. Trump tweeted after ignoring the attacks for weeks, "AUSTIN BOMBING SUSPECT IS DEAD. Great job by law enforcement and all concerned!"

Praying for my hometown. This is insanity. #Austin  Gabriel Luna (@IamGabrielLuna) March 21, 2018

The bomber is not a terrorist. Got it. https://t.co/YjQDFhUr5B  Kumail Nanjiani (@kumailn) March 20, 2018

If this terrorist bomber was a brown guy, my mom wouldnt be able to leave her house for a week.  Kumail Nanjiani (@kumailn) March 21, 2018

If the Austin bomber had been Muslim, the national guard would be on the streets of Texas by now.



White people wouldn't be arguing over "semantics." They'd be trying to shut down mosques.  Mikel Jollett (@Mikel_Jollett) March 21, 2018

Just imagine the hysteria is the bomber had been targeting white people.  Dave Anthony, LLC. (@daveanthony) March 21, 2018

Surprise surprise.

Austin bomber was a white male.

Maybe Mexico will pay for that wall.  Ethan Embry (@EmbryEthan) March 21, 2018

The Austin bomb suspect, Mark Anthony Conditt, blew himself up when confronted by police. But the authorities are warning he may have planted more bombs before his death. pic.twitter.com/A0VWwQGwVY  HuffPost (@HuffPost) March 21, 2018

Police: Austin bomber left 25-minute confession video on phone https://t.co/HjlS8gHVzy pic.twitter.com/ZnBkllm7UF  CNN Philippines (@cnnphilippines) March 22, 2018

$100,000 reward offering from @Austin_Police , @ATFHou , @FBISanAntonio for information leading to the arrest and conviction of person(s) responsible for the Austin, Texas package bombings. Contact the TIPS Hotline at 512-472-TIPS (8477). pic.twitter.com/roR2vYlkvu  ATF HQ (@ATFHQ) March 18, 2018

Sixth explosion in Austin, Texas, is not linked to serial bomber, police say https://t.co/J50SPeTXkV  Metro (@MetroUK) March 21, 2018

This guy belonged to a religious group called the Righteous Invasion of Truth where he practiced weapons skills. If he were Muslim, that fact would be in every single headline. https://t.co/ilqAdjiRTw  Michael Linden (@MichaelSLinden) March 21, 2018

Mark Conditt was apparently raised in a Christian homeschooling family https://t.co/MJeaQcdI6x  Sarah Jones (@onesarahjones) March 21, 2018

The family of the Austin bomber says they are "devastated and broken at the news" that 23-year-old Mark Conditt was the person behind the attacks. https://t.co/JGlEC0OWz4  KXAN News (@KXAN_News) March 21, 2018

The suspect's family issued the following statement through an aunt to @CNN regarding the death of Mark Anthony Conditt and the crimes he's suspected of committing. pic.twitter.com/icpmdDROUn  Jeff Stensland (@JeffStensland) March 21, 2018

According to a classmate, Mark Conditt created a blog about his political views as a requirement for a political-science class he took at Austin Community College. His posts include arguments against same-sex marriage and a defense of the death penalty. https://t.co/7EBZdfQV9u  NYT National News (@NYTNational) March 21, 2018

Mark Anthony Conditt blogged about hating homosexuals, opposing abortion, and ironically, being against Islamic terrorists.https://t.co/xtGUJvXnSr  Eugene Gu, MD (@eugenegu) March 21, 2018

I want to know more about this batshit belief the Austin bomber was espousing, but it's gonna turn out that like one of the top ten most trafficked subreddits is dedicated to it, right? pic.twitter.com/4lpZPJznQG  Conor Lastowka (@clastowka) March 21, 2018

Have any white people denounced the Austin bomber yet?  Travon Free (@Travon) March 21, 2018

Glad we're all feeling better in Austin right now, but we should be reading this story from @OliviaMesser and asking hard questions about the #AustinBombings. https://t.co/9SMTOvbUnW 1/ pic.twitter.com/oipQIka08c  Bobby Blanchard  (@bobbycblanchard) March 21, 2018

Bombs are illegal you fucking moron. https://t.co/KPz2D3LyW6  feminist next door (@emrazz) March 21, 2018



follow up to this post



Let's get creepy again, ONTD! Killers, cult maniacs, cryptids, spectres, and my personal favorite - ALIENS.

The Hills Have Eyes



On the way to California, a family has the misfortune to have their car break down in an area closed to the public, and inhabited by violent savages ready to attack.



Director Wes Craven gave an interview discussing the true story behind the 1977 film, which involved the Sawney Bean family in Scotland:



"[T]here was an area that had road running through it from Scotland, and people thought it was haunted because people kept disappearing from that road. The story came out when a couple was attacked by these wild looking people, and one got away. He knew someone in the court, and they sent out an expedition which resulted in finding a cave along the English Channel. A dog actually found it. A whole gaggle of these people. Naked, wild and feral. And the [authorities] did the most excruciating things to them. I responded to the irony of it, of people who should be nice and civilized doing horrible things. And horrible people having a nice side to them, too."



Don't believe it's true? You're probably right; check out

this article from BBC

, detailing the Bean legend (supposedly, the cave-dwelling Bean family killed and ate 1,000 people).

Borderland

The Beast of Bray Road

The Girl Next Door



Based on the Jack Ketchum novel of the same name, The Girl Next Door follows the unspeakable torture and abuses committed on a teenage girl in the care of her aunt...and the boys who witness and fail to report the crime.

Open Water



Based on the true story of two scuba divers accidentally stranded in shark infested waters after their tour boat has left.



Tom and Eileen Lonergan were on a scuba diving trip in the Great Barrier Reef when their diving group failed to take a proper headcount - and left the couple behind. The Lonergans were not discovered missing for two days. Their scuba gear turned up somewhere miles away from where they went lost, but their bodies were never found.



Disturbingly, during search and rescue, their diving slate was discovered, reading: "Monday Jan 26; 1998 08am. To anyone who can help us: We have been abandoned on A[gin]court Reef by MV Outer Edge 25 Jan 98 3pm. Please help to rescue us before we die. Help!!!"



The skipper of the boat was charged with unlawful killing, but was found not guilty.

The Enfield Haunting



In August 1977, a series of bizarre and terrifying events begin to take place in a seemingly ordinary house in Enfield, North London.



The Enfield Poltergeist lived at 284, Green Street, in Brimsdown, Enfield, England from 1977 to 1979. The standard ghost activity was recorded: furniture moving, strange noises and voices, and even children levitating. Some paranormal investigators believed the haunting to be genuine, while many others called it a hoax. Two of the children at the home, Margaret and Janet, did admit to performing some pranks, but claimed only "2%" of it was faked.



The Conjuring 2 is also (loosely) based on the case.





Fire in the Sky



An Arizona logger mysteriously disappears for five days in an alleged encounter with a flying saucer in 1975.



Fire in the Sky is the true and terrifying story of Travis Walton who was abducted by aliens in 1975. Walton was a logger in the Arizona forest. One night, while riding in a truck with six of his coworkers, they encountered a UFO about 100 feet away. Walton got out of the truck and approached the craft. A beam of light struck him, knocking him out. Astonishingly, his coworkers drove away! The Enfield Poltergeist lived at 284, Green Street, in Brimsdown, Enfield, England from 1977 to 1979. The standard ghost activity was recorded: furniture moving, strange noises and voices, and even children levitating. Some paranormal investigators believed the haunting to be genuine, while many others called it a hoax. Two of the children at the home, Margaret and Janet, did admit to performing some pranks, but claimed only "2%" of it was faked.The Conjuring 2 is also (loosely) based on the case.Fire in the Sky is the true and terrifying story of Travis Walton who was abducted by aliens in 1975. Walton was a logger in the Arizona forest. One night, while riding in a truck with six of his coworkers, they encountered a UFO about 100 feet away. Walton got out of the truck and approached the craft. A beam of light struck him, knocking him out.

CREEPY POST !!!! And of course, favorite horror-movie-based-on-real-life-events post!!!

*Thank you to zyuranger for the original image header (which I modified for this post)!!! 

Loosely based on Adolfo de Jesus Constanzo, a serial killer cult leader drug lord. His cult was called Los Narcosatanicos. Costanzo claimed he had magical powers, and used them to help drug dealers, corrupt police, and organized crime bosses. By the time he was making a name for himself, he was using human bones in his spell casting.But raiding graveyards wasn't enough for him, and he moved onto ritual murder. Sadly more than 20 people lost their lives as human sacrifices, including Mark Kilroy, an American pre-med student, who was kidnapped outside a bar during his spring break.Many people witnessed "the beast of bray road" in the 1980s and early 1990s, describing the creature as "bear-like," "hairy biped resembling Bigfoot," and an extremely tall wolf walking on its hind legs. Despite the fact that no one saw the creature transform from a human into a wolf, people still like to refer to this cryptid as a "werewolf."Interestingly, a journalist named Linda Godfrey was sent out to the area to investigate the sightings. While initially skeptical, by the end of her investigation she believed the creature to be true. Her articles were published as a book calledThe true story behind the graphic, disturbing film is the torture and murder of Sylvia Likens, who was only 16 years old. Sylvia's parents were carnival workers; they left her and four siblings in the care of Gertrude Baniszewski. For three months, Baniszewski, Baniszewski's children (one as young as 13), and their neighbors tortured and abused Sylvia.Baniszewski was eventually convicted of first-degree murder. She was sentenced to life imprisonment - but was granted parole and released from prison on December 4, 1985.Walton was missing for five days. During this time, Walton remembers being in a hospital-like room, and was subjected to testing by what he described as "short, bald creatures." He doesn't remember anything else until he found himself back outside. He saw the UFO flying away from him.All of his coworkers took a polygraph, attesting to what they witnessed - and all of them passed, except one which was inconclusive. IMO, it makes no sense why anyone would lie about this.ONTD how are your boobs this morning?



quite painful and not fitting in my bra thanks to my period!

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ONTD how are your boobs this morning



Finally not sore. Stuipid period. But they sure don't look as fantastic as hers do.

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I love Ellen von Unwerth's photography.

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She looks scared.

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Too big. I am also at that annoying stage where I lost a little weight and now my bra band is not tight enough and I'm going to have to get a smaller band, bigger cup bra and I'm already at a 32H, ugh. I really need to figure out a plan to get insurance to pay for a reduction.

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She looks a little ~serious~, but damn, do her boobs look fabulous.

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FABULOUS

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presumably the double covers were planned before he cut her out of his latest movie



Awkward but get that promo Chastain. I love her other photoshoot with Ellen too.

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Amazing, I love my boobs. Go buy good lingerie, this is one area where you should splurge

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suggestions? please

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von unworth is so great. beautiful pic

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Jessica Chastain is one of those actresses who looks like a time traveller, like Ruth Negga. So pretty 



And I'm lucky that my breasts are small and humble, so you don't confuse them with mountains. *yodels in colombian*

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Mte to this whole comment

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le ro lo le lo le~

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Dead @ yodels in Colombian



Edited at 2018-03-22 04:41 pm (UTC)

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aw this line made me feel so bad that I had bigger breasts as a middle schooler than Shaki did as a grown woman

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lmao

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w o w that's a great pic!

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She def got implants, yes?

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I think she just tapes her boobs up + photoshop.



LOL this is a weird thing to know but I've seen her topless in movies and her breasts definitely look natural.

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They're natural, she's always had nice, bouncy boobs.

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ONTD how are your boobs this morning?



I need a new bra.

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10 more minutes and then I can take my bra off

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I'm wearing a wired corselet in which I feel dead sexy, even with sweat pants and pink socks on. Boobs and I are good!

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Link"We were upfront about the source material. We were never doing a biopic of Versace, because that's this amazing success story. We were always doing a crime story, and the crime story is Cunanan.



I missed that post, and I couldve save myself 4 hours of painful TV watching. I loved the woeful spins of Gianni and Donatella but had to quit after the umpteenth time the sociopathic Darren Criss did something sociopathic. I can go visit friends in my hometown if I want to get to know the motives behind (potentially murderous) queer psychopaths.

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i'm calling bull. Then why the hell would they call it 'American Crime Story: VERSACEEEEEEEEEEEEE'.



Admit you couldn't get Edgar Ramirez for more than 2 minutes.

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Haven't watched the finale but it's recorded and I plan to watch it later today. I'm sad it's over. This show really caught my attention from start to finish. I haven't seen season 1 but now I have to watch it. Damnit Ryan Murphy you've done it again

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Darrens portrayal of Cunanan really reminds me of someone I work with. I should probably be worried.

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Yes, you should be worried. My job had a workplace violence seminar a few weeks ago, and while I don't see anything happening at my job, I do worry about other public areas.

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he reminded me of someone i knew too and i stopped hanging out with them lmao. like watching him it just clicked that there are certain creepy vibes/behaviors u just don't want to be around.

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Mess

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I read that title as Gives warning about how killers are male and I was like yep, sounds accurate

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mte

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I have enjoyed the show and was never expecting a Versace biopic. The show is titled American *Crime* Story so of course the assassination itself and the events that led to that would be thoroughly covered.



I found the juxtaposition of Versace/Cunanan to be interesting.



Of course many people have overcome bad childhoods, but I think the combination of that along with Cunanan's sociopathic nature, lack of empathy, and tendency to lie (and thus alienating all of his potential friends) created a perfect storm where he felt alone and that also led to his vengeful rampage.



Though I wonder if Cunanan would have gone down the same path today, given advances in technology. I read an article stating that narcissists now have a lot more avenues (social media for example) to gain attention so he may not have necessarily turned into a murderer. Though even if he did -- advances in technology would have gotten him apprehended far sooner (probably after the first kill or two) versus what happened in '97. He very likely would have never even made it to Miami without being captured.



Interesting things to ponder, but none of it excuses the fact that Cunanan was a monster. I have no sympathy for him, but I do think Darren did a great job portraying his creepy nature very effectively.



/sorry for the thesis!



Edited at 2018-03-22 03:46 pm (UTC)

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The book's author focused a lot of attention on how these crimes were very much a product of the time and that there were several unique variables that wouldn't apply today. I liked that they focused on Jeff Flake because his experience as a gay man was very much indicative of that time and had he not faced these prejudices, shame, bigotry, judgement, etc. he may still be alive and never have met Andrew or been a prime target for his manipulation. These same prejudices and preconceived notions against the Gay community are also responsible for all of the murders after Jeff. The police didn't communicate, they didn't view the victims as anything but deviant and ~asking for it, there was no empathy and there was absolutely no attempt to reach out to the gay community, etc.

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yep. all excellent points, which I've been reading more and more about over the past few weeks because of this show.



Cunanan was so smart though with an alleged IQ of 144. Imagine all of the great things he could have potentially achieved had be actually been willing to work. The quote from Norman Blachford's friend a few episodes back was spot on: "Too lazy to work and too proud to be kept" lol

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I don't know, man. I know it's completely different case, but I think about the serial killer in Toronto and how he was able to prey on so many men because he was targeting members of the gay community as well as MOC. The police haven't gotten any better in dealing with communities that they routinely alienate and that is the gap predators take advantage of.

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I think you mean Jeff Trail, unless the Az senator has something to tell us.

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I enjoyed the series but the finale seemed a bit underwhelming? Compared to last weeks episode which was amazing

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I did wish for more exposure on Antonio and Donatellas fight over the Versace will. I also think they were way too forgiving of Antonio. He loved Gianni but he was definitely no saint and they had an open relationship due to Antonios promiscuous behavior not Gianni.

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Yeah I know it was supposed to be about Andrew but Im a sucker for some good ole family business drama and last weeks episode delivered, especially with Gianni grooming Donatella to take over the company and his ear cancer stuff

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literally no one cared about this season, the ratings were terrible compared to the first season. should have picked another case.

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I wouldnt call this dude a genius if I were ya tho

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Exactly and i do appreciate how the series shed light on how the police force and the publics treatment of the Gay community but also kept focus on what a monster Cunanan was. I thought they did an excellent job



Edited at 2018-03-22 03:59 pm (UTC)

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I just felt bad for everyone involved. So much unnecessary death

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This series was so good and underrated. I had been waiting for years for a good Cunanan story to be done. There were a lot of things i never knew about his life.



Darren deserves an Emmy. He was that good in this

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he was terrifying and juidth light better get a guest starring emmy

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That letter scene with Judith had me in tears for some reason. Shes fucking amazing.

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i just really want a lana turner/johnny stompanato season

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Darren was surprisingly fantastic but something was missing in the series. I didn't hate it but it wasn't as good as the first season.

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There was no humor or campiness like there was in the first season. It was just all dark.

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really, i thought it was extremely campy at times. andrew himself was p campy. but yeah there was a dark cloud hanging over even the lighter moments for sure.

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yeah, i really liked this season but it was almost like everyone was too good at their roles. the first season was much more ensemble so we could sort of enjoy how over the top half of the cast was playing it but in this one, especially since darren did a surprisingly good job (imo at least) and everyone else was very minor in comparison, it was missing the fun (for lack of a better word) of the first season.

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How are the ratings for this? I feel like no one talked about it anymore after a few episodes. Focusing on Cunanan was just depressing and bleh.

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i think that was inevitable given the case they decided to focus on. i don't know anyone irl who watched this season whereas everyone was buzzing about last season. even though gianni was a high profile person at the time, the case didn't seem to captivate the public so there wasn't anyone really clamoring for this season.

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LinkDespite public claims that he was happy with him, President Trump complained privately in recent days that he thought John Dowd was falling short of his duties, a source familiar with his thinking says https://t.co/dzftuVccrp  CNN (@CNN) March 22, 2018





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I'm honestly surprised that traitorous bitch hasn't fired Mueller yet.

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Part of me thinks that he believes he can outsmart Mueller. He has a clear disconnect from reality.

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I'm wondering if he's actually listening to one of his advisors bc firing Mueller would be a terrible move for him and I can only imagine they're telling him over and over again not to do it.

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Mte. It's really odd.

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I mean, good, I guess, but I have given up on thinking anything means anything with this wretched sack of shit.

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This probably means that Mueller will be fired by next week tbh.

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Apparently I have a doppleganger around my town. She's been seen by numerous people. She was at a Simple Plan concert and this douche I hung out with a few times before he ghosted me saw her at a bar. I'm side eyeing the fuck out of her for being at a Simple Plan concert.

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i've been told someone who looks just like me is in my city too! i had a friend who told me she was like, seconds away from going over to chat with this person at a restaurant, lol. like i've even been sent texts asking if i'm at certain places because people see me there??

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this is my biggest fear for some reason lol coherence fucked me up.

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In the Goth LA Scene, I've been told I have one, then again most of us do all look the same, esp with glasses and bettie bangs.



I don't have bettie bangs anymore cuz of this. And it's weird. ME and this GIRL have never been in the same room, and we go to events at different times, and I get messages from friends that the girl is there, but I'm not, and I was there a week ago, and she wasn't.



it freaked us all out.





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my early childhood was terrorized by doppelganger and changeling stories - thanks grandpa!

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Everyone I used to know in Pakistan thinks that I was a model for some company in Karachi because a model who looks like me is plastered all over that city.



I am so incredibly flattered that anyone thinks short, pudgy lil me could be a model.

Made my day tbh.



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that's so fetch

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How very

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I love this tbh.

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You got: Susie Carmichael



You're smart and kind, but you don't take any BS from anyone.



https://www.buzzfeed.com/milogoodman/everyone-has-a-90s-nicktoons-character-that-match-2wiqr?origin=filqui&utm_term=.kvLKBkQ2z#.luNyxQDz9 : Susie CarmichaelYou're smart and kind, but you don't take any BS from anyone.

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You got: Susie Carmichael

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You got: Rocko

You're a little out there, but in a good way.



Yay I love Rocko.

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You got: Susie Carmichael

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You got: Doug Funnie

You have an amazing imagination and a big heart.

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You got: Doug Funnie

You have an amazing imagination and a big heart.

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You got: Gerald Johanssen

No matter where you go, you're the coolest person in the room.



Yaaaaaah

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You got: Doug Funnie

You have an amazing imagination and a big heart.



:))

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You got: Gerald Johanssen

No matter where you go, you're the coolest person in the room.

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I got Doug.

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omg <3

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what a cutie patootie



my friend got a mini goldendoodle puppy this week and she is the cutest little thing

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awwwwwwwwww

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daw

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So precious!

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Anyone got opinions? :)

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Both! :) Thanks - I'll avoid anything nut cheese lmao, that sounds disgusting anyway!

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If you're ok with spending a bit more - Miyoko's mozzarella

If you want to put slices on a burger or a grilled cheese - Chao

Acceptable and tasty - Follow Your Heart or Daiya

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The Chao slices are good.

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not really an opinion but i hate how expensive it is here in belgium

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kite hill, chao, and follow your heart are my favorites. idk why i mentioned yves. i dont think they even make cheese



Edited at 2018-03-22 05:23 pm (UTC)

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Fuck. I forgot the name of that vegan cheese I used to eat and cook with all the time. Omg. Im trying to remember rn

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I feel as though I should know the answer for this since I work for a cheese company lol. I wish I was more adventurous with my cheeses.

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Chao slices on sandwiches are good but I don't like it melted (it gets slimy like Daiya cheese). I haven't found a choose cheese for pizza yet.



Also, I make my own parmesan using cashews, nutritional yeast, garlic powder, and salt.

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happy thursday!

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So sad. I hate people who keep wild animals as pets. I hope whoever she rescued them from is in prison, dead, or living a miserable life.

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same! i just thought it was so sweet to see 3 mega predators being buds and even having their own hierarchy

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OMG, that is hell.

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ugghhh that's seriously

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ugh that's been me all week. yesterday I thought it was Thurs too :(

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that is rude

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buy me something nice, bae

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they gave me $1,100 last week



get that money!

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they gave my money to someone else and even though they've acknowledged the error I still don't know when I'm getting it. I should have gotten it 4 weeks ago. And I know 2 people directly this happened to as well this year.

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Would you rather live in a teeny tiny studio flat haunted by a nice ghost that never shuts up, or live in a sprawling seaside mansion that is haunted by a passive-aggressive ghost that may want to harm you, but cannot?

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seaside mansion. 1-800-555-2368 ghost busters bitch

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The latter. Seaside mansion sounds amazing, and I was raised by Catholics; I can totally handle passive-aggression.

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Mansion. Motherfucker ghost wants some, he'll get some



Lol this reminds me of my grandma screaming SHUT THE FUCK UP at weird noises in her old house (she claimed she had a ghost) and when they stopped she was like YEAH YOU KNOW WHAT'S BEST 4 U

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omg this is so cute lol

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Seaside mansion for sure. I can deal with passive aggressive.

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Seaside mansion. I can't handle a lot of mindless babble, even from the spirit world.

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seaside fo sho

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My brain is basically a passive-aggressive ghost that can harm me, so seaside mansion, please. The ghost and I can fight over who gets to be Mrs. Danvers.

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seaside mansion. can't hurt me? it's all good

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Passive aggressive who may harm me but can't - it would be no different than living with a sibling

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One that never shuts up. I've lived with ghosts who wanna kill you before. No more, thanks.

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Nice one b/c I like tiny studios and I always keep the tv on so I don't feel alone so having a ghost buddy would be nice

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mansion. I've done the passive-aggressive petty ghost thing already. I can handle it.

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The stupid rain out here took out my DirecTV reception. :(



WFH with no TV now.

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I feel like garbage, I have a sore throat and my neck and upper back hurt. When I pick up my cup of tea I feel it in my neck, it's crazy.

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this has been me this week! i'm sorry!

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Im sorry bb :( I hope you feel better soon.

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:( tigerbalm or vicks vaporub could help with that tight feeling? it won't solve it but it might ease temporarily. hot compress? <3

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Cannes Speculation 2018: Intrigue Spikes As Fest Lineup Reveal Looms https://t.co/EuBZpMAhVt pic.twitter.com/lzU48NDHdQ  Deadline Hollywood (@DEADLINE) March 22, 2018





nnn @ widows and destroyer may or may not be being here nnn @ widows and destroyer may or may not be being here

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I'd love to see Destroyer in comp but I don't see it happening because Fremaux hates women directors.



Also GIVE DENIS A MOTHERFUCKING COMP SLOT! I'm soooo going to laugh/cry if she doesn't get one this year after working with perpetual Cannes fave Robert Pattinson. It's just embarrassing for Fremaux at this point.

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idk if its from my meds or maybe weed but for some reason the last few weeks my anxiety has turned into straight rage?? im pissed all the time now idgi



Edited at 2018-03-22 05:03 pm (UTC)

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LinkA gothic mystery, magical realism and secret crushes in Taiwan, and a contemplative drama from the author of Still Alice...



Check out the buzzy new books hitting shelves TODAY: https://t.co/WQ78lltmNc pic.twitter.com/zUy3WRRkVi  goodreads (@goodreads) March 20, 2018









The Broken Girls

Vermont, 1950. There's a place for the girls whom no one wantsthe troublemakers, the illegitimate, the too smart for their own good. It's called Idlewild Hall. And in the small town where it's located, there are rumors that the boarding school is haunted. Four roommates bond over their whispered fears, their budding friendship blossominguntil one of them mysteriously disappears...Vermont, 2014. As much as she's tried, journalist Fiona Sheridan cannot stop revisiting the events surrounding her older sister's death. Twenty years ago, her body was found lying in the overgrown fields near the ruins of Idlewild Hall. And though her sister's boyfriend was tried and convicted of murder, Fiona can't shake the suspicion that something was never right about the case.When Fiona discovers that Idlewild Hall is being restored by an anonymous benefactor, she decides to write a story about it. But a shocking discovery during the renovations will link the loss of her sister to secrets that were meant to stay hidden in the pastand a voice that won't be silenced...A former general, Ike kept the peace: he ended the Korean War, avoided a war in Vietnam, adroitly managed a potential confrontation with China, and soothed relations with the Soviet Union after Stalins death. He guided the Republican Party to embrace central aspects of the New Deal like Social Security. He thwarted the demagoguery of McCarthy and he advanced the agenda of civil rights for African Americans. As part of his strategy to wage, and win, the Cold War, Eisenhower expanded American military power, built a fearsome nuclear arsenal and launched the space race. In his famous Farewell Address, he acknowledged that Americans needed such weapons in order to keep global peacebut he also admonished his citizens to remain alert to the potentially harmful influence of the military-industrial complex.From 1953 to 1961, no one dominated the world stage as did President Dwight D. Eisenhower. The Age of Eisenhower is the definitive account of this presidency, drawing extensively on declassified material from the Eisenhower Library, the CIA and Defense Department, and troves of unpublished documents. In his masterful account, Hitchcock shows how Ike shaped modern America, and he astutely assesses Eisenhowers close confidants, from Attorney General Brownell to Secretary of State Dulles. The result is an eye-opening reevaluation that explains why this do-nothing president is rightly regarded as one of the best leaders our country has ever hadLeigh Chen Sanders is absolutely certain about one thing: When her mother died by suicide, she turned into a bird.Leigh, who is half Asian and half white, travels to Taiwan to meet her maternal grandparents for the first time. There, she is determined to find her mother, the bird. In her search, she winds up chasing after ghosts, uncovering family secrets, and forging a new relationship with her grandparents. And as she grieves, she must try to reconcile the fact that on the same day she kissed her best friend and longtime secret crush, Axel, her mother was taking her own life.Alternating between real and magic, past and present, friendship and romance, hope and despair, The Astonishing Color of After is a stunning and heartbreaking novel about finding oneself through family history, art, grief, and love.Life is good for Jesse "The Lord" Ward. Perfect, actually. He still has the charm, he's in great shape, and he still reduces his wife, Ava, to a pool of desire with a mere look. He's in full control, just how he likes it.But Jesse's perfect world falls apart when a terrible accident lands Ava in the hospital with a life-threatening head injury. Devastated and angry, he feels like his entire existence hangs in the balance. He cannot survive without this woman's love. So when she finally comes around, his shaking world begins to level out. But his nightmare doesn't end there. It's only just begun. Because his wife can't remember the last sixteen years of her life. That's all of him. All of their time together. He is a stranger to her.Now Jesse must do whatever it takes to find her memories . . . and help her fall madly, passionately in love with him all over again.The last person Alice Shipley expected to see since arriving in Tangier with her new husband was Lucy Mason. After the accident at Bennington, the two friendsonce inseparable roommateshavent spoken in over a year. But there Lucy was, trying to make things right and return to their old rhythms. Perhaps Alice should be happy. She has not adjusted to life in Morocco, too afraid to venture out into the bustling medinas and oppressive heat. Lucyalways fearless and independenthelps Alice emerge from her flat and explore the country.But soon a familiar feeling starts to overtake Aliceshe feels controlled and stifled by Lucy at every turn. Then Alices husband, John, goes missing, and Alice starts to question everything around her: her relationship with her enigmatic friend, her decision to ever come to Tangier, and her very own state of mind.Tangerine is a sharp dagger of a booka debut so tightly wound, so replete with exotic imagery and charm, so full of precise details and extraordinary craftsmanship, it will leave you absolutely breathless.Sources: 1By Jason Rantanen

Its an exciting time for Iowa Lawwe have some phenomenal junior faculty members who joined us this past fall and, as of Tuesday, we have a new dean. Kevin Washburn, Regents Professor of Law and former dean of the University of New Mexico School of Law, will be joining the Iowa College of Law as its 18th dean in mid-June.

Dean Washburn has an amazing professional history, including serving as the Assistant Secretary of Indian Affairs from 2012-2016 (a position for which he was confirmed unanimously by the Senate), an AUSA in the violent crimes section of the Department of Justice, and General Counsel of the National Indian Gaming Commission. Im ecstatic about the provosts selection of dean Washburn and am looking forward to seeing where he leads Iowa Law.

You can read more at the Universitys press release: https://now.uiowa.edu/2018/03/university-iowa-names-new-dean-college-lawEuropean leaders are on Thursday set to strongly condemn Turkey's "illegal actions" toward Greece and Cyprus in a blistering denunciation that could upend an EU-Turkish summit in Bulgaria next week. The statement by the 28 European Union member states meeting in Brussels comes after Turkey's arrest of two Greek soldiers, and its promise to prevent the internationally-recognised Greek Cypriot government from exploring for oil and gas. "The European Council strongly condemns Turkey's continued illegal actions in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Aegean Sea and underlines its full solidarity with Cyprus and Greece," the draft conclusions said. The draft "calls on Turkey to cease these actions and respect the sovereign rights of Cyprus to explore and exploit its natural resources in accordance with EU and international law." The statement shows firm support for Greece and Cyprus -- which have so far been among the EU countries most reluctant to endorse a separate EU summit condemnation of a nerve agent attack on a former Russian agent on English soil. The draft urged Turkey to normalise relations with Cyprus, divided since 1974 when Turkish troops invaded and occupied the northern third of the island in response to a Greek military junta-sponsored coup. A standoff over exploiting energy resources in the region risks further complicating stalled efforts to reunify Cyprus after UN-backed talks collapsed last year. In recent weeks Turkish warships blocked an Italian drillship from exploring for gas in the east Mediterranean island's waters. The leaders also expressed "grave concern over the continued detention of EU citizens in Turkey" and called for these issues to be resolved through dialogue with the EU member states. - 'Difficult and sensitive' - Two Greek soldiers were arrested on March 2 for entering a military zone in the northern Turkish province of Edirne and are waiting for their case to be heard. Ties between Athens and Ankara are strained by the Greek failure to extradite eight Turkish troops who escaped Turkey by helicopter on the night of the July 2016 attempted overthrow of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Turkish tensions with Greece and Cyprus are part of a wider plunge in relations since Brussels denounced Ankara over its post-coup crackdown. Turkey has expressed increasing anger over its long-stalled bid to join the EU, mainly over human rights concerns. It was not clear whether the summit denunciation could derail an EU-Turkey summit in the Bulgarian resort of Varna on Monday aimed at improving strained ties. An EU diplomat appeared to suggest Wednesday that the summit would go ahead although it will be "difficult and sensitive" because of the many disputes. The diplomat said on condition of anonymity that the goal would be to keep "pragmatic strategic cooperation." The EU sees Turkey as a strategic partner in the fight against Islamic extremism and its efforts to stop Syrian and other asylum seekers from flooding into Europe and destabilising the bloc under a 2016 aid-for-cooperation deal.The origin of the pnictogen catalysis: The large empty space, the blue hole, on antimony, inside the molecule. Example: molecular model of Sb(C6F5)3, empty space in the molecule in blue. Sb = antimony. Credit: UNIGE

About a third of all Swiss exports result from fundamental discoveries in synthetic chemistry. Certain drugs and perfumes, as well as food and agricultural productsand even Ferrari's famous red colourare derived from new molecular structures invented by Swiss scientists. Chemists at the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, have just discovered that chemical bonds based on antimony, a forgotten element in the middle of the periodic table, yield powerful new catalysts that can be used to stimulate the transformation of a molecule from within. These bonds complement existing interactions such as conventional hydrogen bonds or the more recent chalcogen bonds with sulfur. This finding, published in the journal Angewandte Chemie, could lead to the creation of new, innovative materials. It has triggered a small revolution among synthetic chemists, who had always believed that there was a limit to the number of possible bonds to build new catalysts.

Basic research in chemistry requires creativity. But chemists need specific tools. To induce a molecular transformation, the substrate molecule must enter into contact with an element in the catalyst. Under normal conditions, that bond is hydrogen. But the creative possibilities are reduced when restricted to this single element. Finding new ways to initiate contact between molecules would make it possible to transform them differently, thereby enabling chemists to create new materials. "That's why my team is constantly looking for new bonds for catalysis," explains Stefan Matile, a professor in the Department of Organic Chemistry in UNIGE's Faculty of Science. "After discovering the sulfur-based bond for catalysis, chalcogen, two years ago, we decided to look at another category in the periodic table, pnictogen elements, which are distinguished by their metallic components." Nitrogen, phosphorus, arsenic, antimony and bismuth all belong to this category.

Unearthing new bonds for the catalysis requires innovation. "Research usually focuses on studying the electrons of the elements. We took the opposite approachwe only examined the empty spaces left by the electrons, which are essential for molecular construction, so we could look for possible new interactions," says professor Matile. Heavy pnictogen elements, like ripe fruits, are more flexible and deformable than hydrogen, which is very compact. The empty spaces are thus more accessible and intelligible for the chemists.

Seven elements were chosen by the UNIGE scientists. "Theoretical calculations make for a better visualisation of the empty spaces," says Amalia I. Poblador-Bahamonde, a researcher in the Organic Chemistry Department in the Faculty of Science. "That's why we first carried out computer modeling of the seven elements alone so we could visualise where both the electrons and the empty spaces were located. We then did it again with the molecules to be tested in order to measure the strength of the new bond." The more visible the molecule's empty spaces became, the better the bond works, and the better the element as a catalyst. At this theoretical stage, antimony turned out to be the best of the seven elements tested. The findings encouraged the chemists to focus on elements at the bottom of the periodic table, an area that is little explored in organic chemistry.

Basing their work on the theoretical modeling, the chemists studied the bonds using nuclear magnetic resonance, which makes it possible to visualise the molecules and the transformations in their structure. "Our results were perfectly consistent with the theoretical predictions," says Sebastian Benz, a Ph.D. student in professor Matile's team. "Antimony proved to be ultra-efficient once more, up to 4,000 times faster than the other elements tested in creating a new structure."

Antimony turned out to be a surprise for the UNIGE researchers. It was used as eye makeup in ancient Egypt before falling into oblivion. This research puts the element back into the spotlight, all thanks to the exceptional qualities it showed for molecular transformation. "Antimony is not only ultra-fast but alsounlike other catalysts that act on the molecule's surfaceit works from within. This impacts on the material's entire environment and enables the chemist to be more precise when undertaking the transformations," says professor Matile.

The pnictogen bonds with antimony are the third bonds for catalysis discovered by the UNIGE chemists, following anion- bonds and chalcogen bonds with sulfur. All three introduce new ways of looking at molecular transformations and open up untried prospects. "We don't intend to stop there, of course. We're going to keep on looking for new bonds and ways in which we can make use of them," says professor Matile. The researchers have developed the first enzymes that work with anion- bonds, made in the National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) Molecular Systems Engineering, and the first fluorescent probes that can visualise mechanical forces in living cells thanks to chalcogen bonds with sulfur, made in the NCCR Chemical Biology at UNIGE.

Explore further The hidden side of sulfurThis sensor can detect methane at much lower concentrations than current ones. It relies on nanotechnology developed at the Center for Nanoscale Materials, an Office of Science user facility.

The human nose can distinguish among a trillion different combinations of smells. Even so, there are plenty of gases that our noses can't detect at the level of sensitivity we need. That's where gaseous sensors come in. While some of the first sensors were animals  like canaries in coal mines  we've since replaced them with technologies that can detect miniscule amounts of chemicals in the air.

Just like our own noses, gaseous sensors are essential for safety and comfort. In factories, gaseous sensors can alert managers to chemical leaks or processes running incorrectly. Outside, they measure pollutants, helping cities monitor air quality. In homes, they keep family members safe. Building managers use measurements from humidity and temperature sensors to maximize energy efficiency.

These sensors wouldn't exist without a fundamental understanding of chemistry and physics. This basic knowledge helps scientists understand how and why sensing materials interact with gaseous chemicals. Many cutting-edge materials have promise for use in sensors, if only scientists can learn how to better produce and control them.

"Sensors are where materials research meets environmental detection," said Pete Beckman, a researcher at Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory (ANL).

To set the groundwork for innovation, the DOE Office of Science funds projects and user facilities that support sensors research.

Creating the Materials for Sensing

Like noses, sensors rely on a combination of components to detect and make sense of gases or chemicals in the air. In humans, molecules float up into your nose and bind to special neurons. Neurons then pass the message up to the brain. In sensors, the material inside the sensor acts as a neuron. When that material interacts with a chemical in the air, it may emit light, change its ability to conduct electricity, or shift shape. The materials and electronics around the sensing material communicate that message to the sensor's "brain," whether that brain is a computer or a warning signal like a siren.

Developing sensors' nervous systems and brains is a job for applied science. Fundamental research like the work at the Office of Science's laboratories sets the foundation for that applied science. In particular, this research is expanding scientists' understanding of the materials themselves and how to produce them.

Three types of cutting-edge materials offer huge potential for use in sensors: nanoparticles, two-dimensional (2-D) materials, and metal-organic frameworks (MOFs). Nanoparticles are miniscule particles that are bigger than atoms, but act fundamentally differently from larger particles of the same substance. 2-D materials, like graphene, form sheets only a single atom thick. MOFs are compounds made of metal ions linked together by carbon-based connectors.

All of these materials have humongous surface areas compared to their overall sizes. Because lots of gas molecules can interact with their surfaces, they can be sensitive to tiny amounts of chemicals. In addition, scientists can craft all of these materials into a variety of structures. That customization could allow researchers to create specialty materials to detect a particular chemical.

Zinc Sulfide Nanoparticles

The key to building a better sensor may lie in making its sensing material out of nanoparticles. Unfortunately, it's challenging to manufacture some of the most promising of those nanoparticles. Sensors for hydrogen and other gases already use the material zinc sulfide. Producing zinc sulfide in nanoparticle form could make it cheaper and more effective. But the current process for producing zinc sulfide nanoparticles involves very high temperatures, pressures, and toxic chemicals.

Scientists at DOE's Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) investigated a cheaper, more efficient nanoparticle production process. Researchers supported by both DOE's Advanced Manufacturing Office and Office of Science found that microbes may offer an alternative path forward.

Not just any bacteria will do. Scientists used Thermoanaerobacter, a bacteria that normally lives in extremely hot places with no oxygen. After adding a cheap sugar and chemicals that included zinc and sulfur, the bacteria produced about three-quarters of a pound of zinc sulfide nanoparticles. The process was 90 percent cheaper than current methods.

Growing 2-D Materials

Two-dimensional materials are a special form of nanomaterial that are only a few atoms thick. They have so much surface area compared to their volume that they provide a lot of space for gas molecules to interact and are able to hold a large number of them. But 2-D materials act so differently from their normal "bulk" counterparts that scientists don't have a good grasp on how they grow. Without this understanding, manufacturers can't consistently produce high-quality versions of them.

To tackle this problem, ORNL scientists explored a better way to grow 2-D material gallium selenide (GaSe). As they grew the material in a container filled with argon gas, they found that by changing the temperature and flow of the gas, they could switch back and forth between laying down and taking away atoms. But just discovering how to change back and forth between the two states didn't tell them what was actually happening on the chemical level.

"To visualize what we were doing in the lab, we needed high-resolution, state-of-the-art facilities as well as in-situ diagnosis tools," said Tolga Aytug, an ORNL scientist. To get that level of precision, the team turned to the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences, an Office of Science user facility at ORNL. The tools there helped them see how the processes they used to grow the material affected its structure and properties. Based on that information, they refined their methods to get the characteristics they wanted.

In the future, scientists may be able to combine various 2-D materials into thin, versatile sensors. "The beauty of 2-D materials is that you can stack the different layers together to make some artificial material," said Kai Xiao, an ORNL scientist. These artificial materials would be able to detect a variety of different chemicals instead of just a single one.

Metal-Organic Frameworks

The metal ions and carbon-based connectors of MOFs form open, cage-like structures. A MOF only a few inches wide has an amazing 2.5 acres of surface area. That provides plenty of space for molecules to interact with.

As a result, MOFs can sense minute levels of chemicals. Scientists control which chemicals they want a MOF to detect by changing the size of its spaces, its shape, or how its parts link to each other.

"For a MOF-based sensor to work, it has to be very selective and very sensitive," said Praveen Thallapally, a scientist at DOE's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL).

One benefit specific to MOFs is their ability to accommodate new molecules by changing their structures. PNNL scientists found a MOF with a zinc base could capture cobalt and copper. When these metals exited the molecule, the MOF returned to its original structure. This means after a chemical attaches to a MOF and triggers a sensor, someone could reset and reuse the sensor without needing to replace the MOF.

Much of the ongoing research into MOFs focuses on how to discover and build them. MOFs' traditional starting materials are rigid and difficult to work with. In contrast, polymers (flexible chains of molecules) are easier to control. However, they usually bunch together in dense, disorganized clumps. To draw on the advantages of each, scientists from the University of California, San Diego found a way to use polymers to build MOFs. Using both allows researchers to combine MOFs' consistency and large surface area with polymers' ease of use. The researchers used the hybrid materials to create thin films, which are typically used in sensors.

The next breakthrough in MOF research may come from computer modeling. Using trial and error to figure out which structure will interact best with a specific chemical could take years and be very expensive. In contrast, powerful computer models using machine learning allow scientists to find just the right material in a few days.

PNNL scientists searching for a MOF that could select between xenon and krypton collaborated with the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, an Office of Science user facility at DOE's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. After searching through more than 120,000 options, their computer model pointed to a calcium-based material that excelled at this task.

Connecting the Nose to the Body

A great sensing material is essential, but it won't work by itself. Just as a nose needs a body and brain, sensing materials need to be part of a bigger mechanism. Unfortunately, getting these materials to work together within a sensor is often a challenge.

Printing Nanoparticle Ink

"Ink" made of sensing nanoparticles printed onto paper, plastic, rubber, or fabric could allow engineers to create smaller and more flexible sensors.

"Making particles is one thing. But from those particles, making a functional ink is not trivial," said ORNL scientist Pooran Joshi, in a slight understatement.

One ORNL study tackled the best way to turn copper-based nanoparticles into high-quality ink. By shining a high-intensity light for only a few millionths of a second, scientists fused the nanoparticles together without melting the surface underneath. When the copper-based nanoparticle ink fused together, it created a printed surface. Researchers then used the printed surface as a component in a temperature sensor.

Combining Nanotubes and Nanocrystals

Scientists know that sensors made of nanotubes and nanocrystals could detect as little as one part per million of a gas  if only they can get these two materials to work together.

Ralu Divan and her team at ANL discovered a way to add nanocrystals of zinc oxide  which is already used in sensors  to carbon nanotubes. Sensors that use the two together could be far more sensitive to methane than current technology. By placing the zinc oxide nanocrystals down atom by atom, they created a thin, consistent layer on top of the nanotubes. With this process, companies can precisely control the zinc oxide's thickness and coverage.

To examine the bonds between the nanocrystals and nanotubes, the team relied on the Center for Nanoscale Materials, an Office of Science user facility at ANL. "Having everything in one place has saved a lot of time and we were able to move faster than we expected," said Divan.

As a result, they developed a sensor that could detect much lower concentrations of methane than previous ones. Operators can use it again in seconds instead of minutes or hours.

This sensor improved so much on the existing technology that in 2016, R&D 100 Magazine recognized it as an R&D 100 finalist. The research team is now working with the Array of Things project, a collaboration between the University of Chicago and ANL. As part of the effort to collect real-time data from hundreds of sensors across Chicago, the Array of Things team anticipates using these methane sensors in the future.

Projects such as the Array of Things have the potential to transform cities into networks of sensors, placing digital eyes and noses throughout the built landscape. But these networks and technologies wouldn't be possible without a solid scientific foundation. Nothing may match the human nose's versatility, but research the Office of Science is supporting helps fill in the gaps of our biological capabilities.

Explore further New smart sensor could revolutionise crime and terrorism preventionCredit: AquaTT

The demand for cost-effective desalination is increasing with the growing population and the need for safe drinking water, driving continuous innovation in the sector. REvivED water, a pilot project led by FUJIFILM Manufacturing Europe B.V., is focusing on the potential of electrodialysis for desalination applications, both as stand-alone systems and in combination with established desalination technologies.

Electrodialysis can be added as a pre-desalination step to existing Reverse Osmosis systems, increasing their water recovery; more drinking water will be produced from the same amount of seawater with lower energy consumption and at affordable costs. The REvivED water consortium has recently welcomed Trunz Water Systems AG, a Swiss water treatment company with distribution channels across Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Pacific. Trunz Water will build and operate a system in Spain that demonstrates the benefits of combining electrodialysis with Reverse Osmosis for sea water desalination. The test system is expected to be operational by the end of 2018.

The REvivED water project is also developing small scale stand-alone systems for rural areas powered by solar energy. The main target is off-grid applications in developing countries, where brackish water can be converted into safe drinking water. The first such system is under construction and will be tested from May 2018 onwards in Somaliland, Africa, demonstrating the role of electrodialysis in the provision of quality drinking water for the world's growing population.

Credit: AquaTT

Explore further Standalone system to produce drinking water via solar energy

Provided by AquaTTTo really do something about our massive overconsumption of water, we should limit the strain we put on rivers and freshwater basins. Information on the water use of our products should be transparent and clear. And in the end, individual citizens would have to change their lifestyle fundamentally. Taking shorter showers simply is not enough. Prof Arjen Hoekstra of the University of Twente, wrote an analysis on this in U.N. Chronicle, the magazine of the United Nations, on World Water Day.

Rivers such as the Yellow River and Colorado River don't even meet the ocean anymore, lakes like the Aral Sea and the Lake Urmia dry out: a water crisis has been in the top five risks to the global economy, for many years now. Half a billion people face severe water scarcity, all year round. Two thirds of the world population live under conditions of water scarcity at least one month of the year.

Purple water

"We live in a rainy country, and thus there is no water scarcity, you would say. But 40 percent of our water footprint is outside Europe, often in areas with severe water scarcity," says Arjen Hoekstra, Professor of Water Management at the University of Twente. In particular, for our daily food, a lot of water is needed: a 200 gram steak takes 3000 liter, a 200 gram chocolate bar 3400 liter. Our clothes often come from countries suffering from severe water scarcity, like China and Bangladesh. There, it is even worse: the water isn't just consumed but also polluted: "In Bangladesh, the water appears red, purple or deep blue, depending on the latest fashion in the West."

How do we reach a water footprint that is sustainable, then? According to Hoekstra, we have to put a maximum on the amount of water we extract from the catchments in the world. Dry seasons have to be taken into account, as well as water needed for the natural ecosystem. Water pollution is also a factor: water that returns to the system after it has been cleaned, has no effect on the water footprint.

Apart from this, benchmarks are important, according to Hoekstra: especially for products that require a lot of water, like food, beverages, clothes, flowers and bioenergy. Can the production chain be altered, in order to reduce water consumption? Transparent information about the water foot print of products will help consumers make responsible choices. Save water campaigns are often about taking shorter showers or choosing another programme on your washing machine. In effect, this is just a few percent of our daily water consumption. Another way of living, eating less meat for example, will be far more effective.

40 percent reduction

A fair use of water is needed as well. In the United States and the South of Europe, citizens use twice the amount of water of the global average. Hoekstra: "If we want to stabilize our water foot print, the average annual consumption has to go from 1385 cubic meter to 835 in the year 2100, taking population growth into account." In practice, this implies that the American citizen has to do with only 30 percent of his or her current consumption. Even in countries with water scarcity like China and India, consumption has to be reduced by over 20 percent, while at this moment it is rising sharply. It is a discussion that will give rise to sharp debates, just like the ones on climate changes, but this is the time to start, says Hoekstra.

Prof. Arjen Hoekstra wrote his analysis "How to reduce our water footprint to a sustainable level' in U.N. Chronicle, the magazine of the United Nations that has a special issues devoted to World Water Day, titled "The quest for water."

Explore further Four billion people experience severe water shortage at least one month a year, researchers findMicrosoft co-founder Bill Gates meets Premier Li Keqiang in Beijing last year. Li has pledged China will "strictly protect" intellectual property rights, but the US technology firm has won only paltry compensation from Chinese courts

It took a crucial piece of evidence for Microsoft to win one of its numerous anti-piracy lawsuits in China: A computer seller telling an investigator that he could install a Windows 7 knock-off for free.

But the US software giant's victory was marred by the paltry compensation ordered by the court, illustrating both progress and challenges for foreign firms defending their intellectual property in China.

Premier Li Keqiang pledged this week that China will "strictly protect" intellectual property rights, and special IP courts have been created to hear such cases.

But US President Donald Trump has already made up his mind, and was preparing to unveil on Thursday tariffs on a wide-range of Chinese imports for what the White House called "state-led" efforts to steal US technologies.

Alibaba's Taobao e-commerce website remains on a list of "notorious markets" put out by the United States Trade Representative. As does the Silk Market in the heart of Beijing, where fake Ralph Lauren polo shirts fly off the shelves.

Washington has also long accused Beijing of forcing US companies to turn over proprietary commercial information and intellectual property as a condition of operating in China.

'Mirror copy'

A survey of US businesses by the American Chamber of Commerce shows IP infringement continues to be a top challenge for some in China, citing inadequate laws and the difficulty of prosecuting cases as the most vexing IP issues.

Microsoft argued its case in a civil court, but the country set up special courts in 2014 to handle IP cases in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou

In Microsoft's case in the southern province of Guangdong, the company's lawyers focused on a large computer maker bundling its hardware with a pirated version of Microsoft's operating system in sales on Taobao.

Using the name "Bob Jovi", its investigator purchased a computer from MSI's flagship online store in 2015, asking customer service if the machine came with an operating system.

According to the court documents, the customer service representative wrote back that he could help install Windows 7: "It's a mirror copy of Microsoft's official operating system, just like the real thing, no fee."

After receiving the computer with pirated software, the investigator made two more purchases over the following months to show the bundling was "commonplace" and "sustained", Microsoft argued.

While the court ruled in Microsoft's favour, it set damages at $32,000 after finding the total cost of the infringement undeterminable as Microsoft only demonstrated three instances of piracy. Nor did it award Microsoft all of its legal fees.

In December, after a two-year process, Microsoft lost its appeal for a larger settlement, leaving the software giant paying out more than it was awarded, the court documents show.

"Most important is that the defendant will stop infringing and purchase genuine software," said a lawyer who has represented Microsoft in IP cases, who asked his name not be used. Microsoft declined to comment.

The lawyer said it was not cost efficient to sue all infringers but the cases deterred others.

In Microsoft's case in the southern province of Guangdong, the company's lawyers focused on a large computer maker bundling its hardware with a pirated version of Microsoft's operating system in sales on Taobao

'Whack a mole'

Microsoft argued its case in a civil court, but China set up special courts in 2014 to handle IP cases in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. A dozen other lower-level IP tribunals were opened.

From 2013 to 2017 the number of IP-related court cases doubled, breaking the 200,000 mark last year, said Tai Kaiyuan, a justice of the Supreme People's Court, noting China now has sufficient IP-related legislation.

"We've worked hard to implement them and build the justice system," Tai said, according to state media.

Scott Palmer, an IP lawyer who represents US and European companies at Sheppard Mullin Richter & Hampton in Beijing, said China has made "incredible" progress.

"There are still problems. There is still infringement, sure, but anyone who watches China and speaks honestly about what they see has to admit it has come a long way," Palmer told AFP.

The main area of infringement in China has moved to online platforms like Taobao, where brands face a frustrating game of "whack a mole" to get a range of knock-off products taken down, he said.

Laura Wen-yu Young, a lawyer at the IP law firm Wang & Wang, said the IP courts are a "huge improvement" from the past when judges had no relevant training.

A trademark case can now take just over a year on average to be decided, compared to having to wait up to four years in the past, she said, though there are still "a lot of improvements needed".

Explore further Court rules against Microsoft in China font case

 2018 AFPCredit: University of Michigan

Training workers with soft skills like time and stress management, problem solving, communication and teamwork can have big impacts on the productivity of workers and company profits, says a University of Michigan researcher.

Achyuta Adhvaryu, assistant professor of business economics and public policy at Michigan's Ross School of Business, has studied the impact of soft skills in the garment industry in India over the past five years, and has now launched a foundation to take the message to other sectors in India.

Along with Anant Nyshadham of Boston College, Adhvaryu started the Good Business Lab last year. Anant Ahuja from Shahi Exports, India's largest garment manufacturing factory, is also a co-founder and CEO of the Lab.

"Our goal with starting a foundation is to study interventions that have the potential to impact worker welfare while also promoting the growth of firms," Adhvaryu said. "We incubate new ideas and serve as a platform to disseminate findings from our research."

The textiles and apparel sector employs more than 119 million workers in India, with women making up roughly 35 percent of the workforce. The garment sector is also the largest employer of low-skilled and semi-skilled female workers.

"Gender imbalance persists in many spheres of life, whether it is caring for children, participating in village politics or surfing the internet," Adhvaryu said. "Our research is evaluating whether and how women work, their lives and the lives of their families and communities improve."

The Good Business Lab is planning to establish 10 garment-sector skill enhancement centers for women at rural locations, informing job creation policy at the national level. It has received funding from the U.K. Department for International Development, the Indian government and Shahi Exports for the evaluation and implementation of the project.

The women who complete the training will be offered a job at one of the Shahi's garment factories and the lab will track the women over a period of time to see its impact.

The migration of women from rural to urban areas is also a key focus of research for the Good Business Lab. A research survey is being rolled out to 20 taluks, or subdivisions of districts, in Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh.

Worker retention, especially for migrants is a major industry-wide challenge, Adhvaryu said.

India's massive labor force is second only to China's. However, 90 percent of Indian workers are not formally trained, compared to 47 percent of Chinese workers. Three out of four women in India don't work. By giving women training and skills, the Good Business Lab hopes to influence the conversation at the policy level.

"We hope the study will provide insights that can have sector- and economy-wide implications," Adhvaryu said.

Explore further Soft skills training boosts productivityCredit: The Ohio State University

Stellar grades in college could hurt - rather than help - women new to the job market, according to a new study that suggests employers place more value on the perceived "likability" of female applicants than on their academic success.

Male applicants with high grade point averages were twice as likely to be contacted by employers as women with the same grades and comparable experience and educational background in a study from The Ohio State University.

The picture was even worse for women who majored in math. Male math majors who excelled in school were called back by employers three times as often as their women counterparts.

Furthermore, a survey of 261 hiring managers found that while employers value competence and commitment among men applicants, they are prone to gravitate toward women applicants who are perceived as likable - those who did fine, but did not excel, academically. This helps women who are moderate achievers and are often described as sociable and outgoing, but hurts high-achieving women, who are met with more skepticism, the study found.

"We like to think that we've progressed past gender inequality, but it's still there. The study suggests that women who didn't spend a lot of time on academics but are 'intelligent enough' have an advantage over women who excel in school," said researcher Natasha Quadlin, an assistant professor of sociology at Ohio State. Her study will appear in the April edition of the journal American Sociological Review.

"There's a particularly strong bias against female math majorswomen who flourish in male-dominated fieldsperhaps because they're violating gender norms in terms of what they're supposed to be good at."

The 2,106 job seekers in the study weren't actual people - they were invented for purposes of the research, but the employers advertising for entry-level positions didn't know that. Each "applicant" had a corresponding email address and phone number.

Quadlin created resumes for freshly graduated job seekers of both genders, using names common to the regions where she sent their applications. Some majored in math, an area traditionally thought of as male dominated; some in English, which skews female; and some in business, which is considered gender-neutral according to a survey she conducted prior to distributing the applications.

Quadlin used an online employment database to find entry-level jobs that weren't specific to the applicants' majors. For each job posting she selected, she sent two applications - one from a man and one from a woman. Both applications included similar cover letters, academic history and participation in gender-neutral extracurricular activities.

When she looked at callbacks based on gender alone, Quadlin didn't find a significant difference. But disparities emerged when she compared men and women with GPAs in the A/A-minus range. Men were called back at approximately the same rate regardless of their GPA, but the callback rate dropped for women with higher GPAs.

On the high-achievement end, discrepancies were seen for math majors, but not for business or English majors.

In the second part of her study, the survey of hiring managers, Quadlin found clear evidence of discrepancies in how they perceived male applicants and female applicants when gender was the only thing that set them apart from each other.

The employers gave feedback on how likely they would be to hire an individual based on a resume alone. They also shared perceptions about individuals' personal traits based on the contents of the resumes, including GPAs.

"Men were more likely to get a call back if they were seen as having more competence and commitment, but only 'likability' seemed to benefit women," Quadlin said. And likability, she added, is associated with moderate academic achievement.

The study didn't target high-paying, more-prestigious jobs, and that could change the outcomes, Quadlin said.

Employers should consider biases they may not even realize they have when sorting through applications, Quadlin said.

"Most people probably aren't aware that they're making these kinds of gender-based decisions," she said.

As for women in college or just beyond, Quadlin doesn't advise aiming for mediocrity in the interest of employment. Instead, she said, high-achieving women should value the types of employers who value them.

"These are the people who will be advocates for you throughout your career - those who support you early on and appreciate your intelligence and hard work."

Explore further Employers prefer male managerial potential to female proven track record

More information: Natasha Quadlin. The Mark of a Woman's Record: Gender and Academic Performance in Hiring, American Sociological Review (2018). Journal information: American Sociological Review Natasha Quadlin. The Mark of a Woman's Record: Gender and Academic Performance in Hiring,(2018). DOI: 10.1177/0003122418762291The reclusive pangolin, also known as the scaly anteater, has become the most trafficked mammal on earth due to soaring demand in China and Vietnam

On a winding Hong Kong street where shops keep a dizzying array of dried produce, one highly valued ingredient is still being sold despite being subject to an international ban: deep-fried scales of endangered pangolins.

The reclusive pangolin, also known as the scaly anteater, has become the most trafficked mammal on earth due to soaring demand in China and Vietnam.

While its scales are prized for their supposed medicinal properties in treating everything from acne to liver disease and cancer, its flesh is considered a delicacy.

Trade in the animals was banned in 2016 to protect remaining populations, but AFP found traditional Chinese medicine shops in Hong Kong still selling bags of pangolin scales, stashed away out of sight.

"If you need it for health reasons, I will look to see if I have some," one elderly shopkeeper said, before stepping on a ladder to reach a package hidden behind stacks of boxes.

He brought down a sack of deep-fried scales and named his price: 500 Hong Kong dollars ($65) for a mere 40 grams.

Then he flipped through a ledger of traditional Chinese medicine recipes, showing a type of tea that calls for ground pangolin scales mixed with herbs and roots.

Hong Kong has an unenviable reputation for trading in several controversial, banned or endangered commodities including ivory, shark fin, rhino horn and tiger parts and critics routinely accuse the territory of failing to do enough to stamp out such practices.

A traditional Chinese medicine recipe listing pangolin scales, herbs and roots

The shopkeeper even refuted the need for conservation: "There are still many pangolins in Asia. They're only saying that they are endangered."

An estimated one million of the animals have been plucked from Asian and African forests over the past decade, shunting them onto the list of species at the highest risk of extinction.

Another shop on the same street had an even bigger stash of deep-fried scales, also concealed behind stacks of boxes and on sale for $82 per 40 grams.

"Pangolin can rid the body of toxins. This is really good quality and worth the price," the saleswoman said.

Campaigners say there is no evidence to support any of the medicinal claims attributed to pangolin.

A third shopkeeper did not have scales on display but said they were available on "special order".

A woman walks past a shop on a street popular for dried foods used in traditional Chinese medicine and dishes in Hong Kong

High-speed boat chase

About the size of a small dog, pangolins are almost defenceless in the wild, curling up into a ball when they are scared, allowing poachers to easily scoop them up.

Commercial breeding is unfeasible because pangolins are picky eaters, prone to disease and easily stressed. Their average survival rate in captivity is less than five years compared to 20 years in the wild.

Hong Kong is a top destination for illegal pangolin shipments because there is demand from local residents, and the semi-autonomous city also functions as a first stop for onward smuggling to southern mainland China.

In September 2016, all 182 member nations of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) agreed to move pangolins into the highest protection category banning all trade.

Previously, CITES allowed for trade in pangolins but under strict conditions.

Deep fried pangolin scales next to a bag containing shredded pangolin scales at a traditional Chinese medicine store in Hong Kong

"If Hong Kong was following CITES guidelines and implementing the policy decisions made in 2016, then this would no longer be happening in 2018," said Astrid Andersson, founder of Hong Kong for Pangolins.

Updated sentencing guidelines taking effect in May will increase the maximum jail term for trafficking and possession of endangered species from two to 10 years but the law is rarely enforced and the city has come under fire for some relatively lax penalties for CITES violations in the past.

"A slap-on-the-wrist fine from Hong Kong authorities is not uncommon for smugglers, who generally avoid trafficking their illegal wildlife products straight into mainland China because of much heavier sentences there," said Alex Hofford, wildlife campaigner for WildAid.

Hong Kong's Customs and Excise Department told AFP they are committed to combating smuggling activities and conducts checks on "passengers, cargoes, postal packets and conveyances at various control points and sea boundaries".

The amount of pangolin scales recovered in Hong Kong increased in 2017 after the CITES protection upgradea total of 7.7 tonnes from 21 seizures compared to 1.4 tonnes in 2016 from 24 seizures.

The countries of origin in the shipments were all African, according to government data.

Graphic on pangolins, the world's most heavily trafficked mammals.

In December, customs officers pursued a gang of smugglers for two hours on speedboats in Hong Kong waters after two vessels were detected trying to enter mainland China.

The gang members jumped into the sea and swam ashore to escape, but officers recovered pangolin scales and arrested one Hong Kong resident in connection with the case.

China crackdown

In Guangzhou, the capital of China's southern Guangdong province where pangolin shipments have arrived from Hong Kong in the past, shopkeepers were much more on edge.

At the Qingping Market complex, some traditional medicine merchants walked away when AFP asked about pangolin.

"I've never heard of such a thing!" one saleswoman said, after a neighbouring stall owner referred to her shop as one selling scales.

The amount of pangolin scales recovered in Hong Kong increased in 2017 after the CITES protection upgradea total of 7.7 tonnes from 21 seizures compared to 1.4 tonnes in 2016 from 24 seizures

Another explained: "It is illegal and very hard to get now. No one will sell it to you unless you're already a trusted client."

Hofford said such difficulties in buying scales showed how mainland China is leading Hong Kong on the protection of endangered species.

"The Chinese enforcement authorities have been doing a great job lately smashing smuggling and trafficking rings and raising awareness on protecting these amazing animals," he said.

Explore further Seven tons of African pangolin scales seized in Hong Kong

 2018 AFPThis is a photo mosaic of an edge-on view of the Milky Way galaxy, looking toward the central bulge. Superimposed on it are radio-telescope images, colored pink, of the stretched, arc-shaped Magellanic Stream below the plane of the galaxy and the shredded, fragmented Leading Arm crossing the galaxys plane and extending above it. These gas clouds are being gravitationally pulled apart like taffy from the Small and Large Magellanic Cloudssatellite galaxies to our Milky Waywhich appear as bright clumps within the gas. The source of the ribbon-like Magellanic Stream was uncovered by the Hubble Space Telescope about five years ago, and it was found to come from both Magellanic Clouds. However, the source of the Leading Arm remained a mystery until today. Now, scientists have used Hubbles ultraviolet vision to chemically analyze the gas in the Leading Arm and determine its origin. Because they could not directly sample it, they instead used the light from seven quasarsthe bright cores of active galaxiesto measure how it filtered through the Leading Arms gas. These quasars reside billions of light-years beyond the Leading Arm and act as lighthouses shining through the gas. Scientists looked for the absorption of the quasars ultraviolet light by oxygen in the cloud. This is a good indication of how many heavier elements reside in the Leading Arms gas. The team then compared Hubbles measurements to hydrogen measurements made by the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope in Green Bank, West Virginia, as well as several other radio telescopes. Marked locations indicate the three brightest of the seven quasars used to study the composition of the Leading Arm. Spectra for these three quasars are superimposed at the bottom of the graphic. The vertical axis of each spectrum indicates how much absorption is taking place. The more absorption, the greater the signal strength is. The horizontal axes indicate the velocities of the gas at different points. Blue boxes isolate the velocities unique to the Leading Arm. The oxygen, combined with the hydrogen, provided conclusive chemical fingerprints to match the origin of the Leading Arms gas. The team found that the gas matches the contents of the Small Magellanic Cloud. Credits: Illustration: D. Nidever et al., NRAO/AUI/NSF and A. Mellinger, Leiden-Argentine-Bonn (LAB) Survey, Parkes Observatory, Westerbork Observatory, Arecibo Observatory, and A. Feild (STScI) Science: NASA, ESA, and A. Fox (STScI)

On the outskirts of our galaxy, a cosmic tug-of-war is unfoldingand only NASA's Hubble Space Telescope can see who's winning.

The players are two dwarf galaxies, the Large Magellanic Cloud and the Small Magellanic Cloud, both of which orbit our own Milky Way Galaxy. But as they go around the Milky Way, they are also orbiting each other. Each one tugs at the other, and one of them has pulled out a huge cloud of gas from its companion.

Called the Leading Arm, this arching collection of gas connects the Magellanic Clouds to the Milky Way. Roughly half the size of our galaxy, this structure is thought to be about 1 or 2 billion years old. Its name comes from the fact that it's leading the motion of the Magellanic Clouds.

The enormous concentration of gas is being devoured by the Milky Way and feeding new star birth in our galaxy. But which dwarf galaxy is doing the pulling, and whose gas is now being feasted upon? After years of debate, scientists now have the answer to this "whodunit" mystery.

"There's been a question: Did the gas come from the Large Magellanic Cloud or the Small Magellanic Cloud? At first glance, it looks like it tracks back to the Large Magellanic Cloud," explained lead researcher Andrew Fox of the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland. "But we've approached that question differently, by asking: What is the Leading Arm made of? Does it have the composition of the Large Magellanic Cloud or the composition of the Small Magellanic Cloud?"

Fox's research is a follow-up to his 2013 work, which focused on a trailing feature behind the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds. This gas in this ribbon-like structure, called the Magellanic Stream, was found to come from both dwarf galaxies. Now Fox wondered about its counterpart, the Leading Arm. Unlike the trailing Magellanic Stream, this tattered and shredded "arm" has already reached the Milky Way and survived its journey to the galactic disk.

The Leading Arm is a real-time example of gas accretion, the process of gas falling onto galaxies. This is very difficult to see in galaxies outside the Milky Way, because they are too far away and too faint. "As these two galaxies are in our backyard, we essentially have a front-row seat to view the action," said collaborator Kat Barger at Texas Christian University.

In a new kind of forensics, Fox and his team used Hubble's ultraviolet vision to chemically analyze the gas in the Leading Arm. They observed the light from seven quasars, the bright cores of active galaxies that reside billions of light-years beyond this gas cloud. Using Hubble's Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, the scientists measured how this light filters through the cloud.

In particular, they looked for the absorption of ultraviolet light by oxygen and sulfur in the cloud. These are good gauges of how many heavier elements reside in the gas. The team then compared Hubble's measurements to hydrogen measurements made by the National Science Foundation's Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope at the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia, as well as several other radio telescopes.

"With the combination of Hubble and Green Bank Telescope observations, we can measure the composition and velocity of the gas to determine which dwarf galaxy is the culprit," explained Barger.

After much analysis, the team finally had conclusive chemical "fingerprints" to match the origin of the Leading Arm's gas. "We've found that the gas matches the Small Magellanic Cloud," said Fox. "That indicates the Large Magellanic Cloud is winning the tug-of-war, because it has pulled so much gas out of its smaller neighbor."

This answer was possible only because of Hubble's unique ultraviolet capability. Because of the filtering effects of Earth's atmosphere, ultraviolet light cannot be studied from the ground. "Hubble is the only game in town," explained Fox. "All the lines of interest, including oxygen and sulfur, are in the ultraviolet. So if you work in the optical and infrared, you can't see them."

Gas from the Leading Arm is now crossing the disk of our galaxy. As it crosses, it interacts with the Milky Way's own gas, becoming shredded and fragmented.

This is an important case study of how gas gets into galaxies and fuels star birth. Astronomers use simulations and try to understand the inflow of gas in other galaxies. But here, the gas is being caught red-handed as it moves across the Milky Way's disk. Sometime in the future, planets and solar systems in our galaxy may be born out of material that used to be part of the Small Magellanic Cloud.

The team's study appears in the Feb. 20, 2018, issue of the Astrophysical Journal.

As Fox and his team look ahead, they hope to map out the full size of the Leading Armsomething that is still unknown.

Explore further Astronomers create most detailed radio image of nearby dwarf galaxy

More information: Andrew J. Fox et al. Chemical Abundances in the Leading Arm of the Magellanic Stream, The Astrophysical Journal (2018). arxiv.org/abs/1801.06446 Journal information: Astrophysical Journal Andrew J. Fox et al. Chemical Abundances in the Leading Arm of the Magellanic Stream,(2018). DOI: 10.3847/1538-4357/aaa9bbCredit: European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST)

Combining multiple images and cutting-edge technology is helping forensic science to give law enforcement agencies, juries and the judiciary the clearest ever picture of what happens at the scene of a crime.

The COST programme is bringing law enforcement, academia and industry together to show how improvements in forensic imaging are helping justice to be served.

MULTI-FORESEE - MULTI-modal Imaging of FOREnsic SciEnce Evidence  is a COST Action that promotes how advanced imaging solutions are giving unprecedented levels of detail from crime scenes. One of its members, Dr Chiara Villa of IT University in Denmark , is developing a combination of medical imaging, such as CT scans, and digital technology to produce dynamic animated footage. It will give a precise view of events at a crime scene, including how a victim's wounds were inflicted.

It contrasts to when a small number of photos would be presented to legal teams and juries at criminal trials. Furthermore, large amounts of different evidence were gathered in isolation, leading to challenging and expensive investigations. And information that was either incomplete or too complex when shown to juries could also lead to miscarriages of justice.

Dr Simona Francese of Sheffield Hallam University is the Chair of MULTI-FORESEE, which is linking law enforcement, academia and industry around multi-modal forensic imaging for the first time.

"These three sectors worked in isolation for a long time," says Dr Francese. "This has meant that academic innovation has scarcely led to commercialisation, and industry technologies have not become operational. Furthermore, a lack of communication has meant that end users like the police and the judiciary were ignoring current cutting-edge developments. This Action seeks to use the synergy generated by these three sectors to promote imaging solutions that are operational and commercially exploitable."

MULTI-FORESEE started in early 2017, and began to reap results straight away. It pulls together stakeholders and interested parties from 27 countries, having initially been proposed by members from 14 COST member states. MULTI-FORESEE's diverse, international make-up is one of the Action's strengths, and highlights how COST brings scientists together, wherever they are located.

"The way the end users are engaging is excellent, both in terms of attendance and in terms of remote and live input," adds Dr Francese. "This is vital to the success of this Action."

MULTI-FORESEE's impact has gone beyond Europe, with Dr Francese due to speak at the Australian and New Zealand Forensic Science Society in Perth in 2018. She predicts a bright future with even greater collaboration via MULTI-FORESEE's network helping broaden knowledge of what the latest forensic technology can offer.

"COST's funding will enable us to capitalise on internal and national funding, helping with international scientific collaborations. This means we can write stronger bids to quickly advancethe work of our own researchers, and the work that falls within MULTI-FORESEE's scope."

Explore further Research could help point the finger at drug dealers

Provided by European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST)Credit: TU Delft

Researchers from TU Delft and Rijksmuseum Boerhaave have solved an age-old mystery surrounding Antonie van Leeuwenhoek's microscopes. A unique collaboration at the interface between culture and science has proved conclusively that the linen trader and amateur scholar from Delft ground and used his own thin lenses.

Considering the unrivaled quality of the microscopic images produced by Van Leeuwenhoek, this was always thought to be practically impossible. The prevailing view was that grinding small lenses of such high quality by hand was simply a bridge too far. A new research method helped to solve the mysterynamely, using a neutron bundle from the TU Delft research reactor. The TU Delft Reactor Institute uses radiation to conduct research on materials, for energy and health care purposes.

The microscopes manufactured by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek (1632-1723) featured a single lens and a spike upon which the sample was skewered. The microscopes of Van Leeuwenhoek's contemporaries magnified objects approximately 30 times, but his microscopes were up to 10 times more powerful. How he managed this feat remained a mystery up until now. Was there truth in his claim that he had invented an advanced method of glass-blowing, as he revealed to a group of German nobles in a rare moment of candour in 1711? Or was his precise grinding responsible for the quality of the lens?

Credit: Delft University of Technology

Van Leeuwenhoek's claim resulted in widespread speculation. Innumerable suggestions were made, but a conclusive answer remained forthcoming. The 11 Leeuwenhoek microscopes that have stood the test of time, four of which are in the collection of Rijksmuseum Boerhaave, are too valuable to dismantle. "Van Leeuwenhoek clasped his lenses between two metal plates, which he secured with rivets," explains Tiemen Cocquyt, a curator at the museum who was involved with the research. "In light of their rarity and enormous historical value, dismantling the microscopes is not an option. Aside from a tiny hole a half-millimetre wide, there's no way of accessing the lenses. More than 90 percent is out of view. And that is the way it has been for the last 350 years."

Uncharged particles

The mystery of the Leeuwenhoek lens was solved thanks to non-invasive neutron tomography, which made it possible to create an image of the inside of the microscope without having to break it open. The Reactor Institute Delft is home to a new instrument that operates using this technology. "Tomography involves rotating an object in a neutron bundle in front of a camera, and photographs are taken as the object rotates," explains Lambert van Eijck, a TU Delft researcher. "Neutrons are uncharged particles and pass through metal  in contrast to X-rays, for example. After you have rotated the object through 180 degrees, you can use the collection of 2-D images to construct a 3-D image of the object on the computer."

Credit: Delft University of Technology

A skilled grinder

The resulting image of one of the microscopes from Rijksmuseum Boerhaave leaves no doubt: A Leeuwenhoek microscope does not contain a blown lens, but rather a ground lens. "It would appear that there was no exotic method of production after all, but Van Leeuwenhoek was just exceptionally skilled in grinding tiny lenses," concludes Cocquyt.

Credit: TU Delft. Credit: Delft University of Technology

The Leeuwenhoek microscope was recently chosen as a Dutch showpiece in the design category on a national television programme. Tiemen Cocquyt says, "The instrument opened new worlds, and Van Leeuwenhoek was the first to view bacteria, sperm cells and blood cells, discoveries that he published in the journal of the British Royal Society." With his simple, yet extremely specialised microscope, Van Leeuwenhoek saw what nobody had seen before  or even could have seen. It was another 150 years before others succeeded in building a microscope capable of revealing more.

A question that the researchers would still like to see answered is whether the lens is made from a special type of glass. "That is something that we can research using gamma spectroscopy," says Van Eijck. "You see, neutron tomography makes objects temporarily radioactive. How the radioactivity decays reveals which elements it contains."

Explore further System of flat optical lenses that can be easily mass-produced and integrated with image sensorsCredit: Asociacion RUVID

A team led by researchers Maria Jose Caturla and Carlos Untiedt, from the University of Alicante Department of Applied Physics, have studied the importance of relativistic effects on long-range interactions between objects. They have published their results in two articles from the American Physical Society's flagship journal Physical Review Letters.

The researchers discovered that Albert Einstein's laws of relativity determine the distance at which forces between two objects start acting. "It is surprising to see how Einstein's special relativity influences everyday processes, such as the one whereby two objects touch. We proved that due to this effect, heavier elements, for instance gold, exert forces on others at longer distances than one would expect if it were not for special relativity," physicist Carlos Untiedt explains.

These forces are highly important to understand a variety of processes, including chemical reactions or friction. Untiedt says, "These effects will be essential to quantitatively understand how molecular bonds are formed between atoms."

Einstein's theory of special relativity is useful to plan space travel and plays a key role in everyday technology. For instance, it enables GPS systems to accurately calculate positions. Untiedt says, "Einstein's relativity is relevant in cosmic or global phenomena, but it is also fundamental when it comes to understanding certain properties of matter at a microscopic level. As elements in the periodic table become heavier, electrons move around the nucleus faster, and reach speeds at which relativistic effects cannot be dismissed."

Such is the case of gold, which has an electronic structure similar to those of silver and copper, but a considerably greater atomic mass. "Relativistic effects are therefore greater in gold and determine many of its properties, as, when its electronic properties change, relativity affects atomic bonding, among other things," the UA researcher explains.

"In our study, we have proved how relativity affects the way two gold electrodes come into contact with each other. To that end, we have measured the distance at which a single atom of a metallic electrode is attracted by a second electrode approaching it," Untiedt adds.

These experiments allowed researchers to determine that, in the case of gold, electrodes interact at much longer distances than when silver or copper are involved. "With the help of theoretical simulations, it was proved that the attraction between gold atoms at long distances is mostly explained by relativity." In summary, Untiedt says, "We proved the influence of relativistic effects on the mechanical properties of metals at a microscopic level."

Explore further Einstein's theory of relativity explains fundamental properties of gold

More information: M. R. Calvo et al. Influence of Relativistic Effects on the Contact Formation of Transition Metals, Physical Review Letters (2018). M. R. Calvo et al. Influence of Relativistic Effects on the Contact Formation of Transition Metals,(2018). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.120.076802 C. Sabater et al. Role of first-neighbor geometry in the electronic and mechanical properties of atomic contacts, Physical Review B (2018). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevB.97.075418 Journal information: Physical Review Letters , Physical Review BFlooding in Frankfurt. Credit: Vienna University of Technology

The complex interactions between floods and society are currently being investigated at TU Wien. The economy needs the central government to organise flood protection. Humans have an impact on water sources through dams, regulations and agriculture. And the risk of flooding affects society and economic decisions. The complicated interplay of these factors is being investigated at TU Wien.

The mathematical economist Johanna Grames has developed conceptual models to describe economic decisions for long-term flood protection strategies. Private businesses should not shoulder the responsibility for flood protection alone. In prosperous countries in particular, it makes sense for central government to establish the necessary infrastructure for flood protection.

"The field of hydrology has been investigating the impact of agriculture and building work on the risk of flooding for decades," says Johanna Grames. "But research on the two-way interactions between water systems and society is an extremely young field of research. Implementing these interactions is important to make the right decisions in the long term."

How do people behave if flood risk decreases as a result of dams? Should capital-intensive businesses be located in flood risk areas and increase flood protection, or should they be (re)located to areas that are less vulnerable to flooding? Johanna Grames investigated these questions as part of her Ph.D. thesis supervised by Prof. Alexia Furnkranz-Prskawetz at the Institute of Stochastics and Mathematical Methods in Economics at TU Wien.

Central government and the economy

Mathematical and economic analyses have shown that both central government and the private sector have an important role to play in flood protection. "Companies naturally want to reduce their own risks. The risk depends on the probability that a dangerous flood occurs, and on the capital that is at risk. Therefore, investments made to avert possible flood damage might not pay off, even if they are subsidised by the central government," explains Johanna Grames.

Thus, it makes economic sense for the central government to provide long-term flood protection. "Each party should focus on what they can do best," Grames stresses, "Central government is best at building infrastructure, and private companies can then be sure that their investments are not at high risk."

The calculations also show that government investment in infrastructure is better than direct subsidies to companies. Direct subsidies are not invested in flood protection, but are often invested in measures that merely maximise profit in the short term. On the contrary, if the government invests in flood protection instead of giving subsidies, firms will produce more and consequently earn higher profits in the long term. Flood protection allows for higher economic growth than direct subsidies to firms in flood risk areas.

However, the best investment strategy may not be the same for each country. "Interestingly, from a macroeconomic point of view there are two scenarios, each with a different optimal solution," explains Grames. In rich economies, such as Austria or the Netherlands, substantial investments in flood protection are best to both reduce flood risk and enable economic growth. The existing technology and capital allow a significant reduction of flood risk. In poorer areas, such as the Mekong Delta in Vietnam, where there is very little capital available, it may make more economic sense to boost their economic performance and accept a degree of flood risk instead of pouring resources into flood protection measures which have very little success anyway.

Johanna Grames says, "People can only make the right decisions if they have all the important facts at their disposal. We need transparency and education so that all parties involved can make rational, well-informed decisions, and this can only happen with interdisciplinary cooperation." Thus, a lot remains to be done in the research area of socio-hydrology in the future.

Explore further New study finds flood risk for Americans is greatly underestimated

More information: Johanna Grames et al, Optimal investment and location decisions of a firm in a flood risk area using impulse control theory, Central European Journal of Operations Research (2018). Johanna Grames et al, Optimal investment and location decisions of a firm in a flood risk area using impulse control theory,(2018). DOI: 10.1007/s10100-018-0532-0Emissions from shipping traffic are monitored using physical/chemical analysis through a "sniffer" on the Oresund Bridge. Credit: Jorg Beecken

Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology have shown that between 87 and 98 percent of ships comply with the tougher regulations for sulphur emissions that were introduced in northern Europe in 2015. The lowest levels of compliance were observed in the western part of the English Channel and in the middle of the Baltic Sea.

The highest permitted sulphur content in shipping fuel was drastically reduced at the end of 2014 for vessels sailing in the northern European Sulphur Emission Control Area (SECA) - from 1.00 to 0.10 percent. Before the stricter regulations were implemented, sulphur emissions from the shipping industry were estimated to cause the premature deaths of 50,000 Europeans each year, because sulphur forms particles that are swept inland by the wind.

Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, have developed a groundbreaking method for remotely monitoring emissions from marine vessels, which they've used to investigate the effects of the new regulations. The work has been carried out through the Danish Environmental Protection Agency and the EU projects Compmon and Envisum.

Some of the measurements were taken using an aeroplane flying over Denmark, the English Channel and the middle of the Baltic Sea, while others used fixed measuring stations in the approach to Gothenburg, Sweden, on the Oresund Bridge (between Copenhagen and Malmo) and on the Great Belt Bridge in central Denmark.

Johan Mellqvist, professor of optical remote sensing, heads the work at Chalmers. "We can see differences in how the regulations are followed depending on who owns the vessels," he says. While the vast majority of the ships comply with the regulations, a few shipping companies seem repeatedly to use non-compliant fuel.

"Other patterns we can see are that vessels that only rarely come into these waters break the rules more frequently. In addition, it's more common that vessels emit excessive sulphur as they are leaving the SECA rather than on the way in, when they risk an on-board inspection. Some ships that have installed abatement technique for sulphur, so-called scrubbers, have been observed with high levels on multiple occasions."

One use of remote sensing is to advise port authorities as to which ships they should select for on-board fuel inspections. Such inspections are a prerequisite for taking legal action against rule breakers. Recently, the Norwegian Maritime Authority fined a ship NOK 600,000 (about EUR 63,000) for noncompliance. This was detected by the Great Belt measuring station and reported to the Norwegian Authorities.

Optical sensing of sulphur emissions by plane in the Port of Gothenburg. This gives an initial rough indication that a vessel is releasing too much sulphur; the results must then be confirmed with a physical/chemical analysis. The vessel in the film is not breaking the rules, because the recording was made before the sulphur regulations were tightened. Credit: Niklas Berg and Johan Mellqvist

"In general, the vessels carry both low-sulphur fuel oil and the less expensive high-sulphur oil on board," Mellqvist says. "If they switch fuel well in advance of their passing of the measuring stations, they won't be caught out. That's why aerial monitoring is superior. It shows how much the vessels actually emit when they are out at sea and don't know that they will be monitored."

The aerial surveys show that 13 percent of vessels in the western part of the English Channel, near the SECA border, were in violation of the sulphur regulations in September 2016. For vessels around Denmark, the corresponding figure is 6 to 8 percent, depending on time period. The fixed measuring stations on the approach to Gothenburg, on the Oresund Bridge and the Great Belt Bridge show that between 2 and 5 percent of the bypassing ships use non-compliant fuel. This can be compared to on-board inspections showing non-compliance rates of around 5 percent of the vessels at port. This may indicate that some ships change to compliant fuels too late (when entering the SECA) or change to non-compliant fuels too early (when leaving the SECA), while aiming at compliance at the fixed stations where they expect to be observed.

"There is a strong financial incentive for shipping companies to continue using the prohibited high-sulphur fuel," Mellqvist says. "For example, they can save around 100,000 euros by using the cheaper, high-sulphur fuel on a single round trip between the U.K. and St. Petersburg. The entirety of this journey lies within the SECA."

On Friday, March 23, Johan Mellqvist will present the ship surveillance work at the 19th International Environmental Forum "Baltic Sea Day" 2018 in St Petersburg, describing results from surveillance flights last summer in the middle of the Baltic Sea. The preliminary results show that the compliance rate was 88 percent, which is lower than in the western part of the Baltic Sea.

The method that the Chalmers researchers have developed is based on a combination of established technologies that have been refined and adapted. They include optical remote sensing, physical/chemical analysis using a "sniffer" and monitoring vessels using an Automatic Identification System (AIS). In addition to sulphur, the system can analyse marine emissions of nitrogen oxides and particles, for which the regulations have also been tightened for the shipping industry in recent years.

The method was completely unique when it came, and it is gaining ground in the industry. For example, the Chalmers team has built an aerial surveillance system for monitoring air pollution in Belgium. They've also conducted a pilot project in Los Angeles and maintain regular contacts with China, where the detection technique is about to be implemented.

The inside of the sulphur-detecting plane. The sniffer is the big box on the left. Credit: Johan Mellqvist

Sulphur emissions are above all a health issue, but in the Nordic region, where the bedrock has low lime content, they also contribute to acidification in lakes and waterways. Since 2015, the Baltic Sea, the Kattegat, the Skagerrak, the North Sea and the English Channel have made up a Sulphur Emission Control Area in which shipping fuel may contain no more than 0.1 percent sulphur. The rest of the EU follows the regulations set out by the UN's International Maritime Organisation, IMO, which will reduce the maximum permitted sulphur content in shipping fuel from the current 3.5 percent to 0.5 percent worldwide by 2020.

Reducing sulphur emissions is very costly for shipping companies, no matter how they choose to meet the requirements. There are several alternatives:

Powering ships with the significantly more expensive low-sulphur heavy fuel oil (HFO).

Installing scrubbers on board to reduce sulphur emissions to the necessary degree.

Switching fuels entirely, for example to liquefied natural gas (LNG) or methanol, which the ferry company Stena Line is now testing on a few of its vessels.

The research

The results come from measurements that the Chalmers researchers carried out on the behalf of the Danish Environmental Protection Agency and the recently completed EU compliance monitoring project Compmon. The report from Compmon was published end of December 2017 (http://dx.doi.org/10.17196/CompMon.001 and http://dx.doi.org/10.17196/CompMon.002 )

The EU project Envisum is currently investigating the health benefits created by the new regulations in the countries around the Baltic. Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg University and City of Gothenburg are some of the participants. The project focuses particularly on health effects in Gothenburg, St Petersburg and Gdynia-Gdansksome of the biggest ports in the area, which are centrally located in their respective cities.

Explore further New scrubber does not pollute sea waterSugar-based immune defence: new, more efficient vaccine candidates against pneumoccoci can be produced using synthetic chemistry. The intermediate product shown here arises during the production of a carbohydrate vaccine. Credit: MPI of Colloids and Interfaces/Claney Pereira

More effective vaccines against certain forms of pneumonia and meningitis could soon be available. A team of scientists at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces in Potsdam has identified a synthetic carbohydrate that provides extremely effective protection for animal models  at least  against a particularly dangerous strain of pneumoccoci bacteria, which doctors refer to as serotype 1. Many people who are infected with this serotype, particularly in developing countries, develop meningitis. The synthetic vaccine is based on chemically produced carbohydrates. These are more effective and easier to process than the carbohydrates found in conventional vaccines, which are isolated from bacteria. Working in collaboration with Vaxxilon AG, a start-up whose founders include Max Planck scientists, the researchers are now developing the vaccine for marketing.

The availability of effective vaccines against bacterial infections is more important today than ever: bacteria are developing resistance to increasing numbers of antibiotics and, for reasons of availability and logistics, antibiotic treatment is not a viable option in many developing countries. For this reason alone, over 1.6 million people throughout the world die from infections with the bacterium Streptococcus pneumoniae every year. In Germany, pneumococcal disease kills over 5,000 people annually. The risk of developing a serious pneumococcal infection is highly age-dependent. Children under five, adults over 60 and chronically ill patients are particularly at risk. Pneumococcal bacteria can cause serious cases of pneumonia and meningitis and pose a persistent problem in developing countries in particular. Serotype 1 (ST 1), a particularly dangerous strain of pneumococci, is widespread in sub-Saharan Africa and causes many cases of meningitis there. Indeed, the sub-Saharan region is often described as the 'meningitis belt' as major meningitis epidemics have arisen there in recent decades.

Traditional vaccines provide little protection against ST1 pneumococci

Researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces in Potsdam, the Freie Universitat Berlin and the Charite-Universitatsmedizin Berlin have now developed a synthetic carbohydrate vaccine against serotype 1 pneumococci. This strain is inadequately covered by the available traditional vaccines. The new vaccine provides extremely effective protection against ST1 pneumoccocal infections in rabbits.

Synthetic sugars are components of novel vaccines against infectious diseases such as multiresistant hospital microbes. A method for synthesizing sugars quickly and reliably was the brainchild of Peter H. Seeberger, Director at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces in Potsdam. Seeberger is a pioneer in the glycosciences, a research field investigating the role of sugar molecules. Credit: Max Planck Society

"The synthetic carbohydrate vaccine against pneumococcal infections is very promising and is currently being tested in combination with licensed vaccines," says Peter H. Seeberger, a Director at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces.

To survive in the human body and shield themselves from attacks by the immune system, pneumococci enclose themselves in a capsule consisting of carbohydrate molecules. This is where the vaccines get to work: vaccine developers make the carbohydrate visible to the immune system by attaching it to a carrier protein and this triggers the development of antibodies against the bacterium by the human immune system. However, the 90-plus pneumococcal strains include bacteria whose carbohydrate molecules cannot be attached to carrier proteins without relinquishing their effectiveness as vaccines. "During the processing of isolated carbohydrates it is easy for an important building block like AAT to be altered. As opposed to this, synthetic carbohydrates can be planned down to the last detail and developed accordingly so that nothing goes wrong," says Benjamin Schumann, a former researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces and first author of the study. Synthetic carbohydrates can avoid this problem and are more effective as a result.

A synthetic carbohydrate remains detectable by the immune system

The researchers made use of this fact in the current study. They established that when attaching ST1 carbohydrates to a protein, it is crucial that an unusual amino sugar, which chemists refer to as AAT, remains detectable by the immune system. This building block is altered and deactivated by the traditional vaccine production processes, however is conserved unaltered by the new chemical process. "Our synthetic carbohydrate contains an artificial attachment point that reacts with the carrier protein without interfering with the AAT." In this way, the immune system is focused on the AAT and forms antibodies which recognise the ST1 pneumococci. When tested, the innovative vaccine candidate provided better protection against infections with ST1 bacteria in rabbits than a currently marketed vaccine.

The researchers from Potsdam and Berlin now aim to develop the vaccine to the point at which they can test it on humans in clinical trials. To this end they are collaborating with the start-up Vaxxilon AG, which was established by the Max Planck Society on the initiative of Peter Seeberger and the Swiss company Actelion AG. The company's mission is to develop carbohydrate-based synthetic vaccines for marketing. Peter Seeberger is convinced that this approach will open up new prospects in medicine: "In a matter of just a few years, this new generation of carbohydrate vaccines could be protecting humans against dangerous pathogens."

Explore further A sweet vaccine against pneumonia

More information: Benjamin Schumann et al. Development of an Efficacious, Semisynthetic Glycoconjugate Vaccine Candidate against Streptococcus pneumoniae Serotype 1, ACS Central Science (2018). Journal information: ACS Central Science Benjamin Schumann et al. Development of an Efficacious, Semisynthetic Glycoconjugate Vaccine Candidate against Streptococcus pneumoniae Serotype 1,(2018). DOI: 10.1021/acscentsci.7b00504Telecom Italia said that eight directors had announced their resignation, which it says under the company's bylaws means that the entire board must be re-elected

Eight members of Telecom Italia's board of directors resigned on Thursday, triggering a re-election of the entire board as an activist investor fund has challenged the control over the company by France's Vivendi.

Activist fund Elliott had called for the removal of six board members at a shareholders meeting next month, complaining about Vivendi's management of Telecom Italia (TIM), which like many other former state monopoly operators has had trouble in the face of heightened competition and rapid technological change.

But in a statement released on Thursday, Telecom Italia said that eight directors had announced their resignation, which it says under the company's bylaws means that the entire board must be re-elected.

"In resigning, the aforementioned directors have expressed their hope that this move would help to clarify and provide certainty to the governance of the company," said a company statement.

A shareholders meeting was called for May 4 to elect the new board.

Among those who quit was executive chairman Arnaud de Puyfontaine, who is also Vivendi's CEO, and whom Elliot sought to remove.

"As chairman of TIM, and in the interest of all the shareholders, I want to free the board from the climate of uncertainty that was created," de Puyfontaine told journalists.

He said at the May 4 meeting "shareholders can rapidly elect a new board instead of voting for partial changes as requested by Elliot."

Sometimes called a "vulture" fund, Elliott has regularly invested in companies in difficulty or whose shares it considers undervalued, and often engages in showdowns with those companies' management.

Last week it called for a shake-up at the top "to improve both governance and performance at TIM".

Despite controlling only 24 percent of ordinary shares, Vivendi has managed to gain de facto control over the company through getting its people on TIM's board and senior management.

"Elliott believes that the company is managed in the interest of Vivendi and to the detriment of all other TIM shareholders," it wrote.

It also highlighted the 35 percent drop in the value of the company's share price from when who it calls "Vivendi nominees" joined the board in December 2015 to "the day before our interest in the company was made public".

De Puyfontaine said Thursday the election "gives each shareholder an opportunity to choose between a business strategy capable of creating long-term value and a programme of short-term financial engineering."

Elliott will need to find allies to carry the day at the shareholding meeting as it holds a stake of around 5 percent in TIM.

Explore further China's Tencent to take stake in Ubisoft games maker

 2018 AFPCredit: CC0 Public Domain

A team of researchers with the University of Copenhagen and the Museum fur Naturkunde, Leibniz-Institut fur Evolutions has come up with a new explanation regarding the difference in composition of the planets in our solar system. In their paper published in the journal Nature, they describe their study of the calcium-isotope composition of certain meteorites, Earth itself, and Mars, and use what they learned to explain how the planets could be so different. Alessandro Morbidelli with Observatoire de la Cote d'Azur in France offers a News & Views piece on the work done by the team in the same journal issue.

As Morbidelli notes, most planetary scientists agree that the planets in our solar system had similar origins as small rocks orbiting the sun, comprising the protoplanetary disk, which collided and fused, creating increasingly larger rocks that eventually became protoplanets. But from that point on, it is not clear why the planets turned out so differently. In this new effort, the researchers have come up with a new theory to explain how that happened.

The protoplanets all grew at the same rate, the group suggests, but stopped growing at different times. Those that were smaller, they continue, stopped growing sooner than those that were larger. During this time, they further suggest, material was constantly being added to the disk. Early on it, it appears that the composition of the material was different from the material that came later, which explains why the rocky planets we see today have such differences in composition.

The researchers developed their theory after studying the calcium-isotope composition of several meteorites called angrites and ureilites, as well as that of Mars and Earth, and also from the asteroid Vesta. Calcium isotopes, they note, are involved in the formation of rock, and because of that, offer clues about their origins. The researchers found that isotopic ratios in samples correlated with the masses of their parent planets and asteroids, which they claim provides a proxy for their accretion timeline. And that, they further claim, provides evidence of the different compositions of the planets, as the smaller ones ceased accreting material while the larger ones continued to add material that was different from what had come before.

Explore further Study sheds new light on how Earth and Mars were created

More information: Martin Schiller et al. Isotopic evolution of the protoplanetary disk and the building blocks of Earth and the Moon, Nature (2018). Martin Schiller et al. Isotopic evolution of the protoplanetary disk and the building blocks of Earth and the Moon,(2018). DOI: 10.1038/nature25990 Abstract

Nucleosynthetic isotope variability among Solar System objects is often used to probe the genetic relationship between meteorite groups and the rocky planets (Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars), which, in turn, may provide insights into the building blocks of the EarthMoon system. Using this approach, it has been inferred that no primitive meteorite matches the terrestrial composition and the protoplanetary disk material from which Earth and the Moon accreted is therefore largely unconstrained6. This conclusion, however, is based on the assumption that the observed nucleosynthetic variability of inner-Solar-System objects predominantly reflects spatial heterogeneity. Here we use the isotopic composition of the refractory element calcium to show that the nucleosynthetic variability in the inner Solar System primarily reflects a rapid change in the mass-independent calcium isotope composition of protoplanetary disk solids associated with early mass accretion to the proto-Sun. We measure the mass-independent 48Ca/44Ca ratios of samples originating from the parent bodies of ureilite and angrite meteorites, as well as from Vesta, Mars and Earth, and find that they are positively correlated with the masses of their parent asteroids and planets, which are a proxy of their accretion timescales. This correlation implies a secular evolution of the bulk calcium isotope composition of the protoplanetary disk in the terrestrial planet-forming region. Individual chondrules from ordinary chondrites formed within one million years of the collapse of the proto-Sun7 reveal the full range of inner-Solar-System mass-independent 48Ca/44Ca ratios, indicating a rapid change in the composition of the material of the protoplanetary disk. We infer that this secular evolution reflects admixing of pristine outer-Solar-System material into the thermally processed inner protoplanetary disk associated with the accretion of mass to the proto-Sun. The identical calcium isotope composition of Earth and the Moon reported here is a prediction of our model if the Moon-forming impact involved protoplanets or precursors that completed their accretion near the end of the protoplanetary disk's lifetime. Journal information: Nature

 2018 Phys.orgIn this June 21, 2017, file photo, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg speaks during preparation for the Facebook Communities Summit, in Chicago. Zuckerberg embarked on a rare media mini-blitz Wednesday, March 22, 2018, in the wake of a privacy scandal involving a Trump-connected data-mining firm. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh, File)

In the wake of a privacy scandal involving a Trump-connected data-mining firm, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg embarked on a rare media mini-blitz in an attempt to take some of the public and political pressure off the social network.

But it's far from clear whether he's won over U.S. and European authorities, much less the broader public whose status updates provide Facebook with an endless stream of data it uses to sell targeted ads.

On Wednesday, the generally reclusive Zuckerberg sat for an interview on CNN and several more to other outlets, addressing reports that Cambridge Analytica purloined the data of more than 50 million Facebook users in order to sway elections. The Trump campaign paid the firm $6 million during the 2016 election, although it has since distanced itself from Cambridge.

Zuckerberg apologized for a "major breach of trust," admitted mistakes and outlined steps to protect users following Cambridge's data grab.

"I am really sorry that happened," Zuckerberg said on CNN. Facebook has a "responsibility" to protect its users' data, he added, noting that if it fails, "we don't deserve to have the opportunity to serve people."

His mea culpa on cable television came a few hours after he acknowledged his company's mistakes in a Facebook post , but without saying he was sorry.

Zuckerberg and Facebook's No. 2 executive, Sheryl Sandberg, had been quiet since news broke Friday that Cambridge may have used data improperly obtained from roughly 50 million Facebook users to try to sway elections. Cambridge's clients included Donald Trump's general-election campaign.

Chief Executive of Cambridge Analytica (CA) Alexander Nix, leaves the offices in central London, Tuesday March 20, 2018. Cambridge Analytica, has been accused of improperly using information from more than 50 million Facebook accounts. It denies wrongdoing. (Dominic Lipinski/PA via AP)

Facebook shares have dropped some 8 percent, lopping about $46 billion off the company's market value, since the revelations were first published.

While several experts said Zuckerberg took an important step with the CNN interview, few were convinced that he put the Cambridge issue behind hm. Zuckerberg's apology, for instance, seemed rushed and pro forma to Helio Fred Garcia, a crisis-management professor at NYU and Columbia University.

"He didn't acknowledge the harm or potential harm to the affected users," Garcia said. "I doubt most people realized he was apologizing."

Instead, the Facebook chief pointed to steps the company has already taken, such as a 2014 move to restrict the access outside apps had to user data. (That move came too late to stop Cambridge.) And he laid out a series of technical changes that will further limit the data such apps can collect, pledged to notify users when outsiders misuse their information and said Facebook will "audit" apps that exhibit troubling behavior.

That audit will be a giant undertaking, said David Carroll, a media researcher at the Parsons School of Design in New Yorkone that he said will likely turn up a vast number of apps that did "troubling, distressing things."

But on other fronts, Zuckerberg carefully hedged otherwise striking remarks.

In the CNN interview, for instance, he said he would be "happy" to testify before Congressbut only if it was "the right thing to do." Zuckerberg went on to note that many other Facebook officials might be more appropriate witnesses depending on what Congress wanted to know.

The offices of Cambridge Analytica (CA) in central London, after it was announced that Britain's information commissioner Elizabeth Denham is pursuing a warrant to search Cambridge Analytica's computer servers, Tuesday March 20, 2018. Denham said Tuesday that she is using all her legal powers to investigate Facebook and political campaign consultants Cambridge Analytica over the alleged misuse of millions of people's data. Cambridge Analytica said it is committed to helping the U.K. investigation. (Kirsty O'Connor/PA via AP)

At another point, the Facebook chief seemed to favor regulation for Facebook and other internet giants. At least, that is, the "right" kind of rules, such as ones requiring online political ads to disclose who paid for them. In almost the next breath, however, Zuckerberg steered clear of endorsing a bill that would write such rules into federal law, and instead talked up Facebook's own voluntary efforts on that front.

"They'll fight tooth and nail to fight being regulated," said Timothy Carone, a Notre Dame business professor. "In six months we'll be having the same conversations, and it's just going to get worse going into the election."

Even Facebook's plan to let users know about data leaks may put the onus on users to educate themselves. Zuckerberg said Facebook will "build a tool" that lets users see if their information had been impacted by the Cambridge leak, suggesting that the company won't be notifying people automatically. Facebook took this kind of do-it-yourself approach in the case of Russian election meddling, in contrast to Twitter, which notified users who had been exposed to Russian propaganda on its network.

In what has become one of the worst backlashes Facebook has ever seen, politicians in the U.S. and Britain have called for Zuckerberg to explain its data practices in detail. State attorneys general in Massachusetts, New York and New Jersey have opened investigations into the Cambridge mess. And some have rallied to a movement that urges people to delete their Facebook accounts entirely.

Sandy Parakilas, who worked in data protection for Facebook in 2011 and 2012, told a U.K. parliamentary committee Wednesday that the company was vigilant about its network security but lax when it came to protecting users' data.

He said personal data including email addresses and in some cases private messages was allowed to leave Facebook servers with no real controls on how the data was used after that.

Paul Argenti, a business professor at Dartmouth, said that while Zuckerberg's comments hit the right notes, they still probably aren't enough. "The question is, can you really trust Facebook," he said. "I don't think that question has been answered."

Cambridge Analytica headquarters in central London was briefly evacuated Thursday as a precaution after a suspicious package was received. Nothing dangerous was found and normal business resumed, police said.

 2018 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.Hetq interviewed Avetis Avetisyan, recently released on parole after serving four years and four months in prison on charges stemming from the November 5 case", involving Shant Harutyunyan and others in 2013.

Avetis, one of the 38 individuals detained on November 5, 2013 at the start of a march in Yerevan entitled The Revolution of Values, was sentenced to five years.

Avetiss son was just a couple of days old when he was arrested.

Welcome, Avetis. What are your priorities now that youve been released?

Thank you. Now I must work, to support my family, but we also must liberate the country from Russian colonialism. I am a customs financier by education, but I have never worked as one, and I do not think I will work as long as we have this government. When we have a liberated country, I will go to one of the distant villages of Armenia to engage in agriculture and beekeeping.

If you have started fighting, you have to go till the end, without fear. You have to be ready for everything. The solution, in my opinion, is to have more people fighting for change. The change might take 100 days or 100 years to happen.

People need freedom. But we havent seen freedom - we just read about it in books.

Freedom is when a citizen succeeds in choosing the government and being demanding.

De jure - we are an independent state, de facto - this is not independence. We are just a colony, the slogan of which is Armenia without Armenians.

Colonizers do their best to make people leave Armenia and economically weaken our country. But no one will hand our independence to us  we should liberate our homeland and our people.

You could have been released on parole two years ago, in 2016, but you stayed in the penitentiary four years and four months.

Yes, I could have been back home on May 5, 2016. But at that time, the prison administration refused to present my parole case to the court. Then the law was changed, and I applied to the Court of General Jurisdiction of Kotayk Province. I must say that the prosecutor was against my parole, always objecting, but Judge Vardan Stepanyan decided to release me on parole under the strict control. I think the prosecutor will still appeal.

How did the prosecutor explain his objection?

There was no concrete basis. I did not have any penalty in four years and four months, but I didnt get any encouragement, either. I recently organized a donation of around 400 books to the Sevan prison. I think they should have given me an encouragement, but they did not.

Is there anything good in prison?

Being deprived of liberty nullifies any positivity. I was in Nubarashen Prison for one year and seven months, starting on November 2013. The conditions were severe there.

There were 18-19 people in our cell. We slept in shifts. We only ate bread, and our relatives brought food in shifts. On May 29, 2015 they took me to the Sevan Prison. I am satisfied with the local administration, the attitude of the warden and staff. It was semi-open; I could walk as much as I liked.

There was a gym. I read books. There was a yard in front of our dormitory, and we grew things there. Long visits were every two months, and short ones - once a month. The work was very limited, though, only in the canteen, and it wasnt for everyone.

Were there inmates in the prison who shouldnt have been there?

Of course. There were many. There was a person sentenced for two years for stealing two chickens. He shouldnt have been sentenced. He could have been sent to the border to serve instead.In line with the global trend of energy saving and high performance in power generation, Louisiana State of the U.S., with abundant natural-gas deposit, has broken ground on a new-type 994 MW natural gas-fired power plant, capable of cutting CO2 emission by 40%.

The power plant, dubbed Lake Charles power station, is a CCGT (combined cycle power generation) plant, was built by Entergy Louisiana, a subsidiary of major U.S. power firm Entergy Corp., at cost of US$872 million. It broke ground in Jan. this year and is scheduled for inauguration in June 2020, capable of supplying power to 675,000 households, in addition to creating 1,200 job openings during construction period and 30 long-term posts.

The CCGT system will consist of two sets of Mitsubishi-Hitachi G-series natural gas-fired turbine generators, equipped with booster transformer, capable of big-data analysis and machine learning, which will enable the plant to constantly adjust and enhance performance in operation. It will draw cooling water from ponds under the jurisdiction of the Sabine River Authority, which will be recycled for use, thanks to a closed-loop system, minimizing impact on water resources of the ponds, which only need repletion of vaporized water.

Most new natural gas-fired power plants embrace CCGT system, which transmits waste heat from natural-gas burning to heat recovery steam generator (HRSG) for producing steam which is then used to generate extra power before being sent to water condenser for cooling down. The system can raise heat-engine efficiency to over 51%, up from 34%, thereby boosting power output by near 50%.

The plant will be sited beside Roy S Nelson Plant of Entergy, taking advantage of the latter's existing infrastructure, an arrangement which will cut cost of transmission engineering by US$600 million, achieving total saving of US$1.3- 2 billion within 30 years, on top of slashing of CO2 emission, compared with traditional natural gas-fired power plant.

The plant follows a previous 980 MW CCGT plant built by Entergy Louisiana, which broke ground in Jan. 2017 and is scheduled for launch in June 2019, supplying more than 670,000 households.

(Written by Daisy Chuang; first photo courtesy of Entergy)Labelling the verdicts handed down by a Yerevan court on March 20 in the trial of Jirayr Sefilyan and five other defendants a travesty of justice, some 30 civil society NGOs in Armenia have issued a public statement describing all six as political prisoners and promising to take all necessary steps to free them and all other unjustly imprisoned.

Yerevans Shengavit Administrative Court sentenced Jirayr Sefilyan to ten years and five months imprisonment on charges of preparing to foment public disorder, illegal arms possession, and conspiracy to seize government buildings.

Gevorg Safaryan, another defendant in the case, was sentenced to five years and five months. Sasounik Kirakosyan and Nerses Poghosyan were sentenced to three years and five months. Galust Grigoryan and Hrayr Topchyan were sentenced to three years, and Hovhannes Petrosyan received a two-year sentence.

The NGOs argues that the charges were fabricated and that government prosecutors failed to submit sufficient physical evidence to find the defendants guilty.

The NGOs say that Sefilyan and the others were hounded for voicing oppositionist political views.

The signatory NGOs include the Helsinki Citizens Assembly (Vanadzor), Asparez Journalists Club, Transparency International Anticorruption Center, Social Justice, Dialogue for Peace, Pink Armenia, Womens Rights Center, Yerevan Press Club, Womens Resource Center, Womens Support Center, Vanadzor Citizen Youth Center, Gavar Citizen Youth Center, and Reporters for Human Rights." " Ice floes drift in the Arctic Ocean, the world's smallest, near Spitsbergen, Norway. Arterra/UIG/Getty Images

We humans may spend most of our time on land, but we live in a saltwater-dominated world, with ocean covering 71 percent of Earth's surface. Geographers divide the globe's ocean into named regions, and the smallest of these is the Arctic Ocean.

Even the smallest of the world's oceans is impressively vast. Stretching for about 5.4 million square miles (8.7 million kilometers), the Arctic Ocean measures about 150 percent larger than North America. It's located at the polar region of the Northern Hemisphere and is almost completely surrounded by the continents of Europe, Asia and North America. Frigid conditions keep the Arctic Ocean partly covered in ice throughout the year and entirely covered in winter, although rising global temperatures have led to increased melting of this Arctic sea ice.

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The Arctic Ocean is not only ranked the smallest in size (it's 10 times smaller than the Pacific Ocean), it's also the shallowest. The average ocean depth, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is 2.3 miles (3.7 kilometers), or about 12,100 feet. The Arctic Ocean's average depth, meanwhile, is much shallower  around 0.65 miles (1.04 kilometers), or 3,407 feet. That's like water sloshing in a kiddie pool when compared to the deepest regions of the Pacific Ocean, which have been measured to around 6.85 miles (11 kilometers), or 36,200 feet, deep.

The relatively small size and depth of the Arctic Ocean have led some to resist classifying it as an ocean, instead referring to it as part of the Atlantic Ocean called the Arctic Mediterranean Sea or simply the Arctic Sea. Seas are considered smaller parts of oceans that are partially enclosed by land.

It may seem unusual that some scientists would challenge whether a body of water is an ocean, but debate around the world's oceans extends beyond the Arctic. Historically, the global community has recognized four oceans: the Atlantic, Pacific, Indian and Arctic Oceans. In 2000, the International Hydrographic Organization (IHO), added a fifth: The Southern Ocean. This ocean, also called The Antarctic Ocean, encircles Antarctica and makes up the southernmost waters on Earth, below the 60-degree south latitude.

The addition of the Southern Ocean, while generally accepted, has not yet been ratified because not all members of the IHO have officially accepted the parameters defining the Southern Ocean as a fifth ocean. So how many oceans are there  four or five? For now, the surest answer may be one since, technically, all the world's oceans are in fact connected as a single, vast body of salt water.

Now That's Interesting Unlike in Jules Verne's 19th-century novel, "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" in which depth and distance traveled underwater is marked in leagues  each equivalent to about 3.4 miles (5.5 kilometers)  ocean depth today is typically measured by feet, miles or kilometers.FILE PHOTO - A Phantom drone by DJI company, equipped with a camera, flies during the 4th Intergalactic Meeting of Phantom's Pilots in an open secure area in the Bois de Boulogne, western Paris FILE PHOTO - A Phantom drone by DJI company, equipped with a camera, flies during the 4th Intergalactic Meeting of Phantom's Pilots (MIPP) in an open secure area in the Bois de Boulogne, western Paris, March 16, 2014. REUTERS/Charles Platiau/File Photo

By Fiona Lau and Julie Zhu

HONG KONG (Reuters) - China's SZ DJI Technology Co Ltd, the world's largest maker of drones for consumers, is in talks with investors for at least $500 million in funding ahead of a planned stock market debut, people with knowledge of the matter said.

DJI plans to expand into drones for sectors such as agriculture, energy, construction and for use in infrastructure inspection, two of the three sources said.

With the funding, set to be obtained via a combination of new equity and debt, the firm would be valued at about $15 billion, nearly double its valuation in 2015, they added, declining to be identified as the information was private.

The move adds to a stream of fundraising by companies in the world's second-largest economy as robust investor enthusiasm for Chinese tech stocks continues to push up valuations to heady levels for many firms.

DJI, which commands 70 percent of the global commercial and consumer drone market, wants to finalise the deal in the coming months while a stock market listing either in Hong Kong or mainland China would likely take place next year, two of the sources said.

Proceeds for Shenzhen-based DJI could be between $500 million and $800 million, one person said.

A spokeswoman for DJI said in an emailed statement the company had no announcement to make on fundraising and that it was not planning an initial public offering at the moment. She did not elaborate.

DJI was valued at about $8 billion in 2015 when it raised $75 million from Silicon Valley venture capital firm Accel Partners. Its valuation increased to $10 billion last year, said one person.

Online technology publication The Information first reported some details of DJI's latest fundraising plans on Tuesday.

(Reporting by Fiona Lau of IFR and Julie Zhu in HONG KONG; Editing by Sumeet Chatterjee and Edwina Gibbs)How do lawyers charge for civil litigation in Singapore? This article must be prefaced with the caveat that there is no one way of charging legal fees for civil litigation. Every lawyer is different, every client is different, every case is different. This is why litigators dont have a menuThe post How Do Lawyers Charge for Civil Litigation in Singapore? appeared first on SingaporeLegalAdvice.com.

How do lawyers charge for civil litigation in Singapore?

This article must be prefaced with the caveat that there is no one way of charging legal fees for civil litigation. Every lawyer is different, every client is different, every case is different. This is why litigators dont have a menu of services with prices for you to order from, and you will instead have to approach them for a quote on how much they will charge to litigate your matter.

However, it is possible to elaborate on some of the main factors that do have an impact on how lawyers typically charge for civil litigation.

What are Some Factors Which Affect How Much Lawyers Charge for Civil Litigation?

Practice area(s) involved in the matter

First, different practice areas may have different premiums depending on how rare that particular expertise is in the market.

For example, suing someone for defamation, suing a subcontractor in a construction dispute and taking an action against a tech company for stealing your intellectual property rights might all have very different starting points in terms of fees, depending on the current market for each practice area.

Law firm-specific factors

Second, different lawyers and law firms will often charge vastly different rates for the same work due to factors such as:

The size or location of the firm

The seniority of or demand for a particular lawyer

Whether the lawyer or law firm has a reputation for a particular practice area

Every lawyer and law firm will have a floor of fees which they cannot undercut without losing money after paying their overheads, and that floor will be different in every firm.

Complexity of the matter

Third, a lawyer will try to preliminarily assess the complexity of the matter to take an educated guess as to the amount of time and effort she will need to put into it and how many other lawyers she may need to get to help her.

For example, a simple debt recovery case will likely require far fewer man-hours for a law firm than a huge dispute between the developer of a commercial property and his main contractor where there may need to be rooms full of documents to prepare or review.

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Quantum of the dispute

Fourth, the quantum of the dispute (i.e. how much you are claiming for) will probably have some effect on legal fees.

If the quantum of the dispute is high, the case will be heard in the High Court instead of the District Court and Magistrates Court. The market of High Court litigators is a smaller and more expensive one and having to enter that market will increase your fees significantly.

Separately, a very high quantum is also a general indicator that a lot of work will be required as the client will expect the matter to receive high priority and a lot of attention from the lawyer. Hence, fees will likely be higher.

How Do Lawyers Quote for Civil Litigation?

Some lawyers will give an open-ended hourly rate to take conduct of a matter. Others will give an hourly rate but agree to a fee cap. Others will give an hourly rate but with a rough estimate of the anticipated range of fees to complete a case.

Often, estimates are given in tranches by reference to certain milestones in the case, e.g. exchange of pleadings, discovery, trial, appeal, enforcement. Some may agree to fixed fees for those tranches but this is rare as litigation is, by its nature, unpredictable.

In Singapore, champerty rules prevent lawyers from accepting contingency fee arrangements or win bonuses. In other words, lawyers in Singapore cannot agree to be paid in a percentage of the winnings.

Finally, you should always clarify whether the quote you have been given includes or excludes GST (goods & services tax).

Apart from Professional Fees, What Other Costs Will You Need to Factor in?

Apart from the lawyers professional fees, you also need to factor in other costs such as disbursements.

Consider whether you will need expert witnesses who will charge their own fees for the production of reports and/or attendance at trial to give evidence and possibly travel expenses associated with that.

Other major disbursements include those associated with a large-scale discovery where huge quantities of documents may need to be produced and organised.

You must also take into account the courts filing fees, of which your lawyer will inform you.

Be prepared for orders of costs against you should you lose the case, or cause delay to or lose any ancillary applications along the way. Your lawyer should be able to advise you how much to expect in this regard.

Finally, your adverse party may make certain applications that may result in you incurring costs, such as an application for you to provide security for costs before the matter can proceed. In that case you would need to pay a certain amount of money into escrow to cover your adverse partys costs in the event you lose.

How Do Lawyers Bill for Civil Litigation?

In terms of how lawyers collect their fees, there is a similar diversity of practices here.

Typically, most law firms will need you to pay a deposit of a certain sum into your client account before any work can commence. Sometimes, part of this sum is earmarked for certain disbursements, such as filing fees, with the rest set aside for professional fees.

Thereafter, some firms will send you a monthly bill for the amount of work clocked during the preceding month. If any of these bills go unpaid for more than a few weeks, typically work stops.

Alternatively, some firms will bill whenever the previous payment has been fully used up by the work done since that payment was made.

Other firms will just ask for a few large payments to be made at certain key junctures in the case.

You should discuss billing with your lawyer in advance so you know when to expect bills, and how quickly you are expected to pay them.



Given the vast fee spectrum and diversity of billing practices in the market as well as the wide array of factors that will affect the quotes that various firms will give you, it is advisable to shop around to find a civil litigation lawyer who you are not only comfortable working with, but whose fees are within your budget.

The post How Do Lawyers Charge for Civil Litigation in Singapore? appeared first on SingaporeLegalAdvice.com.On the streets of Cairo's Shubra district, many Coptic Christians -- but not all -- say they will support President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in his re-election bid on Monday. Pro-Sisi banners hang overhead in the neighbourhood where many Copts reside, often showing the president standing alongside Coptic Orthodox Pope Tawadros II. "There is no other man like him... at the moment," Edward Tawfik, a 60-year-old who runs a coffee shop in the area, told AFP as his customers smoked water pipes and played backgammon. Sisi, who as defence minister led the 2013 overthrow of Islamist president Mohammed Morsi, was elected in 2014. Many Christians say he rescued the country by ousting Morsi, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, following massive protests demanding his resignation. The former army chief, who repeatedly calls on Muslim leaders to spearhead a "renewal of religious discourse", rarely misses an opportunity to appear alongside Tawadros. Tawadros has repeatedly praised Sisi. Coptic Church spokesman Boulos Halim told AFP that relations between the two men are excellent, but that there has been no official endorsement of Sisi. "We are not calling on people to vote for a particular person, but just to vote," he said. Sisi is running for re-election virtually unopposed in a March 26-28 poll. His only opponent, Moussa Mostafa Moussa, was relatively unknown before announcing his candidacy in late January. All other presidential hopefuls have been arrested or withdrew from the race. -'Majority' support Sisi- Halim said a "majority" of Christians support Sisi and that the incumbent has worked to tighten security following a spate of attacks on Christians that began in 2016 and claimed by the Islamic State group's Egypt affiliate. While the jihadists, based in North Sinai, mainly target security forces, they have also focused on Copts. More than 100 Christians have been killed in attacks since December 2016, when an IS suicide bomber targeted a small church in the Saint Mark's Cathedral complex, the seat of the Coptic papacy, killing nearly 30 worshippers. Halim also expressed the community's appreciation for the construction of new churches. These include Egypt's largest cathedral, built in the heart of the country's new capital, under construction east of Cairo. The cathedral was inaugurated during this year's January Coptic Christmas mass, attended by Sisi and many of his ministers. Copts, estimated to make up about 10 percent of Egypt's population of 96 million, complain that they are sidelined from senior posts in the justice system, universities, the police, and the military. They also have endured intermittent sectarian attacks, especially in remote and impoverished villages in southern Egypt. - Church 'does not represent all' - After Morsi's ouster, many of his supporters accused the Christian community of supporting the overthrow. They pointed to Tawadros's appearance next to Sisi in July 2013, when the then army chief announced Morsi's removal on television, even though he was also surrounded by senior Muslim and opposition figures. Following the deadly dispersal by security forces of two pro-Morsi protest camps in Cairo in August 2013, dozens of Coptic churches, schools, homes and businesses were attacked. Early last year, hundreds of Christians fled northern Sinai after IS killed several Christians and threatened more attacks. But a lack of public surveys means it is difficult to precisely determine the level of Coptic support for Sisi, according to Nevine Mossaad, a political science professor at Cairo University specialising in minorities in the Arab world. "It's true that the majority of Copts are pro-Sisi, but some of them are against him," he said. "The Copts do not vote as one bloc." Coptic youths are particularly vocal in their opposition to the church's connection to the regime. "The Church does not represent all Christians," said activist Bishoy Tamri, a member of the Maspero Youth Union, a Coptic human rights organisation born in the wake of the January 2011 protests that toppled longtime ruler Hosni Mubarak. "We reject the church's exploitation for political purposes," said Tamri, adding that his organisation's activities, "like many civil society movements", had been curtailed because of a widening crackdown. In Shubra, many of those critical of Sisi preferred to remain quiet, although some did voice concerns over rising prices. "I hope that he (Sisi) will provide security for the simple and poor and will enable them to live decently," said Angie Kirollos, a 21-year-old mother who plans on voting for Sisi.An asylum seeker claiming to be from Afghanistan faces his verdict in Germany on Thursday for the rape and murder of a student that fuelled a backlash against a mass migrant influx. A court in Freiburg was due to announce the verdict and sentence from 0830 GMT in a case that also highlighted shortcomings in cooperation between EU security and immigration authorities. Hussein Khavari, of uncertain age and origin, has admitted to the deadly night-time attack on medical student Maria Ladenburger, 19, in October 2016 in the university town near the French border. Khavari pushed her off her bicycle as she was riding home alone from a party, then bit, choked and raped her and left her on the bank of a river where, an autopsy showed, she drowned. He was arrested seven weeks later after a huge manhunt. Police had found a black hair partially dyed blond at the scene, then spotted Khavari by his hairstyle on security camera footage and linked him to the crime using his DNA. As the crime sparked public anger and revulsion, social media users posted sarcastic "thank you" messages to Chancellor Angela Merkel over her liberal policy that brought more than one million refugees and migrants to the country. Prosecutor Eckart Berger reminded the two jurors sitting alongside three judges that "on trial is a criminal offender and not Germany's refugee policy". - Jailed in Greece - Khavari arrived in Germany, without identity papers, in November 2015, near the peak of the refugee influx, as an unaccompanied minor claiming to be 16 or 17 years old and hailing from Afghanistan. A police officer told the court that Khavari's cellphone and social media accounts suggested he had long lived in Iran. Khavari was sent to live with a German host family in the picturesque town on the edge of the Black Forest, went to a local school, learnt German and received state benefits. It emerged only after his arrest that he had already committed a violent crime in May 2013 in Greece, where he pushed a woman off a cliff on the island of Corfu, leaving her badly injured. He was sentenced there in February 2014 to 10 years jail for attempted murder but was granted a conditional release from Greece's overcrowded jails in October 2015. He fled via Austria to Germany, where authorities knew nothing of his criminal past because Greece had only issued a nationwide warrant, and because no match was detected in an EU-wide fingerprint data base for asylum seekers. Khavari was initially tried as a juvenile offender, but prosecutors have tabled expert opinions that estimate him to be older than 21. One assessment based on X-rays of his bone structure found him to be 22 or 23 years old, while a dental analysis estimated him to be aged between 22 and 29. If a higher age is accepted by the court, the defendant could face a life term under adult criminal law, which usually translates to 15 years behind bars but can be extended for convicts deemed to pose an ongoing threat to the public. Khavari on the second day of court hearings in September admitted to the crime, claiming he had heavily abused alcohol and drugs at the time. He has also claimed that his father died long ago in a battle against Afghanistan's Taliban. The presiding judge, Kathrin Schenk, in December dialled a number on Khavari's cellphone and reached his father, who told her through an interpreter that he was living in Iran.An asylum seeker claiming to be from Afghanistan was Thursday sentenced to life in jail in Germany for the rape and murder of a student that stoked a public backlash against a mass influx of migrants. Hussein Khavari, of uncertain age and origin, was found guilty of the deadly night-time attack on medical student Maria Ladenburger, 19, in October 2016 in the university town of Freiburg. Khavari pushed her off her bicycle as she was riding home alone from a party, then bit, choked and repeatedly raped her and left her on the bank of a river where she drowned. Presiding judge Kathrin Schenk condemned the extreme "lack of empathy" of Khavari, who was handcuffed and wearing a black hooded jumper, before reading out the verdict and sentence, which were greeted with applause in the courtroom. She handed down the maximum sentence of life in prison, which under German law means 15 years behind bars, with no chance of parole and the possibility of "security detention" afterwards if the convict is still deemed to pose a threat to society. Schenk said she saw almost no chance of rehabilitation, telling Khavari that "you would have to become an entirely different human being". Khavari had been arrested seven weeks after the murder, following a huge manhunt in the town near the French border. Police had found a black hair partially dyed blond at the scene, then spotted Khavari by his hairstyle on security camera footage and linked him to the crime using his DNA. As the crime sparked public anger and revulsion, social media users posted sarcastic "thank you" messages to Chancellor Angela Merkel over her liberal policy that brought more than one million refugees and migrants to the country. During the trial, prosecutor Eckart Berger had reminded the two jurors sitting alongside three judges that "on trial is a criminal offender and not Germany's refugee policy". - Jailed in Greece - Khavari arrived in Germany, without identity papers, in November 2015, near the peak of the refugee influx, as an unaccompanied minor claiming to be 16 or 17 years old and hailing from Afghanistan. A police officer told the court that Khavari's cellphone and social media accounts suggested he had lived in Iran. Khavari was sent to live with a German host family in the picturesque town on the edge of the Black Forest, went to a local school, learnt German and received state benefits. It emerged only after his arrest that he had already committed a violent crime in May 2013 in Greece, where he pushed a woman off a cliff on the island of Corfu, leaving her badly injured. He was sentenced there in February 2014 to 10 years jail for attempted murder but was granted a conditional release from Greece's overcrowded jails in October 2015. He fled to Germany, where authorities knew nothing of his criminal past because Greece had only issued a nationwide warrant, and because no match was detected in an EU-wide fingerprint data base for asylum seekers. Khavari was initially tried as a juvenile offender, but the court accepted expert opinions, based on X-rays and dental analysis, that he is now aged between 22 and 29. The defendant had admitted to the crime, but claimed diminished culpability because he was under the influence of alcohol and drugs -- a position which his defence said it would argue again in an appeal. Khavari had also claimed that his father died long ago in a battle against Afghanistan's Taliban. Judge Schenk in December dialled a number on Khavari's cellphone and reached his father, who told her through an interpreter that he was living in Iran.Pop quiz: How many species of big, land-dwelling animals are there in the world? Count all the different kinds of big cats, bears, wolves, wild dogs and other carnivores weighing at least 15 kilos. Add large herbivores -- 100 kilos or more -- such as bison, zebra and deer, along with rhinos, elephants, large apes, giraffes, hippos, wild pigs, tapirs... What's the final tally? The answer, based on this widely used definition of terrestrial megafauna, is 101. That modest number is sure to shrink to double digits, and could continue to diminish at an alarming rate, biologists warn. Three fifths of these iconic creatures are already listed as threatened with extinction by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which tracks the survival status of Earth's animals and plants on its Red List. More than a dozen are in the wildlife equivalent of intensive care, tagged as "critically endangered" or "extinct in the wild". "Conservation scientists will soon be busy writing obituaries for species and subspecies of megafauna as they vanish from the planet," said Bill Ripple, a professor at Oregon State University, and lead author of an appeal published in December -- entitled "World Scientists' Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice" -- signed by more than 15,000 of his colleagues. Just this week, the last male northern white rhino, a genetically distinct subspecies, died at age 45 in a Kenyan zoo. When the rhino, named Sudan, was born, there were at least 700 of its kind still roaming the wild. Conservation biologists, once circumspect, no longer mince words. - Silent savannah syndrome - The Saharan Addax antelope is "doomed to extinction". The Eastern Gorilla, also hunted for meat, is "only one step away from going extinct", as are the startlingly gentle and intelligent orangutans of Borneo and Sumatra. Charismatic species still numerous enough to attract millions of tourists to Africa each year are also in sharp decline. Over the course of the last century, lions, rhino and cheetah populations have collapsed by more than 90 percent; once common giraffes -- newly classified as "vulnerable" to extinction -- are down by 40 percent in just three decades; polar bears are forecast to lose a third of their numbers by mid-century. "We are facing the very real possibility of seeing these titans of nature go extinct in the wild in our lifetime, on our watch," said IUCN Director General Inger Andersen. The broader context is not encouraging. Scientists agree that Earth has entered a so-called "mass extinction event" in which species of all sizes and shapes are disappearing at 100 times the normal rate. The last mass die-off -- the fifth in half-a-billion years -- was 65 million years ago, when an asteroid collision wiped out non-avian dinosaurs. Many forces are pushing megafauna -- especially vulnerable to such pressures -- towards the edge, including habitat loss, poaching, conflict over livestock, and -- in the case of polar bears -- climate change. But the common denominator behind all this is a single cause: humanity's inexorable expansion. "The primary threat to wildlife in Africa is that we are eating it to death," said Paul Funston, senior lion program director for Panthera, a global wild cat conservation organisation. - Time for triage - In some areas, this has led to what conservationists call the "silent savannah syndrome", he added. "There are many protected areas that look absolutely intact -- the woodlands, the birds, the bees are all there," Funston told AFP. "But the big mammals are gone, and that's because they have been eaten." Africa's population, he noted, is projected to quadruple from one to four billion by 2100. Conservationists are, by necessity, optimists -- if they didn't see a silver lining, all their efforts would seem pointless. In certain regions, they have in fact helped species claw back from the brink. But they must also be realists, said Michael Knight, head of the IUCN's African Rhino Specialist Group, and a scientist at the Centre for African Conservation Ecology in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. "Africa is no longer the pipedream people imagine of open landscapes with wild animals running all over," he said in an interview. "We are going to have to face the reality that certain areas are not going to be complete ecosystems." Fifty years down the road, he added, "the challenges are going to be ten -- maybe 50 -- times harder". For Funston, the key is strategic investment in national parks -- studies have shown a direct correlation between dollars-per-square-kilometre invested, and the survival rate of protected species. "We are almost ready for triage," he said. "For lions, it's done -- we have identified 14 key landscapes where conservation money and attention should be spent." "This applies to all megafauna," he added. "We urgently need to get away from our single-species approach to megafauna."By Gabriela Baczynska and Elizabeth Piper

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - European Union leaders backed Britain on Thursday in blaming Moscow over a nerve agent attack on a former Russian spy in England, raising the possibility of additional retaliatory steps by some European countries.

The show of support from the EU, at a time when Britain is grappling with its departure from the bloc, will boost Prime Minister Theresa May, who has also been asking other nations to match her decision to expel Russians over the attack.

In a joint summit statement, the leaders said the EU "agrees with the United Kingdom government's assessment that it is highly likely that the Russian Federation is responsible and that there is no plausible alternative explanation".

After discussions over dinner in Brussels, they added: "We stand in unqualified solidarity with the United Kingdom in the face of this grave challenge to our shared security."

Some countries were considering taking their own action by, for example by following May and expelling Russian diplomats. People familiar with the talks said leaders were discussing a proposal to withdraw the EU's ambassador from Moscow in protest.

May accused Russia of the first known offensive use of a nerve toxin in Europe since World War Two after Sergei Skripal, a former Russian double agent, and his daughter were found unconscious in the city of Salisbury on March 4.

The attack has sparked tit-for-tat retaliation. May's move to expel 23 "undeclared intelligence officials" was followed by similar measures from Moscow, including the closure of Britain's cultural centre in St Petersburg.

Over a dinner of lamb, May called on EU leaders to work together to confront the challenge Russia presented.

"Russia staged a brazen and reckless attack against the United Kingdom," May had said on arrival at the summit.

"It's clear that the Russian threat does not respect borders and indeed the incident in Salisbury was a pattern of Russian aggression against Europe and its near neighbours."

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In the early days after the attack, May won the support of French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and U.S. President Donald Trump when they said they shared Britain's assessment of Russian culpability.

But in Brussels, May had to convince more dovish states including Greece, Hungary and Bulgaria, that they should blame Russia squarely over the attack.

RUSSIAN SPIES

The summit agreement opened the way for EU leaders to discuss future "coordinated action". Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite said she was ready to expel Russian spies and diplomats said Poland could do so too.

Both had held off to see who else would join. Diplomats said several other countries were considering expulsions.

Highlighting the bloc's familiar divisions on how to handle Russia, Slovakia's new prime minister, Peter Pellegrini, said he wanted "constructive dialogue" with Moscow despite the poisoning of the Skripals. British authorities say the pair have been critically ill since the attack by a Soviet-designed, military-grade nerve agent called Novichok.

"The European Union and its member states should also continue to bolster their capabilities to address hybrid threats, including in the areas of cyber, strategic communication and counter-intelligence," the leaders said.

May has also asked fellow European leaders to step up intelligence cooperation to start going after Russian spy networks, diplomats said.

"Britain says there are these networks that organise such things like Salisbury, that these networks exist across our borders and that it would be good to go after them together," a senior EU diplomat said.

Another diplomat said: "There is movement among several willing states to do something together in reaction to Skripal." The person added this could be done by some states individually, so as not to press more reluctant EU member states too hard.

BEEF UP DEFENCES

Russia has offered several different motives to explain the attack on the Skripals, who may have been left brain-damaged, and to absolve Moscow of responsibility. London has labelled that disinformation and distraction.

On Thursday, Moscow's ambassador to London, Vladimir Yakovenko, said that, had Novichok been used, the Skripals would have died and he rebuked British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson for comparing Russia's hosting of the soccer World Cup this summer with Nazi Germany's hosting of the Olympics in 1936.

In Moscow, President Vladimir Putin discussed Britain's "unfriendly and provocative" policy at a session of the national security council, RIA news agency quoted the Kremlin as saying.

Ties between Russia and the West plummeted over Moscow's 2014 annexation of Crimea and support for rebels in eastern Ukraine. Both have triggered rounds of EU sanctions.

"Russia has shown itself as a strategic enemy, not a strategic partner," a British official said.

(Additional reporting by Robin Emmott, Richard Lough, Jean-Baptiste Vey and Andreas Rinke, Writing by Gabriela Baczynska, Editing by Andrew Heavens, John Stonestreet and Alastair Macdonald)Former Bosnian Serbian commander Ratko Mladic on Thursday appealed against his convictions for genocide and war crimes, urging UN judges to acquit him on all charges. Mladic, once dubbed the Butcher of Bosnia, was sentenced to life imprisonment in November for his role in the Balkans war, including the 1995 Srebrenica genocide -- Europe's worst bloodshed since World War II. But in filings to a UN tribunal in The Hague on Thursday, his lawyers asked that "all erroneous findings" be reversed or quashed. "The volume and magnitude of errors in the judgement is unprecedented," they argued, alleging the trial chamber judges had made "basic mistakes," including misidentifying Mladic's position within the Bosnian Serb leadership. - 'No respect for life' - Prosecutors also filed an appeal, urging that the tribunal should find Mladic, 75, guilty of a second charge of genocide in Bosnian towns, on which he was acquitted. In one of their final verdicts, judges at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) found Mladic guilty on 10 counts including genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity such as murder and deportation. But he was acquitted of one charge of genocide in certain municipalities. About 100,000 people were killed and 2.2 million displaced in the 1992-1995 war which erupted as ethnic rivalries tore Yugoslavia apart. Judges said "ruthless" Bosnian Serb forces under Mladic's command carried out "mass executions" and showed "little or no respect for human life or dignity." "For having committed these crimes, the chamber sentences Mr Ratko Mladic to life imprisonment," presiding judge Alphons Orie said as applause broke out in the public gallery. The crimes were "amongst the most heinous known to humankind," he added. But Mladic, who once left a trail of fear across Bosnia, was not present in the courtroom to hear the verdict in November. In dramatic scenes he was dragged out and watched the proceedings from a neighbouring chamber, after accusing the judges in an outburst of lying, when they refused to adjourn the hearing because of his high blood pressure. - 'Unfit' for trial - He has suffered three strokes since being arrested in Serbia in 2011 and transferred to the court in the Hague. His defence team again on Thursday renewed their contention that a neurologist had found Mladic's mental capacity was compromised and he was therefore "unfit to meaningfully participate in the trial." But in his appeal, chief prosecutor Serge Brammertz called on the judges to "re-evaluate Mladic's responsibility for genocide" in the municipalities and "convict" him. The case will now be heard by the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals, set up to hear the last of the cases hanging over from the ICTY. Mladic, former Bosnian Serb wartime leader Radovan Karadzic and ex-Yugoslav president and Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic were among the top leaders, accused of forming a "joint criminal enterprise" to create a Greater Serbia by ridding the territory of Bosnian Muslims and non-Serbs. But Milosevic died before judgement could be passed, suffering a heart attack in his cell in The Hague in March 2006. In March 2016, Karadzic was sentenced to 40 years in jail on 10 charges including genocide. He has also appealed his conviction and sentence, and two days of appeal hearings start on April 23.Chile on Thursday hit back at Bolivian claims that it had stymied talks on vital sea access, and denied it was the "isolationist villain" of a century-old territorial dispute. Landlocked Bolivia has appealed to the International Court of Justice urging UN judges to rule that Chile has a legal obligation to enter into negotiations to end the row. But the Chilean representative told the court in The Hague that La Paz's "claim is unsustainable and it must be dismissed in its entirety." "In 1904 Chile and Bolivia completed a treaty of peace and harmony which fully settled all outstanding territorial issues between our two states," insisted Claudio Grossman. "Chile also recognised in favour of Bolivia, in perpetuity, the fullest and most unrestricted rights of commercial transit in its territory and its Pacific ports." The dispute revolves around moves by Bolivia to restore badly-needed access to the Pacific Ocean, which it lost at the end of a four-year war in 1883 when it forfeited certain rights and territory. The ICJ judges were told on Monday at the opening of seven days of hearings that Bolivia once had 400 kilometres (248 miles) of Pacific coastline which it accessed via the Atacama desert. "Today it has none," former Bolivian president Eduardo Rodriguez Veltze said on Monday. Highlighting the significance of Bolivia's claim, its delegation to the court has been headed by President Evo Morales. He claimed on Monday that the lack of sea access had had imposed "limitations" on the growth of the economy of Bolivia, one of the poorest countries in South America. But Grossman insisted "Bolivia enjoys unrestricted access to Chilean territory in transporting goods in both directions." "At significant cost" Chile had done "more than required" under the 1904 treaty, building three new border complexes, and improving roads and port facilities. "Bolivia is one of the few countries in the world to operate its own custom authorities in another countrys ports," said Grossman. He also disputed Bolivia's contention that Santiago had refused to negotiate a fair resolution, insisting La Paz "repeatedly broke off negotiations and terminated diplomatic relations." "Doing justice cannot be... treating Chile as an isolationist villain on the basis of an entirely uncertain and misleading accusation," Grossman added. The two countries have not had formal diplomatic relations since 1978. Santiago has meanwhile opened its own case against Bolivia over the Silala waterway, which flows into the parched Atacama and which La Paz has threatened to divert.China and the Philippines said Wednesday they will cautiously proceed with discussions on joint oil and gas exploration in the South China Sea, further reversing years of tensions over their competing claims to the region. The two states have long been embroiled in a bitter dispute over the waterway -- with China claiming nearly the entire sea -- but Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has in recent years softened his predecessors' policy of opposing Beijing's claims. The countries will "in a prudent and steady way advance cooperation on offshore oil and gas exploration", Chinese foreign minister Wang Yi told reporters after meeting Philippine Foreign Secretary Alan Peter Cayetano. "The South China Sea disputes will no longer be a source of negative energy blocking the development of bilateral ties," he added. The Philippines said earlier this month it was in talks with a Chinese state firm over joint exploration and extraction in the strategic and supposedly resource-rich sea. Brunei, Malaysia, Taiwan and Vietnam also claim all or part of the sea, and proposed cooperation between Manila and Beijing has caused alarm among neighbouring Southeast Asian countries in the past. Cayetano said at the press conference that China and the Philippines "are finding a common legal framework to conduct joint exploration and surveys". "Our relationship... is in a golden period, and with very positive momentum," he said, adding that the countries "are now ready to face more challenges together". However no further details on the nature of the agreed cooperation were given. Cayetano said last month that Manila would consult legal experts to make sure any accord would not infringe Philippine sovereign rights. Duterte has described a proposed deal as akin to "co-ownership" of contested areas, saying this was preferable to the "massacre" of Filipino troops in a war with China. Duterte's willingness to cooperate with China marks a turnaround from the stance of predecessor Benigno Aquino who accused Beijing of encroaching, occupying, and building structures on reefs and rocks that Manila claims as part of its exclusive economic zone. Aquino won an international arbitration tribunal ruling in 2016 invalidating Beijing's claims, but Duterte set aside the ruling while courting investments and trade from the Philippines' giant neighbour, the world's second-largest economy.China has sold Pakistan a powerful tracking system in an unprecedented deal that could speed up the Pakistani militarys development of multi-warhead missiles.

News of the sale  and evidence that China is supporting Pakistans rapidly developing missile programme  comes two months after India tested its most advanced nuclear-ready intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) with a range long enough to hit Beijing or Shanghai.

Chinese authorities declassified information about the deal on Wednesday.

A statement on the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) website said China was the first country to export such sensitive equipment to Pakistan.

Zheng Mengwei, a researcher with the CAS Institute of Optics and Electronics in Chengdu, Sichuan province, confirmed to the South China Morning Post that Pakistan had bought a highly sophisticated, large-scale optical tracking and measurement system from China.

The Pakistani military recently deployed the Chinese-made system at a firing range for use in testing and developing its new missiles, he said.

India and Pakistan are in a heated race to build up their nuclear weapons capabilities.

Indias January 18 test of its Agni-V ICBM, with a range of more than 5,000km (3,100 miles), is seen as a message that the South Asian giant can deploy a credible nuclear deterrent against China.

While Indias single-warhead missiles are bigger and cover longer distances, Pakistan has focused its efforts on developing multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles (MIRVs), a type of missile carrying several nuclear warheads that can be directed towards different targets.

The US Defence Intelligence Agency officially confirmed in March that Pakistan conducted the first test launch of its nuclear-capable Ababeel missile in January 2017, demonstrating South Asias first MIRV payload.

Although the Ababeel missile has a range of only 2,200km, it can deliver numerous warheads to different targets. The technology has the potential to overwhelm a missile defence system, wiping out an adversarys nuclear arsenal in one surprise attack.

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There are growing concerns that MIRV technology will tip the strategic balance between India and Pakistan and destabilise the subcontinent.

India has so far not found success in building a system that can effectively deliver more than one nuclear warhead at a time.

But outside Pakistan, military experts believe that it will take much more time before the Ababeel missile is ready for use in battle. It is thought to be still at an early stage of development, with plenty of room for improvement.

It has been a long-held notion that Beijing is supporting Islamabads missile development programme. But solid evidence can seldom be found in the public domain, making the CAS statement a rarity.

The Chinese team enjoyed VIP treatment during the nearly three months it spent in Pakistan assembling and calibrating the tracking system and training technical staff on how to use it, according to the statement.

The systems performance surpassed the users expectations, it said, adding that it was considerably more complex than Pakistans home-made systems. It did not reveal how much Pakistan paid for the system.

Chinas hi-tech missile ambitions are marching ahead at warp speed

An optical system is a critical component in missile testing. It usually comes with a pair of high-performance telescopes equipped with a laser ranger, high-speed camera, infrared detector and a centralised computer system that automatically captures and follows moving targets.

The device records high-resolution images of a missiles departure from its launcher, stage separation, tail flame and, after the missile re-enters atmosphere, the trajectory of the warheads it releases.

The uniqueness of the Chinese-made system lay in its use of four telescope units, more than normally required, Zheng said.

Each telescope, with a detection range of several hundred kilometres, is positioned in a different location, with their timing synchronised precisely with atomic clocks. Together, the telescopes provide visual information of unprecedented detail and accuracy, which missile developers can use to improve designs and engine performance.

India can strike anywhere in China with new nuclear-capable missile, government says

Using more telescopes allows the system to track more warheads simultaneously from different angles, reducing the risk of losing a target.

Zheng said he could not elaborate further on the technology nor where in Pakistan it was being used as it involved the countrys defence interests.

We simply gave them a pair of eyes. They can use them to look at whatever they want to see, even the Moon, he said.

High-quality optics are essential in missile development, especially MIRVs, said Rong Jili, deputy director at the Beijing Institute of Technologys School of Aerospace Engineering.

Other types of tracking devices, such as radar, can collect more precise data at longer distances, but the Chinese-made optical system provided the intuitive, close-up look at real-life action that missile developers craved, he said.

Arms race in Asia is cause for concern

Seeing it with our own eyes is completely different from mining dry data. It helps to not only diagnose problems, but also generate inspiration, Rong said.

China has sold Pakistan many conventional weapons, including warships, fighters, short-range missiles, diesel submarines and surveillance drones.

A mainland military observer said the sale of the optical system was no big surprise, as it could not be used directly to develop long-range MIRVs.

They required small nuclear warheads with sophisticated control after re-entry, and it was unlikely China would share such sensitive technology with Pakistan, he said.

China definitely doesnt want a nuclear war breaking out between India and Pakistan. Both countries sit right on our border, said the analyst, who asked not to be identified.

The fallout could drift over Everest and rain over Tibet, and our big cities are within reach of ballistic missiles. Stability is always our top concern.

This article China provides tracking system for Pakistans missile programme first appeared on South China Morning Post

For the latest news from the South China Morning Post download our mobile app. Copyright 2018.

More from South China Morning Post:Ecosystm is a platform for medium sized businesses to get the data they need without emptying the coffers for actionable data

Once a startup gets going, the job of a Founder is to wake up, make a bunch of decisions, go to bed, rinse and repeat.

But in making decisions, a lot of companies dont have access to premiere data. Hamstrung by the reality of startup finances, the market data that corporate CEOs find essential is usually out of their reach.

Think of the Big Four auditing firms (Deloitte, EY, KPMG or PwC)  they have built global empires on their ability to provide CEOs with hyper in-depth actionable information.

They also are far to expensive for the SME.

A new startup in Singapore wants to change that. Called Ecosystm, the recently-launched company hopes that by building a turn-the-knob service for merchants, buyers and analysts they can build a, well, ecosystem that facilitates significantly more affordable market-data services.

Who is helping the rest of them? The 95 per cent of the market, especially with technology being such a huge disrupter in any industry, said Amit Gupta, the Founder and CEO of Ecosystm in a chat with e27.

Amid all this disruption, you have this wave of emerging vendors coming in. Often these are companies that are not very mature, they dont have deep pockets.

Imagine a foreign company who may be looking to make an entrance into Southeast Asia. They can do their best to ask around, maybe read a few white papers and take a trip. But the high-level data  and expert analysis  can run anywhere from US$50,000 to US$100,000.

The problem exacerbates itself because while that is a serious chunk of change for a startup, its not enough spend to get anything besides scratch-the-surface information from the big consultancy firms.

Ecosystm thinks by democratising data and Uberising how analysts can support SMEs, they can build a product that can offer data for as low as a few hundred bucks. (Gupta was hesitant to make the cliche Uber comparison but laughed it off, citing the difficulty of finding another comparable idea).

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The company has received funding from a family office firm and Gupta says the startup has a three-year runway to work towards its vision.

To clarify what Ecosystm offers, lets break it down into the two core pillars.

Pillar One: The technology vendors and sellers

Pillar one is the pain-point  the technology companies who might rely on antiquated and expensive surveys to work around the fact that they cant afford the Big Four.

It also is Ecosystms IP. Gupta wouldnt give away the details of his trade secret, but he claims Ecosystm has developed a technology that would allow vendors to essentially gain access to real-time market data at a fraction of the price. Again, specific price was not revealed, but based on the conversation, an in-depth analysis of one country would cost a company in the low-four-digit range.

It will take us time to get to the point, but the vision is to have enough data, thats so robust in whatever markets we cover, that comes directly from the market. That allows vendors to be able to get a drill down into any market, by geography, by industry. Slicing dicing, said Gupta.

Also Read: Exclusive: Yinglan Tans Insignia Ventures Partners invests US$600K into Vietnamese startup LOGIVAN

While surveys can be helpful, they can also become irrelevant by the time they get published.

Lets take this weeks big story. If a company was planning a social media strategy in the United States, inevitably a survey would analyse how the country uses Facebook. And yet, if they had spent tens of thousands of dollars on commissioning the survey, all that information would be rendered pointless by the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Once Ecosystm truly takes off, the hope is I could look at American social media marketing strategies today and see an update that prices-in the current Facebook debacle.

As with a lot of data-driven companies, the more people use Ecosystm, the better the information. That would then incentivise people to spend more time on the platform, creating a benevolent cycle.

Next, lets take a look at the people who provide the add-value that will hopefully help Ecosystm distill and improve their data functions.

Pillar Two: The analysts

The analysts are the source of the Uberisation comparison.

A fairly typical part of becoming a professional analyst is the unfortunate reality that reaching an elite-level often results in trouble getting promoted. The biggest value an analyst provides to the firm is their expert knowledge  which often is the result of simply being around for a long time. A lot of companies are not going to give up that value to promote someone to the C-suite.

Often, analysts leave and try to start their own consultancy firm with mixed results. The issue is they need data to back up their findings, but without connection to the firm their access can be limited.

Ecosystm wants to help these types of people build up their businesses. The goal is to get them on the platform, provide them with their proprietary data and then the vendors choose from the pool of analysts to write a report.

[Customers] look at our cloud infrastructure, see that is the guy in my region who is rated quite high. Maybe I want to chat with him? said Gupta.

They connect, talk, they get what they want, the analyst gets paid for that. We are giving the analysts a platform to build their own business.

Much like how ride-hailing pitches the driver-partners as building their own little business, Ecosystm is trying to perform a similar task for analysts. Thus, the Uber comparison.

When asked about leakage  if a company likes an analyst, wouldnt they just shift the relationship offline?  Gupta said that its not difficult to imagine this happening once or twice, but eventually the analyst will need access to the data. Plus, the rating system should benefit the honest actors.

I think you have to start from the default stance [of assuming] people are honest. I think if someone rips people off, they will eventually drop off, said Gupta.

So [lets say] an analyst does some work with our data and doesnt tell us they have done some work. The thing is, where are they going to source the data? It might work one time, but customers need consistency. That ethics system still exists in the marketplace. Im not too worried about that.

Also Read: [Podcast] The Story of You with Postr CEO Milan Reinartz

Moving forward, the startup wants to build the largest pool of on-demand analysts in the industry. If successful, they hope they are the only platform that provides in-depth analysis of markets that, at their price point, are often only superficially covered.

Also, ecosystm has plans to go global fairly quickly with the logic that its crucial to be able to provide information for practically any question. As the startup is young, this means building out APAC and making its first foray into the US fairly quickly.

If the idea that data is the new oil is true, Ecosystm one day hopes to be the gas station pump for SMEs across the world. They can visit the site, pay for however much, or little, they want and use the information to move forward with their business.

If it bears out, maybe we can think of the analysts as the gas station attendants selling those yummy candy bars and helping people with directions to the nearby tourist attraction.



The post If data is oil, Singapore startup Ecosystm plans to be the gas station for the tech industry appeared first on e27.A Facebook logo in Frankfurt, Germany September 16, 2017. REUTERS/Ralph Orlowski

Law and Home Affairs Minister K Shanmugam questioned Facebook in Parliament on Thursday (22 March) on why the social media giant had not been open when it first found out about a massive breach of its user data arising from the Cambridge Analytica (CA) saga.

Shanmugams pointed questions directed at Simon Milner, Facebooks vice-president of public policy for Asia-Pacific, during the hearing for the Select Committee on Deliberate Online Falsehoods come after media reports in the past week revealed that personal data of 50 million Facebook users were obtained by CA, a UK analytics firm, in part to help Donald Trump in his 2016 US presidential election campaign.

In 2014, CA hired a researcher, Aleksandr Kogan, to gather basic profile information of Facebook users along with what they chose to Like. Some 270,000 Facebook users downloaded Kogans app and the researcher was able to collect data of 50 million people.

Kogan later passed the information without Facebooks knowledge to CA, which then used it to reach voters with hyper-targeted messaging and advertising based on their psychological profiles.

Pointing out that the saga constituted a major breach of Facebooks policy, which the company discovered in 2015, Shanmugam said, You do not inform the users (then), which is very odd, and inexplicable and one would say, inexcusable. You do not tell the public about it. And its contrary to everything you have stated about the importance of protecting data, and protecting users data.

We then fast forward through last year, nothing. This year, UK parliament, questions were asked. From my perspective, those questions were capable of being answered only in one way, which is to come out with the truth. And that didnt happen, said Shanmugam, referring to Milners answers to a UK select committee on fake news on 8 February this year.

Denying any wrongdoing and dishonesty in answering to the UK committee, Milner said that in hindsight he could have given a fuller answer but could not do so given the context of the hearing then.

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I felt that at the time I was giving truthful answers to questions. Now in hindsight, especially given recent events, I wish I had said more but at that timeit is really only the events of the last few days and the things that have come to light, said Milner.

During the sometimes fiery exchange, Milner insisted that he was being open in his answers to Shanmugam and the Select Committee and questioned the minister on the relevance of his questions concerning developments outside of Singapore.

This prompted a strong response from Shanmugam who said the questions on exchanges between Facebook and other jurisdictions were very relevant to Singapore in establishing the degree of trust the government could place in Facebook.

Facebook can be trusted to answer questions when asked, Facebook can be trusted to be a reliable partner, that the government of Singapore can depend on Facebook to tell us the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

If you thought that you could turn up here today, not answer questions on CA, and explain (away) your answers today with your answers five weeks ago to a different parliament. We are all sovereign parliaments but we look at your conduct all over the world, Shanmugam said.In his remark during the 39th commencement exercises for Philippine National Police Academy (PNPA), President Rodrigo Duterte said that the country will no longer participate in all US-led wars.

MANILA, Philippines  President Rodrigo Duterte has ordered a halt on the countrys participation in all expeditions led by the United States (US).

According to the President, the country has nothing to benefit from those missions.

The Chief Executive cited as an example the Philippines participation in the United States efforts to free Kuwait from the control of Iraq during the Gulf war in 1991.

The Philippines sent Filipino troops to help in the war that freed Kuwait, but the President lamented, the now independent Arab nation allows the abuse of Filipino workers there.

I am addressing America right now, whatever expeditions that you will conduct, any wars that you will fight in any countries, count us out. We benefit nothing all these years of sacrifice except brutality, said Duterte.

The President also noted that the Philippines can stand on its own; further arguing that what is important is for the country to maintain its dignity.

He added that invasions such as during the Spanish and American colonial era should not happen again.

Tama na po yun (Thats enough). You have had your fill. Do not ask for more, said the President.

At the end of his speech during the 39th commencement exercises for Philippine National Police Academy (PNPA), the President said the Philippines will no longer participate in any war by the US under his term.

Unless we are threatened directly, there will be no more joint expeditions at least sa panahon ko (during my term), he said.  Rosalie Coz | UNTV News & Rescue

The post PH to withdraw participation in all US-led expeditions appeared first on UNTV News.The leader of Romania's ruling Social Democrats party (PSD), Liviu Dragnea, claimed to be innocent on Wednesday during his trial over the creation of fictitious jobs. "I reject categorically these accusations and declare myself innocent," he told the High Court of Cassation and Justice in Bucharest. Dragnea is accused of "abuse of power" between 2006 and 2012 by creating fake jobs when he was chairman of the departmental council in Teleorman. Due to a previous two-year suspended prison sentence for electoral fraud, Dragnea could not take up the post of prime minister after the PSD won legislative elections at the end of 2016. His appearance at Wednesday's hearing, which lasted more than seven hours, was his first since the trial opened in January 2017. Dragnea rejected the accusations, dismissing them as "mere statements, gossip and rumours". Prosecutors are seeking damages of 24,000 euros ($30,000). Dragnea has been criticised for attempting to modify anti-corruption legislation to lighten his criminal record and remove obstacles blocking his entry into government. In the hours following the opening of his trial in 2017, the government adopted a controversial reform of the penal code. The revision adjusted the threshold of sanction for convictions of abuse of power, meaning Dragnea could only be sent to prison over a loss of more than 44,000 euros if found guilty. The decree provoked a wave of protest forcing the government to backtrack. Dragnea is also suspected of embezzling European funds in another investigation and his assets have been frozen. The next hearing, which could be the last before the verdict, was set for April 25. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Viorica Dancila on Wednesday wrote to European Commission President Jean-Claude Junker questioning Brussels' supposed "interference in the running of justice" in Romania.Saudi Arabia and America must pursue "urgent efforts" to bring a peaceful end to Yemen's war, US Defense Secretary Jim Mattis told Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on Thursday. The two defense ministers also discussed ways Saudi Arabia might be able to offer or facilitate some sort of a "safe haven" to more moderate Taliban members who are prepared to negotiate for peace in Afghanistan, an official said. Mattis and Prince Mohammed met at the Pentagon as part of Prince Mohammed's tour of the United States, which began this week with a White House visit. "As you discussed with President (Donald) Trump on Tuesday, we must also reinvigorate urgent efforts to seek a peaceful resolution to the civil war in Yemen and we support you in this regard," Mattis told Prince Mohammed. Mattis said he believes Saudi Arabia is "part of the solution." "They have stood by the United Nations-recognized government and we are going to end this war, that is the bottom line. And we are going to end it on positive terms for the people of Yemen, but also security for the nations in the peninsula," Mattis added. Saudi Arabia leads a coalition in Yemen fighting the Iran-backed Huthi rebels. The devastating three-year-old conflict was an early proving ground for the prince, who is also the minister of defense, but it has been beset by allegations of atrocities against civilians, and strategic drift. Just hours after the prince left the White House on Tuesday, the US Senate rejected a bipartisan bid designed to curtail US support for the war, which includes air-to-air refueling of Saudi jets as well as target and intelligence sharing. Mattis had lobbied Congress to reject the bill, warning that restrictions could increase civilian casualties, jeopardize counterterrorism cooperation, and "reduce our influence with the Saudis." Speaking through a translator, Prince Mohammed told Mattis that cooperation between the Pentagon and the kingdom has "improved tremendously" of late. - Taliban 'safe haven'? - More than 9,200 people have been killed and tens of thousands wounded in Yemen's war, which is seen as both a civil conflict and a proxy war between regional titans Saudi Arabia and Iran. Pentagon spokeswoman Dana White said after the meeting that Mattis and Prince Mohammed did not discuss civilian casualties except when it had been brought up by a reporter. Separately, on Afghanistan, White said Mattis and the prince discussed the issue of what to do with Taliban members open to peace talks. During a visit to the war-torn country last week, Mattis and other US officials claimed some Taliban elements are open to talking with the Afghan government, after Afghan President Ashraf Ghani unveiled a plan to open peace talks with the insurgents. "Ensuring that there is a safe haven for those who would want to negotiate a political solution is what they generally talked about," White told reporters. The prince "was supportive of finding ways to help the reconciliation," she added. "Not necessarily specifically safe haven but talking about (looking) at ways to help facilitate a political reconciliation for those Taliban members who are willing to talk." Saudi Arabia nurtured the Taliban's rise in the 1990s and was one of only three countries, along with the United Arab Emirates and Pakistan, to recognize the Taliban government. White added that Saudi Arabia expressed an interest in doing greater training with US forces, and noted that Trump had been hastening military sales to the kingdom.Firefighters battling the huge fire at 11 Kranji Crescent. (Photo: Facebook/SCDF)

Update: The fire has been put out, according to a Singapore Civil Defence Force social media post at about 10.40am.

Firefighters fought another massive early morning fire on Thursday (22 March), the Singapore Civil Defence Force (SCDF) announced on social media.

SCDF said it was alerted at 2.16am to a fire at 11 Kranji Crescent. The blaze, which involved piles of waste material, was contained within a warehouse. Some 70 firefighters were deployed to the scene to battle the blaze, which also required a total of 22 firefighting appliances and support vehicles.

Three unmanned firefighting machines were deployed together with five water jets to surround and suppress the blaze, as such fires involving piles of waste materials are often deep-seated, SCDF added in another Facebook post. This made it difficult to extinguish the fire quickly, it said.

Another challenge was created by the zinc roof contributing to the smoky conditions, which hampered visibility. There was also the risk of the roof collapsing.

The Kranji fire came a couple of days after another huge fire broke out at an oil storage tank on Pulau Busing. That fire took six hours to extinguish, with 128 personnel deployed to the scene.

Related stories:

Pulau Busing oil storage tank fire extinguished by SCDF after hours-long battle

VIDEO: Fire Rages at Oil Storage Tank in Pulau BusingBEIJING (Reuters) - Senior Chinese diplomat Yang Jiechi will visit South Africa this week in the first foreign visit by a top official since China's government reshuffle, the foreign ministry said on Thursday, offering details on a new role for the veteran envoy.

Yang was China's top diplomat when he was State Councillor and is now a member of the ruling Communist Party's 25-member Politburo. He will visit on Friday and Saturday as a special representative of President Xi Jinping, ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying told a daily news briefing.

Yang, a fluent English speaker and former Chinese ambassador to the United States, currently has only a party and not government position.

There has been speculation in diplomatic circles about what he will do following the reshuffle, though the foreign ministry has said he will continue to play an important diplomatic role.

Yang will meet South African government and political party leaders to discuss plans for a summit later this year between China and African countries, as well as bilateral ties, Hua added.

Yang was appointed to the Politburo, the second-largest of the party's three elite ruling bodies, in October after a party congress.

Yang, 67, remains secretary general of the Foreign Affairs Leading Group chaired by Xi, which is a top party body that directs and coordinates Chinese diplomacy, although the body is due to be re-named and the party has not said who will be on it.

The party is ultimately responsible for all government decisions and it is where real power lies.

Yang's successor as state councillor, Wang Yi, is not a Politburo member but is on the Central Committee, the largest of the party's decision-making bodies and a rung below the Politburo.

Wang's new position was announced on Tuesday as part of a broader government reshuffle. Wang also remains foreign minister.

(Reporting by Ben Blanchard; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)(Getty Images file photo)

A male suspect who stabbed a 42-year-old man to death outside a Jalan Besar pub remains at large, almost two years after the incident.

Oh Beng Yam, 50, fled to Malaysia via the Woodlands Checkpoint less than half-an-hour after allegedly stabbing Chua Meng Guan to death on 11 July 2016, said State Coroner (SC) Kamala Ponnampalam during an inquiry into Chuas death on Wednesday (21 March).

Further checks with the Malaysian authorities revealed that Oh left for Thailand two days later via the Bukit Kayu Hitam border checkpoint in Kedah. The Thai authorities have been alerted to the case but Ohs whereabouts remain unknown to date with no credible leads, SC Kamala added.

CCTV footage showed that Chua had arrived at KSP Pub & KTV along Jalan Besar Road at about 11.17pm on 11 July 2016. He was seen entering the pub briefly before exiting it to get into his car.

Less than 10 minutes later, Oh was seen leaving the pub through the rear exit and re-entering the place holding an object wrapped in newspaper in his hand.

Exiting the place once again, Oh then confronted Chua, who was seated in his car, and an altercation broke out between the two Singaporean men. The fight stopped when two men came out of the pub and separated them.

Another scuffle broke out between both parties shortly after, with Chua backing into a corner in front of the adjacent Trey Hostel. Oh was seen stabbing Chua repeatedly with a knife  leaving the latter with open wounds on his chest and left elbow  before re-entering the pub and fleeing the scene.

Paramedics arrived at the scene at about 11.27 pm and pronounced Chua dead a minute later.

A forensic pathologist found that the victim died from stab wounds to his chest. Autopsy findings revealed that two stab wounds to Chuas chest had penetrated his lungs while defensive wounds were found on his upper and lower limbs.

The stab wound on the left chest had transected the upper lobe bronchus (the airway leading to the lung) deep within the left lung tissue, said SC Kamala. The aforementioned injury was potentially fatal, and sufficient in the ordinary course of nature to cause death.

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There is clear and unequivocal evidence of foul play, she noted, referring to the CCTV footage and autopsy findings.

She added that police investigations have not implicated any other individuals in Chuas death.

His parents, who were present in court, remained stoic as the findings were delivered.

If found guilty of murder, Oh could face the death penalty.

Related stories:

Man armed with knife arrested after locking himself with father and girlfriend in Jurong West flat

Fund accountant jailed 11 months for role in sharing obscene films onlineFILE PHOTO: People holding mobile phones are silhouetted against a backdrop projected with the Twitter logo in Warsaw FILE PHOTO: People holding mobile phones are silhouetted against a backdrop projected with the Twitter logo in this illustration picture taken in Warsaw, Poland, September 27, 2013. REUTERS/Kacper Pempel/File Photo

By Fathin Ungku

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Global tech giants including Facebook and Twitter on Thursday expressed concern about a possible Singapore plan to bring in a new law to tackle the threat of fake news, saying sufficient rules are already in place.

Officials of Facebook, Twitter and Google attended a parliamentary hearing on how to counter the threat that Singapore said it was particularly vulnerable to due to its size, its role as a global financial hub and its ethnic and religious mix.

They were among 79 people asked to speak in parliament over the eight days set for the hearing.

The wealthy city state is among the countries looking to introduce legislation, so far unspecified, to rein in fake news, a trend that has stirred concern that such laws could be used to exert government control over the media.

"We do not believe that legislation is the best approach to addressing the issue," Alvin Tan, Facebook's head of public policy for Southeast Asia, said in a written submission.

"Singapore already has a variety of existing laws and regulations which address hate speech, defamation and the spreading of false news."

Singapore ranks 151 among 180 countries rated by the World Press Freedom Index of Reporters Without Borders, a non-government group that promotes freedom of information.

Lawmakers in the United States and Europe have called for probes into how Facebook allowed Cambridge Analytica to access data on 50 million users and use it to help the election campaign of U.S. President Donald Trump.

Expressing the view that social media networks were not capable of regulating themselves, Singapore's law minister, K Shanmugam, questioned Facebook official Simon Milner over how "one of the world's most competent firms" could have breached users' trust.

"Right now, it doesn't feel like it," Milner, the firm's Asia policy chief, responded. He conceded failure to be upfront about the breach of user data, saying, "We had a moral obligation to do it (notify our users)."

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He added, "As I understand it, there was not a legal obligation."

Milner questioned the premise that a legal framework could be used to decide whether information was fake news, however.

"How do you define ... what is a deliberate online falsehood and what is not? We are skeptical about that."

Microblogging site Twitter also shared concerns about Singapore's plans.

"No single company, governmental or non-governmental actor, should be the arbiter of truth," said Kathleen Reen, Twitter's director of Public Policy for Asia Pacific.

(Reporting by Fathin Ungku; Editing by Jack Kim and Clarence Fernandez)We do not believe that legislation is the best approach to addressing the issue, said Alvin Tan, Facebooks head of public policy for Southeast Asia

Global tech giants including Facebook and Twitter on Thursday expressed concern about a possible Singapore plan to bring in a new law to tackle the threat of fake news, saying sufficient rules are already in place.

Officials of Facebook, Twitter and Google attended a parliamentary hearing on how to counter the threat that Singapore said it was particularly vulnerable to due to its size, its role as a global financial hub and its ethnic and religious mix.

They were among 79 people asked to speak in parliament over the eight days set for the hearing. The wealthy city state is among the countries looking to introduce legislation, so far unspecified, to rein in fake news, a trend that has stirred concern that such laws could be used to exert government control over the media.

We do not believe that legislation is the best approach to addressing the issue, Alvin Tan, Facebooks head of public policy for Southeast Asia, said in a written submission.

Ansarada, a Sydney-based provider of virtual data rooms and organiser of business information, has raised $19 million led by Ashok Jacobs Ellerston Capital.

The company, which made $31 million revenue for a $1.2 million profit after tax in 2016-17, plans a public listing within two years of this raise, which included three more local cornerstone investors in Tempus Partners, Belay Capital and Australian Ethical Investments.

The six-figure advisory fee for the raise will go to anti-poverty projects in Uganda and Nepal, because Ansarada used Adara Partners, whose panel of investment bankers work on a pro bono basis.

Story continues

Oyo Rooms has initiated talks to raise US$500-800 million in fresh funding, six months after the company raised its last round, four people aware of the development said.

Oyo Rooms is in early talks with existing investors led by SoftBank Group and two new investors to raise its next round in order to increase its presence in the country as well as accelerate its international expansion, the people cited above said on condition of anonymity.

Mint could not ascertain the names of the new investors Oyo is talking to.

Facebook Inc Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg apologized on Wednesday for mistakes his company made in how it handled data belonging to 50 million of its users and promised tougher steps to restrict developers access to such information.

The worlds largest social media network is facing growing government scrutiny in Europe and the United States about a whistleblowers allegations that London-based political consultancy Cambridge Analytica improperly accessed user information to build profiles on American voters that were later used to help elect US President Donald Trump in 2016.

This was a major breach of trust. Im really sorry this happened. We have a basic responsibility to protect peoples data, Zuckerberg said in an interview with CNN, breaking a public silence since the scandal erupted at the weekend.

Malaysias e-sports brand Kitamen to raise US$128K via Ata Plus platform [press release]

Kitamen, an e-sports lifestyle brand in Southeast Asia, has launched an equity crowdfunding (ECF) campaign on Ata Plus, a licensed ECF platform in Malaysia.

The startup will use 40 per cent of the fund to build the dedicated spaces, 20 per cent for marketing, 20 per cent for operations, 10 per cent for the integrated database system and 10 per cent for contingencies.

Kitamen is a lifestyle brand for eSports, with a community hub that delivers a platform for all eSports titles under one roof with multiple outlets across Klang Valley and growing throughout Malaysia. It works with global brands as a pathway to the elusive gamer community, and act as a vehicle for brands to connect with an exclusive user segment.

As of today, Kitamen has 15 licensed e-sports DOJOs nationwide with growing community members of 90,000.

The post Todays top tech news, March 22: Tech giants express concern over Singapore plan to fight fake news appeared first on e27.For many months, the Trump administration has been attempting to push through a regulatory change that would make it easier for restaurant owners to skim tips from their employees. As if that werent rotten enough, it now appears that high level officials, including White House budget chief Mick Mulvaney, attempted to bury a government analysis showing how badly the move would hurt workers who rely on gratuities to make a living.

Back in December, the Department of Labor proposed a rule that would overturn an Obama-era regulation and let restaurants force staff like waiters, waitresses, and bartenders to their share tips with their colleagues in the kitchen, as long as they were paid the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour. In theory, this is not an inherently bad idea. Its unfair that front-of-the-house staff, who in high-end dining tend to be young and white, can make a decent living off tips, while back-of-the-house staff like cooks and dishwashers, who are typically minorities, have found themselves stuck earning near poverty wages. Wouldnt it be great if the Trump administrations proposal let managers gather up tips and distribute them more fairly among their whole crew? But in reality, the regulation could also become a license for your local Buffalo Wild Wings proprietor to simply commit tip theft.

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As the labor-backed Economic Policy Institute has noted, the rule doesnt actually require that employers distribute pooled tips to workers. Under the administrations proposed rule, as long as tipped workers earn minimum wage, employers could legally pocket those tips. Why not just tweak the language? Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta claims his department doesnt have the legal authority to ban tip theft; Congress would have to do it.

Its hard to say precisely how much pay Americas servers could see siphoned off if Trumps regulation takes effect, in part because theres a lack of good data about tip theft in general. But its possible to make an reasonable estimate. The Economic Policy Institute, for instance, thinks that restaurant workers could lose $5.8 billion annually in the bargain. The Department of Labor, on the other hand, has been officially silent on this point. Despite the fact that federal law requires government agencies to perform a cost-benefit analysis for new regulations, the proposal that department put out in December did not contain any estimate of the economic toll the regulation change might take on workers. The administration claimed that it couldnt produce such an analysis, because it was too hard to predict how restaurants, their employees, and customers would react to the change.

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It turns out that wasnt the whole story. In February, Bloomberg Laws Ben Penn broke the news that Trump appointees in the Department of Labor had actually flushed multiple in-house estimates of how the rule would effect restaurant workers, including one that showed they would lose billions in tips:

Senior department political officialsfaced with a government analysis showing that workers could lose billions of dollars in tips as a result of the proposalordered staff to revise the data methodology to lessen the expected impact, several of the sources said. Although later calculations showed progressively reduced tip losses, Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta and his team are said to have still been uncomfortable with including the data in the proposal. The officials disagreed with assumptions in the analysis that employers would retain their employees gratuities, rather than redistribute the money to other hourly workers. They wound up receiving approval from the White House to publish a proposal Dec. 5 that removed the economic transfer data altogether, the sources said.

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On Wednesday, Penn reported out Mulvaneys role in the scheme. In short, the section of Trumps Office of Management and Budget responsible for reviewing all new federal regulations tried to block the new tip pooling rule unless the Department of Labor added its cost estimates back in. Mulvaney, as director of OMB, overruled them, and let the proposal go through.*

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This weird and wonky scandal shows how far the administration is willing to go to downplay unflattering data and push through a regulation that will likely hurt working class Americans. But there may be an upside. Amit Narang, the regulatory policy advocate at Public Citizen, told me that the decision to hide its cost analysis could make the tip pooling regulation easier to challenge in federal court under the Administrative Procedures Act, which requires the government to take certain steps while promulgating new regs. This is about as serious a violation of the rule making process as there is, he told me. This weeks revelations make it 100 percent clear that there was a deliberately withheld economic analysis. Thats a big problem in defending this rule legally. I think that makes it very vulnerable.

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The story also comes served with a bitter digestif of irony. In public, Mulvaney has been a quite vocal advocate for carefully considering the costs of new regulations, presumably because it would lead to government to implement fewer of them. In May of last year, he told reporters that the Obama administration failed to follow the law in many, many circumstances and simply imposed regulation without proper regard to the cost side of that analysisa claim that earned him three Pinocchios from the Washington Posts Fact Checker column. When Mulvaney became acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau this yearyes, he now wears two major hats in the Trump administrationhe sent an email to staff telling them that theyd have to be diligent about justifying all their rules with careful economic analysis.

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Speaking of data: the Dodd Frank Act requires us to consider the potential costs and benefits to consumers and covered persons. To me, that means quantitative analysis. And while qualitative analysis certainly can play a role, it should not be to the exclusion of measurable costs and benefits. In other words: there is a lot more math in our future.

Mick Mulvaney: A stickler for math when it comes to regulating payday lenders, but not so much when it comes to stealing tips from waitresses.

*Correction, March 22, 2018: An earlier version of this story incorrectly referred to Bloombergs reporter as Ben Parr.This post is part of Outward, Slates home for coverage of LGBTQ life, thought, and culture. Read more here.

The news cycle has spun so quickly around the issue of Cynthia Nixon and lesbianism in the past 24 hours, it may have finally collapsed in on itself. First, everyone was incensed that Christine Quinn, an avowed homosexual and ally to the New York governor Nixon is trying to unseat in her recently announced campaign, called Nixon an unqualified lesbian in an apparent attempt to dog-whistle homophobic voters. Now, people are taking issue with the very veracity of the descriptor.

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Not the unqualified part, mind youthough a long-time progressive activist, Nixon has never held political office. But according to some internet writers, Nixon is not a lesbian. Stop Erasing Cynthia Nixons Bisexuality, a Pride.com article succinctly requested. Vox elevated the response to Nixons candidacy as an example of how bisexuality gets erased. The Advocate accused Quinn of misidentifying Nixon, who identifies as bisexual. HuffPost, NBC, and the Cut all matter-of-factly identified Nixon as bi.

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It is true that Nixon had long-term relationships with men prior to her current marriage to Christine Marinoni. And, in the past, she has tacitly accepted the label of bisexuality. In 2010, she told the Advocate that she was gay as a political stance, but that if anybody, prior to my meeting and falling in love with Christine, had asked me about what I think about sexuality, I would have said I think were all bisexual. Two years later, amid criticism for comments she made about her sexuality to the New York Times, she sent the Advocate a statement that said, While I dont often use the word, the technically precise term for my orientation is bisexual.

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But in April 2017, in what is, as far as I can tell, the most recent interview Nixon has given about her sexuality, she said she didnt really identify as bisexual when she said all that. Nixon framed her former portrayal of bisexuality as a way to get out from under the weighty questions LGBTQ advocates threw at her whenever she tried to explain her personal experience with queerness, which defies gay orthodoxy.

Nixon has long been one of my queer heroes for her refusal to simplify her sexuality for the convenience of a politically expedient LGBTQ narrative. As my colleague J. Bryan Lowder wrote in 2012, Nixon has described the inner workings of her sexual and romantic lives as being driven more by choice than biology. This is a threatening concept for a gay-rights movement that has successfully argued that gay people are born this way, and thus deserve acceptance because they cant help the way they are. Nixon and I both believe that the movement for LGBTQ equality hangs its messaging on a gay gene at its perilthat it shouldnt matter how or why people are gay. They deserve equal protections and rights, unconditionally.

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A certain section of our community is very concerned that it not be seen as a choice, because if its a choice, then we could opt out. I say it doesnt matter if we flew here or we swam here, it matters that we are here, Nixon said in the 2012 interview that triggered widespread outrage in mainstream gay circles. Why cant it be a choice? Why is that any less legitimate? It seems were just ceding this point to bigots who are demanding it, and I dont think that they should define the terms of the debate. I also feel like people think I was walking around in a cloud and didnt realize I was gay, which I find really offensive. I find it offensive to me, but I also find it offensive to all the men Ive been out with.

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Still, people kept pressing Nixon to define her sexuality in easily digestible terms. A few days after the New York Times piece was published, journalist Kevin Sessums posted a rather daft interview with Nixon in which he reminded her that she once said, In terms of sexual orientation, I dont really feel Ive changed  Ive been with men all my life and Id never fallen in love with a woman. But when I did, it didnt seem so strange.

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Im a bit confused, Sessums said. Were you a lesbian in a heterosexual relationship? Or are you now a heterosexual in a lesbian relationship? That quote seemed like you were fudging a bit.

Its so not fudging. Its so not, Nixon said. I dont pull out the bisexual word because nobody likes the bisexuals. Everybody likes to dump on the bisexuals.  We get no respect. Sessums thought hed caught her: You just said we, he said, so you must self-identify as one. I just dont like to pull out that word, Nixon replied.

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Is this what all the people who claim Nixon is a victim of bisexual erasure are pinning their arguments to? I just dont like to pull out that word and while I dont often use the word, the technically precise term for my orientation is bisexual, statements she made six years ago under conditions approaching duress? The Vox piece in particular raises my B.S. detector, because it links directly to the 2017 HuffPost interview where Nixon said she didnt really identify as bisexual when she made those old remarks. In fact, the Vox writer quotes Nixon from that interview to support her argument that Nixon is bisexual, but begins the quote immediately after the I didnt really identify as bisexual clause. It feels like deliberate obfuscation in service of a point.

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Nixons full quote in that 2017 interview is gorgeously nuanced and perceptive. Because of that, and in the interest of transparency, Id like to publish it in full: I didnt really identify as bisexual, but people were so insistent that I pick ayou know, it caused a huge controversy and everyone wanted to graft on to me this narrative[that] I felt that I had just simply been mistaken about myself for all these years and finally the veil was lifted and I was a lesbian. And that was not true.

This statement tells the story of a woman who felt forced to choose between two false poles. On one end is the idea that all the relationships shed previously had with men were a lie, that she was kidding or denying herself, and that now she finally realizes who she has truly, biologically been all along. On the other end is the sociopolitical category of bisexuality. It is possible that Nixon sees herself in neither of these camps. A woman can have had true, authentic, affirming relationships with men and still not be bisexual. Lesbian identity does not require that its adherents forswear all sexual and romantic encounters theyve ever had with men, just as bisexual identity does not require that people date men and women in equal measure.

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On Tuesday, in her response to Quinns unqualified lesbian insult, Nixon seemed to actually claim the term: Her being a lesbian and my being a lesbian is not the issue, she told the New York Post. Still, to be clear, I have no idea how Nixon does or does not identify, beyond the conclusions Ive drawn from the recent interviews I cite here. I reached out to her campaign for clarity and have gotten no response. Ill update this post if I hear back. But after a decade of obsessive nitpicking and willful misreading of her every word on her beautifully complex, personal queerness, I dont blame Nixon if shed rather never mention it again.Its time to push the panic button.

John Boltons appointment as national security advisera post that requires no Senate confirmationputs the United States on a path to war. And its fair to say President Donald Trump wants us on that path.

After all, Trump gave Bolton the job after the two held several conversations (despite White House chief of staff John Kellys orders barring Bolton from the building). And there was this remark that Trump made after firing Rex Tillerson and nominating the more hawkish Mike Pompeo to take his place: Were getting very close to having the Cabinet and other things I want.

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Bolton has repeatedly called for launching a first strike on North Korea, scuttling the nuclear arms deal with Iran, and then bombing that country too. He says and writes these things not as part of some clever madman theory to bring Kim Jong-un and the mullahs of Tehran to the bargaining table, but rather because he simply wants to destroy them and Americas other enemies too.

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His agenda is not peace through strength, the motto of more conventional Republican hawks that Trump included in a tweet on Wednesday, but rather regime change through war. He is a neocon without the moral fervor of some who wear that labeli.e., he is keen to topple oppressive regimes not in order to spread democracy but rather to expand American power.

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In the early days of the George W. Bush administration, Vice President Dick Cheney finagled Bolton a job as undersecretary of state for arms controlan inside joke, since Bolton has never read an arms-control treaty that he liked. But his real assignment was to serve as Cheneys spy in Foggy Bottom, monitoring and, when possible, obstructing any attempts at peaceful diplomacy mounted by Secretary of State Colin Powell.

When Powell got the boot, Cheney wanted to make Bolton deputy secretary of state, replacing Richard Armitage, who resigned along with his best friend Powell. But Powells replacement, Condoleezza Rice, who had been Bushs national security adviser, blocked the move, fully aware of Boltons obstructionist ideology.

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As a compromise, Bush nominated Bolton to be United Nations ambassador, but that move proved unbearable to even the Republican-controlled Senate at the time. It was one thing to be critical of the U.N.its a body deserving of criticismbut Bolton opposed its very existence. There is no such thing as the United Nations, he once said in a speech, adding, If the U.N. Secretariat building in New York lost 10 stories, it wouldnt make a lot of difference.

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More than that, he was hostile to the idea of international law, having once declared, It is a big mistake for us to grant any validity to international law even when it may seem in our short-term interest to do sobecause over the long term, the goal of those who think that international law really means anything are those who want to constrain the United States.

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These might be quaint notions for some eccentric midlevel aide to espouse, but the United Nations is founded on international law, Security Council resolutions are drafted to enforce international law, andas even Bush was beginning to realize by the start of his second term, around the time of Boltons nominationsome of those resolutions were proving useful for expressing, and sometimes enforcing, U.S. national security interests. How could someone with these views serve as the U.S. ambassador to the U.N.?

In his confirmation hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Bolton put on a dreadful show, grumbling and scowling through his walrus mustache. Finally, in a tie vote, the committee sent Boltons nomination to the full Senate without recommendation. Properly fearing that this foretold a rejection on the floor, Bush gave Bolton the job as a recess appointment after Congress went on holiday. But the law allowing this evasion gave the Senate a chance to take a vote 18 months later. In the second round of hearings, Bolton behaved even more obnoxiously than in the first. When one Republican senator asked him whether his year and a half in the U.N. had altered his ideas about the place, Bolton, rather than seizing the chance to mollify skeptics, replied, Not really. The head counters in the White House withdrew the nomination, and Bolton headed back to neocon central at the American Enterprise Institute.

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During Trumps presidential transition, Bolton made the short list of candidates for deputy secretary of state, but Tillersonwho would soon get the nod for secretaryexpressed misgivings about working with the guy. (Trump might have recalled that conversation earlier this month, when he decided to fire Tillerson.) After Michael Flynn flamed out as national security adviser, Bolton was also on the short list to replace him. Gen. H.R. McMaster got the nod, but Trump publicly said he liked Bolton and that he too would soon be working for the White House in some capacity.

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And now, here he is.

In his one year and one month on the job, McMaster, who is still an active-duty Army three-star general, proved a deep disappointment to his friends and erstwhile admirers. Hed made his reputation 20 years ago, as the author of a dissertation-turned-book, Dereliction of Duty, which lambasted the top generals of the Vietnam era for failing to give their honest military advice to President Lyndon Johnson. And now, in his only tour as a policy adviser in Washington, McMaster has wrecked that reputation, committing his own derelictions by pandering to Trumps proclivities and tolerating his falsehoods.

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But at least McMaster assembledand often listened toa professional staff at the National Security Council and insisted on ousting amateur ideologues, several of them acolytes of Flynn.

Bolton is not likely to put up with a professional staff, and the flood of White House exiles will soon intensify. One subject of discussion at Boltons Senate hearings, back in 2005, was his intolerance of any views that differed from his own. He displayed this trait most harshly when, as undersecretary of state, he tried to fire two intelligence analysts who challenged his (erroneous) view that Cuba was developing biological weapons and supplying the weapons to rogue regimes.

Nor is Bolton at all suited to perform one of a national security advisers main responsibilitiesassembling the Cabinet secretaries to debate various options in foreign and military policy, mediating their differences, and either hammering out a compromise or presenting the choices to the president.

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Then again, there may now no longer be many differences to mediate in this administration. The last of the grown-ups is Secretary of Defense James Mattis, the retired Marine four-star general, who got that job mainly because Trump had heard his nickname was mad dog. He didnt know that Mattis regularly consulted a personal library of some 7,000 volumes on history and strategy, that (like most generals) hes not too keen to go to war unless he really has to, and that (also like most generals) he takes the Geneva Conventions seriously and opposes torture.

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In recent weeks, Trump was said to be tiring of aides who kept telling him no. He might soon tire of Bolton, who, whatever else he is, cant be pegged as a yes man. But in the short term, Bolton may be just the man to excite Trumps darker instincts, to actualize the frustrated he-man who raged about pelting Kim Jong-un with fire and fury like the world has never seen or fomenting the total collapse of the Iranian regime, which he somehow believes was about to happen, if only Obama hadnt signed the nuclear deal and lifted sanctions.

With Tillerson out, Bolton in, and Pompeo waiting in the wings for confirmation, Trump is feeling his oats, coming into his own, like Trump is free to be Trump. Finding out just who that is may make the rest of us duck and cover.Former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe, who was symbolically and summarily fired by Attorney General Jeff Sessions hours before his official retirement last week, authorized a criminal investigation into Sessions in the aftermath of his misleading testimony during his confirmation hearing in January 2017, ABC News reported Wednesday. The investigation of Sessions for perjury was previously unknown to the public, although according to ABCs reporting, several top Republican and Democratic lawmakers were briefed on the investigation last year by McCabe and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

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Details on the exact timing and extent of the investigation remain sketchy, but NBC News reports the inquiry was ultimately subsumed by special counsel Robert Muellers probe after Rosenstein named him May 17, 2017. From ABC News report it sounds as if the investigation remained active until as recently as two months ago when Sessions was interviewed by Muellers investigators. Two months ago, Sessions was interviewed by Muellers team, and the federal inquiry related to his candor during his confirmation process has since been shuttered, according to a lawyer representing Sessions.

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The Special Counsels office has informed me that after interviewing the attorney general and conducting additional investigation, the attorney general is not under investigation for false statements or perjury in his confirmation hearing testimony and related written submissions to Congress, Sessions attorney Chuck Cooper said in a statement Wednesday. That remains to be confirmed. Its unclear how actively federal authorities pursued the matter in the months before Sessions interview with Muellers investigators, according to ABC News. Its also unclear whether the special counsel may still be pursuing other matters related to Sessions and statements he has made to Congressor otherssince his confirmation.

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One other point of interest with potential legal ramifications is whether Sessions was aware he was under investigation for his confirmation testimony where he said he had not met with any Russians during the Trump campaign despite meeting with then-Russian ambassador to the U.S. Sergey Kislyak multiple times. If Sessions was aware he was the target of an investigation initiated by McCabe that would change the context of McCabes last-minute dismissal, robbing McCabe of his pension benefits, for vague claims of wrongdoing. McCabe has said he believes he is the subject of smear campaign by the Trump administrationthat has been spearheaded by the president himselfas part of an effort to brand him as partisan and untrustworthy in order to discredit his potential testimony against Trump. McCabe would likely be a key witness in any investigation into Trump obstructing justice given his high profile role at the FBI during James Comeys tenure and dismissal. In that context, McCabes departure, minimally, could be seen as a parting reprisal by a jilted boss. ABC News cited one source saying that Sessions was unaware of the investigation when he sacked McCabe, but Sessions attorney declined to confirm to the network that the attorney general was unaware of the investigation.Shortly before the 2016 election, Mary Saucedo sat down with her husband of 52 years, Gus, to fill out her absentee ballot. Mary, a resident of Manchester, New Hampshire, is currently 95 years old and legally blind. She has voted consistently since 1944. Federal and state law both permit Gus to help his wife cast her vote, but Mary wanted to sign the ballot herself, so he guided her hand to the affidavit and she affixed her signature. Gus mailed her ballot to the Manchester clerks office. She had every reason to believe her vote would be counted.

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It wasnt. On Election Day, a local official compared the signature on Marys ballot to the one on her absentee ballot affidavit, a document shed signed to attest that her disability prevented her from voting in person. The official determined that the two signatures didnt match and tossed out her ballot. There was no opportunity for appeal. Mary didnt know shed been disenfranchised until the American Civil Liberties Union of New Hampshire informed her in 2017.

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That election cycle, an estimated 275 New Hampshire voters suffered the same fate, losing their right to vote because an official with no expertise in handwriting analysis decided that two signatures didnt match. In the 2012 election, as many as 370 voters in the state were disenfranchised through this scheme. Its not clear that a single one of these voters knew what happened to their ballotsat least not until the ACLU of New Hampshire told them. The organization is now suing the state in federal court for flagrant violation of federal law and the U.S. Constitution. It will very likely win in a rout.

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Why are so many New Hampshire voters disqualified on the basis of their handwriting? The answer to that question is oddly elusive. Voters signatures are analyzed by moderators at each polling place. The number of ballots rejected by moderators due to signature mismatch varies wildly from town to town. In 2016, all such rejected ballots came from just 26 percent of New Hampshires 318 polling places; the remaining 74 percent of polls rejected zero ballots for mismatch. It thus appears that a minority of overzealous moderators are responsible for this disenfranchisement.

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These moderators analysis of ballot signatures is shockingly amateurish: They briefly compare the two names, decide whether they match, and either accept or reject the ballot based on their subjective determination. There are no objective standards to guide the process. Dr. Linton A. Mohammed, a forensic document examiner, testified to the ACLU that effective signature comparisonwhich is difficult even for expertsrequires 10 signature samples at a minimum to account for variability. Moderators only have two: the signature on the affidavit requesting a ballot and the signature on the ballot itself. With this limited sample, Mohammed explained, any analystand especially one with no trainingis likely to erroneously conclude that two signatures from the same voter do not match.

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Voters are not informed directly when their ballots are rejected due to a signature mismatch. Instead, municipal clerks add their names to a website days or weeks after the election. Then, 90 days after the election, the information is scrubbed from the internet. The state does virtually nothing to educate voters about the existence of this site. Voters also have no way to resolve the issue; they are not allowed to prove their identities after the fact. Once a vote is discarded by a moderator, its lost forever.

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No other state employs a scheme as draconian as New Hampshires, though some have tried.

Making matters worse, New Hampshire only allows residents to vote absentee if they have a legitimate impediment to voting at the polls, such as a disability. For this reason, a disproportionate number of absentee voters are disabled. The ACLU found that many of those whose votes were tossed out because of a supposed signature mismatch lived in assisted-living facilities, including a number of retired service members in veterans homes. Presumably, age and disability prevented them from affixing perfectly consistent signatures to their ballots. Sadly, a number of them died following the 2016 election. The last vote they cast was not counted.

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In light of this problem, the New Hampshire Legislature recently adjusted its voting laws to clarify that disabled voters may receive help filling out their ballots so long as an assistant submits a statement declaring he helped out. Yet, even under this new law, a moderator can still reject the ballot for signature mismatch. And of course, individuals who cannot obtain effective assistance, or have no disability, are not helped by this tweak at all. The Secretary of States Office even acknowledged to the legislature that this putative fix does not allay the New Hampshire ACLUs lawsuit.

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That suit alleges, quite plausibly, that the states mismatch scheme is illegal under the Americans with Disabilities Act, which requires states to enact voting procedures that grant equal access to disabled residents. It also claims that the scheme violates procedural due process under the 14th Amendment by depriving voters of any recourse to cure the loss of their vote. And it argues that New Hampshire infringes upon its residents fundamental right to vote as protected by the Equal Protection Clause. Any law that severely burdens the franchise, as this scheme clearly does for hundreds of voters each election, must survive strict scrutiny to pass constitutional muster. In this case, New Hampshire plainly cannot put forth a legitimate interest to justify its stringent mismatch rule aside from a generalized (and empirically unsupported) fear of voter fraud, which cannot satisfy heightened scrutiny.

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No other state employs a scheme as draconian as New Hampshires, though some have tried. Judges have struck down mismatch laws in Florida, California, and Illinois that do not give voters notice or an opportunity for remedy. A federal judge found that Floridas rule wouldve disqualified as many as 23,000 ballots in the 2016 election; the ACLU estimates that Californias disenfranchised 40,000 voters that same year. Plenty of other states also compare signatures, but they all provide notice and a chance to fix any purported mismatch. New Hampshires stringent rule seems to be singular.

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The ACLU filed its first complaint in this case in May. Since then, the Republican-controlled legislature has had ample opportunity to fix the glaring legal infirmities in its mismatch scheme. Instead, legislators have forged ahead with voter suppression laws targeting lower-income residents and college students. So, on Monday, the ACLU filed for summary judgment, asking the court to rule in its favor without a trial. It hopes to win the case in time for the 2018 midterms so people like Mary Saucedo can ensure their votes are counted. Saucedo testified that she plans to cast an absentee ballot once again in the next electionas long as Im still here.Over the past week, Donald Trump has escalated his attacks on Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating the relationship between the Trump campaign and Russia. (On Wednesday, Trumps attack took the form of tweeting out a quote from Alan Dershowitz about how Mueller should never have been chosen for the role.) Amid rumblings that Trump might move to fire Mueller, and with Democrats warning that such a decision could spark a constitutional crisis, many congressional Republicans have been silent. Those who have been critical have mostly refused to spell out the consequences of what a Mueller firing would cause them to do. And the House and Senate leadership still say they see no need for a bill protecting Muellers job.

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To talk about the relationship between the president and his party, I spoke by phone with Tom Cole, a Republican congressman for Oklahomas 4th Congressional District, and the House deputy whip. He has criticized Trump for things like falsely claiming to have been wiretapped by his predecessor, and for his remarks after Charlottesville, but he has also overwhelmingly supported Trumps agenda. During the course of our conversation, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, we discussed whether Trump is a threat to democracy, how to understand the presidents psyche, and why congressional Republicans just refuse to put pressure on him.

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Isaac Chotiner: How would you define the 14 or 15 months of this Congress, during the first part of the Trump presidency?

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Tom Cole: I would call it actually productive, but also divisive. Productive in the sense that weve got, frankly, the most significant tax reform, tax reduction, in a generation. You have to go back to the 1980s. Its also been a Congress, working with the administration, thats done more on the deregulatory front than any other Congress, frankly, in modern American history.

I think Democrats are very entrenched and find it difficult politically to cooperate with this president. In that sense, its not unlike Republicans dealing with Obama.

How do you think the Republican Party has dealt with this president?

I think probably theyve dealt with him in a very guarded way, in some senses. They by and large agree on agenda items, but not in all areas. Youve seen some Republican rebellion, for instance, on the Russian sanctions. You see it on discussions about tariffs. The president has one view. Most Republicans in Congress are free traders.

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The president ran as an outsider, very much so, and I think that still remains. This is actually part of his appeal and strength, an outsider to the ways of Washington and the traditional Republican political establishment. He beat that establishment in the campaign. Theres a certain amount of tension there. You can argue that sometimes its creative tension. Sometimes it just makes legislating very difficult.

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What do you think about the Mueller investigation?

Well first of all, I think it needs to continue. If theres no there there, in the sense of collusionand I dont think there is; I havent seen any evidence to suggest itI think ultimately it will work to the presidents advantage. Mueller is seen as a guy of enormous personal integrity and a guy of enormous professional competence. If you get to the end of this, and the presidents not seen to have colluded or done anything wrong, the campaign has not done anything wrong, then that will be the ultimate vindication. If something is there, and again I dont think thats the case, but if there were, then thats going to be extraordinarily dangerous for the president.

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Ill go back to something Trey Gowdy said this Sunday, which I thought was the line of the day. Speaking about one of the Trump lawyers: If your clients innocent, act like it. So I dont think undermining this does well. Now again, do I understand why the presidents irritated? Yeah. If youre going through something like thisand remember this investigation began before Donald Trump was even president; it began in Julyand you see some things like the emails that came out between FBI agents involved in the Clinton investigation that clearly were pro-Clinton and anti-Trump, you kind of wonder about this, and you see people spending enormous amounts of money in a very intrusive investigation.

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I dont think they shaped the election. I really dont believe that. I dont see any evidence that the election was driven by them, but I do recognize they tried to interfere. So its legitimate to try and understand how and why, and make sure that they cantthat people have confidence in elections going forward.

The president seems to be someone who likes testing the limits of his office. Well, limits of all sorts, lets say. It seems like there are a lot of Republicans who are worried that he might fire Mueller. But there have been bills proposed by Democrats to protect Muellers job, and Republicans have said no. No, hes not going to fire Mueller, even though we know that he at one point tried to, and then the White House counsel threatened to resign. It seems to me that youd want to set limits for him because he wants to push those limits. Congressional Republicans dont want him to do certain things, but theres no desire to actually enforce certain limits and enforce certain checks. And I dont really get that.

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I think sometimes you count on the institutions themselves. For instance, we know the president has been a lot slower to acknowledge the extent of Russian efforts, whether they succeeded or not, to impact the election. But none of the people around him have been that way. Pompeo, for instance, has been very forthright about this.

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I think we dont think he will go there. And Im not sure, frankly, that a law is going to make much difference. There are executive powers here that are pretty firmly established. But I think the message has been sent pretty directly, and I mean pretty clearly. Look, I dont know a single Republican, OK Im sure theres some, but most of them have said, Look, dont mess with the Mueller probe.

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So again, well see. I dont pretend to be able to predict what the president will do. I think to a degree he is unpredictable. And I think thats been part of his M.O. his entire career, not just as the president of the United States.

Look, I understand concerns, but weve got a deeper cultural problem politically in the country than Donald Trump.  Rep. Tom Cole

Do you have any concerns about the state of American democracy, and would that answer change if Trump fired Mueller?

In terms of American democracy, I dont have any concerns about the institution or the robustness of the democracy at all. Look, I think obviously we have a very free press, and its very aggressive. I think we have a very good, brisk political system. It moves back-and-forth between the two parties. I think its very hard for any politician to be held unaccountable. So when I see the president described as authoritarian, or people suggesting that were moving in that direction, I dont see that at all. I do worry about our democracy in the sense that I do think the two bases, the respective parties, have, No. 1, become so antagonistic to one another. I think thats been developing, by the way, long before Donald Trump. I think he just saw it and used it more effectively than any politician in the 15, 16 cycle. That does worry me.

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In terms of democracy, I think Don McGahn gave the president very good advice if the stories that we hear are true. It would be a catastrophic mistake, in my opinion, to fire Mueller. The truth, whatever it is, is going to come out. If its to your advantage, you should want this to happen quickly. Now again, I understand being irritated. I understand investigations going off the lane.

I think a lot of prosecutors and investigators like high-profile politicians. Again, I understand that sort of concern, but in this case weve got witnesses. Theyve got cooperating witnesses. That is people who have pled guilty to things. Theyve got 13 Russians charged, which is, I think, totally independent of the president, but tells you

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The presidents former campaign manager and former national security adviser.

Yeah. So, let this play out.

If its a tainted investigation, I think well be able to tell that. At this point, I dont have any reason to believe it is.

If you take things like the House Intelligence Committees probe, there are a lot of signals coming from Republicans that they are OK with his behavior. The president is potentially going to get the Republican Party in a lot of trouble in 2018, and there will be more trouble if he fires Mueller. I just dont understand the psychology of not trying to set more limits for him, in terms of your own political interest, or in terms of proper checks and balances.

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President Obama got Democrats in a lot of trouble in 2010. Im not equating the two; Im just saying midterms are midterms. Youre going to have bad midterms. Almost everybody does. Actually, it tells me the systems working the way it traditionally does. Again, we are going into tough headwinds. Weve differed with the president on trade. Weve differed with him on sanctions to Russia. But most of the time, look, if youre pursuing traditional deregulatory policies, thats where Republicans [are].

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I mean more about issues of democracy and separation of powers, and things like that.

Yeah, the elections weve had, which suggest democracys working  Its not like the presidents had a bunch of good off-year elections. I mean, Virginia was Virginia, New Jersey was New Jersey, Alabama was Alabama. I would suggest the democracys quite healthy, and the opposition is extremely energized.

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I just dont see the danger

I meant about passing a law to protect Mueller. It just seems like it would be in everyones self-interest, and thats the sort of thing I just have trouble understanding.

Well, you know, I think if people are worried about that, I guess they could. But I think the president would create a far bigger problem for himself by firing Mueller than by letting him run through. And I think thats kind of the thinking because we know theres resistance inside the White House itself. We know there are people there that are telling him, Dont do this. Itd be a huge mistake for you to do this. And I think that sentiment has been expressed pretty uniformly by Republicans. That doesnt mean that you have to go and  look, I think the consequences of firing him politically would be far, far greater. If youre running a risk, its the risk that he might actually do it because I think the backlash would be tremendous.

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I mean, lets look at Comey. Had the president fired Comey on his first day in office, Democrats would have been cheering from the rooftops because I think he did intervene in inappropriate ways in the 2016 election, and he may well have cost Hillary Clinton the election with the last intervention a few days out before the ballot. That stuff was unbelievable to me. And most Democrats were calling for his head. Now, hes being treated like a martyr. Im not sure that he is. I think hes a much more complex figure than either side has portrayed him.

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OK, if the president fires Mueller, youll come back on for an interview with me, and I get to say, I told you so. And if in four years democracys in great shape, youll come on for an interview with me and you get to say, I told you so, to me.

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Look, I think your concern, and its a legitimate concern it seems to me, is that one man is threatening democracy. Im much more worried about the divisions inside the country that preceded Donald Trump and that I see playing themselves out in the legislative process every day. I see Democrats who want to compromise but cant because theyll be punished if they do. We had 151 Republicans vote against the fiscal cliff in the House because it was a tax increase and it was a deal with the devil. It was no such thing. Really stupid politics to do that. Really dumb. So theres something wrong inside our system.

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Look, I understand concerns, but again to me, weve got a deeper cultural problem politically in the country than Donald  Donald Trump is much more an expression of some of the challenges we have than the cause, in my view.

I notice you didnt say anything about the House Intelligence Committee investigation when I mentioned it. Did you have any thoughts about that?

Well in my view, I think well see because were going to have everything from an IGs opinion to, at some point, a Mueller opinion and whatever. I think this is one where the report is broadly correct, in terms of the areas they looked at. I think what youre seeing there, and what you may yet see on the Senate side, because I think the pressures are starting to manifest themselves there, is people reflecting the opinions of their respective political bases. I dont have a problem with what the conclusions are here. I havent seen any reason to doubt them at this point, but theres plenty of other evidence to come. Obviously, this is part of a process. On the plus side, they did say, Yeah, look, the Russians were massively trying to get involved in our elections.For several weeks, President Donald Trump has insisted that he wants the federal government to execute drug dealers as a way to combat the opioid crisis. He reportedly got the idea from countries like the Philippines, where grisly extrajudicial assassinations of suspected drug criminals have become routine. The United States is not the Philippines (yet), and there is essentially no chance that Trumps scheme will succeed. But on Wednesday, Attorney General Jeff Sessions played along, issuing a memo in which he strongly encourage[d] federal prosecutors to seek capital sentences for certain drug-related crimes, including those that do not involve murder.

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Sessions memo might be disturbing if it werent so pathetic. He must know that his entreaty will not lead to a single execution, but insteadat mostto millions of taxpayer dollars spent litigating appeals. But ever since Trump turned on Sessions over his recusal from the Russia investigation, the attorney general has operated as the Justice Departments own Devin Nunes, feverishly transforming the presidents whims and ad-libs into policy proposals with a sheen of legitimacy. While it might look good in a press release, Sessions plan to put drug dealers on death row is about as plausible as Nunes short-lived claim that the Obama administration spied on Trump.

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To be fair, Sessions is much more adept at turd-polishing than Nunes has ever been. His memo cites a handful of federal statutes that allow a sentence of death, including ones governing the lethal use of a firearm in drug trafficking and murder in furtherance of a continuing criminal enterprise. Fair enough; in theory, homicidal dealers are certainly eligible for capital punishment. But Sessions then cites another statute that prescribes capital punishment for leaders of lucrative drug rings. His directive is clear: U.S. attorneys who bust up opioid cartels should charge their organizers under this law and seek the death penalty.

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There are a few threshold problems with this policy. First, the federal government has not proved to be an especially efficient or competent executioner. The overwhelming majority of capital cases arise in the states, under state law, and virtually all executions are carried out by state officials in state prisons. Since Congress reinstated the federal death penalty in 1988, there have been exactly three federal executions. (The last one occurred 15 years ago.) Only 61 people currently sit on federal death row; their executions have been delayed by myriad appeals as well as an ongoing shortage of lethal injection drugs. U.S. attorneys dont have much incentive to bring capital charges and dont usually succeed when they do: Judges and juries opt for a life sentence in two-thirds of federal trials at which prosecutors seek death.

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Even if a U.S. attorney somehow secured a capital conviction for a drug boss, the Justice Department would immediately encounter constitutional problems. In 2008s Kennedy v. Louisiana, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Eighth Amendments bar on cruel and unusual punishments generally forbids a sentence of death for crimes other than murder. Even the gruesome rape of a child, the court held, could not be punished by death. Societys evolving standards of decency require capital punishment to be reserved for the worst of crimesthat is, homicide.

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Kennedy might seem to irrefutably prohibit the death penalty for drug criminals. Yet in one odd passage, the court left the door open for other applications. Our concern here is limited to crimes against individual persons, it noted. We do not address, for example, crimes defining and punishing treason, espionage, terrorism, and drug kingpin activity, which are offenses against the state.

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Sessions is pretending to check off the top items on Trumps wish list.

This passage has been criticized for inexplicably lumping in drug kingpin activity with traditional offenses against the state where its an obvious outlier. And it doesnt decide whether execution for such conduct would be lawful; it merely leaves the question open. Regardless, the federal statute Sessions cites is not limited to kingpins; it also allows a death sentence for a dealer who occupies a position of organizer, a supervisory position, or any other position of management in a cartel that moves huge quantities of drugs. Most supervisor[s] in a drug syndicate are not kingpins, even if they help move thousands of kilos each day. (Perhaps thats why the Justice Department has never used this law to seek the death penalty.) And if the DOJ did secure a capital conviction for a bona fide opioid kingpin, it remains entirely possible that the Supreme Court would rule that our evolving standards of decency since Kennedy forbid his execution.

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Yet you wouldnt guess from Sessions memo that he is asking U.S. attorneys to achieve the impossible. His memo is dry and technical, conveying the sense of business as usual. The same is true of his March announcement proposing a ban on bump stocks, which allow shooters to fire more bullets more quickly. In February, following the mass shooting in Parkland, Florida, Trump asserted that he would impose a ban on such devices. Bump stocks, we are writing that out, the president said. I am writing that out. He promptly passed the buck to Sessions, directing his attorney general to draft a federal ban.

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Can Sessions actually do that? Nah. Under federal law, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives can determine that a piece of firearm equipment qualifies as a machine gun conversion device, at which point the DOJ can outlaw it. But the bureau had previously studied and tested bump stocks for months and concluded they do not fit into this category. Still, Sessions pushed forward with his ban, knowing full well that it is bound to fail. Sessions isnt helping Trump to faithfully execute the law: Hes indulging the presidents fantasy.

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Indeed, the attorney general has become quite adept at appeasing the president. Remember, in May, when Trump signed a mostly meaningless executive order instructing Sessions to issue guidance interpreting religious liberty protections in federal law? Sessions did just that in October, sending 25 pages of guidance to federal agencies. Progressive groups worried that the guidelines would legalize discrimination against women and LGBTQ people. But in reality, theyve done basically nothingand for good reason: Sessions doesnt have the authority to unilaterally undermine federal civil rights law. All that fanfare amounted to little more than a prolix proclamation of principles with no apparent legal force.

Sessions has not yet gone quite so far as Nunes, concocting facts and colluding with the White House to further Trumps favored narratives and policies. But he does appear to be scuttling in that direction. In a desperate bid to regain favor with the president, Sessions is pretending to check off the top items on Trumps wish list. Its a fun ride for now. But as Nunes learned the hard way, no fantasy can last forever.In two tweets, both posted on Wednesday afternoon, President Donald Trump revealed, as clearly as ever, just how utterly clueless he is about the most basic aspects of foreign policy.

They came in a moment of anger over media criticism that Trump, against the advice of his staff, had congratulated Russian President Vladimir Putin on his election victory. Trumps response:

Getting along with Russia (and others) is a good thing, not a bad thing They can help solve problems with North Korea, Syria, Ukraine, ISIS, Iran and even the coming Arms Race. Bush tried to get along, but didnt have the smarts. Obama and Clinton tried, but didnt have the energy or chemistry (remember RESET). PEACE THROUGH STRENGTH!

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Each of these five sentences contains a distinct misunderstanding of how international politics worksand sends a signal, to friends and foes alike, that whenever Trump enters negotiations with foreign leaders, he steps into waters way over his head.

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So lets parse them, one by one.

Getting along with Russia (and others) is a good thing, not a bad thing. Yes, all things equal, getting along is better than not getting along, but all things are not equal, and, in any case, getting along is not the goal of any foreign policy. Getting along might smooth the rough spots in a relationship between two countries, but the nature of the relationship is set by whether their interests converge or collide.

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Trump is the Willy Loman of foreign policy.

Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill got along splendidly during World War II, but their friendship would have been worthless if they didnt share a vital interest in defeating Nazi Germanyand, even so, their generals disagreed in major ways over how best to wage the war. Trump has tried to get along with Chinese President Xi Jinping, and Xi has pushed all of Trumps buttons to encourage his misconception of how the world spins. But a slice of beautiful chocolate cake at Mar-a-Lago did little to push Xi toward pressuring North Korean leader Kim Jong-un to dismantle his nuclear arsenaland if Xi ever did decide to take a decisively harder line, it would stem from a recalculation of Chinese interests, not from some desire to do Trump a favor.

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In general, good relations stem from shared interests, not the other way around.

They can help solve problems with North Korea, Syria, Ukraine, ISIS, Iran and even the coming Arms Race. True, if any of these problems can be solved, Russia will have to play a part in the solution, and this is why maintaining diplomatic relations is important. But there are a few problems with this notion.

First, when it comes to Syria, Ukraine, and the coming Arms Race (if there is one), Russia is the problemor at least a fair part of it. Good relations alone wont solve these problems; diplomacy has to be aligned with pressure.

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Second, even in good relations, leaders have to confront each other candidly. Washington and Moscow have long cooperated in areas where cooperation might lead somewhere while still acknowledgingand sometimes clashing overtheir differences. When Trump called Putin to congratulate him for winning his rigged re-election, and said nothing about Putins meddling in American elections or assassinating Russian exiles on British soil, he was giving Putin tacit permission to keep subverting our democracy and violating our allies sovereignty. Trump was, among other things, tagging himself as an easy mark.

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Third, there is clear hypocrisy here. One could make an equally valid case that Iran could help solve problems with Syria and ISIS, that ISIS could help solve problems with Syria, and that Syria could help solve problems with ISIS. Yet Trump isnt cuddling up to them. Hypocrisy by itself isnt necessarily a problem; all nations engage in it, to some degree. But this sentence is soaked in it so thoroughly that anyone who reads it can figure its not meant to be taken seriously.

Bush tried to get along, but didnt have the smarts.  Regardless of his smarts, George W. Bush didnt have as many problems with Russia, because Russia was still reeling from its Cold War defeat: Its economy was tanking, its military was crumbling, Putinthe former KGB officer who would later describe the collapse of the Soviet empire as the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the centurywas in a state of deep resentment, poised for revenge when he could take it.

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Whether or not Bush thought he had good relations with Russia, Putin viewed America as a trampling aggressor, starting with Bill Clintons policy of enlarging NATO right up to Russias borders. Its debatable whether a more sensitive U.S. policy might have drawn Russia into European civilization. The point here is that, whatever caused the renewed rupture in East-West relations, getting along and smarts had nothing to do with it.

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Obama and Clinton tried, but didnt have the energy or chemistry (remember RESET). Here Trump is referring to Hillary Clinton, who, as Obamas secretary of state, coined their stab at improving U.S.-Russian relations as a reset. But Trump is off the mark in at least two ways.

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First, while Dmitry Medvedev was Russias president, from 2008 to 2012, the reset accomplished quite a bit. He and Obama signed the New START nuclear arms treaty, which both countries still honor. Medvedev canceled the sale of advanced air-defense missiles to Iran, even refunding the cash, which Tehran had paid upfront. (Without those missiles, U.S. or Israeli jets could easily have attacked Irans nuclear reactors, a fact that may have driven Tehran to negotiate the nuclear deal.) The reset screeched to a halt, then went into reverse, after Putin regained control of the Kremlinand this happened not because Medvedev got along better with the Americans, or because Putin got along worse, but rather because the two Russian leaders had different concepts of their countrys interests.

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Second, and more to the point, the idea that Obama and Clinton failed (to the degree they failed) because they lacked energy or chemistry is absurd on two levels. On the matter of energy, whatever one thinks of Obamas time in office, no one could fault him for fatigue or laziness; he worked as hard as anyone, and in his eight years as president, he made 52 foreign trips to 58 countries. Clinton visited 112 countries, more than any secretary of state in history.

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As for chemistry, Trump comes full circle to his assumption that international relations and personal relations are one and the samethat negotiations and policies succeed or fail because the two leaders do or do not click. This is Trumps biggest fallacy. And it could get himand all of usinto serious trouble. Does he believe his forthcoming talks with Kim Jong-un will succeed if they get alongif Trumps charms throw him into a spell or, conversely, if Trumps brazen power makes him quake in the knees? If so, he should figure out some excuse to cancel the trip.

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Finally, PEACE THROUGH STRENGTH! This is a Republican bromide, but in this context, its even more vague than usual. Where is the strength in Trumps nice-talk with Putin? And strength spawns peace only if the strong leader knows what kind of peace he or she wants and how to use force as a diplomatic lever to get there. Trump shows no signs of knowing how to do this. Like many sentences that he tweets in all caps with an exclamation point, its a bit of empty theater, nothing more.

Trump is the Willy Loman of foreign policy. He thinks, as does the tragic traveling salesman of Arthur Millers play, that personality always wins the day and a smile and a shoeshine are more important than having something to sell that customers want. And unlike Willy, who at least used to be the No. 1 man in his neck of the woods, Trump has never known the territory of global politicsand he doesnt know that he needs to learn its contours. He doesnt even know what hes selling. He doesnt know the values or interests of his own nation.Vladimir Putin is a dictator.

In recent years, his regime has neutered Russias judiciary, jailed political opponents, killed investigative journalists, and taken firm control of formerly independent television and radio stations. In recent months, it has arrested Putins most serious challenger, Alexey Navalny, and banned him from running in the presidential election. In recent days, it has pressured state employees to go to the polls and shuttled groups of supporters from one polling station to the next. With loyalist security forces, a subservient judiciary, a controlled media environment, and a legislature consisting of a ruling party and pliable opposition groups, Freedom House reported in its most recent update on Russia, the Kremlin is able to manipulate elections and inhibit genuine opposition.

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Why am I rehashing all of this widely known information? Because both our political leaders and our most important newspapers have, for the past week, been pretending that they didnt know all of this.

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Unsurprisingly, one of the worst offenders has been Donald Trump. Though his advisers reportedly pleaded with him to NOT CONGRATULATE Putin on his supposed victory, he did it anyway. When he faced loud criticism for doing so, he doubled down on his stance, emphasizing that getting along with Russia (and others) is a good thing.

I am usually deeply resistant to anti-anti-Trumpist commentators, on both the left and the right, who are desperate to downplay how unique this president is: A lot of people on the right squint so hard that they manage to blind themselves to the utterly aberrant way in which Trump is undermining basic democratic norms and attacking the independence of key institutions like the Department of Justice. Meanwhile, a lot of people on the left are so committed to the view that America has always been irredeemably evil that they see Trump as standing in a neat line of descent from George W. Bush (or for that matter, Barack Obama).

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Both stances dangerously underplay the unique threat that authoritarian populists like Trump pose to liberal democracy. And yet, this is one of those rare instances in which Trump really is more typical than atypical. In fact, European leaders with perfectly moderate views have behaved just as cowardly over the past days. Congratulations on your re-election, President #Putin, Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission, tweeted. I warmly congratulate you on your reelection, Angela Merkel, Germanys chancellor, added in a message released by her office.

Many journalists and editors have, depressingly, been guilty of a similar lack of clarity. Putin Wins Fresh Six-Year Term in Russian Elections, the Wall Street Journal headlined on the day of the election. Other media outlets were not much better. Putin Wins Russia Election, and Broad Mandate for 4th Term a headline on the New York Times website read. Putin cruises to victory in Russia, tells supporters: Success awaits us! the Washington Post repeated.

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This is one of those rare instances in which Trump really is more typical than atypical.

The coverage in Europe has, if anything, been even worse. Vladimir Putin secures landslide victory, the Guardian announced. Putin triumphs, La Repubblica reported. Putin has been strengthened by the presidential election, the German Press Agency, DPA, gushed.

To be sure, most of the articles under these headlines do acknowledge that the Russian election was neither free nor fair. And most of the journalists who write these articles do not count among the ranks of thesadly ever more prevalentpro-Putin trolls who are willing to flatter him for his supposed achievement and explain any of his misdeeds away with increasingly distasteful conspiracy theories.

And yet, these media outlets are unwittingly doing Putins bidding. By framing the election as though it was a legitimate democratic enterprise, they are adding to the dictators domestic legitimacy and boosting his international popularity. No wonder, then, that Putin has an increasingly vocal fan club in most North American and Western European countriesor that Germans are now much more worried about the policies of Donald Trump than they are by those of Vladimir Putin.

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The alternative is not too difficult: Media outlets should make sure that they convey the fraudulent nature of the Russian elections in their headlines, not just buried deep into the articles they write. This is easy for outlets that pride themselves on having a clear editorial tone: Shocker: Vladimir Putin Easily Wins Re-Election by a Huge Margin my Slate colleague Daniel Politi wrote with deservedly dripping sarcasm. New York magazine took a similar tack, going with Vladimir Putin Wins Russian Election in Stunning Upset.

Newspapers that cultivate a more neutral tone have found it more difficult to report the Russian news without furthering Putins propaganda. But they can find a model for how to navigate this problem closer to home: When Donald Trump started to tell blatant lies on the campaign trail, legacy media slowly deviated from old standards to reflect new realities In a famous headline, for example, the New York Times reported Trump Remarks on London Rile the British but then added, directly underneath, Claims With No Proof. Now, its time for them to make a similar shift on foreign news, going with factual hard-nosed headlines like Vladimir Putin Extends Lease on Power in Unfree Elections.

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Even more importantly, democratic leaders should finally refrain from congratulating Vladimir Putinor other dictators who hold sham electionson his supposed victory. This doesnt mean that they have to break off contact with him or appear hostile to the Russian people; sadly, it is a reality of international politics that you sometimes need to keep up decent relations with not-so-decent leadersand of course we should always remember that many ordinary people are not responsible for the thugs who suppress their freedoms. But as Ive written before, theres a clear distinction between engaging an adversary in a distantly respectful manner and treating him like a friend.

Emanuel Macron, the French president, has trodden this thin line carefully. Like other political leaders, he called Putin on the day after the election. But unlike them, he pointedly refrained from congratulating him on an election victory. Instead, he addressed his wishes to the Russian people, wishing them success in the countrys political, democratic, economic and social modernization.

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Oddly enough, Trump expressed a rather similar principles rather well in his latest tweet: His motto, he explained, is PEACE THROUGH STRENGTH. Despite the Orwellian ring and Reaganite origins of that phrase, it does capture something important: We will never be able to contain adventurers like Vladimir Putin if we continually bow to their will. On the contrary, it is only if we show that we are willing to stand up for our principles that we can actually improve our relations with countries like Russia. And that, of course, is precisely why it is such a scandal that the president of the United States should be willing to pretend that the fraudulent election that enthroned Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin for another six years was the real deal.

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As democracies come under threat in their traditional heartlands, and authoritarians around the world wield their influence more and more boldly, politicians and journalists need to become more courageous and purposeful about how to defend their values. This doesnt require reporters to turn into moralists or statesmen to turn into social activists. But it does require that we speak our truth at least as boldly as the Kremlin spreads its lies. And the truth about the Russian election is unambiguous: Far from being free and fair, it was a cynical effort to legitimize the rule of Russias long-standing dictator, Vladimir Putin.The extent and exact timeline of the Trump campaigns association with under-fire British data firm Cambridge Analytica remains hazy, but Trumps data operation has been on the radar of special counsel Robert Mueller. Muellers team has been sorting through the ties between the campaign, Cambridge Analytica, and the Republican National Committee, ABC News reports. A Trump campaign spokesperson, however, denied that the campaign used Cambridge Analyticas data at all, saying the Trump operation instead relied on the RNC voter data. Using the RNC data was one of the best choices the campaign made, the spokesperson said. Any claims that voter data were used from another source to support the victory in 2016 are false. This contradicts the previous statements of Trump officials.

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Cambridge began courting the Trump campaign early on, making at least three unsuccessful overtures in early 2015 and 2016, according to a source familiar with the conversations, according to CNN. In the meantime, Cambridge inked deals with the presidential campaigns of Carson, now the secretary of housing and urban development, and Texas Sen.

Ted Cruz, according to Federal Election Commission data and campaign operatives. Cambridge Analytica was officially brought into Trump World in June 2016 by Brad Parscale, who was then a digital advisor to the Trump campaign. But not everyone was sold on the company, CNN reports, including Trump campaign head Paul Manafort, who thought the company was full of shit.

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From ABC News:

Three Cambridge Analytica employees, including two data scientists, immediately moved to San Antonio to embed with Parscales firm and by August, the number of fulltime staffers in Texas ballooned to 13. The team led by Matt Oczkowski, who served as the data firms chief product officer, was divided into three groups focusing on data science, research and polling and marketing. Parscale would eventually leave Texas to move into Trump Tower in September, and the data firm sent a mid-level employee with him to interpret daily polling reports, according to sources.

Cambridge Analytica was one entity involved in creating the voter information and fundraising database now known as Project Alamo, built jointly by staffers from the RNC, the Trump campaign and Parscales firm with data supplied by the RNC and the campaign, sources said, according to ABC News. Overseeing that effort was Parscale, [who] coordinated work with Cambridge Analytica executives to identify voters who were undecided and use social media to motivate them to support Trump over Hillary Clinton.Aleksandr Kogan, the Russian-American academic at the center of the Cambridge Analytica controversy, has been relatively vocal yet strikingly calm in public since news broke that the company had acquired personal information from more than 50 million Facebook accounts and later used it to boost Donald Trumps presidential campaign. Cambridge Analytica and Facebook have both blamed Kogan for the imbroglio, though hes denied any wrongdoing.

In Facebooks first statement disclosing Cambridge Analyticas activities on Friday, the company accused Kogan of lying and breaking its policies. According to its narrative, Kogan gave data he had gathered from users and their friends through his personality prediction Facebook app to the political consulting firm. Developers are not allowed to give such data to third parties. The New York Times reported that the firm had recruited Kogan while he was a psychology professor at Cambridge to build the app and harvest the data. Cambridge Analytica representatives told the Times that they did not know Kogan had broken the rules and that they deleted the information two years ago as soon as they found out.

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In an attempt to clear his name, Kogan appeared on CNN in an interview with Anderson Cooper on Tuesday and claimed that he had no idea that Cambridge Analytica would use the data for voter targeting to help the Trump campaign. I was pretty heavily siloed as far as funders or clients. I found out about Donald Trump[s use of the data] like everybody else through the news, Kogan said. He also said that Cambridge Analytica had been the one to guide him through the privacy terms of service for the app and that the data he collected wasnt even particularly useful for profiling individual voters.

Then, on Wednesday, Kogan took to Twitter to publish six lighthearted tweets about the controversy on an account that has been dormant since 2015. (He confirmed to Slate in an email that the unverified account is, in fact, his.) Among his more peculiar posts was a fact check of a Heavy.com article reporting that his grandfather had a Russian institute named after him:

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Nope, my grandfather doesn't have a neurocybernetics (what is that?) institute named after him in Russia. Russian middle names come from your father, not your grandfather. Just because its fun doesnt make it fact! @HeavySan @tomwcleary https://t.co/PAwueGyYrx  Aleksandr Kogan (@AleksandrBKogan) March 21, 2018

When Heavy corrected the article, he thanked the reporter:

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He also gushed about Stephen Colberts monologue on the news:

If only math was magic! @StephenAtHome but i was rolling watching this! https://t.co/cLcINapQe6  Aleksandr Kogan (@AleksandrBKogan) March 21, 2018

Kogans almost blase reaction to the newfound attention is essentially the antithesis of Sam Nunbergs meltdown earlier this month. Kogans time in the spotlight may last longer, though: It seems unlikely Cambridge Analytica will be out of the news any time soon.The omnibus spending bill released on Wednesday night includes a provision that may allow Microsoft and the Department of Justice to avoid a messy legal battle before the Supreme Court.

The Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data (CLOUD) Act grants law enforcement the right to request data held in other countries and offers the DOJ and the tech industry much clearer guidelines for dealing with foreign laws. The Supreme Court is currently considering these issues in U.S. v. Microsoft, which concerns a search warrant that authorities served to Microsoft in a drug trafficking case. The warrant called for Microsoft to give the government emails held at its data center in Dublin, Ireland, where a person connected to the case signed up for an Outlook account. Microsoft argued that retrieving the emails would violate Irelands privacy laws and pushed the DOJ to directly negotiate with Irelands authorities using a treaty that the U.S. has with the country.

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The DOJ, however, does not consider international borders to be an obstacle, since Microsoft is able to remotely retrieve the data while still on U.S. soil even though its being hosted on a server in Ireland. The Stored Communications Act, which the DOJ used to serve the warrant, compels third parties like Microsoft to provide law enforcement with electronic communications. However, Congress passed the act in 1986 before cloud servers allowed companies to keep data in far off locales.

As The Verge points out, the stakes of this case extend far beyond the DOJs drug trafficking investigation. Microsoft fears that providing authorities with the emails will scare off foreign customers, who may be more inclined to use local data and communications services that are not under the purview of U.S. law enforcement. And by acquiescing to the DOJs demands, Microsoft may open the door for other countries to demand data hosted in the U.S. The DOJ, on the other hand, doesnt want to waste its time and effort dealing with foreign governments when it can just compel American tech companies to divulge the data. In fact, the DOJ hasnt even asked Ireland for help retrieving the emails in the five years since this legal conflict began.

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The CLOUD Act included in the Houses omnibus spending bill offers a compromise.

It extends the scope of the Stored Communications Act to include cloud data in foreign countries and sets up a streamlined process for the DOJ to request said data through the use of reciprocal treaties. The CLOUD Act also provides Microsoft and other tech companies with a legal route through which to challenge a warrant if it requires them to break another countrys laws.

Though the government and the tech industry appear to be happy with this solution, advocacy groups like Amnesty International, the ACLU, Human Rights Watch, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation worry that the CLOUD Act allows authorities to circumvent the Fourth Amendment and violate similar protections in other countries. Plus, the groups argue, the human rights benchmarks are too vague for vetting countries that are allowed to request data from the U.S. As press release from the Electronic Frontier Foundation reads, The CLOUD Act would be a dangerous overreach into our data. It seeks to streamline cross-border police investigations, but it tears away critical privacy protections to attain that goal. This is not a fair trade. It is a new backdoor search loophole around the Fourth Amendment.

Yet, a debate addressing these concerns with the CLOUD Act will not likely take place on the floor before Congress votes on it, since the act is attached to the much larger spending bill.After a silence so long it made headlines of its own, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg responded on Wednesday to the Cambridge Analytica data scandal that has plunged his $500 billion company into crisis.

In a post on his Facebook page, Zuckerberg accepted responsibility for mistakes without exactly apologizing; he offered a qualified defense without seeming defensive; and he proposed a series of relatively modest fixes that probably should have been implemented years ago. In short, Zuckerberg successfully addressed several of the specific issues highlighted by the Cambridge Analytica data leak while steering clear of the larger questions it has raised about Facebooks core business.

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Zuckerbergs statement seems unlikely to mollify the companys more persistent critics or to extricate Facebook from the legal and regulatory trouble its facing. Within minutes, for example, Sen. Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, had responded: You need to come to Congress and testify to this under oath. But it might be just enough to defuse what has probably been the most damaging news cycle in Facebooks history and to satisfy casual users and observers that Facebook is doing at least something to solve whatever problem it is that everyone seems so upset about.

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We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we cant then we dont deserve to serve you, Zuckerberg began, in probably the statements most sincere-sounding line. (It could be read as a subtle nod to the #DeleteFacebook campaign.) Ive been working to understand exactly what happened and how to make sure this doesnt happen again. From there, his tone brightened: The good news is that the most important actions to prevent this from happening again today we have already taken years ago. But we also made mistakes, theres more to do, and we need to step up and do it.

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Zuckerberg never specifies what "mistakes" he thinks Facebook made.

Note that Zuckerberg doesnt say what those mistakes were, however. One strong candidate for that distinction would be the Facebook policy that gave third-party apps access to data on users friends without those friends knowledge. Thats the policy that Facebook changed in 2014, and its what Zuckerberg is referring to when he says that actions have already been taken. But it would have been nice to hear him admit that it was a deeply misguided and greedy policy in the first place.

Its also possible that by mistakes, Zuckerberg is alluding to the companys failure to disclose to users that their data had been passed to Cambridge Analytica back when Facebook found out about it in 2015. Again, the fact that Zuckerberg declined to get specific about what he thinks Facebook did wrong is maddening to those who follow the company closely, not to mention those who appreciate a proper apology.

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Zuckerberg goes on to lay out a timeline of relevant events, starting with the companys 2007 launch of the Facebook Platform, which first allowed third-party-app developers to plug into the social network. He explains that the permissions Facebook granted them to access data on users friends were meant to power certain types of social apps: Your calendar should be able to show your friends birthdays, your maps should show where your friends live, and your address book should show their pictures. Its those kinds of permissions that researcher Aleksandr Kogan allegedly abused years later to gather data on unwitting Facebook users for purposes of targeted political messaging.

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Another subtle nod to critics comes at the end of Zuckerbergs timeline. Facebooks first response when the story broke on Saturday was to quibble over news organizations use of the term data breach. That came across to many critics as defensive, and several (including me) pointed out that there was a more important kind of breach here: a breach of users trust. Facebook has grown adept of late at echoing the language of its critics, and Zuckerberg did that in his statement today:

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This was a breach of trust between Kogan, Cambridge Analytica and Facebook. But it was also a breach of trust between Facebook and the people who share their data with us and expect us to protect it. We need to fix that.

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Then comes the key part: Facebooks actual plan. Its a pretty straightforward three-pronged proposal:

1) Facebook will investigate apps that had access to lots of user data, audit any of those with suspicious activity, ban those found to have misused peoples information, and inform the users who were affected. That includes notifying Facebook users whose information was gathered by Cambridge Analytica.

2) It will further restrict apps access to users data in several ways, such as cutting them off from users who havent opened the app in at least three months.

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3) It will place a temporary notice at the top of users news feeds encouraging them to review the data theyve consented to share with various apps.

It seems clear now that the long silence from the companys leaders was at least partly a function of their determination not to speak until they could commit to some specific fixes. In some ways thats admirable: Proposing concrete solutions is an important way to show that youre taking a problem seriously. And it should help to turn down the heat on the company at least somewhat. Notifying affected users, in particular, is something many critics have demanded.

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Yet Zuckerberg and Facebook have developed a habit of acknowledging criticism and proposing solutions in the same breath. That can feel a bit facile at times, because it suggests that said problems are superficial enough to be solved with a few simple tweaks. Contrast that with Twitter CEO Jack Dorseys recent admission that his platform has become fundamentally unhealthy, and he doesnt know exactly how to fix it yet. Inaction may signal weakness in the short term, but it could lead to more meaningful change in the long run.

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Everything Zuckerberg is proposing seems sensibleprovided you view the Cambridge Analytica scandal as one that primarily concerns third-party-app permissions. But the problems Facebook now faces seem broader and deeper than that. Ive argued that what people are really upset about is Facebooks core business model. At this point, the entire arrangement by which social media companies trade access to critical online services in exchange for wide-ranging surveillance on peoples behavior and preferences is being called into question. And a lot of critics, including a growing cadre in Congress, think the answer lies in legislation and regulationnot audits of bad actors and minor adjustments to data policies.

The Cambridge Analytica story, in this view, is just the fuse to a powder keg of discontentment with the companys central project of mining users personal data to help advertisers target them. If thats the case, then what Zuckerberg has just announced is a plan to disable the fuse after the bomb has already gone off.After five days of mounting outrage over the revelation that a strategic communication firm used pilfered Facebook data to target voters, many were wondering why Facebooks founder Mark Zuckerberg hadnt issued a statement. Finally, Wednesday afternoon, at a moment when many users were contemplating whether to #deletefacebook, Zuckerberg released a post on his Facebook page, followed later in the evening by a two-part interview on CNN that repeated much of the same content.

Zuckerbergs statement addresses the Cambridge Analytica situation. In it, he offers a defense of the Facebooks actions and promises change. He also provides a timeline of the event, detailing when a researcher named Aleksandr Kogan created a personality quiz app, deployed it on Facebook, collected data from millions of users, and then later shared the dataset with Cambridge Analytica. Zuckerberg outlines steps Facebook has already taken to mitigate this kind of behavior and the steps they will take moving forward. He closes with an earnest personal narrative about how seriously he takes this matter.

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The post follows a pattern visible across a decade and a half of Zuckerberg mea culpas that have followed:

 the 2006 user uproar over the introduction of the News Feed;

 the 2007 outrage over Facebook allowing user profiles to be discoverable by search engines;

 the 2008 complaints about Facebooks practice of indefinitely keeping copies of user data from deleted accounts;

 the 2008 backlash when the Beacon program was introduced;

 the 2009 user indignation about expansions to Facebooks user data retention policies;

 the 2010 concern over the way Facebook was handling privacy and was divulging identifying information to advertisers;

 the 2010 worry that Facebook was breaking things;

 the 2015 critique that Facebook was acting in an anti-competitive manner in introducing a Free Basics program in India;

 and more recently, in responses over Facebooks influence on the 2016 U.S. elections and other global elections.

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I know this pattern because of my work on the Zuckerberg Files. Along with Anna Lauren Hoffmann at the University of Washington and Michael Zimmer at the University of WisconsinMilwaukee, I researched and analyzed nearly every single thing that Mark Zuckerberg ever said in public from 20042014. The pattern Ive observed goes like this: Acknowledge, diffuse blame, make the problem manageable, empower users, invoke personal care.

Step 1. Acknowledge

Typically, Zuckerberg situates Facebook as attentive to users concerns, but positions whatever critique is being made within the context of an ever-changing Facebook. Credit where credit is due, he has gotten a lot better at this step since his 2006 post, Calm down. Breathe. We hear you, which came in response to user outrage over the introduction of the news feed system that broadcast profile changes to other users. In that case, his tone was outright dismissive of the issue.

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This is how it shook out Wednesday:

We have a responsibility to protect your data.  Ive been working to understand exactly what happened and how to make sure this doesnt happen again. The good news is that the most important actions to prevent this from happening again today we have already taken years ago.

In these opening lines, Zuckerberg lets the public know that he, personally, is responsive to their cries. The next step is selectively avoiding responsibility.

Step 2. Diffuse blame

Avoiding blame is something that Zuckerberg does well. He has sometimes dodged it by suggesting outraged users are part of a feedback mechanism that feeds the evolution of the platform. However, in this case, he has a readymade patsy in researcher Aleksandr Kogan (who he mentions nine times by name in the 900-word post) and Cambridge Analytica, stating, This was a breach of trust between Kogan, Cambridge Analytica, and Facebook. Zuckerbergs tone is almost congratulatory toward his own company for having the foresight to change its policies in 2014, to prevent bad actors from accessing peoples information in this way.

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While moving blame, Zuckerberg positions himself individually (as opposed to Facebook as a whole) as an agent for positive change. For example, he writes in his latest post (emphasis mine):

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Ive been working to understand exactly what happened

Im serious about doing what it takes to protect our community.

At the same time, when he does finally cop to some blame, he does so by shifting the onus for previous undesirable outcomes onto the institution as a whole.

We have a responsibility to protect your data.  But we also made mistakes, theres more to do. 

Step 3. Make the problem manageable

When Zuckerbergs faced blowback, one of the things his responses do is frame the problem so that it appears manageable through platform redesign or policy response. For example, in a 2010 Washington Post op-ed responding to the way the company handled privacy, Zuckerberg wrote, Sometimes we move too fastand after listening to recent concerns, were responding. In Wednesdays post, Zuckerberg does it again, stating,

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In this case, we already took the most important steps a few years ago in 2014 to prevent bad actors from accessing peoples information in this way. But theres more we need to do and Ill outline those steps here. 

By making the problem appear addressable through these changes, he simultaneously makes the issue not about Facebooks economic model itself. Problems no longer become fundamentally about Facebook building profiles of individuals against which advertisements are sold (which some have argued actually is the problem in this case), but instead become a function of design.

Step 4. Empower users

In Zuckerbergs rhetoric, new tools that empower users are the panacea solution to what ails Facebook. New tools were the response to the sudden threat of search engine visibility in 2007, and of overcomplexity of already existing privacy tools in 2010. These tools reposition users as having control. We can see this same rhetorical device deployed in his Wednesday post:

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[W]e want to make sure you understand which apps youve allowed to access your data. In the next month, we will show everyone a tool at the top of your News Feed with the apps youve used and an easy way to revoke those apps permissions to your data.

Of course, what this statement doesnt address is why it took this event for Facebook to make privacy tools more centrally located.

Step 5. Invoke personal care.

Finally, Zuckerberg tends to conclude his responses to controversy with a reminder of how much he cares. For example, responding to the 2006 controversy over the introduction of profile changes alerting news feeds, he wrote, This may sound silly, but I want to thank all of you who have written in and created groups and protested. Even though I wish I hadnt made so many of you angry, I am glad we got to hear you. This same note is hit in the closing remarks of Wednesdays statement:

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Im serious about doing what it takes to protect our community.  I want to thank all of you who continue to believe in our mission and work to build this community together. I know it takes longer to fix all these issues than wed like, but I promise you well work through this and build a better service over the long term.

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This passage is doing a lot of work, but I want to draw attention to one thing in particular. It pushes the idea that he (Zuckerberg, not regulators) will be the instigator to save Facebook, (though in the CNN interview, he did mention being open to certain forms of industrywide regulation). And it presupposes that he actually has the power to do so. This is important because, if users or investors lose faith in Zuckerbergs ability to create change, they lose faith in Facebook.

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So should we put faith in Zuckerbergs mea culpa this time? To answer that question, lets return to what Zuckerberg wrote in his 2010 Washington Post op-ed. He told us the five principles under which Facebook operates:

1) You have control over how your information is shared.

2) We do not share your personal information with people or services you dont want.

3) We do not give advertisers access to your personal information.

4) We do not and never will sell any of your information to anyone.

5) We will always keep Facebook a free service for everyone.

We need to see this most recent mea culpa for what it is. Not just a formula for crisis response, but the pattern of a tech leader who cannot publicly reckon with the fact that his company and its sprawling, unchecked third-party information ecosystem rotted away those first three principles.

Read more from Slate on Cambridge Analytica.I rode in my first self-driving car in the summer of 1997, as part of a demonstration to display the technology in the real world on a stretch of Interstate 15 in San Diego. The organizers took great pains to carefully regulate the separate HOV lanes of the highway to ensure that there were barriers preventing all other carsand pedestriansfrom interfering. Everyone involved knew there was a significant amount of work to get from that demonstration to having self-driving cars safely navigate normal city streets.

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In the 20 years since, Ive continued to study automated vehicles, particularly their history, and the technology has continued to develop. Carnegie Mellon engineers did groundbreaking research on vehicle-size robotic technology, and the U.S. militarys Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency funded competitions that challenged inventors to create automated cars that could navigate desolate stretches of desert. But it is a reality of technology that there is only so much testing one can do in a lab, through computer modeling, or in carefully controlled spaces. The real world presents complexitiesincluding unpredictable factors such as human beingsthat can be addressed only by releasing technologies into the wild. We never quite know how a technology will work until we put it in the hands of normal people and see what happens. Ultimately, average people play the guinea pigs in the last round of testing of most new technologies.

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I again became a self-driving car guinea pig about a year ago when Uber, Waymo, and others began to put dozens of their autonomous vehicles in my neighborhood and around my university. Until this week, I was used to seeing up to a half-dozen Uber SUVs trailing each other on my way to school and a few other automated car companies using my very neighborhood as a technical challenge because it has no sidewalks or lane markings. Every day, as I go to and from work, I drive past the exact spot in Tempe, Arizona, where Elaine Herzberg was struck and killed by a self-driving Uber car on Sunday night.

It is not at all uncommon that we unwittingly have technologies tested on us. In fact, it is sort of an American tradition. We pride ourselves on being a people who innovate and take risks. And in many ways, whether we like it or not, we are all affected by that mindset. Our governments regulatory framework is largely tentative. Innovation is the goose that lays the golden eggs upon which our economy, quality of living, and happiness are built. There is a great fear in the halls of government that if we create guidance for our inventors, we will choke off their creativity. Thus for the most part technologies are innocent until proven unsafe. That is, we rarely regulate until someone dies.

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The one field in which we do have clearly defined limits is medicine. Our country is a bit intimidated by the immediate and possibly deadly effects that untested pharmaceuticals could have on us. And as such, our government requires medicine to be proven safe (or at least beneficial enough to warrant the side effects) before it may be used on normal patients.

As long as the process is followed, then, medicines are not unwittingly tested on just anybody. Medical ethicists have successfully argued that people should have informed consent before they are experimented upon. Thus we have created a process by which those involved are told what they are getting into before they agree to be a part of the process. To limit the coercive powers of the experimenters, we put in additional safeguardsfor instance, generally not allowing them to test on children or inmates. But most technological development does not require that those being experimented upon have informed consent.

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The tragedy that befell Elaine Herzberg Sunday night should make us pause and ask whether there are more areas of technology where those being experimented upon should have informed consent. Uber had not reached out to the citizens of Arizona to let them know about the technology they were testing. They hadnt engaged in a discussion about the benefits, let alone the risks. Many of us were intrigued by the daily sight of these vehicles with the strange array of sensors on their roofs. But few of us, even those who study the technology, had access to Ubers rationale for the experiment we were part of. We werent given the ability to know how or why we were being experimented upon or any chance for feedback. Elaine Herzberg was ultimately a casualty of progress, but it could have happened to any of us.Stephen Hawking, renowned physicist and best-selling author, died on March 14 at the age of 76. Hawking is well-known as one of the greatest scientists of our time, whose discoveries transformed our knowledge of black holes and whose popular science texts inspired millions. He is also well known for having amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a disease that left him almost completely paralyzed, and for losing his ability to speak after a bout of pneumonia that required a tracheotomy.

Fortunately for us all, Hawking refused to let his disabilities prevent him from sharing his brilliant ideas and insights with all of us. His beliefs about communication were beautifully summarized in, of all places, a 1993 commercial:

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Speech has allowed the communication of ideas, enabling human beings to work together to build the impossible. Mankinds greatest achievements have come about by talking, and its greatest failures by not talking. It doesnt have to be like this. Our greatest hopes could become reality in the future. With the technology at our disposal, the possibilities are unbounded. All we need to do is make sure we keep talking.

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He lived that philosophy. He worked tirelessly with engineers, software developers, interaction designers, and many others to co-create technologies that would enable him to give inspiring lectures, transact emails, explore the internet, and write insightful books.

His success serves as a powerful example of how people and machines can work symbiotically to unleash human potential. We can empower people across the entire range of abilities to express their creativity and engage in intellectual pursuits. While humans have always used tools and technologies to enhance their abilities, new developments in areas like artificial intelligence, machine learning, and human-machine symbiosis can advance this goal far more effectively, more efficiently, and faster. This increases accessibility to people across the ability spectrum and geographical boundaries.

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Hawking was able to communicate with the world through a computer tablet mounted on his wheelchair. A program called ACAT, developed by Intel, allowed him to select characters from an on-screen keyboard by twitching his cheek muscle. An infrared sensor in his glasses detected this movement. A predictive text algorithm, customized to Hawkings writings and lectures, sped up the painstaking process. These words could then be saved to text or vocalized through a separate voice synthesizer. ACAT also allowed Hawking to operate his entire computer, surfing the internet, connecting with friends through Skype and more. Intel released ACAT as open-source software in 2015 so that anyone could access and adapt the program for their own needs.

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The development of ACAT was a highly iterative process that took several years, a team of experts, and close collaboration with Hawking. For example, Hawking had trouble adapting to the initial predictive text application. After many attempts to improve it, the team ended up incorporating a third-party algorithm that worked better.

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The key to developing assistive technologies is building them with, not just for, the people who are intended to use them. Better still is when these technologies can be designed and built in partnership and by people who will also use them. For example, at Arizona State University, where I work, a legally blind student named David Hayden needed help capturing class lecture notes from the blackboard. Off-the-shelf technologies did not completely meet his needs, so he worked with a team at ASUs Center for Cognitive Ubiquitous Computing to create his own device called Note-Taker. (Disclosure: ASU is a partner with Slate and New America in Future Tense.)

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This kind of inclusive multidisciplinary collaboration produces comprehensive, meaningful, innovative, and person-centered solutions with broad impact. For example, after Hayden developed his Note-Taker, sighted students were keen to use it, as he had arguably the best course notes from the various lectures.

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All technologies at their core can be thought of as assistive technology, since we use them to enhance our abilities. For instance, we are developing devices in CUbiC that provide haptic (tactile) feedback for people who are blind. This was based on feedback we received from our collaborators who are visually impaired. They emphasized the importance of not using the audio/speech modality as it typically overloads their auditory perception. We therefore chose to work with the sense of touch instead to communicate augmentative cues.

However, not everyone with a disability has a team of Intel scientists or a university laboratory available to them.

There is significant interest in using this technology to enhance situational awareness for sighted individuals. We are increasingly saturated with visual and auditory inputs. For example, soldiers in the battlefield or air-traffic controllers need to be alerted of an impending danger or disaster in addition to what they are able to glean from the audio-visual information. We need a way to convey important additional information that doesnt compete with the auditory and visual perception.

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This crossover also works in reverse. Predictive text was developed to make it easier to send messages on early cellphone keypads. But it has also proven invaluable to Hawking and others with similar disabilities. In both cases, the technology serves to enhance the ability of users to convey messages faster.

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By collaborating with machines, Stephen Hawking reclaimed his voiceone that is as recognizable to all of us as those of other celebrities. He served as a role model not only for aspiring scientists, but also for people who do not want their accomplishments bound by the limits of their bodies.

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However, not everyone with a disability has a team of Intel scientists or a university laboratory available to them. This is where some of the latest advances can have tremendous impact.

Machine learning is a process by which computers are not only programmed to do a task, but to learn from and adapt to individual users. It is, in a sense, a team of programmers that could be available to everyoneif we choose to take advantage of the latest developments in ways that serve humankind. In his speech at Websummit 2017, Hawking cautioned that new artificial intelligence technologies could be either the best or the worst thing to happen to humanity. We could create solutions to disease and poverty. Or we could create new ways to destroy and oppress.

We are all responsible to ensure that we identify the opportunities and challenges of new technologies and focus our development efforts in a way that provides opportunities for everyone. Technology typically moves in the direction that people steer it. So let us follow Hawkings approach: Keep engaging. Keep speaking.Grumpy Cat  or at least the company behind the internet-famous feline  just won a major copyright and trademark infringement lawsuit against a beverage company that used the cats name and image without permission.

The family-owned beverage company, Grenade, actually had an initial agreement with Grumpy Cat Limited to sell a beverage called the Grumpy Cat Grumppuccino. But Grumpy Cat Limited claimed that Grenade used the cats image on several of its other products where it did not have permission. And the courts sided with Grumpy Cat, ordering Grenade to pay $710,001 in damages.

Lesson Learned from Grumpy Cat Lawsuit

For small businesses, this lawsuit should serve as an important warning. Just because theres a popular meme, image or character that gets re-posted all over social media and elsewhere online doesnt mean its fair to use in actual marketing or packaging materials. These memes or characters sometimes actually have companies or brands behind them protecting their intellectual property. So using names or images without permission can be just as serious as other types of copyright or trademark infringement.

In the case of Grumpy Cat, the cats owner set up a company surrounding the sour faced cat, whose real name is Tardar Sauce, shortly after the initial photo went viral online. Since then, the company has created products ranging from books to beverages. So part of running that business is protecting the cats name and image against other entities trying to use it for their own interests without permission. Other companies and brands built around popular memes or internet personalities are also likely to do the same.

For its part, Grenade filed a countersuit claiming that Grumpy Cat Limited didnt hold up its end of the bargain when it came to promoting the Grumpy Cat Grumppuccino. However, the jury again sided with Grumpy Cat and no damages were awarded in this case.Have Canadians, insulated from the cruelty of life elsewhere, become too sentimental? Or have Slovaks been made callous to the fate of others by decades of cynical misrule?

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Moving from Slovakia to Canada can be profoundly disorienting. Its more than the sudden sense of human space (4 people per square kilometer here compared to 113 in Slovakia); the sea and the immense dark woods; the fact that police patrol the streets rather than ambushing drivers at hidden stops; or that in Canada you can visit one office to get a drivers license, public health insurance or unemployment benefits, quickly and pleasantly, rather than pry these services from disgruntled clerks at multiple government offices.

No, its more than the greater freedom and convenience of life. Its that life here seems comparatively uneventful, even  sometimes  a little boring.

Take the example of Teddy.

22. Mar 2018 at 8:45 | Tom NicholsonItalian journalist: The Courts say that the Vadalas are from Ndrangheta. Thats all there is to it

The annual turnover of Ndrangheta is 60 billion dollars, investigative reporter Albanese says.

An investigative journalist from Il Quotidiano del Sud (the Daily of the South) Michele Albanese has been studying Ndrangheta for 30 years, and he has had bodyguards for four.The murder of Jan Kuciak has caught all of his Italian colleagues by surprise, he says.

Sme: You are a reporter for Il Quotidiano del Sud. What stories do you focus on?

Michele Albanese (MA): I have been dealing with Ndrangheta for 30 years.

Sme: When someone writes about the Mafia, they are thought to be very brave. Have you ever felt fear?

MA: Fear is a human dimension for every person. Not just journalists but also  for example  the police are afraid. But each one of us should act to respect the values we believe in. I want to be a free person and I am doing my job as a free journalist. Even if I am afraid, I have to do it. In past years, I have even received threats. They came here and looted my house. They entered my office and searched through my documents. I was outside my home then. They spied on me so I know what fear is about. They sent threatening letters to the newspaper.

Sme: Did they threaten to murder you?

MA: Yes. Threats that they would kill me. There were crosses on those letters.

Sme: What were your feelings in those situations? What did you do?

MA: I realised that there are happy moments in life  but also moments of fear. But happiness and fear are companions who walk together in a humans life. Courage is born from the awareness of what your role is in your homeland. This is my country and Slovakia is your country. And we should defend these countries. We should do everything we can so that people are able to live in peace even though that may evoke fear. I feel fear too but it wont stop me.

 Many years ago, people from Ndrangheta spread out to the whole of Europe, including eastern Europe, to do their business. Thus, you cannot rule out the notion that they joined their criminal interests with corruption.  Italian journalist Michele Albanese

Sme: Did your relatives ever tell you to quit this work?

MA: They told me several times. But this is my job. I chose it. The new enemies of Europe are not ideologies but the mafia. Not only the armed mafia but the mafia in suits and ties, the economic mafia who recycle money from the drug trade.

Sme: Your bodyguards are here with us, in the same room. How many years have you had them? And why?

MA: For four years. It turned out that people from Ndrangheta wanted to kill me, and thats why the state protects me. If I leave my home, I call the police, and they come with an armoured car.

Sme: What is life with bodyguards like?

MA: Very bad.

Sme: Why?

MA: You are not free anymore. But I prefer living like this because I can make more space for freedom in my country. Because I want to work as a journalist and defeat the Mafia.

Sme: Three weeks ago, investigative journalist Jan Kuciak was murdered in Slovakia; he used to write about Italian entrepreneurs living there. One of the theories is that it was Ndrangheta who killed him. Do you consider it probable, or does the Calabrian mafia not do such things?

MA: In Calabria, Ndrangheta has never killed a journalist; they are intelligent mafia, wishing to act silently. I know, though, that many years ago, people from Ndrangheta spread accross the whole of Europe, including eastern Europe, to do their business. Thus, you cannot rule out the notion that they joined their criminal interests with corruption. A reporter may have caused them problems when scrutinising the connection between the criminal interests of Ndrangheta, and individual parts of the executive power in Slovakia. Therefore, it may well have been that Jan Kuciak was murdered on the order of someone whose plans he thwarted with his investigation. It is an ugly and terrible thing. It is in fact dangerous for the freedom of the spread of information in Europe.

 But as they have money, they tend to buy politicians. They corrupt. The first enemy of a democratic state is corruption. A politician who sells himself cannot represent his fellow citizens. He must be dumped.  Italian journalist Michele Albanese

Sme: What impact has this murder had on Italian journalists?

MA: The murder of Jan Kuciak and his fiancee had a crushing impact on Italy. We were hit hard by the way they were murdered. It touched us deeply. In Italy, we know what risks reporters involved in investigative journalism dealing with the Mafia face. Not just in Sicily but elsewhere, many journalists have been killed.

Sme: Can you say how many, at least approximately?

MA: Dozens. A journalist has to ask questions, has to scrutinise things, has to collect data and if he discovers something, he must tell it  this is his professional duty, even if it means danger. This is because a country is, by essence, free and democratic if the press is free. It has to spread serious and correct information not influenced by anyone, neither political or economic or criminal. Information is the salt of democracy.

Sme: You say that Italy was very much affected by the way the Kuciak and his fiancee were murdered. Famous Italian journalist Roberto Saviano said in an interview, however, that the method rather resembled that used by the Slavonic mafia. What do you think?

MA: There are many ways to kill a person. If this murder had happened in southern Italy, in Calabria, maybe a bomb or a lupara would have been used. I cannot be certai whether it was a Mafia murder, or not, but I think it was a political-mafia murder, based on what Kuciak wrote about. He wrote about the connection between criminal interests and corrupt state institutions.

Sme: The key person in this story is Antonino Vadala. Do you know about him?

22. Mar 2018 at 10:04 | By Jan KrempaskyForeigners also want a decent Slovakia

The Slovak Spectator asked foreigners living in Slovakia how they see the murder of the journalist and his fiancee as well as the political upheaval it has provoked.

In the past month, Slovakia has been hitting international headlines following the murder of Jan Kuciak and Martina Kusnirova, the resignation of the prime minister who ruled the country for over ten years, and the massive protests in the streets. How do foreigners living in Slovakia cope with the fact that the country they live in is on its feet, the government is down and people in the streets are demanding a decent Slovakia?

I may be a foreigner but I care about this country since I live here and corruption affects everyone, Thanos Michael from Greece told The Slovak Spectator. Most foreigners living and working in Bratislava whom The Slovak Spectator interviewed feel the same way about Slovakia.

Shocked by the murder

The murder of a journalist came as a total shock to me, it showed that something is really rotten in the political backbone of this country and that drastic measures are needed, opined Michael, adding that this is especially since journalists were not killed even during the turbulent years following the Czechoslovakia split.

All that is happening in Slovakia now is arrogant and unacceptable, Aneta Czyszczon, a Pole living in Slovakia, told The Slovak Spectator, adding that the killing of a journalist and his girlfriend was apparently meant to show that they are able to do anything to anybody.

None of us can feel safe now, Czyszczon noted.

Matthew Wirtz from the US sees the current situation in Slovakia as a bit of a tragedy.

Not just because young people have been murdered, but because it took an act like this for the Slovak people to stand up, he opined.

Other foreigners interviewed by The Slovak Spectator noted that its a pity that only a murder of two young people got things to move.

The murder has evoked the awareness of most of the population on how Slovakia will be shamed and degenerated by the government, thinks Yen, a Taiwanese man living Slovakia.

Attilio Nisco from Italy believes that a line was crossed and now people are fed up, they want to participate more in politics.

I have the impression that before the murder, people were tolerating corruption in some way and they were not so willing to read the newspapers and stay informed, he explained.

Easy to follow

The murder of Jan Kuciak and Martina Kusnirova as well as the political crisis that ensued met with massive protests in the streets of dozens Slovak cities as well as cities abroad where bigger Slovak communities live.

The attitude of Slovak people, all the protests and concerts is exactly what should be happening now. Jan Kuciak is dead but his voice is still alive thanks to them, added Czyszczon.

I come from Greece where protests tend to be violent, so peaceful protests like these made me want to attend and be a part of this, explains Michael.

Some of the foreigners The Slovak Spectator spoke to follow local politics closely, some admit that their interest increased in the last weeks.

This incident definitely made me more involved. I have also noticed a change among Slovaks, Thanos Michael explained, mentioning his colleagues.

We live here, too

Most foreigners The Slovak Spectator interviewed feel involved in the situation.

We foreigners live here, too. Its our home, noted John Thompson from the UK. He feels it as an obligation to support Slovaks with their demonstrations against what he sees as a corrupt government with connections to the Mafia.

James Griffith from the US opined that when he first arrived not too long ago, there seemed to be a kind of resignation to what was taken to be a far-reaching amount of corruption. The murder of Kuciak and Kusnirova appears to have been the last straw.

I admit to being surprised at first at how intense the reaction was, but I also think its impressive just how many people from all walks of life in Slovakia, or at least Bratislava, seem to have decided they arent going accept the corruption anymore, Griffith explained.

Italians concerns

Attilio Nisco, as an Italian, felt very involved when at first seven Italians were arrested.

I was afraid that this could be bad for our image, he explained. It was easier to blame the Mafia, but it is still too dangerous to investigate some Slovak politicians or business oligarchs, he noted.

Some of the foreigners The Slovak Spectator talked to attended all the protests, some only one due to the language barrier but some are not participating.

Aneta Czyszczon feels touched by the events.

This is the country I live in, already a part of me, she said, adding that it is impossible not to react when people are killed because of freedom of speech or, even worse, because of who they love.

James Griffith attended all three demonstrations in Bratislava.

Its been exciting to be a part of a moment in a countrys history that might really bring about change, whether Im a citizen or otherwise, said James Griffith.

22. Mar 2018 at 7:55 | Nina Hrabovska FrancelovaKiska appoints Pellegrini cabinet

The president approved the new government, despite some reservations. The new PM promises to investigate the murder of the journalist and his fiancee.

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The Pellegrini cabinet Prime Minister: Peter Pellegrini (Smer) Deputy PM for investments: Richard Rasi (Smer) Foreign Affairs: Miroslav Lajcak (Smer) Labour, Social Affairs and Family: Jan Richter (Smer) Economy: Peter Ziga (Smer) Finance: Peter Kazimir (Smer) Health: Andrea Kalavska (Smer nominee) Interior: Tomas Drucker (Smer nominee) Culture: Lubica Lassakova (Smer) Justice: Gabor Gal (Most-Hid) Environment: Laszlo Solymos (Most-Hid) Transport: Arpad Ersek (Most-Hid) Agriculture: Gabriela Matecna (SNS nominee) Defence: Peter Gajdos (SNS) Education: Martina Lubyova (SNS nominee)

President Andrej Kiska officially appointed the new government of Peter Pellegrini (Smer) on March 22. He did so despite having some reservations towards some cabinet members.

Kiska stressed in his speech that as the head of state he will not allow the ministers in the new cabinet to forget about their task to win back the trust of the public. They can rely on his support for all the measures adopted for this purpose.

At the same time, he congratulated the new government and wished them enough energy and determination in serving the public. It will be an especially hard task in the current tense atmosphere, the president said, as reported by the website of the Sme daily.

President recalls the murders

The president recalled that a month has passed since investigative journalist Jan Kuciak and his fiancee were murdered in their house in Velka Maca (Trnava Region), during which much has been said about the state of our society, the trust in institutions whose task is to secure justice, and the foundations on which our state stands.

Too many words were probably said, but not much has been done to calm the situation, Kiska said, as quoted by Sme.sk.

The response to the current situation cannot be screaming, arrogance and ignorance of suspicions that there are links between organised crime and top politicians, he added.

Read also:

Read also: Tomas Drucker may become new interior minister Read more

The president also praised the agreement with the new interior minister, Tomas Drucker, on replacing the current police leaders, Sme.sk wrote.

Who is in the new cabinet?

The appointment of the new cabinet is one of the significant steps towards restoring the stability. Kiska stressed in his speech that acts like murdering the journalist and his fiancee cannot happen in Slovakia. His government has condemned such actions and considers them an attack on freedom of speech.

He promised to do everything to investigate the double murder and punish the perpetrators.

We will do everything to make Slovakia a successful country, a good place for living and a country we can be proud of, Pellegrini said, as quoted by the TASR newswire.

Compared with the previous government, there are several changes: since Pellegrini left the post of deputy prime minister for investments and informatisation, this went to outgoing Kosice Mayor Richard Rasi (Smer). Lubica Lassakova (Smer) has become the new culture minister, while Gabor Gal (Most-Hid) is filling the post at the Justice Ministry.

Read also:

Read also: Lassakova talks about "money from overseas" in the third sector Read more

The most debated post of the interior minister was given to Tomas Drucker, who was replaced at his post of health minister by former state secretary of the Health Ministry, Andrea Kalavska.

The remainder are unchanged compared with the third Robert Fico government.

Parliament may vote on the new government this Friday

Following the appointment, the new government is expected to meet at its first session, where the ministers will adopt their programme statement. Pellegrini said it will be based on the previous programme statement, with a focus on developing the economy and social area as well as responsible budgeting. He also stressed the pro-European orientation of Slovakia.

The Dennik N daily pointed out that the programme statement contains several non-current aims. This means that the new cabinet wants to fulfil the tasks that have already passed. This includes the successful and secure course of Slovakias Presidency of the EU Council in the second half of 2016, the re-assessment of the decision to scrap IC trains between Bratislava and Kosice even though they were restored in December 2016, the preparation of the national programme concerning education until the end of 2016, approval of the action plans for the least developed regions in 2016, and fully launch eHealth in 2017 (actually, it was launched in 2018, but not all doctors are using it).

Read also:

Read also: Pellegrinis cabinet bets on a non-partisan interior minister Read more

Pellegrini responded to the fact that the programme statement will contain the old goals by saying that this cabinet needs to start working immediately and it does not have time to deal with itself or re-write some documents, as quoted by Dennik N.

After adopting the programme statement, the government will ask the parliament to summon the session at which it will introduce the programme and ask for support.

The parliamentary session will probably be summoned on March 23, parliaments spokesperson Tomas Kostelnik told TASR.

22. Mar 2018 at 13:50 | Compiled by Spectator staffThe prosecutors office will check police representatives wife

The wife of high police official owns a shopping mall worth 45 million.

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There are several questions concerning the assets of the wife of the National Anti-Corruption Unit at the National Criminal Agency (NAKA)s head, Robert Krajmer. As a result, the General Prosecutors Office will check whether they correspond with her official income, the Sme daily reported.

Maria Krajmerova has run a real estate business for several years, but there is a lack of clarity around some of her recent projects. She is doing business with Zoroslav Kollar, who appeared on the so-called mafia lists, and Norbert Bodor, considered to having close ties with Smer.

Suspicious business

Krajmerova, among other things, is a co-owner of the firm Vsetko Pre Byvanie, which owns a store at Zlate Piesky, Bratislava worth 45 million. She co-founded the company in June 2015 with three business partners. By December 31, 2017 she controlled a 45-percent stock in the firm.

In September 2015 the company bought an unfinished shopping mall linked to the Shopping Palace centre. It completed the building and opened it last March under the name Styla, Sme wrote.

She bought the buildings for 1 with all related agreements and debts. Part of it was also a loan of more than 40 million from the Austria's Raiffeisen Bank International. Krajmerovas company paid off the loan, the Dennik N daily reported.

It is not clear from which sources, though, since the company claims it is part of its business secret, Dennik N wrote.

Apart from this, Krajmerova has a real estate business in Zilina where she is building a guest house, and in Trencianske Teplice where she is building social housing for the city from a government subsidy.

Krajmer at the crime scene

The assets will be checked by the financial intelligence unit which is, similarly to the unit run by Robert Krajmer, part of NAKA. However, he has no influence on financial intelligence, as the organisational structure suggests.

Read also:

Read also: Why did anti-corruption units head come to Kuciaks home? Read more

Krajmer was among the first people to appear at the crime scene in Velka Maca, shortly after the bodies of investigative journalist Jan Kuciak and his fiancee Martina Kusnirova were found, even though his unit is not responsible for investigating murders, Sme wrote.

Krajmerova says that journalists are trying to harm her and that as a private person she does not have to respond to their questions.

22. Mar 2018 at 13:57 | Compiled by Spectator staffEconomy remains unaffected for now

Rating agencies are closely watching political developments in Slovakia

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Political stability is what investors and companies list with the euro and the location in central Europe among the advantages of investing in Slovakia. Now stability has been shaken by the political crisis triggered by the murder of investigative journalist Jan Kuciak and his fiancee Martina Kusnirova. It will be only seen whether the governmental reshuffle orchestrated by Peter Pellegrini, the new prime minister and close ally of resigned prime minister Robert Fico, will be enough to alleviate the political situation.

I can ascertain that this government will maintain its clear pro-European orientation, that this will be the government to continue in good started-up projects, said Pellegrini on March 17.

Political crisis does no good for the economy

The tense and uncertain political situation is not good news for any economy.

Long-term and serious political instability very often leads to the departure of investors from the country or the disinterest of potential investors, said Jana Glasova, economic analyst of Postova Banka. Its consequence is an increase in unemployment, the worsening of the financial situation in households and a general slow-down of economic growth.

For now the political crisis has not resulted in any such negative implications.

22. Mar 2018 at 13:53 | Jana LiptakovaLast Week in Slovakia: Fico resigns, Slovakia gets a new ruling cabinet

Peter Pellegrini is the new prime minister.

video //www.sme.sk/vp/36593/

A week ago it still looked like early elections were the most likely option in Slovakia, but PM Robert Fico surprised the nation when he announced on March 15 that he would resign - which he did the day after.

That did not stop people from going out to the squares around Slovakia in protest against the government of Robert Fico. Protesting public does not trust the outgoing PM anymore, and they worry Pellegrini will only be a puppet in Fico's hands.

Fico will be replaced in his post by Peter Pellegrini, who served as the deputy PM for informatisation and investment in his cabinet.

Amid the biggest political crisis Slovakia has experienced since 1998, the Bratislava department of the immigration office (the Border and Alien Police Office) has moved to a new building.

Below you can listen to all the headlines from Last Week in Slovakia published on March 21.

https://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=https%3A//api.soundcloud.com/tracks/417110220&color=%23ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_comments=true&show_user=true&show_reposts=false&show_teaser=true

22. Mar 2018 at 19:05 | Compiled by Spectator staffSwitch to daylight-saving time will delay six trains

Slovakia will resume daylight saving time during the night from Saturday to Sunday.

The weekend time change will affect six trains in Slovakia. Daylight savings time will begin on Sunday, March 25 at 02:00, when the time will skip one hour forward to 03:00. Thus these trains will arrive in their final destinations one hour later. The time change will affect the express trains Zemplin, EuroNight and Metropol in both directions, the railway company ZSSK informed.

Daylight savings time was used in the Czechoslovak Republic between 1916 and 1918 and again between 1940 and 1949. After an almost 30-year break, daylight savings time was reintroduced in 1979.

The reason for this is to save energy and make better use of natural daylight. However, some claim that it does not make any real difference in terms of savings and that it disrupts people's bio-rhythms, making them more susceptible to illness.

Members of the European Parliament are calling for a thorough assessment of the current bi-annual time change. A resolution approved on February 8 said the EU should maintain a unified time regime even after any end to daylight-saving time. The bloc began to regulate the time regime in the 1980s by harmonising national practices. However, the opinions of MEPs, including Slovak ones, on this matter, are split.

Read also:

Read also: Slovak MEPs have mixed opinions on annual clock change Read more

22. Mar 2018 at 23:01 | Compiled by Spectator staffCroatia gives Slovakia a giant Easter egg

The Easter egg will decorate the city centre for about a month.

The giant Easter egg is decorated with Slovak motifs. (Source: Courtesy of Old Town )

More information about travelling in Slovakia

Please see our Please see our Spectacular Slovakia travel guide

Following Berlin, New York and also the Vatican, Bratislava will be another city on which Croatian artists have bestowed a giant Easter egg. Its painted surface features motifs of Slovakia.

I am glad that our most beautiful square will become part of this interesting tradition, said Radoslav Stevcik, mayor of Bratislavas Old Town.

Read also:

Read also: What Easter events will be held in Bratislava? Read more

The egg will decorate Hviezdoslavovo Square. The unveiling ceremony will take place on Sunday, March 25 at 16:00. Croatian Ambassador Aleksander Hein will attend the ceremony in person. The egg will remain on the square until April 20.

video //www.youtube.com/embed/sRmQLJAwOYA

22. Mar 2018 at 22:58 | Compiled by Spectator staffWhy will Bratislava Castle go dark?

Slovakia joins Earth Hour.

Slovakia will join the world largest event to protect the planet, Earth Hour for the ninth time. This year the event is taking place under the slogan #Connect2Earth. On Saturday, March 24, Bratislava will switch off its landmarks from 20:30 until 21:30. Other cities including Trencin, Prievidza, Zilina, Kosice and Humenne will join in too.

Cities, institutions and companies express by this symbolic gesture their support for environmental protection and inspire people to live in a more responsible way with more respect for nature, Miroslava Plassmann, director of WWF Slovensko said, as cited in a press release. Earth Hour reminds us that not just for one time per year but each minute, day and week we can be more considerate to our planet and that we can behave in an environmentally friendly way.

video //www.youtube.com/embed/Hr1rC6Dut-U

In Bratislava the Earth Hour programme will start on Primacialne Square at 18:00 featuring a music band beating drums made from waste, competitions for children, creative workshops where children will learn to make animals from waste and more.

Exactly at 20:30, the lights on the square will switch off. The square will be lit only by a fire show by the Dreamdancers. Moreover, Bratislava Castle and the presidential palace will switch off their lights.

Other landmarks in Slovakia that will go dark include the St Elisabeth Cathedral in Kosice, St Martin Cathedral in Bratislava, castles in Trencin, Bojnice and Spis and more.

22. Mar 2018 at 22:54 | Compiled by Spectator staffSaara Aalto has revealed she's invited The X Factor judges to her wedding.

The X Factor runner up of the 2016 series is hoping Nicole Scherzinger will sing at the ceremony later this year.

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"Were thinking of having a summer wedding," Saara revealed this week. "I have already been wedding dress shopping and it was so much fun.

I love wedding dresses."

Saara, who is engaged to girlfriend Meri, told The Sun newspaper: I would love Nicole Scherzinger to sing at the wedding and of course Sharon Osbourne has to attend.

I saw them both at the Pride of Britain Awards and we all had such a great catch up. Sharon gave me judging tips as Im now a judge on The X Factor Finland. She said Be you and be bold!'

Simon Cowell also has an invite, despite "drama" when Saara left his record label to sign to a rival.

She revealed to the tabloid: I will invite Simon too. There was a whole drama that I had left Sony to go to Warner, but there is no bad blood between us at all.

Im the X Factor Finland judge we still have a great relationship."

Saara is competing in the 2018 Eurovision Song Contest for Finland, announcing previously (via Eurovision.tv): I know that this journey is going to be fantastic regardless of the results of the actual competition."

She joked: "I'm of course jumping right in with the attitude that I can win the Eurovision Song Contest  or at least finish in second place! That's something I've been great at, no doubt about it."

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Eurovision 2018 will air in May from Lisbon, Portugal.

The UK Eurovision act for 2018 was confirmed last month. SuRie and her song Storm, written by Nicole Blair, Gil Lewis and Sean Hargreaves, will head to Lisbon in May after being chosen in a live show.While more and more Vietnamese are taking outbound tours and spending big in international destinations, foreign tourists are complaining that they have quite few reasons to open their wallets when visiting the Southeast Asian country.

Most international tourists plan only a short stay in Vietnam, and those who are willing to spend lavishly find few services or items worth their price.

Min-jun, a South Korean on a six-day-five-night visit to Ho Chi Minh City with his six-member family, visited the famed Ben Thanh Market, but left with only a few bags of dried lotus seeds and coffee.

The tourist told Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper that he had wanted to buy handicrafts and souvenirs, but found the products to be either poor quality or overpriced.

Tam Bui, the Vietnamese photographer behind a number of coffee-table photobooks, shared his personal travel experiences with Tuoi Tre, citing that other countries are quite good at convincing tourists to spend money while in Vietnam, those who want to spend dont know what to buy.

Tam said souvenirs in the countries he has visited are diverse and unique.

They may not be cheap but you cant resist traveling home with them in your luggage, he said.

I wonder if Vietnam has a research team to study which souvenirs are attractive and convenient for international tourists.

Foreign tourists shop at Ben Thanh Market, Ho Chi Minh City. Photo: Tuoi Tre

Thao, who works for an ad agency in Ho Chi Minh City, said she consistently left scratching her head when it comes to choosing typical Vietnamese gifts for her foreign partners, often settling on small figurines featuring Vietnamese women in three different traditional dresses or refrigerator magnets in the shape of women donning ao dai, Vietnam's traditional gown.

Other common gifts, including lacquerware and souvenirs made from bamboo and wood, are also available but it isnt easy to find those that are typically Vietnamese, she said.

And if you choose clothes or silk, chances are you will end up buying made-in-China products, she warned.

Changes needed

Ho Chi Minh City received nearly 6.4 million tourists in 2017, a strong 22.8 percent increase from a year earlier.

However, tourist spending only rose 12.6 percent in the same period, meaning more visitors are coming to Vietnam, but they are spending less.

The municipal tourism department put the blame on booming online travel services which offer would-be big spenders the opportunity to plan their trip via the Internet rather than through local tour organizers.

Holidaymakers are booking their own flights and hotel rooms through services run by international companies, leaving a meager piece of the pie for Vietnamese travel firms.

When it comes to shopping in Ho Chi Minh City, foreign tourists are also reluctant to spend large sums, instead preferring to try their hand at Vietnams bargaining culture.

Foreign tourists shop at Ben Thanh Market, Ho Chi Minh City. Photo: Tuoi Tre

We need shopping centers exclusively for made-in-Vietnam goods to service international tourists, Bui Ta Hoang Vu, director of the tourism department, said.

Tran Van Long, general director of travel firm Du Lich Viet, said a tourist spends an average of 2.6 days in Ho Chi Minh City, too short to expect big spending.

Nguyen Van My, chairman of Lua Viet Tour, also said Vietnam needs more tourism products to keep tourists staying longer and spending more.

We have to ensure that tourists are able to buy genuine Vietnamese goods at reasonable prices, he said.Best Buy Co Inc, the largest U.S. consumer electronics retailer, will stop buying smartphones from Chinese telecom equipment maker Huawei, a source familiar with the matter told Reuters on Wednesday.

The company will stop selling Huaweis devices over the next few weeks, according to the source.

We dont comment on specific contracts with vendors, and we make decisions to change what we sell for a variety of reasons, a Best Buy spokesman told Reuters.

Last year, U.S. carrier AT&T Incs planned deal with Huawei to sell its smartphones in the United States collapsed at the 11th hour due to security concerns after lawmakers pressured the company to cut ties with Huawei.

The Huawei logo is seen during the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, February 26, 2018. Photo: Reuters

Huawei then decided to sell its flagship smartphone Mate 10 Pro - its challenger to the iPhone - in the United States only through open channels.

Verizon Communications Inc also ended its plans to sell Huawei phones last year, according to media reports.

Huawei could not be immediately reached for comment.

CNET first reported the termination of the agreement earlier on Wednesday.A traffic police officer in Ho Chi Minh City has been told to adjust his attitude after he was filmed telling a German driver his international driving permit (IDP) was not valid in Vietnam.

A foreign national was pulled over on Sunday for speeding after failing to show a Germany-issued drivers license when he presented his IDP to a traffic police officer, a requirement under Vietnamese law.

According to Ho Chi Minh City Traffic Police, the incident occurred in the afternoon on Mai Chi Tho Street in District 2, where nine officers had set up a speed trap as part of their assigned duties.

At around 1:00 pm, officers pulled over 40-year-old Vo Thanh Tung for traveling 13 kilometers per hour above the speed limit.

Tung, a German national living in Binh Thanh District, presented his IDP but failed to present a Germany-issued drivers license upon being asked, a police chief told Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper.

According to Vietnamese law, IDP holders from countries and territories that are signatories of the 1968 Vienna Convention on Road Traffic, including Germany, can legally drive in Vietnam provided that they carry both an IDP and a drivers license issued by their country of origin.

Officer Vo Thanh Tam, who was left in charge of Tungs case, tried to explain this regulation to Tung as the driver insisted he did not violate the speed limit and repeatedly demanded that he see evidence.

The exchange between Ho Chi Minh City traffic police officer Vo Thanh Tam and German driver Vo Thanh Tung is seen in this clip posted online.

Video footage of the incident posted online shows Tam impatiently telling the driver, who speaks Vietnamese, Your international driving permit is not valid within the borders of our country.

Im going to tow your car now. No more arguing. I will take responsibility for my actions if I do anything wrong, he said.

Tung eventually showed up at the police station to present his Germany-issued drivers license and was allowed to take his car, according to a police chief.

Regarding Tams manner of speaking to violators, the chief said it was due to his impatience with the driver, who was causing a bottleneck in processing other cases.

We have asked Tam to fix his attitude and not to engage in behavior that could hurt the public image of traffic police, he said.

Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam!Dong Thap transport authorities have suggested suspending a passenger bus service operating between the Mekong Delta province and Ho Chi Minh City after video footage surfaced of the company owner and an employee assaulting passengers.

A video showing the owner of Kim Cuong Co. and one of the companys shuttle car drivers verbally and physically attacking three passengers, a mother and two sons, was posted to Facebook on Tuesday, causing widespread outrage on the social network.

The incident took place at the Kim Cuong stop in Cao Lanh City, the capital of Dong Thap, on Monday.

Kim Cuong Co. is a Ho Chi Minh City-registered company so Dong Thap authorities were only able to suggest the one-month suspension to their Ho Chi Minh City counterparts, rather than issue an enforcement order themselves.

Le Thi Kim Cuong, the company director, was summoned by Dong Thap authorities to discuss the situation on Wednesday.

On March 19, V.T.N.N. and her two sons were picked up by a Kim Cuong Co. shuttle car at their house in Thanh Binh District, Dong Thap for transport to Cao Lanh, about 30km away, where they were meant to board the companys passenger bus to come to Ho Chi Minh City.

At the Cao Lanh terminal, N. asked to buy two tickets as she could arrange for her children to share one seat.

Cuong, however, insisted that the mother buy three tickets, and the two quickly got into a quarrel.

The passenger later said she would not travel with Kim Cuong, and offered to pay VND50,000 (US$2.2) for the shuttle service.

The company owner again showed her disagreement and asked for VND100,000 ($4.4).

As N. refused to pay, Cuong and the shuttle car driver began to verbally attack the passenger, aggressively putting her finger to N.s face and grabbing her bag.

The two children began to cry at the sight of their mother being threatened.

An onlooker filmed the entire row and later uploaded the footage on Facebook.

Le Thi Kim Cuong (right), the bus company director, is pictured at a meeting with authorities in Dong Thap Province, southern Vietnam, on March 21, 2018. Photo: Tuoi Tre

At Wednesdays meeting, the Dong Thap Department of Transport said it would file an official request with the Ho Chi Minh City counterpart to suspend Kim Cuong Co. for a month and impose administrative fines on the individuals involved.

The shuttle car driver should also be banned from work, according to the department.

Cuong and her driver are required to give an official apology to the passenger and her children.

The company boss told Tuoi Tre (Youth) newspaper that she lost her temper at the time, which led to her improper behavior toward her customers.

Cuong also asked the newspaper to extend her apologies to N. and her children.Following a two-day state funeral, the celebration of life for the former Vietnamese leader commenced at 7:30 am on Thursday when his body was carried back to his home in Cu Chi District, Ho Chi Minh City.

According to the funeral committee, more than 2,000 delegations representing groups from across the nation attended the formal ceremony on Tuesday and Wednesday.

General Secretary of the Communist Party of Vietnam Nguyen Phu Trong read a glowing eulogy praising Khais achievements to thousands gathering at the Reunification Palace.

Party chief Nguyen Phu Trong reads the eulogy at the celebration of life of late PM Phan Van Khai. Photo: Tuoi Tre

Phan Van Khai was an excellent leader of the Vietnamese Party, state, and people. He dedicated his whole life to the countrys independence, freedom, and happiness, General Secretary Trong remarked.

He displayed absolute loyalty and was an example of integrity, impartiality, and morality. He was dearly loved by the Vietnamese people and cherished by international friends, the Party chief continued.

Vietnamese leaders attend the celebration of life. Photo: Tuoi Tre

Outside the entrance of the Reunification Palace, a large crowd assembled to watch the event and offer their farewells to the late leader.

I attend this celebration of life because of my love and admiration for the late premier, Giang Thi Hong, a District 1 resident, said as she wiped tears from her face.

Many people also lined up resolutely along the procession route to witness PM Khais body and say the final goodbye to the late leader.

Thousands of people gather at the Reunification Palace to attend the ceremony. Photo: Tuoi Tre

The funeral procession traveled on Nam Ky Khoi Nghia (District 1), Le Duan, Pasteur, Vo Thi Sau, Nam Ky Khoi Nghia, Nguyen Van Troi, Phan Thuc Duyen, Tran Quoc Hoan, Cong Hoa, Truong Chinh, National Highway 22, Le Minh Nhut, Street No. 54, and finally down Street No. 51 in Tan Thong Hoi Commune, Cu Chi District.

Along the routes leading to Tan Thong Hoi Commune, local residents set up countless altars adorned with photos of PM Khai and incense, flowers, and fruit to show their respect.

Students holding white roses line up at the entrance of the Reunification Palace. Photo: Tuoi Tre

We owe him a lot, and love him so. Many improvements have been made to our neighborhood thanks to him. Today, we stop all of our daily work just to bring him home, Nguyen Thi Nho, a local resident, said.

The burial ritual began at 11:00 am on Thursday, when PM Khai was laid to rest next to his late wife at his home in Tan Thong Hoi Commune, Cu Chi District.

At the venue, thousands of local residents, officials, and elementary students arrived early in the morning to witness the celebration of life through two large monitors.

The body of PM Phan Van Khai is taken out of the Reunification Palace. Photo: Tuoi Tre

The funeral procession travels on Phan Thuc Duyen Street. Photo: Tuoi Tre

Local residents stand along Phan Thuyc Duyen Street to bid farewell to the late premier. Photo: Tuoi Tre

Local residents stand along the street near the Cong Hoa-Hoang Hoa Tham flyover. Photo: Tuoi Tre

People in Cu Chi District set up altars to pay respects to the late leader. Photo: Tuoi Tre

People in Cu Chi District set up altars to pay respects to the late leader. Photo: Tuoi Tre

A woman bows to the photo of PM Phan Van Khai displayed on an altar. Photo: Tuoi Tre

Students of the Tan Thong Elementary School gather at the house of PM Khai to witness the celebration of life. Photo: Tuoi Tre

Final preparations are carried out for the burial ritual at PM Phan Van Khais home. Photo: Tuoi Tre

Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam!Four young men from a coastal region in south-central Vietnam have been saved from a trafficking scheme involving their transfer to China.

Police in Quang Nam Province said Wednesday that their cooperation with relevant Vietnamese and Chinese agencies helped to thwart an attempt to illegally transfer four people from a six-man group across the Vietnam-China border.

The men, from a local ethnic minority group in Quang Nam, were deceived by 42-year-old Hoang Cong Hoang, a resident of Thai Nguyen Province in northeastern Vietnam.

An investigation into the crime revealed that Hoang first contacted H.V.T., a resident of the province in 2017, while the middle-aged man was working at a local gold mine.

In early March, he arrived at H.V.T.s home and coaxed six of H.V.T.s young neighbors and relatives into working in Hanoi with the guarantee of a high salary.

Ho Van Tieu, 19; Ho Van Thi, 18; Ho Van Dao, 15; Ho Van Tham, 18; Ho Van Dip, 24; and Ta Cao Vai, 19, were all swayed by Hoangs convincing proposition and agreed to set out for Hanoi on March 6.

Instead, the group found themselves at Hoangs house in Thai Nguyen Province, near the capital, en route to the Vietnam-China border in Lang Son province.

On March 10, authorities saved Tieu, Thi, Dao, and Tham from the conspiracy at the border crossing.

The two other victims had already been taken to China.

Vietnamese police are still attempting to rescue the remaining victims and catch Hoang.

Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam!A pig farm in one of southern Vietnams primary pork-producing hubs has been found to force water into its livestock to fatten up the pigs before butchering and suspected of injecting them with tranquilizers.

Police in Dong Nai Province caught the staff of a pig farm in Bien Hoa, the provinces capital city, pumping water into 79 pigs through tubes forced directly into the animals stomachs on the evening of March 20.

Such practices are typically done to increase the weight of the livestock before butchering.

When local authorities arrived on the scene, the pigs were lying on the floor of the pigsty, many of them too fat and exhausted to rise to their feet.

Authorities also identified several syringes and bottles of tranquilizers on the farm.

Bottles of tranquilizer at a sty in Bien Hoa City, Dong Nai Province, on the evening of March 20, 2018. Photo: Tuoi Tre

The pigs were sold by a company in Dong Nai and were being prepared for transfer to a slaughterhouse in the neighboring province of Long An, according to an official from the Dong Nai veterinary department.

The piggerys owner admitted to pumping the animals full of water but rejected accusations of injecting the hogs with sedatives.

Authorities are still examining the hogs for signs of the drug.

Injecting swine with tranquilizers is not without precedent.

In September last year, 3,750 pigs tested positive for the substance at an abattoir in Ho Chi Minh Citys suburban district of Cu Chi, sparking fear amongst local consumers.

All these animals were destroyed as a result.

Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter to get the latest news about Vietnam!ABC has announced its presenting team for upcoming lifestyle series, Escape from the City.

They are: Jane Hall, Simon Marnie, Bryce Holdaway (pictured), Del Irani and Dean Ipaviz.

The series, being produced by FremantleMedia Australia, is based on Escape to the Country and sees sees one of the 5 hosts guiding participants through property moves to coastal, country or regional Australia.

It is currently in casting stages via escape.castasugar.com

The show is tipped for the 6pm weeknight slot later this year.

Jane Hall has been there, done that! Having undergone a tree-change of her own, Jane will share her first-hand experience of the highs and lows of relocating her life. An actor, presenter and radio host, Jane is a much-loved personality whose credits include Neighbours, Secret Life of Us, All Together Now and very successful stints on Melbourne radio stations Mix 101.1 and KIIS 101.1.

Simon Marnie is the presenter of The Weekend Show on ABC Radio Sydney. Passionate about regional issues and communities, there is nothing Simon hasnt covered about life away from the city during the 18 years he has been on air.

Bryce Holdaway is a professional buyers agent and financial planner, a bestselling author of The Armchair Guide to Property Investing, a co-host of The Lifestyle Channels Location, Location, Location Australia and presenter of Australias No. 1 property podcast The Property Couch.

ABC News Breakfast presenter and finance journalist, Del Irani will be sharing her unique financial insights with our house-hunters. Del has worked internationally as a producer, journalist and presenter including for BBC World News where she was the presenter of India Business Report.

Dean Ipaviz is a qualified carpenter, registered builder and project manager with a passion for green building principles and practices, and is committed to creating awareness of environmental issues. Dean previously co-hosted Best Houses Australia on 7TWO.The History Channel screens documentary The Vatican and the Third Reich: An Unholy Alliance on Easter Tuesday.

In the midst of WWII, Catholics look to the pope to guide them through one of historys darkest periods. Hitler has already begun secretly launching his plan to exterminate the Jews of Europe. Secretly, that is, to most- except Pope Pie XII. The pope remains silent whilst the rest of the world awaits any kind of grand gesture or speech condemning Hitlers atrocities.

He will choose to keep quiet in the face of the crimes committed by the Nazis throughout Europe, crimes that even took place below the Popes own windows, like the 1943 liquidation of the Jewish Ghetto in Rome, to which the pope made no official reaction. At first glance, Nazism and Catholicism are diametrically opposed. The Vatican even seems an institution beyond all suspicion. The Church, however, faced in turn with the rise of Nazism, the Second World War and the extermination of Jews, will play an ambiguous  at times unholy  role. Several men of the Church, priests and bishops, being fervent admirers of Hitler, will even fall into complicity.

8:30pm Tuesday April 3 on History.Six media organisations which had sought to intervene in proceedings between Bauer Media and actress Rebel Wilson will not be able to be heard.

Seven, Nine, News Corp, Fairfax, Macquarie Media and the ABC wanted to argue Rebel Wilsons record $4.5 million payout was inconsistent with previous defamation awards and it could have an unwanted effect on public interest journalism.

Barrister David Collins QC, acting for the media organisations, said legislation was in place to provide an approximate median value of such payouts.

But the court ruled the issue of capping damages for non-economic loss would already be covered in Bauers submissions.

Bauer Medias intents are aligned with the interveners intent. Justice Pamela Tate said, stating that while the six media organisations had a significant interest in the case, she and Justice David Beach were not persuaded their arguments would be useful.

The media organisations were also ordered to pay Rebel Wilsons legal costs in defending the unsuccessful bid.

Wilson has promised to donate her defamation payout to charity, scholarships or the Australian film industry.

An appeal by Bauer Media is listed for April 18.

I obviously don't hold any negative feelings towards Ch 7, Ch 9, ABC, Fairfax, News Corp & Macquarie Media  I was actually just watching the finale of Married At First Sight online  but guys, please stick to reporting the truth & entertaining Australia!  Rebel Wilson (@RebelWilson) March 22, 2018

Source: News CorpCambridge Analyticas (CA) use of data shouldnt be surprising considering the idea that the powerful use peoples desires, concerns and fears to manipulate them for their own ideals has existed for as long as intelligence within humans. Why are people surprised that powerful companies would act in this way? Especially when there was a profit to be made. The simple truth is that most people and the elite have known, but either benefitted from it or wilfully ignored the problem.

CA is a privately held company that combines data mining, data brokerage, and data analysis with strategic communication for the electoral process.

It was created in 2013 as an offshoot of its British parent company SCL Group to participate in American politics.

The art of manipulation

In 2016, the private company became involved in Donald Trumps campaign and Leave.EUs campaign during the EU referendum with criminal investigations ongoing for both. This is linked with how it has been using peoples personal data acquired from Facebook, without permission, the extent of which was revealed this week. Alexander Nix, the CEO whom has recently been suspended, boasted how they ran all of Trumps digital campaigns that include possible illegal activities, as well as lauding over the use of prostitutes, bribery sting and "honey traps" to discredit politicians whom it conducts opposition research on with claims that the firm used proxy organisations to feed negative material about oppositions of the clients on Social media.

Furthermore, there are direct links with the Conservative Party with several party donors also holding shares in the company. Theresa May denied that the government have had anything to do with the firm, however, the Ministry of Defence previously held contracts with SCL, paying them 40,000 for "external training" in 2010/11 and 150,000 for "target audience analysis" in 2014/15, according to government documents.

SNP Westminster leader, Ian Blackford, highlighted that a chairman of Oxford Conservative Association had run SCL, its founding chairman was a former Conservative MP, a director appears to have donated over 700,000 to the Tory party and a former Conservative party chairman is a shareholder.

Whether it has been British leaders use of nationalist rhetoric, Hitler, Mussolini or any other violent leadership, the use of information about people has always been a vital tool.

The ability to stir emotive feelings and use that to control how people vote is something that was vital for Churchill, Hitler, Mussolini, Franco or any other violent leadership. CA have just been infinitely cleverer and used capitalisms economic fascism to perfection. This is just a modern version of this, with a more willing public to give up such personal information through social media.

#DeleteFacebook campaign

The campaign is absurd and it will only fuel the far-right rather than empower the left. Social media is often looked down at by previous generations and this has shown the dangers of the internet and social media. But campaigns such as these and companies such as CA and Facebook will further the cause of the far-right and the pursuit of censorship.

This will no doubt bring awkward questions and there will have to be a well thought out solution to stopping powerful companies manipulating data in this way again in the future but any social media or internet censorship will weaken the voices of populations and potentially create nationalists echo chambers.

The majority of the population get a lot of information from Facebook and as Another Angry Voice (AAV) pointed out, the Analysis by The Guardian found that every single one of the 30 most viral political stories on Facebook during GE2017 was pro-Corbyn, anti-Tory, or both. Furthermore, it was the left-leaning media sites such as The Canary, AAV and Evolve Politics that made a greater impact on social media than the fleet street mainstream.

Research has shown that most people do tend to have an echo chamber within their profiles. But removing it entirely, means you become reliant on the fleet street mainstream, such as the Daily Mail, Express, Telegraph, Financial Times, Daily Mirror, The Sun, Guardian etc. along with the publicly funded BBC.

They have all been known to lie or twist the truth, some more than others (Daily Mail being the worst offender and the Daily Mirror being the most truthful). Social media is a wonderful platform to spread information and it opens up many different sources than the ones previous generations have relied upon. The internet and social media is a powerful tool as proved by CA but boycotting them also weakens the populations ability to combat manipulative companies such as these.* First (Other OTC: FSTC - news) payment tranche made before deal stalled -sources

* Acquisition seen as sign of growing Russia-China ties

* Deal stalled due to investigation into CEFC (Shenzhen: 002018.SZ - news) boss -sources

By Dmitry Zhdannikov

LONDON, March 22 (Reuters) - Chinese conglomerate CEFC had already started paying for a stake in Russian oil giant Rosneft when the economic crime police took its chairman Ye Jianming away, halting the $9.1 billion deal in its tracks, according to three sources close to the matter.

The fate of the deal, one of the largest Chinese investments in Russia, has become a litmus test of how far President Xi Jinping's government is prepared to go with a crackdown on financially risky activities among big-spending conglomerates.

The acquisition of the stake in Russian state oil firm is seen as strengthening relations between Russia and China, the world's top energy exporter and top energy consumer.

CEFC China Energy was buying the 14.16 stake from a consortium including Swiss trader Glencore (Frankfurt: 8GC.F - news) . It had transferred the first tranche of payment before it ceased all communications, the sources told Reuters.

The sources declined to say how much had been paid. One said the fact some money has changed hands would make it more difficult for any party to back out of the deal.

CEFC founder and chairman Ye was put under investigation by Chinese authorities over suspected economic crimes, Reuters reported at the beginning of March, and he will step down from his position at the firm.

Rosneft representatives have since travelled to China but failed to get any update from CEFC on the stake acquisition deal, according to the sources.

"The other party (CEFC) has just vanished," one source said.

Rosneft and Glencore declined to comment, while CEFC did not respond to a Reuters request for comment.

Another of the sources said it was difficult to predict how the deal would unfold. "One thing is clear though. The Kremlin wants China to own a stake in Rosneft. And China has long said it wants to boost Russian energy ties," he added.

Story continues

The Kremlin, the Chinese foreign ministry and the Chinese national development and reform commission, a state economic management agency, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

RAPID GROWTH

The investigation into Ye, who founded CEFC in 2002, followed mounting concerns among Chinese authorities about the finances and opaque ownership of the Shanghai-based private firm which has grown from a niche fuel trader into an oil and finance conglomerate with assets across the world.

An investment firm owned by the Shanghai government has been tasked with evaluating CEFC's financial position as part of a restructuring and takeover process.

State-controlled China Huarong Asset Management Co has taken a 36.2-percent stake in CEFC Hainan International, the unit that is acquiring the Rosneft stake.

Complications to the deal could prove a blow for Rosneft boss Igor Sechin, a close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Sechin is keen to attract new foreign investment as a way of showing the Kremlin (IOB: 0Q8D.IL - news) oil producer is not crumbling under the pressure of Western sanctions but is growing.

In 2016, Sechin clinched a deal with Glencore and Qatar's state fund QIA to sell 19.5 percent in Rosneft for 10.2 billion euros. Qatar contributed 2.5 billion euros with the rest mainly coming from Russian banks.

Less than nine months later, CEFC agreed to buy out the majority of the stake with QIA keeping its stake intact at around 5 percent, equal to its initial contribution.

(Additional reporting by Vladimir Soldatkin and Aizhu Chen; Writing by Dmitry Zhdannikov; Editing by Pravin Char)FILE PHOTO - A Phantom drone by DJI company, equipped with a camera, flies during the 4th Intergalactic Meeting of Phantom's Pilots in an open secure area in the Bois de Boulogne, western Paris FILE PHOTO - A Phantom drone by DJI company, equipped with a camera, flies during the 4th Intergalactic Meeting of Phantom's Pilots (MIPP) in an open secure area in the Bois de Boulogne, western Paris, March 16, 2014. REUTERS/Charles Platiau/File Photo

By Fiona Lau and Julie Zhu

HONG KONG (Reuters) - China's SZ DJI Technology Co Ltd, the world's largest maker of non-military drones, is in talks with investors for at least $500 million (353.46 million pounds) in funding ahead of a planned stock market debut, people with knowledge of the matter said.

With the funding, set to be obtained via a combination of new equity and debt, the firm would be valued at about $15 billion, nearly double its valuation in 2015, they said.

The move seeks to capitalise on robust investor enthusiasm for Chinese tech stocks which have pushed valuations to heady levels for many firms, as well as on rapid growth in demand for commercial-use drones.

Shenzhen-based DJI plans to expand into drones for sectors such as agriculture, energy, construction as well as drones for use in infrastructure inspection, two of the three people said, declining to be identified as the information was private.

Proceeds from the fundraising could be between $500 million and $800 million, one person said.

DJI, which commands 70 percent of the global commercial and consumer drone market, wants to finalise the deal in the coming months while a stock market listing either in Hong Kong or mainland China would likely take place next year, they added.

But there are also risks to its business, with U.S. President Donald Trump set to announce tariffs on Chinese imports on Thursday.

Drone technology tends to spark extra scrutiny due to concern the unmanned aircraft may be used to capture sensitive information.

DJI made headlines in 2015 when its one of its top-selling consumer drones, the Phantom, crashed into the White House lawn and last August, the U.S. Army ordered its members to stop using DJI drones because of "cyber vulnerabilities". DJI has since tightened data security on its drones.

A spokeswoman for DJI said in an emailed statement the company had no announcement to make on fundraising and that it was not planning an initial public offering at the moment. She did not elaborate.

Story continues

DJI was valued at about $8 billion in 2015 when it raised $75 million from Silicon Valley venture capital firm Accel Partners. Its valuation increased to $10 billion last year, said one person.

Founded by Chief Executive Frank Wang in 2006, DJI is also backed by Sequoia Capital China. It is the world's top consumer drone maker by revenue and in January its president, Roger Luo, was quoted by media as saying that 2017 sales were likely to have exceeded 18 billion yuan ($2.9 billion).

DJI booked about 5 billion yuan in profit last year, said one of the people with knowledge of the fundraising.

Its competitors include China's Yuneec, which is backed by Intel <INTC.O>, France's Parrot <PARRO.PA> and units of Boeing <BA.N> and Lockheed Martin <LMT.N>.

Global spending on drones is likely to reach $9 billion this year and is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 30 percent in the next five years, according to research firm IDC, which estimates more than half of that spending will be on drones for commercial use.

Online technology publication The Information first reported some details of DJI's latest fundraising plans on Tuesday.

(Reporting by Fiona Lau of IFR and Julie Zhu in HONG KONG; Additional reporting by Sijia Jiang; Editing by Sumeet Chatterjee and Edwina Gibbs)Donald Trump has paused tariffs on Europe (Getty)

European businesses have been spared US tariffs on steel and aluminium due to come into force tomorrow.

US President Donald Trump said real friends could apply for an exemption when he announced his intention to put tariffs 25% on steel and 10% on aluminium two weeks ago.

And US trade envoy Robert Lighthizer confirmed today that the European Union was one of seven areas where the tariffs will not take effect immediately.

Speaking to the US Senates finance committee, he said: What he [Donald Trump] has decided to do is to pause the imposition of the tariffs with respect of those countries.

The other countries to benefit are Mexico, Canada, Australia, Argentina, Brasil and South Korea.

Lighthizer said negotiations would continue with these countries over a permanent exemption based on criteria which has not yet been finalised.

US trade envoy Robert Lighthizer with Donald Trump in the Oval Office (Getty)

The news came after two days of intensive talks between the US and EU.

EU Commissioner for trade Cecilia Malmstrom met yesterday with Lighthizer and US commerce Wilbur Ross in Washington to try and secure an exemption.

Back in Brussels today, she told the European Parliaments trade committee that she was optimistic of securing an agreement.

It is the president who decides this, she told MEPs. But we expect that Secretary Ross will recommend that the EU is excluded as a whole.

European heads of state will still discuss the issue at todays European Council meeting in Brussels.

European Parliament president Atonio Tajani said the news was a in the right direction.

The US and Europe are two sides of the same coin and I dont think we should get involved in a trade war, he told a news conference.

We are not a threat to American steel. The problem is Chinese overcapacity.

But he and other EU leaders are keen to receive confirmation from President Trump himself.

In Britain, former shadow chancellor and Labour MP Chris Leslie said the episode had been a brutal lesson in the realpolitik of international trade for the Government.

Story continues

Our Brexit-supporting International Trade Secretary, Liam Fox, tried to get an exemption from the tariffs for the UK and achieved the sum total of nothing, he said.

But by negotiating through the EU as a bloc, weve secured a temporary exemption, at least.



ZURICH, March 21 (Reuters) - The Swiss Office of the Attorney General (OAG) said on Wednesday it was examining whether Rio Tinto (Hanover: CRA1.HA - news) or its subsidiaries had paid bribes linked to the landmark Oyu Tolgoi copper-gold mine in Mongolia.

In an emailed statement to Reuters, the OAG also said it had agreed to provide legal assistance to the Mongolian government after it requested help in 2017. (Reporting by John Miller Editing by Raissa Kasolowsky)PRAGUE (Reuters) - An explosion killed six people at a refinery in the Czech Republic on Thursday, rescue officials said.

Two other people were taken to hospital with serious injuries, a fire department spokeswoman told Czech Television.

The blast occurred at Unipetrol's plant in Kralupy nad Vltavou about 30 km (19 miles) north of Prague.

"There was an explosion at the storage tank but no subsequent fire in the Kralupy refinery," Unipetrol spokesman Pavel Kaidl said. "The situation is under control and there is no other danger. There was no leakage of dangerous substances."

The mayor of Kralupy told Czech Television the blast occurred during cleaning of the storage tank.

Unipetrol had been preparing the refinery for maintenance and an upgrade scheduled to run from March 27 to May 9. The facility has an annual capacity of 3.2 million tonnes of oil.

In August 2015, a blast and fire at Unipetrol's Litvinov facility knocked the refinery out for more than a year.

In February, Poland's PKN Orlen said it had raised its stake in Unipetrol to more than 90 percent from 63 percent, meeting a threshold to take full control and delist the company from the Prague stock exchange.

($1 = 20.6020 Czech crowns)

(Reporting by Robert Muller and Jason Hovet; Editing by Jason Neely and Mark Potter)This woman was seen placing her vote at two different polling stations (Reuters)

Widespread vote rigging in Russians election last weekend has revealed on camera  with photos emerging of over a dozen people casting their ballot more than once.

On Sunday, Vladimir Putin secured his fourth term as Russian President, receiving more than 76 percent of the national vote.

But new pictures show the apparent reality of his victory, as everyday Russians cast their vote at several polling stations.

Vladimir Putin won with a huge percentage (Reuters)

In one photo, Russian hospital administrator Lyudmila Sklyarevskaya is seen casting her ballot at two separate polling stations in the town of Ust-Djeguta, southern Russia.

When quizzed on the photos, Sklyarevskaya replied: Thats not me.

Another photo shows a man in a cap casting his vote at a polling station with a tiled floor, before proceeding to do the same.

Reuters journalists often followed the voters and watched them cast two ballots

The validity of Vladimir Putins victory has been widely criticised (Reuters)

It is claimed that many voters appeared to be state employees, with many arriving in mini buses that beard the name of state-provided services.

In all 12 polling stations, the turnout declared by election officials exceeded a tally kept of how many people voted.

At one polling station, the difference between the two figures was a staggering 528 votes, or 66 per cent of the votes cast.

At one polling station, the difference between the two figures was a staggering 528 votes

Widespread vote rigging was reportedly witnessed in Russia (Reuters)

Official results released on Monday showed the three polling stations had an average turnout of 81.5 per cent and delivered a majority for Putin of 89.86 per cent. National turnout was 67 per cent, according to the central election commission.

Dismissing claims of election rigging, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said: If these reports from the respected Reuters agency are backed up by corresponding statements to law enforcement agencies from the observers who were at each polling station, then its a worry. If they are not backed up, then it does not worry us at all.A general view shows the building of All-Russian State Library for Foreign Literature which houses the British Council in Moscow A general view shows the building of All-Russian State Library for Foreign Literature, named after Margarita Rudomino, which houses the British Council in Moscow, Russia March 17, 2018. REUTERS/Gleb Garanich

MOSCOW (Reuters) - The British Council said in a statement on Thursday it has been instructed by the Russian foreign ministry to cease activity in Russia and it has cancelled all scheduled events and programmes.

"We deeply regret this and are grateful for your understanding," the statement said.

The British Council, a state-funded body which promotes British culture overseas, has worked in Moscow continuously since 1959, the statement said.

(Reporting by Polina Nikolskaya; Editing by Christian Lowe)A teacher in California was fired Tuesday evening after he was captured on video delivering an anti-military rant in school. The El Rancho Unified School District board voted unanimously to fire history instructor Gregory Salcido, who was previously a teacher at El Rancho High School, reported the Los Angeles Times.

In the video, seemingly taken surreptitiously in a classroom, one can hear Salcido talking frankly about the military who are overseas.

"We all have night-vision goggles, all that kind of stuff, and we can't freaking control these dudes wearing freaking robes and chanclas [flip-flops] because we have a bunch of dumb shits over there," Salcido said in the video, which was published by a friend of a child's parent in January.

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"Think about the people you know who are over there, your freaking stupid uncle Louie, or whatever, they're dumb shits. Theyre not like high-level thinkers, they're not academic people, they're not intellectual people," Salcido continued. "They're the freaking lowest of our low. Not morally, I'm not saying they make bad moral decisions. They're just not talented."

The teacher was apparently prompted to deliver his remarks after a student wore a sweatshirt with a United States Marines logo to school. Local Board of Education President Aurora Villon said Salcido's remarks created an atmosphere where students didn't feel respected.

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"The classroom should never be a place where students feel that they are picked at, bullied, intimidated," she said, according to the L.A. Times.

Salcido will remain on unpaid leave pending any appeals and told the Whittier Daily News via text message that it "would not be appropriate to comment until I am officially notified of a decision by the District."

Story continues

Salcido's rant has drawn national attention, including a response from White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, a retired Marine general.

"I think the guy ought to go to hell." Kelly told Fox News. "I just hope he enjoys the liberties and the lifestyle that we have fought for."

This article was first written by Newsweek

More from NewsweekLaura Harris is crowdfunding her treatment (SWNS)

An NHS nurse is reportedly being forced to crowdfund treatment for her own terminal cancer, as the drug is not available on the NHS.

Laura Harris, 42, has spent her life helping cancer patients but has been told there is no treatment available for her own fight with the disease.

Laura was diagnosed with stage four bowel cancer last year and given just three months to live.

But while she astounded colleagues by returning to work as a specialist oncology nurse at the North Devon District Hospital, an urgent appeal to raise 40,000 could now prove integral in funding the treatment she needs for more time with her young children.

Laura still works as an Oncology nurse in Devon (SWNS)

The Go Fund Me page aims to raise 40,000 (SWNS)

After enduring hours of chemotherapy and radiotherapy, doctors say her options and time are now running out.

Laura believes that a treatment named Bevacizumab, unavailable on the NHS, may offer her some more time if she can urgently raise 20,000 for the first round.

Laura said: As an oncology nurse, Im only too aware of what Im up against, but Im not finished on this earth just yet.

Laura Harris hopes the drug will give her more time for her young children (SWNS)

I still feel I have so much more to give and I hope this treatment will buy me some extra time with my family.

This last year has been the hardest of my life but we are so grateful for the support we have already received.

Laura has a husband Paul, two children and a stepson, and is also continuing to act as a carer for her own elderly mother.

A fundraising page set up for Lauras treatment has already raised nearly 15,000.

MOST POPULAR TODAY ON YAHOO

Laura added: I want to thank everyone who has donated and everyone who is working so hard to raise money.

Story continues

According to Cancer Research UK, Bevacizumab is a cancer treatment drug and is also known by its brand name, Avastin.

It is a treatment for many different types of cancers, and works by targeting cancer cell proteins.

To donate to Lauras appeal, please visit her GoFundMe page at www.gofundme.com/laura-treatment-fundAt least 39 people were injured after a school bus crashed in the Nakhon Luang district of Ayutthaya city, Thailand, on Thursday, March 21.

The bus, carrying 50 students and teachers, skidded off the highway and flipped on a section of the Asian Highway around 60 miles north of Bangkok, according to local news reports. The driver was seriously injured, the report said, while the other injured passengers were all reportedly students and teachers from Ban Nonyai school in Kamphaeng Phet province.

This video taken by an eyewitness shows the emergency services at the scene after the crash. Credit: Wethin Kaeowiset via StoryfulThe Arab world isn't known for its progressive outlook on queer culture or fluid gender roles. But Lebanese dancer Alexandre Paulikevitch isn't letting that stop him from freely expressing himself, in the form of "baladi" dancingthe preferred term for the form of torso dancing that originated in Egypt.

"Baladi is the authentic word for the colonial nomination of 'belly dancing,'" Paulikevitch explained in an interview with BBC, published Wednesday. "It's really a nomination that I think is more authentic than 'belly dance' that frames this dance with a female body for a male, essentially to arouse him."

Baladi dancing, Paulikevitch continued, on the other hand, is a solo, improvised dance intended to express emotion, whether it be celebration, anger or pain. Paulikevitch is one of the few male baladi dancers in the Arab world, and it's not been an easy journey for himeven in Beirut, one of the most progressive cities in that region. (In 2013, the Lebanese Psychiatric Society conceded that homosexuality was not a disease and did not need to be treated; in 2017, the country hosted its first-ever Beirut Pride Week.)

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Alexandre-Paulikevitch

PATRICK BAZ/AFP/Getty Images

Paulikevitch said he fights to be respected as an openly gay artist, especially performing a dance that many see only as an avenue for female sexuality. He performs all over Beirut, from concert halls to festivals to the street, and he does field harassment. "I had people screaming in the audience, insulting me, [telling me to] get out. I had people in hysterical laughs, not controlling themselves."

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Paulikevitch doesn't let it deter him. "I have a strong personality. I dont hide," he told The New York Times in December. "I know what needs to be done for gay rights: Less fear. More confrontation."

Paulikevitch is not the only artist using dance as a political tool for his country. He, and several other artists are featured in the documentary TV series, We Speak Dance, hosted by dancer Vandana Hart, and streaming on Netflix now.

Paulikevitch also teaches baladi dancing classes weekly in Beirut, and sees mostly women students. "Women in this country have learned to take less space," he told BBC. "When I say be more organic, I mean lose control of the mind. Let the body express itself."

This article was first written by Newsweek

More from NewsweekAbdoul Abdi who came to Canada as a Somali refugee and facing deportation speaks to Reuters in Toronto Abdoul Abdi, 24, who came to Canada as a Somali refugee at age 6 and facing deportation after serving a criminal sentence, because no one got him citizenship while he was in foster care, speaks to Reuters in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, February 18, 2018. REUTERS/Anna Mehler Paperny

By Anna Mehler Paperny

TORONTO (Reuters) - A Canadian tribunal stayed the deportation hearing of a former foster child on Wednesday in a case that could have ramifications for hundreds of immigrant children who are wards of the state but do not have citizenship.

Abdoul Abdi, 24, faces deportation after serving a prison sentence for violent crimes. In foster care since age 7, the former Somali refugee had not obtained Canadian citizenship because child services did not file an application on his behalf.

The Immigration and Refugee Board decided to postpone a deportation hearing until a federal court weighs in, according to Abdi's lawyer, Benjamin Perryman, and decide whether it is reasonable or lawful to deport someone who is deportable because of government inaction - a decision that could alter the fate of hundreds of children.

Abdi said he did not know he was not a citizen until he received a letter from Canada Border Services Agency in prison informing him of his immigration status, he told Reuters.

The case is a high-profile example of the risks facing 1,300 immigrant children in foster care across Canada, according to a Reuters review of census data. When older, they could face deportation if they are charged with crimes before they have citizenship.

Emma Halpern, executive director of Nova Scotia's Elizabeth Fry Society, has dealt with three cases in three years of former foster children who never got citizenship, were found guilty of crimes and then faced deportation. Two eventually won the right to stay in Canada. One is still fighting.

Toronto-based legal aid service Justice for Children and Youth estimates that it receives five to 10 calls a year from people in this situation, said lawyer Emily Chan.

One former client grew up in foster care in Canada, became involved in criminal activity as a young adult and was deported to Mexico, where he knew no one, Chan said.

A class action launched earlier this month alleges the Ontario government failed in its duty to non-citizen children in its care by not ensuring they had permanent residency and the means to pursue citizenship.

Story continues

Immigration and Refugee Minister Ahmed Hussen, who came to Canada as a refugee from Somalia, is looking at what options exist to get foster children citizenship, spokesman Hursh Jaswal said.

Canada deems parts of Somalia too dangerous to send deportees, but people deemed inadmissible for reasons of criminality can be deported there.

(Reporting by Anna Mehler Paperny; Editing by Leslie Adler)The Russian scientist who helped develop the nerve agent that the British government says left former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in a critical condition in Salisbury has said they will die if they are taken off life support because there is no antidote.

Vladimir Uglev worked at Russias state scientific research institute for organic chemistry and technology, or GOSNIIOKHT, where he helped develop "Novichok" in a pilot project between 1972 and 1988 in the town of Volsk in the Saratov region.

Uglev pointed out Novichok is in fact a group of four nerve agents, each named after the year they were created. He developed B-1976 and C-1976. The other two, A-1972 and D-1980, were developed by Pyotr Kirpichev, who led the so-called Foliant program ordered by the then Soviet ministry of defense.

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He said they produced doses of up to several kilograms in liquid form, apart from D-1980 which was a powder, and they were stored in a special warehouse in sealed packaging.

Vladimir Uglev Novichok Scientist



Russian scientist Vladimir Uglev told the Russian news outlet The Bell how he helped develop the nerve agent Novichok as part of a program ordered by the Soviet ministry of defence. He says there is no antidote.

Vladimir Uglev

He told the Russian news outlet The Bell that the person who poisoned Skripal would have had to transport the nerve agent via a carrier like cotton balls or powder, which would have been in a container covered in a degassing solution.

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If Skripal and his daughter received a lethal dose of B-1976, C-1976, or D-1980, then, most likely, they will suffer the same fate as earlier victims. There is no antidote to these agents. I can say with nearly 100% certainty that if Skripal and his daughter are taken off of life support, they will die, although they are now only technically alive, said Uglev.

Story continues

At the institute, where he worked until 1994, he was unable to make Novichok a binary weapon, in which the toxin can be created by mixing two non-toxic substances together.

British Prime Minister Theresa May has said that it was highly likely that the Russian government was behind the attack on Skripal, who was a former Russian military intelligence officer acting as a double agent for British intelligence services.

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Moscow has denied involvement, stating that for the UK to be able to identify the agent, it must have a sample of it in their possession.

Sergei Skripal



Former Russian military intelligence colonel Sergei Skripal attends a hearing at the Moscow District Military Court in Moscow on August 9, 2006.

YURI SENATOROV/AFP/Getty Images

Uglev said that there are several dozen people in Russia who know the formula. "The British, just like the Germans, are excellent chemists who can with one hint do what in Moscow is classified as top secret. In addition, the secret was already 20 years old in 1993.

"So the question should be directed to those specialists charged with protecting state secrets; is it possible to keep such information secret without any leaks?"

This article was first written by Newsweek

More from NewsweekA respected expert on Russia has told Sky News that Vladimir Putin is laughing at Britain's latest response to the Salisbury poisoning.

Yuri Felshtinsky, who co-authored a book with Alexander Litvinenko before his assassination on the orders of the Kremlin, says Britain is exposing itself to the risk of more attacks directed by President Putin.

"If he is still able to laugh, then he is laughing," he told Sky News.

After the tit-for-tat expulsion of 23 British diplomats from Moscow, the Government says it will use existing laws and draw up new ones to go after the financial assets of Putin's billionaire associates in the UK if they can be proven to be acquired through corruption.

But critics say that is playing for time, effectively kicking the issue into the long grass.

Investigation of allegedly ill-gotten gains and their pursuit through the courts would take years.

:: Russia slams Britain's 'island mentality' in Salisbury spy poisoning rant

Closer observers of Russia, such as Mr Felshtinsky, propose an alternative:

"Do not take their property," he told Sky News. "Do not take their accounts, take the whole of Britain from them. Ban them from entering the country."

President Putin's cronies use Britain as a sanctuary, he says, so barring them access to that refuge is the ultimate sanction.

"And this is very easy to achieve. You simply have to revoke visas to revoke dual citizenship and to revoke permanent residency permits."

If that is on the UK's agenda, ministers have yet to publicly say so.

Mr Felshtinsky argues it should be the basis for discussions with allies.

"If you then get a general agreement of NATO countries that they will do the same, then you will take the whole regime of Putin down very quickly and without blood," he says.

The suspicion is ministers are avoiding any measures that might lead to an exodus of Russian money, however corrupt, out of Britain.

Story continues

Whether or not the Government has done enough to deter Russia in the future is a pressing question because the next attack might not be against one or two Russians whiling away a quiet Sunday in a sleepy Wilthsire town.

President Putin is waging a hybrid war with the West and has at his disposal a formidable armoury.

He has the ability to bring the NHS to its knees with cyberwarfare, or part of the national power grid, or a water supply company.

The list of potential targets goes on. Not to mention what he can do to our democracy.

Relying too much on allies may prove naive.

Donald Trump last week promised to stand with Theresa May "all the way".

This week he hopped on the phone with Vladimir Putin, congratulated him on his dodgy re-election and did not once mention the Salisbury attack.

European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker went one further, putting on paper his praise for Putin and his re-election in the fake presidential poll.

If President Putin judges the UK's response to the attack to have been weak he may be emboldened in the future.

"I think he is not worried," says Mr Felshtinsky, "because I'm afraid very much that what he is doing for now is just the first step.

"We don't have to think that that is where he is going to end. He is escalating, he is going further into crisis, this not the end of the story, this is just the beginning."President of Slovakia Andrej Kiska attends a news conference after a meeting with Slovak deputy Prime Minister Peter Pellegrini, at the Presidential Palace in Bratislava, Slovakia, March 15, 2018. David W. Cerny/Reuters

By Tatiana Jancarikova

BRATISLAVA (Reuters) - Slovak President Andrej Kiska will appoint a new cabinet on Thursday to end a political crisis sparked by the murder of an investigative journalist that led to mass protests and the resignation of veteran Prime Minister Robert Fico.

Tens of thousands of people have taken to the streets to demand a new cabinet or early election and guarantees of a fair investigation into last month's killing of Jan Kuciak, 27, who probed fraud cases involving businessmen with political ties.

The ruling Smer party picked Deputy Prime Minister Peter Pellegrini to replace Fico and non-partisan Tomas Drucker, current health minister, as interior minister to secure an independent investigation into the shooting death of Kuciak.

Kiska told reporters on Wednesday he accepted the new cabinet plan after rejecting a previous proposal by Pellegrini on Wednesday. Kiska demanded a different nomination for an interior minister because the previous candidate was an acquaintance of Fico's interior minister and closest ally Robert Kalinak, and Pellegrini agreed to that.

Kiska said on Wednesday he was not entirely satisfied with the proposed team, backed by the same Smer-led three-party coalition as the previous one, but that he had already gone to the limit of his presidential powers in his personnel demands.

He said the new cabinet faced an uphill task to win the confidence of the Slovak public.

"Mr Pellegrini's cabinet will ask parliament for confidence, but more importantly he will have to fight for public trust. Given the current tense atmosphere it will be a very difficult task," Kiska said.

Protests, attended by tens of thousands of people across Slovakia in the past few weeks, are to resume on Friday.

Many Slovaks do not believe that Pellegrini, hand-picked by Fico, and Drucker will safeguard a fair investigation of Kuciak's murder while the Smer party, a target of Kuciak's investigative journalism, remains in power.

Story continues

Drucker will replace Kalinak, who had served in the job in three different Fico-led governments. Kalinak has been the subject of reports by Kuciak. He has denied any wrongdoing.

Kuciak's case, only the fifth such killing of a journalist or journalists in the European Union in the past decade, remains unsolved and police have not charged anyone. He and his fiancee were found shot dead in their home last month.

Fico was prime minister for 10 of the last 12 years, mostly during times of fast economic growth.

He positioned Slovakia, a formerly communist country of 5.4 million people which has been in the European Union since 2004 and the euro zone since 2009, as a pro-European bastion in a eurosceptic region. He remains the leader of Smer.

(Editing by Mark Heinrich)MIAMI (AP)  Hundreds of Florida International University students gathered for a vigil Wednesday morning to remember the six victims who died in a pedestrian bridge collapse near campus.

The names of the victims were displayed on a screen inside a ballroom at the Miami-area school. Loud gasps and crying could be heard from the crowd when the name of FIU student Alexa Duran appeared on the screen.

"No one will be able to understand how I feel. Alexa was my world and my life," the student's mother, Gina Duran, told The Associated Press. "Nothing will ever be the same."

Mourners laid flowers and other items honoring the victims at a roadside memorial near the site where the bridge fell.

FIU President Mark Rosenberg said the school remained in deep shock over the collapse Thursday of the 950-ton (860-metric ton) structure onto a busy roadway.

"Families are shattered," he said. "We will carry the memory of the victims. We will carry them forever."

The bridge was intended to connect the campus with Sweetwater, a neighboring municipality.

Sweetwater Mayor Orlando Lopez said the bridge had been cause for celebration when it was installed March 10.

"Less than a week later, the bridge meant to save lives took six lives and injured many more," Lopez said.

Construction of the bridge was behind schedule and millions over budget, in part because of a key change in the design and placement of one of its support towers, according to documents obtained by AP through a public-records request.

The documents show the Florida Department of Transportation told FIU and its contractors in October 2016 to move one of the bridge's main support structures 11 feet (3 meters) north to the edge of a canal, widening the gap between the crossing's end supports and requiring some new structural design.

Videos of Thursday's collapse show that the concrete, prefabricated segment of the bridge started crumbling on the same end of the span where the tower redesign occurred, two days after an engineer on the project reported cracks in the same location. The segment that failed had been placed atop the pylon's footing; the taller tower section was to be installed later.

Story continues

U.S. Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao has ordered her department's inspector general to conduct an audit of the bridge. The agency awarded millions of dollars to the project.

It is still unclear if the design change contributed to the failure. But emails between the school, contractors, Sweetwater city officials and permitting agencies show a project that was behind schedule, which had officials worried that further delays could jeopardize the federal funding.

When the bridge collapsed, the project was already running about $2.6 million over its $9.4 million initial budget, cost-tracking documents from February show. Originally scheduled to be completed in July, the finish date had been pushed back to January 2019.

Munilla Construction Management, or MCM, and FIGG Bridge Design collaborated on the bridge project. Representatives for both companies and the city of Sweetwater declined comment, pending an investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board.

FIU spokeswoman Maydel Santana said Tuesday that the bridge was expected to be completed early in 2019, and its grant would run out on Sept. 30, 2019.

Multiple engineers who reviewed the documents obtained by the AP, as well as images of the collapse, said moving the tower after the bridge's initial design invited errors. But they also said more analysis was warranted before it could be known whether this played a role in the collapse.

___

Associated Press writers Jason Dearen in Gainesville, Florida, and Jennifer Kay and Adriana Gomez Licon in Miami contributed to this report.

See Also:Donald Trump has threatened former vice president Joe Biden with violence, describing him as "weak, both mentally and physically".

The US President added that his Democrat rival would "go down fast and hard".

It follows comments from Mr Biden, who said he would "beat the hell" out of the President if they were in high school together and Mr Trump disrespected women.

Tweeting his response, Mr Trump wrote that "crazy" Joe Biden was "trying to act like a tough guy".

He added: "Actually, he is weak, both mentally and physically, and yet he threatens me, for the second time, with physical assault.

"He doesn't know me, but he would go down fast and hard, crying all the way. Don't threaten people Joe!"

:: Donald Trump's extensive back catalogue of controversial comments

Mr Biden made his comments at an anti-sexual assault rally at the University of Miami on Tuesday.

The man who supported Barack Obama through two terms at the White House commented: "A guy who ended up becoming our national leader said: 'I can grab a woman anywhere and she likes it.'

"If we were in high school, I'd take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him."

Mr Biden added that any man who disrespected women was "usually the fattest, ugliest S.O.B. in the room".

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He was referring to comments Mr Trump made in a 2005 tape about groping women.

In them, the current occupant of the Oval Office said that "when you're a star", women will let you "grab them by the p****. You can do anything".

After the remarks became public in October 2016, he said he was sorry "if anyone was offended" by the "locker room banter" .

Mr Biden also referred to those remarks in the month they emerged, again saying that if he and Mr Trump were in high school, he would take him "behind the gym".

Story continues

He said Mr Trump's words could be interpreted as: "'Because I'm famous, because I'm a star, because I'm a billionaire, I can do things other people can't.'

"What a disgusting assertion for anyone to make," Mr Biden said.A woman in Toronto is set to receive a lifesaving kidney transplant from a kind stranger and is paying it forward for other patients  all thanks to the power of social media.

Jennen Johnson, 42, a mother of one in Toronto, is in renal kidney failure, the result of a decades-long battle with lupus, an autoimmune disease that attacks the bodys organs and causes chest pain, labored breathing, skin lesions, facial rashes, and joint stiffening. For the 1.5 million Americans who suffer from lupus, the condition is genetic and often triggered by sunlight, various infections, or medications.

Yoga instructor Christi Nolan, left, donated her kidney to mom Jennen Johnson  a complete stranger  after seeing her desperate Facebook ad. (Photo: Go Fund Me)

Johnson was diagnosed with lupus in her mid-20s and had managed the disease through high-dose cycles of the immunosuppressive drug prednisone, among other medications. But two years ago, during a routine checkup, Johnsons urine revealed high levels of protein, and after an ultrasound and biopsy, the mom was given bad news. The doctors told me my lupus was attacking my kidneys, Johnson tells Yahoo Lifestyle.

According to the Urology Care Foundation, kidney disease occurs when the kidneys are no longer able to function properly, causing waste to build up inside the body, which can be fatal.

Doctors prescribed Johnson medicine to slow the release of protein in her body and manage her blood pressure. She was required to reduce her salt intake and prescribed counseling to handle all the changes coming her way.

She was also placed on a six- to eight-year deceased donor wait list and a living donor list that spanned even longer. While both of Johnsons kidneys are failing, the plan was to give her a third donor kidney to take over once the weaker one failed completely.

Eventually, Johnson started on dialysis, a time-consuming and uncomfortable ongoing procedure that filters waste from the body, substituting the job of working, normal kidneys. At one point, I was in the hospital and overheard a doctor tell his med students that I had only four years left to live, she says.

Story continues

Christi Nolan gave one of her kidneys to total stranger Jennen Johnson, and the pair are now friends for life. (Photo: Courtesy of Christi Nolan)

At the end of September, Johnsons health worsened and she began vomiting after every meal. My doctor said, Something has to give. You need a donor now, she says.

Johnson began asking friends and family if anyone could donate but no one had type O blood. I was thinking, OK, do I need to contact my relatives in Trinidad or old high school friends?

One day, Johnsons mom had an epiphany. While she was in the shower, she said God told her to place a personal ad in the newspaper asking if anyone wanted to give me their kidney, says Johnson. I was like, What are you talking about?

Skeptical, Johnson queried three major Toronto newspapers, but none wanted to broach the topic of organ trade. She finally found placement in a free, alternative weekly newspaper called NOW, but unable to afford the $3,000 for a two-week ad, she turned to Facebook to raise funds.

Photo: Courtesy of Jennen Johnson

Mother of a 12-year-old daughter desperately looking for a generous O blood type, willing to get tested and possibly donate a kidney to save my life, read Johnsons ad. If seriously interested in helping me continue to be a mom to my daughter for years to come, please contact me.

The ad went totally viral, getting more than 1K shares in three weeks, says Johnson, adding that she began receiving phone calls and messages from all over the United States, plus Indonesia from a potential donor willing to make the 9,300-mile trip to Toronto.

However, the woman who saved Johnsons life lived only an hour away.

Christi Nolan, 37, a yoga instructor in Hamilton, Ontario, saw the Facebook ad and took only three seconds to pick up the phone and call Johnson.

When I saw Jennens ad, I knew so strongly that I had to donate my kidney, Nolan tells Yahoo Lifestyle. This wasnt a rash, impulsive decision, and I never considered backing out, especially considering all the rejection Jennen must have faced.

After the two women briefly communicated over Facebook, Nolan downloaded an application from Toronto General Hospital and signed up for a health screening. One month later, she started the necessary blood and urine work and psychological testing to determine mental and physical compatibility and was determined a 91 percent match  an outcome typically for family members  for the March 27 surgery.

Christi is my angel donor, says Johnson. Shes so selfless and a blessing, and she doesnt even realize it. She just happened to be on Facebook that fateful day.

Christi Nolan, a kidney donor, met Jennen Johnson, her recipient, at an emotional family gathering. (Photo: Courtesy of Christi Nolan)

The serendipitous arrangement doesnt surprise Jen Martin, vice president of the National Kidney Foundation, who oversees the organizations the Big Ask: the Big Give program, which encourages patients to spread their stories on social media in the hopes of finding kidney donors. We want people to consider social media as another option, in addition to getting on the donor list, Martin tells Yahoo Lifestyle.

There are not many statistics proving the success rate of crowdsourced kidney donations; however, a 2011 Loyola University study found that of 91 Facebook pages studied, 12 percent had reported receiving a kidney transplant, per the HuffPost, and 30 percent reported that potential donors volunteered to undergo testing. What I can say is that it is clear that social media are being used by people to look for kidney donors, and the transplant medical community needs to be prepared for this and some of the special issues its use may create, study author Alexander Chang told Scientific American. Moreover, people of all stripes and ages are using social media in this manner.

The Big Ask: the Big Give offers workshops and a help line from which patients can receive training for incorporating social media into their search and feedback from people who have gone through the process. We suggest people share their stories on social media, starting with their immediate networks, and expand from there, says Martin, adding that Facebook can be more effective than, say, a billboard ad that can inundate hospitals with calls from volunteers.

For those uncomfortable with the idea of soliciting donors online, Martin says, subtlety works. You dont need to say, Can you donate a kidney? You can ask if one might consider a donation or help share the post, she says. Anything helps.

There is no compensation for organ donation on ethical and financial grounds  for example, low-income people may be coerced into donating  and Martin says the common profile of a donor is one with either a personal tie to the cause or an altruistic history. We know of a woman who donated her kidney and pancreas because her husband underwent the same procedure and she wanted to pay it forward, says Martin.

For Nolan, her deed was divine. I believe were all connected on such a basic level, and I dont have the right to determine who deserves life. Giving my kidney is an extension of how I feel about humankind.

The women met briefly while Johnson was receiving dialysis in January, but on Saturday Nolan drove to Johnsons home for lunch and to meet the entire family shes helping to stick together.

Johnson said her kidney disease served a higher purpose, and shes determined to help other patients. She has created her own transplant list composed of 13 people who underwent prescreening when she was in need. Ive already paired up a little girl with someone on the list, she says. I used to ask God, Why me? but now I say, Why not me?

Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle:

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Super budget branded hotel owner, developer and operator easyHotel has signed a franchise agreement with Continuum Hospitality Group for the development of a 146-room hotel in Malaga, Spain, it announced on Thursday.

The AIM-traded firm said the hotel is centrally located in the popular port city of Malaga, less than a five minute walk from the cruise terminal and 200 metres from the Malaga high-speed train station.

It said the city welcomed more than 1.2 million tourists in 2016, with tourism arrivals having grown by 6.7% on average every year since 2009.

International tourism had been a key driver behind tourism growth in Malaga, representing more than half of the total visitors to the city.

The hotel would be developed and managed by Continuum Hospitality Group, backed by investor Extendam, and was scheduled to open in 2019.

EasyHotel Malaga would be the Group's second hotel now under development in Spain, with the company-owned hotel in Barcelona due to open this summer.

The group said it was also pleased to confirm the opening of its new franchise hotel in the Netherlands.

It said the 87-room easyHotel was now open at The Hague Scheveningen Beach - one of the countrys most popular seaside resorts.

We continue to expand our franchise portfolio in key international destinations and I am delighted that we are strengthening our presence in both of these important European tourist resorts, working alongside highly experienced partners, said easyHotel CEO Guy Parsons.

These additions will take our franchise portfolio to 1,728 rooms opened with 1,857 under development, and the board looks forward to announcing further opportunities in due course.

Anna Cohen and Matthieu Dracs of Extendam said in a joint statement that they were delighted to be working with easyHotel at an exciting time in its development.

The brand offers Malaga's visitors comfortable accommodation at highly affordable prices and we look forward to working together to develop their first hotel in this popular tourist destination.Parity announced the award of a recruitment managed services contract with Primark Stores on Thursday, which began on 21 March and under which Parity Professionals would provide all of the fashion retailers contract and interim IT staff.

The AIM-traded firm said Primark Stores - an international retailer, part of Associated British Foods - was undertaking rapid expansion in overseas markets.

Operating more than 320 stores in Europe and America required significant investment in the redevelopment of its IT systems from offices in the UK and Ireland, which Parity said necessitated the need for a supplier which could deliver to the increased demands placed on the Primark IT team.

Alongside the new client award, Parity said it had also secured key contract extensions for Parity Consultancy Services post period end with the Ministry of Defence in relation to the Military Capability Output Costing System.

It also won contract extensions from British American Tobacco, and the Education and Skills Funding Agency.

The companys board said the awards provided encouraging visibility to its order book, helping to underwrite expectations for group growth with a total opportunity of 5.3m in the year for Parity Consultancy Services, and estimated revenues in the region of 20-25m over a three-year period for Parity Professionals.

I am delighted with Primark's decision to choose Parity as their managed service partner for IT resources, said Parity CEO Alan Rommel.

These awards, completed so far in 2018, demonstrate the flexibility and quality of our service, and create a fantastic platform for growth in both our staffing and consultancy businesses through the remainder of 2018 and beyond.

Andy Foskett, managing director of Parity Professionals, added that he was extremely pleased with the positive step for Parity Professionals, partnering with a well-established brand during a period of expansion.

Primark is a welcome addition to recent awards in the private and public sector, adding to our success on the CCS Digital Outcomes and Specialists and Scottish Government DPS frameworks.Oil and gas company Range Resources has agreed on an early production focused work programme on its Perlak field asset in Indonesia, with first oil production targeted for mid-2018.

With field work, principally comprising well re-openings and work-overs, expected to kick off during the second quarter, Range's planned work programme is expected to add up to 200 barrels of oil per day to its production levels.

Since completing the acquisition of Perlak in October, Range, working with the Indonesian state-owned oil and natural gas firm Pertamina, the group has built an experienced team in Indonesia, focused on finalising a work programme and budget for the projects, as well as undertaking initial geological and geophysical studies.

The AIM-quoted group now plans to reopen as many as ten existing, previously producing wells, in addition to completing workovers of two wells.

"This work programme has been designed to swiftly reinitiate production from the historically producing Perlak oilfield in 2018," the firm told investors on Thursday.

The total forecast expenditure for 2018, including well reopening, workovers and other required fieldwork was estimated to be approximately $6m.

Yan Liu, Range's chief executive, said "Following the completion of the initial study work, Range and its partners have developed a plan to target a rapid return to production by undertaking a low risk, focused work programme. This is a first step towards unlocking the full potential of this highly prospective asset, which has the potential to deliver significant benefits to our shareholders in the form of increased production, cash flows and new development opportunities."

As of 1040 GMT, shares had slipped 8.89% to 0.20p.Catalan president, Roger Torrent has called for a vote in the regional assembly on Thursday afternoon on whether to nominate Jordi Turull as their candidate to Catalonia's presidency, despite the imminent risk that he might be sentenced to jail on charges of secession.

Torrent announced overnight that a vote would take place on Thursday at 5pm, telling Catalunya Radio that the decision was perfectly normal and "has been done before. We are prepared to talk at any time and especially if it means moving forward."

Torrent said he wants to ensure the rights of all the members of parliament and in this case Jordi Turulls. And although there is a risk that the Supreme court might decide to send Turull to prison on Friday, "all his political rights are intact right now".

But in any case, Turull had reportedly not yet mustered sufficient parliamentary support in order guarantee his election as president, with most political parties expected to hold private meetings prior to the ballot to decide where they stood.

If finally elected, the last remaining hurdle would be to obtain the monarch's, King Philip the Sixth, signature, with Torrent on the record as saying he could not fathom why the King might refuse to sign in the new president chosen by the regional parliament.

Should he fail to garner sufficient ballots, Turull would become the third candidate to fail in his bid for the presidency of the Generalitat since regional elections were last held in March.

His immediate predecessor, Jordi Sanchez failed in his attempt after the Supreme Court in Madrid refused to allow him to leave prison while Carles Puigdemont, the original candidate, was stymied in his attempt by his condition as an exile in Brussels, which impeded him from being able to attend the prerequisite parliamentary session in person.German business confidence deteriorated a little in March, according to a widely-followed survey released on Thursday.

The Ifo business climate index fell to 114.7 from 115.4 in February, just missing expectations for a reading of 114.8.

Meanwhile, the current assessment index dropped to 125.9 from 126.3 the month before, coming in slightly ahead of expectations for a reading of 125.7.

The expectations index slipped to 104.4 in March from 105.4 the month before, bang in line with forecasts.

The index for manufacturing fell to 26.5 from 28.1 in February, while the index for construction rose to 17.9 from 15.9 and the wholesaling gauge was steady at 20.7. The index for retailing slumped to 4.7 this month from 11.1 in February.

Clemens Fuest, president of the Ifo Institute, said the threat of protectionism is dampening the mood in the German economy.

Berenberg economist Florian Hense said: "Few major advanced economies rely on international trade as much as Germanys. Thus, trade tensions and fears of a protectionist wave that have surfaced over the last couple of weeks were set to leave a mark on business confidence in the eurozones biggest economy.

"That a new government was formed in Germany, reducing political uncertainty, could not offset the headwinds from the threat of trade wars. For the time being we probably do not need to worry about the only small correction in confidence. Sentiment had reached multi-decade highs at the turn of the year before falling off a bit recently. The fall in the soft data brings it in line with the hard data and the current level suggests a healthy pace of expansion in 2018."

Hense added that the risk of a trade war has increased, but remains low. "For now, the tariffs announced by the US administration do not pose an immediate economic threat to the global economy. They remain very limited in size and scope."

Claus Vistesen, chief eurozone economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, said that while the expectations index dropped, it's not yet at a level where alarm bells start ringing.

"Anything below 100, however, would be a bad sign," he said.Robert Lighthizer, US trade representative, on Wednesday said the United States could be looking to avoid a trade war with some of its top allies, with the EU, Australia, South Korea, Argentina and Brazil maybe exempted from the tariffs on steel and aluminium.

Lighthizer, who was speaking to the House Ways and the Means Committee, still hasnt confirmed if these countries will definitely be exempt from the tariffs that are set to take effect on Friday.

President Donald Trump will later announce around $50bn of tariffs against China over intellectual-property violations on Thursday, Forbes reported. The White House said the president had decided to take action based on Chinas "state-led, market-distorting efforts to force, pressure, and steal U.S. technologies and intellectual property.

Although Lighthizer made clear that while details are being worked out with certain countries, he said tariffs were designed not to disrupt supply chains.

Nobody wins from a trade war," he said. "We certainly dont want a trade war. On the other hand, you have to ask yourself, can we go on with an $800 (and growing) billion trade deficit?.

He added: Our view is that we have a very serious problem of losing our intellectual property, which is really the biggest single advantage of the American economy. We are losing that to China."

The Trump administration already confirmed that Canada and Mexico would not be included in the tariffs and this decision has been integrated in the NAFTA renegotiation talks.

The President will also increase tariffs for countries like China on Thursday with $60bn in new levies on their technology and telecommunications sector to avoid the loss of US intellectual property.

If the countries mentioned by Lighthizer are given exemptions that would leave top four exporters to the US out of the tariffs.

According to The Telegraph, one EU source said Germany believed it was close to acquiring an exemption to the tariffs but was waiting for the President to sign it himself.

The Trump administration is set to decide by the end of April which countries will have this privilege.President Donald Trumps lead lawyer for the investigation into alleged Russian election interference has resigned from the legal team according to media reports on Thursday.

John Dowd reportedly left his post as the head of the legal team after mounting frustration over the Presidents repeated failure to follow his advice, after Trump recently began criticising Robert Mueller by name, rather than just his enquiry.

"I love the President and wish him well," Dowd said to the Washington Post.

Dowd called for an immediate shutdown of Muellers investigation into links between the Presidents associates and Russia last week, claiming initially that he was speaking on behalf of the White House before backing down and branding the outburst as his personal opinion.

The lawyer also courted controversy in January as a tweet he claimed to have written suggested that the president was aware that former national security advisor Michael Flynn lied to the FBI during the Russia investigation, effectively implying that Trump had obstructed justice.

Jay Sekulow, counsel to the President, said: "John Dowd is a friend and has been a valuable member of our legal team. We will continue our ongoing representation of the President and our co-operation with the Office of Special Counsel."

Trumps legal team is currently deliberating over the possibility of allowing Muellers team to interview the President, a move that Dowd was strongly opposed to.

Dowd's successor is not immediately clear as the legal team has seen a number of changes over recent weeks with Washington attorney Joseph diGenova, who has claimed that the FBI are engaged in a "brazen plot" to "frame" the President, added just three days ago.Stocks on the Continent got dinged on Thursday, weighed down by a slate of weaker-than-expected economic data ahead of the expected announcement of US trade tariffs against China later in the day.

Just as important, reports overnight indicated that Beijing had prepared a series of retaliatory measures which it might bring to bear in response.

In the event, shortly after the market close in Frankfurt, US president Donald Trump instructed the country's Trade Representative to draw up a list of goods worth at least $50bn on which levies would be imposed.

Against that backdrop, by the close of trading the benchmark Stoxx 600 had falled by 1.55% or 5.81 points to 369.15, alongside a 1.70% or 209.07 point fall to 12,100.08 on the German Dax while the Cac-40 was retreating 1.38% or 72.53 points to trade at 5,167.21.

In parallel, euro/dollar was still down a touch, off by 0.28% at 1.23030, alongside a six basis point drop in 10-year German bund yields to 0.53%.

Commenting on the White House's announcement, analysts at Capital Economics said: "The tariffs on Chinese imports outlined by President Donald Trump today wont have a huge impact on the economy even if implemented in full, and we suspect they will end up being watered down.

"But as the market reaction today highlights, there is a clear risk that sentiment continues to deteriorate. And the damage from a further escalation of the trade conflict with China could be much greater."

Weak prints on key manufacturing and business sector surveys - partly do to such trade tensions, but between the US and Germany or the European Union - also weighed on sentiment.

The key IHS Markit euro area manufacturing sector purchasing managers' index dropped from a reading of 59.6 for February to 56.1 in March, marking a significant shortfall versus forecasts for a reading of 58.2.

IHS Markit's Chris Williamson put down at least part of that weakness to bad weather in Northern Europe, but said other factors were "clearly at play", with the export order book having halved.

IFO's widely-followed German business confidence index also weakened, from 115.4 last month to an 11-month low of 114.7.

That was only a shade weaker than expectations for a reading of 114.8, but according to the research institute's president, "the threat of protectionism is dampening the mood in the German economy."

"It is reassuring to know that German exporters have a strong footprint in the EU. For instance, car producers shipped 12% of their total exports to the US last year but 54% went to the EU (China: 9%)," said Dr.Andreas Rees, chief German economist at UniCredit Bank.

"We think that there is no reason to become overly pessimistic. The latest business sentiment data (Ifo, PMIs) still signal respectable GDP growth ahead."GKN has written to its shareholders urging them not to back Melrose Industries  hostile takeover bid and describing Melrose as an unsuitable steward of the company.

With a week until the 29 March deadline for shareholders to respond to Melroses 8.1bn offer, GKN Chairman Mike Turner told shareholders Melroses offer was wholly inadequate compared with GKNs own strategy. His letter is the latest salvo in a bitter battle for the future of the FTSE 100 engineer.

GKN published the letter as Melrose, the FTSE 250 turnaround company, said it had reached an agreement with GKNs pension scheme that would protect and improve the position of the schemes members.

GKN proposes selling its automotive business to Dana Inc of the US, leaving a world-class aerospace company that will positively re-rate in line with peers, Turner said. GKN shareholders would have a stake in Dana, allowing them to benefit from combining the automotive businesses, GKN said.

Turner referred to Airbuss warning about GKN being owned by a company with a short-term investment plan. Airbus, GKNs biggest customer, said on 21 March it would be almost impossible to award new work to GKN under Melroses ownership.

We believe that Airbus is right to be concerned about such an approach and the comments from Airbus reinforce our firmly held belief that Melrose is not an appropriate owner of GKN, Turner said. Indeed, throughout this process, Melrose has shown itself to be an unsuitable steward of your company with no long term plan.

GKN and Melrose have been locked in an increasingly rancorous battle since GKNs board rejected Melroses approach in January. Melrose has said GKNs management is not up to the job of reviving the engineers fortunes while GKN has branded Melrose a novice operator with no plan for the business.

GKNs pension scheme has been one of the main points of contention between the companies. Melrose said it had agreed with the trustees to inject about 1bn into the scheme if its takeover goes ahead.

Melroses chairman, Christopher Miller, said: "The agreement with the GKN pension scheme Trustees is another concrete example of Melrose's exemplary track record with pension schemes and its desire to look after all stakeholders. This agreement would significantly improve the position of the members of GKN's pension schemes and is in line with our original plans for the business.Ted Baker reported a 12% jump in full-year pre-tax profit on Thursday as revenue grew but the retailer warned that "external" trading conditions will remain challenging.

In the year to 27 January 2018, pre-tax profit rose to 68.8m from 61.3m on revenue of 591.7m, up 11% from the previous year despite a challenging backdrop. Adjusted earnings per share rose 12% to 127.7p and the company lifted its total dividend by 12% to 60.1p a share.

Retail sales including e-commerce were up 10.4% to 442.5m as the group increased its average square footage by 5.9%, with sales in the UK and Europe up 7.7% to 301.1m. Meanwhile, retail sales in the US and Canada were 16.2% higher at 120.1m.

E-commerce sales rose 40% to 101.1m and wholesale sales were ahead 14.6% to 149.2m.

The company opened a new store at London Luton Airport during the year and plans to open new stores at Barcelona Airport and London Bridge station, an outlet in Lyon and its first outlet in Neumunster, Germany, along with further concessions in the UK, France, Germany and Spain.

In North America, it plans to open stores in Austin and Orlando, along with further licence partner concessions in Mexico.

In the rest of the world, Ted Baker said it remains focused on building brand awareness, as it's still in the relatively early stages of investment.

The company said recent unseasonal weather across Europe and the East Coast of the US had affected the early part of its spring/summer and that it expects external trading conditions to remain challenging across many of its global markets. However, it also stressed that the new season collections have been well received.

Founder and chief executive officer Ray Kelvin said: "I am pleased to report a year of continued progress in Ted Baker's expansion as a global lifestyle brand. The group's good performance demonstrates the strength of the brand as well as the quality and appeal of our collections.

"Ted Baker's continued success is driven by the passion and talent of our global teams. I would like to take this opportunity to thank our colleagues across the world for their hard work and Tedication during the year.

"Our new collections have been received positively and although we anticipate external trading conditions will remain challenging across many of our global markets, the strength of our brand and business model mean that we remain well positioned to continue the group's momentum and long-term development. We have a clear strategy for growth across both established and new markets which is underpinned by our controlled, multi-channel distribution as well as the design, quality and attention to detail that are at the heart of everything we do."

At 0950 GMT, the shares were down 8% to 2,706p.

Mike van Dulken, head of research at Accendo Markets, said the results were "solid" but as with many other retailers of late, the company "has fallen foul of its outlook statement" with management anticipating trading conditions will remain difficult.

"More cautious investors are clearly not prepared to look through this observation, for fear of it actually sugar-coating what could be a worsening in recent trading conditions. After all, the message from the high street this week was hardly one of optimism. And as much as growth levels are handsome double-digits (retail, wholesale, internet and licensing), there is also a worry that GBPs recent climb is eroding what has been a rather helpful FX boost."

George Salmon, equity analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown, said: "The arrival of the Beast from the East in early March was untimely for clothing retailers to say the least, as it came just as they started to push spring/summer collections. While the cold snap has seen trading slow a touch, investors should nonetheless be reassured that Ted is confident this seasons lines will fly off the shelves once things warm up a bit.

"Overall, we think theres several reasons to be optimistic about Teds long-term prospects. The groups quirky designs offer high-fashion at accessible prices, and thus fill an attractive niche in market. We also like the fact expansion has been well-managed, and recent years have seen Ted grow without stretching the balance sheet too much. That makes the unexpected increase in debt something of a blot on the copybook, although to be honest were still some way off it becoming a problem."America and the European Union have pledged to reach an agreement on President Trumps steep steel and aluminium tariffs as rapidly as possible. Donald Tusk, the European Council president, expressed cautious optimism that the EU would persuade the US to offer an exemption from the duties. Everything will be clear tomorrow, he said. - The Times

Reckitt Benckiser has ended talks with Pfizer over a multibillion-pound acquisition of its consumer healthcare business leaving the way clear for Glaxosmithkline to complete the deal. In a surprise statement last night, the consumer goods company behind Cillit Bang and Clearasil said its proposal had been for part of the business only. - The Times

Britains post-Brexit blue passport is set to be made by a Franco-Dutch firm, according to reports. Changing the colour from the burgundy favoured across the EU is regarded by some Brexiters as a powerful symbol of Britains restored sovereignty. - Guardian

Interserve late on Wednesday agreed a refinancing deal worth almost 300m with its lenders after tense months struggling to convince investors after the collapse of outsourcing peer Carillion. Management made an agreement in principle with lenders and other financial stakeholders which will give it 196.6m of cash as well as bonding facilities of up to 95m which expire in 2021. Bonding facilities are a type of guarantee for construction projects. - Telegraph

Conservative party donors are among the investors in the company that spawned the election consultancy at the centre of a storm about use of data from Facebook. Filings for SCL Group, which is at the top of a web of companies linked to Cambridge Analytica, show that since its conception in 2005 its shareholders and officers have included a wine millionaire who has given more than 700,000 to the party, a former Conservative MP, and a peer who was a business minister under David Cameron. - Guardian

Advertisers threatened to abandon Facebook last night as Mark Zuckerberg apologised for the Cambridge Analytica scandal and admitted that the company made mistakes. Mr Zuckerberg, co-founder and chief executive of the US technology giant, broke his silence to head off a revolt among users and financial backers. He described the incident as a major breach of trust and said he was open to further regulation of the website. - The Times

Conviviality is meeting with investors over the coming days as it scrambles to raise funds to pay off its debts, though warned that if it failed to secure the cash, it could go bust. The Bargain Booze owner, which earlier this month said it was considering tapping shareholders for funds, said it had arranged meetings with institutional investor this week to persuade them to take part in its share placing to raise 125m. - Telegraph

Troubled retailer New Look secured approval from 98pc of its creditors for a deal to stem losses by closing 60 stores through a company voluntary arrangement that puts 980 jobs at risk. The retailer on Wednesday initiated the CVA, a form of insolvency aimed at protecting a business from going bust entirely, earlier this month. - TelegraphIn ceremonies held March 21 at the Georgia State Capitol, two University of North Georgia (UNG) cadets were recognized by Gov. Nathan Deal and the General Assembly for being ranked in the top five Army ROTC cadets in the United States.

Cadet 1st Lt. Andrew Gomez of Cumming, Georgia, is ranked second in the nation and Cadet Lt. Col. Bryton Wenzel of Albany, Georgia, is ranked fifth.

Cadets are ranked on the national Order of Merit List (OML) by achieving superior grade point averages, strong performance in the Army physical fitness test, proving their worth as exceptional leaders in their college ROTC training, and their performance at Advanced Camp at Fort Knox, Kentucky. With more than 5,000 cadets from across the nation ranked on this years OML, it is extraordinary that two cadets from the same university are ranked among the top five nationally.

Gomez and Wenzel each received a governor's commendation from Deal at the Georgia Capitol and resolutions were presented honoring each cadet in the state Senate and the House of Representatives. UNG President Bonita Jacobs and Col. Brent Cummings, professor of military science at UNG, also addressed each legislative body.

The recognition was held in conjunction with UNG Day at the Capitol, an annual event to showcase some of UNG's recent achievements, innovative programs and points of pride with the Georgia legislature. University administrators, faculty and students met lawmakers, including Deal and House Speaker David Ralston, a UNG alumnus.

Ralston commended UNG for its role in preparing students to become leaders in business, military and civic realms across the state and around the world.

"We have a real treasure in UNG, and I'm proud of the way this school prepares leaders in all walks of life. Through these graduates and cadets like Andrew Gomez and Bryton Wenzel, UNG makes a positive impact across our state and throughout the world," Ralston said. "As an alumnus, I'm proud to celebrate UNG Day at the Capitol and recognize these two outstanding cadets. I'm glad my colleagues in the General Assembly have the opportunity today to learn more about the important role UNG plays in the future of north Georgia."

Sen. Butch Miller, a UNG alumnus who represents District 49 and is the highest-ranking senator in the General Assembly, was among legislators celebrating their alma mater at UNG Day.

I often describe UNG as the foundation of my professional development and I am proud to call myself a UNG alumnus and celebrate two outstanding cadets, Miller said. It is my hope that students and alumni of the past, present, and future continue to learn what wonderful place the University of North Georgia is and will continue to be.

Gomez, a three-year recipient of the Army ROTC Scholarship, is majoring in computer science and seeks to commission into the U.S. Army's Cyber Corps; he is the son of Audrey and Albeiro Gomez.

All the hard work of others who helped out to get me here has really paid off, Gomez said. Honestly, its just all the great leaders who are here who have developed others to be better leaders. One of the biggest things I love about the University of North Georgia is that everyone is just trying to help each other.

A recipient of the state-funded UNG Georgia Military Scholarship, Wenzel is majoring in nursing and seeks to commission into the Corps of Engineers in the Georgia National Guard; he is the son of Tina and Jeff Coalson.

I just reflect on all the hard work that Ive done and I thank all of those other people who have helped me along the way, Wenzel said.

Sen. Steve Gooch, who earned bachelor's and master's degrees at UNG and represents District 51, introduced the cadets on the floor of the Senate. Gooch, along with Sens. Butch Miller, Bill Cowsert, Michael Williams, and John Wilkinson, co-sponsored Senate Resolution 818 and Senate Resolution 819 commending Gomez and Wenzel.

"It is my honor to be involved in recognizing two outstanding cadets and Georgia natives who exemplify leadership and service," Gooch said. "UNG provided me the academic foundation to further my career in public service and my leadership role in the state Senate, so I know that the education and training Gomez and Wenzel have received at UNG has well-prepared them to be leaders in the U.S. Army and Georgia National Guard."

Rep. Kevin Tanner, an alumnus who represents District 9, introduced the cadets on the floor of the House. Tanner, along with Reps. Lee Hawkins, Marc Morris and Todd Jones, co-sponsored House Resolution 1238 and House Resolution 1239 commending Gomez and Wenzel.

"UNG is the only university in the nation to have two cadets ranked among the top five in the country by U.S. Army Cadet Command, and we commend these two young men for serving as positive role models for future cadets and students across the state," Tanner said. "Cadets Andrew Gomez and Bryton Wenzel are among the best in the country, and I thank them for their commitment to serve our state and the nation as members of the armed forces."

This is the third time in four years that UNG cadets placed in the top 10 in the nation  Jonathan Strickland of Gainesville, Georgia, was the No. 1 cadet in 2014 and Eric Gleason of Marietta, Georgia, also a recipient of the UNG Georgia Military Scholarship, was ranked eighth in 2015.

As one of six senior military colleges in the nation, UNG is designated as The Military College of Georgia.Microsoft Corp is launching a cloud-based gaming division, creating a future where gaming and consoles are different from what they are today. This new system has been dubbed Netflix for video games. The service will offer users access to games from a variety of titles on a subscription basis.

This new service is designed to attract developers and game publishers to offer their selections through Microsofts cloud-based services, especially as games become more connected across systems for multiplayer experiences. Currently, Microsoft Azure is being used by video game publishers.

Video games serving only one console forced players to purchase specific hardware and software to access certain titles. This new system has created a new market for developers to stream content to multiple platforms including PCs, mobile devices, and consoles. Head of Microsofts new gaming cloud division Kareem Choudhry spoke to the Verge saying he believes there is going to be two billion games in the world. Microsofts goal is to reach every one of them.

The fight lies with Sony and Nintendo

Microsoft now faces a tough battle convincing companies like Sony and Nintendo to agree and get on board with this new system. Previously, companies have not expressed interested in allowing exclusive games on other consoles.

Nintendo has been the only company to deliver games beyond their consoles, and only with Apple and Google devices. Amazon just announced their own cloud service, attempting to draw in developers.

The new division was created as a result of the success of their popular Xbox Game Pass, which gives players access to more than 100 titles including "Halo 5: Guardians" since its release last year.

Choudry also said that Microsoft believes there is room for a gaming subscription service. The most difficult part of Microsofts plans is streaming titles to different platforms.

Microsoft has been preparing for this move for a while. Over the past few years, the tech giant has been acquiring gaming-related companies including Havok in 2015, Simplygon in 2017 and just recently PlayFab.

While they are unknown companies, they are key to Microsofts cloud-based gaming goals.

Microsoft just getting started

The companys cloud gaming division is just getting started on a number of projects in order to make their dreams a reality. The real test falls to whether they can attract developers and game publishers and convince them to use a game streaming service.Another controversy is embroiling the White House. This time, it ties back to President Donald Trump's magnified relationship with his Russian counterpart.

This weekend, Vladimir Putin won the race to be Russia's next president - again. The election was fraught with allegations of misconduct, ballot stuffing, and other significant problems. Many believe Putin would've won regardless, but this wasn't fair and square. Now, many are expressing their belief that President Trump shouldn't have given the Russian president a congratulatory call.

Placing the call to Putin

President Trump dialed his Russian counterpart on Tuesday morning. According to the Washington Post, the president congratulated his friend/foe on an election victory. Leaked information suggests that this came in direct opposition to some of the president's highest advisors, who fiercely advocated against him congratulating Putin on his victory.

President Trump was reportedly furious later in the day because the advisement he refused to agree to leaked to the media. He demanded to know who leaked the information. This shouldn't be much of a surprise since news outlets earlier reported about the president's attempt to stem leaks from the White House by making officials sign nondisclosure agreements.

The complimentary call to Putin, however, is the biggest issue in this story.

An error from the White House

Calling Putin in the first place was a mistake, especially so soon after the election. There was enough controversy surrounding the election to determine it wasn't a truly democratic exercise. The United States isn't historically in the business of congratulating people who could be considered dictators or authoritarians; Vladimir Putin certainly fits in that category at this point.

Beyond that fact, the optics are bad for the White House. The Russia probe is still swirling around 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. There are already plenty of people who think the Russians may have helped elect Donald Trump through interfering means. Now, it almost appears as if the two world leaders are in cahoots, giggling over the phone about their shared election victories.

Odds are, President Trump won't learn from this mistake and won't stop lashing out at the media coverage of him. We've learned that much over the first 14 months of his presidency. Whether there will be consequences for this remains to be seen.After yet another woman came forward to accuse Donald Trump of sexual assault, the president decided to speak out. Following his denial of the allegations, social media quickly went viral.

A woman I dont know and, to the best of my knowledge, never met, is on the FRONT PAGE of the Fake News Washington Post saying I kissed her (for two minutes yet) in the lobby of Trump Tower 12 years ago. Never happened! Who would do this in a public space with live security......  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 20, 2018

Trump on Twitter

It all kicked into high gear just a month before Election Day in 2016 with the release of the now infamous "Access Hollywood" tape that revealed Donald Trump's private sexual thoughts.

In the four weeks that followed, a dozen women came forward to accuse Trump of various acts of sexual assault and harassment, all of which the president has denied. Fast forward to present day and the Washington Post cover story on February 20 highlights Rachel Crooks, who has added her name to the list of Trump accusers.

....cameras running. Another False Accusation. Why doesnt @washingtonpost report the story of the women taking money to make up stories about me? One had her home mortgage paid off. Only @FoxNews so reported...doesnt fit the Mainstream Media narrative.  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 20, 2018

Rachel Crooks claims that in 2006 she was kissed by Donald Trump on the floor of Trump Tower in New York City.

In response, the former host of "The Apprentice" was quick to deny the allegations with an aggressive post on Twitter. "A woman I dont know and, to the best of my knowledge, never met, is on the FRONT PAGE of the Fake News Washington Post saying I kissed her (for two minutes yet) in the lobby of Trump Tower 12 years ago," Trump tweeted.

Is anyone listening? This Trump accuser keeps asking herself that https://t.co/BtMG3VjiDy  Washington Post (@washingtonpost) February 20, 2018

"Never happened! Who would do this in a public space with live security," Trump wondered. "Cameras running. Another False Accusation. Why doesnt Washington Post report the story of the women taking money to make up stories about me?

One had her home mortgage paid off. Only Fox News so reported...doesnt fit the Mainstream Media narrative," he added.

Instant backlash

Following Donald Trump's denial on social media, those who oppose the president made sure to hit back. "You... Because your spoiled, entitled brat all grown up. You think your sh*t doesn't stink and you are above the law because you are rich. You are real a**hole," a tweet read.

Let's see, you've lied several times every day you've been in office. About stupid stuff like the size of the inaugural crowd, the viewership of the SOTU. You also made it clear you think you can "do whatever you want to do with women" So I believe the woman.  Tim (@tg123x3) February 20, 2018

When you have money, you can do whatever you want. Grab em by the pussy...you said that.  Maverick (@devin1956) February 20, 2018

"Why mention it if it never happened?

You worried?" a Twitter user wondered. "When you have money, you can do whatever you want. Grab em by the pu**y...you said that," a tweet pointed out. "Let's see, you've lied several times every day you've been in office. About stupid stuff like the size of the inaugural crowd, the viewership of the SOTU. You also made it clear you think you can "do whatever you want to do with women" So I believe the woman," yet another tweet noted.

You would. You did it all the time. Because you said that when you were famous, women just let you do that to them. Remember? Your words. I believe everything she said.  V Christopher Murray (@VictoriaECM) February 20, 2018

Maybe someone who said "Just kiss. I dont even wait. And when youre a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.  Jeremy Newberger (@jeremynewberger) February 20, 2018

You... Because your spoiled, entitled brat all grown up. You think your shit doesn't stink and you are above the law because you are rich. You are real asshole  Max Hodgdon (@MaxHodg92) February 20, 2018

"Must have been a weak moment for you .

We know you prefer to grab em behind closed doors, brag about it , then pay them off," a follow-up tweet read. "You would. You did it all the time. Because you said that when you were famous, women just let you do that to them. Remember? Your words. I believe everything she said," a social media user added. As the backlash continued, Trump appears to be standing by his denial against the claim that he cheated on Melania Trump while committing sexual assault.Austin, Texas - The suspected serial bomber who took at least two lives has blown himself up with his own bombs after a hectic police chase, Fox News reports. The bomber who terrified citizens on the east side of Austin with parcel bombs and trip-wired explosives had been identified as a 24-year-old male.

Austin bomber fled from police

During the police chase, gunfire was exchanged. It is not yet known whether it was the bombs in the vehicle or the shots fired by the police that killed the suspected bomber. The Irish Mirror reported that one member of the SWAT team was blown back by the blast and was injured.

Police car chase along Interstate 35 motorway

The incident went down near Interstate 35 motorway in the suburb of Round Rock, just north of Austin, according to KVUE TV.

Fox quoted police as saying that they had hoped to engage in a non-violent way, but they were left with no choice. Austin Police Chief Brian Manley said, "However, we were not afforded that opportunity when he started to drive away."

Bomber is a 24-year-old male

It was reported by The Austin American-Statesman, that police tracked the suspected Austin serial bomber down using "cell phone triangulation technology" and footage from a surveillance camera when a fifth bomb was delivered to a FedEx store in Austin.

They tracked the man down to a hotel but he bolted to his car and the chase ensued.

Some outlets report that he crashed into a ditch before triggering the bomb. In a press conference, police said that the suspected serial bomber is a 24-year-old white man. It is not known at this time if he was acting alone.

Serial killer may be from Pflugerville

Fox7 report that police think the suspected serial bomber may be from the Austin suburb of Pflugerville - "where a suspicious package was found overnight."

Police sources tell @fox7austin they believe the #AustinBombing suspect who has died is from the Pflugerville area. They are not ruling out that others may be involved. @fox7austin  Jane Lonsdale (@JaneOnFOX7) March 21, 2018

Two people were killed in the spate of bombings

The Austin, Texas bomber took the lives of African-American Anthony House and teenager Draylen Mason.

Draylen's mom was injured. In another incident, a Hispanic woman was injured. Two people were injured when they triggered a trip wire. A FedEx employee was also injured by a bomb in San Antonio which had been placed on a conveyor belt.

ABC Action News reported from the scene that police and FBI officials were investigating the incident. The name of the 24-year-old suspected serial bomber who blew himself up in Austin has not been released, pending notification of his family.Today, March 21, President Donald J. Trump had a phone conference with France's President Emmanuel Macron to discuss the trade tariff issue. He expressed his desire for the United States and Europe to explore and reach a fair trade agreement over tariffs that would produce a better trade deal for all involved. He also reminded President Macron that the United States stands with the United Kingdom and is appalled by the recent reckless use of chemical nerve agents that targeted private citizens on British soil. He agreed with the United Kingdom's decisive action of expelling Russian diplomats as a means of holding Russia accountable.

Conversation with Putin

Yesterday, President Trump spoke to President Vladimir Putin, according to CNN, to not only congratulate him on his re-election but to discuss the state of bilateral relations, as it is the key building block for establishing international relations. They both agreed to continue to keep an open dialogue on resolving the challenges on national security priorities. President Trump also stressed the importance of denuclearizing the Korean Peninsula.

I called President Putin of Russia to congratulate him on his election victory (in past, Obama called him also). The Fake News Media is crazed because they wanted me to excoriate him. They are wrong! Getting along with Russia (and others) is a good thing, not a bad thing.......  Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 21, 2018

Welcomes and bilateral meeting

President Trump also met and welcomed the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, yesterday.

His visit to the White House was to reaffirm and discuss the ongoing progress of their bilateral relationship In remarks before the meeting President Trump and the Crown Prince acknowledged the alliance between the United States and the Middle East. They also spoke of Saudi Arabia's investment of artillery equipment and other products that will be made in the United States.

The investment adds up to $400 billion in products, of which $200 billion has been already invested in U. S. companies and has provided thousands of jobs for U. S. citizens. The Crown Prince thanked the President for defeating ISIS and stopping Iran's deadly interaction across the Middle East.

In the Bilateral Meeting, President Trump and the Crown Prince discussed the realization of new commercial deals that would not only put thousands more of Americans to work, but also would help Saudi Arabia to succeed further in their economic reform agenda.

They also addressed the threats facing the Yemeni people and what steps needed to be taken to find a political resolution to solve the humanitarian situation. President Trump reminded the Crown Prince that Saudi Arabia and other countries in the Middle East will be held to their commitment of zero tolerance for the funding of terrorism. He strongly noted that any country found to be funding terrorism would mean an end to any relationship between that country and the United States, reported theWhite House Channel.The Daytime Emmy nominations were announced earlier today. Soap fans have been waiting to find out the nominations for several months now. There were several actors in the pool to be chosen, but only a handful made it through the final round and into the potential winner's circle. While General Hospital and The Young and the Restless lead the pack, Days of our Lives and The Bold and the Beautiful are still contenders.

'General Hospital' nominations

There was some talk about Kelly Monaco being a favorite for a nomination, and yet, she didn't make the cut.

Playing Sam Morgan over the last two years have been challenging for her. Monaco has done an amazing job but apparently, her costars did a better job in their reels. Nancy Lee Grahn, Maura West, and Laura Wright were all nominated. They play Alexis Davis, Ava Jerome, and Carly Corinthos respectively. Hayley Erin and Chloe Lanier (Kiki Jerome and Nelle Benson) were nominated in the younger actress category. The men fared a little worse than the women with Michael Easton and Billy Miller heading up the group for the best leading actor for their portrayal as Finn and Drew Cain. In the supporting category, Wally Kurth and Anthony Montgomery round it out for their roles as Ned Quartermaine and Andre Maddox.

Finally, the younger actor category saw Hudson West nominated for his role as Jake Webber.

'The Young and the Restless' names that made the cut

It looks like The Young and the Restless seems to be the biggest competition for General Hospital. The nominations for the women consist of several strong contenders. Eileen Davidson comes in as the only leading actress nominee for her portrayal of Ashley Abbott.

The supporting actress category is dominated by the Y&R team. Mishael Morgan, Marla Adams, Camryn Grimes, and Elizabeth Hendrickson are all nominated for their roles as Hilary, Dina, Mariah, and Chloe. Cait Fairbanks was nominated for her role as Tessa in the younger actress category. Peter Bergman is nominated in the lead actor category for his role as Jack Abbott.

The supporting category saw Greg Rikaart nominated for his role as Kevin. This was a bit shocking given the drama surrounding his situation with the show and the status of his future. Tristan Lake Leabu was nominated for his role of Reed in the younger category.

All four of the prominent soaps are up for the best drama, but the real competition lies between these two soaps. They dominate the ratings and have each been on the air for several decades. As of now, there is no information on whether or not the show will be shown to the public but fans are hoping that it will.In-Depth

The Changing Face of Disaster Recovery in the Cloud Age

A stagnant and feature-poor market has grown into a rich and vibrant ecosystem filled with a variety of offerings to meet any need.

I've been having something of a debate with myself as of late. Does systems administration ingrain a deep sense of paranoia and laziness into practitioners, or does it attract people who possess these traits? More important: How does this impact real-world systems administration responsibilities, such as configuring and managing data protection?

Systems administrators are trained -- either formally or through the school of hard knocks -- to prepare for the worst. We must plan for any eventuality. We must constantly think about data protection, disaster planning and the depths of human inability.

We are also lazy. If we're asked to do a job more than a handful of times we'll seek to automate it. Few things are more annoying to a sysadmin than repeating some mundane task that could be accomplished by a shell script.

Despite all of this -- and perhaps because all of this -- sysadmins as a group aren't very comfortable with the public cloud. The cloud certainly speaks to the lazy in us: Look at all the pretty automation! But something about having someone else control the infrastructure we run on grinds the paranoia in us the wrong way.

I've traditionally been one of the public cloud's biggest skeptics. Cost has always been part of this skepticism. Lock-in another very serious consideration. But under it all is the matter of trust. Who can I trust? Can I trust anyone? And if I can't trust anyone, how do I engineer a cloud solution so that I can withstand a cloud provider going sideways on me?

I don't have satisfactory answers to all of these questions. But what I do know is that the world is a different place today than it was 10 years ago. The Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud is more than an online empire; it marked the beginning of a revolution in how vendors of all sizes ply their wares.

The public cloud changed not only how software is sold to individuals and organizations, it changed the dynamics of hardware sales, of support contracts and especially of data protection. More important, AWS lit a fire under the services provider space. A stagnant and feature-poor market has grown into a rich and vibrant ecosystem filled with a variety of offerings to meet any need.

Somewhere in all of this, there's a path to daylight.

Data Protection Is More Important

Data protection in my world used to be simple. The cron server would run a script each night. This script would copy relevant files into the backup folder, pause the financials server and copy its database, release the financials server, and then zip the whole backup directory up. This would then be pushed to a tape, the tape would be verified, and a little old man would come by once a day to courier it off to some shelf in a building on the other side of the city.

Transmitting the data over the terrible ADSL connection that small businesses could afford in my city wasn't going to happen. Hard drives were too expensive to use as rotating media, and too fragile. So tapes it was.

All of which was great, until the time came to restore from those tapes. It may come as no surprise to those who have had to rely on tape backups before, but tapes aren't exactly the most reliable backup media. Our success rate was somewhere around 75 percent, which wasn't acceptable back then, let alone once all this newfangled cloud stuff came about.

Eventually, Internet connectivity got better. Backing up over the Internet became feasible. I dipped my toe into the cloud with backups. My zip ball got pushed into the cloud instead of onto tape. Restores were successful every single time. I slept better. I still do.

But backups are not disaster recovery, and one day, a river flooded. So did one of my datacenters.

It took me two weeks to return all workloads to full functionality. I was unimpressed. The customers were even less so. The boss was significantly less than impressed, and was unwilling to listen to any conversations about his being unwilling to buy adequate backup equipment.

Rock, meet hard place. That was six years ago. The world has changed since then.

Disaster Recovery to the Cloud

What if you didn't have to buy adequate backup equipment? What if you didn't pay any more for your disaster recovery capabilities than you do your raw backups? Or, at most, you pay a completely negligible amount more? What if, in the unlikely event that things go boom, you could simply turn your backups on as easily as turning on virtual machines, and only be charged for the time that those workloads are in use, serving their disaster recovery purpose?

This was fantasy six years ago. Oh, the large-and-in-charge could do it. The Fortune 2000, working in concert with a variety of startups and paying ridiculous amounts of money for the software to make it all go could do it. But not small business. We were left out in the cold.

Slowly, piece by each, this changed. At first, the public cloud vendors opened up, and an increasing number of solutions started to offer the ability to affordably do disaster recovery to the public cloud. It wasn't easy. Workload conversion was a bit of a crapshoot, networking was a problem and the lack of VM consoles made troubleshooting a nightmare.

Software evolved. Now you can take your VMware, Hyper-V, or even bare metal workloads and send them up to a public cloud, or virtually any services provider cloud of your choice. Lock-in is functionally gone. Conversion is no longer a problem. Networking got solved, and services providers figured out VM consoles are kind of important.

Today, you can back your data up to a services provider over the Internet for prices that small businesses can afford, and in the case of disaster, light your workloads up at the services provider. You can do so only for as long as you need, only pay the compute charges for the duration of the event, and fail back to your on-premises infrastructure (should you choose) when it's all over.

And you hardly need to know a thing about how data protection software works to make it go. I find my cloud skepticism increasingly hard to maintain. Not impossible, mind you, but increasingly difficult.

Caveats and Addendums

The flag to wave for cloud skeptics is, of course, cost control. Lighting up Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) workloads 24x7 gets costly in a right hurry. Ease of use also plays a factor: As backing up our workloads and data to the cloud gets easier, so, too, does the temptation to back up that which we don't absolutely need to backup, or to never delete anything. That laziness thing again.

What's also worth bearing in mind is that the instant you fail over to a cloud provider, those workloads then need to be backed up somewhere else. Cloud-to-cloud backups are increasingly easy, so it's not that this is difficult, but it needs to be kept in mind.

Personal experience has taught me that failing over to the cloud often becomes an "out of sight, out of mind" affair. During a disaster event, the systems administrator -- and everyone else -- is usually so focused on dealing with whatever the disaster is to bother thinking, "Oh, my disaster recovery copies of the workloads are now my primaries, maybe I should add some data protection to those."

This is where a good services provider comes in. Services providers can and do cultivate much closer relationships with their customers than the major public cloud providers. In my experience, there's real value in being able to pick up the phone, tell them one of your datacenters melted, and ask for help not only in making sure all the workloads come up, but in making sure that you didn't miss anything as part of your response to the event.

Over the past 10 years, those who have embraced the cloud have predominantly been developers. Freeing themselves from the shackles of systems administrators, they found happiness in the cloud. As the disaster recovery capabilities of cloud providers -- big and small -- become more capable, inexpensive and all-encompassing, slowly but surely even the most paranoid systems administrators are joining them.

None of this settles my personal debate over which came first, the paranoia or the job, but at least I can stop worrying about being left behind.To recruit more fishers to help with marine conservation, cast a wider net.

This is the conclusion of a new study by Virginia Tech researchers who examined participation in a payment for ecosystem services program. The study modeled preferences of fishers in Chile in creating and monitoring marine protected areas inside their fishing management zones.



Lead author Michael Sorice, an associate professor of conservation social science in the College of Natural Resources and Environment, and his colleagues found that more fishers voted in favor of adopting the program when it was designed to incorporate their preferences and when they had a reasonable expectation of good outcomes for the fishery.



We call this approach where participants needs are given the same weight as the resources needs during the design phase of the program, 'human-centered design,' said Sorice, who is also affiliated with the universitys Global Change Center, an arm of the Fralin Life Science Institute. It can help minimize costs by building programs that are seen as desirable at the outset.



The findings, published in PLOS ONE on March 9, question previous assumptions in the field that the payments themselves are the most effective motivator of participation.



Similar to the way consumers make purchasing decisions, voluntary conservation programs are value propositions, said Josh Donlan, founder and director of Advanced Conservation Strategies and co-author on the study. While payments are important, fishers also consider other costs and benefits they expect to occur and then decide whether their overall wellbeing would be improved.



The human-centered design approach works by attracting fishers who may be otherwise uncertain or unenthusiastic about the payment program. Their study found that desirable programs were better able to attract fishers who thought the program was a good idea, but who might have low trust that the conditions exist to make it happen. They also found that fishers who were not sure it is a great idea were more willing to participate based on program adjustments like shorter enrollment periods.



Kevin Boyle, co-author and a professor of agricultural and applied economics in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Virginia Tech, said that these results indicate that small program design changes that reduce fisher uncertainty are keys to successfully casting the wider net.



The team surveyed a total of 168 fishers across 12 fishing associations in central Chile, all of which have functioning territorial user rights (TURFS) assigned by the Chilean government. The TURF-reserve program was described to respondents as a marine biodiversity conservation program in which businesses, organizations, and agencies interested in protecting marine biodiversity, either for philanthropic purposes or to offset environmental impacts elsewhere, would provide the fishing association with an annual cash payment to set aside 15 hectares of their fishing territory as a no-take protected area.

Fishers were informed that an independent nonprofit organization would be created to administer the program, and that, while the fishing association would actually receive the cash payment, each member would receive a portion.

For a lot of these fishers, fishing is more than money, its a way of life. Programs that provide a better fit to their way of life will be more likely to be successful and grow, said Stefan Gelcich, a co-author on the study and professor of natural resource management at the Center of Applied Ecology and Sustainability at Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile.CLOUD

CSRA joins Google Cloud partner program

CSRA said Thursday it has joined Google's cloud partnership network to further expand the federal IT provider's industry partnership portfolio.

The pact covers the Google Cloud Platform and G Suite products, which CSRA's government customers such as the Defense Department will now have access to. CSRA is implementing the second iteration of DOD's milCloud environment under a $498 million contract.

This move brings Google into CSRA's portfolio of key alliance partners with other commercial IT companies such as Citrix, Dell-EMC, Brocade and IBM. CSRA won its first contract to provide Google-related services to a federal agency last month.

CRSA considers its partnerships with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure to be strategic alliances.

CSRA's partnerships with these commercial vendors and others were among many factors that attracted General Dynamics to bid for CSRA and more recently raise its offer over a competing proposal from CACI International.As often with Anderson, two parallel stories converge, with many a flashback and droll aside. Strongman Mayor Kobayashi bans all dogs from Megasaki, exiling them to Trash Island, near the city. The mayors nephew crash-lands a stolen biplane on the island to rescue his canine bodyguard, Spots (Schreiber), with help from top dog Cranston. Meanwhile, back in Megasaki, an American exchange student (Greta Gerwig) works to expose Kobayashis corruption.

Anderson is clearly enamored of Japanese culture and film, and skillfully pays his respects to classics including Seven Samurai. But good as Gerwig is, her B plot feels lazy and unearned. If you want to see it with animation-loving offspring, Isle of Dogs falls in the gray area of child-friendly, with its confusing translations and reliance on visual humor. Its good for the teenage grandchildren, who will likelier get the jokes and oddball storytelling style, though you may like the psychedelic 1965 soundtrack tune and Oscar-hogging Alexandre Desplat's taiko-heavy score better than they do.

All that said, Isle of Dogs is still a wonder of visual filmmaking, with lively voices and Andersons trademark humor. Its worth watching just to hear dogs Bryan Cranston and Edward Norton arguing about pack democracy.Plenty to do at state parks during the fall and winter monthsOMAHA, Neb. (AP)  Police say a 30-year-old Omaha, Nebraska, man accidentally shot his pinky finger after falling asleep holding his new handgun.

The Omaha World-Herald reports the accident happened early Tuesday. Police say the man told officers he was sitting on a couch in his house when he must have fallen asleep holding his newly-purchased 9 mm pistol in his right hand. He told officers he awoke around 4:30 a.m. to a loud bang and realized he had shot his left pinky finger.

The man's wife and children were asleep at the time and weren't hurt. The man was taken to a hospital where he was told the wound would require surgery.

Police cited the man on suspicion having an unregistered firearm and unlawful discharge of a firearm.

Information from: Omaha World-Herald, http://www.omaha.com

 2018 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed. Learn more about our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.SANTIAGO, Chile  The United States will consider rejoining a sweeping free trade agreement of Pacific Rim countries after it deals with other priorities, U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said Wednesday.

President Donald Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Trans-Pacific Partnership last year, but the remaining 11 members pressed ahead and recently signed a renegotiated pact in the Chilean capital. The deal aimed at streamlining trade and slashing tariffs was renamed the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership, or CPTPP.

Mnuchin said that the Trump administration is now focused on talks to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement and that it would be a bit premature to review details of what needs to be addressed for the U.S. to reconsider joining the CPTPP.

But as we accomplish our goals on these other trading relationships, this (CPTPP) is definitely something that well consider, and Chile will be a big partner of ours in that at the right time, he said at a press conference in Chile following a two-day meeting of G-20 officials in Argentina.

On Monday, the Trump administration banned Americans from engaging in transactions with Venezuelas new cryptocurrency, the petro. The U.S. also repeated a threat that more-damaging oil sanctions could be in the works if the Venezuelan government doesnt free political prisoners and provide guarantees that an upcoming presidential election will be free and fair.

Our strategy, as weve said, is putting sanctions on direct people who are taking away the resources of Venezuela and that have destroyed the democracy, Mnuchin said, adding that he had discussed the issue at the G-20 meeting with officials from Canada, Japan and some European Union countries.

We had discussions with members of the EU about imposing sanctions and matching our sanctions, he said. And thats very important, that they come along, and that we have a united front.TriCore Reference Laboratories has hired a new chief financial officer.

Renee Ennis will take over on April 23 from Kent Gordon, who will be leaving to pursue new opportunities, according to a news release from the company.

Ennis served as TriCores CFO for 10 years before moving to Presbyterian Healthcare Services, where she is a vice president and CFO.

She becomes the second new top executive at the company this year. TriCore earlier this month named Dr. Michael Crossey as CEO and CMO after the departure of Khosrow Shotorbani late last year.

TriCore is a not-for-profit organization co-sponsored by Presbyterian Healthcare Services and University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center. Its core labs perform about 10.5 million clinical tests a year, and the company has 30 patient care sites throughout the state. TriCore employs about 1,300 people in New Mexico.SANTA FE  Mayor Alan Webber has created a new position, a chief of staff for his office, and named Jarel LaPan Hill, who graduated from Capital High School and held positions in Barrack Obamas first presidential campaign and the Obama adminstration, to fill the $85,000-a-year post.

Webber, who took office last week after his March 6 election win, told the Journal that LaPan Hill will coordinate his activities and endeavor to make the trains run on time.

In a news release, Webber referred to his status under voter-approved city charter amendments as Santa Fes first officially full-time mayor, with additional powers on personnel matters and crafting a city budget.

Santa Feans elected a full-time mayor, he said. They expect me to go to work for them and get things done. With Jarels support and leadership, the team we are building will help make our city government the most user-friendly and service-oriented in the country.

Webber said the chief of staffs job was created by combining two city government positions that both had been vacant for years. That freed up funding without adding to the citys budget, the news release said.

In 2016, then-mayor Javier Gonzales and the City Council authorized a new executive position, deputy city manager, that controversially added another six-figure salary to the city payroll. A city commission last year set the salary for the new full-time mayor at $110,000, up from $29,500 before.

LaPan Hill, with a degree from George Washington University, served as chief of staff to the deputy secretary of the federal Department of Health and Human Services for all eight years of the Obama administration. Jarel has exactly the kind of experience we need  from standing up an executive office in transition to advancing President Obamas signature health care initiative,  Webber said in the news release.

The release says she and husband Rob Hill returned to Santa Fe in the past year to raise their two children.

During the race for mayor, she appeared on a Webber campaign mailer identified as a former Obama administration appointee and with her quote, Alan Webber is the best choice for our childrens future. She most recently served as the senior program officer for Grow New Mexico, a non-profit that connects local organizations to federal and private funding.

Also Wednesday, Webber said in an interview that the city needs to focus now on setting a budget for the 2018-19 fiscal year that starts in July, but in about six months he wants to consider a reorganization of city government and revisit the budget, part of a deep rethink of whether some operational divisions should be consolidated or relocated within City Halls work chart.SANTA FE  The leaders of a family drug ring that operated in Taos County for at least two generations have been sentenced to spent a decade behind bars.

In federal court Tuesday, Ivan Romero, 41, of El Prado, was sentenced to 10 years and 10 months in federal prison followed by five years of supervised release after he pleaded guilty to conspiring to traffic heroin and launder the proceeds.

Romeros younger brother, Ricco Romero, was sentenced to 10 years with five years of supervised release for his role in the family operation. They were both also required to forfeit $448,590 in cash and pay $15,000 in community restitution, the U.S. Attorneys Office said.

The brothers were charged in December 2015 for conspiring with seven others, including their mother, to traffic meth and heroin and launder the money. All of the defendants have pleaded guilty for their roles and only two are awaiting sentencing.

According to court documents, Drug Enforcement Administration agents believe the family was selling heroin in Taos County for up to 30 years. Ivan and Ricco Romeros father allegedly ran the operation, which included carriers and street-level drug dealers, before stepping down due to failing health and having Ivan take over for him.

Agents raided Ivan Romeros home in April 2015 and seized over 300 grams of heroin and nearly $65,000 in cash. The next day, family members took $90,000 in cash to a Taos bank to get a cashiers check for Ivans bond. Bank employees called State Police after complaining that the bills smelled funny and made their eyes itch and burn. A police dog later found traces of illegal drugs on the money. Agents conducted more raids, surveillance and controlled buys before making more arrests.

Wilma Romero, Ivan and Riccos mother, was sentenced to two years in prison followed by five years of supervised release. Ivan Romeros wife, Melissa Romero, was given three years of probation.

Nicholas Baca, Juanita Romero and Elena Carabajal have been sentenced and will be under five years of supervised release after serving some prison time. Tyler Zig-Zag Baker and Jason Jurassic Duran are awaiting sentencing.Prev 1 of 4 Next

Copyright  2018 Albuquerque Journal

An employee at a West Side Albuquerque motel was cleaning rooms Wednesday morning and stumbled upon the victim of what police say is the citys fifth homicide in six days.

Officers arrived at the Econo Lodge at Iliff and Coors NW around 11:30 a.m. and quickly determined the man had been killed, said Simon Drobik, a spokesman for the Albuquerque Police Department.

He didnt identify the man or say how he died but said they are investigating it as a homicide.

Because of the condition of the room and the way the body was discovered, that was deemed to be a full homicide callout, Drobik said.

This makes five slayings in six days in Albuquerque, and the 15th reported this year. In addition, police determined three other homicides to have been justifiable.

The city had 13 homicides  with two of them ruled justifiable  by this time last year, when Albuquerque tallied the highest homicide numbers in recent history.

We dont know whats going on. Im not sure why people are committing violence against each other. Its very unsettling, he said. Were asking the public to calm down.

Alongside a plea for peace in the streets, Drobik said detectives are asking anyone with information about the homicide cases to come forward.

Theres always somebody that saw something, or social media, or someone is talking about it, he said. Those little pieces of information crack these cases wide open.

Drobik wouldnt say if there are any suspects in the five cases but said police are following all leads.

As of right now, there seems to be no connection with these homicides, Drobik said, which probably makes it more troubling, as a city, because they are five stand-alone homicides that happened in six days.

The flurry began Friday night when officers responded to a shooting at the Villa Hermosa apartment complex near Coors and Quail NW and found the body of 42-year-old Adrian Johnson in the parking lot.

By Sunday morning, detectives were investigating a second homicide after officers found a mans body with massive trauma lying in landscaping rocks on Menaul NE just west of Interstate 25. That man is believed to have been homeless and has not been identified.

Later that night, police were called to a fight in a neighborhood near Central and Wyoming NE, and found Alexander Begay, 27, dead at the scene.

Then, on Monday night, officers were called to the Smiths grocery store near Constitution and Carlisle NE, where they found a man shot to death in a neighboring alley. Police have not publicly identified him.

During that incident, which began in the Smiths parking lot, Drobik said a bullet lodged in the car of an 18-year-old girl, missing her head by a couple inches and leaving detectives expressing concern that this recent rash of homicides could have caused a bystander to be injured or killed.

He said the department is strapped with detectives working around the clock between crime scenes and attending court hearings for an ongoing homicide case.

Drobik said there are currently five incoming homicide detectives shadowing the original five during the investigations.

Were working really, really hard to solve these crimes, trying to keep the public safe, he said.

Drobik said police cannot saturate an area for homicides as they do to find stolen cars.

Unfortunately, we cant run any kind of (tactical) plans or intervention on homicides, he said. Theyre kind of spontaneous.An Albuquerque man who, from his prison cell, tricked federal officers out of $7,000 in a fake drug buy and then months later evaded police several times through wild police chases, some of which involved hostages, will spend the next 30 years in federal prison.

Kevin Folse, now 32, was sentenced Wednesday for being a felon in possession of a firearm and ammunition, two carjackings and brandishing a firearm during a crime of violence stemming from two carjackings in 2015.

Folse had been charged with crimes related to a 2013 fake drug buy in which he arranged with an associate for the FBI to buy what they thought was cocaine. The associate made off with $7,000 and the agents, once they realized the drugs were fake, chased the drug delivery driver, who did not know his pursuers were FBI task force agents. A wild chase and crash ensued. Charges against the driver were dropped.

And ultimately charges against Folse in that case were also dropped. Folse was released from detention and back into Albuquerque community.

Albuquerque police investigating stolen vehicles encountered Folse on July 2, 2015, triggering two carjackings and wild chases through town.

First, Folse ran from police into a home where he took several people hostage. He, along with a female associate, then forced some of the hostages into a vehicle and on a chase that ended in a crash.

Folse fled  successfully  on foot.

Shortly after he evaded police, he carjacked another vehicle, forcing out a 13-year-old boy before fleeing  again successfully  from police.

The next night, Isleta police arrested him, but details of that arrest are unclear.

He was found guilty of these carjacking-related charges by a federal jury after a four-day trial in Albuquerque in October 2015.

On Wednesday, he was sentenced to 30 years in prison and five years of supervised release by U.S. District Judge James Browning.Earlier this year, sheriffs deputies arrested six people they say operated an interstate sex trafficking ring, driving young, vulnerable women around the nation, including in Albuquerque, and forcing them to have sex and turn over profits to the group.

This is the stereotypical picture of human trafficking.

But trafficking looks very different in our communities, said Deleana OtherBull, executive director of the Coalition to Stop Violence Against Native Women.

Instead of organized exploitation of runaways, family members are bartering their young relatives for drugs, alcohol or other payments or services, OtherBull and others say.

Nearly 200 people from New Mexicos pueblos, tribes and advocacy agencies gathered in Albuquerque this week to focus on the issue at the 5th annual Tribal Leaders Summit hosted by the Coalition, which works with Native communities to solve problems.

This is a very, very sensitive issue, said Arlen Quetawki Sr., tribal councilman and former governor of Zuni Pueblo.

He said he attended the conference to learn the latest research on the issue so he can bring it back to his community, many of whom, he said, are skeptical that such acts are actually happening among their neighbors.

OtherBull said this is the main problem in addressing human trafficking in Native families.

Trafficking is not a new concept to our communities, but the word trafficking is, she said. Some of these terms dont exist in our languages. So we have to start by giving language for concepts that are not new to us.

So the conference focused on creating an awareness that human trafficking isnt always, or even usually, like the interstate ring busted by sheriffs deputies in Albuquerque.

Shelane Rosales, who works as a case worker with First Nations Community HealthSources sex trafficking unit, said a new awareness of how it looks in Native communities, even those communities in Albuquerque, should increase the number of people who can get help through her or other organizations.

They need to know what to look for, the warning signs, she said.

OtherBull said victims themselves need a new awareness about what is happening to them.

To them, what they see happening is Im helping my family provide. Im doing my part, OtherBull said.

Once people start recognizing such bartering as actually human trafficking, the more resources can flow to communities to fund the counseling, medical and living services needed to heal victims, OtherBull said.WASHINGTON  Sen. Martin Heinrich and a bipartisan panel of members of the Senate intelligence committee told current and former heads of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security on Wednesday that they worry the federal government isnt doing enough to protect elections from foreign interference.

Heinrich, a New Mexico Democrat, told Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and Jeh Johnson, who served in the position under former President Barack Obama, that it seems the Trump administration isnt taking election security seriously enough. Senators on the committee criticized both administrations for not moving quickly to combat Russian election interference.

No one is saying the buck stops here.  Someone has to take the responsibility to make this happen, Heinrich said during questioning of Nielsen, before asking how many Cabinet-level meetings the Trump administration has conducted to address election security.

We have had a number of them, and we actually have a number of them coming up, but I take your point, Nielsen said. I am a very strong advocate for making clear who has the lead.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., criticized the Obama administrations response, as well, saying it was not sufficient to warn the public in any way, shape or form.

Theres no evidence that any hack in the November 2016 election affected election results, but the attempts rattled state election officials and prompted the federal government and states to examine the way votes are counted. To speed up communications and intelligence sharing, Homeland Security has been working to grant security clearances to up to three election officials in each state. Nielsen said Wednesday that just 20 of those officials have been granted full clearances.

New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver has received an interim security clearance from DHS. Deputy Secretary of State John Blair and State Elections Director Kari Fresquez are applying for their security clearances.

Toulouse Oliver, who sparred with Trump administration officials over the administrations attempt to obtain state voter rolls last year, told the Journal on Wednesday shes encouraged that the federal government is taking the issue of foreign election meddling seriously.

So far, Ive been encouraged by my interactions with Homeland Security and other federal agencies, and Im hopeful that this constructive communication will continue, she said. We need as much collaboration between state election officials and the federal government as possible in order to prevent future attacks on our elections.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.DETROIT  A young Detroit man who was cleared of four murders after spending eight years in prison has been arrested in Arizona.

Authorities in Maricopa County, Arizona, say Davontae Sanford was charged Tuesday with aggravated assault and endangerment. But his attorney in Michigan, Bill Goodman, says the 25-year-old simply was shooting into dirt and toward mountains.

Goodman tells The Detroit News that the charges arent justified. He says Sanford moved to the Phoenix area to get a fresh start.

In 2008, Sanford was 15 years old when he pleaded guilty to killing four people in Detroit. He says he felt desperate and poorly represented by his trial lawyer.

A hit man later said he had committed the killings, not Sanford. In 2016, Sanford was released from prison on other grounds. The state paid him $408,000.NEW YORK  In the wake of a privacy scandal involving a Trump-connected data-mining firm, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg embarked on a rare media mini-blitz in an attempt to take some of the public and political pressure off the social network.

But its far from clear whether hes won over U.S. and European authorities, much less the broader public whose status updates provide Facebook with an endless stream of data it uses to sell targeted ads.

On Wednesday, the generally reclusive Zuckerberg sat for an interview on CNN and conducted several more with other outlets, addressing reports that Cambridge Analytica purloined the data of more than 50 million Facebook users in order to sway elections. The Trump campaign paid the firm $6 million during the 2016 election, although it has since distanced itself from Cambridge.

Zuckerberg apologized for a major breach of trust, admitted mistakes and outlined steps to protect users following Cambridges data grab.

I am really sorry that happened, Zuckerberg said on CNN. Facebook has a responsibility to protect its users data, he added, noting that if it fails, we dont deserve to have the opportunity to serve people.

His mea culpa on cable television came a few hours after he acknowledged his companys mistakes in a Facebook post , but without saying he was sorry.

Zuckerberg and Facebooks No. 2 executive, Sheryl Sandberg, had been quiet since news broke Friday that Cambridge may have used data improperly obtained from roughly 50 million Facebook users to try to sway elections. Cambridges clients included Donald Trumps general-election campaign.

Facebook shares have dropped some 8 percent, lopping about $46 billion off the companys market value, since the revelations were first published.

While several experts said Zuckerberg took an important step with the CNN interview, few were convinced that he put the Cambridge issue behind hm. Zuckerbergs apology, for instance, seemed rushed and pro forma to Helio Fred Garcia, a crisis-management professor at NYU and Columbia University.

He didnt acknowledge the harm or potential harm to the affected users, Garcia said. I doubt most people realized he was apologizing.

Instead, the Facebook chief pointed to steps the company has already taken, such as a 2014 move to restrict the access outside apps had to user data. (That move came too late to stop Cambridge.) And he laid out a series of technical changes that will further limit the data such apps can collect, pledged to notify users when outsiders misuse their information and said Facebook will audit apps that exhibit troubling behavior.

That audit will be a giant undertaking, said David Carroll, a media researcher at the Parsons School of Design in New York  one that he said will likely turn up a vast number of apps that did troubling, distressing things.

But on other fronts, Zuckerberg carefully hedged otherwise striking remarks.

In the CNN interview, for instance, he said he would be happy to testify before Congress  but only if it was the right thing to do. Zuckerberg went on to note that many other Facebook officials might be more appropriate witnesses depending on what Congress wanted to know.

At another point, the Facebook chief seemed to favor regulation for Facebook and other internet giants. At least, that is, the right kind of rules, such as ones requiring online political ads to disclose who paid for them. In almost the next breath, however, Zuckerberg steered clear of endorsing a bill that would write such rules into federal law, and instead talked up Facebooks own voluntary efforts on that front.

Theyll fight tooth and nail to fight being regulated, said Timothy Carone, a Notre Dame business professor. In six months well be having the same conversations, and its just going to get worse going into the election.

Even Facebooks plan to let users know about data leaks may put the onus on users to educate themselves. Zuckerberg said Facebook will build a tool that lets users see if their information had been impacted by the Cambridge leak, suggesting that the company wont be notifying people automatically. Facebook took this kind of do-it-yourself approach in the case of Russian election meddling, in contrast to Twitter, which notified users who had been exposed to Russian propaganda on its network.

In what has become one of the worst backlashes Facebook has ever seen, politicians in the U.S. and Britain have called for Zuckerberg to explain its data practices in detail. State attorneys general in Massachusetts, New York and New Jersey have opened investigations into the Cambridge mess. And some have rallied to a movement that urges people to delete their Facebook accounts entirely.

Sandy Parakilas, who worked in data protection for Facebook in 2011 and 2012, told a U.K. parliamentary committee Wednesday that the company was vigilant about its network security but lax when it came to protecting users data.

He said personal data including email addresses and in some cases private messages was allowed to leave Facebook servers with no real controls on how the data was used after that.

Paul Argenti, a business professor at Dartmouth, said that while Zuckerbergs comments hit the right notes, they still probably arent enough. The question is, can you really trust Facebook, he said. I dont think that question has been answered.

Cambridge Analytica headquarters in central London was briefly evacuated Thursday as a precaution after a suspicious package was received. Nothing dangerous was found and normal business resumed, police said.

___

AP reporters Danica Kirka and Gregory Katz in London and Michael Liedtke in San Francisco contributed to this story.WASHINGTON  The budget bill before Congress includes an update to federal law that makes clear that authorities with a warrant can obtain emails and other data held by American technology companies but stored on servers overseas.

Passage of the Cloud Act probably would end a Supreme Court dispute between Microsoft and the Trump administration over emails the government wants as part of a drug trafficking investigation.

U.S. authorities obtained a warrant for the emails, but Microsoft has refused to provide the emails because they are kept on a Microsoft server in Ireland.

The Cloud Act has the backing of both the administration and Microsoft, but its opposed by privacy groups. In particular, those groups object to parts of the plan that would regulate how foreign governments could obtain data from U.S. companies.

The House approved the $1.3 trillion budget bill on Thursday and the Senate could vote by weeks end. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., has raised questions about the Cloud Act and also opposes the overall spending bill.

Searches of data stored electronically are covered by a 1986 law written long before the advent of cloud computing and the construction of storage centers around the world by the largest technology companies. Earlier proposals to update the law foundered, but the prospect of a Supreme Court ruling increased the urgency to find a measure both sides could agree on.

The administration believes the Cloud Act will give it the data it wants, with a warrant. The companies have worried about regaining the confidence of their international customers following the 2013 leak of classified information detailing Americas surveillance programs and the role Microsoft and others played in turning over emails and other information. Microsoft President Brad Smith said in a statement that the Cloud Act gives tech companies like Microsoft the ability to stand up for the privacy rights of our customers around the world.

The justices themselves seemed eager for Congress to take action when the court heard arguments last month. Why shouldnt we leave the status quo as it is and let Congress pass a bill in this new age, Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked.

Jennifer Daskal, an American University law professor and former national security official at the Justice Department, said there would be nothing left for the Supreme Court to decide if the Cloud Act becomes law.

The court took up the case to determine whether the 1986 law was intended to cover data controlled by U.S. companies, but held overseas, Daskal said. The Cloud Act definitely answers that question, saying yes it covers data held overseas, Daskal said in an email.Authorities in the U.S. and the U.K. are bearing down on Facebook and political data-mining firm Cambridge Analytica over allegations the firm stole data from 50 million Facebook users and used it to manipulate elections.

There have been numerous demands for investigations and calls for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to testify. Zuckerberg said Wednesday that he is willing to testify before Congress to answer questions about the privacy scandal. But he suggested other executives might be better qualified to field questions from lawmakers.

___

IN THE UNITED KINGDOM:

 PARLIAMENT COMMITTEE: The U.K. parliamentary media committee has summoned Zuckerberg to testify. The chairman, Damian Collins, said his panel has repeatedly asked Facebook how it uses data. He said Facebook officials have been misleading to the committee. In a letter to Zuckerberg, Collins wrote, It is now time to hear from a senior Facebook executive with the sufficient authority to give an accurate account of this catastrophic failure of process.

 INFORMATION COMMISSIONER: Commissioner Elizabeth Denham is pursuing a warrant to search Cambridge Analyticas servers. Although Cambridge Analytica said it is committed to helping the U.K. investigation, Denhams office said the firm failed to meet a deadline to produce the information requested. Denham said the prime allegation against Cambridge Analytica is that it acquired personal data in an unauthorized way.

___

IN THE UNITED STATES:

 SENATE: Dianne Feinstein of California, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, has called Facebooks latest privacy scandal a danger signal. She wants Zuckerbergs assurances that Facebook is prepared to take the lead on security measures that protect peoples privacy  or Congress may step in. Mark Warner of Virginia, the senior Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, also wants Zuckerberg to testify. But Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Burr, a Republican from North Carolina, wont commit to asking Zuckerberg to appear. Republicans on the Commerce Committee also have sent letters requesting information from Facebook and Cambridge parent SCL Group. And two other Democrats, Edward Markey of Massachusetts, and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, both members of the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, want Facebook to answer additional questions about data access.

 HOUSE: Chris Wylie, a former Cambridge Analytica employee who became a whistleblower, has agreed to be interviewed by Democrats on the U.S. House Intelligence Committee. A date has not been set, and its unclear if Republicans on the panel will attend.

 FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION: A dozen consumer-advocacy organizations are pressing the FTC to investigate whether the release of data violated an agreement Facebook signed with the FTC in 2011 offering privacy assurances. Bloomberg News first reported the FTC could already be investigating. The FTC hasnt confirmed the investigation but said it takes any allegations of violations of our consent decrees very seriously.

 INDIVIDUAL STATES: Attorneys general in several states have launched or called for investigations. New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal said his office is investigating how personal information came into the possession of Cambridge Analytica. The top prosecutors in Massachusetts and New York have sent a letter to Facebook demanding the social media giant protect its users private information. Connecticuts attorney general sent Zuckerberg a letter demanding answers.SEATTLE  Starbucks will continue investing in its workers even if that means forgoing the short-term stock-price lift it might have seen by passing more of its tax-cut windfall on to shareholders, Howard Schultz said Wednesday.

The coffee giants executive chairman urged shareholders who are disappointed with the fairly flat performance of Starbucks stock over the last year  a period that has seen broader markets up 15 to 20 percent  to take a longer view.

The reduction of the corporate-tax rate to 21 percent yielded hundreds of millions of dollars in savings. We could have taken that money and given it all away to our shareholders, and maybe the stock would have gone up a point or two, Schultz said.

Were trying to make long-term decisions, he continued. Were trying to value the dignity of work. Were trying to do everything we possibly can to demonstrate to the world  that there is a better way. And the better way is not a zero-sum game where you leave your people behind.

Starbucks touted a host of benefits and accomplishments related to its workers  including in the strategically paramount China market  some of which were accelerated due to changes in tax laws, said the companys top human-resources executive, Lucy Helm.

Helm said the companys U.S. employees performing similar work are now paid equitably regardless of gender or race. That hasnt always been the case. The gender pay gap in the U.S. economy broadly is 80 percent, Helm said, meaning women, on average, earn 80?cents for each dollar earned by men. In retail, the gap is even wider.

She said the pay-equity milestone was an emotional moment for her after 19 years at the company and as a woman in senior leadership. (The companys 150,000-person U.S. workforce is 66 percent women and 43 percent minorities, but only 32 percent of its top 50 leaders are women, and 18 percent are minorities. A shareholder proposal to provide a more granular view of diversity at Starbucks failed.)

Over the last 10 years, Starbucks has put in place systems and practices to root out pay inequity, including ensuring starting pay is equitable, openly discussing pay, and conducting audits to address and close any unexplained pay gaps between men and women and between people of different races, Helm said.

The company now turns its attention to striving for 100?percent pay equity for employees in all company-owned stores around the world. Starbucks, which has more than 300,000 employees globally, would not disclose pay disparities in other markets, nor did it specify a timeline for reaching the goal, but said it would provide an update in a year. Meanwhile, pay equity at Starbucks-licensed stores in the U.S. and abroad will remain up to the third-party owners of those businesses. Starbucks also is making its pay-equity principles and expertise available to other employers.

Helm said Starbucks intends to set a new bar for multinational companies who recognize the importance of equal pay for equal work.

In China, too, the company is trying to set a standard with its benefits package. Last year, the company began offering critical illness insurance for the parents of employees. Since then 93 percent of eligible full-time workers have signed up, covering 14,000 parents.

We want to inspire more companies to do the same for their people, said Starbucks China CEO Belinda Wong, adding that Starbucks has met with more than 100 companies about the insurance benefit, and some will soon launch similar coverage for employees parents.

Starbucks employs more than 45,000 people in China and opens a new store there every 15 hours, on average. Starbucks has grown from 800 stores in China to more than 3,200 stores in the last five years and aims for more than 5,000 by 2021.

While it is thriving in China today, Schultz said the company lost money there for nine consecutive years.

There were so many people who doubted whether in a tea-drinking society we could break through, Schultz said, adding that China will be Starbucks largest market. This was the crowning achievement of the entire company over the last almost 50 years, he said. (The first Starbucks store opened at Pike Place Market in 1971.)

Pay equity is in keeping with Starbucks record on pay and benefits, Helm said. Earlier this year, Starbucks announced pay increases for U.S. employees which take effect next month, additional stock grants of $2,000 for store managers and at least $500 for employees, family sick pay, and expanded paid parental leave. CEO Kevin Johnson told employees in January that the company would boost U.S. benefits more quickly than planned, thanks to its tax savings.

The company was the first retailer to provide part-time employees with health benefits for themselves and their families, including domestic partners, in 1988, when that just wasnt done, Helm said. In 1991, the company began including part-time workers in its stock options program. Thats why the company insists on referring to its employees as partners, because they are owners of this company, she said.

Indeed, about half the audience of about 3,000 people in McCaw Hall obliged when Johnson asked employees to stand up and be recognized during the shareholder meeting. They also cheered wildly throughout, but particularly when the pay and benefits milestones were announced, and when Schultz took the stage.

While Starbucks isnt planning to pass its full tax savings on to shareholders, it does plan to spend $15 billion on stock buybacks and dividends over the next three years, said Johnson.

We are optimistic about the future, said Johnson, who has been CEO for nearly a year.



2018 The Seattle Times

Visit The Seattle Times at www.seattletimes.com

Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

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PHOTO (for help with images, contact 312-222-4194):

_____Last year can be termed as stand-up and take notice year for marketers. Starting with Marc Pritchard, chief brand officer at Procter & Gamble, declaring, "We have a zero-tolerance standard when it comes to brand safety. Our brands are protected in other forms of media. The same zero-tolerance standard of performance applies to digital media. to YouTube where big names Verizon, Walmart, Pepsi and likes pulling out their spends on google when YT allowed monetisation of violent content featuring children.

It was the year of advertisers agony. It was the year when Brand safety, a term defined as - ensuring of advertising appears in an appropriate and relevant context online so that a brand's reputation is not damaged was the talk of all marketing summit.

Needless to say there are certain steps that Google has taken to address this issue such as - a channel must have 10k views before the videos can be monetised and stricter measures to scrutinise the pool of content that google receives. However, the advertisers are still wary and some have either restricted their spends to search only or completely cut their partnership.

Another big concern has been the advent of fake news. Research backed reports states the negative impact it has on the brands whose ads appear on any platforms carrying fake news.

To Read More Visit Here.

With automated buying at the centre stage can this issue really be 100% resolved?

In my opinion 2018 will be the year when the brands take back the control. This is the year when brands will shift their spends from FaceBook & Google onto content which is created in brand safe environments. We will see more monies being spent on OTT platforms like Hotstar, Sonyliv, Zee5 as well as content platforms like Scoopwoop, Storypick etc. Created and not curated content will be sought after. This is because it allows all parties to know where exactly the ads would appear.

The recent DAN report also stated that the ads on OTT platforms have higher viewership of over an hour with viewers completing almost 98% of the ads. Thus more bang for the buck!

A huge push in this space will also come when cross media measurement becomes much comprehensive with the launch of measurement services like EKAM. This will clearly give a huge boost to premium created content.

Thus with the combination of measurement services and the brand safe environment I foresee going forward the TV ad budgets too will shift to these platforms.

(The article is written by Aatsi Desai Jasani, Co-founder & Chief Business Officer of What Clicks, India's leading digital marketing audit firm.)

To Read More Visit Here.ITC Foods has just launched its new campaign for Candyman Crunchy. The peanut flavoured candy is unique in that its bite is unlike anything one has experienced. Its crunchy and brittle, and crumbles in the mouth. The campaign has been crafted and conceptualized by FCB Ulka.

The film takes this aspect of the product, its crunchiness, forward in a hilarious way!

The seriousness of the situation and the way the product experience provokes an extreme reaction in such a situation, is what makes the film so very memorable.

In the film, we see a worried family standing around their fully bandaged up sons bedside. While the doctor examines the X-Ray and is about to pronounce his diagnosis, the mother bites into the Candyman Crunchy, is taken by surprise at the crunchiness of the candy and starts reacting spontaneously to the experience, much to everyones shock and surprise!

To Read More Visit Here.

This television campaign is complimented with outdoor media presence and retail branding.

Speaking about the campaign, Romit Nair, Creative Head, FCB Ulka -Bangalore, said  Our latest commercial for Candman Crunchy focuses on the Fun-breakable attribute of the candy. We are super excited about this campaign. Sometimes its important for everything to fall into place for a good piece of creative to take shape. Thats exactly what happened with this project. The production house/director, the FCB Ulka team and the client have worked closely to together to bring this campaign to life.

Menaka Menon, Vice President, FCB Ulka, Bangalore said  The entire story here evolves from the product truth. Candyman Crunchy is crunchy and crumbly and unlike the regular candy experience, and therein lay the story. We just needed to find an interesting way to communicate it!

Credits

Client: ITC Foods

Brand: Candyman Crunchy

Agency: FCB Ulka, Bangalore

Director: Karan Shetty (Finger Print Production)

To Read More Visit Here.Bisleri International has brought on board Wavemaker India as its media agency. Wavemaker, the media, content, and technology agency from GroupM created from the merger of Maxus and MEC, will manage the offline media communications buying and planning for the brand Bisleri Fonzo.

Speaking on this win, Kartik Sharma, Managing Director, Wavemaker  South Asia, said, We are extremely excited to start our partnership with Bisleri, one of the most trusted brands in India. Through our new operating system Rapid Growth Planning, we could demonstrate to Bisleri how we can help grow their business further. I am confident about our in-depth understanding of the dynamic consumer journey clubbed with innovative media solutions which will help the brand connect to its consumers in many meaningful ways.

Wavemaker won the account following a multi-agency pitch.Would you like to receive breaking news notifications from The Post and Courier?

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Please enable notifications in your browser and reload the page.CAIRO  Sharm el-Sheikh, once known as the crown jewel of Egypts tourism sector, has become, in the last few years, a hopeless case where all tourism campaigns seem to fail.

The most recent of such flops are the efforts of the Ministry of Culture and Ministry of Tourism to attract tourists to Sharm el-Sheikh through festivals, such as the Sharm el-Sheikh Film Festival (SHAFF), whose second edition took place March 3-9, and the Sharm el-Sheikh International Theater Festival for Youth, planned for April 1-9. But with the film festival concluded in early March and the youth theater festival about to start, it looks unlikely that either will give the kiss of life to the once-popular city on the Red Sea.

Only five years ago, the city of Sharm el-Sheikh was the most prominent destination for tourists in Egypt. But tourism revenue took a nosedive following the Russian plane crash in the Sinai Peninsula in October 2015. Russia and other countries banned their airlines and tourists from traveling to Sharm el-Sheikh. A statement by Russia said that an act of terrorism had caused the plane crash. Egypts tourism-generated revenue was estimated at $6.1 billion in 2015, compared to $7.5 billion in 2014. Revenue continued to decrease in 2016, to $3.4 billion.

This year, the Ministry of Tourism has put special efforts in SHAFF, to ensure large media coverage and a star-studded attendance from Egyptian and international actors.

Rasha al-Azaizy, the spokeswoman for the Ministry of Tourism, told Al-Monitor that a number of meetings between tourism ministry officials at and the festival team at the Ministry of Culture were organized to coordinate efforts to boost local tourism. Azaizy said that the Ministry of Tourism managed to attract to the city more than 400 guests, including Egyptian and foreign film stars and media figures. She noted that the ministry worked hard to use its presence to promote tourism in Sharm el-Sheikh.

Wadid Shokri, the executive director of SHAFF, told Al-Monitor that festival guests who included actors and journalists took part in tours organized in collaboration with the Ministry of Tourism, local hotels and Egyptian tourism and transportation companies. The tours featured the most prominent landmarks in Sharm el-Sheikh, Shokri said. We aimed to make sure that the guests  through their experience in Sharm el-Sheikh  [would become] ambassadors promoting tourism in Egypt. I think the service was excellent.

Tarek al-Shenawi, a film critic and professor at the International Academy of Media Sciences, disagrees with Azaizy and Shokri on the festival's tourism-boosting potential. Organizing festivals achieves two goals for any country, he told Al-Monitor. First, it showcases a states capacities to organize and host major global festivals and events, which would encourage foreigners to visit Egypt when there is a festival, such as in Dubai. Second, it helps promote major national landmarks through pictures and interviews of the stars taken during their visit.

Shenawi said the Sharm el-Sheikh film festival has fallen short of its goals, compared to other Egyptian festivals. The festival didnt demonstrate exceptional organizational skills, Shenawi said. The first mistake was to hold it at the same time as the Oscars, which is why notable American stars could not attend it. Foreign media outlets were too busy covering the Oscars and ignored the festival in Sharm el-Sheikh. As notable stars were absent from Sharm el-Sheikh, people [did not] pay attention to less famous actors there. Their interviews and pictures [were not widely covered] no matter how positively they talked about the city.

The organizing committee chose I, Tonya as the festival's opening film  a film that was nominated for three Oscars. The film's main actors and the team were not present in Sharm el-Sheikh.

Bakinam Qatamesh, critic and editor-in-chief at the art-oriented Al Kawakeb Magazine, had a more favorable outlook of the festival. He told Al-Monitor, The main role the festival plays is sending a message of reassurance to the world about the situation in Sharm el-Sheikh. Qatamesh said that the youth theater festival will further assert this message, provided "it demonstrates a similar level of competence to that of the film festival"  especially as it is a youth-oriented festival, which in many countries brings in tourism revenue [with the youth traveling in their own country].

Hani al-Sharbini, an independent tourism expert and entrepreneur, shares this view. He told Al-Monitor, While the festival wasnt the best from an artistic standpoint, it asserted that things are stable in Egypt and Sharm el-Sheikh, particularly at a time when the tourism sector in Sharm el-Sheikh has taken a hit due to the security concerns in the country. He added that some of these concerns still exist, as Russia and the United Kingdom continue their ban on their national airlines flying to Sharm el-Sheikh and warn their nationals against traveling to the country.Youre going to see what I do, said US President Donald Trump on March 20 when asked about his chosen course of action on the sanctions waivers due May 12; the waivers must be signed to prevent a US violation of the nuclear deal with Iran. The comments came as he received Saudi Arabias powerful Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman at the White House, giving an impression that the US president is heading toward nixing the deal with Iran. In fact, there are many reasons to believe the landmark accord is heading toward an unhappy ending, at least when it comes to US adherence to it. In this vein, the recent appointment of Mike Pompeo as the new secretary of state has enhanced this notion around the world and in Iran in particular.

The view of Pompeo is very skeptical in Tehran; the fact that hes highly critical of the Islamic Republic is the foundation of the concern. But his experience as CIA director adds to the apprehension and creates an atmosphere of uncertainty toward the future not only about the nuclear deal but regarding the matter of broader stability in the region.

The first Iranian official to indirectly comment on Pompeos appointment was Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, who tweeted March 13 that Trump has made a habit of being unpredictable and thus unreliable for anybody to engage with. Zarif tweeted, Nobody will be interested in reaching any agreement with the White House if US signature only good for 4-8 yrs.

Zarifs comments were reiterated by Foreign Ministry spokesman Bahram Qassemi, who told the Lebanese daily Al-Akhbar that Iran views the appointment as an internal US issue "but if we want to study the issue, the world knows Trumps weird ways and surprising decisions; therefore, his decision to dismiss his secretary of state wasnt surprising. Qassemi elaborated on the decision, saying that the world is getting used to the fact that Trump takes his foreign policy decisions in a unilateral and selfish way and announces them through social media [such as on] Twitter. Sacking the foreign minister of a state that presents itself as the leader of the world, without previous notice, and during a foreign trip, doesnt imply political understanding or wisdom; its interesting that this is the 42nd firing in only 14 months. This is unprecedented.

As such, to Iran, theres nothing to suggest that the United States is going to stick with the nuclear deal, with Pompeos nomination appearing as if its the final big announcement before Trump does what he wishes to do in May. Iranian journalist Abbas Aslani told Al-Monitor, By appointing Pompeo, Trump will try to make his threat on his withdrawal from the JCPOA [Joint Comprehensive Plan of action] seem a credible and believable threat. By making this threat more credible, he wants to gain more on imposing sanctions against Iran and making some changes to the nuclear deal. But if he cannot get what he wants, like making changes to the JCPOA, his withdrawal from the nuclear deal is not unlikely. But after all, I dont think his threats can make Iran compromise on the missile issue.

Aslani said there is a common Iranian view that Pompeo will make US foreign policy toward Iran more radical and hostile. He has been very outspoken against the nuclear negotiations and also the deal. Compared to Tillersons tenure, the State Department under Pompeo will use more pressure on Iran. In other words, Pompeos presence in the State Department will be less diplomatic than the past," Aslani said.

Less diplomacy from the US side appears set to push the Iranians toward harder positions in response. Here, the question is whether this would ultimately lead the United States to opt out of the deal while other signatories keep adhering to it.

Indeed, there is still lack of clarity over how the deal will look if the United States withdraws. To Iran, the real guarantee for the continuation of the deal is the commitment of the remaining parties, but there are concerns in Tehran that Pompeos aggressive approach toward Iran might help create greater pressure on Irans regional role and involve the other JCPOA parties in such pressure  perhaps leading to rifts with Tehran. Still, it should be noted that Pompeo, as CIA chief, did move to send a direct letter to an Iranian major general. Last year, it was revealed that Pompeo had sent Quds Force commander Qasem Soleimani a direct message. What we were communicating to him in that letter was that we will hold he and Iran accountable for any attacks on American interests in Iraq by forces that are under their control, Pompeo told a panel at the annual Reagan National Defense Forum in Southern California on Dec. 3. According to Pompeo, We wanted to make sure he and the leadership in Iran understood that in a way that was crystal clear.

But Soleimani declined to receive the letter, Mohammad Golpayegani  a senior aide to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei  told Iranian press, adding that an unnamed CIA contact had tried to give a letter to Soleimani when he was in the Syrian town of Albu Kamal in November during the fighting against the Islamic State. According to Golpayegani, Soleimani responded by saying, I will not take your letter nor read it, and I have nothing to say to these people. The question is whether the same dynamic with the Iranians will be repeated when and if Pompeo becomes confirmed as the new US chief diplomat.In Iran, the Reformists are becoming increasingly suspicious about the possibility that the centrist Hassan Rouhani administration will officially form a coalition with moderate conservative parliament Speaker Ali Larijani. This comes as many are saying that Rouhanis second-term Cabinet has been filled with figures from the presidents inner circle instead of Reformists; at the same time, Reformist First Vice President Eshaq Jahangiris role appears to have diminished.

Since taking office in 2013, Rouhani has enjoyed close ties with Larijani, who has been speaker since 2008. During this time, Larijani has come to Rouhanis rescue at several critical junctures, including during the nuclear negotiations, in parliaments ratification of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and in confidence votes for ministers in Rouhanis first and second Cabinets. In contrast with the tense relations he had with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Larijani has enjoyed close relations with Rouhani and approved many measures taken by the executive branch. This interaction, of course, has not been one-sided, as Rouhani has responded to Larijanis support in kind.

One example of this mutual support is the case of conservative Abdolreza Rahmani Fazli, who has served as interior minister in both of Rouhanis Cabinets despite strong Reformist opposition. Indeed, virtually all political observers in Iran believe Larijani is the reason why Rahmani Fazli holds his post. Now the Reform movement is becoming more concerned about Rouhani and Larijanis close ties, especially in light of growing speculation about the speakers potential candidacy in the 2021 presidential elections. At the same time, Jahangiris notable performance in the 2017 presidential debates, which drew him favorable public opinion, has also prompted the Reformist front to view him as a potential contender.

As such, in the eyes of many Reformists, the Rouhani administration is now facing a critical crossroads: that of choosing between its Reformist vice president or its moderate conservative ally in parliament. This juncture will become even more challenging for Rouhani as his term advances. At present, the Reformists believe the balance is tipped more in favor of Larijani than Jahangiri. Indeed, ever since the president introduced his second Cabinet, Jahangiri has been pushed to the sidelines. Even the task of creating a lineup for the governments economic team, which was to be assigned to Jahangiri, was taken away, and instead Rouhani created the team himself by appointing individuals from his inner circle to key economic positions.

Parliaments move to impeach three Reformist ministers is the most recent incident illustrating the dynamics between Rouhani and Larijani. On March 13, parliament began impeachment proceedings against the ministers of labor, of agriculture and rof oads and urban development  all of whom are from the Reform movement. Despite major criticisms regarding Labor Minister Ali Rabieis performance on unemployment and the social welfare of workers, many Reformists blame his impeachment on the Principlists  and especially Larijanis entourage.

On March 11, Abdollah Ramezanzadeh, a Reformist politician who served as spokesman for the government of President Mohammad Khatami from 2001-2005, posted several tweets in which he warned Reformist parliament members not to be fooled, saying Larijani was behind the ministers impeachment.

One day later, on March 12, Reformist Ali Shakouri-Rad, secretary-general of the Union of Islamic Iran People Party, tweeted, There are no prospects for the existence of better options for the three ministries. What is worse is that a government party seems to have colluded or reached an agreement with a parliamentary party over the replacements [of the three ministers]. There is definitely no good in this. But what was really going on behind the scenes? It appears that Larijani and the president may have agreed to remove Reformist forces from the Cabinet and replace them with figures from Rouhanis inner circle. Meanwhile, Larijani  who is an astute player on Irans political stage  may have tried to avoid any repercussions by delegating the impeachment sessions to Deputy Speaker Masoud Pezeshkian. The impeachment plan, however, was unsuccessful, as all three ministers survived the votes of confidence, despite much difficulty.

After the impeachment proceedings, Ramezanzadeh tweeted March 13, Rabieis vote is an indication that Larijani has 125 votes in parliament at most. If the [Reformist] Hope faction becomes more active, it can take over leadership of parliament.

Even though the alleged maneuvering of Rouhani and Larijani to rid the Cabinet of three prominent Reformists failed, it is likely that the two will continue to engage in similar joint measures. Just like Larijani, Rouhani is viewed as a clever political player, and it is very possible that if he sees a potentially bleak future with the parliament speaker  and in the absence of other options  he might lean more toward the Reformists and his vice president. Up to now, though, this does not seem to be the case.

In a March 18 interview, Mohammad Atrianfar, a member of the Executives of Construction Party, said, Mr. Jahangiris role in the new administration is very small. We expected Jahangiri to be put in charge of the governments economic team. However, Mr. Rouhani preferred to trust the loyal forces in his inner circle [instead]. Such statements are an indication of the Reformists concern over Rouhanis performance and his being too close to the right on the Iranian political spectrum  and especially Larijani. This is particularly significant since the Reform movement has already witnessed how easily Rouhani dismisses the slogans and promises he made to them. As such, the current trajectory of tension between Rouhani and the Reformists suggests the probability of a looming confrontation  to the detriment of both sides. Only time will tell whether the president will ease up on his turn to the right.On March 21, Al-Monitor and the Israeli press broke the story of Israel admitting that jets from the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) had destroyed the Syrian nuclear reactor at Deir ez-Zor in September 2007. Soon after publication, a battle of versions began as to who had been responsible for the decision to attack.

When the dust finally settles after this weeks embarrassing jostling over credit for the operation, the notion that Israel is best led by someone who used to be a general will be dispelled forever. Following a day of battling versions and public squabbling between the two Ehuds  former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and former Defense Minister and Prime Minister Ehud Barak  it turns out that Lt. Gen. Barak had actually sought to delay the airstrike.

Olmerts rendition of events, laid out at length in his newly published memoir, is not the only version of Baraks reluctance to approve the bombing. According to almost everyone at the nexus of decision-making in those days, Olmert had bravely led the attack plan, knowing that it could embroil Israel in a bloody war, while Barak, the vaunted military commander, was the one trying hardest to rein him in.

Barak had only become defense minister in June 2007, after winning the Labor Party primaries. Until then, the person shepherding the attack plan alongside Olmert had not been a general either. Olmert's defense minister was another politician, Labor Party leader Amir Peretz. Furthermore, the public standing of these two civilians was at a record low for their alleged failures in conducting the Second Lebanon War, in summer 2006. The ridicule to which Peretz was subjected peaked some six months later when a video surfaced showing him, surrounded by the countrys top brass, peering into a pair of binoculars with the lens caps on during a military exercise on the Golan Heights. That photo proved that Israel had been led during the war by a clueless defense chief whose military inexperience and lack of understanding were the main cause of its flawed handling.

The alleged military failure of these two men was the backdrop for the political comeback engineered that same year by Barak, the former military chief of staff, defense minister and prime minister. Barak, the most decorated soldier in the annals of the IDF, was perceived as the antithesis of Olmert, whose military career consisted of reporting for an army magazine, and Peretz, who served as a lowly maintenance officer.

Now, it transpires that Olmert was the one who adopted one of the toughest defense decisions ever made by an Israeli prime minister. Even without his boastful interviews in recent days promoting his book, the public and the media would have given Olmert full credit for the way he made the decision to raze the reactor and oversaw its implementation.

While Peretz had taken part in the decision-making, he was ultimately forced to bow out in humiliation after being ousted in his party's primaries. The reporting in recent days has done him proud, albeit somewhat after the fact. The justified credit he was given after his forced departure from office for the decision to forge ahead with the development of the Iron Dome anti-missile defense proves that despite his lack of defense experience, he knew how to make wise and courageous decisions of great importance. Overruling IDF objections and despite the Finance Ministrys refusal to allocate the necessary budget, Peretz stood his ground. Barak, his successor, carried on with the project, but Peretz, who, as mentioned was a weakened incumbent and an outsider in defense circles, nonetheless stood up to the generals and other experts, something that can hardly be taken for granted.

Barak was perceived at the time as the responsible adult who rebuilt the countrys military deterrence after the failure of the Second Lebanon War, but the picture painted in recent days of his conduct in the Syrian reactor affair is troubling. Olmert in his book describes the tensions that developed behind closed doors when Barak assumed the position of defense minister and was presented with an operational attack plan given the assessment that the plutonium reactor would soon go on line: The participants were very quickly surprised to hear the new defense minister raising questions about the need for military action to demolish the reactor.  During one of the discussions, he even remarked that he could not understand why everyone was so stressed. After all, the operation could wait until the following spring [of 2008]. The meeting participants were stunned. According to intelligence data, by that point the reactor would be hot. Whats the problem, Barak asked. So well destroy a hot reactor.

Barak, for his part, claims he acted responsibly in dealing with the inexperienced Olmerts frenetic activity, given that the prime minister had already gone to war the previous year without meaning to. The inexperienced Olmert, however, deserves credit for standing his ground despite Baraks warnings and reservations and for not feeling inferior to the decorated general who had logged decades of experience in making sensitive decisions on matters of defense.

Barak was not the only one to whom Olmert bravely stood up. He also held his ground against the United States after President George W. Bush made clear that the US military would not attack the Syrian nuclear facility, an option Olmert had proposed. Olmert in his book describes the dramatic conversation with Bush: I respect your explanations but we will do what needs to be done.  I did not question, I did not ask, I did not wait for approval. I said unequivocally: You are not going to? OK. We are!

Israel has twice destroyed nuclear reactors in operations that could have led to war. In 1981, when Prime Minister Menachem Begin decided to bomb Iraqs nuclear reactor, and in 2007, when Olmert ordered the destruction of the Syrian facility. Begin, like Olmert, was considered an outsider by the defense establishment, and his military record boiled down to his service as a soldier in the Polish army. Begin commanded the pre-state resistance group Irgun, but did not serve in the IDF. Like Olmert, Begin had proceeded without US backup.

Various pundits have interpreted the decision to lift the lid on the 2007 bombing at this time as serving the interests of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, widely viewed as Mr. Defense, in highlighting the Iranian nuclear threat. The sequence of events in 2007 proves, however, that it doesnt take a general to make decisions of great magnitude. With various political parties now chasing after former military chiefs of staff, such as Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz and his predecessor, Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, to join their ranks and boost their defense credentials, it turns out that a prime minister with a non-military resume, personal courage and ability to make decisions can be preferable to a general.Israeli Supreme Court Justice Hanan Meltzer reprimanded the state March 19 over its continued evasion of the Supreme Courts instructions to ease overcrowding in the nations prisons, saying, Our verdict was not a recommendation. His remark reflects the serious undermining of Israeli democracy by disrespect for judicial rulings.

Law-abiding democratic countries uphold the cardinal and obvious principle of respecting and executing the rulings of the courts. Apparently, this is not the case in a state whose prime minister constantly lambasts law enforcement authorities. And former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who only recently exchanged his prison garb for civvies, heaps scorn in a new memoir on judges, senior prosecutors and a former state comptroller.

An ordinary citizen who decides to ignore a court ruling knows he stands to pay for it with his freedom or bank account, as well as his reputation. Politicians, on the other hand, view verdicts that are incompatible with their populist messages as opportunities to make headlines. Israeli prime ministers and Cabinet members who make a mockery of court rulings have never had to pay the price, neither at the ballot box nor at the bank.

Thus, for example, none of them were forced to shell out the 20,000 shekels ($5,700) in legal expenses the courts awarded to the Palestinian plaintiffs who petitioned the Supreme Court in 2009 against the planned course of the separation fence between Israel and the West Bank. The same was true for the 50,000 shekels ($14,400) awarded by a lower court to the plaintiffs in an earlier ruling. At a 2009 hearing, then-Chief Justice Dorit Beinisch accused the state of being a law unto itself. She, too, found it appropriate to state the obvious: This courts verdicts are not by way of being recommendations, and the state is duty-bound to respect and implement them with the speed and efficiency required.

In a detailed 2010 memo to Attorney General Yehuda Weinstein, former Deputy Attorney General Yehudit Karp listed 11 contempt of court ordinances and Supreme Court rulings by which the state had failed to abide. Such cases, she warned, raise suspicions that we are not dealing with the random, negligible failings of government bureaucracy, but with a severe phenomenon of [a government] systematically and consciously ignoring its duty to implement judicial verdicts. Karp, at that time no longer in government, further warned that the problem posed a real and present danger to democracy, the rule of law and the principle of separation of powers in Israel.

Issuing instructions in response to Karps memorandum, Weinstein wrote that adherence to court verdicts is a fundamental duty imposed on the state. He underscored that implementation of rulings handed down against the government constitutes an essential element in building public confidence in the government and state institutions.

The reprimand indicates that Weinsteins directive and Beinischs complaint went unheeded by the countrys elected officials and public servants.

How can ordinary citizens be expected to respect court rulings when Knesset member Moti Yogev of HaBayit HaYehudi  the party of Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked  claims certain rulings turned the court from a pillar of democracy into a pillar of massacres against Israelis. The court caused Israeli soldiers deaths by not allowing the immediate destruction of Palestinian attackers homes after attacks, he argued. The same party's chair, Education Minister Naftali Bennett, panned a December 2017 Supreme Court ruling that Israeli law does not allow the government to retain the bodies of Palestinian attackers as leverage.

In his essay in the Federalist Papers, Founding Father Alexander Hamilton noted that the proposed structure of the US judiciary does not provide it with any influence over either the sword or the purse. The prominent 18th-century thinker and political leader observed even then the wisdom of making the judicial branch dependent on the support of the executive arm of government. However, Israels judicial branch finds itself helpless in the face of public figures who at best view its rulings as recommendations and at worst as aiding the enemy. In an April 2016 speech at a conference of the Israel Bar Association, for example, Shaked fired off a barrage of criticism couched as questions about various court rulings. Which purse exactly should pay for compensation awarded by the court to Palestinians injured during the intifada? Who will take care of the public purse gone empty over the end of the private prisons?"

According to the justice ministers views, which faithfully represent those of the government, the judges must rely on the power of the people and their choice of representatives tasked with matters of sword and purse. These representatives are the same ones who advocate maintaining a Jewish majority in Israel no matter the price. She said so outright in a February speech at a forum called the "Israeli Congress on Judaism and Democracy," arguing, "We need to protect the Jewish character of the state even if that means sacrificing human rights." Shaked isnt just talk. She is working hard to populate the nations top court with judges for whom the sanctity of the states Jewish majority takes precedence, even at the cost of human rights.

Judges are not perfect. They, too, make mistakes. However, by its continued court bashing, the right is not just dealing a blow to democracy, but also shooting itself in the foot. Since Israel was established 70 years ago, the Supreme Court has upheld various forms of occupation. It approved numerous laws enabling the expropriation of Arab lands within Israel for the construction of Jewish communities. Judges persistently adopted legal interpretations that allowed the state to establish settlements for Jews only in territories outside its sovereign borders. Generations of Israeli diplomats concealed the rampant injustices of Israels 50-year occupation of Palestinian lands behind successive Supreme Court rulings. For years, judges who were accused of being leftist recorded hundreds of rulings rejecting petitions by human rights organizations  to their credit or detriment, depending on the eye of the beholder. Israel cannot boast of being the only democracy in the Middle East and at the same time undermine fundamental democratic principles.The fall of Afrin to Turkish forces March 18 came as a surprise to most parties involved in the Syrian crisis. Experts, observers and even international anti-Islamic State coalition officials thought that the Syrian Kurdish fighters would have put up a stronger resistance to protect the land and that Turkeys victory would come at a great cost.

Following the decision by the Syrian Kurdish Peoples Protection Units (YPG) to hand over the city center without engaging in urban warfare against the Turkey-led Free Syrian Army (FSA) forces, most now believe that Turkeys military intervention in Afrin is a prelude to a wider offensive against other cities under the control of Syrian Kurdish forces.

As experts are scrambling to understand the reasons behind the YPGs withdrawal, Aron Lund, a prominent Middle East expert, observed that the Syrian Kurdish fighters didnt receive the support from the international community they had hoped.

Thrown to the wolves by its only powerful defender in Afrin [Russia], the YPG could not hold out for long. By early March, all that remained was the question of whether to pull out to save lives or mount a hopeless last stand to score political points, Lund wrote.

Turkeys Operation Olive Branch, which began Jan. 20, concluded its 58th day with a Turkish flag hoisted over Afrins city center. At the same time, Turkey-led FSA factions, including Salafi jihadi groups, were busy plundering the city. The images emerging from the city resembled the taking of a medieval era war booty.

After chasing Kurdish fighters from Afrin, the pro-Ankara fighters broke into shops, restaurants and houses and left with foodstuff, electronic equipment, blankets and other goods, the correspondents said, AFP reported. They placed the loot in cars and small trucks and drove them out of the city.

The clashes between the Turkish army and YPG fighters had unleashed a humanitarian crisis. Thousands of people who fled the region werent able to reach shelters and had to sleep outdoors with no food or water.

The UN estimates that nearly 100,000 civilians were displaced from Afrin before the city fell on Sunday. Kurdish officials and humanitarian sources put the number at more than 150,000, out of the enclaves total estimated population of 323,000, Lund wrote. Most had gathered in the districts capital, which had filled up with desperate civilians even after water supplies were cut off in early March.

One of the first acts of the FSA fighters was to demolish a statute of a mythical figure in Kurdish history: Kawa. Kawa is a Kurdish legend who represents the resistance and freedom.

One of the first acts of Turkish fighter jets in the first week of the operation was to reduce a 3,000-year-old temple into rubble: Ain Dara, a Syro-Hittite temple that had existed since 1300 B.C.

The eradication of Afrins cultural heritage and the destruction of its ethnic identity have sparked an international outcry.

It appears the majority of the population of the city, which is predominantly Kurdish, evacuated under threat of attack from Turkish military forces and Turkish-backed opposition forces, the US State Department said in a statement March 19. We are also concerned over reports of looting inside the city of Afrin. We have repeatedly expressed our serious concern to Turkish officials regarding the situation in Afrin, the statement added.

However, the move was a day late and a dollar short, and it had no impact on Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who considers the State Department statement yet another display of American weakness or indecisiveness.

Now they are expressing their concerns about Afrin. Where were you when we were expressing our concerns? Where were you when we offered you to eradicate these terrorist organizations jointly, Erdogan said March 20 addressing his partys parliamentary group. If youre our strategic partner, then you have to respect us and walk with us, he added.

Experts now warn of a looming crisis between Ankara and Washington on Manbij, which Erdogan pointed out as the next target for the Turkish forces.

The problem is that if the United States did what Turkey wants, the result would be bloody chaos in Manbij that might cascade south and east, unraveling the stability that was bought at such cost, seasoned journalist David Ignatius wrote. A reasonable goal would be a gradual withdrawal by the United States and SDF [Syrian Democratic Forces] from Manbij, as the Afrin conflict ends and theres a de-escalation in northern Syria.

Now two questions persist: How will Turkeys military achievement translate into politics, and how long will the Turkish military stay in Afrin?

The best example to find answers is the Euphrates Shield region, which came under control of the Turkish army and FSA forces in March 2017. Since then, Turkeys grip on the region has only tightened. Jarablus, al-Bab and Azaz are being ruled by officials appointed by Ankara. Turkey resettled some 140,000 Syrians in the region, and Afrin will probably witness a similar process.

However, unlike the Euphrates Shield region, Afrin is more homogenous, with an overwhelmingly Kurdish population. Some 90% of its inhabitants are  or at least were  Kurds, according to Fabrice Balanche, a prominent Syria expert.

It is also a very combative region. Three-quarters of YPG leaders hailed from Afrin, Balanche wrote. [Erdogan] has also dealt a blow to the Kurds of his own country, who were following with hope the experience of territorial autonomy of the Syrian Kurds.

As for Erdogans threat to expand the military intervention in other regions controlled by Syrian Kurdish forces, "Why would he stop, since no one has reacted so far? Balanche asked.

The only forces that can prevent Turkey from going after the Kurdish fighters in other parts of Syria are the United States and Russia.

Therefore, Afrin didnt turn into Turkeys Vietnam, as the YPG vowed in the first week of the offensive, but instead might have morphed into Washingtons nightmare.Southwest Syria could be the next confrontation zone in Syrias multiple regional wars. The US-Russian cease-fire agreement is collapsing, except in the buffer zone on the Iraqi-Jordanian border. The Syrian regime and its allies are making their way through to the Nassib border crossing and the Golan Heights. These new dynamics are altering the calculations of Jordan and Israel, while further weakening the armed opposition on the southern front.

On March 12, the Syrian military launched airstrikes on Daraa province, the first violation of the cease-fire agreement. Civilians began to flee these areas, as the Russian military is using scare tactics. Spokesperson of the Khmeimim base, Alexander Ivanov, had warned a day before on March 11 that after securing the perimeters of the capital [city] Damascus, [we seek] to eliminate terrorists present south of the country."

The United States promptly called for restraint and held an urgent meeting for the armed opposition groups operating under the Amman-based Military Operations Center, which has been inactive since late last year. Pro-opposition news websites have speculated that Washington is planning a wide-ranging military campaign in southwestern Syria.

However, a Pentagon official told Al-Monitor that the United States is focused on defeating the Islamic State (IS) in southeastern Syria and is "not involved in monitoring de-escalation zones. This comment from the Pentagon is noteworthy, considering the presumed existence of the Amman Center for cease-fire control in southwestern Syria, which includes Quneitra, Daraa and Suweida provinces.

More importantly, the two major players in southwestern Syria  neighbors Jordan and Israel  have been surprisingly silent as the Russian-backed Syrian regime expands territorial gains. There might be Russian assurances to both countries that their interests will be preserved.

Jordan seems ready to move on

Jordan has for a while now had fatigue from the Syrian civil war and has recently failed to convince the Syrian armed opposition to transfer the Nassib border crossing to the Syrian regime. Amman is prioritizing the need to reopen this crossing to reinvigorate its economy. Russia is not sanctioning any attack in the Jordanian buffer zone near the Iraqi border where the US-controlled al-Tanf base is located. The Syrian regime is advancing along the Damascus-Daraa highway and is about to reach the Nassib border crossing.

Meanwhile, armed opposition groups on the southern front have been publicly talking about uniting their efforts to push back the Syrian regime and its allies; however, they have long been dependent on foreign support to operate. The armed groups operating in Daraa remain divided with no coherent military structure. This past January, the Revolutionary Army and the Sunni Youth Forces clashed in eastern Daraa, and a disengagement force had to be deployed between them. Furthermore, radical groups are benefiting from the chaos. Khaled bin Walid, which pledges allegiance to IS, attempted this week to advance from the Yarmouk basin toward the Jordanian border.

Ammans ability to act in this turmoil is disabled by US-Russian tensions; hence, Jordan will most likely not pick winners in the race to control Daraa. The challenge is what will happen after the Syrian regime reaches the Jordanian border. Will the armed opposition launch an attack on the Syrian regime deployed along the Damascus-Daraa highway? Will the regime use the same tactics of eastern Ghouta by dividing the territories of rival armed opposition groups and compel them to make separate concessions? The collapse of the US-Russian cease-fire in southwest Syria undermines Jordanian interests, and Amman will now have to limit the damage.

Quneitra and Israels defiance

Israel continues to target the Syrian regime and Iranian proxies with Russian consent  or at least without Russian objection. What is remarkable, though, is the deafening Israeli silence and inaction as the Syrian regime has now reached the 1974 cease-fire line near the Lebanese-Syrian border.

The Syrian regime is expanding control through local militias that are reportedly being trained by Hezbollah, emulating the model of Popular Mobilization Units in Iraq. The Syrian regime has recently combined these local militias in Quneitra under one banner (Homeland Shield/Quneitra Hawks Forces). Hezbollah cleared last year its military bases in Quneitra for them, most notably in the so-called death triangle  the intersection of the countryside of Daraa, Quneitra and Damascus  where major battles occurred between the regime and the opposition. These forces have also recently controlled what is known as Area 99 in the Golan Heights section that is not under Israeli control, which leaves them three kilometers away from Israeli troops. It will be hard to see how the armed opposition can prevent the Syrian regime from controlling the Quneitra province without regional support. Unlike Turkey and Jordan, Israel cannot openly endorse a Syrian armed group to fight on its behalf or build a buffer zone on an Arab land.

Israel sent last week a request to the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) to redeploy its peacekeepers along the cease-fire line as the Syrian regime has reached the area of separation near the occupied Golan Heights. UNDOF denied the request. US Acting Assistant Secretary of State David Satterfield visited last month UNDOF headquarters in Camp Ziouani in the Golan area. Countries sending the peacekeepers will expect US-Russian guarantees that their troops can operate in a safe environment.

Israel recently sent two subtle messages to Russia. First, the Israeli army conducted last week an exercise that stimulated a multifront war in which Russia intervened to prevent Israel from attacking Syria. Second, Israel publicly confirmed this week that it had launched airstrikes in 2007 against a potential nuclear reactor in Syria. Israel is preparing contingency plans for the coming period and is rather worried about the Russian restraint on its activities in Syria.

The collapse of the US-Russian cease-fire agreement might realign once again Jordanian-Israeli interests and makes Moscow the sole powerbroker in southwest Syria. Israel can only blame Russia moving forward if an Iranian tangible threat emerges on its border. Balancing Israeli and Iranian demands could be Moscows make-or-break deal in Syria.Proposed language on Turkey sanctions in defense of what Congressional lawmakers call US hostages was dropped from a draft $1.3 trillion federal spending bill that was released to the public yesterday.

The move comes amid a concerted push by the State Department to assuage Turkey, a critical NATO ally, over the United States continued support for Syrian Kurdish militants labelled terrorists by Ankara. The State Departments Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs, which handles relations with Turkey, is believed to have played a major part in persuading Congress to shelve proposed sanctions against Turkish officials deemed to have been responsible for what the Donald Trump administration terms the unlawful detention of US nationals and Turkish citizens employed by the US consulates in Istanbul and Adana.

Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., who together with Sen. James Paul Lankford, R-Okla., co-sponsored the sanctions language, confirmed to Al-Monitor that it had been pulled to allow more time for diplomacy to work. Shaheen said in an email: The safety and security of US hostages held in Turkey is a bipartisan concern and priority for Congress. This is why, upon further discussion with those involved in diplomatic negotiations, Senator Lankford and I have agreed to give the State Departments newly established dialogue with Turkey more time to succeed.

Shaheen was referring to a consultative mechanism announced by outgoing Secretary of State Rex Tillerson following talks in Ankara with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu. The dialogue is multi-pronged, with differences on Syria and the status of imprisoned Americans and consulate staff as well as that of Fethullah Gulen, the Pennsylvania-based Sunni cleric Turkey wants extradited over his alleged masterminding of the July 2016 coup, dominating the agenda.

The senator added, however, [W]e have made it clear to both the Government of Turkey and to US officials that if no improvements are made to the conditions of the Americans held unlawfully in Turkey, we will prepare even stronger sanctions against those involved in the arrest and detention of innocent Americans like Pastor [Andrew] Brunson and others.

The plight of the North Carolina minister, who was arrested in October 2016 on a cocktail of terror charges including links to the Gulen network and involvement in the coup, has especially aroused bipartisan fury and calls for sanctions.

The language that was removed from the omnibus, which was seen by Al-Monitor, included among its provisions, The Secretary of State shall deny entry into the United States to any senior official of the Government of Turkey about whom the Secretary has credible information is knowingly responsible for the wrongful or unlawful prolonged detention of the citizens or nationals of the United States. The provision contains caveats such as allowing the secretary to waive the sanctions should he determine that the waiver would serve a United States national interest or that the circumstances which caused the individual to be denied entry have changed sufficiently.

Nate Schenkkan is the project director for Nations in Transit at Freedom House. He told Al-Monitor Turkey should not be lulled into complacency. The debate on sanctions shows how strong the consensus is on the Hill to take action over the unwarranted detention of Americans. Even reaching the point of serious discussion of sanctions on Turkish officials is a big first step given the depth of the relationship. Schenkkan further cautioned, This omnibus is a stopgap bill and Congress will have a chance to put sanctions into the next funding bill within just a few months. If Turkey doesnt take action to resolve this issue, they can expect sanctions to come up again very shortly.

The decision to withhold the sanctions language presumably rests on the hope that Brunson will be allowed to leave the country after an initial court hearing, much in the same way a German-Turkish journalist who was held for for a year on similarly specious terror charges was last month. Critics say Brunson and others are being held as bargaining chips to secure Turkish interests though thinly disguised "hostage diplomacy." The American Center for Law and Justice, a conservative group that has taken up Brunsons cause, predicted that a hearing could take place as early as April 16.

Prosecutors in the Aegean port city of Izmir, where Brunson is being held, finally indicted him this week. The charges being leveled against the native of Black Mountain include seeking to convert muslim Kurds to Christianity and a web of subversive liaisons with former CIA and Pentagon operatives, all part of a bid to dismember and destabilize Turkey. Much of the supposed evidence is based on secret witnesses testimonies.

In a copy of the indictment that was obtained by Al-Monitor, one of the witnesses describes a scene in which 25 Turkish university students held their hands to their hearts while the American national anthem was being played. The witness, codenamed prayer, claimed, Andrew Craig Brunson was involved in these activities. Andrews church believes the Kurds are the [lost] 13th tribe.

The 50-year-old pastors wife, Norine, who was initially detained with him when the couple went to police headquarters in Izmir thinking they were going to be issued permanent residency permits, weighed in on the sanctions debate on the State Departments side, sources familiar with the discussions told Al-Monitor. She remains in Izmir to pay weekly visits to her husband, who has lost around 50 pounds since the beginning of his incarceration.

Turkeys state-run Anadolu news agency reported Brunson could face up to 35 years for crimes he allegedly committed in the name of the Gulen group and the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). The PKK has been fighting for Kurdish self-rule inside Turkey since 1984 and its ties to the United States Syrian Kurdish allies is a source of bitter contention between Ankara and Washington. In January, Turkey launched a massive assault against the Syrian Kurdish militia in the northwestern region of Afrin, a move that has undermined the US-led coalitions fight against the Islamic State farther east.

The cases of two Turkish nationals employed at the American consulate in Istanbul targeted over their alleged ties to Gulen remain hazy. Metin Topuz, a liaison officer for the US Drugs Enforcement Agency, was arrested in October. Washington hit back by suspending visa services for Turkish citizens at all of its missions in Turkey only to rescind the ban in December. Topuz remains in jail and has yet to be indicted.

A second Istanbul consulate employee, Mete Canturk, was placed under house arrest in January. His status remains a mystery. The State Department declines to comment on it. On March 14, a court in the southeastern province of Mardin rejected demands to free a third jailed local staff member who had worked for the US mission in Adana. Hamza Ulucay, who worked at the consulate as a translator for 36 years, accompanying US officials on trips to the mainly Kurdish southeast region, was briefly detained in February 2017, then arrested soon after for his alleged ties to the PKK.

Turkish thuggery has won further respite, it emerged yesterday. The Wall Street Journal reported that federal prosecutors dropped charges against 11 of 15 members of Erdogans security team who were accused of involvement in the violence against pro-Kurdish protesters outside the Turkish ambassador's residence in May 2017. According to the paper, prosecutors first asked a judge to dismiss charges against four members of Erdogans security detail. Then they dropped charges against seven others on Feb. 14, a day before Tillersons rendezvous with Erdogan in Ankara.

Giran Ozcan is the Washington representative of the Peoples' Democratic Party (HDP), the largest pro-Kurdish bloc in Turkey, whose elected leaders are in jail together with nine other HDP lawmakers. He told Al-Monitor, The dropping of charges by federal prosecutors against Erdogans security detail is yet another indication the United States, contrary to public opinion, tacitly encourages Erdogans increasingly repressive policies, both domestically and internationally. Ozcan added, Countless acts of aggression by Erdogan directed at US citizens in the case of the Sheridan Circle act and the Andrew Brunson case, and to US allies like the Kurds in Afrin, are going unanswered by the US government.  This appeasement policy is encouraging Erdogans assault on Turkish democracy and emboldening him to behave contrary to US interests in the wider region."In part four of the series on North Korean defectors, Um Yae-run sheds light on how brokers work in the country.

Seoul, South Korea  Around 31,000 North Koreans have defected into the South since the end of the Korean War in 1953.

Almost 71 percent of those defectors are female, most in their 20s and 30s.

Only a few take the most dangerous route through the Korean Demilitarized Zone that a North Korean soldier took late last year.

Most of the North Koreans defect via the long and expensive journey that takes them into China after crossing the Yalu River.

The journey takes them to Chinas southern border into Vietnam and Laos before they arrive in Thailand.

They are often flown into South Korea from Thailand.

Some even opt to go to the US, according to Liberty in North Korea, an NGO based in the US and South Korea.

But their arrival into South Korea does not signal an end to their worries and problems.

Part 1  Korean government doesnt treat defectors as people

Part 2  I wish I can go back to North Korea for a day

Part 3  North Korean defector describes life at home through cartoons

In part four of the series, Al Jazeera speaks to Um Yae-run, a 41-year-old defector who now works at a marriage bureau and also as a broker.

She describes the routes and costs associated with fleeing North Korea.

My aunt lived in the border region and managed to flee to South Korea through China.

Three years later, she contacted me through a broker to try to get me to come over. I pondered over it for about a month. I didnt want to leave but eventually, in 2009, left my daughter and mother and fled.

The broker took me to the border but made me cross the river [at the border] in the middle of the day.

Its not very big. Theres a hole in the middle of the frozen river and North Koreans pump water to do their laundry there. I pretended to do the same and then the broker on the other side started yelling miss, put that down and run. I heard that and ran.

The border guards shot at me. I had learnt that you have to run zig-zag to avoid being shot and thats what saved me.

From China, the broker took me to Vietnam. When we reached Hanoi we were in a motel for about four days. The brokers dont take one or two people but gather about 10 and move them together.

We then took a train to the Cambodian border. We walked and then crawled for a kilometre, taking a road that was totally dark and empty except for some checkpoints.

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We waited for three nights in Cambodia. We then rode in a car to get to a ferry that crossed the river and were driven to the Korean embassy. They moved us to a church where we stayed for three months.

A lot of people who come to South Korea become brokers. They work with brokers in China who work with brokers in North Korea.

If someone in the South wants to bring a family member over, they will give the address of the person in North Korea so the South Korean broker who will pass it on.

In North Korea, you cant trust anyone who says hes a broker. So we give the brokers personal information, like a code word, so the person knows who sent the broker.

The person will then work with the brokers to get you to the border. If you dont live near the border you need to take a train for which you will need a licence. The brokers will pay to get you on the train and bribe the railway officials.

In North Korea, if you have money, you can do anything. Once at the border, the broker will arrange a time for crossing the river. In the summer, you might swim with a black rubber boat or the boat might have a string attached to the Chinese side that the brokers there will pull.

The brokers might also bribe the border patrol to tell them their shifts so they can cross over then. If they can strike a deal, it becomes easy.

When I crossed the border, it cost me around 3m Korean won ($2,800). When my daughter came, I paid 6.5m ($6,000). Now, it costs almost 10m won ($9,300). Coming to South Korea will cost you around 15m won ($14,000). Crossing the border is the most expensive part. Rest is cheaper.

After arriving in South Korea, I was interrogated by the intelligence agency for a month before they let me out. I decided to work as a broker because for every person you help, you made around two to four million Korean won ($1,800 to $3,700).

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The first person I helped flee was my daughter. My mother didnt want that. She wanted me to get married in South Korea and start over. I had many suitors but after I brought my daughter over, they all left.

When I came here, I saved a lot of money. I didnt eat, I didnt buy anything expensive. My clothes cost me 2000 to 4000 won ($1.8 to $3.7) and I also wore clothes that others gave me. When you receive free money, you dont realise how its made. My mother acted like she was the mother of some rich daughter.

Im not in touch with my mother now. My siblings are there with her so might be okay. Sometimes I feel bad that were not in contact, like Im being selfish, and Im sorry to my parents.

I now work at a marriage bureau. We pair up North Korean women with South Korean or other foreign men. We bring the girls through personal networks. If there are girls around me who are single, Ill just bring them over and tell them theres a good client in my company.

As told to Faras Ghani and Hae Ju KangWater related challenges can not be solved within a global capitalist system that is itself destroying nature.

The theme of this years World Water Day  marked annually on 22 March  is Nature for Water, which, as the website of the United Nations Environment Programme informs us, explores nature-based solutions (NBS) to the water challenges we face in the 21st century.

The challenges are clearly dire; as the UN notes, 2.1 billion people currently lack access to safely managed drinking water services, while an estimated 1.8 billion use an unimproved source of drinking water with no protection against contamination from human faeces.

In theory, of course, nature-based solutions are the obvious answer to problems in nature. The UN advises planting more trees, restoring wetlands, and reconnecting rivers to floodplains.

But while the whole NBS campaign will no doubt generate handsome revenues for a UN system that specialises in self-enrichment, no solution to water or related challenges is possible within a global capitalist system that is itself destroying nature.

And even if water is considered a basic human right under international law, there isnt much room for rights in a neoliberal milieu of comprehensive commodification and the eradication of any sort of terrestrial harmony in favour of the financial tyranny of an elite minority.

Oceans of pollution

Lets start with the 2.1 billion people reportedly lacking access to safely managed drinking water services. Horrifying as this figure is, it would appear to be an egregious underestimate in light of the findings of various recent scientific studies.

Last year, for example, scientists discovered microplastic contamination in tap water around the world. The Guardians environment editor noted some of the tragicomic details: The US had the highest contamination rate, at 94 percent, with plastic fibres found in tap water sampled at sites including Congress buildings, the US Environmental Protection Agencys headquarters, and Trump Tower in New York.

Now, a new study has additionally found microplastics in 93 percent of worldwide samples of popular bottled water brands  leaving humanity with the question of what, exactly, we are supposed to drink.

In other uplifting water news, new research suggests that the earths oceans are severely more polluted with plastic than previously thought.

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Even before this revelation, a report by the World Economic Forum had indicated that, if we continue with business as usual, there will be more plastic than fish in the oceans by 2050.

The precise effects of ubiquitous plastic contamination on the human body are as yet unknown  but its safe to assume well find out soon enough.

In the very least, plastic itself is a fine symbol of the soulless consumerism and overconsumption the forces of capitalism would have us believe constitutes life.

Larger contexts

In her 2013 book A Human Rights Manifesto, Julie Wark discusses the monetisation (read: neoliberal theft) of resources and rights, highlighting the role of the bottled beverage industry in environmental destruction -none of this damage will be reversed by planting trees or restoring wetlands.

The annual production of tens of billions of plastic bottles in the United States alone, writes Wark, uses 17 million barrels of oil per year and making the bottle takes three times more water than that which fills it.

Oil production, for its part, also requires large quantities of water  to say nothing of the wider water and acid rain pollution that attends the process.

Meanwhile, according to a 2016 Washington Post article on the aforementioned World Economic Forum report, plastic production accounts for 6 percent of global oil consumption (a number that will hit 20 percent in 2050).

In short, on World Water Day, it might be helpful for the world to ponder how water fits into larger contexts of corporate plunder and environmental spoliation  particularly when a certain imperial superpower has been known to wage wars for corporate profit in oil-rich lands, unleashing all manner of human and environmental calamity.

Water as weapon

Speaking of war, the capitalist order conveniently provides all sorts of nifty opportunities for the effective weaponisation of water.

The state of Israel comes to mind, where the Zionist tradition of usurping Palestinian water supplies has only exacerbated the suffering of Israels Palestinian victims, who are forced to pay disproportionate sums of money for portable water while Israel blissfully waters its lawns, fills the swimming pools of illegal Israeli settlers, and demolishes water cisterns used by Palestinian farmers.

In the Gaza Strip, the Israeli blockade and periodic bombing of relevant infrastructure have left the population to contend with raw sewage on the beach and other delights. A January 2018 headline in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz proclaims: Ninety-seven Percent of Gaza Drinking Water Contaminated by Sewage, Salt, Expert Warns.

Naturally, none of this has prevented Israel from being marketed as a brilliant pioneer in the field of water technology and a veritable oracle on how to quench global thirst  which means loads of money for Israeli firms and a total whitewash of Israels ethnic cleansing habit.

Beyond Israel, there are plenty of other instances of water-based assaults to human dignity. These range from the United States apparent determination to poison its own water supplies via reckless oil pipelines and other manoeuvres to a previous World Bank-inspired privatisation experiment in Bolivia in which  as Ben Dangl writes in The Price of Fire: Resource Wars and Social Movements in Bolivia  residents of the city of Cochabamba were billed for everything from the water piped into their houses, to water collected in rain gutters, to the water in community wells.

On World Water Day, it might be nice to pretend that there existed some possibility of hope in a system predicated on economic disparity and a permanent division between haves and have-nots.

But the only nature-based solution to capitalism is to get rid of it.

The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeeras editorial stance.Last week, social media giant Facebook announced that it was suspending data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica (CA) from its platform. According to Facebook, CA had violated its policies on user data when a researcher accessed millions of users data from the site and transferred it to CA.

CA has so far denied any accusations of wrongdoing and has since issued a statement asserting that the middleman, Global Science Research, was entirely to blame for any violations of Facebooks policies, doubling down on denials it has had to issue repeatedly since the 2016 US general election.

CEO Alexander Nix told a UK parliamentary select committee two weeks ago that data analytics is embedded in modern political practice and the only reason why people are upset with CAs work is they dont like the candidate who won.

Thousands of miles away in Nairobi, those of us who watched the 2017 Kenyan election closely received the news with a mix of vindication and alarm. Vindication, because we had already seen the footprints of various data analytics firms like CA all over our contentious, yet-unresolved 2017 election; alarm because we still dont know what exactly CA did in Kenya beyond its PR operations.

We know that since 2013, digital tools have been extensively used in our politics as our major political parties spent millions on foreign PR and IT consultants. We know that in 2012, a young consultant working for the firm in Kenya was found dead in his hotel room. In 2017, Privacy International claimed that the ruling Jubilee Party spent $6m to contract Cambridge Analytica, while the opposition retained Aristotle, Inc for its own analytics operation. In fact, in the secret video shot by Channel 4, Mark Turnbull, managing director of Cambridge Analytica, says of the Jubilee party, we have rebranded the entire party twice, written their manifesto, done two rounds of 50,000 surveys Wed write all the speeches and stage the whole thing, so just about every element of his campaign.

Beyond a mere 'breach of trust', this scandal raises important legal, moral and philosophical questions about the nature of politics in the digital age, in which Kenya is instructive.

Responding to the reports, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted that the site had made mistakes and that there had been a breach of trust. But this legalese doesnt get to the heart of what Cambridge Analytica has done, or what Facebook has made possible: the core issues that come up when technology collides so crudely with politics. Beyond a mere breach of trust this scandal raises important legal, moral and philosophical questions about the nature of politics in the digital age, in which Kenya is instructive.

Privacy and data

The best way to think about this scandal is as three concentric rings of increasing historical impact. The smallest ring  or the immediate issue  concerns privacy and data, and especially the legal space in which social media sites operate. When individuals hand over their private data to social media sites, they believe that what they are doing is similar to having a one on one conversation with family, friends or colleagues but on a specific platform. But a social media site is not a telephone company or a public space. It is a private corporation that needs to make money for its shareholders. The easiest way for them to do that is to turn all the information that you hand over to them into a product for other people to sell you things  which is what Facebook routinely does.

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In this case, an innocuous quiz administered to about a quarter of a million people allowed a firm to collect private data on over 50 million users because it also surreptitiously collected information on friends and friends of friends  people who had not consented to allow their data to be mined. And that, in part, is why this issue has caused problems for Facebook and Cambridge Analytica in the UK and not in North America or Africa: UK privacy law prohibits such indirect data collection and has systems in place to punish it. In the US, there isnt a unified law prohibiting this third party data mining so journalists have scrambled to find a connection between CA and Russian collusion in the general election as a smoking gun for culpability. In Kenya, which to date still doesnt have a broad data protection law, users are essentially at the mercy of their own discernment.

Of course, illegality and immorality are two separate things. Much of the problem here is that information was being taken from people who did not expressly consent to having it taken. As researcher Zeynep Tufecki has demonstrated, until 2014 this was not a bug in Facebooks systems  it was a feature that made it so attractive to app developers because of the ability to easily amass large amounts of user data. Data collection in this way is a violation of users privacy rights and is certainly immoral, even if legislators around the world have been loath to follow Europes lead and develop strong regulations that rein in such predatory behaviour.

Foreign interference in domestic politics

The next circle out is the conversation on foreign interference in domestic politics, and this has more to do with CAs political consulting and what it does with your data once it has it. Based on the secretly recorded conversations shared by Channel 4 and the Guardian, Cambridge Analytica routinely violated EU and UK laws on bribery and working with foreign governments. CEO Alexander Nix admits in the video that the firm would gladly bribe, entrap and even procure prostitutes for clients. The ongoing investigation also revealed that Israeli operatives procured private emails of now Nigerian President Buhari and attempted to sell them to CA in order to influence the 2015 Nigerian election. All of this is illegal in the UK, where the corporation is domiciled.

Is it illegal in the country for which the activities were undertaken? Bribery and prostitution are, perhaps, but in the absence of a strong data protection laws in Kenya, strictly speaking, data mining is not illegal. In fact, private electronic communications are constantly interfered with  phones are bugged, emails monitored  often by the government itself and with no consequences for perpetrators. LGBT rights organisations have cases where clients are being blackmailed with being outed based on their private communications. Nor is there a culture of responsible data management. Companies using social media for customer service routinely reveal private customer information online without consent.

Late last year it emerged that the treasury could not identify the private company that had been collecting revenue for the e-Citizen platform, which collects millions of terabytes of personal identity information on anyone who needs to get a new drivers license, buy a car, register to vote, or register a business. No one has been charged with any offence in this regard.

Coincidentally, the Kenyan parliament is debating the Cyber Crimes bill this week, but typical of the National Assembly in Kenya, even in the shadow of these devastating revelations, the focus of the debates has been only on how data insecurity affects members of parliament and how MPs can be protected from citizens.

Kenyan politicians still dont get it. Or maybe they do, and this is wilful ignorance on their part to create a legal framework that allows them to punish their opponents but still facilitate the kind of manipulation that CA is accused of perpetrating over the last six years. After all, the Channel 4s undercover investigation affirms that Kenya is CAs biggest success story  the one they use to lure in politicians who want a shortcut to power. CA twice built Kenyas ruling party in a London boardroom on the back of a legal and moral vacuum and they are proud of it.

The ethical and moral dimension

Which leads to the third and largest ring, that is, the ethical and moral dimension of the ongoing scandal. Should a British company be able to fly into an already heated political context halfway around the world and heavily influence political discourse for profit? Nix himself acknowledged in an interview with Tech Crunch last year that CA was well aware of the potential consequences of interfering in the Kenyan election. Shouldnt there be consequences for a corporation that riles up dangerous ethnonationalist rhetoric purely for profit and then gets to leave without having to deal with the fallout? For CA, the Kenyan election was a revenue stream. For Kenyans, it was life or death. Shouldnt some things be sacred?

In the colonial era, we talked about divide and rule: about the British East Africa Company pitting African tribes against each other in order to make it easier for them to control and subjugate. How, after almost 60 years of independence, is Kenya still here?

Recall that at the time of the 2013 election, the two protagonists of the Jubilee party were facing indictments at the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity committed during the 2008 post-election violence. The 2013 Kenyan election campaign didnt just bring the Jubilee administration into power. It has had serious social and political consequences for the country and the region. The PR spin around their candidacy portrayed them as victims of an elaborate Western plot to persecute African politicians. The view was unquestioningly adopted and propagated by academics and local media, many who owe their financial survival to their relationship with power. It erased the plight victims of election violence in Kenya and gave quarter to Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, who is accused of overseeing genocide in Darfur and the Blue Nile state. This narrative became so big that at one point African nations, which make up the largest single regional block in the membership of the ICC, threatened to withdraw from the court en masse, only for the current Kenyan attorney general to quietly state earlier this year that Kenya has no intention of leaving the ICC.

Simply calling this irony doesnt do the situation justice: a political party went on a crusade against neo-colonial interference while paying a British company to package and propagate that message. And the damage is much deeper than that. In the colonial era, we talked about divide and rule: about the British East Africa Company pitting African tribes against each other in order to make it easier for them to control and subjugate. How, after almost 60 years of independence, is Kenya still here?

Ultimately, precision will be key to responding to the current scandal. Cambridge Analytica was both a data analytics corporation and a political consultancy, and it is important not to conflate the responses to both. The solution to the data analytics problem does not lie in increasing oversight of what end users do on social media as a Kenyan MP suggested yesterday. People have the right to offer up whatever information they want to offer up to the public provided they fully understand the consequences and consent. The solution here is in restricting what companies like Facebook are able to do with that data once users provide it. Its one thing for to use analytics to try and sell things  your financial position should ideally act as a natural check against spending money you dont have. Its another thing altogether for the same technology to be used to mobilise political viewpoints that will take years to undo.

The political consulting problem is more complex because the solution lies in changing the political culture around the world. Its about destroying the idea that its okay to leave moral values behind when flying into developing countries to tilt the balance of political power towards tyranny. It lies in part in enforcing laws that restrict the way political parties in the developing world spend money. It lies in creating a culture that sees African people as more than an inconvenience on the way to power. The rhetoric around the 2017 election in Kenya has damaged lives and livelihoods. Fear of ethnic violence was so high that certain neighbourhoods were emptied out. Personal relationships have been irreparably damaged. None of this is illegal per se, but it is deeply immoral, and this needs to count for something.

The views expressed in this article are the authors own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeeras editorial stance.Myanmars de facto leader Aung San Suu Kyi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991 in part for striving to attain ethnic conciliation by peaceful means.

Yet after she rose to power in Myanmar decades later, Aung San Suu Kyi has drawn international condemnation for her response to the militarys brutal use of force against the Muslim Rohingya minority.

Despite Aung San Suu Kyi being the de facto head of state, the current commander-in-chief of the Myanmar Armed Forces, Min Aung Hlaing, still maintains a great degree of power in the country.

Today, Aung San Suu Kyis official title is state counsellor, a post created in 2016 to give her control over the presidents office, the foreign ministry, the energy ministry, and the ministry of education.

State counsellor. In 2012, Aung San Suu Kyi registered to run for a seat in Myanmars parliament. In November 2015, the NLD won 80 percent of the available seats. But she was prevented by Myanmars constitution from taking up the post of president because she was married to a non-Myanmar citizen.

The 2011 film, The Lady , told of the love story between Aung San Suu Kyi and her British husband, Michael Aris, and the long separation they suffered because of her detention.

House arrest. In 1990, the party won elections, but the military government annulled the results and arrested Aung San Suu Kyi. She spent much of her time between 1989 and 2010 in some form of detention, most of it under house arrest. In 1991, while under house arrest, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Democracy in Myanmar. Upon her return to Myanmar in 1988, Aung San Suu Kyi was elected secretary-general of the National League for Democracy (NLD) party.

She completed high school in India following her mothers appointment as ambassador to the country in 1960. Aung San Suu Kyi went on to study philosophy, politics and economics in the United Kingdom at the University of Oxford.

Aung San Suu Kyi had a talent for learning new languages. She speaks Burmese, English, French and Japanese.

International education. Born in Rangoon (now Yangon) in 1945, Aung San Suu Kyi is the daughter of Myanmars liberation movement leader Aung San, who was assassinated in July 1947.

Textbook ethnic cleansing. In August 2017, a fierce military crackdown sent more than 600,000 Rohingya fleeing Myanmars northern Rakhine state. The United Nations described it as textbook ethnic cleansing.

I dont think there is ethnic cleansing going on, Aung San Suu Kyi told the BBC in April. I think ethnic cleansing is too strong an expression to use for what is happening.

It is a matter of people on different sides of the divide, and this divide we are trying to close up.

The mostly Muslim minority is not recognised as an ethnic group in Myanmar, despite having lived there for generations. Rohingya have been denied citizenship, effectively making them stateless.

Shielding the military. While Aung San Suu Kyi has limited control over the military, she has been criticised for failing to denounce the violence in Rakhine. Myanmars constitution gives 25 percent of parliamentary seats to unelected military officers, effectively giving them a veto over constitutional changes.

Speaking to Al Jazeera, James Gomez, Amnesty Internationals regional director for Southeast Asia, said: It almost came across that she was shielding the military. What is the role of the military if she says there have been no attacks since September 5 in Rakhine state, then why is the burning going on?

Pope Francis visit. Pope Francis arrived in Myanmar on November 27 to meet religious leaders, Myanmars army head General Min Aung Hlaing and with Aung San Suu Kyi.

The pope has repeatedly spoken out from afar about the crisis, standing up for what he has called his Rohingya brothers and sisters.

Prosecution: In March 2018, a group of Australian human rights lawyers filed a private prosecution application against Kyi.Minister departing from Hadis government says Saudi-led coalition has deviated from its objectives in war-torn country.

A former Yemeni minister of state has said that the Saudi-led coalition has deviated from its objectives, adding that the sovereign Yemeni decision has been taken away from the people.

Salah al-Sayadis statement followed his resignation on Wednesday and came just days after he said that Yemeni President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi was under house arrest in the Saudi capital, Riyadh.

All Yemenis are calling for demonstrations and rallies for the return of President Hadi to Yemen, he said.

Besides al-Sayadi, Abdulaziz al-Jubari, the minister of civil service, also resigned from Hadis government on Wednesday.

He later said the relationship between the coalition and the internationally recognised Yemeni government should be mended.

Power shifts

While the military coalition, led by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), was launched in 2015 after the start of the war to defend Hadis government and push back the Houthi rebels, the balance of power seems to have shifted.

The UAE has come to dominate southern Yemen, where it has been training and financing troops that answer only to Abu Dhabi, while the Houthis still control the north of the country.

Hadi and much of his government have been in Riyadh for most of the war but, according to the Associated Press news agency, he has been continuously sending written requests to Saudi Arabias King Salman, wanting to return to Yemen.

Hadis inability to get back to southern Yemen is seen as underscoring the presidents loss of authority  even in the south that is nominally under his administration.

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Referring to the controversy surrounding Lebanese Prime Minister Saad al-Hariris reported detention in Saudi Arabia, al-Sayadi said that while it took the Lebanese people a matter of days to get their prime minister back, the Yemeni president has been lost for three years.

In November, AP reported that Saudi Arabia had been barring Hadi, along with his sons, ministers and military officials, from returning.

Citing Yemeni officials, the news agency reported that the ban was prompted by enmity between Hadi and the UAE.

The Emiratis distrust Hadi, accusing him of corruption and opposing his alliance with the Islah Party, Yemens branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, according to the AP report.Lee Myung-bak is the latest leader to face corruption allegations, a year after former president Park was detained.

An arrest warrant has been issued for South Koreas former President Lee Myung-bak on corruption allegations, the latest former leader of the country to face prosecutors over alleged graft.

Lee, 77, is accused of bribery, embezzlement, tax evasion and other charges, including allegedly accepting $10.2m from South Koreas spy agency and major corporations, Yonhap news agency reported on Thursday.

South Koreas president from 2008 to 2013, Lee denied all charges and called the investigation political revenge by the current government of President Moon Jae-in.

If convicted of all charges, he faces up to 45 years in prison, Yonhap said.

The conservative main opposition Liberty Korea Party called Lees arrest mortifying and cruel.

Should living as a former president in this country be this difficult? said Chang Je-won, the partys spokesman. We hope that Lees [arrest] will mark an end to political reprisals.

Deja vu

All four former South Korean presidents who are still alive have been convicted, charged or investigated for criminal offences.

South Koreas previous President Park Geun-hye, 66, was charged a year ago with bribery, coercion, and abuse of power, among other offences. Prosecutors are seeking a 30-year prison sentence, and a verdict is expected in the coming weeks.

President Moon has embarked on an anti-corruption crackdown since he took office in May 2017, following Parks impeachment.

Kim Hyung-joon, a professor at Myongji University in Seoul, told Al Jazeera that public pressure was forcing politicians to act against corruption by South Korean leaders.

Mechanisms should be built to check the presidents absolute power reasonably and efficiently. I think it will improve one by one, said Kim.

With the decision by the Seoul Central District Court, prosecutors can immediately detain Lee for up to 20 days before formally charging him.Explosion outside popular hotel in Mogadishu kills at least 14 people and wounds 10, interior ministry spokesman says.

At least 14 people have been killed in a car bomb blast outside a popular hotel in Somalias capital, Mogadishu, according to a government official.

The explosion on Thursday happened near Weheliye hotel on the busy Maka Al-Mukarrama Road.

A spokesman for the Somali interior ministry confirmed the death toll to Al Jazeera, adding that 10 others were wounded in the blast.

Witnesses at the scene said the powerful blast struck a street filled with civilians.

Most of the casualties are  people who were spending time to take tea, there was devastation and buildings were damaged, Mohamednur Abdirahman told AFP News Agency.

The blast was so huge, a vehicle containing explosives went off near a teashop in front of Weheliye hotel, leaving more than 10 people dead. I saw people being rushed to hospital and some of them were already dead, another witness, Abdulahi Moalim, told AFP.

The attack was claimed by al-Shabab, Reuters news agency reported, citing the armed groups military operation spokesman.

Al-Shabab, which is fighting to overthrow Somalias internationally recognised government, is frequently carrying out attacks in and around the capital.

The east African country continues to grapple with a delicate security situation. An African Union Mission to Somalia (known as AMISOL) is expected to withdraw its last troops by 2020.

Thursdays attack comes about a month after a twin car bombing in Mogadishu left 38 people killed.Protesters march across the country to protest against government plans to change labour law, scrap social benefits.

Hundreds of thousands of public sector workers have marched across France to protest against the governments economic policies, including plans to reform public services and slash jobs.

Staff from the national railway company, commonly known as SNCF, were joined on Thursday by employees of the national carrier Air France and other public servants as they took to the streets of the capital, Paris, and other major cities.

The Ministry of Interior said 323,000 people took part in the nationwide protest, while the countrys second largest trade union, the General Confederation of Labour, put the number at about half a million.

The demonstrators are protesting President Emmanuel Macrons plans to trim retirement benefits, overhaul unemployment insurance and allow SNCFs competitors to enter the French market.

Al Jazeeras Natacha Butler, reporting from Paris, said the SNCF has been operating at a loss for a number of years.

It has $50m of debt and the government says it must change to remain competitive, especially because under EU rules in 2020, the company will lose its monopoly, she said.

Edouard Philippe, Frances prime minister, has previously said the government cannot not afford to sustain the same level of spending.

The world is changing, the SNCF must change with, he said in February. Faced with competition, SNCF cannot remain the only company to recruit workers under a special status.

SNCF staff currently enjoy lifelong civil-servant-like contracts.

Public servants  including air traffic controllers  have also voiced their opposition to the governments intention of introducing new ordinary work contract and recruiting more staff.

Workers are planning to hold protests two days out of every five through April to June.

This is not the first time workers have taken to the streets to demonstrate against Macrons labour plans.

Protests erupted last year to denounce legislation that would make employment contracts more flexible.Ex-president has six months to appeal to have charges of illegal campaign financing by Libyan leader Gaddafi overturned.

Nicolas Sarkozy, the former French president, has been formally charged with corruption and illegal campaign financing over allegations that Muammar Gaddafi, the slain Libyan leader, helped fund his 2007 campaign.

After five years of investigation and two days of questioning in police custody, judges looking into the scandal decided they had enough evidence to charge the 63-year-old, who served as president between 2007 and 2012.

He was first taken into custody in the Nanterre suburb west of Paris on Tuesday morning before returning for another interrogation session on Wednesday morning.

This calumny has made my life a living hell since March 11, 2011, the newspaper Le Figaro quoted Sarkozy as having told the investigators.

He will have six months to appeal to have the charges overturned, which he is likely to do, and the judges will have to make a further decision about whether they have sufficient proof to take the case to trial.

The case is connected to accusations that Sarkozy received money from Gaddafi to fund his successful election bid in 2007, allegations he denies and has dismissed as grotesque.

The prosecution claims Sarkozy spent nearly double the legal limit of $24m on his campaign, using false billing from a public relations firm called Bygmalion.

An investigation into the allegations has been under way since 2013.

In 2016, businessman Ziad Takieddine told French investigative site Mediapart that he had delivered suitcases containing more than $6m in cash from Libya to Sarkozy and his former chief of staff, Claude Gueant.

These are the facts, yes  Gaddafi paid Sarkozy, it paid for the campaign, it paid for other things , Takieddine said.

His right-wing Republicans party has so far backed him publicly.

Friendship and loyal support to Nicolas Sarkozy in this test, the treasurer of his 2007 campaign, Eric Woerth, tweeted.

Amitie et fidele soutien a @NicolasSarkozy dans cette epreuve  Eric Woerth (@ericwoerth) March 21, 2018

But there have been signs of unease among some senior conservatives who fear being contaminated by the mounting allegations against him.

Brice Hortefeux, a Sarkozy ally who was a top minister during his presidency, was also questioned on Tuesday.

Mr Hortefeux again assured that there was no financing from Libya or any foreign country, his lawyer Jean-Yves Dupeux told agencies.

This Sarkozy

In 2011, as NATO-backed forces were driving Gaddafi out of power, the long-time Libyan leaders youngest son Seif al-Islam, told Euronews network that Sarkozy must first give back the money he took from Libya to finance his electoral campaign.

Sarkozy has dismissed the allegations as the rantings of vindictive Gaddafi loyalists who were furious over the French-led military intervention in Libya that helped end Gaddafis 41-year rule and ultimately led to his death.

The former president had also sued Mediapart, which led media coverage of the Libyan allegations since 2012 when it published a document allegedly signed by Libyas intelligence chief showing that Gaddafi had agreed to finance Sarkozy to the tune of 50m euros ($62m).

Le Monde newspaper reported on Wednesday that several other Gaddafi government members had come forward recently with more evidence.

Takieddine claimed he provided 1.5 to 2 million euros ($1.8m, $2m) in 200 euro ($247) and 500 euro ($618) notes each time and was given the money by Gaddafis military intelligence chief, Abdullah Senussi.

The legal investigation is looking into these allegations, as well as a 500,000 euro ($618,341) foreign cash transfer to Sarkozys former interior minister, Claude Gueant, and the 2009 sale of a luxury villa in the south of France to a Libyan investment fund for a suspiciously high price.Operation aimed at arresting main suspect of March 13 bomb blast leaves two Hamas security personnel dead.

Two suspects in the bomb attack on the Palestinian prime ministers convoy in the Gaza Strip have been killed in a security operation, according to the Hamas-led governments interior ministry.

Two members of Hamas security forces were also killed during Thursdays operation aimed at arresting the main suspect in last weeks attack on the motorcade of Rami Hamdallah, Gaza officials said.

They said the suspect, Anas Abu Khousa, and an accomplice, Abdul Hadi al-Ashab, sustained critical injuries during the operation and later died of their wounds.

Khousa and Ashab reportedly resisted arrest and exchanged fire with the authorities.





Several security guards of Hamdallah were wounded during the March 13 explosion, which occurred during his visit to Gaza to open a water-treatment facility.

The blast was aimed at the convoy as it passed through the Israeli-controlled Erez checkpoint, known to Palestinians as Beit Hanoun, in northern Gaza.

Hamdallah is the prime minister of the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority (PA) government.

PA President Mahmoud Abbas has accused Hamas of orchestrating the explosion. Hamas has denied any role in the attack.

The attack and the subsequent recriminations marked a serious deterioration in relations between Hamas and the PA.

Fatah, the ruling party within the PA, and Hamas, the party that governs Gaza, signed a reconciliation agreement in October 2017, ending a decade of division that saw two parallel governments operating in Gaza and the West Bank, respectively.

But the deal was never fully implemented due to differences within the two political factions, which are the largest in Palestinian politics.

Analysts said the attack on Hamdallahs convoy was intended to put a strain on reconciliation efforts.Irans Khamenei criticises governments economic record

Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei used the occasion of Nowruz, the Persian New Year, to address the countrys economic problems during his annual speech.Iran was never found to have directly supported the September 11 hijack plot, while questions about Saudis role linger.

Saudi Arabia is adding Iran to legal proceedings in the US over its alleged involvement in the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York City and Washington, court documents show.

Attorneys representing Saudi Arabia in a lawsuit that alleges its connection to the attacks filed a tag-along action on Wednesday to consolidate litigation accusing Iran of also playing a role.

The lawsuit, Dillaber et al v Islamic Republic of Iran et al, alleges that Iran and its Ministry of Information and Security (MOIS), along with Saudi Arabia, supported the 19 hijackers  11 of whom were Saudi citizens.

It was filed on March 9.

Saudi Arabia has requested that the panel, which handles the myriad lawsuits alleging Saudi support for al-Qaeda in the 9/11 attacks transfer [the case]  for consolidation, the court document says.

Iranian involvement unclear

The newly filed suit that names Iran and its MOIS as supporters of al-Qaedas 9/11 hijacking plot details a long history of meetings between Iranian-linked fighters.

The lawsuit alleges that Iran, Lebanese militia Hezbollah, and al-Qaeda formed a committee to oversee a joint, anti-US campaign of attacks.

Iran and Hezbollah have maintained an antagonistic relationship with Saudi Arabia, largely over its support for the US and its military.

Furthermore, the 9/11 Commission, which was tasked with preparing a full and complete account of the circumstances surrounding the attacks, found no evidence of direct Iranian support, other than certain hijackers traveled through Iran on their way to Afghanistan, without having their passports stamped.

Iran and Hezbollah also allegedly provided training to al-Qaeda fighters, though not ones directly linked to the September 11 attacks.

The US considers Iran a state sponsor of terror and holds Saudi Arabia as a close ally.

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The plaintiffs believe this support meets the requirements to find Iran liable in the attacks.

Iran was ordered to pay families and a group of insurers $1.8bn in 2016 in a default judgment on a similar case filed in 2011.

Iran did not contest the case in a US court.

JASTA

The US passed a law in 2016 called the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act (JASTA), which limited immunity given to sovereign states for their participation in international acts of terror.

JASTA was heavily contested by Saudi Arabia, which engaged in a costly and far-reaching lobbying campaign in the US capital to block its passage.

The campaign included a tactic of misrepresenting legal consequences of passing the law. Firms employed by Saudi Arabia informed US military veterans they could be sued for their actions in foreign wars, which is not true.

The Saudi-employed lobbying firms flew veterans to Washington, DC so they could visit legislators to argue against the bill.

Some veterans did not know their trips were paid for by the Saudis, news reports said.

Plaintiffs in the main lawsuit against Saudi Arabia have filed documents supporting the consolidation of the cases, court documents show.

They are seeking billions of dollars in damages from Saudi Arabia.Tanya Gersh has accused Anglin of stirring up an online, anti-Semitic troll storm against her and her family.

A federal magistrate judge decided that a neo-Nazi bloggers time living and travelling outside the United States does not justify dismissing a lawsuit over a flurry of anti-Semitic hate he stirred up against a Jewish real estate agent in 2016.

On Wednesday, US Magistrate Judge Jeremiah Lynchs order said there was not sufficient evidence to prove that Andrew Anglin, who runs the infamous Daily Stormer blog, was domiciled outside the US when Tanya Gersh filed a suit against him in April 2017.

Along with co-counsel in Montana, Gersh is being represented by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), an Alabama-based hate monitor and legal advocacy group.

Anglins lawyers have argued that the court does not have jurisdiction to hear the case because the neo-Nazi was not a resident of any US state. They pointed to his travels in Greece, Cambodia and Thailand as evidence that he was a resident abroad.

Marc Randazza, one of Anglins lawyers, has not responded to Al Jazeeras numerous email requests for comment.

The judges decision was not a final ruling, and oral arguments for the motion to dismiss the case are slated to be heard on April 3, according to court documents seen by Al Jazeera.

The SPLC says Anglins Daily Stormer  a blog that includes sections such as The Jewish Problem and Race War  at one point received more than 400,000 views a month.

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Speaking to Al Jazeera last August, David Dinielli, SPLCs lawyer on the case, said the wave of harassment triggered by Anglin is a part of an ongoing shift in the way people terrorise others.

In the past, they would have burned a cross on the lawn, he told Al Jazeera at the time. Now theyre doing it from behind a keyboard.

Take action

Anglin first set his sights on Gersh in December 2016, after the real estate agent had a disagreement with the mother of Richard Spencer, a prominent white supremacist and leading figure in the alt-right.

The alt-right is a loosely knit coalition of white supremacists, white nationalists and neo-Nazis that advocates a white ethnostate.

After Sherry Spencer first published a blog post about the dispute with Gersh, Anglin took to the Daily Stormer and urged his followers to take action.

Anglin titled his article: Jews targeting Richard Spencers mother for harassment and extortion  TAKE ACTION!

He published Gershs phone number, address, social media profiles and email accounts. He also gave contact information for Gershs husband and other acquaintances and linked to the Twitter account of Gershs 12-year-old son.

In the months that followed, Gershs inbox, voicemail and mailbox filled up with death threats, harassment and hate messages.

Among the messages sent to Gersh, according to the lawsuit, was one that said: Listen here you f*cking Jew. You had better back off of Richard Spencers mom. Everybody is watching you.

A Twitter message sent to her son included an image of an oven. Psst kid, theres a free Xbox One inside this oven, it read.

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Since the deadly August 12 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, when a far-right demonstrator allegedly killed a 32-year-old activist when he ploughed his car into a crowd of anti-racists, Daily Stormer has struggled to maintain a home online.

After that rally, Anglin lambasted the victim, Heather Heyer, on his website, prompting GoDaddy to boot the neo-Nazi blog. It has since been kicked from one web hosting service to another, often forced to operate on the dark web.Leaked documents show Saudi, UAE bid to influence Trump

A Lebanese-American businessman, George Nader, is said to have been working for over a year to win influence in the Republican National Committee.Last November, Ziyad Itani went from being a prominent Lebanese actor, playwright and local celebrity to being an alleged Israeli spy informing on other intellectuals and government officials.

Itanis world came crashing down on him as he was detained in Roumieh Prison pending further investigations and a court date.

The official statements by the General Directorate of State Security, the agency that arrested and investigated the charges against him, suggested at the time it was an open-and-shut case of treason and espionage.

It is illegal under Lebanese law to travel to or to engage in any dealings or communications with Israel, which Lebanon considers an enemy state.

But in a sudden turn of events on March 13, Itanis fortunes changed again when he was released from prison, and the charges against him were effectively dropped following a decision by Military Investigative Judge Riad Abu Ghaida.

In a further twist in the case, Judge Abu Ghaida issued arrest warrants for Lieutenant-Colonel Suzanne Hajj Hobeiche, a former head of the Anti-Cybercrime and Intellectual Property Bureau, and hacker Elie Ghabash on suspicion of fabricating and framing the case against Itani.

In an interview with Al Jazeera, Itani said he never was a spy, and that he is an innocent man.

He said he had always supported the Palestinian peoples struggle against the Israeli occupation of Palestine and was an active advocate against normalising political and cultural ties with Israel.

He said he was framed to make him look like if he was communication with agents from Mossad, the Israeli spy agency.

Al Jazeera: You were jailed after you were accused of being a spy for Israel last November and the government said you confessed to the charges against you. However, several months later you walked home a free man after a judge decided to release you without bail or any charges against you. Tell us what happened.

Ziyad Itani: After I was arrested, my case was transferred from the General Directorate of State Security to the Military Justice court under Investigative Judge Riad Abu Ghaida.

After looking at my case, he determined that the only evidence they had against me was a private message on my Facebook messenger and on my email account, which I did not open or read.

After two sessions, the judge decided to expand the investigation by enlisting the Internal Security Forces Directorate-Information Branch, (ISF) to investigate the case further. In the meantime, I refuted and denied the so-called confession before the judge.

The ISF investigation resulted in discovering and later arresting the hacker Elie Ghabash, who subsequently implicated Lieutenant-Colonel Hobeiche as the one who hired him to frame me.

After that development, I was released without bail, which meant that the charges had been dropped. Now we are waiting for the conclusion of the investigation of Hobeiche and Ghabash.

Al Jazeera: While the case appears that you were framed to look like an Israeli spy, were you at any point thinking in your mind that you were having conversations with Israeli agents or working for Israel?

Itani: No. I was not even communicating via messages on my Facebook or email account. I did not even see those messages.

Al Jazeera: Then why did State Security say in an official statement that there were exchanges between you and an Israeli agent posing as a Swedish woman and that you confessed to that on tape?

Itani: At this point, I will not be able to discuss such intricate details because of the ongoing investigation against officer Hobeiche and the hacker. But once the judge reaches his final decision, I will legally say more about this.

Al Jazeera: State Security also said in the statement that you confessed, on tape. What do you say about that?

Itani: I am totally denying and have rejected this accusation. After all, of the investigations that were done by the very capable ISF, it proved I was innocent, and I was released without any strings attached.

Al Jazeera: As an actor and a Lebanese intellectual, where do you stand about having political or cultural ties with Israel?

Itani: My, and my entire familys, ethical position against Israel should go without saying here. We, as Lebanese, have historically supported our Palestinian brothers and stood by them against this enemy [Israel].

But if I may recount one example here about the criminal act committed by the enemy [Israel] against the Turkish flotilla [led by the] Mavi Marmara in 2010 that was supposed to break the Israeli siege of Gaza, I called, along with other journalists in the country, for organising and sending another aid ship to Gaza.

We actually did that and organised the ship, called Naji al Ali, which was supposed to carry  along with aid  journalists and activists from all segments of Lebanese society. I was the representative and a spokesperson for this project. I was even called in addition to two others a terrorist journalist by the enemy because of our commitment to the Palestinian cause.

Al Jazeera: Several people in Lebanon point to your support for Lebanese director Ziyad Doueiri, who has travelled to Israel and made films there.

In the film, The Attack, Doueiri hired Reymonde Amsallem, an Israeli actress, to play a Palestinian character. He also shot the film in Israel, with the help of the Israeli government.

In, The Insult, Doueiri advances the argument of the Lebanese Christian militias against the Palestinians, concluding that they are the enemy because of their activities in Lebanon and that the Lebanese have no problem with Israel.

Itani: First, what I said about Doueiri at the time was not being conveyed accurately on the Lebanese social media.

Doueiri directed his film in Israel and went back and forth between Israel and Lebanon many times over, and no one from either from the government or the public said anything to him about that.

But when the film was publicly released, and it was popular, a storm of objections went up against him.

What I said at the time was I criticised those who were objecting to Ziyads film stating that they really were after him because of the successes he achieved in his film, not because of his normalisation with Israel.

I also said that they were cowards and that they should have objected to Doueiris normalisation and filed legal complaints against him if they were honest about it. But they didnt.

Al Jazeera: How do you feel about Doueiris work, especially when treating the Palestinians as an enemy of Lebanon?

Itani: Well, first you have to look at Doueiri during a certain period of time when he was to us, a young and upcoming generation, an icon of Lebanese cinema. This is especially true when he did his [1998] film, West Beirut. However, when he went and worked inside the enemys territory [Israel], I considered it an unnecessary attempt as a filmmaker. I looked at that as one of his shortcomings  [trying] to normalise cultural ties with Israel.

Al Jazeera: What is your view, as a Lebanese actor and intellectual, of cultural and artistic ties with Israel under the current conditions?

Itani: First, Lebanon is the one country in the Arab world that has paid more blood in defence of the Palestinian cause against this entity [Israel]. This entity cannot be accepted in our societies because it was built on our blood and at the expense of our people.

Follow Ali Younes on Twitter @ ali_reportsCan Macrons reforms modernise Frances railway system?

The reforms will open up the rail network to foreign investors and scrap the special status given to rail workers.Abdulla Yameen lifts emergency a day after an ex-president and two top judges were put on trial on terrorism charges.

Maldives President Abdulla Yameen has lifted a 45-day state of emergency he imposed after the island nations Supreme Court overturned criminal convictions against nine of his opponents.

In a statement on Thursday, the presidents office said Yameen lifted the emergency in an effort to promote normalcy despite there still existing a diminished threat to national security.

Under the emergency, security forces arrested former President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, Yameens half-brother, as well as two Supreme Court judges and a top judicial administrator on charges of trying to topple the government.

All four were charged with terrorism on Wednesday.

A court in the capital, Male, ordered they be held until the end of their trials.

If convicted of terrorism, they could be jailed for up to 15 years. The two judges and their aide have also been charged with receiving bribes to help overthrow the government.

Mohamed Nasheed, the Indian Ocean archipelagos exiled former president, said Yameen lifted the emergency because he now has no need for it.

In a Twitter post, he said Yameen has overrun the judiciary and legislature, arrested hundreds unlawfully and introduced a new normal in the Maldives  full dictatorship.

President Yameen lifts the SoE because he now has no need for it. He has overrun the judiciary and legislature, arrested hundreds unlawfully and introduced a new normal in the #Maldives  full dictatorship. We will not give up, we will fight and we will overcome.  Mohamed Nasheed (@MohamedNasheed) March 22, 2018

Those arrested during the emergency included opposition parliamentarians, journalists and a former police chief.

Some 141 were detained on Friday alone when thousands of opposition supporters defied the emergency and staged a protest in the Maldives congested capital. Most have since been released.

The opposition accuse Yameen, who assumed power in 2013 following a disputed election, of abuses of power and siphoning millions of dollars from state coffers, allegations he has denied.

During his tenure, nearly all opposition leaders have been jailed or forced into exile. That includes the leaders of the coalition that brought him to power, two of his former vice presidents, as well as a former defence minister.

Crackdown continues

Meanwhile, following the arrest of Chief Justice Abdulla Saeed and Judge Ali Hameed on February 5, the remaining three judges on the Supreme Court reversed their earlier ruling ordering the release of dissidents.

They also suspended a section of the verdict that reinstated 12 parliamentarians who were removed for defecting to the opposition.

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The 85-member parliament, where the ruling party holds a majority without the 12 defectors, then pushed through a law that strips judges of their seats if they are convicted of a criminal offence.

The parliaments minority leader, Ibrahim Mohamed Solih was arrested under the emergency on Saturday and has been remanded for nine days.

In early February, Nasheed, the former president, had urged neighbouring India to send an envoy backed by its military to help free Gayoom and the political detainees.

India did not comment on the request, but said it was deeply dismayed by Yameens extension of the initial 15-day emergency in late February.

The emergency also drew criticism from the United States, and the European Union.

However, China, whose influence has been growing in the Maldives, said the crisis in the island nation was an internal affair and called on the international community to respect the Maldives sovreignty and territorial integrity.

The emergency also prompted a flurry of travel advisories to the Indian Ocean archipelago, known for its upmarket resorts.

Hundreds of hotel bookings were cancelled, according to media reports, but official figures show an increase in tourist arrivals in the month of February as compared with the same period last year.Leobardo Vazquez Atzin, 42, is the fourth journalist to be killed this year, raising concerns regarding media freedom.

A local journalist has been killed in the state of Veracruz in eastern Mexico, according to reports in local media.

Leobardo Vazquez Atzin, 42, was shot dead on Wednesday night inside his home in the state known for drug violence, reports said, adding that the alleged suspects left the scene on a motorcycle.

These are the first accounts we have. There are no more details, Ana Laura Perez, the president of the State Commission for the Attention and Protection of Journalists (CEAPP), told El Siglo de Durango website on Wednesday.

The murdered journalist operated a Spanish language news website, Enlace Informativo Regional, covering local events around the municipality of Guiterrez Zamora, according to Perez.

Mexican newspaper, SinEmbargo, reported that Vasquez had been threatened before his murder  having already requested help and protection.

Vazquez is the fourth journalist murdered this year. In January Jose Gerardo Martinez, was shot in a borough of Mexico City in January and Carlos Dominguez was stabbed to death 21 times in Tamaulipas state. Pamika Montegro was shot dead at a beach-side resort in Acapulco in February.

Mexico was the most dangerous place to be a journalist in 2017, ahead of Iraq and Syria, with 14 deaths, according to the International Press Institute.

The Latin American nation was left shocked by the murder of highly acclaimed and awarding winning-journalist Javier Valdez last year. Vazquezs death is the 48th under Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto.

According to the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights (ACHR), Mexico is a high risk country in terms of freedom of expression  specifically Mexican states of Veracruz, Tamaulipas, Oaxaca, Guerrero and Chihuahua.

Previously Vasquez worked for local newspaper La Opinion de Poza Rica and Vanguardia.

At least 22 journalists have been murdered in the state of Veracruz in the last seven years, according to Mexican newspaper, El Universal.

Mexico continues to be the Western Hemispheres deadliest country for the media. When journalists cover subjects linked to organised crime or political corruption (especially at the local level), they immediately become targets and are often executed in cold blood, the Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said in a statement.Syrian state media says hundreds of opposition fighters and families evacuated from Harasta and are heading to Idlib.

Hundreds of opposition fighters and their families have been evacuated from the town of Harasta in the eastern part of Syrias Eastern Ghouta, according to Syrian state media.

Sana, the official Syrian news agency, said at least six buses carrying the evacuees are heading to Idlib province in Syrias north, which is an area under opposition control.

The evacuation comes as part of a deal brokered on Wednesday by the Syrian governments principal ally, Russia, between fighters in Harasta and a Syrian government delegation.

A member of the Harasta local council confirmed the news to Al Jazeera, but could not confirm the number of people evacuated.

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The operation was facilitated by a United Nations delegation as well as the Syrian Red Crescent.

The Eastern Ghouta suburb of Damascus  the capital, where the government of President Bashar al-Assad sits  has been under intense bombardment as the latter makes major advances to regain control over the area from the armed opposition.

The territory has been under the control of armed opposition groups aiming to topple the Assad government since mid-2013.

But with Russias intervention in support of al-Assad in 2015, the government has been able to deal the opposition one defeat after another.

Until recently, Eastern Ghouta was one of the last remaining rebel strongholds. In a renewed offensive by the government since February 18, the opposition lost large parts of it, with the Syrian army claiming it has now recaptured 80 percent of the suburb.

Civilian pressure

Munther Fares, a spokesperson for the Ahrar al-Sham armed opposition group operating in Harasta, told Al Jazeera that his group had agreed to the evacuation deal due to civilian pressure.

Due to the bombing and [government] siege and the lack of medicine and the lack of place to move, said Fares.

According to the White Helmets, a voluntary rescue group operating in parts of rebel-controlled Syria, at least 1,252 documented civilians have been killed in the offensive on Eastern Ghouta since February 18, while more than 4,000 people have been wounded.

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The surrender of Harasta leaves only a few pockets in Eastern Ghouta under rebel control. Government forces having effectively split the area into three sections during their offensive.

The Syrian governments campaign follows the pattern of previous assaults on rebel strongholds, deploying massive air power and tight sieges to force rebel fighters to accept evacuation deals.

These involve rebels surrendering territory in exchange for safe passage to opposition areas in northwestern Syria, along with their families and other civilians who do not want to come back under al-Assads rule.Pedro Pablo Kuczynski was due to face an impeachment vote on Thursday over corruption allegations.

Perus president has offered his resignation to Congress after videos surfaced in which several of his allies were filmed allegedly trying to gain the support of a lawmaker in a vote on the leaders impeachment.

Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, 79, made the announcement in a televised address to the nation on Wednesday, a day before he was due to face an impeachment vote over corruption allegations.

Kuczynski promised an orderly and constitutional transition of power.

I dont want to be an obstacle for the nation finding the path of union and harmony that it so badly needs and which was denied to me, he said.

It was not immediately clear if Congress would accept the resignation.

On Tuesday, videos emerged apparently showing some of the presidents backers allegedly trying to buy the support of a lawmaker so he would block Kuczynskis impeachment.

The former Wall Street investor had been accused of covering up decades-old illegal payments from Brazilian construction giant Odebrecht.

The company became embroiled in a political scandal after admitting to paying more than $788m in bribes to win construction contracts across 12 countries, including Argentina, Mexico and Venezuela.

The accusations centre on Westfield Capital Ltd, a company owned by Kuczynski, which received $782,000 from Odebrecht, according to Peruvian national paper El Comercio.

Kuczynski has denied any wrongdoing.

Reporting from the capital Lima, Al Jazeeras Mariana Sanchez said if Congress accepts the presidents resignation, Kuczynski could face criminal proceedings.

Constitutional lawyers say that the president, who has immunity for a period of time of five years after he leaves the presidency, would only have immunity for crimes committed during his presidency.

The crimes that he allegedly committed when he was a finance minister more than a decade ago happened way before his presidency, so constitutional lawyers say that he could be taken to trial very soon and that he does not have immunity for that, she said.The announcement that Saif al-Islam is planning to run for president has prompted mixed reactions within Libya.

Saif al-Islam Gaddafi plans to run in Libyas presidential elections expected for later this year, according to a spokesman for the son of ex-Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.

The announcement by Ayman Boras was made on Monday during a press conference in Tunisia, where the spokesman outlined Saif al-Islams vision of restoring the Libyan state, making it for everyone.

Since his release from prison in June 2017, the whereabouts of Saif al-Islam has been unknown. Boras, however, claimed that he is in Libya and is ready to become part of the political process  an announcement that stirred mixed reactions within Libya.

Mixed reactions

Mohammad al-Darrat, a member of the Tobruk-based Libyan House of Representatives (HoR), told Al Jazeera that Saif al-Islams intention to run does not deserve any attention, asserting that the Gaddafis regime is gone for good.

If Saif al-Islam wants to return to power, what was the point of the revolution? said al-Darrat.

He added that international and regional powers are not interested in supporting his return since the former regime is gone and the world believes in interests rather than individuals.





Political analyst Kamel al-Merash thinks otherwise. He believes that not all Libyans can be put in one basket, arguing that while some oppose Saif al-Islams plan to run, others support it.

Al-Merash said no regional forces back Saif al-Islam directly but added that some would not object to a potential candidacy due to his popularity within Libya.

Saleh Afihima, a member of the HoR and a supporter of Operation Dignity led by renegade General Khalifa Haftar, agrees with al-Merash.

He believes that no one can deny Saif al-Islams constitutional right as a Libyan citizen, so long as there are no judicial restrictions to prevent him from running.

Law of political isolation

In 2013, a law was passed banning Gaddafi-era officials from holding public office. The law was later revoked in 2015.

Aguila Saleh, president of the HoR, said that as a Libyan citizen, Saif al-Islam has the right to run, since the lifting of the ban three years ago.

He added that unless prevented by judicial restrictions, the choice of his election is in the hands of Libyans.

Afihima told Al Jazeera that Libyans need to recognise supporters of the former regime as part of the Libyan fabric, warning that intolerance towards any Libyan would have catastrophic consequences on the national reconciliation process.

He also said that all parties must adhere to democracy, without excluding opposing views, if we [Libyans] want to reach a real state.

The Gaddafi regime still enjoys the support and loyalty of some tribes, especially in the south and the Warshefana region in Tripoli, as well as a number of tribes in Sirte, the birthplace of the late president.

Gaddafi was killed in October 2011 after being captured by rebels during Libyas war. He had ruled the North African country for four decades.

Libya has since descended into chaos and is now split between three governments: two in Tripoli and one in Tobruk.

Death sentence

In July 2015, a court in Tripoli sentenced Saif al-Islam to death for war crimes, including the killing of protesters during the February Revolution and other crimes related to financial and administrative corruption.

He was later exempted and released following a general pardoning.

Mohamed Barra, professor of criminal law at the University of Tripoli, told Al Jazeera that Saif al-Islam must appear before the courts and defend himself against the charges put against him.

He said that in order for him to be able to legally run in the elections, the court should decide whether the general pardon also applies to him.

Alternatively, the HoR must issue a special order specifically pardoning him of all charges, added Barra.Reports by Intercept come weeks after President Trumps son-in-law and special adviser had security clearance revoked.

Saudi Arabias Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman boasted US President Donald Trumps senior adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner was in his pocket, according to a report in The Intercept.

Citing three sources close to the Saudi and Emirati royal families, the news outlet said Kushner provided the heir to the Saudi throne details about Saudi princes who were not loyal to him.

According to a separate source, Mohammed bin Salman is said to have told the Abu Dhabi crown prince, Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, that Kushner was in his pocket.





Kushners lawyers have rejected the report as false and ridiculous, adding that the allegations did not merit response.

Dozens of Saudi princes, businessmen, and other senior officials were placed under arrest at the Ritz Carlton in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, in November, ostensibly over accusations of corruption.

Some were later released but only after paying huge sums back to the Saudi state.

The Intercept report comes just weeks after Kushner had his White House security clearance to access highly classified US intelligence revoked.

According to the Washington Post, officials from United Arab Emirates (UAE), China, Israel and Mexico, had privately discussed ways they can manipulate Jared Kushner.

Kushner and the Saudi prince are said to have struck up a close relationship since Trumps inauguration and the two are believed to have talked into the early hours during a visit by Kushner to Saudi Arabia in October.

The 37-year-old has reported earned the ire of others in the Trump administration, including the White House chief of staff, John Kelly.

Kelly is reportedly looking at ways of pushing Kushner and his wife Ivanka Trump from their roles at the White House.

Mohammed bin Salman is currently on a two-week state visit to the US.Authorities in Ukraine have arrested Nadiya Savchenko, an ex-combat pilot who became a member of parliament after spending nearly two years in a Russian jail, on charges she was planning to carry out a coup.

According to the allegations, Savchenko planned an attack on parliament using grenades and automatic weapons acquired from pro-Russian separatists in the east.

General Prosecutor Yuriy Lutsenko on Thursday told parliament about the alleged plot, after which legislators voted to remove her political immunity.

The plan was to overthrow the constitutional system by carrying out terrorist attacks on Kievs central government quarter  using weapons received from the leaders of the so-called DNR, Lutsenk said, referring to Donetsk Peoples Republic.

However, Savchenko, an outspoken critic of the Ukrainian government, claimed it was a plot by undercover agents working for the Ukrainian government to discredit her.

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She said she knowingly went along with the agents in order to reveal the scheme to the public.

This is not a terrorist act, this is a political provocation to make the authorities look ridiculous, Savchenko said in a statement.

To accuse me of treason against Ukraine  and to make anti-heroes out of yesterdays heroes simply because they do not agree with the policies and positions of the current government, thats all the authorities can do, she said.

She also accused authorities of betraying the ideals of the 2014 revolution during which pro-Russia President Viktor Yanukovich was overthrown.

Savchenko said that if the current situation in Ukraine continues, the danger in parliament wont be me, your danger will be your people.

Prisoner swap

Savchenko, an ex-military helicopter pilot, became famous in 2014 when she was captured by Russian-backed rebels in eastern Ukraine and sentenced to 22 years in prison for her alleged role in the deaths of two Russian journalists in the conflict zone.

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Her refusal to bend after nearly two years in Russian custody made her a national hero in Ukraine.

Russian President Vladimir Putin pardoned her in 2016 as part of a swap for two Russian servicemen jailed in Ukraine.

Savchenkos demeanour during her ordeal in Russia earned her the nickname of Ukraines Joan of Arc.

After her return, she was awarded the Star of the Hero of Ukraine award and became an opposition figure in the Ukrainian parliament.US: Not all school, mass shootings are treated the same

Al Jazeera visits a high school in Frankfort, Kentucky, where a recent school shooting took place to find out why it didnt garner as much attention as others in the US.World facing water crisis, with one in nine people already lacking access to clean water close to home, says report.

The world is facing a water crisis, highlighting a big gap in access to clean water and sanitation between the wealthy and economically disadvantaged, according to a WaterAid study.

Entitled The Water Gap  The State of the Worlds Water, the water access advocacy groups report was released on Thursday to mark World Water Day.

One in nine people around the world do not have access to clean water close to home, and 60 percent of people live in areas of water stress, where the water supply cannot or will not continue to meet demand, the report said.

That amounts to 844 million people who have difficulties accessing clean water.

And wherever you are in the world, its the poorest and least powerful who are most often without clean water, the report said.

Eritrea, Papua New Guinea and Uganda are the three countries with the lowest access to clean water. In Eritrea, only 19 percent of people have access to clean water close to home. In Papua New Guinea, the number is 37 percent.

Lack of access to clean water has deadly health consequences, especially for children. The report said that roughly 290,000 children under the age of five die as a result.

Its deplorable that nearly 300,000 children under five years old die each year from diarrhoeal illnesses directly linked to dirty water, lack of decent toilets and poor hygiene, Tim Wainwright, WaterAids chief executive, says in the report.

We all need to step up the urgency around the water and sanitation crisis as current progress is nowhere near fast enough.

Cape Town example

South Africas city of Cape Town has served as a siren for organisations tracking the worlds water crisis.

The city is facing an unprecedented drought that began in 2015. City officials say people should use no more than 50 litres of tap water a day.

Cape Town relies on reservoirs that are replenished solely by rainwater. Observers say climate change is responsible for the lack of rain and other cities should be prepared.

On July 9, the city will reach day zero and be forced to shut off tap water for homes. Only communal taps will have running water.

Cape Town is a wake-up call, reminding us that access to water, our most precious resource, is increasingly under threat, said Jonathan Farr, WaterAids senior policy analysts on water security and climate.

WaterAid said the global community should recognise that UN global goals, which list clean water and sanitation, are everyones responsibility to deliver.

This could be accomplished by allocating resources from taxes and tariffs while increasing the amount and proportion of aid for water, sanitation, and promoting pro-poor policies that ensure access to water for everyone, the group said.Yemens central bank closes over shortage of funds

The Yemeni central bank has announced it is closing because it has run out of money.Get married before you have children and strive to stay married for their sake. Get the education you need for gainful employment, work hard, and avoid idleness. Go the extra mile for your employer or client. Be a patriot, ready to serve the country. Be neighborly, civic-minded, and charitable. Avoid coarse language in public. Be respectful of authority. Eschew substance abuse and crime.

In August 2017, Amy Wax, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and Larry Alexander, a law professor at the University of San Diego, wrote an article arguing that we are paying the price for the loss of values that we had up to the mid-60s. They listed those values as:

They argued that these values are superior to what we have today such as the single-parent, antisocial habits, prevalent among some working-class whites; the anti-acting white rap culture of inner-city blacks and the anti-assimilation ideas gaining ground among some Hispanic immigrants.

One could hardly imagine a more innocuous article, yet the blowback has been escalating ever since and Black Lives Matter plans to sow chaos on Penns campus if Dr. Wax is not fired.

Note that while single parenthood is a bigger problem in the black community than in the white community, Amy Wax and Larry Alexander went out of their way to describe it as a characteristic of the white community, because they wanted to stress that people from all segments of our society have lost the values of the past. Wax emphasized that Bourgeois values arent just for white people, and that bourgeois values can help minorities get ahead in an interview about her article with the Daily Pennsylvanian.

The efforts of Wax and Alexander to be evenhanded didnt protect them from false accusations of racism and white supremacism from organizations at Penn. It didnt stop 33 Penn Law faculty members from publishing a letter in the Daily Pennsylvanian condemning Amy Wax.

Why such a negative reaction to the Waxs accurate pinpointing of problems that need to be addressed in Western society?

The Penn professors condemned Wax for saying that All Cultures are not equal and for saying that Anglo-Protestant cultural norms are superior but did not explain why they found those statements so offensive. Neither did GET-UP, a graduate student organization that issued a statement that called her views hateful and regressive. Their statement also condemned the presence of toxic racist, sexist, homophobic attitudes on campus. Haley Pilgrim, the chair of the Graduate and Professional Student Assemblys Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, Access and Leadership Council said Wax should no longer be allowed to teach a mandatory first-year course because it places students affected by the public comments in an unfair learning environment. Why it was an unfair to learn from someone who believes society used to have better values, Haley did not explain.

An answer to why the left reacted in this way can be found in a debate that Wax with Duke Professor Erwin Chemerinsky. Dr. Chemerinsky and others in the audience expressed the concern that Amy Wax was blaming blacks for their problems instead of white people, thus absolving white people of their obligation to pay more and more to help black people Waxs response was

if you look across the nation, you see that school districts like Washington DC and Philadelphia which are almost exclusively African-American have some of the highest per pupil spending in the country and have achieved some of the worst results and that is because education is not something that one does to people, it is something that people do for themselves.

She pointed out that when blacks went to the same schools as whites, many performed worse. Theyve got a mother whos got a sort of revolving door of boyfriends, they have a chaotic home situation they have an unreliable parental familial setting and theyve got violence- ridden communities. She explained that violence is not something that comes down from the sky, violence is something that people do, it involves choices that people make. Nothing that the white community does forces an individual to pick up a gun, aim that gun at another person, and shoot it. Nothing that some white person does will force a black person to abandon the mother of his child. No government program is going to stop people from making these choices. Wax stressed that only the black community can choose better values; no one can do it for them and those values are essential for success.

From the left-wing perspective, Wax had committed two major heresies, in so doing threatening help for the oppressed. According to the left-wing narrative, evil white racists are responsible for the problems innocent oppressed blacks are having, and therefore owe reparations in the form of more money and more affirmative action. Wax challenged the narrative that all whites are racists, stating that white society used to have good values. She threatened the belief that whites should redistribute more and more of their money to blacks by suggesting that a dominant cause of the problems blacks have today has to do with choices they make and wouldnt be fixed even if whites gave more money.

Opponents of Dr. Wax found ammunition to use against her in a video of an interview on the Glen Loury show in September 2017. Wax stated, I dont think Ive ever seen a black student graduate in the top quarter of the class, and rarely in the top half. Wax made that statement while explaining to Loury that efforts to help blacks by placing them in highly competitive environments for which they were unready might hurt more than help. This argument has been made by others, including by Thomas Sowell in his book Preferential Policies.

Penn Law students and alumni signed a petition demanding that law school dean Ted Ruger take action against Wax's "false and deeply offensive claims." The petition called for Ruger to dismiss Wax's claims and to remove her from teaching first-year courses and from committees involving the direction of the law school. On March 13, Ruger attempted to appease the activists, announcing that Wax would no longer teach the first-year course. His excuse was that although she had the right to free speech, she had violated Penn policy by revealing student grades when saying that she didnt know of blacks who had graduated in the top half of their class. He also yielded to the demand that he deny her claims and said that black law students have graduated at the top of their class at Penn law. With that statement, Ruger violated the same policy against revealing student grades.

Of course, appeasement never works. Four days later, Asa Khalif, the leader of Pennsylvania Black Lives Matter, told the Philadelphia Tribune that he wants Wax fired and that he is prepared to disrupt classes and other campus activities if she isnt. BLM has probably done more to hurt blacks than any other organization, spreading a false narrative of police brutality which resulted in reduced policing and more black-on-black violence.

Did Wax tell the truth about black performance at Penn? We dont have access to student grades, but we can get a clue from a study that showed that the elimination of race-based admissions policies would lead to a 63% decline in black matriculants at all law schools and a 90% decline at elite law schools. Heather MacDonald wrote in the Wall Street Journal that

In the early 1990s, the Law School Admissions Council tracked 27,000 students at nearly 90% of all accredited law schools. Of the 2,000 students attending the most "elite" law schools, 52% of blacks were in the bottom tenth of their class, compared with 6% of whites. Only 8% of blacks were in the top half of their class. Bar failure rates were also skewed; the LSAC data showed that 19% of blacks graduating from these elite schools failed the bar, compared with 3.5% of whites.

Putting black students in a position where they fail the bar after accruing enormous debt at an elite law school is not helping them.

Ironically, the loss of values leading to poor performance are in part a result of white efforts to help blacks. Sowells explanation of this is that white efforts to help black people with welfare have been very harmful to the black community.

By substituting the government for fathers as a breadwinner for children, government welfare has reduced the incentive for black women to get married with the result that many black children grow up in single families. Welfare also created an incentive for black women to have as many babies as possible since they get increased benefits for each. As a result, many black children lack a supportive environment that encourages educational achievement.

Amy Wax is right in claiming that the government cant force blacks to make good choices, but our public schools can stop indoctrinating black children that they are helpless victims of racism. Instead, schools could teach them that if they work hard, they can succeed -- maybe even become president of the United States. More importantly, our schools, instead of indoctrinating blacks that they live in a racist society, could start addressing the problem of black racism and teach that all racist beliefs, whether black or white, are wrong.Fifty Years after the Prague Spring

March 22 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the first flowering of the Prague Spring, when Marxism in Czechoslovakia tried to end the abuses of power and to grant to the people a measure of the sort of freedom so solemnly promised in the charters of every communist regime in the world. The Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia demonstrated to anyone who could be convinced by facts that leftism seeks only power and nothing else. The Prague Spring did not begin with a repudiation of Marxism. Indeed, the slogan used by the Czechs involved in the Prague Spring was that they wanted to create "Socialism with a Human Face." These reformers were careful not to criticize communism or the Soviet Union and not to pull out of the Warsaw Pact. Dubcek, the first secretary of the Communist Party, having ousted the prior first secretary, was actually using the Communist Party as an agent of reform.

This allowed Svoboda in late March of 1968 to become president of Czechoslovakia, which meant both the party and the government were now behind the reforms. What sort of reforms were sought? Reducing the power of the secret police, allowing freedom of speech and of the press, making the economy more focused on the needs of consumers rather than mass industrialization, and friendly relations with all nations. When Svoboda became the head of state in Czechoslovakia after Dubcek was made first secretary of the Communist Party, the reformers were in control, and the reforms they sought proceeded. Unlike the Hungarian Revolution a dozen years earlier, which was a war against the communist rulers of that unhappy nation, the Prague Spring was entirely peaceful and offered no threat to anything that ought to have mattered to the Soviets, if the Soviets actually cared about what Marxism preached. Moreover, Czechoslovakia was the one nation in Eastern Europe that had a long history of friendly relations with the Soviet Union, dating back before Hitler's rise to power, and this attitude more or less compelled the Soviets to treat Czechoslovakia differently when the war ended, allowing other political parties, for a few years, anyway, to exist and to participate in the life of the nation. While Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria had declared war on the Soviet Union and while Poland constituted a real dilemma for the Soviets because of its traditional hostility to Russia and its size and population, Czechoslovakia, both as an independent state and as a vassal territory of the Third Reich, had behaved about as sympathetically to the Soviet Union as any nation in Europe. Dubcek himself fought against Nazism as part of the Underground in Czechoslovakia. When the Soviets and the whipped dog nations of the Warsaw Pact invaded Czechoslovakia, Dubcek asked the people to offer no violent resistance, and that request was honored by the Czechs, presenting Brezhnev and the Politburo with a problem. Dubcek was briefly taken into custody and eventually drummed out of the Communist Party, but the Soviets had him made ambassador to Turkey. When the Soviet Empire was dismantled beginning in 1989 with the overwhelming non-Communist victory in the first free elections Poland had since the end of the war, Dubcek was not forgotten by the Czechoslovakian people, who made him chairman of the Federal Assembly in the post-communist era. The Prague Spring was a noble experiment to test the true tolerance of leftism and the true goal of leftism. Dubcek and his fellow Czechs simply wanted genuine liberty of mind and conscience, restraint of the brutal power of statism, and real democracy. They failed in a way that the Solidarity Movement in Poland did not fail because Dubcek and his allies in Czechoslovakia assumed that by offering no threat to communism, they could actually humanize leftism. But the reality is that leftism, wherever it exists, ultimately does not stand for anything at all. It has no values, respects no principles, embraces no moral code, and represents nothing true. When the Cold War was won, it was won by brave, noble, and hard-headed people who grasped that fact: President Reagan, Prime Minister Thatcher, Pope John Paul II, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn. The Prague Spring was a glorious gesture doomed to fail. There is no compromise with the gangsters who infest every aspect of leftism. Good men like Dubcek should be respected for what they tried to do but not for how they tried to do it. The only way to stop evil is to defeat it and never to compromise with it.A report for the Century Foundation , a liberal think tank, and the Massachusetts chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union says that even in places where localities have refused to cooperate with deportation efforts, illegal immigrants are spotted by federal authorities when they show up in databases after arrests.

Remember when liberals claimed they believed in equal protection under the laws? The fanatical hatred for Donald Trump and fanatical desire to replace the population of the United States with third-world people who will vote for Democrats have led the Massachusetts chapter of the ACLU and the progressive Century Foundation to urge police to create a special class of people  violators of immigration laws  protected from arrest for crimes that the rest of us would still be arrested for. Stephen Dinan of the Washington Times reports:

Welcome to second-class status in your own country, citizens of America.

The logic here is to exempt people already breaking the law from arrest for breaking other laws, in order to hinder the enforcement of laws.

"In Trump 's America, immigrants have ample reason to fear that any interaction with the criminal legal system will result in the initiation of deportation proceedings against them," the report said.

The answer, the groups said, is for local police to stop arresting immigrants  particularly those who are also racial, religious or sexual minorities  with crimes such as drug offenses, driving without a license, larceny and trespassing.

Remember when liberals claimed they believed in equal protection under the laws? The fanatical hatred for Donald Trump and fanatical desire to replace the population of the United States with third-world people who will vote for Democrats have led the Massachusetts chapter of the ACLU and the progressive Century Foundation to urge police to create a special class of people  violators of immigration laws  protected from arrest for crimes that the rest of us would still be arrested for. Stephen Dinan of the Washington Times reports:

A report for the Century Foundation, a liberal think tank, and the Massachusetts chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union says that even in places where localities have refused to cooperate with deportation efforts, illegal immigrants are spotted by federal authorities when they show up in databases after arrests. The answer, the groups said, is for local police to stop arresting immigrants  particularly those who are also racial, religious or sexual minorities  with crimes such as drug offenses, driving without a license, larceny and trespassing. "In Trump's America, immigrants have ample reason to fear that any interaction with the criminal legal system will result in the initiation of deportation proceedings against them," the report said.

The logic here is to exempt people already breaking the law from arrest for breaking other laws, in order to hinder the enforcement of laws.

This is madness, and repulsive.

Welcome to second-class status in your own country, citizens of America.Britain's lost consciousness

In the midst of world-changing events in Asia, Putin's serial aggressions in Europe suggest the collapse of Western principles, specifically the defense of national interest. Foreign secretary Boris Johnson in the United Kingdom said it is "overwhelmingly likely" that Putin personally ordered the nerve agent attack on former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in the English city of Salisbury. Hours before these revelations, Scotland Yard said it was treating the death of Nikolai Glushov, another Russian expatriate and an associate of Putin's critic, as murder. British intelligence sources maintain there is little doubt about the origin of the atrocities, despite Russian denials. The nerve agent known as Novichok is a chemical weapon developed by the Soviet Union in the 1970s. Its signature is unequivocal.

The question that remains unanswered is, why now? Putin has cleverly inserted himself in Europe by supporting candidates whom he envisions as potential allies. However, the real reason for his boldness, as I see it, is the pusillanimous response of Western leaders. The softness in approach, the virtually pre-emptive surrender, indicates a Europe suffering from a moral collapse. A godless continent has forgotten its roots. Standing astride the postmodern world of Jean-Paul Sartre and the Frankfurt School and the intimidation of a growling Russian bear, Europe has turned inward, fearful and uncertain about the future. Yes, Russian diplomats have been asked to leave England. And steps will be taken for condemnation at the U.N. Security Council. But these are mere droplets falling off Putin's back, a mere echo of the 2006 assassination of Alexander Litvinenko, another former agent fatally poisoned in London with a radioactive isotope. At the time, the British press described this murder as an "invasion." Despite the anger and saber-rattling, almost nothing substantive occurred. Putin has a very good memory. Mobilizing the energy and resolve to defend Western traditions when defense budgets are declining is a Sisyphean task. Moreover, the threat of radical Islam assists with the Putin agenda. Like a traffic cop, Putin stands between the totalitarian temptation that grows each day in British mosques and the soft underbelly of national will declining each day. Many in the United Kingdom see Putin as a strong national leader capable of offsetting Islamic ambitions, a kind of King John Sobieski of the twenty-first century. In an environment in which every crevice of British opinion has been penetrated by relativism, right and wrong are merely situational. The opposition to Russian imperialism that awakened Churchill to the Iron Curtain is gone like so many threads on the canvas of world affairs. The notion of truth itself is a figment of the imagination unattainable in a country bereft of moral standards. Postmodern scholars are cheering, but those cheers are easily converted to tears with the possible capitulation to radical Islam and the life preserver Putin is prepared to employ. History does not have easily defined guidelines. But it does suggest that when basic principles that undergird a nation are challenged without an adequate defense, collapse is the result. What one sees in Prime Minister Theresa May's nation are a proud British people who vaguely recall their past and love the freedom they won in World War II, now regressing to a point where they have forgotten how to defend that freedom. Just ask Vladimir Putin. Herbert London is the president of the London Center for Policy Research.Say what you want about the legitimacy of Vladimir Putin's re-election; at least voters for his opponents were not instructed that their votes wouldn't count. You have to travel to Cook County, Illinois to see that kind of trick pulled off. As you read the accounts below, keep in mind that the office of county assessor determines how much the property tax burden will be for owners of parcels of land and buildings. That makes it a powerful office, able to grant or withhold favors to wealthy property-owners and developers if so inclined.

In a stunning admission, Chicago election officials said Tuesday it erred by sending out a text saying that votes for an assessor candidate would not count. CBS Chicago reports that election judges were incorrectly instructed via text message today that a vote for Andrea Raila was not valid. "We have thousands and thousands of people who want to come out and cast their vote and they are finding out they can't," Raila said. "I'm calling for an investigation of this process."

Winning a Democratic primary in Cook County is tantamount to winning the office.

We are supposed to believe that it was a "mistake":

Chicago Board of Elections spokesperson said they made mistake sending election judges a text this morning regarding Raila being off the ballot. CBS Chicago #illinoisprimary  Daniel Blom (@Blomly) March 20, 2018

It was a "mistake" that went beyond text messages to election judges:

Compounding the mistake, flyers stating Ralia's votes would not count were distributed to precincts. "[The flyer] was sitting on the table as part of the ballot until I insisted it be removed," said voter Danielle Neerghen.

The background factor was a challenge to the signatures on Ralia's nomination petition:

The saga started when Raila was accused of having fraudulent names on her election petition. However, a judge ruled recently that her name should stay on the ballot. Her candidacy was challenged by her opponents: Cook County Assessor Joseph Berrios and Fritz Kaegi. ... While the process played out in court, Raila's name ended up on the early voting ballots. But voters were given notices saying she was no longer a candidate. Later a judge ruled differently.

The background factor was a challenge to the signatures on Ralia's nomination petition:

The saga started when Raila was accused of having fraudulent names on her election petition. However, a judge ruled recently that her name should stay on the ballot. Her candidacy was challenged by her opponents: Cook County Assessor Joseph Berrios and Fritz Kaegi. ... While the process played out in court, Raila's name ended up on the early voting ballots. But voters were given notices saying she was no longer a candidate. Later a judge ruled differently.

The Board of Elections was so diligent in getting out the news that it "had placed ads in newspapers saying a vote for Raila would not be counted."

Except that an appellate court reversed that ruling, placing Ralia back on the ballot. That is when the diligence ended.

John Seidel of the Chicago Sun-Times reports:

Jim Allen, a spokesman for the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners, acknowledged the error. He said a text had been pre-programmed to go out to judges after the initial ruling keeping Raila off the ballot. The text was a reminder to pass out green and white notices indicating that Raila and Democratic clerk candidate Jan Kowalski McDonald had been removed from the ballot. Allen said county officials forgot to cancel the text after the appellate court overruled the initial ruling.

They forgot? They remembered to buy newspaper ads, but they forgot to pay heed to an appellate court decision reversing the point of the ads they had bought and paid for.

At some point, the error is claimed to have been corrected:

"We subsequently to that sent out six different text messages saying 'Do not hand out the green and white notices,'" Allen said. He said a different black and white notice should have been handed out that referred only to McDonald's removal from the ballot.

Ralia, quite understandably, is demanding a do-over election and a federal investigation.

What is so threatening about Ralia? Her campaign website states:

As Cook County Assessor, I will fight to ensure that all property owners are treated the same, no matter the location of their property, their income level or their ethnicity, and that property tax assessment increases should be controlled and understood. ... Andrea promises to work to: Ensure Equal Treatment of all Cook County property Taxpayers

Allow Cook County taxpayers to challenge the state tax multiplier on property tax appeals

Control Triennial Reassessments that Are Greater than 15% or the CPI

Demand that 2018 Triennial Reassessments are delayed until the current error-riddled Assessor formulas are corrected

Cook County is like a banana republic with cold"Lasandra Johnson drove into the South Broward district office on Monday with accelerants in her car," said Joy Oglesby, a spokeswoman for the sheriff's office. ...

It's a rule of thumb for alert readers that when a politician is caught doing something embarrassing or criminal, if no political party is specified, you can safely bet that he is a Democrat. Something similar appears to be at work with terroristic acts. Consider the incident on Monday in which a woman named Lasandra Johnson appeared to deliberately crash her car into a Broward Sheriff's Office in Pembroke Park, Florida, carrying accelerants that caused the car to burst into flames. The local newspapers, the Sun-Sentinel and Miami Herald , both reported the rather dramatic incident. The Sun-Sentinel noted:

However, Johnson, 34, was hurt and burned in the crash and remained hospitalized Wednesday. A worker who was painting inside the building when the incident happened was able to help Johnson get out of the crashed red Toyota Camry. "She was engulfed in flames," the worker, Ben Mendez, said on Monday.

Pretty shocking behavior, and drama aplenty. What could be behind this? Readers might want to know what could possibly cause a woman to do this. Or at least see a picture of her. But all the Sun-Sentinel would note is:

Detectives with the Violent Crimes Unit of the sheriff's office are still trying to determine why the crash happened.

The Herald's shorter account covered most of the same facts and left readers with a mystery:

Detectives in BSO's Violent Crimes Unit were still investigating Wednesday to determine why Johnson drove into the building.

Neither paper mentioned facts or pictures that John Cardillo was able to discover and post to Twitter:

Two days ago Lasandra Johnson intentionally crashed her car into a Broward Sheriffs Office substation.



Complete media blackout about Johnson being a devout Muslim with ties to radical S. Florida mosques. pic.twitter.com/ss6St96J9y  John Cardillo (@johncardillo) March 21, 2018

As Pamela Geller notes:

Deliberately ramming cars into people and buildings, and targeting police in particular, is a common jihadi pattern. The Islamic State (ISIS) and others have called on Muslims in the U.S. to attack police, and to run them over with their cars. If the media in Florida were worth its salt and actually interested in reporting, they would tell these facts to the public, and reveal that Lasandra Johnson is a devout Muslim. Instead, silence. Why? What do they think will happen? Do they think the jihad will go away if they ignore it? Do they think reporting on jihad attacks will incite their ever-present bogeymen, "right-wing extremists"? It's madness.

Ignoring the obvious has never worked out well with any problem.Is Eric Holder really qualified to scold Jeff Sessions?

Former attorney general Eric Holder scolded Jeff Sessions for the "rushed" firing of FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe under pressure from the White House. Holder said Sessions needs "to have the guts" to stand up to President Donald Trump. This is the same Eric Holder who on June 28, 2012 became the first U.S. attorney general in history to be held in both criminal and civil contempt by the House of Representatives in a 255-67 vote, with 17 Democrats voting for the measure (the rest of the Democrats walked out of the House, refusing to vote).

Peculiarly enough, in the first part of his claim, Mr. Holder may be not too far from the truth. Jeff Sessions really does "need to have the guts"...to consider starting a DOJ investigation of Holder's activity in 2009-2015, when he "served" our country as the U.S. attorney general. And Sessions knows it as well as anyone. It was Republican Senator Jeff Sessions who gave a well deserved objurgation to Mr. Holder on June 17, 2009, at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing. Back at that time, Sessions was of the opinion that after spending only five months on the job, Holder put into question the integrity and independence of the Department of Justice. According to then-senator Jeff Sessions, in just a few months, A.G. Eric Holder, among other things, ignored recommendations of the Office of Legal Counsel on the constitutionality of a D.C. voting bill, refused a request from law enforcement officials to keep interrogation methods confidential, and released dangerous detainees from American prisons. The list of Holder's "achievements" as A.G. could be continued to eternity. On February 18, 2009, during Black History Month. Eric Holder called USA a "nation of cowards" on racial issues, stirring much controversy and even a statement from President Obama mentioning that he "would use different language" talking about the same issue. Mr. Holder refused to prosecute the famous case of voters intimidation by the Black Panthers in Philadelphia and called only black Americans "my people" while supposedly representing the whole American nation. According to some ATF officials, Eric Holder was allegedly involved in the cover-up of the details of the failed "Fast and Furious" operation, which left 2,000 guns in the hands of Mexican drug-dealers and led to the murder of Border Patrol agent Brian Terry in December 2010. The scandalous case was investigated by Rep. Darrell Issa and Senator Charles Grassley. According to them, A.G. Holder's approach to their efforts "distorted the truth and obstructed investigation." One more "little" thing: In 2013, Holder modified the Justice Department's sentencing policy for low-level drug-related crimes out of the belief that they were discriminatory and destabilizing. He mandated lesser penalties for "minor" drug crimes during the time when thousands of Americans die from illegal drug abuse every year. Is the guy with this resume really qualified to issue any advice to Attorney General Jeff Sessions?So now hed like you to know hes Mister Tough Guy, Joe the fighter, or something.

Up until now, Joe Biden has always been something of a sissy, a lickspittle, a sap, desperate to be liked and slavering to be respected. Remember how he reportedly begging President Obama to stop belittling him in front of other cabinet members? Or that the only reason he gave up his lifelong dream to run for president in 2016 was that President Obama talked him out of it and he went along like a sheep? The tales of his being a wacky sidekick to Obama were  basically true , he admitted in public. His long, bumbling record of gaffes could be lined up and would extend to Mars.

Stepping well outside the dignity of his old office of vice president, he now vows to assault President Trump.

Heres what he said, according to the New York Post:

A guy who ended up becoming our national leader said, I can grab a woman anywhere and she likes it,' Biden told students at the University of Miami on Tuesday, ABC News reported. They asked me if Id like to debate this gentleman, and I said no. I said, If we were in high school, Id take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him.' Ive been in a lot of locker rooms my whole life, Biden continued. Im a pretty damn good athlete. Any guy that talked that way was usually the fattest, ugliest S.O.B. in the room.

Oh, gawd.

Obviously, the clown is running for office and hes put a new hat on, playing himself as a parody of President Trump, who is known for his pugnaciousness. In this case, it's particularly ridiculous, because as he attempts to climb aboard the #MeToo bandwagon, his weird statements and on-camera gropings of women are pretty well known.

Trump of course didnt let it go unnoticed, and gave an impressive smackdown:

Crazy Joe Biden is trying to act like a tough guy. Actually, he is weak, both mentally and physically, and yet he threatens me, for the second time, with physical assault, Trump, 71, tweeted at 6:20 a.m. He doesnt know me, but he would go down fast and hard, crying all the way. Dont threaten people Joe! the combative president added.

Normally, this would be beneath the dignity of the office of president, but in the case of Biden, an exception can be made.

What kind of fool gets his rocks off by threatening to beat up the president of the United States on the one hand and clucks and harrumphs about the lack of civility in politics on the other? Or who touts himself as smart, and then solves his problems with his fists? Except that he doesn't use his fists, he just talks about using his fists?

Only Joe Biden can pull off that kind of idiocy. Obviously, hes running for president, and the Democrats are so bereft of leaders, he's actually leading. Hes watched President Trump win office against a dozen rivals in his own party and then against the big-dollar Hillary Clinton machine, and has decided that thats his ticket, fighting as a farcical imitation of Trump, even at his advanced age. After saying 'no' to the White House to make Obama happy, he still chomps at the leash to have another go, and the message he's gotten is that he must do it unconventionally. So expect more of this from the dolt. Its pathetic in someone who should be focused on being a dignified old gentleman in his retirement. But Joe never caught the hang of dignity. Plugs in hair and Chiclet teeth out front, he was too busy pleasing people in his party, saying what he thought they wanted said, and making a clown of himself. Now that the tenor and timbre of the Democrats has gone rock bottom into anti-Trump insanity, Biden looks more pathetic than ever.This case is noteworthy because Daniels/Clifford recently filed a lawsuit to get out of the confidentiality agreement she signed in 2016 in exchange for a $130,000 payment from Donald Trump's attorney, Michael Cohen. Meanwhile, Cohen is suing Daniels for violating the confidentiality agreement. The case is therefore going to wind up in court. Opponents of President Trump hope the resulting imbroglio will contribute to their ongoing efforts to embarrass, weaken, and ultimately take down the 45th president.

On Sunday, March 25, "porn star" Stormy Daniels (real name: Stephanie Gregory Clifford) is scheduled to appear on CBS's 60 Minutes in an interview recorded earlier this month. Failing CNN prime-time host Anderson Cooper, who moonlights as a correspondent for 60 Minutes, conducted the interview. Daniels/Clifford has been in the news recently because of her claim of having had a consensual intimate relationship  or, more accurately, a series of alleged intimate encounters  with Donald J. Trump more than a decade ago.

Meanwhile, Cooper is scheduled to interview another Trump-accuser  in this case, model and former Playboy "Playmate" Karen McDougal, who has also come forward to allege an intimate relationship with Trump. Cooper's interview with McDougal is scheduled to be broadcast live on CNN on Cooper's program, AC 360, on Thursday, March 22, between 8 and 10 P.M. EDT.



Karen McDougal  another Trump-accuser.

As the Los Angeles Times reported on March 21, "[o]n Tuesday, former Playboy playmate Karen McDougal filed suit in Los Angeles to abrogate her own confidentiality agreement, saying she wishes to tell the world of an alleged affair with Trump." Fortunately for her, she  like Daniels/Clifford  has found an enthusiastic listener in Cooper.

Why is any of this important and worth more than a moment's notice? Well, the Los Angeles Times, in another article on March 21 titled "In a one-two legal punch, Trump faces new jeopardy from sex scandals," put the developments in context:

President Trump faced new legal and political jeopardy Tuesday as a former Playboy Playmate and alleged paramour sued to break a confidentiality agreement and a judge rejected his move to quash a lawsuit stemming from a charge of sexual assault.

The developments, coming on opposite coasts, promised many more months  if not years  of legal skirmishing, keeping Trump's personal conduct at the fore of this election season and complicating GOP efforts to protect their congressional majorities in November.

Taking this story to a somewhat higher level: On Tuesday, March 20, Shannon Bream, the host of Fox News@Night with Shannon Bream on the Fox News Channel (M-F 11 P.M. E.T.), interviewed Michael Avenatti, the attorney for Daniels/Clifford. The interview (video here) is noteworthy because it showcased the skills of Bream, who is not only an experienced reporter, program host, and interviewer, but an attorney with extensive experience covering the Supreme Court. In light of her background, Bream was able to intelligently question and challenge Avenatti, unlike the other cable news hosts who have welcomed Avenatti but who lacked an understanding of the law and who are part of the Resist Trump movement that hopes to see the president impeached.



Shannon Bream interviews Michael Avenatti, Fox News@Night, March 20, 2018.

Following is a transcript of the Bream-Avenatti interview, provided by Fox News.

SHANNON BREAM, FOX NEWS HOST: Joining me now, Stormy Daniels' attorney, Michael Avenatti. Great to have you with us tonight, sir. MICHAEL AVENATTI: Thanks for having me, Shannon. Really appreciate it. BREAM: You want to say anything more about those physical threats, whether they were reported to law enforcement, what you planned to do about them? AVENATTI: Not at this time, but I think, when viewers tuned in to the 60 Minutes interview this Sunday, they're going to learn in detail about those threats. And they're going to be able to measure for themselves the credibility of my client. BREAM: Well, it sounds like you, and she, want to continue proceeding as if the nondisclosure agreement is not valid. I know that you have filed the lawsuit to that effect. In the meantime, who is funding your services? AVENATTI: Well, I'm basically doing it pro bono at this point. We've set up a GoFundMe page. It's actually not on the GoFundMe page. It's a Crowd Justice page in an effort to raise money. But other than that, no one. BREAM: Well, you know, a lot of folks have questions about why now? Why this is coming to light? Why it that happened ten years ago or more when the president wasn't the president? Why it's grabbing so many headlines? Let me ask you about this, on your own web site, you say that, "While in college and later in law school, Michael worked at a political opposition research and media firm run by Rahm Emanuel, who later became White House chief of staff and is presently, the mayor of Chicago. During his time there, Michael worked on over 150 campaigns in 42 States, including multiple gubernatorial and congressional campaigns. Including Joe Biden's U.S. Senate campaign." Is any of this political in nature for you? AVENATTI: Absolutely not. That was 20-25 years ago, and it's laughable that people are pointing to that is the reason behind this. I haven't spoken to Rahm Emanuel since January 2nd or 3rd, 2007. Now, why do I know that? Because I ran into him in the Rio airport after coming back from a holiday, for New Year's down in Brazil, back in '07. I haven't e-mailed him, texted him, communicated with him. I haven't had any communication with Joe Biden or anyone else on the left. The idea that this is politically motivated is laughable. This is about a search for the truth. I don't care if you're on the right, the left, or in the center, you deserve to know the facts. That's what this is about, period. BREAM: OK. You're client, Ms. Clifford, her real name. We all refer to her, Stormy Daniels, but Stephanie Clifford. In the nondisclosure agreement, I know that there's a lot of language there talking about the fact that part of the deal that she apparently agreed to at the time, whether it's valid or not, as you do not contest. It talks about a lot of tangible property, it talks about potential text messages, still images. All those kinds of things and part of the deal was that she would make sure all of it was turned over to the relevant counsel, or it was destroyed. Does she still now maintain any of those materials? Does she plan to go public with any of those? AVENATTI: I'm not going to answer that question. That's a question for her. But what I will say is this: there was never any deal because the parties to the deal did not execute the agreement. Your viewers know that if there's a written contract if everybody doesn't sign it, there's no deal. And in this situation, everybody did not sign the deal. Donald Trump never signed the deal, and there was a consideration that my client was to receive beyond the $130,000 consideration that only Donald Trump could provide. Release of claims, an agreement to stay away from her and her family, the list goes on and on. This deal will never be upheld in a court of law, there was never any deal.



Attorney Michael Avenatti representing his client, "porn star" Stormy Daniels, on Fox News@Night, March 20, 2018.

BREAM: OK. A couple of things, you and I both know, we learned in the first year of law school that there are contracts and courts do this all the time that uphold things that aren't fully signed. You know that happens, I know that happens. But, let's point out the language here so that we can talk about that. In this deal that was signed October 28, 2016, the first part of it says, "This settlement agreement and mutual release is made and deemed effected as of 28th day of October 2016, by and between E.C., LLC," which is the company that Michael Cohen set up. And/or David Denniso. On the one part, grouping them together and Peggy Peterson on the other parts. Now, I know that you've talked about that, and/or language, but sounds like  you know, in the  in the clause right after that saying, on the one part that they were a pocket deal. Cohen signed this deal. So, how does that not satisfied the fact that both sides, both parties of this agreement have signed it? AVENATTI: Well, first of all, under a California law, and/or is a conjunctive term, it's a plural term under the law. But it's even simpler than that, it's basic English. If in fact, the intent of Mr. Cohen was that the agreement could be entered into either by E.C., LLC or Donald Trump, he inverted the names. He got it wrong. Wait a minute. (CROSSTALK) BREAM: But the  but the word or is used. AVENATTI: No, no, no, but though, it's simple. BREAM: It is used. AVENATTI: It's worth  it is used but that's not the reading of the English language. He inverted the names. If he wanted it to be that E.C. could enter into it without Donald Trump, E.C. needed to be the second name, not the first name. And  I mean, it's simple English. And regardless Section 8.6 of the agreement, required all parties to sign, all parties. This agreement is going to be thrown out, it's full of holes, it's poorly drafted, it has all kinds of superfluous language. I don't  I don't know who drafted this in Mr. Cohen's office, but whoever did it, did a terrible job and certainly did not serve Mr. Trump, well. BREAM: You mentioned the issue of consideration. So, let's talk about that. It details that you are to be paid, and then, when all of the conditions are satisfied, ultimately the money would go to your client. It was wired to you, did you write her a check? AVENATTI: No, it was not wired to me, this was her predecessor counsel, to be  to be clear. BREAM: The predecessor counsel. OK. AVENATTI: My client  my client was to receive $130,000 and a whole host of other consideration from Mr. Trump. BREAM: Did she received the money? AVENATTI: Not Mr. Cohen. She received the money but she didn't get the rest of the consideration. It's like buying a house, a four-bedroom house, but you only get one bedroom. That's not a deal. BREAM: What didn't she  what didn't she received? AVENATTI: Well, she didn't get the release from Mr. Trump, as provided for in the agreement. She didn't get the agreement by Mr. Trump to stay away from her and her family, and not contact her. BREAM: So when did  AVENATTI: She didn't get a whole host of other things. BREAM: When did he contact her or her family? AVENATTI: No, no, no, that's not the issue. The issue is the agreement, the binding agreement for him not to do so. That's the consideration. She didn't get the binding release in the agreement. Mr. Cohen could not bind Mr. Trump under the agreement. This is going to be thrown out. There was no agreement. It's just that clear. BREAM: Well it's not that clear because have the word "or" there and talking about them at part. And I know you filed in State Court, the Trump folks are trying to move this to Federal Court. We'll see if that succeeds. We'll see if a judge likes your argument or if you get a different judge. I know this isn't the first time that you've faced off against the President in court. You did so at least with a settlement in 2006 with regard to The Apprentice so you are at least experienced in facing him in another legal fight. So we'll watch this one and see how it proceeds but we're glad to have you with us tonight and we'd love to have you back. AVENATTI: Thank you. BREAM: Thanks, Michael. AVENATTI: I appreciate it. Have a good night. BREAM: You too. All right, a school resource officer stepped up in the face of danger today. Should every school have armed guards? Our panel weighs in when we return.

End of transcript.

Peter Barry Chowka is a veteran reporter and analyst of news on national politics, media, and popular culture. He is a frequent contributor to American Thinker. Follow Peter on Twitter at @pchowka.Predictably, this has set off a wave of violence against white South African farmers that has led to the death of one white every five days, according to Newsweek :

We've been covering the ongoing tragedy for white farmers in South Africa for more than a year, culminating in a law passed by the radical South African parliament that expropriates white farmland that's been in the same family for hundreds of years without compensation.

Activists say South African authorities are tacitly approving attacks on the country's white farmers, with one being murdered every five days, and the police turning a blind eye to the violence. The white nationalist lobbying group AfriForum says that when lawmakers passed a motion last month which could see land being seized from farmers without compensation, it sent a message that landowners could be attacked with impunity. It said there have been 109 recorded attacks so far in 2018 and 15 farm murders, meaning that this year, one white farmer has been killed every five days. In a statement, Ian Cameron, AfriForum's Head of Safety said: "Our rural areas are trapped in a crime war. Although the South African government denies that a violence crisis is staring rural areas in the face, the numbers prove that excessive violence plague these areas."

They may be "white nationalists," but that doesn't mean they should be slaughtered. But the radical black government claims it's a lie and that white farmers who are now fleeing to Australia should "leave the keys" to their houses and their tractors when they go.

News.com:

IF WHITE farmers want to flee for a "racist country" like Australia they should leave the keys to their houses and tractors behind, the head of South Africa's radical Marxist opposition party says. But Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) leader Julius Malema, who recently declared his party was "cutting the throat of whiteness", denied white farmers were being killed. "We don't know violence, we know negotiations," Malema told a packed Human Rights Day rally in Mpumalanga Stadium on Wednesday. "And we are very robust in our engagement sometimes. A racist country like Australia says: 'The white farmers are being killed in South Africa.' We are not killing them. Now Australia says: 'Malema, EFF want to kill white farmers, they must come to Australia.' "If they want to go, they must go. They must leave the keys to their tractors because we want to work the land, they must leave the keys to their houses because we want to stay in those houses. They must leave everything they did not come here with in South Africa and go to Australia."

It should be noted that violence in rural areas of South African has been endemic even before the expropriation law was passed. Not all of the violence is black on white. Many blacks have been murdered as well.

But what's happening there is reminiscent of what happened in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in 1980, when the black majority took control and an orgy of black-on-white murders of white farmers drove the rest into exile.

The result? Zimbabwe is still trying to recover economically from that violent period.

But South Africa has a far more educated and skilled black middle class than Rhodesia had, and expectations are that while there will be some economic fallout if most whites leave the country, the country will not suffer the same ill effects.

Also, the white urban minority in South Africa is far more tolerant and determined  for the most part  to make its society work. More whites are likely to stay than remained in the mostly rural Rhodesia.

There has never been such a radical government that has taken power in South Africa. What was promised in the constitution about property rights is in the process of being trashed. If the murders continue and the government refuses to do anything about them, South Africa will become another economic basket case in Africa.

And the government will have only itself to blame.Trump calls Putin, the establishment gets the vapors

The establishment left and right had a meltdown yesterday because President Trump spoke to Vladimir Putin and congratulated him on his "electoral" win. "How dare he," they say, from John McCain to every single leftist pundit. Doesn't he know the man is a tyrant? Doesn't he know he has people killed? Gee, they actually think Trump does not know these things. They think Trump is naive. Their hysteria was exacerbated because someone on the National Security Council staff leaked a directive memo that, in all caps, said, "DO NOT CONGRATULATE" before the phone call to the Russian president. And because he did not follow the order, he's an ignorant loose cannon? Will these people never learn? No, they will not. They are blinkered and beyond help. Their eyes and ears are impervious to facts that do not coincide with their ideological convictions that Trump has no idea what he is doing, no idea how to lead the nation.

The same hysterics never noticed or cared when Obama congratulated a host of bad actors on their undemocratic holds on power. He refused, of course, to congratulate Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu because he loathes the man and the state of Israel. He made that abundantly clear over his eight years in office. Obama was a wannabe tyrant himself, which is why he governed the way he did. He abhors our Constitution and demonstrated that every day he held office. Trump, on the other hand, has an actual grasp on how the world works. Most world leaders do not play by the Marquess of Queensberry rules. Trump figured that out decades ago as he built things all over the world. He knows what he is doing. That he ignored the screaming memo is a good thing. He knows better than his so-called advisers. He is ten steps ahead of them, his detractors in Congress, and the idiotic press. CNN has gone way beyond beclowning itself. It has reduced itself to the National Enquirer of cable news, and that is probably an insult to the National Enquirer. Is there a sentient person on the planet who does not know who and what Putin is? Perhaps in the untouched wilds Margaret Mead failed to discover. Trump knows better than anyone who and what the man is, just as he knows who and what Kim Jong-un is, the little rocket man who is suddenly willing to talk. He does know what he is doing. It can't be easy when the entire political establishment is determined to see him fail. But he is the energizer bunny, the inflatable bozo punching bag that cannot be knocked down. Until Trump was elected, the American left loved Russia. Obama loved Russia; he couldn't wait to make common cause with Putin and Medvedev. Hillary did as well but demeaned herself with that stupid "reset" button. Not until Trump was elected and the Clintons and the rest of the left invented a fake news reason for her loss did the left suddenly and explicably decide that Russia was bad and Putin is evil. Russia is bad and Putin is evil, and Trump knows that better than anyone.Twitter co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Jack Dorsey believes Bitcoin will replace all of the worlds currencies over the next decade, having said as much in a recent interview with The Times of London. The 41-year-old forecasted the shift will begin with the Internet, expressing belief that Bitcoin will eventually overcome the current obstacles that stand in its way of global adoption. Ease of transactions and available use cases remain the two largest challenges of the worlds most popular cryptocurrency, not counting its general volatility that isnt a technological problem but an economic one. Once Bitcoin becomes more suitable for making smaller transactions and a larger number of product and service providers start accepting it, the cryptocurrency is likely to stabilize, some experts previously predicted, with Twitters chief echoing those sentiments earlier this week.

Mr. Dorsey has been publicly endorsing Bitcoin for several months now, with his mobile peer-to-peer payments startup Square also embracing the cryptocurrency early last month. The entrepreneurs dual-CEO role recently placed him under some pressure, with several industry watchers suggesting hes in a conflict of interest thats preventing him from being objective when making a decision on whether to ban advertisements for initial coin offerings and new cryptocurrencies on Twitter. The microblogging platform still ended up doing so earlier this week, having followed the example of the likes of Google and Facebook. Snapchat also banned ICO and blockchain-related advertising several days back.

Mr. Dorsey insists Bitcoin is a transformational technology and one thats not just here to stay but ultimately replace all other methods of conducting payments. The St. Louis, Missouri-born computer scientist recently recorded one of the largest wins in his career, having finally seen Twitter make money twelve years after being established. The achievement is still largely attributed to cost-cutting efforts and not major revenue increases, though the San Francisco-based firm is now expected to place a larger focus on long-term sustainability moving forward.A new fan-made concept render envisions Samsungs upcoming Galaxy Note 9. The number one smartphone manufacturer only recently released its Galaxy S9 lineup globally, with the new smartphones putting a heavy emphasis on their cameras thanks to the variable aperture sensor that is included. And now, a new concept render of the companys next flagship shows off a device that puts an even bigger focus on the camera department.

Beginning with the overall look of the device, the fan-made smartphone adopts a slightly less rectangular design than last years Galaxy Note 8, while reducing the bezels on the front to a minimum. Furthermore, the device retains the glass and metal construction that has been associated with Samsung since 2015. Interestingly, though, it doesnt sport a fingerprint sensor on the rear as with the companys recent flagships. Instead, the concept envisions a device with an in-display fingerprint scanner that is placed towards the bottom of the display. Moving on to the rear, the area that is no longer occupied by the fingerprint sensor has been reassigned to a new third camera sensor, which could be either a new wide-angle sensor or monochrome one that should help the South Korean giant better compete with Huaweis upcoming P20 Pro that is set to boast a triple camera sensor on the rear. In either case, the third sensor on the Galaxy Note 9 render accompanies a main, variable aperture camera and a secondary telephoto lens. Another interesting design feature is the use of multiple tiny LED lights positioned on either side of the camera module that likely replace the typical dual-tone LED flash in the hope of providing significantly better artificial lighting. Lastly, as with the companys previous flagships, this particular Galaxy Note 9 render also boasts a heart rate monitor just below the camera sensors and a dedicated Bixby button on the side.

Samsung is yet to confirm any official details surrounding the upcoming Galaxy Note 9, but with both the Galaxy Note 7 and Note 8 making their respective debuts in August, it seems likely that Samsung will continue this trend with its next device. Nonetheless, itll remain to be seen if Samsung does choose to implement a third sensor in the hope of competing with Huawei, or if the company will deem the extra sensor unnecessary. In the meantime, though, the only trace of the devices existence is a recent Note 9 name trademark in Colombia.Google has today announced improvements to the Google Play Music experience accessed through Wear OS. Specifically, the announcement  which came by way of the Wear OS help forum  states that Google Play Music users will now have much greater on-screen control of the music streaming service when using a smartwatch.

Previously, controlling Google Play Music via a Wear OS watch largely only allowed users to play and pause music, or the option to skip forward or back through tracks (as shown above). However, Google states users will now be able to select the shuffle option from their smartwatch, as well as the ability to see a preview of the song scheduled to play next. In addition, Google explains a new download indicator will also now be visible highlighting what songs can be downloaded to the watch directly  providing this feature is supported by the watch to begin with. As of today, the Google Play Store listing for the Wear OS Android app is already detailing the new features with an update that has seemingly already rolled out. So Wear OS smartwatch owners should be able to make use of the new features now. Those who are not seeing the features just yet may have to wait until an update for the Wear OS app has rolled out to their devices. The same changelog also notes the visibility of the display on smartwatches has now been improved, as has notifications related to in-store payments, as well as a new ability to pin Google Keep notes from the watch.

Speaking of these latest Play Music features, these are the first new features to be announced since Wear OS officially became Wear OS. As up until last week Wear OS was more commonly known as Android Wear, Googles Android-powered smartwatch platform. As part of the rebrand Google confirmed it was looking to somewhat distance the branding of the platform from Android due to the number of iPhone users who also now use a smartphone powered by the platform. Officially speaking, the platform is now called Wear OS by Google, which ties in with the more general Made by Google branding.Googles Cloud division is developing blockchain technologies meant to support its growing business, Bloomberg reported earlier this week, citing people familiar with the companys efforts. One particular solution that Alphabets subsidiary is presently said to be pursuing is a digital ledger for verifying third-party transactions, a classic application of blockchain which served as a basis for various cryptocurrencies that emerged over the last decade, including Bitcoin. The platform is understood to be in development as an extension of the Google Cloud portfolio of services that will be offered to the tech giants clients and its existence likely doesnt indicate Google is interested in launching its own cryptocurrency.

While Google Clouds main competitors  Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services  have already been exploring blockchain applications for some time now but none of them offer them as a core part of their hosting lineups. The Mountain View, California-based firm may hence see an opening that would allow it to differentiate itself from its rivals, which has been one of its main focus points in recent years. Just yesterday, Google Cloud debuted a wide variety of new security features meant to illustrate how the platform is seeking to beat its competitors through innovation. From a practical perspective, a blockchain-powered solution would be unlikely to significantly alter the user experience of Google Cloud clients but would provide them with additional assurances in regards to the level of protection they can expect applied to their sensitive data.

Its presently unclear when Google may officially announce such a technology, though the current project reportedly encompasses two main variants of the platform, a Google-branded system and a white-label one meant to be made available for rebranding by other companies. Google is said to have been seeking outside expertise to fuel its blockchain ambitions in recent years, primarily through acquisitions which remain largely unannounced. The firm has already been maintaining a testing cloud environment allowing third parties to run blockchain technologies on its infrastructure since 2016. The company previously confirmed its internally experimenting with blockchain applications but has yet to indicate its prepared for entering the emerging segment with a commercial product in any capacity.The Houzz app has been updated with ARCore support following Googles initial announcement from March 20 that it was expanding the reach of ARCore with more applications that contain the technology. For Houzz and its app, the added support for ARCore means that users will be able to place virtual representations of furniture and other home decor items anywhere in their home to see how they would look. This is the exact same kind of feature that Lowes launched with its app yesterday and works in the same fashion. You find a piece of furniture you like in the Houzz app, and you can see how it would look if you purchased that item and brought it home.

To access this function users will need to open the View in My Room 3D tool that was added to the Houzz app back in 2017. Worth noting though, is that the app will need to be updated and on the latest version as the update contains the ARCore capabilities for the tool. Youll also need to have a smartphone that supports ARCore, like any of Googles Pixel devices, before you can utilize the feature.

For those that have the compatible phone and the latest version of the app with the feature available, any items that are placed in the home virtually through the augmented reality view will be true to scale according to Houzz, so youll be able to gauge things perfectly, meaning youll be able to tell if that sofa is too long for the space you wanted to put it. For Houzz, adding this functionality was likely a no-brainer, as it mentions that people who used the View in My Room 3D tool were eleven times more likely to make a purchase, and that number may only go up now that the tool has been updated with support for ARCore.Huawei is no stranger to the scrutiny that it has been facing in the US, for quite a few years now. But things really started to change for the Shenzhen-based smartphone maker this year. With AT&T and Verizon dropping deals to sell its Mate 10 Pro smartphone just days before CES  where Huawei was due to announce the fact that the phone would be available at both carriers. Instead, Huawei had to opt for announcing that the Mate 10 Pro would be available unlocked in the US for $799. The latest chapter in this saga is the fact that Best Buy is going to discontinue selling Huaweis smartphones and other products.

In the grand scheme of things, Best Buy dropping Huaweis products probably wont affect Huaweis sales numbers in the US, seeing as Amazon and Newegg are still selling its products  at least at the time of writing this. Its likely that Amazon sells far more Huawei smartphones than Best Buy, though that is not confirmed, since those specific numbers are not made public by either the retailers or Huawei. But Best Buy was the only physical store that you could walk into and actually see a Huawei smartphone, so that could have a big affect on Huaweis business in the US.

How Huawei got here

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It all truly started back around 2011 when Huawei was looking to enter the US in earnest. The US Government  at the time, under President Obamas leadership  was worried about Huawei using its devices to spy on its users. The White House opened an investigation, as well as a few other regulatory agencies, and found nothing. The White Houses investigation actually lasted around 18 months, and found no proof whatsoever of Huawei spying on its users with its smartphones. The spying allegations seemed to dissipate in recent years, until around 2016, when Huawei began looking to get back into the US again. However, it really gained steam in late 2017 and into 2018, under the Trump Administration.

As we mentioned before, AT&T and Verizon both pulled the plug on its deal with Huawei to sell its Mate 10 Pro smartphone ahead of CES  where the US availability was slated to be announced. Later on in January, a few reports came out that the US government was urging carriers to not only refrain from carrying Huawei smartphones, but also refrain from using their equipment for their 5G networks. Huawei doesnt just build smartphones and tablets, it also builds network hardware, which is very commonly used in Asia and Europe, but you wont find it here in the US.

The companys CEO, Richard Yu, seemed to have gotten fed up with all the allegations of spying, and when talking to the BBC at Mobile World Congress in February, stated that its competitors are keeping Huawei out of the US. Stating that competitors (likely referring to Samsung and Apple, which have a stranglehold on the US market) are using the government to keep Huawei out of the US market. While Huaweis public relations department was in damage control shortly after that interview, the entire company has since followed Yus words, and are also claiming that its competitors are keeping Huawei from entering the US.

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Are competitors scared of Huawei entering the US?

Competitors should be scared of Huawei entering the US, but they shouldnt be able to keep them from entering. Huawei builds quality smartphones, that can rival the best from Samsung and Apple, and is pushing the boundaries in the camera and battery departments. Huawei isnt a small smartphone maker either, in fact it is the third largest, globally with 11% market share, sitting behind Apple and Samsung. So its definitely possible that both Apple and Samsung see Huawei as a competitor, but there is no proof that those two companies are using the government to keep Huawei out of the US. And it likely wont be proven, unless a whistleblower comes out and says that is exactly what is happening here.

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It is very possible that Samsung and Apple are using President Trumps hatred towards Chinese companies to keep Huawei out of the US. The President recently signed an executive order keeping Broadcom from buying Qualcomm (even though Broadcom is technically a US company, though its second headquarters are now in Singapore, but are moving back to the US soon). Trump has also been keen on making sure Chinese companies are not able to start business in the US. So its very possible that Samsung and Apple are playing on Trumps views on China to keep Huawei out. Especially since Huaweis hardships really started when Trump took office in January 2017.

How can Huawei stay in the US?

After Best Buy opted to drop Huaweis products in the US, other retailers could do the same, which could effectively keep Huawei out of the US. Now as long as the FCC approves Huaweis smartphones to be sold in the US, Huawei wont be officially leaving the market, but if its devices are only sold on Huawei and Honors websites, its going to be much harder to get a decent chunk of the market share in the US. Seeing as many people buy smartphones from retailers like Best Buy, Amazon, Newegg and B&H Photo, and even more buy from carriers  which is why Huawei had been trying to get carrier agreements in place.

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It wouldnt be too surprising to see Huawei pack up shop and head out of the US. Though, many are going to hope that Huawei does opt to stay, as it does make some incredible devices, and some that are even better than what Apple and Samsung both offer. Hopefully, Huawei is able to clear its name in these spying allegations, especially since many believe that Huawei is part-owned by the Chinese government, which is not true whatsoever. Huawei has quite a bit of work to do in the US market, if it really wants to succeed and challenge the heavyweights of Apple and Samsung.

Wrap Up

Huawei isnt the only Chinese manufacturer that is having trouble in the US, ZTE is also having issues, and its business is essentially the same as Huawei. Where it also does network equipment, though it hasnt been [reportedly] barred from carriers using its equipment for 5G networks. But it is appearing that any Chinese smartphone maker that wants to enter the US, theres going to be some big hurdles for them to climb. And that includes Xiaomi who has been looking to get into the US market for quite some time now, and may jump in next year. Regulation should loosen up for these companies in the coming years  considering easing regulations is one of the things that President Trump campaigned on when running for President in 2016. But only time will tell.Netflix today announced it is opening a bug bounty program to the public, allowing anyone who finds a bug or critical issue to provide details on that issue and possibly receive a financial reward  often dictated by the severity of the issue  in return. This sees Netflix added to a growing list of tech companies (including Google and Samsung) who have turned to the public pool of researchers as an additional means to improve the functionality and the security of their products.

Although the public side of the bug bounty is a new thing, Netflix has explained a private version of the bounty program has been in effect since September, 2016. The streaming service confirmed as part of that private launch 275 issues had been submitted, with 145 of them deemed as valid issues that varied in their level of importance. The company also explained that the private launch has in-part being used as a testing platform for this public launch with the number of researchers involved gradually increasing from the initial 100 up to around 700 at the last count. Something which is likely to now increase significantly with the opening of the platform to the public.

As for the reward tiers, Netflix has not gone into specifics on this point other than stating that at present $15,000 is the highest reward payout to date for the program  with this equating to what the company defined as a critical vulnerability. Therefore, it should be expected rewards on offer will decrease accordingly in line with the decreased severity of the issue. In either case, Netflix states that the framework that is now in place means the whole bug bounty process has been streamlined to be as efficient as possible with the companys engineers able to evaluate and award rewards with autonomy. Something the company says helps as an additional motivator for researchers to take part in the program in the first place. If a financial reward is not enough on its own, Netflix also stated that if a change is made based on a reported issue, the first researcher to report the issue is added to its publicly visible Security Researcher Hall of Fame.Samsung is still undecided on the fingerprint reader of the Galaxy Note 9 but should finalize its plans for the upcoming device in the coming days, The Korea Heralds Investor reported Thursday, citing people familiar with the latest developments at the firm. The companys panel manufacturing arm Samsung Display is said to have prepared three or four potential fingerprint scanning options for the Galaxy Note 9 that would allow the sensor to be integrated into the smartphones screen, insiders claim, suggesting the upcoming phablet may end up with an optical sensing solution after all.

While Samsung traditionally finalizes the concept of its next Galaxy Note-branded device by this time of the year, around five months before flow production is scheduled to start, the Galaxy Note 9 project was delayed due to the fingerprint reader dilemma which is now set to be resolved by the end of the month, as per the same report. That state of affairs shouldnt impact Samsungs traditional product release roadmap, with the Galaxy Note 9 still being expected to debut by late summer. With the Seoul-based phone maker already starting firmware development for the device, the handset may even debut less than a year after its predecessor which was unveiled on August 23, 2017.

Samsung has been actively developing in-screen fingerprint readers for approximately half a decade now and repeatedly attempted commercializing them following the Galaxy Note 7s release in the summer of 2016, according to previous reports. Insiders claim the company ended up circumventing the technology on numerous occasions as it struggled with yield rates and achieving an acceptable level of accuracy and convenience of such authentication applications. Some industry analysts remain unconvinced about Samsungs ability to improve the technology in a substantial manner in time for the mass-production of its next S Pen-equipped Android flagship. The Galaxy Note 9 is expected to feature internal hardware thats relatively similar to that of the Galaxy S9 Plus and stick with the Infinity Display-centric design of Samsungs recent ultra-premium offerings. The handset is also likely to be the companys final high-end smartphone that lacks 5G capabilities.Verizon spent more on ads last month than any other U.S. carrier totaling an estimated $55 Million just for ads and commercials in February alone. That number shouldnt seem surprising given Verizons ranking as the number one U.S. carrier in terms of subscriber numbers, which help the carrier to rack up a sizable amount in annual revenue each year. The data, which comes from iSpot.tv and Fierce Wireless, also shows various other pieces of information about the wireless industrys ad spending habits, including how much some of the other carriers spent on ads last month, as well as which ads for each carrier were the most expensive.

For Verizon, its most expensive ad cost it more than half of its total monthly spending amount, said to be totaled at about $32.5 Million for the Departure ad. Though the iSpot.tv data doesnt mention anything about why the ads are expensive as they are, for Verizon and Departure a big contributing factor is likely that it included Thomas Middleditch, who most will commonly know from his role on HBOs Silicon Valley. The remaining amount of money Verizon spent on ads last month was spread out across eleven more ads, all of which combined were ran almost 7,600 times over the course of the month.

Sprint was the next biggest spender with a total of $51.3 million for a total of 15 ads which ran almost 7,700 times, and its most expensive ad cost it $26 Million, which, is a fair amount less than what Verizon spent for a single ad but not by much, and $26 Million for one ad is still quite a hefty sum. T-Mobile spent nearly as much as Sprint, totaling $51.1 Million for ten ads with $12 Million being attributed to a single ad, though one interesting thing of note is that T-Mobiles ads ran almost 8,800 times, which is a lot more than the number of times ads ran for Verizon and Sprint, and it spent less money than both carriers. Included in the measurement data in addition to these three top carriers were Boost Mobile and Metro PCS, both of which spent a total of $16.3 Million and $$23.3 Million on ads last month respectively. Noticeably absent however, is data about AT&Ts ad spending, though there is a category for other carriers which it is likely lumped into.The police department in Raleigh, North Carolina is obtaining warrants meant to compel Google to disclose personal data pulled from all applicable devices whose geolocation data pins them at or near the scene of a crime within a certain time frame. The tactic is being used in the investigations into two separate shootings in the area. Essentially, the investigators have put up an imaginary threshold around the crime scenes and are asking for data on every smartphone that goes into that area during likely time frames for the suspect to be there, with the obvious goal being to obtain data on the suspect that will help find them. In order to avoid alerting the suspect, the warrants come with orders for Google not to alert affected users that their data has been pulled and handed over to law enforcement officials. The breaking of this news is therefore a double-edged sword; if the perpetrators of these crimes are indeed reading mobile news sites, they will find out that their smart device of choice could betray them. On the other side of the coin, the innocent general public is now aware that at least one police department in the United States is using this tactic and may have their data in hand, and the tactic may well be used by other departments elsewhere.

The move has some obvious privacy implications, which the Raleigh Police Department says that it has indeed considered. The Department says that the tactic does not violate Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizure because it casts its net based on proximity to a crime scene in such a way that the suspect is almost certainly ensnared, causing cold logic to be used as probable cause. The tactic is a seemingly natural evolution of current practices, which often include using location information from smartphones and other devices to track suspects or figure out where they were. Privacy advocates and attorneys have voiced concerns over this tactic and the precedent that it could set.

Google, for its part, has not spoken out on this particular issue as of this writing. As the issue enters popular media, its quite probable that the company will release some sort of statement on this practice. The clause in the warrants that keeps Google from alerting affected users may have some bearing on the companys handling of the matter, but as with any other issue where tech, government, and privacy all collide, only time will tell what will happen with this case and how similar cases will be handled going forward.Following the Xiaomi Mi MIX 2S Pacific Rim-themed teaser video which surfaced earlier today, two new video teasers have popped up. These new videos are a bit more mysterious, they were both shared by the company via Weibo (Chinese social network), and both of them feature famous painters and their artwork. We have included links to both videos below this article, in case you want to check them out, as embedding them was not an option due to the fact they come from Weibo.

The first video is teasing the Xiaomi Mi MIX 2S facial recognition feature, which will be able to recognize your face even if youre wearing a hat, at least according to this teaser, and changes when it comes to facial hair probably wont affect its performance either. That teaser actually shows us a video montage set to Johann Strauss Voices of Spring classical tune. Now, the other teaser video features famous paintings, and in that video, you will also see a symbol which will signal a scene-recognition feature. This is probably suggesting that the Mi MIX 2S will have some camera AI features, and that it will be able to recognize a scene to optimize an image that you take. So, the Mi MIX 2S is expected to recognize landscape, buildings, people, pets, and so on. That is pretty much it as far as these teasers are concerned, though it is worth noting that the Mi MIX 2S will be announced on March 27 in China, and that a ton of info regarding this smartphone surfaced already.

The companys brand ambassador, Kris Wu, shared several images of the Mi MIX 2S quite recently, while the companys CEO reshared those images soon after. The Mi MIX 2S will sport really thin bezels, and it will resemble its predecessor, the Mi MIX 2, quite a bit. The Mi MIX 2S is, unlike the Mi MIX 2, expected to sport a dual camera setup on the back, while the phone will probably ship with a rear-facing fingerprint scanner as well. The device will be fueled by the Snapdragon 845 64-bit octa-core processor, that had been confirmed earlier, while the device will ship with the companys MIUI 9 skin, which will be included on top of Android Nougat or Oreo. The phone will probably launch in both 6GB and 8GB RAM variants, and its even possible that Xiaomi will manufacture glass + metal and ceramic unibody variants of the Mi MIX 2S, as was the case with the Mi MIX 2.

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Scene Recognition Video

Facial Recognition VideoAuthorAccording to Catalan MP Joan Josep Nuet who was included in the first group of Catalan politicians called to testify before the Supreme Court in the case against the independence process, Supreme Court judge Llarena welcomed them by saying: Relax, this is not the National Court". This came after the Spanish Supreme Court decided to take charge of the investigation of the case, and after judge Carmen Lamela, of the National Court, had remanded the two Jordis to provisional prison without bail (they are still behind bars, more than five months later). The only difference that comes to mind is that Lamela acted shamelessly as a judge whose decisions are biased by political instructions, while Llarena has tried to give his resolutions and judicial statements a technically more elaborate appearance. This, however has been completely undone by his most recent decisions: not allowing Jordi Sanchez to attend the investiture session for the presidency, and now citing Jordi Turull to appear, with the possibility of sending him to prison, just a few hours after the Speaker of the House, Roger Torrent, announced a third round of talks to propose him as a candidate for the presidency. The judge and all those who want to continue proclaiming the alleged independence of Spanish justice can dress it up with as many technicalities as they want, but the political persecution that lies behind these decisions is brazen and crass.

In Spain the political persecution that lies behind the judicial decisions is brazen and crass Llarena, however, insists on trying to conceal this third obstacle to the formation of a government in Catalonia within the overly muddy waters of the general case [against Catalan separatism]. And so, in order that people not say that he is moving only against Turull, he has also called Carme Forcadell, Marta Rovira and three ex-ministers who, like Turull, have already suffered the ignominy of being political prisoners: Raul Romeva, Dolors Bassa and Josep Rull. All of them could be sent, or returned, to jail following Friday's statement. No matter how you look at it, they can only be charged with crimes of opinion, the kind of offence that is only prosecuted (without ever calling it by name, of course) in authoritarian regimes. Like that which is being imposed in Spain, with the determined support, it must be said, of a large segment (probably a majority) of the Spanish people, the media, and the political parties with the highest representation in Madrids parliament. Former Catalan Attorney General Jose Maria Mena claims that the imprisoned Catalan leaders are political prisoners. An ex-magistrate of the Supreme Court, Jose Antonio Martin Pallin, has denounced that the current situation reminds him of what he experienced during Franco's dictatorship. He also claims that Llarena is guilty of wilfully neglecting his duty, and warns that the whole case against the independence process could be invalid. Professor of Constitutional Law Javier Perez Royo also sees neglect of duty, and insists that all Catalan citizens could file complaints against Llarena because he has also violated their rights. Because these are weighty opinions, Llarena a keen judge persists in proving them right. And thus the bar of Spanish justice and democracy has been precisely set.Three border provinces of the Dominican Republic will see additional forces assigned to the defense of the border with Haiti. The order was issued by President Danilo Medina on February 27, 2018.



Dominican troops are sent to the border with Haiti as sentinels in charge of blocking illegal immigrants, drug trafficking, and the smuggling of goods (Picture source: Dominican Today)

The plan is designed to counteract the well-known traffic of undocumented persons, drug trafficking, and the smuggling of goods into the country. The deployment will involve 1,000 troops from the Army, Navy, and Air Force; the commissioning of 30 drones and 50 new vehicles for patrol; and the use of Air Force aircraft and Navy vessels to support ground troops. Defense Minister Lieutenant General Ruben Dario Paulino Sem traveled to Dajabon, Elias Pina, and Jimani to supervise the formal start of the operations. He handed off command of the operations to commanders of the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th Army Brigades.

The 900 soldiers assigned to this sentinel mission have been duly trained with command courses oriented to develop their skills, abilities, and aptitudes for the operational tasks they will have to carry on.

The drones acquired by the Government for the MIDE are equipped with state-of-the-art technology and designed, especially for military and surveillance purposes, to take high-resolution images and transmit them in real time to the command post at the border, to the headquarters of the ERD and the MIDE information processing center. The information provided by the MIDE indicates that along with the entry into operations of the drones, the intelligence structure has also been strengthened in a general sense.By: Vasundhara Rastogi

Following the withdrawal of the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), the 11 remaining signatories of the TPP agreed to move ahead with a revised TPP. The rechristened Comprehensive Progressive Agreement for the Tran-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) was formally signed on March 8, 2018, and will enter into force as soon as at least six out of 11 member countries ratify it. The 11 member countries are Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, and Vietnam.

RELATED: Pre-Investment and Market Entry Advisory from Dezan Shira & Associates

How is CPTPP different from TPP?

Similar to the stated objectives of the original TPP, the revised trade agreement aims at promoting economic integration through liberalization of trade and investment. In terms of the agreement text, it maintains most of the annexes from the original 12-party TPP agreement except a list of 20 clauses that have been temporarily suspended by the signatory countries. These are, in particular, provisions on intellectual property, arbitration, investment dispute resolution and express delivery services. The suspended provisions  which were originally negotiated by the US, and were unpopular amongst other member countries  could be reinstated in the future, if the countries mutually agree to do so. Until then, the governments of the member states are not required to implement these rules at the domestic level.

Besides the suspension of these limited number of provisions, all other clauses of the TPP have been retained in the CPTPP. There are no other changes to any of the member countrys schedules or commitments with regards to technical barriers to trade and phytosanitary measures, competition, government procurements, state-owned enterprises, labor, and dispute settlement.

Impact of CPTPP on ASEAN and other member countries

The new trade deal  without the US  represents a significantly smaller share of global GDP at 14 percent, down from 40 percent of global gross domestic product (GDP) under the original TPP. Yet, it is substantial enough to boost the economies of the member states, which means that the countries are better off with the CPTPP than without it.

Once it enters into force, the CPTPP will gradually remove tariffs on a high percentage of goods traded among the member states, and expand their market reach to a region of over 500 million people, having a combined GDP of US$10 trillion. Besides, it will help these countries gain from access to a diversified range of sectors, efficient supply chains, greater facilitation of investment, and improved access to government procurement contracts.

The agreement will deliver 18 new free trade agreements between the CPTPP member states. For Singapore, that means new trade agreements with Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Chile, and Peru. Malaysia and Vietnam, too, will gain from the free market access into Canada, Peru, and Mexico  countries they do not currently have any trade agreements with. The CPTPP is expected to boost Vietnams exports by over 37 percent by 2025.

In the medium term, the net profit of the CPTPP to all its members is expected to be roughly 0.3 percent of their combined GDP or US$37.3 billion.

Conclusion

Foreign investors operating within ASEAN or the CPTPP states must clearly understand all aspects of the CPTPP and structure their investments accordingly to take full advantage of the agreement. For instance, it is important for investors to know that the Investor-State Dispute Settlements (ISDS) provisions have been narrowed under the CPTPP, and therefore no longer apply to foreign investment screening and private contracts between the government and foreign companies."Ratha and Dan both have top-tier expertise which will complement our offering and so enhance our reputation in Australian and Asian markets, said Mark Stanbridge, practice group lead, Australia. We are a M&A team that is growing significantly  Ratha and Dan are the fourth and fifth Australian based M&A partner hires in the last year."

Support staff taking on more first-year lawyer tasks

Law firm and legal department support staff are increasingly taking on more tasks as costs savings and efficiencies are demanded.

Legal profession recruiter Robert Half polled lawyers in the US and found that 66% said that blended or hybrid paralegal and legal secretary roles have become more prevalent in the last two years.

"Hybrid positions that combine administrative tasks with paralegal duties are becoming more widespread as firms restructure their support teams to improve efficiencies," said Jamy Sullivan, executive director of Robert Half Legal. "To deliver quality results to clients at lower billing rates, the responsibilities of legal professionals in these blended roles are also expanding to include a variety of litigation support tasks traditionally handled by first-year associates."

The survey reveals that 50% of legal support jobs at law firms or companies are hybrid roles and 15% of respondents said they intend to hire more of these roles in the next 12 months.

Global firm announces finance, banking leadership changes

Hogan Lovells has made some leadership changes in its finance and banking practice groups.

Partner Rachel Kent is ending her tenure as head of the Financial Industry Sector industry group to become head of Financial Services Regulation. This will mean a continuation of her role working with the financial sector on the significant changes in the UK, Europe and elsewhere as the result of Brexit.The trick is Spark Controlled Compression Ignition , which helps the 2.0-liter work of wonder achieve 20 - 30 percent better efficiency than the SkyActiv-G of the same displacement and number of cylinders. The amount of torque is also superior to the G, with the Hiroshima-based automaker quoting a boost of 10 - 30 percent.Despite the high-tech blunderbuss accommodated in the engine bay, the 2019 Mazda3 wont differ too much from the one available today. Take the design of the interior as a perfect example, from the point of view of the driver. Mind you, this is a prototype, so bear in mind that the production-ready model could differ here and there.Published by Chinese publication PC Auto , the leaked images of the 3s cockpit offer a glimpse into whats changed. The steering wheel of the prototype is largely the same as before, and so are the buttons and instrument panel surround. The detail that strikes a discordant note is the Audi-esque digital display of the instrument cluster, which combines premium and minimalist traits.Two configurations can be seen in the images, which appear to have been photographed by a potato, not a smartphone with a gazillion pixels and ultra whatever. The normal setting shows the tachometer on the left and speedometer on the right, with the speedos needle turning counterclockwise. Hey Mazda, it appears that youre a big fan of Aston Martin models from the pre-DB11 era, arent you?The sporty setting, on the other hand, sees the speedometer and tachometer combined into one gauge. It has that motorsport feeling to it, but the 6,000-rpm redline is nothing to write home about. Last, but certainly not least, the P displayed on the screen confirms that this prototype is gifted with an automatic transmission, most likely an evolution of the SkyActiv-Drive slushbox.Previewed by the KAI Concept , the 2019 Mazda3 is expected to debut by the end of the year. Deliveries for domestic, European, and American markets should start at the beginning of 2019.The start-up, established in 2014, aims to create a revolutionary electric car, that can be charged based on Faraday's law of induction. There were two cars presented until now by the start-up, the FF Zero1 in 2016, and the FF91, one year later.This latter model is now said to be ready to get a pre-production version as soon as August this year. The model is to be built at a new facility in Hanford, California, where Faraday Future has already begun preparatory work. And theres video below to prove it.When and if the FF91 will hit the roads, it would prove to be quite a sight in the electric automotive world. The 300 miles advertised range (482 km) would put it right beside the giants, at the top of the pack.At the same time, the huge 1,050 horsepower developed by the electric drivetrain would allow for naught to sixty acceleration time of 2.39 seconds, making it perhaps the fastest in its world.Its unclear what the problem holding Faraday Future back is. Back in early 2017, the company bragged of having over 60,000 reservations for the model in just a few weeks. Thats way more than Jaguar received for the I-Pace in a lot more time.Initially, Faraday Future was planning to assemble the FF91 at a site in Las Vegas, after a huge $1 billion investment. The plan fell through in 2017.The Hanford facility used to belong to Pirelli and has now been leased by the start-up to create the assembly lines for the FF91. The plant is expected to employ up to 1,300 workers, over 3 shifts.The Prancing Horse was caught on camera outside the Mugello Circuit, with this Italian encounter showing the Pista next to a regular 488, if we might call the latter so.Returning to our real-world curiosty we mentioned above, we're particulary curious to check out the FDE system of the newcomer - we're refering to the Ferrari Dynamic Enhancer, a feature that uses advanced braking-based torque vectoring to help the driver perform the tail-out dance.Here's how the Italian describe the system: "The FDE uses Ferrari software to adjust the brake pressure at the calipers. This additional level of control further fine-tunes the Ferrari 488 Pista's performance through, and powering out of, corners making the car's handling even more effortless, intuitive and predictable. The extra confidence the system gives means that drivers can more easily control yaw angles, even on the limit,"Then again, with the Pista badge boosting the maximum output to 720 ponies (we're looking at a 50 horsepower increase here), while allowing the dry weight of the mid-engine animal to drop to 1,280 kg (2,822 lbs), the advances regarding the interaction with the driver are welcome.Oh, and we still don't know the pricing of the Ferrari 488 Pista , which is expected to sit north of the $300,000 mark.P.S.: If you missed the Geneva introduction of the Italian exotic, we've added a second video below (the clip on the right), which shows the 488 Pista moving around during the Swiss event.Having a realtime map of empty parking spaces might be just what the doctor prescribed. And mapping parking lots might not be as complicated as it might seem at first.There are more and more cars out there fitted with parking or proximity sensors. These sensors, says Ford, can do more than alert the drivers when theyve reached the end of the allocated parking space. They can be used to map the lot, and even relay that information to other cars, so that they could go for the bullseye.The idea is to have this sort of information available through crowd-sourcing. Sure, one driver, the first to reach the parking lot, will have to sacrifice himself and go around the lot scanning, before settling for an empty spot. But thats the whole point of having a crowd-sourced map. On another occasion, the said driver would benefit from another driver's sacrifice.Ford calls this collaborative parking. The information gathered by vehicles is shared with other cars, but with infrastructure as well, so that it could be picked up not only by Ford vehicles, but by most makes capable of car-to-infrastructure communication.Data is sent to a map shown on screens of cars, alerting the driver by red and green colors which spaces may be free.We understand how much wasted time, and unnecessary stress is caused by searching for parking spaces in towns and cities, said Christian Ress from Ford Research and Advanced Engineering.With our research into collaborative parking, we see an opportunity to hand that time back to drivers, helping them enjoy happier, healthier and more efficient journeys.Ford's research is part of a UK government-funded project called Autodrive. Its 20 million pounds goal is to develop self-driving and connected-car technologies.kWh

EV

While we've already covered the first two letters in the nameplate of the crossover, the "C" at the end lets us know that, as is the case with the GLC, we'll be dealing with a C-Class-sized offering in terms of length.The German carmaker is expected to showcase the production form of the EQC next year, with this potentially hitting the US market as a 2020 model.The newcomer is part of an electric vehicle offensive that will see the three-pointed star introducing nine more such machines by 2025, with one of them being the A-Class-sized EQA.Returning to the EQC, this rides on a modular platform dubbed the Modular Electric Architecture (MEA). Given the dedicated architecture, the battery is stored in the floor, which each of the axles can receive an electric motor.Speaking of the battery, the lithium-ion unit will come from the Daimler subsidiary Deutsche Automotive.So far, the carmaker has only mentioned that EQC will offer more than 70, while coming with multiple levels of output, with the crossover deliver a range of at least 300 miles per charge.The competition for the Mercedes-Benz EQC is uber-fierce. For instance, Jaguar has already introduced its model for the compact premium crossover segment, namely the i-Pace And we should also mention the 2020 BMW iX3 , which is currently in its advanced development stages. As for Porsche, Zuffehnausen is expected to come up with a Macan-sized electric crossover. This should be built on the PPE (Premium Platform Electric)architecture that's being developed together with Audi, which means Ingolstadt will also be active in this segment thanks to its e-tron badge. Of course, we can't forget the upcoming Tesla Model Y.SUV

ICE

The move is likely to prompt similar others across the continent, as local authorities are struggling to become more environmentally-friendly, including through measures like banning access to some diesel vehicles in city centers.The Basel-Stadt police department said it will buy seven electric SUVs, which will be converted for use as police cars by Dutch security company Force Pro.In a statement released last week, authorities say they have reached this decision after careful analysis of the pros and cons of using EVs for law enforcement. Although being around $50,000 more expensive than current diesel cars, police say the much lower operating and maintenance costs is enough to justify the move.To those arguing that the range of the model might not be enough to get the police to and from an incident, the department says their force currently averages 200 km per day (124 miles), while the maximum range of the model X is 500 km (310 miles).The requirements of the cantonal police can currently only be fulfilled by one supplier of electric vehicles on the market, said the police in a statement The Model X was introduced by Tesla in 2015, to complete the offering together with the Model S sedan. The two are built on the same platform, theis in essence a beefed-up version of the S.It was chosen by Swiss police in part to just that: more storage space and a higher payload than thecars currently in use.The seven vehicles will be ready to enter service later this year, despite detractors claiming the money will be ill-spent on cars that have not been tested in everyday police use.In the wake of the still-under-investigation incident, Toyota announced on Tuesday it will temporarily halt the tests of its Chauffeur autonomous driving system in the country.The Japanese automaker does not justify the decision by the need to further analyze the safety of its system, but says it has has been made to protect the drivers involved in its project, which it claims have been affected by the tragedy.Because we feel the incident may have an emotional effect on our test drivers, we have decided to temporarily pause our Chauffeur mode testing on public roads, Toyota said in a statement for Bloomberg Toyota introduced its self-driving system in the U.S. late last year, on two platforms, called the Guardian and Chauffer. The former is being tested with drivers who will be asked to intervene during the vehicles operation, while the latter is mainly autonomous.The tens of other automakers, IT companies and start-ups doing tests in this field have not yet responded in any way to the Uber incident.Despite the high-profile of the case and the implications it may have onnthe emerging industry, initial investigation into the incident in Tempe, Arizona, tends to blame it on the woman who got killed.Tempe police released on Wednesday onboard footage from the Volvo XC90 involved in the crash, further strengthening the idea that the car is not at fault.Its very clear it would have been difficult to avoid this collision in any mode based on how she came from the shadows right into the roadway, local chief of police Sylvia Moir told the San Francisco Chronicle moments after the incident.Back at the 2018 Geneva Motor Show, Mercedes-Benz introduced the updated C-Class sedan and wagon. It featured a subtle styling upgrade with most of changes found in the tech department. Now, the German automaker has revealed its two-door counterpart in the form of the refreshed C-Class Coupe and Cabriolet.

Unsurprisingly, both the C-Class Coupe and Cabriolet receive the same styling upgrades from their four-door sibling. The AMG-line single-bar diamond grill is now used on the standard model C-Class Coupe and Cabriolet. It is then flanked by new full-LED headlights, which also come standard. Meanwhile, the C43 AMG models are now denoted by a two-bar grill, a more prominent rear diffuser, and twin circular exhaust tips.

Similar to the four-door C-Class, most of the changes found on the Coupe and Cabriolet are found inside and in the tech department. Inside, all-models now come with a 10.25-inch infotainment screen with smartphone integration. Buyers can now also opt to upgrade to a 12.3-inch digital gauge cluster as well as a multi-function steering wheel with touch controls that respond to swiping motions.

New on the C-Class Coupe and Cabriolet is the Intelligent Drive assist tech taken from the S-Class. The new safety tech includes adaptive cruise control, lane keep assist, lane change assist, active steering assist, automatic emergency braking, and automatic evasive steering. There are also improved camera and radars fitted, allowing the C-Class to see further and wider than previous.

Under the hood, the C300 Coupe and Cabriolet continue to use a 2.0-liter turbocharged four-cylinder engine. Power has been increased however as it now outputs 255 PS (14 PS more) and 370 Nm of torque. It is then mated to a 9-speed automatic transmission which sends power to either the rear wheel or all-four wheels depending on the the variant.

The C43 AMG also gets a boost in power. The 3.0-liter biturbo V6 now produces 385 PS  23 PS over the previous  and 520 Nm of torque. A 9-speed automatic and 4MATIC all-wheel drive then comes as standard.Struggling with worsening pilot retention in a hot civil hiring market, the Navy is offering its aviators substantial bonuses to stay in the service. For the second year in a row, the Navy has boosted its incentive pay up to $175,000 for pilots who sign on for a five-year term.

Vice Admiral Robert Burke told Congress last month that the Navy isnt retaining sufficient pilots in the strike fighter, electronic attack and helicopter mine countermeasure specialties as airlines continue to draw away experienced pilots for higher-paying civil jobs.

The Air Force is having similar retention problems. That service expects to retain about 65 percent of its pilots with retention bonuses, but recently, that rate has plummeted. The Air Force said it finished 2017 with 2000 fewer pilots than it needed, up from a 1500-pilot shortage the previous year.

The Navy Times reported that pilots who sign on for five years quality for up to $35,000 a year in typical bonuses. To entice pilots not willing to sign on for five years, the Navy is also offering three-year extensions.The newly-released Capitol Hill government spending plan rejects the White House's push to sharply cut renewable energy R&D and kill an Energy Department program that seeds breakthrough technology innovation.

Why it matters: There's little GOP appetite on Capitol Hill for the White House's energy spending agenda, even as Republicans largely support the Trump administration's efforts to unwind regulations and expand fossil fuel development.

A few numbers: The sweeping fiscal year 2018 spending plan would . . .

Provide over $2.3 billion for DOE's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, an increase over current levels that rejects the White House's proposal to cut funding by two-thirds.

for DOE's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, an increase over current levels that rejects the White House's proposal to cut funding by two-thirds. Provide $353 million for DOE's Advanced Research Projects Agency  a roughly $48 million boost that bats aside the White House effort to end the program that's popular on both sides of the aisle.

for DOE's Advanced Research Projects Agency  a roughly $48 million boost that bats aside the White House effort to end the program that's popular on both sides of the aisle. Increase funding for DOE's fossil energy arm to roughly $727 million, in contrast to the White House request for a cut in its fiscal year 2018 request. The Office of Fossil Energy includes work to develop low-carbon coal tech.

to roughly $727 million, in contrast to the White House request for a cut in its fiscal year 2018 request. The Office of Fossil Energy includes work to develop low-carbon coal tech. DOE's Office of Science would see an $868 million boost to $6.26 billion, per Science Magazine  instead of the 15% cut the White House wanted.

Our thought bubble: While the White House budget plan is always DOA, it nonetheless helps to set parameters around decisions. So that's one reason  though hardly the only one  that advocates for a huge increase in clean tech R&D spending won't have traction anytime soon.

Go deeper: This Washington Examiner piece looks at EPA funding and the bill's mandate for another round of sales from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

Go way deeper: You can read the whole 2,232 page, $1.3 trillion federal spending bill here.

Editor's note: This story has been corrected to compare the omnibus to the White House's FY 2018 proposal and not FY 2019 proposal.The European Commission proposed a new tax Wednesday that stands to hit major web companies like Google and Facebook. The new 3% tax on revenue applies to certain online businesses, including digital ads and ride-hailing, but The Wall Street Journal reports that not every country that's a member of the E.U. is on board.

Why it matters: It's the latest move in Europe to crack down on powerful American tech giants.

What the EU is saying: In a press release, the EU says the measure is intended to ensure digital companies "contribute their fair share of tax" since current tax rules weren't designed to account for virtual companies with little or no physical presence within borders.

What US tech firms are saying: While acknowledging tax changes should be made to reflect today's digital economy, tech trade association Information Technology Industry Council says the move "harms business certainty in Europe and would chill trade and investment from companies across the globe."

Go deeper: The Financial Times breaks down the potential impact of the proposal.African countries launched a historic free trade agreement at the African Union Summit in Rwanda on Wednesday, establishing the largest free trade market since the formation of the World Trade Organization.

Why it matters: Encompassing 1.2 billion people and a GDP of more than $2 trillion, the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) promises to increase intraregional commerce and attract new investors to a single African market.

The agreement has been in the works since 2012 and builds on progress made over the last decade by sub-regional organizations such as the East African Community. It commits countries to removing tariffs on 90% of goods, with the remaining 10% phased in over time. In line with the WTO's Trade Facilitation Agreement, the AfCFTA also addresses non-tariff barriers such as border delays. Intellectual property, investment and competition policy will be addressed in a second phase of negotiations.

What's next: AfCFTA has a ways to go before full ratification and implementation. In Kigali, 50 African countries signed at least one of the three legal instruments that will free the movement of people, money and goods across borders. But 11 countries  including Africa's biggest economies, Nigeria and South Africa  have yet to sign the main agreement. The AfCFTA will come into force after ratification by 22 countries.

Once implemented, the AfCTA is predicted to increase intra-African trade from 16% to 52% by 2022. The UN Conference on Trade and Development has predicted that the reduction in tariffs and increased trade will deliver $3.6 billion in welfare gains to the region.

The bottom line: The AfCTA is a significant positive development within international trade and will support long-term economic growth in Africa.

Aubrey Hruby is a nonresident senior fellow in the Atlantic Council's Africa Center.The House Intelligence Committee has voted on party lines to release the report on the Russia investigation, and now the probe is formally ending. The report finds that there was no evidence of collusion between Trump associates and the Kremlin and recommends rooting out intel leaks with "mandatory polygraphs" for those with top secret security clearances, per Politico.

What now: The intelligence community must review report to redact classified information before publicly releasing it, per Politico. The Democrats will continue their investigation, but they dont have subpoena power without the Republicans on board, per CNN.

The reports other conclusions:

The possible attempts to set up a back-channel with Trump associates suggest the absence of collusion during the campaign, since the communication associated with collusion would have rendered such a 'back channel' unnecessary.

during the campaign, since the communication associated with collusion would have rendered such a 'back channel' unnecessary. Obamas intel director James Clapper provided inconsistent testimony about contacts with the media.

testimony about contacts with the media. Carter Page provided an incomplete account of his trip in 2016 to Moscow.

account of his trip in 2016 to Moscow. Trump associates had ill-advised contacts with WikiLeaks.

Rep. Adam Schiff pointed out today that there are relevant reports to the Russia investigation that have come out since Republicans ended the probe. His list:

News that other countries talk about exploiting Jared Kushner and his company.

Reports that George Nader, an advisor to the UAE with ties to Trump, was cooperating with the Mueller probe.

Reports that Roger Stone was warned about the DNC email leak.

Reports that the Special Counsel was looking into the Trump Organizations links with Russia.

Reports that former FBI Andrew McCabe kept memos of conversations with Trump.

News about Cambridge Analyticas role in the misuse of data on Facebook of 50 million Americans and its role in the 2016 election.

Editor's note: This post has been updated to include the report's findings.More than a dozen Russian news outlets, including three national newspapers, are boycotting the Russian parliament after the Ethics Committee declined to sanction Leonid Slutsky, chairman of the International Affairs Committee, for alleged sexual harassment. The decision came despite allegations from four journalists that he'd sexually harassed them, including a BBC reporter who recorded his unwanted advances.

Why it matters: This is the first massive sexual harassment scandal in Russia since the Weinstein allegations, and the act of solidarity by journalists is unprecedented, according to Ivan Kolpakov, editor-in-chief of Meduza. "This looks like the beginning of something huge," he tells Axios.North Koreas state media agency KCNA has broken its silence over the regimes latest diplomatic moves, noting a dramatic atmosphere for reconciliation with South Korea and a sign of change with the U.S., AFP reports. The release doesnt mention President Trump by name.

Why it matters: The North Korean populace likely has little awareness of potential talks between Kim Jong-un and Trump, but this release indicates that Kim's government is setting the stage.

What the release said:Russia used a procedural vote on Monday to prevent UN Human Rights Commissioner Zeid Raad al-Hussein from presenting on human rights conditions in Syria to the UN Security Council (UNSC).

Why it matters: To date, Russia has vetoed nine resolutions aimed at intensifying pressure on Syrias Bashar al-Assad, moves that not only counter U.S. interests but undermine the international system.

Turkeys actions have driven a wedge between Turkey and the U.S., which partners with Syrian Kurds against ISIS. Russia has exacerbated the situation by allowing Turkeys jihadist proxies to enter the city of Afrin in northern Syria, where they have threatened Kurds with beheading and committed other atrocities. Since Russia has bases in Afrin and controls the air space, nothing happens in the area without its acquiescence.

What's next: Britain, France and other countries sympathetic to the Syrian people should call on the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court to investigate criminal liability on the parts of Russia, Syria and Turkey. There are ways to work around Russias obstruction, including the Arria formula  named after Venezuelan diplomat Diego Arria  which allows a UNSC member to convene a meeting in an adjoining chamber when the Council is unwilling or unable to do so.

The bottom line: Trump refuses to criticize Vladimir Putin and ignores human rights issues. Absent U.S. moral leadership, other countries should take the lead to strengthen the international system and restore ethics in international affairs.

David L. Phillips is director of the Program on Peace-building and Rights at Columbia University and a former senior adviser to both the UN Secretariat and the U.S. Department of State.President Trump may find himself in a difficult position as soon as he sits down with Kim Jong-un, according to Jim Walsh, who has been in the room for previous talks and says North Koreas first pitch is often a curveball.

Ive been in settings [in which they] set it at the top of the meeting, were not going to talk about denuclearization," Walsh told Axios. "People on the other side say why the hell are we meeting?

Walsh, an international security expert at MIT, says that while negotiators from Iran, for example, tend to talk in circles before reaching their main point, North Koreans will often lay down a hard line right at the top.

Ive sat in the room with people who were meeting North Koreans for the first time. Theyre not used to the North Korean style, he says.

Setting the stage

Trump is certainly not used to the North Korean style, and a former government official who has negotiated with North Korea says beginning talks at the top level adds a host of challenges:

"This is extremely unusual for the president to be his own special envoy. He's not going to have the time or the inclination to do what the special envoy" would do to set the stage for talks.

The official said even before Trump, negotiations with North Koreans had been driven by the personalities in the room. Now, theyll be dependent on two big personalities, in Trump and Kim.

What its like in the room

Walsh says in his experience, conversations with the North Koreans are nothing like the bombastic statements that come out of North Korean state media.

The conversation is quite normal, especially if the people already know each other, he says. While the talks can sometimes be frustrating for both sides, as any conversation between countries with bad relations might be, the tone is not tense or hot or cold.

Walsh says the North Koreans generally do not confer with each other before responding, nor are there regular long pauses.

The people doing these are generally pros and understand that there are constraints, especially on the North Korean side.

The Trump factor

These talks, assuming they go ahead, will be unlike any that came before them  and skipping the lower echelons makes things less predictable:

Trump and Kim Jong-un will likely speak in broad strokes, without a lot of detailed conditions, the former official said.

Trump doesnt have a full roster of experts on his side, given key vacancies, and has been known to make snap decisions when it comes to foreign policy.

of experts on his side, given key vacancies, and has been known to make snap decisions when it comes to foreign policy. Normally, North Korean officials have to stick to strict instructions set out before negotiations. Officials down the food chain have to be very careful about what they say because they could get shot," Walsh says. Kim, however, doesnt have a congress or an adversarial press to answer to, or elections to worry about.

"If he flips, everything flips, thats a little bit of wild card."

 Jim Walsh

What to expect

 Its not in [the North Koreans'] interest for the summit to crash and burn. I dont think theyre going to show up just to shut it down, Walsh says.

Its not in [the North Koreans'] interest for the summit to crash and burn. I dont think theyre going to show up just to shut it down, Walsh says. But if things do turn sour, he says, that very much increases the likelihood that the two countries will find themselves on a fast track to some sort of military conflict.

Go deeper: North Korea is a black hole for U.S. intel and how past talks have failed.As the US and China slouch towards each others throats over trade and technology, one of the issues that is set to get hot again is Taiwan. Late last week, President Trump signed a bill that encourages high-level official bilateral visits between Washington and the island nation of 23 million. Beijing, which considers Taiwan to still be a province of China, is not pleased.

The big picture: Self-governing Taiwan is where the nationalist forces who lost the Chinese civil war to Mao set up shop in 1949. As part of a deal to establish formal relations with China in 1979, the US agreed to pantomime Beijings One China policy, while also maintaining a robust trade relationship with the island that includes more than $25 billion in arms sales since then.

In recent months, the temperature has risen as the US broadens its diplomatic support for the pro-independence leadership that won Taiwans elections in 2016, while China has increased its efforts to diplomatically isolate and militarily threaten the island. Chinese officials have warned that if the US keeps up its new overtures to Taiwan, Beijing could move to forcefully reunite the island with the mainland  a longstanding threat that carries new weight under the assertive leadership of President Xi Jinping.

Trump and Congress, for their part, seem unfazed. Set in the context of broader tensions between the US and China  over trade, technology, North Korea, and the South China Sea  this long-simmering point of contention between Washington and Beijing could get hot again, and fast.

Go deeper: U.S. official visits Taiwan amid tensions with China over travel act.

Sign up for Signal, a twice-weekly newsletter from GZERO Media, a Eurasia Group company, and follow @saosasha on Twitter.Alicia Vikander as Lara Croft in Tomb Raider.

Almost, not quite, sums up Roar Uthaugs Tomb Raider, another reboot of a long-dormant property that does its best to rekindle the initial fervor surrounding Lara Croft, the video game character that spawned two Angelina Jolie features. Thanks to a fresh take on her origin as well as a winning turn from Alicia Vikander that helps ground the action in a degree of reality, the film gets off to a promising start. However, it falters in its second hour with an adventure that comes off as a rote exercise despite its promising premise.



Lara has quite a chip on her shoulder. Working as a bicycle messenger, shes turned her back on the vast fortune left by her father, Lord Richard (Dominic West). Having disappeared seven years ago, Lara finally cedes to the wishes of her stepmother (Kristin Scott Thomas) and signs documents that would declare him legally dead and put his fortune in her hands. However, just as shes about to do so, a mysterious clue falls into her hands that leads her to discover just where her father went and his purpose for having done so. Commissioning a bucket of bolts from Lu Ren (Daniel Wu), whose own father went missing while taking Lord Richard to the South China Sea, this duo sets off for a remote island in the Pacific where supposedly a tomb exists that houses an ancient, evil queen.

So far, so good, but once the ship reaches its destination, the film switches to autopilot. Walton Goggins is the resident-heavy Mathias Vogel, who simply wants to uncover the tomb so that he might return to the mainland and his family. The actor does his best to bring a bit of life to the character but hes hemmed in by too many cliches to make him genuine or memorable. Equally underwhelming is the exploration of the finally found tomb, replete with its requisite deadly booby traps, cryptic curses and logic-defying amount of interior space. The set pieces that drive our heroine to the edge lack the element of surprise or suspense and the fact that Uthaug and his three editors splice together the action scenes for maximum confusion prevents the viewer from becoming fully engaged.All of this is a shame as Vikander proves to be an appealing action heroine, a far more relatable actress than Jolie and one who naturally brings a degree of much-needed levity to the movie. Screenwriters Geneva Robertson-Dworet and Alastair Siddons effectively ground the character, as they dont put Croft in the position of having to do the impossible in order to survive. This more modest approach is welcome as it prevents the film from spinning wildly out of control as so many big-budget action films do.Plucky, fun, physical, charming and tough, Vikander is very good here, and were left with the sense that she deserves a better movie. Whether she will get a chance to plunder again will depend on whether foreign audiences embrace her or not. If she does, heres hoping that when shes put through her paces, itll be in service of a worthwhile quest, as the chemistry between Vikander and Wu pops and supplies a bit of needed levity to the proceedings.By Trend

Over the past 24 hours, Armenias armed forces have 98 times violated the ceasefire along the line of contact between Azerbaijani and Armenian troops, the Azerbaijani Defense Ministry said March 22.

Armenias armed forces were using large-caliber machine guns.

The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts.

The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts.

---

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAzBy Laman Ismayilova

An exhibition of Azerbaijani artists and a concert program dedicated to Novruz holiday was held at the Azerbaijan Cultural Center in Paris.

The gala event was held at the organization of the Azerbaijani Embassy in France, the association "Ulduz" and the gallery AsmarArt, Trend Life reported.

Numerous guests viewed paintings of national artists with great interest, as well as samples of arts and crafts. Bright and colorful works created by talented Azerbaijani artists reflect the customs and traditions of Novruz holiday.

The exhibition featured works of such talented artists as Asmar Narimanbayova, Samra Akhundova, Leyla Aliyeva, Sahib Asadli, Aysel Mirgasimova, Fidan Akhundova, Rena Amrakhova, Arif Amirov, Vafa Efendizade, Azer Aliyev, and Murad Hasanzade.

Further, art lovers enjoyed fascinating concert program which marked the arrival of spring.

Asmar Narimanbayova is an associate professor of Azerbaijan State Academy of Fine Arts, and a member of the presidium of the Azerbaijan Union of Artists.

Narimanbayova was born in a family of eminent artists. Her father Togrul Narimanbayov, was world-famous Azerbaijani artist, while her mother Elmira Huseynova was a sculptor.



She grew up in the atmosphere of love to art, music and literature. Narimanbayova is an artist full of light, wide and enthusiastic soul. While creating works in different styles starting from fauvism to impressionism, then from postimpressionism to cubism and expressionism, the artist has found her individual creative manner of the letter, the original color sensation acting as a composition dominant. She has been characterized for her bold and engaging style.



Colors in her artworks fill the form with dynamics and saturate her canvas with the strong energy. Narimanbayovas works are displayed in exhibitions, international festivals and symposiums all over the world.

The creativity of the national artist has been appreciated by art professionals, and many connoisseurs and art lovers.

Her works are featured in many prestigious galleries in France, Russia, New York, Ankara, Beijing, Berlin and London.

Fidan Akhundova participated in a number of exhibitions, including Password unknown (Azerbaijan ), " Errinerungsorte" (Germany), " Granatapfel & Feuerberg" (Germany), Music in Stone" 2nd International Stone Symposium Baku, etc.

She is a member of the youth section of Artist Union of Azerbaijan, Union of Azerbaijan Cartoonists.

Rena Amrakhova is a well-known Azerbaijani artist. She also engaged in teaching other artists.

In her works, artist masterly reveals the secrets of female charm. Her canvases are distinguished by a soft color and depth of thought.

Azer Aliyev`s works have been displayed in more than 40 international and national exhibitions. In 2016, his works were displayed at Carrusel de Louvre gallery.

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Laman Ismayilova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Lam_Ismayilova

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAzBy Laman Ismayilova

The third International Terekeme Chershenbe Folklore Festival kicked off in Azerbaijan's beautiful Agsu region.

The colorful feast was held in Gagali village on March 19-21.

The project was implemented by MIRAS Social Organization in Support of Studying of Cultural Heritage with the assistance of the Azerbaijan Ministry of Culture and Tourism, Agsu Executive Power as well as the Institute of Folklore.

Bringing together participants from Azerbaijan, Turkey, Russia, Georgia, and Iran, the festival aims to promote national folklore and establish cultural bridges between countries.

A number of exhibitions, fairs, dance numbers and other events was organized as part of the celebration.

The festival's participants enjoyed workshops on the art of carpet weaving and felting. Guests of the festival also toured around region's famous landmarks.

Notably, the 2nd International Terekeme Chershenbe Folklore Festival was held in 2016. The two-day festival were attended by representatives from Azerbaijan, Turkey, Georgia, Egypt, India, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Norway, Yemen, Indonesia and Myanmar.

Novruz celebrations begin four weeks before the actual holiday. These four weeks - or, exactly four Wednesdays - are each devoted to one of the four elements: water, fire, earth and wind.

Each year, it is celebrated throughout Azerbaijan with special food, extensive spring cleaning, and traditions dating back hundreds of years.

In 2009, Novruz was included in the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity and since then, March 21 was declared the International Day of Novruz.

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Laman Ismayilova is AzerNews staff journalist, follow her on Twitter: @Lam_Ismayilova

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAzBy Trend

President of the Republic of Azerbaijan Ilham Aliyev has met with Secretary General of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) Mohammad Barkindo.

OPEC Secretary General Mohammad Barkindo thanked for the invitation to visit Azerbaijan and said he was pleased to meet with the President of the Republic of Azerbaijan.

President Aliyev recalled his meeting with Mohammad Barkindo in Davos, stressing great importance of the OPEC Secretary Generals visit to Azerbaijan where the first oil in the world was produced.

Mohammad Barkindo thanked for the warm words. He described Azerbaijan as the cradle of the oil industry, saying every oilman should come and see Azerbaijan.

President Aliyev said the visit is a good opportunity for Mohammad Barkindo to familiarize himself with Azerbaijans historical places and modern development.

President Ilham Aliyev praised successful development of Azerbaijan-OPEC cooperation, saying the country completely fulfills all its commitments to the organization.

The head of state hailed effective and coordinated efforts taken by Mohammad Barkindo and OPEC to maintain oil price stability, describing this as a good result of joint activities.

Mohammad Barkindo noted President Ilham Aliyevs role in bringing OPEC and non-OPEC members together, and hailed Azerbaijans co-chairmanship of the high-level technical committee, which led to the adoption of Declaration of Cooperation between OPEC and non-OPEC members.

Mohammad Barkindo said Azerbaijan completely fulfilled all obligations it undertook, adding this demonstrates the countrys commitment to the agreement. He said not only oil producing, but also oil consuming countries are interested in this, noting that results of this work are already obvious in the oil industry and oil markets.

The sides discussed cooperation prospects.

---

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAzBy Trend

The Georgian Prime Minister Giorgi Kvirikashvili and President Giorgi Margvelashvili have sent warm wishes to the countrys Azerbaijani population on the holiday of Novruz.

Novruz is an ancient holiday and marks the beginning of spring.

Kvirikashvili addressed the Azerbaijani population earlier today and stated that he is taking part in the celebrations and festivities with them.

My brothers, my Azerbaijanis! Happy Novruz, a beautiful holiday to celebrate a new year, the coming of spring, rebirth, the day of life and love! I share the happiness of the day with all my heart; we are compatriots of one and the same country.

"Our ancestors lived side by side, worked together, served the country together, shared happiness and sorrow. This tradition will be continued by future generations, Kvirikashvili said in his address.

The PM stated that the government of Georgia has done its utmost to create all conditions for better lives for its citizens, and taken all necessary steps to involve its ethnic minorities in more and more public activities.

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Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAzBy Trend

Chairman of the Central Election Commission (CEC) of Azerbaijan Mazahir Panahov met with a delegation led by First Deputy Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) Viktor Guminsky, who is in the country to monitor the presidential elections scheduled for Apr.11, Trend learned from the media and public relations department of the CEC Secretariat.

Greeting the CIS delegation, which always directly participates in observing electoral processes in Azerbaijan, Mazahir Panahov expressed satisfaction with the meeting held in the CEC on the eve of the elections.

Expressing gratitude for the warm welcome, head of the delegation Victor Guminsky asked about preparations for the forthcoming elections.

Panahov spoke about the projects for ensuring free, fair and transparent elections, which are of great importance for the socio-political life of Azerbaijan, as well as the forthcoming steps.

The meeting participants also exchanged views on the prospects for mutually beneficial cooperation in various spheres related to elections and other issues of mutual interest.

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Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAzBy Trend

Azerbaijanis know that President Ilham Aliyev is the only political figure with the experience and the competence to run the country, President of the Association of Friends of Azerbaijan in France Jean-Francois Mancel told Trend.

Jean-Francois Mancel, commenting on the upcoming presidential election, stressed that the pre-election climate in the country is peaceful and democratic.

He further stressed that incumbent President Ilham Aliyev is a favorite in the upcoming election.

President Ilham Aliyev has a vision that will further strengthen Azerbaijan's international influence and accelerate economic and social development, Mancel said adding that in this he is supported by First Vice-President Mehriban Aliyeva.

"President Aliyev's record is excellent despite a difficult environment," he said.

Mancel noted that the pressure exerted on Azerbaijan by the great powers, international terrorism, occupation of a fifth of the Azerbaijani territory by Armenia and the fall of the energy prices are heavy constraints.

Nevertheless, President Aliyev managed to strengthen the independence of his respected country all over the world, ensure security, to cushion the shock of the drop in oil prices thanks to a preventive financial strategy and the strengthening of the national economy, Mancel said.

The presidential election in Azerbaijan is to be held on April 11.

---

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAzBy Trend

The US visit of Bako Sahakyan, who claims to be the president of the illegal regime created in the occupied Azerbaijani territories, can seriously harm the bilateral relations between Washington and Baku, political analyst and international relations expert at the Milwaukee-based Marquette University Peter Tase told Trend.

The recent US visit of a war criminal Bako Sahakyan seriously harms the bilateral relations between the United States and the Republic of Azerbaijan, he said.

Tase said he is confident that the US State Department can undertake serious measures so that such visits to Washington DC would be impossible.

It is a fact that US Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson, has publicly prohibited the entrance to the United States of the former Attorney General of the Republic of Albania, Adriatik Llalla (accused for corruption) and his family. I am confident that the Department of State can undertake equal measures against the leadership of the illegal regime every time they plan on visiting the United States Congress and other government entities, he said.

Unfortunately, until today this matter has not been solved and is part of the double standard attitude and ambiguity embraced by international actors and applied by some US government officials, when it comes to the issue of territorial integrity of of Azerbaijan, according to Tase.

Further, Tase said that indeed, the government of Azerbaijan has been very proactive, energetic and has swiftly acted on defense of international laws and on defense of the sovereign territory of Azerbaijan.

Earlier, over Bako Sahakyans visit, the US Ambassador to Azerbaijan Robert Cekuta was summoned to the Foreign Ministry and received a note of protest, sent by the Foreign Ministry of Azerbaijan to the US State Department.

Meanwhile, Azerbaijans ambassador to the US, Elin Suleymanov, after a meeting in the State Department, presented the protest of Azerbaijan to the American side.

The conflict between the two South Caucasus countries began in 1988 when Armenia made territorial claims against Azerbaijan. As a result of the ensuing war, in 1992 Armenian armed forces occupied 20 percent of Azerbaijan, including the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts.

The 1994 ceasefire agreement was followed by peace negotiations. Armenia has not yet implemented four UN Security Council resolutions on withdrawal of its armed forces from the Nagorno-Karabakh and the surrounding districts.

---

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAzBy Trend

The talks were held at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Turkmenistan with the delegation of the Islamic Republic of Iran headed by the Minister of Oil of this country, Mr. Bijan Namdar Zangane, who arrived in Ashgabat with a working visit on March 19.

At the beginning of the meeting, the parties warmly congratulated each other on the upcoming international holiday of Novruz. Speaking about the political and diplomatic direction of cooperation, the sides noted the role of visits at higher levels. In this context, the Turkmen side noted that the forthcoming visit of the President of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Hassan Rouhani to Turkmenistan, will give a new impetus to the relations between the two countries in all its directions.

During the talks, the sides exchanged views on the current state and prospects for expanding bilateral trade, economic and energy cooperation. The parties expressed the need to actively cooperate in the energy sector in the future.

The parties also noted the Turkmen-Iranian business forum that will be held in Ashgabat in the coming days, which will promote the activation of contacts between state and private structures of the two neighboring states.

---

Follow us on Twitter @AzerNewsAzAnthony Sonnenberg's 'Still Stage, Set Life'

When: Now through June 3; public reception from 6:30 p.m.-8:30 p.m. Friday.Thirty years ago today, Beaumont Police Department officer Paul Douglas Hulsey, Jr. was shot and killed while investigating a vehicle with stolen plates parked outside a motel.

Hulsey, 30, found which room the suspect was in and approached the man, not knowing he was a serial killer wanted in connection with the brutal slayings of two teenage girls.

Michael Lee Lockhart, 27, of Toledo, Ohio, was charged with capital murder in the fatal shooting of Hulsey, whom authorities said was killed while trying to arrest Lockhart at the Beaumont motel.

The case was moved from Beaumont to San Antonio in August 1988 because of extensive publicity.

Meanwhile, Lockhart was charged in Indiana and Florida with murder in connection with the fatal stabbings of a 16-year-old girl in Griffith, Ind., and a 14-year-old girl in Land O' Lakes, Fla.

At trial in San Antonio, prosecutors said Lockhart was a suspect in 21 crimes in Texas, Indiana, Florida, Louisiana, Ohio and Georgia.

During his capital murder trial, Lockhart dove out a third-floor window at the Bexar County Courthouse as part of an escape attempt. He was injured in the 15-foot fall onto a paved roof and taken away in an ambulance.

A Bexar County jury convicted Lockhart of capital murder for Hulsey's death.

Lockhart, 37, died in the Huntsville execution chamber on Dec. 9, 1997.During a fire drill the week before spring break, three Hardin-Jefferson High School art students learned they had a last-minute assignment.

They had just over a week to design and create an Easter egg to represent Texas at the annual White House Easter Egg Roll, held every year on the White House South Lawn in Washington, D.C.

Schools from each state were asked to submit designs, and when another Texas campus dropped out at the last minute, H-J was up.

At first, they scrambled. Teacher Kate Ducote had to find the right software and assemble a

team that could put together the project quickly and wouldn't mind working during vacation.

"My family kept making fun of me because I was sitting on the beach in Florida with my iPad, drawing furiously," said senior Zoe Bjerke, one of three Ducote chose for the project, along with senior Hannah Fontenot and junior Faith Herman.

The design draws on "things you think of when you hear Texas," Fontenot said. It boots, bluebonnets and yellow roses.

The three wanted to include something that tied the project to Tropical Storm Harvey, which devastated the district and closed one of its campuses this fall. They settled on the words "Texas Strong," Bjerke said.

Their work will be printed on a two-dimensional Easter egg and displayed at the annual White House event, hosted this year by first lady Melania Trump on April 2.

The tradition, which started in 1878 under President Rutherford B. Hayes, includes rolling eggs across the White House lawn using wooden spoons, and other Easter activities. Kids enter a ticket lottery to participate.

"Our faculty advisers and the students from our high school did an outstanding job with the design," Superintendent Shannon Holmes said. "I am proud that their work will represent H-JISD and our community, and I feel it does a great job depicting emblems found in our great state."

Ducote, who worked in graphic design before she began teaching, said the project was a good introduction to work in the field for the students, because of the tight deadline and strict requirements they had to follow.

The guidelines included rules on exactly what colors and shades they could use, which made for a challenge when they first considered incorporating the Texas flag into the design. Ultimately, they decided to focus on the flowers and boots, Ducote said.

The students said this was their first time creating art for a large audience and a good experience learning how to work on a design with a team, rather than just "coming up with something and running with it" on their own.

"We are so excited that our students have the opportunity to represent the State of Texas and to participate in this national tradition," said Michelle Yentzen, president of the board of trustees.

"It truly is an honor and very exciting for our community."

LTeitz@BeaumontEnterprise.comTwitter.com/LizTeitzRiverside (Calif.) University Health System broke ground on a medical office building featuring an outpatient surgery center in Moreno Valley, Calif., Commercial Property Executive reports.

Here's what you should know.

1. The health system broke ground on the facility March 21.

2. The 200,000-square-foot facility will feature specialty physician groups, an outpatient surgery center and expanded pharmacy services.

3. Trammell Crow is constructing the facility.Montecito Medical Real Estate acquired Norfolk, Va.-based Virginia Eye Consultants' medical office building and ASC.

Here's what you should know.

1. Montecito acquired the building that houses the practice's 34,177-square-foot headquarters.

2. The building has 25,953-square-feet of medical offices, more than 60 exam rooms and an accredited ASC.

3. Virginia Eye Consultants President John Sheppard, MD, said, "Physicians evaluate patients thousands of times every year, but we sell our professional home perhaps only once or twice in a lifetime." He said the practice sold the building to Montecito because of the company's professionalism and availability.

4. Montecito Medical CEO Chip Conk said, "This asset met all of our criteria and is the second medical office property in the Tidewater area of Virginia that our company has acquired over the past four months."Here are seven updates for ASC leaders to know for March 22, 2018.

California ASC anesthesiologist charged with murder to face judge

California anesthesiologist Stephen Kyosung Kim, MD, went before a judge March 20 to determine if he is fit to stand trial. Dr. Kim allegedly sedated a patient and then gave him a lethal dose of Demerol while he was in recovery from a procedure at Beverly Hills, Calif.-based Rodeo Drive Plastic Surgery Center Sept. 26, 2017.

Wills Eye appeals to change classification from ASC to hospital

Philadelphia-based Wills Eye Institute went to the Third Circuit Court of Appeals in its battle to qualify as a hospital under Medicare rules. Qualifying as a hospital would allow Wills to receive greater Medicare reimbursements, and Wills' ASC status prevents it from performing certain complex procedures.

Berkshire Medical Center opens new endoscopy center

Pittsfield, Mass.-based Berkshire Medical Center opened a new endoscopy center on its main campus, combining its ambulatory and inpatient offerings under one roof. The center will see 7,000 patients annually.

HCA appoints Dr. Ravi Chari president of West Florida division

Ravi Chari, MD, will take over as president of HCA's West Florida division beginning May 1. Dr. Chari succeeds 40-year industry veteran Peter Marmerstein, who is retiring. Mr. Marmerstein became West Florida division president in 2012.

4 Washington independent practices form the state's largest independent practice

Four independent gastroenterology groups in Western Washington merged to form Washington Gastroenterology. The combined practice features more than 40 gastroenterologists and 20 non-physician providers, with several ambulatory endoscopy centers.

Private equity firm's ophthalmology practice management services organization, acquires 3 practices

LLR Partners formed Eye Health America  an ophthalmology practice management services organization  and acquired two ophthalmology practices and an ASC: Bradenton, Fla.-based The Eye Associates, Clemson (S.C.) Eye and Greenville, S.C.-based Piedmont Surgery Center.

UnitedHealth takes aim at Envision's ER billing practices through new website

A website launched by UnitedHealth is the latest in a series of disputes with Envision. The site links to a fact sheet claiming Envision charged on average 975 percent more than what Medicare pays for the same service. The sheet also says UnitedHealth is negotiating a new contract with Envision to bring the company's providers in network.HIPAA-covered entities and business associates reported 25 healthcare record breaches in February, constituting a 19 percent month-over-month increase, according to HIPAA Journal.

A hacking incident at Albany, N.Y.-based St. Peters Surgery & Endoscopy Center that affected 134,512 individuals comprised 43.6 percent of all healthcare records exposed in February.

Here are 16 statistics on healthcare data breaches in February.

Number of records exposed in top five largest breaches

1. St. Peters Surgery & Endoscopy Center: 134,512

2. Tufts Associated Health Maintenance Organization (Watertown, Mass.): 70,320

3. Triple-S Advantage (San Juan, Puerto Rico): 36,305

4. CarePlus Health Plan (Miami): 11,248

5. Union Lake Supermarket: 9,956

Main causes of reported breaches

6. Unauthorized access/disclosure: 12

7. Hacking/IT incident: 9

8. Theft: 2

9. Loss: 1

10. Improper disposal: 1

Breaches by covered entity

11. Healthcare provider: 15

12. Health plan: 8

13. Business associate: 2

Records exposed by entity type

14. Healthcare provider: 137,586

15. Health plan: 166,862

16. Business associate: 4,332Leaders at Lawrence (Kan.) Memorial Hospital released the details of a proposed $93 million outpatient medical building March 21, according to the Lawrence Journal-World.

The proposed 200,000-square-foot facility will house an enlarged surgery center, an orthopedic center of excellence, an expanded breast center, a therapy practice, physician offices and a retail pharmacy.

Lawrence Memorial's proposed facility will not house any inpatient services, as those will be done at the main hospital campus. Hospital officials said the new facility will increase its foothold in the outpatient arena.

The original proposal called for the outpatient facility to house an urgent care clinic; however, leaders shelved that plan because they were not ready to enter that market.

Lawrence Memorial's must receive approval from the Lawrence-Douglas County Planning Commission to begin the construction. If approved, construction would begin June 1 and wrap up in early 2020.Dallas-based Tenet Healthcare has significantly reduced charity care spending in Detroit-area acute care hospitals, the Michigan Nurses Association claims in a report released March 21.

Here are seven things to know.

1. For the report, the MNA examined data from Medicare cost reports submitted to CMS by Detroit-area hospitals. They said they found charity care spending in Tenet Detroit Medical Center declined 98 percent over the course of three years. The report states Tenet DMC spent $470,000 on charity care in 2016, down from $22.9 million in 2013  the year Tenet purchased DMC from for-profit Vanguard Health Systems.

2. The MNA ssaid Southfield, Mich.-based Beaumont Health and Detroit-based Henry Ford Health System also saw charity care decline during that time period, although not as much. The union said they found Beaumont spent $26.6 million on charity care in 2016, down 67 percent from $79.8 million in 2013. At Henry Ford Health System, they said charity care spending declined 65 percent, from $55.7 million in 2013 to $19.3 million in 2016.

3. The MNA recommended the Legacy DMC Board include "a requirement that Tenet DMC set aside additional funds for charity care, greater access to information for patients and the public, and appointment of an ombudsman to represent patient and community concerns." Board President Joe Walsh told The Detroit News the board is looking into the union's allegations.

4. A part of the decline in charity care in Michigan hospitals can be attributed to the state's expansion of Medicaid under the ACA in 2013. Under the expansion, the state created the Healthy Michigan Medicaid program for low-income residents, which kicked off in 2014 and resulted in fewer uninsured patients and less charity care spending. In 2014, charity care levels in the state were at $353 million. By 2016, that number had declined to $159 million, according to a study from Ann Arbor-based University of Michigan. Michigan Health and Hospital Association data also shows this trend, finding Medicaid expansion in Michigan through the insurance exchange and the Healthy Michigan Plan contributed to a statewide decline of charity care for fiscal years 2015 and 2016, the latest years for which data is available. The association also noted hospitals in Michigan at the same time saw additional bad debt in fiscal year 2016.

5. Tony Tedeschi, MD, CEO of the DMC expressed disappointment in the report. He said in a statement to Becker's Hospital Review the union "has chosen to cherry pick numbers in their report that leave out essential information about how all hospitals across the state report uncompensated and charity care." He also called the report "an unfortunate attempt to characterize an issue that does not reflect the entire story. The American Hospital Association reports that hospitals incur two forms of uncompensated care  bad debt and charity care."

"These attempts by the MNA are intended to distract us from what is most important and that is our commitment to provide quality patient care to our community," Dr. Tedeschi said. "We continue to work in good faith with the MNA and the Huron Valley-Sinai Hospital nurses to negotiate a contract that is fair. This is an insult to these hardworking men and women who work with the DMC as well as to those who rely on the DMC in their times of need. We are privileged and honored to provide critical services to all who seek care at our facilities.  while the DMC, including Huron Valley-Sinai Hospital, is now part of a larger, investor-owned health system, we continue to stand up for all who are in need just as we did when we operated as a nonprofit."

6. Dr. Tedeschi noted hospitals in Medicaid expansion sates have seen charity care decline, but DMC still provided more $112.3 million in charity care between 2013 and 2017.

7. Beaumont denied the assertion that it has reduced charity care.

"The ACA and Healthy Michigan have provided coverage to many patients who were not covered previously," said Beaumont in a statement to Becker's Hospital Review. "We also offer discounted care for those with hardships. We work together as one care team to advocate for our patients and provide the highest quality healthcare services regardless of where our patients live or their financial circumstances."

Becker's Hospital Review reached out to Henry Ford Health System and will post additional details as they become available.

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S&P expects new rating criteria to be unfavorable for hospital districtsPolice are searching for a psychologist who left Little Rock-based Arkansas State Hospital with a patient March 20, reports the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

Authorities issued an arrest warrant for 41-year-old Michelle Messer March 21. She is wanted on a misdemeanor charge of aiding in an unauthorized departure. Security footage from the state-run psychiatric hospital showed Ms. Messer leaving the facility with 46-year-old psychiatric patient Cory Chapin.

A court acquitted Mr. Chapin of numerous charges, including kidnapping and theft, by reason of mental illness in 2015. He became a patient at Arkansas State Hospital's forensic unit, which treats patients with mental illnesses who are accused of crimes, in December 2015.

State records show Ms. Messer, a licensed independent psychological examiner, has worked in Arkansas' Department of Human Services for nine years. The state of her relationship with Mr. Chapin is not clear.

Arkansas State Hospital plans to terminate her employment once she is located.

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5 New York City physicians charged with taking kickbacks for fentanyl prescriptions

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Former Allina VP pleads guilty to embezzling over $417kDetectives from the Miccosukee police force acting on an order signed by a tribal court judge took a baby from Baptist Hospital in Kendall, Fla., on March 18, according to the Miami Herald.

The baby was born to a Miccosukee mother and a white father. The parents say the order was a sham initiated by the baby's maternal grandmother, who they claim does not want a white father to be involved in the baby's life. The tribal order granted the baby's maternal grandmother custody.

The Miccosukee reservation is about 30 miles away from Baptist Hospital, and the tribal police force's jurisdiction mainly covers the reservation and properties owned by the tribe.

The baby's parents have filed complaints with Miami-Dade police, state prosecutors and the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs. State authorities are reviewing the incident and determining whether the tribal police acted lawfully in executing the tribal court order. Miami-Dade detectives are also investigating the incident, according to the report.

In a statement to the Miami-Herald, a hospital spokesperson said Miami-Dade police officers were with tribal police to enforce the order. "We obeyed law enforcement. It is our hospital's policy to cooperate with Miami-Dade law enforcement as they enforce court orders," the spokesperson said.

Miami-Dade police said their officers were misled by the tribal police sergeant, who requested backup while executing a "federal court order." Miami-Dade Capt. Sergio Alvarez told the Miami-Herald two officers were dispatched "solely in the role of keeping the peace" after the tribal police sergeant said the baby's father may pose a threat.

In a tweet on March 21, Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., said, "Miccosukee tribe police used tribal court order to kidnap newborn baby from parents in Miami hospital. They don't have any jurisdiction outside reservation. I'm in contact with fed officials & this won't end well for tribe if they don't return child ASAP."

The Miccosukee tribe's legal adviser did not respond to the Miami-Herald's request for comment.

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5 New York City physicians charged with taking kickbacks for fentanyl prescriptions

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Former Allina VP pleads guilty to embezzling over $417kIn response to accusations of patient dumping at Baltimore-based University of Maryland Medical Center Midtown Campus after hospital security guards left a woman at a bus stop in January, the Maryland state Senate passed legislation to outline a bill of rights for the state's hospital patients March 9, according to The Baltimore Sun.

CMS cited the hospital March 21 for violating several patient safety and patient rights regulations. Despite increased concern for patient safety and rights, advocates who originally supported the proposal are now fighting lawmakers to eliminate a revised version of it.

Senators approved the bill 36-7, despite arguments among lawmakers, patient advocates and hospital executives over which rights should be included in state law and which should be left to care providers. The approved version calls for eight broad guarantees backed by hospitals, as opposed to a list of 22 specific patient rights contained in the original legislation offered by patient advocates.

The patient advocates proposed a set of 22 rights included guaranteeing patients opportunities to request an escort during examinations, to make advanced directives and to participate in their discharge plans. These rights must be explicit in state law because respect, safety and care quality can significantly vary across different hospitals, said Anna Palmisano, coordinator of Marylanders for Patient Rights.

Patient advocates said the proposal has changed so significantly that it now prioritizes healthcare organizations' concerns over patient safety, according to patient advocates. "This is not a compromise  this is a further erosion of our rights," Ms. Palmisano said.

However, Jim Reiter, a spokesperson for the Maryland Hospital Association, said the amended bill "does not remove any rights for patients." Existing state and federal rules currently impose standards that exceed what the advocates are calling for, Mr. Reiter added.

Additionally, hospital officials said the advocates wanted too much control over the way care is provided, which is territory already covered by the CMS and the Joint Commission. Hospital officials offered an amendment to the bill, which included a set of eight rights the Joint Commission already requires hospitals to maintain, including certainty of patient privacy, visitation, access to medical records and clear communication. CMS and the commission already have "pages of standards that we must meet beyond what the bill as introduced requires," Mr. Reiter said.

Under current Maryland law, hospitals are required to provide patients with an existing "bill of rights" established by the Joint Commission. The law does not specify what those rights should be.

The Senate's action March 9 marks the first time in three attempts that a patients' bill of rights proposal reached the General Assembly floor.Manish Shah, MD, is pediatric neurosurgeon at Memorial Hermann Texas Medical Center in Houston. Dr. Shah makes annual trips to Haiti to perform endoscopic surgery on children with hydrocephalus, according to The Princeton Alumni Weekly.

Here are three things to know.

1. Dr. Shah is an assistant professor of pediatric neurosurgery at the University of Texas Medical School in Houston. He is one of eight pediatric neurosurgeons in the Houston area, which has a population of over 6 million.

2. Dr. Shah received his medical degree from Vanderbilt University in Nashville. He underwent fellowship training neurosurgery at Barnes-Jewish Hospital of Washington University in St. Louis and fellowship training in pediatric neurosurgery at St. Louis Children's Hospital.

3. There are no pediatric neurosurgeons in Haiti. Dr. Shah began making the trips in 2011 after a 2010 earthquake devastated Haiti.

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Scoliosis Research Society collaborates with Medtronic, NuVasive & more for scoliosis study: 5 key insights

Which factors impact rod slippage with magnetically controlled growing rods? 4 takeawaysA new study published in Spine questions whether surgeons are overestimating the association between obesity and perioperative adverse outcomes due to ICD coding classifications.

Study authors gathered data on posterior lumbar fusion patients from 2013 to 2016 from procedures performed at a large academic hospital. There were 796 patients included in the study. Here are four key findings.

1. The overall ICD coding for obesity sensitivity was 42.5 percent and significantly higher in patients with the following factors:

 Greater BMI

 Diabetes

 American Society of Anesthesiologists Class III or above

 Longer length of stay

 Venous thromboembolism

 Adverse events

2. The study authors conducted a multivariate analysis to determine outcomes for increased risk with diabetes defined by the ICD coding, which included VTE, major adverse events and any adverse events.

3. Outcomes with increased risk didn't have positive associations with obesity when defined by BMI, according to the multivariate analysis.

4. Study authors concluded, "ICD codes for obesity are more commonly assigned to patients with other comorbidities or postoperative complications. Further, use of such nonrandomly assigned ICD codes for obesity has the potential to skew studies to suggest greater associated adverse events than calculated BMI would demonstrate."A Birmingham-based company has announced it will be operating up to four student accommodation blocks in Belfast.

Student Roost will open two new student blocks on Great Patrick Street and at Swanston House on Wellington Place in Belfast in September.

Together, the two blocks will be home to nearly 800 students.

And it announced it's bought the historic John Bell House at College Square East, as well as having a "further central Belfast property" in the pipeline. A spokesman confirmed it also owns the other properties.

The company would not say how much it spent on acquisitions, but said its spend in Belfast now amounted to "a significant investment".

John Bell House was formerly Belfast Technical Institute before it was turned into student accommodation and renamed by a joint venture of Co Down firm, Lacuna, and Welsh developer, Watkin Jones. With up to four Belfast blocks in its portfolio, Student Roost will be the biggest operator of student accommodation in Belfast.

However, there have been fears that some potential investors in student accommodation could be put off by delays in the completion of the latest phase of Ulster University's new Belfast campus.

Student Roost chief executive Tim Butler said the company had enjoyed council support, and the backing of the city's universities.

"These fantastic new properties could only have come about with the support of Belfast City Council and the city's two universities," he said.

"The issues were frequently complex, as they often are, but we never lost sight of our shared vision and ambition for the city.

"Yes, Belfast is a great, historic city, but it understands that its future is in being a modern place to work, invest and study.

"Modern purpose built student accommodation (PBSA) is a big part of that picture. The two developments have created over 300 construction jobs and the properties will employ a further 20 permanent staff, meeting students' needs."

The developments feature all-inclusive bills, study and socialising areas and super-fast wifi.

Student Roost chief operating officer Nathan Goddard said: "When the centre was redeveloped to increase university presence, it had the potential to put real strain on residential housing. Having new, high-quality, purpose-built student accommodation will give students somewhere affordable and safe to stay outside of traditional residential areas."

Great Patrick Street has 474 beds and Swanston House has 317. Northern Ireland building firm Gilbert-Ash carried out the work on the 11-storey development on Great Patrick Street for Olympian Homes.

Student Roost is a UK manager and developer of purpose-built student accommodation.

The company operates 44 properties, housing 16,400 in 18 UK cities. It's owned by property fund Brookfield Real Estate Strategic Partners II.

Some 7,500 beds are at various stages of development across Belfast. More than 3,000 have been given the green light by planners, with many of those near to the new Ulster University campus.One needs to take a tactical approach when interviewing Def Leppard frontman Joe Elliott. Not because he's a difficult interviewee who offers awkward answers or shrugs at certain questions. No, with Elliott it's almost the opposite.

Ask him a question and it's quite possible you won't be asking another one for almost 10 minutes. So spending 20 minutes with a man who has led one of rock's most enduring and influential bands is an interesting task.

Wearing a tight black T-shirt, he removes his sunglasses as he sits behind a table at the Gibson Guitar Studio in London's West End. He's here to talk about the band's catalogue eventually arriving on streaming services.

For Elliot, who used to take a suitcase full of CDs and DVDs with him on tour, it's about time.

It was a long process though. Each song had to be remastered and the 58-year-old was heavily involved.

He sat in the studio with the band's sound engineer, Ronan McHugh, listening to almost every track before they were ready to be put out.

Elliott explains all of this in response to a query on why the band had chosen now to join Spotify and the like. His answer includes the intriguing analogy: "Imagine this room is Def Leppard and everybody's out there watching what we're doing. Imagine we close the curtains, we're still here doing stuff, but you just can't see us anymore."

Asked what he thinks of streaming services and playlist culture's impact on modern music, he launches, full-throttle, into a lengthy response in which it becomes clear he is not fully aware of the huge effect it has had. "This is a learning curve for me," he openly admits. "People have been hitting the forward button since we had listening stations.

"We can't stop people doing that. People do whatever people do. I'm not worried about it because it's not going to affect the way I write songs in the future, and we can't do anything about songs we've written in the past.

"For us, it's art and if you don't like it, then don't buy it."

Keen to emphasise his point again, Elliott attempts another interesting analogy.

"Let's imagine there's a painting on that wall that I've just done and you come in and say, 'I really like it, but can you redo this bottom bit'? No. If you don't like it, don't buy it."

It sparks an interesting conversation about the music Elliott listened to as a kid in which he reels off Bowie, Bolan and Slade as inspirations. He thinks of contemporary music as he did back then. "There's good and bad. There was plenty of s**t music then, too."

But one genre which gets his specific wrath is rap. "I just don't like it," Elliot says. "Anyone can stand there and talk. My mother could do that. There's talent in the writing and the expression and all that kind of stuff, but it's just not my thing."

As well as their arrival on Spotify and the like, Elliot and co have also announced a UK tour as well as a tour with Journey in the US.

Of course, that will mean a triumphant homecoming for the band's Northern Irish guitarist, Vivian Campbell. The Lisburn-born star is set to appear alongside fellow band members at the SSE Arena in Belfast this December.

Campbell last performed in the city last November when he was honoured with the Oh Yeah Legend Award at a special event at Mandela Hall.

The musician has celebrated 25 years with Def Leppard and has also been a member of Whitesnake, Dio and Thin Lizzy.

"I've been very fortunate that my life's work has also been my passion," he said at the time.

In 2013, Campbell revealed that he'd been diagnosed with Hodgkin's Lymphoma, but told this newspaper that throwing himself into his music had helped him cope with it. "I think I would have succumbed to the cancer if I had stayed at home and convalesced - which a lot of people wanted me to do, like the guys in Def Leppard. You want people to attend to their illnesses, but no-one knew better than me how to deal with it...my work was cathartic."

Meanwhile, Elliott has just arrived back from the States, where he had been doing five days' press with Journey's Neal Schon. "We're Cheech and Chong," he says.

"It was like Morecambe and Wise, hysterical."

The UK tour is celebrating the band's 1987 acclaimed Hysteria record, which dominated charts and is the 51st best-selling album of all time in the US.

Hysteria came at a pivotal point for the band; it was the last to feature guitarist Steve Clarke before his death and Leppard's first since drummer Rick Allen's 1984 car crash which left him with one arm.

Released amid a whirlwind of media furore, the album charted at Number One in the US and UK, despite being plagued by delays as the band experimented with emerging and exciting production equipment. Recording had originally begun before Allen's car crash and it's a time Elliott remembers vividly.

"The world changed while we were making it," he says. "We kept updating the record to accommodate the change. The 80s were a very creative time period. It wasn't the writing, we had that down because we had all our 70s heroes to reference, but when it came to production, it was."

Last year, Iron Maiden's Bruce Dickinson titled his autobiography, What Does This Button Do?, which Elliot describes as his mantra during the making of Hysteria. The band spent hours rewiring machines, turning them inside out, endless experimentation.

"We were trying to make something that no one else has ever done, so of course you're going to hit a brick wall every now and again, more often than not really," he says.

"We had all this human nature s**t to deal with, too. Steve's decline, which was occurring at the time, Rick's accident. It was tough to deal with, but it brought the humanity out in the band and that went into the record."

The Hysteria tour in December, which comes after the lengthy run in the US with Journey, will include all the big hits, vows Elliott, who is indignant about artists that refuse to perform crowd-pleasers.

He has also coined quite a beautiful term in "Dorito boy" to describe fans who complain on the internet. "Dorito Boy lives with his mum, sits in the basement, eats Doritos and completely slags your set list off, but has never been to a gig.

"That's the guy we never listen to anymore," Elliot says. "Why would we abandon songs that got us into the O2?" he queries. "That's why they're coming.

"I look at The Rolling Stones, Paul McCartney or anyone like that... yeah, you wanna play the new stuff, it feeds your soul, but don't abandon the people that are out there. You can't pander the guy who never comes to the gig, but makes a big noise on the internet."

Def Leppard's music is available now across streaming services. The band plays the SSE Arena in Belfast on December 2, with a concert in Dublin the previous night. Tickets on sale nowMick Jagger from The Rolling Stones performs on stage (Anthony Devlin/PA)

Fans of The Rolling Stones have been issued a warning by promoters ahead of the release of tickets for their Croke Park gig.

The iconic rockers will perform at the Dublin venue on May 17, with tickets going on general sale from Ticketmaster on Friday, March 23 9am.

Ahead of this, Aiken Promotions are advising fans not to purchase tickets from any unofficial sources or websites.

A spokesperson said: "We are aware that some sites are already advertising that they have tickets for sale.

"We believe that these are speculative tickets and caution fans from purchasing tickets from any unofficial source or secondary site."

General admission tickets for the Croke Park date are priced at 70.45

Seated ticket prices start from 90, while Gold Circle tickets are 181.

Tickets will be available from all usual Ticketmaster outlets or www.ticketmaster.ie.

The Rolling Stones will kick off their No Filter European tour at Croke Park, which will be the largest stadium they will play during the planned dates.

They will also perform in UK, France, Germany, Czech Republic and Poland.Rachel Dean checks out the style in Victoria Square, Belfast.

Alice Donnelly (24) assistant buyer, Liverpool

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Wore what? Coat, 60, bag, 25, both ASOS; jeans, 55, & Other Stories; boots, 90, Dr Martens.

Why? I like an effortless look, Ill go for anything casual and comfy.

Who? Alexa Chungs style seems so effortless.

Monthly spend: 50-100

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Jodie Garrett (22), student, Ballygowan

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Wore what? Top, 14, jeans, 22, both Debenhams; coat, 140, Jasper Conran; belt, 3, shoes, 16, bag, 12, all Primark.

Why? I like the monochrome look. Its effortless but effective.

Who? Victoria Beckham wears a lot of stunning, classic pieces. She looks fabulous.

Monthly spend: 100

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Sharon Saygivar (22), student, Newry

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Wore what? Top, 15, Pull & Bear; coat, 80, Warehouse; jeans, 30, Topshop; boots, 150, House of Fraser; bag, 130, Kate Spade.

Why? I tend to wear darker colours more as I find I suit them much more than lighter, pale colours.

Who? I like Daisy Ridleys style, she always looks so elegant.

Monthly spend: 100

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Nicola Leatherborrow (23), centenary nurse, Liverpool

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Wore what? Jumper, 20, boots, 90, bag, 45, all Zara; coat, 85, jeans, 36, both Topshop.

Why? My style is very casual. I prefer softer, pastel colours over anything bright and bold.

Who? I follow Tia Lineker on Instagram and I just love her simple, quirky look.

Monthly spend: 100

Rebecca Nixon (19), student, Bangor

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Wore what? Top, 12, scarf, 12, jeans, 45, all Topshop; jacket, 45, boots, 30, both New Look.

Why? I would say my style is really simple. I tend to go for a lot of neutral colours or greys.

Who? I love how Saoirse Ronans style can go from classic and smart to bold and fun.

Monthly spend: 200 plus

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Nicole Sutton (23), project co-ordinator, Holywood

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Wore what? Jumper, 20, boots, 30, H&M; coat, 30, F&F; jeans, 15, ASOS; bag, 24, Accessorize.

Why? Im very much a jumper and jeans kind of girl. I wear black a lot, but always with a pop of colour.

Who? Philippa Ross has a real effortless look. She always looks classy and well put together.

Monthly spend: 50-100

Michelle Hatfield (46), corporate services director, Liverpool

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Wore what? Dress, 25, gloves, 25, both M&S; coat, 250, House of Fraser; boots, 200, Ralph Lauren; bag, 800, Louis Vuitton.

Why? I would have to describe my style as relaxed glam. I love adding a little hint of colour to my look whether its through my shoes or my bag.

Who? I think Victoria Beckham is the best style icon for classic looks. She never falters.

Monthly spend: 200

Rosanna Rooke (31), civil servant, Manchester

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Wore what? Top, 15, H&M; coat, 90, Zara; jeans, 35, ASOS; boots, 40, Topshop; bag, 900, Mulberry.

Why? My style is modern and casual but still fun.

Who? Faye Williams has great style. I like that her look is edgy rather than girly.

Monthly spend: 200The Secretary of State has been accused of "cruelty" by her refusal to implement recommendations from the inquiry into historic child abuse.

Ulster Unionist MLA Mike Nesbitt made the claim yesterday after it emerged Eddie McCann, a victim of historical institutional abuse, has died.

Karen Bradley told the House of Commons yesterday that it would be "constitutionally inappropriate" for Parliament to enact the Hart Report recommendations because the inquiry had been established by the Northern Ireland Executive.

The recommendations include compensation, a memorial and a public apology to survivors of abuse.

The NI Secretary was tackled in the House by the Shadow Northern Ireland Secretary Owen Smith, who pointed out other matters that she had intervened in. He said: "I'm afraid she cannot have her cake and eat it. She cannot argue that on the one hand it would be undermining of the devolution settlement to intervene and legislate in areas of devolved competence, for example the HIA or the pensions for the severely disabled.

"And on the other hand, do so, because she is doing precisely that today, in respect of the RHI scheme, which was introduced in the Assembly, by the Assembly, for Northern Ireland. Or in respect of the regional rates, which is an area to do with local government entirely devolved to the Assembly in Belfast."

Mr Smith revealed he had commissioned the House of Commons Library and independent legal advice to assess what difference there was constitutionally in the two areas being considered by MPs, compared to the Hart inquiry and pensions for those injured during the Troubles.

It said there was "no constitutional reason" why the Secretary of State could not legislate on HIA or victims pensions, said Mr Smith. Legal counsel, meanwhile, supported the UK government intervening in the HIA, based on the fact it was just a convention not to do so, there was a constitutional obligation to avoid a vacuum in governance, and the HIA inquiry had made a clear case for intervention.

Mrs Bradley responded: "The HIA, the Hart inquiry, was set up by the Executive and therefore constitutionally it is a matter for the members of the Executive to make a decision about the recommendations in the Hart inquiry.

"The Hart inquiry reported to the Executive after it had collapsed, and therefore they were unable to do so. That therefore gives a legal difficulty in terms of what would the Executive have decided with regards to the recommendations for this Parliament to try to second guess."

She added the government was clear it wanted to set up the institutions agreed under the Stormont House Agreement and will consult on how that was done, given victims had been waiting for too long.

Mr Nesbitt last night challenged Mrs Bradley over her position.

"Within an hour of the original release of this statement, I was informed of the passing of Eddie McCann, whom I met the day Sir Anthony Hart published his report. Eddie never had a passport or enjoyed a holiday," he said.

"Like so many survivors, he was denied the sort of life opportunities in education, employment and social inclusion the rest of us take for granted.

"To give survivors a public inquiry which then makes a series of recommendations that no one is prepared to deliver is cruel and perverse. I urge the Secretary of State to rethink."Pope John Paul II in September 1979, during the last papal visit to Ireland

Senior church leaders have welcomed Pope Francis' announcement that he will visit Ireland later this year - although he is unlikely to come north of the border.

The Pontiff confirmed yesterday that he will come to Dublin to participate in the final two days of the World Meeting of Families on August 25 and 26 - almost 40 years after the first papal visit to Ireland.

Former Methodist Church president, the Rev Harold Good, described the planned trip as an opportunity to further enhance relations between members of the Protestant and Catholic communities.

"I am very pleased for my Roman Catholic friends," he said.

"Pope Francis is a universally respected person, not just for his own views and ecumenical spirit but for his integrity and humble approach.

"This will be particularly good for relations within Northern Ireland and will give us the opportunity to share in our neighbours' joy."

The Methodist minister, who oversaw IRA decommissioning in 2005, recalled Pope John Paul II's call for peace during a Mass just a few miles from the border.

Over 300,000 attended the call to peace in Drogheda on September 29, 1979, where the only reigning Pontiff to have visited these shores urged politicians and terrorists to shun violence and assured Irish Protestants that no Pope poses any threat to them.

"Pope John Paul made the most impassioned plea to the people of Ireland to lay down their arms and cease killing - who can forget when he said, 'Nobody may ever call murder by any other name than murder'," Rev Good said.

"He uttered an appeal for all of us to return to the way of peace when we were in the most awful and brutal phase of our history. Thankfully we are now in a very different and much better place.

"This visit will lay to rest the prejudices and fears of the past."

Over 1.25 million people - almost one third of the population in the Republic at that time - turned out to a special open-air sermon which Pope John Paul II delivered at Phoenix Park.

Rev Good said he believes that Pope Francis will attract just as large a crowd despite serious controversies which have blighted the Catholic Church in recent years.

"Many people will be interested in what he has to say, particularly at this time," the clergyman said.

"I would hope this gives them encouragement and confidence to move beyond recent scandals - not to forget or minimise them, but to allow us all to be the people we are called to be."

Pope Francis will take part in a faith-based cultural concert, the Festival of Families, in Croke Park on the first day of his trip and will be the chief celebrant at a special Sunday Mass in Phoenix Park on the second day. There has been no mention of a visit to Northern Ireland.

Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Expand Previous Next Close Pope Francis exchanges gifts with Irish Taoiseach Enda Kenny and wife Fionnuala during a private audience on November 28, 2016 at the Vatican. / AFP PHOTO / POOL / Alessandra TarantinoALESSANDRA TARANTINO/AFP/Getty Images AFP/Getty Images Pope Francis exchanges gifts with Irish Taoiseach Enda Kenny during a private audience in his private studio at the Vatican, Monday, Nov. 28, 2016. AP Pope Francis meets with Irish Taoiseach Enda Kenny during a private audience on November 28, 2016 at the Vatican. / AFP PHOTO / POOL / Alessandra TarantinoALESSANDRA TARANTINO/AFP/Getty Images AFP/Getty Images Pope Francis exchanges gifts with Irish Taoiseach Enda Kenny (L) during a private audience on November 28, 2016 at the Vatican. / AFP PHOTO / POOL / Alessandra TarantinoALESSANDRA TARANTINO/AFP/Getty Images AFP/Getty Images Pope Francis laughs with Irish Taoiseach Enda Kenny and his wife Fionnuala, during a private audience on November 28, 2016 at the Vatican. / AFP PHOTO / POOL / Alessandra TarantinoALESSANDRA TARANTINO/AFP/Getty Images AFP/Getty Images Pope Francis talks with Taoiseach Enda Kenny during a private audience on November 28, 2016 at the Vatican. / AFP PHOTO / POOL / Alessandra TarantinoALESSANDRA TARANTINO/AFP/Getty Images AFP/Getty Images Taoiseach Enda Kenny and wife Fionnuala with Pope Francis in the Vatican. Pope Francis meets Taoiseach Enda Kenny in Rome. Pope Francis laughs with Taoiseach Enda Kenny and his wife Fionnuala, during a private audience on November 28, 2016 at the Vatican. / AFP PHOTO / POOL / Alessandra TarantinoALESSANDRA TARANTINO/AFP/Getty Images AFP/Getty Images Pope Francis talks with Taoiseach Enda Kenny, left, and his wife Fionnuala, during a private audience in his private studio at the Vatican, Monday, Nov. 28, 2016. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino, pool ) AP Pope Francis talks with Taoiseach Minister Enda Kenny, right, during a private audience in his private studio at the Vatican, Monday, Nov. 28, 2016. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino, pool ) AP Pope Francis talks with Taoiseach Enda Kenny, left, and his wife Fionnuala, during a private audience in his private studio at the Vatican, Monday, Nov. 28, 2016. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino, pool ) AP Pope Francis exchanges gifts with Taoiseach Enda Kenny, right, during a private audience in his private studio at the Vatican, Monday, Nov. 28, 2016. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino, pool ) AP A Swiss Guard enters in the Apostolic Palace before an audience between Pope Francis and Taoiseach Enda Kenny at the Vatican, Monday, Nov. 28, 2016. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino, pool ) AP Pope Francis exchanges gifts with Taoiseach Enda Kenny, left, and his wife Fionnuala during a private audience in his studio, at the Vatican, Monday, Nov. 28, 2016. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino, pool ) AP Pope Francis attends a private audience with Taoiseach Enda Kenny, in his studio at the Vatican, Monday, Nov. 28, 2016. (AP Photo/Alessandra Tarantino, pool ) AP / Facebook

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His liturgy, expected to focus on the theme of the festival which is 'The Gospel of the Family: Joy for the World', will conclude the ninth gathering of the festival, which will be supported by all 26 dioceses across the island.

The event will take place in the wake of a deeply divisive referendum on abortion in the Republic and could attract protests.

The General Secretary of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, Rev Trevor Gribben, said he is certain that many people of differing theological and political views will want to "join our Catholic neighbours" in welcoming the long anticipated announcement.

"The attendance of Pope Francis at the World Meeting of Families will greatly enhance the affirmation of the place of the family at the heart of society, and that is to be welcomed," he said.

Rev Gribben, who is also the Clerk of the General Assembly, said that many Catholics, both south and north of the border, have reason to be "excited and encouraged" by the visit.

Senior leaders within the Church of Ireland, including the Primate of All Ireland, have reiterated their previous welcome of the papal visit. The Most Rev Dr Richard Clarke previously said any joint visit would be "remarkable and wonderful" and that church bishops would be very happy to see the Pope in Ireland, north or south.

A joint statement from the Irish Catholic Bishops' Conference said they are "deeply honoured" that Pope Francis will participate in a universal Church celebration of faith and joy "which no doubt will be an occasion of spiritual renewal for our laity, religious and clergy, as well as a strengthening of Christian family life".A residents group has secured permission to mount a High Court challenge over a planned gold mine in Co Tyrone.

A residents group has secured permission to mount a High Court challenge over a planned gold mine in Co Tyrone.

Leave was granted to seek a judicial review of alleged flaws in the preliminary consultation process carried out by Canadian company Dalradian.

The case is being taken against the Department for Infrastructure for giving the green light to the project.

A spokesperson for Dalradian said: "Dalradian is aware, as a notice party, of the legal challenge of a decision by the Department for Infrastructure. The company will comment on any material developments, if, as or when they arise."

Lawyers representing the Greencastle, Rouskey and Gortin Concerned Community (GRG) claimed it was the first case of its kind, with the potential to halt the gold mine.

With millions of ounces of precious metal identified near the village of Gortin, it is estimated that it could eventually generate hundreds of millions of pounds.

The resident's challenge centres on a proposal to construct a processing plant and waste storage facility on the area known as Crockanboy Hill.

The group, led by a professional advisory team, claim the pre-application consultation process carried out by Dalradian was vague and ambiguous.

According to their case the complexity of the scheme confused impacted residents.

They allege the Department failed to fulfil its statutory duty to ensure the pre-application community consultation was robust and meaningful.

Mr Justice McCloskey granted leave to apply for judicial review on the basis that an arguable case has been established.

The challenge will now proceed to a full hearing at the High Court in Belfast in June.

Outside court GRG spokesperson Martin Conway said: "We are the people who will be directly impacted by a processing and waste storage facility right on our doorsteps.

"The consultation event was not fit for purpose with little detail exhibited.

"This is in stark contrast to the planning application where we have been bombarded with a whole host of maps and drawings that should have been made available earlier for proper consultation, input and comment."

Solicitor Andrew Ryan of international law firm TLT, representing GRG, added: "The planning application is one of the largest and most complex to be submitted in Northern Ireland and it is therefore critical that the pre-application community consultation requirements have been met.

"This is the first judicial review of its kind in Northern Ireland and it is essential that there is a thorough examination of the procedures and the work of the Department for Infrastructure in allowing Dalradian's planning application to be accepted and processed in view of the procedural and legal issues identified by GRG and its advisers."Self-confessed killer Rhys Magee kicked his victim Richard Miskelly so violently that he thought he had broken his foot, a court heard yesterday.

Prosecution lawyer Ciaran Murphy QC gave details of the attack which took place in February last year, as a court decided how long the 20-year-old would serve of his life sentence.

Adjourning the hearing until next month, Mr Justice Colton apologised, saying previous court commitments prevented him from preparing a written judgement on the minimum jail term.

Earlier, the Belfast Crown Court judge listened as the prosecution argued the tariff imposed should begin at the higher starting point of between 15 to 16 years.

Magee from Carrowdore Road in Newtownards, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in January for the murder of 24-year-old Mr Miskelly outside a friend's home on the town's Bangor Road.

At the time Magee, high on a cocktail of drink and the drug ketamine at the time of the attack, told police he had just arrived at the scene in a taxi and had tried to help the unfortunate Mr Miskelly.

Yesterday, prosecutor Mr Murphy revealed that as Mr Miskelly attempted to sit up after the initial attack, Magee ran at him, and "vollied the deceased with his right foot", telling his friend he thought he had broken it.

Mr Murphy pointed to the vulnerability of Mr Miskelly, describing him as being "of light weight, small stature".

"Clearly there was no justification for his actions when he caused the death of the deceased," said Mr Murphy.

Earlier, the court heard how Magee and a friend returned to his friend's house in the early hours to find Mr Miskelly and his friend in the kitchen.

Not knowing them, and unaware they had been at an earlier party, they were ordered to leave.

However, when they were spotted in the driveway some ten minutes later, Magee carried out the first of his two attacks, while his friend remonstrated with the friend of Mr Miskelly. Then, following the second attack, he was overheard asking Magee, "What the f*** have you done?".

Although Magee initially told police he had just arrived at the scene in a taxi and came across Mr Miskelly lying on the ground, a "shocked" Magee had also tried to revive him.

A post mortem examination later revealed death was due to a bleed on the brain caused by blunt force trauma to the head.

Mr Miskelly also suffered bruising and abrasions to the side of his neck, two fractures to the jaw and other injuries to his face and body, which could have been caused by punching or kicking or stomping with a shod foot, or a combination of all three.

Later, defence lawyer Martin O'Rourke QC told the court: "This genuinely was a one-off incident which will not be replicated."

What had happened, he said, was "spontaneous and lacked any pre-planning".

The lawyer said that at the time Magee had taken the drug ketamine, which experts recognised could cause even patients to suffer violent and aggressive behaviour and act in irrational ways.

Mr O'Rourke said that Magee had also made a timely guilty plea to the murder and had admitted his involvement to police.

He accepted he lost his temper, had punched and kicked Mr Miskelly and his actions were aggressive.

Having seriously hurt the deceased, he had panicked, the lawyer said.

Mr O'Rourke argued the court could accept that Magee was genuinely remorseful for what he has done, clearly demonstrated when charged with the murder, saying that he was "very sorry" for Mr Miskelly's family.A letter of condolence sent by Pope Francis after the death of a disgraced Northern Ireland-born Cardinal has been strongly criticised.

Cardinal Keith O'Brien, from Ballycastle in Co Antrim, passed away earlier this week after a fall.

In 2013, he was forced to resign as the most authoritative voice in the Catholic Church in Scotland following serious allegations of sexual misconduct against him.

Pope Francis penned a telegram of condolences to Archbishop Leo Cushley, Cardinal O'Brien's successor in St Andrews and Edinburgh Archdiocese.

In it, he said: "I was saddened to learn of the death of His Eminence Cardinal Keith Patrick O'Brien, and I offer heartfelt condolences to you, his family and all who mourn his passing.

"Commending his soul to the merciful love of God our Father, and with the assurance of my prayers for the Archdiocese of Saint Andrews and Edinburgh, I cordially impart my Apostolic Blessing as a pledge of peace and consolation in our Lord Jesus Christ."

Margaret McGuckin, from the group Survivors and Victims of Institutional Abuse (SAVIA), which provides support to all victims of abuse, criticised the move by the Pope.

Ms McGuckin said: "This doesn't even surprise me, but it is just one more demonstration that the church once again has let down victims.

"The Pope said he will pray for Keith O'Brien, his family, the diocese - but not the victims.

"This would have been such a difficult week for them and a letter like this will be a further kick in the teeth for them.

"The church keeps on telling us how it has changed and how it has learned lessons from the past, but it hasn't changed one bit.

"This Pope is the same as the one who came before him and the one who came before that, not one thing has changed.

"Victims have been let down for decades and they continue to let down victims by sending out letters of condolences which don't even acknowledge the victims."

O'Brien (80) was forced to resign amid allegations of sexual misconduct by four adult males.

While he initially denied the claims - which dated back to the 1980s and were revealed after an investigation by the Observer newspaper - he later admitted they were true.

He apologised and stepped down from his powerful position after sending a letter of resignation to Pope Benedict, which was accepted.

Speaking on the same day the Pope confirmed he would visit Ireland this year, Ms McGuckin added: "I am going to Dublin when Pope Francis comes to Ireland to stand up in protest for all the victims of the Church who have been ignored and left out in the cold."

In 2015, he renounced all rights of his cardinalship which means that his funeral arrangements will be handled by the Vatican with very little input from the Church in Scotland.

Ms McGuckin said that if they include the pomp and ceremony which usually form a funeral of a member of the Catholic hierarchy, this too will send out a message that victims don't matter.

She explained: "The church keeps on telling us how sorry it is for the abuse inflicted on victims, both child, adult and institutional, and that lessons have been learned, but time and time again, the church stage these funerals full of pomp and ceremony for abusers.

"This is not the way a church that is genuinely sorry or that has the needs of victims at its centre would act.

"I would like to think that Cardinal O'Brien's funeral will be a small, private affair, but unfortunately experience tells us this is unlikely to be the case."

Cardinal O'Brien's death was announced by Archbishop Cushley, who did ask for prayers for his victims.

He said: "In life, Cardinal O'Brien may have divided opinion - in death, however, I think all can be united in praying for the repose of his soul, for comfort for his grieving family and that support and solace be given to those whom he hurt and let down. May he rest in peace."A fire at the Metro Hotel near Dublin Airport on the northside of the city (Brian Lawless/PA)

A major fire has broken out in the upper floors of a hotel and apartment block building in Dublin.

Several floors of the complex in Ballymun near Dublin Airport were engulfed in flames on Wednesday night as at least eight fire crews battled to stop the blaze spreading.

The Dublin Fire Brigade said there were no reports of injuries or missing people.

It tweeted at 10.45pm: It is important for us to give out correct and factual information.

As of yet we have no reports of any casualties or people unaccounted for.

#Ballymun UPDATE: 8 fire engines, 2 aerial appliances, emergency tender, foam tender, command units and senior officers at scene. Firefighters using breathing apparatus inside hotel to search & extinguish #BallymunFire #Dublin #fire pic.twitter.com/dh8xnFgMRj  Dublin Fire Brigade (@DubFireBrigade) March 21, 2018

The Metro Hotel building compromises hotel rooms on the lower floors and residential apartments on the upper floors.

The building is sometimes used to accommodate families in housing need.

Witness Anthony Flynn said he did not believe anyone was still trapped inside the burning building.

It looks like everybody is out of the hotel, he said. There are no reported injuries at this stage.

Thanks to @ICHHDUBLIN for offer of assistance, there are no families in emergency accommodation in the Metro! Hopefully everyone got out safe - stay safe @DubFireBrigade  Homeless Dublin (@HomelessDublin) March 21, 2018

Mr Flynn, a co-founder of the Inner City Helping Homeless organisation, said pieces of debris could be seen flying from the blazing building in scenes similar to the Grenfell Tower tragedy in London.

He said he understood no homeless families were currently housed in the building.

He added: We are looking at the top seven floors that appear to be alight. It seems to be spreading like mad. Its exactly what it looked like at Grenfell. It appears to have started on the top two floors but has spread downwards and upwards.

As well as the large Dublin Fire Brigade presence, gardai and ambulance crews were also on site.

Erica Fleming, whose apartment overlooks the hotel said she could see and hear windows exploding as a result of the heat.

One of the apartments is completely engulfed.

There is smoke belllowing up through the floors.

The windows exploded about 20 minutes ago, obviously from the heat.

The windows of other apartments are just completely blackened out. You cannot see the corridor or landings.

I can see the fire crews dragging the hoses through the building. They are still two floors below but they are making their way up slowly.

Ms Fleming, a mother of one and student, also said she believed she could see people being evacuated from a few floors below the seat of the fire.

There is also a lot of debris falling out the windows.

Dublin city councillor Paul McAuliffe said he believed everyone had been evacuated safely.

We understand from the hotel staff that all of the people living in the accommodation and residents of the hotel got out safely, he said.

We believe everyone got out safely.

Windows and cladding are peeling off the building and falling down onto the side wing where the hotel is.

Dublin Fire Brigade are doing their best to make sure the fire doesnt spread from the upper levels down onto the broader-based hotel parts of the building.

Terrible scenes here in Ballymun as five floors on fire and the Metro Hotel. Tojan work by @DubFireBrigade who have put themselves in amazing danger. pic.twitter.com/z8T2dcXDDf  Paul McAuliffe TD (@PaulMcauliffe) March 21, 2018

The Fianna Fail representative added: Windows are exploding and fire and debris are billowing out the side of the building.

This is going to leave a major scar on the landscape of Ballymun.

Irelands Housing minister Eoghan Murphy tweeted: I want to thank @DubFireBrigade who continue to battle a major fire at the Metro Hotel in Ballymun under difficult conditions. We are monitoring the situation closely.An Irish border deal must be done by October, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said.

Otherwise a backstop option will mean Northern Ireland would continue to follow EU regulations after Brexit involving the all-island economy and North-South cooperation, he added.

Unionists have opposed any solution which would create differences between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK and Prime Minister Theresa May is reliant on Democratic Unionist support in key Westminster votes.

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar sets October deadline for border deal. pic.twitter.com/ivKsaPawBv  michael mchugh (@mmchugh02) March 22, 2018

Ahead of a meeting with European counterparts in Brussels Mr Varadkar said: Everyone takes the view that we will have to have the withdrawal treaty agreed by October because it will have to be ratified by the British parliament and the European parliament, and potentially by some national parliaments. So October is the deadline.

Would I like to have it done by June? Yes, absolutely. But I would rather have the right deal in October rather than any deal in June.

He envisaged a really close trading relationship between the UK and the EU, so close that many of measures in the backstop may become unnecessary.

The British Government is facing increased pressure to find a solution to the border, one of the most vexed issues of the Brexit negotiations on which there has been little detailed agreement with the EU.

Avoiding a hard border is generally defined as one without frontier checks on goods and services but there has been no evidence of a technological solution for frictionless trade anywhere else in the world, a committee of MPs said.

On Thursday the President of the European Parliament Antonio Tajani said: The onus is now on the British Government to propose such a solution.

But I want to make it clear once again that the European Parliament will not give its consent to a withdrawal agreement that does not incorporate solutions to rule out hard borders between the two parts of the island and which can be implemented immediately.

We must heed the principle that nothing is agreed until everything is agreed, not least in order to ensure that the discussions on future relations are not hijacked by this delicate question.

March 29 2019 - UK leaves the European Union

Taoiseach says October 2018 deadline needed for withdrawal agreement

Mr Varadkar reiterated his firm stance on the importance of the backstop arrangement if no other solution is found.

But he said that was not his preferred option and envisaged a deep free trade agreement between the UK and EU.

He added: A customs union partnership between the UK and EU that would be so close to the customs union that it would not necessitate some of the elements that are in the backstop.

Mr Varadkars political opponents in Ireland said letting talks drag on to October put an open border at risk amid hopes a deal could be clinched by June.

Fianna Fail Brexit spokesman Stephen Donnelly said it would be a serious miscalculation, putting Ireland in a weaker negotiating position.

Irelands leverage on the border issue is rapidly declining the further the talks continue between the EU and Britain.

As the talks progress, many other important issues for other EU member states will come to the fore, with the border becoming one of many competing priorities.

The Taoiseach met Theresa May before the evening session of leaders in Brussels.

They spoke about Brexit, Northern Ireland, and Russia.

The Prime Minister reassured the Taoiseach of her commitment to the December Brexit blueprint.

They both looked forward to the negotiations next week at official level in Brussels on the border and will discuss Northern Ireland again after Easter.

The Taoiseach also expressed solidarity and support following the chemical attack in Salisbury.

The Prime Minister congratulated Ireland on winning rugbys Six Nations Grand Slam.The funeral of Cardinal Keith OBrien, formerly the Catholic Churchs most senior figure in Britain, is to be held in Newcastle next month.

The 80-year-old, who resigned as Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh in 2013 after admitting sexual misconduct, had recently been injured in a fall and died in a Newcastle hospital on Monday.

The Catholic Church has announced the requiem mass will take place at the Church of St Michael in Newcastle on April 5 with Cardinal Vincent Nichols, Archbishop of Westminster, leading the service.

He will be buried the following day at Mount Vernon Cemetery in Edinburgh in the grave of his mother and father, in accordance with his own wishes, the church said.

Expand Close Cardinal O'Brien welcomed Pope Benedict XVI on his visit to Scotland in 2010 (Andrew Milligan/PA) Press Association Images / Facebook

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Cardinal OBrien resigned from his position in February 2013 after three priests and a former priest alleged improper conduct during the 1980s.

He initially contested the allegations but later apologised, saying his sexual conduct had fallen beneath the standards expected of him.

Announcing his death on Monday, Cardinal OBriens successor as Archbishop of St Andrews and Edinburgh, Archbishop Leo Cushley, said: In life, Cardinal OBrien may have divided opinion  in death, however, I think all can be united in praying for the repose of his soul, for comfort for his grieving family and that support and solace be given to those whom he offended, hurt and let down. May he rest in peace.

A statement from the Archdiocese of St Andrews & Edinburgh said: The requiem mass of Cardinal Keith Patrick OBrien RIP will take place at the Church of St Michael, Westmoreland Road, Newcastle, on Thursday April 5 at 1pm.

As requested by the Holy See, the main celebrant and homilist will be His Eminence Cardinal Vincent Nichols, Archbishop of Westminster.

Donations to SCIAFs Lenten campaign in lieu of flowers please.The Prince of Wales will carry out a series of engagements in Cornwall including marking the 200th anniversary year of the Royal Cornwall Museum and signing a slate destined for the roof of the Duchys only cathedral.

Charles visit to Cornwall on Thursday will start at the River Street museum in Truro, which was founded by a group of Cornish men and women in 1818, where he will view exhibitions and meet volunteers, staff and trustees.

The prince will then follow in the footsteps of his son and daughter-in-law, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and the Princess Royal by visiting Truro Cathedral to sign a slate in support of its roof appeal.

Almost 5,000 people have so far taken part in the project to raise the 3.2 million need to replace the cathedrals original 60,000 plus slates and preserve the cathedral for future generations.

During the visit Charles will also meet community groups and businesses using the newly refurbished Old Cathedral School, which has undergone restoration work to create a creative hub focused on education, music and art for the city of Truro and the wider community.

The prince visit Nansledan, an extension to Newquay built on Duchy of Cornwall land and embodying the principles of architecture and urban planning championed by Charles, where he will unveil the name of the developments first school.

On Friday, Charles will visit Dartmoor Prison, near Princetown in Devon where he will to learn about the prisons choir project and listen to a brief performance by participants.

He will also meet privately with the facilitys governor and the minister for Prisons and Probation, MP Rory Stewart.Findings from a controversial medical trial which claimed psychotherapy and exercise helped patients with ME were not reliable, a new study has found.

The PACE trial, which was funded by the Medical Research Council, aimed to establish the best way to treat sufferers of myalgic encephalomyelitis, otherwise known as chronic fatigue syndrome.

When its results were published in 2011, researchers claimed that graded exercise therapy (GET) and cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) were moderately effective forms of treatment, each leading to recovery in more than a fifth of patients.

But the study has since faced intense criticism from patients and charities, including the ME Association, over how the results were obtained, analysed and presented.

Unpublished data from the trial was eventually released and has now been independently re-analysed.

The message is clear  CBT and GET are not effective ways of treating a serious neuroimmune disease. The sooner this message gets across to health professionals the better. Dr Charles Shepherd. https://t.co/zRmLncw8KS @meassociation #MECFS #PACETrialDebate #CBT #GET  ME Association (@MEAssociation) March 22, 2018

The paper, published in the journal BMC Psychology, found that the benefits reported for psychotherapy and exercise therapy were modest and not statistically reliable.

Lead author Dr Carolyn Wilshire, from the University of Wellington in New Zealand, said: Our re-analysis was designed to explore how the PACE trial outcomes would have looked if the investigators had adhered to the primary outcome they described in their original published protocol.

We also looked into the published data on long-term outcomes to examine whether they had been influenced by the treatments patients had received after the trial had ended.

We found that the groups receiving CBT or GET did not significantly outperform the control group after correcting for the number of comparisons specified in the trial protocol. Rates of recovery were consistently low and not significantly different across treatment groups.

This sends a powerful message to the research community that they must be willing to share data where there are serious concernsDr Charles Shepherd

In surveys carried out by the ME Association, more than half of patients who had followed the recommended graded exercise programme saw a worsening in their symptoms.

Dr Charles Shepherd, honorary medical adviser to the ME Association, said: This sends a powerful message to the research community that they must be willing to share data where there are serious concerns about protocols or the reliability of results from a clinical trial.

The ME Association believes that it is very important to encourage research data sharing and, where appropriate, independent re-analysis  which is why we made a significant financial contribution towards the processing fee for publication of this paper.

The message is clear  CBT and GET are not effective ways of treating a serious neuroimmune disease. The sooner this message gets across to health professionals the better.

ME is a chronic, long-term neurological condition that can lead to severe, persistent fatigue although symptoms can vary from person to person.

It affects an estimated 250,000 people in the UK, according to the charity Action for ME.Scottish Transport Minister Humza Yousaf has repeated calls for Councillor Jim Dempster to resign after new racial abuse allegations emerged (Andrew Cowan/Scottish Parliament/PA)

A Scottish Government minister has called on a Labour councillor to do the honourable thing and resign after fresh claims of racial abuse emerged.

Jim Dempster, a Labour councillor in Dumfries and Galloway, has already said he is deeply sorry for remarks made about Scottish Transport Minister Humza Yousaf hiding under his burka.

Now further allegations of racial abuse  which Mr Dempster denies  have been made against the local politician.

The claims by a man and a woman reportedly centre on a period in the late 1980s and early 1990s when both were children in the village of Sanquhar.

The honourable thing for Jim Dempster to do would be to resign instead of trying to scramble to save his political careerHumza Yousaf

A Scottish Labour Party spokesman said an investigation already underway into Mr Dempsters behaviour would consider any new allegations.

But Mr Yousaf was clear that he should quit as a councillor.

On Tuesday Mr Dempster said he was deeply sorry for his comment about Mr Yousaf  made during a meeting with Transport Scotland officials  adding that he had asked for further diversity training, and had also visisted a local mosque.

This was dismissed as a tokenistic photo op by the minister as he repeated calls for the councillor to quit.

Mr Yousaf said he had received correspondence to suggest that Cllr Dempsters Islamophobic slur was not a one-off.

On Thursday he told BBC Radio Scotland that the two alleged victims had contacted him when they saw Jim Dempsters face across the news.

Speaking on the Good Morning Scotland programme, Mr Yousaf said: One of them contacted me by email on the day that the allegations surfaced of the Islamophobic slur Jim Dempster made against me. Another one contacted me a couple of days ago.

Its just really disturbing, these incidents took place allegedly a number of years ago but both victims tell me they really had just suppressed them but when they saw Jim Dempsters face across the news they just said they had to come forward.

They wish to remain anonymous but told quite graphic accounts of sustained racial abuse over a decade.

The new allegations are extremely serious and if found to have substance I have no doubt that Jim will be expelled from the Labour PartyElaine Murray, council leader

Mr Yousaf said both he and Labour MSP Anas Sarwar  who recently launched a campaign against Everyday Islamophobia  had spoken to the victims.

The Transport Minister said: One of the victims told me he was haunted by it, he said he had suppressed it, he said the 10 years that he lived in the area in Sanquhar and he was a victim of that abuse were the worst 10 years of his life.

He said when he saw Jim Dempsters face again on the news he couldnt sleep. It really has had an impact on them, I really applaud them on their bravery having spoken to both of them.

While stressing the new allegations have still to be investigated, he claimed they point to a disturbing pattern of behaviour.

Mr Yousaf said: What Councillor Dempster doesnt deny is making an Islamophobic slur. We have to ask ourselves, somebody who admits such inexcusable behaviour  do they have a role in our politics and our political life?

And the fact that hes been trying to get to mosques, do photo ops, to me shows he is more interested in saving his political career than he is in showing any true remorse, so I repeat my calls on him to resign.

He added: The honourable thing for Jim Dempster to do would be to resign instead of trying to scramble to save his political career.

Councillor Elaine Murray, leader of Dumfries and Galloway Council, said: The new allegations are extremely serious and if found to have substance I have no doubt that Jim will be expelled from the Labour Party.

Jim denies the allegations and there is a process of investigation to be undertaken. The Scottish legal tradition is that a person is innocent unless proved guilty.

I appreciate that the accusers wish to preserve their anonymity but I would urge them to take part in the investigation, I understand that they are both known to Anas Sarwar and I am sure that he would arrange for this to be done sensitively.

A Scottish Labour spokesman said: James Dempster has been suspended by the Scottish Labour Party, and an investigation is ongoing.

The investigation will consider any new allegations. The Labour Party has a zero tolerance policy towards racism and all forms of discrimination.Firefighters are tackling a massive blaze which has taken hold of a building in Glasgow and residents are being warned to close their windows due to asbestos fears.

More than 120 firefighters are dealing with the incident on the busy shopping thoroughfare of Sauchiehall Street.

Emergency services were called to the scene at 8.18am on Thursday after a blaze took hold in the roof space of commercial premises.

Expand Close Streets were cordoned off as fire crews battled the blaze (Jane Barlow/PA) PA / Facebook

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Thick smoke billowed across the pedestrian precinct and streets were cordoned off as fire crews battled the blaze.

Flames could been seen in the roof of the building which houses Victorias nightclub and has several shops at street level.

The Scottish Fire and Rescue Service (SFRS) said the occupants of nearby properties were evacuated and there were no reports of any injuries.

Assistant Chief Officer Lewis Ramsay said: This is an extremely challenging incident but the response and professionalism of our firefighters has been outstanding.

We would urge the occupants of surrounding buildings to remain indoors and keep their windows closed due to the suspected presence of asbestos.

This will be a protracted incident and crews will remain on the scene as they work to prevent further fire spread and damage in this prominent city-centre location.

Police helicopter assisting @GreaterGlasgPol and @scotfire_glasgo at the scene of a large fire within Glasgow city centre. pic.twitter.com/91ShR9LC2P  Police Scotland Air Unit (@polscotair) March 22, 2018

Firefighters were also spotted gaining entry to the nearby Pavilion Theatre.

Iain Gordon, general manager of the theatre, said: Its getting worse, the flames are leaping out of the top now.

Everybody is out of the area, they have all been evacuated.

Our problem at the moment will be smoke damage because its gone right into the side of the building.

We are very concerned about everything. The building has been there for a long time and is a major part of Glasgow.

When you see how quickly the fire spread to other parts of the buildings in Sauchiehall Street we just hope the flames dont jump across the lane.

Its a lanes distance but thats not very far when its heat and flames going across.

Expand Close Fire in Glasgow PA Wire/PA Images / Facebook

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First Minister Nicola Sturgeon said the incident appears to be extremely serious.

Speaking at First Ministers Questions, she said: This is a deeply concerning incident in the city of Glasgow.

She praised the firefighters tackling the extremely challenging blaze and said the Scottish Governments resilience unit will remain in contact with the fire service throughout the incident.Mark Zuckerberg has said it was a mistake to rely on Cambridge Analytica (CA) to delete tens of millions of Facebook users data as he apologised for the major breach of trust.

The sites founder said the political consultancy had provided formal assurances that information harvested from 50 million profiles had been destroyed after Facebook first learned of the breach in 2015.

Mr Zuckerberg said he was now open to Facebook being regulated and accepted that malign actors were trying to use the site for political ends.

The site has been rocked in recent days by the row involving CA, who are accused of using the data to help Donald Trumps US presidential campaign target political ads on the platform.

The company has denied using Facebook data in its work on the campaign.

The scandal has prompted calls from politicians on both sides of the Atlantic for Mr Zuckerberg to answer to them in person for the breach.

The billionaire told CNN he would be happy to appear before US Congress if its the right thing to do.

This was a major breach of trust, and Im really sorry that this happened, he told CNN.

On Wednesday Mr Zuckerberg made his first public statement since the controversy erupted  via a Facebook post.

Journalists at The Guardian had told Facebook in 2015 that Aleksandr Kogan, a Cambridge University professor, had shared data from an app he had developed with CA, he said.

I want to share an update on the Cambridge Analytica situation -- including the steps we've already taken and our next... Posted by Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday, March 21, 2018

Facebook immediately banned Dr Kogans app and demanded that he and CA delete the data, for which they provided certifications that they had, the boss said.

Last week the company was alerted by The Guardian, The New York Times and Channel 4 that CA may not have deleted the data as they had said and the firm was banned from Facebook.

I dont know about you, but Im used to when people legally certify that they are going to do something, that they do it. But I think this was clearly a mistake in retrospect, Mr Zuckerberg told CNN.

Prof Kogan is alleged to have surveyed more than 270,000 Facebook users through an app he created.

Facebooks settings at the time allowed app developers to access the personal data of not just the people who used their app, but of all of their friends as well.

Mr Zuckerberg said Facebook has already taken the most important steps to prevent such a situation from happening again.

He told the broadcaster the site would be reviewing thousands of apps in an intensive process.

(Facebook) had very few ways of discovering abuse or enforcing on abuse when it was discoveredWhistleblower Sandy Parakilas

Facebook will ban developers who do not agree to an audit, and an apps developer will no longer have access to data from people who have not used that app in three months.

He said he was confident Facebook could get in front of the problem.

This isnt rocket science. Theres a lot of hard work we have to do to make it harder for nation states like Russia to do election interference, he said.

Mr Zuckerbergs apology came after a former employee of the company told MPs that Facebook had a wild west approach to looking after its users data and had little detection of any violations of its policies.

Whistleblower Sandy Parakilas, who worked in policy compliance and data protection for Facebook between 2011 and 2012, claimed the company had very few ways of discovering abuse or enforcing on abuse when it was discovered.

Facebook shares have slid by more than 7.6% since the first allegations were reported at the weekend by the Observer, and the firm received a backlash online  with a number of users reporting that they were deleting their accounts, including the co-founder of WhatsApp, which was bought by Facebook in 2014.

The company is also facing legal action from some of its own shareholders, who claim the company made materially false and misleading statements regarding the companys business, operational and compliance policies.

The Board has suspended CEO Alexander Nix pending a full independent investigation. https://t.co/HV9Mb5eXIR  Cambridge Analytica (@CamAnalytica) March 20, 2018

CA chief executive Alexander Nix was suspended after recordings emerged of him making a series of controversial claims, including boasts that CA had a pivotal role in the election of Donald Trump.

Downing Street confirmed on Wednesday that the Government employed CA parent company SCL for a contract with the Ministry of Defence, but said this had ended before the recent allegations came to light.

We are looking across Government to see if there were any other contracts, said a spokesman. As the Prime Minister said, we are not aware of any current contracts.

The Conservative Party said it had been approached by CA with a pitch for work during David Camerons leadership, but said this was rejected.

The Conservative Party has never employed Cambridge Analytica or its parent company, nor used their services, a Tory spokesman said.The police officer exposed to the Novichok nerve agent after the Salisbury poisoning has said normal life for me will probably never be the same after he was discharged from hospital.

Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey said he has been overwhelmed by the support he has received during the completely surreal experience.

The news today that DS Nick Bailey has left hospital is great to hear. I know that Nick has been in the minds of many people across the country including our own officers and staff. My thoughts and best wishes continue to be with Nick... Read more: https://t.co/WdA2uJnZXQ  Office Police & Crime Commissioner Wilts & Swindon (@OPCCWiltSwindon) March 22, 2018

He was taken to Salisbury District Hospital after responding to the attack on former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal, 66, and his 33-year-old daughter Yulia on March 4.

At a press conference outside the hospital, Cara Charles-Barks, chief executive of Salisbury NHS Foundation Trust, said he was discharged on Thursday afternoon after his condition improved.

The Skripals remain in a critical but stable condition, she told reporters.

Chief Constable Kier Pritchard has read statements on behalf of DS Nick Bailey & his wife Sarah, during a press conference held at #Salisbury District Hospital. @wiltspoliceCC also read a statement on behalf of the Force - all are available on our website https://t.co/FLKjLj0gbE pic.twitter.com/vwWAfmfRJ7  Wiltshire Police (@wiltshirepolice) March 22, 2018

In a statement read by Wiltshire Police Chief Constable Kier Pritchard, DS Bailey, said: People ask me how I am feeling  but there are really no words to explain how I feel right now. Surreal is the word that keeps cropping up  and it really has been completely surreal.

I have been so very overwhelmed by the support, cards and messages I have received  everyone has been so incredible.

His wife, Sarah, said in a statement: Nick doesnt like the term hero, but he has always been a hero to me and our children.

DS Bailey insisted I am just a normal person with a normal life, but added: I recognise that normal life for me will probably never be the same  and Sarah and I now need to focus on finding a new normal for us and for our children.Frontmen of foreign shell companies which own some of Londons most exclusive properties could face up to two years in jail and unlimited fines if they fail to disclose their true owners identity, ministers have said.

The Government has said it will publish draft laws this summer aimed at combating the use of dirty money to buy British property.

Under the proposals foreign companies must make clear who ultimately owns the properties in question through the worlds first public register of beneficial ownership.

Labour welcomed the move but said it should be followed by further action to tackle the scourge of tax avoidance, including greater transparency in the British overseas territories.

It comes amid growing scrutiny of how the UK property market can be used as a vehicle for money laundering and corrupt funds.

People abusing shell companies to conceal the true owners of UK properties will face up to 2 years in jail https://t.co/jx3ofr9mXU pic.twitter.com/dCI9NGYCAK  Dept for BEIS (@beisgovuk) March 22, 2018

The spotlight has also fallen on Russian ownership of London property in the wake of the nerve agent attack in Salisbury.

Business minister Andrew Griffiths said: The UK is taking a leading role in the global fight against corruption, including cracking down on the use of shell companies to launder dirty money by buying up some of Londons prime real estate.

Our public register will ensure we know who owns UK property wherever they are from and will help authorities come down hard on frontmen seeking to conceal their paymasters true identities.

This is the first register of its kind in the world and we must be careful to ensure it strikes the right balance between improving transparency and minimising burdens on legitimate owners.

Today the Government published it's response to the consultation on a register of real owners buying UK property. We're pleased they remain committed to the measure, but still concerned by delays to implementation https://t.co/e6SpZGKcVt  Transparency Int'lUK (@TransparencyUK) March 22, 2018

Recent estimates suggest prominent Russian figures with ties to the Putin regime own British properties worth nearly 1.1 billion, mostly in London.

However, it is thought this figure could be even higher given the way ownership can be concealed.

The total number of Russian-owned properties in London is believed to be well over 1,000, with reports that Russians are becoming more active in purchasing both residential and commercial property in the capital.

While the majority of foreign companies which own property in the UK do so legitimately, there are concerns that some criminals are buying properties to launder dirty money.

More than 180 million worth of property in the UK has been brought under criminal investigation as the suspected proceeds of corruption since 2004.

More than 75% of properties currently under investigation use offshore corporate secrecy.

While the Governments Damascene conversion on the case for public registers is an important step, it must be followed through with meaningful action to tackle the scourge of tax avoidancePeter Dowd, shadow chief secretary to the Treasury

Peter Dowd, shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, said: We are glad the Government is finally seeing the light and has accepted Labours calls for a register of beneficial ownership.

While the Governments Damascene conversion on the case for public registers is an important step, it must be followed through with meaningful action to tackle the scourge of tax avoidance through the introduction of a full public register of offshore trusts in UK overseas territories and crown dependencies.

Labour is calling on the Government to go further and adopt our tax transparency and enforcement programme in full.

It is the only way to ensure that everyone pays their fair share and we finally have a tax system that works for the many, not the few.

Duncan Hames, director of policy at Transparency International UK, welcomed the move but said the lack of urgency was disappointing.

It is thought the register will not be in operation until 2021, later than the Governments original deadline.

The Prime Minister and other Government officials have not been shy in recent weeks in speaking about cracking down on corrupt money in the UK, said Mr Hames.

The best way to do this is to bring about transparency to holdings of UK property which overseas companies currently avoid.

The longer we have to wait for this register, the longer corrupt individuals will be able to use the UK property market to hide their wealth. It continues to have cross-party support so there really is no reason for any further delay.

The new register follows a series of anti-corruption measures brought in last year, providing new powers such as unexplained wealth orders.

The Government says it will publish draft legislation for the register this summer and introduce the Bill early in the second session of this Parliament.

Ministers say they will seek to introduce the register at the earliest opportunity.Speakers Chaplain Reverend Rose Hudson-Wilkin, speaks during a commemoration for the victims of the terror attack on Westminster (PA)

Victims of the Westminster terror attack have been remembered at a special vigil.

The ceremony in Westminster Hall was held to mark the first anniversary of the attack and was attended by politicians, senior police officers and people involved in the incident.

Five people were killed, including Pc Keith Palmer, and dozens of others were injured when 52-year-old Khalid Masood launched a car and knife attack on Westminster Bridge and the Palace of Westminster before he was shot dead.

Earlier on Thursday, MPs observed a minutes silence as Speaker John Bercow asked members in the House of Commons chamber to pause in respectful memory of those who died on March 22 last year.

With heads bowed, MPs from different parties stood side-by-side along the green benches to pay their respects ahead of digital, culture, media and sport questions.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, told the gathering: A year ago, darkness struck across Westminster Bridge and in this palace.

Expand Close The Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby during the service (PA) PA Wire/PA Images / Facebook

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It spread across the bridge like a snake, driving to left and right, killing and harming.

Reverend Rose Hudson-Wilkin, the Speakers chaplain, told the service: A year ago today on this estate and on Westminster Bridge we were visited by what I regard as evil.

Rev Hudson-Wilkin praised Pc Palmer, saying he ran towards the danger in order that we might be safe.

Expand Close Keith Palmer, left, was one of the five victims (Metropolitan Police/PA) PA Wire/PA Images / Facebook

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The vigil included a two-minute silence for the victims of the attack.

Masoods rampage left five people dead  48-year-old Pc Palmer, who was on duty at the Palace of Westminster, along with US tourist Kurt Cochran, Romanian tourist Andreea Cristea, 31, and Britons Aysha Frade, 44, and 75-year-old Leslie Rhodes who were mown down on the bridge.

Prime Minister Theresa May was not at the Westminster Hall service because she was attending an EU summit in Brussels.

In memory of those who were lost, and in defiance of those who would seek to silence our democracy



PM @Theresa_May #LondonUnited pic.twitter.com/iUncICQCHU  UK Prime Minister (@10DowningStreet) March 22, 2018

But Downing Street said she had attended an earlier private service in the Chapel of St Mary Undercroft in the Palace of Westminster.

Pc Palmers name will be one of 1,400 inscribed on the new UK Police Memorial being built in Staffordshire, commemorating officers who were killed on duty.Hundreds of Syrian opposition fighters and their relatives began evacuating a key besieged town in eastern Ghouta, marking the first such rebel surrender from the bombed-out region east of Damascus.

The departure of opposition fighters from the powerful Ahrar al-Sham group could serve as a blueprint for other rebels in other towns, bringing President Bashar Assads government closer to recapturing the entire territory following years of siege and relentless bombardment.

Syrian TV broadcast footage showing dozens of white buses that had been parked along a main highway for hours, with opposition fighters and civilians on board, start to drive out in a long convoy.

It said among the 1,580 evacuees were 413 gunmen.

More are expected to leave in coming days.

As rebels prepared to depart the town of Harasta, thousands of civilians streamed out of other areas in eastern Ghouta that were still being bombed by the government.

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They included dozens of civilians who appeared to be wounded, some hobbling on crutches, another with an eye injury.

The governments assault has sparked a tide of displacement in the Damascus suburbs as civilians try to escape the violence.

Some have moved deeper into the rebel-held enclave, while some 50,000 others have crossed the front-lines, to government authorities.

The governments air and ground assault, which escalated on February 18, has seen the once sprawling territory at the doors of the capital shrink to three disconnected rebel-held islands.

The evacuation by Ahrar al-Sham rebels from Harasta, if it goes through, could serve as a blueprint for other rebels in other towns, bringing Mr Assads government closer to recapturing the entire territory.

The international medical charity Doctors Without Borders said the advancing government forces had captured or destroyed 19 of the 20 hospitals the group was supporting just one week ago.

It said medical staff were fleeing the approaching front lines.

Rebels hold just 20% of the eastern Ghouta territory they held one month ago, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group.

But that territory includes several densely populated residential zones including Douma, the largest town in eastern Ghouta.

The Observatory said some 4,000 people evacuated Douma since Wednesday.

The Russian military said more than 5,000 people left eastern Ghouta.

Rebels and the government exchanged 18 prisoners ahead of the Harasta evacuation, according to pro-government media.

The 13 men released by the Syrian rebels identified themselves to the media outside Harasta as soldiers and civilians attached to the Syrian army, who were captured by rebels in the fighting for Harasta.

Crying in relief, they thanked God, the Syrian army and Mr Assad for their freedom.

The deal for Harasta will see 1,500 rebels and 6,000 civilians leave to a rebel-held province in northwest Syria, according to the state-affiliated Military Media Centre.

Monther Fares, a spokesman for the rebel faction Ahrar al-Sham, confirmed that his groups fighters were preparing to depart.

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Mr Fares said the rebels agreed to leave because of civilian pressure resulting from intensive airstrikes and warplanes that do not leave the sky, adding that residents of Harasta have spent the last three months inside shelters.

But the arrangement leaves other fighters for the Failaq al-Rahman group still inside.

They government is threatening to move on them if they do not also agree to depart.

State-affiliated al-Ikhbariya TV cast the deal as a victory for the country.

Its correspondent Rabieh Dibeh said the government would restore its authority over Harasta once the terrorists left the town. He said defectors from the army would be ordered to rejoin the service.

Critics say it is a formula for displacement that legitimises the governments brutal siege tactics that have deprived hundreds of thousands of civilians of food and medicines and subjected them to a half-decade of violence.

Numerous, top UN officials have likened the tactics to war crimes and crimes against humanity.Palestinian teenage protester Ahed Tamimi has been sentenced to eight months in prison for slapping and kicking a pair of Israeli soldiers outside her West Bank home.

The sentence capped a case that sparked uproar in Israel, turned the 17-year-old girl into a Palestinian hero and attracted international attention.

Tamimis Israeli lawyer, Gaby Lasky, said she agreed to the sentence as part of a plea deal with prosecutors that allowed her to avoid more serious charges that could have imprisoned her for years.

Under the deal, she is due to be released in the summer. She is also being fined the equivalent of about 990.

Ms Lasky called the legal proceedings a farce. She said they are trying to deter other Palestinian youth from resisting occupation as Ahed did.

The judge agreed to a similar plea deal for Tamimis mother Nariman, who has been charged with incitement.

This is injustice, this court is designed to oppress the Palestinians, her father Bassem said.

He said they agreed to the deal because they had been threatened with three years in jail.

Bassem had visited his daughter and wife for the first time in prison the day before. He said Ahed spends her time doing school work.

An Israeli supporter of Tamimi slapped a prosecutor after the ruling and was later arrested by police.

Tamimi was arrested in December after video surfaced of her kicking the soldiers outside her West Bank home.

While some praised the soldiers for showing restraint, hard-line politicians criticised what they felt was a weak response and called for tough action against the girl, whose family has a long history of run-ins with the Israelis.

But the full-throttle prosecution of Tamimi, who turned 17 behind bars, has drawn widespread international criticism.

An Israeli officials revelation that he had once had parliament investigate whether the blond, blue-eyed Tamimis are real Palestinians drew accusations of racism and helped stoke additional interest in the case.Police in protective suits at The Maltings shopping centre, where former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia were found critically ill

With our seemingly never ending series of crises here in Northern Ireland, we could be forgiven for thinking that the recent events in Salisbury are of little concern to us.

However, I think it is important to note that Russia's attempt to murder Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, is more than a form of Putin "housekeeping", but a serious escalation in an ongoing conflict between Putin and the West; a conflict that, by its very "hybrid", or "asymmetric", challenge, is making the world a much more unstable place.

So, what's this got to do with us in Northern Ireland? There are three main areas we need to be concerned with: firstly, the potential for "hybrid" attacks on our economy and political system; secondly, the "Gaz" energy tri-lemma; thirdly, and most worryingly, what I call the "law of unintended international consequences".

But before I describe these concerns, it's probably useful to put Putin and Russia in context. The first and simplest observation is that we are not dealing with the USSR and the mass military power that the Politburo exercised until the late-1980s.

Today, despite some modernisation, Russia's conventional and nuclear power is a mere shadow of itself. It is very hard-pressed, fighting a "two-front" war in Syria and the Ukraine, and the cost of replacement of limited supply of high-tech and precision weapons means that it is - and will remain - incapable of directly challenging Nato.

Its economy is heavily reliant on oil and gas and, in a decarbonising Western global economy, coupled to low oil prices, Putin has huge fiscal issues that could undermine his legitimacy in the eyes of many Russians.

Finally, Russia has a massive demographic problem; quite simply put, there are fewer and fewer ethnic Russians in an increasingly uncertain neighbourhood and health and longevity outcomes for the average Russian citizen have not materially improved. In many ways, Putin presides over a Potemkin village writ large, whose weaknesses Putin seeks to mask using the remaining "hard power" of the state.

Given these challenges, he has turned Russia into a "hybrid" state, utilising all the tools at his disposal to ensure the prestige of Russia is maintained and, in consequence (bearing in mind the fate meted out to Russian leaders in the past who have failed to support the motherland), his continued survival.

A "hybrid" power like Russia can be a truly disruptive force for either good or ill. Russia, realising the West's vulnerability to a wide range of cyber-attacks, has worked out how to disrupt poorly protected infrastructure; unfortunately, there is more than anecdotal evidence to suggest that Russia may have been behind recent attacks on our NHS, influencing electoral results in the US, France and across Europe and is constantly probing for our weak spots - looking for back doors, if you will.

On a cyber-battlefield, the weakest point is found in the most unexpected of places, including in our NHS and power grids here. On a more positive note, while our cybersecurity industry here in Belfast is a target of Russian security services (as well as others), our skills are helping to disrupt these attacks and our capacity continues to grow.

Our energy system in Northern Ireland is uniquely vulnerable, because when the wind doesn't blow, we are reliant on gas-powered generation.

Indeed, in the recent "auction" run by SONI Ltd, part of the presumption is that Northern Ireland will have a secure gas supply.

However, a prolonged reduction in gas pressure from Russia will have a massive effect on gas price (if not, initially, on supply) and dependent on the time of year and weather conditions, as the reduction continues, those at the end of the network will suffer the most.

Northern Ireland is undoubtedly at the end of the "pipe" and, with the shutdown of Kilroot, the only way we may be able to retain domestic supply is to mothball what's left of our industry if a major international crisis develops.

But, for me, the greatest concern is that rationality in international relations is always in the eye of the beholder.

There needs to be careful calibration and calculation on the use of "hybrid", or "asymmetric", power, particularly when the use of military and security power becomes part of that calculus.

For instance, we regularly hear of Russian Naval Air Force long-range bombers probing Nato airspace just to the north and west of us; however, many of these aircraft are very old and of susceptible reliability. Imagine what would happen, as has regularly occurred in Syria, when one of these aircraft crashes and how this could be spun.

The Russian Navy's safety record in its submarines is questionable and it is not so long ago that the Kursk perished during a routine training exercise.

It does not take too much to realise that an unexplained Russian accident in our, or Irish, waters could again lead to escalatory consequences.

While some of these perspectives may be argued as being speculative, we have to remember that the shooting down of airliners, the use of military-grade chemical weapons, utilising nuclear poisons and deploying thousands of "little green men" in the Ukraine and Caucasus, cyber-attacks on our banking, energy, industry and health networks, are all tactics that have been - and continue to be - used.

Appeasement of Putin has never worked - and never will work.

In a globalised, interconnected and integrated world, we cannot be isolated from Putin's challenges. We cannot avoid the threat.

But we must be aware of the challenges and, despite our own local crisis, we cannot - and should not - forget that Putin is, indeed, a concern to us all.

Dr Steve Aiken OBE MLA is Ulster Unionist MLA for South Antrim. A former Commander in the Royal Navy, he held a variety of senior appointments at the Ministry of Defence, including leading the influential Global Strategic Trends group, advising on issues such as climate change, energy security, Europe and the Middle EastPhilippine National Police chief Ronald dela Rosa (right), speaks in Manila as three suspected Abu Sayyaf militants are presented to reporters, Nov. 17, 2017.

Philippine troops have captured two suspected Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG) militants who were a part of a faction involved in a daring cross-border abduction of foreign tourists from a Malaysian resort 18 years ago, police said Thursday.

The suspects, identified as Dani Suraidi and Amdak Jumah, went with government forces willingly when they were picked up near the southern city of Zamboanga on Tuesday, regional police director Chief Supt. Billy Beltran said.

Suraidi had a standing arrest warrant for kidnapping and serious illegal detention with ransom in connection with an ASG raid in 2000 on Sipadan, an island resort in Sabah, a state in eastern Malaysia that lies off the southern Philippines.

We have been looking for him for so long. Suraidi belongs to the group of slain Abu Sayyaf senior leader Albader Parad who then led the abduction, Beltran said.

Armed with assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, the ASG militants went to Sipadan and seized 21 hostages, including three Germans, two French nationals, two South Africans, a Lebanese national and two Finn holiday makers. They also took nine Malaysian and two Filipino resort workers.

Parad later took the hostages to the jungles of Jolo island, at the southern tip of the Philippines, where he transferred them to a larger ASG faction led by Ghalib Andang.

The kidnapping thrust the little-known but brutal ASG to international infamy. The government of then-President Joseph Estrada sought help from the Libya, who helped broker the captives release.

The hostages were freed one after the other after months in captivity, allegedly after payments of huge ransoms.

Police chief Beltran said Suraidi was a trusted man of another ASG leader Alhabsy Misaya, who was killed by the armed forces in a clash last year in Parang town on Jolo island.

Last week, another ASG member allegedly involved in the Sipadan hostage crisis was killed during a police operation in Tabuan Lasa town, in nearby Basilan province.

Mobin Kulin (alias Mulawin), was being arrested by authorities but resisted violently, provincial police commander Senior Supt. Nickson Muksan said.

He fought back and was killed by arresting police officers, Muksan said.

Numbering around 400 to 500 members, ASG, or Bearers of the Sword, was founded in the 1990s by an Afghan-trained Islamic firebrand, Abdurajak Abubakar Janjalani.

He was killed in an encounter in the late 1990s, and was replaced by his brother, Khadaffy Janjalani who went on to lead the group in carrying out some of the worst terrorist attacks in the Philippines, including bombings, extortions, random attacks and kidnappings.

The military considers the ASG as a terrorist organization bereft of any ideological leanings. In the past two years, it has beheaded a German yacht owner and two Canadians, whom its members had kidnapped separately in the south, for failing to pay ransoms.

One of the groups leaders, Isnilon Hapilon, later branched out to become the de facto leader in the country of the extremist group Islamic State. Last May, he led a siege in the southern city of Marawi that precipitated a five-month battle with the Philippine military. About 1,200 people, mostly militants, were killed in the fighting.

Hapilon and several leaders of the rebellion were killed in October at the end of the battle.

Mark Navales in Cotabato City contributed to this report.Perfection.

Most of us understand the concept but have a hard time envisioning anything truly perfect. Everything in our earthly experience is flawed, imperfect.

And for those who know and love the Lord, the imperfections we are most deeply aware of often tend to be our own. Im not speaking of the frailties of our bodiesthough we feel those all too well. But the imperfections that trouble us most are not that superficial. The real problem is a sinfulness that comes straight from the heart (cf. Mark 7:21-23).

Of course, we have a tendency to be more tolerant of our own imperfections than of the failings of others. We try to cover for ourselves, but in our hearts we know all too well that we are woefully and sinfully imperfect. What Christian cannot echo the sentiment Paul expresses in Romans 7:24: Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?

Were not alone in this. The entire universe suffers the effects of human sin. Paul also writes, We know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now (Romans 8:22). Thats why all we can know on earth is imperfection. All creation agonizes under the cruel effect of sins curse, waiting for the consummation of all things, when the curse will be finally removed.

At that time, everything will be perfect. Pain, sorrow, and the groaning of creation will finally be no more. The ransomed of the Lord shall return and come to Zion with singing; everlasting joy shall be upon their heads; they shall obtain gladness and joy, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away (Isaiah 35:10).

Not only that, but we shall be gloriously perfected. The whole personbody and soulwill be made completely new, flawless. As the apostle John wrote, Beloved, we are Gods children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is (1 John 3:2).

We cant envision it nowwhat we will be has not yet appearedbut we will finally be wholly and completely Christlike. This is the very purpose for which God chose us in eternity past: to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers (Romans 8:29). He chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him (Ephesians 1:4). He has already begun this good work in us, and he will faithfully bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ (Philippians 1:6). And when we see Christ, we will instantly and summarily be made utterly perfect, because we shall see him as he is.

Heaven is a perfect place for people made perfect. Perfection is the goal of Gods sanctifying work in us. Hes not merely making us better than we are; he is conforming us to the image of his Son. He is making us fit to dwell in his presence forever. The utter perfection of heaven is the consummation of our salvation. It is the purpose for which he chose us before the foundation of the world.

Changed from the Inside Out

God begins the process of perfecting us from the moment we are converted from unbelief to faith in Christ. The Holy Spirit regenerates us. He gives us a new heart with a new set of holy desires (Ezekiel 36:26). He transforms our stubborn wills. He opens our hearts to embrace the truth rather than reject it. He enables us to believe rather than doubt. He gives us a hunger for righteousness and a desire for him. And thus the new birth transforms the inner person. From that point on, everything that occurs in our livesgood or badGod uses to make us like Christ (Romans 8:28-30).

In terms of our moral and legal status, believers are judged perfect immediatelynot on the basis of who we are or what we have done, but because of what Christ has done for us. We are fully justified the moment we believe. We are forgiven of all our sin. We are clothed with a perfect righteousness (Isaiah 61:10; Romans 4:5), which instantly gives us a standing before God without any fear of condemnation (Romans 5:1; Romans 8:1). This is the great position of privilege Scripture refers to when it says God has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places (Ephesians 1:3). And when Paul writes that God has raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus (Ephesians 2:6), he is again speaking of this position of favor with God that we have been granted by grace alone. We are not literally, physically seated with Christ in the heavenlies, of course. We are not mystically present there through some kind of spiritual telepathy. But legally, in the eternal court of God, we have been granted full rights to heaven. That is the high legal standing we enjoy even now.

But God does not stop there. Having judicially declared us righteous (Scripture calls that justification) God never stops conforming us to the image of his Son (that is sanctification). Although our legal standing is already perfect, God is also making us perfect. Heaven is a place of perfect holiness, and we would not be fit to live there unless we too could be made holy. In a sense, then, the blessing of justification is Gods guarantee that he will ultimately conform us to the image of his Son. Those whom he justified he also glorified (Romans 8:30).

The seeds of Christlikeness are planted at the moment of conversion. Colossians 2:9-10 says that in Christ the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, and you have been filled in himfilled up with all the fullness of God. Peter adds that believers have been granted all things that pertain to life and godliness (2 Peter 1:3). If you are a Christian, the life of God dwells in your soul, and with it all that you need for heaven. The principle of eternal life is already in you, meaning you have title to heaven as a present possession. You have already passed from death to life (John 5:24). You are a new person (2 Corinthians 5:17). Whereas you were once enslaved to sin, you have now become a slave of righteousness (Romans 6:18). Instead of receiving the wages of sindeathyou have received Gods gift of eternal life (Romans 6:23). And eternal life means abundant life (John 10:10). It is like an artesian well of spiritual power within us, satisfying and enabling us to live the life we are called to (John 7:38). That is what Paul means when he writes, If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come (2 Corinthians 5:17).

Now lets be honest. Even for the most committed Christian, it doesnt always seem like the new has come. We dont always feel like a new creation. Usually we are more keenly aware of the sin that oozes from within us than we are of the rivers of living water Christ spoke of. Although we have the firstfruits of the Spirit, [we] groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies (Romans 8:23). And we groan this way all our lives. Remember that it was a mature apostle, not a fragile new Christian, who cried out in Romans 7:24, Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?

Heres the problem: Like Lazarus, we came forth from the grave still bound in grave clothes. We are incarcerated in human flesh. Flesh in the biblical sense refers not just to the physical body, but to the sinful thoughts and habits that remain with us until our bodies are finally glorified. When Paul speaks of flesh and spirit he is not contrasting the material body and the immaterial spiritsetting up a kind of dualism, the way gnostic and New Age doctrines do. He uses the word flesh to speak of a tendency to sina sin principlethat remains even in the redeemed person.

Paul clearly spells out the problem from his own experience in Romans 7. Here Paul writes,

For I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree with the law, that it is good. So now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells in me, that is, in my flesh. For I have the desire to do what is right, but not the ability to carry it out. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I keep on doing. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me. So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. (Romans 7:15-21)

If you are struggling to understand how the apostle Paul employs the term flesh, this last phrase can virtually be taken as his definition: The flesh is a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand (Romans 7:21). Paul goes on to say that this law is embedded in himin my members (Romans 7:23), waging war against his desire to obey the righteousness of the law, thus making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. That indwelling principle of sin includes all the wicked habits and thought patterns that we acquired in our lives before being born again. These fleshly influences have yet to be done away with, and we are severely troubled by them all our lives. Christians spend their lives mortifying the deeds of the flesh (Romans 8:13), but the sin principle will never be fully eliminated until we are glorified.

As believers we are new creaturesreborn soulsvested with everything necessary for life and godliness, but we cannot appreciate fully the newness of our position in Christ because of the persisting presence of sin in us.

Like Paul, we delight in the law of God, in [our] inner being (Romans 7:22). Only the principle of eternal life in us can explain such love for the law of God. But at the same time, the flesh constricts and fetters us, like tightly-bound grave clothes on someone just up out of the grave. This flesh principle is at war against the principle of new life in Christ. So we feel like captives to the law of sin in our own members (Romans 7:23).

How can this be? After all, Paul earlier wrote in this very epistle that our bondage to sin is broken. We are supposed to have been set free from sin (Romans 6:22). How is it that just one scant chapter later, he says we are captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members (Romans 7:23)?

But being a captive is not quite the same thing as being enslaved. As unredeemed sinners, we were full-time slaves of sinwilling servants, in fact. As Christians who are not yet glorified, we are captives, unwilling prisoners of an already-defeated enemy. Although sin can buffet and abuse us, it does not own us, and it cannot ultimately destroy us. Sins authority and dominion are broken. It lies close at hand in the believers life (Romans 7:21), but it is no longer our master. Our real allegiance is now to the principle of righteousness (Romans 7:22). It is in this sense that the new has come (2 Corinthians 5:17). Even though we still fall into old patterns of sinful thinking and behavior, those things no longer define who we are. Sin is now an anomaly and an intruder, not the sum and substance of our character.

God is changing us from the inside out. He has planted the incorruptible seed of eternal life deep in the believers soul. We have a new desire and a new power to please God. We have a new heart and a whole new love for God. And all those are factors that contribute to our ultimate growth in grace.

Paul makes a fascinating point about the inside-out transformation of believers. In 2 Corinthians 3:1-24, he contrasts the effects of our salvation with what happened to Moses when he encountered Gods glory on Sinai. Remember that when Moses came down from the mountain after the giving of the law, the glow on his face was so terrifying that he had to put a veil over his face (Exodus 34:29-33). Yet that was a relatively weak and diminishing glory (2 Corinthians 3:7). It was also a reflected glory.

In contrast, the glory which shall be revealed in us (Romans 8:18) is an ever-growing glory that is not reflected, but comes straight from within. Paul writes, We all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. For this comes from the Lord who is the Spirit (2 Corinthians 3:18). In other words, the indwelling Spirit of God personally conveys us from one level of glory to another.

The Greek word translated beholding means looking at a reflection. In the familiar King James Version, it says beholding as in a glass (or mirror). Unlike the Israelites, we require no veil to shield us from the reflection of glory. (Not like Moses, who would put a veil over his face so that the Israelites might not gaze at the outcome of what was being brought to an end2 Corinthians 3:13.) We get a full-on look at undiluted glory: God, who said, Let light shine out of darkness, has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ (2 Corinthians 4:6).

We dont literally look directly at the face of Christ, of course. The glory we see is a reflection of Christ in [us], the hope of glory (Colossians 1:27). As we fix our hearts and aspirations on his glory, the glow of Christlikeness grows brighter in us. One day we shall see literally himnot merely as a dim reflection. We will stand bodily in his presence: For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face (1 Corinthians 13:12). And with one face-to-face glance at the person of Christ, we will be instantly transformed into his likeness. We shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is (1 John 3:2).

Meanwhile, his glory is transforming us from the inside out. Thats why (unlike the reflected glow on Moses face) the glory doesnt fade; it grows from one degree of glory to another.

Although sin has crippled our souls and marred our spiritsthough it has scarred our thoughts, wills, and emotionswe who know Christ have already had a taste of redemption. As we set our hearts on heaven and mortify the remaining sin in our members, we can experience the transforming power of Christs glory on a daily basis. And we long for that day when we will be completely redeemed. We yearn to reach that place where the seed of perfection that has been planted within us will bloom into fullness and we will be completely redeemed, finally made perfect (Hebrews 12:13). That is exactly what heaven is all about.

Taken from The Glory of Heaven: The Truth about Heaven, Angels, and Eternal Life, by John MacArthur. Used by permission of Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers, Wheaton, Il 60187, www.crossway.org.

Our pictures of heaven range from comical to curious, mystical to fictitious, with bits of biblical truth thrown in. In this newly updated and expanded edition, pastor John MacArthur takes us through the pages of Scripture, exploring the wonders of heaven and the truth about angels and eternal life while addressing current debates and issues. Come along with this best-selling author for an in-depth look at every Christians futureheaven, our eternal home.Singapore has established itself as a leading country in biomedical sciences manufacturing and R&D activities. In addition, it also provides numerous opportunities for private enterprise to partner with its public-sector research institutes, clinical-research units in hospitals as well as international research organisations.

While Singapore already has one of the most efficient healthcare systems globally (ranked second by Bloomberg Healthcare Efficiency Index 2016), its integrated approach towards the bio-pharma business environment continues to further strengthen its position in an otherwise difficult time for pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. As organizations across the spectrum struggle on multiple fronts  declining R&D, pressures on costs and margins, heightened competition  they are increasingly getting interested in leveraging Singapores enabling and efficient ecosystem to further their productivity and profitability. This is quite evident from the fact that more than 30 leading companies (including the likes of GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis, Amgen and Takeda) have chosen Singapore as their base for APAC operations and are using the city-states enabling facilities to drive innovation, efficiency and business growth.

According to a recent study by research and consulting firm GlobalData (published in June 2017), the pharmaceutical market in Singapore is set to rise from S$1.28 billion in 2017 to around S$1.6 billion in 2021, and will first exceed the S$1.35 billion mark in 2019.

Singapores approach to attracting sectoral investment sector is multi-pronged, with a (1) focus on government initiatives and friendly policies, (2) enabling public-private partnerships, (3) making it easy for Singapore to become a preferred manufacturing base, (4) creating dedicated infrastructure to provide synergies and economies of scale, and (5) providing necessary incentives and impetus on digital health and med-tech. According to EDB, this has in turn helped the sector catapult itself into a significant and growing contributor to Singapores economy  about 3.5 to 4.0 percentage of GDP is already attributable to it, amounting to roughly around S$ 27 billion (of which, approx. ~S$16 billion is from pharma and ~$S11 billion from med-tech). This is not a jobless growth either, as it has resulted in creating more than 18,000 jobs in recent years (with an approx. split of 2:1 between pharma and med-tech).

Public healthcare expenditure in Singapore is an equally important area that deserves a mention, as it provides unforeseen challenges and opportunities for the business. Though the city-state has maintained a modest overall spending in this area, a significant expense towards costly healthcare facilities is still privately spent.

Preferred Pharmaceutical Manufacturing Base

Process research and development capabilities in Singapore are helping companies innovate and improve biologics as well as small-molecule production. Further, with the objective of getting industry and research to collaborate, Biopharmaceutical Manufacturers Advisory Council (BMAC)  a think-tank comprising of members from local pharmaceutical plant site directors and government agencies, is committed to making Singapore become a highly-skilled manufacturing economy with a proven record of quality and process development capabilities. Other examples include Singapores Institute of Chemical and Engineering Services (ICES) opening a pilot-scale laboratory facility to aide pharma companies in process development and improvement.

All these efforts have yielded results, with all pharmaceutical commercial manufacturing facilities here receiving validation from international regulators such as the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the European Medicines Agency (EMEA). A world-class physical and regulatory infrastructure, excellent global connectivity and a highly skilled human resource, therefore gives Singapore a competitive advantage.

This enabling ecosystem has helped Singapore become a leading choice of biopharmaceutical companies that are setting up their global manufacturing base here. Firms like Abbott, GlaxoSmithKline, Lonza, MSD, Novartis, Pfizer, Amgen and Sanofi-Aventis  just to name a few  have multi-purpose plants here that have the capability of manufacturing a range of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs), biologics and nutritionals. Generally speaking, it has steered a number of pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies to diversify their operations over time and led to a focus on developing manufacturing capabilities other than APIs. The country has made significant inroads in areas such as biologics manufacturing: with Baxter, Lonza, GlaxoSmithKline and Roche announcing capital investments for setting up biologics facilities in the range of S$2.7 billion.

Over the last few years, there are some examples of growing interest and investment in this area:

GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) provided ~S$8 million in research funding to 14 principal investigators under GSK-Singapore Partnership for Green and Sustainable Manufacturing (GSM). This is a second tranche of such investment that has provisioned S$33 million of funds totally. The focus of this grant is to conduct research in areas related to chemical-, physical- and bio-transformations, facilities and supply chain, equipment and technical operations, life cycle assessment, and solvent selection and optimisation, with the objective to develop innovative solutions that improve operational efficiency and viability of global operations.

Abbott made its first major capital investment in Asia  also its largest ever investment in nutritional space, with its S$450 million nutritional powder state-of-the-art manufacturing facility in Singapore. This aims to address the increasing regional demand for nutritional products.

In the area of biologics, Amgen is amongst the latest in Singapore, and its facility is truly next-gen: utilizing single-use, disposable technologies. This also helps make its footprint significantly smaller (~75%) than conventional plants, while maintaining similar output levels.

Lonza invested CHF 10 million to expand its biopharmaceutical development services platform in Singapore. This is an expansion to its biological manufacturing facility here, augmenting it with 1858 sq. mt. of state-of-the-art laboratory space and associated equipment, which will seamlessly integrate to enable a full range of front-to-back service offering: from development through pre-clinical and small-scale manufacturing, to large-scale commercial supply. Focus of this platform is to provide support to areas such as cell line construction, upstream and downstream process development, and a wide range of analytical services.

invested CHF 10 million to expand its biopharmaceutical development services platform in Singapore. This is an expansion to its biological manufacturing facility here, augmenting it with 1858 sq. mt. of state-of-the-art laboratory space and associated equipment, which will seamlessly integrate to enable a full range of front-to-back service offering: from development through pre-clinical and small-scale manufacturing, to large-scale commercial supply. Focus of this platform is to provide support to areas such as cell line construction, upstream and downstream process development, and a wide range of analytical services. AbbVie simultaneously announced regarding two new manufacturing facilities: one each for small-molecule APIs and biologics, aiming to build capabilities for both small and large molecules.

In recent years, Singapore has seen investments in a wide range of capabilities, such as: bioprocess development, next-generation facilities and cell therapies. It also remains committed towards developing a skilled workforce that is ready for future challenges and opportunities in biotechnology and pharmaceutical manufacturing. The sector is supported by a growing base of ~5,000 skilled engineers and technicians, and more than 300,000 skilled employees in related sectors such as chemicals, electronics, engineering. Already representing a thriving sector of Singapores economic growth, industry is also a significant contributor to GDP and job creation.

According to Datamonitor 2012, Singapore was the third fastest growing nation globally in the export of pharmaceutical products from 2000 to 2010. The trajectory continues upwards, thanks to the governments focus to make Singapore a destination of choice for the sector.

Public Private Collaboration: A cornerstone for Healthcare Advancement

Singapore has established itself as a leading country in biomedical sciences manufacturing and R&D activities. In addition, it also provides numerous opportunities for private enterprise to partner with its public-sector research institutes, clinical-research units in hospitals as well as international research organisations.

Singapores medical advancements propelled by Governments strong commitment to basic and clinical R&D, is further demonstrated by the establishment of dedicated state-of-the-art infrastructure, which co-locates public sector research institutes with corporate labs. Biopolis, at One-North, is a pioneering effort to facilitate such collaboration in the life-sciences and bio-medical space. Similarly, Tuas Biomedical Park (TBP) is a 360-hectare stretch of ready-prepared and specifically-zoned land set aside by the government for pharmaceutical and biologics manufacturing.

Encouraged by government focus, a number of pharmaceutical companies have taken the lead in leveraging this opportunity by making investments or financial commitments towards establishing and growing their centres of excellence for research and development:

Rocheestablished its Singapore Hub for Translational Medicine (CHF 100 million) comprising of a multi-disciplinary team, to partner with scientific and medical institutions in the country. Objective of the hub is to focus on disease biology for accelerating drug discovery and development.

Bayer Healthcare invested S$14.5 million in five projects with local academic institutions to advance research and development towards oncology diagnosis and treatment (source:EDB).

GlaxoSmithKline established its first Academic Centre of Excellence in Singapore, with an initial focus on early-stage research in ophthalmology, regenerative medicine and neuro-degeneration.

Maccine had earlier started a joint initiative with A*STARs Singapore Bioimaging Consortium to form the Translational Imaging Industrial Lab (TIIL), which aims to be a state-of-the-art preclinical imaging facility for drug development.

Siena Biotech is also partnering A*STARs Experimental Therapeutics Centre, for developing molecular inhibitors of a major signalling pathway in oncology that will target difficult-to-treat cancers.

Humalys SAS and Cytos Biotechnology are working with Singapore Immunology Network to develop antibody-based therapies for infectious diseases that are relevant in the Asian context.

GSK Biologicals and A*STARs Bioprocessing Technology Institute are partnering on vaccine and adjuvant system-related research projects.

Further, with an objective to facilitate research and innovation in the sector, government has started a number of programmes that are focussed at nurturing collaboration between scientists and industry experts, so as to translate research into implementable solutions. Some initiatives to facilitate this process include:

Singapore Translational Research (STaR) Investigator Award recruits leading clinician scientists for pursuing translational and clinical research

Clinician Scientist Award (CSA) provides financial support to medical researchers

Translational & Clinical Research (TCR) Flagship Programme (with a 5-year budget of up to S$ 25 million) provides an avenue for collaborative scientific problem solving and translating academic research into healthcare solutions for patients

Competitive Research Programme (CRP)(with a 3-to-5-year budget of up to S$10 million) provides funding across a spectrum broad of research ideas, including supporting initiatives that help identify new strategic research areas that have the potential to strengthen the core capabilities of the sector

Health Services Research Competitive Research Grants (HSR-CRGs)  a maximum of S$ 1 million provided by Ministry of Health to eligible public healthcare and academic institutions, promotes research and its translation into policy and practice

Advances in Digital Healthcare Solutions

Further building on the conventional Singaporean skill-set, which already has a strong and capable presence in Infocomms and IT sectors - focus is to work with healthcare industry into translating these competencies into applications within healthcare. Strategy also greatly aligns with Singapores vision of becoming a Smart Nation. EDB, along with its partnerships, as well as other similar institutions with a related mandate, help meet the objectives of creating job opportunities and partnerships, as well as opening up new possibilities to enhance the way we live, work, play, and interact.

The Global IT Hub in Singapore, setup by MSD, apart from focussing on software engineering - puts a lot of impetus on emerging and increasingly relevant areas of technology such as data science and cyber security. More recently, and with an aim to harness technology for healthcare  it has also expanded its competencies into areas such as digital health, bioinformatics and cognitive computing. Similarly, Merck (MSD) has also invested in a global innovation hub in Singapore, focused on harnessing digital technologies. Apart from core IT operations, it also supports skill development that are traditionally non-existent in healthcare companies, but are increasingly becoming important.

Generally speaking, there is a growing interest in the industry to invest in capabilities that are digital in nature and harness data driven analytics to provide insightful solutions for addressing real-world healthcare problems. From Singaporean perspective, it is of great essence to create an ecosystem the enables med-tech companies to build such capabilities and platforms, which further the advancement and growth of healthcare industry.During the Foundation Day, BIRAC and Perkin Elmer, Inc. signed a Letter of Intent to work together on the identified areas for a five-year partnership to promote India-led startups and innovators in the areas of biomedical, biotechnology and public health.

The Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council (BIRAC) celebrated its 6th Foundation Day recently in New Delhi. The event, aptly themed Sustaining Innovation: A Market Driven Pathway, was presided over by the Honble Minister of State for Science and Technology & Earth Sciences, Dr. Harsh Vardhan, Prof. Ashutosh Sharma, Secretary, Department of Biotechnology (DBT) and Dr. Renu Swarup, Senior Advisor, DBT & MD, BIRAC, Government of India, and attended by a large number of dignitaries from the scientific and industry sectors both from within the country and overseas.

During the Foundation Day, BIRAC and Perkin Elmer, Inc. signed a Letter of Intent to work together on the identified areas for a five-year partnership to promote India-led startups and innovators in the areas of biomedical, biotechnology and public health.

The goal of the collaboration is to promote the portfolio of Indian-led innovations and startups, which aligns with PerkinElmers mission to innovate for a healthier world. Moving ahead, PerkinElmer will continue to invest in India by lending support to government initiatives in technology innovations and advanced solutions that help protect the environment, the safety of our food, and the health of mothers and their newborn babies, said Scott Palubiak, Vice President, Market Development, PerkinElmer.

Dr. Renu Swarup, Senior Advisor, DBT and Managing Director, BIRAC said, BIRAC supports entrepreneurs and startups at different stages of innovation  from the ideation stage to managing intellectual property rights, and finally to the commercialization of products. This collaboration with PerkinElmer exemplifies our focus to enable commercialization and ensure the global competitiveness of Indian enterprises. This endeavor will also help to develop a complete ecosystem from an innovative idea to employment creation and generation, to product commercialization in domestic and global markets.

PerkinElmer is committed to developing innovative technologies to address the challenges of healthcare in India, completing the ecosystem from preventive to advanced healthcare. The products and solutions developed through this partnership will not only contribute to the national efforts of Make in India, Skill India and Entrepreneurship, but also promotes Go to Global market opportunities, said Jayashree Thacker, President PerkinElmer India.ZOYLO is coming up with more map-based healthcare services including Electronic Health Records, e-Pharmacy, Online Consultations, Healthcard, Hospitals and Home Healthcare among others.

As tech-enabled healthcare is revolutionizing care, Hyderabad-based digital consumer healthcare company, ZOYLO marked a major milestone to record the highest geography network coverage of doctors and diagnostic labs, spreading across 600 cities in 29 states of the country. As a digital healthcare ecosystem in India, which brings together the entire spectrum of healthcare services under a single roof, ZOYLO is a multi-functionality app which has already partnered with 50,000 doctors, 4000 diagnostic services and 3000+ hospitals & wellness centers.

Started with doctors, diagnostics and medical tourism services, ZOYLO is coming up with more map-based healthcare services including Electronic Health Records, e-Pharmacy, Online Consultations, Healthcard, Hospitals and Home Healthcare among others. Offering first map-based app with a hybrid technology, ZOYLO looks forward to an aggregation of every possible healthcare entity to create a rich healthcare network pan India making continuous innovative additions, to deliver its users a wholesome healthcare experience.

With ZOYLOs reach covering healthcare services across the length and breadth of the digital India, it was learnt that Tamil Nadu has the highest number of urban internet users while online healthcare services are being availed maximum in Karnataka, Maharashtra and Delhi.

Mr Vinod Kumar Reddy, Chief Executive Officer of ZOYLO says, India is witnessing an unstoppable rise of digitization. Thanks to laudable central government initiatives like Make in India and Digital India, that created greater awareness of leveraging the latent potentials of the digital world for the betterment of individual lives. With over 80% of the doctors and 40% of the dispensaries accumulated in our urban areas, healthcare is still a largely neglected reality to a major population of the country. ZOYLO was conceived with the vision of enhancing the quality of our every countrymans life, by providing him with his basic right to healthcare, irrespective of his location.

ZOYLO is the recipient of The Best Healthcare app for the Year 2016 at the India Health and Wellness Summit, for topping the charts of being the most improvised and quick map-based website and application in India. It has also made it among The 20 Most Promising mHealth Tech Solution Providers as reported in the CIOReview magazine.Bizarre! Bengaluru Student Books A Cab To North Korea, Can You Guess The Fare? Pulse oi-Ankita

All of us who live, work, study in big cities; more often than not, have felt our lives crumbling down when we need to reach somewhere urgently but our cab doesn't arrive, or the cabbie gives some hard-to-believe reason for being an hour late?

We all have our own set of baffling cab stories. But what we are about to tell you is the bizarrest of the bizarre we have heard. A Bengaluru student Prashant Shahi recently booked an Ola from Bangalore to - wait for it - North Korea! Yes, you heard us right!

We know for a fact that North Korea is arguably impenetrable, thanks to it's nuclear weapon freak tyrant Kim Jong Un. He is ready to go on war with any country and his citizens desperately want to flee, let alone outsiders managing to get an entry.

But Ola was here to accept the challenge and he was confirmed, the driver was even on his way to pick him up from his location. Here's what Prashant said, "North Korea had been trending all over the news... I once opened the Ola app instead of Google Maps to check North Korea's road connectivity to South Korea. There, I noticed was the option for booking a cab. I was surprised to see it possible myself!" [sic]

It doesn't end here, the app also showed the lowest rate of the 5-day ride, it was 1,49,088 INR. Prashant, later, reached out to Ola to point out this whole bizarre episode and you won't believe what happened next, he was asked to restart his phone to get rid of the technical glitch, by the customer care team.

After the Twitterati collectively started pointing out the issue, Ola bothered to respond and escalated the issue. But how could this extremely bizarre episode not kick-up a troll fest on Twitter? After the issue came into notice, people on Twitter started trolling Ola by asking rides to Canada, USA, etc. Someone also asked if the cab can take him on a water ride.

Well, for Ola that must not be a big deal!! :)Google Is Honouring The Woman Who Helped Clean The Seas Off The Nuclear Bombs: Katsuko Saruhashi Pulse oi-Syeda Farah

The biggest search engine Google has released a new doodle today, which is honouring the Japanese female Geochemist, Katsuko Saruhashi for her contributions in the field of science.

It would have been her 98th birthday today and Google has released a doodle to honour her.

She is the woman who has helped clean the seas off the nuclear bombs. Find out more about Katsuko Saruhashi's contributions in the paragraphs provided below.

She Broke Many Barriers She made an impact on the society norms. She was the first woman who earned a PhD in Chemistry from the University of Tokyo in 1957. She was also the first woman who was elected at the Science Council of Japan in 1980. Image Source: Wikipedia There Is A Lot More That She Achieved There is a lot more that she achieved back then, as she was also the first woman who won the Miyake Prize for Geochemistry in 1985. This an award that was named after her mentor, Miyake Yasuo. Google Celebrates 30th Anniversary Of Pi Day With Today's Doodle Her Research Included Her groundbreaking research focused on acid rain, the different radioactivity level which was spread through oceans, and she even tracked the CO2 levels in seawater. Her research helped in contributing towards stopping the test of nuclear warheads in the ocean as well. Google Doodle Honours Kamala Das - The Mother Of Modern English Poetry' She Promoted Women Working In The Field Of Science To promote women empowerment, she also started the Society of Japanese Women Scientists in 1958. The motto of starting this mission was to have more women contributing to the fields of science and world peace. For more Google doodle updates, keep checking our space.By Ann O'Loughlin

The Commercial Court has granted summary judgement against a businessman over a 1.8m loan towards the purchase of a one-acre site at Mill Lane, Shankill, Co Dublin.

Michael Shanahan, Victoria Road, Killiney, Co Dublin was sued by Promontoria (Arrow) Ltd which says the loan now stands at just over 2m.

Mr Shanahan was sued along with Cathal Mallon, Sandymount Avenue, Dublin, and the case against him stands adjourned.

Today, Mr Justice Brian McGovern rejected arguments on behalf of Mr Shanahan that he had an arguable defence to the claim for summary judgement against him.

Mr Shanahan said the 1.8m loan, originally provided by the Educational Building Society (EBS) in 2008/9 and later sold by NAMA to Promontoria, was provided on the basis of limited recourse to him.

He said he would not have borrowed the money if there had been any personal risk or liability.

He claimed this was agreed at a meeting between him and two EBS representatives in June 2006.

The loan facility letter provided by EBS did not comprise the whole of the agreement between him and EBS, he argued.

Mr Justice McGovern said the defence raised by him "lacks credibility and flies in the face of the written documents signed and accepted by the defendant".

For reasons of public policy, the courts will not permit oral evidence to be admissible if it was introduced for the purpose of contradicting the terms of a written agreement, he said.

The defendant had failed to raise an arguable defence to meet the threshold required in order to have the matter sent for full hearing.

The exact amount of the summary judgement will be dealt with later.GDP is expected to grow by 4.8% this year, according to the ESRI.

They say it is a slight slow down after growth of 7.8% last year but it claims there is still strong domestic consumption and investment.The chief executive of Landmark Media said he expects the competition and competition watchdog to approve the purchase of the Irish Examiner group which includes the Evening Echo, as well as regional titles and radio stations, in the near future.

Tom Murphy said Landmark and The Irish Times remained committed to the deal.

The proposed acquisition of the Landmark media group by the Irish Times was agreed in recent months and went to the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission for approval.

The regulator said following a preliminary investigation it had extended its investigation of the deal into a Phase 2 round, and would make its final ruling at the latest by August 1.

That deadline could be extended if it were formally to issue a request for further information, it said.

However, Mr Murphy said Landmark and The Irish Times had re-affirmed their commitment to concluding the transaction.

He said the extension by the regulator while a little disappointing was not wholly unexpected.

I would be very hopeful it would be approved before August 1 on the basis of the straightforward nature of the transaction, he said.

In a statement, the commission said its Phase 2 investigation involved The Irish Times proposed acquisition through Sappho Limited.

The Competition and Consumer Protection Commissions role in reviewing mergers and acquisitions is to ensure that proposed transactions do not substantially lessen competition in any market for goods or services in the state.

Following a preliminary investigation, the commission has determined that further analysis is required to establish if the proposed transaction could lead to a substantial lessening of competition in any market for goods or services in the state.

The commission must make a final decision on the proposed transaction on or before the 1st August 2018. This deadline may, however, change if the commission issues a requirement for information, the regulator said.

The proposed acquisition involves the Irish Examiner and irishexaminer.com; and the Evening Echo and eveningecho.ie.

It also includes regional papers, the Laois Nationalist; Kildare Nationalist; Carlow Nationalist; Western People; Waterford News and Star; and the Roscommon Herald.

The deal also involves: breakingnews.ie; recruitIreland.com; benchwarmers.ie; and radio stations, Beat 102-103 and WLR FM.By Padraig Hoare

Norwegian Air has dismissed concerns about its commitment to its Irish transatlantic routes after it revealed it would post larger-than-expected losses for the current quarter.

Shares in the low-cost long-haul airline fell more than 2% after it said it raised 119.5m (136.8m) in a share sale to help fund its expansion and cope with higher fuel costs. Analysts questioned whether Norwegian can continue pursuing the long-haul strategy with losses piling up.

Karl-Johan Molnes, chief analyst at brokerage Norne Securities, said: The results of the share issue show investors have enormous confidence in the company. And they should not, because Norwegian Air is losing an enormous amount of money.

Mr Molnes said Norwegian should dismantle the long-haul business very quickly because it could not replicate the success on shorter routes.

Long-haul customers are mainly high-paying business-class customers, while Norwegian Air is focusing on economy customers, he said.

Davy said that while the share sale provided breathing space, it warned that issuing new equity equivalent to 24% of ones market cap in order to improve equity levels and a weaker-than-expected first quarter update was about as difficult as it gets.

Norwegian reiterated its confidence in building a profitable long-haul business and said now was the time it had to spend to build its transatlantic business.

Norwegian Air acting CFO Tore Oestby said: This is still early days for us. We are very comfortable with our transatlantic operations.

A spokesman said its Irish routes remained a key focus. Its an important market for our continued growth, he said.

The first-ever transatlantic flight from Cork took off last summer to Providence, Rhode Island, while the airline also has a number of flights from Dublin, Shannon and Belfast. The airline said last month that its Irish expansion is just getting started and that it is in a much better position for growth this year.

Chief executive Bjorn Kjos said he hoped 2017 would be the last year of loss and that he was optimistic of the picture at the end of the year.By Padraig Hoare

Two in five Irish chief executives are not addressing cyber breaches, a global report into data privacy protection has found.

The survey by PwC of 9,500 chief executives in more than 120 countries found just half have an accurate inventory of employee and customer personal data.

PwCs latest Irish chief executive survey found almost nine out of 10 Irish CEOs are concerned about cyber threats, but 40% are not addressing security breaches.

Less than half of bosses globally conduct compliance audits of third parties who handle customer and employee data, or plan to boost investment in this area in 2018. Less than a third (31%) say corporate board members directly participate in a review of current security and privacy risks.

Only one in three had started a general data protection regulation (GDPR) assessment at the beginning of 2018.

The GDPR was ratified in 2016 following four years of negotiation, replacing the existing directive on data protection.

Unlike an EU directive, which can be implemented over a certain time, the regulation will be made law once it begins in May, meaning penalties can be imposed from day one.

The regulation is designed to harmonise data privacy laws across Europe and to protect citizens data privacy. It not only applies to organisations within the EU but also to firms that do business inside member states.

If companies fail to comply with the regulation, they can be fined up to 4% of annual global turnover, or 20m.

PwC Ireland cyber leader Pat Moran said the surveys findings were worrying.

GDPR is just around the corner and it is disappointing that the survey suggests that organisations are not doing enough to protect data privacy.

Using data in more innovative ways opens the door to both more opportunities and more risks. In our experience, there are few companies building cyber and privacy risk management into their digital transformation.

Understanding the most common risks, including lack of awareness about data collection and retention activities, is a starting point for developing a data-use governance framework, he said.

Overall, businesses in Europe lag behind their North American counterparts in developing an overall information security strategy, said PwC.Update 9.37pm: Taoiseach Leo Varadkar met British Prime Minister Theresa May before the evening session of EU leaders in Brussels.

They spoke about Brexit, Northern Ireland, and Russia.

Caught up with British PM Theresa May this evening at @EUCouncil to talk Brexit, Northern Ireland, Russia, and also briefly rugby. She committed again to December agreement. Detailed discussions start next week on EU/UK future relationship with focus on Ireland pic.twitter.com/b5nYx7ohjF  Leo Varadkar (@LeoVaradkar) March 22, 2018

Mrs May reassured the Taoiseach of her commitment to the December Brexit blueprint.

They both looked forward to the negotiations next week at official level in Brussels on the border and will discuss Northern Ireland again after Easter.

The Taoiseach also expressed solidarity and support following the chemical attack in Salisbury.

Mrs May congratulated Ireland on winning rugby's Six Nations Grand Slam.

Varadkar calls for border agreement before October | https://t.co/oM7P5yEXdD pic.twitter.com/fi7ejbeH8Y  RTE News (@rtenews) March 22, 2018

Earlier, Mr Varadkar reiterated his firm stance on the importance of the backstop arrangement if no other solution is found.

But he said that was not his preferred option and envisaged a "deep" free trade agreement between the UK and EU.

He added: "A customs union partnership between the UK and EU that would be so close to the customs union that it would not necessitate some of the elements that are in the backstop."

- PA

Update 5.50pm: Better the right border deal in October than any deal in June, says Taoiseach

The outcome of Brexit will be a test for Ireland's membership of the EU, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has said, as he again vowed there would be no new border in the North.

EU leaders will return to the thorny issue of Brexit today and are expected to agree to a transition deal for Britain.

But in surprise remarks, Mr Varadkar said that Ireland could be willing to wait until October before getting a solution on the so-called 'backstop' promise of a frictionless border in the North.

This follows a rejection of the backstop terms by British Prime Minister Theresa May, who ruled out accepting suggestions the North could remain in the EU customs union without any solution.

Nonetheless, Britain agreed earlier this week to put the backstop in the Brexit withdrawal deal, also saying it favours an alternative solution, including through technical means.

Asked by reporters yesterday when a clear deal or backstop might be agreed on the North, Mr Varadkar said it quite possibly could be as late as October.

I think certainly by October. Everyone takes the view that we will have to have the withdrawal treaty agreed by October because it will have to be ratified by the British parliament and the European Parliament, and potentially by some national parliaments. So October is the deadline.

Would I like to have it done by June? Yes, absolutely. But I would rather have the right deal in October rather than any deal in June.

Fianna Fail warned during the week that the issue of the North had been kicked down the road and now faced being left behind in talks.

Speaking at an EU summit in Brussels, Mr Varadkar said agreement on the Brexit transition period up until the end of 2020 meant really nothing will change until 2021 and that's very important when it comes to jobs and to business and when it comes to farming.

- Irish ExaminerBy Ann O'Loughlin

The extradition of an Irish man who claims he was a paid Garda informer to France from the UK would be "an abuse of process" the High Court in Dublin has heard.

The man says he was a Covert Human Intelligence Source for Gardai when he was arrested in France 17 years ago on drug trafficking offences, and was subsequently given a four year prison sentence.

He never served that sentence.

Earlier this year he was arrested and detained in England on foot of a European Arrest Warrant (EAW) issued by the French Authorities in relation to the sentence.

He opposes the request for his surrender.

In the extradition proceedings due before an English court the man seeks to use documents he has obtained from the Gardai in his pending action against the Irish State over its alleged failure to protect him after he was arrested in France.

In his claim against the Garda Commissioner, Ireland and the Attorney General the man seeks damages for alleged negligence, breach of duty, breach of contract and alleged misrepresentations.

He claims in the late 1990s he entered into an agreement with the Gardai to act as an informant on suspected drug traffickers.

He claims his actions led to the arrest of drug traffickers responsible for importing drugs into Ireland.

It was part of the alleged agreement it is further claimed that the Gardai would take all steps to safeguard his safety, keep his identity confidential and protect him from criminal prosecution in Ireland or abroad.

Following his arrest and conviction in France he claims the Gardai failed to intervene with the French authorities.

He claims the Gardai knew in advance about his expedition to France in 2000, which involved a plan to move drugs from Spain to Ireland.

Following his arrest he claims French police traveled to Ireland to check his claims he was an informant, but says the Irish authorities failed to engage in any meaningful way to ensure his safety from prosecution.

The State opposes that claim and says while it did pay the man for information it rejects his claims it agreed to protect him from prosecution if he was arrested in another jurisdiction.

In 2016 he secured an order from Ms Justice Marie Baker for the discovery of certain documents from the Gardai which he says supports his damage claim.

The defendants claimed privilege over the documents on grounds including that handing them over would cause a risk to life and would be an operational security risk.

At the High Court today Hugh O'Keeffe SC for the man told Ms Justice Marie Baker his client wants the High Court to give his Irish lawyers permission to allow his UK lawyers use the documents that were the subject of the 2016 discovery order in order to defeat the extradition request.

Counsel said it would be "an abuse of process" if the man was surrendered to France.

It is the man's case the abuse is triggered by the alleged failure by the Gardai to give the French authorities a full and proper description of the relationship with the man, the extent of the authority to which he operated and the degree of assurance given to him he would receive immunity from prosecution.

Counsel added the Irish State would not suffer any meaningful prejudice if the documents were put before the English court.

The State, represented by Alice Fawsitt SC, opposed the application on grounds including there would be an absence of control over the use of the documents.

Ms Justice Baker, who agreed the application was both unusual and urgent, adjourned the matter to a date in April to allow both sides make further legal submissions on the matter.The Taoiseach Leo Varadkar is in Brussels today for the start of a two-day European Council meeting.

EU leaders will be focussing on the progress of the Brexit negotiations.Update 6.19pm: Firefighter and Workers Party representative David Gardiner has today called for urgent training and improved resources for firefighters in the wake of last nights fire at the Metro Hotel in Ballymun.

Gardiner, who is the Workers Party representative for Lucan-Palmerstown, and a firefighter with Dublin Fire Brigade (DFB), said: "Thanks to the work of my colleagues in DFB, there was no loss of life in Ballymun last night.

"But the truth is that, in spite of repeated warnings from DFB, Dublin is at risk of a major disaster because we are not properly prepared...

"Equipment to tackle high rise fires is totally inadequate. Since 1981 there has been no increase in the number of fire appliances capable of responding to a fire like we saw last night - but in 1981, there were almost no high rise buildings in Dublin.

"Last year, a number of second-hand appliances were bought to replace old high rise appliances. We discovered after they were bought that these appliances were not big enough to carry a full team of firefighters, and so they have to be accompanied by a separate car when they are deployed.

"This slows down response rate considerably and puts lives at risk.

"DFB and our representatives in SIPTU have been calling repeatedly for proper training in responding to high rise fires. This is becoming more and more important as Dublins number of high rise buildings increases."

Meanwhile, Tanaiste Simon Coveney has paid tribute to the emergency services after a fire destroyed parts of a Dublin apartment complex and hotel.

Residents at the Metro Hotel building are being warned it could be six months before they can return home.

Gardai are investigating the cause but at this stage, its not suspicious.

Simon Coveney says things could have been much worse:

"Nobody was injured. It could have been a very very different and tragic scene and it wasn't.

"I think that is a reflection on the professionalism of our emergency services and first responders."

Update 3.42pm: Families whose apartments were damaged in last night's fire "have nowhere to go and are homeless", according to a local Councillor.

Speaking today, Independent Dublin City Councillor for Ballymun Noeleen Reilly also praised the work of Dublin firefighters.

I am absolutely relieved today that no one has been seriously hurt in the fire last night," she said.

"The 10th to the 15th Floor is gutted and when you look at it, it is a miracle that everyone got out safe.

"The Dublin Fire Brigade were on the scene within minutes and were phenomenal in evacuating people from the building as quickly as they did.

"They saved countless lives last night and deserve all the praise they are getting today.

She said that focus must now turn to the people who lost their homes in the fire.

Now we have to support the families that have nowhere to go and are homeless as a result of this fire," he said.

"All their belongings are gone and they do not know what lies ahead of them in the coming days, weeks and months.

"It will be some time before the apartments are habitable again.

"The Metro Hotel is asking anyone affected to ring 085 754 5232 or 087 769 5555 for assistance.

"I also want to commend the Ballymun Community who have shown unbelievable levels of support for families in the last day.

"A collection has been organised for clothes in the nearby Trinity Comprehensive and St Kevin in Ballygall by Ballymun Kickhams.

Update, 2.48pm: Metro Hotel will be 'closed for some time' following fire

The Metro Hotel has issued a statement following last night's fire apologising to its guests.

They confirmed that all their guests, plus people living in 30 apartments, have been accounted for, but also that the hotel will be "closed for some time".

Their statement read: "Metro Hotel wishes to apologise to hotel patrons and guests that the hotel is currently closed, and will remain closed for some time, following a fire.

"Metro Hotel is actively engaging with emergency services following the fire which occurred at around 7.30pm on Wednesday evening, 21 March 2018.

"All hotel guests (over 150) as well as the residents of 30 apartments attached to the hotel are accounted for and were relocated to the nearby Carlton Hotel for the night.

"The key focus of hotel staff today is to notify inbound guests and to source alternative accommodation for tenants and guests, with whom we will be liaising throughout today.

"Unfortunately, guest and tenant access to personal belongings located in the hotel / apartments is restricted until clearance is received from emergency services. We will provide regular updates as they become available.

"The cause of the fire is still being investigated. No decision can be made about a hotel re-opening date until the cause of the fire has been established and all safety considerations have been thoroughly assessed."

2.18pm: Families may be left homeless for six months after Ballymun fire

Dozens of families have been left homeless after the fire in Dublin.

It could be six months before they are able to return to their homes following the blaze at the Metro Hotel which has caused extensive damage.

Gardai are investigating the cause, but at this stage it is not considered suspicious.

Adeel, his partner Anita and their two children have been living there for the past three years, and he says they are devastated.

He said: "You worry about a place to live, you worry about your belongings, but that's not the main thing.

"The main thing is that our kids are safe and everyone else is safe."

1.14pm: Firefighters seek urgent meeting with Housing Minister in wake of Ballymun high-rise fire

Representatives of SIPTU and Forsa members in the Dublin Fire Brigade (DFB) are seeking an urgent meeting with the Minister for Housing, Planning and Local Government, Eoghan Murphy, concerning the provision of adequate training, resources and risk assessments to deal with the threat of high rise fires.

SIPTU Sector Organiser, Brendan OBrien, said: DFB firefighters believe that the high-rise fire in Ballymun last night has starkly illustrated why their repeated demands for high rise firefighting training, as well as the provision of adequate resources and risk assessments, must be acted on.

#BallymunFire:



 1st 999 call @ 2013

 6 units + ambulance sent

 200 people evacuated

 60+ firefighters

 fire started on 13th floor

 no fire on 11/12

fire under at 0200

 different fire from the tragic events at Grenfell Tower

Orderly evac helped#Ballymun pic.twitter.com/5O2QNd1F35  Dublin Fire Brigade (@DubFireBrigade) March 22, 2018

Since 1981, there has been no increase in the provision of high reach fire appliances, despite the city having grown considerably since then.

Two floors of the apartment complex were completely gutted while others have been significantly damaged.

More than 150 guests were safely evacuated after the blaze broke out last night on an upper floor of the Metro Hotel in Ballymun.

Eight fire engines, 60 firefighters and a range of other emergency services brought the blaze under control in the early hours of this morning.

There are no reports of any injuries.

DFB SIPTU Section Chair, Deirdre Taylor, said: We knew it was only a matter of time before a large scale high-rise fire incident occurred in Dublin. The Area Risk Categorisation document for the Ballymun area does not include high-rise buildings such as the Metro. Thankfully there has been no loss of life in this case. We hope that lessons can be learned from this incident before it is too late.

We have one fire appliance remaining on scene at the #Ballymun fire. No injuries reported either from public or firefighters. #BallymunFire pic.twitter.com/gydYo3elad  Dublin Fire Brigade (@DubFireBrigade) March 22, 2018

Update 12.11pm: Investigations are underway into the cause of a major fire at a Dublin hotel and apartment complex.

Around 200 people were evacuated from the Metro Hotel, and there was no loss of life or injuries.

Two floors have been completely gutted while others have been significantly damaged.

Chief Fire Officer Patrick Fleming says at this stage the cause of the blaze is not suspicious.

He said: "The first crews, when they arrived, were faced with a well-developed fire on the 13th floor, they immediately set about a further evacuation of the premises and firefighting.

"The fire developed and moved to the 10th floor of the building itself. We were fighting the fire both internally and externally and great work was done by the crews in actually bringing it under control."

10.05am: 'I lost everything', says resident as Gardai start investigation into Ballymun fire

Gardai have begun an investigation into the cause of a major fire at a hotel and apartment complex in Dublin.

Sections of the area remain cordoned off and diversions remain in place.

More than 150 guests were safely evacuated after the blaze broke out last night.

The fire erupted on an upper floor of the Metro Hotel in Ballymun shortly after 8pm yesterday evening.

Eight fire engines, 60 firefighters and a range of other emergency services brought the blaze under control in the early hours of this morning.

There are no reports of any injuries.

The top five floors of the building have been badly damaged.

One resident was devastated, saying: "I just went to the gym for 30 minutes, came back home and saw the apartment was on fire.

"I lost everything - all my clothes, furniture, everything."

Another man returned home to find the building in flames.

He said: "I'm not allowed in the building for a couple of days. I have nothing, I have no clothes, no things and I have no idea what's going to happen now."

The Metro Hotel in Ballymun this morning. Pic: Paul Quinn/Newstalk

Dublin's Lord Mayor Micheal Mac Donncha has commended Dublin Fire Brigade on its "rapid and effective response".

The Lord Mayor said: "On behalf of the people of Dublin City I commend Dublin Fire Brigade for their rapid and effective response to the Metro Hotel fire.

"They helped to ensure that there were no casualties in what was a potentially catastrophic fire in a high rise building.

"The efficiency and courage of the Dublin Fire Brigade crews was demonstrated last night and the people of the City are very grateful to them. We must now ensure that all aspects of this fire are fully investigated."

6.30am: More than 150 saved as firefighters put out major fire at hotel in Dublin

More than 150 guests of a Dublin Hotel have been safely evacuated after a major fire broke out last night.

The top five floors of the Metro Hotel in Ballymun in Dublin have been damaged after the blaze.

Crews from Dublin Fire Brigade remain at the scene after they managed to bring the blaze in the upper storeys of the hotel under control in the early hours of this morning.

The residents were transferred to the Carlton Hotel for the night.

Local Fianna Fail councillor Paul McAuliffe was at the scene as firefighters tackled the blaze and says the fire is a blow for the whole area.

He said: "It's going to have a major impact on business in the area, because the hotel was a significant part of the business life of Ballymun.

"So something like this will have a long-lasting effect for everybody."

The fire broke out shortly after 8pm last night and quickly engulfed several floors of the building.

More than 60 firefighters worked to bring the blaze under control earlier this morning.

Mr McAuliffe said the blaze was "one of the most significant fires in the Dublin area in recent times".

"Its cause and the spread of it in such a rapid way are going to have to be investigated," he told the Press Association.

"Dublin Fire Brigade have that capacity to investigate these fires. We want to see the results of it and I imagine there will be serious questions asked."

Erica Fleming, whose apartment overlooks the hotel said she could see and hear windows exploding as a result of the heat.

Last night, she said: "One of the apartments is completely engulfed.

"There is smoke billowing up through the floors.

"The windows exploded about 20 minutes ago, obviously from the heat.

"The windows of other apartments are just completely blackened out. You cannot see the corridor or landings.

"I can see the fire crews dragging the hoses through the building. They are still two floors below but they are making their way up slowly."

Dublin Fire Brigade said there will be road closures around the area as they will have four units putting out hotspots remaining in the hotel overnight.

We'll have 4 fire engines on scene at the #BallymunFire overnight to damp down & extinguish hot spots. Road closures are likely to affect traffic in the morning #Dublin #fire #Ballymun @DCCTraffic @aaroadwatch pic.twitter.com/qewyJlUvHV  Dublin Fire Brigade (@DubFireBrigade) March 22, 2018

There had been concerns a number of homeless families were being accommodated there, but Dublin City Council confirmed last night that there wasn't any.

Witness Anthony Flynn last night said he did not believe anyone was still trapped inside the burning building.

"It looks like everybody is out of the hotel," he said. "There are no reported injuries at this stage."

Mr Flynn, a co-founder of the Inner City Helping Homeless organisation, said pieces of debris could be seen flying from the blazing building in scenes similar to the Grenfell Tower tragedy in London.

He said he understood no homeless families were currently housed in the building.

He added: "We are looking at the top seven floors that appear to be alight. It seems to be spreading like mad. It's exactly what it looked like at Grenfell. It appears to have started on the top two floors but has spread downwards and upwards."

- Digital Desk and PATogether For Yes warn of implications of No vote; 'Medical Alliance for 8th' say ending life 'nothing to do with healthcare'

Women in Ireland could be forced to travel even further than the UK for an abortion if the health service in the UK stops treating them, according to the former Master of the National Maternity Hospital.

A hospital in Liverpool temporarily scaled back its services for Irish women recently due to staffing issues.

Dr Peter Boylan was speaking at the launch of the Together For Yes campaign ahead of the upcoming abortion referendum.

He says Irish doctors should be allowed to treat women here.

"That's a foretaste of what is likely to happen in the future, both because of the NHS being overstretched and also because of English doctors saying: 'Look, hang on a sec, you need to sort out your own problems'," he said.

"If the NHS, and the UK in general, closes its doors to Irish women, they obviously would have to travel further afield."

Responding today the 'Love Both Project' were critical of the Rotunda Hospital.being chosen by the 'Together for Yes' campaign as a venue for the launch.

It is deeply sad that we are at this stage in Irish history, where a campaign to remove all meaningful protections from unborn babies could be launched in the grounds of a thriving maternity hospital," said LoveBoth spokesperson Maeve O'Hanlon.

"Under the Eighth Amendment, mothers and their babies receive equal protection and care that is world-class. All of that would change if the repeal side were successful.

Repealing the Eighth Amendment means leaving Ireland open to whatever wide-ranging abortion laws politicians decide to introduce."

Separately, a number of doctors against the repeal of the 8th amendment launched their campaign today.

The Medical Alliance for the 8th, a group consisting of doctors, nurses, midwives and other health professionals who support keeping the 8th Amendment to the Constitution, held a press briefing in Dublin earlier today.

Dr Siobhan Crowley said that repealing the 8th would be the wrong decision.

"This is the exact opposite of what we, as healthcare professionals, were trained to do, which is to protect human life, not end it," she said.

"It concerns us greatly that without any consultation from government, it is assumed that we will fall into line with the proposal and go from being a healing profession to one that facilitates the ending of a childs life and abortion on demand.

"Lets be clear, this proposal from government has nothing to do with healthcare. Abortion is life ending. It is never life-saving. This proposal is about opening the door to wide-ranging abortion and nothing more."

- Digital deskA Dublin man has pleaded guilty to harassing Sharon Ni Bheolain.

Conor OHora, of Heather Walk in Portmarnock in Dublin appeared before the Dublin Circuit Criminal Court this afternoon.

He pleaded guilty on the basis of recklessness to harassing newsreader Sharon Ni Bheolain between March 27, 2013 and January 7, 2014.

The 40-year-old also pleaded guilty to one charge of the possession of child pornography on February 18, 2014.

He was remanded on bail ahead of his sentence hearing in May.

Ms Ni Bheolain was not in court for the proceedings.

Conor OHora. Pic: Courtpix

- Digital deskBy Declan Brennan

A jury has convicted a Polish roofer of carrying out random sex attacks on two women in a four year period.

Slawomir Gierlowski (33) denied attacking the women in 2011 and 2015 at locations around Clondalkin in south Dublin.

A jury at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court took a little over four hours to reach unanimous guilty verdicts on six counts of sexual assault, assault and false imprisonment of the two women.

The jury of 11 men will continue its deliberations on three further charges arising out of a third attack on a woman in 2016 tomorrow morning.

Mr Gierlowski of Galtymore Rd., Drimnagh, Dublin denies carrying out this attack.

He has pleaded not guilty to false imprisonment, sexual assault and assault of a woman on September 11, 2011 and to false imprisonment, sexual assault and assault of a second woman on September 3, 2015.

He has further pleaded not guilty to falsely imprisoning and assaulting a woman and having a hunting knife with intent to intimidate on May 16, 2016.

This third attack took place on Knockmeenagh Lane, Clondalkin, Dublin, not far from the other two attacks and from a house occupied by the family of Mr Gierlowski's partner.

The court heard that in all three attacks a man came up from behind the women and attacked them around their neck area.

In the 2011 and 2015 incidents, the attacker dragged the women to the ground and sexually assaulted them.

The third attack was carried out in broad daylight on the morning of May 16, 2016. The victim was walking along Knockmeenagh Lane to the nearby Luas stop when a man armed with a hunting knife put his arm around her neck and began to pull her backwards.

This woman told the court that she thought the man was going to slit her throat and she grabbed the blade to stop that happening, causing the knife to cut tendons in three of her fingers.

She managed to get out from under the knife and began screaming and her attacker ran off.

The first attack took place late at night on September 11, 2011 when a man attacked a young woman walking home from a night out, dragging her to the ground and sexually assaulting her.

She managed to get away from him but he caught her and began punching her repeatedly around the face.

On September 3, 2015 a woman was also walking home late at night when a man came up behind her and put a leather belt around her neck and began pulling backwards. He pulled her to the ground and then wrapped duct tape around her face and hands before sexually assaulted her.

Mr Gierlowski was identified as a suspect after detectives tracked a white VW Crafter van spotted near the scene of the 2016 attack back to Galtymore road, where Mr Gierlowski lives. Using a wild card search of a partial registration provided by neighbours who had seen the van, detectives were able to identify the van as being one registered to Mr Gierlowski.

After his arrest gardai took a DNA sample from him and found it matched various blood, semen samples taken from the 2011 and 2015 crime scenes. The jury also heard that blood found on a jacket taken from his home was the blood of the 2016 victim.

Orla Crowe SC, defending, told the jury that DNA evidence could not prove when semen or blood was placed where it was found.An online predator, who sexually exploited 15 young girls online, has been banned from doing a computer course in jail.

Matthew Horan from Dublin was jailed for seven and a half years after using social media to coerce the girls.

Horan has previously been described by a Judge as having a very unhealthy, insidious and debased sexual interest in children.

The 26-year-old of St Johns Crescent in Clondalkin used Skype, Snapchat, Instagram and Kik to coerce the girls  some aged as young as nine.

Horan would pretend to be a child of the same age and get them to send explicit photos and videos.

The court heard Horan threatened to send photos to the friends of one girl if she did not send more.

Gardai found hundreds of files on his electronic devices when they searched his home in July 2015.

Today Matthew Horan appeared in court again where the Judge was told the Probation Service had asked the court to make an order that he should not be allowed do a certain type of computer programming course while in prison.

The Judge made the ruling and Matthew Horan was remanded back in custody to continue carrying out his sentence.

- Digital deskUpdate 5.54pm: The Chair of the Oireachtas Finance Committee says Permanent TSB should pass discounts on bad mortgages on to customers.

John McGuinness argues they could get more money from restructuring current deals rather than selling the loans to vulture funds.

The bank wants to sell around 18,000 bad loans.

Finance Committee chair John McGuinness said that there has to be a better way.

"Maybe the customer might pay you more than what you will receive from the vulture funds in order to restructure a loan," he said.

"So why not give them the benefit of what you're about to do and allow them to stay in their home and pay a restructured loan?" he said.

"That's debt forgiveness, and we don't do debt forgiveness," said Permanent TSB chief executive Jeremy Masding.

Permanent TSB says it has no option but to sell non-performing loans pic.twitter.com/CAK56PuGWB  RTE Business (@RTEbusiness) March 22, 2018

- Digital desk

Update 13.18pm: Permanent TSB says it takes an average of 32 attempts to get in contact with mortgage holders in long-term arrears.

Management at the bank has been appearing before the Oireachtas Finance Committee about the proposed sale of almost 18,000 loans.

The bank says it's a necessary move to shed non-performing loans from their books.

Shane O'Sullivan, PTSB's group director of operations, says many of those in long-term arrears have been difficult to deal with.

"On average it takes us 32 attempts for a customer to speak to us in this category about their mortgage. That's an average figure that's not a high or low figure, so on average it will take 32 attempts for us to speak to the right party about the debt that's owing."

PTSB boss Jeremy Masding.

Earlier:The head of Permanent TSB says vulture funds are not pursuing mortgage holders any more aggressively than Irish banks.

PTSB plans to sell 3.7bn worth of troubled loans in the coming months.

There are fears many mortgage holders may end up with their loans being owned by vulture funds.

However, PTSB boss Jeremy Masding says people will still be protected if that happens.

Mr Masding said: "Since our announcement, much of the commentary has focused on customer protection when the loans are sold, but as the Governor of the Central Bank of Ireland confirmed in recent weeks, where a loan is sold the protections travel with the loan.

"Of course thousands of such loans have already been sold by a variety of banks in Ireland.

"And as the Governor pointed out, the evidence today does not support the narrative that these buyers are managing these loans any more aggressively than the original banks were."

- Digital DeskTaoiseach Leo Varadkar is to hold a bilateral meeting with the British Prime Minister Theresa May in Brussels later today.

The border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland is one of the most vexing issues facing Brexit negotiators.

Mr Varadkar is hoping to agree guidelines on the future relationship between the EU and UK at this week's European Council summit of leaders, with the focus on progress in the negotiations.

On Monday the UK and EU agreed terms for a transition period.

The draft text of a withdrawal treaty includes an agreement that there must be a backstop solution to ensure there is no hard border on the island of Ireland if no other answers are found.

The Irish Government has insisted the UK has provided a "cast-iron guarantee" that will ensure no physical infrastructure, checks or controls at the border between the North and the Republic after withdrawal.

Without any other broader trade solution, Northern Ireland would continue to follow EU regulations which affect the island.

Most of the detail around how the border arrangements would operate have not been agreed.

Mr Varadkar said: "On Friday we will meet in Article 50 format to discuss the Brexit negotiations.

"This is an important moment in the Article 50 negotiations and it is hoped that we can agree guidelines on the future relationship between the EU and the UK.

"I am pleased that the UK has now agreed that a backstop solution to avoid a hard border proposed in December, will form part of the legal text, and that all the issues identified by the EU side in the draft will be addressed, to deliver a legally sound solution to avoid a hard border on our island.

"Prime Minister May confirmed this in a letter to (European Council) President (Donald) Tusk on Monday."

Discussions over Thursday and Friday will also focus on jobs, growth and competitiveness, external relations, the future of Europe and particularly digital taxation, and further and better economic and monetary union.

Today, European leaders will discuss and adopt conclusions on jobs, growth, competitiveness including the Single Market, social issues, and trade.

They will also consider external relations including Turkey and the Western Balkans.

Leaders' discussions are intended to facilitate open exchanges of views on the future of Europe.

Mr Varadkar added: "The main focus this evening will be on digital taxation.

"We believe that global solutions are needed to ensure that tax is paid by companies where value is created and profits are generated, reflecting the highly international nature of the digital economy.

"I will strongly argue that the EU should wait for the OECD to complete its work before deciding on how to act, and should only do so in the context of agreement on an international level."

- PABy Conor Kane

Gardai are trying to establish a motive for an attack on an apartment in the early hours of this morning which forced a young family out of their home in a tight-knit residential estate.

An accelerant was used in the incident which caused a broken window and some smoke damage at the ground-floor apartment in the quiet Sycamores estate in Waterford city at about 1am.

A couple, both aged 27, and their eight-year-old child had to leave the apartment and it may be some days before they can return, given the amount of cleaning up that will have to be done as a result of the incident.

Nobody was injured in the incident and the family were helped by neighbours as they got out of the apartment.

Former mayor of Waterford city Cllr Adam Wyse, who lives in that part of the city, described the attack on the house as worrying and said there has been a number of arson attacks in Waterford recently.

Superintendent Chris Delaney visited the scene this morning and said a significant amount of damage had been caused by the fire.

We are treating it as criminal damage by fire, he said. It was some form of arson attempt on the dwelling.

He confirmed that some form of accelerant was used by whoever was responsible.

Gardai have been carrying out a forensic examination of the scene and are keeping an open mind on a motive for the attack, Superintendent Delaney said. An incident room has been set up at the local garda station.

Were looking at all avenues and were putting an appeal out this morning, for anyone with information to contact us.

The Sycamores is located just off the Dunmore Road, close to University Hospital Waterford and the Ardkeen shopping centre. It contains about 30 houses, along with some apartments.

Local councillor Adam Wyse said this area would rarely have incidents like this. Its terrible to hear that a young family were inside when the fire started.

"Usually, this would be an accident or an electrical fault but to hear the gardai treating it as suspicious is worrying for residents in the area.

He hoped the gardai can uncover the source of the fire and prosecute whoever is responsible.

There has been a number of arson attacks in Waterford, and self-set fires, and hopefully the trend ends here. Communities shouldnt be put under this type of stress, especially ones like The Sycamores who are a tight-knit estate.Police in Texas say they have removed explosives from the home of a man believed to be behind a string of parcel bombs in Austin.

23-year-old Mark Anthony Conditt blew himself up in his car as officers closed in.

Six blasts have killed two people and seriously injured four others.

Fred Milanowski from the Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives Bureau says it may not be over yet:

Mr Milanowski said: "We are concerned that there still may be other devices out there, we want to make sure that if people see suspicious packages or bags that they continue to call 911 and report it to the police "

APD, local, state and federal partners provide update on Austin package bomb murder investigation. https://t.co/5w8F6lmijS  Austin Police Department (@Austin_Police) March 21, 2018

Officers have also warned residents in Austin to remain vigilant in case the suspected bomber whose deadly explosives terrorised the city for three weeks planted more bombs before his death.

Mark Anthony Conditt, an unemployed college dropout who bought bomb-making materials at Home Depot, was tracked down using store surveillance video, mobile phone signals and witness accounts of a customer shipping packages in a disguise that included a blonde wig and gloves. His motive remained a mystery.

Police finally found the 23-year-old early on Wednesday at a hotel in a suburb north of Austin.

Officers prepared to move in for an arrest, and when the suspect's SUV began to drive away, they followed.

Conditt drove into a ditch on the side of the road, and SWAT officers approached, banging on his window.

Within seconds, the suspect had detonated a bomb inside his vehicle, blasting the officers backward, Austin police chief Brian Manley said.

One officer then fired his weapon at Conditt, the chief said. The medical examiner has not finalised the cause of death, but the bomb caused "significant" injuries, he said.

Police discovered a 25-minute video recording on a mobile phone found with Conditt, which Mr Manley said he considered a "confession" to the bombings. It described in great detail the differences among the bombs, he said, but no motive.

"It is the outcry of a very challenged young man talking about challenges in his own life," he added.

Law enforcement officials did not immediately say whether Conditt acted alone in the five bombings in the Texas capital and suburban San Antonio that killed two people and badly wounded four others.

Fred Milanowski, of the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, said investigators were confident that "the same person built each one of these devices".

Investigators released few details about Conditt, except his age and that he was white. Neighbours say he was home-schooled.

He later attended Austin Community College from 2010 to 2012, according to a college spokeswoman, but he did not graduate.

Conditt's family released a statement saying they had "no idea of the darkness that Mark must have been in". His uncle, Mike Courtney, said his nephew was a "computer geek" who was intelligent and kind.

Austin was hit with four bombings starting on March 2. The first explosions were from packages left on doorsteps. Then a bomb with a tripwire was placed near a public trail. A fifth parcel bomb detonated early on Tuesday at a FedEx distribution centre near San Antonio.

Police warned of the possibility that more bombs had yet to be found.

"We don't know where this suspect has spent his last 24 hours, and therefore we still need to remain vigilant to ensure that no other packages or devices have been left to the community," Mr Manley said.

By late afternoon, federal officials had a "reasonable level of certainty" that there were no more package bombs "out in the public," said Mr Milanowski, the agent in charge of the Houston division of the ATF. But authorities urged continued awareness just in case.

"We think we're on top of this, but we just don't know," FBI agent Chris Combs said.Update - 6.58pm: President Donald Trump has signed an order that paves the way for imposing tariffs on as much as 50 billion US dollars worth of Chinese imports to punish Beijing for what he said is the theft of American technology and Chinese pressure on US companies to hand it over.

"It is the largest deficit of any country in the history of our world," Mr Trump said of the US-China trade imbalance, blaming it for lost American jobs.

He said his action would make the country stronger and richer.

China has already warned that it will take "all necessary measures" to defend itself, raising the prospect of a trade war between the world's two biggest economies.

The White House said Mr Trump would direct the Office of the US Trade Representative to publish a list of proposed tariffs for public comment within 15 days.

USTR has already identified potential targets: 1,300 product lines worth about 48 billion US dollars.

The president is also asking Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to come up with a list of restrictions on Chinese investment.

Financial markets skidded on the risk of growing commercial conflict between the US and China and the possibility that China will impose retaliatory tariffs on US products.

Dozens of industry groups sent a letter last weekend to Mr Trump warning that "the imposition of sweeping tariffs would trigger a chain reaction of negative consequences for the US economy, provoking retaliation; stifling US agriculture, goods, and services exports, and raising costs for businesses and consumers".

The administration moves mark the end of a seven-month US investigation into the hardball tactics China has used to challenge US supremacy in technology, including, the US says, dispatching hackers to steal commercial secrets and demanding that US companies hand over trade secrets in exchange for access to the Chinese market.

The administration argues that years of negotiations with China have failed to produce results.

"It could be a watershed moment," said Stephen Ezell, vice president of global innovation policy at the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, a think tank.

"The Trump administration's decision to go down this path is illustrative that previous strategies have not borne the hoped-for fruit."

Business groups mostly agree that something needs to be done about China's aggressive push in technology, but they worry that China will retaliate by targeting US exports of aircraft, soybeans and other products and start a tit-for-tat trade war of escalating sanctions between the world's two biggest economies.

"The sanctions are a very big deal," says Mary Lovely, a Syracuse University economist and senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

"The Chinese see them as a major threat and do not want a costly trade war."

Chinese officials warned of potential retaliation and expressed hopes that the US would avoid taking actions that would hurt both countries.

"China will not sit idly to see its legitimate rights damaged and must take all necessary measures to resolutely defend its legitimate rights," the Commerce Ministry in Beijing said in a statement on its website.

The move against China comes just as the United States prepares to impose tariffs of 25% on imported steel and 10% on aluminium, sanctions that are meant to hit China for flooding the world with cheap steel and aluminium but will likely fall hardest on US allies like South Korea and Brazil because they ship more of the metals to the United States.

Mr Trump campaigned on promises to bring down America's massive trade deficit, 566 billion US dollars last year, by rewriting trade agreements and cracking down on what he called abusive commercial practices by US trading partners.

Earlier:The Trump administration is readying restrictions on Chinese investment and tariffs on nearly 50 billion US dollars worth of Chinese imports to punish Beijing for stealing American technology and pressuring US companies to hand it over.

China is already warning it will take "all necessary measures" to defend itself, raising the prospect of a trade war between the world's two biggest economies.

President Donald Trump has said he "would like to" give evidence before the special counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation.

The White House says President Donald Trump will direct the Office of the US Trade Representative to publish a list of proposed tariffs for public comment within 15 days.

USTR has already identified potential targets: 1,300 product lines worth about 48 billion US dollars.

The president is also asking US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin to come up with a list of restrictions on Chinese investment.Update - 12.12pm: A gay priest prevented from working as a hospital chaplain after marrying his partner has lost an Appeal Court challenge over his discrimination claim.

Canon Jeremy Pemberton, a Church of England priest for more than 30 years, had his permission to officiate revoked after he married Laurence Cunnington in April 2014.

He was also denied a licence to officiate in the diocese of Southwell and Nottingham, which left him unable to take up a job offer at the King's Mill Hospital in Sutton-in-Ashfield.

Canon Pemberton brought an employment tribunal against the former acting Bishop of Southwell and Nottingham, the Rt Rev Richard Inwood, but his claims of discrimination and harassment were dismissed - a decision upheld by the employment appeal tribunal in 2016.

He renewed his fight at London's Court of Appeal, where his lawyers argued that the tribunal decisions should be overturned.

But, in a written ruling on Thursday, Lord Justice Underhill and two other judges found the bishop's decision was lawful under the Equality Act.

The judge said: "I have no difficulty understanding how profoundly upsetting Canon Pemberton must find the Church of England's official stance on same-sex marriage and its impact on him.

"But it does not follow that it was reasonable for him to regard his dignity as violated, or an 'intimidating, hostile, degrading, humiliating or offensive' environment as having been created for him, by the Church applying its sincerely-held beliefs in a way expressly permitted by Schedule 9 of the (Equality) Act.

"If you belong to an institution with known, and lawful, rules, it implies no violation of dignity, and it is not cause for reasonable offence, that those rules should be applied to you - however wrong you may believe them to be.

"Not all opposition of interests is hostile or offensive."

Earlier: A gay priest prevented from working as a hospital chaplain after marrying his partner will learn the outcome of an Appeal Court challenge in England over his claim he was discriminated against.

Three leading judges are expected to deliver a ruling today in the case of Canon Jeremy Pemberton, who had his permission to officiate revoked after he married Laurence Cunnington in April 2014.

Canon Jeremy Pemberton, a Church of England (C of E) priest for more than 30 years, was also denied a licence to officiate in the diocese of Southwell and Nottingham - which left him unable to take up a job offer at the King's Mill Hospital in Nottinghamshire.

He lost an employment tribunal against the Rt Rev Richard Inwood, former acting Bishop of Southwell and Nottingham, and his claims of discrimination and harassment were also rejected by the employment appeal tribunal.

Canon Jeremy Pemberton, a gay priest prevented from working as a hospital chaplain after marrying his partner, who will learn the outcome of an Appeal Court challenge over his claim he was discriminated against.

But he renewed his fight at London's Court of Appeal, where his lawyers argued the earlier rulings should be overturned.

During a two-day hearing in January, his legal team said the bishop's decisions were wrong, because the C of E has no fixed rule on same-sex marriage among members of the clergy.

His barrister Sean Jones QC also said C of E clergy members in civil partnerships were allowed to officiate and that those were "effectively indistinguishable" from same-sex marriages.

He added: "There isn't a doctrine that says if you have entered into a same-sex civil marriage, then you cannot officiate."

Lawyers for the former bishop said it was accepted Canon Pemberton felt "humiliated" by the decisions, but the tribunal was right to find there was no "homophobic harassment".

Thomas Linden QC told the court the decisions were taken on the grounds Canon Pemberton had "publicly flouted the doctrines of the Church on marriage, whereas his duty as a priest was to exemplify them".

He added: "As a result, he remained a priest and he was perfectly entitled to remain a member of the Church, to continue to participate in the life of the Church, and indeed to continue to argue for a change in the Church's position on same-sex marriage.

"But he did not have permission to officiate in the diocese of Southwell and Nottingham."A man has been injured after attempting to kill himself by leaping from the public gallery of the Dutch parliament in front of politicians today.

The man jumped several meters above the floor of the Dutch parliament with something tied around his neck, according to police and local media.Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy has defended himself against the "mad allegations" that he accepted millions of euros in illegal campaign funding from late Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.

"It's an ignominious act, not (just) a lie," Sarkozy said during a live television interview. "I owe the French people the truth: I never betrayed their trust."

The one-term ex-leader was handed preliminary charges yesterday in an investigation of his successful 2007 campaign for the French presidency.

The charges include illegally funding the campaign, passive corruption and receiving money from Libyan embezzlement.

"I'm not above the law, but I'm not below it either," Sarkozy, 63, said during the TF1 interview.

He was detained and questioned by anti-corruption police before he was given the preliminary charges by judges leading the probe.

Le Figaro newspaper reported today that Sarkozy said in his statement to the investigating judges that "I am accused without any physical evidence".

He said he was "living the hell of this slander" since 2011 and denounced the accusations as lies, according to a text of the statement published by the newspaper. The allegations were first made in 2011 by Gaddafi's son Saif al-Islam.

According to the text, the former president told investigators that the allegations even cost him a re-election bid in 2012 when they emerged during the campaign.

Investigators are examining allegations that Gaddafi's regime secretly gave Sarkozy 50m for his 2007 presidential election bid.

The former president was released last night but placed under judicial supervision.

As France's president from 2007 to 2012, Sarkozy put France in the forefront of the Nato-led airstrikes against Gaddafi's troops that helped rebel fighters topple Gaddafi's regime in 2011.

An investigation has been under way since 2013 into the case.

It got a boost when French-Lebanese businessman Ziad Takieddine told the online investigative site Mediapart in 2016 that he delivered suitcases from Libya containing 5m in cash to Sarkozy and his former chief of staff, Claude Gueant.

Mr Takieddine repeated his allegations during a live interview with France's BFM TV on Wednesday night.

- PAA helicopter carrying American tourists has crashed at a coral-viewing site on Australia's Great Barrier Reef, killing two passengers and injuring another two, police said.

The pilot pulled one passenger from the wreckage but desperate attempts to revive the 65-year-old woman failed, Police Inspector Ian Haughton said.

A 79-year-old man also died despite bystanders' attempts to resuscitate him, Mr Haughton said.

The two who died were from Hawaii.

A 34-year-old man and a 33-year-old woman, from Colorado, were taken to the Australian mainland for treatment on non-life-threatening injuries, he said.

All four tourists knew each other.

The five-seat, single-engine Eurocopter EC120 Colibri crashed 40 miles north east of the Whitsunday Islands, near a pontoon that has underwater viewing chambers to see coral.

The US embassy in Australia said in a statement it was aware that two American citizens had died and was "providing all appropriate consular assistance".

Whitsunday Air Services said the helicopter was approaching the pontoon to land when it crashed.

The company suspended operations as it works with authorities to determine the cause of the crash.

"We are extremely saddened by this incident and our deepest condolences are with the families of all of the passengers," the company said in a statement.

The Australian Transport Safety Bureau confirmed a crash investigation was under way.The ARJ21-700, China's first domestically made regional jetliner, took a demonstration round trip flight from Hohhot to Ulanhot on Tuesday, preparing for potential commercial use of the aircraft in the Inner Mongolia autonomous region, said Commercial Aircraft Corp of China, its manufacturer.

Operated by Chengdu Airlines, the flight was the first by the ARJ21-700 in Inner Mongolia; it is already in commercial use elsewhere. The area has been a major base for test flights in the alpine region.

The ARJ21-700 is the first jetliner made in China that is designed for flying in Western China, and it has proved that the aircraft is suitable for take-offs and landings at the plateau airports of Western China. Also, it can operate at ultra-low temperatures, as low as -30 C.

The model has been in commercial use for more than two years. In late 2015, the aircraft was delivered to its first customer, Chengdu Airlines, and conducted its first commercial flight in June 2016. In September, it started large-scale manufacturing.

The ARJ21-700 has netted 453 orders from 21 customers at home and abroad. So far, four aircraft have been delivered, and they have been operating on several routes, including flights between Chengdu and Shanghai, Chengdu and Nantong, East China's Jiangsu province, Chengdu and Changsha, Central China's Hunan province, and Chengdu and Hefei and Central China's Hubei province, as well as Chengdu and Jinan, East China's Shandong province.

With 78 to 90 seats, the ARJ21-700 has a flying range of 2,225 to 3,700 kilometers. More than 50,000 passengers have flown on the aircraft.



Congressional leaders finalised a sweeping $1.3trn (1.05trn) budget bill on Wednesday that substantially boosts military and domestic spending.

But it leaves behind young immigrant "Dreamers", deprives president Donald Trump of some of his border wall money and takes only incremental steps to address gun violence.

As negotiators stumbled towards an end-of-the-week deadline to fund the government or face a federal shutdown, House Speaker Paul Ryan dashed to the White House amid concerns Mr Trump's support was wavering.

The White House later said the president backed the legislation, even as some conservative Republicans baulked at the size of the spending increases and the rush to pass the bill.

Talks continued into Wednesday evening before the 2,232-page text was finally released.

"No bill of this size is perfect," Mr Ryan said. "But this legislation addresses important priorities and makes us stronger at home and abroad."

Leaders still hoped to start voting as soon as today. A stopgap measure may be needed to ensure federal offices are not hit with a partial shutdown at midnight on Friday when funding for the government expires.

Negotiators have been working for days - and nights - on details of the bill, which is widely viewed as the last major piece of legislation likely to move through Congress in this election year. Politicians in both parties sought to attach their top priorities.

Two of the biggest remaining issues had been border wall funds and a legislative response to gun violence after the clamour for action following recent school shootings, including the one in Parkland, Florida.

On guns, leaders agreed to tuck in bipartisan provisions to bolster school safety funds and improve compliance with the criminal background check system for firearm purchases. The bill states that the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention can do research on gun violence, though not advocacy, an idea Democrats pushed.

But there was no resolution for Dreamers, the young immigrants who have been living in the United States illegally since childhood, but whose deportation protections are being challenged in court after Mr Trump tried to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals programme, or DACA.

Democrats temporarily shut down the government earlier this year as they fought for that protection. But the issue only rose to a discussion item when Mr Trump made a late-hour push for a deal in exchange for $25bn (20bn) in border wall funds.

Instead, MrTrump is now poised to win $1.6bn (1.3bn) for barriers along the border, but none of it for the new prototypes he recently visited in California.

Less than half the nearly 95 miles of border construction, including levees along the Rio Grande in Texas, would be for new barriers, with the rest for repair of existing segments.

In one win for immigrant advocates, negotiators rejected Mr Trump's plans to hire hundreds of new Border Patrol and immigration enforcement agents.

"We are disappointed that we did not reach agreement on Dreamer protections that were worthy of these patriotic young people," said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.

The core purpose of the bill is to increase spending for military and domestic programmes that have been sharply squeezed under a 2011 agreement that was supposed to cap spending. It gives Mr Trump a huge budget increase for the military, while Democrats scored wins on infrastructure and other domestic programs that they failed to get under president Barack Obama.Large Australian shareholders, including investment giant AMP Capital, are reconsidering their investments in Facebook due to ethical concerns over the social media giant's latest privacy scandal.

AMP is among those reviewing its stake in the social media behemoth after the personal information of 50 million users was reportedly collected by political consultancy Cambridge Analytica.

"The recent developments will be considered by the independent Ethics Committee at the next meeting," an AMP Capital spokesman said.

The investment house has Responsible Investment Leaders funds with an ethics charter to screen sectors with high negative social harm". This fund invests in Facebook.Myer's largest shareholder Solomon Lew says the department store's $467 million half-year loss was the "final nail" for its board, and would have been even worse without the company's "mathematical gymnastics".

Write-downs of $538 million, mostly to goodwill and brands, drove Wednesday's dire result, which executive chairman Garry Hounsell called "unsatisfactory".

Solomon Lew is preparing to call an extraordinary general meeting to try to roll Garry Hounsell and the current board. Credit:Jesse Marlow

Mr Lew's Premier Investments, which owns 10.8 per cent of Myer shares, again savaged the company, claiming it had "fudged its results" by using one-off items and implementation costs in its accounts.

"These so-called 'one-offs' actually seem to be more of a constantly recurring feature of Myers mathematical gymnastics", the retailer behind the Just Group, Smiggle and Peter Alexander said in a statement.The Australian consumer watchdog has launched legal action against a prolific Aboriginal art wholesaler, claiming many of the souvenirs it sells are made in Indonesia.

Queensland-based Birubi Art Pty Ltd has drawn the ire of the Australian Consumer and Competition Commission over allegedly misleading consumers about the authenticity of its products.

ACCC commissioner Sarah Court claimed Birubi was falsely spruiking that many of its wares were made in Australia and 'handmade' or 'painted' by Aboriginal people.

There are claims the artwork is made in Indonesia. Credit:ACCC

A document filed in the Federal Court in Sydney on Thursday identifies five offending products: loose boomerangs, boxed boomerangs, bamboo didgeridoos, bullroarers and message stones.Paul Chapman believes banking is only going to get more complex.

"We like to say Japan is living in the future," he says. "People have a very fragmented life with three to four banks and several different financial products. There is so much complexity and we think that is happening in Australia."

Paul Chapman is the co-founder of Moneytree, which has 2 million users.

The Australian co-founder of financial management app Moneytree, which is based in Japan and launched in Australia last year, is one of a number of start-ups jostling for position as the government looks to introduce open banking to Australia.

Speaking to Fairfax Media on the sidelines of the Salesforce World Tour in Sydney this month, he said open banking presented an opportunity for small businesses and start-ups.The Australian Energy Market Operator wants the government's national energy guarantee pushed through as it questioned AGL's commitment to replace the lost electricity lost when its Liddell coal-fired power plant closes.

AEMO said the uncertainty around AGLs promise to replace all the power lost when it closes Liddell in 2022 may create a 850-megawatt shortfall, but the National Energy Guarantee could encourage other players to replace it instead of pushing AGL to commit to new generation.

AGL announced the closure of Liddell in 2022, which will pull 2000 megawatts of energy from the system. Credit:Janie Barrett

"Due to the volume of the gap, AEMO's preference is that either the National Energy Guarantee or a mechanism that can be used for NSW and is consistent with a pending NEG will be agreed to by year end 2018 for use during 2019," AEMO chief executive Audrey Zibelman said.

Federal Environment and Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg said AEMOs advice vindicates the Turnbull governments concern over Liddells closure and the need for dispatchable power in the system.The promotion of science, technology, engineering and mathematics education is more than a fad: it is a much-needed movement to encourage a well-rounded education that is essential to Australian students. The focus on STEM, resulting from a 10-year national strategy, was never to denigrate humanities, arts and social sciences, but rather to address an imbalance in the education of Australian students.

In the Balmoral speech at Queenswood on Wednesday, NSW Education Minister Rob Stokes was correct in stating that education for the sake of education is essential to a progressive society. The importance of a well-rounded education in preparing children to be well-rounded citizens cannot be denied. But are students currently receiving such an education? With a shortage of trained mathematics teachers in secondary education and the paucity of science education in primary school it is unlikely.

Australian students need a well-rounded education that includes science, maths, engineering and technology. Credit:Jeffrey Chan

Yes, there has been a focus on promoting a STEM education. It is a focus that is still needed; not to the detriment of other subjects, but because of the falling uptake of STEM subjects. High school students are less likely to undertake more challenging mathematics subjects[2] while at a tertiary level, STEM enrolments are at the lowest proportion of enrolments in almost a decade[3]. In the ministers own state of NSW in 2017, about one in five students did not study a single mathematics subject in the final year of the Higher School Certificate, and only 50 per cent studied at least one science course.

Stokes lamented academic discipline silos yet his inference that a STEM education does not require creativity, analytical skills and communication skills is the exact kind of thinking that creates these silos. A STEM education is more than just maths, equations and scientific principles, it is a way of looking at the information available, analysing that information, drawing conclusions and finding creative solutions to future problems. It prepares people to become self-actualised, engaged and proactive members of society.SBS Australia will monitor Voice of China news, broadcast on SBS World Watch, and try to bring balance to through its own news and Mandarin radio station.

Voice of China is the merger of the Communist Party's China Central Television (CCTV), China National Radio and China Radio International as part of the ruling party's reorganisation program to gain greater control of the China message in an age of the internet and social media.

The new giant broadcaster has the task of "propagating the party's theories, directions, principles and policies" as well as "telling good China stories", according to a party document. It will be under the strict control of the party's central propaganda department, United Front, and has the hallmarks of World War II radio service Voice of America, which was created by the US government's then-propaganda machine.Coal-fired power is on track to start shrinking globally by 2022, dimming prospects for exporters of the fossil fuel, including Australia, according to a report by environmental groups.

China and India, which have dominated construction of new power plants for more than a decade, both cut new capacity sharply for the second year in a row in 2017, the annual Boom and Bust report by Greenpeace, Sierra Club and CoalSwarm found.

On current trends, coal plant capacity worldwide could peak by 2022. Credit:AP

Taking into account plants that closed, China's net addition in 2017 was its lowest since 2003. For India, last year's newly operating capacity of 9 gigawatts was the smallest since 2009.

"China and India were once seen as countries blocking progress on climate change," Nikola Casule, a Greenpeace climate and energy campaigner, said. "That's clearly no longer the case."EDITOR'S NOTE: The High Court overturned Cardinal George Pell's conviction for historic child sex offences in a judgment handed down April 7, 2020. In a unanimous decision all seven High Court judges found Victoria's Court of Appeal should not have upheld Pell's conviction It found the evidence could not support a guilty verdict.

An ABC investigative journalist has agreed to read aloud more than 100 pages of her notes about Cardinal George Pell which his lawyer told a court were unreadable.

Louise Milligans notes were subpoenaed by Cardinal Pells lawyers for his committal hearing on historical sex offences.

Louise Milligan, author of 'Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of George Pell'. Credit:Simon Schluter

The Melbourne Magistrates Court heard on Wednesday that a significant portion of Ms Milligans notes relating to her book, Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of George Pell, were unreadable, with the cardinals lawyers requesting that she read out and record her notes before she gives evidence next week.The Emergency Services Agency has hit back at claims it is leaving Canberra "dangerously vulnerable" because of a shortage of firefighters, rubbishing the suggestion and accusing the ACT's firefighting union of scaremongering.

ESA Commissioner Dominic Lane labelled claims made by ACT United Firefighters Union branch secretary Greg McConville "outrageous", after Mr McConville accused the ESA of breaching the Emergencies Act 2004 on Sunday, when temperatures in the capital topped 31 degrees.

ESA commissioner Dominic Lane says claims that a firefighter shortage led it to break the law are "outrageous". Credit:Jamila Toderas

Making the allegations, Mr McConville said the ESA failed to make available four additional water tanks in line with its legal obligations on Sunday, a day with a severe fire danger rating and a total fire ban in place.

Mr McConville claimed this was the result of ACT Fire and Rescue, which is overseen by the ESA, having only 304 firefighters ready for duty despite an available budget for 344.Peter Stone, a British academic who specialises in protecting cultural heritage sites in wars. Credit:Jason South "For me, the evidence from the past is there to show that people have, in fact, far more in common then they do that differentiates them," Professor Stone says. "People have been trying to deal with the same things  the environment, their understanding of their place in the world, their understanding of god or gods  all of these things across the world and through time have been the same sort of issues that all communities  have been trying to grapple with and that in itself is such a remarkable part of the human story that it is a tragedy if we lose that evidence from any part of the world." After the large-scale destruction of cultural heritage during World War II, the world community came together and pledged not to target cultural property in conflict. What resulted was the 1954 Hague Convention, to which Australia is a signatory.

But Australia has yet to sign either of the two protocols, which set out rules preventing the export of cultural objects and governing their return. The second protocol, which has been signed by 75 countries, also requires nation-states to catalogue all of their cultural properties and have a plan in the event of conflict for their protection. Next year will mark the second protocol's 20th anniversary. In 2017, Britain signed and ratified the Hague Convention and the two protocols. Professor Stone wants Australia to follow suit. A Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade spokesman says the Australian government continues to consider accession to the two protocols, which involves consultation across government.

"Australia will only accede to the protocols once it is confident that it can comply with the obligations they establish," he says. "This requires careful analysis of the obligations that the protocols create and how these obligations could be incorporated into Australian law and practice." The Age understands there is no firm timeline for signing the protocols. Modern warfare increasingly involves non-state actors such as Islamic State, who are not parties to international law. One of the destroyed vehicles at Ras al-Marqab, Libya, with the Roman fort left intact. Credit:Karl Habsburg

But Professor Stone says that shouldn't stop the international community from setting benchmarks for conduct in armed conflict, citing a 2011 case in Ras al-Marqab, Libya, where forces loyal to dictator Muammar Gaddafi stationed six mobile radar units close to a Roman fort, in the hopes of avoiding being targeted. All the vehicles were destroyed but the fort left intact thanks to precision weapons used by a forewarned NATO. Professor Stone believes that such laws, once established, will catch up with even non-state combatants, pointing to the case of Ahmed al-Faqi al-Mahdi, who led a raid by Islamist militants on the city of Timbuktu in northern Mali in July 2012. Ahmed al-Faqi al-Mahdi, left, at the International Criminal Court in The Hague in September 2015. Credit:AP Mahdi ordered an attack with pickaxes on the World Heritage Listed site, destroying nine mausoleums and a mosque. One of the desecrated places was the entrance to the 15th-century Sidi Yahya mosque, meant to stay shut until the end of the world. Four years later, the former teacher pleaded guilty in front of the International Criminal Court in The Hague and was sentenced to nine years' jail for committing a war crime. It was the first such prosecution.

"They may be able to get away with it at the time, but they will be hunted down at some point in the future," Professor Stone says. There are those who criticise the focus on saving property rather than human lives. Professor Stone says he counts himself among them. "People ask me 'do I think that protecting for example [the Roman temple in the Syrian city of] Palmyra [repeatedly targeted by IS] or any other archaeological site in the Middle East is more important than protecting human beings and the refugees?' Of, course it is not," he says. "But the distinction between protecting human beings and protecting their cultural heritage and their cultural property is paper-thin. Because I always say that an individual without a memory is a dysfunctional individual ... and a community's memory is largely held in its cultural heritage and its cultural property.

"If you allow those to be taken away and destroyed, then you very quickly get a dysfunctional community, and that's not good for anybody." An explosion at Palmyra, Syria, during its occupation by the Islamic State militant group. In 2014, the Australian government appointed cultural property lawyer Shane Simpson to review the legislation governing the movement of cultural material in Australia  the Protection of Moveable Cultural Heritage Act 1986. Mr Simpson delivered his findings in September 2015 and says currently the Act protects only foreign cultural material that has been illegally exported, and is silent on material that has been stolen or looted from war zones. The lawyer, who advised the National Gallery of Australia in 2008 that a $US5 million Dancing Siva statue they were purchasing could be stolen, has proposed a new model for regulating cultural material coming into and leaving Australia. This includes a warrant scheme for the seizure of cultural material based on a reasonable suspicion that the material was illegally exported, looted or stolen.

A Department of Communications and the Arts spokesman said the government was committed to legislative reform of the Act based on the principles identified by Mr Simpson. And though the spokesman could not state when the amendment would be introduced in Parliament, he said the reform remained a "high priority". One of the organisations working hard for many years to get the Australian government to sign the two protocols to the Hague Convention is the Australian Red Cross. Its International Humanitarian Law legal adviser, Tara Gutman, says the main motive behind heritage protection is humanitarian. "There is so much senseless destruction of culture happening in the last decade at an increasing and alarming rate that we have tried to shine the spotlight on this to say protection of culture has to be fortified," Ms Gutman says. "People say 'why are we protecting buildings instead of people, isn't that your role?' And we say, actually culture is what's most valuable to people. We see that in war zones all the time that people put their lives at risk to save artefacts, to save monuments.Australian Catholic church leaders are locked in a misogynistic and unaccountable culture that has failed to adequately respond to the child sexual abuse scandal and is denying the need for urgent reform, say Catholic groups meeting in Canberra on Friday to demand change.

More than 50 leading Catholic reformists are expected to seek an urgent meeting with Australias bishops after a request to release the first formal church assessment of child abuse royal commission recommendations was declined last week by Melbourne Archbishop Denis Hart.

Archbishop Denis Hart has declined to release the church's final response to the child abuse royal commission. Credit:Michael Clayton-Jones

The lack of a decisive response on systemic reform after the catastrophe of sex abuse by clergy was the last straw for many committed Catholics, said Australian Catholic Coalition for Church Reform in a statement on Thursday.

Coalition convenor Peter Johnstone said the Canberra meeting is a direct response to the bishops refusal to release a Truth Justice and Healing Council analysis of the royal commissions findings and recommendations before a bishops conference in May. It was given to a senior church leaders group several weeks ago.The bushfire that ripped through the NSW south coast town of Tathra on Sunday was most likely caused by fallen electrical wires, a preliminary investigation has found.

NSW Rural Fire Service confirmed the suspicions of residents on Thursday afternoon after fire investigators examined the scene where the fire originated.

An electricity worker inspects properties on Wildlife Drive in Tathra after the bushfire. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen

"The investigation has found electrical infrastructure on Reedy Swamp Road as the likely cause of the fire," NSW RFS said in a statement.

The Electrical Services Union was quick to weigh in, tweeting on Thursday afternoon that the NSW government and Australian Energy Regulator "have serious questions to answer" to the people of Tathra.Three Brisbane blokes are charging ahead in the lucrative electric car market despite Queenslanders being slow to adopt the global trend.

There are less than 500 electric cars in Queensland, but Tritium - established by three Brisbane university students about 16 years ago - is producing about 1800 electric car chargers every year.

Tritium will hire 50 new staff in 2018.

Co-founder Paul Sernia said most of Tritium's products were shipped internationally and it operated as an export company.

A lot of the demand for our product comes from international customers and the unique technology in our product allows us to be very effective and very competitive in an international market, he said.Disgraced greyhound trainer Tom Noble has won a court battle to keep the Queensland property he used for live-baiting.

On Thursday, Brisbane Supreme Court Justice Graeme Crow dismissed an application by the Crown to seize the 16-hectare Churchable property, west of Brisbane, because it was used for illegal activity.

Disgraced greyhound trainer Tom Noble fought the bid to take his property. Credit:Jorge Branco

Justice Crow said in his judgment it would have been "wholly disproportionate" to confiscate the $600,000 home when he only made a total of between $635 and $1270 from live-bait training.

"Mr and Mrs Noble are already in need of medical assistance and further treatment may be required," he wrote.The Queensland government is funding flu vaccines for all children under five in an effort to prevent a repeat of last year's horror flu season.

The government-funded vaccine will be distributed late-April and also be available for pregnant women, over-65s, people with chronic disease and all indigenous people over 15.

In 2017 more than 56,000 cases of influenza were confirmed in Queensland, making it one of the state's worst seasons on record.

The state government hopes the program, along with a change to this year's flu vaccine and new detection technology, will help stop the spread of the virus.

Queensland's chief health officer, Dr Jeannette Young, says it's important all children over six months be vaccinated this season and at the right time.The wait for a verdict in the trial of a Russian refugee who allegedly posed as a psychologist in Queensland hospitals will go into a third day.

The jury in the trial of Vincent Victor Berg was sent home on Thursday after deliberating for the entire day at the Southport District Court.

Berg has pleaded not guilty to seven charges including three counts of fraud.

The only development on Thursday was a brief moment when the jury asked to have portions of Berg's testimony relating to a fraudulent document he allegedly created read back to them.

His two-week trial wrapped up on Wednesday morning and the jury will resume deliberations from 9.30am on Friday.An extensive investigation will focus on whether human error, maintenance or weather played a part in a Great Barrier Reef helicopter crash that killed two US tourists and injured two others.

Bystanders worked frantically to save the lives of a 65-year-old woman and 79-year-old man after the helicopter they were travelling in went down in the Whitsundays about 3.30pm on Friday.

This Eurocopter EC120B Colibri was involved in a fatal crash at Hardy Reef in the Whitsundays. Credit:Bidgee

Police said the planes 35-year-old pilot managed to pull the older lady free as the chopper sank metres from a landing pontoon at the popular Hardy Reef, about 45 nautical miles north-east of Airlie Beach.

Witnesses worked for some time to try to save the woman and the older man, who was freed from the helicopter but died at the scene.A Mandurah mans health deteriorated after he was sent home twice from Peel Health Campus, only later to discover at Fiona Stanley Hospital that he had blood cancer.

Reginald Whiu, 73, from Greenfields, said he was diagnosed with degeneration of the spine at a GP early last year, after complaining of back pain.

Reginald and Rosemarie Whiu reading their hospital discharge letters. Credit:Mandurah Mail.

Reginalds wife, Rosemarie Whiu, said her husbands pain worsened and he became constipated, so he was taken by ambulance to the Peel Health Campus emergency department on July 21, 2017.

At this point, Reginald had not passed a stool for about two weeks. I remember going in there, and he was bent over in so much pain, Rosemarie said.Perth's northern suburbs has one of the lowest immunisation rates in children in the nation, according to new research from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare.

Perth's north recorded an immunisation rate in five year olds of 90.6 per cent, below the national average of 93.5 per cent in the 2016-17 period.

The data analysed the immunisation rate among five-year-old children. Credit:Wayne Taylor

Only northern New South Wales was able to match Perth's low rate, also at 90.6 per cent. The national target is set at 95 per cent.

Despite the state specific results, the institute maintains the overall results revealed Australia was on an upwards trend overall, and Perth's northern suburbs were most likely an outlier.Two Geraldton men are dead after a sequence of events that seems to have stemmed from a family dispute between three brothers over their father's will.

WAtoday understands Geraldton gunman Rodney Vlahov, who was found dead on Friday morning at his farm in Chapman Valley, had on Thursday attended a meeting with his two brothers at the firm of their accountant, Philip Chamberlain.

Mr Vlahov, 48, is understood to have brought a gun to the meeting, where Mr Chamberlain, 49, was shot, although it's unclear if he was the intended victim.

Police found Mr Vlahov's body when they arrived at his Chapman Valley farm on Friday morning and said that, while his death was not suspicious, it would be the subject of a coronial investigation, as he was on the run.The ACT Legislative Assembly has found Chief Minister Andrew Barr's threat to Liberal MLA Jeremy Hanson breached parliamentary rules, after a debate that descended into "a very tawdry affair" on Thursday.

The heated debate over Mr Barr's self-admitted threat to Mr Hanson dominated the final day of Legislative Assembly sittings this week as politicians across the party divide flung insults at each other.

ACT Chief Minister Andrew Barr responds to claims he threatened Liberal MLA Jeremy Hanson. Credit:Dion Georgopoulos

It stems from a heated "exchange" between the two long-term political foes during a committee hearing late last year, in which Mr Hanson claimed Mr Barr was putting rates revenue into his pocket, as treasurer.

Mr Barr then asked Mr Hanson to "take it outside", later clarifying he meant "into the chamber", before Mr Hanson asserted his role as committee chairman, to which Mr Barr said: "For the time being, yes".The University of Canberra has given the green light for an Australian-first pill testing trial at next month's Groovin the Moo music festival.

The decision brings the pilot one step closer to reality, after a proposal for last year's Spilt Milk festival was cancelled by the promoter just weeks before the event.

When Groovin the Moo returns to Canberra next month, it could host an Australian-first pill testing trial. Credit:Mikki Gomez.

Rumours of federal sabotage swirled around the trial, which had been planned on Commonwealth land by the STA-SAFE consortium with the backing of ACT police and health authorities.

Groovin the Moo, an all-ages event, will come to Canberra in late April at the university, which controls the land under a lease.Bill Shorten is standing by ALP national secretary Noah Carroll, despite the top official being named as a co-architect of the so-called 'rots for votes' scandal rocking Victorian politics.

The Victorian Ombudsman on Wednesday identified state 21 Labor MPs - including some who went on to become senior ministers - who used parliamentary allowances in the months leading up to the 2014 state election to hire Labor "field officers" to work on the campaign.

The investigation was prompted by a whistleblower's claims that taxpayer funds intended for legitimate electoral work had been diverted to fund partisan campaigning.

The arrangement saw staff paid two days a week by the Parliament and the rest by Labor. In her report, Ombudsman Deborah Glass said this "60:40" pay arrangement "appears to have been the brainchild" of former state secretary and then state MP John Lenders, and Mr Carroll, who at the time was the secretary of the party's Victorian division.The Turnbull government has ruled out amending its company tax cut package to exempt the big banks from benefiting, a proposal raised by crossbench senator Derryn Hinch in negotiations over the legislation.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Finance Minister Mathias Cormann, the government's leader in the Senate, rejected the proposition but expressed optimism they could still get the Senate's support for the legislation, which would see the tax rate for companies with a turnover of more than $50 million gradually lowered from 30 per cent to 25 per cent.

With Labor and the Greens opposing the tax cuts, the government is edging closer to securing the nine votes it needs after striking a deal with Pauline Hanson's One Nation to establish a $60 million apprenticeship scheme.

So far, the government has the support of Australian Conservatives' Cory Bernardi, Liberal Democrat senator David Leyonhjelm, independents Fraser Anning and Steve Martin, as well as three One Nation votes.Our successive governments have attempted to find solutions of where to hide all of our perfectly legitimate (although now very emotionally damaged) refugees around the world, with the most recent place being the US.

I have had a pen pal for the last two years, one actually write to by hand; yes, thats right, that old-fashioned habit where we write to each other using a pen and paper. But its a little different to how I used to write to pen pals when I was a child because when I address the envelope to my friend instead of writing his name I have to write his code and instead of writing about fluffy topics, instead I have to implore my friend not to give up hope and see him write things like "I feel I am not human" and "Why do they treat us like this?"  questions I have no answer for.

And now that Peter Dutton is in charge of the mega-department encompassing immigration, ASIO, border protection and the AFP he continues to see fit to apply his warped logic to who he thinks is suffering the most and needs to be fast tracked into Australia. His criteria now seems fairly obvious  if youre white, English speaking and non-Muslim, welcome to Australia, well even fast track you. The rest of you whinging inmates over there on Manus can sit back down and wait your turn, no matter how long it takes (because, just quietly, were still trying to sweet talk another country into taking you).

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What beggars belief is the outrage and horror with which the government speaks of the South African issue, with Steve Ciobo, the Member for Moncrieff, stating, "People who are being thrown off their land, being persecuted, I've read of people being shot, raped, all sorts of different things  then I do believe that there's a role to be played." How are these people any different from the legitimate asylum seekers who have been waiting in limbo on Manus for years? The only differences I can see are the colour of their skin and their religious beliefs  in that they are different to Dutton and Ciobo and therefore less important; if it wasnt so distressing it would be laughable. Peter Dutton thinks the South African farmers want to work hard and contribute to Australia  so do all the people on Manus and they have been asking for a very long time for the opportunity.

I am at a loss of what to tell my pen pal, how to keep his spirits up and show him there are still good people in the world. People who would welcome him to this country and allow him to find a safe life, which is all that he wanted and the reason he made the perilous journey.

Nicola Philp is writer and teacher.Construction union leader John Setka has savaged Labor and the candidacy of Wayne Swan as its national president, calling him a "maggot" and a "sell-out moron".

John Setka (centre) at a court hearing in 2016. Credit:Justin McManus

In an email to union leaders entitled "Stop supporting traitors and dogs", the CFMEUs Victorian secretary also unloads on the party and former ACTU secretary and federal minister Greg Combet.

Sent to ACTU secretary Sally McManus and senior figures in his own union, the Construction, Forestry, Maritime, Mining and Energy Union, at 5:23am on March 10, the email, leaked to The Age, contains Mr Setka's reaction to the news that Mr Swan would be Labors right-faction candidate for president.

"I think it would be an absolute disgrace to put forward this piece of shit as president of the ALP," he wrote.London: Former High Court justice Michael Kirby says the constitution should be changed to allow dual citizens to run for federal parliament because "dis-entitling" them undermines Australia's success as a multicultural nation.

Mr Kirby said Australia's prohibition - which has seen 10 MPs disqualified since the 2016 election - was detrimental given Australia's rich immigrant culture.

"Unless there is some other interpretive way to solve the problem then I think it should be changed because Australia really has been successful as a multicultural society and that is challenged by this approach to disentitle a very large number of members of the Australian community being elected to the national parliament. That's not a good thing," he said.

Former High Court justice Michael Kirby believes the constitution should be changed to allow dual nationals to run for Parliament. Credit:Liliana Zaharia

According to the 2016 census, nearly half the population was born either overseas, or at least one of their parents was born overseas.A government backbencher has been forced to defend spending on travel and flowers, following an audit while she was a school principal.

The LNP lodged a Right to Information request for reports held by Education Queensland's ethical standards unit related to any investigations of fraud or serious financial irregularity in the expenses at Cavendish Road State High School - which elicited 92 documents - but the application was rejected on the grounds it was contrary to the public interest.

Corrine McMillan said she personally paid all the expenses, despite being found to be entitled to make them.

Member for Mansfield Corrine McMillan, who was principal at the Brisbane school from 2014 to 2017, said the Queensland Audit Office investigated her school in May 2017, along with other large secondary schools.

"The audit examined some travel expenses arising from a Harvard University scholarship and a Churchill fellowship, of which I was very proud to receive," she told Parliament, rising to address the issue after questions by the LNP.There is little light at the end of the tunnel for the Eagle Farm race track, with doubts it will reopen any time soon.

Racing Minister Stirling Hinchliffe said he could not give any confident timeline on when racing would return to the "jewel in Queensland's racing crown".

Racing Minister Stirling Hinchliffe says the "jewel in Queensland's racing crown" will not reopen until it is ready.

Eagle Farm was taken offline in 2014, reopened for racing in 2016, and last hosted races in May last year.

"What I have done, and what I will commit to, is making sure it will not come back until it is ready," Mr Hinchliffe told Queensland Parliament on Thursday."This concerns us, because breaking even or making a small surplus over the long term is an important part of being financially sustainable," Mr Worrall wrote in a Queensland Audit Office report tabled in Parliament on Thursday.

But the sector was still spending more than it earned.

Long-term financial sustainability remains a major risk for many Queensland councils, a report reveals. Credit:Louise Kennerley

Mr Worrall said the five-year average operating surplus was consistent to the prior year.

Long-term financial sustainability remains a major risk for many councils, Queensland's auditor-general Brendan Worrall warns.

Indigenous councils had a higher risk of becoming unsustainable compared with other council segments due to their inability to raise their own revenue and their reliance on grant funding.

The cost of living was also higher in Indigenous council areas, due to remoteness.

Councils with five consecutive years of negative operating surplus ratios included Kowanyama Aboriginal Shire Council, Torres Shire Council, Balonne Shire Council, Barcaldine Regional Council, Cook Shire Council and Maranoa Regional Council.

Queensland councils had $5.6 billion in debt, up 5 per cent in one year.

South-east Queensland and coastal councils held the highest amount of debt - $5.2 billion - with 57 councils holding debt, according to an Audit Office report."I found myself hyper-vigilant and aggressive and being in close proximity with others meant I was constantly on edge."

Brent Mickelberg, the new LNP member for Buderim, spoke about his mental health struggles, nightmares and anger following his service in the Australian Army during a heartfelt and deeply personal maiden speech in the Queensland Parliament.

Captain Brent Mickelberg, Platoon Commander, talks to locals during an army operation outside Toowoomba. Credit:Australian Department of Defence

Upon returning from overseas service in 2013, his wife Anna arranged for them to go on a cruise for a week, where Mr Mickelberg said he found himself tense.

"At home, I found it hard to reconnect with Anna and found myself yearning to be back in Afghanistan," he said.Beijing: Australia's first ambassador to China, Stephen Fitzgerald, has called for calm in the increasingly heated debate about Chinese government influence in Australia, adding that the Turnbull government should delay its foreign interference legislation.

Mr Fitzgerald is among 30 China scholars who have signed an open letter which describes the government's Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme is a threat to intellectual freedom.

Stephen FitzGerald was Australia's first ambassador to China. Credit:Sally Tsoutas

"It takes a lot to get China scholars to agree," Fitzgerald told Fairfax Media.



"The last time it happened in Australia was in response to the Tiananmen massacre in 1989. This time, it concerns what is happening here in Australia, and the way in which debate about China and our relations with it is being prosecuted."Jakarta: For millions of people across south-east Asia, their smart phone and Facebook are their only interaction with the people who govern them and shape their society.

And that is unlikely to change any time soon, according to Australian National University lecturer Ross Tapsell, even as the social media giant's reputation and share price take a battering over the alleged improper use of Facebook data by Cambridge Analytica.

Customers on their phones at a cafe in Jakarta. Credit:Bloomberg

While Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg has admitted his company's mistakes, and as authorities in Australia, the United States and elsewhere investigate, Dr Tapsell says countries in south-east Asia are yet to have a debate about social media and privacy.

His recent book, Media Power in Indonesia: Oligarchs, Citizens and the Digital Revolution, notes there were 64 million Indonesians with a Facebook account in 2015. Twenty million have a Twitter account. The penetration of both platforms in a region where smart phones are cheap and accessible is among the highest in the world."China does not want to fight a trade war, but it is absolutely not afraid of a trade war. We are confident and capable of meeting any challenge. It is hoped that the US side will be able to make a swift decision and not to drag bilateral economic and trade relations into danger." A strongly worded statement from the Chinese embassy in Washington late on Thursday said Beijing does not want a trade war but will not recoil from one and "would fight to the end ... with all necessary measures". "We will retaliate. If people want to play tough, we will play tough with them and see who will last longer," Chinese ambassador Cui Tiankai said in a video posted to the embassy's Facebook page. Stocks fell sharply on Trump's announcement, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average falling nearly 3 per cent. Major industrials that could become targets of Chinese trade retaliation slumped further, with aircraft maker Boeing down 5.2 per cent and earthmoving equipment maker Caterpillar falling 5.7 per cent. Mr Trump signed a memorandum imposing the restrictions after a Section 301 investigation found Chinese violations of technology intellectual property rights.

He said he had spoken to the China's President Xi Jinping and asked him to reduce the trade deficit by $100 billion immediately and he was in the midst of a very large negotiation with Beijing. "I view them as a friend" Trump said of the Chinese as he started his announcement. "We have spoken to China and we are in the middle of negotiations." The US action will target key areas identified in Chinas Made in China 2025 program, including electronics, robotics, aviation and aerospace products, Trump advisor Peter Navarro told reporters. There are fears the move would trigger a trade war between the worlds number one and number two economies.

Chinas commerce ministry said before Trump's announcement that China firmly opposed US acts of unilateralism and trade protectionism. China will never sit idly and let its lawful rights and interests be undermined and will surely take all necessary measures to firmly safeguard its legitimate rights and interests, said Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying. She said China hoped the US would refrain from moves that will hurt both itself and others. Loading Before the Trump announcement, Chinas ambassador to the WTO, Zhang Xiangchen, said China was considering a WTO complaint against the expected package of tariffs, but that was only one option.

At a press conference earlier on Thursday, Hua highlighted key US exports to China but declined to say whether these would be likely targets for retaliatory action. Chinas market receives the largest number of US planes and soybeans and the second largest number of US cars and cotton. The figure I saw is that 62 per cent of US soybeans and 25 per cent of its Boeing planes ended up in China. She said the US side had complained about the need for fairness and reciprocity in trade, but China believed the trade imbalance between the two countries was partly the result of US policies restricting exports to China. The US is on the one hand urging China to buy what it wants to sell, while refusing to sell what China wants to buy. Is the US in the right position to criticise China on trade imbalance? Is it fair? How many toys do we have to sell to equal the value of one Boeing plane? Asked if China would retaliate to US tariffs by hitting US sales of soybeans and Boeing aircraft to China, Hua said Chinas trade department handled the issue.

Chinese premier Li Keqiang said earlier this week that China wanted the US to ease restrictions on the sale of hi-tech goods to China to help rebalance trade. In a speech on Tuesday Li said China would improve conditions for foreign companies in China, bringing down overall tariffs for imports, slash tariffs for day-to-day consumer goods and would eliminate tariffs for drugs. Manufacturing would be opened up to foreign investors with no requirement for technology transfer, Li said, addressing a long-time sore point for foreign companies. Market access to aged care, education and healthcare and financial services sectors would be widened, and limits on foreign equity lifted in some areas. But American and European business have long complained about a lack of action on reform, despite pledges that China would continue to open up its markets.The report will not be made public until intelligence agencies review it to determine what can be declassified.

Republican Representative Mike Conaway said the committee approved the release. He and other committee members declined to give a tally of the vote.

Washington: The US House Intelligence Committee voted on Thursday to release a Republican report on the panel's Russia probe, the leader of the investigation said, a decision that formally ends the panel's examination of Russia and the 2016 US election.

Representative Adam Schiff, the panel's top Democrat, told reporters after the committee business meeting that Republicans had declined every motion offered by Democrats, including requests to subpoena witnesses who refused to answer questions.

"The (Republican) majority was not interested in conducting any further investigation, even when the flaws in what we have done so far have become so apparent in the course of the last week," Schiff said.

Reports have emerged from a whistleblower this week that British political consultancy Cambridge Analytica improperly accessed Facebook Inc users' information to build profiles on American voters later used to help elect Trump in 2016.

Hidden camera footage released by British television showed a company official criticizing how the House committee had conducted its interview.

President Donald Trump's fellow Republicans have majorities in both the Senate and House, controlling every congressional committee. The House panel's investigation of how Russia might have sought to influence the 2016 US presidential election, and whether Trump associates colluded with Moscow has, has been marked by partisan disagreements for months.The MFAA has come to the defence of trail commissions, after a draft report released by the Governments Productivity Commission last month described such compensation as perverse incentives for brokers by rewarding them for keeping customers in their existing loan.

The Commissions report claimed that consumers are not given the best choice suited for them because of products are channelled through the vertical integration of brokers and other distribution channels. [M]ortgage brokers are not obliged by law to act in the best interests of the customer. And an important source of advice subsequent to the transaction is compromised, as trailing commissions encourage broker loyalty to the financial institution, not the customer.

In a commentary of the Commissions report, the MFAA said trail commissions do not restrict or discourage customer switching or refinancing.

Such compensations ensure alignment of interests between a lender, aggregator, broker, and customer over the life of a loan. [W]hen a broker refinances a loan, their existing trail flow is replaced with a new trail flow, and the broker also has the possibility of earning an additional new upfront commission if they are refinancing with a different lender.

Citing figures from other countries, the association added that markets without trail commissions see higher upfront commissions. In Canada for example, it said brokers earn an upfront commission between 0.90% and 1.40%, with the most common commission at 1.10%.

As trail is paid on the amortising value of a loan, it declines over time  but certain lenders have scaled their trail to remain competitive, MFAA said.

Considering the broker business model is built on positive customer relationships, with over 70%of business generated directly or indirectly via existing customers, brokers have a strong incentive to maintain contact with their customers over the life of the loan to ensure they have a competitive solution that is appropriate to their changing needs. Trail assists in funding such services over time, it added.

Related stories:Sign up for our PoliticsNY newsletter for the latest coverage and to stay informed about the 2021 elections in your district and across NYC

Erin go hurrah!

St. Patricks Day falls on a Saturday this year, so you can get Guinness-ed up for the Irish holiday without worrying about work the next day! And Brooklynites have plenty of options for going green, in concert halls, movie theaters, and classic pubs. Here are some of the boroughs coolest happenings for St. Paddys Day.

Fancy footwork

Start your St. Patricks Day weekend early with a visit to the stage at Kingsborough College. At the Claddagh show on Friday night, Celtic rock band the Prodigals will provide the music for a tapping band of traditional Irish dancers. And appropriately named actor Gregory Grene will read a modern Irish fairy tale alongside the song and dance.

Claddagh at On Stage at Kingsborough [2001 Oriental Boulevard at Quentin Street in Manhattan Beach, (718) 3685596, www.onsta geatk ingsb oroug h.org ]. March 16 at 8 pm. $32$37.

Gold stars!

Get drunk and laugh at the screen during the midnight screening of Leprechaun 4: In Space at Nitehawk Cinema. The 1996 classic about an Irish leprechaun marrying a space princess and murdering space marines has received an astounding zero percent on movie rating site Rotten Tomatoes.

Leprechaun 4: In Space at Nitehawk Cinema [136 Metropolitan Ave. between Berry Street and Wythe Avenue in Williamsburg, (718) 7828370, www.niteh awkci nema.com ]. March 16 and 17 at 11:45 pm. $12.

Booze and beef

Feed your hunger for corned beef and cabbage at the Tamaqua Bar and Marina in Gerritsen Beach, which will serve the delicious dish all day. In addition to an array of drink options, the bar will host Irish music from the band Crossroads during the day, Irish dancers at 6 pm, and a performance from local band Lil Sister and the Rolling Machine starting at 7 pm.

St. Patricks Day Party at Tamaqua [84 Ebony Ct. between Channel and Bijou avenues in Gerritsen Beach, (718) 6469212]. March 17; 210 pm. $10.

Green and bear it

Make this drunken holiday one you will remember forever by getting a free St. Patricks Daythemed tattoo at the Dromedary Bar in Bushwick! With the purchase of any food or drink item, you can get one of 11 tattoos designed by Olivia Pakitsas, including a shamrock, pot of gold, or overflowing beer mug. The offer lasts until 7 pm, but the party, the Irish whiskey special, and the option to top your burger with corned beef will last all night.

St. Patricks Day Tattoos at Dromedary [266 Irving Ave. at Menahan Street in Bushwick, (347) 7154255, www.faceb ook.com/ drome daryb ar ]. March 17, 37 pm. Free.

We shant miss it!

Irish music fans can sham-rock out with the Shanties for St. Paddys. The New Irish band will play old Irish classics and new songs at Park Slope fixture Smiths Tavern. The bar promises it will be shantastic!

The Shanties Live at Smiths Tavern [440 Fifth Ave., between Eighth and Ninth streets in Park Slope, (718) 7885218]. March 17 at 7 pm. Free.

Erin go-go girls

Its not a parade, but burlesque troupe Wasabassco will have you on your feet for St. Patricks Day for Sinners, its annual all-redhead striptease show that celebrates the hair color frequently found among inhabitants of the Emerald Isle. Host Nasty Canasta promises a night free of green beer and bridge and tunnel fake Irish, just a classy night of nearly-naked redheads.

St. Patricks Day for Sinners at Littlefield (635 Sackett St. between Third and Fourth avenues, www.littl efiel dnyc.com ). March 17 at 8 pm. $15$30.

Saint goes marching

Brooklyn is the luckiest borough, because it gets two parades for St. Paddys! First up is the festive and fun Brooklyn St. Patricks Parade in Park Slope, happening on March 18 alongside green Prospect Park. Next weekend, the Bay Ridge St. Patricks Day Parade will set off down Third Avenue.

Brooklyn St. Patricks Parade (starts at Prospect Park West and 15th Street in Park Slope, www.brook lynst patri ckspa rade.com ). March 18 at 1 pm. Free.

Bay Ridge St. Patricks Day Parade (starts at Marine Avenue and Third Avenue in Bay Ridge, www.bayri dgest patri cksda y.com ). March 25 at 1 pm. Free.

Reach reporter Adam Lucente at aluce nte@c ngloc al.com or by calling (718) 2602511. Follow him on Twitter @Adam_Lucente.Sign up for our PoliticsNY newsletter for the latest coverage and to stay informed about the 2021 elections in your district and across NYC

Shes got a saucy love story!

Just like the narrator of her new novel Bagels & Salsa, author Lara Reznik left Long Island to attend college in New Mexico in the 1970s, and wound up finding the man of her dreams. Both character and writer married a Hispanic man from the Land of Enchantment, but that is where the similarities end, said the author, who now lives in Texas.

I write about my life, about what I know, said Reznik, who is also the author of The Girl from Long Guyland and The M&M Boys. The actual story is not really autobiographical, but the people in it are based on people in my life, so lets say its 50 percent autobiographical.

Bagels & Salsa, a finalist in the Texas Writers League 2017 fiction contest, is the unpredictably quirky tale of the love story between Jewish Long Island sociologist Laila Levin and Latino surgeon Eduardo Quintana, who could not be more different. It begins with a backdrop of New York City in 1977, when the murderous Son of Sam stalked the streets of the city preying on young women, and winds through a variety of subplots, from an unlikely beginning on an auditorium stage in a Bronx public high school, through a torrid buildup in Manhattan, and a visit to Quintaras hometown, which is the complete opposite of New York  the small town of Espanola, New Mexico.

Along the way, numerous new characters  a stuttering stalker; a cocaine-addicted ex-girlfriend; meddling mothers, sympathetic fathers, supportive sisters, horseback-riding cousins and a loyal dog named Brooklyn, to name a few  come into and out of the lives of these two lovers, who break up, make up, break up, and make up again, until their bond proves stronger than their obvious cultural differences.

Reznik hopes that the cross-cultural romance at the heart of her story inspires readers to look beyond their own societal boundaries.

I never realized there are still so many racists in this country, said Reznik. I would like readers [of Bagels & Salsa] to think about embracing religious, ethnic and cultural differences.

Bagels and Salsa is now available in bookstores and at Amazon.com.Sign up for our PoliticsNY newsletter for the latest coverage and to stay informed about the 2021 elections in your district and across NYC

Its a bear of a story to deal with.

A chilly, snowy spring is the ideal backdrop for William Shakespeares The Winters Tale, opening this weekend at Fort Greenes Polonsky Shakespeare Center. The tragicomedy, written late in Shakespeares career, follows Leontes, a jealous king, who accuses his queen, Hermione, of infidelity. Director Arin Arbus brings the mammoth five-act play to life, but said that, although she has tackled a half-dozen of the Bards plays before, this problem play is something entirely new.

With this play, Shakespeare created a new form, said Arbus. Hes written a three-act tragedy, followed by a fourth-act comedy with song and dance, and then in the fifth act, theres a miracle; a mythic, spiritual restoration. This was written by a man who lost a child 15 years earlier, who felt guilty, and I think the play is looking at whats possible after a tragedy or great loss.

While fun to direct, Arbus admitted it was challenging to balance the plays tonal shifts.

The language does it so effortlessly, but in production, you have to figure in actors, costumes, lighting  all these elements that must sync up with the text, she said.

So she ditched her preconceived notions, and worked with set designer Riccardo Hernandez to allow the plays language to create the physical spaces, including Sicilia, Bohemia, and the interior of King Leontess mind. Crafting an open, abstract set for the play created new possibilities for the actors, said Arbus.

If you dont have to fit the action into an Edwardian living room, theres space to make discoveries about whats actually happening, she said.

A cold heart: Anatol Yusef plays the imperious King Leontes in Theater for a New Audiences production of The Winters Tale, which officially opens on March 25. Carol Rosegg

The Polonsky Shakespeare Center is uniquely flexible in its design, allowing a director to reconfigure sets according to their vision. For A Winters Tale, Arbus is using a thrust configuration, which brings the audience in close to the action.

The great thing about the space is its at once intimate and epic, said Arbus. Its a tall space, great for classical plays where you want to be able to hear an actor whisper onstage. But you also want to get a sense of something larger than human scale, like the Act Five miracle. This is a space where you can feel that.

Last year, Arbus was honored with an Obie Award for her direction of The Skin Of Our Teeth, also at the Polonsky Center. Her residency with the theater has given her great freedom to explore, she said

Artists need artistic homes in order to take risks, to develop and succeed and even fail, which is an essential part of the process, she said.

Her next project will be an adaptation of The Tempest, performed by Syrian refugees within a Grecian refugee camp. Arbus hopes the experience will be a freeing experience for everyone involved.

The people were working with are in a very difficult situation, but theater can make you feel free, she said. I hope by letting people manifest things within their imaginations, the difficulties of their daily lives will disappear for a moment.

The Winters Tale at Polonksy Shakespeare Center [262 Ashland Pl. between Fulton Street and Lafayette Avenue in Fort Greene, (866) 8114111, www.tfana.org]. Opening on March 25 at 7:30 pm. Through April 15, WedSun at 7:30 pm. $90$100 ($20 students).The JioPhone was all the rage last year, with its promise of being the cheapest 4G phone on the planet and the connectivity prospects that brings. While the first 4G feature phone by disruptor Reliance Jio had quite a few things to offer, one expected one was nowhere to be found. WhatsApp has not featured on the KaiOS-powered 4G feaure phone, yet, but this may not be the case for long.

WhatsApp, the Facebook-owned instant messaging application, is reportedly working on a KaiOS compatible application. KaiOS is a Linux-based operating system that is used with feature phones. References about a new native KaiOS app in works had been found in the latest WhatsApp beta for Windows Phone 2.18.38, indicating the presence of a new platform that can be connected to WhatsApp servers, said a report by WABetaInfo.

While there is no word on the functionalities that WhatsApp will bring to KaiOS, or when it will be launched, it should sure bring give JioPhone users a reason to smile. But not only JioPhone, a WhatsApp version compatible with KaiOS will also be something prospective Nokia 8110 4G buyers can cheer for. Yes, you read it right.

The Nokia 8110 4G runs Smart Feature OS which is based on KaiOS. WhatsApp coming to the JioPhone would mean that the instant messaging application can very well make its way to the new feature phone from Nokia.

HMD Global showcased the next-generation avatar 'banana phone' for the first time at Mobile World Congress 2018 in February earlier this year. The handset does not support WhatsApp as of now. The new 4G feature phone on the block rocks a Snapdragon 205 chipset with 512MB of RAM and 4GB of internal storage, which can be expanded to 64GB via microSD card. The Nokia 8110 4G is expected to be available for purchase in May later this year. The phone will be available at EUR 79, or around Rs 6,300.

Notably, WhatsApp is going to end support for the Symbian S40 operating system, which used to power earlier Nokia mid-range feature phones, from next December 31. WhatsApp has also withdrawn support for BlackBerry OS and Windows Phone 8.

Bringing a connectivity option associated with smartphones to these 'dumbphones' is likely to make them more desirable. While there is no shortage of hype for devices like the JioPhone or Nokia 8110 4G, owing to reasons varying from value for money to nostalgia factor, lack of applications we have grown accustomed to often proves to be a deal-breaker.

KaiOS Technologies has recently entered into collaborations with several technology majors including Facebook, Google, and Twitter. Following this, Facebook launched a native KaiOS app about a month ago, available on JioPhone now. The cheap 4G handset already has a special version of Google Assistant.In an attempt to tap into the talent in South Asia, Harvard University has opened a new centre in New Delhi. There are already multiple regional offices across the globe, including total three in India. This centre in New Delhi is affiliated to the recently renamed Lakshmi Mittal South Asia Institute. The centre will facilitate researches in South Asia, circulate ideas and knowledge as well as foster a connection between Harvard University and the region.

The centre will also look after seminars and lectures delivered by scholars working in South Asia-related fields.

"Having a platform here provides us a way of having a permanent presence in the region. It is an important symbolic message to show that we are here. We won't only have professors showing up often and delivering lectures, we are also establishing roots here, and looking for new partnerships, collaborations as well as for support for faculty who want to come here. We are also looking forward to provide information about what Harvard does and to attract people to the university in whatever capacity we can, and in whatever field, and also students looking to pursue a degree. We, at Harvard, rely upon the talent of the whole world," Mark Elliott, Vice Provost of International Affairs, Harvard University told Business Today.

Similar offices and initiatives are also in other cities across the world including Brazil's Sao Paolo, Chile's Santiago, and South Africa's Johannesburg.



Talking about India's role, Elliott said that India is the third largest source of students in the university. Elaborating on how students who are brilliant but need financial support can get admission to the university, Elliott said that it is only the perception of Harvard as an expensive institution. SAI India Country Director Dr. Sanjay Kumar mentioned to Business Today that apart from scholarships, they run a programme that helps the first in a family to pursue higher education. Students are selected to go on a fully-funded training programme to Dubai where they are helped to understand their career prospects and future education.

Elaborating on the role of the centre, SAI Executive Director Meena Hewett said, "Harvard is already operating in this region. With this centre in New Delhi, we anticipate other academic institutions to see that we are here. We will be conducting a monthly seminar series. Through this we want to engage other scholars and invite leading academics as well. Such engagements attract other scholars that lead to conversations, which eventually lead to something big. When you have good product you will attract more people."

South Asia Institute is a university-wide research institute at Harvard that engages faculty members, students, and regional institutions through interdisciplinary programs to disseminate knowledge, inform policy, and engage with issues that are shaping South Asia. The institute has funded 354 research projects, internship opportunities and language study grants since 2010.There's a lot of good news on the export front. To begin with, the latest trade data released by the Ministry of Commerce and Industry Exports shows that exports have exhibited positive growth of 4.48 per cent in dollar terms in February 2018 (year-on-year). In fact, exports have been on a positive trajectory since August 2016, barring a temporary setback in October 2017. And today, Union Minister Suresh Prabhu, announced that the government is working on a new strategy that seeks to boost the services sector while providing an enabling environment to the industry to increase the country's exports. According to him, the services sector will play a significant role in pushing the country's economic growth and the industry must focus on delivering services of global standards.

"In last few months, we are seeing exports registering growth. We are targeting to ensure that exports are not only [of] traditional products, but new products are also added to the basket," said the commerce and industry minister on the sidelines of inaugurating the CapIndia 2018 event in Mumbai. He added that the share of services is likely to grow faster than merchandise exports, thus raising the total exports from the country.

The government apparently has already identified 12 service sectors as 'Champion Services' - including IT, tourism and hospitality - and approved a whopping Rs 5,000 crore to promote them. "We have prepared an action plan for each of these sectors to promote them domestically as well as globally," he explained, adding that this decision will drive the growth of the services economy in India.

Then there is the country's booming chemical sector that, as Prabhu pointed out, needs to create a capacity to meet exports demand. According to Satish Wagh, Chairman of CHEMEXCIL, (as the Basic Chemicals, Pharmaceuticals and Cosmetics Export Promotion Council is popularly known), the sector is expected to double to $300 billion by 2025, clocking an annual growth rate of 15-20 per cent. "To achieve this, the government is also working on a draft chemical policy that will focus on meeting the rising demand for chemicals and reduce imports," he added.

Wagh is also looking forward to tapping opportunities at the three-day expo that kicked off today, which will feature over 700 manufacturers/exporters showcasing a range of products. Over 10,000 business visitors are expected to attend the event along with 400-odd overseas buyers, according to its website. "The expo will help us tap immense opportunities for growth, which exist in the fields of speciality chemicals, polymers and agrochemicals industries, as [the] Make in India initiative further facilitates growth and investment," said Wagh.

Prabhu claimed that the ministry is also in the process of formulating an agri-export policy, which has been put in the public domain to seek stakeholders' views. Meanwhile, the aviation ministry is preparing a plan for providing air cargo support to agricultural hubs to promote farm exports. The minister added that the UAE and Saudi Arabia have shown a keen interest in investing.

The new industrial policy, which seeks to promote emerging sectors, will reportedly be released in a few months.

(With PTI inputs)In a major setback to Anil Ambani-led Reliance Communications Ltd (RCom) and its lenders, the Supreme Court on Thursday refused to lift the status quo on RCom's asset sale to Mukesh Ambani-owned Reliance Jio. Following the order, RCom stock closed 5.36 per cent lower to Rs 23.85 on BSE.

A consortium of banks led by the State Bank of India had approached the apex court challenging a tribunal's order barring the beleaguered RCom from selling or transfer of its consolidated assets without prior permission. The Bombay High Court had also upheld the lower court order on March 8.

Ericsson had earlier approached the tribunal against RCom's move to sell the assets to Jio on grounds that the debt-ridden telecom firm had not cleared arrears of Rs 1,012 crore to the Swedish telecom equipment manufacturer. Ericsson had signed a seven-year contract in 2014 to operate and manage RCom's nationwide network. In September 2017, it had filed the insolvency petition to get its dues.

The apex court bench, comprising Justices A K Goel, R F Nariman and U U Lalit, refused to lift the stay ordered by Bombay High Court on R-Com asset sale. The Supreme Court bench will hear all the parties concerned on April 5.

RCom owes Rs 45,000 crore to 35 banks. The State of Bank of India's dues as on February 28 was at Rs 4,027 crore. Other lenders include Bank of Baroda, Bank of India, Canara Bank, Central Bank of India, Punjab National Bank, IDBI Bank, UCO Bank, Indian Overseas Bank, Dena Bank, Corporation Bank, Union Bank, United Bank, LIC and Barclays Bank.

RCom's consolidated assets include Reliance Communications, Reliance Infratel and Reliance Telecom.

In December 2017, the banks had initiated the asset sale through a bidding process. Mukesh Ambani-owned Jio had agreed to buy Rcom's spectrum, mobile towers and other infrastructure, including 1.78 lakh km of fibre optics line, for Rs 17,300 crore.

On December 26, while finalising the deal with Jio, Anil Ambani had said that RCom had agreed to a new debt resolution plan that will see it sell its assets.

After the announcement, Ericsson had moved the tribunal. The resolution was passed on March 5. RCom's March 8 petition against the arbitration order was subsequently dismissed by the Bombay High Court.

In its appeal, filed through advocate Sanjay Kapur, SBI had challenged the high court decision, saying an unsecured creditor (Ericsson) could not steal a march over secured creditors like SBI.

RCom had said it will reduce debt by about Rs 25,000 crore through the sale of some of its spectrum, tower and real estate assets.

For a long time, the speculations were rife that Jio will be most likely buy RCom since the two entities already has agreement where Jio is using RCom's spectrum, towers infrastructure and optical fibre network.European Union leaders will on Friday offer Britain a Brexit transition deal, the summit chair Donald Tusk said - but the deal will only be finalized if London honors its commitments on the Irish border and Gibraltar.

As sought by London, British Prime Minister Theresa May will be offered a 21-month, status quo transition period to help businesses adjust to Britain's official withdrawal from the EU, due in March 2019.

"I have some good news for Prime Minister Theresa May," Tusk told a news conference. "I have just recommended to our leaders that we welcome, in principle, the agreement on transition."

"It is important  not least to our people and businesses  to buy this time, so that everyone is prepared for the real impact of Brexit."

But the deal will only take effect if the two sides agree within the next year on the future status of both the Irish border - an issue they have so far struggled to reach agreement on - and Gibraltar.

As well as offering Britain an interim accord on Friday, the remaining 27 EU states will also agree on their joint negotiating stance for further talks with London, due to start next month, on the two sides' future relationship.

Spain had voiced concern about how the transition deal would affect its demands for a final say on how Brexit affects the British territory of Gibraltar on Spain's south coast.

Spain ceded Gibraltar to Britain in 1713 but wants it back. The territory, which is due to leave the EU along with the rest of Britain but which voted 96 percent in favor of remaining in the bloc, is keen to preserve movement of people across its border with Spain.

As a result, the text to be endorsed by the 27 EU leaders on Friday reminds London that the transition agreement will only become legally binding once the whole treaty on Britain's exit from the bloc is agreed and ratified, probably next year.

"The European Council calls for intensified efforts on the remaining withdrawal issues as well as issues related to the territorial application of the Withdrawal Agreement, notably as regards Gibraltar, and reiterates that nothing is agreed until everything is agreed," the latest draft document read.

Tusk said the document, which was seen by Reuters, had the backing of both Spain and Britain.

The deal on transition comes at the expense of another fudge over how to avoid border checks on the island of Ireland after Brexit, the most difficult circle to square for Brexit negotiators on both sides.

London and Dublin are committed to keeping a free flow of people and goods over the intra-Irish border without returning to checkpoints - as during the three decades of violence in Northern Ireland. But finding a practical solution for any customs checks needed post-Brexit has proved elusive so far. (Reuters)

Source: www.businessworld.ieIt was announced today that Irish law firm Ronan Daly Jermyn (RDJ) will invest 8.3 million as part of an expansion plan in Ireland. The firm will expand its Dublin base with a new office on Georges Dock and add 25 new people to the firm over the next two years.

The new roles will be in corporate, regulation, healthcare, insurance, technology and real estate practices, hiring lawyers and supporting roles.

With an established base in Cork, the firm opened a Dublin office in 2015 and is expanding its current operation to support recent growth and future plans. RDJ has offices in Cork, Dublin, Galway and London and employs 240 people currently.

Over the last twelve months, RDJ has advised Irish and international clients across a number of sectors, including several pillar banks and finance companies, state bodies, and major property developers in Dublin and Cork.

Specifically, the firm is reporting report strong transactional and M&A activity in its healthcare and technology practice, advising clients such as Bon Secours Health System  the largest independent hospital group in Ireland  on its acquisition of Barringtons Hospital and Agilent Technologies on its acquisition of Luxcel Biosciences Limited.

Speaking this week, Partner and head of the RDJ Dublin office, Jamie Olden said, "Dublin is increasingly regarded as an international centre for business. Ireland is the European centre for most of the worlds largest technology companies. Dublin also has a growing reputation as a financial hub, particularly in the fund administration and insurance space. By investing in our Dublin presence, together with our Cork, Galway and London offices, RDJ will be in an excellent position to offer an expanded service offering to new and existing clients."

Source: www.businessworld.ieEU leaders will consider on Thursday how best to enter trade dialog with U.S. President Donald Trump, whose planned tariffs on steel and aluminum have threatened to trigger a trade war.

The United States is set to begin charging import duties of 25% on steel and 10% on aluminum on Friday, although it appears to be ready at the last minute to consider exemptions beyond those already granted to Canada and Mexico.

EU leaders are due to meet at 2 p.m. (1300 GMT), after European Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom's return from talks with U.S. Commerce Security Wilbur Ross and U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer on securing an EU exemption.

She briefed EU ambassadors and the European Parliament on Thursday morning, before the summit, indicating there was a willingness to find a solution to avert a trade war.

Malmstrom told lawmakers she was hopeful the United States would exempt the European Union from metals tariffs. Trump is expected to make an announcement on trade later on Thursday, with Chinese imports targeted.

"It is the president who decides this... but we expect that Secretary Ross will recommend that the EU is excluded as a whole," she told the trade committee of the parliament.

Lighthizer told the U.S. Ways and Means Committee that the United States was in talks with the European Union, Argentina and Australia on granting possible exemptions to metals tariffs, and hoped to settle the issue by the end of April.

Malmstrom and Ross said they had agreed to start immediate discussions on areas of trade concern, including steel and aluminum.

Trump's final word is awaited, but Donald Tusk, who chairs EU summits, said he was cautiously optimistic.

"Meanwhile leaders will discuss how to respond to President Trump's overall approach to global trade, which could negatively affect jobs all over the world. If the United States turns protectionist for good, the whole world will have a problem," he told a news conference on the eve of the summit.

"We are not there yet and there is still time to act sensibly."

The European Commission has proposed that, if tariffs are imposed, the bloc should challenge them at the World Trade Organization, consider measures to prevent metal flooding into Europe and impose import duties on U.S. products to "rebalance" EU-U.S. trade.

The one word neither the Commission nor EU leaders will want to use is "retaliation."

"The EU is quite conscious of not wanting to fight the U.S. or give Trump a bloody nose through words," one diplomat said.

The EU leaders' second topic on Thursday, taxation, also threatens to expose transatlantic strains.

The European Commission on Wednesday proposed rules to make digital companies pay more tax, with U.S. tech giants such as Google, Facebook and Amazon set to foot a large chunk of a potential 5 billion euro bill.

EU Economics Commissioner Pierre Moscovici brushed off accusations that he was going after rich American tech companies to enrich EU coffers and France, Germany, Italy, Britain and Spain welcomed the proposals in a joint statement.

However, some smaller countries fear the proposed tax would undermine their ability to attract multinationals and see the measure as more likely to shift tax revenue to bigger EU countries rather than raising more money. (Reuters)

Source: www.businessworld.ieModified On Mar 22, 2018 07:04 PM By Dhruv.A for Force Gurkha 2017-2020

The update will help the Gurkha pass upcoming crash test norms

The Force Gurkha, a niche off-roader that competes with the popular Mahindra Thar, has been around for quite some time. But to stay in sync with the times and live beyond 2020, the Gurkha is set to receive some updates to its engine and safety department.

In a conversation with CarDekho, Prasan Firodia, the managing director of Force Motors, said, The Force Gurkha remains a priority for us. It will be getting necessary modifications for making it future-ready. That said, the rough-and-tough Gurkha will still remain a bare-bone SUV. The Gurkha, however, will be readied for the Bharat New Vehicle Safety Assessment Program (BNVSAP) which is set to be enforced in October 2019.

To do this, the Gurkha is expected to get airbag(s), ABS (anti-lock braking system) and seat belt reminders. Force is likely to tinker with what is under the flat bonnet too. Powered by a 2.6-litre, 4-cylinder diesel engine which churns out 85PS of power and 230Nm of torque, the Gurkha conforms to BSIV emission norms. But considering the fact that Force is updating the Gurkha to meet BNVSAP norms, we expect it to receive an engine that meets BSVI emission norms as well. Related: Maruti Alto To Be BSVI-Compliant Before 2020

Mind you, Force already manufactures engines for two German car giants - Mercedes-Benz and BMW - in India. This also includes the updated Mercedes-Benz S-Class 3.0-litre diesel engine, which also happens to be Indias first BSVI-compliant motor that can run on BSIV fuel. When asked about the possibility of reintroducing the 7-seat Force One SUV, Firodia said that it is unlikely to happen in the near future. Related: Mercedes-Benz S-Class Facelift Launched In India

The list of changes the Gurkha is expected to receive will make it more expensive than before. Currently, it is priced between Rs 9.15 lakh and Rs 11.90 lakh (ex-showroom). Meanwhile, the Gurkha is expected to receive even tougher competition in the form of the new-gen Thar that Mahindra has been working on. The new Thar is expected to be based on an all-new platform being developed in conjunction with SsangYong. We expect the upcoming Thar to feature a chic and radical design penned by the iconic Italian design house Pininfarina, which is now owned by Mahindra. Also Read: Mahindra Rexton Vs Toyota Fortuner Vs Ford Endeavour: Specifications Comparison

Read More on : Force Gurkha dieselPhoto: Contributed

American authorities say a 14-year-old girl in Canada has been charged with threatening a high school in New Hampshire.

Police in Hanover, N.H., say they learned about an Instagram post early Tuesday morning that threatened Hanover High School and mentioned a shooting.

They say the threat was traced to a home in Canada but won't say where.

Investigators say Canadian officers executed a search warrant and seized electronic devices.

The girl was arrested but police offered no further details.

The threat came a day after provincial police announced charges against five tweens and teens with threatening schools in Ontario in the weeks since the massacre at a Florida high school last month.

Sgt. Peter Leon of the Ontario Provincial Police said those accused also used Instagram.

Experts have said online threats tend to spike after high-profile school shootings. Aimee Morrison, a professor of digital media at the University of Waterloo said Tuesday that some teens make threats on social media in an attempt to gain notoriety and garner a larger following.Photo: The Canadian Press

A pod of dolphins trapped by pack ice in a Newfoundland harbour have been freed by the local fire chief, who used an excavator to clear a channel for the stranded animals.

The six white-beaked dolphins had been stuck in a small, open pool of sea water just off Heart's Delight since Sunday, prompting concerns for their safety.

On Thursday, a change in the wind pushed the ice closer to shore, shrinking the opening.

Local resident Verna Chislett says fire Chief Stan Legge swung into action, using an excavator to pull chunks of ice around the end of the town's wharf.

At one point, the wind shifted again, the ice pans moved apart and the dolphins quickly swam to the open waters of Trinity Bay.

Fisheries Department spokesman Kevin Guest says the dolphins appeared to be healthy despite their ordeal.7 Morning Prayers you need to get your day started with God

7 Morning Prayers you need to ...Egypt exports rise 79% in January

22 March 2018

Egypts cement exports increased 79 per cent in January 2018 to reach US$7m, compared to US$4m in the year-ago period, according to a report from the country's Export Council for Building Materials. This follows a recent 194 per cent rise in cement exports to Yemen, which contributed US$1.3m in January.



Exports to Kenya boomed, advancing 6630 per cent to US$1.9m from US$29,000. However, cement dispatches to Saudi Arabia declined 25 per cent YoY to US$891,000 from US$1.19m.



Following the 49 per cent rise in exports for 2017, a further increase is anticipated within 2018.

Published underPakistan's cement export revenue totals US$149.7m in 8MFY18

22 March 2018

Pakistan exports revenue of cement during the first eight months of FY17-18, recorded a YoY fall of 13.4 per cent and 16.9 per cent in quantity and value in dollars, respectively, says data released by Federal Bureau of Statistics, Government of Pakistan.



The breakdown shows that the country exported 2.98Mt of cement and earned export revenue of US$149.71m in July 2017-February 2018 compared to 3.44Mt at US$180.13m in the corresponding months of the previous fiscal year.



In February 2018 alone, Pakistan exported 264,300t of cement at US$13.24m compared with 357,363t at US$17.788m in January 2018. Exports decreased by 26 per cent in terms of quantity and 25.9 per cent in terms of value MoM. However, when compared with data of February 2017 (229,749t at US$12.23m), exports saw a growth of 15 per cent and 8.2 per cent in terms of quantity YoY.



During July-February 2018, Pakistan exported 1.38Mt to Afghanistan and recorded a fall of 1.7 per cent. Similarly, export to India fell by 4.7 per cent to 783,086t and rest of the world by over 33 per cent.







Published underMPA challenges government for level playing field on energy pricing and biomass fuels

22 March 2018

The Mineral Products Association's (MPA) 2017 annual sustainable development report highlights that although domestic sales have steadily improved since 2012, UK manufacturers continue to face high regulatory policy costs with high energy prices and high electricity network and wholesale costs.



The MPA states that these issues are largely a result of energy and climate change policies and considerable change in the energy system induced by government policy.

A specific concern highlighted in the report relates to the manufacturers' ability to reduce their fossil fuel use. For decades UK cement manufacturers have replaced fossil fuels with waste-derived alternatives, investments that require millions of pounds. However, the rate of fossil fuel replacement is slowing as a result of increasing competition for such fuels from other users which, unlike the cement industry, receive government incentives.



Meanwhile, the MPA's sustainability report shows that MPA cement members have made major investments in recent years to reduce emissions to air. Levels of nitrogen oxides, particulate matter and sulphur dioxide have fallen since 1998 by 84, 86 and 82 per cent, respectively.



Reflecting on the year the MPA's Cement Director, Dr Richard Leese, praised the cement manufacturers for their efforts saying, "This latest sustainable development report clearly demonstrates the great effort the cement manufacturers have taken to minimise the impact of their operations on the environment, neighbours and their own employees. In coming years, a key focus for the sector will be meeting tighter conditions from EU legislation whilst ensuring that domestic production remains internationally competitive.



"Cement is an essential material to meet societys needs for homes, schools, hospitals, leisure and workplaces. The industry has ambitious goals for decarbonisation, but if these ambitions are to be achieved, action must be taken to remove market distortion from the biomass fuels market to allow cement manufacturers to compete on a level playing field," added Dr Leese.

Published underVogue Czech Republic and Slovakia yesterday announced the appointment of Andrea Behounkova to the role of Editor-in-Chief. The Czech and Slovak edition of Vogue will debut both digitally and in print in August 2018, published in partnership with V24 Media.

Andrea Behounkova is widely recognised in the Czech publishing world, having spent the past eight years editing Elle Czech Republic. Behounkovas career began editing a national newspaper, Cesky denik at 21 years old. She then spent seven years working across various forms of media including television and reporting until moving into womens fashion and lifestyle publishing.

During this time, Behounkova held the post of Editor-at-Large of Style and was then pivotal in successfully relaunching Zena a zivot, twice honoured as Best Magazine by The Publishers Union. Behounkova was appointed Editor-in-Chief of Elle Czech Republic in 2010 where she also oversaw the launch of Elle Man and relaunch of Elle Decoration.

After years of speculation, I am thrilled to see the arrival of Vogue to the Czech Republic and Slovakia. As the market has matured, the hunger amongst potential readers and advertising clients has grown. This is the most fitting time to launch Vogue Czech Republic and Slovakia. 2018 represents the 100th anniversary of the establishment of our republic and we are marking it with the launch of Vogue, remarked Behounkova.

Behounkova will spearhead the launch of the newest Vogue platform. Under Behounkova s direction, Vogue Czech Republic and Slovakia will build on the heritage of the title, whilst adopting an up-to-the minute, digital approach to news.

Joining Vogue Czech Republic and Slovakia, Behounkova will work to build a world-class fashion team comprised of experienced journalists and authors as well as seeking out emerging talent. Over the coming months, Vogue Czech Republic and Slovakia will be announcing further new appointments, say the publishers.

Vogue Czech Republic and Slovakia is the twenty-fourth edition of the magazine worldwide.President Trumps proposed 2018 budget cuts suggest a 15% funding reduction for the U.S. Geological Survey, something many believe would place volcanic studies on the back burner. Actually, less than half of the 169 hazardous volcanoes in the U.S. are being monitored as it stands today. So, it begs the question: If an active volcano was at risk of explosion, would America even know about it?

Volcanoes dont erupt spur of the moment  at least historically they dont. Explosions are usually prefaced by earthquakes or heightened magma pressures in the volcanic chambers. But should one of the active volcanoes blow, millions of Americans, and countless others around the world, would be in danger without much warning.

Which volcanoes are next in line for eruption? We break down 10 currently active volcanoes and the areas most at risk. Is your city on the list?

1. Yellowstone Caldera

Area at risk: Yellowstone National Park, as well as many U.S. cities, including Denver, Salt Lake City, and Cheyenne

Beneath one of the worlds most beautiful national parks lies one of the most dangerous active supervolcanos. The Yellowstone Caldera hides beneath a quarter of the park and scientists say its long overdue for a massive eruption. Researchers from the University of Arizona determined the Caldera could erupt in a matter of decades  a far cry from the thousands of years scientists originally thought.

An eruption at Yellowstone would shoot more than 500 cubic miles of rock and ash into the air, a wingspan 2,500 times more material than Mount St. Helens produced in 1980 that killed 57 people. A good chunk of the entire Northwest would be affected. But theres really no way of telling just how massive or intense the next explosion could be. As expected, this causes scientists quite a bit of worry.

Next: A threat a little further west

2. Mount Rainier

Area at risk: Seattle and Central Washington State

Statistics show a volcanic eruption in the Cascades two to three times every century. Mount St. Helens blew in 1980 and Lassen Peak in Northern California erupted in 1915. Now, scientists suggest the residents around Seattle, Tacoma, and Olympia keep their eyes on Mount Rainier, as its surely building up to something big.

A blow would cause deadly mudflows and thick atmospheric ash that impair respiratory breathing. Geologist Carolyn Driedger also warns that There would be blocks half the size of the visitors center here at Paradise or the size of Volkswagens and fine grain material being blasted into the atmosphere and then falling back on the snows surface.

Next: The second threatening volcano in the Pacific Northwest

3. Mount Hood

Area at risk: Portland, Oregon

If the northwestern chunk of the U.S. manages to dodge Mount Rainier, theyll still need to track Mount Hood for a potential volcanic explosion. Again, geologist Carolyn Driedger warns an eruption is not unlikely. The city of Portland would experience earthquakes as a precursor to the burst and mudslides and gas flux changes as a result. (This video stimulation paints an accurate picture.) Thankfully, the USGS continues to monitor the active volcano closely.

Next: A threat to Alaska

4. Mount Cleveland

Area at risk: Aleutian Islands, Alaska

Also known by its native name, Chuginadak, referring to the Aleut goddess of fire, Mount Cleveland in the central Aleutian Islands has been in a state of volcanic unrest since June 2015. The Alaskan Volcano Observatory reported two small explosions in November 2017, prompting them to raise the watch level of concern to orange. One person died during a major eruption in 1944, but recent eruptions have been less deadly. Should this volcano erupt again, people can expect ash clouds rising high enough to affect aviation and hot lava to reach the Bering Sea.

Next: A volcano that poses a serious threat to a popular American island

5. Mauna Loa

Area at risk: Hilo and the Big Island, Hawaii

United States Geological Survey lists the threat potential for Mauna Loa in Hilo, Hawaii, as very high. The Earths largest  and most active  volcano has erupted 33 times since 1843. The lava flowed dangerously close to the residents Hilo during past eruptions. Geologists are currently monitoring this active volcano for signs of unrest and elevated seismic activity.

Next: The U.S. issues travel warnings to this region

6. Mount Agung

Area at risk: Bali, Indonesia

In 2017, seismic activity within Mount Agung cost Bali at least $110 million in tourism and productivity while locals were moved to shelters away from the active volcano. The region endured hundreds of earthquakes in a matter of days, indicating the movement of magma and increasing the likelihood of an eruption. The volcanic activity eventually slowed, but the volanco is still active.

Next: The widespread effect of glaciers and volcanoes

7. Bardarbunga volcano

Area at risk: Vatnajokull, Iceland

Four large earthquakes in October lead geologists to believe the Bardarbunga volcano is preparing to erupt once again. Icelands most active volcano stands 6,590 feet tall and lies hidden underneath the Vatnajokull glacier. The earthquakes suggest the volcanos magma chamber is building with pressure. When this next eruption begins, they expect consequential damage similar to the last one in 2014, which persisted six months, spread 1,000 cubic meters of lava per second, and caused air pollution across western Europe.

When the nearby Eyjafjallajokull volcano erupted underneath a glacier in 2010, it triggered a massive flood-induced from meltwater. Ash spewed into the atmosphere and caused airport closures across Europe. The travel delays cost the European economy and estimated $4.9 billion, according to Forbes.

Next: An island at risk of a tsunami

8. Cumbre Vieja volcano

Area at risk: Canary Islands

A team of scientists rushed in to monitor the Cumbre Vieja volcano on a 24-hour watch cycle in October 2017. The island of La Palma is a popular British tourist destination thats been rocked by significant earthquakes this fall, prompting an eruption warning from experts. Should this active volcano erupt, some 86,000 residents would be in the flood path of a tsunami once large chunks of the island collapse into the sea.

Next: Active volcano spurs evacuations in popular tourist destination

9. Mount Vesuvius

Area at risk: Naples, Italy

Mount Vesuvius is an active volcano in the widely popular vacation destination of Naples, Italy. It is most famous for burying Pompeii and other nearby cities in a thick layer of ash during an eruption in A.D. 79. Since then, the volcano has erupted 36 times, most recently in 1944 when 6,000 people were killed.

Naples residents were evacuated in July 2017 after the mount went up in flames, prompting local officials to implement a wide-spread evacuation plan should Vesuvius erupt again. Scientists claim its only a matter of time.

Next: Supervolcano in Italy

10. Campi Flegrei

Area at risk: Naples, Italy

Campi Flegrei is a supervolcanic hot zone according to scientists. The fiery cauldron has rested inactive since the 1980s but recent tremors and magma movement have sparked interest. Increased pressure within the volcano suggests this dangerous volcano is awakening from the dead. Should it blow, some 1.5 million people surrounding Naples, Italy, would be affected.

Follow Lauren on Twitter @la_hamer.

Check out The Cheat Sheet on Facebook!How did Florida gun culture get so out of control? Thats the question people have been asking since long before Marjory Stoneman Douglas High massacre in Parkland took place.

In March 2018, with students from Parkland leading the charge, Florida residents saw something unusual happen: The state legislature passed a gun control measure. Like clockwork, the National Rifle Association (NRA) immediately filed a lawsuit to strike the law down.

As a report published in The New Yorker and The Trace showed, the NRA is not used to losing gun battles in Florida. Heres how the nations most powerful gun lobby  and one woman in particular  ran roughshod over state lawmakers to pass 30 laws in the past decades.

1. The rise of concealed carry

While concealed carry laws did not begin in Florida, most agree the effort there by the NRA sparked a national movement. The publicity surrounding the bill, and the NRAs victory in a subsequent legal challenge, led to similar laws passing quickly in other states.

Some 30 years later, we couldnt find any state in America where gun owners cant legally carry weapons concealed on their person. In many cases, you can even carry your weapon into another state due to reciprocity laws.

In this way, Florida has become a sort of laboratory for state gun laws. When the NRA made it there, they figured out the system for making it anywhere.

Next: A challenge to carrying semi-automatic weapons became a modern-day Gestapo movement to this NRA lobbyist.

2. The NRA fights for semi-automatic weapons in Florida  in 1988.

While people cringe at the NRAs Dana Loesch ominously telling Americans Times up on TV, its nothing new for the organization. Back in 1988, when Florida lawmakers wanted to close loopholes on the concealed-carry law, the states top lobbyist described the effort as a modern-day Gestapo movement.

The speaker was Marion Hammer, a former NRA president whos been the most powerful gun lobbyist in America for decades. Her goal was to shoot down a law that would ban revolvers and semi-automatic handguns. Many Republicans bristled at Hammers half-truths and overall aggression, but she was too determined (and well-funded) to stop.

A police chief summed up the state of affairs in 88: [The NRA] has abandoned its old hunting and gun safety priorities and is spending millions of dollars to lobby for measures that jeopardize public safety and police officers lives.

Next: Hammer makes the case for Stand Your Ground.

3. The ringmaster for Stand Your Ground

In describing Hammers influence across the state, The Traces Mike Spies quoted Floridas Dan Gelber, a Florida House representative who followed the introduction of the Stand Your Ground law. Marion was the ringleader, he said of Hammer and her bill. She was telling everyone where to go and what hoops to jump through.

The measure, which Hammer pushed in the Florida legislature in 2004, eliminated any obligation to flee when you felt threatened by someone. If you believed you were in danger, you could shoot an intruder or anyone you feared might harm you in public.

It was a license to kill  and do so without standing trial. And Floridians began to kill.

Next: Stand Your Ground goes national with the killing of Trayvon Martin.

4. Stand Your Grounds role in the death of Trayvon Martin

Governor Jeb Bush signed Stand Your Ground into law in 2005, with only 20 Democrats opposing it. However, if you werent following Florida gun policy debates, you may not have heard about it until 2012.

That year, a Sanford man named George Zimmerman shot and killed Trayvon Martin, an unarmed 17-year-old boy, while volunteering on the neighborhood watch. Despite the national uproar over Martins death, it took nearly two months and the appointing of a special prosecutor to charge Zimmerman with a crime.

It was par from the course. Some 70% of shooters had gone free in Florida since Stand Your Ground became law, according to a study that year by the Tampa Bay Times.

Next: Floridas Stand Your Ground task force features Hammers preferred lawmakers and Hammer herself as a witness.

5. The NRA ran the Stand Your Ground task force.

Before Zimmerman went to trial (and was found not guilty of any crime), pressure on Governor Rick Scott forced him to launch a task force on the law. As Spies points out in his report, one of Stand Your Grounds primary sponsors (and four others who voted for it) sat on the commission.

In the words of a Republican lawmaker, the task force was window dressing, an NRA-sponsored affair from top to bottom. To make the proceedings more one-sided, Hammer herself  the former NRA president  appeared as a key witness. Naturally, nothing about the Stand Your Ground law changed.

Next: Hammer saw her opening with Rick Scott earlier  and took the opportunity.

6. Hammers 2011 open-carry bill got Scotts signature.

In 2011, Hammer went to work on a bill that would allow people to carry guns in public without a safety holster. When Florida sheriffs opposed it, Hammer was asked if these men and women of law enforcement were anti-gun radicals. She replied, Yep, a lot of em are.

She and the NRA got their law through the statehouse in this fashion. Governor Scott signed it in June of that year.

Next: If local officials passed a gun law stricter than Florida laws, they could lose their jobs and face fines.

7. Another 2011 law pre-empted local gun regulations in Florida. Scott signed it.

What if the mayor of Miami or another Florida city (say, Parkland) wanted to pass a gun law that made sense for the community? After yet another law Hammer pushed in 2011, that local leader could face thousands in fines and even lose their job.

Municipal leaders all across the state objected to this policy, but Hammer dismissed them as gun-hating liberals in a clip collected by NRA on the Record. In another interview, Hammer made it clear who runs Florida gun policy.

We never file legislation or ask to have legislation filed that isnt needed, and when we file it, we plan to pass it, she said. Once again, Scott signed her bill into law in October 2011.

Next: Following a college shooting, Hammer and the NRA pushed to get guns in college classrooms.

8. Hammer also lobbied to get guns on college campuses.

If someone tells you its too soon to talk about the horror at Marjory Stoneman Douglas, you can bring up a 2011 shooting at a Florida college. After a students AK-74 assault rifle accidentally killed another student, Hammer brought up a bill that would allow guns in college classrooms and dorms.

Again, Florida police chiefs and campus security officials opposed it. The father of the slain college student spoke at a committee hearing before the campus provision was removed.

Next: When you dont support the NRA on a single measure, you are a target for revenge.

9. NRA vengeance on display

In 2015, when Hammer and the NRA wanted Stand Your Ground shooters to avoid any trial whatsoever, they added that provision to the law. (Spoiler: It eventually passed, and Rick Scott signed it into law.)

However, Charles McBurney, a Republican lawmaker looking to become a state judge, could not support it. When his name appeared on the list of candidates for the position, emails began flooding Scotts office in opposition to McBurney, The Trace reported.

McBurney was one of the NRAs most loyal foot soldiers for nine years. When he crossed Hammer once, he lost his shot at the judgeship. Governor Scott feared Hammers wrath too much to do otherwise.

Next: Get rid of all liberals?

10. Get rid of all liberals.

In 1996, when The New York Times profiled Hammer as she took over at the NRA, she had an idea that was a match for getting rid of all the guns. Why not get rid of all liberals? she asked.

The reporter noted it was a joke, mostly. Maybe, but youll find that same line said in complete seriousness any day on the internet in 2018  right near a story about the latest shooting and a quick accounting of the dead.

Check out The Cheat Sheet on Facebook!Its relatively unusual for a president to spend as much time at one of his own properties as Donald Trump spends at Mar-a-Lago. (Though it isnt entirely unprecedented for a commander-in-chief to have a winter White House.) But Donald Trump is far from the only president to enjoy vacationing in Florida.

Each state has its pros and cons, of course. But Florida is often cited as the most hated state. But that hasnt stopped Donald Trump from making frequent getaways to the sunshine state. And it certainly didnt keep these other presidents from making it their favorite vacation destination.

1. Warren G. Harding

29th president of the United States

Favorite Florida destination: Saint Augustine and Hollywood

Warren G. Harding, one of the presidents known for a particularly corrupt Cabinet, often took vacations to Saint Augustine or Hollywood, Florida, according to The Sun-Sentinel. In Hollywood, he would stay at a hotel on Young Circle. And in Saint Augustine, he visited the Castillo de San Marcos and stayed at the Ponce de Leon Hotel, now a part of Flagler College.

The Sun-Sentinel reports that Harding almost moved into a winter White House of his own on Bird Key, near Sarasota. John Ringling, the man behind the circus empire, had arranged for a mansion to be renovated with electric lighting and acetylene gas, lavish furnishings for that time. It took three years to complete the project, but Harding never got to move in. He died of a heart attack at a San Francisco hotel.

Next: This president enjoyed a trip to Miami even though he almost got shot.

2. Franklin D. Roosevelt

32nd president of the United States

Favorite Florida destination: Fort Lauderdale and Miami

The Sun-Sentinel reports that Franklin D. Roosevelt came within a hair of being assassinated in South Florida. He was almost shot in Miami. As the publication explains, Roosevelt went fishing in Fort Lauderdale and Miami before his inauguration. Then he gave a speech at Bayfront Park in Miami.

A would-be assassin, armed with a .32-caliber pistol, began firing at Roosevelt during the speech. Although he missed Roosevelt, he shot five other people, including one who later died of his wounds. But despite the shooting, Roosevelt still enjoyed his vacation to Florida. At the time, Roosevelt reportedly said, I only have one complaint: I gained a lot of weight, and I have to knock it off before my inauguration.

Next: This president loved vacationing in Key West.

3. Harry S. Truman

33rd president of the United States

Favorite Florida destination: Key West

The Sun-Sentinel reports that after ordering atomic bombs dropped on Japan in 1945 and overseeing post-war construction, Truman felt physically exhausted. His doctor prescribed a warm vacation. So in 1946, Truman began staying at a former Naval officer residence in Key West. He quickly fell in love with Florida and ended up taking 11 working vacations to Key West.

According to Time, records show that Truman enjoyed swimming and deep-sea fishing in Florida. But he also did a lot of presidential business on those vacations. According to the Sun-Sentinel, Harry S. Truman created the U.S. Department of Defense while hanging out in Key West. He also met with high-ranking officials. Trumans Little White House was later used by six other presidents as a retreat and summit location. Today, it serves as a museum.

Next: This president also took vacations to Key West.

4. Dwight D. Eisenhower

34th president of the United States

Favorite Florida destination: Key West

Dwight D. Eisenhower numbers among the presidents who have visited Trumans Little White House over the years. Eisenhower reportedly visited the residence twice: once for meetings in 1955, and a second time to recover from a heart attack in 1956.

Visit Florida reports that Eisenhower wrote a state-of-the-union address from the dining room table at Trumans Little White House in Key West. Eisenhower is known to have made visits to other parts of Florida, too. He stayed at Hawks Cay Resort in Duck Key, and also at the Lakeside Inn in Mount Dora.

Next: This president vacationed at a mansion in Palm Beach.

5. John F. Kennedy

35th president of the United States

Favorite Florida destination: Palm Beach

The Sun-Sentinel notes that John F. Kennedy and his family loved to vacation at a historic mansion on North Ocean Boulevard in Palm Beach. He made some history-altering decisions while vacationing in Florida. Kennedy reportedly strategized as to how the United States should deal with the Soviet nuclear threat while he kicked back in Palm Beach.

Additionally, Kennedy carries the dubious distinction of being one of two presidents almost assassinated in Florida. Shortly after he was elected, Kennedy was walking around Palm Beach with his wife and children. A man driving a Buick  and carrying 10 sticks of dynamite  began to follow them. He planned to blow up the car and kill the president-elect, but decided not to do it when he saw Mrs. Kennedy and the children.

Next: This president loved trips to Key Biscayne.

6. Richard Nixon

37th president of the United States

Favorite Florida destination: Key Biscayne

The Sun-Sentinel reports that, as a native Californian, Richard Nixon was right at home vacationing in Florida. He reportedly loved the warmth and ambiance. Nixon dined at Joes Stone Crabs and drank at local taverns. Before he won the 1968 election, Nixon purchased a home on Key Biscayne. And he visited it frequently while in office. (Nixon was also criticized for using $400,000 in federal funds to build a helicopter pad near his winter White House.)

Nixon reportedly preferred not to conduct presidential business in Key Biscayne. But he still changed history while vacationing in Florida. The publication reports that Nixon and his advisors reportedly hatched the Watergate scheme while staying in Key Biscayne. As the resulting scandal escalated, Nixon spent more and more time in Florida.

Next: This president has taken many vacations to the Florida Keys.

7. Jimmy Carter

39th president of the United States

Favorite Florida destination: The Keys

The Sun-Sentinel reports that Jimmy Carter numbers among the presidents who have spent time at Trumans Little White House. And while Carter tended to vacation in his home state of Georgia during his presidency, he has made a tradition of vacationing in Florida in recent years.

In 1996, the Carters had a New Years Eve dinner at Trumans Little White House in Key West. They returned to Key West for a visit in December 2007, during a cruise stopover. During a 2010 vacation to the Florida Keys, Carter and his wife participated in the release of a loggerhead turtle into the Atlantic Ocean. The Carters also interacted with dolphins in the Keys. In 2011, Carter went fishing in the Keys. And on a family vacation in the area in 2017, Carter helped with another sea turtle release.

Next: This president loves Islamorada.

8. George H.W. Bush

41st president of the United States

Favorite Florida destination: Islamorada

The Sun-Sentinel reports that George H.W. Bush has quite a long history with the state of Florida. During World War II, an 18-year-old Bush learned how to fly torpedo bombers at the Naval Air Station in Fort Lauderdale. He became the youngest Naval aviator of that time.

And later, in the 1970s, Bush made many visits to the Cheeca Lodge on Islamorada in the Florida Keys. There, he did a lot of bone fishing. And after he had concluded his term as 41st president, Bush cofounded the George Bush Cheeca Lodge Bonefish Tournament to raise money for charity.

Next: Donald Trump takes plenty of vacations to Florida, too.

9. Donald Trump

45th president of the United States

Favorite Florida destination: Palm Beach

Most Americans know that Donald Trump was a part-time resident of Palm Beach, Florida, when he was elected president. And he continues to spend a lot of time at Mar-a-Lago, his resort in the coastal, South Florida town. Vanity Fair reports that the Palm Beach estate was built by breakfast-cereal heiress Marjorie Merriweather Post in the 1920s.

Before her death in 1972, Post left Mar-a-Lago to the U.S. government as a presidential retreat. Carters administration, looking at the tax burden and maintenance costs, gave it back to the Post Foundation in 1981. The foundation wanted to sell it for $20 million, but eventually sold it to Trump for less than $8 million, when he bought the beachfront lot in front of the resort and threatened to block the view.

Read more: 11 Favorite Vacation Spots of Trump, Obama, and Other U.S. Presidents

Check out The Cheat Sheet on Facebook!Kering also under investigation in Switzerland

Switzerland

Switzerlands Attorney General Office (AGO) is reported to have opened criminal proceedings involving the luxury conglomerates Gucci division.

The Swiss probe is said to be in connection with the recent Italian investigation regarding an alleged tax evasion by the Gucci brand, and not directly related to Kerings distribution platform in the country, Luxury Goods International (LGI). The Swiss AGO confirmed to local media that it has received and executed a request for mutual legal assistance from the Milan Public Prosecutor's Office in Italy.

According to Italian media La Stampa, the Italian justice alleges Gucci of having declared in Switzerland activities carried out in Italy over several years, hence, saving an estimated 1.3 billion in Italian tax. Read more here.

As reported by ILM, the French authorities are also investigating an alleged tax evasion carried out by Kering between 2002 and 2017. The judges are said to be particularly interested in investigating the conglomerates LGI logistics platform located in Cadempino, Switzerland.

Source: Le MatinThe Church of England is trying to keep up with digital innovations as it rolls out payment terminals at over 16,000 sites to accept cashless or contactless donations.

The state church originally tested the terminals at 40 Anglican institutions for more than six months and announced on Tuesday that it will soon extend the service to its other religious establishments as it aims to make donations convenient and faster. Members of the church could also donate via text messaging services, Apple Pay and Google Pay with this digital improvement. The contactless payment system will also apply for church fees and bookings during christenings, weddings and other events.

"How we pay for things is changing fast, especially for younger church-goers who no longer carry cash," stewardship officer John Preston said. "We want all generations to be able to make the most of their place of worship," he added.

Contactless and cardless payment systems became the preferred mode of payment for half of the British population in 2016. Since then, the Church of England has been exploring ways to take advantage of modern technology and tapped the mobile point-of-sale companies SumUp and iZettle as its partners.

While there are virtual terminals at the church sites, a staff member will be manning the transactions or helping parishioners input their donations. The Church of England collects an estimated $810 million (580 million) yearly for donations. Parishioners said they welcome the innovation since digital transactions can be properly traced and accounted for.

Meanwhile, even the Catholic Church in the U.K. might shift to contactless donations as well, as Britain adapts to a cashless society. Some sites have started accepting donations via credit card, debit card or mobile phones using specific codes.

"Now as we move into more of a cashless society, we want to make it easier for parishioners as well as visitors," a spokesperson from the Diocese of Westminster said, according to Tablet. "The diocese is considering contactless collections as one of a number of possible options for the future," the spokesperson also mentioned.Topher Grace, who starred in the television program "That '70s Show," has nabbed the role of Pastor John Noble in the faith-based drama "The Impossible." The drama is based on the 2017 memoir that Joyce Smith wrote, titled "The Impossible: The Miraculous Story of a Mother's Faith and Her Child's Resurrection."

The movie follows John Smith, a 14-year-old boy from Missouri, who was pronounced dead at the hospital after falling into a frozen lake. His mother Joyce, played by Chrissy Metz ("This Is Us"), fervently prayed at the ER and the teenager's heart started beating again.

Grace's Pastor John will help the family through this whole ordeal that also rattled the whole community. Also starring in the movie are Mike Colter ("Luke Cage"), Isaac Kragten ("Odd Squad") and Marcel Ruiz ("Snowfall").

On Jan. 19, 2015, John submerged into a frozen lake for at least 15 minutes before paramedics rescued and pulled him out. Doctors at St. Joseph West Hospital gave up on the boy after nearly an hour of CPR and asked his mother to come in to say her last goodbyes.

"At 43 minutes, I was not hopeful at all that he would come back," Dr. Kent Sutterer told reporters. "I was anticipating explaining to his mom that efforts were futile from this point forward," he went on to say.

Joyce, however, prayed loudly for her son's life and doctors were shocked to find that John's heart was beating again. The boy, however, was not yet in the clear, and doctors thought he would still expire in a matter of hours. Sutterer said he did not know of anyone surviving past 25 minutes without any pulse.

Pastor John, along with five other pastors from the First Assembly Church, visited the family at the hospital and prayed over the boy. The pastor revealed that he had visions of angels tending over the teenager while they were praying. He believed it was God at work, rewiring John's brain so that he would recover completely.

The boy woke up on the third day after his accident. Today, the teenager has no memory of the accident and has not incurred any lifelong damages to his body.

Meanwhile, "The Impossible" has started filming, but Fox 2000 has not yet announced its theater date.Photo : Makset Djabbarbergenov with his wife, Aigul, and three sons in 2010. The family now has four boys, and is expecting a fifth child (Open Doors News)

A former Uzbek house church pastor is in prison in Kazakhstan, awaiting a ruling whether he will be returned to his native country, Open Doors News reports. Meanwhile, Kazakhstans Supreme Court considers whether to declare him a refugee in the face of almost-certain persecution. Makset Djabbarbergenov was arrested Sept. 5 in Almaty, Kazakhstans financial center. He was detained by authorities who have frowned on his leadership in unregistered Christian communities. Djabbarbergenov was at one point an active church leader in Nukus, the capital of Karakalpakstan, the autonomous republic of Uzbekistan. At present, Protestant churches in Karakalpakstan are illegal. After appearing before court six different times, Djabbarbergenov and his family fled to Kazakhstan in 2007, where they are considered refugees by the United Nations, although the Kazakh government disagrees. Uzbekistan now wants him back to face charges that he practiced religion outside state regulation. He faces two charges; each carry a maximum penalty of three years in prison. Uzbekistan is ranked No. 7 on the World Watch List of the 50 countries where it is most difficult to be a Christian.home US Andy Savage steps down as pastor of Highpoint Church following investigation

Highpoint Church has announced on Tuesday that Andy Savage has resigned from his post as a teaching pastor following an investigation into his sexual assault of a teenage girl in Texas 20 years ago.

In a statement, the Memphis megachurch noted that the investigation found no other instances of abuse, but the "leadership team at Highpoint Church agrees that Andy's resignation is appropriate."

Savage drew national headlines in January when he got a standing ovation from the congregation after confessing to a "sexual incident" with a teenager in his former youth group.

The victim, Jules Woodson, was 17 at the time, while Savage was 22 and was serving as the youth minister at Woodlands Parkway Baptist Church near Houston, now known as Stonebridge Church.

The incident was first brought to light after Woodson shared the story ion the Wartburg Watch website. In the blog, Woodson recounted that Savage had taken her to a secluded area when he was supposed to be driving her home from church. She narrated that Savage asked her to perform oral sex before changing his mind later and telling her not to say anything.

In a radio interview shortly after the blog was publishes, Savage said that he remembered the encounter as a spontaneous and consensual situation.

Apart from the statement from the church, Savage also posted a personal letter on the church website on Tuesday. The pastor stated in the letter that the opinions expressed over the past two-plus months have helped him "gain perspective that I simply could not have achieved on my own. I have come to understand Jules' vantage point better, and to appreciate the courage it took for her to speak up."

"While Jules cried out for justice, I carelessly turned the topic to my own story of moral change, as if getting my own life in order should help to make up for what she went through and continues to go through," he said, as reported by Commercial Appeal.

Woodson issued a statement on Wednesday, saying Savage's decision to resign from Highpoint was an important step toward solving a systematic problem in churches. She said that the conversation must not end there and that the resignation should serve as a "wake-up call for everyone."

"There is a systemic problem within the institution of the church that props people up in places of power and gives them immunity based on cheap grace and a call for forgiveness," she added.

Last month, Larry Cotton, the pastor to whom Woodson reported the sexual assault, resigned from his post at an Austin, Texas church following an investigation similar to the one conducted at Highpoint.

Cotton had been on staff at Woodlands at the time of the abuse but did not report the crime to the authorities. He said that he had come to understand the "weight of my mistakes."home US College guideline lists 'God bless you,' 'Merry Christmas' as 'microaggression'

A new social justice guideline released by a women's college in Boston has listed "Merry Christmas" and "God bless you" as forms of "microaggression."

The document, prepared by librarians at Simmons College, lists six "anti-oppression" categories a "anti-racism," "anti-transmisia," "anti-ableism," "anti-Islamomisia," "anti-sanism" and "anti-queermisia" a with which students should be familiar.

Under "anti-Islamomisia," students are warned that saying "God bless you" after someone sneezes is microaggression against Muslims.

The document argued that wishing someone "Merry Christmas" is also a microaggression because it "conveys one's perception that everyone is Christian or believes in God."

Other microaggressions under the section include "endorsing religious stereotypes," viewing hijabs as trendy or fashionable and suggesting that Muslims follow the wrong religion.

The authors also asserted that Christians suffer from "Christian fragility" and may become angry, hostile or defensive when discussing religion. They surmised that this occurs because Christians do not have the "skills for constructive engagement with [religious] difference" as they are the dominant religious group.

They also contended that Christians benefit from "Christian privilege" because they can expect to have some free time off work during religious holidays.

The guide explains that it is intended for providing some general information about "anti-oppression, diversity, and inclusion" as well as information about available resources about key social justice issues in the community.

According to The College Fix, the guide includes hyperlinks to more than 100 resources, such as articles and videos.

The guide stressed that it avoids using the suffix "phobia," and has replaced it with the term "misia" because the term "phobia" is offensive to those suffering from a phobia or mental health disorder.

"Misia (pronounced 'miz-eeya') comes from the Greek word for hate or hatred, so similar to how Islamophobia means 'fear of Islam,' the more accurate Islamomisia means 'hatred of Islam,'" the document explained.

Under the "transmisia" tab, students are warned against using incorrect gender pronouns or "misgendering" their classmates.

The authors maintained that attaching the prefix "micro" to the noun "aggression" does not minimalize or otherwise evaluate the impact or "seriousness of the aggressions."

"The prefix 'micro' is used because these are invocations of racial hierarchy at the individual level (person to person), where as the 'macro' level refers to aggressions committed by structures as a whole (e.g. an organizational policy)," it stated.

Simmons College Library Deputy Director Jason Wood noted that the guide was created as a collaborative effort that included all of the librarians at the university. But a school spokesperson has stated that the document published by the librarians is not an official policy of the university.home World Former Irish Prime Minister urge voters to protect unborn's right to life

Former Irish Prime Minister John Bruton has urged voters to reject the repeal of the Eighth Amendment, which enshrines the equal right to life on the unborn child and the mother.

Ireland is expected to vote on a referendum in May to determine whether to retain or repeal the Eighth Amendment, which effectively prohibits abortion in all cases.

The referendum will ask voters if they are in favor of abortions without restriction up to 12 weeks into pregnancy, and afterward when there is a risk to the mother.

Bruton, who served as prime minister from 1994 to 1997, has spoken strongly against the repeal and said that Ireland should be "proud" of having protection for the unborn in its constitution.

The former prime minister has contended that babies in the womb can already "feel and are already developing their strength."

"To arbitrarily say that, after whatever number of weeks, it's okay to suppress that life is just not in accordance with the values of charity towards the weak in our communities that have exemplified the Irish over the last many centuries," Bruton said, as reported by Irish Times.

"It's true that we are probably one of the few countries in the world that has, in our constitution, an express recognition of the right to life of the unborn child, but that's something we should be proud of," he added.

Bruton had previously led the Fine Gael party which is now pushing for liberalization of the country's abortion laws.

He confirmed that he will not be voting for the repeal, but declined to offer a prediction of how the referendum will go.

The former prime minister further cautioned that people will not stop buying abortion pills online if abortion is legalized.

While pro-abortion advocates are claiming that legalizing abortion could reduce the number of women ordering abortion pills over the internet, Bruton does not believe it will make a difference.

"People ordering those pills over the internet, that's a problem in Britain as well and hasn't been cured by having fairly liberal abortion law, so I think that remains a problem," he said.

Meanwhile, Health Products Regulatory Authority (HPRA) has said that abortion drugs will not be readily available for several months in the event that the amendment is repealed and abortions up to 12 weeks of pregnancy become legal.

The organization noted that doctors will be unable to provide the pills except in rare circumstances because they will have no license.

On Sunday, Prime Minister Leo Varadkar announced that any post-referendum abortion law will not be debated until the autumn, which means that abortion pills are unlikely to be available until at least summer 2019.home US Judge bans 5 pro-life advocates from picketing abortion clinics

A judge has banned five pro-life advocates from protesting outside abortion clinics in Michigan after they were convicted of trespassing and obstructing a police officer.

Pro-life advocates Monica Migliorino Miller of South Lyon, Robert Kovaly of Hastings, Patrice Woodworth of Minnesota, Will Goodman of Wisconsin and Matthew Connolly of Illinois were sentenced to 12 months of probation on Wednesday for entering the Women's Center on Orchard Lake Road on Dec. 2, 2017 and distributing red roses to pregnant women and urging them not to have an abortion.

Apart from the probation, Bloomfield Township's 48th District Judge Marc Barron also sentenced the five pro-life activists to eight days of community service, more than $1,000 in fines each, and ordered them to stay 500 feet from any abortion clinic in the U.S, Life Site News reported.

The activists, who are part of a movement called Red Rose Rescue, will also be forbidden from associating with or communicating with each other for a year, and they cannot associate with anyone who is "engaged in breaking the law."

The judge has given Miller 30 days to pay the fine, but she has reportedly told him she refuses to do so.

"I'll (agree to) go see a probation officer, but I'm not paying a fine, and I'm not gonna do community service. I am not guilty of a crime," she said.

"Even in the heyday of the Rescue movement, we never saw anything like this, really. I can only come to the conclusion that the judge is in favor of legalized abortion, that he saw that the Red Rose Rescue was a threat to the practice of abortion. Otherwise, we would have had a lenient sentence. ... I don't think any of us expected the harshness of this sentence," she continued.

Miller, a theology professor at Madonna University, has previously been convicted five times for similar activities. She told the judge that their trial last month was "sanitized," where any mention of abortion or pro-life views were prohibited.

During the trial, Barron reportedly agreed to the prosecutor's request to never refer to the Women's Center as an abortion clinic.

Goodman, Woodworth and Connolly also had prior convictions for similar offenses. Kovaly, who did not have a prior conviction, received a lighter sentence of six months probation, community service and courts costs and fines. He is required to stay away from the Women's Center and those who work there, but there are no other restrictions regarding abortion clinics.

Defense attorney Robert Muise, who's representing the five, said that plans are already underway to appeal the convictions and sentences.home US Judge blocks Mississippi's 15-week abortion ban a day after governor signs it into law

A judge has temporarily blocked a new Mississippi law that would have been the earliest ban on abortions in the nation, just a day after it was signed into law by Gov. Phil Bryant.

The law, which bans abortions after 15 weeks' gestation, was supposed to take effect immediately after it was signed by Bryant on Monday. But the state's only abortion clinic, Jackson Women's Health Organization, quickly challenged the law in court, saying it is unconstitutional because it bans abortions weeks before a fetus can survive outside the womb.

On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves granted the clinic's request for a temporary restraining order that would prevent the law from taking effect as the lawsuit moves forward.

While several states have banned abortions at 20 weeks, Mississippi was the first state to ban the procedure at 15 weeks.

Reeves stressed that the "ultimate question" was whether abortions can be banned by the state before viability of the fetus.

"Does the state have the right to trump the woman's right to have control over her decisions, over her body?" he said.

Paul Barnes, a special assistant state attorney general, contended that the law serves Mississippi's "interest in protecting maternal health and the state's interest in protecting unborn life." He argued that medical advances and legal decision continue to define viability earlier, noting that it used to be around 28 weeks in 1973, but it has been defined as being 23 or 24 weeks in more recent court cases.

Reeves pointed out in his order that the Mississippi law "places viability at 15 weeks a about two months earlier than where the medical consensus places it."

According to Fox News, the judge did not rule from the bench but granted the temporary restraining order about an hour later, noting that the clinic's lawyers have said that a woman who was at least 15 weeks pregnant was scheduled to have an abortion Tuesday afternoon.

One of the lawyers, Rob McDuff, noted that the woman's next available appointment would be March 28 because physicians travel out of state to work there. He went on to say that the clinic does not perform abortions after 16 weeks of pregnancy, and the woman's next appointment would put her beyond that limit. The lawsuit noted that 78 abortions were performed at the clinic in 2017 at 15 weeks or older.

The Mississippi law does not contain exceptions for rape and incest, but it includes exceptions in cases when a fetus has health problems, making it "incompatible with life" outside of the womb at full term, or if the pregnant woman's life or a "major bodily function" is threatened by the pregnancy.home World Polish archbishop castigates priest for wishing for pope's death

A Polish archbishop has chastised a priest for praying for the quick death of Pope Francis in his homily last month in an apparent expression of his disagreement with the pontiff's views on immigration, divorce and Islam.

Fr. Edward Staniek, a noted theologian and former rector of the Higher Theological Seminary of the Archdiocese of Krakow, said in his Feb. 25 homily that he was praying for "wisdom for the Pope, for his heart to open to the Holy Spirit, and if he does not, I pray for his quick passage to the Father's House."

The priest went on to accuse Francis of misrepresenting the idea of Christian mercy, particularly when it comes to the ongoing refugee crisis.

"In the name of mercy, he calls parishes and dioceses to open the door for the followers of Islam. As a religion, they are hostile to the Gospel and the Church. They murdered millions in religious wars. And we Poles, remembering the victory over their armies near Vienna, understand better than others that there is no way to talk about dialogue with them," Staniek said, as reported by Catholic Herald.

He also criticized the pope's teaching regarding Communion for divorced and remarried Catholics, saying it was too vague and was being misinterpreted by the media. He ended his homily calling on the pontiff to "listen to Jesus, just as His Father on Mount Tabor recommended us."

Archbishop Marek JAdraszewski, who serves as Vice President of the Polish Bishops' Conference, issued a strong rebuke against Staniek and said that he had also discussed his concerns with the priest in a face-to-face meeting.

"It is with great pain and regret that I learnt of the recent remarks made by Father Edward Staniek about Pope Francis," said JAdraszewski.

The archbishop stressed that the Church in Krakow "prays" fervently for the intentions of the pontiff, asking God to give him the grace necessary for him to fulfill his duties.

Pope Francis has drawn some backlash in recent years over Amoris Laetitia, his exhortation on marriage and the family.

The document, published in 2016, has been blamed for leading dioceses around the world to open Holy Communion for divorced and civilly remarried Catholics in certain situations.

Since its release, bishops and bishops' groups in Argentina, Malta, Germany and Belgium have issued pastoral instructions that allowed divorced and civilly remarried Catholics to receive the Eucharist, in defiance of longstanding Church teaching and practice.

In January, as many as 54,000 Poles have petitioned their bishops to defend the indissolubility of marriage and prohibit divorced and civilly remarried Catholics from receiving Communion.home World Richard Dawkins' 'The God Delusion' to be made available for free in Islamic countries following surge in illegal downloads

Richard Dawkins has expressed plans to make his bestselling book, "The God Delusion," available for free in Islamic countries due to the surge of illegal downloads of the book in Middle Eastern countries.

The famed atheist has said that he was "greatly encouraged" to learn that there had been 13 million downloads of the unofficial Arabic .pdf version of the book. He is now translating several of his books, including "The God Delusion," into Arabic, Urdu, Farsi and Indonesian in response to what he called the "stirring towards atheism" in Islamic countries.

"We are choosing languages, not countries," Dawkins said, according to The Guardian. "The pdfs may, of course, be downloaded by anybody in any country, but we imagine most Urdu downloads will be in Pakistan, most Indonesian downloads in Indonesia and Malaysia, and most Farsi downloads in Iran," he added.

"The God Delusion," which has sold 3.3 million copies worldwide, argues that a supernatural creator almost certainly does not exist and that a belief in a personal god should qualify as a delusion. The atheist author also contended in the book that religion is not a requirement for living a meaningful life.

While Dawkins is known for being a critic of all religions, he has been especially vocal in his criticism of Islam, calling it "the most evil religion in the world."

"[O]f course that doesn't mean all Muslims are evil, very far from it. Individual Muslims suffer more from Islam than anyone else," the author explained.

In 2017, Dawkins called out California radio station KPFA Radio in Berkeley after it canceled an event with him due to his remarks against Islam. He noted that he is also known to be a frequent critic of Christianity but he has never been "de-platformed" for that. "Why do you give Islam a free pass? Why is it fine to criticise Christianity but not Islam?" he asked.

Dawkins noted that the Washington DC-based Center for Inquiry (CFI), which recently merged with the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, had decided on a "more systematic programme" of translating his work in ebook form.

The first book that will be translated would be Dawkins' shortest book "River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life," which focuses on evolution. The CFI will no longer work on books that already have legitimately published translations. The organization is hoping that the new versions will be made available on its website by the end of the year.home US University nixes 'trigger warning' for pro-life speech to settle lawsuit with student group

A university in Ohio has agreed to remove the requirement for "trigger warnings" for pro-life speech on campus as part of the settlement of a lawsuit filed by Students for Life America (SFLA).

Miami University of Ohio had agreed to a settlement following a legal battle that stemmed from the school's decision to require its Students for Life chapter to post "trigger warnings" for pro-life displays. A school official argued that such warnings were required because displays opposing abortion might cause "emotional trauma" to people who might view them.

The displays in question were 300 crosses planted in the ground, with each representing 1,000 babies aborted by Planned Parenthood. In 2016, doctors working with the organization had reportedly aborted 328,348 babies.

Students for File filed a lawsuit against the school with the help of nonprofit legal organization Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) in November. The lawsuit raised objections to the university's policies that give officials broad powers over an exhibit's presentation and content.

At the time of the suit, the school officials indicated that the peaceful display of crosses would only be allowed if warning signs were placed around campus. However, no other student organization was told to comply with a similar requirement.

As part of the settlement, the university disavowed its warning sign requirement and revised a second policy to guarantee that other groups will not face similar mistreatment.

A third policy was also revised to prevent officials from stifling free speech simply because it could "cause alarm, annoyance or nuisance," The Daily Caller reported.

Following the news of the rollback of the requirements, SFLA President Kristan Hawkins commended the ADF and the students for working to secure free speech rights on the campus.

"This is a victory for the free speech rights of students, who should not be told that their support of mothers and their preborn children is some kind of shameful act that should be apologized for or vilified as harmful," Hawkins said in a statement to The Christian Post.

"We appreciate the work of Alliance Defending Freedom, and especially love the commitment of our student leaders who courageously advocate for life, no matter the obstacles," she added.

ADF Legal Counsel Travis Barham commended the university for "quickly recognizing that its officials do not have the authority to censor student speech simply because of how someone might respond to it,"

"By revising its policies to respect students' constitutionally protected rights, the university has fostered the marketplace of ideas that public universities are supposed to be," Barham said, contending that the only permission slip needed by students to speak on campus was the First Amendment.home World Vatican admits altering photo of Benedict's comments on Francis

A Vatican office has admitted that it had altered a photo of a letter written by Pope emeritus Benedict XVI regarding Pope Francis' theological background.

The letter was written on Feb. 7, but the photo was only released on Monday, marking Francis' five-year anniversary as pope.

The Associated Press reported that the alteration had changed the meaning of the letter. In the legible part of the document, Benedict spoke about the "interior unity" between his papacy and his successor, Pope Francis, and described the assertions that the two popes were theologically opposed as "foolish prejudice."

Sections of the letter were reportedly featured at a Vatican news conference on Monday to promote "The Theology of Pope Francis," a series of 11 books written by 11 different authors.

"I applaud this initiative which is intended to oppose and react to the foolish prejudice according to which Pope Francis would be only a practical man devoid of particular theological or philosophical formation, while I would be solely a theoretician of theology who could understand little of the concrete life of a Christian today," Benedict wrote, as reported by Catholic News Agency.

On Thursday, the Vatican admitted that it blurred the two final lines of the page where Benedict explained that the could not comply with the request to contribute to a theological assessment of Francis because he has not read the books.

"Nonetheless, I do not feel that I can write a brief and dense theological page about them because for my whole life it has always been clear that I would write and express myself only on books that I had also truly read," Benedict wrote.

Benedict explained that he felt that he would not be able to read the 11 volumes in the near future due to "physical reasons" and because of his other obligations.

The portion that was blurred out was reportedly read during the Vatican news conference by the prefect of the Secretariat for Communications, Monsignor Dario ViganA. The full letter was published on March 13 by Italian journalist Sandro Magister in his column.

The Vatican has not explained why the picture of the letter was altered but told the Associated Press that it was never intended for full publication.

Vigano, who has been prefect of the Secretariat for Communications since the office was established in 2015, has brought all Vatican media under one entity in an effort to reduce cost and improve efficiency as part of Francis' reforms.

In its message to the church's World Day of Social Communications, the office denounced "fake news" as evil and urged media to seek the truth.Android 8.0 Oreo release date, news: Latest OS update to arrive on Samsung Galaxy Tab S3 soon after recent Wi-Fi certification

Google launched the Android 8.0 Oreo update last year, but the latest Android operating system (OS) has yet to roll out in every device that supports this version. According to the latest reports, however, the Android update is expected to be available in Samsung's premium gadgets very soon, specifically the Galaxy Tab S3. This is due to the leaked Wi-Fi certification of the tablet running the Oreo OS.

It was tipped that the Samsung Galaxy Tab S3 is the next device to receive the Android 8.0 Oreo update this year. This is following the recent test certification given by the Wi-Fi Alliance on the said tablet, and it was indicated that the test was performed while the Galaxy Tab S3 was running the latest Android OS build. The Wi-Fi regulatory agency has specifically certified a Galaxy Tab S3 LTE variant with model number SM-T825C, which means that the device is located within China or Hong Kong. Still, this is a good sign that the Android 8.0 Oreo update will continue to roll out in all Samsung Galaxy Tab S3 variants, including the Wi-Fi only device with model number SM-T820.

Even before the Wi-Fi Alliance's certification, the Android 8.0 Oreo's release in Samsung Galaxy Tab S3 in the coming days or weeks is already anticipated as the OS update has already been dropped in Samsung's 2017 smartphone flagships, the Galaxy S9 and S9 Plus. Earlier this week, the Android Oreo version is reportedly rolling in selected Samsung Galaxy Note 8 units in France. However, Samsung has yet to confirm an exact release date of Oreo's arrival in Galaxy Tab S3.

The Samsung Galaxy Tab S3 was launched in February 2017 with the Android 7.0 Nougat version. The changes in performance and user interface after the Android Oreo update are still uncertain, although the users can expect improved multitasking features and stability. It is also worth noting that the Galaxy Tab S3 successor, the Tab S4, is expected to run the Android 8.0 Oreo out of the box upon its launch this year.As Palm Sunday approaches, Egyptian Christians still face a deadly enemy one year after church bombings

This coming Palm Sunday has an even more poignant meaning than usual for Egypt's Coptic Christians who make up some 10 per cent of the country's Muslim-majority population.

For it recalls the horrific church bombings on April 9, 2017, which killed at least 45 people and injured more than a hundred.

Twin suicide bombings, claimed by Islamic State, took place at St George's Church in the northern Egyptian city of Tanta on the Nile Delta, and at St Mark's Coptic Orthodox Cathedral in Alexandria, which is the seat of the Coptic papacy (Pope Tawadros II, the leader of the Coptic Orthodox Church, was inside St Mark's Church but was not harmed).

Security will be especially tight around the Palm Sunday church services, with the added tension that they take place immediately after presidential elections which begin on Monday 26 and last for three days. The contest is between the incumbent president Abdel Fattah al Sisi and the little known El Ghad party chair, Moussa Mostafa Moussa.

It was Sisi who, the day after the attacks, formally decreed a three-month state of emergency. This, approved unanimously by the country's parliament on April 11, gave the armed forces responsibility for preserving security throughout the country and protecting private and public property.

Egypt's emergency law, which dates back to 1958, gives the authorities sweeping powers to arrest, detain, try, and sentence suspects with almost no judicial review. It was last used in June 2012, when the government allowed it to expire more than a year after a nation-wide uprising as part of the so-called 'Arab Spring' swept up the long-time former leader Hosni Mubarak.

Though in response to the attacks on Christians, the latest crackdown has not benefited the Coptic population, who groups such as Human Rights Watch (HRW) say face widespread legal and social discrimination and are routinely denied high-level government and security services jobs.

As HRW has said: 'They [Coptic Christians] have been the victims of increasing sectarian attacks since the 2011 uprising, particularly since July 2013, when the military removed Mohamed Morsy, Egypt's first freely elected president.'

And HRW continues to document how interior ministry officials and prosecutors fail to conduct proper investigations or prosecutions into sectarian attacks on Coptic Christians.

The immediate background to the twin attacks is that, in February 2017, ISIS called for attacks on Christians, and during the Sinai insurgency, hundreds of Christians fled their homes in the North Sinai.

Sisi had recently returned from a trip to the US to visit President Donald Trump, in which the two leaders underlined their joint resolve against ISIS.

In the event, security was not as tight as it could have been at the churches. In Tanta, a man wearing concealed explosives managed to pass through a security checkpoint outside St George's Church and detonate himself near the front pews, killing at least 28 people and wounding 77.

In Alexandria, footage from a church security camera showed another bomber trying to enter St Mark's through an open gate and being directed toward a metal detector which was guarded by police officers. Stopped by an officer, the man then detonated his explosives, killing at least 17 people and wounding 48.

This Palm Sunday, which falls on the West's Easter  April 1  Christians will be hoping that such atrocities will not strike in the same place two years in a row.

But they face a fierce enemy still.

According to the New York Times, 'The Islamic State...most likely ordered it precisely to provoke such questioning in the most painful way possible. The goals were to fan the sectarian discord between Christians and Muslims in Egypt and the world, to undercut Mr Sisi's pledges to resist Islamist terror and defend the Christian minority, and to spread fear throughout Egypt on the eve of a papal visit.'

This is doubtless correct, but another, simpler motive should also not be ruled out: fundamental, and deadly, opposition to Christians for being Christians.Don't fear tattoos, Pope Francis tells young people

Pope Francis gave his blessing to the use of tattoos, telling an audience of young people not to fear them but to see tattoos as an opportunity for community and dialogue.

The pontiff was addressing a pre-Synodal meeting of young people at the Vatican, according to Vatican News. There a Ukranian seminarian asked how priests-in-training might 'respond to the complexities of present day culture  like tatoos for instance?'

'Do not be scared of tattoos,' the Pope responded, as reported by ChurchPOP. 'The Eritreans for years made the cross here [indicating the forehead]. Also today we see them. The cross was tattooed. Yes, they are exaggerations, but today I see some.'

He added: 'Tattoos often signify membership in a community. You, young man, that you're tattooed like that, what are you looking for? In this tattoo, which community membership are you expressing?

'It's important not to be scared. With young people one should never be scared! Never! Because always, even behind the things that are not so good, there is something that will bring us to some truth.'

Speaking more broadly about the challenges of priesthood, he warned against the damage that 'gossip' could do to the bond between a priest and his community.

But he also condemned clericalism  undue power granted to religious authorities  which he called 'one of the worst illnesses of the Church'.

Clericalism, he said, confuses the 'paternal role of the priest' with the 'managerial role of the boss'  the priest should fundamentally be a 'witness to Christ'.Has the prospect of Pope Francis visiting Northern Ireland fallen victim to Brexit?

Yesterday's confirmation by Pope Francis that he will visit Ireland on August 25 and 26 presents the prospect of a fascinating trip to a changing country that remains, in a very deep way, culturally Catholic but is no longer wedded to the conservative social approach associated with the Church.

As has been noted widely, the visit will come only three months after the forthcoming referendum on abortion in May, in which, according to current predictions, a majority will defy the Catholic Church and vote in favour of repealing the eighth amendment and allowing unrestricted abortion up to the 12th week of pregnancy.

In January, a poll found that 56 per cent would back liberalisation of the law, with 29 per cent against and 15 per cent undecided or unwilling to say. Among those aged 18 to 24, support for change was at 74 per cent, compared with 36 per cent among over-65s.

If these projections ring true, this will not be the first time that the Irish public has gone against the strong advice of the Church on a major social issue: In May 2015, 62 per cent voted to legalise same-sex marriage.

Then there is the sheer spectacle of the first papal visit to the country since the trip by John Paul II in 1979. Whatever disputes the mainstream majority may have with the Church  not to mention over its reputation when it comes to abuse  that there will be a massive display of love for Pope Francis is not in doubt.

For there is something about this pope, unlike, perhaps, his apparently more conservative predecessor Benedict XVI, that may appeal to the more liberal minded young Irish man and woman. It is of course a myth that Francis is changing doctrine on any major issue  yes, including communion for the divorced and remarried  but he is gifted with the kind of popular touch that is likely to go down a treat in Ireland.

He is also likely to make several gestures that will further endear him to the people. Dublin's Archbishop Diarmuid Martin has said the pope 'will want particularly to meet with the poor'.

Martin is president and host of the international World Meeting of Families, which takes place from August 21 to 26, at which the pope will preside at the concluding mass, most likely to be held in Croke Park on Sunday, August 26.

'He is coming for the World Meeting of Families, that is his primary purpose. He will focus on the many difficulties and challenges families have to face,' Martin has said.

'He doesn't want big shows, he wants to be just present with those who are marginalised,' Martin added.

But there is speculation that Francis may visit a prison, as is his wont in Italy, and any encounters with the 'marginalised' are likely to be electric.

However, there is one surprise  a major gesture that many have wished for  that appears to be off the agenda.

Many in the region and elsewhere had hoped that the pope would visit Northern Ireland, deemed too sensitive back in 1979 when John Paul II came. But there was no mention of the North in the official announcement of the trip yesterday.

And this appears to be thanks, alas, to Brexit, and the dreaded prospect of a return to a 'hard border' between Northern Ireland and the Republic that this brings.

Because the UK government plans to leave the single market and the customs union, and the fact that the EU will seek to police those, it remains difficult to see how a hard border could be avoided. The issue has become key to the tangled Brexit negotiations, with the former prime ministers Sir John Major and Tony Blair issuing strong warnings over the implications for Brexit of the Northern Irish peace process crystalised by the 1998 Good Friday Agreement instigated by Major and sealed by Blair.

As a senior Vatican source with no agenda, no Remain axe to grind, told me of the issue last year, when the trip was being planned: 'It complicates things quite a bit'.

Why? Because the concept of a divided Ireland is anyway controversial, especially among Catholics, and a visit by the pope at a time of political uncertainty and unrest could be seen a an endorsement, however faint, of the concept of that divisive, hard border. Prior to the Brexit vote in 2016, the North and South were making very serious inroads towards peace, and a trip to the former by Francis would have been seen as backing nothing other than peace. Instead, it now would have much more complicated connotations in this most sensitive of former conflict zones.

Therefore, it appears that a potential papal trip to Northern Ireland has been the first major international event that has fallen victim to Brexit.

That aside, the visit will doubtless be fascinating as a spectacle in itself  and as a litmus test as to how a culturally Catholic but ever-changing and liberalising country welcomes the global leader of the Catholic Church.

Follow James Macintyre on Twitter @James_Macintyre'One step forward': Jules Woodson welcomes megachurch pastor Andy Savage's resignation  up to a point

Jules Woodson, the woman who was sexually abused by the Memphis megachurch pastor Andy Savage, has said his resignation on Tuesday is 'one step forward' in a statement in which she remained critical of the church as a whole.

The original incident  what Savage has now called an 'immoral' relationship  took place in 1998, when Savage was a youth pastor at Woodlands Parkway Baptist Church in Houston and Woodson was a 17-year-old high school senior. In an account originally published on the website The Wartburg Watch, Woodson said that Savage sexually assaulted her in his car in a secluded area while driving her home from a church event.

Savage, who controversially received a standing ovation when he spoke about the incident earlier this year, has said he believed that the relationship was consensual. However, he resigned from Highpoint megachurch on Tuesday, saying: 'When Jules cried out for justice, I carelessly turned the topic to my own story of moral change, as if getting my own life in order should help to make up for what she went through and continues to go through. Morality is meant to guard against injustices, not to minimize them, to compensate for them, or to obscure them. I agree with Jules that, of all places, we as the church should be getting this right.

'As I've reflected during my leave of absence, I have come to see that many wrongs occurred in 1998. The first was my inappropriate relationship with Jules, which was not only immoral, but meets the definition of abuse of power since I was her youth pastor; therefore, when our relationship became physical, there could be no claim of mutual consent. Another wrong was the failure to follow due process afterward; Jules deserved, and did not get, a full investigation and proper response 20 years ago.

He added: 'That is why, after much prayer and counsel, I now believe it's appropriate for me to resign from my staff position at Highpoint Church and step away from ministry in order to do everything I can to right the wrongs of the past. Apologies are important, but more is required. I know that stepping down once, or even a second time, still doesn't make things right for Jules. But addressing my own acts of abuse this way acknowledges the importance of confronting abuse in our culture and in the Church at large.'

Yesterday, Woodson responded with a statement, warning of 'contrived' repentance and saying: 'While [Savage's] announcement is a step in the right direction, the conversation must not end here. Instead, this needs to be a wake-up call for everyone. There is a systemic problem within the institution of the church that props people up in places of power and gives them immunity based on cheap grace and a call for forgiveness.

'This has bred a culture ripe for abuse and cover-up. Repentance, accountability and justice should not be contrived.'

She went on: 'Unfortunately, my story is not unique. My hope in speaking out is that this opens up the conversation and empowers others. We, as Christians, should be leading the way in recognising, preventing and handling abuse.

'Genuine repentance is not demonstrated by one decision but by many decisions that, over a period of time and born out of humility, transform the culture of the church. As Jesus demonstrated, the church should be the safest and most affirming community for the vulnerable and the wounded. This announcement [by Savage] is one step forward and I am hopeful there are many more steps to follow.'

In an 'investigation conclusion' statement, the church concluded that Savage's resignation was 'appropriate'. It added: 'Highpoint leadership has come to recognise that it was defensive rather than empathetic in its initial reaction to Ms Jules Woodson's communication concerning the abuse she experienced, and humbly commits to develop a deeper understanding of an appropriate, more compassionate response to victims of abuse.'

A church email to the Highpoint congregation read: 'We as a church are deeply saddened by the suffering experienced by Jules Woodson and all victims of abuse, and we remain committed to understanding how our church should minister to the needs of our community.

'Before employing Andy Savage, the church leadership was informed of his past with Jules Woodson and we understood that it had been thoroughly addressed at the time. We have since learned that this was not the case, and we have accepted Andy's resignation. Our prayers are with Andy, Amanda, and their boys as they enter this new season.'Samsung Galaxy Tab Active 2 news, specs, features: Rugged Android tablet now available in the US

After its launch in European and Pacific regions last year, the Samsung Galaxy Tab Active 2 is set to take over the United States as the rugged tablet is now available in the country. While the device is nothing like the high-end Galaxy Tab S3, the users will not have to worry about carrying the Galaxy Tab Active 2 to their workplace as it is designed to withstand severe impacts.

The first Galaxy Tab Active device was launched back in 2014, and the latest hardware update makes the tablet even more durable and more competent when it comes to professional work. Of course, the design of the Galaxy Tab Active 2 lives up to its rugged, commercial appeal. For one, the tablet's S Pen is made more sturdy and rugged in appearance. The Tab Active 2 also received an IP68 dust and water resistance certification, so the users can be more confident that the device will survive even after being exposed to moisture and powdered debris in a construction site.

The Samsung Galaxy Tab Active 2 is also the perfect on-the-go device, as the tablet has a replaceable battery. Most importantly, the device has a MIL-STD-810 certification, meaning that the Tab Active 2 can withstand excessive pressure, temperature, and vibrations in the workplace. The tablet will remain functioning and intact even after being dropped a number of times. The Tab Active 2's screen panel is also designed to detect the user's hand gestures while wearing gloves.

Outdoor workers are less likely to choose a delicate device like an iPad or the Galaxy Tab S3 as they are also concerned about the tech's durability. Those in the construction business, for example, will need a reliable partner device to do computational work for them, but it also has to be rugged enough to survive a whole day of use.

Other features of the Samsung Galaxy Tab Active 2 include an 8-inch 1,200x800 TFT display, 5-megapixel front camera, 8-megapixel rear shooter, 4,450mAh battery cell, an Exynos 7870 octa-core chipset, plus 3GB of RAM. The tablet is tipped to run the Android 7.0 Nougat OS out of the box. The Tab Active 2 price starts at $420 for the Wi-Fi only variant.Should Christians boycott companies that support anti-Christian policies?

Christians boycotting companies isn't something new. In fact, various groups of Christians in the United States have boycotted big brands like Starbucks, JC Penney, Best Buy, Lowes, Heinz, Levis, McDonalds, Target, Proctor and Gamble, Ford, and Disney. Was it right for them to do that? We're not here to be the ultimate judge of that, but today, let's learn more about our duties as Christians when a company promotes something against our beliefs and how we should act on it.

Boycotting is Never Violent

When a company or business goes against something you believe in, this can hurt and anger you. As a Christian, you don't want to just sit on the sidelines and let the company do what it wants to do. Of course, there's a part of you that wants to do something about it. Generally, Christians will come out and protest against the company, and there's nothing wrong with that. The problem ensues when Christians resort to more aggressive and even violent acts.

Jesus calls everyone to peace, and when a Christian destroys a property, that person becomes a type of civil terrorist. This isn't what God wants a Christan to do, nor is this God's work. Romans 12:17-18 says, "Do not repay anyone evil for evil. Be careful to do what is right in the eyes of everyone. If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone."

Again, there's nothing wrong with speaking your mind, but Christians should be mindful of pursuing our aims in a generally peaceful way.

One more important point to note is that it is not in man's hand to seek vengeance. Romans 12:19 says, "Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God's wrath, for it is written: 'It is mine to avenge; I will repay,' says the Lord."

If you can trust the Lord with everything, you can also trust Him with this.

A Christian's Duty

So, should you continue buying or supporting a company that promotes anti-Christian principles? The obvious answer is a no. 1 Thessalonians 5:22 says, "Abstain from all appearance of evil." This means that you should seriously consider rejecting anything that promotes sin.

Ask yourself, where does your loyalty lie? Isn't it with the Lord? Now ask yourself again, what is your duty as God's steward? First, if you are loyal to God, then you will not let any anti-Christian teaching or promotion slip. As a Christian, you have the duty to speak up and let your voice be heard. This is not a selfish act. Speaking up also means calling the company out for its bad actions that will affect society.

Frankly speaking, anyone can call it what they want  boycotting or just speaking up. The bottom line is it is a Christian's responsibility to let others know that such company's promotion goes against God's principles. And it is also a Christian's responsibility to seriously consider withdrawing any support for that company's actions or business.

In situations like these, you must always bear in mind that you are a child of God. As a child, you must not allow anything that will discredit or attack your father. We do not hide just because we are afraid of conflict. Why should we fear when we have God behind us? Also, choosing how not to support a company will be a matter of personal preference, and should also be something we should pray about and seek guidance from God about. Whether you want to protest publicly or speak out in your own community, we should always remember that as Christians we are representing Christ to this world, and what we do and say, and how we say it can influence the way others will see Jesus through us.

So we must remember to always honor God's teachings in whatever you do, even if it means sacrificing supporting a product that you've come to love for years.Texas shoppers could soon buy a handle of whiskey or vodka at Walmart and other publicly traded big-box retailers if a opposing group doesnt successfully appeal a federal judges ruling.

Under state law, publicly owned retailers like Walmart Stores, Costco Wholesale Corp. and Target Corp. are prohibited from selling liquor  a rule that doesnt apply to privately held retailers.

That could change after U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman in Austin sided with Walmart late Tuesday in a federal lawsuit against the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission, stating in a 50-page ruling that the ban violates the Dormant Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution.

Pitman also ruled against a state law prohibiting some retailers and not others from obtaining more than five permits, citing the constitutions Equal Protection clause.

We applaud Judge Pitmans order striking down Texas laws that have prevented us from fully serving our customers, Walmart spokeswoman Anne Hatfield said in a statement. Walmart filed suit because these laws are unfair and hurt our customers. We are grateful for Judge Pitmans thoughtful opinion, finding that these laws violate the U.S. Constitution.

Shoppers shouldnt expect to immediately see liquor bottles on store shelves in Walmart, Costco and Target. Pitman put a 60-day stay on any implementation of the ruling to allow defendants ample time to appeal.

The Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission is currently reviewing Pitmans ruling with the state Attorney Generals Office to decide whether to appeal, agency spokesman Chris Porter said. Porter declined to comment on the substance of the ruling but said he does not expect the ruling to be implemented until after any appeal process is exhausted.

The Texas Package Stores Association, an organization that represents 2,500 liquor store owners, has vowed to appeal the ruling. The group was allowed to intervene in the case in 2015.

The Texas Legislature put a system in place to ensure safe access to alcoholic beverages in Texas, and that system has worked for over 80 years, Lance Lively said in a statement. We will appeal the trial courts decision and continue to fight for family-owned liquor store owners against the worlds largest corporate entities that seek to inflate their profits by upending sensible state laws that protect both consumers and small businesses.

And consumers wont likely see bottles of Jack Daniels and Jose Cuervo in stores grocery aisles should the ruling survive the appeals process. State law requires retailers like Walmart to sell liquor out of a space separate from its main stores and with its own entrance.

The Tuesday ruling is the latest in a years-long tug-of-war over the states alcohol laws, some of which date back to the Prohibition era.

A series of bills signed by then-Gov. Rick Perry in 2013 allowing independent brewers to sell their beer on-site and brewpubs to boost their maximum beer production, sell off-site through distributors and sell limited amounts directly to retailers led to a boom in the states craft beer industry.

But Perry also signed a bill that year prohibiting independent brewers from selling their distribution rights to distributors. A trio of Texas brewers  Live Oak Brewing in Austin, Peticolas Brewing Co. in Dallas and Revolver Brewing in Granbury  sued the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission in 2014 to overturn the law but are awaiting a ruling in the case from the state Supreme Court.

State lawmakers passed a law last year barring brewers who produce a certain amount of beer from operating an on-site tasting room. Under the same law, brewers are capped at self-distributing 40,000 barrels of beer annually. If they want to exceed that amount, they have to pay a distributor.United Continental Holdings boss expressed regret for the recent in-flight death of a 10-month-old puppy.

We got it wrong last week, chief executive officer Oscar Munoz said in a speech this week to a Chicago business group. We take this deeply seriously.

Munoz acknowledged the shortcomings after a bruising week of public-relations fiascoes involving animals. The puppy died March 12 after a flight attendant had the pet and its crate placed in an overhead bin. In a separate incident, the airline sent a Kansas-bound German shepherd to Japan.

A U.S. senator called Chicago-based Uniteds handling of pets simply inexcusable, saying 18 of 24 animals that died on a major airline last year were in the airlines care. United said this week it is suspending new reservations for pets traveling in the cargo compartment while it completes a review of its program.

The dog blunders occurred almost a year after United drew worldwide scorn when a passenger was dragged off a flight by security officials in Chicago. The airline is learning from its mistakes, Munoz said in his speech.

Ultimately this whole thing is about trust, he said. You have the right to demand the highest level of performance from us.Houston Exponential is narrowing its list of CEO candidates. The winner will be tasked with boosting Houston's appeal to technology investors and innovators.

The nonprofit is having serious conversations with a handful of candidates, said interim CEO Gina Luna. She wouldn't call any finalists, and negotiations are not under way, but she hopes the selection will be in weeks rather than months.

Still, the process will not be rushed.

"It's better to be right than to be fast," Luna said. "What we're looking for is very specific, and so we are finally down to what I think is a good short list."

RELATED: Houston Exponential to harness startup potential

Those specific traits include experience and credibility in technology and innovation. He or she must speak that world's language and have deep connections. And since a major focus of Houston Exponential is increasing access to financing, the future CEO will need to understand venture capital.

"We're all very focused on it," Luna said of selecting a CEO. "And we'd like to make it happen soon."

Houston Exponential was formed in October by merging the Houston Technology Center with the Greater Houston Partnership's technology innovation roundtable and the Mayor's Technology & Innovation Task Force.

Its goals are to vault Houston among the nation's top innovation "ecosystems" by 2022, to create 10,000 new technology jobs over that same period and to lure $2 billion in venture capital investment to Houston-based startups in 2022 alone.

RELATED: Coming to Houston: esports arena, tech hub

Dick Williams, a former chair of the Houston Technology Center, was named the interim CEO in October. But the agreement was that Williams would fill the role for three months. With the CEO search taking a bit longer, Luna added interim CEO to her other duties as chair of the governing board of Houston Exponential.

She said the organization is making progress in many areas. One is its "fund of funds." Houston Exponential is creating a venture capital fund that will raise money from Houston corporations. An investment professional will then invest that money in 10 to 12 venture capital funds across the U.S.

Similar efforts in other places have shown that connecting corporate investors with venture capitalists brings more investment to the local areas.

In the past two weeks, Luna said Houston Exponential has started calling corporations and making pitches. The fund could have its first close in the fall and make its first investment in early 2019. Maybe sooner.

The first close typically occurs when the fund receives verbal commitments for at least half of which it's seeking to raise. The first close allows the fund manager to get money from the early committers and start making investments before the fund's full amount is committed.Texas shoppers could soon buy a handle of whiskey or vodka at Walmart and other publicly traded big-box retailers if a opposing group doesnt successfully appeal a federal judges ruling.

Under state law, publicly-owned retailers like Walmart Stores Inc., Costco Wholesale Corp. and Target Corp. are prohibited from selling liquor  a rule that doesnt apply to privately-held retailers.

That could change after U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman in Austin sided with Walmart late Tuesday in a federal lawsuit against the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission, stating in a 50-page ruling that the ban violates the Dormant Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution.

RELATED: Texas businesses busted accused of substituting alcohol

Pitman also ruled against a state law prohibiting some retailers and not others from obtaining more than five permits, citing the constitutions Equal Protection clause.

We applaud Judge Pitmans order striking down Texas laws that have prevented us from fully serving our customers, Walmart spokeswoman Anne Hatfield said in a statement. Walmart filed suit because these laws are unfair and hurt our customers. We are grateful for Judge Pitmans thoughtful opinion, finding that these laws violate the U.S. Constitution.

Shoppers shouldnt expect to immediately see liquor bottles on store shelves in Walmart, Costco and Target. Pitman put a 60-day stay on any implementation of the ruling to allow defendants ample time to appeal.

RELATED: 15 unusual facts about Texas' alcohol laws

The Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission is currently reviewing Pitmans ruling with the state Attorney Generals Office to decide whether to appeal, agency spokesman Chris Porter said. Porter declined to comment on the substance of the ruling but said he does not expect the ruling to be implemented until after any appeal process is exhausted.

The Texas Package Stores Association, an organization that represents 2,500 liquor store owners, has vowed to appeal the ruling. The group was allowed to intervene in the case in 2015.

The Texas Legislature put a system in place to ensure safe access to alcoholic beverages in Texas, and that system has worked for over 80 years, Lance Lively said in a statement. We will appeal the trial courts decision and continue to fight for family-owned liquor store owners against the worlds largest corporate entities that seek to inflate their profits by upending sensible state laws that protect both consumers and small businesses.If you're looking to own a pristine part of Houston history, you may want to take a look at 1908 Decatur Street.

The three-bedroom, two-bathroom 2,320 square-foot home near Washington and Houston avenues is on the market for $750,000 and lies just northwest of downtown in what's called "Old Sixth Ward." If the location isn't a selling point, the Queen Anne Victorian home's link to William Marsh Rice may attract the attention of history buffs.

GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN: Houston neighborhood mourns midcentury homes lost to Harvey

According to owner Leisha Medina, the home was built by Angelina Valentine after her husband, Peter, died. He was the chauffeur for Rice and upon retirement, the Valentines were given a "large sum" of money as a gift. The Valentines bought several tenant properties in First and Sixth Wards. After her husband's death in 1897, Angelina Valentine sold all of his tenant properties and had a home built at 1907 Decatur. She lived in the home for nine years before selling it to First Baptist Tabernacle in 1907, according to Medina.

Medina said she and her husband bought the home in September 2008. She said they could see Fourth of July fireworks from the neighborhood and there are nearby festivals throughout the year including Cinco De Mayo and Day of the Dead. Nearby restaurants include Taco Deli, B&B Butchers and Catalina Coffee.

HOUSTON REAL ESTATE NEWS: Houston office market to firm up this year, according to forecast

Other features of the home include two wrap around porches, hardwood floors, stained glass windows and granite countertops. The home is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Those interested in the home can check out the full listing from HAR here.

Will Axford is a digital reporter for Chron.com. Read more of his stories here and follow him on Twitter.An Humble High School parent is seeking answers about injuries her daughter received after a fight between her daughter and another student led to an encounter with an Humble ISD police officer.

According to Humble ISD, on March 9 two female students had a verbal disagreement, which escalated into a fight, while walking in the hall.

School staff and Humble ISD police officers stepped in to break up the fight. The district said one of the students did not stop fighting and punched and spit on the Humble ISD officer breaking up the fight.

District officials said the officer sustained bruising and swelling around his eye, and information about the incident was sent to the Harris County District Attorney's office.

"We have reviewed video footage from multiple cameras showing the full incident," Humble ISD Police Chief Solomon Cook said. "The officer, despite being punched and spit on, stopped the fight, made an arrest, and prevented further injury to students and staff."

Humble ISD said the district reviewed the event, including full videos from the scene, witness statements and evidence of the officer's injuries. The school district declined to release security camera footage of the incident or the officer's name.

The parent, Ebony Dawson, said she was allowed to see the video after spring break, and there is no video footage of her daughter spitting or punching the officer in the face.

Dawson did say there is footage of her daughter being placed in a choke hold by the police officer for two minutes. The student sustained cervical sprains, Dawson said.

"I sat down with school officials (March 19) to watch the video, and I asked them to play back the area or the time frame (my daughter) assaulted the officer. And they went back about one minute to a point (and said) 'We're going to assume it happened here.' ... There's no video that she assaulted the officer," Dawson said.

School district officials said the officer did his job, responding to a fight between students within seconds, preventing further injury, and restoring peace.

Dawson said her daughter was placed on suspension for three days and was charged for assaulting a public servant and harassment against a public servant. She has filed a complaint against the officer with the Humble ISD police department and is currently waiting on a response.

"I'm not looking for a lawsuit, and I think that's what everyone thinks this is about. It's not about a lawsuit," Dawson said. "It's about these kids being able to enter into a safe environment. ... You look up Humble ISD (on the internet) and you can pull up any kind of brawl there is. So we have to figure out what's wrong and why the students are doing that. In no way shape or form am I condoning my daughter's fighting - that is not becoming of a young lady. Neither am I saying that the school is responsible for fighting. I'm going to say the school was negligent."

Dawson also alleges her daughter was not given immediate medical attention and was questioned without Dawson's consent.

Jamie Mount, Humble ISD's director of public communications, confirmed the arresting officer was a male but declined to comment on other allegations made by Dawson.

"The district examined videos from multiple angles, as well as witness statements and evidence of the officer's injuries. In every situation, a totality of evidence is considered," Mount said. "The officer responded to a fight between students within seconds. The officer acted appropriately to remove the threat and prevent the arrested student from furthering injuring her classmates, herself, and Humble ISD staff. All Humble ISD students deserve a positive and safe learning environment. The officer acted quickly to restore peace for all."Texas Land Commissioner George P. Bush got a first-hand look at the San Jacinto River's massive sand deposits during his visit to the Lake Houston area on Thursday, March 22.

His tour of the area was initiated in response to the Plea to See Lake Houston campaign.

The Plea to See campaign is the second letter writing campaign launched as part of Recover Lake Houston  an initiative headed up by the Lake Houston Area Chamber of Commerce to promote flood mitigation efforts for the area after Hurricane Harvey.

Plea to See asks Gov. Greg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and Land Commissioner George P. Bush to visit the Lake Houston area and witness the issues persisting in the wake of Hurricane Harvey - including sand deposits in the San Jacinto River that limits its capacity to hold water.

Abbott was the first of the three officials to respond to the plea. After viewing the river and lake by helicopter on March 15, he met with community leaders in Kingwood where he said the state would provide money to initiate the permitting process to dredge the San Jacinto River. Abbott stressed the importance of enforcing sand mining operation regulations to prevent siltation and sand build-up in the river. Additionally, he discussed his authorization of voluntary buyouts for 134 Kingwood-area homes.

Bush's visit came just a week after Abbott's. Houston City Council Member Dave Martin led Bush on a boat tour of the San Jacinto River.

"It was great to see up close and personal the issues as relates to the San Jacinto River and the sand deposits," Bush said. "We'll work with the legislature in the next session, and in the short term, to make sure the TCEQ's enforcing sand mining operation (regulations.)"

Bush expressed his intention to help advance dredging operations to increase the river's holding capacity and plans to continue collaborating with entities like the city of Houston and the Army Corps of Engineers as plans develop for efforts to prevent future flooding, such as building a third reservoir in Houston.

"So, (we) all come together, forming a team to create the vision for tomorrow," Bush said.

During the tour, Bush told Martin he'd noticed the high level of social media activity from District E residents to propel the campaign forward.

Jenna Armstrong, president and CEO of the Lake Houston Chamber, explained with so many in the area still suffering because of Harvey, people were ready to push forward on the new campaign.

"They were ready and they responded and sent emails and we had a lot more activity with this onTwitter and I think that made an impact on Bush and his staff," Armstrong said.

After less than two inches of rain caused the San Jacinto River to rise out of its banks on Feb. 26, Armstrong said concern increased for Lake Houston area residents.

"That was very evident with response to the Plea to See campaign  sharing on Facebook and Twitter and getting people onboard to make someone pay attention," Armstrong said.

Bush said his goal is to be responsive to all constituents' post-Harvey needs.

"This is a storm that roughly impacted the geographic size of Indiana, so as an honest broker  and this is something I've communicated to Mayor Turner and Judge Emmett as well  that I have to be an honest broker for all Texans," Bush said.

The Lake Houston Area Chamber of Commerce announced on March 22 that Lt. Gov. Patrick also plans on answering the Plea to See call to visit the Lake Houston area. The Lake Houston Chamber and Patrick's office are in the process of scheduling a visit in the next few weeks.

"We're pretty optimistic about it and we're waiting to hear back on the dates to get something on the books," Armstrong said.

Patrick's visit will be the last of the three officials to respond to the Plea to See Lake Houston initiative, which had only just kicked-off during at the Kingwood Town Hall meeting on March 6.

"I think the campaign was very fast and furious," Armstrong said. "There have been a lot of people working on different pieces to coordinate this effort. It was a perfect combination of their work, from Dave Martin's office, from Dan Huberty's office, and from our new representatives on the SJRA board, Mark Micheletti and Kaaren Cambio, all working with their connections and I think it all came together with perfect timing."

Armstrong points to Gov. Abbott's allocation of $3 million for the permitting process to dredge the river as one of the ways in which the Plea to See campaign has already helped the Lake Houston area.

"To see it is to understand it," Armstrong said. "When elected officials see the sand, the magnitude really impacts them and they understand better that, yes, we have to do something."According to the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, every minute in the United States, 20 people on average are physically abused by their intimate partners.

The End Abuse 2018 Awareness Breakfast is slated for April 11 at The Junior League of Houston and will raise awareness about the important issue of domestic abuse.

AVDA, or Aid to Victims of Domestic Abuse, is a nonprofit that has served the community of Houston since 1980. It provides abuse survivors a variety of services that are free of charge.

"Its staff of dedicated, trauma-informed attorneys provide free legal representation for protective orders, divorce, child custody and adoption. Other services provide emergency financial assistance, counseling for survivors and their children, as well as education and training assistance to help [them] remain free from the abuser," said AVDA CEO Sherri Kendall.

She said AVDA also has its Battering Intervention and Prevention Program, where those who commit abuse can identify and take ownership of their abusive behaviors and work toward ending them in order to create healthier lives. The program is paid for by the abusers on a sliding scale basis.

Kendall said another one of the organization's main goals is to "foster a community-wide response to abuse." Its youth and outreach team offers programs for teens that aim to prevent violence in teen dating and promote healthier relationships.

The breakfast is in its second year, and its keynote speaker will be Mark Wynn, a well-known expert on domestic violence and retired lieutenant from the Nashville Police Department. Kendall said AVDA chose Wynn to speak based on both his professional knowledge and personal experience with abuse.

"Mark Wynn is a true champion for victims of domestic violence," she said. "His compelling personal story as a domestic violence survivor, combined with decades of dedicated law enforcement experience, have given him a passion and dedication to ending abuse which resonates with his audience and inspires change."

Carter Dugan, End Abuse 2018 Awareness Breakfast chair, said KPRC Meteorologist Khambrel Marshall will serve as the master of ceremonies, and the program will also include words from a former AVDA client who will share about her experiences and the help she received from the organization.

Kendall said creating happier, healthier lives at home is key to breaking the cycle of abuse, where a child who grows up with abuse often becomes an abuser later in life.

"Domestic violence is a learned behavior, most often learned in the home as a child. That said, it is reinforced across our society and culture through the glorification of power and violence," Kendall said. "While abusive behavior is always a choice, it is imperative that our youth are exposed to healthy, respectfully and mutually satisfying relationships so that their adult relationships will more likely reflect those early experiences."

Although domestic violence is not a topic some would want to discuss, Dugan said the breakfast will show how critical the issue is and that there are resources out there for those in need.

"This event is an opportunity to address an important issue that, unfortunately, often remains hidden. Domestic violence is unpleasant to talk about, but talking about it is an important step in building community support and showing victims that help is accessible and available," Dugan said.

Rachel Roosth, End Abuse 2018 Awareness Breakfast chair, said AVDA is hoping to have approximately 250 people in attendance at the breakfast and that last year's event brought together many different types of people with one common goal.

"The common bond between the attendees is an interest in better understanding how to prevent domestic violence and how to assist families who have experienced domestic violence," she said.

Kendall said AVDA is supported through individual and foundation donations, the United Way and state and federal government funding. The breakfast is free to anyone considering getting involved with AVDA or donating in the future. Roosth said she hopes the event will motivate attendees to work toward impacting lives around them.

"We hope our guests will not just attend a one-hour breakfast, but be inspired to take actions that will change the lives of domestic violence victims-whether that is by volunteering, offering financial support to AVDA or keeping their eyes open to signs of domestic abuse in their communities," Roosth said.

The breakfast will be held April 11, 7:30-8:30 a.m., at The Junior League of Houston at 1811 Briar Oaks Lane, Houston. Those interested in attending the free breakfast can contact Lauren Summerville at 713-224-9911 or laurens@avda-tx.org. For more information about the event or AVDA and its services, visit www.avda-tx.org.Houston ISD administrators plan to recommend the district surrender significant control over seven chronically low-performing schools for three years as part of the district's plan for avoiding major state sanctions, Chief Academic Officer Grenita Lathan said Wednesday.

District leaders had previously recommended "partnering" with outside organizations, which would essentially run the campuses, but they hadn't said how long the agreements would last. During those three years, the outside organization would control hiring, academics, scheduling and several other aspects of each campus. State law does not require a specific time frame for "partnership" agreements.

Administrators haven't named any potential partners, but Lathan said Wednesday that district leaders hope to provide names at an April 2 school board meeting, with HISD trustees voting on partnership contracts on April 12. She cautioned those dates could change.

"We are still looking at the possible partners and trying to narrow down a decision," Lathan said. "A lot of it right now is going back-and-forth. People are presenting information to us, telling us what they have to offer as a partner."

HISD administrators are proposing "partnerships" in response to the threat of severe sanctions related to a law passed in 2015 known as HB 1842. Under the law, any school district with a campus that receives a fifth consecutive "improvement required" rating for poor academic performance this year is subject to one of two sanctions: closure of the chronically failing campus, or a state takeover of the district's locally elected school board.

HoustonChronicle.com: HISD must give up control over hiring, governance to get break

HISD has 10 schools at risk of receiving a fifth straight "improvement required" rating in August. To stave off those punishments, HISD administrators have recommended one of two options at each campus: forming "partnerships" under a separate law, known as SB 1882, or closing and immediately reopening the school with limited grade levels and entirely new staff.

Administrators now are proposing "partnerships" at seven schools: Dogan and Mading elementary schools; Henry Middle School; Woodson PK-8; and Kashmere, Wheatley and Worthing high schools. Three schools would be closed and re-opened: Blackshear, Highland Heights and Wesley elementary schools.

District leaders held meetings in each of the 10 school communities in recent weeks, culminating with Wednesday night's gathering at Worthing High School, where neighboring Woodson PK-8 was also discussed.

HISD administrators pitched new plans Wednesday for Woodson PK-8, which was originally recommended for closure and re-opening.

RELATED: Residents skeptical, frustrated at 1st community meeting on struggling schools

Under the revised proposal, Woodson would become a "partnership" school, but it would only serve grades prekindergarten through five. The change would allow the school to continue serving grades one through five next year -- which it couldn't have done under the closure-restart plan -- and keep its staff in place. Still, students entering sixth, seventh and eighth grade would be sent to neighboring campuses that aren't in "improvement required" status, with transportation provided.

Stephanie Washington, whose third-grade son attends Woodson, applauded the decision because she believes elementary and middle school students shouldn't attend the same campus. At the same time, Washington criticized the district for Woodson's history of poor academic performance.

"I feel like it's sad HISD is just now finally taking steps to fix it. It's ridiculous it took this long," Washington said.

Principals of Worthing and Woodson, both of whom are in their first full year on-campus, heralded early data that they believe shows academic progress and fewer discipline issues at each school.

But to meet state academic standards this year, both schools would need to make enormous gains. Of the 10 HISD schools at risk of triggering HB 1842 this year, Worthing and Woodson were far-and-away the two lowest-rated schools last year under the state's academic accountability system.

"Do we have our issues? Yes. We always will," Worthing Principal Khalilah Campbell-Rhone said. "But we have many more students that are shining and we're excited for things to come."Police have identified the driver who led them on a more than hourlong chase through Baytown and Houston in rush hour traffic Thursday morning as 42-year-old Eric Brown.

Officers tried different pursuit tactics to stop the chase, including the controversial "PIT" manuever.

The tactic, which involves officers nudging the car and causing the driver to lose control, did not succeed in ending the chase. But with television stations broadcasting the pursuit, the public and media got the opportunity to view a strategy that Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo has advocated since November.

Houston and Baytown police eventually pinned the fleeing SUV and forced the driver off the road. After almost an hour and a half of pursuing the drivers Ford Escape, the chase ended around 9:25 a.m. on Highway 288 northbound at MacGregor, when HPD SWAT members apprehended the driver by physically pulling him out of his car.

Everybody worked as a team, HPD Executive Assistant Chief Troy Finner said. Sometimes a chase like this where a suspect is slow rolling, stops the car, keeps going and whatnot, the one thing I want our citizens to know, time is on our side. We have time, we wanted to just wait it out, do what we can, because at the end of the day, we want everybody to go home safely.

Brown is a suspect in a domestic assault disturbance that occurred 7:30 a.m. Thursday in the 3400 block of Carriage Lane in Baytown. Brown is accused of pistol whipping his wife and discharging a gun, acting as if he'd shot himself, before he fled.

Neighbors tried to stop him as he left the house, said Lt. Steve Dorris of the Baytown Police Department. The police pursuit to apprehend Brown began a short time later.

After starting out at high speeds, weaving in and out of traffic and sometimes surpassing cars on the shoulder, the chase continued at a snail's pace for the better part of an hour. The drivers back tire went flat at some point in the pursuit, and at least 12 police cars flanked behind the driver as he teased police, repeatedly pulling over before taking off again, helicopter footage from television stations showed.

Police originally heard reports that the man had a gun and had self-inflected gunshot wounds, leading officers to take their time and try multiple different tactics to stop the driver, police said. Law enforcement agencies used spike strips, which were not successful, and Houston police tried the "PIT" maneuver.

Unfortunately we tried different techniques so no one would get hurt since this is rush hour traffic, Sgt. Bernard Simien said. We tried the PIT maneuver and the suspect just continued to drive on.

Around 8 a.m., Baytown police began following the driver at high speeds through east Houston. The driver took the South Loop westbound and exited on Post Oak, making made several U-turns to avoid police. The driver then headed northbound on Post Oak and got back on the South Loop, heading eastbound. Houston police joined in the chase around 8:40 a.m.

During the high-speed part of the chase, the driver managed to evade rush hour traffic by passing other cars on the shoulder and swerving in and out of traffic. At times, the car drove across sidewalks and grassy areas.

Police eventually caught up to the driver as he appeared to slow down, occasionally wobbling across lanes of traffic. One police car hit the back of the SUV, using the "PIT maneuver," and the driver stopped on the South Loop and Stella Link.

He continued driving, and after stopping one more time, he exited off the South Loop Eastbound to Highway 288 north. The driver was boxed in by police cars on Highway 288 at Holcombe, but after a police car backed up, the driver took off again.

Finner said the police department would look at what happened there to cause the driver to get away.

At one point in the chase, the driver turned his car around and started driving toward a row of police cars. He opened and closed his door several times, and he once drove with his car door open.

Once, police were out of their cars with guns drawn, as people sat in halted traffic behind them and on the opposite side of the freeway.

Baytown police were also on the phone with Brown during the chase, trying to convince him to pull over, police said.

Police eventually forced the car off the road, when Simien sidled next to the Escape and hit it, causing him to spin out. Two other police cars approached, and the sergeant came back to the Escape, boxing it in.

After the car stopped, SWAT officers moved in and forced their way into the man's car, yanking him out through the driver's side door. He was thrown to the ground and was taken away in an ambulance. He did not have a weapon.

Acevedo announced in November that officers would be authorized to use the Precision Immobilization Technique, or PIT maneuver, which was developed decades ago in Germany as an anti-terrorist tactic. Some argue that the PIT maneuver can be prevent deadly crashes at the end of police chases.

It is a slightly controversial technique, however, because if it is used at high speeds or with narrow vehicles that have a high center of gravity, the maneuver can cause vehicles to roll over, leading to injuries and fatalities, experts have said.

Although the maneuver didnt work Thursday morning, Finner said the police department will try the tactic when it is safe to do so.

When we can safely terminate a chase, were going to do whatever we can within our policy, and our chief supports us on that, he said.

Acevedo praised the officers involved in the chase for trying new strategies to catch Brown.

"Proud of our @houstonpolice and partner agencies," Acevedo said in a tweet. "We are utilizing recently authorized tactics to safely end pursuits in order to enhance the safety of our community, our officers and ultimately the fleeing suspect. At HPD we are on the move!"

The chase tied up traffic on most south Houston highways. All mainlanes were blocked in both directions on Highway 288 at MacGregor.

I want to apologize to our citizens, Finner said. I know a lot of people, when it started, youre on the way to work, and when a chase is this long all over the city, it ties up the freeways.

Brown will likely face charges of aggravated assault and felony evading of a motor vehicle, Baytown police said.High school girls from Houston and surrounding areas poured into the Bammel Church of Christ Teen Center on Wednesday to become a princess and work with a "fairy godmother" to choose a prom dress. Approximately 1,500 girls are expected to become princesses for a day through The Giving Gown Foundation's annual Boutique Day.

"A lot of these girls come into Boutique Day nervous. Some of the girls on occasions, are not happy about it because they envision just a bunch of used dresses, but what they find is this beautiful boutique where they can choose from thousands of options and everybody is encouraging them," said Cassie Miller, president of The Giving Gown Foundation.

The event, which has been turning girls into princesses for a decade, is held March 21-24 and hosted through the nonprofit foundation that provides prom dresses for teens who are in need of assistance of obtaining a gown. The focus of the foundation is not on the dress, but more on the girl who is receiving it.

Girls who have benefitted through the foundation started at 86 girls in the organization's first year has grown to serving approximately 1,500 girls. High schoolers can choose from an inventory of 10,000 dresses.

Gowns in sizes 16-36 are also in stock, so that girls who attend the dress event are aware that beauty comes in all sizes.

The organization aims to surround young ladies with positive role models and show them grace and love for being who they are. Girls from all walks of life are welcomed and are celebrated as they learn about what defines true beauty. The event includes 400 volunteers from various communities. The gowns are donations that include new and gently used formal gowns and accessories. Everything is at no cost to deserving high school juniors and seniors who will be receiving the dresses. Less formal dresses that are donated to the foundation are kept and sold at the fall annual dress sale. The money raised from the sale helps fund the annual Boutique Day.

Through MW Cleaners, more than 1,500 dresses were donated during the fourth annual MW Cares Prom Dress Drive. Dresses were cleaned as well. "When we saw the impact this event had on the young ladies, the look on their faces, and the treatment they get on the Boutique Days, we were set," said Melanie Villeda, MW Cleaners marketing manager.

"We want to be a part of the community that serves us and we serve them. Especially in a year like this, our city is pretty bruised recovering from Hurricane Harvey. We saw that a lot of ladies who would not normally be in need of assistance were probably struggling on deciding to spend a certain amount on a dress."

In the four years MW Cleaners has partnered with The Giving Gown Foundation, approximately 4,000 dresses in total have been donated. Donations are accepted all year long at any Houston MW Cleaners.

The organization, which started in 2007, recruits girls from various schools throughout various communities. Professionals in the community help bring the girls into the foundation. High school girls attend Boutique Day with their school groups through their social workers or school counselors.

"Our kids were excited about coming to Boutique Day, and they pretty much needed it," said Angela Williams and educator and senior advisor at Spring ISD's Westfield High School. "It's important for organizations to reach out to high school girls for events like prom because I believe, from working in the school system, it's one of the biggest things students look forward to, but it's very costly. To try and keep the cost down, this is a great way of giving back to the community."

The mission of The Giving Gown Foundation is to make each girl feel they are being treated with respect, grace, and love. The foundation believes every young woman deserves the opportunity to realize positive experiences regardless of their financial or family circumstances.

"It feels nice to attend this event because all the girls are uniting; we are all going to this special event. I think it's nice because everyone get s to choose what they want and feel pretty," said Katherine Pitty, 18, Westfield High School (Spring ISD) student. "I think it's important for organizations to do this because there are many people that don't get to go to prom or are able to afford things like this, so it's a good opportunity for everyone to get a chance. I hope to take away more confidence and a dress that make me feel happy."

The Boutique Day experience typically takes 3-4 hours, and the girls are assigned a "Fairy Godmother" who is a volunteer from within the community that helps the young ladies find a dress, all while making her feel like a real princess. The girls also have access to a seamstress for on-site alterations.

The godmother's role is to help the student find a gown and accessories. The "Fairy Godmother" is encouraged to show the teens kindness, compassion, and to give them a dignified experience.

Strike Energy, a sponsor for the event, provided meals for the girls and their guests on Boutique Day. Other sponsors included MW Cleaners and H-E-B. Every girl received a swag bag of beauty products provided by the Junior League of The Woodlands.

Volunteers, seamstresses, and girls in need of dresses are welcome to join the organization.

The Giving Gown Foundation serves girls from Houston and surrounding areas, which include Montgomery County, Cy-Fair, Klein, Tomball, and Spring.

"The girls come to us for a dress, but they leave with so much more. The most important part of our event is our self-esteem workshop where we empower the girls and teach them that they are strong, capable, and worthy of these things," Miller said. "It's great to see transformations; sometimes they are literally dancing with joy when they leave. It's moving to know that you can make a difference just in that moment."

Want to know more?

The Giving Gown Foundation

2700 Cypress Creek Parkway

Houston, TX 77068

www.givinggown.org

contact@givinggown.orgShortly after taking office in 2013, U.S. Congressman Steve Stockman hired a crew of amateur spies to perform political surveillance on a rising star in his own state Republican party, according to witnesses Thursday at the former lawmaker's federal corruption trial in Houston.

Stockman gave $32,000 in charitable funds to a political operative to conduct surveillance of state Rep. James White, R-Woodville and two other GOP officeholders.

After three months of trailing White at work and leisure, planting a fake intern with surveillance equipment on his staff and combing through public records, the conservative operative and attorney Benjamin Wetmore, testified his crew netted nothing, or "bupkis," as he put it.

Wetmore was associated with the American Phoenix Foundation, an Austin-based group that claimed in May 2015 to have amassed hundreds of hours of covert video footage of Texas lawmakers with the goal of proving corruption.

MORE: Megadonor says he thought former U.S. Congressman Steve Stockman was trustworthy

Prosecutors in Stockman's criminal trial contend he funneled thousands of dollars from a charitable donation into one such surveillance operation in hopes of uncovering what Wetmore called "salacious" gossip about White, one of the few African-American Republican lawmakers in Austin and a perceived political rival.

Stockman is charged with 28 criminal counts, including allegations that he illegally converted major charitable donations to pay for personal and political expenses.

Stockman, who was a Republican lawmaker then serving in Washington, D.C., hired the political operative to dig up dirt on White, an East Texas politician whom Stockman thought was considering a primary bid for his congressional seat.

White testified in Stockman's trial Thursday that he had been approached by a lobbyist to consider a bid for Congress but decided not to run. He told the jury he knew nothing about being secretly filmed while at work in the state capitol in Austin.

After court adjourned, White said he believed it was possible he had been followed, if that's what the FBI investigators determined, but he knew nothing about it at the time.

"On most days I try to conduct myself as if my grandmother was around," said White, a former Army infantryman. "My goal is to wake up every morning and comport myself in the best way possible."

RELATED: Former Congressman Steve Stockman ran 'massive scam' with donations, prosecutors said

During testimony, an FBI agent told jurors that Stockman paid for the surveillance operation by transferring funds from a $350,000 charitable donation meant to pay for a training center for conservative interns in Washington.

In testimony, Wetmore was evasive about whether the sting was focused on White, the possible rival, but he confirmed he testified before a grand jury that Stockman hired him to find out "salacious things about White." Wetmore told the court that Stockman asked him to have his surveillance team collect information on two other Republican lawmakers, state representatives Dennis Bonnen, R-Angleton and Rep. Craig Goldman, R-Fort Worth.

Wetmore said he hired one employee to work the outside, chatting with legislators in bars and following them home. The other staffer, Oluwaseun "Shaughn" Adeleye, was his plant inside White's office.

Adeleye testified that he made misrepresentations in order to obtain an unpaid internship in White's office, and used Wetmore's payments to pay for audio equipment, including a watch and a pen that were equipped to record conversations.

Adeleye testified that Wetmore's request on behalf of his client seemed weird, since his own "undercover citizen journalism" business was set up to catch fraud, waste or abuse in government.

"He wanted me to catch him cursing," Adeleye said.

Adeleye told the jury he spent three months in the office and heard White use profanity on a few occasions.

"White screaming and cursing at you would be excellent footage," Wetmore told Adeleye, in an email introduced into evidence.

Adeleye, in email correspondence with Wetmore, was questioned about what kind of car White drove and whether it was messy.

MORE: Stockman fraud case not about fur coats, Rolexes and Mercedes Benzes, lawyer says

During this same period Stockman told Wetmore, in a text admitted in evidence, that he was concerned that the tracking of White's movements might be discovered.

"Republicans love black conservatives. I'm worried," said the 2013 text from Stockman to Wetmore.

But Wetmore was sure Adeleye would find something compromising if he kept at it.

"We will hit the pervert line so hard he'll run screaming," Wetmore texted back, without explanation.

Outside the courtroom, Stockman's lawyer said after court that surveillance activities had nothing to do with the criminal allegations.

"This is a sideshow meant to distract from the real issues, and a complete waste of time," said attorney Sean Buckley. He said political espionage happens all the time, on both sides of the aisle.

Buckley has argued that Stockman did not commit fraud by spending the charitable money as he did.

"Our position is the donor didn't care what the money was used for," he said.

Gabrielle Banks covers federal court for the Houston Chronicle. Follow her on Twitter and send her tips at gabrielle.banks@chron.com.Thursday, March 22, 2018 Blog Topics: Straight Ticket Voting, An "Absurd" Ethics Meeting? Dem Muscle In Republican Roswell And A Round Of Congressional Endorsements



There's a bunch of them and they are all listed



Reader Rick Lass, who has run as a Green Party candidate, isn't too pleased with one plan developing in the office of the SOS. That would be her plan to reinstate straight ticket voting in New Mexico:



I and many others are completely opposed to straight ticket voting, which very clearly discriminates against independent and minor party candidates. In fact, I am quite sure that straight ticket voting is the primary reason I lost a 2008 Public Regulation Commission election--there was a straight ticket devise for him, not for me, so, in effect, there were two ways for him to receive votes and there was only one way for me to receive votes.



Also, I think it is unfair to say straight party voting increases voter turnout in down ballot races--the voter has already turned out, and merely chooses not to vote for people in down ballot races.



Republicans for the most part also oppose straight ticket voting which was suspended in 2012 under GOP Sec. of State Dianna Duran. However, Dems are mostly supportive. Some R lawmakers argue the SOS must get authorization from the Legislature to return to straight ticket voting.



NOW WE KNOW



Th mystery over why former BernCo Commissioner Michael Brasher decided to pull the plug on a run for his old commission seat this year is over. And it's pretty



Former Bernalillo County commissioner and onetime Albuquerque city councilor Michael Brasher will now help govern the University of New Mexico. Gov. Martinez has appointed Brasher to the vacant seat on UNMs seven-member Board of Regents. Her announcement came late Wednesday  less than a day before the board convenes for its annual budget summit. Brasher is a familiar face in local government. He served on the Bernalillo County Commission from 2002-2010 and was on the Albuquerque City Council from 1989-2001.



We blogged recently of how John Jones, who entered the commission race but then withdrew to run for the state House, was upset that he could not get a straight answer from Brasher when he asked him if he was in or out of the commission contest. Now he knows why.



AROUND NEW MEXICO







Joe, great story on Aztec. We have a similar situation in the Roswell city election this month There are three new Dems on the city council which now has 6 R's and 4 D's. We run as non-partisan candidates, but you know how that is. The council has elected a Democrat as mayor pro tem. The vote was 5 to 5 and he won with a coin flip. Thanks for your work, I read every day.



Thanks for checking in



Down in Otero County there is



According to Otero County Clerk Robyn Holmes, 17 Republicans and 3 Democrats have filed for eight positions in Otero County (for the 2018 election).



ABSURD MEETING?



Absurd indeed seems the word to describe today's meeting of a Bernalillo county board



He has helped propel many Democrats to victory. . . but political operative Alan Packman will put on a different hat Thursday and preside over an ethics case filed against Republican Wayne Johnson. . . The idea that Packman - who serves as chairman of Bernalillo County's Code of Conduct Review Board - could be impartial on this matter is absurd. Even if that weren't the case, there is clearly an appearance of a conflict of interest, and that is reason enough for Packman to recuse himself. Absent that, the other members of the board should sideline him and prohibit him from having any additional say on this matter. . .



Is it a



YOU'RE ENDORSED



Sedillo Lopez On the ABQ congressional endorsement front:



Antoinette Sedillo Lopez campaign announced the endorsement of the Working Families Party of New Mexico.



Like Senator Elizabeth Warren, Antoinettes fight for working people began decades before she ever ran for office, said NM Working Families Party State Director Eric Griego. Her long record of advocating for those without a strong voice sets her apart in the Democratic primary. . ."



Former US Attorney Damon Martinez, also seeking the Dem nod for the ABQ US House seat, comes with this:



Damon Martinez was endorsed by three former U.S. Attorneys who served in the Obama administration. Joyce White Vance (Alabama), Carmen M. Ortiz (Massachusetts), and Stephanie Yonekura (California)



ABQ City Councilor Pat Davis has won the endorsement of State Senators Jerry Ortiz y Pino and Mimi Stewart and Damian Lara has been endorsed by Kathy and Joe Duffy, longtime active Democrats from the ABQ Valley.



Janice Arnold-Jones is unopposed for the GOP nomination at the June 5 primary.



This is the home of New Mexico politics.







Interested in reaching New Mexico's most informed audience? Advertise here.



( c)NM POLITICS WITH JOE MONAHAN 2018 Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver this week "qualified major party candidates for state districted and county elected offices to appear on the 2018 Primary Election ballot."There's a bunch of them and they are all listed here Reader Rick Lass, who has run as a Green Party candidate, isn't too pleased with one plan developing in the office of the SOS. That would be her plan to reinstate straight ticket voting in New Mexico:Republicans for the most part also oppose straight ticket voting which was suspended in 2012 under GOP Sec. of State Dianna Duran. However, Dems are mostly supportive. Some R lawmakers argue the SOS must get authorization from the Legislature to return to straight ticket voting.Th mystery over why former BernCo Commissioner Michael Brasher decided to pull the plug on a run for his old commission seat this year is over. And it's pretty good news for the general manager of public radio station KANW-FM:We blogged recently of how John Jones, who entered the commission race but then withdrew to run for the state House, was upset that he could not get a straight answer from Brasher when he asked him if he was in or out of the commission contest. Now he knows why.Recently elected Roswell Democratic City Councilor George Peterson writes in reaction to our reader report Wednesday that the usually GOP city of Aztec in the Four Corners has elected a lot of Dems recently:Thanks for checking in Councilor George . It's always a pleasure to hear from readers outside the ABQ/Santa Fe corridor. We will do our best to include more coverage of the key races in those areas as Election '18 gets going. Meanwhile, we checked and found that. . .Down in Otero County there is no sign of a Dem resurgence. The R's continue to rule that roost:Absurd indeed seems the word to describe today's meeting of a Bernalillo county board that will hear an ethics complaint against State Auditor Wayne Johnson stemming from when he ran for mayor against Time Keller last year.Is it a Code of Conduct Board or a Kangaroo Court?On the ABQ congressional endorsement front:Antoinette Sedillo Lopez campaign announced the endorsement of the Working Families Party of New Mexico.Former US Attorney Damon Martinez, also seeking the Dem nod for the ABQ US House seat, comes with this:ABQ City Councilor Pat Davis has won the endorsement of State Senators Jerry Ortiz y Pino and Mimi Stewart and Damian Lara has been endorsed by Kathy and Joe Duffy, longtime active Democrats from the ABQ Valley.Janice Arnold-Jones is unopposed for the GOP nomination at the June 5 primary.This is the home of New Mexico politics. E-mail your news and comments. (jmonahan@ix.netcom.com)Sending a child to private school can make a sizable dent in anyone's wallet. Institutions that best prepare students for college can often cost as much or more than the universities.

That's why it makes sense to see which private schools offer the best value for their steep price tag.Two Houston men who were impersonating police officers wound up pulling over a pair of undercover cops Tuesday, police said.

And now, both men  Travion Crawford, 19, and Reginald Edwards, 26  are behind bars with no bond, jail records show.

The two were in Houston's north side Tuesday night driving in Edwards' car that was equipped with red and blue lights, similar to those on a police cruiser, according to Houston police.

At one point, Edwards and Crawford allegedly pulled over a vehicle in the 600 block of West Little York.

MURDER CHARGE: Houston man drives into crowd in Montrose, killing one

That vehicle turned out to be occupied by two Houston Police Department narcotics officers who were in street clothes and patrolling the neighborhood.

As Edwards and Crawford approached the vehicle, the officers recognized they were not real police officers and pulled out their guns, readying for an altercation, police said.

But when Crawford and Edwards got to the real cop car, they were quickly arrested and taken to jail.

Prosecutors filed felony charges of impersonating a public servant on Wednesday, court records show.

Jay R. Jordan is a breaking news reporter at Chron.com. Follow him on Twitter at @JayRJordan.Police arrested two men Thursday who were accused of trying to steal an ATM, using a front-end loader at a southeast Houston bank.

The failed smash-and-grab follows two similar incidents this year in which people were accused of using forklifts to steal ATMs. In one of the cases, two men were also arrested. The other case didn't yield an immediate arrest.MEXICO CITY (AP)  Five states in Mexico now have the sternest "do not travel" advisories under a revamped U.S. State Department system unveiled Wednesday, putting them on the same level as war-torn countries like Syria, Yemen and Somalia.

The five states are Tamaulipas on the U.S. border and Sinaloa, Colima, Michoacan and Guerrero on the Pacific coast. All the states are hotspots of drug cartel activity, either hosting trafficking routes or extensive drug-crop cultivation.

Tamaulipas shares a border with Texas, stretching from the Gulf of Mexico to Laredo.

READ ALSO: Employee of Mexican music group reportedly beheaded by Gulf Cartel in Tamaulipas

The State Department had previously discouraged travel to all or part of those states but the new warnings are sterner, placing them on a level 4 warning, the highest level of potential danger.

Mexico as a whole has a level 2 rating, meaning Americans should "exercise increased caution" because of concerns about crime. But an additional 11 Mexican states got a level 3 warning Wednesday, which urges people to "reconsider travel" there. Mexico has 31 states, half of which are now under level 3 or 4 warnings.

Those states where Americans are urged to reconsider travel include the State of Mexico  Mexico's most populous state, which includes most suburbs of Mexico City  and Jalisco, home to the city of Guadalajara, the Puerto Vallarta resorts and the lakeside expat community of Chapala and Ajijic. But the travel advisory said there are "no restrictions on U.S. government employees for stays in ... Guadalajara, Puerto Vallarta, Chapala, and Ajijic."

RELATED: Acapulco, once popular Mexican town, deteriorates as warring cartels provoke killings and violence

Mexico's federal tourism department was not immediately available to comment on the new warnings.

Most of northern Mexico, including the border states of Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo Leon and Sonora as well as Durango, Zacatecas and San Luis Potosi, are under level 3 warnings.

Some of the states have long been off limits for U.S. government employees. Last year, the State Department extended a total ban on personal travel by U.S. government personnel to Guerrero.

U.S. personnel had previously been allowed to fly to the resort of Ixtapa, the last place in Guerrero where they had been allowed to go. Personal travel by land and to the resort city of Acapulco had already been prohibited.

Tamaulipas has long been riven by turf wars between rival drug cartels, and Sinaloa is home to the cartel of the same name. Michoacan was so dominated by a drug cartel that vigilantes took up arms in 2013 to drive them out.

RELATED: Report: 8 cartel members arrested in Mexico after officials say they killed 16 people

Colima has seen homicides skyrocket in recent years due to the growth of the Jalisco New Generation drug cartel, and the state now has Mexico's highest homicide rate, with 83.3 killings per 100,000 residents, according to figures for the first 11 months of 2017.

The state with second-highest homicide rate  61.6 per 100,000  was Baja California Sur, home to the twin resorts of Los Cabos. The state conserved its level 2 advisory, "exercise increased caution," despite a series of shootouts and killings in recent months.

Rising levels of violence have not so far affected Los Cabos, which saw a 16 percent increase in tourism arrivals and an 18 percent rise in hotel occupancy in 2017, said Rodrigo Esponda, managing director of the Los Cabos Tourism Board.

Esponda said local officials and tourism operators are investing in increased security, including camera systems and the construction of a new marine base.

"We are going to keep working very hard in 2018 to make sure that Los Cabos continues as a safe destination," Esponda said.

Speaking to local media earlier this week, Tourism Secretary Enrique De la Madrid said, "In my opinion, the most important challenge we have in the tourism sector are crime events occurring where they didn't before, for example in Cancun, la Paz and Los Cabos."According to UNESCO, 264 million children do not have access to schooling, while at least 600 million more are in school but not learning constituting what the World Bank calls a learning crisis.

This is the problem that drove the Varkey Foundation to create the Next Billion EdTech prize, which recognises leading EdTech start-ups making an impact on education in low income and emerging economies.

Awarded to the most innovative technology destined to have a radical impact on education in low income and emerging world countries, the competition saw over 40 start-ups from all over the world pitching to a panel of judges including venture capitalists, philanthropic investors, experts in EdTech and learning sciences, and senior education policy makers.

The new wave of EdTech is clearly about to hit its stride, said leading judge and TechCrunch Editor-at-Large Mike Butcher. It was clear to the judges that emerging market EdTech is going to be one of the hottest tech sectors in the world for the next few years. Most of the start-ups we saw during the competition clearly have enormous potential. Its fantastic that GESF is throwing the spotlight on this exciting sector.

The prize identifies, spotlights and celebrates the worlds leading EdTech start-ups that have shown through ingenuity and innovation that they can improve learning in parts of the world where there is limited access to good quality teaching.

"Over a billion young people  a number growing every day  are being denied what should be the birth right of every single child in the 21st century, no matter where they live: a good education that allows them to make the most of their God-given talents, says Sunny Varkey, Founder of the Varkey Foundation.

We have launched the Next Billion Prize to highlight technologys potential to tackle the problems that have proven too difficult for successive generations of politicians to solve. Our fervent hope is that the prize inspires practical and persistent entrepreneurs the world over to come forward with fresh tech ideas. These ideas must be hardy enough to improve education in regions where young people are denied access to a good quality teacher and a great learning environment.

The three finalists - Dot learn, Chatterbox, and TeachMeNow were each awarded $25,000 as well as the opportunity to pilot their technology in partner schools in Western Cape, South Africa. The overall winner  UK-based start-up Chatterbox  was then chosen by popular vote by delegates at the Global Education and Skills Forum (GESF) which took place last weekend in Dubai.

Chatterbox is an online language school which harnesses the wasted talent of unemployed professionals who are refugees, offering them work as on-line and in-person language tutors. The problem it solves is not only that of refugee unemployment and integration, however; In the United Kingdom alone, the language skills shortage is estimated to cost the economy 48bn every year, so the services the platform provides are very much in demand. So much so, in fact, that the company already counts several universities, major non-profits and corporations in the country among its clients.

I was three years old when I arrived in the UK as a refugee with my mum Patuni. She was a civil engineer who spoke English and three other languages fluently, recalls Chatterbox CEO Mursal Hedayat. After we had to leave Afghanistan because of civil war, I watched her become unemployed in the UK for more than a decade. Refugees with degrees and valuable skills still face shockingly high levels of underemployment. An idea like Chatterbox has never been more urgently needed, she concludes.

Fellow finalists Dot Learn, which is in Nigeria, makes online video e-learning accessible on slow, expensive Internet connections for users in low-income countries. Its technology reduces the file-size of learning videos, requiring 1/100th of the bandwidth to watch. At current data prices in Kenya and Nigeria, this means a student or learner can access 5 hours of online learning for about the cost of sending a single text message ($0.014). It offers content providers the opportunity to reach potentially billions of users for whom online learning would otherwise be impractical or ruinously expensive.

Another positive aspect to emerge from the competition was the diversity of backgrounds among the competing start-ups. Of the six finalists to pitch on Sunday, five were led by female founders.

TeachMeNow Managing Director Thea Myhrvold agrees that this diversity is of crucial importance: As a female entrepreneur, I felt it was important to create positive stories for and from the Middle East. Thats why I came back to the UAE to start TeachMeNow. The first class using our technology had a Venezuelan teaching Spanish to a Saudi student. Now, we empower tens of thousands of teachers, entrepreneurs, schools, institutions to reach students all over the world.

The prize was the focal point of Tomorrow, a new EdTech summit which took place for the first time at GESF.

According to Sunny Varkey, this was the first EdTech summit in the world which joined the most important players from the spheres of education and technology together, giving start-ups access to every type of stakeholder  from Silicon Valley venture capitalists to former and current education ministers, foundations, academics and the worlds best teachers. They can draw on their expertise and support to build products that will work as well in the classroom as they do in an elevator pitch, he concluded.New York governor Andrew Cuomos cruise to reelection hit a speedbump of sorts this week when the accomplished actress Cynthia Nixonplaying the part of an openly gay, starry-eyed activist and progressive public school momentered the race. How well she does could be determined by how convincingly she acts the role and how Cuomo responds to her presence.

In conventional terms, Nixon appears to present little more than a nuisance candidacy. The incumbent has $30 million in the bank, his alliance with New Yorks most powerful special interestorganized laborseems secure, and he has dutifully punched every progressive button over the past seven years. So why worry?

Because these are not conventional times. New Yorks far-left-leaning Democrats deeply distrust their governor. A progressive gadfly, Fordham law professor Zephyr Teachout, embarrassed Cuomo in a primary four years ago, and current polls demonstrate that rank-and-file Democrats arent thrilled with him, either. New York mayor Bill de Blasio, always at dagger points with his nemesis, has lent significant logistical support to Nixona longtime supporterwhich, in turn, could attract national progressive money to her candidacy. Whether all this adds up to a serious threat Cuomo seems doubtful, but it could do critical damage to whatever post-gubernatorial ambitions he harbors, given the strong leftward drift of the national Democratic Party.

Taken in that context, then, Nixons challenge could wind up doing damage to sound policy in New York Statedepending on how Cuomo responds to it. Look for him to seize every opportunity to project a progressive image. A hint of what might be coming could be seen in Lower Manhattans Zuccotti Park last week, when the governor lay downliterallynext to American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten as part of an anti-gun die-in protest. Lurking nearby was Michael Mulgrew, president of the AFTs New York City affiliate, the United Federation of Teachers. He had negotiated a $9 billion sweetheart of a long-term contract with City Hall, which de Blasio might reasonably have thought earned him a measure of loyaltybut the mayor wasnt remotely welcome at the Zuccotti Park kabuki dance.

As with great nations, Big Labor has permanent interests, not permanent allies. From the UFTs perspective, de Blasio is yesterdays newsits next contract will be negotiated with a different mayorwhile Cuomo is up for reelection. Opportunities for union advantage-taking reside in Albany this year, not at City Halla stark fact of considerable significance to Nixon and her mayoral allies.

So back to Zuccotti Park. As symbolic gestures go, the Cuomo-Weingarten-Mulgrew affirmation spoke more to transactionalism than to solidarity, the governor and the union having been at loggerheads for much of his tenure. When it came to the conflict between the unions economic and job-security concerns and childrens education, Cuomo in his first term stood firmly with the kids. He had famously appointed himself the students lobbyist, pledging support for stringent teacher-evaluation standards and tough classroom-performance benchmarks. And he provided strong, often critical, support for alternatives to union-dominated public education, especially for charter schools. But even as Cuomos relationship with the UFT grew frigid, open warfare broke out with the unions upstate affiliate, New York State United Teachers. (Nixon, interestingly, just resigned as a paid representative of the Alliance for Quality Education, an NYSUT front.)

But after Cuomo was jolted by Zephyr Teachouts surprisingly strong 2014 primary challenge, the governors ardor for quality public education began to cool. He backed off from a meaningful teacher-evaluation regimen a year ago, and talk of tougher student-performance standards had disappeared into the ether before that. Even his bedrock support for charter schools may be waning. Not surprisingly, then, Cuomos relationship with Mulgrew began to warm, and while its not likely that the governor has fully rehabilitated himself in union eyes, he doubtless will have further opportunities to please the bosses as the Albany legislative session progresses.

Nixons emergence seems to have eliminated any possibility of backsliding. Shes a Teachout analogue who could, like her predecessor, take a substantial bite out of Cuomos already-lukewarm progressive support in September. This, the governor could survive, but the loss of union support would be a catastrophe.

So while the presence of Weingarten and Mulgrew in Zuccotti Park last week probably didnt represent an endorsement, it clearly signaled a rapprochementdriven, no doubt, by Cuomos own newly transactional approach to public education. Look for more of this as Cuomos reelection year proceeds.

Photo by Cindy Ord/Getty ImagesIve written this article once before. It was titled Fatal Preservation and appeared in the Summer 1997 issue of City Journal, following the murders of six-year-old Elisa Izquierdo and other New York City children by violent, drug-addicted parents to whose custody they had been returned. I described how a once-sensible liberal reform known as family preservation, designed to keep troubled but essentially functional poor families together by providing them with services and counseling, had been carried to ideological extremes, in which judges and social workers zealously reunified children with monsters.

Later that year, Congress passed, and President Clinton signed, landmark legislation, the Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1997 (ASFA), aimed at curbing the excesses of family preservation. Many in the social-work establishment, including officials in the administrations of New York Citys last two mayors, Bill de Blasio and Michael Bloomberg, have remained hostile to ASFA and committed to the old family-preservation orthodoxy. Now a new spate of child fatalities suggests that de Blasios Administration for Childrens Services (ACS) may be redoubling this commitment. The commissioner brought in to clean up ACS after these deaths has retained the nations leading institutional advocate for family preservation to review the agencys practices. The results could be ominous for the safety of New Yorks children.

While family preservation sounds like the kind of policy that social conservatives would support, its pedigree comes from the Left. It dates from the rights revolution of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when activists reacting to past racial and class injustices came to believe that poor families too often had their children taken away because of cultural bias. They sought to keep such families together when possible by offering them services such as emergency financial assistance and family counseling. Family preservation was originally billed as a means of helping such families through temporary crises involving short-term neglect or isolated abusenot families with a history or serious risk of life-threatening abuse or neglect due to parental addiction, mental illness, or sociopathy.

The law began incorporating the new preference for preserving families in the late 1970s and early 1980s, with the language of the statutes seeming to reflect the reasonable original intent to limit the policy to situations in which it did not seriously endanger children. The federal Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980 required states, in order to qualify for federal foster-care funding, to make reasonable efforts to keep families together prior to removing a child from the home and to reunify families after removal. Similarly, the New York State Child Welfare Reform Act of 1979 and subsequent legislation required preventive services and reasonable efforts to preserve or reunite families when it was reasonable to believe that this would enable a child to remain with or be returned to his familythat is, when it was reasonably likely that these services would significantly improve the parents behavior.

Implementing this language proved problematic. Because states risked the loss of federal funds for doing too little to preserve families, but not for doing too much, bureaucrats erred on the side of keeping children in dangerous family situations. This tendency was reinforced by the efforts of several large liberal foundations, such as the Annie E. Casey Foundation, which devoted millions of dollars to promoting preventive-services programs, rather than foster care, as the first option in even extreme cases. These taxpayer-funded servicesincluding payment of housekeepers to cook, clean, and shop for abusive or neglectful parentswere often extraordinarily generous, well out of the financial reach of other poor or even middle-class families.

Carrying the cultural sensitivity that motivated family preservation to an absurd length, one of the foundations proclaimed that child abuse  (in sneer quotes) may simply reflect a groups cultural norms. This ideology found a receptive audience in the new social-work establishment, which, going to the opposite extreme from earlier excesses, began to view keeping even the most dangerous families together as almost always reasonableand not doing so as unacceptably judgmental. A caseworker interviewed in a Bill Moyers television documentary thus deplored the labeling process that puts a crack-addicted single mother in a different category from a working family unable to afford day care. And in one case that I described in the 1997 article, when a Bronx father killed his five-year-old son by hanging him from a coatrack, rupturing his liver and crushing his chestfor taking a piece of cake from the refrigeratorchild-welfare workers listed the permanency goal for the surviving children as return to parent.

Congress acted to contain this lunacy with the enactment of ASFA in 1997. The act made three principal changes to the law governing federal child-welfare funding. First, it expressly declared that the childs health and safety shall be the paramount concern in determining the reasonable efforts to be made to preserve or reunify families. Second, it provided that these efforts werent required in the most egregious casesspecifically, where:

the parent had killed (i.e., committed murder or involuntary manslaughter of) another child;



the parent had severely injured the child in question or another child;



the parents parental rights to another child had been involuntarily terminated; or



the parent had subjected the child in question to other aggravated circumstances to be defined by the individual states, which may include but need not be limited to abandonment, torture, chronic abuse, and sexual abuse.

Third, to end the revolving door in which abused children often bounced back and forth between their biological parents and various foster homes, ASFA required states to move to terminate parental rights, and to begin the process of placing children in permanent adoptive families, when they had spent 15 of the previous 22 months in foster care, as well as in cases of abandonment or where reasonable efforts at reunification were not required because the parent had killed or severely injured a child. Exceptions were made where a child was in the foster care of a relative, if reasonable efforts to keep the family together were still required under the law and had not been made, or if state officials could document a compelling reason that adoption was not in the childs best interest. The definition of compelling reason was left to the states.

The law thus gave states a fair amount of latitude to establish when reasonable efforts could be dispensed with and when termination proceedings would be required. New York State, after missing the compliance deadline, eventually passed one of the weaker ASFA-enabling statutes, as the Democratic-led state assembly sought to retain as much of the family-preservation philosophy as possible. The New York law does add one additional aggravated circumstance to the federally mandated situations, such as murder, where efforts to preserve families are not required: severe or repeated abuse of a child, including rape and other particularly vicious sexual assaults. But unlike the statutes in many other states, it does not include other forms of sexual abuse such as forcible touching or torture that does not result in serious physical injury. And the compelling reasons it specifies for not initiating termination and adoption proceedings are absurdly broad and circular, including there are insufficient grounds and the child has a permanency goal other than adoption. So caseworkers and judges determined to cling to the old family-preservation dogma have always had some leeway to do so in New York.

New York City, however, had begun moving away from this dogma even before the passage of ASFA and the New York implementation law. After Elisa Izquierdos horrific 1995 death following prolonged torture by her crack-addicted mother, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani declared: The philosophy of child welfare has been too rigidly focused on holding families together . . . at the cost of protecting babies and children and When a child is abused, when child safety is in question, then government must act. Giuliani shut down the old Child Welfare Administration, an arm of the Human Resources Administration superagency, replacing it with the new cabinet-level ACS, and tapped Nicholas Scoppetta, a respected former deputy mayor and federal prosecutor and himself once a foster child, as the first commissioner.

Scoppetta seemed strongly committed to the new philosophy at first, even suggesting that the city needed to consider the creation of new orphanages like the one where he and his brothers had lived for seven years. But in 1999, as part of the settlement of a federal class-action lawsuit brought by the advocacy group Childrens Rights against the agency, he agreed to the appointment of an expert panel of monitors funded and staffed by the vehemently pro-family-preservation Annie E. Casey Foundation. When later that year, Childrens Rights issued a report criticizing ACS for still not doing enough to remove endangered kids from abusive homespointing to a 50 percent increase in fatalities of children known to ACS on Scoppettas watchthe Casey panel revealed its ideology. Casey president and panel head Douglas Nelson blasted the report for singling out fatalities, saying that this may reinforce the oversimplified view that we can protect at-risk kids in fragile families with an even more aggressive approach to removal and chiding its Childrens Rights patrons for sounding like Mayor Giuliani. Issuing his own final monitoring report the next year, Nelson reiterated the Casey philosophy that help for families, including birth parents . . . should be at the heart of any child welfare system.

Prosecutors found that the girl, who weighed only 36 pounds, had been systematically tortured for weeks.

In a classic case of going native, Scoppetta began to take on the views of the experts and the bureaucrats left over from the old Child Welfare Administration. He asked the Casey panel to stay on as advisors after the court-ordered monitorship period ended. And by the time he left office with Giuliani at the end of 2001, he was a full convert, grading ACS offices on how swiftly families were reunited and crediting the panel with shifting his focus from child removal . . . toward a recognition that child safety could often be better served by preventing the trauma of foster care placement in the first place.

The ACS commissioners appointed by Mayor Bloomberg didnt have to be converted. Bloomberg was, in many ways, an excellent mayor, but like many successful technocrats, his greatest weakness (and his greatest difference from Giuliani) was a tendency to defer to experts in an unfamiliar field, without realizing the almost invariably liberal bias of their expertise. He followed that instinct in selecting ACS chiefs firmly committed to family preservation. William Bell, who served from 2002 to 2004, was a social-work Ph.D. and former Child Welfare Administration official whom Scoppetta had brought over as deputy commissioner when ACS was formed. He would go on to head Casey Family Programs, a Casey Foundation spinoff, where he has criticized caseworkers viewing children, rather than parents, as their clients. John Mattingly, who served from 2004 to 2011, had been a Casey Foundation official and a member of the Casey-led ACS monitoring panel.

Mattinglys tenure, however, was jolted by several horrendous deaths that, according to disappointed family-preservation advocates, shook his conviction to the cause. The most notorious was the 2006 murder of seven-year-old Nixzmary Brown by her stepfather while her biological mother looked on. Prosecutors found that the girl, who weighed only 36 pounds and whose body was covered with bruises, had been systematically tortured for weekstorture that included binding her to a chair, forcing her to eat cat food and use a litter box, and submerging her head under water. The final beating, in which the stepfather bashed her head against a bathtub, came after she took a cup of yogurt from the refrigerator.

Nixzmary was the fourth child in two months to die while in the custody of parents previously investigated by ACS. In her case, her school had reported eight months earlier that she had been absent 46 days and had several injuries, including a burned hand. The month before she died, the school reported that she had further extensive absences, appeared emaciated, and had a black eye. ACS closed the first case, determining that her 46 absences did not establish educational neglect because they had been due to her mothers inability to get her to school during her pregnancy. They let the second case languish after being denied entry to the home and failing to seek a warrant.

Nixzmarys murder seems to have been a shock that launched Mattingly on something of the reverse course from the one that Scoppetta had traveled. He was not a family-preservation ideologue, he told the New York Times, but thought that a childs safety had to come first, and he acknowledged serious practice problems in the present approach. If you are leaving children in the home just to leave them in the home, that is bad practice and we will fix it. He implemented a new policy requiring caseworkers to seek warrants when denied access to a childs home. Another reforma presumptive policy of seeking removal of newborns from parents who had lost custody of other childrencame two years later, after an infant was beaten to death by his drug-addicted mother, who had been allowed to keep him even though she had lost custody of another baby the previous year.

Discussing this new policy, Mattingly sounded like a man growing frustrated with ideology as it clashed with reality: When I got here three and a half years ago, the assumption was the child would stay in the home, he told an interviewer, but if older siblings are in foster care, and the court has affirmed that they are at substantial risk of harm, it makes very little sense to make the opposite assumption about a six-pound baby coming into the home. He had seen too many deaths in such cases, he said.

Mattingly seems to have taken no further significant steps to limit family preservation or enforce strict compliance with ASFA, though. Even after another gruesome death rocked the city in 2010that of four-year-old, 18-pound Marchella Pierce, who was starved, drugged, and beaten to death by another substance-abusing mother while ACS failed to investigate complaintsMattingly embraced only cosmetic reforms, such as enhanced supervision of caseworkers and service providers. Such proposals, which crop up whenever a child dies, turn on the notion that the dead child slipped through the cracks of an overworked, undertrained bureaucracy. But children like Marchella and Nixzmary and Elisa Izquierdo, all known to the system but left in danger, dont slip through its cracks. They are the victims not of ineptitude but of ideology. Ultimately, Mattingly, though apparently torn, could not shed his ideology; and on his watch, the number of children placed in permanent adoptive homes fell by almost 50 percent (from 2,314 in fiscal year 2005 to 1,186 in fiscal year 2011), while the number of children known to ACS who died increased from 30 to 46 per year.

These numbers seem to have gotten even worse under Bill de Blasios first ACS commissioner, Gladys Carrion, who rewrote the agencys mission statement to proclaim up-front that ACS is deeply committed to . . . ensuring that interventionsincluding child protection . . . are performed in a manner that is respectful of the racial, cultural and economic character of each family involved. Fatalities of children from families with previous ACS involvement or abuse reports spiked at 58 during her first year in office in 2014, though they fell back to 43 in 2015. And adoptions (which had increased somewhat under Mattinglys successor, Judge Ronald Richter, during the last two years of the Bloomberg administration) fell back to slightly lower levels than under Mattingly.

Carrion resigned in December 2016 after another string of horrifying deaths. Two killings in particular stood out. Six-year-old Zymere Perkins of Harlem died in September 2016 after being brutally beaten for over a year by his mothers boyfriend. Subsequent investigations revealed that Zymere had been the subject of five previous abuse reports to ACS, including reports by his school of repeated absences and unexplained injuries, but that the agency had credulously accepted his mothers explanations that he was accident prone. ACS had actually closed two of the five cases as unfounded; and even for those it found to be indicated, it had merely referred the family for preventive services (including mental-health and drug-treatment therapy, for which they failed to keep appointments).

The other death was that of three-year-old Jaden Jordan of Gravesend, Brooklyn, in December 2016. Like Zymere, Jaden was the victim of a savage beating by his mothers boyfriend. Unlike in Zymeres case, there had apparently been only one previous report about Jadenan anonymous tip a few days earlier that he was being kept in a dog cratebut ACS failed to pursue the lead because the caller gave the wrong address. These were by no means the only fatalities during Carrions tenure. A study by Comptroller Scott Stringer found that, in just the three months prior to Zymeres killing, ten other children had died whose families had been the subject of four or more prior child-abuse reports.

An earlier report by the citys Department of Investigation (DOI) analyzed two other fatalities and one near-fatality of abused children previously known to ACS, and demonstrated the link between these tragedies and the agencys systemic violation of the ASFA mandate to place child safety over family reunification. DOI found that ACS repeatedly investigated abuse and neglect allegationsoften the same or similar allegationswithin a family . . . and found credible evidence that the children had been repeatedly abused and neglected, yet rather than seek to remove the children, it provided the same, evidently ineffective, services over and over. In fact, incredibly, in two of the three cases of death or severe injury studied by DOI, ACSs permanency plan for the victims surviving siblings (now finally in foster care) is to return them to their parents. And in the third case, the agency stalled for more than two months in filing an ASFA court motion to end its reasonable efforts to reunify the siblings with the mother who had beaten their sister to death.

DOI also found that ACS habitually violates the ASFA and state law requirement to move to terminate parental rights when children have been in foster care for 15 of the preceding 22 months, thus freeing them for adoption into safe, permanent homes. These petitions have not been filed within the required time in 82 percent of cases, DOI found, resulting in delayed or thwarted adoptions for more than 1,000 children a year. This likely helps to explain the citys drastic reduction in adoption placements.

Its worth quoting at length from one of DOIs case studies, concerning a deceased child it calls Morgan, as it gives a chilling sense of ACSs zeal to keep families together at all costs:

During the 12 years prior to Morgans death, ACS investigated 11 reports of neglect concerning Morgans mother and indicated seven of those reports, repeatedly determining that [she] neglected her children. . . . The findings . . . included exposing some of her children to cocaine in utero . . . and failing to ensure they attended school. Over the course of six years, the family received ACS-contracted preventive services at least five times. . . . [When finally placed] in foster care, the children thrived. They received needed therapeutic and developmental services, took their prescribed medications, and [were] enrolled in school for the first time. During this time, the mother tested positive for cocaine while pregnant with her fifth child despite the fact that she was attending substance abuse treatment. While in foster care, the children made numerous . . . allegations [that] the younger childrens father . . . was abusive . . . including . . . attempting to suffocate two of the children. Neither ACS nor provider agency staff reported these allegations. . . . Morgans foster parent . . . wanted to adopt [her]; however, adoption was not pursued, and, instead, the children were trial discharged to their mother. Following the trial discharge, the mother often failed to cooperate with the services that the family court ordered . . . and the progress the children had made while in foster care began to deteriorate significantly. . . . [W]hile the children were home on trial discharge . . . ACS found that the mother was failing to ensure one . . . attended school and to prevent [them] from injuring each other. However, ACS failed to inform the court of this . . . and the court final discharged the children to the mother. Seven months after being final discharged, two different ACS investigators separately reported that the children were living in a deplorable, unsafe, hazard-filled home and were only sporadically attending school. . . . ACS investigated three reports of neglect during the year and a half following the childrens discharge . . . and indicated all three. . . . However, the children remained in the mothers care. . . . [A] preventive services agency was working with the family up to the day Morgan died. Despite all the evidence of neglect ACS uncovered . . . over many years . . . it failed to . . . consider that the neglect was chronic. ACS repeatedly provided the mother with the same services over and over again, failing to see that this was futile. . . . [T]he mother continued to fail to meet the childrens basic needs.

In view of this agency mind-set, its probably not surprising that children have continued to die since Carrions departure in December 2016. Five-year-old Michael Guzman of Queens was found dead on January 22, 2017. ACS had investigated 13 reports of abuse and neglect of Michael and his five siblings since 2008, finding evidence of physical trauma, sexual abuse, or inadequate food or clothing eight times, but allowed all six children to remain in the home. The problem with ACS is their motto is, Keep the families togetherthey would have kept the Manson family together, an agency source told the New York Post after Michaels death.

A few days later, four-year-old Zamair Coombs of Harlem was beaten to death with a broomstick by his mother, the subject of two previous ACS cases. In February 2017, the 2016 death of one-year-old Nichelle Warring of Bedford-Stuyvesant was ruled a homicide. Her father, a member of the Bloods gang, had been probed by ACS for sexual abuse of another daughter. On March 20, one-year-old Bianca Abdul of Staten Island, whose parents had been investigated seven times by ACS, with three cases substantiated for drug use and inadequate supervision, was found dead in her crib from an opioid overdose. In April, one Bronx infant from a family with a previous ACS history, two-month-old Kadiha Marrow, was savagely beaten, and another, three-month-old Mark Ruane, Jr., was found dead. In response to subsequent deaths, such as that of 16-month-old Nylah Lewis, whose father broke her skull on Fathers Day, ACS has taken to claiming that it is barred by confidentiality laws from saying whether it had any previous involvement with the family.

Appointed commissioner in February 2017, David Hansell, a Yale-educated lawyer, has impressive credentials in government, consulting, and the nonprofit sector. But nothing in his background, including stints at the Gay Mens Health Crisis and as an Obama administration welfare official, or in his statements and actions since taking the job, suggests that he will challenge the progressive family-preservation orthodoxy. Interviewed for a vehemently pro-family-preservation article in the New York Times (which attacked foster care as Jane Crow), he boasted that under his leadership, the agency was trying to steer away from removing children from the home and instead seeking court-ordered supervision, under which families are required to participate in services. Reiterating this position in an op-ed, he noted that ACS is now training new caseworkers in the discredited theory of implicit bias, apparently to curb removals of abused black and Latino children from black and Latino parents.

ACS would have kept the Manson family together, an agency source told the New York Post.

The team that Hansell has brought in to review ACS operations, including retired Los Angeles child-protection chief Philip Browning and Casey Family Programs, also offers no reason for optimism. Browning stepped down from the L.A. job a year ago, after the death of an 11-year-old boy weighing 34 pounds who had been locked in a closet and starved; Brownings agency had kept the boy with his family despite six previous abuse reports. Casey Family Programs, the nations leading family-preservation promoter, is worse. In a 2009 speech, its president, former ACS commissioner William Bell, attacked the child as client paradigm and frankly declared his goal to move our social welfare system from a focus on child welfare to a focus on family welfare. Predictably, Caseys first report to ACS argued against judging an agencys overall safety on the basis of the number of child fatalities that happened on its watch and cautioned against reactive and punitive action against agency staff following high-profile tragedies, lest this lead to fear-based decisions and an increased number of children removed and placed in foster care.

In a forthcoming book, Out of Harms Way, Richard Gelles, former dean of social work at the University of Pennsylvania and a longtime critic of family preservation, laments that the Casey philosophy of focusing on parents, rather than children, already dominates the social-work establishment. This philosophy is directly at odds with the rule that Congress enshrined in ASFA 20 years ago that child health and safety must be the systems paramount concern. Its time to stop subverting the law and start protecting childrens lives.

Top Photo: Seven-year-old Nixzmary Brown was murdered in 2006 by her stepfather, while her biological mother looked on. (ROBERT A. SABO/GETTY IMAGES)copyright Parliament

The whole aid sector is in the same boat as Oxfam over safeguarding and that boat is sinking, according to an international human rights lawyer.

Speaking at a meeting of the Haiti All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) in Parliament yesterday, Brian Concannon, executive director of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, said the Oxfam safeguarding scandal had engulfed the entire international aid sector. And he compared the aid sector in the wake of these scandals to a sinking ship.

Because of these scandals the whole sector is now in this boat, and it's sinking said Concannon. If they dont fix the boat, then it will sink.

He presented a summary of recommendations from a soon-to-be published report from in full by the Institute of Justice and Democracy in Haiti. He said these recommendations would help the move the conversation forward.

This included proposing a sector-wide inquiry because everyone else in the international aid sector needs to step up, because if they aren't already, they will be suffering the same consequences as Oxfam until the problem is corrected. Its an opportunity for the entire humanitarian aid sector to step up and do a review of accountability structures and procedures that are already in place.

He also said the entire sector needs to put in place reporting and accountability structures for all external and internal operations. He said this would be extremely difficult, but was extremely necessary.

An independent, cross-sector review

Jennifer Robinson from Doughty Street International law firm, welcomed Oxfams announcement of an internal commission into its safeguarding issues, but joined Concannon in calling on Oxfam to consent to an independent, cross-sector review driven by the charity sector, and the governments of the UK and Haiti.

Robinson said that a cross sector review would have greater credibility with the public; would better protect Oxfams reputation and the reputation of other aid organisations and would also be far more cost efficient than if each and every aid organisation conducted its own, internal review.

Concannon called Oxfam the visible tip of the iceberg in terms of abuse in international aid. This gave the organisation an opportunity to play a historical role in helping to rebuild not only the trust and confidence of the donating public, but also of the people of Haiti, by helping lead on an independent review.

I would encourage Oxfam to extend its inquiry to the broader, sector wide approach. I understand why that is extremely unwelcome. What Oxfam has already committed to do is substantial but I would encourage them nevertheless as Oxfam has a unique, opportunity to play a real historic role in structural change for the sector.

Being the visible tip of the iceberg gives the charity potential for leadership of the rest of the iceberg. The historical position Oxfam has of already being a leader in making the international aid sector more accountable. In many ways, Oxfam being the international poster boy for this scandal is ironic given that Oxfam has been a leader in promoting accountability.

He also said that, while Oxfams proposed internal commission would present short-term advantages for Oxfam, public trust has now been damaged to the point where anything other than the most transparent review process would present more long-term disadvantages.

Oxfam does not have all the answers

Also appearing before the APPG, Nick Roseveare, director of international programmes at Oxfam, said that in terms of an independent review, Oxfam needed to be very careful of how it positioned itself, not to protect ourselves but because of whats right. It would be wrong for the organisation to suggest that it is proper for it to lead the sector in finding solutions to this at the moment.

He said the sector didnt have all the answers yet, and said it would be a joint process of discovery for the wider sector to find solutions to what seems to be a systemic problem.

Roseveare cited figures recently published by the Charity Commission which said that 26 international aid organisations have now reported a total of 80 separate, serious safeguarding incidents.

As unenviable as being the tip of the iceberg is, its very important that the rest of the iceberg is exposed, he said. Theres a great deal of the iceberg left to be uncovered. He did say however that Concannon and Robinson were absolutely right that there is a need for a cross-sectoral look at this.

Roseveare confirmed that Oxfam had lost a number of its regular supporters, and said it was very grievous and sad for the charity to have been the trigger for a fall in public trust and confidence in the wider aid sector.

Its not about raising money for us, but if the publics faith in the aid sector has been damaged because of this, then its our responsibility to repair it, said Roseveare. Oxfam knows that its not alone in this, but that it should be the trigger of these things is very troubling indeed.

He said the internal review of the organisation, co-chaired by Zainab Bangura, former under-secretary general of the United Nations, and Katherine Sierra, former vice president of the World Bank, would publish a report "probably within the next 12-months" and "may well visit Haiti" at some point in its investigations.Charities and other progressive organisations are being squeezed out of public discussion by socially conservative and regressive forces, according to a report assessing the state of global civil society.

CIVICUS published its annual State of Civil Society Report 2018 this month, which warns that uncivil society is on the rise.

It said that regressive voices are entering the civil society arena, and that: Socially conservative forces are claiming civil society space, among them pressure groups that seek to rob women of their reproductive rights, think tanks that act as outriders for nationalist and xenophobic ideas and market fundamentalism, and protest movements against LGBTI, refugees and migrants rights.

The report said these voices are increasingly emboldened and that in some cases they are supported by regressive governments which are funding organisations.

It called for greater clarity about what civil society is.

We need to be clear about and restate the essential values that define who can be identified as a member of civil society, the report says.

We also need to pay renewed attention to efforts to demonstrate that we are accountable and transparent, so the public can understand what civil society really is and believes in.

It also said civil society needs to formulate a new defence of multilateralism and to find new ways of engaging with the private sector.

Get our house in order on gender discrimination

The report highlighted the #MeToo and Times Up movements as an example of an issue that needs attention from civil society and said the sector must get its own house in order.

We need to take an active part in movements that put patriarchy under the spotlight and challenge behaviours and attitudes that enable sexism, gender discrimination and other forms of intersecting discriminations, wherever we see them, it said.

"But the sector must get its own house in order first. Revelations and rumours of sexual harassment within civil society must be taken seriously and investigated fully, perpetrators dealt with and findings shared transparently.

"We need to lead by example by putting in place and implementing clear policies on workplace harassment in CSOs. We have to ensure we model and promote best practice as civil society, on this issue as in all others.

Fightback is on

In previous years the report has noted the increasing difficulties for civil society. But this year it said there is some cause for optimisim, that resistance works and that there had been a number of successes in 2017 to show this.

It gave the example of protests in Romania resisting government plans to soft pedal on corruption and persuading the government in El Salvador to ban gold-mining practices that harm the land, water and communities.

Almost everywhere we look, we see signs of citizens organising and mobilising in new and creative ways to defend civic freedoms, fight for social justice and equality, and pushback on populism, said Dr. Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah, secretary general of CIVICUS. What is different about this years report is the focus on resistance; the fightback is on.

The report added that the challenge now is to sustain this fightback.

Top ten trends

The report identified ten key trends. They are:

Globalised neoliberalism is failing people all around the world. Polarising politics are dividing our societies. Personal rule by political leaders is undermining democratic institutions. Attacks are increasing on journalists reporting on corruption and public protests. Growing surveillance and manipulation of opinion is betraying the promise of social media. Uncivil society is claiming civil society space. Multilateralism is in the firing line. The private sector's growing role in governance demands more scrutiny. Patriarchy is now firmly under the spotlight. Civil society is fighting back and building resolute resistance.



This was a major breach of trust, and Im really sorry that this happened, Mark Zuckerberg told CNNs Laurie Segall. Our responsibility now is to make sure that this doesnt happen again. Speaking on camera for the first time since the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke over the weekend, Zuckerbergs appearance on AC360 capped a whirlwind media blitz that included several print interviews and a personal post on his social media platform.

Throughout the day, Zuckerberg repeatedly apologized for Facebooks failures and promised that changes were already underway. He stressed his willingness to testify before lawmakers, and acknowledged that some level of regulation may be necessary. In many ways, he said all the right things. But after five days that saw serious concerns raised and the companys stock plummet, while Zuckerberg and other Facebook top execs remained silent, its fair to ask why it took so long.

In addition to CNN, Zuckerberg spoke with The New York Times, Wired, and Recode, making plenty of news along the way. He told the Times that Facebook had used new technology to identify and eliminate a significant number of accounts based in Macedonia spreading fake news during the Alabama special election. He told Recode that Facebook needs to develop standards for content that reflect the values of various communities, adding I feel fundamentally uncomfortable sitting here in California at an office, making content policy decisions for people around the world. And he acknowledged to Wired that he couldnt say whether the personal data of American voters had made its way into the hands of Russian operatives.

RELATED: The Facebook Armageddon

Facebooks post-election fumbling was already a major story before reports on Cambridge Analyticas use of the platform by the Observer and The New York Times dropped. Wireds most recent cover featured a bruised headshot of Zuckerberg over a story about the tech giants two years of hell.

With each new revelation about manipulation on its platform, it becomes increasingly clear that Facebook has, at least to some extent, lost control of its technology. Its also apparent that users, by and large, arent aware the privacies theyre forfeiting when they sign up for the service or click through any number of third-party apps. Zuckerbergs openness to oversight is welcomed, but it comes as legislators in the US, and especially in Europe, are already circling. If Facebook is to rebuild any of the trust it has squandered, yesterday cant be a one-off.

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Below, more on Zuckerbergs media tour and the fallout from the Cambridge Analytica controversy.

Changes underway: The Verges Jacob Kastrenakes breaks out the news from Zuckerbergs Wednesday afternoon post, noting that Facebook will further restrict the personal information that third-party apps receive.

The Verges Jacob Kastrenakes breaks out the news from Zuckerbergs Wednesday afternoon post, noting that Facebook will further restrict the personal information that third-party apps receive. The big picture: The New Yorkers Adrian Chen looks at our lives inside the surveillance machine. You dont need to believe Cambridge Analyticas own hype about the persuasive power of its methods to worry about how data-obsessed political marketing can undermine democracy, Chen writes.

The New Yorkers Adrian Chen looks at our lives inside the surveillance machine. You dont need to believe Cambridge Analyticas own hype about the persuasive power of its methods to worry about how data-obsessed political marketing can undermine democracy, Chen writes. A whistleblowers story : The Washington Posts Craig Timberg and Karla Adam speak with Christopher Wylie, the whistleblower whose revelations launched the Cambridge Analytica reports. I didnt set out to attack Facebook. Facebook has just been incredibly uncooperative, Wylie tells them. It hasnt respected the role of the media and scrutiny and embraced this scrutiny and worked to improve itself.

: The Washington Posts Craig Timberg and Karla Adam speak with Christopher Wylie, the whistleblower whose revelations launched the Cambridge Analytica reports. I didnt set out to attack Facebook. Facebook has just been incredibly uncooperative, Wylie tells them. It hasnt respected the role of the media and scrutiny and embraced this scrutiny and worked to improve itself. A familiar script: Last fall, The New York Timess Farhad Manjoo explained the Zuckerberg apology playbook. Scandals involving Facebook tend to follow a well-worn pattern, Manjoo wrote at the time. Though Zuckerbergs media blitz on Wednesday seemed to signal that the company is taking this controversy seriously, its worth looking back at how it has handled issues in the past.

Last fall, The New York Timess Farhad Manjoo explained the Zuckerberg apology playbook. Scandals involving Facebook tend to follow a well-worn pattern, Manjoo wrote at the time. Though Zuckerbergs media blitz on Wednesday seemed to signal that the company is taking this controversy seriously, its worth looking back at how it has handled issues in the past. Trust issues: Facebook is staring down the barrel of impending regulation.People are describing its algorithm-driving News Feed as a Frankenstein-like monster that even its creators cant control. Those words could have been written at any point in the past five days, but they actually come from last fall, when Wireds Jessi Hempel wrote about Zuckerbergs trust problem.

Other notable stories

In an expected decision, Meredith officially acknowledged that Time, Sports Illustrated, Fortune, and Money are up for sale. Our main portfolio that we built over time at Meredith has been focused on a different audience type, company CEO Tom Harty told The New York Timess Sydney Ember. Ember also reports that the company plans to immediately lay off around 200 employees, with about 1,000 about more cuts coming over the next 10 months.

As traditional media have scaled back coverage of the countrys conflicts abroad, a new crop of online publications gives voice to veterans and military journalists, reports Jack Crosbie for CJR. Sites like The War Horse and Task and Purpose join The New York Timess recently relaunched At War blog in providing coverage of Americas wars and the people who fight them with an unvarnished blend of personal experience and investigative reporting, Crosbie writes.

Breitbarts readership has plunged, reports Politicos Jason Schwartz. The right-wing site that saw its profile skyrocket during the 2016 campaign and early months of the Trump presidency garnered just 7.8 million unique visitors in February, down 49 percent from the same period a year earlier. Its no surprise that Breitbarts influence is waning as the country grapples with the harsh realities of a Trump presidency, particularly when Fox News already fills the Trump-can-do-no-wrong niche, writes Splinters David Uberti. It turns out that shilling for someone in power offers only so many opportunities for good content.

Longtime Fox News analyst Lt. Colonel Ralph Peters left the network in a blaze of glory on Tuesday, writing that he felt the channel had degenerated from providing a legitimate and much-needed outlet for conservative voices to a mere propaganda machine for a destructive and ethically ruinous administration. CNNs Oliver Darcy spoke with employees at Fox News, who he reports were rattled by the charges Peters levied. The thing hit like a bombshell, one staffer told him.

ICYMI: Facebook under fire following data-breach reports

Has America ever needed a media watchdog more than now? Help us by joining CJR today

Pete Vernon is a former CJR staff writer. Follow him on Twitter @ByPeteVernon.It might not have registered for most people trying to keep up with the maelstrom of news this week about the Facebook data leakthe one in which the shadowy, Trump-linked data company Cambridge Analytica got personal details on more than 50 million usersbut a number of critics noticed one of the The New York Timess stories about the topic changed as it was edited.

So what, you might ask? After all, that kind of thing happens on news websites all the time: A short version goes up quickly and then later is replaced by a longer version as more information comes in.

ICYMI: Ouch! Here are headlines editors probably wish they could take back

In this case, however, the Times removed a paragraph suggesting that Alex Stamosa senior Facebook executive in charge of securitywanted to be more open about Russian involvement on the platform, and Chief Operations Officer Sheryl Sandberg shut him down.

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That sent the media conspiracy machine into overdrive. A site called Law & Crime, run by ABC News legal commentator Dan Abrams, noticed the change and wrote a story suggesting that the Times changed the story because of a complaint from Facebook.

The New York Times apparently offers powerful third parties the ability to edit awaythat is, to delete from the internetunfavorable coverage appearing in the paper of records online edition, the site wrote. The story was picked up by Glenn Greenwald, the occasionally combative journalist who runs The Intercept, who also accused the Times of watering down the story after complaints from Facebook.

Fascinating: Big NYT article on Facebook originally said Alex Stamos left FB after clashing with FB officials  most prominently major Dem donor/operative Sheryl Sandberg  who were resisting disclosure on Russia. After FB complained, NYT deleted this https://t.co/kxNJqpGnsV https://t.co/A5eX001dbO  Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) March 21, 2018

Soon others joined the fray, including Kurt Walters of Demand Progress, who tweeted: The original has multiple sources saying advocacy to disclose info about Russian activities on FB caused friction/resistance by Sandberg & other execs. The second does not.

To their credit, Times reporters involved in the storyincluding Sheera Frenkel and Nicole Perlrothresponded to these allegations at length on Twitter, describing the changes to the story as nothing more than the usual editing process. They and others pointed out that the final version of the story still suggested Stamos and Sandberg clashed over the formers desire to be more open about Russian activity, it just didnt use the same specific sentence or word (consternation) as the original.

Glenn, I'm confused why you keep stating as fact that FB called NYT about the article (and that we subsequently weakened the passage). I'll repeat: I was the reporter who spoke to FB that day and this didn't happen.  Sheera Frenkel (@sheeraf) March 21, 2018

ICYMI: My heart sank. I wrapped up my work and headed home

None of this seemed to dissuade Greenwald, however, who continues to maintain that the Times made a significant change, after receiving criticism from Facebook, and is refusing to acknowledge it:

I'm sorry that your decrees aren't treated as gospel and that people still are allowed to question them. Along with many, many people, I view the subsequent versions about Sandberg as weaker than the first one. I'm not duty-bound to adopt your interpretations of how to read those  Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) March 21, 2018

To be fair to Greenwald and other Times critics, some of this is the papers fault. It routinely changes news storiesin some cases significantlyand then never discloses or explains the change. In several cases, the changes have become the subject of columns by former Public Editor Margaret Sullivan (the Times no longer has a public editor, after shutting down the position last year).

Web geeks have been recommending for some time that the paperand other publishersimplement a diffs approach, which maintains a record of all the changes in an article over time, the way Wikipedia does with its talk pages (WikiTribune, the new journalism venture from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, has a similar system).

There is a site called NewsDiffs that tracks changes to Times stories, which is how the latest changes were discovered. But it would be so much easier if that kind of tracking system was built into the Times website. The chances of that seem astronomical, however. If the Times was interested in talking openly about those kinds of things, it would probably still have a public editor. All we got in this case was a response from Times PR department on Twitter about how the Law & Crime story was false.

ICYMI: Trumps use of the word sanctimonious astonishes Twitter users

Has America ever needed a media watchdog more than now? Help us by joining CJR today

Mathew Ingram is CJRs chief digital writer. Previously, he was a senior writer with Fortune magazine. He has written about the intersection between media and technology since the earliest days of the commercial internet. His writing has been published in the Washington Post and the Financial Times as well as by Reuters and Bloomberg.Unless sex trafficking is something you have a specific interest in, you might not be familiar with a bill that was has been making its way through Congress, known as the Stop Enabling Sex Trafficking Act, or SESTA. The bill has already been approved by the House, and on Wednesday was overwhelmingly approved by the Senate, which means it is on its way to President Trump for approval, and if he signs itwhich seems likelySESTA will become law.

Why should you care? Because in the process of trying to combat sex trafficking, Congress could wind up endangering free speech. As CJR described in a piece on the law last year, when it was still going through the House, SESTA effectively weakens one of the key pillars of online speech: Namely, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. Thats the clause that gives platforms like Facebook and Google safe harbor for the user-generated content that appears on their platforms.

While everyone was focused on Facebook, Congress just amended the bedrock law that undergirds the internet https://t.co/nXe0fBETno via @nitashatiku  Scott Thurm (@ScottThurm) March 22, 2018

In a nutshell, Section 230 is the reason that Facebook, Google, and Twitter can distribute your tweets or status updates or video clips without being held legally liable for everything contained in them. SESTA effectively removes that protection or safe harbor in the case of anything involving sex traffickingwhich wouldnt be a problem, except for the fact that by removing that protection, free-speech advocates say it weakens the entire edifice that is Section 230.

This isnt happening in isolation. Section 230s safe-harbor provisions are already under fire from Congress because of the belief that they insulate platforms like Facebook or YouTube from responsibility for other kinds of speech the government doesnt like, including Russian troll campaigns, fake news, sexual harassment, neo-Nazi sentiments, and anything that falls into the large and growing bucket labeled terrorism.

And there's more coming. When I asked @MarkWarner yesterday what regulation Facebook should face, he specifically mentioned further changes to Sec. 230  the law that defines @facebook as a platform instead of as a publisher https://t.co/E3FPNJRbsE Sign up for CJR 's daily email  Kasie Hunt (@kasie) March 22, 2018

The risk is that if Section 230s protections for speech are weakenedas similar protections are being weakened in Europe in an attempt to stamp out fake news and hate speechit will give everyone from trolls to governments license to go after all kinds of speech they dislike or disagree with, because online publishers could become liable for that content. And while Facebook and Google might have the resources to deal with that, lots of small publishers and services dont.

As Senator Ron Wyden, one of the authors of Section 230, put it during debate over the bill on Wednesday: In the absence of Section 230, the internet as we know it would shrivel. Only the platforms run by those with deep pockets, and an even deeper bench of lawyers, would be able to make it. In other words, the bills relaxation of that safe harbor for speech could entrench the dominance that Facebook, Google, and other massive platforms already have.

Has America ever needed a media watchdog more than now? Help us by joining CJR today

Mathew Ingram is CJRs chief digital writer. Previously, he was a senior writer with Fortune magazine. He has written about the intersection between media and technology since the earliest days of the commercial internet. His writing has been published in the Washington Post and the Financial Times as well as by Reuters and Bloomberg.NEW MEDIA JOBS are on the rise, including a growth in data journalism and social media-based positions. Take, for instance, recent hiring at ProPublica. In April 2017, the outlets homepage advertised eight open positions, six of which were focused on data or news applications. Quartz has a Things Team dedicated to data-driven, visual, and otherwise creative journalism, and Vox has a team solely focused on creating content for Snapchat.

Even so, a 2017 International Center for Journalists study found that although technical skills in newsrooms were increasing, there was still a significant gap in competency between programmers hired specifically for technical work and reporters working in newsrooms. And as the American Press Institute noted late last year, these skills might be more important than ever: The modern journalist needs to find and fight misinformation, but doing so requires computational skills that are often missing.

A new study from the Tow Center for Digital Journalism examines the career trajectories of New York City journalists to better understand how technical skills have developed in newsrooms since 2010. To do so, we collected the employment histories for 6,116 newsroom staffers and freelancers for newspaper, broadcast, and digital-first companies in the New York City metropolitan area. The 24,598 jobs worked by those individuals were manually aggregated from LinkedIn and verified using other sources, then coded for analysis.

ICYMI: Who killed Time Inc.?

We find that data, analytic, and platform-based (DAP) jobs have grown substantially in newspaper and online media companies, now accounting for an estimated 9 percent of all jobs in those companies, while the share of traditional, non-DAP jobs decreased 8 percent in online media (9 percent in newspapers and 5 percent in broadcast). These skills have quickly become critical to the day-to-day functioning of newsrooms.

We also wanted to understand how employees move from company to company, and from industry to industry. To do this, we looked at the connections between companies, and between industries, based on employees moving between those companies. The following visualization shows the movement of employees working in DAP roles between NYC-based media companies from 2010 and 2015.

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Companies were included in this network if they hired an individual into a DAP role, or if they hired an individual from a DAP role. In total, 736 companies were included in the network, and there were 1,071 cases where employees moved from one company to another. Lines between two organizations indicate that an employee left one organization to work for the other. The size of the organizations circle indicates the relative number of employees moving through that organization.

Outlets such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, HuffPost, and Conde Nast are important influencers in this network. They occupy central positions, as many employees working in New York City media passed through these companies during this five-year period. Functioning as training grounds, they provide many employees with early on-the-job education that serves to shape subsequent years of their careers.

Notably, there is not a significant influx of employees from outside industries. High-tech companies such as Google are present in the network, but they are not central nor influential. Growth of data and platform-based jobs appears to be driven from within the industry.

Data indicates, however, that industry leaders within our sample employment network are starting to fill key positions (managers, digital editors, and others) by hiring from outside industries. While this type of recruitment requires additional resources, including higher salaries, companies such as HuffPost and Conde Nast are spearheading this emerging trend.

Our analysis, paired with prior work, suggests that when strategizing hiring practices, diversifying employee pools and skill sets, and adapting to new technology and modes of news production, newsrooms should think more broadly around talent investment. For larger media companies, the investment in new skills from other industries is a critical and strategic part of enabling success in technologically enabled newsrooms.

Beyond hiring, there is a need for renewed investment in training journalists to develop technical skills. Given the trend toward recruitment from within the news industry, it is important to foster the growth of new skills among existing reporters. But again, that training shouldnt necessarily come from within; sparking innovation requires new ideas from afield.

RELATED: New EU regulations will have serious implications for newsrooms worldwide

Has America ever needed a media watchdog more than now? Help us by joining CJR today

Matthew S. Weber and Allie Kosterich are fellows at the Tow Center for Digital Journalism. Matthew S. Weber is an associate professor at Rutgers University in the School of Communication and Information, and he has published extensively on the role of technology in newsrooms. Allie Kosterich is an assistant professor at Pace University in the Department of Media, Communications, and Visual Arts; her research focuses on media industry transformation.IN EARLY MARCH, Block Communicationsan Ohio-based media company that owns the Toledo Blade and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazettemerged those newspapers editorial page operations and appointed Keith Burris to lead them. The two papers would share the same editorial pagean effort that, to my knowledge, has never before been tried in American journalism, wrote Burris, who previously edited the Blades editorial pages. For all of us, this is going to be fun.

Many readers in Pittsburgh disagree. Burris appointment comes after an unsigned editorial, published in both papers in January, roiled readers in both cities and drew pointed criticism in Pittsburghfrom current and former Post-Gazette newsroom employees, community foundations, members of the publishers family, and other journalists. (Disclosure: The author was a staff reporter at the Post-Gazette from January 2012 to September 2015, and signed a letter from former Post-Gazette employees who objected to the editorial.)

ICYMI: A reporter asked for 20 years of lottery winner data. After analyzing the records, he noticed something unusual.

The unsigned Reason as Racism editorial appeared first at the Blade and then ran in the Post-Gazette on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. (The papers have previously run each others editorials from time to time.) The editorial cautioned that charges of racism are the new McCarthyism, and argued for the need to confine the word racist to people like Bull Connor and Dylann Roof. According to the editorials rationale, racist cannot function as a useful, evidence-backed descriptor, but only as a term of malice and libel.

The Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh attributed ultimate responsibility for the editorial to publisher John Robinson Block, who previously asked that Post-Gazette staff scrub President Donald Trumps shithole countries comment from an AP story slated for the front page.

Our publisher is requesting us to remove @realDonaldTrump's "vulgar language" from the lede in our @AP story about his vulgar language.  Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (@PittsburghPG) January 12, 2018

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A week later, Burris was identified as the author of the unsigned editorial, which he defended in a subsequent column. What happens if you think outside the box, about matters of identity conviction, elevated to an almost theocratic level? asked Burris. You get called out. You get called a racist yourself, and maybe even, for good measure, homophobic or misogynistic. A week after that, he appeared to call for a return to a more faith-based society in a piece that also blamed the 1960s and feminism for what he views as todays coarse culture. (Feminism, wrote Burris, was a step back toward barbarism, not away from it. It is a ridiculously inconsistent ideology: Let us be feral but victims too.)

Those readers repelled by Burris editorials were likely shocked by a March column in which Burris introduced himself to his Pittsburgh audience and outlined his vision for the merged editorial pages. Our search is a search for insight, which means that one has to be willing to risk giving offense, wrote Burris. He also endorsed a resistance to othodoxies [sic], ideologies, and -isms, and claimed that the opinion writer must have roots, but no permanent alliances.

ICYMI: Controversy as Pittsburgh Post-Gazette newsroom confronts its publisher

How this all will work in practice remains to be seen. Burris and Block did not respond to requests for comment. CJR also reached out to John Allison, who was named Post-Gazettes editorial page editor in 2016, to inquire about the new arrangement, but Allison declined to comment.

Burris appointment, however, seems destined to sustain the outrage of Post-Gazette readers and staffers, many of whom were alarmed and offended by Burris January columns. The Post-Gazettes new editorial page arrangement indicates the paper may not yield to their concerns.

I disagree with the ed board on Trump, Saccone, race, and many other things. The ed board doesnt speak for me.

THE REASON AS RACISM EDITORIAL is not the first time in recent memory the Post-Gazettes opinion pages caught blowback from its readership.

In June 2015, the paper published a column by now former associate editor Jennifer Graham about Caitlyn Jenner, which bore the headline Caitlyn Jenner is Still a Mister. Graham misgendered Jenner throughout the piece by referring to her with male pronouns, and suggested it was not unreasonable for people to say that Jenner, who had recently come out as transgender, would have headlined the tragic freak shows in carnivals of old. Reached by media reporter Jim Romenesko, Graham brushed off the criticism as all in a days work. Tom Waseleski, then the Post-Gazettes editorial page editor, defended Grahams column to Romenesko as well-written and worth publishing. Graham left the Post-Gazette in December 2015 for a job with the Deseret News.

The Post-Gazette published several letters critical of Grahams column. Jay Brown, director of the Human Rights Campaign, called Grahams column despicably offensive and inaccurate, and asked that Graham be relieved of her role as a columnist. While some Post-Gazette staff members talked about withholding their bylines from stories in protest, no byline strike occurred at that time.

A few months later, former PG columnist Jack Kelly wrote a column titled Remnants of Slavery, in which he posited that black Americans descended from slaves were better off than if their ancestors had remained in Africa. Damon Young, the Pittsburgh-based editor of Very Smart Brothas, blasted the column as shockingly offensive and unapologetically racist (along with factually inaccurate and structurally inept). Waseleski again defended the PGs writer, saying in a statement that columnists speak for themselves and their own viewsnot for the Post-Gazette. Kelly and Waseleski both retired in 2016.

Longtime Post-Gazette columnist Tony Norman was a member of the Post-Gazettes editorial board from 1999 to 2016. He wrote a column for the January 16 edition of the Post-Gazette titled MLKs Message Today: Resistance with Loving Kindness. While the column did not specifically call out Reason as Racism, it refuted many of the editorials central arguments. Unlike the racists of the past who luxuriated in the ugliness of their belief system, wrote Norman, todays racists desperately want to come across as reasonable and fair-minded in their intolerance.

Norman declined to comment about the current boards decision-making process, or about Burris, whom Norman says he does not know. In an email, Norman cited the firewall between the editorial board and internal critics such as himself.

As far as my perspective as a columnist is concerned, I can say what should be obvious: Im not changing my liberal ways to fits with the publishers ethos, Norman wrote. I disagree with the ed board on Trump, [GOP Congressional candidate Rick] Saccone, race, and many other things. The ed board doesnt speak for me.

I think it is disappointing in a community newspaper that there wouldnt be some deeper introspection and reckoning, for what that response means for its community mission.

FOR WHOM DOES THE POST-GAZETTE editorial board speak? The Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh, which represents the rank-and-file members of the Post-Gazette newsroom, does not usually take official positions on Post-Gazette editorials, but its executive committee broke with tradition to condemn the editorial, in a response the paper declined to print. (Guild President Michael Fuoco declined to comment about Burris hiring.) Members of the Block family signed a letter that argued the editorial went against the values of the late Bill Block, and voiced gratitude that the former publisher never had to read it. Damon Young, the Very Smart Brothas editor who decried the 2015 Remnants of Slavery column, called out Reason as Racism as the worst editorial youll read in a major newspaper this year.

Community members spoke out as well. Grant Oliphant, president of the Pittsburgh-based Heinz Endowments, co-wrote a widely shared letter with Pittsburgh Foundation president Maxwell King denouncing the Racism editorial.

I think it is disappointing in a community newspaper that there wouldnt be some deeper introspection and reckoning, for what that response means for its community mission, says Oliphant, who in an interview with CJR stressed his support for the First Amendment and his respect for the Post-Gazette news staff. There are people in our community of all ilks who feel vulnerable and scared and under attack and demeaned and degraded by the rhetoric coming out of Washington, and I think there was a sense of betrayal that our newspaper wouldnt stand up for them.

Bill Moushey, a journalism professor at Point Park University who worked as a Post-Gazette investigative reporter from 1985 to 2009, says he doesnt understand the rationale for putting Burris at the helm of the Post-Gazette editorial page. The entire community has joined against [the Reason as Racism editorial], he tells CJR. The unions, the foundations, everybody.

Block and Burris spoke with the Yale Daily News, in what appear to be their only interviews regarding the Reason as Racism backlash. (Block is a Yale alumnus.) In his comments, Block did not seem troubled by the criticism of the editorial, or concerns about the editorial pages political leaning.

A newspapers job is to comment on the issues of the moment, and thats what we do, Block told the Daily News. Controversy goes right along with being an independent newspaper, and being an independent newspaper of course means that people on both sides are surprised at times when you take a position that they dont think is consistent with other positions youve taken. Burris told the paper he had discussed contemporary usage of the word racist, and added, Sometimes you have to risk offending people to make people think.

For now, it seems the outcry in Pittsburgh and beyond are not enough to make its editorial board think twice. A newspaper is supposed to be the voice of a community, says Moushey, the former Post-Gazette investigative reporter. Not thumb their noses at us.

ICYMI: The outrageous editorial by a Charlottesville daily that preceded violence

Has America ever needed a media watchdog more than now? Help us by joining CJR today

Kim Lyons is a Pittsburgh-based freelance writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and other local and national publications. She was a 2015 Kiplinger Fellow in Public Affairs Journalism at Ohio State University, and is co-host of The Broadcast Podcast, focused on amplifying women's voices.Starr Companies Announces Organizational Changes

Starr Companies announced the following organizational and leadership changes within the Casualty business units.

Financial Lines and Professional Liability are consolidating under the leadership of Brian Inselberg, senior vice president. He will assume responsibilities for Political Risk and Crisis Management.

Dan Conway, executive vice president, will oversee Energy, Environmental, Transportation and Warranty. Additionally, he will act as special advisor for Construction and the General Casualty lines. All Energy lines are consolidated under the leadership of Carmella Capitano, vice president.

Kevin McCracken has been promoted to senior vice president. He will continue to manage Defense Base Act while assuming responsibilities for Risk Management, Commercial General Casualty, Excess Casualty, and a soon to be formed Mergers & Acquisitions profit center led by Nina Huffman, vice president.

Primary and Excess Construction are consolidating under the leadership of Andy Robinson, senior vice president.

Rob Cruz, senior vice president, will maintain leadership of Distribution, Field Operations and will assume management of Small Business.

Seasoned Insurance Exec, Willis, Joins Netradyne as New VP of Data Services and Insurance

San Diego-based Netradyne, an artificial intelligence (AI) technology provider focusing on driver and fleet safety, appointed Dale Willis as vice president of data services and insurance. Willis comes to Netradyne with an extensive background in both the automotive technology and insurance industries and plans to help advance Netradynes service offerings by leveraging the companys robust data offerings as a means to help insurance companies better understand the roads drivers use every day.

Netradynes advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies are creating deep driver, vehicle and environmental analysis; yielding unique opportunities to create efficiencies in risk identification, data trend analysis and timely payment of insurance claims. Their robust commercial fleet platform currently captures and analyzes several million driving miles each month and Willis expertise will allow the company to turn this insightful data into comprehensive offerings insurance companies can use to underwrite and analyze professional drivers across the country. In parallel, Willis will support customers who are actively reducing fleet risk by managing relationships with insurance carriers to provide evidence of improvement. He will also foster relationships with captive program managers to help drive fleet sales growth.

Willis keen business acumen will enable him to provide critical strategic counsel to the executive team and he looks forward to nurturing customer engagement by leveraging his strong fleet operations and technology background, knowledge in market research and skills in building strong client relationships. Willis brings 20 plus years of experience in the automotive and insurance industries. He previously held executive and management positions at Peak Telematics, Fleetmatics, National Interstate Insurance Company, Progressive Insurance and Navistar International Corporation.

PartnerRe Appoints New Head of Structured Risk

PartnerRe appointed Jonathan Schriber head of Structured Risk, North America P&C.

Schriber has extensive experience in structured risk solutions, having specialized in this line of business for much of his 24-year reinsurance career. Working out of PartnerRes Stamford office as part of the North America P&C business unit, he will report to Dick Sanford, head of North America P&C and President of PartnerRe US.

Most recently, he was chief underwriting officer, Global Reinsurance at W.R. Berkley Corporation where he was involved in overall underwriting strategy, aggregate management and new product development. He joined Berkley Re America in July 2007 to manage the North American brokered treaty unit where he developed new lines of business including structured risk and successfully opened a Canadian branch.

Schriber holds a Chartered Financial Analyst designation.Alondra Alvarez lives about five minutes from her high school on Detroits southwest side but she drives there instead of walking because her mother fears for her safety. Once the 18-year-old enters the building, her surroundings take on a more secure feel almost immediately as she passes through a bank of closely monitored metal detectors.

My mom has never been comfortable with me walking to school. My mom is really scared of street thugs, said Alvarez, who attends Western International.

As schools around the U.S. look for ways to impose tougher security measures in the wake of last months school shooting in Parkland, Florida, that left 17 people dead, they dont have to look further than urban districts such as Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles and New York that installed metal detectors and other security in the 1980s and 1990s to combat gang and drug violence.

Security experts believe these measures have made urban districts less prone to mass shootings, which have mostly occurred in suburban and rural districts.

Officials in some suburban and rural school districts are now considering detectors as they rethink their security plans after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, where 19-year-old former student Nikolas Cruz allegedly brought in a duffel bag containing an assault rifle and opened fire. Hes charged with 17 counts of first-degree murder and 17 counts of attempted murder.

The massacre has galvanized thousands of students around the country who walked out of their classrooms for 17 minutes  one for each Parkland victim  on March 14 to protest gun violence.

I think urban schools are eons ahead. Theyve been dealing with violence a lot longer than suburban schools, said Philip Smith, president of the National African American Gun Association.

During the mid-1980s, Detroit was one of the first districts in the nation to put permanent, walk-through metal detectors in high schools and middle schools. New York schools also had them in some buildings.

By 1992, metal detectors had been installed in a few dozen Chicago high schools. And in 1993, under pressure to make schools safer, Los Angeles district announced that it would randomly search students with metal detectors.

Such measures are designed to identify and hopefully deter anybody from bringing a weapon to school, but metal detectors alone portray an illusion of being safe, said Nikolai Vitti, superintendent of the 50,000-student Detroit Public Schools Community District.

Our schools need to be safer than they are, Vitti said. As a nation, we need to fully fund and make sure all districts can adequately staff school resource officers and also offer mental health and first-aid training to all educators.

Security measures dont always keep guns off school grounds. A 17-year-old high school senior was killed and another student wounded March 7 in a Birmingham, Alabama, classroom shooting. Metal detectors at the school were not in use that day. A 17-year-old student has been charged with manslaughter.

Two students were shot and three people suffered other injuries in February when a gun in a backpack accidentally fired inside a Los Angeles Unified School District middle school. The district does random metal-detector wand searches daily in middle schools and high schools. A 12-year-old girl has been charged with being a minor in possession of a firearm and having a weapon on school grounds.

In response to the Parkland shooting, Floridas governor has said he wants to spend $500 million to increase law enforcement and mental health counselors at schools, to make buildings more secure with metal detectors and to create an anonymous tip line.

A package of legislation passed by the New York state Senate includes provisions for metal detectors and improved security technology in schools. A parent in Knox County, Kentucky, has said his law office would donate $25,000 for metal detectors in schools there.

Alvarez, the student at Detroits Western International, said she and others who attend the school go through metal detectors every morning. Her elementary and middle schools also had metal detectors.

Ive always seen it as something that made me feel safe, she said, adding that all schools should have them and not just inner-city ones so students dont feel discriminated against.

Metal detectors are seen as a symptom of a stigma that already exists, said Mark Fancher, staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigans Racial Justice Project.

There is a presumption that urban schools  particularly those with students of color  are violent places and security demands you have procedures in place that are intended to protect the safety of the students, Fancher said.

But metal detectors, property searches, security guards and police in schools create conditions similar to those found in prisons, he said.

Students, themselves, internalize these things, Fancher said. If you create a school that looks like a prison, the people who go there will pretty much decide thats what is expected of them.

Many urban districts have a greater awareness and sensitivity when it comes to students needs, said Kenneth Trump, president of the Cleveland-based National School Safety and Security Services, a K-12 security consulting firm.

I think in urban schools, the approach of most of the educators, administrators and security personnel is, We realize there are issues kids bring to school, said Trump, who has been in the school safety field for more than 30 years. The people will tell you, We are not in denial  we acknowledge our problems. We just dont have enough resources to deal with it.

Suburban and rural administrators, parents and students often view themselves as different from their big-city counterparts, and that may impact how they treat school security, he said.

Theres very often that divide of Theres us and theres them. Were not the urban district. We are the alternative. Were the place people go to get away from the urban district, he said.

(Associated Press writer Jesse Holland in Washington contributed to this report.)

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.As hundreds of people stood in line for food and many went hungry during the days and weeks after Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, Walmart Inc. and local supermarkets threw out tons of spoiled meat, dairy and produce.

Emails and text messages made public Tuesday in a letter sent by the top Democrat on the House oversight committee describe frantic efforts by officials at Walmart and the Puerto Rican government to get fuel for generators to prevent food from going bad.

From the Federal Emergency Management Agency came only silence.

Within a three-hour time span, Walmart officials were able to connect, through email and text messages, with a congressmans office and local Puerto Rican government officials. They passed on their urgent request for help, just two days after the hurricane made landfall.

Meanwhile, the letter states, FEMA remained unresponsive for days.

The fuel issue is another window into difficulties the agency has faced in responding to Hurricane Maria, along with providing Puerto Ricans with thousands of tarps for the homeless and millions of meals for the hungry.

Dorado, Puerto Rico, Feb. 13, 2018Blue roofs are visible in the town of Villa Santa in the municipality of Dorado. Operation Blue Roof is carried out by the U.S Army Corps of Engineers as a temporary repair until the homeowner is able to find a permanent fix. The mission is 89% complete with more than 57,000 blue roofs installed to date. FEMA/K.C. Wilsey

Walmart ultimately disposed of an unclear amount of perishable foods, and local supermarkets reported that they lost tens of thousands of dollars in perishable foods, according to the letter sent by Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, and Stacey Plaskett, the delegate from the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Their letter reiterates a request made to Oversight Committee Chairman Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., in October for documents from the Department of Homeland Security related to FEMAs preparation for and response to Hurricanes Irma and Maria in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Gowdys office did not immediately reply to requests for comment.

Maria, which made landfall in the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico on Sept. 20, shut down ports, destroyed crops, and disrupted the power grid, leaving supermarkets without electricity or the fuel to run their generators. Hundreds of thousands of people were also left without easy access to food.

Two days after the hurricane, a senior Walmart official emailed Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., to ask for help keeping food refrigerated in the few stores they had been able to get up and running.

The problem is were running out of generator fuel and need help getting the Governors approval for me, the Walmart official wrote. Have you guys been in touch with anyone from FEMA that we can contact to help? We want to keep this food fresh for people.

Walmart had opened three facilities to support the public and had plans to bring more on line, but the key to doing this was having power to run the operation and re-establish its supply chain, the Walmart official wrote.

Roughly an hour after that first email, Gutierrezs office forwarded the email to a Puerto Rican government official. And 12 minutes later, the Puerto Rican government official responded: FYI Im sitting with FEMA rep right now so we are taking care of this.

Walmart officials sent over a priority list of a dozen of their top stores  they operated 46 on the island  needing fuel to keep food from spoiling, in addition to their distribution center and home office.

Fuel at this point is becoming a key concern as we are less than 24 hours left in maintaining power in most facilities, the Walmart official wrote.

The message was forwarded by the Puerto Rican government official to a FEMA official 26 minutes later. But by Sunday, two days after initially reaching out, there was still no response from FEMA. The Puerto Rican government official texted Walmart that FEMA had not responded to numerous requests.

Did the hospitals get fuel? the Walmart official asked.

I think so. But I cant be sure. Our communication with FEMA on the specifics of certain things has been less than desired, the Puerto Rican government official said.

The following morning, the two exchanged messages again. The Puerto Rican government official informed Walmart that he had reached out to the islands emergency management agency, which they hoped could help.

Our chief concern right now is with our distribution center, the official text messaged back. We might have two days worth of fuel left. It is critical that we keep that going in order to preserve our fresh inventory. If that goes down it could take weeks to replenish which would have a big negative impact on the island.

A week after the hurricane, still with no reply from FEMA, Puerto Rican Gov. Ricardo Rossello personally reached out to FEMA to request emergency fuel for grocery stores to maintain perishable food supplies, the letters timeline states.

A Puerto Rican government official informed FEMA officials in an email that because of immediate threat to public health and safety, the Governor asked John Rabin (FEMAs Acting Regional Administrator for Region II) at 8:10 a.m. this morning to have FEMA deliver fuel to all grocery and large retail immediately.

Its unclear exactly how much food was lost or whether FEMA ultimately provided the emergency fuel.

Responding to a request for comment, FEMA spokesman Daniel Llargues said in an email Tuesday that the agency is aware of the letter and has consistently worked with the committee and will continue to do so.

The protection of life and safety is our first priority in any response, including working closely with the government of Puerto Rico to support the fueling mission for critical infrastructure such as hospitals and communications centers, Llargues said.

Llargues said that FEMA has distributed more than 13 million gallons of fuel to date. He did not provide any timeline nor did he confirm the details in the letter.

It was tough at the beginning of that all the way through, it was tough, we didnt have power, Phillip Keene, a spokesman for Walmart, told The Associated Press. But he added, We felt comfortable that people were acting in good faith.

Keene said he did not know how much food was thrown out and could not confirm details of the initial scramble for generator fuel. He said nearly all but a handful of stores were able to get back online within a matter of months, relatively quickly given the extent of the damage.

Manuel Reyes, the executive vice president of the Puerto Rico Chamber of Marketing, Industry, and Distribution of Food, told The Associated Press that the lack of fuel was a greater problem in the immediate aftermath of the hurricane due to logistics issues.

Reyes, whose organization represents grocers, food distributors and food manufacturers on the island, said large quantities of food spoiled because businesses ran out of fuel for their generators and there was no distribution system for delivering more. He said many businesses paid up to four times the real cost of fuel when buying on the black market, sometimes competing with large hotels, housing complexes or department stores.

Since the beginning we made the local and federal governments aware of this, but as far as we know FEMA did not provide fuel or made trucks available to the private food distribution network, Reyes said. We believe they did provide some fuel to hospitals. We were forced to establish our own distribution system for our members using retrofitted waste-water trucks in order to keep some stores opened and food from going bad.

Reyes said that after three to four weeks, gas stations began to normalize and businesses could get fuel easier.

But by that time the emergency generators, which are not designed for continuous operation, began failing and we needed new ones or spare parts but few were available, Reyes said. No help with that either.

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.California Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr. proposed $123 million for trial court system upgrades in this years state budget.

According to Chief Justice Tani G. Cantil-Sakauye, the money is much needed by the states trial courts to restore services reduced during the recession.

Few of us need to be reminded that in the Great Recession, civil cases took a back seat to criminal cases,  said Cantil-Sakauye. For many courts, civil dockets were, and continue to be, greatly delayed. The additional money would help courts help those who were unfortunately left behindthose seeking civil justice. Civil justice encompasses wide and complicated bodies of law like constitutional law, environmental law, consumer law, and health and welfare across the board. It focuses on claims for personal injury, discrimination, retaliation, misconduct, lost jobs, and many more.

She said the money will help trial courts resolve civil matters in a timely manner. The funds come just in time, given the onslaught of claims/cases resulting from the devastating wildfires last year.

This is important because what we know is there is an onslaught of cases waiting to be filed, said Cantil-Sakauye. With the fires alone, were informed that our residents have filed more than 45,000 insurance claims totaling nearly $12 billion dollars, concerning 32,000 homes and 4,000 businesses.

Cantil-Sakauye commented on the budget earlier this week, during her State of the Judiciary address to the Joint Session of the California Legislature.The data scientist at the center of Facebook's data controversy says the company knew he passed information to Cambridge Analytica, and called Facebook's side of the story a "fabrication."

Those claims came in an email obtained by Bloomberg that University of Cambridge data scientist Aleksandr Kogan had written to university colleagues.

Kogan confirmed to CNBC that the Bloomberg article "states the facts of what the email entailed" but declined to give further comment or provide a copy of the email.

"We clearly stated that the users were granting us the right to use the data in broad scope, including selling and licensing the data," Kogan reportedly wrote in the March 18 email. "These changes were all made on the Facebook app platform and thus they had full ability to review the nature of the app and raise issues."

He also insists that the method of data collection was perfectly legitimate.

"Each user who authorized the app was presented with both a list of the exact data we would be collecting, and also a Terms of Service detailing the commercial nature of the project and the rights they gave us as far as the data," he reportedly wrote.

Furthermore, he reportedly said the personality profiles he had assembled wouldn't be particularly useful to for targeted advertising  or in this case, campaigning.

Facebook did not step in until 2015. And when it did, the social media company removed his app and asked that Kogan delete the data. Kogan insists he did.

Kogan's assertions directly contradict those of Facebook executives, who insist he "lied" in passing the data along to Cambridge Analytica.

A Facebook representative forwarded to CNBC a statement that it claims Kogan made to the company in 2014:

"This app is part of a research program in the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge. We are using this app for research purposes  learning about how people's Facebook behaviour can be used to better understand their psychological traits, well-being, health, etc and overcome classic problems in social science. Users of the app will be presented with a description of the types of data we gather and the scientific purpose of the data. Users will be informed that the data will be carefully protected and never used for commercial purposes." (The underline was made by Facebook.)

Facebook has come under fire this week after reports emerged that political data analytics company Cambridge Analytica accessed the data of over 50 million users of the social media network without their permission. Facebook knew about the data leak back in 2015, but the public only learned after reports in the New York Times and Observer over the weekend.

Read more about Aleksandr Kogan's email on Bloomberg.A combine in field with rows of corn and soya bean plants. Mitch Kezar | Getty Images

The U.S. on Wednesday vowed "to defend" American soybean producers against possible Chinese trade action as fears of a trade war loomed over the nation's agriculture industry. China's Global Times, the ruling Communist Party's official newspaper, said in an editorial that "the Trump administration has repeatedly accused China of violating international trade rules and threatened to impose higher tariffs on Chinese products. But the U.S. is actually the breaker of WTO rules, which can be seen clearly by how subsidized U.S. soybeans are dumped on China." With the editorial, "the Chinese are hinting that they are going to restrict soy as part of an anti-dumping proceeding," said Daniel Ikenson, director of trade policy studies at Washington-based Cato Institute, the libertarian think tank. The Chinese media attack on U.S. agriculture comes as President Donald Trump is expected Thursday to announce up to $60 billion in annual new tariffs against Chinese goods as part of clampdown on Beijing's intellectual property theft. Administration officials have previously estimated that China's theft of intellectual property could cost the U.S. economy up to $600 billion annually.

China's big soy demand

China is the world's top buyer of soybeans, using most of it for soy protein to feed roughly 700 million pigs in the country or to make cooking oil. The U.S. ships about $14 billion worth of the commodity annually to the Asian nation, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. "The United States stands ready to defend our producers that may be harmed by foreign country retaliation, in particular farmers and ranchers who are often the first to be targeted by trade actions," a USDA representative said in an email response following the Chinese nationalist tabloid's editorial.

A Monsanto soybean production facility in Manlius, Illinois. Daniel Acker | Bloomberg | Getty Images

"There is a reason the United States is the world's largest soybean producer, and one of the top exporters: we are great at growing soybeans," the official added. "There is a reason China is not a big producer and a major importer: it is not competitive."

The USDA spokesperson also said that even with China's domestic soybean prices that are well above world prices as a result of "distortionary support programs," the Chinese still can't keep up with domestic demand and therefore must rely on imports. "Any suggestion that imports of U.S. or South American soybeans are unfairly traded or causing some injury to China is not justified by the facts," the official continued. At the same time, the USDA official said the Chinese has been told the facts previously and that U.S. still holds out "hope rumors of unjustified trade remedies are not thinly disguised protectionist actions." According to the Chinese op-ed, "Strong restrictive measures need to be taken against the massive subsidies and dumping of soybeans by some countries on China. This can reduce the adverse effects of imported soybeans on the Chinese market and provide a fair and sound environment for the sustainable development of the Chinese soybean industry."

$20 billion at risk

Besides buying American-grown soybeans, China also is a large buyer of other U.S. agricultural products, including course grains, hides and skins, as well as pork and cotton. Overall, U.S. agricultural exports to China represent about $20 billion annually for American farmers. Earlier this month, Trump unveiled a 25 percent duty on steel imports and 10 percent charge on aluminum imports, essentially targeting foreign suppliers such as China. In taking the action, the administration said the two industries "are vital to our national security." Agricultural executives say American farmers also could end up getting squeezed by those imported steel and aluminum tariffs since the metals are used to make everything from farm machinery and equipment to steel storage bins and metal sheds used for housing livestock. The U.S. farm sector is already struggling with low crop prices and is expected to post another year of declines in net farm incomes. "If this keeps going on, we're going to start losing farmers," said John Heisdorffer, a farmer from Iowa and president of the American Soybean Association. "We sure can't lose our exports  that's one of the few things we have."

Fear of 'tremendous impact'

American farmers in the Midwest, a region where Trump's base helped get him into the White House, are well aware Chinese trade retaliation could hurt them. "It has the potential to have a tremendous impact," said Brent Bible, an Indiana farmer who grows soybeans and corn. "When you think about the fact that China is the No. 1 importer of U.S. soybeans and related products, any action that they would take would have a negative market action." China buys roughly half of the U.S. soybean exports, and roughly 1 in 3 rows of beans grown on the nation's farms goes to the world's second-largest economy, according to the American Soybean Association. Illinois is the top state for soybean production, and Iowa, Minnesota, Indiana, Nebraska, Ohio and Kansas are major producers. However, China has other options when it comes to importing soybeans, including going to South America.

Competition from South America

"China could shift their supply chains to other markets such as Brazil and Argentina," said Sherman Robinson, research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute, a Washington-based think tank and research group. He said it would force the U.S. to find other customers for soybeans, but it still would "be a big hit and it would take time to do any adjustment in the market. It would be serious damage to U.S. soybean producers." Still, a persistent drought has been a concern in soybean-growing areas in Argentina and prompted some estimates the country will have its lowest crop in six years. Meanwhile, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization estimates Brazil will overtake the United States as the world's largest soybean producer in the coming decade. Together, the U.S. and Brazil represent about 80 percent of the global exports of soybeans.

Beijing's previous threatsDemocrat Conor Lamb said on Wednesday his Republican opponent in a U.S. House of Representatives special election on March 13 in Pennsylvania had conceded the race.

Lamb made the statement on Twitter about Rick Saccone, cementing a stunning Democratic upset in a long-time Republican area that President Donald Trump won handily in 2016.

Conor Lamb tweet: Just got off the phone with my opponent, @RickSaccone4PA, who congratulated me & graciously conceded last Tuesday's election. I congratulate Mr. Saccone for a close, hard-fought race & wish him the best. Ready to be sworn in & get to work for the people of #PA18.

"Just got off the phone with my opponent, @RickSaccone4PA, who congratulated me & graciously conceded last Tuesday's election," the tweet said in part.The Facebook fallout could be good news for blockchain technology, said Mitch Steves, analyst at RBC Capital Markets.

"In the future, someone like yourself no longer has to give their photos to Facebook," Steves said Wednesday on CNBC's "Fast Money," on how blockchain would work with social media. "Instead, you could just share that photo specifically with people, and then you'd be able to track it and make sure it's not shared with someone who gets access to your information."

"You can 100 percent track all this stuff," he said. "I think that's where we're going long term."

While blockchain, the online ledger technology underlying bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, would allow users to keep tabs on their data and how it is being shared, it would not allow users to prevent misuse in the first place, Steves said. "Blockchain would solve the transparency issue, but it would not solve the control issue you have."

Privacy issues came to the fore after The New York Times and the Guardian's Observer reported Saturday that political data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica improperly gained access to personal data of more than 50 million Facebook users. Despite being aware of the misuse since 2015, Facebook did not alert its users.

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg spoke out on Wednesday for the first time since the news broke. In a Facebook post he wrote, "We have a responsibility to protect your data." But the stock tumbled considerably this week.

"Big tech and the centralized control isn't working," said Susan Och, senior fellow at the nonpartisan think tank New America.

"This is why distributed ledger technology is taking off," Och said on "Closing Bell" Wednesday.

Despite the recent declines of bitcoin and other digital currencies, Steves predicted that cryptocurrencies and the underlying blockchain technology could swell into a $10 trillion industry within the next 15 years. The use of decentralized computing and open source software will help this market develop, he said.

Bitcoin was one of the first applications of blockchain technology nearly a decade ago. The same technology has been used by developers to create other digital currencies.Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has explicitly apologized for the Cambridge Analytica data scandal, which has knocked off nearly $46 billion in the social media giant's stock valuation this week.

"This was a major breach of trust, and I'm really sorry that this happened," Zuckerberg said on CNN Wednesday evening, elaborating on the statement he posted to his Facebook page earlier in the day.

Zuckerberg has come under harsh criticism on social media for not explicitly apologizing in his earlier post.

Zuckerberg was addressing bombshell reports by The Observer and The New York Times published over the weekend that said London-based firm Cambridge Analytica improperly gained access to the personal data of more than 50 million users.

After the news broke, Facebook's stock price plummeted, losing nearly $46 billion in market capitalization between Friday's close of trading and Wednesday's. In addition, U.K. officials have opened a probe and U.S. lawmakers have called for Zuckerberg to appear before a panel to address Facebook's handling of user data.

Zuckerberg told CNN he would be willing to testify before Congress, though he avoided committing himself to an appearance.

"What we try to do is send the person at Facebook who will have the most knowledge," Zuckerberg said. "If that's me, then I am happy to go."

One of the issues at the heart of the incident is whether or not Facebook has done enough to safeguard users' personal information.

In 2013, Cambridge University researcher Aleksandr Kogan created an app called "thisisyourdigitallife" that harvested Facebook information from the roughly 300,000 people who used it, as well as from their friends.

Facebook changed its policies in 2014 to limit the data third-party apps could receive, but there were still tens of millions of people who would have had no idea that Kogan's app had collected their data in the first place, or that it had ultimately been passed to Cambridge Analytica.

When Facebook learned in 2015 that Cambridge Analytica had received data from Kogan, it told the firm to delete it, but the recent reports allege that the firm never did.

"I don't know about you, but I'm used to when people legally certify that they are going to do something, that they do it. But I think this was clearly a mistake in retrospect," Zuckerberg said on CNN. "We need to make sure we don't make that mistake ever again."

Cambridge Analytica worked on Facebook ads in support of Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential election, though it denies that it used the Facebook data it received from Kogan.

Earlier on Wednesday, Facebook outlined the six steps it would take to prevent similar abuses. They include turning off an app's access to user data if a person hadn't used it in three months, limiting initial Facebook Login data to a person's name, profile photo and email address, and investigating other apps that had collected large amounts of data,

"It's hard to know what we'll find, but we are going to review thousands of apps," Zuckerberg told CNN. "This is going to be an intensive process."

Zuckerberg also addressed concerns about Russian meddling on Facebook ahead of the November midterm elections, saying he is "sure someone's trying" to influence results but that the company is focused on mitigating that risk.

"There's a lot of hard work we have to do to make it harder for nation states like Russia to do election interference," he said. "But we can get in front of this."

After the 2016 presidential election, Facebook built and tested new artificial intelligence-powered tools to root out bad actors, Zuckerberg said during a separate interview with The New York Times, and those tools helped Facebook delete accounts that were spreading false news ahead of the special election for U.S. Senate in Alabama at the end of 2017. He said many of those accounts were based in Macedonia.

"And that, actually, is something I haven't talked about publicly before, so you're the first people I'm telling about that," he said. "I feel a lot better about the systems now."

To make sure that Facebook is prepared for potential election interference in the U.S. and abroad this year, the company is increasing the number of people working on its security and community operations team to more than 20,000 people by the end of 2018, he said.Singapore's Changi Airport has been named "world's best airport" for the sixth consecutive year  as regional rival Hong Kong came in fourth place.

The 2018 iteration of the annual World Airport Awards from research group Skytrax was based on 13.73 million survey questionnaires across more than 500 airports worldwide, taking place from August 2017 to February 2018, the firm said.

"To be voted the World's Best Airport for the sixth consecutive year is fabulous achievement for Changi Airport, and this award yet again demonstrates the airport's popularity with international air travellers," Edward Plaisted, CEO of Skytrax, said in a statement accompanying the rankings.

This is the ninth time the Singapore airport has won the top international title since 2000. The airport was also named the best for leisure amenities.U.K. Finance Minister Philip Hammond unveiled a task force that examines the risks and benefits of cryptocurrencies on Thursday.

Hammond announced Thursday that the task force includes Britain's central bank, the Bank of England (BOE), and the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) watchdog.

He said that the BOE and FCA would also take the "first steps" toward automating financial compliance in Britain.

The cryptocurrency task force is part of a wider fintech, or financial technology, strategy laid out by Westminster. As part of its initiative, the U.K. signed an agreement dubbed a "fintech bridge" with Australia on Thursday that will enable British fintech firms to sell products and services in Australia. The deal will also look to build cooperation on policies and regulation surrounding the sector, Hammond said.

Hammond said he wanted to make the U.K. the "most attractive home" for global fintech firms.

"Every hour a new tech business is founded in the U.K. and my aim is to make that every half hour," the minister said at a fintech conference organized by the Treasury, the U.K.'s finance department, in London.

"Our doors will always be open to the innovators and inventors," he added.

Some businesses worry the country's decision to leave the European Union  in particular, a potential exit from the single market  will damage their ability to trade freely across the bloc.

Both Britain and Australia's fintech industry bodies  Innovate Finance and Fintech Australia  will engage in regular summits aimed at advising the governments of both countries, the Treasury said.

Charlotte Crosswell, the chief executive of Innovate Finance, said the so-called fintech bridge, which was signed by Australian Treasurer Scott Morrison, offered an "excellent opportunity" for the two countries to share industry knowledge.

The U.K. government's strategy also aims to create financial industry-wide standards that make it easier for fintech firms to partner with banks.

Cryptocurrencies are a contentious issue for governments due to their decentralized nature and volatility in prices. The world's best-known cryptocurrency, bitcoin, soared to a record high close to $20,000 last year.

Bank of England Governor Mark Carney called for more regulation on the sector this month, and labeled price volatility within the space "speculative mania." The central bank's chief said last month that bitcoin has "pretty much failed" as a form of money.

In addition, Financial Conduct Authority Chief Executive Andrew Bailey has previously warned buyers of bitcoin to "be prepared to lose all your money."Most flights are seen canceled at the Ronald Reagan National airport during a snowstorm in Washington, March 21, 2018.

Airlines canceled more than 600 flights scheduled for Thursday, as the fourth major storm in three weeks continued to disrupt air travel in the Northeast.

Carriers said operations were much improved from Wednesday, when they called off more than 4,400 flights.

Travel out of New York's LaGuardia Airport was the most affected on Thursday, with 119 canceled flights, or about a fifth of the day's scheduled departures, according to flight-tracking site FlightAware.

American Airlines, the world's largest airline, said it canceled 230 flights throughout the Northeast, or about 4 percent of its global schedule. American and competitors Delta and United waived date-change fees and fare differences if travelers can fly by March 26. Travelers can also ask for a refund if they can't travel.

Back-to-back snowstorms snarled air travel throughout March. Airlines have canceled more than 16,000 flights to, from or within the U.S., making it the worst March for flight cancellations in at least six years, according to Flight Aware.

Airlines routinely cancel flights and encourage customers to rebook their tickets ahead of time to avoid stranding passengers and to prevent a costly cascade of additional disruptions if planes and crews are out of position.

Travel disruptions can continue even after a storm has passed. In January, several long-haul international flights took off for New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport only to be diverted to other airports when a powerful winter storm halted arrivals. Flights poured in following the storm, leading to a bottleneck and scramble for gates that left passengers sitting on planes for hours and others stranded.Bitcoin failed to hold above $9,000 on Thursday after reports of increased scrutiny on cryptocurrencies by Japanese regulators.

The cryptocurrency hit a low of $8,495.10 and was trading 3 percent lower near $8,600 as of 11:42 a.m. ET, according to CoinDesk's bitcoin price index.

Bitcoin has struggled to recover the $9,000 level after tumbling from a short-term high of $11,660 earlier this month. It remains about 17 percent above its low of $7,335.57 hit over the weekend.

Bitcoin 24-hour performance

Source: CoinDesk

Japan's Financial Services Agency plans to issue a warning against Hong Kong-based cryptocurrency exchange Binance for operating in the country without registration, Reuters reported Thursday, citing a source familiar with the matter. If Binance does not heed the warning, the agency will file a criminal complaint, the source told the newswire. Nikkei first reported the news.

"We are in constructive dialog[ue] with Japan FSA, and have not received any mandates," Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao said in a tweet. Binance is one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world.

Tweet

Japan requires cryptocurrency exchanges to register with the government.

Separately, a local media report said Japan's National Police Agency has found 149 cases of cryptocurrency hacks last year, for a loss of 662.4 million yen ($6.3 million), primarily involving ripple. The agency did not immediately respond to a CNBC request for comment outside of Japanese business hours.

On Monday, Japan's Financial Services Agency said it held a "Blockchain Round-Table" on March 8 and 9 with regulators and policymakers from countries such as Singapore and Canada. The agenda for the closed-door meeting included discussion of vulnerability issues of the public blockchain and coordination between regulators and academia.Major Australian insurer QBE will look to continue expanding in North America and Asia, even though it has struggled for success in those regions, the CEO of the company told CNBC on Wednesday.

"In both of those areas, we need to see some improvements as we go forwards," Patrick Regan, the group CEO of QBE Insurance said, adding that 2017 was an "unacceptable year," performance-wise in Asia.

In order to step up growth in Asia, Jason Brown  previously the group's chief risk officer  has taken the position of CEO for Asia Pacific Operations, and a new team has been put in place, Regan said. The group chief added that the new Asia Pacific team would execute new strategies while building on parts of the business that are strong in the region, such as the agency-based business.

"I think the progress is good and I expect to see improvements in 2018 already," Regan said from Credit Suisse's annual Asian Investment Conference in Hong Kong.

Meanwhile, QBE will also focus on growing in North America, according to Regan, who said the company would need to become more efficient and grow in "mid-market and specialty businesses" in the region.

The CEO maintained that, while the company retains strong businesses, especially in Australia and Europe, it needs to improve "the consistency of what we do" to attain similar levels of performance in other regions.China blamed U.S. export restrictions for its record trade surplus with the United States, but expressed hope that a solution can be found to settle trade issues between the world's two biggest economies as U.S. tariffs loom.

Beijing was bracing on Thursday for an announcement from U.S. President Donald Trump of tariffs of as much as $60 billion on Chinese imports, raising fears that the two countries could be sliding towards a trade war.

The tariffs will be imposed under Section 301 of the 1974 U.S. Trade Act, focusing on Chinese high-tech goods. Trump says Beijing has forced U.S. firms to transfer their intellectual property to China as a cost of doing business there.

Washington is also pressing China to reduce its staggering $375 billion trade surplus with the United States by $100 billion.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying said it was unfair to throw around criticism about unfair trade if the United States won't sell to China what it wants to buy, referring to U.S. export controls on some high-tech products.

"How many soybeans should China buy that are equal to one Boeing aircraft? Or, if China buys a certain number of Boeing aircraft should the U.S. buy an equal number of C919s?" Hua said, mentioning China's new self-developed passenger jet.

However, China still hopes it can hold constructive talks with the United States in a spirit of mutual respect to seek a win-win solution, she added.

U.S. agricultural exports to China stood at $19.6 billion last year, with soybean shipments accounting for $12.4 billion. Chinese penalties on U.S. soybeans will especially hurt Iowa, the state that backed Trump in the 2016 presidential elections and is home to U.S. Ambassador to China Terry Branstad.

Some Americans believe that China can't find a substitute for U.S. soybeans, but that's an "arrogant and naive" idea, China's Global Times said in an editorial on Thursday.

The widely read state-run tabloid is run by the ruling Communist Party's official People's Daily, though its stance does not necessarily equate with Chinese government policy.

Boeing jets have also been often cited as a potential target by China, which has been developing the C919 as part of its civil aerospace ambitions.

The U.S. plane manufacturer, which has the biggest market share in China, said last year it expects China to buy more than 7,000 Boeing jets worth $1.1 trillion over the 20 years to 2036.A paramilitary police officer stands guard in front of red flags at Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China.

A Chinese envoy to the US offered easier access to China's markets for foreign investors, promising reforms "beyond expectations", as Washington moves to institute punishing trade and other sanctions against Beijing for rules that restrict foreign participants.

Speaking at a China General Chamber of Commerce USA event, New York-based Consul General Zhang Qiyue said barriers will be removed or eased for foreign investors in the country's financial sector and that market entry standards will be the same for Chinese and foreign banks.

"Many more measures will be introduced this year and some of the measures will be beyond the expectations of foreign companies and investors."

More from the South China Morning Post:

US lawmakers seek to force Confucius Institutes to register as foreign agents

China's young consumers are snubbing foreign brands amid growing national pride, says Credit Suisse

Fears about Chinese influence grow as more powers given to shadowy agency

Beijing is facing a groundswell of acrimony from US policymakers and members of Congress over an ever-increasing trade imbalance in China's favour and restrictions on US companies operating in the Asian country.

US President Donald Trump accused the country of actively undermining American national security.

Lawmakers have portrayed China's support for "national champions" in the tech sector and efforts to acquire advanced technology from US companies as part of a plan to gain military advantages over Washington.

Trump is expected to announce imminently the imposition of a package of as much as US$60 billion worth of annual tariffs on telecommunications equipment, consumer electronics and other goods from China, the result of a months-long investigation into rules faced by foreign companies operating in the country.

The White House will unveil the sanctions on Thursday, Agence-France Presse reported, citing spokesman Raj Shah.

In August, US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer launched an investigation under section 301 of the US Trade Act of 1974 into the Chinese regulations, which force US companies operating in the country to transfer technology and intellectual property rights to local business partners.

Soon afterward, USTR began taking testimony from US companies, seeking verification that the Chinese government uses unfair tactics on US companies' operations in China "to require or pressure the transfer of technologies and intellectual property to Chinese companies", according to USTR documents.

"Our view is we have a very serious problem losing our intellectual property, which is the single biggest advantage of the US economy," Lighthizer said in a congressional hearing on Wednesday.

"We are losing that to China in ways that aren't reflective of the underlying economics.

"As of today, the administration hasn't been satisfied with the types of responses we're getting from China," the top US trade negotiator said.Following is the transcript of CNBC's interview with Credit Suisse's Asia Pacific Vice Chairman, Lito Camacho at the Credit Suisse Asian Investment Conference in Hong Kong. The interview was broadcast on Squawk Box on 22 March 2018.

All references must be sourced to a "CNBC Interview'.

Interviewed by CNBC's Akiko Fujita.

Akiko Fujita (AF): Would love to get started with the headlines coming out of the Philippines or more on China yesterday, with the Chinese and the Philippines announcing potential for developments in the South China Sea which is disputed waters between these two countries. It seems like more of this pivot that we've seen from President Duterte, essentially aligning himself more closely with China to really see those economic benefits that could come in.

Lito Camacho: Well I think it's a very pragmatic direction that the president has taken. Very very different from the previous, from his predecessor. I think the president sees great economic advantages with improving the relationship with China. And it's beginning to show. Today, as we speak there are a lot of negotiations going on for major infrastructure projects that will be finance capitalized by Chinese organizations. You also see the influx of Chinese tourism now. I mean you see growing involvement of Chinese  Chinese tourism, Chinese infrastructure, Chinese investments in the Philippines.

AF: You talk about the infrastructure investments. Certainly when you think broadly in the Philippines, there's been a huge boom, really, activity starting to pick up, how much more upside is there?

Lito Camacho: I think we're just beginning to see the start of the boom, Akiko. When you think about it in the last year and a half since the new government, not many contracts have actually been signed. I think a lot of preparatory work has to be done and we're now beginning to see it. I think I would expect the Chinese and the Japanese governments actively involved in supporting infrastructure in the Philippines, especially with the government taking on a more active role in the Build program that they have established. There's probably going to be less participation from the private sector, unfortunately. But otherwise, I see major infrastructure beginning to be signed, contracted and start getting implemented in the Philippines. So I think for the next few years infrastructure will be a big contributor to the GDP growth in the country.

AF: When you look broadly at the economic growth in the Philippines, what do you see is the biggest risk right now that could really derail that growth story?

Lito Camacho: The biggest risk, I think, in the Philippines will always be implementation, execution. Good plans, a lot of capital, a lot of financing available, it's getting the projects up and about and getting implemented. I think that's one of the risks. The other risk, of course, are political events that might slow down, undermine, disrupt, distract attention of leaders away from business, economic matters and into politics. As you know there's a lot of talk about a shift in the form of government, from its current form to federalism. I mean if that takes too much time of the Congress, takes too much time of the Senators, of the cabinet members and so on, it may take away very important attention that should be on the tax reform, on infrastructure, facilitating the implementation of projects and so on and so forth.

AF: Speaking of politics, a lot of eyes on Malaysia and the potential for an election by August. We had an analyst on yesterday talking about just the economic impact this could have, didn't seem to really think that this would shake things up a whole lot. As you look at the political landscape over in Malaysia right now, where do you see things headed?

Lito Camacho: Well I think there's the consensus would be that the prime minister and this government will be able to retain control of government. He has to call an election very soon. I think August is probably the deadline. People are expecting that it will probably come sooner, maybe sometime in May. I guess the opposition is not as organized as you otherwise could be. And the expectation is that the government will be able to take control.

Now having said that, I think for a couple of years now, it's become business as usual again in Malaysia and investors, business people are continuing to make commitments, investment commitments and the like. I think the market has performed quite well. So generally speaking, I'm cautiously optimistic about the prospects of the Malaysian economy with or without the elections that's coming.

AF: There's a story coming out of Singapore this morning about a media blackout law - essentially blocking out any form of electronic post, if you will, in some of these areas that would, essentially be the scene of any kind of terrorist attack and you know what not. And I raise this issue because it does seem like what we're talking about Singapore today, there is this increasing movement from governments to really try and control the narrative. You described it earlier as this strongman really taking flight, not just here in Southeast Asia or here in Asia but globally.

Lito Camacho: But I think it is a global phenomenon. I think we see a shift from a preference for Western style democracy, for western, you know, the old paradigm, the old conventions of free trade, globalization, to more strongman rule, firmer control of governments and you see that around the world from the U.S. to Russia to China to Southeast Asia. And I think the guard for media, control for media, has also been influenced by all the stuff about fake news and so on.

So media is kind of losing some credibility to the public and I think political leaders are taking advantage of that. And allowing them to take firmer actions to control media, whether it's social media or you know mainstream media, so that they can control the narrative of what's coming out in the public domain.

AF: And, I guess if you take that approach certainly hard to argue, with all the instability that's coming from the West particularly the U.S. right now. You look at a place like China, where Xi Jinping is just, you know, the party has just voted to eliminate those term limits, consolidation of power seems to be working in China. And if you look at it from an economic standpoint.

Lito Camacho: Well I think it reinforces the view that perhaps Western style democracy has not worked as well as it could, in the past, for many economies and a different form of democracy - let's call it Asian democracy - it seems to be working better in many many parts of the world. And you see from the results, you know, where the economies are going and what kind of government, what kind of leaders they have.

And certainly from my experience in government, when I was in the government, it is very frustrating when you've got, you know, the inability to be able to implement and push for reforms that you really want to do for the economy. And having that ability, and you see that now in the Philippines you know. If I may just go back to the Philippines. I think having a strong leader like President Duterte allows even these ministers, his finance secretary, Secretary Dominguez, the ability to push for radical reforms that in previous governments where it would have been inconceivable. The recent tax reforms that they've done and it's only the first part of a four-part tax reform package I think is quite something, it's very radical.

END

Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross told CNBC on Thursday he doesn't think there will be a trade war with China resulting from President Donald Trump's latest tariffs.

Ross spoke shortly after the president slapped China with about $60 billion in retaliatory tariffs on Chinese imports.

"There will be some ultimate retaliation [from the Chinese] but I don't think it's going to be the end of the earth," he said on "Power Lunch."

Ross called the $60 billion figure a "tiny fraction" of the economies of both the U.S. and China.

"It's not as though we're blowing them up," he said. "This is not going to put China into a depression. It's not going to put us into a depression. This is simply trying to cure abuses."

The measures are meant to penalize China for trade practices that the Trump administration says involve stealing the intellectual property of American companies.

"This is the first of many" trade actions, Trump said, as he signed the executive memo.

The new measures follow a so-called 301 investigation led by U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer into China's potentially unfair trade practices with the U.S.

Lighthizer's office will publish a list of targeted products in 15 days, and there will be a 30-day period for public comment, according to senior administration officials.The plan includes a military funding increase, as well as money for fighting the opioid crisis, border security and infrastructure.

Congress is rushing to pass a bill to fund the government through Sept. 30.

Facing another possible government shutdown, Congress rushed on Thursday to vote on a massive $1.3 trillion spending bill only hours after its release. Congressional leaders unveiled the more than 2,200-page proposal Wednesday night after striking agreement on some major points of contention. Lawmakers will have to pass the legislation by the midnight Friday deadline or see government funding lapse for the third time this year. The Republican-controlled House aims to approve the bill as early as Thursday, and narrowly cleared a procedural hurdle toward doing so Thursday morning. The vote is expected at roughly between 12:15 p.m. and 12:45 p.m. ET, according to House Majority Whip Steve Scalise's office. If the House passes the measure, the Senate will still have a tight window to pass the legislation before the deadline, with possible snags looming. The proposal would boost funding for the military and border security technology, two major Republican priorities. It would also increase funds to fight the opioid epidemic and improve U.S. infrastructure. Other provisions include measures meant to strengthen gun sale background checks and school safety.

Easing Trump's concerns

President Donald Trump, who was hesitant to support the proposal entering Wednesday, now backs the spending bill. He talked Wednesday afternoon with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan, who aimed to ease his concerns. The White House and Ryan's office said Trump will back the plan. The president had misgivings about the amount of funding for his proposed border wall and the lack of a provision to pull federal money from so-called sanctuary cities, among other issues. The president appeared to show his support for the bill in a tweet Wednesday night, touting the boost to military and border security funding. He also decried what he called wasting money on "Dem giveaways" in order to secure his desired defense spending. He did not specify which policies he opposed. Trump tweet: Got $1.6 Billion to start Wall on Southern Border, rest will be forthcoming. Most importantly, got $700 Billion to rebuild our Military, $716 Billion next year...most ever. Had to waste money on Dem giveaways in order to take care of military pay increase and new equipment. Only part of the $1.6 billion going toward border security will fund border fencing, not a "wall" as Trump proposed. Most of the money will go to surveillance and other technology. Ryan and other Republicans have promoted the bill as a win for the U.S. military. The Wisconsin Republican appeared Thursday on "Fox & Friends"  a morning show Trump watches and frequently tweets about  to promote the spending plan and potentially shore up final support from Trump. In the interview, Ryan highlighted Trump's priorities the legislation would boost: the military, border security and fighting the opioid crisis. He also stressed that the plan would not directly fund a rail tunnel connecting New York and New Jersey that the president opposed. He called it "the Trump-[Defense Secretary] Jim Mattis budget for the military."

Democrats claim victory, tooThat prediction was based largely on one reason: China lacks "serious law" about data protection, which gives companies pretty much free rein to develop their technology, said Dong Tao, vice chairman for Greater China at Credit Suisse Private Banking Asia Pacific.

The two largest economies in the world are dominating global research and development in the artificial intelligence field, but China is likely to emerge the winner, according to Credit Suisse .

The U.S. and China are the forefront of A.I. development.

At present, China lags U.S. in every area of AI development  hardware, research and algorithm, and industry commercialization  except big data, according to a recent Oxford University report.

"I'm not saying Chinese companies are better than American companies, I'm not saying Chinese engineers are better than American engineers. What will make China be big in AI and big data is: China has no serious law protecting data privacy," Tao told reporters Thursday at the Credit Suisse Asian Investment Conference in Hong Kong while explaining his call for the East Asian giant to become the top player in AI.

"WeChat is processing 7 billion photos a day  that's a massive, massive data resource. They will have an edge in image recognition," he added.

The comments by Tao, a well-known China expert, came in the wake of increasing legal backlash over data and privacy issues in some countries. Facebook, for example, has come under regulatory scrutiny for the way it handles user data.

Chinese technology companies won't be spared either, Tao said, explaining that tighter data privacy laws would be introduced at some point. And it would be a challenge for authorities to balance protecting the privacy of tech users and not hurting the sector's growth, he added.

Tech companies from China have grown leap and bounds in the past decade. Tao noted that the market capitalization of Tencent, for example, jumped from 105 billion Hong Kong dollars ($13.38 billion) in 2007 to 3.86 trillion Hong Kong dollars ($491.57 billion) 10 years later.

At a time when the Chinese economy is undergoing structural changes and a difficult deleveraging process, innovation led by tech companies can help the country maintain growth, said Tao.

"Cyclically, perhaps China will face headwinds due to deleveraging ... which will lead to some slowdown in GDP growth. The risk of even more acute adjustment is possible," he said.

"In the meantime the Chinese economy is moving into the next decade with new consumption and innovation. The risks and opportunities co-exist in China," he added.Chinese consumers, especially the younger ones, increasingly favor local brands, a Credit Suisse survey has found. The bank, which released the Emerging Consumer Survey report Wednesday, found 19 percent of Chinese consumers surveyed saying local sportswear brands are worth paying for. That's an improvement from the 15 percent who said the same in 2010. The study also found an overwhelming 87.4 percent of Chinese consumers preferring local home appliance brands the most. That's especially the case among consumers aged 18 to 29, with 90.7 percent of that group saying they like local brands most.

Visitors to Tianzifang, a popular shopping and cafe enclave in the French Concession area of Shanghai. Yen Nee Lee | CNBC

The survey interviewed 14,000 consumers face-to-face in eight emerging economies: Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Russia, South Africa and Turkey. "Like it or not, China is becoming a major power globally and that makes the younger generation more proud about Chinese brands," said Charlie Chen, head of China consumer research at Credit Suisse. Chen, speaking to reporters on the sideline of the Credit Suisse Asian Investment Conference, added that the trend may not hold for all consumer products. Infant formula milk and cars, for example, are areas where international brands are winning over local ones, according to Chen. But the rise of local Chinese consumer brands has had a role in the country's "economic rebalancing" efforts to rely more on consumption spending for growth. In 2017, consumption accounted for 58.8 percent of China's economic growth, Reuters reported, citing data from the National Bureau of Statistics. Many economists have said that's a trend that is likely to continue as the Asian economic giant moves away from its reliance on debt and capital to grow the economy.

Investing in China's consumer sectorU.S. Marines and Sailors with the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit

The military's massive funding hike just got a little bit closer to reality.

Congressional leaders unveiled a colossal government spending bill Wednesday night after striking an agreement on some major points of contention. In order to avoid the third government shutdown this year, lawmakers will now rush to pass the 2,200-page legislation by Friday's midnight deadline.

The $1.3 trillion omnibus offers the most significant increase in defense funding in the past 15 years, including a pay hike for personnel.

House Speaker Paul Ryan and other Republicans have touted the bill as a win for the U.S. military. Appearing on "Fox & Friends" Thursday morning, Ryan called the spending plan the "Trump-Jim Mattis budget," referring to the secretary of Defense.

"Obama shortchanged our military, this fixes us," Ryan said. "This is the Trump-Jim Mattis budget for the military. That's probably the biggest victory here is what we are doing for our soldiers, sailors, our airmen, our marines, and veterans."

The Department of Defense is set to gain $61 billion more than last year's enacted funding for a top line of $700 billion.

The funding will be spread over the Pentagon's base budget of $589.5 billion and $65.2 billion for the overseas contingency operations, or OCO, budget. The remainder of the $700 billion is appropriated to other defense-related programs outside the Department of Defense.

The omnibus allocates $144.3 billion for military equipment procurement, including big-ticket items such as:

$23.8 billion for 14 Navy ships

$10.2 billion for 90 F-35 fighter jets

$1.8 billion for 24 F/A-18 fighter jets

$9.5 billion for the Missile Defense Agency

The defense-friendly bill also provides $238 billion for operations and maintenance, $89.2 billion for research and development, and $137.7 billion for personnel pay  a 2.4 percent increase from fiscal year 2017.European equities tumbled by Thursday's close as traders reacted to weakness seen on Wall Street, policy announcements from central banks and concerns surrounding global trade. The pan-European STOXX 600 provisionally closed down 1.55 percent, off its session lows, while sectors all posted sharp declines by the end of trade.

On the bourses front, the FTSE 100 slipped 1.23 percent lower after the U.K. central bank kept rates unchanged but two policymakers unexpectedly voted in favor of an immediate rate hike. This sent sterling to a fresh seven-week high against the dollar shortly after midday, before reversing to trade lower. The British index had opened below 7,000 points for first time since December 2016. Meantime, France's CAC 40 was off 1.38 percent and Germany's DAX fell 1.7 percent by the close, making the index its worst day since March 2, when it declined by 2.27 percent. Stocks came under additional pressure in afternoon trade, on the back of a market sell-off in the U.S.

Reckitt Benckiser rises 4.8% as stocks underperform

Technology was one of the worst performing sectors Thursday, closing down 2.15 percent. Stocks have been impacted this week amid an ongoing scandal involving Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg admitted Wednesday that the social media network committed mistakes in a data leak that was potentially used for political purposes. The European sector came under additional pressure following earnings, with United Internet tumbling 9.5 percent after reporting its results for 2017. Banks meantime posted declines of 2.5 percent as a group. Even though central banks are moving away from their ultra-low rates, an announcement from the Fed on Wednesday proved less hawkish than expected. In individual stock news, Reckitt Benckiser was the STOXX 600's best performer, finishing up 4.78 percent. This was after news that it had ended talks to buy the consumer health-care division of Pfizer, stating that the business "did not fit in its acquisition criteria".

Wall Street dampens sentiment

Markets in Europe extended losses during the later part of trade, as U.S. stocks came under severe pressure, on the back of technology stocks declining. Stocks were also pressured by worries of a potential trade war, consequently, the Dow Jones industrial average tumbled more than 300 points around Europe's market close. On Thursday, President Donald Trump is expected to sign an executive memorandum, which would slap China with $50 billion in tariffs. The measures are designed to penalize the consumer nation, with the U.S. administration stating that China's trade practices involve stealing U.S. firms' intellectual property. Consequently one of the sectors in focus today was the miners, with basic resources tumbling almost 3 percent by the close, with a number of London-listed miners posting losses of 2 percent or more. Sticking with U.S. politics, on Thursday John Dowd resigned as Trump's lead attorney in the special counsel Robert Mueller's probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.Investment manager Ross Gerber thinks Facebook is in deep trouble after the Cambridge Analytica data leak.

On CNBC's "Closing Bell," Gerber argued that "social media has peaked" and predicted that "daily active users in the North American region in Facebook will decline in this quarter, and will continue to decline, and the fact that they have Instagram is the only thing that's saving them right now."

Ian Winer, an analyst at Wedbush Securities, strongly disagreed, saying "the fundamental business, the fact that 2 billion people use this service, where else are advertisers going to go?"

The debate got heated when Gerber accused Cambridge Analytica of being responsible for deaths in Kenya. Later on Twitter, he referenced a BBC article about the firm boasting about influencing last year's Kenyan elections. The elections were marred by violent protests.

Facebook shares have plunged 11 percent this week, following revelations on Friday that Cambridge Analytics misused the data of over 50 million users.Commerzbank and Mozilla have suspended ad campaigns on Facebook following the data scandal that has seen more than $45 billion wiped off the social network's market value this week. "We are pausing our campaign on Facebook. Brand safety and data security are very important to us," Uwe Hellmann, Commerzbank's head of brand strategy, told Handelsblatt newspaper Thursday, according to Reuters. A post on Mozilla's blog site stated that it will suspend its advertising until Facebook takes action to strengthen its default privacy settings. "Mozilla is pressing pause on our Facebook advertising," it said. "While we believe there is still more to learn, we found that its current default settings leave access open to a lot of data  particularly with respect to settings for third party apps." British ad council ISBA, which is set to meet Facebook on Friday, issued a statement saying the alleged use of Facebook data for political targeting was "deeply concerning."

More than 50 million Facebook profiles were harvested by an app for data, which then passed the information to political consultancy Cambridge Analytica. This heightened concerns over whether such data were used to try to influence the outcome of the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the Brexit vote. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg apologized Wednesday for the breach of trust and said Facebook would investigate all apps that had access to large amounts of data. ISBA will push Facebook for details on this investigation during its meeting Friday, Director General Phil Smith said in an email to CNBC. "We want to understand the scope of the inquiry Mark Zuckerberg announced yesterday. We want reassurances for our members that it will get to the bottom of the issues and any implications for the public and for advertisers." David Kershaw, chief executive of ad agency M&C Saatchi, said clients would begin to exert pressure on the social network. "Make no mistake, Facebook is an amazing medium from the advertisers' point of view because of the accuracy of its targeting, which comes from data. But I think those large companies are now very nervous to be associated with a medium where the data is being abused, particularly in a political context," Kershaw told the BBC's Radio 4 "Today" program on Thursday.Four of the five biggest threats to the global political system this year are directly related to President Donald Trump's administration, according to an assessment from a Washington-based policy think tank.

"What's worrisome about the first days of President Trump's second year is that the political stress emanating from Washington is escalating while the world's ability to absorb new shocks is diminishing," Fred Kempe, president and CEO of the Atlantic Council, said in a note this week.

Trump's White House has strongly signaled its willingness to depart from traditional U.S. foreign policy.

"So, hold on to your seats for a year ahead that is fraught with risk, one in which the U.S. and the world will face a stress test amid potential political and economic shocks," Kempe said.

Those possible shocks, according to Kempe, include:Trump has consistently singled out China for what he says are unfair practices in the global trade arena.

The White House is reportedly poised to announce up to $60 billion in new duties on Chinese goods later on Thursday.

Europe's economic powerhouse has condemned President Donald Trump's plans to impose sanctions against China on Thursday. The White House is reportedly poised to announce up to $60 billion in new duties on Chinese goods later on Thursday. The Trump administration has previously claimed China is responsible for encouraging the theft and transfer of intellectual property away from U.S. businesses. "Past experience with tariffs is that if one country starts then there is retaliation and the overall impact is negative for everybody," Clemens Fuest, president at Germany's IFO Institute, told CNBC Thursday. Fuest said while the threat of an escalating trade war over the coming months is "dampening the mood" in Berlin, the U.S. is just as likely to find itself suffering the economic consequences of global tariffs. "I think it is a very bad idea," he concluded.

Trump's tariffs are 'unlawful'

Trump has consistently singled out China for what he says are unfair practices in the global trade arena. He has also blamed the Asian giant for Washington's massive trade deficit, which he said harmed American businesses and workers. The U.S.-China trade gap hit an all-time high of $275.81 billion last year.



In response to reports the U.S. is planning to target Beijing's technology, telecommunications and intellectual property products on Thursday, China has threatened to take retaliatory action. The world's second-largest economy threatened to hit America's agriculture exports if the tariffs are announced, stoking fears of a global trade war.

Sean Gallup | Getty Images

"We consider these tariffs unlawful," Chancellor Angela Merkel told lawmakers in the German parliament Wednesday. She went onto add Germany was convinced Washington's threat to impose protectionist policies would ultimately hurt everyone. Talks of a tit-for-tat trade war were initially triggered earlier this month, when Trump announced hefty charges on steel and aluminum imports. Trump cited national security concerns as a reason for the charges, though they were widely regarded as an attack on Chinese overproduction. However, they could also have ramifications for key allies  including members of the European Union (EU). When asked whether the U.S. and EU were struggling to overcome massive philosophical differences, Pierre Vimont of political analysis firm Carnegie Europe told CNBC Thursday: "Yes, I think it is at the heart of the problem. This whole system here in Brussels was built precisely on the idea that we were going to enhance the multilateral process."

"Everybody has to do a little of concession to move forward," he added.

'Unilateral approach is a worry'rices are up for treatments, doctor visits and prescription drugs, while usage has remained flat or going down in many instances.

Glow Images | Getty Images

The biggest issue for health care today is that there's limited transparency into the cost or quality of care. If we know that an insurance premium  whether it's for auto, home or health  is built primarily off the cost of claims, then it seems obvious that the objective is to reduce the amount of fender-benders, basement water damage and costly medical treatments. The Healthcare Cost Institute outlined that health-care spending is up. Way up. That's because prices are up for treatments, doctor visits and prescription drugs, while usage has remained flat or going down in many instances. If you look across the world in terms of industrialized countries, the United States has the highest prices for health care by far, and not nearly the best quality. So we have a problem, and it's crushing consumers. That problem is driven by a complete lack of transparency, particularly on the price side. So it's imperative to talk about prices. Over the past nine years, employee out-of-pocket spending for a family of four increased 69 percent in the form of higher co-pays and higher deductibles, along with 105 percent employee premium contribution growth. Over the same period, employer premium contributions increased 62 percent. In 2008 more than 8 percent of a family's income was spent on health care. In 2015 (last available data) it rose to 12 percent. This means people are making less money today as a direct result of the cost of health care.

Here are four ways to slash the cost of health care in America  that health insurance companies don't want you to know about.

1. Control the claims and per-unit cost

By refocusing employers on the destination, it's much easier to overcome the perceived issues of the journey. The bigger message to challenge employers and their employees is that health-care costs are a simple function of frequency of claims multiplied by the unit cost of those claims. The item that many people continue to struggle with as it relates to their health insurance are the premiums (fully insured or stop loss for self-insured) derived from the claims and per unit cost. Control these two items and you finally control the health-care expense. Yet misaligned incentives dictate that not one entity that's charged with 'controlling' the health insurance premium are talking about these two items  not the health insurance carriers, not the traditional broker/consultant and not the pharmacy benefit manager. The Employee Benefit Research Institute highlights that more than 150 million consumers obtain health insurance coverage through their employers, almost 60 million of them on a fully insured plan, where a company pays a monthly premium for its health insurance. The balance is covered under a self-insured plan, where the company pays the employee's health claims directly. If the fully insured carrier lowers the company's claim costs due to the Medical Loss Ratio requirement that is part of the Affordable Care Act, the carrier would have to lower their premiums next year and/or offer premium rebates, which would upset shareholders and upper management, whose main job is to drive premium growth. Since most health insurance brokers get paid a commission based on a percentage of the premium paid, most brokers have a financial incentive to allow the premium to increase and therefore the underlying claims. The higher the health-care spend, the more money made by the parties surrounding the health plan.

2. Shop for lower-cost care

Focusing on frequency and per-unit cost is a function of managing the health-care supply chain. This paradigm shift is available for any group that chooses to pursue a self-funded or level-funded (self-insurance with stop-loss built in, then divided into 12 equal monthly installments to feel like a budgetable premium) arrangement, as employers pay only for the health claims their people consume. By managing the supply chain  which is the actual cost of the items utilized, like office visits, surgeries, imaging, hospitals and prescription drugs  consumers can pay attention to the cost and quality of each unit of health care by shopping around, using readily accessible online tools, then collectively are able to lower costs together and improve the predictability of outcomes.

3. Take advantage of telemedicine

Telemedicine allows doctors to evaluate, diagnose and often prescribe patients at a distance by phone, email, text or video. The approach has been through a striking evolution in the last decade, and it is becoming an increasingly important part of the American health-care infrastructure. Net cost savings for these remote consultations is around $200 per visit.

4. Pay attention to incentives

If employees are armed with education and the information they need, coupled with incentives, like waived deductibles or co-pays to drive action, the rewards are lower employee contributions or, in some cases, no employee contributions, along with profitability increases for employers. Reduce the health-care costs and you reduce the health insurance costs for all.

People are making less money today as a direct result of the cost of health care.

A win-winFacebook is vulnerable to a user revolt and a government crackdown in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica data scandal, historian and prolific author Niall Ferguson told CNBC on Thursday.

"Over a five-year time horizon, it's hard to see that its business model is going to survive intact. Because the core of the business model is essentially selling the users' data, making it available indirectly to advertisers," Ferguson said in a "Squawk Box" interview.

Shares of Facebook were under intense pressure again Thursday morning after a brief respite in the previous session. But as of Wednesday's close, the stock was down about 8.5 percent since Friday.

"The lesson of economic history is that companies like Facebook are very vulnerable to two things. One [is] a shift in public sentiment where the users just say, 'We're not going to trust you anymore.' And No. 2 [is] a change in the regulatory environment," said Ferguson, whose most recent book, "The Square and the Tower: Networks and Power, from the Freemasons to Facebook," explores what the history of human connectivity portends for the future.

Regulators in the United States and Europe have been demanding answers since the weekend allegations that Cambridge Analytica, which worked with Donald Trump's presidential election team, misused the data of 50 million Facebook users.

Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg broke his silence on the matter Wednesday, in an apology tour that included television and print interviews. He said he would be open to testifying before Congress, while seeming resigned to his company facing new regulations. He also said he has not seen a "meaningful number of people" deleting their accounts.

"The FTC is coming to Silicon Valley. And this time, I think, 'No more Mr. Nice guy,'" Ferguson said, adding regulators should re-examine whether Facebook and other social networks should be held legally responsible for the content that's posted on their platforms.

Ferguson said a possible regulatory solution could be to prevent Facebook from buying any more companies that it perceives to be a competitor, like it did with Instagram and WhatsApp. "You could [also] talk about breaking [up] these companies," such as Facebook.

The more than 2 billion people active on Facebook every month also need to take some responsibility, Ferguson said. "Users need to be skeptical. I think I detect amongst the younger generation great skepticism about Facebook. We all were slightly foolish. We gave away far too much about ourselves and about friends, and they basically sold it to the highest bidder."The House passed a massive $1.3 trillion spending bill Thursday, sending it to the Senate with just over a day to spare before the government would shut down for the third time this year.

The chamber approved the more than 2,200 page legislation  released only Wednesday night  by a 256-167 vote with bipartisan backing.

The legislation would fund the government through the end of September. It would significantly boost military spending and increase funding for border security, infrastructure and efforts to fight the opioid epidemic, among other programs. It also includes measures meant to strengthen gun sale background checks and improve school safety.

Earlier Thursday, the House narrowly cleared a procedural hurdle allowing its vote to take place later in the day. Some members criticized the rushed process and expressed concerns about the limited time to read and understand the massive legislation. If the chamber had not moved up the vote, the chances of at least a brief shutdown after the midnight Friday deadline would have greatly increased.

The hard-line conservative House Freedom Caucus mounted the most opposition to the spending bill in the House.

The legislation now goes to the GOP-controlled Senate, where it is expected to pass with bipartisan support. The chamber can also expedite a vote with approval from all senators present, but if any senators object, Senate rules could delay a vote until Friday or later.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said both he and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., hope the chamber can vote on Thursday. He said he believes no Democrats will push to delay the vote.

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., carried the Senate past a shutdown deadline last month as he objected to the budget deal that set up the massive spending increases contained in this week's bill. Paul could delay a vote again.

Still, the Senate could vote with at least a few hours' cushion before the shutdown deadline.

Leaders from both parties touted victories in the compromise bill, but acknowledged they made concessions. Republicans like House Speaker Paul Ryan promoted the boost to military funding and border enforcement efforts.

"What this ultimately is about is giving our military the tools and the resources it needs to do its job," he said.

Both major parties cheered increased funding to fight the opioid crisis and improve infrastructure.

Democrats touted provisions such as higher funding for child-care subsidies and low-income housing tax credits. They also got wins from what was not included in the legislation: measures championed by conservatives to pull funding for Planned Parenthood or so-called sanctuary cities.

The bill "is legislation that neither side sees as perfect, but which contains a host of significant victories and important achievements on behalf of the American people," McConnell said Thursday on the Senate floor.

Schumer also acknowledged concessions from both major parties on Thursday.

"Now, it certainly doesn't have everything Democrats want. And it contains a few things Democrats aren't thrilled about. The same is true of our Republican friends. That is true of all compromises " Schumer said.

President Donald Trump entered Wednesday hesitant to support the plan. Trump had concerns over such issues as the amount of money set aside for his proposed border wall, the lack of a sanctuary cities provision, and whether funding would go toward a rail tunnel connecting New Jersey and New York that he opposed.

Trump reportedly threatened to veto the bill if it put money toward the tunnel, which is part of the Gateway plan to revitalize rail transportation. The bill did not directly put money toward the project.

After Ryan went to the White House on Wednesday to sell Trump on the legislation, the administration said the president supported it. Trump sent a tweet Wednesday night in which he appeared to back the proposal.

Trump tweet

Ryan promoted the plan again Thursday morning on "Fox & Friends," a Fox News Channel morning show Trump frequently watches and tweets about.

Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney reiterated Trump's support on Thursday and said he "looks forward to signing it." The president will support it "because it funds his priorities," Mulvaney said.

Here are some of the bill's notable provisionsScott Harrison was 28 years old and partying in Uruguay when he had a fundamental, existential break. "I had gone on a trip to Punta Del Este and realized on that trip, I had gotten most of the things I thought would make me happy and they hadn't," Harrison tells CNBC Make It. "Even though I drove a B.M.W. and had a nice apartment in New York City, my life was a mess." In the midst of throwing house parties with hundreds of guests, Harrison made a promise to himself: He "vowed to come back and change my life," he says. And change his life he did, as well as the lives of millions of others. Harrison founded the non-profit organization Charity: water, which since 2006, has given 8 million people around the world access to clean water by funding nearly 30,000 water projects in 26 countries across the world. Over one million people have donated more than $300 million to its cause. Charity: water is driven by the stories of the individuals it helps and those who donate. For example, Thursday is the 25th annual World Water Day, which serves to call attention to the fact that 2.1 billion people live without safe drinking water at home, according to the event's website. To recognize the day, Charity: water is highlighting one donation as a call to action: Six-year-old Nora Jackson from Virginia sent the non-profit $8.15 in collected dollar bills and coins after watching a Charity: water video with her dad. The donation included a handwritten note, "I do not want people to die because of water."

But before Harrison could help others change the world, he had to transform himself. Going to extremes Harrison was born in Philadelphia and grew up in Hunterdon County, New Jersey, an only child in a "very conservative family." His father was an executive at a small company that sold electrical transformers. His mother, meanwhile, was very ill. When Harrison was 4, she fell victim to a carbon dioxide leak and, though she survived, it made her ultra sensitive to chemicals. She "lived in a tile bathroom in our house that had been scrubbed down with a special soap 20 times and on a cot that had been washed in baking soda 20 times. There was tin foil covering the doors," he recalls. She had to wear a charcoal mask on her face "a barrier against toxins, it was it was monitoring the air, filtering the air that she breathed," says Harrison. "I was in really a caregiver role helping to do the cooking, the cleaning," explains Harrison. When he graduated from high school, Harrison high-tailed it to New York City, eager to live on his own  "Okay, now it's my turn!" he recalls thinking. He attended New York University from 1994 through 1998, but was, by his own admission, a terrible student. He majored in communications as a path of least resistance. Harrison was the keyboard player and band manager for Sunday River from 1992 to 1994, and played at then-famous music clubs around New York City like CBGBs, The Lion's Den and The Wetlands. Though the band was short lived because the musicians couldn't get along, it introduced Harrison to the world of club promoters. From ages 18 to 28 Harrison lived what he calls his "decade of clubs," working as a promoter for some 40 venues. "We bring the beautiful people, we bring the clients who can spend a thousand dollars on a bottle of champagne, or $500 in a bottle of vodka. We were kind of mercenaries  we would get a percentage of all the sales that happened that night but with no loyalty to the venue, so the minute the venue cooled down, we would take our set to the hottest club," explains Harrison. On a good night, Harrison grossed anywhere from $3,000 to $5,000. He was also an influencer before there was social media  both Bacardi and Budweiser paid him and a friend $4,000 a month to drink their brands in public. Harrison was working all night and sleeping all day. He "was out drunk almost every night," he recounted in a video posted by Charity: water. "I had just had become a really selfish sycophant. Hedonist. I had betrayed the spirituality and the morality of my childhood, smoked two packs of cigarettes [a day] for 10 years. I had a gambling problem. I had a pornography problem. I had a drinking problem," Harrison tells CNBC Make It. He knew he was lost and started reading about theology. "I was trying to find a way back. I'd grown up with a Christian faith that I'd completely walked away from," he says. And it was in Punta Del Este that Harrison made up his mind to change his trajectory. "It was a soul-searching couple of weeks for me, amidst the party that was happening," he says.

Today, Charity: water has 73 employees, 71 of whom are in its New York City headquarters, and is employing another 1,250 workers in the 16 countries where it's currently building water projects. Charity: water partners with local organizations in each country.

always inspired hanging out with our local partners, especially our drilling teams. these guys kill it every day ... A large portion of Harrison's time is spent cultivating the relationships with the families who donate significant amounts of money to the operations fundraising pipeline. He also spends a lot of time traveling and giving speeches. He makes 150 speeches a year, he says. Since his days promoting clubs and partying all night, Harrison's life has changed epically. He's married (his second employee, Viktoria, became his wife) and he has two kids  Jackson, 3, and Emma, 18 months. He's never gone back to his old way of life. "I had a very clean break with the vices, so before I set foot on the Mercy Ship, I had my last cigarette. So, I never smoked again. Never gambled again in my life. ... I completely cleaned up my life," says Harrison.With Italian politics still in a stalemate following elections in early March, one lawmaker from the ruling Democratic Party (PD) has ruled out the possibility of his party making alliances with its main rivals. The country's parliament is convening for its first session since the March 4 elections on Friday. Lawmakers will be meeting to elect the speakers of the Senate and the Lower House and many market participants will be looking for clues on potential deals struck within the three main political blocs: the anti-establishment Five Star Movement (M5S), the center-right alliance, and the incumbent party Democratic Party (PD). As none of the parties were able to achieve an absolute majority at the elections, the selection for the speakers could provide some clues as to what discussions have been going on behind closed doors. Speaking to CNBC, PD lawmaker Stefano Ceccanti ruled out any possible alliance with another party saying that "the PD is not available to form a government with either the Lega or the Five Star Movement because they are against the EU. We are in favor of the European Union."

Earlier this week the center-right alliance (formed of Lega, Forza Italia and the Brothers of Italy) invited other parties for preliminary discussions. PD and the Five Star Movement, led by Luigi Di Maio, opted out of attending. The Senate speaker of the house is elected through a voting process that requires a simple majority in a run-off ballot. As such, it is likely that the center-right candidate from Forza Italia, Paolo Romani, is elected due to the alliance gaining more voters than the Five Star Movement back on the March 4 vote. This leaves the position of speaker of the Lower House. The voting process in that parliamentary chamber is less straightforward, requiring a two-thirds majority in the early stages of the vote before an absolute majority in the final stages of the vote.

Speaking to CNBC, Ceccanti confirmed that the process will be more arduous saying "I think the speaker of the Senate will be elected on Saturday, when the two most voted candidates will face each other. For the speaker of the lower chamber, it could take several days of the next week. Our parliament is divided into three minorities and it will be very difficult to find some sort of agreement between them. A government will be formed in April, if the president of the Republic indicates a solution." He added that the PD party is planning on submitting blank votes. With the Five Star Movement only garnering around 230 seats in the lower chamber, short of the 316 majority threshold, it is thus imperative that Di Maio finds partners during the process. According to Wolfango Piccoli, from analysis firm Teneo Intelligence, the Five Star leader faces a dilemma: partner up with Lega and risk alienating his own party due to conflicting platforms, or run the risk of holding multiple inconclusive voting rounds and not end up with a speaker in the House. The tail-risk scenario remains one in which Lega and M5S form an alliance. However, Piccoli thinks this option remains unlikely: "Despite some common ground, there are significant differences between them ... A deal would entail significant risks for both Di Maio and (Lega leader Matteo) Salvini, including possible defections and a loss of popularity."Joe Daniel Price | Getty Images

Italy's parliament is convening for a vote on Friday that could pave the way for negotiations between rival parties to form a coalition government. But, as ever with Italian politics, there are plenty of obstacles to overcome. The vote is aimed at electing speakers to both the upper and lower houses of parliament, the Senate and Chamber of Deputies respectively. Italy's most popular single party  the Five Star Movement (M5S)  and the most popular coalition of center-right parties, including Lega and Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia, have discussed the possibility of each appointing a speaker of their choosing to one of the houses, although there are already disputes over this. "The situation is evolving now and I hope that in the end an agreement will be found because it's absolutely necessary to move ahead... with negotiations for a new government," Franco Frattini, former foreign minister and president of the Italian Society for International Organization (SIOI) told CNBC on Thursday.

The current political stalemate follows an election on March 4 that led to a hung parliament, with no one party or coalition winning a majority of seats allowing it to govern alone. The vote saw anti-establishment, populist parties like M5S and Lega do much better than expected, while traditional, long-standing ones, like the former ruling Democratic Party and Forza Italia, performed badly.

Once speakers to both houses of parliament are elected, hopefully Friday, negotiations can begin to form a government  but that process will likely also to be protracted and could take weeks, if not more. The process will be overseen by Italian President Sergio Mattarella. Frattini, who was foreign minister in two former cabinets under Berlusconi, was not worried about the formation of a coalition government. "We're in very good hands with President Mattarella and I'm sure he'll be able to get this difficult situation under control... Stability is possible, provided that Mattarella promotes a good agreement (between the parties) based on tax reduction and cutting useless public spending where there is broad agreement," he said.

The largest win for a single party was claimed by M5S, with 32 percent of the vote, but the center-right coalition including Lega and Forza Italia was the largest coalition, with 37 percent. Neither M5S nor the center-right bloc gained enough votes to govern alone, however. The former ruling Democratic Party fared badly in comparison, with 23 percent of the vote. On Wednesday, the center-right coalition  which is made up of Lega (formerly Lega Nord), Forza Italia, the right-wing Fratelli d'Italia, and the smaller Noi con l'Italia  claimed the right to name the upper house speaker and said M5S should name the speaker in the lower house. So far, M5S has opposed the center-right's choice of Paolo Romani for speaker of the upper house, however, meaning Friday's vote is far from clear cut.

Clashes

Still, Italy is no stranger to political stalemates and M5S and Lega have shown some willingness to at least talk about forming a government, although there are major differences over key policies. For instance, M5S wants a universal basic income, which guarantees a minimum set of earnings for all, while the center-right coalition wants a flat income tax of 15 percent. There are also frictions between political leaders, with M5S' Luigi Di Maio clashing repeatedly with Forza Italia's Silvio Berlusconi. So personalities are also likely to prove a sticking point. In addition, old rivalries are at play. While the Democratic Party performed badly in the election, it nonetheless could have a decisive factor in the formation of a government, playing something of the role of "kingmaker," either choosing to support or oppose a proposed coalition government. It has previously shown an aversion to an anti-establishment M5S-led government, although the party is divided, with some members favoring a coalition. Against this backdrop, political analysts did not expect the election of speakers Friday to provide any clarity on overcoming the deadlock created by the election. "A possible deal over the speaker positions between the two populist forces that prevailed on March 4  the Five Star Movement and the Northern League (Lega)  should not be regarded as a prelude to a possible joint governing arrangement," Wolfango Piccoli, co-president of Teneo Intelligence, said Tuesday. The lack of visibility on a future government "is likely to persist for weeks and the outcome of the consultations that will start later this month remains highly uncertain," he added. "Regardless, the election of the two speakers will constitute a first significant test for the cohesion of the center-right electoral bloc and the unity of the extremely-divided Partito Democratico (Democratic Party). This is important, given the fact that the arduous task of creating a working majority could be facilitated by eventual defections and a party split."

Patchy growth

The Italian Minister of State for EU Affairs, Sandro Gozi, told CNBC Thursday that growth is back for the country and there is also a consistent fall in unemployment. However, the Democratic Party politician said the wealth was, once again, not being spread around the country. "The north is full steam ahead, at Germany standards, but the south is once again being excluded," he said.

Gozi said that his Democratic Party had fared poorly in elections because it had not managed to shake a perception that refugees from the Middle East and North Africa were flooding into Italy. And on the proposed new coalition, Gozi said he hoped Italy would continue to have a strong role at the European level.

Markets relaxedJohn Dowd resigned Thursday as President Donald Trump's lead attorney for special counsel Robert Mueller's probe into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

"I love the president and wish him well," Dowd told NBC News.

Dowd's resignation comes only two days after he told CNBC "No" when asked whether Trump would be soon making changes to his legal team, as The New York Times had reported Monday.

The Times, which also broke the news of Dowd's departure, noted that he had been considering leaving in recent months, after having been tapped to head Trump's legal team last summer.

Dowd thought that Trump was increasingly ignoring his legal advice, the Times said, citing a person briefed on Dowd's departure.

Specifically, Dowd opposed Trump's desire to be interviewed by Mueller's office.

In a statement after Dowd's resignation announcement, another Trump lawyer, Jay Sekulow, said: "We will continue our ongoing representation of the President and our cooperation with the Office of Special Counsel."

He added: "John Dowd is a friend and has been a valuable member of our legal team."

Two sources close to the president's legal team told NBC News that Trump is interested in bringing back his previous lead lawyer for the Russia probe, Marc Kasowitz, who was removed last summer.

Kasowitz, who is currently representing Trump in a defamation lawsuit filed in New York state court by an ex-"Apprentice" contestant who claims Trump sexually groped her, "is someone the president can trust" as he grows anxious about the Mueller probe, according to NBC News.

Last weekend, Dowd called on Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who has oversight over the Russian probe because of Attorney General Jeff Session's recusal, to end that investigation by Mueller's office.

The Times reported that Trump was angry that Dowd, who had originally claimed to be speaking on the president's behalf in that call, had backtracked by claiming he was actually not speaking for Trump.GOP Rep. Kevin Brady on Thursday urged President Donald Trump to be cautious about his new proposed tariffs on China.

The House Ways and Means Committee chairman said Trump, who is expected to unveil his plan Thursday, is right to go after China for intellectual property theft, saying the actions by China cost "thousands of U.S. jobs."

"The challenge for every president is how to do it in a way that doesn't punish Americans for China's misbehavior," the Texas Republican told CNBC's "Squawk Box." "So, you've really got to narrow these and target these. It is a very discerning line to do that."

On Wednesday, top U.S. trade official, Ambassador Robert Lighthizer said Trump would target China's high-technology sector and could also include restrictions on Chinese investments in the United States. He said the policy goal is to structure the tariffs to inflict maximum harm upon China and try to limit the effect on U.S. consumers.

The administration's actions are just the latest crackdown on China. Earlier this month, the White House announced tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, sparking fears of a possible trade war and sending the stock market into a tailspin. The tariffs could hurt Chinese imports of the metals.

China's Global Times, the ruling Communist Party's official newspaper, suggested in an editorial this week that China take against U.S.-subsidized soybean exports.

Brady, whose state is a major soybean growing region, said his committee is urging the president to "narrow" his proposal on China, "and make sure there isn't spillover that affects our workers, our families, our farmers."

Tariffs are taxes, he added. "Lower is better. Zero is best."

Following Trump's announcement, Brady would like Trump to hold a "30-day comment period" before the tariffs are initiated. "You lay it out, you get the feedback, you continue to fine tune it," he said. "Again, every president has had this challenge with China."

Brady, who helped put through the tax law passed in December, is talking to the White House about a possible "phase two" of the Republican tax plan. He said in April the House will push a bill that restructures the IRS.

"We think a new and improved tax code requires a new and improved IRS," Brady said Thursday.The livestock industry is a global sustainability crisis that many overlook, according to a start-up focused on tackling climate change and global food insecurity.

"I think when we talk about urgent, the most pressing global crisis when it comes to sustainability, [the] livestock industry is most probably the most overlooked industry that people do not know about," David Yeung, founder of Green Monday told CNBC on Thursday.

The ability to continue feeding the current population of more than 7 billion people is already proving to be an issue, and that total is only projected to grow (it's expected to reach 9 billion to 10 billion in the near future), Yeung said. Add the need to feed any livestock that humans are raising, and the crisis becomes all the more challenging, he said.

"But what people don't know, is that we have 2 billion pigs, close to 2 billion cows, and over 20 billion chickens on this planet," Yeung said, explaining that the industry consumes a disproportionate amount of land and water.

The environmental advocate told CNBC the livestock industry is a problem because of its release of carbon into the environment, challenges with food production efficiency, and connection to water scarcity. That all serves as the "biggest and most overlooked" issue that people are unaware of related to sustainability, he said.

One of the steps that the start-up has taken to resolve the problem is to partner with innovative food-tech companies to create alternate vegan food choices.

"Plant-based food tech companies have been absolutely exploding," Yeung said, adding that Green Monday has partnered with Beyond Meat to bring its products to Asia.

Beyond Meat is a plant-based food company that has received funding from actor Leonardo DiCaprio and Microsoft founder Bill Gates.

The Los Angeles-based producer sells the Beyond Burger, a meat-free patty that imitates the look and taste of a meat patty.Streaming giant Netflix has created its own typeface, just like other tech companies have done.

Netflix Sans is the name of the bespoke font, while Apple's is called San Francisco, introduced at its developer conference in 2015. Samsung announced SamsungOne in July 2016.

Why? Because it will save Netflix marketing dollars, as using fonts often attracts large licensing fees, according to its brand design lead Noah Nathan.

"With the global nature of Netflix's business, font licensing can get quite expensive," he told design website It's Nice That on Wednesday. "Developing this typeface not only created an 'ownable' and unique element for the brand's aesthetic  But saves the company millions of dollars a year as foundries move towards impression-based licensing for their typefaces in many digital advertising spaces."

TWEET

Netflix designed the new font in partnership with Dalton Maag, a foundry that licenses its typefaces around the world. And while having a bespoke font may save the company millions, that is a drop in the ocean as its overall marketing budget will hit $2 billion this year, up from $1.8 billion in 2017.

Chief Executive Reed Hastings would rather Netflix shows sold themselves, however. "Our sort of Holy Grail dream is that the service was so good at promoting the new content in such relevant ways that we wouldn't have to spend externally," he said on the company's fourth-quarter earnings call in January. Hastings added that while marketing is a good investment, he'd like to improve organic (or free) promotion of different shows via PR and social media.A customer picks up a Nike shoe, deciding what size he wants to buy.

Nike on Thursday reported earnings and revenue that beat analysts' expectations, fueled once again by international growth and momentum within China.

Its shares climbed more than 7 percent in after-hours trading following the announcement.

CEO Mark Parker also said he sees a steady sales slump in the U.S. reversing, as the company focuses on adding experiences to stores and scaling new products. He told analysts and investors that the current (fourth) quarter is already off to a good start in North America, owing much to the record consumer response for new React cushioning technology in sneakers.

Nike's net loss for the third quarter ended Feb. 28 totaled $921 million, or 57 cents a share, compared with net income of $1.14 billion, or 68 cents a share, one year ago. The company reported a higher income tax expense from new U.S. tax laws, which reduced earnings per share by $1.25.

Excluding one-time items, Nike earned 68 cents a share, 15 cents above forecasts, based on a Thomson Reuters survey of analysts.

Revenue for the period climbed roughly 7 percent overall to $8.98 billion, compared with expectations of $8.85 billion.

Sales in North America were down 6 percent, while those in Greater China jumped 24 percent. Sales in Nike's division for Europe, the Middle East and Africa grew 19 percent. Sales in Asia Pacific and Latin America rose 13 percent.

CFO Andy Campion said Thursday that U.S. sales should turn positive and grow again by the first half of fiscal 2019. Inventory has been reset, and orders from Nike's strategic partners in North America are building, he told analysts and investors.

In recent quarters, Nike has struggled to gain a stronger footing on its home turf, where shoppers are increasingly flooded with options from rivals Adidas and Under Armour. Still, the company has seen success overseas, which continues to boost the business.

Part of Nike's strategy to win sales includes selling more directly to consumers (thereby improving gross margins), making bigger investments in women's footwear and apparel, piloting a test with Amazon to rid the market of counterfeit goods, and launching of digital styling service Stitch Fix.

The company said Thursday it would begin testing mobile checkout in two stores ahead of a wider rollout. It also announced its acquisition of New York-based Zodiac, which helps retailers identify the customers who will be the most valuable to their businesses.

Nike meanwhile has found itself caught in the middle of growing complaints from female employees about its workplace culture, prompting multiple executive departures.

Jayme Martin, vice president and general manager of global categories for Nike, was recently ousted from the company. Part of Martin's job included overseeing Nike's women's business. His departure came just one day after Nike President Trevor Edwards resigned amid discontent internally over poor conduct.

"I'm committed to ensure we have an environment where every Nike employee can have a positive experience ... and reach their full potential," Parker said Thursday. He will continue to serve as CEO beyond 2020.

Earlier on Thursday, a source told CNBC that Bill Ackman's Pershing Square sold its stake in Nike, making around $100 million in profit from the investment. Pershing Square is believed to have started buying Nike shares in October. The stock has climbed about 3.5 percent so far this year.Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-WI) speaks to the media after a House Republican conference on Capitol Hill in Washington.

House Speaker Paul Ryan appeared to have one intended listener during a Thursday morning TV appearance to promote Congress' massive spending bill: a reluctant president.

President Donald Trump entered Wednesday hesitant to support the $1.3 trillion plan, which would pair a massive military funding increase with a boost to domestic spending to improve infrastructure and battle the opioid epidemic, among other programs. Trump had concerns over such issues as the amount of money set aside for his proposed border wall, the lack of a provision to pull money from so-called sanctuary cities, and whether funding would go toward a rail tunnel connecting New Jersey and New York that he opposed.

Trump reportedly threatened to veto the bill to fund the government through September if it put money toward the tunnel, which is part of the Gateway plan to revitalize rail transportation.

After Ryan went to the White House on Wednesday to sell Trump on the legislation, the administration said the president supported it. Trump sent a tweet Wednesday night in which he appeared to back the proposal.

Trump tweet

On Thursday morning, Ryan appeared on"Fox & Friends"  a Fox News Channel morning show Trump frequently watches and tweets about  to again promote the plan as a victory for Trump's priorities: strengthening the U.S. military and boosting border security, among them.

"This funds the wall, fixes the military, fights opioids and does the things that we said," the Wisconsin Republican said. He also emphasized that the measure does not give money directly to the Gateway project. Rather, Ryan said, it "gives Donald Trump the decision on Gateway."

Ryan repeatedly highlighted how the plan helps Trump's agenda or meets his demands. Congress "actually exceeded what the administration asked us for" in funding for border security technology and fencing along the border with Mexico, Ryan said. The bill would increase border security funding by $1.6 billion, though it would fund fencing rather than a "wall," which Trump has promoted.

Ryan tweet

"The administration, meaning the president, gets to decide which cities" get funding for mass transportation systems, Ryan said. The House speaker added that "we also fund the president's opioid campaign" to curb abuse of the drugs.

"The president asked" lawmakers to include measures intended to strengthen gun sale background checks and improve school safety, which they did, Ryan noted. He also promoted the roughly $80 billion increase in Department of Defense funding as a win for Trump and service members.

"This is the Trump-[Defense Secretary] Jim Mattis budget for the military," Ryan said. "That's probably the biggest victory here is what we're doing for our soldiers, our sailors, our airmen, our Marines, our veterans. This fixes that massive problem."

Ryan's comments came ahead of an expected House vote on the legislation Thursday afternoon. Congress needs to pass a spending bill by Friday at midnight or see the government's funding authority lapse for the third time this year.

The hard-line conservative House Freedom Caucus has already announced its opposition to the bill. A member of the group, Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, told Fox on Thursday that "this may be the worst bill I have seen in my time in Congress."

The House could overcome the group's opposition with support from most Republicans and Democrats. Ryan appeared not to be counting on backing from the Freedom Caucus.

"Jim's never voted for one of these bills, ever. I don't expect him to do it anytime in the near future," he said Thursday.Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro is working with foundations from Rite Aid and the Pittsburgh Penguins to develop an effort to address teenage prescription-drug abuse.

The Prescription Drug Safety program will be made available to Pittsburgh-area high schools at no cost, according to a news release.

Through interactive scenarios and self-guided activities, the digital prescription-drug abuse prevention program, developed by Everfi, uses an evidence-based, public health approach to teach high school students skills to make safe and healthy decisions about prescription drugs, according to the release.



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"Eighty percent of heroin users begin their substance use by abusing prescription drugs, so educating our children about the dangers of drug abuse is critically important," said Attorney General Josh Shapiro in a prepared statement. "I want to commend The Rite Aid Foundation, the Pittsburgh Penguins organization, and Everfi for bringing this prevention curriculum to children and young people in our schools. Fighting this epidemic is my top priority, and I'm proud to partner with you in this important effort."

The Rite Aid Foundation is making a three-year, $1.125 million commitment to the program, and plans to introduce it to schools in eastern Pennsylvania, Ohio, Washington and Oregon during that time, according to the release.

"Prescription drug abuse and misuse is a growing issue that poses a serious threat to the health, safety and well-being of our nation's young people," said Kermit Crawford, president and COO of Rite Aid (NYSE: RAD) and president of The Rite Aid Foundation, in a prepared statement. "The Rite Aid Foundation is proud to help introduce this important prevention education initiative to high school students so they can gain awareness and have the knowledge they need to stay safe and prevent abuse before it occurs."As a CEO and native Chicagoan, I love my city and would live nowhere else. Yet it bothers me when I see Chicago in national headlines for troubling reasons  failing public schools in low-income areas with high dropout rates, and (as everyone knows) an epidemic of gun violence in these same neighborhoods. Obviously, these problems go hand in hand, and solutions have been frustratingly elusive.



City Year Chicago recruits a corps of 230 recent college graduates to work in Chicago's most economically challenged public schools. Although they only make $12,000 for the full year, the number of applicants vastly exceeds the number of available slots. City Year Chicago

Four years ago I joined the board of City Year Chicago, an amazing nonprofit organization that is tackling both problems with remarkable success. Sound too good to be true? It's not. City Year Chicago uses mentorship to enhance the educations and lives of tens of thousands of students, while making dangerous neighborhoods safer at the same time. Each year, City Year Chicago recruits a corps of recent college graduates who sign up for a year of full-time educational service in urban areas. Although these young people only make $12,000 for the full year, the number of applicants vastly exceeds the number of available slots because of the altruistic nature of the mission. Corps members are eligible for subsidized housing and food, but not all take advantage of this option  roughly 60 percent. It's a very competitive process to be selected as a City Year Chicago corps member, and we look for the best and the brightest.

City Year Chicago's 230 corps members are sent into the most economically challenged Chicago public schools in teams of 8 to 10 people per school. These schools are typically in high-crime neighborhoods, with a vast majority of students of color. And within these resourced-strapped schools, City Year focuses only on the most "at risk" kids  students who may have one or both parents missing, who may have learning and/or behavioral issues or other external factors preventing success. Obviously, focusing on the toughest students in the toughest schools is a very heavy lift, because these are students who almost always fall through societal cracks.



I recently conducted a 'fireside chat' on leadership with all corps members, and though I was supposed to be the one inspiring them, I left the session amazed and humbled at what a force for good these young people are.

Mentorship is the secret sauce. When students need extra attention, City Year corps members immediately pull them aside and provide targeted one-on-one mentoring. This not only frees the teacher to continue educating the 30-plus other kids in the class, it forms a tremendous bond of trust between the student and corps member. When chronically absent students don't show up for school, the City Year corps mentor calls the students at home and motivates them to come in. When students have problems at home, they go to the City Year corps member for emotional support. The list goes on and on. Given the volatile and under-resourced world in which these students live, in many cases the City Year mentor becomes the most important person in the student's lives.



A tremendous source of future leadership

The University of Chicago recently concluded a multiyear study of the effectiveness of City Year Chicago, and the results are amazing. Schools that use City Year mentors have a 20 percent higher graduation rate versus similar schools, which translates to hundreds of kids who get a diploma each year who wouldn't have otherwise. Even more impressive is that City Year schools reduce the amount of detentions by 86 percent, and behavior-related expulsions by 33 percent. Why is this so important? Because in Chicago, students who drop out of school are nine times likelier to end up in prison or get caught up in gangs. By "having the back" of these at-risk kids (who tragically could end up as shooting victims or even perpetrators), City Year Chicago is literally saving lives while furthering education. (In fact, a recent Deloitte report showed that schools partnering with City Year each receive 1,900 hours of extra educational hours annually.)

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel talks to City Year Chicago corps members at a fundraiser hosted by GMM Nonstick Coatings CEO Ravin Gandhi in January 2018. Marc Harris

Clearly, City Year has a wonderful mission. And clearly, it works. But as a CEO, I had a practical question. Is it economically affordable? On this measure, City Year Chicago shines. Each school that uses City Year pays (on average) $96,000 per year but gets $853,000 in value because the corps members are typically able to do the work of six different service providers. Thus, the public and private dollars that fund City Year are multiplied eight times, which is a great return no matter how you slice it. In our economically strapped city, City Year is a rare "sure thing" investment in the future. Although City Year Chicago helps almost 13,000 students each year, our 230 corps members are a tremendous source of leadership after they complete their year of service. City Year alumni are the No. 1 source of Teach For America (TFA) candidates in Chicago, with more than 75 percent of graduates remaining in education or public service as a career. I recently conducted a "fireside chat" on leadership with all corps members, and though I was supposed to be the one inspiring them, I left the session amazed and humbled at what a force for good these young people are.

Even though City Year has a great story, today we operate on a relative shoestring budget of $10 million dollars per year and are only in 26 schools on Chicago's South and West sides. Within five years we want to be in 100 schools all over the city and hope to grow our budget to at least $30 million. When Chicago's Mayor Rahm Emanuel spoke recently about why he has been a crucial supporter of City Year Chicago, he said it's because "demographics should not determine destiny." This sentiment is echoed by hardworking principals and teachers in the City Year partner schools, who see the irreplaceable impact our corps makes each day.

The sudden resignation of Myanmar President Htin Kyaw is a worrying development for the country's future, according to one politics watcher, especially as a crescendo of criticism engulfs de-facto ruler Aung San Suu Kyi.

In a statement on Wednesday, Htin Kyaw's office said the 71 year-old was departing immediately "in order to take rest from the current duties and responsibilities." The outgoing leader is a close confidante of Nobel laureate Suu Kyi, whose ruling National League for Democracy (NLD) party took power in a historic 2015 election.

Officially barred from the presidency due to a constitutional clause, Suu Kyi still rules the country though trusted proxies. Htin Kyaw's replacement is widely expected to be fellow NLD loyalist Win Myint, who is currently speaker of the lower house.

Htin Kyaw's resignation "brings to the fore the issue of leadership and who the successors are going to be in Myanmar moving forward," Bridget Welsh, a political science professor at John Cabot University, told CNBC at the Credit Suisse Asia Investment Conference.

The news raises questions in people's minds, she said.

There is now a sense that "the country is not necessarily moving in a more democratic direction," Welsh continued, referring to the rise of complex identity politics, reports of ethnic cleansing and the military's continued grip on power.Defense Secretary James N. Mattis meets with Saudi Arabias First Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Defense, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman bin Abdulaziz at the Pentagon in Washington D.C., Mar. 22, 2018.

Secretary of Defense James Mattis met with Saudi Arabia's powerful Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman on Thursday at the Pentagon as part of an effort to strengthen one of America's most important strategic alliances.

The 32-year-old prince, who spoke through a translator, said his nation's cooperation with the United States would continue to grow.

"Under the leadership of you, Mr. Secretary, the cooperation has improved tremendously between the two ministries of defense, and we will continue doing so in the future," the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman said.

Mattis emphasized the importance of the U.S.-Saudi relationship and noted efforts to address malignant Iranian activities and the civil war in Yemen, which neighbors Saudi Arabia to the south.

In 2015, a Saudi-led coalition intervened in Yemen against Iran-aligned Houthis, who ousted the recognized government of President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi. The now-three-year campaign is estimated to have killed 10,000 and displaced more than 2 million people.

"As you discussed with President Trump on Tuesday, we must also reinvigorate urgent efforts to seek a peaceful resolution to the civil war in Yemen, and we support you in this regard," Mattis said to the prince.

When the secretary was asked whether he would discuss civilian casualties in the war in Yemen, Mattis reiterated the U.S.' aim to end the war.

"We have been working very hard with the new U.N. envoy to end the fight in Yemen, and we believe that Saudi Arabia is part of the solution. They have stood by the United Nations-recognized government, and we are going to end this war, that is the bottom line," Mattis said. "We are going to end it on positive terms for the people of Yemen but also security for the nations in the peninsula."

President Donald Trump noted during an Oval Office meeting with Crown Prince Mohammed that Saudi Arabia's oil-rich monarchy is a significant patron of U.S. defense companies.While Aramco is expected to list first on the local Saudi exchange, the company is also considering London, New York and Hong Kong.

"I don't see 2018 as a necessary year to list unless it's optimum," he said.

"What remains is the selection of a potential secondary venue and the timing, and like I said we need to make sure the markets are ready to do that," said al-Falih. "We're ready to do it in the second half if we determine the timing is optimum." But he added if it slips, that is not a problem.

He said the initial pubic offering of the world's largest energy company could be this year, but it could also be later. Aramco is expected to be listed first on the local Tadawul exchange in Saudi Arabia, according to industry sources.

Saudi Energy Minister Khalid al-Falih told CNBC that Saudi Aramco is ready to go public but the company and kingdom will wait for the "optimum" time.

Al-Falih said that the kingdom is ready for the IPO from a regulatory standpoint, and that Saudi Aramco is preparing its 2017 results in line with international standards.

The energy minister also discussed the kingdom's relationship with Russia, which has grown closer since the two agreed to join with OPEC and other producers to curb oil production.

"I think cooperating and sharing experiences in technology while encouraging Russian supply companies to come in and invest in the kingdom is an area we started working on, and I think you'll be hearing about Russian investment in the supply chain in Saudi Arabia," he said.

Al-Falih said the Aramco IPO is expected to attract Russian capital, pooling it from investors, pensions and individuals. "The IPO is going to be open to all investors and Russian capital that is looking to invest wisely in companies with great reputations and potential. We believe Saudi Aramco is going to be on top of its list," he said.

"It's similar to what we've seen from every major economy. Every major economy is already looking at Aramco as a very attractive outlet for their investment," he said.

Al-Falih said the current production agreement between OPEC and other producers has been good for the kingdom and Russia, as well as others including U.S. shale. OPEC is expected to meet with Russia in June to discuss their current agreement to hold 1.8 million barrels a day from the market.

"We will review in June what are the specific targets for a balanced market," al-Falih said. He said even if the market is balanced, the producers may not want to "lift our hands from the steering wheel and leave the market without stewardship" because it could quickly become out of balance.

Al-Falih is in the U.S., along with other Saudi officials, as Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman visits Washington and other U.S. cities, to shore up relations and seek investment opportunities.

Al-Falih is the chairman of Saudi Aramco, which is expected to go public as the centerpiece in a plan to diversify the kingdom's economy away from oil.When it comes to saving for the future, Americans aren't doing great. Those between the ages of 55 and 64 who have retirement savings have a median of $120,000 socked away, Bankrate reports in a new survey, citing data from the Federal Reserve. That's only 12 percent of the $1 million many experts recommend, and it's worth noting that even $1 million doesn't stretch as far as it used to.

So how much should Americans be earmarking for retirement in order to be sufficiently funded in their golden years? Financial services company Fidelity recommends putting away 15 percent of your income per year starting at age 25 and investing more than 50 percent of your savings over your lifetime.

"The good news is that that 15 percent also includes any employer match," Ken Hevert, senior vice president of retirement at Fidelity, previously told CNBC Make It. If you're eligible for a 5 percent match on your 401(k) plan and you contribute 5 percent of your salary to the account, you're already putting away 10 percent.

To know if you're on the right track, start by figuring out your savings rate, recommends Eric Roberge, a CFP and founder of Beyond Your Hammock. This will show you how close you are to the ideal of at least 15 to 20 percent.State-run retirement programs that automatically enroll private workers could help future retirees maximize their Social Security benefits, a new study suggests. Based on projected account balances in 2050, 39 percent of participants in such auto-enrollment strategies would have enough to delay claiming Social Security by a year or more even at low contribution levels, according to research released Wednesday by the Pew Charitable Trusts. For every year a person puts off claiming benefits, their monthly payment jumps by about 8 percent.

Hinterhaus Productions | Getty Images

"Some people have questioned whether these accounts will make a difference, but these findings show they could have a big impact for both higher- and lower-income earners," said Alison Shelton, a senior research officer on Pew's retirement savings team. The research, done with help from the Social Security Administration, assumed an average contribution rate of 3 percent of a worker's income. For about a fifth of all account holders, their balances would be enough in 2050 to provide income equivalent to their Social Security benefit for at least two years, based on current formulas. While you can tap your benefits as early as age 62, your monthly payments are lower than if you wait because they are stretched out over a longer period of time. For illustration purposes: A person who is expecting $700 at age 62 could delay their benefits by a year if they have $8,400 in an account (12 monthly withdrawals of $700). A two-year delay could be funded by a $16,800 balance.

Tapping Social Security benefits early Age at claiming Reduction to benefit Monthly benefit after reduction for claiming early Change from delaying claiming by one year 62 30 percent $700 -- 63 25 percent $750 7.1 percent 64 20 percent $800 6.7 percent 65 13.3 percent $867 8.4 percent 66 6.7 percent $933 7.6 percent 67 (full retirement age if born after 1960) -- $1,000 7.2 percent

"This shows that even small account balances can make a big difference," Shelton said. For many people, delaying or supplementing Social Security proves tricky due to minimal or nonexistent savings. About 42 percent of Americans have less than $10,000 set aside for retirement, according to a recent study from GoBankingRates. Since 2012, more than 40 states have acted to implement or consider legislation to establish state-run retirement programs for workers whose employer doesn't offer a 401(k) or similar workplace retirement savings plan, according to Georgetown University's Center for Retirement Initiatives. Those employees  about 57 million, according to AARP  are left to fend for themselves. "That's the group we're trying to help," said Joshua Gotbaum, chair of the Maryland Small Business Retirement Savings Board. His group is in the process of searching for an executive director and expects to begin enrollment in its program in 2019.

Various research over the years has shown better retirement outcomes for workers who have access to savings through work versus those who don't. Additionally, employees are 15 times more likely to save for retirement if they have a workplace option, according to an AARP study. In Oregon, officials began rolling out its OregonSaves program in phases last year. Employees are automatically enrolled, and 5 percent of their paycheck goes into a Roth IRA. Workers can opt out if they want or change the withholding rate. So far, 436 employers have registered through OregonSaves, covering more than 35,800 eligible employees. Of those workers, about 7,400 (about 21 percent) have chosen not to participate. The remainder have invested $1.6 million in assets through the program thus far. Other states  including Illinois, Connecticut and California  are in various stages of implementing similar strategies. State-run retirement initiatives for private workers*Right-wing political strategist Steve Bannon said Thursday that he did not know about Cambridge Analytica's data mining from Facebook, marking the first time the former top White House strategist and Trump campaign boss spoke publicly about the scandal.

What happened there, Bannon said, is between Facebook, Cambridge Analytica and "the professor"  meaning Aleksandr Kogan, who reportedly shared data harvested from his psychological test Facebook app with Cambridge Analytica.

Bannon was once an executive with the political-consulting firm, which is alleged to have used data mined from millions of Facebook users to create political ads that favored Donald Trump's presidential campaign and the push for Brexit. He also claims credit for the company's name.

Bannon was speaking at a conference held by the Financial Times newspaper.

The former Breitbart News boss also pushed back on the idea that Cambridge Analytica won the election for Trump.

"Here's what won it for Trump: economic nationalism" and talking in plain language to the American people, Bannon said.

Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix was suspended earlier this week after the UK's Channel 4 ran an expose which showed the executive bragging that the firm was in charge of all the data and ads for the Trump campaign. Cambridge Analytica executives also were caught on video boasting of using entrapment, fake news and psychological manipulation in its operations.

Bannon declined to comment directly on Nix, but instead zeroed in on Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, assailing the social media giant's business model.

"They take your stuff for free. They sell it and monetize it for huge margins. That's why the companies trade for such high valuations," Bannon said. "Then they write algorithms and control your life."

Referring to Zuckerberg's apologies and media interviews reacting to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Bannon said he "sounds like a first-year associate hired in corporate development, mumbles through the whole interview, and no one asks him a tough follow-on question." He also accused media outlets of playing "patty cake" with the Facebook CEO.

Cambridge Analytica and Facebook have both denied wrongdoing.

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg also apologized for her company's role in the data scandal.

"We know this is an issue of trust. We know this is a critical moment for our company, for the service we provide," Sandberg told CNBC. "We are going to do everything we can."

Correction: This story was updated to correctly attribute a quote to Steve Bannon.Police in London removed cordons and reopened the offices of analytics firm Cambridge Analytica, after a suspicious package sparked a brief evacuation on Thursday afternoon.

Police said they were called at 1:26 p.m. London time Thursday to reports of a suspicious package at the building in New Oxford Street.

"The building has been evacuated as a precaution," police initially said. "No injuries have been reported." Around half an hour later, the police gave the all clear and said that the incident was over.

Cambridge Analytica is in the midst of a media firestorm after an undercover sting operation caught senior executives boasting about psychological manipulation, entrapment techniques and fake news campaigns. The company's CEO has been suspended and the country's Information Commissioner is seeking a warrant to raid the office.

Tweet

The London Met Police put road closures in place during the evacuation, while emergency services dealt with the incident.

Alongside social media giant Facebook, the London-based elections consultancy is at the center of an ongoing dispute over the alleged harvesting and use of personal data. The allegations have heightened concerns over whether such data was then used to try and influence the outcome of the 2016 U.S. presidential election and the Brexit vote. Both companies deny any wrongdoing.

CNBC's Sam Meredith contributed to this article.Major retailers and trade associations have sounded the alarm on trade. They are imploring the Trump administration to refrain from imposing tariffs that will raise the price of goods for American consumers and trigger international retaliation in the form of tariffs on American goods.

Other members of the U.S. business community could be tempted to jump on the protectionist bandwagon and identify more products that could be subject to tariffs. Instead, they should take this opportunity to communicate the shared, widespread economic benefits of fair and open trade in a way that taps into the same emotional response that has been so effectively evoked on the anti-trade side.

The overarching message from industry must be: When the U.S. engages openly in free and fair trade, we all win. Competition makes the country better, encouraging industry around the world to deliver more value to more people. Trade is not zero sum. It helps to grow the standards of living of people around the globe. We need the inexpensive products from outside the country to raise our standard of living. And, with only 5 percent of the world population, we need open access to markets for our own goods to grow our economy. We cannot have one without the other.

Of course, sometimes trade does hurt some workers in specific industries. And we must advocate policies that help these workers recover, retrain, and redeploy into other jobs. Sometimes trading partners take advantage of the U.S. and violate agreements. So we must enforce agreements and advocate fair trade.

But overall, free trade is beneficial to the U.S. Because of free trade, Americans enjoy higher living standards and a wider variety of more affordable products like clothing and electronics. Imports from low-cost countries deliver products at lower prices to consumers.

Imports actually boost the purchasing power of the average American household by approximately $18,000. These products sell because American consumers choose to buy them, and they are more affordable because they are made in low-cost regions.

Trade also yields work opportunities and well-paying jobs, all while benefiting American businesses. U.S. trade is part of an inter-connected, global supply chain. Half of what the United States imports is not consumed directly, but rather goes into other U.S.-produced goods.

The importation of these intermediate goods, raw materials, and capital goods lowers costs for manufacturers and other employers. When underlying business costs go down, more cash remains for worker salaries, wages, and benefits. About 41 million American jobs depend on trade. That's about one in four U.S. jobs.

And then there are the many benefits of exporting. U.S. businesses that export their goods also tend to create higher paying jobs. When engaged in competition around the world, those firms necessarily must remain sharp and competitive  increasing their productivity to the benefit of the customers, employees, and business owners.

On U.S. exporting in particular, the numbers back up the jobs argument: U.S. exports to current free trade agreement partners support an estimated 11.5 million American jobs. Moreover, free trade advocates should never miss a chance to point out that trade benefits Main Street. Roughly 98 percent of the 300,000 U.S. companies that export are small and medium-sized businesses.

Don't forget the flip side of open marketsit encourages others to invest here. Foreign investment also puts people back to work. For example, after the shutdown of textile factories devastated workers in South Carolina, BMW came to the state and, working with IBM and Microsoft, invested $2.5 billion in a training center. The BMW factory in the state employs 10,000 workers producing vehicles and buys from 40 suppliers based in South Carolina (of 235 suppliers nation-wide). Mercedes employs 3,600 in its Alabama plant. Honda. Nissan. The examples go on.

Tariffs have terrible consequences for consumers. The time is right for a positive, hopeful message that reminds us all of the tremendous macro-economic benefits of free and fair trade.

Commentary by Steve Odland, the CEO of the Committee for Economic Development and former CEO of Office Depot and AutoZone. Check out CED's trade report here. Follow Steve Odland on Twitter @CEDUpdate and @SteveOdland .

For more insight from CNBC contributors, follow @CNBCopinion onTwitter.Microsoft is to purchase 315 megawatts (MW) of energy from two new solar facilities in Virginia, it said Wednesday.

The tech giant will buy energy from the Pleinmont I and II sites in what it described as "the single largest corporate purchase of solar energy ever in the United States."



The Pleinmont developments are part of a bigger 500 MW project owned and operated by sPower, an AES and AIMCo business. When operational, Pleinmont I and II will have over 750,000 solar panels covering more than 2,000 acres.



"This project is our second solar agreement in Virginia and allows our Virginia data centers to be powered fully by solar energy," Brad Smith, Microsoft's president, said in a statement Wednesday.

Microsoft's total of directly purchased renewable energy now stands at around 1.2 gigawatts (GW). This, Smith said, was enough power to light 100 million LED bulbs.

More than 10 GW of new solar photovoltaic capacity were installed in the U.S. in 2017, according to a recent report from GTM Research and the Solar Energy Industries Association. Photovoltaic refers to a way of directly converting light from the sun into electricity.

Virginia's governor, Ralph Northam, welcomed Wednesday's news. "When companies like Microsoft invest in Virginia solar, they opt for clean and reliable energy as well as new jobs in the energy economy we are working hard to build," he said.

Microsoft's latest announcement follows recent renewable energy deals in Asia. At the beginning of March, the company agreed to buy all the renewable energy output from a 60 MW solar project in Singapore, its first clean energy deal in Asia. A few days later, it announced it had entered into an agreement to purchase 3 MW of solar-powered electricity in India.

Correction: An earlier version had the wrong last name for Gov. Ralph Northam.Shares of China's Tencent Holdings fell as much as 4.6 percent on Thursday after the Hong Kong-listed internet giant's results announced a day earlier showed that revenue missed estimates and it warned that planned investments may hurt margins.



Tencent shares fell to as low as 441.4 Hong Kong dollars ($56.26) in early trading. The company on Wednesday reported a 98 percent jump in quarterly net profit, beating estimates, though revenues rose slower than expected at 51 percent.

Company president Martin Lau warned at a briefing on Wednesday that the company plans to invest "aggressively" in areas including video and payment, which may hurt margins.

With a market capitalization of around $535 billion, Tencent is Asia's most valuable listed company and the world No.5 behind Apple, Alphabet, Amazon.com and Microsoft.The outspoken German central bank governor is unlikely to become the next president of the European Central Bank (ECB), a political analyst told CNBC Thursday.

There is widespread opposition across the euro zone against Jens Weidmann, the current head of the German Bundesbank, as the debate grows over who's going to replace ECB President Mario Draghi next year.



Europe will have to choose a new ECB chief in the first half of 2019 and following the appointment of a southern European national, Luis de Guindos, for vice president, many analysts believe that the next president will be from the north of Europe, potentially Germany.

Analysts argue that Germany will fight to get the top role at the ECB as it needs to restore credibility among its voters and they believe its own central bank governor, Jens Weidmann, will land the job.

"There's a lot to play for here. Weidmann is a very good man but I think there's a lot of ammunition being built up against him," David Marsh, chairman of the London-based think tank OMFIF (Official Monetary and Financial Institutions Forum), told CNBC Thursday.

Recent remarks by Bruno Le Maire, the economy minister of France, showed that the name to replace Draghi is far from being decided. The minister said earlier this month that just because France decided to back the Spanish economy minister de Guindos as ECB vice president, it doesn't prejudge other choices France will make for other major European posts.

"I think in the end (Weidmann) won't get the job. It could even be another Frenchman actually," Marsh told CNBC, adding that this will be a "big issue" for Germany and France  the two largest euro economies.

On top of the decision for ECB chief, there will be an array of discussions to elect officials for many other European positions that will become vacant over the next two years. For instance, Europe will have to choose a new European Commission president in the spring of 2019, as well as a new European Council president, along with other roles inside the ECB.Tina Tchen, former Assistant to the President, former Chief of Staff to the First Lady and Director of the White House Council on Women and Girls and attorney behind the Time's Up legal defense fund.

Employers may boast a slight increase in staff diversity and data may show women gaining ground in male-dominated industries, but according to Tina Tchen, the lawyer spearheading the Time's Up Legal Defense Fund and Michelle Obama's former chief of staff, the surface has barely been scratched. "We're a lot of years away from gender equality," she said at the 2018 Catalyst Awards Conference, which featured panel discussions with corporate execs on workplaces that empower women. Tchen dismisses that notion that it's the government's responsibility to advocate for women by passing laws, pointing to its bleak track record. She recalled her horror when she joined the Obama administration in 2009 and was informed by a White House staffer that government employees are not entitled to paid maternity leave  a situation that she set out to rectify by advocating for all eligible workers to be granted paid family leave. Tchen also fought for the passage of the Equal Pay Act, which prohibits the federal government from asking prospective candidates about prior salaries. The bill was defeated by two votes.

If you have diverse and equitable workforces, you are going to have less sexual harassment. Tina Tchen Time's Up Legal Defense Fund

Instead, Tchen calls on the private sector to attack these issues head-on, particularly through an increased focus on promoting women to leadership roles. "The fastest way to achieve this diversity is going to be with companies stepping up to the plate," she says. "Especially in this current environment." Tchen tells CNBC Make It that in order to create workplaces where women can thrive, companies must commit to four key actions:

1. Be brutally honest

"We have to honestly admit that what we've been doing for the past three decades hasn't worked," says Tchen."We know it hasn't worked because the numbers on diversity are moving at a glacial pace." Citing research from McKinsey, Tchen notes that women make up just 6.4 percent of CEOs at Fortune 500 companies and 12 percent of board members. She also highlights the fact that "literally every company in America," utilizes sexual harassment training in the workplace, in accordance with Supreme Court rulings, to no avail. "Look where we are," she says. "That hasn't prevented sexual harassment from occurring...and being very prevalent in many of our workplaces."

2. Be willing to examine challenges beyond sexual harassment

Tchen says that companies must realize that sexual harassment is the result of a more deeply-rooted problem, rather than the problem itself. "Sexual harassment is the end of the process. It is the symptom of having a workforce that's actually not truly diverse and equitable," explains Tchen. "If you have diverse and equitable workforces, you are going to have less sexual harassment." Furthermore, leaders should not concentrate solely on addressing sexual harassment, while ignoring the other barriers that keep women from progressing in the workforce. Tchen mentions hurdles like equal pay, paid leave and fair promotion and retention practices. "All of those things need to be looked at holistically," she says.

A Time's Up billboard on Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA Gabriel Olsen | Getty Images

3. Recognize that these aren't just 'HR issues'

A company's HR department should not be alone in pursuing solutions for female employees. "These are core corporate governance issues," says Tchen. The "tone" must start at the very top and flow through the entire organization. Fairness and equality for employees have to be considered key success metrics for a business, just as profit and revenue growth are, says Tchen. She points to findings which show that companies with a high percentage of female leaders report a higher return on investments. "These are going to be key to your company's future," says the attorney.

4. Go beyond the lawPresident Donald Trump lashed out at Joe Biden for wanting "beat the hell out of him," saying Thursday that the former vice president "would go down fast and hard, crying all the way."

The Republican president tweeted: "Crazy Joe Biden is trying to act like a tough guy. Actually, he is weak, both mentally and physically, and yet he threatens me, for the second time, with physical assault. He doesn't know me, but he would go down fast and hard, crying all the way. Don't threaten people Joe!"

Donald Trump tweet

Biden spoke at an anti-sexual assault rally at the University of Miami on Tuesday and cited lewd comments Trump made in a 2005 "Access Hollywood" tape about grabbing women without their permission.

The Democrat said, "If we were in high school, I'd take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him." He also said any man who disrespected women was "usually the fattest, ugliest S.O.B. in the room."

Biden, 75, made similar comments in the closing days of the 2016 campaign. He has kept open the possibility of a 2020 bid for president and is gearing up to play a big role campaigning for Democrats running in this year's midterm elections.

Trump, 71, dismissed the prospect of a Biden run recently at the annual Gridiron Dinner with Washington journalists, calling him "Sleepy Joe" and saying he could "kick his ass." Trump also attacked Biden on Twitter in 2016, calling him "Our not very bright Vice President."President Donald Trump signed an executive memorandum on Thursday that would impose retaliatory tariffs on up to $60 billion in Chinese imports.

"This is the first of many" trade actions, Trump said as he signed the memo.

The new measures are designed to penalize China for trade practices that the Trump administration says involve stealing American companies' intellectual property. They will primarily target certain products in the technology sector where China holds an advantage over the U.S.

The new measures follow a so-called 301 investigation led by U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer into China's potentially unfair trade practices with the U.S.

Lighthizer's office will publish a list of targeted products in 15 days, and there will be a 30-day period for public comment, according to senior administration officials.

The U.S. Trade Representative's yet-to-be-released report covers 1,300 product lines, the administration officials said.

The bottom line, said Trump's trade director, Peter Navarro, on Thursday, is that the U.S. is "strategically defending itself against economic aggression." The president is standing up for American corporations, he added.

Lighthizer told lawmakers on Thursday, however, that China is likely to retaliate against the tariffs by targeting U.S. agricultural products that are reliant on the Chinese export market.

The Trump administration had previously signaled that the tariffs would apply to at least $30 billion in Chinese imports, multiple news outlets reported. Trump himself has pushed for $60 billion in tariffs on Chinese goods.

In the Senate Finance Committee on Thursday before Trump's announcement, Lighthizer outlined the Chinese products that will be subject to the new tariffs, including aeronautics, modern rail, new-energy vehicles and high-tech products.The U.S. will grant the European Union and some other countries a temporary exemption from aluminium and steel tariffs, averting a trade war with key allies as the Trump administration tailors penalties to target China.



U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer told the Senate Finance Committee on Thursday that the Trump administration would temporarily exempt some countries "based on a certain set of criteria" from steel and aluminum tariffs while they negotiate with the United States.

In addition to the EU, those exempt are Argentina, Australia, Brazil and South Korea, Lighthizer said. President Donald Trump had already granted exemptions to Mexico and Canada when he signed the tariffs earlier this month.



"There are countries with whom we're negotiating and the question becomes the obvious one that you think, as a matter of business, how does this work? So what he has decided to do is to pause the imposition of the tariffs with respect to those countries," Lighthizer said.



Trump's tariffs had sparked outrage among European officials, who lobbied hard for an exemption, citing the continent's long-standing military alliance and close economic ties to the United States.Hours after his lead attorney in the Russia probe quit, President Donald Trump said Thursday he still wants to be interviewed by special counsel Robert Mueller's office as part of its investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

"Yes, I would like to. I would like to," Trump told reporters at the White House after being asked whether he still is interested in testifying for the special counsel.

Earlier Thursday, John Dowd, the lead lawyer in the probe, quit the president's legal team.

Among other things, Dowd reportedly disagreed with Trump over potentially submitting to an interview with Mueller's team. On Tuesday, Dowd pushed back against the notion that the president was on the verge of shaking up his legal team.

Over the weekend, Dowd called for the special counsel's probe to end, and Trump criticized Mueller by name on Twitter for the first time.

In addition to probing Russian meddling in the election, Mueller is investigating whether associates of Trump colluded with Russians during the campaign.

Trump has repeatedly and angrily denied any such collusion occurred.Student loan borrowers in the United States collectively owe almost $1.5 trillion in student debt, and according to the Brookings Institute, almost 40 percent of borrowers will default on their student loans by 2023.

Currently, it is nearly impossible to have your student debt forgiven during bankruptcy  but that may soon change. In February, the Department of Education announced that it will review and potentially alter policies that make it difficult for student debt to be discharged in bankruptcy.

Miranda Marquit, personal finance expert at Student Loan Hero tells CNBC Make It that there are three steps for discharging student debt in bankruptcy: Borrowers must find a lawyer, decide what type of bankruptcy proceeding to pursue and prove that they face "undue hardship."

"It's almost impossible to discharge student loans in bankruptcy," Student loan expert Mark Kantrowitz tells CNBC. "The problem was undue hardship was never defined, and the case law has never led to a standardized definition."Once upon a time, smartwatches were going to be the Next Big Thing  the future of mobile computing that'd replace smartphones as our go-to gadgets and upend the way we lived, worked, and played.

Yeah. So much for that.

Just like the more recent chatbot "revolution," all the hype surrounding smartwatches failed to materialize into anything meaningful. These days, most smartwatches are glorified fitness trackers and email checkers. They're nowhere near as pervasive as tech prophets once predicted, and even when they are present on a person's wrist, they tend to be anything but transformative.

Perhaps it's no surprise, then, that Google is in the midst of attempting to give its wearable platform a fresh start. The company recently announced a rebranding of Android Wear to the far more generic "Wear OS"  a move that, by all counts, seems to be about communicating the software's cross-platform support as much as anything.

But Google's real problems with Wear run much deeper than its name. Google's lack of focus and conviction with its own vision snuffed out the spark and promise present in the platform's earlier days. And Wear is far from the only instance where an inability to commit and stick to its guns has sent Google down an ill-advised path.

[Android Intelligence in your inbox. Upgrade your knowledge with the new insider's newsletter.]

Context without conviction: A classic Google conundrum

At the beginning, Android Wear had a secret weapon no other smartwatch had managed to master: context.

In writing about Wear ahead of its release, I said the killer feature that'd set a smartwatch apart and turn it into a genuinely useful gadget was smart context  the type of predictive intelligence Google alone excelled at providing:

[It would be] Google Now  only optimized for your wrist and made more useful than ever. Cards popping up with info you need before you ever ask for it. Intelligent reminders based on where you are, what you're doing, and where you're going next. Those of us who use Android are already familiar with how useful Google Now can be  but on a phone, it's inherently limited to being useful only when you pick up and look at the device. On a watch, that barrier is essentially eliminated.

Android Wear's initial implementation certainly wasn't perfect (and the early hardware had ample room for improvement), but the overall focus was spot on. At their core, smartwatches are most useful as systems for letting you quickly catch up with pertinent info  whether it's an incoming notification or a heads-up about heavy traffic to a place you're likely heading.

As I put it in my initial Wear review:

What makes the info special is the fact that it shows up when you need it  before you even think to ask. And while that same sort of info is available with a few swipes on an Android phone, having it on your wrist really does change the way you experience it. This is because Wear puts contextual info front and center  and consequently makes it feel like a natural extension of your body as opposed to an out-of-the-way interruption. Add at-a-glance access to notification-based cards like text messages and emails, and you've got a pretty compelling framework for a wearable-tech platform.

But then, the Apple Watch came along, complete with its overly complicated interface and app-centric nature (something Apple would refine somewhat over time but that was almost laughably bad in the beginning). And Google, rather than sticking to the parts of its platform that made sense, decided to revamp Wear entirely and parrot Apple's flawed approach.

With 2017's Wear 2.0 update, Android Wear lost the core element that made it sensible as a wearable operating system  the focus on easily glanceable info from both notifications and predictive intelligence  and instead put the focus on things that sound impressive in ads but don't make for a great real-world experience on a tiny wrist-based screen: complicated standalone apps, cramped on-screen keyboards, and notifications that don't appear in a glanceable way and require multiple taps and interactions to process.

Like Apple, Google started approaching the smartwatch as if it were a tiny phone on your wrist. But the way we interact with one type of technology doesn't necessarily carry over to another. At the base level, at least, Google got it right in the beginning but then failed to stick with its vision. Rather than finding a way to refine and then market its concept and make sure people understood why it made sense, Google gave up and blindly emulated Apple instead.

It wouldn't be the first or the last time such a pattern would emerge.

When Google gets in Google's way

We talked about Google Now's missed potential with smartwatches, but Google Now itself is a prime example of Google having something exceptional and then failing to follow through with it.

When Google Now first appeared on Android phones in 2012, it was heralded as "the predictive future of search." It brought the countless tidbits Google knows about our lives and our world together in a fantastically useful way  a way no company other than Google could truly pull off.

Now? Google Now has been lazily rebranded as "the feed" (not even important enough to warrant being a proper noun) and is basically just another stream of news stories you can scroll through.

And why did that change happen? By all counts, Google gave up on its unique vision in order to chase competitors like Facebook in the race for cheap attention. In doing so, it once again lost that special spark, as I wrote last fall:

Five years ago, Google Now felt like the future. Today, the Google feed feels like the past  like a mildly different spin on a ubiquitous concept and a step backwards from what Google achieved when it put the full power of its resources front and center.

There are countless other examples of Google acting as its own worst enemy and failing to follow through with a commendable initial vision. Look at the company's never-ending messaging mess, for instance, or the awkward implementation of Apple-like app shortcuts in Android 7.1. In the latter case, as I said at the time, "instead of thinking through what'd be the most sensible and user-friendly way for a feature like this to work, Google seemed to just emulate the way Apple did it." See the pattern?

To a degree, a company being flexible and open to the evolution of its products  even when said transformation blatantly revolves around "borrowing" inspiration from other sources  can be an asset. But there's also something to be said for having the stones to stand by the value of your own ideas and remaining willing to recognize when you've got a good thing going, even if that thing requires a mix of refinement and promotion to reach its potential.

Unless Google manages to master the art of commitment and conviction, this pattern is doomed to continue  and the company is only going to keep getting in its own way.

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[Android Intelligence videos at Computerworld]Microsoft this week released the first preview of Windows Server 2019, the next iteration of its enterprise-standard server software and announced that the final code would ship in the second half of his year.

Licensing costs will likely go up for Server 2019, Microsoft added.

The Server 2019 early look is available now to participants in Windows Insider, the preview program Microsoft established prior to Windows 10's launch and expanded in June 2017 to include Windows Server. Microsoft has tagged the beta with the build number 17623.

Windows Server 2019's beta, the general window of release, even its nameplate, were not unexpected. Microsoft signaled each when last year it conformed Server's development and release cadence to that of the client versions of Windows and Office.

All three lines, Microsoft's most important software by leagues, now issue multiple interim upgrades annually - those are dubbed "Semi-Annual Channel" builds, or SACs - that in turn lead to a new more-static-and-stable build every two to three years (with the emphasis on the latter). Those less-frequent versions are labeled "Long-Term Service Channel," or LTSC.

For Office and Windows Server, the LTSC also gets a new moniker, such as "Office 2019" or "Windows Server 2019," to distinguish the every-so-often editions available as "perpetual" licenses, as opposed to software "rented" from Microsoft via a subscription. So, it's no coincidence that the next editions of Office and Windows Server will share the same "2019" label, as they both rely on the same licensing rhythm.

Like other products sold as perpetual licenses, Server 2019 will be supported using the standard 5+5 scheme, with five years of "Mainstream" support and another five years of "Extended" support. The former will probably expire in early 2024, while the latter will likely end in early 2029.

However, customers willing to pay for the privilege may receive support for six more years atop the usual decade, for a total of 16 years. That option, "Premium Assurance," debuted in December 2016.

Microsoft puts a stake in the ground

Because of the way Microsoft delivers Server SACs and limits the support for each to 18 months, Server 2019 - in particular, the preview - will be the first glimpse customers have of the future in an edition that supports a full desktop mode.

SACs of Windows Server 2016, like last year's 1709 (using Microsoft's yymm nomenclature), the impending 1803 and even this fall's 1809 have been limited to the Nano and Server Core configurations, with the former relegated to container-only and neither providing a full desktop GUI (graphical user interface).

Those SACs, however, were where Microsoft introduced new technologies or features into Windows Server. As with the development of Office, every two or three years Microsoft will take the contents of the twice-annual SACs to compose the feature set of the next Windows Server X, essentially putting a stake in the ground for customers who prefer stability over instant innovation.

Erin Chapple, director of program management for Windows Server, laid out the foundational additions and improvements to the product in a March 20 post to a company blog.

Among the most notable, Microsoft will embed its Windows Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) technology into the Server 2019 operating system so that administrators can detect and react to intrusions. ATP, a cornerstone of many of Microsoft's most expensive, and thus profitable, products, including the top-tier Microsoft 365 subscriptions, will be accompanied by other new tools, including extending the shielded VM concept of Server 2016 to encompass Linux-hosted virtual machines. Server 2019 will also include the ability to encrypt network segments, such as those between servers.

A more detailed "What's New?" description of Server 2019, of build 17623 specifically, was offered by Mary Hoffman, a spokeswoman who often blogs about Server.

CAL cost to go up

Nothing is free, particularly if it's from Microsoft.

Windows Server 2019 will cost more to run than its predecessor, Microsoft admitted, though it did not reveal how much more. "It is highly likely we will increase pricing for Windows Server Client Access Licensing (CAL)," said Chapple in his Tuesday post. "We will provide more details when available." (When the Redmond, Wash. company says "highly likely" in the context of price increases, the money is on those hikes coming to pass.)

CALs, as they're known, are the licenses necessary to connect other software to the server. Microsoft's general rule, in fact, is that all server software access requires a CAL. And because CALs are generally (but not always) required for each user, per-CAL hikes can quickly accumulate into, as former Sen. Everett Dirkson (R-Ill.) once said, "real money."

How to download the Server 2019 preview

Build 17623 can be downloaded from the Insider website in disk image (.iso) or Hyper-V (.vhdx) formats. The initial build is available in 18 languages, including Chinese, English, German, Korean and Russian.

Testers must have already registered as an Insider participant; that can be accomplished here.May urges EU leaders to join the UK in a mass expulsion of Russian spies

Theresa May will tell EU leaders they must all toughen up on Russia  or put all of Europe at threat. Vladimir Putins alarming aggression will last for years, the PM will also warn at a Brussels summit. And she will insist that his refusal to respect international laws and borders means the whole continent is now at risk. It emerged tonight that she has also began to urge the 27 other member states to order their own Russian spy expulsions to send a strong joint message to the Kremlin over the Salisbury nerve agent outrage. Mrs May will tell leaders over the summit dinner on Thursday: The challenge of Russia is one that will endure for years to come. As a European democracy the United Kingdom will stand shoulder to shoulder with the European Union and with NATO to face these threats together.  The Sun

>Today:

Brussels presses for progress on the Irish border, as fishing row continues

Theresa May has been warned that Britain has three months to solve the Irish border dilemma or Brexit trade talks may stall. European leaders meeting in Brussels tomorrow are expected to sign a transition deal and move on to trade talks. The prime minister will be told, however, that the government must come up with a concrete solution to the issue by the next EU summit in June or sign off on a legally binding backstop to keep Northern Ireland in the Customs Union. Failure to do so could result in a suspension of talks on the future relationship. A senior EU diplomat said yesterday that the other 27 countries expected to see a solution to all matters relevant to the backstop in good time for the June summit.  The Times

>Yesterday: Ray Bassett on Comment: It is time for political game-playing over the Irish border to be stopped

Evans-Pritchard: A global downturn during Brexit transition will throw Leavers and Remainers into turmoil

Forsyth: The Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister clash in Cabinet over stop and search

A cyclical recession will change the chemistry of Brexit talks. The relative attractions of the British and eurozone polities  the beauty contest that so shaped perceptions in the euro crisis of 2010 to 2014  will take on enormous salience. It is not hard to imagine the vitriolic debate within the UK. Those who wish to blame Brexit for all that goes wrong will seize on the chance, claiming vindication as unemployment surges by a million and the budget deficit spirals to 8pc of GDP. It is an open goal for them since the UK has a famously high beta economy, leveraged to the global and commodity cycle, naturally prone to boom and bust. Yet the eurozone is even more vulnerable. It cannot plausibly withstand the political consequences of a second great crisis. Austerity fatigue is endemic in the South. Bail-out fatigue is equally endemic in the North.  Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, Daily Telegraph

Theresa Mays Home Office record is normally off limits at cabinet. But when ministers discussed the governments strategy for reducing violent crime on Tuesday, Boris Johnson took issue with what the Prime Minister regards as one of her key legacies: the dramatic reduction in stop and search. He argued that more stop and search was needed to deal with a spike in crime. What went unsaid  but what every-one around the cabinet table was acutely aware of  was that this was the opposite of Mrs Mays approach as Home Secretary. The exchange was pointed. They irritate each other, one cabinet minister observed to me afterwardsOne secretary of state half-jokingly described the cabinet as a water cannons retrospective, a reference to Johnsons irritation when May barred the Metropolitan police from using the ones he had bought after the 2011 London riots. But this wasnt just a clash of egos. Rather, it was a profound disagreement on how best to prevent crime. As one of those present put it to me: Boris thinks stop and search is the answer; she thinks she stopped a national scandal.  James Forsyth, The Spectator

On policing, on housing, and on fighting Momentum, Sadiq Khan is letting London down  Nick Timothy, Daily Telegraph

Durham police discover that challenging low-level crime reduces more serious offending  FT

Some 999 callers have to wait weeks for any response in some areas  Daily Mail

Mercer calls for troops to get the same pay rise as nurses

Lords complain that DEFRA is too focused on farming

Theresa May sparked uproar yesterday as the Government said cash-strapped squaddies would have to wait months for a pay rise that matches the 4 billion deal for nurses. Downing Street and Treasury sources yesterday said the NHS was a clear priority and warned soldiers, police, teachers and other public sector workers not to expect a similar deal. Furious peers and MPs let rip and said it summed up fears that the Government only thinks about Our Boys when they have to fight to protect UK interests around the world. Soldiers in junior ranks have seen their real earnings shrink by 1,000 a year since 2010Tory backbencher Johnny Mercer told The Sun: Nurses deserve a better deal but of course I want to see that replicated across the military. The offer to our servicemen and women has unacceptably declined of late; pay is an important part of that and I want to see it addressed. The row came as official figures revealed the 12-month squeeze on pay across the UK was finally at an end. Total pay rose 2.8 per cent in the three months to January  and by 2.6 per cent excluding bonuses.  The Sun

The Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) is too preoccupied with farming and the environment to tackle chronic deprivation and social mobility cold spots, which have become endemic in rural areas, a report by the natural environment and rural communities select committee found. Lord Cameron of Dillington, committee chairman, said: There is real poverty and deprivation in the countryside but because it is mixed up with chocolate box villages it tends to get ignored. Defra has never really got the fact that agriculture, forestry and fisheries represent around 7.5 per cent of rural employment and the other 90 per cent have problems  problems like deprivation and transport, Lord Cameron added. Defra seems to regularly ignore the needs of 93 per cent of its constituents.  The Times

Pursglove accidentally propositions the Prime Minister  Daily Mail

Zuckerberg apologises, and warns of further attempts to meddle in US elections

One year since the Westminster Bridge attack

Mark Zuckerberg says hes sure someones trying to meddle with elections using Facebook. Speaking to CNN, the Facebook CEO apologised again for the Cambridge Analytica data breach and said he WOULD testify in front of Congress, and even backed regulation for the social network. Asked if he thought bad actors were using Facebook to mess with the US mid-terms, he said: Im sure someones trying and Im sure theres a version two of whatever the Russian effort was in 2016, and theres going to be some new tactics we have to get in front of. We have some sense of the things we need to get in front of. He described the Cambridge Analytica scandal as a major breach of trust adding Im so sorry.  The Sun

The widow of the American man killed in the Westminster Bridge terror attack in London says she will be remembering him with forgiveness and peace one year on. Melissa Cochran, 47, will honor husband Kurt Cochran by advocating love on the first anniversary of the March 22 attack. Speaking to DailyMail.com, the Utah resident said that she still grieves for her husband and wants to express her deepest sympathies to the families of the three other people who died and 49 who were injuredKurt and Melissa, who have two sons in their 20s, were visiting the UK on a trip to mark the 25th anniversary of their wedding when they were struck by terrorist Khalid Masood in a 44 on Westminster Bridge near Parliament. Masood killed Kurt, 54, and seriously injured Melissa, leaving her with a broken rib and badly injured leg, before stopping and stabbing to death British police officer Keith Palmer. Masood was shot dead at the scene by an armed policeman  most British officers do no carry guns  who was hailed a hero for stopping further carnage.  Daily Mail

Aaronovitch: Corbynism is Britains first personality cult

Vaz investigation resumes  The Sun

The Corbyn cult is just about the first I can recall from British political history; unique in Labour, almost unprecedented in any party. Never mind Eden, Macmillan or Heath, even Churchill did not receive such uncategorical support from his activists. The nearest equivalent is the treatment Tories handed out to Margaret Thatcher, but only after victory in the Falklands war. I didnt enjoy the Thatcher Supremacy, but most of the time the attitude even of party members towards leaders has been one of friendly scepticism. Not any more. It is enough today in many Labour gatherings simply to invoke the name of the leader to banish opposition or rally support. Over in America, where Ive been recently, a similar cult of personality has hijacked another great party. And ironically it was also illustrated in the matter of Russia. Donald Trump, we learnt from a leak this week, ignored advice from his security advisers and congratulated Mr Putin on his re-election as president and neglected to mention either Russian meddling in US affairs or the Skripal attack.  David Aaronovitch, The Times

>Yesterday: UKIPWatch: Its time the pollsters stopped prompting UKIP as a major party

Welby speaks of his shame at how the Church of England let down abuse victims

Justin Welby has said he is ashamed of the Church of England as he admitted he had a sense of failure over the Churchs treatment of abuse victims. Giving evidence at the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse, the Archbishop of Canterbury said the Churchs discipline process for accused priests was not fit for purpose and needed reform. The damage it does to victims and survivors, the damage it does to people against whom a complaint is made, is extraordinary, he said. Asked about the lack of responsibility taken by individuals for failings in the church, he warned that tribalism in the Church of England had allowed paedophile clerics to thrive.  Daily Telegraph

News in BriefHelen Whately is MP for Faversham and Mid-Kent.

The NHS is nothing without the people who work in it. The care we value so much depends utterly on the doctors, nurses, therapists and everyone else who works in our health service.

We are living longer, but with more health problems. And as our need for healthcare increases, so does the need for doctors and nurses. Many areas of life can be automated, but healthcare largely bucks this trend; the NHS depends on people.

At the moment there are around 150,000 doctors working in the NHS, but up to ten per cent of jobs for doctors are vacant. Some posts are filled by locums, others just go unfilled  adding to the pressure on the doctors who are there.

For many years, weve relied on doctors from overseas boosting the numbers in the NHS  currently around 25 per cent. This wont change overnight, and theres a lot to be said for doctors working internationally, but the time has come to boost our own home-grown supply.

Thats exactly what the Government is doing.

Every year 6,000 students start medical school in England. This year, there will be 630 extra new starters. And by 2020, there will be an extra 1,500 medical school places  an increase of 25 per cent.

So in a few years time, the NHS will have more doctors to staff our hard-pressed A&Es and GP surgeries.

But this news is better than that. While many of these new doctors will follow in the footsteps of their forebears and train in established medical schools, 410 of the places will be in new medical schools  in Sunderland, Lancashire, Lincoln, Chelmsford, and, most significantly to me as a Kent MP, in Canterbury. Ive been working with the two universities in Canterbury for this almost since the day the Government announced this expansion in medical students. Why? Because it could transform healthcare in Kent.

Kent struggles to attract doctors, especially to the east of the county. Its largely rural with deprived coastal communities. Our A&Es rely on locums. We have some of the worst waiting times in the country. And we need 530 more GPs to reach the national average per head.

Canterbury Hospital was once a magnet for clinicians looking to work outside London, but its hard to compete with renowned London hospitals, where doctors can take up opportunities to research and teach as well as practice medicine. And when doctors consider where to apply for jobs post-qualification, many are drawn to places and people they have got to know as students.

By locating new medical schools around the country, in areas which struggle to recruit, the Government is not only boosting the absolute numbers but also sharing the supply to address some of the imbalances.

Better still, universities successful in their bids for these new medical students have also committed to recruiting more candidates from disadvantaged backgrounds. Having a medical school within reach of your home, especially one that reaches out and encourages you to apply, could suddenly make the idea of becoming a doctor a dream worth dreaming for a teenager in an area where life doesnt seem to offer much.

Its not been easy for the new medical schools to succeed in their bids. Ive seen the huge effort they have made close at hand in Kent. Congratulations to the University of Kent, Canterbury Christ Church University and all the other universities who have won a share of the new places.

All winter weve seen negative headlines about the NHS. Here is a positive one that deserves coverage. 1,500 more student doctors, in the areas of the country where they are most needed  along with 5,000 more nurse training places, also a 25 per cent uplift.

Whenever I visit hospitals, staff tell me how they struggle to find time to give patients the care they want to. They tell me the gaps in staff rotas and the reliance on locums and agency staff make a difficult job so much harder. This wont be solved overnight  it takes two to four years to train a nurse and seven years to train a doctor  but a change is coming.

So long as the hospitals and surgeries these new nurses and doctors start work in give them the support they will need, the NHS will truly turn a corner. They are the future of our NHS.J P Floru: People only moan about the use of Facebook data when it is used by campaigns they dislike

J.P. Floru is a Westminster City councillor and author of The Sun Tyrant: A Nightmare called North Korea and Heavens on Earth: How to Create Mass Prosperity. He contested Bermondsey and Old Southwark in the 2015 General Election.

Shock! Horror! Facebook is sharing our personal data! Who would have thought it?

ErmYes. Everybody. And yet for the last week, the Guardian and the BBC, now followed by other media, have made a massive brouhaha about something few Facebook users care about. We know its happening. By continuing to use Facebook, we tacitly acquiesce. A few of us dont use Facebook for privacy reasons, as is their right. But why are some in the media, now aided by Big Government, suddenly telling me that what I know to happen and am quite content about is somehow not acceptable and/or illegal? Why might Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, suddenly be dragged before Parliaments Culture Committee to come and explain what few of his users care about?

This is of course not about privacy. This is about a conspiracy theory.

Ever since the Trump election and the Brexit vote, some self-named metropolitan elites have kept themselves busy bemoaning, contesting, and explaining away the unwanted results. How could all of this happen, when The Enlightened View was expounded by such overwhelming force by the elites?

Youve got it: a conspiracy. Evil Facebook has gathered our personal data and somehow transmitted that to Evil Cambridge Analytica, which actually used those data! Manipulative social media have fooled the gullible (stupid) population into voting for the wrong results! To the stake with the culprits!

A splendid article in The Spectator explains what happened next. Every few weeks Carole Cadwalladr pens long articles in the Guardian and the Observer on how the Trump and Brexit campaigns allegedly hacked democracy. This is then re-tweeted ad infinitum by the incandescent self-named elites. Others write about it, too; and Russia, the behemoth on-call, of course makes routine guest appearances.

Now it has paid off: Damian Collins MP (Conservative, Remainer), head of the Culture Committee, has written to Zuckerberg to come and explain himself. Expect grandstanding; expect breathless BBC reporting for days on end. The self-named elites are on the offensive (if you dont want to hear about it I suggest you book a two-week holiday around the time Zuckerberg appears). I bet the Guardian already has a large team investigating The Revelations. The stupid voters were fooled  and the Culture Committee and the enlightened media will reveal all!

What makes the whole exercise so pathetic is the selectiveness of the elites memories. Other political campaigns used exactly the same methods before. Obama and Hillary used social media data as well. The elites did not object: quite to the contrary. Obamas campaigning methods were lauded as ground-breaking, innovative, the stuff which will make futuristic paradises reach higher levels of civilisation. Just like Kennedy brought in the television presidency, I think were about to see the first wired, connected, networked presidency, they cooed in The New York Times.

Then the other side used it. As the other side is evil (fascist, xenophobic, dumb, uninformed, and uneducated), their methods have suddenly become evil too. The Financial Times (Remain) unwittingly revealed the thinking: A little over a year ago, I sat down for lunch with some of the brainiacs who work for Cambridge Analytica, the political polling and analysis group that helped Donald Trump in the 2016 US election  and which has faced controversy ever since. Emphasis on ever since. Work for Trump equals being in the wrong, and attracts the self-named elites opprobrium and attacks.

If Hillary and Remain had won, using the same methods, would anyone at the Guardian or the BBC have cared a bean about the data gathering by Facebook and Cambridge Analytica?

You know the answer.

Our parliamentary committees should not waste time with these political witch-hunt practices. And the BBC needs to be called to order.Kemi Badenoch is MP for Saffron Walden, and the Conservative Partys Vice Chairman for Candidates.

I was very proud to have been appointed as Vice Chairman for Candidates in January. I was on the candidates list for nine years. I fought a safe Labour seat in 2010, canvassed in seats across the country, manned phone-banks in CCHQ and campaigned in numerous by-elections throughout this period before successfully getting elected last year. I know the ups and downs of being a candidate and want to use this experience to help iron out the creases and continue to improve the system.

I have clear objectives in my new role: to improve candidates well-being and satisfaction through support and development; to broaden the pipeline of candidates so that we have the breadth of talent that is as representative as possible of our countrys diversity; and to build an effective body of campaigners who can win elections.

Selection

It is critical that our Party members have faith in the system, and know that only the brightest and best candidates are being selected. I am against the use of quota systems, including all-women shortlists. I believe they are a short-term fix which do nothing to resolve the underlying problem of why fewer women decide against a career in politics.

Except in extraordinary circumstances, local associations must have the final say in picking their candidates, but it is also crucial that associations do not decide on who they want before the selection process, without having the opportunity to see many others keen to represent their seat.

A balanced Parliamentary Party requires a diverse pipeline of candidates, and this means diversity of background and thought. Given the nature of our work, it is right that we have a decent number of talented lawyers but we need much more than that. The nurses, doctors, engineers, postmen, miners in the Party provide us with a depth and breadth of life experience far beyond that of Labour, Lib Dem, or SNP MPs.

Communication

It is important that the candidates department communicate as often and as clearly as possible  not just about what we are doing, but how and why. Many Party members find the selection process mysterious and opaque. Many candidates can feel left in the dark about how the machine is functioning, and how close they are to getting shortlisted for a seat.

We can and we must do better, and I will be working with the rest of the team to improve the communications we send out. We cant please everyone all the time, but the number of those disappointed will fall if we provide a clear and transparent process with rules laid out in advance.

Transparency

In return, we expect transparency and integrity from our candidates. We will be increasing due diligence activities. This means continuing to ensure that the job descriptions and achievements on candidates CVs give associations the right information to hand when making decisions.

Teamwork

Teamwork is the single most important attribute for electoral success. For candidates, this means helping other candidates, not just at a parliamentary level but at council elections and by-elections too.

Real teamwork often means personal sacrifices for the greater good. It means turning up at campaigning events if no government minister will be attending, volunteering to run associations and other networks.

We are a campaigning party, and that campaigning is built on support for each other. For candidates, that means supporting fellow aspiring MPs in their seats and on to electoral victory. It is a key part of being a candidate and works in both directions. It continues when you are elected, and when you are a minister. It is a fundamental part of ensuring that we form a government, through having more Conservatives in the Commons.

On my part, this means collaborating more with other vice-chairs. There is some overlap in the work we do and supporting each other, which will be vital to achieving success. For example, I will be working on training for candidates with James Morris, my fellow Vice Chairman.

I am looking forward to working with everyone on the list, and with my colleagues here at CCHQ, to ensure that being a candidate for our party is as fulfilling and enjoyable as possible. Whether or not you are successful in finding and winning a seat, being a candidate should be an enriching experience that is both personally and professionally rewarding.Garvan Walshe is a former National and International Security Policy Adviser to the Conservative Party. He runs Brexit Analytics

One line sums up Moscows foreign policy since Russia invaded Georgia in 2008: Come on, if you think youre hard enough!

Its no secret that Putin suffers from a psychotherapist might call geostrategic inadequacy issues. The renovated Kremlin buildings, exquisitely uniformed presidential guards, the almost plaintive insistence that Russia was an energy superpower (because it was no longer a superpower), and, dont forget, those repeated topless photoshoots. They add grandeur to the squalid Russian policy of bullying weaker neighbours and supporting the ruthlessly murderous Assad regime, and they evoke memories of the great power that first Russia, and then the Soviet Union, once was, but which Moscow now lacks the means to recreate.

Putin may receive congratulations for his exaggerated electoral triumph from the Oval Office (Trump imagines to himself and Fox News that he won the popular vote; Putin arranged for the count to reflect the 75 per cent total he desired) and Jean-Claude Juncker. But they dont disguise that his power is based on a fraud.

He may have restored the operation of the Russian state, and excited the population with military pomp, but he cant disguise Russias miserable economic performance.

After two decades in power, Russias economy is smaller than Canadas, or that of the Iberian peninsula. Instead of using Russias energy resources to improve productivity, or restore the formerly excellent Soviet technical education system, he has presided over a corrupt and extractive economic system that has enriched a few and entrenched the gap between Moscow and St Petersburg and the rest of the country. Its only strengths is its willingness to see how far it can get away with breaking the rules of the international order, and to deploy some of the extracted mineral wealth to suborn democratic political processes.

Russias two most recent attempts to test limits have had dramatically different results. Merceneries fighting for the Wagner Private Military Company (controlled by a Russian oligarch with close links to the Kremlin) met with withering American fire when attempting an attack on their base at Deir Ezzor in Syria. The Skripals poisoners received in public at least only a minor rebuke in the form of the expulsion of spies under diplomatic for which Russia itself retaliated. Despite solidarity from Germany, France, Donald Tusk and, belatedly, the United States, Moscow hasnt paid a serious political price for its actions.

RT, its broadcaster, continues to operate in the UK. There has not been an attempt to direct existing anti-money-laundering powers against UK property owned by members of the Russian elite and purchased with the proceeds of corruption. Nor has there begun a process of directing the foreign policy resources of the United Kingdom with the intensity the situation requires.

While it is true that the government of the UK is consumed by Brexit, taking action against Russia is not a policy major European powers oppose. It is in fact one that Germany, France and Poland, whatever their disagreements with each other and with the UK over Brexit, Eurozone Reform and the rule of law, can unite in supporting. Countries are able to do more than one thing at a time.

In order to demonstrate its seriousness, the UK should conduct a thorough review of its policy towards Russia, in order to direct elements of its national economic, political and diplomatic resources (themselves significantly greater than those available to Moscow) towards neutralising Russia. As well as measures already agreed, including creating Magnitsty Act-style sanctions powers, it should address at least the following areas:

Military preparedness

Can the UK deter Russian provocations that threaten vital UK national interests?

Military mobility: much infrastructure, especially in former Warsaw Pact countries, has not been built to support the swift movement of military equipment to reinforce a defence against a Russian incursion. What can the UK do to support the NATO-led upgrade programme in this area.

Counter-propaganda

Review broadcast licences granted to foreign state broadcasters and other media outlets.

The Cambridge Analytica disclosures will increase pressure to regulate social media  this needs to be done in ways that strengthen the quality of debate in free societies, while denying dictatorships the ability to censor

Promote true news in Russia and in other countries subject to heavy Russian propaganda. They can advertise cheaply on Facebook here. Whats to stop the BBC world service (or indeed other organisations independent of the World Service) from bringing unbiased content to Russia itself in a similar manner?

Cyber-security

The Government is rightly concerned to expand UK capability in this area.

Develop legal instruments prohibit the use in the UK of cyber security software, telecommunications services, and technology that is owned either by Russia, or is under the commercial control people subject to Russian jurisdiction, including in the private sector. Even if the providers of such services have legitimate intentions, they can be intimidated by the Russian state into cooperating with its intelligence apparatus.

Russian money

Russia currently believes the UK is too greedy to clamp down on wealth linked to the Russian regime. It needs to be disabused of this notion.

Unexplained Wealth Orders should be used systematically to freeze money stolen from the Russian people through corruption and shareholders in Russian companies through state extortion, forced sales and other harassment.

This can be held in an escrow fund for return to a future Russian government that respects the rule of law. The funds could even be invested in the mean time in areas, such as renewable energy, that undermine the basis of Russian state power.

Other out-of the box ideas

Immigration policy. It should be tightened against the Kremlin affiliated elite but loosened for ordinary Russians in search of opportunities.

Research into anti-acceess and area denial military capability that relatively less sophisticated militaries in Eastern Europe could use to increase the cost of potential Russian aggression, perhaps to prohibitve levels

Establsh public-key sovereign self-identity systems (as proposed here by Julia Apostle) to limit fraud on social media and ensure that bots can automatically be detected as such without handing over details of peoples identity to the authorities or creating a honeypot for hackers.

Now is a good time to take these steps. It was Corbyn who politicised this issue of national security by refusing to give the Prime Minister and security services the backing on this issue that the Labour party had done since 1945. It would be remiss of a Conservative government not to take advantage of an occasion on which party and national interest coincide.Holyrood set for showdown with Westminster as Brexit bill passes

The Scottish Parliament is on a collision course with the constitution after MSPs passed a Brexit Bill which the presiding officer had declared beyond their remit.

In Cardiff the Welsh Assembly passed its own similar bill, again opposed by the Conservatives, hours before.

Earlier this week the Scottish Tories, who have been indulging the Nationalist power grab line but opposed the legislation, tried to write a Union guarantee into it.

These bills are the latest twist in a long-running battle between the devolved legislatures and Westminster over the future of some of the powers being repatriated from Brussels after Brexit. The first ministers want them all passed down, whereas UK ministers insist that some  indeed many  of them are necessary to maintaining the British internal market and should be reserved to Westminster.

Unfortunately the general election has robbed the Government of much of its fight on this topic, and it has been prepared to make significant and potentially dangerous concessions. However, only last week the Prime Minister vowed not to allow post-Brexit devolution to imperil the Union.

That, combined with the fact that picking a fight with London over powers is the default state of devocrat politicians throughout the kingdom, means that the row has yet to be resolved. It is likely that a deal will be struck, but the Government must not allow the Scottish Parliament to get away with trying to expand its prerogatives through illegal legislation.

Bradley gains power to cut MLAs pay

Earlier this week the House of Commons passed several pieces of legislation pertaining to Northern Ireland, even as the Government continued to insist that direct rule is not on the agenda.

Amongst the measures included was the authority for Karen Bradley, the Northern Irish Secretary, to vary  which is to say, to cut  the salaries paid to members of the Northern Ireland Assembly, which has not sat for over a year.

She has been urged to consider this option for some time as a way of incentivising the Provinces recalcitrant politicians to strike a deal on restoring the power-sharing arrangements and getting devolved government up and running again. At present neither Sinn Fein nor the Democratic Unionists are under much pressure from their electorates to compromise.

In the meantime, there also appears to have been some more friction between London and Dublin over the process this week.

First, Bradley went on the record to say that she will not impose a timetable on the talks shortly after Leo Varadkar, the Irish prime minister, called for a redoubled effort to get them going again. Given the Governments manifest unwillingness to implement full direct rule she probably wants to avoid repeating James Brokenshires mistake of continually setting meaningless deadlines which became a bit of a running joke.

Second, and more concretely, the Times reports that the British Government has rebuffed calls by Simon Coveney, the Irish foreign secretary, to convene a British-Irish inter-governmental conference over the Ulster issue. This is the latest development in a long-running row between the two capitals: Dublin insists that it will not accept a return to direct rule, whereas London has quite forcefully insisted that the decision is the prerogative of the British Government.

Varadkar attempted to assuage Unionist unease about his governments involvement during a St Patricks Day speech in the United States, wherein he acknowledged that some of its interventions had been seen as unwelcome or intrusive but insisted that there was no secret plot for a united Ireland behind his actions.Britains take on Russia is not the same as Greeces, which has religious and cultural ties to it, and has been drifting into Vladimir Putins orbit; or Viktor Orbans who, short of friends in Brussels, is looking for others elsewhere, and has met the Russian President four times in two years; or Germanys, given the commercial and economic relationship between the two countries. In Italy, both Lega and the Five Star Movement have criticised sanctions against Russia. Emmanuel Macron has an anti-Putin record, but he has been offering the latter a kind of tough love, and French attitudes to Russia are more accomodating than British ones, partly because their take on America is (traditionally) less.

If all this is taken into account, it isnt hard to see why Theresa May will find it hard to get the EU where she wants it on Putin, in the wake of the Salisbury incident. France and Germany lined up with Britain last week to finger Russia as responsible: there is no plausible alternative explanation, they said. But the EU collectively, taking into account the view of Hungary, Italy and Greece, said that it takes our Governments view on the matter extremely seriously, which is not quite the same thing.

Jean-Claude Juncker went so far as to congratulate Putin (which Macron and Angela Merkel did not) and wish him every success. This was too much for Donald Tusk, who knows a thing or two about the Russian state: after the Salisbury attack, Im not in the mood to celebrate President Putins reappointment, he said. And for Guy Verhofstadt, who tweeted bluntly that this is no time for congratulations. The Prime Minister will be hoping to toughen up the EUs language in a joint communique that will be issued at the end of todays summit.

All of which, you may say, reminds us all why were leaving. Either the EU doesnt take a coherent position, in which case it is ineffective. Or it does, but its stance isnt ours, in which case it is unsupportive. Perhaps  but Putin will not have welcomed a statement critical of his government at all. And the head of government of our strongest post-war ally hasnt been any firmer. True, America signed last weeks statement with France and Germany, and Donald Trump was reported to be with the UK all the way.

But that form of words came from Downing Street, not the White House. The Presidents original reaction was to say that the attack looked like the Russians, which is not quite no plausible alternative explanation. And he too has, since, done a Juncker  calling Putin to congratulate him (apparently against the advice he was given, in a note reading DO NOT CONGRATULATE), before defending his decision, in characteristic style, on Twitter. The Prime Minister has reportedly not asked the EU for new sanctions on Russia, and given the background this is not surprising. As weve said before, the most effective action she can take is to deprive Putins cronies and allies of the pleasures of life in Londons fleshpots and the English countryside. Garvan Walshe has some other suggestions below.CORNWALL, Ontario  Daxton Dionne, 7, is a member of the Earth Rangers and wanted to do his part to help protect environment.

Daxton used his artistic talents to create bookmarks, which he planned on selling to raise money so the Earth Rangers can help support the Gray Fox, which is a threatened species in Canada.

Daxton said that he started making bookmarks when he started reading and wanted to make more for others who like to read.

When I was in Grade 1 I wanted to start reading and I know other people who were starting to read so I wanted to make bookmarks, he said.

Daxton is a Grade 2 student at Rothwell-Osnabruck Public School in Ingleside. He explained that he chose to support the Gray Fox because it was the favourite animal of his late great-aunt Jackie.

Jen Blair Manley of Royal LePage in Cornwall was getting her hair done at a hair salon in Ingleside where Daxtons mother works and saw Daxton with his book marks.

When Manley learned a little more about the bookmarks, and what the money was going towards, she decided to do what she could to support the cause.

Manley bought 30 bookmarks then and there, with the promise to acquire more. Manley will be helping to sell the bookmarks by making them available for purchase at the front desk in their office the Dreamteam Hub in Cornwall at 722 Pitt St. Unit 11.

Jen Blair Manley and her dream team at Royal LePage consists of herself, her twin sister Jody Blair and Christal Bowen and they are happy to do their part to support this young mans initiative.

I hope this inspires other kids, said Manley. This is the kind of thing I like to support. I like it when its more personal. Its stuff like this that inspires hope. Its not about how much, but the fact that you did it.

For his part, Daxton was thrilled what Manley decided to support his project.

I was surprised, he said. My mom was crying, and I almost cried.

Each bookmark is $5, and they are available at the Royal LePage office. Manley said that seven were sold within the first 10 minutes.CORNWALL, Ontario  Members of four CUPE councils that represent municipal employees voted overwhelmingly for a strike on Tuesday night.

CUPE Locals 234, 3251, 3251-01 and 5734 which represent indoor and outdoor workers as well as paramedics and librarians vote in favour of a strike mandate by 93 percent.

The library workers in the City have been without a contract since 2015, the others have been working without a contract since 2016.

We are focussed on getting a settlement, said CUPE National Representative Keith Sandford. But our members have told us clearly through this vote that they will take job action if they must, for fair working conditions and to defend the quality of public services in Cornwall.

No date has yet been set for a strike or lockout.

The City and the unions will enter into concilliation talks at the end of March facilitated by a representative from the Ministry of Labour.

We need to see progress toward settlement during the bargaining dates we have at the end of March, said Alison Denis, a CUPE National Representative who works with Cornwall paramedics. This strike vote result tells us clearly that the process needs to head in the direction of resolution.

These four local CUPE councils represent about 450 municipal employees.KINGSTON, Ontario  A 52-year-old Maxville woman has been charged after she misappropriated over 600,000 from her employer.

For the past several years the accused has acted as comptroller for a Kingston based business. During this time the accused sat on the boards of two charities located in Maxville, Ontario. Due to errors on her part, both charities incurred huge debts while the accused acted as the secretary treasurer. In an effort to keep the charities from falling into serious arrears the accused used her position as comptroller and began funneling money from her Kingston employer. Over the next three years the accused transferred just over $600,000 from the business into the bank accounts of both charities.

In December 18, 2017 the matter was reported to police and Detectives with the Kingston Police Fraud Unit began an investigation. It was determined some of the funds misappropriated by the accused to the charities were used to cover the expenses the accused incurred through her role as secretary treasurer.

On March 11, 2018 Detectives arrested the accused at her address in Maxville. The accused was transported to Kingston police headquarters where she was later released with a future court date.

The accused was charged with fraud over $5,000.Earlier this month, Cornwall citizens were informed that the owner of the Cornwall Square has decided to demolish the section of the building that Sears once occupied. Replacing Sears will be a six to eight story building that will contain retail spaces, as well as multiple floors of residential units. When the Cornwall Square was being constructed in 1978, a lot of buildings and homes had to be demolished to make room for the mall. It is as if this new face-lift will allow this section of Cornwalls main drag to revert to its former state.

At the corner of Pitt and Water Streets (on the East side) used to be the Fiesta Room. In the 40s, a Barber Shop operated in this building by a gentleman named Emile Vachon. Attached to The Fiesta Room was the Lloyd George Hotel, owned by both Lloyd Gallinger and George Bringloe. Many people enjoyed a ten cent draft in the Wharf Lounge, and would bar hop between this location and the bar two doors down. Directly beside the hotel was another building owned by George: Bringloes Furniture.

Although many buildings were demolished at the foot of Pitt Street, a large portion of Sydney Street also met the wrecking ball in preparation for the construction of the Cornwall Square. Among several apartment buildings, side by sides and homes, St. Pauls United Church was also lost. Although the Mall parking garage is in the Churchs former site, the steeple from St. Pauls United Church was salvaged and moved to its current location in front of the Best Western and Parkway Inn.

Down the road from St. Pauls Church was Pearsons Furniture Store. Many people enjoyed attending dances that used to be held there! The furniture store was located beside the Cornwall Street Railway Light and Power Company building. Across the road (at the foot of Sydney and Water Streets) was Halliwells Garage. Another section of Cornwall that was lost in the construction of the Square was a portion of Central/Horovitz Park, and Central Park Avenue. A few apartments and homes lined this little avenue.

Cornwall has unfortunately lost much of its history in the name of progress. Many homes, hot spots, and businesses were lost in order to build the Cornwall Square. Although these areas of Cornwall no longer exist, they are definitely not forgotten.Managed print services provider MidAmerica Technology has developed an app for Xerox's ConnectKey software platform that allows businesses to create customized sales brochures in four touches of the screen.

SellMe, unveiled by the Bloomington, Ind.-based Xerox partner earlier this month, lets users update sales and marketing collateral across their organization from a single location, said Patrick Leone, founder and CEO of MidAmerica. The documents can then be instantly printed across any connected Xerox AltaLink and VersaLink devices or emailed directly to customers through the app interface.

"For a marketing department, they would want to have control over the messaging and the brochures. The salespeople don't really have to worry about it. All of their information plugs in automatically," said MidAmerica CIO Glenn Leone.

[Related: Just-Tech Buys Fellow Xerox Agent To Accelerate Managed IT, Custom App Businesses]

Patrick Leone demonstrated SellMe to a contingent of senior Xerox leadership last month and said the entire team came away highly impressed. The potential range of use cases is broad, he added, noting that midsize legal, health-care and real estate businesses would be particularly well-suited to take advantage of the app.

"At a big real estate chain, one person can be responsible of putting up all the different properties that are for sale," Patrick Leone said. "There's someone at a realty company that does that. Whoever that is, now with the tool they can update the properties from their PC and pull off the ones that sold, put new ones on the market, reduce prices if needed. They can push that out to every Xerox machine instantly in four touches of the screen. No computer required."

Any sales document or brochure template uploaded to SellMe is then stored and can be changed at a later date, he added, ensuring that information is up tov date.

MidAmerica's launch of SellMe comes on the heels of success around another customized app, SignMe, which was released in August and has enjoyed a "high degree" of early adoption. Patrick Leone said Xerox is in the beginning stages of training 4,000 sales reps to demo the app and conducting demonstrations at the print giant's solutions center on behalf of partners.

SignMe eliminates the need to print, fill out and then scan a document that requires a handwritten signature. Users can enter notes on the document once it is loaded as a print job and sign on the front panels of the Xerox machine, Glenn Leone said.

"The document is the exact look of the piece of paper that would've come out," Patrick Leone said. "The end user didn't do anything differently on their side. All they did was release their print job to a different print queue. They would select SignMe and the machine does the rest."

Patrick Leone said MidAmerica, which has another custom app in development, has hopes of releasing a "Me" Xerox app bundle that includes SignMe, SellMe and the app to be announced.As IBM prepares to implement its largest channel overhaul in years, partners have been conferring all week at the Think conference in Las Vegas with Big Blue's leadership, and each other, to ready themselves to take advantage of the program changes.

The revamped PartnerWorld program, revealed in January and going into effect next month, is being met enthusiastically by attendees of the PartnerWorld summit that's part of the larger conference, Jacqueline Woods, chief marketing officer for IBM Global Business Partners, told CRN.

Partners had long been clamoring for a streamlined structure that breaks down barriers across partner categories and productsone that better aligns with the evolution they have seen in their practices to delivering comprehensive solutions that often include components they've developed themselves.

[Related: IBM Introduces First of Several Watson Data Kits To Jumpstart AI Projects]

The "2018 new generation ecosystem strategy," which goes live April 10, pares down IBM's channel structure to five distinct tracks, dramatically reducing the complexity of engaging with the technology stalwart.

IBM partly achieved that by marrying tracks for hardware and software resellers, which made a lot of sense given partners were typically selling integrated solutions.

Strict categorizations defining partner business models have also been abandoned, she said.

"We're seeing business partners dont neatly fit into one category," Woods told CRN. "They're not just a reseller or ISV or cloud service provider or MSP or systems integrator."

Partners these days wear many hats, she said, often "depending on who they're talking to and the solution that they're selling."

IBM's new channel strategy looks to support the broader changes in the ecosystem across all program elementsmetrics, margins, reimbursement, co-marketing, training and enablement tools.

"Our ability to offer models that can easily help a partner navigate between those specific types of business models is critically important," Woods said. "I think the advantage of what we have now is we're offering companies a number of different types of ecosystems that they can participate in."

The new program also was designed to encourage partners to embed IBM's next-gen products, especially cloud, data, analytics, and Watson artificial intelligence.

One of the biggest changes in recent years to Big Blue's channel is that many traditional resellers have become de facto ISVsdeveloping and bundling their own intellectual property.

Technology partners are no longer the only ones taking advantage of IBM's longtail ISV program, Woods said, which enables developers embedding IBM solutions with cloud credits and a development sandbox.

One solution provider that has strayed into ISV territory is Clear Technologies, which recently marked its 25th anniversary as an IBM partner.

Phil Godwin, the Addison, Texas solution provider's chief operating officer, joined Martin Schroeter, senior vice president for IBM Global Markets, on stage for a PartnerWorld keynote at the Think conference to discuss the journey.

Focusing on data center infrastructure "was great business for us the first 15 years," Godwin told CRN after the keynote. But around 2008, it became hard for Clear to differentiate itself in the market.

That's when the company's transformation started, leading to development of a product called Visual Storage Intelligence that's been a "huge part of our story over the last 8 years."

In the keynote, Schroeter talked about how 60 percent of IT decisions are now made outside of IT. Clear Technologies has seen that shift up close, Godwin said.

"We can now go have conversations with line of business people, where in the past we were focused on having technology conversation with technologists," Godwin told CRN.

Godwin has attended PartnerWorld for the last 17 years. At every previous conference his focus was on meeting IBM staff, but this year he's spent as much time meeting other partners.

The reason is his peers are bringing to market the company's home-grown solution. And Clear is doing the same with products built by other solution providers.

"Now is the time more than ever that we need to be partnering with partners," Godwin said.

"The ecosystem is becoming more valuable as we try to transform because our transformation journeys are all taking us to different places. We're selling other people's stuff and they're selling our stuff, and the common thread that holds that all together is IBM," Godwin told CRN.

This month, Clear Technologies is launching Clear Intelligence, Godwin said, a new product leveraging IBM technology to take the company into the future around IoT and AI.

"I think IBM is staying on the forefront of what's taking place in the marketplace," Godwin told CRN.

One way IBM is supporting those partners navigating massive changes in the market is through a co-marketing program it revamped last year, Woods told CRN.

IBM is investing $80 million dollars across 2,200 partners driving 12,000 campaigns annually, Woods said.

Another imminent change that has been met with enthusiasm by partners comes in the reimbursement process.

"They used to have put their leads in in order for reimbursement to happen," Woods said.

That could be challenging, especially for small companies for whom cash flow was critically important.

"It takes time to generate pipeline, time to generate leads, so that's not a condition of them being reimbursed anymore," she said.

Partners now only need to provide proof of performance of an approved activity.

"They can get their money back more quickly," Woods said.Google Cloud has named a former Xively vice president as its new go-to-market lead for the Internet of Things following the company's $50 million acquisition of Xively from LogMeIn earlier this year.

According to Mario Finocchiaro's LinkedIn page, he started in the new go-to-market position at Google Cloud this month. He had served as vice president of Xively, which was previously LogMeIn's IoT device management platform, since 2013.

With Finocchario's appointment, Google Cloud's acquisition of Xively has officially closed, a company spokesman confirmed to CRN. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company plans to share updates on its integration plans with Xively in the future, the spokesman said.

Allen Falcon, CEO of Google Cloud partner Cumulus Global, told CRN that Google's acquisition of Xively shows that the company is "serious about improving its market position in the IoT space." Compared with Amazon and Microsoft, he said Google is "somewhat playing catch-up" right now.

"Amazon and Microsoft have not just a had good breadth of IoT offerings themselves, but through third parties they both have pretty viable ecosystems and partner networks that understand how to leverage and use their tools," Falcon said. "Bringing in someone who's going to focus on marketing and building the brand of Google Cloud in the IoT space will only help accelerate that effort."

Google announced its plan to acquire Xively in mid-February to deepen its technology and engineering expertise for IoT Core, Google's fully managed service that securely connects, manages and ingests data from globally dispersed devices. The company said at the time that approximately 45 employees would join its team.

"Our customers will benefit from Xivelys extensive feature set and flexible device management platform, paired with the security and scale of Google Cloud," Anthony Passemard, product management lead for Google Cloud Platform, said in a blog post announcing the deal.

Prior to selling Xively, LogMeIn had once seen the IoT platform becoming the Boston-based connectivity company's largest business over time, but the division failed to turn into a significant growth engine. LogMeIn had acquired the business when it was known as Pachube for $15 million in 2011. But despite years of efforts, Xively only managed to bring in $3 million in revenue last year, a drop in the bucket for a company whose total non-GAAP revenue in 2017 surpassed $1 billion.

To make its IoT division a success under Google Cloud, Falcon said the company won't be able to increase market share without partners, "simply because every implementation is unique."

"So Google Cloud can provide all the Lego pieces, but you need a team that understands the business and the technical requirements to put them together so that they function properly and provide the data and analytics to make it worthwhile," Falcon said.In order to speed up prototyping, so-called Development Acceleration Centers (DACs) have been set up by Wartsila, which said it is also using the concept with Royal Caribbean to develop aspects of intelligent vessels further.

The first DAC opened in Helsinki in October, a second is due to open in Singapore, with more in the planning stages. In addition, pop-up DACs can be set up on customers sites.

With the DACs we are focused on working with a customer on a particular idea or project, using a start-up culture and mind set, explained Marco Ryan, chief digital officer and executive vice president at Wartsila. We are working to reach outcomes quickly, what we call a minimal viable product (MVP); we are talking days or weeks, not months or years in the traditional R&D fashion.

As soon as we decide if a product is viable, we move it to the next stage, accelerating its development. If it does not work, we stop it right away.

In the marine industry, one of the objectives is to create so-called intelligent ships. Explained Riku-Pekka Hagg, vice president of ship design: It starts with operations that can be automated, creating intelligence within the ship, eventually creating more reliability and safety.

Ryan described the intelligence as being on three different levels. First, using technology and data onboard to optimize operations. Secondly, optimize operations of a fleet of ships by sharing information and thus driving safety, environmental impact and efficiencies. And thirdly, integrating the ship or fleet in an eco-system where a ship could even operate autonomously and unmanned.

For cruise ships, practical intelligence applications could be applied in the navigation system, providing navigation and docking assistance, as well as for collision avoidance, according to Hagg.

In the big picture, we look at the integration of the mechanical side, which is very much about hardware, and the automation, providing decision support and enabling smart decisions on the bridge and in the engine room, Ryan added.

Using computer algorithms machines can learn and make decisions, or provide recommendations for humans to make decisions, based on data.

If you were to load information for a specific route from 1,000 ships, then filter that by weather conditions, time of year, and type of vessel, that would lead to a better data-driven decision, Ryan said.

Other topics for the DACs include hybrid power solutions including fuel cells, which in turn will open up new ways for optimization inside a vessel.

When cruise lines introduce new generations of vessels they always represent technology leaps, Hagg said. Looking forward, he said that cruise ships of 2030 or 2040 could be hybrids, but not necessarily with combustion engines, instead combining other solutions such as solar and wind power, for instance.

Some of these technologies require more maturity before they can be put on vessels, but typically when you see the cruise industry becoming curious about something, you see the leapfrogging starting to happen. Technology development is not linear but exponential.

At the moment, the focus is on fuel and powerplants, because of the cost of fuel and emissions regulations, but in the future the focus may shift to other areas, developing technologies for the rest of the ship as well, Ryan added.A report published this evening by Symantec outlines the rocky year consumers and business owners had online in 2017, covering everything from coin mining attacks and problems in the supply chain to ransomware, BEC attacks, and more.

There was a shift in attack types and patterns as criminals adjusted their tactics to deal with constant exposure via media coverage and responsive security teams.

One of the tactical shifts included targeting supply chains and using these attacks to target organizations. Symantec says that there was a 200-percent increase in these types of attacks, representing one every month in 2017.

"Hijacking software updates provides attackers with an entry point for compromising well-protected targets, or to target a specific region or sector," the report says.

(Note: Symantec used detections from their own products and other internal data when compiling their report.)

Ransomware

The ransomware market for criminals really didn't hit its stride until 2016, when the underground economy was flooded with ransomware offerings, some good, others bad. This is when the SaaS model of ransomware really started to take shape, which required that the criminal ransomware market take some self-correcting action.

The number of new ransomware variants climbed by 45-percent in 2017, with the United States and China leading the pack when it came to splitting detections by country. There was a spike in detection last May, followed by a sharp decline until July when detections climbed at a steady rate until the end of the year.

As part of the self-correction in the ransomware market, the number of new ransomware families declined in 2017, down to 28 from 98 the previous year. In addition, the average ransom demand fell to $522.00 USD in 2017, after hitting a peak of $1,071 the year prior.

Related video:

Email

Symantec says that the Necurs botnet blasted out nearly 15 million malicious emails in 2017, mostly in the second half of the year. However, it was the disappearance of Necurs that led to a decline in email overall, hitting a low of 1 in 412 messages.

The average small to medium business (1-250 employees) were the hardest hit when it came to malware-laced email, no matter how it's measured. That segment topped the list when it came to emails with malicious links and attachments. Interestingly, the larger enterprises were the ones that had the lowest ratios, with 1:512 messages for malicious attachments and 1:13 for malicious links.

BEC (Business Email Compromise) and Phishing

Each month in 2017, Symantec notes, 7,710 organizations were hit by a BEC attack, an average of 4.9 times per victim. The results of these attacks can be catastrophic, leading to the loss of sensitive employee data (W-2 records) or sensitive internal data (sales, IP, etc.).

Typically, the most common subject line in these BEC attacks were "payment" followed by "urgent", "request", "attention", and "important". In most cases the emails were framed to get attention and align with the normal business workflow, a fact that is evident by the successes criminals achieved last year.

Overall, the phishing rate increased in 2017 after a brief dip, picking up an average of one phishing email for every thirty-three users by the end of the year. Agriculture, forestry, and fishing was the top targeted industry last year, followed by small businesses (non-classifiable establishments), public administration, mining, and the services sector.

"From the sudden spread of WannaCry and Petya/NotPetya, to the swift growth in coinminers, 2017 provided us with another reminder that digital security threats can come from new and unexpected sources," the report states.

"With each passing year, not only has the sheer volume of threats increased, but the threat landscape has become more diverse, with attackers working harder to discover new avenues of attack and cover their tracks while doing so."More than 200 years ago, a British botanist smuggled a cache of tea plants and seeds out of China and into British-controlled India. Within a couple of years, that theft enabled India to usurp China as the worlds leading tea grower. India is still one of the biggest producers of tea as a result of one of the greatest acts of corporate espionage in history.

Today, stealing trade secrets doesnt require anyone to cross borders, break into file cabinets or even open iron-clad safes. Thieves, posing as employees online, can easily smuggle large amounts of data with a few keystrokes. Industrial espionage has become highly sophisticated and more daunting than ever to combat. Any company that sees R&D as a means to gaining competitive advantage should be concerned.

Modern-age industrial espionage can come in multiple forms and have serious financial consequences for those impacted. A man casually walked into the Houston offices of a Fortune 500 energy company in the early morning and strolled around for two hours unchallenged before leaving with a stolen backpack and shoulder bag. He wasnt an employee or contractor, but rather a criminal who pilfered corporate secrets that could be in the hands of a competitor or foreign government. In 1981, Hitachi snagged design documents for IBMs Adirondack Workbooks, even though the technical materials were marked FOR INTERNAL IBM USE ONLY.

A gold mine for industrial espionage

The common thread across these scenarios is that the final product is less critical than the underlying intellectual property (IP). Whether the IP exists in the form of software code or cancer cures, the digitization of IP  coupled with the adoption of technologies such as cloud and mobile  results in an ever-expanding attack surface that is a gold mine for those attempting industrial espionage.

In this context, what is clear is that traditional cybersecurity methods are no longer the answer. Try as hard as they might, security teams cannot shore up defenses to protect perimeters that dont exist. With personal and corporate data intermingling on mobile devices and in cloud services, data usage and behavior patterns have changed so much that the perimeter is now the people. And that perimeter constantly shifts as people move around in the digital world.

The irony is that we are relying on the same old technology to catch IP thieves who now know how to avoid getting caught. Instead, our businesses and government agencies need to shift their thinking to analyze and predict human behaviors as warning signs of espionage. A human-centric approach to security could sound the alarm based on human cyber behavior and enable security teams to mitigate or prevent critical data loss regardless of whether the network was breached.

The stakes are incredibly high as we face new and exotic threats of large-scale data theft and business disruption. Organizations are challenged to protect digital crown jewels, whether that means proprietary algorithms that run high-speed trading operations, sensitive customer data most vulnerable to breaches, IP and valuable R&D that companies have invested millions for product roadmaps.

According to the FBI, the American economy loses $400 billion a year from industrial espionage. On a global scale, nation states continue to penetrate and steal corporate assets across a wide swath of industries, leaving businesses to fend off the resources of major governments. They use drones and aircraft to identify physical weaknesses as well as thieves with stolen identities who brazenly walk into offices to steal important data.

Think about it this way: if a spy steals a blueprint to the cockpit of a stealth aircraft, he might as well have walked into the cockpit on the manufacturing floor  only in the case of the blueprints, he will have much more information to act upon.

Rather than focus on building bigger walls, the industry needs better visibility into human behavior to understand how, when and why people interact with critical data, no matter where it is located. With anonymity, people behave differently in the cyber realm than they do in the physical world. Companies need to understand who is touching critical content and why.

This new approach doesnt require a new government policy or more regulation. But it is a paradigm shift that calls for companies to take a realistic look at current security norms and implement technology that is already available to help detect cyber thieves. Stopping corporate theft requires understanding the behavior of legitimate users with access to important systems and data.

Shifting security industry's focus

Typical security teams receive dozens or hundreds of alerts in a given day. Advances in behavior and risk analytics can help spot anomalies and provide needed context to parse normal from malicious or compromised activity. Automatic enforcement policies could then curtail or prevent access to sensitive IP depending on the observed level of risk. Security teams would understand, predict and act on potential threat events as they unfold, not weeks, months or years after the fact.

By shifting the security industrys focus from protecting infrastructure to understanding human behavior, we can also enlist our employees to help secure our corporate assets. We end up with not only greater security efficacy, but we also engage with our people and continually include them in the security equation. In a chaotic world of hackers and industrial thieves, we all have to work together to keep ourselves and our data secure.

All companies, big and small, are trying to figure out how to secure important data  the trade secrets. Lucky for us, it might come down to something as simple as being human.Development of the Stress Factory comedy club is nearing a conclusion with opening day less than a month away, according to owner Vinnie Brand. With his eyes set on an April 14 opening day, Brand said he is looking forward to bringing the funny to the growing nightlife scene in downtown Bridgeport at 167 State St.

Downtown Bridgeport is about to just explode with the residents and the shops and our comedy club and the beer hall. Its a really great area, Brand said.

Brand owns another comedy club by the same name in New Brunswick, N.J., which has hosted nationally known comedians and offers a pub-style menu of burgers, nachos, paninis and wraps.

His New Brunswick comedy club has been in business for 27 years, bringing in some top names in comedy as well as making way for up-and-comers. According to the New Jersey resident, he is planning on doing the same in downtown Bridgeport.

Fortunately, weve been able to develop a reputation that we get the very best in the business, so we are hoping to bring the same thing up there, Brand said. The club is beautiful. The space we took and renovated. Its gorgeous.

The club owner is looking to bring a mix of top-tier comics like Jim Breuer and Gary Owen, as well as introducing a stable of new comics, as well.

Brand said the concept behind the Bridgeport venue is to provide patrons with a complete night that will draw and keep people coming down to McLevy Square.

The food and beverage has to be great, the comic has to be great, the wait staff has to be great, Brand said. We build a whole experience, and weve been doing that in New Brunswick for a long time.

Even in the wake of a snow storm that left 14 inches of snow in parts of New Jersey this week, Brand said his New Brunswick club is sold out for the next two nights, which are slated to feature George Lopez.

As ground-floor development continues, apartments on the upper floors of the mixed-use space are leasing up, as well, according to Brett Wilderman of Darien-based Forstone Capital, which is developing the site.

The apartments are leasing up nicely, Wilderman said. Were over 50 percent leased at this point. I expect as the good weather rolls in soon, well be 100 percent leased at the apartments.

Forstone began leasing out 32 units last summer, with a mix of studios, one- and two-bedroom options with prices ranging from $1,200 for the smaller one-bedroom units to $1,600 for the larger two-bedroom units. A portion of the apartments also have affordable components and restricted income guidelines.

The Stress Factory will be join on the same block Harlan Haus beer hall, which opened in December. According to Wilderman, the beer hall has been exceeding expectations, laying the groundwork for the night-life scene that city officials and developers have desired for some time.

Were so excited to have them next door to us, Brand said. The two venues complement each other very nicely. We expect people will be heading into Harlan Haus after our show, hanging out for another hour or so. That downtown area is going to be red hot, and it is such a beautiful area.Fairfield County led the state in population gains, according to figures released by the U.S. Census Thursday.

The figures also showed that Connecticut gained 499 new residents between July 1, 2016 and July 1, 2017.

Of Connecticuts eight counties, three - Litchfield, Hartford and New London - lost population.

The states population numbers are puny compared to the Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington metropolitan area that gained nearly 74,000 new residents in a one-year-period.

Historically, the Dallas metro area attracts large numbers from both international and domestic migration. Many of the other largest metro areas in the country rely mostly on international migration and natural increase for growth, said Molly Cromwell, a demographer at the Census Bureau.

Among the nations counties, the top 10 with the largest numeric growth are all located in the South and the West. The 10 largest counties in the country all maintained their rank compared to last year.

Fairfield Countys population gained 730 people for a total of 949,921.

Since 2010, Fairfield County had a 3.6 percent population increase with 33,075 new residents.

Hartford is the only other county that has seen a population growth in that seven-year period with a small 0.2 percent increase.

Since 2016, New Haven County was had a 462 person gain for a total population of 860,435.

Tolland and Windham counties each gained 317 people in 2017.

The figures also showed Litchfield County continuing to lose population. In one year, it lost 920 residents bringing its population down to 182,177.

Since 2010, Litchfield County has lost 4.1 percent of its population.

With deaths far outrunning births, and with fewer and fewer jobs available to keep young people from leaving, Litchfield is on a trajectory to become a region of economically struggling communities and of public school systems so small theyre no longer viable, experts said.

Two main factors contribute to Litchfields steep population decline, according to census data released. First, annual deaths regularly exceed births. In fact, Litchfield is the only county in Connecticut where that has been the case for six years running. Last year there were 349 more deaths than births in the county.

As a result, the median age is climbing, which is having a dramatic effect on demand for schools and social services.

Other population declines include 274 in New London County, 109 in Hartford County and 23 in Middlesex.

The census said six of the top 10 largest-gaining counties were in Texas  Bexar, Collin, Dallas, Denton, Harris and Tarrant. The remaining four counties on the list were Maricopa County, Ariz.; Clark County, Nev.; Riverside County, Calif.; and King County, Wash. Most of the nations 3,142 counties grew, with 57 percent gaining in the last year.WASHINGTON  For Sen. Chris Murphy, the inclusion of Fix NICS in the Omnibus spending bill working its way through Congress is more symbolic than substantive.

Its a victory, but its a small victory, Murphy said in an interview Thursday. What it stands for is the changed politics on the issue of guns. If you had told me 2016 there would be two provisions on guns (in the spending bill), Id have told you youre crazy.

Fix NICS, which Murphy co-authored with Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn, R-Texas, offers a carrot-and-stick approach to states and federal agencies to encourage addition of names to the existing FBI database of individuals unqualified to own guns.

It won not only bipartisan support on Capitol Hill but a nod from the National Rifle Association.

In addition to Fix NICS, the Omnibus also includes clarifying language that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention can study gun violence. CDC had steered clear of such research since the so-called Dickey amendment in 1996 said agency could not use research to promote gun control.

The Omnibus steers a narrow path through the ideological divide over gun rights in America, stipulating CDC can conduct research in an apolitical manner.

The National Rifle Association, which supported Fix NICS, claimed the CDC language was no victory for the gun-control side.

The clarifying language added to the Omnibus spending bill simply states that research into firearms and violence is permissible and always has been, said NRA spokeswoman Catherine Mortensen.

Murphy, a leader on guns on Capitol Hill since the 2012 mass-shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, said he felt as though the advances were palpable but ultimately limited.

With the gun-violence prevention side winning new-found strength from teen-agers in the wake of the Feb. 14 mass-shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida, Republicans are on defense, Murphy said.

By including Fix NICS in the Omnibus, Murphy said, Republicans effectively staved off debate on wider, more controversial gun issues such as universal background checks  which would extend the background check requirement to private sales at gun shows and elsewhere.

Overall, though, theres a lot of good stuff in this bill for Connecticut, Murphy said.

Among the items are:

_ Defense-spending boosts, especially for Sikorsky Aircraft in Stratford. The bill includes an additional $62 million for UH-60M helicopter production line modifications, and an extra $250 million for two additional CH-53K heavy-lift helicopters for the Marine Corps.

_ Long Island Sound. The Omnibus gives $5.7 million extra to the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administrations fisheries aquaculture program, and avoids cuts to its lab in Milford. It also adds $2 million to the NOAA marine aquaculture program.

_ Opioid addiction and prevention. The compromise has a $3.3 billion increase from last year for all government departments and agencies to combat opioid addiction and extend services for mental illness. Opioids have plagued wide swaths of Connecticut, especially more rural areas.

_ Railroad infrastructure and safety. Positive Train Control, a GPS-like system mandated by Congress to prevent wrecks of out-of-control trains, gets an extra $250 million to help governments pay for the share the railroads themselves arent shouldering. Connecticut lawmakers have pushed for PTC in the wake of Metro North crashes.

Murphys Honor Our Commitment Act also made its way into the Omnibus. The bill would open up VA mental health services to veterans with other-than-honorable discharges.

The House passed the $1.3 trillion spending package Thursday on a vote of 256-167. The Senate has yet to schedule a vote.

All eyes in Washington are now on Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., who refused to offer consent on a spending bill last month, effectively shutting the government down for a number of hours.

The Senate has until midnight Friday to pass the Omnibus and avoid a shutdown.

For his part, President Trump hailed the bills inclusion of $1.6 billion for his long-promised U.S.-Mexico border wall  even though it fell far short of the $25 billion he initially sought.HARTFORD  Gov. Dannel P. Malloy has offered a former Republican state senator a nomination to the state Supreme Court if the Senate next week confirms Justice Andrew J. McDonald for the vacant chief justice post, sources have told Hearst Connecticut Media.

The proposal to nominate Andrew Roraback, a sitting judge in Waterbury Superior Court, seems intended to deflate the partisan, potentially toxic political atmosphere that has marked McDonalds confirmation process.

Roraback, who is from Goshen and represented towns including New Milford, Kent, Litchfield and Brookfield in the Senate, was on vacation this week and not immediately available for comment.

If McDonald is confirmed, the offer would assure a Republican seat on the court. McDonald was narrowly confirmed in a mostly partisan House vote this month, but with one Democrat, Sen. Gayle S. Slossberg of Milford, recusing herself in the evenly divided Senate, a party-line vote could prevent McDonald from becoming the first openly gay chief justice in the nation.

Malloys office declined to comment on the statement by sources, who had knowledge of the offer but were not authorized to speak publicly.

Our administration has never commented on potential judicial appointments before they are made, or disclosed the content of our discussions with potential nominees, said Kelly Donnelly, Malloys spokeswoman. What we will say is that, over the course of his tenure, Governor Malloy has purposefully used his nominating power to further diversify Connecticuts judiciary, including its racial and gender makeup, but also the backgrounds and perspectives of individual judges. The Governor is not only open to further balancing our courts in this way, he is committed to it.

The offer complicates the political calculus in the Capitol, which has been the focus of a TV and telephone campaign in attempt to persuade Republicans to confirm McDonald.

While political horse-trading on judicial nominations has a long tradition, the lateness and public nature of the apparent offer, adds more intrigue.

The Senate is expected to debate and vote on McDonald next Tuesday. Unlike many states that elect judges, Connecticut jurists are first vetted by a selection board before they are put on a list of eligible candidates for nomination by the governor.

Senate Republican Leader Len Fasano of North Haven said Thursday that he doesnt like the idea of a one-for-one transaction over the McDonald nomination.

I think that as far as I am concerned, Andrew McDonald will rise and fall on Andrew McDonald, Fasano said in an interview. I think that Judge Roraback is a fine person, and theres an opening right now thats on the Supreme Court and if Gov. Malloy wants to appoint Roraback right now to the opening on the Supreme Court, I could see me agreeing with that appointment.

John McKinney, a former longtime Senate majority leader, was skeptical of the offer.

I dont think this type of deal can work, McKinney said. Andrew Roraback is an extraordinary individual and hes doing an excellent job on the Superior Court. I see my former colleagues taking a very studied, thoughtful approach.

Roraback served 17 years in the General Assembly, and cast nearly 8,500 consecutive votes without missing one.

Known as a thoughtful conscience in the House and Senate, in 2014 Roraback testified in the corruption trial of John G. Rowland, which sent the former governor to prison for a second time. The case was sparked by an investigation into the 2012 congressional election of Democrat Elizabeth Esty. Roraback was the losing congressional candidate for Republicans that fall.

Roraback was also an early critic of former GOP Senate minority leader Louis C. DeLuca of Woodbury, who admitted that he tried to bribe someone to possibly assault the partner of his granddaughter then resigned after pleading to a misdemeanor.

The controversy over McDonald, who is on the verge of a losing candidacy, is unlike anything in recent history.

I think the nomination has been politicized, no matter what the outcome, said McKinney, a lawyer who once was the clerk for Supreme Court Justice Richard Palmer. I dont think that genie can be put back in the bottle.BRIDGEPORT  Leaders of four local communities say there is a lot they can do together to make schools safe  but arming teachers is not one of them.

We did talk about whats smart and what is not smart, Bridgeport Mayor Joseph Ganim said after a group of politicians, public safety experts and school administrators met Thursday. Guns in the hands of teachers is not a smart move.

Others in the room called arming teachers a recipe for disaster.

Hosted by Ganims office, the forum brought together chief elected officials, police chiefs, lawmakers and school superintendents from Bridgeport, Trumbull, Fairfield and Stratford. The event ended with a press conference.

Fairfield First Selectman Mike Tereau said it was important to join forces because school safety doesnt stop at town borders.

One of the struggles in Connecticut is that we have 169 towns. We shouldnt have 169 different approaches to school security, he said.

This is not the first time the group has met to share best practices. Fairfield Police Chief Gary MacNamara said it is important to have law enforcement, educators and mayors all at the same table because they all bring different perspectives.

Yet we all have one goal, to ensure that our children, when they leave their houses, come home the same way they left, MacNamera said.

We dont want to give away all that we are doing but we ... want to make schools as safe as they possibly can be, Ganim said.

One way, the group said, is through the support of pending legislation to ban bump stocks  which essentially turn firearms into machine gun and so called ghost guns, which are sold through the mail without background checks, require assembly and are unregistered.

The legislatures Judiciary Committee will hear testimony on both bills Friday. Ganim said he plans to testify.

State Sen. Tony Hwang, R-Fairfield, who was also at the forum, said he believes both measures have bipartisan support and will build on strong gun laws passed by the state legislature following the Newtown school massacre in 2012 that killed 20 first-graders and six educators.

Hwang said he is mindful that the right balance needs to be struck between schools that are fortified yet conducive to learning.

We want schools to be as safe as they can be, Hwang said, encouraging students and staff to say something if they see or hear something that doesnt seem right.

Hwang said the apprehension of a student at Staples High School in Westport who reportedly threatened to shoot a teacher was the result of courageous young people saying something.

In Parkland there was over 30 instances of reports that were ignored, Hwang said.

Jeremy Stein, executive director of Connecticut Against Gun Violence, said he visited Douglas High School in Parkland shortly after it was reopened after the Feb. 14 shooting that left 17 dead, and was able to walk in without being stopped or questioned.

In most Connecticut schools, visitors need to be buzzed in. At some, identification is checked. Many have security guards, but not all.

In Bridgeport, the city school district has more than 80 security guards. The high schools have metal detectors. And the police department has five School Resource Officers to patrol around schools. Soon there will be nine more who will also remain outside schools for the most part, A.J. Perez, Bridgeports Acting Police Chief said.

In Bridgeport, there is an ongoing debate about stationing school resource officers inside schools or outside in the neighborhood. Perez said he favors the outside model.

I dont like the idea of armed police inside schools, Perez said.NEWTOWN  Among the 440 Newtowners taking buses to the youth-led march in Washington, D.C., on Saturday to call for gun safety laws is a group of high schoolers who were in fourth grade at Sandy Hook School in 2012.

When those Newtown high schoolers meet peers from the Florida school where a gunman massacred 17 students and staff on Valentines Day, the Newtown students will be in a unique position to understand the horror of hearing gunfire in classrooms, and the terror of seeing peers run for their lives.

The students who are freshmen at Newtown High School, who were fourth graders at Sandy Hook when the shooting occurred, feel a special connection to those students from Florida, and that is why we are attempting to connect them, said Po Murray, chair of the Newtown Action Alliance  one of two homegrown nonprofits that are paying for buses to take Newtown residents to Saturdays March for Our Lives protest. Our students have a lot to offer the students from Florida.

The Newtown high schoolers who survived the 2012 massacre of 26 students and educators at Sandy Hook School are part of a 200-youth contingent who will leave Newtown in eight chartered buses Saturday to join thousands in a national march to protest the lack of congressional action on gun policy reform.

For those who cannot travel to Washington, D.C, some 830 local marches are planned across the country, including in Roxbury, Westport, Stamford and Hartford. Locally, buses have been chartered to take marchers to the Hartford protest from Joel Barlow High School in Redding and from Ridgefield High School.

Other groups that are sponsoring buses to the march in Washington include the Bridgeport-based Connecticut Civic Action Group, which has chartered a bus out of Danbury early Saturday morning.

The march, organized by survivors of the Feb. 14 massacre at Floridas Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, comes 10 days after a youth-organized national student walkout to remember the victims and call for gun safety legislation. A second national student walkout organized by Ridgefield High School sophomore Lane Murdock is planned for April 20.

The youth-led movement, which has captured the nations attention and emboldened activists, appears to embody zeal that America has not seen since the Vietnam War protests two generations ago.

Its been incredible  just incredible  and America is ready for it, said Murray, whose group formed after the Sandy Hook shooting to lobby for gun violence prevention. Weve witnessed too many mass shootings with no action since Sandy Hook.

Murray said the initial thought was to charter three buses to transport Newtowners to Saturdays march. Interest was so widespread that the nonprofits added five more buses from Newtown, and started a waiting list. Newtown Action Alliance also chartered a bus to leave from the University of Connecticut in Storrs.

Murray said the youth are not only inspiring a movement that has been looking for a tipping point, but supplying hope for the future.

They are not only marching and walking out of school but they will be walking into the polls, Murray said.TRUMBULL  Students from Trumbull High School will join supporters from across Connecticut Saturday in Hartford for the first March for Our Lives gathering.

THS students, independently from their school, organized a bus to transport themselves and their peers to the march, which is one of many marches scheduled around the country, including ones in Stamford and Washington, D.C.

Matt Kuroghlian, senior class president at Trumbull High, helped organize the school walkout on March 14 and said several teens came to him about wanting to do something more in response to the Feb. 14 shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla.

School shootings are an issue that hits close to home in Connecticut, the site of one of the deadliest school shootings in history when 20 young elementary students and six teachers were shot to death in Newtown in 2012.

Sandy Hook, it was so, so close and to know that this is still happening in Florida and ... in Maryland, its upsetting, Kuroghlian said. Newtown was really close to home because my dad was a first responder. We experienced that second hand, I guess you could say. The thought of people having to go through this thousands of times over and all over the country ... I don't want people to feel the way I felt in 2012.

Students worked with the administration and town leaders to organize last weeks walkout and discuss school safety, but planned the trip to Hartford on their own, Kuroghlian said. Theres an Instagram page, @we_speakout, with nearly 400 followers for the Trumbull Walkout movement where information was posted regarding the event on March 14 and Saturdays March for Our Lives in the state capital.

Some members of the Trumbull Democratic Town Committee helped the students with the down payment for the bus to Hartford, he said, and 80 students have said they were willing to pay $20 to ride the bus, which fits 46, to the march. Several other students are planning on carpooling or driving up themselves, as well, he said.

Trumbull High students joined students across the country in a walkout on March 14, with 98 percent of the student body participating, according to student representatives who spoke at a Trumbull Democratic Town Committee meeting this week.

A message left for school administrators for comment was not immediately returned.'Fisking' Dianne Feinstein's

Gun Control Op-Ed

By Tom Knighton. March 18th, 2018

When I saw Dianne Feinstein had penned an op-ed for USA Today on gun control, I just had to give it a read. After all, it might give me a good bit to write about here at Bearing Arms. I was not wrong.

However, there was so much wrong with it that I couldn't do a normal post. No, it was jacked up beyond all measure, and that requires a special tool, a tool called "The Fisk."

If you're unfamiliar with a fisk, it's a point by point rebuttal of her claims, often with a fair bit of snark thrown in. Her words will be block-quoted, while mine won't be.

We've heard passionate pleas in recent weeks from students who survived a massacre and lost their friends and teachers. Through their pain, with Wednesday's National School Walkout and in many other ways, this generation of students growing up with active-shooter drills is demanding that lawmakers take action to reform gun laws. Unfortunately, there's a lot of misleading information about reasonable measures to ensure gun safety, and it distracts from the fundamental issue at hand: the safety of our children, communities, schools and businesses.

Wow, off to a good start. I agree. There is a lot of misleading information out there that distracts from the issue. Maybe this won't be so bad, right?

Right?

One frequent refrain: "Criminals don't follow the law." This is absurd on its face. By this logic, we shouldn't criminalize murder, rape or kidnapping. Laws exist to deter crime, and when a crime is committed, laws are there to ensure punishment is meted out.

Oh, we're going there instead.

Okay, let's. Criminals don't follow the law, but you know who does? Law-abiding citizens. .......

The full article contains a significant series of rebuttals and pulls Feinstein's op-ed apart. The majority of points covered are pretty predictable and the way that anti rights people usually try to present their "argument". The "gun control" approach is the usual emotionally driven methodology that seeks to achieve control without accepting the rights of the lawful majority - painting with a broad brush in order to advance further towards an end goal of confiscation and total disarmament.

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WASHINGTON - President Donald Trump, whose top attorney handling the Russia probe resigned Thursday, is struggling to find top-notch defense lawyers willing to represent him in the case, according to multiple Trump advisers familiar with the negotiations.

Some law firms have signaled that they do not want the controversy of representing a divisive and unpopular president, while others have told Trump advisers they have clients with conflicting interests, according to several lawyers and three of the president's advisers. Several prominent white-collar lawyers also have declined requests to sign on with the president in recent weeks, including former Solicitor General Theodore Olson.

The difficulties in finding representation come as the investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller intensifies its focus on Trump's actions. John Dowd, the president's chief lawyer in handling the Mueller probe since last year, quit Thursday morning after several strategy disputes with the president, who ultimately lost confidence in the veteran lawyer, three Trump aides said.

Dowd had been the president's main point of contact with Mueller's office, which is investigating Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and contacts with Trump campaign members. Dowd also had been negotiating the terms for the president to sit for an interview with Mueller's team as it examines whether Trump obstructed justice by seeking to shut down the investigation.

Despite overtures by Trump's aides and Trump himself in the past weeks, several lawyers have passed on taking on the president as a client. Olson's law firm, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, publicly rebuffed the idea of him representing Trump on Tuesday through a statement from one of his partners - less than 24 hours after a Trump ally had asked him to consider the job. Several weeks earlier, the Trump team reached out to Robert Giuffra, a partner at Sullivan & Cromwell, who also declined, according to a person familiar with the talks, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

Two weeks ago, Trump also interviewed Williams & Connolly partner Emmet Flood, a Republican defense lawyer who helped President Bill Clinton during impeachment proceedings, and asked him to consider joining his legal team in some capacity. As of Dowd's resignation Thursday, the discussions were still preliminary, people familiar with the talks said. Trump and his advisers are eyeing one high-profile lawyer to take the lead on his legal team, but neither the president nor the lawyer have decided whether to begin the representation, according to three people familiar with the discussion.

The struggles are reminiscent of Trump's difficulties in the spring of 2017 when the president was first seeking new attorneys to represent him in the Russia probe. He interviewed a half-dozen high-profile legal stars in the white-collar defense bar, including Flood, Brendan Sullivan and A.B. Culvahouse; all of them declined.

"These major law firms have spent millions of dollars on their image," said one Trump adviser, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity. "It's political. They are saying that representing this president is just too controversial."

Ty Cobb, who joined the White House last summer as an internal lawyer handling the Mueller case, originally had been offered the job of serving as Trump's lawyer working alongside Dowd. But two people familiar with his hiring said leaders at Cobb's law firm, Hogan Lovells, had expressed reservations about Cobb representing Trump personally; some firm leaders were more amenable to Cobb representing the White House instead.

Aside from being controversial, aides said Trump has proved to be a difficult client, as Dowd learned firsthand.

Dowd complained to colleagues that Trump had ignored his advice and tweeted attacks on Mueller and other topics hours after Dowd and other advisers urged him not to, those colleagues said. Dowd also said he was personally insulted by the president's efforts to hire other lawyers. One person familiar with the dynamics said Trump frequently praised his legal team to their faces but criticized them when they were not around.

Dowd declined to discuss his decision when reached Thursday. "I love the President and wish him well," he wrote in an email.

But privately, Dowd was "blindsided" when the president interviewed Flood and again when Trump announced he was adding conservative lawyer and attack-dog Joseph diGenova to the team last week.

He and the president had been increasingly disagreeing over strategy, but especially so on Saturday. One Trump adviser said the president berated Dowd for not doing enough to, in the president's view, highlight corruption and political bias in the FBI to undercut the legitimacy of the Mueller probe. Trump told Dowd he wanted to tweet that the firing of Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe was another reason the Mueller probe should be shut down, the adviser said.

At Trump's insistence, Dowd issued an emailed statement saying the investigation was corrupted by political bias, according to a Trump adviser. Dowd called on Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who oversees that probe, to shut it down.

"I pray that Acting Attorney General Rosenstein will follow the brilliant and courageous example of the FBI Office of Professional Responsibility and Attorney General Jeff Sessions and bring an end to alleged Russia Collusion investigation manufactured by McCabe's boss James Comey based upon a fraudulent and corrupt Dossier," Dowd said.

Dowd told The Washington Post that he was speaking for himself and not on Trump's behalf. Earlier Saturday, Dowd had told the Daily Beast that he was speaking on behalf of the president and in his capacity as the president's attorney. After the Daily Beast published its story, Dowd emailed the publication and said he was not speaking on the president's behalf.

At 10 a.m. Thursday, Dowd resigned without consulting Trump, three advisers said. Aides said they were unsuccessful in asking him to hold off until they could confer with the president and prepare a statement.

A huge bone of contention between Trump and his team has been over testifying in front of Mueller's team, these people said. Trump wants to do so, thinking he can talk his way out of it, while his lawyers are far more wary, these people said. Dowd and Marc Kasowitz, Trump's former lawyer who he still occasionally consults, both have told Trump he could damage himself by testifying. His chief White House counsel, Donald McGahn, also has chafed at Trump granting an interview and has criticized others on the team.

Trump has groused to friends and aides that he thinks his lawyers are weak and that his New York attorneys are tougher and better.

Earlier this month, Trump dubbed news reports of trouble on his legal team as inaccurate.

"The Failing New York Times purposely wrote a false story stating that I am unhappy with my legal team on the Russia case and am going to add another lawyer to help out," Trump tweeted March 11. "Wrong. I am VERY happy with my lawyers, John Dowd, Ty Cobb and Jay Sekulow. They are doing a great job."

Eight days later, the president hired diGenova, and Dowd is now off the team.

Sekulow was in the White House meeting with Trump about the case and his legal team Thursday afternoon, White House officials said. He and diGenova were spotted at the White House again late Thursday.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said Thursday that he feels confident the president eventually will find good counsel and that he is more worried about how focused Trump seems to be on the probe.

"The model should be the Bill Clinton model," Graham said. "You can go after the special counsel, like he did with Ken Starr, and ask about impartiality, but the president should focus on being president. I'm not worried about him finding good lawyers. He'll find them. I'm worried about him and his day job, not being distracted. Clinton, for all his problems, never lost sight of being president. Clinton let other people go after the so-called witch hunt."

---

The Washington Post's Rosalind S. Helderman and Robert Costa contributed to this report.African Union HQ Building Bugged

A number of African leaders have turned to Chinese investment as a viable alternative to Western development aid. The recent allegations of Chinese cyber-espionage of the African Unions headquarters might prompt them to reconsider.

Earlier this year, Le Monde reported that confidential data on the IT network of the Chinese-built African Union headquarters in Ethiopia was being siphoned off to Shanghai every night between 2012 and 2017.

Despite denials from China and the African Union, the alleged espionage is worth analysing as it highlights Africas geopolitical importance to China and endangers Beijings preferred narrative of benevolent relations with African states. Moving forward, African leaders will face a more complex calculus when approaching the West and China with respect to tech issues.

Although this sort of Spycraft is fairly routine, it signals Africas growing strategic importance to China. In a world of finite resources, states spy on states that matter to them. China seems to have calculated that the hard power benefits of accessing internal AU data to gain the upper hand in negotiations with African leaders outweighed the soft power benefits that came with building them a headquarters.

For their part, a number of African leaders have turned to Chinese investment as a viable alternative to Western development aid. Beijing has invested millions of dollars in infrastructure across the continent, trades heavily with the continent, and opened its first overseas military base in Djibouti.

African leaders, including Ugandas Yoweri Museveni, have decried Western actors as conceited, full of themselves, ignorant of our conditions, and they make other peoples business their business, while the Chinese just deal with you as one who represents your country.

Chinas alleged espionage takes it from benevolent business partner to potential political meddler, adding a dimension of realpolitik to the relationship.

What Can African States Do?

According to Le Monde, the African Union kept the Chinese surveillance secret for a year after discovering it, suggesting that African leaders believed such information, if public, could have explosive consequences for their relationship with China. Africas hesitation to disclose this incursion demonstrates just how much influence Chinese strategic ambitions have over choices African actors make.

What can AU members do? African states have historically found ways to push back against powerful outside influences, despite continued power imbalances. Cold War geopolitics allowed African states play Soviet and Western interests off of each other, giving them more space to operate.

For instances, they used aid and trade deals from one region to negotiate better deals with another. They also strategically granted military privileges to one side or the other as a negotiating tactic.

The African strategic toolkit shifted with the post-Cold War ascendancy of the West. African states began to use rules, a central element of Western global politics, as a mode of resistance.

All but three African members of the International Telecommunication Union that attended an important 2012 conference endorsed changes to a telecom treaty known as the International Telecommunications Regulations.

China also endorsed these changes, while the United States did not.

African states have also been reticent to accede to the Council of Europes Convention on Cybercrime, largely on the grounds that they had no role in drafting it.

Instead, African states developed their own rival set of rules in the African Union Convention on Cybersecurity and Personal Data Protection, underscoring their resistance.

Resistance through rules probably will not help African states deter Chinese cyber espionage. International law is generally silent on espionage, so playing one set of rules off of another would do little to deter it. Instead, African states could return to playing one regions interests off of another to gain strategic space to maneuver. African states will not be able to stop Chinese espionage.

But, African states could respond to this allegation of Chinese espionage by, for example, indicating greater openness to Western partners. This incident also opens possibilities for the West to re-engage with African countries and offer itself as a more appealing partner to African states to balance Chinas influence.

So far, however, African states have failed to deal with China in response to the bugging in a manner that bolsters their autonomy. Eight days after news of the Chinese espionage broke, the African Union joined Chinese denials. The AU chairman appeared in Beijing with the Chinese foreign minister calling the allegations all lies while the Chinese foreign minister added that the allegation was a Western attempt to divide China and Africa.

The African Unions failure to address Chinas behavior demonstrates just how dramatically Chinas influence has narrowed African strategic choices. African states have failed to counterbalance Chinas interests by buying the party line.

If this behavior continues, African autonomy will take a real hit. The original Le Monde report quotes AU officials rationalising the Chinese behavior, at least they never colonised us.

This may be true, but China does not have to colonise Africa to affect its destiny on Chinese rather than African terms.

DefenseOne:

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In S.Africa The Cybersecurity Skills Gap Is A Chasm:Somerset DA Jeff Thomas facing rape, assault charges

Somerset County District Attorney Jeffrey Thomas is facing rape and assault charges after police say he assaulted an acquaintance Sept. 18.The BJPs by-poll debacle in Uttar Pradesh and Bihar has thrown up three pieces of conventional wisdom. One, the Modi wave is over. Two, the BJP will get no more than 180 seats in the 2019 Lok Sabha election. Three, the combined Opposition will sink their ideological differences and come to power.

Its impossible to predict an election result a year in advance. Whats certain though is the BJP will not win the 282 seats it did in 2014. Lightning doesnt strike twice. The 2014 Lok Sabha poll brought two powerful forces together: a strong anti-Congress wave and an equally strong pro-Modi wave. They combined to form a tsunami that led to the BJP sweeping Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Delhi.

Electoral tsunami

Such electoral tsunamis are rare. Even the sympathy wave caused by Rajiv Gandhis assassination in May 1991 didnt help the Congress win a majority in the Lok Sabha. Prime Minister PV Narasimha Rao led a minority government for five years before India got its first khichdi United Front government in 1996 with HD Deve Gowda as Prime Minister, supported by the Congress from outside.

Will history repeat itself in 2019? If it does, look at the cast of characters who will be part of a new United Front melting pot: Mayawati, Akhilesh Yadav, Tejashwi Yadav, MK Stalin, Sharad Pawar, Assaduddin Owaisi, Omar Abdullah and Sitaram Yechury. The chef who will supervise the making of this khichdi government is, of course, Rahul Gandhi.

As he turns 49 next June, has Rahuls time finally come? How will the Congress control the clashing egos of the more than dozen leaders of the new-look United Front? To complicate the broth, TMCs Mamata Banerjee and TRS KCR are plotting to set up a non-BJP, non-Congress Third Front (TF).

In a best-case scenario, the Congress can hope to gain significant Lok Sabha seats from only seven states: Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, Haryana, Punjab, Karnataka and Kerala. It is locked in binary contests with the BJP in four of these states, with the Left in one (Kerala) and in multipolar contests in two (Punjab and Haryana). Doubling its 2014 tally to around 90 seats would be an optimistic outcome.

When it supported Deve Gowdas UF government from outside in 1996, the Congress had 140 Lok Sabha seats. The various parties that made up the UF had 192 seats and the BJP 161 seats. In 2019, the combined Opposition (United Front plus Third Front) will likely account for 120-140 seats with the TMC, TRS, DMK, SP and BSP providing the bulk.

The small parties in the mix like the NCP, NC, AIMIM and the Left will top up the numbers. Lalu Prasads RJD in Bihar, despite its win in Araria and Jehanabad (but loss in Bhabua) in recent by-polls, is unlikely to get into double digits in the 2019 Lok Sabha election given Lalus conviction in yet another fraud case. The sympathy factor can wear thin.

Hung Parliament

With 120-140 seats in the UF-TF combine and 90 seats for the Congress, totalling 210-230 seats for the mahagathbandhan, the 2019 Lok Sabha election will obviously produce a hung Parliament. This accepts the prevalent hypothesis that the BJP wins 180-200 seats. With few reliable allies, the BJP-led NDA will thus be unable to cross 240 seats. Unattached parties like the BJD, AIADMK, TDP and independents will make up the rest and be the kingmakers. This, therefore, is what the 17th Lok Sabha in 2019 could look like: NDA 240 seats; Congress-led mahagathbandhan (UF+TF) 220 seats; others 85 seats.

Seven errors

Modi has made seven key errors that have brought the BJP to this pass. First, alienating NDA allies. Second, misallocating portfolios in the Union Cabinet. (Arun Jaitley would have been a better external affairs minister and Sushma Swaraj a better home minister. Ministers like Mahesh Sharma, Harsh Vardhan, Radha Mohan Singh and Uma Bharti have not distinguished themselves). Three, remaining silent on issues ranging from cow vigilantism to divisive remarks by party MPs.

Four, not holding daily media briefings by the PMO or MEA as every major country does  and as India did when Syed Akbaruddin was MEA spokesperson. Five, not submitting himself to regular press conferences with robust question-and-answer sessions.

Six, allowing the bureaucracy to slow down corruption cases against UPA-era offenders. Seven, following an inconsistent policy on Pakistan. The significant achievements of the Modi government  and there are many  have been submerged by these self-inflicted wounds.

Will the Rahul Gandhi-led Congress with, say, 90 seats be willing to support a new UF+TF government from outside? Will it seek the prime ministership for Rahul by dint of having the largest number of MPs in the mahagathbandhan? How will the ambitious leaders of the Opposition khichdi take to such an arrangement?

Rahuls own reluctance to lead such a coalition could stem from the recognition that with 210-230 seats the mahagathbandhan will not be able to claim a working majority in the Lok Sabha without support from unattached parties like the BJD, TDP, AIADMK and independents.

With around 240 seats, the shrunken NDA will wait to pounce if a coalition government of over 20 parties collapses under the weight of its own ideological contradictions as it did in 1998. Six years of NDA government followed. History has an uncomfortable habit of repeating itself.

(Courtesy of Mail Today)

Also read: Ahead of 2019 Lok Sabha polls, why Facebook-Cambridge Analytica scandal should scare ECAfter ushering in Ugadi  the Telugu New Year  on March 18 with almanacs and its interpreters forecasting Telangana chief minister K Chandrashekar Rao can spell magic anywhere, he took off, the next afternoon, in a chartered 14-seater Bombardier Challenger 850 to discuss the prospects of forging a national Federal Front, opposed to both the Congress and the BJP, with his West Bengal counterpart Mamata Banerjee and bringing together other like-minded parties.

Not surprisingly, KCR found instant support from the Trinamool Congress chief who is fighting the communists and the Congress on one side and the BJP on the other. At the end of a two-hour meeting in her office at the State Secretariat in Kolkata, both concurred, they have made a good beginning only to suggest that they have a long way to go. What they clamour for is a greater devolution of powers, as well as finances, from the Centre to the states by rewriting, if need be, the precepts of federal relations. Such a coming together of regional parties as a national coalition has been unimpressive in the past.

KCR found instant support from the Trinamool Congress chief (Photo: PTI)

Such coalitions, which came to power, during the tenure of the ninth and 11th Lok Sabhas, were short-lived as they were at the mercy or propped up either by the Congress or the BJP. Significantly, these were post-poll coalitions based on electoral outcomes and relative strengths of the parties and never through a pre-poll sharing of perceptions and understanding. Moreover, in changed political circumstances, it is unclear whether the BJP and the Congress will back a motley group of small parties to keep each other out of power.

KCR is, however, determined to be path-breaker and optimistic about delivering a masterstroke perhaps enthused by what almanac readers and other forecasters have hinted or indicated about his political future. For a dogged politician who waited for about a decade-and-a-half before capturing power, the TRS chief is acutely aware that regional parties which are a force in one or may be two states cannot add to each other's vote banks. The TRS, like most of them, will have to struggle to be relevant and seen as a serious player in a national election vis-a-vis the Congress and the BJP. It becomes even a greater challenge if the Lok Sabha poll is held simultaneously with the Assembly elections as it will be for the two Telugu states, including Andhra Pradesh.

The ambitious TRS strongman is pitching for drafting an alternative agenda by a pan-Indian rainbow coalition. A Federal Front will be a huge entity. We have only seen BJP and Congress ruling the country. There have only been two choices. What magic can they do? We have seen what they did in the last 71 years. Dont assume what we are forming is something that has already been tried. That is routine thinking. Our plans are much bigger, says KCR, reluctant to divulge anything more except saying that it will be steered by collective leadership. If the states are strong, the nation will be strong, says a non-committal Banerjee.

This is a stunt and not going to be a front, says veteran Congress parliamentarian S Jaipal Reddy, sceptical about power-hungry regional satraps doing political business from a larger perspective. Others in Telangana claim it is KCRs mantra aimed at diverting peoples attention from the failures of his government.

The TRS chief is not one to take criticism in his stride or brush it aside. Even if he is peeved, KCR is capable of chasing his dreams and goals with a single-minded pursuit. India needs some miracle, he says confident about casting a spell. Except that he is still far from bringing on board takers in several states.

(Courtesy of Mail Today)

Also read: How KCR plans to win farmers over ahead of 2019 Assembly electionsThe Afghan jihad and the creation of jihadists

From 1977 to 1988, Pakistan was ruled by a military dictator, General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq.

He was austere, a consummate British-trained army man, brutal and widely disliked. He ruled over Pakistan with an iron hand. He was personally devout, but he used Islam ruthlessly for political and strategic ends. He believed that without Islam "Pakistan would fail". His regime introduced and mainstreamed the concept and the terminology of the "Pakistan ideology", that Pakistan was created for Islam. As described in chapter 4, with the help of the Jamaat-e-Islami party, he used this concept to transform educational curricula. Under the guise of Islamisation, he also changed parts of Pakistan's legal system, rendering some laws discriminatory at best and draconian at worst.

But Zia's most damning legacy came from his role in the (US-and Saudi-funded and supported) anti-Soviet Afghan jihad. For all his hardline beliefs and policies, Zia was pro-America, and his term was a high point of US-Pakistan relations. He joined the US-Saudi alliance not to support the fight against communism but to acquire "strategic depth" for Pakistan in Afghanistan that would boost its power with regard to India. The argument was that a friendly government in Afghanistan would boost Pakistan's regional standing and counter the Indian threat on its east with an ally to its west. That the strategic decision to counter India in this way was taken during army rule is not a surprise.

The cause was strategic, but the methods used were not. The Afghan resistance against the Soviet occupation was framed as a religious jihad, its fighters called mujahideen. They were armed as much with ideology as with guns; the armed resistance was conflated deliberately with Islam. This suited Zia. Steve Coll argues that "a war fought on Islamic principles could... help Zia shore up a political base at home and deflect appeals to Pashtun nationalism."

Thus the same imperatives that led Pakistan to rely on Islam - the need for political legitimacy and fear of internal fractures - led it to use Islam in this external war. In fact both Islam and countering India - Pakistan's two narrative pillars - played a role in driving Pakistan into the Afghan jihad.

Both America and Saudi Arabia funded the jihad, and America provided arms and technical advice. Pakistan (and its Inter-Services Intelligence, the ISI) trained the Afghan fighters as well as Pakistani volunteers who joined the jihad. The training was both ideological and military, and it was conducted in new madrasas in Pakistan and in existing ones repurposed for the jihad.

Pakistan Under Siege: Extremism, Society, And the State; by Madiha Afzal, Penguin

A mainstream Islamist party, the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (JUI), ran many of these madrasas. The JUI's rural madrassas were already the "main conduit for the dissemination of Wahhabi Islam" in Pakistan in the 1970s. These madrasas multiplied in number during the 1980s and, through them, the JUI became a major supplier of mujahideen for the Afghan jihad.

The military's ISI conducted the trainings and the management of the Afghan mujahideen. Coll argues that America left the choice of picking political winners among the Afghan resistance to Pakistan, and that Pakistan chose the more radical fighters over Pashtun leaders because the jihadists were better fighters (in its view) and because the Pashtun fighters were "likely to stir up Pashtun nationalism inside Pakistani territory," and would have been threatening to an internally insecure Pakistan.

Many of the well-known militant-linked madrasas in Pakistan today - the one at Lal Masjid, the Binoria madrassa in Karachi, and Lashkar-e-Taiba's Dawat-ul-Irshad - were established during this time. These madrasas were mostly Sunni, and the ones supported by Saudi Arabia were Wahhabi.

The immediate result of the Afghan jihad was a dramatic increase in money, arms, and hardline religious ideology in Pakistan; the latter two far outlasted the Soviet withdrawal, as did the jihadi groups created during this time, the madrasas, and the Pakistani men who were trained in them. The worst outcome of the whole affair in some ways was the normalisation of the concept of jihad as a tool in modern Pakistan. The success of this strategy in Afghanistan led the ISI to use it next to the east, in Kashmir, against its biggest foe: India.

Kashmiri jihadists and the state

Some of the Pakistani jihadi groups that fought the Soviets - the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HuM) and Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HuJI) - turned their focus toward the Kashmir cause once the Soviets withdrew. It is understood that Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence directed them that way, to aid what had begun as an organic resistance in Kashmir against Indian rule in 1989. Here was a second example of the Pakistani army using Islam for war, in this case against its existential threat, India-another decision in service to its narrative.

Since then, the ISI has reportedly given cover and support to jihadist groups fighting in Kashmir - particularly to Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammad, and Harkat-ul-Mujahideen. In some cases these groups have allegedly acted as proxies for Pakistan's security agencies; in others, they have acted more independently. The support they receive has meant a financial backing, but these groups also generate money through donations. They are able to function and organise in the heart of Punjab. These groups also have ties with Islamists. Hafiz Saeed, the head of Lashkar-e-Taiba (and its political and charitable arm, Jamaat-ud-Dawa), is a former member of the Jamaat-e-Islami.

In response to foreign pressure to take action against these groups, the Pakistani state has engaged in purposefully negligible prosecution towards them. This is why Hafiz Saeed can give public speeches and openly hold large rallies with a $10 million American bounty on him. It is also why Kashmiri jihadist groups are able to rename and reconstitute themselves after they have been banned.

During those times, the charity wings of these militant groups, such as the LeT's Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD), function as acceptable fronts for the groups. JuD was ostensibly officially banned in 2015, but it continues to function freely.

When one of these Kashmir-focused militant groups is held responsible by India (or the West) for a large-scale attack, like LeT for the Mumbai attacks in 2008 or JeM for the Pathankot air base attack in 2016, any punitive action against the group, its leader, and its facilities tends to be short-lived and largely symbolic. When the furore dies down, things go back to the way they were. Hafiz Saeed has been detained multiple times - after September 11, 2001, and after attacks in India in 2006 and 2008 - only to be released after a few months with the claim that there were no grounds to keep him detained. Similarly, JeM's Masood Azhar was taken into protective custody after September 11 and later released.

These jihadi groups do not target Pakistani civilians or the state directly; their enemy is clearly India. But the concept of jihad is unwieldy, and the rhetoric of these groups is not limited to liberating Kashmir. They are anti-Israel, anti-America, and anti-West. They say their ultimate goal is to impose Sharia in South Asia, and they talk of support for a global jihad. This is explicit in their pronouncements, as in the Jamaat-ud-Dawa's manifesto, titled Why Are We Waging Jihad: "Is there any place in this world today where Muslims are not suffering? Are there not cries for help from the downtrodden Muslim men, women and children in Indian Kashmir, the Philippines, Chechnya, China, Russia, Bosnia among other places, all pleading to be saved from their torments?

The blurring of lines across jihadist groups is not limited to rhetoric; they sometimes provide sanctuary to members of other groups, and their own fighters "migrate" across groups. According to the US State Department, a top al Qaeda lieutenant was discovered at a LeT safe house in 2002.33 And Coll reported that LeT fighters joined the fight with the Afghan Taliban in the mid-2000s: "Some of its [JuD's] younger volunteers wanted to join the fight with the Taliban in Western Pakistan and Afghanistan . . . and so Jamaat [ud-Dawa] had evolved an internal HR policy by which these young men would turn in their Jamaat identity cards and go West 'on their own time,' much as think tanks allow policy scholars to take leaves of absence to advise political campaigns."

Thus these groups pose a direct security risk to Pakistan, but Pakistan's India-obsessed army fails to recognise that-it feels they can be contained, or that their strategic use is worth the risk.

The Pakistani state has allowed these Kashmiri militant groups to function as social-political-militant entities. They openly provide charity and extensive social services, as described in chapter 1. This helps them win over Pakistanis' hearts and minds. In 2016, Pakistani newspapers reported the existence of an illegal JuD Sharia court in Lahore, running parallel justice to the state. The government seemed to have no knowledge of it. JuD denied it was running a court and said it was engaged only in arbitration. But the person who first reported the story to the media - the "defendant" in a case - showed he had, in fact, received a summons to the court.

These militant groups are also able to freely publish and distribute their propaganda. JuD and LeT run a slate of magazines in multiple languages - Urdu, English, and Arabic - with large circulations. LeT also runs a magazine for students and one for women in addition to publishing dozens of booklets and maintaining websites in Urdu, Arabic, and English.

(Excerpted with permissions of Penguin from Pakistan Under Siege by Madiha Afzal.)

Also read: Can an anti-Modi alliance defeat the BJP in 2019?The BJP in Rajasthan having lost three crucial by-polls held in January this year, including for two Lok Sabha seats of Alwar and Ajmer, is in a tight corner but not willing to give up the fight just yet.

Chief minister Vasundhara Raje, in the final year of her current term in office, is definitely down, if not completely out in the run-up to the Assembly elections. The magnitude of the by-poll losses can be gauged from the fact that the Ajmer and Alwar Lok Sabha seats have eight Vidhan Sabha segments each, and along with Mandalgarh Assembly seat, make for 17 out of 200 Assembly seats in Rajasthan. All these three seats earlier were with the BJP. On Alwar Lok Sabha seat, the BJP candidate lost by a whopping margin of more than 1.90 lakh votes. The BJP had won this seat by close to 2.84 lakh votes during the 2014 Lok Sabha elections.

Image: PTI photo

During the 2013 Assembly polls, riding on the Modi wave which swept across the western state of Rajasthan, Raje attained power in the desert state with more than a whopping 160 seats in an Assembly of 200. And then, during the Lok Sabha polls in the following year, with the mood against the incumbent Congress and in favour of the BJP spearheaded by an aggressively upbeat Modi, the party swept the state by bagging all 25 seats.

The surge was so strong that the Barmer-Jaisalmer seat saw former BJP leader and finance minister Jaswant Singh, who was contesting as an Independent after being denied a party ticket, losing to Colonel (retd) Sonaram Chaudhary, considered a turncoat who had joined the BJP after leaving the Congress just before the elections.

Cut to 2018. The marginalisation of Raje in the run-up to the Assembly polls, from selection of candidates to organisational changes, can be gradual but obvious, to contain the damage that has already been done.

With hardly much time left for the elections, the party is looking at the prospect of making some key changes in Rajasthan, including the reshuffling of key ministries, the possibility of appointing a deputy chief minister considered close to the Sangh and ensuring that the party's outreach programme gains impetus.

With the Assembly polls inching closer, the party has decided to send its cabinet ministers in the state, apart from the likes of senior functionaries including Bhupendra Yadav and Avinash Rai Khanna, across different districts to gauge peoples mood and contain the anti-Raje sentiments currently prevailing across various parts.

During Prime Minister Narendra Modis visit to Rajasthans Jhunjhunu district on March 8, several female contractual workers, allegedly forced to work at a measly salary of Rs 5,000 for almost a decade now, were seen shouting anti-Raje slogans in the presence of the prime minister. Some of those workers even showed black flags and shouted "Raje go back", much to the chagrin of the BJP leaders present there.

The farmers, not getting the minimum support price (MSP) for their crops for a long time, have their own set of grouses with the sitting chief minister. A subdued Raje was seen on stage along with the prime minister for the expansion of the "Beti Padhao Beti Bachao" scheme.

With rumours doing the rounds about the current chief minister's unpopularity within the Sangh circles as well as the BJP high command, her role may become more marginalised and that of the RSS more evident in the run-up to the elections in the state.

From ticket distribution to campaigning, the "queen" may get increasingly sidelined as the BJP high command would want to take some tough decisions to put up a stiff fight against a resurgent Congress in Rajasthan.

Also read: Why Congress winning Rajasthan by-polls isn't enough to dislodge Vasundhara RajeIf Uttarakhand is one of India's most beautiful tourist destinations, the state also happens to house the most intriguing abandoned settlements - modern ghost villages. Ironically, it is sixth richest state in India in terms of per capita income, but those living in its hill districts have a different story to tell.

It seems as if Uttarakhand was created for the development of Haridwar, Haldwani, Rudrapur and Dehradun - all cities in the plains - and not for the 16,000-plus villages in the hills. The irony is that the state was carved out of Uttar Pradesh in 2000 in order to give the required attention to development of its remote hill districts.

Since its formation, the BJP and the Congress have in turn ruled the state, which has had seven chief ministers in 17 years. That's one every two-and-a-half years. Only veteran ND Tiwari could complete his full five-year tenure. Seventeen years since, the hills of Uttarakhand are still deprived of basic facilities, most importantly healthcare.

The issue of migration often makes it to the election manifestos of many political parties, but not much has been done to check the problem beyond political rhetoric. Abject lack of employment in these districts has led to large-scale migration to the plains, leaving entire mountain villages uninhabited. Farming, which used to be the primary occupation in the hills, is crippled by small land holdings and lack of agricultural initiatives by the governments.

Uttarakhand chief minister Trivendra Singh Rawat. The state has seen seven chief ministers in 17 years.

Even in the past people living in the mountains used to migrate to the plains in search of jobs, but they would leave their families behind. But now migrations to the plains involve entire families moving from the hills to the plains, either within Uttarakhand or to other parts of the country. While hill districts in the state saw a decadal population growth of 12.75 per cent, the plains recorded almost 32 per cent.

This is a sure sign of large scale migration of entire families from the hills. The intra-state migration has led to a demographic drain from the hill-districts leading to creation of ghost villages. There are 1,048 villages in the state that are uninhabited , according to Census 2011.

As many as 80 per cent villages across the 13 districts, including Pauri, Tehri, Almora, Uttarkashi, Chamoli and Pithoragarh have registered a population of less than 500. There has been a negative decadal growth of -1.38 observed in the district of Almora. The Pauri Garhwal district has also seen negative growth of -1.41 per cent. Ironically, Uttarakhand CM Trivendra Singh Rawat, UP CM Yogi Adityanath, Army chief Bipin Rawat, NSA Ajit Doval and RAW chief Anil Dhasmana hail from villages in Pauri Garhwal.

The population in both the districts together fell by 17,868 people between 2001 and 2011.

In 2015, the National Institute for Rural Development and Panchayat Raj conducted a survey in 217 households in Almora and Pauri Garhwal to understand the dynamics of exodus in the state. The top reason for migration was found to be unemployment.

The attraction to cities in plains arising due to hardship of village life in hills such as poor commuting facilities, lack of water, inadequate healthcare facilities, poor educational facilities and inaccessible markets have further accelerated the process of migration of youth. There has also been slowing down of growth in agriculture and allied activities in Uttarakhand.

Its annual, average growth stood at 4 per cent between 2010 and 2015 compared with Himachal Pradeshs 9 per cent in the same period.

Himachal Pradesh earns more than Rs 15,000 crore every year from horticulture and agriculture because of its government policies. It seems the Uttarakhand government never focussed on developing agriculture and that is why there is such a deep decline.

What's more, with migrants abandoning their land to the village community, vacant farmlands are attracting wild animals from surrounding forests and this is leading to man-animal conflicts.

The hill population in villages live as communities and work as communities. If a faction of population starts migrating then it becomes difficult for the rest to stay back. There is an inevitable socio-economic pressure to migrate on the community. The already migrated populace also helps others to settle in other cities by providing help in seeking employment or temporary accommodation.

The Panchayati Raj Act of Uttarakhand, passed as late as 2016, clearly states that local hill-governments have not been given the importance that was meant to be accorded to them during the creation of the state. Agriculture has become furthermore difficult to manage with productive land scattered between the barren land left by the resettled population. (Land turns barren after abandonment or gets covered with deep-rooted weeds and shrubs). Also, increasing water scarcity has made irrigation of land almost impossible.

These are the primary causes of migration. The decline in agriculture should be the first step towards checking the problem of migration because farming is the main occupation of the people. Any issue that plagues the villages cannot be resolved without solving problems related to agriculture. No major initiatives have been taken up to improve agriculture and its productivity through its diversification in favour of high value crops. Also, the barren land has the potential to be redeveloped and consolidated with farmlands.

The crops could also be diversified with focus on cash crops like mushrooms that require less irrigation. There are many alternatives to revive the agricultural sector, but theres no support from the governments side. Farmers are not getting the required support of agricultural extension services, development of irrigation channels, use of better seeds, improved inputs, technology and marketing.

While the respective governments have been busy playing political games, the common people of the state have hardly mattered.

These are the real "constitutional" crises of the state today (right to life and livelihood) that need quick remedies, not electoral gimmicks. Uttarakhandis who have migrated out of the state can also play a role here by adopting the affected villages.

Also read: 13 ways of looking at English: This language gets work done in IndiaA few days ago, Kenya announced that Sudan, its last male northern rhino, died at the age of 45, of age-related complications. He's survived by his daughter and granddaughter but with no males left, the species' proximity to extinction is perilously near.

According to the World Economic Forum, wildlife trafficking is the fourth most lucrative business in the world after drugs, humans and arms. The global illegal wildlife trade generates anything from $7 billion to $23 billion every year, and trophy hunting is estimated at $200 million in annual revenue. Unfortunately, India doesn't have much to gloat about in this domain. In fact, the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) states that there has been a 52 per cent spike in poaching and wildlife crimes between 2014 and 2016. The number of species that are poached or illegally traded in the country has gone up from 400 in 2014 to 465 in 2016.

Global Tiger Initiative, Save the Elephant, UNDP Sea Turtle Project, Wildlife Crime Initiative, Protecting Species, Wildlife Crime Control Bureau; and multiple private and government institutions are just some of the countless projects operating for wildlife conservation. Still, instead of a steady decline, every year poaching and killing seem to fluctuate.

The CSE states that 50 tigers were poached across Indian reserves in 2016, the highest number in a decade, despite conservation efforts by the government and global institutions. About 340 peacocks were poached between 2015 and 2016, amounting to a 193 per cent rise over 2014.

In a wildlife bio reserve or nature reserve, rangers are able to patrol only small areas at any given point of time. Often understaffed, underequipped and poorly armed, these men go beyond the call of duty to pursue and apprehend wildlife poachers. But as the statistics show, it's not always enough.

Adding to this is the evolution of poachers, who have mapped patrolling routes and avoid regular trails; they can anticipate animal movement and have resources to track their prey; they have advanced weapons as well as circumvent laws to stay protected.

So what can be done that's humanly possible to counter poaching?

The answer does not necessarily lie in simply increasing human intervention, but probably in the use of better technology. Aerial-drones, infra-red cameras, real-time monitoring devices, RFID tags, GPS geo-location for surveillance and data collection are some of the devices that can be put to good use. If you combine this with the use of big data and analytics to process incoming data feeds and link it with artificial intelligence (AI), I believe a significant difference can be made.

This is not a long shot. Similar technologies are actively being tested and deployed across the globe for anti-poaching purposes.

These technologies collate and process huge volumes of data such as poaching signs, wildlife observations, arrests and other patrol results that are logged in real-time on handheld devices by rangers in the field. The data, fed into a centralised analytics platform, is processed into charts, maps and reports on rangers' movements, poaching arrests, deaths and causes, locations, animals being targeted, among multiple metrics to help standardise monitoring and enforcement.

Other technologies employ AI planning, machine learning, and behaviour modelling for wildlife protection. It is fed with basic information about the protected area and information about previous patrolling routes and poaching activities to generate predictions of potential poaching locations and possible patrol routes. But that's not all.

By integrating machine with AI, these technologies can also predict poachers' behaviour, game-theoretic reasoning and route planning. They learn the behaviour models of the poachers from the crime data collected and calculate a randomised patrolling strategy to match the probabilities of poachers taking each route.

For a country like India, where there is a poaching threat to animals such as tigers, peacocks, elephants, leopards, blue bulls, blackbucks, rhinoceroses, chinkaras and spotted deer; a combination of Big Data Analytics and AI that can collect and process wildlife crime data and predict poaching, will do wonders.

Such technology can be implemented in areas such as Kaziranga for rhinos, Corbett, Sundarbans, Bandhavgarh and Ranthambore for tigers, Periyar for elephants, Gir for lions, Kahna for peacocks, among many others, which are dealing with inadequate wildlife protection infrastructure and staff. Going forward, sanctuaries that have been initiated with drones and advanced tracking gear might be able to leverage Big-Data analytic and

AI tools to become the hunters instead of the hunted.

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SRINAGAR: Azadi camp in Kashmir does not have a global agenda and has nothing to do with the Daesh and its ideology, Mohammad Ashraf Sehrai told Greater Kashmir in an exclusive interview soon after succeeding Syed Ali Shah Geelani as the new Tehreek-i-Hurriyat chairman.Some elements are creating confusion among masses by raising ISIS flags at the funeral of militants. We have kept a close watch on them, and will soon chart out a plan to stop them after TeH elections, Sehrai said, citing the hoisting of ISIS flags at the funeral of Soura youth Muhammad Eisa Fazili.

Sehrai, however, expressed concern over the ISIS thinking finding resonance among a section of youth. It could be the handiwork of agencies keen to defame the Kashmir movement and undermine its indigenous character, he said. Our agenda is simple. We only want Kashmir to be free from Indian occupation. Nothing else.

Hurriyat leader said that there was no role in Kashmir for the organisations with an international agenda.

Daesh and Al-Qaida have nothing to do with our movement and we will never accept them, Sehrai said. He urged youth not to get swayed by the extremist ideology and understand Islam in its correct perspective.

Some youth are influenced by ISIS ideology, but I appeal to them not to go to extremes and read Islamic books, the Quran, and the hadith, and see what rules and regulations Prophet Muhammad (SAW) has laid down for war. Then they must decide for themselves as to what is right and what is wrong.

Sehrai said he was pained by the events at the funeral of Eisa Fazili. These things are unacceptable. Mysterious forces are creating chaos among the masses. Youth have to maintain discipline in the freedom movement, he said. Those raising ISIS flags are strengthening the roots of occupation in Kashmir. India directly benefits by this. These youth tell the world that we are extremists and deserve to be killed.

Talking about Zakir Musa, chief of Ansar Gazwat-ul-Hind, Sehrai said Musa had sacrificed everything for Kashmir cause. Zakir Musa is the light of my eyes. He left everything for the sacred cause. But I want to tell him that by moving towards extremism he was doing India a favour.CSS Industries, Inc., a consumer products company, designs, manufactures, procures, distributes, and sells seasonal, gift, and craft products principally to mass market retailers in the United States and Canada. Its craft and gift consumer products include craft ribbons and bows, trims, buttons, sewing patterns, knitting needles, needle arts, kids' crafts, infant products, journals, gift card holders, all occasion boxed greeting cards, memory books, scrapbooks, stationery, stickers, and other gift and craft items, as well as floral accessories, including pot covers, foil, waxed tissue, shred, aisle runners, corsage bags, and other paper and film products. The company's seasonal consumer products comprise Christmas products, such as packaging ribbon and bows, boxed greeting cards, gift wraps, gift bags, gift boxes, gift tags, gift card holders, tissue papers, and decorations; Valentine products consisting of classroom exchange Valentine cards and other related Valentine products; Easter products, including Easter egg dyes and related Easter seasonal products; and back-to-school products, such as teachers' aids and other learning oriented products. CSS Industries, Inc. offers its products principally under the Paper Magic, Berwick, Offray, C.R. Gibson, McCall's, Butterick, Kwik Sew, Vogue Patterns, Markings, Stepping Stones, Tapestry, Seastone, Dudley's, Eureka, Stickerfitti, Favorite Findings, La Mode, Simplicity, Wrights, Boye, Dimensions, and Perler brand names. The company sells its products to mass market retailers, discount department stores, specialty chains, warehouse clubs, drug and food chains, dollar stores, office supply stores, and retail teachers' stores, as well as to independent card, gift, and floral shops through account sales managers, sales representatives, product specialists, and a network of independent manufacturers' representatives. The company was founded in 1923 and is headquartered in Plymouth Meeting, Pennsylvania.

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Ltd., Pfizer Asia Pacific Pte Ltd., Pfizer Atlantic Holdings S.a.r.l., Pfizer Australia Holdings B.V., Pfizer Australia Holdings Pty Limited, Pfizer Australia Investments Pty. Ltd., Pfizer Australia Pty Limited, Pfizer B.V., Pfizer BH D.o.o., Pfizer Baltic Holdings B.V., Pfizer Biofarmaceutica Sociedade Unipessoal Lda, Pfizer Biologics (Hangzhou) Co. Ltd, Pfizer Biologics Ireland Holdings Limited, Pfizer Biotech Corporation, Pfizer Bolivia S.A., Pfizer Canada Inc., Pfizer CentreSource Asia Pacific Pte. Ltd., Pfizer Chile S.A., Pfizer Cia. Ltda., Pfizer Colombia Spinco I LLC, Pfizer Commercial Holdings Cooperatief U.A., Pfizer Commercial Holdings TRAE Kft., Pfizer Commercial TRAE Trading Kft., Pfizer Consumer Healthcare AB, Pfizer Consumer Healthcare GmbH, Pfizer Consumer Healthcare Ltd., Pfizer Consumer Manufacturing Italy S.r.l., Pfizer Corporation, Pfizer Corporation Austria Gesellschaft m.b.H., Pfizer Corporation Hong Kong Limited, Pfizer Croatia d.o.o., Pfizer Deutschland GmbH, Pfizer Development LP, Pfizer Development Services (UK) Limited, Pfizer Domestic Ventures Limited, Pfizer Dominicana S.R.L, Pfizer ESP Pty Ltd, Pfizer East India B.V., Pfizer Eastern Investments B.V., Pfizer Egypt S.A.E., Pfizer Enterprise Holdings B.V., Pfizer Enterprises LLC, Pfizer Enterprises SARL, Pfizer Europe Finance B.V., Pfizer Export B.V., Pfizer Export Company, Pfizer Export Holding Company B.V, Pfizer Finance Share Service (Dalian) Co. Ltd., Pfizer Financial Services N.V./S.A., Pfizer France International Investments, Pfizer Free Zone Panama S. de R.L., Pfizer GEP S.L., Pfizer Global Holdings B.V., Pfizer Global Supply Japan Inc., Pfizer Global Trading, Pfizer Group Luxembourg Sarl, Pfizer Gulf FZ-LLC, Pfizer H.C.P. Corporation, Pfizer HK Service Company Limited, Pfizer Health AB, Pfizer Health Solutions Inc., Pfizer Healthcare Ireland, Pfizer Hellas A.E., Pfizer Himalaya Holdings Cooperatief U.A., Pfizer Holding France, Pfizer Holding Ventures, Pfizer Holdings Corporation, Pfizer Holdings Europe Unlimited Company, Pfizer Holdings G.K., Pfizer Holdings International Corporation, Pfizer Holdings International Luxembourg (PHIL) Sarl, Pfizer Holdings North America SARL, Pfizer Hungary Holdings TRAE Kft., Pfizer Inc., Pfizer Innovations AB, Pfizer Innovations LLC, Pfizer Innovative Supply Point International BVBA, Pfizer International LLC, Pfizer International Markets Cooperatief U.A., Pfizer International Operations, Pfizer International S. de R.L., Pfizer International Trading (Shanghai) Limited, Pfizer Investment Capital Unlimited Company, Pfizer Investment Co. Ltd., Pfizer Investment Holdings S.a.r.l., Pfizer Ireland Investments Limited, Pfizer Ireland PFE Holding 1 LLC, Pfizer Ireland PFE Holding 2 LLC, Pfizer Ireland Pharmaceuticals, Pfizer Ireland Ventures Unlimited Company, Pfizer Italia S.r.l., Pfizer Italy Group Holding S.r.l., Pfizer Japan Inc., Pfizer LLC, Pfizer Laboratories (Pty) Limited, Pfizer Laboratories Limited, Pfizer Laboratories PFE (Pty) Ltd, Pfizer Leasing Ireland Limited, Pfizer Leasing UK Limited, Pfizer Limitada, Pfizer Limited, Pfizer Luxco Holdings SARL, Pfizer Luxembourg Global Holdings S.a r.l., Pfizer Luxembourg SARL, Pfizer MAP Holding Inc., Pfizer Manufacturing Austria G.m.b.H., Pfizer Manufacturing Belgium N.V., Pfizer Manufacturing Deutschland GmbH, Pfizer Manufacturing Deutschland Grundbesitz GmbH & Co. KG, Pfizer Manufacturing Holdings LLC, Pfizer Manufacturing Ireland Unlimited Company, Pfizer Manufacturing LLC, Pfizer Manufacturing Services, Pfizer Medical Technology Group (Belgium) N.V., Pfizer Medicamentos Genericos e Participacoes Ltda., Pfizer Mexico Luxco SARL, Pfizer Mexico S.A. de C.V., Pfizer Middle East for Pharmaceuticals Animal Health and Chemicals S.A.E., Pfizer New Zealand Limited, Pfizer Norge AS, Pfizer North American Holdings Inc., Pfizer OTC B.V., Pfizer Overseas LLC, Pfizer Oy, Pfizer PFE ApS, Pfizer PFE AsiaPac Holding B.V., Pfizer PFE Australia Holding B.V., Pfizer PFE Australia Pty Ltd, Pfizer PFE B.V., Pfizer PFE Baltic Holdings B.V., Pfizer PFE Belgium SPRL, Pfizer PFE Brazil Holding S.a r.l., Pfizer PFE CIA. Ltda., Pfizer PFE Chile Holding LLC, Pfizer PFE Colombia Holding Corp., Pfizer PFE Colombia S.A.S, Pfizer PFE Commercial Holdings LLC, Pfizer PFE Croatia Holding B.V., Pfizer PFE Eastern Investments B.V., Pfizer PFE Finland Oy, Pfizer PFE France, Pfizer PFE Global Holdings B.V., Pfizer PFE Ireland Pharmaceuticals Holding 1 B.V., Pfizer PFE Italy Holdco 2 S.a r.l., Pfizer PFE Italy Holdco S.a r.l., Pfizer PFE Korlatolt Felelossegu Tarsasag, Pfizer PFE Limited, Pfizer PFE Luxembourg S.a r.l., Pfizer PFE Mexico Holding 3 LLC, Pfizer PFE Netherlands Holding 1 C.V., Pfizer PFE New Zealand, Pfizer PFE New Zealand Holding B.V., Pfizer PFE Norway Holding S.a r.l., Pfizer PFE PILSA Holdco S.a r.l., Pfizer PFE Peru Holding LLC, Pfizer PFE Peru S.R.L., Pfizer PFE Pharmaceuticals Israel Holding LLC, Pfizer PFE Pharmaceuticals Israel Ltd., Pfizer PFE Private Limited, Pfizer PFE S.R.L, Pfizer PFE Service Company Holding Cooperatief U.A., Pfizer PFE Singapore Holding B.V., Pfizer PFE Singapore Pte. Ltd., Pfizer PFE Spain B.V., Pfizer PFE Spain Holding S.L., Pfizer PFE Sweden Holding 2 S.a.r.l., Pfizer PFE Sweden Holding S.a.r.l., Pfizer PFE Switzerland GmbH, Pfizer PFE Turkey Holding 1 B.V., Pfizer PFE Turkey Holding 2 B.V., Pfizer PFE UK Holding 4 LP, Pfizer PFE US Holdings 1 LLC, Pfizer PFE US Holdings 2 LLC, Pfizer PFE US Holdings 3 LLC, Pfizer PFE US Holdings 4 LLC, Pfizer PFE US Holdings 5 LLC, Pfizer PFE spol. s r.o., Pfizer PFE Ilaclar Anonim Sirketi, Pfizer Pakistan Limited, Pfizer Parke Davis (Thailand) Ltd., Pfizer Parke Davis Inc., Pfizer Parke Davis Sdn. Bhd., Pfizer Pharm Algerie, Pfizer Pharma GmbH, Pfizer Pharma PFE GmbH, Pfizer Pharmaceutical (Wuxi) Co. Ltd., Pfizer Pharmaceutical Trading Limited Liability Company (a/k/a Pfizer Kft. or Pfizer LLC), Pfizer Pharmaceuticals B.V., Pfizer Pharmaceuticals Global B.V., Pfizer Pharmaceuticals Israel Ltd., Pfizer Pharmaceuticals Korea Limited, Pfizer Pharmaceuticals LLC, Pfizer Pharmaceuticals Ltd., Pfizer Pigments Inc., Pfizer Polska Sp. z.o.o., Pfizer Private Limited, Pfizer Production LLC, Pfizer Products Inc., Pfizer Products India Private Limited, Pfizer Research (NC) Inc., Pfizer Romania SRL, Pfizer S.A., Pfizer S.A., Pfizer S.A. (Belgium), Pfizer S.A. de C.V., Pfizer S.A.S., Pfizer S.G.P.S. Lda., Pfizer S.L., Pfizer S.R.L., Pfizer SRB d.o.o., Pfizer Saidal Manufacturing, Pfizer Sante Familiale, Pfizer Saudi Limited, Pfizer Seiyaku K.K., Pfizer Service Company BVBA, Pfizer Service Company Ireland Unlimited Company, Pfizer Services 1, Pfizer Services LLC, Pfizer Shared Services Unlimited Company, Pfizer Shareholdings Intermediate SARL, Pfizer Singapore Holding Pte. Ltd., Pfizer Singapore Trading Pte. Ltd., Pfizer Spain Holdings Cooperatief U.A., Pfizer Specialties Limited, Pfizer Strategic Investment Holdings LLC, Pfizer Sweden Partnership KB, Pfizer TRAE Holdings Kft., Pfizer Trading Polska sp.z.o.o., Pfizer Transactions Ireland Unlimited Company, Pfizer Transactions LLC, Pfizer Transactions Luxembourg SARL, Pfizer Transport LLC, Pfizer Ukraine LLC, Pfizer Vaccines LLC, Pfizer Venezuela S.A., Pfizer Venture Investments LLC, Pfizer Ventures LLC, Pfizer Worldwide Services Unlimited Company, Pfizer Zona Franca S.A., Pfizer spol. s r.o., Pharmacia, Pharmacia & Upjohn Company Inc., Pharmacia & Upjohn Company LLC, Pharmacia & Upjohn LLC, Pharmacia & Upjohn S.A. de C.V., Pharmacia Brasil Ltda., Pharmacia Hepar LLC, Pharmacia Holding AB, Pharmacia Inter-American LLC, Pharmacia International B.V., Pharmacia LLC, Pharmacia Limited, Pharmacia Nostrum S.A., Pharmacia South Africa (Pty) Ltd, PowderJect Research Limited, PowderMed, Purepac Pharmaceutical Holdings LLC, Redvax, Renrall LLC, Rinat Neuroscience, Rinat Neuroscience Corp., Roerig Produtos Farmaceuticos Lda., Roerig S.A., Sao Cristovao Participacoes Ltda., Searle Laboratorios Lda., Serenex, Servicios P&U S. de R.L. de C.V., Shiley LLC, Sinergis Farma-Produtos Farmaceuticos Lda., Site Realty Inc., Solinor LLC, Sugen LLC, Tabor LLC, The Pfizer Incubator LLC, Therachon, Thiakis Limited, Treerly Health Co. Ltd, US Oral Pharmaceuticals Pty Ltd, Upjohn Laboratorios Lda., Vesteralens Naturprodukter A/S, Vesteralens Naturprodukter AB, Vesteralens Naturprodukter AS, Vesteralens Naturprodukter OY, Vicuron Holdings LLC, Vinci Farma S.A., W-L LLC, Warner Lambert, Warner Lambert Ilac Sanayi ve Ticaret Limited Sirketi, Warner Lambert del Uruguay S.A., Warner-Lambert (Thailand) Limited, Warner-Lambert Company AG, Warner-Lambert Company LLC, Warner-Lambert Guatemala Sociedad Anonima, Warner-Lambert S.A., Whitehall International Inc., Whitehall Laboratories Inc., Wyeth (Thailand) Ltd., Wyeth AB, Wyeth Australia Pty. Limited, Wyeth Ayerst Inc., Wyeth Ayerst S.a r.l., Wyeth Biopharma, Wyeth Canada ULC, Wyeth Consumer Healthcare LLC, Wyeth Europa Limited, Wyeth Farma S.A., Wyeth Holdings LLC, Wyeth Industria Farmaceutica Ltda., Wyeth KFT., Wyeth LLC, Wyeth Lederle S.r.l., Wyeth Lederle Vaccines S.A., Wyeth Pakistan Limited, Wyeth Pharmaceutical Co. Ltd., Wyeth Pharmaceuticals Company, Wyeth Pharmaceuticals FZ-LLC, Wyeth Pharmaceuticals LLC, Wyeth Pharmaceuticals Limited, Wyeth Puerto Rico Inc., Wyeth S.A.S, Wyeth Subsidiary Illinois Corporation, Wyeth Whitehall Export GmbH, Wyeth Whitehall SARL, Wyeth-Ayerst (Asia) Limited, Wyeth-Ayerst International LLC, and Wyeth-Ayerst Promotions Limited.The following companies are subsidiares of Bristol-Myers Squibb: 1096271 B.C. ULC, 345 Park LLC, A.G. Medical Services P.A., AHI Investment LLC, AbVitro LLC, Abraxis BioScience Australia Pty Ltd., Abraxis BioScience Inc., Abraxis BioScience International Holding Company Inc., Abraxis BioScience LLC, Abraxis BioScience Puerto Rico LLC, Acetylon Pharmaceuticals Inc., Adnexus, Adnexus a Bristol-Myers Squibb R&D Company, Allard Labs Acquisition G.P., Amira Pharmaceuticals, Amira Pharmaceuticals Inc., Amylin Pharmaceuticals, Apothecon LLC, B-MS Generx Unlimited Company, BMS Benelux Holdings B.V., BMS Bermuda Nominees L.L.C., BMS Data Acquisition Company LLC, BMS Forex Company, BMS Holdings Sarl, BMS Holdings Spain S.L., BMS International Insurance Designated Activity Company, BMS Investco SAS, BMS Korea Holdings L.L.C., BMS Latin American Nominees L.L.C., BMS Luxembourg Partners L.L.C., BMS Omega Bermuda Holdings Finance Ltd., BMS Pharmaceutical Korea Limited, BMS Pharmaceuticals Germany Holdings B.V., BMS Pharmaceuticals International Holdings Netherlands B.V., BMS Pharmaceuticals Korea Holdings B.V., BMS Pharmaceuticals Mexico Holdings B.V., BMS Pharmaceuticals Netherlands Holdings B.V., BMS Real Estate LLC, BMS Spain Investments LLC, BMS Strategic Portfolio Investments Holdings Inc., Blisa Acquisition G.P., Bristol (Iran) S.A., Bristol Iran Private Company Limited, Bristol Laboratories Inc., Bristol Laboratories International S.A., Bristol Laboratories Medical Information Systems Inc., Bristol-Myers (Andes) L.L.C., Bristol-Myers (Private) Limited, Bristol-Myers Middle East S.A.L., Bristol-Myers Overseas Corporation, Bristol-Myers Squibb (China) Investment Co. Ltd., Bristol-Myers Squibb (China) Pharmaceuticals Co. Ltd., Bristol-Myers Squibb (Israel) Ltd., Bristol-Myers Squibb (NZ) Limited, Bristol-Myers Squibb (Proprietary) Limited, Bristol-Myers Squibb (Shanghai) Trading Co. Ltd., Bristol-Myers Squibb (Singapore) Pte. Limited, Bristol-Myers Squibb (Taiwan) Ltd., Bristol-Myers Squibb (West Indies) Ltd., Bristol-Myers Squibb A.E., Bristol-Myers Squibb Aktiebolag, Bristol-Myers Squibb Argentina S. R. L., Bristol-Myers Squibb Australia Pty. Ltd., Bristol-Myers Squibb Axia Limited, Bristol-Myers Squibb B.V., Bristol-Myers Squibb Belgium S.A., Bristol-Myers Squibb Business Services Limited, Bristol-Myers Squibb Canada Co., Bristol-Myers Squibb Canada International Limited, Bristol-Myers Squibb Delta Company Limited, Bristol-Myers Squibb Denmark Filial of Bristol-Myers Squibb AB, Bristol-Myers Squibb EMEA Sarl, Bristol-Myers Squibb Egypt LLC, Bristol-Myers Squibb Epsilon Holdings Unlimited Company, Bristol-Myers Squibb Farmaceutica Ltda., Bristol-Myers Squibb Farmaceutica Portuguesa S.A., Bristol-Myers Squibb GesmbH, Bristol-Myers Squibb GmbH & Co. KGaA, Bristol-Myers Squibb Holding Germany GmbH & Co. KG, Bristol-Myers Squibb Holdings 2002 Limited, Bristol-Myers Squibb Holdings Germany Verwaltungs GmbH, Bristol-Myers Squibb Holdings Ireland Unlimited Company, Bristol-Myers Squibb Holdings Limited, Bristol-Myers Squibb Holdings Pharma Ltd. Liability Company, Bristol-Myers Squibb Ilaclari Inc., Bristol-Myers Squibb India Pvt. Limited, Bristol-Myers Squibb International Company Unlimited Company, Bristol-Myers Squibb International Corporation, Bristol-Myers Squibb Investco L.L.C., Bristol-Myers Squibb K.K., Bristol-Myers Squibb Kft., Bristol-Myers Squibb Luxembourg International S.C.A., Bristol-Myers Squibb Luxembourg S.a.r.l., Bristol-Myers Squibb MEA GmbH, Bristol-Myers Squibb Manufacturing Company, Bristol-Myers Squibb Marketing Services S.R.L., Bristol-Myers Squibb Middle East & Africa FZ-LLC, Bristol-Myers Squibb Norway Ltd., Bristol-Myers Squibb Nutricionales de Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., Bristol-Myers Squibb Peru S.A., Bristol-Myers Squibb Pharma (HK) Ltd, Bristol-Myers Squibb Pharma (Thailand) Limited, Bristol-Myers Squibb Pharma Company, Bristol-Myers Squibb Pharma EEIG, Bristol-Myers Squibb Pharma Holding Company LLC, Bristol-Myers Squibb Pharma Ventures Corporation, Bristol-Myers Squibb Pharmaceuticals Limited, Bristol-Myers Squibb Pharmaceuticals Unlimited Company, Bristol-Myers Squibb Polska Sp. z o.o., Bristol-Myers Squibb Products SA, Bristol-Myers Squibb Puerto Rico Inc., Bristol-Myers Squibb Puerto Rico/Sanofi Pharmaceutical Partnership Puerto Rico, Bristol-Myers Squibb Romania S.R.L., Bristol-Myers Squibb S.A.U., Bristol-Myers Squibb S.r.l., Bristol-Myers Squibb SA, Bristol-Myers Squibb Sanofi Pharmaceuticals Holding Partnership, Bristol-Myers Squibb Sarl, Bristol-Myers Squibb Service Ltd., Bristol-Myers Squibb Services Sp. z o.o., Bristol-Myers Squibb Spol. s r.o., Bristol-Myers Squibb Theta Finance Ltd., Bristol-Myers Squibb Trustees Limited, Bristol-Myers Squibb Verwaltungs GmbH, Bristol-Myers Squibb de Colombia S.A., Bristol-Myers Squibb de Costa Rica Sociedad Anonima, Bristol-Myers Squibb de Guatemala S.A., Bristol-Myers Squibb de Mexico S. de R.L. de C.V., Bristol-Myers Squibb/Astrazeneca EEIG, Bristol-Myers Squibb/Pfizer EEIG, Bristol-Myers Squibb/Sanofi Pharmaceuticals Partnership, Bristol-Myers de Venezuela S.C.A., CHT I LLC, CHT II LLC, CHT III LLC, CHT IV LLC, CR Finance Company LLC, Cardioxyl Pharmaceuticals, Cardioxyl Pharmaceuticals Inc., Celem LLC, Celem Ltd., Celgene, Celgene A.B., Celgene AS, Celgene Ab (Finland), Celgene Alpine Investment Co. II LLC, Celgene Alpine Investment Co. III LLC, Celgene Alpine Investment Co. LLC, Celgene ApS, Celgene B.V., Celgene BVBA, Celgene Brasil Produtos Farmaceuticos Ltda., Celgene CAR LLC, Celgene CAR Ltd., Celgene Chemicals Sarl, Celgene China Holdings LLC, Celgene Co., Celgene Corporation, Celgene Distribution B.V., Celgene EngMab GmbH, Celgene Europe B.V., Celgene Europe Limited, Celgene European Investment Company LLC, Celgene Financing Company LLC, Celgene Global Holdings Sarl, Celgene GmbH [Austria], Celgene GmbH [Germany], Celgene GmbH [Switzerland], Celgene Holdings East Corporation, Celgene Holdings II Sarl, Celgene Holdings III Sarl, Celgene Ilac Pazarlama ve Ticaret Limited Sirketi, Celgene Inc., Celgene International Holdings Corporation, Celgene International II Sarl, Celgene International III Sarl, Celgene International Inc., Celgene International Sarl, Celgene K.K., Celgene Kft., Celgene Limited [Hong Kong], Celgene Limited [Ireland], Celgene Limited [New Zealand], Celgene Limited [Taiwan], Celgene Limited [UK], Celgene Logistics Sarl, Celgene Ltd, Celgene Luxembourg Sarl, Celgene Management Sarl, Celgene NJ Investment Co, Celgene Netherlands B.V., Celgene Netherlands Investment B.V., Celgene Pharmaceutical (Shanghai) Co. Ltd., Celgene Pte. Ltd., Celgene Pty Ltd, Celgene Puerto Rico Distribution LLC, Celgene Quanticel Research Inc, Celgene R&D Sarl, Celgene RIVOT LLC, Celgene RIVOT Ltd., Celgene RIVOT SRL, Celgene Receptos Limited, Celgene Receptos Sarl, Celgene Research Incubator At Summit West LLC, Celgene Research S.L.U., Celgene Research and Development Company LLC, Celgene Research and Development I ULC, Celgene Research and Development II LLC, Celgene Research and Investment Company II LLC, Celgene S. de R.L. de C.V., Celgene S.L.U., Celgene S.R.L., Celgene SAS, Celgene Sarl AU, Celgene Sdn Bhd, Celgene Services Sarl, Celgene Sociedade Unipessoal Lda, Celgene Sp. Z.o.o., Celgene Sro [Czech Republic], Celgene Summit Investment Co, Celgene Switzerland Holding Sarl, Celgene Switzerland II LLC, Celgene Switzerland Investment Sarl, Celgene Switzerland LLC, Celgene Switzerland Sarl, Celgene Tri A Holdings Ltd., Celgene Tri Sarl, Celgene UK Distribution Limited, Celgene UK Holdings Limited, Celgene UK Manufacturing II Limited, Celgene UK Manufacturing III Limited, Celgene UK Manufacturing Limited, Celgene d.o.o., Celgene sro [Slovakia], Celmed LLC, Celmed Ltd., ConvaTec Divestiture, Cormorant Pharmaceuticals, Cormorant Pharmaceuticals AB, Crosp Ltd., Delinia Inc., Deuteria Pharmaceuticals Inc., DuPont Pharmaceuticals, E. R. Squibb & Sons Inter-American Corporation, E. R. Squibb & Sons L.L.C., E. R. Squibb & Sons Limited, EWI Corporation, EngMab Sarl, F-star Alpha, FermaVir Pharmaceuticals L.L.C., FermaVir Research L.L.C., Flexus Biosciences, Flexus Biosciences Inc., Forbius, Galecto Biotech, GenPharm International L.L.C., Gloucester Pharmaceuticals LLC, Grove Insurance Company Ltd., Heyden Farmaceutica Portuguesa Limitada, IFM Therapeutics, Impact Biomedicines Inc., Inhibitex, Inhibitex L.L.C., Innate Tumor Immunity Inc., JuMP Holdings LLC, Juno Therapeutics GmbH, Juno Therapeutics Inc., Kosan Biosciences, Kosan Biosciences Incorporated, Linson Investments Limited, Mead Johnson (Manufacturing) Jamaica Limited, Mead Johnson Jamaica Ltd., Medarex, Morris Avenue Investment II LLC, Morris Avenue Investment LLC, MyoKardia, O.o.o. Bristol-Myers Squibb, Oy Bristol-Myers Squibb (Finland) AB, Padlock Therapeutics, Padlock Therapeutics Inc., Pharmion LLC, Princeton Pharmaceutical Products Inc., Receptos LLC, Receptos Services LLC, RedoxTherapies Inc., Route 22 Real Estate Holding Corporation, SPV A Holdings ULC, Seamair Insurance DAC, Signal Pharmaceuticals LLC, Sino-American Shanghai Squibb Pharmaceuticals Limited, Societe Francaise de Complements Alimentaires(S.O.F.C.A.), Squibb Middle East S.A., Summit West Celgene LLC, Swords Laboratories, VentiRx Pharmaceuticals Inc., Westwood-Intrafin SA, Westwood-Squibb Pharmaceuticals Inc., X-Body Inc., ZymoGenetics, ZymoGenetics Inc., ZymoGenetics LLC, ZymoGenetics Paymaster LLC, iPierian, and iPierian Inc..Square, Inc. provides payment and point-of-sale solutions in the United States and internationally. The company's commerce ecosystem includes point-of-sale software and hardware that enables sellers to turn mobile and computing devices into payment and point-of-sale solutions. It offers hardware products, including Magstripe reader, which enables swiped transactions of magnetic stripe cards; Contactless and chip reader that accepts EMV chip cards and Near Field Communication payments; Chip card reader, which accepts EMV chip cards and enables swiped transactions of magnetic stripe cards; Square Stand, which enables an iPad to be used as a payment terminal or full point of sale solution; and Square Register that combines its hardware, point-of-sale software, and payments technology, as well as managed payments solutions. The company also provides Square Point of Sale software; Cash App, which provides access to the financial system, allowing customers to electronically send, store, and spend money; Caviar, a food ordering platform for restaurants to offer food ordering, pickup and delivery, to their customers; and Square Capital that facilitates loans to sellers based on real-time payment and point-of-sale data. Square, Inc. was founded in 2009 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California.

Read MoreFranklin Covey Co. engages in consulting and training in the areas of strategy execution, customer loyalty, leadership, and individual effectiveness. It operates through the following three segments: Direct Offices, Education Practice, International Licensees and Corporate and Other. The Direct Offices segment includes sales personnel that serve the United States and Canada; international sales offices located in Japan, China, the United Kingdom, and Australia; governmental sales channel; and public program operations. The Education Practice segment includes domestic and international Education practice operations, which are focused on sales to educational institutions such as elementary schools, high schools, and colleges and universities. The International Licensees segment primarily comprised of royalty revenues received from these licensees. The Corporate and Other segment includes leasing operations, shipping and handling revenues, and certain corporate administrative expenses. The company was founded by Brent L. Bishop, Stephen R. Covey and Hyrum Wayne Smith in 1983 and is headquartered in Salt Lake City, UT.

Read More993ha forestland encroached in Siraha

Nine hundred and ninety-three hectares of forestland have been encroached upon in the name of landless people in Siraha district.51 minutes ago

Adobe Is Not Just Another Brick In The Wall

Adobe Sinks Like A Brick After Q3 Results Adobes (NASDAQ: ADBE) results for the 3rd quarter ensure the 3rd quarter earnings cycle is going to be an interesting one. Only two days after Wells Fargo analysts called the stock out as a crown jewel among blue-chip tech stocks the company reported blow-out earnings and garnered the attention of at least ten major sell-side firms.

Read ArticleThe following companies are subsidiares of Valero Energy: AIR BP-PBF DEL PERU SAC, BELFAST STORAGE LTD, CANADIAN ULTRAMAR COMPANY, COLONNADE TEXAS INSURANCE COMPANY LLC, COLONNADE VERMONT INSURANCE COMPANY, DIAMOND ALTERNATIVE ENERGY LLC, DIAMOND ALTERNATIVE ENERGY OF CANADA INC., DIAMOND GREEN DIESEL HOLDINGS LLC, DIAMOND GREEN DIESEL LLC, DIAMOND K RANCH LLC, DIAMOND OMEGA COMPANY L.L.C., DIAMOND SHAMROCK REFINING COMPANY L.P., DIAMOND UNIT INVESTMENTS L.L.C., DSRM NATIONAL BANK, ENTERPRISE CLAIMS MANAGEMENT INC., GCP LOGISTICS COMPANY LLC, GOLDEN EAGLE ASSURANCE LIMITED, HAMMOND MAINLINE PIPELINE LLC, HUNTWAY REFINING COMPANY, MAINLINE PIPELINES LIMITED, MAPLE ETHANOL LTD., MICHIGAN REDEVELOPMENT GP LLC, MICHIGAN REDEVELOPMENT L.P., MRP PROPERTIES COMPANY LLC, NECHES RIVER HOLDING CORP., NORCO METHANOL LLC, OCEANIC TANKERS AGENCY LIMITED, PARKWAY PIPELINE LLC, PENTA TANKS TERMINALS S.A., PI DOCK FACILITIES LLC, PICKARD PLACE CONDOMINIUM ASSOCIATION, PORT ARTHUR COKER COMPANY L.P., PREMCOR USA INC., PROPERTY RESTORATION L.P., PURE BIOFUELS DEL PERU S.A.C., PURE BIOFUELS HOLDINGS L.P., Parkway Pipeline, Premcor, Pure Biofuels Del Peru, SABINE RIVER HOLDING CORP., SABINE RIVER LLC, SAINT BERNARD PROPERTIES COMPANY LLC, SUNBELT REFINING COMPANY L.P., THE PREMCOR PIPELINE CO., THE PREMCOR REFINING GROUP INC., THE SHAMROCK PIPE LINE CORPORATION, TRANSPORT MARITIME ST. LAURENT INC., ULTRAMAR ACCEPTANCE INC., ULTRAMAR ENERGY INC., ULTRAMAR INC., Ultramar Diamond Shamrock, V-TEX LOGISTICS LLC, VALERO (BARBADOS) SRL, VALERO (PERU) HOLDINGS GP LLC, VALERO (PERU) HOLDINGS LIMITED, VALERO ADMINISTRATIVE SERVICES DE MEXICO S.A. DE C.V., VALERO ADMINISTRATIVE SERVICES DE MEXICO S.A. DE C.V., VALERO ARUBA ACQUISITION COMPANY I LTD., VALERO ARUBA FINANCE INTERNATIONAL LTD., VALERO ARUBA HOLDING COMPANY N.V., VALERO ARUBA HOLDINGS INTERNATIONAL LTD., VALERO ARUBA MAINTENANCE/OPERATIONS COMPANY N.V., VALERO BROWNSVILLE TERMINAL LLC, VALERO CANADA FINANCE INC., VALERO CANADA L.P., VALERO CAPITAL CORPORATION, VALERO CARIBBEAN SERVICES COMPANY, VALERO COKER CORPORATION ARUBA N.V., VALERO CUSTOMS & TRADE SERVICES INC., VALERO EAST BAY LLC, VALERO ENERGY (IRELAND) LIMITED, VALERO ENERGY ARUBA II COMPANY, VALERO ENERGY INC., VALERO ENERGY LTD, VALERO ENERGY PARTNERS GP LLC, VALERO ENERGY PARTNERS LP, VALERO ENERGY UK LTD, VALERO ENTERPRISES INC., VALERO EQUITY SERVICES LTD, VALERO FINANCE L.P. I, VALERO FINANCE L.P. II, VALERO FINANCE L.P. III, VALERO FOREST CONTRIBUTION LLC, VALERO GRAIN MARKETING LLC, VALERO H2 PIPELINE COMPANY LLC, VALERO HOLDCO UK LTD, VALERO HOLDINGS INC., VALERO INTERNATIONAL HOLDINGS INC., VALERO LIVE OAK LLC, VALERO LOGISTICS UK LTD, VALERO MARKETING AND SUPPLY (PANAMA) LLC, VALERO MARKETING AND SUPPLY COMPANY, VALERO MARKETING AND SUPPLY DE MEXICO S.A. DE C.V., VALERO MARKETING AND SUPPLY DE MEXICO S.A. DE C.V., VALERO MARKETING AND SUPPY INTERNATIONAL LTD., VALERO MARKETING IRELAND LIMITED, VALERO MKS LOGISTICS L.L.C., VALERO NEDERLAND COOPERATIEF U.A., VALERO NEDERLAND COOPERATIEF U.A., VALERO NEW AMSTERDAM B.V., VALERO OMEGA COMPANY L.L.C., VALERO OPERATIONAL SERVICES DE MEXICO S.A. DE C.V., VALERO OPERATIONAL SERVICES DE MEXICO S.A. DE C.V., VALERO OPERATIONS SUPPORT LTD, VALERO PARTNERS CCTS LLC, VALERO PARTNERS CORPUS EAST LLC, VALERO PARTNERS CORPUS WEST LLC, VALERO PARTNERS EP LLC, VALERO PARTNERS HOUSTON LLC, VALERO PARTNERS LOUISIANA LLC, VALERO PARTNERS LUCAS LLC, VALERO PARTNERS MCKEE LLC, VALERO PARTNERS MEMPHIS LLC, VALERO PARTNERS MERAUX LLC, VALERO PARTNERS NORTH TEXAS LLC, VALERO PARTNERS OPERATING CO. LLC, VALERO PARTNERS PAPS LLC, VALERO PARTNERS PORT ARTHUR LLC, VALERO PARTNERS SOUTH TEXAS LLC, VALERO PARTNERS TEXAS CITY LLC, VALERO PARTNERS THREE RIVERS LLC, VALERO PARTNERS WEST MEMPHIS LLC, VALERO PARTNERS WEST TEXAS LLC, VALERO PARTNERS WYNNEWOOD LLC, VALERO PAYMENT SERVICES COMPANY, VALERO PEMBROKESHIRE LLC, VALERO PEMBROKESHIRE OIL TERMINAL LTD, VALERO PLAINS COMPANY LLC, VALERO POWER MARKETING LLC, VALERO RAIL OPERATIONS DE MEXICO S.A. DE C.V., VALERO RAIL OPERATIONS DE MEXICO S.A. DE C.V., VALERO RAIL PARTNERS LLC, VALERO REFINING AND MARKETING COMPANY, VALERO REFINING COMPANY-ARUBA N.V., VALERO REFINING COMPANY-CALIFORNIA, VALERO REFINING COMPANY-OKLAHOMA, VALERO REFINING COMPANY-TENNESSEE L.L.C., VALERO REFINING-MERAUX LLC, VALERO REFINING-NEW ORLEANS L.L.C., VALERO REFINING-TEXAS L.P., VALERO RENEWABLE FUELS COMPANY LLC, VALERO SECURITY SYSTEMS INC., VALERO SERVICES INC., VALERO SKELLYTOWN PIPELINE LLC, VALERO TEJAS COMPANY LLC, VALERO TERMINAL HOLDCO LTD, VALERO TERMINALING AND DISTRIBUTION COMPANY, VALERO TERMINALING AND DISTRIBUTION DE MEXICO S.A. DE C.V., VALERO TEXAS POWER MARKETING INC., VALERO ULTRAMAR HOLDINGS INC., VALERO UNIT INVESTMENTS L.L.C., VALERO WEST WALES LLC, VRG PROPERTIES COMPANY, VTD PROPERTIES COMPANY, WARSHALL COMPANY LLC, and ZELIG COMMERCIAL INC..ConvaTec Group Plc develops, manufactures, and markets medical products and technologies worldwide. It offers advanced wound dressings and skin care products for the management of acute and chronic wounds resulting from various conditions, such as diabetes, immobility, and venous disease, as well as from traumatic injury, burns, invasive surgery, and other causes. The company also provides devices, accessories, and services for people with a stoma resulting from colorectal cancer, inflammatory bowel disease, bladder cancer, obesity, and other causes. In addition, it offers continence and critical care products, including intermittent urological catheters; and products for people with urinary continence issues related to spinal cord injuries, multiple sclerosis, spina bifida, and other urological disorders, as well as devices and products use in intensive care units and hospital settings. Further, the company provides advanced systems for managing acute fecal incontinence, as well as for monitoring urine production output and intra-abdominal pressure; and various disposable medical devices, such as wound drainage systems, urine collection bags and catheters, airway management and oxygen/aerosol therapy devices, suction handles and tubes, gastroenterology tubes, and securement devices. Additionally, it offers disposable infusion sets to the manufacturers of insulin pumps for diabetes, as well as similar pumps that are used in continuous infusion treatments for other conditions; and various products to hospitals and the home healthcare sector. The company sells its products to pharmacies, hospitals, and other acute and post-acute healthcare service providers directly or through distributors and wholesalers. It serves a range of customers, including healthcare providers, patients, and manufacturers. The company was founded in 1978 and is headquartered in Reading, the United Kingdom.

Read MoreWall Street analysts have given Delphi Energy Corp. (DEE.TO) a "N/A" rating, but there may be better buying opportunities in the stock market. Some of MarketBeat's past winning trading ideas have resulted in 5-15% weekly gains. MarketBeat just released five new stock ideas, but Delphi Energy Corp. (DEE.TO) wasn't one of them. MarketBeat thinks these five companies may be even better buys.

View MarketBeat's top stock picks here.CNH Industrial N.V. designs, produces, markets, sells, and finances agricultural and construction equipment, trucks, commercial vehicles, buses, and specialty vehicles in North America, Europe, South America, and internationally. It operates through five segments: Agriculture, Construction, Commercial and Specialty Vehicles, Powertrain, and Financial. The Agriculture segment offers farm machinery and implements that include two-and four-wheel drive tractors, crawler tractors, combines, cotton pickers, grape and sugar cane harvesters, hay and forage equipment, planting and seeding equipment, soil preparation and cultivation implements, and material handling equipment under the New Holland Agriculture, Case IH, STEYR, Miller, Kongskilde, A-verum, K-Line, and JF brands. The Construction segment offers excavators, crawler dozers, graders, wheel and backhoe loaders, and skid steer and compact track loaders under the CASE Construction and New Holland Construction brands. The Commercial and Specialty Vehicles segment provides light, medium, and heavy vehicles for the transportation and distribution of goods under the IVECO brand; commuter buses and city-buses under the IVECO BUS and Heuliez Bus brands; quarry and mining equipment under the IVECO ASTRA brand; firefighting vehicles under the Magirus brand; and vehicles for civil defense and peace-keeping missions under the Iveco Defence Vehicles brand. The Powertrain segment offers engines, transmission systems, and axles for on- and off-road applications, as well as for marine and power generation under the FPT Industrial brand. The Financial Services segment provides and administers retail financing to customers for the purchase or lease of new and used industrial equipment or vehicles, and other equipment; wholesale financing, which consists primarily of floor plan financing; and trade receivables factoring services. The company is based in London, the United Kingdom.

Read MoreDelhi proposes April 6-8 for Olis India visit

Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli is likely to embark on a three-day official visit to India from April 6, his maiden foreign trip after taking office last month.Getting into murky waters

Oli undermined geopolitical sensitivity by inviting the Pakistan PM as his first guestGlobal donor agencies keen to conserve historical sites

International donor agencies have shown interest to work with the government of province-5 to conserve historical and cultural sites in Nepal, sources said on Wednesday.Govt preparing to set up energy regulatory body

The Energy Ministry has been making preparations to establish the Nepal Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC), a powerful body to regulate the countrys energy sector. The NERC will set standards to regulate organisations involved in power generation, transmission, distribution and trade.Govt rejects EU report on elections

The government on Wednesday rejected the conclusions and recommendations of the report of European Unions Election Observation Mission (EUEOM) on the recently concluded elections of the House of Representatives and Provincial Assemblies.Grant voter rights to non-resident Nepalis, SC tells govt

The Supreme Court has directed the government to ensure voting rights for the Nepali citizens living in foreign countries.Himalaya Airlines turns sights northward

Himalaya Airlines is turning its sights northward after being refused landing permission in India. The private Nepali carrier has charted out an aggressive plan to connect Chinese cities that are key outbound markets with a high consuming capacity.Indian man held with illegally smuggled chickens

An Indian man has been arrested with illegally imported Indian chickens from Mahottari.We all know that the CIty and the WR-V are not natural rivals. Where the City is a mid-size sedan, the WR-V belongs to the class of sub-4m SUVs. However, they both have quite a few things in common. Both of them are Hondas and have the same diesel engine under their bonnet. One more thing that is similar between the two are the prices of their petrol variants. So, lets compare and find out which suits you best, shall we?

And thats what weve just done. But before we compare the closely priced variants, here are some of the basic differences between these two cars:

Prices:

Variants:

The Honda WR-Vs top VX variant with the petrol engine is priced at Rs 9 lakh. Weve compared this variant with the base S variant of the petrol-powered Honda City, which is priced at Rs 8.71 lakh. While the WR-V VX is also available with a diesel engine, priced at Rs 9.99 lakh (ex-showroom Delhi), Honda doesnt offer the base S variant of the City with the diesel engine. As a result, the price difference between the most affordable diesel Honda City SV and the most expensive diesel WR-V VX is Rs 1 lakh.

Honda WR-V VX vs Honda City S

Features:

Being the top-spec model, the WR-V VX is clearly more feature-loaded than the City S. Where the WR-V is packed with comfort features such as automatic climate control, rear parking camera with sensors, power-foldable ORVMs and telescopic-adjustable steering wheel, the City S ticks just the basics like an audio system, manual AC, power windows, tilt-adjustable steering and electrically adjustable ORVMs. However, both cars are equally equipped when it comes to safety and get dual front airbags and ABS with EBD. The City gets ISOFIX child seat anchors as well. Features like sunroof, touchscreen infotainment system, chrome door handles and alloy wheels add to the feel-good factor of the WR-V. All these are missing in the base variant of the City.

Why buy the City?

Boot space: The Citys 510 litres of boot can any day hold more luggage than the WR-V, even with 5 people on board. So if thats a basic requirement for you, go for the City.

More powerful engine: The Citys 1.5-litre petrol engine makes 29PS more than the WR-Vs and is still almost as fuel efficient as the WR-V on paper. If you want a more fun-to-drive car, then opt for the City, especially the petrol. The City diesel is also an efficient highway cruiser but is better suited for those with a relaxed driving style

Resale value: The City nameplate enjoys a good resale value in India. While the WR-V is a relatively new product and cant be directly compared on this front, the Citys past record does give it an advantage.

Safety: If you have kids, the City is a safer choice as it comes with ISOFIX child seat anchors that will allow you to install child seats on the rear seats.

Why buy the WR-V?

Features: The WR-V is loaded to the gills. Features like sunroof, tilt- and telescopic-adjustable steering, alloy wheels, automatic climate control, parking camera and alloy wheels not only make it look the part but also add to the convenience.

Size: The WR-V is smaller than the City, and if parking space is an issue at your residence or office the WR-V will be easier to move about in.

High ground clearance: Our roads are infamous for their potholes and Hondas sedans have traditionally not fared well against them, scraping their underbelly on many occasions. The WR-V, then, with its 188mm ground clearance, will let you own the Honda badge without worrying about low ground clearance.

Before we end this comparison, heres a look at the specifications of both these cars

Dimensions

Engine

Petrol:

Diesel

Source: CarDekho.comRCom remains confident that its asset monetisation programme will be completed expeditiously to protect the interests of its secured lenders.

New Delhi: Debt-laden Reliance Communications (RCom) on Thursday exuded confidence that its asset monetisation programme will be completed "expeditiously", much ahead of the RBI-prescribed deadline of August 31.

The comments follow the Supreme Court order earlier in the day that status quo be maintained on RCom's sale of certain assets to Reliance Jio on pleas by a consortium of banks.

The apex court refused to lift the stay ordered by Bombay High Court on RCom asset sale. It will hear pleas from the consortium of banks and RCom against the stay of assets sale by HC on April 5.

"As legally advised, RCom remains confident that its asset monetisation programme will be completed expeditiously to protect the interests of its secured lenders, much in advance of the time limit of 31 August, 2018 prescribed by the RBI for resolution of such cases," RCom said in a statement.

RCom said its lenders, led by SBI, had filed Special Leave Petitions (SLPs) in the Supreme Court against the stay granted by two lower Courts on sale of certain assets by the company.

In December, Mukesh Ambani-led Reliance Jio had announced a mega deal to acquire mobile business assets including spectrum, mobile towers and optical fibre network of RCom, owned by his younger brother Anil Ambani. RCom, reeling under about Rs 45,000 crore debt, hoped to use the entire proceeds to pare its debt.

The asset sale process, however, hit a hurdle when an arbitration court, in an interim order, barred the sale plans without its permission, on an appeal by telecom gear maker Ericsson India.The merger of Vodafone-Idea was imminent as the incumbent operators have been bruised by aggressive offers from newcomer Reliance Jio. (Photo: PTI/File)

New Delhi: Idea Cellular and Vodafone Group on Thursday announced the new leadership team of the soon-to-be merged entity that will have Kumar Mangalam Birla as the non-executive Chairman.

Announcing the top deck for the merged entity, a regulatory filing by Idea Cellular said that Balesh Sharma (currently Chief Operating Officer of Vodafone India) will be the CEO.

He will be responsible for the combined business strategy and its execution as well as driving integration.

"The existing leadership teams of Idea Cellular and Vodafone India will continue to manage their separate businesses and be accountable for each company's operational performance until the merger becomes effective," Idea Cellular said.

It may be recalled that the two companies had, in 2017, announced they will combine the operations to create the country's largest telecom operator worth over USD 23 billion, with a 35 per cent market share.

The merger of Vodafone-Idea -- which is set to dislodge the numero uno player Bharti Airtel -- was imminent as the incumbent operators have been bruised by aggressive offers from newcomer Reliance Jio, which triggered a tariff war in the Indian telecom market.Mumbai: The government is working on a strategy to boost share of services, which will grow faster than merchandise exports raising the total exports from the country, said commerce and industry minister Suresh Prabhu.

"In last few months, we are seeing exports registering growth. We are targeting to ensure that exports are not only traditional products, but new products are also added to the basket. We are focusing on services and have identified 12 services as 'Champion Services'," Prabhu said after inaugurating CapIndia event here.

He said that the government has already approved a Rs 5,000 crore to promote 12 champion services sectors such as IT, tourism and hospitality. The decision, he said, will drive growth of the services economy in India.

We have prepared an action plan for each of these sectors to promote them domestically as well as globally, the minister said. Services sector will play a significant role in pushing the country's economic growth and the industry must focus on delivering services of global standards, he added.

Prabhu pointed out that the country's chemical sector has huge growth potential and it needs to create capacity to meet exports demand.

The country's chemicals industry is expected to more than double and touch USD 300 billion by 2025 from USD 147 billion now, according to Chemexcil.

The new industrial policy, which seeks to promote emerging sectors, will be released within a few months.

The government will provide an enabling environment to the industry to increase the country's exports, he said. Prabhu said the ministry is also formulating an agri- export policy, which was put in the public domain to seek stakeholders' views.

The aviation ministry is preparing a plan for providing air cargo support to agricultural hubs to promote farm exports and UAE and Saudi Arabia have shown keen interest in investing, he added.

"The chemical sector is expected to double to USD 300 billion by 2025, clocking an annual growth rate of 15-20 per cent. To achieve this, government is also working on a draft chemical policy that will focus on meeting the rising demand for chemicals and reduce imports," chemicals export promotion council (Chemexcil) chairman Satish Wagh said on the sideline of 3-day CapIndia exhibition here.

"The expo will help us tap immense opportunities for growth, which exist in the fields of speciality chemicals, polymers and agrochemicals industries as Make in India initiative further facilitates growth and investment," Wagh said.The Bill will also empower the government to fix the period of maternity leave through executive order.

New Delhi: The Rajya Sabha on Thursday passed the Payment of Gratuity (Amendment) Bill 2017, which seeks to double the limit of tax free gratuity to `20 lakh and empower the government to fix the ceiling of the retirement benefit through an executive order.

The Bill will also empower the government to fix the period of maternity leave through executive order. Prime Minister Narendra Modi tweeted: A significant pro-people measure passed in Parliament. Will benefit lakhs of Indians.

The Bill, which was passed by the Lok Sabha on March 15, was passed by the Rajya Sabha after chairman M. Venkaiah Naidu held a meeting of leaders of opposition parties, who had been protesting on various issues, resulting in adjournment of the Upper House.

As all parties agreed to clear the bill, it was passed through a voice vote without a discussion, within of four minutes of being moved by Union labour minister Satosh Gangwar.

The bill notifies the period of maternity leave as part of continuous service and proposes to empower the central government to notify the gratuity ceiling from time to time without amending the law.

The labour ministry later said in a statement that the Bill also envisages amending the provisions relating to calculation of continuous service for the purpose of gratuity in case of female employees who are on maternity leave from twelve weeks to such period as may be notified by the central government from time to time.

After implementation of the 7th Central Pay Commission, the ceiling of tax free gratuity amount for central government employees was increased from `10 lakh to Rs 20 lakh. The labour unions have been demanding for inclusion of the change in the Act.Mumbai: The Bombay high court on Wednesday directed police officers to release advocate Rizwan Siddiquee, who was arrested by the Thane police in connection with the CDR scam. Names of several Bollywood celebrities  Ayesha Shroff, Kangana Ranaut, Nawazuddin Siddiqui have cropped up in the CDR probe.

The court ordered Siddiquees release, as there was no compliance of section 41A of the CrPC that contemplates notice of appearance before the police officer in absence of an arrest warrant.

The division bench of Justice S.C. Dharmadhikari and Justice P.D. Naik passed this order while hearing habeas corpus petition filed by advocate Siddiquees wife Tasneem. She requested the court to direct the police to release her husband claiming his detention to be illegal and unlawful. The Thane police arrested Siddiquee for allegedly obtaining Call Data Records (CDRs) of Bollywood actor Nawazuddin Siddiquis wife Aaliya. As part of its probe, the Thane police on Wednesday issued summons to Ranaut and Shroff to record their statements.

Pertaining to Ranaut, we have sought details from the nodal officer to ascertain if the CDR of the said number, messaged by her to Siddiquee, was ever procured. If it was not, then there is no case. If it was, the probe will go to next stage, said a senior police officer. After his release from the custody of Thane police, Siddiquee said, I never sought for a bail. I was released by the court based on facts.

He refused to comment on the bit pertaining to why Ranaut had sent him the name and number of her co-star Hrithik Roshan adding. He said, Last five days I do not even know what has been happening in the media and outside.

The bench termed the manner in which Siddiquee was arrested as high handed action of the police and directed his release by 5 pm. The HC also directed senior police officers and the home department to launch disciplinary proceedings against Abhishek Trimukhe, DCP crime branch, Thane. The bench observed that it wouldnt have directed any action against him had he apologised genuinely and sought time to release Siddiqui.

Also read: Why would anyone apart from Nawazuddin want to spy on his wife, asks Rizwan's lawyer

Advocate Rizwan Merchant on behalf of Tasneem contended before the court that on February 14, the Thane crime branch had issued witness summons to Siddiquee, and he was asked to remain present before the police on March 17. But on March 16, the police reached his office and while recording his statement, arrested him at around 10.10 pm without giving him any notice under section 41(A) of CrPC.

Also read: Nawazuddin Siddiqui case: His wife feels actor is soft target, finds him innocent

Though the police claimed that Siddiqui refused to accept the notice, Justice Dharmadhikari observed, The entire file was perused by us we do not see any compliance with the mandate of law. The bench raised a question as to when Siddiquee was supposed to appear before the police on March 17 at 11 am and how the police arrested him in the night of March 16.

(This story was first published in The Asian Age)Mumbai: Sikander Kher seems to have made a mark in the negative space on screen. After Tere Bin Laden: Dead Or Alive, he played a villain even in the TV series 24.

I always wanted to work with Tigmanshu sir for years and when he asked me if I would play the baddie in his next, I immediately jumped at the offer. It is a brilliant script and I am excited about playing a wicked role, says Sikandar Kher.

This time along, the actor has been roped in for a negative role even in Tigmanshu Dhulias Milan Talkies.

Ali Fazal has already started shooting for the film and Sikandar is expected to join the film unit in Mathura in the next 10 days.

Also featuring Ashutosh Rana, Sanjay Mishra and Yashpal Sharma, the film is based on the plight of single screen cinemas and the pathetic situation the talkies have been in for the last decade.During the infancy of his career, Rajkummar Rao was thought of as an actor. Today, he is nothing less than a star. Rajkummar has carved a niche for himself and is carefully selecting every project he gets. The actor will now be seen in Mental Hai Kya alongside Kangana Ranaut.

We havent started shooting yet, but I really like Kangana. We worked on Queen together, which was loved! And I am really looking forward to do this one, Rajkummar said.

Ask him about the ego clashes between the stars on sets and he says his work is beyond all the drama. For me acting is not about egos. It is something very pure  its about dealing with pure emotions. How can you put your egos into that? he questions.

Mental Hai Kya is directed by National Award-winner Prakash Kovelamudi and produced by Ekta Kapoors Balaji Motion Pictures and Shaailesh R Singhs Karma Media. Kovelamudi is a popular Telugu actor-filmmaker, who bagged a National Award in 2006 for Bommalattam.

Meanwhile, Rajkummar will also be seen in Sree along with Shraddha Kapoor.

Telling us more about Sree, he says, I am heading to Bhopal for the final schedule and it has shaped up really well so far. I am excited for the release and it is great working with Shraddha  she is very dedicated and hardworking.NC top leaders assemble in Nuwakot and press for unity

As part of party rebuilding campaign, two-day gathering of district-level treasurers of the Nepali Congress (NC) began in Nuwakot district on Wednesday.The last five days of the final schedule of Shree Narayan Singhs Batti Gul Meter Chalu had to be cut short in Uttarakhand. The crew has returned to Mumbai without completing the schedule.

Says a source, The last schedule in Dehradun was supposed to be over on March 26. However, Shahid took ill with very high fever and had to be rushed back to Mumbai on March 21. The entire unit will have to reassemble in Dehradhun later for the remaining five days of the schedule.

Back in Mumbai, theres much alarm over Shahids viral fever. A source close to the actor says, Shahid is very health-conscious and has never cancelled even a days shooting in his life. Hes very upset over the five-day cancellation of the Batti Gul schedule. The shooting had been a breeze so far, despite the huge crowds that gather to look at Shahid, who is now in the Rs 300 crore club after Padmaavat.

When contacted to comment on the schedule being cut short, producer Prernaa Arora shrugged it off as being part of the business. There will be illnesses, and sometimes schedules will get postponed, delayed and cancelled. Its no big deal. Shahid is a dream actor to work with. The way he has transitioned smoothly from his royal role in Padmaavat to the working class everyman in Batti Gul is a measure of his versatility. The audiences wont believe its the same actor! she says.CHICAGO: Longtime AIDS researcher Dr. Robert Redfield will be the new director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump announced on Wednesday.

Redfield, 66, a professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore and a co-founder of the Institute for Human Virology, succeeds Dr. Brenda Fitzgerald, a former commissioner of the Georgia Department of Public Health who resigned in January because of financial conflicts of interest. The position does not require Congressional approval.

In a statement announcing the appointment, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar noted Redfields long career in promoting public health, and his significant achievements in early work linking the HIV virus to AIDS. He also touted Redfields more recent work running a treatment network for HIV and hepatitis C patients in Baltimore. We are proud to welcome him as director of the worlds premier epidemiological agency, he said.

Azar praised Redfields two-decade stint at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, where he helped advance the understanding of HIV/AIDS and demonstrate how the virus is transmitted in heterosexuals. Redfield is the founding director of the Department of Retroviral Research within the U.S. Militarys HIV Research Program.

Dr. Robert Gallo, co-founder of the Institute of Human Virology with Redfield in 1996, said Redfield has served his country well, and demonstrates strong public health instincts that are grounded in science and clinical medicine.

Redfields appointment won praise from leading researchers and several U.S. lawmakers, including Democratic U.S. Representative Elijah Cummings. Although I seldom agree with the Trump administration, I am in complete agreement that Dr. Bob Redfield is the best choice to lead the CDC, Cummings said in a statement, noting Redfields public service, his scientific achievements and his work helping patients with HIV and hepatitis C.

Dr. Carlos del Rio, an infectious disease expert at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, praised Redfields efforts in early HIV research, his more recent efforts working to address the opioid crisis and his expertise in addressing global health issues. His work to save lives in Africa and Haiti gives him a deep understanding of CDCs global health mission, and it will serve him well as he works to address health issues nationally as well as around the globe as director of the CDC, del Rio said in a statement. Redfield takes over for acting CDC Director Dr. Anne Schuchat.Chennai: After recording the highest number of dengue cases and deaths in the state last year, the health department is on its toes to prevent the outbreak of any vector borne disease this year. Tamil Nadu recorded 23,035 dengue cases and 63 deaths in 2017. The state health department has joined hands with state district administration personnel to prevent the incidence of dengue this year.

Under the national vector borne diseases control programme, IgM kits are issued for diagnostic purpose of various vector-borne diseases. Of the total allocation of 1,070 IgM kits for vector borne diseases, 850 have been allocated for better diagnostic facility of dengue in the state. As against the usual allocation of 500 IgM kits for dengue, 300 additional kits have been provided to the state this year.

Under the national vector borne diseases control programme, 30 government hospitals from Tamil Nadu have been listed under sentinel surveillance hospitals for monitoring dengue cases. Adding to the preparatory measures against dengue, the state health department has instructed all government hospitals to continue blood sample tests for dengue for all fever cases reported at the hospital for early reporting of suspected dengue fever cases, said public health director Dr K Kolandaisamy.

Continuing the practice of observing Dengue Awareness Day every Thursday of the week, every public health centre will organise a mass awareness drive in association with educational institutions or welfare associations in the locality, he said.

In a meeting with the district administration department, the state health department has drawn up action plans to conduct domestic breeding checks for the management and prevention of vector borne diseases. Various establishments including educational institutions, commercial complexes, hospitals and construction sites were fined for harbouring mosquito-breeding sources last year. District administration personnel will conduct domestic breeding checks across the state as the monsoon commences, added Dr Kolandaisamy.

The health education department of the Greater Chennai Corporation has also roped in the civic authorities to conduct a survey on mosquito breeding structure and breeding activity. Apart from awareness drives, more than 160 entomologists will send reports on breeding activity thrice a week to identify breeding patterns and assist in monitoring and surveillance of vectors, said senior officials from the corporation health education department.

We have been conducting dengue awareness drives along with local residents and educational institutions. Distribution of pamphlets and door to door campaigning is also in practice to prevent an outbreak as in 2017. We do not have any drug or vaccine available for the treatment of dengue or dengue hemorrhagic fever. Early detection with proper case management and symptomatic treatment can help reduce mortality substantially, said health education officer T. Srinivasan.Notably, Valerie had allegedly told a local shop keeper her mother was living in a care home for the elderly.

Reclusive Valerie Jones is lucky to be alive after she was found collapsed under debris in Aberaeron, West Wales last week.

However what is shocking is that the 56-year-old was found along with the rotting body of her 87-year-old obsessive hoarder mum who had died four years back.

Reclusive Gaynor Jones died up to four years ago but her body has only just been found in the 19th century stone cottage which was full of hoarded possessions.

Police and firefighters were forced to wear face masks to protect themselves from the stench when they broke into the pensioner's property.

The personnel fought their way through a mountain of junk to discover that Valerie had collapsed under the debris. And it took teams another four days to find the remains of her widowed mum in another part of the cottage.

Neighbours believe her daughter had been sharing the house with her dead mother for 'many months or even years.'

Valerie was taken to hospital in a 'poorly condition' from the 'heavily cluttered' stone cottage in their family for generations

Neighbours said the mother and daughter were 'well known' but 'odd' and rarely left their old stone cottage.

Notably, Valerie had allegedly told a local shop keeper her mother was living in a care home for the elderly.

Their home is the first of three stone buildings known as the Dolheulog Cottages believed to have been built in the late 19th century.Most complaints registered at gender sensitisation committees include groping at public places, sending of obscene or lewd messages, among others.

HYDERABAD: A 50 per cent increase in sexual harassment cases has been noted across campuses in India, according to a recently-released UGC report.

The state itself has seen an increasing number of complaints from varsities, some of which have resulted in police complaints. The usage of social media by students, to reveal their issues, has been hailed as many perpetrators have been identified and brought to light with the help of public posts.

Most complaints registered at gender sensitisation committees include groping at public places, sending of obscene or lewd messages, among others.

A girl student of the University of Hyderabad had put a public post stating that while she was watching a street play performed on the campus by students at a crowded junction, she felt a hand touching her inappropriately.

The post further read, I moved far away from him and made sure that there was a lot of space between us but he came back again.

The student also uploaded a photo of the man who was reportedly not a student from the university.

Adeep H., a professor at the UoH, said that in many cases the accused are not students.

They are outsiders and it is really sad to note the same. Similarly, last year, we also saw a trend of professors being held for their inappropriate behaviour. Talks need to be held at campuses about gender sensitisation, he said.

We will be working keeping the UGC guidelines in mind to decrease the number of sexual harassment cases on campuses. We urge all students to approach the authorities concerned in case of any inappropriate behaviour from anyone, Professor V. Venkata Ramana, Vice-Chairman of Telangana State Council of Higher Education, said.

Many students, especially PhD students, claim that they do not come forward in fear of their course period getting extended or being ridiculed by others.Vijayawada: The Chief Minister, Mr N. Chandrababu Naidu, criticised the YSRC and the Jana Sena and said that both parties had turned coverts to BJP. He said that both YSRC and Jana Sena are not letting a fly sit on BJP. Mr Naidu was speaking at the party coordination committee meeting through a telecommunication. With his displeasure with Pawan Kalyan being amply evident, Mr Naidu said that Mr Kalyans acts were immoral and that his double standards could be observed in his false corruption allegations on Lokesh when he himself had earlier stated there were no proofs.

Mr Naidu attacked Pawan Kalyan and said if he knew how much funds the state should receive from Union and wondered if he knew how much funds the state was already receiving. He was reacting to Mr Kalyans statement that the funds received by the state were sufficient even if the state did not receive special status category. Mr Naidu further said that the YSRC and the Jana Sena along with the BJP were conspiring against the TD.

Mr Naidu added that the public were keenly observing every partys words, both past and present. Mr Naidu also said even a small child will know the answer on who cheated on the sate. TD chief even pointed out that Mr Pawan Kalyan had no clarity on what he was speaking as earlier he made baseless corruption allegations on TD, later said there are no evidences but nonetheless commented as all others do. He had even said that he would go on a hunger strike for special status but strangely was now saying that even though special status was not given, the funds to the state were sufficient.Vijayawada: The Chief Minister has decided to extend his support to any party organising protests for protecting the states interests only if Law and Order is not violated. While interacting with Sadhikara Mitra members on Wednesday in Undavalli grievance hall, Mr Naidu opined that protests should be constructive and yield results like the one in Japan. Naidu even mentioned extending support to the opposition.

It is rare for the ruling party to support such protests. But, TD is careful not to get negative response from the public in the Special Category Status matter.

TD also extended its support for the block of National Highways across the state, a protest call by left parties to be held today. Mr Naidu while maintaining that protests arent good for development, agreed to sacrifice his stand for protecting the states interests. He even opined of hurdles for investments to the state if protests arent under control and affect the law and order and suggested working with black badges while protesting.

Sadhikara Mitra members are like TDs army and there is one Sadhikara Mitra member for every 35 households, and across the state there are 4.75 lakh members. Mr Naidu interacted with the team leaders of Sadhikara Mitra on Wednesday and assigned them the responsibility of explaining to the public effectively how the Union Government has cheated the state. He directed them to explain clearly how TD had allied with BJP for development and how it broke the relation for protecting the states interests and public sentiments. At the same time, Mr Naidu explained the developmental activities taken up by TD across the state and see the happiness index among the public increase.According to media reports, the woman was hospitalised after a road accident. (Photo: Twitter/ANI)

Patna: A woman who was operated on under torchlight at Bihar's Sadar Hospital in Saharsa died on Wednesday night.

The family members of the victim held the hospital administration and their negligence responsible for her death.

"We were not satisfied with her treatment. So, we admitted her in a private hospital. They kept saying she is fine and made us wait for two days. Suddenly they asked us to take her to Patna where they said she has broken bones and internal injuries," said Omkar, a relative of the deceased.

"No case has been registered yet," the relative added.

The incident took place on March 19 and the video has gone viral.

In the video, it could be seen that a doctor was operating on a woman while another woman was holding a torch.

However, no authority from hospital has said anything about this.

According to media reports, the woman was hospitalised after a road accident.Reddy said that the cameras were turned off because Jayalalithaa was the only patient occupying the 24-bed intensive care unit. (Photo: File)

Chennai: In a major revelation, Apollo Hospitals chairman Dr Prathap C Reddy on Thursday said all CCTV cameras in the hospital were switched off during the 75 days of former Tamil Nadu Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa hospitalisation before her death on December 5, 2016.

Reddy said that it was done because she was the only patient occupying the 24-bed intensive care unit.

"Unfortunately they (CCTVs) were switched off. Jayalalithaa got admitted and one ICU was completely occupied only by her. All patients were diverted to another ICU. So they removed the footage because they did not want everyone to be watching," he said.

Reddy said all relevant documents concerning Jayalalithaa's hospitalisation were submitted before Justice Arumugasamy commission which was constituted by the Tamil Nadu government.

In an affidavit filed before the commission, VK Sasikala had earlier stated that Jayalalithaa had refused to go to hospital after she collapsed in the washroom on September 22, 2016.

Also Read: Jayalalithaa refused to visit hospital, regained senses on way: Sasikala

Sasikala also said that senior AIADMK leaders including O Panneerselvam and M Thambidurai met her, who themselves have claimed that they were denied access to Jayalalithaa in her three months in hospital.

Jayalalithaa, popularly known as 'Amma', was taken to Chennai's Apollo hospital on September 22, 2016 and treated in the hospital for 75 days. She suffered a cardiac arrest on December 4 and was declared dead the next day.

Following her death, allegations of foul play began to do the rounds and state forest minister Dindigul Sreenivasan even claimed that all cabinet ministers had lied to the people about hospitalisation and death of the former AIADMK general secretary.

Subsequently, a one-man commission was constituted and a probe under a retired Madras High Court judge, Justice Arumugasamy, was initiated on October 30.

Also Read: Retired Justice Arumughaswamy to probe Jayalalithaa's deathThe CBI carried out searches at the official and residential premises of promoters of Kanishk Gold Pvt Ltd as it launched probe in the Rs 824-crore loan fraud case. (Representational Image)

New Delhi: The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has registered a case of alleged loan fraud of Rs 824.15 crore committed by Chennai-based Kanishk Gold Pvt Ltd on a consortium of 14 banks led by the State Bank of India (SBI) and carried out searches on Wednesday, officials said.

The case has been registered by the CBI on a complaint from the SBI on behalf of the 14-bank consortium, they said.

The agency has booked the company Kanishk Gold Pvt Ltd, its promoter Director Bhoopesh Kumar Jain, Director Neeta Jain, Tejraj Achha, Ajay Kumar Jain and Sumit Kedia besides unidentified public servants.

The CBI carried out searches at the official and residential premises of promoters of Kanishk Gold Pvt Ltd as it launched probe in the Rs 824-crore loan fraud case, the officials said.

The company engaged in manufacturing gold jewellery which was marketed under the brand name 'Krizz' which were sold through distributors till 2014. But in 2015 it changed its business model to B2B (business-to-business) and started supplying to large retail jewellers, the SBI said in the complaint to the CBI.

The loan accounts of the company were taken over by the SBI from the ICICI in 2008, while its banking arrangement was converted into a multiple banking system in March 2011, it said.

The SBI alleged that the "fraud" is to the tune of Rs 824.15 crore, but the security available with it to cover the "loss" is only around Rs 156.65 crore.

CBI officials said the complaint has been received and the agency was in touch with the bank because of certain loopholes in the complaint which were to be rectified by the bank.

The complaint from the SBI came in public domain before the agency could complete its searches raising fears in the CBI that it may not be able to grab hold of crucial documentary evidence, sources said.

They said "some vested interests" may have leaked the complaint but it is trying hard to do as much damage control as possible.

The bank has alleged that the company had "misrepresented and falsified" the records and financial statements of the company to show a "rosy picture" since 2009 to avail credit facilities from it.

Kanishk Gold Pvt Ltd and its directors allegedly diverted the funds detrimental to the rights and interests of the bank, it said.

The company's account was declared fraud and non-performing asset (NPA) in 2017-18 by various lending banks, it alleged.PM assures full support to provinces

Prime Minister KP Sharma Oli on Wednesday assured full support to chief ministers and principal secretaries of the provincial governments.Police personnel at DGP office thwart the immolation attempt by two policemen from Theni district who alleged harassment by senior officers (Photo: DC)

Chennai: Tension prevailed outside the office of Director General of Police (DGP) on Kamarajar Salai on Wednesday evening after two policemen attempted suicide by immolation alleging harassment by senior officers.

The policemen, Raghu and Ganesan, were attached to the Armed Reserve (AP) and were serving in Theni district. On Wednesday, the two had come to the DGP to file a grievance petition after which they attempted suicide by immolation.

Police sources said that they doused themselves with kerosene when other cops on security duty at the DGPs office rushed and thwarted their suicide attempt. Later, speaking to mediapersons gathered there, the policemen levelled allegations against AR inspector Srinivasan claiming that he turned up drunk at work and hurled abuses against all personnel.

They claimed that they are being unfairly transferred out to another district for no fault of theirs. The duo was then taken to senior officers for counselling. Meanwhile, reacting to the incident, Theni Superintendent of Police, Baskaran said action was initiated against the two cops as there were complaints of indiscipline.

Woman constable attempts suicide

In a similar incident, a 45-year-old woman constable Sabeera of Kancheepuram district police attempted suicide on Tuesday night by consuming mosquito repellant. Police sources said that, marital dispute with her policeman husband Ravi is the reason behind her attempt. The woman constable was attached to the Maduranthagam Prohibition and enforcement wing. She is out of danger and is undergoing treatment at a hospital.On Chinese presence in Doklam, Congress president Rahul Gandhi charged Prime Minister Narendra Modi with being 'silent' on it and other key national issues. (Photo: Twitter/@INCIndia)

Chikkamagaluru: Congress president Rahul Gandhi on Wednesday asserted that the Modi government would not win the 2019 Lok Sabha polls as he charged the Prime Minister with not understanding the true meaning of 'Dharma.'

He also that the Congress would win the coming assembly polls in Karnataka "with a bang".

"Four years of Modi's rule has gone by and he had made big speeches. There is only a year left for his rule and I would like to tell party workers that the same kind of rule is going to continue and Modi is going to lose the next election," he said.

Addressing a public meeting in Karnatakas Chikkamagaluru, Gandhi continued to keep Modi as the focal point of his attack during the second day of his latest tour of poll-bound Karnataka, asserting Congress would win the assembly polls.

Attacking Modi, Gandhi said "when India looks at its Prime Minister, it wants to hear the truth and not speeches filled with hate.

"It wants to hear speech of love and brotherhood, as they know without truth this country cannot go forward, and this is the foundation of Dharma."

The Congress president visited Sharada Peetham at Sringeri in Chikkamagaluru district, one of the four seats established by Adi Guru Shankaracharya in the eighth century and met Jagadguru Shankaracharya, Sri Bharati Tirtha Swamiji.

During his interaction with students of Rajiv Gandhi Sanskrit University at Sringeri Mutt, he cited a 14-year-old boy's reply to his query on Dharma.

"Replying to my question on the foundation of Dharma, a 14-year-old child told me Dharma means truth, Satyameva Jayate. The same was repeated by all the children there."

"During the interaction I felt it is a strange world... a 14-year-old child can understand the meaning of Dharma, but the Prime Minister does not understand Dharma," he said.

He said a Prime Minister "becomes successful only when his heart is filled with love and empathy, without which the country cannot be run."

Reiterating that India is what it is today due to the efforts of its people, Gandhi said "our Prime Minister does not agree to this."

Attacking the Prime Minister, he sarcastically said "Everything was done by Narendra Modi...see in what sort of the world our PM lives."

Stating that he has seen several Prime Ministers like Vajpayee, Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi and Narasimha Rao, Gandhi said, "India's Prime Minister can be successful only when he has compassion in his heart."

He said when Vajpayee was leader of the Opposition, he respected the people of India.

Gandhi said Vajpayee never in his speeches (while he was Prime Minister) said that "before him nothing happened in India."

On Chinese presence in Doklam, Gandhi charged Modi with being 'silent' on it and other key national issues.

"You can see China is sitting in Doklam, they are making roads, helipads, and airport. Whole country knows about it, but our Prime Minister is not uttering a word about it," he said.

Gandhi asserted that Congress would win the coming Karnataka assembly polls with a 'bang.'

"I want to tell Congress workers and leaders who have stood behind us that the Congress will win the next Karnataka election with a bang. This I am telling because of the experience I had traversing parts of Karnataka," he said.

Gandhi also recalled his grandmother Indira Gandhi's association with Chikkamagaluru from where she had won the Lok Sabha bypolls in 1978.

"Whatever Indira Gandhi did for the poor and weaker sections of India was because of the strength you gave her," he said.

Stating that his thinking was like that of her, Gandhi said, "The strength that you will give me... I will use that strength to change the lives of India's poor and weaker sections."This cap on the scholarship was imposed last year, after the Seventh Pay Commission report and impacted nearly 3,400 children of army personnel. (Photo: PTI/Representational)

New Delhi: The Government has decided to remove the cap of Rs 10,000 per month as education reimbursement for the children of soldiers killed in action, those missing or disabled in the line of duty.

This move comes after repeated protests from different sections of the armed forces and the government seeking removal of Rs 10,000 limit.

The Union Finance Ministry has sent a notice lifting the Rs. 10,000 limit, an NDTV report said.

Earlier, children of soldiers killed in action, those missing or disabled were given a full reimbursement of tuition fees, hostel charges, cost of books, cost of uniforms and clothing. This has now been capped to Rs 10,000 per month, in an order that was issued by the government on July 1.

This cap on the scholarship was imposed last year, after the Seventh Pay Commission report and impacted nearly 3,400 children of army personnel.

In December, last year, Naval Chief Admiral Sunil and Rajya Sabha MP Rajeev Chandrashekhar had appealed to Defence Minister Nirmala Sitharaman to reverse a government order that is attempting to limit educational reimbursement to children of martyred or disabled soldiers.

Also Read: Don't cut soldiers' kids education fund, says Navy chief; MoD to reassess cap

Admiral Lanba, who is also Chairman, Chiefs of Staff Committee, wrote: "this small gesture would assure the families of our brave women and men that the nation cares for them and their sacrifices are truly appreciated by the government."

The scheme to provide financial aid to children of martyrs was announced in December 1971, days after the Indian victory in the war with Pakistan.India has conveyed to Islamabad that safety and security of the Indian High Commission, its officers, staff members and their families is the responsibility of the Pakistan government. (Photo: PTI/Representational)

New Delhi: In yet another diplomatic note, India on Thursday asked Pakistan to ensure safety and security of its officials working at the Indian mission in Islamabad, saying they continue to face "harassment" and "intimidation", official sources said.

In its 16th 'Note Verbale' to the Pakistan Foreign Ministry, the Indian High Commission specifically mentioned three incidents of harassment of senior officials, they said.

India has conveyed to Islamabad that safety and security of the Indian High Commission, its officers, staff members and their families is the responsibility of the Pakistan government, the sources said.

On the incidents mentioned in the 'Note Verbale', they said the vehicle of the deputy high commissioner, while going to an embassy within the diplomatic enclave for a meeting, was aggressively followed by two people in a car.

They said the Naval Attache of the Mission was also "aggressively followed" by a person on a motorbike while going to Serena Hotel for a meeting.

The second secretary (political) of the mission was also aggressively followed and harassed by a person at the Street-1 Cafe within the diplomatic enclave. He had gone there for an official meeting with a diplomat, they said.

The sources said the website of the High Commission of India continues to be intermittently blocked, adding it is causing inconvenience and has affected normal functioning of the mission.

"Such incidents of harassment, intimidation and threats to physical security of diplomats and officials are in violation of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations of 1961, and a threat to the security and safety of the personnel of the High Commission of India," said a source.

The sources said India has asked the Pakistan Foreign Ministry to immediately investigate all the incidents and direct the relevant authorities to ensure that such incidents do not recur.

Pakistan has also been accusing India of harassing its diplomats and releasing videos of alleged intimidation of its officials. However, the veracity of these videos could not be ascertained.

Islamabad has also called its High Commissioner to India back home for consultations on the issue.Chennai: We feel remorse to observe that no words of solace and comfort, no amount of compensation, no amount of punishment to the accused can undo the damage done to the child and her innocence, said a division bench comprising Justices R. Subbiah and A.D. Jagadish Chandra of the Madras High Court while upholding the life sentence awarded to an accused of causing aggravated penetrative assault four times under threat on his own 16-year-old daughter.

We hope and believe that time, the great healer, will restore her back to normalcy. At the same time, we could only observe that given the nature and magnitude of the offence committed by the accused, even though we feel that the sentence imposed on the accused is inadequate, we could not also enhance the sentence imposed on the accused than the one our legislators have indicated under the Pocso Act for the offences punishable under section 5 (l) and 6 thereof, the bench added.

The bench confirmed the order of the Mahila Court, Madurai convicting and sentencing A. Kalimuthu to life imprisonment. The Mahila court also directed the state government to pay Rs 10 lakh as compensation to the victim girl for the trauma and mental disturbance suffered by her on account of the act of Kalimuthu.

The bench said the victim girl, has given a clear narration of the manner in which she was ravaged by none else than her father. It is her version that her father had committed aggravated penetrative sexual assault four times. In a case of this nature, we are of the view that the sole testimony of the victim girl, if it is clear and cogent, is sufficient to hold the accused guilty of the offence complained of. On careful examination of the deposition of the victim girl, coupled with the deposition of her mother and brother (12 years old), we are of the view that their testimony is cogent and corroborative with each other, the bench added.

The bench said, A daughter always looks up to her father as a shield of her dignity and honour which is an intrinsic facet of a family especially of a father-daughter relationship.Pakistan had asked Mahmood to return home for an unspecified time after Pakistan alleged that its diplomats in India were being 'harassed'. (Photo: Pakistan Embassy)

New Delhi: Days after Pakistan Foreign Office informed that its High Commissioner to India will not return anytime soon, Islamabad will send back its envoy Sohail Mahmood to India who will host 'Pakistan National Day' function at the High Commission in Delhi on Friday.

Earlier last week, Pakistan Foreign Office official had said that the high commissioner would stay back for an indefinite period.

Pakistan had asked Mahmood to return home for an unspecified time after Pakistan alleged that its diplomats in India were being "harassed". The move was downplayed by the Ministry of External Affairs as "routine".

Also Read: After MEA's 'routine' remark, Pak says won't send back envoy to India soon

Pakistan had also accused the Indian officials of intimidating the children of a senior diplomat while they were on their way to school.

The Pakistan high commission alleged that the children were harassed and blocked by Indian authorities while they were on their way to the British School.

Pakistan had also summoned India's Deputy High Commissioner JP Singh over the alleged harassment of officials and families of the Pakistan High Commission in New Delhi.

In reply to all the allegations, External Affairs Ministry Spokesperson Raveesh Kumar had said that the Indian High Commission in Islamabad was also facing a "litany of issues" which have not been resolved for several months by that country.An injured trekker being rushed to a government hospital in Theni district. (Photo: PTI/File)

Coimbatore: The toll in the devastating fire at Kurangani forests in Theni district rose to 18 with the death of a woman at a hospital in Coimbatore on Thursday, police said.

The 32-year-old woman, identified as Jayashree, a resident of Chennai, was airlifted from Madurai and admitted to the private hospital here on March 12.

Jayashree was brought to the hospital with more than 60 per cent burns. She died on Thursday without responding to treatment, hospital sources said.

A total of 39 persons - 12 from Erode and Tirupur and 27 from Chennai had embarked on a trip on March 10. Three among the Chennai group went to Kerala and the rest proceeded for trekking.

Of the 36 people caught in the forest fire, 18 died, 10 were rescued without any injuries and the rest are undergoing treatment.

On March 19, Chief Minister K Palaniswami told the state Assembly that a forester was suspended and a case registered against a local man, G Ranjithkumar, for leading the trekkers through the reserve forest.

For violations, police were taking action against Chennai Trekking Club and Erode based Tour de India, he had said.

The Tamil Nadu government has also appointed top official, Atulya Misra, as Inquiry Officer to probe into the circumstances leading to the death of the trekkers in Kurangani hills and submit a report on the incident within two months.Kerala CPI(M) chief Kodiyeri Balakrishnan (Left) on said that the party was ready to vote Congress to defeat BJP in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. (Photo: DC/File)

Kasargode: Amid discussions of a CPI(M)-Congress alliance at the national level, Kerala CPI(M) chief Kodiyeri Balakrishnan on Thursday said that the party was ready to vote Congress to defeat BJP in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections.

"The Left Democratic Front (LDF) will contest 100-150 seats in the next Lok Sabha election. In all the remaining seats we will identity the candidate who can defeat BJP and the Left/CPI(M) will vote for such candidates. It could be SP, BSP, regional parties or even if it is Congress, we will vote for Congress to defeat BJP," Balakrishnan was quoted as saying by India Today at a public gathering in Kasargode district.

Earlier in March, Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan had ruled out the possibility of the CPI(M) aligning with the Congress in the fight against the BJP, saying such an alliance would lack credibility.

"In CPI(M)'s fight against the BJP, the party cannot take Congress into its side. Previous experience show that such an alliance will lack credibility and people will not accept it," Vijayan had said.

Vijayan's statement came a day after CPI general secretary S Sudhakar Reddy described the BJP as the "prime enemy" and stressed the need for a broader platform to take on the saffron party.

The trouncing of the CPI(M) in the Tripura Assembly elections has forced it to rethink strategies and increased the clamour within the party for an "adjustment" with the Congress, ahead of a crucial party meet next month.

Also Read: CPI(M)-Cong to tie up? Call for 'adjustment' grows louder after Tripura loss

The heavy defeat in Tripura has raised several questions within the CPI(M) on adopting the "right strategy" for survival, party leaders said.

Party general secretary Sitaram Yechury had in January proposed an alliance with the Congress which was vehemently opposed by the party's Kerala unit, along with politburo member Prakash Karat, known as a hardliner in the CPI(M).Hyderabad: As water levels sunk in Srisailam and Nagarjunasagar even before peak summer, the sharing of Krishna waters was creating a rift between the two Telugu states of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. The Telangana government accused Krishna River Management Board (KRMB) of being biased towards AP. The Board issued orders allocating 17 TMC to TS and 16 TMC to AP. TS complained that AP had already utilised additional water than allocated on March 6 while it was yet to utilise 7.26 TMC from the allotted share.

Its contention was that KRMB resorted to blatant discrimination in its fresh allotment without taking into consideration water utilisation. KRMB issued orders on March 6, allocating 24.467 TMC to TS and 9.3 to AP. But, at a meeting held late on March 20 fresh allocations were made to the two States. The TS government strongly objected to higher allocations to AP without taking into consideration the utilisation amount between March 6 and 20.

However, AP Government dismissed the argument and said water should be allotted on the basis of available reserves and not previous utilisation which was approved by KRBM. Chief Secretary S.K. Joshi, who is also the irrigation secretary, took up the issue with Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao.Hyderabad: Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao, on Thursday, conferred benefits on the Goud community, who are dependent on traditional occupations for their livelihood. He has enhanced pensions for toddy tappers from Rs 200 to Rs 1,000 per month. The CM has also announced a waiver of tax on palm trees and sanctioned 5 acres and Rs 5 crores to construct a Gouda Bhavan in the city.

Mr Rao stated in the Legislative Assembly, The TRS government is striving hard to stre-ngthen and improve the financial standards of rural areas. The main focus is the development of agriculture and water resources as well as the encouragement of the traditional occupations. Many communities are dependent on the resources available in the rural areas to protect and improve their standard of living.

The Goud community is one among these, living on their traditional occupation. The toddy tappers were badly neglected in the undivided state. The lack of understanding of Telangana culture had led to doubts about the very existence of the toddy profession. The Chief Minister also said that the Goud community had not rec-eived any support in the undivided state and that they had not even been allowed to live on their own. The toddy shops in Hyderabad had been closed to benefit the li-quor lobby, and unfortunately, the TS leaders at the time had supported rather than objecting to such activities.

The arrears pending from 3 years before the formation of the state of Telangana, and which amounts to Rs 6.38 crores, were paid by the TRS government all together, immediately after coming to power. We have increased the ex gratia amount. Earlier, it was Rs 2 lakh in the case of death and Rs 50,000 in the case of permanent disability. We have increased the amount in both cases to Rs 5 lakh, added the Chief Minister.



.............

On the other hand, they had become mute spectators to the life-th-reatening menace of Gudamba in rural and urban areas. The health of the people had been badly affected by the social destruction caus-ed by the then AP government. Thereby, the traditional occupation of toddy tapping has been jeopardised, he noted.

As promised during the Telangana agitation, we have reopened the toddy shops in Hyderabad, we have undone the injustice meted out to the Goud community. We have also taken more steps to ensure their welfare, remarked the Chief Minister.Politics in a mans world

Given the requirement to follow the principle of inclusion in the PR part of the election, who you are becomes crucial18 out of 31 districts facing drinking water crisis even before summer has set in.

Hyderabad: Groundwater levels are plummeting alarmingly in Telangana even before peak summer. While summer had just set in, groundwater levels in all districts have already touched rock-bottom, raising alarm bells over impending drinking water crisis across the State.

The situation has entered the danger zone in over 1,000 villages. All municipalities and municipal corporations are experiencing water scarcity. The situation is worse in villages and agency areas. People are now forced to spend more for buying drinking water. Last year, the government tried to supply drinking water by hiring private water tankers. This year, they were reluctant to supply tankers as the dues of last year are yet to be cleared.

The groundwater department has gathered the data based on 10 erstwhile districts. The situation in Karimnagar district is the worst with the groundwater table falling to 16 metres. This was followed by Nizamabad (13.88 mts), Ranga Reddy (13.73mts), Medak (12.16mts), Nalgonda (11.45mts), Khammam (10.92mts), Mahabubnagar (9.79mts), Warangal (9.6mts) and Adilabad (9.05mts) Warangal district topped in maximum number of villages which entered danger zone at 213. This is followed by Adilabad (190mts), Nizamabad (188mts), Mahabubnagar (177mts), Nalgonda (163mts), Medak (108mts), Ranga Reddy (100mts), Karimnagar (92mts) and Khammam (82mts).

Another worrying factor was a steep decline in levels of all the waterbodies in a month. The level in all districts came down significantly in February compared to January. As per the reports obtained by the government, 18 out of the total 31 districts are facing drinking water crisis.

Officials sources revealed that these districts include Asifabad, Adilabad, Bhupalpally, Jagtial, Kamareddy, Karimnagar, Mahbubnagar, Medak, Nirmal, Nalgonda, Nagarkurnool, Ranga Reddy, Suryapet, Siddipet, Siricilla, Wanaparthy, Vikarabad and Yadadri.

Making matters worse, Mission Bhagiratha  a project to supply drinking water to all households  is also moving at a slow pace in majority of the districts and the chances of water for all households in summer looks grim.

The government has set in a deadline for contractors to complete Mission Bhagiratha by March 31. However, going by the current pace of work, all works are expected to be complete only by June-end.

The laying of main pipeline network has been completed to 90 per cent, but intra-village pipeline network is lagging behind at just 60 per cent without which water will not reach villages and households. This leaves the TS to rely on bore wells, agricultural bore wells to ensure water supply in summer.The petitioner told the court that they wanted to take out the Rath Yatra on March 18, the day of Ugadi. It was to reach Tadbund on March 31, the day of Hanuman Jayanti, and its purpose was to create religious awareness among rural youth.

Hyderabad: The Hyderabad High Court on Thursday dismissed the plea of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) challenging the action of the Telangana state police in refusing permission to hold Srirama Rath Yatra from Basara to Hanuman Temple at Tadbund in Secunderabad.

Justice M. Seetharama Murti, while dismissing the petition by M. Galreddy, secretary of the VHP, Telangana state wing, observed that the apprehensions expressed by the police in refusing permission to the yatra are justifiable.

The petitioner told the court that they wanted to take out the Rath Yatra on March 18, the day of Ugadi. It was to reach Tadbund on March 31, the day of Hanuman Jayanti, and its purpose was to create religious awareness among rural youth.

He alleged that the state government refused permission with an intention to curb the activities of the VHP in the state.

S. Sharath Kumar, special counsel for the government, submitted that there were intelligence inputs that the yatra will create a law and order problem, and the VHP is taking out the yatra to create fear among the minority communities, and there have been instances in the past when ratha yatras have created social turmoil in the country.

He said that industrialists have been coming forward to invest in the state because of the improved law and order situation, and any breach in the current situation will adversely affect the development of the state.

While dismissing the petition, the judge said that the court is not inclined to intervene in the matter in view of the fact that it would be difficult for the police to provide security to the yatra from Basara to Secunderabad.The Department has detected 571 cases of bank deposits above Rs 1 crore for which the depositors had not filed their income tax returns.

BENGALURU: For the first time the net income tax collection for Karnataka and Goa (K&G) region in the 2017-18 financial year is likely to exceed Rs 1 lakh crore, said Rajnish Kumar, Principal Chief Commissioner of Income Tax, Karnataka & Goa, at a press meet in the City on Thursday.

K&G region is the third largest contributor to income tax revenue in the country, after Mumbai and Delhi. Listing the achievements of the I-T Department in the region in this fiscal year, Kumar said that post demonetization of higher value currency notes in November 2016, the Department has detected 571 cases of bank deposits above Rs 1 crore for which the depositors had not filed their income tax returns (ITRs).

"Most of these high bank deposits were linked to property transactions. In one instance we detected an undisclosed sale of property worth Rs 189 crore held by a couple, who was involved in real estate business, apart holding their regular jobs. They had not paid their ITRs for two years. On Wednesday the tax recovery officer arrested another assessee, who had deliberately defaulted on paying self assessment tax of Rs 16.45 lakh and had willfully alienated his property to escape recovery action," he added.

This is the first time the I-T Department has arrested a tax defaulter in the K&G region to send across a stern message to assessees, who deliberately evade filing tax returns.

"In another instance of high cash deposit we found that one assessee had diverted his unaccounted money to other persons' bank accounts. He later admitted of possessing unaccounted income of Rs 2,15,80,000 and has paid tax of Rs 87 lakh," the senior I-T officer said.

He added that the Department had conducted more than 600 surveys in the K&G region and verified 517 entities for defaulting on compliance with the provisions of Tax Deducted at Source (TDS). "Out of them 436 entities with tax default of Rs 250 crore were detected in Karnataka," said Sanjay Kumar, Commissioner, Income Tax (TDS). The Directorate of Income Tax (Investigation) has conducted 50 search and seizure operations this year and unearthed unaccounted wealth of Rs 5,259.4 crore. According to official sources, this year the DGIT has filed 111 prosecution complaints in 66 cases for various offences in the Income Tax Act.Chennai: Madras high court has upheld an order of a trial court, convicting and sentencing a convict to life imprisonment for forcibly indulging in unnatural oral sex with a VIII standard boy student and when he refused subsequently, murdered him at Virudhunagar district in 2014.

A division bench comprising Justices R. Subbiah and A.D. Jagadish Chandra confirmed the order of Mahila Court in Viridhunagar convicting and sentencing S. Mareeshwaran for offences under section 450 and 302 IPC.

Having regard to the nature and magnitude of the offence committed by Mareeshwaran, particularly during broad daylight in the school premises making the other students in the school grip with panic, we direct that Mareeshwaran shall not be released unless he completes 30 years of actual imprisonment without any statutory remission or commutation, the bench said.

The bench also confirmed the order of the Mahila court convicting and sentencing another accused Maheswaran, who abetted Mareeshwaran in the commission of the offences.

According to prosecution, when Mareeshwaran was studying in the school, where the deceased boy was studying, he indulged in acts of fellatio whereby he forced the deceased to indulge in unnatural oral sex with him to give vent to his pent up lust. After he dropped out from the school in 2013, he frequently disturbed the deceased enroute to school. On knowing this, victim's parents changed the school. But the accused continued to force the deceased to indulge in unnatural oral sex with him.

Subsequently, the boy bluntly refused to accede to his request. Thereafter, when the accused forced the boy to indulge in the same activities by threatening him, the villagers noticed the same, chased him and his friend Maheswaran who accompanied in a motor vehicle and warned them not to come to their village.

Enraged, they bought a knife and Mareeshwaran went to the school and stabbed the boy and murdered him in the class room.

The bench said Mareeshwaran with the active assistance of Maheswaran, murdered the victim. This was clearly proved by the prosecution by examining the witnesses, who have cited the incident that took place in 2013.

Expressing shock and grief over the manner in which a young boy was done to death in a barbaric, inhuman and heartless manner in broad daylight, the bench said, We are also pained to note that the deceased was gored to death by stabbing him indiscriminately in the classroom and the intensity of the stab is such that the knife could not be retrieved from his temple region and it was implanted there. The knife was ultimately retrieved and handed over to the investigation officer by the doctor, who had done post mortem. The death of the deceased in the blood splattered class room would no doubt send shock waves in the minds of students studying in the school especially when they see the deceased lying in a pool of blood with a knife implanted on his temple region, the bench added.Chennai: There is no CCTV footage of former Chief Minister Jayalalithaa during her 75-day treatment at Apollo Hospitals as all the CCTV cameras in the ICU were switched off, Dr Prathap Reddy, Chairman of Apollo Hospitals disclosed on Friday.

Unfortunately, they (Jayalalithaa's attendants) switched off all the CCTVs for all the 75 days. As soon as she got admitted, the access to the ICU was closed. All patients were shifted to another ICU. Only one out of 24 rooms in the ICU was used by the CM. They removed the cameras because they did not want everyone to be watching, he said.

Dr. Reddy also added that no visitors were allowed to meet her. In the hospital we follow a simple policy. No one is allowed in the ICU, except close relatives for a short time. Since she was critical, we did not permit. But relatives have an option to ask for some people. The doctor who is on duty can allow, he said.

Dr. Reddy's latest revelation contradicts Sasikalas so-called affidavit before the Justice Arumugaswamy Enquiry Commission probing the Jayalalithaa treatment, that some officials and ministers had met Jayalalithaa. In the affidavit, Sasikala had claimed that Jayalalithaa was videographed in a lucid state four times in the hospital  she reportedly claimed in the affidavit that she had done the video as per Jayalalithaa's wishes  and that senior AIADMK leaders, including O Panneerselvam and M Thambidurai, had met her. Both the leaders have denied this and insisted they had not met their leader any time during her hospitalisation.

Dr. Reddy, speaking on the sidelines of a press conference of the Apollo International Colorectal Symposium 2018, said that all medical records along with the hospital's report had been submitted to the Justice Arumugaswamy Commission and he would not be able to comment any further.

If they call us, we are ready to appear before the Commission. Unfortunately we lost her in spite of giving her the best possible treatment, Dr. Reddy said.

Sasikala had also claimed that on the day she suffered a cardiac arrest (Dec 4, 2016) Jayalalithaa was having coffee and was watching Jai Hanuman on Jaya TV.

She had suddenly collapsed and the attending doctors rushed to help but found her heart had stopped functioning. Jayalalithaa passed away at 11.30 pm the next day (Dec 5).

Sasikala, who is currently on parole for attending the funeral rites of her husband M. Natarajan, had been at the centre of the controversy surrounding Jayalalithaas treatment and death.

She has been accused of ignoring the former Chief Minister's health while at home and cutting off all information flow about the exact nature of her illness after her hospitalisation. Sasikala had also filtered the visitors preventing most of them from actually seeing Jayalalithaa.Chennai: Holding that nomination of 3 MLAs to the Puducherry Legislative Assembly is valid, the Madras high court has set aside the order of the Speaker, refusing to accept and recognise the 3 MLAs as members of the Puducherry Legislative Assembly.

The First Bench comprising Chief Justice Indira Banerjee and Justice M. Sundar dismissed the petition filed by K. Lakshminarayanan, the whip of the ruling Congress Party (INC) and a PIL filed by S. Dhanalakshmi, assailing the nomination of 3 MLAs while allowing the petitions filed by the nominated 3 MLAs V. Saminathan, K.G. Shankar and S. Selvaganapathy, challenging an order the Speaker, rejecting their claim that they are members of legislative assembly.

Dismissing the petitions, the bench said, We have no difficulty in accepting that the nominations have been made by an appropriate authority in accordance with section 3 (3) of the UT Act, which in other words traceable to Article 239A of the Constitution of India.

Rejecting the challenge to section 3 (3) of the UT Act, the bench said the challenge to the constitutionality of section 3 (3) of UT Act cannot be sustained as it was predicated solely on the basis of misuse owing to the powers being unfettered/unguided and a possibility of misuse.

The nominated MLAs being members of a political party i.e BJP, was certainly not a bar for their nomination. It cannot be put against them. We hold that there is no illegality or infirmity in the nomination of these three MLAs, the bench added.

Allowing the petitions from 3 MLAs, the bench said while the competence of a legislator to sit in the House can be examined by the Speaker under the Tenth Schedule to Constitution of India, there was no constitutional provision for the Speaker to examine the validity or otherwise of nominations of legislators made to the legislative assembly. Speakers order was actually a legal scrutiny of the pro-cess of nominations and is tantamount to a verdict which has the effect of nullifying the nominations.

Thus, we are afraid, is outside the realm of the Speakers power in his capacity as master of the house, the bench added. The bench said, We, therefore, have no hesitation in holding that the impugned order and proceedings of the Speaker deserve to be set aside and quashed.Lucknow: The Yogi Adityanath government in Uttar Pradesh has started the process of withdrawing 131 criminal cases related to the 2013 riots in Muzaffarnagar and Shamli districts. The cases being withdrawn include 13 related to murder and 11 related to attempt to murder. These cases include charges under IPC sections related to heinous crimes with a minimum punishment of seven years in jail. Besides, there are 16 cases under section 153 A on charges of promoting enmity on religious grounds, and two under section 295 A for deliberate and malicious acts intended to insult a religion or religious beliefs.

The decision to start the process on the withdrawal was taken after a delegation of Khap leaders from Muzaffarnagar and Shamli, led by BJP MP Sanjiv Baliyan and the BJP MLA Umesh Malik, met the Chief Minister last month and presented a list of 179 cases. Mr Baliyan had told reporters that the list presented to the chief minister included only Hindus.

In the meeting with the Chief Minister last month, I requested him to consider the withdrawal of 179 cases in which over 850 Hindus were held accused. All these cases were registered in Muzaffarnagar and Shamli districts. We had been preparing the list for a while now. The cases include those of arson, attempt to murder and damage of properties, he said. UP law minister Brajesh Pathak said, We had taken a call to reduce pendency of cases and we want to withdraw politically motivated cases.Chennai: Asserting that stringent mechanism will be in place to operate the sand quarries in Tamil Nadu, Chief Minister Edappadi K. Palaniswami has informed that the state government will run the sand quarries in the state and also sell the imported sand.

The sand quarries will be opened soon and tenders would be invited on Thursday for quarrying. Tenders were called about a fortnight ago but only some quarries were taken up for sand quarrying work by contractors.

And since there were no takers for other quarries, it has been decided to float fresh bids tomorrow, the CM said. Intervening the speech of Congress Legislature party leader K. R. Ramasamy in the Assembly on

Wednesday, Mr. Palaniswami said activities at the quarry sites would be monitored through CCTV cameras at loading and unloading points including the yards.

The vehicles transporting the sand would be fitted with GPS to facilitate tracking by the government. On importing sand from foreign countries, the CM said it would be done by private players, but the government would sell imported sand varieties. Imported sand will be allowed for sale by the government online after tests to ascertain its worthiness. No private players would be allowed to sell sand in the State, he said and added that the process of sale would be ensured only after online payment.

Norms governing sand quarrying have been tightened and court guidelines in this regard were being followed, the Chief Minister said.

Sand mining was recently banned in the light of public interest litigations in the court and steps were now being taken to open quarries following a

judgment in this regard.

Last November, the Madras High Court had directed the State government to stop sand quarrying within six months. The court had also said that no new mines and quarries should be opened. While a division bench upheld the single judge benchs order in January, the Supreme Court last month stayed that order.

Raising the issue, Mr. Ramasamy said the non availability of sand had affected the construction activity and he sought to know when sand quarries would be opened.Chennai: The state government has warned of stringent action against those vandalising the statues of rationalist leader Periyar and said police protection to statues of various leaders across TN has been enhanced.

Responding to a special call attention motion moved by Opposition parties in the State Assembly on damage to Periyar statues in Tiruppattur and Pudukkottai, on Wednesday, Chief Minister Edappadi K. Palaniswami said the person, who had vandalised the statue in Pudukkottai, was arrested within 12 hours. He was identified as CRPF jawan S. Senthil Kumar and he was in an inebriated condition.

With regard to the Thirupattur incident, following a complaint by DK member Elangovan, the police registered a case arrested two BJP functionaries: Muthukumar and Francis, the CM informed and warned that the government would not remain silent against those damaging public property, especially the statues of leaders. However big they may be, strict action will be taken without partiality, Mr Palaniswami said.

Earlier, raising the issue, DMK working president M. K. Stalin wanted to know why no action was taken against BJP national secretary H. Raja, for his controversial Facebook post leading to vandalising the Periyar statue. He demanded Rajas arrest and detention under Goondas Act. Had the state government acted swiftly against him immediately after the Tiruppattur incident, the Pudukkottai incident would not have occurred, he added.

Meanwhile, the CRPF jawan arrested for the incident was suffering from Schizophrenia has been undergoing psychiatric treatment since February, the CRPF clarified. He was on a 30-day leave from March 14 at his native place in Tamil Nadu and has been suspended in the wake of the incident.

Head constable S. Senthil Kumar (35) was arrested from his house in Vidhuti village on Tuesday night after the CCTV footage obtained from the area showed him damaging the statue in an inebriated state, Pudukottai district police said.Chennai: Parched Chennai will get a respite soon with the State government making much headway in establishing a dam at Kannankottai Thervaikandigai in Tiruvalluvar district, near here, to supply protected water to the residents.

Chief Minister Edappadi K. Palaniswami informed the Assembly on Thursday that the scheme would ensure one TMC water to the residents. We have initiated this scheme at a cost of Rs 330 crore to impound one TMC water and this will help to supply protected drinking water to the Chennai residents, CM said.

Responding to the issue raised by DMKs former State Minister Duraimurugan, the CM said the dam project would be completed soon as TN managed to acquire the remaining portions of land required for establishing the dam.

Due to our persistent efforts we managed to get about two TMC water from Andhra Pradesh and we now have about 4.5 TMC water, which is sufficient to meet the requirements of the people, Mr. Palaniswami said. He claimed that both he and Deputy CM O. Panneerselvam have been persuading the Andhra Pradesh government to release water from the Krishna river. But they have agreed to release only 2.5 TMC water and told us to obtain the remaining 2.5 TMC water from Telangana government, the CM said.Provide easy justice to service seekers: Acting CJ Joshee

Acting Chief Justice (CJ) Deepak Raj Joshee has directed the Tulsipur High Court and Banke District Court to make judicial service easily accessible and effective.BJP state president and former CM B.S. Yeddyurappa addresses a press conference at the BJP office in Bengaluru on Thursday

Bengaluru: State BJP President and the partys Chief Ministerial candidate B.S.Yeddyurappa on Thursday dropped a bombshell alleging that Water Resources Minister M.B. Patil had received a kickback of Rs 25 crore from M/s National Projects Construction Corporation Limited to award an Upper Bhadra project tender to them.

Releasing documents pertaining to the award of the tender to these companies which had allegedly furnished bogus work done certificates, Mr Yeddyurappa went to the extent of demanding a narco- analysis test on Mr Patil and officers of Visvesvaraya Jala Nigam, Mr Cheluvaraj and Krishnamurthy.

Visvesvaraya Jala Bhagya Nigam Limited had called for tenders for the Upper Krishna Project which costs Rs 4999.99 crore.

Officers in Visvesvaraya Jala Nigam, allegedly appointed by Mr Patil, illegally awarded the tender to two companies.

The National Projects Construction Corporation Limited got the tender to take up 2.9 km of work on the Chitradurga Canal at an estimated cost of Rs 157.94 crore and the work order was issued to this company on January 1, 2018.

Another company, M/s Amma Constructions India Pvt. Ltd also was awarded the tender for the work.

According to the KTPP Act, to win a tender, a company have must produce work done certificate from its previous projects.

But it was found that both contractors had provided bogus work done certificates, claimed the BJP president.

These companies had obtained work done certificates from the Manipur and Tripura governments. After enquiring and finding that these certificates were bogus, it was prepared by the officials of Visvesvaraya Jala Nigam to award tender to both the companies, Mr. Yeddyurappa claimed while addressing a press conference.

Even the Manipur and Tripura governments have clarified that they have not issued any work done certificates to these companies.

In fact, both the state governments have clarified that they dont have an executive engineers post, Mr Yeddyurappa added.Bengaluru: The Siddaramaiah government which is already in neck-deep trouble over the Veerashaiva-Lingayat religion row, has stocked another controversy by seeking caste-wise information of Group A, B, C and D officers/officials serving in the state police department.

On March 17, 2018, Mr Amrit Paul, inspector general of police (administration) had issued a circular to police commissionerates, IGP of all ranges, SPs of all districts, Karnataka Police Academy Director, Principal of Police Training Schools and commandants of all reserve police units asking them to provide information as these details had to be incorporated in the report of the Social and Educational Survey conducted by Karnataka State Commission for Backward Classes to make a detailed comparison with the primary source of date collected from the survey.

This circular has kicked up a big row at a time when the state Assembly polls are round the corner.

When contacted, Home Minister R Ramalinga Reddy slammed the BJP for giving political colour to this exercise and clarified that it had nothing to do with the coming elections. The recent circular had been sent after the home department failed to respond to seven reminders sent since December, 2016 asking for information. The commission had sent such a circular to all 50 departments seeking information of the staff working in their respective departments to incorporate the same in the government's ambitious Social and Educational Survey being undertaken by Chief Minister Siddaramaiah at a cost of Rs 180 crore. Reminders had been sent not only to home department but also other departments which failed to provide information.

When he was asked why the backward classes commission was not ready to get details of each employee provided at the time of joining government service, Mr Reddy said the commission wanted to reconfirm whether details furnished by government servants were true as wrong information should not be furnished for a comprehensive survey being done by the government. "Our idea is not to use this information for election purposes but only to help the government come out with a proper survey report".

While Mr Reddy defended seeking caste-information from all departments, the question arises: was is this being done now when the state government is not serious about making the survey report public? While the Commission claims that the survey report is ready, the government is postponing its release on the ground that it was yet to obtain certain information from many departments. Time and again, the CM and Social Welfare Minister H Anjaneya had been dodging questions on making the caste survey public.

But, according to insiders, there was lot of pressure on the government against making this survey report public fearing strong protests from the majority communities. Already, Vokkaliga Sangha had threatened to challenge this survey report claiming that it had been prepared 'unscientifically'.

Besides, the Siddaramaiah government has been facing fierce opposition from the Veerashaiva community who have accused him of dividing their community at the behest of some ministers on the Lingayat religion issue. In these circumstances, seeking caste-wise information of the police department is definitely going to provide ammunition to the opposition parties to launch a fresh attack on the state government.

Gowda to Siddu: people will teach you a lesson

Former PM Deve Gowda while addressing a public meeting in Chamaraja constituency on Thursday slammed Chief Minister Siddaramaiah for claiming the JD(S) was the B team of the BJP.

He said, "I am 85, Siddaramaiah may be in his early 60s, I may not be able to fight him in the ring, but people who are with me, will teach you a lesson for your ego and arrogance,"

"He satirically says I want to make Kumaraswamy CM. He should be grateful to me before making satirical comments. My intention is not to ensure Kumaraswamy becomes CM, I want to ensure this regional party survives and resolves the problems of people.I shall not rest until then," he said.

He added, "Had he exhibited the dignity his position demanded, I would have bowed my head before him. It is the arrogance of power and money. It will not last long. He should remember who was responsible for his rise. Mr Narendra Modi termed them a 10 per cent commission government, whose percentage is what will be known soon," he said.

"Did he behave respectably when he was opposition leader? I do not have any personal enmity with B.S. Yeddyurappa. But it was my son who exposed the scams of Yeddyurappa and he went to jail because of me. Can they (Congress) win all seven Assembly seats in Hassan? They cannot defeat Revanna or stop Kumaraswamy. If he (Siddu) can bring 50,000 people I can bring 1 lakh people in Hassan."With the Narendra Modi government blocking the admission of the Oppositions no-confidence motion, it is quite possible that the Lok Sabha will continue to be adjourned on flimsy pretexts till the Budget Session ends on April 6.

Although this will deny the Opposition a parliamentary forum to criticise the government, recent moves suggest that it might not prevent them from coming together before the 2019 general election.

The Speaker of the Lok Sabha daily throws up her hands saying that because of disruptions in the House she is unable to count 50 MPs who need to stand up in favour of admitting the no-confidence motion. At first it was the Congress and Telugu Desam Party (TDP) MPs agitating in the Well of the House demanding a debate on the Nirav Modi fraud and special status for Andhra respectively. Then the no-confidence motion galvanised the non-BJP Opposition parties.

Since March 18, it is the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) and Telangana Rashtra Samiti (TRS) MPs who have forced adjournments. Political observers believe that they are inadvertently or willingly playing into the hands of the parliamentary floor managers of the ruling BJP.

The no-confidence motion is not about the numbers in the Lok Sabha. On that count, the government is safe. It is about debating the performance of the government. It would seem that the Modi government does not want a live telecast of the Opposition lambasting it, following its resounding electoral defeats in the Gorakhpur, Phulpur and Araria Lok Sabha byelections.

The BJP and its allies should have nothing to fear from a debate in the Lok Sabha where they outnumber the Opposition. However, in Prime Minister Narendra Modi the government has a leader who will not stand for any public criticism of his government. Unlike veteran BJP leaders Atal Behari Vajpayee and Lal Krishna Advani, he is not a product of parliamentary discussions. He has little use for parliamentary debate  unless he himself is holding forth  and sees it only as an opportunity for an unworthy Opposition to attack him.

While the governments record can be criticised on a host of issues, perhaps the one that scares the Modi government most is a debate on the `13,580-crore bank fraud perpetrated by Nirav Modi and his uncle Mehul Choksi right under the eyes of this government. After all, the Opposition jibe Chhota Modi has now stuck to Nirav Modi, and the irony of the PM using the intimate form hamare Mehulbhai  literally, my brother Mehul  to single out Choksi at a public function at his residence is not lost in the publics perception.

The government thinks that it may have successfully pushed the Chhota Modi issue to the background by publicly pursuing corruption cases against the son of former finance minister P. Chidambaram and announcing the death of 39 Indian workers in Iraq. But a debate on a no-confidence motion would reopen the issue and allow the Opposition to consolidate.

Yet the BJP cannot be unaware of a series of recent developments indicating that a realignment of Opposition forces is taking place.

In the Lok Sabha bypolls in UP, the Samajwadi Party (SP) and Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) were brought together by fear of BJP president Amit Shah breaking their parties through promises of power and pelf. It is a strategy he has successfully followed elsewhere in the country.

The electoral alliance in UP has spoiled the political atmosphere for the BJP in the run-up to 2019. The manic support that existed for Mr Modi in 2013 before the last general election, with crowds chanting Modi-Modi, is completely absent today. The SP-BSP victory and their intention to work together has effectively exorcised the Modi-mania or whatever support was left for the BJP after its disastrous economic policies and its violently divisive Hindutva drive.

Even the windsock of Indian politics, Ram Vilas Paswan of the Lok Janshakti Party, an ally of the BJP, appeared to be politically repositioning himself with his comment that the NDA needs to take along all sections of society, though he has since recanted. And the man who-could-have-been-king until he chose political hara-kiri, Nitish Kumar of the Janata Dal (United), has begun to argue for building an inclusive society and to appreciate some virtues in the way the Congress governs. Recently a virtual political nobody like Om Prakash Rajbhar of the Suheldev Bahujan Samaj Party got away with the threat that he would not vote for the BJP candidate in the coming Rajya Sabha elections in UP unless he was given an appointment with BJP president Amit Shah. These straws seem to indicate a rising wind against the Modi government.

The last 10 days alone have seen a number of initiatives aimed at taking on the BJP frontally. Former Congress president Sonia Gandhis dinner for the Opposition attracted 20 political parties; while Nationalist Congress Party leader Sharad Pawar is holding a similar event on March 27; even the TDP has broken its alliance with the BJP to move a no-confidence motion against the government; Trinamul Congress leader Mamata Banerjee has held a meeting with K. Chandrashekhar Rao of the TRS to explore the formation of a non-BJP, non-Congress alliance of regional parties; Congress president Rahul Gandhi has called on Sharad Pawar; and at the 84th plenary session of the Congress a political resolution has been adopted calling for a pragmatic approach to cooperation with all like-minded parties and a common workable programme against the BJP in the next general election.

Of these moves, Ms Banerjee and Mr Raos proposed federal front has the potential to divide the non-BJP Opposition. In trying to battle the Congress in their respective regions, these leaders may undermine the larger national level struggle of the Opposition to oust the BJP. As of now, however, these are exploratory moves and their outcomes are uncertain. It may be too early to judge whether the rising East Wind will grow strong enough to wither the Narendra Modi government in 2019.Over 80 persons, most of them Muslims but also some from the dalit community among Hindus, who have traditionally done carcass removal in rural India, were done to death with the legal system not bothering to take cow vigilantism seriously.

A fast-track court in Jharkhands Ramgarh awarded the life term on Wednesday to 11 of the 12 accused in a cow-connected lynch-mob murderous assault against a Muslim meat trader. One of those convicted is the BJPs district official handling media operations. In the two years, from about September 2015 to around July 2017, that cow vigilante murders had a free rein, this is the first conviction and sentencing. Its thus a matter of belated satisfaction that the legal system has at last delivered.

It must be seen if the convicted persons go in appeal with the support, open or tacit, of the multitude of local outfits spawned by Hindutva forces. In Rajasthan, they came out openly to back a man who killed a poor Muslim labourer with an axe and had the killing videographed.

Over 80 persons, most of them Muslims but also some from the dalit community among Hindus, who have traditionally done carcass removal in rural India, were done to death with the legal system not bothering to take cow vigilantism seriously.

When in June 2017, thousands of Indians rose in cities across the country to protest against cow vigilantism under the banner of Not In My Name, Prime Minister Narendra Modi did take note, but his rebuke was lukewarm and appeared tailored to meeting the criticism mounted on such a wide scale.

The first vigilante murder was that of Akhlaq near Delhi. When one of the crime leaders later died, his body was draped in a party flag and honoured by a BJP minister, leading many to believe that cow vigilantism is a political ploy to polarise Hindu votes.The law minister, who also holds charge of information technology, has been fulminating about summoning Facebooks founder-CEO Mark Zuckerberg to India to explain data theft from his social media platform and the alleged use of such data to influence elections. There is perhaps nothing more risible than this belated threat to haul up a tech titan at a time when big data is playing havoc with the traditional democratic format of political parties. For a nation that has so many problems bringing back its own kind in renegade businessmen who have flown the coop and are refusing to return, such dramatic gestures like summoning head honchos to appear before inquiry commissions and suchlike have a hollow ring.

The political rhetoric over the da ta scandal enveloping the cloak-and-dagger firm of Cambridge Analytica is essentially diversionary. There is nothing in the statutes to have prevented the hiring of a firm like Cambridge Analytica or its subsidiaries and associates. Both leading political parties in India may have in some way used or intended to use their services. The exposures about the firm does, however, point to an evolving mechanism of trying to alter behaviour of a large set of targeted people by the use of behavioural science into acting in certain ways, such as voting for a particular party. Major Indian parties, always afraid of losing their appeal to voters, havent been averse to hiring such mechanisms like big data analysis which may not be illegal, but certainly stretch the moral fabric. The Steve Bannon-inspired firm at the heart of the data theft had been quite the dirty tricks department of the Donald Trump poll campaign. But its not only Cambridge Analytica that is under the scanner in thesocial media-dominated modern era.

From its inception in college dorms, Mark Zuckerbergs Facebook was intended to connect people. Even as a couple of billion users may be assessing Zuckerbergs mea culpa when intending to take a call on their accounts, where Facebook went wrong is in giving access to user data, even if it was to a researcher. As the data was manipulated in mind control games and probably helped swing a major election, it is the citizens of democracies who are under threat of being devalued by the use of such methodology. Given the laxity of our legal frameworks, such voter or consumer influencing mechanisms are certain to crop up in some form. It will be up to political parties to agree on how to keep such strategies out, although some of them could be rendered obsolescent if they dont modernise their outreach. The issue assumes salience when major elections are coming up. Populist propaganda and inter-party wrangling are not going to help us in facing up to newer and more complex mechanisms challenging notions of democracy.This artist's rendering shows the first interstellar asteroid: 'Oumuamua. This unique object was discovered on Oct. 19, 2017 by the Pan-STARRS 1 telescope in Hawaii. (Photo: AP)

Our first known interstellar visitor likely came from a two-star system. That's the latest from astronomers who were amazed by the mysterious cigar-shaped object, detected as it passed through our inner solar system last fall.

The University of Toronto's Alan Jackson reported that the asteroid - the first confirmed object in our solar system originating elsewhere - is probably from a binary star system. That's where two stars orbit a common centre. According to Jackson and his team, the asteroid was likely ejected from its system as planets formed.

"It has been wandering interstellar space for a long time since," the scientists wrote in the Royal Astronomical Society's journal, Monthly Notices.

Discovered in October by a telescope in Hawaii millions of miles away, the asteroid is called Oumuamua, Hawaiian for messenger from afar arriving first, or scout. The red-tinged rock is estimated to be possibly 1,300 feet (400 meters) long and zooming away from the Earth and sun at more than 16 miles (26 kilometres) per second.

Last month, a science team led by Wesley Fraser of Queen's University Belfast reported that Oumuamua is actually tumbling through space, likely the result of a collision with another asteroid or other object that kicked it out of its home solar system. He expects it to continue tumbling for billions of more years. Scientists originally thought it might be an icy comet, but now agree it is an asteroid.

"The same way we use comets to better understand planet formation in our own solar system, maybe this curious object can tell us more about how planets form in other systems," Jackson said in a statement.

Close binary star systems may be the source of the majority of interstellar objects out there, both icy comets and rocky asteroids, according to the researchers.

Click on Deccan Chronicle Technology and Science for the latest news and reviews. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter.

Click on Deccan Chronicle Technology and Science for the latest news and reviews. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter.In the wake of a privacy scandal involving a Trump-connected data-mining firm, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg embarked on a rare media mini-blitz in an attempt to take some of the public and political pressure off the social network. But its far from clear whether hes won over US and European authorities, much less the broader public whose status updates provide Facebook with an endless stream of data it uses to sell targeted ads.

On March 21, the generally reclusive Zuckerberg sat for an interview on CNN and gave another to the publication Wired, addressing reports that Cambridge Analytica purloined the data of more than 50 million Facebook users in order to sway elections. The Trump campaign paid the firm $6 million during the 2016 election, although it has since distanced itself from Cambridge. Zuckerberg apologized for a major breach of trust, admitted mistakes and outlined steps to protect users following Cambridges data grab.

I am really sorry that happened, Zuckerberg said on CNN. Facebook has a responsibility to protect its users data, he added, noting that if it fails, we dont deserve to have the opportunity to serve people.

His mea culpa on cable television came a few hours after he acknowledged his companys mistakes in a Facebook post, but without saying he was sorry. Zuckerberg and Facebooks No. 2 executive, Sheryl Sandberg, had been quiet since news broke Friday that Cambridge may have used data improperly obtained from roughly 50 million Facebook users to try to sway elections. Cambridges clients included Donald Trumps general-election campaign.

Facebook shares have dropped some 8 per cent, lopping about $46 billion off the companys market value, since the revelations were first published. While several experts said Zuckerberg took an important step with the CNN interview, few were convinced that he put the Cambridge issue behind him. Zuckerbergs apology, for instance, seemed rushed and pro forma to Helio Fred Garcia, a crisis-management professor at NYU and Columbia University.

He didnt acknowledge the harm or potential harm to the affected users, Garcia said. I doubt most people realized he was apologizing. Instead, the Facebook chief pointed to steps the company has already taken, such as a 2014 move to restrict the access outside apps had to user data. (That move came too late to stop Cambridge.) And he laid out a series of technical changes that will further limit the data such apps can collect, pledged to notify users when outsiders misuse their information and said Facebook will audit apps that exhibit troubling behaviour.

That audit will be a giant undertaking, said David Carroll, a media researcher at the Parsons School of Design in New York  one that he said will likely turn up a vast number of apps that did troubling, distressing things.

But on other fronts, Zuckerberg carefully hedged otherwise striking remarks. In the CNN interview, for instance, he said he would be happy to testify before Congress  but only if it was the right thing to do. Zuckerberg went on to note that many other Facebook officials might be more appropriate witnesses depending on what Congress wanted to know.

At another point, the Facebook chief seemed to favour regulation for Facebook and other internet giants. At least, that is, the right kind of rules, such as ones requiring online political ads to disclose who paid for them. In almost the next breath, however, Zuckerberg steered clear of endorsing a bill that would write such rules into federal law, and instead talked up Facebooks own voluntary efforts on that front.

Theyll fight tooth and nail to fight being regulated, said Timothy Carone, a Notre Dame business professor. In six months well be having the same conversations, and its just going to get worse going into the election.

Even Facebooks plan to let users know about data leaks may put the onus on users to educate themselves. Zuckerberg said Facebook will build a tool that lets users see if their information had been impacted by the Cambridge leak, suggesting that the company wont be notifying people automatically. Facebook took this kind of do-it-yourself approach in the case of Russian election meddling, in contrast to Twitter, which notified users who had been exposed to Russian propaganda on its network.

In what has become one of the worst backlashes Facebook has ever seen, politicians in the US and Britain have called for Zuckerberg to explain its data practices in detail. State attorneys general in Massachusetts, New York and New Jersey have opened investigations into the Cambridge mess. And some have rallied to a movement that urges people to delete their Facebook accounts entirely.

Sandy Parakilas, who worked in data protection for Facebook in 2011 and 2012, told a UK parliamentary committee Wednesday that the company was vigilant about its network security but lax when it came to protecting users data. He said personal data including email addresses and in some cases private messages was allowed to leave Facebook servers with no real controls on how the data was used after that.

Paul Argenti, a business professor at Dartmouth, said that while Zuckerbergs comments hit the right notes, they still probably arent enough. The question is, can you really trust Facebook, he said. I dont think that question has been answered.

Click on Deccan Chronicle Technology and Science for the latest news and reviews. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter.

Click on Deccan Chronicle Technology and Science for the latest news and reviews. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter."I started Facebook, and at the end of the day I'm responsible for what happens on our platform," Zuckerberg wrote.

Facebook Inc Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg said on Wednesday that his company made mistakes in how it handled data belonging to 50 million of its users and promised tougher steps to restrict developers access to such information.

The worlds largest social media network is facing growing government scrutiny in Europe and the United States about a whistleblowers allegations that London-based political consultancy Cambridge Analytica improperly accessed user information to build profiles on American voters which were later used to help elect US President Donald Trump in 2016.

Zuckerberg, in his first public comments since the scandal erupted at the weekend, said in a post on Facebook that the company "made mistakes, there's more to do, and we need to step up and do it."

He did not elaborate on what the mistakes were, but he said the social network plans to conduct an investigation of apps on its platform, restrict developer access to data, and give members a tool that lets them more easily disable access to their Facebook data.

His plans did not represent a big reduction of advertisers ability to use Facebook data, which is the companys lifeblood.

Zuckerberg later told CNN, This was a major breach of trust. Im really sorry this happened. We have a basic responsibility to protect peoples data.

He told CNN that Facebook was committed to stopping interference in the US midterm election in November and elections in India and Brazil.

Zuckerberg said he was open to additional government regulation and happy to testify before the US Congress if he was the right person.

Im not sure we shouldnt be regulated, he said. I actually think the question is more what is the right regulation rather than yes or no, should it be regulated? ... People should know who is buying the ads that they see on Facebook.

Facebook shares pared gains on Wednesday after Zuckerbergs post, closing up 0.7 per cent. The company has lost more than $45 billion of its stock market value over the past three days on investor fears that any failure by big tech firms to protect personal data could deter advertisers and users and invite tougher regulation.

Facebook representatives including Deputy Chief Privacy Officer Rob Sherman met US congressional staff for nearly two hours on Wednesday and planned to continue meetings on Capitol Hill on Thursday. Facebook was unable to answer many questions, two aides who attended the briefing said.

Zuckerberg told the website Recode that fixes to protect users' data would cost "many millions of dollars."

The whistleblower who launched the scandal, Christopher Wylie, formerly of Cambridge Analytica, said in a tweet that he had accepted invitations to testify before US and UK lawmakers.

The German government said Facebook must explain whether the personal data of the countrys 30 million users were protected from unlawful use by third parties, according to a report in the Funke group of German regional newspapers.

SCAPEGOAT

On Tuesday, the board of Cambridge Analytica suspended its Chief Executive Alexander Nix, who was caught in a secret recording boasting that his company played a decisive role in Trumps victory.

But the academic who provided the data disputed that on Wednesday.

I think what Cambridge Analytica has tried to sell is magic, and theyve made claims that this is incredibly accurate and it tells you everything there is to tell about you. But I think the reality is its not that, psychologist Aleksandr Kogan, an academic at Cambridge University, told the BBC in an interview broadcast on Wednesday.

Kogan, who gathered the data by running a survey app on Facebook, also said that he was being made a scapegoat by Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. Both companies have blamed Kogan for alleged data misuse.

Only 300,000 Facebook users responded to Kogans quiz, but that gave the researcher access to those peoples Facebook friends as well, who had not agreed to share information, producing details on 50 million users.

Facebook has said it subsequently made changes that prevent people from sharing data about friends, and maintains that no data breach occurred because the original users gave permission. Critics say that it essentially was a breach because data of unsuspecting friends was taken.

Facebook banned Cambridge Analytica from using any of Facebooks services on Friday.

Zuckerberg said the company will restrict developers data access even further to prevent other kinds of abuse and that the company is working with regulators as they investigate what happened.

Many analysts have now raised concerns that the incident will have a negative impact on user engagement with Facebook, potentially reducing its clout with advertisers. Three Wall Street brokerages cut their price targets.

Investors now have to consider whether or not the company will conclude that it has grown in a manner that has proven to be untenable or whether it needs to significantly improve how it is managed, said Pivotal Research Group analyst Brian Wieser.

Facebook shares are down more than 8 per cent since Friday. The company has risen more than 550 per cent in value in the past five years.

Click on Deccan Chronicle Technology and Science for the latest news and reviews. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter.

Click on Deccan Chronicle Technology and Science for the latest news and reviews. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter.The statement says the move aims to deny Asperman the resources he needs to plan and carry out further terrorist attacks. (Photo: Representational)

Washington: The Trump administration is imposing sanctions on a French chemical weapons expert accused of making and using such munitions for the Islamic State group in Syria.

The State Department on Thursday identified Joe Asperman as a "specially designated global terrorist." The listing comes with penalties including the freezing of any assets he may have in US jurisdictions and bars Americans from any transactions with him.

The designation applies to foreigners who have committed or pose a risk of committing terrorist acts that threaten US national interests.

The statement says the move aims to deny Asperman the resources he needs to plan and carry out further terrorist attacks.

It says Asperman is a senior chemical weapons expert who oversaw IS chemical operations production in Syria and deployed them at the battlefront.Hamas-run security forces in Gaza had earlier on Thursday detained the main suspect in last weeks assassination attempt against Palestinian Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah after a gunbattle in which two security officers were killed, a security official said. (Photo: AP)

Gaza: The main suspect in last weeks attempted assassination of Palestinian Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah died of his wounds after a gun battle on Thursday with Hamas-run security forces in the Gaza Strip, a security official said.

Another gunman and two security officers were also killed in the shootout, the official said.

Hamas-run security forces in Gaza had earlier on Thursday detained the main suspect in last weeks assassination attempt against Palestinian Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah after a gunbattle in which two security officers were killed, a security official said.

The suspect, who was not immediately identified, was wounded in the shootout with security forces that surrounded his hideout in the central Gaza Strip, the official said.

Two other gunmen were also detained, the official added.

Hamdallah and Palestinian Security Chief Majid Farajs convoy was attacked by a roadside bomb in Gaza on March 13. They were uninjured.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Monday blamed Hamas for the explosion. His remarks threatened reconciliation efforts to end a decade-old rift between his Fatah faction and the Islamist Hamas group that is dominant in Gaza.

Hamas had declared a $5,000 reward for anyone giving information about the suspects whereabouts. It provided no immediate details on his alleged motive or of an affiliation to any militant group.

Abbas, who is based in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, has offered no evidence of the involvement of Hamas in the attempt against Hamdallahs life. But he said he did not trust Hamas to investigate the incident honestly and that there had been zero progress in the Egyptian-brokered reconciliation.

Hamas seized the Gaza Strip from forces loyal to Fatah in 2007.SC bench seeks report for not registering complaint against Parajuli

The Supreme Court (SC) has directed the court administration to present a report for not registering a complaint against outgoing Chief Justice Gopal Prasad Parajuli.Monther Fares, a spokesman for the rebel faction Ahrar al-Sham, says his groups fighters are preparing to leave. He says fighters are waiting for buses to arrive to take them and their families to other rebel-held areas in north Syria. (Photo: AP)

Beirut: Syrian rebels and their families are expected to leave a besieged town in the eastern Ghouta suburbs of Damascus, in an evacuation deal that will see the town handed over to the government following years of bombardment.

Monther Fares, a spokesman for the rebel faction Ahrar al-Sham, says his groups fighters are preparing to leave. He says fighters are waiting for buses to arrive to take them and their families to other rebel-held areas in north Syria.

The government-controlled Military Media Centre says 1,500 rebels and 6,000 civilians will leave Harasta on Thursday.

Also Read: So many scared faces: Ghouta sirens distress call, death toll rises to 1000

The deal is modelled after others that have had rebels surrender swaths of territory around the capital and other major cities to the government. The UN and human rights groups have condemned such arrangements as forced displacement.Indonesian Hasria swimming with hundreds of jars tied to her back to get clean water in Tinambung, West Sulawesi. (Photo: AFP)

Makassar: Indonesian Mama Hasria swims upstream with about 200 empty jerry cans tied to her back, a daily trip she and other local women make to get clean water for their community on Sulawesi island.

Hasria makes the 4 km, hour-long trip in the hot sun along the murky Man-dar river to clean water wells built along the riverbank. There, the 46-year-old fills up her cans with clean water made drinkable by the surrounding soil which acts as a natural filter and purifier.

The work of Hasria and her fellow water collectors, who get paid about 500 rupiah (3.5 US cents) for each can, or $7 for the whole load, is vital for some 5,800 families in Tinambung district.

The World Water Day, a UN initiative, focuses this year on nature-based solutions for sourcing potable water globally.

It is a challenge in Tinambung where residents have complained for years about limited access to clean water in the remote fishing village.

We have to collect water from upstream for drinking and cooking, Hasria said. Water can only be used for bathing and doing laundry.

Indonesia has the dubious distinction of hosting the filthy Citarum river, that empties into the sea near Jakarta. A decade ago, the World Bank declared it the most-polluted river in the world.

Faced with a health emergency after decades of failed efforts, the government is stepping in to making the Citarums water drinkable by 2025.SALT LAKE CITY  Sarah Fornace had a sense that Manual Cinema, the new performance collective she and some friends had started, was going to work right from the start. She was sitting in the audience of their first official performance and she could sense something happening to the people around her.

"We only had one projector. We would set up, open it and animate it and then close it, and then set the next one and open it. It kind of felt like it was being telegraphed from the moon," she told the Deseret News. "And even then, at the slower paces, you could really feel the audience leaning in."

Fornace is the co-artistic director of the Chicago-based group Manual Cinema, which is making a stop at Kingsbury Hall on March 29. What exactly the group does is best described by its name: manually creating live cinema through puppetry, shadows, projectors, sound effects, live music and actors. Fornace said it's an experience that engages people in unexpected ways.

"I think (people connect with it) because the medium asks (the audience) to do work since theres no faces and no words," she said. "But it also leaves space for audiences to project themselves and what they themselves need in the story. So even though (Manual Cinema) asks for work, it also gives a lot of room for people. I think thats why audiences can have such an emotional relationship (to it.)"

In 2010, Fornace and fellow founder and co-artistic director Julia Miller were living in Chicago and working with various theater groups around the city, including Blair Thomas and Company, a well-known touring puppet theater troupe. Miller had an idea for a show of their own, using a projector she found in her garage. After teaming up with a local indie band  that fortuitously had a background in music composition and experimental sound design  they started performing a 20-minute narrative production titled "Lula Del Rey" with live musicians, puppets and actors. More ideas, inventions and experimental shows followed, including a non-advertised performance they staged in Fornace's home bay window on Halloween, and Manual Cinema started to grow.

Now, after years of touring, dozens of new productions and countless live shows, Fornace said their shows are just as "manual" as when they started eight years ago.

"Everything is created during the performance," she said. "All of the music, all of the visuals, all of the acting, so its like seeing a movie created live in front of you. And as an audience member, you can choose to watch just the screen above  just watch the linear, silent film thats being created  or you can look down at the puppeteers and see how its being made or look at the band."

The screen above the stage reflects a projection  literally  of the work happening below it. Each Manual Cinema show begins with large stacks of paper on stage that the actors cut into shadow sets, characters and anything else they may need to tell the story. Fornace said they create as many as 400 or 500 pieces as a show progresses, combining the newly created puppets with actors, musicians and sound cues for a truly live experience.

"We make all of the visual for the show, theres no premade video," Fornace said. " Youll see the performers creating digital edits, cuts and dissolves, with just using their hands and pieces of paper. Actors jump in and out of shadow silhouettes to play the character and then switch off in the next shot with a puppet who then takes over the character."

Live musicians accompany this process in a format somewhat similar to early silent films, with sound effects and music helping draw each story along. Fornace said that the history of cinema, from the silents to contemporary films, influences each of their new productions.

"We often look to specific film traditions and film directors," she said. "As we were creating (the production) "Ada/Ava," we were watching a lot of Hitchcock, film noir.  Once we have a story, we ask ourselves, 'What movie is this like and what shots can we do as homage and what conversations can we have with those films?'"

Those in Manual Cinema will perform their Hitchcockian "Ada/Ava" when they come to Utah, a noir production about an elderly woman who has lost her twin sister and is struggling to reimagine life without her other half, according to Manual Cinema's website.

As the Utah audience watches the show unfold, Fornace revealed there is one tell-tale way to know how the action is moving along: the progress of those sheets of paper on stage.

"As we use them we throw them under the table so its a physical record of the show. As the puppet stacks get smaller and smaller, were getting closer to the end of the story."

But not the end of Manual Cinema, which has stacks of stories ready in the wings for years to come.

If you go 

What: Manual Cinema: "Ada/Ava"

When: Thursday, March 29, 7:30 p.m.

Where: Kingsbury Hall, 1395 Presidents Circle

How much: $5 for U. students, $10 for ages 18 and under and non-U. students, $20 for general admission

Phone: 801-581-7100

Web: tickets.utah.eduI was deeply saddened by a recent report that painted me as the kind of person who would try to shield or even protect a sexual predator and serial abuser. Let me be clear, I have not and would never knowingly do anything to shield any individual who acted inappropriately with respect to sexual harassment. That being said, I believe the facts surrounding my involvement in the allegations of sexual misconduct by former Provo Police Chief John King were misrepresented and not accurately reported.

I have the deepest respect and admiration for the brave victims who have come forward. I fully support them and continue to stand by their side. I cant imagine how hard this has been for them. As a husband, father and grandfather, my heart aches to think that there may have been something I could have done to help avoid the pain and trauma those victims have courageously faced. Anyone who knows me or has worked with me, knows that I would never deliberately tolerate the abhorrent behavior that John King has been accused of.

I want to set the record straight.

As mayor of Provo, I received two complaints regarding former Police Chief John King. The first incident was when a police dispatcher informed the city that she felt uncomfortable with the way the former chief looked at her. I never once questioned the validity of this allegation, and worked with both the human resource and legal departments of Provo City to resolve the complaint. I insisted that the matter be promptly resolved by Provo Citys human resources team. I personally worked with the chief to set boundaries in dispatch to make a better work environment for the employee.

The second incident occurred when I received a phone call in my car from a woman who explained that she had been raped by the Provo police chief. Again, I did not question the validity of her story, and I took her allegation extremely seriously. Within minutes, I contacted the appropriate city officials. In addition, I contacted Utah County to insist they pursue an independent investigation of this allegation. In order to avoid any potential conflict, Utah County requested that the Salt Lake County Sheriffs Office perform the investigation. The chief was put on administrative leave while Salt Lake County investigated. Ultimately, they came to the conclusion that no charges should be filed and the Salt Lake County district attorney determined not to pursue any criminal charges.

Regardless, the allegations were so serious that I insisted John King resign from his position as Provo police chief.

Contrary to what has been reported, these are the only two allegations of misconduct that I ever received regarding Chief King. I took both seriously and took decisive action to ensure that any misconduct would be addressed immediately. I never attempted to protect or shield John King or the alleged horrendous actions.

Like others, I have asked myself many times how someone with a background like John King was ever hired as Provos chief of police in the first place. In 2013, Provo City contracted with a firm to screen potential candidates for the vacant police chief job. The thorough screening process included a background check, a psychiatric evaluation and a polygraph examination. A seven-member hiring committee, which I was not a part of, interviewed the finalists for the job and described John King as an outstanding candidate. After that recommendation, references were checked and I even personally contacted several others independent of those King had provided. Through all this, I was never made aware of any information that would have led me to suspect that he was a serial sexual offender.

All that being said, it is clear that he had been accused of sexual harassment by female co-workers while working for other police departments, and somehow, we missed those warning signs. It is a shame to me that his former employers failed to report these allegations to us, and that our own careful vetting processes failed as well.

As mayor, I believe I tried my best to respond to these allegations. I ask my friends, neighbors and constituents to not judge me solely on a mischaracterization of my involvement in this heartbreaking situation.

I have and continue to be fully committed to transparency and accessibility to all those who I represent.SALT LAKE CITY  President Donald Trump congratulated Vladimir Putin on the Russian president's election victory this past Sunday and suggested the two leaders would soon meet in person.

Seven weeks earlier, Trump's man in Moscow  former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman Jr.  said in an interview with the radio station Echo of Moscow that the two men are moving toward a face-to-face meeting.

"We have to take the steps that build the trust and create a framework of problem-solving that results in enough success where the people in Russia and the people in the United States can say, 'OK I understand why theyre having a formal meeting. Theyve done enough together, theyve built enough trust. Theyve had enough in the way of success in Syria and Ukraine, (North Korea),'" Huntsman said.

Huntsman headed to Russia as U.S. ambassador last October recognizing the relationship between the two countries is at a low point. But in the Jan. 31 radio interview, he said Trump and Putin already have some successes from their informal meetings.

Trump is taking heat for congratulating Putin on his re-election during a phone call Tuesday in which the two leaders also discussed the state of bilateral relations and resolved to continue talking about mutual national security priorities and challenges.

Trump emphasized the importance of denuclearizing the Korean peninsula and confirmed the need for the United States and Russia to continue their shared efforts on strategic stability, according to the White House.

"We had a very good call, and I suspect that we'll probably be meeting in the not-too-distant future to discuss the arms race, which is getting out of control," Trump told reporters.

In the radio interview, Huntsman said "President Trump has told me personally on more than one occasion how much he values conversations with President Putin."

Huntsman said Trump and Putin have also talked on the margins of some gatherings, specifically the Hamburg G20 and more recently the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in Danang, Vietnam.

The work that established the "most important" ceasefire in southwestern Syria since the war started came out of the Hamburg sidebar, Huntsman said. The brief meeting in Danang last November resulted in Trump and Putin signing a joint statement on solving the Syria conflict.

"You can have a five-minute pull-aside that results in something that totally changes the dynamic on the battlefield or the transition to government. Thats how important the work is between the United States and Russia," the ambassador said. "So over time, of course, there will be more formal meetings."

Huntsman has spent his first few months on the job trying to meet as many Russians as possible, from people on the street to high-level officials.

Ive been able to access people who no ambassador in recent years has been able to access, in the military side, on the intelligence side, and mostly, on the national security issues where were deeply involved and in joint efforts, where we need to meet, where we need to carry messages, where its critical to get the work done, he told Foreign Policy in his first interview with the Western press since arriving in Moscow.

The March 14 story in Foreign Policy notes that Moscow and Washington remain at odds over everything from Syria to North Korea as well as the simmering war in Ukraine. There are also U.S. sanctions on Russia for its annexation of Crimea and additional measures for meddling in the 2016 presidential election.

The way forward is uncertain, but Huntsman makes clear what he will not be doing, according to the story.

"In the years past, every new administration has tried to reset, or redo of some sort, and lets not repeat the cycles of the past, because in every case, the reality was such that those resets could not be sustained, he said. Lets not even begin with that thought in mind; no resets, no redos. Just take the relationship for what it is, clear-eyed and realistically."

The radio interviewer told Huntsman that 69 percent of Russians believe the U.S. is unfriendly to Russia.

Huntsman said he has talked to some of those people in the street and misinformation can give a snapshot of a negative or hostile relationship, adding that type of rhetoric needs to stop.

"I just think the wrong facts and the wrong details sometimes are out there, and theyre spun in an unfriendly and unhelpful way," he said. "If you were to get the real truth out there, I would say that people in Russia would see the relationship as one based on problem-solving, trying to fix things where our interests overlap and generally trying to do the right thing."SALT LAKE CITY It was Rosalyn Eves LDS mission to Hungary that helped inspire her to write a historical fantasy set in that country.

The Utah author knew she wanted her story to take place in the 19th century, and she was fascinated by the Hungarian Revolution, thanks to an 18 month mission she served for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in that country. Many hours of research later, this idea turned into her Blood Rose Rebellion young adult fantasy series.

"Lost Crow Conspiracy," the sequel to Eves' debut novel, "Blood Rose Rebellion," comes out this month and continues the story of Anna Arden, a young British woman who's found herself wrapped up in the Hungarian Revolution, especially because of her unique magical abilities.

In the sequel, Anna is in Vienna living with her sister while her brother-in-law works for the British embassy. Congress is meeting to decide the fate of the magical beings she released in the previous book, and, of course, nothing is going the way Anna hoped it would.

Eves introduces a second perspective character in this novel who, the author said, is very different from herself  making him particularly fun to write. One of the differences is the amount of swearing he does, which Eves said her children were scandalized by.

"I don't know how to write a 19th-century nobleman without swearing," Eves said. "It wasn't like I sat down and said, 'OK, he's going to be a little more vulgar.' It's just how he came out."

She also enjoyed adding some 19th-century Hungarian bandits to this book, something she researched heavily, discovering that Hungarians loved to romanticize their highwaymen. One famous bandit was even pardoned during the revolution to fight for his country, though after the war he went back to being a bandit and eventually died in prison.

But bandits aside, the central conflict in the book, Eves said, is within Anna.

"I think Anna is really feeling powerless," she said. "She had a lot of naive ideas in the first book about how society works and how much inertia she had to fight against."

Eves was working on "Lost Crow Conspiracy" as advance copies of "Blood Rose Rebellion" were being released. She suffered from a massive anxiety attack during this time.

"I realized I was letting people into my head, people I didn't know, and it was really terrifying," she said. "I've had anxiety most of my life, and it just flared up and I had to talk to people and get medication.

She was surprised by how this anxiety bled into Anna's character development in the second book.

"It actually worked really well because she'd been pretty confident and then discovered things weren't as neat as she thought they were going to be," Eves said. "It wasn't flawless and she didn't have the power she thought she was going to have. She spends a lot of the second book and even into the third book trying to figure out, 'What does this mean for me? Do I have a voice? How do I have a voice?' I think those are questions a lot of us grapple with."

Eves also admitted to struggling with writing the second and third books after getting a book deal for the first.

"Every time I would sit down and write, I would look at it and think, 'They're paying money for this and it's terrible,' because most first drafts are terrible. At least mine are," she said.

She's learned not to read reviews. Even good ones, she said, saddled her with expectations that made it hard for her to write. Though feedback is helpful while she revises, during the drafting phase she can't focus on what other people think.

Eves has a Ph.D. in English from Pennsylvania State University and has wanted to write novels since she was a little girl. She lost track of that dream for most of her 20s, then came back to it after graduating, marrying and having a couple kids. After writing her dissertation with a baby, she knew she could write a novel with kids too. She realized if she didn't do it then, she never would.

"Blood Rose Rebellion" was the second novel Eves wrote as an adult, and it only took her a few months after finishing it to get an agent and a book deal, which she emphasizes is not ordinary. She calls herself "lucky."

Now, she hopes readers will continue to enjoy the series as much as she does.

"The weird thing about writing is you put a lot of heart into it, but you never know until it comes out (how readers will receive it)," Eves said. "Writing is for you as a writer but once the book comes out, it's for the readers."

If you go 

What: Rosalyn Eves book signing

When: Thursday, March 29, 7 p.m.

Where: Provo Library, 550 N. University Ave., Provo

Web: kingsenglish.com

Note: Places in the signing line are reserved for those who purchase a copy of the featured book from The King's English.PLEASANT GROVE  Utah learning-management software company Instructure engaged in a festival of 10s on Wednesday, celebrating both its 10-year anniversary and cutting the ribbon on its 10th office location.

The company, best-known for its cloud-based Canvas platform that connects and streamlines interactions between students and instructors, employs more than 1,100 in Utah and around the world and will be able to accommodate 400 employees in its new facility.

In a statement, Jeff Weber, Instructure's senior vice president of people and places, said the company remains as committed to Utah now as it did when first launching in 2008.

"Utah has been our home base for 10 years and continues to provide us with the right atmosphere for growth," Weber said. "We value the smart talent pool that allows us to scale quickly and continue to build our culture of awesome innovators who are passionate about helping people maximize their potential in classrooms and in companies. The company benefits from strengthening our roots in Utah County, and the employees in our new office will thrive in this creative, productive space that accommodates our growing team."

Instructure was founded by two BYU computer science graduate students, Brian Whitmer and Devlin Daley, who began developing Canvas while still in school. The company earned the attention of outside investors soon after forming and, before going public in late 2015, had attracted almost $90 million in venture capital.

Canvas is a platform in wide use both in the U.S. and around the world. All of Utah's higher education institutions employ Canvas as well as 90 percent of the state's K-12 school districts. In a blog post featuring feedback from Utah teachers using Canvas, Mount Logan Middle School technology teacher Dave Anderson said the platform was key to managing his large group of students.

"Try to differentiate assignments for 180 students, allow them to work at their own pace, measure and report student progress every day, maintain individual portfolios and then help students individually," Anderson said. "Impossible? No. I use Canvas."

Since becoming a publicly traded company, Instructure has continued to thrive and expand. While the company's initial stock price near the end of 2015 was about $18 per share, its stock closed regular trading Wednesday at $45.15 per share with a market capitalization of over $1.5 billion.

Governor's Office of Economic Development Executive Director Val Hale, who attended the ribbon-cutting for Instructure's new office Wednesday, lauded the company's success in a statement.

"Entrepreneurism and business (are) thriving in Utah," Hale said. "Instructure is a true success story of a local startup that has grown to become a global and industry leader. We're excited for their success and confident their new offices in Pleasant Grove will be a tremendous benefit to our state as they continue to grow and innovate."SALT LAKE CITY  A bill giving terminally ill patients access to certain forms of medical cannabis was signed into law this week by Gov. Gary Herbert.

The new law, introduced and debated this year as HB195, allows a physician's recommendation of marijuana to be given to any patient who has been diagnosed as having "an incurable and irreversible disease" and likely has six months or less to live.

Herbert signed it Tuesday.

Forms of marijuana allowed to be recommended under the new law include a tablet, capsule, concentrated oil or patch, so long as the substance comes from a source approved by the state.

The law prohibits doctors from recommending cannabis to more than 25 terminally ill patients "at any given time."

A patient may be recommended up to a one-month supply at a time.

HB195, sponsored by Rep. Brad Daw, R-Orem, passed the House 40 to 26 and the Senate 19 to 3.

Advocates from Together for Responsible Use and Cannabis Education opposed the bill, saying it was too restrictive in the forms of marijuana it approved, that it was unwise to limit the number of terminally ill patients a doctor can make recommendations for, and was a distraction from efforts at legalization for a much broader group of patients via a ballot initiative.

However, Daw characterized the bill as measured legislation designed to give relief to patients who have "exhausted all other methods of treatment" and are interested in trying the drug for their pain.

The governor has not yet signed HB197, which asks the Department of Agriculture to contract with a third party to grow marijuana directly in Utah. Daw has said that some of the cannabis grown under the bill, which narrowly survived its vote in the House of Representatives, would be used to assist the terminally ill patients described in HB195.

Also awaiting Herbert's signature is SB130, which authorizes the state to more vigorously regulate the sale of CBD oil and making it possible for patients to buy it from a pharmacy with a doctor's recommendation.

Herbert has signed HB302, which allows those who obtain a license from the state to grow hemp products commercially. Though it is related to the marijuana plant, hemp contains extremely low levels of THC, marijuana's psychoactive component.

The governor has likewise signed HB25, which makes adjustments to a state-appointed body which reviews existing marijuana reasearch, broadening what types of studies that board is asked to examine.MOUNTAIN GREEN, Morgan County  Ashley and Gavin McCleary hopped from house to house in Layton, Ogden, Syracuse, and Farmington, but they didn't feel at home until their family of six settled into a small mountainside community in Morgan County five years ago.

"It's not suburbia and it's not out-on-your-own country. It's that kind of perfect in-between where you feel like you've got a little bit more space, less traffic, clean air, and you're still close to all of the amenities and the work you need to have access to," Gavin McCleary said. "It's a hidden secret."

But more newcomers are tracing the McClearys' steps, new estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau confirm. The figures point to rapid population growth in their northern Utah county over a one-year period ending in July 2017.

Now home to roughly 11,800 people, Morgan jumped from the nation's 44th fastest-growing county to eighth, according to the estimates. The increase of about 500 is meaningful for the longtime farming community that has sprouted more subdivisions in recent years.

"It's a small county to begin with. Any increase in growth is going to be a large percentage," explained Pam Perlich, director of demographic research at the University of Utah's Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute. Its proximity to Ogden and to trails, reservoirs and towering peaks also makes for short work commutes and good quality of life, Perlich added.

The McClearys know firsthand. In spring, the parents and their three sons and daughter  ages 5, 7, 9 and 12  sometimes ski at Snowbasin Resort and then mountain bike on trails near home on the same day.

It takes more planning to organize trips to the store down the canyon road to Morgan, Ashley McCleary said, but "it just is so picturesque every day that it's hard to take for granted."

But they also have experienced for themselves the area's rising popularity. They faced a tight housing market in 2016 when they were building a new home and found it difficult to find a short-term apartment to lease until the paint dried, Gavin McCleary said.

Morgan is not alone. It's one of three Utah counties that have cracked the top 10 list of the nation's fastest growing. Wasatch County took third place, behind Virginia's Falls Church and Comal County in Texas. Tooele County came in seventh.

The three Utah counties are so-called ring areas. They're not dense enough to be considered metropolitan areas, but they're part of expanding urban communities, Perlich said.

"The Intermountain West continues to be an area of growth and dynamism. Within the state itself, that story of growth is happening very unevenly," Perlich said. "The kind of growth you're seeing in the metropolitan areas is just not shared by these rural counties."

Uintah County, bordering Colorado, is among the fastest-shrinking in the country, according to the figures, with a drop of 2.9 percent, or 1,044 fewer people, down to a total of 35,150. The drop is related to the region's volatile energy extraction industry, Perlich said.

The change in Utah is small in the broader, national picture.

When sheer numbers are considered, Arizona's Maricopa County, which surrounds Phoenix and its suburbs, swelled the most in the one-year period, with 73,600 people, a 1.7 percent change that puts the current population at slightly more than 4.3 million. Las Vegas' Clark County came in second.

Perlich, the top state demographer tasked with tracking the census figures, said the new numbers are consistent with her team's independent analyses that rely on local data using different methods.

Other things to know about growth in Utah:

Rapid pace in St. George: Southwestern Utah's biggest city, population 165,600, is expanding faster than any other metropolitan area in the country, the figures show. It logged a 4 percent boost  about 6,400 people  in the one-year timeframe. The newcomers largely are coming from other parts of Utah, but some also move from California, said Perlich.

And many of the new residents are of retirement age, confirms Perlich's own analysis of Medicare data. Just behind St. George were Myrtle Beach and its surrounding areas in South and North Carolina, with a 3.7 percent growth rate.

Provo/Orem continues to grow: The two-city Utah County area with a high student population also was a top 10 metropolis, with a 2.7 percent increase  about 16,000 people  putting the total population at 617,600.

LDS culture influence: Utah has the second-highest fertility rate in the nation: Women of child-bearing age in the Beehive State have more kids than in any other state except South Dakota. Utah's growth rate has slowed as the births have dipped and its population ages, Perlich said, but it still remains in the top three, behind neighboring Idaho, which had the most-rapid expansion of any state, and Nevada, according to an earlier Census review.

"For the foreseeable future, Utah remains the heart of the 'Mormon Culture' region," Perlich added. "Births clearly, significantly exceed deaths in Utah. We've got strong natural increase. But it's not the mainstay of growth throughout the entire state, and Washington County is a clear example of that."PROVO  A police report released Wednesday evening shed new light on allegations against a former president of the LDS Church's Missionary Training Center in Provo.

In an interview with BYU University Police three months ago, Joseph L. Bishop, 85, said he asked a missionary to expose her breasts to him in a room at the MTC in 1984, which she did, but he denied her allegation that he raped her.

The new information came from a University Police case report originally released as a heavily redacted document to the Deseret News on Tuesday through an open-records request. On Wednesday evening, after reviewing Utahs open-records laws, University Police re-sent the report with much of the redaction lifted, including a recounting of the interview with Bishop.

"Josephs account was fairly similar to (hers) except for the rape," Sgt. Robert Nelson wrote in the report. "Joseph told us that he did go to his small MTC preparation room in the cafeteria area with (her). Then while talking to her he asked her to show him her breasts, which she did."

Bishop served as the MTC president for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from July 1983-86. He previously served as president of Weber State University from 1972-78.

Through his son, Bishop continued Wednesday night to adamantly deny committing any crimes.

"He was very clear there was not sexual activity, whether consensual or non-consensual," Gregory Bishop said.

Gregory Bishop said his father told him the woman exposed her breasts to him on her own in the summer of 1985 when she came to him for help after her mission, not in 1984 at the MTC.

The woman is now 55. The Deseret News typically does not name victims of alleged sexual assault without their permission.

Posing as a reporter, the woman confronted Bishop near his home in Arizona at the start of December 2017. She recorded that conversation. MormonLeaks released the recording on Monday without the permission of the woman, who told the Deseret News she was unhappy with the release, which she said created problems for her.

The new information from the BYU police report appeared to corroborate information on the recording, where Bishop admitted to going alone with her to what he said was a secondary office.

In the recording, she said he attempted to rape her. He responded that they talked about her breasts. Elsewhere on the tape, he admitted having inappropriate conversations with her, described himself as a sex addict and said yes when pointedly asked if he molested a second sister missionary.

Nelson said in the report that detectives listened to the recording, and he concluded it was consistent with the detectives interviews with the woman on Dec. 4 and Bishop on Dec. 5, except for whether a rape happened and the rooms layout. The woman told detectives the room had a bed, TV and VHS tapes. Bishop said it did not.

The Deseret News Tuesday reported that the first release of the BYU report included a note from a prosecutor saying that, based on BYU's investigation, he would have charged Bishop with a crime if the statute of limitations had not run out.

"I have no reason to doubt the victims disclosure, and would have likely prosecuted Mr. Bishop but for the expiration of the statute of limitations," deputy Utah County attorney David Sturgill told University Police. He said the statute of limitations for the undisclosed charge expired after four years.

Gregory Bishop said his father's memory of the time is foggy and that he was on medication after heart surgery when the tape was made. He said his father was holding himself to his own higher standard for a church leader when he said he was a sex addict and had molested the other woman.

Gregory Bishop also questioned the credibility of the woman who made the tape because of her criminal history and accusations she has made against other men.

The woman confirmed that some of that history is valid when she spoke Tuesday with the Deseret News, but she said it does not alter what she said happened with Bishop.

In the University Police report, Nelson said he and another detective on the case asked Bishop to explain "why his account of the rape was different from the womans."

"He said he either cant remember it or that (she) was exaggerating her account," Nelson stated.

In a statement released by the church Monday, LDS spokesman Eric Hawkins said the woman's allegation is "very serious and deeply disturbing."

"If the allegations of sexual assault are true," he added, "it would be a tragic betrayal of our standards and would result in action by the church to formally discipline any member who was guilty of such behavior, especially someone in a position of trust."Three cheers to Oli

PM Olis biggest challenge is not management of external ties but the three tiers of govtWhoever said The only thing that is constant is change obviously had nothing to do with building a convention hotel in Salt Lake City.

I wrote my first column on the perceived need for such a thing 23 years ago. Were still waiting for dirt to be turned, and conventions are still telling Visit Salt Lake, the county-supported convention and visitors bureau, they would love to come but they dont want their delegates spread around the city in lots of hotels.

Without a big hotel, the Salt Palace Convention Center, built about the time I wrote that first column, could be likened to a race car that is confined to residential streets where the speed limit is 25 mph.

But the holdup is not what you think.

Two years ago this month, Salt Lake County selected DDRM to be the developer  this after the winner of an earlier bidding process, Omni Hotels, pulled out because its demands for more of a taxpayer subsidy were refused.

That led to the usual posturing over whether a convention hotel is unique and important enough to the economic health of a community for government to give it a leg up over other hotels.

If the private market really was demanding a hotel, the conservative counterargument went, a developer already would have built one. Government should not be picking winners and losers.

But the hang-up today is not the lack of a public subsidy. Sources tell me the developer has assembled a deal that makes the hotel viable with mostly private money. The state has approved a $75 million subsidy, mostly to cover the cost of building meeting rooms directly tied to conventions. But the developer can access that money only after the project can prove it has fulfilled promises to add to the local economy.

The subsidy isnt an issue. The remaining challenges lie elsewhere, Im told.

Thats an encouraging bit of news, as is the persistent optimism of those associated with the project that it can be made to happen, no matter how long it might take.

I think its inevitable that we will, in this market, have a convention hotel, Scott Beck, president of Visit Salt Lake, told me.

He certainly hopes so. The city loses about 25 to 30 conventions a year because it doesnt have one.

Meanwhile, the cities Salt Lake competes with for convention business have such hotels, and virtually all of them were built with lots of taxpayer money. Beck said some conventions that come here need 20 or more hotels. For an event planner, that means 20 or more separate contracts with separate cancellation policies, etc.

And that doesnt begin to tell the story of the transportation challenges.

This isnt a problem unique to Salt Lake City. Lots of cities are struggling over whether to build, or encourage construction of, new convention hotels. Two years ago, the Indianapolis Business Journal said officials there were lamenting the loss of more than 1,000 hotel rooms over the previous five years. That had pushed the citys occupancy rate to more than 69 percent.

Salt Lake Countys rate already tops 70 percent.

Back in 1995, the county commissioned a study by Economics Research Associates that concluded a hotel could be built without much of a public subsidy, provided the county was willing to use its power to condemn property.

Utahns, fortunately, dont like the idea of taking private property by force. As luck would have it, that study was published just after the state Supreme Court ruled against Salt Lake County for the way it had condemned private property in the Union Fort area to make way for a large retail project.

I have been a persistent critic of the push to subsidize construction of a convention hotel. The way the state has structured its limited subsidies in this case, however, should not offend any philosophical sensibilities.

But I have never argued against the need for a hotel to boost a convention industry that adds life, and money, to the downtown area. If DDRM or any other developer can make it happen without any more public involvement, we should cheer them on and hope Im not still writing about it 20 years from now.St. George is officially the countrys fastest-growing metro area, according to a USA Today report on U.S. Census Bureau data.

Based on the new data, about 165,662 people lived in St. George during 2017, which is a 4 percent increase from the previous year.

Pam Perlich, director of demographic research at the Kem C. Gardner Policy Institute at the University of Utah, told USA Today that St. George saw a spike in growth in part because of Las Vegas.

"Certainly it's tied to the growth dynamic of the Greater Las Vegas area, but it's got its own internal growth dynamic, and there isn't another county in the state we can point to that has this," she said.

The Myrtle Beach area in South Carolina placed second on the list, jumping 3.7 percent to 446,793 people.

Areas such as Greeley, Colorado; Bend, Oregon; Coeur dAlene, Idaho; Lakeland-Winter Haven, Florida; Boise, Idaho; Austin-Round Rock, Texas; and The Villages, Florida, all ranked among the top 10, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

The Provo-Orem area also ranked among the top 10 fastest-growing metro areas, according to USA Today, placing eighth on the list. The area received a 2.7 increase in population to reach 601,478 people.

Utahs overall speed of growth has caught the eye of many, Perlich said.

Indeed, three Utah counties were among the top 10 fastest-growing areas in the United States, according to the census data. Wasatch County was third, while Tooele County placed second.

Morgan County, meanwhile, jumped for the 44th fastest-growing county to the eighth based on the census data, Deseret News reported.

"It's a small county to begin with. Any increase in growth is going to be a large percentage," Perlich told the Deseret News.

Perlich told the Deseret News that these counties represent ring areas, which are expanding urban communities.

"The Intermountain West continues to be an area of growth and dynamism. Within the state itself, that story of growth is happening very unevenly," Perlich said. "The kind of growth you're seeing in the metropolitan areas is just not shared by these rural counties."

Earlier this month, Forbes named Boise, another city in the Intermountain West, as the fastest-growing city in 2018.

Using Moodys Analytics, Forbes found that the city grew by 3.08 percent last year.

Adam Kamins, a senior economist at Moodys, told Forbes that Boise "is not necessarily a place you would associate with really robust growth.

But, he said, Boise has got the pieces in place. It's has got the location, it's got low cost, a healthy tech presence.PROVO  A Provo man has been arrested for causing the death of his girlfriend's 4-month-old daughter, according to police.

Cameron Chad Willingham, 23, was booked into the Utah County Jail Wednesday for investigation of child abuse homicide.

About 7:30 p.m. Monday, emergency crews were called on a report of a baby not breathing. "When patrol officers arrived, they found an unresponsive infant with serious injuries," according to a statement from Provo police.

Nevaeh King was taken by medical helicopter to Primary Children's Hospital. She died Wednesday morning of "serious head and neck injuries, as well as abdominal hemorrhaging," police said.

She had been on life support for approximately 36 hours, according to a police affidavit filed in 4th District Court.

Doctors found swelling on the baby's brain, a fractured rib, "and multiple hemorrhages in the abdominal region and rib cage," the affidavit states. Medical crews also noted "evidence of severe dehydration and malnutrition would imply child abuse."

Willingham is the boyfriend of Nevaeh's mother. He told police he was watching the child for about four hours leading up to the incident.

"Willingham admitted to 'tossing' the infant on the bed. (He) identified that earlier he had given the baby a bottle in effort to stop the baby from 'freaking out.' This bottle was given to police and contained dried up formula and mold as if old and not applied as stated by Cameron," the affidavit says.

Despite his arrest, a woman claiming to be the baby's mother called the Deseret News Thursday to defend Willingham.

"He loved that baby girl. He would never hurt her  ever," she said. "The love of my life is in jail for something he didn't do."

The woman contends police arrested Willingham because "he was the only one around to pin it on."

Provo Police Lt. Brian Taylor, however, said detectives established probable cause and denied the woman's claims.

"That's not what we do here. We investigate according to well understood, Fourth Amendment standards," he said. "We don't just arrest the first person. We investigate according to legal standards."

A woman who used to live with the mother when she was pregnant described Nevaeh as a sweet baby.

"The baby was the most pure soul you would ever meet. She would smile at, really, anyone, once she knew how. She was calm and quiet, said Trisha Creviston.

Court records show Willingham was convicted of misdemeanor drug possession twice in December in different jurisdictions. In December of 2016, Willingham was charged with misdemeanor assault in a domestic violence incident.

He was convicted of misdemeanor assault on a pregnant woman in September of 2016, and misdemeanor drug possession and failing to stop at an officer's commands in April of 2016, according to court records. Willingham pleaded no contest to unlawful sexual activity with a minor in 2014.

Contributing: Caitlin BurchillFilmmaker K.V. Anand Looking Forward To Rope In Priya Varrier For His Next

Kollywood filmmaker K.V. Anand is known to have helmed in movies such as Kana Kandaen, Maattrraan and Ayan. He has previously helmed the movie Kavan. According to a story published on regional.pinkvilla.com, the filmmaker is looking forward to rope in the internet sensation Priya Varrier in his upcoming movie.





Regarding this, a person from the Kollywood industry said, It is true that top Telugu producers and directors want to sign her for a couple of big Telugu films. Dil Raju who is making films with big stars like Sharwanand, Nithiin and Nani, was impressed with the cuteness of the girl and wanted to cast her opposite one of the top heroes. Similarly, UV Creations who are also making big films wanted to sign her. But would continue their efforts to launch her in Telugu industry.





On receiving movie offers, Priya said, I am very happy. Dont know how to handle so much love. Its completely surreal. Im falling short of words trying to express myself. Never expected this. Priya Varrier is a Malayalam actress who shot to limelight with her flawless winking style in the song of the movie Oru Adaar Love.





For latest movie reviews, ratings and trailers, download the Desimartini App.

Source: pbs.twimg.comThai number three dtac is in talks with state-owned CAT about the possibility of a long-term infrastructure partnership.

The companies made a previous attempt to form a joint venture but it was ruled illegal by the Council of State in 2015 as dtac held a 51% stake in the unit, which violated a law stipulating that the government must hold at least 51% of projects related to core state infrastructure.

With dtacs concessions with CAT set to expire on 15th September, the companies are discussing an infrastructure leasing agreement that would enable CAT to carry on using dtacs towers after this date. The state-owned operator is currently able to provide mobile services on the 850MHz and 1.8GHz bands, but the firms are looking to agree a deal that would extend this permission to all spectrum bands.

Dtac is looking to secure an agreement with CAT that will last at least 10 years, according to its chief of corporate affairs and business development officer Rajiv Bawa. He noted that the objective of a partnership would be to transfer ownership of 100% of dtacs 9000 2G telecoms towers to CAT with a build, operate, transfer arrangement.

Owned by Norways Telenor, dtac has seen its market share decline in the first quarter of the year, and was overtaken for second place by rival operator True. Its CEO Lars-Ake Norling is leaving the company in the third quarter, and the impending expiry of its concessions with CAT mean that the firm is likely to be adversely affected by the recent delay to Thailands planned spectrum auction. Dtac did not acquire any spectrum in 2015s auctions, so once its concessions expire it will have very limited spectrum.Reliance JioPhone, which run on KaiOS, a Linux-based light mobile Operating System (OS), may soon get WhatsApp.

According to Wabetainfo.com, a fan site that tests new WhatsApp features early, as of February 2018 KaiOS Technologies have acquired many new partners, including Facebook that also owns the popular messaging platform. This could indicate that the smart feature phone from Reliance Jio is readying to provide the WhatsApp messaging app to its users. Reliance JioPhone users can currently download the Facebook app on the phone. "The highly-coveted social media app has made its way to KaiOS-powered feature phones. This partnership supports access to Facebook via a native KaiOS app, thus allowing more users to connect with their friends and families," KaiOS wrote in a blog post last month.

"After stopping support for BlackBerry OS and Windows Phone 8, the Facebook-owned messaging platform is focusing to develop the app for this platform, providing an app for JioPhones," Wabetainfo reported. WhatsApp also recently dropped support for Nokia S40 and BlackBerry OS platforms.

Kai OS originates from the Firefox OS open-source project started in 2011 and has continued independently from Mozilla since 2016. KaiOS was first launched publicly in the US market in 2017 followed by the Indian market with the JioPhone.

The mobile OS supports 4G/LTE, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS and is compatible with chipsets from major manufacturers.Twelve jobs are to be recreated with a new whiskey distillery and visitors centre in west Donegal.

Udaras na Gaeltachta has given a support grant of 121,000 to Drioglann Thir Chonaill Teo for the project at Coillin Darach in Crolly.

The proposal involves refurbishing the old Crolly doll factory and the provision of a distillery. The proposal also includes a new visitor centre.

The Tir Chonaill distillery project is expected to create 12 jobs when fully operational in three years time.

The first batch of distilled whiskey will go on sale by 2022.

Donegal TD Joe McHugh has welcomed the support package to help get the project off the ground.

The boost that this investment will bring to the region should not be underestimated, the minister said.

The entrepreneurs behind the idea and support from government and Udaras for this brilliant project will breathe new life back into an old landmark in west Donegal.

Drioglann Thir Chonaill Teo will be a go-to destination for any tourist coming to the county and it will undoubtedly draw passing visitors who want to see history in the making.

The Irish whiskey industry aims to produce 24 million cases a year and tourism chiefs are targeting 1.9 million people to visit distilleries by 2025.

Less than five years ago there were just four distilleries in Ireland and the growth since has been phenomenal.

With the support of Udaras and the Government Donegal is going to capitalise on this huge local and international success story.

Seosamh O Duibheannaigh, Conor McMenamin and Kieran Davis deserve huge credit for the foresight theyve shown to drive this development and help create new and diverse employment in west Donegal.

I wish them every success and look forward to seeing the finished product.

Support for inventive projects like this is invaluable and could not be achieved without the 7 million euro in capital funding in the budget this year for Udaras and this figure will continue to increase over the lifetime of the 10 year capital plan.

I am delighted that funding will be going to this important project.

Boost for the area

Donegal TD Pat the Cope Gallagher, the Leas Cheann Comhairle of the Dail, has also welcomed the funding package agreed by Udaras na Gaeltachta.

The announcement is a great boost for the Crolly area and the proposed Distillery will be an immense addition to tourism in the area and source of employment for west Donegal in the years ahead, he said.

The proposal involves refurbishing the old Crolly doll factory and in excess of  1 million is granted to carry out these necessary works. In addition to the provision of a distillery, the proposal also includes a new visitor centre. The Tir Chonaill distillery project has the potential to create 12 jobs when fully operational in three years time.

Meantime, the entire premises at Crolly will undergo a major refurbishment in order to facilitate the new distillery; the building previously famous for the production of the Crolly Dolls is an iconic building and well-known structure located along the N56 in the village of Crolly.

The Tir Chonaill project has further proposals for greater expansion after the first phase is completed. This is welcome news and the development offers great potential for the area and job creation for west Donegal.

Iconic building

He wished those involved in the new project every success.

This Distillery project ticks all the boxes  it provides a product in an ever-growing market of whiskey production, it is utilising an iconic building for a new purpose, it is creating employment in a rural area and provides for further tourism diversity along the Wild Atlantic Way. This is a good news story for west Donegal and the entire county.Luxury brands will spearhead the electric car revolution. Despite relatively low sales of existing electric cars, a new wave of battery-powered vehicles from the likes of Jaguar, Porsche and Mercedes-Benz will help car buyers to embrace the new technology.

Thats the view of Audi product planning director Shawn Ticehurst, who confirmed that the four-ring brand will introduce the e-tron SUV to local showrooms in the second half of 2019 before the arrival of the e-tron Sportback (pictured below) in 2020.

Ticehurst shrugged off suggestions that the luxury brands could hold back on EVs in Australia due to a lack of demand, predicting that premium badge buyers will grow as the technology becomes more common.

[The market for EVs] will grow Im confident in that end of the market, Ticehurst told Drive.

I think it will. Theres going to be so many cars coming into the segment that will create its own momentum as well. I think some people are still working how this whole electric car thing works - where do I plug it in? How often do I need to plug it in? - but anyone who owns a Tesla has learnt to deal with that.

"Therell be a lot more hype about electric cars this year going into next year, and as long as the cars look great, theyre cool cars and theyre priced well that will create momentum.

However, he stopped short of confirming Audi Australia would introduce every new EV launched by the parent company. Following the e-tron and e-tron Sportback, Audi will launch an as-yet-unnamed compact EV in Europe before the end of 2020.

But while the e-tron and e-tron Sportback are locked in for Australia, beyond that Ticehurst believes its better to take a wait-and-see approach.

Weve got to evaluate the market. Ideally, yes [wed take all three], but weve got to make sure all three are right. I know the first one is 100 per cent [right], e-tron.

He added: The third one, which has just been described as a more compact car, weve just got to evaluate.

Beyond those three Audi has also confirmed the e-tron GT (pictured below), a performance model that will sit under the Audi Sport banner and could be available in Australia by 2021.UNDP showcases technology to propel good governance

A United Nations conference held here on Wednesday highlighted how new technology and innovation could propel better governance and help achieve Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).There has always been those who buck the trend, dont conform and push the boundaries. The BMW 6-Series Gran Turismo is definitely one of those things.

Part-sedan, part-wagon, part-SUV and not a Grand Tourer in the traditional sense, the 6-Series Gran Turismo doesnt really fit into any established segment. It blends elements of all those various vehicle types to create a spacious, practical luxury car for those who dont mind standing out.

In simple terms the new 6-Series GT is actually based on the same underpinnings as the latest generation 5-Series. Although it is based on new underpinnings the dimensions of car remain largely unchanged (it has the same wheelbase and width) but the body has been lengthened by 87mm and the roofline lowered by 20mm to create a more stylish silhouette compared to the sometimes awkward 5-Series GT.

As the name implies it sits as part of the revised 6-Series line-up that consists solely of the Gran Turismo as the Coupe, Convertible and four-door Gran Coupe will soon be moved up to create the all-new 8-Series range.

What do you get?

There are two 6-Series Gran Turismo to choose from - the $123,500 (plus on-road costs) 630i GT were testing here and the 640i xDrive priced from $148,900.

Standard equipment for the 630i includes 19-inch alloy wheels, adaptive LED headlights, power liftback, keyless entry and ignition, panoramic sunroof, leather upholstery, ambient lighting, head-up display, dual-zone air-conditioning, wireless smartphone charging pad, Bluetooth, DAB+ digital radio and a 16-speaker harman/kardon sound system.

Buyers can also choose between the standard M Sport styling package or option the Luxury Line for no extra cost, which brings different exterior and interior trim as well as different alloy wheel design.

The 630i comes with a comprehensive safety package that includes full airbag protection for the occupants, surround view parking system, front and rear parking sensors and automated parking. It also comes with BMWs latest active safety technology, forward collision warning, active cruise control with stop and go function, lane keeping assist and rear-cross traffic alert - the combination of those elements allow for semi-autonomous driving functionality for up to 30-seconds at a time.

The 6-Series GT range is covered by BMWs Condition Based Servicing program that uses sensors and advanced algorithms to calculate how much the car has been driven and therefore how much maintenance is required. Buyers can opted to pay for servicing in advance by purchasing a BMW Service Inclusive package, either Basic or Plus. The Basic package costs $1695 and covers fluid checks, air filter and spark plug replacements and labour.

Whats inside?Volkswagen also offered attractive benefits to its respective customers on the purchase of a brand new carline. Also, current Volkswagen owners received attractive exchange and financial benefits along with loyalty bonus.

Recommended Video - Watch Now! Horrific Footage Of Volkswagen Polo Exploding At A CNG Filling Station

Steffen Knapp, Director, Volkswagen Passenger Cars India said, "We are delighted with the overwhelming response received from our customers this festive season. Festivals are all about celebrations and joy, and to keep up with the momentum, we offered attractive benefits to our customers. We welcome our new customers to the Volkswagen family and would like to assure them our world-class service experience."

The latest offerings from Volkswagen are the Vento Sport and the Polo Pace. Prices of these limited edition models are similar to their regular variants.

The two models have primarily received aesthetic changes, without any mechanical changes being made. The Polo Pace receives 15-inch razor Diamond cut alloy wheels, while the Vento sport gets glossy black roof foils and spoilers.

Thoughts On The Volkswagen Mega-delivery Programme

Volkswagen's recent mega-delivery programme created a great opportunity for the company to attract new customers. While also working towards better sales in regional markets.Sinn Fein councillor Ruairi O Murchu has hit out at those responsible for an arson attack that occured in Muirhevnamor on Tuesday night.

The incident happened at approximately 10.20pm on Tuesday night at the Cuidigh Linn building in Muirhevnamor. A section of the roof of the building was badly damaged during the attack (below). No one was hurt.

O Murchu has branded the incident "a disgraceful attack."

"Cuidigh Linn is a group who provide necessary services to elderly people in Dundalk and the surrounding region," he said in a statement. "They rent this premises from Louth County Council in order to carry out this valuable service. This attack was disgraceful but it will not deter Andrea Connolly and her team who carried on today (Wednesday, March 21st) with their vital work for older people.

The councillor, who will replace Gerry Adams on the Sinn Fein at the next General Election, described what happened as an attack on the entire community."

"Cuidigh Linn employs 10 local people. We could have been reporting a tragedy today or these 10 people could have been out of work. It is absolutely unacceptable and the community demand action against these criminal gangs operating in the area.

"We are calling on the Gardai to take action before someone is seriously hurt or worse." The local representative also called for the speedy deployment of the promised Drugs and Organised Crime Unit and a strategy to deal with these criminal elements. He urged anyone with infomation about the incident to report it to Gardai.

Cuidigh Linn is a service provider for older people living in Dundalk area, delivering a wide range of supports to help older persons live safely and confidently in their own home. The service operates throughout Dundalk town.

The project is funded by the Department of Social Protection.

Outreach workers at Cuidigh Linn are qualified Health Care Assistants, allowing them to deliver a professional personal care service to their clients.Christmas is a distant memory, the last major date on food producers calendars, and now its time to get ready for the next big thing.

Its the 11th year of Blas na hEireann, the Irish Food Awards, the largest blind-tasted food awards on the island of Ireland, designed to recognise and celebrate the very best Irish food and drink, and entry is now open to producers across all categories since March 17th with the early bird discounted rate for entries running until 30th April.

Entries will finally close on June 15th. Carlingford Oyster Company won best in county for Louth last year and we're sure many Louth food producers will be keen to follow in their footsteps this year.

Winning a Blas na hEireann award has made significant business differences to our winners, says Artie Clifford, Chairperson and founder of Blas na hEireann, and our winners are always our best ambassadors. Whether its the independent endorsement of a Blas win helping get a product onto the shelves of a particular retailer or onto a restaurant menu, the validation and recognition impacts on the bottom line for our winners.

"Its the clap on the back that producers dont often give themselves and it opens doors, creates opportunities and helps boost a strong sense of confidence in the Irish food sector. Blas is the shop window for some of Irelands best producers, and the celebration of this authentic community we continue to build is of huge importance to all the participants, from makers, to buyers, to organisers.

Winners are always the competitions best ambassadors, something to which over a decades worth of small producers, farmers, growers, bakers and artisan food makers who have won a Blas award and proudly put the winners sticker on their product can attest.

Research has shown that the Blas accreditation has the highest recognition among Irish consumers and having the award logo on products encourages shoppers to buy  it is a recognised guarantee of a top quality Irish product.

These are exceptionally rigorously-judged awards, as Blas na hEireann use an innovative blind-tasting judging system developed by Blas with the Food Science Dept of UCC  a system which is now recognised as an international industry standard.

The baking experts at The Baking Academy of Ireland have judged the Blas na hEireann baking competition since the awards began too, meaning that the initial founding mission of Blas  establishing quality benchmarks for Irish produce on a level playing field  is strictly adhered to and measurably applied.

More than 10 years on, this sector is getting more competitive every year, says Artie Clifford, Chairperson and founder of Blas na hEireann. Its more challenging than ever for authentic small producers to cut through the clutter and be recognised, and winning a Blas award, in the words of one of our previous winners, Siobhan Lawless of Foods of Athenry, helps in becoming less invisible in an ocean of other products. This is what we hope Blas does and will continue to do. We are looking forward to an epic year for Blas na hEireann 2018.

Entries for Blas na hEireann 2018 received online between 17th March and 30th of April are at the discounted early bird fee of 60 per entry (ex VAT). The full entry fee, applicable from 1st May to 15th of June is 75 per entry (ex VAT).

http://www.irishfoodawards.com

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The Federal Communications Commission on Thursday officially published its Net neutrality rollback order in the Federal Register, triggering a flurry of legal actions and Capitol Hill scrambling to stop it before it takes hold.

The order, which goes into effect on April 23, reverses an Obama era rule requiring that broadband access be regarded as a utility. Without it, ISPs and other firms will be able to speed up or slow down Internet traffic.

It also will allow service provers to make adjustments in program access that could speed up technology innovation, the rollback's supporters have contended.

The repeal was a major priority of FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, a commissioner who took the FCC's helm after Donald Trump won the presidential election in 2016 and proceeded to strip away numerous regulations put into place by Obama.

Legal Maneuvers

Following publication of the FCC's Final Rule, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman announced that a coalition of 23 state attorneys general had filed a petition in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit seeking to block the illegal rollback of Net neutrality.

The FCC's ruling was arbitrary and capricious, the AGs argued, and would open up consumers to throttling, blockage of certain content, and a the possibility that some consumers would be charged more than others for the same content.

Public Knowledge also filed a lawsuit in federal court to challenge the FCC's order, arguing that Chairman Ajit Pai had broken with more than 20 years of FCC history as protector of the open Internet.

"The impact of this order is clear," said John Bergmayer, senior council at Public Knowledge. "By eliminating its rules and oversight role, the FCC has given broadband providers the green light to press forward with anti-competitive and anti-consumer business models."

Opponents of the Net neutrality reversal have 60 days to file suit and 10 days to be a part of the multi-district lottery to determine where the cases will be heard, according to Public Knowledge. Congress has 60 legislative days to challenge Net neutrality through the Congressional Resolution of Disapproval.

Mozilla on Thursday re-filed its earlier suit challenging the repeal of Net neutrality.

The FCC's order does not simply "roll back" an unregulated Internet, argued Dennelle Dixon, chief legal and business officer at Mozilla. It also removes affirmative protections from the public, despite the fact that many consumers do not have a choice of high-speed service provider.

Vimeo also filed a petition with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit on Thursday,arguing that the FCC engaged in a "wholesale abdication of FCC's statutory mandate" to regulate one of hte most critical means of communication that exists, through broadband Internet.

The FCC engaged in a "deeply flawed rulemaking process" that departed starkly from prior FCC reasoning and precedent, according to the filing.

The FCC expressed confidence that its order would withstand the legal bombardment.

"We are confident that the Restoring Internet Freedom Order will be upheld in the courts," the agency said in a statement provided by spokesperson Mark Wigfield. "In 2005 the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the FCC classification of broadband as a Title I information service, and we have every reason to believe that the courts will uphold the FCC's decision to return to that light touch regulatory framework."

However, there remained fierce opposition to the move from the FCC's two Democratic commissioners.

The majority was giving billion-dollar broadband providers the keys to the Internet, said Commissioner Mignon Clyburn, but she remained hopeful that the opposition would prevail.

Reps. Mike Doyle, D-Penn., ranking member of the Communications and Technology Subcommittee and Frank Pallone, D-N.J., ranking member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, announced that 143 House members had agreed to co-sponsor a bill to prevent the FCC from rescinding Net neutrality.

Low Density, Slow Buildout

Rural communities have not seen any additional investment as a result of the rule reversal, according to Christopher Mitchell, director of community broadband networks at the Institute for Local Self Reliance.

CenturyLink last month announced plans to focus more of its future investments in high-speed, high density urban areas, he noted.

The ILSR does not plan to file a lawsuit, but it has pledged its support to other organizations that take the fight to court.

"We continue to work with rural groups to improve Internet access, but most of the hope lies with local groups and states -- not the federal government," Mitchell told the E-Commerce Times.

While the Department of Agriculture has been doing some good work to help rural investment, he said, the FCC's Connect America has wasted billions on obsolete networks that make it harder to bring high-speed access to those communities.

David Jones is a freelance writer based in Essex County, New Jersey. He has written for Reuters, Bloomberg, Crain's New York Business and The New York Times.



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CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday broke Facebook's mysterious silence following news of several investigations into Cambridge Analytica's access to personal data belonging to 50 million Facebook users.

Facing the wrath of everyone from U.S. and European regulators to shareholders, customers and employees, Zuckerberg conceded that Facebook must make several changes in how it protects data if it expects to be taken seriously in the future, and it pledged to take those necessary steps.

"We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can't we don't deserve to serve you," he wrote in a post on his own Facebook page. "I've been working to understand exactly what happened and how to make sure this doesn't happen again."

Facebook earlier this week announced the suspension of Strategic Communication Laboratories and its Cambridge Analytica political data firm for harvesting the personal information of those 50 million Facebook users without their permission. The data gathering was accomplished by leveraging research that a former Cambridge professor, Aleksandr Kogan, had performed with Facebook's approval.

Using his "thisisyourdigitallife" app, Kogan sent quizzes to more than 270,000 Facebook members. He then harvested personal data from millions of their friends as well. Kogan passed that information to Cambridge Analytica, which then used it to target voters during the U.S. 2016 presidential election campaign, on behalf of Donald Trump.

Zuckerberg acknowledged that Kogan was given permission to conduct the quiz, but added that he had violated Facebook policy by passing on the data to a third party. Zuckerberg also said that after Facebook deleted the app, Kogan, Cambridge Analytica and Christopher Wylie -- the former Cambridge Analytica employee who blew the whistle on the incident -- had reneged on a certification they gave to Facebook that they would delete the millions of data records.

New Protocols

In a related post on Wednesday, Facebook promised to take steps to prevent any recurrence of this type of activity. The company said it would investigate all apps that have had large amounts of access to customer data, conduct full audits, and ban them if it should find violations.

It also plans to implement the following changes:

Facebook will disclose to members if their data has been misused by an app.

Facebook will turn off an app's access to users who haven't used it in more than three months.

Facebook will restrict Facebook login data to the user's name, profile photo and email address.

Facebook will encourage members to manage the apps they use.

In addition, Facebook will expand its bug bounty program, which rewards people who report security vulnerabilities or misuse of data.

Several leading House and Senate committee leaders have fired off letters to Facebook seeking answers on its data policies. Zuckerberg, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg and other executives have been urged to appear on Capitol Hill.

Arrangements for a staff briefing are under way, according to Frederick Hill, spokesperson for Sen. John Thune, who chairs the Commerce Committee.

Heavy Fallout

Several customer and investor lawsuits related to the data controversy already have been filed against Facebook.

Maryland customer Lauren Price filed a potential class action suit against Facebook and Cambridge Analytica in U.S. District Court in Northern California, which alleges that the failure to safeguard her private data and failure to disclose constitute negligence and violation of California's unfair competition law.

Facebook, Zuckerberg and CFO David Wehner are named in Yuan v. Facebook, an investors lawsuit alleging failure to disclose.

"We are committed to vigorously enforcing our policies to protect people's information," said Paul Grewal, Facebook's deputy general counsel. "We will take whatever steps are required to see that this happens."

The UK's Information Commissioner's Office has been seeking a warrant to enter the offices of Cambridge Analytica, which failed to respond to an earlier request to hand over documents to that office, confirmed spokesperson Helen Booth.

Cambridge Analytica on Tuesday announced that it suspended CEO Alexander Nix, naming Alexander Tayler as interim CEO. Nix was suspended after the airing of an undercover report by Channel 4 in the UK, which included hidden camera footage of Nix making statements regarding the firm's use of sex workers to ensnare politicians.

The company's board ordered an independent investigation into the comments.

Mozilla has launched a petition to get Facebook to change its app permissions.

"Individuals' security and privacy on the Internet are fundamental and must not be treated as optional," Mozilla said in a statement provided to the E-Commerce Times by spokesperson Jenifer Boscacci. "With our petition to Facebook we're sending a clear message to the company, take users' privacy more seriously."

The Electronic Privacy Information Center has filed a Freedom of Information Request with the Federal Trade Commission, which has launched an investigation into the data disclosures to Cambridge Analytica, to find out if Facebook complied with a 2012 consent order that required it to report to the commission on whether it was maintaining proper privacy controls over data.

EPIC and other privacy groups had filed a complaint with the FTC over a previous data leak, which led to an agreement that compelled Facebook to maintain tight controls over third-party data disclosures.

Following Zuckerberg's public comments, EPIC Executive Director Marc Rotenberg told the E-Commerce Times that "it's no longer for Facebook to decide what happens next."

David Jones has been an ECT News Network reporter since 2015. His areas of focus include cybersecurity, e-commerce, open source, gaming, artificial intelligence and autonomous vehicles. He has written for numerous media outlets, including Reuters, Bloomberg, Crain's New York Business and The New York Times. Email David.

GREENSBORO  Following misleading news reports claiming that the company had pledged to increase its garment sourcing commitments in Cambodia, VF Corporation has clarified its position regarding the organisations purchasing strategy in the nation.

Yesterday, local media began reporting that, following a meeting with the Cambodian Ministry of Labor, VF Corporation would be upping its purchasing in the countrys RMG industry.

Speaking to Ecotextile News the company denied these 'false reports' which coincided with the announcement that an open letter from a group representing apparel brands had been submitted to the Cambodian Prime Minister, calling for reforms in the countrys garment sector.Six months since Hurricane Maria battered the island of Puerto Rico, the island is the site of a pitched battle between wealthy investorsparticularly from the technology industryand everyday Puerto Ricans fighting for a place in their island's future.

The Puerto Rican government has pushed for a series of privatization schemes, including privatizing PREPA, one of the largest public power providers in the U.S., and increasing the number of privately run charter schools and private school vouchers.

For more, we speak with best-selling author and journalist Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Her latest piece for The Intercept, where she is a senior correspondent, is The Battle for Paradise: Puerto Ricans and Ultrarich 'Puertopians' Are Locked in a Pitched Struggle over How to Remake the Island.

Reposted with permission from our media associate Democracy Now!.This was a big week for the suit brought by San Francisco and Oakland against the five largest investor-owned fossil fuel companies for the costs associated with adapting to climate change.

First, the five companies in questionChevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, BP and Royal Dutch Shellfiled a motion Tuesday to dismiss the case, arguing that the U.S. Supreme Court and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit had dismissed similar cases in the past because the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, not private companies, is responsible for setting and enforcing carbon dioxide levels, Forbes reported.

But they didn't file in time to avoid participating in Wednesday's historic climate science tutorial. U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup, who is currently hearing the case, ordered both sides to answer a series of questions about climate science in a two-hour presentation each.

Chevron was the only company whose lawyer actually presented at the tutorial. The other companies did not present as a show of their opposition to the court's jurisdiction, Alyssa Johl, an attorney and the founder of Climate Rights Collective, reported in a live tweet of the tutorial.

Alsup, however, did not let the other companies off the hook, but gave their lawyers two weeks to file statements detailing any differences they had with the testimony of Chevron's lawyer.

Chevron was represented by Theodore Boutrous, Jr., who did not attempt to deny the science behind climate change and based his presentation on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report, which was published in 2013.



According to Grist's Nathaniel Johnson, the strategy behind this move was revealed when Boutrous cited part of the report which states that climate change is caused "largely by population and economic growth.

"This appears to be the core of the oil companies' strategy," Johnson wrote in his write-up of the session. "First, believe everything the IPCC says. Second, the IPCC says the real problem is prosperity, economic growth! Therefore, blame the ones burning the oilall we did was dig the stuff up."



Several observers also questioned Boutrous' reliance on five-year-old data in such a fast-moving field, since it played up the IPCC's "uncertainties" regarding the impacts of climate change, which have only gotten frighteningly more certain in the intervening years.

"Sea-level rise science from the past few years blows this out of the water," journalist Amy Westervelt noted in a tweet from the courtroom.

Even one of the scientists who presented for the cities, University of Illinois professor Don Wuebbles, who helped write the IPCC and the more recent 4th U.S. Climate Assessment, cast shade on Boutrous' reliance on the report.



"The science doesn't stop at 2012," Wuebbles said, according to the McClatchy Washington Bureau.

Two other scientists presented for the cities before Boutrous and Wuebbles spoke. The University of Oxford's Myles Allen spoke on the history of climate science and University of California, Santa Cruz professor Gary Griggs spoke on the relationship between climate change and sea level rise, according to Alyssa Johl's live tweets.



Deborah Moore, western states campaign manager at the Union of Concerned Scientists, was a courtroom observer. She noted a part of Allen's testimony that might be particularly useful to the cities' case: it is, apparently, possible to directly link products sold by particular companies to the emissions they produced.

But first, Alsup will have to decide if there will continue to be a case at all. According to Forbes, Alsup will likely hear the companies' motion to dismiss in April.WB to provide Rs27.8b in credit to Nepal

The World Bank is providing a credit of $200 million (approximately Rs20.9 billion) to Nepal to strengthen the public financial management, a move aimed at supporting the countrys fledgling federalism.By Sebastian Losada

Over the last two weeks, the International Seabed Authority (ISA) has been in discussions in Jamaica. Its missionto work towards the finalization of exploitation regulations, a so-called mining code, that will allow commercial deep sea mining operations to begin all around the world.

In the quest for minerals, deep seabed mining means to extend mining activities into the deep ocean. The coming two years are critical in the openingor notof this unnecessary new frontier of resource exploitation.

The deep sea covers around fifty percent of the earth's oceans and a great share of that is in international waters. Hidden under thousands of meters of water, the vast majority of it hasn't been explored, meaning deep seabed mining could wipe out species and ecosystems before we even know them.

The ISA regulates the sea floor outside nations' jurisdiction. It has to decide what the rules are: how much money will go to developing countries and their communities, what kind of environmental controls there will be. And, right now, decisions that could impact the earth's seabed forever are being made in Jamaica, ushered through under pressure from industry and mining advocates with a decided lack of transparency.

Advocates of ocean exploitation, like U.S. giant military company Lockheed Martin, argue that we need deep sea mining in order to meet "the growing global demand for precious metals" and to support "economic growth."

They also claim that deep sea mining is necessary to satisfy our endless thirst for technological and electronic innovation. This conveniently ignores many aspects of the problem.

"Are we going to continue to develop huge mines that destroy villages, alter rivers, pollute water courses, take thousands of years to restore, remove whole mountains? You don't have any of that with deep seabed mining," said ISA Secretary General Michael Lodge, recently.

While it's true that mining for essential and finite raw materials often endangers workers and leaves the earth irreversibly scarred, the solution is notand cannot beto translate these mining impacts to other ecosystems that provide crucial services to humanity and our climate. Doing so would not only result in potentially irreversible biodiversity losses, but would also send a completely wrong signal: that we do not need to improve efficiency and reduce resource use because there is plenty down there.

Why is it that the IT sector, and its current leaders such as Samsung and Apple, can show the ingenuity to develop technologies that allow us to do things we could only have dreamed of a decade ago, but do not put such ingenuity to the service of a truly sustainable economy within the boundaries of the planet?

Instead, in the race to gain market share, IT companies increasingly change the design of their products in a way that accelerates the replacement cycle, making them difficult to service, upgrade or repair and shortening their useful life.

Mining advocates also argue that we need the minerals to meet increased demand from the growth of renewable energy technologies and the electrification of transport.

But there is no evidence that a transition towards renewable energy necessitates mining in the deep ocean. On the contrary; a recent report by the Institute for Sustainable Futures found that: "Even with the projected very high demand growth rates under the most ambitious energy scenarios, the projected increase in cumulative demandall within the range of known terrestrial resourcesdoes not require deep-sea mining activity."

Different types of seabed mining involve different extraction methods and technologies, but whatever the approach, severe impacts can be expected. Sediment plumes, the potential release of toxic chemicals, habitat destruction, increased temperature and noise all threaten the deep sea's precious and as yet untouched environment.

Researchers recently concluded that most mining-induced loss of biodiversity in the deep sea is likely to last forever on human timescales, given the very slow natural rates of recovery in affected ecosystems.

Yet the ISA has recently rejected the establishment of an environmental committee to better include environmental considerations in its functioning, and key environmental information is not public. Its Legal and Technical Commission meets mostly behind closed doors, and its composition is such that biological and ecological considerations are underrepresented.

Despite all the arguments against this unnecessary pillaging of our planet's seabed, so far the ISA has approved 28 exploration contracts in the Pacific, Indian, and Atlantic oceanscovering more than 1.4 million square kilometers (approximately 540,000 square miles), roughly four times the size of Germanyto companies like Lockheed Martin.

And in the meantime, the first commercial test case for the deep seabed mining industry is already planned to take place in the waters of Papua New Guinea. Canadian company Nautilus Minerals plans to extract mineral-rich sulfides, containing copper, zinc and gold, at depths between 1,500 and 2,000m. The mining operation, known as the Solwara project, is scheduled to begin early in 2019.

A strong alliance of NGOs made of more than 20 communities in the Bismarck and Solomon Seas is fighting to stop the project. Arguing a lack of consultation, and drawing attention to the grave impacts that could be derived from the project, the local opposition is growing stronger while the company is facing potential financial troubles.

The European Union Parliament has recently agreed on a resolution on international oceans governance, which calls for a moratorium on seabed mining.

While opposition is mounting, alternative economic models are gaining momentum and people are increasingly aware of what's at stake. For the sake of the oceans, the planet and the people, it's urgent that we stand to prevent commercial deep sea mining before it's too late.

Sebastian Losada is the oceans policy adviser for Greenpeace International.On Saturday, March 24 at 8:30 p.m. local time, skylines around the world will go dark as millions celebrate WWF's Earth Hour to spark global awareness and action on nature and the environment.

From the Eiffel Tower to the Empire State Building, and the Bird's Nest stadium to Burj Khalifa, thousands of landmarks will switch off their lights in solidarity for the planet, urging individuals, businesses and governments worldwide to move forward the conversations and solutions we need to build a healthy, sustainable future for all.

For the first time, in addition to participating in the global switch-off, WWF is inviting people across the globe to connect2earth to share and talk about what nature means to them, in the places they live in and care about. As the planet faces the dual challenge of climate change and the staggering loss of nature, the world's largest grassroots movement for the environment aims to mobilize unprecedented global action on biodiversity and nature by kick-starting global conversations on issues such as healthy forests, plastic-free oceans and wildlife conservation.

"Nature is in alarming decline. Halting its loss is urgent and crucial as much as tackling climate change," said Marco Lambertini, director general of WWF International. "Biodiversity and nature is the foundation of life, essential to our wellbeing. Yet we continue to take nature for granted while our actions are pushing it to the brink. This Earth Hour, we want to shine a light on the importance of biodiversity and nature. Together, as individuals, businesses and governments, we must show the same determination to halt biodiversity and nature loss as we have shown on climate action to secure a healthy, thriving and living planet for all."

In the past decade, Earth Hour has inspired millions to support and participate in critical climate and conservation projects led by WWF and many others, helping drive climate policy, awareness and action worldwide. Among its highlights, the movement has helped ban all plastics in the Galapagos in 2014, plant 17 million trees in Kazakhstan, light up homes with solar power in India and the Philippines and push new legislation for the protection of seas and forests in Russia. Today, as biodiversity loss threatens global ambition on climate action and sustainable development, Earth Hour will focus its efforts on building mainstream support for action on biodiversity and nature.

"The totality of forms of life on the planet, what we call biodiversity, provides the infrastructure for the healthy functioning of natural systems," said Cristiana Pasca Palmer, executive secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity. "This is critical not only to safeguarding life on Earth but also to the wellbeing and development of the human species. Once this natural capital is destroyed, life on Earth, as we know it currently, will no longer be possible. It is therefore imperative to take action, today and every day, to help safeguard biodiversity.

"Earth Hour links people from all around the globe ... It is my great hope that together with our partners from WWF, Earth Hour will inspire and mobilize a wave of actions ... WWF is a dynamic partner of the Secretariat of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, helping to raise awareness of the importance of biodiversity and nature for people and communities worldwide."

In 2018, French Polynesia is expected to move to protect 5 million square kilometers (approximately 1.9 million square miles) of its seas to preserve ocean ecosystems. In Kenya, school children will plant 500,000 trees to help reduce deforestation and in Hong Kong and the UK, people will pledge to shift toward sustainable living. In Colombia, people will call for the country to commit to zero deforestation by 2020. In China and Singapore, WWF will mobilize public support for plastic-free lifestyles.

Recognizing the critical role young people will play in creating a more sustainable world, WWF is also joining forces with the World Organization of the Scout Movement to inspire scouts worldwide to be a part of the global movementand momentumtackling the planet's most pressing environmental challenges and to become environmental leaders of tomorrow.

Starting as a symbolic lights out event in Sydney in 2007, today Earth Hour is celebrated in more than 180 countries and territories across the globe. Earth Hour 2018 will take place on Saturday, March 24 at 8:30 p.m. local time. Visit www.earthhour.org to know more and read individuals' stories about what they are doing for our planet.Global carbon dioxide emissions from energy increased for the first time in 2017 after three years of remaining flat, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said Thursday, meaning the world remains far off course in curbing planet warming emissions.

Carbon emissions reached a record-high of 32.5 gigatonnes in 2017 due to global economic growth and increased energy demands that was met mostly by fossil fuels. As the Financial Times noted, that growthan increase of 460 million tonnesis the equivalent to the emissions of an additional 170 million cars.

These findings are part of the Paris-based IEA's "Global Energy and CO2 Status Report" released today.

The report shows that global energy demand rose by 2.1 percent last year (or 14,050 million tonnes of oil equivalent), more than twice the rate in 2016. Oil, natural gas and coal met more than 70 percent of additional need, while renewable energy met just about the rest.

Global energy-related CO2 emissions grew by 1.4 percent in 2017, reaching a historic high of 32.5 gigatonnes, a resumption of growth after three years of global emissions remaining flat. Global Energy & CO2 Status Report

"The significant growth in global energy-related carbon dioxide emissions in 2017 tells us that current efforts to combat climate change are far from sufficient," said Fatih Birol, IEA executive director, in a statement.

"For example, there has been a dramatic slowdown in the rate of improvement in global energy efficiency as policy makers have put less focus in this area."

The IEA's findings "demonstrates that current efforts are insufficient to meet the objectives of the Paris Agreement," the report says. The 2015 Paris agreement set a primary goal to limit global warming well below 2C to avoid dangerous climate tipping points.

"Global emissions need to peak soon and decline steeply to 2020; this decline will now need to be even greater given the increase in emissions in 2017," the report says.

However, this increase was not universal. While most major economies saw a rise, others such as the U.S., UK, Mexico and Japan experienced declines in CO2 emissions.

Interestingly, the greatest decline came from the U.S., where emissions fell by 0.5 percent, the third consecutive year of decline. This is despite President Trump's push for fossil fuels and his intention to withdraw from the Paris agreement.

The reason behind the drop? Mainly because of higher deployment of renewables. In the U.S., a record 17 percent of electricity generation was from renewables last year. According to the report, 10 gigawatts of solar PV was added in 2017, down 30 percent relative to 2016 but still the second highest year on record.

The report also highlighted the clean energy strides of another major global polluter and the world's largest heat consumer: China.

"China's economy grew nearly 7 percent last year but emissions increased by just 1.7 percent (or 150 Mt) thanks to continued renewables deployment and faster coal-to-gas switching."

Asian economies accounted for two-thirds of the global increase in carbon emissions. Global Energy & CO2 Status Report

Renewable energy played the most important role in the growth of low-carbon energy, the report points out. The sector saw the highest rate of growth of any energy source in 2017, and met around a quarter of global energy demand growth last year.

Here are other key findings of the IEA report:

Oil demand grew by 1.6 percent, more than twice the average annual rate seen over the past decade, driven by the transport sector (in particular a growing share of SUVs and trucks in major economies) as well as rising petrochemical demand.

Natural gas consumption grew 3 percent, the most of all fossil fuels, with China alone accounting for nearly a third of this growth, and the buildings and industry sectors contributing to 80 percent of the increase in global demand.

Coal demand rose about 1 percent, reversing declines over the previous two years, driven by an increase in coal-fired electricity generation mostly in Asia.

Renewables had the highest growth rate of any fuel, meeting a quarter of world energy demand growth, as renewables-based electricity generation rose 6.3 percent, driven by expansion of wind, solar and hydropower.

Electricity generation increased by 3.1 percent, significantly faster than overall energy demand, and India and China together accounting for 70 percent of the global increase.

Energy efficiency improvements slowed significantly, with global energy intensity improving by only 1.7 percent in 2017 compared with 2.3 percent on average over the last three years, caused by an apparent slowdown in efficiency policy coverage and stringency and lower energy prices.By Katherine Paul

A citizen-led group in Nebraska is fighting Costco's plan to build a huge chicken factory farm operation that residents in nearby cities say would pollute their drinking water.

Residents of Devils Lake, North Dakota, along with members of the Spirit Lake Nation Tribe are battling plans to build a hog CAFO in a neighboring community. They say the operation would pollute Devils Lake and area wetlands.

On the east coast, industrial dairy operations have all but ruined Vermont's lakes and rivers. One of the biggest offenders? Unilever-owned Ben & Jerry's.

In North Carolina, industrial hog operations foul the state's waterways with 10 billion gallons of feces and urine each year.

It's no better on the west coast. In 2015, a federal judge ruled that Washington's industrial dairy operations pose "a significant public health risk by contaminating water supplies."

Whether it's the animal waste and antibiotics from livestock operations, or the nitrates and pesticides from GMO corn and soy grown to feed the millions of confined animals, from sea to shining sea, industrial agribusiness, led by multi-billion dollar corporations like Tyson, is destroying our most precious natural resourcewater.

State and federal regulators by and large use their power to protect corporate profits, not public health.

That leaves citizens to battle it out in the courts. But now some members of Congress want to eliminate even that last resort.

'Nature for Water'

Thursday, March 22, is World Water Day. It's been 25 years since the United Nations designated the first annual international celebration of water.

This year's theme, "Nature for Water," focuses on nature-based solutions for how to better manage the world's water.

We like it. Here's why.

According to the UN, agriculture uses 70 percent of the world's available freshwater, including for crop irrigation and livestock production.

The UN also reports that farms discharge large quantities of agrochemicals, organic matter, drug residues, sediments and saline drainage into water bodies, resulting in "demonstrated risks to aquatic ecosystems, human health and productive activities."

From the report:

Water pollution from agriculture has direct negative impacts on human health; for example, the well-known blue-baby syndrome in which high levels of nitrates in water can cause methaemoglobinemiaa potentially fatal illnessin infants. Pesticide accumulation in water and the food chain, with demonstrated ill effects on humans, led to the widespread banning of certain broad-spectrum and persistent pesticides (such as DDT and many organophosphates), but some such pesticides are still used in poorer countries, causing acute and likely chronic health effects. Aquatic ecosystems are also affected by agricultural pollution; for example, eutrophication caused by the accumulation of nutrients in lakes and coastal waters has impacts on biodiversity and fisheries.

The report also states that in the last 20 years, a new class of agricultural pollutants has emerged in the form of veterinary medicines (antibiotics, vaccines and growth promoters [hormones]), which move from farms through water to ecosystems and drinking-water sources.

The upshot? Agriculture is the biggest user, and one of the biggest polluters, of the world's water.

No Help From the Feds

Given agriculture's role in destroying our most precious natural resource, you'd think the U.S. Congress would do everything in its power to protect your water.

Instead, it's moving in the opposite direction.

In 2015, Congress passed the Waters of the United States (WOTUS) rule, in an attempt to bring more clarity to the Clean Water Act. Specifically, the rule was intended to protect U.S. waterways from polluters, including agricultural operations, which have historically enjoyed a high level of exemptions under the Clean Water Act.

Enter the Trump administration, which has asked the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers to "revisit" WOTUS, which according to the Washington Post, Trump described as "paving the way for the elimination of this very destructive and horrible rule."

So much for regulatory relief.

But even before Trump attacked WOTUS, some members of Congress began looking for additional ways to protect agribusiness profitsby making it impossible for citizens to sue companies that destroy their drinking water.

Last year, Rep. Dan Newhouse (R-Wash.) introduced a bill (H.R. 848, the Farm Regulatory Certainty Act), to strip citizens' ability to file lawsuits under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) against factory farms that have polluted their drinking water. If passed, the bill would leave rural Americans with no recourse if their drinking water is polluted by mismanagement of livestock waste on a factory farm.

No surprise that Newhouse would lead this charge. It was in his state that citizens successfully used RCRA to go after factory farm dairies that had made their water too polluted to even bathe in, much less drink. After a 15-year struggle, the courts finally forced companies to clean up their acts, and also provide hundreds of families with drinking water until their wells could be restored.

If Newhouse and his co-sponsors in the U.S. House get their way, dairy farm manure would be exempt from any regulations, and lawsuits like the one filed by Washington state citizens would be banned.

What Can You Do?

Back to World Water Day.

We like the "nature-based" solutions for cleaning up the world's water because it leads us away from the dominant corporate agribusiness model, to the regenerative organic modela model that works with nature to build healthy soil that retains more water, and uses practices that don't include synthetic chemicals and a host of dangerous chemicals like glyphosate, 2,4-D, atrazine, chlorpyrifos and others.

The corporate industrial ag empire will tell us it can't be done. But as consumers, concerned citizens, ethical business owners, independent farmers and countless others will ultimately prove, it can.

What can you do? To help speed the transition to an agriculture model that heals our waterways, rather than exploit and pollute them?

Here are a few concrete steps you can take.

Get involved in the Regeneration Movement. You can start by signing up for the Regeneration International newsletter, and by learning more about how to join or build a local or regional Regeneration Alliance.

Tell Congress to protect your water! Call your members of Congress with these two asks: 1) Ask them to protect WOTUS which would at least help hold more companies accountable for ag-related water pollution; 2) Ask them to protect citizens' right to clean drinking water by rejecting Rep. Newhouse's H.R. 848. Find your Representatives' phone numbers here.

Ask Congress to support Rep. Earl Blumenauer's (D-Ore.) Food & Farm Act. This is the year Congress rewrites the Farm Bill. Historically, the Farm Bill has doled out millions in subsidies to corporations like Monsanto, Tyson, Cargill, Dowbig water polluterswhile ignoring the farmers who produce healthy food, using practices that build healthy soil. Please use our alert to contact your members of Congress and ask them to support the Food & Farm Act.

Buy organic and regenerative! Consumers are key to successfully shifting our country's food and farming system from one that degenerates to one that regenerates. The more we use our consumer dollars to support the farmers and producers who understand the importance of regenerating our soil and water, the more likely they will succeed.

Katherine Paul, former communications director for Common Dreams, is now the associate director of the Organic Consumers Association.

Reposted with permission from our media associate Common Dreams.Peaceful "kayaktivists" from Greenpeace Norway boarded a Statoil-contracted rig set to drill two Arctic wells this year.

Two people boarded the rig at the Skipavik yard on Norway's west coast Thursday morning and have requested a meeting with the rig's captain.

Another 10 activists are in the water with signs that say, "Same shit, new wrapping," in reference to Statoil, Norway's biggest petroleum company, that wants to change its name to "Equinor."

The protesters are there "to ensure the rig does not leave port," Truls Gulowsen, the head of Greenpeace in Norway, told Reuters.

"We are prepared to stay as long as necessary," he added.

Kayaktivists from Greenpeace Norway have boarded the oil rig West Hercules in a fjord off the west coast of Norway. Greenpeace

Statoil contracted the West Hercules semisubmersible rig set to drill two exploration wells in the Barents Sea this summer.

Earlier this year, Greenpeace and other groups lost a climate case against the Norwegian government for granting new oil drilling licenses in the Arctic ocean, claiming that such activity violates people's right to a healthy environment and breaches the Paris agreement.

An appeal was launched soon after. Greenpeace demands that Statoil suspend all drilling until a final verdict is reached.

"The amount of oil and gas that has already been found is more than the climate can withstand, so it is pointless and dangerous to look for more. Nevertheless, Statoil is preparing for a massive oil exploration operation in the Barents Sea," said Gulowsen in a statement.

Greenpeace has labeled Statoil's name-change as "greenwashing."

"Whatever they call themselves, oil will still stain their name if they continue to pursue drilling in the Barents Sea and are involved in several highly controversial oil projects around the world," said Gulowsen.

"They must cancel plans for exploration drilling at Korpfjell and Gjkasen over the summer, for the climate and environmental reasons, and also because the oil wells are subject to a legal challenge."

Statoil said the protest would not affect operations.

"There's a contract for upcoming work, but we haven't begun any operations yet in that regard. It's from this summer and onwards," spokesman Morten Eek told Reuters.Monsanto shareholders voted to approve the company's $66 billion takeover by German pesticide and pharmaceutical corporation Bayer AG on Tuesday.



The acquisition faces intense regulatory scrutiny in the U.S., the European Union and other markets, as combining the two multinational juggernauts would form the world's largest seed and chemical company.



As Reuters reported, the combined companies plan to increase research and development spending and develop a global seeds and biotechnology hub in St. Louis to help spur regulatory approval.

"I think those augur well for the deal," Monsanto CEO Hugh Grant told the news service.

Grant told the St. Louis Dispatch that regulatory filings have now been made in the U.S. The deal also needs to be upheld in the European Union, Brazil, India and China. The Monsanto boss is hopeful that the proposed merger would pass in all jurisdictions, since "the overlap between the two [companies] is really quite small."

But last month, several U.S. state attorneys generals reportedly joined federal antitrust investigations of the pending multibillion dollar deal. One concern is Bayer and Monsanto's overlapping cotton seeds. Bayer licenses genetic traits that make seeds resistant to the herbicide Liberty, while Monsanto licenses traits that make seeds resistant to its herbicide Roundup.

Monsanto and Bayer control the two top cotton seed brands in the U.S., respectivelyor about 70 percent of all cotton acreage in the country.

"One of the worst things you could do is to link Liberty and Roundup in the same company," Peter Carstensen, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin and leading agricultural antitrust expert, explained to the St. Louis Dispatch. "There's no incentive for somebody to develop a third alternative."

Critics of the takeover have many concerns including increased prices for farmers and consumers due to reduced competition, the monopolization of the global food supply and the proliferation of pesticides.

In September, when Monsanto and Bayer first announced the deal, Sen. Bernie Sanders called the proposed consolidation, "a threat to all Americans ... These mergers boost the profits of huge corporations and leave Americans paying even higher prices."



However, after yesterday's vote that was supported by approximately 99 percent of shareholders, Grant seemed confident the merger would pass regulatory reviews.



The companies' executives believe that a successful merger would be beneficial for farmers and help address global agriculture issues such as climate change and food scarcity.

"The acquisition of Monsanto is driven by our strong belief that this combination can help address the growing challenges facing farmers and the overall agriculture industry today and in the future," Werner Baumann, CEO of Bayer AG, said in a statement after the vote.

The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) disagrees. The environmental organization has concerns that the potential mega-corporation would have control of 29 percent of the market for seeds and 28 percent for pesticidesa threat to farmers, consumers, bees and other pollinators, as well as the environment.

"The existence of such a powerful player would substantially harm both farmers and the environment by decreasing competition and innovation, resulting in increased costs, and allowing for greater corporate control over farmers' planting choice. It's lose-lose for farmers and consumers," the organization said. "Of particular concern to NRDC is that the merger would reinforce the chemical-intensive growing practices currently threatening bees and wild pollinators that support between $200-600 billion worth of crops in the global food supply."



On Monday, the NRDC filed a letter with the U.S. Department of Justice objecting to the proposed takeover. The specific concerns are:

Eliminate competition and innovation: Cottonseed is a good example of the threat. Bayer controls 38.5 percent of the cottonseed market; Monsanto controls about 31 percent. Together the chemical giant would control nearly 70 percent of the total market, an unacceptably high level of dominance by antitrust standards.

Increase costs and limit planting options for farmers: Past consolidation in the agricultural chemical marketplace has increased costs for farmers. For example, there was a 4-fold increase in the price of corn seed over the last 20 years without corresponding benefit in yields. The price of corn per bushel is now about the same it was 20 years ago.

Accelerate chemical-intensive agricultural techniques that threaten the existence of pollinators and imperil the global food supply: Pollinators are under severe threat as 90 percent of the monarch population has been lost in the last two decades, and nearly half of managed honey bee colonies die every year. Wild bees are also devastated by pesticide practices; the Rusty Patched bumble bee is now up for listing as an endangered species.

Consolidating Monsanto and Bayer would escalate the use of dangerous toxic pesticides and create a bad deal for farmers, bees, consumers and the planet," NRDC senior attorney Rebecca Riley said. "The Department of Justice should reject this proposal."

The NRDC's letter also notes that other major agribusinesses also plan to combine, including ChemChina with Syngenta AG and Dow Chemical with DuPont.

"Mergers are a big win in a corporate boardroom, but out on the farm, consolidation just means higher costs," Riley said.

The deal now faces a lengthy regulatory review and is expected to close by the end of 2017. Incidentally, the election of Donald Trump might be a boost to Bayer's purchase of Monsanto. While the president-elect campaigned on blocking mega-deals such as AT&T Inc's purchase of Time Warner Inc, Trump's nominee for attorney generalSen. Jeff Sessions, a pro-business conservative from Alabamais good news for any pending mergers.

Environmental activists, science educators and the Athens Ohio City Council are teaming up against a controversial new proposal by the Ohio Department of Natural Resources Division of Wildlife (ODNRDOW) to open a bobcat trapping season in the southeastern part of the state, The New Political reported Wednesday.

The Athens City Council passed a resolution opposing the measure Monday night, citing concerns that bobcats were taken off the state's threatened and endangered species list less than four years ago and that not enough research has been done to determine if the newly-growing populations can sustain a trapping season, according to a copy of the resolution obtained by EcoWatch. The city council also looked to prevent similar proposals in the future, urging "the State of Ohio to declare the bobcat a protected species and ban all hunting and trapping of this wonderful animal for all Ohioans now and in the future."

The resolution notes that bobcats do not overpopulate.

"I like the idea that there's wild animals in the woods," Athens City Councilman Jeff Risner told The Post. "They're worth more to me alive than they are dead."

The resolution further notes that the trapping proposal contradicts the ODNRDOW's own research plans.

In an October 2017 report, the department wrote, "Little is known about the density and distribution of bobcats in Ohio, as well as the population trajectory, and which areas act as source populations. Such information is critical before decisions are taken on opening a trapping season and the maximum yearly take."

The ODNR entered into a contract with the Ohio University in August 2017 to conduct such a study, which will take four years to complete.

"So why the rush and sudden turn-around??," Heather Cantino, an environmental educator and vice chair of the Buckeye Forest Council board who drafted the council resolution, asked in The Athens' News Readers Forum. "Politics and pressure from the Ohio Trappers Association seem to be trumping the DOW's own recent science-based plan to protect Ohio's top native predator species," she wrote.

Chapter 1501:31-16 of the Ohio Revised Code values a bobcat at $500.

Bobcats are making a comeback in Ohiothere were 499 verified sightings in 2017, The Columbia Dispatch reported. "We're confident the population is secure," ODNR wildlife management and research executive administrator Mike Reynolds told The Dispatch.

The proposed trapping season would last from November 2018 to January 2019 and end once a maximum of 40 bobcats are trapped in the east and 20 in the south, where Athens is located, The Dispatch reported.

But Cantino pointed out that each verified sighting does not necessarily correspond to a different animal and that the increase in sightings might be due to the increase in trail cameras installed in the past years, which the ODNRDOW itself suggested in its Ohio Bobcat Management Plan. Further, she expressed concerns that the hunting licenses themselves will be unlimited and sell for $5, meaning hunters might go over the proposed quota before the state can enforce it. Finally, not enough research has been done to determine if the quota amounts are really safe for the existing populations.

Assistant professor of conservation biology at Ohio University and the lead researcher on the bobcat study told The Dispatch he did not yet have enough information to make that call.

"I would love to have a solid answer, but it's a tough question," Popescu told The Dispatch.

Public outcry by individuals like Cantino and groups like Save Ohio Bobcats II has persuaded the ODNRDOW to extend the online commenting period until March 31 and push back the dates planned for the public hearing and vote. The Ohio Wildlife Council, a board of 8 that decides all ONDRDOW proposals, will hold a public meeting on April 11 and vote on May 9.

In her letter, Cantino pointed out that the council is composed entirely of sportspeople and does not have a biologist, though one member is a veterinarian.

"Only a massive outcry will defeat this dangerous, greedy, and ill-considered plan," she wrote.By Stacy Malkan

"I want grandkids one day, so sperm is important to me because I've got three young boys," said mom, author and social media genius Leah Segedie in a video introducing her "Save the Swimmers" campaign.

"This is where my youngest rolls his eyes at me and says, 'I know Mom. Avoiding plastics can help save my swimmers, oooh kay.' But to me this is no laughing matter. Over 25 years of studies have demonstrated that these little sperm are crying out for help."

In her new book, out now from Rodale Books, Segedie explains what the science is saying about the impact of hormone-disrupting chemicals on male fertility. As she puts it, she drops science, along with truth bombs about how the government is failing to ensure the safety of toxic-chemical-laden products and food, and many practical tips about how to protect our families without going bonkers. The book is called Green Enough: Eat Better, Live Cleaner, Be Happier (All Without Driving Your Family Crazy).

As the founder of Mamavation.com, a mom-focused social media community devoted to practical conversations about healthy living, Segedie doesn't let eye rolls stop her from delivering her message in the most straightforward and relatable way she can, cuss words and all. One headline in the book describes the food safety system in the U.S. as, "Generally Recognized as Safe Bullshit."

So what do Moms need to know about toxic chemicals in our homes and how to protect our loved ones and their swimmers? I asked Leah Segedie to share some of the takeaway messages from her book.

Stacy Malkan: You spent a lot of time studying up on endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDCs)chemicals that can mimic or block our body's natural hormonesand one of the pioneering scientists in the field, Pete Myers, was your science advisor for your book. Tell us what the research on EDCs is saying.

Leah Segedie: The most important part of what I've learned is simpledose doesn't equal the poison when it comes to hormone disrupting chemicals. Smaller amounts can have a more detrimental impact on pregnant women and children than larger ones. And chemicals do unpredictable things at low doses, which has been demonstrated in tons of studies. The scariest part is how regulators ignore low-dose effects. Lots of products contain low doses of these hormone-disrupting chemicals. In Green Enough I tell you exactly what those chemicals are and how you can avoid most of them. The most vulnerable of the population are pregnant women and small children. But those aren't the only people at risk. Hormone disruption is more likely to happen when you are going through a hormonal change, so in addition to considering this for pregnant women and children, the same is true for adolescents going through puberty and women going through menopause.

And then there is the toxic soup environment to consider. We don't know the impact of what happens when different chemicals mix together in our bodies. So with the 85,000 chemicals in commerce, we actually have no idea what they are doing and how they are impacting our health. Long story short, we are not protected the way everyone thinks. Chemicals are evaluated based on old and outdated technology and techniques. And we need to update how we treat and evaluate chemicals in this country. But I say don't wait for them to get their act together. It's your life and your familytake control of your own home environment.

Malkan: What are your top tips for saving the swimmers?

Segedie: When I talk about the Save the Swimmers campaign in my home, I'm referring to how I got my husband and young boys on board with all the changes I needed to make. And it was simple. I explained to them what is happening to sperm health in the United States. About 90 percent of young men have some degree of unhealthy sperm. Did they want unhealthy sperm that could prevent them from having children one day? Well then, we need to make some change in this house to dumb down the amount of hormone disrupting chemicals we have everywhere. I involved them in the process and was clear why it was happening. It was about as simple as that.

My top tips for avoiding hormone-disrupting chemicals:

1. Stop eating or drinking from plastic.

2. Stop using synthetic fragrances in the home, especially ones that don't list their ingredients.

3. Pay attention to what's in your personal care products.

4, Notice what your food is wrapped in.

5. When you make changes, make them slowly so they stick and are accepted by your family. When things happen to quickly, it creates a mutiny.

I'd say that starting with food would be the most important part, not just what ingredients you chose, but also the chemicals coming from packaging, cookware, storage containers and cans. Getting a handle on these "indirect additives" is the quickest way to get toxic chemicals out of the food you eat. In Green Enough, I discuss how to purge your kitchen of these chemicals, what to do when you find them and what products are safer solutions.

Malkan: What has been the biggest challenge in getting your family on board?

Segedie: I'm very honest with my family about why I'm doing things and I involve them in those decisions all the time. In the beginning, I sat them down and explained I wanted to have grandkids one day and there were chemicals inside our home that have the potential to prevent that from happening. And I needed their help to ensure they had healthy sperm. It seems that boys care a great deal about how virile they are, even when they are young, so that worked to my advantage. So when I have to make adjustments, I tell them "I want grandkids one day ... do you want kids? Okay then do you agree this is wise?" and I get a yes and possibly an eye roll. But that's really all I need.

My biggest challenges are not my two youngest but my oldest son and my husband. My husband is more set in his ways and we aren't planning on having more children so he joked with me for a time that he could do whatever he wanted and his sperm could become green with mutation and it would be fine. My oldest son is just starting go through puberty so all he wants to do is things his friends are doing. But he's very much a thinker and prides himself on being smart so I blow up his ego by saying he knows more about endocrine disruption than most adults and he gets a kick out of that part. For those two I just have to reward them more. The younger two are fine with me giving them a hug and me telling them how proud I am of them. But you'd be surprised how far they got in a couple of years ... even with eye rolling.

Malkan: A recent study found high levels of endocrine disrupting chemicals called phthalates in macaroni and cheese. As the mom of a toddler who loves mac and cheese, this one is a real challenge. What's your 'green enough' guidance?

Segedie: Phthalates (said "Thal-8s") are in all dairy products at varying levels, including organic dairy. But the rule about dairy is simple: the more processing the dairy goes through the higher the phthalate level. And this is why powdered cheese has the highest level of phthalate contamination. We still enjoy dairy in my home, so I find other places to lessen the amount we are exposed to. I end up purchasing low fat versions of yogurt and string cheese because it's hiding inside the fat. I know fat is all the rage right now, but fat from animal products is also a very efficient delivery method for these chemicals.

As for the solution to your mac and cheese problem, I would recommend instead of using the powdered cheese, make your own mac and cheese with milk and cheese you grated yourself. That will cut down on the phthalate level instantly. And if you are really worried about phthalate contamination, start paying more attention to other places where phthalates are hiding. The final two chapters of Green Enough will help you lessen phthalate contamination inside each room of your home and your personal care products. These complicated scenarios were a primary focus of the book.

Malkan: The green path can be a lonely one. What's your best advice for having the green enough conversation with reluctant loved ones?

Segedie: I would say that if they don't live inside your home don't lecture them. Just live your life the way you need to and eventually they will ask you why you do things the way you do and that is your opportunity to tell them. Wait until they ask you. That's when they are more likely to accept what you have to say.

Malkan: You have been sparking discussions on social media about the role of women in the food industry. Do you think the natural products industry has a gender inequity problem?

Segedie: Yes, I do believe the natural industry could use more women and people of color in charge. It's ironic that women are their primary customers and yet decisions that impact them don't involve them. And it's typical of industries that are growing and seeing a bull market, so to speak. Not only would I like to see more female CEOs and people of color, but I'd also like to see them sitting on the boards of directors. For an industry that prides itself on being "better," in this case they really are not.

I wrote about this the other day after having a very unpleasant experience with someone very powerful in the industry. And I think the solution is really simple: as women we need to start using our voices more and supporting brands that respect us and give us a seat at the table. Now there are so many organic brands to choose from, we can start getting picky. I'm starting to create a list of these brands and I encourage other women to start sharing their stories to create more awareness around this issue. We deserve this!(Photo:  Peter Kenny)Offices of the European Commission on June 12, 2013.

New research shows the decline of Christianity in Europe and it points to claims young people are turning their backs on faith.

The research is published by Stephen Bullivant, a theology professor from St. Mary's University in London and gives further credence to the claim Christianity is on the decline in Europe.

It reveals that a majority of young people in a dozen European countries say they are not affiliated to a religion.

They include countries like Belgium and the Netherlands, who experts say have traditionally had strong religious cultures.

The statistics come from the joint study by the Catholic Institute of Paris along with St. Mary's Catholic University at Twickenham in Greater London.

It is on the religious affiliation of young people aged 16-29 in Europe.

In 12 out of the 21 European countries studied, plus Israel, most young people say they have no religion. This figure rises to 91 percent in the Czech Republic.

In 12 out of the 21 European countries studied, plus Israel, most young people say they have no religion. This figure rises to 91 percent in the Czech Republic.

DECLINE IN RELIGIOUS AFFILIATION

This decline in religious affiliation, which should not be confused with belief in God, which can be distinguished from belonging to a religion, forms one of the main conclusions, a report in La Croix International highlights.

The authors base their findings on sub-samples of several hundred young people aged 16-29 in each country, analyzing their beliefs and religious practices.

Nevertheless, these samples were sometimes quite limited in size, meaning that caution is necessary in drawing conclusions, says La Croix.

Thus, in France, 64 percent declared themselves to be without a religion compared with 23 percent who said they were Catholic and 10 percent who were Muslims.

However, another survey carried out by OpinionWay for La Croix in July 2016, which was based on a much larger and more representative sample, found that 42 percent of young people aged 18-30 described themselves as Catholic while 47 percent said they had no religion.

Euronews reported that a study by the Pew Research Center in 2015 said Europe's Christian population is expected to shrink by around 100 million people in the coming decades.

It said while Christians will remain the largest religious group in Europe, Muslims will make up 10 percent of the continent's population by 2050, up from 5.9 percent in 2010.

Key conclusions of Bullivant's report include:

The Czech Republic, with 91 percent has the largest proportion of young adults (16-29) with no religion.

Poland is at the other end of the scale and just 17 percent don't have a faith.

A majority of this young adults in Estonia, Sweden, Netherlands, UK, Hungary, Belgium, France, Denmark, Finland, Norway and Spain don't associate with a religion.

The biggest concentration of young adults identifying as Christians can be found in Poland (83 percent), Lithuania (74 percent) and Ireland (59 percent), while the smallest proportions are in Czech Republic (9 percent), Sweden (18 percent) and the Netherlands (19 pecent)

The largest proportions of young Muslims (16-29), of the European countries studied, can be found in France (10 percent), Belgium (10 percent) and Austria (10 percent).

Bullivant said: "The differences in the religiousness  or, as dominates in many countries, non-religiousness  of 16-29 year-olds in our sample of European countries is genuinely remarkable. There are, moreover, some genuine surprises in the data.

"For example, Ireland's young adults are  contrary to recent reports  still remarkably religious, at least by the standards of other highly developed European nations.

"Meanwhile, countries that had, until quite recently, traditionally strong religious cultures  Lithuania, Belgium, Netherlands, Austria  look to be in serious trouble, in terms of the coming generations."Education leaders face challenges every day. We examine them through the lens of opportunity and strive to be proactive in solving problems before they materialize. We lead to serve, to build capacity, and to nurture hopes, dreams, and our childrens futures. Yet, we live in a time where we wake each day to a barrage of formidable responsibilities that politics and divisive behaviors only amplify. Among those are frequent acts of school violence. Many of us agonizedand continue to do sofollowing the Parkland school shooting, the student walkouts, and the tenuous struggle between encouraging civic activism and protecting our students safety. These gnaw at the essence of my being.

Faced with these challenges, we create opportunities; we shift paradigms. Despite our best efforts to make the best decisions, we will never be right in everyones eyes. That is the school leaders reality. Opinions surrounding the March 14th student walkout were varied. They represented a wide range of values and beliefs. But our school district runs on consensus, so it was important to me to make the decision about the walkout together with my district colleagues. We wanted to remain true to our priorities: school safety and the education of our students.

On March 5th, we sent home a letter to the parents and guardians of the 846 students in our districts one high school, since these were primarily the students who would be walking out. We made it clear that if students chose to exit the building, they would face consequences as defined by our districts code of conduct. And these would be the same consequences they would face for leaving the building on any other school day.

We made this decision for our district out of a concern for school safety. We were concerned about sending students outside at a specific timethe same time across the nation for all school walkouts. We were concerned that our students could be targets for someone who might do something extreme. After drafting our plan, we received a general guidance letter from our state department of education on the walkout. As it turned out, our plan aligned with the guidance: Meet with student leaders, prioritize safety, make this a teachable moment, communicate with stakeholders, articulate consequences for those who choose to walk out, and ensure students are respectful of the range of opinions.

When it came to last weeks walkout, each district leader employed the best strategy for the community that he or she serves. And all of us did this with our students best interests as our guiding tenet. No two school districts are the same, and no one plan fits the expectations of every community.

Despite our best efforts to make the best decisions, [school leaders] will never be right in everyones eyes."

On the day of the march, the range of student responses to our districts decision varied widely. Almost 75 percent of the student body chose to remain in class. Some of them told their high school principal that they wanted to stay in honor of the students who were killed because they can no longer go to classes. A little more than 100 students attended a local career and technical institute, and some of those students participated in a 17-minute event in the cafeteria.

But there were also roughly 40 students who didnt attend school that day. And another 40 students sent texts, emails, or called their legislators to voice their ideas and concerns during a planned event in the high school theater.

The administration held conversations with students on a number of occasions prior to March 14th. We listened to the students ideas, and they became a part of the planning process. Many voiced their concerns about safety during the walkout. They also suggested alternatives, including specific acts of kindness. They would ask their peers to make 17 new friends, say 17 positive words to others, or do 17 acts of kindness.

But we also had students who chose to walk out56 of them. During their walkout, they read aloud the biographies of the 17 students and staff members who were killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. They shared their feelings and had a moment of silence.

I believe that the students who chose to walk out learned the act of civil disobedience. It is thoughtful, conscious, and makes a strong point, but it also has consequences. We are all held accountable for how we conduct ourselves within our families, communities, organizations, or for a civic purpose. Our students learned how to advocate for themselves. They spoke up, but they also accepted their detentions.

Following the walkout, a number of our high school students told their principal that they felt the administration supported the rights of the students to peacefully protest. They also demonstrated that they understood the complexity of the administrations decision-making process. You upheld that right with dignity, but you also upheld the integrity of your job and your duty to protect the students, and we find that as being one of the most honorable things one could do, they told the principal.

These are divisive and confusing times; however, our students have a solid grasp of how complex things are right now. As education leaders, it is our responsibility to empower all of our young people. This was a learning moment for all of us. I cant help but believe that because of our young people our future is bright.Shop window damaged in Douglas

Police are appealing for information after a shop window was damaged in Douglas.

A large pane of glass at PC Solutions on Bucks Road was damaged between the 3rd and 5th of March.

Officers at Police Headquarters want to hear from anyone who can help with the investigation.BEER-SHEVA, Israel...March 22, 2018 - An innovative new type of robotic arm that could be useful in outer space or in the orchards has been developed by Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) researchers.

BGU's minimally actuated serial robot (MASR) operates much like a traditional snake robot with many connected motors, except that it only uses two: one to travel along the structure and another to rotate the joint it needs to flex. Watch the video.

"This unique minimalistic configuration, which can be applied to any serial robot with two or more links, reduces weight, size and cost," says Dr. David Zarrouk, a lecturer in BGU's Department of Mechanical Engineering, and head of the Bio-Inspired and Medical Robotics Lab. It allows a robotic manipulator to achieve a wide range of movements using few actuators that aren't possible with other robots.

"This robot is easy to operate and likely has a number of applications including space, agriculture, and industry, as well as search and rescue," Dr. Zarrouk adds.

The robot design is ideal for space applications due to its lightweight and inertia and could be used to fix malfunctioning satellites, and for docking or refueling to increase their satellite lifespan. Dr. Zarrouk also envisions that picking fruit is another potential application.

"The configuration of the MASR robot combines the best characteristics of existing robot technologies to achieve a high level of accuracy and control," he says. "In addition, the ability to add or subtract up to four links in less than a minute makes it possible to target quick repairs in isolated sections."

The BGU researchers are also experimenting with adding motors to increase speed and are exploring ways to apply their minimally actuated concept to walking robots, utilizing motors that can change position along the legs and move from one to another when necessary.

###

Dr. Zarrouk is part of the ABC Robotics Initiative, supported by the Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust.

About American Associates, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

American Associates, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (AABGU) plays a vital role in sustaining David Ben-Gurion's vision: creating a world-class institution of education and research in the Israeli desert, nurturing the Negev community and sharing the University's expertise locally and around the globe. As Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) looks ahead to turning 50 in 2020, AABGU imagines a future that goes beyond the walls of academia. It is a future where BGU invents a new world and inspires a vision for a stronger Israel and its next generation of leaders. Together with supporters, AABGU will help the University foster excellence in teaching, research and outreach to the communities of the Negev for the next 50 years and beyond. Visit vision.aabgu.org to learn more.

AABGU, which is headquartered in Manhattan, has nine regional offices throughout the United States. For more information, visit http://www.aabgu.org.Findings need to be replicated but physicians should be aware of this possible association

Use of certain diabetes drugs, known as dipeptidyl peptidase-4 inhibitors, is associated with an increased risk of inflammatory bowel disease, the digestive condition that causes stomach pain and bloating, finds a study published by The BMJ today.

The researchers stress that the absolute risk is low - and that their findings need to be replicated - but say "physicians should be made aware of this possible association."

Dipeptidyl peptidase-4 (DPP-4) inhibitors are a relatively new type of diabetes drug that lower high blood sugar levels. They are usually prescribed for people with type 2 diabetes who have not responded well to other drugs.

They work by blocking the DPP-4 enzyme that is involved in the body's inflammatory response and regulates gut hormones. Some data suggest that lower serum levels of DPP-4 enzyme may be linked to increased disease activity in patients with inflammatory bowel disease, but no study has investigated the impact of inhibiting this enzyme on the occurrence of this disease.

So a Canadian team, led by Laurent Azoulay at McGill University, set out to assess whether the use of DPP-4 inhibitors is associated with inflammatory bowel disease in patients with type 2 diabetes.

They analysed data from the UK's Clinical Practice Research Database for 141,170 patients aged at least 18 years of age, who were starting antidiabetic drugs between 2007 and 2016.

Patients initially treated with insulin and those with a history of inflammatory bowel disease or similar conditions were excluded. Factors such as age, weight (BMI), smoking status, alcohol related disorders and complications of diabetes were taken into account.

Participants were monitored for an average of three and a half years, during which time 208 new cases of inflammatory bowel disease were recorded (an incidence rate of 37.7 per 100,000 person years).

Overall, use of DPP-4 inhibitors was associated with a 75% increased risk of inflammatory bowel disease (53.4 cases per 100,000 person years) compared with use of other antidiabetic drugs (34.5 cases per 100,000 person years).

This association gradually increased with longer durations of DPP-4 inhibitor use, reaching a peak after three to four years and decreasing after more than four years of use.

Although no single DPP-4 inhibitor drug was statistically associated with inflammatory bowel disease, these findings remained unchanged after further analyses to test the strength of the results.

This is an observational study, so no firm conclusions can be drawn about cause and effect, and the researchers point to some limitations, such as possible misclassification of drugs or cases. And while they adjusted for several risk factors, they cannot rule out the possibility that other unmeasured (confounding) factors may have influenced the results.

Nevertheless, they say in this first population based study, the use of dipeptidyl peptidase-4 inhibitors was associated with an increased risk of inflammatory bowel disease.

"Although our findings need to be replicated, physicians should be aware of this possible association and perhaps refrain from prescribing DPP-4 inhibitors for people at high risk, such as those with a family history of disease or with known autoimmune conditions," they conclude.

###March 22, 2018 - In 2003, scientists made a surprising discovery of a 6-inch mummified humanoid skeleton in the Atacama region of Chile with an estimated bone age of about 6-8 years old at the time of death. The specimen's exceptionally small stature and multiple skeletal abnormalities, including a cone-shaped skull led to widespread speculation on its origin. In a study published today in Genome Research, whole genome sequencing of the Atacama (Ata) skeleton offers insights into its ancestry and strange phenotype.

Early analyses revealed that the Ata skeleton contained high-quality DNA that was suitable for modern sequencing technology. "This was an unusual specimen with some fairly extraordinary claims put forward. ... it would be an example of how to use modern science to answer the question "what is it?" says senior author Garry Nolan from Stanford University. Using DNA extracted from the bone marrow, Nolan and his colleagues conducted a whole-genome sequence analysis of Ata.

Sequencing reads were aligned to human and non-human primate reference genomes, including chimpanzee and rhesus macaque, which revealed Ata to be of human origin. Ata's Chilean ancestry was resolved by comparing single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) against a database of known SNPs from diverse geographical populations. The ratio of sequence read alignment to the X and Y Chromosomes revealed that Ata was female.

The researchers next probed for genetic clues that could explain Ata's small stature, multiple bone and skull abnormalities, abnormal rib count, and premature bone age. They found multiple mutations in genes associated with diseases such as dwarfism, scoliosis, and musculoskeletal abnormalities. Surprisingly, Nolan claims Ata's "dramatic phenotype could in fact be explained with a relatively short list of mutations in genes known previously to be associated with bone development."

"This is a great example of how studying ancient samples can teach us how to analyze modern day medical samples" says co-author Atul Butte, UCSF. Future studies employing deeper sequencing and analyses of the novel sequence variations found in Ata may improve our understanding of the functional basis of genetic skeletal disorders.

###

Researchers from the University of California, San Francisco, Roche Sequencing Solutions, Stanford University, National Autonomous University of Mexico, Ultra Intelligence Corporation, and Stanford University School of Medicine contributed to this work. The study was supported by the Lucile Packard Foundation for Children's Health, the University of California San Francisco endowment, the Human Frontier Science Program Fellowship, and the Rachford and Carlota A. Harris Professorship.

Media Contacts:

The authors are available for more information by contacting Laura Kurtzman, UCSF Communications (Laura.Kurtzman@ucsf.edu); or Hanae Armitage, Stanford press office (harmitag@stanford.edu); 650-725-5376 [office]).

Interested reporters may obtain copies of the manuscript via email from Dana Macciola, Administrative Assistant, Genome Research (macciol@cshl.edu); +1-516-422-4012).

About the article:

The manuscript will be published online ahead of print on 22 March 2018. Its full citation is as follows: Bhattacharya S, Li J, Sockell A, Kan M, Bava F, Chen, S, Avila-Arcos M, Ji X, Smith E, Asadi N, Lachman R, Lam H, Bustamante C, Butte A, Nolan G. 2018. Whole genome sequencing of Atacama skeleton shows novel mutations linked with dysplasia. Genome Research doi: 10.1101/gr.223693.117

About Genome Research:

Launched in 1995, Genome Research is an international, continuously published, peer-reviewed journal that focuses on research that provides novel insights into the genome biology of all organisms, including advances in genomic medicine. Among the topics considered by the journal are genome structure and function, comparative genomics, molecular evolution, genome-scale quantitative and population genetics, proteomics, epigenomics, and systems biology. The journal also features exciting gene discoveries and reports of cutting-edge computational biology and high-throughput methodologies.

About Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press:

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press is an internationally renowned publisher of books, journals, and electronic media, located on Long Island, New York. Since 1933, it has furthered the advance and spread of scientific knowledge in all areas of genetics and molecular biology, including cancer biology, plant science, bioinformatics, and neurobiology. The Press is a division of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, an innovator in life science research and the education of scientists, students, and the public. For more information, visit our website at http://cshlpress.org.

Genome Research issues press releases to highlight significant research studies that are published in the journal.Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology have shown that between 87 and 98 percent of ships comply with the tougher regulations for sulphur emissions that were introduced in northern Europe in 2015. The lowest levels of compliance were observed in the western part of the English Channel and in the middle of the Baltic Sea.

The highest permitted sulphur content in shipping fuel was drastically reduced at the end of 2014 for vessels sailing in the northern European Sulphur Emission Control Area (SECA) - from 1.00 to 0.10 per cent. Before the stricter regulations were implemented, sulphur emissions from the shipping industry were estimated to cause the premature death of 50,000 Europeans each year, because the sulphur forms particles that are swept inland by the wind.

Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, have developed a ground-breaking method for remotely monitoring emissions from marine vessels, which they've used to investigate the effects of the new regulations. The work has been carried out through the Danish Environmental Protection Agency and the EU projects Compmon and Envisum.

Some of the measurements were taken using an aeroplane flying over Denmark, the English Channel and the middle of the Baltic Sea, while others used fixed measuring stations in the approach to Gothenburg, Sweden, on the Oresund Bridge (between Copenhagen and Malmo) and on the Great Belt Bridge in central Denmark (see videos and photos below).

Johan Mellqvist, professor of optical remote sensing, heads the work at Chalmers.

"We can see differences in how the regulations are followed depending on who owns the vessels," he says. While the vast majority of the ships comply with the regulations, a few shipping companies seem repeatedly to use non-compliant fuel.

"Other patterns we can see are that vessels that only rarely come into these waters break the rules more frequently. In addition, it's more common that vessels emit excessive sulphur as they are leaving the SECA rather than on the way in, when they risk an on-board inspection. Some ships that have installed abatement technique for sulphur, so called scrubbers, have been observed with high levels on multiple occasions."

One use of remote sensing is to advise port authorities as to which ships they should select for on-board fuel inspections. Such inspections are a prerequisite for taking legal action against rule breakers. Recently the Norwegian Maritime Authority fined a ship NOK 600.000 (about EUR 63.000) for non-compliance. This was detected by the Great Belt measuring station and reported to the Norwegian Authorities.

"In general, the vessels carry both low-sulphur fuel oil and the less expensive high-sulphur oil on board," Mellqvist says. "If they switch fuel well in advance of their passing of the measuring stations, they won't be caught out. That's why aerial monitoring is superior. It shows how much the vessels actually emit when they are out at sea and don't know that they will be monitored."

The aerial surveys show that 13 per cent of vessels in the western part of the English Channel, near the SECA border, were in violation of the sulphur regulations in September 2016. For vessels around Denmark, the corresponding figure is 6-8 per cent, depending on time period. The fixed measuring stations on the approach to Gothenburg, on the Oresund Bridge and the Great Belt Bridge show that between 2 and 5 per cent of the bypassing ships use non-compliant fuel. This can be compared to on-board inspections showing non-compliance rates of around 5 per cent of the vessels at port. This may indicate that some ships change to compliant fuels too late (when entering the SECA) or change to non-compliant fuels too early (when leaving the SECA), while aiming at compliance at the fixed stations where they expect to be observed.

"There is a strong financial incentive for shipping companies to continue using the prohibited high-sulphur fuel," Mellqvist says. "For example, they can save around 100,000 euros by using the cheaper, high-sulphur fuel on a single round trip between the UK and St Petersburg. The entirety of this journey lies within the SECA."

On Friday, March 23, Johan Mellqvist will present the ship surveillance work at the 19th International Environmental Forum "Baltic Sea Day" 2018 in St Petersburg, describing results from surveillance flights last summer in the middle of the Baltic Sea. The preliminary results show that the compliance rate was 88 percent, which is lower than in the western part of the Baltic Sea.

More about: The Chalmers researchers' method for remote sensing of emissions:

The method that the Chalmers researchers have developed is based on a combination of established technologies that have been refined and adapted. They include optical remote sensing, physical/chemical analysis using a "sniffer" and monitoring vessels using an Automatic Identification System (AIS).

In addition to sulphur, the system can analyse marine emissions of nitrogen oxides and particles, for which the regulations have also been tightened for the shipping industry in recent years.

The method was completely unique when it came, and it is gaining ground in the industry. For example, the Chalmers team has built an aerial surveillance system for monitoring air pollution in Belgium. They've also conducted a pilot project in Los Angeles and maintain regular contacts with China, where the detection technique is about to be implemented.

More About: Sulphur emissions from the shipping industry:

Sulphur emissions are above all a health issue, but in the Nordic region, where the bedrock has low lime content, they also contribute to acidification in lakes and waterways.

Since 2015, the Baltic Sea, the Kattegat, the Skagerrak, the North Sea and the English Channel have made up a Sulphur Emission Control Area in which shipping fuel may contain no more than 0.1 per cent sulphur. The rest of the EU follows the regulations set out by the UN's International Maritime Organisation, IMO, which will reduce the maximum permitted sulphur content in shipping fuel from the current 3.5 per cent to 0.5 per cent worldwide by 2020.

Reducing sulphur emissions is very costly for shipping companies, no matter how they choose to meet the requirements. There are several alternatives:

- Powering ships with the significantly more expensive low-sulphur heavy fuel oil (HFO).

- Installing scrubbers on board to reduce sulphur emissions to the necessary degree.

- Switching fuels entirely, for example to liquefied natural gas (LNG) or methanol, which the ferry company Stena Line is now testing on a few of its vessels.

More about: The research

The results come from measurements that the Chalmers researchers carried out on the behalf of the Danish Environmental Protection Agency and the recently completed EU compliance monitoring project Compmon. The report from Compmon was published end of December 2017 (http://dx.doi.org/10.17196/CompMon.001 and http://dx.doi.org/10.17196/CompMon.002 )

The EU project Envisum is currently investigating the health benefits created by the new regulations in the countries around the Baltic. Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg University and City of Gothenburg are some of the participants. The project focuses particularly on health effects in Gothenburg, St Petersburg and Gdynia-Gdansk - some of the biggest ports in the area, which are centrally located in their respective cities.

###Topics range from the digital image and the Iranian highlands to medical imaging / approximately 80 million for three years

The Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) has approved the establishment of 14 new Priority Programmes (PP) for 2019. Priority Programmes aim to examine fundamental scientific issues relating to particularly topical or emerging areas of research. The new programmes were selected by the Senate of the DFG - Germany's largest research funding organisation and central self-governing organisation for the research community - from a total of 53 submissions.

The newly approved Priority Programmes cover the entire spectrum of disciplines, from the humanities and social sciences, life sciences and natural sciences to engineering sciences. Topics range from the digital image to spatial genome architecture in development and disease, the evolutionary optimisation of neuronal systems, through to the Perovskite semiconductor and property-controlled forming processes.

All of the programmes are highly interdisciplinary and are notable for their application of innovative methods. Early career support is a key element and one of the essential prerequisites for the establishment of a new Priority Programme. All new Priority Programmes also feature a gender equality strategy.

The programme designation describes the overriding topic of the collaboration. Over the coming months, the DFG will announce a separate call for proposals for each of the programmes. Proposals will be evaluated to determine their research quality and their contribution to the respective main topic. Approximately 80 million will be available for the 14 new programmes in the first three-year funding period. There will also be a 22 percent programme allowance for indirect project costs. Priority Programmes are generally funded for six years. Currently, a total of 98 Priority Programmes are being funded.

The new Priority Programmes, grouped according to scientific discipline, are:

Computational Literary Studies

(Coordinator: Prof. Dr. Fotis Jannidis, University of Wurzburg)

(Coordinator: Prof. Dr. Fotis Jannidis, University of Wurzburg) The Digital Image

(Coordinator: Prof. Dr. Hubertus Kohle, LMU Munich)

(Coordinator: Prof. Dr. Hubertus Kohle, LMU Munich) The Iranian Highlands: Resilience and Integration of Premodern Societies

(Coordinator: Prof. Dr. Thomas Stollner, Ruhr University Bochum)

Life Sciences

Spatial Genome Architecture in Development and Disease

(Coordinator: Prof. Dr. Stefan Mundlos, Institute of Medical Genetics and Human Genetics of the Charite, Berlin)

(Coordinator: Prof. Dr. Stefan Mundlos, Institute of Medical Genetics and Human Genetics of the Charite, Berlin) Evolutionary Optimisation of Neuronal Processing

(Coordinator: Prof. Dr. Fred Wolf, Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organisation, Gottingen)

(Coordinator: Prof. Dr. Fred Wolf, Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organisation, Gottingen) Molecular Mechanisms of Functional Phase Separation

(Coordinator: Prof. Dr. Edward A. Lemke, University of Mainz)

(Coordinator: Prof. Dr. Edward A. Lemke, University of Mainz) Radiomics: Next Generation of Biomedical Imaging

(Coordinator: Prof. Dr. Fabian Bamberg, University of Tubingen)

Natural Sciences

Dynamic Wetting of Flexible, Adaptive and Switchable Surfaces

(Coordinator: Prof. Dr. Uwe Thiele, University of Munster)

(Coordinator: Prof. Dr. Uwe Thiele, University of Munster) Novel Production Processes and Multi-Scale Analysis, Modelling and Design of Cell-Cell and Cell-Bioreactor Interactions (InterZell)

(Coordinator: Prof. Dr.-Ing. Ralf Takors, University of Stuttgart)

(Coordinator: Prof. Dr.-Ing. Ralf Takors, University of Stuttgart) Perovskite Semiconductors: From Fundamental Properties to Devices

(Coordinator: Prof. Dr. Lukas Schmidt-Mende, University of Konstanz

Engineering Sciences

Adaptive Modularised Constructions Made in a Flux: Rapid, Economical and Alterable

(Coordinator: Prof. Dr.-Ing. Peter Mark, Ruhr University Bochum)

(Coordinator: Prof. Dr.-Ing. Peter Mark, Ruhr University Bochum) Property-Controlled Metal Forming Processes

(Coordinator: Prof. Dr.-Ing. Markus Bambach, Brandenburg Technical University Cottbus-Senftenberg)

(Coordinator: Prof. Dr.-Ing. Markus Bambach, Brandenburg Technical University Cottbus-Senftenberg) Cooperative Multilevel Multistable Micro Actuator Systems

Scalable Interaction Paradigms for Pervasive Computing Environments

(Coordinator: Prof. Dr. Susanne Boll, University of Oldenburg)

###

Further Information

Media contact:

DFG Press and Public Relations, Tel. +49-228-885-2109, presse@dfg.de

Information is also provided by the coordinators of the new Priority Programmes.

For information on the DFG Priority Programmes also see: http://www.dfg.de/spp/enBarcelona, Spain: As early detection and treatment of breast cancer improves, more and more women are surviving the disease. However, they still face challenges, which include determining the moment when it might be reasonable to state they are "cured" of the disease, and obtaining life insurance.

"In the Netherlands, most applications for life insurance are accepted, but not for cancer survivors. A lot of former breast cancer patients are rejected for life insurance or subjected to higher insurance premiums," said Ms Marissa van Maaren, a researcher at the Netherlands Comprehensive Cancer Organisation (Utrecht, The Netherlands), at the 11th European Breast Cancer Conference today (Thursday). "Others might not even apply for life insurance because they might think they do not have a chance of being accepted. Former cancer patients in other countries may face similar problems.

"At the request of the Dutch Association of Insurers and the Dutch Federation of Cancerpatient Organisations (NFK), we have created a model for predicting the extra risk of death of breast cancer patients and survivors for up to ten years after their diagnosis. Importantly, this model takes into account that survival rates improve as each year passes by. This should provide patients and their clinicians with increased insight into their prognosis, and medical advisors with a more reliable basis on which to make their decisions."

Ms van Maaren and her colleagues matched 23,234 women diagnosed with breast cancer in 2005 and 2006 with the general Dutch population. Information on the patients, including age, year of diagnosis and stage of breast cancer, was taken from the Netherlands Cancer Registry. There were 10,101 women diagnosed with stage I cancer, 9,868 with stage II and 3,265 with stage III.

"We were interested in the excess risk of death for breast cancer survivors, so the risk of death in the patient population minus the risk of death in the general Dutch population. We also wanted to take into account the number of years survived after diagnosis," she explained.

Then she built 30 models, ten for each of the three stages of breast cancer for each year of survival after diagnosis up to ten years. The models were adjusted to take account of important prognostic factors that might influence the risk of death, such as type of breast cancer, whether or not the cancer had spread to lymph nodes, age at diagnosis, type of surgery, and if treatments such as radiotherapy, chemotherapy, hormone therapy and other targeted treatments were used.

"All the separate models were integrated into one model that, for every stage of disease, shows the extra risk of death in the first ten years compared to the general Dutch population, conditional on the number of years survived after diagnosis," she said.

To give an example, the model can show that a particular patient with certain characteristics who applies for life insurance two years after diagnosis might have a 5.8% extra risk of dying within ten years compared to the general Dutch population, but if she applies five years after diagnosis her risk may be reduced to 4.2% and after nine years it may be 0.6%.

"This could result in lower premiums as the years go by, although the exact premium may vary depending on the insurance company," said Ms van Maaren. "It's also important to bear in mind that treatments for breast cancer have improved a lot since 2005 to 2006 when these women were diagnosed."

The researchers tested the accuracy of the 30 underlying models and found that they had a reasonable to good ability to predict the outcome and to discriminate between the risk of dying or staying alive. In addition, validation on an external population showed similar outcomes.

Now, Dutch insurance companies are testing the newly-developed model, comparing its results with those from old data, and calculating how it might affect whether or not someone is accepted for life insurance and the effect on their premiums. Then it will be discussed with all patient organisations and working groups involved in the project, and when everyone agrees that the model is valid enough to use, it could be implemented.

As the model is based on the Dutch population, other countries would need to validate it against their own populations before it could be used. "However, we do not expect that the extra death rates, in other words the difference between breast cancer survivors and the general population, will be very different," said Ms van Maaren.

"Currently, insurance companies in The Netherlands are using international data to assess breast cancer patients' and survivors' risk of dying, which may not be specifically targeted at the Dutch population. In addition, every insurance company is free to use other information on which to base their decision. We think it is unjustified to reject patients based on data that may not predict the risk for a Dutch breast cancer patient or survivor correctly. At present, the life insurance application process is not transparent and this results in a lot of uncertainty and incomprehension among breast cancer patients and survivors. We hope insurance companies will use this model and be more transparent with patients regarding the outcome of their life insurance applications."

She said the model could support decisions made by clinicians, insurance companies and patients but would not automate the process. "Clinicians and insurance companies take account of a number of other variables not included in this model, such as the presence of other diseases and conditions. But it could provide clinicians with a basis on which to deem a patient cured of the disease, and insurance companies have a more reliable basis for their life insurance application process that is based on more recent Dutch clinical data," she concluded.

Co-chair of the European Breast Cancer Conference, Professor Isabel Rubio, director of the Breast Surgical Unit at Clinica Universidad de Navarra (Spain), who was not involved with the research, commented: "This is an interesting study; however, it is just based on the Dutch population and would need to be re-worked for populations in other countries. It does appear to be a useful tool that might help former patients lead more normal lives and caregivers could use this information to better inform survivors about their actual prognosis."

###

Abstract no: 9, "When will a breast cancer patient be cured? A prediction model predicting the conditional extra risk on mortality" Thursday, "After the primary treatment of breast cancer, then what?" clinical science session, 10.05 hrs, Goya room.New research links specific numerical activities undertaken by parents to certain math skills in young children. Published today in open-access journal Frontiers in Psychology, the study also finds that the more parents engage in mathematical activities with their children, the higher their early numeracy performance.

Previous studies indicate that early mathematical skills provide a better transition to school-taught mathematics. It's well-known that parents can play an important role in their children's early mathematical development -- but, until now, the link between specific numerical activities and certain math skills was not well understood.

To shed light on these links, researchers from KU Leuven in Belgium assessed 128 kindergarten-age children for various symbolic and non-symbolic numerical tasks. The researchers also asked parents to indicate the frequency of certain numeracy activities undertaken with their children at home and then looked for connections between this and the children's early numeracy skills.

"We found that the more parents engaged in activities such as identifying numerals, sorting objects by size, color, or shape, or learning simple sums, the higher the children performed on skills like counting," says the study's lead author, Belde Mutaf Y?ld?z.

"These activities -- and talking about money when shopping or measuring ingredients while cooking -- were linked with a more accurate estimation of the position of a digit on an empty number line. In addition, engaging in activities such as card and board games was associated with better pictorial calculation skills."

Mutaf Y?ld?z says the research supports and extends the idea that parent-child interaction plays a role in children's acquisition of early mathematical skills -- and that policymakers should recognize this.

"Increased public awareness on the role that parents can play in their children's development of mathematical skills just by doing more number related activities in a home environment would be hugely useful," she says.

"Policymakers should think about providing educational tools for some home numeracy activities to help parents enhance their children's mathematical development."

The researchers caution that the study's findings are based on cross-sectional design and correlation analysis, meaning that the results don't indicate any cause-and-effect relationship. For example, it could be that children who are already good at mathematics are the ones triggering 'home numeracy' instead of their parents.

Despite this, with research on home numeracy in its infancy, Mutaf Y?ld?z and her colleagues are calling for more comprehensive investigations and observations of home numeracy activities, as well as further intervention studies to determine which specific activities best help children enhance their mathematical skills.

###Frankfurt/ Germany, 22 March 2018. Around 7,600 years ago, the emergence of agricultural settlements in Southeastern Europe and subsequent progress of civilization suddenly came to a standstill. This was most likely caused by an abrupt sea level rise in the northern Aegean Sea. Researchers of the Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre, the Goethe University in Frankfurt and the University of Toronto have now detected evidence of this oceanographic event and an earlier sudden sea-level rise in the fossils of tiny calcifying marine algae preserved in seafloor sediments in the Aegean Sea. The impact of these events on historical societal development emphasizes the potential economic and social consequences of a future rise in sea levels due to global climate change, the researchers write in the study recently published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Originating in the Middle East, the Neolithic Age witnessed one of the most significant upheavals of civilization in human history: the transition from a culture of hunter-gatherers to an agricultural and sedentary lifestyle. During the Neolithic revolution, agricultural societies also began to spread toward Southeastern Europe. However, archeological digs show that the development of settlements temporarily declined about 7,600 years ago. Researchers from Frankfurt have now identified one of the likely causes for this.

"Approximately 7,600 years ago, the sea level must have risen abruptly in the Mediterranean regions bordering Southeastern Europe. The northern Aegean, the Marmara Sea and the Black Sea recorded an increase of more than one meter. This led to the flooding of low-lying coastal areas that would have been ideal areas for settlement", says lead author Professor Dr. Jens Herrle of the German Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre and Goethe University.

The new study is based on a sediment core from the ocean floor of the northern Aegean Sea, which allowed Herrle and his collaborators to reconstruct the level of salinity in this part of the Mediterranean between 11,000 and 5,000 years ago. The ocean floor is richly abundant in tiny fossils of the calcified algae species Emiliania huxleyi. Viewed up-close under a scanning electron microscope, size changes in these algae preserved a signal of the level of salinity in the surface water of the Aegean during their lifetime.

"These calcifying algae evidence two rapid decreases in the salt content, at approximately 8,400 and again 7,600 years ago, which can only be explained by the fact that a higher volume of low-saline surface water flowed from the Black Sea into the northern Aegean at these times. A prerequisite for this is a rapid rise in sea levels that would lead to an increased outflow of surface water in this direction. The source of this may have been Lake Agassiz in North America. This glacial meltwater lake was enclosed in ice and experienced a massive breach during this period, which emptied an enormous volume of water into the ocean," explains Herrle.

The new evidence supports a conclusion of extensive flooding along the edges of the northeastern Mediterranean, coinciding with two standstills in the Neolithic revolution. The earlier change in sea-level approximately 8,400 years ago highlighted by the new salinity record coincides with archeological dates suggesting that settlement on low-lying areas had already been significantly impeded by rising sea levels and the subsequent climatic changes. The renewed rise in sea levels 800 years later likely further hampered the transition to agricultural communities.

"Our results show that the timing and severity of past fluctuations in sea level has already had a significant effect on human history during its early agricultural development", explains Herrle in closing. "Due to climate change, we expect global sea levels to rise by up to one meter over the next 100 years. Millions of people could thus be displaced from coastal regions, with severe social and economic consequences."

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Goethe University is a research-oriented university in the European financial centre Frankfurt The university was founded in 1914 through private funding, primarily from Jewish sponsors, and has since produced pioneering achievements in the areas of social sciences, sociology and economics, medicine, quantum physics, brain research, and labour law. It gained a unique level of autonomy on 1 January 2008 by returning to its historic roots as a "foundation university". Today, it is among the top ten in external funding and among the top three largest universities in Germany, with three clusters of excellence in medicine, life sciences and the humanities. Together with the Technical University of Darmstadt and the University of Mainz, it acts as a partner of the inter-state strategic Rhine-Main University Alliance. Internet: http://www.uni-frankfurt.de.

To study and understand nature with its limitless diversity of living creatures and to preserve and manage it in a sustainable fashion as the basis of life for future generations - this has been the goal of the Senckenberg Gesellschaft fur Naturforschung (Senckenberg Nature Research Society) for 200 years. This integrative "geobiodiversity research" and the dissemination of research and science are among Senckenberg's main tasks. Three nature museums in Frankfurt, Gorlitz and Dresden display the diversity of life and the earth's development over millions of years. The Senckenberg Nature Research Society is a member of the Leibniz Association. The Senckenberg Nature Museum in Frankfurt am Main is supported by the City of Frankfurt am Main as well as numerous other partners. Additional information can be found at http://www.senckenberg.de.Alexandria, Va., USA - The American Association for Dental Research announced Kyounga Cheon as the second recipient of the AADR Anne D. Haffajee Fellowship. She was recognized at the Opening Ceremonies of the 47th Annual Meeting of the American Association for Dental Research (AADR), held in conjunction with the 42nd Annual Meeting of the Canadian Association for Dental Research (CADR). The AADR/CADR Annual Meeting is in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., USA from March 21-24, 2018.

Kyounga Cheon is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Pediatric Dentistry at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, USA. Cheon graduated from the Dental School at South Korea and was trained as an orthodontist at the Korean Orthodontic Research Institute. Her research career began at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas where she worked on an interdisciplinary research project bridging clinical and molecular biology to identify novel biomarkers for lung cancer patients.

Inspired by this research experience, she pursued an academic career at University of Alabama at Birmingham. She successfully completed the Pediatric Dental Residency Program while at the same time working on her master's degree in oral biology by receiving a number of fellowships including Rahemtulla Endowed Scholarship Award for Achievement in Research and she was awarded a National Research Service Award T32 post-doctoral fellowship for her postdoctoral research.

Cheon's current research focuses on the investigation of Streptococcus mutans genotypes to determine the cause of caries in high-risk children and develop early diagnostic tool for prevention of dental caries, as well as tooth regeneration using novel nitric oxide releasing biomimetic nano-matrix gel.

"The AADR Anne D. Haffajee Fellowship supports women researchers at the early stages of their scientific careers," said AADR President Raul I. Garcia. "We are pleased to present this Fellowship to Kyounga Cheon and are grateful for all those who have made this Fellowship possible through their generous donations."

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About the American Association for Dental Research

The American Association for Dental Research (AADR), headquartered in Alexandria, Va., is a nonprofit organization with over 3,400 members in the United States. Its mission is: (1) to advance research and increase knowledge for the improvement of oral health; (2) to support and represent the oral health research community; and (3) to facilitate the communication and application of research findings. AADR is the largest Division of the International Association for Dental Research (IADR). To learn more about the AADR, visit http://www.aadr.org.

About the AADR Anne D. Haffajee Fellowship

The Anne D. Haffajee Fellowship was created in recognition of Dr. Haffajee's many contributions to clinical research in periodontology and oral biology and her prominence as a female leader in the field. This Fellowship is endowed thanks to generous donors and the AADR Board of Directors, which is matching donations to fund the endowment at $250,000 allowing for at least one Fellowship of $10,000 to be granted annually. Dr. Haffajee's mentee and friend Flavia Teles created the fellowship, for which an endowment was started with a very generous gift from Haffajee's husband, Charles Haffajee.The American Association for Dental Research (AADR) has announced Teresa Dolan as the 2018 recipient of the AADR Jack Hein Public Service Award. She was recognized at the Opening Ceremonies of the 47th Annual Meeting of the American Association for Dental Research (AADR), held in conjunction with the 42nd Annual Meeting of the Canadian Association for Dental Research (CADR). The AADR/CADR Annual Meeting is in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., USA from March 21-24, 2018.

Dolan is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Rutgers University, she earned a D.D.S. from the University of Texas and a M.P.H. from the University of California, Los Angeles. She was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Dental Health Services Research Scholar and completed a Veterans Administration Fellowship in Geriatric Dentistry.

Dolan serves as Vice President and Chief Clinical Officer for Dentsply Sirona. In her role as Chief Clinical Officer she provides strategic direction for global Dentsply Sirona professional education activities in accordance with ADA CERP standards and guidelines. She also is actively engaged with the various business units to support their unique clinical initiatives and strategies.

Dolan joined Dentsply Sirona after serving as professor and Dean of the University of Florida College of Dentistry from 2003 until 2013. Dolan joined the University of Florida in 1989 as the faculty director of the geriatric dentistry program. There her research focused on geriatric dentistry, including access to care and oral health (promotion and appropriate outcomes) for older populations. She is being recognized for her many contributions to the image of women in dentistry and as a champion for diversity.

The AADR Jack Hein Public Service Award honors individuals who have given exemplary service in the area of public affairs by consistently promoting the interests and activities of oral health research to a wide constituency.

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About the American Association for Dental Research

The American Association for Dental Research (AADR), headquartered in Alexandria, Va., is a nonprofit organization with over 3,400 members in the United States. Its mission is: (1) to advance research and increase knowledge for the improvement of oral health; (2) to support and represent the oral health research community; and (3) to facilitate the communication and application of research findings. AADR is the largest Division of the International Association for Dental Research (IADR). To learn more about the AADR, visit http://www.aadr.org.Alexandria, VA, USA - At the 47th Annual Meeting of the American Association for Dental Research (AADR), held in conjunction with the 42nd Annual Meeting of the Canadian Association for Dental Research (CADR), Alen Blagajcevic, student at Tufts University School of Dental Medicine, Boston, Mass., presented an oral session titled "Bioengineered Tooth Bud Model Functionalized With Decellularized Tooth Bud ECM." The AADR/CADR Annual Meeting is in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., USA from March 21-24, 2018.

Researchers aimed to create 3D bioengineered tooth buds to serve as a biologically based replacement tooth alternative to current dental implants. Gelatin Methacrylate (GelMA) hydrogel can be used to encapsulate postnatal dental stem cells (DSC) and support odontogenic differentiation and mineralized tissue formation.

Blagajcevic's work is done under the direction of Pamela Yelick, Ph.D., professor of orthodontics and director of the division of craniofacial and molecular genetics at Tufts University School of Dental Medicine, whose research has long-focused on creating biological-tooth replacements.

"To enhance enamel and dentin matrix production, we have created functionalized bioengineered GelMA tooth buds with decellularized tooth bud extracellular matrix (dTB ECM)" said Alen Blagajcevic. "The Yelick lab at Tufts had previously determined that dTBs retain ECM components known to play important roles in dental cell proliferation, differentiation, and tooth morphogenesis. Upon in vivo implantation, cell-seeded dTB scaffolds formed whole tooth structures. In this study, we introduced lyophilized dTB ECM to our bioengineered GelMA tooth bud model." "We found that dTB ECM powder can be used to enhance DSC differentiation in GelMA tooth bud constructs," said Alen Blagajcevic. "These promising but preliminary results suggest that dTB ECM can be used to enhance dental stem cells DSC proliferation and differentiation, advancing the GelMA tooth bud model towards future clinical applications." The Yelick Lab at Tufts is funded by the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research of the National Institutes of Health (award numbers R01DE026731 and R01 DE016132, both to PCY).

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This is a summary of oral session #0122 titled "Bioengineered Tooth Bud Model Functionalized With Decellularized Tooth Bud ECM" presented by Alen Blagajcevic on Wednesday, March 21, 2018 at 3:15 p.m. in Grand Ballroom B of the Greater Fort Lauderdale/Broward County Convention Center in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., USA.

About the American Association for Dental Research

The American Association for Dental Research (AADR), headquartered in Alexandria, Va., is a nonprofit organization with over 3,400 members in the United States. Its mission is: (1) to advance research and increase knowledge for the improvement of oral health; (2) to support and represent the oral health research community; and (3) to facilitate the communication and application of research findings. AADR is the largest Division of the International Association for Dental Research (IADR). To learn more about the AADR, visit http://www.aadr.org.Alexandria, VA, USA - At the 47th Annual Meeting of the American Association for Dental Research (AADR), held in conjunction with the 42nd Annual Meeting of the Canadian Association for Dental Research (CADR), Miriam Walker, Meharry Medical College School of Dentistry, Nashville, Tenn., presented a poster titled "Effects of Periodontitis on the Colon Microbiome." The AADR/CADR Annual Meeting is in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., USA from March 21-24, 2018.

Severe gum disease is among the most prevalent chronic infection in particular in African-American populations and is associated with complex microbial infection in the sub-gingival cavity. The polybacterial nature of periodontal disease is a risk factor for several various systemic diseases.

"We have shown that the synthesis of nitric oxide (NO), known to regulate gut motility functions and NRF2, a transcriptional factor known to regulate several antioxidant genes, mediated Phase II protein expression have been altered in colon specimens of polybacterialinfected ApoE-/-mice," said Miriam Walker. "The gut microbiome plays a vital role in intestinal motility, however it is unclear whether oral polybacterial DNA is present in colon and how it alters the microbiome and NO synthesis in this mice animal model."

The goal of this study was to determine whether oral pathogens are found in the colon and to investigate how these pathogens modulate the microbiome of the colon. Colon specimens were obtained from 16 weeks polymicrobial-infected and healthy mice. Microbial DNA from colon specimens were isolated and analyzed by use of 454 pyrosequencing of 16S RNA genes.

"Through BLAST and RDP analysis, several microbiome were found in the colon that belongs to oral and colon microbiome," said Walker. "Our studies are the first to demonstrate that polybacterial infection can alter colon microbial environment and this may impact on colon motility."

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This is a summary of poster #0425 titled "Effects of Periodontitis on the Colon Microbiome" presented by Miriam Walker on Thursday, March 22, 2018 at 11 a.m. in Hall B/C of the Greater Fort Lauderdale/Broward County Convention Center in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., USA.

About the American Association for Dental Research

The American Association for Dental Research (AADR), headquartered in Alexandria, Va., is a nonprofit organization with over 3,400 members in the United States. Its mission is: (1) to advance research and increase knowledge for the improvement of oral health; (2) to support and represent the oral health research community; and (3) to facilitate the communication and application of research findings. AADR is the largest Division of the International Association for Dental Research (IADR). To learn more about the AADR, visit http://www.aadr.org.Alexandria, VA, USA - At the 47th Annual Meeting of the American Association for Dental Research (AADR), held in conjunction with the 42nd Annual Meeting of the Canadian Association for Dental Research (CADR), Kelsea Marie Hubka, a Rice University graduate student and visiting student at University of Texas Health Science Center School of Dentistry, Houston, Texas, presented a poster titled "Growth Factor Gradients in Migration-Permissive Hydrogels for Salivary Gland Assembly." The AADR/CADR Annual Meeting is in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., USA from March 21-24, 2018.

Engineered 3D morphogen gradients in hydrogels can direct human salivary gland stem/progenitor cell (hS/PC) differentiation into ductal and acinar cell phenotypes for gland replacement and direct tissue organization during embryogenesis/tissue repair. Heparin-binding growth factor (HBGF) gradients form by release from matrix heparin sulfate proteoglycans such as perlecan at sites on heparan sulfate chains decorating N-terminal domain I (PlnD1). HBGFs, including the FGF family elicit both cell differentiation and motility. Gradients of HBGFs, PlnD1, and matrix components can be introduced into migration-permissive hydrogels made using a custom 3D-printed gradient maker device.

To allow the cells to form into structures that look like native tissue, the hydrogel system was modified with matrix molecules to provide sites for the cells to attach as they move. The chemical cross links were also partially replaced with biological ones that let the cells use their enzymes to cut through and clear space for movement. The extent of cell spreading and motility was assessed. hS/PCs were incorporated into these customized hydrogels with optimal crosslinking density where PlnD1 was introduced as a gradient using the 3D-printed gradient maker device at flow rate 0.9mL/min. After gradient hydrogels were crosslinked, growth factors FGF-7/10 were bound to PlnD1 to promote directional cell movement. Morphogenesis was assessed using confocal microscopy.

Human hS/PCs remained viable and assembled into acinar-like structures at each crosslinking density. PlnD1/HBGF gradients permitted greater hS/PC cell motility over time than PlnD1 gradients lacking growth factors.

The HA-based hydrogel with enzymatically-degradable crosslinkers for selective degradation and cell motility allowed for gland assembly. The growth factor gradients in PlnD1-modified migration-permissive hydrogels support salivary gland cell motility and can serve as instructive matrices for salivary gland tissue engineering.

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This is a summary of abstract S0410 titled "Growth Factor Gradients in Migration-Permissive Hydrogels for Salivary Gland Assembly" presented by Kelsea Marie Hubka on Thursday, March 22, 2018 at 11 a.m. in Hall B/C of the Greater Fort Lauderdale/Broward County Convention Center in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., USA.

About the American Association for Dental Research

The American Association for Dental Research (AADR), headquartered in Alexandria, Va., is a nonprofit organization with over 3,400 members in the United States. Its mission is: (1) to advance research and increase knowledge for the improvement of oral health; (2) to support and represent the oral health research community; and (3) to facilitate the communication and application of research findings. AADR is the largest Division of the International Association for Dental Research (IADR). To learn more about the AADR, visit http://www.aadr.org.Alexandria, VA, USA - At the 47th Annual Meeting of the American Association for Dental Research (AADR), held in conjunction with the 42nd Annual Meeting of the Canadian Association for Dental Research (CADR), Najla Kasabreh, The Ohio State University, Columbus, presented an oral session titled "Synergistic Effects of Smoking and Obesity on the Subgingival Microbiome." The AADR/CADR Annual Meeting is in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., USA from March 21-24, 2018.

In the United States, over 35% of adults are obese, 20% of adults smoke and 4.7% of adults are obese smokers. While both smoking and obesity increase the risk for periodontitis, their individual and synergistic effects are not understood. This study compared the subgingival microbiomes of normal weight and obese nonsmokers as well as obese smokers.

Seventy-five periodontally and systemically healthy subjects with no recent history of antibiotics, pregnancy or oral prophylaxis were recruited and divided evenly between three groups based on body mass index and smoking status. Subgingival biofilm samples were collected, DNA was isolated and Illumina MiSeq sequencing was performed generating 599,652 classifiable sequences, which were compared to the Human Oral Microbiome Database.

The results showed that known periodontal pathogens Aggregatibacter actinomycetemcomitans (Aa) and Porphyromonas gingivalis (Pg) were present in the obese and smoker groups, but not in the controls. Streptococcus sobrinus was unique to the obese group. Diverging patterns of bacterial interactions were observed in obese smokers and non-smokers, indicating the role played by these factors in driving bacterial colonization.

"The data suggests that both smoking and increased body mass index alter the composition of the subgingival microbiome and that the collective effects of these two factors are not merely additive, but multiplicative. We also discovered that obesity affects the male and female oral microbiomes differently. This indicates a true need for precision dentistry that incorporates multiple metrics such as BMI, gender, smoking status and other variables in assessing risk and prognosticating treatment outcomes" said Najla Kasabreh.

Well-studied periodontal pathogens, Aggregatibacter actinomycetemcomitans and Porphyromonas gingivalis, are unique to obese individuals even when they are periodontally healthy, which might suggest why these populations are at increased risk for periodontal disease. Due to the ease of collection, low cost and unique position as the gateway to the body, the oral cavity warrants greater attention as a model to study the roles of environmental pertubations on the human microbiome.

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This is a summary of oral session #0557 titled "Synergistic Effects of Smoking and Obesity on the Subgingival Microbiome" presented by Najla Kasabreh on Thursday, March 22, 2018 at 2 p.m. in Grand Ballroom E of the Greater Fort Lauderdale/Broward County Convention Center in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., USA.

About the American Association for Dental Research

The American Association for Dental Research (AADR), headquartered in Alexandria, Va., is a nonprofit organization with over 3,400 members in the United States. Its mission is: (1) to advance research and increase knowledge for the improvement of oral health; (2) to support and represent the oral health research community; and (3) to facilitate the communication and application of research findings. AADR is the largest Division of the International Association for Dental Research (IADR). To learn more about the AADR, visit http://www.aadr.org.Alexandria, VA, USA - The 47th Annual Meeting of the American Association for Dental Research (AADR), held in conjunction with the 42nd Annual Meeting of the Canadian Association for Dental Research (CADR), featured a symposium sponsored by the American Dental Association (ADA) titled "Transforming Oral Health Through Science and Evidence-based Practice." The AADR/CADR Annual Meeting is in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., USA from March 21-24, 2018.

How can we transform oral health research and do research that better meets the needs of dental patients and clinicians? This symposium features clinical and scientific perspectives on topics such as building a stronger oral health research infrastructure through improved advocacy, institutional support and funding from federal agencies. There will also be a focus on investigating ways to "change the narrative" for oral health research advocacy which will provide faculty and clinicians with the tools to build research capacity and obtain long-term financial support for conducting research that addresses the most impactful oral diseases faced by the U.S. population (e.g., dental caries, periodontal disease, oral cancer).

"The ADA Council on Scientific Affairs is pleased to present on such important topics," said Marcelo Araujo, D.D.S., M.S., Ph.D., ADA Science Institute vice president and session moderator. "We are dedicated to advancing oral health through research and look to support the next wave of research to improve patient outcomes."

The speakers and topics of the symposium were "Building the Oral Health Research Pipeline to Measure and Improve Treatment Outcomes" by Steven Offenbacher, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, "Precision, Risk-based Caries Management" by Margherita Fontana, University of Michigan Department of Cariology, Restorative Sciences and Endodontics, Ann Arbor, "Improving Evaluation of Potentially Malignant Disorders in the Oral Cavity" by Lauren Patton, University of North Carolina School of Dentistry, Chapel Hill and "Closing the Gap Between Oral Health Research and Evidence-based Practice" by Robert Weyant, University of Pittsburgh School of Dental Medicine, Pa. The session moderator is Marcelo Araujo, American Dental Association Science Institute, Chicago, Ill.

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The symposium was held on Wednesday, March 21 at 3:15 p.m. in Grand Ballroom H of the Greater Fort Lauderdale/Broward County Convention Center in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., USA.

About the American Association for Dental Research

The American Association for Dental Research (AADR), headquartered in Alexandria, Va., is a nonprofit organization with over 3,400 members in the United States. Its mission is: (1) to advance research and increase knowledge for the improvement of oral health; (2) to support and represent the oral health research community; and (3) to facilitate the communication and application of research findings. AADR is the largest Division of the International Association for Dental Research (IADR). To learn more about the AADR, visit http://www.aadr.org.Alexandria, VA, USA - The 47th Annual Meeting of the American Association for Dental Research (AADR), held in conjunction with the 42nd Annual Meeting of the Canadian Association for Dental Research (CADR), featured a symposium titled "Three-dimensional Printing and Bioprinting for Tissue Engineering." The AADR/CADR Annual Meeting is in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., USA from March 21-24, 2018.

Dental, oral and craniofacial tissues are complex structures requiring simultaneous regeneration of various tissues. This, in turn, causes major limitations in relation to conventional regenerative procedures.

3-D printing technologies have been introduced into both clinical dentistry and dental/craniofacial research with claims to eliminate these limitations. This symposium aims to review current developments and challenges in research related to 3-D printing and bioprinting technologies for regeneration of dental, craniofacial and oral structures.

The symposium featured the topics "Guided Self-assembly and Coding of Three-dimensional Living Architectures" by Utkan Demirci, Stanford University School of Medicine, Palo Alto, Calif., "3D-printing Constructs for Treatment of Critically-Sized Oral and Craniofacial Defects" by Lobat Tayebi, Marquette University School of Dentistry, Milwaukee, Wis., "Geometric Controls of Periodontal Tissue Regeneration Using 3-D Printing Technology" by Chan Ho Park, Seoul National University Dental Research Institute, Republic of Korea and "3-D Printing Technology for Periodontal/Peri-implant Regeneration" by Sophia Pilipchuk, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Mich.

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The symposium was held on Wednesday, March 21 at 3:15 p.m. in Grand Ballroom G of the Greater Fort Lauderdale/Broward County Convention Center in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., USA.

About the American Association for Dental Research

The American Association for Dental Research (AADR), headquartered in Alexandria, Va., is a nonprofit organization with over 3,400 members in the United States. Its mission is: (1) to advance research and increase knowledge for the improvement of oral health; (2) to support and represent the oral health research community; and (3) to facilitate the communication and application of research findings. AADR is the largest Division of the International Association for Dental Research (IADR). To learn more about the AADR, visit http://www.aadr.org.INDIANAPOLIS -- In the not-so-distant future, surgeons could ensure the complete removal of malignant tumors, and pathologists could analyze tissue more efficiently, by using a device invented at the Indiana University School of Medicine.

Dr. Hany Osman has invented a native-state microscope that is able to scan large areas using fiber optics. It could allow for immediate, real-time microscopic confirmation of the complete removal of malignant tissues during surgery.

Osman said using conventional microscopes requires a few days of processing to produce an image. It also requires studying tissues that have been removed from the patient, which can make it challenging to pinpoint the exact location where they were removed if surgery is required later.

"For instance, a patient may undergo surgery to remove cancer," Osman said. "After the removed tissues are analyzed, the surgeon may determine that residual cancer still exists. The patient must then go through another procedure to remove it.

"The native-state microscope could be applied directly to the tissues during surgery to confirm that -- at a microscopic level -- we've removed the malignancy, thus improving the effectiveness of these surgeries," he said. "The microscope incorporates a combination of fiber optics and direct laser treatment. This allows for a two-in-one action of identifying residual malignant tissue within a large area and then eradicating it at a microscopic level."

Osman said the microscope could also be used by pathologists during medical diagnoses.

"A native-state microscope eliminates the necessity of a physical biopsy by bringing the microscope directly to the diseased tissues," he said. "A pathologist is then able to determine immediately whether the tissues are malignant or benign, allowing us to accurately locate malignant tissues and treat them on-site."

Osman disclosed the invention to the IU Office of Technology Commercialization, which protects, markets and licenses intellectual property developed at Indiana University so it can be commercialized by industry. Osman is currently a fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School in Boston.

Osman said the next step to develop the native-state microscope is performing clinical trials that will optimize the device and harness its capacity.

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About Indiana University Innovation and Commercialization Office

Indiana University ICO is tasked with the protection and commercialization of technology emanating from innovations by IU researchers. Since 1997, IU research has generated almost 3,000 inventions resulting in more than 4,500 global patent applications. These discoveries have generated more than $142 million in licensing and royalty income, including more than $115 million in funding for IU departments, labs and inventors.March 12, 2018 - Thuwal, Saudi Arabia: The King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST) and Leica Microsystems inaugurated a new Center of Excellence (CoE) for Optical Microscopy on the University's campus today. With the new center, KAUST and Leica Microsystems embark on a long-term partnership in cutting-edge life science research with the objective of encouraging new discoveries.

"With the opening of the Center of Excellence on the KAUST campus, there is now a visible expression of our partnership." said Markus Lusser, president of Leica Microsystems. "We will work with KAUST and their world-class faculty members and students to drive the use and implementation of sample preparation and imaging systems. These systems are already revolutionizing approaches to life science and materials research and we expect KAUST to play a significant role in extending developments in these areas."

A powerful first for the Kingdom

A new SP8 confocal platform from Leica with Super Resolution (STED) and light sheet capabilities was unveiled--the first of its kind to be installed in the Kingdom and in the Middle East.

"Today we, KAUST and Leica Microsystems, have pledged to combine our strengths. The launch of this CoE will impact, not just the field of optical microscopy as a whole, but on the scientific ambitions of KAUST and the Kingdom," explained Justin Mynar, associate vice president for research and executive director of the KAUST Core Labs. "Our partnership will impact on all of our users for the betterment of the Kingdom and the scientific achievements that will guide its ambitious development objectives."

The system is housed in the Imaging and Characterization Core Lab, providing researchers access to the latest advances in microscopy from Leica Microsystems. The CoE places KAUST at the leading edge of technological advances in optical microscopy--an auspicious partnership that will positively impact the entire KAUST academic community, its collaborators and industrial partners.

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About KAUST:

Established in 2009, KAUST is a graduate-level research university located on the shores of the Red Sea in Saudi Arabia. The University is dedicated to advancing science and technology through interdisciplinary research, education and innovation. Curiosity-driven and goal-oriented research is conducted by students, faculty, scientists and engineers to address the world's pressing scientific and technological challenges related to food, water, energy and the environment. Visit kaust.edu.sa for more information.MAYWOOD, IL - While deployed in combat zones, U.S. armed forces prepare for the rigors of combat and stay in peak condition by lifting weights during intense and demanding workouts.

However a new study has found that serious chest muscle injuries are occurring with "alarming frequency" among deployed service members who lift weights. The injuries - tears of the pectoralis major tendon - occurred while doing bench press weight training. The injuries then required surgical repair and six months recovery.

Loyola Medicine orthopaedic surgeon Dane Salazar, MD, a former Air Force orthopaedic surgeon, is lead author of the study, published March 13, 2018 in the Journal of Orthopedics and Rheumatology.

Dr. Salazar and fellow Air Force orthopaedic surgeon W. Steven Choate, MD, treated nine active duty soldiers and airmen for pectoralis tears during just four months at a hospital in a forward deployed location. The injury is relatively rare among civilians. In fact, a shoulder-and-elbow surgeon may see an average of less than one pectoralis tear a year.

Deployed active duty personnel "likely represent a high-risk population for this injury," Dr. Salazar and colleagues wrote. "Future studies designed to identify the true incidence, report long-term outcomes and investigate modifiable patient risk factors in this population are warranted."

Before joining Loyola, Dr. Salazar spent 14 years in the U.S. Air Force Medical Corps. From the fall of 2013 through the summer of 2014, he was deployed at an expeditionary medical treatment facility (field hospital).

During a four month span in that deployment, Drs. Salazar and Choate treated nine male patients (four Army, five Air Force) for pectoralis major tears. All were injured while doing bench press weight training. At the time of injury, the weight on the bench press bar ranged from 135 pounds to 415 pounds, with an average of 258 pounds. The servicemen ranged in age from 23 to 52, with an average age of 32. Three were officers and six were enlisted.

The pectoralis major muscle has two distinct heads. One originates at the collar bone. The other extends from the chest bone to the upper arm bone via a tendon. The muscle-and-tendon unit often is referred to as "the Pec" or "pec muscle."

The surgeons hypothesize that the pectoralis major tears "can be attributed to the increase in both intensity and frequency of physical training that occurs during deployments to the war zone."

The field hospital lacked all of the equipment and technology of a civilian hospital. For example, the surgeons had to send pectoralis tear patients to foreign local hospitals for MRIs. Nevertheless, Drs. Salazar and Choate were able to successfully repair the pectoralis tears without serious complications. They used a technique called bone trough and transosseous repair.

Following surgery, the patients wore slings for six weeks. From six weeks to four months, the patients did physical therapy, but could not lift anything heavier than five pounds. From four months to six months, patients continued therapy and began light strengthening exercises. They were allowed to resume full activity at six months. All were able to return to duty.

To reduce the risk of pectoralis injuries, the surgeons urged the military to ban maximum-weight bench press competitions. They also recommend weightlifters lift lighter weights with more repetitions.

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Dr. Salazar is an assistant professor in the department of orthopaedic surgery and rehabilitation of Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine. (During the time the study was conducted, Dr. Salazar was affiliated with St. Louis University School of Medicine.)

The study is titled "Acute Pectoralis Major Tears in Forward Deployed Active Duty U.S. Military Personnel: A Population at Risk?"

In addition to Drs. Salazar and Choate, other co-authors are Irshad Shakir, MD, Heidi Israel, PhD, Kara Van de Kieft, MD and the late Keith Joe, MD.Following the completion of the Human Genome Project in 2001, scientists and the media described the genome as "the book of life", holding the answers to the way genes are linked to disease. Yet, seventeen years later, we are still deciphering how cells interpret this book.

Since then, so-called Omics technologies have flourished, allowing researchers, for example, to observe and quantify thousands of gene products in a single tissue sample. Omics experiments used to require tens of thousands of cells. But in the last couple of years, novel single-cell methods have emerged which enable scientists to perform such global analyses in individual cells. The molecular make-up of tissues and organs can now be assessed at single-cell resolution.

Snapshots are not enough

Mapping and analyzing tissues at the single-cell level is highly informative and challenging by itself, but a diverse group of 60 scientists across Europe decided that merely taking snapshots is not enough. Cells are highly dynamic entities and may even change identities. To understand molecular forces behind different cell states in development, aging and disease, these scientists want to track the molecular make-up of human cells in time and space. To this end, they formed the LifeTime consortium with the goal of establishing an integrated toolbox containing several novel revolutionary methods.

Single-cell technologies will be applied to experimental model systems such as organoids, miniature organs grown in the petri dish from one or more cells. Combined with the genome editing tool CRISPR/Cas as well as state-of-the-art microscopy, these models will help to understand how cells stay healthy or progress towards disease and react to therapeutics. Importantly, LifeTime scientists will also develop computational strategies such as powerful machine-learning and artificial intelligence methods that help to understand molecular mechanisms and predict the future of a patient's tissue or even means to steer the tissue towards health. This strategy is expected to improve early diagnoses and intervention, predict the course of a disease, identify new drug targets and select the most effective therapies for individual patients.

A group of pioneers

Future and Emerging Technologies Flagships (such as the ongoing Human Brain Project, the Graphene and the Quantum Technologies Flagship) are funded by the European Commission with one billion Euros for ten years. The competition for the next two Flagships has just started, and proposals have been submitted. LifeTime - jointly coordinated by the Max Delbruck Center for Molecular Medicine in the Helmholtz Association (MDC) in Berlin and the Institut Curie in Paris - is one of them.

Currently the LifeTime consortium consists of over 60 leading single-cell biologists, computer scientists, mathematicians, clinicians, pathologists, imaging experts, and physicists from over 50 European institutions in 18 countries. They are pioneers in their disciplines, working towards a common vision of future medicine, and would like LifeTime to be an open endeavor that will attract new talents and integrate all scientists in Europe who can make a significant contribution. Their unique collective network will transcend institutional boundaries and improve the overall infrastructure for the life sciences in Europe, with a focus on training for the next generation of scientists.

Steer life sciences and healthcare to the future

The LifeTime consortium will build on the achievements of the Human Cell Atlas (HCA), an international project launched about a year ago. The HCA aims to create a map of healthy tissues with single-cell technologies, thereby capturing the enormous diversity of cell types within those tissues. LifeTime proposes to go far beyond providing static tissue maps and to track, understand and predict how the molecular make-up of cells changes during human diseases and ultimately intervene.

It is a vision that can steer both life sciences and healthcare into the future and kick-start a single-cell innovation ecosystem in Europe. Many technologies at the center of LifeTime are key European research strengths that the Flagship could boost. These include single-cell technologies combined with advanced imaging, artificial intelligence and patient-matched organoids, or organ-on-a-chip disease models to study the progression of an illness and develop novel therapeutics.

Inspiration from Renaissance Europe

As an inspiration, LifeTime scientists name Renaissance Europe. Back then, new types of telescopes permitted Brahe, Galileo and Kepler to accurately map the precise positions of stars and planets. They were able to decode the patterns in these maps thanks to new types of mathematics developed by Leibniz and Newton, and thus discovered that celestial bodies moved in rule-governed and therefore predictable ways. Their efforts reshaped the society of their time.

Similarly, emerging technologies now allow scientists to observe cells (corresponding to planets in this analogy) and entire organs (corresponding to solar systems) with unprecedented precision. New mathematical and computational tools will be required to understand the movement and relationships of those cells. The resulting ability to explain cellular changes as they age or progress towards disease will fundamentally change our perception of how organisms function and will greatly advance medicine.

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The LifeTime consortium

The more than 60 scientists and clinicians forming the LifeTime consortium are distributed over 18 European countries and 52 institutions. Both the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres and the French National Center for Scientific Research CNRS - two of the biggest science organizations in Europe - have pledged their strong support. Furthermore, the consortium is endorsed by Science Academies such as the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, the French Academy of Sciences, the Royal Society and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences and Arts and the EU-life Alliance. Professor Nikolaus Rajewsky, Director of the Berlin Institute for Medical Systems Biology at the Max Delbruck Center for Molecular Medicine, and Professor Genevieve Almouzni, CNRS senior researcher and director of the research center at Institut Curie in Paris, are jointly coordinating the LifeTime proposal.

Participating institutions: Helmholtz Association * CNRS * Institute of Molecular Biotechnology * Research Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences * VIB-KU Leuven * Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research * University of Basel * University of Zurich * Central European Institute of Technology * Max Planck Institute of Immunobiology and Epigenetics * Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics * German Cancer Research Center * Max Delbruck Center for Molecular Medicine * German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases * Helmholtz Zentrum Munchen * Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology * Helmholtz Institute of RNA-based Infection Research * Saarland University * Technical University Munich * University of Wurzburg * Biotech Research & Innovation Centre * Interdisciplinary Nanoscience Center * University of Copenhagen * Centre for Genomic Regulation * Institut Curie * Universite de Montpellier * Inserm * Universite Toulouse III - Paul Sabatier * Ecole nationale superieure des mines de Paris * Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland * The Biomedical Research Foundation, Academy of Athens * Weizmann Institute of Science * Hebrew University * Sapienza - University of Rome * Instituto Nazionale Genetica Molecolare * University of Napoli * University of Padua * University of Milan * European Institute of Oncology * Netherlands Cancer Institute * Radboud University * University Medical Center Utrecht * Hubrecht Institute * Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciencia * Institute of Bioorganic Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences * Romanian Center for Systems Immunology * Karolinska Institute * MRC Human Genetics Unit * University of Edinburgh * Wellcome Sanger Institute * The Babraham Institute * European Molecular Biology Laboratory - European Bioinformatics InstituteAccurately detecting, locating and quantifying leaks of methane, the main component of natural gas and a major fuel source worldwide, is critically important for both environmental and economic reasons. Unfortunately, traditional methods are slow, labor-intensive, limited to small coverage areas and expensive to operate over time.

Now, researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the University of Colorado Boulder (CU Boulder) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) have successfully demonstrated a novel solution that features an innovative NIST adaptation of a Nobel Prize-winning technology to continuously and cost-effectively monitor leaks of methane (CH 4 ) and other trace gases with extreme precision and over large areas.

The demonstration is described in a paper published today in the journal Optica.

Although its lifetime in the atmosphere is much shorter than the more prevalent greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide (CO 2 ), methane is significantly more powerful than CO 2 because it traps more of the sun's heat pound for pound--about 25 times more over a 100-year period, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Taking that difference into account, the EPA estimates that the methane leaked or intentionally vented from human activities such as natural gas exploration, storage and pipelining; coal mining; chemical manufacturing and processing; waste management; and livestock farming accounts for about 10 percent of the warming potential of all greenhouse gas emissions in the United States.

Along with the environmental benefits, more reliable methane monitoring also could reduce the number of costly, disruptive community evacuations by catching leaks from residential or commercial lines before they become threats, and more importantly, save lives and property by helping prevent gas explosions.

Finally, there's a financial incentive for keeping methane leaks in check. According to the National Resources Defense Council, capturing currently wasted methane for sale could bring in more than $2 billion of additional revenue each year.

Current approaches to methane detection rely heavily on inspectors using infrared (IR) cameras to look laboriously for gas plumes one by one across large sites, such as well fields with hundreds of potential leaks. This is time-consuming, requires skilled operators and may only be done once a year or less because of the high cost for monitoring expansive, remote or otherwise difficult-to-survey areas. Aircraft and vehicle-mounted IR cameras or spectrometers offer another option; however, this method also is expensive and may be ill-suited for continuous monitoring.

In fact, said Ian Coddington, a NIST physicist and co-author of the Optica paper, potential users of current methane detection and quantification systems often find the costs prohibitive for meeting three needs: coverage of large areas, frequent monitoring and sensitivity. "The last one really becomes evident when you realize that leaks may have rates as small as 0.2 cubic meters per hour (6 cubic feet per hour), about one-fourth the respiration rate of an average human being," he said.

To address these problems, NIST and its partners have developed a novel observing system that combines the world's first "in-the-field" dual-frequency comb laser spectrometer and an array of corner cube retroreflectors. The spectrometer is based on the frequency comb technology for which NIST's John Hall shared the 2005 Nobel Physics Prize (see http://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2005/10/nistjila-fellow-jan-hall-shares-2005-nobel-prize-physics). And the retroreflectors--special mirrors that send light striking them straight back to their source--exhibit an optical phenomenon exploited by NIST's James Faller in the early 1960s for his design of the laser reflecting arrays deployed during two Apollo landings to measure the Earth-moon distance (see http://www.nist.gov/nist-time-capsule/any-object-any-need-call-nist/moon-and-back-25-seconds).

As explained in more detail by a NIST fact sheet (see http://www.nist.gov/topics/physics/optical-frequency-combs), an optical frequency comb is a very precise tool for measuring different colors--or frequencies--of light. Scientists start with lasers that emit a continuous train of very brief (femtosecond, or one millionth of one billionth of a second) pulses of light containing millions of different colors, also known as frequency spectra. The evenly spaced, individual lines of the spectra look like the teeth of a comb, giving the tool its name. The laser pulses--with their millions of highly defined teeth--can serve like the marks on a ruler for measuring the spectral signature of any material through which they pass with incredible precision.

The new trace gas monitoring system uses a NIST-developed evolution of the frequency comb technology, a dual-comb laser spectrometer where a second comb is added. "When paired, the combs can act like hundreds of thousands of laser spectrometers working in unison, and yield a device that is 10 to 100 times better than a traditional spectrometer and very sensitive to leaks, even at a great distance," Coddington said. "It is comparable to standing at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., and detecting one person exhaling among hundreds near the Washington Monument at the other end of the National Mall."

In the demonstration described in the Optica paper, the researchers ringed a Colorado well field containing multiple methane leak sources with retroreflectors equally spaced along a 1-kilometer-diameter circle. In the center of the ring, they stationed a trailer with the portable dual-comb device inside.

To detect and quantify methane leaks within a "pie-slice" section of the circle--the area defined by the arc between two consecutive retroreflectors--pulses from the dual-comb laser are first bounced off one reflector back to the spectrometer to quantify residual gas from outside the field. Subtracting that amount from the measurement made by the second reflector yields the level of methane being released within the arc alone. Data from repeated scans of the sector under varying wind conditions (direction and speed) are interpreted by a NIST computer model to define the leak locations and rates.

According to Kuldeep Prasad, a NIST mechanical engineer who helped design the computer model, combining local meteorological data with the measurements taken from all of the arcs within the ring of retroreflectors provides a complete accounting of the methane escaping from an entire field of wells. "The monitoring can be done continuously over time so that every leak in a field is accurately detected and quantified," he said. "Furthermore, if you set up mobile spectrometers at adjoining fields, you can dramatically expand the total coverage area to several square kilometers."

For gas storage facilities, oil and gas processing plants and other industrial environments where line-of-site leak monitoring isn't possible, Prasad said that the spectrometer can be placed high above the site to detect and quantify methane as it rises.

Development of the NIST-CU Boulder mobile dual-comb laser spectrometer, as well as the associated modeling effort, has been funded by the NIST Greenhouse Gas Measurements Program, the Advanced Research Projects Agency - Energy (ARPA-E), the Department of Energy's Office of Fossil Energy and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Not only does the innovation allow for 24/7, highly reliable methane leak detection and quantification over large areas in the field, but it makes the entire operation more cost-effective than current IR methods.

"Besides refining the monitoring capabilities of the mobile dual-comb laser spectrometer, our team will next be attempting to bring the operating cost down to a per-well-per-year price tag of around $300," Prasad said. "Achieving that goal would make the system affordable for most users."

Coddington said that the portable dual-comb laser spectrometer system for detecting and quantifying methane leaks already has attracted several industrial partners who are now working with the NIST, CU Boulder and NOAA collaborators on tests to evaluate the system's performance at operational oil and gas facilities.

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S. Coburn, C.B. Alden, R. Wright, K. Cossel, E. Baumann, G-W. Truong, F. Georgetta, C. Sweeney, N.R. Newbury, K. Prasad, I. Coddington and G.B. Ricker. Detection of small and variable trace gas emissions across large regions. Optica. Published 22 March 2018. DOI: 10.1364/OPTICA.5.000320Researchers at New York University have discovered a novel mechanism through which information can be effectively transmitted across many areas in the brain--a finding that offers a potentially new way of understanding how consciousness arises.

The study appears in the journal Neuron.

"For us to navigate through everyday situations, it is critical that electrical signals from our senses stimulated by the external world are able to reach relevant brain areas," explains Xiao-Jing Wang, Global Professor of Neural Science at NYU and the paper's senior author. "Our brain, however, is a very complicated system, with billions of neurons organized in an interconnected network with more than a hundred areas. It is therefore not easy to understand how signals may travel from area to area in an efficient manner."

Brain areas tend to be organized in a hierarchy, ranging from "lower" sensory areas to "higher" cognitive areas. These areas have excitatory and inhibitory neurons, which either stimulate or suppress activity in other neurons.

Understanding how neural signals are transmitted across this hierarchy, the researchers note, is still a fundamental challenge in neuroscience and served as the focal point for the Neuron study.

Previous computer modeling of signal transmission across areas in the brain did not take into account the complexity of brain's area-to-area connections. By contrast, thanks to the recent advances in the field of "Connectomics" dedicated to quantitatively analyzing the brain's connectivity, the NYU scientists were able to build models incorporating anatomical connectivity data of macaque monkeys.

Here they found that signal transmission in a large-scale model of the primate brain is robust under the condition in which area-to-area connections exhibit a "balance" between excitation and inhibition. Specifically, stimulation provided by the excitatory neurons allows for signals to be transmitted, whereas suppression from inhibitory neurons makes sure the signal activity does not grow out of control.

"Unexpectedly, our model reveals that only when the signal is strong enough, above a threshold level, the signal reaches a large set of areas of the brain region called the prefrontal cortex, which plays a critical role in high-level cognition," said Madhura Joglekar, the paper's first author who conducted the research as a postdoctoral fellow in Wang's lab and is now an instructor at NYU's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences.

Notably, the global activation pattern resembles the ones previously found in the human brain while consciously perceiving sensory information--a parallel suggesting a potential connection between the proposed "balanced" large-scale neural circuit mechanism for signal transmission and understanding how conscious information processing is achieved.

###

The paper's other co-authors are former members of Wang's lab: Jorge Mejias, now an assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam, and Guangyu Robert Yang, now a research fellow at Columbia University.

This work was supported by the Swartz Foundation, the Office of Naval Research (N00014-17-1-2041), and Simons Collaborative Global Brian Program grant.A team of biologists has deciphered how neurons used in the perception of motion form in the brain of a fly --a finding that illustrates how complex neuronal circuits are constructed from simple developmental rules.

The discovery, which appears in the journal Cell, offers new pathways for understanding the fundamental processes by which circuits in the brain form to process visual information.

"Understanding how neuronal identities are specified and how neural circuits are built during development leaves us in a better position to understand the onset of neurological disorders," explains lead author Filipe Pinto-Teixeira, a post-doctoral fellow at New York University's Department of Biology and NYU Abu Dhabi's Center for Genomics and Systems Biology. "Specifically, we can fine tune our understanding of the generation of the general principles that guide the production of stem-cell-derived neurons and the construction of neural circuits, which could point to new therapeutic advances."

The study, conducted in the laboratory of Professor Claude Desplan at the Center for Genomics and Systems Biology (CGSB) at NYU Abu Dhabi and NYU's Department of Biology, aimed to unpack the relationship between neuron formation and creation of neural circuits for motion detection.

The dynamic is a complex one--the development of a functioning nervous system requires that different neurons with specific functions be produced following the execution of precise developmental programs that establish correct neuronal networks. A video of this process may be viewed here: http://bit.ly/2I5UEi2 (see attached image caption for description).

The scientists focused their research on the fruit fly Drosophila, which is commonly used in biological research as a model system to decipher basic principles that direct the functions of the brain.

In the species, visual information from 800 unit eyes, or facets, is processed in distinct brain structures in the optic lobes, each subdivided into 800 matching columns that project in the brain an image of the world perceived by the retina. For example, motion information is processed in two parallel pathways: T4 neurons detect the motion of bright objects in a black background while T5 neurons process motion of dark objects.

T4 and T5 have four subtypes, each responding to motion in one of four directions (back to front, front to back as well as up and down), such that all T4 and T5 neurons with the same directional preference work to support the perception of self-motion.

In their study, the scientists discovered that T4 and T5 neurons originate from two pools of stem cells--one that produces cells sensitive to horizontal motion and the other attuned to vertical motion.

These stem cells, they found, then rely on a novel mode of neuron production where two sequential cell divisions produce sets of two T4 and two T5 neurons with opposite motion direction selectivity--for instance, one T4/T5 pair is sensitive to back-to-front movement and the other to front-to-back.

"Because T4 and T5 neurons with opposite motion direction selectivity are produced by the same stem cell at the same time, these four neurons synchronously project to the same position in the brain corresponding to a specific point in visual space," explains Desplan. "As a result, the organization of neuronal projections results directly from neuronal birth order, illustrating how simple developmental rules can produce complex neural organization."

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The study was supported by a grant from the CGSB of the NYU Abu Dhabi Institute and by the National Institutes of Health (R01 EY017916).

About New York University

Founded in 1831, NYU is one of the world's foremost research universities and is a member of the selective Association of American Universities. NYU has degree-granting university campuses in New York, Abu Dhabi, and Shanghai; has eleven other global academic sites, including London, Paris, Florence, Tel Aviv, Buenos Aires, and Accra; and both sends more students to study abroad and educates more international students than any other U.S. college or university. Through its numerous schools and colleges, NYU is a leader in conducting research and providing education in the arts and sciences, engineering, law, medicine, business, dentistry, education, nursing, the cinematic and performing arts, music and studio arts, public administration, social work, and professional studies, among other areas.

About NYU Abu Dhabi

NYU Abu Dhabi is the first comprehensive liberal arts and science campus in the Middle East to be operated abroad by a major American research university. NYU Abu Dhabi has integrated a highly-selective liberal arts, engineering and science curriculum with a world center for advanced research and scholarship enabling its students to succeed in an increasingly interdependent world and advance cooperation and progress on humanity's shared challenges. NYU Abu Dhabi's high-achieving students have come from 115 nations and speak over 115 languages. Together, NYU's campuses in New York, Abu Dhabi, and Shanghai form the backbone of a unique global university, giving faculty and students opportunities to experience varied learning environments and immersion in other cultures at one or more of the numerous study-abroad sites NYU maintains on six continents.A bizarre human skeleton, once rumored to have extraterrestrial origins, has gotten a rather comprehensive genomic work-up, the results of which are now in, researchers from the Stanford University School of Medicine report.

The findings stamp out any remaining quandaries about the specimen's home planet -- it's without a doubt human -- but more than that, the analysis answers questions about remains that have long been a genetic enigma.

After five years of deep genomic analysis, Garry Nolan, PhD, professor of microbiology and immunology at Stanford, and Atul Butte, MD, PhD, director of the Institute for Computational Health Sciences at the University of California-San Francisco, have pinpointed the mutations responsible for the anomalous specimen. The researchers found mutations in not one but several genes known to govern bone development; what's more, some of these molecular oddities have never been described before.

"To me, it seems that when doctors perform analyses for patients and their families, we're often searching for one cause -- one super-rare or unusual mutation that can explain the child's ailment. But in this case, we're pretty confident that multiple things went wrong," said Butte. It's an indication, he said, that looking for a single mutation, or even mutations that are already known to cause a particular disease, can discourage researchers from looking for other potential genetic causes and, in turn, potential treatments for patients.

Nolan, who holds the Rachford and Carlota Harris Professorship, and Butte, a former Stanford faculty member who now holds the Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg Distinguished Professorship at UCSF, are senior authors of the study, which will be published online March 22 in Genome Research. Sanchita Bhattacharya, PhD, senior research specialist at UCSF, is the lead author.

A human? A primate? An alien?

The skeleton, nicknamed Ata, was discovered more than a decade ago in an abandoned town in the Atacama Desert of Chile. After trading hands and eventually finding a permanent home in Spain, the mummified specimen started to garner public attention. Standing just 6 inches tall -- about the length of a dollar bill -- with an angular, elongated skull and sunken, slanted eye sockets, the internet began to bubble with other-worldly hullabaloo and talk of ET.

"I had heard about this specimen through a friend of mine, and I managed to get a picture of it," Nolan said. "You can't look at this specimen and not think it's interesting; it's quite dramatic. So I told my friend, 'Look, whatever it is, if it's got DNA, I can do the analysis.'"

With the help of Ralph Lachman, MD, a professor of radiology at Stanford and an expert in a type of pediatric bone disease, Nolan set the record straight. Their analysis pointed to a decisive conclusion: This was the skeleton of a human female, likely a fetus, that had suffered severe genetic mutations. In addition, Nolan saw that Ata, though most likely a fetus, had the bone composition of a 6-year-old, an indication that she had a rare, bone-aging disorder.

To understand the genetic underpinnings of Ata's physicality, Nolan turned to Butte for help in genomic evaluation. He accepted the challenge, running a work-up so comprehensive it nearly rose to the level of patient care. Butte noted that some people might wonder about the point of such in-depth analyses.

"We thought this would be an interesting exercise in applying the tools that we have today to really see what we could find," he said. "The phenotype, the symptoms and size of this girl were extremely unusual, and analyzing these kinds of really puzzling, old samples teaches us better how to analyze the DNA of kids today under current conditions."

New insights through an old skeleton

To understand the genetic drivers at play, Butte and Nolan extracted a small DNA sample from Ata's ribs and sequenced the entire genome. The skeleton is approximately 40 years old, so its DNA is modern and still relatively intact. Moreover, data collected from whole-genome sequencing showed that Ata's molecular composition aligned with that of a human genome. Nolan noted that 8 percent of the DNA was unmatchable with human DNA, but that was due to a degraded sample, not extraterrestrial biology. (Later, a more sophisticated analysis was able to match up to 98 percent of the DNA, according to Nolan.)

The genomic results confirmed Ata's Chilean descent and turned up a slew of mutations in seven genes that separately or in combinations contribute to various bone deformities, facial malformations or skeletal dysplasia, more commonly known as dwarfism. Some of these mutations, though found in genes already known to cause disease, had never before been associated with bone growth or developmental disorders.

Knowing these new mutational variants could be useful, Nolan said, because they add to the repository of known mutations to look for in humans with these kinds of bone or physical disorders.

"For me, what really came of this study was the idea that we shouldn't stop investigating when we find one gene that might explain a symptom. It could be multiple things going wrong, and it's worth getting a full explanation, especially as we head closer and closer to gene therapy," Butte said. "We could presumably one day fix some of these disorders, and we're going to want to make sure that if there's one mutation, we know that -- but if there's more than one, we know that too."

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Other Stanford authors of the study are graduate student Alexandra Sockell; senior research scientist Felice Bava, PhD; and Carlos Bustamante, PhD, professor of biomedical data science and of genetics.

Researchers at UCSF, Roche Sequencing Solutions, National Autonomous University of Mexico and Ultra Intelligence Corporation also contributed to the work.

Nolan is a member of Stanford Bio-X, the Stanford Child Health Research Institute and the Stanford Cancer Institute.

The study was supported by the Lucile Packard Foundation for Children's Health, UCSF endowment funds and the Human Frontier Science Program.

Stanford's departments of Pediatrics, of Microbiology and Immunology and of Genetics also supported the work.

The Stanford University School of Medicine consistently ranks among the nation's top medical schools, integrating research, medical education, patient care and community service. For more news about the school, please visit http://med.stanford.edu/school.html. The medical school is part of Stanford Medicine, which includes Stanford Health Care and Stanford Children's Health. For information about all three, please visit http://med.stanford.edu.

Print media contact:

Hanae Armitage

650-725-5376

harmitag@stanford.edu

Broadcast media contact:

Margarita Gallardo

650-723-7897

mjgallardo@stanford.eduThe skeleton, discovered in a leather pouch behind an abandoned church, was pristine: a tiny figure, just six inches long, with a cone-shaped head, 10 pairs of ribs, and bones that looked like those of an eight-year-old child. Found in the Atacama Desert of Chile and later affectionately nicknamed "Ata," the skeleton made its way onto the black market for archeological finds and then to a collector in Spain who thought it might be the remains of an extraterrestrial being.

But a forensic analysis of Ata's genome by scientists at UC San Francisco and Stanford University has proved beyond a doubt that it is human. Ata has the DNA of a modern human female with the mix of Native American and European ancestral markers one would expect from someone who lived near the place where she was found. And her arresting appearance, which scientists refer to as a phenotype, can most likely be explained by a handful of rare genetic mutations--some already known, others newly discovered--that are linked to dwarfism and other bone and growth disorders.

Their discoveries, published Thursday, March 22, 2018, in Genome Research, does more than lay to rest the fable of Ata's extraterrestrial origins. It also illustrates how far open-source genetic data has come in enabling the sort of needle-in-a-haystack analysis that can pinpoint the handful of mutated genes--out of more than 2.7 million single-nucleotide variants (SNVs) in Ata's genome--that were most likely to be associated with the unusual shape of her body.

"The bioinformatics analyses in the paper showcase the power and wealth of information available in the public domain that led to the discovery of novel and rare deleterious variants in genes associated with Ata's phenotype," said Sanchita Bhattacharya, a bioinformatics researcher at the UCSF Institute for Computational Health Sciences (ICHS). "The analysis was even more challenging with a very limited amount of information about the specimen, and lack of family history, which makes it a unique case."

Bhattacharya used the Human Phenotype Ontology (HPO), a database that links genomic data to the abnormal phenotypes found in human disease, everything from atrial septal defect, or a hole in the chambers of the heart, to musculoskeletal abnormalities.

In an initial analysis Bhattacharya found 64 gene variants that seemed likely to be damaging. She fed them into the HPO database, and to her amazement, most of the possible phenotypes the program homed in on had to do with the skeletal system, including "proportionate short stature" and "11 pairs of ribs." Ata had 10 pairs, a phenotype that had never been observed.

"The moment I saw it, I could see there was something interesting going on there," Bhattacharya said. "It was a little amount of information, and I am not a bone expert. This was a very blinded analysis."

The results revealed four new SNVs--a type of genetic mutation at the individual level--in genes that were known to cause bone diseases, like scoliosis or dislocations, as well as two more SNVs in genes involved in producing collagen.

While esoteric, the analysis of Ata's genome points toward the clinical genetics of the future, said Atul Butte, MD, PhD, who directs ICHS and is the Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg Distinguished Professor at UCSF.

With rapidly accumulating genetic data, Butte said, scientists can take a "backwards" approach to diagnosis. Instead of starting with a description of the disease and looking for a mutated gene to explain it, they start with the patient's raw genetic material to see how it differs from a normal, or "reference" set of samples. The genetic variations that pop out of this comparison then reveal, in an unbiased way, what processes are at work in the patient to create disease.

"Analyzing a puzzling sample like the Ata genome can teach us how to handle current medical samples, which may be driven by multiple mutations," Butte said. "When we study the genomes of patients with unusual syndromes, there may be more than one gene or pathway involved genetically, which is not always considered."

Garry Nolan, PhD, a professor of microbiology and immunology at the Stanford University School of Medicine began the scientific exploration of Ata in 2012, when a friend called saying he might have found an "alien."

Nolan believes further research into Ata's precocious bone aging could one day benefit patients. "Maybe there's a way to accelerate bone growth in people who need it, people who have bad breaks," he said. "Nothing like this had been seen before. Certainly, nobody had looked into the genetics of it."

But Nolan also said that he hopes, one day, little Ata will be given a proper burial. Far from being a visitor from another planet, Ata's genome marked her as South American, with genetic variations that identified her as being from the Andean region inhabited by the Chilean Chilote Indians. Judging from the skeleton's intact condition, he said, it is probably no more than 40 years old.

"We now know that it's a child, and probably either a pre- or post-term birth and death," he said. "I think it should be returned to the country of origin and buried according to the customs of the local people."

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Other authors of the study include, Matthew Kan and Shann-Ching Chen, of UCSF; Alexandra Sockell, Felice Bava, Xuhuai Ji, Ralph Lachman and Carlos Bustamante, of Stanford; Jian Li, Narges Asadi and Hugo Lam, of Roche Sequencing Solutions; Emery Smith of Ultra Intelligence Corporation; and Maria Avila-Arcos, of the National Autonomous University of Mexico.

About UCSF: UC San Francisco (UCSF) is a leading university dedicated to promoting health worldwide through advanced biomedical research, graduate-level education in the life sciences and health professions, and excellence in patient care. It includes top-ranked graduate schools of dentistry, medicine, nursing and pharmacy; a graduate division with nationally renowned programs in basic, biomedical, translational and population sciences; and a preeminent biomedical research enterprise. It also includes UCSF Health, which comprises top-ranked hospitals, UCSF Medical Center and UCSF Benioff Children's Hospitals in San Francisco and Oakland - and other partner and affiliated hospitals and healthcare providers throughout the Bay Area. Please visit http://www.ucsf.edu/news.

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ucsf.edu | Facebook.com/ucsf | Twitter.com/ucsf | YouTube.com/ucsfProteins do not function in isolation and their interactions with other proteins define their cellular functions. Therefore, detailed understanding of protein-protein interactions (PPIs) is the key for deciphering regulation of cellular networks and pathways.

These complex networks of stable and transient associations can be studied by affinity purification mass spectrometry (AP-MS) and complementary proximity-based labeling methods such as BioID.

In a study published in the 22th of March issue of Nature Communications, a research team led by Dr. Markku Varjosalo (HiLIFE / Institute of Biotechnology, University of Helsinki) introduce an optimized and integrated approach combining AP-MS and BioID in a single workflow. In addition to just exploiting the advantages of both strategies, the authors show that their approach allows identification and quantification of protein-protein interactions and protein complex stoichiometries; identification of transient or close-proximity interactions with BioID; visualization of the bait protein and the proximal interactors with immunofluorescence microscopy; and defining the molecular context with MS microscopy utilizing the reference dataset obtained by identifying proximal interactors for bona fide subcellular localization markers.

The authors show that using the MS microscopy, it is possible to assign the studied protein to its correct cellular or even subcellular location in even higher resolution than with confocal microscopy.

"This study is a continuum of our rigorous efforts in developing new systems biology tools for studying the molecular interactions formed by proteins. We have previously proven that AP-MS is highly reproducible method, which is also suitable for large-scale and inter-laboratory studies", Dr. Varjosalo states. He continues:

"Our newly developed integrated workflow and the reference molecular context proteome map, allows an easy way to probe the molecular localization of (m)any protein(s). The developed MAC-tag and the integrated approach should empower, not only the interaction proteomics community, but also cell, molecular and structural biologists, with an experimentally proven integrated workflow for mapping in detail the physical and functional interactions and the molecular context of proteins in human cells."

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The study was financially supported by the Academy of Finland, University of Helsinki, the Sigrid Juselius Foundation and Instrumentarium Science Foundation.Researchers at the archaeology laboratory have determined the origin and trajectories of clay pottery from nearly 5000 years ago

Was it the fine pottery itself, or the artisans who made it, that moved around the Baltic Sea region during the Corded Ware Culture of late Neolithic period? Are the archaeological artefacts found in Finland imported goods or were they made out of Finnish clay by artisans who had mastered the new technology? These are the questions researchers are trying to answer in the most extensive original study of archaeological ceramics ever undertaken in the Nordic countries.

Researchers mapped the arrival routes of pottery and people representing the Corded Ware Culture complex (c. 2900-2300 BCE) into the Nordic countries by identifying the areas where the pottery was made.

Corded Ware pottery was very different from earlier Stone Age pottery. It represented a new technology and style, and as a new innovation, used crushed ceramics -- or broken pottery -- mixed in with the clay.

Eastern influences fashionable in Sweden

Finland, Estonia and Sweden had at least five different manufacturing areas for Corded Ware pottery which engaged in active pottery trade across the Baltic Sea approximately 5000 years ago. Hame in Southern Finland had a manufacturing hub of Corded Ware pottery which can be described as quasi-industrial in Neolithic terms, and spread its products along the Finnish coast and into Estonia.

Traditionally, Swedish archaeologists have assumed that Corded Ware pottery arrived in Sweden from the south. However, it now seems clear that that eastern influences were particularly fashionable during the Neolithic, and both pottery and people belonging to this culture arrived first in Eastern Sweden from Finland and Estonia. This was not a one-way one-time event: There were many active contacts in all directions across the Baltic Sea during the period, shown by the fact that pottery that was manufactured in Sweden over time turn up in Finland and Estonia.

Skilled female artisans

In traditional societies it is usually women who are in charge of the pottery craft and it is also common for women to relocate upon marriage. Corded Ware burials show that females were more likely to receive pottery as burial gifts, and analyses from European cemeteries show that the women were more likely to relocate during their lifetime.

It is likely that the first Corded Ware Culture artisans to arrive at the Fenno-Baltic and Swedish coasts were women who had learned their craft at their place of birth. They would have begun to use the clay available at their new home, but they mixed it with crushed pieces of pottery they had brought with them. Perhaps this was a way to preserve the older pottery which had been made in their previous homelands, thus maintaining a symbolic connection to their families and the members of their former communities in their everyday lives.

The study posits that skilled female artisans arrived in Sweden particularly from Estonia and Finland, as both the geochemical origin and cultural links of the imported pottery indicates a connection to the region. Cultural similarities in turn link the first Corded Ware communities in Finland and Estonia to the eastern part of the Bay of Finland, present day Russia.

The exchange network also suggests that even during the Stone Age, the Baltic Sea was less an obstacle and more a connection between communities, attaching Finland to a broader European culture.

International Stone Age phenomena are inscribed in pottery

The study examined clay pottery from 24 archaeological sites in Finland, Estonia and Sweden. The goal was to determine the geochemical composition and geological origin of Corded Ware pottery, i.e., where the clay came from.

The project involved international and cross-disciplinary cooperation between the group of archaeologists from Finland, Sweden and Estonia and material physicists. Funded by the Academy of Finland, the research project was headed by Elisabeth Holmqvist-Sipila, who works at the University of Helsinki's archaeology laboratory.

"International prehistoric phenomena may be apparent in everyday objects, such as dishware and the old pottery fragments crushed into the clay they were made with," says Holmqvist-Sipila.

"Pottery was so important to its owner that it would be carried along on long journeys. Now, thousands of years later, when most things have turned into dust, it is these objects that tell the story of the routes taken by people and their belongings."

###

The results of the research were published on 5 February 2018 in the esteemed Journal of Archaeological Science.

Reference: Holmqvist, E., A. Larsson, A. Kriiska, V. Palonen, P. Pesonen, K. Mizohata, P. Kouki and J. Raisanen 2018. Tracing grog and pots to reveal Neolithic Corded Ware culture contacts in the Baltic Sea region (SEM-EDS, PIXE), Journal of Archaeological Science 91: 77-91.

Link to the published article: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305440317302091

For more information please contact

Ph.D., archaeologist

Elisabeth Holmqvist-Sipila

phone +358-50-9100-279

elisabeth.holmqvist@helsinki.fi

Communications Specialist

Suvi Uotinen

phone +358-0-2941-24021

suvi.uotinen@helsinki.fiThe multidisciplinary team led by Professor Donal McNally, Professor of Bioengineering and Head of the Bioengineering Research Group, along with researchers from the Centre for Healthcare Technologies, has launched a three-year project to develop the Next Generation Neonatal Transport System - the first system of its kind in the world.

The System aims to cut down vibration and noise, improve comfort and safety, and reduce the stress that extremely premature babies are subjected to when they are transported to medical centres in a bid to improve neurological outcomes.

Over 16,000 neonatal transfers are carried out in the UK every year and this is set to increase. For the majority of babies, this is a safe clinical pathway and ensures that they have access to the care they need and for high-risk babies it increases survival rates. For a small number of high-risk infants, it is also necessary but could also expose them to additional risks from noise, vibration, discomfort and in rare cases, potential accidents involving the ambulance.

A detailed assessment, the first of its kind to date, was carried out by Dr Don Sharkey, Clinical Associate Professor of Neonatal Medicine, Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences, which highlighted the effects of vibration on newborn babies when they are transported. Dr Sharkey said, 'Neonatal transport can be potentially hazardous for extremely premature infants or babies requiring specialist care or surgery. While in transit, the infant is exposed to harmful stimuli including mechanical shock and vibration, which could be a factor in the associated additional brain injury observed in these babies.

'This can lead to lifelong disabilities and neurological conditions such as cerebral palsy. This type of brain injury is most likely to happen in the first few days of life when many of these babies are transported.'

Professor McNally said, 'This research provides a well-grounded baseline assessment of newborns' exposure to head and torso vibrations, and linear accelerations. More importantly, the study also addresses key issues including if the transport could be made safer, for example by redesigning the incubator or its components, or by exerting control over the route and speed of the ambulance's journey.

'Understanding the mechanism and resulting damage of excessive vibration could be the key to developing new strategies to reduce the brain injury seen in these babies. This in turn can result in the lifelong improvement in the quality of life for both the babies and their families.'

Research has linked transportation to an increased risk of bleeding in the brain of very premature babies, which potentially can lead to cerebral palsy and learning difficulties later in life. Data collected by the team at Nottingham suggest that babies are exposed to vibration levels well above recommended limits for adults, such as lorry drivers, which are linked to headaches, fatigue, circulatory and digestive disorders.

The study which has been awarded NIHR Invention for Innovation (i4i) Programme funding, has enabled the research team to travel in the specially equipped research ambulance with these premature babies. This has allowed them to monitor key details including blood flow to the brain and carry out the measurement of bio-markers indicating stress.

Dr Sharkey, the clinical lead on this project, believes 'By the end of this study we hope to have developed the world's safest neonatal transport system that improves the comfort and safety of the baby, reduces stress and ultimately improves the long-term outcomes for the most vulnerable babies.'

Invitation to Professor McNally's Inaugural Lecture

On Wednesday 11th April, Professor McNally will deliver his Inaugural Lecture, Squishy Biomechanics: Spines, Injuries and Infants at the University of Nottingham's Keighton Auditorium on University Park Campus. The hour-long lecture will feature the biomechanics of some of the squishier parts of the human body and shed light on the fascinating form and function behind continence and spinal motion, and explain the effects of disease and injury. Professor McNally will also examine the mechanisms of injuries to the spine, aorta and brain that result from trauma such as car crashes and consider how severe brain injuries, linked to ambulance transport, might be minimised in extremely low birthweight babies.

For further details and to book your free place online, visit https://donalmcnallyinaugural.eventbrite.co.uk

###We have only known about the existence of the unusual yeti crabs (Kiwaidae) - a family of crab-like animals whose hairy claws and bodies are reminiscent of the abominable snowman - since 2005, but already their future survival could be at risk.

New Oxford University research suggests that past environmental changes may have profoundly impacted the geographic range and species diversity of this family. The findings indicate that such animals may be more vulnerable to the effects of human resource exploitation and climate change than initially thought.

Published in PLoS ONE, the researchers report a comprehensive genetic analysis of the yeti crabs, featuring all known species for the first time and revealing insights about their evolution. All but one of the yeti crab species are found on one of the most extreme habitats on earth, deep-sea hydrothermal vents, which release boiling-hot water into the freezing waters above above them.

The research was conducted by ecologists from Oxford's Department of Zoology, Ewha Woman's University in Seoul, South Korea and additional Chinese collaborators.

The results reveal that today's yeti crabs are likely descended from a common ancestor that inhabited deep sea hydrothermal vents on mid-ocean ridges in the SE Pacific, some time around 30-40 million years ago.

By comparing the location of current yeti crab species with their history of diversification, the authors suggest that the crustaceans likely existed in large regions of mid-ocean ridge in the Eastern Pacific, but have since gone extinct in those areas.

While the reasons for this are unclear, the findings point to a specific event, when a shift in deep sea oxygen levels was triggered by climate change and changes to hydrothermal activity at mid-ocean ridges. At the same time yeti crabs appear to have changed the way they disperse their larvae between hydrothermal vents.

Christopher Roterman, co-lead author and postdoctoral researcher in of Oxford's Department of Zoology, said: 'Using these genetic techniques, our study provides the first circumstantial case for showing that hydrothermal vent species have gone extinct in large areas. The present-day locations of these animals are not necessarily indicative of their historical distribution.

'The findings have implications for our understanding of how resilient deep-sea hydrothermal vent communities might be to environmental change and the consequences of deep sea mining.'

Hydrothermal vents are just a small fraction of the deep sea environment. However, researchers are finding new species continuously and building a better picture of deep ocean life and its potential resources. Overtime these insights should help us to understand whether we can or should responsibly utilise them.

Roterman, who was also co-author of a study published last year, highlighting shocking gaps in our knowledge of deep sea environments, added: 'Our understanding of deep sea ecosystems is still very basic and we need to adopt a cautionary approach to exploitation. Before we go bulldozing in, we need to more aware of not only what lives down there, but how resilient their populations are likely to be to human activity.

'Animals like the yeti crabs are potentially vulnerable to resource exploitation in the deep sea and I believe that humans, as a species, have a responsibility to preserve and steward our planet's biodiversity as prudently and ethically as possible.'

###

The research was co- led by Won-Keung Lee of Ewha Woman's University in Seoul, South Korea and supervised by Yong-Jin Won of the same institute.

Notes to editors:

The full paper citation is: PLoS One: A new yeti crab phylogeny: Vent origins with indications of regional extinction in the East Pacific

By Christopher Nicolai Roterman, Won-Kyung Lee, Xinming Liu, Rongcheng Lin, Xinzheng Li and Yong-Jin Won

Link to the paper: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0194696

Images and video footage available: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/bfzxm9i4i775yo2/AABt3JZSdZfOjGLeUc_xIqkka?dl=0

For further information please contact Lanisha Butterfield, Media Relations Manager, 01865 280531 or email lanisha.butterfield@admin.ox.ac.ukPITTSBURGH (March 22, 2018) ... Small- to medium-sized companies in southwestern Pennsylvania have a friend in the University of Pittsburgh. For the past two years, Pitt Industrial Engineering (IE) students have worked with manufacturing extension partnership Catalyst Connection to make productivity and operations improvements throughout the region.

"The collaboration with Catalyst Connection began during the fall semester in 2016," says Louis Luangkesorn, assistant professor of industrial engineering at the Swanson School of Engineering and Senior Design Capstone Course advisor. "Senior design projects require students to complete a complex project based on challenges they'll face in the workplace so using these projects as an opportunity to help local businesses is a natural fit."

Catalyst Connection is one of only 60 manufacturing extension partnership centers throughout the 50 states. They provide improvement services and consultation to companies in the 14 counties of southwestern Pennsylvania. After recognizing the many similarities between Catalyst Connection's work and the work Pitt students were doing in the classroom, the two joined forces.

"Pitt students are brought in for the heavy lifting: time studies, development of systems, scheduling, and resource plans," says Eric MacDonald, senior continuous improvement consultant at Catalyst Connection. MacDonald works directly with companies to determine their consulting needs and coordinates their demand with Dr. Luangkesorn's supply of students.

Last semester, a team of five Pitt seniors assisted All-Clad Metalcrafters, an internationally recognized cookware manufacturer in Canonsburg, Pa. They focused on improving the "cladding" process, which consists of heating, bonding, and "blanking" metal sheets into disks.

"Cookware manufacturing begins with a round disk called a 'blank.' The first step involves putting the blank in an oven and cooking it properly based on the temperature, time, and design. The Pitt team looked at this first step of the process to see if they could improve it. In the end, they found ways to improve four steps of the process," says Mike Whaley, process engineer at All-Clad.

Contributions from the Pitt teams during the spring and fall semesters in 2017 resulted in an estimated annual savings of $466,057 for All-Clad Metalcrafters. "The best resource I was provided was intelligent questions to things I have not yet resolved. Those questions drove new paths in the project, and those paths led to breakthrough innovation," adds Whaley.

Evan Bair, who last December received a B.S. degree in Industrial Engineering, was part of the fall 2017 Pitt team at All-Clad. They compiled temperature profiles of the product in the oven, executed trials with cost-reduced designs, and wrote data-based reports that recommended ways to improve All-Clad's manufacturing processes.

"Being able to work alongside full-time engineers in a manufacturing environment is so helpful in teaching students the skills that can't be taught in the classroom: working on multi-discipline teams, dealing with setbacks caused by events that are out of the students' control, interacting with people who work on the plant floor. The list could go on, but I feel that this kind of work is a vital part of any student's education," says Bair.

Another Pitt team traveled to Anchor Distributors in New Kensington, Pa. to study the company's more than 130,000 square foot warehouse. Most of Anchor's business come from distributing books, and the company began working with Catalyst Connection to improve warehouse efficiency and prepare for potential expansion.

"The Pitt students were able to quantify the effect of a new layout and firmed up our decision to go in a new direction and get on the right track," says Rob Whitaker III, financial analyst at Anchor Distributors.

The company's original "serpentine pattern" for fulfilling orders had workers walking an average of 10 to 12 miles per day. By changing the warehouse to a six-zone layout in which products are organized based on popularity, the students demonstrate with engineering models how the company could increase productivity while lowering labor and overtime cost.

"I was impressed by how competent the students were and how well they worked together," says Whitaker. "It's encouraging to know that this is the next generation about to enter the work force."

Seventeen teams journeyed off Pitt's campus and helped Pennsylvania companies last year. According to Dr. Luangkesorn, these experiences have lasting effects on the students as well as the companies because the collaborations explore new ideas and apply fresh thinking to traditional manufacturing processes.

"While the University of Pittsburgh rightly celebrates the achievements of its best students, the success of so many of these senior capstone projects speaks to the quality and prospects of the entire Pitt engineering student body, not only the top students," says Dr. Luangkesorn.

###Boron has a range of uses throughout everyday life, from laundry bleaches to heat-proof glass and ceramics. Chemists at Julius-Maximilians-Universitat Wurzburg (JMU) in Bavaria, Germany, have a particular interest in the chemistry this element, and have been researching the fundamental properties of boron for years. These researchers have now succeeded in twisting molecules with multiple bonds between boron atoms, leading to unusually stable biradicals.

Biradicals are usually highly reactive molecules. They are generated in energetic processes such as combustion and are normally so short-lived that they are unable to be isolated or studied by traditional methods of chemical analysis.

The new biradicals prepared at the JMU are dramatically different, however: they are solid compounds and were found to be stable for weeks. "We now have model compounds in hand that we can study without having to rush", explains Prof. Holger Braunschweig from the Institute for Inorganic Chemistry. The results have been presented in the journal Nature Communications.

Twisting of boron-boron double bonds

For a long time, chemists have attempted to twist, distort and rupture double bonds between atoms - with only limited success. The JMU team has now made the dream of twisting a double bond by a full 90 degrees a reality.

The Wurzburg researchers had originally expected to obtain diborenes from their reactions: the products should have had double bonds between their boron atoms, as would normally be the case. Instead, they obtained molecules where the double bond between the atoms was twisted by 90 degrees and thereby completely broken.

Biradicals in their electronic ground state

The result of the experiments was the synthesis of unusually stable biradicals. This is highly unusual: "When a molecule is twisted against its will, it usually becomes less stable, and also more reactive", explains Julian Bohnke, doctoral student at the JMU and first author of the publication in Nature Communications. "The stability of the molecules is due to them being biradicals in their electronic ground state, despite their two unpaired electrons", says Braunschweig. "This structure was completely unexpected."

Applications of the molecules are still far away, according to Prof. Braunschweig. If they could be installed into a polymeric material, their use in organic electronics could become a possibility. However, Braunschweig emphasises that "this is still a long way off". The next step for the JMU chemists is to test whether similarly stable biradicals can be prepared with double bonds between boron and carbon.

A success story of Research Training Group 2112

The study of the biradicals was particularly extensive and complex, involving sixteen researchers and three years of research. The main part of Julian Bohnke's doctoral thesis will be based on the topic. Bohnke is part of the Research Training Group (Graduiertenkolleg) 2112 (Molecular Biradicals: Structure, Properties and Reactivity), a research consortium headed by Prof. Ingo Fischer. The Research Training Group allows doctoral students to investigate the physical and chemical properties of biradicals in an interdisciplinary team.

Critical to the success of the study was the efficient collaboration with expert theoretical chemistry groups. Work by the teams of Profs. Bernd Engels and Roland Mitri? was essential in obtaining a thorough understanding of the bonding situations in the newly-prepared biradicals. Two other German research groups from Gottingen and Mulheim an der Ruhr were also integral parts of the team.

###Tuberculosis can be cured and could be eradicated. For this to happen, however, patients have to receive the right treatment. Researchers at the Makerere University and the University of Zurich were able to demonstrate that the levels of medication used are often too low. As a result, patients remained contagious with the dangerous disease for longer than necessary.

More than 4,000 people worldwide die from tuberculosis every day. This means the disease tops the list of the most common causes of death that result from a single pathogen. The people who are most affected are those also suffering from an immune deficiency, such as an HIV infection. However, the high rate of mortality isn't unavoidable: Tuberculosis can be cured if the relevant drugs are used correctly.

But this is precisely where the problem lies. The most important medications for treating tuberculosis - in Switzerland, too - date back to the 1960s: Treatment is lengthy, involves several pills, and comes with numerous side effects. People thus often discontinue their treatment, which means that patients continue to suffer from the disease and also pass it on to others. In addition, the optimal dose of tuberculosis drugs has also not yet been determined.

Concentration of medication in the blood

Led by Prof. Jan Fehr, researchers at UZH and the UniversityHospital Zurich have now joined forces with a team of researchers from a partner university in Kampala, Uganda, to tackle this question. Over a two and half year period, the researchers repeatedly measured the concentration of tuberculosis medication in the blood of 268 study patients suffering from pulmonary tuberculosis as well as an HIV infection. At the same time, they carried out further tests including tests to detect the pathogen in the sputum. Patients took their medication in accordance with the currently valid dosage guidelines of the World Health Organization (WHO).

Contagious for a longer period of time

"We were able to show that the concentrations of the two principal tuberculosis drugs, namely isoniazid and rifampicin, in the blood were very clearly below the internationally targeted levels," explains Prof. Jan Fehr. These lower blood concentrations mean that tuberculosis patients cough up tuberculosis bacteria for a longer period of time compared to patients with higher levels of medication in their blood. "These patients with lower levels of isoniazid and rifampicin thus also remain contagious for longer."

Blood levels have to be measured regularly

This in turn has far-reaching global consequences. The WHO aims to cut the rate of tuberculosis deaths by 90 percent by 2030. However, this will only succeed if the global epidemic can be controlled and infections don't spread any further. To achieve this, we must think about how routine checks of the levels of the major tuberculosis drugs can be implemented and how to increase the dosage if the levels are too low. Relevant studies need to be carried out, and should be based on the SOUTH study, which was the first study worldwide to investigate this topic in great depth.

###

Literature:

Christine Sekaggya-Wiltshire et al. Delayed Sputum Conversion in TB-HIV Co-Infected Patients with Low Isoniazid and Rifampicin Concentrations, Clinical Infectious Diseases. 3 March 2018. DOI: 10.1093/cid/ciy179

UZH/USZ and Makerere University cooperate to research global health issues

Since 2012, there has been a close partnership between the University of Zurich, the UniversityHospital Zurich, Makerere University, and the Infectious Disease Institute in Kampala, Uganda. As a result of the growing global challenges posed by infectious diseases, the two partner organizations decided to enter into a long-term cooperation in the fields of research, clinical practice, and teaching. Current efforts are focusing on the global optimization of healthcare for patients suffering from HIV and/or tuberculosis. A physician from the UniversityHospital Zurich's Department of Infectious Diseases has been on site in Kampala permanently since 2012.

Education from patient care staff to physicians

The cooperation also extends to the education of medical students, physicians, patient care staff, and junior researchers from Uganda and Switzerland. So far, more than 10 Swiss medical students have completed practical training, a Master's or a doctoral thesis at the Makerere University with the supervision of UZH. Ugandan medical students are instructed at the patients' bedsides during ward rounds at the Infectious Diseases Institute at the Mulago National Teaching and Referral Hospital.

Measuring blood levels now possible

A Ugandan physician was able to obtain her PhD in connection with the study mentioned above. In addition, a young Ugandan lab technician was trained in measuring TB and HIV levels in the blood of patients. The trained lab technician is currently passing this knowledge on to his colleagues while also studying for a Master's degree in pharmacology. Measuring the blood levels of tuberculosis medication as well as of the newer HIV drugs has only recently become possible in Uganda and can now be performed for the long-term benefit of patients in the entire region.

More information is available at http://www.r4gh.org.NEW YORK (March 22, 2018) -- Logging activities in biodiverse forests can have a huge negative impact on wildlife, particularly large species such as big cats, but a new study proves that the Western Hemisphere's largest cat species--the jaguar (Panthera onca)--can do well in logging concessions that are properly managed, according to conservationists from the San Diego Zoo Global and the Bronx Zoo-based WCS (Wildlife Conservation Society).

The study titled "Do responsibly managed logging concessions adequately protect jaguars and other large and medium-sized mammals? Two case studies from Guatemala and Peru" appears in the online version of the journal Biological Conservation. The authors are: Mathias W. Tobler and Samia E. Carrillo-Percastegui of San Diego Zoo Global; Rony Garcia Anleu, Gabriela Ponce Santizo, John Polisar, and Isaac Goldstein of WCS; and Alfonso Zuniga Hartley of San Diego Zoo Global and Servicio Nacional Forestal y de Fauna Silvestre, Lima, Peru.

"Our findings indicate that certified logging operations can play an important role in maintaining vital habitat for jaguars and other large wildlife species," said Tobler, a scientist for San Diego Zoo Global and lead author of the study.

Much of the world's tropical forests have disappeared as a result of deforestation, particularly in biodiverse regions such as Central and South America that are home to jaguars, tapirs, peccaries, and many other charismatic species. Reduced impact logging operations, which strive to prevent uncontrolled hunting and other negative environmental impacts, provide conservationists with a sustainable alternative in multiple-use and/or buffer areas near core zones or fully protected areas.

To that end, the study research team initiated large-scale camera trap surveys to gauge the effectiveness of Forest Stewardship Council (FSC)-certified logging concessions in both Guatemala and Peru in maintaining terrestrial mammal communities, with a focus on jaguars. The camera traps in Guatemala's Maya Biosphere Reserve captured a total of 23 individual jaguars, whereas the traps in two concessions in Peru's Madre de Dios region recorded 43 of these big cats. The appearance of the same jaguar in two or more images can be determined from spot patterns that are unique to each individual; such "recaptures" are important for accurately determining jaguar densities.

The spatial capture-recapture models used to calculate jaguar densities in both certified logging concession locations estimated that the Guatemala site contained an average of 1.5 jaguars per 100 square kilometers, whereas the Peru site contained an average of 4.5 jaguars. Further, both sites supported more than 20 large and medium mammal species (with 22 in Guatemala and 27 in Peru).

Additionally, the scientists found that strictly controlled logging roads with limited access in well-managed concessions were used by several species, including carnivores, as movement corridors, a finding contrary to the conventional thinking of the roads being negative disturbances to wildlife. Authors caution that logging roads must still be closed to the public so that traffic levels can be kept low to ensure that impacts to wildlife are minimized.

"Controlling access into an area and hunting of prey are paramount considerations for the objectives of preserving biodiversity and ecological function, both of which are selling points for certified lumber products," said Dr. John Polisar, coordinator for WCS's Jaguar Program and a co-author of the study. "The presence of jaguars in a logging concession is testimony that environmental guidelines are being followed."

Polisar was the lead author in a previously published paper (in the journal Ambio) titled "Using certified timber extraction to benefit jaguar and ecosystem conservation." The study focused exclusively on jaguars (as opposed to jaguars and other large and medium sized species in the aforementioned paper) and explored the factors that contributed to the persistence of these big cats in certified forests in Bolivia, French Guiana, Nicaragua and Guatemala.

Studies assessing the environmental impacts of logging operations are crucial for saving wildlife, say study authors and other conservationists, who add that certified, low-impact timber management by community groups and industrial operators constitutes one of the most effective jaguar conservation strategies available to jaguar-range countries. Properly managed concessions help forests persist in the face of more intensive land uses, generate income for local stakeholders who become lead defenders of the forests, and maintain habitat for jaguars and their prey as they range beyond fully protected areas.

###

This work was supported by the Liz Claiborne and Art Ortenberg Foundation; the Climate, Nature, and Community Program of the U.S. Agency for International Development and Rainforest Alliance; WWF Switzerland; and Christian Rossell of Pecorino Ristorante.

Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS)

MISSION: WCS saves wildlife and wild places worldwide through science, conservation action, education, and inspiring people to value nature. VISION: WCS envisions a world where wildlife thrives in healthy lands and seas, valued by societies that embrace and benefit from the diversity and integrity of life on earth. To achieve our mission, WCS, based at the Bronx Zoo, harnesses the power of its Global Conservation Program in more than 60 nations and in all the world's oceans and its five wildlife parks in New York City, visited by 4 million people annually. WCS combines its expertise in the field, zoos, and aquarium to achieve its conservation mission.

San Diego Zoo Global

Bringing species back from the brink of extinction is the goal of San Diego Zoo Global. As a leader in conservation, the work of San Diego Zoo Global includes on-site wildlife conservation efforts (representing both plants and animals) at the San Diego Zoo, San Diego Zoo Safari Park, and San Diego Institute for Conservation Research, as well as international field programs on six continents. The work of these entities is inspiring children through the San Diego Zoo Kids network, reaching out through the internet and in children's hospitals nationwide. The work of San Diego Zoo Global is made possible by the San Diego Zoo Global Wildlife Conservancy and is supported in part by the Foundation of San Diego Zoo Global.The Federal Council says it wants to amend Switzerlands tax laws to ensure equal fiscal treatment of married couples compared to unmarried cohabitating couples. The recommendation must still be approved by parliament.

On Wednesday, the executive body outlined its plan to end long-running tax disparities affecting married couples a treatment which it claims is unequal and unconstitutional.

Under the governments proposal, a tax authority must first calculate how much a married couple would owe jointly. It must then carry out a second calculation for the couple, but this time, the calculation should be based on a cohabitating couple taxed individually. The married couple should pay the lower of the two tax estimates, the government said in a statement.

In 1984, the Federal Court ruled that tax levied on a married couple is unconstitutional if it exceeds 10% of the amount theyd have paid as people cohabitating. In 2016, it was estimated that about 80,000 couples in Switzerland  representing 5% of all marriages or registered partnerships  are at a disadvantage, with some paying thousands more per year in tax than their unmarried counterparts, who are taxed individually.

On Wednesday, parliamentarians from the centre-right Christian Democratic Party and the conservative right Swiss Peoples Party voiced their support for the governments project. However, it was criticised by the centre-left Social Democrats and Green Party, which warned that this tax gift would only benefit the wealthy and would have an impact on the federal coffers.The offices of the state-owned defence company RUAG were raided on Thursday by Swiss federal prosecutors as part of aninvestigation into suspected arms deals involving Russian President Vladimir Putins bodyguards.

The Office of the Attorney General of Switzerland (OAG) confirmed that it had ordered a search of RUAGs premises on Thursday morning following a report of a criminal offence, reported by the company itself. OAG added that it had opened criminal proceedings relating to the federal act on war materiel, criminal mismanagement and possibly misconduct in public office.

The Swiss state-owned defence contractor RUAG is reportedly cooperating fully with the prosecuting authorities.

The Handelszeitung newspaper broke the story on Thursday. The German-speaking business newspaper said the case allegedly involved an executive at RUAGs ammunitions business Ammotec and a Julius Baer banker in Russia, who for years secretly arranged deals in technical equipment and weapons for Putins guards.

After being made aware of the allegations by a whistle-blower, RUAG said it had immediately launched an internal investigation and had filed a criminal complaint with the OAG.

Julius Baer told Reuters that it was aware of the allegations and was investigating them, adding that the employee in question would be suspended.













SDA-ATS/sb





A report by the NGO Society for Threatened Peoples (STP) has accused Swiss gold refiner Metalor of procuring gold from controversial suppliers in Peru. Metalor denies the charge.

The report, released on Thursday to time with the opening of the Baselworld Watch and Jewellery Fair, says that in all likelihood, Metalor continues to procure illegally mined and sold Peruvian gold, which is linked to tax evasion and environmental destruction.

The refiners main supplier, the Peruvian export company Minerales del Sur (Minersur), delivered more than 47 tons of the precious metal to Metalor between 2012 and 2017. STP says that Minersur only has the right to sell gold from the Puno region, but manages four concessions in Huepetuhe, one of the main illegal gold mines located in Madre de Dios.

According to the accusations, the company exports more gold to Switzerland than officially produced in Puno, raising the suspicion that it is palming off illegal gold from Madre de Dios to Metalor.

We have not been contacted by the NGO. We do not get even a gram of gold from Madre de Dios and all our shipments from Peru are approved by the customs and tax body SUNAT, Jose Ramon Camino, general counsel for Metalor, told swissinfo.ch.

Dubious Dubai

The STP report also accused Swiss gold refiners of laxness concerning imports from the United Arab Emirates (UAE), which it deems to be a hub for conflict gold from African countries. It pointed fingers at the Swiss refiner PAMP, which obtained gold from Dubai-based companies Kaloti and Al Etihad Gold.

According to STP, Kaloti had underreported gold sourced from Sudan and Liberia, and had also procured some from the conflict-ridden Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) between 2012 and 2014.

The report accused audit firm Ernst & Young Switzerland of conducting an improper third-party verification for PAMP, which could have allowed conflict gold funnelled through UAE to enter the companys supply chain.













swissinfo.ch





The Office of the Attorney General of Switzerland (OAG) has opened a criminal investigation into a tax case involving an ex-manager of French luxury group Kering, owner of the Gucci brand, following a request by Italian authorities.

The OAG confirmed to Reuters on Wednesday that it had received and carried out a request for mutual legal assistance from the public prosecutors office at the court of Milan. It added that it had opened its own criminal proceedings on suspicion of, among other things, money laundering and document forgery against unknown persons. Italian-speaking Swiss public radio RSI had also reported the case. Kering declined to comment.

A source told Reuters that the request from Milan referred to a former Kering manager in Italy under investigation for suspected tax evasion and did not concern a separate tax probe into the French group.

Last week, Kering announced that it had complied with its tax obligations in Switzerland, in answer to reports claiming that the group used a Swiss-based scheme to evade taxes on earnings from brands such as Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent.

The French information site Mediapart and Germanys Der Spiegel had alleged that Kering had saved on taxes it should have paid in countries such as Italy by billing some business carried out elsewhere to a Swiss site. Mediapart, which cited documents linked to an Italian tax investigation, said it estimated that since 2002 Kering had saved 2.5 billion ($3.1 billion) in tax in this manner. The newspapers claimed the French group benefited from a low tax rate of about 8% by billing them through the Swiss region of Ticino.

Kering defended itself in a statement sent to Reuters: The group pays its due taxes in Switzerland, in compliance with the law and the fiscal status of the company. This business operating model is known by French and other competent tax authorities.













ATS-SDA/Reuters/sb





Swiss prosecutors said Thursday they have opened a criminal investigation into state arms producer RUAG following a tipoff, reportedly over suspect weapons deals connected to Russian presidential bodyguards.

The office of Switzerlands attorney general (OAG) confirmed in an email to AFP it has opened criminal proceedings in connection with the Federal Act on War Material, criminal mismanagement, and possibly misconduct in public office.

In a statement posted on Twitter, RUAG said it found out via its internal whistleblower system that a manager was allegedly involved in a severe compliance breach.

RUAG immediately notified authorities, pressed criminal charges and is fully cooperating with the investigation.

The OAG confirmed that the company initiated the probe and is cooperating, but provided no details about the individual concerned or the alleged offence.

House searches have been conducted and various documentation/ data carriers have been secured, the OAG statement said.

Swiss financial paper Handelszeitung has reported that the probe centres on arms deals with Russia.

The paper said an official within RUAGs ammunition division, Ammotec, may have been covertly making deals with branches of the Russian security services tasked with protecting Russian President Vladimir Putin and other government officials.

RUAG describes itself as a technology firm offering products for air, space and land.

It manufactures military aircraft, heavy terrestrial weapons, in addition firearms and ammunition.

bs/gca/bpSwiss banking giant UBS will pay $230 million to settle charges it misrepresented mortgage-backed securities in the run-up to the financial crisis, New York State officials announced Wednesday.

The settlement with the New York Attorney General resolves allegations UBS sold loan securities that were of dodgy quality but packaged as if they were low-risk.

The agreement is the latest in a long line of settlements in which a big bank has agreed to cash payouts to move past a regulatory crackdown after mass defaults on subprime loans sparked the 2008 financial crisis.

Years later, New Yorkers are still recovering from the housing crash, as communities grapple with the effects of plummeting home values, vacant properties, and an affordable housing crisis, said New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman in a news release.

Todays settlement marks another key step forward as New Yorkers rebuild their lives and communities.

The agreement includes a $41 million cash payment to New York state and $189 million in customer relief for New York homeowners.

UBS is the seventh large financial institution to settle with Schneiderman, who said the agreements have yielded $3.9 billion in cash and consumer relief for New York since the housing bust.The leaders of Britain, France and Germany will hold special talks on the sidelines of an EU summit Thursday to discuss the poisoning of a Russian ex-spy on English soil, the French presidency said.

Prime Minister Theresa May, President Emmanuel Macron and Chancellor Angela Merkel are set to discuss a statement that the 28 EU leaders will issue on the nerve agent attack, which Britain has blamed on Russia, a presidency official said.

The official said it was very likely the European Council will adopt conclusions which will be quite close to those expressed by the three leaders and US President Donald Trump last week.

The statement by the four leaders said that there was no plausible alternative explanation to Britains assessment that Russia was behind the attack on Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia.

But the draft version of the EU summit statement stops far shorter, saying only that they take the British view extremely seriously and expressing solidarity with London.

Greece and Italy have led opposition to harder language.Authorities in the German capital Berlin decided Thursday to soften one of Europe's strictest regimes for short-term rental firms such as Airbnb, allowing private individuals to rent out their main home without time limitations.

The new rule will come into effect on May 1.

The news comes after the Berlin administrative court confirmed in several rulings that home sharing does not impact the local housing market.

A May 2016 ruling had clamped down on the practice, allowing home owners to only renting out one room via specialised web portals such as Airbnb or Wimdu, with a 100,000 euro (120,000) fine available for those breaching the rule.

Airbnb Germany head Alexander Schwarz hailed the rule change: We welcome that Berlin embraces home-sharing in creating new rules that benefit regular people who want to share their homes with travellers.

Under the new law owners will only be allowed to rent out second/holiday homes for 90 days a year.

Rents have traditionally been low in Berlin compared with other major German cities.

But they have risen substantially in recent years, prompting city authorities to crackdown on online rentals, fearing a potential shortage of accommodation for residents in favour of tourists while also pushing rentals higher.

After the initial restrictions came in, however, city governors noted that many owners were managing to get around the limits and also found themselves having to deal with a raft of appeals.

Four months after the restrictions came in one court allowed through an exception for the owners of a pied-a-terre in the German capital.

City authorities estimate between 20,000 and 30,000 properties or rooms are rented out on a temporary basis.Polish victims of World War II should be able to claim 440 billion euros ($543 billion) from Germany in World War II damages, the head of a parliamentary commission said Thursday.

Arkadiusz Mularczyk of the nationalist ruling Law and Justice Party (PiS) based the figure, which the German government rejects, on a 1990 study which found that there were 13.32 million direct victims of Nazi Germany in Poland.

That figure takes into account deportees, labour and concentration camp prisoners, civilians left maimed during that period, widows, orphans and those who suffered from illnesses which broke out under Nazi occupation and during the conflict.

Mularczyk said the 1990 study found that reparations of $284 billion should be paid.

That was the sum in 1990. If we revalue taking into account dollar purchasing power in 2017 we get 1.984 trillion zloty, or $543 billion, the PAP news agency quoted Mularczyk as saying.

The issue of German reparations had long been regarded as closed  but PiS leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski revived the topic last year.

Polish Foreign Minister Jacek Czaputowicz earlier this week alluded to differences of opinion with Berlin, including on the reparations issue.

Last year, then German government spokesman Steffen Seibert said the issue had already been settled in August 1953 when Polands then communist administration said it renounced any right to war reparations.

At that time Polish ministers put potential compensation at around $1,000 billion (850 billion euros).

Six million Poles  including around three million of Jewish origin  were killed during the six-year Nazi occupation and the capital Warsaw was virtually razed following an uprising in 1944.The Polish attorney general's office has described as partly unconstitutional the Holocaust law that was meant to defend Poland's image abroad but instead drew criticism from Israel, Ukraine and the United States.

The statement published Thursday came as a surprise, as Prosecutor General Zbigniew Ziobro is also the head of the justice ministry that came up with the controversial law.

The legislation, which came into force earlier this month, imposes fines or up to three years in jail on anyone who ascribes responsibility or co-responsibility to the Polish nation or state for crimes committed by the German Third Reich.

The attorney generals office published its statement on the website of the Constitutional Court, which was tasked by the president with checking whether the law was constitutional.

The office said that penalising acts committed abroad independently of the laws in place there was against the Constitution, which opposes excessive interference.

It added that the law was dysfunctional, could have opposite results than those intended and could undermine the Polish states authority.

The law is at the centre of a row with Israel, which sees it as a bid to deny that certain Poles participated in the genocide of Jews during World War II.

Critics also worry that because of vague wording the legislation could open the door to prosecuting Holocaust survivors for their testimony.

The bill has also triggered public debate in Poland, where the Israeli embassy noted an increase in anti-Semitic statements.EU proposals for a digital tax targeting US tech giants could reap rewards for the block and help overcome the hole left by Britain's departure, French President Emmanuel Macron said Wednesday.

Such a tax could bring in half of the financial needs after Brexit, he told reporters in The Hague citing European Commission figures and adding there may be no need to boost members contributions.

On the eve of a two-day EU summit, Macron paid a whirlwind visit to the Netherlands seeking to win over Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, who remains sceptical of the French plans for eurozone reform.

The two men held long head-to-head talks, with Rutte insisting again that the Netherlands  already one of the biggest contributors to the blocs budget  should not have to pay more.

On Wednesday EU Economic Affairs Commissioner Pierre Moscovici presented his proposals in Brussels aimed at recovering billions of euros from mainly US multinationals, such as Facebook and Google, that shift earnings around Europe to pay lower tax rates.

During the Brussels summit on Thursday and Friday, Macron will urge European leaders to back his vision for eurozone reforms, including setting up a crisis fund for nations in trouble.

Paris is hoping a roadmap can be drawn up at the next summit in June, ahead of European parliamentary elections next year.

But Rutte stressed in an interview with the French daily Le Monde that it was up to individual nations to put their economies in order, control their budgets and slash deficits.

Any extra contributions should be avoided, Rutte said, insisting the priority should be on things such as innovation, monitoring the EUs external borders and handling the migrant issue.

Before being received by Dutch King Willem-Alexander, Macron first visited the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) based in The Hague.

The visit comes amid the Syrian crisis and the Salisbury attack, French officials said.

OPCW arms experts arrived in Britain on Monday to help investigations into the poisoning of a former Russian spy, who remains in hospital after allegedly being exposed to a nerve agent in Salisbury earlier this month.

leb/jkb/jhe/pvhEstonia's government on Thursday agreed to send 50 troops from the Baltic state to Mali as part of France's Operation Barkhane anti-jihadist mission.

By participating in an operation with the aim of creating stability on the southern edge of NATO and the EU, we support our strong European ally, Estonian Defence Minister Juri Luik said in a government statement.

The countrys parliament still has to green-light the year-long mission, in which an Estonian infantry unit on armoured personnel carriers would be tasked with ensuring the security of the Gao military base and its surroundings.

Around 4,000 French troops are deployed under Operation Barkhane alongside the United Nations 12,000-strong MINUSMA peacekeeping operation in Mali.

France launched an intervention to chase out jihadists linked to Al-Qaeda who had overtaken key northern cities in Mali in 2013.

That mission evolved into the current Barkhane deployment launched in 2014 with an expanded mandate for counter-terror operations across the Sahel.Ten members of a French committee that annually produces a book commemorating significant historical events collectively resigned on Wednesday, accusing the government of "censorship" for removing a reference to far-right author Charles Maurras.

Each year the High Committee for National Commemorations publishes a list of around 100 anniversaries, multiples of 50 years, that it considers significant in French history.

The 2018 edition included the 150th anniversary of the birth of Maurras, an anti-Semitic nationalist who was highly influential in the 1930s but was later jailed over his support for the collaborationist, wartime Vichy regime.

Culture Minister Francoise Nyssen first praised the High Committees book, which runs to over 300 pages, in her foreword to this years publication.

But she changed her tone after several prominent rights defenders condemned the inclusion of Maurras and ordered that his name be removed.

In an open letter to Nyssen seen by AFP, ten of the Committees 12 members  including historian and former communication minister Jean-Noel Jeanneney  said her decision meant they could no longer continue to be a part of this body.

The controversy which followed (Maurras inclusion), and the reaction you took give us reason to believe such incidents are likely to reoccur, they wrote, saying they could not remain on with the permanent threat of censorship or self-censorship.

The debacle has cast a cloud over the political debut of one of the ministers President Emmanuel Macron plucked from relative obscurity last year and brought into government on the strength of their achievements in their field.

As the head of Actes Sud, an independent publishing house, Nyssen came to the portfolio with strong credentials.

But the Maurras affair placed in her a bind.

The head of the governments task team on racism and anti-Semitism, Fred Potier, sided with human rights groups who complained that to include the writer in the commemorative effort was to pay him tribute.

Writing in Le Monde newspaper in January Jeanneney and fellow historian Pascal Ory rejected that argument.

Giving as an example World War I, they wrote: We commemorate the Great War, we dont celebrate it.

In Wednesdays group statement, the historians re-emphasised the distinction.

Maurras was an enemy of the Republic who nonetheless played a considerable intellectual and political role in the history of our country, they argued.Privacy Settings

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NOTE: These settings will only apply to the browser and device you are currently using.The president of the Banif Commission of Inquiry in Madeira is appalled that the governor of the Bank of Portugal, Carlos Costa, refused to turn up and give his version of a series of events that ended up costing customers 263 million.

I express absolute repudiation for the attitude shown by those who refused to come here to give their testimony, with special emphasis on the governor of the Bank of Portugal, who, being an official of the State  and Madeira being part of the same State  refused to appear, said commission president, Carlos Rodrigues.

The final report of the Banif Commission of Inquiry comes after nearly two years of hearings, where several parties were heard and where it was pointed out that Madeiras regional government was left in the dark while Lisbon cooked up a deal in 2015 to sell the bank to Santander  for just 150 million.

As for Carlos Mr Magoo Costa at the Bank of Portugal, More serious than to have refused to attend was to have had the boldness and the nerve to question the legitimacy of parliament in setting up the committee of inquiry, said Rodrigues, adding that this was an insult that he will never accept, especially from an official of the State.

The Banif Inquiry committee was set up in February 2016 by the Socialist Party government shortly after the bank collapsed. Part of its remit was to look at Banifs management and to assess the losses that Madeiras government was left exposed to.

The work was completed in November 2017, and representatives of Santander and the Bank of Portugal, the two entities responsible for the resolution that culminated in Banifs sale, refused to appear before the committee of inquiry.

Rodrigues pointed out the tragic situation of many of the Banif victims, In the midst of all this talk, they have lost their savings, they have lost their dreams, in some cases they have lost their means of financial survival.

Aware of the progress being made to come to an agreement with those BES customers left high and dry after that bank went bust, Rodrigues said that Banif depositors deserved at least the same terms of settlement as those found for BES depositors.

The indecent haste with which Banif was sold to Santander, for which the vehicle company Oitante was created, resuted in a considerable number of customers who lost their money, some 263 million of it.Yesterdays agreement between the UK and Brussels to work within a 21 month Brexit transition period (HERE) may be scuppered by Spain which still wants Gibraltar and seeks major concessions in an effort to control this spec of British territory.

Madrids reaction to the withdrawal agreement which contains the timeline for the transition period, has been a threat to withhold support just days before the deal is due to be signed by EU member states as it wants a veto on Gibraltar enjoying the single market and customs union.

Spain already has the EUs agreement that the UK must come to a two way agreement over The Rock or it will not sign any UK-Brussels deal.

The president of the European council, Donald Tusk, has warned of a possible breakdown in the talks due to Spains political chicanery and much behind the scenes diplomacy is being carried out to enable at least the transition agreement to be agreed on, an agreement that the UKs negotiator, David Davis, has said included Gibraltar.

The EUs negotiator, Michel Barnier, confirmed that the transition deal can not be agreed without Spains signature on the document, leaving Davis the prospect of a failed deal even on the timing of withdrawal or dropping Gibraltar into Madrids lap.

Gibraltar is a recognised British Overseas Territory but has been officially claimed by Spain since General Franco made it his governments policy.

There is no question that Gibraltar is British. The Rock was captured in 1704 during the War of the Spanish Succession with the Spanish Crown formally ceding the territory in perpetuity to the British Crown in 1713, under Article X of the Treaty of Utrecht.

Spain attempted to recapture the territory during the thirteenth siege (1727) and the Great siege (17791783). British sovereignty over Gibraltar was confirmed in later treaties signed in Seville (1729) and the Treaty of Paris (1783) yet Spanish governments have brought up the Gibraltar question whenever domestic support is on the wane and political support can be increased by some well-timed nationalist rhetoric.

Reclamation of the territory remained government policy after Franco, with the Gibraltarians constant in their rejection of all claims from Madrid.A British coroner on Thursday opened an inquest to establish the cause of death of Russian exile Nikolai Glushkov, who was found at his London home on March 12.

The inquest at West London Coroners Court was told that a post-mortem discovered the 68-year-old businessman suffered from compression to the neck, suggesting he may have been strangled.

His family said Wednesday they were devastated by the death.

We are devastated at the loss of Nikolai and are coming to terms with our grief, they said in a statement.

Scotland Yard opened a murder probe last week following the autopsy results.

Glushkov had received political asylum in Britain after being jailed in Russia for money laundering and fraud.

He was linked to late Kremlin opponent Boris Berezovsky, an oligarch and one-time supporter of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who was found hanged in his home outside London in 2013.

The Russian embassy in London said that it had asked British authorities for details of Glushkovs death.

The suspected murder is not believed to be linked to the nerve agent attack on former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia in Salisbury, southwest England, on March 4, which has caused a diplomatic row between the two countries.

In English law, inquests are held to examine violent, unnatural or unexplained deaths. They set out to determine the place and time of death as well as how the deceased came by their death, but do not apportion blame.

The inquest was adjourned.Blood samples from former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia can be taken for testing by the world chemical weapons body (OPCW), an English judge ruled Thursday.

The Skripals, victims of a nerve agent attack that Britain has blamed on Russia, are in a coma in a critical but stable condition in hospital in Salisbury, southwest England.

Russia denies all responsibility and the poisoning has plunged relations between London and Moscow into crisis.

Judge David Williams ruled it was lawful for doctors to take blood samples for provision to OPCW (the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons) and to provide copies of medical notes to OPCW.

The judge concluded that it was in the best interests of the Skripals, who are unconscious and therefore unable to give their consent.

He made the ruling following a hearing in the Court of Protection in London, where issues relating to people who lack the mental capacity to make decisions are considered.

The High Court judge examined the case at a private hearing earlier this week.

He said doctors at the Salisbury hospital where they are being treated could not only provide blood samples but also provide copies of medical notes to the OPCW.

Both Mr and Ms Skripal remain in hospital under heavy sedation, Williams said in his ruling, published online by the English judiciary.

The precise effect of their exposure on their long term health remains unclear albeit medical tests indicate that their mental capacity might be compromised to an unknown and so far unascertained degree.

It is not inconceivable that their condition could rapidly deteriorate, he added.

The ruling said it was the OPCWs wish to collect fresh blood samples, undertake their own analysis in relation to evidence of nerve agents, and conduct DNA analysis to confirm the samples originally tested in Britains defence laboratories as being from the Skripals.

They also want to analyse their medical records and re-test the samples already analysed by the British labs.

Skripal, 66, and his daughter, 33, Yulia were found slumped on a bench in Salisbury after visiting a pub and a restaurant on March 4.The leaders of several EU countries said Friday they are mulling whether to expel Russian diplomats or take other steps to support Britain following a nerve agent attack on a former spy.

European Union leaders returned to summit talks on Friday after uniting behind British Prime Minister Theresa May in blaming Russia for the attack in England, and agreeing to recall the blocs ambassador to Moscow for consultations.

Britain expelled 23 Russian diplomats they said were spies, and has been pressing EU allies to follow suit despite Moscows warning against confrontational steps.

The leaders of former Soviet bloc EU states the Czech Republic and Lithuania, as well as Denmark and Ireland, said they were considering further unilateral steps, including expelling diplomats.

I think national measures will be applied already starting from next week from a lot of countries, Lithuanias outspoken President Dalia Grybauskaite said returning to the summit on Friday.

Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babis told the CTK news agency that Prague may expel several Russian diplomats over the poisoning of former double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia.

Yes, we will probably move in this direction, Babis said, adding he will consult with cabinet members on Monday.

Irelands Prime Minister Leo Varadkar said his government would decide early next week whether to expel diplomats following a security assessment.

We are not going to randomly expel people who are genuine diplomats, Varadkar told reporters.

Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen said his government heard the strong signal from the blocs leaders.

He said he would hold consultations with members of his government.

My government will then in the next coming days very seriously consider to take further steps, Rasmussen said.

 Concern about Russian meddling 

A French presidency source said Thursday that Paris was also ready to act.

The poisoning has heightened worries across Europe about Russian meddling  from repeated cyber attacks to what the EU has called an orchestrated strategy of disinformation aimed at destabilising the bloc.

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who has close ties with Moscow and has clashed with Brussels on democracy issues, was behind the plan to recall the EU ambassador in solidarity with Britain, a diplomatic source said.

At yesterdays meeting it was PM Orban who proposed the recall of the EU ambassador to Moscow for consultations in Brussels, the diplomatic source told AFP on condition of anonymity.

Greece and Italy were the most reluctant to take further common actions against Russia.

During a visit to Hanoi, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov warned that British officials are feverishly trying to force allies to take confrontational steps.Top Russian media have launched a rare boycott of a senior lawmaker after a parliamentary commission cleared him of sexual harassment despite claims from several journalists.

Several reporters including one of the BBC Russian Service have accused Leonid Slutsky, head of the foreign affairs committee in parliaments lower house, the State Duma, of making lewd sexual comments and groping.

But on Wednesday a parliamentary ethics commission said it had not found any violations in the behaviour of the 50-year-old lawmaker from the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party.

The commission questioned the journalists motives, saying their claims had appeared in the runup to a presidential election.

The boycott is a rare campaign of solidarity in a country where all major television channels are state-controlled and toe the Kremlin line.

RBC media holding said Wednesday evening its journalists would no longer work in the State Duma, while Kommersant publishing house said it would no longer quote Slutsky.

Echo of Moscow liberal radio, Dozhd (Rain) TV independent station and RTVi, a New York-based international Russian-language television network, also joined the boycott.

Echo of Moscow now considers the State Duma an unsafe workplace for journalists of both sexes, chief editor Alexei Venediktov wrote Thursday.

Dozhd quoted its chief editor Alexandra Perepolova as saying that after the meeting of the commission it had become clear that its simply dangerous for women to work in the State Duma.

RTVi chief editor Alexei Pivovarov said his channel would also have nothing to do with the Duma while Slutsky remained there.

Kremlin-friendly online news portal Lenta said it would from now on ignore Slutskys existence and would delete all materials about him except those covering the sexual harassment claims against him.

The women journalists broke the silence on a subject that remains largely taboo in Russia as the #MeToo movement swept across the globe.

Slutsky was widely supported by his colleagues, including his partys leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who accused the women of receiving orders from the West.Russian gas giant Gazprom said Thursday it had appealed a Swedish arbitration court ruling that ordered it to pay nearly $2.6 billion to Ukraine's gas firm Naftogaz.

On March 21 Gazprom filed a request to the Court of Appeals in the Svea District to partially annul the final arbitration ruling with Naftogaz Ukraine on the subject of deliveries of gas, the firm said in a statement on Thursday.

It said the appeal was motivated by errors of procedure and abuses committed by the arbitrators.

Last month the Stockholm Arbitration Court ordered Gazprom to pay $2.56 billion to Naftogaz to settle all of their legal disputes and ordered the resumption of deliveries of Russian gas to Ukraine.

The two companies had demanded tens of billions of dollars from each other in a dispute over an expensive 10-year contract Ukraine signed in 2009 after Gazprom cut its deliveries in the middle of the winter.

Gazprom refused to restart deliveries as ordered at the beginning of March and had indicated it planned to appeal the ruling.

Moscow and Kiev have had a number of disputes over gas supplies in recent years, some of which led to reductions in supplies to other European countries via pipelines that transit Ukraine.

Roughly 15 percent of the gas Europe buys from Russia is transported through Ukraine.

apo/rl/jhBritish Prime Minister Theresa May will urge EU leaders Thursday to unite against a Russian threat that could last for "years to come", following the nerve agent attack in Britain.

At a summit in Brussels, May will say that the attempt to kill former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal in the city of Salisbury  which she has blamed on Moscow  could have happened anywhere.

The challenge of Russia is one that will endure for years to come, May will tell European Union leaders over dinner on Thursday night, her office said.

Despite tensions over Brexit, she will add: As a European democracy the UK will stand shoulder to shoulder with the EU and with NATO to face these threats together. United we will succeed.

The prime minister will set out the actions Britain has taken following the March 4 attack, including expelling 23 Russian diplomats believed to be undeclared spies.

It is understood that British officials have been pressing European allies to follow suit with their own expulsions.

The incident in Salisbury has shown the threat that Russian networks pose to all our national security, the prime ministers spokesman said.

He added: The Russian threat does not respect borders and as such all are at risk.

However, Britain is not asking for any coordinated action at the summit, particularly as EU sources say that some states, including Greece, have been reluctant to put pressure on Moscow over the incident.

May will emphasise the need to work together in the long term to uphold and protect the international rules-based order and to hold Russia to account, her spokesman said.

Officials say the expulsion of diplomats and the suspension of high-level contacts with Russia was a robust but proportionate response to the Salisbury attack.

Were not looking for confrontation or regime change, a senior government official told reporters in London.

But the official added: Russia is a strategic enemy not a strategic partner.

Britain believes it has identified the specific nerve agent used  part of the Soviet designed Novichok group  and where it was produced, sharing details with its intelligence partners.

The United States, Germany and France last week backed Londons conclusion that Moscow was to blame, and demanded answers.

However, EU foreign ministers earlier this week said only that they took the accusations against Moscow extremely seriously, and offered solidarity.

Russia has denied any involvement and responded with its own diplomatic expulsions.The British police officer who was exposed to the nerve agent used in the attack against former Russian spy Sergei Skripal was on Thursday discharged from hospital, its director said.

Officer Nick Bailey has left the hospital, said Cara Charles-Barks, chief executive of Salisbury NHS Foundation Trust.

Skripal and his daughter Yulia, targets of the March 4 attack in the southern England city of Salisbury, remain in a critical but stable condition, she added.

Bailey said he had been overwhelmed by the support, cards and messages in a statement read out by Wiltshire Police Chief Constable Kier Pritchard.

The level of support has been unbelievable and Ive tried to respond to what I can, but I want to say I have really appreciated every single message, he said.

He paid tribute to the staff at Salisbury District Hospital but asked for a time out of the spotlight to recover.

I am just a normal person with a normal life, and I dont want my wife, children, family or I to be part of that attention, said Bailey.

There are really no words to explain how I feel right now. Surreal is the word that keeps cropping up  and it really has been completely surreal, he added.

A judge ruled earlier Thursday that blood samples from former Russian spy Skripal and his daughter Yulia could be taken for testing by the world chemical weapons body (OPCW).

Russia denies all responsibility and the poisoning has plunged relations between London and Moscow into crisis

Pritchard said the investigation was highly likely to take many months as he paid tribute to Bailey.

I have personally been amazed at Nicks strength and resilience, he said.

He really is a credit to Wiltshire Police and the wider police family.From: American Evaluation Association (AEA) For Immediate Release: Dateline: Washington , DC Thursday, March 22, 2018

Ryan Watkins and I teach how to do needs assessments at George Washington University and for The Evaluators Institute. It can be implied from the word that a need refers to a relationship where something is needed, or in other words that there is a necessity relationship. In needs assessments we begin by looking for those necessity relationships as they link together results  result X is necessary to achieve result Y.

We then tie several of those relationships together as the basis for a Theory of Change. For example, a community organization may determine that a delivered service or output (X) is necessary to achieve an outcome (Y) for their clients. Further, the clients must achieve the outcome (Y) in order for the community to accomplish a desired impact (Z).

Necessity relationships are tricky however; necessity leaves little wiggle room. If you state that X is necessary for Y, then you are saying that there is no way to accomplish Y without having achieved X. Often these relationships appear clear; but rarely are they. Whereas initially we may believe that, in order to achieve a desired cholesterol level (Y) we have to maintain adherence to a prescription medication (X1); we may now learn that maintaining a healthy lifestyle (X2) is also necessary  yet neither may be sufficient. Today X3 is necessary, tomorrow it is not. Necessity relationships can get complex.

However, we get into necessity troubles when we try to extend these necessity relationships to what we may do in order to achieve those results. Here is why: system theory posits (in the principle of equifinality) that in open systems there are always alternatives for achieving any result. The options may not be desirable, but they do exist. These options, however, keep us from being able to claim necessity in the relationship between an activity (which the literature often refers to as solutions or satisfiers) and a result. That is, an activity (A) cant be necessary to achieve result (X) since there are always options to consider. Activity A may be the most desirable activity for achieving X, but that is different than saying it is necessary. Likewise, A may be sufficient for achieving X, but still not be necessary.

Hot Tip: Clarity in language can improve decisions.

With sufficient evidence, we state that one result is necessary for the achievement of another result  and we call these needs. But we cant say that any activity or intervention is necessary to achieve those results, we must note that there are always alternatives. Fortunately, just knowing that there are options can lead us to better decisions.

Rad Resources:

Using set theory,





The American Evaluation Association is celebrating Needs Assessment (NA) TIG Week with our colleagues in the Needs Assessment Topical Interest Group. The contributions all this week to aea365 come from our NA TIG members. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the

About AEA The American Evaluation Association is an international professional association and the largest in its field. Evaluation involves assessing the strengths and weaknesses of programs, policies, personnel, products and organizations to improve their effectiveness. AEAs mission is to improve evaluation practices and methods worldwide, to increase evaluation use, promote evaluation as a profession and support the contribution of evaluation to the generation of theory and knowledge about effective human action. For more information about AEA, visit www.eval.org. Underlying any needs assessments is a concept of what is a need. Imand I teach how to do needs assessments at George Washington University and for The Evaluators Institute. It can be implied from the word that a need refers to a relationship where something is needed, or in other words that there is a necessity relationship. In needs assessments we begin by looking for those necessity relationships as they link together results  result X is necessary to achieve result Y.We then tie several of those relationships together as the basis for a Theory of Change. For example, a community organization may determine that a delivered service or output (X) is necessary to achieve an outcome (Y) for their clients. Further, the clients must achieve the outcome (Y) in order for the community to accomplish a desired impact (Z).Necessity relationships are tricky however; necessity leaves little wiggle room. If you state that X is necessary for Y, then you are saying that there is no way to accomplish Y without having achieved X. Often these relationships appear clear; but rarely are they. Whereas initially we may believe that, in order to achieve a desired cholesterol level (Y) we have to maintain adherence to a prescription medication (X1); we may now learn that maintaining a healthy lifestyle (X2) is also necessary  yet neither may be sufficient. Today X3 is necessary, tomorrow it is not. Necessity relationships can get complex.However, we get into necessity troubles when we try to extend these necessity relationships to what we may do in order to achieve those results. Here is why: system theory posits (in the principle of equifinality) that in open systems there are always alternatives for achieving any result. The options may not be desirable, but they do exist. These options, however, keep us from being able to claim necessity in the relationship between an activity (which the literature often refers to as solutions or satisfiers) and a result. That is, an activity (A) cant be necessary to achieve result (X) since there are always options to consider. Activity A may be the most desirable activity for achieving X, but that is different than saying it is necessary. Likewise, A may be sufficient for achieving X, but still not be necessary.With sufficient evidence, we state that one result is necessary for the achievement of another result  and we call these needs. But we cant say that any activity or intervention is necessary to achieve those results, we must note that there are always alternatives. Fortunately, just knowing that there are options can lead us to better decisions.Using set theory, Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) techniques give us tools for measuring necessity relationships. The open-source statistics platform, R , now has a free QCA package you can install to analyze case study data.The American Evaluation Association is celebrating Needs Assessment (NA) TIG Week with our colleagues in the Needs Assessment Topical Interest Group. The contributions all this week to aea365 come from our NA TIG members. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this aea365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the aea365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an aea365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to aea365@eval.org . aea365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.

From: Ad Council For Immediate Release: Dateline: New York , NY Thursday, March 22, 2018







I attended my first SXSW Interactive in 2006 where I moderated a panel discussion with two teen bloggers  this was shortly

In those early years of SXSW, we saw Facebook eclipse MySpace and Twitter launch. The crowd was very optimistic about the potential for these new platforms to build communities around common interests that would transcend geography, democratize knowledge and allow families and friends to stay connected. Critiques of these new platforms and how they would use our data and privacy were certainly present but relatively muted. Many of us, myself included, were fighting what we saw as another moral panic being fueled by the media around stranger danger, bullying, sexting and the other darker realities of the internet, especially as it related to teens. In my 2007 book for parents and educators, Totally Wired, I argued for a balanced approach in addressing the reality of kids growing up with this new technology.

I wrote Totally Wired before I had my daughter, who is now 8! While many parents were grateful to read a balanced perspective on technology, I also received a lot of, Wait until you become a parent! They were right in that I feel that instinct to try to protect my daughter from any potential harm  and Im going to attempt to wait until shes 12 before allowing her to have her own smartphone (well see). The New York Times recently profiled other Silicon Valley executives who were well intentioned and optimistic in those days but have also The story is filled with anecdotes including an early Facebook executive who now limits screen time for his kids and a former Instagram engineer acknowledging that the idea that a product could make your life worse was not in anyones perception.

Fast forward to this years SXSW Interactive  where conversations about the need for ethics around data and privacy, intentionally designing technology to be addictive, what to do about fake news, and European regulation of the big tech companies abounded. Sadiq Khan, Londons mayor, th and 20th centuries with dynamite and then chemical weapons.

I agree that computer scientists, and really anyone who works in technology, have an obligation to anticipate how anything new they build could be used for harm, while businesses and governments need to institute substantive guard rails against abuse. If what happens on these platforms is a virtual extension and at times an amplification of what happens in the real world, we need to enforce ethics and rules for the greater good just as we do offline. Its time.



The post

I attended my first SXSW Interactive in 2006 where I moderated a panel discussion with two teen bloggers  this was shortly after launching my youth culture blog Ypulse. While there are certainly many people who have been attending SXSW Interactive longer than I have, making the annual pilgrimage to Austin for more than a decade has given me perspective on where we were in those early days and where we are now. I am still an optimist when it comes to digital, and Im lucky to be in a role at the Ad Council where I get to see it used for good every day. But I also believe we have reached a moment of reckoning in our industry when it comes to the negative impact of technology.In those early years of SXSW, we saw Facebook eclipse MySpace and Twitter launch. The crowd was very optimistic about the potential for these new platforms to build communities around common interests that would transcend geography, democratize knowledge and allow families and friends to stay connected. Critiques of these new platforms and how they would use our data and privacy were certainly present but relatively muted. Many of us, myself included, were fighting what we saw as another moral panic being fueled by the media around stranger danger, bullying, sexting and the other darker realities of the internet, especially as it related to teens. In my 2007 book for parents and educators, Totally Wired, I argued for a balanced approach in addressing the reality of kids growing up with this new technology.I wrote Totally Wired before I had my daughter, who is now 8! While many parents were grateful to read a balanced perspective on technology, I also received a lot of, Wait until you become a parent! They were right in that I feel that instinct to try to protect my daughter from any potential harm  and Im going to attempt to wait until shes 12 before allowing her to have her own smartphone (well see). The New York Times recently profiled other Silicon Valley executives who were well intentioned and optimistic in those days but have also The story is filled with anecdotes including an early Facebook executive who now limits screen time for his kids and a former Instagram engineer acknowledging that the idea that a product could make your life worse was not in anyones perception.Fast forward to this years SXSW Interactive  where conversations about the need for ethics around data and privacy, intentionally designing technology to be addictive, what to do about fake news, and European regulation of the big tech companies abounded. Sadiq Khan, Londons mayor, gave a keynote address where he spoke about the need for Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to do more to prevent the proliferation of hate speech, harassment and propaganda. I spotted an intriguing thread in my Twitter feed just this week from an engineer tweeting about how computer science is experiencing a revolution similar to what chemistry experienced in the 19and 20centuries with dynamite and then chemical weapons.I agree that computer scientists, and really anyone who works in technology, have an obligation to anticipate how anything new they build could be used for harm, while businesses and governments need to institute substantive guard rails against abuse. If what happens on these platforms is a virtual extension and at times an amplification of what happens in the real world, we need to enforce ethics and rules for the greater good just as we do offline. Its time.The post SXSW 2018: Its Time for a Real Conversation About Ethics in Technology appeared first on AdLibbing.org

New tariffs on Chinese imports could make it harder for U.S. liquefied natural gas exporters to tap into Chinas booming market and raise billions for the next generation of Gulf Coast LNG facilities.

President Donald Trump said Thursday he would impose tariffs targeting roughly $60 billion in Chinese goods per year. The new trade policy could further complicate a complex relationship and add another layer of risk that could scare off investors already jittery about doing business with China.

LNG operators need to line up long-term contracts to gain the financing and investment needed to build multibillion-dollar projects that convert natural gas to a liquid form and ship it to foreign markets. Investors and lenders were already wary about Chinese buyers honoring contracts for the full-length of their 20-year term. A trade war that could drive the Chinese to buy LNG from Australia, the Middle East or other U.S. rivals only adds to the uncertainty for investors and the projects.

Contracts with Chinese buyers may be off the table for the next wave of projects, said Katie Bays, an energy investment analyst at the consultancy Height Capital Markets in Washington.

Chinas demand for liquefied natural gas is surging as the government attempts to lower the countrys carbon dioxide emissions by using gas for power generation instead of coal. Spot LNG prices in Asia climbed to the highest point in three years in December, as buyers gobbled up record amounts of gas in the wintertime, according to S&P Global Platts.

Chinese demand for LNG, which makes up 20 percent of the global market, is set to rise from 40 million tons to 100 million by the early 2020s, analysts said. Its where U.S. exporters hope to send a giant chunk of their natural gas in coming years, as LNG export capacity nearly triples from 3.5 billion cubic feet of gas a day this year to 9.6 billion by the end of 2019, according to the Energy Department.

U.S. companies like Cheniere Energy and Tellurian plan to build 10 multibillion-dollar projects in Texas, Louisiana, Georgia and Maryland over the next decade to ship natural gas from the nations shale plays overseas. But several of these projects have yet to get the go-ahead as companies try to line up contracts and financing.

China will clearly be a very important driver for any project that would like to enter service in the near future, Bays said. But the Trump administrations tariffs on Chinese goods would exacerbate the obstacles in locking down LNG contracts there, especially if China retaliates for the change in U.S. trade policy, she added.

The new tariffs on Chinese goods come as the construction costs climbs for oil companies and LNG exporters that would have to pay more for materials. Earlier this month, Trump announced a 25 percent tariff on imported steel, which analysts and economists say will almost certainly cost the oil industry jobs.

On Monday, Jack Gerard, president of the American Petroleum Institute, said the U.S. oil and gas industry needs clarity and flexibility on the tariffs, saying the industry trade group expects the Commerce Department to take into consideration that oil companies use specialty steel not made in the United States.

The Commerce Department is working to determine which industries and types of metal will be excluded from the tariffs, to try and minimize damage to the U.S. economy, while still putting pressure on China and other Asian steel producers.

The stakes are particularly high for the oil industry, which relies on steel to build to build pipelines and other equipment to meet growing production from the hydraulic fracturing boom.

We support an exclusion process from the Department of Commerce that is both transparent and flexible, Gerard said. That will allow the U.S. oil and natural gas industry to continue our significant investments in producing, transporting and refining U.S. energy resources, building world-class infrastructure and creating high-paying American jobs.

U.S. LNG exporters are already facing higher project costs because of the steel tariffs.

Steel accounts for roughly 10 percent of the cost of building an LNG facility. A roughly 25 percent price increase in steel costs could lift project expenses by around 3 percent to 5 percent, said Akos Losz, a research analyst at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. That could add hundreds of millions of dollars to the cost of building an LNG export terminal, Losz said.

Houston LNG exporter Tellurian, which is building a $15.2 billion gas export terminal in Louisiana, said in regulatory filings last week that its project costs could climb substantially when steel tariffs are imposed.

In the U.S., Cheniere began exporting the nations first shipments of shale gas from its facilities at Sabine Pass, La., in early 2016, after it brought its first supercooling unit online to turn natural gas into a liquid.

In the first year, the nations only active LNG export facility sent less than 1.5 billion cubic feet of natural gas per day overseas. But as it brought three more LNG processing plants online, exports nearly doubled to 2.8 billion cubic feet per day by the end of 2017. Chenieres fifth unit is under construction and will bring its export capacity to 3.5 billion cubic feet a day this year.

U.S. companies, including Cheniere, are building five other LNG projects, including two in Texas and one in Louisiana. One of Chenieres projects is under construction at Port Corpus Christi.

Another eight LNG projects have been approved by government agencies but are not yet under construction, awaiting approval from corporate executives, according to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.

Over the next few years, analysts expect China to benefit from the global surge of natural gas exports. China could make progress toward reducing air pollution that hangs thick over its capital, Beijing, and other major cities.

The diversity of supply will be helpful for China, but the biggest impact will be on the environment, said Rob Thummel, portfolio manager at Tortoise Capital Advisors, an investment firm with more than $19 billion under advisement. China needs to lower its CO2 emissions, and one of the most practical ways to do that is to use LNG instead of coal.A New Braunfels nonprofit company that provides retirement housing and health care to more than 300 residents and patients has sought bankruptcy protection.

Eden Home Inc., which does business as EdenHill Communities, filed Chapter 11 last Friday after defaulting on about $52.6 million in bonds used to finance construction of 103 apartments, a health center and other improvements.

An agreement with bondholders to delay a foreclosure expired, prompting them to direct the bond trustee to exercise remedies, Eden Home CEO Laurence Dahl said in a court filing accompanying the bankruptcy petition. The bondholders have a lien against Eden Homes real estate and personal property.

Dahl blamed construction defects and delays for Eden Homes financial troubles. It is mired in litigation with the contractor.

Messages left for Dahl and Eden Homes bankruptcy lawyer were not returned.

Eden Home has yet to file schedules of all of its assets and liabilities, but reported both categories are in the range of $10 million to $50 million.

The nonprofit posted almost $13 million in losses for the four years ending in 2015, its tax returns show. Its 2016 and 2017 tax returns have not been filed with GuideStar, a website that gathers financial information on nonprofit organizations.

Eden Home occupies about 15 acres on Lake Boulevard in New Braunfels. Its original facilities were built in 1956 and it has expanded at various points over the years.

It operates a 184-bed nursing home, 103 independent living apartment-style residences, 47 independent living cottages, 37 assisted living units and 30 memory support assisted living units.

The nursing home received an above average overall rating from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services. The rating is based on health inspections, staffing and qualify-of-care measures.

Two months ago, though, the Texas Health and Human Services Commission cited Eden Home for 15 violations. The agency found the facility did not make sure that residents who cannot care for themselves receive help with eating/drinking, grooming and hygiene.

Eden Home also was cited for not properly caring for residents needing special services, including injections, tracheal suctioning and colostomy.

The agency conducted a follow-up up visit on Feb. 22 and all of the violations were corrected, according to its spokeswoman, Christine Mann.

Eden Home employs about 310 workers, including medical staff, food preparers and maintenance.

The nonprofit is affiliated with the Southern Central Conference of the United Church of Christ, though the church is not responsible for Eden Homes obligations.

The Chapter 11 filing is intended to allow Eden Home to remain in operation, reorganize its debts and repay its creditors over time.

The publicly traded revenue bonds used to expand Eden Homes were issued by Red River Health Facilities Development in 2012 and were slated to mature in late 2022.

In bankruptcy court documents, Eden Home said it contracted with JE Dunn Construction for an expansion project. Before it was completed, however, Eden Home said it discovered substantial defects.

The defects resulted in delays in opening and additional construction and renovation expenses incurred by Eden Home, it said.

JE Dunn sued Eden Home in 2015 in Comal County. A fourth amended complaint filed last month and included in the bankruptcy shows JE Dunn moved to foreclose on liens against Eden Homes property. The contractor sued Eden Home and Dahl for breach of contract, fraud and unjust enrichment, though the complaint doesnt specify how much in damages are sought.

A lawyer for JE Dunn didnt have an immediate comment.

Eden Home countered with its own claims against JE Dunn and Zurich American Insurance Co., which issued the builders risk insurance policy.National Democrats are boosting Gina Ortiz Jones in her runoff against former Bernie Sanders delegate Rick Trevino in Texas 23rd Congressional District, adding her Thursday to a program that provides candidates in competitive districts with campaign resources and guidance on strategy.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, House Democrats campaign arm, added Jones to its Red to Blue program, which deep-pocketed Democratic donors have historically used to pinpoint competitive candidates in close districts.

Jones was one of 10 congressional candidates added to the program Thursday, also among them Colin Allred in the 32nd District in the Dallas area, amounting to 33 Democrats nationwide. The DCCC said it plans to make more targeted and frequent additions to the program than in previous election cycles, according to a news release.

Gina Ortiz Jones is the daughter of an immigrant, an Air Force intelligence officer and went to college on an ROTC scholarship. She is the embodiment of the American Dream, DCCC Chairman Ben Ray Lujan said in a statement. When Gina is elected, I know shell fight every day to make sure that same dream is a reality for Texas families.

In a statement, Jones said she sees her inclusion in the program as affirmation of the grass-roots-based campaign shes built.

As I have traveled the district, Ive seen and heard how hungry everyday people are for change. They know we can and must do better as a district, state and country, Jones said. Im proud to stand with them to demand our community has the real representation it deserves, and Im thankful for their support.

The 23rd District, held by Will Hurd, R-San Antonio, is largely expected to produce Texas most competitive congressional contest this year. Hurd won in 2016 by about 3,000 votes out of nearly 229,000 cast, and the district, which stretches from San Antonio to El Paso County, was one of a handful to swing in favor of Hillary Clinton and elect a Republican representative.

Jones received 41 percent in the first leg of the primary, while Trevino took in 17 percent, edging out Judy Canales by 216 votes.

The DCCC is hoping to aid Democrats effort to regain control of the House, but it has drawn recent criticism for supporting Democrats running against more progressive primary opponents. In Texas 7th Congressional District in the Houston area, the committee published an opposition research memo against activist Laura Moser, one of seven Democrats running in the primary there.

Our Revolution, an organization formed out of Sanders presidential campaign, has endorsed Moser and Trevino. Moser also advanced to her districts runoff.

Trevino said that although he expected the national organization to get involved in the race, the committees tendency to oppose progressive Democrats has upset him.

You do see that theres this legitimate movement within the party to evolve, and if anybody threatens the current power structure of the Democratic Party, they come in pretty aggressively, Trevino said. If anything, I think it shows that the DCCC, or at least the donor class, doesnt want what the American people want. Theyre going to support candidates that are going to evolve on their terms.

The DCCC has raised more than $50 million online ahead of the 2018 midterms.

Trevino has criticized Jones for taking contributions from EMILYs List, a national group that backs female candidates who support abortion rights. Hes called the group a very establishment part of the Democratic Party.

An EMILYs List super PAC contributed about $117,000 to Jones campaign in February. Shed spent $381,000 through mid-February, to Trevinos $20,000.

Meanwhile, Hurd did not face a serious primary challenge, allowing him to conserve campaign funds; he reported $1.2 million on hand in his latest campaign finance report.STAMFORD  A student of Doug MacLehoses recently asked whether America was like a melting pot. MacLehose, the history department head at Stamford High School, prefers a more precise metaphor to describe the country: a salad bowl. Rather than all different races and cultures melting together into one cohesive dish, each group  like vegetables in a salad retains its distinctive flavor.

Each culture is in there, but it doesnt mix together, he said. You can definitely get the different flavors. These groups are different and they might clash, but ultimately a lot of them do get along.

This is how MacLehose, a teacher for two decades, approaches the subject of immigration in his U.S. History classes. As the country is in the midst of a hot debate on immigration with the potential repeal of DACA and multiple attempts at a ban on immigrants from majority Muslim countries, MacLehose tries to show that history is repeating itself.

MacLehose said he wants students to understand that the issues being discussed today are part of a larger trend informing how we react toward immigrants in this country.

Especially in a history class you want them to see the connection, MacLehose said. You want them to be able to see the connection with whats going on in the world today.... So can we learn from the past where we make mistakes and, even if we cant learn, can we see why these are trends that happen?

At Stamford High, all required history classes cover the waves of immigration in America including the influx of Irish and German citizens in the 1880s, the Italian, eastern European and Asian immigrants who came in the late 19th century, and the coursework touches upon past prejudices and restriction laws that came with them.

The school also offers advanced placement Human Geography, which talks about American history and patterns of immigration, as well as race and ethnic neighborhoods.

I try to present the nativist side along with the immigrant side because, historically, you want to be true to the era, MacLehose said. Its important were not just looking through current eyes. You want to get a feel for the times so you understand why these events happened the way they did, whether we think its horrible or good.

Some of the policies and mindsets - historical and current day - may hit close to home for students in Stamford. From 1990 to 2014, the number of foreign-born people living in Fairfield County increased by 90,300, or 89 percent, reflecting an uptick in immigration nationwide, according to a 2016 Fairfield County community well-being index. By 2014, a fifth of the county-wide population, or 191,300 individuals, were immigrants.

In total, 43 percent of immigrants living in Fairfield County are naturalized U.S. citizens. Of the countys 109,300 non-citizen residents, more than half are legal U.S. residents, while an estimated 47,400 are undocumented immigrants.

MacLehose said he welcomes students sharing their personal stories and thoughts on the topic, but few participate.

For kids who are concerned about their immigration status, its very stressful, he said. Ive had kids over the years tell me theyre here illegally. I wonder if Ill hear less of that now because they dont want to admit it.

Dr. Lisa Forbes, the social studies department head at Westhill High School, also finds that some students are hesitant to share their experiences with immigration  particularly when discussing modern policy.

They see and theyre able to understand why something happened and they take their stance, Forbes said. For some of the students here, its very personal to them because they're the ones who are affected by the policy.

Forbes said Westhill has students active in immigration policy movements in the city and have organized demonstrations, but like Stamford High, the teachers try to teach all sides of history.

Staff reporter Emilie Munson contributed to this report.STAMFORD  The fourth noreaster to hit the region in as many weeks largely spared the city for much of the day Wednesday.

But the storm, which stalled and battered cities to the southwest, was enough to dismiss students early from school and keep Stamford streets mostly quiet on Wednesday  the first full day of spring.

Libby Carlson, a spokeswoman for Mayor David Martin, said workers began spreading salt early Wednesday as snow coated the trees and grassy areas but quickly melted on most road surfaces. Carlson said 50 plows remained prepared for the about a foot of snow the National Weather Service was predicting by early Thursday morning.

Ted Jankowski, the city's director of public safety, said Stamford will remain in a snow emergency until at least 6 a.m. Thursday. The emergency calls for all cars to be removed from the citys snow routes or they will be towed.

While the city remained relatively quiet on Wednesday, some businesses opened as usual.

Farnaz Jarmatz, owner of FreshCo Cafe on Belltown Road, said she opened her doors like every other day at 6:30 a.m.

Im not going to close my doors on my customers, she said. I hate having to do that. I know these people. I see them every day and I cant close my doors on them.

Residents walking downtown said they had enough of the snow.

More Information See story on Page A7 See More Collapse

I stopped paying attention, Hannah Wright said during a Starbucks break while working from home.

The Starbucks connected to the Ferguson Library offered residents refuge from the light dusting of snow in the morning. But the library, Lorca Coffee Shop and other downtown businesses ended up closing early.

Wright, who lives downtown and works in Norwalk, said she decided to work from home to avoid getting stuck at the office, but wasnt following the hype surrounding the storm.

This is the fourth noreaster, she said. It doesnt excite me.

Staff writers Erin Kayata, Kat Russell and John Nickerson contributed to this story.Stamford police / Contributed

A former Stamford man was shot and killed by deputies in Nassau County, Florida, after he opened fire during a standoff on Wednesday, according to a report.

News 4 Jax reported deputies responded to the Amelia Island Surf and Racquet Club Condo after 25-year-old Jason Raffaeli said armed men were inside his unit. Deputies said Raffaeli claimed to have a loaded handgun and refused to come outside, barricading himself inside.WESTPORT  You dont have to go to Washington, D.C., New York City or Hartford to protest gun violence.

On the same day as the March for Our Lives protest in major cities and state capitals, Westport resident Greg Kraut has called on area residents to gather Saturday outside the headquarters of Sturm, Ruger & Co., a Fairfield-based gun manufacturer.

Sturm, Ruger, which recently sold more ARs than any other gun company, is located less than a mile from the Westport border, said Kraut, a member of the Representative Town Meeting from District 5.

The half-hour protest, set to begin at 11 a.m., aims to honor the lives of those lost to gun violence, educate area residents on Sturm, Rugers guns, and encourage attendees to sign a letter that will go to investors and vendors, urging them to enforce socially responsible investing and divest from Sturm, Ruger.

Everything starts with money. The way you get to the source of the companys money is through institutional investors, Kraut said.

If investors, such as Vanguard and BlackRock, divest from Sturm until the company ceases production of assault-style rifles and activists convince companies to stop selling them, as Dicks Sporting Goods has already done, then Sturm will be hit on both the supply and demand sides, Kraut explained. Politicians are more inclined to act if business trends change in the direction of a given policy, Kraut said, citing the divestment movement in South Africa that preceded the end of apartheid in that country in the early 90s.

Kraut, Saturdays sole organizer, said he hopes the protest will help reinstate the ban on high-capacity magazines and assault rifles that lawmakers passed in 1994, but which lawmakers let expire amid pressure from the National Rifle Association a decade later. The NRA is especially against a ban on the AR-15, Kraut said, because the weapon is many gun companies golden goose, boosting their sales, especially in recent weeks since the shooting in Parkland, Fla., and allowing gun manufacturers to survive amid declining sales for other types of guns.

Im not against all guns, but I am against this one specific gun  the assault weapon. The AR-15 was built for military, not civilian use, Kraut said.

The weapon of choice in recent mass shootings  including at First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, and the Las Vegas music festival  AR-15-style rifles, Kraut said, can kill dozens of people in seconds.

According to Kraut, company co-founder William Ruger Sr. didnt think AR-15-style rifles should be used by civilians and told Tom Brokaw in a 1992 interview, No honest man needs more than 10 rounds in any gun. ... I never meant for simple civilians to have my 20- or 30-round mags or my folding stock.

As for the current leadership of the company, they have offered no roadblocks to Krauts protest on Saturday.

Fairfield police said Kraut and the group assembling outside the Sturm, Ruger headquarters at 1 Lacey Place in Fairfields Southport section didnt need permits for the gathering because its on private property and Sturm, Ruger agreed to let the group use a portion of the headquarters for the gathering. Police officers will be on hand at the property at the time of the gathering.

The goal of the police department is to ensure the safety and security of the Sturm, Ruger employees and its property while protecting the First Amendment right to free speech and peaceful assembly of those attending, Fairfield police Lt. Robert Kalamaras said.

Sturm, Ruger did not respond to calls for comment on the protest.by Ryan Patti | Clippers Correspondent | Thu, Mar 22nd 12:42am EDT

Justise Winslow supplied 15 points on 6-for-14 from the field (1-for-6 on threes, 2-for-3 at the line), two assists and a rebound in 26 minutes in Miami's 119-98 win versus the Knicks.

Fantasy Impact:

Winslow and Kelly Olynyk saw more playing time than James Johnson and Bam Adebayo despite coming off the bench. The 21-year-old is shooting just 2-for-13 from downtown in his last three games, although his two-point scoring is savoring his uptick in value. He'll look to get hot from deep against the Thunder on Friday.The rain on the Plains falls mostly on the grain prices. (I couldnt resist. Well, I could, but I didnt). It had to happen someday. We have stayed in this cautious rally, mostly in soybeans, but partly in corn, for an extended period.

The biggest driving factor was the dry conditions in Argentina, although wet conditions in Brazil contributed, especially to corn prices. Dryness in our Great Plains was driving interest in wheat prices. Reality was that several things could happen to end the party. The South American harvest would finish and be better than expected.

The USDA Planting Intentions Report would show an increase of bean acres. The traders would reverse positions just as an exhaustion top to the market. It remains to be seen if the American rain results in a situation like the one in the old Frank and Earnest cartoon.

Frank is a grocer explaining, Its the law of supply and demand, maam. Wheat goes up, bread goes up. Wheat goes down, bread stays up! Production problems in the Great Plains means less bread wheat, but doesnt affect our cookie wheat supply.

Prices crash

It does affect our price, as there is sympathy between the Chicago, Kansas City, and Minneapolis (hard red spring) wheat markets. Prices crashed Monday, March 19, on the Chicago Board of Trade with the weight of rains in Argentina, with more rain expected, and with rains in the Great Plains of America to help our hard red winter wheat crop.

May corn futures lost almost eight cents on the day, adding to previous losses the preceding four sessions. At the low Monday and overnight Tuesday morning, we traded 3.74-34, 21 cents below the high of 3.95-14 on March 13.

May Soybean futures traded 10.21-34 Monday, a low that was almost 61 cents off the March 2 high of 10.82-12. We lost a crushing 27 cents of that Monday.

The November new crop futures lost over 18 cents, trading a low of 10.21-12 overnight going into Tuesday. July Chicago wheat futures have now lost over 65 cents from the high of 5.31-34 posted March 2.

Spring arrives

Fears of a reduced hard red crop have been receding with the increase of rain. Spring will be here before you read this. The vernal equinox arrives in Ohio just after noon on Tuesday.

This means the sun did not set on Windsor Road by me last night, but it was close. Tonight it will look like it sets in the middle of the road, but it will be a little to the north.

The sun is on its way back north, and today marks the exact middle of its progress from the depths of winter to the start of fall. Days are getting longer, and we can sit in the backyard after supper if the hay is done for the day and the corn side dressing is done.

Spring arrives with snow still on the ground at my house, but that is no surprise. The first of the daffodils are sprouting, but more snow is forecast for the Northeast. It is mostly supposed to miss us, as it has all winter. We only plowed the drive twice this winter, and both times it was for Bible Study on Friday nights.

I am getting to old to help push cars out of the yard. The March 31 Planting Intentions Report will be on the 29th this year, as the 31st comes on Saturday. Once I would have anticipated some market-shaking news from the report.

Now, I am not so sure. With the current breaks in the market, and negative news may already be in the market. The expected one million-acre increase in soybean plantings is surely already expected, and already reflected in the current plunge.

It remains to be seen what other results we see.By Other News

ROCK SPRINGS, Pa.  The 45th Performance-Tested Bull Sale will be held March 30, at noon, at Pennsylvanias Livestock Evaluation Center in Rock Springs, Centre County.

Consignors will offer 103 bulls that completed a 112-day evaluation. They also passed a breeding soundness exam. Top bulls from each breed are in sale order as follows.

Angus. Consigned by Alexis Cash of York County; adjusted yearling weight 1,382 pounds; average daily gain 5.13 pounds; adjusted loineye 13.9 square inches; 63 Angus will sell.

Simmental. Consigned by Lady Bug Farm, Middleport, New York; adjusted yearling weight 1,406 pounds; ADG 5.37 pounds; adjusted loineye 14.0 square inches; 13 Simmentals will sell.

Hereford. Consigned by Slaytons Beardance Farm, Bedford County; adjusted yearling weight 1,340 pounds; average daily gain 4.58 pounds; adjusted loineye 14.6 square inches; 12 Herefords will sell.

Red Angus. Consigned by Country Acres Farm, New Windsor, Maryland; adjusted yearling weight 1,400 pounds; average daily gain 4.62 pounds; adjusted loineye 13.4 square inches; Seven Red Angus will sell.

Fleckvieh Simmental. Consigned by Elk County Simmentals, Elk County; adjusted yearling weight 1,355 pounds; average daily gain 4.58 pounds; adjusted loineye 15.0 square inches.

Charolais. Consigned by Smeal Farms, Clearfield County; adjusted yearling weight 1,243 pounds; ADG 4.98 pounds; adjusted loineye 13.2 square inches.

Shorthorn. Consigned by Bomgardners Shorthorns, Lebanon County; adjusted yearling weight 1,148 pounds; ADG 4.23 pounds; adjusted loineye 13.6 square inches.

SimAngus. Consigned by Messick Farms, Dauphin Co.; adjusted yearling weight 1,343 pounds; ADG 4.81 pounds; adjusted loineye 14.5 square inches; Four SimAngus sell.

Shorthorn Plus. Consigned by Bomgardners Shorthorns, Lebanon Co.; adjusted yearling weight 1,244 pounds; ADG 3.71 pounds; adjusted loineye 14.6 square inches.

Catalogs featuring final weights and performance information, and videos of the bulls are available at livestockevaluationcenter.com. The auction will be streamed on cowbuyer.com.

Additional events include a trade show and the Pa. Angus Finest Female and Simmental female consignment sales following the bull sale.Place Your Advert

Thousands of Active jobseekers are looking for new agricultural positions in 2020. Call us now to discuss the options for advertising your vacancy in our job section.The NFU Kendal branch has voted in its first ever female branch chairperson, just months after the election of the NFU's first ever female President.

Maggie Kelly farms with her husband David and children Harriet, 22, and John, 17, at Netherhall Farm near to Kirby Lonsdale in Cumbria  a farm Maggie has lived at for the past 15 years.

The family breed pedigree Herefords and Limousin cattle over four farms they privately own - totalling 900 acres.

The Kelly familys Hereford bulls mainly go to dairy farmers and the Limousin cattle are sold as breeding stock and stores at Kirkby Stephen Auction Mart with some of the heifers being kept.

Maggie said: We currently have 540 cattle on the farm but after calving I estimate well have approximately 700 cattle by May. Herefords are perfect for our farming system. They are placid, easy calving and have a shorter gestation period.

As part of the Hereford breeding program at Netherhall, embryos are imported from Australia and America.

In fact, when Maggie was elected as NFU Kendals new chairperson, Maggie and David had just returned from a trip to Australia where they have been buying embryos and a Hereford bull called Wirruna Lennon so that the business can start importing its own semen.

When asked what she thought could affect farming in south Cumbria during her tenure in office, Maggie said: The two major issues the industry faces are getting on top of the TB outbreaks in Shap and of course the uncertainty which surrounds Brexit.

We all need to be banging the buy British food drum a lot louder.

We must help the general public understand how the food produced in this country is second to none and why our animal welfare is the best.

Once a dairy farmer herself, Maggie was a Wilson before marriage and is the eighth generation of her family to farm.The National Sheep Association is launching a campaign next week to promote responsible dog ownership as cases of sheep worrying continue to rise at an alarming rate.

As sheep worrying cases continue to be publicised, the National Sheep Association (NSA) is asking dog owners, together with the farming community, to unite in spreading positive messages on enjoying the British countryside responsibly.

Thanks to an increasingly social media savvy population, horrific cases of sheep worrying by dogs continue to be well-documented online.

And with the potential to reach thousands, the NSA say it serves as a powerful tool in highlighting the damage attacks cause.

In March alone, two out-of-control dogs savaged twelve sheep on a Hertfordshire farm, one sheep died in Sussex due to severe bite injuries, two dogs attacked and seriously injured sheep, killing one newly-born lamb in Dorset, a dog attacked pregnant ewes in the Scottish Borders and a dog attacked and killed five sheep in Aberdeenshire.

Katie James, NSA Communications Support Officer, say sheep worrying by dogs is a "very serious problem" for farmers "which isnt going away."

Ms James said: The NSA continues to hear of a frustratingly high number of dog attacks on livestock.

We do not want to discourage dog owners from enjoying the beautiful landscapes in Britain, only to do so responsibly and consider the impact an attack can have on farmers business and livelihood as well as animal welfare.

Targeted campaign

With the clocks going forward marking the official start of British summertime, Sunday 25th March will mark the start of NSAs week-long, targeted campaign.

By spreading graphics, case studies and statistics, NSA is aiming to unite messages on promoting responsible dog ownership across Facebook and Twitter.

Ms James continues: With the long-awaited arrival of spring, farmers can see an increase in walkers on footpaths through and around fields.

And at a time when ewes are heavily pregnant or have young lambs at foot, the risk of dogs chasing livestock can also increase the risk of serious problems like ewes aborting or lambs becoming separated from their mothers.

With the power of social media, we are hoping this campaign can go some way to raise awareness of the problem and ultimately help to reduce the amount of sheep worrying cases we hear about at the NSA.1. Yes. Several other districts factor them in. It would provide a more complete picture.

2. Yes. Theyre not as accurate, but they can be useful in spotting a trend in infections.

3. No. The district is keeping tabs on those numbers, so the public doesnt need to.

4. No. As long as the public health district is aware of those stats, thats all that matters.

5. Unsure. The district isnt obligated to include them, but it might be helpful.

Vote

View ResultsTwo new projects have been announced which aims to take the agricultural industry one step closer to eradicating bovine TB.

The Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB) has announced that they will be partnering with Scotlands Rural College (SRUC) to embark on the projects.

Using recent research which identified significant genetic variations between resistant and non-resistant dairy cattle, AHDB and SRUC intend to develop a national database of genetic evaluations and a new genomic prediction tool.

This will enable farmers to identify natural resistance traits and make informed decisions about which cattle they choose to breed, depending on their resistance to Bovine TB.

Combating Bovine TB is a national priority, manifested by the 100 million spent annually on disease surveillance, monitoring and non-genetic control.

If accuracies of genomic predictions were improved, genetic improvement could contribute to a long term reduction of this figure by reducing both infected and infectious animals on farm.

Defra Secretary Michael Gove reiterated the importance of eradication when he announced a review of the 25-year Bovine TB Strategy four years after it was first published.

'Game changing potential'

The first of the two projects will be in partnership with the Centre for Innovation Excellence in Livestock (CIEL) and will focus specifically on dairy cattle.

Innovate UK have granted AHDB and CIEL 360,000 of funding, which will enable them to buy the genotyping services required to genotype around 12,000 cattle.

The additional funding provided by Innovate UK will allow a far greater number of cattle to be included in the database, ensuring greater accuracy when the improved genomic prediction tool is put into practice says Marco Winters, Head of Animal Genetics for AHDB Dairy.

He added: This project has game-changing potential for the dairy industry and is a further demonstration of how the industry is actively using genetics, as part of wider industry initiatives, toward a sustainable livestock sector.

Genetic evaluations

The second project, which is being co-funded with Defra, will build on initial research on dairy genetic evaluations, but instead focus specifically on beef cattle.

This is a slightly more complicated project due to the number of different beef cattle breeds in comparison to dairy cattle, but could reap huge savings for livestock breeders.

Farming Minister George Eustice commented: "Bovine TB is a slow moving, insidious disease which presents many challenges. That is why we are taking strong action to deliver our 25-year strategy to eradicate the disease through tighter cattle measures, improved biosecurity and badger control in areas where the disease is rife.

He added: Reducing the risk of disease entering a farm is crucial to end the devastation of bovine TB and that is why we have chosen to support this project which has the potential to lead to reductions in its incidence.

'Major development'

Both projects are being undertaken by Scotland's Rural College and new TB Advantage evaluations will be calculated by EGENES.

Professor Mike Coffey from SRUC said: This is a major development in the battle against TB. It will increase data available for evaluations and create a new rich dataset for further research, leading to a reduction in cow to cow transmission of TB

AHDB were keen to point out that despite the potential of these projects, current disease control measures must continue to be adhered to as part of the UKs bTB eradication strategy.

The first of the two projects, focused specifically on dairy cattle, is scheduled to commence later this year. The beef cattle project co-funded by Defra is currently underway.Legislation to protect devolved powers has been passed overwhelmingly by the Scottish and Welsh governments in a bid to stop a Westminster "power grab".

The new Continuity Bill will both protect the devolved settlement and prepare Scotlands and Wales's laws for the UKs exit from the European Union.

It will prevent what ministers in Scotland and Wales have described as a power grab.

The powers cover areas such as agriculture support and food labelling.

However, the farming industry has expressed fears over disagreements between the UK government and devolved governments.

The chief executive of the Tenant Farmers' Association (TFA) aired his concern that disagreements between Westminster and the devolved governments of the UK could impede a post-Brexit agreement for agriculture.

'Support devolution'

Michael Russell, the Minister for UK Negotiations on Scotlands Place in Europe said the "overwhelming majority" of people in Scotland voted to remain in the EU.

We have a duty to prepare our laws for Brexit, Mr Russell said, however, Brexit must not be used by the UK Government as cover to grab powers from the Scottish Parliament and hand them to Westminster.

I am delighted that the majority of the Scottish Parliament has come together to support devolution. The process of working through, and improving this bill, has been a credit to our national parliament and demonstrates the strength of feeling over this issue.

The parliament has been clear that it could not recommend consent to the UK Governments EU Withdrawal Bill, as it stands, as it allows the UK Government to unilaterally take control of devolved powers.

Mr Russell added: We are still committed to discussions with the UK Government. We now expect them to acknowledge the overwhelming view expressed by the Scottish Parliament  and the Welsh National Assembly  and come forward with proposals that respect the devolution settlement and allow us to come to an agreement.

'Unhelpful sideshow'

Welsh Conservative AM David Melding has voiced his opposition to the Bill, labelling it an "unnecessary and unhelpful sideshow" which risks "undermining the ongoing negotiations" with the UK government.

It was a parody from the start, with members unable to scrutinise its passage through the Assembly in anything like a proper fashion," Mr Melding said.

The UK government has delivered a considerable and reasonable offer to deliver a smooth and orderly departure from the EU for the whole of the UK.

Sadly, the Welsh Government allowed itself to be carried away by the SNP on a nationalist whim  instead of acting in the national interest.

I remain hopeful that an agreement will be reached between the devolved administrations and the UK Government, so that we can put this bogus Bill behind us.

Fortunately, our constitution allows us to repeal this unnecessary legislation from the statute book once that agreement has been reached.Benefits and pitfalls of clover overseeding examined on farm

'If it's not 20% clover, its not doing the job'Kitnaa hai badnaseeb Zafar dafan ke liye Do gaz zamiin bhii naa milii kue-yaar mein...(How unfortunate is Zafar... he was not granted even two yards for his burial in the land of his beloved)During the last years of his life, legendary painter Maqbool Fida Husain may have identified with the pathos of these lines, written by Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last Mughal emperor to rule India. After the revolt of 1857, the poet king wrote this verse, while exiled in Burma. In 2005, Indias most celebrated artist chose self-exile, when court cases and protests against him from extremist groups questioned the manner in which he painted Hindu goddesses.

He chose to live in Dubai and finally died in frosty London away from the warmth of his beloved country. For Husain, who once wrote about his feet, Yeh bahut chalein hai, bahut daude hain, magar kabhi bhaage nahin (they walked a lot, ran as much, but never fled), there couldnt have been a greater irony. And it was this feeling of grave injustice meted out to her mentor and close friend by her countrymen, which inspired well-known painter/writer Ila Pal to pen Husain: Portrait Of An Artist.

Having shared a relationship with Husain that spanned five decades, Ila deeply understood his sense and sensibilities. The nudity in his paintings of goddesses was not about nakedness; it was about innocence and purity. We didnt do justice to an artist of his calibre, she laments. Ila insists that Husain was a Sufi soul. He was as much a Hindu as a Muslim. He never differentiated between faiths. Before beginning a painting, hed draw a Ganesh, she says adding, Painting was like ibadat (prayer) for him! She reveals in the book that Husains reverence for the Ramayana could be traced back to his childhood. He had a Hindu friend. Hed sit with him in temples and listen to the Ramayana. Even as an adult, he listened to the Ramayana of both Tulsidas and Valmiki, she says. Ila recalls an incident where Puri Shankaracharya visited Husains exhibition in Hyderabad, inspired by the Ramayana in the 70s. Puriji remarked, Husain, all your samskaras (rites) are Hindu! says Ila. Husain saab listened to the Ramayana before painting it. Who has cared to do this? You accuse such a person of painting nudes for commercial purposes? she asks.

A young Ila, first saw Husain in the doorway of the Jehangir Art Gallery in Mumbai in 1955. While the rain lashed its wrath outside, Husain vented his creative fury onto the canvas. Oblivious of me, he continued painting for an hour, she recalls. Six years later, in 1961, she met the celebrity painter at his studio at Bhulabhai Desai Institute. She recalls him as the tall wiry man, with a salt-and-pepper-beard. It was the beginning of a journey together, between a student and a master, which evolved to a close friendship. Ila has written five books out of which two are on the iconic painter. The two books that Pal wrote on Husain are separated by 23 years. When he was almost 80, Ila wrote the first book Beyond The Canvas: An Unfinished Portrait of M.F. Husain. The second book has her observations of him and also the conversations they shared. He was my muse. He shaped my life, my attitude. Ive not seen anyone paint like him, live like him, she says. Id try to get close to his mastery. If I saw him getting up at 5am and beginning to paint, Id want to match that. Only to find him getting up at 3am the next day. He considered himself a student all through his life, she says.

She recalls the time when as a 23-year-old, she accompanied a 46-year-old Husain on a month-long sketching trip to Rajasthan. We hired a car and would go sketching together. Suddenly, one day, he threw his sketch book in the car and walked away. I feared that disappointed with my drawing, he had walked away in disgust. He returned after a long time. I asked him, What happened? He said, Look at your sketch! So much freshness. Look at mine, fatichar! Which artist of his stature would talk like that? Imagine the humility and graciousness! she remarks. Moreover, Husain dismissed the term guru. Every new painting is an assertion of ones individuality, of ones breaking away from the past and from the masters, he once told Ila. The boldness, the radical thought that you see in my paintings is from Husain saab, she maintains.She credits her late husband, Devain Pal, for allowing her to bloom under Husains influence. I travelled with Husain saab for months. Its not that my husband and I didnt have fights over this. But it never reached a point where it got out of hand. Also, Devain realised that Husain saab was fascinated with me as an artist, not as a person. Even my children  Anuradha (Pal) and Ashish (Pal) loved him, she says. She confides that anyone would want to be considered as his close friend. But to assume that I was his only friend would be a folly, she says. Yet, I could criticise him openly. He shared his life, his loves, his thoughts with me. I missed him and would be angry when he ran off as he often did. And I showed it. But he dismissed such things, she smiles.

Another thing Husain was crazy about, apart from painting, was cinema. In fact, he began his career by painting film hoardings. Early in his career he made the 15-minute film Through The Eyes Of A Painter (fetched the 1st prize, in The Golden Bear Film Festival in Berlin, 1967). And like most of his generation he was fascinated by Meena Kumari. Once we went to watch Sahib Bibi Aur Ghulam (1962). So mesmerised were we by Meena Kumari that we bought the tickets for the next show and then the next... deewanon ki tarah! recalls Ila. She recollects an incident when Husain happened to meet Meena Kumari, while she was recuperating in hospital. As also mentioned in her book, Ila says, Her eyes subtly shaded with kohl, her long hair loose... she (Meena Kumari) looked beautiful. She offered him paan from her silver paandaan. Husain saab was left speechless. Later, when Ila asked him why he seemed flabbergasted, he replied, Kambakht ne is andaz se meri taraf dekha, meri toh zaban hi kat gayi.

Through the years Husain had many favourites from Mumtaz, Smita Patil, Sridevi... Being an artist, the body beautiful mattered to him. He liked well-endowed and curvaceous women. That was his idea of beauty. Like all men, he liked sexy women. Yet, he was understated about everything, which was beautiful. Even in his poetry, nothing is obvious, says Ila. On a lighter note she adds, He was someone who always wanted to be in love. Once he came home looking off colour. I remarked, Ukhde ukhde lag rahe ho! He replied, Mazaa hi nahin aaraha hai. I said, Bardasht karlo! You will find someone, she laughs.However, she insists that nothing could supersede his obsession for Madhuri Dixit. The first time he had walked out of Hum Aapke Hain Koun...! (1994) within 20 minutes. But when he watched it for the second time, he was entranced by Madhuris movements in Didi tera devar deewana  when she takes a few steps with her back to the camera. In her he found the tribhangi (the three bends in the female form), which Indian sculptures glorify, says Ila.Soon after, one morning Husain came to Ilas house with the script of Gaja Gamini (2000). I didnt like it. His nostrils began to flare. He was sarcastic and said, You only like sentimental stuff! narrates Ila. The next morning, he came witha revised version. I said, Its beautiful! He was embarrassed and changed the topic saying, What are you giving me for breakfast? And went on to have his usual fried eggs, smiles Ila.

She maintains that the actress tackled his obsession with dignity. Everyone enjoys the attention of a famous person. There are no two ways about it. It was flattering all the way for her. And being a showman, he understood the value of being in the spotlight with her. But his nonsensical exposure lowered him in eyes of people. Somehow, it was annoying. I told him so. But he didnt care, she remarks. As an afterthought she adds, Thankfully, his obsession, ended after her marriage.

After Gaja Gamini, a cinematic essay on Indian womanhood, Husain went on to make Meenaxi:A Tale of Three Cities in 2004, starring Tabu and Kunal Kapoor. It centred on an unconventional muse and was shot in Hyderabad, Jaisalmer and Prague. I thought well of his films. People didnt understand them though. They were like a series of beautiful paintings, says Ila.Courting controversiesFrom the 90s onwards, Husain put Indian art on the global platform  brandishing his brush and brand with flamboyance. But, someone who was known to enjoy the sunrise in one continent and sunset in the other, he was grounded by controversies and court cases. Dejected, he left India in 2005. He lived in Dubai for most of the time. Ilas last meeting with him was in 2010. Husain passed away on June 9, 2011 at the Royal Brompton Hospital in London. I couldnt believe he had passed away. I was shocked. He always gave you the feeling that he would live forever, she says. Husain had once mentioned to Ila that when in London, hed mingle with the Indian taxi drivers there. He missed India terribly. Hed say, I talk to them to get a feel of India. No one can take India away from me! He may have said that in jest. But what does that mean? The poignancy cant be missed, she points out. He felt sad when his artist friends didnt understand his work. Rivalry never bothered him. Lack of understanding did. This book is a tribute to him but with a lot of angst. We took away from ourselves an artist of such stature. His death has left me with a lot of anger for the way Indians treated him. They just let him die It was horrible, she sighs.But someone whose paintings leap back and forth in time to convey eternal truths, Husain will live on in the colours and contours he has left behind. Let History Cut Across Me Without Me, a book he created of his paintings, could well be his challenge to the world that abandoned him. Maqbool Fida Husain was born on September 17, 1915 in Pandharpur, Maharashtra to Zunaib and Fida Husain, who hailed from a Bohra family. He lost his mother when he was a very young child. He moved to Bombay (now Mumbai) in 1935 with the dream of becoming an artist. His initial years were difficult. He managed to get a job of painting billboards and posters for Bollywood movies. During this time, he also worked for a toy company designing and building toys. He held his first serious exhibition in 1947 at the Bombay Art Society. India gained independence in August the same year, and the partition of India and Pakistan had a profound impact on his career. During that time, a group of young artists, including Husain, wanted to encourage the development of Indian avant-garde art and popularise Indian art on the international scenario. The political chaos and violence following the independence of India proved to the catalyst that led to the forming The Progressive Artist's Group in Bombay in December, 1947. Some of the major themes he painted on were related to prominent personalities like mother Teresa and Mahatma Gandhi. He drew inspiration from Hindu epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Paintings of Indian urban and rural life were also recurring motifs. During the early 1950s he went to Europe for the first time and did a barefoot grand tour. He also held his first solo exhibition in Zurich. While in Europe he met other famous painters such as Picasso, Matisse and Paul Klee. He ventured into filmmaking and made his first film, Through the Eyes of a Painter, in 1967, which was shown at the Berlin International Film Festival. Some of the major works he painted are Vishwamitra (1973) and Passage Through Human Space, a series of 45 watercolors, which he completed in the mid-1970s. In 2006, he was charged with hurting sentiments of people because of his nude portraits of Hindu deities. He left India and went on a self-imposed exile. After leaving India, he spent his later years mainly in London and in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. He had a strong desire to return to India but could not do so. He was offered citizenship by Qatar in 2010 which he accepted. He died on 9 June 2011, in London, England. He was 95.'My Choice Of Films Has Changed With The Way I Have Grown Up'

Q. From playing a college girl in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, then Black and now essaying a teacher in Hichki, how do you see the transformation in yourself?

A. I started my career at the age of 16. It's been a journey where I have actually grown in this film industry. Whatever I have learnt, experiences I have had, this journey has been wonderful. Of course there were ups and downs, which also teaches you a lot.

My choice of films has also changed with the way I have grown up. Each phase in my life, whether it was early teenage years or early 20s, late 20s, early 30s, late 30s, all have been a part of my journey in the movie business.

Every time I have chosen a role, it has connected to me at that point in my life.

Today, the point of life in which I am, Hichki was a very special film that connected with my soul and what message I would like to give India, in a way. Or tell the world that this is the kind of films India is churning. Hichki is a special film about overcoming one's weakness and turning them into strength.

It also talks about the education system in our country and also talks about the discrimination that people face from society when they have a weakness.

It talks about how students from different economic backgrounds are treated in school.

The film has a lot of layers. All the things are something very close to my heart.

When I was young I had a stammering issue.Had someone taken that as a weakness of mine, and if I would have made that a very strong weakness then I wouldn't be have been actor. You don't have an actor who has a stammering issue.

It's the first film that has been such a huge tribute to teacher in the country because there's no other noble profession than teaching. You are actually imparting knowledge to the future of the country, who are going to make a different in the society.After you see Hichki everyone is going to call up their favourite teacher because you will get too nostalgic.

'I Find It Funny When People Ask Me How I Survived In The Industry Without Being On Social Media'

Q. You mentioned about having a stammering issue. Did Hichki take you back in time since your character in the film stammers too?

A. Well, that is what life is. I think God tests us at different times in our lives.We have to emerge winners because the life God has given is too special.

When I met the dumb, deaf and blind people during my research for Black, I started thanking God everyday. You suddenly feel so blessed that you can see, talk, walk without anybody's help. When you go through moments like that in your life, you only become a more humble as a human being.

You suddenly gain a lot of wisdom through these experiences and start to live life in a different way. When people ask me how have you survived, being in the industry without being on social media, I find it really funny.

It's not important to me and my life. Everything boils down to was Rani Mukerji good in the film or no'. That is my work, job and profession. I treat this (interview) as a meet and greet that I get some pointer from you guys, some things that I get to learn that what are people thinking. I still consider journalists as a medium between my fans and me.

'With The Way Times Are Going, Our Actors Do Need Acting Classes'

Q. Does formal education aid actors in any manner?

A. Formal education, if you are talking about academics, I don't see how that would help actors but definitely, with the way times are going, our actors do need acting classes.

Q. How was your working experience with the kids in Hichki?

A. Shooting with the kids has been amazing because most of them were facing the camera for the first time.They had a lot of real and organic quality in them which was great because we wanted the classroom scenes to look real.

When you have kids who go to sleep in the middle of the take, it's great na, so you can wake them up and say, Hello, the take is going on, so get up'.

Some of them were trained actors, one is from television, so they came with their set of experience. What is amazing with the kids is that they don't have an image or a particular way of performing. They give it their all.

'How Does It Matter To Anybody What Shape An Actor Is In After He's Done With A Particular Role?'

Q. In recent times, actors are under constant pressure stay fit and stay in shape. Recently you mention on a TV reality show (Sourav Ganguly Dadagiri) that you love macher jhol bhat. How difficult is it to eat everything you love and still manage to look great?

A. Firstly, I don't understand this pressure. Today, I think actors are really spoilt and pampered.There are 10 people: PR person, media person, managers, fitness person, security, blah blah. It is a never ending story. We were never pampered.

Earlier, if we said something wrong, we used to get criticized for it and we learnt from those mistakes and didn't repeat them.Today, the PRs write all the dos and the don'ts.The young actors are so pampered since the moment they step out.

There's so much training, I don't think there's any pressure.

Actors are wearing rented clothes for free, what pressure will they have?

You are getting to wear beautiful clothes, people are there to get you ready, make you beautiful, what's the pressure? Even weight wise, what's the pressure? Khao peyo, khush raho. Kya itna tension leneka.

When you see an Aamir Khan in Dangal, you see him as a character.When you see him in Dhoom 3 you are seeing another character, so weight depends on what you are doing for your role. How does it matter to anybody what shape an actor is in after he's done with a particular role?

Does it matter to you that I'm wearing a particular jean today? But it will matter to you if I am not playing my role well. That is what is important. How I looked during pregnancy and post pregnancy, how does it matter? What should matter is, is Naina Mathur (her character in Hichki) convincing? Is she real?

That is what matters for actors, we are not models.

We have to do justice to who we are on screen. We have to be believable.

Somewhere, Aamir is an institution of how an actor should be.Even Kamal Haasan, these actors have redefined their characters and their position.

Today, because of social media, people are interested in how they are looking.

How we are looking when we are going to the gym or to the airport. Arre how does it matter? Kya farak padta hai bhai? At the end of the day, this pressure and all is rubbish. It is a stupid belief. I come from an era where I bought my own clothes.

I feel scared to wear rented clothes ki kahin khujli na ho jaye... kaun kaha se pehenke aa raha hai, uss insaan ne nahaya nahi hai. Hame kya pata? (You never know if the person wearing the clothes before you had a bath or no). Today, when Sabhyasachi makes an outfit for me, he makes it especially for me and that's why I wear it. I don't ask for any rented clothes.

I wear my own clothes.Whatever I can afford and buy, I wear that. My manager feels very hyper and says, ma'am don't repeat your clothes'.Aree why? Why can't I repeat it? They are my clothes and sometimes I will have to repeat it.

Let the media write, it is their job. Why will I change how I am for the media?

For whom it makes a difference, it makes a difference.When I had become an actress, the brand culture was introduced to India and everyone was saying you wear a brand' and I was like why should I wear it?

I said no back then also and today too I don't wear it. If I have personally purchased some clothes then I wear them. If you ask me what I am wearing today, I myself won't know it. I wore what I liked.

'I Don't Want To Be In The Limelight With A Quote'

Q. Rani, you are quite fearless...

A. But I have always been like that. Today what happens is, unfortunately, people like to misinterpret what you're saying or what you communicate or put words into your mouth, then it becomes a problem.

If I am being clear about something, I am being clear. My only request would be not to try and take out a story out of that or try and two and two together to make a controversy.

Today I think what sells, unfortunately, is whenever it can make a headline.That is very unfortunate because I am not asking anybody to make a headline out of what I am speaking. I don't want to be in the limelight with a quote.

I don't want to say something that will create troubles between people or create disharmony. I like to do my work, go back to my daughter, my family, come back work, do that and go back home.I am not here to make some great statement and become some hero. That's not my agenda.

I speak what my heart says, something I speak in humour and only if it can be written as humour, can help.

'A Different Kind Of Love Translates Into Your Work After You Become A Mother'

Q. Has motherhood changed you or your choice when it comes to picking up films?

A. Motherhood obviously does change you because there is a different kind of passion, a different kind of love that you feel after you become a mother and you can translate that into your work.

When my father passed away, I truly understood what sadness is. Or what missing somebody in your life is, a vacuum can be by one of your parents not being there. When I have performed those scenes in earlier films, it was probably just an aspect of my performance which I thought, hypothetically, what is it to miss a parent.

I just interpreted it in the way I thought it would be. But when it actually happens to you, how it hits you, what that sadness is, you can really feel it when it happens to you. I've been pregnant and had babies in so many of my films, but I can never begin to explain how different it is when you actually go through the process.

'Today, My Voice Is My Identity'

Q. You started your career at quite a young age. What sort of 'hichkis' did you faced in your life?

A. Obviously, my height, my voice, those were the things.. but luckily, I had Aamir (Khan) opposite me.Then when I worked with Abhishek (Bachchan) the height became a thing but then it became very nice that I was short.We were being compared to his parents (Amitabh-Jaya Bachchan) being in films. So it kind of worked.

If I had come in an era only where there were tall heroes, then it would have become a problem. I came in era where we had Salman, Shah Rukh and Aamir and I looked pretty good with them, considering that I don't have that much of height.

Voice was a huge issue. During Ghulam, Aamir, Mukeshji (Bhatt( and Vikram Bhatt felt that my voice was not as thin as of the heroines of that time. Heroines had quite a shrill voice at that point. So, they dubbed my voice because they didn't think my voice suited.

Then when Kuch Kuch Hota Hai happened, I remember Karan (Johar) coming up to me, it was his first film, he showed a lot of grace and asked me, Rani, why is your voice being dubbed in Ghulam?'.I said that may be they didn't think my voice was not correct for the film or character.

So, he asked me, 'did you dub for your first film (Raja Ki Aayegi Baraat)?

I said yes and he said Kuch Kuch Hota Hai you will dub'. I said okay. I remember Aamir calling me after seeing Kuch Kuch Hota Hai and saying, Babes, I made a mistake, ya, your voice is really good. We should have dubbed it in Ghulam'.

So in life, these things happen but sometimes you have to believe in yourself, other people have to have belief. Today, my voice has become my identity.

With my height, I've crossed the hurdle, because you need to be tall with your achievement and not by your physical height. That is something I have worked towards. When you give flops, people will write you off. People will say you are finished, you are over'.

In my career of 22 years, I've been written off many times, but it's the audience which has always wanted me back. It's the love which my audiences have for me which has kept me going. So inspite of people writing me off or considering that I am over, I have always bounced back with a sweet, sensitive film and a good performance.

Q. Between 'Black' and 'Hichki' which was the more challenging role?

A. Both were challenging. When you play such sensitive characters, you have to keep in mind the sensitivity of the people who are actually having that (disability).

With Hichki, my whole thing constantly was that it could become comical at any time.

People suffering from Tourette syndrome are often laughed upon at. But in the US, a lot of people suffering from Tourette Syndrome have become standup comedians.They don't mind people laughing at them, but pay for it so they make a career out of it.

I can't be doing that in films. I can't make Naina Mathur a stand-up comedian.

So it has to be in a sensitive way, in a way that when people see Naina Mathur, even if they begin with laughing but from there they should change and feel empathetic towards people who have the Tourette Syndrome. There are lot of complexities and sensitivity that comes with playing a role like that.

'When I Come Back From Work, The First Thing My Husband Tells Me, 'Go, Remove Your Makeup'

Q. Now after Adira's birth, how do you manage to strike a balance between work and personal life?

A. When I was shooting for the film, I used to go early in the morning.I used to finish 5-6 hours of work in the morning and get back home before her lunch time so that she doesn't miss me too much.

When a baby wakes up she has her whole routine.I used to make sure that before she kind of misses me I used to be back.Now, slowly, slowly we've started to tell her that I go for shooting.

Recently when I came back from my promotions she said mumma aap shooting pe gaye the?'Makeup nikal diya'(she asked) I said nikal diya'.

She understands because when she sees me without make up she sees I'm completely (different).Suddenly she'll see these things happening (makeup) and she'll be like yeh kya hai, mumma' then I have to explain to her yeh make up hai.

When I go clean she asks make up nikal diya then she's very happy. Both her father and she have this complain that I should never be in makeup. Even my husband, when I come back first he says go remove your makeup'.

Q. Finally, will we ever see your husband Aditya Chopra directing you in a film?

A. (laughs), Usko bolo naa...you all start writing 'direct your wife'.Actor Akshay Kumar today said politicians should stop bringing religion into politics. The Padman actor was speaking at trailer launch of "Nanak Shah Fakir".

When asked if he thinks the teachings of Guru Nanak should be adopted by all politicians who try to use religion to create vote bank politics, he told reporters, "I believe in it thoroughly. There is only one God and that God is yours. To bring religion into everything...it is not done. I hope everyone follows that."

On whether he thinks that Bollywood was the most secular industry, Akshay said, "Yes."

The National Award-winning actor said he had been associated with"Nanak Shah Fakir" since over a year as he believed in the message of the film thatthere is only one God.

"This is such a film that I saw one-and-half years ago, this is the only film I saw twice on the same day once with my mother and the other time I saw it alone. It is a beautiful film with a beautiful belief," he added.

There were reports that Narendra Modi, during his tenure as the chief minister of Gujarat, had come to the rescue of the makers while they were shooting in his state.

When asked about it, producer Harinder Sikka said, "It's a very difficult thing to say, but some NGO did come ahead for our support."

"I was not allowed to shoot in Bhuj, there was a boat scene that was to be shot in the ocean and we were not allowed to do that scene. That time we had called the CM and later he got things approved for us," the producer said.

Sikka thinks that after going through the hardships of shooting for the film, there was some spiritual guiding force, who was helping him make the film.

"The film is directed by Guru Nanak," he added.

The film, which is distributed byViacom 18 Motion Pictures, is set to release on April 13.

Meanwhile when asked if he is still a part of "Mughal", in which he is said to play the part of late Gulshan Kumar, Akshay Kumar said, "I myself don't know yet."

There have been reports that Akshay had walked out of this film.

Credits - PTISajid Nadiadwala Reunites With Protege Kriti Sanon

Sajid Nadiadwala had launched Kriti Sanon with Tiger Shroff starrer Heropanti in Heropanti in 2014. Now the filmmaker is all set to team up with his protege for the second time for Housefull 4.

Kriti Talks About Joining The Housefull 4 Cast

The actress was quoted as saying to DNA, "Joining the cast of Housefull 4 is like coming back home. My journey started with Sajid sir in Heropanti. Since then, he has always been there for me and has guided me. I can't wait to work with him again and that too, in the super-successful Housefull franchise!"

Housefull 4 Revolves The Theme Of Reincarnation

Touted as a reincarnation drama, Housefull 4 will be mounted on a huge budget and set in two eras. A little birdie tells us that the budget of the film is around Rs. 180 crores. Phew, now that's quite huge!

Sajid Khan Regretted Not Directing Housefull 3

In one of his earlier interviews, Sajid had revealed, "I regret a lot that I couldn't do Housefull 3. Sajid Nadiadwala and I are back together. He is my brother and we have been friends for 17 years. I think it's ok to have a fight for two years when you have such a long relationship with someone. But the only regret is that we patched-up when he made Housefull 3 with someone else. We are working on Housefull 4 now."

A Reunion Of Old Friends

Earlier in a media interaction while speaking about the film, Akshay said, " It's been a while since I have done a full-on comedy film. It's a genre that I really enjoy working in. I am looking forward to that film. Housefull 4 is going to be like a three-month vacation. For me, it's like a reunion of old friends."Reacting to her name being brought up in the Call Detail Records (CDR) case, Bollywood actor Kangana Ranaut yesterday said a thorough investigation must be done before dragging her into the controversy.

"Proper investigation should be carried out before making assumptions," Kangana said in a statement, which came after reports that Thane Crime Branch Deputy Commissioner of Police Abhishek Trimukhe said the actor had shared actor Hrithik Roshan's number with advocate Rizwan Siddiqui.

Siddiqui, arrested for alleged illegal possession of CDRs of actor Nawazuddin Siddiqui's wife, was released by Thane police today, after a Bombay High Court directive.

"When we respond to a notice, we give all details tolawyer. To assume that these details were used to violate law and make statements based on that assumption and defame an artiste is super lame on Abhishek Trimukhes part. Proper investigation should be carried out before making assumptions," Kangana said.

Trimukhe had also said that actor Jackie Shroffs wifeAyesha Shroff had procured call records of actor Sahil Khan, who made his debut in Bollywood with Style along with Sharman Joshi, and shared the same with Siddiqui.

"Probe found that Ayesha Shroff (wife of Jackie Shroff) procured CDR of Sahil Khan and shared it with Rizwan, this was revealed in an analysis of Rizwan's mobile," said DCP Trimukhe.

As per information, Ayesha Shroff allegedly had affair with actor Sahil Khan and after a dispute between them, the former procured the CDRs of the 'Style' actor and gave it to Rizwan.

Rizwan was apparently blackmailing Sahil.

Rizwan was arrested by police last week in course of an investigation into the illegal acquisition of CDRs by private detectives.

Earlier, it was reported that Nawazuddin Siddiqui and his wife were summoned by Thane's crime branch in connection with the Call Data Records (CDR) racket that was unearthed in January.

Inputs From PTIThe Big Entry Through Annayum Rasoolum

It was through Annayum Rasoolum that he was first noticed as an actor. His role of Collin, which was glazed with a realistic touch was performed to perfection by this multi-talented actor. The role as well as the man who portrayed it gained the attention of the audiences and it marked the big beginning for the actor.

Premam & Chandrettan Evideya  Big Breakthroughs

These two movies came in quick succession, in fact, within a span of few weeks. In Chandrettan Evideya, he played an able foil to the character played by Dileep and he did nail with his impeccable comic timing. It was through his portrayal of PT Master in Premam that he reached a larger section of the audiences. Later, he impressed with a good number of comic roles in movies like Maheshinte Prathikaram, Loham, Charlie and much more.

The Amazing Makeover In Kammatipaadam

Well, when the audiences tagged him as the new age comedy king of Malayalam cinema, Soubin Shahir sprung a surprise with his role in Kammatipaadam. All those who watched the FDFS of Kammatipaadam was shocked to see this man in different role altogether. He stunned with his performance in this raw and rusty character, which had no dialogues in the film.

The Stunner In Parava

With Parava, Soubin proved his prowess as a film-maker and the movie gained widespread acclaim. More importantly, he just left everyone awestruck with the portrayal of the main negative role in the movie. Truly, the role was yet another feather in the cap of Soubin's acting career.Hina Has Been Getting A Lot Of Negative Comments

Now that the show is over, the actress has been still receiving a lot of negative comments on her social media. Also, Hina's fans are seen lashing out at those who are sending negative comments.

Hina Khan Trolled

Recently, Hina was trolled for her unique dress that she wore for a Dubai event. Her dress was compared to a broom. Also, since it was a semi transparent dress, many trollers reminded her of her words that she told Arshi Khan in the house, "Kapde faad ke kaam milega!"

Actress Is Fed Up Of Negativity

Looks like the actress is fed up of negativity! While chatting LIVE with her fans, she asked fans to spread love and positivity. She seemed so much irritated with negative comments that she asked the fans to stop spreading negativity else she would delete her Twitter account.

Hinas Message For Her Fans

In a video that is doing rounds on social media, Hina was seen telling her fans, "I love you a lot and keep following me, keep loving me. I need your good wishes, your blessings, your love and positivity." - (sic)

The Actress Asks Fans To Spread Positivity

She further said, "Stay positive guys, don't respond. Try and change all the handles. And Twitter pe thoda positivity spread karo (Spread some positivity on Twitter)." - (sic)

Hina Khan Warns Fans That She Will Delete Her Account

"Nahi tho mein seriously bol rahi hun mein apna account delete kardungi, mera bharosa nahi hai, mein karsakti hun aisa. (Or else seriously I will delete my account. Yes, I can do that!)" - (sic)JetBlues Plan to Beat Alaska-Virgin America on the West Coast

After losing out on the opportunity to purchase Virgin America, east coast airline JetBlue decided to compete against them through expanding their premium cabin product, Mint. The plan seems to be working: JetBlue is cruising towards one of their most profitable years, while Alaska is trying to recover from their purchase.

Can a transcontinental premium product make all the difference in airline competition? If those two airlines are JetBlue and Alaska Airlines, it might be the key to profitability. An editorial by The Motley Fool credits JetBlues Mint premium product as the reason their airline is doing better than Alaska on the west coast.

JetBlue originally launched Mint in 2014 as their best service on the longest routes from New York to the west coast. While originally planned as an alternative for business flyers and the only premium offerings in JetBlues fleet, the product was an instant success. As a result, the carrier added it to more routes, including from Boston and Florida to the west coast, as well as seasonally to the Bahamas.

After the carrier lost the Virgin America bidding war to Alaska, they continued to amp up the pressure by targeting their most loyal flyers in advertising campaigns. At one point, JetBlue gave away 500 free seats to those who never flew the carrier.

Two years after the purchase, JetBlue appears to be on the winning side of the fare war. While they have expanded service and Mint premium cabin seats to transcontinental flights, Alaska is starting to pull back on competing routes, such as those between Fort Lauderdale and San Francisco. In addition, Alaska is not as profitable as JetBlue, blaming the transcontinental divide for the lack of profitability.

Alaska Air is finally starting to retreat in the face of JetBlues assault, Adam Levine-Weinberg writes for The Motley Fool. Given that there arent many other competitors on these two routes, there is a pretty clear link between JetBlues upgrade to Mint service and Alaska Airs recent struggles on California transcontinental routes.

As a result of the shifts, the analyst believes JetBlue will continue to grow on the west coast, while Alaska will be forced to make a decision. The options include investing in premium-cabin service, or retreat on competing routes with JetBlue.

[Photo: Shutterstock]If you want to predictably generate wealth over the long term, buying and holding high-quality dividend stocks is your best bet. But in today's volatile markets, it's not always easy to find the best dividend stocks our market has to offer.

So we asked three top Motley Fool investors to chime in with their top dividend stock to buy this month. Read on to see why they like NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA), Sysco Corporation (NYSE:SYY), and Ventas (NYSE:VTR).

More room to run for this GPU leader

Steve Symington (NVIDIA): With the jaw-dropping gains its stock has delivered for investors over the past few years -- including a nearly 140% pop over the past year as of this writing -- it's easy to forget that NVIDIA also pays a small dividend yielding around 0.24%.

Much of its recent growth has been driven by NVIDIA's core gaming chip segment, where revenue soared 29% last quarter to $1.74 billion, or nearly 60% of total sales, thanks to a strong holiday season, the rise of esports gaming trends, and purchases of its cutting-edge GPUs for cryptocurrency mining.

But we also shouldn't overlook the supplementary potential of NVIDIA's other markets.

When we had the chance to stop by NVIDIA's stunning Endeavor headquarters building earlier this month, for example, two of the company's artificial intelligence and machine-learning experts even they admitted they're consistently "blown away" by the number of novel applications their customers continue to find for their technology.

Take smart cities -- or "AI cities," as NVIDIA calls them, which include everything smart lighting to automatic facial and license plate recognition for law enforcement -- revenue from which skyrocketed from just $10 million in 2016 to an expected $100 million this year. Those sales are included NVIDIA's datacenter segment, where revenue more than doubled year over year last quarter to $606 million.

Or consider the automotive space, where NVIDIA saw revenue climb a much more modest 3% year over year last quarter to $132 million -- albeit driven primarily by its conscious decision to de-emphasize sales into the auto infotainment market. Moving forward, NVIDIA boasts over 320 partners already using its NVIDIA Drive autonomous vehicle platform, ensuring it will play a central role as self-driving cars become more mainstream over the next few years.

These are only two examples or investors willing to bet that tech leaders around the world will continue finding new applications for NVIDIA's powerful GPU technology, I think the stock has plenty of room to run.

Bank on restaurants

Jordan Wathen (Sysco Corporation): This company makes its money distributing virtually everything a restaurant needs to keep its doors open, from foods to napkins and straws. The business enjoys a competitive edge from scale, as it delivers food products and services to over 500,000 locations, and it's roughly twice the size of its nearest competitor.

The distributors are arguably the best part of the food service value chain. Though food service is incredibly competitive, and flavors and styles quickly go in and out of fashion, the distribution business rarely changes. But food costs can fluctuate tremendously from quarter to quarter, and even day to day, which can lead to some volatility in Sysco's margins and earnings over the short-term. Over the long haul, however, I view it as a business that can still grow earnings at a respectable single-digit rate each year, driven by slow sales growth and widening margins.

Dividend investors are likely to be rewarded with larger payouts over time. Sysco takes its spot as a Dividend Aristocrat, one of just a few companies that have increased dividends for 25 consecutive years or more. Shares currently yield about 2.4%, and trade for about 20 times my earnings expectations in 2018, a reasonable valuation for a company of its caliber.

A high yield backed by demographics

Reuben Gregg Brewer (Ventas, Inc.): Healthcare property real estate investment trust (REIT) Ventas currently offers shareholders a yield of 6.3%. That's the highest the yield has been since the deep 2007-to-2009 recession. Ventas has increased the dividend annually for eight consecutive years and is generally considered one of the best run healthcare REITs. The recent downdraft in the REIT sector, which has left Ventas' shares around 30% below the highs they reached in mid-2017, is a good opportunity for long-term investors to jump aboard.

"Long-term" is the operative phrase here. Ventas owns senior housing facilities, medical office and research facilities, and health systems and hospitals, making up around 50%, 25%, and 15% of net income, respectively. The rest of its business is largely made up of loans, acute-care assets, and rehab facilities. These properties generally provide services that the internet can't replace and will be increasingly in demand in the years ahead.

How do I know demand will be increasing? Easy: demographics. The large baby boomer generation is flooding into retirement, with 10,000 members of this group becoming Medicaid eligible every day. Those 65 and older spend five times more on healthcare than younger age groups. Things get even more compelling as you move up the age spectrum, with 40% of those 85 and older needing help with at least three activities of daily living, such as eating, washing, and dressing. This one is worth a deep dive.

Conclusion

There's no way to guarantee that these three stocks will beat the market. But between NVIDIA's enviable growth potential, Sysco's steady industry leadership, or long-term trends that work in Ventas' favor, we like their chances of doing just that. And we think investors would do well to consider opening or adding to a position before the end of this month.The unique and thriving farmer-led Exmoor Hill Farming Network has grown to support 300 local farming businesses since it began four years ago under the guidance of chairman Dave Knight and network officer Katherine Williams.

Now the rural group, which used to celebrate getting 20 people to a meeting, has produced the Exmoor Ambition: a proposal for sustaining and improving Exmoors farmland and countryside post Brexit, and other similar upland areas.

Watch the video and read the full report below.

In November 2016, the network held a meeting following the UKs vote for Brexit to get feedback from farmers about their preferences for a future scheme.

After a year of creating a plan incorporating their ideas and working on the numbers, chairman Dave Knight presented the paper to the farmers and it received unanimous support.

Mr Knight, 33, runs a National Trust beef and sheep farm near Minehead, west Somerset, with his father and brother. He attended agricultural college and has been farming at home since he returned, aged 19.

Mr Knight said: There were alarm bells ringing about what was going to happen with the subsidies system. We thought lets take the bulls by the horns because we know what Exmoor needs. What started as a small project has completely snowballed.

Just before Christmas we sat down with Michael Gove and we put a copy right into his hand, which was a huge step forward. Even if only a handful of ideas are taken from it then weve achieved something. We keep pushing with it until someone tells us it cant be done.

Concept proposals

The Exmoor Ambition plans to: harness the concept of natural capital to draw value out of the areas features; use trust and co-operation rather than regulation and form-filling; encourage new thinking, especially from the next generation; and be co-designed and delivered by locals.

The scheme proposes a new system of farm support, based on outcomes, not prescriptions, which is flexible and integrated with farming. It envisages two tiers of payment.

The first measure, Good Farming, would reward all farmers for managing their land in ways that are good for nature and people. The second measure, Enhanced Benefits, would target specific objectives, such as enhancing heather moorland for wildlife and reducing flooding, decided by the farmers and local communities.

See also: Duchy of Cornwall: Creating opportunities for new entrants

Based on the premise that there is no one better to attempt this than those who live and work in the area, the Ambition intends to achieve a stronger brand identity and premium for Exmoor products and provenance.

Mr Knight explained: Weve delivered a costed proposal. Now were asking government to help us pilot it and show it works.

The Ambition paper has been produced in combination with the Exmoor National Park Authority, one of the networks key funders. Robin Milton, authority chairman, called the project a timely proposal to meet todays challenges.

He said: I feel this should be part of developing a blueprint for the future. We need to keep farmers farming in national parks, not constrained by layers of rules and bureaucracy.

Led by farmers, for farmers

This project is undoubtedly the groups biggest achievement to date, but the members, who range from young farmer age to people who have farmed on the moor for decades, most value the training and support it provides.

The main aims of the network are to supply practical and legislative training, share knowledge, plan information events, and bring people together. Peer support groups for micro farming, next-generation farmers (under 30 years old) and women in farming provide activities targeted to best suit them.

Mr Knight said one of the most successful aspects has been bringing training opportunities to the moor.

It is a minimum of an hours drive from Exmoor to any of the training course centres or colleges. Our approach is to bring the assessors to the moor and that gets farmers out and gets them to training which they otherwise wouldnt do, he explained.

Though overseen by funders and a hosting organisation, the network is led by farmers for farmers, which Katherine Williams, 29, believes is key to its popularity.

She said: I feel we have something really unique here by bringing people together  in other parts of the UK some people dont even know their neighbours.

The voluntary steering group is made up of 15 members, predominantly farmers, who meet every six weeks to make decisions about the overarching plan for the upcoming months. Miss Williams then takes on the task of bringing the ideas to fruition.

She grew up on an Exmoor beef and sheep farm and still returns home to help her parents and brother at busy times, such as during lambing. This experience is vital to help her understand the networks members, their priorities and their concerns.

Members praise her for creating an inclusive, welcoming and ambitious community, and she is an instrumental part of the networks success.

Funding streams

Generating income is also an integral part of Miss Williams role, and she recognises all their hard work would mean nothing without the continued support of their funders and sponsors, which include grants from the Exmoor National Park Authority and the Princes Countryside Fund (PCF).

A PCF spokesman said: The network is a fantastic organisation working in an area of real need, and their work is crucial to the success of farms on Exmoor. It boosts their sense of community and helps farm businesses remain vibrant and prepare for the future.

Local businesses are able to get involved with sponsorship packages, buying visibility and access to the networks members. Key sponsors include Exmoor Farmers Livestock Auctioneers, Masons Kings, NFU and North Devon Council.

Members make a Peer Support Contribution towards a meetings cost and admin fees for training courses. The network also asks for a contribution for advertising job vacancies on their website, social media and email database.

Bringing farmers together

Goals for the network include becoming self-funded, increasing staff numbers from one full-time member to two, and tackling the difficult topic of mental health and well-being.

Miss Williams explained: Many of our farmers are exceedingly proud and are not very good at opening up. We have had volunteers come to speak to our Women in Farming Group to tell them about the support available. We wanted to show our members we are here for them.

The network team would also recommend other people look into setting up similar groups, by building around a geographic area or a mutual interest.

Mr Knight said: The most important thing is just bringing people together, getting them off the farms, for whatever reason, and learning.

The Eveleigh family

Chris and Victoria Eveleigh have farmed at West Ilkerton on Exmoor for 31 years, and run Devon cattle and Exmoor horn sheep. Both have been members of the network since it began. Mr Eveleigh is on the networks steering committee and the Exmoor Ambition steering committee. Mrs Eveleigh is a member of the Women In Farming group, and they both regularly attend network events. Mrs Eveleigh said: We often visit other peoples farms, which is really useful. You often learn more hearing about the problems than you do hearing about the successes. The couple also enjoys how inclusive, friendly and supportive the network is, and have met a huge number of people by being members. Mr Eveleigh added: Its made Exmoor a smaller place because were beginning to know farmers right out on the other side of the moor. Its very good for socialising and exchanging ideas. I wish it had happened 20 years ago.Emotional distress caused by uncontrollable life events robs us of our creative power. This was the message from Laralyn McWilliams, chief creative officer at Skydance Interactive who, at an emotional talk at GDC 2018, recounted her experience struggling to make games after being diagnosed with incurable lung cancer.

I could not be creative or do my job, said McWilliams. I sat on the couch and said to my husband: I am a talentless hack. I thought in that moment that I would never create again. And I meant it.

McWilliams, who has worked on games such as Full Spectrum Warrior, Sid Meier's Pirates!, and The Elder Scrolls: Daggerfall, said that, while chemotherapy treatment is known to cause cognitive impairments, trauma caused by divorce, the death of a parent or child, and sexual abuse can all have major negative effects on our creativity.

When you are in times of distress you feel lost and broken, because you cant set aside fear and anger," she said. "And if you feel broken your creative work is broken. Everyone reacts differently to these sorts of stress, she said, but there's one thing everyone has in common: it makes creativity almost impossible.

The effects of emotional distress include, McWilliams said, feeling unusually disorientated, a loss of concentration, experiencing a general feeling that thoughts dont flow. Not only are these effects frustrating for anyone who works in a creative field, they can also leave you feeling unsure of your essential identity.

Studies have found, McWilliams said, that regular sleep aids creativity and problem-solving. And everybody knows, said McWilliams, that sleep is the first thing to go following a traumatic or difficult life event. Similarly, emotional distress skewers the act of daydreaming, another activity shown to be crucial to creativity and problem-solving. Likewise, McWilliams said, emotional distress affects ones capacity to work with others, to trust one owns decisions and to form and keep habits related to creativity are all impaired by emotional distress.

McWilliams suggested a series of steps and tips to help guide those experiencing emotional distress toward creative recovery. The first and most important step, she said, is to recognize and acknowledge what is happening to you.

Denying the situation, or cause of your trauma, will cause a psychological block, she said, that frustrates creativity. The nature of the situation youre in robs you of your objectivity, she said.

Then, McWilliams said, you have to find ways to center your thoughts in order to shut off the incessant chatter in your mind. McWilliams found that meditation techniques, particularly using guided online relaxation audio tools, was a hugely effective way to quiet the mind, and create the space for creative thoughts to re-enter her life.

It is crucial, McWilliams said, to find a way to go beyond yourself. She suggested that engaging in therapy and speaking about what youre going through can be like releasing a valve; vulnerability helps you, helps others, and in turn helps you again. I talked about cancer on Twitter, and kept a blog, she said, while admitting that she was concerned that speaking publicly about living with incurable cancer would harm her chances at finding work.

McWilliams suggested that finding low-pressure creative outlets is an effective way to begin to reclaim creativity. She gave the example of playing Rock Band as a way to fool your brain into thinking youre doing something creative while following guided play.

Sitting by windows in order to absorb sunlight, and journaling are effective ways, she said, to start the process of rebuilding creative habits in small ways as a way to kickstart the creative assembly line to provide a way to get back to yourself again.

"No matter what's happening to you," she said, "you're not broken. You're growing."What Imeli building and place where first OSCARS ceremony was held have in common - GeorgianJournalKathleen explained how she urged council members to use this opportunity to educate parents to make a different choice. Maybe its not about asking parents to quit smoking, she suggested, but once they know that doing so in the car with children is really harmful, then they have the information to say, OK, maybe I wont quit, but I wont smoke in the car. Most of us, when we know better, we do better.

And its not just secondhand smoke that Kathleen is worried about. Thirdhand smoke is also dangerous, especially for babies and toddlers. What is thirdhand smoke? It originates from the particles of a burning cigarette that are left on surfaces, for example, the chemicals and nicotine that stay behind on doors, windows, and everywhere else in a vehicle when someone smokes inside it. This means that even when children arent in a car at the time someone is smoking, they can still ingest all those chemicals later on as they touch different parts of the vehicle.

Kathleen revealed that when children are chronically exposed to nicotine and smoke, their chances of becoming a smoker greatly increase. By passing the ordinance, the girls and city council members are helping prevent 2,200 kids in Colorado from becoming daily smokers, she further explained.

To every young girl who wants to make a change in the world but isnt sure shes capable of doing so, Kathleen says, There is power in numbers, and an organization like Girl Scouts can really boost [girls] confidence in their ability to make change, get things done, and stay motivated through the obstacles. I have a four-year-old daughter, and I cant wait for her to start as a Girl Scout Daisy. I was so proud to show her that I was working with Girl Scouts and what they were able to do.

There is power in numbers, and an organization like Girl Scouts can really boost [girls] confidence in their ability to make change, get things done, and stay motivated through the obstacles."

Even with all of the support the girls were able to garner, they also encountered some negativity and opposition. After their first meeting with the city council, a few not-so-nice comments cropped up on social media and in the form of other complaints. Because of this, Kristen and her co-leader, Michele Malchow, were concerned about having the girls attend the final council meeting in which a final vote for or against the ordinance would be made.

We had been trying to keep the experience positive for the girls, Kristen said. But when we talked to them about it, they said, This is part of life, and we have to deal with it. Kristen was impressed with the girls maturity and courage and decided to let them attend the meeting; they would leave only if things got too heated.

What I have learned throughout this process is that everyone has an opinion on everything and not everyone will agree with what youre trying to achieve, but thats OK, Makenna said.

I have seen [the girls] blossom so much throughout this entire process, Kristen praised. Here are these young women who are changing the world and doing big things for the community. Theyve asked such good and insightful questions. Theyve embraced the project wholeheartedly, remained focused, and theyve been willing to listen to feedback and be flexible. Theyve also just been so gracious and grateful with all of the adults and mentors who have helped them along the way. I am so proud of the young women they are becoming.

Through this process, both the girls and their troop leaders discovered just how much girls can accomplish when they put their minds to it. This is what Girl Scouts is all about, beamed Kristen. The idea of being girl-led, promoting the G.I.R.L. Agenda, and embodying all of the different facets of being a G.I.R.L. I dont think my girls had truly realized their power until they were able to get this ordinance passed and make history.

This is what Girl Scouts is all about. The idea of being girl-led, promoting the G.I.R.L. Agenda, and embodying all of the different facets of being a G.I.R.L."

Can you imagine what Troop 60789 will be able to accomplish in the years to come? Congratulations, girls, on a job extraordinarily done!

Are you a G.I.R.L. (Go-getter, Innovator, Risk-taker, Leader) who wants to change the world? Learn more about what Girl Scouts do every day.Display notch

Going by the same, the Oppo F7 could feature a 6.23-inch notched LED display. Oppo calls it Super Full Screen and it is said to have FHD+ resolution of 2280 x 1080 pixels, 19:9 aspect ratio and 88% screen-to-body ratio. The Full Screen multitasking feature will also be introduced and it will let users do several things at the same time.

Processor

Under its hood, the Oppo F7 could make use of an octa-core MediaTek Helio P60 chipset. This chipset was introduced recently and come with AI capabilities. The chipset is manufactured using TSMC's 12nm process. According to the chip maker, the MediaTek P60's AI lets it understand how a user uses the phone and adapt to the usage.

Camera

Being the successor to the Oppo F5, which was the first one to arrive with an AI-powered selfie camera, the F7 will bring an improved 25MP sensor to the table. The 25MP selfie camera will be powered by AI and have features such as group selfie beautification and AI-based 16 scene recognition support. The rear camera is said to be a 16MP sensor.

My Cloud Home: Unboxing and Set Up

Other features

From the recently leaked sales material, we get to know that the Oppo F7 will arrive with Color OS 5.0. It remains to be known if the device will run Android Nougat or Oreo. The Color OS 5.0 will have feature such as Face Unlock and Screen Recording as well. A 3400mAh battery will power the Oppo F7 rendering 15 hours of usage on a single charge. While the sales manual does not reveal the RAM and storage capacity, the device is believed to feature 4GB RAM and 64GB storage along with expandable storage space up to 256GB.US Navy Eyes Double Carrier Purchase in 2019 in Pursuit of 355-Ship Fleet

Sputnik News

23:43 21.03.2018

Following a push by Congress urging the procurement of two aircraft carriers in fiscal year 2019, the United States Navy has asked shipbuilders to send in bids "to further define the cost savings achievable with a two-ship buy," a March 20 news release reads.

Some lawmakers say the goal to field a 355-ship fleet may depend on it. More than 100 lawmakers sent a letter to the Pentagon in late 2017 "to express interest in a dual procurement of Gerald R Ford-class aircraft carriers" in the coming fiscal year. The legislators said the government could save up to $2.5 billion by buying two carriers in the same year as a result of lower logistical costs.

Buying two carriers "allows the Navy to build a fleet of 12 aircraft carriers more quickly as prescribed by the FY18 National Defense Authorization Act  which established that the Navy should maintain 355 ships, including 12 aircraft carriers," Rep. Rob Wittman (R-VA) said last December.

"The Navy developed an acquisition strategy to combine the CVN-80 and CVN-81 procurements to better achieve the Department's objectives of building a more lethal force with greater performance and affordability," James Geurts, assistant secretary of the navy for research development and acquisition said in the March 20 announcement. CVN-80 and CVN-81 are the Navy's official designations for the two prospective carriers: CVN-80 will be the USS Enterprise; CVN-81 is not yet named. "This opportunity for a two-ship contract is dependent on significant savings that the shipbuilding industry and government must demonstrate."

According to the US Navy, buying two ships at once was a strategy that was "effectively used in the 1980s to procure Nimitz-class aircraft carriers and achieved significant acquisition cost savings compared to contracting for the ships individually."

The namesake ship in the Ford class, the USS Gerald R Ford, ran 20 percent over budget and more than a year behind schedule before being delivered in 2017, highlighting the service's struggle to control the costs of building an aircraft carrier.

 Sputnik

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Early Election Fever Grows With Turkish Military Victory in Syria

By Dorian Jones March 21, 2018

With Turkish led military forces scoring a decisive victory in Syria against the YPG Kurdish militia, speculation is rife in Turkey of early general and presidential elections.

Sunday's capture of the key Syrian town of Afrin from the YPG was perfectly choreographed to coincide with Turkey's Martyrs Day. The symbolism was not lost on Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan who has linked his fortunes to the military incursion, declaring the Syrian campaign the most important since Turkey's war of independence.

Ankara calls the YPG "terrorists", linking the militia to a decades long Kurdish insurgency inside Turkey. Erdogan's political message has been obediently followed by most the media, which is under direct or indirect government control.

"It (Syrian operation) has shored up his political position. There is already talk of bringing the elections forward," observes political columnist Semih Idiz of Al Monitor website, "I think that discussion will be more animated now, and Erdogan and his political advisors may try and strike while the iron is hot." General and presidential elections have to be called by 2019.

Critics have accused, usually anonymously, Erdogan of deliberately orchestrating the Syrian military campaign to create the grounds for an election victory. An accusation he strongly rejects.

Rules changing

But early election rumors are fueled by the passing of a series of electoral reforms earlier this month by Erdogan's ruling AKP party. The reforms include allowing of electoral alliances between political parties. It allows the formalization of an existing pact between the AKP and the nationalist MHP Party.

The electoral reforms also included controversial measures critics say removed voter fraud protections and opened the door to gerrymandering. Both charges the government rejected.

But Erdogan has repeatedly rejected speculation of early polls, insisting the election will be held as scheduled in November 2019. Throughout his 15 years in power, first as prime minister and then head of state, Erdogan has never called early polls.

"I don't think Erdogan wants early elections" claims political analyst Atilla Yesilada of Global Source Partners, "Erdogan is operating under two assumptions. Continuing to push the (Syrian) Kurdish militia away from border will continue to give him a boost in the polls, and he thinks by continuing to pump more fiscal stimulus into the economy, he can increase voter satisfaction,"

The Turkish economy is booming, thanks to billions of dollars of stimulus by the government through major infrastructure projects and cheap loans to companies.

Erdogan has pledged to expand military operations to remove the YPG Kurdish militia from all its border. But military and economic realities could yet force Erdogan's hand, "He will soon grasp his goals are simply not possible," warns analyst Yesilada. "The advance of the Turkish forces toward east in Syria are going to be prevented by the United States and economic turbulence and withdrawal of portfolio investments from Turkey will slow down the Turkish economy. Soon Mr. Erdogan will grasp this is as good as it gets, it does not get any better."

Economic alarm bells have already starting ringing about the sustainability of Turkish economic growth. Earlier this month the international financial rating agency, Moody's, reduced Turkey's rating, citing concerns about an over heating economy and future sustainability to repay its financial debts. Such concerns have resulted in the Turkish currency touching record lows. Experts warn of looming growing economic and financial problems.

Changing political landscape

But the dilemma facing Erdogan is that while the Syrian military operation appears broadly popular, opinion polls have provided only a mixed picture on whether that has transferred into electoral gains for him personally and his AKP Party.

"While AKP may be gaining (Turkish) nationalists voters they are losing in the Kurdish population," observes analyst Yesilada,"remembering up to 50 percent of Kurds voted for AKP previously, whereas probably one-third of nationalists vote AKP. The losses among Kurds is more significant than the gains to be made from the nationalist base."

Kurds roughly account for 20% of the Turkey's electorate. Another complicating factor in Erdogan's electoral calculations, is in the past Kurds who voted for his AKP Party did not have a strong electoral alternative, as many AKP Kurdish voters are deeply hostile to the pro Kurdish HDP. But a new center right IYI party is actively targeting Erdogan's Kurdish vote. With most opinion polls only predicting a narrow majority for an Erdogan presidency and some polls indicating his ruling AKP even losing it majority, observers suggest early polls remains a gamble.

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Peter Lumaj, the Albanian-born immigration lawyer from Fairfield who is running for the GOP nomination for governor, told the West Hartford Republican Town Committee this week that he was recruited by the Trump administration.

"I was offered a job to become the next ambassador to Albania to represent the United States," he told about 50 people in Town Hall. "I turned it down because I think I can serve the state better than being somewhere overseas serving you."For a long time, the conventional entrepreneurial wisdom was that you shouldn't do anything that could potentially alienate part of your customer base, like, say, speaking your mind on political issues. But despite the fraught nature of conversations around issues such as gun control, many companies are no longer keeping their stances to themselves.

In the wake of fatal gun violence that killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., on Feb. 14, Delta Air Lines, United Airlines, Enterprise and Hertz all announced that they will end discount programs for members of the NRA. Cybersecurity firm Symantec, insurance firm MetLife and First National Bank of Omaha said it would be doing the same.

Retailers including Dicks Sporting Goods announced that in addition to raising the age of purchase to 21, it would also no longer be selling assault-style firearms. Walmart also raised the age of purchase to 21 and said it would be removing any items in the stores that resembled an assault rifle, including toys. L.L. Bean and grocery store chain Kroger also said that they would be raising the age to purchase firearms to 21.

FedEx has said that it will continue to offer a discount program for NRA members. And while the NRA uses competitor UPS to ship items from its online store, UPS does not have a discount program.

Increasingly, it seems that great customer service, a vibrant company culture or an innovative online presence is no longer enough to truly make an impact with customers. A recent survey by social media management firm Sprout Social found that 66 percent of those polled said it was important for brands to take a public stance about social and political concerns. According to a study conducted by Weber Shandwick, 47 percent of millennials said they believe CEOs have a responsibility to be vocal about important societal issues.

Last week, more than a million students across the country staged walkouts to raise awareness and call for an end to gun violence. On March 24, according to the March for Our Lives website, there will be more than 800 protests taking place around the world. Thanks to the work of young activists and their supporters, this conversation has been amplified and shows no signs of being cast aside anytime soon. But this will certainly not be the first or the last time the business community will be asked, or feel compelled, to speak out on concerns of national importance.

While it may seem like making yourself heard on an issue might be courting controversy -- and it could put off people on either or even both sides of an issue -- Megan Kashner, a professor at Northwestern Universitys Kellogg School of Management, says that business leaders are actually in a position to open the lines of communication around an issue rather than fan the flames further.

Related: Business Leaders Slam Trump's Decision to Withdraw From Paris Climate Agreement

Sometimes taking a position can seem scary or risky, not because people disagree with you, but because somehow the public discourse has been skewed, Kashner says. When the public discourse has been skewed, then entrepreneurs, innovators and business leaders actually have the opportunity to step in and normalize it, and bring things back down from a fever pitch to a conversation.

One thing is for sure: if your response isnt coming from a genuine place, youve already lost, says Melissa Gonzalez, CEO of retail strategy firm The Lionesque Group.

People pick up on that right away. People on social media are unforgiving and then it takes two seconds for them to comment on that and call B.S. on you and then that becomes the conversation, she says. Do it for the things you believe in and stand for and then be genuine about it or don't do it at all.

As much as you might want to respond quickly, Gonzalez cautions that speed is not always the best course of action when you are speaking out. Even if a statement is deleted, someone could very well screenshot and circulate an ill-thought out response.

Take as much time as you need sussing out how you're going to communicate what you stand for, Gonzalez explains. What your voice is as the brand shouldn't be compromised," she says. "The stance you want to take in the message still should go through that same filter, even if it's something that may seem a little bit more controversial.

According to a survey taken by market research firm YouGov about the 17 brands that did cut ties with the NRA: Consumers who affiliated as Democrats felt more positive about the brands, Republicans didnt change their perception, and independents actually steered negative. While the Democrats are going as expected, it seems Republicans are divided on their brand support in light of their parting with the NRA. The study found that the brands that did speak out did see a boost in word-of-mouth recognition, but it also identified that when it came to overall customer perception, the needle didnt move in a significant fashion, which YouGov said could reflect that consumers are applying equal positive and negative pressure, depending on their politics and position on gun control.

That assessment is in line with a Sprout Social study, which noted that when customers' personal beliefs align with what the companies are saying, 28 percent will publicly praise it. If they disagree, only 20 percent said they would publicly criticize the brand. The survey also found that social media is where customers are most open to brands sharing their positions on issues, particularly, if they express themselves via a call to action, making donations or providing resources for customers to get involved.

In the aftermath of the Parkland shooting, on March 9, Florida Gov. Rick Scott signed The Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Act into law. The bill raises the minimum age to buy a firearm from 18 to 21, institutes a three-day waiting period for most firearm purchases and bans the sale of bump stocks. There is also a controversial $67 million provision in the bill that could allow some teachers to be armed if school districts and local law enforcement departments come to an agreement. The bill also allocates $69 million for mental health aid in schools and $98 million to increase the security of school buildings. Whether other states will adopt similar laws, or if a similar bill were to reach the federal level, remains to be seen.

So whether you opt to use your platform to take a stand or not, Kashner says there is always a chance that you could lose some of your customer base. But if you are going to lose some ground, youre better off doing it because you took action in a way that was aligned with your value system.

If you know who you are and you know what you believe in and you stand up behind who you are and what you believe, then the market will respect you for that, Kashner says. Studies have shown that purpose-driven enterprises do a better job of attracting and retaining top talent. They have higher productivity and they have higher reputational ratings in the marketplace. Not all of these purpose-driven companies have the same values. But they have values and that's the difference.

Related:

The Productivity Secrets of an Entrepreneur Whose First Business Idea Turned Into Multimillion Dollar Company

How Other Cultures Think of Entrepreneurship

Your Team Will Love You More When You Stop Trying to Be Perfect



Copyright 2018 Entrepreneur.com Inc., All rights reserved



This article originally appeared on entrepreneur.com

Beantown Bedding co-founders Kirsten Lambert and Joan Ripple are on a mission to help the world live laundry-free. Like many first-time founders, the friends had no previous startup experience and held not desire to start a business.

"Ironically, neither of us had any intention of starting a business. We simply saw a need for a product that didn't exist and decided to find a solution," says Ripple. The founders joined the Disrupters Unite! Facebook Live March 2, 2018 episode on Entrepreneur Magazine's Women Entrepreneur page to talk about growing a business while growing a friendship. Lambert and Ripple identified five key factors that enabled them to go from solving a challenge for their college kids into a thriving high-growth startup.

Related: 10 Inspirational Quotes From Women Business Leaders

1. Solve your own problem.

The friends-turned-business-partners met when their high school teens began dating. Almost a year and countless dog walks later, the founders unwittingly began a journey toward creating a viable business. Soon after their kids left for college, Lambert and Ripple were surprised to find out that a full course load meant making trade-offs on time-consuming tasks; laundering sheets fell to the bottom of the priority list.

After months of researching disposable, economical and eco-friendly sheets that did not compromise comfort and quality for convenience. There were none to be found. A few years later, Beantown Bedding is now a business-to-business player in the wholesale college, large events, conferences, camps markets and has entered the retail industry, selling through Target and Bed, Bath, and Beyond.

2. Start in stealth mode.

For over a year, Lambert and Ripple intentionally did not share their idea for Beantown Bedding with anyone other than their immediate families. This allowed them to be laser-focused on gathering as much information as they could about the market, customers, competitive landscape, products and pricing.

"We interviewed everyone who would talk to us: textile industry experts, entrepreneurs and business owners. We read articles, attended events and held focus groups with college students, and parents of college students, around the country," says Lambert.

The founders used their well-researched insights to create a solid business plan from which to launch in an industry that they had not known a year prior. "Priorities were to get the product developed and establish a supply chain and distribution channel for it so we could roll it out nationally right from the start," says Lambert.

3. Make your working partnership and personal friendship a priority.

Co-founder and management team issues account for over 65 percent of business failures. Although the response from friends and family has been mostly positive, there have been a few vocal naysayers who warned about putting too much trust into someone else's hands.

"Since then, mutual trust and respect have formed the backbone of our partnership," says Ripple. The secret sauce to the partnership's strength lay in the understanding that there is no business without intentional behavior based on the right partnership culture.

During good times and bad, learning to compromise for the good of the company and the good of the friendship is a muscle the founders intentionally practice. "Mutual trust and respect have formed the backbone of our partnership," says Ripple.

Related: 15 Things Men Say That Get on Women's Nerves

4. Find the yin to your yang.

The founders each have business backgrounds, one in management consulting and the other in consumer research. Bonded by the vision to disrupt the disposable bedding industry, the founders were mindful of playing to their individual strengths and areas of interest as part of their partnership modus operandi. "Our working relationship has always been so positive because we have always been able to balance each other," says Ripple.

That balance mindset has held true as the business has grown and the leaders have refined their roles in order to scale the business. "Eventually we began to specialize based on our skill sets and interests. Joan is operationally focused and I'm more strategically focused," says Lambert.

5. Leverage your local startup ecosystem.

Once the startup was formed, Lambert and Ripple found help in their local entrepreneur ecosystem. They applied for and were selected to part of the Boston chapter of MassChallenge, a four-month global accelerator. Through building the founders' social capital, exposure and experience, the founders were able to create a big vision for a business and not be pigeon-holed into one product idea. "MassChallenge really helped us understand what disruptive impact could be beyond what we originally envisioned," says Ripple.

With a laser focus on building the company's brand recognition and worth, the founders rolled up their sleeves and became their own PR agency. The founders received a lot of publicity through national channels such as The View, Today Show, HSN, and the Primetime Emmys.

The partners are now focused on their next strategic objective by strengthening their supply chain and carving out a solid footprint in other industry verticals. "Our end goal it to find the right partner to take our business to the next level," says Ripple. Every startup starts with an idea and continues to thrive through specific goals, innovation, focus and prioritization and grit. Lambert and Ripple are well on their way.

Related:

How These 2 Friends Disrupted the World of Bedding While Beating the Odds of Success

How This Nonprofit Leverages Powerful Allies Like Joe Biden to Advance Its Goals

How the Co-Founder of Noosa Went From Office Drone to $220 Million in Sales



Copyright 2018 Entrepreneur.com Inc., All rights reserved



This article originally appeared on entrepreneur.com

These are the best offers from our affiliate partners. We may get a commission from qualifying sales.Published on 2018/03/22 | Source

Korean movies opening today 2018/03/22 in Korea "Microhabitat", "A Field Day", "Taklamakan", "Mini Special Forces X" and "Female Hostel 2"

Advertisement

"Microhabitat" (2017)

Directed by Jeon Go-woon

With "Esom", Ahn Jae-hong, Kang Jin-ah, Kim Guk-hee, Lee Sung-wook, Choi Deok-moon,...

Also known as "A Little Princess"

Synopsis

A woman works as a housekeeper for very little money and her only joy in life is whiskey and cigarettes. When cigarette prices rise, faces a crisis because housing prices are also rising and she can't afford rent. She gives up her home to hold onto her whiskey and cigarettes and begins to stay with friends who live scattered across Seoul.

"A Field Day" (2016)

Directed by Kim Jin-tae-I

With Kim Su-an, Yang Ji-woong, Lee Jung-bi, Choi Hyuk-I, Park Chan-young, Kim Hayoung,...

Synopsis

Seung-hee is a nine-year-old who hates losing. She is betrayed by love, and her family upsets her, too. Her father is fired from his job, her mother is in love with someone else, her grandfather is in club, and her uncle is only full of enthusiasm. Although they are family, they have secrets they can't tell one another until one day they face an unimaginable truth. What will happen to Seung-hee's family?

"Taklamakan" (2017)

Directed by Ko Eun-ki

With Jo Sung-ha, Ha Yoon-kyung, Song Eun-ji, Gong Sang-ah, Jang Bong-soo-I, Choi Won,...

Synopsis

Tae-sik tries to make a living collecting recyclables, but doesn't see a way out.

Soo-eun dreams of becoming a nail artist, but she is actually a call girl.

The two of them end up spending a night together and face something inevitable.

Will they be alright in the Red Desert that is easy to enter, but not escape?

"Mini Special Forces X" (2018)

Directed by Lee Yeong-joon

With Um Sang-hyun, Jeon Tae-yeol, Lee So-young-I, Shin Yong-woo,...

Synopsis

The powerful Mini Commando battles the extraterrestrial beings that threatens mankind.

"Female Hostel 2" (2018)

Directed by Lee Ri-dan

With Lee Chae-dam, Seo Won-I, Jin Joo, Min Do-yoon, Kang Min-woo,...

Synopsis

At a women's boarding house, the ladies like to be pampered and served by the men and expect satisfaction of all of their desires.By Vasia Orion | Published on 2018/03/21

The ladies possibly joining upcoming mystery thriller "Secret Mother" may have possibly found their gents, as Kim Tae-woo and Song Jae-rim join the consideration game of positively reviewing roles for the drama. Additionally, we have some new character information about all the main characters.

Advertisement

Kim Tae-woo is up for the role of Han Jae-yeol, Kim Yoon-jin's (Song Yoon-ah) husband. Jae-yeol is described as a man who has a captivating and intelligent demeanor. He is an elite police chief, and the youngest to climb through the ranks and reach that position after graduating from the academy. While people find him appealing, Jae-yeol makes a 180 degree turn when facing criminals. Of course he does, because Kim Tae-woo loves his jerks.

Song Jae-rim is considering the role of homicide detective Ha Jeong-wan. Jeong-wan is a man who is blunt and who moves forward on his own accord. He doesn't like thinking too much or being too serious. He is a "one step forward and two steps back" type of person, but his hotheadedness makes him go all the way to the end when he's determined.

We also have a bit more information on Song Yoon-ah's character. Kim Yoon-jin was not only a successful doctor, but she became the head of the board of directors to her father's medical foundation, following the man's accident. After a speedy marriage to her husband, Yoon-jin quit her position to focus on being a full time mother. I wonder what this means about her relationship with her husband.

Kim So-yeon would play Kim Eun-young, whose foreign name is Lisa Kim, according to previously released information. Her role description is definitely an odd one, but not so much for a society as focused on academic success as South Korea.

Eun-young is essentially a caretaker for teenagers preparing for the college entrance exam. The role of this "college admissions nanny" is making sure that their assigned person has the nutrition, health and comfort needed for optimal exam preparation. She is described as someone who provides warm care through the home-stay she runs for those coming to study in the United States.

Despite the premise of one woman entering the home of the one who holds the secret to her child's death sounding like a clash ready to happen, the series is clearly described as a womance mystery thriller. It is about the friendship that forms between these women who both carry a lot of scars. A friendship based on the secrets that connect the two. Basically, sign me up and serve this to me on a platter.

"Secret Mother" will be directed by Park Yong-soon ("Wanted"). It will be written by Hwang Ye-jin and it is set to follow "The Good Witch" on SBS.

Written by: Orion from 'Orion's Ramblings'

Sources (1) (2) (3) (4) (5)Published on 2018/03/22 | Source

Added episode 8 captures for the Korean drama "The Great Seducer" (2018)

Advertisement

Directed by Kang In-I, Lee Dong-hyun-IV

Written by Kim Bo-yeon-I

Network : MBC

With Woo Do-hwan, Joy, Moon Ga-young, Kim Min-jae-I, Kim Seo-hyung, Shin Sung-woo,...

32 episodes - Mon, Tue 22:00 (2x35min)

Formerly know as "Love Game" and "Love Game: The Great Seduction" ( -  , leo-beu-ge-im - wi-dae-han yu-ok")

Synopsis

Based on the 2003 "Untold Scandal", this drama centers on an aristocratic man and woman engage in a bet. If the man can convince a virtuous widow to sleep with him, then he can finally have the aristocratic woman.

Broadcast starting date in Korea : 2018/03/12

MorePress release

Landowners will now have until May 1 to submit applications to Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks for enrollment in the Unlocking Public Lands Program.

Through this program, landowners who agree to allow access, for a majority of the year  at least six months and one day  are entitled to receive a $750 annual tax credit per contract. Landowners may have a maximum of four contracts per year or up to $3,000 in tax credits. Public recreational access across private land to reach a parcel of otherwise inaccessible state  DNRC  or federal Bureau of Land Management or United States Forest Service land can be limited to foot traffic only.

More information about the program, including enrollment criteria and the application form, can be found at http://fwp.mt.gov/hunting/hunterAccess/unlockingPublicLands/.Press release

HELENA  Montana State Parks has announced that applications for $300 field trip travel grants are now being accepted through the 2018 Montana Fourth Graders to Public Lands Initiative.

The grant money is aimed at providing transportation funding to Montana fourth graders for visits to federal and state public lands with an emphasis on assisting classrooms and groups who lack needed transportation funds. The grants are made possible by the National Park Foundation and help support the 2015 White House youth initiative Every Kid in a Park.

Now in its third year, the progr...Press release

The temperature may be cool outside, but boating safety advocates urge boaters to enroll in a boating education course. Spring Aboard  Take A Boating Education Course campaign encourages boaters to get educated prior to the kick-off of the boating season. Many education providers offer discounts or other incentives for students during the week of March 18-24, 2018 to enroll in a boating education course.

We know that an educated boater is safer on the water, said Phil Kilbreath, Boating Law Administrator for Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks. If a boater has taken a...I waited for my friend  a combat veteran of the First Gulf War  at a restaurant.

As I sat there, my Twitter feed was lighting up with news of Dana Loesch of the National Rifle Association who had put all of us lyin journalists on notice that our time was up. The practitioners of the First Amendment were being strongarmed by those who love the Second Amendment even more.

And as someone who cherishes the First Amendment, I support her right to freedom of speech. I also have a message for Loesch and her NRA zealots: Right. Back. At. You.

I believe the time for the NRA may be runnin...With a focus on diversity and inclusion, we must ensure that we embed a culture that not only treats everyone equally, but actively seeks input from all.

Doing this will lead to more robust dialogue, smarter decisions and ultimately, sustainable growth in the short and long term.

Indeed, the company recently announced enhanced entitlements for its parental leave program to further support its focus on gender equality.

The new approach includes, 14 weeks of paid Birth Leave for the birth mother, eight weeks of paid Bonding Leave for partners of the birth mother and eight weeks of paid Adoption Leave for adoptive parents of a child under 17 years old.

One Johnson & Johnson employee, Paul Bottomley, has just recently returned from four weeks of Bonding Leave and will be taking four more weeks shortly, to allow him to support Nicola Johnson and his newborn baby daughter, Immy.Scientists have pinpointed the mechanism behind hydrocephalus, an accumulation of cerebrospinal fluid around the brain, in an inherited developmental disorder called Noonan syndrome.

The results were published online on March 20 in Science Signaling.

In a mouse model of Noonan syndromes effects on the brain, Cheng-Kui Qu, MD, PhD and colleagues observed defects in the cilia on ependymal cells, which are essential for the flow of cerebrospinal fluid.

The findings will aid in differential diagnosis of Noonan syndrome versus closely related disorders, and also advance a potential treatment for hydrocephalus in the context of Noonan syndrome.

Qu is professor of pediatrics at Emory University School of Medicine and Aflac Cancer and Blood Disorders Center, and a Childrens Healthcare of Atlanta Research Scholar. First author Hong Zheng, PhD is a postdoctoral fellow.

Noonan syndrome is caused by mutations in the SHP2 gene that result in hyperactivation of the enzyme it encodes. It is a developmental disorder including congenital heart disease, dysmorphic facial features, short stature, and intellectual disability. Patients with Noonan syndrome also have an increased risk of developing hematological malignancies.

A distinct set of inactivating mutations in the SHP2 gene cause a highly related disorder  Noonan syndrome with multiple lentigines (formerly called LEOPARD syndrome), which Qu says can be difficult to distinguish from its Noonan syndrome. Hydrocephalus could be used for differential diagnosis and prognosis, he says.

Qus lab created a mouse that had the SHP2 gene altered only in brain cells and these mice displayed hydrocephalus. By electron microscopy, Zheng could see changes in the structure of cilia on ependymal cells, which line the ventricles in the brain. The cilia were shorted and disorganized-looking. This defect appeared to come from something intrinsic to developing cells, because aberrant development in ependymal cells and their cilia could be seen in neural stem cells grown in culture.

SHP2 encodes a tyrosine phosphatase, an enzyme that regulates signals from several growth factors. The researchers were able to narrow down which downstream signaling pathway was responsible for the cilia defects: STAT3. They were also able to track how different mutations that affect the SHP2 enzyme activities impacted ependymal cell development.

SHP2 inhibitors are being investigated as anticancer drugs. Qus team used an SHP2 inhibitor in a culture system to rescue problems in ependymal cells. This suggests that those medications might be a tool for controlling the progression of hydrocephalus in Noonan syndrome patients.

Researchers at Cincinatti Childrens Hospital Medical Center, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, and New York University contributed to the paper.

This work was supported by the National Heart Lung and Blood Institute (HL130995), the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (DK092722), the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (HD087760).

Emory UniversityLA JOLLA, CA  A genetic mutation that may protect people from malaria, but was thought to be rare, is surprisingly common, suggest the findings of a new study led by scientists at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI). The discovery sheds light on how humans who live in close quarters with malaria-carrying mosquitos may evolve defenses against the disease.

The researchers found that a mutation in the gene PIEZO1, which codes for a pressure-sensing protein, can dehydrate red blood cells. In a mouse model, this mutation made it harder for the malaria parasite Plasmodium to infect red blood cells and cause cerebral malaria (a severe neurological complication of Plasmodium infection). This red blood cell dehydration condition, called hereditary xerocytosis, was thought to be extremely rare, so the researchers were surprised to find it could be present in one in three people of African descent.

This syndrome is not rare anymore, says Shang Ma, PhD, a research associate at TSRI and first author of the study, published March 22, 2018 in the journal Cell. The study was led by Ardem Patapoutian, PhD, a professor at TSRI and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator.

The mutation in PIEZO1 is uncommon in non-African populations and had never been the focus of a large-scale analysis. The new findings suggest the mutation is much more common in areas where people have lived alongside selection pressure from malaria.

This study is a good example of a host/pathogen arms race playing out in real-timethis time with the host a likely winner, says Kristian Andersen, PhD, an assistant professor at TSRI and director of Infectious Disease Genomics at the Scripps Translational Science Institute (STSI).

The PIEZO1 mutation is not the first adaptation linked to malaria resistance. People of African descent are also more likely to have a genetic condition called sickle cell disease, which makes it harder for Plasmodium to enter their red blood cells. Going forward, Andersen says, large-scale genomic association studies will be needed to confirm the PIEZO1 mutations role in malaria resistance.

Patapoutian says his lab plans to learn more about the biological role of PIEZO1 and how mutations in the protein could affect other health conditions. The fact that we have a mouse model will make it seamless to test mechanisms behind any association we find in humans, says Patapoutian. Indeed, PIEZO1 as a pressure sensor is important for cardiovascular development and function, and its deletion is proposed to cause hypertension.

The study, Common PIEZO1 allele in African populations causes RBC dehydration and attenuates Plasmodium infection, also included authors from the University of California, San Diego; the University of Montpellier; Leiden University Medical Center; the Genomics Institute of the Novartis Research Foundation; and the Institute of Molecular and Cellular Pharmacology of the National Center for Scientific Research and Cote dAzur University.

The research was supported by the National Institutes of Health (grants UL1TR001114, R01 DE022358, AI090141 and AI103058), an A.P. Giannini postdoctoral fellowship and the Pew Biomedical Scholar program.

About The Scripps Research Institute

The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI) is one of the worlds largest independent, not-for-profit organizations focusing on research in the biomedical sciences. TSRI is internationally recognized for its contributions to science and health, including its role in laying the foundation for new treatments for cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, hemophilia, and other diseases. An institution that evolved from the Scripps Metabolic Clinic founded by philanthropist Ellen Browning Scripps in 1924, the institute now employs more than 2,500 people on its campuses in La Jolla, CA, and Jupiter, FL, where its renowned scientistsincluding two Nobel laureates and 20 members of the National Academies of Science, Engineering or Medicinework toward their next discoveries. The institutes graduate program, which awards PhD degrees in biology and chemistry, ranks among the top ten of its kind in the nation. In October 2016, TSRI announced a strategic affiliation with the California Institute for Biomedical Research (Calibr), representing a renewed commitment to the discovery and development of new medicines to address unmet medical needs. For more information, see www.scripps.edu.Stopping exercise can result in increased depressive symptoms, according to new mental health research from the University of Adelaide.

PhD student Julie Morgan from the University of Adelaides Discipline of Psychiatry has reviewed the results of earlier studies that examined the effects of stopping exercise in regularly active adults.

The results of her review are now published online ahead of print in the Journal of Affective Disorders.

Adequate physical activity and exercise are important for both physical and mental health, says Ms Morgan.

Current public health guidelines recommend being active on most if not all days of the week. At least 150 minutes of moderate intensity exercise a week is recommended to maintain health and prevent depression, or 75 minutes of vigorous intensity exercise for added health benefits.

An extensive body of clinical evidence shows that regular exercise can reduce and treat depression. However, there is limited research into what happens with depressive symptoms when exercise is stopped, she says.

Ms Morgan reviewed studies that investigated the cessation of exercise in 152 adults. They had each undertaken at least 30 minutes of exercise, three times a week, for a minimum of three months.

In some cases, ceasing this amount of exercise induced significant increases in depressive symptoms after just three days, says Professor Bernhard Baune, Head of Psychiatry at the University of Adelaide and senior author on the paper.

Other studies showed that peoples depressive symptoms increased after the first one or two weeks, which is still quite soon after stopping their exercise.

Professor Baune says the depressive symptoms arising from stopping exercise occurred in the absence of the typical biological markers commonly involved with depressive symptoms.

This suggests some kind of novel effect in these cases, although we should add some caution here, as the number of people included in the studies we examined was small. Such findings would need to be replicated in additional trials, he says.

Professor Baune says the lack of research in this specific area points to the need for further studies, to help better understand the way in which stopping exercise affects depressive symptoms.

For now, it is important that people understand the potential impact on their mental well-being when they suddenly cease regular exercise, he says.

The University of AdelaideThe key chemical for happiness and sadness, serotonin, is also a force in our bodys weight gain and calorie control, and scientists say more research could reduce obesity rates.

In a new development in gastrointestinal research, researchers from Flinders University, SAHMRI and the University of Adelaide have found more evidence that elevated concentrations of serotonin, the crucial neurotransmitter that chemically transmits messages to nerve cells in the body, is also linked to obesity.

Only recently have researchers understood that this gut serotonin is actually bad for our metabolism, as it increases blood glucose and fat mass, thus endangering us of developing diabetes and obesity.

The new research demonstrates for the first time in humans that this gut serotonin is doubled in obese individuals. This new insight now paves the way to try and find potential new treatments for obesity by focusing on the cells in our gut that produce this hormone.

The South Australian researchers were part of a large international research team including University of Adelaide experts that found human obesity is characterised by an increased capacity to produce and release serotonin in the gut.

Their findings are catalogued in the article titled Augmented capacity for peripheral serotonin release in human obesity, which has been published in the International Journal of Obesity.

Our gut wall is lined by a protective layer of cells similar to skin cells. But scattered amongst these exists a variety of hormone-producing cells that play important roles in controlling our metabolism, fat mass, and even telling our brain when to stop or start eating, says Professor Keating, NHMRC Research Fellow Professor Damien Keating, from Flinders University and the South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute (SAHMRI)..

Half of these cells produce serotonin, which is most commonly associated with having important roles in the brain to make us feel happy. However more than 90% of our bodies serotonin is actually made in the gut, which cannot enter the brain to affect mood.

We know from a raft of recent high profile publications that gut-derived serotonin causes diabetes and obesity, but we didnt know if this was relevant to such disorders in humans. Our findings are the first work implicating serotonin as a driver of worsening obesity in humans, says Professor Keating.

Having established this, we can now focus on understanding why this happens, so we can develop methods to reduce circulating serotonin levels. These sorts of therapeutic outcomes are exactly why Pfizer decided to partner with us in this research area over the past four years.

University of Adelaide Senior Research Fellow, Associate Professor Richard Young, says these findings also indicate that obese humans secrete excess serotonin from the upper gut at rest, as well as during a meal.

This has revealed new ways that we may be able to control the release of serotonin from within the gut, and in turn, further improve the outlook for people living with obesity, says senior co-author on the paper Associate Professor Young.

Researchers included collaborators from US pharmaceutical company Pfizer, SAHMRI, University of Adelaide Associate Professor Young and the NHMRC Centre of Research Excellence in Translating Nutritional Science to Good Health and other experts at the Flinders College of Medicine and Public Health.

The project is part of an ARC Linkage supported collaborative research project investigating the peripheral-intestinal serotonin system in humans. This system has novel and emerging roles in metabolic control, and is an exciting prospect for future novel therapies for obesity and Type 2 diabetes.

The University of AdelaideFor-profit HCA reaches deal to buy Mission

Related Stories

Mission Health's Board of Directors announced Wednesday that it has signed a Letter of Intent to enter into exclusive discussions to join HCA Healthcare, a Nashville, Tennessee-based company founded 50 years ago by two physicians.

HCA Healthcare is one of the nations leading providers of healthcare services and uses its extensive resources to strengthen hospitals, deliver patient-focused care and improve the practice of medicine. The LOI is an important, proactive step to ensure Mission Health remains well-positioned to continue to meet the unique needs of western North Carolina as the health care environment continues to evolve. A key component of the proposed agreement is the establishment of a new foundation that would provide substantial annual investments dedicated to improving the health and well-being of the citizens of western North Carolina. In addition, as part of HCA Healthcare, Mission Health is expected to generate millions of dollars in tax revenues for the area. As a nonprofit, Mission is not subject to property taxes; owned by HCA it would be.

The Board, all of whom are community members who care deeply about ensuring access to high quality care for the people of western North Carolina for generations to come, is confident that HCA Healthcare is the right and best choice for Missions team members and providers, its patients and the communities we are privileged to serve, said Mission Health Board Chair John R. Ball, MD. We are extremely excited about this unprecedented opportunity to create an even stronger cornerstone of value, access and quality.

HCA Healthcare is a leading healthcare operator that offers advantages on a scale that would be difficult, if not impossible, to achieve otherwise, Dr. Ball said. As important, the newlyformed foundation will be life-changing for the residents of our region, providing tens of millions of dollars annually in new support for the most vulnerable.Mission Health has a more than 130-year tradition of caring for communities throughout western North Carolina, and we are excited to formalize discussions with them about how we can help continue their impressive legacy, said Milton Johnson, HCA Healthcares chairman and CEO. As a healthcare provider founded by physicians 50 years ago, we appreciate the way Mission Health has served western North Carolina with a level of excellence that has earned national recognition as one of the top 15 healthcare systems in the country. We appreciate the opportunity to discuss becoming an integral part of their community.

In making the announcement, Mission Healths Board Vice Chair, John W. Garrett, MD, noted that even though HCA Healthcare is one of the nations leading health system operators, it does not currently have operations in North Carolina. HCA Healthcare is attracted to Mission Health for many reasons, including the reputation of Mission Health clinicians and broader team to deliver best-in-class care and patient outcomes and our shared commitment to innovation. When combined with the ability of the newly formed foundation to enhance access in underserved communities and to invest in solving some of healthcares most complex and intractable problems  health risks that are beyond the reach of traditional medicine  its an ideal opportunity for our community, said Dr. Garrett.

HCA Healthcare appreciates that Mission Health has the capacity to continue its work alone, and yet we both recognize that meeting our core missions could be achieved more effectively together. It is a tribute to the Mission Health Board and team that we are in such a position of strength that we can make the best choice for our people, our patients and our communities, said Mission Health President and CEO Ronald A. Paulus, MD.

We are excited to be considering joining HCA Healthcare and benefitting from its caliber and exceptional capabilities in research, clinical trials, data analytics, graduate medical education and more. We believe that HCA Healthcare uniquely provides the experience, scale and resources that will enable Mission Health to enhance and expand our services in western North Carolina, said Dr. Paulus. In return, joining HCA Healthcare would allow Mission Health to share our quality and clinical outcome best practices with the broader HCA Healthcare family to the benefit of communities across the nation.

It is important to us that HCA Healthcare expresses a commitment to supporting our clinical best practices and our communities values, Dr. Paulus added. The recognition HCA Healthcare continues to earn for being one of the worlds most ethical companies is compelling. For the past nine years, HCA Healthcare has been ranked as one of the Worlds Most Ethical Companies by the world leader in business ethics, the Ethisphere Institute.

Mission Health is the only health system in North Carolina to be named one of the nations Top 15 Health Systems by Truven Health Analytics, an IBM Company, and the only health system in the nation to be named a Top 15 Health System in five of six years.

The transaction contemplated by the LOI is subject to the negotiation of a definitive agreement and applicable regulatory approval.An Ireland and Ulster rugby player on trial for rape has told the truth, warts and all, a court has heard.

Stuart Olding, who denies raping a woman in June 2016, has also welcomed the opportunity to put his account before a jury, according to his defence counsel.

"Finally that someone might listen to him and decide, he told the truth, warts and all," Frank O'Donoghue QC told Belfast Crown Court.

"The reality is there was no rape by Stuart Olding. There is no case here. There was no force used. There was consent on both sides. Perhaps a matter of regret now to all parties but such is life."

The remarks were made as Mr O'Donoghue ended his two-hour closing submission to the jury of eight men and three women.

Turning to face them, he added: "Stuart Olding is innocent in this charge. I implore you to do your duty."

Mr Olding (25), from Ardenlee Street, Belfast, has pleaded not guilty to raping a woman at a house party on June 28, 2016.

His team-mate and friend, Paddy Jackson (26), from Oakleigh Park in the city, also denies rape and a further charge of sexual assault.

Two other men are also on trial in connection with the alleged incident.

Blane McIlroy (26), from Royal Lodge Road in Belfast, denies exposure, while Rory Harrison (25), from Manse Road in the city, denies perverting the course of justice and withholding information.

Mr O'Donoghue suggested his client had been let down "very, very badly" by the authorities, adding that the case was "never properly investigated".

"He has asked no favours, he has pulled no strings," the barrister said.

"His career has been very badly damaged as a result of what has happened.

"Indeed, perhaps his and Paddy Jackson's profile has been an unnecessary complicating factor in this case."

Nonsense

The court heard that Mr Olding had returned from a rugby tour of South Africa, having regained his place on the Irish team after two years of career-threatening injuries.

"His career was on the up. He had everything to live for," Mr O'Donoghue said.

"You have seen him on CCTV. You have seen him in photographs. He had been on the go for at least 24 hours, if not more.

"Was he someone who was going out to rape someone? A man with no history of violence; I suggest even the suggestion is nonsense."

Referring to explicit WhatsApp messages in which Mr Olding bragged about sexual exploits to friends the morning after the alleged attack, Mr O'Donoghue said he had simply been "acting the big lad".

They had no evidential value but were put before the court as a "titillating sideshow" to create prejudice, he suggested.

"The social media texts are only bragging," he said.

"He is suitably ashamed of what he wrote. But nowhere in his texts will you find one word that comes remotely near that anything he was involved in was non-consensual."

The trial, originally scheduled to last five weeks, has now entered its eighth week.

Last week, jurors heard closing speeches from the prosecution and a barrister representing Mr Jackson.

Mr O'Donoghue was critical of the police investigation.

"They should have dug much deeper than they did, as even scraping the surface of this case, the sheer unreliability of the complainant's complaint comes to the fore," he said.

Clothing

Prosecution claims that Mr Olding's clothing, which was not seized, was of little evidential value were dismissed as "utter tosh".

"He has never shied away from telling anyone who would listen to him what happened," Mr O'Donoghue said.

"He has undoubtedly told the truth, warts and all."

Earlier, the barrister outlined more than a dozen questions he believed should have been put to the complainant by police.

"Why did she not say no?," he said. "Why didn't she open her mouth? Why didn't she scream? A lot of very middle-class girls were downstairs, they were not going to tolerate a rape or anything like that. Why didn't she scream the house down?"

The police investigation was flawed, he further suggested.

The investigation of the allegations against Mr Olding was "at best poor" and "at worst, virtually non-existent".

The lawyer also suggested that Mr Olding's accounts were further "verified" by independent witnesses.

He is "credible but also inherently reliable. You can rely on what he has said," he added.

"This is why there is not only reasonable doubt about this belated allegation but also it proves the innocence of Stuart Olding in relation to this."

Forced

The prosecution alleges that Mr Olding forced the woman to perform oral sex, the court was told. However, Mr O'Donoghue said: "Mr Olding has made the case that the act was entirely consensual."

The lawyer invited jurors to "study the evidence" in order to "root out" inconsistencies.

"Do not judge the book by its cover. Do not assume that because an account appears plausible it must therefore be true," he said.

"It does not come remotely near the required standard to render you sure that Stuart Olding orally raped the complainant in June 2016.

"If, on the evidence, you cannot be sure, then it is your duty to acquit.

"We, the court, the jury, must never be party to any miscarriage of justice. We must avoid that at all costs."

The case continues with further closing statements today.'While an exact motive for the attack has not yet been established, sources said the gang may have targeted the victim over allegations that he attacked a local woman' (stock photo)

A convicted sex offender suffered horrific facial injuries when he was lured into a car and slashed multiple times by a three-man gang in a "bloodbath" punishment attack.

The shocking incident unfolded at Beechwood Drive, Drogheda, at around 5.45pm on Tuesday.

Sources have revealed that one of the east coast's most violent crime gangs was behind the sickening attack in which a Stanley knife was used to hack at the victim's face and head.

Injuries

It is understood the trio fled the scene in a black Volkswagen Passat before the 31-year-old was taken to Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital where he was treated for his injuries.

He required a number of staples to be placed in his head and also needed stitches to his face.

While an exact motive for the attack has not yet been established, sources said the gang may have targeted the victim over allegations that he attacked a local woman.

The victim has multiple previous convictions, including for sexual assault, driving offences and other crimes he has committed since he was a teenager.

No arrests have yet been made in the case being investigated by Drogheda gardai.

The victim has since been discharged from hospital.

The Herald can reveal that gardai are investigating if the former right-hand-man of jailed gangster Cornelius Price ordered the attack.

The 33-year-old thug was previously a suspect in a similar knife attack and has been a major target for gardai for years.

However, he is not believed to have been a direct participant in the attack.

Since Price was jailed last year, his former close associate has become a more powerful underworld figure.

Feud

Price was jailed for three years in February 2017 after being convicted of reckless endangerment of a garda at Balbriggan Garda Station more than three years ago following a trial.

The gangster who has taken over from Price was heavily involved in the bitter feud that led to the gun murder of Benny Whitehouse in Balbriggan, Co Dublin, in September 2014.

Since the murder of Whitehouse, the gang has carried out a number of attacks against people connected to him.

The same gang is also believed to be responsible for the suspected murders of Willie Maughan (34) and his partner Anastasija Varslavane (21) who were last seen in the Gormanston area of Co Meath on April 14, 2015.The movement of seven trams from the Luas red line to the green line has been labelled "robbing Peter to pay Paul" by the Green Party.

Dublin south central representative Ed Davitt has described the movement of the trams as an "indictment of poor planning" during the transition to the Luas Cross City.

It is understood that the move by the National Transport Authority (NTA) along with Transport Infrastructure Ireland has been undertaken in what has been described as an "all hands on deck" effort.

Efficient

A transport source told the Herald that the decision was made in order to ensure that the Luas lines were operating as efficiently as possible.

The revelation came following a parliamentary question to Transport Minister Shane Ross by the Green Party's Catherine Martin, who said the situation with overcrowding is "becoming dangerous" and added the movement of the trams was a result of bad planning.

Her colleague Mr Davitt said it was "not a solution".

"It is completely unacceptable that red line commuters should suffer lower capacity and a less reliable service due to the poor planning for the rollout of the Cross City service," Mr Davitt said.

"The solution to alleviating problems on the green line is to create problems on the red line? That's not a solution - that's robbing Peter to pay Paul. Commuters, on the red line and on the green line, deserve better than this.

"The Government and the NTA must get on top of this issue, and quickly."

However, a transport source insisted that the movement of the trams has no effect on tram services on the red line and that all trams continue to arrive at their scheduled time.

The source added that the shift from red line to green line had been undertaken in order to ensure each tram is "best utilised".

It all comes as the Luas Cross City - which launched in December - continues to cause major disruption, particularly around the College Green part of the city.

Seven longer trams were purchased by Luas Cross City to alleviate the demand by commuters.

However, "an unforeseen technical fault" arose with two of the trams.

Mr Ross said all of the 55-metre trams will be put into use between now and May.Pope Francis has confirmed he will make the first papal trip to Ireland in nearly 40 years and will visit Dublin this summer.

The World Meeting of Families is taking place in Dublin from August 21-26.

The Pope (81) will preside at the closing ceremonies on the final two days.

He will take part in the Festival of Families in Croke Park on August 25 and the following day he will celebrate Mass in the Phoenix Park.

Welcomed

The Pope announced the visit to tens of thousands of people in St Peter's Square for his weekly audience.

The confirmation of his two-day visit to Dublin appears to rule out a papal visit to Northern Ireland. However, insiders have said it is still possible.

One senior source stressed that the Pope's full schedule will not be confirmed until June.

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has welcomed the announcement by Pope Francis.

"I look forward to meeting him during his visit," the Taoiseach said.

His statement added that while it is not a formal State Visit, it will be a major event for Ireland, with a high degree of public participation and a high international profile.

The Irish Catholic Bishops' Conference welcomed the news and said they are "deeply honoured" that the pontiff has chosen to come to Dublin.

"We are deeply honoured that Pope Francis will come to our country to participate in this universal Church celebration of faith and joy, as well as of the contemporary challenges which face families," the bishops said in a statement.

Garda management is expected to put together a significant security operation for the visit of the Pope, involving highly-trained snipers and bomb sweeps.

The security plan will be on par with similar operations put in place for the visits of Britain's Queen Elizabeth and then US President Barack Obama by the garda's Liaison and Protection branch.

While garda management has not yet received an itinerary from the Pope's representatives in Rome to draw up formal plans, up to 20 members of the Emergency Response Unit (ERU) will accompany him on a 24/7 basis.

Safety

The officers are part of the new Close Protection Unit, set up this year under Special Tactics and Command (STOC) to ensure the safety of VIPs.

These suited detectives will be fully armed as they travel with the pontiff - whose representatives will bring their own armoured vehicles from Rome.

Bomb sweeps and general security checks of locations and venues will also be carried out by ERU officers - known as a special advance team - prior to the arrival of the Pope.

As with the visit of the queen and President Obama, drains will be welded shut on any travel routes to prevent bombs being placed in the sewers.

The Garda Water Unit will also patrol the River Liffey during the papal visit.

Snipers attached to the ERU will also take up positions on roof-tops when the Pope is out in public.

A source said that including snipers and bomb sweeps was "standard protocol" for the visit of a high-profile VIP, and that there is no intelligence to suggest there is a threat against the Pope when he visits Ireland.

Yesterday in Rome, two Irish families - the Tobins from Co Kildare and the Bushells who live in Rome - were selected to present the official World Meeting of Families 2018 Icon of the Holy Family to Pope Francis during his weekly general audience in St Peter's Square, in a delegation led by Archbishop Diarmuid Martin.Michelle Burke says she didn't realise her Vegas wedding was legal here

A mother-of-four accused of unlawfully obtaining almost 30,000 in one-parent family social welfare payments has claimed her drunken Las Vegas wedding was just "a bit of fun" and she did not know it was legal here.

Hearing the case at Dublin District Court, Judge John Brennan compared it to the film The Hangover, starring Bradley Cooper, about the misadventures of a group of men at a bachelor party in Las Vegas.

Michelle Burke (39), of Cappagh Road, Finglas, Dublin 11, is being prosecuted by the Department of Social Protection.

The total alleged fraud was 29,773 and it was the prosecution's case that she got married and failed to notify the department while claiming the one-parent family payment between November 2010 and August 2012, which she denies.

The trial heard she had been in receipt of the payment since 1997. Social welfare inspector Helen O'Reilly told prosecuting counsel Gareth Robinson BL that the accused was getting 317-a-week.

Declarations

She told the trial that in 2011 and 2013 reviews were conducted and Ms Burke signed declarations that she had not got married nor was she living with a partner.

However, Ms O'Reilly told Judge John Brennan there was a suspicion she may have been cohabiting. An investigation commenced and she was able to obtain a copy of a marriage certificate from the US.

She agreed with Mr Robinson it confirmed Ms Burke got married to her current partner on November 6, 2010, at the Hollywood Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas.

The Clark County marriage certificate had her date of birth and address as well as that of the man she married.

The court heard the certificate was recognised in Ireland.

Her payment was stopped and she was interviewed but told the inspector she did not think the marriage was legal.

She also said her partner, who was not the father of her children, paid tax and then lived at a different address in Dublin 1.

The inspector told defence counsel Matthew Holmes BL the marriage was legally binding for the purpose of social welfare. She also agreed the defendant and her partner were now claiming a family allowance.

Following legal submissions over the validity of the US marriage documents, the judge accepted the certificate was evidence of what was recorded.

In the witness box, Ms Burke claimed she had gone to America for a few days with a group of 16 or 17 friends for a 30th birthday party.

Questioned by her barrister about her marriage, she claimed "we just thought it was funny" and it was done "for a laugh", adding: "I honestly didn't think it was legal."

Asked why she did not remember much about the ceremony, she replied: "Because we were drunk."

In cross-examination, she said they were "walking up and down the Strip a few times and saying, 'Do you want to get married?'. We thought it'd be funny, like".

She also said she could not remember much about the ceremony, performed by a Rev Dennis Kovarik, but she agreed the certificate had her address and date of birth as well as her partner's details and that they had to hand over their passports beforehand.

Mr Holmes also asked the judge to note the woman's evidence and the legal principle of an "honest though unreasonable belief".

He argued that at all times the woman had stated that it was her belief that the marriage was not legal and "an innocent act is always a defence".

Judge Brennan commented that the Hangover films came to mind but added that, joking aside, it was a serious matter and he adjourned the case to May to consider legal submissions from both sides.Rock band Panic! at the Discos upcoming Pray for the Wicked Tour will stop in Salt Lake City at Vivint Smart Home Arena on Aug. 8, it was announced Wednesday.

The concert also will include performances from rock group Arizona and pop artist Hayley Kiyoko.

The summer tour will stop at 28 locations across the U.S. and Canada, beginning July 11 in Minneapolis and ending Aug. 18 in Las Vegas.

The tours title shares that of Panic! at the Discos sixth studio album, Pray for the Wicked, which is set for release June 22. The band formed in 2004 and has since released hits including I Write Sins Not Tragedies, Hallelujah, Miss Jackson and Nine in the Afternoon.

General public tour tickets will become available March 30 at noon at panicatthedisco.com. Those who pre-order Panic! at the Discos new album through the bands webstore before March 29 at 7 p.m. will receive a code for a presale starting March 30 at 9 a.m.I was deeply saddened by a recent report that painted me as the kind of person who would try to shield or even protect a sexual predator and serial abuser.

Let me be clear, I have not, and would never, knowingly do anything to shield any individual who acted inappropriately with respect to sexual harassment. That being said, I believe the facts surrounding my involvement in the allegations of sexual misconduct by former Provo Police Chief John King were misrepresented and not accurately reported.

I have the deepest respect and admiration for the brave victims who have come forward. I fully support them and continue to stand by their side. I cant imagine how hard this has been for them. As a husband, father and grandfather, my heart aches to think that there may have been something I could have done to help avoid the pain and trauma those victims have courageously faced.

Anyone who knows me or has worked with me, knows that I would never deliberately tolerate the abhorrent behavior that John King has been accused of.

I want to set the record straight.

As mayor of Provo, I received two complaints regarding former Police Chief John King. The first incident was when a police dispatcher informed the city that she felt uncomfortable with the way the former chief looked at her. I never once questioned the validity of this allegation, and worked with both the human resource and legal departments of Provo to resolve the complaint. I insisted that the matter be promptly resolved by Provos human resources team. I personally worked with the chief to set boundaries in dispatch to make a better work environment for the employee.

The second incident occurred when I received a phone call in my car from a woman who explained that she had been raped by the chief. Again, I did not question the validity of her story, and I took her allegation extremely seriously. Within minutes, I contacted the appropriate city officials.

In addition, I contacted Utah County to insist they pursue an independent investigation of this allegation. In order to avoid any potential conflict, Utah County requested that the Salt Lake County Sheriffs Office perform the investigation.

The Chief was put on administrative leave while Salt Lake County investigated. Ultimately, they came to the conclusion that no charges should be filed, and the Salt Lake County District Attorney determined not to pursue any criminal charges.

Regardless, the allegations were so serious that I insisted John King resign from his position as chief.

Contrary to what has been reported, these are the only two allegations of misconduct that I ever received regarding King. I took both seriously and took decisive action to ensure that any misconduct would be addressed immediately. I never attempted to protect or shield John King or the horrendous actions.

Like others, I have asked myself many times how someone with a background like John King was ever hired as Provos police chief in the first place. In 2013, Provo contracted with a firm to screen potential candidates for the vacant police chief job. The thorough screening process included a background check, a psychiatric evaluation and a polygraph examination. A seven-member hiring committee, which I was not a part of, interviewed the finalists for the job and described John King as an outstanding candidate. After that recommendation, references were checked and I even personally contacted several others independent of those King had provided. Through all this, I was never made aware of any information that would have led me to suspect that he was a serial sexual offender.

All that being said, it is clear that he had been accused of sexual harassment by female coworkers while working for other police departments, and somehow, we missed those warning signs. It is a shame to me that his former employers failed to report these allegations to us, and that our own careful vetting processes failed as well.

As mayor, I believe I tried my best to respond to these allegations. I ask my friends, neighbors, and constituents to not judge me solely on a mischaracterization of my involvement in this heartbreaking situation.

I have and continue to be fully committed to transparency and accessibility to all those who I represent.Donald Trump is moving into a new and more dangerous phase.

Before, he was constrained by a few adults  Rex Tillerson, Gary Cohn, H.R. McMaster and John Kelly  whom he appointed because he thought they had some expertise he lacked.

Now, Trump has either fired or is in the process of removing the adults. Hes replacing them with a Star Wars cantina of toadies and sycophants who will reflect back at him his own glorious view of himself and help sell it on TV.

Narcissists are dangerous because they think only about themselves. Megalomaniacs are dangerous because they think only about their power and invincibility. A narcissistic megalomaniac whos unconstrained  and whos also president of the United States  is about as dangerous as they come.

The man who once said he could shoot someone dead on Fifth Avenue and still be elected president now openly boasts of lying to the Canadian prime minister, decides on his own to negotiate mano a mano with North Koreas Kim Jong Un, unilaterally slaps tariffs on imported steel and aluminum, and demands the death penalty for drug dealers.

For weeks, Trump has been pulling big policy pronouncements out of his derriere and then leaving it up to the White House to improvise explanations and implementation plans.

Trump is increasingly flying solo, Catherine Lucey and Jonathan Lemire of the Associated Press reported earlier this month. Trump has told confidants recently that he wants to be less reliant on his staff, believing they often give bad advice, and that he plans to follow his own instincts, which he credits with his stunning election.

Trump has always had faith in his instincts.

Im speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain and Ive said a lot of things, Trump said on the campaign trail.

Im a very instinctual person, but my instinct turns out to be right, he told Time magazine last year.

But instincts arent facts, logic or analysis. Its one thing for a business tycoon or even a presidential candidate to rely on instincts, quite another for the leader of the free world to rely solely on his gut.

Worse yet, the new Trump believes no one can lay a glove on him. Hes survived this far into his presidency despite lapses that would have done in most other presidents.

So what if he paid off a porn star to keep quiet about their affair? So what if hes raking in money off his presidency? So what if theres no evidence for his claims that 3 million to 5 million fraudulent votes were cast for Hillary Clinton, or that Obama wiretapped him? There are no consequences.

The new Trump doesnt worry that his approval ratings continue to be in the cellar. By his measure, hes come out on top: His cable-TV ratings are huge. Fox News loves him. He dominates every news cycle. The pre-selected crowds at his rallies roar their approval.

Hes become the Mad King who says or does anything his gut tells him to, while his courtiers genuflect.

How will this end?

One possible outcome is that Trump becomes irrelevant to the practical business of governing America. He gets all the attention he craves while decision-makers in Washington and around the world mainly roll their eyes and ignore him.

Theres some evidence this is already happening. Trumps big infrastructure plan was dead on arrival in Congress. His surprise spending deal with Democrats Chuck and Nancy went nowhere. His momentary embrace of gun-control measures in the wake of a Florida school shooting quickly evaporated.

Meanwhile, world leaders are now taking Trumps braggadocio and ignorance for granted, acting as if America has no president.

But another possible outcome could be far worse. Trump could become so enraged at anyone who seriously takes him on that he lashes out, with terrible consequences.

Furious that special counsel Robert Mueller has expanded his investigation, an unbridled Trump could fire him  precipitating a constitutional crisis and, in effect, a civil war between Trump supporters and the rest of America.

Feeling insulted and defied by Kim Jong Un, an unconstrained Trump could order an attack on North Korea  precipitating a nuclear war.

The mind boggles. Who knows what a mad king will do when no adults remain to supervise him?For Subscribers Promised abuse, misconduct investigation, Heritage accusers still wait

A letter to families of Heritage Academy near Hagerstown in the summer of 2020 told of an investigation into abuse by former teachers.New Delhi : The Home Ministry has conveyed to a parliamentary panel that Sikh youth are being trained at ISI facilities in Pakistan to carry out terror activities in India, and members of the community who are settled in Canada and other places are also being instigated against the country with false and malicious propaganda.

Top officials of the home ministry, led by the Union Home Secretary, told the Committee on Estimates, headed by senior BJP leader Murli Manohar Joshi, that radicalisation of youth by terrorist groups through the misuse of internet and social media has emerged as a big challenge.

According to the report of the committee   Central armed police forces and internal security challenges-evaluation and response mechanism  which was tabled in Parliament on Monday, there have been some developments on the Sikh militancy front.

The commanders of terror groups based in Pakistan are under pressure from ISI to further the Pakistani spy agencys terror plans not only in Punjab but also in other parts of the country, it said.

Sikh youth are being trained at ISI facilities in Pakistan. Interdictions and interrogations have revealed use of jailed cadres, unemployed youth, criminals and smugglers by Pakistan-based Sikh terror groups for facilitating terror attacks, the report said.

Sikh youth based or settled in Europe, the US and Canada are also being misguided and instigated against India with false and malicious propaganda, but the situation is being watched closely by the central and state agencies and they are taking lawful action as and when required.

On the issue of new challenges which have emerged as a threat to internal security, the ministry, in a note furnished to the committee, voiced concern over radicalisation of youths by the terrorist groups through the misuse of internet and social media.

The problem is further accentuated by the fact that the terror groups have started using secure social media platforms and proxy servers etc. to avoid detection by intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

Activities of radicalised people returning from conflict areas and threat of lone wolf attack are also a challenge, it said.

The ministry told the panel that India continues to remain the prime focus of Pakistan-based terrorist outfits, particularly the Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Muhammed (JeM) and a faction of Indian Mujahideen besides groups like SIMI and Al-Unmah.

Separately, there are indications regarding revival of JeM in Pakistan and renewed efforts of the said outfit to cause harm to India. Besides, the IS and al-Qaida in Indian sub-continent have started posing new challenges to the existing security environment.

The ministry also said that violence by Left Wing Extremism (LWE) outfits continues to pose a threat to the internal security scenario in the country.

Since its formation in September 2004, CPI(Maoist) has emerged as the most potent among the LWE outfits active in the country, the report said.

Source : TOITheatre lovers in Delhi have all the reasons to rejoice these days, thanks to the ongoing 8th Theatre Olympics in the city. Organised by National School of Drama (NSD) and Ministry of Culture, the festivals theme this year is: Flag of friendship  an attempt at bridging borders and bringing together different cultures. And taking part in the coveted event will be artists from India and abroad.

Its a matter of great pride for us because this is a very grand event that will put Indian theatre on the world map  Waman Kendre, director, NSD

It is for the first time that we (India) are hosting the Theatre Olympics. Its a matter of great pride for us because this is a very grand event that will put Indian theatre on the world map, says Waman Kendre, director, NSD. About 90-95 shows will be staged by international artists in over 15 cities, including Delhi. So therell be a major exchange of theatrical knowledge and talent, he adds.

With 25,000 participating artists from across the globe, there are 450 shows, 600 ambience performances and 250 youth forum shows in total at the fest. Some of these acts will be movement theatre format and contemporary dance shows.

Our production, Bhinna Vinyasa, has no spoken word  its a movement theatre show. And its a celebrated performance that explores the theme of migration. Not just physical but metaphysical. We looked at how humanity has been migrating over centuries, and thought of exploring what is it that prompts someone to leave the familiar for the unfamiliar, says playwright Jayachandran Palazhy.

The dance group Aangika presented five acts of Mayur Bhanj Chhau.

We will be presenting stories of various characters through five acts of Mayur Bhanj Chhau, says Sadashiv Pradhan, director of the group, Aangika. Through one act, there will be depiction of Lord Shiva as Nataraja. Through another, well show the eternal love relationship between the lily and the moon; and guru Dronacharyas chakravyuha in the last, he adds.

Plays to be staged include adaptations of Shakespeares Julius Caesar and Taming of the Shrew, and Kasai Bada by director Abhishek Pandit.

Catch it live What: 8th Theatre Olympics Where: NSD; Kamani Auditorium; The Little Theatre Group (LTG); Shri Ram Centre, New Delhi On till: April 8 Timing: 2pm onwards Nearest Metro Station: Mandi House on Blue Line and Violet Line

Speaking about the impact of the fest, Pandit says, There is no theatre audience or culture in our home town, Azamgarh, so getting to perform at such a grand platform is a major confidence boost for all of us. Gharwaalo ko bhi lagta hai kuch toh career hai. Aur gaon mein toh aisa mahaul hai jaise koi tyohaar ho (Our family members now understand our career. And everyone in the village is celebrating like its festive season).Madhya Pradesh state assembly was adjourned sine die on Wednesday after repeated disruptions during the House proceedings on the issue of alleged suicide by a woman who was said to be the daughter-in-law of PWD minister Rampal Singh.

The budget was passed amid uproarious scenes with voice vote with Opposition alleging it was unprecedented the way session was cut short hurriedly before the due date-March 28.

There was adjournment of the House four times due to ruckus created by the Opposition which was demanding a discussion on the suicide case and overall women safety in the state.

Congress legislators who had moved adjournment motion wanted a discussion on the suicide case and overall safety of women in the state.

Seeking cooperation of Congress legislators in the smooth conduct of the House proceedings, speaker Sitasharan Sharma, however, maintained that the demand was being looked into, adding that there were already call attention motions related to these issues.

This led to pandemonium in the House. Parliamentary affairs minister Narottam Mishra said the Opposition was not allowing the House proceedings deliberately. Congress legislators maintained that all they wanted was a discussion on the issue. They entered the well and started shouting slogans against the state government and related to women safety.

Ajay Singh, leader of the Opposition in the House said it was a black day in the history of the assembly the way the listed business for the day was amended to end the budget session prematurely. It is clear now that daughters are not safe in your regime, he said.

BJP legislators responded by questioning Congress that if they were so serious about women safety, where was their MLA Hemant Katare and where they were not presenting him before the authorities concerned.

After the House was adjourned sine die, Ajay Singh told media persons outside that he was a six-time MLA, but he had never come across what had happened in the House on Wednesday. This is a black day in our democracy. Without allowing discussion on such a sensitive issue, the budget was passed hurriedly and House adjourned sine die, he said, adding, Our voice is being stifled.Remember those thundering arguments made by lawyers in older Hindi movies, and the more recent edge-of-the-seat courtroom scenes in the Jolly LLB series (2013 and 2017), Pink (2016), and Oh My God (2012)? The legal drama, as a genre, appears to have come into its own in Bollywood  a string of films are planned for this year and the next, and stars like Shahid Kapoor, Taapsee Pannu, and Yami Gautam are putting on the lawyers coat.

Courtroom dramas and actors turning lawyers Richa Chadha and Akshaye Khanna will battle it out in court in Manish Guptas Section 375: Marzi Ya Jabardasti, which is about the about the misuse of rape laws in India, using an ambiguous case as the background. Taapsee Pannu turns lawyer for Anubhav Sinhas directorial Mulk, a story about a girl trying to help her family trapped in a dark controversy. Starring Yami Gautam and Shahid Kapoor as lawyers, Shree Narayan Singhs film, Batti Gul Meter Chaalu, is about the discrepancies in electric billing in rural areas and small towns. The third film in the Jolly LLB franchise is likely to show a clash between both the previous leads, played by Akshay Kumar and Arshad Warsi. Theres a biopic, too, being made on the top defence laywer Ram Jethmalani. Casting has not yet been announced.

It can be a source of inspiration

What makes the courtroom drama a popular genre? Shree Narayan Singh, who is directing Batti Gul Meter Chaalu, says, Lawyers, with all due respect, are often viewed with doubt and suspicion, especially since they have to represent all sorts of clients. To see a lawyer use the tools of their trade to overcome greater enemies is, therefore, a source of inspiration. (For instance, Amitabh Bachchans lawyer character in Pink ensured justice for his client, a young woman played by Taapsee Pannu, by ripping apart a commonly peddled notion: when a woman says no to sex, she actually means yes. Amitabh establishes that no simply means no.)

Actor Taapsee Pannu in a still from PINK (2016).

Anubhav Sinha, director of Mulk, feels that the courtroom drama has been a sub-genre across the world. Even in India  no matter how unrecognised  this space has always been flourishing. Also, it needs more research than a regular fiction drama, because youre dealing with the law and also the norms of a courtroom, so you want to be technically correct, he says.

Actor Kunal Kemmu, who is co-producing a biopic based on the famous defence lawyer Ram Jethmalani, believes that its the suspense of whether justice will be served or not, and two sides battling it out  right and wrong  that makes such films an interesting watch.

More research on actors part

Actors, too, need to put in that extra effort to play a lawyer. And most of them agree that it requires way more research than for most other characters. The body language and the mannerisms [of a lawyer] are a challenge. Also, the environment in an actual courtroom is quite different from what we see in films; hence, witnessing a real courtroom always helps, says Yami Gautam.

Taapsee says that its quite different standing on the other side of the box. I realised that the responsibility and intimidation is much more when youre the one driving the argument. We had a practising lawyer on the sets all the time to help us with the exact terminology and body language, she says.

Actors Akshay Kumar and Arshad Warsi are likely to team up for Jolly LLB 3

To play her part of a public prosecutor right, Richa Chadha is watching a lot of documentaries. Im trying to understand how female lawyers have crusaded against issues close to them across continents. This film will show the Indian courts proceedings pretty much as they are, without the sort of over-dramatised versions of the past, she says.

The challenge that comes along

Although a legal drama isnt a new concept, with cinemas reach increasing, filmmakers and actors do have a responsibility to inform as well as entertain. The only way to deal with serious subjects is to look at the situations with a bit of humour; it not only entertains but also eases the load of a heavy subject, says Shree Narayan. He adds that actors in legal dramas have to draw upon nuance more than movement, as their physical space is limited.

Taapsee sums up: Being a part of a courtroom drama is extremely challenging, as the movie revolves around the same set of actors, between the same walls for a long time, and its a challenge to hold the audiences attention.

Interact with Monika Rawal Kukreja at Twitter/@monikarawalReacting to controversies involving actor Sahil Khan and Jackie Shroffs wife Ayesha Shroff in the latest Call Data Recording (CDR) case, the Style actor claimed Karma is a b***h. In a video posted on his YouTube channel, Khan said, I have moved on, I had forgiven her for whatever happened. I do not know what her intentions were; well know when the police find out. Karma is a b***h, what goes around comes around, I had forgotten about this but maybe karma had other plans.

Earlier, during the analysis of celebrity advocate Rizwan Siddiquis mobile, Deputy Commissioner of Police (DCP), Thane crime branch, Abhishek Trimukhe had revealed that they recovered CDRs of Khan. As per DCP Trimukhe, the CDRs were shared with Rizwan by Ayesha Shroff.

As per information, Ayesha allegedly had an affair with Khan and a dispute between the two led the former to procure the CDRs of Khan, who later shared it with Rizwan. The lawyer was allegedly blackmailing Sahil.

The scandal involves the extraction of call details from private detectives. The case surfaced in January but various Bollywood celebrities were named earlier this month. While actor Nawazuddin Siddiqui has refuted allegations that he was paying to spy on his wife, Kangana Ranaut -- who police said shared Hrithik Roshans number with the lawyer -- also said proper investigation must be done before drawing assumptions. When we respond to a notice, we give all details to lawyer. To assume that these details were used to violate law and make statements based on that assumption and defame an artiste is super lame, Kangana Ranaut said in a statement.

Meanwhile, the Bombay High Court slammed the Thane police for not following procedure before arresting Rizwan Siddiqui following which he was released this evening.While last year, actor Sharad Kelkar had five releases including four Hindi and one Marathi film, this year, he has had only one release so far  Marathi film Rakshas. But doing several movies at the same time is not on his mind, and neither is he worried about the number of offers hes getting.

If you observe my career, I always do one positive role and then one negative. I dont want to do limited things in the same category, so I am always reinventing [my onscreen image]. I may wait for six months but I ensure that I pick something different, says the actor who was seen in the Sanjay Dutt and Aditi Rao Hydari-starrer Bhoomi and Baadshaho, featuring Ajay Devgn and Ileana DCruz, last year.

Sharad insists that he wants the audience to remember him for his good work and not the number of films that he has been a part of. Number of films dont count for me. It is the quality of work I am doing in a year that matters. I dont want to get dated or typecast and I work with that in mind. I did a biopic on a minister, then Rocky Handsome (2016), and then played a common man, followed by a villainous role in Bhoomi, so I have always tried to grow as an actor, he adds.

The actor refrains from being part of films where he doesnt have a substantial role. I believe that even if you do one film, people should remember your character for a long time after the film, and hope that hell do something different next. Thats my motto, he shares.

Sharad recalls that even during his television days, he never repeated roles on screen. There were times when I was sitting at home [for six months] with nothing in hand, and I used to chill and choose between shows. I remember 50 shows came to me but I refused and said that I have already done this. Whether the money was good or not, Ive not got repetitive, he says. Sharad is a well-known face on television through shows such as Uttaran, Sinndoor Tere Naam Ka, Saat Phere, Koi Laut Ke Aaya Hai, and more.

So is this the reason that despite hailing from TV, hes had a fairly good graph in films too? Sharad replies in agreement, Yes, I guess that attracts filmmakers, to an extent. Also, when you go on set, you have to be honest, punctual, and prepared for whatever role you are doing. And then when you perform, the director also sees that hard work in your performance and that urge to do something new each time. Eventually, they start liking you, so its a formula that everyone has in their life.

Interact with Monika Rawal Kukreja at Twitter/@monikarawalSC Lowy Financial HK Ltd. said it will trade more distressed debt in India, which has become its most important market in Asia, thanks to a hefty supply spurred by the rollout of a new bankruptcy law.

India now accounts for 30% to 40% of the Hong Kong-based loan and bond trading firms activities, up from 10% to 15% just a year ago, said Soo Cheon Lee, its co-founder and chief investment officer. Previously, it was more or less evenly spread in Australia, Korea, China, India, South East Asia and the Middle East.

India is the main market for distressed debt in Asia for us, Lee said in an interview. Its because of the Modi governments initiative to clean up non-performing loans at its lenders and the amazing execution of the new insolvency law, he said.

Cleaning up Indias stressed loans has been a big priority of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in order to attract investments to the country. The new insolvency resolution process, born in 2016 after the the government overhauled its archaic bankruptcy laws, was designed to clear out distressed companies through asset sales.

Among companies under the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC) are Essar Steel India Ltd., Aircel Ltd. and Bhushan Steel Ltd. A $2 billion bank fraud at Punjab National Bank will also likely add to the supply of distressed loans.

As a foreign financial firm, it is easier to do business in India than in China, where local partnerships are usually required, Lee said. High returns of about 15% from its distressed debt investments in India is a draw too, he said.

Rising bankruptcy cases in India are presenting new opportunities for hedge funds focusing on the latest fallout in banking and other key industries. Regulatory pressure for banks to recognize bad loans has also led to a 30% jump in non-performing loans, Fitch Ratings said in a Feb. 22 note.

The government is fine-tuning the bankruptcy process, which has to continue as they are cleaning up the NPLs, Lee said. It is still just the beginning and we expect this to last for at least 1-2 years.

--With assistance from David YongThe Supreme Court on Thursday refused to grant permission to Reliance Communications Ltd (RCom) to sell its wireless assets to upstart rival Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd, saying it will hear the case again in two weeks.

The ruling marks a setback for RCom, which is trying to reduce debts worth $6.8 billion and pay back its creditors. The companys shares dropped as much as 6.9% after the ruling.

The Supreme Court set a hearing for April 5 to continue examining whether it will allow the sale to go through despite an ongoing legal challenge filed by Swedish telecom gearmaker Ericsson at an arbitration tribunal. The Swedish company had sought the courts help to prevent RCom from selling assets without its permission.

State Bank of India, one of RComs biggest creditors had filed a petition to the Supreme Court to allow the sale to go through even as Ericssons case remains at the arbitration tribunal.

RCom, controlled by billionaire Anil Ambani, had decided in December to sell its wireless assets to Jio in a deal pegged at $3.8 billion, sources said. The indebted company was keen to close the sale by March after previous debt-reducing attempts had failed.

RCom is also facing a separate legal challenge after the National Company Law Tribunal, Indias designated court for bankruptcy cases, last week stayed the asset sale following a petition filed by HSBC Daisy Investments (Mauritius) Ltd.Aditya Birla group firm UltraTech Cement on Wednesday said it has not violated the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC) in offering a Rs 7,266 crore bid to acquire debt ridden Binani Cement (BCL), which was already set to be sold to the Dalmia Bharat group by its group of creditors.

UltraTech has announced it will acquire Binani Cement by providing Rs 7,266 crore to its parent company Binani Industries Ltd (BIL), against a bid of Rs 6,350 crore along with 20% equity in BCL by Rajputana Properties, a part of Dalmia Bharat group, approved by the resolution professional (RP).

| Read: UltraTech attempts to beat out Dalmia Bharat, says set to buy Binani Cement

We are fully compliant with IBC (Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code). We have submitted our bid. We are allowed to revise our bids. IBC says maximise value and if the banker is getting higher amount of money before they have taken a decision, then they should take a decision with their eyes open, Atul Daga , CFO, UltraTech Cemen told PTI.

Daga added that the company is committed to honour the amount which it has offered.

We have filed it with NCLT, well before the Committee of Creditors (CoC) recommendation was put out, well before CoC filed their resolution plan bid with NCLT. Where we have gone wrong?, Daga said.

He said UltraTech agreed to issue comfort letters to provide Rs 7,266 crore in return for 98.43% stake in Binani Cement after an approach from the owners of BCL.

If they can take the company out of insolvency proceedings, we are happy to pay the same amount of money to buy the company and it has to be used to repay the debt. For that purpose they wanted a letter of comfort and we have given them a letter of comfort. I do not think that we have gone against IBC anyway, Daga added.

According to him, some of the creditors who were not happy with Dalmia Group bids have approached NCLT backing Ultratechs bid.

All the creditors, who are against the bid from the present resolution plan have gone to NCLT. They are trade creditors, suppliers who have filed the claim at NCLT, said Daga.

He further said, SBI Hongkong, Exim bank had filed a case for maximisation of the value because clearly they were feeling let down by the proposal accepted by the majority of the creditor.

Meanwhile, in a separate development, BIL denied reports of resolution professional alleging fraud by BIL promoters.

The question of any fraud committed by the company or by members of the board of directors of the company does not and cannot arise as all the accounts of the company and the holding companies are fully audited, and all transactions, including related party transaction have been disclosed, BIL said in a regulatory filing.

Dalmia Bharat had informed stock exchanges on Tuesday that its Rs 6,350-crore bid has been submitted by RP before NCLT for approval and it has also submitted a performance bank guarantee (PBG) of 10% of upfront payment of its offer to the financial creditors of BCL.Vodafone India and Idea Cellular Ltd, which are in the process of a merger, on Thursday outlined the key leadership team which will head the merged entity.

Kumar Mangalam Birla will be the non-executive chairman of the merged company. Balesh Sharma, who is currently the chief operating officer (COO) of Vodafone India, has been as the chief executive officer (CEO) of the merged entity.

Akshaya Moondra, currently chief financial officer at Idea Cellular, will be the CFO and Ambrish Jain, currently deputy managing director at Idea, will take over as COO of the merged entity, a statement from Vodafone Group Plc said.

Both Moondra and Jain will report to Balesh Sharma, who will be responsible for the combined businesss strategy and its execution as well as driving integration.

Mint had on 10 February reported that Birla may be appointed as the chairman of the Vodafone-Idea combine.

Vodafone and Idea continue to make good progress in securing the required regulatory approvals for the merger...and completion is expected to be in the first half of the current calendar year, the statement said.

The merged entity is yet to receive the final approval from the department of telecommunications. It has already received approval from the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT), the Competition Commission of India (CCI) and the Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi).

The Vodafone-Idea merger, aimed at dominating a market that Mukesh Ambanis Reliance Jio Infocomm Ltd had disrupted with free voice calls and low data tariffs, will create the worlds second largest and Indias largest telecom firm in terms of subscribers, overtaking Bharti Airtel Ltd.

The existing leadership teams of Idea Cellular and Vodafone India will continue to manage their separate businesses and be accountable for each companys operational performance until the merger becomes effective, the statement said. The two will cease to operate as distinct and competing entities only upon completion of the merger.

Manish Dawar, currently CFO of Vodafone India, will have overall responsibility for integration planning, governance and execution. Nick Gliddon, currently director, Vodafone Business Services, at Vodafone India, will head the enterprise business of the merged entity.

Sashi Shankar, currently chief marketing officer at Idea, will head the marketing and brand strategy while Vishant Vora, currently chief technology officer of Vodafone India, will assume responsibility for networks and overall technology strategy.

Vodafone Indias HR head Suvamoy Roy Choudhury would continue in the same role for the merged entity, and Prakash Paranjape, currently chief information officer at Idea Cellular, will be responsible for IT operations.

Kavita Nair, who is associate director (commercial operations) at Vodafone India, will lead digital transformation across all functions. Navanit Narayan, chief service delivery officer at Idea Ceullar, will be incharge of strategy. P. Balaji, Vodafone Indias head of regulatory, external affairs and CSR, will have the same role in the merged entity.

Vodafone Indias general counsel Kumar Das will lead the legal function. Rajesh Srivastava, chief commercial officer at Idea, will hold charge of the procurement function of the combined businesses.

Ideas head of corporate affairs Rajat Mukherjee and head of technology Anil Tandon would be full-time advisers to the merged business in their respective areas of expertise.

Vodafone India CEO Sunil Sood will join Vodafone Group Plcs Africa, Middle East & Asia-Pacific leadership team. Aditya Birla Group intends to nominate Himanshu Kapania, currently the CEO of Idea Cellular, as non-executive board member of the merged entity, the statement added.

The Idea-Vodafone merger, announced in March 2017, is based on equal rights and equal shareholding between Ideas promoters and Vodafone. To achieve this, Vodafone has kept its 42% stake in Indus Towers Ltd, valued at around $5 billion, out of the deals purview. It can also contribute Rs2,500 crore more net debt than Idea into the merged entity.

On 4 January 2018, the promoters of Idea Cellular said they will invest Rs3,250 crore into the firm. As a result of a change in Ideas shareholding following the fundraising, Aditya Birla Group and Vodafone agreed the former will buy a minimum of 2.5% of the merged entity from Vodafone, or such stake as is required in order for it to ultimately own at least 26% of the merged entity, Vodafone said in a statement then.

Consequently, Vodafone will receive minimum proceeds of Rs1,960 crore from such a sale and Vodafones ownership in the combined entity is expected to be approximately 47.5% at completion.

The two companies also await the closure of the deal with ATC Telecom Infrastructure Pvt. Ltd, which has agreed to purchase a total 20,000 standalone telecom towers of Idea Cellular and Vodafone India for $1.2 billion.Congress members held a protest at Buddha Park here on Wednesday against the new excise policy that favours big players.

The new policy for FL 5 liquor that would be sold from malls and departmental stores benefits only big operators, said Mandi Parishad chairman Sumit Hridyesh, who led the protest.

The government has set a target of selling non-alcohol goods worth 5 crore a year to get eligible to open a liquor shops in a mall, Hridyesh said, adding that it was not possible for a small liquor operator.

The policy is to create monopoly of big liquor operators and syndicates, said Hridyesh.

Congress leaders urged the government to change the liquor policy so that small operators get a level playing field and unemployed youth, who are employed in this trade, are not devoid of their livelihood.

Congress Haldwani city unit president Rahul Chhimwal said the government wants to promote monopoly of the big cartels in the liquor trade.

It is condemnable that a new clause was added in the policy and unjustified as license holders in Uttarakhand cannot have that high turnover and that too in the non-alcohol segment, he said.

Chhimwal said his party would be raising the issue on various forums and press upon the chief minister to change the liquor policy so that it does not tend to create monopoly of the big operators.The Rs 45,585-crore Budget 2018-19 presented by Uttarakhand finance minister Prakash Pant Thursday is nearly equal to the amount that the mountain state has to repay to various agencies against loans it availed over last 16 years.

The hill state needs to repay Rs 45,000 crore  only Rs 585 crore less than the budget. The burden is likely to increase considering the fact that the budget proposes a deficit of Rs 9,925 crore. The second budget of the Trivendra Singh Rawat government has proposed earnings of Rs 35,660 crore from revenue receipts. The budget allocation for the next fiscal is 14.08% more than previous fiscals.

A closer look reveals the mess that states finances are in. The hill state is spending much more than it is earning.

Sample this: In the current fiscal, the fund-starved state had to take a loan of Rs 5700 crore to pay salaries, pension, and for other related expenditure.

Prior to this, the previous Congress government had availed Rs 23,000 crore in loans during its five year term from 2012 to 2017. The BJP government that ruled state from 2007 to 2012 had taken loans worth Rs 10,500 crore. The first government, of Congress, elected in 2002, two years after Uttarakhand was created, had borrowed Rs 6500 crore.

Former chief secretary Indu Kumar Pandey, who is also an expert on financial matters, said it was a matter of concern that sources of revenue in Uttarakhand were drying up. The 14th finance commission has limited the provision of assistance to special category states like ours. Due to this state is losing Rs 2000 crore annually, Pandey said.

Moreover, the state could have capitalized on the hydro-power but most of the projects are stuck in legal and environmental net. Tourism sector has a huge revenue potential provided the government departments work in a focussed way and in sync with each other.

The government will have to look for private investment in tourism. Moreover tough initiatives need to be taken to cut down non-plan expenditure, Pandey said.

The former chief secretary, who submitted a report to the government earlier this year on administrative house-keeping, said the state government will have to cut down the workforce in the years to come else it would become very tough for the future governments to manage the finances.

A retired finance officer, TN Singh, said that financial scene worsened after 2004 when some new but unnecessary departments were established.

According to the budget plan, 56.36% of the money will be spent on paying salaries, pension, and other administrative expenditures.The budget presented by the AAP government in the Delhi Assembly on Thursday focused on reducing pollution levels in the national capital by proposing various measures, including concession in registration of CNG cars.

Presenting estimates for the 2018-19 fiscal, deputy chief minister Manish Sisodia said this is the first Green budget of the government aimed at effective containment of pollution in the city.

On Wednesday, Sisodia had presented the governments report card by highlighting the targets met by 14 of its 34 departments for a period of nine months from April to December, 2017. Road infrastructure and public transport are the two sectors where people have benefitted the least from Delhi government, results of the citys first outcome budget revealed.

Here are the updates:

2:30pm: Delhi govt allocates Rs 13,997 crore, which is 26% of the total budget, for the education sector.

2pm: The AAP government allocated Rs 6,729 crore for the health sector in its budget for 2018-19 fiscal presented in the Delhi Assembly and announced the launch of a health insurance for all scheme.

1:45pm: The project to install CCTV cameras across Delhi will be completed by June, 2019, according to the government.

1:42pm: Govt announces that construction of an elevated road parallel to Yamuna between Signature Bridge and Kalindi Kunj will start this year.

1:40pm: Delhi budget allocations -- Rs 100 crore for free Wi-fi scheme in Delhi. Rs 10 crore for Smart Krishi Yojna for farmers

1:35pm: AAP allocates Rs 1,500 crore for the development of unauthorized colonies. Last years allocation in this connection was Rs 846 crore, says Sisodia.

1:32pm: The state finance minister says in his budget speech that Barapullah Phase-2 and Phase-3 elevated roads are likely to be completed by the end of March 2018 and December 2018 respectively.

Expenditure on Barapullah phase-3 is expected to be Rs 1,260 crore.

1:30pm: Amid row over the sealing drive, Delhi govt announces an allocation of Rs 100 crore for development of markets. Money will be spent in coordination with various market associations

1:25pm: Internal sewer line installation in 162 colonies to be completed by 2020. It will benefit 13 lakh people, says AAP govt.

RS 2,777 crore allocation for water sector. In 2017-18, the same was 2,107.9 crore.

1:20pm: Allocation to the health sector in 2018-19 is Rs 6729 crore. Mohalla clinics and polyclinics will get 403 crore. Rs 450 crore for new hospitals and redeveloping existing hospitals.

In 2017-18, the allocation was Rs 5,736 crore

1:15pm: Aam Aadmi Party government allocates Rs 175 crore to install 1.2 lakh CCTV cameras in government schools, says education/finance minister.

1:05pm: Other schemes:

Rs 10 crore for civil defence training of girl students

Rs 35 crore allocation for two schemes to promote sportsperson in Delhi.

Additional Rs 20 crore to promote sports in every assembly constituency

Rs 15 crore allocated to Delhi Commission for Protection of Child Rights to evaluate and rank government schools

1pm: School management committee (SMCs) to get a fund of Rs 5 lakh for expenses on reaching innovation in schools.

12:50pm: The govt will introduce parenting workshops, apart from happiness curriculum, education minister Manish Sisodia says, refers to the alleged suicide of a Class 9 girl to explain the importance of the two programmes.

12:45pm: Delhi govt to introduce solar farms to harness renewable energy in agricultural land. The PWD, on pilot basis, will install solar panels over 16 km length of cycle tracks, Sisodia says.

12:40pm: 1000 electric buses to be brought in Delhi, apart from that 905 electric feeder buses that will be introduced for last mile connectivity.

12:35pm: Make Delhi Kikar free is another campaign that the Delhi govt will run.

Incentives galore for those who shift to cleaner gas, generators and tandoors pic.twitter.com/XUZjY9YAPl  Sweta Goswami (@sweta_goswami) March 22, 2018

12:32pm: Delhi budget has a 26-point programme under the citys first Green Budget.

12:30pm: Govt gives a special allocation of Rs 1000 crore to repair roads. Even those which come under the MCDs will be covered under this. Sisodia requests L-G Anil Baijal to give the government NOC from civic bodies.

12:25pm: Total Budget outlay for 2018-19 is Rs 53,000 crore. Last year, it was Rs 48,000 crore.

12:15pm: Instead of a trickle down model, Delhi govt has applied a trickle up model so that our schemes directly reach the poor, says finance minister.

12:10pm: Manish Sisodia presents the Delhi Budget 2018 in Delhi Assembly.

The budget estimates for 2018-19 are pegged at Rs 53000 crore which is 19.45 per cent more than the revised budget estimates of Rs 44,370 crore for the previous financial year, Sisodia said.

11:45am: Deputy CM and state finance minister Manish Sisodia arrives to present the Delhi budget at the Legislative Assembly in Old Secretariat.

Govts proposed schemes

The Delhi govts two schemes -- waiving road tax on electric vehicles and creating solar farms -- will be part of the citys first Green Budget that will seek to control air pollution in the national capital.

 The government is hoping that the owners of some of the 6.7 million scooters and motorcycles in the city will move to electric vehicles on the strength of this incentive, an official told HT.

 The budget is also likely to introduce the concept of solar farming where interested farmers can get solar panels installed on their land at no cost by empanelled companies and earn money by selling a part of the electricity generated.

Outcome report

The Delhi governments report card, presented on Wednesday, indicated good performances in the education sector, social welfare and by the Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Board -- highlighting education and healthcare as the core sectors of progress. However, experts also said the Delhi govt is lagging behind when it comes to tangible projects like infrastructure.The Class 10 social science examination of the Central Board of Secondary Education evoked a mixed response from students on Thursday as some found the paper easy and others complained that questions related to maps were tricky and time-consuming.

Lucknow

Students and teachers in Uttar Pradesh capital, said the social science paper was more or less easy but tricky and the questions related to maps was tough and took time.

Questions carrying 1 mark and 3 marks were easy, but map work was difficult, Siddhi Suryavanshi, a student from GD Goenka Public School, said.

The question on map work was indirect but other questions were fine, Dolsi Varshney, another student from the same school, said.

Other students from the school also claimed that overall the paper was easy barring question 13 and 18. Some students added that the 5 mark value based question was tricky as it involved more thinking skills.

Some of the teachers from GD Goenka Public School said students should be able to score well since the overall level of paper was as expected.

Though a few students faced problems in the long-answer type questions, it will not affect their overall scores as the paper wasnt long and students could manage their time well, they added.

Some students, however, found the paper easy.

It was an easy paper. We attempted all question and managed to complete the paper before time, Neha Mahajan, a student from City International School, said.

She said most of the students found the paper easy and scoring as well.

Abhinav, another student from the same school, said the paper was easy but he found paper a little lengthy though he attempted all the questions.

Bhopal

Students in Madhya Pradeshs Bhopal were happy with the easy and prompt questions.

I found all the questions very straight. I answered them promptly because I rigorously followed NCERT books, Sagar Public Schools Divyansh Pipariya said.

The exam paper was so easy. I read the questions so many times to clear my doubt that how they can ask easy questions in the board exam, Neenu Vijay, a student of Bal Bharti Public School, said.

Kempfort Public Schools Sachin Singh Kushwaha said the map section was also very easy. I am expecting a good score, Kushwaha added.

Patna

Himanshu of Gyanasthali School in Bihars capital found the history section toughest of all, economics easiest and labelled questions from geography as average.

I think I will score over 85, he said.

PJ Joseph, a teacher of economics at Notre Dame Academy, said the questions were direct.

This year the questions were the easiest of all as compared to last five to six years, he added.

Allahabad

Animesh Srivastava, a student of Gangagurukulam School, said the paper was easy and the questions were from the syllabus. Piyush Pratap Singh, another student, also termed the paper as easy but lengthy.

The social science question paper of class 10 was easy. The one mark analyse the statement question should have been moulded in a better way, Alpona Dey, principal of Gangagurukulam School, who also teaches social science, said.

Scoring part of the paper was map work of geography and history besides questions covering topics of international trade, globalisation, institutional and technological reforms in agriculture, etc, she added.

Kusum Srivastava, another teacher of the subject, also referred to the paper as balanced and in accordance with the pattern prescribed by the board.

Students were able to attempt all the questions as the same pattern was asked in two pre-board exams. The subject is strenuous as students have to cover almost 30 chapters pertaining to history, civics, geography and economics for the exam, she added.

The Class 10 board exams are being taken by 16,38,428 candidates at 4,453 centres across India and 78 centres outside the country.

The Class 10 students are taking the compulsory board exams after a gap of seven years after the human resource development (HRD) ministry made the Class 10 exams optional in 2009. Last year, the ministry decided to make board exam for Class 10 mandatory.Shri Ram College of Commerces (SRCC) fest Crossroads is usually a spectacle beyond compare. And to some extent, it was this year, too. However, it was the fashion competition that played spoilsport, as it reportedly saw ugly spats and drama, prompting the winning teams to return their awards and boycott the fest.

Whats the matter?

The fashion societies of Sri Guru Gobind Singh College of Commerce (I Vogue), Kamala Nehru College (Glitz) and Lady Irwin College (Prophecy) put up posts and stories on Instagram using the hashtag #UnitedWeStand, alleging that they were met with rude behaviour and shoddy management at Crossroads. They declared that theyll be giving up the titles they won at the show, with some deciding to boycott the fest altogether.

Chayan Jain, a participant and president of IVogue, has shared with HT that after the competition ended, the participating teams waited for the results to be announced. However, the host college, SRCC, told them that the results will be uploaded on Crossroads Facebook page.

To not announce the results after the show is not a usual practice. So, everyone pleaded the hosts to declare the results. After much cajoling, they told us that our college had won the first spot. But everyone wanted to see the mark sheet, which is a usual practice. But SRCC refused. Thats when we all raised our voices. Strangely, later they announced another result, according to which, KNCs Glitz was the winner and we were on the second spot. The drama didnt end there. They put up yet another result on FB where KNC was first and Lady Irwin was on the second spot, says Jain.

Upasna Dogra, a member of the fashion team of Lady Irwin College, adds that SRCCs organising team misbehaved with other teams. When we asked for the mark sheets of the judges, they rudely said that it wont be shown, and literally ran away. What was more annoying was that they kept uploading different results each time. They pointed out that the change in results was due to a technical glitch. So, they basically announced three different results. Their treatment of teams was unfair and how they handled the results was shady, something the fashion teams decided to stand up against. That is why we (Lady Irwin College) decided to boycott the fest and give up our positions.

See the posts here

SRCCs side

HT reached out to Demeanor, the fashion society of SRCC, for their side of the story. Shreeya Bharghava from the team said, We do acknowledge that there were a few issues on our part, but as a team we were answerable to the student union as well, which had put some rules in place. We tried our best to calm the participating teams, but I was scratched, my clothes were pulled and we were helpless.

Shreeya added that they took the matter in their hands because involving bouncers wouldve only escalated the situation further. We got the participants to sign a statement stating that they wouldnt take the matter further if we return their money (participation fee), yet this is what they ended up doing... I understand that these teams boycotting our fest might make a difference, but Crossroads has a legacy of its own, and the show will go on. Acting this way, despite our apologies and clarification, is something we didnt expect.Officials of the Sarvodaya Drivers Association, the principal cab drivers union in the NCR, have said that the aggregator cabs will not ply on Friday as the drivers would participate in a protest against low wages and the decision to ban the shared cab and bike service in the region.

The protest is likely to cripple cab services in the city and hit commuters, who have already been suffering due to the lack of adequate transportation services in Gurgaon. Due to lack of lack of last mile connectivity and public transport, city residents have had to fall back on the aggregator cabs to make their commute.

As per an estimate by the Regional Transport Office (RTO), over 20 thousand cabs ply in Gurgaon at present.

We will hold a big protest against the aggregators, as they have only been paying one-third of the promised amount to the drivers. Hence, as part of our bid to step up campaign till our demands are met, we have decided to pull out the aggregator cabs from the NCR for 24 hours, Kamaljeet Singh Gill, president, Sarvodaya Drivers Association, said.

Gill added that the protesting drivers and union members will assemble at Shaheed Bhagat Singh Park in New Delhi around 11am and march to the offices of OLA and Uber.

However, the despite the union threatening to pull out the aggregator cabs, OLA officials said that their cabs will ply as usual on the day.

We have learned about the strike by our driver partners in Delhi from media reports. As of now, it is business as usual for us in Delhi-NCR, an OLA spokesperson said.

Read I Gurgaon: Six days into strike, cabbies vexed over forgone income

There are no disruptions to our service in Delhi-NCR at this point. We are committed to serving the city and ensuring that our driver partners continue to access stable earning opportunities while giving riders a convenient option to get around Delhi-NCR, a statement from Uber said.

Although the union enlisted their support to the nationwide protest against OLA and Uber on Monday, it said it couldnt pull out a significant number of drivers under its wing from the streets, citing short notice. This was the reason why the protest on Monday had a marginal effect on the NCR.

Residents claimed a slight jacking up of fares and also reported a longer waiting time for cabs on Monday. However, the union, on Monday, did threaten to launch a full-scale protest on Friday.

Residents voiced mixed reactions to the decision to pull out aggregator cabs on Friday.

I book aggregator cabs quite often and had been informed by some drivers earlier that they have a lost a significant chuck of their daily earnings due to such protests in 2017. The said the previous protests failed to fetch them any gains. They said that their union had been a big letdown and they ply their vehicles instead of participating in such protests in future. Hence, I believe that there wont be any significant disruption to the cab service tomorrow, Anaita Kaul, a resident of DLF Phase-4, said.

However, others said they are not hopeful of the aggregator cabs plying as usual on Friday and will rely on the Metro service instead.

There have been previous incidents where the protests turned violent and cabs were damaged. Hence, I believe it would be wise to stay out of harms way and board the Metro instead, Nikhil Dsouza, a resident of DLF Phase-2, said.

On April 17 and 18, 2017, drivers working for the aggregators protested against increased road tax in Haryana.

Earlier, in February 2017, cab services were severely affected as drivers grounded their vehicles demanding higher wages and life insurance among other benefits.Have you ever pondered upon the little things that actually make you happy? Is it sleeping late on a Saturday night without worrying about waking up early the next day? Or is it a quiet meditation session late at night? Is it going on a shopping spree, splurging all your money or is it simply sitting down to a delicious home-made meal after a long day at work?

The answer is always subjective i.e. one persons favourite sandwich is another persons love for playing with babies. However, according to a Japanese study, happiness runs far deeper than commonplace culinary joys  in fact, it boils down to neuroscience and the size of a particular region in the brain.

A team of university professors in Japan examined the links between brain structure and happiness and found that happier people had a larger volume of grey matter in the precuneus, an area in the brain sandwiched between the two cerebral hemispheres that studies have linked to memory retrieval.

The researchers analysed structural MRI scans and compared these results with participants responses to the Japanese version of the Subjective Happiness Scale (SHS), which measures happiness levels via a four-item questionnaire. They asked questions intended to rate their personal levels of happiness on a seven-point scale and has been used globally in psychiatry since its advent in 1999.

They found that those who scored highly on the scale typically also benefited from this unique neurological structuring, quoted the Independent. However, they added that their findings dont necessarily suggest that happiness is dependent on neurological structuring, explaining that there are some lifestyle changes people can make to actually increase the volume of grey matter mass.

The benefits of meditation for mental wellbeing are well-documented, with one study claiming that just seven weeks of regular meditation boosted peoples feelings of life purpose enriching their social lives and even decreasing symptoms of illness. The Japanese study is published in Scientific Journals.

Follow @htlifeandstyle for moreAs legislators across 19 states on Friday vote to elect 59 members to the Rajya Sabha, all eyes are fixed on a single seat in Uttar Pradesh.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is assured of winning at least eight out of the 10 Rajya Sabha seats in Uttar Pradesh while the Samajwadi Party (SP) is set to win one. But the final seat --for which the BJP takes on a Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) candidate backed by the SP and the Congress -- is being seen as a key political battle after the recent bypolls in Gorakhpur and Phulpur.

Apart from the 10 seats from UP, six seats each from Bihar and Maharashtra, five each from Madhya Pradesh and West Bengal, four each from Gujarat and Karnataka, three each from Odisha, Rajasthan, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, two from Jharkhand and one each from Haryana, Chhattisgarh, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, and Kerala will also be decided.

A victory for the BJPs ninth candidate in the fray, Anil Agarwal, would mean defeat for joint opposition candidate Bhimrao Ambedkar of the BSP.

BJP (311) and its allies Suheldev Bharatiya Samaj Party (4) and Apna Dal (9) have a total of 324 votes, 296 of which will be needed to get eight candidates elected to the upper House, leaving only 28 surplus votes for the ruling party in Uttar Pradesh, nine short of the required number for its ninth candidate .

Each candidate needs 37 votes to be elected and the SPs Jaya Bachchan, whose party has 47 votes, is expected to win. The SP would be left with 10 votes to spare for Ambedkar after voting for Bachchan. The BSP has 19 votes of its own, and Ambedkar also has the support of seven Congress MLAs and one Rashtriya Lok Dal MLA, giving him exactly 37 votes.

In hectic lobbying preceding Fridays elections, two additional state legislators  SPs Nitin Agrawal and independent Amanmani Tripathi  attended a meeting over dinner hosted by chief minister Yogi Adityanath on Wednesday, suggesting that they would vote for the BJPs ninth candidate. The BJP is also banking on Vijay Mishra, a legislator of the Nishad Party, who has assured it of support. This takes Agarwals tally to 31 votes.

The battle on Friday is about whether the opposition is able to retain its 37 MLAs, or the BJP is able to wean away six more to its side.

A win over Ambedkar would exact revenge for the BJP, which lost the crucial Gorakhpur and Phulpur Lok Sabha seats to the SP this month in by-elections in which the latter had the backing of the BSP.

But BJP strategists admit that it is not going to be easy. The presence of independent legislator Raghuraj Pratap Singh, better known as Raja Bhaiya, and SP president Akhilesh Yadavs estranged uncle and party member of the legislative assembly (MLA) Shivpal Yadav at the SPs dinner for lawmakers indicates that the Opposition is in no mood to give up the fight. After Shivpals attendance at the SP dinner and claim that both candidates supported by his party would win, it remains to be seen how the SPs family feud plays out at the time of the actual voting, a BJP insider said.

At the same time, observers believe that there could be a last minute swing. As it is in power, BJP seems to have advantage at the moment as it has a few committed extra votes. says Athar Siddiqui of the Centre of Objective Research and Development. BJP strategists are also looking out for vulnerable MLAs in the SP, the BSP and the Congress.

Former SP general secretary Naresh Agrawal reached the BJP state headquarters on Thursday where he, along with his son Nitin Agrawal, formally joined the BJP in the presence of the partys state president Mahendra Nath Pandey.Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday greeted the people of Bihar on the occasion of Bihar Diwas, saying that the states contribution towards the countrys progress was exemplary and invaluable.

Greetings to my sisters and brothers of Bihar on Bihar Diwas. Right from historical times, Bihars contribution towards the nations progress is exemplary and invaluable, Modi tweeted.

Bihar Diwas marks the day the state of Bihar was carved out of the Bengal Presidency by the British in 1912.On Thursday, the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) registered a bank fraud case against Hyderabad-based Totem Infrastructure Ltd and its promoters, taking to 12 the number of major cases of suspected bank swindles it has registered this year.

Totem is accused of defrauding a consortium of eight banks led by Union Bank of India to the tune of Rs 1,394 crore. That takes the total amount involved in bank fraud cases this year to Rs 19,194 crore. The company couldnt immediately be reached for comment on Thursday evening.

The amount has already exceeded the Rs 11,777 crore involved in the 31 bank fraud cases registered by the investigating agencys Banking Security and Fraud Cell (BS&FC) in all of 2017  an indication of both the rash of bank fraud cases emerging as banks follow up on overdue loans and the huge amount involved in the Punjab National Bank (BNP) fraud case.

Diamond traders Nirav Modi and Mehul Choksi are alleged to have defrauded PNB to the tune of Rs 12,922 crore (thus far).

According to the Reserve Bank of Indias master directions issued on 1 July , 2016, banks can directly make a complaint to the CBIs specialized banking fraud unit, if the fraud involves more than Rs 25 crore and up to Rs 50 crore.

Complaints of frauds involving more that Rs 50 crore are lodged by the joint director (policy) of CBI but these cases too usually end up with the banking fraud unit. Cases involving frauds of between Rs 3 crore and up to Rs 25 crore are probed by the Anti Corruption Branch and Economic Offences Unit of the agency.

The BS&FC was formed in 1992 during the Harshad Mehta (stock market) scam, when the government felt the need to have a specialized unit in CBI to probe banking frauds, said NR Wasan, who retired as chief of the Bureau of Police Research and Development and worked with CBI for more than a decade.

In 2017, the BS&FC unit in Bengaluru registered the maximum of 11 cases while those in Delhi and Mumbai accounted for eight cases each. The Kolkata BS&FC unit registered four cases last year.

The fraud figures are based on the initial reporting by the banks to the CBI.

CBI probes only those cases where the fraud amount is above Rs 3 crore. The state police deals with the rest, although banks have to lodge a complaint with the state police as well as the Serious Fraud Investigation Office of the ministry of corporate affairs on frauds involving amounts higher than Rs 1 crore (but less than Rs 3 crore).

To be sure, the total amount of money involved in bad debts given out by banks is much bigger than the value in these cases. According to a database maintained by credit information company CIBIL, the total amount outstanding with wilful defaulters on 30 September 2017 was Rs 1.11 lakh crore. This amount only includes cases where the value of loan outstanding is more than Rs 25 lakh.In a move that will benefit over 3,200 students, the government has withdrawn a controversial order that capped educational aid to children of martyred and disabled soldiers at Rs 10,000 per month last year.

Educational concession will continue without the cap of Rs 10,000 per month, an order issued by the finance ministry on March 21 stated.

The government had faced a backlash from various quarters after the defence ministry instructed the three chiefs and the coast guard head in a letter dated September 13, 2017, that the combined amount of tuition fees and hostel charges for such wards be restricted to Rs 10,000 per month.

The new order said the educational concession will be admissible for pursuing studies in government and government-aided educational institutions. It can also be availed for studying in military/sainik schools and other educational institutions recognised by the central and state governments (including autonomous organisations financed by the administration).

By removing the cap on the educational concession, the government has restored the faith of families left behind in the system. We know we are not alone. The country is with us, said Captain Shalini Singh (retd), whose husband  Major Avinash Singh Bhadauria  was posthumously awarded the Kirti Chakra in 2001. Their son is pursuing a course in engineering.

This is the least we, as a country, can do for the children of our bravehearts, said a senior army officer.

The government spends over Rs 15 crore on the scheme annually. The defence ministry persuaded the finance ministry twice in this regard, a defence ministry spokesperson said on Thursday.

The cap on financial aid was imposed in keeping with the recommendations of the 7th Central Pay Commission last year. The defence ministry re-examined the matter and reached out to the finance ministry after the armed forces wrote to it in this regard.

Admiral Sunil Lanba, navy chief and chairman of the chiefs of staff committee, had also sought the withdrawal of the Rs 10,000 cap in a letter to defence minister Nirmala Sitharaman. She then met finance minister Arun Jaitley to get the matter resolved, said a defence ministry official familiar with the issue.

The scheme to provide financial aid to children of martyrs was announced in December 1971, days after Indias victory in its war with Pakistan.Telugu Desam Party president and Andhra Pradesh chief minister N Chandrababu Naidu on Thursday demanded demonetisation of Rs 2,000 and Rs 500 notes to root out corruption, particularly in politics.

Replying to a debate in the state assembly in Amaravati, the chief minister also suggested that the push for cashless transactions should continue with more vigour. He wanted all transactions to be made online and said Andhra Pradesh had been making progress in that direction.

Naidu was the chairman of the 13-member committee of Niti Aayog on cashless economy constituted in November 2016, when the NDA government launched the demonetisation drive.

I was the first politician in the country to demand a ban on currency of high value denominations. I am demanding again now to ban the same high value currency of Rs 2,000 and Rs 500, he said. "If you ban Rs 2,000 and Rs 500 notes, no party can distribute money in elections. How much money of Rs 100 denomination can the leaders carry?

He said his government had been struggling day and night to take up developmental works across the state. But, just before elections, somebody from Bombay or Bangalore enters the scene with bundles of cash. Why should we be afraid of such people? We should ask votes based on our service and the administration we give to them, Naidu said.

Referring to the allegations levelled by popular Telugu actor and Jana Sena Party chief Pawan Kalyan that the TDP had already parked Rs 25 crore each in all the 175 assembly constituencies for the next elections, the chief minister said: Let the government ban Rs 2,000 and Rs 500 notes immediately. If at all I had already diverted cash to the constituencies, it would become useless if the high value currency is banned.

Naidu spoke at length on the corruption charges levelled against his government by the BJP, with which he had snapped ties in the last fortnight over special staus for Andhra Pradesh. "My reply to all those who level corruption charges on my government is that we have proved our sincerity to end corruption by making online all payments under welfare schemes, right from social security pensions. It is because of zero corruption investors from across the globe are coming to Andhra Pradesh," he added.The Congress would bring a privilege motion against external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj for misleading Parliament and the families of 39 Indians who were killed in Iraq, senior party leader Ambika Soni said on Thursday.

The motion would be moved in the Rajya Sabha, a party leader said.

The statement came a few hours after Congress president Rahul Gandhi accused the government of inventing his partys links to British firm Cambridge Analytica, which is in the middle of a data-breach storm, as it was caught lying on missing Indians.

The Congress has accused the government and Swaraj of giving false hope to the families and delay in announcing the death of the workers who were abducted by Islamic State in Mosul in 2014 when the group overran large swathes of Iraq.

Swaraj had informed Parliament on Tuesday that the men were dead after DNA samples of the family members matched those of the bodies found in a mass grave near Mosul.

The minister, who had earlier maintained the government would not declare the men dead till it had strong evidence, has said the search for bodies could not have begun until Mosul was liberated.

The northern Iraqi city was freed of IS in July 2017 after a bitter nine-month battle and it was after that the government started collecting DNA samples of the family members of the missing men.

As reported by Hindustan Times on March 22, the men were shot, most of them in the head. Dr Zaid Ali Abbas of Iraqs department of forensic medicine told HT that most of the bodies had gunshot wounds to the head.

Forensically, I can confirm that they definitely died over a year ago, Abbas said over the phone.The central government has begun work on rolling out its ambitious healthcare scheme, Ayushman Bharat, day after the Union Cabinet gave its approval for the launch of the insurance project that aims to fund hospitalisation cost of an estimated 10 crore economically deprived families.

Union health minister Jagat Prakash Nadda on Thursday said the government has set June-end as the target for on-ground assessment of the information technology (IT) system, which he described as the backbone of the totally cashless and paperless National Health Protection Scheme (NHPS).

The minister said the Rs 10,000 crore scheme, which will provide a cover of Rs 5 lakh per family per year, will include protection for 1,347 diseases, with the possibility for addition to or deletion from this package list of diseases.

The insurance scheme will take care of secondary and tertiary treatment, including treatment for cancer, cardiac and neuro surgeries. It will do away with out-of-pocket expenditure as comprehensive packages covering expenditure incurred in travelling to and from hospital are also being drafted. Patients will pay absolutely nothing from their pockets, Nadda said.

Under the first phase of implementation, organ transplantation surgeries will not be included. We are still fine-tuning the list. It will take some time, said Preeti Sudan, secretary, health ministry.

The NHPS is a cashless scheme that can be availed at any government or private empanelled hospital across the country. It (the scheme) is not linked to Aadhaar and no eligible person will be denied the benefits if they dont have the Aadhaar, Sudan added.

The government has also decided not to issue any new card or number as part of the scheme. We tried distributing cards for Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojna (RSBY) but failed as it took us about a year to just distribute the cards. For this scheme, we will make use of the QR code already assigned to the families by the rural development ministry. The families can retain the code by printing it out, Sudan said.

The health ministry has held a series of consultations with the state governments and insurance companies to discuss the implementation of the scheme.

All states are on board. Even though Tripura wasnt part of the consultations held last month, it hasnt declined to implement the scheme. There has been a positive response from private insurance companies, too, said Dinesh Arora, director, Ayushman Bharat. While West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee had criticised the scheme, her states representatives had participated in the discussions.

The government has allowed the states to choose a financing model that works best for them  a private insurer, a Trust-based model or a mixed model, Arora said. Seven states use Trust models while Tamil Nadu has a mixed model system.

The operational guidelines will be shared with the states in April. We will sign a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the states individually once they finalise what they want to retain from our guidelines. We have planned meeting with the states at the zonal level in April and by May, there will be a robust IT network in place, Nadda said, adding the training of officials working on the project will be conducted in June. This will be the pilot stage to test its functioning and by July, the states will empanel eligible hospitals.

Experts feel the first year wont be a problem.

The financial constraint shouldnt be for this year. As insurance schemes work, and we have seen with RSBY, the typical hospitalisation is about 1% per family per year, so the average is no way going to be 5 lakh in a year, said Ramanan Laxminarayan, director, Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics & Policy.

The insurers, too, are hopeful. Its a welcome move not just to maintain a healthy India but also will create several lakh/s new jobs in the country as new healthcare facilities will come up in smaller districts and villages, said Antony Jacob, CEO, Apollo Munich Health Insurance.Hitting out at the Opposition for demanding a CBI probe into the alleged financial irregularities in an irrigation scheme, Andhra Pradesh chief minister N Chandrababu Naidu on Thursday said his life was an open book and he has done no wrong.

The chief minister also charged the YSR Congress and the BJP with hatching a conspiracy against him.

Naidu made the remarks to finance minister Yanamala Ramakrishnudu, who, during a teleconference this morning with the CM, had referred to YSRCs demand for a CBI probe against Naidu, said an official release.

Ramakrishnudu also referred to BJPs demand in the state Assembly on Wednesday for a CBI probe into the financial irregularities in the Pattisam lift irrigation scheme.

YSRC MP V Vijayasai Reddy said he would continue to meet the Prime Minister till he dragged me to the court. This itself reveals their conspiracy against me, the press release said quoting the TDP chief.

My life is an open book. I have committed no mistake, Naidu was quoted as telling his finance minister.

Lashing out at the opposition, he said they were not concerned about the peoples right but rather bent upon taking revenge against him.

In his teleconference with the CM, the finance minister also feared that a conspiracy may be on to block the execution of Polavaram project also.

To this, Naidu responded saying that he would tolerate no anti-farmer design by anyone.

The farmers themselves would revolt against any such act, he said, adding We will not tolerate if anything detrimental to farmers interest happens.

The chief minister called for a Japanese style protest of doing more work to carry the state forward on the development path.

Everyone should work daily for two hours extra and protest for an hour. While fighting with the Centre (on demand for special status to the state), we must ensure that the states development too is not hampered, he added.

The BJP had on Wednesday demanded an inquiry either by a sitting judge or the CBI into the large-scale financial misappropriation in execution of the Pattisam lift irrigation scheme on the Godavari river.

Citing a report by the Comptroller and Auditor General, BJP floor leader P Vishnu Kumar Raju had said over Rs 371 crore was allegedly misappropriated in the execution of the scheme.Sriram Mondal, a farmer at Chhoto Mollakhali village in the Sundarbans, will have to survive on his savings till the next crop season unless there is a normal monsoon this year.

Mondol is facing the crisis after the water table beneath his farmland dried up. And, he admits that he is to blame.

I made a blunder by tapping groundwater to grow high-yield paddy all these years. In the process, I also killed the only source of drinking water at this spot, Mondal laments.

The Sundarbans, famous for the worlds largest mangrove forest and as the home to the Royal Bengal Tiger, is a unique biosphere comprising more than 100 islands spread across India and Bangladesh.

The entire region was devastated by Cyclone Aila in 2009. The cyclone brought with it giant waves from the Bay of Bengal that submerged the islands in sea water, leaving thousands of acres unfit for traditional rainwater farming.

To save the locals, scientists and NGOs painstakingly retrieved pre-Green Revolution era paddy seeds that germinate in brackish water.

The experiment ensured food security for the local population but not profit for farmers. So, in the years that followed, people started tapping groundwater to sow high-yield seeds.

And now a new crisis is looming in the Sundarbans, a Unesco World Heritage site.

Increasing salinity in groundwater

Powerful pumps and shallow wells used for drawing groundwater are taking a toll on the only source of safe drinking water on several islands in the Sundarbans spread across the two districts of South and North 24 Parganas in West Bengal.

Some of the pumps used last year, say local farmers, were powered by five-horsepower motors that can draw as much as 10,000 litres of water in 30 minutes.

Several hundred acres are being irrigated with water drawn from depths of 50 feet and below on islands with a sizeable human population in Gosaba and Basanti assembly constituencies in the South 24 Parganas.

A number of water tables have already run dry and some are now producing saline water that can neither be consumed nor used for farming.

On March 14, around 10 farmers from Chhoto Mollakhali came and said they tapped water from around 100 feet till these sources dried up. They changed location and dug again till around 40 feet and came to us with water samples, Santanu Banerjee, who runs the laboratory at Tagore Society for Rural Development (TSRD) at Rangabelia, says.

Nine out of 10 of these samples were highly saline in nature. It is a clear indication that salinity in groundwater is rising wherever fresh water reserves are being tapped, adds Banerjee.

Image: Shutterstock

TSRD, a non-government organisation set up in 1969 to help farmers in West Bengal, Odisha and Bihar, runs the project at Rangabelia since 1975. One of its crucial jobs is to test soil and water samples for salinity.

There is no official record to show how much land in Gosaba and Basanti is being irrigated with fresh water but local farmers claim that groundwater is being used in around 350 acres at Chhoto Mollakhali and 380 acres at Bali island.

At Kumirmari, where people are still waiting for electricity, roads and basic amenities, an estimated 380 acres of land is being irrigated with groundwater tapped with shallow pumps powered by generators.

Sensing the danger, Tapan Mondal, a third-generation farmer at Kumirmari, has saved a boxful of pre-Green Revolution era paddy seeds with the names and characteristics of each variety written in bold.

Seeds like these saved people after Aila, he points out. But once the brackish water receded and successive monsoons washed away the salt on the soil surface, farmers started sowing high-yielding and even hybrid seeds to recover losses, Mondal adds.

Villagers are getting shallow pumps on hire to make some money. An acute water crisis is going to hit the Sundarbans very soon, Thakurpada Mondal, a farmer at Rangabelia, says.

Anil Dey, a senior TSRD field worker, says salinity in the rivers that dissect the delta and flow into the Bay of Bengal has risen because of climate change.

But nature cant be blamed for the depletion of groundwater reserves. As we speak, there is no natural source of drinking water within three kilometres of our camp office at Bharatgarh in Basanti. There are similar spots on Bali island, he adds.

Govt steps in

The crisis has not gone unnoticed in the corridors of power and action is being taken, say officials in the state water resource department.

The state government, which allows farmers to use groundwater to improve production in drought-prone districts, was recently informed by the Central Ground Water Board that water level has receded to a semi-critical level in more than 60 blocks spread across West Bengal.

Some of these blocks are in the South and North 24 Parganas districts that are not drought-prone at all. In 2011, the number of these semi-critical blocks stood at 53.

The government has taken note and decided to impose a restriction on the use of powerful pumps. Farmers will have to seek the states permission to draw groundwater, a water resources department official, who is not authorised to speak to the media, says.

Need for more steps

Experts, however, feel that restricting the use of shallow pumps alone will not save the precious groundwater reserves.

Asish Kumar Ghosh, a former director of Zoological Survey of India and a Fullbright scholar who retired 20 years ago, was one of the men to show the Sundarbans farmers how to survive the curse of nature.

When I landed in the Sundarbans after Aila, only five farmers volunteered to experiment with traditional paddy that once grew in brackish water. But getting old seeds that would germinate was the bigger challenge, says the octogenarian at his south Kolkata residence that also houses the Centre for Environment and Development.

Ghosh, whose research papers on food security, environment and climate change have been published in 10 countries, including the UK, USA, Japan and Russia, founded the centre to encourage young researchers.

Dr Debal Dey, who has worked in this field for 20 years and set up seed banks in 10 states, helped us. So did the National Institute for Rural Development, Hyderabad. The paddy we produced in the first two years was saved for seeds. Eventually, farmers in five blocks joined the project, says Ghosh.

A seed bank started functioning in less than five years after Aila, which were given free of cost but on the condition that whoever took them had to return twice the amount after harvest.

The central government must set up seed banks across the nation and encourage farmers to grow crops that can withstand the effects of climate change. Potable water will get more and more scarce in the coming years, Ghosh warns.

Turning the tide

TSRD is trying to influence farming habits and counter the water crisis in Basanti and Gosaba.

One of our main objectives is to discourage farmers from sowing hybrid paddy and promote vegetables and lentils, such as grass pea, that require minimum water. In 2016-17, farmers in 14 villages harvested grass pea, Rabindra Nath Mondal, a coordinator at TSRD, says.

It has received aid from foreign agencies. Its grass pea project is being funded by OCP Foundation of Morocco that focuses on community development and International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), a global research-for-development organisation based in Lebanon.India is seeking a lifeline for the parched Yamuna river  all the way from Nepal.

As part of its first trans-country river-linking project, the government is approaching Nepal to bring surplus water from the Sharda river, also known as the Mahakali, on the border with Nepal to the Yamuna near Delhi.

The project is part of Prime Minister Narendra Modis ambitious plan of interlinking 31 rivers and divert surplus water to arid areas.

The proposal has been cleared by a committee of secretaries and a request has been sent to the MEA (ministry of external affairs) to initiate a dialogue with Nepal, secretary of water resources UP Singh said.

The committee of secretaries, according to officials who requested anonymity, met to discuss the terms of negotiations with Nepal on the 540MW Pancheshwar multi-purpose hydro-electric project. The project, conceived in 1981, made progress under the Modi government when Nepal was ruled by the Nepali Congress. Concerns have surrounded the project under a Communist alliance that came to power in Kathmandu last month.

According to the officials cited above, while all the required clearances for the Pancheswar dam on the Indian side are in place, India is waiting for the newly-elected Nepalese government to settle down before bringing the proposal to the table again.

The proposed Sharda-Yamuna interlinking project is aimed at bringing surplus water from Sharda to Yamuna via Uttarakhand and Uttar Pradesh. The project is designed to be a lifeline for the Yamuna to ensure uninterrupted flow of water in Delhi. Water from the link is likely to also benefit Haryana, Punjab and Rajasthan.

The project was first discussed by Modi with then Nepalese Prime Minister Sushil Koirala during his first visit to the neighbouring country as Prime Minister in August 2014.

India discussed the Pancheshwar dam project with Nepal twice last year  in August and September  and will take it up soon with the new government. This will be the first time Yamuna-Sharda link will be discussed with the Nepalese government, a senior official said.

In a question tabled in Parliament on March 15, the government said the proposed Yamuna-Rajasthan link and Rajasthan-Sabarmati link also depends on the Sharda-Yamuna link.

A final report on the proposed Sharda-Yamuna interlinking project was prepared by the National Water Development Agency way back in 2003. On the basis of the balance water available at the tail-end of the link, detailed project reports for subsequent connecting links with Rajasthan and Sabarmati were also prepared.

According to officials familiar with the development, the Nepal government under Koirala had agreed to cooperate on the Sharda-Yamuna project. The discussion in 2014 was very preliminary. It will be difficult to comment till we know what the government of India is proposing. It will require extensive discussions from both sides, said Rajan Bhattarai, a close foreign policy aide to Nepals new Prime Minister Khadga Prasad Sharma Oli and and a member of the India -nepal eminent persons group.

The National Water Development Authority has prepared a feasibility report on the Indian portion of the Yamuna-Sharda project. A detailed project report will be finalised after negotiations with Nepal start.

Both the Uttrakhand and Uttar Pradesh governments have given their consent for the project. Uttar Pradesh was on board all along but since most of the submergence would happen in Uttrakhand, a consensus has been built in the state as well, said Singh.

Experts say the cleanliness of the Yamuna as well as the development of the river banks will depend on the flow of water into the river.

The 31 proposed Inter-River Links (IRLs) have two components  a peninsular component involving 16 rivers in southern India and the Himalayan component with 15 river linkages (Sharda-Yamuna will be a part of this). The IRLs, according to the government, have the potential for irrigating an additional 35 million hectares of land and generate 34,000MW of hydropower. The river links will reinforce domestic and industrial water supply besides help in flood management in many states.

Ecologists have their reservations about the projects owing to potential adverse effects on the environment.

Pancheswar, for instance, is said to be in a highly fragile seismic zone. The (Sharda-Yamuna) link depends on the Pancheswar Dam  which is the worlds tallest dam  being proposed in an earthquake prone area. If there is damage in the dam due to an earthquake it will devastate millions of people, said Himanshu Thakkar, coordinator of the South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People.

The Pancheshwar dam is being built in the Mahakali basin on the Indo-Nepalese border. The link is proposed to start from the dam and the waters of the river will flow into the Yamuna via a canal.

Experts are also concerned that the construction of the dam can lead to soil erosion , floods and landslides. Besides Sharda is a main tributary for the Ganga and instead of recharging theYamuna, we will be destroying another river (Ganga), Thakkar added.

Around 30,000 people will be displaced by the construction of the Pancheshwar dam, which will submerge areas in Pithoragarh, Champawat and Almora districts in Uttarakhand. Thakkar says the Pancheswar dam will not be economically viable as the cost of the electricity it will generate will be higher than the price at which it is likely to be sold to Nepal.

In 1980, the then Ministry of Irrigation and the Central Water Commission formulated the National Perspective Plan (NPP) for Water Resources Development envisaging inter-basin water transfers.

Indias first river linking project is the Ken-Betwa , which is likely to irrigate 800,000 hectares of land in Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh. A memorandum of understanding is likely to be signed between the two states after differences on distribution of water are sorted out. In spite of a detailed project report being finalised in 2006, the linking of the river Ken in Madhya Pradesh and and Betwa in Uttar Pradesh is yet to take off.A draft press release of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) prepared by some politburo leaders a day after it lost Tripura squarely blamed the Congress dismal performance for losing its base in the northeastern state to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a senior Left leader said.

The CPI(M) leader said the initial draft pointed out with statistics how the Congress vote share had dwindled to just 2% while the BJP gained votes. The draft, however, was changed later.

It indicated that while the Left has been able to largely retain its vote base, it is the Congress that is responsible for the BJPs rise and thereby, the fall of the Left, in the landlocked state, the leader added.

A majority of the states 2.5 million voters decided against giving a sixth consecutive term to the CPI(M) in the countrys first direct Left-Right electoral contest, opting instead for the BJP.

The saffron party, with its ally Indigenous Peoples Front of Tripura (IPFT), comfortably crossed the majority mark, leaving the Left party a distant second.

CPI(M) general secretary Sitaram Yechury was in Shimla to attend a meeting of the Himachal state unit of the party and when the draft was sent to him through e-mail, he refused to let it go out.

He was of the view that it would be incorrect to blame the Congress for Lefts defeat. He pointed out that two years ago, a party document had stated that the BJP has become the axis for all the anti-Left forces in the state. So, the Congress position was well known, said another CPI(M) leader.

According to party leaders in the know of things, the published press release was a diluted version of the original text.

The BJP has, apart from other factors, utilised massive deployment of money and other resources to influence the elections. The BJP was able to consolidate all the anti-Left votes, virtually appropriating the erstwhile main opposition party, the Congress, the release about the Tripura election merely said.

It comes at a time when a large section of the party is keen on keeping the doors open for political adjustments with the Congress in the 2019 election.

Another senior party leader also pointed out that blaming the Congress was politically wrong because weeks before the voting, a delegation of the grand old party met Manik Sarkar and the then chief minister told them to contest all seats to curb the BJPs influence.

The Left has always taken a critical view of the Congress-INPT (Indigenous Nationalist Party of Twipra) alliance in the past. This year, the Congress didnt have that alliance and that too helped the BJP consolidate the tribal votes, said a central committee leader.A 25-year-old man, who was allegedly assaulted by militants in south Kashmir earlier this month, has succumbed to his injuries at a hospital, police said on Thursday.

A police official said that Omais Rashid Bhat, 25, of Qaimoh in Kulgam district, died at the at Sher-i-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences (SKIMS).

Bhat was working as a labourer when gunmen abducted him from his native village during evening hours on March 8 with the intention to kill him. He was dumped at Ves Batpora area in an almost unconscious state.

Militants abducted and then, beat him up. He has now succumbed to the torture, said Kulgam superintendent of police Shridhar Patil.

After the assault, local reports had said that militants allegedly sent letters to mosques in Kulgam saying the man was involved in dubious activities. However no militant organisation formally owned up to the attack.

The SP said that the attack was to terrorise people so that nobody should talk against illegal things militants are doing.

The claims of militants against the youth are not true, he added.

Militant groups often abduct, torture and kill people they suspect of working as informers for security forces.A Latvian woman is desperately searching for her sister who is missing since March 14, when an autorickshaw driver dropped her off at the Kovalam beach.

Police have launched a search Liga Skormane, 33, but failed to make any headway. Ligas sister, Ilzie Skormane, has announced a reward of Rs 1 lakh for information that would help find her.

According to the police, Liga came to an Ayurveda hospital in the state for treatment on February 3 following complaints of depression. Her husband and Ilzie were with her.

During investigation, an autorickshaw driver told the police he dropped Liga at Kovalam beach, 16 km south of Thiruvananthapuram, last Wednesday. Police said no one has reported seeing Liga since then. She did not take her passport or mobile phone when she left the hospital, police added.

Ligas relatives have put up posters with her pictures across Kovalam and adjoining areas, appealing for help. They have also appealed for help on social media.

We are doing our best to trace her. A special team has been formed to investigate the case, said state tourism minister Kadakampally Surendran.The World Health Organization (WHO) describes youth violence as a global public health problem. It can range from bullying and physical fighting to more severe sexual and physical assault to homicide.

Worldwide, an estimated 200 000 homicides take place among those aged 1029 each year, making it the fourth leading cause of death of people in this age group, according to a 2016 WHO review on youth violence.

When it is not fatal, youth violence has a serious, often lifelong, impact on a persons physical, psychological and social functioning. It also greatly increases the costs of health, welfare and criminal justice services; reduces productivity; and decreases the value of property.

Most experts working in the field of psychiatry will agree that youth violence, especially teenage violence, has increased over the years. I am not only talking about the cases I come across, but also what we see around or read about.

If you look at the past couple of decades, not only has the number of teenagers exhibiting violent tendencies increased, but also the intensity of violence has changed for the worse.

Angry adolescents

I have observed that the seeds of violent behaviour in teenage or adulthood is usually sown during ones childhood; temper tantrums could be a symptom.

Children have even started behaving violently when their demands are not met. I recently saw a 12-year-old who misbehaved with his parents merely because they didnt buy him a Playstation. He stopped talking to them and started throwing things around the house when the parents tried to speak to him. I had to counsel the child and the parents for months before things returned to normal.

While this couple was aware and sought help when things got out of hand, there are many parents who live in a state of denial and take their childs aggressive behaviour for tantrums that the child will eventually grow out of.

Most children have aggressive impulses in their growing years  throwing or breaking their toys when angry or harming pets that are soft targets.

The reasons are many, ranging from general frustration to stress, a poor coping mechanism, cut-throat competition, high expectations to even lack of social support as their family doesnt spend sufficient of time with the children.

Social support in the form of family and friends works as a great buffer for a child trying to channelise anger, frustration or any negative emotion.

How the child reacts or copes with stress is important. But these days I mostly see them to be maladaptive; parents tend to reinforce the negative behaviour by giving in to their (at times unreasonable) demands.

Also, there is an element of guilt in working parents that makes them vulnerable to yield to pressure created by the child and may lead to impulsivity and behaviour problems among children.

Someone should hear them out and show them what is right and whats wrong. Of all the cases I have seen, a large number didnt have people around them to talk to when they felt low.

They couldnt learn to contain their anger ; that also led to low frustration tolerance. There is very raw release of anger in most kids of today that is taking its toll on their temperament.

Absent parents

Parents nowadays have become so engrossed that they do not get to spend enough time with their child. Hired care-takers, who can never fill their shoes, are standing in.

Parenting was an important task earlier; now earning more money seems to have become the priority. Ironically, it is to provide their child a better life, but in this attempt it is the child who is getting neglected. The single-child norm that is fast becoming common is also to be blamed to a great extent as parents tend to over-pamper an only child.

Strict discipline used to be maintained in families once, but now parents give in to their childrens demands simply as a way of compensating for not being able to spend enough time with them.

Another reason, and an important one, for growing teenage violence is increased exposure to all kinds of external stimuli, especially mobile phones and other gadgets, which gives them access to content with extreme forms of violence.

Then there is a tendency to experiment. The current lot is extremely curious and inclined to experiment, which is why alcohol and drugs are tried at a very young age; that also contributes to very poor judgment.

Not all children have criminal tendencies, in fact, the percentage is extremely small. I very rarely see children or teenagers with criminal tendencies.

Talking of teens belonging to poor families, they are vulnerable to different contributing factors for aggressive behaviour, such as migration. The families are migrating to cities from villages, and it is a task to adjust to horrible living conditions in the cities for these people.

Parents again have no time as they are busy providing food and shelter for the family. There is very little space to themselves as a large number is living in one room, as a result which these children face a lot of negativity at a very early age.

Warning signs

Signs that parents should watch out for include manipulative behaviour, lying, stealing, throwing frequent tantrums, aggressive behaviour towards younger siblings or pets, hyperactivity, a drop in performance, and aloofness. In most cases I have come across, parents had these complaints.

Not all children need professional help as parental guidance works for most of them. A lot also depends on what kind of example parents are setting for the child; children tend to emulate their parents a lot. So you have to be mindful of your actions and words in front of a child.

Parent-teacher communication is also important as a child often faces problems in school that parents need to be aware of. A small percentage of children actually require professional treatment, that too, mostly in the form of counselling.

The very first step of this counselling is behavioural analysis by talking to the child, parents and even school teachers. I try to get to the reason behind a childs abnormal behaviour to draft a psycho-social management plan.

Then I teach them relaxation techniques that have helped significantly in a majority of cases. In very rare cases do we need to put the child on medicines that could be anti-anxiety drugs or even anti-depressants for a few weeks to a few months.

But nothing can be more effective than familial support. If we want our teens to grow in a healthy manner, it is high time the family takes the responsibility. I have seen a childs behaviour transforming marvellously once parents started taking an interest in their childs life.

(The author is professor, department of psychiatry, All India institute of Medical Sciences, Delhi)

This is the fourth of a five-part series, Lets Talk About Teenage Violence. You can read parts one, two and three here. To join the conversation, tweet or post using #LetsTalkAboutTeenageViolence on social media.Holding the government responsible for the stalemate in Parliament, the Congress on Wednesday said the ruling coalition had not initiated any front-channel or back-channel talks and not made a single phone call to any senior Opposition leader to break the deadlock in the past 12 days. Nor had it moved to convene an all-party meeting. The government denied the charge and blamed the Opposition for stalling proceedings in Parliament.

Senior Congress leader Jyotiraditya Scindia also charged the government with promoting intolerance in the country and inside Parliament.

No front-channel talks, no back-channel talks, no all-party meeting and no communication with the opposition parties and leaders. So, you promote an atmosphere of intolerance in the country and you promote an atmosphere of intolerance inside Parliament, said Scindia, who is the Congress partys chief whip in the Lok Sabha.

The second half of the Budget Session that started on March 5 has been disrupted by Opposition protests in both Houses. Demanding special category status for Andhra Pradesh, the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) and the YSR Congress Party have moved notices of a no-confidence motion against the government, but Lok Sabha Speaker Sumitra Mahajan has not admitted them, citing lack of order in the House.

All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) and Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) members have been at the forefront of protests, demanding the formation of a Cauvery Water Management Board to settle the river water dispute between Tamil Nadu and Karnataka and an increase in reservation limits, respectively.

Scindia pointed out that the governments in the past has always made efforts to break the logjam in Parliament. Whether we were in government or BJP was in power during the (Atal Bihari) Vajpayee era, there have always been efforts at some sort of rapprochement by the ruling side. But in the past four years, we have seen a transformation in the parliamentary democracy system in the country.

The government denied the charge.

Junior parliamentary affairs minister Vijay Goel said the Opposition itself was not interested in the functioning of Parliament.

There is no question of not reaching out. We have meetings with opposition leaders every day in the RS chairmans room. The opposition is talking to the media instead of discussing and debating the issues inside the House. The 2019 elections are here and it seems the opposition parties are using the Lok Sabha and Rajya Sabha for their own political gains.

The Trinamool Congress and the Biju Janata Dal echoed Scindias views. No effort has been made by the government to reach out to the parties to end the logjam. The BJP is not interested in allowing a discussion on bank fraud and the no-confidence motion, said BJD leader Bhartruhari Mahtab.

Trinamool Congress leader Sudip Bandopadhyay said that while the government had not called any all-party meeting, the onus of ending the logjam was on the Speaker. The AIADMK and the TRS should be convinced to allow the House to run, he added.A week after he was called back for consultations amid raging row between India and Pakistan over harassment of diplomats, Pakistan High Commissioner to India Sohail Mahmood will return from Islamabad late in the evening and be present at Pakistan national day functions on Friday, a diplomat said.

The ambassador will host a series of events to mark the Pakistan National Day at the countrys mission in New Delhi, including a dinner reception. The envoy will also hoist the flag and deliver a speech, they said. Mahmood was called back to Islamabad for consultations after alleged incidents of harassment of its diplomatic staff in New Delhi with Pakistan Foreign Office spokesman Muhammad Faisal claiming that the Indian government failed to take notice of the increasing incidents of intimidation of Pakistani diplomats, their families and staffers by its intelligence agencies.

India and Pakistan have accused each other of harassing diplomats and their families in Islamabad and New Delhi respectively.The proceedings in Parliament on Thursday began with sloganeering in the Lok Sabha, which was adjourned within minutes of assembly.

The Rajya Sabha passed the Gratuity Bill before erupting into protests and being adjourned for the day.

On Wednesday, Parliament proceedings had been washed out for the 13th consecutive day as members of parties like the AIADMK and TRS continued with their protests.

Both the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha have not transacted any substantial business since the Budget session of Parliament resumed on March 5, barring the passage of the budget by the Lower House without any debate.

Senior Congress leader Jyotiraditya Scindia said the government had not made any effort to end the impasse in the House.

Here are the highlights:

12. 15pm: Lok Sabha adjourned till 11am till March 23, 2018.

12.10pm: Lok Sabha proceedings resume.

Parliamentary Affairs Minister Ananth Kumar appeals to MPs through Speaker Sumitra Mahajan to let the House run. Kumar says the government is ready for discussion on all issues, be it no -confidence motion or banking related matters.

11.18am: Rajya Sabha adjourned till 11am on March 23, 2018.

11.16am: Ruckus in the Rajya Sabha.

Naidu says, I have been adjourning (the house) because I dont want these ugly scenes to be seen by the people.

11.13am: AIADMK and TDP MPs protest in the well of the House.

11.12am: Payment of Gratuity Amendment Bill, 2018, is passed.

11.11am: TDPs CM Ramesh raises the issue of the Andhra Pradesh Reorganisation Act, 2014 not being implemented.

11.10am: Rajya Sabha Chairman M Venkaiah Naidu tells members that this is the fourteenth day of not transacting business. He requests that the Payment of Gratuity Amendment Bill, 2018, be taken up today and, subsequently, other issues can be taken up.

11.02am: Lok Sabha adjourned till noon as loud slogans of We want justice are raised as soon as proceedings begin.

10.55am: AIADMK MPs hold protest on Parliament premises over Cauvery issue.

10.45am: Telugu Desam Party MPs hold protest on Parliament premises demanding special status for Andhra Pradesh.The opposition slammed Keralas CPI(M)-led Left Democratic Front government on Thursday over its stand-off with farmers in Kannur district over land acquisition for a road project, reminding it of violence in West Bengals Nandigram in similar circumstances during Left rule.

A section of farmers are opposing a proposed national highway 17 bypass in Keezhattur village, saying it will destroy 250 acres of paddy fields, leave many homeless and destroy wetlands.

The farmers want a realignment of the road, but the government has rejected their demand. Incidentally, some of the farmers opposing the project claim they are CPI(M) supporters.

Congress leader Ramesh Chennithala said the government should forego ego and talk to the protesting farmers. The CPI(M) is trying to enact another Nandigram in Kerala, said Chennithala, leader of the opposition in the assembly.

The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) too mounted pressure on the CPI(M), sending a delegation to meet Union environment minister Harsh Vardhan in Delhi and demand an ecological study of the area. Sad that proletarian party leaders are talking like big corporates. We will try our best to help farmers, said state BJP unit president Kummanam Rajasekharan.

The CPI(M), however, said the development project could not be stalled. You cant browbeat us citing Nandigram, said CPI(M) state secretary Kodiyeri Balakrishnan. As many as 14 people died in police firing on March 14, 2007 at Nandigram, where villagers were resisting land acquisition for a project. Nandigram became a massive poll plank in the 2011 Bengal assembly elections in which Mamata Banerjees Trinamool Congress trounced the CPI(M), which had been in power for 34 years.

Chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan said 56 people had given their land for the highway project and only four persons were opposing it.

The CPI(M) faced severe criticism last week after the agitating farmers alleged that the partys activists set their tents on fire. The farmers are agitating under a group they have named Vayalkilikkal (sparrows).

State public works department minister G Sudhakaran, however, dubbed the group as vultures in the assembly on Wednesday.

Suresh Keezhattur, leader of the Vayalkilikkal movement, said, Our struggle is to protect paddy fields that shrink alarmingly. We are not against development. The road alignment can be changed easily. Suresh, a former branch secretary of the CPI(M), alleged that the partys activists attacked his house two days ago.

The protesters alleged that farmers who gave their land for the project did so under pressure from CPI(M) activists.

The protest is fast taking the shape of a mass movement and several environmental activists have pledged their support to the farmers.

The CPI(M) has announced a mass march on Saturday to expose those stalling development projects.President Ram Nath Kovind will travel to three African countries next month and Vice President M Venkaiah Naidu will go on a three-nation trip later this year as part of the governments effort to boost ties with the continent and counter Chinas growing influence, two officials familiar with the development said.

These trips would take to 24 the number of African countries visited by the President, Vice President, and Prime Minister. India has received 12 heads of government and state from Africa since it hosted the Africa Forum summit in October 2015.

China has considerable influence in resource-rich Africa. The 55 countries of the continent will have a crucial say in Indias quest to become a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council.Outreach to Africa has been a key foreign policy focus area of the NDA government since it came to power in May 2014, with high-level visits raising the profile of bilateral ties with the continent.

Kovind will travel to Swaziland, Equatorial Guinea, and Zambia in the first visit week of April, covering both the South and Central African region.

The dearth of high-level visit from India to African countries has long been cited as a problem in stepping up bilateral ties. One of the focus areas of the government is this. At least one ministerial visit took place from India to all African countries since 2015. The forthcoming visits would add to the high-level exchanges,said one of the two officials cited in the first instance on condition of anonymity. He said relations with Africa had gained momentum following the Africa Forum summit in 2015 attended by 41 heads of state or government.

Naidu is likely to visit Africa in October, his second foreign trip as V-P. He will visit Bostwana, Malawi, and Equatorial Guinea. On his first foreign visit after taking charge in August 2017, Naidu will travel to the Latin American countries of Panama and Guatemala in May. Ethiopia and Djibouti were the first foreign ports of call for President Kovind.

India is stepping up its engagement as China expands its economic and strategic footprint across the continent. India has extended 152 lines of credit to the tune of almost $8 billion to 44 African countries for developing agriculture, infrastructure, public transport, clean energy, irrigation, and manufacturing capacity. Strategic affairs expert C Uday Bhaskar said, The kind of attention India is giving to Africa is overdue. The very fact that the President is making his second visit to the continent in a short span is significant. But India needs to follow up on all promises it makes and agreements it signs during these trips to ensure that the ties are, indeed, stepped up.

.Congress president Rahul Gandhi lashed out at the government on Thursday, accusing it of fabricating his partys link to a British data firm to divert attention from the death of 39 Indians in Iraq.

The government had on Wednesday accused the Congress of engaging political consultancy Cambridge Analytica (CA) for 2019 Lok Sabha election. The British firm is accused of illegally harvesting personal data of more than 50 million Facebook users to sway elections, including that of US President Donald Trump in 2016.

Problem: 39 Indians dead; Govt on the mat, caught lying. Solution: Invent story on Congress & Data Theft, Gandhi tweeted, adding media was debating the CA story and 39 dead Indians were off the radar.

The Congress has accused the government of delaying the announcement of death of the Indian workers who were kidnapped in Mosul four years ago and giving false hope to the families.

External affairs minister Sushma Swaraj had told Parliament on Tuesday that the 39 Indians who were kidnapped by Islamic State in June 2014 in Mosul in northern Iraq were dead. They were gunned down by the IS and their bodies were found in a mass grave in Badush, which is around 50km from Mosul.

The Congress also said it was unpardonable and insensitive that the government announced the deaths in Parliament without informing the families first. The government has said it was following protocol.The Yogi Adityanath governments move to withdraw cases registered against Hindus during the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots is likely to hit a judicial hurdle as the Samajwadi Party (SP) and Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP) have decided to challenge the move in court.

Law minister Brijesh Pathak said on Thursday the government plans to withdraw all such cases that were filed due to political reasons. Pathak denied that his government had initiated the exercise with a view to help the Muzaffarnagar riots accused. Whether riot cases or not we will seek withdrawal of all such cases that are politically motivated, Pathak said. He added that leaders of all parties have approached the government to demand withdrawal of politically motivated cases against them.

I have the entire list (of leaders) with me, Pathak said. More than 62 lakh cases are pending in various courts. Its a serious issue. We will definitely withdraw cases that certainly were filed on extraneous considerations, he said. The state government has already issued an order for withdrawal of about 20,000 political cases registered against political leaders, legislators and ministers in the state under the Uttar Pradesh Criminal Law (Composition of Offences and Abatement of Trials) (Amendment) Bill, 2017 passed by the legislative assembly.

Talking to HT, principal secretary, law, Umesh Kumar said there is procedure under section 321 of the code of criminal procedure under which cases are withdrawn by the state government. The application for withdrawal of cases has been forwarded to the district magistrate of the respective district. The report of the district magistrate will be put before a two-member committee, consisting of the principal secretary, home and principal secretary, law. The committee will in turn forward its recommendation to the law minister.

Once the state government gives its approval for withdrawal, the public prosecutor will move a petition in the district court for the same. The court will take up the petition for hearing only after the investigation officer in the case files a charge sheet against the accused in court. Its the court that will determine whether cases could be withdrawn or not, he said. Senior lawyer in Allahabad high court IB Singh said the public prosecutor has to convince the court that the withdrawal of the cases is in public interest.

Meanwhile, leader of SP legislature party Ram Govind Chaudhary and BSP state unit president Ramachal Rajbhar said the decision of the BJP government to withdraw cases against the riot accused charged with murder, loot and arson was politically motivated. The local leaders have been directed to challenge the petition of the state government for withdrawal of cases in the district court, Rajbhar said.

Former union minister Sanjeev Balyan had met the CM in February seeking withdrawal of 402 cases registered largely against Hindus during the riots. The move comes weeks after UP government sought information on the possibility of withdrawing nine criminal cases against BJP leaders in these riots in which Balyan, too, is an accused. He was accompanied by members of the Muzaffarnagar and Shamli khaps during the meeting with Adityanath, who is said to have assured the delegation that he will look into their demands.

Along with 402 cases of arson, Balyan briefed the CM about nine other cases registered after riots largely against the community women who were charged with preventing the police from carrying out arrests of the men. The 2013 riots claimed over 60 lives, displaced nearly 50,000 people and shattered Jat-Muslim unity, altering the political dynamics of western UP. Asked if he thought the government could withdraw cases that are now in court, Balyan said, If withdrawal isnt possible, we will seek re-inquiry as we are convinced that these cases were politically motivated.The Centre must file a review petition against the Supreme Courts recent judgment that banned automatic arrests and allowed anticipatory bail under the SC/ST Prevention of Atrocities Act, two Union ministers from the Scheduled Castes demanded on Thursday. As the demand for a review built up, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) indicated it was open to seeking a review, with party president Amit Shah likely to meet ministers concerned with the issue on Friday.

Lok Janshakti Party president Ram Vilas Paswan and Republican Party of India chief Ramdas Athawale  both allies of the BJP-led NDA  said the top court judgment would have serious implications on the SC population and a review petition was needed to protect their rights.

Athawale said he and social justice minister Thawarchand Gehlot met BJP president Amit Shah and finance minister Arun Jaitley on Thursday and were assured that a review petition would be filed after studying the judgment. Gehlot is the BJPs tallest SC leader in the Union council of ministers.

Shah spoke to law minister Ravi Shankar Prasad and asked him to study the judgment and file a review petition, Athawale said. Prasad said at a press conference that government was examining the matter and would give a structured response to it in the coming days.

There could be some instances of fake complaints in matters involving transfers and posting, but 99% of the complaints are genuine, said Athawale, the junior minister for social justice. He said crimes such as murder and rape of a Scheduled Caste person are far too serious an offence to allow concessions to the alleged perpetrators. More than 45,000 cases related to atrocities against SCs (also known as Dalits) and STs, are filed every year, but the conviction rate is lower than 30%, he said.

Paswan said SCs and STs across the country were angry over the judgment and that the government must step in. The veteran politician credited Prime Minister Narendra Modi for making the law more stringent in 2016, but alleged that several SC and ST MPs of the ruling alliance were upset with the verdict.

His parliamentarian son, Chirag Paswan, said: The LJP has decided to file a review petition. We demand the centre, too, file a similar petition. The act, Chirag said, was the only weapon in the hands of the two oppressed communities to prevent atrocities.

A senior BJP leader said the government and the party would decide what to do after a proper study of the judgment and its fallout, political and social. A group of the BJPs Scheduled Caste MPs met Prasad earlier in the day seeking a review petition. Lok Sabha MP and BJPs SC Morcha chief Vinod Kumar Sonkar said a group of SC MPs would meet Shah with a similar demand, and insisted that the government would ensure that no harm was done to the interests of the community.

The BJP has faced criticism over atrocities against Scheduled Castes in states such as Gujarat and Maharashtra.

A senior minister aware of the developments said the party high command has decided to examine the courts judgment in detail before rushing in to make a political statement. But there were hints from senior leaders in the government and the party that they would not take a step seen as anti Dalit, and a decision on seeking a review was possible. A senior bureaucrat who spoke on the condition of anonymity added that this was the logical course of action for the government , since the issue has turned into a political hot potato.

While the Congress has asked for a review of the judgment, which it described as unfortunate and one that will led to a sense of insecurity among the oppressed classes, several BJP MPs have expressed concern over the ramifications of the order, particularly when the party is preparing for polls in as many as eight states and the general election.

Incidentally, in February, the ministry of social justice and empowerment, which is the nodal ministry for SC/ST welfare programmes asked 11 state governments to clear the backlog of cases of atrocities against Dalits and tribals to combat disenchantment among these communities.

States such as the BJP-ruled Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, apart from Odisha, Telangana and Andhra Pradesh, which are on the list of 11, have been instructed to speed up the process of filing charge sheets and setting up special courts for the hearing these cases.

As per the data available with the government for the period between 2014 and 2016, Bihar has a pendency rate of 95%, Gujarat 92%, Maharashtra 86.3%, Rajasthan 87.2% and Karnataka 87.2%. Conviction rates are as low as 3.5% in Gujarat, 4.2% in Andhra Pradesh, 3.3% in Karnataka and 3.9% in Odisha as against the all India rate of 26.6%.Union minister Vijay Goel will meet key opposition leaders at their residence in an effort to break the logjam in Parliament, which has been paralysed for 14 days due to protests by various parties.

The government is willing for a discussion on no-confidence motions against it and enjoys a strong majority in the Lok Sabha, Goel, who is minister of state for parliamentary affairs, said on Thursday, wondering why the opposition leaders were debating on television and not in the House.

Goel said he will be visiting key leaders of opposition parties, including the Congress, AIADMK, TDP and TRS, to persuade them to call off their protests, which have resulted in a washout of Parliaments proceedings since March 5 when it met after a recess to continue the Budget session.

At a press conference, Goel noted that over Rs 2.5 lakh is spent per minute in running Parliament, and asked opposition parties to raise their issues and debate them in the two Houses.

The second leg of the Budget Session is of 23 days and all 14 days so far have been wasted, Goel said.

I have been meeting opposition leaders in Parliament and will now visit their homes to persuade them to call off their protests and start discussion on their issues in the two Houses, he said.

On issues like the PNB scam, the government has more to tell the people than the opposition, he claimed and said the Modi government has been an honest dispensation which has worked against corruption.

Parliament is meant for debate. It is sad that opposition leaders can debate outside and on TV channels but not in Parliament. It is also strange for some of them to keep protesting in the Well of the two Houses and then say that it is the governments job to run them, he said.

Arjun Ram Meghwal, who is also a junior minister for parliamentary affairs, said it is difficult for the Speaker to take up notices for no-confidence motions as long as members are present in the Well as she is required to do a head-count of members supporting the notices.

The Telugu Desam Party (TDP) and the YSR Congress have given notices for no confidence motion against the government following the Centres stand that it cannot provide special category status to Andhra Pradesh.

Several parties have been protesting in the Lok Sabha and the Rajya Sabha over various of issues such as banking scam, Cauvery board, special status to Andhra Pradesh and quota hike, leading to daily adjournments.

A large number of bills, including on triple talaq, whistleblower protection and OBC Commission, are pending in Parliament. The Lok Sabha passed the crucial Finance Bill without any discussion. A couple of other bills have also been pushed in the two houses amid the din.Distraught with the news of her husbands death in Mosul, Dipali Tikadar now harbours just one wish: a meeting with West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee to seek a government job.

Dipalis husband Samar Tikadar was kidnapped along with 38 other Indians in Iraq in 2014 by Islamic State. External affairs minister Sushma Swaraj announced in Parliament on Tuesday that all 39 men were dead.

I will tell the CM when I meet her about my poor financial condition, and appeal for a government job. I think she will understand my situation, Tikadar, a mother of two, said.

Over the past four years, she had been toiling hard to make ends meet for her two children with a hope that her husbands return will change their life for better.

I thought after Samar returns, our days of hardship would be over. But now, I dont know what to expect from life, Dipali Tikadar told PTI.

She is staring at an uncertain future with little means to provide for her children. Her son Sudip is preparing for Class 10 board exams and daughter Sharmistha is studying in Class 4.

I want a government job so that I can arrange for the education of my children, the 35-year-old woman said.

The tin shed over her mud house in Nadia district, along the Indo-Bangladesh border, is also in need of immediate repair, but Tikadar says she has no money.

I get Rs 4,800 as an Integrated Child Development Service worker. It is not enough to run a family. Please arrange to take me to chief minister Mamata Banerjee, she pleaded.

Samar Tikadar had left for Iraq in 2011, much like Khakon Tikadar -- both residents of Chapra Mahakhola area of Nadia district, close to India-Bangladesh border. Their families last heard from them early 2014 before the abduction by IS militants.

Minister of state for external affairs VK Singh has said that it would take the government eight to 10 days to bring back the remains of the 39 workers.

Dipali Tikadar, however, is not keen on visiting Kolkata airport to receive her husbands remains.

Even if I get scope to go to the airport to receive the remains of my husband, I wont go. I am too depressed to handle the situation, she said, adding that the Nadia administration has collected blood samples from Samars siblings for a DNA test.A woman was allegedly tied to a tree and flogged in public by her husband on a village panchayats order for eloping with another man in Uttar Pradeshs Bulandshahr district, police said on Thursday.

The womans husband, a former panchayat head and his son were arrested after a video clip of the incident was widely circulated on social media and through messaging apps. Hindustan Times could not independently verify the authenticity of the video clip.

The incident occurred on March 10 at Launga village, about 400 km from state capital Lucknow.

Bulandshahr superintendent of police Praveen Ranjan Singh said police registered a case against 18 people, 12 of them unidentified, after receiving a copy of the video clip.

Police contacted the woman, said to be in her late 20s, at her parents house on Wednesday night.

Former pradhan Shersingh, his son Shravan and womans husband Shaudan Singh have been arrested and raids are underway to arrest other accused, said Singh.

The 73-second video clip, apparently shot with a mobile phone, purportedly shows the saree-clad womans hands tied to an overhead branch of a tree and repeatedly hit with what appeared to be a leather belt by a man in a green shirt and a jacket. The woman could be heard grunting and screaming after each hit.

The video also shows a large crowd of men watching the beating and some of them can even be heard berating the woman.

Police said the panchayat wanted to teach a lesson to the woman.

In her complaint to police, the woman admitted to eloping with her neighbour Dharmendra Lodhi on March 5 and staying at the house of one of his relatives in another village.

After five days, a group of people from Launga convinced the couple to return to their village.

Police said Shersingh and his supporters convened a kangaroo court and ordered her public flogging.

Some of the villagers had objected to the punishment and asked the former pradhan to stop it but they were abused and asked to leave the place.

After the beating, the woman was dragged into a room where Shersingh and his supporters allegedly molested her and asked to keep silent. The woman also accused Shersingh of asking his men to make a video of the incident so that others could see the consequences of eloping.

Despite campaigns and awareness programmes, patriarchy runs deep in Indian societies, especially rural areas, where women must follow strict social norms which give them very little freedom. The mostly male-dominated village bodies such as panchayats and khap panchayats also mete out such diktats against women for bringing what they perceive as dishonour to the community.

.The state-wide strike of the Rajasthan government ambulance service employees continued on Thursday  the fourth day -- following failure of their talks on wage hike.

The ambulance service employees have been shunning work since Monday to press for their 15-point demand, including the salary hike, which, they say, has been denied for the last five years.

Staff of 108 emergency service, 104 Janani Express and the base ambulance service shaved off their heads and performed sadhbudhi yagya to protest against the adamant attitude of the government and the service-providing company, GVK-EMRI.

Last night talks failed and our strike continues. We have shaved off our heads in protest and even performed sadhbudhi yagya, said Virendra Singh Shekhawat, president of the Rajasthan Aapatkaleen Ambulance Karamchari Ekta Union.

Patients are facing problems, but the service provider and the government are responsible for this, as the union had submitted its demands to the chief minister on February 22, and announced the agitation on March 14.

Shekhawat said nearly 6,000 ambulance service employees have joined the strike. The service provider is exploiting its employees and our demands include increasing salary, overtime payment, among others.

Health department and GVK-EMRI officials held talks with union leaders late on Wednesday evening. After the talks failed, the health department took possession of 108 ambulances parked at the agitation spot. Talks could be held late on Thursday evening.

GVK EMRI public relations officer Bhanu Soni said Rajasthan has 1,506 ambulances -- 730 of 108 service, 587 of Janani Express and 189 base ambulances. Around 220 were plying in the state on Wednesday, and the number increased to 290 after alternative arrangements made by GVK-EMRI.

On an average 3,500 patients are brought to hospitals by these ambulances every day, Soni said. 500 drivers and emergency medical technicians (EMTs) have been called from other states where GVK-EMRI is running ambulance services. A few agitating staff have resumed duty, and recruitment process has started at a few district headquarters.

The ambulance employees resorted to the strike within days after the governments March 16 notification, which declared the 108 emergency service, 104 Janani Express service and the base ambulance service as part of the essential services under the Rajasthan Essential Services Maintenance Act (RESMA), 1970.Former principal chief conservator of forest RN Mehrotra has demanded the resignation of Rajasthan forest minister Gajendra Singh and said that the minister should own responsibility for the death of the tiger, ST-11, in Sariska Tiger Reserve on Monday.

Mehrotra also alleged that the minister was aware of the conditions in the tiger reserve and he knew that this was an incident waiting to happen. He said that STR has been allotted good captains but they do not have a team of good soldiers hence they are unable to stop such incidents.

About 35-40% posts are vacant and those who are working in the STR are not properly skilled. Due to these circumstances, the crisis of 2005 when tigers wiped off in STR is waiting to repeat. STR is passing through a bad phase due to the short shrift that the government is giving STR, he said.

Due to the shortage of staff, no search operation can be launched to check use of snares by farmers, the former forest official said. Proper night patrolling is not on in the reserve, he added.

Mehrotra said human disturbance is increasing by the day. Commercial activities are increasing from Kushalgarh to STR and critical tiger habitat. Tehsildar, sub divisional magistrate and district collector are not taking cognisance of conversion of land through corrupt practices, he said.

The forest officer said that the most important unit of monitoring is beat guards. In STR, there are 102 beats where only 110 guards are working when the number of sanctioned posts is 139.

The empowerment committee, headed by VP Singh, had recommended more than 20 points for the welfare and effective monitoring in STR. The panel recommended that there should be three beat guards in one beat.

STR administration has written to the state government to fulfil these recommendations, but nothing has been done, said an official of the reserve without wishing to be named.

Mehrotra said that when the forest minister camped in STR for 20 days in January this year, forest officials told him about every problem of the reserve.

Meanwhile, the forest minister has accepted that the death of ST-11 is a case of poaching. He held a meeting of higher officials of his department and in Jaipur gave directions. He also decided to constitute a high-power committee to inquire the circumstances that led to the death of two tigers, one in Ranthambore and the other is in STR.Relaxing her blanket ban on public display of arms during Ram Navami, Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee on Wednesday told the state police that organisations taking out such processions for more than 10 years can be allowed to carry traditional weapons.

The move, completely unexpected and unprovoked, invited sharp reaction from Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Rashtriya Shayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP) leaders who saw in this an attempt to counter them by wooing the Hindu community.

Earlier this month, the Trinamool Congress raised eyebrows when its leaders announced that they, too, would celebrate the festival in the districts amid fanfare.

Read: Trinamools decision to celebrate Ram Navami is moral victory for the organisation, says RSS

Some organisations in Bengal have been celebrating Ram Navami and taking out processions with traditional weapons for a long time. Right now I can think of two such organisations in Howrah and Asansol. Let them celebrate the way they have been doing all these years. Only those who have started this trend recently should not be allowed to carry weapons. The police have to do the screening carefully, said Banerjee without naming the BJP or any Hindu group.

Read: Wont allow processions with weapons: Mamata throws challenge at RSS, VHP

The chief minister made the statement in the middle of an administrative review meeting at Bolpur in Bibhum district. The meeting was aired live by several television channels. She asked director general of state police Surajit Kar Purakayastha and other senior officers present on the dais to implement her new guideline and remain vigilant.

Read: Bengal BJP chief vows Ram Navami rally with weapons despite Kolkata Police ban

Banerjee is stepping backwards because we have scared her. First she said no processions would be allowed on Ram Navami. Now her party is celebrating the festival. Earlier she said nobody could carry weapons. Now she says weapons can be allowed. In the deathbed, every Hindu chants the name of Lord Ram. The chief minister has realised that her regime is drawing to a close, said BJP national general secretary Rahul Sinha.

Kharagpur MLA and Bengal BJP president Dilip Ghosh, who made news last year by wielding a sword in a procession in his constituency, said Ram Navami would be celebrated in the same manner this year. Let the government do what it wants, said Ghosh.

Read: Kolkata police bans carrying weapons in public, Bengal police may follow

Does the chief minister really believe that allowing some Hindu groups to carry weapons will make the entire community forget the riots at Basirhat, Dhulagarh and Kaliachak? Bengal never witnessed a more communal government in the past. To prove that she is secular, Banerjee should first remove the communal elements in her cabinet, said Jishnu Basu, south Bengal general secretary of the RSS.

Read: TMC leaders to organise conference of Hindu priests in Bengal district

VHP organising secretary in Bengal, Bihar, Odisha and Andamans, Sachindra Narayan Sinha said numerous organisations in Bengal have been taking out armed processions for decades. I took part in such processions in Asansol 30 years ago. The chief minister must realise that Ram Navami was not invented by the VHP or BJP. What she did today is an insult for all Hindus. By trying to please one religious group she is losing the trust of another, said Sinha.

Last week, Jishnu Basu said the Trinamools decision to observe Ram Navami was a moral victory for the RSS because the states ruling party had opposed the celebrations in 2017.An army man was shot dead over old rivalry in Cantonment area of Bareilly on Wednesday afternoon, police said.

Superintendent of police, Bareilly, Rohit Singh said a man, Dhruv Kumar, opened fire on Lance Naik Anil Kumar in Sadar Bazar area at around 1.30 pm.

The army man was rushed to military hospital where he was pronounced dead by doctors. The accused has been arrested and the country-made pistol used to commit the crime has been recovered, Singh said.

The SP said preliminary probe had revealed that the army man, a resident of Cant area, had an old rivalry with Dhruv.

The accused Dhruv Kumar (in white) in police custody. (HT Photo)

No official statement was issued by the army till reports last came in.

Doctors at the military hospital said Lance Naik Anil Kumar was brought in a critical state, He was probably shot from a close range which resulted in excessive bleeding, an official at the hospital said.

Police said the body had been sent for post-mortem examination.

Though the army has not registered a case, Cantonment police station has lodged a suo motu complaint.

A police team is interrogating the accused. We are waiting for the post-mortem report after which charges will be added and an FIR will be lodged, the SP said.The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) is all set to organise a programme on the University of Lucknow (LU) campus, to usher in the Hindu New Year on March 24. The event has already generated controversy with left wing student outfits, including the All India Students Association (AISA), accusing varsity authorities of saffronising the campus.

It is worth mentioning that the same administration denied permission to some students who wanted to conduct a talk on the union budget. But now, it has allowed its auditorium to be used for the RSS function, said AISA district secretary Nitin Raj.

However, this is not the first right wing event that the university has allowed on its campus. On January 28, the Akhil Bharatiya Samgra Vichar Manch organised a programme at LU in which Surya Kumar Shukla, a 1982 batch IPS officer, took pledge with others for early construction of Ram temple in Ayodhya.

The video of this officer of UP cadre taking the pledge had stirred a row and became national news, said Nitin Raj.

We strongly condemn the administrations decision to give permission to an organisation that has nothing to do with the university to organise their event here, he said, adding that such programmes violated the ethos of campus life, which was meant to promote only academic activities.

LU spokesperson NK Pandey, however, defended the universitys stand, saying it was not LUs official function. Anybody can book the universitys auditorium and organise functions that dont disturb the peaceful academic atmosphere on campus, he said.

But AISAs LU secretary Shivam Chaudhary rejected this explanation. He alleged that this step of the varsity administration was meant to propagate the RSS agenda to saffronise education and implement its ideology. This has been done with the consent of vice chancellor SP Singh, he added.

Meanwhile, Kavita Krishnan, secretary of the All India Progressive Womens Association, said, This same University of Lucknow had cancelled my scheduled programme on honour killings sometime back in 2015.

The hall had been booked in advance and some 300 students were waiting for me to address them. But at the last minute, under some pressure, LU cancelled the booking and did not allow the programme to take place, she said, adding: There is no harm if a student body like the ABVP is allowed to hold its event at LU. But why throw campus gates open to the RSS?

Recently, LU was in the midst of another controversy when its B Com Applied Economics examination question paper tested students awareness on Modi government schemes such as Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao, Deendayal Upadhyaya Gram Jyoti, Startup India and Digital India. Then too, AISA had protested strongly.In collaboration with the National Commission for Women (NCW) of India, the UP police will soon launch a drive to sensitise police personnel and general public on crime against women. NCW experts will also counsel cops and hold capacity building exercise for them.

NCW member Rekha Sharma, who holds additional charge as the organisations chairperson, along with some other members of the commission met UP director general of police OP Singh on Wednesday to discuss the matter.

The DGP said NCW authorities had a discussion over crime against women in the state and chalked out a plan to sensitise police personnel on the issue. He said the NCW members assured to conduct sensitisation programmes for cops at district and police station levels across Uttar Pradesh.

Singh said NCW members also assured of capacity building exercise for police personnel to improve their skills and knowledge related to crime against women. As part of this, police personnel will be told about the existing laws, amendments made in them and special laws related to crime against women introduced in the past few years.

He said this drive would help police personnel in attending to complaints of women in a better and effective manner and gradually improve the image of UP police.Angry over the governments alleged plan to suppress their agitation, powermen on Wednesday declared they would boycott the video conference proposed to be held by the principal secretary, energy and UP Power Corporation Ltd (UPPCL) chairman to review schemes on Friday (March 23).

The states power employees are protesting the state governments decision to hand over the power distribution system in five cities, Lucknow, Varanasi, Gorakhpur, Meerut and Moradabad to private franchisees.

Taking exception to the chief secretarys directions asking the administration to strictly deal with protestors, UP Vidyut Karmchari Sanyukt Sangharsh Samiti on Wednesday sent a letter to Chief minister Yogi Adityanath urging him to intervene into the matter.

We have also informed the chief minister that the states power engineers will not participate in the video conference that the UPPCL has called on Friday, Sanghasrh Samiti leader, Shailendra Dubey said, adding The government as it is evident from the chief secretarys directions, is trying to crush the peaceful agitation.

He warned any repressive action would only force the power employees to intensify their agitation. We are determined to resort to work boycott on March 27 and then decide on a statewide indefinite strike if the franchisee decision was not rolled back.

The government must review it gains and losses from a similar move whereby it transferred the power distribution of Agra city to a private franchisee in 2010 and for this the franchisees accounts must be audited by the CAG, Dubey demanded.

COME UP WITH BETTER PLAN: ENERGY MINISTER TO CONSUMER BODY

Lucknow: Energy minister Srikant Sharma on Wednesday asked the UP Rajya Vidyut Upbhokta Parishad to come with an action plan the implementation of which could fetch the desired results without having to hand over the five cities to private franchisees.

The minister, however, refused the possibility of the government to reconsider its decision on franchisee unless a better alternative was there.

The minister asked us to submit to him a proposal for reforms as an alternative to the franchisee model and we will make an action plan available to him within two days, parishad president, Awadhesh Kumar Verma said.

During his meeting with the minister, Verma explained how the introduction of private franchisee in five cities would go against the interests of consumers as well as the UPPCL. He said the discoms should be provided the performance parameters as expected of the private franchisees and the franchisee model be introduced only after discoms fail on those parameters.Lives today are wrapped around information technology, through smartphones, tablets , computers

and what not. No doubt this provides important learning tools and also helps people stay connected through social media platforms. But it is a double-edged sword: the flip side is that misuse of such platforms and access to porn sites sometimes lead to sexual predation in the virtual world.

Checklist for social networking site users Make password alphanumeric (at least 8 to 10 characters), not based on personal info Users, especially girls, should not post their photos or sensitive details on profile page. Accept friend request only from familiar people Always use privacy and security settings of the site Always avoid sharing personal details for public view.

To cite a few recent examples, Uttar Pradesh police arrested an imposter Himanshu Singh in early 2017 from Lucknow for allegedly duping and sexually harassing girls through social media. According to police, the imposter posed as a major in the Indian army on social networking sites where he forged friendship with more than 25 girls, ending up harassing them sexually on the pretext of marrying them.

In the same year, a social media platform user approached the UP Police Cyber Cell in the state capital, with a complaint that his account had been hacked and the hacker was sending obscene messages to his female friends. On investigating, police found that his account was not hacked but someone known to him had cracked his password that was his mobile number.

Dos and donts on social media: Avoid using same passwords that you use at work on a social networking site. Limit usage of social networking sites to personal use only. Always assume everyone in the world will be able to see what youre writing even if the site limits your post to your friends exclusively. Try to avoid mentioning where you work, so that if you mention something you thought innocent (but that might be valuable information for hackers) they will not know who to target. Be wary of what youre posting, if you use your pets name as a password anywhere do not post about it on your social networking site naming it. Do not log on to your social network page from public computers such as Internet cafes where someone might have installed a key logger and would later get access to your credentials. Do not automatically trust that posts are from who they claim they are; if your workmate sends you a private message asking for some confidential information first verify that he/she did really send you that message as their account might have been compromised. Do not send confidential information through a social networking site even if someone who has legitimate access to that information asks you to. Beware of what links you click and what software you download and install. Do not trust links/software sent by your friends implicitly as they themselves might not be aware it includes malware or their account might have been compromised. Always be sceptical and wary. If some one asks to be friends on a social networking site and the profile appears to match a work mate, check personally with that person before accepting him as he could be an imposter. Also be sceptical of any offers or prizes you might have been told you won, they might actually be phishing attacks. Ensure your computer is up to date and has good antivirus protection; social networking sites are frequent targets of malware attacks.

As per the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) 2016 report, around 957 cases were registered under IT Act for transmission of obscene and sexually explicit content through social media and Internet. UP ranks top on the list of states where the cases were reported. The data said that in UP, around 284 cases were reported, in Assam 114, in Maharashtra 98, in Karnataka 73 and in West Bengal 64. Other than these figures, in UP around 138 cases with motive of sexual exploitation and 13 cases of insult to modesty of women were also reported the same year.

UP STFs Cyber Cell staff said on an average they got more than a dozen cases in a month, which is a big number. Crimes against women through social media are on the rise. And in most of the cases, they fall victim due to their own mistakes while handling their social media accounts, said additional SP Triveni Singh, nodal officer, UP STF Cyber Cell.

Singh said one of the most common mistakes netizens made was while creating their password for social networking sites and e-mail accounts. People often chose easy passwords like date of birth or mobile number that were easy to guess and this made the account vulnerable to cyber criminals, he said.

Other than password, the social media users should refrain from accepting friend requests from unknown people, he advised. The unknown users could enter into the account holders profile and misuse his personal details photographs, mobile numbers and friends list.

Other IT experts too endorsed the view and termed social media as a catalyst in crime against women and circulating pornography. A cyber security expert and cyber security consultant Rakshit Tandon said, No doubt technology has changed the world but has also brought along a nuisance. It has created a sort of window, allowing people to peep into the lives of others while staying miles away. And this is turning out to be dangerous for the fair sex. 

He said social media was also misused to circulate pornography.

Only recently the CBI busted an international child abuse pornography racket operating on a social media platform, arrested an unemployed youth from Kannauj in UP and booked him under various sections of IT Act, he added.

Another IT expert Himanshu Rai, professor in IIM Lucknow, however, had a different take on the issue. I dont find social media and accessibility to porn sites the main culprit. In fact, porn was available in other forms even before the Internet era, he said.

Rai also said going by the recent scenario when social media was misused for sexual harassment, there was a need to strengthen the laws. Presently, we have the IT Act to tackle cyber crime but things are still hazy. There is a need to define up to what degree the punishment will be or what shall constitute harassment and so on, he said.

Rai said that intervention from the government level was also required to stop the circulation of porn material through social media. He also said that the government should constitute a separate body to check cases of harassment that were on the rise.The UP Housing and Development Board (UPHADB) has announced schemes in four cities in the state under the Central governments flagship housing-for-all initiative. The housing body plans to provide a roof over the head to urban poor at Rs 4.50 lakh each and set a target of building over 5,000 flats in Lucknow, Sultanpur, Moradabad and Meerut.

This is the time for those who wanted to have a house of their own but could not afford it, to apply under the scheme, said a UPHADB official. He said a subsidy of Rs 2.50 lakh was being provided on the cost of one dwelling unit and the registrations had been opened and would continue till April 12. However, only those under the lower income group registered with CSC, SUDA, DUDA, Nagar Nigam and Nagar Palika could apply under the scheme.

The housing agency will build 4,752 flats under its Awadh Vihar Yojana in Lucknow, 192 in the Lohramau Marg Yojana in Sultanpur, 288 in the Majhola Yojana (4) in Moradabad and 144 units in Jagriti Vihar Vistar scheme in Meerut. Each dwelling unit will have a super area of 34.07 square metres and an applicant will have to deposit Rs 25,000 at the time of registration. The remaining Rs 1.75 lakh will have to be paid in 60 instalments of Rs 3,675 each. The flats will be built in a cluster of four-storeyed (Ground floor+3) complexes that will have all basic civic amenities.

Under the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY) , the Union Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs has set a target of providing financial assistance to the tune of over Rs 2 lakh crore over the next five years for enabling two crore urban poor to own their house by 2022. According to a 2012 government report, India has an estimated housing shortage of 18.78 million. Of this, Uttar Pradesh alone accounts for 3.07 million. This is 16% of the total shortage. Approximately, 95% of the total shortage is in the economically weaker section and low income group category.In the narrow alley at Koliwada, Worli, 27-year-old Roma, a patient with extensive drug resistant tuberculosis (TB) has stopped taking medicines. Her emaciated face is the first thing that gets everyones attention. She was diagnosed with multi-drug TB at St Elizabeth hospital, Mumbai, in 2014.

Back then, she took the medicines regularly for over a year, but eventually, lack of will and a recurrent state of despondence took over, after which she stopped her medicines.

I lost the will to take medicines and neither do I feel like doing anything. The medicines used to make me nauseous.

After the private hospital notified her case, Revised National Tuberculosis Control Program (RNTCP) officials contacted her only to realise that the resistance had increased and had become an XDR case. Roma lives with her father, who is a local fisherman, her mother, who is a domestic help, and her two siblings in a small room. She spends most of her day at home.

She had confessed to the local District TB officer (DTO) that her father is an alcoholic and taunts her about her illness. Doctors are worried that if she continues without medications, she will become one of the many loss-to-follow-up patients. Moreover, if she acquires further resistance, the treatment will get extremely tough. When HT visited Roma, she said, she intends to start the medication again. However, DTOs said she drops outs midway, each time she resumes her treatment.In a partial relief to commuters, drivers of Ola, an app-based taxi aggregator, called off their three-day strike on Wednesday, while Uber drivers will continue to protest.

Maharashtra Navnirman Vahatuk Sena (MNVS), transport wing of the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS), called off the strike after an assurance from the Ola management.

The strike, which started on Sunday night, was called off after hours-long meeting between Ola executives and MNVS leaders in the presence of police officers in Andheri. MNVS leader Sanjay Naik said Ola has accepted their demands of reinstating the blacklisted drivers in phases.

Naik said Ola promised to take steps to improve monthly earning of drivers. It also agreed to remove bouncers at Ola office and depute coordinators with drivers. Ola has agreed to provide agreements in Marathi language and stickers for cabs, added Naik.

According MNVS, the strike of Uber drivers will continue till the firm accepts their demands. Uber management agreed to a meeting after the intervention by Chirag Nagar police station on March 22. Hence, offline agitation of Uber drivers will continue, said an MNVS worker.

The drivers were demanding an assured income of Rs1.25 lakh per month and stopping the use of company-owned cabs, among other demands. This was their third strike since January 2017 over the same demands. Citizens, however, bore the brunt of the strike. Disruption of railway traffic added to commuters woes.

Commuters faced difficulties as fewer cabs were plying. According to drivers, most of them preferred to stay off the road because of vandalism fears.In a step towards unclogging storm water drains, less flooding and cleaner beaches, the civic body will be installing new floating trash booms before the monsoons to stop floating waste from choking nullahs and flowing into the sea.

Read more: Finish work on 55 chronic flooding spots in Mumbai by April, says Ajoy Mehta

The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporations (BMC) standing committee on Wednesday approved a proposal to use automatic net-like devices in drains, creeks and rivers for the first time in the city. By March-end, BMCs storm water drains department will issue a work order to install these trash booms in Dahisar, Mithi, Poisar, Oshiwara rivers and Irla, Mogra, Lovegrove nullahs. Chief engineer, (solid waste department), VH Khandkar told HT, This will be phase one of the project. Then, as per councillors requests, we will install more trash booms. The ideal spot to install the booms is just upstream of the outfall that is right before the drains join the sea. Seven booms will be placed at the seven spots by June. It will cost BMC Rs1.17 crore to fix trash booms at seven places and make quality-checks for a year.

Civic engineers said the booms are automatic devices that will function without any fuel. Such nets have been used only in the Ganges. The booms are acid-resistant and well-equipped to stop all floating material, including plastic, from flowing into the sea. The waste will be collected on one side and can be removed mechanically, said an engineer working on the project. This will avoid clogging of drains, flooding and mosquito-breeding. It will also prevent waste from ending up on the citys beaches. BMC spends Rs1 lakh per day on cleaning all beaches in the city. City councillors lauded the proposal, but demanded quick implementation. Alka Kerkar, a councillor, said, These should be installed where there are no pumping stations.The trash booms should in place before the monsoons.The Air Intelligence Unit (AIU) at the Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport (CSIA) on Wednesday arrested three Korean nationals for smuggling gold.

One Yoon Yoosung, who was intercepted after his arrival from Hong Kong, was found to be carrying five gold bars, weighing a total of 5,000 grams and valued at Rs1.40 crore.

The gold bars were concealed in specially-made pouches stiched to his underwear, said a senior AIU officer.

After questioning Yoosung, the involvement of two more Korean nationals - later identified as Kim Chang Ho and Lee Chang Hwa - was revealed. The duo had smuggled gold using the same modus operandi and were about to leave the country when they were caught the same day.

Custom officials are investigating whether there a gold-smuggling syndicate is involved.

The trio was produced before a court on Thursday and remanded in judicial custody, said the officer.Senior BJP leader and former Maharashtra minister Eknath Khadse on Thursday demanded an inquiry into the way a contract to kill rats in Mantralaya (the state secretariat) was executed.

How could the company which was given the contract to kill 3,19,400 rats in Mantralaya accomplish the task in a mere seven days, he asked, speaking in the Legislative Assembly.

The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) had taken two years to kill six lakh rats in the city, he said during a discussion on Budgetary demands.

A survey found that there were 3,19,400 rats in Mantralaya. A work order was issued by the General Administration Department. The company was given six months. But it claimed to have killed them in just seven days, Khadse said.

It means it killed 45,628.57 rats a day. Those 0.57 must be the new-born ones, he said, evoking laughter in the House.

It also means the company killed 31.68 rats every minute. Their weight was around 9,125.71 kg and every day one truck was required to take dead rats out of Mantralaya. But it is not known where they were disposed of, he said.

The government could have deployed 10 cats to do the job instead of hiring a private firm, the former revenue minister said in a lighter vein.

Dharma Patil, a farmer who committed suicide in February, consumed poison from the stock kept by the company on the premises of Mantralaya, he alleged.

Patil, alleging injustice in award of compensation for land acquisition, consumed poison at Mantralaya and died a few days later.

There is no information on whether the company had the permission to use the poison. Also, was it permitted to keep the poison stock in Mantralaya? Khadse asked.

It is very surprising that this company killed over three lakh rats in just seven days while the BMC took two years to kill six lakh rats. There is a discrepancy in the claim made by the company, he said, demanding an inquiry.In past three years, 442 farmers and farm workers died after inhaling poisonous pesticides in India, a recent report by union health ministry revealed. Over 94% of the deaths were from Punjab (233) and Maharashtra (183).

Rajasthan (20), Karnataka (3), Tamil Nadu (3) were other states that figured on the list. However, agricultural experts, on the basis of individual fact finding studies, said that the statistics could be under-reported and dont reveal the exact number of deaths and hospital emergencies caused by pesticide handling. The deaths were reported between financial years 2013-14 and 2017-18.

Maharashtra continues the sale of monocrotophos pesticide, which was responsible for deaths of over 50 farmers and farm workers in Maharashtra in 2017. The pesticide was banned in October for 60 days in five districts  Akola, Washim, Amravati, Buldhana and Yavatmal, as per the suggestion of a Special Investigation Team (SIT), formed to investigate the deaths. HT had reported the SIT findings.

The SIT found that monocrotophosa 1B category, extremely poisonous drug according to World Health Organization (WHO) was being used with mixture of pesticide, Plant Growth Regulator and fertilisers, which aggravated the toxicity of the mixture.

Punjab government recently refused to renew licenses for sale of over 20 pesticides, including monocrotophos knowing its health hazards to farm hands, farmers and environment. But Maharashtra continued the sale monocrotophos after 60 days of ban citing a clause in insecticide rule that the states have no right to ban the sale of pesticides but can only control the licensing, said Kavitha Kuruganti, member of Alliance for Sustainable & Holistic Agriculture, that conducted state-wide fact finding surveys.

Farm activist Kishor Tiwari said that Maharashtra government seemed to be resuming the sale of hazardous pesticides. The state government is aware that even internationally, there is no antidote available for monocrotophos poisoning, even then they didnt take any steps to prevent its manufacture or sale. Stringent action shouldve been taken to at least stop the sale in areas from where deaths were reported, said Tiwari.

Read more: Ignorance, pesticides form a fatal alliance in Maharashtras Vidarbha

Kuruganti claimed that the state and union ministries of agriculture have intentionally or unintentionally avoided multiple studies which refute the need of synthetic and hazardous pesticides for farming in India.

Secondly there is no data collection of pesticide poisoning incidences, through oral ingestion or accidental inhalation which can offer insight on the kind of insecticides to be banned in the country. Moreover, the new insecticide act, to be tabled in monsoon session in the parliament, doesnt influence the policies to prevent these hazardous pesticides being sold openly in market and advertised aggressively, Kuruganti added.

Bijay Kumar, IAS and principal secretary of agriculture department, said that since the sale of pesticides has resumed in Maharashtra, they are soon to write to union government to ban five pesticides including Monocrotophos. Since as a state, we can extend the ban only for 60 days, we will request to ban the pesticide during months they are used. Moreover, we are seeking legal remedies to counter the pesticide manufacturers who immediately seek relief from high court as soon as the ban is exercised to resume sale, said KumarOwing to pressure from anganwadi workers, Shiv Sena and the Opposition  the Congress and NCP, the Maharashtra government on Thursday stayed its decision to impose the Maharashtra Essential Services and Maintenance Act (MESMA) on anganwadi workers. The parties had disrupted the proceedings of the legislature on Wednesday, demanding the withdrawal of MESMA on anganwadi workers.

Chief minister Devendra Fadnavis announced the decision of the government in the state assembly. Fadnavis stated that anganwadi workers were brought under the purview of MESMA to prevent them from going on strike.

Employees of services under MESMA can be taken into detention by authorities, and the offences registered under the act are non-bailable.

The anganwadi workers run the Centres Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS), which battles malnutrition among young children and pregnant and lactating women. The state has around two lakh such workers working at 97,000 anganwadis. They cater to around 56 lakh children below the age of six.

Last year, the anganwadi workers were on a strike for around 26 days. During this period, more than 120 infants had died due to malnutrition and improper care in anganwadis across the state. The state government had come under severe criticism, both by the judiciary and the political parties for being negligent. The Bombay high court questioned the government for keeping the anganwadi services out of essential services.

The anganwadi workers had gone on 26-day strike in September-October last year, following which a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) was filed in the high court. The PIL blamed the government for the death of infants that occurred during the strike period. The government through its two affidavits had informed the court that the MESMA was lapsed in August, and thus could not be invoked during the strike. The act was again enacted in February this year, the chief minister said on the floor of the house.

Now, the anganwadi workers have again threatened to go on strike to meet their demands. Their decision to go on strike can have health implications on malnourished infants and lactating mothers. Thus, to prevent them from doing so, the state government had decided to invoke MESMA on anganwadi workers. However, considering the demands of legislators across party lines, we have now decided to stay the decision, Fadnavis said.

Meanwhile, the Opposition claimed they were preparing to ask for a poll on the issue. The BJP was scared that Shiv Sena may not vote in favour of their decision (to invoke MESMA) following which the government was left with no right to continue ethically, said the Opposition.

Our (Congress-NCP) strategy for today was to demand for a poll over the decision of invoking MESMA against anganwadi workers. We would have got majority of votes as Sena is strongly opposing the move and would have voted against it. As soon as the government came to know our strategy, they decided to withdraw it, said Radhakrishna Vikhe Patil, leader of Opposition.

Of the total strength of 288-member house, the BJP has 122 members while Shiv Sena has 63, Congress 42 and the NCP has 41 members.A 48-year-old man reeling from a failed business allegedly tried to murder four members of his family in a Goregaon (west) building. Police said he critically injured his wife and son and also stabbed his daughters with knives late on Tuesday, before surrendering.

According to the Goregaon police, the businessman ran a lottery shop in Pathanwadi, Malad (East). He had suffered a loss of several lakhs in his business and had also taken loans, which he was unable to repay.

On Tuesday night, the man returned home in an inebriated condition. Somewhere between 11.30pm on Tuesday and 1.30am on Wednesday, when the family was asleep, the businessman woke up and stabbed his wife, who was sleeping next to him in the bedroom, police said.

She ran to the hall where their three children were sleeping, police said.

He then allegedly attacked his 16-year-old son and then his two daughters, who are in their twenties. Police said the man stabbed his wife and son three to four times each.

He attacked both his daughters and his son on their heads, police said. One of the daughters managed to escape and alerted a neighbour who called the police.

All four family members were rushed to Siddharth hospital where his two daughters were said to be out of danger, but his wife and son are in a critical, but stable condition. The wife and her son were first rushed to Cooper hospital but due to lack of beds they were shifted to SRV hospital in Goregaon (West).

The Goregaon police conducted a panchnama of his house and found the two knives used to commit the crime.

The accused does not have any prior criminal record. The police said this was the first time he fought with his family. They said he was depressed and frustrated because of the financial losses. He was worried about how he would pay for his sons studies and his daughters weddings.

He has been booked for attempt to murder and causing grievous hurt under section 307 and 326 of the Indian Penal Code respectively. He was produced before a magistrate court and remanded in police custody till Thursday.A 42-year-old Nigerian national has been arrested by the MIDC police for duping a Delhi-based businessman. The police believe he has duped several people by posing as a representative of a UK firm in need of herbal seeds and tricking his victims into buying them for a hefty commission.

The accused, Daniel Chukwuanus bank account statement showed he had Rs1.5 crore in it, which the police believe is ill-gotten money.

According to the MIDC police, Chukwuanu had come to India five years ago on a tourist visa. He had cheated Arjun Kasana, 22, a businessman from Delhi of Rs4.12 lakh after which an FIR was registered on March 9. Around Rs1.90 lakh has been recovered from him. Chukwuanu posed before Arjun as a representative of a UK-based firm in need of herbal seeds. He then told Arjun that such seeds are available with a vendor in India and if he could get those seeds, then he will be given a hefty commission by his firm.

Arjun was also provided a number by the Nigerian. Arjun called on the number and bought seeds worth Rs4.12 lakh. However, after buying the seeds, the seller and Chukwuanu stopped contacting him. Arjun had seen neither Chukwuanu, nor the seller.

Investigating officer, assistant police inspector Shrinivas Kamuni managed to trace Chukwuanu from a building in Navghar, Bhayander. DCP ND Reddy said, We have found he had Rs1.50 crore in his bank account. We are now finding out how many more he has duped. The police found five SIM cards , several debit and credit cards from the accused. More Nigerian nationals and their Indian aides are wanted in the case.For the first time in 20 years, at least 80 baby Olive Ridley turtles were spotted at Versova beach on Thursday morning, making their way to the sea.

Morning walkers and beach clean-up crusaders were pleasantly surprised on Thursday when they went to Versova beach and spotted newly hatched Olive Ridley turtles waddling into the sea. The hatchlings were first spotted by beach clean-up crusader Afroz Shah and his team around 9.30am near Sagar Kutir Wadi.

Witnesses said around 80 hatchlings emerged from a three-feet-deep pit.

Clean-up activists and animal welfare groups together ensured that the little turtles navigated their way into the sea safely, from the hatching site, which was 30-35 metres from the shoreline.

Residents believe the turtles have come back because the beach is clean now. It was a delightful sight to see our clean-up efforts bear fruits, as turtles have made their home at Versova beach, probably the only beach in Mumbai where they are currently present, Shah said.

Both marine experts and officials from the state mangrove cell said this is the first time in two decades that Olive Ridley turtles have been reported to hatch on a Mumbai beach. Shaunak Modi from Marine Life of Mumbai, a group promoting marine life welfare in the city, said: We counted 80 individuals, saw that they were healthy, and removed all obstacles in their path as they moved towards the sea. We kept birds and dogs away from the site as they are so small. All 80 successfully entered the sea.

Witnesses said around 80 hatchlings emerged from a three-feet-deep pit which was 30-35 metres from the shoreline. (Photo courtesy: Afroz Shah)

Olive Ridleys are sea turtles found in the warm tropical currents of the Indian and Pacific oceans. An endangered species, they travel thousands of kilometres in the ocean, with females returning to their original nesting sites within a minimum of two years to lay eggs.

Over a period of 126 weeks, Shah and other members of Versova Residents Volunteers (VRV) have removed 13 million kg of plastic and other garbage from what was till then the dirtiest beach in the city. They have carried out over 200 beach clean-up operations, have sensitised local residents and slumdwellers, and moved the state machinery to help them in their efforts. The United Nations has termed their movement as the worlds largest beach clean-up.

We believe there are several more nesting sites and we have begun combing operations in these areas to ensure that the turtles dont face any problems reaching the sea after hatching, Shah said.

Threats to the turtles Consumption of their eggs in coastal countries in the Asia Pacific region Destruction of their natural habitats Turtle slaughter for leather and oil Overfishing Climate change

Such an incident has happened after 20 years. The presence of more turtle nesting sites cannot be ruled out, said Prashant Deshmukh, range forest officer, western region, Mumbai Mangrove Conservation Unit of the state mangrove cell, after conducting a panchnama at the site. We will push for the development of a turtle rescue centre close to this nesting site, and we expect it to be built soon.

Currently, the turtle nesting centres closest to Mumbai are in Raigad and Palghar districts. According to the mangrove cell, approximately 600 Olive Ridley turtles find their way to nesting sites across various districts of Maharashtra, on beaches such as Velas, Anjarle, Harihareshwar, Maral and Diveagar beaches in Ratnagiri every year. However, there have been no such reports from Mumbai for two decades.

There were reports of turtle nesting near the private beach at the governors bungalow (Raj Bhavan), but we have never heard of something like this along Versova beach. This is a historical documentation for Mumbai, and citizens like Afroz Shah should be proud that they have ensured that the beach is clean enough to harbour turtles, said Vinay Deshmukh, marine biologist and former chief scientist, Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute.Scores of farmers from Vikramgadh, Dahanu, Jawhar, Mokhada and other areas in Palghar district under the aegis of the Surya Pani Bachav Samiti (SPBS) are on an indefinite fast at Palghar for the past three days to protest the state governments plan to divert water from the Surya dam to the twin cities of Vasai-Virar and Mira-Bhayander. The contract to construct the 88-km long pipeline has already been awarded to the L&T Group by the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA) under the Surya Regional Bulk Water Supply Scheme.

Ramakant Patil, chief convenor of the SPBS who is also undertaking the fast, said the Surya dam, which was built in 1990 over the Kawdas and Dhamni rivers in Kasa taluka,Dahanu, was specifically for irrigational purpose for 19,000 odd acres of farmland in Palghar district. Now the MMRDA is planning to divert around 89% of the dam water to the above cities so as to solve the cities drinking water issues, but we the farmers would be denied water for our land,said Patil.

According to information, the government had issued an affidavit to the high court that it would be diverting the irrigational water to the above cities on temporary basis till 1996 and later extended the diversion to 2007. Now the water will be permanently diverted to the above four cities,and we will be left with little water for our farms, said Patil.

Prakash Lovekar, another activist who is also taking part in the hunger strike said that the Rs457 crore construction cost of the Surya dam,which has a full capacity of 403 mld (million litres per day) was borne out of funds from the Tribal Welfare Department. Now, the very purpose of providing water to tribal farmers is being diverted to quench the thirst of the urban city-dwellers,he said.

If the government goes ahead (with the plan to divert water), then in the coming years, Palghar district will be denied of any new drinking water schemes as there would be no water available from the Surya dam for the purpose,Patil said. Lovekar further said that the government would be stopping all pending left and right side canal works of the Surya dam, as the majority of the water will be diverted to the above cities,as there would be no water left in the dam.

Scores of farmers also blocked the peak-hour morning traffic for two hours near Hutatma Chowk, where the agitators are on hunger strike. Some protestors also marched to the office of Dr Prashant Narnaware, district collector,Palghar, for his intervention. The collector was unavailable as he was in Mantralaya due to the ongoing assembly session, a leader said.In a major relief to the residents of nodal areas of Panvel City Municipal Corporation, the state government has asked the City and Industrial Development Corporation (Cidco) to continue providing services for now.

The state government formed a three-member committee to look into the issue of transfer of services from Cidco to the PCMC.

The order has helped resolve the deadlock over the garbage collection.

Cidco, which had given the final deadline of March 15 for the PCMC to take up the responsibility, had stopped collecting garbage from Wednesday. Piled-up garbage and bins spilling over were a common sight in several areas of PCMC in the past two days.

Although Cidco resumed the work from Thursday evening, not all areas were covered.

PCMC commissioner Sudhakar Shinde, who was in Mantralaya on Thursday, got the requisite sanction from chief minister Devendra Fadnavis.

Ajit Kawade, under secretary, government of Maharashtra, issued an order stating that a three- member committee will be formed to chalk out the transfer of basic amenities and civic services from Cidco areas to the PCMC.

The committee will comprise Cidco joint managing director and municipal commissioners of Navi Mumbai and Panvel city.

The order also states that till a final decision is taken by the state government, all basic amenities and civic services will continue to be provided by Cidco. It has asked Cidco and PCMC to ensure that the citizens do not face problems.

Deputy municipal commissioner Sandhya Bawankhule said, The governments decision will provide a major relief to residents. It will ensure a time-bound and systematic transfer of services to the PCMC based on its capability in terms of resources and manpower available to take up the responsibility.

Senior public relations officer of Cidco, Mohan Ninawe, said: We started collecting garbage from Thursday in the Panvel region nodal areas, as per the orders of the government.

The residents, who are fed up of the garbage problem, are happy about the decision.

Khaleel Athavani, 46, a resident of New Panvel, said, We kept getting deadlines from Cidco, while the PCMC was not ready to take up the responsibility. Municipal commissioner Sudhakar Shinde has once again proven his capability.Six people have suffered injuries after a gas tanker rammed into an SUV on the flyover on Sion-Panvel highway at Vashi. The accident took place on Thursday at 12.30 am near Vashi Plaza on the Mumbai-Panvel lane.

Among the injured are the drivers of the tanker and the SUV. They were rushed to a nearby hospital. Two of the injured are said to be critical.

In a separate accident, five vehicles piled up after a car applied sudden brake on the same bridge around 9.30am. No one was injured in the second accident, the police said.

Satish Gaikwad, senior police inspector of Vashi traffic unit, said, There were traffic jams on the busy highway after the accident. We removed the vehicles piled up within a few minutes. We had to deploy extra manpower to handle the situation.Chief minister Devendra Fadnavis on Thursday said the government will not withdraw the cases against the railway job aspirants who resorted to stone-pelting during the rail-roko protest on Tuesday morning.

Speaking in the legislative assembly, Fadnavis said the cases against the youths who participated in the protest silently and in a democratic manner will be withdrawn. A wrong precedent will be set if such agitators are spared. In future, more such violent protests would take place if no action is taken now. The youths who pelted stones on trains and the police will have to face action, he said.

Radhakrishna Vikhe-Patil, leader of opposition in the legislative assembly, had demanded withdrawal of the cases against the youths. He said while it was true that the protest inconvenienced commuters, it was out of the despair that job aspirants protested. Their future is at stake if the cases against them are not withdrawn, he said.

Nearly 3,000 apprentices of the Indian Railways had staged rail-roko agitation between Dadar and Matunga stations on Tuesday. The protesters blocked the Central line train paralyzing the rush hour services. Some of them threw stones at the police and trains. The police registered complaints against the protesters.

Meanwhile, Maharashtra Navnirman Sena (MNS) chief Raj Thackeray had a telephonic conversation with Union railway minister Piyush Goyal regarding jobs for the railway apprentices. According to MNS sources, Goyal assured Thackeray that he was working out modalities to absorb them in the Railways. Goyal told Rajsaheb that he wanted to end the unrest and give them jobs in the Railways, said a MNS leader. Raj also asked Goyal to take a humanitarian view of the apprentices against whom cases were lodged. Goyal said he would do all in his capacity.Ireland's oldest civic building is Reginald's Tower in Waterford, built at the beginning of the 13th century by the Anglo-Normans.

WEATHER

It's expected to be dry today locally with sunny spells, the best of these in the late afternoon. Highest temperature of 18deg in moderate westerly breezes. On this day in 1969 the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford, premiered. It would become a classic western.Every year around 2,000 tuberculosis (TB) patients drop out of treatment in Mumbai. These patients not only put their own lives at risk, but also expose healthy people around them to the disease, and often with drug-resistant forms that are more difficult to treat. In most cases, the reasons for dropping out are social, economic or personal.

While officials from the governments Revised National Tuberculosis Control Programme, where diagnosis and treatment are offered free, actively chase these patients  called loss to follow-up cases  the job of persuading them to resume treatment is a tough one.

In Kajupada, Kurla, an area where 80% of residents live in slums, 30-year-old Ganesh, a chronic alcoholic who weighs only 35kg, spends most of his day sleeping on the second floor of a small shanty, which he shares with his elder brother and the latters family  wife and a 10-year-old son  who live on the ground floor.

An electrician, Ganesh was diagnosed with TB during Diwali last year. His incessant coughing and drastic weight loss were the first signs of the disease. At a local municipal health post, he was diagnosed with a drug-sensitive TB  an easily treatable form  and was prescribed medicines, a course that he was supposed to take for six months, two tablets a day.

However, in three months, after the cough subsided and Ganesh felt relief, he stopped taking the medicines. I am feeling better now, so I have stopped taking the medicines, he told the local health officials, who were tracking his intake of medicines.

When Ganesh failed to update the officials about his daily intake of medicines through the phone call system, as per the Directly Observed Treatment short-course (DOTS) 99 programme, the local health officials had to visit Ganesh and put him back on medication.

Under DOTS 99, patients make a free call each time they take their medication, so that providers can monitor adherence records, without the patients having to visit them.

Ganesh, along with TB, is also battling alcoholism, which is a double whammy for the District Tuberculosis Officer (DTO) and health officials, as they never find him in a state where they can convey the seriousness of his disease to him.

We have been visiting him every week. He takes the medicines after we tell him, but stops again, said Rajkumar Kumbhar, a civic official in the area.

Until now, the health officials have visited him thrice to put him back on treatment, but Ganesh keeps dropping out. His family, too, has given up.

We give him his meals upstairs. We have asked him not to come down anymore as he is drunk most of the times, said Chayya, his sister-in-law.

In January 2017, when Ganesh finished a month of skipping his daily medicines, he was termed as a loss-to-follow-up patient, as per the new RNTP guidelines.

Currently, there are 1,500 patients on treatment in Kurla, of which 23% have dropped out of treatment in 2016. However, in 2017, the numbers fell to 12 % as more health workers were visiting the loss-to-follow-up patients in the ward. Most of the patients who drop out of treatment have drug-sensitive TB, which is worrying for health workers, as these patients eventually go on to becoming multi-drug-resistant cases.

Doctors said other loss-to-follow-up patients such as Ganesh could be tricked into believing that their health is recuperating within the first two weeks of taking the medicines, but without completing the stipulated dose, the TB bacilli in their body is multiplying and possibly acquiring resistance. In fact, in the area where Ganesh lives, there are a staggering 46 MDR cases and 13 XDR cases.

Ganeshs own health is at risk and loss-to-follow-up TB patients like him pose a big public health hazard to the general public, said doctors.

Once the patient stops taking medicine, they may feel better, but they still harbour the bacterium. This increases the chances of the bacterium becoming resistant to more and more drugs, making it a challenge to treat the patient, said a senior doctor, who works at the civic-run Sewri TB hospital.

But, what is more worrisome is that the patient may then infect healthy individuals with a strain that is already drug resistant.

In Prabhadevi, 35-year-old Ramesh, a newspaper vendor was taking treatment for drug-sensitive TB. However, he stopped taking the medicines, the day he stared feeling better. His drug sensitivity tests, which tell which drugs would work for a patient, revealed that he had acquired Extensively Drug Resistant (MDR) TB, a form of TB which is resistant to at least four of the core anti-TB drugs. XDR-TB patients can be cured, but with the current drugs available, the likelihood of success is much lesser than in patients with ordinary TB or even MDR-TB, says the WHO.

The fear of taking 15 tablets and a daily injection has now deterred him from even starting his course of medication. Three months have passed, but he has not resumed treatment. They told me my report was bad. I stopped the medicines. I was scared. I thought my health was improving, but the report said something else, Ramesh told HT.

But, during that period, Ramesh was going about his normal life, meeting people, showing up at work, where he may have infected other people.

In his case, counselling by the local district TB officials helped, and they were successful in putting him back on medicines. In cases where patients are not traceable, what can the DTOs do? They cant do much.

An internal analysis by the ward officer showed that 35% patients stop treatment because they migrate out of the city during the period of treatment; 24% just refuse to take treatment; 20% are alcoholics; 16% opt for private treatment; and 5% have adverse drug reaction.

DTOs said most loss-to-follow-up patients are men who migrated to the city for work. In a quest to find cheap accommodation, workers move from one slum to another, leaving the health officials only guessing about their whereabouts.

Sometimes the addresses are incorrect, sometimes they would have moved out of the city, how do we track them in that case? said Vikram Chavan, a TB home visitor, whose job is to look for loss-to-follow-up cases.

In Chandivali, the TB home visitors have not been able to trace a 35-year-old patient, Mumtaz Shaikh, for the past month. When the health officials visited her at the address she had provided, they found her family had relocated to a slum near the airport, but none of the neighbours knew where they had gone. She has started taking TB medicines in November 2017, but in two months, she moved to her village in Karnataka, without informing health officials.

When patients move without informing the health officials, how do we trace them? said Dr Yashodhara Sonawane, district TB officer, L-ward.

As civic officials continue to grapple with the problem of loss-to-follow-up cases in the city, they are hopeful that new initiatives under the RNCP, including providing ration to TB patients, will incentivise treatment for patients and decrease the number of loss-to-follow-up cases.

Dr Daksha Shah, the TB officer at Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC), said it is only in the past three years the programme has intensified their efforts in finding these cases.

We now have 50 counsellors under the programme to educate these patients about the harmful effects of stopping treatment. Moreover, many loss-to-follow-up patients, when they realise that their heath is deteriorating, come back to the programme, but they are still termed as loss-to-follow-up. To tackle loss-to-follow-up cases, we need to counter problems related to social factors, stigma, lack of better family support , alcoholism and rapid migration, she said.The Bombay University and College Teachers Union (BUCTU) has asked the University of Mumbai to reschedule the semester examinations. MU had recently announced the date of commencement of all courses while specific time-tables of all courses is still awaited.

The university has announced dates for theory papers without giving enough time to colleges to conduct the practical examinations first. This means practical examinations will have to be conducted in May, which is unfair to teachers as well as students, said Madhu Paranjape, general secretary of BUCTU. While Allowed-To-Keep-Term (ATKT) exams are already underway, the first of the exams for fresh candidates will begin on April 3, with TYBCom examinations.

Many teachers are also angry about once again giving up on their vacation this year for assessment of papers. When the first and second year exams were still conducted by individual colleges, we could finish their assessment before starting work on third year papers. Weve worked through Diwali and Christmas vacations last year and now the May holidays too will be usurped by the university, said a teacher on condition of anonymity.

Officials from the examinations department of the university said they havent received the complaint as yet. We will look into their complaints, said an official.A truck rammed into the divider of an arterial road at Turbhe around 11 am on Thursday.

The driver of the truck suffered injuries in the accident. He was rushed to a nearby hospital by the local residents. He is said to be out of danger.

Suraj Padvi, senior police inspector of Sanpada police station, said, The reason behind the accident is still not clear. We think the driver somehow lost his control and ended up hitting the divider. We dont think that it was a case of drunk driving.Wadala is going to get a makeover and the government wants your suggestions for it. The Mumbai Metropolitan Regional Development Authority (MMRDA) plans to develop Wadala as the third central business district of the city after Nariman Point and Bandra-Kurla Complex (BKC).

Citizens can refer to the plan on the MMRDA website and send their suggestions/objections to MMRDA by April 15. UPS Madan, metropolitan commissioner of MMRDA, said, Once the suggestions/objections are in, we will get a sanction from the government and start issuing tenders for the development.

MMRDA is the special planning authority for Wadala and has been looking at developing the area on the lines of BKC for a long time.

According to a report by the planning authority, it has proposed to develop the area commercially and include residential properties. It also plans to make way for the retail sector, restaurants, hotels, public open spaces and serviced apartments. MMRDA hopes that the plan will create more than 92,000 jobs in the next three decades.

MMRDA also plans to create an inter-state bus terminal (ISBT) in Wadala, which is likely to reduce the number of illegally parked buses on the streets. In addition, it has proposed to make the area pedestrian-friendly, introduce smart-parking along with well-laid utility lines.

On the lines of BKC, Wadala will also become a source for revenue for MMRDA, said a senior official.

Who to send objections to?

Citizens can send their suggestions/objections (in writing) to chief, town and country planning division, 3rd floor, MMRDA, New Office Building, plot nos. R-5,6 and 12, E-Block, BKC, Bandra (East), Mumbai -51.Adani Group representatives on Thursday met Yamuna Expressway Industrial Development Authority (YEIDA) officials to buy 2,500 acres of land for its logistics project.

The Adani Group is planning to set up the Adani Multi-modal Logistics Park at Jewar along the 165km Yamuna Expressway that connects Greater Noida to Agra. It had, on February 22 this year at the UP investor summit, signed a memorandum of understanding with the state government for the investment. The group wants to start work on the project in 2018-19.

Today the team from the Adani Group discussed project details and land allotment, including when they would set up the project. The Adani Group will invest 1,000 crore, excluding the land cost. We have asked them to deposit 10 per cent of the total project cost to begin the allotment process, said Arun Vir Singh, chief executive officer, YEIDA.

The Adani Groups plans for the state-of-the-art multi-modal logistics park include warehousing, cold storage facilities, and an investment in container rakes and an airstrip.

They want to buy land in sectors 10, 11 and 12 near the site of proposed Jewar airport, said the YEIDA CEO.

The YEIDA has asked the Adani Group to submit a detailed project report, along with the 10% of total project cost, to begin the next step of the land allotment. Once the group deposits the money, we will call them for an interview before finalising the land allotment. The logistics park is expected to create 2,500 direct and indirect jobs in this region, Sigh said.

The Union civil aviation ministry on June 24, 2017 had given its approval for building an international airport in Jewar. Subsequently, the YEIDA in November, 2017 had selected Singapore-based Pricewaterhouse Cooper (PwC) as consultants for the Jewar international airport project. The PwC, on March 16 this year, submitted its draft of a techno-economic feasibility report (TEFR) for the airport project.

The airport project has helped us lure investors. Since the announcement of the airport project, many corporate houses and investors are exploring investment opportunities along the expressway, said another YEIDA official.A 24-year-old woman, who is accused of masterminding an acid attack on a woman on March 20 near Mohan Nagar, was arrested by the police after her ex-boyfriend revealed her plans to the police and told them that she had offered him money to carry out the attack.

The woman was named in the FIR lodged by the police on a complaint from the family but she denied her role in the incident until Thursday, the police said. However, she broke down when her ex-boyfriend revealed her plans and an offer she had made to him to execute the plan.

The police on Thursday arrested the accused woman and four of her accomplices who allegedly helped her plan and execute the acid attack on a 23-year-old woman.

The police said that the attack was planned as the victim walked out of a relationship with the woman and got friendly with a man. The victim is presently lodged at a hospital in Delhi with 25% burns on her face, shoulders and back, while four other passengers who were in the auto also suffered burns during the attack on the morning of March 20.

The accused woman knew that her mobile phone details would be scanned by the police and she switched off her phone whenever she followed and recced the locations of the victim. Her locations were not near the scene of the crime and she denied her involvement in the acid attack. However, when we scanned her call records, we came across a number which belongs to her former boyfriend, a police officer said.

The police called her man, who runs a fast-food business in Chandigarh. He told the police that over a month ago, the accused woman had approached him with Rs50,000 and sought his help in carrying out an acid attack on the victim.

The man refused to help her out. A month ago, she came into contact with auto driver Arjun who arranged three others and agreed to carry out the attack for a payment of Rs1 lakh. After the job was done, the woman called up her former boyfriend and sarcastically told him that he is of no use and she got the job done on her own, Akash Tomar, superintendent of police (city), said.

This was the breaking point when the accused woman broke down and confessed her plan and gave away her accomplices, who were tasked with executing the acid attack on March 20.

Also, procurement of acid from Loni for the attack also sheds light on its easy availability, despite various directions of the Supreme Court.

We have sealed the factory from where the acid was procured. The officers have been asked to deal with such persons in a strict manner to ensure that no such sale of acid is taking place, Vaibhav Krishna, senior superintendent of police, said.

The family of the accused, however, denied the womans involvement in the acid attack.

She never used an auto to travel to her office but used a scooter. We dont know if the two women had a relationship. We were already looking for alliances to get her married and she had also registered on matrimonial websites. Also, my sister was looking for a well-settled man for marriage, the elder sister of the accused woman said.The strike by Ola and Uber drivers across Delhi-NCR on Thursday left many commuters inconvenienced. While some cabs were still available on Thursday, the drivers plan a complete shutdown on Friday.

Commuters from Noida and Ghaziabad found it difficult to book cabs towards Delhi. Commuters also said that within Uttar Pradesh, drivers from Noida did not accept duties for Ghaziabad and vice versa.

I live in Ghaziabad and work in Noida. I regularly use shared cabs. On Thursday, Noida drivers said that they would not go to Ghaziabad as there is a strike there and asked me to cancel. I faced the same problem in Ghaziabad as drivers refused to go out of the city, to Noida or Delhi, Namita Relan, an architect and Ghaziabad resident, said.

Pratiksha Singh, of Noida Sector 30, who uses cabs regularly, said that she took almost two hours to find a cab to go to Delhi. Drivers would accept the duty and then call to ask the destination. They refused to pick me up when I said I had to go to North Campus in Delhi, Singh said.

Commuters in Noida and Ghaziabad are worried about the availability of cabs on Friday.

Cab drivers said that while the strike has been going on for almost a week, many had continued to ferry commuters. While some stopped operations on Thursday, a complete shutdown is planned on Friday. The drivers and unions are demanding better compensation, better verification of riders and streamlining of shared duties.

The app-based aggregators are running a business of selling cheaper vehicles at higher lease rates, leaving no profit for drivers. The commission they charge has been increasing while the fares have been reducing, Kamaljit Singh, president, Sarvodaya driver association of Delhi, said.

Sanjay Samrat, the president of Delhi Taxi Tourist Transporters Association, said, The cab fares are very low and we have to pay about 25% of these rates as commission. We want the government to fix uniform rates for all operators in Delhi-NCR, which are higher and acceptable to us. We will be on strike on Friday and have support from drivers across NCR as well as associations in Lucknow, Ahmedabad and other cities.

Few cab drivers said that they were threatened by unions to stop running cabs and were warned that their vehicles would be damaged.

It is better not to work for a day than getting the vehicle damaged and stopping work for several days, along with bearing the repair cost. We dont really have a complaint but we have to cooperate with the unions, a Noida-based driver said.

Some drivers said they will continue to ferry commuters who call them personally, without using the cab aggregator apps.

Meanwhile, aggregators informed that they have not received any demands from driver-partners and there was no disruption of services in Delhi-NCR.

We have heard about the strike by driver partners in Delhi from media reports. As of now, it is business as usual for us in Delhi-NCR, an Ola spokesperson said.

A spokesperson for Uber said, There is no disruption to the service in Delhi-NCR, at this point. We are committed to serving the city, ensuring driver-partners can continue to access a stable income while giving riders a convenient, reliable option to get around Delhi-NCR.

The cab aggregators said that Uber has over 4.5 lakh driver-partners across the country and Ola has about 9 lakh driver-partners in 110 cities.Two days after a 15-year-old girl committed suicide by hanging at her residence in Noida, the police are yet to arrest the teachers accused of allegedly sexually harassing and abetting suicide. Police have cited lack of evidence as the reason for not making any arrests.

On Tuesday at 6pm, the girl had committed suicide when she was alone at home. No suicide note was found from the spot. The girls parents insist that their daughter was under extreme academic stress and she had confessed as much to them recently. The victim, whose annual exam result was declared on March 16, had failed two subjects.

One teacher and the principal of a private school in east Delhi have been booked as accused for abetting the suicide of the class 9 student.

One male teacher has been booked under the Protection of Children against Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act for allegedly sexually harassing the minor and for abetting suicide.

Police said that they have been questioning the accused for two days, and that they have not found any evidence that indicates that she was being sexually harassed.

We are yet to find any evidence that proves sexual misconduct by the male teacher. We will take action based on the evidence we find as the case progresses. No arrest has been made as our investigation is underway, said AK Singh, superintendent of police (city).

Police sources claim that the major obstacle behind the arrest of teachers is the absence of a suicide note. They said the police do not have any evidence that suggests involvement of the two teachers.

On Wednesday afternoon, the police had found a register belonging to the victim from her room. She had written several lines on the last pages of this register. The scribbles suggest that the girl was battling anxiety and a sense of despair.

The victim had allegedly used words including failure and dumb to identify herself on one page. On another page, she had used the designation doctor before her name.

Police officers said that they are treating her scribbles as crucial evidence in their investigation.

A friend of the victim who studies in class 10 of the same school said that she used to discuss how the subject Social Studies would make her anxious.

I had spoken to her a few days before the examination and she had mentioned that she was scared that she might fail the subject. Recently, she had also read a poem to me, which she had written, said the class 10 student.

Meanwhile, police officials said they have written to Central Board Of Secondary Education (CBSE) asking them to constitute a committee to re-evaluate the victims answer sheets.

As the school is affiliated to CBSE, we have written to the board asking them to constitute a committee which will re-evaluate the victims answer sheets to determine if she was intentionally failed by her teachers, said Rajiv Singh, circle officer 2, Noida Police.At the recent foundation day summit of the International Solar Alliance (ISA), Prime Minister Narendra Modi issued a clarion call for a worldwide solar revolution while underlying the critical role solar energy must play to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals. The ISA is the first international energy body that is not only headquartered in India, but has been conceptualised here. This gives us a golden opportunity to build on our extensive experience on various facets of solar energy, from decentralised thermal applications to GW-sized solar parks.

ISA, therefore, needs to focus on providing support to partner countries for a range of activities from developing specific action plans, identifying technological choices, ease of financing and risk-mitigation, and effective implementation. This essentially involves knowledge and experience-sharing with respective stakeholders, including policy-makers, practitioners, industry, and civil society at large. However, for ISA to be considered as a truly global organisation, it must shed the image of being a wing of the government and put in place a forward-looking narrative outlining broad directions for its collaborative journey.

On the domestic front, while we in India must feel proud of having achieved a solar power capacity of 20 GW well ahead of the solar missions initial timeframe, it would be useful to keep the goal of 100 GW by 2022 in sight. At this juncture there is a need, therefore, to pause and reflect if there was anything that could have been done better; something that might have put the sector in an altogether different trajectory.

Ever since the solar tariffs started coming down drastically on account of aggressive reverse bidding coupled with several global factors, the unfolding scenes have not been very reassuring. On the one hand, there appears to be a sense of complacency (or is it overconfidence?) as far as the government is concerned. On the other, there are disquieting incidents such as utilities going back on negotiated power purchase agreements and imposition of duty on imported solar panels.

That the indigenous solar industry must be encouraged cannot be overemphasised if we are to draw maximum benefits from a programme of this scale. For this to happen, India needs to graduate to policies that facilitate and incentivise industry to acquire the latest technologies, state-of-the-art manufacturing equipment and economic scales of operation. The key is to focus on the complete value chain, on components, balance of systems, and products as well.

Currently, the unease is due to sudden, and at times, seemingly arbitrary reversal of stated policies. And this is the case when both proliferation of solar energy and ease of doing business have been accorded top priority by the prime minister. A perceived risk in consistency and long-term visibility of policies could prove detrimental to the further progress of the programme.

The more worrying aspect pertains to the apparent lack of coordination among different government ministries and departments. It is imperative that the concerns of project proponents and investors too are taken in to account before affecting any policy changes midway. After all, the programmes success is ultimately predicated on these very players. And the best way to avoid such risks is through long-term visibility of the policy and regulatory regimes. It is said that the public governance is important for investors and their businesses. It helps build trust and provides rules and stability needed for planning investment in the medium and long term.

All the planning and investments decisions are taken on the basis of the prevailing commercial conditions. In a situation when bidding had already turned very aggressive, changing those very parameters put the industry in a totally unviable and in a way, helpless, situation that does not bode well for the sector itself in the long run.

For the Indian solar narrative to go forward, it has to be perceived as being built around a robust and inclusive framework. On the other hand, India also needs to rededicate itself to R&D, which somehow has got relegated to the fringes. Along with ISA partnerships, its enviable experiences and knowledge would then enable a solar revolution in more ways than one.

Amit Kumar is senior fellow and senior director, Rural Energy and Livelihoods, TERI

The views expressed are personalA day after minister of external affairs Sushma Swaraj disclosed details about death of 39 Indian workers in Iraq, grieving families on Wednesday demanded one member from each victim family be given a government job on compassionate ground along with adequate compensation.

Families gathered at the residence of Manjinder Singh, one of the workers killed in Iraqs Mosul, in Bhoewal village, 30 kms from Amritsar, on Wednesday. Manjinders sister Gurpinder Kaur has been fighting for the prisoners for a long time now. Till the filing of this report, kin of Nishan Singh, Harsimranjit Singh, Harish Kumar and Malkit Singh had gathered here to chalk out a course of action. Gurpinder said she was contacting other families as well.

On behalf of the families, she said, First of all, the government must provide proof. We also want the government to tell the date of the killings.

She said financial condition of all the families was bad and many youth who have been declared dead were the only bread winners in their family. The government should do something for our future. They not only need compensation, but also a government job.

She also handed over a memorandum of demands to Manish Gulati, newly-appointed chairperson of Punjab Mahila Commission, who met the families to express condolence.

No representative of the government has met the kin of the deceased yet.

Complaining about the attitude of the government, Sarwan Singh, younger brother of Nishan Singh, said it was painful that the government neither gave formal intimation of the deaths, nor did it tell them when the mortal remains would come to India.A day after HT reported that the UT engineering department will be splurging around Rs 1.62 crore on renovating nine suites of the Chandigarh guest house for the 49th conference of governors in May, it has found the department flouted tender norms for the renovation.

According to the Central Public Works Department (CPWD) Works Manual 2014, a minimum seven days are required for the publicity of a tender amounting rs 20 lakh, while for a tender between Rs 20 lakh and Rs 2 crore, minimum 10 days are required.

But the UT engineering department floated one tender on March 16 and opened it on March 21, while another tender of the same work was floated on March 17 and will be opened on March 23, yet another violation of the manual, as no work of the same nature can be split.

DK Aggarwal, executive engineer, UT administration, said, We floated e-tender with a gap of five days looking at the urgency of the work, as the hospitality department needed the work completed early. It is an open tender and any one can participate in it.

On why the work was split, he said the hospitality department wanted the work done floor-wise for early completion.

UT home secretary Anurag Agarwal said, I have asked UT chief engineer Mukesh Anand to follow the norms and remove any discrepancy.

The two-day 49th conference of governors is scheduled in May, where besides 26 governors from across the country, President Ram Nath Kovind, Vice-President Venkaiah Naidu and Prime Minister Narendra Modi will be in attendance.

As per the tenders, the UT engineering department will renovate nine suites on the ground, first and second floors of the guest house that was built in 1972.

The administration also plans to demolish the boundary wall of the guest house with the Punjab and Haryana Raj Bhawans for the event.

The governors conference, which is usually held at the Rashtrapati Bhawan, Delhi, was shifted to Chandigarh after the PM expressed his desire to hold the event in the city.President Ram Nath Kovind on Thursday said India will not hesitate using might to protect its national sovereignty as our men and women in uniform will rise to the occasion, if need be.

The President was at the Halwara air force station to award the Presidents Standard to the Indian Air Force (IAF)s 51 Squadron and Colours to the 230 Signal Unit.

India has gained a standing as the worlds fastest growing economy. While we remain firmly committed to peace, we will not hesitate using our might to protect the sovereignty of our nation, if the need be. Our armed forces reflect this firm national resolve, he said while addressing the gathering.

The President said the 51 Squadron and the 230 Signal Unit have distinguished themselves in service to the nation. They have a rich history of professional excellence and have served India with honour and distinction both during peace and hostilities, he said.

Chinese jets not out of Indias radar

Air Chief Marshal BS Dhanoa said the Indian Air Force is capable of carrying out any kind of surgical strike if the need arises as they have a strong, hi-tech mechanism when compared to many countries. He rejected the suggestion that Chinese Air Forces jets and other equipment are out of the reach of Indians radar system.

He said the Indian government has been purchasing 40 Rafale fighter jets for the IAF which would strengthen the force.

The Air Chief Marshals statement comes days after the Indian Army chief voiced concerns about Chinas military build-up in the Doklam region, where the troops of the two countries were engaged in a stand-off for over two months last year.

The air force is on a strong wicket against China. Whatever requirements are there from the budget, have been sent to the government. We have elaborate plans to increase the strength of the squadrons in the IAF, which are nine less than the sanctioned strength of 42, he said.Punjab chief minister Captain Amarinder Singh, on Thursday, told the assembly that the state government would provide adequate compensation to families of 27 workers from the state, who are among the 39 Indian workers killed in Mosul city of Iraq. He reiterated his demand for the Centre to also recompense the victims since the tragedy had occurred overseas.

Amarinder ordered the immediate release of Rs 20,000 monthly pension to each of the bereaved families for February and March 2018, waiving the condition of quarterly payouts. Deputy commissioners have been asked to disburse the pension immediately, he added.

Amarinders statement came after SAD leader Bikram Singh Majithia accused the state government of not paying pension to these families for the past six months.

It is a sensitive matter. The government should take care of these families. Why is the state government shirking its responsibility and passing it to the Centre? Doesnt it have any responsibility towards these families, he asked.

In response, the CM said payment had been made till January 31, 2018, as of Wednesday. With the release of pension for the next two months, the payment was now up to date, he added. Later, talking to reporters, he clarified that the state government had been paying the monthly pension to 24 families, of which it had information on, previously.

Amarinder had informed the House that, as per information from the Union ministry of external affairs, there are 27 victims from the state. Of these, 11 were from the Majha region and 11 from Doaba, with the remaining five from other parts of the state.

Intervening in a discussion initiated by leader of opposition Sukhpal Singh Khaira on financial assistance to the next of the kin of the bereaved families, the CM told the House that his government would duly follow all criteria for compensation in such matters.

My government will not indulge in any politics or arguments with the Centre on grant of compensation, he said, adding, It is the Central governments responsibility also to provide financial assistance since the killings took place outside the country.

In response to questions from members, he said the mortal remains of the victims would take some time to reach India as there were legal issues that the ministry of external affairs was sorting out with the authorities in Mosul.A day after Panjab University (PU) featured in the list of University Grants Commission (UGC) granting full autonomy to higher institutions, the vice-chancellor sounded alarm at the financial condition of the varsity even as he welcomed the status.

Jobs bhi generate na karo, fees bhi mat badhao aur university bhi zaari rakho Students ki fees se teachers ko salary mat do. Ultimately, jab university HMT Pinjore ban jayegi, phir pata chalega, kya khatam hogaya Chandigarh se (Generate jobs, but dont increase the fees, keep on running the university, but dont pay salaries to teachers from students fees, when university becomes HMT Pinjore, then they will know what has been lost from Chandigarh), said PU vice-chancellor, Professor Arun Kumar Grover on Wednesday at the media briefing.

Professor Grover expressed resentment for not being able to increase the tuition fee in reference to the stone pelting violence incident last year and for not generating jobs for poor students after the agitations by the student bodies.

Tuition fee is not increased here and we increase it, the environment heats up. Student bodies start competing, that they will get it reversed. How much had we increased last year? If we increase the fee from 100 to 200, how much income we will be able to generate?

What is tuition fee? It is a fraction of what you are spending if you are a resident of PU. I had held several meetings with students but they took to violence and brought a bad name instead. Later students objected that how we can pay the salaries to the teachers out of students fees. Alright, do not pay the fees!, Grover said.

Professor Grover said the university needs to be realistic about the total human resource this country generates and in that number what university is adding is a small fraction but that small fraction needs to be of high quality.

The announcement of the autonomy, the V-C said has given a hope to initiate the long-pending foreign tie-ups, including with the Curtin School of Business, Australia, and the Nottingham University.

Welcome full autonomy

The autonomy gives different degrees of freedom in academic and administrative decision making. Professor Grover, said, In the background of changing India, things are changing. I personally see permission to do something without seeking permission from UGC as a welcome step. Kuch to dheel di gayi hai.

He added, Earlier, we were generating money on our own, we cannot decide the remuneration for somebody on our own. It has to be strictly as per UGC guidelines. We cannot pay more than Rs 1,000 per lecture. If somebody is not UGC qualified, we pay him Rs 800, then the UT administration reduced that amount to Rs 500 even when they have no jurisdiction, prima facie, they have no role in the universitys autonomy.

Now we can decide on what remuneration we can give to an outsider, although the insider will be paid the remuneration as per UGC, but if I call somebody from the industry or some other profession, little freedom is given, he added.

Professor Grover said they are not given any additional money to implement these freedom, but if university can generate this money, it can exercise these options. There is a limitation no doubt but there is a freedom, he added.

Long pending foreign tie-ups

The announcement of the autonomy, the V-C said has given a hope to initiate the long-pending foreign tie-ups, including with the Curtin School of Business, Australia, and the Nottingham University. He said that an MBA programme could be initiated with Curtin School where the students pursue half of their education in Chandigarh and half of it in Australia.

Our possibilities are Australia, British and Canada, whose deputy high commissioners are in the city and with these three countries, we can initiate twinning programmes, although we shall start the programme with a very small number of students, not more than 100, he said.

New courses, campuses

Professor Grover shared that another domain is to initiate newer programmes on the campus. Can we conceive a school for the field of medical science? A programme, which is MBBS and MD together on the basis of American schools? Can we start such a programme in Chandigarh, in collaboration with PU, PGI and NIPER? Can we conceive a medical school, in north west of India on the lines of medical schools in America and Canada. This is one of the proposals we have prepared. Fee structure will be different and there will be no exit policy in this six year course, said V-C.

Liberalisation on adjunct faculty

The V-C talked about bringing to the campus civil servants, people from the corporate sector, hotel management, industry, police officer, municipal councillors or a municipal commissioner, even political people who have served the government, to teach students. The UGC is wanting to give experience of those professionals to the students, where the students would want to serve after passing out or create such interaction or internships. This is liberalisation of some kind, he said.The Punjab and Haryana high court on Wednesday summoned UT senior superintendent of police (SSP) Nilambari Vijay Jagdale while putting the Union home secretary on notice for April 4 over spurt in snatching cases in the city.

What court said : On stricter law: Snatching is happening every day in the city and you are referring it to Delhi. Tomorrow, you will do same for thefts. Why do you always refer everything to Delhi? Do something on your own. On submission that proposal to make offence bailable is pending before MHA On easy bails: HC cant be a mute spectator. Those judicial officers who gave bail despite you saying that certain accused was a repeat offender are not fit for the service in Chandigarh. We will repatriate them. On poor policing: After 6pm, police presence is zero. PCRs are there but policemen sitting idle... Senior citizens are afraid of coming out of their houses during late hours due to growing menace of chain snatching.

The high court (HC) bench of justices AK Mittal and Anupinder Singh Grewal also trashed the report submitted by the UT police, wherein the department had listed out reasons behind the rise in crime and efforts being made to curb it. As many as 73 snatchings have been reported in the city this year, with the police managing to solve only 32 cases so far. Motorcycle-borne miscreants have mostly been targeting elderly women, leaving them injured while snatching their gold chains.

The court has been hearing a public interest litigation (PIL) filed by a lawyer, HC Arora, who had demanded that police be directed to take steps to curb snatchings. Even during the last hearing, the court had come down heavily on police, telling them to have a heart and empathise with the victims.

Punjab drug crackdown is to blame: Police

Listing out reasons for the spurt in crime in the UT, Chandigarh Police told the court that after Punjab launched a crackdown on drug addicts, they are making a beeline for the city. Police said most of the accused are repeat offenders and indulge in substance abuse. Raising concern on the existing law, police said those arrested easily get bail and many times the sureties turn out to be fake.

Police also attributed the crime to festive season and weddings, when people come out in their best finery.

The high court took note of a report carried in Hindustan Times on Wednesday, which stated that the Union home ministry is sitting on a proposal to increase punishment for snatching from three years to up to 10 years and making the offence non-bailable.

The UT police last year had made the recommendation to the administration last year. A proposal was sent to the Centre in April. The draft recommendations were based on the amendments made by Punjab in laws related to snatching in 2010. Even Haryana had made the amendment later.

At this stage, the HC issued notice to Union home secretary and sought reply by April 4.

The police also told court that against the requirement of 15,000 cameras in the city, 14,000 have been installed by residents. Police also said that out of 947 cases reported in past five years, 643 have been solved.Last seen playing a full-length role in a Telugu film over two decades ago, Malayalam superstar Mammootty is set to return to the industry with upcoming film Yatra, a biopic on the rise of former Andhra Pradesh chief minister, YS Rajasekhar Reddy. Director Mahi Raghav, whose Telugu comedy Anand Brahma was one of the low-budget hits of last year, will helm this project and hes thrilled to team up with the 66-year-old actor.

With the project slated to go on the floors from June, Raghav has confirmed that Mammootty will dub in his own voice for the film in Telugu as well as Tamil. Were planning to make the film as a bilingual. Even though the story will be about Telugu leader YSR, I believe his story is quite universal, making it accessible for everybody, he told Hindustan Times.

To be produced by Vijay Chilla and Shashi Devireddy, the makers on Wednesday announced Malayalam superstar Mammootty will play the titular role in this prestigious project. Reacting to rumours that the project may also stars Suriya and Nayanthara in key roles, Raghav said: Honestly, we havent approached any other actor yet as we were waiting for the final go ahead from Mammootty sir. Now that we have his go ahead and his dates, we will start the casting actors but its going to be challenging. Not too many actors are going to be keen to be part of this project as its a political film. Nevertheless, Im trying to rope in actors from Tamil industry.

As of now, four films - Mahanati, biopic on NTR, biopic on Uyyalawada Narasimha Reddy and the Pullela Gopichand biopic -- are in the offing. Mahanati, the film based on the life of legendary southern actor Savitri, is confirmed to hit the screens on May 9 this year. Itll be interesting to see how audiences will react to two biopics on the most fascinating politicians in the history of Andhra Pradesh.

Follow @htshowbiz for more

ott:10:ht-entertainment_listing-desktopAn air strike hit near a school in Syrias northwestern province of Idlib Wednesday, killing at least 16 children, a monitoring organisation said.

Twenty civilians, including 16 children, were killed in an air strike in Kafr Batikh in Idlib province, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said.

Rami Abdel Rahman, the head of the Britain-based monitoring organisation, said the strike hit near a checkpoint held by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, a jihadist group that consists largely of ex-members of a former Al-Qaeda affiliate.

It was not clear whether the air strike was carried out by the Syrian regime or its Russian ally.

Abdel Rahman said the strike hit children coming out of a nearby school. The oldest among them is 11, he said.In the wake of a privacy scandal involving a Trump-connected data-mining firm, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg embarked on a rare media mini-blitz in an attempt to take some of the public and political pressure off the social network.

But its far from clear whether hes won over US and European authorities, much less the broader public whose status updates provide Facebook with an endless stream of data it uses to sell targeted ads.

On Wednesday, the generally reclusive Zuckerberg sat for an interview on CNN and gave another to the publication Wired, addressing reports that Cambridge Analytica purloined the data of more than 50 million Facebook users in order to sway elections. The Trump campaign paid the firm $6 million during the 2016 election, although it has since distanced itself from Cambridge.

Zuckerberg apologised for a major breach of trust, admitted mistakes and outlined steps to protect users following Cambridges data grab.

I am really sorry that happened, Zuckerberg said on CNN. Facebook has a responsibility to protect its users data, he added, noting that if it fails, we dont deserve to have the opportunity to serve people.

His mea culpa on cable television came a few hours after he acknowledged his companys mistakes in a Facebook post , but without saying he was sorry.

Zuckerberg and Facebooks No 2 executive, Sheryl Sandberg, had been quiet since news broke on Friday that Cambridge might have used data improperly obtained from roughly 50 million Facebook users to try to sway elections. Cambridges clients included Donald Trumps general-election campaign.

Facebook shares have dropped some 8%, lopping about $46 billion off the companys market value, since the revelations were first published.

While several experts said Zuckerberg took an important step with the CNN interview, few were convinced that he put the Cambridge issue behind him. Zuckerbergs apology, for instance, seemed rushed and pro forma to Helio Fred Garcia, a crisis-management professor at NYU and Columbia University.

He didnt acknowledge the harm or potential harm to the affected users, Garcia said. I doubt most people realized he was apologizing.

Instead, the Facebook chief pointed to steps the company has already taken, such as a 2014 move to restrict the access outside apps had to user data. (That move came too late to stop Cambridge.) And he laid out a series of technical changes that will further limit the data such apps can collect, pledged to notify users when outsiders misuse their information and said Facebook will audit apps that exhibit troubling behavior.

That audit will be a giant undertaking, said David Carroll, a media researcher at the Parsons School of Design in New York  one that he said will likely turn up a vast number of apps that did troubling, distressing things.

But on other fronts, Zuckerberg carefully hedged otherwise striking remarks.

In the CNN interview, for instance, he said he would be happy to testify before Congress  but only if it was the right thing to do. Zuckerberg went on to note that many other Facebook officials might be more appropriate witnesses depending on what Congress wanted to know.

At another point, the Facebook chief seemed to favor regulation for Facebook and other internet giants. At least, that is, the right kind of rules, such as ones requiring online political ads to disclose who paid for them. In almost the next breath, however, Zuckerberg steered clear of endorsing a bill that would write such rules into federal law, and instead talked up Facebooks own voluntary efforts on that front.

Theyll fight tooth and nail to fight being regulated, said Timothy Carone, a Notre Dame business professor. In six months well be having the same conversations, and its just going to get worse going into the election.

Even Facebooks plan to let users know about data leaks may put the onus on users to educate themselves. Zuckerberg said Facebook will build a tool that lets users see if their information had been impacted by the Cambridge leak, suggesting that the company wont be notifying people automatically. Facebook took this kind of do-it-yourself approach in the case of Russian election meddling, in contrast to Twitter, which notified users who had been exposed to Russian propaganda on its network.

In what has become one of the worst backlashes Facebook has ever seen, politicians in the US and Britain have called for Zuckerberg to explain its data practices in detail. State attorneys general in Massachusetts, New York and New Jersey have opened investigations into the Cambridge mess. And some have rallied to a movement that urges people to delete their Facebook accounts entirely.

Sandy Parakilas, who worked in data protection for Facebook in 2011 and 2012, told a UK parliamentary committee Wednesday that the company was vigilant about its network security but lax when it came to protecting users data.

He said personal data including email addresses and in some cases private messages was allowed to leave Facebook servers with no real controls on how the data was used after that.

Paul Argenti, a business professor at Dartmouth, said that while Zuckerbergs comments hit the right notes, they still probably arent enough. The question is, can you really trust Facebook, he said. I dont think that question has been answered.It was another day and another position taken by Jagmeet Singh, the charismatic young leader of Canadas New Democratic Party (NDP). In the midst of a storm over videos of him speaking at a pair of events advocating Khalistan, Singh has told reporters in Ottawa he will not attend rallies that promote violence.

But he reiterated his position that he would unequivocally defend the right of people to seek self-governance. He said, I support the right to talk about self-determination, whether its in Scotland, whether its in Catalonia, whether its in India. I support that right, unequivocally.

Following the NDPs caucus meeting in the Canadian capital, Singh was quoted as saying that if an event promotes violence, I do not accept that. I do not accept violence. Political violence is not something that is acceptable.

However, he couched it with the proviso that he would shun such rallies if he knew ahead of time that someone at the event would be on stage advocating political violence.

This latest statement came after pressure mounted on Singh, 39, from within the group of MPs of his party who werent satisfied with his previous response that he would continue to attend such rallies.

According to multiple Canadian media reports, the MPs wanted him a clarify that position further and not be seen as associating with those advocating violence, such as the pro-Khalistan elements at the events in San Francisco and London, whose videos had landed Singh in the midst of controversy.

But he still has no problem with those pursuing a separatist agenda as long as they do so peacefully, as he told reporters: I absolutely draw a distinction between political violence and someone advocating for independence or self-determination."

This is the latest set of remarks from Singh, who has shifted position several times in recent days since he faced criticism over his presence at events that he described as related to genocide and human rights, though that wasnt what others who spoke at the San Francisco rally or the London panel restricted themselves to.

Singh made the latest statements with his party MPs lined up behind him, watching and listening to his responses to questions from the media, underscoring the rising discomfort within the NDP over Singhs stand on separatism.China has sold Pakistan a powerful optical tracking and measurement system that could speed up the development of multi-warhead missiles by Islamabad, according to a media report on Thursday.

Chinese authorities declassified information about the deal through a statement on the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) website. The statement, evidence that Beijing is supporting Islamabads rapidly developing missile programme, said China is the first country to export such sensitive equipment to Pakistan.

India and the US have long accused China of supporting Islamabads missile and nuclear development programme but credible evidence of such cooperation can rarely be found in the public domain, making the CAS statement a rarity.

Zheng Mengwei, a researcher with the CAS Institute of Optics and Electronics in Chengdu, Sichuan province, confirmed to the South China Morning Post that Pakistan had bought a highly sophisticated, large-scale optical tracking and measurement system from China.

The Pakistani military recently deployed the Chinese-made system at a firing range for use in testing and developing its new missiles, Zheng was quoted as saying.

As India has built single-warhead missiles that are bigger and cover longer distances, Pakistan has focused on developing multiple independently targetable re-entry vehicles (MIRVs), a type of missile carrying multiple nuclear warheads that can be directed towards different targets, the Post reported.

The US Defence Intelligence Agency confirmed in March that Pakistan conducted the first test launch of its nuclear-capable Ababeel missile in January 2017, demonstrating South Asias first MIRV payload.

A Chinese team enjoyed VIP treatment during the nearly three months it spent in Pakistan assembling and calibrating the tracking system and training technical staff on how to use it, the statement said.

The systems performance surpassed the users expectations, it said, adding it was considerably more complex than Pakistans home-made systems. The statement did not reveal how much Pakistan paid for the system.

An optical system is a critical component in missile tests. It usually has a pair of high-performance telescopes equipped with a laser ranger, high-speed camera, infrared detector and a centralised computer system that automatically captures and follows moving targets.

The device records high-resolution images of a missiles departure from its launcher, stage separation, tail flame and, after the missile re-enters atmosphere, the trajectory of the warheads it releases.

The uniqueness of the Chinese system lay in its use of four telescope units, more than normally required, Zheng said.

Each telescope, with a detection range of several hundred kilometres, is positioned in a different location, with their timing synchronised with atomic clocks. The telescopes jointly provide visual information of unprecedented detail and accuracy, which missile developers can use to improve designs and engine performance.

Using more telescopes allows the system to track more warheads simultaneously from different angles, reducing the risk of losing a target.

Zheng said he could not elaborate on the technology or where in Pakistan it was being used as it involved the countrys defence interests. We simply gave them a pair of eyes. They can use them to look at whatever they want to see, even the moon, he said.

Though the Ababeel has a range of 2,200km, it can deliver multiple warheads to different targets. The technology can be used to overwhelm a missile defence system, wiping out an enemys nuclear arsenal in one surprise attack.

There are growing concerns that MIRV technology will tip the strategic balance between India and Pakistan and destabilise the subcontinent, the report said.

Outside Pakistan, military experts believe it will take more time before the Ababeel is ready for use in battle. It is thought to be in an early stage of development, with plenty of room for improvement.

High-quality optics are essential in missile development, especially MIRVs, said Rong Jili, deputy director at the Beijing Institute of Technologys School of Aerospace Engineering.

Other types of tracking devices, such as radar, can collect more precise data at longer distances, but the Chinese-made optical system provides an intuitive, close-up look at real-life action that missile developers crave, he said.

Seeing it with our own eyes is completely different from mining dry data. It helps to not only diagnose problems, but also generate inspiration, Rong said.

China has sold Pakistan a wide array of military gear, including warships, combat jets, short-range missiles, diesel submarines and surveillance drones.The ubiquity of samosa in Indian life is reflected in one of the most famous quotes in contemporary politics: Jab tak samosa mein rahega aloo, Bihar mein rahega Lalu (as long as the samosa has potatoes, Bihar will have Lalu).

Lalu Prasad Yadav is facing new legal challenges, but the humble samosa has crossed the seas to become as prominent in Britain as the burger. To honour its stature, a National Samosa Week has been launched to draw attention to the culture and food heritage of South Asia.

Supported by the local police and charity organisations, samosa lovers in the East Midlands city of Leicester  which has a large population of Indian origin  have announced the event from April 9 to 13, when people will be encouraged to buy, eat and sell as many samosas as they can.

Money raised through the sales at pop-up centres during the week will go to two local charity organisations.

Romail Gulzar, founder of Leicester Curry Awards, said: Theres a national food event for everything from burgers to beer, so why not samosas? The savoury dish has grown in popularity and for many people in the South Asian community, eating one is like the equivalent of having tea and cake.

We want to encourage people all over the UK to buy or make their own samosas during the week and sell them at work and school to raise funds for their local community or charities. Were hoping this could be the start of something really popular and we hope it will gain momentum with each passing year.

The samosa has become intrinsic to the discourse of going for an Indian, an increasingly prominent phrase in British social, economic, and cultural life since the 1960s  it means going for an Indian meal after weekend bouts in pubs and other occasions.

Leicesters lovers of samosa are keen that it acquires a similar stature as the chicken tikka masala, which was hailed by former foreign secretary Robin Cook, as a true British national dish.

Food historians believe the samosa has roots in the Persian sanbosag and came to the Indian sub-continent with merchants from Central Asia around the 13th century. It figured in the writings of Amir Khusro and Ibn Batuta, and a recipe was mentioned in the Ain-i-Akbari.Canadas opposition Conservative Party is pressuring the government to instruct the National Security Advisor to appear before a parliamentary committee and explain in public the allegation that rogue elements in the Indian establishment had planted a convicted Khalistani terrorist to embarrass Prime Minister Justin Trudeau during his recent trip to India.

Jake Enright, a spokesperson for opposition leader Andrew Scheer, said a motion on the matter had been placed on notice and the Conservative Party wanted it to be debated and voted on in the House of Commons.

The motion relates to the controversy over Jaspal Atwal, who was convicted in 1987 of attempting to assassinate a visiting minister from Indias Punjab state the previous year, and his invitation to an official dinner reception hosted for Trudeau by Canadas envoy to New Delhi on February 22.

The invitation was rescinded after Atwals antecedents became clear, but the matter was complicated by an unnamed senior official, later revealed to be NSA Daniel Jean, briefing Canadian media on the rogue elements theory.

Despite a strong rebuttal to the allegation from the external affairs ministry, Trudeau further aggravated strained relations by stating in Canadas Parliament that he believed the charge to be true, a stand he has reiterated since then.

Days later, foreign minister Chrystia Freeland said in an interview with the CTV network that during her meeting with her Indian counterpart Sushma Swaraj in New Delhi, she had described the invitation to Atwal as a honest mistake.

This statement by Freeland has been seized on by the opposition in its motion, moved by Quebec MP Pierre Paul-Hus.

The motion states: That, given the Prime Minister has supported a claim that the invitation issued to a convicted attempted murderer was the work of a foreign government attempting to interfere in Canadian foreign relations, while others in the government, including the Minister of Foreign Affairs, claimed that the invitation was an honest mistake on the part of the Canadian government, the House call upon the Prime Minister to instruct his National Security Advisor, Daniel Jean, to appear before the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security to provide the Committee the same briefing he gave to journalists on February 23, 2018, and that the briefing take place in public and no later than March 30, 2018.

MPs from the ruling Liberal Party have already blocked an attempt by the opposition to call Jean to testify before a House of Commons national security committee and another attempt in the Senate is stalled.

The Canadian government has argued that any such testimony by the NSA must be held before a committee behind closed doors. The opposition Conservatives, though, want a public hearing and will push for that objective with the latest motion they have backed in the House.A minutes silence was held in the British Parliament and across London on Thursday in remembrance of the five people killed in the Westminster Bridge terror attack on March 22 last year.

After mowing through pedestrians on the bridge in a car and killing four people, attacker Khalid Masood murdered police constable Keith Palmer at the gates of Parliament.

Prime Minister Theresa May laid a wreath near where Palmer was attacked, with a note: In memory of those who were lost and in defiance of those who would seek to silence our democracy.

Defence minister Tobias Ellwood, who tried to revive Palmer soon after the attack, was in tears as he remembered the incident on BBC, saying: These attacks will continue unless we step forward and actually participate, become more pro-active in dealing with what is a very changing and dark chapter that we are enduring.

The House of Commons and the House of Lords observed a minutes silence. The phrase #LondonUnited was to be projected onto the Houses of Parliament on Thursday evening, the first of four commemorations of terrorist attacks on London in 2017.

The projection, co-ordinated by the Mayor of Londons Office, will be repeated at London Bridge, Finsbury Park Mosque and Parsons Green tube station to mark the anniversaries of attacks at those locations later in the year.Maldives President Abdulla Yameen on Thursday lifted a 45-day state of emergency which had outlawed protests amid political upheaval on the Muslim-majority Indian Ocean island chain.

Yameen imposed the emergency on February 5 for 15 days after a Supreme Court ruling quashed convictions against nine opposition leaders and ordered his government to free those held in prison.

He extended the state of emergency by another 30 days with parliament approval, a move challenged by the opposition.

Though there still exists a diminished threat to national security, because the nation can now continue without further losses incurred, and upon the advice of the Security Services and in an effort to promote normalcy, the president has decided to lift the state of emergency, his office said in a statement.

Under the emergency, Yameens administration arrested former president Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, the chief justice, another Supreme Court judge and a Supreme Court administrator on allegations of attempting to overthrow the government. They have all rejected the charges.

Rights group Amnesty International said in a statement last month the government was using the emergency as a licence for repression, targeting members of civil society, judges and political opponents.An Indian-origin man was part of a gang whose five members have been jailed for a total of 56 years for their role in prolific dealing in drugs through the dark web and leading a lavish life when they were students at the University of Manchester.

Jaikishen Patel, 26, was jailed for 11 years and two months, while his accomplices  Basil Assaf, Elliot Hyams, Joshua Morgan and James Roden  were given different terms by the Manchester Crown Court on Wednesday following an international investigation involving British and US officials.

Their drug dealing through a website called Silk Road was described as prolific by Britains National Crime Agency (NCA). It said the website, modelled on eBay and Amazon, was part of the internet known as the dark web and was used to sell a range of illicit goods, though it was most well-known for drug sales.

NCA said the group, led by Assaf, moved its small-time drug dealing operation to Silk Road in May 2011, and soon ran one of its most successful businesses. Junior member Morgan was paid to package drugs for the group.

Under the brand name Ivory, the gang members sent drugs, including LSD, ecstasy, 2CB, ketamine and valium, to buyers around the world. In the course of 6,305 individual sales, the students sent almost 17 kg of liquid ecstasy, equivalent to 240,000 tablets, through the post to buyers.

According to the NCA, the gang also sent more than 1.2 kg of 2CB and more than 1.4 kg of ketamine. They sent LSD in small bottles and in individual doses on paper, stamps and sweets.

They netted at least $1.14 million (about 812,000), though where possible they took cash or crypto currencies, meaning the total value of sales was likely to be considerably greater. The online shop funded a luxury lifestyle for the group, including holidays in the Bahamas and Jamaica, and weekends partying with suppliers in Amsterdam, NCA said in a statement.

The gang was arrested following infighting among the members and the FBI shutting down the Silk Road website in October 2013.

Ian Glover of NCA said: These five men were interested only in making money. They had no regard whatsoever for the harm these drugs could do to their users. The FBIs excellent work shut the site down in 2013 in a globally significant operation and information they shared with us enabled us to identify, arrest and successfully build this case.US President Donald Trump vigorously defended his congratulatory call to his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, even as the White House launched an investigation into the leak that he had ignored advice from aides against it.

Trump had called Putin on Tuesday to congratulate him on his re-election. Most US officials and experts believe the election were not free or fair.

I called President Putin of Russia to congratulate him on his election victory (in past, Obama called him also), Trump tweeted on Wednesday, referring to a similar call by his predecessor Barack Obama to Putin earlier.

According to various news reports, Trump had been expressly urged by national security council aides, who typically brief the president before such calls, to not congratulate Putin, writing on the briefing material in capital letters  DO NOT CONGRATULATE.

The aides had also wanted Trump to raise with Putin the poisoning of a former Russian double agent and his daughter in Britain, but he did not.

Trump and the White House were furious over the leak, and a hunt was launched for the leaker, according to reports, as only someone with high security clearance could have had access to the briefing material.

It was later reported that Trump might not have seen the briefing material at all. Other aides said Trump is keen to forge a different sort of relationship with Putin, and he did not want to antagonise him.

The Fake News Media is crazed because they wanted me to excoriate him. They are wrong! Getting along with Russia (and others) is a good thing, not a bad thing, Trump tweeted, arguing that the US needs Russias help to solve the crises in North Korea and Syria, among other issues.

Trump also took on his predecessors, saying they had been incapable of forging better relations with Moscow. He tweeted: Bush tried to get along, but didnt have the smarts. Obama and Clinton tried, but didnt have the energy or chemistry (remember RESET). PEACE THROUGH STRENGTH!, referring to the policy of Hillary Clinton, who as secretary of state in pursued a reset aimed at turning around a dysfunctional relationship.US President Donald Trumps top lawyer for the Russia investigation has resigned, The New York Times reported on Thursday.

John Dowd, who had counselled full cooperation with special counsel Robert Muellers team, had found himself increasingly at odds with Trump, who, he felt, was ignoring his advice. His exit is being called the most significant shake-up of the legal team since the departure of Marc E Kasowitz, a long-time personal lawyer, who left last summer.

Earlier this week, Trump added a new member to his legal team, Joe diGenova, who has described the Russia investigation as a brazen plot to exonerate Hillary Clinton and frame Trump. He was to work with Dowd, who had taken over Trumps Russia team last summer.

Muellers team wants to interview Trump personally, but his legal team is trying to prevent it or narrow the scope of the questioning, uncertain of how Trump would hold up. Trump has taken to attacking Mueller aggressively concerned that the probe could be closing in on him personally.US congressional leaders on Wednesday reached a compromise on a $1.3 trillion budget bill which sets aside $1.6 billion for President Donald Trumps wall along the border with Mexico and contained legislative steps on gun reforms.

The bill also reflects the freeze on military aid to Pakistan worth $2 billion  tied to counter-terrorism efforts  and a further $33 million linked to release of a doctor jailed by Islamabad for helping the US hunt down Osama bin Laden.

Aimed at keeping the government funded till October, the 2,232-page bill must be passed by congress and signed into law by Friday. It is the first part of a massive two-year spending law signed by Trump in February.

As agreed upon at that time, the bill boosts defence spending  a key demand of Trump and Republicans  by $80 billion. It also gives a $63 billion boost to health and social care programmes, a priority for Democrats.

Congressional leaders from both sides hailed portions of the comprise addressed their respective priorities. Republicans said it made the US stronger at home and abroad and for Democrats, it put workers and families first.

For Trump, the priority was the wall and military spending. Got $1.6 Billion to start Wall on Southern Border, rest will be forthcoming. Most importantly, got $700 Billion to rebuild our Military, $716 Billion next year...most ever. Had to waste money on Dem giveaways in order to take care of military pay increase and new equipment, he tweeted.

The $1.6 billion will fund approximately 53 km of new fencing on the Texas border, and around 96.5 km of secondary fencing. But the money cannot be spent on new construction designs and must conform to operationally effective designs, ruling out the concrete wall that Trump has long advocated.

The compromise bill also had legislative measures on gun law reforms. It incorporates a measure to strengthen compliance with the national background check system for buying firearms. It also ends what is effectively a ban on federal government-funded research into gun violence.The White House fumed on Wednesday about an embarrassing leak regarding US President Donald Trumps shock decision to congratulate Russias Vladimir Putin on his re-election, as lawmakers blasted him for feting the strongmans landslide win.

Trump shunned the advice of some aides in making the call in the first place, after Putin sailed to a fourth term in a vote plagued by evidence of ballot stuffing, media censorship and the jailing of political opponents.

But the controversy was compounded as it emerged the Presidents prepared notes for the call had specifically warned him DO NOT CONGRATULATE -- with a hunt now underway for the person who leaked the document.

The row erupted as lawmakers heard that Russia -- slapped with US sanctions over its meddling in the 2016 election -- remains a menace as the country gears up for congressional polls in November.

The threat of interference remains, Homeland security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen told a hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee on election security.

We recognise that the 2018 midterm, and future elections, are clearly potential targets for Russian hacking attempts, she said.

Democratic senator Mark Warner told the hearing it was clear that 2016 will not be the last attempt to meddle by Russia, calling Trump out for his failure -- once again -- to tackle the subject with Putin.

The fact that the President did not even bring up the topic of our election security when he called Vladimir Putin to congratulate him on his victory in a pre-cooked election, is extremely troubling.

Trump ignored advice

The Washington Post and others reported that aides explicitly advised Trump not to congratulate the Russian president, and instead urged him to condemn the poisoning of a former Russian spy in Britain.

According to accounts from the White House and the Kremlin, Trump did neither.

The leak of such sensitive information about Oval Office deliberations points to deep frustration within the White House about the Presidents ad-hoc approach and disregard for the advice of his inner circle.

Only individuals at the very highest levels of the administration would have known about the details of the call.

Officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, told AFP that a hunt for the leaker was underway.

One suggested the documents prepared for the call may have been classified, making unauthorised disclosure a crime.

Russian hacking threat remains

The furore in the White House over the leak broke out even as Nielsen, Trumps top domestic security official, sounded a fresh warning about the threat posed by Russia.

It needs to be very clear that there are consequences for countries that meddle in our affairs.

Warner said Moscows threat has grown larger than in 2016.

There are signs that the Kremlin is becoming more brazen. As we saw recently, the Putin regime was behind an assassination attempt on European soil with a prohibited military-grade nerve agent. This is not the action of a regime that is being successfully deterred.

He echoed the criticism of Trumps call by Republican Senator John McCain, who warned on Wednesday that an American president does not lead the free world by congratulating dictators on winning sham elections.

Hold Russia accountable

Allies, most notably in Britain, were furious about Trumps apparent lack of solidarity after double agent Sergei Skripal was poisoned in a small English town.

The White House waited for days before condemning the attack, which London has pinned squarely on the Kremlin and Moscow has denied.

Also facing mounting domestic pressure over his unwillingness to confront Putin, the White House said Wednesday Trump agreed in a call with French President Emmanuel Macron on the need to take action to hold Russia accountable over the attack.

For critics, Trumps call offered Putin legitimacy while giving him a wedge to drive between Western allies and within the White House itself.

But Republicans also lined up behind the president in anger about the latest leak from the White House.

I dont like that he did it, but you know what I like even less? That there is somebody close to him leaking this stuff out. If you dont like the guy, quit! said Republican Senator Marco Rubio.Appointment

22 March 2018

Maly will oversee day-to-day operations of the hotel and contribute fresh ideas for local, community partnerships and ongoing initiatives that create unique guest experiences for locals and travelers alike. Maly began his career in hospitality more than 14 years ago after receiving a Bachelor of Business Administration from Texas Tech University. Prior to his new role, Maly contributed to the success of multiple properties, overseeing million-dollar renovation projects, increasing hotel profitability, and improving overall consumer satisfaction. Maly began his journey in Dallas, Texas at the Four Seasons Resort and Club, later going on to manage The Lodge at Turning Stone. Most recently, Maly served as the General Manager of The Ivey's Hotel in Charlotte, North Carolina, where he successfully led opening operations for the property, including employee hiring and training, development of revenue strategy, and creation and execution of the bar and lounge program.Appointment

22 March 2018

ONYX Hospitality Group, one of the region's leading hotel management companies, is enhancing its commitment to China by strengthening its Shanghai-based team structure. In addition to creating a new Greater China regional base in Shanghai, the company has appointed Gina Wo to a newly-created role as Senior Vice President and Head of Greater China, effective 26 March 2018.

Joining ONYX Hospitality Group after over 16 years at InterContinental Hotels Group, Gina will oversee all aspects of the company's ongoing growth and expansion in one of the world's fastest growing economies. To be based in Shanghai and reporting directly to President and CEO Douglas Martell, Gina will focus on further growth through the localisation of the company's long-term strategic road map, to solidify the positioning of ONYX Hospitality Group as the hospitality player of choice among travellers, team members, investors and partners in the Greater China region.

One of Gina's first priorities at ONYX Hospitality Group would be to increase the company's corporate talent capabilities in Greater China by reviewing the existing manning and structure, as well as strengthening the company's regional operations, hotel openings and commercial expertise in order to ensure its sustained and continued growth in line with robust portfolio expansion in the coming years. The Shanghai regional headquarters will be complemented by a satellite office in Hong Kong, with team members dedicated to supporting the company's Hong Kong presence.

This strategic move follows significant recent China development wins for ONYX Hospitality Group, including a China-wide strategic partnership with Sincere Holdings Group for both companies to exclusively develop and open multiple Shama serviced apartment properties across 12 key cities across China. Amari, the company's flagship hotel brand, also launched its first hotel in China in 2017 with the opening of Amari Yangshuo in Guilin.Supplier News

22 March 2018

ALPHARETTA, GA -- The Rainmaker Group (Rainmaker), a leading provider of cloud-based hospitality revenue and profit optimization software, today announced that Angie Dobney, vice president of casino and gaming sales, will be a featured speaker at the 11th Annual Tribal Casino & Hotel Development Conference. The conference will be held March 26-27 at the Pechanga Resort & Casino in Temecula, Calif. Rainmaker is a gold-level sponsor of the event.

Dobney will participate in a panel discussion entitled, How Tracking Every Dollar Spent by Your Patrons Not Only Increases Profit but Also Decreases Cost Throughout Your Enterprise. The panel, which will address new technologies that track guests and their preferences, will include topics such as: uncovering additional profit centers in your hotel and casino; getting the right customers into the casino; player loyalty; and how to make player rewards programs desirable to all age groups.

Dobney, a former Rainmaker customer who joined the company in 2014, brings to her role a user's perspective on technology. Having worked in both manual and automated environments, she knows firsthand the challenges customers face and draws from personal experience to guide her clients in best practices. Her expertise spans the unique challenges related to revenue optimization, and she is a frequent industry speaker.

Rainmaker offers best-of-breed revenue and profit optimization solutions to hotels, resorts and casinos. Its product suite includes:

guestrev , an intuitive and easy-to-use revenue management solution that analyzes total guest value across a hotel or casino property to forecast and price rooms;

, an intuitive and easy-to-use revenue management solution that analyzes total guest value across a hotel or casino property to forecast and price rooms; grouprev , an innovative group pricing solution that streamlines the process of responding to group RFPs by analyzing historical data, future demand, and price sensitivity to recommend the best pricing for group business;

, an innovative group pricing solution that streamlines the process of responding to group RFPs by analyzing historical data, future demand, and price sensitivity to recommend the best pricing for group business; revcaster , a powerful rate shopping tool that gives hoteliers access to real-time actionable market data, so that rates can be set against the competitive landscape; and

, a powerful rate shopping tool that gives hoteliers access to real-time actionable market data, so that rates can be set against the competitive landscape; and revintel, an intuitive business intelligence solution that improves day-to-day revenue management by mining various data sets and providing deep insights at a granular level.

"We are excited to participate in the 11th Annual Tribal Casino & Hotel Development Conference, both as industry thought leaders and as a gold-level sponsor," said Mike Cowles, chief commercial officer of The Rainmaker Group. "We are deeply committed to the success of our tribal gaming customers, and this meeting is always a great event."

The Tribal Casino & Hotel Development Conference is dedicated to the design and development of tribal-owned casinos, resorts and hotels. Each year, tribal leaders gather with industry professionals to discuss the most relevant topics in the business, including government legislation, advancements in technology, and the latest trends in renovation and design. The annual conference is produced by Native Nation Events in Ramsey, N.J.Supplier News

22 March 2018

SAN FRANCISCO, CA -- Next week members of the Asian American Hotel Owners Assn. can experience hospitality's "most innovative technology" at the AAHOA Annual Convention & Trade Show, to be held March 27 to 30 at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center in National Harbor, Md. The Beekeeper digital workforce platform, considered to be the best employee app in the industry, will be on display in Booth #1075. With Beekeeper, hoteliers can exchange information, share property updates, and communicate best practices with front- and back-of-house hotel employees who don't sit at a desk or have a company email address. Beekeeper was honored with the 2018 TechOvation Award by Hospitality Technology Next Generation (HTNG) earlier this month.

"We are eager to introduce Beekeeper to AAHOA members at this important event," said Corey McCarthy, Beekeeper VP of Global Marketing. "We understand that most hotel employees don't have traditional desk jobs. Because they don't have a work email, they rely on bulletin boards for internal communications. While this system is okay, it doesn't resonate well with today's employees, especially Millennials who prefer to send and receive information digitally. Beekeeper connects colleagues across locations and departments in real time via mobile or desktop devices, and it features an intelligent analytics dashboard to help hotels improve internal communication and streamline business processes.

"Beekeeper also links non-desk workers with a hotel's operational systems, such as payroll, scheduling, file sharing, task management and others," she said. "This gives staff a sense of belonging and trust . . . it increases engagement and loyalty . . . and it ultimately translates into better individual and team performances. We encourage anyone who wanting to digitize their workforce communication to visit the Beekeeper booth. We'll show attendees how they can turn employee satisfaction into guest satisfaction."

With Beekeeper, hoteliers can:

See what's happening throughout the day at their hotel and read what's happening in the company.

Keep all team members aligned and unified by sharing information that is necessary for staff to do their jobs.

Use the Survey feature to poll employees on their satisfaction or request input.

Communicate with team members during a crisis or while a property is closed.

Onboard new team members and engage with them even before they start on their first day.

Update staff on the status of engineering or housekeeping projects.

"Our customers often tell us that their favorite feature of Beekeeper is its accessibility," McCarthy said. "Information can be accessed on a tablet, a smartphone, or a computer. Some hotels even have a communication monitor in their employee dining rooms so workers can see what's going on while they're having their breaks. A great employee experience will always translate to a great guest experience."

Beekeeper joined the Asian American Hotel Owners Association (AAHOA) as an Allied Member in 2017.

To preschedule a meeting with Beekeeper at the AAHOA Annual Convention & Tradeshow, please email Corey McCarthy at [email protected] or request a time at www.beekeeper.io/aahoa2018.Opinion Article

22 March 2018

We hear a great deal about the "frictionless travel experience" and how it may be a lofty goal, but every day we are getting closer and closer to this reality. Industry leaders agree that low-tech travel experiences are a thing of the past and consumer demand is driving innovation.

We are now able to book our air, hotel and rental car all via a mobile device. We can then use this same device to check-in at airports, hotels, and car rental sites. Many of us even assume that our smartphones should be used to open our hotel room door. All of these conveniences would have been impossible on such a scale five years ago. Though some were individually achievable from a technology standpoint - all of it combined was a reality still waiting in the wings of the future.

There are still some essential elements lagging in the modernized travel ecosystem. The tours and activities space is one that remains cluttered with paper transactions instead of mobile or digital experiences. The good news is that there are many exciting advancements on the cusp of disrupting both air travel and hotel stays over the next few years.

Frictionless commerce, on the other hand, has still proven elusive for the travel industry. All of the back-end processes to ensure that payment is seamless between the travelers, intermediaries, and suppliers is still disjointed.

The hotel industry has been especially challenged when it comes to implementing an effective commerce experience that serves both the guests and the hotel. This was a hot topic at the HEDNA Conference in Austin that I attended last month. Hotel Electronic Distribution Networking Association (HEDNA) developed a whitepaper via their Payment Working Group that tries to tackle this issue head-on. I would highly suggest that you download the whitepaper so here's the LINK.

This comes directly from their whitepaper:

While most hotels have a centralized room reservation system, they do not have a centralized payment processing solution. When the guest reserves a room, payment information is captured during the booking process but then gets forwarded to the individual property where the guest will stay. That individual property is the merchant of record, which has its own acquiring relationship to manage and process the payment.

When you think about this situation, it is disturbing on many levels. There is so much money being left on the table via payment commissions which really may not be warranted. The report goes on to state that there are four major hurdles that impact the process of frictionless commerce:

Payment Acceptance Multi-Currency Operational Inefficiency PCI Compliance and Security

When it comes to achieving frictionless commerce, there are several areas where hotels are failing to retain revenue via these four major areas of concern.

By simply moving away from a property by property payment model to a centralized model, hotels will save an enormous amount of money (1). Also, displaying prices upfront to guests in their relevant currency will lead to increased conversions and sales (2).

Operational efficiencies (3) are somewhat in line with payment acceptance whereby if the process is done centrally, the brand can optimize the number of relationships it has with service providers/payment gateways. Then there is the matter of PCI compliance (4). I believe that we, as an industry, are well on our way to having a very good handle on this issue. Unfortunately, data breaches and hacks to platforms will likely continue, so we must stay vigilant.

In a landscape of ever-increasing technology and business model disruption, pull from consumers and profitability will be the catalysts for frictionless commerce. Trust, convenience, and perceived value are the ingredients that will propel these changes in order to lower the fee structures while enhancing the travel journey at every touchpoint. Essentially, if it makes travelers' lives easier and boosts the bottom line, then there is a huge opportunity just waiting to be taken advantage of.

Please share your thoughts about hotel and travel technology with me on LinkedIn.Performance

22 March 2018

Within the hospitality industry, Qatar has long been a country known as a relatively busy transit spot. Its Hamad International Airport connects to 100 different destinations, making Qatar a popular destination for layovers as visitors wait to head to other countries.

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For some, however, it has also become common place to tack a few extra days onto their trips in order to spend more time in Qatar, which is a tiny Gulf nation that has grown in terms of the offerings it has to entice guests. In many ways, Qatar is somewhat of an ideal place to spend a few days in the Middle East: it's one of the safest countries in the entire world, there's a rich variety of beaches, it features year round sunshine, and the food is on par with the best the region has to offer.

That's why today we're going to be taking a look at some of the hottest destinations in Qatar, as well as at information about the country's hotel project pipeline from the TOPHOTELCONSTRUCTION database.

Photo: TOPHOTELPROJECTS

Tourist Attractions Making Qatar More Popular with Guests

Travel experts say that there are plenty of places to spend some time in Qatar, but among the best are the country's famous sand dunes, which are as high as they are steep. In fact, for many making the drive across the desert and to the sea in Qatar is an amazing experience. While doing so, guests have the option to spend a night in a luxury Arabian tent or to pitch their own. They can, of course, also spend some time sleeping under the stars.

The other must-see tourism experience in Qatar is taking in Doha's Corniche and dhows. Simply put, a walk along Qatar's Doha Corniche is an absolutely gorgeous way to spend a typical late afternoon. There's a seven kilometer stretch of promenade there that goes across the Persian Gulf in the Way Bay from the Sheraton Hotel to the famous Museum of Islamic Art, and along the way you can grab coffee, fly kits and, of course, take photos by Qatar's iconic pearl shell, which stands as a traditional symbol of its past.

Qatar's Project Pipeline

Hotel construction is also booming in Qatar, according to information from the TOPHOTELCONSTRUCTION database.

In fact, as of now, Qatar currently has 47 projects in its pipeline that once completed stand to yield a total of 13,679 rooms. The majority of these projects29 to be exactare slated to open in 2018, and 60 percent of the total projects in Qatar's pipeline will be designated as luxury hotels while the other 40 percent are tabbed as first class.

Let's take a look at a few other projects currently underway in Qatar:

Steigenberger Hotel Doha Airport Road

The project is to be realised within the close proximity of Doha City Centre and Doha International Airport and thus serve the interests of both leisure and business guests [READ MORE]

Dream Doha

The ambitious property featuring nine dining and nightlife venues, is the first Middle Eastern development for the brand [READ MORE]

Waldorf Astoria Doha West Bay

The Waldorf Astoria Hotel Doha is a 43 story tower in West Bay, including several specialty restaurants, a luxurious spa and large function spaces, plus a grand ballroom. [READ MORE]

More information on Qatar hotel projects can be found in the

TOPHOTELPROJECTS database.

TOPHOTELPROJECTS is the specialized service provider of cutting-edge information of the hospitality industry.Performance

22 March 2018

HENDERSONVILLE, Tennessee -- The U.S. hotel industry reported positive year-over-year results in the three key performance metrics during the week of 11-17 March 2018, according to data from STR.



In comparison with the week of 12-18 March 2017, the industry recorded the following:

Occupancy: +1.0 at 70.7%

Average daily rate (ADR): +2.8% to US$133.76

Revenue per available room (RevPAR): +3.9% to US$94.55

Among the Top 25 Markets, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania-New Jersey, experienced the largest increases in occupancy (+13.6% to 72.3%) and RevPAR (+19.8% to US$90.57).

Boston, Massachusetts, reported the second-highest increases in occupancy (+12.7% to 74.9%) and RevPAR (+16.1% to US$135.89).

Miami/Hialeah, Florida, posted the only double-digit lift in ADR (+14.1% to US$262.04) and the third-largest jump in RevPAR (+13.0% to US$235.22).

Overall, 17 of the Top 25 Markets reported growth in RevPAR.

San Diego, California, reported the largest decline in RevPAR (-15.0% to US$142.56), due primarily to the only double-digit drop in ADR (-11.8% to US$163.99).

Detroit, Michigan, experienced the largest decrease in occupancy (-7.3% to 64.6%).

St. Louis, Missouri-Illinois, saw the second-largest decrease in ADR (-8.5% to US$99.97) and the only other double-digit decline in RevPAR (-12.0% to US$70.38).Those who have been paying attention know that A$AP Rockys new album is coming. The New York rapper has been taking his time to perfect the project, a testament to his visionary status. A man like Rocky is not about to get on Instagram and rattle off the entire tracklist. True, he cant resist the urge of posting an occasional snippet. Hes only human. Yet theres a certain mystique associated with A$APs ringleader that pervades his forthcoming project.

His rollout has at once in-process and pending. A trifecta of un-mixed songs felt more like artistic statements than official singles. Perhaps thats why he deemed them for testing purposes only. Yet even that felt calculated, given the albums frequent visual motifs.

Behold, the promotional singles:

Strangely enough, it feels like Rockys forthcoming album has yielded more questions than answers. For that reason, were here to compile an extensive list of everything we know. To be honest, Rockys secrecy has proven sound. Yet beneath the veil of mystery lies the truth. Let us commence.

Eerie!

2 Days Ago. The Rollout has begun. With an eerie, lo-fi visual, Rocky suggests a promising blend of dark imagery and an even darker banger. We welcome this direction.

Finished!

At the beginning of February, Rocky took to a Berlin stage with some magnificent news. His album was done, for all intents and purposes. "A lot of ya'll don't know but the only reason I came to Berlin was to finish my album," he explained. "And I just finished." While assumptions tend to make asses out of you and I alike, perhaps its safe to conclude that done, in this instance, can be understood as truth. That means tracking, mixing, mastering, sequencing, and the like. If that is indeed the case, it wouldnt be surprising to see the project sooner than later.

Dummies!

Perhaps a youthful A$AP Rocky used to binge watch the 1993 Fox hit The Incredible Crash Dummies. Perhaps he simply enjoyed their strange anthropomorphism. Either way, the imagery clearly left a lasting effect on the rapper. While the project has yet to officially land a title, consider that both Testing and Dummie were both heavily featured on the artwork of the promotional singles.

Not only that, but Rocky has also adorned his studio with sexually suggestive dummies; perhaps this signifies a more twisted and deranged creative direction. Perhaps hes merely young at heart. Either way, expect Crash Test Dummies to feature prominently in the albums artwork.

Testing!"

Rockys secrecy regarding his new album is frustrating, yet respectable. He really hasnt given us much to work with, but thats not to say hes been utterly mums the word. In October of 2017, Rocky spoke with GQ about his process, which seemed to suggest a more experimental approach. As you read the following excerpt, take note of the word test in the opening sentence.

People are scared to test new sounds, so they go with whats current cause its the easy thing to do. The top 100 songs sound a certain way. People cater more to that because its a bigger demographic behind that, or its a guaranteed demographic behind that. I prefer to experiment and have my crowd grow with me and to reach new crowds. I dont just rapI actually make music. Thats why it takes time.

Europe!

Not exactly breaking news here, but something for the true geeks among us. According to that same GQ cover story, the majority of this project was recorded in London. London has a cool sound. I always record in London, says Rocky. But I needed to get away. Londons my second home. Its hard to say whether or not UK influences will seep into his craft, but he did contribute to Skeptas Vicious EP. Lets be real though - locale and geography can play a pivotal role in influencing ones creative direction. Rocky also later confirmed that parts of the album were recorded in Berlin.

Snippets!

As secretive as Rocky has been, its safe to say that no rapper can resist teasing new music. The allure of sharing ones craft is simply too strong to resist. Thus, we do have some previews on deck. Remember, its impossible to confirm whether or not any of these cuts will appear on the forthcoming album. Still, it does signify a glimpse into his headspace, albeit a brief one.

First, Rocky hit Yams Day audiences with a first hand glimpse at one song from his upcoming project. Footage can be seen below, and bars have been provided for your perusal:

"First things first, I done heard the worst things/ Like if I'm, in your top 10, mines better be the first name/ Out your mouth or even worst sayin'/ Lil n****s is my offsprings/ They deserve a n***a first name, middle name, third name/ From another planet birthplace/ Cloud 9, hello earthlings

Theres also this low key banger, with the potential title of Gang:

Perhaps the following snippets signify a much-desired return to the chopped and screwed sound of vintage Rocky:There's probably a lot of American's that are wishing they had a time machine just to go back in time and tell Donald Trump what he wanted to hear at the age of 25: do no run for President.

During an interview at D.C.'s Generation Next Summit, Donald was asked what he would tell himself back when he was in his 20's. Plain and simple he responds telling the crowd that he would say, "Don't run for president."

Referencing a conversation he's had, Donald explained: "All my life I've gotten - you know every once in a while you get a knock - but I've gotten the greatest publicity....until I ran for office." He then explains how people do "get it" though because there's lots of fake news out there and he's "proud of the fact" that he's exposed that to everyone. Watch the video below.

In other news surrounding Donald, the 60 Minutes interview with Stormy Daniels airs this Sunday and will be the first time the former porn star appears on national television to discuss her affair with the President.

The interview airs on March 25th, at 7 PM on CBS.Chicago rapper G Herbo impressed many a few days ago with his freestyle ability, dropping some firey bars over Three 6 Mafia's "Who Run It" instrumental. Herbo's flow was insane as he remained focused, bringing an energy we've become accustomed to from him. Everyone from his fans to one of the hottest rappers in the entire music industry took notice, urging Herb to formally record over the beat and officially release it. Drake actually hit up the Chicagoan via Instagram to praise him for snapping on the beat, sending a flurry of messages.

"Why you spaz on who run it like that," wrote Drake before spamming Herbo with face-palm emojis and admitting he had been listening to the 30-second freestyle for five days straight. The 6ix God finished off his messages with a simple request: "You should make that a song and just drop it." Ask and you shall receive. G Herbo took a screenshot of the exchange and made a post of his own on Instagram, saying that once he hits 150K likes on the post, he'll release the track. His fans around the world have been clamoring for a full version of the freestyle since Herb posted a teaser nearly one week ago. It appears as though the song may be releasing today as the post had only been up for 26 minutes at the time of publication and is nearing 100K likes.

Keep an eye out for new G Herbo and, if you want his version of Three 6 Mafia's "Who Run It," smash the like button on the post below.Juicy J is known for popularizing a murky, lo-fi sound due to a limitation in the range of equipment that was widely available when he began making music. While plenty of high-quality musical devices exist today, younger rappers of the SoundCloud era strive to create a sound that recalls vintage Juicy J records. A lo-fi ambiance can be heard throughout much of Smokepurpp, Lil Pump, XXXTentacion and Kodak Black's arsenal, opting for muddy vocals and crackling white noise backgrounds. Juicy J is fully aware of the current movement in hip-hop and he likes where it is headed, recognizing that a broken sound is the wave that artists are aspiring to create.

In an interview with Rolling Stone, the former Three 6 Mafia member praised Lil Pump and XXXTentacion for extending a sound that he popularized, giving him further inspiration. Juicy spoke to the interviewer about both Florida rappers, saying, "They keep the music alive. They keep people interested in the music." While it is certainly a bold claim, X and Pump are two of the most popular artists among a younger audience, with the former's ? album expected to debut at the top of the Billboard 200 chart.

Memphis rap in the 1990's was familiar with the murky sound that is often heard today and with two of the hottest Florida rappers catching on to a similar vibe, the sound could be around for a while. Do you agree with Juicy J's comments? Read the full interview here.Juicy sat down with Rolling Stone to cover a broad spectrum of subjects which all seemed to commemorate his legacy in terms made oh so obvious by the new generation's imitation of his sound. One thing about the tone of the interview which strikes me as odd, is the way Rolling Stone frames the write-up as a send off into retirement. Juicy J is possibly more prolific than he was in his heyday with Triple Six. He's seen his friends pass away, retire, move onto other pastures, and yet his formula for longevity appears impenetrable.



The greatest takeaway from the interview is his optimistic outlook on the future and the present of rap. When asked to share his feelings about his "Slob on my Knob" verse seeing new light through vocal interpolation, he was surprisingly willing to pass on the torch. The new generation exemplified by ASAP Ferg who asked permission to record "Plain Jane," are showing dueful respect to the originator.



Juicy J wrote "Slob on my Knob" in the eleventh grade and later recorded it on a 4-track with Project Pat. The moment he knew his song had become a watershed moment for the movement was after he landed in Japan.



"I know people in the States know about the song, but I was just, like, way over in Japan they know the words to "Slob on the Knob." It just fucked me up, you know what I'm saying? I'm in Japan and people knowin' who I am. I was walking down the street to go into McDonalds, and they walked up to me like, "Yo, Juicy J!" And I was like, "Y'all know who I am? Damn."



Check the whole Q&A here.



It looks like Kanye West might have to fight for the right to use the Yeezy nickname. According to a report from TMZ, a Chinese company apparently came out of nowhere and swindled their way behind Kanyes back last year and filed trademark paperwork in an effort to use the popular Yeezy brand name.

Kanye's company has owned the Yeezy name for footwear since 2013, but for whatever reason abandoned the trademark for other clothing items besides shoes in 2017. The Chinese company, Fujian Baby Network Technology Co., reportedly seized the opportunity by immediately filing trademark paperwork for the term "Yeezy Boost" for its clothing products.

The media outlet says Kanyes company then refiled its application for Yeezy clothing, but the trademark office said not so fast because the Chinese company now had the rights to it.

Kanye shouldn't have to worry about this trademark issue affecting future Yeezy sneakers, but if he wants to expand business and start making other clothing items with the name Yeezy on it he might be in for a legal battle.

This report comes in the midst of Kanye working on his next album in Wyoming. If you missed it, the likes of Drake, Lil Uzi, Nas, Kid Cudi, Travis and more have all been out there in the past weeks to help him.

Well continue to keep you posted moving forward.

[Via]After flipping a classic Lauryn Hill sample on last months Forever And Always release, rising South Carolina spitter Nick Grant decides to come through today and share a new song called 96 Bulls, which hes been teasing all week long on social media.

On his 6-ring flow shit, like the 96 Bulls, Nick shows off his effortless bars & slick wordplay, rapping about his come up in the streets, and getting money, among other things. No hook or funny business here, just straight bars for the lyrical fans to digest.

Its unclear at the moment if this will see life on his upcoming Dreaming Out Loud project or not, but were all for it regardless. Take a listen and let us know what you think! Look for the official video to drop at midnight.

Quotable Lyrics:

You never met a nigga this cold

Somebody tell them boys class never gets old

The more success they hate me thats the way this shit goes

Married to the money thats relationship goalsA UPS employee in Secaucus, New Jersey was reportedly caught stealing more than $1,100 worth of sneakers directly from the companys facility, according to a report by NJ.com.

41-year old Halif Bryant of Jersey City, New Jersey was reportedly arrested late last week and charged with theft, but was released shortly after being processed. According to NJ.com, Bryant had stolen three pairs of sneakers, valued at over $1,100, although it's unclear exactly what kind of shoes they were.

This isn't the first time we've heard a story like this. A Maryland truck driver pleaded guilty to stealing over $19,000 worth of New Balances last year after a co-worker allegedly offered him $250 to pull of the heist.

Also last year, a Fed Ex employee was accused of stealing a Yeezy Boost 350 delivery, rather than dropping the box off at its destination. The allegations called into question Adidas' transparent shipping methods, which have the style code listed on the outside of the box, allowing the drivers to know exactly what sneakers are being shipped.By Jhoo Dong-chan







KEB Hana Bank will provide 15 trillion won ($13.9 billion) in "productive finance" to help the nation's small- and medium-size enterprises by 2020, the bank said Thursday.







The bank added it will directly invest 120 billion won every year for startups and small businesses while establishing a venture capital fund to provide 100 billion won of support annually until 2020.







Plus, KEB Hana Bank is set to expand its financial support for tech-savvy SMEs to 9 trillion won. It said it will also expand its loans to guarantee agencies to 4 trillion won as part of its commitment to help accommodate the upcoming Fourth Industrial Revolution.







It also plans to supply 1.5 trillion won for firms that create job opportunities.







In a bid to support the nation's startups, KEB Hana Bank has also established a task force exclusively for ventures and SMEs.







"KEB Hana Bank will do its best to create more job opportunities and help facilitate income-driven growth through the bank's productive finance programs," a KEB Hana Bank official said.







KEB Hana Bank also supported the PyeongChang Winter Olympics last month as an official sponsoring partner. Separate from directly sponsoring $9.6 million, the bank invited its clients to PyeongChang before the Olympics in January and offered a tour to Naksan Temple in Yangyang for a glimpse of Korean Buddhist traditions.







KEB Hana Bank also looked into entry to Southeast Asia as it signed a strategic partnership MOU with Laos' top bank by assets last July.







The agreement was aimed at boosting the two lenders' partnership on remittance and trade financing. KEB Hana said the collaboration will allow the two sides to provide financial services to Laotians working in Korea.

Mandatory arbitration has long been a standard clause of contracts to buy cars, open bank accounts and take jobs, blocking consumers, investors and employees from bringing disputes to court and forcing them to use a forum widely viewed as favoring companies.

But mandatory arbitration is coming under increasing attack in the courts, Congress and state legislatures, and those attacks are beginning to make dents in a practice once viewed as unassailable. Congress, for example, is considering legislation that would ban mandatory arbitration in cases of sexual harassment in the workplace, and state attorneys general, including Ken Paxton of Texas, are urging lawmakers to act.

In California, a new law prohibits employers from requiring workers to arbitrate workplace claims in other states. And the Supreme Court, which has long upheld arbitration clauses, is reconsidering whether a typical provision that prohibits employees from joining class action lawsuits, violates the National Labor Relations Act.

"There has definitely been some erosion," said Rick Anderson, a Houston consumer lawyer. "Its not a full-on attack, but you do see a judicial and administrative look at whether or not some arbitrations are appropriate."

Several factors have come together to prompt these second looks, including the #MeToo movement, which has exposed sexual harassment and assault in the workplace, and efforts by the porn actress Stephanie Clifford, known as Stormy Daniels, and the former Playboy model Karen McDougal to challenge arbitration clauses in nondisclosure agreements involving alleged affairs with President Donald Trump. Trump has denied the affairs.

Media attention has also focused on cases in which companies have used arbitration to shield themselves from egregious practices. Wells Fargo, for example, forced its customers to arbitration to settle claims related to the thousands of fake accounts that the banks employees set up to meet sales quotas, provoking such an outcry that the California Legislature last year passed a law that prohibits financial services firms from triggering arbitration clauses in cases of fraud.

Companies, meanwhile, are beginning to rethink arbitration; Microsoft, for example, recently dropped mandatory arbitration for sexual harassment claims. In Texas, corporate lawyers say many of their clients are getting rid of arbitration clauses, finding that the high costs and finality of arbitration -- rulings cant be appealed in court -- are not always such a good deal for them.

Alex Brauer, a Dallas lawyer, said one his clients soured on mandatory arbitration after losing in a dispute with a supplier. The arbitrator assessed damages of just $1, but under the rules of that arbitration, the loser must pay the winners legal costs. Brauers client was hit with a $200,000 bill.

"We try to appeal but the courts say, No, you signed up for this," said Brauer, who declined to name the client. "You dont know what youll get."

Mandatory arbitration clauses, often buried in the fine print, are written into a dizzying array of contracts, including home building, banking, payday loans, cell phones, rental cars, medical services, nursing homes, employment and car buying and leasing. People who sign these contracts waive their rights to sue and agree to settle disputes through binding arbitration, a process that is secretive, expensive and final. An estimated 60 million U.S. private-sector non-union employees  or 56 percent of the total workforceare covered by mandatory arbitration policies, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington think tank.

Arbitration became part of the American legal landscape in 1925, when federal legislation opened the door to resolving business disputes with arbitrators. The scope of arbitration expanded vastly during the 1980s, after a series of Supreme Court decisions struck down state laws requiring arbitration notices to be clearly labeled, upheld high arbitration fees and ruled that arbitration clauses could prohibit consumers, investors and employees from joining class action lawsuits.

Companies say that arbitration is a fair, less costly and faster way to resolve disputes. But consumer groups, worker advocates and other critics say arbitration unfairly favors corporations and employers. A two-year study by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, for example, found that consumers win only 9 percent of arbitration cases that they bring against financial companies.

Consumer and employment lawyers continue to push back against arbitration clauses. In state and federal courts in Texas, arbitration provisions have been challenged hundreds of times in cases ranging from bounced checks to sexual assault to construction contracts.

The challenges typically focus on narrow issues, targeting rules that require far-flung arbitration venues and provisions that dont allow for reimbursement of attorney fees. Victories, however, remain rare. Rich Tomlinson, a consumer lawyer at Lone Star Legal Aid, which provides legal aid to low income residents in Houston and East Texas, estimates he has challenged arbitration provisions a couple of dozen times  mostly without success.

"The best you can do is knock provisions in the clause that are totally unfair," Tomlinson said, but the courts still say you have to go to arbitration.

The best hope for reducing the role of arbitration in consumer and employment contracts may be the companies themselves. Bank of America, for example, has dropped mandatory arbitration in contracts for car loans, recreational vehicle loans, deposit accounts and other financial products, as well as credit cards.

David Komiss, a Bellaire lawyer who represents the Houston Independent Automobile Dealers Association, said he advises his member companies to avoid arbitration Most disputes go to small claims courts  which handle civil cases up to $10,000  and both sides get a chance to present their cases without all the formality of introducing evidence, calling witnesses and proving damages, he said. Judges have experience evaluating witness credibility and it doesnt cost anything to use the courthouse, except modest filing fees that run about $124.

Im not trying to say arbitration is a bad thing, said Komiss, estimating that all of his automotive clients have taken his advice. I like the judicial system handling it because you know what to expect.

For Priority Energy Services, a Louisiana oilfield services company with operations in Houston, arbitration didnt turn out as expected as fees and costs climbed to least $500,000 to handle 40 individual claims by employees, who alleged they were denied overtime pay, according to court records.

The company, which included mandatory arbitration in its employment contracts, tried to force their employees to split the costs, but the American Arbitration Association, which is the designated coordinator of the companys arbitration program, does not permit fee splitting, outside of an initial $200 filing fee assessed to workers. Priority Energy asked the federal court in Tyler to force employees to split the fees or let the company out of arbitration arrangement, but the court rejected both requests in December.

Prioritys expenses were quickly spiraling to $1 million, between the arbitration fees, defense costs and other legal bills, said Dan Pipitone, the Houston lawyer who represented Priority. The company settled with the employees for $700,000, he said.

Pipitone, who didnt draft the arbitration clause, said he advises clients not to use them in employment contracts, since, as Priority learned, costs can quickly pile up and employees can use that as leverage to wrest settlements from companies. Thats a pretty big hammer, Pipitone said.

Legal specialists expect further erosion in mandatory arbitration, particularly if the Supreme Court determines that employers cannot use arbitration clauses to prohibit workers from filing and joining class action lawsuits. The court consolidated three cases to determine whether company rules against employees pursing work-related disputes on a collective basis violates the National Labor Relations Act, which gives employees the right to join together to improve wages and working conditions. A ruling is expected later this year.

The #MeToo movement is targeting mandatory arbitration as more women come forward to report sexual abuse. Some labor experts say mandatory arbitration perpetuates sexual harassment in the workplace because the secretive process keeps women from learning about other victims while protecting abusers who move on to other targets.

Two senators  Democrat Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Republican Lindsey Graham of South Carolina introduced a bill in December to ban arbitration in sex discrimination cases, including harassment, compensation, promotions, hiring and firing. Rep. Cheri Bustos, D-Ill., introduced a similar bill in the House. Attorney generals in all 56 states and territories recently sent a letter urging Congress to ban mandatory arbitration of sexual harassment claims to "help to put a stop to the culture of silence that protects perpetrators at the cost of their victims."The Montrose Management District will soon be no more.

After less than an hour in a closed door session Thursday, the board approved a motion to dissolve itself, ending a key piece of a years-long legal battle between the district and commercial property owners who have been calling for its dissolution since at least 2012.

"The Montrose Management Board has finally done the right thing and voted to dissolve," Andy Taylor, attorney for the property owners, said after the board's announcement. "It's been a six year battle. The people won today and the government lost."

Read full story at HoustonChronicle.com: Montrose board votes to disband

The motion for dissolution comes after a judge ordered the district at the end of January to conduct a more thorough review of a petition property owners filed seeking its dissolution.

RELATED: Uptown Park getting modern-day makeover

The district previously rejected the petition by declaring more than a quarter of the signatures invalid.

But state District Judge Daryl Moore said the district's lack of analysis was "arbitrary and unreasonable," and gave it 45 days to conduct the additional review.

"Based on the research that we did and information that counsel for the folks that brought the lawsuit provided, we made the decision to move forward with the dissolution," the district's managing director Ben Brewer said.

"I'm hoping this will send a clear message," Taylor said. "Don't play games when 80 percent of the people you represent don't want you."

LISTEN: Immigrants' impact on rebuilding Houston

Troubles at the district date back to at least 2012, when a property owner challenged its legality.

Last fall, a judge ruled that it illegally collected nearly $6.6 million in assessments and said it must reimburse the money to property owners. That case is now on appeal.

Opponents have long claimed that they don't benefit from the district's programs and that the assessments amount to taxation without representation. After the district was created by the state legislature, it was able to begin assessing property owners with a petition of only 25 signatures.

The Montrose Management District is one of dozens of improvement districts in Houston authorized by the Legislature to promote economic development and enhance public areas and individual neighborhoods.

In Montrose, the district had been providing services such as security patrols, graffiti removal and colorful lights on the bridges over U.S. 59.The silence that followed the Saturday night performance of "We Are Proud to Present ," at Stages Repertory Theatre through April 1, was long and angry.

"That cannot be the (expletive) end," said a man sitting in front of me. He stretched and chewed the word "not" as if his entire face were scrunched while saying it. Shaking his head, he said the sentence again.

During the 90 unrelenting minutes of the best theater production in Houston this year thus far, at least two audience members walked out. When the show ended, my guest and I looked at each other with the same staggered expression and stumbled out into the lobby. Then, we spent the following hour roaming the streets outside Stages, arms waving, as we debated the themes presented in the show. We did not want to process that experience inside a Honda.

Jackie Sibblies Drury's "We Are Proud to Present ," which officially bears a much longer title, has been vastly underrated since its 2012 debut. It was never shown on a large scale in New York (its run at Soho Rep received mildly praising reviews) and didn't win a Pulitzer or Tony. Though it has been performed across the country, it's rarely mentioned in the same light of classic race plays ("A Raisin in the Sun"), semi-recent seminal works on race ("Topdog/Underdog") or current post-modern narratives on race ("An Octoroon"). But it should be.

The play is, after all, an unforgettable reminder that even the most eager and earnest of us tend to euphemize racial violence. To have a truly rigorous interrogation on the history of oppression, the play asks us to endure images and words that make us want to crawl out of our skin. At the heart of this story is a desperate search for integrity, but getting there - to that point of truth - has a cost. The play asks us if we're willing to pay that price.

Actor Michelle Elaine - who is forceful but sparingly so - starts the show with an introduction. Her role is Black Woman, she says. Chasen Parker is White Man. Aaron Ruiz is Another White Man. Joe Palmore is Black Man. Camryn Nunley is Another Black Man. To help explain how he's different from Palmore, Nunley does Carlton's dance from "Fresh Prince." So "Another," we see, means whiter. Laura Menzie, a white woman (but not playing a role called White Woman), was to be explained at a later time.

The opening conceit puts people at ease. It's friendly meta-theatricality, not so different from the audience participation in "Shear Madness" or "The Marvelous Wonderettes," two of Stages' popular previous shows. The cordial tone continues as Elaine flips through slides, explaining that Germany once occupied what is now Namibia, whose Herero tribe was favored by the German soldiers.

Notice how the actors smile as they speak in euphemisms. The Germans "took care of" the local tribes' cattle rather than "took." One white actor later describes the genocide of the Herero as a "rehearsal Holocaust." How cute! A rehearsal. It's a word that makes you imagine middle schoolers dressed up as lions and witches after school.

More Information 'We Are Proud to Present ...' When: 7:30 p.m. Wednesday and Thursday, 8 p.m. Friday, 2:30 and 8 p.m. Saturday, 2:30 p.m. Sundays through April 1 Where: Stages Repertory Theatre, 3201 Allen Parkway Tickets: $25-$59; 713-527-0123, stagestheatre.com See More Collapse

Black Woman wanted to tell this story because she had seen a photo of a Herero woman who looked nearly identical to her grandmother. In an attempt to give voice to the massacred people, she asked five other actors to research and write a devised-play-meets-Powerpoint-presentation.

Most of the drama derives from the problems that arise in attempting to tell the story right. Working off of a series of letters written by German soldiers to their wives and girlfriends, White Man (Parker) asks Black Woman what his inspiration should be. The troupe decides that all the wives should be embodied by Menzie, now known as Sarah, who is indulgent and grating in her efforts to find her character.

How repetitive and beside the point, I thought, as I watched self-absorbed actors imitate the longings of dead old Europeans. The shtick goes on and on. Only later did I realize Drury was in control the entire time - of the euphemistic intro, the humorous meta-theater, the trite romance, the triviality of actors working through their feelings. Because there is a bomb, so to speak, at the center of "We Are Proud to Present ," but it falls slowly.

When Black Man complains that he can't stand watching "white people fall in love in Africa" anymore, the fuse starts to sizzle and burn. Sarah asks why he's "so angry all the time." The actors begin to fight. Drury, and masterful director Alice M. Gatling, tighten their grips on the audience.

But Drury's play isn't just political, serious, edgy and tough. It's also rendered with bonfires and rainwater. A German soldier and his forlorn housewife exchange words underneath a tree. It's Parker and Menzie, who both look like traditional romantic leads: young, attractive, white. They speak. Those accents, the desert air of lost love, the dialogue somehow both spare and overwrought - it made me think of "The English Patient."

Meanwhile, Palmore and Elaine linger in the background. The couple is silent. The actors pantomime their own story in the shadow of whiteness, borrowing the words of the European couple to enact a romance of their own.

Black Man huddles with Black Woman next to a fire representing the continued life of the Herero's ancestors. He tells her he loves the way the hair on her arm looks in the rain. How delicate, how sweet this gasp of humanity is before the great sin arrives at their doorstep - before Black Man is lying on the ground, panting for life, straddled by a German soldier reloading his revolver.

Gatling is brilliant, drawing the audience's eye to the interplay of foreground and background. She makes sure the small, hinting gestures are present without dominating, knowing that the frenetic rhythms soon to come will emerge naturally, without warning.

This, we see, is the natural order of progression when a group of Americans - three white, three black - try to talk about how to present a story about Europeans murdering Africans. Presentation begets acting. Acting begets appropriation. Appropriation begets minstrelsy. Minstrelsy begets violence. What else were we to expect?

Drury shows us that the modern conception of blackness is by definition connected to this history, that to understand the difference between how black and white people experience the world today you must look at what happened in the blood-soaked deserts of Namibia. Palmore is exceptional in relaying this message. And Gatling shows she might be among Houston's most keen directors.

I will never forget that shattering scene when Black Woman and Black Man are put to work by the German occupiers. They slap the ground with a fast and fierce rhythm. Yet another post-modern race play, I thought, turning human tragedy into some kind of song and dance. It was nearly offensive. I was not yet won over, mistaking "We Are Proud to Present" for a lesser work. Little did I know that the play unfolds its scenes the same way Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring" presented its most surprising motifs - striking without notice yet maintaining a lyricism that coheres to the larger narrative.

But then Black Woman and Black Man arch their backs against the desert sun. As if they could offer their skin to save their spirit. As if there existed a body armor for hatred. With their eyes trained forward, hands still slamming the earth, they open their mouths, and history comes rushing into the present. They begin to sing the blues.Most zombie movies begin and end with the outbreak and its immediate aftermath as the world descends into chaos, violence and scrambled brains for breakfast.

George Romero, in some of his post-"Night of the Living Dead" films, toyed with the idea of just what a zombie world might look like - would they begin to organize and plan for needs beyond immediate hunger? - but few have followed his path.

Irish director/writer David Freyne explores one fascinating possibility in his thoughtful, if flawed, feature debut, "The Cured."

Technically, the zombies in "The Cured" aren't zombies. They're not undead - just the victims of a virus that makes them crave human flesh. They're not super-fast like the monsters in "28 Days Later," or shuffle-slow like "The Walking Dead" zombies; and you don't necessarily have to shoot 'em in the head (though you might want to, just to make sure). In other words, they're just like us, except, well, they're flesh-gobbling freaks.

In this version of contemporary Ireland, the government has found a cure for the illness and most of the zombies are returned to their fully human state. One of the cured is twentysomething Senan (Sam Keeley, "Megan Leavey"), who is sent to live with the only family he has left: his journalist sister-in-law, Abbie (Ellen Page), and her young son. Senan's brother died at the hands of a zombie at the height of the attacks.

This sounds like a happy ending but is merely the start of a new nightmare. The cured, who can remember in vivid detail the atrocities they committed while sick, are viciously discriminated against. Often shunned by families, friends and employers, they are monitored constantly and harassed by the military and never-infected citizens. Equally troubling is the 25 percent of zombies who are biologically resistant to medical treatment and have been rounded up by the government, which has plans to put them down like rabid animals.

Conor (Tom Vaughan-Lawlor), a lawyer and politician in his pre-zombie life and Senan's closest friend, agitates for violent protest and appeals to Senan on the basis of their shared infection identity. He and his increasingly militant buddies in the cured movement wonder: if the government will just blithely kill the resistant, how long before they come for us.

The parallels to the real world, especially given the history of "the troubles" in Northern Ireland, are obvious and perhaps heavy-handed (who are the real monsters here?). But the combination of solid acting and a tension created by a sense of foreboding and melancholy make "The Cured" more than just another exercise in scares (though there are plenty of those). At its best, it has the provocative cunning of a "Black Mirror" episode.

Unfortunately, "The Cured" becomes less cerebral and more predictably action-oriented in its third act and the ending is slightly unsatisfying. Still, "The Cured" is intriguing enough to make Freyne someone to watch and the late Romero proud.Former Congressman Steve Stockman and two aides used a major charitable donation to cover credit card debt, two spots at a Christian summer camp, a friends stint in rehab and a funeral for employees wife, according to testimony Wednesday from an FBI agent at Stockmans federal fraud trial in Houston.

But they didnt spend any of the $350,000 gift  as Stockman had promised he would at a pitch meeting with a conservative Midwestern mega-donor  on the renovation of a house near Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., to be used as living quarters and a training facility for young conservatives.

A series of witnesses called by federal prosecutors in the second day of Stockmans corruption trial traced the path of that $350,000 donation, testifying that Stockman and his associates spent it on an extensive array of expenses, which the donor said he never meant to cover. The former Republican lawmaker is on trial for 28 counts of fraud and illegal use of campaign funds.

The two aides have pleaded guilty and could testify about the alleged scheme to syphon off donations to cover personal and campaign expenses.

However, Stockmans defense lawyer said after court Wednesday that while his client lost control of his staff and his expenses, the charitable nature of his spending demonstrates he had good intentions.

It was in this spirit that Richard Uihlein, a formidable conservative donor from the Chicago area, took a liking to Stockman. He testified that his father, Ed Uihlein, was a fan of Stockmans work the first time he was in office, and Uihlein himself was happy to invest in Freedom House, the GOP lawmakers pet project because he considered him trustworthy.

Uihlein said after spending less than an hour meeting with Stockman at his corporate offices in Pleasant Prairie, Wis. on Jan. 24, 2013, he wrote a check from the Ed Uihlein Family Foundation to the newly elected representatives charitable foundation for $350,000.

One month prior, at the urging of Larry Pratt, CEO and founder of Gun Owners of America, Uihlein had donated $5,000 to help pay for a group of home-schooled children to be in Washington for Stockmans swearing in ceremony.

And a year after he made the Freedom House donation, Uihlein testified that he wrote a $450,000 check to cover a mailing in Stockmans unsuccessful bid to unseat U.S. Sen. John Cornyn in the Republican Primary, court records in the case show.

RELATED: Stockman fraud case not about fur coats, Rolexes and Mercedes Benzes, lawyer says

And now the GOP legislator and an aide, Thomas Dodd, had arrived with an impressive brochure about Freedom House and asked for money to create their training center for young congressional interns. Uihlein, the CEO of a moving supplies empire, said he liked the idea of helping cover the houses renovation.

I felt they were trustworthy, Uihlein told the jury, under questioning from a federal prosecutor. And I trusted that they would spend the money the way they said.

He said he understood from the brochure that Stockman was soliciting the money for a charitable cause through a 501c3 organization, and stressed he would not have given it if he knew it would be spent on the former lawmaker's personal and campaign costs.

Federal prosecutors called several witnesses to trace the path of the Illnois shipping supplies magnates generous contribution.

Spencer Brooks, a special agent with the FBIs public corruption and fraud squad, testified that the donation landed in the nearly empty account of nonprofit Stockman oversaw called Life Without Limits. Because the account had a balance of $33.48 it was easy to trace where Uihleins money went.

Brooks said Stockman and his aides syphoned off money from the account into other bank accounts and used it to pay for storage fees, consulting fees, credit card debt and campaign costs, exhausting $82,000 of the money in the first week.

A campaign accountant, Rabih Zeidan, testified that around this same time the defendant told him he had given some money to his aides to donate to his campaign, which set off red flags for the accountant. A Federal Election Commission analyst testified that campaign filings indicated that two of Stockmans aides were listed as donors to his campaign.

Another witness, who initially set up the 501c3 under a different objective, said the goal for Life Without Limits under Stockmans aides direction was to provide medical supplies to African countries.

Uihlein said he didnt intend for his money to go directly to Stockman or to cover a charity overseas.

MORE: Former Congressman Steve Stockman ran 'massive scam' with donations, prosecutors said

The FBI agent testified that none of the money appeared to be spent for home renovations in the Washington area.

After court, Stockmans defense lawyer, Sean Buckley said the ledgers and bank accounts showed his client had a huge heart, so much so that he was duped by his aides who paid the bills.

What were seeing is a pattern of Mr. Stockman helping people who are dealing with serious life problems, Buckley said. He cautioned that the case shouldnt be viewed as a monolithic conspiracy, because the improprieties stemmed from the two aides who pleaded guilty.

Mr. Stockmans failure was trusting them, he said.

Gabrielle Banks covers federal court for the Houston Chronicle. Follow her on Twitter and send her tips at gabrielle.banks@chron.com.WASHINGTON - President Donald Trump, whose top attorney handling the Russia probe resigned Thursday, is struggling to find top-notch defense lawyers willing to represent him in the case, according to multiple Trump advisers familiar with the negotiations.

Some law firms have signaled that they do not want the controversy of representing a divisive and unpopular president, while others have told Trump advisers they have clients with conflicting interests, according to several lawyers and three of the president's advisers. Several prominent white-collar lawyers also have declined requests to sign on with the president in recent weeks, including former Solicitor General Theodore Olson.

The difficulties in finding representation come as the investigation by Special Counsel Robert Mueller intensifies its focus on Trump's actions. John Dowd, the president's chief lawyer in handling the Mueller probe since last year, quit Thursday morning after several strategy disputes with the president, who ultimately lost confidence in the veteran lawyer, three Trump aides said.

Dowd had been the president's main point of contact with Mueller's office, which is investigating Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election and contacts with Trump campaign members. Dowd also had been negotiating the terms for the president to sit for an interview with Mueller's team as it examines whether Trump obstructed justice by seeking to shut down the investigation.

Despite overtures by Trump's aides and Trump himself in the past weeks, several lawyers have passed on taking on the president as a client. Olson's law firm, Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, publicly rebuffed the idea of him representing Trump on Tuesday through a statement from one of his partners - less than 24 hours after a Trump ally had asked him to consider the job. Several weeks earlier, the Trump team reached out to Robert Giuffra, a partner at Sullivan & Cromwell, who also declined, according to a person familiar with the talks, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.

Two weeks ago, Trump also interviewed Williams & Connolly partner Emmet Flood, a Republican defense lawyer who helped President Bill Clinton during impeachment proceedings, and asked him to consider joining his legal team in some capacity. As of Dowd's resignation Thursday, the discussions were still preliminary, people familiar with the talks said. Trump and his advisers are eyeing one high-profile lawyer to take the lead on his legal team, but neither the president nor the lawyer have decided whether to begin the representation, according to three people familiar with the discussion.

Now Playing: Outgoing GOP Representative Trey Gowdy called out President Trump's lawyer for wanting to end special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation. Veuer's Maria Mercedes Galuppo has the story. Video: Buzz 60

The struggles are reminiscent of Trump's difficulties in the spring of 2017 when the president was first seeking new attorneys to represent him in the Russia probe. He interviewed a half-dozen high-profile legal stars in the white-collar defense bar, including Flood, Brendan Sullivan and A.B. Culvahouse; all of them declined.

"These major law firms have spent millions of dollars on their image," said one Trump adviser, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity. "It's political. They are saying that representing this president is just too controversial."

Ty Cobb, who joined the White House last summer as an internal lawyer handling the Mueller case, originally had been offered the job of serving as Trump's lawyer working alongside Dowd. But two people familiar with his hiring said leaders at Cobb's law firm, Hogan Lovells, had expressed reservations about Cobb representing Trump personally; some firm leaders were more amenable to Cobb representing the White House instead.

Aside from being controversial, aides said Trump has proved to be a difficult client, as Dowd learned firsthand.

Dowd complained to colleagues that Trump had ignored his advice and tweeted attacks on Mueller and other topics hours after Dowd and other advisers urged him not to, those colleagues said. Dowd also said he was personally insulted by the president's efforts to hire other lawyers. One person familiar with the dynamics said Trump frequently praised his legal team to their faces but criticized them when they were not around.

Dowd declined to discuss his decision when reached Thursday. "I love the President and wish him well," he wrote in an email.

But privately, Dowd was "blindsided" when the president interviewed Flood and again when Trump announced he was adding conservative lawyer and attack-dog Joseph diGenova to the team last week.

He and the president had been increasingly disagreeing over strategy, but especially so on Saturday. One Trump adviser said the president berated Dowd for not doing enough to, in the president's view, highlight corruption and political bias in the FBI to undercut the legitimacy of the Mueller probe. Trump told Dowd he wanted to tweet that the firing of Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe was another reason the Mueller probe should be shut down, the adviser said.

At Trump's insistence, Dowd issued an emailed statement saying the investigation was corrupted by political bias, according to a Trump adviser. Dowd called on Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who oversees that probe, to shut it down.

"I pray that Acting Attorney General Rosenstein will follow the brilliant and courageous example of the FBI Office of Professional Responsibility and Attorney General Jeff Sessions and bring an end to alleged Russia Collusion investigation manufactured by McCabe's boss James Comey based upon a fraudulent and corrupt Dossier," Dowd said.

Dowd told The Washington Post that he was speaking for himself and not on Trump's behalf. Earlier Saturday, Dowd had told the Daily Beast that he was speaking on behalf of the president and in his capacity as the president's attorney. After the Daily Beast published its story, Dowd emailed the publication and said he was not speaking on the president's behalf.

At 10 a.m. Thursday, Dowd resigned without consulting Trump, three advisers said. Aides said they were unsuccessful in asking him to hold off until they could confer with the president and prepare a statement.

A huge bone of contention between Trump and his team has been over testifying in front of Mueller's team, these people said. Trump wants to do so, thinking he can talk his way out of it, while his lawyers are far more wary, these people said. Dowd and Marc Kasowitz, Trump's former lawyer who he still occasionally consults, both have told Trump he could damage himself by testifying. His chief White House counsel, Donald McGahn, also has chafed at Trump granting an interview and has criticized others on the team.

Trump has groused to friends and aides that he thinks his lawyers are weak and that his New York attorneys are tougher and better.

Earlier this month, Trump dubbed news reports of trouble on his legal team as inaccurate.

"The Failing New York Times purposely wrote a false story stating that I am unhappy with my legal team on the Russia case and am going to add another lawyer to help out," Trump tweeted March 11. "Wrong. I am VERY happy with my lawyers, John Dowd, Ty Cobb and Jay Sekulow. They are doing a great job."

Eight days later, the president hired diGenova, and Dowd is now off the team.

Sekulow was in the White House meeting with Trump about the case and his legal team Thursday afternoon, White House officials said. He and diGenova were spotted at the White House again late Thursday.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said Thursday that he feels confident the president eventually will find good counsel and that he is more worried about how focused Trump seems to be on the probe.

"The model should be the Bill Clinton model," Graham said. "You can go after the special counsel, like he did with Ken Starr, and ask about impartiality, but the president should focus on being president. I'm not worried about him finding good lawyers. He'll find them. I'm worried about him and his day job, not being distracted. Clinton, for all his problems, never lost sight of being president. Clinton let other people go after the so-called witch hunt."

---

The Washington Post's Rosalind S. Helderman and Robert Costa contributed to this report.On Tuesday afternoon, I walked into the Harris County GOPs headquarters and saw a heartening sign.

It was a literal sign, leaning against the receptionists desk. The party is moving into a new space, and so its current headquarters is in a bit of disarray; Im moving too, so I can relate. And the message of this particular sign was simply that the school or store or library it might be placed in front of, during a primary or general election, is a polling place.

But that message was given in four languages: English, Spanish, Vietnamese and Chinese. So the sign also said something about Harris County itself, and its presence in the foyer said something about the people I was about to meet with, who lead the county GOP.

We all know that Harris County Democrats are fired up about this years elections, and have a chance to make further gains. Harris County Republican leaders are responding to the risk at hand by encouraging people to vote. Under normal circumstances, I wouldnt commend them for that, or even consider it noteworthy. But things really arent normal, these days. And on Tuesday afternoon, as it happens, I was looking for signs of sanity.

Read more: Texans are in the mood to vote without meddling from anyone

That morning, Texans woke up to the news that a package bomb had exploded in a FedEx facility in Schertz, which is just north of San Antonio in Bexar County. There had already been four such incidents in Austin since the beginning of the month, which left two people dead and several others seriously injured.

I had been paying close attention to the story, for several reasons. One is that a lot of my friends live in Austin, and they were actually being terrorized, along with the rest of the community. And the fifth bombing disturbed me for a different reason. My brother Mark works in Schertz, at that FedEx facility. His shift ended about an hour before the package exploded Monday.

Thankfully, no one died in that bombing, or sustained major injuries. And by the time I went to the Harris County GOP headquarters I had calmed down, because FedEx had told employees at the Schertz facility to stay home on Tuesday. Also, I felt reasonably optimistic that the bomber would be caught by Wednesday, because  well, FedEx is pretty good at tracking packages. I knew that even before my little brother started working there.

Still, Austin is continuing to mourn the senseless murders of Anthony Stephan House and Draylen Mason  the latter of whom was just 17, and who died in a blast that also left his mother critically injured.

The entire city has been through a harrowing few weeks, and remains on edge, although the suspect blew himself up on Wednesday morning as a SWAT team approached. Its not clear if he was working alone, or on what basis he targeted his victims, or what motivated him to target anyone in the first place.

Read more: Mourning in Texas after Joe Straus decides hes done

On Wednesday, Austin police said he had left behind a 25-minute confession describing the bombs he built and problems in his personal life. But the bomber processed his personal issues in the public sphere, and thats an inherently political thing to do.

I spent some time reflecting on that after news of the fifth explosion spurred me to talk to my brother.

The first three bombs, I knew, had a couple of common denominators. They were placed on doorsteps in East Austin, and their victims were not white. House and Mason, who were killed by the first two bombs, were African-American. The third critically injured a 75-year-old woman who is Latina.

But the fourth was a tripwire, on the other side of town. Anyone could have detonated it, and the two bicyclists who did so were white. The same is true of my brother, who wasnt the intended recipient of the fifth bomb, but is among the FedEx employees who might have put it on the Austin-bound truck.

In other words, the common denominator between all five explosions is that they were intended to cause harm in Austin, as if the bomber had a grievance with the city itself, or something it represents.

And I was scared, once I thought about it that way, because some FedEx packages sent to Austin are routed through the warehouse in Schertz. My brother wasnt a target, but he would have been at risk.

Read more: Normal Republicans deserve a voice

People in Austin have been facing the opposite scenario, of course; they didnt know why people were being targeted, or who might be targeted next. In a sense, thats why I would describe the bomber as a domestic terrorist. We may never know the source of his hatred, but he evidently felt justified in acting on it.

And theres a lot of hatred being stoked these days, during the course of our debates about politics. There are a lot of people acting on their grievances, too, although usually they take a more subtle approach.

So I do appreciate those leaders on both sides of the aisle who are resisting the temptation to dehumanize their opponents by demonizing them. And I want to commend those who are encouraging all Texans to vote. Thats a much better way to deal with our differences, after all.E. Joseph Deering/Houston Chronicle

It was a troubling sequence of events. First, the Crockett County treasurer died on March 13. Then, on the day of her funeral, March 19, the local justice of the peace was airlifted for treatment of what appeared to be similar symptoms.

Officials in the rural, west Texas county, acting out of caution, decided temporarily to close their courthouse annex -- worried it was the root of the problems, the Ozona Stockman reported.New Census data released Thursday show six of the 10 counties with the nation's largest increases in population were located in Texas, thanks to economic growth, immigration and high fertility rates.

The six Texas counties with the biggest population increases between July 1, 2016, and July 1, 2017, are located throughout the state: Harris County had the fourth largest increase in the country; Tarrant was fifth; Bexar was seventh; Dallas was eighth; Denton was ninth; and Collin was 10th.

"Texas is not only the fastest-growing state, but it's not only a few areas. It's pervasive in terms of our largest metro areas," said Steve Murdock, a professor at Rice University and former director of the U.S. Census Bureau. "It's another view from another year that shows that Texas growth is substantial and continues to be so."

While the Houston area experienced growth, the new numbers are lower than recent years.

"What's kind of interesting here is that Harris County dropped to the fourth most significant-growing county," said Texas State Demographer Lloyd Potter. "Last year, it was the second most significant-growing county, and in 2015  and for several years before that  it was the first."

And as much as it may pain Houstonians to hear, Dallas and the rest of North Texas has been a key player in bringing new residents to Texas.

"Historically, the Dallas metro area attracts large numbers from both international and domestic migration. Many of the other largest metro areas in the country rely mostly on international migration and natural increase for growth," Census Bureau Demographer Molly Cromwell said.

The Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington metropolitan area saw an increase of 146,000 people between 2016 and 2017, making it the fastest-growing metro area in the U.S. That put the metro area at 7.4 million people, securing its spot as the nation's fourth largest, just ahead of the Houston-The Woodlands-Sugar Land metro area, which ranks as the nation's fifth largest. Houston saw the second-largest gain by number in 2017, increasing by 94,000 residents.

But that's to be expected. The Houston region has been growing steadily for years now, and demographers expect the city itself to leapfrog Chicago in population counts in less than two decades  a theory that's likely bolstered by this week's census report, which shows Cook County, where Chicago is located, lost more residents between 2016 and 2017 than any other county in the country, with a decrease of about 20,000 residents.

In 2017, Harris County picked up an additional 35,939 residents. Maricopa County, Ariz., Clark County, Nev., and Riverside County, Calif., were the only areas to see their resident counts tick up by more.

This is the continuation of a solid trend that's spanned years. Since the beginning of this decade in 2010, Harris County has grown by 13.7 percent, adding more than a half-million residents.

"What surprised me is that this continues to be so extensive," Murdock said. "The growth in Texas has been very strong for a number of decades, really. And I don't think you can really find other states of our size that are having the same kind of patterns we're having for this long."

It's fascinating for demographers, but it also has real-world implications for everyday people. Good ones, according to Murdock.

"Growth means opportunities," he said. "So there are additional jobs being created not only in Houston, but across Texas. So it generally means that this is something that reflects the general strong growth of the economy and the state as a whole."

The statewide growth is part of a years-long trend, influenced by a variety of factors. Births are up in Texas, but only slightly. The real story is inward migration. Statewide, 673,000 new residents have entered from other nations, and nearly a million people have moved to Texas from other states since 2010, the new data shows.

"In Texas, we certainly have a lot of momentum, economically," Potter said. "Certainly our politicians are quick to point out that we're an open-for-business state  that we have a fairly tax- and regulatory-friendly state for business. And the cost of living here for individuals and families is less than it is in many other states on average, so buying a house and the basic expenses of life are less."

While Harris County is a good example of sustained growth, the formula here is slightly different than the statewide picture. In Harris County, births are significantly higher than the state average, and they more than make up for the amount of deaths that have been recorded in recent years.

Between 2016 and 2017, Harris County recorded 73,000 births and only 23,000 deaths, a local tick that is likely linked to the fact that the county's median age of 33 years old is about 5 years younger than the national average.

After years of healthy growth fueled by people moving to Harris County from other parts of America, that trend began to reverse during the recent oil bust. Between 2015 and 2016, the county recorded a loss of 16,000 residents, heading elsewhere in the U.S.; and between 2016 and 2017, that trend grew stronger, nearly tripling to 45,000 residents pulling up stakes.

Maybe they're going to Denton County. The area just outside Dallas saw the largest increase of domestic migration last year when compared to all Texas counties, with nearly 19,000 residents coming to town from elsewhere in the nation.

These former Houstonians could also be looking for a spot even closer to home: Harris County's southwest neighbor Fort Bend County had the 14th largest numeric increase in population among all U.S. counties during this time period, with 22,870 new residents.

Both Denton and Fort Bend are what Potter classifies as "suburban ring counties"  areas around the urban core that have experienced rapid growth in recent years.

"If you look at the growth happening in suburban ring counties, it's huge," he said. "Urban growth is still substantial, but now it's extending out to the counties surrounding them. In Houston, that's largely Montgomery and Fort Bend."

It's not so much that Texas is becoming less or more suburban, he said. It's more that the state's suburbs are beginning to look more urban. He cites Collin and Denton counties as perfect examples.

"All of these places, 10 years ago, they were outside of Dallas, and now they're almost contiguous with Dallas," he said. "And the density is increasing very rapidly. So essentially, I suppose there may be some characteristics that are very suburban. But you see high-rises going up. And the same is true in some areas of Fort Bend and Montgomery counties as well. There are urban cores developing in areas that we used to think of as suburban."As police banged on the windows of his truck before dawn Wednesday, Mark Anthony Conditt blew himself up on the edge of Interstate 35, capping 20 nightmarish days in which officials say he wielded terror over Austin with nails, tripwires and packages, all seemingly expertly placed to attack innocent people in the places they felt safest.

Hed bought Children at Play signs to tether to his bombs.

Originally thought to be an older, more sophisticated attacker, the Austin bomber turned out to be an otherwise quiet, introverted 23-year-old from Pflugerville, northeast of Austin, troubled over personal challenges that authorities did not specify.

WHO WAS HE: Everything we know about the alleged Austin bomber

He left a trail of digital breadcrumbs that spelled his demise and brazenly mailed bombs from a FedEx Office in an obvious disguise.

He laid out a confession detailing each bomb in a 25-minute cell phone recording hours before officers closed in, never mentioning terrorism or hate, interim Austin Police Chief Brian Manley said Wednesday. Because the first bombs killed and injured blacks and Hispanics, there had been worries of racial motives.

We are never going to be able to put a rationale behind these acts, Manley said. It is the outcry of a very challenged young man.

Conditts death brought some relief, as investigators said the seven bombs detailed on the recording have all been accounted for. Manley said he is fairly confident there are no more, but said the public should remain vigilant, as Conditt indicated he intended to do more harm.

Questions remained: What did those closest to him know? What personal struggles turned a quiet, introverted kid from the suburbs into a killer? And for the wounded families and rattled city he left behind, how would they heal?

Now Playing: Videos on the serial bombings in Austin, San Antonio Video: San Antonio Express-News

Tracking a killer

Investigators had followed Conditt for days. He lived just five minutes from Anthony Stephan House, whom he killed with his first bomb March 2.

Seventeen-year-old Draylen Mason was killed and his mother was injured March 12 in a second bombing at their home in East Austin, and a few hours later and a few miles away, Esperanza Herrera, 75, was injured in a third explosion from a package left on her porch.

The big break in the case came Sunday evening when  wearing a blond wig, ball cap and gloves  Conditt shipped two packages from the FedEx store in Sunset Valley, a community in South Austin, authorities said. From surveillance video, electronic data and shipping information there, investigators determined his identity and eventually his whereabouts. They identified his presence at each of the bomb sites through his cell phone number, Gov. Greg Abbott and other officials said.

By Monday evening, police had tracked Conditt to a Pflugerville home and determined that he had two vehicles - one which they found and one which they hadnt yet located. On Tuesday night, they secured an arrest warrant, charging him with one count of unlawful possession and transfer of a destructive device. Details of the accompanying arrest affidavit remained under seal late Wednesday.

Investigators used cell phone triangulation to locate him in the parking lot of a hotel on the interstate in Round Rock, north of Austin. As they waited for tactical vehicles to arrive early Wednesday, Conditt drove away. Police, pursuing in unmarked cars, forced him to stop, Manley said. They may have used a tactic known as a pit maneuver, when one vehicle rams another to make it spin out.

Despite knowing he likely had a bomb, they approached and hammered on the windows of the red sport-utility vehicle, intent on stopping him before he could do more, Manley said. Video shows a tremendous blast propelling the officers backward, the chief said. One officer fired his gun at Conditt.

It wasnt clear whether the blast or shooting killed him, but the bomb caused significant injuries, Manley said.

In addition to the explosives in the SUV, Conditt also had a loaded pistol, said Steve McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety. It was a further indication, investigators said, that he knew authorities were closing in on him late Tuesday.

Conditt apparently taped the confession Tuesday sometime between 9 p.m. and 11 p.m., just before he drove to the motel parking lot.

A family in shock

While some law enforcement pored over the roadside scene and traffic snarled on the highway, others turned to his home in Pflugerville, a 1,200-square-foot, $68,000 work-in-progress built in 1955.

Police evacuated a four-to-six-block area around the home near downtown for most of the day as federal agents retrieved bomb-making materials - including device components and homemade explosives, but no completed devices - from the house, said Fred Milanowski, special agent in charge with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Agents wearing blue crime-scene booties methodically searched yards and trash cans in the area.

They detained Conditts two roommates for questioning and released one in the early afternoon, not releasing their names because they were not under arrest, Austin police said.

Investigators were being cautious about identifying people because of past investigations in which named individuals were wrongly identified as suspects, Milanowski said.

It was unclear if the second roommate was still being questioned late Wednesday.

Conditt purchased five "Children at Play" signs at a Home Depot in recent days, one of which was used at the southwest Austin site where a tripwire stretched from the sign to a bomb. It injured two men walking in a neighborhood Sunday. Investigators are considering whether Conditt might have planned to use the other signs in future attacks, Abbott said.

Authorities had not ruled out that there were accomplices, the governor said.

Asked how it was possible others in the home could not have known Conditt was making bombs, Milanowski said the materials were largely contained to one room.

Theres obviously private rooms inside that house, he said. There was one door that had a lock on it.

Conditt's Google search history showed several additional addresses in the greater Austin area, investigators confirmed. Those addresses were checked to rule out that he sent packages there, including two homes in Cedar Park that were searched late Tuesday.

At least one business in Austin was also checked, the investigators confirmed, but no additional explosives had been found. Authorities briefly evacuated a FedEx facility near Austin-Bergstrom International Airport to investigate a suspicious package, and later said the scene was clear. Austin High School also was searched, though it wasnt clear what led officials there.

Authorities said Conditts parents, who live in a home a few minutes across town, were cooperating. Conditts father appeared to have learned his son was the suspect when a TV reporter approached him at home early Wednesday. Police have no information indicating Conditt's family had any knowledge of the bombings, Austin Police Detective David Fugitt said.

A family friend of 15 years emerged Wednesday evening from the parents neat, blue-trimmed home, built in 1937 with a stone path leading to a covered porch with a picket fence and an American flag.

The family is grieved both for their loss, Eddie Harp said, but also for the loss of those affected by these heinous actions. The family's present focus is on dealing with their shock and loss and in cooperating with the police investigation. If you are a praying person, please join us in praying for the families, all who have lost loved ones.

Mysteries remain

The first bomb, on March 2, was inside a package placed at a home in northeast East Austin, killing House, who was a father and businessman.

Mason, a teen musician, was killed March 12 when a bomb left at his home exploded. Herrera was also injured that day after picking up a parcel from her porch.

A fourth bomb went off Sunday evening just before 9 p.m., as two men walking through the southwest Austin neighborhood bumped into the tripwire.

The fifth exploded in the early morning hours Tuesday on a conveyor belt at a FedEx sorting plant in Schertz, near San Antonio. The sixth bomb was found at the FedEx facility near the Austin airport, and was the only one that didnt detonate.

The seventh bomb exploded with Conditt in his vehicle.

Austin Mayor Steve Adler said the city, while frayed and panicked, showed it was not helpless. But he also drew a somber warning after a month of hell.

As a community, we do not know our neighbors the way that we should, or perhaps the way that we used to, he said. The legacy of this event for us should be that we walk across the street and introduce ourselves.

Among the mysteries that remained, the FBI was trying to determine the authenticity of a Reddit post, since removed, by a user who called himself austinbomber and who briefly entertained questions on the site Tuesday night. Some of the information in his posts matched evidence in the case, according to preliminary information from investigators familiar with it. Some did not.

Asked about his motives, the user said hed had a long self-dialogue about killing, but had decided he was more interested in destruction than death.

I honestly just want to see the world burn, he posted.Silent Spills Part 2: For Crosby residents, a bitter taste about Arkema, and little help from government

Silent Spills Part 2: For Crosby residents, a bitter taste about Arkema, and little help from government

Second in a series

CROSBY  By the morning of Tuesday, Aug. 29, the skeleton crew at Arkemas chemical plant knew it was time to go.

Flooding from Hurricane Harvey had caused the plant to lose power. Thousands of gallons of chemical-laden water had spilled into the floodwaters. Soon, the companys stash of volatile organic peroxides would warm enough to produce fires so noxious that first responders vomited at the scene. The last of Arkemas workers evacuated, floating over a 6-foot chain-link fence in a small boat.

A half-mile to the northwest, Diane and Nolan Glover knew none of this. Then the National Guard showed up on Tuesday afternoon, ordering them to evacuate.

The retired couple, both in their 60s, were busy trying to protect their belongings from more than 3 feet of floodwater and didnt think to turn on the radio. Though they had power, the storm had knocked out their satellite TV reception.

Many of their neighbors also were unaware of the danger that lurked. Their desperate pleas for information were posted beneath vague Facebook updates from the company. Interviews with about 10 residents also show that they didnt receive emergency robocalls from Arkema that were ordered by a Harris County judge after a release of sulfuric acid more than 20 years ago.

Today, they are still angry about all they did not know until the knock on the door Aug. 29. And seven months later, they say they still know very little about any potential health effects from the flood and the fires. They dont know what chemicals theyve been exposed to  or about any threat they face from the air they breathe or the water they continue to drink.

They say that the company failed them before the accident, and that the state and the federal government have failed them afterward.

I have a bitter taste in my mouth about Arkema, Diane Glover said. I feel like they should have reached out to everyone.

The activity of the company and government regulators since the Arkema disaster falls into the pattern that has emerged seven months after the storm, a Houston Chronicle/Associated Press review of county, state and federal records shows. The extent of the environmental assault is starting to emerge, and Gov. Greg Abbotts emergency declaration suspending state environmental rules remains in effect, making it more difficult for local authorities to press their case against companies that lost control of their petroleum and chemical products.

During the height of the chaos, Environmental Protection Agency officials, along with Arkema, repeatedly assured residents that the air and water were not dangerous. Contractors for the company and federal regulators conducted some sampling of air and water as well as solid ash produced by the fires in the aftermath of the storm, but homeowners, lawyers and environmental experts say it was done in a haphazard, patchwork way that was inadequate to establish whether there is a threat to public health.

Arkema, for example, tested the wells of 37 homes; there are roughly 350 homes within 1.5 miles of the plant, though its unclear how many get their water from private wells.

I dont think they did enough analyses, said Hussain Abdulla, an assistant professor of chemistry at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, who examined the test results at the request of the news organizations. He referred both to the company and to regulators.

ARKEMA DOCUMENTS: Planning, mechanical failures led to fires

EPA test results show peroxide in the air near Arkema at the time of the accident. And testing of some private wells at the homes near the plant showed elevated levels of some metals that the company says are not byproducts of their production. The tests also found acetone, a chemical used by Arkema that can cause headaches, nausea, dizziness and confusion. It is the primary ingredient in nail polish remover.

Federal officials have declined to answer reporters questions, directing them instead to information on the EPA website.

Texas state environmental authorities did not conduct any tests of sediment, groundwater or air around the plant site either during or after the storm, records show. Officials with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality declined to be interviewed, citing a pending investigation into the incident.

The EPA and the Harris County District Attorneys Office are also investigating. Harris and Liberty counties are suing the company.

Records previously obtained by the Houston Chronicle show that the companys emergency response plan had little direction on how to handle a major flood. Its power transformers and backup generators were not high enough off the ground, and it had a tank of an extremely dangerous chemical, isobutylene, located about 40 yards from six trailers loaded with organic peroxides that had been relocated during the storm.

Arkema spokeswoman Janet Smith said company officials have taken a number of steps to help those who live near the plant.

Were extremely sorry that our incident caused an evacuation at a time when our neighbors were already reeling from a historic storm, Smith said. We care about our community, and we demonstrated this in Crosby before, during and after Hurricane Harvey.

AFTER HARVEY: Read all of our Harvey coverage here

The company is the North American branch of the Colombes, France-based chemicals manufacturer that specializes in vinyl products including PVC, cholorochemicals and compounds. It has two dozen facilities in the United States, including plants in Crosby, Bayport, Clear Lake and Beaumont. The Crosby facility has had a history of regulatory problems related to the improper storage of organic peroxides and the mishandling of hazardous materials.

Rock Owens, Harris Countys environmental attorney, said officials want to make sure the August incident isnt repeated.

Our primary mission (now) is when the plant reopens  maybe in the spring sometime  that its in the condition where this cannot happen again, Owens said. What we found so far was just a lack of preparation for this kind of event. We think that plant could upgrade  and they probably need to move some of this material off site.

After a 5-year-old girl was severely burned during a 1994 sulfuric acid release at the Crosby plant, a Harris County judge ordered in 1996 that the company alert residents within a mile of its property when potential dangers arise.

Residents who live within that boundary estimate those emergency calls came more than 10 times during the past 10 years.

But the Glovers, along with their neighbors Margaret and Tom Lewis, say that call never came when Harvey bore down on the area.

The order requires plant officials to activate the system in the event of any release of pollutants with potentially adverse health or safety impacts. The list of active phone numbers must be updated to the maximum extent practicable every six months, it states.

Owens said the company appears to have failed to activate the call system. He said that had raised questions for the county, adding that having to evacuate people without notice means they likely suffered hardship, difficulty and damages.

Emergency personnel began evacuating residents within a 1.5-mile radius of the plant Aug. 29. An analysis of Harris County property records and U.S. Census Bureau data shows there are 350 homes in that area.

Harris County has filed suit against the company. Separately, several first responders and about 660 local residents have also sued Arkema. Neither the Glovers nor the Lewises are involved in the residents lawsuit.

Janet Smith, an Arkema spokeswoman, said the question of whether the company issued robocalls as required is part of pending litigation.

However, she said Arkema communicated with local residents through media statements and news releases, as well as Twitter and Facebook posts. The company also posted updates on its website, created a 24/7 phone hotline and placed messages on an industry-run cell phone application called Community Awareness Emergency Response (CAER) for informing the public about potentially hazardous incidents.

A review of posts on Arkemas Facebook page shows that the company posted ambiguous messages more than 10 times between Aug. 29 and when the evacuation order was lifted Sept. 4, redirecting concerned residents to the companys website. The company posted more detailed information there.

Before Arkema posted its first update on Aug. 29, the plant completely lost electrical power, forcing the skeleton crew still there to move highly volatile organic peroxides into refrigeration trailers to keep them cool. They can explode if they get too hot.

And those trailers already had started to fail.

PREVIOUS LAWSUIT: Arkema harmed residents before fires, blasts

Arkemas first website update at 8 a.m. on Aug. 29 told residents that they didnt need to worry: Arkema does not believe that the situation presents a risk to the community or the ride-out crew, due to the distance between the refrigerated cars and any people. By that time, the workers had been given the OK to leave, and one already had.

About six hours later, Arkema posted another Facebook update at 2:30 p.m., saying the situation had become serious.

The potential for a fire or explosion on site due to the compromised trailers was real, company officials wrote, but still they felt there was no imminent danger. Arkema officials posted an update again at 5:50 p.m., with little new information.

At the time, Arkema officials did not inform residents of a wastewater spill earlier that day into the floodwaters that had inundated the plant.

State records show that Arkema reported the accidental release of up to 18,000 gallons of stormwater laced with mineral oil and residual organics. That spill, which mingled with floodwaters in the plant and ran downstream toward Cedar Bayou, also caused a release of chemicals into the air including ethylbenzene, which is linked to cancer but can also cause inner ear and kidney damage, as well as vertigo; trimethylbenzene, which can cause chemical pneumonia and chronic bronchitis; and tert-butyl alcohol, which can affect the kidneys and thyroid.

We reported this inundation of our wastewater system to TCEQ, which is a public agency, Smith said. Consistent with other industry in the area, we broadly notified the community about issues that we believed presented a potential threat to community members.

With each new Facebook post, frightened local residents and their family members posted questions, at points demanding information about how they might be affected. Company officials did not respond publicly to those questions on their Facebook page.

The Glovers did not see any of these updates. The couple does not use social media. Neither do the Lewises.

On Aug. 30, Arkema said on its website that the organic peroxide in the refrigerated containers likely would catch fire. It listed key health effects related to smoke exposure from an organic peroxide fire, which included eye, skin and respiratory irritation, as well as dizziness, drowsiness and nausea.

The update also noted that there was a small possibility that the chemicals could be released into floodwaters  without saying anything about the spill that had occurred the previous day.

While it is possible that you may see an oil sheen or smell a slight odor, we anticipate the break down products would dissipate in the water or evaporate, the update stated.

The first trailer caught fire Thursday, Aug. 31, and Arkema later reported that it had released acetone, nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide and 2-ethylhexanol, among other chemicals, according to the county lawsuit. Two more trailers burned in the days that followed, leading to a controlled burn of the remaining trailers on Sept. 3.

Volatile organic compounds were detected in the air between 2.5 and 3 miles northwest of the plant, accompanied by a laundry detergent-like odor, smoke and falling ash, according to Harris Countys lawsuit.

No state testing

Bret Simmons cried out in pain as he pushed his motorcycle through the floodwaters near Arkema on Aug. 29, his legs burning more with each staggered step through the water, he contends in a lawsuit.

Once he and his wife, Phyllis, made it safely to higher ground, they stopped to examine his legs. They were covered in blisters, lesions and burns. Phyllis was safe from the floodwaters, the residents lawsuit states, because she was seated on the motorcycle with her legs out of the water. Bret sought medical treatment.

On the same day, state officials had been told by Arkema that chemicals were spilled into the floodwaters around the plant. Additionally, state records show that several days later, on Sept. 1, Arkema told the state environmental agency that material stored in a container on site was decomposing and mixing with stormwater, which caused a threat to Cedar Bayou.

 it is unsafe to be in the vicinity, due to floodwaters, the records stated, adding that Arkema was performing tests around the facility.

On Sept. 1, the EPA collected six surface water runoff samples from four locations outside the evacuation zone near residential homes, according to a Sept. 8 news release.

The results were lower than what would warrant an investigation, according to the release, and no volatile or semi-volatile organic chemicals were detected.

The next day, Sept. 2, emails show agency officials discussing a yellow discharge oozing from some of the trailers full of chemicals on the site in the days after Harvey made landfall.

Multiple aerial photos taken by federal officials capture the spread of this substance, which officials said in an email appears to be heating.

The Houston Police Departments bomb squad began setting fire to the remaining containers on site on Sept. 3.

The contractors hired by Arkema waited until Sept. 6 to test the stormwater, taking samples from 41 drainage and containment ditches in and around the facility, according to a state environmental document produced in October. The results of 13 of those samples were made available to the state as of Oct. 9.

REGULATIONS: CSB urges industry to rethink emergency plans after Arkema

All 13 samples showed elevated levels of acetone, a chemical found in the companys inventory, and methane. Benzene, a known carcinogen, also was detected in one of the areas tested, according to results published on the state environmental agencys website.

The contractors did not test any stormwater near homes surrounding the plant.

A&M Corpus Christis Abdulla said he was concerned about the approaches and analysis of the testing.

For example, he noted the apparent lack of testing for dioxins, which could have been released when the refrigerated trailers full of organic peroxides burned.

There were no analyses conducted for these compounds in the air, soil and the water around the accident area, he said. In addition, there is no information about the materials that made these refrigerated trailers, as some older models could contain asbestos.

Drinking the water

The Glovers wake up each morning hoping that their well is free of toxic chemicals.

They treated the well with bleach numerous times in an attempt to cleanse their drinking water, but they lacked the funds to have it tested. Lab-certified well water testing can cost $25 to $400, depending on what toxins are being screened, according to Wisconsin-based Clean Water Testing Certified Lab and Services.

That cost seemed overwhelming to the couple. Their home of three decades was so damaged in Harvey they had to bulldoze it and start over with a double-wide trailer.

It comes to a point where you have to say, Were just going to take our chances,  Diane Glover said. We dont have the money to do that, and I wish Arkema would do that for us.

A history of problems The sulfuric acid release of the 1990s isn't the only time Arkema has found itself in hot water with regulatory agencies. In 2006, the state cited the plant for a fire caused by improperly stored organic peroxides. Five years later, the state cited the plant again, this time for failing to maintain proper temperatures of its thermal oxidizer. And in 2016, the federal government took notice. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration fined Arkema $91,724 after finding 10 violations at the Crosby site, many involving the mishandling of hazardous materials. "Process safety management prevents the unexpected release of toxic, reactive or flammable liquids and gases in processes involving highly hazardous chemicals," said David Doucet, director of OSHA's Houston North Area Office. "It's vital that Arkema ensure that safeguards are in place to protect the safety of workers at this facility." Arkema's CEO Richard Rowe said last fall that the company spent millions of dollars on upgrades after the fines and believed all issues cited in the inspections had been addressed. Arkema, however, could be in more regulatory trouble after the various agencies complete their investigations into the August accident.

Arkema did conduct tests for some residents. A contractor hired by the company conducted private well testing at the request of residents, said Smith, the company spokeswoman.

The Glovers said they did not know they could ask Arkema to test their water.

The companys contractor tested 37 wells around the site, Smith said, and none of the wells we tested showed levels of our chemicals that exceeded residential limits established by the State of Texas.

The results of those tests show that many wells had elevated levels of barium, a heavy metal never found in nature as a free element, while others showed elevated levels of lead, acetone, and bis(2-Chloroethyl)ether, used to make pesticides as well as paint and varnish. Smith said that barium and lead would not be related to the plant and its not clear if any of the other chemicals are from the August accident.

Those test results were provided to the individual well owners, the states website stated. In Texas, there is no regulatory oversight to ensure water quality for owners of private wells, according to the Texas Groundwater Protection Committee.

CHEMICAL BREAKDOWN: Our look at the regulatory failures that put us in jeopardy

In looking at the test results, Abdulla said these single snapshot measures couldnt reveal the true environmental impact of the accident. However, he said some of the results of the drinking water analyses were alarming.

For example, Abdulla said the testing results of one well showed elevated levels of bromodichloromethane  known to cause kidney and liver problems in animals  and chloroform, which could be a byproduct of chlorine disinfection or some leaks of the organic solvents that (are) used to synthesize organic peroxides.

The company does not plan on testing any more wells, Smith said.

We have done a substantial amount of testing as requested by our neighbors in Crosby, and we dont believe additional well-water testing is warranted because none of our testing has shown levels of our chemicals that exceed residential limits established by the State of Texas for drinking water wells, she said.

Kevin Thompson, a West Virginia-based attorney representing Bret and Phyllis Simmons and about 660 other Crosby residents, said initial testing results conducted on behalf of his firm show that water in and around the plant is toxic. Arkema and the EPA, he said, were not testing for all the appropriate chemicals.

Testing paid for by Thompsons firm showed levels of cyanide and bromodichloromethane in private water wells that exceeded the state and federal screening standards. Surface water samples taken show levels of arsenic that exceed the human health risk-based exposure limits for humans and fish.

To read the first part of this series, go here.

To read the third part of this series, go here.

Lise Olsen contributed to this report.

About the series:

This series is the result of a collaboration between the Chronicle and the Associated Press.



Alex Stuckey joined the Chronicle as the NASA, science and environment reporter in 2017. She is a 2017 Pulitzer Prize winner for her work at the Salt Lake Tribune on how Utah colleges handle reports of sexual assault. That same year, she was named a Livingston Finalist and, several years prior, won an Investigative Reporters and Editors award for a story on the failed reporting of drug seizures in Ohio that resulted in a seven-year jail sentence for former Athens County Sheriff Pat Kelly. Contact her at alex.stuckey@chron.com. Follow her on Twitter at@alexdstuckey.

Multimedia by Elizabeth Conley and John Mone

Interactives and design by Jordan Rubio

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Even before explosions at the Arkema chemical plant shook the Crosby area, the battering from Hurricane Harvey had led to the release of more than 20,000 pounds of toxic chemicals into floodwaters, according to a lawsuit filed Tuesday.

The complaint, filed in federal court on behalf of 14 residents, seeks compensation from Arkema for health care expenses and damage to homes during the period when residents were evacuated, as well as punitive damages.

Arkema lost control of its Crosby facility after floodwaters cut power and wiped out its back up generators. With the power out and cooling systems failing, volatile organic peroxides exploded multiple times over the course of a week, producing towering pillars of fire and thick plumes of black smoke.

A 1.5-mile evacuation zone was established after government officials got access to the company's chemical inventories. About 300 households were evacuated during the crisis.

The lawsuit is the first to accuse Arkema of causing environmental damage separate from the fires and explosions.

The suit cites a report the company filed with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, disclosing details of the chemical spill, which occurred Aug. 28. Released into flood waters were potential carcinogens such as volatile organic compounds and ethylbenzene, and toxins such as tert butyl alcohol, which irritates skin and can cause vomiting and dizziness. The company report wasn't released to the public for more than a week because Gov. Greg Abbott had suspended TCEQ reporting rules before Harvey's arrival.

The federal lawsuit says residents living more than 6 miles from the Arkema facility were exposed to toxins and argues that the evacuation zone was not large enough to protect the public.

Health issues cited

Environmental lawyer Kevin Thompson, who represents the 14 plaintiffs, said his firm has conducted tests of ash, soil and water miles from the chemical facility, and that the results show his clients were harmed. According to the suit, some residents experienced respiratory problems, and one suffered burns and blisters on his legs after wading through contaminated flood waters.

Arkema rejected the suit's claims.

"Based on testing results received to date, Arkema has not detected chemicals in off-site ash, soil, surface or drinking water samples that exceeded  levels established by TCEQ for soil and groundwater," said company spokesperson Janet Smith. "We are cooperating with authorities in ongoing investigations, and we will not comment further on these lawyers' accusations."

Thompson's firm is seeking class action status for anyone within a seven-mile radius of the company's Crosby facility.

The case is the latest in Arkema's legal troubles since Hurricane Harvey.

Almost 30 residents and first responders have sued the company in Harris County, seeking more than $1 million in damages. Also named as a defendant in that suit was Bureau Veritas, a global environmental testing company hired by Arkema to conduct air monitoring around the facility. The company was accused of not disclosing critical information about chemical hazards to the public.

Criminal investigation

In addition, Harris County commissioners have approved a civil suit contending that Arkema violated the Texas Clean Air Act and created a public nuisance. Rock Owens, managing attorney for the county attorney's environmental group, said the suit likely will be filed later this week or early next week, after county lawyers meet with counterparts at Rusty Hardin's law firm, which is representing Arkema in Harvey-related legal matters.

Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg's office is conducting a criminal investigation. In addition, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the federal Chemical Safety Board are all investigating Arkema.

Officials at the county attorney's office plan to meet with CSB officials next week and will share documents the county has acquired about Arkema, Owens said.

No sign of documents

He said the company has not provided the county with documents showing where and how it disposed of debris from the fire and explosions. Nor has it told the county how it tested drinking water or surface water near the plant, or what toxins were produced when its chemical inventory burned, Owens added.

Arkema did not respond to a request for comment on Owens' assertions.

The company has also refused to disclose its chemical inventories to the public and the media.

An investigation by the Houston Chronicle in 2016 found that Arkema was one of 55 facilities in the Houston area that pose a high potential for harm to the public, based on an analysis performed in conjunction with Texas A&M University. The study assessed potential harm based on the amount and type of dangerous chemicals on site and their proximity to the public.

The Arkema plant lies within the 500-year flood plain, according to a Chronicle analysis.A memorial service for Elizabeth Ellen Parish, a fifth generation Houstonian and member of one of Houstons pioneering families, is scheduled for Friday morning at the St. Martins Episcopal Church.

Parish, or Betsy as she was better known by family and friends, died at 71 at her home on Feb. 13.

As former newspaper columnist, Betsy wrote a daily column for the Houston Post for more than seven years, resulting in her being saluted as Houstons hot media personality.

Described as a hard worker with an infectious laugh, Parish graduated from Mirabeau B. Lamar High School in 1963.

After high school she left Houston briefly to attend Mount Vernon College in Washington, DC, later returning to Houston and enrolled at the University of Houston.

She majored in journalism and landed a job at the now defunct Houston Post.

As a prolific writer, Parish also developed a desire to document and preserve the history of healthcare in Houston.She authored the book, Legacy: 50 Years of Loving Care, Texas Childrens Hospital, 1954-2004.

Online records show that she was preceded in death by her parents, her stepfather, Hugh Garrett Alexander Jr., her sister, Marion Robbins Parish, and aunt, Ellen Robbins Red.

She is survived by her brothers, Ford Alexander and wife Leah, Hugh G. Alexander III and wife Carolyn, her niece Taylor Alexander and nephew John Alexander, her uncle Dr. Horace Taylor Robbins and numerous cousins.

Parishs celebration memorial service begins at 11 a.m. Friday at St. Martins Episcopal Church, located at 717 Sage Road in Houston. In lieu of flowers and customary remembrances, per the family, memorial contributions may be sent to The Betsy Parish Fund, c/o The Parish School, 11001 Hammerly Blvd., Houston, TX 77043.

twitter.com/jdhardenTexas top higher-education official is warning public universities against creating new campuses and expanding programs without adequate state support.

Noting that multiple universities are seeking to offer medical degrees  but not mentioning the University of Houston by name  Commissioner of Higher Education Raymund Paredes said the state would have to make some tough decisions moving forward.

Were expanding programs more quickly than resources from the state  suggest we should, he said last week. When we take a pie that is not growing very quickly and we slice it into smaller and smaller pieces, the differential impact is felt worse by smaller institutions.

Paredes spoke at a Texas Senate higher education committee hearing that addressed what authority state policymakers should have over the development of new higher-education locations and programs. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick charged lawmakers with creating a long-term statewide strategy for authorizing new locations and programs which includes a plan to ensure adequate support for expansion.

UH Chancellor and President Renu Khator has said that adding a medical school is a top goal. She said on Twitter that she was in Austin on Wednesday for a meeting with other chancellors and state senators, but that she did not testify.

UH spokesman Mike Rosen said Wednesday that the university was not worried that Paredes statement indicated a lack of support from the states higher education coordinating board, which must sign off on UHs proposal before it can move forward. The plan would also require appropriations from state lawmakers.

Were working hand in hand with state officials, Rosen said, adding that lawmakers had asked UH to evaluate the need for a medical school in the last legislative session.

That session proved a difficult one for Texas colleges and universities, whose administrators had to justify their spending to lawmakers. The University of Texas Systems decision to purchase hundreds of acres of land in southwest Houston without a stated goal drew fire from state senators. Chancellor William McRaven later called off the Houston expansion.

Also, Texas A&M University has developed programs outside of its traditional geographic region. In the fall, Texas A&M will begin offering bachelors degrees in fields including biomedical sciences and food systems industry management in McAllen.

Texas A&M also purchased a tract of land near the Texas Medical Center in the fall. Chancellor John Sharp said at the time that the UT deal was on his mind and notified two critics of UTs purchase  the UH system and state Sen. John Whitmire, a Houston Democrat  in advance.

McRaven was originally scheduled to testify Wednesday but had a schedule conflict, spokeswoman Karen Adler said.

Sen. Kel Seliger, a Republican from Amarillo and the committees chair, said the UT purchase was not directly addressed in Wednesdays hearing because that session was intended to be a broader policy discussion.

Paredes said that if universities expand their offerings or build new campuses without an increase of state support, student costs would likely increase.

His comments follow tuition increases from the UH and UT Systems this month. In each case, administrators attributed the hikes to lower state support per full-time student.

College presidents and chancellors on Wednesday told lawmakers about ways they were trying to make degrees more affordable.

University of Houston-Downtown President Juan Sanchez Munoz said his campus is offering a new nursing degree program with Houston Community College.

Munoz also put in a plug for more funding for the university, one of the largest in Houston.

The university has a very, very modest portion of the pie, he said. We have a greater appetite.Prior to the chemical fire at its Crosby plant, Arkema underestimated the potential for storm damage and failed to keep essential backup power protected from rising floodwaters, documents obtained by the Houston Chronicle show.

Poor planning and a series of cascading equipment failures led to dangerous chemicals erupting into flame in late August during the height of Hurricane Harvey. The miscalculations reflect the companys lack of preparation for more than 3 feet of flooding, reflected by an emergency management plan that barely addressed how to handle such a storm.

Those judgments led to the burning of nine trailers containing the companys stockpile of organic peroxides. The resulting inferno exposed first responders and local residents to dangerous fumes and pulled emergency staffers away from hurricane recovery at a critical time.

Arkema officials argue that unprecedented floods made it impossible to prevent its chemicals from catching fire. The site had only seen up to 2 feet of flooding in the past, company officials said.

The Chronicle obtained Arkemas internal records from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and conducted interviews with government employees with knowledge of ongoing investigations of the events at the plant. The emerging picture reveals nine days of chaos, culminating with the decision to intentionally burn chemicals that posed a danger to the public.

The records, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, and interviews show that:

Arkemas emergency response plan provided employees with little direction for how to handle major flooding events. It contained one paragraph about flooding, but a page and a half on handling bomb threats, records show.

Arkemas main power transformers and its powerful backup generators were not high enough off the ground, causing them to become submerged with floodwaters, Arkema records show. Without power, the company could not keep its stash of organic peroxides at a safe temperature inside its refrigerated buildings.

The companys last resort for keeping organic peroxides cool  refrigerated trailers  was also destined to fail. The diesel-powered trailers had fuel tanks that ran along the bottom of the vehicle. More than 3 feet of water compromised the fuel tanks, causing the freezers to die.

Arkema had a tank of an extremely dangerous chemical, isobutylene, located about 40 yards from six trailers that had been relocated during the storm, according to interviews and satellite images. Government officials were concerned about a chain reaction with that chemical that could have led to catastrophic results.

Company responds

Arkema officials said again Tuesday that no amount of planning could have protected its site from the storm.

Many of your conclusions fail to recognize that Hurricane Harvey was unlike any rain event Houston ever experienced, company spokeswoman Janet Smith said Tuesday in an email. FEMAs 500-year flood map doesnt address the situation that occurred during Hurricane Harvey.

Four days after Harvey made landfall in Texas, the Arkema plant was under 7 feet of water. The last employees to evacuate the site left by boat, floating over a 6-foot chain-link fence topped by barbed wire, the records show.

However, flooding in Houston is a perfectly foreseeable event, said Paul Orum, an independent Washington, D.C., consultant and longtime chemical safety advocate. Facilities should be prepared when it comes to several different layers of flooding.

Lines laid low

Arkema, a French multinational company, manufactures chemicals used to create plastic products. Many of its proprietary compounds are classified as organic peroxides, which must be kept at temperatures well below freezing to prevent the chemicals from catching fire.

With Hurricane Harvey bearing down on Southeast Texas and the National Hurricane Center warning of potentially catastrophic or life-threatening flooding, the companys plans for protecting its product were simple: keep the chemicals cold on-site.

The company had multiple freezer buildings, six backup generators and, as a last resort, refrigerated trucks. Documents provided to the Chronicle did not indicate any plans to drive the organic peroxides away from Harveys impact.

But Arkemas plan for Harvey was based on one flawed assumption: That the site would never experience floods higher than 3 feet. By the end of the weekend, the rain had exceed that total.

On the afternoon of Aug. 27, two days after the storm made landfall, Arkema employees riding out the storm became concerned that floodwaters would seep into the primary power transformers, according to the crews logs. If that happened, the plan was to start the backup generators; one of them was connected to refrigerated buildings keeping the organic peroxides cold.

At the same time, employees were already aware that a backup liquid nitrogen system was useless after floodwaters had reached the pipes that would pump freezing nitrogen into buildings.

Within 24 hours, the primary transformers and two generators powering the refrigerated buildings were inundated with floodwaters, records show.

In planning for catastrophic flooding, Arkema could have elevated its backup generators on platforms or placed them on roofs, said Rick Laine, a salesman for Cay Power Products Co. of Houston. Laine noted that its rare, but not impossible, for generators to be placed on platforms several feet above the ground.

We sometimes see them elevated that high in Galveston with the storm surge, but not in a place thats way out there like Crosby, Laine said.

By the night of Aug. 27, the 12 employees riding out the storm at Arkema were in a precarious position. Only one freezer building still had power. Their land lines were out. The internet was out. Water was about a foot away from the main transformers. They had already moved some of the peroxides into freezer trucks and used heavy equipment to relocate the trailers farther from the workers.

This effort of our ride out crew has been nothing short of heroic, the crews log reads.

But the crews circumstances were only going to get worse.

A toxic cloud?

With the liquid nitrogen system down and backup generators inundated, the team spent most of Aug. 28 wading through floodwaters to move the remaining peroxides into refrigerated trailers, the documents show.

It was the last line of defense  and one that was already failing.

As employees stuffed 48 pallets of organic peroxides into a trailer, two other freezer trailers died, crew logs show. Arkema told employees to move to the front of the site so they wouldnt be near the trailers if they caught fire, according to a family member of one of the workers.

The next day, Aug. 29, the workers were ordered to evacuate. Local government officials ordered everyone within 1.5 miles of the plant to leave, affecting about 300 homes. During the next two days, three refrigerated trailers lost the ability to cool the chemicals, causing the first of the fires that burned over Crosby.

The first fire started in the middle of the night of Aug. 31. Fumes from one trailer swept over the evacuation zone, where sheriffs deputies were patrolling. Law enforcement officers manning the perimeter and medical staff responding to the scene doubled over, vomiting and gasping for breath, according to a civil lawsuit filed against Arkema by the first responders. In all, 23 people were briefly hospitalized.

The scene was nothing less than chaos, the lawsuit states.

Two more trailers caught fire on Sept. 1. Two days later, members of the Houston Police Departments bomb squad entered the site and placed charges on the side of the remaining six trailers. Officers remotely detonated the charges, creating enough heat to trigger the runaway reactions and burn out the remaining chemicals.

Its not clear whether Houston police offered to do the mission or were asked to participate by other agencies overseeing the crisis.

The entire police operation was conducted without warning the public. Until the documents were released earlier this month by the EPA, the public didnt know who performed the controlled burn, or how it was done.

Ultimately, the bomb squad was successful. The evacuation zone was lifted that evening. First responders returned to helping with Harvey recovery and Crosby residents returned to their homes.

Throughout the blazes, Arkema and local officials said the fumes were not toxic. And Arkema downplayed the odds of other chemicals being affected by the flames.

Some government officials worried that a tank containing isobutylene, an extremely hazardous chemical, could fail when the organic peroxides burned, according to a source close to the investigation. An isobutylene tank failure could have triggered a chain reaction, taking out the companys sulfur dioxide tank and creating a toxic cloud. Arkemas risk-management plan said such a reaction could affect more than a million Houston-area residents.

The concern was so great that the bomb squad set fire to the remaining trailers farthest from the isobutylene first, just to be sure. The tank was not damaged and did not catch fire.

Multiple investigations continue into the Arkema fires. On Wednesday, the U.S. Chemical Safety Board will discuss its progress during a news conference.AUSTIN  Chas Moore was too anxious to sleep Tuesday night.

After a seemingly endless string of alarming news about bombs found in FedEx facilities in Austin and San Antonio, followed by a bomb scare later that night at a Goodwill here, he was too wound up to sleep.

So he sat up all night, and ended up watching the dramatic conclusion of a nearly three-week mystery during the wee hours of the morning as police tracked down the suspected bomber, ran his vehicle into a ditch, and when agents banged on his window, the 23-year-old Mark Anthony Conditt detonated a bomb in his car, killing him in a concussive blast.

I know a lot of people were slightly disappointed that this person wasnt captured alive because we want to know why, said Moore, co-founder of the Austin Justice Coalition, who has worked to bring empower people of color and marginalization in the Austin community. This will all be speculation as opposed to hearing it from him.

Austinites are breathing a hesitant sigh of relief now that the serial bomber has claimed what everyone hopes was his last victim  himself.

But with a long list of unanswered questions and a standing plea from police for people to continue vigilance looking out for suspicious package, people here are both relieved and hoping Conditt was working alone.

The month has been a test of fortitude in a city known for maintaining its chill and keeping it weird. But for 19 days a bomber has terrorized the city, planting explosives in seemingly random neighborhoods throughout the town of about 1 million people. The first two explosives were package bombs in African American neighborhoods, the first killing Anthony House, 39, on March 2. The next killed Draylen Mason, 17, and seriously injured his mother on March 12. Later that morning, Esperanza Herrera, a 75-year-old Latino woman, was critically injured from a package bomb on her doorstep.

Another rash of bombings emerged early this week. Bomb No. 4 detonated Sunday, seriously injuring two men in their early 20s who were walking and riding bikes after the sun had set and triggered an tripwire attached to a bomb. Bomb No. 5 exploded early the next morning on a conveyer belt at a FedEx facility in Schertz, just north of San Antonio. Within hours, a FedEx facility near the Austin-Bergstrom International Airport reported a suspicious package that authorities determined was a bomb.

Authorities here have spent the last 10 days warning people to call police if they receive a suspicious package, and that later grew to include suspicious packages. Since then, people here reported more than 1,200 suspicious packages to the Austin Police Department, ranging from unexpected packages and deliveries left at the the wrong house to even a sea shell on the sidewalk a group of people found suspicious because it hadnt been there then they got to work.

The biggest break in the case was when Conditt allegedly mailed two packages from a FedEx store in Sunset Valley, a suburb surrounded by Austin. The large store nestled in an outdoor shopping complex was quiet Wednesday morning, with a few customers trickling in to drop off packages or pick up a few office items.

I think we're doing just fine considering what we've been through, said the store manager, who did not want her name published. She referred all other questions to FedExs corporate office. Employees wouldnt say if they privately figured out who waited on Mark Anthony Conditt Sunday when he walked in wearing a blond wig and a hat to ship two package bombs from there.

Mauricio Castillo visits the store almost daily to send and print bids and plans for his construction business. The bombings didnt phase him, but hes glad the bomber is dead, he said.

I was wasn't scared or anything, but I have a 4-year-old daughter, he said, adding his wife wanted to keep her home from school when the bombings initially appeared racially motivated. I hope it was only him.

Is it really over?

Vicki Mayne turned on the TV early Wednesday morning before she made coffee or let her two dachshunds outside. The caption flashed on the screen: Serial bomber dead, she said

The new was a huge relief for the semi-retired CPA office worker who has stressed about the bombings with her friends and neighbors for the past three weeks. Now she just wants to be sure he hasnt left any more surprises.

Its always been an easy-going, laid-back town. To have something like this going on in our world is just terrible, she said while loading groceries in her car at a Randalls grocery store.

Andrew ONeil has questions: What did the bombers two roommates know? Did the bomber leave any more bombs?

Not everything is wrapped up in a nice, tight bow, he said while waiting for his breakfast taco at the iconic Marias Taco Express with a large statue of a woman protruding from the roof. I dont have the sense this is 100 percent done.

It wasnt until the bomb scare at a Goodwill  that turned out to be a donated artillery simulator that injured a worker there  that Heather Arthur began to think twice about the bombings here.

It wasn't something that really worried me, said Arthur while sitting with her 10-month-old daughter at a playground. After authorities swarmed the Goodwill, she said to herself, maybe I should be out walking her.

Epi Ramirez grew up east of I-35, a region of town largely home to minorities where the first three bombings took place. He knew Herrera, the 75-year-old woman injured by bomb No. 3.

Im glad he blew himself up, said Ramirez, who works at a cookie factory. Nothing happens in Austin like that If hes gone, we dont have to worry about him no more.

While there is a breath of fresh air knowing the suspected bomber is no longer able to terrorize people, theres a lot more work to be done, said Moore who still has not gotten any sleep.

Mayor Adler said hes hopeful there will be a silver lining to the bombings.

As a community, we do not know our neighbors the way that we should, or perhaps the way that we used to, he said. I think its real important as a community that we use this moment, the legacy of this event for us should be that we walk across the street and introduce ourselves to our neighbors, or down the street or across the hall. We should know our neighbors than we do. And if we do that, we will be a stronger and better community and we will have advanced from this time.

Andrea Zelinski covers breaking news and politics for the Houston Chronicle. Follow her on Twitter and Facebook. Send her tips at andrea.zelinski@chron.com.President Trump is treating the opioid crisis as a prop for campaign rallies. While he basks in his applause lines, people are dying.

At a speech in New Hampshire on Monday, Trump mused about the death penalty for drug dealers and argued that building a wall on the Mexican border would stop the flow of heroin and other opioids.

The president also outlined some smart approaches, such as curbing opioid prescriptions and increasing access to treatment and recovery. But Congress and his administration have not shown the willingness to provide the level of funding required to treat the opioid epidemic as the public health crisis it is.

The opioid epidemic was not triggered by Mexican drug smugglers, Salvadoran gangs or sanctuary cities. The National Institute of Drug Abuse said it was caused by a pharmaceutical industry that assured doctors that patients could take powerful opioids without becoming addicted.

BRODESKY: Border wall would be a monument to appeasement

Opioid prescriptions boomed, and hundreds of thousands of patients became addicted. More than 42,000 died of opioid overdoses in 2016, with 32,000 of the deaths attributed to prescription opioids, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Many of the deaths to non-prescription opioids can be traced back to prescription drugs. Eighty percent of people who use heroin first misused prescription opioids, according to the National Institute of Drug Abuse.

Does Trump plan on executing Richard Sackler? His family founded Purdue Pharma, which pleaded guilty in 2007 to misleading the public about the risk of addiction for OxyContin. That opioid drug, by the way, made the company $35 billion in revenue.

The opioid crisis was born in the corporate board room. Instituting capital punishment for drug dealers would do nothing to address this fact. Decades of history also have shown that draconian sentencing laws fill up jails with people of color, and little else.

EDITORIAL: Big Pharma needs an answer for the opioid epidemic

While it is true that much of the heroin and fentanyl available on U.S. streets comes across the Mexican border, Trumps wall would do nothing to stop trans-national drug cartels.

Opioids arent smuggled by backpackers humping across empty stretches of border. According to the Drug Enforcement Administration, Mexican cartels transport the bulk of their goods over the Southwest Border through ports of entry (POEs) using passenger vehicles or tractor trailers.

U.S. Customs agents form the first line of defense against the cartels at border crossings. The agency says it is short about 3,700 agents, but the Trump administration doesnt plan to fund additional customs agents in its budget. The administration even plans to cut 200 of the nearly 500 canine units use to fight terrorism and drug smuggling, the New York Times has reported.

The money would be used instead  wait for it  to fund the border wall.

Meanwhile, Trumps first choice as drug czar, U.S. Rep. Tom Marino, R-Pa., had to withdraw when he was caught loosening restrictions on opioid manufacturers after accepting $100,000 in donations from the drug industry.

For months, National Drug Control Policys top political appointee was a 24-year-old staffer with no relevant qualifications. He resigned earlier this year.

EDITORIAL: More awareness is a start to ending opioid abuse and overdose deaths

Fighting the opioid epidemic is a massive challenge that will require a major commitment of health care and law enforcement resources. The government will have to make difficult decisions about how to reduce opioid prescriptions without triggering unintended consequences for patients suffering from chronic or acute pain.

Above all, this is a public health crisis, and should be treated as such. Five people die every hour from an opioid overdose. These deaths are actually driving a decline in the national life expectancy. Law enforcement must play a role in combatting drug trafficking, but were not going to be able to jail  or execute  our way out of this problem.

The health care industry also will play a critical role in curbing opioid abuse. The Texas Hospital Association took a helpful step earlier this year in releasing guidelines for emergency departments that should reduce opioid prescriptions and, hopefully, addiction rates.

The president should be a powerful moral voice in the fight against opioid addiction and death. Trump can still fill that role, but only if hes willing to focus on the root causes of the crisis and skip the clowning.

Our nation could use Trumps leadership on the opioid issue. Lives depend on it.It was recently announced that America has just beaten its own all-time high in crude oil production  but these claims dont quite stand up to scrutiny.

No doubt, greater volumes are flowing out of U.S. oil wells. This is a major feat  at least on the surface.

In November 1970, the U.S. produced a then-record 10.04 million barrels per day of crude. Nearly half a century later, when many once predicted that oil would be in short supply by now, this record apparently has been shattered.

On Feb. 2, 2018, production amounted to 10.25 mbd. This trend is expected to continue. The International Energy Agency projects that the United States is set to become the worlds dominant oil and gas production leader for decades. This news was received triumphantly, with some proclaiming American energy independence, as oil imports from foreign countries shrink to new lows and U.S. crude exports rise.

But the oils produced in 1970s and much of whats now flowing forth are two entirely different resources.

EDITORIAL: Congress should stop Trump's trade war

Historically, the United States has produced conventional crudes resembling maple syrup that could be readily refined into a wide assortment of petroleum products, including gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, marine fuels, fuel oils and more. Today, a significant portion of American oil that is extracted through hydraulic fracturing is ultra-light condensates that are the consistency of cream soda, and which our refineries are not well-equipped to process into same products that fuel our mobility. Instead, fracked liquids from U.S. oil and gas are better suited to fire up propane grills and make plastics and other petrochemicals.

Having less need for our own new oils means that the United States is increasingly exporting it, mostly from the Gulf Coast. Some 1.5 million barrels per day of condensates are now being sent abroad, up ten-fold since 2010. The U.S. Energy Information Administration projects that continued fracking will raise condensate production to 5 mbd in 2023  nearly 35 percent above 2017 levels, while Americas conventional crude production will level off at 11-12 mbd.

This changes everything.

These ultra-light, gassy oils and wet gases have to be managed anew. Its not just that theyre extracted using unconventional techniques with new issues to attend to (such as disposing of water from the fracking process).

They also tend to leak the powerful greenhouse gas methane into the atmosphere, vastly increasing climate risks. They can explode in transit. They require major new infrastructure investment, especially in pipelines to handle them. And they require new processing and refining methods in order to make the full slate of conventional petroleum products we depend on.

LOWRY: How to lose a trade war with China -- oops! We're doing it.

On an economic front, if the oil America is producing is increasingly geared toward petrochemicals and liquefied petroleum gas instead of gasoline and diesel, the nation needs to hasten its move to electric vehicles before motor fuel supplies are in short supply amid condensate abundance.

In terms of trade, a majority of U.S. ultra-light condensates are heading to Canada to dilute with their extra-heavy bitumen so oil sands can flow through pipelines to be refined in America or exported abroad. The IEA recently reported that a shipment of U.S. condensate blended with heavier crude recently arrived in the United Arab Emirates. This development would have seemed incredible a few years ago, but is now looking like the shape of things to come. If were not careful, the current decision to export an increasing volume of condensates may find us inadvertently trading away our long-term interests for short-term profits, when what we should be doing is gearing up domestically for a changing oil future.

This has a material bearing on national energy policy.

The first thing that needs to be done is to gather as much public information as possible on these new record-breaking ultra-light oils, starting in Texas. Surprisingly, there is still no clear-cut definition of what even constitutes a condensate. Policymakers, investors, trade partners, and the public would benefit from knowing these oils better in terms of their compositions, supply chain characteristics, and environmental trade-offs. New reporting protocols are needed to ensure greater transparency in order to balance private interests and public goods where oil decision-making is concerned.

Before we celebrate, we need to step back and find out the details of the competing resources America is producing. Only then will the U.S. really know when it breaks its own record  and what this means for Americans.Dependent contractors refers to situations where a person works for reward and is defined as self-employed but, in reality, would have very little or none of the autonomy that you would expect of an independent contractor, she explains.

Youre talking about people who are traditionally termed as independent contractors but theyre actually heavily controlled by a company, have to work certain hours, dont get the freedom you might expect  theyre people who might theoretically meet some of the criteria for an independent contractor but they sit in a grey area.

According to Rowe, the previous two governments have both looked at dependent contractors but have never undertaken major reforms like she suspects the current government plans to.

They increased a few protections for specific types of dependent contracts, like home workers, but they didnt make the wide sweeping change which the Labour government is probably thinking of doing, she tells HRD.

The governments first round of legislative changes came in January, addressing meal breaks, 90-day trials and unions  issues which Rowe says were relatively easy to amend as they were either restoring or reversing previous legislation. However, overhauling or even updating legislation around contractors is a little trickier.Im really pleased that the report acknowledged the courage of DHB staff, who made repeated efforts to bring the issue of overspending and spending outside policy to Dr Murrays attention, before escalating their concerns to the chair, said Webb.

This is one man, out of a staff of 7,000, who was a bad apple, did not meet the high standards we would expect from a chief executive and has damaged the reputation of our DHB, but is not indicative of how the many hard working and committed staff in our organisation behave, she added.

Murray stepped down in October last year  less than a month after the Minister of Health requested an investigation into circumstances surrounding Murrays spending.

The subsequent report, conducted by the State Services Commission, found 129 items of inappropriate expenditure  59 of those (valued at $101,161) did not meet the Waikato DHBs standards for appropriate authorisation and 45 (valued at $120,608) were unjustified when measured against the Auditor-Generals guidelines.

A further $74,265 was identified by the Waikato DHB as personal expenditure requiring reimbursement. So far, Murray has repaid $54,831 of the personal expenditure but a further $19,434 remains in dispute.Sir Vince Cable has claimed the support of almost one-third of EU leaders for the Liberal Democrats call for a referendum on the final Brexit deal. The Lib Dem leader said that eight prime ministers  from the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Luxembourg, Slovenia, Estonia and the Czech Republic  had agreed a joint statement saying that British voters should have the final say on any withdrawal deal.

Pertaining to the LibDem press release issued today on Brexit: at the ALDE leaders meeting of 22 March no statement has been agreed upon or released.  ALDE Party (@ALDEParty) March 22, 2018

But his claim was thrown into doubt after the ALDE grouping, which brings together liberal parties including the Lib Dems in the European Parliament, denied that any such statement had been released. The ALDE, which organised a lunch attended by Sir Vince and his EU counterparts in Brussels, issued a tweet: Pertaining to the Lib Dem press release issued today on Brexit: at the ALDE leaders meeting of 22 March no statement has been agreed upon or released. But sources close to Sir Vince insisted that the statement was verbally agreed by the leaders at the lunch, though it had not been formally signed. The party said it was not aware of any of the eight PMs raising concerns about Sir Vinces announcement. And Dutch PM Mark Rutte appeared alongside the Lib Dem leader after the lunch to say: If some way or another, the UK would decide to change its position, it would be highly welcomed by every liberal leader and, my impression is, almost everybody in the EU. Whether that happens will be up to the UK itself and UK politicians.

Today @VinceCable met with Liberal Prime Ministers in Europe. Dutch @MinPres Mark Rutte said: ''If some way or another the UK would decide to change its position it would be highly welcomed by any of the Liberal Prime Ministers and I think everybody in the European Union'' pic.twitter.com/HsqcgawPT7  Liberal Democrats (@LibDems) March 22, 2018

ALDE later put out a further statement: As a matter of fact: Vince Cable did attend the liberal leaders meeting and they showed support for the Lib Dems but no statement has been issued or agreed. The Lib Dems said that the eight leaders had backed a proposition put forward by former Belgian PM Guy Verhofstadt at the lunch, which stated: We regret Brexit, but acknowledge the choice made by British voters for the UK Government to negotiate withdrawal. We further acknowledge and support the Liberal Democrats call for the British people to have the final say on the Brexit deal. All parties need to seek a broad deal accommodating both the position of the UK Government and the principles on which the European Union is built. Along with Mr Rutte, the Lib Dems said that the statement was backed by Belgiums Charles Michel, Lars Lokke Rasmussen of Denmark, Andrej Babis of the Czech Republic, Xavier Bettel of Luxembourg, Miro Cerar of Slovenia, Juri Ratas from Estonia and Finlands Juha Sipila.

An update from @vincecable, who is currently in Brussels meeting with prime ministers from across Europe to discuss Brexit pic.twitter.com/pkcW7wXgJh  Liberal Democrats (@LibDems) March 22, 2018Sir Vince  who is campaigning for a second referendum on the Brexit deal  said the statement showed that other EU states would welcome an exit from Brexit with open arms.

The joint statement  backed by prime ministers of the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Luxembourg, Slovenia, Estonia and the Czech Republic  was released after Sir Vince Cable travelled to Brussels for a meeting with fellow liberal leaders on the margins of the European Council.

Eight EU leaders have signed a statement backing Liberal Democrat calls for the British public to have the final say on any Brexit deal.

An update from @vincecable , who is currently in Brussels meeting with prime ministers from across Europe to discuss Brexit pic.twitter.com/pkcW7wXgJh

In the statement, the eight prime ministers said: We regret Brexit, but acknowledge the choice made by British voters for the UK Government to negotiate withdrawal.

We further acknowledge and support the Liberal Democrats call for the British people to have the final say on the Brexit deal.

All parties need to seek a broad deal accommodating both the position of the UK Government and the principles on which the European Union is built.

Sir Vince said: This is a clear signal from our European friends that they want us to remain in the European Union and would welcome an exit from Brexit with open arms.

Polls show that there is a growing desire among the British public for a vote on the terms of the deal. People can now be reassured that there is no desire among EU leaders to punish us if we decided to remain in the bloc.

The message is clear: Brexit is not inevitable.A Scottish Government minister has called on a Labour councillor to do the honourable thing and resign after fresh claims of racial abuse emerged.

Jim Dempster, a Labour councillor in Dumfries and Galloway, has already said he is deeply sorry for remarks made about Scottish Transport Minister Humza Yousaf hiding under his burka.

Now further allegations of racial abuse  which Mr Dempster denies  have been made against the local politician.

The claims by a man and a woman reportedly centre on a period in the late 1980s and early 1990s when both were children in the village of Sanquhar.

A Scottish Labour Party spokesman said an investigation already underway into Mr Dempsters behaviour would consider any new allegations.

But Mr Yousaf was clear that he should quit as a councillor.

On Tuesday Mr Dempster said he was deeply sorry for his comment about Mr Yousaf  made during a meeting with Transport Scotland officials  adding that he had asked for further diversity training, and had also visisted a local mosque.

This was dismissed as a tokenistic photo op by the minister as he repeated calls for the councillor to quit.

Mr Yousaf said he had received correspondence to suggest that Cllr Dempsters Islamophobic slur was not a one-off.

On Thursday he told BBC Radio Scotland that the two alleged victims had contacted him when they saw Jim Dempsters face across the news.

Speaking on the Good Morning Scotland programme, Mr Yousaf said: One of them contacted me by email on the day that the allegations surfaced of the Islamophobic slur Jim Dempster made against me. Another one contacted me a couple of days ago.

Its just really disturbing, these incidents took place allegedly a number of years ago but both victims tell me they really had just suppressed them but when they saw Jim Dempsters face across the news they just said they had to come forward.

They wish to remain anonymous but told quite graphic accounts of sustained racial abuse over a decade.

Mr Yousaf said both he and Labour MSP Anas Sarwar  who recently launched a campaign against Everyday Islamophobia  had spoken to the victims.

The Transport Minister said: One of the victims told me he was haunted by it, he said he had suppressed it, he said the 10 years that he lived in the area in Sanquhar and he was a victim of that abuse were the worst 10 years of his life.

He said when he saw Jim Dempsters face again on the news he couldnt sleep. It really has had an impact on them, I really applaud them on their bravery having spoken to both of them.

While stressing the new allegations have still to be investigated, he claimed they point to a disturbing pattern of behaviour.

Mr Yousaf said: What Councillor Dempster doesnt deny is making an Islamophobic slur. We have to ask ourselves, somebody who admits such inexcusable behaviour  do they have a role in our politics and our political life?

And the fact that hes been trying to get to mosques, do photo ops, to me shows he is more interested in saving his political career than he is in showing any true remorse, so I repeat my calls on him to resign.

He added: The honourable thing for Jim Dempster to do would be to resign instead of trying to scramble to save his political career.

Councillor Elaine Murray, leader of Dumfries and Galloway Council, said: The new allegations are extremely serious and if found to have substance I have no doubt that Jim will be expelled from the Labour Party.

Jim denies the allegations and there is a process of investigation to be undertaken. The Scottish legal tradition is that a person is innocent unless proved guilty.

I appreciate that the accusers wish to preserve their anonymity but I would urge them to take part in the investigation, I understand that they are both known to Anas Sarwar and I am sure that he would arrange for this to be done sensitively.

A Scottish Labour spokesman said: James Dempster has been suspended by the Scottish Labour Party, and an investigation is ongoing.

The investigation will consider any new allegations. The Labour Party has a zero tolerance policy towards racism and all forms of discrimination.The suspended boss of Cambridge Analytica (CA) has been called to appear before MPs to explain inconsistencies in his evidence about the firms use of Facebook data. Alexander Nix has been asked to attend another grilling by the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport committee. Meanwhile Culture Secretary Matt Hancock said the revelations about Facebook and CA marked a turning point in peoples attitudes to their online data. The Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Secretary said new measures coming into force in May could leave Facebook facing a fine of more than 1 billion if it breached data laws and promised the Information Commissioner would also be given beefed-up powers. But the data watchdog has yet to be granted a warrant to search CAs computers as part of its current investigation and Mr Hancock acknowledged the system isnt good enough at present.

The decision by MPs to recall Mr Nix comes after Cambridge University researcher Aleksandr Kogan  who developed a personality survey used to harvest tens of millions of peoples data for CA  contradicted some of his evidence. Dr Kogan said Mr Nix was wrong when he told MPs he had not been supplied data by the academics firm Global Science Research (GSR). Mr Nix told MPs that GSR did some research for us back in 2014 that proved to be fruitless. Asked if that was wrong, Dr Kogan told the BBC: I believe it is. I dont see why that would be accurate. Select committee chairman Damian Collins said in a letter to Mr Nix  who was suspended earlier this week  that there were a number of inconsistencies in the evidence given on his appearance on February 27, notably your denial that your company received data from the Global Science Research company. He added: Giving false statements to a select committee is a very serious matter. We urge you to come forward and explain your comments at a committee hearing.

Facebooks boss Mark Zuckerberg said it was a mistake to rely on CA to delete tens of millions of Facebook users data, as he apologised for the major breach of trust. He said the political consultancy had provided formal assurances that information harvested from 50 million profiles had been destroyed after Facebook first learned of the breach in 2015. Mr Zuckerberg set out a series of measures to toughen up the sites policies, said he was now open to Facebook being regulated, and accepted that malign actors were trying to use the social network for political ends.

I want to share an update on the Cambridge Analytica situation  including the steps weve already taken and our next Posted by Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday, March 21, 2018

Facebook has seen billions of US dollars wiped off its market value following the row involving CA, which is accused of using the data to help Donald Trumps US presidential campaign target political ads on the platform.

Were committed to being responsible, fair and secure with data. Well be working with everyone  Facebook, independent auditors and the ICO  as their investigations continue.  Cambridge Analytica (@CamAnalytica) March 22, 2018

CA has denied using Facebook data in its work on the Trump campaign and added: Were committed to being responsible, fair and secure with data. Well be working with everyone  Facebook, independent auditors and the ICO  as their investigations continue. The scandal has prompted calls from politicians on both sides of the Atlantic for Mr Zuckerberg to answer to them in person for the breach and led to an online campaign for people to delete their profiles.Victims of the Westminster terror attack have been remembered at a special vigil. The ceremony in Westminster Hall was held to mark the first anniversary of the attack and was attended by politicians, senior police officers and people involved in the incident. Five people were killed, including Pc Keith Palmer, and dozens of others were injured when 52-year-old Khalid Masood launched a car and knife attack on Westminster Bridge and the Palace of Westminster before he was shot dead.

Earlier on Thursday, MPs observed a minutes silence as Speaker John Bercow asked members in the House of Commons chamber to pause in respectful memory of those who died on March 22 last year. With heads bowed, MPs from different parties stood side-by-side along the green benches to pay their respects ahead of digital, culture, media and sport questions. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, told the gathering: A year ago, darkness struck across Westminster Bridge and in this palace.

Alastair Grant

The Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby during the service (PA) It spread across the bridge like a snake, driving to left and right, killing and harming. Reverend Rose Hudson-Wilkin, the Speakers chaplain, told the service: A year ago today on this estate and on Westminster Bridge we were visited by what I regard as evil. Rev Hudson-Wilkin praised Pc Palmer, saying he ran towards the danger in order that we might be safe.

Metropolitan Police

Keith Palmer, left, was one of the five victims (Metropolitan Police/PA) The vigil included a two-minute silence for the victims of the attack. Masoods rampage left five people dead  48-year-old Pc Palmer, who was on duty at the Palace of Westminster, along with US tourist Kurt Cochran, Romanian tourist Andreea Cristea, 31, and Britons Aysha Frade, 44, and 75-year-old Leslie Rhodes who were mown down on the bridge. Prime Minister Theresa May was not at the Westminster Hall service because she was attending an EU summit in Brussels.

In memory of those who were lost, and in defiance of those who would seek to silence our democracy PM @Theresa_May#LondonUnitedpic.twitter.com/iUncICQCHU  UK Prime Minister (@10DowningStreet) March 22, 2018Facebook founder Mark Zuckerbergs response to the Cambridge Analytica (CA) row does not go far enough, Culture Secretary Matt Hancock has said. Mr Zuckerberg said it was a mistake to rely on CA to delete tens of millions of Facebook users data as he apologised for the major breach of trust. He said the political consultancy had provided formal assurances that information harvested from 50 million profiles had been destroyed after Facebook first learned of the breach in 2015. Mr Zuckerberg set out a series of measures to toughen up the sites policies, said he was now open to Facebook being regulated, and accepted that malign actors were trying to use the social network for political ends.

I want to share an update on the Cambridge Analytica situation  including the steps we've already taken and our next Posted by Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday, March 21, 2018

But the Culture Secretary said it should not be up to individual sites to decide how to respond as he highlighted plans to strengthen data law. Mr Hancock  who has faced privacy concerns over his own social media app for constituents  said the Data Protection Bill would strengthen the rules. He said the way people give consent for their data to be used should be meaningful rather than endless pages of terms and conditions in tiny type with a little click box at the bottom. He told BBC Radio 4s Today programme: The big tech companies need to be far, far more transparent with how they use peoples data. I saw overnight Mark Zuckerberg has apologised and said that they are going to make some changes, but frankly I dont think those changes go far enough. And anyway, it shouldnt be for a company to decide what is the appropriate balance between privacy and innovation and use of data  those rules should be set by society as a whole and so set by Parliament. Thats the approach that we are taking  the big tech companies need to abide by the law and we are strengthening the law.

Ian West

Culture Secretary Matt Hancock (Ian West/PA) Facebook has seen billions of US dollars wiped off its market value following the row involving CA, which is accused of using the data to help Donald Trumps US presidential campaign target political ads on the platform. The company has denied using Facebook data in its work on the campaign. The scandal has prompted calls from politicians on both sides of the Atlantic for Mr Zuckerberg to answer to them in person for the breach. The billionaire told CNN he would be happy to appear before US Congress if its the right thing to do. This was a major breach of trust, and Im really sorry that this happened, he told CNN. On Wednesday, Mr Zuckerberg made his first public statement since the controversy erupted  via a Facebook post. Journalists at the Guardian had told Facebook in 2015 that Aleksandr Kogan, a Cambridge University psychology researcher, had shared data from an app he had developed with CA, he said. Facebook immediately banned Dr Kogans app and demanded that he and CA delete the data, for which they provided certifications that they had, the boss said.

Dominic LipinskiI want to share an update on the Cambridge Analytica situation -- including the steps we've already taken and our next steps to address this important issue.

We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can't then we don't deserve to serve you. I've been working to understand exactly what happened and how to make sure this doesn't happen again. The good news is that the most important actions to prevent this from happening again today we have already taken years ago. But we also made mistakes, there's more to do, and we need to step up and do it.

Here's a timeline of the events:

In 2007, we launched the Facebook Platform with the vision that more apps should be social. Your calendar should be able to show your friends' birthdays, your maps should show where your friends live, and your address book should show their pictures. To do this, we enabled people to log into apps and share who their friends were and some information about them.

In 2013, a Cambridge University researcher named Aleksandr Kogan created a personality quiz app. It was installed by around 300,000 people who shared their data as well as some of their friends' data. Given the way our platform worked at the time this meant Kogan was able to access tens of millions of their friends' data.

In 2014, to prevent abusive apps, we announced that we were changing the entire platform to dramatically limit the data apps could access. Most importantly, apps like Kogan's could no longer ask for data about a person's friends unless their friends had also authorized the app. We also required developers to get approval from us before they could request any sensitive data from people. These actions would prevent any app like Kogan's from being able to access so much data today.

In 2015, we learned from journalists at The Guardian that Kogan had shared data from his app with Cambridge Analytica. It is against our policies for developers to share data without people's consent, so we immediately banned Kogan's app from our platform, and demanded that Kogan and Cambridge Analytica formally certify that they had deleted all improperly acquired data. They provided these certifications.

Last week, we learned from The Guardian, The New York Times and Channel 4 that Cambridge Analytica may not have deleted the data as they had certified. We immediately banned them from using any of our services. Cambridge Analytica claims they have already deleted the data and has agreed to a forensic audit by a firm we hired to confirm this. We're also working with regulators as they investigate what happened.

This was a breach of trust between Kogan, Cambridge Analytica and Facebook. But it was also a breach of trust between Facebook and the people who share their data with us and expect us to protect it. We need to fix that.

In this case, we already took the most important steps a few years ago in 2014 to prevent bad actors from accessing people's information in this way. But there's more we need to do and I'll outline those steps here:

First, we will investigate all apps that had access to large amounts of information before we changed our platform to dramatically reduce data access in 2014, and we will conduct a full audit of any app with suspicious activity. We will ban any developer from our platform that does not agree to a thorough audit. And if we find developers that misused personally identifiable information, we will ban them and tell everyone affected by those apps. That includes people whose data Kogan misused here as well.

Second, we will restrict developers' data access even further to prevent other kinds of abuse. For example, we will remove developers' access to your data if you haven't used their app in 3 months. We will reduce the data you give an app when you sign in -- to only your name, profile photo, and email address. We'll require developers to not only get approval but also sign a contract in order to ask anyone for access to their posts or other private data. And we'll have more changes to share in the next few days.

Third, we want to make sure you understand which apps you've allowed to access your data. In the next month, we will show everyone a tool at the top of your News Feed with the apps you've used and an easy way to revoke those apps' permissions to your data. We already have a tool to do this in your privacy settings, and now we will put this tool at the top of your News Feed to make sure everyone sees it.

Beyond the steps we had already taken in 2014, I believe these are the next steps we must take to continue to secure our platform.

I started Facebook, and at the end of the day I'm responsible for what happens on our platform. I'm serious about doing what it takes to protect our community. While this specific issue involving Cambridge Analytica should no longer happen with new apps today, that doesn't change what happened in the past. We will learn from this experience to secure our platform further and make our community safer for everyone going forward.

I want to thank all of you who continue to believe in our mission and work to build this community together. I know it takes longer to fix all these issues than we'd like, but I promise you we'll work through this and build a better service over the long term.

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg shared Zuckerberg's post, and added her own note:

Sharing Mark's post addressing the Cambridge Analytica news. As he said, we know that this was a major violation of peoples' trust, and I deeply regret that we didn't do enough to deal with it. We have a responsibility to protect your data - and if we can't, then we don't deserve to serve you.

We've spent the past few days working to get a fuller picture so we can stop this from happening again. Here are the steps we're taking. We're investigating all apps that had access to large amounts of information before we changed our platform in 2014 to dramatically reduce data access. And if we find that developers misused personally identifiable information, we'll ban them from our platform and we'll tell the people who were affected.

We're also taking steps to reduce the data you give an app when you use Facebook login to your name, profile photo, and email address. And we'll make it easier for you to understand which apps you've allowed to access your data.

You deserve to have your information protected -- and we'll keep working to make sure you feel safe on Facebook. Your trust is at the core of our service. We know that and we will work to earn it.A woman in Arizona has been hit and killed by a self-driving Uber car.

It's believed to be the first time an autonomous vehicle has killed a pedestrian.

Uber says it is cooperating with the authorities.

The victim has not yet been named by Tempe Police Department.

A woman in Arizona has died after being hit by a self-driving car operated by Uber in what is believed to be the first time ever a pedestrian has been killed by an autonomous vehicle.

One of the transportation firm's vehicles hit a woman in Tempe, Arizona, on Monday morning, and she died of her injuries at a hospital, the Tempe Police Department said in a statement provided to journalists. The vehicle was in self-driving mode at the time of the crash, the department said. The news was first reported by ABC 15.

The incident appears to be the first time a pedestrian has been killed by an autonomous vehicle, and is sure to ignite debate around the ethics, safety, and legal culpability of the tech. Proponents of the technology tout them as a far safer alternative to traditional, human-driven cars. (A male driver was previously killed while using Tesla's semiautonomous "Autopilot" mode, though he had ignored seven safety warnings.)

Uber has since paused all its self-driving-car operations in Tempe, San Francisco, and Toronto, WPXI News reports.

The victim was walking outside of the crosswalk when she was hit, police said. She was not yet named as her next of kin had yet to be notified. There was a vehicle operator behind the wheel of Uber's car at the time of the crash.

The exact circumstances of the crash are not yet known.

In a brief statement provided to Business Insider, Uber confirmed someone had died and said the company was cooperating with investigators.

A spokesperson said: "Our hearts go out to the victim's family. We are fully cooperating with local authorities in their investigation of this incident." The company did not immediately provide further details about the deadly incident.

In a statement, the Tempe Police Department said: "We wanted to provide an update to the Uber accident that occurred overnight on Mill Ave. just south of Curry Rd. The vehicle involved is one of Uber's self-driving vehicles. It was in autonomous mode at the time of the collision, with a vehicle operator behind the wheel. The vehicle was traveling northbound just south of Curry Rd. when a female walking outside of the crosswalk cross the road from west to east when she was struck by the Uber vehicle.Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg finally said that he's "responsible" for what happens at the company, including the Cambridge Analytica data scandal. A data company got hold of detailed information on 50 million Facebook users and used it to psychologically manipulate people during the 2016 election. And COO Sheryl Sandburg? She said, "I deeply regret that we didn't do enough to deal with it."

The no-sorry-or-apology statements, days after the news broke, is an attempt to corral a runaway scandal that has already trimmed tens of billions from the company's value. That has former insiders turning against the company, with WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton urging people to #deletefacebook. That has stunned customers, who look at their privacy settings in shock when they realize how many companies have access to their data.

This is way too little, far too late, with a textbook not-sorry try to get out of hot water by not addressing the elephant sitting on everyone's keyboard.

The issue isn't Cambridge Analytica. It's Facebook's repeated stumbling over personal privacy as it reaches to make yet another dollar off its users.

Sure, all companies need to make money, and getting bigger can be great. But you still need to operate with integrity. Not Facebook's strong suit as time and again over the years it has overstepped boundaries and essentially said "oops."

But even as Sandberg writes that "[y]our trust is at the core of our service" and Zuckerberg thanks "all of you who continue to believe in our mission and work to build this community together," they're showing how out of touch they've become.

Who trusts Facebook? The people now deleting their accounts? And who believes in the company's "mission"? Which seems more about making a buck off people's own communities than helping to create one.

Focusing on Cambridge Analytica is a distraction. That's nothing but the last straw. Facebook has been happy to see companies running these data slurping fake social quizzes for years. Facebook prowls through all your posts and even private messages. They say the private message content isn't used to target ads.

Who's not to trust, right?

Maybe this is the self-deception of Silicon Valley, the grand words of missions and world change and all the other convoluted claptrap that so many in tech indulge in. But the would-be masters of the world need to declutter their thinking.

Business basics are always in call. You provide a product or service that people want. They pay you, either in money or by watching ads. And you respect customers, because most will eventually sniff out a phony. You know, like someone who keeps saying one thing and doing another.

Facebook's business isn't going to disappear immediately. People want to keep in touch with others, and there isn't another sufficiently popular social network that would provide similar types of experiences.I just returned from my third trip to Cuba, which has become one of my favorite destinations. Havana, which changes dynamically every time I go, bursts with zest and has become one of my soul cities, right up there with Tel Aviv. It also has fabulous weather and a long oceanfront walking drive, which is one of my favorite walks on the planet.

My experience on my third trip was different. Having run through all the typical touristic recommendations, I had an opportunity to delve a bit deeper and explore some things I wouldn't have done on a first trip.

I thought, as I did with my first trip, that I would run through some of the highlights, for any of you dear readers who are thinking of heading to Havana.

But, before that, a few reminder trips for any travel to Cuba:

1) Bring enough cash because you really can't get money there without tremendous difficulty. Whatever you think you need, just double it.

2) You can buy wifi cards on the street, and exchange money on the street as well for a better rate. If you're in a pinch and really need it, go to the lobby of the Havana Libre and buy their in-hotel wifi.

Best New Restaurant I Visited: Grados

This new place is about 8 blocks due south of the Havana Libre Hotel off Avenue 23, is from a young, exciting chef who convinced his mother to open her home and redesign it to fulfill his gastronomic creations. I had my best and most creative meal in Cuba there.

Best New Dessert Spot: Museum of Chocolate

Right in Old Havana, there are two doors - takeout and sit down - and its one of those rare places that appeals to tourists but is also priced to include ordinary Cubans. The chocolates are made by hand right there and you can see the man at work, and they are locally famous for their hot chocolate varietals.

Best New Cultural Experience: The AfroCuban FestivalNo doubt you've heard that on Sunday, an Uber in Tempe, Arizona, operating in autonomous mode with a backup safety driver, or supervisor, in the car, killed a pedestrian.

What we know at this point is based on the Tempe police's preliminary findings after viewing the car's forward-facing camera and speaking to the Uber safety driver.

Whatever the ultimate findings of the NTSB, which is investigating the incident, and potential liability, if any, of Uber, or its driver, one thing is clear: When an autonomous vehicle is involved in an incident that results in injury or death, it's going to get our attention. And, even though I'm a big proponent of autonomous vehicles, I believe that it should.

They Are Not Driverless

It has always been the case that any sufficiently disruptive technology will evoke fear, resistance, and the wrath of naysayers who will always have ample evidence to prove that disruption is a very bad thing.

What happened in Tempe is tragic, as is every one of the 3,287 automobile deaths each day. None of them are acceptable to the people killed, their families, and friends. But that's exactly why I'm so keen on autonomous vehicles, because that carnage is something we no longer need to accept.

Tempe is one of countless incidents where autonomous machines will be scrutinized for their actions and behaviors. Yes, I said behaviors, because in many cases what these devices do and how they act will be far more akin to a behavior, in which decisions are not always apparent, versus a programmatic or machine-like response, which is predictable.

Notice that I'm also not calling them driverless, because they aren't. They have drivers, just not human ones. We need to drop the driverless label and start to understand what autonomous means if we're to accurately weigh the benefits against the risks.

This isn't about driverlessness. It's about an entirely new kind of driver; one that, although not infallible, is ultimately better and safer than the vast majority of human drivers in the vast majority of cases. We are creating a new species that we're going to co-habitate the world with. So, it's worth taking the time to understand what that means and, to whatever degree we can, put in place the cornerstones for its evolution.

To help reveal a bit about how AVs are going to evolve, and to provide a foundation for understanding them, I'm writing a three-part series of columns, each one focusing on a critical aspect of AVs. The first two will look at why we have such difficulty in seeing beyond the short-term risks of AVs.

Living in the Danger Zone

Of all the things we do each day, driving and sharing our world with vehicles is the riskiest. It's exactly because driving a car is so risky that we have a tough time imagining how an intelligent machine could ever do it as well as we humans. But there's just one problem with that thinking: We really don't do it all that well.

Motor vehicles account for 1.3 million deaths each year, placing them as the 10th leading cause of death globally and the only nondisease related cause of death in the top 10. Which means that if you adjust for the fact that there are only one billion vehicles globally, as opposed to the fact that all seven billion people risk acquiring any of the other nine diseases, you could make the case that vehicles are the leading cause of death for those who own or interact with an automobile.

Given that, you'd think we'd be thrilled at the prospect of having technology take over. We're not. In fact, we're mostly terrified by the prospect. And there are three good reasons why:

1. We measure new technology against an artificial goal of 100 percent accuracy and reliability when the current state of affairs isn't even close to that goal.

We measure the efficiency of a new technology against a standard of perfection rather than against the actual benefit it has over whatever the current risks are without the technology. Many of the arguments against AVs involve scenarios where the car might make a decision that results in injuries or fatalities. It's impossible to avoid every such incident. So, yes, autonomous vehicles will not eliminate all of the risks of motor vehicles. However, it is virtually certain that, as a whole, they will be orders of magnitude safer than human drivers. So much so that the ultimate tipping point for driverless cars will likely be economic because of the relatively high cost of insuring a human operating a vehicle over one driven by AI.

While doing research for my upcoming book, Revealing the Invisible, I spoke with a number of personal injury lawyers and insurance companies. Autonomous vehicles will have a dramatic impact on their business, perhaps putting them out of business. Surprisingly, the reactions I got to that were not what you might expect. Marc Lamber, a personal injury lawyer at Fennemore Craig PC, a 130-year-old Southwest law firm, voiced the predominant perspective:

Ultimately, self-driving cars are remarkable in the sense that they will put me out of business. I'm a personal injury lawyer and I'm glad [about that]. I don't think it's going to happen in the next year but as you look at the rapidity with which the technology is moving forward, it's an eventuality that personal injury lawyers, like myself, who represent victims of car crashes, will be out of business or our business will be reduced drastically--and it's such a wonderful thing if you think about that statistically. One of the accepted statistics that I see thrown around is that at least 90 percent of traffic accidents are caused by human error. If we're in a stage 4 vehicle that's fully autonomous, 10 years down the road, we're going to eliminate almost all of those collisions. So, you're saving potentially a million lives a year and you're avoiding countless injury accidents.

Marc's comments echoed a recurring theme that I came across time and again. We've come to accept what I have no doubt we will soon look back on as totally unnecessary risk and human suffering.

2. We measure the known risks of a new technology against unknown benefits.

It is far easier to anticipate the risks (perceived and real) of a new technology than its future benefits. In an earlier column, I talked about how AVs would provide safe mobility for the elderly, disabled, and youth, radically changing their quality of life and the risks of currently available options. The societal value in doing that is nearly impossible to measure. Additionally, AVs will have an irrefutable record of every incident they are involved in. It will not longer be a guessing game of what happened based on the imperfect memory of those involved or of bystanders. Instead a precise account of all the factors involved will be preserved, not only for liability issues but more important for learning.

However, until we experience that new normal, the known risks far outweigh the unknown benefits.

3. The A.I. that drives autonomous vehicles learns from doing.

There's an old saying that goes something along the lines of "good judgment depends mostly on experience, and experience usually comes from poor judgment." While that may sound trite, few of us would argue that it's in the doing that we learn the most valuable lessons. The same is true of A.I. While A.I. can be trained using simulations and observation, it learns primarily by doing. And doing involves making mistakes and learning from them.

Some of those mistakes will terrify us. The difference, however, between how an A.I. driven car learns and how humans learn is dramatic, because once A.I. learns something the lesson is shared with every other vehicle using that same A.I. That means the rate at which learning positively impacts outcomes scales in a way that the proficiency of human drivers never could.

Tempe was tragic. Elaine Herzberg was one of the 3,287 people who lost their lives to automobiles on that day. Our objective should be to radically reduce that, not by retreating into the past but by moving boldly into the future, a future of setbacks and breakthroughs, tragedy and triumph. And, over time, a future in which we will share not just our roads with new drivers but our world with a new species.UPDATE 3/23/18: In the early hours on Friday, China offered its response to U.S. President Trump's call for tariffs on Chinese exports--announcing its own tariffs on up to $3 billion worth of U.S. goods, including fruit, pork and recycled steel and aluminum.

Just hours before tariffs on imported steel and aluminum were set to take effect, President Trump announced a series of new tariffs on as much as $60 billion worth of Chinese goods. That's causing many in the business community to re-evaluate their supply chains.

"Prices are escalating on our raw products [including] tubing and plate steel, and that's due to volatility and the threat of tariffs," says Jacob Uhlenkott, an adviser with his family's Grangeville, Idaho-based steel fabricator, Advanced Welding and Steel. The roughly 60-person company, which purchases some imported metals and then sells materials to general contractors, is considering laying off a portion of the workforce and automating operations, should the added cost of goods impact the bottom line.

"How do you pivot when you see 20 to 50 percent increases in your raw product?" Uhlenkott asks. "Our goal is zero layoffs, but that might mean freezing wages. We're looking at all options right now to stay competitive."

The goal of the tariffs, as White House officials explained on Thursday, is to reduce America's deficit with the world's most populous country and defend against what Trump views to be China's shady trade practices. In particular, the administration is taking aim at the unfair seizure of U.S. intellectual property, and plans to impose new restrictions on foreign investment. "We have a tremendous intellectual property theft problem," the president said on Thursday. "[This] is going to make us a stronger, much richer nation."

Advanced Welding and Steel is one of a number of domestic businesses that are concerned that the introduction of new tariffs could lead to losses, particularly for those that import parts or manufacture abroad. "This is a huge threat to U.S. businesses," says Uhlenkott.

While it's unclear what products the most recent tariffs will target, analysts expect that it could include items that many large companies--including, say, Walmart or Sony--typically import from abroad. "We could see anything and everything, such as [tariffs on] electronics, footwear, and clothing," says Doreen Edelman, a trade attorney with the Memphis-based law firm Baker Donelson. U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer has 15 days to release the list of Chinese goods and sectors that will be targeted, though he insisted during Thursday's announcement that technology was sure to be included in some capacity.

The more pressing fear, Edelman says, is the notion that China may retaliate by levying its own tariffs on U.S. exports, including soybeans or other agricultural products. At present, China is one of the largest buyers of American crops and could conceivably look elsewhere for those products, including Brazil and Argentina. "If we pull the trigger, I don't see how you avoid a trade war," she adds. "You immediately have the agricultural industry outraged." (Beijing this week renewed a previous warning that it would hit back with tariffs of its own should Trump proceed as planned.)

Indeed, the effect of the new tariffs may spiral beyond what the administration has intended. Earlier this week, more than 40 business groups joined the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in urging the President not to levy new, sweeping tariffs against China, arguing that the uncertainty created for companies could stymie U.S. agriculture, goods and service exports, and raise costs for businesses.

"Tariffs make everybody freeze up," Nicole Sahin tells Inc. The founder of Boston-based international recruiting firm Globalization Partners suggests that some of her clients will shelve plans for global expansion amid new tariffs.

Others are optimistic that the new tariffs could lead to more innovation and strengthen local manufacturing. In response to the previously announced steel and aluminum tariffs, for which U.S. allies including the E.U., Canada, and Mexico are exempt, the Aluminum Association issued a statement in support of the move. "We appreciate the President's commitment to strengthening the U.S. aluminum industry," the trade group said.

Even so, it's feasible that tariffs could similarly drive up the cost of American goods, since local manufacturers could justify charging more. That would hurt businesses such as Isaiah Industries, a Piqua, Ohio-based manufacturer of metal roofing. The company's president, Todd Miller, tells Inc. that he anticipates higher costs to manufacture his products, despite the fact that he only sources from American steel makers. "Our chief concern is that the cost of domestic metal will go up according to what the tariffs do to foreign metal," Miller says. "Domestic mills will now be able to get the margins they wanted all along."When Nicole Sahin launched her recruitment firm, Globalization Partners, in Boston in 2012, she banked on the premise that U.S. businesses were increasingly looking to grow and expand their teams internationally. Her more than $100 million services company helps businesses hire foreign workers in more than 130 countries worldwide, but she's concerned that new tariffs on imported goods could give her clients pause, and ultimately impact their bottom lines.

"Tariffs make everybody freeze up," Sahin says. "Our clients need to have [some degree of] predictability to build and expand their businesses globally, which includes pricing and sales decisions. Now, any company that relies on steel or related businesses is not as likely to hire salespeople abroad or try to capture new markets."

Earlier this month, President Trump announced he would impose sweeping tariffs on steel and aluminum imports. The tariffs--of 25 percent and 10 percent on steel and aluminum, respectively--are set to take effect this week, though some countries may be exempt. The move is aimed at reducing the U.S.'s staggering $568 billion trade deficit, which is particularly steep with China. On the campaign trail, Trump repeatedly lambasted the world's most populous nation for what he described as shady trade practices that affected local manufacturers, and promised to introduce new trade policies that would benefit U.S. businesses.

The impact of these tariffs on local manufacturers could be costly--particularly those that source, say, auto parts from abroad--but what's less clear is the impact such tariffs might have on U.S. services. Indeed, some have argued that the more Trump focuses on obtaining favorable terms for the producers of goods, the worse off services businesses will be; for instance, they could lose valuable clients as makers rush to reallocate funds. Travel alone represented $204 billion in service exports in 2016, while financial services and the trade of intellectual property notched $59.9 billion and $66 billion in 2016 exports, respectively, according to the most recent available Fed data. As the New York Times's Neil Irwin pointed out last week, services actually account for the lion's share of American jobs--84 percent of private sector workers--while manufacturing represents only around 20 million total positions.

Collateral Damages

Irwin suggests that the ripple effects to the new steel and aluminum tariffs could put dozens of service entrepreneurs at a competitive disadvantage, and ultimately hurt companies' sales, potentially leading to layoffs.

"We really believe there is a possible negative chain reaction," says Melissa Blaustein, the founder and CEO of the Brussels, Belgium-based advocacy group Allied for Startups, which represents the interests of private companies across borders to local governments. "Any time you introduce a new barrier to entry--including tariffs--it makes it more difficult for startups to create the products and services they want in the long run," she adds.

To wit, Allied for Startups is among the more than 40 U.S. business groups--representing giants including Walmart, Google, and Costco--that recently joined the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in urging the president to reconsider the tariffs. In a letter issued on Sunday, the groups highlighted concerns with the new moves. "The imposition of sweeping tariffs would trigger a chain reaction of negative consequences for the U.S. economy, provoking retaliation stifling U.S. agriculture, goods, and service exports; and raising costs for business and consumers," the letter said.

David French, the senior vice president for government relations for the Washington, D.C.-based National Retail Federation, puts these "negative consequences" in more concrete terms. The trade group represents hundreds of businesses serving U.S. customers that pitch everything from food and clothing to household products. French argues that these businesses might even struggle to afford basic office repairs under the new tariffs.

"If you're doing renovation or an improvement of your retail store, you are probably using steel components for structural support. There's also a fair amount of steel that goes into racking systems in distribution centers," explains French. "This [steel tariff] will make it more expensive for retailers on an everyday basis, but it also makes it more expensive for them to evolve and grow, adding to the cost of renovations," he adds.

The Upside of Change

Other service entrepreneurs, however, anticipate that Trump's tariffs might be generally productive for small businesses. Ryan Neal, the co-founder and CEO of the Bellevue, Washington-based consulting firm Blueprint Technologies, anticipates that many of his clients--including those that extract oil and gas, for instance--may need to become savvier in how they operate. Blueprint generated more than $47 million in 2016 revenue, landing on the Inc. 5000 list at No. 161 last year. "Most of the industries in the U.S. and most of the buyers of steel and aluminum are ripe for innovation," Neal says. "This forces some of our clients to get innovative around changing the materials that they use in their pipelines, which gets them to think differently about their business."

Neal waves off concerns that he could lose business, should the tariffs create added costs for his clients. "The tariff isn't necessarily going to put anyone out of business--and most companies turn to technology [like ours] to get more efficient," he says.Lionel Richie has defended Katy Perry's controversial kiss with an American Idol contestant, saying it was done in jest.

Perry, 33, faced a backlash after she unexpectedly gave 19-year-old performer Benjamin Glaze his first kiss ahead of his audition.

After Glaze agreed to kiss her on the cheek, she asked for a second one, but quickly moved her face so the kiss landed on his lips.

Clearly shocked, Glaze stumbled back and said "you didn't!" while Perry put her arms in the air.

The incident was upsetting for Glaze, now 20, who revealed in a New York Times interview that it was his first kiss and he had been saving it for someone special.

The moment attracted controversy from critics who said that Perry had kissed Glaze without his consent, and the uproar would be bigger if it had been a male judge kissing a female contestant.

However Richie later spoke out and said he felt like their babysitter because they have no filter, but said he believed she did no wrong.

Lionel Richie has defended his fellow judge Katy Perry (Getty)

Katy is one of those phenomenons, she can do things and get away with it. It's all in fun, it's all in jest, he told the Press Association in Los Angeles.

I was there, I'm a witness to it. She was hamming it up, then it was nothing more than that. Of course when you do it to the public you're going to get two different views of what's happening, but trust me it was all in fun.

Everybody's having a good time - including the contestant.

Bryan also sided with Perry, telling The Morning Show that he believed the story had been over-exaggerated.

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"It's unfortunate that stuff like that turns into a story that big," he said. "I watched an actual interview where Ben, the kid that was involved, said he was cool with everything."

He added: "I may say something one day that everybody's not going to like. That's just what you signed up for. At the end of the day, me and Lionel and Katy and Ryan, our hearts are in the right place."

Glaze addressed the backlash on Instagram to clarify he did not believe he had been sexually harassed and thanked Perry for launching my career into the sky like a flaming cannonball.

Additional reporting by Press AssociationJack White, Boarding House Reach



Download: Connected By Love; Corporation; Over And Over And Over; Ice Station Zebra

Who does Jack White think he is? Well, judging by the cover to Boarding House Reach, a smoothly airbrushed simulacrum of Keanu Reeves, which rather flatters both men, in complementary ways. But the question remains pertinent due to Whites restless probing of musical boundaries, with each new release wrong-footing listeners by shifting from blues to pop to prog to goth to whichever new cloud his head is in at the moment. So, who does Jack White think he is this time?

Hard to tell from the single Connected By Love, which opens with a slow, momentous synth buzz burring behind Whites passionate entreaties to the object of his affection; its a sort of electro-blues, which gradually expands via gospelly backing vocals, strident organ solo and one of Jacks signature bursts of splintered guitar, into something genuinely unique, in touch with his blues roots but straining for some new expression of emotion.

Things become a bit clearer with Corporation, which finds him squealing with delight about the prospect of starting a corporation (isnt he one already?), over a shuffling funk-fusion groove of clavinet and congas. Having expanded his accompanists with a plethora of seasoned soul, funk and jazz session players, Whites clearly had great fun jamming with them, recording the results on much the same basic analogue gear he used as a teenager, and Corporation offers the first indication of where thats taking him here.

Theres an ever-present feel of the extempore about these tracks, which sometimes seem to succeed through sheer persistence, and sometimes struggle to coalesce into something worthwhile. The choogling funk clavinet returns for Ice Station Zebra, alongside declamatory piano chords and tumbling drums, epitomising Whites rap about pursuing ones individual direction; but the blending of electric piano, organ, cuica, choral voices and synth-sheet backdrop over the shuffling Latin rhythm of Get In The Mind Shaft just results in a bit of a mess.

Over And Over And Over is better, with Whites meteorological metaphors and references to the onerous burdens of Atlas and Sisyphus harnessed to an infectiously waspish guitar riff; the resulting prog-metal anthem is both heavy and hummable, positively Zep-tastic in the way it hints at uncontrollable urges and mythic destinies. Elsewhere, Whats Done Is Done is a fairly straight piano blues, and Ezmerelda Steals The Show a poem recited over waltzing guitar arpeggios, while the combination of bustling guitar riff, organ and total dropout lacunae puts the devotional Respect Commander well in the shade of Hendrixs long, jammed version of Voodoo Chile.

Overall, its an entertaining, multifaceted set, albeit weakened by a tendency to pursue slim ideas and dead-end notions  a clutter of synths, a gypsy fiddle, a Dvorak melody, a comedy announcement  that give Boarding House Reach a rather fragmentary character. Which, I suppose, reflects Jack Whites own at this moment.

Nina Simone, The Colpix Singles



Download: Willow Weep For Me; Summertime; Work Song; Blackbird

Nina Simones early success with I Loves Ya, Porgy earned her a contract with Colpix Records  who promptly ignored her unique blend of jazz, gospel, classical and blues influences by releasing the cantering country-pop oddity Chilly Winds Dont Blow as her label debut. A delicious pairing of the gospel standard Children Go Where I Send You with an oozingly soulful Willow Weep For Me quickly restored Simones direction; but her vocals were of such richness that arrangers were often tempted to swaddle them in lush orchestrations.

As the live album Nina Simone At Town Hall demonstrated in songs like Summertime, she was better served by a striking concert reverb, with the simple walking bass and brushed snare better suiting her extempore piano style. Covers of Work Song and I Got It Bad (And That Aint Good) further cemented her reputation as a bluesy interpreter, but the pared-down talking-drum, handclaps and vocal arrangement of this 2CD sets closing Blackbird reflects Simones expanding artistic maturity in the early Sixties.

Chris Smither, Call Me Lucky



Download: Blames On Me; Maybellene; Nobody Home; Everything On Top; Lower The Humble

Chris Smither may be Americanas most underrated talent, offering acute observations about lifes bitter ironies in a baritone drawl as worn as antique leather, its weary tone belied by the sprightliness of his fingerstyle guitar. The sardonic album title is reflected in the wry, mordant humour of tracks like Blames On Me and Lower The Humble, where he advises that the lower the humble, the shorter the fall  a precariousness further addressed in the carousel metaphor of Everything On Top, with time constantly carrying us above and below  although, as he notes with a twist of bitterness, everything on top is what we once called the underground.

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A cover of Maybellene relocates Chuck Berrys breakthrough hit in the country-blues tradition, bowling along nimbly amidst subtle harbingers of violin; while elsewhere Smithers band proves endlessly flexible on the jaunty jugband stomp Change Your Mind and shuffling folk-rocker Nobody Home, which brings echoes of Maggies Farm to his cogent commentary on the lack of true communication in the age of social media.

Courtney Marie Andrews, May Your Kindness Remain



Download: May Your Kindness Remain; Lift The Lonely From My Heart; Rough Around The Edges; Kindness Of Strangers

Courtney Marie Andrews takes depression as the general theme of May Your Kindness Remain, citing the widespread human fallout caused by failure to fulfill the fanciful promises of the American Dream.

The characters in songs such as Kindness Of Strangers and Rough Around The Edges are paralysed by isolation, social ineptitude and the lingering wounds of failure: the past was cruel, and it caught up with me, as she notes over the miasma of ambient guitar drones and piano skilfully assembled by producer Mark Howard, who brings a similarly weather-beaten tone to that applied on albums by Dylan, Tom Waits and Lucinda Williams.

Elsewhere, big vibrato guitar chords haunt Lift The Lonely From My Heart, an expression of how loneliness becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy whilst one is pining, mining for a feeling Im not finding.

Though hobbled by the occasional cliche, its an album with its heart in the right place, most articulately presented in Andrews passionate delivery of the title-track, a testament to empathy as the true riches of life.Its hard to believe were anticipating Lily Allens fourth album. Shes been around for what feels like forever. Well, since 2006 when Alright, Still, her first album was released.

Her music, for many, would have formed the anthems to their youth; poppy songs with a real edge and a f**k you attitude.

Her latest album No Shame is set to be released in June after a four-year hiatus. But, satisfyingly its worth the wait. Its the Lily Allen we all know and love  but a bit smoother.

Its supposed to be her grown-up album, away from her bold, brash and often rather cheeky self of yesteryear. And that it is, but dont expect that to mean she wont still say what she thinks, peppered with a handful of expletives, too.

Tonight is her second night of three UK shows before heading off to Europe and America. Shes more nervous tonight than she was last night in Manchester, she admits followed by a shy giggle.

The Dome in north Londons Tufnell Park is a small and intimate venue, which is rather admirable of Lily to choose, really. Although shes been off the scene for a while, she surely could have sold out a much larger venue.

But it seems the small size is for the fans. The room is no larger than a typical town hall and even at the back, you feel Lily is speaking to you. Shes sincere and tender and wanting to be liked.

She opens with Higher from her new album, and is full of smiles as the crowd whoops throughout. Its a hazy, slowed-down melody that points to her more vulnerable side  a real sidestep from the Lily we knew before.

Its followed by two more new tracks: Come On Then, with the lines, Im a bad mother, Im a bad wife ... If you go on record saying you know me, then why am I so lonely, coz nobody f***ing phones me; and Lost My Mind, which she says, Ive been doing a lot of lately.

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Both tracks and lyrics point to the album being an honest look back on the breakdown of her marriage with Sam Cooper.

Ive not played this one in ages, she says, hinting that coming next is a classic, which is Knock Em Out. Its so weird to do that song, Lily admits. Its like listening to my 19-year old self. And shes right; her voice has changed. Its less harsh, more mellow and defined.

The highlight songs from the new album come from Apples, which she (quite amazingly) admits was born from liking Stormzys Cigarettes and Cush.  I basically stole it and wrote a song like it, she says, about having sex and smoking fags. She offers a curtsey at the end of the song, evidently proud.

Three is a sweet song from the viewpoint of her baby girls about missing their mum: You say youre going, but you dont say how long for. You say its for work, but Im not sure  Please dont go, stay here with me. Afterwards she jokes: Everyone thinks Im being sentimental, but really, Im gunning for a mobile phone contract.

Family Man is the most heartfelt from the album, which is all about her divorce. But a few songs later, she dedicates Pushing Up Daisies to her new boyfriend in the crowd, shouting love you to before recoiling: God, Im so cringe.

And it would not be Lily if she weren'tt making some sort of political stance, somehow. I wrote this song about 10 years ago, about another arsehole who now has a different job. But it can be dedicated to another arsehole, Theresa, she blares, before singing Fuck You which was originally about George W Bush.

Trigger Bang, first leaked in December 2017, is the first of a trio of encores and includes a live performance from rapper Giggs, who features on the track.

Shes humble in her thanks: Youve been so good listening to all these tracks youve never heard before. The crowd are rewarded for their patience with The Fear and an almighty sing-along for Not Fair.

Despite not releasing any music for four years, Lilys trio of intimate gigs around the country had sold out quickly  and no doubt a huge push comes from the nostalgia for her bop-along reggae and ska infused tunes with catchy lyrics.

But her new album is still her. Shes grown up, moved on and we can tell. Its good to have her back.John Oliver's parody book about a gay bunny which trolls Mike Pence has radically outperformed the original version penned by the Vice President's daughter.

Olivers book has sold 180,000 copies on Amazon and became the bestselling book on the site within two days of its release.

Earlier this week, Charlotte Pence, Mr Pence's daughter, released a book about her familys pet rabbit, Marlon Bundo.

John Oliver got word of the release beforehand and decided to spoof the book, releasing a childrens book about the same rabbit but instead portraying Bundo as gay.

The reason? Oliver wanted to highlight the Vice Presidents many controversial views on homosexuality, telling his Last Week Tonight audience: This is not an adult book telling Mike Pence to go f**k himself. Although thats exactly what you would be doing by buying it.

The Vice Presidents oldest daughter has since resounded to Olivers release, offering support for the book. I have bought his book, the author of Marlon Bundos A Day in the Life of the Vice President told ITK.

Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Show all 29 1 /29 Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Inauguration - 20 January 2017 US President Donald Trump acknowledges the audience after taking the oath of office as his wife Melania (L) and daughter Tiffany watch during inauguration ceremonies swearing in Trump as the 45th president of the United States on the West Front of the US capital in Washington on 20 January, 2017. Photographer Jim Bourg: "This photo was shot with one of two remote cameras. The cameras were monitored and triggered remotely and the pictures were transmitted to clients worldwide within minutes of being taken." Reuters/Jim Bourg Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Obama farewell address - 10 January 2017 US President Barack Obama wipes away tears as he delivers his farewell address in Chicago on 10 January, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "In his final days in office, Obama made a visit home to Chicago. As he spoke from the stage to his wife and daughter in the audience, he became emotional when he talked about what they had sacrificed during his time in office. I turned from photographing the Obama women embracing to find him onstage wiping away tears." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Inauguration - 20 January 2017 A combination of photos shows the crowds attending the inauguration ceremonies to swear in U.S. President Donald Trump at 12:01pm (left) on January 20, 2017 and President Barack Obama sometime between 12:07pm and 12:26pm on January 20, 2009. Reuters/ Lucas Jackson/Stelios Varias Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Liberty Ball - 20 January 2017 US President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump attend the Liberty Ball in honour of his inauguration in Washington on 20 January, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "What I see when I look at this picture is the end of a very long day, not to mention weeks and months of preparation by many photographers, editors and network experts and the beginning of everything since." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Inaugural Law Enforcement Officers and First Responders Reception - 22 January 2017 US President Donald Trump greets Director of the FBI James Comey as Director of the Secret Service Joseph Clancy (L), watches during the Inaugural Law Enforcement Officers and First Responders Reception in the Blue Room of the White House on 22 January, 2017. Photographer Joshua Roberts: "I have covered the White House for 16 years and normally either the President or the pool is in position when an event starts. In this case the President was not where anyone expected him to be. In fact, he was almost blocking the door when the pool came in. We had to scramble to find a position without bumping him or the furniture as he greeted and thanked members of law enforcement for their security efforts during the inauguration. Luckily, he greeted FBI Director James Comey a few seconds after the pool had made its way into the room." Reuters/Joshua Roberts Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Private phone calls to world leaders - 28 January 2017 US President Donald Trump, is joined by his staff, as he speaks by phone with Russia's President Vladimir Putin in the Oval Office on 28 January, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "Very early in the Trump administration, weekends were as busy as weekdays. On Trump's second Saturday the official schedule said he would be making private phone calls to a number of world leaders including Russia's Vladimir Putin. I arrived early and, before sitting down at my desk walked up to Press Secretary Sean Spicer's office. He, too, was just taking his coat off. I gingerly made the suggestion that previous administrations had sometimes allowed photos of such phone calls through the Oval Office windows on the colonnade. To my mild shock, he didn't even think about it twice. "We'll do it!" he said. In truth, I really only expected the Putin call, but we were outside the windows multiple times throughout the day as the calls went on." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Senior advisor Kellyanne Conway - 27 February 2017 Senior advisor Kellyanne Conway (L) attends as US President Donald Trump welcomes the leaders of dozens of historically black colleges and universities (HBCU) in the Oval Office on 27 February, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "We're often asked how much access we have to the Trump administration, and the answer is we have an awful lot. President Trump himself is very comfortable in the spotlight, and his aides are similarly unfazed by cameras. In this instance, senior advisor Kellyanne Conway was so comfortable in our presence she seemed not to consider the optics of kneeling on a Oval Office sofa to take pictures with her phone." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Angela Merkel heads to Washington - 17 March 2017 Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel and US President Donald Trump hold a joint news conference in the East Room of the White House on 17 March, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "Chancellor Merkel made one of the earliest important visits of any US allies to meet Trump in his first months in office. When world leaders give joint news conferences they don't always tend to give each other their full attention - but Merkel watched Trump intently at several key moments, and here seemed particularly rapt." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Trump welcomes truckers to the White House - 23 March 2017 President Trump reacts as he sits on a truck while he welcomes truckers and CEOs to attend a meeting regarding healthcare at the White House on 23 March, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "The White House organised a listening session with truckers and CEO's of major American companies, regarding healthcare reform. An 18-wheeler tow truck was parked on the South Lawn of the White House and as Trump welcomed the truckers someone invited the him to come and sit in the driver's seat. Trump jumped into the cab and started yelling and pretending to drive - creating one of the most memorable pictures of the year. A lesson learned, always be prepared for the unexpected." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Air Force One - 6 April 2017 US President Donald Trump talks to journalists members of the travel pool on board the Air Force One during his trip to Palm Beach, Florida on 6 April, 2017. Carlos Barria: "During the many trips to President Trump's residence in Florida it is usual to see the president coming to the back of the plane to chat with journalists. During one of the trips to the so called 'Winter White House', Trump had a long talk with reporters while the Air Force One entertainment system was playing one of the latest Star Wars movies. As I was listening to Trump talk I was also looking at the movie waiting for a part of the movie to frame the mood of the day. Of the many scenes, I choose the one with Darth Vader." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures 100 Days - 27 April 2017 US President Donald Trump speaks during an interview with Reuters in the Oval Office of the White House on 27 April, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "A day before President Trump's hundred days in office I was part of the team that interviewed the commander-in-chief in the Oval Office. I was only allowed to photograph Trump during the last five minutes of the interview. The time was very tight so I had to move fast as I had pictures in mind that I wanted to shoot. I walked into the Oval Office and saw that the President had printed maps of the country showing areas in red where he won. I raised my hands holding my camera as high as possible to get the best view of the scene using a 16mm wide angle lens." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures 100 Days - 27 April 2017 US President Donald Trump reacts as he arrives at Harrisburg international airport, before attending a rally marking his first 100 days in office in Pennsylvania on 29 April, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "President Trump travelled to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania to celebrate his hundred days in office with a victory rally. He was in friendly territory as he won with a big difference over his opponent Hillary Clinton in Pennsylvania, during the November elections. As usual when the commander-in-chief arrives local residents gather to greet him. This time a small group of military personnel attended the arrival. Surrounded by secret service agents Trump walked from the Air Force One and raised his hand in a sign of victory as the crowd cheered him on." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures White House staffers - 2 May 2017 White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer (L) and White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus watch as US President Donald Trump presents the U.S. Air Force Academy football team with the Commander-in-Chief trophy in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington on 2 May, 2017. Photographer Joshua Roberts: "Covering the White House does not just mean covering the President. White House staffers are an important part of the story and their relationship with the President and each other is an indicator of how things are going in the West Wing. The tendency is to focus exclusively on the President once an event starts but I always try to look around to see how people are reacting as things unfold." Reuters/Joshua Roberts Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Secret Service - 4 May 2017 Secret Service agents use a presidential limousine as cover from spraying water as US President Donald Trump lands via Marine One helicopter in New York on 4 May, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "The best part of any trip to New York City with the sitting US President is the helicopter ride into Manhattan. The ride out at night can be stunning. Here, Secret Service agents protect themselves from the spray from the East River as Trump lands on the helipad." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures NATO Summit - 25 May 2017 US President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump wait the arrival of French President Emmanuel Macron (unseen) before a lunch ahead of a NATO Summit in Brussels on 25 May, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "One of the best parts of travelling overseas for White House coverage is the chance to see the U.S. president in different environments and (literally) a different light. Here, Trump and his wife came out of the shadows to greet France's President Macron." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Trump meets Putin at G20 summit - 7 July 2017 US President Donald Trump meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin during their bilateral meeting at the G20 summit in Hamburg, Germany on 7 July, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "On July 7, I witnessed one of the most important meetings of President Trump's first year in office. Trump met Russian President Vladimir Putin during a bilateral meeting at the G20 summit in Germany. The world's eyes were on these two leaders after speculation about Russian interference during the 2016 US elections. We entered the room for less than two minutes, where I took dozens of pictures. But there was this very interesting moment when Trump extended his hand to Putin for a handshake. Putin paused for a second and looked at Trump's hand. That was the picture that I was looking for, a little moment that seemed to say a lot." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures First lady - 8 July 2017 First lady Melania Trump chats with US President Donald Trump during their return from Germany at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland on 8 July, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "After President Trump's trip to Germany he arrived back at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland. First Lady Melania Trump said goodbye to Trump as she was heading off in a different direction that day. While chatting a breeze blew Melania's hair up in the air." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Made in America product showcase - 17 July 2017 Vice President Mike Pence laughs as President Donald Trump holds a baseball bat as they attend a Made in America product showcase event at the White House on 17 July, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "This summer the White House organized an event to showcase 'Made in America' products. All kinds of exhibitors brought their products as the President and Vice President toured the event. One of the companies was Marucci Sport, a manufacturer of baseball bats based in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. As Trump approached a table full of baseball bats, photographers at the event, including me, rushed to get a good angle hoping that he would pick up a bat. As we predicted, he did. He took one and joked around as though he was hitting something hard. The only thing closer to him right there, was the media." Reuters Donald Trump's first year: in pictures White House staffers - 25 July 2017 Former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski says hello to reporters as he and White House advisors including Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci accompany President Trump for an event celebrating veterans at AMVETS Post 44 in Ohio, July 25, 2017. Jonathan Ernst: "The most visible person in any White House is naturally the President, followed by the press secretary. But there are also the staff who support them. For those of us covering the Trump administration, there seem to be more compelling figures in the West Wing than ever before. It's crucial to know who's who and why they're important. When I raised my camera and back-pedalled ahead of the group to take this image Lewandowski gave me a hello. I liked the photo, but had no idea it would go a little bit viral, especially since Scaramucci, who was the biggest mover and shaker that week, was hidden back in the pack. But I guess the image catches a glimpse of what it's like to be a West Wing staffer on the road." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Campaign rally - 3 August 2017 US President Donald Trump arrives at a rally in West Virginia on 3 August, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "President Trump travelled to Huntington for one of his usual campaign rallies. While members of his family spoke to the crowd he was waiting under a black curtain to be introduced. Suddenly he walked onto the stage, one of the first frames that I took was of his hand. I set my exposure for the light on the stage hoping to create this dark background and it worked." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Staring into the solar eclipse - 21 August 2017 Without his protective glasses on, US President Donald Trump looks up towards the solar eclipse while viewing with his wife Melania and son Barron at the White House on 21 August, 2017. Photographer Kevin Lamarque: "On a day when everyone, and I mean everyone, was told not to look at the eclipse without protective glasses, Trump, President of the United States, couldn't help himself." Reuters/Kevin Lamarque Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Hurricane Harvey - 2 September 2017 US President Donald Trump poses for a photo as he and first lady Melania Trump help volunteers hand out meals during a visit with flood survivors of Hurricane Harvey at a relief centre in Houston, Texas on 2 September, 2017. Photohrapher Kevin Lamarque: "Trump, eager to deliver the image of a hands-on response to Hurricane Harvey, made this visit to a relief centre and obliged this woman with a selfie as Melania continued to work." Reuters/Kevin Lamarque Donald Trump's first year: in pictures White House - 15 September 2017 Donald Trump welcomes 11-year-old Frank Giaccio as he cuts the Rose Garden grass at the White House on 15 September. Frank, who wrote a letter to Trump offering to mow the lawn, was invited to work for a day at the White House along the National Park Service staff. Frank was so focused on his task that he did not notice the President arrive to surprise him. He took his father jumping in to grab his attention and point Trump out. Photographer Carlos Barria said: The image of Trump shouting at a kid who is mowing his lawn might have many interpretations in today's politically polarized United States. But for me it was just a kid who loved what he was doing, to the point he almost appeared to ignore the President." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Take a knee - 27 September 2017 A man kneels with a folded U.S. flag as the motorcade of U.S. President Donald Trump passes him after an event at the state fairgrounds in Indianapolis, Indiana, U.S., September 27, 2017. In September, soon after Trump had made comments condemning NFL players who kneel during the national anthem, he made a day trip to a rally in Indianapolis. Jonathan Ernst managed to capture a man on one knee with a tri-folded flag and was able to use a portion of the sign on the building he was kneeling in front of to track the man down and tell his story in full. US Army veteran Marvin Boatright wanted to send a message against social injustice. Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Hurricane Maria - 3 October 2017 President Donald Trump throws rolls of paper towels into a crowd of local residents affected by Hurricane Maria as he visits Calgary Chapel in San Juan, Puerto Rico on 3 October, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "During an afternoon visit to Puerto Rico for President Trump to survey damage from Hurricane Maria and greet some of its victims, Trump made a stop at a church where food and supplies were being distributed. Among the items were paper towels and Trump, apparently caught up in the moment, decided to distribute some of the rolls." Reuters Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Jared Kushner - 1 November 2017 White House Senior adviser Jared Kushner sits behind President Trump during a cabinet meeting in Washington on 1 November, 2017. Photographer Kevin Lamarque: "The role of Jared Kushner has gone through a series of changes. He began front and centre as a high profile adviser, but as time has passed and issues surrounding him have surfaced, he has become more of a background figure." Reuters/Kevin Lamarque Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Trump in China - 9 November 2017 Donald Trump and China's President Xi Jinping shake hands after making joint statements at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on 9 November, 2017. Photographer Damir Sagolj: "It's one of those "how to make a better or at least different shot when two presidents shake hands several times a day, several days in row". If I'm not mistaken in calculation, presidents Xi Jinping and Donald Trump shook their hands at least six times in events I covered during Trump's recent visit to China. I would imagine there were some more handshakes I haven't seen but other photographers did. And they all look similar - two big men, smiling and heartily greeting each other until everyone gets their shot. But then there is always something that can make it special - in this case the background made of US and Chinese flags. The first time it didn't work for me. The second time I positioned myself lower and centrally, and used the longest lens I have to capture only hands reaching for a handshake." Reuters/Damir Sagolj Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Air Force One - 10 November 2017 US President Donald Trump boards Air Force One to depart for Vietnam from Beijing Airport in Beijing, China, November 10, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "There is a Reuters photographer in the tight pool covering the US president for every appearance he makes 365 days a year. This was just one of 32 images of mine that were transmitted on the Reuters wire of President Trump visiting China and Vietnam that day. You never know when a sudden interaction, a gust of wind or a unique facial expression will lead to a striking image that grabs peoples' attention." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures ASEAN handshake - 13 November 2017 Donald Trump registers his surprise as he realises other leaders, including Russia's Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, Vietnam's Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc, President of the Philippines Rodrigo Duterte and Australia's Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, are crossing their arms for the traditional "ASEAN handshake" as he participates in the opening ceremony of the summit in Manila on 13 November, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "Having covered a few ASEAN summits, I knew to expect the ASEAN handshake. Not everyone in the room knew to expect the ASEAN handshake. A lot was written about this unscripted moment, and what deeper meaning it might have. The simple truth is that sometimes in life there are unscripted moments." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst

Hes giving proceeds of the book to charity, and were also giving proceeds of our book to charity, so I really think that we can all get behind it.

The 24-year-old added: It doesnt have to be divisive. I think that everybody can come together over Marlon.

Proceeds from Ms Pences book will go towards Tracys Kids, providing young cancer patients with art therapy. The money from Olivers childrens book - which has already topped the Amazon best-seller charts - are going towards AIDS United and the Trevor Project, an LGBT suicide prevention charity. I also want to support those charities - I really mean that, Ms Pence added.

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The comedian strategically announced the release of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver Presents a Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo on his HBO show on Sunday. This was the day before Marlon Bundos A Day in the Life of the Vice President, penned by his daughter and illustrated by his wife Karen, was due to be released.

Olivers book features a simple story about two male rabbits falling in love but unable to get married because of the rule-making stinky bug (who has a likeness to Mr Pence). The audiobook features the voices of Jim Parsons, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Ellie Kemper, RuPaul, and John Lithgow.

Olivers version pokes fun and satirises the original book about the vice presidential familys rabbit. It is a dig at Mr Pences stance on LGBT+ rights  the former governor of Indiana is steadfastly opposed to gay marriage and has a record of supporting the widely discredited practice of gay conversion therapy.

Alyssa Farah, press secretary for the Vice President, has previously denied the allegation Mr Pence supports conversion therapy, saying: "The accusation is totally false with no basis in fact".

Resources should be directed toward those institutions which provide assistance to those seeking to change their sexual behaviour, Mr Pence wrote on his congressional campaign website back in 2000.

Many argued the statement was evidence he supported gay conversion therapy, but a spokesperson for Mr Pence told the New York Times in November 2016 that the Indiana-born politician does not support the practice.

Mr Pence, a devout Christian, is also famed for his anti-abortion views. He has previously vowed to relegate Roe vs Wade - the landmark Supreme Court decision which legalised abortion nationwide in 1973  to the ash heap of history, where it belongs.

You can watch the full Last Week Tonight segment here.You may think that grabbing a blueberry muffin with your morning coffee rather than a croissant is a healthy choice, but this is not necessarily the case.

Campaigners are now warning the public about the hidden sugar content in blueberry muffins, with leading brands containing up to 10 teaspoons of sugar, which is more than in a can of Coke.

In the UK, the government recommends adults consume no more than 30g of free sugars, equivalent to about seven sugar cubes, a day.

Recommended Cadbury Creme Egg sugar content revealed in shocking Facebook post

New analysis by Action on Sugar and the Obesity Health Alliance (OHA) reveals quite how high in sugar many blueberry muffins available on the high street are, however they also found a huge variation in content, portion size and lack of nutrition labelling.

The two groups have come together to call on the Government to reduce the sugar content in blueberry muffins, in line with plans to cut sugar in common products by 20 per cent by 2020.

The researchers assessed 28 different muffins available in supermarkets and train station food outlets, including AMT Coffee, Camden Food Co., Delice de France, Patisserie Valerie, Pumpkin, Ritazza and Upper Crust.

A huge 61 per cent of muffins were found to contain over six teaspoons of sugar, which is the maximum a child aged seven to 10 should consume in one day, according to the NHS.

Its also worth noting that train station muffins on average were 32 per cent larger and contained 19 per cent more sugar per portion than those bought in supermarkets.

Here are the worst offenders:

Costa - 122g portion size - 10 teaspoons of sugar per muffin

McDonalds - portion size not stated - eight teaspoons

Pret A Manger - 124g - eight teaspoons

Caffe Nero - 115g - seven teaspoons

Tesco - 82g - seven teaspoons

On the lower end of the scale, however, was Marks and Spencer, whose blueberry muffins contain just three teaspoons each.

The least sugary muffins:

M&S - 65g portion size - three teaspoons of sugar per muffin

Co-op - 64g - four teaspoons

Holly Lane (Aldi) - 75g - five teaspoons

Asda - portion size not stated - five teaspoons

Pumpkin - 92g - five teaspoons

The report warns that eating too much sugar is a key driver in the UKs obesity epidemic, adding that children are consuming nearly three times more than the five per cent maximum recommended level in school-aged children.

And with around 18 per cent of the food we consume being eaten away from home, its important people know what theyre picking up from supermarkets and station cafes to eat on the go.

Caroline Cerny, Obesity Health Alliance Lead, said: We may think grabbing a blueberry muffin is a reasonably healthy option for a snack on the go compared to other cakes or a chocolate bar  yet the figures suggest otherwise.

There is huge variation in both the size of muffins and the sugar content; and with limited nutrition labelling its all too easy to eat a huge amount of sugar in just one serving.

Some of the muffins on sale have twice as much sugar than others. This shows that it is possible for the industry to significantly reduce sugar even in their most sugary products to help us all make healthier choices. The industry must step up to the plate and take responsibility for making the food they produce healthier.

The researchers point out that products such as blueberry muffins should be better labelled to reveal the nutritional information. They are calling for all manufacturers and retailers to use a traffic light labelling display on products at the point of sale.

Registered Nutritionist Kawther Hashem from Action on Sugar, said: During the Easter holidays, if families are travelling through these busy stations and were to buy blueberry muffins from one of the outlets available, those kids would likely be consuming almost their entire recommended limit of sugar that day, if not more.

And worryingly, its very difficult to know exactly whats in these products as there is often no clear nutrition information at the point of sale.

This analysis shows just how difficult it can be for consumers to make informed choices when it comes to buying food on the go. It is time all out of home outlets are made to be transparent about the nutrition content of their products by making nutrition labelling available to consumers at the point of sale.Big internet companies and small software developers alike are likely to face scrutiny over how they share customer information in the wake of the scandal involving Facebook and the consulting firm Cambridge Analytica.

Politicians in the United States and the EU have called for probes into how Facebook allowed Cambridge Analytica to access data on 50 million users and use it to help the election campaign of President Donald Trump. Facebook shares have fallen 8.5 per cent this week as investors fear the incident will lead to new regulation.

The scrutiny and the risk of regulatory action could affect Alphabets Google, Twitter, Uber, Microsofts LinkedIn and the many others that make their user data available to outside developers.

The interconnections between platforms such as Facebook and Google and third-party services sit at the core of the contemporary internet, enabling people to quickly share articles to Facebook from news websites and log into shopping apps using their Google account.

But the Facebook case has turned the application programming interfaces, or APIs, that enable such data sharing, into a new front in the escalating battle between lawmakers and tech companies over the monitoring and securing of their vast platforms. Threat of sanctions has already prodded companies into better policing of inappropriate commentary on their services.

All companies are going to need to do a lot more than just laissez faire policy to manage third-party data access moving forward, said Jason Costa, who helped run APIs at Pinterest, Twitter and Google and now works at GGV Capital. The days of (the) were just a platform and cant be held responsible for how users use it line that many companies use, is no longer going to be tenable.

APIs have raised privacy concerns since they emerged around 2005, but their adoption and impact has grown rapidly as companies move data online and look for ways to make it more useful.

Uber, for example, in 2016 enabled apps that provided tax and lending services to import driver paystubs. The company did not respond to a request for comment on its monitoring and auditing practices.

The economic dynamic behind APIs is simple: software developers create new tools that benefit big tech companies users, and in return they gain instant access to a large number of consumers.

The big platforms say they have built in protection, such as human reviews and automated scanning tools to detect abuse by partners.

But software experts say policies are toothless because auditing is lax; Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg, under intense public pressure, said Wednesday the company would now perform audits of the information it shared with partners before it tightened rules in 2014.

Dartmouth University engineering professor Geoffrey Parker, who has assigned students to develop apps based on APIs, said automated policing methods will detect spam-like apps and brazen efforts to steal data. It is much more difficult to enforce bans on storing or mashing together information, or acting against users interest, he said.

Some companies added safeguards in the last several years. Facebook stopped allowing developers access to information on its users friends. But compliance audits were minimal, a former employee said on the condition of anonymity.

Twitter and LinkedIn limited free public access.

For paid deals, LinkedIn said partners are rigorously vetted and regularly declined. The company added that it regularly monitors API usage and takes swift action when we see or hear of any abuse of our terms.

Software developers acknowledged they often do not even read the terms of use for APIs. Rule-breakers can fly under the radar and amass significant information, said Andres Blank, chief executive of recruiting software maker Scout.

Its hard to police if the alarms arent being sounded, said Blank, who has worked with APIs from LinkedIn and Google.

Alex Moore, chief executive of Baydin, which develops Boomerang, an app that can send emails on time-delay, said Microsoft scrutinised his services when the companies partnered on a new feature. But he was not aware of any auditing after it launched.

Google recently asked whether Boomerang could access less information, but that was a rare poke, Moore said.

Theres going to be things people took for granted about data sharing that come to light, he said.

Google declined to comment. Microsoft did not respond to a request to comment.

Clamping down could limit the supply of innovative tools built on data sharing. But some providers, including Royal Bank of Canada, which announced an API this week, have gone a step further to only allow access to vetted partners.

Paul Nerger, senior vice president at Developerprogram.com, which helps companies such as Cisco Systems manage APIs, said clients have limited the number of partners so that software can be tested to make sure they are not illegally harvesting data.

Startups are taking heed too. Affectiva, which last year released an API for identifying consumers emotional states from speech samples, said that it would audit partners as its programme grows.

Gabi Zijderveld, the companys chief marketing officer and head of product strategy, said, though, we inevitably need regulation and legislation on ethical and transparent use of data.

ReutersFrontmen for anonymous foreign firms that invest cash in British property face up to two years in prison and unlimited fines if they flout proposed new laws.

The Government announced the plans aimed at cracking down on money laundering as part of its long-awaited response to a consultation on the billions of pounds of high-end UK property owned by overseas shell companies.

Under the plans, beneficial owners of overseas companies investing in property must be named on a public register but campaign groups say the plans do not go far enough. The Government has said it will publish draft laws this summer.

However, concerns have been raised about the fact that any new rules will not be implemented until 2021.

Todays announcement gives the criminal and corrupt another three years to invest their stolen cash in Londons property market, Naomi Hirst, anti-corruption campaigner at Global Witness, said on Thursday.

If Theresa May is serious that these people and their money are not welcome in the UK, its time she put her money where mouth is and put an end to this secrecy and table this legislation immediately.

Property ownership by foreign entities has come under renewed scrutiny following the attempted murder of former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia.

Russian figures connected to Vladimir Putin are thought to own British properties worth close to 1.1bn, and the true value may be much greater because ownership can be concealed.

Duncan Hames, director of policy at Transparency International UK welcomed the Governments response but described the lack of urgency to implement new rules as disappointing.

They had planned for legislation to be introduced by next month but this has been delayed by at least a year.

The prime minister and other government officials have not been shy in recent weeks in speaking about cracking down on corrupt money in the UK.

The best way to do this is to bring about transparency to holdings of UK property which overseas companies currently avoid.

At least 122bn of property in England and Wales is owned through companies based in secretive tax havens where true ownership can be difficult or impossible to establish, according to a 2014 analysis by the Financial Times.

The large sums of money flowing into UK property are also thought to distort the market, particularly in London, where millions are already priced out of owning a home.

Business minister Andrew Griffiths said the UK was taking a leading role in the global fight against corruption.

Our public register will ensure we know who owns UK property wherever they are from and will help authorities come down hard on frontmen seeking to conceal their paymasters true identities, he said

This is the first register of its kind in the world and we must be careful to ensure it strikes the right balance between improving transparency and minimising burdens on legitimate owners.

Peter Dowd, shadow chief secretary to the Treasury, said: We are glad the Government is finally seeing the light and has accepted Labour's calls for a register of beneficial ownership.

While the Government's Damascene conversion on the case for public registers is an important step, it must be followed through with meaningful action to tackle the scourge of tax avoidance through the introduction of a full public register of offshore trusts in UK overseas territories and crown dependencies.

Labour is calling on the Government to go further and adopt our tax transparency and enforcement programme in full.

It is the only way to ensure that everyone pays their fair share and we finally have a tax system that works for the many, not the few.Scientists have revealed the origins of a mysterious skeleton long thought to have been extra-terrestrial.

After five years of examination, a research team unravelled the genetic make-up of the bizarre specimen found in the Atacama Desert in 2003, and nicknamed Ata.

Led by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco and Stanford University, forensic analysis of the remains revealed they undoubtedly belonged to a human, albeit one with severe and previously unknown genetic mutations.

The skeleton, which was discovered in a leather pouch behind an abandoned church and has been dated approximately to the 1970s, has been the subject of intense speculation among online alien enthusiasts ever since it was revealed to the world.

Prominent among these has been Steven Greer, director of the Center for the Study of Extraterrestrial Intelligence and the Disclosure Project, who produced a documentary featuring the Ata skeleton called Sirius.

Standing at 15 centimetres tall, the skeleton has an elongated skull, slanted eye sockets and only 10 pairs of ribs instead of the usual 12.

Despite its tiny stature, the bone development of the skeleton matches that of a six-year-old child.

 Scientists discover new technique for finding hidden aliens

Since its initial discovery, Ata was sold on to the black market and eventually passed into the hands of a Spanish businessman.

Dr Garry Nolan, a microbiologist at Stanford University, first heard of the specimen through a friend, and resolved to get to the bottom of its mysterious origins.

"You can't look at this specimen and not think it's interesting; it's quite dramatic, said Dr Nolan.

So I told my friend, 'Look, whatever it is, if it's got DNA, I can do the analysis."

After contacting the makers of Sirius, Dr Nolan and his colleagues were given the opportunity to undertake just such an analysis.

Having examined the remains, they concluded the skeleton undoubtedly belonged to a female human foetus with a mix of Native American and European ancestry, although the reason for her unusual appearance remained unknown.

For the next stage of the investigation, Dr Atul Butte joined the team to help understand exactly what genetic factors resulted in the specimens appearance.

Earlier analysis had demonstrated that the Ata skeleton had plenty of high-quality DNA for modern sequencing technology to unravel.

Science news in pictures Show all 20 1 /20 Science news in pictures Science news in pictures Pluto has 'beating heart' of frozen nitrogen Pluto has a 'beating heart' of frozen nitrogen that is doing strange things to its surface, Nasa has found. The mysterious core seems to be the cause of features on its surface that have fascinated scientists since they were spotted by Nasa's New Horizons mission. "Before New Horizons, everyone thought Pluto was going to be a netball - completely flat, almost no diversity," said Tanguy Bertrand, an astrophysicist and planetary scientist at NASA's Ames Research Center and the lead author on the new study. "But it's completely different. It has a lot of different landscapes and we are trying to understand what's going on there." Getty Science news in pictures Over 400 species discovered this year by Natural History Museum The ancient invertabrate worm-like species rhenopyrgus viviani (pictured) is one of over 400 species previously unknown to science that were discovered by experts at the Natural History Museum this year PA Science news in pictures Jackdaws can identify 'dangerous' humans Jackdaws can identify dangerous humans from listening to each others warning calls, scientists say. The highly social birds will also remember that person if they come near their nests again, according to researchers from the University of Exeter. In the study, a person unknown to the wild jackdaws approached their nest. At the same time scientists played a recording of a warning call (threatening) or contact calls (non-threatening). The next time jackdaws saw this same person, the birds that had previously heard the warning call were defensive and returned to their nests more than twice as quickly on average. Getty Science news in pictures Turtle embryos influence sex by shaking The sex of the turtle is determined by the temperatures at which they are incubated. Warm temperatures favour females. But by wiggling around the egg, embryos can find the Goldilocks Zone which means they are able to shield themselves against extreme thermal conditions and produce a balanced sex ratio, according to the new study published in Current Biology journal Ye et al/Current Biology Science news in pictures Elephant poaching rates drop in Africa African elephant poaching rates have dropped by 60 per cent in six years, an international study has found. It is thought the decline could be associated with the ivory trade ban introduced in China in 2017. Reuters Science news in pictures Ancient four-legged whale discovered in Peru Scientists have identified a four-legged creature with webbed feet to be an ancestor of the whale. Fossils unearthed in Peru have led scientists to conclude that the enormous creatures that traverse the planets oceans today are descended from small hoofed ancestors that lived in south Asia 50 million years ago A. Gennari Science news in pictures Animal with transient anus discovered A scientist has stumbled upon a creature with a transient anus that appears only when it is needed, before vanishing completely. Dr Sidney Tamm of the Marine Biological Laboratory could not initially find any trace of an anus on the species. However, as the animal gets full, a pore opens up to dispose of waste Steven G Johnson Science news in pictures Giant bee spotted Feared extinct, the Wallace's Giant bee has been spotted for the first time in nearly 40 years. An international team of conservationists spotted the bee, that is four times the size of a typical honeybee, on an expedition to a group of Indonesian Islands Clay Bolt Science news in pictures New mammal species found inside crocodile Fossilised bones digested by crocodiles have revealed the existence of three new mammal species that roamed the Cayman Islands 300 years ago. The bones belonged to two large rodent species and a small shrew-like animal New Mexico Museum of Natural History Science news in pictures Fabric that changes according to temperature created Scientists at the University of Maryland have created a fabric that adapts to heat, expanding to allow more heat to escape the body when warm and compacting to retain more heat when cold Faye Levine, University of Maryland Science news in pictures Baby mice tears could be used in pest control A study from the University of Tokyo has found that the tears of baby mice cause female mice to be less interested in the sexual advances of males Getty Science news in pictures Final warning to limit "climate catastrophe" The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has issued a report which projects the impact of a rise in global temperatures of 1.5 degrees Celsius and warns against a higher increase Getty Science news in pictures Nobel prize for evolution chemists The nobel prize for chemistry has been awarded to three chemists working with evolution. Frances Smith is being awarded the prize for her work on directing the evolution of enzymes, while Gregory Winter and George Smith take the prize for their work on phage display of peptides and antibodies Getty/AFP Science news in pictures Nobel prize for laser physicists The nobel prize for physics has been awarded to three physicists working with lasers. Arthur Ashkin (L) was awarded for his "optical tweezers" which use lasers to grab particles, atoms, viruses and other living cells. Donna Strickland and Gerard Mourou were jointly awarded the prize for developing chirped-pulse amplification of lasers Reuters/AP Science news in pictures Discovery of a new species of dinosaur The Ledumahadi Mafube roamed around 200 million years ago in what is now South Africa. Recently discovered by a team of international scientists, it was the largest land animal of its time, weighing 12 tons and standing at 13 feet. In Sesotho, the South African language of the region in which the dinosaur was discovered, its name means "a giant thunderclap at dawn" Viktor Radermacher / SWNS Science news in pictures Birth of a planet Scientists have witnessed the birth of a planet for the first time ever. This spectacular image from the SPHERE instrument on ESO's Very Large Telescope is the first clear image of a planet caught in the very act of formation around the dwarf star PDS 70. The planet stands clearly out, visible as a bright point to the right of the center of the image, which is blacked out by the coronagraph mask used to block the blinding light of the central star. ESO/A. Muller et al Science news in pictures New human organ discovered that was previously missed by scientists Layers long thought to be dense, connective tissue are actually a series of fluid-filled compartments researchers have termed the interstitium. These compartments are found beneath the skin, as well as lining the gut, lungs, blood vessels and muscles, and join together to form a network supported by a mesh of strong, flexible proteins Getty Science news in pictures Previously unknown society lived in Amazon rainforest before Europeans arrived, say archaeologists Working in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso, a team led by archaeologists at the University of Exeter unearthed hundreds of villages hidden in the depths of the rainforest. These excavations included evidence of fortifications and mysterious earthworks called geoglyphs Jose Iriarte Science news in pictures One in 10 people have traces of cocaine or heroin on fingerprints, study finds More than one in 10 people were found to have traces of class A drugs on their fingers by scientists developing a new fingerprint-based drug test. Using sensitive analysis of the chemical composition of sweat, researchers were able to tell the difference between those who had been directly exposed to heroin and cocaine, and those who had encountered it indirectly. Getty Science news in pictures Nasa releases stunning images of Jupiter's great red spot The storm bigger than the Earth, has been swhirling for 350 years. The image's colours have been enhanced after it was sent back to Earth. Pictures by: Tom Momary

Using cutting-edge techniques, the scientists found rare mutations linked to dwarfism and a variety of other bone and growth disorders.

The investigation also revealed four genetic mutations presumed to be involved with bone diseases, all of which were previously unknown to science.

These mutations are the cause of both Atas unusual appearance and the premature ageing of her bones, which made her appear much older than she really was.

"When doctors perform analyses for patients and their families, we're often searching for one cause  one super-rare or unusual mutation that can explain the child's ailment. But in this case, we're pretty confident that multiple things went wrong," said Dr Butte.

The results of this analysis were published in the journal Genome Research.

Recommended Alien asteroids could have brought life to Earth from space

Besides solving a 15 year-old mystery, the scientists say the success of their project could be useful for modern medicine as well, and points to ways in which complex living cases can be handled.

"The phenotype, the symptoms and size of this girl were extremely unusual, and analysing these kinds of really puzzling, old samples teaches us better how to analyse the DNA of kids today under current conditions, said Dr Nolan.

"For me, what really came of this study was the idea that we shouldn't stop investigating when we find one gene that might explain a symptom. It could be multiple things going wrong, and it's worth getting a full explanation, especially as we head closer and closer to gene therapy," said Dr Butte.

"We could presumably one day fix some of these disorders.

As Ata is definitely not an alien, and her remains are probably no more than 40 years old, Dr Nolan said he hoped one day she would be given a proper burial.

"We now know that it's a child, and probably either a pre- or post-term birth and death," he said.

"I think it should be returned to the country of origin and buried according to the customs of the local people."Today's Google Doodle celebrates what would have been the 105th birthday of Mexican astronomer Guillermo Haro (1913-88).

A native of Mexico City who grew up at the height of the Mexican Revolution, Haro originally graduated in philosophy from the country's National Autonomous University.

He subsequently turned his attention to stargazing under the influence of scientist and politician Luis Enrique Eroz, a fateful intervention that would change his life.

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Haro began his career as assistant to Eroz at the Tonantzintla Observatory in San Andres Cholula in Puebla before relocating to the US between 1943 and 1945 to train at Harvard College Observatory and Case Institute of Technology.

He then returned to Mexico and was involved in the commissioning of the powerful Tonantzintla Schmidt telescope, which would prove an invaluable tool in advancing man's knowledge of the stars.

Haro subsequently broke new ground with the discovey of a new type of large planetary nebula - with Hawaiian colleague George Herbig - that were named Herbig-Haro objects in their honour.

He was also involved in the study of bright red and blue flare stars close to the Orion constellation.

In 1956, Haro listed 8,746 blue stars and 44 blue galaxies in the known universe and is otherwise credited with the discovery of T Tauri stars, a supernova, more than 10 novae and a comet.

Guillermo Haro's achievements saw him become the first Mexican to be elected to London's Royal Astronomical Society in 1959.

He went on to found both the Mexican Academy of Sciences - serving as its first president from 1960 - and the National Institute of Astrophysics, Optics and Electronics, which supports science graduates in their careers. That institution now runs an observatory named after him in the state of Sonora.

Guillermo Haro married twice - to Gladys Learn Rojas and more famously to journalist Elena Poniatowska - and had three children. He left behind as his legacy a pathway to the stars that thousands of others have since followed.An inquest into the death of Russian businessman Nikolai Glushkov has opened after he was murdered in his London home.

Richard Furniss, the assistant coroner at West London Coroner's Court, adjourned proceedings because of the ongoing police investigation into his death.

It was initially treated as unexplained but detectives opened a murder inquiry after a post-mortem found the 68-year-old had died of compression to the neck.

Mr Glushkovs body was discovered at his home in Clarence Avenue, New Malden, on 12 March.

Coroners officer Gary Waple told the court police were called at 10.46pm by London Ambulance Service paramedics, who pronounced Mr Glushkov dead two minutes later.

I have to adjourn this inquest pending further police investigation and enquiries, Mr Furniss said, and did not set a date for the next hearing.

Counter-terror police are leading the ongoing probe because of Mr Glushkov's connection to Russian dissidents including Boris Berezovsky, who died in 2013.

At the time, Mr Glushkov said he believed his friend had been murdered, telling The Guardian: I dont believe Boris died of natural causes. Too many deaths [of Russian exiles] have been happening.

Mr Berezovsky was an outspoken critic of Vladimir Putin and friend of murdered Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko.

His death is among up to 14 being reviewed by police and MI5 in light of the nerve agent attack on Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury.

Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Show all 15 1 /15 Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Scene of attack Members of the emergency services in hazard suits fix the tent over the bench where Sergei and Yulia Skripal were found unconscious on a park bench in Salisbury in March 2018. Getty Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Victim - Sergei Skripal The retired Russian colonel and former double agent for MI6 was in a critical condition in hospital for more than two months after being exposed to novichok in Salisbury. He was given refuge in the UK after being jailed in Moscow for treason. Mr Skripal came to Britain as part of a high-profile spy swap in 2010 in which four men were exchanged for ten Russian "sleeper agents" in the US. In this image he is speaking to his lawyer from behind bars in Moscow in 2006. AP Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Victim - Yulia Skripal Yulia Skripal was struck down by a novichok poison alongside her father Sergei. Facebook Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Scene of attack A police officer stands guard outside a branch of the Italian chain restaurant Zizzi where the pair dined at before falling ill. It was boarded off whilst investigators worked on the building and later found traces of the chemical weapon within it. AFP/Getty Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Scene of attack Large areas of central Salisbury were cordoned off by police following the discovery of the Skripals. Traces of nerve agent were also found in The Mill pub. PA Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Victim - Nick Bailey Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey, rushed to the aid of the Russian ex-spy and his daughter who were targeted with a nerve agent. He was hospitalized after aiding them and didn't leave until three weeks after the attack. Wiltshire Police/Rex Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Police investigation - Skripals home Police believe they were poisoned at home, and detectives found the highest concentration of novichok on the front door of Mr Skripals house. Getty Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Theresa May visits scene of attack Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May spokes with Wiltshire Police's Chief Constable Kier Pritchard near where the Skripal's were found. Britain expelled 23 Russian diplomats over the nerve agent poisoning and suspended high-level contacts, including for the World Cup on March 14. Theresa May told parliament that Russia had failed to respond to her demand for an explanation on how a Soviet-designed chemical, Novichok, was used in Salisbury. AFP/Getty Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Skripal days before attack Sergei Skripal days before he was exposed to Novichok, that has left him fighting for life. ITV News Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Police investigation - military involvement British soldiers were deployed soon after the attack to help a counter-terrorism investigation into the nerve agent attack. One of the places they were asked to help out with was Skripal's home and it's surrounding. They were asked to remove a vehicle connected to the agent attack in Salisbury, from a residential street in Gillingham. AFP/Getty Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Police investigation Personnel in protective coveralls and breathing equipment cover an ambulance with a tarpaulin at the Salisbury District Hospital. AFP/Getty Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Police investigation The investigation extended to the grave of Sergei Skripal's son Alexander in London Road cemetery. Getty Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Police investigation The Counter Terrorism Policing Network requested assistance from the military to remove a number of vehicles and objects from Salisbury. EPA Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Home Secretary visits scene of attack Home Secretary Amber Rudd visited the scene of the nerve agent attack at the Maltings shopping centre on 9 March. Getty Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Yulia Skripal speaks for the first time Yulia Skripal, speaking for the first time, said she felt lucky to have survived the nerve agent attack in Salisbury which left her fighting for life. Ms Skripal said her life had been turned upside down by the assassination attempt. But the Russian national added she hoped to return to her homeland one day, despite the Kremlin being blamed for the attack. Reuters

Mr Glushkov worked for Mr Berezovskys LogoVaz car company in Russia, before becoming the first deputy general director for Russias flag carrier Aeroflot in the late 1990s.

He served a five-year term for money laundering and fraud in Russia, then fled the country after being handed a two-year suspended sentence for fraud in 2006.

Last year, he was sentenced to eight years imprisonment and a 1 million ruble fine in absentia for allegedly defrauding Aeroflot  a case that continued at the time of his death.

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Mr Glushkov, who has two children, was due to attend a commercial court hearing last Monday morning but did not arrive, sparking concerns among friends who later confirmed his death.

His body was reportedly found by his daughter, Natalia, who is believed to have made the first 999 call.

Mr Glushkovs relatives issued a statement through Scotland Yard, saying: We are devastated at the loss of Nikolai and are coming to terms with our grief.

Police have stressed that there is no evidence of a link between the murder and the nerve agent attack on Mr Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury.

Detectives are appealing for information and no arrests have yet been made.

Russias official Investigations Committee has launched its own criminal investigations into the attempted murder of the Skripals and Mr Glushkovs death.Police are taking days to respond to 999 calls that should take less than an hour, a watchdog has revealed while warning of significant stress on forces.

Vulnerable people and victims of assault and other serious crimes are among those left waiting in distress, sometimes without knowing when or if officers would arrive.

HM Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMICFRS) warned that many police forces in England and Wales had backlogs of emergencies, resulting in long delays and incidents being left unresolved.

One force had an average waiting time of 15 hours for emergency calls and the watchdog found people waiting days for a response.

Policing is under significant stress and cracks are appearing in the system, said HM Inspector Zoe Billingham.

About a quarter of forces are all too often overwhelmed by the demand they face, resulting in worrying backlogs of emergency jobs.

People are waiting a long, long time for that 999 response and our concern is where there are vulnerable victims in the queue who havent been identified properly, putting them at risk.

Last years annual report on police effectiveness found that some forces were artificially suppressing demand by wrongly categorising calls to stretch resources further.

Police are facing rising demand and falling staff numbers (Getty) (Getty Images)

But now we are seeing a very different problem, Ms Billingham said. The demand is not being suppressed any longer but in some forces it is simply being unmet.

Police unions and campaigners have blamed much of the strain on plummeting numbers of police officers  down 21,000 since 2010  but the watchdog said there were other issues at play.

Its about the choices forces make, where they choose to deploy officers and making sure they understand what their demand is and when they are busiest, Ms Billingham told The Independent.

Weve set out a number of recommendations that we think will make the situation better and improve the service to the public

Recommended Police failing to respond to some crimes because of budget cuts

Not all forces are experiencing the same problems so that gives us a degree of confidence that police do have the ability to resolve these issues.

The Womens Aid charity warned of the potential impact of delays on people suffering domestic abuse and sexual violence.

This failure to respond efficiently when a survivor first reaches out for help not only compromises the chances of an effective investigation but also poses serious concern for survivors safety and access to justice, said chief executive Katie Ghose.

The HMICFRS report shows that a domestic abuse crime is committed every minute in England and Wales but the arrest rate is falling.

Inspectors found that cases were being abandoned because of victims withdrawing support for prosecution  a move campaigners say is caused by poor evidence-gathering.

Outcome 16 can be used for any crime on the grounds that victims do not support legal action, but is used in as many as 60 per cent of domestic cases by some forces.

Officers have been asking for more government funding (PA)

In the year to June 2017, it was used in 13 per cent of all cases  up from 11 per cent the year before  and HMICFRS called for a review of practices to ensure police are not using outcome 16 as an easy way to conclude enquiries.

It also demanded urgent assessments of how the use of bail conditions has changed since the Government imposed a 28-day limit on pre-charge bail in April last year.

It caused the number of suspects released under investigation with no conditions or restrictions to rocket, even when they may pose a risk to victims, witnesses and the public.

In the six months after the limit came into force, the use of police bail plummeted by 65 per cent  and three quarters in domestic abuse cases.

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Inspectors warned that a drop across all offences suggests police are not protecting vulnerable victims the way that they should.

We are asking all forces to assess their own practices and procedures around bail now, before the problem becomes even more acute and before the risk increases, Ms Billingham said.

There was a change in legislation and it was lost in translation.

The report revealed that police have yet to assess the risk posed by 3,300 registered sex offenders living in communities, possibly because officers are busy doing other things, and the figure has risen by almost fifth in a year.

Forces are also failing to track wanted suspects and develop intelligence to identify their whereabouts, with 60,061 wanted records on the police national computer including 374 relating to homicide and 1,135 to rape as of July.

HMICFRS also raised concerns about failures in evidence gathering, seeing crucial material lost and enquiries being carried out too slowly or not thoroughly enough.

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This is the third challenge Tobias, who has cerebral palsy and autism, has completed, raising more than 150,000 for his school and Sheffield Children Hospitals charity PA UK news in pictures 11 September 2021 British player Emma Raducanu, holds up the US Open championship trophy winning the women's singles final of the US Open in New York AP UK news in pictures 10 September 2021 People paddle board during a misty morning in Ullswater, the second largest lake in the Lake District, Cumbria PA UK news in pictures 9 September 2021 Troops from Wiltshire based 4 Armoured Close Support Battalion Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers during final inspection at Wellington Barracks in London, ahead of providing troops for the Queens Guard PA UK news in pictures 8 September 2021 Workers cross London Bridge during the morning rush hour in London Reuters UK news in pictures Mixing it up: Painting it up press view in London A gallery employee poses for photographers next to a painting entitled Prairie by British artist, Louise Giovanelli during the exhibition 'Mixing it up: Painting it up' at the Hayward Gallery in London EPA UK news in pictures 6 September 2021 Traders in the Ring at the London Metal Exchange, in the City of London, after open-outcry trading returned for the first time since March 2020, when the Ring was temporarily closed due to the pandemic PA UK news in pictures 5 September 2021 People enjoy the warm weather on Sandbanks beach, Poole PA UK news in pictures 4 September 2021 Demonstrators from Animal Rebellion and Nature Rebellion protest in Trafalgar Square in London. PA UK news in pictures 3 September 2021 South Africa's Ntando Mahlangu (centre) wins the Men's 200 metres T61 Final ahead of second placed Great Britain's Richard Whitehead at the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games PA UK news in pictures 2 September 2021 A young common seal on the beach at Horsey Gap in Norfolk, as hundreds of pregnant grey seals come ashore ready for the start of the pupping season. PA UK news in pictures 1 September 2021 Goldfinches fighting over food in a garden in Strensham, Worcestershire PA UK news in pictures 31 August 2021 Gold Medallist Sarah Storey of Britain celebrates on the podium Reuters UK news in pictures 30 August 2021 Extinction Rebellion protesters hold a a tea party on Tower Bridge in London EPA UK news in pictures 29 August 2021 A police office tussles with a demonstrator on Cromwell Road outside the Natural History Museum during a protest by members of Extinction Rebellion in London PA UK news in pictures 28 August 2021 Members of the British armed forces 16 Air Assault Brigade walk to the air terminal after disembarking a Royal Airforce Voyager aircraft at Brize Norton, Oxfordshire POOL/AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 27 August 2021 Fabio Quartararo crashes during a MotoGP practice session at the British Grand Prix, Silverstone Circuit Action Images via Reuters UK news in pictures 26 August 2021 An Extinction Rebellion activist holds a placard in a fountain surrounded by police officers, during a protest next to Buckingham Palace in London Reuters UK news in pictures 25 August 2021 Gold Medallist Great Britains cyclist, Sarah Storey, celebrates after winning the Womens C5 3000m Individual Pursuit Final at the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games. It was her 15th Paralympic gold Reuters UK news in pictures 24 August 2021 A demonstrator dressed as bee during a protest by members of Extinction Rebellion on Whitehall, in central London PA UK news in pictures 23 August 2021 Former interpreters for the British forces in Afghanistan demonstrate outside the Home Office in central London AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 22 August 2021 Police officers form a line in front of the entrance to the Guildhall, London, where protesters have climbed onto a ledge above the entrance during an Extinction Rebellion stage a protest PA UK news in pictures 21 August 2021 People take part in a demonstration in solidarity with people of Afghanistan, in London Reuters UK news in pictures 20 August 2021 People zip wire across the sea from Bournemouth pier towards the beach. PA UK news in pictures 19 August 2021 Supporters of Geronimo the alpaca gather outside Shepherds Close Farm in Wooton Under Edge, Gloucestershire PA UK news in pictures 18 August 2021 Former Afghan interpreters and veterans hold a demonstration outside Downing Street, calling for support and protection for Afghan interpreters and their families PA UK news in pictures 17 August 2021 Military personnel board the RAF Airbus A400M at RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire, where evacuation flights from Afghanistan have been landing Reuters UK news in pictures 16 August 2021 Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer takes part in a minute's silence at Wolverhampton police station for the victims of the Plymouth mass shooting last week PA UK news in pictures 15 August 2021 2Storm, a ten-metre tall puppet of a mythical goddess of the sea created by Edinburgh-based visual theatre company Vision Mechanics, makes its way alongside the seafront at North Berwick, East Lothian, during a performance at the Fringe By The Sea festival PA UK news in pictures 14 August 2021 A woman and two young girls look at floral tributes in Plymouth where six people, including the offender, died of gunshot wounds in a firearms incident PA UK news in pictures 13 August 2021 Forensic officers in the Keyham area of Plymouth where six people, including the shooter, died of gunshot wounds in a firearms incident on Thursday evening PA UK news in pictures 12 August 2021 Children ride horses in the River Eden in Appleby, Cumbria, during the annual gathering of travellers for the Appleby Horse Fair PA UK news in pictures 11 August 2021 Stella Moris (left) reacts after talking to the media outside the High Court in London, following the first hearing in the Julian Assange extradition appeal, n London, following the first hearing in the Julian Assange extradition appeal. The US government has won the latest round in its High Court bid to appeal against the decision not to extradite Julian Assange on espionage charges PA UK news in pictures 10 August 2021 Students react after they receive their A-Level results at the Ark Academy, in London Reuters UK news in pictures 9 August 2021 The final athletes from Great Britain arrive home including Jason Kenny, Laura Kenny and Katie Archibald (front left-right) at Heathrow Airport, London following the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games PA UK news in pictures 8 August 2021 Great Britain's Laura Kenny during the closing ceremony of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games at the Olympic stadium in Japan PA UK news in pictures 7 August 2021 People from the Glasgow Southside community take part in the Govanhill Carnival, an anti-racist celebration of pride, unity and the contributions immigrants have made to the community in Govanhill, at Queen's Park, Glasgow PA UK news in pictures 6 August 2021 Chijindu Ujah of Britain, Zharnel Hughes of Britain, Richard Kilty of Britain and Nethaneel Mitchell-Blake of Britain celebrate winning silver as they pose with Asha Philip of Britain, Imani Lansiquot of Britain, Dina Asher-Smith of Britain and Daryll Neita of Britain after they won bronze in the women's 4 x 100m relay during Olympic Games Day 14 Getty UK news in pictures 5 August 2021 A protester places flowers on a photograph of an executed man during a demonstration organised by supporters of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) to protest against the inauguration of Iran's new president Ebrahim Raisi in central London AFP via Getty UK news in pictures 4 August 2021 England's Joe Root looks on as India's KL Rahul doesn't make it to a catch during day one of Cinch First Test match at Trent Bridge, Nottingham PA UK news in pictures 3 August 2021 Great Britain's Laura Kenny and Jason Kenny with their silver medals for the Women's Team Pursuit and Mens Team Sprint during the Track Cycling at the Izu Velodrome on the eleventh day of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games in Japan PA UK news in pictures 2 August 2021 Great Britains Charlotte Worthington competes during the Womens BMX Freestyle Final at the Tokyo Olympics PA UK news in pictures 1 August 2021 EPA UK news in pictures 31 July 2021 James Guy, Adam Peaty and Kathleen Dawson celebrate winning the gold medal in the mixed 4x100m medley relay final at the Tokyo Olympics AP UK news in pictures 30 July 2021 Great Britain's Bethany Shriever and Kye Whyte celebrate their Gold and Silver medals respectively for the Cycling BMX Racing at the Ariake Urban Sports Park on the seventh day of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games in Japan PA

But it found more than two thirds of forces in England and Wales continued to be good at keeping people safe and reducing crime, with improvements in recording and action against organised crime.

Of the 43 forces assessed in England and Wales, one was judged to be outstanding, 30 were good, and 12 require improvement, with nine showing improvement in the past year and six declining.

The report came after police officer numbers reached the lowest level since current records began, and recorded crime rose by 14 per cent in a year.

Senior officers have repeatedly called for the Government to provide a blanket increase in funding to respond to rising demand and the unprecedented terror threat, but were told to rely on council tax increases to generate much of a 450m boost.

Some of the cash has already been earmarked for recruiting new police officers, amid a nationwide shortage of 5,000 investigators, meaning one in five detective desks are empty or filled with unqualified staff.

Neighbourhood policing  the frontline for prevention work and counter-terror efforts  shows some signs of being shored up after mounting concern but there was still an 8 per cent decrease in overall funding for the area.

Sara Thornton, chair of the National Police Chiefs Council, said increases in demand were impacting on the ability to meet standards in important areas.

In the last year, policing has been under real strain with rising crime and demand that is more complex, an unprecedented terror threat, and officer numbers at 1985 levels, she added.

The response to terror attacks had led to backlogs of incidents and a slower response to the public.

Nick Hurd, the policing minister, urged police chiefs and elected commissioners to act on HMICFRS recommendations, adding: It is clear the police response can be inconsistent and requires improvement.

He said the Government had recognised the changing nature of crime and increasing demand with a new financial settlement for 2018/19, and giving police new powers including domestic violence protection orders and new offences under the Modern Slavery Act.Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey, the police officer exposed to the Novichok nerve agent in the Salisbury attack, has been discharged from hospital.

In a statement released by Wiltshire Police, Det Sgt Bailey said the experience had been completely surreal and that life would never be the same again.

There are really no words to explain how I feel right now, he added.

Recommended Sergei and Yulia Skripal may have brain damage from nerve agent attack

Det Sgt Bailey said he had been overwhelmed by the support he had received.

He was taken to Salisbury District Hospital after responding to the attack on former Russian double agent Sergei Skripal, 66, and his 33-year-old daughter Yulia on March 4.

His wife, Sarah, said in a statement: Nick doesnt like the term hero, but he has always been a hero to me and our children.

DS Bailey insisted I am just a normal person with a normal life, but added: I recognise that normal life for me will probably never be the same  and Sarah and I now need to focus on finding a new normal for us and for our children.

Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Show all 15 1 /15 Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Scene of attack Members of the emergency services in hazard suits fix the tent over the bench where Sergei and Yulia Skripal were found unconscious on a park bench in Salisbury in March 2018. Getty Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Victim - Sergei Skripal The retired Russian colonel and former double agent for MI6 was in a critical condition in hospital for more than two months after being exposed to novichok in Salisbury. He was given refuge in the UK after being jailed in Moscow for treason. Mr Skripal came to Britain as part of a high-profile spy swap in 2010 in which four men were exchanged for ten Russian "sleeper agents" in the US. In this image he is speaking to his lawyer from behind bars in Moscow in 2006. AP Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Victim - Yulia Skripal Yulia Skripal was struck down by a novichok poison alongside her father Sergei. Facebook Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Scene of attack A police officer stands guard outside a branch of the Italian chain restaurant Zizzi where the pair dined at before falling ill. It was boarded off whilst investigators worked on the building and later found traces of the chemical weapon within it. AFP/Getty Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Scene of attack Large areas of central Salisbury were cordoned off by police following the discovery of the Skripals. Traces of nerve agent were also found in The Mill pub. PA Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Victim - Nick Bailey Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey, rushed to the aid of the Russian ex-spy and his daughter who were targeted with a nerve agent. He was hospitalized after aiding them and didn't leave until three weeks after the attack. Wiltshire Police/Rex Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Police investigation - Skripals home Police believe they were poisoned at home, and detectives found the highest concentration of novichok on the front door of Mr Skripals house. Getty Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Theresa May visits scene of attack Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May spokes with Wiltshire Police's Chief Constable Kier Pritchard near where the Skripal's were found. Britain expelled 23 Russian diplomats over the nerve agent poisoning and suspended high-level contacts, including for the World Cup on March 14. Theresa May told parliament that Russia had failed to respond to her demand for an explanation on how a Soviet-designed chemical, Novichok, was used in Salisbury. AFP/Getty Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Skripal days before attack Sergei Skripal days before he was exposed to Novichok, that has left him fighting for life. ITV News Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Police investigation - military involvement British soldiers were deployed soon after the attack to help a counter-terrorism investigation into the nerve agent attack. One of the places they were asked to help out with was Skripal's home and it's surrounding. They were asked to remove a vehicle connected to the agent attack in Salisbury, from a residential street in Gillingham. AFP/Getty Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Police investigation Personnel in protective coveralls and breathing equipment cover an ambulance with a tarpaulin at the Salisbury District Hospital. AFP/Getty Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Police investigation The investigation extended to the grave of Sergei Skripal's son Alexander in London Road cemetery. Getty Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Police investigation The Counter Terrorism Policing Network requested assistance from the military to remove a number of vehicles and objects from Salisbury. EPA Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Home Secretary visits scene of attack Home Secretary Amber Rudd visited the scene of the nerve agent attack at the Maltings shopping centre on 9 March. Getty Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Yulia Skripal speaks for the first time Yulia Skripal, speaking for the first time, said she felt lucky to have survived the nerve agent attack in Salisbury which left her fighting for life. Ms Skripal said her life had been turned upside down by the assassination attempt. But the Russian national added she hoped to return to her homeland one day, despite the Kremlin being blamed for the attack. Reuters

Cara Charles-Barks, chief executive of Salisbury NHS Foundation Trust, confirmed the injured officer left hospital earlier on Thursday, nearly three weeks after the attack on Mr Skripal and his daughter.

She said the Skripals remain in hospital in a critical but stable condition.

Earlier, a court was told Mr Skripal and his daughter may have suffered life-long brain damage as a result of the military-grade nerve agent they ingested.

The pair remain in intensive care under heavy sedation, Mr Justice Williams told the Court of Protection.

The precise effect of their exposure on their long term health remains unclear but medical tests indicate that their mental capacity might be compromised to an unknown and so far unascertained degree, the judge said.

At present both Mr and Ms Skripal are critical but stable; it is not inconceivable that their condition could rapidly deteriorate.

A consultant treating the victims as Salisbury District Hospital said Mr Skripal was unable to communicate in any way, but his daughter was unable to communicate in any "meaningful way".The leaders of 28 European Union states have agreed with the UK it is highly likely Russia is responsible for the military-grade nerve agent attack on Sergei Skripal and his daughter.

Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council, said there is no other plausible explanation for the attack in Salisbury.

It comes after the Prime Minister, Theresa May, briefed Germanys Chancellor, Angela Merkel, and Frances President, Emmanuel Macron, on the evidence Britain believes lays the blame for the attack on Russia.

Ms May said the European Council was "standing together'' on the Salisbury attack and "the threat that Russia poses respects no borders and it is a threat to our values''.

Mr Tusk said: "European Council agrees with UK government that highly likely Russia is responsible for Salisbury attack and that there is no other plausible explanation."

The statement agreed by the leaders of the EU's 28 member states at the European Council summit in Brussels said: "The European Council condemns in the strongest possible terms the recent attack in Salisbury, expresses its deepest sympathies to all whose lives have been threatened and lends its support to the ongoing investigation.

"It agrees with the United Kingdom Government's assessment that it is highly likely that the Russian Federation is responsible and that there is no plausible alternative explanation. We stand in unqualified solidarity with the United Kingdom in the face of this grave challenge to our shared security.

"The use of chemical weapons, including the use of any toxic chemicals as weapons under any circumstances, is completely unacceptable, must be systematically and rigorously condemned and constitutes a security threat to us all."

Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Show all 15 1 /15 Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Scene of attack Members of the emergency services in hazard suits fix the tent over the bench where Sergei and Yulia Skripal were found unconscious on a park bench in Salisbury in March 2018. Getty Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Victim - Sergei Skripal The retired Russian colonel and former double agent for MI6 was in a critical condition in hospital for more than two months after being exposed to novichok in Salisbury. He was given refuge in the UK after being jailed in Moscow for treason. Mr Skripal came to Britain as part of a high-profile spy swap in 2010 in which four men were exchanged for ten Russian "sleeper agents" in the US. In this image he is speaking to his lawyer from behind bars in Moscow in 2006. AP Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Victim - Yulia Skripal Yulia Skripal was struck down by a novichok poison alongside her father Sergei. Facebook Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Scene of attack A police officer stands guard outside a branch of the Italian chain restaurant Zizzi where the pair dined at before falling ill. It was boarded off whilst investigators worked on the building and later found traces of the chemical weapon within it. AFP/Getty Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Scene of attack Large areas of central Salisbury were cordoned off by police following the discovery of the Skripals. Traces of nerve agent were also found in The Mill pub. PA Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Victim - Nick Bailey Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey, rushed to the aid of the Russian ex-spy and his daughter who were targeted with a nerve agent. He was hospitalized after aiding them and didn't leave until three weeks after the attack. Wiltshire Police/Rex Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Police investigation - Skripals home Police believe they were poisoned at home, and detectives found the highest concentration of novichok on the front door of Mr Skripals house. Getty Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Theresa May visits scene of attack Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May spokes with Wiltshire Police's Chief Constable Kier Pritchard near where the Skripal's were found. Britain expelled 23 Russian diplomats over the nerve agent poisoning and suspended high-level contacts, including for the World Cup on March 14. Theresa May told parliament that Russia had failed to respond to her demand for an explanation on how a Soviet-designed chemical, Novichok, was used in Salisbury. AFP/Getty Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Skripal days before attack Sergei Skripal days before he was exposed to Novichok, that has left him fighting for life. ITV News Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Police investigation - military involvement British soldiers were deployed soon after the attack to help a counter-terrorism investigation into the nerve agent attack. One of the places they were asked to help out with was Skripal's home and it's surrounding. They were asked to remove a vehicle connected to the agent attack in Salisbury, from a residential street in Gillingham. AFP/Getty Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Police investigation Personnel in protective coveralls and breathing equipment cover an ambulance with a tarpaulin at the Salisbury District Hospital. AFP/Getty Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Police investigation The investigation extended to the grave of Sergei Skripal's son Alexander in London Road cemetery. Getty Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Police investigation The Counter Terrorism Policing Network requested assistance from the military to remove a number of vehicles and objects from Salisbury. EPA Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Home Secretary visits scene of attack Home Secretary Amber Rudd visited the scene of the nerve agent attack at the Maltings shopping centre on 9 March. Getty Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Yulia Skripal speaks for the first time Yulia Skripal, speaking for the first time, said she felt lucky to have survived the nerve agent attack in Salisbury which left her fighting for life. Ms Skripal said her life had been turned upside down by the assassination attempt. But the Russian national added she hoped to return to her homeland one day, despite the Kremlin being blamed for the attack. Reuters

The announcement came as reports suggested as many as five EU countries  France, Poland and the three Baltic states  are considering following Britain's lead by expelling suspected Russian spies.

Meanwhile, the EU's ambassador to Moscow is being recalled for consultations over the Salisbury nerve gas attack, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte said.

Earlier on Thursday, the police officer exposed to the Novichok nerve agent in the attack, Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey, was discharged from hospital.

Det Sgt Bailey said: Normal life for me will probably never be the same.

Recommended Police officer affected by Salisbury nerve agent attack discharged

A court also heard that Mr Skripal and his daughter may have suffered life-long brain damage as a result of the military-grade nerve agent they were exposed to.

The pair remain in intensive care under heavy sedation, Mr Justice Williams told the Court of Protection.

The precise effect of their exposure on their long term health remains unclear but medical tests indicate that their mental capacity might be compromised to an unknown and so far unascertained degree, the judge said.

At present both Mr and Ms Skripal are critical but stable; it is not inconceivable that their condition could rapidly deteriorate.

A consultant treating the victims as Salisbury District Hospital said Mr Skripal was unable to communicate in any way, but his daughter was unable to communicate in any "meaningful way".The suspended chief executive of Cambridge Analytica, the firm at the centre of Facebook data harvesting claims, has been recalled before a parliamentary select committee over alleged inconsistencies in the evidence he gave MPs.

In a letter asking Alexander Nix to reappear before the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, chairman Damian Collins asked the 42-year-old to explain why he told MPs on 27 February that Cambridge Analytica does not work with Facebook data.

Mr Collins said Mr Nix had also denied receiving data from the company Global Science Research (GSR).

On Sunday, whistleblower Christopher Wylie reportedly revealed that in 2014 Cambridge Analytica had acquired data from 50 million Facebook users via GSR.

In his letter, Mr Collins, the Conservative MP for Folkestone and Hythe, told Mr Nix: Following material published over the past few days, the committee would like to request that you supply further evidence.

There are a number of inconsistencies in your evidence to us on 27 February, notably your denial that your company received data from the Global Science Research company.

We are also interested in asking you again about your claim that you do not work with Facebook data, and [] we do not have Facebook data.

The letter adds: Giving false statements to a select committee is a very serious matter. We urge you to come forward and explain your comments at a committee hearing.

The Cambridge Analytica board this week suspended its chief executive pending what it called a full independent investigation.

Cambridge Analytica confirmed in a statement on 17 March that in 2014 it had contracted GSR and the research company had given it Facebook data.

The statement said: GSR was contractually obliged by us to only obtain data in accordance with the UK Data Protection Act and to seek the informed consent of each respondent.

The statement added: When it subsequently became clear that the data had not been obtained by GSR in line with Facebooks terms of service, Cambridge Analytica deleted all data received from GSR.

We worked with Facebook over this period to ensure that they were satisfied that we had not knowingly breached any of Facebooks terms of service and also provided a signed statement to confirm that all Facebook data and their derivatives had been deleted.

Facebook, however, has cast doubt on the companys claim that all the data really was deleted.

It suspended Cambridge Analyticas account, citing reports that, contrary to the certifications we were given, not all data was deleted.

Dr Aleksandr Kogan of GSR has defended his companys actions, suggesting it has been used as a scapegoat by both Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, when we thought we were doing everything appropriately.

 Cambridge Analytica headquarters evacuated after suspicious package found

The developments come as Cambridge Analyticas London office was evacuated after the delivery of what was initially feared to have been a suspect package.

After police were called and assessed the package on Thursday afternoon, however, it was deemed to contain nothing untoward.

At about the same time, the Information Commissioner, Elizabeth Denham, who is investigating the data controversy, experienced a delay in getting an urgent warrant to enter Cambridge Analyticas London offices.

Ms Denham had begun the warrant application process on Tuesday, but on Thursday her office (the ICO) issued a statement saying: A High Court judge has adjourned the ICOs application for a warrant relating to Cambridge Analytica until Friday.

The ICO will be in court to continue to pursue the warrant to obtain access to data and information to take forward our investigation.

On Tuesday, the day the ICO started applying for a warrant, Cambridge Analytica had issued a statement saying: Cambridge Analytica has been in touch with the ICO since February 2017, when we hosted its team in our London office to provide total transparency on all the data we hold.

We have been fully compliant and proactive in our conversations with the ICO.

Insisting that Cambridge Analytica remained committed to helping the ICO, the company statement added: We have offered to share with the ICO all the information that it asked for and for the ICO to attend our office voluntarily, subject to our agreeing the scope of the inspection.

The Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee is conducting an inquiry into fake news.

World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 30 September 2020 Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 September 2020 A girl's silhouette is seen from behind a fabric in a tent along a beach by Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 September 2020 A Chinese woman takes a photo of herself in front of a flower display dedicated to frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China. China will celebrate national day marking the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st Getty World news in pictures 27 September 2020 The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California. The fast moving Glass fire has burned over 1,000 acres and has destroyed homes Getty World news in pictures 26 September 2020 A villager along with a child offers prayers next to a carcass of a wild elephant that officials say was electrocuted in Rani Reserve Forest on the outskirts of Guwahati, India AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 September 2020 The casket of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seen in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol to lie in state in Washington, DC AFP via Getty World news in pictures 24 September 2020 An anti-government protester holds up an image of a pro-democracy commemorative plaque at a rally outside Thailand's parliament in Bangkok, as activists gathered to demand a new constitution AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 September 2020 A whale stranded on a beach in Macquarie Harbour on the rugged west coast of Tasmania, as hundreds of pilot whales have died in a mass stranding in southern Australia despite efforts to save them, with rescuers racing to free a few dozen survivors The Mercury/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 22 September 2020 State civil employee candidates wearing face masks and shields take a test in Surabaya AFP via Getty World news in pictures 21 September 2020 A man sweeps at the Taj Mahal monument on the day of its reopening after being closed for more than six months due to the coronavirus pandemic AP World news in pictures 20 September 2020 A deer looks for food in a burnt area, caused by the Bobcat fire, in Pearblossom, California EPA World news in pictures 19 September 2020 Anti-government protesters hold their mobile phones aloft as they take part in a pro-democracy rally in Bangkok. Tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters massed close to Thailand's royal palace, in a huge rally calling for PM Prayut Chan-O-Cha to step down and demanding reforms to the monarchy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 September 2020 Supporters of Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr maintain social distancing as they attend Friday prayers after the coronavirus disease restrictions were eased, in Kufa mosque, near Najaf, Iraq Reuters World news in pictures 17 September 2020 A protester climbs on The Triumph of the Republic at 'the Place de la Nation' as thousands of protesters take part in a demonstration during a national day strike called by labor unions asking for better salary and against jobs cut in Paris, France EPA World news in pictures 16 September 2020 A fire raging near the Lazzaretto of Ancona in Italy. The huge blaze broke out overnight at the port of Ancona. Firefighters have brought the fire under control but they expected to keep working through the day EPA World news in pictures 15 September 2020 Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny posing for a selfie with his family at Berlin's Charite hospital. In an Instagram post he said he could now breathe independently following his suspected poisoning last month Alexei Navalny/Instagram/AFP World news in pictures 14 September 2020 Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida celebrate after Suga was elected as new head of the ruling party at the Liberal Democratic Party's leadership election in Tokyo Reuters World news in pictures 13 September 2020 A man stands behind a burning barricade during the fifth straight day of protests against police brutality in Bogota AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 September 2020 Police officers block and detain protesters during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus. Daily protests calling for the authoritarian president's resignation are now in their second month AP World news in pictures 11 September 2020 Members of 'Omnium Cultural' celebrate the 20th 'Festa per la llibertat' ('Fiesta for the freedom') to mark the Day of Catalonia in Barcelona. Omnion Cultural fights for the independence of Catalonia EPA World news in pictures 10 September 2020 The Moria refugee camp, two days after Greece's biggest migrant camp, was destroyed by fire. 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Indigenous protesters blocked a major transamazonian highway to protest against the lack of governmental support during the COVID-19 novel coronavirus pandemic and illegal deforestation in and around their territories AFP via Getty World news in pictures 16 August 2020 Lightning forks over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as a storm passes over Oakland AP World news in pictures 15 August 2020 Belarus opposition supporters gather near the Pushkinskaya metro station where Alexander Taraikovsky, a 34-year-old protester died on August 10, during their protest rally in central Minsk AFP via Getty World news in pictures 14 August 2020 AlphaTauri's driver Daniil Kvyat takes part in the second practice session at the Circuit de Catalunya in Montmelo near Barcelona ahead of the Spanish F1 Grand Prix AFP via Getty World news in pictures 13 August 2020 Soldiers of the Brazilian Armed Forces during a disinfection of the Christ The Redeemer statue at the Corcovado mountain prior to the opening of the touristic attraction in Rio AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 August 2020 Young elephant bulls tussle playfully on World Elephant Day at the Amboseli National Park in Kenya AFP via Getty

Cambridge Analytica, whose former vice-president was Steve Bannon, ex-chief strategist to Donald Trump and the co-founder of alt-right news website Breitbart, has insisted that no GSR or Facebook data was used in its assistance to the 2016 presidential campaign.

After Mr Trumps election victory, Cambridge Analytica announced itself as The Data Gurus Who Anticipated the Election Result, while Mr Nix was quoted as telling reporters that with the help of his company, pretty much every message that Trump put out was data-driven.

We can address villages or apartment blocks in a targeted way. Even individuals, Mr Nix was quoted as saying.

When he appeared before the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee on 27 February, Mr Nix said Cambridge Analytica did not have special powers and was just a small technology company.

He told MPs: Thats very flattering that you might suggest people might see us as having these incredible powers, [but] what were doing is really no different to what the advertising industry at large is doing across the commercial space.

The science of political campaigning goes back hundreds of years and what were doing is a natural evolution to whats been done before and many other people are doing as well.

He added: Part of the issue is that [Trump] is somewhat polarising, so people see the work we did in a negative light. They refuse to accept the fact that Clintons machine was twice the size or three times the size of anything we were doing for Trump.

When asked about Facebook, he said: We do not work with Facebook data, and we do not have Facebook data. We do use Facebook as a platform to advertise, as do all brands and most agencies, or all agencies.

Mr Collins gave Mr Nix until next Tuesday, 27 March, to reply to his letter.

Mr Wylie has also been invited to appear before the committee.The headquarters of Cambridge Analytica have been evacuated after a suspicious package was found.

Police closed off roads surrounding the building it shares with other firms in London's New Oxford Street as investigations continued.

A spokesperson for the Metropolitan Police said officers were called shortly before 1.30pm to reports of a suspicious package at Cambridge Analytica's offices.

Officers attended and the package was assessed, she added. It was deemed not to be suspicious. No injuries were reported."

Some workers were shut inside their offices and nearby restaurants as investigations continued, with large numbers of police seen at the scene.

The security alert came as the firm is embroiled in an international scandal over data harvesting and privacy on Facebook.

Whistle-blower Christopher Wylie revealed that it took large amounts of information from users without consent using a personality app, prompting an apology from Mark Zuckerberg.

The Facebook founder said Cambridge Analytica had provided formal assurances that data harvested from 50 million profiles had been destroyed after the breach was revealed in 2015 but it was clearly a mistake to trust the firm.

"I'm used to when people legally certify that they are going to do something, that they do it, Mr Zuckerberg told CNN.

UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 15 September 2021 Children pose by ice sculptures depicting people collecting water by charity Water Aid to show the fragility of water and the threat posed by climate change in London AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 14 September 2021 Heavy rain covers the A149 near Kings Lynn in Norfolk PA UK news in pictures 13 September 2021 Luke Jerram's 'Museum of the Moon' at Durham Cathedral PA UK news in pictures 12 September 2021 Inspirational young fundraiser Tobias Weller crosses the finish line, near his home in Sheffield, as he completes his latest epic feat where he swam and triked his way to the end of his awesome year-long Ironman Challenge. This is the third challenge Tobias, who has cerebral palsy and autism, has completed, raising more than 150,000 for his school and Sheffield Children Hospitals charity PA UK news in pictures 11 September 2021 British player Emma Raducanu, holds up the US Open championship trophy winning the women's singles final of the US Open in New York AP UK news in pictures 10 September 2021 People paddle board during a misty morning in Ullswater, the second largest lake in the Lake District, Cumbria PA UK news in pictures 9 September 2021 Troops from Wiltshire based 4 Armoured Close Support Battalion Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers during final inspection at Wellington Barracks in London, ahead of providing troops for the Queens Guard PA UK news in pictures 8 September 2021 Workers cross London Bridge during the morning rush hour in London Reuters UK news in pictures Mixing it up: Painting it up press view in London A gallery employee poses for photographers next to a painting entitled Prairie by British artist, Louise Giovanelli during the exhibition 'Mixing it up: Painting it up' at the Hayward Gallery in London EPA UK news in pictures 6 September 2021 Traders in the Ring at the London Metal Exchange, in the City of London, after open-outcry trading returned for the first time since March 2020, when the Ring was temporarily closed due to the pandemic PA UK news in pictures 5 September 2021 People enjoy the warm weather on Sandbanks beach, Poole PA UK news in pictures 4 September 2021 Demonstrators from Animal Rebellion and Nature Rebellion protest in Trafalgar Square in London. PA UK news in pictures 3 September 2021 South Africa's Ntando Mahlangu (centre) wins the Men's 200 metres T61 Final ahead of second placed Great Britain's Richard Whitehead at the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games PA UK news in pictures 2 September 2021 A young common seal on the beach at Horsey Gap in Norfolk, as hundreds of pregnant grey seals come ashore ready for the start of the pupping season. PA UK news in pictures 1 September 2021 Goldfinches fighting over food in a garden in Strensham, Worcestershire PA UK news in pictures 31 August 2021 Gold Medallist Sarah Storey of Britain celebrates on the podium Reuters UK news in pictures 30 August 2021 Extinction Rebellion protesters hold a a tea party on Tower Bridge in London EPA UK news in pictures 29 August 2021 A police office tussles with a demonstrator on Cromwell Road outside the Natural History Museum during a protest by members of Extinction Rebellion in London PA UK news in pictures 28 August 2021 Members of the British armed forces 16 Air Assault Brigade walk to the air terminal after disembarking a Royal Airforce Voyager aircraft at Brize Norton, Oxfordshire POOL/AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 27 August 2021 Fabio Quartararo crashes during a MotoGP practice session at the British Grand Prix, Silverstone Circuit Action Images via Reuters UK news in pictures 26 August 2021 An Extinction Rebellion activist holds a placard in a fountain surrounded by police officers, during a protest next to Buckingham Palace in London Reuters UK news in pictures 25 August 2021 Gold Medallist Great Britains cyclist, Sarah Storey, celebrates after winning the Womens C5 3000m Individual Pursuit Final at the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games. It was her 15th Paralympic gold Reuters UK news in pictures 24 August 2021 A demonstrator dressed as bee during a protest by members of Extinction Rebellion on Whitehall, in central London PA UK news in pictures 23 August 2021 Former interpreters for the British forces in Afghanistan demonstrate outside the Home Office in central London AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 22 August 2021 Police officers form a line in front of the entrance to the Guildhall, London, where protesters have climbed onto a ledge above the entrance during an Extinction Rebellion stage a protest PA UK news in pictures 21 August 2021 People take part in a demonstration in solidarity with people of Afghanistan, in London Reuters UK news in pictures 20 August 2021 People zip wire across the sea from Bournemouth pier towards the beach. PA UK news in pictures 19 August 2021 Supporters of Geronimo the alpaca gather outside Shepherds Close Farm in Wooton Under Edge, Gloucestershire PA UK news in pictures 18 August 2021 Former Afghan interpreters and veterans hold a demonstration outside Downing Street, calling for support and protection for Afghan interpreters and their families PA UK news in pictures 17 August 2021 Military personnel board the RAF Airbus A400M at RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire, where evacuation flights from Afghanistan have been landing Reuters UK news in pictures 16 August 2021 Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer takes part in a minute's silence at Wolverhampton police station for the victims of the Plymouth mass shooting last week PA UK news in pictures 15 August 2021 2Storm, a ten-metre tall puppet of a mythical goddess of the sea created by Edinburgh-based visual theatre company Vision Mechanics, makes its way alongside the seafront at North Berwick, East Lothian, during a performance at the Fringe By The Sea festival PA UK news in pictures 14 August 2021 A woman and two young girls look at floral tributes in Plymouth where six people, including the offender, died of gunshot wounds in a firearms incident PA UK news in pictures 13 August 2021 Forensic officers in the Keyham area of Plymouth where six people, including the shooter, died of gunshot wounds in a firearms incident on Thursday evening PA UK news in pictures 12 August 2021 Children ride horses in the River Eden in Appleby, Cumbria, during the annual gathering of travellers for the Appleby Horse Fair PA UK news in pictures 11 August 2021 Stella Moris (left) reacts after talking to the media outside the High Court in London, following the first hearing in the Julian Assange extradition appeal, n London, following the first hearing in the Julian Assange extradition appeal. The US government has won the latest round in its High Court bid to appeal against the decision not to extradite Julian Assange on espionage charges PA UK news in pictures 10 August 2021 Students react after they receive their A-Level results at the Ark Academy, in London Reuters UK news in pictures 9 August 2021 The final athletes from Great Britain arrive home including Jason Kenny, Laura Kenny and Katie Archibald (front left-right) at Heathrow Airport, London following the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games PA UK news in pictures 8 August 2021 Great Britain's Laura Kenny during the closing ceremony of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games at the Olympic stadium in Japan PA UK news in pictures 7 August 2021 People from the Glasgow Southside community take part in the Govanhill Carnival, an anti-racist celebration of pride, unity and the contributions immigrants have made to the community in Govanhill, at Queen's Park, Glasgow PA UK news in pictures 6 August 2021 Chijindu Ujah of Britain, Zharnel Hughes of Britain, Richard Kilty of Britain and Nethaneel Mitchell-Blake of Britain celebrate winning silver as they pose with Asha Philip of Britain, Imani Lansiquot of Britain, Dina Asher-Smith of Britain and Daryll Neita of Britain after they won bronze in the women's 4 x 100m relay during Olympic Games Day 14 Getty UK news in pictures 5 August 2021 A protester places flowers on a photograph of an executed man during a demonstration organised by supporters of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) to protest against the inauguration of Iran's new president Ebrahim Raisi in central London AFP via Getty UK news in pictures 4 August 2021 England's Joe Root looks on as India's KL Rahul doesn't make it to a catch during day one of Cinch First Test match at Trent Bridge, Nottingham PA UK news in pictures 3 August 2021 Great Britain's Laura Kenny and Jason Kenny with their silver medals for the Women's Team Pursuit and Mens Team Sprint during the Track Cycling at the Izu Velodrome on the eleventh day of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games in Japan PA UK news in pictures 2 August 2021 Great Britains Charlotte Worthington competes during the Womens BMX Freestyle Final at the Tokyo Olympics PA UK news in pictures 1 August 2021 EPA UK news in pictures 31 July 2021 James Guy, Adam Peaty and Kathleen Dawson celebrate winning the gold medal in the mixed 4x100m medley relay final at the Tokyo Olympics AP UK news in pictures 30 July 2021 Great Britain's Bethany Shriever and Kye Whyte celebrate their Gold and Silver medals respectively for the Cycling BMX Racing at the Ariake Urban Sports Park on the seventh day of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games in Japan PA UK news in pictures 29 July 2021 Team GB's Mallory Franklin during the Womens Canoe Slalom Final on day six of the Tokyo Olympic Games. She went on to win the silver medal Getty UK news in pictures 28 July 2021 Canoers on Llyn Padarn lake in Snowdonia, Gwynedd. It was announced that the north-west Wales slate landscape has been granted UNESCO World Heritage Status PA

The scandal deepened when Channel 4 released undercover footage showing claiming that they were involved with Donald Trumps presidential campaign and could entrap rival politicians.

Cambridge Analytica has denied any wrongdoing and said conversations caught on camera were grossly misrepresented.

But it later suspended CEO Alexander Nix pending a full, independent investigation, saying his comments do not represent the values or operations of the firm.

Britains data watchdog, the Information Commissioner, has applied to the High Court for a warrant to search Cambridge Analyticas files and servers and a hearing will take place on Friday.

Culture Secretary Matt Hancock told MPs that the Wild West free-for-all of the internet companies has to come to an end in light of the scandal, which he called a turning point in the privacy debate.

Labour MP Chi Onwurah called for the introduction of a digital bill of rights, adding: It is increasingly clear that we need a new settlement with these big tech companies.

Downing Street confirmed on Wednesday that the Government employed Cambridge Analytica parent company SCL for a contract with the Ministry of Defence, but said this had ended before the recent allegations came to light.

We are looking across Government to see if there were any other contracts, said a spokesman. We are not aware of any current contracts.

The Conservative Party said it had been approached by the firm with a pitch for work during David Cameron's leadership, but said this was rejected.A company subcontracted by the Home Office to run housing for asylum seekers is continuing to force residents to share bedrooms despite the local council banning the practice.

Newcastle City Council banned forced bedroom sharing, which sees unrelated asylum-seeking adults forced to share bedrooms with one another, in March 2017 following widespread public outcry.

The city council issued legal notices to property developer Jomast  contracted by G4S to provide accommodation for asylum seekers on behalf of the Home Office  under the Housing Act 2004 following an inspection of seven properties, which found they were over-occupied due to reliance on forced bedroom sharing.

But Jomast has refused to comply with the ban and is attempting to appeal the environmental health notices at a tribunal on Friday.

Campaigners described the practice of bedroom sharing as degrading and a cause of real harm, while the council acknowledged that it could have a serious effect on the mental health of asylum seekers.

One asylum seeker, 28-year-old Jerome, said sharing a bedroom had left him with no privacy, and that sharing his space with another man he didnt know and who didnt speak his language caused him a large amount of stress.

Another, Abdullah, 33, said he suffered from a skin condition meaning he has to sleep naked, but that he was unable to due to having to share a bedroom.

Jane Streather, cabinet member for public health and housing at Newcastle City Council, said: Providing safe and secure housing for everyone in Newcastle, including asylum seekers, is extremely important.

We know that poor housing can have a serious effect on the mental health of asylum seekers  it is vital that we provide an environment where they can live securely, supporting them to develop fully and integrate into their new community.

This is reflected in our Accommodation Standards Policy, which was approved in 2017, and outlines fully our commitment to delivering a fair level of housing for everyone in our city.

Campaigners described the practice of bedroom sharing as degrading and a cause of real harm (Migration and Asylum Justice Forum) (Migration Asylum Justice Forum)

We will not hesitate to sanction organisations who do not share these values; the tribunal taking place on 23 March is part of this approach.

Sam McGill, a volunteer with Migration and Asylum Justice Forum, which is staging a protest outside court on Friday, said: Every adult, no matter their circumstances, deserves to live with dignity. That means  at the minimum  having a bedroom of their own where they can rest and have their own space.

Forcing adult strangers to share bedrooms is degrading and causes real harm, it is disgusting that this practice is continuing across the region for the sole purpose of making money for Jomast.

Jomast should listen to the council and listen to the people of Newcastle and end its deplorable reliance on forcing strangers to share bedrooms.

A report by Home Affairs Select Committee in January 2017 described the standard of asylum accommodation in Newcastle and across the UK as disgraceful.

The Independent contacted Jomast for comment but had not received a response at the time of publication. G4S declined to comment.

A Home Office spokesperson said: The UK has a long history of granting asylum to those who need our protection and we are committed to providing safe and secure accommodation while applications are considered.

UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 19 September 2021 Bubbles surround Manchester Uniteds Cristiano Ronaldo before the match against West Ham at London Stadium Action Images/Reuters UK news in pictures 18 September 2021 Children take part in the Settrington Cup Pedal Car Race as motoring enthusiasts attend the Goodwood Revival, a three-day historic car racing festival in Goodwood, Chichester, Reuters UK news in pictures 17 September 2021 Hugo, 7, from London rides past a 4x7 metre rainbow arch, made entirely of recycled aluminium cans, which has been installed by recycling initiative 'Every Can Counts', in partnership with The City of London Corporation in front of St Paul's Cathedral in London, to encourage members of the public to recycle their drinks cans ahead of recycling week, which starts on 20 September PA UK news in pictures 16 September 2021 Sheikeh MOhammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, leader of Abu Dhabi, leaves Downing Street after meeting with Boris Johnson PA UK news in pictures 15 September 2021 Children pose by ice sculptures depicting people collecting water by charity Water Aid to show the fragility of water and the threat posed by climate change in London AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 14 September 2021 Heavy rain covers the A149 near Kings Lynn in Norfolk PA UK news in pictures 13 September 2021 Luke Jerram's 'Museum of the Moon' at Durham Cathedral PA UK news in pictures 12 September 2021 Inspirational young fundraiser Tobias Weller crosses the finish line, near his home in Sheffield, as he completes his latest epic feat where he swam and triked his way to the end of his awesome year-long Ironman Challenge. This is the third challenge Tobias, who has cerebral palsy and autism, has completed, raising more than 150,000 for his school and Sheffield Children Hospitals charity PA UK news in pictures 11 September 2021 British player Emma Raducanu, holds up the US Open championship trophy winning the women's singles final of the US Open in New York AP UK news in pictures 10 September 2021 People paddle board during a misty morning in Ullswater, the second largest lake in the Lake District, Cumbria PA UK news in pictures 9 September 2021 Troops from Wiltshire based 4 Armoured Close Support Battalion Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers during final inspection at Wellington Barracks in London, ahead of providing troops for the Queens Guard PA UK news in pictures 8 September 2021 Workers cross London Bridge during the morning rush hour in London Reuters UK news in pictures Mixing it up: Painting it up press view in London A gallery employee poses for photographers next to a painting entitled Prairie by British artist, Louise Giovanelli during the exhibition 'Mixing it up: Painting it up' at the Hayward Gallery in London EPA UK news in pictures 6 September 2021 Traders in the Ring at the London Metal Exchange, in the City of London, after open-outcry trading returned for the first time since March 2020, when the Ring was temporarily closed due to the pandemic PA UK news in pictures 5 September 2021 People enjoy the warm weather on Sandbanks beach, Poole PA UK news in pictures 4 September 2021 Demonstrators from Animal Rebellion and Nature Rebellion protest in Trafalgar Square in London. PA UK news in pictures 3 September 2021 South Africa's Ntando Mahlangu (centre) wins the Men's 200 metres T61 Final ahead of second placed Great Britain's Richard Whitehead at the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games PA UK news in pictures 2 September 2021 A young common seal on the beach at Horsey Gap in Norfolk, as hundreds of pregnant grey seals come ashore ready for the start of the pupping season. PA UK news in pictures 1 September 2021 Goldfinches fighting over food in a garden in Strensham, Worcestershire PA UK news in pictures 31 August 2021 Gold Medallist Sarah Storey of Britain celebrates on the podium Reuters UK news in pictures 30 August 2021 Extinction Rebellion protesters hold a a tea party on Tower Bridge in London EPA UK news in pictures 29 August 2021 A police office tussles with a demonstrator on Cromwell Road outside the Natural History Museum during a protest by members of Extinction Rebellion in London PA UK news in pictures 28 August 2021 Members of the British armed forces 16 Air Assault Brigade walk to the air terminal after disembarking a Royal Airforce Voyager aircraft at Brize Norton, Oxfordshire POOL/AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 27 August 2021 Fabio Quartararo crashes during a MotoGP practice session at the British Grand Prix, Silverstone Circuit Action Images via Reuters UK news in pictures 26 August 2021 An Extinction Rebellion activist holds a placard in a fountain surrounded by police officers, during a protest next to Buckingham Palace in London Reuters UK news in pictures 25 August 2021 Gold Medallist Great Britains cyclist, Sarah Storey, celebrates after winning the Womens C5 3000m Individual Pursuit Final at the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games. It was her 15th Paralympic gold Reuters UK news in pictures 24 August 2021 A demonstrator dressed as bee during a protest by members of Extinction Rebellion on Whitehall, in central London PA UK news in pictures 23 August 2021 Former interpreters for the British forces in Afghanistan demonstrate outside the Home Office in central London AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 22 August 2021 Police officers form a line in front of the entrance to the Guildhall, London, where protesters have climbed onto a ledge above the entrance during an Extinction Rebellion stage a protest PA UK news in pictures 21 August 2021 People take part in a demonstration in solidarity with people of Afghanistan, in London Reuters UK news in pictures 20 August 2021 People zip wire across the sea from Bournemouth pier towards the beach. PA UK news in pictures 19 August 2021 Supporters of Geronimo the alpaca gather outside Shepherds Close Farm in Wooton Under Edge, Gloucestershire PA UK news in pictures 18 August 2021 Former Afghan interpreters and veterans hold a demonstration outside Downing Street, calling for support and protection for Afghan interpreters and their families PA UK news in pictures 17 August 2021 Military personnel board the RAF Airbus A400M at RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire, where evacuation flights from Afghanistan have been landing Reuters UK news in pictures 16 August 2021 Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer takes part in a minute's silence at Wolverhampton police station for the victims of the Plymouth mass shooting last week PA UK news in pictures 15 August 2021 2Storm, a ten-metre tall puppet of a mythical goddess of the sea created by Edinburgh-based visual theatre company Vision Mechanics, makes its way alongside the seafront at North Berwick, East Lothian, during a performance at the Fringe By The Sea festival PA UK news in pictures 14 August 2021 A woman and two young girls look at floral tributes in Plymouth where six people, including the offender, died of gunshot wounds in a firearms incident PA UK news in pictures 13 August 2021 Forensic officers in the Keyham area of Plymouth where six people, including the shooter, died of gunshot wounds in a firearms incident on Thursday evening PA UK news in pictures 12 August 2021 Children ride horses in the River Eden in Appleby, Cumbria, during the annual gathering of travellers for the Appleby Horse Fair PA UK news in pictures 11 August 2021 Stella Moris (left) reacts after talking to the media outside the High Court in London, following the first hearing in the Julian Assange extradition appeal, n London, following the first hearing in the Julian Assange extradition appeal. The US government has won the latest round in its High Court bid to appeal against the decision not to extradite Julian Assange on espionage charges PA UK news in pictures 10 August 2021 Students react after they receive their A-Level results at the Ark Academy, in London Reuters UK news in pictures 9 August 2021 The final athletes from Great Britain arrive home including Jason Kenny, Laura Kenny and Katie Archibald (front left-right) at Heathrow Airport, London following the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games PA UK news in pictures 8 August 2021 Great Britain's Laura Kenny during the closing ceremony of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games at the Olympic stadium in Japan PA UK news in pictures 7 August 2021 People from the Glasgow Southside community take part in the Govanhill Carnival, an anti-racist celebration of pride, unity and the contributions immigrants have made to the community in Govanhill, at Queen's Park, Glasgow PA UK news in pictures 6 August 2021 Chijindu Ujah of Britain, Zharnel Hughes of Britain, Richard Kilty of Britain and Nethaneel Mitchell-Blake of Britain celebrate winning silver as they pose with Asha Philip of Britain, Imani Lansiquot of Britain, Dina Asher-Smith of Britain and Daryll Neita of Britain after they won bronze in the women's 4 x 100m relay during Olympic Games Day 14 Getty UK news in pictures 5 August 2021 A protester places flowers on a photograph of an executed man during a demonstration organised by supporters of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) to protest against the inauguration of Iran's new president Ebrahim Raisi in central London AFP via Getty UK news in pictures 4 August 2021 England's Joe Root looks on as India's KL Rahul doesn't make it to a catch during day one of Cinch First Test match at Trent Bridge, Nottingham PA UK news in pictures 3 August 2021 Great Britain's Laura Kenny and Jason Kenny with their silver medals for the Women's Team Pursuit and Mens Team Sprint during the Track Cycling at the Izu Velodrome on the eleventh day of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games in Japan PA UK news in pictures 2 August 2021 Great Britains Charlotte Worthington competes during the Womens BMX Freestyle Final at the Tokyo Olympics PA UK news in pictures 1 August 2021 EPA

G4S Managing Director for COMPASS and Policing Services, John Whitwam said: G4S subcontracts to Jomast to support us in providing housing for asylum seekers in the North East.

"Jomast conduct regular property inspections to ensure all their accommodation meets the contractual standards set by the Home Office. Where repairs or inventory replacements are necessary they are effected within tight deadlines set by the Home Office. In addition to this, the Home Office, as well as local authority housing teams, conduct random, no-notice joint inspections of numerous properties each month.

"All properties must comply for size, safety and all other housing standards with the standards set by the Home Office and the various extant Housing Acts, and are inspected regularly to ensure that they do."A policeman has been mocked by colleagues after appearing to accidentally prosecute himself for having an untaxed vehicle.

West Yorkshire Police said he received the penalty notice after filling out a form incorrectly, to the amusement of the rest of the office.

The officer apparently put his own name on the paperwork instead of the actual offender.

A letter from the DVLA, which was sent to a police station in Bradford, demanded the officer pay 81 by 1 April or be taken to court.

It said the offence related to an untaxed vehicle found in Oak Street, Bradford, on 15 February.

To the great amusement of the rest of the office, one of our colleagues managed to fill a form in incorrectly, and prosecuted himself for driving an untaxed vehicle! the forces Roads Policing Unit wrote on Twitter.

But the officer, whose identity has not been revealed, later pleaded not guilty to the mistake, according to the policing unit.

[He] is blaming an admin error at @DVLAgovuk. Enquiries are on going it said.Sergei and Yulia Skripal may have suffered life-long brain damage as a result of the nerve agent attack in Salisbury, a court has heard.

Mr Justice Williams told the Court of Protection that the father and daughter remain in intensive care under heavy sedation.

The precise effect of their exposure on their long-term health remains unclear but medical tests indicate that their mental capacity might be compromised to an unknown and so far unascertained degree, the judge said.

At present both Mr and Ms Skripal are critical but stable; it is not inconceivable that their condition could rapidly deteriorate.

A consultant treating the victims at Salisbury District Hospital said that Mr Skripal was unable to communicate in any way, but said his daughter was unable to communicate in any meaningful way.

The doctor said it was not yet possible to tell whether the pair can recover but that they were being treated on the basis that they would wish to be kept alive and to achieve optimal recovery.

He ruled that doctors could pass fresh blood samples from the victims to the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) alongside their medical records to aid an international investigation.

Mr Justice Williams made the ruling under the Mental Capacity Act 2005 at the Governments request because the Skripals are unable to give consent.

Inspectors from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) arrive to begin work at the scene of the nerve agent attack (Reuters) (REUTERS/Peter Nicholls)

The judge said taking new samples was in their best interest and it was not possible to say whether their current incapacity was temporary or permanent.

He concluded that the OPCWs investigation may provide information on how to treat Mr Skripal and his daughter, and what happened to them.

That might simply confirm the current conclusions, it might elaborate or clarify them, it might reach a different conclusion, Mr Justice Williams said.

Although the Secretary of State [Amber Rudd] does not believe the latter prospect to be likely given her confidence in Porton Downs findings, I do not think the possibility can be ignored.

He announced his decision on Thursday after analysing the case at a private hearing earlier this week, during which evidence was heard from chemical weapons experts, arms control and the Home Office.

The samples will be used to identify the nerve agent used to poison the pair and for DNA analysis confirming the origin of blood originally tested by the British military.

Experts at the Defence, Science and Technology Laboratory at Porton Down identified the nerve agent used against the Skripals as part of the Soviet-developed novichok group.

The Prime Minister said Russia had provided no credible explanation on how the substance came to be used on the streets of Wiltshire and accused Vladimir Putins government of culpability.

OPCW investigators have carried out tests in areas visited by Mr Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury and the results are expected to take a minimum of two weeks.

Police have not confirmed how the nerve agent was administered but confirmed a total of 38 people were treated for varying symptoms resulting from exposure.

The Russian government has denied accusations of culpability amid presidential elections that saw Vladimir Putin win a fourth term in power (EPA)

Only the Skripals and Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey were kept in hospital, while an unnamed person is being treated as an outpatient.

DS Nick Bailey was discharged from treatment on Thursday, officials announced.

Wiltshire Police Chief Constable Kier Pritchard hailed the absolutely fantastic news and read statements from DS Bailey and his wife, Sarah.

The officer said the level of global support had been unbelievable, adding: Ive really appreciated every single message. One of the things that has lifted me is the public support police have received during this incident.

DS Bailey gave his heartfelt thanks to medics and said he has been focusing on getting better.

I want people to focus on the investigation  not the police officer who was unfortunate enough to be caught up in it, he added. I understand why there is attention on me, but all I have done is represent every police officer who goes out there every day and puts their life at risk.

As for what happens now  we are just taking each day as it comes normal life for me will probably never be the same.

DS Baileys wife said life had been turned upside down for the family.

Nick doesnt like the term hero, but he has always been a hero to me and our children, she added.

Ms Skripal had been visiting her father on a holiday from Russia when they fell ill after going for lunch in Salisbury on 4 March, with passersby trying to help after finding the pair slumped on a park bench.

Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Show all 15 1 /15 Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Scene of attack Members of the emergency services in hazard suits fix the tent over the bench where Sergei and Yulia Skripal were found unconscious on a park bench in Salisbury in March 2018. Getty Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Victim - Sergei Skripal The retired Russian colonel and former double agent for MI6 was in a critical condition in hospital for more than two months after being exposed to novichok in Salisbury. He was given refuge in the UK after being jailed in Moscow for treason. Mr Skripal came to Britain as part of a high-profile spy swap in 2010 in which four men were exchanged for ten Russian "sleeper agents" in the US. In this image he is speaking to his lawyer from behind bars in Moscow in 2006. AP Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Victim - Yulia Skripal Yulia Skripal was struck down by a novichok poison alongside her father Sergei. Facebook Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Scene of attack A police officer stands guard outside a branch of the Italian chain restaurant Zizzi where the pair dined at before falling ill. It was boarded off whilst investigators worked on the building and later found traces of the chemical weapon within it. AFP/Getty Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Scene of attack Large areas of central Salisbury were cordoned off by police following the discovery of the Skripals. Traces of nerve agent were also found in The Mill pub. PA Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Victim - Nick Bailey Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey, rushed to the aid of the Russian ex-spy and his daughter who were targeted with a nerve agent. He was hospitalized after aiding them and didn't leave until three weeks after the attack. Wiltshire Police/Rex Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Police investigation - Skripals home Police believe they were poisoned at home, and detectives found the highest concentration of novichok on the front door of Mr Skripals house. Getty Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Theresa May visits scene of attack Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May spokes with Wiltshire Police's Chief Constable Kier Pritchard near where the Skripal's were found. Britain expelled 23 Russian diplomats over the nerve agent poisoning and suspended high-level contacts, including for the World Cup on March 14. Theresa May told parliament that Russia had failed to respond to her demand for an explanation on how a Soviet-designed chemical, Novichok, was used in Salisbury. AFP/Getty Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Skripal days before attack Sergei Skripal days before he was exposed to Novichok, that has left him fighting for life. ITV News Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Police investigation - military involvement British soldiers were deployed soon after the attack to help a counter-terrorism investigation into the nerve agent attack. One of the places they were asked to help out with was Skripal's home and it's surrounding. They were asked to remove a vehicle connected to the agent attack in Salisbury, from a residential street in Gillingham. AFP/Getty Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Police investigation Personnel in protective coveralls and breathing equipment cover an ambulance with a tarpaulin at the Salisbury District Hospital. AFP/Getty Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Police investigation The investigation extended to the grave of Sergei Skripal's son Alexander in London Road cemetery. Getty Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Police investigation The Counter Terrorism Policing Network requested assistance from the military to remove a number of vehicles and objects from Salisbury. EPA Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Home Secretary visits scene of attack Home Secretary Amber Rudd visited the scene of the nerve agent attack at the Maltings shopping centre on 9 March. Getty Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Yulia Skripal speaks for the first time Yulia Skripal, speaking for the first time, said she felt lucky to have survived the nerve agent attack in Salisbury which left her fighting for life. Ms Skripal said her life had been turned upside down by the assassination attempt. But the Russian national added she hoped to return to her homeland one day, despite the Kremlin being blamed for the attack. Reuters

Witnesses described them twitching, vomiting and stopping breathing  all symptoms consistent with nerve agent exposure.

The deadly chemicals attack the nervous system and can kill victims by paralysing the respiratory system, causing oxygen deprivation and eventual suffocation.

One of the scientists who developed novichok before defecting to the US said there was no cure for the weapons, and any antidote must be administered extremely quickly to take effect.

Mr Skripal moved to the cathedral city after being handed over in a Cold War-style spy swap in 2010.

He had been jailed for treason in Russia for allegedly passing secrets to MI6 while a colonel in the GRU military intelligence agency.

Mr Skripals wife died in 2012, his son passed away last year and he is also believed to have lost his brother in recent years.

The Court of Protection heard that he has some relatives in Russia but the Home Office has not attempted to contact them.

The Russian government has promised to cooperate with the OPCW but dismissed its conclusions that ally Bashar al-Assad killed civilians with sarin gas in Syria last year.

It denies any wrongdoing and claims it has destroyed all chemical weapons stockpiles and complied with the Chemical Weapons Convention.

Alexander Yakovenko, the Russian ambassador to the UK, heightened tensions by accusing Britain of storing deadly novichok itself in an extraordinary press conference, while the attack was discussed in EU talks.

The Metropolitan Police has said the criminal investigation is likely to take many months and continues to appeal for anyone with information to come forward.The number of households living in temporary accommodation has surged by 64 per cent since the Tories came to power in 2010, new figures show.

Almost 79,000 families were staying in temporary housing in the last three months of last year because they didn't have a permanent home, compared with 48,010 in the same period eight years before.

The figures, published by the Government on Thursday, have been branded "unacceptable" by campaigners, who warn that temporary accommodation can have a "devastating" impact on peoples lives and mental health.

There had been a significant reduction in families living in such conditions before the Coalition government came into power, with the number having fallen by 52 per cent between 2004 and 2010 under the Labour government.

But the figure has crept up in each of the past seven years, from 69,140 in the last quarter of 2015, to 75,740 in the same period in 2016 and 78,930 at the end of last year.

Nearly 58,000 families have been accepted as homeless by their local council in the past year, equating to an increase of 8 per cent over the last five years.

Losing a private tenancy remains the single biggest cause of homelessness, with 28 per cent of all homeless households in priority need becoming homeless after being evicted from a privately rented home in the last year.

The rise in evictions coincides with increasing rents, welfare changes which have seen cuts in support for families and a shortage of affordable homes across the UK.

It comes as separate government figures show the number of children in poverty across the UK has surged by 100,000 in a year, prompting calls for the Government to urgently review cuts to child welfare.

Jon Sparkes, chief Executive at Crisis, said: It's unacceptable that nearly 79,000 households across England are finding themselves homeless and with no choice but to live in temporary accommodation such as B&Bs and hostels.

Recommended Children forced into homelessness as councils breach protection laws

"Temporary accommodation is often cramped, unsuitable, and sometimes even dangerous. It can have a devastating impact on peoples lives and mental health, and it's no place for anyone to call home.

"Worryingly, our research shows that the number of households in the worst forms of temporary accommodation is set to double by 2026 if nothing is done to address the problem. This can't go on."

Polly Neate, CEO of homelessness charity Shelter, said the "crisis" was being fuelled by a "crippling combination" of increasing rents, welfare changes and an underlying lack of affordable homes.

Its no surprise that eviction from a privately rented home is the biggest cause of homelessness. Families up and down the country are battling to pay their rent or find somewhere they can afford," she continued.

"Rents eat up such a huge chunk of income that many families then struggle to provide essentials like putting food on the table and paying their utility bills.

To prevent thousands more families from sliding into homelessness, the Government must get on with the job of building many more homes that are genuinely affordable for families to rent and making lettings more stable and secure.

UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 21 September 2021 Gabriella Diment prepares a monumental bronze patinated fibreglass wall sculpture depicting household cavalry soldiers on horseback which is expected to be sold for 12,000-18,000 when it goes up for auction at Summers Place Auctions in Billinghurst, Kent PA UK news in pictures 20 September 2021 Florist Judith Blacklock puts the finishing touches to a floral carousel installation in Halkin Arcade, which she has designed with Neill Strain for the Belgravia in Bloom festival, running from September 20-26, in London PA UK news in pictures 19 September 2021 Bubbles surround Manchester Uniteds Cristiano Ronaldo before the match against West Ham at London Stadium Action Images/Reuters UK news in pictures 18 September 2021 Children take part in the Settrington Cup Pedal Car Race as motoring enthusiasts attend the Goodwood Revival, a three-day historic car racing festival in Goodwood, Chichester, Reuters UK news in pictures 17 September 2021 Hugo, 7, from London rides past a 4x7 metre rainbow arch, made entirely of recycled aluminium cans, which has been installed by recycling initiative 'Every Can Counts', in partnership with The City of London Corporation in front of St Paul's Cathedral in London, to encourage members of the public to recycle their drinks cans ahead of recycling week, which starts on 20 September PA UK news in pictures 16 September 2021 Sheikeh MOhammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, leader of Abu Dhabi, leaves Downing Street after meeting with Boris Johnson PA UK news in pictures 15 September 2021 Children pose by ice sculptures depicting people collecting water by charity Water Aid to show the fragility of water and the threat posed by climate change in London AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 14 September 2021 Heavy rain covers the A149 near Kings Lynn in Norfolk PA UK news in pictures 13 September 2021 Luke Jerram's 'Museum of the Moon' at Durham Cathedral PA UK news in pictures 12 September 2021 Inspirational young fundraiser Tobias Weller crosses the finish line, near his home in Sheffield, as he completes his latest epic feat where he swam and triked his way to the end of his awesome year-long Ironman Challenge. 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Chief executive of the National Housing Federation, David Orr, said the growing numbers of people in temporary housing since 2010 was "yet another disastrous consequence" of the lack of social housing in England.

"B&Bs and hostels are often overcrowded and provide little privacy. They are in no way acceptable places to bring up children. Nor is paying private landlords to run these places a good use of tax payers money," he said.

Family homes can be expensive to build and for seven years there was no Government money to build houses for social rent. Of course were now in desperate need of more."Britain had stores of the Novichok nerve agent before the poisoning of former spy Sergei Skripal, the Russian ambassador to London has claimed.

In an extraordinary and lengthy press conference, Alexander Yakovenko said the accounts around the events in Salisbury were so complicated it would take someone like fictional detective Hercule Poirot to solve the crime.

Mr Skripal and his daughter Yulia are in a critical condition after collapsing on a bench on 4 March. Britain accuses Russia of attempted murder but Russia denies involvement and says Britain has no evidence.

The ambassador, who wished the Skripals a speedy recovery, said the Russians were unaware of the motivation of the British Government and its classified investigation. This case is so complicated, we need, lets say, some wisdom of a person like Poirot to investigate, he said.

With what some might regard as considerable chutzpah, surely not lost on the 63-year-old, Mr Yakovenko accused the UK of a bad record of violating international law and misleading the international community. Russia, he added, cant take British words for granted.

He continued: History shows that British statements must be verified. We demand full transparency of the investigation and full cooperation with Russia.

He even hinted Britain may have produced the nerve agent used in the attack.

How that was possible that the British authorities managed to designate the nerve agent used as so-called Novichok and its origin so quickly, he said. Could it mean that it is highly likely that the British authorities already had this nerve agent in their chemical laboratory in Porton Down?

Mr Yakovenko, who appeared to enjoy himself in front of the cameras, responded with good humour to journalists questions as he attempted to shift public opinion over the incident in Salisbury.

The ambassador, who laughed repeatedly towards the end of the press conference, linked other Russian deaths on UK soil to British secret services, suggested the Government had given residence to Russian serial killers, and said Britain was trying to find a new role in the world after Brexit by taking an anti-Russia stance.

World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 30 September 2020 Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 September 2020 A girl's silhouette is seen from behind a fabric in a tent along a beach by Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 September 2020 A Chinese woman takes a photo of herself in front of a flower display dedicated to frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China. China will celebrate national day marking the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st Getty World news in pictures 27 September 2020 The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California. 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On Wednesday, Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson compared the upcoming World Cup in Moscow to the 1936 Olympic Games under Adolf Hitler.

Mr Yakovenko hit back, telling reporters it was an insult to the Russian people who defeated nazism and lost more than 25 million people.

Despite Moscows claims of innocence, Lithuanias President offered her full support to Theresa May and the British Government over its stance on the poisoning attack.

At a European Union summit in Brussels, Dalia Grybauskaite said she was considering expelling Russian diplomats from the country  a former Soviet state which shares a border with Russias western Kaliningrad enclave.

Ms May told EU leaders they must unite to counter the threat from Russia, and said the Salisbury incident was part of a pattern of Russian aggression against Europe and its near neighbours from the western Balkans to the Near East.

 Russian ambassador claims UK has stocks of Novichok nerve agent

Addressing the fallout over Cambridge Analytica, Mr Yakovenko insisted Russia had no links to the company at the centre of the Facebook data scandal.

Asked why he was pictured alongside Alexander Nix, the suspended chief executive of the firm, he said: One day I was invited to the Windsor [polo] club, and the main prize was the Russian vodka, Ivan the Terrible. And the organisers asked me... why dont you give the prize to all the members of the team.

I gave the prize to maybe 10 people, 12 people, and that was the only time that I met this gentlemen. But the picture is good, I like it.

Meanwhile, the British Council said in a statement it had cancelled all events and programmes in Russia after being told by its foreign ministry to cease activity.

We deeply regret this and are grateful for your understanding, the statement said.

The British Council, a state-funded body that promotes British culture overseas, has worked in Moscow continuously since 1959.

Additional reporting by agenciesSurvivors and friends of the victims of the Westminster terror attack have spoken about their suffering, one year after the tragedy in which five people were killed and 50 injured.

Khalid Masood ploughed a 4x4 vehicle into pedestrians on Westminster Bridge on 22 March last year, killing US tourist Kurt Cochran, Romanian visitor Andreea Cristea, 31, and Britons Aysha Frade, 44, and Leslie Rhodes, 75.

He then stabbed unarmed police constable Keith Palmer to death as he stood on duty outside the Houses of Parliament. One year after the 48-year-olds death, a friend paid tribute to a courageous officer and family man who idolised his wife and daughter.

Hospital shop worker Francisco Lopes, who was among the dozens injured during the attack, said he was forced to give up his job and plans to emigrate to escape the haunting memories of the atrocity.

The 27-year-old was walking across Westminster Bridge when he was flung across the bonnet of a vehicle driven by the extremist.

He said he had almost reached Big Ben when he heard a woman scream behind him and saw a Hyundai vehicle veer into the cycle lane.

I saw that the car was on the pavement. Thats a moment thats been in my head a lot, he said.

The car just comes onto the pavement. I had no time to do anything, it just went at me. I just felt that I spun in the air. I was just on the ground after that.

Thats all I can recall from that moment. At the time I had no clue what was going on.

Fortunately I didnt pass out, I was just moving in pain on the floor.

PC Keith Palmer (Metropolitan Police)

He said he then looked around and saw people who appeared in a far worse condition than he was.

I saw an unconscious lady to my left, and another lady who was screaming to my right, he said. It is a pretty horrific memory that I have still.

The former English teacher required surgery on his hand and months of physiotherapy to regain its full use.

He still struggles with memories of that day, dislikes being in crowded places and was forced to give up his job near the site of the attack because of the sadness that his journey to work provoked.

Looking back on it now, my life is so much different than it was, he said.

I was so different than I am now. Sometimes I wish I was that person still. I was much stronger. I had a much stronger character. Ive kind of lost a lot of confidence in myself.

I try not to talk a lot about it because I dont want people to feel sorry for me. I want to try my best to be the normal person that I was. Its been quite tough.

He is now set to move from London to Ecuador, where his mother lives.

I dont really enjoy my life here after the accident, I just want to go where I feel comfortable, he said. My goal is to go back to South America to be with my fiancee.

Also speaking on the eve of the anniversary, junior doctor Colleen Anderson, who was working at St Thomas Hospital at the time of the attack, described seeing mayhem when she arrived to treat the casualties of the attack.

She was only eight months into her training at the time and said much of the two hours she spent attending to the wounded on the bridge was with PC Kristofer Aves, who has been left paralysed by the injuries he suffered.

In pictures: Westminster attack Show all 9 1 /9 In pictures: Westminster attack In pictures: Westminster attack An air ambulance lands after gunfire sounds were heard close to the Palace of Westminster in London PA wire In pictures: Westminster attack MPs wait until the situation is under control in Westminster. 'The alleged assailant was shot by armed police,' David Lidington, leader of the House of Commons, told the house. BBC News In pictures: Westminster attack Crowds gather in Westminster after shooting incident, which police are treating as terror attack BBC News In pictures: Westminster attack Police were also called to an incident on Westminster Bridge nearby AP In pictures: Westminster attack Early reports indicate the car, which mounted the pavement on Westminster Bridge and mowed into around a dozen people, was the same vehicle which then rammed into the railings of the Palace of Westminster, just around the corner Reuters In pictures: Westminster attack Security sources described the suspected assailant as a middle-aged Asian man, who is understood to have left the car before attacking a police officer with a seven-to-eight inch knife PA wire In pictures: Westminster attack Police have asked people to avoid the immediate area to allow emergency services to deal with the ongoing incident AP In pictures: Westminster attack One woman has died and a number of others, including the police officer, have been hurt, according to a junior doctor at St Thomas' Hospital Reuters In pictures: Westminster attack At least three gun shots were heard by those inside Westminster, and proceedings in the House of Commons have been suspended AP

The police officer had been celebrating a day of professional success when the attack unfolded, having just been presented with a commendation for his work as a police liaison officer.

Dr Anderson, 27, said: I spent the majority of my time with him, I was holding him in a C-spine position to keep his neck dead still.

He wont remember any of the day. I was speaking to him, keeping him awake.

I was asking him about his day, about his family  he was talking about the award he got.

I was just trying to calm him down as well.

Looking back one year later, Dr Anderson said: I remember it vividly and perhaps I would not remember so much if there were not these constant reminders.

There was a show on looking back at 2017 and all the attacks and unfortunately I was on call when London Bridge happened.

But she added good things had come from the tragic events, saying they brought people much closer together.

Melissa Cochran, whose husband Kurt was among the five killed in the attack and who suffered a broken rib and leg when she was hit by Masoods vehicle, said she continued to grieve for her partner.

We all miss Kurt very much and speak of him often, she said in a statement. I continue to focus on my recovery and think of all of the victims of that terrible day at this difficult time.

While I continue to grieve my husband Kurt and all the victims of that day, I strive to move ahead and focus on my recovery as well as honouring Kurts life by advocating love, forgiveness and peace.

The inquests into the five deaths will begin in September, followed by a separate jury inquest into the death of Masood, who was shot by police.

Lawyer Patrick Maguire from Slater and Gordon, which is representing the victims families, said: When Khalid Masood drove into our clients in a despicable act of evil a year ago he changed their lives forever.

Many still face a daily struggle with their physical injuries that are unlikely to ever properly heal. But what has blighted all of their lives are the mental scars from the horrors they experienced that day.

The anniversary of this terrible day should be used to remember those who lost their lives and support those who survived with their recovery.

We look forward to the inquest, when questions about how this atrocity was ever allowed to happen, will hopefully be answered.

Recommended Last message left by Westminster attacker Khalid Masood revealed

PC Shaun Cartwright paid tribute to his friend PC Palmer, calling him a proud and courageous police officer who did his job and never wanted any fuss.

In a statement released through Scotland Yard he said: Keith loved being a police officer, he just wanted to help people and do his best.

Keith was always happy, always the first to help anyone out, first in to work and the last one out.

He was a proud and courageous police officer who did his job and never wanted any fuss or to be the centre of attention. Keith was a true and loyal friend, utterly reliable.

Recommended Thousands link hands on Westminster Bridge for memorial

Most of all I will remember him as a family man who idolised his wife, daughter and his family; theyre the important ones that I think about a year on from the Westminster attack.

Senior officers are expected to attend a number of private memorial services on Thursday to mark the first anniversary of the atrocity, but the force has not made details public.

PC Palmers name will be one of 1,400 inscribed on the new UK Police Memorial being built in Staffordshire, commemorating officers who were killed on duty. Another 4,000 of those who died on duty will be remembered inside the memorial.

Supporters have been asked to donate 5 towards the scheme, for which 3.1m has been raised of a total 4m cost.

It includes an education programme to teach children about policing and support scheme for bereaved families.

Sir Hugh Orde, chair of trustees of the UK Police Memorial, said: This has been an unprecedented year for policing with officers and staff repeatedly putting themselves in danger to keep the public safe and protecting them from harm.

Sadly, in March last year we saw one of my policing colleagues Pc Keith Palmer lose his life during a terrorist attack in London whilst protecting our freedoms and safeguarding our democracy.

Keiths death put greater emphasis on the need to create a memorial where the nation can go to commemorate our police service.Leaders of several European countries have shown their support for offering the British public a say on the final Brexit deal, the Liberal Democrats have claimed.

As Theresa May arrived in Brussels for a crucial EU summit, Lib Dem leader Sir Vince Cable held meetings on the margins with a group of European liberal prime ministers, who verbally agreed to back calls for fresh referendum on the final deal.

However, confusion abounded when the group representing liberal EU parties put out a contradictory statement an hour later, in which they claimed no such statement had been agreed.

The Lib Dems had sent out a press release boasting of the support of eight prime ministers, including the Netherlands, Belgium, Finland and the Czech Republic.

It claimed the leaders said: We regret Brexit, but acknowledge the choice made by British voters for the UK Government to negotiate withdrawal.

We further acknowledge and support the Liberal Democrats call for the British people to have the final say on the Brexit deal.

All parties need to seek a broad deal accommodating both the position of the UK Government and the principles on which the European Union is built.

In a humiliating twist, the party claimed it was backed by eight prime ministers  including Slovenian PM Miro Cerar, who resigned his post earlier this month.

Sir Vince said the statement offered a clear signal that the EU would welcome an exit from Brexit with open arms.

Polls show that there is a growing desire among the British public for a vote on the terms of the deal. People can now be reassured that there is no desire among EU leaders to punish us if we decided to remain in the bloc, he said.

However, the ALDE Party, an umbrella group representing liberal parties in Europe, said the statement was incorrect.

A spokesman said: ALDE leaders did meet on 22 March in Brussels and did support Vince Cable and the Liberal Democrats.

However, no statement was agreed upon or issued.

If there would have been such a statement issued by the ALDE Party, it would have been done in their capacity as party leaders, not as prime ministers.

A Liberal Democrat source said the statement had been verbally agreed by the prime ministers but not by all of their parties.

The mix-up came as the British Prime Minister travelled to Brussels for the European Council summit, where she urged other European leaders to unite against Russias reckless and brazen nerve agent attack in Salisbury.

UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 22 September 2021 A new sign hangs on the Millicent Fawcett statue after it was altered by CrackTheCrises coalition activists to highlight the climate crisis as a feminist struggle in Parliament Square in London EPA UK news in pictures 21 September 2021 Gabriella Diment prepares a monumental bronze patinated fibreglass wall sculpture depicting household cavalry soldiers on horseback which is expected to be sold for 12,000-18,000 when it goes up for auction at Summers Place Auctions in Billinghurst, Kent PA UK news in pictures 20 September 2021 Florist Judith Blacklock puts the finishing touches to a floral carousel installation in Halkin Arcade, which she has designed with Neill Strain for the Belgravia in Bloom festival, running from September 20-26, in London PA UK news in pictures 19 September 2021 Bubbles surround Manchester Uniteds Cristiano Ronaldo before the match against West Ham at London Stadium Action Images/Reuters UK news in pictures 18 September 2021 Children take part in the Settrington Cup Pedal Car Race as motoring enthusiasts attend the Goodwood Revival, a three-day historic car racing festival in Goodwood, Chichester, Reuters UK news in pictures 17 September 2021 Hugo, 7, from London rides past a 4x7 metre rainbow arch, made entirely of recycled aluminium cans, which has been installed by recycling initiative 'Every Can Counts', in partnership with The City of London Corporation in front of St Paul's Cathedral in London, to encourage members of the public to recycle their drinks cans ahead of recycling week, which starts on 20 September PA UK news in pictures 16 September 2021 Sheikeh MOhammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, leader of Abu Dhabi, leaves Downing Street after meeting with Boris Johnson PA UK news in pictures 15 September 2021 Children pose by ice sculptures depicting people collecting water by charity Water Aid to show the fragility of water and the threat posed by climate change in London AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 14 September 2021 Heavy rain covers the A149 near Kings Lynn in Norfolk PA UK news in pictures 13 September 2021 Luke Jerram's 'Museum of the Moon' at Durham Cathedral PA UK news in pictures 12 September 2021 Inspirational young fundraiser Tobias Weller crosses the finish line, near his home in Sheffield, as he completes his latest epic feat where he swam and triked his way to the end of his awesome year-long Ironman Challenge. This is the third challenge Tobias, who has cerebral palsy and autism, has completed, raising more than 150,000 for his school and Sheffield Children Hospitals charity PA UK news in pictures 11 September 2021 British player Emma Raducanu, holds up the US Open championship trophy winning the women's singles final of the US Open in New York AP UK news in pictures 10 September 2021 People paddle board during a misty morning in Ullswater, the second largest lake in the Lake District, Cumbria PA UK news in pictures 9 September 2021 Troops from Wiltshire based 4 Armoured Close Support Battalion Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers during final inspection at Wellington Barracks in London, ahead of providing troops for the Queens Guard PA UK news in pictures 8 September 2021 Workers cross London Bridge during the morning rush hour in London Reuters UK news in pictures Mixing it up: Painting it up press view in London A gallery employee poses for photographers next to a painting entitled Prairie by British artist, Louise Giovanelli during the exhibition 'Mixing it up: Painting it up' at the Hayward Gallery in London EPA UK news in pictures 6 September 2021 Traders in the Ring at the London Metal Exchange, in the City of London, after open-outcry trading returned for the first time since March 2020, when the Ring was temporarily closed due to the pandemic PA UK news in pictures 5 September 2021 People enjoy the warm weather on Sandbanks beach, Poole PA UK news in pictures 4 September 2021 Demonstrators from Animal Rebellion and Nature Rebellion protest in Trafalgar Square in London. PA UK news in pictures 3 September 2021 South Africa's Ntando Mahlangu (centre) wins the Men's 200 metres T61 Final ahead of second placed Great Britain's Richard Whitehead at the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games PA UK news in pictures 2 September 2021 A young common seal on the beach at Horsey Gap in Norfolk, as hundreds of pregnant grey seals come ashore ready for the start of the pupping season. PA UK news in pictures 1 September 2021 Goldfinches fighting over food in a garden in Strensham, Worcestershire PA UK news in pictures 31 August 2021 Gold Medallist Sarah Storey of Britain celebrates on the podium Reuters UK news in pictures 30 August 2021 Extinction Rebellion protesters hold a a tea party on Tower Bridge in London EPA UK news in pictures 29 August 2021 A police office tussles with a demonstrator on Cromwell Road outside the Natural History Museum during a protest by members of Extinction Rebellion in London PA UK news in pictures 28 August 2021 Members of the British armed forces 16 Air Assault Brigade walk to the air terminal after disembarking a Royal Airforce Voyager aircraft at Brize Norton, Oxfordshire POOL/AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 27 August 2021 Fabio Quartararo crashes during a MotoGP practice session at the British Grand Prix, Silverstone Circuit Action Images via Reuters UK news in pictures 26 August 2021 An Extinction Rebellion activist holds a placard in a fountain surrounded by police officers, during a protest next to Buckingham Palace in London Reuters UK news in pictures 25 August 2021 Gold Medallist Great Britains cyclist, Sarah Storey, celebrates after winning the Womens C5 3000m Individual Pursuit Final at the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games. It was her 15th Paralympic gold Reuters UK news in pictures 24 August 2021 A demonstrator dressed as bee during a protest by members of Extinction Rebellion on Whitehall, in central London PA UK news in pictures 23 August 2021 Former interpreters for the British forces in Afghanistan demonstrate outside the Home Office in central London AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 22 August 2021 Police officers form a line in front of the entrance to the Guildhall, London, where protesters have climbed onto a ledge above the entrance during an Extinction Rebellion stage a protest PA UK news in pictures 21 August 2021 People take part in a demonstration in solidarity with people of Afghanistan, in London Reuters UK news in pictures 20 August 2021 People zip wire across the sea from Bournemouth pier towards the beach. PA UK news in pictures 19 August 2021 Supporters of Geronimo the alpaca gather outside Shepherds Close Farm in Wooton Under Edge, Gloucestershire PA UK news in pictures 18 August 2021 Former Afghan interpreters and veterans hold a demonstration outside Downing Street, calling for support and protection for Afghan interpreters and their families PA UK news in pictures 17 August 2021 Military personnel board the RAF Airbus A400M at RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire, where evacuation flights from Afghanistan have been landing Reuters UK news in pictures 16 August 2021 Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer takes part in a minute's silence at Wolverhampton police station for the victims of the Plymouth mass shooting last week PA UK news in pictures 15 August 2021 2Storm, a ten-metre tall puppet of a mythical goddess of the sea created by Edinburgh-based visual theatre company Vision Mechanics, makes its way alongside the seafront at North Berwick, East Lothian, during a performance at the Fringe By The Sea festival PA UK news in pictures 14 August 2021 A woman and two young girls look at floral tributes in Plymouth where six people, including the offender, died of gunshot wounds in a firearms incident PA UK news in pictures 13 August 2021 Forensic officers in the Keyham area of Plymouth where six people, including the shooter, died of gunshot wounds in a firearms incident on Thursday evening PA UK news in pictures 12 August 2021 Children ride horses in the River Eden in Appleby, Cumbria, during the annual gathering of travellers for the Appleby Horse Fair PA UK news in pictures 11 August 2021 Stella Moris (left) reacts after talking to the media outside the High Court in London, following the first hearing in the Julian Assange extradition appeal, n London, following the first hearing in the Julian Assange extradition appeal. The US government has won the latest round in its High Court bid to appeal against the decision not to extradite Julian Assange on espionage charges PA UK news in pictures 10 August 2021 Students react after they receive their A-Level results at the Ark Academy, in London Reuters UK news in pictures 9 August 2021 The final athletes from Great Britain arrive home including Jason Kenny, Laura Kenny and Katie Archibald (front left-right) at Heathrow Airport, London following the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games PA UK news in pictures 8 August 2021 Great Britain's Laura Kenny during the closing ceremony of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games at the Olympic stadium in Japan PA UK news in pictures 7 August 2021 People from the Glasgow Southside community take part in the Govanhill Carnival, an anti-racist celebration of pride, unity and the contributions immigrants have made to the community in Govanhill, at Queen's Park, Glasgow PA UK news in pictures 6 August 2021 Chijindu Ujah of Britain, Zharnel Hughes of Britain, Richard Kilty of Britain and Nethaneel Mitchell-Blake of Britain celebrate winning silver as they pose with Asha Philip of Britain, Imani Lansiquot of Britain, Dina Asher-Smith of Britain and Daryll Neita of Britain after they won bronze in the women's 4 x 100m relay during Olympic Games Day 14 Getty UK news in pictures 5 August 2021 A protester places flowers on a photograph of an executed man during a demonstration organised by supporters of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) to protest against the inauguration of Iran's new president Ebrahim Raisi in central London AFP via Getty UK news in pictures 4 August 2021 England's Joe Root looks on as India's KL Rahul doesn't make it to a catch during day one of Cinch First Test match at Trent Bridge, Nottingham PA

Leaders of the remaining 27 EU nations are expected to rubber-stamp plans for a Brexit transition deal  as agreed by Brexit Secretary David Davis and EU Brexit chief Michel Barnier  and pave the way for talks of the future trading relationship.

Arriving at the summit, Ms May struck an optimistic note, saying: We made considerable progress through the agreement on the implementation period, which will bring certainty to businesses and people.

I look forward to the European Council endorsing that agreement and moving on swiftly to talk about the future partnership that we all want to build together.Cabinet ministers ministerial aides have almost unanimously called on Theresa May to sack Gavin Williamsons parliamentary aide over her criticism of the Governments policy on fishing rights after Brexit.

Aides to other ministers used a meeting of Conservative parliamentary private secretaries (PPSs) on Thursday morning to demand that Downing Street remove Anne-Marie Trevelyan from her post.

Sources told The Independent that an aide to Philip Hammond was among those leading the calls, prolonging a long-standing rift between the Chancellor and the Defence Secretary.

Ms Trevelyan, Mr Williamsons PPS, took part in a protest on Wednesday in which former Ukip leader Nigel Farage threw a tray of haddock into the River Thames.

Recommended 13 Tory MPs warn Theresa May over Brexit transition proposals

The Berwick MP appeared alongside arch Brexiteer Tory backbencher Jacob Rees-Mogg at a press conference, along with campaigners from the Fishing for Leave group, although they left before Mr Farage arrived.

Eurosceptics were furious that the transition deal agreed with Brussels will see EU countries retain access to the UKs fishing waters until 2021.

Conservative whips had ordered MPs not to take part in the protest, and Ms Trevelyans participation angered many of her fellow ministerial aides. Although PPSs are not ministers, their key role as secretary of states eyes and ears in Parliament means they are still expected to toe the party line.

Conservative sources said the anger at Ms Trevelyan was partly a result of frustration at Ms Mays previous decision to promote another arch Brexiteer, Suella Fernandes, despite her previously having been seen to speak out against the Government.

As the then chair of the European Research Group of Eurosceptic Tory backbench MPs, Ms Fernandes orchestrated a letter to the Prime Minister last September trying to force her to pursue a hard Brexit  a move that was seen as being incompatible with the MPs other role as the then PPS to Mr Hammond.

Many Tory MPs were angered when, rather than being punished for speaking out, she was instead promoted by being given a plum role as a Brexit minister at the Department for Exiting the European Union.

Other government PPSs used a meeting with Ms Mays own parliamentary aides, George Hollingbery and Seema Kennedy, to express their anger and warn that the Prime Minister needed to take a stronger line with Ms Treveylan than she had with Ms Fernandes.

UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 22 September 2021 A new sign hangs on the Millicent Fawcett statue after it was altered by CrackTheCrises coalition activists to highlight the climate crisis as a feminist struggle in Parliament Square in London EPA UK news in pictures 21 September 2021 Gabriella Diment prepares a monumental bronze patinated fibreglass wall sculpture depicting household cavalry soldiers on horseback which is expected to be sold for 12,000-18,000 when it goes up for auction at Summers Place Auctions in Billinghurst, Kent PA UK news in pictures 20 September 2021 Florist Judith Blacklock puts the finishing touches to a floral carousel installation in Halkin Arcade, which she has designed with Neill Strain for the Belgravia in Bloom festival, running from September 20-26, in London PA UK news in pictures 19 September 2021 Bubbles surround Manchester Uniteds Cristiano Ronaldo before the match against West Ham at London Stadium Action Images/Reuters UK news in pictures 18 September 2021 Children take part in the Settrington Cup Pedal Car Race as motoring enthusiasts attend the Goodwood Revival, a three-day historic car racing festival in Goodwood, Chichester, Reuters UK news in pictures 17 September 2021 Hugo, 7, from London rides past a 4x7 metre rainbow arch, made entirely of recycled aluminium cans, which has been installed by recycling initiative 'Every Can Counts', in partnership with The City of London Corporation in front of St Paul's Cathedral in London, to encourage members of the public to recycle their drinks cans ahead of recycling week, which starts on 20 September PA UK news in pictures 16 September 2021 Sheikeh MOhammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, leader of Abu Dhabi, leaves Downing Street after meeting with Boris Johnson PA UK news in pictures 15 September 2021 Children pose by ice sculptures depicting people collecting water by charity Water Aid to show the fragility of water and the threat posed by climate change in London AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 14 September 2021 Heavy rain covers the A149 near Kings Lynn in Norfolk PA UK news in pictures 13 September 2021 Luke Jerram's 'Museum of the Moon' at Durham Cathedral PA UK news in pictures 12 September 2021 Inspirational young fundraiser Tobias Weller crosses the finish line, near his home in Sheffield, as he completes his latest epic feat where he swam and triked his way to the end of his awesome year-long Ironman Challenge. This is the third challenge Tobias, who has cerebral palsy and autism, has completed, raising more than 150,000 for his school and Sheffield Children Hospitals charity PA UK news in pictures 11 September 2021 British player Emma Raducanu, holds up the US Open championship trophy winning the women's singles final of the US Open in New York AP UK news in pictures 10 September 2021 People paddle board during a misty morning in Ullswater, the second largest lake in the Lake District, Cumbria PA UK news in pictures 9 September 2021 Troops from Wiltshire based 4 Armoured Close Support Battalion Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers during final inspection at Wellington Barracks in London, ahead of providing troops for the Queens Guard PA UK news in pictures 8 September 2021 Workers cross London Bridge during the morning rush hour in London Reuters UK news in pictures Mixing it up: Painting it up press view in London A gallery employee poses for photographers next to a painting entitled Prairie by British artist, Louise Giovanelli during the exhibition 'Mixing it up: Painting it up' at the Hayward Gallery in London EPA UK news in pictures 6 September 2021 Traders in the Ring at the London Metal Exchange, in the City of London, after open-outcry trading returned for the first time since March 2020, when the Ring was temporarily closed due to the pandemic PA UK news in pictures 5 September 2021 People enjoy the warm weather on Sandbanks beach, Poole PA UK news in pictures 4 September 2021 Demonstrators from Animal Rebellion and Nature Rebellion protest in Trafalgar Square in London. PA UK news in pictures 3 September 2021 South Africa's Ntando Mahlangu (centre) wins the Men's 200 metres T61 Final ahead of second placed Great Britain's Richard Whitehead at the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games PA UK news in pictures 2 September 2021 A young common seal on the beach at Horsey Gap in Norfolk, as hundreds of pregnant grey seals come ashore ready for the start of the pupping season. PA UK news in pictures 1 September 2021 Goldfinches fighting over food in a garden in Strensham, Worcestershire PA UK news in pictures 31 August 2021 Gold Medallist Sarah Storey of Britain celebrates on the podium Reuters UK news in pictures 30 August 2021 Extinction Rebellion protesters hold a a tea party on Tower Bridge in London EPA UK news in pictures 29 August 2021 A police office tussles with a demonstrator on Cromwell Road outside the Natural History Museum during a protest by members of Extinction Rebellion in London PA UK news in pictures 28 August 2021 Members of the British armed forces 16 Air Assault Brigade walk to the air terminal after disembarking a Royal Airforce Voyager aircraft at Brize Norton, Oxfordshire POOL/AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 27 August 2021 Fabio Quartararo crashes during a MotoGP practice session at the British Grand Prix, Silverstone Circuit Action Images via Reuters UK news in pictures 26 August 2021 An Extinction Rebellion activist holds a placard in a fountain surrounded by police officers, during a protest next to Buckingham Palace in London Reuters UK news in pictures 25 August 2021 Gold Medallist Great Britains cyclist, Sarah Storey, celebrates after winning the Womens C5 3000m Individual Pursuit Final at the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games. It was her 15th Paralympic gold Reuters UK news in pictures 24 August 2021 A demonstrator dressed as bee during a protest by members of Extinction Rebellion on Whitehall, in central London PA UK news in pictures 23 August 2021 Former interpreters for the British forces in Afghanistan demonstrate outside the Home Office in central London AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 22 August 2021 Police officers form a line in front of the entrance to the Guildhall, London, where protesters have climbed onto a ledge above the entrance during an Extinction Rebellion stage a protest PA UK news in pictures 21 August 2021 People take part in a demonstration in solidarity with people of Afghanistan, in London Reuters UK news in pictures 20 August 2021 People zip wire across the sea from Bournemouth pier towards the beach. PA UK news in pictures 19 August 2021 Supporters of Geronimo the alpaca gather outside Shepherds Close Farm in Wooton Under Edge, Gloucestershire PA UK news in pictures 18 August 2021 Former Afghan interpreters and veterans hold a demonstration outside Downing Street, calling for support and protection for Afghan interpreters and their families PA UK news in pictures 17 August 2021 Military personnel board the RAF Airbus A400M at RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire, where evacuation flights from Afghanistan have been landing Reuters UK news in pictures 16 August 2021 Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer takes part in a minute's silence at Wolverhampton police station for the victims of the Plymouth mass shooting last week PA UK news in pictures 15 August 2021 2Storm, a ten-metre tall puppet of a mythical goddess of the sea created by Edinburgh-based visual theatre company Vision Mechanics, makes its way alongside the seafront at North Berwick, East Lothian, during a performance at the Fringe By The Sea festival PA UK news in pictures 14 August 2021 A woman and two young girls look at floral tributes in Plymouth where six people, including the offender, died of gunshot wounds in a firearms incident PA UK news in pictures 13 August 2021 Forensic officers in the Keyham area of Plymouth where six people, including the shooter, died of gunshot wounds in a firearms incident on Thursday evening PA UK news in pictures 12 August 2021 Children ride horses in the River Eden in Appleby, Cumbria, during the annual gathering of travellers for the Appleby Horse Fair PA UK news in pictures 11 August 2021 Stella Moris (left) reacts after talking to the media outside the High Court in London, following the first hearing in the Julian Assange extradition appeal, n London, following the first hearing in the Julian Assange extradition appeal. The US government has won the latest round in its High Court bid to appeal against the decision not to extradite Julian Assange on espionage charges PA UK news in pictures 10 August 2021 Students react after they receive their A-Level results at the Ark Academy, in London Reuters UK news in pictures 9 August 2021 The final athletes from Great Britain arrive home including Jason Kenny, Laura Kenny and Katie Archibald (front left-right) at Heathrow Airport, London following the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games PA UK news in pictures 8 August 2021 Great Britain's Laura Kenny during the closing ceremony of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games at the Olympic stadium in Japan PA UK news in pictures 7 August 2021 People from the Glasgow Southside community take part in the Govanhill Carnival, an anti-racist celebration of pride, unity and the contributions immigrants have made to the community in Govanhill, at Queen's Park, Glasgow PA UK news in pictures 6 August 2021 Chijindu Ujah of Britain, Zharnel Hughes of Britain, Richard Kilty of Britain and Nethaneel Mitchell-Blake of Britain celebrate winning silver as they pose with Asha Philip of Britain, Imani Lansiquot of Britain, Dina Asher-Smith of Britain and Daryll Neita of Britain after they won bronze in the women's 4 x 100m relay during Olympic Games Day 14 Getty UK news in pictures 5 August 2021 A protester places flowers on a photograph of an executed man during a demonstration organised by supporters of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) to protest against the inauguration of Iran's new president Ebrahim Raisi in central London AFP via Getty UK news in pictures 4 August 2021 England's Joe Root looks on as India's KL Rahul doesn't make it to a catch during day one of Cinch First Test match at Trent Bridge, Nottingham PA

One PPS who attended the meeting told The Independent: There was a feeling that the Prime Minister had been weak in her handling of Suella Fernandes and it could not happen again in respect to Anne-Marie.

It was raised that Anne-Marie had basically supported the Farage fish protest and also asked a very unhelpful PMQ.

It was clearly disloyal - theres no doubt about that. There was a feeling among the existing PPS group that this should be reflected in her sacking. That feeling was pretty unanimous.

In response, Mr Hollingbery and Ms Kennedy reportedly said the issue had already been raised at the daily Downing Street strategy meeting on Thursday morning, and promised to report back to Ms May on the strength of feeling among the other PPSs.

The source said: Loyalty is important and its crucial that everyone from ministers and PPSs downwards toe the line.

If the Prime Minister doesnt sack her it sends the wrong message to backbenchers and gives them carte blanche to do whatever they like. It would make the PM look even weaker.

It is understood the calls for Ms Trevelyan to be sacked were led by Simon Hoare, the aide to Education Secretary Damian Hinds, and Kwasi Kwarteng, who fills the same role for Mr Hammond.

The involvement of Mr Kwarteng, a fellow Brexiteer of Ms Trevelyan, is likely to fuel rumours of an ongoing rift between the Treasury and the Ministry of Defence.

Earlier this year, the Chancellors team reacted angrily to Mr Williamson publicly demanding more money for the military and banning Mr Hammond from using RAF planes until Treasury debts had been paid.

As an extraordinary briefing war unfolded, allies of Mr Hammond suggested Mr Williamson had not yet grasped the complexities of the defence budget and nicknamed him Private Pike in reference to the intellectually-challenged character in the Dads Army television series.

 Jacob Rees-Mogg states he is not a 'fish thrower' after reports of protest about Brexit fishing quotas

The issue of fishing rights during the Brexit transition has caused a major headache for Downing Street after 13 Tory MPs, including Mr Rees-Mogg, warned they would vote down the final Brexit deal if the issue is not resolved.

In a letter to the Prime Minister, they called the current proposals completely unacceptable.

Ms Trevelyan also raised the issue of fishing rights with Ms May during Prime Ministers Questions on Wednesday, saying the Governments deal with the EU had left fisherman very anxious.

She said: The EU agreement published this week has sadly left my fisherman in Amble and the North East very anxious.

While it is great news that we will regain control of our fishing grounds at the ends of the implementation period, there is real concern that our EU colleagues might try to take advantage of our losing our voting in the [Common Fisheries Policy] by altering discard rules or quota rules during the implementation period.

Will the Prime Minister consider asking the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs to prepare a financial mitigation plan to protect our fleet until 2021 should we need to do so?

Ms May replied: The implementation period is there so that people have the certainty of being able to operate on the same basis until we reach the new partnership that we are negotiating. As I said earlier, in that new partnership, we want to take back control of our waters but ensure that British fishermen are not unfairly denied access to other waters and that we can rebuild our fishing industry. That is important.Britain is set to be pulled into talks with Spain and the EU about the status of Gibraltar after Brexit, under a roadmap for future negotiations set to be agreed by EU leaders on Friday.

Spain threatened to block progress in Brexit talks this week after David Davis said in passing that the Brexit withdrawal agreement would apply to the British tax haven  reigniting long-held anxieties in Madrid about the British presence there.

As recently as Tuesday senior EU officials said concerned member countries  which later turned out to be Spain  were refusing to back the agreement in preparatory meetings for the summit.

By Wednesday evening diplomats were indicating that the Spanish government had relented on the issue, but on the condition that the 27 EU member states include Gibraltar high up on the list of issues they say must be resolved.

The question under discussion will be whether the withdrawal agreement and transition period agreed between David Davis and Michel Barnier applies to Gibraltar as it would to the rest of the UK.

A final draft of the European Council guidelines, widely expected to be agreed by heads of government at a Brussels summit on Friday, but leaked in advance to The Independent says:

The European Council calls for intensified efforts on the remaining withdrawal issues as well as issues related to the territorial application of the Withdrawal Agreement, notably as regards Gibraltar, and reiterates that nothing is agreed until everything is agreed,

The clause, the very first part of the draft text, effectively says the issue of Gibraltar must be resolved before a deal can be struck, and alludes to the fact that Spain has a veto on the entire deal, in common with the other EU member states.

It will be formally signed off by the 27 other EU leaders in the second day of the European Council summit on Friday, after Theresa May goes home following dinner on Thursday night.

On Thursday night Ms May will address leaders over dinner about Brexit, and also update them on the state of the investigation into the Salisbury poisoning. The British government is hoping for a strong statement condemning Russia for the attack, but is not pushing for additional sanctions against Vladimir Putin's regime.

Other issues on the summit's packed agenda include a tax on digital tech giants, the response to growing trade dispute over steel tariffs with Donald Trump's administration, and relations with the Western Balkans countries, which hope to join the EU.

Brexit so far: in pictures Show all 53 1 /53 Brexit so far: in pictures Brexit so far: in pictures Brexit campaign Boris Johnson led the VoteLeave campaign PA Brexit so far: in pictures Brexit campaign Boris Johnson MP, Labour MP Gisela Stuart and UKIP MP Douglas Carswell address the people of Stafford in Market Square during the Vote Leave Brexit Battle Bus tour on 17 May 2016. Their lead line on the tour was: We send the EU 350 million a week, let's fund our NHS instead. Getty Brexit so far: in pictures Voting day A man shelters from the rain as he arrives at a polling station in London on 23 June 2016. Millions of Britons voted in the referendum on whether to stay in or leave the European Union AFP/Getty Brexit so far: in pictures Referendum results Leader of Ukip, Nigel Farage, reacts at the Leave EU referendum party at Millbank Tower in central London as results indicated that it was likely the UK would leave the European Union AFP/Getty Brexit so far: in pictures Protesting the result A young couple painted as EU flags and a man with a sign reading Im not leaving protest outside Downing Street against the voters decision to leave the EU on 24 June 2016 Getty Brexit so far: in pictures David Cameron resigns British Prime Minister David Cameron resigns on the steps of 10 Downing Street on 24 June 2016 after the results of the EU referendum were declared and the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union Getty Brexit so far: in pictures Theresa May Becomes the new Conservative Party leader Theresa May receives a kiss from her husband Philip, after becoming the new Conservative Party leader on 11 July 2016. May became Prime Minister two days later and although she voted to remain in the referendum was keen to lead Britains Brexit talks after her only rival in the race to succeed David Cameron pulled out unexpectedly. May was left as the only contender standing after the withdrawal from the leadership race of Andrea Leadsom, who faced criticism for suggesting she was more qualified to be prime minister because she had children AFP/Getty Brexit so far: in pictures Lancaster House keynote speech on Brexit British Prime Minister Theresa May delivers her keynote speech on Brexit at Lancaster House in London on 17 January 2017. Where she spoke about her offer to introduce a transition period after the UK formally leaves the European Union in March 2019. Despite repeating the pro-Brexit mantra of no deal is better than a bad deal, the Prime Minister claimed she wanted a tone of trust between the negotiators and said Britain was leaving the EU but not Europe. She said there should be a clear double lock needed for the transitional period to make sure businesses had time to prepare for changes to their trading relationships with the EU Getty Brexit so far: in pictures Triggering of Article 50 British Prime Minister Theresa May in the cabinet, sitting below a painting of Britain's first Prime Minister Robert Walpole, signs the official letter to European Council President Donald Tusk invoking Article 50 and the United Kingdom's intention to leave the EU on 29 March 2017 Getty Brexit so far: in pictures Gibraltar nonsense Tensions have risen over Brexit negotiations for the Rock of Gibraltar. The European Council has said Gibraltar would be included in a trade deal between London and Brussels only with the agreement of Spain. While former Conservative leader Michael Howard claimed that Theresa May would be prepared to go to war to protect the territory. Spain's foreign minister stepped in only to assert that there was no need for the dispute Getty Brexit so far: in pictures Shock snap election Soon after triggering Article 50, Theresa May called on 18 April 2017 for a snap general election. The election would be on 8 June and it came as a shock move to many, with her reasoning to try to bolster her position before tough talks on leaving the EU AFP/Getty Brexit so far: in pictures Dissolution of Parliament for General Election Campaign Prime Minister Theresa May makes a statement in Downing Street after returning from Buckingham Palace on 3 May 2017. The Prime Minister visited the Queen to ask for the dissolution of Parliament signalling the official start to the general election campaign Getty Brexit so far: in pictures Conservatives lose parliamentary majority An arrangement of British daily newspapers showing front page stories about the exit poll results of the snap general election. British Prime Minister Theresa May faced pressure to resign on 9 June 2017 after losing her parliamentary majority, plunging the country into uncertainty as Brexit talks loomed. The pound fell sharply amid fears the Conservative leader would be unable to form a government AFP/Getty Brexit so far: in pictures Labour gains Britains opposition Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn gives a tumbs up as he arrives at Labour headquarters in central London on 9 June 2017 after the snap general election results showed a hung parliament with Labour gains and the Conservatives losing their majority AFP/Getty Brexit so far: in pictures Brexit negotiations begin Brexit Minister David Davis and European Commission member in charge of Brexit negotiations Michel Barnier address a press conference at the end of the first day of Brexit negotiations in Brussels on 19 June 2017 AFP/Getty Brexit so far: in pictures May speaks in Florence British Prime Minister Theresa May speaks on 22 September 2017, in Florence. May sought to unlock Brexit talks after Brussels demanded more clarity on the crunch issues of budget payments and EU citizens' rights AFP/Getty Brexit so far: in pictures EU council summit  insufficient progress German Chancellor Angela Merkel joins other EU leaders for a breakfast meeting during an EU summit in Brussels on 20 October 2017. The EU spoke about Brexit and announced that insufficient progress had been made AFP/Getty Brexit so far: in pictures DUP derails settlement on the withdrawal part of Brexit DUP Deputy Leader Nigel Dodds walks off after speaking to members of the media as a protester holding flags shouts after him outside the Houses of Parliament on 5 December 2017. British Prime Minister Theresa May was forced to pull out of a deal with Brussels after the DUP said it would not accept terms which see Northern Ireland treated differently from the rest of the UK Getty Brexit so far: in pictures May suffers defeat over EU (Withdrawal) Bill Theresa May suffers defeat in parliament over EU (Withdrawal) Bill on 13 December 2017. The Government was defeated by Conservative rebels and Labour MPs in a vote on its key piece of Brexit legislation. MPs amended the EU (Withdrawal) Bill against Theresa May's will, guaranteeing Parliament a meaningful vote on any Brexit deal she agrees with Brussels. Ms May's whips applied pressure on Conservative rebels who remained defiant in the Commons throughout the day and in the end the Government was defeated by 309 votes to 305 Brexit so far: in pictures EU council summit  sufficient progress Britain's Prime minister Theresa May arrives to attend the first day of a European union summit in Brussels on 14 December 2017. European leaders discussed Brexit and announced there was finally sufficient progress at the end of the two days AFP/Getty Brexit so far: in pictures The game moves to transition Brexit Secretary David Davis gives evidence on developments in European Union divorce talks to the Commons Exiting the EU Committee in Portcullis House, London, on 24 January 2018 PA Brexit so far: in pictures Trade deal is what May wants French President Emmanuel Macron gestures to Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May after they hold a press conference at the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, on 18 January 2018. May and Macron agreed a new border security deal, through which the UK will pay more to France to stop migrants trying to reach British shores on 18 January 2018 AFP/Getty Brexit so far: in pictures Transition period agreed The UK and EU agree terms for Brexit transition period on 19 March, 2018 Reuters Brexit so far: in pictures No agreement on Irish border The EU and UK however failed to reach an agreement on the Irish border during the successful talks on other Brexit issues AFP/Getty Brexit so far: in pictures EU attacks Mays fantasy strategy For months after the March deal is struck there is little significant progress in talks. One senior EU official tears into Britains fantasy negotiating strategy and accuses Theresa May of not even having a position on a variety of important issue Getty Brexit so far: in pictures UK releases Ireland plan Britain releases a new customs plan to solve the Northern Ireland border but Michel Barnier says it leaves unanswered questions and would not prevent a hard border EbS Brexit so far: in pictures Chequers plan agreed The cabinet agrees on a plan known as the "Chequers deal" on July 6 2018. The plan seeks regulatory alignment on goods and food, divergence on services, freedom from the European Courts of Justice and an end to free movement. Many were surprised that the hard Brexiteers of the cabinet would agree to this plan PA Brexit so far: in pictures Chequers plan sparks resignations Brexit Secretary David Davis and Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson and numerous ministers resign in the days following the Chequers agreement Reuters Brexit so far: in pictures Davis out, Raab in On 9 July, Dominic Raab replaces David Davis as Brexit Secretary. Raab is a keen Brexiteer and was a housing minister before taking over from Davis Reuters Brexit so far: in pictures Barnier's "deal like no other" EU chief negotiator Michel Barnier claims on August 29 2018 that they are prepared to offer Britain a trade deal like no other, though he stressed that they will not divide or change the single market to accommodate Britain AP Brexit so far: in pictures "My deal or no deal" In an interview on Panorama on September 17, the Prime Minister insists that any Brexit deal will be offered to the EU on her terms. She asserts this amongst continued attacks on her approach to Brexit by Boris Johnson and the European Research Group, headed by Jacob Rees Mogg BBC/Jeff Overs Brexit so far: in pictures EU leaders reject Chequers Quite the blow was dealt to the Prime Minister at a EU leaders summit in Salzburg on September 20. European Council President Donald Tusk stated that the Chequers deal "will not work" Reuters Brexit so far: in pictures May demands respect Following the rejection of her Chequers plan the day before, the Prime Minister voiced her anger that the EU had dismissed it without offering an alternative. She stated that throughout this process, I have treated the EU with nothing but respect. The UK expects the same. A good relationship at the end of this process depends on it." Getty Brexit so far: in pictures People's Vote march As the People's Vote campaign and The Independent's Final Say campaign gain traction, 700,000 people turn out in London to demand a final say on the UK's Brexit deal on October 20 2018 PA Brexit so far: in pictures More resignations As the Prime Minister settles on a Brexit deal, Brexit secretary Dominic Raab resigns along with Work and Pensions secretary Esther McVey and many other ministers Getty Brexit so far: in pictures Final Say petitions delivered to Downing Street People's Vote supporting MPs Chukka Umunna, Justine Greening and Caroline Lucas and The Independent editor Christian Broughton deliver over a million signatures in favour of a People's Vote to the Prime Minister at 10 Downing Street on December 3 2018 PA Brexit so far: in pictures May delays vote On December 10, the Prime Minister delayed the vote on her Brexit deal as it was near certain not to pass through the Commons due to Tory rebels and lack of DUP support AFP/Getty Brexit so far: in pictures No confidence motion Tory MPs triggered a confidence vote in the Prime Minister on December 12. She won by 200 votes to 117 Reuters Brexit so far: in pictures Commons rejects the deal Following the delay, the Prime Minister's deal was rejected in the Commons by a historic 230 votes AFP Brexit so far: in pictures Corbyn tables a no confidence motion Following the rejection of the Prime Minister's deal, opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn tabled a motion of no confidence in the government, which the government won by a margin of 19 AFP/Getty Brexit so far: in pictures Plan B The Prime Minister won the support of the commons to return to Brussels to renegotiate the backstop on January 29. In the same sitting, MPs also voted against a no-deal Brexit in a non-legally binding motion PA Brexit so far: in pictures EU council president savages Brexit campaigners who failed to plan for departure: Special place in hell There is a special place in hell for pro-Brexit campaigners who demanded Britain leave the EU without explaining how it should happen, Donald Tusk has said. The European Council president launched the scathing attack as he accused anti-EU campaigners of pushing for Brexit without even a sketch of a plan how to carry it out safely. Mr Tusk also dismissed suggestions that the EU could reopen negotiations over the controversial Northern Ireland backstop, dealing a blow to Theresa Mays hopes of securing fresh concessions as she tries to get her exit deal through parliament. Speaking in Brussels alongside Irish taoiseach Leo Varadkar, Mr Tusk said: Ive been wondering what a special place in hell looks like for people who promoted Brexit without even a sketch of a plan how to carry it out safely. He also tweeted the accusation moments later Getty Brexit so far: in pictures EU and UK announce talks to restart after Theresa May visits Brussels Both have agreed to restart Brexit talks to find a way through the deadlock in Westminster, following a visit by Theresa May to Brussels. In a joint statement the British government and European Commission said Ms May had had a robust but constructive meeting with president Jean-Claude Juncker, and that the pair would meet again before the end of the month. But the EU again refused to reopen the withdrawal agreement and its controversial backstop  with any negotiations expected to focus on the future relationship between the UK and EU instead Getty Brexit so far: in pictures Brexit strategy lost MPs voted down May's Brext plans, with a majority of 45. The prime minister did not appear in parliament to see another defeat PA Brexit so far: in pictures Labour and Conservative MPs resign and create the Independent Group Back row of Chris Leslie, Gavin Shuker, Chuka Umunna and Mike Gapes, middle row of Angela Smith, Luciana Berger and Ann Coffey and front row of Sarah Wollaston, Heidi Allen, Anna Soubry and Joan Ryan PA Brexit so far: in pictures Non-biding votes on amendments to Brexit motion On February 27 he house held a series of votes, unanimously calling for the UK and EU to guarantee citizens rights in a no-deal scenario AFP/Getty Brexit so far: in pictures Attorney General publishes legal advice A hammer blow for May as Geoffrey Cox said her renegotiated deal can still leave UK in backstop against its will. Mr Cox did say the prime ministers efforts had reduced the risk of the UK being trapped in the backstop indefinitely. MPs went on to vote against her deal by 391 to 242 UK Parliament/PA Brexit so far: in pictures No-deal off the table MPs rejected a no-deal Brexit by 43 votes on March 13, with cabinet ministers rebelling in another humiliating defeat for Theresa May. A day later they voted in favour of the prime minister seeking an extension to Article 50 AFP/Getty Brexit so far: in pictures House speaker bans May from third Commons vote on same Brexit deal John Bercow sensationally told Theresa May he would stop her making another attempt to pass her Brexit deal unless she has secured changes. The Speaker said a further meaningful vote would be ruled out of order if the motion was the same or substantially the same  under an ancient convention to stop the government bullying parliament on issues MPs have rejected Parliament Live Brexit so far: in pictures May writes to Tusk The prime minister wrote to Donald Tusk, president of the European Council, to ask for a three-month extension to give her more time to try to get her deal through parliament. However the European Commission advises the EU27 should offer a short extension to May 23 or a longer one meaning the UK would participate in European elections 10 Downing Street/AFP/Getty Brexit so far: in pictures European Council summit Theresa Mays request to extend triggering Article 50 until the end of June was rejected by the EU, and instead offered a shorter time frame. She accepted the offer of a delay until May 22 if her withdrawal deal is approved by Parliament. If MPs rejected it for a third time, the EU said Britain must propose a new plan by April 12. Ms May said she will not support a long delay because it would mean Britain participating in elections for the European Parliament Getty Brexit so far: in pictures Brussels confirms preparations for a no-deal Brexit are completed They warned that it is increasingly likely the UK will crash out. In a statement the European Commission (EC) said preparedness and contingency work, which the EC has been conducting since December 2017, was now finished. The announcement came days after EU leaders agreed to a request by Theresa May to extend the UKs Brexit date AFP Brexit so far: in pictures May resigns Reuters

Spain claims Gibraltar, a British Overseas Territory, is part of Spain, because of its location on the Iberian peninsula. The rock has been under British control since 1704 when it was captured during the war of Spanish succession.

The Spanish monarchy repeatedly ceded the area to Britain in a series of treaties over the following decades, but government policy changed under General Franco's rule, and Spain has since officially wanted it back.Britains political parties are poised to grant themselves special powers to use personal data to find out how people are likely to vote, despite the Cambridge Analytica scandal, The Independent can reveal.

Legislation set to clear Parliament within weeks will allow the profiling of voters to help infer their political opinions, privacy campaigners have warned.

The move comes as controversy has engulfed Cambridge Analytica over its collection of Facebook data, with the aim of using it to profile and target people during election campaigns. Even before the scandal erupted, political parties had faced questions about their use of social media to carry out online campaigning.

All the major parties have agreed to the exemption from new data protection laws, arguing it clarifies their widely recognised right to canvas voters in order to target possible supporters.

But critics say technological advances now enable such data to be mined to discover peoples opinions without their active consent. Organisations outside of the main political parties will be barred from collating voting data in this way.

Ailidh Callander, a lawyer at the group Privacy International, told The Independent that no meaningful justification had been given for the powers in the Data Protection Bill.

This exemption is open to abuse by political parties and those working for them and can be used to facilitate targeted and exploitative political advertising, she warned.

Paul Bernal, a data protection expert at the University of East Anglia Law School, said: Theres a reason that we have secret ballots in elections and that we dont keep a record of how people voted.

The Electoral Reform Society has also raised the alarm over data harvesting and campaign targeting, demanding an urgent review of regulations.

Online campaigning is the 21st centurys wild west  and the Cambridge Analytica saga is a very stark reminder that we have to assess how to govern the new terrain, said Willie Sullivan, the organisations senior director.

The controversy has blown up over the way Parliament will update data protection laws that were put in place 20 years ago.

A schedule in the new legislation will give additional rights to process personal data  gained from fundraising, surveys and casework  to elected representatives, or a person acting with the authority of such a representative.

They will be granted to MPs, MEPs, members of the Scottish Parliament, Welsh Assembly and Northern Ireland Assembly, and also to local councillors.

The law will say data should not be processed if the person involved is likely to suffer substantial damage or substantial distress, or if they have opted out.

But critics say such exemptions require people to choose to intervene  when they may not even know the data has been collected about them.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal has shown that even apparently innocent data, such as the music a person likes, can be used to work out their political opinions, they point out.

Privacy International said the proposed new rules were similar to the 1998 Act, but failed to recognise that technology and data processing in the political arena have moved on.

As we can see from the work of Cambridge Analytica, personal data that might not have previously revealed political opinions can now be used to infer information about the political opinions of an individual, Ms Callander added.

It would allow private firms, under contract to political parties, to process personal data revealing political opinions for a wide range of purposes without the explicit consent of the person concerned, Ms Callander said.

Mr Bernal said data that could reveal voting preferences should be given more protection, warning: Almost anything can be used to at least have a guess at your political leanings.

However, the Government, Labour and the Liberal Democrats defended the schedule in the bill, which has already cleared the Lords, is in its later stages in the Commons and is intended to reach the statute book next month. It is needed to conform with new data protection rules being imposed by the EU, which come into effect in May.

The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport said that, without the special status for political parties, they would need separate written consent to use the data gathered from every doorstep conversation, or from any volunteer or political survey.

It described the measure as both necessary and proportionate, insisting it had put the appropriate safeguards in place.

Liam Byrne, Labours shadow digital minister, said: Engaging, listening to and canvassing voters is fundamental to what political parties do and is expected by citizens as something fundamental to our democracy.

That task is rightly, massively regulated by both the Information Commissioner and the Electoral Commission.

The Data Protection Bill, and previous Data Protection Act, recognises the need for political parties of all stripes to process this data with lots and lots of appropriate safeguards.

The Liberal Democrats argued the issue was entirely separate to the allegations against Cambridge Analytica, which are deeply concerning to us and should be properly investigated.

A spokeswoman said: Liberal Democrats take the importance of data protection incredibly seriously, and potential abuses of it.

This amendment to the Data Protection Bill clarifies the position of political parties, which is a separate issue to that of third parties.Theresa May is to hold a three-way crisis meeting on the Salisbury nerve agent attack with the French and German premiers in the margins of a European summit on Thursday.

The Prime Minister is attending the European Council meeting in Brussels where she will brief the other 27 EU leaders on Brexit and the Salisbury nerve agent incident, as well as consider a response to rising US trade protectionism.

Arriving at the Europa building in the Belgian capital Ms May told reporters that Russia had staged a brazen and reckless attack against the United Kingdom by using the Novichok nerve agent.

I'll be raising this issue with my counterparts today because it's clear that the Russian threat does not respect borders, and indeed the incident in Salisbury was part of a pattern of Russian aggression against Europe and its near neighbours, from the western Balkans to the Middle East, she said.

Downing Street said the Prime Minister was set to meet the three premiers in the early evening before the 28 EU leaders sit down for dinner.

Federica Mogherini, the EUs foreign affairs chief, said EU leaders would express our strongest possible solidarity with the United Kingdom after the attack in Salisbury, as well as we have done with the foreign ministers on Monday.

The strongest political sign we can give is unity, unity, and unity: including in the moment when we move forward on negotiations on Brexit, she said on the doorstep of the meeting.

EU foreign affairs chief Federica Mogherini speaks at the summit (EAS)

This doesnt mean anything in terms of diminishing our solidarity, on the contrary we stand together.

EU diplomats ahead of the summit said Britain was not pushing for new sanctions against Russia, but that the focus had instead been getting EU leaders to accept the UK position Russia was behind the attempted poisoning.

Investigations by military experts at the Defence, Science and Technology Laboratory at Porton Down identified the nerve agent used against the Skripals as part of the Soviet-developed Novichoks group.

Independent experts from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) are continuing work to verify the analysis in Salisbury and have been seen in areas visited by Mr Skripal and his daughter.

The results are expected to take a minimum of two weeks and police have not confirmed how the nerve agent was administered.

NHS England said a total of 38 people were treated for varying symptoms resulting from exposure to the substance, but only the Skripals and Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey remain in hospital, with an unnamed person being seen as an outpatient.

A judge gave doctors permission to pass fresh blood samples from the victims to the OPCW on Thursday.

Mr Justice Williams made the ruling in the Court of Protection because the Skripals remain unconscious in intensive care, and are unable to give consent.

Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Show all 15 1 /15 Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Scene of attack Members of the emergency services in hazard suits fix the tent over the bench where Sergei and Yulia Skripal were found unconscious on a park bench in Salisbury in March 2018. Getty Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Victim - Sergei Skripal The retired Russian colonel and former double agent for MI6 was in a critical condition in hospital for more than two months after being exposed to novichok in Salisbury. He was given refuge in the UK after being jailed in Moscow for treason. Mr Skripal came to Britain as part of a high-profile spy swap in 2010 in which four men were exchanged for ten Russian "sleeper agents" in the US. In this image he is speaking to his lawyer from behind bars in Moscow in 2006. AP Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Victim - Yulia Skripal Yulia Skripal was struck down by a novichok poison alongside her father Sergei. Facebook Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Scene of attack A police officer stands guard outside a branch of the Italian chain restaurant Zizzi where the pair dined at before falling ill. It was boarded off whilst investigators worked on the building and later found traces of the chemical weapon within it. AFP/Getty Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Scene of attack Large areas of central Salisbury were cordoned off by police following the discovery of the Skripals. Traces of nerve agent were also found in The Mill pub. PA Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Victim - Nick Bailey Detective Sergeant Nick Bailey, rushed to the aid of the Russian ex-spy and his daughter who were targeted with a nerve agent. He was hospitalized after aiding them and didn't leave until three weeks after the attack. Wiltshire Police/Rex Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Police investigation - Skripals home Police believe they were poisoned at home, and detectives found the highest concentration of novichok on the front door of Mr Skripals house. Getty Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Theresa May visits scene of attack Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May spokes with Wiltshire Police's Chief Constable Kier Pritchard near where the Skripal's were found. Britain expelled 23 Russian diplomats over the nerve agent poisoning and suspended high-level contacts, including for the World Cup on March 14. Theresa May told parliament that Russia had failed to respond to her demand for an explanation on how a Soviet-designed chemical, Novichok, was used in Salisbury. AFP/Getty Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Skripal days before attack Sergei Skripal days before he was exposed to Novichok, that has left him fighting for life. ITV News Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Police investigation - military involvement British soldiers were deployed soon after the attack to help a counter-terrorism investigation into the nerve agent attack. One of the places they were asked to help out with was Skripal's home and it's surrounding. They were asked to remove a vehicle connected to the agent attack in Salisbury, from a residential street in Gillingham. AFP/Getty Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Police investigation Personnel in protective coveralls and breathing equipment cover an ambulance with a tarpaulin at the Salisbury District Hospital. AFP/Getty Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Police investigation The investigation extended to the grave of Sergei Skripal's son Alexander in London Road cemetery. Getty Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Police investigation The Counter Terrorism Policing Network requested assistance from the military to remove a number of vehicles and objects from Salisbury. EPA Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Home Secretary visits scene of attack Home Secretary Amber Rudd visited the scene of the nerve agent attack at the Maltings shopping centre on 9 March. Getty Skripal attack aftermath  in pictures Yulia Skripal speaks for the first time Yulia Skripal, speaking for the first time, said she felt lucky to have survived the nerve agent attack in Salisbury which left her fighting for life. Ms Skripal said her life had been turned upside down by the assassination attempt. But the Russian national added she hoped to return to her homeland one day, despite the Kremlin being blamed for the attack. Reuters

The judge ruled that the Salisbury NHS Foundation Trust could provide blood samples to the OPCW alongside copies of medical notes, saying the moves were in their best interest.

The Russian government has promised to cooperate with the OPCW but dismissed its conclusions that ally Bashar al-Assad killed civilians with sarin gas in Syria last year.

It denies any wrongdoing and claims it has destroyed all chemical weapons stockpiles and complied with the Chemical Weapons Convention.

Alexander Yakovenko, the Russian Ambassador to the UK, heightened tensions by accusing Britain of storing deadly Novichok itself in an extraordinary press conference.

The Prime Minister said Russia had provided no credible explanation on how the substance came to be used on the streets of Wiltshire and accused the state itself of culpability.

A meeting of EU foreign ministers on Monday did not explicitly say Russia was responsible for the attack, and said only that the European Union takes extremely seriously the UK Governments assessment that it is highly likely that the Russian Federation is responsible.

It is understood that UK diplomats have been pressing for national leaders to go further in their condemnation than foreign ministers did and explicitly point the blame at Russia.

Europe has so far presented a less-than-united front against Russia. European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker on Tuesday caused a stir by congratulating Mr Putin on his re-election and wishing him every success, while there are reports that the foreign ministers meeting toned down the language criticising Russia at the behest of sceptical member states.Theresa May will seek the shoulder to shoulder support of other EU countries to face the growing threat from Russia, telling their leaders: We are all at risk.

The Prime Minister will use a Brussels summit on Thursday to push for a hard-hitting communique to underline the joint belief that the Kremlin was behind the nerve agent attack on double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter.

EU leaders will not be asked to impose their own sanctions at this stage  although the UK has pushed privately for the expulsion of Russian spies where any are identified in other countries embassies.

Recommended Boris Johnson compares Russia World Cup to Hitler hosting Olympics

But Ms May will use the summit to stress that the Russian threat does not respect borders and, as such, we are all at risk, a No 10 official told The Independent.

And she will tell fellow leaders: The challenge of Russia is one that will endure for years to come.

As a European democracy, the United Kingdom will stand shoulder to shoulder with the European Union and with Nato to face these threats together. United we will succeed.

The appeal will follow further tensions in relations with Russia, as Moscows Ministry of Foreign Affairs claimed Britain had poisoned Mr Skripal.

Logic suggested the UK had carried out the attack in Salisbury, claimed Vladimir Yermakov, head of the ministrys non-proliferation and arms control department.

The only alternative conclusion was that UK authorities were not able to provide protection from... a terrorist attack on their soil, he said, at a briefing in the Russian capital.

In Britain, the security services believe they are compiling ever more powerful evidence that Russia was responsible, based on its past behaviour, its motive and the nerve agent used, called Novichok.

UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 21 September 2021 Gabriella Diment prepares a monumental bronze patinated fibreglass wall sculpture depicting household cavalry soldiers on horseback which is expected to be sold for 12,000-18,000 when it goes up for auction at Summers Place Auctions in Billinghurst, Kent PA UK news in pictures 20 September 2021 Florist Judith Blacklock puts the finishing touches to a floral carousel installation in Halkin Arcade, which she has designed with Neill Strain for the Belgravia in Bloom festival, running from September 20-26, in London PA UK news in pictures 19 September 2021 Bubbles surround Manchester Uniteds Cristiano Ronaldo before the match against West Ham at London Stadium Action Images/Reuters UK news in pictures 18 September 2021 Children take part in the Settrington Cup Pedal Car Race as motoring enthusiasts attend the Goodwood Revival, a three-day historic car racing festival in Goodwood, Chichester, Reuters UK news in pictures 17 September 2021 Hugo, 7, from London rides past a 4x7 metre rainbow arch, made entirely of recycled aluminium cans, which has been installed by recycling initiative 'Every Can Counts', in partnership with The City of London Corporation in front of St Paul's Cathedral in London, to encourage members of the public to recycle their drinks cans ahead of recycling week, which starts on 20 September PA UK news in pictures 16 September 2021 Sheikeh MOhammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, leader of Abu Dhabi, leaves Downing Street after meeting with Boris Johnson PA UK news in pictures 15 September 2021 Children pose by ice sculptures depicting people collecting water by charity Water Aid to show the fragility of water and the threat posed by climate change in London AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 14 September 2021 Heavy rain covers the A149 near Kings Lynn in Norfolk PA UK news in pictures 13 September 2021 Luke Jerram's 'Museum of the Moon' at Durham Cathedral PA UK news in pictures 12 September 2021 Inspirational young fundraiser Tobias Weller crosses the finish line, near his home in Sheffield, as he completes his latest epic feat where he swam and triked his way to the end of his awesome year-long Ironman Challenge. This is the third challenge Tobias, who has cerebral palsy and autism, has completed, raising more than 150,000 for his school and Sheffield Children Hospitals charity PA UK news in pictures 11 September 2021 British player Emma Raducanu, holds up the US Open championship trophy winning the women's singles final of the US Open in New York AP UK news in pictures 10 September 2021 People paddle board during a misty morning in Ullswater, the second largest lake in the Lake District, Cumbria PA UK news in pictures 9 September 2021 Troops from Wiltshire based 4 Armoured Close Support Battalion Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers during final inspection at Wellington Barracks in London, ahead of providing troops for the Queens Guard PA UK news in pictures 8 September 2021 Workers cross London Bridge during the morning rush hour in London Reuters UK news in pictures Mixing it up: Painting it up press view in London A gallery employee poses for photographers next to a painting entitled Prairie by British artist, Louise Giovanelli during the exhibition 'Mixing it up: Painting it up' at the Hayward Gallery in London EPA UK news in pictures 6 September 2021 Traders in the Ring at the London Metal Exchange, in the City of London, after open-outcry trading returned for the first time since March 2020, when the Ring was temporarily closed due to the pandemic PA UK news in pictures 5 September 2021 People enjoy the warm weather on Sandbanks beach, Poole PA UK news in pictures 4 September 2021 Demonstrators from Animal Rebellion and Nature Rebellion protest in Trafalgar Square in London. PA UK news in pictures 3 September 2021 South Africa's Ntando Mahlangu (centre) wins the Men's 200 metres T61 Final ahead of second placed Great Britain's Richard Whitehead at the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games PA UK news in pictures 2 September 2021 A young common seal on the beach at Horsey Gap in Norfolk, as hundreds of pregnant grey seals come ashore ready for the start of the pupping season. PA UK news in pictures 1 September 2021 Goldfinches fighting over food in a garden in Strensham, Worcestershire PA UK news in pictures 31 August 2021 Gold Medallist Sarah Storey of Britain celebrates on the podium Reuters UK news in pictures 30 August 2021 Extinction Rebellion protesters hold a a tea party on Tower Bridge in London EPA UK news in pictures 29 August 2021 A police office tussles with a demonstrator on Cromwell Road outside the Natural History Museum during a protest by members of Extinction Rebellion in London PA UK news in pictures 28 August 2021 Members of the British armed forces 16 Air Assault Brigade walk to the air terminal after disembarking a Royal Airforce Voyager aircraft at Brize Norton, Oxfordshire POOL/AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 27 August 2021 Fabio Quartararo crashes during a MotoGP practice session at the British Grand Prix, Silverstone Circuit Action Images via Reuters UK news in pictures 26 August 2021 An Extinction Rebellion activist holds a placard in a fountain surrounded by police officers, during a protest next to Buckingham Palace in London Reuters UK news in pictures 25 August 2021 Gold Medallist Great Britains cyclist, Sarah Storey, celebrates after winning the Womens C5 3000m Individual Pursuit Final at the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games. It was her 15th Paralympic gold Reuters UK news in pictures 24 August 2021 A demonstrator dressed as bee during a protest by members of Extinction Rebellion on Whitehall, in central London PA UK news in pictures 23 August 2021 Former interpreters for the British forces in Afghanistan demonstrate outside the Home Office in central London AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 22 August 2021 Police officers form a line in front of the entrance to the Guildhall, London, where protesters have climbed onto a ledge above the entrance during an Extinction Rebellion stage a protest PA UK news in pictures 21 August 2021 People take part in a demonstration in solidarity with people of Afghanistan, in London Reuters UK news in pictures 20 August 2021 People zip wire across the sea from Bournemouth pier towards the beach. PA UK news in pictures 19 August 2021 Supporters of Geronimo the alpaca gather outside Shepherds Close Farm in Wooton Under Edge, Gloucestershire PA UK news in pictures 18 August 2021 Former Afghan interpreters and veterans hold a demonstration outside Downing Street, calling for support and protection for Afghan interpreters and their families PA UK news in pictures 17 August 2021 Military personnel board the RAF Airbus A400M at RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire, where evacuation flights from Afghanistan have been landing Reuters UK news in pictures 16 August 2021 Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer takes part in a minute's silence at Wolverhampton police station for the victims of the Plymouth mass shooting last week PA UK news in pictures 15 August 2021 2Storm, a ten-metre tall puppet of a mythical goddess of the sea created by Edinburgh-based visual theatre company Vision Mechanics, makes its way alongside the seafront at North Berwick, East Lothian, during a performance at the Fringe By The Sea festival PA UK news in pictures 14 August 2021 A woman and two young girls look at floral tributes in Plymouth where six people, including the offender, died of gunshot wounds in a firearms incident PA UK news in pictures 13 August 2021 Forensic officers in the Keyham area of Plymouth where six people, including the shooter, died of gunshot wounds in a firearms incident on Thursday evening PA UK news in pictures 12 August 2021 Children ride horses in the River Eden in Appleby, Cumbria, during the annual gathering of travellers for the Appleby Horse Fair PA UK news in pictures 11 August 2021 Stella Moris (left) reacts after talking to the media outside the High Court in London, following the first hearing in the Julian Assange extradition appeal, n London, following the first hearing in the Julian Assange extradition appeal. The US government has won the latest round in its High Court bid to appeal against the decision not to extradite Julian Assange on espionage charges PA UK news in pictures 10 August 2021 Students react after they receive their A-Level results at the Ark Academy, in London Reuters UK news in pictures 9 August 2021 The final athletes from Great Britain arrive home including Jason Kenny, Laura Kenny and Katie Archibald (front left-right) at Heathrow Airport, London following the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games PA UK news in pictures 8 August 2021 Great Britain's Laura Kenny during the closing ceremony of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games at the Olympic stadium in Japan PA UK news in pictures 7 August 2021 People from the Glasgow Southside community take part in the Govanhill Carnival, an anti-racist celebration of pride, unity and the contributions immigrants have made to the community in Govanhill, at Queen's Park, Glasgow PA UK news in pictures 6 August 2021 Chijindu Ujah of Britain, Zharnel Hughes of Britain, Richard Kilty of Britain and Nethaneel Mitchell-Blake of Britain celebrate winning silver as they pose with Asha Philip of Britain, Imani Lansiquot of Britain, Dina Asher-Smith of Britain and Daryll Neita of Britain after they won bronze in the women's 4 x 100m relay during Olympic Games Day 14 Getty UK news in pictures 5 August 2021 A protester places flowers on a photograph of an executed man during a demonstration organised by supporters of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) to protest against the inauguration of Iran's new president Ebrahim Raisi in central London AFP via Getty UK news in pictures 4 August 2021 England's Joe Root looks on as India's KL Rahul doesn't make it to a catch during day one of Cinch First Test match at Trent Bridge, Nottingham PA UK news in pictures 3 August 2021 Great Britain's Laura Kenny and Jason Kenny with their silver medals for the Women's Team Pursuit and Mens Team Sprint during the Track Cycling at the Izu Velodrome on the eleventh day of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games in Japan PA

Russia has previously produced the chemical, has a record of carrying out state-sponsored assassinations and is known to view defectors as legitimate targets, they say.

Detailed information about the type of Novichok used has been shared with some key UK allies  and efforts are underway to convince the Greek government, thought to be the most sceptical of Russian culpability.

The UK has also compiled a list of 17 different explanations Russia has given for the attack  ranging from suicide, an accidental overdose and a distraction from Brexit, to murder by everyone from Sweden to the daughters future mother-in-law.

A senior Whitehall official said it was clear that Russia is a strategic enemy, not a strategic partner, but added: We are not looking for confrontation or regime change.

This week, Downing Street backed away from further reprisals against Russia  despite the Kremlin going beyond a tit-for-tat expulsion of diplomats by closing the British Council.

However, it said the Government was still actively considering other measures and stand ready to deploy at any time.

In Brussels, the Prime Minister will address the other 27 leaders over dinner, when she will also make a short speech welcoming progress in the Brexit negotiations.

The EU is poised to sign off the transition deal she is seeking, as well as agree guidelines for the looming talks on a long-term economic and security relationship.

The talks will also focus on jobs, trade and digital taxation, where Ms May will welcome EU proposals which include a new 3 per cent levy on the turnover of tech giants.MPs have observed a minute's silence in memory of those who died during the Westminster terror attack last year.

With bowed heads, politicians filled the House of Commons chamber to mark the tragedy, where five people were killed and 50 others injured when Islamist extremist Khalid Masood ploughed his car into pedestrians on Westminster Bridge.

Masood then stabbed Pc Keith Palmer, an unarmed constable guarding the gates of Parliament, before he was shot by an armed police officer in the grounds of the Palace of Westminster.

Recommended Survivors of Westminster terror attack speak of their suffering

Speaker John Bercow called on MPs to unite for silence in "respectful memory" of those killed in the tragedy, which also included US tourist Kurt Cochran, Romanian visitor Andreea Cristea, 31, and Britons Aysha Frade, 44, and Leslie Rhodes, 75.

Culture Secretary Matt Hancock, who was in the chamber to answer departmental questions, said: "I'm sure the whole House will want to associate ourselves to mark the memory of those who passed away a year ago, as we have just noted in the one minute's silence, and to thank once more the emergency services who keep us safe and, especially on this day, those who put others' safety ahead of their own.

"We remember those who have lost their lives defending democracy. They will not be forgotten."

A year on from the tragedy, one of Pc Palmer's friends described him as "a proud and courageous police officer who did his job and never wanted any fuss".

Pc Shaun Cartwright said: "Keith loved being a police officer, he just wanted to help people and do his best.

"Keith was always happy, always the first to help anyone out, first in to work and the last one out.

"He was a proud and courageous police officer who did his job and never wanted any fuss or to be the centre of attention. Keith was a true and loyal friend, utterly reliable.

"Most of all I will remember him as a family man who idolised his wife, daughter and his family; they're the important ones that I think about a year on from the Westminster attack."

UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 20 September 2021 Florist Judith Blacklock puts the finishing touches to a floral carousel installation in Halkin Arcade, which she has designed with Neill Strain for the Belgravia in Bloom festival, running from September 20-26, in London PA UK news in pictures 19 September 2021 Bubbles surround Manchester Uniteds Cristiano Ronaldo before the match against West Ham at London Stadium Action Images/Reuters UK news in pictures 18 September 2021 Children take part in the Settrington Cup Pedal Car Race as motoring enthusiasts attend the Goodwood Revival, a three-day historic car racing festival in Goodwood, Chichester, Reuters UK news in pictures 17 September 2021 Hugo, 7, from London rides past a 4x7 metre rainbow arch, made entirely of recycled aluminium cans, which has been installed by recycling initiative 'Every Can Counts', in partnership with The City of London Corporation in front of St Paul's Cathedral in London, to encourage members of the public to recycle their drinks cans ahead of recycling week, which starts on 20 September PA UK news in pictures 16 September 2021 Sheikeh MOhammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, leader of Abu Dhabi, leaves Downing Street after meeting with Boris Johnson PA UK news in pictures 15 September 2021 Children pose by ice sculptures depicting people collecting water by charity Water Aid to show the fragility of water and the threat posed by climate change in London AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 14 September 2021 Heavy rain covers the A149 near Kings Lynn in Norfolk PA UK news in pictures 13 September 2021 Luke Jerram's 'Museum of the Moon' at Durham Cathedral PA UK news in pictures 12 September 2021 Inspirational young fundraiser Tobias Weller crosses the finish line, near his home in Sheffield, as he completes his latest epic feat where he swam and triked his way to the end of his awesome year-long Ironman Challenge. This is the third challenge Tobias, who has cerebral palsy and autism, has completed, raising more than 150,000 for his school and Sheffield Children Hospitals charity PA UK news in pictures 11 September 2021 British player Emma Raducanu, holds up the US Open championship trophy winning the women's singles final of the US Open in New York AP UK news in pictures 10 September 2021 People paddle board during a misty morning in Ullswater, the second largest lake in the Lake District, Cumbria PA UK news in pictures 9 September 2021 Troops from Wiltshire based 4 Armoured Close Support Battalion Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers during final inspection at Wellington Barracks in London, ahead of providing troops for the Queens Guard PA UK news in pictures 8 September 2021 Workers cross London Bridge during the morning rush hour in London Reuters UK news in pictures Mixing it up: Painting it up press view in London A gallery employee poses for photographers next to a painting entitled Prairie by British artist, Louise Giovanelli during the exhibition 'Mixing it up: Painting it up' at the Hayward Gallery in London EPA UK news in pictures 6 September 2021 Traders in the Ring at the London Metal Exchange, in the City of London, after open-outcry trading returned for the first time since March 2020, when the Ring was temporarily closed due to the pandemic PA UK news in pictures 5 September 2021 People enjoy the warm weather on Sandbanks beach, Poole PA UK news in pictures 4 September 2021 Demonstrators from Animal Rebellion and Nature Rebellion protest in Trafalgar Square in London. PA UK news in pictures 3 September 2021 South Africa's Ntando Mahlangu (centre) wins the Men's 200 metres T61 Final ahead of second placed Great Britain's Richard Whitehead at the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games PA UK news in pictures 2 September 2021 A young common seal on the beach at Horsey Gap in Norfolk, as hundreds of pregnant grey seals come ashore ready for the start of the pupping season. PA UK news in pictures 1 September 2021 Goldfinches fighting over food in a garden in Strensham, Worcestershire PA UK news in pictures 31 August 2021 Gold Medallist Sarah Storey of Britain celebrates on the podium Reuters UK news in pictures 30 August 2021 Extinction Rebellion protesters hold a a tea party on Tower Bridge in London EPA UK news in pictures 29 August 2021 A police office tussles with a demonstrator on Cromwell Road outside the Natural History Museum during a protest by members of Extinction Rebellion in London PA UK news in pictures 28 August 2021 Members of the British armed forces 16 Air Assault Brigade walk to the air terminal after disembarking a Royal Airforce Voyager aircraft at Brize Norton, Oxfordshire POOL/AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 27 August 2021 Fabio Quartararo crashes during a MotoGP practice session at the British Grand Prix, Silverstone Circuit Action Images via Reuters UK news in pictures 26 August 2021 An Extinction Rebellion activist holds a placard in a fountain surrounded by police officers, during a protest next to Buckingham Palace in London Reuters UK news in pictures 25 August 2021 Gold Medallist Great Britains cyclist, Sarah Storey, celebrates after winning the Womens C5 3000m Individual Pursuit Final at the Tokyo 2020 Paralympic Games. It was her 15th Paralympic gold Reuters UK news in pictures 24 August 2021 A demonstrator dressed as bee during a protest by members of Extinction Rebellion on Whitehall, in central London PA UK news in pictures 23 August 2021 Former interpreters for the British forces in Afghanistan demonstrate outside the Home Office in central London AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 22 August 2021 Police officers form a line in front of the entrance to the Guildhall, London, where protesters have climbed onto a ledge above the entrance during an Extinction Rebellion stage a protest PA UK news in pictures 21 August 2021 People take part in a demonstration in solidarity with people of Afghanistan, in London Reuters UK news in pictures 20 August 2021 People zip wire across the sea from Bournemouth pier towards the beach. PA UK news in pictures 19 August 2021 Supporters of Geronimo the alpaca gather outside Shepherds Close Farm in Wooton Under Edge, Gloucestershire PA UK news in pictures 18 August 2021 Former Afghan interpreters and veterans hold a demonstration outside Downing Street, calling for support and protection for Afghan interpreters and their families PA UK news in pictures 17 August 2021 Military personnel board the RAF Airbus A400M at RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire, where evacuation flights from Afghanistan have been landing Reuters UK news in pictures 16 August 2021 Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer takes part in a minute's silence at Wolverhampton police station for the victims of the Plymouth mass shooting last week PA UK news in pictures 15 August 2021 2Storm, a ten-metre tall puppet of a mythical goddess of the sea created by Edinburgh-based visual theatre company Vision Mechanics, makes its way alongside the seafront at North Berwick, East Lothian, during a performance at the Fringe By The Sea festival PA UK news in pictures 14 August 2021 A woman and two young girls look at floral tributes in Plymouth where six people, including the offender, died of gunshot wounds in a firearms incident PA UK news in pictures 13 August 2021 Forensic officers in the Keyham area of Plymouth where six people, including the shooter, died of gunshot wounds in a firearms incident on Thursday evening PA UK news in pictures 12 August 2021 Children ride horses in the River Eden in Appleby, Cumbria, during the annual gathering of travellers for the Appleby Horse Fair PA UK news in pictures 11 August 2021 Stella Moris (left) reacts after talking to the media outside the High Court in London, following the first hearing in the Julian Assange extradition appeal, n London, following the first hearing in the Julian Assange extradition appeal. The US government has won the latest round in its High Court bid to appeal against the decision not to extradite Julian Assange on espionage charges PA UK news in pictures 10 August 2021 Students react after they receive their A-Level results at the Ark Academy, in London Reuters UK news in pictures 9 August 2021 The final athletes from Great Britain arrive home including Jason Kenny, Laura Kenny and Katie Archibald (front left-right) at Heathrow Airport, London following the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games PA UK news in pictures 8 August 2021 Great Britain's Laura Kenny during the closing ceremony of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games at the Olympic stadium in Japan PA UK news in pictures 7 August 2021 People from the Glasgow Southside community take part in the Govanhill Carnival, an anti-racist celebration of pride, unity and the contributions immigrants have made to the community in Govanhill, at Queen's Park, Glasgow PA UK news in pictures 6 August 2021 Chijindu Ujah of Britain, Zharnel Hughes of Britain, Richard Kilty of Britain and Nethaneel Mitchell-Blake of Britain celebrate winning silver as they pose with Asha Philip of Britain, Imani Lansiquot of Britain, Dina Asher-Smith of Britain and Daryll Neita of Britain after they won bronze in the women's 4 x 100m relay during Olympic Games Day 14 Getty UK news in pictures 5 August 2021 A protester places flowers on a photograph of an executed man during a demonstration organised by supporters of the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) to protest against the inauguration of Iran's new president Ebrahim Raisi in central London AFP via Getty UK news in pictures 4 August 2021 England's Joe Root looks on as India's KL Rahul doesn't make it to a catch during day one of Cinch First Test match at Trent Bridge, Nottingham PA UK news in pictures 3 August 2021 Great Britain's Laura Kenny and Jason Kenny with their silver medals for the Women's Team Pursuit and Mens Team Sprint during the Track Cycling at the Izu Velodrome on the eleventh day of the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games in Japan PA UK news in pictures 2 August 2021 Great Britains Charlotte Worthington competes during the Womens BMX Freestyle Final at the Tokyo Olympics PA

Senior officers will attend private memorial services today to mark the atrocity and Pc Palmer's name will be one of 1,400 inscribed on the new UK Police Memorial in Staffordshire, commemorating officers who were killed on duty.

There will also be a number of services and events in Parliament for staff, MPs and peers to pay their respects.President Donald Trump boasted during the campaign that he has the best words. If the past 14 months in the White House are an indication, he and his team also have the worst spelling.

Among the many casualties of Washingtons protocols in the Trump era has been a lack of rigour to the accuracy of the printed word  whether its the Presidents typo-filled tweets or the White Houses error-prone news releases.

Special Council is told to find crimes, wether crimes exist or not, Mr Trump wrote on Twitter earlier this week to start off a posting in which he misspelled counsel three times and had five errors in the span of 280 characters.

As journalists and others poked fun at the mistakes, the President quickly deleted the tweet and posted an edited version. He successfully changed wether to whether and eliminated an inadvertent repeat of the word the  but he failed to correct the three inaccurate references to the title of his nemesis, Robert Mueller.

If Trump directs Rosenstein to fire the special council, I think we might be ok folks, cracked former US attorney Preet Bharara of New York, whom Mr Trump fired last summer, referring to deputy attorney general Rod J Rosenstein.

Amid all the chaos in the White House  including West Wing personnel drama, the Stormy Daniels scandal and Mr Muellers Russia investigation, some wayward spellings and inaccurate honorifics might seem minor. But the constant small mistakes  which have dogged the Trump White House since the Presidents official Inauguration Day poster boasted that no challenge is to great  have become, critics say, symbolic of the larger problems with Mr Trumps management style, in particular his lack of attention to detail and the carelessness with which he makes policy decisions.

Earlier this week, for example, the White House rolled out an executive order from Mr Trump aimed at cutting off US investment in Venezuelas digital currency as a way to pinch strongman Nicolas Maduros regime. But in the headline on the public news release, the White House wrote that Mr Trump was taking action to address the situation in America.

Freudian slip???? wondered Rosiland Jordan, a reporter for Al Jazeera.

It echoes a political quote I tell people a lot from [Ralph Waldo] Emerson: The institution is lengthened by the shadow of one man, said Rick Wilson, a Republican political consultant who has been highly critical of Mr Trump. The sloppiness and the looseness and the chaos and lack of rigour across all areas of Trump world reflects Trump. They do not care. They dont give a damn. But everybody needs an editor.

In Mr Trumps world, Air Force One became Air Force Once on the Presidents public schedule. The White House sought lasting peach in a news release touting efforts to broker a deal between Israel and Palestinian territories. And another release announced the departure of an East Wing aide to work for Republican representative Will Hurd of Texas, who was reincarnated as representative Hill in the next sentence.

Last week, in a tweet, the commander in chief lauded his visit to the Marine Core Air Station Miramar in San Diego, prompting veterans everywhere to facepalm, according to a headline in the Marine Times.

The steady stream of errors has prompted outlets as disparate as People magazine and Fox News to compile the White Houses greatest hits  or whiffs, as the case may be.

Jason Silverstein, a political reporter, had been posting a running list of typos at the New York Daily News, noting in his introduction that Mr Trump was elected to lead, not to proofread. He reached 32 entries before departing the paper last October.

Asked whether he had a favourite, Mr Silverstein pointed to Mr Trumps tweet in December 2016 in which the president-elect denounced the seizure of a US Navy underwater glider by a Chinese warship as unpresidented.

I always told our [editor] that that should be our front-page headline if Trump gets impeached, Mr Silverstein said in an email.

World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 30 September 2020 Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 September 2020 A girl's silhouette is seen from behind a fabric in a tent along a beach by Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 September 2020 A Chinese woman takes a photo of herself in front of a flower display dedicated to frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China. China will celebrate national day marking the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st Getty World news in pictures 27 September 2020 The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California. The fast moving Glass fire has burned over 1,000 acres and has destroyed homes Getty World news in pictures 26 September 2020 A villager along with a child offers prayers next to a carcass of a wild elephant that officials say was electrocuted in Rani Reserve Forest on the outskirts of Guwahati, India AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 September 2020 The casket of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seen in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol to lie in state in Washington, DC AFP via Getty World news in pictures 24 September 2020 An anti-government protester holds up an image of a pro-democracy commemorative plaque at a rally outside Thailand's parliament in Bangkok, as activists gathered to demand a new constitution AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 September 2020 A whale stranded on a beach in Macquarie Harbour on the rugged west coast of Tasmania, as hundreds of pilot whales have died in a mass stranding in southern Australia despite efforts to save them, with rescuers racing to free a few dozen survivors The Mercury/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 22 September 2020 State civil employee candidates wearing face masks and shields take a test in Surabaya AFP via Getty World news in pictures 21 September 2020 A man sweeps at the Taj Mahal monument on the day of its reopening after being closed for more than six months due to the coronavirus pandemic AP World news in pictures 20 September 2020 A deer looks for food in a burnt area, caused by the Bobcat fire, in Pearblossom, California EPA World news in pictures 19 September 2020 Anti-government protesters hold their mobile phones aloft as they take part in a pro-democracy rally in Bangkok. Tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters massed close to Thailand's royal palace, in a huge rally calling for PM Prayut Chan-O-Cha to step down and demanding reforms to the monarchy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 September 2020 Supporters of Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr maintain social distancing as they attend Friday prayers after the coronavirus disease restrictions were eased, in Kufa mosque, near Najaf, Iraq Reuters World news in pictures 17 September 2020 A protester climbs on The Triumph of the Republic at 'the Place de la Nation' as thousands of protesters take part in a demonstration during a national day strike called by labor unions asking for better salary and against jobs cut in Paris, France EPA World news in pictures 16 September 2020 A fire raging near the Lazzaretto of Ancona in Italy. The huge blaze broke out overnight at the port of Ancona. Firefighters have brought the fire under control but they expected to keep working through the day EPA World news in pictures 15 September 2020 Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny posing for a selfie with his family at Berlin's Charite hospital. In an Instagram post he said he could now breathe independently following his suspected poisoning last month Alexei Navalny/Instagram/AFP World news in pictures 14 September 2020 Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida celebrate after Suga was elected as new head of the ruling party at the Liberal Democratic Party's leadership election in Tokyo Reuters World news in pictures 13 September 2020 A man stands behind a burning barricade during the fifth straight day of protests against police brutality in Bogota AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 September 2020 Police officers block and detain protesters during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus. Daily protests calling for the authoritarian president's resignation are now in their second month AP World news in pictures 11 September 2020 Members of 'Omnium Cultural' celebrate the 20th 'Festa per la llibertat' ('Fiesta for the freedom') to mark the Day of Catalonia in Barcelona. Omnion Cultural fights for the independence of Catalonia EPA World news in pictures 10 September 2020 The Moria refugee camp, two days after Greece's biggest migrant camp, was destroyed by fire. Thousands of asylum seekers on the island of Lesbos are now homeless AFP via Getty World news in pictures 9 September 2020 Pope Francis takes off his face mask as he arrives by car to hold a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 8 September 2020 A home is engulfed in flames during the "Creek Fire" in the Tollhouse area of California AFP via Getty World news in pictures 7 September 2020 A couple take photos along a sea wall of the waves brought by Typhoon Haishen in the eastern port city of Sokcho AFP via Getty World news in pictures 6 September 2020 Novak Djokovic and a tournament official tends to a linesperson who was struck with a ball by Djokovic during his match against Pablo Carreno Busta at the US Open USA Today Sports/Reuters World news in pictures 5 September 2020 Protesters confront police at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, Australia, during an anti-lockdown rally AFP via Getty World news in pictures 4 September 2020 A woman looks on from a rooftop as rescue workers dig through the rubble of a damaged building in Beirut. A search began for possible survivors after a scanner detected a pulse one month after the mega-blast at the adjacent port AFP via Getty World news in pictures 3 September 2020 A full moon next to the Virgen del Panecillo statue in Quito, Ecuador EPA World news in pictures 2 September 2020 A Palestinian woman reacts as Israeli forces demolish her animal shed near Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank Reuters World news in pictures 1 September 2020 Students protest against presidential elections results in Minsk TUT.BY/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 31 August 2020 The pack rides during the 3rd stage of the Tour de France between Nice and Sisteron AFP via Getty World news in pictures 30 August 2020 Law enforcement officers block a street during a rally of opposition supporters protesting against presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus Reuters World news in pictures 29 August 2020 A woman holding a placard reading "Stop Censorship - Yes to the Freedom of Expression" shouts in a megaphone during a protest against the mandatory wearing of face masks in Paris. Masks, which were already compulsory on public transport, in enclosed public spaces, and outdoors in Paris in certain high-congestion areas around tourist sites, were made mandatory outdoors citywide on August 28 to fight the rising coronavirus infections AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 August 2020 Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe bows to the national flag at the start of a press conference at the prime minister official residence in Tokyo. Abe announced he will resign over health problems, in a bombshell development that kicks off a leadership contest in the world's third-largest economy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 27 August 2020 Residents take cover behind a tree trunk from rubber bullets fired by South African Police Service (SAPS) in Eldorado Park, near Johannesburg, during a protest by community members after a 16-year old boy was reported dead AFP via Getty World news in pictures 26 August 2020 People scatter rose petals on a statue of Mother Teresa marking her 110th birth anniversary in Ahmedabad AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 August 2020 An aerial view shows beach-goers standing on salt formations in the Dead Sea near Ein Bokeq, Israel Reuters World news in pictures 24 August 2020 Health workers use a fingertip pulse oximeter and check the body temperature of a fisherwoman inside the Dharavi slum during a door-to-door Covid-19 coronavirus screening in Mumbai AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 August 2020 People carry an idol of the Hindu god Ganesh, the deity of prosperity, to immerse it off the coast of the Arabian sea during the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in Mumbai, India Reuters World news in pictures 22 August 2020 Firefighters watch as flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires approach a home in Napa County, California AP World news in pictures 21 August 2020 Members of the Israeli security forces arrest a Palestinian demonstrator during a rally to protest against Israel's plan to annex parts of the occupied West Bank AFP via Getty World news in pictures 20 August 2020 A man pushes his bicycle through a deserted road after prohibitory orders were imposed by district officials for a week to contain the spread of the Covid-19 in Kathmandu AFP via Getty World news in pictures 19 August 2020 A car burns while parked at a residence in Vacaville, California. Dozens of fires are burning out of control throughout Northern California as fire resources are spread thin AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 August 2020 Students use their mobile phones as flashlights at an anti-government rally at Mahidol University in Nakhon Pathom. Thailand has seen near-daily protests in recent weeks by students demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-O-Cha AFP via Getty World news in pictures 17 August 2020 Members of the Kayapo tribe block the BR163 highway during a protest outside Novo Progresso in Para state, Brazil. Indigenous protesters blocked a major transamazonian highway to protest against the lack of governmental support during the COVID-19 novel coronavirus pandemic and illegal deforestation in and around their territories AFP via Getty World news in pictures 16 August 2020 Lightning forks over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as a storm passes over Oakland AP World news in pictures 15 August 2020 Belarus opposition supporters gather near the Pushkinskaya metro station where Alexander Taraikovsky, a 34-year-old protester died on August 10, during their protest rally in central Minsk AFP via Getty World news in pictures 14 August 2020 AlphaTauri's driver Daniil Kvyat takes part in the second practice session at the Circuit de Catalunya in Montmelo near Barcelona ahead of the Spanish F1 Grand Prix AFP via Getty World news in pictures 13 August 2020 Soldiers of the Brazilian Armed Forces during a disinfection of the Christ The Redeemer statue at the Corcovado mountain prior to the opening of the touristic attraction in Rio AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 August 2020 Young elephant bulls tussle playfully on World Elephant Day at the Amboseli National Park in Kenya AFP via Getty

Inside the West Wing, however, it was another mistake in January 2017, by a junior White House aide, that caused the most consternation  just a week after Mr Trump took office. Announcing the visit to the White House of British Prime Minister Theresa May, the official schedule misspelled her name three times as Teresa May, which The Independent drolly noted is the stage name of a British pornographic movie actress whose oeuvre includes Whitehouse: The Sex Video and Leather Lust.

The mistake reverberated throughout the West Wing and prompted then-Chief of Staff Reince Priebus to implement new procedures, building in extra layers of sign-offs before news releases were made public, according to a former White House official familiar with the fallout who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private matters. The main change was that official announcements would have to be cleared by the office of the staff secretary, led by Rob Porter, who resigned last month amid accusations of abuse from two former wives.

There was a lot of head-desk, said the former official, when asked how the White House press office reacted to errors that became public. Snarky reaction on Twitter was usually the first indication that something got missed. Even having the staff secretary look at it was not foolproof. Were humans.

The mistakes hardly abated. The White House mangled the titles of foreign leaders and their countries. It called Prime Minister Shinzo Abe the president of Japan. After Mr Trump held a high-stakes bilateral meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping at Mar-a-Lago in July, the White House readout referred to the Republic of China, which is the official name of Taiwan. Mr Xi is the leader of the Peoples Republic of China.

In a sign that the sloppiness might be infecting other parts of Washington, tickets to Mr Trumps address to a joint session of Congress in January, distributed by the Office of the Sergeant at Arms and Doorkeeper, touted the State of the Uniom.

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders did not respond to a request for comment.

Liz Allen, who served as White House deputy communications director under former President Barack Obama, said in an interview that the press office under the 44th President sought to be as rigorous as possible. Releases typically were proofread for accuracy and content by at least four or five people. Announcements that dealt with domestic policy issues and foreign affairs were vetted by experts at federal agencies and the National Security Council, she said.

We felt a burden and responsibility to get it right, Ms Allen said. We were acutely aware of the integrity of our platform. We took it seriously. No one should meet a higher bar than the White House. They are the ultimate voice.

That voice was a bit garbled last month when, according to the White House daily guidance, Mr Trump was planning to address the Conservative Political Action Conference at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center in Oxen Hill.

The proper spelling of the suburban Maryland jurisdiction is Oxon Hill, a mistake made more pronounced by the fact that the Gaylord resort is the home of the National Spelling Bee.

The Washington PostIn his first interview addressing a user privacy scandal that has besieged his company, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he would be willing to testify before Congress and apologised.

Im really sorry this happened, Mr Zuckerberg said, and Im happy to appear before Congress if its the right thing to do.

But the Facebook founder, whose company last year dispatched a top deputy rather than Mr Zuckerberg to testify before Congress on Russian actors seeking to influence the election via Facebook, hedged on the possibility.

The goal there is to get Congress all the information they need to do their extremely important job and we want to send whoever is best informed, Mr Zuckerberg said.

He also said Facebook was committed to stopping interference in the US midterm election in November and elections in India and Brazil, adding he was "sure someone's trying" to use the site to meddle.

"There are going to be some new tactics that we need to make sure that we observe and get in front of," he said.

For days Mr Zuckerberg made no public comment on the news that consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, which wielded sophisticated online targeting to shape the 2016 presidential race in the service of Donald Trumps campaign, had gathered data on some 50 million Facebook users. His absence amid the mounting fallout spurred widespread criticism.

Breaking that silence, Mr Zuckerberg, acknowledged earlier in the day that Facebook had known since 2015 that researcher Aleksandr Kogan shared user data he gathered from an app with Cambridge Analytica.

World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 30 September 2020 Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 September 2020 A girl's silhouette is seen from behind a fabric in a tent along a beach by Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 September 2020 A Chinese woman takes a photo of herself in front of a flower display dedicated to frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China. China will celebrate national day marking the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st Getty World news in pictures 27 September 2020 The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California. The fast moving Glass fire has burned over 1,000 acres and has destroyed homes Getty World news in pictures 26 September 2020 A villager along with a child offers prayers next to a carcass of a wild elephant that officials say was electrocuted in Rani Reserve Forest on the outskirts of Guwahati, India AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 September 2020 The casket of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seen in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol to lie in state in Washington, DC AFP via Getty World news in pictures 24 September 2020 An anti-government protester holds up an image of a pro-democracy commemorative plaque at a rally outside Thailand's parliament in Bangkok, as activists gathered to demand a new constitution AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 September 2020 A whale stranded on a beach in Macquarie Harbour on the rugged west coast of Tasmania, as hundreds of pilot whales have died in a mass stranding in southern Australia despite efforts to save them, with rescuers racing to free a few dozen survivors The Mercury/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 22 September 2020 State civil employee candidates wearing face masks and shields take a test in Surabaya AFP via Getty World news in pictures 21 September 2020 A man sweeps at the Taj Mahal monument on the day of its reopening after being closed for more than six months due to the coronavirus pandemic AP World news in pictures 20 September 2020 A deer looks for food in a burnt area, caused by the Bobcat fire, in Pearblossom, California EPA World news in pictures 19 September 2020 Anti-government protesters hold their mobile phones aloft as they take part in a pro-democracy rally in Bangkok. Tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters massed close to Thailand's royal palace, in a huge rally calling for PM Prayut Chan-O-Cha to step down and demanding reforms to the monarchy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 September 2020 Supporters of Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr maintain social distancing as they attend Friday prayers after the coronavirus disease restrictions were eased, in Kufa mosque, near Najaf, Iraq Reuters World news in pictures 17 September 2020 A protester climbs on The Triumph of the Republic at 'the Place de la Nation' as thousands of protesters take part in a demonstration during a national day strike called by labor unions asking for better salary and against jobs cut in Paris, France EPA World news in pictures 16 September 2020 A fire raging near the Lazzaretto of Ancona in Italy. The huge blaze broke out overnight at the port of Ancona. Firefighters have brought the fire under control but they expected to keep working through the day EPA World news in pictures 15 September 2020 Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny posing for a selfie with his family at Berlin's Charite hospital. In an Instagram post he said he could now breathe independently following his suspected poisoning last month Alexei Navalny/Instagram/AFP World news in pictures 14 September 2020 Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida celebrate after Suga was elected as new head of the ruling party at the Liberal Democratic Party's leadership election in Tokyo Reuters World news in pictures 13 September 2020 A man stands behind a burning barricade during the fifth straight day of protests against police brutality in Bogota AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 September 2020 Police officers block and detain protesters during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus. Daily protests calling for the authoritarian president's resignation are now in their second month AP World news in pictures 11 September 2020 Members of 'Omnium Cultural' celebrate the 20th 'Festa per la llibertat' ('Fiesta for the freedom') to mark the Day of Catalonia in Barcelona. Omnion Cultural fights for the independence of Catalonia EPA World news in pictures 10 September 2020 The Moria refugee camp, two days after Greece's biggest migrant camp, was destroyed by fire. Thousands of asylum seekers on the island of Lesbos are now homeless AFP via Getty World news in pictures 9 September 2020 Pope Francis takes off his face mask as he arrives by car to hold a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 8 September 2020 A home is engulfed in flames during the "Creek Fire" in the Tollhouse area of California AFP via Getty World news in pictures 7 September 2020 A couple take photos along a sea wall of the waves brought by Typhoon Haishen in the eastern port city of Sokcho AFP via Getty World news in pictures 6 September 2020 Novak Djokovic and a tournament official tends to a linesperson who was struck with a ball by Djokovic during his match against Pablo Carreno Busta at the US Open USA Today Sports/Reuters World news in pictures 5 September 2020 Protesters confront police at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, Australia, during an anti-lockdown rally AFP via Getty World news in pictures 4 September 2020 A woman looks on from a rooftop as rescue workers dig through the rubble of a damaged building in Beirut. A search began for possible survivors after a scanner detected a pulse one month after the mega-blast at the adjacent port AFP via Getty World news in pictures 3 September 2020 A full moon next to the Virgen del Panecillo statue in Quito, Ecuador EPA World news in pictures 2 September 2020 A Palestinian woman reacts as Israeli forces demolish her animal shed near Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank Reuters World news in pictures 1 September 2020 Students protest against presidential elections results in Minsk TUT.BY/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 31 August 2020 The pack rides during the 3rd stage of the Tour de France between Nice and Sisteron AFP via Getty World news in pictures 30 August 2020 Law enforcement officers block a street during a rally of opposition supporters protesting against presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus Reuters World news in pictures 29 August 2020 A woman holding a placard reading "Stop Censorship - Yes to the Freedom of Expression" shouts in a megaphone during a protest against the mandatory wearing of face masks in Paris. Masks, which were already compulsory on public transport, in enclosed public spaces, and outdoors in Paris in certain high-congestion areas around tourist sites, were made mandatory outdoors citywide on August 28 to fight the rising coronavirus infections AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 August 2020 Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe bows to the national flag at the start of a press conference at the prime minister official residence in Tokyo. Abe announced he will resign over health problems, in a bombshell development that kicks off a leadership contest in the world's third-largest economy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 27 August 2020 Residents take cover behind a tree trunk from rubber bullets fired by South African Police Service (SAPS) in Eldorado Park, near Johannesburg, during a protest by community members after a 16-year old boy was reported dead AFP via Getty World news in pictures 26 August 2020 People scatter rose petals on a statue of Mother Teresa marking her 110th birth anniversary in Ahmedabad AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 August 2020 An aerial view shows beach-goers standing on salt formations in the Dead Sea near Ein Bokeq, Israel Reuters World news in pictures 24 August 2020 Health workers use a fingertip pulse oximeter and check the body temperature of a fisherwoman inside the Dharavi slum during a door-to-door Covid-19 coronavirus screening in Mumbai AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 August 2020 People carry an idol of the Hindu god Ganesh, the deity of prosperity, to immerse it off the coast of the Arabian sea during the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in Mumbai, India Reuters World news in pictures 22 August 2020 Firefighters watch as flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires approach a home in Napa County, California AP World news in pictures 21 August 2020 Members of the Israeli security forces arrest a Palestinian demonstrator during a rally to protest against Israel's plan to annex parts of the occupied West Bank AFP via Getty World news in pictures 20 August 2020 A man pushes his bicycle through a deserted road after prohibitory orders were imposed by district officials for a week to contain the spread of the Covid-19 in Kathmandu AFP via Getty World news in pictures 19 August 2020 A car burns while parked at a residence in Vacaville, California. Dozens of fires are burning out of control throughout Northern California as fire resources are spread thin AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 August 2020 Students use their mobile phones as flashlights at an anti-government rally at Mahidol University in Nakhon Pathom. Thailand has seen near-daily protests in recent weeks by students demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-O-Cha AFP via Getty World news in pictures 17 August 2020 Members of the Kayapo tribe block the BR163 highway during a protest outside Novo Progresso in Para state, Brazil. Indigenous protesters blocked a major transamazonian highway to protest against the lack of governmental support during the COVID-19 novel coronavirus pandemic and illegal deforestation in and around their territories AFP via Getty World news in pictures 16 August 2020 Lightning forks over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as a storm passes over Oakland AP World news in pictures 15 August 2020 Belarus opposition supporters gather near the Pushkinskaya metro station where Alexander Taraikovsky, a 34-year-old protester died on August 10, during their protest rally in central Minsk AFP via Getty World news in pictures 14 August 2020 AlphaTauri's driver Daniil Kvyat takes part in the second practice session at the Circuit de Catalunya in Montmelo near Barcelona ahead of the Spanish F1 Grand Prix AFP via Getty World news in pictures 13 August 2020 Soldiers of the Brazilian Armed Forces during a disinfection of the Christ The Redeemer statue at the Corcovado mountain prior to the opening of the touristic attraction in Rio AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 August 2020 Young elephant bulls tussle playfully on World Elephant Day at the Amboseli National Park in Kenya AFP via Getty

Both Cambridge Analytica and Mr Kogan certified they had destroyed the information, Mr Zuckerberg said, and Facebook only learned they may not have from news reports this week. In the interview with CNN, he said Facebook erred in accepting the assurances of Cambridge Analytica and Mr Kogan.

Im used to, when people legally certify that theyre going to do something, theyre going to do it. But I think this was a mistake in retrospect, Mr Zuckerberg said. We should not have trusted the certification they gave us, he added, and were not going to make that mistake again.

In his post, Mr Zucckerberg said Facebook had instituted safeguards in 2014 to prevent apps from harvesting the amount of user data gleaned by Mr Kogans survey and pledged Facebook would roll out more stringent measures to limit data collection. He reiterated the pledge to better safeguard user data during the CNN interview, promising a sweeping review of existing apps.

We are doing a set of things to restrict the amount of access that developers get going forward, he said, adding that Were going to review thousands of apps.

While Mr Zuckerbergs statement hewed to the explanation already publicly offered by Facebook, it came after Mr Zuckerberg faced rising frustration from elected officials who wondered why the CEO had not publicly addressed the gathering crisis.

 Cambridge Analytica: Theresa May addresses government connections at PMQs

Members of Congress and Parliament have called on Mr Zuckerberg to testify, and his post did not quell their desire to hear from the Facebook founder himself.

The steps Facebook has laid out to protect its users are a start but Zuckerberg still needs to come testify, said Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat who has sought to more tightly regulate political speech on Facebook.

Similarly, Senator Ed Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, responded to Mr Zuckerbergs post by writing You need to come to Congress and testify to this under oath.

I still want to know why it took Facebook so long to do anything about this, particularly when there are indications that this user data was exploited by Cambridge Analytica for years, said Senator Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat.The suspect in a Texas car chase has been arrested after more than an hour of pursuit.

The chase, which started out at high speeds, ended in Houston just before 9.30am after the driver repeatedly stopped in rush hour traffic, and then ultimately slowed down.

Police say that the driver is a suspect in a domestic disturbance case that was reported early Thursday morning, according to the Houston Chronicle.

Recommended What we know about Texas bombing suspect Mark Anthony Conditt

Lt Steve Dorris of the Baytown Police Department told that newspaper that they had received a 911 call in the morning from someone who claimed a husband was assaulting his wife.

The chase then began after police arrived at the scene to discover that the suspect had fled in his vehicle.

After identifying the vehicle, police pursued the suspect as he made several U-turns to avoid capture. After entering the rush hour traffic after 8 am, the suspect avoided other vehicles by swerving in and out of traffic, passing other vehicles on the shoulder of the road, and even driving through sidewalks and grassy areas.

World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 30 September 2020 Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 September 2020 A girl's silhouette is seen from behind a fabric in a tent along a beach by Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 September 2020 A Chinese woman takes a photo of herself in front of a flower display dedicated to frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China. China will celebrate national day marking the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st Getty World news in pictures 27 September 2020 The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California. The fast moving Glass fire has burned over 1,000 acres and has destroyed homes Getty World news in pictures 26 September 2020 A villager along with a child offers prayers next to a carcass of a wild elephant that officials say was electrocuted in Rani Reserve Forest on the outskirts of Guwahati, India AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 September 2020 The casket of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seen in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol to lie in state in Washington, DC AFP via Getty World news in pictures 24 September 2020 An anti-government protester holds up an image of a pro-democracy commemorative plaque at a rally outside Thailand's parliament in Bangkok, as activists gathered to demand a new constitution AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 September 2020 A whale stranded on a beach in Macquarie Harbour on the rugged west coast of Tasmania, as hundreds of pilot whales have died in a mass stranding in southern Australia despite efforts to save them, with rescuers racing to free a few dozen survivors The Mercury/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 22 September 2020 State civil employee candidates wearing face masks and shields take a test in Surabaya AFP via Getty World news in pictures 21 September 2020 A man sweeps at the Taj Mahal monument on the day of its reopening after being closed for more than six months due to the coronavirus pandemic AP World news in pictures 20 September 2020 A deer looks for food in a burnt area, caused by the Bobcat fire, in Pearblossom, California EPA World news in pictures 19 September 2020 Anti-government protesters hold their mobile phones aloft as they take part in a pro-democracy rally in Bangkok. Tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters massed close to Thailand's royal palace, in a huge rally calling for PM Prayut Chan-O-Cha to step down and demanding reforms to the monarchy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 September 2020 Supporters of Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr maintain social distancing as they attend Friday prayers after the coronavirus disease restrictions were eased, in Kufa mosque, near Najaf, Iraq Reuters World news in pictures 17 September 2020 A protester climbs on The Triumph of the Republic at 'the Place de la Nation' as thousands of protesters take part in a demonstration during a national day strike called by labor unions asking for better salary and against jobs cut in Paris, France EPA World news in pictures 16 September 2020 A fire raging near the Lazzaretto of Ancona in Italy. The huge blaze broke out overnight at the port of Ancona. Firefighters have brought the fire under control but they expected to keep working through the day EPA World news in pictures 15 September 2020 Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny posing for a selfie with his family at Berlin's Charite hospital. In an Instagram post he said he could now breathe independently following his suspected poisoning last month Alexei Navalny/Instagram/AFP World news in pictures 14 September 2020 Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida celebrate after Suga was elected as new head of the ruling party at the Liberal Democratic Party's leadership election in Tokyo Reuters World news in pictures 13 September 2020 A man stands behind a burning barricade during the fifth straight day of protests against police brutality in Bogota AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 September 2020 Police officers block and detain protesters during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus. Daily protests calling for the authoritarian president's resignation are now in their second month AP World news in pictures 11 September 2020 Members of 'Omnium Cultural' celebrate the 20th 'Festa per la llibertat' ('Fiesta for the freedom') to mark the Day of Catalonia in Barcelona. Omnion Cultural fights for the independence of Catalonia EPA World news in pictures 10 September 2020 The Moria refugee camp, two days after Greece's biggest migrant camp, was destroyed by fire. Thousands of asylum seekers on the island of Lesbos are now homeless AFP via Getty World news in pictures 9 September 2020 Pope Francis takes off his face mask as he arrives by car to hold a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 8 September 2020 A home is engulfed in flames during the "Creek Fire" in the Tollhouse area of California AFP via Getty World news in pictures 7 September 2020 A couple take photos along a sea wall of the waves brought by Typhoon Haishen in the eastern port city of Sokcho AFP via Getty World news in pictures 6 September 2020 Novak Djokovic and a tournament official tends to a linesperson who was struck with a ball by Djokovic during his match against Pablo Carreno Busta at the US Open USA Today Sports/Reuters World news in pictures 5 September 2020 Protesters confront police at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, Australia, during an anti-lockdown rally AFP via Getty World news in pictures 4 September 2020 A woman looks on from a rooftop as rescue workers dig through the rubble of a damaged building in Beirut. A search began for possible survivors after a scanner detected a pulse one month after the mega-blast at the adjacent port AFP via Getty World news in pictures 3 September 2020 A full moon next to the Virgen del Panecillo statue in Quito, Ecuador EPA World news in pictures 2 September 2020 A Palestinian woman reacts as Israeli forces demolish her animal shed near Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank Reuters World news in pictures 1 September 2020 Students protest against presidential elections results in Minsk TUT.BY/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 31 August 2020 The pack rides during the 3rd stage of the Tour de France between Nice and Sisteron AFP via Getty World news in pictures 30 August 2020 Law enforcement officers block a street during a rally of opposition supporters protesting against presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus Reuters World news in pictures 29 August 2020 A woman holding a placard reading "Stop Censorship - Yes to the Freedom of Expression" shouts in a megaphone during a protest against the mandatory wearing of face masks in Paris. Masks, which were already compulsory on public transport, in enclosed public spaces, and outdoors in Paris in certain high-congestion areas around tourist sites, were made mandatory outdoors citywide on August 28 to fight the rising coronavirus infections AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 August 2020 Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe bows to the national flag at the start of a press conference at the prime minister official residence in Tokyo. Abe announced he will resign over health problems, in a bombshell development that kicks off a leadership contest in the world's third-largest economy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 27 August 2020 Residents take cover behind a tree trunk from rubber bullets fired by South African Police Service (SAPS) in Eldorado Park, near Johannesburg, during a protest by community members after a 16-year old boy was reported dead AFP via Getty World news in pictures 26 August 2020 People scatter rose petals on a statue of Mother Teresa marking her 110th birth anniversary in Ahmedabad AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 August 2020 An aerial view shows beach-goers standing on salt formations in the Dead Sea near Ein Bokeq, Israel Reuters World news in pictures 24 August 2020 Health workers use a fingertip pulse oximeter and check the body temperature of a fisherwoman inside the Dharavi slum during a door-to-door Covid-19 coronavirus screening in Mumbai AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 August 2020 People carry an idol of the Hindu god Ganesh, the deity of prosperity, to immerse it off the coast of the Arabian sea during the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in Mumbai, India Reuters World news in pictures 22 August 2020 Firefighters watch as flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires approach a home in Napa County, California AP World news in pictures 21 August 2020 Members of the Israeli security forces arrest a Palestinian demonstrator during a rally to protest against Israel's plan to annex parts of the occupied West Bank AFP via Getty World news in pictures 20 August 2020 A man pushes his bicycle through a deserted road after prohibitory orders were imposed by district officials for a week to contain the spread of the Covid-19 in Kathmandu AFP via Getty World news in pictures 19 August 2020 A car burns while parked at a residence in Vacaville, California. Dozens of fires are burning out of control throughout Northern California as fire resources are spread thin AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 August 2020 Students use their mobile phones as flashlights at an anti-government rally at Mahidol University in Nakhon Pathom. Thailand has seen near-daily protests in recent weeks by students demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-O-Cha AFP via Getty World news in pictures 17 August 2020 Members of the Kayapo tribe block the BR163 highway during a protest outside Novo Progresso in Para state, Brazil. Indigenous protesters blocked a major transamazonian highway to protest against the lack of governmental support during the COVID-19 novel coronavirus pandemic and illegal deforestation in and around their territories AFP via Getty World news in pictures 16 August 2020 Lightning forks over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as a storm passes over Oakland AP World news in pictures 15 August 2020 Belarus opposition supporters gather near the Pushkinskaya metro station where Alexander Taraikovsky, a 34-year-old protester died on August 10, during their protest rally in central Minsk AFP via Getty World news in pictures 14 August 2020 AlphaTauri's driver Daniil Kvyat takes part in the second practice session at the Circuit de Catalunya in Montmelo near Barcelona ahead of the Spanish F1 Grand Prix AFP via Getty World news in pictures 13 August 2020 Soldiers of the Brazilian Armed Forces during a disinfection of the Christ The Redeemer statue at the Corcovado mountain prior to the opening of the touristic attraction in Rio AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 August 2020 Young elephant bulls tussle playfully on World Elephant Day at the Amboseli National Park in Kenya AFP via Getty

Police at one point rammed the car, and the suspect ultimately pulled off of the interstate before being boxed in by police.

At one point, as many as 10 police cars were reportedly flanking the vehicle as it made its attempted getaway Thursday.A Fly Jamaica Airways crew member was arrested with four packages of cocaine taped to his legs, after arriving at New York's John F Kennedy International Airport.

US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) said Hugh Hall had travelled to the airport from Montego Bay, Jamaica, when he was discovered.

Approximately nine pounds worth of white powder were seized, which tested positive for cocaine.

It had a street value of around $160,000 (113,000).

World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 30 September 2020 Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 September 2020 A girl's silhouette is seen from behind a fabric in a tent along a beach by Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 September 2020 A Chinese woman takes a photo of herself in front of a flower display dedicated to frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China. China will celebrate national day marking the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st Getty World news in pictures 27 September 2020 The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California. The fast moving Glass fire has burned over 1,000 acres and has destroyed homes Getty World news in pictures 26 September 2020 A villager along with a child offers prayers next to a carcass of a wild elephant that officials say was electrocuted in Rani Reserve Forest on the outskirts of Guwahati, India AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 September 2020 The casket of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seen in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol to lie in state in Washington, DC AFP via Getty World news in pictures 24 September 2020 An anti-government protester holds up an image of a pro-democracy commemorative plaque at a rally outside Thailand's parliament in Bangkok, as activists gathered to demand a new constitution AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 September 2020 A whale stranded on a beach in Macquarie Harbour on the rugged west coast of Tasmania, as hundreds of pilot whales have died in a mass stranding in southern Australia despite efforts to save them, with rescuers racing to free a few dozen survivors The Mercury/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 22 September 2020 State civil employee candidates wearing face masks and shields take a test in Surabaya AFP via Getty World news in pictures 21 September 2020 A man sweeps at the Taj Mahal monument on the day of its reopening after being closed for more than six months due to the coronavirus pandemic AP World news in pictures 20 September 2020 A deer looks for food in a burnt area, caused by the Bobcat fire, in Pearblossom, California EPA World news in pictures 19 September 2020 Anti-government protesters hold their mobile phones aloft as they take part in a pro-democracy rally in Bangkok. Tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters massed close to Thailand's royal palace, in a huge rally calling for PM Prayut Chan-O-Cha to step down and demanding reforms to the monarchy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 September 2020 Supporters of Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr maintain social distancing as they attend Friday prayers after the coronavirus disease restrictions were eased, in Kufa mosque, near Najaf, Iraq Reuters World news in pictures 17 September 2020 A protester climbs on The Triumph of the Republic at 'the Place de la Nation' as thousands of protesters take part in a demonstration during a national day strike called by labor unions asking for better salary and against jobs cut in Paris, France EPA World news in pictures 16 September 2020 A fire raging near the Lazzaretto of Ancona in Italy. The huge blaze broke out overnight at the port of Ancona. Firefighters have brought the fire under control but they expected to keep working through the day EPA World news in pictures 15 September 2020 Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny posing for a selfie with his family at Berlin's Charite hospital. In an Instagram post he said he could now breathe independently following his suspected poisoning last month Alexei Navalny/Instagram/AFP World news in pictures 14 September 2020 Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida celebrate after Suga was elected as new head of the ruling party at the Liberal Democratic Party's leadership election in Tokyo Reuters World news in pictures 13 September 2020 A man stands behind a burning barricade during the fifth straight day of protests against police brutality in Bogota AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 September 2020 Police officers block and detain protesters during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus. Daily protests calling for the authoritarian president's resignation are now in their second month AP World news in pictures 11 September 2020 Members of 'Omnium Cultural' celebrate the 20th 'Festa per la llibertat' ('Fiesta for the freedom') to mark the Day of Catalonia in Barcelona. Omnion Cultural fights for the independence of Catalonia EPA World news in pictures 10 September 2020 The Moria refugee camp, two days after Greece's biggest migrant camp, was destroyed by fire. Thousands of asylum seekers on the island of Lesbos are now homeless AFP via Getty World news in pictures 9 September 2020 Pope Francis takes off his face mask as he arrives by car to hold a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 8 September 2020 A home is engulfed in flames during the "Creek Fire" in the Tollhouse area of California AFP via Getty World news in pictures 7 September 2020 A couple take photos along a sea wall of the waves brought by Typhoon Haishen in the eastern port city of Sokcho AFP via Getty World news in pictures 6 September 2020 Novak Djokovic and a tournament official tends to a linesperson who was struck with a ball by Djokovic during his match against Pablo Carreno Busta at the US Open USA Today Sports/Reuters World news in pictures 5 September 2020 Protesters confront police at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, Australia, during an anti-lockdown rally AFP via Getty World news in pictures 4 September 2020 A woman looks on from a rooftop as rescue workers dig through the rubble of a damaged building in Beirut. A search began for possible survivors after a scanner detected a pulse one month after the mega-blast at the adjacent port AFP via Getty World news in pictures 3 September 2020 A full moon next to the Virgen del Panecillo statue in Quito, Ecuador EPA World news in pictures 2 September 2020 A Palestinian woman reacts as Israeli forces demolish her animal shed near Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank Reuters World news in pictures 1 September 2020 Students protest against presidential elections results in Minsk TUT.BY/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 31 August 2020 The pack rides during the 3rd stage of the Tour de France between Nice and Sisteron AFP via Getty World news in pictures 30 August 2020 Law enforcement officers block a street during a rally of opposition supporters protesting against presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus Reuters World news in pictures 29 August 2020 A woman holding a placard reading "Stop Censorship - Yes to the Freedom of Expression" shouts in a megaphone during a protest against the mandatory wearing of face masks in Paris. Masks, which were already compulsory on public transport, in enclosed public spaces, and outdoors in Paris in certain high-congestion areas around tourist sites, were made mandatory outdoors citywide on August 28 to fight the rising coronavirus infections AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 August 2020 Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe bows to the national flag at the start of a press conference at the prime minister official residence in Tokyo. Abe announced he will resign over health problems, in a bombshell development that kicks off a leadership contest in the world's third-largest economy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 27 August 2020 Residents take cover behind a tree trunk from rubber bullets fired by South African Police Service (SAPS) in Eldorado Park, near Johannesburg, during a protest by community members after a 16-year old boy was reported dead AFP via Getty World news in pictures 26 August 2020 People scatter rose petals on a statue of Mother Teresa marking her 110th birth anniversary in Ahmedabad AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 August 2020 An aerial view shows beach-goers standing on salt formations in the Dead Sea near Ein Bokeq, Israel Reuters World news in pictures 24 August 2020 Health workers use a fingertip pulse oximeter and check the body temperature of a fisherwoman inside the Dharavi slum during a door-to-door Covid-19 coronavirus screening in Mumbai AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 August 2020 People carry an idol of the Hindu god Ganesh, the deity of prosperity, to immerse it off the coast of the Arabian sea during the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in Mumbai, India Reuters World news in pictures 22 August 2020 Firefighters watch as flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires approach a home in Napa County, California AP World news in pictures 21 August 2020 Members of the Israeli security forces arrest a Palestinian demonstrator during a rally to protest against Israel's plan to annex parts of the occupied West Bank AFP via Getty World news in pictures 20 August 2020 A man pushes his bicycle through a deserted road after prohibitory orders were imposed by district officials for a week to contain the spread of the Covid-19 in Kathmandu AFP via Getty World news in pictures 19 August 2020 A car burns while parked at a residence in Vacaville, California. Dozens of fires are burning out of control throughout Northern California as fire resources are spread thin AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 August 2020 Students use their mobile phones as flashlights at an anti-government rally at Mahidol University in Nakhon Pathom. Thailand has seen near-daily protests in recent weeks by students demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-O-Cha AFP via Getty World news in pictures 17 August 2020 Members of the Kayapo tribe block the BR163 highway during a protest outside Novo Progresso in Para state, Brazil. Indigenous protesters blocked a major transamazonian highway to protest against the lack of governmental support during the COVID-19 novel coronavirus pandemic and illegal deforestation in and around their territories AFP via Getty World news in pictures 16 August 2020 Lightning forks over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as a storm passes over Oakland AP World news in pictures 15 August 2020 Belarus opposition supporters gather near the Pushkinskaya metro station where Alexander Taraikovsky, a 34-year-old protester died on August 10, during their protest rally in central Minsk AFP via Getty World news in pictures 14 August 2020 AlphaTauri's driver Daniil Kvyat takes part in the second practice session at the Circuit de Catalunya in Montmelo near Barcelona ahead of the Spanish F1 Grand Prix AFP via Getty World news in pictures 13 August 2020 Soldiers of the Brazilian Armed Forces during a disinfection of the Christ The Redeemer statue at the Corcovado mountain prior to the opening of the touristic attraction in Rio AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 August 2020 Young elephant bulls tussle playfully on World Elephant Day at the Amboseli National Park in Kenya AFP via Getty

Mr Hall was arrested for importing a controlled substance and turned over to Homeland Security Investigations.

This seizure is another example of our CBP officers being ever vigilant in protecting the United States from the distribution of illicit drugs, said Leon Hayward, acting director of CBPs New York Field Operations.For the first time in nearly two decades, Americans have turned against the National Rifle Association, according to a new poll.

It found that 40 per cent of people surveyed had a negative view of the NRA, while 37 per cent had a positive view.

That represented a significant drop from April 2017, when the same NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found a 45 per cent positive to 33 per cent negative divide.

It is the first time since at least 2000 that the poll registered a negative favourability rating for the gun owners group.

According to the survey, the biggest declines in support came from married white women, urban residents, white women in general and moderate Republicans.

The NBC/WSJ poll also matched other recent polling showing that the NRAs favourability is starting to turn negative in the wake of its response to the high school shooting in Parkland, Florida.

An Economist/YouGov poll released in February found that for the first time in the polls tracking, significantly more Americans express a negative opinion of the National Rifle Association than a positive one.

Overall, 45 per cent of people surveyed held an unfavourable view of the NRA, while 36 per cent had a favourable view. That was a decline from October, when the NRA held a 40 per cent favourable to a 36 per cent unfavourable edge.

World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 30 September 2020 Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 September 2020 A girl's silhouette is seen from behind a fabric in a tent along a beach by Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 September 2020 A Chinese woman takes a photo of herself in front of a flower display dedicated to frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China. China will celebrate national day marking the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st Getty World news in pictures 27 September 2020 The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California. The fast moving Glass fire has burned over 1,000 acres and has destroyed homes Getty World news in pictures 26 September 2020 A villager along with a child offers prayers next to a carcass of a wild elephant that officials say was electrocuted in Rani Reserve Forest on the outskirts of Guwahati, India AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 September 2020 The casket of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seen in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol to lie in state in Washington, DC AFP via Getty World news in pictures 24 September 2020 An anti-government protester holds up an image of a pro-democracy commemorative plaque at a rally outside Thailand's parliament in Bangkok, as activists gathered to demand a new constitution AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 September 2020 A whale stranded on a beach in Macquarie Harbour on the rugged west coast of Tasmania, as hundreds of pilot whales have died in a mass stranding in southern Australia despite efforts to save them, with rescuers racing to free a few dozen survivors The Mercury/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 22 September 2020 State civil employee candidates wearing face masks and shields take a test in Surabaya AFP via Getty World news in pictures 21 September 2020 A man sweeps at the Taj Mahal monument on the day of its reopening after being closed for more than six months due to the coronavirus pandemic AP World news in pictures 20 September 2020 A deer looks for food in a burnt area, caused by the Bobcat fire, in Pearblossom, California EPA World news in pictures 19 September 2020 Anti-government protesters hold their mobile phones aloft as they take part in a pro-democracy rally in Bangkok. Tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters massed close to Thailand's royal palace, in a huge rally calling for PM Prayut Chan-O-Cha to step down and demanding reforms to the monarchy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 September 2020 Supporters of Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr maintain social distancing as they attend Friday prayers after the coronavirus disease restrictions were eased, in Kufa mosque, near Najaf, Iraq Reuters World news in pictures 17 September 2020 A protester climbs on The Triumph of the Republic at 'the Place de la Nation' as thousands of protesters take part in a demonstration during a national day strike called by labor unions asking for better salary and against jobs cut in Paris, France EPA World news in pictures 16 September 2020 A fire raging near the Lazzaretto of Ancona in Italy. The huge blaze broke out overnight at the port of Ancona. Firefighters have brought the fire under control but they expected to keep working through the day EPA World news in pictures 15 September 2020 Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny posing for a selfie with his family at Berlin's Charite hospital. In an Instagram post he said he could now breathe independently following his suspected poisoning last month Alexei Navalny/Instagram/AFP World news in pictures 14 September 2020 Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida celebrate after Suga was elected as new head of the ruling party at the Liberal Democratic Party's leadership election in Tokyo Reuters World news in pictures 13 September 2020 A man stands behind a burning barricade during the fifth straight day of protests against police brutality in Bogota AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 September 2020 Police officers block and detain protesters during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus. Daily protests calling for the authoritarian president's resignation are now in their second month AP World news in pictures 11 September 2020 Members of 'Omnium Cultural' celebrate the 20th 'Festa per la llibertat' ('Fiesta for the freedom') to mark the Day of Catalonia in Barcelona. Omnion Cultural fights for the independence of Catalonia EPA World news in pictures 10 September 2020 The Moria refugee camp, two days after Greece's biggest migrant camp, was destroyed by fire. Thousands of asylum seekers on the island of Lesbos are now homeless AFP via Getty World news in pictures 9 September 2020 Pope Francis takes off his face mask as he arrives by car to hold a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 8 September 2020 A home is engulfed in flames during the "Creek Fire" in the Tollhouse area of California AFP via Getty World news in pictures 7 September 2020 A couple take photos along a sea wall of the waves brought by Typhoon Haishen in the eastern port city of Sokcho AFP via Getty World news in pictures 6 September 2020 Novak Djokovic and a tournament official tends to a linesperson who was struck with a ball by Djokovic during his match against Pablo Carreno Busta at the US Open USA Today Sports/Reuters World news in pictures 5 September 2020 Protesters confront police at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, Australia, during an anti-lockdown rally AFP via Getty World news in pictures 4 September 2020 A woman looks on from a rooftop as rescue workers dig through the rubble of a damaged building in Beirut. A search began for possible survivors after a scanner detected a pulse one month after the mega-blast at the adjacent port AFP via Getty World news in pictures 3 September 2020 A full moon next to the Virgen del Panecillo statue in Quito, Ecuador EPA World news in pictures 2 September 2020 A Palestinian woman reacts as Israeli forces demolish her animal shed near Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank Reuters World news in pictures 1 September 2020 Students protest against presidential elections results in Minsk TUT.BY/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 31 August 2020 The pack rides during the 3rd stage of the Tour de France between Nice and Sisteron AFP via Getty World news in pictures 30 August 2020 Law enforcement officers block a street during a rally of opposition supporters protesting against presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus Reuters World news in pictures 29 August 2020 A woman holding a placard reading "Stop Censorship - Yes to the Freedom of Expression" shouts in a megaphone during a protest against the mandatory wearing of face masks in Paris. Masks, which were already compulsory on public transport, in enclosed public spaces, and outdoors in Paris in certain high-congestion areas around tourist sites, were made mandatory outdoors citywide on August 28 to fight the rising coronavirus infections AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 August 2020 Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe bows to the national flag at the start of a press conference at the prime minister official residence in Tokyo. Abe announced he will resign over health problems, in a bombshell development that kicks off a leadership contest in the world's third-largest economy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 27 August 2020 Residents take cover behind a tree trunk from rubber bullets fired by South African Police Service (SAPS) in Eldorado Park, near Johannesburg, during a protest by community members after a 16-year old boy was reported dead AFP via Getty World news in pictures 26 August 2020 People scatter rose petals on a statue of Mother Teresa marking her 110th birth anniversary in Ahmedabad AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 August 2020 An aerial view shows beach-goers standing on salt formations in the Dead Sea near Ein Bokeq, Israel Reuters World news in pictures 24 August 2020 Health workers use a fingertip pulse oximeter and check the body temperature of a fisherwoman inside the Dharavi slum during a door-to-door Covid-19 coronavirus screening in Mumbai AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 August 2020 People carry an idol of the Hindu god Ganesh, the deity of prosperity, to immerse it off the coast of the Arabian sea during the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in Mumbai, India Reuters World news in pictures 22 August 2020 Firefighters watch as flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires approach a home in Napa County, California AP World news in pictures 21 August 2020 Members of the Israeli security forces arrest a Palestinian demonstrator during a rally to protest against Israel's plan to annex parts of the occupied West Bank AFP via Getty World news in pictures 20 August 2020 A man pushes his bicycle through a deserted road after prohibitory orders were imposed by district officials for a week to contain the spread of the Covid-19 in Kathmandu AFP via Getty World news in pictures 19 August 2020 A car burns while parked at a residence in Vacaville, California. Dozens of fires are burning out of control throughout Northern California as fire resources are spread thin AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 August 2020 Students use their mobile phones as flashlights at an anti-government rally at Mahidol University in Nakhon Pathom. Thailand has seen near-daily protests in recent weeks by students demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-O-Cha AFP via Getty World news in pictures 17 August 2020 Members of the Kayapo tribe block the BR163 highway during a protest outside Novo Progresso in Para state, Brazil. Indigenous protesters blocked a major transamazonian highway to protest against the lack of governmental support during the COVID-19 novel coronavirus pandemic and illegal deforestation in and around their territories AFP via Getty World news in pictures 16 August 2020 Lightning forks over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as a storm passes over Oakland AP World news in pictures 15 August 2020 Belarus opposition supporters gather near the Pushkinskaya metro station where Alexander Taraikovsky, a 34-year-old protester died on August 10, during their protest rally in central Minsk AFP via Getty World news in pictures 14 August 2020 AlphaTauri's driver Daniil Kvyat takes part in the second practice session at the Circuit de Catalunya in Montmelo near Barcelona ahead of the Spanish F1 Grand Prix AFP via Getty World news in pictures 13 August 2020 Soldiers of the Brazilian Armed Forces during a disinfection of the Christ The Redeemer statue at the Corcovado mountain prior to the opening of the touristic attraction in Rio AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 August 2020 Young elephant bulls tussle playfully on World Elephant Day at the Amboseli National Park in Kenya AFP via Getty

A Quinnipiac poll released on 20 February found that 38 per cent of respondents thought the NRA supports policies that are good for the US, while 51 per cent said the group supports policies that are bad for the US.

And a CNN poll released five days later found that 46 per cent of people held a favourable view of the NRA and 49 per cent held an unfavourable view.

Read more:

 May tackles new Brexit Rebellion

 Philip Hammond and Mark Carney are in China to secure 1 billion of trade deals

 Facebook admits that social media can be bad for you

Read the original article on Business Insider UK.  2018. Follow Business Insider UK on Twitter.A police body camera captured the moment two officers saved the life of a two-month-old girl who was choking on milk.

Officers Ryan Sidders and Alex Oklander rushed to help the baby, who had stopped breathing, after noticing her mother in distress at the roadside in Ohio. They had pulled up behind her car after spotting its hazard warning lights blinking.

We pull up behind the car; we saw a female exit the car, run to the passenger rear door and appear to be in some distress, Mr Sidders told Fox 8 Cleveland.

Recommended Homeless man saves life of father having heart attack

In the footage, Mr Oklander is seen pulling the baby out of her car seat as his partner is heard saying shes choking.

Mr Oklander added: The baby had what seemed to be milk coming out of her mouth and nose. Thats when we administered the back thrusts.

The video shows him holding the girl face down and gently patting her on the back as Mr Sidders issues instructions.

At an angle, at a 45 degree angle, the officer is heard saying.

After several attempts he manages to clear the babys airway.

Her mother Tamica Pruitte thanks the officers after they tell her the girl, Tyra, is breathing again.

World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 30 September 2020 Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 September 2020 A girl's silhouette is seen from behind a fabric in a tent along a beach by Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 September 2020 A Chinese woman takes a photo of herself in front of a flower display dedicated to frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China. China will celebrate national day marking the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st Getty World news in pictures 27 September 2020 The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California. The fast moving Glass fire has burned over 1,000 acres and has destroyed homes Getty World news in pictures 26 September 2020 A villager along with a child offers prayers next to a carcass of a wild elephant that officials say was electrocuted in Rani Reserve Forest on the outskirts of Guwahati, India AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 September 2020 The casket of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seen in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol to lie in state in Washington, DC AFP via Getty World news in pictures 24 September 2020 An anti-government protester holds up an image of a pro-democracy commemorative plaque at a rally outside Thailand's parliament in Bangkok, as activists gathered to demand a new constitution AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 September 2020 A whale stranded on a beach in Macquarie Harbour on the rugged west coast of Tasmania, as hundreds of pilot whales have died in a mass stranding in southern Australia despite efforts to save them, with rescuers racing to free a few dozen survivors The Mercury/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 22 September 2020 State civil employee candidates wearing face masks and shields take a test in Surabaya AFP via Getty World news in pictures 21 September 2020 A man sweeps at the Taj Mahal monument on the day of its reopening after being closed for more than six months due to the coronavirus pandemic AP World news in pictures 20 September 2020 A deer looks for food in a burnt area, caused by the Bobcat fire, in Pearblossom, California EPA World news in pictures 19 September 2020 Anti-government protesters hold their mobile phones aloft as they take part in a pro-democracy rally in Bangkok. Tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters massed close to Thailand's royal palace, in a huge rally calling for PM Prayut Chan-O-Cha to step down and demanding reforms to the monarchy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 September 2020 Supporters of Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr maintain social distancing as they attend Friday prayers after the coronavirus disease restrictions were eased, in Kufa mosque, near Najaf, Iraq Reuters World news in pictures 17 September 2020 A protester climbs on The Triumph of the Republic at 'the Place de la Nation' as thousands of protesters take part in a demonstration during a national day strike called by labor unions asking for better salary and against jobs cut in Paris, France EPA World news in pictures 16 September 2020 A fire raging near the Lazzaretto of Ancona in Italy. The huge blaze broke out overnight at the port of Ancona. Firefighters have brought the fire under control but they expected to keep working through the day EPA World news in pictures 15 September 2020 Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny posing for a selfie with his family at Berlin's Charite hospital. In an Instagram post he said he could now breathe independently following his suspected poisoning last month Alexei Navalny/Instagram/AFP World news in pictures 14 September 2020 Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida celebrate after Suga was elected as new head of the ruling party at the Liberal Democratic Party's leadership election in Tokyo Reuters World news in pictures 13 September 2020 A man stands behind a burning barricade during the fifth straight day of protests against police brutality in Bogota AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 September 2020 Police officers block and detain protesters during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus. Daily protests calling for the authoritarian president's resignation are now in their second month AP World news in pictures 11 September 2020 Members of 'Omnium Cultural' celebrate the 20th 'Festa per la llibertat' ('Fiesta for the freedom') to mark the Day of Catalonia in Barcelona. Omnion Cultural fights for the independence of Catalonia EPA World news in pictures 10 September 2020 The Moria refugee camp, two days after Greece's biggest migrant camp, was destroyed by fire. Thousands of asylum seekers on the island of Lesbos are now homeless AFP via Getty World news in pictures 9 September 2020 Pope Francis takes off his face mask as he arrives by car to hold a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 8 September 2020 A home is engulfed in flames during the "Creek Fire" in the Tollhouse area of California AFP via Getty World news in pictures 7 September 2020 A couple take photos along a sea wall of the waves brought by Typhoon Haishen in the eastern port city of Sokcho AFP via Getty World news in pictures 6 September 2020 Novak Djokovic and a tournament official tends to a linesperson who was struck with a ball by Djokovic during his match against Pablo Carreno Busta at the US Open USA Today Sports/Reuters World news in pictures 5 September 2020 Protesters confront police at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, Australia, during an anti-lockdown rally AFP via Getty World news in pictures 4 September 2020 A woman looks on from a rooftop as rescue workers dig through the rubble of a damaged building in Beirut. A search began for possible survivors after a scanner detected a pulse one month after the mega-blast at the adjacent port AFP via Getty World news in pictures 3 September 2020 A full moon next to the Virgen del Panecillo statue in Quito, Ecuador EPA World news in pictures 2 September 2020 A Palestinian woman reacts as Israeli forces demolish her animal shed near Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank Reuters World news in pictures 1 September 2020 Students protest against presidential elections results in Minsk TUT.BY/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 31 August 2020 The pack rides during the 3rd stage of the Tour de France between Nice and Sisteron AFP via Getty World news in pictures 30 August 2020 Law enforcement officers block a street during a rally of opposition supporters protesting against presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus Reuters World news in pictures 29 August 2020 A woman holding a placard reading "Stop Censorship - Yes to the Freedom of Expression" shouts in a megaphone during a protest against the mandatory wearing of face masks in Paris. Masks, which were already compulsory on public transport, in enclosed public spaces, and outdoors in Paris in certain high-congestion areas around tourist sites, were made mandatory outdoors citywide on August 28 to fight the rising coronavirus infections AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 August 2020 Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe bows to the national flag at the start of a press conference at the prime minister official residence in Tokyo. Abe announced he will resign over health problems, in a bombshell development that kicks off a leadership contest in the world's third-largest economy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 27 August 2020 Residents take cover behind a tree trunk from rubber bullets fired by South African Police Service (SAPS) in Eldorado Park, near Johannesburg, during a protest by community members after a 16-year old boy was reported dead AFP via Getty World news in pictures 26 August 2020 People scatter rose petals on a statue of Mother Teresa marking her 110th birth anniversary in Ahmedabad AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 August 2020 An aerial view shows beach-goers standing on salt formations in the Dead Sea near Ein Bokeq, Israel Reuters World news in pictures 24 August 2020 Health workers use a fingertip pulse oximeter and check the body temperature of a fisherwoman inside the Dharavi slum during a door-to-door Covid-19 coronavirus screening in Mumbai AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 August 2020 People carry an idol of the Hindu god Ganesh, the deity of prosperity, to immerse it off the coast of the Arabian sea during the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in Mumbai, India Reuters World news in pictures 22 August 2020 Firefighters watch as flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires approach a home in Napa County, California AP World news in pictures 21 August 2020 Members of the Israeli security forces arrest a Palestinian demonstrator during a rally to protest against Israel's plan to annex parts of the occupied West Bank AFP via Getty World news in pictures 20 August 2020 A man pushes his bicycle through a deserted road after prohibitory orders were imposed by district officials for a week to contain the spread of the Covid-19 in Kathmandu AFP via Getty World news in pictures 19 August 2020 A car burns while parked at a residence in Vacaville, California. Dozens of fires are burning out of control throughout Northern California as fire resources are spread thin AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 August 2020 Students use their mobile phones as flashlights at an anti-government rally at Mahidol University in Nakhon Pathom. Thailand has seen near-daily protests in recent weeks by students demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-O-Cha AFP via Getty World news in pictures 17 August 2020 Members of the Kayapo tribe block the BR163 highway during a protest outside Novo Progresso in Para state, Brazil. Indigenous protesters blocked a major transamazonian highway to protest against the lack of governmental support during the COVID-19 novel coronavirus pandemic and illegal deforestation in and around their territories AFP via Getty World news in pictures 16 August 2020 Lightning forks over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as a storm passes over Oakland AP World news in pictures 15 August 2020 Belarus opposition supporters gather near the Pushkinskaya metro station where Alexander Taraikovsky, a 34-year-old protester died on August 10, during their protest rally in central Minsk AFP via Getty World news in pictures 14 August 2020 AlphaTauri's driver Daniil Kvyat takes part in the second practice session at the Circuit de Catalunya in Montmelo near Barcelona ahead of the Spanish F1 Grand Prix AFP via Getty World news in pictures 13 August 2020 Soldiers of the Brazilian Armed Forces during a disinfection of the Christ The Redeemer statue at the Corcovado mountain prior to the opening of the touristic attraction in Rio AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 August 2020 Young elephant bulls tussle playfully on World Elephant Day at the Amboseli National Park in Kenya AFP via Getty

Having kids, you never want that to happen to any person, let alone a child, especially a baby that is two months old, said Mr Oklander.

The officers noted how lucky they were to have passed Ms Pruittes car.

We could have easily backed up another officer at a different part of the city, Mr Sidders said. We might have been there two, three minutes later and when someone isnt breathing, two or three minutes is life or death.Police in Sacramento fatally fired at an unarmed black man 20 times after mistaking his mobile phone for a weapon.

Two officers shouted for a suspect to show his hands and then yelled gun, gun, gun moments before shooting him dead, audio from body camera footage released by Sacramento police shows.

Footage from the body cameras and an overhead helicopter does not clearly illustrate what the man, who was only holding a mobile phone, was doing in the moments before the police aimed at him on Sunday night.

The shooting took place in the backyard of the mans grandparents home where he was staying. Police said investigators did not locate any guns after an exhaustive search and the only item found was a mobile phone.

The Sacramento Police Department said the man was witnessed breaking into at least three vehicles and later into the home of a neighbour. The break-ins were first reported by a 911 call also released by the police.

World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 30 September 2020 Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 September 2020 A girl's silhouette is seen from behind a fabric in a tent along a beach by Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 September 2020 A Chinese woman takes a photo of herself in front of a flower display dedicated to frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China. China will celebrate national day marking the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st Getty World news in pictures 27 September 2020 The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California. The fast moving Glass fire has burned over 1,000 acres and has destroyed homes Getty World news in pictures 26 September 2020 A villager along with a child offers prayers next to a carcass of a wild elephant that officials say was electrocuted in Rani Reserve Forest on the outskirts of Guwahati, India AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 September 2020 The casket of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seen in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol to lie in state in Washington, DC AFP via Getty World news in pictures 24 September 2020 An anti-government protester holds up an image of a pro-democracy commemorative plaque at a rally outside Thailand's parliament in Bangkok, as activists gathered to demand a new constitution AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 September 2020 A whale stranded on a beach in Macquarie Harbour on the rugged west coast of Tasmania, as hundreds of pilot whales have died in a mass stranding in southern Australia despite efforts to save them, with rescuers racing to free a few dozen survivors The Mercury/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 22 September 2020 State civil employee candidates wearing face masks and shields take a test in Surabaya AFP via Getty World news in pictures 21 September 2020 A man sweeps at the Taj Mahal monument on the day of its reopening after being closed for more than six months due to the coronavirus pandemic AP World news in pictures 20 September 2020 A deer looks for food in a burnt area, caused by the Bobcat fire, in Pearblossom, California EPA World news in pictures 19 September 2020 Anti-government protesters hold their mobile phones aloft as they take part in a pro-democracy rally in Bangkok. Tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters massed close to Thailand's royal palace, in a huge rally calling for PM Prayut Chan-O-Cha to step down and demanding reforms to the monarchy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 September 2020 Supporters of Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr maintain social distancing as they attend Friday prayers after the coronavirus disease restrictions were eased, in Kufa mosque, near Najaf, Iraq Reuters World news in pictures 17 September 2020 A protester climbs on The Triumph of the Republic at 'the Place de la Nation' as thousands of protesters take part in a demonstration during a national day strike called by labor unions asking for better salary and against jobs cut in Paris, France EPA World news in pictures 16 September 2020 A fire raging near the Lazzaretto of Ancona in Italy. The huge blaze broke out overnight at the port of Ancona. Firefighters have brought the fire under control but they expected to keep working through the day EPA World news in pictures 15 September 2020 Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny posing for a selfie with his family at Berlin's Charite hospital. In an Instagram post he said he could now breathe independently following his suspected poisoning last month Alexei Navalny/Instagram/AFP World news in pictures 14 September 2020 Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida celebrate after Suga was elected as new head of the ruling party at the Liberal Democratic Party's leadership election in Tokyo Reuters World news in pictures 13 September 2020 A man stands behind a burning barricade during the fifth straight day of protests against police brutality in Bogota AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 September 2020 Police officers block and detain protesters during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus. Daily protests calling for the authoritarian president's resignation are now in their second month AP World news in pictures 11 September 2020 Members of 'Omnium Cultural' celebrate the 20th 'Festa per la llibertat' ('Fiesta for the freedom') to mark the Day of Catalonia in Barcelona. Omnion Cultural fights for the independence of Catalonia EPA World news in pictures 10 September 2020 The Moria refugee camp, two days after Greece's biggest migrant camp, was destroyed by fire. Thousands of asylum seekers on the island of Lesbos are now homeless AFP via Getty World news in pictures 9 September 2020 Pope Francis takes off his face mask as he arrives by car to hold a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 8 September 2020 A home is engulfed in flames during the "Creek Fire" in the Tollhouse area of California AFP via Getty World news in pictures 7 September 2020 A couple take photos along a sea wall of the waves brought by Typhoon Haishen in the eastern port city of Sokcho AFP via Getty World news in pictures 6 September 2020 Novak Djokovic and a tournament official tends to a linesperson who was struck with a ball by Djokovic during his match against Pablo Carreno Busta at the US Open USA Today Sports/Reuters World news in pictures 5 September 2020 Protesters confront police at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, Australia, during an anti-lockdown rally AFP via Getty World news in pictures 4 September 2020 A woman looks on from a rooftop as rescue workers dig through the rubble of a damaged building in Beirut. A search began for possible survivors after a scanner detected a pulse one month after the mega-blast at the adjacent port AFP via Getty World news in pictures 3 September 2020 A full moon next to the Virgen del Panecillo statue in Quito, Ecuador EPA World news in pictures 2 September 2020 A Palestinian woman reacts as Israeli forces demolish her animal shed near Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank Reuters World news in pictures 1 September 2020 Students protest against presidential elections results in Minsk TUT.BY/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 31 August 2020 The pack rides during the 3rd stage of the Tour de France between Nice and Sisteron AFP via Getty World news in pictures 30 August 2020 Law enforcement officers block a street during a rally of opposition supporters protesting against presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus Reuters World news in pictures 29 August 2020 A woman holding a placard reading "Stop Censorship - Yes to the Freedom of Expression" shouts in a megaphone during a protest against the mandatory wearing of face masks in Paris. Masks, which were already compulsory on public transport, in enclosed public spaces, and outdoors in Paris in certain high-congestion areas around tourist sites, were made mandatory outdoors citywide on August 28 to fight the rising coronavirus infections AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 August 2020 Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe bows to the national flag at the start of a press conference at the prime minister official residence in Tokyo. Abe announced he will resign over health problems, in a bombshell development that kicks off a leadership contest in the world's third-largest economy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 27 August 2020 Residents take cover behind a tree trunk from rubber bullets fired by South African Police Service (SAPS) in Eldorado Park, near Johannesburg, during a protest by community members after a 16-year old boy was reported dead AFP via Getty World news in pictures 26 August 2020 People scatter rose petals on a statue of Mother Teresa marking her 110th birth anniversary in Ahmedabad AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 August 2020 An aerial view shows beach-goers standing on salt formations in the Dead Sea near Ein Bokeq, Israel Reuters World news in pictures 24 August 2020 Health workers use a fingertip pulse oximeter and check the body temperature of a fisherwoman inside the Dharavi slum during a door-to-door Covid-19 coronavirus screening in Mumbai AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 August 2020 People carry an idol of the Hindu god Ganesh, the deity of prosperity, to immerse it off the coast of the Arabian sea during the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in Mumbai, India Reuters World news in pictures 22 August 2020 Firefighters watch as flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires approach a home in Napa County, California AP World news in pictures 21 August 2020 Members of the Israeli security forces arrest a Palestinian demonstrator during a rally to protest against Israel's plan to annex parts of the occupied West Bank AFP via Getty World news in pictures 20 August 2020 A man pushes his bicycle through a deserted road after prohibitory orders were imposed by district officials for a week to contain the spread of the Covid-19 in Kathmandu AFP via Getty World news in pictures 19 August 2020 A car burns while parked at a residence in Vacaville, California. Dozens of fires are burning out of control throughout Northern California as fire resources are spread thin AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 August 2020 Students use their mobile phones as flashlights at an anti-government rally at Mahidol University in Nakhon Pathom. Thailand has seen near-daily protests in recent weeks by students demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-O-Cha AFP via Getty World news in pictures 17 August 2020 Members of the Kayapo tribe block the BR163 highway during a protest outside Novo Progresso in Para state, Brazil. Indigenous protesters blocked a major transamazonian highway to protest against the lack of governmental support during the COVID-19 novel coronavirus pandemic and illegal deforestation in and around their territories AFP via Getty World news in pictures 16 August 2020 Lightning forks over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as a storm passes over Oakland AP World news in pictures 15 August 2020 Belarus opposition supporters gather near the Pushkinskaya metro station where Alexander Taraikovsky, a 34-year-old protester died on August 10, during their protest rally in central Minsk AFP via Getty World news in pictures 14 August 2020 AlphaTauri's driver Daniil Kvyat takes part in the second practice session at the Circuit de Catalunya in Montmelo near Barcelona ahead of the Spanish F1 Grand Prix AFP via Getty World news in pictures 13 August 2020 Soldiers of the Brazilian Armed Forces during a disinfection of the Christ The Redeemer statue at the Corcovado mountain prior to the opening of the touristic attraction in Rio AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 August 2020 Young elephant bulls tussle playfully on World Elephant Day at the Amboseli National Park in Kenya AFP via Getty

The police said deputies in the helicopter saw the man break a neighbours sliding glass door, before he jumped a fence but the helicopter video ceases to show the alleged break-in.

Instead, it picks up as the man is running through a backyard and climbing over a fence into a neighbouring property. It also shows him looking into a truck in the driveway.

The helicopter, flying over the house, then loses sight of the man. It briefly shows him in the backyard as the police are running up the driveway along the side of the house.

Lashunda Britt, a cousin of Stephan Clark, stands near where he was fatally shot by police in Sacramento (AP)

The department had said he advanced towards the officers holding an object extended in front of him. Police said the officers thought he was pointing a handgun.

Twenty rounds were fired, Sacramento Police sergeant Vance Chandler told KCRA-TV on Tuesday afternoon. Each officer fired 10 rounds.

Although authorities have not released the mans name, a woman who said she was his fiancee, identified him as 22-year-old Stephon Alonzo Clark.

She said Mr Clark, who was pronounced dead at the scene, is the father of her two sons, aged one and three.

Were mourning right now and so we need our time to mourn, Salena Manni said on Wednesday as the family came together in his grandparents home.

He was at the wrong place at the wrong time in his own backyard? Cmon now, they didnt have to do that, Mr Clarks grandmother, Sequita Thompson, told The Sacramento Bee.

Sequita Thompson points to the white area on the patio where she said her grandson Stephon Clark lay dead after being shot by police in Sacramento (AP) (The Sacramento Bee via AP)

The department could not say the number of times Mr Clark was hit and the coroners office said it would not release information until his family members had been notified.

The shooting of Mr Clark, who regularly helped care for his grandparents at their south Sacramento home, has triggered questions from relatives, activists and others after it turned out he was holding only a mobile phone.

Black Lives Matter Sacramento branded it a police murder and called for answers. Black Lives Matter is an international activist movement which campaigns against violence and systemic racism towards black people. In the US it fights to counter racial inequality in the the criminal justice system and highlights the fact black peoples lives are relatively undervalued as they are more likely to be the victims of police brutality.

As long as police are getting away with killing unarmed black people they are going to keep doing it. #BlackLivesMatter, the group said on Twitter.

Authorities said the two officers involved in the shooting have two and four years with the Sacramento Police Department and both have four years of prior law enforcement experience with other agencies before joining the Sacramento police.

Additional reporting by agenciesChina is likely to respond directly to Donald Trumps plan to impose tariffs on up to $60bn of goods and trigger a bilateral trade war that will hurt both countries, experts have said.

Mr Trump campaigned for the White House with a promise to secure better deals between the US and its trading partners, claiming that previous administrations had allowed American firms and workers to lose out. Having announced tariffs on steel and aluminium imports earlier this month, he signed an order opening the way to punish China for what he said was the theft of US technology.

It is the largest deficit of any country in the history of our world, Mr Trump said of the US-China trade imbalance.

But experts said Beijing would not take the move lying down. Rather, China was likely already preparing to respond, and possibly in ways the US might not initially notice.

I think we are making policy as if we are still the dominant superpower in the world, Robert Ross, professor of political science at Boston College, told The Independent. But China has become a major power and a major market, and it has the ability to retaliate.

He said in recent years, China had imposed, or threatened to impose, its own tariffs on several countries, including Japan, Norway and Germany, as part of a broader political strategy. Germanys Daimler carmaker was forced to make a humiliating apology to China earlier this year after one of its adverts featured a quotation from the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan leader whom China regularly denounces and accuses of trying to split the country.

They have ways to impose a cost, Mr Ross said of Chinas way of responding. Suddenly, they impose a block on soy bean imports, or they start asking questions about an American cars emissions standards.

 Trump's Trade Secretary Robert Lighthizer reveals countries exempt from Trump's tariffs

He said if China did not respond, it would fear that other countries might seek to follow the USs actions. Mr Trump has talked of trying to develop a coalition of countries to impose tariffs on China but Mr Ross said he doubted it would get far.

Susan Helper, professor of economics at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, said she was not certain the US tariffs would spark a trade war. She said many powerful people in both countries were making lots of money from the current arrangements, even though Chinese workers were frequently labouring in Victorian-era sweatshop conditions.

She said she was glad Mr Trump was trying to address the issue of Chinas appropriation of intellectual property, which was not properly regulated in China. She added: That is a long-overdue conversation.

World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 30 September 2020 Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 September 2020 A girl's silhouette is seen from behind a fabric in a tent along a beach by Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 September 2020 A Chinese woman takes a photo of herself in front of a flower display dedicated to frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China. China will celebrate national day marking the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st Getty World news in pictures 27 September 2020 The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California. The fast moving Glass fire has burned over 1,000 acres and has destroyed homes Getty World news in pictures 26 September 2020 A villager along with a child offers prayers next to a carcass of a wild elephant that officials say was electrocuted in Rani Reserve Forest on the outskirts of Guwahati, India AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 September 2020 The casket of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seen in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol to lie in state in Washington, DC AFP via Getty World news in pictures 24 September 2020 An anti-government protester holds up an image of a pro-democracy commemorative plaque at a rally outside Thailand's parliament in Bangkok, as activists gathered to demand a new constitution AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 September 2020 A whale stranded on a beach in Macquarie Harbour on the rugged west coast of Tasmania, as hundreds of pilot whales have died in a mass stranding in southern Australia despite efforts to save them, with rescuers racing to free a few dozen survivors The Mercury/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 22 September 2020 State civil employee candidates wearing face masks and shields take a test in Surabaya AFP via Getty World news in pictures 21 September 2020 A man sweeps at the Taj Mahal monument on the day of its reopening after being closed for more than six months due to the coronavirus pandemic AP World news in pictures 20 September 2020 A deer looks for food in a burnt area, caused by the Bobcat fire, in Pearblossom, California EPA World news in pictures 19 September 2020 Anti-government protesters hold their mobile phones aloft as they take part in a pro-democracy rally in Bangkok. Tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters massed close to Thailand's royal palace, in a huge rally calling for PM Prayut Chan-O-Cha to step down and demanding reforms to the monarchy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 September 2020 Supporters of Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr maintain social distancing as they attend Friday prayers after the coronavirus disease restrictions were eased, in Kufa mosque, near Najaf, Iraq Reuters World news in pictures 17 September 2020 A protester climbs on The Triumph of the Republic at 'the Place de la Nation' as thousands of protesters take part in a demonstration during a national day strike called by labor unions asking for better salary and against jobs cut in Paris, France EPA World news in pictures 16 September 2020 A fire raging near the Lazzaretto of Ancona in Italy. The huge blaze broke out overnight at the port of Ancona. Firefighters have brought the fire under control but they expected to keep working through the day EPA World news in pictures 15 September 2020 Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny posing for a selfie with his family at Berlin's Charite hospital. In an Instagram post he said he could now breathe independently following his suspected poisoning last month Alexei Navalny/Instagram/AFP World news in pictures 14 September 2020 Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida celebrate after Suga was elected as new head of the ruling party at the Liberal Democratic Party's leadership election in Tokyo Reuters World news in pictures 13 September 2020 A man stands behind a burning barricade during the fifth straight day of protests against police brutality in Bogota AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 September 2020 Police officers block and detain protesters during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus. Daily protests calling for the authoritarian president's resignation are now in their second month AP World news in pictures 11 September 2020 Members of 'Omnium Cultural' celebrate the 20th 'Festa per la llibertat' ('Fiesta for the freedom') to mark the Day of Catalonia in Barcelona. Omnion Cultural fights for the independence of Catalonia EPA World news in pictures 10 September 2020 The Moria refugee camp, two days after Greece's biggest migrant camp, was destroyed by fire. Thousands of asylum seekers on the island of Lesbos are now homeless AFP via Getty World news in pictures 9 September 2020 Pope Francis takes off his face mask as he arrives by car to hold a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 8 September 2020 A home is engulfed in flames during the "Creek Fire" in the Tollhouse area of California AFP via Getty World news in pictures 7 September 2020 A couple take photos along a sea wall of the waves brought by Typhoon Haishen in the eastern port city of Sokcho AFP via Getty World news in pictures 6 September 2020 Novak Djokovic and a tournament official tends to a linesperson who was struck with a ball by Djokovic during his match against Pablo Carreno Busta at the US Open USA Today Sports/Reuters World news in pictures 5 September 2020 Protesters confront police at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, Australia, during an anti-lockdown rally AFP via Getty World news in pictures 4 September 2020 A woman looks on from a rooftop as rescue workers dig through the rubble of a damaged building in Beirut. A search began for possible survivors after a scanner detected a pulse one month after the mega-blast at the adjacent port AFP via Getty World news in pictures 3 September 2020 A full moon next to the Virgen del Panecillo statue in Quito, Ecuador EPA World news in pictures 2 September 2020 A Palestinian woman reacts as Israeli forces demolish her animal shed near Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank Reuters World news in pictures 1 September 2020 Students protest against presidential elections results in Minsk TUT.BY/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 31 August 2020 The pack rides during the 3rd stage of the Tour de France between Nice and Sisteron AFP via Getty World news in pictures 30 August 2020 Law enforcement officers block a street during a rally of opposition supporters protesting against presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus Reuters World news in pictures 29 August 2020 A woman holding a placard reading "Stop Censorship - Yes to the Freedom of Expression" shouts in a megaphone during a protest against the mandatory wearing of face masks in Paris. Masks, which were already compulsory on public transport, in enclosed public spaces, and outdoors in Paris in certain high-congestion areas around tourist sites, were made mandatory outdoors citywide on August 28 to fight the rising coronavirus infections AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 August 2020 Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe bows to the national flag at the start of a press conference at the prime minister official residence in Tokyo. Abe announced he will resign over health problems, in a bombshell development that kicks off a leadership contest in the world's third-largest economy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 27 August 2020 Residents take cover behind a tree trunk from rubber bullets fired by South African Police Service (SAPS) in Eldorado Park, near Johannesburg, during a protest by community members after a 16-year old boy was reported dead AFP via Getty World news in pictures 26 August 2020 People scatter rose petals on a statue of Mother Teresa marking her 110th birth anniversary in Ahmedabad AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 August 2020 An aerial view shows beach-goers standing on salt formations in the Dead Sea near Ein Bokeq, Israel Reuters World news in pictures 24 August 2020 Health workers use a fingertip pulse oximeter and check the body temperature of a fisherwoman inside the Dharavi slum during a door-to-door Covid-19 coronavirus screening in Mumbai AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 August 2020 People carry an idol of the Hindu god Ganesh, the deity of prosperity, to immerse it off the coast of the Arabian sea during the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in Mumbai, India Reuters World news in pictures 22 August 2020 Firefighters watch as flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires approach a home in Napa County, California AP World news in pictures 21 August 2020 Members of the Israeli security forces arrest a Palestinian demonstrator during a rally to protest against Israel's plan to annex parts of the occupied West Bank AFP via Getty World news in pictures 20 August 2020 A man pushes his bicycle through a deserted road after prohibitory orders were imposed by district officials for a week to contain the spread of the Covid-19 in Kathmandu AFP via Getty World news in pictures 19 August 2020 A car burns while parked at a residence in Vacaville, California. Dozens of fires are burning out of control throughout Northern California as fire resources are spread thin AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 August 2020 Students use their mobile phones as flashlights at an anti-government rally at Mahidol University in Nakhon Pathom. Thailand has seen near-daily protests in recent weeks by students demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-O-Cha AFP via Getty World news in pictures 17 August 2020 Members of the Kayapo tribe block the BR163 highway during a protest outside Novo Progresso in Para state, Brazil. Indigenous protesters blocked a major transamazonian highway to protest against the lack of governmental support during the COVID-19 novel coronavirus pandemic and illegal deforestation in and around their territories AFP via Getty World news in pictures 16 August 2020 Lightning forks over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as a storm passes over Oakland AP World news in pictures 15 August 2020 Belarus opposition supporters gather near the Pushkinskaya metro station where Alexander Taraikovsky, a 34-year-old protester died on August 10, during their protest rally in central Minsk AFP via Getty World news in pictures 14 August 2020 AlphaTauri's driver Daniil Kvyat takes part in the second practice session at the Circuit de Catalunya in Montmelo near Barcelona ahead of the Spanish F1 Grand Prix AFP via Getty World news in pictures 13 August 2020 Soldiers of the Brazilian Armed Forces during a disinfection of the Christ The Redeemer statue at the Corcovado mountain prior to the opening of the touristic attraction in Rio AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 August 2020 Young elephant bulls tussle playfully on World Elephant Day at the Amboseli National Park in Kenya AFP via Getty

Scott Kennedy, an expert on the Chinese economy at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said China might also opt for straight retaliation, in the form of tariffs on imports such as soy beans or aircraft. Alternatively, it could target major US firms that do a lot of business in the country, such as Apple and Intel.

Some analysts believe in order to minimise the damage of the tariffs, Beijing may consider easing restrictions on imports from the US.

This is a negotiation, Alicia Garcia-Herrero, chief economist for Asia-Pacific at Natixis, an investment bank, told the Deutsche Welle news agency. China could offer to import from the US, when they might have thought about importing from somewhere else.

Other analysts agree that China will seek to calm the situation.

China does not want to see an escalation of tension, Aidan Yao, senior emerging Asia economist at AXA Investment Managers, told CNN. Instead, Beijing wants to manage the relationship.

The White House said on Thursday that Mr Trump would direct the Office of the US Trade Representative to publish a list of proposed tariffs for public comment within 15 days. It has already identified potential targets totalling 1,300 product lines.An official appointed by President Donald Trump said during a closed-door United Nations meeting that the US is a pro-life country, despite the fact both the law and public opinion support a womans right to access legal and safe abortion.

Bethany Kozma, a senior adviser in the office of Gender Equality and Womens Empowerment for US Agency for International Development (USAID), made the statement while countries negotiated the final document of the ongoing, annual womens rights conference.

Two diplomats at the UN, who asked not to be named, and charities serving as UN observers, were able to confirm the comment to The Independent and Ms Kozmas continued presence during negotiations the next day.

Recommended UN lectures US ambassador Nikki Haley after Iran demands

As part of the negotiations on the roughly 70-page outcome document, issued every year at the end of the conference, Ms Kozma and the US delegation also called for deleting any mention of the phrase modern contraceptives and replacing it with the phrase family planning in order to push policies like abstinence-only sexual education.

A US official told The Independent: While we cant comment on ongoing diplomatic negotiations, the multi-agency US delegation is representing the administrations policies and priorities at the CSW [United Nations Commission on the Status of Women]. Also, in response to your question related to US support for womens health, as the worlds largest bilateral donor to global health programmes, the US remains committed to helping women and children thrive, particularly in countries where the need is greatest.

A UN diplomat said the statement was shocking and that it demonstrated a weaker and lower position on reproductive rights than Saudi Arabia or the Holy See, representing the Vatican. In the context of the UN, reproductive health refers to issues surrounding maternal health, prenatal care, sexually transmitted diseases, cervical cancer, and other related issues but not necessarily or only abortion.

 Thousands march in Dublin to change abortion laws

While previous Republican administrations took anti-choice and anti-abortion positions, they were still generally in line with accepted frameworks that recognised the importance and centrality of sexual and reproductive rights, said Akila Radhakrishnan, acting president and legal director of the Global Justice Centre.

Ms Kozma, who failed to respond to requests for comment, previously held positions in the White House and the Department of Homeland Security, during the administration of president George W Bush. She left government service to focus on raising her children before accepting an appointment in Mr Trumps administration.

In between, Ms Kozma became known for her writing at right-wing sites like the Daily Signal, a publication of the Heritage Foundation think tank, and espousing anti-transgender views. Her most high-profile campaign was launched in 2016 against the Obama administrations guidance that transgender students should be allowed to use the bathroom of their choosing in public schools.

She wrote at the time that a boy claiming gender confusion must now be allowed in the same shower, bathroom, or locker room with my daughter under the presidents transgender policies... When I learned that predators could abuse these new policies to hurt children in school lockers, shelters, pool showers, or other vulnerable public places like remote bathrooms in national parks, I realised I had to do something.

Women's March 2018 across the world: in pictures Show all 35 1 /35 Women's March 2018 across the world: in pictures Women's March 2018 across the world: in pictures London Women's rights demonstrators hold placards and shout slogans during the Time's Up rally at Richmond Terrace, opposite Downing Street in London. Getty Women's March 2018 across the world: in pictures London The Time's Up initiative was launched at the start of January 2018 as a response to the #MeToo movement and the Harvey Weinstein scandal. AFP/Getty Women's March 2018 across the world: in pictures Berlin Women's March in Berlin. EPA Women's March 2018 across the world: in pictures London The Time's Up Women's March marks the one year anniversary of the first Women's March in London and in 2018 it is inspired by the Time's Up movement against sexual abuse. Getty Women's March 2018 across the world: in pictures Paris Women hold a banner reading "still feminist" with the Eiffel tower in background on the Trocadero esplanade in Paris. AFP/Getty Women's March 2018 across the world: in pictures London Protesters hold up placards at the Women's March in central London. Rex Women's March 2018 across the world: in pictures Paris A demonstator hold signs on the Trocadero esplanade in Paris during a women's march organised as part of global protests. AFP/Getty Women's March 2018 across the world: in pictures London Chanting Times Up in the cold rain - On the anniversary of the Women's March on London. Rex Women's March 2018 across the world: in pictures New York Thousands of people gather holding protest signs on Central Park West. EPA Women's March 2018 across the world: in pictures New York Demonstrators take part in the Women's March in Manhattan Reuters Women's March 2018 across the world: in pictures Chicago A woman holds a sign during the Second Annual Womens March in Chicago AFP/Getty Women's March 2018 across the world: in pictures New York People gather near Central Park before the beginning of the Women's March in New York Getty Women's March 2018 across the world: in pictures Washington Supporters gather during the Women's March in Washington AFP/Getty Women's March 2018 across the world: in pictures New York The crowd lines up near Central Park Getty Women's March 2018 across the world: in pictures Chicago Demostrators attend the Second Annual Womens March in Chicago AFP/Getty Women's March 2018 across the world: in pictures New York Thousands hold signs and rally while attending the Womens March in New York Getty Women's March 2018 across the world: in pictures New York People gather near Central Park before the beginning of the Women's March in New York Getty Women's March 2018 across the world: in pictures Washington People participate in the second annual Women's March in Washington Reuters Women's March 2018 across the world: in pictures New York People hold signs up during the women's march Getty Women's March 2018 across the world: in pictures Philadelphia Oscar Janicki, 6, participates in the Second Annual Women's March in Philadelphia Reuters Women's March 2018 across the world: in pictures Philadelphia Crowds gather to participate in the Second Annual Women's March in Philadelphia Reuters Women's March 2018 across the world: in pictures Washington People participate in the second annual Women's March in Washington Reuters Women's March 2018 across the world: in pictures New York Women pose as they attend the second annual National Womens March in New York City AFP/Getty Women's March 2018 across the world: in pictures Washington People participate in the second annual Women's March in Washington Reuters Women's March 2018 across the world: in pictures New York People gather prior to the second annual National Womens March in New York City AFP/Getty Women's March 2018 across the world: in pictures New York People take part in the Women's March in Manhattan Reuters Women's March 2018 across the world: in pictures New York People gather the second annual National Womens March AFP/Getty Women's March 2018 across the world: in pictures Washington People participate in the Second Annual Women's March in Washington Reuters Women's March 2018 across the world: in pictures Rome A woman holds a banner reading "Womwn united will never be defeated" during Rome Resists demonstration part of the Women's March in downtown. AFP/Getty Women's March 2018 across the world: in pictures Rome Italian actress Asia Argento (3rdL) attends the Rome Resists demonstration part of the Women's March in downtown Rome. AFP/Getty Women's March 2018 across the world: in pictures Rome The Women's March Rome, designed to show solidarity for the protection of civil and social rights, women's rights and the environment included Italian actress Asia Argento, one of the first women to accuse US film producer Harvey Weinstein of sexual assault. AFP/Getty Women's March 2018 across the world: in pictures Zurich A US citizen holds a poster on the anniversary of the inauguration of President Trump apologising to the world on behalf of her country, in Zurich, Switzerland. A year after millions of people took to the streets across the US and countries around the world, women's marches are being held in lots of cities this weekend. EPA Women's March 2018 across the world: in pictures New York People take part in the Women's March in Manhattan Reuters Women's March 2018 across the world: in pictures Rome A woman holds a banner reading "The rising of the women means rising of us all" during Rome Resists demonstration. AFP/Getty Images Women's March 2018 across the world: in pictures Rome A woman lifts her fist while holding a banner reading "Hear our voice" during Rome Resists demonstration. AFP/Getty

This is not the first time conservative views have been pushed by such fringe groups since Nikki Haley became the US Ambassador to the UN. Last year, at the same conference, in the absence of appointed administration officials, Ms Haley invited the Centre for Family and Human Rights (C-FAM) to represent the US. It is a think tank that has been labelled as a hate group for their international anti-LGBTQ advocacy work and violent rhetoric by the Southern Poverty Law Centre, a legal advocacy organisation which specialises in the protection of civil rights.

Conservative NGOs have worked their way into the administration and are twisting the US position into something that does not respect our domestic laws, one diplomat said.

Since the landmark 1973 US Supreme Court case Roe v Wade, each state has been allowed to decide its own abortion laws before the foetus becomes viable. While a number of states are trying to reduce access to abortion  Mississippi politicians recently passed legislation to ban abortions beyond 15 weeks of pregnancy  polling by the Pew Research Centre last year found 57 per cent of Americans believe abortion should be legal in most or all cases. The same polling found 40 per cent believed abortion should be illegal in most or all cases.

As Jessica Stern, the executive director of OutRight Action International told The Independent: It comes as little surprise that now [Ms Kozma] is mischaracterising the status of abortion for Americans, which is most certainly legal in several US states.

Ms Stern said that though Ms Kozma is a disrupter, plain and simple, with a long history of opposing womens rights and gender justice... and seems to reserve a special hatred for transgender children, there is an even larger issue at play. Someone who doesnt respect American law and who opposes the principles of gender equality should not be empowered to negotiate on behalf of the US government, she said, noting that Ms Kozmas appearance as part of the US delegation has thus far been in closed-door meetings with only diplomats.

Many see the development as further evidence of Mr Trumps distaste for the UN, which he has previously called a good time club. According to Shannon Kowalski, director of advocacy and policy at the International Womens Health Coalition, the administration is trying to paint an extreme position at the [UN conference on women] that[is] out of touch with women and girls in the US and around the world.

The US government must prevent this wildcard from subverting American law in the negotiations, Ms Stern said.

The womens conference ends on 23 March. USAID did not respond to requests for a comment.A personal lawyer for Donald Trump has resigned from his position as the President shakes up his legal team and its approach to special counsel Robert Muellers Russia investigation.

The resignation of John Dowd, who was leading Mr Trumps legal team, follows reports of repeated clashes between him and the President in recent weeks, and Mr Dowd is said to have made his decision after determining that his advice was increasingly being ignored.

It has been reported that Mr Dowds departure was largely a mutual decision between him and Mr Trump, even if they disagreed over strategy. The President reportedly lost confidence in Mr Dowds ability to deal with Mr Muellers probe during the confrontations that have played out in recent weeks.

Recommended Trump lawyer obtains restraining order against Stormy Daniels

I love the President and wish him well, Mr Dowd said in a statement after his resignation.

John has been a valuable part of the team and a friend and we will continue to cooperate fully with the special counsel, Jay Sekulow, a spokesman for Mr Trumps legal team, told The Washington Post.

Mr Trump himself had recently insisted that he is happy with the way his legal team has been handling the Russia inquiry, naming Mr Dowd alongside Ty Cobb, and Mr Sekulow, and saying they are doing a great job.

Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Show all 29 1 /29 Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Inauguration - 20 January 2017 US President Donald Trump acknowledges the audience after taking the oath of office as his wife Melania (L) and daughter Tiffany watch during inauguration ceremonies swearing in Trump as the 45th president of the United States on the West Front of the US capital in Washington on 20 January, 2017. Photographer Jim Bourg: "This photo was shot with one of two remote cameras. The cameras were monitored and triggered remotely and the pictures were transmitted to clients worldwide within minutes of being taken." Reuters/Jim Bourg Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Obama farewell address - 10 January 2017 US President Barack Obama wipes away tears as he delivers his farewell address in Chicago on 10 January, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "In his final days in office, Obama made a visit home to Chicago. As he spoke from the stage to his wife and daughter in the audience, he became emotional when he talked about what they had sacrificed during his time in office. I turned from photographing the Obama women embracing to find him onstage wiping away tears." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Inauguration - 20 January 2017 A combination of photos shows the crowds attending the inauguration ceremonies to swear in U.S. President Donald Trump at 12:01pm (left) on January 20, 2017 and President Barack Obama sometime between 12:07pm and 12:26pm on January 20, 2009. Reuters/ Lucas Jackson/Stelios Varias Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Liberty Ball - 20 January 2017 US President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump attend the Liberty Ball in honour of his inauguration in Washington on 20 January, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "What I see when I look at this picture is the end of a very long day, not to mention weeks and months of preparation by many photographers, editors and network experts and the beginning of everything since." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Inaugural Law Enforcement Officers and First Responders Reception - 22 January 2017 US President Donald Trump greets Director of the FBI James Comey as Director of the Secret Service Joseph Clancy (L), watches during the Inaugural Law Enforcement Officers and First Responders Reception in the Blue Room of the White House on 22 January, 2017. Photographer Joshua Roberts: "I have covered the White House for 16 years and normally either the President or the pool is in position when an event starts. In this case the President was not where anyone expected him to be. In fact, he was almost blocking the door when the pool came in. We had to scramble to find a position without bumping him or the furniture as he greeted and thanked members of law enforcement for their security efforts during the inauguration. Luckily, he greeted FBI Director James Comey a few seconds after the pool had made its way into the room." Reuters/Joshua Roberts Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Private phone calls to world leaders - 28 January 2017 US President Donald Trump, is joined by his staff, as he speaks by phone with Russia's President Vladimir Putin in the Oval Office on 28 January, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "Very early in the Trump administration, weekends were as busy as weekdays. On Trump's second Saturday the official schedule said he would be making private phone calls to a number of world leaders including Russia's Vladimir Putin. I arrived early and, before sitting down at my desk walked up to Press Secretary Sean Spicer's office. He, too, was just taking his coat off. I gingerly made the suggestion that previous administrations had sometimes allowed photos of such phone calls through the Oval Office windows on the colonnade. To my mild shock, he didn't even think about it twice. "We'll do it!" he said. In truth, I really only expected the Putin call, but we were outside the windows multiple times throughout the day as the calls went on." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Senior advisor Kellyanne Conway - 27 February 2017 Senior advisor Kellyanne Conway (L) attends as US President Donald Trump welcomes the leaders of dozens of historically black colleges and universities (HBCU) in the Oval Office on 27 February, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "We're often asked how much access we have to the Trump administration, and the answer is we have an awful lot. President Trump himself is very comfortable in the spotlight, and his aides are similarly unfazed by cameras. In this instance, senior advisor Kellyanne Conway was so comfortable in our presence she seemed not to consider the optics of kneeling on a Oval Office sofa to take pictures with her phone." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Angela Merkel heads to Washington - 17 March 2017 Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel and US President Donald Trump hold a joint news conference in the East Room of the White House on 17 March, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "Chancellor Merkel made one of the earliest important visits of any US allies to meet Trump in his first months in office. When world leaders give joint news conferences they don't always tend to give each other their full attention - but Merkel watched Trump intently at several key moments, and here seemed particularly rapt." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Trump welcomes truckers to the White House - 23 March 2017 President Trump reacts as he sits on a truck while he welcomes truckers and CEOs to attend a meeting regarding healthcare at the White House on 23 March, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "The White House organised a listening session with truckers and CEO's of major American companies, regarding healthcare reform. An 18-wheeler tow truck was parked on the South Lawn of the White House and as Trump welcomed the truckers someone invited the him to come and sit in the driver's seat. Trump jumped into the cab and started yelling and pretending to drive - creating one of the most memorable pictures of the year. A lesson learned, always be prepared for the unexpected." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Air Force One - 6 April 2017 US President Donald Trump talks to journalists members of the travel pool on board the Air Force One during his trip to Palm Beach, Florida on 6 April, 2017. Carlos Barria: "During the many trips to President Trump's residence in Florida it is usual to see the president coming to the back of the plane to chat with journalists. During one of the trips to the so called 'Winter White House', Trump had a long talk with reporters while the Air Force One entertainment system was playing one of the latest Star Wars movies. As I was listening to Trump talk I was also looking at the movie waiting for a part of the movie to frame the mood of the day. Of the many scenes, I choose the one with Darth Vader." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures 100 Days - 27 April 2017 US President Donald Trump speaks during an interview with Reuters in the Oval Office of the White House on 27 April, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "A day before President Trump's hundred days in office I was part of the team that interviewed the commander-in-chief in the Oval Office. I was only allowed to photograph Trump during the last five minutes of the interview. The time was very tight so I had to move fast as I had pictures in mind that I wanted to shoot. I walked into the Oval Office and saw that the President had printed maps of the country showing areas in red where he won. I raised my hands holding my camera as high as possible to get the best view of the scene using a 16mm wide angle lens." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures 100 Days - 27 April 2017 US President Donald Trump reacts as he arrives at Harrisburg international airport, before attending a rally marking his first 100 days in office in Pennsylvania on 29 April, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "President Trump travelled to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania to celebrate his hundred days in office with a victory rally. He was in friendly territory as he won with a big difference over his opponent Hillary Clinton in Pennsylvania, during the November elections. As usual when the commander-in-chief arrives local residents gather to greet him. This time a small group of military personnel attended the arrival. Surrounded by secret service agents Trump walked from the Air Force One and raised his hand in a sign of victory as the crowd cheered him on." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures White House staffers - 2 May 2017 White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer (L) and White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus watch as US President Donald Trump presents the U.S. Air Force Academy football team with the Commander-in-Chief trophy in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington on 2 May, 2017. Photographer Joshua Roberts: "Covering the White House does not just mean covering the President. White House staffers are an important part of the story and their relationship with the President and each other is an indicator of how things are going in the West Wing. The tendency is to focus exclusively on the President once an event starts but I always try to look around to see how people are reacting as things unfold." Reuters/Joshua Roberts Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Secret Service - 4 May 2017 Secret Service agents use a presidential limousine as cover from spraying water as US President Donald Trump lands via Marine One helicopter in New York on 4 May, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "The best part of any trip to New York City with the sitting US President is the helicopter ride into Manhattan. The ride out at night can be stunning. Here, Secret Service agents protect themselves from the spray from the East River as Trump lands on the helipad." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures NATO Summit - 25 May 2017 US President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump wait the arrival of French President Emmanuel Macron (unseen) before a lunch ahead of a NATO Summit in Brussels on 25 May, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "One of the best parts of travelling overseas for White House coverage is the chance to see the U.S. president in different environments and (literally) a different light. Here, Trump and his wife came out of the shadows to greet France's President Macron." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Trump meets Putin at G20 summit - 7 July 2017 US President Donald Trump meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin during their bilateral meeting at the G20 summit in Hamburg, Germany on 7 July, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "On July 7, I witnessed one of the most important meetings of President Trump's first year in office. Trump met Russian President Vladimir Putin during a bilateral meeting at the G20 summit in Germany. The world's eyes were on these two leaders after speculation about Russian interference during the 2016 US elections. We entered the room for less than two minutes, where I took dozens of pictures. But there was this very interesting moment when Trump extended his hand to Putin for a handshake. Putin paused for a second and looked at Trump's hand. That was the picture that I was looking for, a little moment that seemed to say a lot." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures First lady - 8 July 2017 First lady Melania Trump chats with US President Donald Trump during their return from Germany at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland on 8 July, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "After President Trump's trip to Germany he arrived back at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland. First Lady Melania Trump said goodbye to Trump as she was heading off in a different direction that day. While chatting a breeze blew Melania's hair up in the air." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Made in America product showcase - 17 July 2017 Vice President Mike Pence laughs as President Donald Trump holds a baseball bat as they attend a Made in America product showcase event at the White House on 17 July, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "This summer the White House organized an event to showcase 'Made in America' products. All kinds of exhibitors brought their products as the President and Vice President toured the event. One of the companies was Marucci Sport, a manufacturer of baseball bats based in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. As Trump approached a table full of baseball bats, photographers at the event, including me, rushed to get a good angle hoping that he would pick up a bat. As we predicted, he did. He took one and joked around as though he was hitting something hard. The only thing closer to him right there, was the media." Reuters Donald Trump's first year: in pictures White House staffers - 25 July 2017 Former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski says hello to reporters as he and White House advisors including Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci accompany President Trump for an event celebrating veterans at AMVETS Post 44 in Ohio, July 25, 2017. Jonathan Ernst: "The most visible person in any White House is naturally the President, followed by the press secretary. But there are also the staff who support them. For those of us covering the Trump administration, there seem to be more compelling figures in the West Wing than ever before. It's crucial to know who's who and why they're important. When I raised my camera and back-pedalled ahead of the group to take this image Lewandowski gave me a hello. I liked the photo, but had no idea it would go a little bit viral, especially since Scaramucci, who was the biggest mover and shaker that week, was hidden back in the pack. But I guess the image catches a glimpse of what it's like to be a West Wing staffer on the road." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Campaign rally - 3 August 2017 US President Donald Trump arrives at a rally in West Virginia on 3 August, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "President Trump travelled to Huntington for one of his usual campaign rallies. While members of his family spoke to the crowd he was waiting under a black curtain to be introduced. Suddenly he walked onto the stage, one of the first frames that I took was of his hand. I set my exposure for the light on the stage hoping to create this dark background and it worked." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Staring into the solar eclipse - 21 August 2017 Without his protective glasses on, US President Donald Trump looks up towards the solar eclipse while viewing with his wife Melania and son Barron at the White House on 21 August, 2017. Photographer Kevin Lamarque: "On a day when everyone, and I mean everyone, was told not to look at the eclipse without protective glasses, Trump, President of the United States, couldn't help himself." Reuters/Kevin Lamarque Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Hurricane Harvey - 2 September 2017 US President Donald Trump poses for a photo as he and first lady Melania Trump help volunteers hand out meals during a visit with flood survivors of Hurricane Harvey at a relief centre in Houston, Texas on 2 September, 2017. Photohrapher Kevin Lamarque: "Trump, eager to deliver the image of a hands-on response to Hurricane Harvey, made this visit to a relief centre and obliged this woman with a selfie as Melania continued to work." Reuters/Kevin Lamarque Donald Trump's first year: in pictures White House - 15 September 2017 Donald Trump welcomes 11-year-old Frank Giaccio as he cuts the Rose Garden grass at the White House on 15 September. Frank, who wrote a letter to Trump offering to mow the lawn, was invited to work for a day at the White House along the National Park Service staff. Frank was so focused on his task that he did not notice the President arrive to surprise him. He took his father jumping in to grab his attention and point Trump out. Photographer Carlos Barria said: The image of Trump shouting at a kid who is mowing his lawn might have many interpretations in today's politically polarized United States. But for me it was just a kid who loved what he was doing, to the point he almost appeared to ignore the President." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Take a knee - 27 September 2017 A man kneels with a folded U.S. flag as the motorcade of U.S. President Donald Trump passes him after an event at the state fairgrounds in Indianapolis, Indiana, U.S., September 27, 2017. In September, soon after Trump had made comments condemning NFL players who kneel during the national anthem, he made a day trip to a rally in Indianapolis. Jonathan Ernst managed to capture a man on one knee with a tri-folded flag and was able to use a portion of the sign on the building he was kneeling in front of to track the man down and tell his story in full. US Army veteran Marvin Boatright wanted to send a message against social injustice. Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Hurricane Maria - 3 October 2017 President Donald Trump throws rolls of paper towels into a crowd of local residents affected by Hurricane Maria as he visits Calgary Chapel in San Juan, Puerto Rico on 3 October, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "During an afternoon visit to Puerto Rico for President Trump to survey damage from Hurricane Maria and greet some of its victims, Trump made a stop at a church where food and supplies were being distributed. Among the items were paper towels and Trump, apparently caught up in the moment, decided to distribute some of the rolls." Reuters Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Jared Kushner - 1 November 2017 White House Senior adviser Jared Kushner sits behind President Trump during a cabinet meeting in Washington on 1 November, 2017. Photographer Kevin Lamarque: "The role of Jared Kushner has gone through a series of changes. He began front and centre as a high profile adviser, but as time has passed and issues surrounding him have surfaced, he has become more of a background figure." Reuters/Kevin Lamarque Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Trump in China - 9 November 2017 Donald Trump and China's President Xi Jinping shake hands after making joint statements at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on 9 November, 2017. Photographer Damir Sagolj: "It's one of those "how to make a better or at least different shot when two presidents shake hands several times a day, several days in row". If I'm not mistaken in calculation, presidents Xi Jinping and Donald Trump shook their hands at least six times in events I covered during Trump's recent visit to China. I would imagine there were some more handshakes I haven't seen but other photographers did. And they all look similar - two big men, smiling and heartily greeting each other until everyone gets their shot. But then there is always something that can make it special - in this case the background made of US and Chinese flags. The first time it didn't work for me. The second time I positioned myself lower and centrally, and used the longest lens I have to capture only hands reaching for a handshake." Reuters/Damir Sagolj Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Air Force One - 10 November 2017 US President Donald Trump boards Air Force One to depart for Vietnam from Beijing Airport in Beijing, China, November 10, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "There is a Reuters photographer in the tight pool covering the US president for every appearance he makes 365 days a year. This was just one of 32 images of mine that were transmitted on the Reuters wire of President Trump visiting China and Vietnam that day. You never know when a sudden interaction, a gust of wind or a unique facial expression will lead to a striking image that grabs peoples' attention." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures ASEAN handshake - 13 November 2017 Donald Trump registers his surprise as he realises other leaders, including Russia's Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, Vietnam's Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc, President of the Philippines Rodrigo Duterte and Australia's Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, are crossing their arms for the traditional "ASEAN handshake" as he participates in the opening ceremony of the summit in Manila on 13 November, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "Having covered a few ASEAN summits, I knew to expect the ASEAN handshake. Not everyone in the room knew to expect the ASEAN handshake. A lot was written about this unscripted moment, and what deeper meaning it might have. The simple truth is that sometimes in life there are unscripted moments." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst

Last week, Mr Dowd attracted criticism to the Trump team by calling on the Justice Department to shut down Mr Muellers investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, saying that the investigation was corrupted by political bias. Those calls were made just after former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe was fired, leading to a strong, bipartisan rebuke of the administration in Congress, where even some Republicans said that impeachment could be necessary if Mr Mueller is fired.

 Donald Trump branded a 'disgraced demagogue' by former CIA director John Brennan over sacking of Andrew McCabe

I pray that the Acting Attorney General Rod Rosenstein will follow the brilliant and courageous example of the FBI Office of Professional Responsibility and Attorney General Jeff Sessions and bring an end to alleged Russia collusion investigation manufactured by McCabes boss James Comey based upon a fraudulent and corrupt dossier, Mr Dowd said in a statement then.

Mr Comey is the former head of the FBI who was fired by Mr Trumps Justice Department last year. The dossier in question refers to a contentious research file compiled by former British spy Christopher Steele.

The Trump legal team, in addition to that public speculation about firing Mr Mueller, has been negotiating with the special counsel over if, how, and when the President might be interviewed in the Russia probe.

Mr Trump has reportedly been privately saying that he thinks he should sit down with Mr Muellers team, even as he has begun to publicly attack Mr Mueller in a shift of tone that has been interpreted as the President becoming increasingly concerned that the Russia investigation is beginning to focus more explicitly on him.

 Donald Trump claims he would be interviewed 'under oath' by Robert Mueller

Mr Dowd had insisted that meeting with the Mueller team would be a bad idea.

It is not clear who will take over as the lead on Mr Trumps team, but a veteran Washington lawyer, Joseph diGenova, was hired earlier this week. Mr diGenova has been expected to take up a more offensive role to fill what the President sees as a lack of people publicly defending him and challenging Mr Mueller.In his first public comments on revelations that a firm employed by Donald Trumps presidential campaign - Cambridge Analytica - had obtained information on some 50 million Facebook users, Mr Zuckerberg pledged to tighten rules around app data collection and suggested he would be willing to appear before Congress.

Im happy to if its the right thing to do, Mr Zuckerberg told CNN, although he qualified that offer by saying we just want to make sure that we send whoever is best informed.

For the Republican chair and top Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, there was no doubt about who that person would be.

Mr. Zuckerberg has stated that he would be willing to testify if he is the right person. We believe, as CEO of Facebook, he is the right witness to provide answers to the American people, Oregon Republican Greg Walden and New Jersey Democrat Frank Pallone said in a statement.

Seeking to allay a rising political backlash, Facebook has dispatched representatives to brief people on Capitol Hill. But Mr Walden and Mr Pallone said those emissaries were not sufficient.

World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 30 September 2020 Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 September 2020 A girl's silhouette is seen from behind a fabric in a tent along a beach by Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 September 2020 A Chinese woman takes a photo of herself in front of a flower display dedicated to frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China. China will celebrate national day marking the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st Getty World news in pictures 27 September 2020 The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California. The fast moving Glass fire has burned over 1,000 acres and has destroyed homes Getty World news in pictures 26 September 2020 A villager along with a child offers prayers next to a carcass of a wild elephant that officials say was electrocuted in Rani Reserve Forest on the outskirts of Guwahati, India AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 September 2020 The casket of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seen in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol to lie in state in Washington, DC AFP via Getty World news in pictures 24 September 2020 An anti-government protester holds up an image of a pro-democracy commemorative plaque at a rally outside Thailand's parliament in Bangkok, as activists gathered to demand a new constitution AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 September 2020 A whale stranded on a beach in Macquarie Harbour on the rugged west coast of Tasmania, as hundreds of pilot whales have died in a mass stranding in southern Australia despite efforts to save them, with rescuers racing to free a few dozen survivors The Mercury/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 22 September 2020 State civil employee candidates wearing face masks and shields take a test in Surabaya AFP via Getty World news in pictures 21 September 2020 A man sweeps at the Taj Mahal monument on the day of its reopening after being closed for more than six months due to the coronavirus pandemic AP World news in pictures 20 September 2020 A deer looks for food in a burnt area, caused by the Bobcat fire, in Pearblossom, California EPA World news in pictures 19 September 2020 Anti-government protesters hold their mobile phones aloft as they take part in a pro-democracy rally in Bangkok. Tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters massed close to Thailand's royal palace, in a huge rally calling for PM Prayut Chan-O-Cha to step down and demanding reforms to the monarchy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 September 2020 Supporters of Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr maintain social distancing as they attend Friday prayers after the coronavirus disease restrictions were eased, in Kufa mosque, near Najaf, Iraq Reuters World news in pictures 17 September 2020 A protester climbs on The Triumph of the Republic at 'the Place de la Nation' as thousands of protesters take part in a demonstration during a national day strike called by labor unions asking for better salary and against jobs cut in Paris, France EPA World news in pictures 16 September 2020 A fire raging near the Lazzaretto of Ancona in Italy. The huge blaze broke out overnight at the port of Ancona. Firefighters have brought the fire under control but they expected to keep working through the day EPA World news in pictures 15 September 2020 Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny posing for a selfie with his family at Berlin's Charite hospital. In an Instagram post he said he could now breathe independently following his suspected poisoning last month Alexei Navalny/Instagram/AFP World news in pictures 14 September 2020 Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida celebrate after Suga was elected as new head of the ruling party at the Liberal Democratic Party's leadership election in Tokyo Reuters World news in pictures 13 September 2020 A man stands behind a burning barricade during the fifth straight day of protests against police brutality in Bogota AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 September 2020 Police officers block and detain protesters during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus. Daily protests calling for the authoritarian president's resignation are now in their second month AP World news in pictures 11 September 2020 Members of 'Omnium Cultural' celebrate the 20th 'Festa per la llibertat' ('Fiesta for the freedom') to mark the Day of Catalonia in Barcelona. Omnion Cultural fights for the independence of Catalonia EPA World news in pictures 10 September 2020 The Moria refugee camp, two days after Greece's biggest migrant camp, was destroyed by fire. Thousands of asylum seekers on the island of Lesbos are now homeless AFP via Getty World news in pictures 9 September 2020 Pope Francis takes off his face mask as he arrives by car to hold a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 8 September 2020 A home is engulfed in flames during the "Creek Fire" in the Tollhouse area of California AFP via Getty World news in pictures 7 September 2020 A couple take photos along a sea wall of the waves brought by Typhoon Haishen in the eastern port city of Sokcho AFP via Getty World news in pictures 6 September 2020 Novak Djokovic and a tournament official tends to a linesperson who was struck with a ball by Djokovic during his match against Pablo Carreno Busta at the US Open USA Today Sports/Reuters World news in pictures 5 September 2020 Protesters confront police at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, Australia, during an anti-lockdown rally AFP via Getty World news in pictures 4 September 2020 A woman looks on from a rooftop as rescue workers dig through the rubble of a damaged building in Beirut. A search began for possible survivors after a scanner detected a pulse one month after the mega-blast at the adjacent port AFP via Getty World news in pictures 3 September 2020 A full moon next to the Virgen del Panecillo statue in Quito, Ecuador EPA World news in pictures 2 September 2020 A Palestinian woman reacts as Israeli forces demolish her animal shed near Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank Reuters World news in pictures 1 September 2020 Students protest against presidential elections results in Minsk TUT.BY/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 31 August 2020 The pack rides during the 3rd stage of the Tour de France between Nice and Sisteron AFP via Getty World news in pictures 30 August 2020 Law enforcement officers block a street during a rally of opposition supporters protesting against presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus Reuters World news in pictures 29 August 2020 A woman holding a placard reading "Stop Censorship - Yes to the Freedom of Expression" shouts in a megaphone during a protest against the mandatory wearing of face masks in Paris. Masks, which were already compulsory on public transport, in enclosed public spaces, and outdoors in Paris in certain high-congestion areas around tourist sites, were made mandatory outdoors citywide on August 28 to fight the rising coronavirus infections AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 August 2020 Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe bows to the national flag at the start of a press conference at the prime minister official residence in Tokyo. Abe announced he will resign over health problems, in a bombshell development that kicks off a leadership contest in the world's third-largest economy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 27 August 2020 Residents take cover behind a tree trunk from rubber bullets fired by South African Police Service (SAPS) in Eldorado Park, near Johannesburg, during a protest by community members after a 16-year old boy was reported dead AFP via Getty World news in pictures 26 August 2020 People scatter rose petals on a statue of Mother Teresa marking her 110th birth anniversary in Ahmedabad AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 August 2020 An aerial view shows beach-goers standing on salt formations in the Dead Sea near Ein Bokeq, Israel Reuters World news in pictures 24 August 2020 Health workers use a fingertip pulse oximeter and check the body temperature of a fisherwoman inside the Dharavi slum during a door-to-door Covid-19 coronavirus screening in Mumbai AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 August 2020 People carry an idol of the Hindu god Ganesh, the deity of prosperity, to immerse it off the coast of the Arabian sea during the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in Mumbai, India Reuters World news in pictures 22 August 2020 Firefighters watch as flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires approach a home in Napa County, California AP World news in pictures 21 August 2020 Members of the Israeli security forces arrest a Palestinian demonstrator during a rally to protest against Israel's plan to annex parts of the occupied West Bank AFP via Getty World news in pictures 20 August 2020 A man pushes his bicycle through a deserted road after prohibitory orders were imposed by district officials for a week to contain the spread of the Covid-19 in Kathmandu AFP via Getty World news in pictures 19 August 2020 A car burns while parked at a residence in Vacaville, California. Dozens of fires are burning out of control throughout Northern California as fire resources are spread thin AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 August 2020 Students use their mobile phones as flashlights at an anti-government rally at Mahidol University in Nakhon Pathom. Thailand has seen near-daily protests in recent weeks by students demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-O-Cha AFP via Getty World news in pictures 17 August 2020 Members of the Kayapo tribe block the BR163 highway during a protest outside Novo Progresso in Para state, Brazil. Indigenous protesters blocked a major transamazonian highway to protest against the lack of governmental support during the COVID-19 novel coronavirus pandemic and illegal deforestation in and around their territories AFP via Getty World news in pictures 16 August 2020 Lightning forks over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as a storm passes over Oakland AP World news in pictures 15 August 2020 Belarus opposition supporters gather near the Pushkinskaya metro station where Alexander Taraikovsky, a 34-year-old protester died on August 10, during their protest rally in central Minsk AFP via Getty World news in pictures 14 August 2020 AlphaTauri's driver Daniil Kvyat takes part in the second practice session at the Circuit de Catalunya in Montmelo near Barcelona ahead of the Spanish F1 Grand Prix AFP via Getty World news in pictures 13 August 2020 Soldiers of the Brazilian Armed Forces during a disinfection of the Christ The Redeemer statue at the Corcovado mountain prior to the opening of the touristic attraction in Rio AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 August 2020 Young elephant bulls tussle playfully on World Elephant Day at the Amboseli National Park in Kenya AFP via Getty

After committee staff received a briefing yesterday from Facebook officials, we felt that many questions were left unanswered, they wrote, adding they would send Mr Zuckerberg a letter requesting he appear.

Asked if Mr Zuckerberg would comply, a Facebook spokesman referred the Independent to his comments to CNN.

Multiple members of Congress have demanded in recent days that Mr Zuckerberg account for how Cambridge Analytica was able to sweep up reams of user data.

In a Facebook post and interviews, Mr Zuckerberg echoed his companys public explanation that researcher Aleksander Kogan wrongfully shared data from an app with Cambridge Analytica and that the consulting firm then lied about deleting the data. He said privacy safeguards instituted in 2014 prohibit apps from collecting as much information as Mr Kogan did and vowed to further bolster privacy rules.

 Mark Zuckerberg on Cambridge Analytica: 'I'm really sorry'

But those statements were not enough to mollify legislators who continued to call for Mr Zuckerberg himself to appear before Congress. Last year, when Congress held hearings on how Russian-affiliated actors used social media to spread misinformation and propaganda, Facebook sent its general counsel to testify.

Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, went so far as to say Mr Zuckerberg should be subpoenaed if he declines to testify.

Mark Zuckerberg needs to testify under oath in public before the Judiciary Committee. He owes it to the American people, Mr Blumenthal told reporters.Congress is racing to pass a $1.3 trillion spending bill to fund the federal government for the next six months and avoid a government shutdown, a move that would significantly increase military and non-defence funding.

In many ways, the bill could be seen as a loss for Donald Trump, whose proposals for severe cuts to funding for the Environmental Protection Agency, State Department and other federal agencies were largely ignored.

The bill also excludes some of Trumps immigration-related funding requests. While the President at one point wanted the bill to allocate $25bn to fully fund construction of his long-promised border wall, negotiations to make that happen fell apart.

Recommended No Dreamer deal in sight as government funding deadline looms

Instead, under the budget deal revealed on Wednesday, Mr Trump would get nearly $1.6bn for border security this year. More border patrol agents could be hired, but there would not be a significant increase in immigration agents working in the rest of the US.

When coupled with recently enacted tax cuts, the legislation is projected to lead to budget deficits of more than $800bn for this year, potentially creating problems for Republicans up for re-election in November.

In a 256-167 vote, the House of Representatives passed the measure, with majorites of both Democrats and Republicans backing the spending package. Ninety Republicans and 77 Democrats voted against it.

The bill now has to be approved by the Senate before it can head to the Presidents desk to be signed by Mr Trump, who appears grudgingly willing to support the measure.

Got $1.6 Billion to start Wall on Southern Border, rest will be forthcoming, he wrote on Twitter. Had to waste money on Dem giveaways in order to take care of military pay increase and new equipment.

Mr Trump must sign the bill by midnight on Friday night. If he doesnt, the government will close.

The measure has faced opposition from both Democrats and Republicans.

World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 30 September 2020 Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 September 2020 A girl's silhouette is seen from behind a fabric in a tent along a beach by Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 September 2020 A Chinese woman takes a photo of herself in front of a flower display dedicated to frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China. China will celebrate national day marking the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st Getty World news in pictures 27 September 2020 The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California. The fast moving Glass fire has burned over 1,000 acres and has destroyed homes Getty World news in pictures 26 September 2020 A villager along with a child offers prayers next to a carcass of a wild elephant that officials say was electrocuted in Rani Reserve Forest on the outskirts of Guwahati, India AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 September 2020 The casket of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seen in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol to lie in state in Washington, DC AFP via Getty World news in pictures 24 September 2020 An anti-government protester holds up an image of a pro-democracy commemorative plaque at a rally outside Thailand's parliament in Bangkok, as activists gathered to demand a new constitution AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 September 2020 A whale stranded on a beach in Macquarie Harbour on the rugged west coast of Tasmania, as hundreds of pilot whales have died in a mass stranding in southern Australia despite efforts to save them, with rescuers racing to free a few dozen survivors The Mercury/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 22 September 2020 State civil employee candidates wearing face masks and shields take a test in Surabaya AFP via Getty World news in pictures 21 September 2020 A man sweeps at the Taj Mahal monument on the day of its reopening after being closed for more than six months due to the coronavirus pandemic AP World news in pictures 20 September 2020 A deer looks for food in a burnt area, caused by the Bobcat fire, in Pearblossom, California EPA World news in pictures 19 September 2020 Anti-government protesters hold their mobile phones aloft as they take part in a pro-democracy rally in Bangkok. Tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters massed close to Thailand's royal palace, in a huge rally calling for PM Prayut Chan-O-Cha to step down and demanding reforms to the monarchy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 September 2020 Supporters of Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr maintain social distancing as they attend Friday prayers after the coronavirus disease restrictions were eased, in Kufa mosque, near Najaf, Iraq Reuters World news in pictures 17 September 2020 A protester climbs on The Triumph of the Republic at 'the Place de la Nation' as thousands of protesters take part in a demonstration during a national day strike called by labor unions asking for better salary and against jobs cut in Paris, France EPA World news in pictures 16 September 2020 A fire raging near the Lazzaretto of Ancona in Italy. The huge blaze broke out overnight at the port of Ancona. Firefighters have brought the fire under control but they expected to keep working through the day EPA World news in pictures 15 September 2020 Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny posing for a selfie with his family at Berlin's Charite hospital. In an Instagram post he said he could now breathe independently following his suspected poisoning last month Alexei Navalny/Instagram/AFP World news in pictures 14 September 2020 Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida celebrate after Suga was elected as new head of the ruling party at the Liberal Democratic Party's leadership election in Tokyo Reuters World news in pictures 13 September 2020 A man stands behind a burning barricade during the fifth straight day of protests against police brutality in Bogota AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 September 2020 Police officers block and detain protesters during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus. Daily protests calling for the authoritarian president's resignation are now in their second month AP World news in pictures 11 September 2020 Members of 'Omnium Cultural' celebrate the 20th 'Festa per la llibertat' ('Fiesta for the freedom') to mark the Day of Catalonia in Barcelona. Omnion Cultural fights for the independence of Catalonia EPA World news in pictures 10 September 2020 The Moria refugee camp, two days after Greece's biggest migrant camp, was destroyed by fire. Thousands of asylum seekers on the island of Lesbos are now homeless AFP via Getty World news in pictures 9 September 2020 Pope Francis takes off his face mask as he arrives by car to hold a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 8 September 2020 A home is engulfed in flames during the "Creek Fire" in the Tollhouse area of California AFP via Getty World news in pictures 7 September 2020 A couple take photos along a sea wall of the waves brought by Typhoon Haishen in the eastern port city of Sokcho AFP via Getty World news in pictures 6 September 2020 Novak Djokovic and a tournament official tends to a linesperson who was struck with a ball by Djokovic during his match against Pablo Carreno Busta at the US Open USA Today Sports/Reuters World news in pictures 5 September 2020 Protesters confront police at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, Australia, during an anti-lockdown rally AFP via Getty World news in pictures 4 September 2020 A woman looks on from a rooftop as rescue workers dig through the rubble of a damaged building in Beirut. A search began for possible survivors after a scanner detected a pulse one month after the mega-blast at the adjacent port AFP via Getty World news in pictures 3 September 2020 A full moon next to the Virgen del Panecillo statue in Quito, Ecuador EPA World news in pictures 2 September 2020 A Palestinian woman reacts as Israeli forces demolish her animal shed near Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank Reuters World news in pictures 1 September 2020 Students protest against presidential elections results in Minsk TUT.BY/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 31 August 2020 The pack rides during the 3rd stage of the Tour de France between Nice and Sisteron AFP via Getty World news in pictures 30 August 2020 Law enforcement officers block a street during a rally of opposition supporters protesting against presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus Reuters World news in pictures 29 August 2020 A woman holding a placard reading "Stop Censorship - Yes to the Freedom of Expression" shouts in a megaphone during a protest against the mandatory wearing of face masks in Paris. Masks, which were already compulsory on public transport, in enclosed public spaces, and outdoors in Paris in certain high-congestion areas around tourist sites, were made mandatory outdoors citywide on August 28 to fight the rising coronavirus infections AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 August 2020 Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe bows to the national flag at the start of a press conference at the prime minister official residence in Tokyo. Abe announced he will resign over health problems, in a bombshell development that kicks off a leadership contest in the world's third-largest economy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 27 August 2020 Residents take cover behind a tree trunk from rubber bullets fired by South African Police Service (SAPS) in Eldorado Park, near Johannesburg, during a protest by community members after a 16-year old boy was reported dead AFP via Getty World news in pictures 26 August 2020 People scatter rose petals on a statue of Mother Teresa marking her 110th birth anniversary in Ahmedabad AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 August 2020 An aerial view shows beach-goers standing on salt formations in the Dead Sea near Ein Bokeq, Israel Reuters World news in pictures 24 August 2020 Health workers use a fingertip pulse oximeter and check the body temperature of a fisherwoman inside the Dharavi slum during a door-to-door Covid-19 coronavirus screening in Mumbai AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 August 2020 People carry an idol of the Hindu god Ganesh, the deity of prosperity, to immerse it off the coast of the Arabian sea during the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in Mumbai, India Reuters World news in pictures 22 August 2020 Firefighters watch as flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires approach a home in Napa County, California AP World news in pictures 21 August 2020 Members of the Israeli security forces arrest a Palestinian demonstrator during a rally to protest against Israel's plan to annex parts of the occupied West Bank AFP via Getty World news in pictures 20 August 2020 A man pushes his bicycle through a deserted road after prohibitory orders were imposed by district officials for a week to contain the spread of the Covid-19 in Kathmandu AFP via Getty World news in pictures 19 August 2020 A car burns while parked at a residence in Vacaville, California. Dozens of fires are burning out of control throughout Northern California as fire resources are spread thin AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 August 2020 Students use their mobile phones as flashlights at an anti-government rally at Mahidol University in Nakhon Pathom. Thailand has seen near-daily protests in recent weeks by students demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-O-Cha AFP via Getty World news in pictures 17 August 2020 Members of the Kayapo tribe block the BR163 highway during a protest outside Novo Progresso in Para state, Brazil. Indigenous protesters blocked a major transamazonian highway to protest against the lack of governmental support during the COVID-19 novel coronavirus pandemic and illegal deforestation in and around their territories AFP via Getty World news in pictures 16 August 2020 Lightning forks over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as a storm passes over Oakland AP World news in pictures 15 August 2020 Belarus opposition supporters gather near the Pushkinskaya metro station where Alexander Taraikovsky, a 34-year-old protester died on August 10, during their protest rally in central Minsk AFP via Getty World news in pictures 14 August 2020 AlphaTauri's driver Daniil Kvyat takes part in the second practice session at the Circuit de Catalunya in Montmelo near Barcelona ahead of the Spanish F1 Grand Prix AFP via Getty World news in pictures 13 August 2020 Soldiers of the Brazilian Armed Forces during a disinfection of the Christ The Redeemer statue at the Corcovado mountain prior to the opening of the touristic attraction in Rio AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 August 2020 Young elephant bulls tussle playfully on World Elephant Day at the Amboseli National Park in Kenya AFP via Getty

Some Democrats have asserted that they will not pay for a wall that Mr Trump originally said would be paid for by Mexico. They also complained that in the rush to pass the measure, few if any legislators have had time to read through the 2,232-page bill to see what it actually contained.

Meanwhile, conservative Republicans have big problems with the deficit-spending.

The Houses Freedom Caucus, a group of about three dozen conservative hardliners, said they would not support the bill because it massively increases spending while not defunding Obamacare, Planned Parenthood and so-called sanctuary cities.

Youre going to see lots of conservatives vote against it, Republican Representative Jim Jordan, a caucus member, told Fox News in an interview.

Along with a $80bn increase in military spending, the largest in 15 years, the measure allocates money toward infrastructure improvements and fighting Russian election hacking.

In response to public outrage over mass shootings, including a massacre last month at a Florida high school that left 17 people dead, the bill contains modest improvements to background checks for gun sales and grants to help schools prevent gun violence.

However, these provisions still far short of the broader measures that Democrats say are needed to end the crisis.Donald Trump has unveiled a plan to impose up to $60bn in new tariffs on Chinese goods, as well as limiting the country's investment in the US as payback for what his administration alleges is years of intellectual property theft.

The presidents order - which earlier reports had suggested would be nearer $50bn - is likely to trigger retaliation by Beijing and could further stoke fears of a global trade war.

Just before signing the trade action, Mr Trump said it was the first of many as he looks to correct what has repeatedly called "unfair" trade deals with nations around the world.

Under the terms of the memorandum Mr Trump signed, he will target the Chinese imports only after a consultation period, thereby giving industry lobbyists and members of Congress a chance to water down a list of proposed 1,300 products that could be targeted.

The consultation period will also give China time to respond, reducing the risk of immediate revenge from Beijing. The Chinese government has vowed to take all necessary measures to defend the countrys interests if Mr Trump attacks it for allegedly stealing American technology or pressuring US companies to hand it over.

China will not sit idly to see its legitimate rights damaged and must take all necessary measures to resolutely defend its legitimate rights, the Commerce Ministry in Beijing said in a statement on its website.

 Donald Trump unveils $60bn in tariffs on China for intellectual property theft

Mr Trump struck a conciliatory tone when he first began speaking at the White Houses signing ceremony, calling China a friend and saying he had tremendous respect for Chinese President Xi Jinping.

We have spoken to China and we are in the middle of negotiations, Mr Trump said, adding that loss of American jobs from unfair trade was one of the main reasons he had been elected as President.

He again lamented over unfair trade deals and the USs trade deficits with other countries, saying he had asked China to immediately reduce its trade surplus with America by $100bn.

World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 30 September 2020 Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 September 2020 A girl's silhouette is seen from behind a fabric in a tent along a beach by Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 September 2020 A Chinese woman takes a photo of herself in front of a flower display dedicated to frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China. China will celebrate national day marking the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st Getty World news in pictures 27 September 2020 The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California. The fast moving Glass fire has burned over 1,000 acres and has destroyed homes Getty World news in pictures 26 September 2020 A villager along with a child offers prayers next to a carcass of a wild elephant that officials say was electrocuted in Rani Reserve Forest on the outskirts of Guwahati, India AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 September 2020 The casket of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seen in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol to lie in state in Washington, DC AFP via Getty World news in pictures 24 September 2020 An anti-government protester holds up an image of a pro-democracy commemorative plaque at a rally outside Thailand's parliament in Bangkok, as activists gathered to demand a new constitution AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 September 2020 A whale stranded on a beach in Macquarie Harbour on the rugged west coast of Tasmania, as hundreds of pilot whales have died in a mass stranding in southern Australia despite efforts to save them, with rescuers racing to free a few dozen survivors The Mercury/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 22 September 2020 State civil employee candidates wearing face masks and shields take a test in Surabaya AFP via Getty World news in pictures 21 September 2020 A man sweeps at the Taj Mahal monument on the day of its reopening after being closed for more than six months due to the coronavirus pandemic AP World news in pictures 20 September 2020 A deer looks for food in a burnt area, caused by the Bobcat fire, in Pearblossom, California EPA World news in pictures 19 September 2020 Anti-government protesters hold their mobile phones aloft as they take part in a pro-democracy rally in Bangkok. Tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters massed close to Thailand's royal palace, in a huge rally calling for PM Prayut Chan-O-Cha to step down and demanding reforms to the monarchy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 September 2020 Supporters of Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr maintain social distancing as they attend Friday prayers after the coronavirus disease restrictions were eased, in Kufa mosque, near Najaf, Iraq Reuters World news in pictures 17 September 2020 A protester climbs on The Triumph of the Republic at 'the Place de la Nation' as thousands of protesters take part in a demonstration during a national day strike called by labor unions asking for better salary and against jobs cut in Paris, France EPA World news in pictures 16 September 2020 A fire raging near the Lazzaretto of Ancona in Italy. The huge blaze broke out overnight at the port of Ancona. Firefighters have brought the fire under control but they expected to keep working through the day EPA World news in pictures 15 September 2020 Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny posing for a selfie with his family at Berlin's Charite hospital. In an Instagram post he said he could now breathe independently following his suspected poisoning last month Alexei Navalny/Instagram/AFP World news in pictures 14 September 2020 Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida celebrate after Suga was elected as new head of the ruling party at the Liberal Democratic Party's leadership election in Tokyo Reuters World news in pictures 13 September 2020 A man stands behind a burning barricade during the fifth straight day of protests against police brutality in Bogota AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 September 2020 Police officers block and detain protesters during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus. Daily protests calling for the authoritarian president's resignation are now in their second month AP World news in pictures 11 September 2020 Members of 'Omnium Cultural' celebrate the 20th 'Festa per la llibertat' ('Fiesta for the freedom') to mark the Day of Catalonia in Barcelona. Omnion Cultural fights for the independence of Catalonia EPA World news in pictures 10 September 2020 The Moria refugee camp, two days after Greece's biggest migrant camp, was destroyed by fire. Thousands of asylum seekers on the island of Lesbos are now homeless AFP via Getty World news in pictures 9 September 2020 Pope Francis takes off his face mask as he arrives by car to hold a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 8 September 2020 A home is engulfed in flames during the "Creek Fire" in the Tollhouse area of California AFP via Getty World news in pictures 7 September 2020 A couple take photos along a sea wall of the waves brought by Typhoon Haishen in the eastern port city of Sokcho AFP via Getty World news in pictures 6 September 2020 Novak Djokovic and a tournament official tends to a linesperson who was struck with a ball by Djokovic during his match against Pablo Carreno Busta at the US Open USA Today Sports/Reuters World news in pictures 5 September 2020 Protesters confront police at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, Australia, during an anti-lockdown rally AFP via Getty World news in pictures 4 September 2020 A woman looks on from a rooftop as rescue workers dig through the rubble of a damaged building in Beirut. A search began for possible survivors after a scanner detected a pulse one month after the mega-blast at the adjacent port AFP via Getty World news in pictures 3 September 2020 A full moon next to the Virgen del Panecillo statue in Quito, Ecuador EPA World news in pictures 2 September 2020 A Palestinian woman reacts as Israeli forces demolish her animal shed near Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank Reuters World news in pictures 1 September 2020 Students protest against presidential elections results in Minsk TUT.BY/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 31 August 2020 The pack rides during the 3rd stage of the Tour de France between Nice and Sisteron AFP via Getty World news in pictures 30 August 2020 Law enforcement officers block a street during a rally of opposition supporters protesting against presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus Reuters World news in pictures 29 August 2020 A woman holding a placard reading "Stop Censorship - Yes to the Freedom of Expression" shouts in a megaphone during a protest against the mandatory wearing of face masks in Paris. Masks, which were already compulsory on public transport, in enclosed public spaces, and outdoors in Paris in certain high-congestion areas around tourist sites, were made mandatory outdoors citywide on August 28 to fight the rising coronavirus infections AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 August 2020 Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe bows to the national flag at the start of a press conference at the prime minister official residence in Tokyo. Abe announced he will resign over health problems, in a bombshell development that kicks off a leadership contest in the world's third-largest economy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 27 August 2020 Residents take cover behind a tree trunk from rubber bullets fired by South African Police Service (SAPS) in Eldorado Park, near Johannesburg, during a protest by community members after a 16-year old boy was reported dead AFP via Getty World news in pictures 26 August 2020 People scatter rose petals on a statue of Mother Teresa marking her 110th birth anniversary in Ahmedabad AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 August 2020 An aerial view shows beach-goers standing on salt formations in the Dead Sea near Ein Bokeq, Israel Reuters World news in pictures 24 August 2020 Health workers use a fingertip pulse oximeter and check the body temperature of a fisherwoman inside the Dharavi slum during a door-to-door Covid-19 coronavirus screening in Mumbai AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 August 2020 People carry an idol of the Hindu god Ganesh, the deity of prosperity, to immerse it off the coast of the Arabian sea during the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in Mumbai, India Reuters World news in pictures 22 August 2020 Firefighters watch as flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires approach a home in Napa County, California AP World news in pictures 21 August 2020 Members of the Israeli security forces arrest a Palestinian demonstrator during a rally to protest against Israel's plan to annex parts of the occupied West Bank AFP via Getty World news in pictures 20 August 2020 A man pushes his bicycle through a deserted road after prohibitory orders were imposed by district officials for a week to contain the spread of the Covid-19 in Kathmandu AFP via Getty World news in pictures 19 August 2020 A car burns while parked at a residence in Vacaville, California. Dozens of fires are burning out of control throughout Northern California as fire resources are spread thin AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 August 2020 Students use their mobile phones as flashlights at an anti-government rally at Mahidol University in Nakhon Pathom. Thailand has seen near-daily protests in recent weeks by students demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-O-Cha AFP via Getty World news in pictures 17 August 2020 Members of the Kayapo tribe block the BR163 highway during a protest outside Novo Progresso in Para state, Brazil. Indigenous protesters blocked a major transamazonian highway to protest against the lack of governmental support during the COVID-19 novel coronavirus pandemic and illegal deforestation in and around their territories AFP via Getty World news in pictures 16 August 2020 Lightning forks over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as a storm passes over Oakland AP World news in pictures 15 August 2020 Belarus opposition supporters gather near the Pushkinskaya metro station where Alexander Taraikovsky, a 34-year-old protester died on August 10, during their protest rally in central Minsk AFP via Getty World news in pictures 14 August 2020 AlphaTauri's driver Daniil Kvyat takes part in the second practice session at the Circuit de Catalunya in Montmelo near Barcelona ahead of the Spanish F1 Grand Prix AFP via Getty World news in pictures 13 August 2020 Soldiers of the Brazilian Armed Forces during a disinfection of the Christ The Redeemer statue at the Corcovado mountain prior to the opening of the touristic attraction in Rio AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 August 2020 Young elephant bulls tussle playfully on World Elephant Day at the Amboseli National Park in Kenya AFP via Getty

The US runs a $375bn goods trade deficit with China, although Mr Trump claims it is $504bn.

Economic experts have asserted that using trade deficits or surpluses to measure US commercial relations with any single country, as Mr Trump does, ignores the complexities of trade in todays global economy. What matters is the totality of trade, the experts argue.

The presidents action was made under Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act, which gives Mr Trump broad authority to respond to a foreign countrys unfair trade practices. An investigation identified theft from and coercion of US companies to disclose their intellectual property as well as purchases by Chinese state funds of American companies for their technology knowledge.

Ahead of the trade announcement, White House officials said the administration was looking at tariffs on $50bn worth of Chinese goods, a figure based on a calculation of the impact on the profits of US companies that had been forced to hand over their intellectual property as the price of doing business in China.

There was no explanation of the difference between the numbers provided by White House officials in the briefing and Trumps $60bn.

Many of these areas are those where China has sought to acquire advantage through the unfair acquisition and forced technology transfer from U.S. companies ... establishing its own competitive advantage in an unfair manner, Everett Eissenstat, deputy director of the National Economic Council, told reporters.

During his remarks, the President also slammed the World Trade Organization, saying it has been a disaster for the US and arbitration has been very unfair.

 Trump's Trade Secretary Robert Lighthizer reveals countries exempt from Trump's tariffs

Mr Trumps announcement came two weeks after he imposed sweeping new tariffs on steel and aluminium imports, trade penalties also aimed at China for flooding the world with cheap metals. Since his announcement of those tariffs, allies have been willing to renegotiate trade barriers, the President said.

The EU, Australia, Argentina, Brazil and South Korea are among the nations that will get an initial exemption from the looming steel and aluminium tariffs, said US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer.

There are countries involved in various stages of trade talks with the US, and Mr Trump decided to pause the imposition of tariffs with respect to those countries, Mr Lighthizer told the Senate Finance Committee. Canada and Mexico will also be initially exempt from the tariffs that will go into effect on Friday.Donald Trumps homeland security chief Kirstjen Nielsen has said it is a priority to protect the countrys elections amid accusations the president is showing no sense of urgency over the threat.

In a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, legislators attacked Mr Trumps response to findings by the US intelligence community that Russia meddled in the USs 2016 presidential election.

During the hearing, which was held to examine Mr Trumps efforts to improve election security ahead of the midterms in November, Republican Senator Susan Collins expressed concern to DHS Secretary Ms Nielsen about the departments sluggishness in getting security clearances for election officials who are responsible for securing voting systems.

Recommended A Republican Senator backs impeaching Donald Trump

At this point, we know for certain that the Russians were relentless in their efforts and also that those efforts are ongoing, Ms Collins said. And yet, when I listen to your testimony, I hear no sense of urgency to really get on top of this issue.

Ms Nielson responded by calling the issue a matter of extreme urgency. She said her department was prioritising election efforts ... over all other critical infrastructure sectors, such as the financial, energy and communication systems.

Twenty election officials had received security clearances, she said.

Twenty out of 150? Ms Collins gasped.

Yes, maam, Ms Nielsen admitted.

More than a year into its investigation into Russias 2016 election meddling, the committee on Tuesday issued its first recommendations on how to fix the US election system. Along with pressing states to buy voting machines that produce paper ballots and to secure voter databases, the panel also urged the Mr Trump to make clear that it would not tolerate any attacks on systems used to run elections. The panel also called for better cooperation between state and federal elections officials ahead of the midterm elections.

Republican Senator Richard Burr, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the need for improvements in election security is urgent.

This issue is urgent. If we start to fix these problems tomorrow, we still might not be in time to save the system for ... 2020, he said at a committee hearing on the issue, a day after it released draft recommendations on how to fix the system.

The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Show all 17 1 /17 The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Paul Manafort Mr Manafort is a Republican strategist and former Trump campaign manager. He resigned from that post over questions about his extensive lobbying overseas, including in Ukraine where he represented pro-Russian interests. Mr Manafort turned himself in at FBI headquarters to special counsel Robert Muellers team on Oct 30, 2017, after he was indicted under seal on charges that include conspiracy against the United States, conspiracy to launder money, unregistered agent of a foreign principal, false and misleading US Foreign Agents Registration Act statements, false statements, and seven counts of failure to file reports of foreign bank and financial accounts. Getty The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Rick Gates Mr Gates joined the Trump team in spring 2016, and served as a top aide until he left to work at the Republican National Committee after the departure of former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort. Mr Gates' had previously worked on several presidential campaigns, on international political campaigns in Europe and Africa, and had 15 years of political or financial experience with multinational firms, according to his bio. Mr Gates was indicted alongside Mr Manafort by special counsel Robert Mueller's team on charges that include conspiracy against the United States, conspiracy to launder money, unregistered agent of a foreign principal, false and misleading US Foreign Agents Registration Act statements, false statements, and seven counts of failure to file reports of foreign bank and financial accounts. AP The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation George Papadopoulos George Papadopoulos was a former foreign policy adviser for the Trump campaign, having joined around March 2016. Mr Papadopoulos plead guilty to federal charges for lying to the FBI as a part of a cooperation agreement with Special Counsel Robert Mueller's investigation. Mr Papadopoulos claimed in an interview with the FBI that he had made contacts with Russian sources before joining the Trump campaign, but he actually began working with them after joining the team. Mr Papadopoulos allegedly took a meeting with a professor in London who reportedly told him that Russians had "dirt" on Hillary Clinton. The professor also allegedly introduced Mr Papadopoulos to a Russian who was said to have close ties to officials at the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Mr Papadopoulos also allegedly was in contact with a woman whom he incorrectly described in one email to others in the campaign as the "niece" to Russian President Vladimir Putin. Twitter The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Donald Trump Jr The President's eldest son met with a Russian lawyer - Natalia Veselnitskaya - on 9 June 2016 at Trump Tower in New York. He said in an initial statement that the meeting was about Russia halting adoptions of its children by US citizens. Then, he said it was regarding the Magnitsky Act, a US law blacklisting Russian human rights abusers. In a final statement, Mr Trump Jr released a chain of emails that revealed he took the meeting in hopes of getting information Ms Veselnitskaya had about Hillary Clinton's alleged financial ties to Russia. He and the President called it standard "opposition research" in the course of campaigning and that no information came from the meeting. The meeting was set up by an intermediary, Rob Goldstone. Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort were also at the same meeting. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Jared Kushner Mr Kushner is President Donald Trump's son-in-law and a key adviser to the White House. He met with a Russian banker appointed by Russian President Vladimir Putin in December. Mr Kushner has said he did so in his role as an adviser to Mr Trump while the bank says he did so as a private developer. Mr Kushner has also volunteered to testify in the Senate about his role helping to arrange meetings between Trump advisers and Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Rob Goldstone Former tabloid journalist and now music publicist Rob Goldstone is a contact of the Trump family through the previously Trump-owned 2013 Miss Universe pageant, which took place in Moscow. In June 2016, he wrote to Donald Trump Jr offering a meeting with a Russian lawyer, Natalya Veselnitskaya, who had information about Hillary Clinton. Mr Goldstone was the intermediary for Russian pop star Emin Agalaraov and his father, real estate magnate Aras, who played a role in putting on the 2013 pageant. In an email chain released by Mr Trump Jr, Mr Goldstone seemed to indicate Russian government's support of Donald Trump's campaign. AP images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Aras and Emin Agalarov Aras Agalarov (R) is a wealthy Moscow-based real estate magnate and son Emin (L) is a pop star. Both played a role in putting on the previously Trump-owned 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow. They allegedly had information about Hillary Clinton and offered that information to the Trump campaign through a lawyer with whom they had worked with, Natalia Veselnitskaya, and music publicist Rob Goldstone. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Natalia Veselnitskaya Natalia Veselnitskaya is a Russian lawyer with ties to the Kremlin. She has worked on real estate issues and reportedly counted the FSB as a client in the past. She has ties to a Trump family connection, real estate magnate Aras Agalarov, who had helped set up the Trump-owned 2013 Miss Universe pageant which took place in Moscow. Ms Veselnitskaya met with Donald Trump Jr, Jared Kushner, and Paul Manafort in Trump Tower on 9 June 2016 but denies the allegation that she went there promising information on Hillary Clinton's alleged financial ties to Russia. She contends that the meeting was about the US adoptions of Russian children being stopped by Moscow as a reaction to the Magnitsky Act, a US law blacklisting Russian human rights abusers. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Mike Flynn Mr Flynn was named as Trump's national security adviser but was forced to resign from his post for inappropriate communication with Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak. He had misrepresented a conversation he had with Mr Kislyak to Vice President Mike Pence, telling him wrongly that he had not discussed sanctions with the Russian. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Sergey Kislyak Mr Kislyak, the former longtime Russian ambassador to the US, is at the centre of the web said to connect President Donald Trump's campaign with Russia. Reuters The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Roger Stone Mr Stone is a former Trump adviser who worked on the political campaigns of Richard Nixon, George HW Bush, and Ronald Reagan. Mr Stone claimed repeatedly in the final months of the campaign that he had backchannel communications with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and that he knew the group was going to dump damaging documents to the campaign of Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton - which did happen. Mr Stone also had contacts with the hacker Guccier 2.0 on Twitter, who claimed to have hacked the DNC and is linked to Russian intelligence services. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Jeff Sessions The US attorney general was forced to recuse himself from the Trump-Russia investigation after it was learned that he had lied about meeting with Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Carter Page Mr Page is a former advisor to the Trump campaign and has a background working as an investment banker at Merrill Lynch. Mr Page met with Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak during the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland. Mr Page had invested in oil companies connected to Russia and had admitted that US Russia sanctions had hurt his bottom line. Reuters The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Jeffrey "JD" Gorden Mr Gordon met with Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak during the 2016 Republian National Convention to discuss how the US and Russia could work together to combat Islamist extremism should then-Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump win the election. The meeting came days before a massive leak of DNC emails that has been connected to Russia. Creative Commons The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation James Comey Mr Comey was fired from his post as head of the FBI by President Donald Trump. The timing of Mr Comey's firing raised questions around whether or not the FBI's investigation into the Trump campaign may have played a role in the decision. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Preet Bharara Mr Bahara refused, alongside 46 other US district attorney's across the country, to resign once President Donald Trump took office after previous assurances from Mr Trump that he would keep his job. Mr Bahara had been heading up several investigations including one into one of President Donald Trump's favorite cable television channels Fox News. Several investigations would lead back to that district, too, including those into Mr Trump's campaign ties to Russia, and Mr Trump's assertion that Trump Tower was wiretapped on orders from his predecessor. Getty Images The biggest names involved in the Trump-Russia investigation Sally Yates Ms Yates, a former Deputy Attorney General, was running the Justice Department while President Donald Trump's pick for attorney general awaited confirmation. Ms Yates was later fired by Mr Trump from her temporary post over her refusal to implement Mr Trump's first travel ban. She had also warned the White House about potential ties former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn to Russia after discovering those ties during the FBI's investigation into the Trump campaign's connections to Russia. Getty Images

The next US presidential election will take place in 2020.

Democratic Senator Martin Heinrich said there appears to be no doctrine from Mr Trump explaining what the consequences for Russia will be if it interferes with US elections again.

The hearing came a day after Mr Trump spoke with Russian President Vladimir Putin on the phone and congratulated him for his reelection.

The congratulatory call has been widely criticised, with Republican Senator John McCain saying that an American president does not lead the free world by congratulating dictators on winning sham elections.

During their conversation, Mr Trump didnt raise Russias meddling in US elections or its suspected involvement in the poisoning of a former spy in Britain. The Russian government has denied its involvement in both.

Democratic Senator Mark Warner, the Vice Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said at the hearing on Wednesday that Mr Trumps failure to bring up the topic of election security is extremely troubling.

We need a president who acknowledges the gravity of this threat, Mr Warner said.

During a White House briefing on Tuesday following the Trump-Putin call, Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Mr Trump has indicated that he will be tough on Russia.

Weve been very clear in the actions that weve taken that were going to be tough on Russia, particularly when it comes to areas that we feel where theyve stepped out of place, she said. Weve placed tough sanctions on Russia and a number of other things where we have shown exactly what our position is.Donald Trump is replacing national security adviser HR McMaster with the hawkish former Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton in the latest administration shake-up.

In a sign of the administrations unusually high rate of turnover, the pro-Iraq war hardliner will become Mr Trumps third National Security Adviser.

"General McMasters leadership of the National Security Council staff has helped my administration accomplish great things to bolster Americas national security. He helped develop our America First National Security Strategy, revitalize our alliances in the Middle East, smash ISIS, bring North Korea to the table, and strengthen our nations prosperity, Mr Trump said in a statement.

The President said on Twitter that an official handover would occur in April.

I am thankful to President Donald J. Trump for the opportunity to serve him and our nation as national security advisor. I am grateful for the friendship and support of the members of the National Security Council who worked together to provide the President with the best options to protect and advance our national interests, Mr McMaster said in a statement.

Mr Trump's initial pick for the role, General Michael Flynn, stepped aside after it emerged he had misled officials about conversations with the then-Russian ambassador; Mr Flynn subsequently pleaded guilty to lying to FBI agents who were investigating potential coordination between the Russian government and the Trump presidential campaign.

North Korea Military Parade Show all 6 1 /6 North Korea Military Parade North Korea Military Parade AP North Korea Military Parade AFP/Getty Images North Korea Military Parade AP North Korea Military Parade AP North Korea Military Parade AP North Korea Military Parade AFP/Getty Images

In elevating Mr Bolton, a staunch proponent of the Iraq war, the President has chosen an aide whose support for military entanglements abroad would seem to clash with Mr Trump's America First instincts and campaign promises to emphasise domestic issues.

The change also comes at a key moment for the Trump administration's foreign policy after the President committed to what would be an unprecedented meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un to discuss denuclearisation.

In an interview with Fox News, Mr Bolton called the appointment a great honour.

Ive never been shy about what my views are, but frankly what I have said...is behind me, at least effective 9 April, Mr Bolton said. The important thing is what the President says and what advice I would give him.

A hawkish figure who rose to prominence under George W Bush and a vocal supporter of the American invasion of Iraq, Mr Bolton served in the State Department during Mr Bushs first term before becoming Americas ambassador to the United Nations.

Critics called the ambassador post an inappropriate choice given Mr Boltons history of assailing the international body, and Democrats later helped force his resignation by blocking a confirmation vote.

Mr Bolton has also been a fierce critic of Iran and North Korea, two countries that Mr Trump has forcefully criticised and that will likely continue to feature prominently in the Trump administrations global posture.

In 2003, when he was serving as Americas chief arms control diplomat, Mr Bolton delivered a speech in Seoul, South Korea, denouncing then-North Korean leader Kim Jong Il as a tyrannical dictator whose country resembled a hellish nightmare.

The President is no stranger to using vivid language to denounce North Korea, threatening the regime of Kim Jong-un with military force as the country menaced neighbours and tested multiple intercontinental ballistic missiles in recent months.

But Mr Trump has also embraced a diplomatic opening with his extraordinary agreement to meet with Mr Kim. His openness to negotiating an end to North Korea's nuclear programme contrasts with Mr Bolton's repeated recent declarations that diplomatic approaches to North Korea cannot succeed.

In late February, shortly before the White House announced Mr Trump had accepted Mr Kims offer to meet, Mr Bolton wrote an op-ed backing a preemptive military strike on North Korea.

 Sarah Sanders says HR McMaster will continue to do his job as Trump's National Security Advisor

Mr Bolton also shares Mr Trumps suspicion of Iran, a country the President has singled out as a threat to the United States.

Mr Trump has frequently excoriated a deal forged during the Obama administration to halt Irans nuclear programme.

Warning Mr Obamas approach towards Iran has brought a bad situation to the brink of catastrophe, Mr Bolton in 2015 authored an op-ed advocating a military strike on Irans nuclear facilities.

The inescapable conclusion is that Iran will not negotiate away its nuclear program. Nor will sanctions block its building a broad and deep weapons infrastructure, Mr Bolton wrote, saying that only military action can accomplish what is required.

That background prompted an outcry from Democrats in response to Mr Trump's selection of Mr Bolton. Rep Brendan Boyle of Pennsylvania called him a "dangerous radical" with a record of "undermining key alliances around the world", and several lawmakers said he had been discredited by his support for the Iraq war.

Bolton played a key role in politicizing the intel that misled us into the Iraq War. We cannot let this extreme war hawk blunder us into another terrible conflict, Senator Edward Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, said on Twitter.Donald Trump has hit out at former vice-president Joe Biden in an early morning tweet suggesting he could beat the 75-year-old in a fight.

After Mr Biden said he would have beat the hell out of Mr Trump if they were both in high school together the President said Mr Biden would go down fast and hard, crying all the way.

Mr Trump said the vice-president to Barack Obama was trying to act like a tough guy but argued he was in fact both mentally and physically weak.

Mr Trump said the Democrat did not know him and warned him not to threaten him.

Crazy Joe Biden is trying to act like a tough guy. Actually, he is weak, both mentally and physically, and yet he threatens me, for the second time, with physical assault, Mr Trump tweeted.

He doesnt know me, but he would go down fast and hard, crying all the way. Dont threaten people Joe!

The row started on Tuesday when Mr Biden criticised the President over comments he has made about women.

A guy who ended up becoming our national leader said, I can grab a woman anywhere and she likes it, Mr Biden said at an anti-sexual assault rally at the University of Miami.

They asked me if Id like to debate this gentleman, and I said no. I said if we were in high school, Id take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him.

It is not certain what Mr Trump was alluding to when he said Mr Biden was weak but it could be a reference to times when the former Delaware senator has become emotional during public appearances.

Mr Biden burst into tears after Mr Obama awarded him with the highest civilian honour in the US during a surprise ceremony in January 2017.

Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Show all 29 1 /29 Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Inauguration - 20 January 2017 US President Donald Trump acknowledges the audience after taking the oath of office as his wife Melania (L) and daughter Tiffany watch during inauguration ceremonies swearing in Trump as the 45th president of the United States on the West Front of the US capital in Washington on 20 January, 2017. Photographer Jim Bourg: "This photo was shot with one of two remote cameras. The cameras were monitored and triggered remotely and the pictures were transmitted to clients worldwide within minutes of being taken." Reuters/Jim Bourg Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Obama farewell address - 10 January 2017 US President Barack Obama wipes away tears as he delivers his farewell address in Chicago on 10 January, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "In his final days in office, Obama made a visit home to Chicago. As he spoke from the stage to his wife and daughter in the audience, he became emotional when he talked about what they had sacrificed during his time in office. I turned from photographing the Obama women embracing to find him onstage wiping away tears." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Inauguration - 20 January 2017 A combination of photos shows the crowds attending the inauguration ceremonies to swear in U.S. President Donald Trump at 12:01pm (left) on January 20, 2017 and President Barack Obama sometime between 12:07pm and 12:26pm on January 20, 2009. Reuters/ Lucas Jackson/Stelios Varias Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Liberty Ball - 20 January 2017 US President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump attend the Liberty Ball in honour of his inauguration in Washington on 20 January, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "What I see when I look at this picture is the end of a very long day, not to mention weeks and months of preparation by many photographers, editors and network experts and the beginning of everything since." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Inaugural Law Enforcement Officers and First Responders Reception - 22 January 2017 US President Donald Trump greets Director of the FBI James Comey as Director of the Secret Service Joseph Clancy (L), watches during the Inaugural Law Enforcement Officers and First Responders Reception in the Blue Room of the White House on 22 January, 2017. Photographer Joshua Roberts: "I have covered the White House for 16 years and normally either the President or the pool is in position when an event starts. In this case the President was not where anyone expected him to be. In fact, he was almost blocking the door when the pool came in. We had to scramble to find a position without bumping him or the furniture as he greeted and thanked members of law enforcement for their security efforts during the inauguration. Luckily, he greeted FBI Director James Comey a few seconds after the pool had made its way into the room." Reuters/Joshua Roberts Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Private phone calls to world leaders - 28 January 2017 US President Donald Trump, is joined by his staff, as he speaks by phone with Russia's President Vladimir Putin in the Oval Office on 28 January, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "Very early in the Trump administration, weekends were as busy as weekdays. On Trump's second Saturday the official schedule said he would be making private phone calls to a number of world leaders including Russia's Vladimir Putin. I arrived early and, before sitting down at my desk walked up to Press Secretary Sean Spicer's office. He, too, was just taking his coat off. I gingerly made the suggestion that previous administrations had sometimes allowed photos of such phone calls through the Oval Office windows on the colonnade. To my mild shock, he didn't even think about it twice. "We'll do it!" he said. In truth, I really only expected the Putin call, but we were outside the windows multiple times throughout the day as the calls went on." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Senior advisor Kellyanne Conway - 27 February 2017 Senior advisor Kellyanne Conway (L) attends as US President Donald Trump welcomes the leaders of dozens of historically black colleges and universities (HBCU) in the Oval Office on 27 February, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "We're often asked how much access we have to the Trump administration, and the answer is we have an awful lot. President Trump himself is very comfortable in the spotlight, and his aides are similarly unfazed by cameras. In this instance, senior advisor Kellyanne Conway was so comfortable in our presence she seemed not to consider the optics of kneeling on a Oval Office sofa to take pictures with her phone." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Angela Merkel heads to Washington - 17 March 2017 Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel and US President Donald Trump hold a joint news conference in the East Room of the White House on 17 March, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "Chancellor Merkel made one of the earliest important visits of any US allies to meet Trump in his first months in office. When world leaders give joint news conferences they don't always tend to give each other their full attention - but Merkel watched Trump intently at several key moments, and here seemed particularly rapt." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Trump welcomes truckers to the White House - 23 March 2017 President Trump reacts as he sits on a truck while he welcomes truckers and CEOs to attend a meeting regarding healthcare at the White House on 23 March, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "The White House organised a listening session with truckers and CEO's of major American companies, regarding healthcare reform. An 18-wheeler tow truck was parked on the South Lawn of the White House and as Trump welcomed the truckers someone invited the him to come and sit in the driver's seat. Trump jumped into the cab and started yelling and pretending to drive - creating one of the most memorable pictures of the year. A lesson learned, always be prepared for the unexpected." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Air Force One - 6 April 2017 US President Donald Trump talks to journalists members of the travel pool on board the Air Force One during his trip to Palm Beach, Florida on 6 April, 2017. Carlos Barria: "During the many trips to President Trump's residence in Florida it is usual to see the president coming to the back of the plane to chat with journalists. During one of the trips to the so called 'Winter White House', Trump had a long talk with reporters while the Air Force One entertainment system was playing one of the latest Star Wars movies. As I was listening to Trump talk I was also looking at the movie waiting for a part of the movie to frame the mood of the day. Of the many scenes, I choose the one with Darth Vader." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures 100 Days - 27 April 2017 US President Donald Trump speaks during an interview with Reuters in the Oval Office of the White House on 27 April, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "A day before President Trump's hundred days in office I was part of the team that interviewed the commander-in-chief in the Oval Office. I was only allowed to photograph Trump during the last five minutes of the interview. The time was very tight so I had to move fast as I had pictures in mind that I wanted to shoot. I walked into the Oval Office and saw that the President had printed maps of the country showing areas in red where he won. I raised my hands holding my camera as high as possible to get the best view of the scene using a 16mm wide angle lens." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures 100 Days - 27 April 2017 US President Donald Trump reacts as he arrives at Harrisburg international airport, before attending a rally marking his first 100 days in office in Pennsylvania on 29 April, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "President Trump travelled to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania to celebrate his hundred days in office with a victory rally. He was in friendly territory as he won with a big difference over his opponent Hillary Clinton in Pennsylvania, during the November elections. As usual when the commander-in-chief arrives local residents gather to greet him. This time a small group of military personnel attended the arrival. Surrounded by secret service agents Trump walked from the Air Force One and raised his hand in a sign of victory as the crowd cheered him on." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures White House staffers - 2 May 2017 White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer (L) and White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus watch as US President Donald Trump presents the U.S. Air Force Academy football team with the Commander-in-Chief trophy in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington on 2 May, 2017. Photographer Joshua Roberts: "Covering the White House does not just mean covering the President. White House staffers are an important part of the story and their relationship with the President and each other is an indicator of how things are going in the West Wing. The tendency is to focus exclusively on the President once an event starts but I always try to look around to see how people are reacting as things unfold." Reuters/Joshua Roberts Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Secret Service - 4 May 2017 Secret Service agents use a presidential limousine as cover from spraying water as US President Donald Trump lands via Marine One helicopter in New York on 4 May, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "The best part of any trip to New York City with the sitting US President is the helicopter ride into Manhattan. The ride out at night can be stunning. Here, Secret Service agents protect themselves from the spray from the East River as Trump lands on the helipad." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures NATO Summit - 25 May 2017 US President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump wait the arrival of French President Emmanuel Macron (unseen) before a lunch ahead of a NATO Summit in Brussels on 25 May, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "One of the best parts of travelling overseas for White House coverage is the chance to see the U.S. president in different environments and (literally) a different light. Here, Trump and his wife came out of the shadows to greet France's President Macron." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Trump meets Putin at G20 summit - 7 July 2017 US President Donald Trump meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin during their bilateral meeting at the G20 summit in Hamburg, Germany on 7 July, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "On July 7, I witnessed one of the most important meetings of President Trump's first year in office. Trump met Russian President Vladimir Putin during a bilateral meeting at the G20 summit in Germany. The world's eyes were on these two leaders after speculation about Russian interference during the 2016 US elections. We entered the room for less than two minutes, where I took dozens of pictures. But there was this very interesting moment when Trump extended his hand to Putin for a handshake. Putin paused for a second and looked at Trump's hand. That was the picture that I was looking for, a little moment that seemed to say a lot." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures First lady - 8 July 2017 First lady Melania Trump chats with US President Donald Trump during their return from Germany at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland on 8 July, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "After President Trump's trip to Germany he arrived back at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland. First Lady Melania Trump said goodbye to Trump as she was heading off in a different direction that day. While chatting a breeze blew Melania's hair up in the air." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Made in America product showcase - 17 July 2017 Vice President Mike Pence laughs as President Donald Trump holds a baseball bat as they attend a Made in America product showcase event at the White House on 17 July, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "This summer the White House organized an event to showcase 'Made in America' products. All kinds of exhibitors brought their products as the President and Vice President toured the event. One of the companies was Marucci Sport, a manufacturer of baseball bats based in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. As Trump approached a table full of baseball bats, photographers at the event, including me, rushed to get a good angle hoping that he would pick up a bat. As we predicted, he did. He took one and joked around as though he was hitting something hard. The only thing closer to him right there, was the media." Reuters Donald Trump's first year: in pictures White House staffers - 25 July 2017 Former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski says hello to reporters as he and White House advisors including Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci accompany President Trump for an event celebrating veterans at AMVETS Post 44 in Ohio, July 25, 2017. Jonathan Ernst: "The most visible person in any White House is naturally the President, followed by the press secretary. But there are also the staff who support them. For those of us covering the Trump administration, there seem to be more compelling figures in the West Wing than ever before. It's crucial to know who's who and why they're important. When I raised my camera and back-pedalled ahead of the group to take this image Lewandowski gave me a hello. I liked the photo, but had no idea it would go a little bit viral, especially since Scaramucci, who was the biggest mover and shaker that week, was hidden back in the pack. But I guess the image catches a glimpse of what it's like to be a West Wing staffer on the road." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Campaign rally - 3 August 2017 US President Donald Trump arrives at a rally in West Virginia on 3 August, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "President Trump travelled to Huntington for one of his usual campaign rallies. While members of his family spoke to the crowd he was waiting under a black curtain to be introduced. Suddenly he walked onto the stage, one of the first frames that I took was of his hand. I set my exposure for the light on the stage hoping to create this dark background and it worked." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Staring into the solar eclipse - 21 August 2017 Without his protective glasses on, US President Donald Trump looks up towards the solar eclipse while viewing with his wife Melania and son Barron at the White House on 21 August, 2017. Photographer Kevin Lamarque: "On a day when everyone, and I mean everyone, was told not to look at the eclipse without protective glasses, Trump, President of the United States, couldn't help himself." Reuters/Kevin Lamarque Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Hurricane Harvey - 2 September 2017 US President Donald Trump poses for a photo as he and first lady Melania Trump help volunteers hand out meals during a visit with flood survivors of Hurricane Harvey at a relief centre in Houston, Texas on 2 September, 2017. Photohrapher Kevin Lamarque: "Trump, eager to deliver the image of a hands-on response to Hurricane Harvey, made this visit to a relief centre and obliged this woman with a selfie as Melania continued to work." Reuters/Kevin Lamarque Donald Trump's first year: in pictures White House - 15 September 2017 Donald Trump welcomes 11-year-old Frank Giaccio as he cuts the Rose Garden grass at the White House on 15 September. Frank, who wrote a letter to Trump offering to mow the lawn, was invited to work for a day at the White House along the National Park Service staff. Frank was so focused on his task that he did not notice the President arrive to surprise him. He took his father jumping in to grab his attention and point Trump out. Photographer Carlos Barria said: The image of Trump shouting at a kid who is mowing his lawn might have many interpretations in today's politically polarized United States. But for me it was just a kid who loved what he was doing, to the point he almost appeared to ignore the President." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Take a knee - 27 September 2017 A man kneels with a folded U.S. flag as the motorcade of U.S. President Donald Trump passes him after an event at the state fairgrounds in Indianapolis, Indiana, U.S., September 27, 2017. In September, soon after Trump had made comments condemning NFL players who kneel during the national anthem, he made a day trip to a rally in Indianapolis. Jonathan Ernst managed to capture a man on one knee with a tri-folded flag and was able to use a portion of the sign on the building he was kneeling in front of to track the man down and tell his story in full. US Army veteran Marvin Boatright wanted to send a message against social injustice. Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Hurricane Maria - 3 October 2017 President Donald Trump throws rolls of paper towels into a crowd of local residents affected by Hurricane Maria as he visits Calgary Chapel in San Juan, Puerto Rico on 3 October, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "During an afternoon visit to Puerto Rico for President Trump to survey damage from Hurricane Maria and greet some of its victims, Trump made a stop at a church where food and supplies were being distributed. Among the items were paper towels and Trump, apparently caught up in the moment, decided to distribute some of the rolls." Reuters Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Jared Kushner - 1 November 2017 White House Senior adviser Jared Kushner sits behind President Trump during a cabinet meeting in Washington on 1 November, 2017. Photographer Kevin Lamarque: "The role of Jared Kushner has gone through a series of changes. He began front and centre as a high profile adviser, but as time has passed and issues surrounding him have surfaced, he has become more of a background figure." Reuters/Kevin Lamarque Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Trump in China - 9 November 2017 Donald Trump and China's President Xi Jinping shake hands after making joint statements at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on 9 November, 2017. Photographer Damir Sagolj: "It's one of those "how to make a better or at least different shot when two presidents shake hands several times a day, several days in row". If I'm not mistaken in calculation, presidents Xi Jinping and Donald Trump shook their hands at least six times in events I covered during Trump's recent visit to China. I would imagine there were some more handshakes I haven't seen but other photographers did. And they all look similar - two big men, smiling and heartily greeting each other until everyone gets their shot. But then there is always something that can make it special - in this case the background made of US and Chinese flags. The first time it didn't work for me. The second time I positioned myself lower and centrally, and used the longest lens I have to capture only hands reaching for a handshake." Reuters/Damir Sagolj Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Air Force One - 10 November 2017 US President Donald Trump boards Air Force One to depart for Vietnam from Beijing Airport in Beijing, China, November 10, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "There is a Reuters photographer in the tight pool covering the US president for every appearance he makes 365 days a year. This was just one of 32 images of mine that were transmitted on the Reuters wire of President Trump visiting China and Vietnam that day. You never know when a sudden interaction, a gust of wind or a unique facial expression will lead to a striking image that grabs peoples' attention." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures ASEAN handshake - 13 November 2017 Donald Trump registers his surprise as he realises other leaders, including Russia's Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, Vietnam's Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc, President of the Philippines Rodrigo Duterte and Australia's Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, are crossing their arms for the traditional "ASEAN handshake" as he participates in the opening ceremony of the summit in Manila on 13 November, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "Having covered a few ASEAN summits, I knew to expect the ASEAN handshake. Not everyone in the room knew to expect the ASEAN handshake. A lot was written about this unscripted moment, and what deeper meaning it might have. The simple truth is that sometimes in life there are unscripted moments." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst

Mr Biden turned his back to the crowd to wipe away tears after the former president announced he was bestowing him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

The former vice-president has also spoken emotionally about his sons brain cancer diagnosis and subsequent death. He previously said his sons illness made him feel unable to run for president against Mr Trump.

No one should ever seek the presidency unless they are able to devote their whole heart and soul and passion into just doing that, Biden told ABC News in 2016. Beau was my soul. I just wasnt ready to be able to do that. My one regret is my Beaus not here. I dont have any other regrets.

The death of Beau, an Iraq War veteran who died in 2015, is not the only tragedy to have hit the family. Beau was just two when his mother, Neilia Hunter, was killed in a car crash in 1972, which also took the life of Mr Bidens one-year-old daughter.

Mr Biden, the first Roman Catholic vice-president, ruled out running for office in 2016 in a race that would have seen him pitted against Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. He has since said he would have been able to beat Mr Trump if he had been the Democratic candidate. Mr Biden previously pursued the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988 and in 2008 but dropped out of the race early on both occasions.

Mr Trumps stern warning to Mr Biden on Thursday is reminiscent of the time he implied he would be willing to fight Mr Biden behind a barn at a rally in Florida in 2016.

Referring to a fist fight between the pair, Mr Trump said: Id love that.

He branded Mr Biden Mr Tough Guy and said of beating him up: Some things in life you could really love doing.

The comments followed Mr Biden saying he wished he was in high school with Mr Trump and could take him behind the gym. He said: The press always asks me, dont I wish I was debating him? No, I wish we were in high school and I could take him behind the gym. Thats what I wish.

Mr Bidens comments referred to the leaked tape from 2005 which surfaced in October 2016 in which Mr Trump could be heard bragging about groping and making unwanted advances on women. He boasted that he was such a star he can grab women by the p***y.

Mr Biden sought to clarify his remarks at a rally just two days afterwards, saying that he would only fight Mr Trump if he were still in high school. He added: I want to make it clear I understand what assault is. Im not in high school.President Donald Trump has decided to exempt the EU  which includes Britain  and other allies from the recently announced steel and aluminium tariffs, a senior official has revealed.

US trade representative Robert Lighthizer told politicians on Capitol Hill that the EU, along with Argentina, Australia, Brazil and South Korea, would not be subject to the levies. Earlier, the US had announced that Canada and Mexico would also not be subject to them while negotiations continued.

The idea that the President has is that, based on a certain set of criteria, some countries should be out, Mr Lighthizer told the Senate Finance Committee. What he has decided to do, is pause the implementation of the tariffs in respect to those countries.

Earlier this month, Mr Trump announced plans to impose tariffs of 25 per cent on imported steel and 10 per cent on aluminium  trade penalties aimed at China for flooding the world with cheap metals. He responded to claims he was set to trigger a trade war by saying he would welcome one as he believed it would be good for the country.

After many nations complained vociferously, Mr Lighthizer said there were several countries involved in various stages of trade talks with the US, and that Mr Trump had decided to pause the imposition of tariffs with respect to those countries.

The EUs trade chief Cecilia Malmstrom, who returned on Thursday from a trip to the US, said that she expected the bloc to be exempt.

We have argued, and I think successfully, that the European Union is not an enemy of the US when it comes to steel and aluminium, Ms Malmstrom said in her account of the visit. Hopefully, that will lead to us being excluded from the measures.

The European Commission has threatened the US with retaliatory measures targeted against Bourbon whiskey, Harley Davidson motorcycles and Levis jeans if the steel and aluminium tariffs go ahead.

Exempting the EU would be a significant climbdown for the US President, who said in recent weeks that trade wars were good, and easy to win. He has previously hit out at what he called Europes very unfair trade policies towards the United States.

Mr Lighthizer also cited Canada and Mexico in his list. The US is in consultations with the two countries in an effort to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta).

 Liam Fox calls Donald Trump's tariffs on steel and aluminium 'absurd'

Mr Lighthizer identified the countries initially exempted from the tariffs in response to a question from Democratic Senator Ron Wyden, who said politicians wanted more consultation from the administration on trade.

Which countries  this is going to happen tomorrow  will not have these steel and aluminium tariffs applied to them? Mr Wyden said.

The list I just gave, Mr Lighthizer said.

World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 30 September 2020 Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 September 2020 A girl's silhouette is seen from behind a fabric in a tent along a beach by Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 September 2020 A Chinese woman takes a photo of herself in front of a flower display dedicated to frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China. China will celebrate national day marking the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st Getty World news in pictures 27 September 2020 The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California. The fast moving Glass fire has burned over 1,000 acres and has destroyed homes Getty World news in pictures 26 September 2020 A villager along with a child offers prayers next to a carcass of a wild elephant that officials say was electrocuted in Rani Reserve Forest on the outskirts of Guwahati, India AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 September 2020 The casket of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seen in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol to lie in state in Washington, DC AFP via Getty World news in pictures 24 September 2020 An anti-government protester holds up an image of a pro-democracy commemorative plaque at a rally outside Thailand's parliament in Bangkok, as activists gathered to demand a new constitution AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 September 2020 A whale stranded on a beach in Macquarie Harbour on the rugged west coast of Tasmania, as hundreds of pilot whales have died in a mass stranding in southern Australia despite efforts to save them, with rescuers racing to free a few dozen survivors The Mercury/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 22 September 2020 State civil employee candidates wearing face masks and shields take a test in Surabaya AFP via Getty World news in pictures 21 September 2020 A man sweeps at the Taj Mahal monument on the day of its reopening after being closed for more than six months due to the coronavirus pandemic AP World news in pictures 20 September 2020 A deer looks for food in a burnt area, caused by the Bobcat fire, in Pearblossom, California EPA World news in pictures 19 September 2020 Anti-government protesters hold their mobile phones aloft as they take part in a pro-democracy rally in Bangkok. Tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters massed close to Thailand's royal palace, in a huge rally calling for PM Prayut Chan-O-Cha to step down and demanding reforms to the monarchy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 September 2020 Supporters of Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr maintain social distancing as they attend Friday prayers after the coronavirus disease restrictions were eased, in Kufa mosque, near Najaf, Iraq Reuters World news in pictures 17 September 2020 A protester climbs on The Triumph of the Republic at 'the Place de la Nation' as thousands of protesters take part in a demonstration during a national day strike called by labor unions asking for better salary and against jobs cut in Paris, France EPA World news in pictures 16 September 2020 A fire raging near the Lazzaretto of Ancona in Italy. The huge blaze broke out overnight at the port of Ancona. Firefighters have brought the fire under control but they expected to keep working through the day EPA World news in pictures 15 September 2020 Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny posing for a selfie with his family at Berlin's Charite hospital. In an Instagram post he said he could now breathe independently following his suspected poisoning last month Alexei Navalny/Instagram/AFP World news in pictures 14 September 2020 Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida celebrate after Suga was elected as new head of the ruling party at the Liberal Democratic Party's leadership election in Tokyo Reuters World news in pictures 13 September 2020 A man stands behind a burning barricade during the fifth straight day of protests against police brutality in Bogota AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 September 2020 Police officers block and detain protesters during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus. Daily protests calling for the authoritarian president's resignation are now in their second month AP World news in pictures 11 September 2020 Members of 'Omnium Cultural' celebrate the 20th 'Festa per la llibertat' ('Fiesta for the freedom') to mark the Day of Catalonia in Barcelona. Omnion Cultural fights for the independence of Catalonia EPA World news in pictures 10 September 2020 The Moria refugee camp, two days after Greece's biggest migrant camp, was destroyed by fire. Thousands of asylum seekers on the island of Lesbos are now homeless AFP via Getty World news in pictures 9 September 2020 Pope Francis takes off his face mask as he arrives by car to hold a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 8 September 2020 A home is engulfed in flames during the "Creek Fire" in the Tollhouse area of California AFP via Getty World news in pictures 7 September 2020 A couple take photos along a sea wall of the waves brought by Typhoon Haishen in the eastern port city of Sokcho AFP via Getty World news in pictures 6 September 2020 Novak Djokovic and a tournament official tends to a linesperson who was struck with a ball by Djokovic during his match against Pablo Carreno Busta at the US Open USA Today Sports/Reuters World news in pictures 5 September 2020 Protesters confront police at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, Australia, during an anti-lockdown rally AFP via Getty World news in pictures 4 September 2020 A woman looks on from a rooftop as rescue workers dig through the rubble of a damaged building in Beirut. A search began for possible survivors after a scanner detected a pulse one month after the mega-blast at the adjacent port AFP via Getty World news in pictures 3 September 2020 A full moon next to the Virgen del Panecillo statue in Quito, Ecuador EPA World news in pictures 2 September 2020 A Palestinian woman reacts as Israeli forces demolish her animal shed near Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank Reuters World news in pictures 1 September 2020 Students protest against presidential elections results in Minsk TUT.BY/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 31 August 2020 The pack rides during the 3rd stage of the Tour de France between Nice and Sisteron AFP via Getty World news in pictures 30 August 2020 Law enforcement officers block a street during a rally of opposition supporters protesting against presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus Reuters World news in pictures 29 August 2020 A woman holding a placard reading "Stop Censorship - Yes to the Freedom of Expression" shouts in a megaphone during a protest against the mandatory wearing of face masks in Paris. Masks, which were already compulsory on public transport, in enclosed public spaces, and outdoors in Paris in certain high-congestion areas around tourist sites, were made mandatory outdoors citywide on August 28 to fight the rising coronavirus infections AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 August 2020 Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe bows to the national flag at the start of a press conference at the prime minister official residence in Tokyo. Abe announced he will resign over health problems, in a bombshell development that kicks off a leadership contest in the world's third-largest economy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 27 August 2020 Residents take cover behind a tree trunk from rubber bullets fired by South African Police Service (SAPS) in Eldorado Park, near Johannesburg, during a protest by community members after a 16-year old boy was reported dead AFP via Getty World news in pictures 26 August 2020 People scatter rose petals on a statue of Mother Teresa marking her 110th birth anniversary in Ahmedabad AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 August 2020 An aerial view shows beach-goers standing on salt formations in the Dead Sea near Ein Bokeq, Israel Reuters World news in pictures 24 August 2020 Health workers use a fingertip pulse oximeter and check the body temperature of a fisherwoman inside the Dharavi slum during a door-to-door Covid-19 coronavirus screening in Mumbai AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 August 2020 People carry an idol of the Hindu god Ganesh, the deity of prosperity, to immerse it off the coast of the Arabian sea during the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in Mumbai, India Reuters World news in pictures 22 August 2020 Firefighters watch as flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires approach a home in Napa County, California AP World news in pictures 21 August 2020 Members of the Israeli security forces arrest a Palestinian demonstrator during a rally to protest against Israel's plan to annex parts of the occupied West Bank AFP via Getty World news in pictures 20 August 2020 A man pushes his bicycle through a deserted road after prohibitory orders were imposed by district officials for a week to contain the spread of the Covid-19 in Kathmandu AFP via Getty World news in pictures 19 August 2020 A car burns while parked at a residence in Vacaville, California. Dozens of fires are burning out of control throughout Northern California as fire resources are spread thin AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 August 2020 Students use their mobile phones as flashlights at an anti-government rally at Mahidol University in Nakhon Pathom. Thailand has seen near-daily protests in recent weeks by students demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-O-Cha AFP via Getty World news in pictures 17 August 2020 Members of the Kayapo tribe block the BR163 highway during a protest outside Novo Progresso in Para state, Brazil. Indigenous protesters blocked a major transamazonian highway to protest against the lack of governmental support during the COVID-19 novel coronavirus pandemic and illegal deforestation in and around their territories AFP via Getty World news in pictures 16 August 2020 Lightning forks over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as a storm passes over Oakland AP World news in pictures 15 August 2020 Belarus opposition supporters gather near the Pushkinskaya metro station where Alexander Taraikovsky, a 34-year-old protester died on August 10, during their protest rally in central Minsk AFP via Getty World news in pictures 14 August 2020 AlphaTauri's driver Daniil Kvyat takes part in the second practice session at the Circuit de Catalunya in Montmelo near Barcelona ahead of the Spanish F1 Grand Prix AFP via Getty World news in pictures 13 August 2020 Soldiers of the Brazilian Armed Forces during a disinfection of the Christ The Redeemer statue at the Corcovado mountain prior to the opening of the touristic attraction in Rio AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 August 2020 Young elephant bulls tussle playfully on World Elephant Day at the Amboseli National Park in Kenya AFP via Getty

Before Mr Lighthizers testimony, Germanys economy minister, Peter Altmaier, said he had found officials in Washington open to our arguments during the recent visit with Ms Malmstrom.

Mr Altmaier told Germanys parliament it is a question of fundamental significance: whether we all stand for open and fair world markets in the future.

Trump campaigned on promises to bring down Americas trade deficit, which stood at $566bn (401bn) last year, by rewriting trade agreements and cracking down on what he called abusive commercial practices by Americas trading partners.

Mr Lighthizer said the nations trade deficit indicated that global rules on trade sometimes made it hard for US companies to export. We are negotiating trade deals that will work for Americans, he said.

However, the comments from Mr Lighthizer will do little to calm fears of the potential for a global trade war, given that they came on the same day as Mr Trump announcing up to $60bn of tariffs against China. While the move to seemingly target China rather than staunch US allies will come as a relief to EU diplomats, it is likely to bring a reaction from Beijing. Just before signing the trade action, Mr Trump said it was the first of many.

Under the terms of the memorandum Mr Trump signed, he will target the Chinese imports only after a consultation period, thereby giving industry lobbyists and members of Congress a chance to water down a list of proposed 1,300 products that could be targeted.

The consultation period will also give China time to respond, reducing the risk of immediate revenge from Beijing. The Chinese government has vowed to take all necessary measures to defend the countrys interests if Mr Trump attacks it for allegedly stealing American technology or pressuring US companies to hand it over.

China will not sit idly to see its legitimate rights damaged, and must take all necessary measures to resolutely defend its legitimate rights, the Commerce Ministry in Beijing said in a statement on its website.

Mr Trump struck a conciliatory tone when he first began speaking at the White Houses signing ceremony, calling China a friend and saying he had tremendous respect for Chinese President Xi Jinping.

We have spoken to China and we are in the middle of negotiations, Mr Trump said, adding that the loss of American jobs from unfair trade was one of the main reasons he had been elected as President.

He again lamented over unfair trade deals and the USs trade deficits with other countries, saying he had asked China to immediately reduce its trade surplus with America by $100bn.

The Presidents action was made under Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act, which gives Mr Trump broad authority to respond to a foreign countrys unfair trade practices. An investigation identified theft from and coercion of US companies to disclose their intellectual property, as well as purchases by Chinese state funds of American companies for their technology knowledge.

Ahead of the trade announcement, White House officials said the administration was looking at tariffs on $50bn worth of Chinese goods, a figure based on a calculation of the impact on the profits of US companies that had been forced to hand over their intellectual property as the price of doing business in China.

There was no explanation of the difference between the numbers provided by White House officials in the briefing and Trumps $60bn.

Many of these areas are those where China has sought to acquire advantage through the unfair acquisition and forced technology transfer from US companies ... establishing its own competitive advantage in an unfair manner, Everett Eissenstat, deputy director of the National Economic Council, told reporters.

During his remarks, Mr Trump also slammed the World Trade Organisation, saying it has been a disaster for the US and arbitration has been very unfair.Scores of people were forced to evacuate their homes and at least 30 people were hospitalised after a volcano in Indonesia started to emit toxic gases.

As Mount Ijen in East Java belched thick clouds of sulphuric acid nearly 200 people living on its slopes had no choice but to leave their homes.

The toxic air caused some to vomit, while others experienced difficulty breathing. A popular tourist and mining site were forced to close.

"Because of this incident, the public - tourists or miners - are not allowed near the crater until further notice," said Sutopo Purwo Nugroho, spokesman for the national disaster mitigation agency.

He added that had been no increase in seismic activity around the volcano.

Miners dig up hardening yellow sulphur to sell for use in everything from cosmetics to matchsticks.

Mount Ijen regularly releases small amounts of noxious gases but the site stays open to the public.

World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 30 September 2020 Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 September 2020 A girl's silhouette is seen from behind a fabric in a tent along a beach by Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 September 2020 A Chinese woman takes a photo of herself in front of a flower display dedicated to frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China. China will celebrate national day marking the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st Getty World news in pictures 27 September 2020 The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California. The fast moving Glass fire has burned over 1,000 acres and has destroyed homes Getty World news in pictures 26 September 2020 A villager along with a child offers prayers next to a carcass of a wild elephant that officials say was electrocuted in Rani Reserve Forest on the outskirts of Guwahati, India AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 September 2020 The casket of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seen in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol to lie in state in Washington, DC AFP via Getty World news in pictures 24 September 2020 An anti-government protester holds up an image of a pro-democracy commemorative plaque at a rally outside Thailand's parliament in Bangkok, as activists gathered to demand a new constitution AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 September 2020 A whale stranded on a beach in Macquarie Harbour on the rugged west coast of Tasmania, as hundreds of pilot whales have died in a mass stranding in southern Australia despite efforts to save them, with rescuers racing to free a few dozen survivors The Mercury/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 22 September 2020 State civil employee candidates wearing face masks and shields take a test in Surabaya AFP via Getty World news in pictures 21 September 2020 A man sweeps at the Taj Mahal monument on the day of its reopening after being closed for more than six months due to the coronavirus pandemic AP World news in pictures 20 September 2020 A deer looks for food in a burnt area, caused by the Bobcat fire, in Pearblossom, California EPA World news in pictures 19 September 2020 Anti-government protesters hold their mobile phones aloft as they take part in a pro-democracy rally in Bangkok. Tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters massed close to Thailand's royal palace, in a huge rally calling for PM Prayut Chan-O-Cha to step down and demanding reforms to the monarchy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 September 2020 Supporters of Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr maintain social distancing as they attend Friday prayers after the coronavirus disease restrictions were eased, in Kufa mosque, near Najaf, Iraq Reuters World news in pictures 17 September 2020 A protester climbs on The Triumph of the Republic at 'the Place de la Nation' as thousands of protesters take part in a demonstration during a national day strike called by labor unions asking for better salary and against jobs cut in Paris, France EPA World news in pictures 16 September 2020 A fire raging near the Lazzaretto of Ancona in Italy. The huge blaze broke out overnight at the port of Ancona. Firefighters have brought the fire under control but they expected to keep working through the day EPA World news in pictures 15 September 2020 Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny posing for a selfie with his family at Berlin's Charite hospital. In an Instagram post he said he could now breathe independently following his suspected poisoning last month Alexei Navalny/Instagram/AFP World news in pictures 14 September 2020 Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida celebrate after Suga was elected as new head of the ruling party at the Liberal Democratic Party's leadership election in Tokyo Reuters World news in pictures 13 September 2020 A man stands behind a burning barricade during the fifth straight day of protests against police brutality in Bogota AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 September 2020 Police officers block and detain protesters during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus. Daily protests calling for the authoritarian president's resignation are now in their second month AP World news in pictures 11 September 2020 Members of 'Omnium Cultural' celebrate the 20th 'Festa per la llibertat' ('Fiesta for the freedom') to mark the Day of Catalonia in Barcelona. Omnion Cultural fights for the independence of Catalonia EPA World news in pictures 10 September 2020 The Moria refugee camp, two days after Greece's biggest migrant camp, was destroyed by fire. Thousands of asylum seekers on the island of Lesbos are now homeless AFP via Getty World news in pictures 9 September 2020 Pope Francis takes off his face mask as he arrives by car to hold a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 8 September 2020 A home is engulfed in flames during the "Creek Fire" in the Tollhouse area of California AFP via Getty World news in pictures 7 September 2020 A couple take photos along a sea wall of the waves brought by Typhoon Haishen in the eastern port city of Sokcho AFP via Getty World news in pictures 6 September 2020 Novak Djokovic and a tournament official tends to a linesperson who was struck with a ball by Djokovic during his match against Pablo Carreno Busta at the US Open USA Today Sports/Reuters World news in pictures 5 September 2020 Protesters confront police at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, Australia, during an anti-lockdown rally AFP via Getty World news in pictures 4 September 2020 A woman looks on from a rooftop as rescue workers dig through the rubble of a damaged building in Beirut. A search began for possible survivors after a scanner detected a pulse one month after the mega-blast at the adjacent port AFP via Getty World news in pictures 3 September 2020 A full moon next to the Virgen del Panecillo statue in Quito, Ecuador EPA World news in pictures 2 September 2020 A Palestinian woman reacts as Israeli forces demolish her animal shed near Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank Reuters World news in pictures 1 September 2020 Students protest against presidential elections results in Minsk TUT.BY/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 31 August 2020 The pack rides during the 3rd stage of the Tour de France between Nice and Sisteron AFP via Getty World news in pictures 30 August 2020 Law enforcement officers block a street during a rally of opposition supporters protesting against presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus Reuters World news in pictures 29 August 2020 A woman holding a placard reading "Stop Censorship - Yes to the Freedom of Expression" shouts in a megaphone during a protest against the mandatory wearing of face masks in Paris. Masks, which were already compulsory on public transport, in enclosed public spaces, and outdoors in Paris in certain high-congestion areas around tourist sites, were made mandatory outdoors citywide on August 28 to fight the rising coronavirus infections AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 August 2020 Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe bows to the national flag at the start of a press conference at the prime minister official residence in Tokyo. Abe announced he will resign over health problems, in a bombshell development that kicks off a leadership contest in the world's third-largest economy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 27 August 2020 Residents take cover behind a tree trunk from rubber bullets fired by South African Police Service (SAPS) in Eldorado Park, near Johannesburg, during a protest by community members after a 16-year old boy was reported dead AFP via Getty World news in pictures 26 August 2020 People scatter rose petals on a statue of Mother Teresa marking her 110th birth anniversary in Ahmedabad AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 August 2020 An aerial view shows beach-goers standing on salt formations in the Dead Sea near Ein Bokeq, Israel Reuters World news in pictures 24 August 2020 Health workers use a fingertip pulse oximeter and check the body temperature of a fisherwoman inside the Dharavi slum during a door-to-door Covid-19 coronavirus screening in Mumbai AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 August 2020 People carry an idol of the Hindu god Ganesh, the deity of prosperity, to immerse it off the coast of the Arabian sea during the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in Mumbai, India Reuters World news in pictures 22 August 2020 Firefighters watch as flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires approach a home in Napa County, California AP World news in pictures 21 August 2020 Members of the Israeli security forces arrest a Palestinian demonstrator during a rally to protest against Israel's plan to annex parts of the occupied West Bank AFP via Getty World news in pictures 20 August 2020 A man pushes his bicycle through a deserted road after prohibitory orders were imposed by district officials for a week to contain the spread of the Covid-19 in Kathmandu AFP via Getty World news in pictures 19 August 2020 A car burns while parked at a residence in Vacaville, California. Dozens of fires are burning out of control throughout Northern California as fire resources are spread thin AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 August 2020 Students use their mobile phones as flashlights at an anti-government rally at Mahidol University in Nakhon Pathom. Thailand has seen near-daily protests in recent weeks by students demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-O-Cha AFP via Getty World news in pictures 17 August 2020 Members of the Kayapo tribe block the BR163 highway during a protest outside Novo Progresso in Para state, Brazil. Indigenous protesters blocked a major transamazonian highway to protest against the lack of governmental support during the COVID-19 novel coronavirus pandemic and illegal deforestation in and around their territories AFP via Getty World news in pictures 16 August 2020 Lightning forks over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as a storm passes over Oakland AP World news in pictures 15 August 2020 Belarus opposition supporters gather near the Pushkinskaya metro station where Alexander Taraikovsky, a 34-year-old protester died on August 10, during their protest rally in central Minsk AFP via Getty World news in pictures 14 August 2020 AlphaTauri's driver Daniil Kvyat takes part in the second practice session at the Circuit de Catalunya in Montmelo near Barcelona ahead of the Spanish F1 Grand Prix AFP via Getty World news in pictures 13 August 2020 Soldiers of the Brazilian Armed Forces during a disinfection of the Christ The Redeemer statue at the Corcovado mountain prior to the opening of the touristic attraction in Rio AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 August 2020 Young elephant bulls tussle playfully on World Elephant Day at the Amboseli National Park in Kenya AFP via Getty

Around 5 million of Indonesia's 250 million people live and work near volcanoes, according to authorities, largely because of the fertile farming soil.

Earlier this year the country's Mount Sinabung volcano erupted, shooting a spectacular plume of ash billowing 16,400 feet into the atmosphere.

Hot clouds were subsequently seen rolling down the mountain's slopes near Kutarakyat on the island of Sumatra, before drifting three miles south.

Agencies contributed to this reportDenmark has said it will build a 43.5 mile fence on its border with Germany to keep out wild boars that may be carrying a deadly infection.

Although no cases of African swine fever have yet been detected in Denmark, there are concerns the fever could pose a risk to the countrys large pork industry.

The spread of the disease in eastern Europe is causing significant problems as there is currently no vaccine against it.

African swine fever is harmless to humans and other animals but for wild boar and farm pigs, the disease is deadly in almost all cases within 10 days.

Minister for Food and the Environment Esben Lunde Larsen said they did not want to take any risks.

If African swine fever virus broke out in Denmark, all exports to third countries would immediately stop," Mr Larsen said, according to the Local.

Denmarks pig exports amount to 33 billion Danish krone (3.85bn) per year. An outbreak of the disease in Denmark would shut down the entire industry.

The disease currently exists in Poland, the Czech Republic, Romania, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania and has recently moved closer to Denmark, according to the government.

World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 30 September 2020 Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 September 2020 A girl's silhouette is seen from behind a fabric in a tent along a beach by Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 September 2020 A Chinese woman takes a photo of herself in front of a flower display dedicated to frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China. China will celebrate national day marking the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st Getty World news in pictures 27 September 2020 The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California. The fast moving Glass fire has burned over 1,000 acres and has destroyed homes Getty World news in pictures 26 September 2020 A villager along with a child offers prayers next to a carcass of a wild elephant that officials say was electrocuted in Rani Reserve Forest on the outskirts of Guwahati, India AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 September 2020 The casket of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seen in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol to lie in state in Washington, DC AFP via Getty World news in pictures 24 September 2020 An anti-government protester holds up an image of a pro-democracy commemorative plaque at a rally outside Thailand's parliament in Bangkok, as activists gathered to demand a new constitution AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 September 2020 A whale stranded on a beach in Macquarie Harbour on the rugged west coast of Tasmania, as hundreds of pilot whales have died in a mass stranding in southern Australia despite efforts to save them, with rescuers racing to free a few dozen survivors The Mercury/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 22 September 2020 State civil employee candidates wearing face masks and shields take a test in Surabaya AFP via Getty World news in pictures 21 September 2020 A man sweeps at the Taj Mahal monument on the day of its reopening after being closed for more than six months due to the coronavirus pandemic AP World news in pictures 20 September 2020 A deer looks for food in a burnt area, caused by the Bobcat fire, in Pearblossom, California EPA World news in pictures 19 September 2020 Anti-government protesters hold their mobile phones aloft as they take part in a pro-democracy rally in Bangkok. Tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters massed close to Thailand's royal palace, in a huge rally calling for PM Prayut Chan-O-Cha to step down and demanding reforms to the monarchy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 September 2020 Supporters of Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr maintain social distancing as they attend Friday prayers after the coronavirus disease restrictions were eased, in Kufa mosque, near Najaf, Iraq Reuters World news in pictures 17 September 2020 A protester climbs on The Triumph of the Republic at 'the Place de la Nation' as thousands of protesters take part in a demonstration during a national day strike called by labor unions asking for better salary and against jobs cut in Paris, France EPA World news in pictures 16 September 2020 A fire raging near the Lazzaretto of Ancona in Italy. The huge blaze broke out overnight at the port of Ancona. Firefighters have brought the fire under control but they expected to keep working through the day EPA World news in pictures 15 September 2020 Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny posing for a selfie with his family at Berlin's Charite hospital. In an Instagram post he said he could now breathe independently following his suspected poisoning last month Alexei Navalny/Instagram/AFP World news in pictures 14 September 2020 Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida celebrate after Suga was elected as new head of the ruling party at the Liberal Democratic Party's leadership election in Tokyo Reuters World news in pictures 13 September 2020 A man stands behind a burning barricade during the fifth straight day of protests against police brutality in Bogota AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 September 2020 Police officers block and detain protesters during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus. Daily protests calling for the authoritarian president's resignation are now in their second month AP World news in pictures 11 September 2020 Members of 'Omnium Cultural' celebrate the 20th 'Festa per la llibertat' ('Fiesta for the freedom') to mark the Day of Catalonia in Barcelona. Omnion Cultural fights for the independence of Catalonia EPA World news in pictures 10 September 2020 The Moria refugee camp, two days after Greece's biggest migrant camp, was destroyed by fire. Thousands of asylum seekers on the island of Lesbos are now homeless AFP via Getty World news in pictures 9 September 2020 Pope Francis takes off his face mask as he arrives by car to hold a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 8 September 2020 A home is engulfed in flames during the "Creek Fire" in the Tollhouse area of California AFP via Getty World news in pictures 7 September 2020 A couple take photos along a sea wall of the waves brought by Typhoon Haishen in the eastern port city of Sokcho AFP via Getty World news in pictures 6 September 2020 Novak Djokovic and a tournament official tends to a linesperson who was struck with a ball by Djokovic during his match against Pablo Carreno Busta at the US Open USA Today Sports/Reuters World news in pictures 5 September 2020 Protesters confront police at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, Australia, during an anti-lockdown rally AFP via Getty World news in pictures 4 September 2020 A woman looks on from a rooftop as rescue workers dig through the rubble of a damaged building in Beirut. A search began for possible survivors after a scanner detected a pulse one month after the mega-blast at the adjacent port AFP via Getty World news in pictures 3 September 2020 A full moon next to the Virgen del Panecillo statue in Quito, Ecuador EPA World news in pictures 2 September 2020 A Palestinian woman reacts as Israeli forces demolish her animal shed near Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank Reuters World news in pictures 1 September 2020 Students protest against presidential elections results in Minsk TUT.BY/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 31 August 2020 The pack rides during the 3rd stage of the Tour de France between Nice and Sisteron AFP via Getty World news in pictures 30 August 2020 Law enforcement officers block a street during a rally of opposition supporters protesting against presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus Reuters World news in pictures 29 August 2020 A woman holding a placard reading "Stop Censorship - Yes to the Freedom of Expression" shouts in a megaphone during a protest against the mandatory wearing of face masks in Paris. Masks, which were already compulsory on public transport, in enclosed public spaces, and outdoors in Paris in certain high-congestion areas around tourist sites, were made mandatory outdoors citywide on August 28 to fight the rising coronavirus infections AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 August 2020 Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe bows to the national flag at the start of a press conference at the prime minister official residence in Tokyo. Abe announced he will resign over health problems, in a bombshell development that kicks off a leadership contest in the world's third-largest economy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 27 August 2020 Residents take cover behind a tree trunk from rubber bullets fired by South African Police Service (SAPS) in Eldorado Park, near Johannesburg, during a protest by community members after a 16-year old boy was reported dead AFP via Getty World news in pictures 26 August 2020 People scatter rose petals on a statue of Mother Teresa marking her 110th birth anniversary in Ahmedabad AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 August 2020 An aerial view shows beach-goers standing on salt formations in the Dead Sea near Ein Bokeq, Israel Reuters World news in pictures 24 August 2020 Health workers use a fingertip pulse oximeter and check the body temperature of a fisherwoman inside the Dharavi slum during a door-to-door Covid-19 coronavirus screening in Mumbai AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 August 2020 People carry an idol of the Hindu god Ganesh, the deity of prosperity, to immerse it off the coast of the Arabian sea during the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in Mumbai, India Reuters World news in pictures 22 August 2020 Firefighters watch as flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires approach a home in Napa County, California AP World news in pictures 21 August 2020 Members of the Israeli security forces arrest a Palestinian demonstrator during a rally to protest against Israel's plan to annex parts of the occupied West Bank AFP via Getty World news in pictures 20 August 2020 A man pushes his bicycle through a deserted road after prohibitory orders were imposed by district officials for a week to contain the spread of the Covid-19 in Kathmandu AFP via Getty World news in pictures 19 August 2020 A car burns while parked at a residence in Vacaville, California. Dozens of fires are burning out of control throughout Northern California as fire resources are spread thin AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 August 2020 Students use their mobile phones as flashlights at an anti-government rally at Mahidol University in Nakhon Pathom. Thailand has seen near-daily protests in recent weeks by students demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-O-Cha AFP via Getty World news in pictures 17 August 2020 Members of the Kayapo tribe block the BR163 highway during a protest outside Novo Progresso in Para state, Brazil. Indigenous protesters blocked a major transamazonian highway to protest against the lack of governmental support during the COVID-19 novel coronavirus pandemic and illegal deforestation in and around their territories AFP via Getty World news in pictures 16 August 2020 Lightning forks over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as a storm passes over Oakland AP World news in pictures 15 August 2020 Belarus opposition supporters gather near the Pushkinskaya metro station where Alexander Taraikovsky, a 34-year-old protester died on August 10, during their protest rally in central Minsk AFP via Getty World news in pictures 14 August 2020 AlphaTauri's driver Daniil Kvyat takes part in the second practice session at the Circuit de Catalunya in Montmelo near Barcelona ahead of the Spanish F1 Grand Prix AFP via Getty World news in pictures 13 August 2020 Soldiers of the Brazilian Armed Forces during a disinfection of the Christ The Redeemer statue at the Corcovado mountain prior to the opening of the touristic attraction in Rio AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 August 2020 Young elephant bulls tussle playfully on World Elephant Day at the Amboseli National Park in Kenya AFP via Getty

The Danish government also said it would impose larger fines for illegal food imports and failures to clean animal transportation vehicles properly.

Hunters have also been given new options to hunt wild boars at night time.

Agencies contributed to this reportA fire has broken out on the upper floors of the Metro Hotel in Dublin.

The hotel and apartment complex is located near Dublin Airport, on the northside of the city.

At least eight fire crews battled to stop the blaze from spreading.

Dublin Fire Brigade said there were no reports of injuries or missing people.

8 fire engines, 2 aerial appliances, emergency tender, foam tender, command units and senior officers at scene, the service tweeted.

Firefighters using breathing apparatus inside hotel to search & extinguish.

In another tweet, the service said: "As of yet we have no reports of any casualties or people unaccounted for."

The Metro Hotel building compromises hotel rooms on the lower floors and residential apartments on the upper floors.

It is sometimes used to accommodate families in need of housing.

Paul McAuliffe, a Dublin city councillor, said he believed everyone had been evacuated safely.

We understand from the hotel staff that all of the people living in the accommodation and residents of the hotel got out safely, he said.

We believe everyone got out safely.

He said at least five floors were still engulfed in flames at 10pm.

World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 30 September 2020 Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 September 2020 A girl's silhouette is seen from behind a fabric in a tent along a beach by Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 September 2020 A Chinese woman takes a photo of herself in front of a flower display dedicated to frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China. China will celebrate national day marking the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st Getty World news in pictures 27 September 2020 The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California. The fast moving Glass fire has burned over 1,000 acres and has destroyed homes Getty World news in pictures 26 September 2020 A villager along with a child offers prayers next to a carcass of a wild elephant that officials say was electrocuted in Rani Reserve Forest on the outskirts of Guwahati, India AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 September 2020 The casket of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seen in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol to lie in state in Washington, DC AFP via Getty World news in pictures 24 September 2020 An anti-government protester holds up an image of a pro-democracy commemorative plaque at a rally outside Thailand's parliament in Bangkok, as activists gathered to demand a new constitution AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 September 2020 A whale stranded on a beach in Macquarie Harbour on the rugged west coast of Tasmania, as hundreds of pilot whales have died in a mass stranding in southern Australia despite efforts to save them, with rescuers racing to free a few dozen survivors The Mercury/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 22 September 2020 State civil employee candidates wearing face masks and shields take a test in Surabaya AFP via Getty World news in pictures 21 September 2020 A man sweeps at the Taj Mahal monument on the day of its reopening after being closed for more than six months due to the coronavirus pandemic AP World news in pictures 20 September 2020 A deer looks for food in a burnt area, caused by the Bobcat fire, in Pearblossom, California EPA World news in pictures 19 September 2020 Anti-government protesters hold their mobile phones aloft as they take part in a pro-democracy rally in Bangkok. Tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters massed close to Thailand's royal palace, in a huge rally calling for PM Prayut Chan-O-Cha to step down and demanding reforms to the monarchy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 September 2020 Supporters of Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr maintain social distancing as they attend Friday prayers after the coronavirus disease restrictions were eased, in Kufa mosque, near Najaf, Iraq Reuters World news in pictures 17 September 2020 A protester climbs on The Triumph of the Republic at 'the Place de la Nation' as thousands of protesters take part in a demonstration during a national day strike called by labor unions asking for better salary and against jobs cut in Paris, France EPA World news in pictures 16 September 2020 A fire raging near the Lazzaretto of Ancona in Italy. The huge blaze broke out overnight at the port of Ancona. Firefighters have brought the fire under control but they expected to keep working through the day EPA World news in pictures 15 September 2020 Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny posing for a selfie with his family at Berlin's Charite hospital. In an Instagram post he said he could now breathe independently following his suspected poisoning last month Alexei Navalny/Instagram/AFP World news in pictures 14 September 2020 Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida celebrate after Suga was elected as new head of the ruling party at the Liberal Democratic Party's leadership election in Tokyo Reuters World news in pictures 13 September 2020 A man stands behind a burning barricade during the fifth straight day of protests against police brutality in Bogota AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 September 2020 Police officers block and detain protesters during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus. Daily protests calling for the authoritarian president's resignation are now in their second month AP World news in pictures 11 September 2020 Members of 'Omnium Cultural' celebrate the 20th 'Festa per la llibertat' ('Fiesta for the freedom') to mark the Day of Catalonia in Barcelona. Omnion Cultural fights for the independence of Catalonia EPA World news in pictures 10 September 2020 The Moria refugee camp, two days after Greece's biggest migrant camp, was destroyed by fire. Thousands of asylum seekers on the island of Lesbos are now homeless AFP via Getty World news in pictures 9 September 2020 Pope Francis takes off his face mask as he arrives by car to hold a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 8 September 2020 A home is engulfed in flames during the "Creek Fire" in the Tollhouse area of California AFP via Getty World news in pictures 7 September 2020 A couple take photos along a sea wall of the waves brought by Typhoon Haishen in the eastern port city of Sokcho AFP via Getty World news in pictures 6 September 2020 Novak Djokovic and a tournament official tends to a linesperson who was struck with a ball by Djokovic during his match against Pablo Carreno Busta at the US Open USA Today Sports/Reuters World news in pictures 5 September 2020 Protesters confront police at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, Australia, during an anti-lockdown rally AFP via Getty World news in pictures 4 September 2020 A woman looks on from a rooftop as rescue workers dig through the rubble of a damaged building in Beirut. A search began for possible survivors after a scanner detected a pulse one month after the mega-blast at the adjacent port AFP via Getty World news in pictures 3 September 2020 A full moon next to the Virgen del Panecillo statue in Quito, Ecuador EPA World news in pictures 2 September 2020 A Palestinian woman reacts as Israeli forces demolish her animal shed near Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank Reuters World news in pictures 1 September 2020 Students protest against presidential elections results in Minsk TUT.BY/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 31 August 2020 The pack rides during the 3rd stage of the Tour de France between Nice and Sisteron AFP via Getty World news in pictures 30 August 2020 Law enforcement officers block a street during a rally of opposition supporters protesting against presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus Reuters World news in pictures 29 August 2020 A woman holding a placard reading "Stop Censorship - Yes to the Freedom of Expression" shouts in a megaphone during a protest against the mandatory wearing of face masks in Paris. Masks, which were already compulsory on public transport, in enclosed public spaces, and outdoors in Paris in certain high-congestion areas around tourist sites, were made mandatory outdoors citywide on August 28 to fight the rising coronavirus infections AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 August 2020 Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe bows to the national flag at the start of a press conference at the prime minister official residence in Tokyo. Abe announced he will resign over health problems, in a bombshell development that kicks off a leadership contest in the world's third-largest economy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 27 August 2020 Residents take cover behind a tree trunk from rubber bullets fired by South African Police Service (SAPS) in Eldorado Park, near Johannesburg, during a protest by community members after a 16-year old boy was reported dead AFP via Getty World news in pictures 26 August 2020 People scatter rose petals on a statue of Mother Teresa marking her 110th birth anniversary in Ahmedabad AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 August 2020 An aerial view shows beach-goers standing on salt formations in the Dead Sea near Ein Bokeq, Israel Reuters World news in pictures 24 August 2020 Health workers use a fingertip pulse oximeter and check the body temperature of a fisherwoman inside the Dharavi slum during a door-to-door Covid-19 coronavirus screening in Mumbai AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 August 2020 People carry an idol of the Hindu god Ganesh, the deity of prosperity, to immerse it off the coast of the Arabian sea during the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in Mumbai, India Reuters World news in pictures 22 August 2020 Firefighters watch as flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires approach a home in Napa County, California AP World news in pictures 21 August 2020 Members of the Israeli security forces arrest a Palestinian demonstrator during a rally to protest against Israel's plan to annex parts of the occupied West Bank AFP via Getty World news in pictures 20 August 2020 A man pushes his bicycle through a deserted road after prohibitory orders were imposed by district officials for a week to contain the spread of the Covid-19 in Kathmandu AFP via Getty World news in pictures 19 August 2020 A car burns while parked at a residence in Vacaville, California. Dozens of fires are burning out of control throughout Northern California as fire resources are spread thin AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 August 2020 Students use their mobile phones as flashlights at an anti-government rally at Mahidol University in Nakhon Pathom. Thailand has seen near-daily protests in recent weeks by students demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-O-Cha AFP via Getty World news in pictures 17 August 2020 Members of the Kayapo tribe block the BR163 highway during a protest outside Novo Progresso in Para state, Brazil. Indigenous protesters blocked a major transamazonian highway to protest against the lack of governmental support during the COVID-19 novel coronavirus pandemic and illegal deforestation in and around their territories AFP via Getty World news in pictures 16 August 2020 Lightning forks over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as a storm passes over Oakland AP World news in pictures 15 August 2020 Belarus opposition supporters gather near the Pushkinskaya metro station where Alexander Taraikovsky, a 34-year-old protester died on August 10, during their protest rally in central Minsk AFP via Getty World news in pictures 14 August 2020 AlphaTauri's driver Daniil Kvyat takes part in the second practice session at the Circuit de Catalunya in Montmelo near Barcelona ahead of the Spanish F1 Grand Prix AFP via Getty World news in pictures 13 August 2020 Soldiers of the Brazilian Armed Forces during a disinfection of the Christ The Redeemer statue at the Corcovado mountain prior to the opening of the touristic attraction in Rio AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 August 2020 Young elephant bulls tussle playfully on World Elephant Day at the Amboseli National Park in Kenya AFP via Getty

Windows and cladding are peeling off the building and falling down onto the side wing where the hotel is, he added.

Dublin Fire Brigade are doing their best to make sure the fire doesnt spread from the upper levels down onto the broader-based hotel parts of the building.

The Fianna Fail representative added: Windows are exploding and fire and debris are billowing out the side of the building.

This is going to leave a major scar on the landscape of Ballymun.

Ireland's Housing minister, Eoghan Murphy, tweeted: "I want to thank DubFireBrigade who continue to battle a major fire at the Metro Hotel in Ballymun under difficult conditions. We are monitoring the situation closely."The EUs trade chief has said she expects Donald Trump to exempt the European trade bloc from planned steel and aluminium tariffs after she met with US officials on a diplomatic mission to Washington DC.

Cecilia Malmstrom returned to Brussels from her US trip on Thursday to brief EU leaders, who are discussing the EUs response to Mr Trumps new wave of protectionism as part of a meeting of the European Council.

We have argued, and I think successfully, that the European Union is not an enemy of the US when it comes to steel and aluminium, Ms Malmstrom said in her account of the visit. Hopefully, that will lead to us being excluded from the measures.

She added: It is ultimately the president who decides this. But we expect that secretary Ross will recommend that the EU is excluded as a whole.

The spectre of a transatlantic trade war was raised in recent weeks after Mr Trump announced he would impose a 25 per cent tariff on steel and 10 per cent on aluminium imports.

The European Commission has threatened the US with retaliatory measures targeted against Bourbon Whiskey, Harley Davidson motorcycles, and Levis jeans if the steel and aluminium tariffs go ahead.

Exempting the EU would be a significant climb-down for the US president, who said in recent weeks that trade wars were good, and easy to win. He has previously hit out at what he called Europes very unfair trade policies towards the United States.

Earlier this month the US president criticised the EU for complaining about the tariffs.

Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Show all 29 1 /29 Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Inauguration - 20 January 2017 US President Donald Trump acknowledges the audience after taking the oath of office as his wife Melania (L) and daughter Tiffany watch during inauguration ceremonies swearing in Trump as the 45th president of the United States on the West Front of the US capital in Washington on 20 January, 2017. Photographer Jim Bourg: "This photo was shot with one of two remote cameras. The cameras were monitored and triggered remotely and the pictures were transmitted to clients worldwide within minutes of being taken." Reuters/Jim Bourg Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Obama farewell address - 10 January 2017 US President Barack Obama wipes away tears as he delivers his farewell address in Chicago on 10 January, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "In his final days in office, Obama made a visit home to Chicago. As he spoke from the stage to his wife and daughter in the audience, he became emotional when he talked about what they had sacrificed during his time in office. I turned from photographing the Obama women embracing to find him onstage wiping away tears." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Inauguration - 20 January 2017 A combination of photos shows the crowds attending the inauguration ceremonies to swear in U.S. President Donald Trump at 12:01pm (left) on January 20, 2017 and President Barack Obama sometime between 12:07pm and 12:26pm on January 20, 2009. Reuters/ Lucas Jackson/Stelios Varias Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Liberty Ball - 20 January 2017 US President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump attend the Liberty Ball in honour of his inauguration in Washington on 20 January, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "What I see when I look at this picture is the end of a very long day, not to mention weeks and months of preparation by many photographers, editors and network experts and the beginning of everything since." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Inaugural Law Enforcement Officers and First Responders Reception - 22 January 2017 US President Donald Trump greets Director of the FBI James Comey as Director of the Secret Service Joseph Clancy (L), watches during the Inaugural Law Enforcement Officers and First Responders Reception in the Blue Room of the White House on 22 January, 2017. Photographer Joshua Roberts: "I have covered the White House for 16 years and normally either the President or the pool is in position when an event starts. In this case the President was not where anyone expected him to be. In fact, he was almost blocking the door when the pool came in. We had to scramble to find a position without bumping him or the furniture as he greeted and thanked members of law enforcement for their security efforts during the inauguration. Luckily, he greeted FBI Director James Comey a few seconds after the pool had made its way into the room." Reuters/Joshua Roberts Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Private phone calls to world leaders - 28 January 2017 US President Donald Trump, is joined by his staff, as he speaks by phone with Russia's President Vladimir Putin in the Oval Office on 28 January, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "Very early in the Trump administration, weekends were as busy as weekdays. On Trump's second Saturday the official schedule said he would be making private phone calls to a number of world leaders including Russia's Vladimir Putin. I arrived early and, before sitting down at my desk walked up to Press Secretary Sean Spicer's office. He, too, was just taking his coat off. I gingerly made the suggestion that previous administrations had sometimes allowed photos of such phone calls through the Oval Office windows on the colonnade. To my mild shock, he didn't even think about it twice. "We'll do it!" he said. In truth, I really only expected the Putin call, but we were outside the windows multiple times throughout the day as the calls went on." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Senior advisor Kellyanne Conway - 27 February 2017 Senior advisor Kellyanne Conway (L) attends as US President Donald Trump welcomes the leaders of dozens of historically black colleges and universities (HBCU) in the Oval Office on 27 February, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "We're often asked how much access we have to the Trump administration, and the answer is we have an awful lot. President Trump himself is very comfortable in the spotlight, and his aides are similarly unfazed by cameras. In this instance, senior advisor Kellyanne Conway was so comfortable in our presence she seemed not to consider the optics of kneeling on a Oval Office sofa to take pictures with her phone." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Angela Merkel heads to Washington - 17 March 2017 Germany's Chancellor Angela Merkel and US President Donald Trump hold a joint news conference in the East Room of the White House on 17 March, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "Chancellor Merkel made one of the earliest important visits of any US allies to meet Trump in his first months in office. When world leaders give joint news conferences they don't always tend to give each other their full attention - but Merkel watched Trump intently at several key moments, and here seemed particularly rapt." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Trump welcomes truckers to the White House - 23 March 2017 President Trump reacts as he sits on a truck while he welcomes truckers and CEOs to attend a meeting regarding healthcare at the White House on 23 March, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "The White House organised a listening session with truckers and CEO's of major American companies, regarding healthcare reform. An 18-wheeler tow truck was parked on the South Lawn of the White House and as Trump welcomed the truckers someone invited the him to come and sit in the driver's seat. Trump jumped into the cab and started yelling and pretending to drive - creating one of the most memorable pictures of the year. A lesson learned, always be prepared for the unexpected." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Air Force One - 6 April 2017 US President Donald Trump talks to journalists members of the travel pool on board the Air Force One during his trip to Palm Beach, Florida on 6 April, 2017. Carlos Barria: "During the many trips to President Trump's residence in Florida it is usual to see the president coming to the back of the plane to chat with journalists. During one of the trips to the so called 'Winter White House', Trump had a long talk with reporters while the Air Force One entertainment system was playing one of the latest Star Wars movies. As I was listening to Trump talk I was also looking at the movie waiting for a part of the movie to frame the mood of the day. Of the many scenes, I choose the one with Darth Vader." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures 100 Days - 27 April 2017 US President Donald Trump speaks during an interview with Reuters in the Oval Office of the White House on 27 April, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "A day before President Trump's hundred days in office I was part of the team that interviewed the commander-in-chief in the Oval Office. I was only allowed to photograph Trump during the last five minutes of the interview. The time was very tight so I had to move fast as I had pictures in mind that I wanted to shoot. I walked into the Oval Office and saw that the President had printed maps of the country showing areas in red where he won. I raised my hands holding my camera as high as possible to get the best view of the scene using a 16mm wide angle lens." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures 100 Days - 27 April 2017 US President Donald Trump reacts as he arrives at Harrisburg international airport, before attending a rally marking his first 100 days in office in Pennsylvania on 29 April, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "President Trump travelled to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania to celebrate his hundred days in office with a victory rally. He was in friendly territory as he won with a big difference over his opponent Hillary Clinton in Pennsylvania, during the November elections. As usual when the commander-in-chief arrives local residents gather to greet him. This time a small group of military personnel attended the arrival. Surrounded by secret service agents Trump walked from the Air Force One and raised his hand in a sign of victory as the crowd cheered him on." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures White House staffers - 2 May 2017 White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer (L) and White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus watch as US President Donald Trump presents the U.S. Air Force Academy football team with the Commander-in-Chief trophy in the Rose Garden of the White House in Washington on 2 May, 2017. Photographer Joshua Roberts: "Covering the White House does not just mean covering the President. White House staffers are an important part of the story and their relationship with the President and each other is an indicator of how things are going in the West Wing. The tendency is to focus exclusively on the President once an event starts but I always try to look around to see how people are reacting as things unfold." Reuters/Joshua Roberts Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Secret Service - 4 May 2017 Secret Service agents use a presidential limousine as cover from spraying water as US President Donald Trump lands via Marine One helicopter in New York on 4 May, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "The best part of any trip to New York City with the sitting US President is the helicopter ride into Manhattan. The ride out at night can be stunning. Here, Secret Service agents protect themselves from the spray from the East River as Trump lands on the helipad." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures NATO Summit - 25 May 2017 US President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump wait the arrival of French President Emmanuel Macron (unseen) before a lunch ahead of a NATO Summit in Brussels on 25 May, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "One of the best parts of travelling overseas for White House coverage is the chance to see the U.S. president in different environments and (literally) a different light. Here, Trump and his wife came out of the shadows to greet France's President Macron." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Trump meets Putin at G20 summit - 7 July 2017 US President Donald Trump meets with Russian President Vladimir Putin during their bilateral meeting at the G20 summit in Hamburg, Germany on 7 July, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "On July 7, I witnessed one of the most important meetings of President Trump's first year in office. Trump met Russian President Vladimir Putin during a bilateral meeting at the G20 summit in Germany. The world's eyes were on these two leaders after speculation about Russian interference during the 2016 US elections. We entered the room for less than two minutes, where I took dozens of pictures. But there was this very interesting moment when Trump extended his hand to Putin for a handshake. Putin paused for a second and looked at Trump's hand. That was the picture that I was looking for, a little moment that seemed to say a lot." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures First lady - 8 July 2017 First lady Melania Trump chats with US President Donald Trump during their return from Germany at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland on 8 July, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "After President Trump's trip to Germany he arrived back at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland. First Lady Melania Trump said goodbye to Trump as she was heading off in a different direction that day. While chatting a breeze blew Melania's hair up in the air." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Made in America product showcase - 17 July 2017 Vice President Mike Pence laughs as President Donald Trump holds a baseball bat as they attend a Made in America product showcase event at the White House on 17 July, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "This summer the White House organized an event to showcase 'Made in America' products. All kinds of exhibitors brought their products as the President and Vice President toured the event. One of the companies was Marucci Sport, a manufacturer of baseball bats based in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. As Trump approached a table full of baseball bats, photographers at the event, including me, rushed to get a good angle hoping that he would pick up a bat. As we predicted, he did. He took one and joked around as though he was hitting something hard. The only thing closer to him right there, was the media." Reuters Donald Trump's first year: in pictures White House staffers - 25 July 2017 Former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski says hello to reporters as he and White House advisors including Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci accompany President Trump for an event celebrating veterans at AMVETS Post 44 in Ohio, July 25, 2017. Jonathan Ernst: "The most visible person in any White House is naturally the President, followed by the press secretary. But there are also the staff who support them. For those of us covering the Trump administration, there seem to be more compelling figures in the West Wing than ever before. It's crucial to know who's who and why they're important. When I raised my camera and back-pedalled ahead of the group to take this image Lewandowski gave me a hello. I liked the photo, but had no idea it would go a little bit viral, especially since Scaramucci, who was the biggest mover and shaker that week, was hidden back in the pack. But I guess the image catches a glimpse of what it's like to be a West Wing staffer on the road." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Campaign rally - 3 August 2017 US President Donald Trump arrives at a rally in West Virginia on 3 August, 2017. Photographer Carlos Barria: "President Trump travelled to Huntington for one of his usual campaign rallies. While members of his family spoke to the crowd he was waiting under a black curtain to be introduced. Suddenly he walked onto the stage, one of the first frames that I took was of his hand. I set my exposure for the light on the stage hoping to create this dark background and it worked." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Staring into the solar eclipse - 21 August 2017 Without his protective glasses on, US President Donald Trump looks up towards the solar eclipse while viewing with his wife Melania and son Barron at the White House on 21 August, 2017. Photographer Kevin Lamarque: "On a day when everyone, and I mean everyone, was told not to look at the eclipse without protective glasses, Trump, President of the United States, couldn't help himself." Reuters/Kevin Lamarque Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Hurricane Harvey - 2 September 2017 US President Donald Trump poses for a photo as he and first lady Melania Trump help volunteers hand out meals during a visit with flood survivors of Hurricane Harvey at a relief centre in Houston, Texas on 2 September, 2017. Photohrapher Kevin Lamarque: "Trump, eager to deliver the image of a hands-on response to Hurricane Harvey, made this visit to a relief centre and obliged this woman with a selfie as Melania continued to work." Reuters/Kevin Lamarque Donald Trump's first year: in pictures White House - 15 September 2017 Donald Trump welcomes 11-year-old Frank Giaccio as he cuts the Rose Garden grass at the White House on 15 September. Frank, who wrote a letter to Trump offering to mow the lawn, was invited to work for a day at the White House along the National Park Service staff. Frank was so focused on his task that he did not notice the President arrive to surprise him. He took his father jumping in to grab his attention and point Trump out. Photographer Carlos Barria said: The image of Trump shouting at a kid who is mowing his lawn might have many interpretations in today's politically polarized United States. But for me it was just a kid who loved what he was doing, to the point he almost appeared to ignore the President." Reuters/Carlos Barria Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Take a knee - 27 September 2017 A man kneels with a folded U.S. flag as the motorcade of U.S. President Donald Trump passes him after an event at the state fairgrounds in Indianapolis, Indiana, U.S., September 27, 2017. In September, soon after Trump had made comments condemning NFL players who kneel during the national anthem, he made a day trip to a rally in Indianapolis. Jonathan Ernst managed to capture a man on one knee with a tri-folded flag and was able to use a portion of the sign on the building he was kneeling in front of to track the man down and tell his story in full. US Army veteran Marvin Boatright wanted to send a message against social injustice. Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Hurricane Maria - 3 October 2017 President Donald Trump throws rolls of paper towels into a crowd of local residents affected by Hurricane Maria as he visits Calgary Chapel in San Juan, Puerto Rico on 3 October, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "During an afternoon visit to Puerto Rico for President Trump to survey damage from Hurricane Maria and greet some of its victims, Trump made a stop at a church where food and supplies were being distributed. Among the items were paper towels and Trump, apparently caught up in the moment, decided to distribute some of the rolls." Reuters Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Jared Kushner - 1 November 2017 White House Senior adviser Jared Kushner sits behind President Trump during a cabinet meeting in Washington on 1 November, 2017. Photographer Kevin Lamarque: "The role of Jared Kushner has gone through a series of changes. He began front and centre as a high profile adviser, but as time has passed and issues surrounding him have surfaced, he has become more of a background figure." Reuters/Kevin Lamarque Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Trump in China - 9 November 2017 Donald Trump and China's President Xi Jinping shake hands after making joint statements at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing on 9 November, 2017. Photographer Damir Sagolj: "It's one of those "how to make a better or at least different shot when two presidents shake hands several times a day, several days in row". If I'm not mistaken in calculation, presidents Xi Jinping and Donald Trump shook their hands at least six times in events I covered during Trump's recent visit to China. I would imagine there were some more handshakes I haven't seen but other photographers did. And they all look similar - two big men, smiling and heartily greeting each other until everyone gets their shot. But then there is always something that can make it special - in this case the background made of US and Chinese flags. The first time it didn't work for me. The second time I positioned myself lower and centrally, and used the longest lens I have to capture only hands reaching for a handshake." Reuters/Damir Sagolj Donald Trump's first year: in pictures Air Force One - 10 November 2017 US President Donald Trump boards Air Force One to depart for Vietnam from Beijing Airport in Beijing, China, November 10, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "There is a Reuters photographer in the tight pool covering the US president for every appearance he makes 365 days a year. This was just one of 32 images of mine that were transmitted on the Reuters wire of President Trump visiting China and Vietnam that day. You never know when a sudden interaction, a gust of wind or a unique facial expression will lead to a striking image that grabs peoples' attention." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst Donald Trump's first year: in pictures ASEAN handshake - 13 November 2017 Donald Trump registers his surprise as he realises other leaders, including Russia's Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, Vietnam's Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc, President of the Philippines Rodrigo Duterte and Australia's Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, are crossing their arms for the traditional "ASEAN handshake" as he participates in the opening ceremony of the summit in Manila on 13 November, 2017. Photographer Jonathan Ernst: "Having covered a few ASEAN summits, I knew to expect the ASEAN handshake. Not everyone in the room knew to expect the ASEAN handshake. A lot was written about this unscripted moment, and what deeper meaning it might have. The simple truth is that sometimes in life there are unscripted moments." Reuters/Jonathan Ernst

If they drop their horrific barriers and tariffs on US products going in, we will likewise drop ours, he said.

US steel producers are concerned about the dumping of cheap metal, primarily by Chinese steelmakers. EU diplomats said ahead of the European Council summit that it was clear that steelmaking was a global problem and that the way to deal with it was through the forum of the WTO and G20, rather than by escalating a trade dispute.Eurostar cancelled trains between Paris and London on Thursday as protests against Emmanuel Macrons government erupted in the French capital.

Thousands took to the streets of Paris calling for more investment in public services, with some crowds growing agitated, prompting police to use tear gas and water cannons.

Confrontations between some protesters and riot police also erupted in the western city of Nantes.

Recommended Eurostar and SNCF cancel services during French train strikes

Meanwhile, union strikes caused trains, planes, schools and other public services across France to be seriously disrupted.

Airport authorities said 30 per cent of flights to and from Paris were cancelled. National train company SNCF said only 40 percent of high-speed trains and half of regional trains were running.

Eurostar announced: Due to French Rail disruptions today, we have had to cancel some trains on the Paris London route.

The company urged those with onward connections not to travel and said all trains on Friday had been fully booked. Please only come to our stations if you have a confirmed seat, Eurostar said in an update on its website.

The chateau of Versailles, a popular museum in the Ile-de-France region was also closed because of the employees strike.

Union leaders said the strikes were a warning to the government over its economic plans.

Philippe Martinez, secretary general of the CGT union, told FranceInfo radio: We agree that we need to makes changes to public services, but not to restrain them. To improve them. We need more public servants.

Civil servants want better wages and are protesting against the planned elimination of 120,000 jobs by 2022. SNCF employees also are rejecting a government plan aimed at adapting the rail company ahead of opening the service to competition.

If we are not heard ... there would be calls for strikes and in that case, very few trains would run, said Julien Cabanne, a union official who came to Paris to protest.

SNCF unions have scheduled a series of strikes in April, May and June.

World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 30 September 2020 Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 September 2020 A girl's silhouette is seen from behind a fabric in a tent along a beach by Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 September 2020 A Chinese woman takes a photo of herself in front of a flower display dedicated to frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China. China will celebrate national day marking the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st Getty World news in pictures 27 September 2020 The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California. The fast moving Glass fire has burned over 1,000 acres and has destroyed homes Getty World news in pictures 26 September 2020 A villager along with a child offers prayers next to a carcass of a wild elephant that officials say was electrocuted in Rani Reserve Forest on the outskirts of Guwahati, India AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 September 2020 The casket of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seen in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol to lie in state in Washington, DC AFP via Getty World news in pictures 24 September 2020 An anti-government protester holds up an image of a pro-democracy commemorative plaque at a rally outside Thailand's parliament in Bangkok, as activists gathered to demand a new constitution AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 September 2020 A whale stranded on a beach in Macquarie Harbour on the rugged west coast of Tasmania, as hundreds of pilot whales have died in a mass stranding in southern Australia despite efforts to save them, with rescuers racing to free a few dozen survivors The Mercury/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 22 September 2020 State civil employee candidates wearing face masks and shields take a test in Surabaya AFP via Getty World news in pictures 21 September 2020 A man sweeps at the Taj Mahal monument on the day of its reopening after being closed for more than six months due to the coronavirus pandemic AP World news in pictures 20 September 2020 A deer looks for food in a burnt area, caused by the Bobcat fire, in Pearblossom, California EPA World news in pictures 19 September 2020 Anti-government protesters hold their mobile phones aloft as they take part in a pro-democracy rally in Bangkok. Tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters massed close to Thailand's royal palace, in a huge rally calling for PM Prayut Chan-O-Cha to step down and demanding reforms to the monarchy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 September 2020 Supporters of Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr maintain social distancing as they attend Friday prayers after the coronavirus disease restrictions were eased, in Kufa mosque, near Najaf, Iraq Reuters World news in pictures 17 September 2020 A protester climbs on The Triumph of the Republic at 'the Place de la Nation' as thousands of protesters take part in a demonstration during a national day strike called by labor unions asking for better salary and against jobs cut in Paris, France EPA World news in pictures 16 September 2020 A fire raging near the Lazzaretto of Ancona in Italy. The huge blaze broke out overnight at the port of Ancona. Firefighters have brought the fire under control but they expected to keep working through the day EPA World news in pictures 15 September 2020 Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny posing for a selfie with his family at Berlin's Charite hospital. In an Instagram post he said he could now breathe independently following his suspected poisoning last month Alexei Navalny/Instagram/AFP World news in pictures 14 September 2020 Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida celebrate after Suga was elected as new head of the ruling party at the Liberal Democratic Party's leadership election in Tokyo Reuters World news in pictures 13 September 2020 A man stands behind a burning barricade during the fifth straight day of protests against police brutality in Bogota AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 September 2020 Police officers block and detain protesters during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus. Daily protests calling for the authoritarian president's resignation are now in their second month AP World news in pictures 11 September 2020 Members of 'Omnium Cultural' celebrate the 20th 'Festa per la llibertat' ('Fiesta for the freedom') to mark the Day of Catalonia in Barcelona. Omnion Cultural fights for the independence of Catalonia EPA World news in pictures 10 September 2020 The Moria refugee camp, two days after Greece's biggest migrant camp, was destroyed by fire. Thousands of asylum seekers on the island of Lesbos are now homeless AFP via Getty World news in pictures 9 September 2020 Pope Francis takes off his face mask as he arrives by car to hold a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 8 September 2020 A home is engulfed in flames during the "Creek Fire" in the Tollhouse area of California AFP via Getty World news in pictures 7 September 2020 A couple take photos along a sea wall of the waves brought by Typhoon Haishen in the eastern port city of Sokcho AFP via Getty World news in pictures 6 September 2020 Novak Djokovic and a tournament official tends to a linesperson who was struck with a ball by Djokovic during his match against Pablo Carreno Busta at the US Open USA Today Sports/Reuters World news in pictures 5 September 2020 Protesters confront police at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, Australia, during an anti-lockdown rally AFP via Getty World news in pictures 4 September 2020 A woman looks on from a rooftop as rescue workers dig through the rubble of a damaged building in Beirut. A search began for possible survivors after a scanner detected a pulse one month after the mega-blast at the adjacent port AFP via Getty World news in pictures 3 September 2020 A full moon next to the Virgen del Panecillo statue in Quito, Ecuador EPA World news in pictures 2 September 2020 A Palestinian woman reacts as Israeli forces demolish her animal shed near Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank Reuters World news in pictures 1 September 2020 Students protest against presidential elections results in Minsk TUT.BY/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 31 August 2020 The pack rides during the 3rd stage of the Tour de France between Nice and Sisteron AFP via Getty World news in pictures 30 August 2020 Law enforcement officers block a street during a rally of opposition supporters protesting against presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus Reuters World news in pictures 29 August 2020 A woman holding a placard reading "Stop Censorship - Yes to the Freedom of Expression" shouts in a megaphone during a protest against the mandatory wearing of face masks in Paris. Masks, which were already compulsory on public transport, in enclosed public spaces, and outdoors in Paris in certain high-congestion areas around tourist sites, were made mandatory outdoors citywide on August 28 to fight the rising coronavirus infections AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 August 2020 Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe bows to the national flag at the start of a press conference at the prime minister official residence in Tokyo. Abe announced he will resign over health problems, in a bombshell development that kicks off a leadership contest in the world's third-largest economy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 27 August 2020 Residents take cover behind a tree trunk from rubber bullets fired by South African Police Service (SAPS) in Eldorado Park, near Johannesburg, during a protest by community members after a 16-year old boy was reported dead AFP via Getty World news in pictures 26 August 2020 People scatter rose petals on a statue of Mother Teresa marking her 110th birth anniversary in Ahmedabad AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 August 2020 An aerial view shows beach-goers standing on salt formations in the Dead Sea near Ein Bokeq, Israel Reuters World news in pictures 24 August 2020 Health workers use a fingertip pulse oximeter and check the body temperature of a fisherwoman inside the Dharavi slum during a door-to-door Covid-19 coronavirus screening in Mumbai AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 August 2020 People carry an idol of the Hindu god Ganesh, the deity of prosperity, to immerse it off the coast of the Arabian sea during the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in Mumbai, India Reuters World news in pictures 22 August 2020 Firefighters watch as flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires approach a home in Napa County, California AP World news in pictures 21 August 2020 Members of the Israeli security forces arrest a Palestinian demonstrator during a rally to protest against Israel's plan to annex parts of the occupied West Bank AFP via Getty World news in pictures 20 August 2020 A man pushes his bicycle through a deserted road after prohibitory orders were imposed by district officials for a week to contain the spread of the Covid-19 in Kathmandu AFP via Getty World news in pictures 19 August 2020 A car burns while parked at a residence in Vacaville, California. Dozens of fires are burning out of control throughout Northern California as fire resources are spread thin AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 August 2020 Students use their mobile phones as flashlights at an anti-government rally at Mahidol University in Nakhon Pathom. Thailand has seen near-daily protests in recent weeks by students demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-O-Cha AFP via Getty World news in pictures 17 August 2020 Members of the Kayapo tribe block the BR163 highway during a protest outside Novo Progresso in Para state, Brazil. Indigenous protesters blocked a major transamazonian highway to protest against the lack of governmental support during the COVID-19 novel coronavirus pandemic and illegal deforestation in and around their territories AFP via Getty World news in pictures 16 August 2020 Lightning forks over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as a storm passes over Oakland AP World news in pictures 15 August 2020 Belarus opposition supporters gather near the Pushkinskaya metro station where Alexander Taraikovsky, a 34-year-old protester died on August 10, during their protest rally in central Minsk AFP via Getty World news in pictures 14 August 2020 AlphaTauri's driver Daniil Kvyat takes part in the second practice session at the Circuit de Catalunya in Montmelo near Barcelona ahead of the Spanish F1 Grand Prix AFP via Getty World news in pictures 13 August 2020 Soldiers of the Brazilian Armed Forces during a disinfection of the Christ The Redeemer statue at the Corcovado mountain prior to the opening of the touristic attraction in Rio AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 August 2020 Young elephant bulls tussle playfully on World Elephant Day at the Amboseli National Park in Kenya AFP via Getty

The Paris Metro was running normally, but suburban trains were affected by the strike.

At Paris Orly airport, passenger Noemie Danican had just learned her EasyJet flight to Toulouse, in southern France, was cancelled.

I have no idea whats going to happen. This is going to be very difficult. Very, very difficult, she said.

Associated Press contributed to this reportA number of people have apparently been pictured casting multiple votes in the Russian presidential election that saw Vladimir Putin win a fourth term as president.

Elections officials at several polling station were also observed not keeping count of turnout or the number of ballots cast.

Challenged with photographs appearing to show the same people voting more than once, officials said that they could be twins.

After casting her vote at one polling station Ludmila Sklyarevskaya, a Russian hospital administrator, was witnessed by reporters from the Reuters news agency attending another polling station, where she apparently voted again.

She denied any wrongdoing.

But she was among 17 people who were photographed by Reuters apparently casting ballots at more than one polling station in the town of Ust-Djeguta, in the south of the country.

Many appeared to be state employees and some arrived in groups and in minibuses bearing the names of state-provided services.

An employee at the hospital where Ms Sklyarevskaya worked confirmed the woman captured in photos at the two polling stations was Ms Sklyarevskaya and identified her as the hospitals deputy director of health and safety.

Voting twice is a misdemeanour under Russian law, carrying a penalty of a fine. Shown pictures of some of the people who apparently voted twice, including at Ust-Djegutas polling station 217, Leila Koichuyeva, a member of the election commission there, said: They could be twins.

Ms Sklyarevskaya, when challenged, said: Thats not me.

Seven of the 17 people photographed apparently casting multiple votes were tracked down by Reuters. All either denied voting more than once or declined to comment.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said there were established procedures for reporting election violations. If these reports from the respected Reuters agency are backed up by corresponding statements to law enforcement agencies from the observers who were at each polling station, then its a worry. If they are not backed up, then it does not worry us at all.

World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 30 September 2020 Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 September 2020 A girl's silhouette is seen from behind a fabric in a tent along a beach by Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 September 2020 A Chinese woman takes a photo of herself in front of a flower display dedicated to frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China. China will celebrate national day marking the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st Getty World news in pictures 27 September 2020 The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California. The fast moving Glass fire has burned over 1,000 acres and has destroyed homes Getty World news in pictures 26 September 2020 A villager along with a child offers prayers next to a carcass of a wild elephant that officials say was electrocuted in Rani Reserve Forest on the outskirts of Guwahati, India AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 September 2020 The casket of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seen in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol to lie in state in Washington, DC AFP via Getty World news in pictures 24 September 2020 An anti-government protester holds up an image of a pro-democracy commemorative plaque at a rally outside Thailand's parliament in Bangkok, as activists gathered to demand a new constitution AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 September 2020 A whale stranded on a beach in Macquarie Harbour on the rugged west coast of Tasmania, as hundreds of pilot whales have died in a mass stranding in southern Australia despite efforts to save them, with rescuers racing to free a few dozen survivors The Mercury/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 22 September 2020 State civil employee candidates wearing face masks and shields take a test in Surabaya AFP via Getty World news in pictures 21 September 2020 A man sweeps at the Taj Mahal monument on the day of its reopening after being closed for more than six months due to the coronavirus pandemic AP World news in pictures 20 September 2020 A deer looks for food in a burnt area, caused by the Bobcat fire, in Pearblossom, California EPA World news in pictures 19 September 2020 Anti-government protesters hold their mobile phones aloft as they take part in a pro-democracy rally in Bangkok. Tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters massed close to Thailand's royal palace, in a huge rally calling for PM Prayut Chan-O-Cha to step down and demanding reforms to the monarchy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 September 2020 Supporters of Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr maintain social distancing as they attend Friday prayers after the coronavirus disease restrictions were eased, in Kufa mosque, near Najaf, Iraq Reuters World news in pictures 17 September 2020 A protester climbs on The Triumph of the Republic at 'the Place de la Nation' as thousands of protesters take part in a demonstration during a national day strike called by labor unions asking for better salary and against jobs cut in Paris, France EPA World news in pictures 16 September 2020 A fire raging near the Lazzaretto of Ancona in Italy. The huge blaze broke out overnight at the port of Ancona. Firefighters have brought the fire under control but they expected to keep working through the day EPA World news in pictures 15 September 2020 Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny posing for a selfie with his family at Berlin's Charite hospital. In an Instagram post he said he could now breathe independently following his suspected poisoning last month Alexei Navalny/Instagram/AFP World news in pictures 14 September 2020 Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida celebrate after Suga was elected as new head of the ruling party at the Liberal Democratic Party's leadership election in Tokyo Reuters World news in pictures 13 September 2020 A man stands behind a burning barricade during the fifth straight day of protests against police brutality in Bogota AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 September 2020 Police officers block and detain protesters during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus. Daily protests calling for the authoritarian president's resignation are now in their second month AP World news in pictures 11 September 2020 Members of 'Omnium Cultural' celebrate the 20th 'Festa per la llibertat' ('Fiesta for the freedom') to mark the Day of Catalonia in Barcelona. Omnion Cultural fights for the independence of Catalonia EPA World news in pictures 10 September 2020 The Moria refugee camp, two days after Greece's biggest migrant camp, was destroyed by fire. Thousands of asylum seekers on the island of Lesbos are now homeless AFP via Getty World news in pictures 9 September 2020 Pope Francis takes off his face mask as he arrives by car to hold a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 8 September 2020 A home is engulfed in flames during the "Creek Fire" in the Tollhouse area of California AFP via Getty World news in pictures 7 September 2020 A couple take photos along a sea wall of the waves brought by Typhoon Haishen in the eastern port city of Sokcho AFP via Getty World news in pictures 6 September 2020 Novak Djokovic and a tournament official tends to a linesperson who was struck with a ball by Djokovic during his match against Pablo Carreno Busta at the US Open USA Today Sports/Reuters World news in pictures 5 September 2020 Protesters confront police at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, Australia, during an anti-lockdown rally AFP via Getty World news in pictures 4 September 2020 A woman looks on from a rooftop as rescue workers dig through the rubble of a damaged building in Beirut. A search began for possible survivors after a scanner detected a pulse one month after the mega-blast at the adjacent port AFP via Getty World news in pictures 3 September 2020 A full moon next to the Virgen del Panecillo statue in Quito, Ecuador EPA World news in pictures 2 September 2020 A Palestinian woman reacts as Israeli forces demolish her animal shed near Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank Reuters World news in pictures 1 September 2020 Students protest against presidential elections results in Minsk TUT.BY/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 31 August 2020 The pack rides during the 3rd stage of the Tour de France between Nice and Sisteron AFP via Getty World news in pictures 30 August 2020 Law enforcement officers block a street during a rally of opposition supporters protesting against presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus Reuters World news in pictures 29 August 2020 A woman holding a placard reading "Stop Censorship - Yes to the Freedom of Expression" shouts in a megaphone during a protest against the mandatory wearing of face masks in Paris. Masks, which were already compulsory on public transport, in enclosed public spaces, and outdoors in Paris in certain high-congestion areas around tourist sites, were made mandatory outdoors citywide on August 28 to fight the rising coronavirus infections AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 August 2020 Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe bows to the national flag at the start of a press conference at the prime minister official residence in Tokyo. Abe announced he will resign over health problems, in a bombshell development that kicks off a leadership contest in the world's third-largest economy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 27 August 2020 Residents take cover behind a tree trunk from rubber bullets fired by South African Police Service (SAPS) in Eldorado Park, near Johannesburg, during a protest by community members after a 16-year old boy was reported dead AFP via Getty World news in pictures 26 August 2020 People scatter rose petals on a statue of Mother Teresa marking her 110th birth anniversary in Ahmedabad AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 August 2020 An aerial view shows beach-goers standing on salt formations in the Dead Sea near Ein Bokeq, Israel Reuters World news in pictures 24 August 2020 Health workers use a fingertip pulse oximeter and check the body temperature of a fisherwoman inside the Dharavi slum during a door-to-door Covid-19 coronavirus screening in Mumbai AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 August 2020 People carry an idol of the Hindu god Ganesh, the deity of prosperity, to immerse it off the coast of the Arabian sea during the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in Mumbai, India Reuters World news in pictures 22 August 2020 Firefighters watch as flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires approach a home in Napa County, California AP World news in pictures 21 August 2020 Members of the Israeli security forces arrest a Palestinian demonstrator during a rally to protest against Israel's plan to annex parts of the occupied West Bank AFP via Getty World news in pictures 20 August 2020 A man pushes his bicycle through a deserted road after prohibitory orders were imposed by district officials for a week to contain the spread of the Covid-19 in Kathmandu AFP via Getty World news in pictures 19 August 2020 A car burns while parked at a residence in Vacaville, California. Dozens of fires are burning out of control throughout Northern California as fire resources are spread thin AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 August 2020 Students use their mobile phones as flashlights at an anti-government rally at Mahidol University in Nakhon Pathom. Thailand has seen near-daily protests in recent weeks by students demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-O-Cha AFP via Getty World news in pictures 17 August 2020 Members of the Kayapo tribe block the BR163 highway during a protest outside Novo Progresso in Para state, Brazil. Indigenous protesters blocked a major transamazonian highway to protest against the lack of governmental support during the COVID-19 novel coronavirus pandemic and illegal deforestation in and around their territories AFP via Getty World news in pictures 16 August 2020 Lightning forks over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as a storm passes over Oakland AP World news in pictures 15 August 2020 Belarus opposition supporters gather near the Pushkinskaya metro station where Alexander Taraikovsky, a 34-year-old protester died on August 10, during their protest rally in central Minsk AFP via Getty World news in pictures 14 August 2020 AlphaTauri's driver Daniil Kvyat takes part in the second practice session at the Circuit de Catalunya in Montmelo near Barcelona ahead of the Spanish F1 Grand Prix AFP via Getty World news in pictures 13 August 2020 Soldiers of the Brazilian Armed Forces during a disinfection of the Christ The Redeemer statue at the Corcovado mountain prior to the opening of the touristic attraction in Rio AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 August 2020 Young elephant bulls tussle playfully on World Elephant Day at the Amboseli National Park in Kenya AFP via Getty

Mr Putins opponents, and independent election observers, say the vote was skewed across the country by officials loyal to him using a variety of tricks to inflate the turnout.

Mr Putin is genuinely popular but a low turnout caused by apathy at a one-sided contest would have deprived him of the resounding mandate he sought. In the end, he won by a landslide and on a strong turnout of nearly 70 per cent.

As well as multiple voting in Ust-Djeguta  a practice known in Russia as a carousel  reporters who monitored 12 polling stations around the country witnessed other irregularities, though they were mostly narrow in scale.

In all 12 polling stations, the turnout declared by election officials exceeded a tally kept by Reuters of how many people voted. In one case in Simferopol the difference between the two figures was significant: 528 votes, or 66 per cent of the votes cast.

Reporters also uncovered a loophole in the voter registration system that could allow multiple voting by obtaining authorisation to vote in more than one location.

Under a new system designed to make it easier for people to vote when away from home, a voter can apply online to register temporarily at a different polling station. Three Reuters reporters who registered through the new system as well as at their local election office were able to vote once and then get the go-ahead by officials to vote a second time at a different polling station.

A Central Election Commission spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment.

Medical help

On election day in Ust-Djeguta, Ms Sklyarevskaya arrived just after 5.30pm local time (2.30pm GMT) leading a group of eight other women and one man through the gates of polling station number 216.

About 20 minutes later, reporters observed the same group voting again a few hundred metres away at polling station 215.

Several of the women with her were wearing surgical scrubs and a man wore a jacket with the word ambulance written on it. Ust-Djeguta, a town of 30,000 people 930 miles south of Moscow, has only one hospital, the state-run Central District Hospital.

Ms Sklyarevskaya said she had voted only once, at a third polling station, number 217.

Who directed you to do this investigation? she asked when approached by reporters. You do not have the right to get involved in the electoral system.

Marat Shakmanov, head doctor at the hospital, said he did not believe anyone from the hospital had violated election rules.

 Boris Johnson compares Russia World Cup to Hitler's Olympics

Another woman, wearing sparkly heels, also appeared to vote twice on Sunday.

When approached, she said her name was Jamila Tebueva, a social care specialist in the town administration. She insisted she voted only once, and went to a second polling station to accompany friends.

When told she had been photographed with a voting slip in her hand at the second location she said: Is it alright if I dont reply?

Zukhra Chomaeva, the head election official at polling station 217, said she could not answer for what happened outside her precinct when asked about multiple voting. How do I know if theyre the same person? They might look the same.

Larissa Tekeyeva, head of the election commission for polling station 216, said after looking at a picture of a woman in a pink coat who voted at polling stations 216 and 217: We all have the same mentality. We all look alike.

Ludmila Djukayeva, head of the towns polling station 215, said she had not witnessed any multiple voting. Ruslan Shagarov, a spokesman for the town administration, said he knew nothing about any employees breaking voting rules.

Official results released on Monday showed the three polling stations had an average turnout of 81.5 percent and delivered a majority for Putin of 89.86 percent. National turnout was 67 percent, according to the central election commission.

Turnout discrepancies

Reuters reporters used mechanical counters to count everybody who cast a ballot at the 12 polling stations they monitored from open to close on Sunday. In some places, the discrepancies between the official count and the Reuters tally were small, with local election officials putting it down to the margin of error. But in nine of the 12 polling stations, the discrepancies were 10 per cent or greater.

The biggest divergence, as a share of the total vote, was in polling station number 265, inside a technical college in Simferopol, Crimea. Moscow annexed the region from Ukraine four years ago.

Reuters reporters saw 797 voters at that station, while the official figures stated 1,325 people voted on the day and in person.

Asked about the discrepancy, the chairwoman of the polling stations election commission, Oksana Mediyeva, said independent monitors had watched the vote and had raised no issues.

The three monitors, two from the governing party and one who said he would vote for Mr Putin, did not appear to be keeping count of the turnout.

Typically in elections, the official turnout figures are produced when election tellers count the number of ballots cast. But in three polling stations, in Ust-Djeguta and in Simferopol, election officials were not seen physically counting all the ballot papers.

At Ust-Djegutas polling station 216, a count revealed there were not enough ballot papers to tally with the figure for Putin votes, of 1,299, that officials there had provisionally pencilled in.

After a recount produced the same outcome, the election officials said they were going home.

When a Reuters reporter asked how they could do that without finishing the count, Tatiana Chernyaeva, the director of the school hosting the polling station, said: You want to cast doubt on Putins victory.

Flawed system

Under the new registration system the three Reuters reporters were able to register online to vote in one location and also obtain authorisation to vote in another location by using the old procedure of going to the local election office where they live.

All three reporters were offered a ballot paper in their second location after they had already voted in their first, though none cast a second vote.

Ms Djukayeva, the head of the election commission at polling station 215 where one of the reporters was offered a ballot to cast a second vote, said: I dont know whose mistake that was. They gave us lists yesterday of voters who should be included and excluded. She was in the list to be included, Ms Djukayeva added

ReutersOne of Israels chief rabbis called black people monkeys during his weekly sermon.

Rabbi Yitzhak Yosefs comments were denounced as racially charged and utterly unacceptable by the Anti-Defamation League, a New York City-based organisation devoted to battling anti-Semitism and racism.

During his weekly sermon, the rabbi used a derogatory Hebrew term for a black person, before going on to call a black person a monkey, according to footage published by the Ynet news site.

His office said he was citing a passage from the Talmud - the book of Jewish law.

Mr Yosef represents Israels Sephardic Jews of Middle Eastern and North African descent.

He has previously courted controversy for suggesting secular women behave like animals because they dress immodestly.The Syrian government moved closer to ending rebel resistance in Eastern Ghouta as civilians streamed out of one of its besieged, bomb-battered towns on Thursday and insurgents prepared to surrender another.

The army assault on Eastern Ghouta, an area of towns and farmland just outside Damascus, has been one of the most intense in Syrias seven-year-old war, killing more than 1,500 people in a relentless bombardment with war planes, shells and rockets.

An army officer interviewed on state television urged rebels who had not yet negotiated a deal to evacuate Eastern Ghouta to quit. Death is coming for you if you do not surrender, he said.

It broadcast footage of a long line of parked buses on a highway in the town of Harasta with crowds of people standing alongside. Syrian army soldiers looked on.

A Syrian military source said 600 to 700 fighters were expected to be among about 2,000 people leaving in them in the coming hours for opposition areas in northwestern Syria.

As the daylight dimmed, a small group of them could be seen on television kneeling in a line for Islams sunset prayer  perhaps the last they would perform in their hometown. Children ran among the groups of adults waiting to board the buses.

Between 18,000 and 20,000 people were expected to stay in Harasta under government rule, the military source added.

Syrian civilians and children wait for their evacuation by the Syrian Red Crescent (AFP/Getty)

Meanwhile, state television reported that more than 6,000 people had fled the larger rebel-held town of Douma since Wednesday, crossing over into government-held territory.

The Ahrar al-Sham groups decision to surrender Harasta leaves only Douma and another rebel pocket in Eastern Ghouta that includes the towns of Jobar, Ein Terma, Arbin and Zamalka.

They are all that remain of the main insurgent stronghold near the Syrian capital Damascus, the biggest prize for President Bashar al-Assad in his fight against the rebels since the recapture of Aleppo in late 2016.

Government air strikes had pummelled parts of Eastern Ghouta on Thursday morning, striking Arbin and Zamalka and killing 19 people, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights war monitoring group.

Later, rebels fired rockets from Eastern Ghouta into Damascus on Thursday, killing two people, state media reported. Television showed burning projectile parts on streets and in parks.

On Sunday, Assad drove himself to a newly captured battlefront in Eastern Ghouta, a demonstration of his seemingly unassailable position in the war that has been going his way since Russia sent its air force to help him in 2015.

The deal to surrender Harasta is the first by Eastern Ghouta rebels and began on Thursday with a prisoner swap. In an interview with state television, a Syrian soldier freed by rebels wept and thanked God and the army for his release.

The Russian Defence Ministry website showed what it said was live footage from the al-Wafideen crossing point from Douma into government areas. Over a period of several minutes, it showed dozens of people in small groups coming around a corner and trekking along the dirt road past armed soldiers.

Eastern Ghouta bombings: Syrian war in pictures Show all 14 1 /14 Eastern Ghouta bombings: Syrian war in pictures Eastern Ghouta bombings: Syrian war in pictures A Syrian woman and children run for cover amid the rubble of buildings. AFP/Getty Eastern Ghouta bombings: Syrian war in pictures Smoke rises from buildings following the attack on the village of Mesraba in the rebel-held besieged Eastern Ghouta region on the outskirts of the capital Damascu. AFP/Getty Eastern Ghouta bombings: Syrian war in pictures Injured children receive medical treatment. EPA Eastern Ghouta bombings: Syrian war in pictures A Syrian man carries a child injured. AFP/Getty Eastern Ghouta bombings: Syrian war in pictures An injured child receives treatment following bombings on several areas of eastern Ghouta. EPA Eastern Ghouta bombings: Syrian war in pictures A child reacts inside a hospital after relatives were injured in the bombing. EPA Eastern Ghouta bombings: Syrian war in pictures Syrian children cry at a make-shift hospital in Douma following air strikes on the Syrian village of Mesraba. AFP/Getty Eastern Ghouta bombings: Syrian war in pictures Syrian Civil Defense group extinguishing a store during airstrikes and shelling by Syrian government forces. AP Eastern Ghouta bombings: Syrian war in pictures A wounded 12-year-old Syrian boy, cries as he receives treatment at a make-shift hospital. AFP/Getty Eastern Ghouta bombings: Syrian war in pictures Syrians carry a wounded man. AFP/Getty Eastern Ghouta bombings: Syrian war in pictures An injured man covered with blood at a medical point. Reuters Eastern Ghouta bombings: Syrian war in pictures People sit a medical point in the besieged town of Douma, Eastern Ghouta. Reuters Eastern Ghouta bombings: Syrian war in pictures Syrian Civil Defense running to help survivors. AP Eastern Ghouta bombings: Syrian war in pictures Injured children receive medical treatment. EPA

Some bore bundles of their possessions, others carried small children or pushed prams. Behind were fields and trees. At one point in the road a man could be seen in a red shirt with the logo of the Syrian Arab Red Crescent.

Douma is the most populous area in Eastern Ghouta, and for more than a week it has been entirely surrounded by the government. The Jaish al-Islam rebel group that holds the town has said it is determined to fight on after a month-long government offensive that has taken 70 per cent of the former opposition enclave in Eastern Ghouta.

However, the Observatory said people leaving the area were doing so under an agreement between the group and the governments closest ally Russia.

The Syrian government and Russia have both accused rebels in Eastern Ghouta of stopping civilians leaving the area. They say their assault, which the Observatory says has killed more than 1,500 people so far, is needed to end Islamist militant rule over the areas people.

They also say it is needed to end rebel shelling of Damascus and other nearby areas. On Tuesday, a rocket struck a marketplace in a government-held town, killing dozens.

A Syrian child looks out the window of a vehicle during a civilian evacuation by the Syrian Red Crescent in the rebel-held Eastern Ghouta. (AFP/Getty)

However, the ferocity of the Syrian armys offensive in Eastern Ghouta has prompted Western condemnation and urgent pleas from United Nations humanitarian agencies for a ceasefire.

Over the past week, tens of thousands of people have fled across the front lines into government territory.

For the Harasta rebels, the journey to Idlib is one already well trodden by insurgents from other areas surrendered to Assad after prolonged sieges and intense bombardments of the kind used against Eastern Ghouta over the past month.

The northwestern province is the biggest remaining area under rebel control in Syria and its population has been doubled by refugees fleeing other areas including many opposition supporters.

A military media unit run by Assads ally Hezbollah on Wednesday said some 1,500 fighters along with 6,000 family members would depart Harasta under the agreement with the government.

ReutersAmerican troops may have killed hundreds of Syrian forces backed by Russian mercenaries, a US army general has said.

Up to 300 pro-regime fighters are thought to have died in American bombing that was launched in response to a surprise attack on a US-held base in the oil-rich Deir Ezzor region last month.

The US launched artillery fire and air strikes after coming under attack on 7 February from a group which also included Russian private military contractors.

Recommended Thousands flee Eastern Ghouta as Assad forces redouble assault

Those [incoming] artillery rounds could have landed and killed Americans and thats why we continue to prepare our defences, Brigadier General Jonathan Braga told NBC News.

Many of those killed are believed to have been Russians employed by a contracting firm. Moscow insisted its regular soldiers were not involved.

However, BGen Braga said he was absolutely concerned the conflict could have grown into a larger confrontation with Russia.

The clash is believed to have been the deadliest between US and Russian forces since the end of the cold war.

The Kremlin has only confirmed the deaths of several dozen of its citizens, but continued to insist its military was not involved. It initially said it had no information on the deaths of any Russian mercenaries.

The Pentagon, meanwhile, said the air strikes were launched in self-defence following an unprovoked advance on land controlled by the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces, a coalition of Kurds and Syrian rebels.

Neither Moscow nor Washington have publicly offered many details about the clash.

We only deal with the data that concerns Russian forces servicemen, said President Vladimir Putins spokesman Dmitry Peskov. We dont have data about other Russians who could be in Syria.

World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 30 September 2020 Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 September 2020 A girl's silhouette is seen from behind a fabric in a tent along a beach by Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 September 2020 A Chinese woman takes a photo of herself in front of a flower display dedicated to frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China. China will celebrate national day marking the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st Getty World news in pictures 27 September 2020 The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California. The fast moving Glass fire has burned over 1,000 acres and has destroyed homes Getty World news in pictures 26 September 2020 A villager along with a child offers prayers next to a carcass of a wild elephant that officials say was electrocuted in Rani Reserve Forest on the outskirts of Guwahati, India AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 September 2020 The casket of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seen in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol to lie in state in Washington, DC AFP via Getty World news in pictures 24 September 2020 An anti-government protester holds up an image of a pro-democracy commemorative plaque at a rally outside Thailand's parliament in Bangkok, as activists gathered to demand a new constitution AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 September 2020 A whale stranded on a beach in Macquarie Harbour on the rugged west coast of Tasmania, as hundreds of pilot whales have died in a mass stranding in southern Australia despite efforts to save them, with rescuers racing to free a few dozen survivors The Mercury/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 22 September 2020 State civil employee candidates wearing face masks and shields take a test in Surabaya AFP via Getty World news in pictures 21 September 2020 A man sweeps at the Taj Mahal monument on the day of its reopening after being closed for more than six months due to the coronavirus pandemic AP World news in pictures 20 September 2020 A deer looks for food in a burnt area, caused by the Bobcat fire, in Pearblossom, California EPA World news in pictures 19 September 2020 Anti-government protesters hold their mobile phones aloft as they take part in a pro-democracy rally in Bangkok. Tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters massed close to Thailand's royal palace, in a huge rally calling for PM Prayut Chan-O-Cha to step down and demanding reforms to the monarchy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 September 2020 Supporters of Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr maintain social distancing as they attend Friday prayers after the coronavirus disease restrictions were eased, in Kufa mosque, near Najaf, Iraq Reuters World news in pictures 17 September 2020 A protester climbs on The Triumph of the Republic at 'the Place de la Nation' as thousands of protesters take part in a demonstration during a national day strike called by labor unions asking for better salary and against jobs cut in Paris, France EPA World news in pictures 16 September 2020 A fire raging near the Lazzaretto of Ancona in Italy. The huge blaze broke out overnight at the port of Ancona. Firefighters have brought the fire under control but they expected to keep working through the day EPA World news in pictures 15 September 2020 Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny posing for a selfie with his family at Berlin's Charite hospital. In an Instagram post he said he could now breathe independently following his suspected poisoning last month Alexei Navalny/Instagram/AFP World news in pictures 14 September 2020 Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida celebrate after Suga was elected as new head of the ruling party at the Liberal Democratic Party's leadership election in Tokyo Reuters World news in pictures 13 September 2020 A man stands behind a burning barricade during the fifth straight day of protests against police brutality in Bogota AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 September 2020 Police officers block and detain protesters during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus. Daily protests calling for the authoritarian president's resignation are now in their second month AP World news in pictures 11 September 2020 Members of 'Omnium Cultural' celebrate the 20th 'Festa per la llibertat' ('Fiesta for the freedom') to mark the Day of Catalonia in Barcelona. Omnion Cultural fights for the independence of Catalonia EPA World news in pictures 10 September 2020 The Moria refugee camp, two days after Greece's biggest migrant camp, was destroyed by fire. Thousands of asylum seekers on the island of Lesbos are now homeless AFP via Getty World news in pictures 9 September 2020 Pope Francis takes off his face mask as he arrives by car to hold a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 8 September 2020 A home is engulfed in flames during the "Creek Fire" in the Tollhouse area of California AFP via Getty World news in pictures 7 September 2020 A couple take photos along a sea wall of the waves brought by Typhoon Haishen in the eastern port city of Sokcho AFP via Getty World news in pictures 6 September 2020 Novak Djokovic and a tournament official tends to a linesperson who was struck with a ball by Djokovic during his match against Pablo Carreno Busta at the US Open USA Today Sports/Reuters World news in pictures 5 September 2020 Protesters confront police at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, Australia, during an anti-lockdown rally AFP via Getty World news in pictures 4 September 2020 A woman looks on from a rooftop as rescue workers dig through the rubble of a damaged building in Beirut. A search began for possible survivors after a scanner detected a pulse one month after the mega-blast at the adjacent port AFP via Getty World news in pictures 3 September 2020 A full moon next to the Virgen del Panecillo statue in Quito, Ecuador EPA World news in pictures 2 September 2020 A Palestinian woman reacts as Israeli forces demolish her animal shed near Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank Reuters World news in pictures 1 September 2020 Students protest against presidential elections results in Minsk TUT.BY/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 31 August 2020 The pack rides during the 3rd stage of the Tour de France between Nice and Sisteron AFP via Getty World news in pictures 30 August 2020 Law enforcement officers block a street during a rally of opposition supporters protesting against presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus Reuters World news in pictures 29 August 2020 A woman holding a placard reading "Stop Censorship - Yes to the Freedom of Expression" shouts in a megaphone during a protest against the mandatory wearing of face masks in Paris. Masks, which were already compulsory on public transport, in enclosed public spaces, and outdoors in Paris in certain high-congestion areas around tourist sites, were made mandatory outdoors citywide on August 28 to fight the rising coronavirus infections AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 August 2020 Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe bows to the national flag at the start of a press conference at the prime minister official residence in Tokyo. Abe announced he will resign over health problems, in a bombshell development that kicks off a leadership contest in the world's third-largest economy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 27 August 2020 Residents take cover behind a tree trunk from rubber bullets fired by South African Police Service (SAPS) in Eldorado Park, near Johannesburg, during a protest by community members after a 16-year old boy was reported dead AFP via Getty World news in pictures 26 August 2020 People scatter rose petals on a statue of Mother Teresa marking her 110th birth anniversary in Ahmedabad AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 August 2020 An aerial view shows beach-goers standing on salt formations in the Dead Sea near Ein Bokeq, Israel Reuters World news in pictures 24 August 2020 Health workers use a fingertip pulse oximeter and check the body temperature of a fisherwoman inside the Dharavi slum during a door-to-door Covid-19 coronavirus screening in Mumbai AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 August 2020 People carry an idol of the Hindu god Ganesh, the deity of prosperity, to immerse it off the coast of the Arabian sea during the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in Mumbai, India Reuters World news in pictures 22 August 2020 Firefighters watch as flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires approach a home in Napa County, California AP World news in pictures 21 August 2020 Members of the Israeli security forces arrest a Palestinian demonstrator during a rally to protest against Israel's plan to annex parts of the occupied West Bank AFP via Getty World news in pictures 20 August 2020 A man pushes his bicycle through a deserted road after prohibitory orders were imposed by district officials for a week to contain the spread of the Covid-19 in Kathmandu AFP via Getty World news in pictures 19 August 2020 A car burns while parked at a residence in Vacaville, California. Dozens of fires are burning out of control throughout Northern California as fire resources are spread thin AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 August 2020 Students use their mobile phones as flashlights at an anti-government rally at Mahidol University in Nakhon Pathom. Thailand has seen near-daily protests in recent weeks by students demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-O-Cha AFP via Getty World news in pictures 17 August 2020 Members of the Kayapo tribe block the BR163 highway during a protest outside Novo Progresso in Para state, Brazil. Indigenous protesters blocked a major transamazonian highway to protest against the lack of governmental support during the COVID-19 novel coronavirus pandemic and illegal deforestation in and around their territories AFP via Getty World news in pictures 16 August 2020 Lightning forks over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as a storm passes over Oakland AP World news in pictures 15 August 2020 Belarus opposition supporters gather near the Pushkinskaya metro station where Alexander Taraikovsky, a 34-year-old protester died on August 10, during their protest rally in central Minsk AFP via Getty World news in pictures 14 August 2020 AlphaTauri's driver Daniil Kvyat takes part in the second practice session at the Circuit de Catalunya in Montmelo near Barcelona ahead of the Spanish F1 Grand Prix AFP via Getty World news in pictures 13 August 2020 Soldiers of the Brazilian Armed Forces during a disinfection of the Christ The Redeemer statue at the Corcovado mountain prior to the opening of the touristic attraction in Rio AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 August 2020 Young elephant bulls tussle playfully on World Elephant Day at the Amboseli National Park in Kenya AFP via Getty

It later said five of its citizens had been killed, a figure it subsequently increased to several dozen.

BGen Braga said that reports that between 200 and 300 of the Russian and Syrian force had been killed was close to our estimates.

The US deployed around 2,000 troops to Syria to fight Isis, which has now been forced out of much of the territory it controlled.

While the US opposes Bashar al-Assads Syrian government, American forces have not been targeting his regimes soldiers or those of its civil war allies, such as Russia.

* Update: A previous version of this article suggested in its headline that hundreds of fighters who died in the attack were Russian. Although the US army estimates that between 200 and 300 fighters were killed, it is not known how many of them were mercenaries employed by a Russian contracting firm. 23/3/18Vilnius is a city best known for its historical charm, particularly its Unesco-listed Old Town. Yet there are few European capitals modernising quite so rapidly. Today, for every preserved baroque church theres an achingly hip cafe; for every old cobbled street, a modernist work of art.

This fascinating contrast of the time-honoured and the on-trend make Lithuanias capital a refreshing and rewarding weekend break. Here are 10 of the best things to see and do during a visit.

Enjoy the view

A sea of red-tiled roofs and lush green parkland, punctuated by dozens of church spires: Vilnius looks spectacular from on high. The loveliest panorama in the city  particularly at sunset  is from the Three Crosses, a monument set atop the cheerily-named Bleak Hill, but its a steep walk. Gediminas Tower offers an almost-equally striking view, and is easily reached by funicular, or else take a lift up to the stylish rooftop Skybar (radissonblu.com) to gaze out over the city with a cocktail in hand.

Soak in the views (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

Tour a breakaway republic

Uzupis, which means the other side of the river, is a neighbourhood that sits apart from the rest of Vilnius  both physically and politically. In 1997, Uzupis declared itself an independent republic, with its own flag, anthem and president, and two decades on it retains its distinctive vibe. This bohemian district has some great riverside pubs and cafes, alternative artists workshops and a prominent, wall-mounted constitution featuring idiosyncratic articles such as People have the right to have no rights.

Try a local delicacy

Two dishes dominate dining here: cepelinai and kibinai. The first are filling, zeppelin-shaped dumplings of grated potato, stuffed with mince or curd, slathered in sour cream and served on huge plates. The latter are traditional pastries  not dissimilar to Cornish pasties  typically filled with mutton and onion and sold in every Vilnius bakery (though the best ones are in Trakai, a great day trip from the capital).

Try traditional dumplings slathered in sour cream (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

See the citys street art

Vilnius has many fine contemporary art galleries, but to really see how artists here express themselves, simply step outside. There are quirky al fresco works of art across Vilnius, from a bronze bust of Frank Zappa to a street lined with hundreds of tiny paintings, prints and ceramics, but its the colourful, often political street corner graffiti that really stands out, including a mural of Trump and Putin locking lips.

Make a wish

In August 1989, an extraordinary thing happened: two million people formed a human chain stretching 420 miles from Tallinn to Vilnius, in protest of Soviet occupation. Within seven months, Lithuania was independent. To commemorate this event, a stone tile marked stebuklas (miracle) was laid in Vilnius main Cathedral Square. Today, its a lucky charm, so stand on the tile, spin clockwise and make a wish.

Vilnius' political street art is worth exploring (Petras Malukas/AFP/Getty Images)

Step back in time

Not just under the radar, but out of sight, theres a concealed corner of Vilnius that belongs to another era. Situated in the up-and-coming Snipiskes district, its a 19th century community of pretty, wooden homes with wood-burning stoves, outhouses and communal water pumps, all linked by unpaved streets. It is under constant threat from developers, with many houses burning down in suspicious circumstances, but you can see what remains on the Alternative Tour from Vilnius Free Tour (vilniusfreetour.lt).

Sip a craft beer

Vilnius has a proud farmhouse brewing tradition, and has fully embraced the craft beer boom. Popular brewpubs include Alaus Namai (alausnamai.lt), home of Sirvenos ale  brewed using peas  and Snekutis (facebook.com/BaraiSnekutis), known for its cloudy amber Jovaru Alus. Many pubs also serve surprisingly tasty non-alcoholic wheat beers and stouts brewed by Svyturys (svyturys.lt).

Dig into Lithuanias history

Lithuania has a long and tumultuous history, from the wealth and prosperity of the Middle Ages to the devastating occupations of the 20th century. You can uncover it all with visits to the Palace of the Grand Dukes of Lithuania (valdovurumai.lt) and the Museum of Genocide Victims (genocid.lt).

Explore the bohemian Uzupis district (Antonio Campoy/Flickr)

Stroll along the river

Vilnius is a great strolling city, but forego the cobbled streets and winding alleys for one day in favour of the riverbank. A walk alongside the river Vilnele offers a mix of thriving nature and major city sights, like the atmospheric Bernardine Cemetery, the trumpeting Angel of Uzupis and the leafy Kalnai Park.

Shop for traditional food

Foodies shouldnt miss the covered Hales Market (halesturgaviete.lt). This beautiful historic building, opened in 1906, has stallholders selling everything you could possibly desire, from smoked meat, fresh fish and organic vegetables to clothes, flowers and gifts. Theres also a lovely bakery-cafe.From safety regulations to noise restrictions, a formidable array of rules govern Europes airlines. But the law they despise more than any other concerns passengers rights, known as EC261 and often described as the Denied Boarding Regulation. But cases of travellers being booted off overbooked flights comprise only a tiny proportion of payouts that airlines are obliged to make.

The main pain suffered by airlines is for flight arrival delays of three hours or more. For short hops, compensation is set at 250. For trips such as UK to Greece, its 400. And for 3,500km flights or longer, 600 (except, bizarrely, if the delay is three to four hours, in which case the payout is halved). So thats anything from 215 to 520, whether you have been held up for four hours or 40.

Recommended Ryanair wins High Court battle over flight delay compensation

An airline need not pay when extraordinary circumstances are to blame. Examples include air traffic control strikes or bad weather, both of which have traumatised travel in the past week.

But in a series of court cases, the list of allowable excuses has shrunk. A bizarre lottery has been created, in which a few minutes can make all the difference between a payout of several times the airfare, or getting nothing but increasingly frustrated.

Airlines, faced with paying out many millions of pounds when stuff happens, have adopted a range of responses. Some grit their teeth and pay out when its a fair cop. Others seem to have concluded that the chances of a rap on the knuckles from officialdom are so remote that they can delay, obfuscate and sometimes fib in order to deflect legitimate applications for compensation. And many refuse claims when, as often happens, a delay has multiple causes: seizing on a mild air traffic control delay when a more significant factor was a mechanical issue.

All of which makes this a rich seam for the legal profession and the claims firms that feed off the phenomenon of free money. If a flight you took in 2012 arrived three hours late, they say, theres a pot of cash waiting for you.

Bott & Co, based in Wilmslow, are the market leaders. Unlike many claims handlers, Bott is a proper law firm, under the watchful eye of the Solicitors Regulation Authority. It began its flight delay business five years ago, and since then has handled claims for 126,000 passengers, and claims a success rate of 99 per cent.

The average payout is 285, of which Bott keeps a third. With almost every claim succeeding, that amounts to almost 12m in fees, with passengers picking up 24m.

After several visits to the firm over the past five years, I conclude that it is fighting a pretty good fight over a profoundly flawed piece of legislation. Prominent on its website is a flight-delay compensation letter which you can download for free and send direct to the airline, bypassing the firm.

Ryanair, Europes biggest budget airline, insists that you apply direct, saying you can only claim via a law firm if you have given it four weeks to respond. Both & Co challenged this condition in the High Court. But this week the judge, Edward Murray, said it was reasonable because: Ryanair has established a straightforward and easy-to-use process for its passengers to make their flight delay compensation claims, either online or by correspondence, without the assistance of a third party.

Kenny Jacobs, chief marketing officer for Ryanair, told me: Theres a principle involved. For every 10m in compensation, 4m or 5m ends up in the pockets of solicitors, not customers.

Mr Jacobs speculated that other carriers will now follow Ryanairs practice, saying: If you get full compensation youre better disposed to that airline.

Bott & Co is furious, and plans to appeal. Coby Benson, a solicitor with the firm, said: It is a harsh law, but the law is the law, and for as long as it remains in force, well be here to protect the rights of passengers.

The firm has helped clarify some shockingly badly drafted rules. But if compensation was generally lower and proportionate to the fare paid, the system would become less confrontational. Airlines, lawyers and judges could get on with more productive ways to increase the sum of human happiness than squabbling over flight delays.Access to drinking water and basic sanitation is a right and one of the sustainable development goals of the United Nations. It is a condition for human life.

However, up to two billion people on the planet do not have access to a safe source of water at home, and up to 2.3 billion people suffer from lack of sanitation. Approximately 260 million people  more than the entire population of Brazil  must walk more than 30 minutes to gather water. Guaranteeing access to water is one of the main challenges of our time.

Brazil has 12 per cent of the planets fresh water  but, despite this fact, we are not immune to water-related problems. Major cities in Brazil have been enduring water shortages. An unacceptable sanitation deficit persists, and the suffering caused by drought to the people of Brazils North-east region is a well-known fact.

The search for answers to such urgent issues has led us to host the 8th World Water Forum in Brasilia this week. The forum is gathering more than 40,000 participants from over 160 countries. We welcome heads of state and government, state governors, mayors, members of congress, judges, representatives of international organisations and academia, the private sector, and civil society. Such diversity of participants enriches the forum.

The choice of Brazil to host one of the most important global events on water resources is no surprise. We have long been committed to this matter on the international stage. We hosted the Rio 92 and the Rio+20 conferences, in which the close link between water sustainability and development were recognised. More recently, we were among the first countries to ratify the Paris Agreement, which deals with one of the main threats to the right of access to water: climate change.

This traditional protagonism on the world stage is anchored in solid measures on the domestic side. Brazil knows that water and sanitation are synonymous with environmental preservation, and we made water security a pillar of our environmental policies. To preserve our waterways, we implemented the River Planting programme, which uses digital tools to protect our springs and permanent preservation areas.

World news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 World news in pictures World news in pictures 30 September 2020 Pope Francis prays with priests at the end of a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 29 September 2020 A girl's silhouette is seen from behind a fabric in a tent along a beach by Beit Lahia in the northern Gaza Strip AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 September 2020 A Chinese woman takes a photo of herself in front of a flower display dedicated to frontline health care workers during the COVID-19 pandemic in Beijing, China. China will celebrate national day marking the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1st Getty World news in pictures 27 September 2020 The Glass Mountain Inn burns as the Glass Fire moves through the area in St. Helena, California. The fast moving Glass fire has burned over 1,000 acres and has destroyed homes Getty World news in pictures 26 September 2020 A villager along with a child offers prayers next to a carcass of a wild elephant that officials say was electrocuted in Rani Reserve Forest on the outskirts of Guwahati, India AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 September 2020 The casket of late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seen in Statuary Hall in the US Capitol to lie in state in Washington, DC AFP via Getty World news in pictures 24 September 2020 An anti-government protester holds up an image of a pro-democracy commemorative plaque at a rally outside Thailand's parliament in Bangkok, as activists gathered to demand a new constitution AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 September 2020 A whale stranded on a beach in Macquarie Harbour on the rugged west coast of Tasmania, as hundreds of pilot whales have died in a mass stranding in southern Australia despite efforts to save them, with rescuers racing to free a few dozen survivors The Mercury/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 22 September 2020 State civil employee candidates wearing face masks and shields take a test in Surabaya AFP via Getty World news in pictures 21 September 2020 A man sweeps at the Taj Mahal monument on the day of its reopening after being closed for more than six months due to the coronavirus pandemic AP World news in pictures 20 September 2020 A deer looks for food in a burnt area, caused by the Bobcat fire, in Pearblossom, California EPA World news in pictures 19 September 2020 Anti-government protesters hold their mobile phones aloft as they take part in a pro-democracy rally in Bangkok. Tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters massed close to Thailand's royal palace, in a huge rally calling for PM Prayut Chan-O-Cha to step down and demanding reforms to the monarchy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 September 2020 Supporters of Iraqi Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr maintain social distancing as they attend Friday prayers after the coronavirus disease restrictions were eased, in Kufa mosque, near Najaf, Iraq Reuters World news in pictures 17 September 2020 A protester climbs on The Triumph of the Republic at 'the Place de la Nation' as thousands of protesters take part in a demonstration during a national day strike called by labor unions asking for better salary and against jobs cut in Paris, France EPA World news in pictures 16 September 2020 A fire raging near the Lazzaretto of Ancona in Italy. The huge blaze broke out overnight at the port of Ancona. Firefighters have brought the fire under control but they expected to keep working through the day EPA World news in pictures 15 September 2020 Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny posing for a selfie with his family at Berlin's Charite hospital. In an Instagram post he said he could now breathe independently following his suspected poisoning last month Alexei Navalny/Instagram/AFP World news in pictures 14 September 2020 Japan's Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga, former Defense Minister Shigeru Ishiba and former Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida celebrate after Suga was elected as new head of the ruling party at the Liberal Democratic Party's leadership election in Tokyo Reuters World news in pictures 13 September 2020 A man stands behind a burning barricade during the fifth straight day of protests against police brutality in Bogota AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 September 2020 Police officers block and detain protesters during an opposition rally to protest the official presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus. Daily protests calling for the authoritarian president's resignation are now in their second month AP World news in pictures 11 September 2020 Members of 'Omnium Cultural' celebrate the 20th 'Festa per la llibertat' ('Fiesta for the freedom') to mark the Day of Catalonia in Barcelona. Omnion Cultural fights for the independence of Catalonia EPA World news in pictures 10 September 2020 The Moria refugee camp, two days after Greece's biggest migrant camp, was destroyed by fire. Thousands of asylum seekers on the island of Lesbos are now homeless AFP via Getty World news in pictures 9 September 2020 Pope Francis takes off his face mask as he arrives by car to hold a limited public audience at the San Damaso courtyard in The Vatican AFP via Getty World news in pictures 8 September 2020 A home is engulfed in flames during the "Creek Fire" in the Tollhouse area of California AFP via Getty World news in pictures 7 September 2020 A couple take photos along a sea wall of the waves brought by Typhoon Haishen in the eastern port city of Sokcho AFP via Getty World news in pictures 6 September 2020 Novak Djokovic and a tournament official tends to a linesperson who was struck with a ball by Djokovic during his match against Pablo Carreno Busta at the US Open USA Today Sports/Reuters World news in pictures 5 September 2020 Protesters confront police at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, Australia, during an anti-lockdown rally AFP via Getty World news in pictures 4 September 2020 A woman looks on from a rooftop as rescue workers dig through the rubble of a damaged building in Beirut. A search began for possible survivors after a scanner detected a pulse one month after the mega-blast at the adjacent port AFP via Getty World news in pictures 3 September 2020 A full moon next to the Virgen del Panecillo statue in Quito, Ecuador EPA World news in pictures 2 September 2020 A Palestinian woman reacts as Israeli forces demolish her animal shed near Hebron in the Israeli-occupied West Bank Reuters World news in pictures 1 September 2020 Students protest against presidential elections results in Minsk TUT.BY/AFP via Getty World news in pictures 31 August 2020 The pack rides during the 3rd stage of the Tour de France between Nice and Sisteron AFP via Getty World news in pictures 30 August 2020 Law enforcement officers block a street during a rally of opposition supporters protesting against presidential election results in Minsk, Belarus Reuters World news in pictures 29 August 2020 A woman holding a placard reading "Stop Censorship - Yes to the Freedom of Expression" shouts in a megaphone during a protest against the mandatory wearing of face masks in Paris. Masks, which were already compulsory on public transport, in enclosed public spaces, and outdoors in Paris in certain high-congestion areas around tourist sites, were made mandatory outdoors citywide on August 28 to fight the rising coronavirus infections AFP via Getty World news in pictures 28 August 2020 Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe bows to the national flag at the start of a press conference at the prime minister official residence in Tokyo. Abe announced he will resign over health problems, in a bombshell development that kicks off a leadership contest in the world's third-largest economy AFP via Getty World news in pictures 27 August 2020 Residents take cover behind a tree trunk from rubber bullets fired by South African Police Service (SAPS) in Eldorado Park, near Johannesburg, during a protest by community members after a 16-year old boy was reported dead AFP via Getty World news in pictures 26 August 2020 People scatter rose petals on a statue of Mother Teresa marking her 110th birth anniversary in Ahmedabad AFP via Getty World news in pictures 25 August 2020 An aerial view shows beach-goers standing on salt formations in the Dead Sea near Ein Bokeq, Israel Reuters World news in pictures 24 August 2020 Health workers use a fingertip pulse oximeter and check the body temperature of a fisherwoman inside the Dharavi slum during a door-to-door Covid-19 coronavirus screening in Mumbai AFP via Getty World news in pictures 23 August 2020 People carry an idol of the Hindu god Ganesh, the deity of prosperity, to immerse it off the coast of the Arabian sea during the Ganesh Chaturthi festival in Mumbai, India Reuters World news in pictures 22 August 2020 Firefighters watch as flames from the LNU Lightning Complex fires approach a home in Napa County, California AP World news in pictures 21 August 2020 Members of the Israeli security forces arrest a Palestinian demonstrator during a rally to protest against Israel's plan to annex parts of the occupied West Bank AFP via Getty World news in pictures 20 August 2020 A man pushes his bicycle through a deserted road after prohibitory orders were imposed by district officials for a week to contain the spread of the Covid-19 in Kathmandu AFP via Getty World news in pictures 19 August 2020 A car burns while parked at a residence in Vacaville, California. Dozens of fires are burning out of control throughout Northern California as fire resources are spread thin AFP via Getty World news in pictures 18 August 2020 Students use their mobile phones as flashlights at an anti-government rally at Mahidol University in Nakhon Pathom. Thailand has seen near-daily protests in recent weeks by students demanding the resignation of Prime Minister Prayut Chan-O-Cha AFP via Getty World news in pictures 17 August 2020 Members of the Kayapo tribe block the BR163 highway during a protest outside Novo Progresso in Para state, Brazil. Indigenous protesters blocked a major transamazonian highway to protest against the lack of governmental support during the COVID-19 novel coronavirus pandemic and illegal deforestation in and around their territories AFP via Getty World news in pictures 16 August 2020 Lightning forks over the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge as a storm passes over Oakland AP World news in pictures 15 August 2020 Belarus opposition supporters gather near the Pushkinskaya metro station where Alexander Taraikovsky, a 34-year-old protester died on August 10, during their protest rally in central Minsk AFP via Getty World news in pictures 14 August 2020 AlphaTauri's driver Daniil Kvyat takes part in the second practice session at the Circuit de Catalunya in Montmelo near Barcelona ahead of the Spanish F1 Grand Prix AFP via Getty World news in pictures 13 August 2020 Soldiers of the Brazilian Armed Forces during a disinfection of the Christ The Redeemer statue at the Corcovado mountain prior to the opening of the touristic attraction in Rio AFP via Getty World news in pictures 12 August 2020 Young elephant bulls tussle playfully on World Elephant Day at the Amboseli National Park in Kenya AFP via Getty

We have also made significant progress towards protecting our forests. We have increased our forest conservation areas. We reversed the deforestation curve in the Amazon that we found to be on the rise, and we are about to create two vast marine biodiversity conservation areas. By protecting our ecosystems we protect our water sources. Having water is essential, but it is not enough. The water must get to those who need it.

Recommended Street poetry groups fight prejudice about favelas in Rio de Janeiro

Getting water to those who need it is what the transposition of the Sao Francisco River is all about. The long-awaited project, now in its final stages, will benefit a population of 12 million in Brazils North-east. With the portion that supplies water to the states of Pernambuco and Paraiba completed, the final phase involves enabling water to reach the state of Ceara. By completing this enormous public works project, we did not neglect our sustainability goals. We have launched a new project (Novo Chico), aimed at revitalising the Sao Francisco River.

Our attention, once again, is focused on sanitation and the great deal that must still be done. We are putting the final touches on a bill of law aimed at modernising our regulatory framework in sanitation and encouraging new investment in the area. What inspires us is the need to make this basic service universal.

This is the Brazil that is hosting the World Water Forum: a country in search of common solutions to global problems; a country that will continue to do its part in preserving our most precious resource.

Michel Temer is the President of BrazilJust for once, Theresa May and her soon-to-be-ex counterparts in the European Council will be relieved that they wont have to spoil their digestion by a yet another postprandial wrangle about Brexit. Flawed as it is, the draft transition deal is more or less settled (under the joint caveat that nothing is agree until everything is agreed), and the leaders summit meeting and traditional dinner will only be concerned with rubber stamping it

Instead they can, nuclear powers and microstates alike, turn their gaze upwards instead to geopolitics and constructing a common front towards Russian aggression. It is an interesting prototype or test case for the common security, defence and foreign policy provisions of the eventual EU-UK treaty, areas where both sides are, or appear to be, anxious to maintain and deepen cooperation, even as Britain leaves the European Union.

The auguries have been mixed. While France and Germany have been more or less supportive, there have been unusual splits within the EU bureaucracy itself. Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the European Commission, inexplicably, sent a congratulatory note to Vladimir Putin after his election as President of the Russian Federation, yet the President of the European Parliament, Guy Verhofstadt and the President of the European Council, Donald Tusk, refused to do so, and made their displeasure at Mr Junckers initiative known. When the lives of British subjects and residents in Salisbury have been endangered by a Russian nerve agent it was, at best, tactless, for Mr Juncker to tell Mr Putin that: Our common objective should be to re-establish a cooperative pan-European security order. I hope that you will use your fourth term in office to pursue this goal. I will always be a partner in this endeavour. Mr Juncker should be reminded that what happened in Wiltshire could also have happened in Luxemburg, his home state. So egregious was this faux pas that it has probably moved sentiment towards Britain, a perverse result that is nonetheless welcome.

Yet the undiplomatic diplomacy of Jean-Claude Juncker is not the only obstacle to a united European front. There are countries in the European Union  Sweden, Ireland, Finland, and Austria  who have a long and honourable history of neutrality. They are not members of Nato and, despite signing up to various commitments about European common defence and security policy, have no absolute treaty obligations to use force if one fellow member state finds themselves under attack. The EU does not yet have the Article 5 obligation to assist in the Nato treaty. The fact that some neutrals are reviewing their neutrality in the light of Russian ambitions has not yet changed that formal stance. Then there are others, such as Greece and Hungary, who display much less hostility both towards Russia and towards President Putins brand of authoritarian leadership. On the other side though, we find nations, such as Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland and Poland, who have sound reason to fear Russian territorial ambitions. It is well within living memory, after all, that the three Baltic republics were integral parts of the Soviet Union. Poland, Finland and others have almost as long and just as bitter an experience of Russian or Soviet domination.

The upshot of this? An illustration of why the British need Europe  and why the Europeans need Britain. Whatever divisions there are within the European family, either homegrown or fomented by Russia, the UK is stronger with some European support than with none. The closer a working relationship with the EU27 that can be achieved in the future treaty the better: it will be decisively in the British national interest. One of the few hopeful developments in recent weeks has been this growing consensus around European security solidarity. Everyone in Brussels and London perhaps realises at the backs of their minds that America may not be as reliable an ally as once we assumed.

Meanwhile Sir Vince Cable, seemingly on freelance manoeuvres, claims that a number of European leaders would wish the UK to stay in the EU and would favour a second referendum on the Brexit terms. Officially they have scrambled to dismiss the idea. And yet it has sometimes openly acknowledged that the EU would be perfectly content to see Article 50 cancelled, and the British to stay and find a new arrangement with the EU, presumably based on the one David Cameron negotiated before he lost the 2016 referendum. That may be unrealistic, but the outlines of a final Brexit deal  comprising the exit terms, transition period and final trade agreement  could easily be presented to the British people in a final vote.

Given the difficulties surrounding the Irish border question and the inevitable economic damage that will be done even under the most favourable assumptions, the arguments for a second referendum are increasingly compelling. It is not only a democratic imperative to allow the people the last say on something they could not have foreseen two years ago; but also the balance of opinion in the Conservative parliamentary party  always in favour of Remain  may well be shifting towards seeking a final popular endorsement of what the Government agrees with the EU. None of that will emerge from this EU summit, but a new habit of working together may just be developing.If you want billionaires to take notice you dont write disagreeable things about them in newspapers or sue them in the courts. You hit them in their bank accounts.

And so it is with Mark Zuckerberg, he of Facebook fame. Nothing can take away his achievement: creating a social network of more than 2 billion people. There are 2.13bn active users each month, and there are only 7.3bn people in the world. That is amazing and it turned Zuckerberg into the fifth richest person in the world, who thanks to his shareholding in Facebook was worth last Friday $75bn.

Now, thanks to the fall in the price of Facebook shares, on my quick tally he is down to about $65bn. We should not feel too sorry for him, for that decline is not going to affect his standard of living. But what it does signal, though, is that the financial markets are having a rethink about the business prospects of Facebook, and in particular the ways in which the almost unthinkably huge database of information about 2 billion people can be deployed. There have been rumbling concerns for some time about privacy and abuse of data collected by social media. Now those concerns have burst out and Facebook is first in the firing line.

There are several issues and it might be helpful to separate them out.

 Cambridge Analytica: Dr Aleksandr Kogan denies responsibility for data from Facebook being used in US Presidential campaign

Most immediately there is privacy. Every time we log on, we give information about ourselves. We make a Faustian bargain. In exchange for free access to an extraordinary range of information we give up data about ourselves. Actually I wont go on Facebook, but I checked on Google a few moments ago to see what had happened to the Facebook share price. So Professor Google knows I am interested high-tech shares. I also checked for Cambridge Analytica accounts to see what had been filed at Companies House, so they know about that too.

Most of us are happy with that bargain, but we have a right to know that information about ourselves will not be abused. Quite what is reasonable use of the data is a grey area, and defining what is legal and what is not (and revising laws where appropriate) will occupy politicians and lawyers around the world for at least the next five years. When any new technology arrives it takes a while for legal practice to catch up.

Next, there is the echo-chamber effect: people are fed information they want to hear or at least are particularly interested in. I had the ultimate example of that the other day. A story came up on my Samsung phone about German politics, because apparently I had shown interest in Angela Merkel. I scrolled down and then saw another story about the German economy that looked more interesting. It was very clear and sensible. I was about three sentences in before I realised I had written it myself.

Put together the information we hand over and the echo-chamber effect and you see how valuable the social media are to political parties, hence the latest row. But there are two further challenges.

One of these is tax. This is a particular issue for Europe, since all the high-tech giants are American or Chinese. (It is a fascinating and troubling side issue, as to why Europe and the UK have failed to create a Google or a Facebook.) Now the EU is seeking to put a 3 per cent turnover tax on these technology companies, and there is a debate on how to do so at the EU Council of Ministers on Thursday. Quite whether or how this will work is far from clear, and since the companies are all American it may provoke retaliation from the US.

The other is the destructive impact on existing business models, including Amazons effects on the High Street, and the online media on newspapers. (At the Independent we are in the middle of the latter, being the first major newspaper in the world to go entirely on-line.) No business model is ever static and the online shopping revolution has been a blessing to many, but every time we buy something online we are not buying it in a store.

Eventually this will settle down. There will be new privacy controls and we as users will be required to give consent to passing on information about ourselves. There may well be prosecutions for abuse of data. We will become more cautious about what we put out on a public platform. We will grow more canny about the dangers of the echo-chamber. And the old business models will adapt to the new challenges.

Have we passed peak Facebook? Im not sure, but I think its glory days may be over. It will become more of a regulated public utility, less a ground-breaking social and economic phenomenon. And that is fine. It is the way capitalism works.The Irish (and therefore by law the EU) have said emphatically they will veto any proposal that creates a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic. This can only be avoided if we stay in the single market and the customs union, which Auntie May has at last flatly ruled out. A mountain of fudge cannot hide this impasse.

It is now impossible to devise a compromise that will satisfy all parties, so we remain fixed on course to crash out with no deal. In the mandated parliamentary vote on crashing out, a small majority of MPs from all parties will prevent it.

In the meantime, opinion polls over the next six months will reveal a steady drain in public support for Brexit, as Tory infighting continues to erode confidence, and the national impact of crashing out becomes clearer. This will eventually trigger a general election, which either Momentum (Corbyn), or the Tories under a new leader, will decide they can win with the help of the Lib Dems by switching to a Remain ticket.

So we stay in the EU which, exacerbated by the corrosive impact of a decade of austerity, will lead directly to a sustained period of rioting and anti-minority violence amounting to civil war, barely contained by our already severely depleted police and armed forces.

Shuttle tickets to Mars, anyone?

Andy Knott

Bath

How will we ever solve the Irish border question?

Resolving the Irish border question would be difficult enough without the DUPs strong position at Westminster. As it is, whatever the party says about a frictionless and open border, it would surely not be too concerned to see the Irish economy suffer a little if the border became less open, as the DUPs direction is always towards Great Britain and not Ireland.

David Wallis

Cirencester

Thanks for standing against lies, Boris the truth-teller

So Boris Johnson doesnt like the haystack of lies Russia is putting forth over the poisoning in Salisbury.

Lies and poisoning and poisonous lies!!

Im sure we will all take more notice of Boris when he retracts the claim he made repeatedly during the EU referendum campaign and which was painted on the side of his campaign bus. Just in case hes forgotten, Im referring to his assertion that our NHS will receive an extra 350m per week once we leave the EU.

Joe Hennessy

Faversham

We should all just come offline

Clearly, the recently reported behaviour of Facebook and Cambridge Analytica is despicable. But when will people realise that if they didnt post every minute of the day, then Facebook and Cambridge Analytica wouldnt have any data in the first place.

I dont think you have the right to be offended by the behaviour of these companies if you contribute to the problem. Cant we at least try to remember when privacy meant something.

Steve Mumby

Bournemouth

This Government is incompetent

The Tory Government is selling this country down the river. We are getting nothing out of these Brexit talks (I will not call them negotiations, because there are no negotiations going on  you cannot negotiate with someone who refuses to negotiate). The EU leaders just make demands and we give in to them.

After the referendum, we were led to believe it would take two years (24 months) to leave the EU. Twenty-one months have gone by and nothing has been settled.

Our Government is betraying the majority of people who voted in the referendum. It is a good job they were not in charge at the outbreak of either world war, or they would have thrown their hands in the air before a shot was fired. They are pathetic.

W Slater

Colne

Look to Russias history when considering its involvement in Salisbury

To those of your letters correspondents willing to accept the rebuttals of Russia as to their possession and use of chemical weapons, or the likelihood of the state being involved, either by act or omission, in the Salisbury incident, I ask them to look at the recent history of the Putin regime.

On the world stage he has annexed Crimea using subterfuge, despite all the evidence denied the downing of the Malaysian airliner, then latterly supported Assad in Syria in the commission of alleged war crimes. Internally his opponents coincidentally, are beaten, jailed or murdered. Then of course there was the murder of Litvinenko here in England.

Is this the track record of a regime we can trust, or one which on the balance of probabilities is capable of acting outside the law?

G Barlow

WirralThe corridors and anterooms of the Palace of Westminster are filled with paintings of great men on the Commons terrace.

Keir Hardie lingers behind Edward Grey as a silent drum beats lead the march to war. The monocled eye of Joseph Chamberlain meets the narrow horizon, his placid countenance concealing a heart of beaten metal.

Where they stand Claude Monet once gazed, brush in hand, through fog and sun.

Their ghosts lingered in the golden light of morning, as from the east there came a vessel, its colours fluttering on the still wind. Desmond Swayne MP was here, carrying two miniature polypropylene Union Flags, to mark its arrival with a growl. So had William Wragg MP, but having made less of an effort on the props front, could only give visual voice to love of country through the exultant waggling of his House of Commons order paper.

And there, on this hallowed dawn, beneath this vaunted balcony of history, Nigel Farage tipped two crates of haddock into the river Thames.

UK news in pictures Show all 50 1 /50 UK news in pictures UK news in pictures 20 September 2021 Florist Judith Blacklock puts the finishing touches to a floral carousel installation in Halkin Arcade, which she has designed with Neill Strain for the Belgravia in Bloom festival, running from September 20-26, in London PA UK news in pictures 19 September 2021 Bubbles surround Manchester Uniteds Cristiano Ronaldo before the match against West Ham at London Stadium Action Images/Reuters UK news in pictures 18 September 2021 Children take part in the Settrington Cup Pedal Car Race as motoring enthusiasts attend the Goodwood Revival, a three-day historic car racing festival in Goodwood, Chichester, Reuters UK news in pictures 17 September 2021 Hugo, 7, from London rides past a 4x7 metre rainbow arch, made entirely of recycled aluminium cans, which has been installed by recycling initiative 'Every Can Counts', in partnership with The City of London Corporation in front of St Paul's Cathedral in London, to encourage members of the public to recycle their drinks cans ahead of recycling week, which starts on 20 September PA UK news in pictures 16 September 2021 Sheikeh MOhammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, leader of Abu Dhabi, leaves Downing Street after meeting with Boris Johnson PA UK news in pictures 15 September 2021 Children pose by ice sculptures depicting people collecting water by charity Water Aid to show the fragility of water and the threat posed by climate change in London AFP/Getty UK news in pictures 14 September 2021 Heavy rain covers the A149 near Kings Lynn in Norfolk PA UK news in pictures 13 September 2021 Luke Jerram's 'Museum of the Moon' at Durham Cathedral PA UK news in pictures 12 September 2021 Inspirational young fundraiser Tobias Weller crosses the finish line, near his home in Sheffield, as he completes his latest epic feat where he swam and triked his way to the end of his awesome year-long Ironman Challenge. 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At least 50 journalists and photographers had gathered to bear witness. They saw their scaled bodies bent in sacrifice, these slippery martyrs of Brexit.

They had died so that a nation might live. They had placed their fishy heads in the mouth of the EU lion.

On Monday, you see, they had been betrayed. The draft text of the Brexit transition agreement had been published, and it appeared that post-Brexit Britain would not be gaining full autonomy over its fishing waters until 31 December 2020, not 31 March 2019. The UKs fishing industry, whose total contribution to the British economy is slightly smaller than that of the pet insurance sector, would have to toil under the EUs Common Fisheries Policy for 19 long months more.

This, of course, was an outrage. And just as it is said that men and women in cities are never more than six feet from a rat, wherever there is outrage you are never more than six feet from Nigel Farage.

But not all had been as brave as Nigel. Deliberately dumping two crates of haddock in the Thames is an act of questionable legality, you see. So while Jacob Rees-Mogg MP, Anne-Marie Trevelyan MP and Craig Mackinlay MP were happy to call the TV cameras to Embankment Pier at 8am to pledge their support to the UKs suffering fishermen, they werent going to actually, you know, take part. They werent going to actually get in the little boat and chug up the Thames to upturn two coolboxes of fish into the river beneath Big Ben. Because that, that would be mad.

That all did not go to plan will not surprise anyone. At first, the faceless British bureaucrats of Transport for London refused the boat permission to dock at Embankment Pier, their entirely unreasonable behaviour a consequence of Embankment Pier being an everyday commuter pier where normal people go to catch a boat to work, and none of the protest admin people had, you know, got round to asking for permission.

It left this tiny vessel of flag-waving Brexiteers with nowhere to go. No route on, no route off. It moved in an aquatic holding pattern, sweeping into shore to be filmed and photographed then sweeping out again. HMS Brexit was all at sea. The up-creek-no-paddle impact assessments had not been done.

But once the fish had been dumped, the picture secured, the unending state of national lunacy restored, no one cared. Messrs Swayne and Wragg took themselves off in the direction of the House of Commons and Prime Ministers Questions. It may even still be out there now.Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said Ireland stands in solidarity with the UK over the Salisbury attack (Andrew Matthews/PA)

Ireland stands in full solidarity with the UK following the loathsome and reprehensible poisoning of ex-Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury, the Taoiseach said.

The EU has urged Russia to address the UKs questions and called for full disclosure of its development of Novichok, the nerve agent used.

Leo Varadkar said it was important to stick together.

An attempted assassination or a chemical attack, no matter who does it, is something that were going to condemn and condemn outright, he said.

Mr Varadkar added that the 28 EU member states were all small countries surrounded by larger ones.

As a fellow member of the European Union, were going to be in full solidarity with the United Kingdom, he said.

I think what happened at Salisbury was loathsome and reprehensible; and were going to stand right beside the UK on that issue.

Mr Skripal, 66, and Yulia Skripal, 33, were found slumped and unconscious on a bench near a shopping centre in the centre of Salisbury on March 4, having visited a pub and a restaurant.

Prime Minister Theresa May blamed the Russian state.

Russia is on the agenda as leaders gather in Brussels for a European Council meeting.

President Donald Tusk has proposed strengthening resilience to chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear-related risks, including through closer cooperation among the EU institutions, the states and Nato.

He said: We should also continue to bolster our capabilities to address hybrid threats, including in the areas of cyber, strategic communication and counter-intelligence.

European leaders are expected to adopt conclusions following the Salisbury attack, Mr Tusk added.Prime Minister Theresa May is to hold a bilateral meeting with the Irish Taoiseach in Brussels later on Thursday.

The border between Northern Ireland and the Republic is one of the most vexing issues facing Brexit negotiators.

Irish premier Leo Varadkar is hoping to agree guidelines on the future relationship between the EU and UK at this weeks European Council summit of leaders, with the focus on progress in the negotiations.

On Monday the UK and EU agreed terms for a transition period.

The draft text of a withdrawal treaty includes an agreement that there must be a backstop solution to ensure there is no hard border on the island of Ireland if no other answers are found.

The Irish Government has insisted the UK has provided a cast-iron guarantee that will ensure no physical infrastructure, checks or controls at the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic after withdrawal.

Without any other broader trade solution, Northern Ireland would continue to follow EU regulations which affect the island.

Most of the detail around how the border arrangements would operate have not been agreed.

Mr Varadkar said: On Friday we will meet in Article 50 format to discuss the Brexit negotiations.

This is an important moment in the Article 50 negotiations and it is hoped that we can agree guidelines on the future relationship between the EU and the UK.

I am pleased that the UK has now agreed that a backstop solution to avoid a hard border proposed in December, will form part of the legal text, and that all the issues identified by the EU side in the draft will be addressed, to deliver a legally sound solution to avoid a hard border on our island.

Prime Minister May confirmed this in a letter to (European Council) President (Donald) Tusk on Monday.

Discussions over Thursday and Friday will also focus on jobs, growth and competitiveness, external relations, the future of Europe and particularly digital taxation, and further and better economic and monetary union.

On Thursday, European leaders will discuss and adopt conclusions on jobs, growth, competitiveness including the Single Market, social issues, and trade.

They will also consider external relations including Turkey and the Western Balkans.

Leaders discussions are intended to facilitate open exchanges of views on the future of Europe.

Mr Varadkar added: The main focus this evening will be on digital taxation.

We believe that global solutions are needed to ensure that tax is paid by companies where value is created and profits are generated, reflecting the highly international nature of the digital economy.

I will strongly argue that the EU should wait for the OECD to complete its work before deciding on how to act, and should only do so in the context of agreement on an international level.A withdrawal treaty including any Irish border deal will have to be agreed by October, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar warned.

The deadline was necessary to allow time for UK and European parliaments to ratify arrangements before Brexit a year from now, he said as he arrived at a European Council meeting of state leaders in Brussels.

Mr Varadkar said he had hoped the controversial backstop could be finalised by June, but has agreed to wait longer so that a solution for the border could be agreed instead.

This would negate the need for 'Option C' - or the backstop.

Would I like to have it done by June? Absolutely, but I would rather have the right deal by October, rather than any deal in June, he told reporters on the margins of the European Council meeting in Brussels.

Brexit is due to happen at the end on March 2019, so the October deadline is necessary to allow time for UK and European parliaments to ratify the agreement.

Mr Varadkar reiterated his firm stance on the importance of the backstop arrangement in which Northern Ireland would continue to follow EU regulations which affect the island if no other solution is found.

But he said that was not his preferred option.

"So the way it can be changed is for us to develop option A, which is a really close trading relationship between the UK and the EU, so close that many of the things that are in the backstop may become unnecessary, if that makes sense," he said.

Asked if Irelands priorities were being put on the long finger, and in jeopardy of being side-lined for broader priorities such as the transitional period or financial settlement, he said

"There cannot be a withdrawal agreement without a solution to the Irish border and a hard border being avoided; and well be standing very firm on that."

He denied that Ireland could get left behind if it waits until October to settle the matter of the backstop.

"Weve absolute, unconditional support across the European Union, and across the European Union from all 27 member states that a hard border is avoided.

I havent seen any departure on that absolute position."

Mr Varadkar said it was vital that Europe-wide genuine solidarity for Ireland was forthcoming and consistent, in order to prove to skeptics that the EU was a club worth being a member of.

He said this should be the overriding principle, even if it means abandoning Britain.

There is a real understanding across the European Union that its important that the European Union demonstrates that it supports a small member state that is staying, even if it means not supporting a large member state that is leaving.

Meanwhile, Mr Varadkar has avoided apportioning blame to Russia over attempted assassination of former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury.

He was asked:" do you agree with the British government that Russia is to blame for the attack in Salisbury?"

He replied I think what happened at Salisbury was loathsome and reprehensible; and were going to stand right beside the UK on that issue.

An attempted assassination or a chemical attack no matter who does it is something that were going to condemn and condemn outright.

So far, the EU has failed to come up with a definite line on culpability for the attack.

The UK says the evidence and results of their investigation point the smoking gun squarely at Russia.

Mr Varadkar expressed Irelands full solidarity with Britain we should stick together.

As a fellow member of the European Union, were going to be in full solidarity with the United Kingdom, he said.

Were all members of the European Union; 28 of us. Were all small countries in many ways.

But there are big countries that surround us and we sometimes come in to conflict with them."Joint Agents Savills and Sherry FitzGerald John Rohan are guiding a price of 1.1m for a fully-let retail premises at the heart of Kilkenny City.

No 101 High Street comprises a three-storey, over-basement building which is currently occupied by Ladbrokes at ground floor level on a 21-year lease from 2004, paying a rent of 105,000 per annum.

The basement, first and second floors are occupied by Swans Chinese restaurant on a 21-year lease from 2005, paying a rent of 48,000. The entire property comprises 340 sq m.

Based on its overall current income, the property's 1.1m guide price reflects a net initial yield of 12.8pc.

No 101 High Street is well located at the junction of High Street and Rose Inn Street, and at the centre of Kilkenny City's retail and commercial district. The subject property has the benefit of a double frontage of 27 metres.

The joint agents say: "This sale represents an excellent opportunity for both local and private investors seeking a high yielding investment opportunity on a prime retail pitch in one of Ireland's premier tourist locations".London remains a popular choice for Irish investors, notwithstanding the decrease in the level of overseas investment in 2017

Irish investors are still devoting hundreds of millions of euro in overseas commercial property.

According to research by Cushman & Wakefield, more than $254.7m (207m) was invested abroad by Irish investors last year.

Among the areas targeted were the London Metropolitan area and Birmingham city areas in the UK; Berlin-Brandenburg and Rhine-Ruhr in Germany; and Boston Metropolitan area in the USA.

Retail properties were their favourites, accounting for 37pc of the spend, followed by offices with 37pc, and hotels with 16pc. In contrast with the latest global trends, industrial deals accounted for only 5pc.

In terms of types of investors, 35pc of the Irish share of the market was accounted for by developer and owner/operator purchasers, followed by investment managers (24pc); real estate operating companies (17pc); and equity funds (15pc), with the remainder split between financial companies and corporates.

But the level of overseas investment in 2017 reflected a 31pc drop on the 2016 figures, when almost $378m (307m) worth of overseas deals were done by Irish investors. That drop also meant that Irish investors fell from being ranked 36th in the world in terms of cross-border investment to being ranked 40th.

The survey, known as the Global Investment Atlas 2018, also showed that Ireland has slipped from 10th position to 22nd in terms of the top 40 cross-border investment targets.

Siobhan Corcoran, senior economist at the firm's research department in Dublin, attributes the drops to technical and other factors.

"Those figures are not just direct investment, but also include development sites," she explains. "The change in ranks are a little different due to revisions in the data.

The differences in rank are based on the change in transaction volumes between 2016 and 2017."

Cross-border investment into Ireland fell 64pc from over $6.26bn (5bn) in 2016 to $2.2bn (1.8bn) last year.

"While the drop is considerable, it should be noted that 2016 volumes were significantly boosted by a small number of large deals, namely the sales of Blanchardstown Shopping Centre for 950m, Liffey Valley Shopping Centre for 630m, and the One Spencer Dock office development for 240m, and therefore the ranking of 10 was artificially high. It is important to note that the data in this report relates to total value," Ms Corcoran says.

"Our own analysis of the market in 2017 suggests that smaller lot sizes were a key feature of the year. Approximately 209 deals occurred compared with 218 in 2016, reinforcing the continued health of the present market," she adds.

Europe was widely acknowledged to have experienced its healthiest economic performance in a decade. The European investment market grew by 8.3pc last year, the third strongest year on record. While all areas experienced improving volumes, Southern Europe led the pack, with transactions up by 19.2pc as economic improvements and reforms brightened the outlook.

Asian capital into the EMEA region almost doubled as it grew by 95pc on the year. Nevertheless, North American investors were the strongest global players in the EMEA region overall. Despite predictions to the contrary, the UK was the most-targeted market, with overall volumes closing the year up 3.9pc, which was greater than Germany.

London, Berlin and four other German cities were included on the list of top 10 EMEA cities targeted by investors.

The report shows Asian investors were the major driving force behind the record levels of global real estate investment in 2017, with money from the region accounting for more than half of all global capital deployed and 46pc of all cross-border activity.

The report points out that with the range of sources of capital within Asia still increasing, this is likely to signal a period of sustained dominance.

Despite the outperformance of the US economy, investment activity in North America declined last year, with a fall of 6.9pc overall as both global and domestic buyers drew back.

The Global Atlas shows that In terms of sector trends, the industrial segment underwent the strongest growth, with a 43pc growth in volumes, thanks to online retailers and delivery companies needing logistics space to accommodate deliveries to online shoppers.

Indeed, a separate Cushman & Wakefield report shows that Dublin's logistics property market is one of the most underpriced markets in Europe.

The firm's latest European Fair Value Index says "Logistics remains the most (investment) attractive sector, with 39pc of the markets classified as 'underpriced', and only two markets as 'fully priced'."

The most 'underpriced' European markets in Q4 2017 were Moscow (retail and office), Budapest (retail and logistics), and Dublin (logistics) - experiencing the highest medium term rental growth forecast and further yield compression expectations in 2018.

That places Dublin logistics as one of only five markets in one of only three European cities which offer such good value to investors.

Now logistics, or 'sheds' as they are sometimes called in the trade, may not offer the trophy appeal of offices or hotels, but they are increasing their appeal to investors.

This is also reflected in a CBRE global survey which shows that both industrial and residential sectors are generating stronger appeal for investors than the traditional trophy assets of retail.

CBRE's global 'Investor Intentions Survey' shows that the industrial sector is regarded as the preferred asset class by 32.7pc of the respondents from across the world.

"This reaffirms the status of Industrial as an institutional asset class and shows the confidence investors have in the fundamentals and structural growth," the survey says.

Office ranks second at 26.4pc, "but continues to be a popular asset class and investors in office properties indicated an intention to seek markets with strong economic fundamentals for rental growth and established markets with high liquidity, whereas for industrial, the attractive risk return profile of the market was investors' most important driver," the survey says.

While it may not be a surprise to many Irish buy-to-let investors, it is also encouraging at a time of a shortage of residential rental properties in Ireland that global investors are targeting increased amounts of funds towards that sector, including the student accommodation market.

CBRE's global survey shows that residential has recorded the steepest rise in popularity compared to 2017 and is the preferred asset class for 22pc of the respondents.

"Investors indicated the attractive risk-return profile and strong fundamentals driving rental growth as main motivations for investing in residential," it says.An Bord Pleanala has rejected a plan by developer Johnny Ronan's Ronan Group Real Estate (RGRE) to build Dublin's tallest building next to Tara Street station in Dublin city centre.

Mr Ronan's company, Tanat Ltd, had originally sought permission from Dublin City Council to build a 22-storey (88m) tower comprising offices, a hotel and rooftop restaurant. In refusing permission for the development, Dublin city planners said the proposed tower would have a "significant and detrimental visual impact" on the city's skyline.

In appealing that decision to An Bord Pleanala, Mr Ronan argued that his plans for the site had followed the council's own planning policies and objectives for the Tara Street scheme. He also pointed out that the Dublin City Development Plan 2016 identified the George's Quay area as a location for high buildings of over 50 metres. Mr Ronan's team noted too that the City Plan and George's Quay Local Area Plan (LAP) prepared by Dublin City Council's planners and adopted by the council includes a provision for an 88-metre-high building on the Tara Street site.

Having considered these and other arguments at an oral hearing held over several days last October, An Bord Pleanala came down on the side of Dublin City Council's planners in its decision.

In rejecting Mr Ronan's appeal, the board said it "considered that the proposed development, due to its scale and bulk, would seriously detract from the setting and character of the Custom House, one of the city's most important architectural set pieces, and would also adversely affect the River Liffey Conservation Area and the O'Connell Street and Environs Architectural Conservation Area".

The board also expressed its concern that the proposed building would "have a significant and detrimental visual impact on a number of important views and vistas in the city including from College Green and the Trinity College campus, as well as Lord Edward Street, the Five Lamps, Granby Row, Frederick Street North, Parnell Street North, Henrietta Street, Kildare Street and Harcourt Street."

In arriving at its decision, An Bord Pleanala also decided not to accept its own inspector's recommendation to grant permission for the development. Explaining this, the board said it did not agree with the inspector's view that the "overall effect of the building would be positive and would not affect the setting, context or character of the wider architecturally sensitive area". It also said it did not agree with the inspector's view that the proposed building would achieve "the overall aims and objectives as set out in the George's Quay Local Area Plan".

Commenting on the board's ruling yesterday, a spokesman for Ronan Group Real Estate said: "An Bord Pleanala's own inspector acknowledged that our scheme as proposed would have been a valuable addition to the architecture of Dublin's city centre. Dublin needs beautiful yet purposeful buildings along good transport links. Being adjacent to both the existing Tara Street Dart Station and the planed Metro station and Dart Interchange there is arguably no site in Dublin better served by transport links.

"Naturally we are disappointed by the decision but we are also bewildered that the board would reject a scheme designed to the very highest international standards, endorsed by its own inspector and fully compliant in terms of height with the recently-extended George's Quay Local Area Plan.

"Ronan Group and its advisors will consider the decision carefully before deciding on its next course of action."Farmers whose loans have been taken over by vulture funds are finding it extremely difficult to secure deals on their debts due to the level of security the funds hold.

Debt resolution consultant, Matt Carey, said vulture funds were invariably looking for full repayment of farmers' loans and were unwilling to consider either refinancing or restructuring of the borrowings.

Mr Carey pointed out that farmers and land owners differed from most other borrowers in that the level of security available, usually deeds to land, generally exceeded the value of their loans.

"Because the security held is usually far greater than the loan amount, the vulture funds are looking for full repayment and are unwilling to consider other options," Mr Carey said.

The issue was coming to a head because the 2.3bn of non-performing loans sold by Ulster Bank in October 2016 were now at either final negotiation stage or heading to court.

"You have to go through a process which usually involves around six stages of communication. That is now either coming to a successful end or the Vulture Funds are taking the legal route," Mr Carey said.

Mr Carey described the inflexible attitude of vulture funds as "outrageous" and that the actual consequences of the loan sell-off policy by the banks would become apparent as the year progressed.

Shane O'Loughlin of the ICMSA business committee said the association had warned of the problems of selling impaired loans to vulture funds.

"In many cases and given any kind of fair opportunity, very often farmers can and will work through their loans repayments with the appropriate restructuring. But the reality for many of the farmers dealing with vulture funds is that they are hitting a brick wall," Mr O'Loughlin said.French farmers drive their tractors on the A7 highway to protest changes in underprivileged farm areas mapping and against Mercosur talks, in PIerre-Benite near Lyon, France, February 21, 2018. Message reads, "Mercosur - The destruction of French agriculture". REUTERS/Emmanuel Foudrot

Brazilian President Michel Temer said on Wednesday that Mercosur and the European Union were a step away from signing a free trade agreement.

Temers comment, made during an economic council meeting in Brasilia, came a day after several European officials attending a G20 summit in Buenos Aires said that significant obstacles remained to the long-delayed trade deal.

Meanwhile, Spanish Economy Minister Roman Escolano told reporters on Tuesday that the final obstacles to a long-delayed trade deal between the European Union and South American trade bloc Mercosur can be overcome.

Spain is very clearly committed to bringing this project, which we have negotiated for many years, to an end in the coming weeks or months, Escolano said on the sidelines of a meeting of the G20 finance ministers and central bank governors in Buenos Aires, adding that he had discussed the deal with counterparts from the EU, Argentina, and Brazil.

Expand Close French farmers drive their tractors on the A7 highway to protest changes in underprivileged farm areas mapping and against Mercosur talks, in Solaize near Lyon, France, February 21, 2018. REUTERS/Emmanuel Foudrot / Facebook

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Whatsapp French farmers drive their tractors on the A7 highway to protest changes in underprivileged farm areas mapping and against Mercosur talks, in Solaize near Lyon, France, February 21, 2018. REUTERS/Emmanuel Foudrot

However, European officials said this week that significant obstacles remain to a long-delayed trade deal between the European Union and South American trade bloc Mercosur, even as South American officials expressed optimism a deal would be finalized soon.

On the sidelines of a gathering among the finance ministers and central bank governors of the G20 countries in Buenos Aires, an Argentine Treasury Ministry official said the talks would finish in the first half of this year. An initial target for December of last year was pushed back after EU countries said they needed more time.

There are very few points left, the official said, adding that Argentine Treasury Minister Nicolas Dujovne would meet with French finance minister Bruno Le Maire on Tuesday.

Farmers in France and some other EU members are resistant to an expected increase in beef and biofuel imports from Mercosur, which also includes Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay. Le Maire said European producers were concerned about unfair competition.

For the time (being) the negotiation on the Mercosur (deal) for different reasons is blocked, Le Maire told reporters. You cannot explain to a producer that he has to stick to very constraining rules in Germany, France, Spain or Italy, and well (import) exactly the same good that will not be produced in the same manner on another continent.

An EU diplomat said Mercosur resistance to European proposals on automobile exports and geographic product indicators were also sticking points. Europe has also pushed for its companies to gain better access to government procurement contracts within Mercosur.

Expand Close Trucks line up before cattle are loaded into the NADA vessel in the port of Santos, Brazil, December 2, 2017. Picture taken December 2, 2017. REUTERS/Paulo Whitaker / Facebook

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I blame the Mercosur side more for this as they spent all of their energy moaning about the lack of ambition only to find that they hadnt cleared their lines with their domestic producers, the source said, adding that the issue was not beef.

An official in Brazils foreign ministry disputed Le Maires characterization of the negotiations as blocked, noting that France was not a party to the negotiations, led by the European Commission.

IFA President Joe Healy said Agriculture Commissioner Phil Hogan cannot allow EU Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom to make any additional offers to the Brazilians in the Mercosur trade negotiations.

Joe Healy said "Commissioner Malmstrom has already gone way too far in her reckless sell out of European beef farmers for the benefit of Brazilian big business and the European auto sector.

The IFA President accused Commissioner Malmstrom of being naive and of being misled by the Brazilians in the trade talks.

The only thing we have seen from Commissioner Malmstrom in these negotiations is give away after give away of the European beef sector, with little or nothing in return. The Commissioner has already capitulated to the Brazilians in these negotiations, moving from 45,000t to 70,000t and now reports from Paraguay that the Brazilians are looking for way more.

Expand Close French farmers drive their tractors on the A7 highway to protest changes in underprivileged farm areas mapping and against Mercosur talks, in PIerre-Benite near Lyon, France, February 21, 2018. Message reads, "Mercosur - The destruction of French agriculture". REUTERS/Emmanuel Foudrot / Facebook

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Whatsapp French farmers drive their tractors on the A7 highway to protest changes in underprivileged farm areas mapping and against Mercosur talks, in PIerre-Benite near Lyon, France, February 21, 2018. Message reads, "Mercosur - The destruction of French agriculture". REUTERS/Emmanuel Foudrot

IFA National Livestock Chairman Angus Woods said Commissioner Hogan has to face down the Trade Commissioner and insist that the EU does not give any more concessions to the Brazilians.

He accused the Trade Commissioner of blatantly undermining European policy and values on the environment and animal welfare.

One arm of the Commission is prepared to do this deal and undermine the environment and animal welfare, while European farmers are asked to play their part on climate change and maintain the highest welfare standards.

He said Irish beef production is four times more carbon efficient than Brazil where growth is driven on the back of destruction of the rainforests.

The negotiating strategy flies in the face of everything that the EU stands for, and what is happening in terms of Brexit. Beef is more important to Ireland than any other member state. Commissioner Hogan cannot agree to a Mercosur deal involving a major increase in substandard beef imports from Brazil at the same time as we face into the serious challenges of Brexit, he said.

Additional reporting from ReutersThe Kells Viaduct on the Ring of Kerry where the Dublin to Cahersiveen train passed by Dingle Bay. The last train to cross the bridge was in 1960. The route is one of the proposed 'greenway routes' for walkers and cyclists.

LANDOWNERS who were initially opposed to plans to extend the Great Southern Trail from West Limerick into Listowel when they were first mooted are now fully on board with the project.

The Kerryman reports that it's one of two major developments in the project announced last week that are set to realise an attraction many believe will be worth millions in tourist euros annually to the North Kerry region.

This first official indication of the landowners' change of view comes as massive relief to the thousands of keen walkers and cyclists in the region supporting the project amid deep uncertainty in recent years.

The other major development announced last week is that Kerry County Council has now started designing the new route, having cleared the old railway line on which the greenway will run of vegetation in recent months.

It was a visit to the Deise Greenway in Waterford that convinced the landowners of the potential for a trail design that would address all their concerns. Their subsequent change of opinion was this week credited by the Authority as the key factor in bringing the project to such an advanced stage.

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"A key factor in getting the clearance works completed has been the co-operation and assistance of the land owners along the route of the old railway line. A committee of relevant landowners, the 'Landowners on the North Kerry Abandoned Railway Line' group has been instrumental in liaising with the Council and facilitating the works undertaken to date. The group arranged for several farmers along the line to provide access points to the line for the Council's plant and machinery," Council spokesperson Owen O'Shea said.

Landowners' initial objections were due to the lack of any plan providing for their concerns, The Kerryman understands. They feared the impact on their operations could have been disastrous with walkers and cyclists effectively passing through busy farms in a scenario that raised public liability fears.

However, the new route will now be treated as a public road to all intents and purposes, and with guaranteed provision of underpasses/overpasses for cattle and plant machinery; privacy screening and more landowners are finally happy for the whole thing to proceed.

Indeed, it was the landowners who first produced just such a plan to the Council after meeting counterparts in Waterford whose initial concerns were fully allayed in the end.Former top National Hunt jockey Charlie Swan has seen his training company go into voluntary liquidation. Mr Swan is pictured above taking a tumble on Istabraq, with whom he won three Champion Hurdles

As Cheltenham week reaches its peak tomorrow with the Gold Cup, one of its greatest participants, jockey Charlie Swan, has seen his training company go into voluntary liquidation.

Based in Co Tipperary, Mr Swan confirmed that the company - Charlie Swan Racing Ltd - was connected to his training activities, which he ceased around 2015. The company had 138,000 shareholder deficit at the end of 2016, with net current liabilities of 232,000 at the time.

Mr Swan, a three-times winner of the Cheltenham Champion Hurdles on the famed Istabraq, made a 123,000 settlement as a tax defaulter in 2015. He had announced earlier that year that he would quit training.

Speaking to the Irish Independent, Mr Swan said that the overheads associated the training were too high to make it viable in the long-term. He said it was "too difficult" without having deep pockets and that he was unlikely to ever train again, despite having been reasonably successful. "I really enjoyed it," he said.

However, Mr Swan said he will continue his long-term relationship with horseracing tycoon JP McManus, who owns Istabraq, helping him to buy horses. "I buy foals and sell them as three-year-olds and help JP a little bit buying horses in France and things like that," he said.

A legendary national hunt jockey, Mr Swan rode his first Cheltenham winner on Trapper John in the 1990 World Hurdle. The horse was trained by Mouse Morris. In 1993, he rode four horses to victory at Cheltenham - Montelado, Fissure Seal, Shawiya and Shuil Ar Aghaidh.

In 1994, he had three wins at the festival, on Danoli, Time for a Run, and Mucklemeg.

Mr Swan said this year's festival, with heavy going, should favour the Irish contingent. "It plays into the hands of the Irish horses because we're more used to running on it," he said.The European Commission yesterday launched proposals to levy a tax on around 100 major multinational tech giants - despite opposition from Ireland, the United States and the OECD.

Ireland faces a loss of around 150m-200m a year in corporation tax income if the proposals come into force, according to Joe Tynan, head of tax at PwC Ireland.

That's because the digital turnover tax would be charged where customers live, so will mostly be collected by big countries, unlike corporation tax, which is charged on profits and paid where a business is headquartered.

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has described the levy as a "knee-jerk measure just to be seen to be doing something sooner".

Expand Close Joe Tynan, head of tax at PwC Ireland. Photo: Maxwells / Facebook

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The Taoiseach claimed Germany, where he met Chancellor Angela Merkel on Tuesday, has reservations about the plan.

"I think it's fair to say that our positions were closer than I might have expected before I came here", said Mr Varadkar after an official visit to meet Mrs Merkel in Berlin.

"Certainly we both agree that it's important to get this right, and just introducing a short-term measure without fully thinking it through; without understanding the implications on how it might backfire, wouldn't be the right approach."

The Commission said an extra 5bn in tax would be raised, however that would eat into tech giants' taxable profits - including those taxed here.

The proposals can only be adopted with backing from all EU member states, making the Irish opposition potentially decisive.

The proposed tax is so selective that Google and Facebook, which make their money from online platforms and advertising will be hit, while Amazon will escape the levy altogether, Mr Tynan said.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) said the decision to use "interim measures" to tax online firms could have "adverse consequences". The US warned the scheme would "inhibit growth and ultimately harm workers and consumers," even before it was announced.

However, the G5 group of France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom, said it welcomed the move. Those big countries stand to gain most from the focus on collecting the levy where customers live.

Finance Minister Paschal Donohoe said Ireland will work with others to "critically assess the proposals from the Commission", but noted the OECD views.

Under the scheme, the Commission intends to levy 3pc of revenue earned from certain digital activities that it thinks are missed under current international tax structures.

Revenue generated through targeted advertising is a particular focus.

The levy will also target sales from digital platforms that connect buyers and sellers - such as travel website Airbnb.

The Commission also wants EU states to get a cut of income from the sale of personal data.

Firms such as Facebook and Google with global annual revenues above 750m and taxable EU revenue above 50m, will meet the levy's threshold.

Critics say the plan will be seen as an attack on mostly US companies at a time of escalating trade tension.

But European Commissioner for Economics Pierre Moscovici said European, Asian and American companies will be affected - around 100 in total.Dublin and London-listed oil and exploration company PetroNeft has announced details of its 2018 drilling programme.

The company, which operates in the Tomsk Oblast, Russia, will start drilling a delineation well at the Cheremshanskoye oil field in Licence 67 where it is a 50pc owner-opeator.

The C-4 well is designed to further delineate and de-risk the Cheremshanskoye field in advance of field development.

Three prior wells have been drilled on the field, most recently in 2011 by PetroNeft, and oil has been identified and tested in four different intervals in the field.

SSK Drilling, a drilling contractor with operations throughout Russia, has been awarded the drilling contract.

The well is being drilled under the joint venture agreement with PetroNefts partner for Licence 67, Arawak Energy on a 50:50 basis.

PetroNeft said that their proportion of the well costs will be funded from existing resources.

In respect of Licence 61, where the company is also a 50pc owner-operator, PetroNeft said that it would continue to test the S-373 and S-375s wells for the remainder of the 2018 winter season.

The data from the tests will then be used to plan for future development at Sibkrayevskoye, which requires a 26km pipeline back to the Lineynoye Central Processing Unit, PetroNeft said.

Meanwhile the company said that it was also planning to re-evaluate the development of the West Lineynoye L-8 Lobe. This is based on the good results from the two horizontal wells at South Arbuzovskoye in 2016 where the company said it has similar thin pays with "good reservoir properties" in the continuous J1-1 interval.

"We look forward to drilling the C-4 well which we feel has great potential as it will test multiple targets up-dip from nearby wells that have already tested oil in the same intervals," Dennis Francis, chief executive of PetroNeft, said.

"This is the first well to be drilled by the Company based on the modern 3D seismic data acquired in 2014."

Earlier this year the company announced that it had agreed a loan facility for up to US$2m (1.6m) with Swedish company Petrogrand.

The loan facility, which will mature at the end of this year, will be used for general corporate purposes and to finance a potential drilling programme in 2018, the company said.Permanent TSB's chief executive Jeremy Masding mounted another defence this morning of the bank's plans to offload owner-occupier loans to third party investors, insisting existing legislation offers sufficiently robust protections to consumers.

The State-backed bank has come under fire recently for its decision to launch a 3.7bn loan portfolio sale that includes the sale of 14,000 owner-occupier mortgages.

In arguments extensively rehearsed at the bank's recently released annual results, Mr Masding stressed PTSB needs to reduce its stack of non-performing loans "dramatically and quickly" if it is to prosper and "support the ongoing economic development of the country".

He said the ECB's stance on non-performing loans (NPLs) is clear and said its guidance makes a "loan sale inevitable".

PTSB's soured exposures remain close to five times the recommended level set by Brussels, at 26pc of the overall loan book.

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Mr Masding pointed out taxpayers did not bail out the bank to "support a blanket debt forgiveness approach."

He also emphasised that many lenders have resorted to loan portfolio sales and argued the strategy is "characteristic of a functioning mortgage market and can facilitate greater flexibility in dealing with customers in arrears."

He said that since the launch of bank's mega home loan sale, known as Project Glas, "much of the commentary has focused on customer protection when their loans are sold.

But he pointed out "the Governor of the Central Bank of Ireland has confirmed in recent weeks that where a loan is sold, the protections "travel with the loan" and that "borrowers are protected in accordance with the consumer protection framework."Ornua, Ireland's largest exporter of dairy products, has said that it expects greater potential demand for its products in China to come from food services, rather than premium branded sales.

Announcing its results for 2017 yesterday, Ornua said that the food services part of the market in China was growing very rapidly, however the part of the market that is not growing is the premium high-priced retail products segment.

Demand for the group's products continued at pace in both Germany and the US last year, where the group reported a record year for Kerrygold in both markets, with the brand recording double-digit volume growth in each market.

During the year the group, which is made up of 33 dairy co-ops, expanded its German production facility, with total investment in the facility now standing at 60m. Meanwhile, Ornua reported a record year for its ingredients division in North America.

With Brexit on the horizon, Ornua said that the best scenario would be no change to the current situation, while the worst scenario for its members would be a hard Border and Word Trade Organisation (WTO) tariffs.

"If full EU tariffs were brought in, the penalty or levy on cheddar would be over 1,670 per tonne and no consumer in Britain or anywhere else is going to stomach or eat that extra cost, so it will be a wipeout scenario for the majority of your exports to Britain," said Ornua CEO Kevin Lane.

"We are already feeling the affects in that our sales into Britain and our profitability returns are affected by 12-15pc."

On the subject of genetically modified foods, Ornua said that in some of its key markets there are GM-free products, however they are not selling for any premium over Kerrygold today.

"It is something we are having a look at because of Ireland's position on imported feed ingredients. It is something of a challenge in declaring all of Kerrygold GM-free, but it is something that we are evaluating at this time."

On the issue of milk prices, the group said that it was budgeting 28-30c per litre including Vat for 2018. However, it warned that there was a health warning on this in the form of market volatility.

Overall the group announced record revenues of 2.1bn for 2017, an 18pc increase year-on-year.

Operating profit at the group was 35m, up almost a third on the 2016 performance, according to the group's financial results.

Meanwhile, profit before tax increased by 84pc to 29.1m.Q. I have a great new business idea and I am at a pretty advanced stage of getting ready to launch. I am however, totally confused by the business aspects like should I be a sole trader or a company and how to handle my VAT etc. Can you advise?

A. Far too many people start businesses without getting into the detail. Everyone tends to get excited about their idea and how customers might interact with it. For some the business aspects are not thought through and leave them with a catalogue of problems.

Your Local Enterprise Office will have a raft of advice services, and mentoring. I have heard that the LEO Start Your Own Business programme is excellent and will answer all of your questions above, plus many more. You would also benefit from mentoring. This would allow you to probe your project in detail with an expert who would interrogate the concept and ask some all-important questions of you.

You should be taking certain actions yourself including getting a good accountant, and talking to other people who have set up their own businesses. You obviously recognise the importance of seeking help and that is a great attribute. Never be afraid to seek help.

Q. I applied for an export grant to help me cover the cost of new pack design. This was refused by the agency I went to and they said my export business case in the application was too weak. I am annoyed and don't have time to be filling out forms, is there some other avenue open to me?

A. While I can understand your frustration, and your perception that the agency you applied through has disallowed you unfairly, I am critical of your attitude. Government funding is set aside to support businesses and other initiatives. It is the job of the agencies that this is given to, to give it out. It is not their role or wish to hold onto the money and deny private enterprise opportunities.

Clearly you did a poor job at completing the form and you seem to resent the fact that you have to spend time doing this. No agency, or any other entity is going to give you money based on insufficient information. While form filling can be a bit of a nuisance, it does provide a means to assess your business. If you are poor at articulating plans, or not willing to put the time in, it is unlikely the person reading it will get a full understanding - increasing the chances of your application being rejected.

You need to change your mind-set if you expect others to give you money.

Q. I run a fashion retail outlet. During the recession I cut my margins significantly to keep people coming through the door. That worked, however the business has not been profitable and I am still struggling. Can you give me any advice?

A. I am afraid your question is all too common. Your decision to tighten margins but keep attracting customers was exactly the right thing to do and that has been evidenced by the retention of your customer base. You would be in a far worse place had you lost all of your customers.

Things have moved on and while not all parts of the country show the same level of consumer confidence, I now get positive indicators from most parts. While you might be nervous about what I am about to recommend, you need to do a full review of your model and identify where there might be opportunities to improve margins on certain products. An opportunity exists to recover some lost margin.

In parallel, conduct a survey of all of your competitors. It might also be an opportunity to bring in new fashion labels which allow you to have a different price positioning for these based on the exclusivity, design etc.

I know dozens of businesses who have had to take the same action and several months after report that it was a smooth transition to their new price positioning, with little or no resistance.Setting the digital age of consent at 13 means teens are vulnerable to online data breaches and political manipulation, a leading psychologist warned.

Mary Aiken warned that "our Government ministers are also comfortable with 13-year-old children becoming the target of malicious and manipulative psychological operations".

The Government has formed the view that 13 is the right age for children to be allowed to participate online, but this sparked a backlash, with many calling for the age to be set at 16.

Yesterday, the Irish Independent reported on new research showing adolescents experienced greater unhappiness through their teenage years if they went online too young. In fact, girls who spent an hour or more on social media by the age of 10 show lower well-being by the time they reached 15.

Dr Aiken, the director of the CyberPsychology Research Network, said: "This study provides yet more evidence of the negative impact of age-inappropriate use of social media by children.

"It is incredulous that in the face of the growing body of evidence highlighting the important role of parental monitoring and use of social media, that this Government is putting a digital age of consent policy in place that allows Irish 13-year-olds to be autonomous, unmonitored and unprotected on social media platforms."

She said this was particularly important given recent revelations about users' data being gathered and exploited for commercial or political ends.

Professor Barry O'Sullivan, director of the Insight Centre for Data Analytics at University College Cork, added: "We really need to introduce policies that protect children online, technologies that make clear what is real and what is fake, and technologies that are sensitive to the developmental state of young people."Adrian Weckler [AW]: A criticism your office - and that of your predecessor Billy Hawke - has faced over the years is that it adopts a collaborative or consultative role with the biggest tech companies in Ireland like Facebook and Google compared with other data protection regimes.

Helen Dixon [HD]: I'd go further by saying that I don't think there's anything wrong with a consultative approach. I would go so far as to say it's absolutely necessary. And this is well-documented in terms of theory of regulation, and particularly in relation to regulation that's based on a principles-based framework law.

The academic Julia Black, from the London School of Economics, talks about something called regulatory conversations. And regulatory conversations are absolutely essential, in terms of allowing organisations to set out their understanding of the principles, define the very specific circumstances in which they need to apply those principles of data protection law and seek guidance from the regulator in relation to how they're applying the principles. So, even Article 29, which is the grouping of European data protection authorities, has moved now in this direction of consultation.

In fact, the general data protection regulation obliges the successor to Article 29, the new European Data Protection Board, to consult. So consultation is absolutely necessary because otherwise you have just got very generic and laudable principles ,but you've no means of applying them to the real world.

AW: But what about specific services or specific new features that a company like Facebook will want to introduce? They may want to see whether it will pass muster with their lead European regulator. Does this happen and how often does it happen?

HD: It does happen and it happens very regularly with the big companies that we supervise. As I said to you before, they're going through so many mergers and acquisitions, they're adding new, big and significant products at the rate of knots in some cases. So we have very frequent contacts with these companies over the last year, especially in the roll up to GDPR. There are all sorts of examples.

So they may consult us, and our consulting is currently in relation to their new transparency notices, their privacy notices, how they're going to display them on different devices. And they will take all sorts of guidance and feedback from us in relation to whether we think it hits the mark that the GDPR intended, whether the notice is too inaccessible at any point as an individual navigates the service, whether there is insufficient information provided up-front and too much being left for in context notices to the user. So, we're providing that sort of feedback on an ongoing basis.

AW: Last year, you spoke of increased resources and an eventual doubling of your office's headcount. Since then, though, we've had massive expansion in the tech companies already here and dozens more big tech firms arrive. And then there's the GDPR coming in May. Do you have what you require?

HD: We should have about 140 people by the end of this year. Our budget has more than quadrupled, up to 11.7m this year. So we have been building and building, not just in terms of numbers of staff but with some specialist recruitment. We've recruited very key new members to our legal team, our technology team and in skills that we didn't have - such as business analytics.

AW: So is that enough?

HD: Well it's important to point out that we're now among the top tier of highly-resourced data protection authorities in the EU in terms of resourcing, the annual budget that we have to deploy and in terms of the number of staff that we have. So we're behind the UK, France and Germany in terms of numbers, but we're up there just in the tier right below them. The UK Data Protection Authority is the biggest data protection authority in the world.

AW: Surely with the companies located here, that's the way it should be?

HD: Yes. As for data protection authorities in Europe, in the last survey that I saw, they averaged about 68 staff so they're not huge. And the question of whether they're resourced adequately is a question really for the member states in Europe. Is this the importance that a member state attaches to the regulatory and supervision role under the GDPR? And are we all adequately resourced?

I would say no and I would say no data protection authority has enough resources in terms of the importance we would attach to the issues that fall out of personal data processing and the types of risks and harms that can occur for individuals in terms of discrimination, identity theft, loss of reputation and unfair decision-making.

So we will be making the case to add further resources and particularly in the circumstances, as you say, that in Ireland we're supervising the biggest internet companies in the world. And equally, I would think there's a case for elevating the resources of data protection authorities across the EU.

AW: One of the biggest global data breaches in recent years was Yahoo, where three billion email accounts were compromised. As that company has its international office here, you had said your office would investigate. What is the status of that investigation?

HD: Yes, we did conduct an investigation in relation to that very large-scale Yahoo breach, or two breaches in fact. The controller for European users is located in Ireland. Under the Irish Data Protection Acts, the obligations on that controller based in Ireland where it was transferring the data back to Yahoo Inc in the US, was to ensure that the processor, being Yahoo Inc in the US, had appropriate safeguards in place to safeguard and secure the data.

The breaches in this case occurred from Yahoo Inc in the US rather from the Dublin-based controller. And so we have conducted a lengthy investigation over the last year in relation to the measures that were in place, the active oversight that was taken by the controller in Ireland over what safeguards were put in place by the processor. And we're just at the concluding stages of the report and the findings and we're serving that on Yahoo EMEA in Ireland.

AW: So that's imminent?

HD: That's imminent.

AW: In the US, courts are clearing the way for individual citizens to sue Yahoo over the data breach. In a post-GDPR environment, is that the kind of thing that might happen here? If another Yahoo were to happen, or indeed if people are only discovering now about their Yahoo accounts being hacked, could we see individual citizens taking legal action on that basis here?

HD: I think we certainly could see individuals taking legal action on that basis. It would, of course, be a matter entirely for the courts in Ireland then to assess what quantum would be put on compensation or whether the breach was merely technical. In other words, whether there was a threat of access to the accounts but the loss was mitigated substantially by the company once the breach was discovered, or whether there has been actual loss and consequences suffered by the individuals.

So, that will be for the courts to assess the nature and the gravity of the loss for individuals and then to put a quantum in terms of compensation, if any, they would award.

AW: But in Ireland we don't really have a history of class-action suits.

HD: No, and there won't be class actions in Ireland under the GDPR either.

AW: Yahoo argued that it could be an attack by a nation state. Other big companies in the same situation try to plead the same reason as a get-out-of jail card, arguing that they can't be expected to compete with the cyberwarfare resources of rogue states. Will the GDPR do anything to change the basis of arguing that excuse?

HD: You're right, we hear a lot about these state-sponsored actors that are alleged to be behind some of these larger-scale breaches, particularly as concerns internet and infrastructure companies. It won't, per se, be a get-out-of-jail card. So, where a breach has occurred and it's not contested that it has occurred, they'll likely be a presumption of an infringement of the GDPR in those circumstances.

But when we come to look under Article 83 of the GDPR at what sanction we would apply, it sets out a number of mitigation criteria which we would be obliged to take into account. One of the other things we would have to take into account is whether the controller had applied every last safeguard, state-of-the-art security measures and taken every conceivable action possible.

We haven't, I suppose, come across a company to date in the course of our investigations where we could say 'Well, they've had state-of-the-art processes and systems and taken every last action that was possible', but the theoretical possibility is there.

AW: Even with all those billion-dollar multinational companies with all the resources they have?

HD: As I said, it's a theoretical possibility that if they have applied objectively demonstrable state-of-the-art security and there really appears to have been nothing further they could have done, that would certainly be a mitigation criteria. But, we haven't come across it.

You'll have seen in the annual report that we published recently for 2017 that, particularly in relation to medium-sized organisations, we're still seeing basic cybersecurity hygiene that's very poor in a lot of cases. This is the failure to keep systems and patches updated, poor password-setting, failure to use all of the layered authentication options that are available and leaving systems set at their default settings.

AW: The public services card has proven to be controversial, with some charging that it's a national identity card by stealth. It seems that public bodies are starting to ask for it when we apply for state documents, such as passports. What's your view?

HD: We have an investigation under way in relation to the public services card which we launched late last year. What triggered us to launch the investigation was that it suddenly became prevalent for it to be mandatory to produce the public services card to the exclusion of any other form of identity for a whole range of government services, including the driver theory test now incoming, the driver's licence, the passport and so on. And so we sought to open an investigation to look at what the legal basis for the public services card is and to look at the legal basis for compelling it to the exclusion of any other form of identity in relation to the procuring of services from the State.

We also want to look at what its transparency to the public is in relation to what's being collected, what type of data is on the card, what precisely it's being used for and with what type of government agencies it's being shared with. It seemed to us, from queries that we were receiving to our office, that there wasn't sufficient transparency and so we opened an investigation to look at the range of these issues. The first principles of data protection are lawful and fair processing and we're really going back to first principles with this investigation.

When Irish Water was established there were a number of Irish Water Services acts and it was immediately obvious if you read those acts how the database for Irish Water was being formed, by collecting data from a number of different government databases. But with this particular implementation and rollout by government, it's not immediately apparent for a member of the public where you'd go to look if you were curious and wanted to understand the law underpinning it.

The law is spread over a number of pieces of primary legislation, social welfare legislation and a number of pieces of secondary legislation in some cases. But it's not enough to have a legal basis, you have to be very transparent and clear with the public as to why the data is being collected. And it would also be necessarily to justify why a certain form of identity, to the exclusion of any other form of identity, is necessary in the circumstances.

AW: We are talking about the public sector in government services. If Ryanair or Aer Lingus or other big private organisations start accepting it as a means of identification, or pubs or nightclubs start accepting it, it kind of becomes a runaway thing on its own doesn't it? And whether or not it's required for public sector use, if every single big organisation accepts it as an alternative to a driver's licence or a passport, eventually the public sector will probably accept it as well, right?

HD: I suppose you're getting into speculation that's beyond the scope of the investigation we're conducting. But what I would say is that you talked about alternatives. One of the points we're looking at is the fact that alternatives are not being recognised, it's mandatory to the exclusion of any currently known alternatives. That becomes the point that is significant.

AW: Isn't there a basic issue of taste here, too? In continental Europe, many countries don't have any problem with a national identity card. It's regarded as a fact of life that makes administration more efficient. Is it our common law heritage that makes us more suspicious of the notion of a national identity card? Is it a dislike of being stopped in the street and being asked to produce papers?

HD: You're right, there are national identity cards in the vast majority of EU member states. And, in many cases, they have that characteristic that they have to be carried at all times. And so in common law countries like New Zealand, the UK and Ireland there has, as you said, always been a view that's opposed to national identity cards. That's not the aim of our investigation. It's not the role of the Data Protection Authority to dictate what government policy should or shouldn't be, but to the extent that a card of this nature, and the SAFE 2 registration system itself, involves the collection and processing and sharing of significant amounts of personal data, it must be lawfully collected and there must be transparency about it.

AW: There has also been a lot of commentary about Privacy Shield, the successor EU-US agreement to Safe Harbour, which was struck down by the European Court of Justice for not adequately protecting our European personal data rights. The European group of data protection authorities that you're a member of has been critical of Privacy Shield and has sought clarification on the US side with regard to an ombudsman and other matters. Hasn't it gone so far as to suggest that this treaty might follow Safe Harbour in being referred again to the European Court if nothing happens?

HD: Yes, the appointment of a permanent person in that position is one of the issues. We're still in discussions and waiting to hear updates in relation to progress from the US authorities. That will happen and we'll get something of an update in the next couple of weeks and then it will be a matter for reviewing. I think, incidentally, what that statement from Article 29 said, in relation to a referral to the CJEU was that a national data-protection authority would bring a matter before its national courts.

AW: So that could be you, bringing it before the High Court here?

HD: It could, I suppose.

AW: Will it be you?

HD: It's probably not useful to speculate at this point until we get an update from the US authorities and look at where the various deficiencies that were identified are at.

AW: One of the underlying issues, surely, is US authorities continuing to harvest European citizens' personal data though, isn't it? Do we really believe that's going to stop? And assuming it isn't, doesn't Privacy Shield and any successor face difficult odds?

HD: As you know, we took a case in the Irish High Court in relation to another mechanism for transfers, the standard contractual clauses case which is used not just to transfer to the US but to other third countries. Justice Caroline Costello agreed with the position we took when she issued her judgement on the 3rd of October last year and agreed to make a reference to the Court of Justice of the European Union in relation to the validity of those clauses. And she conducted a hearing in January of this year with the various parties to the case including Max Schrems, Facebook, our office and other participants in terms of formulating the questions.

I think some of those questions around surveillance access and then the appropriate safeguards that have to be in place when data is being transferred will fall out of that case once the reference is made. We anticipate it is likely to be this month when Justice Costello will make the reference.

AW: But are we being a little naive in thinking that the CIA and NSA are going to stop tapping into our data streams?

HD: I suppose I have to be careful because we conduct investigations into these types of issues and we have to follow fair procedures and due process and adduce the facts as they exist. So I don't really want to comment along the lines that you're suggesting. But I suppose what I would say, which probably concurs really with the point you are making, is that there's likely to be a need not just for litigation in these cases, bringing the matters to the CJEU, but also a need for political solutions as well as legal solutions to make transfers sustainable and balanced against rights of individuals in the longer term.

AW: Is there an issue with privacy law keeping up with technology?

HD: I think the GDPR is going to go a long way in that direction. One key thing for us in terms of these companies that monetise personal data is the issue of transparency.

There has always been the complaint that users aren't entirely clear that that is the deal. We're talking to the big companies about layered privacy notices, better visualisation capability for users in terms of data that's being collected and how it's going to be used.

But there are a huge amount of players. Whatever about the big companies like Google and Facebook, who write blogs and discuss their processes, there are other players in ad tech where we just don't have that visibility. There are more nefarious operators, individuals we aren't aware of. So there's a whole issue around surfacing up what is going on in that space and trying to rationalise it in some way, so that ultimately the individual service user has some transparency and control which undoubtedly they don't at the moment. If we visit one website we may discover we've been connected with 24 other websites based on cookies that are dropped.

We expect to see a marked change in how transparency is done by these internet companies under GDPR and we're waiting for the big reveal from a lot of them.

Editor's note: this interview was conducted before the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data controversy.

To hear more of Helen Dixon, download 'The Big Tech Show' podcast on Soundcloud, iTunes or independent.ie/podcasts'The airline is massively expanding its transatlantic network to try to win market share, with routes between Canada and Europe starting in July' Photo: Bloomberg

Norwegian Air has raised 1.3bn crowns (137m) in a share sale to help fund its expansion and cope with higher fuel costs after warning of a larger than expected loss in the current quarter.

The budget airline is trying to crack the transatlantic market by undercutting established rivals but faces pressures to control costs and shore up its balance sheet.

Its fate rests on the still unproven strategy of adapting the model of low-cost short-haul travel to longer routes. A share price decline of more than a third over the past year indicates that some investors have doubts.

The company, whose CEO is Bjorn Kjos, said yesterday that it had sold shares at 155 crowns each, a 9.7pc discount to Tuesday's closing price. Its shares fell 3.1pc immediately after the announcement.

"The equity issuance provides breathing space," said Davy Stockbrokers, which has a neutral rating on the stock.

The airline is massively expanding its transatlantic network to try to win market share, with routes between Canada and Europe starting in July. Its Norwegian Air International unit launched flights between Ireland and the United States last year, and it is expanding its capacity on those routes this summer.

It recently launched flights from Britain to Argentina, and will also fly within the south American country.

It plans to raise its capacity by 40pc in 2018.

The company said it could raise a further 200 million crowns (21m) in an issue for investors who did not take part in the private placement. That would take the total of new shares issued to 9.67m, a 27.6pc increase from before the placement.

"The results of the share issue show investors have enormous confidence in the company. And they should not, because Norwegian Air is losing an enormous amount of money," said Karl-Johan Molnes, chief analyst at brokerage Norne Securities.

Norwegian Air warned this week of a wider-than-expected first-quarter loss.

The airline said its first-quarter pre-tax loss would come in at 2.6bn crowns (273m), versus a 1.8bn crown loss in the corresponding period last year, and fuel expenses were 12pc higher than anticipated so far this year.Eamon O Cuiv was one of 21 Fianna Fail politicians to vote against staging an abortion referendum. Photo: Frank McGrath

There was shock in the Dail yesterday after 21 Fianna Fail TDs voted against the staging of an abortion referendum.

The second stage of a bill allowing for a referendum was passed by a large majority of the Dail.

It later passed through committee stage and was sent to the Seanad for consideration.

A Dail majority of 110 to 32 will allow the Government to press ahead with plans to hold the vote before the end of May.

Just two Fine Gael TDs voted against the Bill, Peter Fitzpatrick and Sean Barrett. However, there was surprise around Leinster House at the number of Fianna Fail TDs who voted against. They were; Bobby Aylward, Declan Breathnach, Mary Butler, Jackie Cahill, Pat Casey, Shane Cassells, Jack Chambers, John Curran, Pat 'The Cope' Gallagher, Sean Haughey, Marc MacSharry, John McGuinness, Aindrias Moynihan, Margaret Murphy O'Mahony, Eugene Murphy, Kevin O'Keeffe, Frank O'Rourke, Eamon O Cuiv, Eamon Scanlon, Brendan Smith and Niamh Smyth.

A senior party source said: "It's ridiculous. This could will come back to haunt us down the line.

"Everybody was fine with people having different opinions - but we didn't expect that many to vote against simply having a referendum."

Eight Independent TDs voted against. Sinn Fein TD Carol Nolan was the only one of its TDs to vote against party lines on the issue. She was suspended from the party for three months after a meeting with party whip Aengus O Snodaigh.

Meath TD Peadar Toibin was not present but had previously made it clear he opposes repeal of the Eighth Amendment. A Sinn Fein spokesman said he had made the party aware he would be unavailable yesterday because of a "family matter".

Last night Mr Toibin backed calls for a referendum. "Personally, as people know, I strongly oppose the Eighth Amendment being deleted from the Irish Constitution. However, at this stage I believe that there should be a referendum."

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said there would not be a second referendum on the issue in the lifetime of this Government.

Mr Varadkar told the Dail: "The Government will respect the result of the referendum so if the result is passed I hope people respect that. If the referendum is defeated then the Government will respect it."

A May vote has been targeted with the intention of maximising the number of people who can participate before students leave for the summer holidays.

It came as Social Democrats TD Catherine Murphy called on Kerry Independent Danny Healy-Rae to withdraw "hurtful" comments he made to Health Minister Simon Harris about people who terminated a pregnancy after the diagnosis of a fatal foetal abnormality.

"I surely do know that the little dead baby did not feel very loved and it would make not a difference whether the baby was in the boot of a car in London or the north of Ireland or the south of Ireland," Mr Healy-Rae said during the debate on Tuesday night.An Anglo Irish Bank dealer said to a colleague who queried an interbank loan: "Do you want the answer to tell the auditor, or do you want the answer?"

Mike D'Arcy told a jury his comment on a phone recording about a deal with Irish Life and Permanent during the financial crisis was "a joke". Mr D'Arcy, who worked in Anglo's treasury department, was giving evidence in the trial of the bank's former CEO, David Drumm.

Mr Drumm (51) has pleaded not guilty to conspiring to defraud Anglo investors by dishonestly creating the impression that the bank's customer deposits were 7.2bn larger than they were. He is alleged to have conspired with Anglo's former finance director Willie McAteer and head of capital markets John Bowe, as well as then-CEO of Irish Life and Permanent, Denis Casey, and others. The case centres on a series of interbank loans between Anglo and ILP in September 2008.

Mr Drumm also denies false accounting, by providing misleading information to the market. Yesterday, Mr D'Arcy was in the witness box as a series of phone calls was played to the jury.

In one call in 2008, Mr D'Arcy was speaking to Paul Kane of Irish Life and Permanent about a transaction. "So do we agree assets, dates, rates, s**t like that?" Mr D'Arcy asked Mr Kane. The jury was then played a phone call from September 25, 2008 between Mr D'Arcy and Vincent Hibbert, finance manager in Anglo's Isle of Man division. "I was cc'd in on the request to have our liquidity placement placed with, which one, which one was it?" he asked.

Mr D'Arcy replied that it was Irish Life. "With Irish Life, yeah," Mr Hibbert said. "Just a quick question of rationale because we will be asked the question by the auditors. Uh, why the one party rather than the usual sort of, you know, two or three? Is there, is there any reason for that?"

"Do you want the answer to tell the auditor or do you want the answer?" Mr D'Arcy replied, before going through the transaction. "No, that's fair enough. I mean I can completely filter that down just to, you know, liquidity management," Mr Hibbert said.

Mr D'Arcy said Irish Life had been on to him "wondering where the money is". Mary Rose Gearty SC, prosecuting, said gardai had asked Mr D'Arcy about his comment "do you want the answer to tell the auditor" and he had said it was "more of a joke than anything". "Absolutely yes," Mr D'Arcy agreed.

Earlier, Declan Quilligan, former head of Anglo's UK division, told Paul O'Higgins SC, prosecuting, that the 2008 financial crisis became "about the survival of the bank".

The trial continues.A DUBLIN man will be sentenced in May for harassing RTE newsreader Sharon Ni Bheolain.

Conor O'Hora (40) of Heather Walk, Portmarnock, pleaded guilty at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court to harassing, without lawful authority or excuse, Ms Ni Bheolain on dates between March 27, 2013 and January 7, 2014.

Pieter Le Vert BL, defending, told Judge Martin Nolan his client was entering the plea on the basis of recklessness.

O'Hora also pleaded guilty to knowingly possessing, on a hard drive, child pornography at Heather Walk, Portmarnock on February 18, 2014.

The charge outlines that the material was a quantity of visual representations that showed persons who were depicted as being children and who were engaged in, or depicted as being engaged in, explicit sexual activity or as witnessing such activity by any person or persons or whose dominant characteristics were the domination, for a sexual purpose, of the genital or anal region of children.

Mr Le Vert said his client had been under therapeutic care for four years and asked for time for a report to be put together prior to sentencing.

Judge Nolan set a sentence date of May 16, 2018 next when full facts of the offending will be heard.Artist's impression of upstairs view of what inside of St Andrews will look like under proposals. Photo: Collins

Restaurant owner Michael Wright told a judge yesterday that his company will be pouring 5million into a complete re-fit of the historic St Andrews Protestant Church as a licensed food court, banqueting hall and culture centre in Dublins heartland.

Circuit Court President, Mr Justice Raymond Groarke promised Wright a pre-Christmas seven-day drinks license providing the redevelopment, mainly to the interior of the Suffolk Street building, is carried out in accordance with Dublin City Council planning permission.

Expand Close Michael Wright (Center) pictured leaving the Four Courts yesterday with his legal team, Constance Cassidy S.C. (Left of pic) and Niki Andrews B.L. (Right of pic) after a Circuit Civil Court action .Pic: Collins Courts / Facebook

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Whatsapp Michael Wright (Center) pictured leaving the Four Courts yesterday with his legal team, Constance Cassidy S.C. (Left of pic) and Niki Andrews B.L. (Right of pic) after a Circuit Civil Court action .Pic: Collins Courts

Mr Wright is a member of the Howth family which run restaurants and a seafood business and he has recently won world recognition of his Marquette food hall at Dublin Airport.

He told Constance Cassidy SC, who appeared in the licensing application with barrister Niki Andrews, that the St Andrews proposal was modelled on Marquette located at Dublin Airport. He said his company had already been approached with regard to setting up similar outlets at JFK Airport, New York; Vancouver airport in Canada and Manchester and Birmingham airports.

Marquette would be employing 70 chefs at Marquette at St Andrews. He already employs 38 chefs at Dublin Airport where, he said, customers were guaranteed a food and drinks service at non-inflated general prices as they would experience in the city.

Mr Wright said he was looking forward to the challenge of re-developing the listed building and he was confident the work would be complete within a maximum of nine months.

The currently vacant neo gothic church was formerly used as a tourist information centre by Bord Failte and is fronted by the now world-famous Molly Malone statue. Wrights company, Mink Fusion Limited, is hopeful the food court will grow to rival Corks famous English Market.

The company plans the provision of a new vibrant public space for the city and does not propose the removal of the historic 19th century surrounding gates and railings. Architect Joseph Doyle told the court the proposal primarily related to the interior of the building and as such there would be little or no visual impact on the surrounding streetscape.

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While much of the space at the rear of the church is concealed it is a natural location for anti-social behaviour.

Mink Fusion proposes to provide public access to the site for the duration of opening hours of the food hall but to secure the site during night-time hours to avoid mis-use and safely preserve more than 100 historic gravestones spread around the perimeter of the site.

Judge Groarke granted Mink Fusion a Declaratory Order for a full seven day publicans license and restaurant certificate on the basis of completion within the parameters of planning permission. Ms Cassidy said that in order to facilitate the granting of a new license an existing license in Main Street, Castleconnell, Co Limerick, had been extinguished.A former Sinn Fein Councillor jailed along with his father, for torturing a man he suspected of trying to defraud him, must wait to hear the outcome of appeals against their sentences.

Jonathan Dowdall (39), with an address on the Navan Road, Dublin 7 and his father Patrick Dowdall (62), of the same address, had both pleaded guilty at the non-jury Special Criminal Court to falsely imprisoning Alexander Hurley and threatening to kill him at Jonathan's family home on January 15th, 2015.

Footage recorded on a mobile phone was shown to the court of Jonathan Dowdall wearing a balaclava and holding a tea-towel to the man's face before pouring water over his head. Patrick Dowdall was heard threatening to pull off his fingers one-by-one with a pliers.

Jonathan Dowdall was sentenced to 12 years imprisonment and Patrick Dowdall eight years imprisonment by the three-judge court on June 1 , 2017.

The Dowdalls moved to appeal their sentences in the Court of Appeal today where judgment was reserved. The three-judge court was shown video footage of the incident at the outset of the hearing.

Counsel for Jonathan Dowdall, Michael O'Higgins SC, said it was an appalling piece of footage and his client had put before the court the most serious and grovelling of apologies.

Mr O'Higgins said the person on the screen was clearly Jonathan Dowdall but that was not the sort of person he was.

He said Jonathan Dowdall grew up in very, very difficult circumstances. He met his partner at the age of 15 and they had been together 20 years. He set up a business as an electrician in 2007 at a time when the economy was collapsing and yet he made it into a successful company with blue chip clients. They gave references and testimonies for him which spoke of the quality of his work, his enthusiasm and, almost, perfection.

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He said Jonathan Dowdall was on the edge in many respects, suffering from depression and anxiety. He was over-committed in his work as a local councillor.

His business was running every hour it was sent but his bank overdraft was critical. That's why he became obsessed with his bank details allegedly being in the possession of the injured party, Mr O'Higgins said.

Jonathan Dowdall was sitting at home when the criminal came to him, counsel said. As a result, he was picking up the biggest bill of his life.

He said the complainant had come to Jonathan Dowdall's house posing as a barrister, with a business profile on LinkedIn that adopted the Law Library logo.

That was the uncomfortable background to the offence, and it wasn't put forward as a justification but a rationalisation of what happened.

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Mr O'Higgins said the Special Criminal Court placed too much emphasis on the video, which skewed the outcome, resulting in a substantial error in the sentence.

He submitted that the headline sentence of 14 years was grossly excessive and the two year discount from that for the guilty plea and other mitigating factors wasn't enough.

He asked whether it was appropriate to devote 10 lines of the court's judgment to his client's mitigating factors when the court was going to send him to jail for 12 years. It was only the most cursory recording of all that Jonathan Dowdall had going for him in mitigation, which was a lot.

Mr O'Higgins said a sentence hearing had taken place in May but a subsequent Newton hearing was necessary to resolve factual conflicts

It was an unavoidable fact, Mr O'Higgins said, that the injured party's credibility was damaged long before any question was asked by me and the Special Criminal Court seemed to penalise his client for seeking to resolve certain factual conflicts.

Counsel for Patrick Dowdall, Michael Bowman SC, said he adopted Mr O'Higgins' submissions in so far as they related to him.

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Mr Bowman said Patrick Dowdall saw before his eyes the capacity for his son's business to collapse. The concern was real but he never at any stage sought to minimise what he did.

Counsel for the Director of Public Prosecutions, Vincent Heneghan SC, said the incident didn't border on torture, it was actual torture.

Mr Heneghan said the sentence was almost textbook in how it followed the dicta set down for sentencing. The court identified a headline sentence, set out the aggravating factors, the mitigating factors and then passed sentence.

He said it was an unusual sentence because very few of these types of cases come before the courts.

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Reserving judgment, Mr Justice Alan Mahon, who sat with Mr Justice John Edwards, and Mr Justice John Hedigan, said the court's ambition was to deliver its decision in April.

The first of three clips, from January 12th 2015, showed Mr Hurley trying on motorcycle gear in the Dowdalls' garage.

In the second and third clips, from some days later, Mr Hurley was seen bound to a swivel-chair in the garage. The swivel-chair had been pushed to its side and Mr Hurley's head was on the floor.

The video showed Jonathan Dowdall hold a tea-towel over Mr Hurley's face and pour a bucket of water over his head.

The former councillor repeatedly asked Mr Hurley, "What were you going to do with my bank details?"

Mr Hurley said that he had applied for a loan.

Jonathan Dowdall said, "I'm going to cut you up piece-by-piece."

"Please don't hurt me," Mr Hurley said.

The court then saw Jonathan Dowdall use an electric razor to shave Mr Hurley's head. He asked again, "What were you doing with my bank details?"

He told Mr Hurley, "It's all over Facebook you're one of the biggest conmen going."

Jonathan Dowdall held Mr Hurley down and poured another bucket of water over his head.

Later, the swivel-chair was lifted up.

Patrick Dowdall was heard saying, "I'm going to start with the little one and work my way up to your thumbs."Keith Lee leaves the Criminal Courts of Justice following a special sitting yesterday after he was charged with the murder of estranged wife Joanne Ball Photo: Collins

A man charged with the murder of his wife Joanne Lee, whose body was discovered in a house in Dublin last month, has been further remanded in custody.

Keith Lee, 42, was wheeled into Dublin District Court on Sunday morning accused of the murder of his estranged wife Joanne.

Mr Lee, whose address was given as no fixed abode, faced his second hearing when he appeared at Cloverhill District Court on Wednesday. Judge Victor Blake further remanded him in custody to appear again on April 18 next.

At his first hearing on Sunday, an order was made that he was to receive any medical attention he required. Bail in murder cases can only be granted in the High Court.

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A book of evidence has yet to be served on him.

Mr Lee had been arrested on March 16 having been previously hospitalised with serious injuries following the discovery of Joanne Lee's body in a house at Ranelagh Road, Dublin 6 on Feb. 15 last.A jury has convicted a Polish roofer of carrying out random sex attacks on two women in a four year period.

Slawomir Gierlowski (33) denied attacking the women in 2011 and 2015 at locations around Clondalkin in south Dublin.

A jury at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court took a little over four hours to reach unanimous guilty verdicts on six counts of sexual assault, assault and false imprisonment of the two women.

The jury of 11 men will continue its deliberations on three further charges arising out of an alleged third attack on a woman in 2016 tomorrow morning. Mr Gierlowski of Galtymore Rd., Drimnagh, Dublin denies carrying out this attack too.

He has pleaded not guilty to false imprisonment, sexual assault and assault of a woman on September 11, 2011 and to false imprisonment, sexual assault and assault of a second woman on September 3, 2015.

He has further pleaded not guilty to falsely imprisoning and assaulting a woman and having a hunting knife with intent to intimidate on May 16, 2016. This alleged third attack took place on Knockmeenagh Lane, Clondalkin, Dublin, not far from the other two attacks and from a house occupied by the family of Mr Gierlowski's partner.

The court heard that in all three attacks a man came up from behind the women and attacked them around their neck area. In the 2011 and 2015 incidents the attacker dragged the women to the ground and sexually assaulted them.

The alleged third attack was carried out in broad daylight on the morning of May 16, 2016. The victim was walking along Knockmeenagh Lane to the nearby Luas stop when a man armed with a hunting knife put his arm around her neck and began to pull her backwards.

This woman told the court that she thought the man was going to slit her throat and she grabbed the blade to stop that happening, causing the knife to cut tendons in three of her fingers.

She managed to get out from under the knife and began screaming and her attacker ran off.

The first attack took place late at night on September 11, 2011 when a man attacked a young woman walking home from a night out, dragging her to the ground and sexually assaulting her.

She managed to get away from him but he caught her and began punching her repeatedly around the face.

On September 3, 2015 a woman was also walking home late at night when a man came up behind her and put a leather belt around her neck and began pulling backwards. He pulled her to the ground and then wrapped duct tape around her face and hands before sexually assaulted her.

Mr Gierlowski was identified as a suspect after detectives tracked a white VW Crafter van spotted near the scene of the 2016 attack back to Galtymore road, where Mr Gierlowski lives.

Using a wild card search of a partial registration provided by neighbours who had seen the van, detectives were able to identify the van as being one registered to Mr Gierlowski.

After his arrest gardai took a DNA sample from him and found it matched various blood, semen samples taken from the 2011 and 2015 crime scenes. The jury also heard that blood found on a jacket taken from his home was the blood of the 2016 victim.

Orla Crowe SC, defending, told the jury that DNA evidence could not prove when semen or blood was placed where it was found.

Roisin Lacey SC, prosecuting, told the jury that DNA is a golden thread connecting the three random attacks.

She said that the three victims were not previously connected to each other or to the accused but that DNA evidence now scientifically and intimately connected them to Mr Gierlowski.

Blood from the victim of the 2016 knife attack was found on the cuff of Gierlowski's jacket seized from his home by gardai. Gierlowski's DNA profile matched semen traces found on the victim of a sexual assault in 2015 and his DNA was also found on the underwear of the 2011 victim.

His DNA was found on duct tape and his blood was found on a belt used in the 2015 attack.

Gardai investigating the 2011 and 2015 attacks had already linked the crime scenes by DNA evidence but did not have a suspect or an identity for that unknown male DNA profile.

It was only after Gierlowski was nominated as a suspect to the 2016 and his profile checked against the DNA database that he was identified as the unknown male in the earlier attacks.

His DNA also linked him to Knockmeenagh Lane, the scene of the 2016 attack, via DNA found on a Polish beer bottle retrieved from the lane shortly after the attack.

The jury also heard evidence that cable ties found on the lane came from an opened bag of cable ties seized by gardai from Gierlowski's van.

Attack

During the trial the victim of the 2011 attack, now in her mid 20s, described how she was left covered in blood during the attack.

She said she had gone out socialising earlier on the evening of September 10 and was walking home when she saw a man walking behind her very quickly.

She said that she got a fright as the man was quite close. She said hello to the man and he said hello back and spoke in an eastern European accent.

This man walked on and she continued to walk home but was nervous. When she got to her driveway she turned around and a man lunged at her from behind, she said. He pushed her onto the ground and on her back and she was screaming for him to get off.

He had his hand around my mouth. He was on top of me. I was trying to pull his hand off my mouth, she testified. She said was screaming loudly at him to please stop and the man just said sssh to her.

She said she didn't see him because it was too dark and she was focused on fighting him off. Her attacker put his hand up her skirt and touched her genital area outside her underwear, the court heard.

The witness said the man was strong but she managed to kick out and get up from under him.

I ran towards my door. He grabbed my arm and flung me around and I fell, she said.

The man got on top of her again and put his two hands around her neck. The woman scratched and bit his face and the man began punching her.

She said he hit her around six times and then the attack just stopped. She ran to her house and was banging on the front door. Her father told the trial that he was woken by the sounds of screaming and banging. He said he went to the front door.

I could see my daughters face red with blood through the glass in the door, he said. He said his daughter was still screaming when she came into the house and gardai were called.

He said he ran outside and saw a parked car with unusual rear lights.

His wife said his daughter was covered with blood. The victim's nose was broken and she suffered two swollen black eyes.

The victim of the 2015 attack told the jury that she was walking home from a night out in the city centre when she felt a sudden force around her neck. She said that it felt like a thick leather belt and it had come around her chin and upper neck before she had time to grab it.

She lost her balance and ended up on the ground. She felt her legs being restricted and he kept putting his hand over my mouth and my nose to prevent her from screaming. She said that after several screams the man told her: "shut up or Ill kill you. She said his voice was an Eastern European sound and was quite vicious and angry.

She felt something being wrapped around her head and face and she guessed from the sound that it was tape. She became upset in court as she described how it became difficult for her to breathe and she started becoming light headed.

I thought I was dying. I had gone quite light headed, like I was passing out. I felt it was for the best. I didnt know what was going to happen, she said.

She said the man turned her on to her stomach and took her hands behind her back and restricted them. He then touched her genitalia. The attack ended when the owners of a nearby house called gardai and the man ran off.A self employed man who fraudulently claimed almost 40,000 in illness benefit over a six year period has been jailed for 14 months.

Edward Doherty (65) had been legitimately claiming illness benefit for a number of years but continued to get monthly sick certificates from his doctor for his back pain and submitted them without notifying authorities about his change in circumstances when he became self-employed.

Doherty, of Belgard Crescent, Belgard Heights, Tallaght, Dublin pleaded guilty that he did, at places unknown within the State, make false declarations for the purpose of gaining illness benefit and steal money property of the Department of Social Protection on dates between 2010 and 2016.

Dublin Circuit Criminal Court heard Doherty had entered a repayment plan of 150 per month and had repaid 2,100 over the past 14 months.

Social Welfare Inspectors became aware of the offences after receiving information from the Revenue Commissioners that Doherty was employed and had earned 140,000 over the six year period. Doherty co-operated with the investigation and made admissions.

Doherty told investigators he regretted the offences. He said he had started a courier business and had needed the additional money from the illness benefit to get by financially.

Seamus Clarke SC, defending, said Doherty had an extensive work history but had been made redundant in 2005. He legitimately claimed illness benefit in relation to his sciatica for five years.

He said Doherty had problems with gambling and drinking during 2005 to 2010. He said his client at the time owed money to the Revenue and in relation to M50 tolls.

Mr Clarke said Doherty then began working in 2010 but continued to send in certificates in relation to his sciatica. He said Doherty genuinely suffered with sciatica and had been tempted by the money coming in.

He said Doherty had got himself into an almighty mess and was trying to remedy the situation.

Mr Clarke submitted that Doherty was eventually going to be caught as Revenue were on to him as he was registered as self employed. He handed in a number of testimonials.

Judge Martin Nolan noted Doherty's guilty plea, full co-operation and that he has no previous convictions. He said Doherty was a good family man, a good community man and had a long work history.

Judge Nolan noted there was good mitigation but said this pattern of misbehaviour was too serious for a non-custodial sentence. He imposed 14 months imprisonment.A woman allegedly raped by two rugby stars lied to save face, a jury has been told.

In his closing submission, Arthur Harvey QC, representing Blane McIlroy who denies exposing himself to the alleged victim, said lies were built on lies.

"What had she to gain from telling an untruth?" he asked.

"The simple thing, in literature as in life, is that lies do not start off necessarily as a malicious intent to cause harm to others, but lies build on lies.

"If you have a sense that you are about to be shamed on a network which your friends access, your first reaction is 'how do you deal with that shame' and mostly it is 'how do I save face'.

"And that's the reaction she had because she said that in her ABE (achieving best evidence) interview. She was mortified because of her foresight as to what the consequences would be."

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The lawyer said that the momentum of the woman telling her friends about the alleged rape led to the complaint being made to police.

And, pressing the point further, he added: "What had she to gain? The answer is her reputation."

Mr Harvey spent almost two hours addressing the jury of eight men and three women who have listened to eight weeks of evidence presented at Belfast Crown Court.

Drawing his speech to a close, he said: "When you look at the facts in relation to Mr McIlroy in this case, you could never be satisfied beyond a reasonable doubt. Almost the reverse.

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"There is neither a hook nor a hinge upon which you could hang any doubt upon his innocence."

Earlier the barrister outlined a "volume of inconsistencies and contradiction" in accounts the woman gave to friends, medics, police and in court.

She was an "unreliable" witness, he suggested, providing "a variety" of answers and "narratives" about what went on in the bedroom of Paddy Jackson's house during the early hours of June 28, 2016, the court was told.

"Which is true?" asked Mr Harvey. "Is it the last account? Is it the middle account? Or is it the first account?"

By contrast, the defence counsel claimed McIlroy had been truthful. "Mr McIlroy has told the truth. The truth is simply not compatible with the account of [the complainant]," Mr Harvey said.

Referencing prosecution allegations that McIlroy had "delivered the wrong lines" after allegedly concocting a cover-up with his friends a day after the alleged assault, the lawyer said: "What is wrong here is that the theory is full of paradoxes."

It was unlikely anyone would risk incriminating themselves just to protect their pals, he suggested.

"What rational, reasonable, sensible, intelligent individual would present himself in the police station to give an account before he knew what any of the allegations are specifically against him. To incriminate himself in a potentially much more serious charge?

"Quite simply it does not bear examination," Mr Harvey said.

Earlier, the court was told that when McIlroy walked into the police station on June 30, 2016, his life changed. He was unaware of the legal system and how it worked, jurors were told.

Mr Harvey said: "His life changed and it changed irrevocably. There is nothing that can bring back the last 20 months of his life. There is nothing that can restore the last 20 months of his life.

"He has come before you, a young man. For three years he had been studying in the United States. He was one semester, three months short of completing his degree. He has been unable to complete it. He's not looking for sympathy. He is looking for his legal entitlement."

The case continues.Some CAO applicants may be seeking an Irish or third language exemption for entry to third level. These exemptions are widely available for applicants who, for a variety of reasons, do not take these subjects.

There are forms that must be completed and submitted to the particular institution(s) to which a student has applied. Given that this is a quiet time for CAO, and the stress of the final school term has not yet begun, now is the time to get started.

Irish is considered a core subject and it is a requirement for entry to a number of third-level institutions. These include all NUI institutions, i.e. University College Dublin, University College Cork, NUI Galway, Maynooth University and the Royal College of Surgeons.

For NUI colleges, a student who has not studied Irish or a modern European language (if they have a specific learning difficulty) in school, may apply to be exempt from these requirements. Students must apply for these exemptions by printing and completing the relevant forms from nui.ie/college and returning them to the NUI offices in Merrion Square, Dublin.

Trinity College Dublin and the University of Limerick require students to pass English and another language, which can cause problems for students who do not take Irish or a modern European language at Leaving Cert level. It is possible for students who do not take Irish and a European language to be exempt from these requirements in certain circumstances.

In the case of Trinity, where applicants are required to pass English and another language for entry, students not taking Irish or any other language as a result of a learning difficulty may apply to the admissions office at the college and seek to be exempted from this requirement. Forms are available from tcd.ie.

University of Limerick has a similar requirement for English and another language, and students can apply for an exemption in writing to the college. Applicants will find more information on the admissions section of its website, ul.ie.

Dublin City University and the institutes of technology require entrants to present with maths and English or Irish, therefore there is no need to apply for exemptions from Irish for these colleges.

Aoife Walsh is a guidance counsellor at Malahide Community School, Co DublinNews of a review of senior cycle education is exciting and scary. Recent experiences with Junior Cycle (JC) change confirm how difficult school reform can be. Perhaps one lesson from the JC experience is that we didn't have the right conversations, especially at the outset. This time, arguably, the stakes are higher. The nation's love-hate relationship with the Leaving Certificate (LC) adds to the complexity. In my opinion, it's important that the conversations should not be reduced to considering technical tweakings of the familiar.

Firstly, senior cycle is much more than the LC. The mid-1990s restructuring, which included mainstreaming Transition Year (TY) as a stand-alone optional year, introducing Leaving Certificate Applied (LCA) as a ring-fenced alternative programme and the Leaving Certificate Vocational Programme (LCVP) as a version of the established LC, has enriched many lives. But Ireland and the world has changed since 1994. A review is overdue.

Difficult conversations need to take place. A hard look at existing provision in schools is required. We have achieved high participation rates but how good is the system at meeting students' needs? Is it flexible enough? Inclusive? How willing are schools to confront the narrowing of curricular experiences that results from an overemphasis on State exams? How open are policymakers to encouraging learning that's important, even when difficult to measure? Why has there been such poor uptake of the genuinely creative and educationally imaginative LCA in many schools? How concerned are vested interests with enabling schooling to liberate from socio-economic disadvantage?

As with JC reform, major insights are available through the NCCA commissioned research. Following students from first year through the secondary cycle, this ESRI research points to many strengths and weaknesses in our system. One stark conclusion is that for too many young people, their schooldays disappoint. Instead of encountering programmes and people that interest, engage, stimulate, challenge and satisfy them, they meet a poverty of experience.

Much can also be learned from the successes and failures of TY. Some schools have moved the learning well beyond examination-focused classrooms. When researching my book Transition Year in Action, it was exciting to find students, teachers and parents enthusiastic about community service, environmental and artistic projects, work experience and other forms of learning. Improved relations between students themselves, with their teachers as well as enhanced well-being and greater maturity also impressed. TY also shows how short courses can work, how active learning can energise, and how ongoing assessment can operate. TY can illustrate how students can cultivate a love of learning. But there is also evidence that TY is uneven, that not all schools realise its potential, that some students feel short-changed. The reasons deserve exploration.

A key idea in TY was to build a bridge between Junior Cycle and an environment where young people "take greater responsibility for their own learning and decision-making". Now that the JC ground has shifted substantially, this bridge needs to be re-imagined and re-engineered. There is also an urgency to ensure coherence with what happens after TY, bearing in mind the rights and needs of students who decide not to follow a TY programme. Critically, the conversations should engage with the possibility that the established LC programme may not be fit for purpose in its design, subject range, course content or modes of assessment, that it may be damaging too many students and teachers.

We need pastorally inclusive schools, where students' and parents' voices are taken seriously and where young people's rights are realised, should abound. Programmes should nurture individual and group flourishing among students; they should also foster creativity, collegiality and professionalism among teachers. Other indicators might include an inspectorate and support services working collaboratively with schools, assessment systems that affirm and encourage as well as enable pathways to further possibilities. While idealistic and hard to measure, such indicators should be central to any conversations about senior cycle review.

Dr Gerry Jeffers teaches educational leadership at Maynooth University. Transition Year in Action is published by Liffey PressAbout 2,000 school-leavers now enter college every year via the CAO on lower points than their peers thanks to national schemes designed to help students to overcome a financial, social or educational disadvantage that may hinder their studies or career ambitions.

But could that figure be higher? For sure.

Progress has been made in boosting the number of students from under-represented groups attending college through two schemes known as DARE and HEAR, but a new report also points to scope for improvement.

The DARE HEAR Facts and Figures Report 2017 signposts avenues for the authorities to explore. It also highlights how students may be excluding themselves because they don't follow through with their application and, in that context, the next week is crucial because April 1 is the deadline for the submission of supporting documents.

DARE offers reduced points places to school-leavers who, as a result of having a disability, ongoing medical condition such as diabetes, or a learning difficulty such as dyslexia, have experienced additional educational challenges.

The focus of HEAR is to encourage more students from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds into third-level by offering places on reduced points as well as in-college supports.

Eligibility for either scheme does not guarantee a place, but it does offer insurance by opening up an alternative route, with entry to a second competition for reserved places on lower points.

Typically, the points waiver is around 5pc-10pc, so a DARE/HEAR entrant to a course with a published cut-off of 500 CAO points may get a place with 450-475 points.

Some 20 third-level colleges, including all the universities, participate in DARE and/or HEAR. New to it this year are IADT Dun Laoghaire, IT Carlow and Limerick IT. Colleges that have not joined, or at least not yet, have individual schemes to encourage access for students suffering disadvantage.

Irish Universities Association (IUA) Director General Jim Miley says the universities want their campuses to reflect the diversity of the communities in which they are located.

"Through DARE and HEAR, there is now good participation by students with disabilities and students from under-represented socio-economic groups in Irish universities and other higher education institutions," he says.

The new report, compiled by the IUA's DARE HEAR unit, provides useful insights. It tells us, for instance, that in 2016, 1,010 HEAR eligible applicants accepted a reduced-points offer. The equivalent figure for DARE was 819.

Those figures tell only part of the story. Many DARE/HEAR applicants do not need the back-up of reduced points and gain entry to their course through the standard CAO competition, often achieving very high points, up to the maximum 625.

According to report author Dr Siobhan Nic Fhlannchadha, about 24,000 DARE/HEAR eligible applicants have accepted a place in a participating college since the schemes were launched nationally in 2009, some on reduced points and others on or above the cut-off points.

In 2016, of the 4,221 eligible HEAR applicants, 3,565 received a CAO offer. Alongside the 1,010 who accepted a reduced-points place, 1,002 accepted a standard CAO offer while 939 took a place in a college not participating in these schemes.

Some 3,076 met the criteria for DARE and the offers/acceptances pattern was broadly similar. What is particularly noteworthy here is how a loosening of the rules in 2016, including a change in emphasis from a diagnosis itself to its impact on the student's education, led to a big increase in applications and offers. This report, and more recent data from the CAO, show a year-on-year increase of about 20pc in applications for DARE since 2015.

The new DARE criteria were partly a response to concerns that students from well-off backgrounds were in a better position to afford the required medical/psychological assessment to support their application. There is now a lot more flexibility around this process. As an example, a GP, rather than a consultant, can verify a student's diagnosed condition, such as a mental health issue or a blood disorder. Encouragingly, there has been a substantial increase in the number of schools with designated disadvantaged status with at least one applicant to DARE. There has also been a leap in applicants declaring a mental health issue.

The HEAR trajectory is different. After a surge between 2009 and 2014, demand plateaued and, according to CAO data for 2018, may fall significantly this year. The reason is unclear, but it may be linked to economic recovery and the availability of jobs for school-leavers or an improvement in family finances, which means they no longer satisfy the income criterion.

Nic Fhlannchadha says they will have to wait to see how many of those who indicated interest will pursue the HEAR application and submit their documents "before we can assess the real change in application numbers from 2017 to 2018". A key requirement here for current applicants is the submission of Revenue documents for the year 2016.

Notwithstanding the positives, the report raises issues, including why some DARE/HEAR applicants don't get an offer, even though they meet the entry requirements for their chosen course.

"Around 85pc of eligible applicants get an offer, but we want to look more closely at those who are eligible but who aren't getting an offer," says Nic Fhlannchadha.

Then there are the applicants "who fill in the form, but don't get to the point of sending documents; unless we receive the documents, we cannot assess the application," she says.The Policing Authority has defended how it responded to concerns raised by two civilian whistleblowers about the force's homicide statistics.

Its chair, Josephine Feehily, denied Garda Siochana Analysis Service personnel Lois West and Laura Galligan were ignored when contact was made with the oversight body last year.

Ms Feehily also denied there was anything improper about someone in the authority informing Garda management that the analysts had been in contact. She was questioned at the Oireachtas Justice Committee as TDs and senators expressed concern about the treatment of the whistleblowers.

Earlier this month, the analysts told the committee they were "belittled" and "shouted down" by Garda management when they tried to raise concerns about data quality in the recording of dozens of deaths.

They were also concerned that they were put under pressure to sign off on an "inherently weak" review of homicide statistics last April.

Ms West made contact with the Policing Authority on several occasions by phone and letter between April and July last year, but no meeting ensued.

She learned from a senior officer last August that Garda management had been informed about their approaches during a phone conversation with someone in the authority.

Ms West said that not only had they not been heard but the authority had "kind of told tales" on them

Speaking at the committee yesterday, Ms Feehily said the evidence of the analysts about how they were treated in the workplace "sounded deplorable" and was "very concerning".

But she defended the failure of the authority to meet with them, saying it was already in possession of much of the information they had.

She said it had already received "intelligence" from a number of sources.

"Having reviewed their evidence to you, I can honestly say that there was very little of substance in it about the review which we didn't know or have grounds to believe since late March or early April of last year," she told the committee.

Ms Feehily said each time the analysts made contact they got a response, were thanked and were assured the issue would not be dropped. "They perceive things in a certain way. Our belief is that we responded each time and that we persisted with all of the issues," she said. "Our belief is that we did not ignore their concerns."

Ms Feehily said a letter from the analysts to the authority was kept confidential, but the fact they had been in contact would not have been considered confidential. "Routine contact was not regarded as confidential," she said.

Asked by Fianna Fail TD Jack Chambers who in the authority had phoned Garda management about the approaches the analysts had made, Ms Feehily said she had "no idea".Patients are being prescribed anti-depressants by GPs because of a lack of talking therapies, doctors warned yesterday.

Although anti-depressants are very effective, many patients with mental health issues would benefit from psychological counselling, the Oireachtas Health Committee was told.

However, Dr Mark Murphy and Dr John O'Brien, of the Irish College of General Practitioners, said: "Prescribing rates of anti-depressants reflect a lack of psychological therapies and a lack of social therapies and resources in society."

These include the impact of fragmented communities, isolation and austerity.

"In 2016, the State spent 40.07m on anti-depressant medications for GMS-eligible patients and 4.29m on the Drug Payment Scheme.

"In contrast, we spent 10m on counselling in primary care."

They also cautioned that delays in getting specialist hospital treatment can result in patients being given strong pain-killing medication.

The doctors' body is aware of the painkiller opiate crisis in the United States.

However, it pointed out that: "GPs are at the frontline and it is difficult when a patient is sitting in front of the GP, disabled with intractable pain, possibly waiting years for an orthopaedic or pain clinic appointment."

The most recent data suggests that while the prescribing of tranquillisers has stabilised, it is still higher than it should be.

On the other hand, the prescribing of 'Z' hypnotics or sleeping pills is now on the increase.

The family doctors pointed to the increase in workload for GPs at a time when their funding is cut.

"We work off a 40-year-old, out-dated contract.

"We have severe capacity restraints, with 6.2 GPs per 10,000 populations - the lowest in Europe - and an exodus of our GP graduates."

It is estimated that two out of every three consultations results in a prescription.

Prof Tom Fahey, head of the general practice in the Royal College of Surgeons, told the committee that a growing numbers of older patients are on more than one medicine.

Research shows that the number of over 65s who are on five medicines has risen to around 60pc.

Around one in five older people are taking 10 medicines as the prevalence of chronic diseases increases.A group of Laurels Charity Crew volunteers on a training cycle for their April fundraiser in aid of vital orthopaedic surgery in Ireland.

AN IRISH charity which has helped support life-changing surgery for 100 children is set to break the 1m mark.

Laurels Charity Crew, which was founded in 2008, now aims to surpass 1m in funds raised with its 10th anniversary cycle from Galway to Dublin.

The cycle takes place from April 20-22 and all proceeds raised will go to the Straight Ahead Fund at Crumlin Hospital.

Straight Ahead is a medical support group which provides surgery, support and medical equipment for children battling severe orthopaedic conditions.

Since the Laurels Crew began their cycle 10 years ago, their fundraising has helped 100 Irish children undergo life-changing orthopaedic surgery.

Founded by Damien Long and Denis McCarthy, cyclists now proudly wear a jersey emblazoned with 100 stars to mark the life of each child they have helped.

Weve grown in strength over the years and have to date raised in excess of 800,000," Damien explained.

"For our tenth anniversary it would be great to reach the 1m target. The cycle is a huge physical challenge but it really brings people together and helps some of Irelands sickest children with life-changing surgeries."

"Its a great cause and purpose  itll certainly make all the sore legs and bums worth it.

Orthopaedic surgeon and Straight Ahead co-founder, Pat Kiely, said their work depends on charity fundraisers like the Laurels Crew.

Weve completed over 125 operations since our beginning in 2011. For children with severe orthopaedic deformities, waiting is simply not an option. The more time they spend on waiting lists the more their pain and discomfort increases, he said.

In 2008, the Laurels Crew had just 27 cyclists - this year they hope to have more than 400 participants from all over Ireland.

Anyone interested in taking part can get further information by clicking here.The scene of the blaze in Ballymun Dublin Fire Brigade/Twitter

General view of Fire Brigade attempting to put out fire at Metro Hotel, Ballymun, Dublin. Picture: Caroline Quinn

A fire at the Metro Hotel near Dublin Airport while (inset) image from Dublin Fire Brigade shows damage caused to inside of the building Picture: Niall Carson/PA Wire/Dublin Fire Brigade

Scene in Ballymun this morning in the aftermath of the fire Picture: Tony Gavin 22/3/2018

Ballymun this morning in the aftermath of the fire in The Metro Hotel. Photo: Tony Gavin 22/3/201

Scene in Ballymun this morning in the aftermath of the fire in The Metro Hotel. Photo: Tony Gavin

One of Dublin Fire Brigade's fire engines remained at the scene of a major blaze at the Metro Hotel in Ballymun this morning as residents described the shock of having to flee their homes.

The fire broke out at the Metro Hotel building in Ballymun, north Dublin shortly after 8.00pm on Wednesday night.

The cause of the blaze is not yet known, but over 60 firefighters battled the blaze to get it under control last night.

It's believed the building was fully evacuated and Dublin Fire Brigade confirmed this morning that there are no reports of any injuries to members of the public or firefighters.

8 fire engines, advanced paramedics & other specialist appliances are now attending the fire in #Ballymun. Severe traffic delays, please avoid the area to enable us to access the fireground #Dublin #fire pic.twitter.com/XLoS7lOD2L  Dublin Fire Brigade (@DubFireBrigade) March 21, 2018

This morning, Dublin Fire Brigade posted images from inside the building, showing the extent of the damage caused by the fire.

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Dublin Fire Brigade confirmed an investigation will begin this morning with the fire now out.

Closures remain in place on Santry Avenue this morning but Ballymun Road is open this morning.

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Last night, firefighters could be seen entering the hotel with breathing apparatus on their backs while high powered hoses battled the flames from the ground up.

The main source of the fire was on the 13th floor of the hotel. Debris from the building could be seen breaking off and crashing onto parked vehicles below.

The building is comprised of the Metro Hotel and Apartments.

The vicinity of the hotel was sealed off to the public with a large section of the Ballymun Road closed to vehicles for the evening.

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A garda helicopter could be seen flying above the scene to access the situation.

A witness, who went by the name of Joy, told Classic Hits' 4fm that she was in shock having waited too long to react to the fire alarm.

"I was in 903 when it happened," Joy said.

"The alarm was going on for a long time, I didn't do anything until I realised it was going on too long.

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"I called reception because I turned and the windows had opened out.

"I thought it was a fault in the window and I called reception to close them.

"They said there's a fire, I needed to leave my home.

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"I literally grabbed whatever. I was reminded of the Grenfell Tower, I thought oh my god, this is happening.

"It was just me in the house," she continued.

"It was a bit shocking. I was running down and I was the only one running down.

"I was shocked. The alarm was going on for so long and I hadn't done anything.

"You just turn a blind eye."

She added; "It was shocking to see the 14th and 15th floor completely gone.

"I just have my phone with me, that's it. We're on buses now going to a hotel.

"I've lived there for two or three years. I haven't thought about the future yet, I'm just thinking, oh my god."

One local man said he could smell the smoke from his home.

"It reeked of burning plastic and even though my windows were closed I knew something big was on fire."

"When I came out to see what was happening a whole section of the upper floor was on fire. "

Anthony Flynn of the Inner City Helping Homeless (ICHH) said he was driving past the hotel shortly before 9pm when he saw a flame at the top of the building.

"I was on my way home when I seen it and it was a spark of a fire, it was just about starting," he said.

"The first pictures I took only the top of it was on fire," he added.

Another local man told Independent.ie: "It started around 7.30pm and I saw a little spark and saw loads of people running out of the exits, screaming for help.

"It started at the third last floor and debris were falling off into the parking lot.

"The fire brigade hadn't arrived yet so ran into the lobby and the alarms were blaring. The person at the reception told me she already knew and that the emergency crew were on their way.

"The smoke hit the whole building and even went into the lifts.

"There were loads of people just running out. I saw one woman crying in her dressing gown with her three children.

"Another man was lying on the ground and being treated by the ambulance men a little while ago."

Social media user Kim Ni Chonmhaic offered help to those who had been impacted by the blaze.

She tweeted: "If anyone around the hotel needs jumpers or blankets, we're in a car in Balcurris and have both."

The Dublin Regional Homeless Executive (DRHE) has confirmed that no homeless families were residing in the building.

Local TD Noel Rock thanked the emergency services for their work during the ongoing incident.

The Fine Gael representative said: "I hope that everybody is safe but cannot be certain for the moment.

"Id like to praise the emergency workers Ive spoken to this evening, and thank them for their work."

This is the second multi story fire that emergency services dealt with within hours, having earlier fought a blaze in an apartment block in Sandyford.

Metro Hotel wishes to apologise to hotel patrons and guests that the hotel is currently closed, and will remain closed for some time, following a fire.

"All hotel guests (over 150) as well as the residents of 30 apartments attached to the hotel are accounted for and were relocated to the nearby Carlton Hotel for the night," it said.

"The key focus of hotel staff today is to notify inbound guests and to source alternative accommodation for tenants and guests, with whom we will be liaising throughout today.

"Unfortunately, guest and tenant access to personal belongings located in the hotel / apartments is restricted until clearance is received from emergency services. We will provide regular updates as they become available.

"The cause of the fire is still being investigated. No decision can be made about a hotel re-opening date until the cause of the fire has been established and all safety considerations have been thoroughly assessed."TRAINS will run every two minutes between Dublin city centre and the airport when the 3bn MetroLink opens for business in 2027.

It will take 20 minutes to travel from the city centre to Dublin Airport, and the National Transport Authority (NTA) and Transport Infrastructure Ireland (TII) say the system will be capable of carrying 15,000 passengers per hour in each direction.

Details of the project have been revealed this afternoon, with planning permission expected to be sought in the third quarter of next year.

It will take six years to build the 26km line, which will run underground in the city centre, and a public consultation on the preferred route begins today.

The project is essentially a re-working of the Metro North scheme, which was granted planning permission in 2010 but mothballed by the Government in 2011 when the financial crisis hit.

The NTA says that some properties and land will have to be acquired to build the scheme, which is designed to cater for future population growth in the capital.

The National Planning Framework says the city will grow by up to 25pc by 2040, resulting in a total population of 1.4 million for the Dublin region.

The NTA says that buses will not be capable of meeting the demand for public transport. Buses can carry 2,000 people per hour in each direction, compared with 7,000 for light rail such as Luas. MetroLink will carry 15,000.

The system begins at Estuary in north Dublin, where 3,000 park and ride spaces will be provided, running at street level and on an elevated structure until it goes underground immediately north of Dublin Airport.

It then runs underground with stops at the airport, Northwood, Ballymun, Collins Avenue, Griffith Park, Glasnevin  where it connects with Irish Rail services to Maynooth/Sligo and Hazelhatch/Kildare  the Mater, OConnell Street, Tara Street (with connections to the Dart network) and a station on the east side of St Stephens Green.

It then continues underground to Charlemont, where passengers will interchange with the Luas Green Line to Broombridge. It then continues along the existing Luas Green line to Sandyford before turning back.

Luas services will continue to Brides Glen.

Twin tunnels are proposed, but this could be amended to a larger, single tunnel.

MetroLink is Irelands largest public transport infrastructure project for many decades, public consultation documents state. As with all projects of this size and scale, it will bring numerous issues and challenges which need to be effectively and sensitively addressed.

It adds that a number of residential and commercial properties will have to be acquired, with the number yet to be decided, and that the works will disrupt some Luas Green line services.

Subject to receipt of planning approval, construction of the project is expected to commence in 2021 with MetroLink open for passenger use in 2027.Geronimo Roa, resident in the apartments above the Metro Hotel and, inset, the building this morning Picture: Tony Gavin

A resident who fled the blaze in the Metro Hotel complex in Ballymun last night in his pyjamas has said he doesn't know if any of his belongings survived the fire.

Geronimo Roa lives on the eighth floor of the apartment block at the centre of last night's blaze.

There was one floor between us and the fire. I live there with my wife, my three year old daughter, and our baby daughter who is just two weeks old, he told Independent.ie.

He spent last night in the Carlton Hotel in Santry, sleeping on a couch in the lobby while the rest of his family stayed with friends.

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We heard an alarm, but sometimes they can be very sensitive so I was looking around to see if there was anything wrong, but everything seemed okay, he said.

My wife went down to reception and saw people running so she realised something was wrong.

We left the apartment we are renting and started to go down the stairs to reception and at around the sixth floor we met ten firemen coming up towards us. They were there really quickly, he explained.

When we got out I looked back up and I could see the fire. It was scary to see how close it was to our apartment. It was just two floors above us, Geronimo added.

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The only thing I have is my phone. I'm here in my pyjamas because that is what I was wearing at the time, he said.

I don't know when I will get back into the building, or what belongings will have survived. The fire was really bad, he added.

The latest information from gardai being given to people trying to get back into the building for belongings is that it is out of bounds until a full structural and forensic examination by engineers and gardai.

Broadband infrastructure on the roof of the building is also out of action, and technicians are unable to access it while the building is sealed off.

An American couple who came to Dublin for the St Patricks Day parade and celebrations have told how they missed their flights home today because of the fire.

We were actually eating in the restaurant when the alarm was raised. Our bags are packed on the first floor but there was no time to get them because we were evacuated so quickly, said Diana Colunga from Texas.

The fire was up high and we could see it spread to the other side of the building, but the firefighters ladders couldnt reach it so they had to go inside, she added.

The police let us sit in their car for a while because we only had T-shirts on and were cold, and then we were brought here to the Carlton Hotel by bus, she explained.

We cant believe it. We arrived in Ireland in blizzards and we will be leaving following a fire, said Dianas husband James.

We will come back here because the people are fantastic. We really had a great time here and everyone is so helpful, he added.

But its a shame that we were so close to getting home but all our stuff was in the room on the first floor and we couldn't grab it, he explained.

The hotel has issued a statement this afternoon, apologising to guests and confirming it will remain closed "for some time".

Metro Hotel wishes to apologise to hotel patrons and guests that the hotel is currently closed, and will remain closed for some time, following a fire.

"All hotel guests (over 150) as well as the residents of 30 apartments attached to the hotel are accounted for and were relocated to the nearby Carlton Hotel for the night," it said.

"The key focus of hotel staff today is to notify inbound guests and to source alternative accommodation for tenants and guests, with whom we will be liaising throughout today.

"Unfortunately, guest and tenant access to personal belongings located in the hotel / apartments is restricted until clearance is received from emergency services. We will provide regular updates as they become available.

"The cause of the fire is still being investigated. No decision can be made about a hotel re-opening date until the cause of the fire has been established and all safety considerations have been thoroughly assessed."Emergency services at the scene in Ballymun last night

A very different and tragic scene at the Metro Hotel was avoid thanks to the work of emergency responders, Tanaiste Simon Coveney has said.

Dublin Fire Brigade and An Garda Siochana have been praised in the Dail for their handling of last nights towering inferno in Ballymun.

Sixty firefighters and eight fire engines battled the blaze which engulfed the hotel and apartment complex around 8pm.

Politicians on all sides of the Dail today paid tribute to the emergency crews who got everybody out safely.

Mr Coveney said it was a very significant and extensive fire.

The professionalism that resulted in no loss of life should be recognised.

It could have been a very, very different and tragic scene, but it wasnt, he said.

Fianna Fails Darragh OBrien said everybody is very grateful and thankful that there has been nobody killed or injured.

Well return to this issue because there are lessons that will be learned from this, he said.

Sinn Feins Eoin O Broin said the workers deserve all our thanks.

And Labour Party leader Brendan Howlin praised the efficient, speedy and lifesaving response.

It worked so well last night. That is an incredible tribute to our emergency services.Parents of a pupil at an all-boys' Catholic school have hit out after it was claimed information was circulated promoting a gay youth forum event to be held in Belfast.

The Irish News reported of how parents of the pupil at St Patrick's Grammar School in Co Armagh were angered and have instructed their solicitor to act saying the information promoted a lifestyle they "vehemently disagree with".

The information circulated promoted a gay youth forum taking place in Belfast at the weekend and organised by a group which offers support to young people.

It's been claimed the boy - who has not been identified - was asked to put up a poster promoting the event by a teacher but he refused.

The parents have instructed the family solicitor to contact the school to ensure that a similar incident does not take place in future.

In 1988 St Patrick's Grammar School was established after St Patrick's College and Christian Brothers amalgamated to form the new school. It was opened by Cardinal Tomas O Fiaich.

Past pupils include former deputy First Minister Seamus Mallon and Armagh GAA star Oisin McConville.

The Belfast Telegraph has contacted St Patrick's Grammar School but they said they did not wish to comment on the matter.FINANCE Minister Paschal Donohoe has asked unions to set up a "new form of engagement" on pensions and Brexit but has ruled out a return to social partnership.

Speaking after a meeting with union leaders, Mr Donohoe said a return to wage setting where unions had a shared role in budgetary policy were not areas he wanted to return to.

"There is a need for a new form of engagement between the government and the Irish trade union movement," he said. "I believe the social partnership model of the past, where social partnership played a role in wage-setting and where the primary role of government in relation to budgetary policy was shared are not areas where I will be returning to."

He said a Labour Employer Economic Forum over the last 18 months had built up a shared understanding of Brexit and there is a need to build on that approach.

The minister said the strengthened Workplace Relations Commission and Labour Court had led the way in creating wage agreements, while his department had been instrumental in forging collective agreements in the public service.

He said he has invited the executive committee of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions to share ideas on the new forum.

Mr Donohoe said his department and the Department of the Taoiseach have also considered ideas in relation to this.

Meanwhile, he refused to say if he would consider restoring pay cuts worth 200m to over 60,000 recruits whose wages were reduced during the recession before the current wage agreement runs out at the end of 2020.

He said his department has already been engaging with unions on the issue. He said their terms and conditions had not prevented the public service from attracting recruits. He said it would be counterproductive to predict how long the talks would last.

Meanwhile, the largest public service union Forsa said it wants pay scales shortened as quickly as possible to compensate recruits who joined after January 2011.

Spokesperson Bernard Harbor said talks must lead to equal treatment for all state employees by removing two points from the new entrant pay scales.Firefighters tackle the fire at the Metro Hotel near Dublin Airport on the northside of the city. Photo: PA

Firefighters were last night battling a massive blaze at a well-known hotel building near Dublin Airport.

Up to 20 fire appliances were on the scene attempting to extinguish flames coming from multiple floors of the Metro Hotel building in Ballymun.

The fire broke out shortly before 8pm at the 15-storey building located at Santry Cross, with early indications that residents and staff were evacuated safely.

However, Dublin Fire Brigade (DFB) had firefighters inside the building using breathing appartuses in order to search the hotel and extinguish the flames last night.

After being inside the building, firefighters change their air cylinders before re-entering the building again.

It is understood the fire broke out at one of the upper floors of the building, but the source of the blaze is as of yet unknown.

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DFB added late last night that "as of yet we have no reports of any casualties or people unaccounted for".

DFB were supported by Dublin Airport Fire Services in their battle to bring the fire under control. Appliances being used to fight the blaze included eight fire engines, two aerial appliances, an emergency tender, a foam tender with command units and senior officers at the scene. A command support unit and incident support unit was set up on site.

Two bus-loads of people were taken from the scene to stay at a nearby hotel.

One woman living in the building said she had heard the alarm going off but just thought it was a fault in one of the windows.

"I thought it was a fault in the window and I called reception to close them," she told the Niall Boylan Show on Classic Hits 4fm.

"They said there's a fire, I needed to leave my home. I literally grabbed whatever. I was reminded of the Grenfell Tower, I thought oh my god, this is happening.

"It was just me in the house.It was a bit shocking. I was running down and I was the only one running down. I was shocked. The alarm was going on for so long and I hadn't done anything."

The woman said she hadn't even begun to think about the future and was just in shock.

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An onlooker told the Irish Independent: "I saw one woman crying in her dressing gown with her three children.

"It started around 7.30pm and I saw a little spark and saw loads of people running out of the exists screaming help," they said.

"It started at the third last floor and debris was falling off into the parking lot. The smoke hit the whole building and even went into the lifts. There were loads of people just running out."

Despite initial concerns, Dublin Regional Homeless Executive (DRHE) confirmed that no homeless families were residing in the building.

Housing Minister Eoghan Murphy tweeted: "I want to thank Dublin Fire Brigade who continue to battle a major fire at the Metro Hotel in Ballymun under difficult conditions. We are monitoring the situation closely."A teenage charity ball was evacuated at a hotel after almost double the number of attendees turned up for the event.

The event, at a hotel in Co Tipperary, was cancelled within around half an hour of it starting.

The event, which sold tickets for 20 in aid of Pieta House, took place on Friday.

A spokesperson for the hotel - Kilcoran Lodge Hotel, in Cahir - said that the function room used for the event can hold 320 people, which was the number it had understood would be turning up.

However, after the number of third year and transition year students that were allowed had been let in, large numbers of people are understood to have then turned up outside the venue, and were bearing tickets for the event.

It is unclear how they had managed to get hold of the tickets.

The hotel spokesperson added that some minor damage was done to the hotel, which included some broken glass.

The manager previously said that a number of teens arrived at the event drunk.

When the vast numbers tried to get into the hotel, the manager decided that the event should be cancelled.

He called gardai for assistance.

No arrests were made, though one teenage boy suffered an injury after being struck by an object.

The boy (16) was hospitalised with minor injuries.

A Garda spokeswoman confirmed an incident where a teenage boy was injured.

"We can confirm a young male (16) was assaulted, he was hit with an object in a premises in Cahir, Tipperary, on Friday, March 16, 2018," the spokeswoman said.

"He was brought to hospital with very minor injuries," she added.

Last month some teens attending an under-age disco in Bandon, Co Cork, were so drunk arriving at the scene that they needed immediate medical attention.

Three ambulances were dispatched to the scene and a doctor set up a triage, before sending two critically-ill children to Cork University Hospital.

Around 500 teens attended the disco.Symphony of the Seas - Ultimate Family Suite (with slide!)

A new collection of private islands? Specialised pool spaces and "ultimate" family suites? An entirely new class of cruise ship?

Say what you like about the size and scale of mega-cruise line Royal Caribbean, nobody can accuse it of standing still.

Not content with launching the world's largest cruise ship this spring - Symphony of the Seas, carrying up to 6,680 guests - it has now unveiled a multi-billion dollar programme of upgrades for its ships and collection of private islands.

Yes, you read that right - private islands.

Royal Caribbean has already invested $200 million in a transformation of CocoCay, its existing private island port of call (pictured, top) in the Bahamas.

Rolling out in phases between September of 2018 and November of 2019, highlights of the revamp include the tallest waterslide in North America (at 135-feet), the Caribbean's largest freshwater pool, and a 1,600-foot zip-line.

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"Once completed, Perfect Day at CocoCay will be the ultimate family destination in the Caribbean, says Michael Bayley, President and CEO.

But that's just the beginning.

The cruise line has also unveiled plans for a new 'Perfect Day Island Collection', described as "a series of unrivalled and exclusive private island destinations". Destinations in Asia, Australia and the Caribbean will be announced.

The move comes amidst a global trend towards experiential holidays, with millennial travellers in particular favouring shorter breaks, immersive adventures and shareable experiences over traditional sights and passive attractions.

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A separate, $900 million investment in digital innovations on board its ships will see Royal Caribbean "reimagining" its fleet with specialised pool spaces, experiential dining and nightlife concepts, and virtual reality experiences, it says.

The programme, dubbed 'Royal Amplified', will reboot 10 ships over four years, touching "every facet of the guest experience".

Independence of the Seas is the first ship to be updated under the programme, with additions including 'Splashaway Bay', a larger interactive waterpark, a revamped theatre, Panoramic Ocean View staterooms and laser tag.

First-of-type attractions on the cards include 'Sky Pad', described as "an out-of-this-world virtual reality, bungee trampoline experience".

Symphony of the Seas, set for its maiden voyage on March 31, carries a host of innovations - including an 'ultimate family suite' (pictured above).

Royal Caribbean, named Ireland's Favourite Cruise Line in our Reader Travel Awards 2017, also plans to debut a new Quantum Class of ships in 2019 and an entirely new 'Icon' class in 2022 and 2024.

Read more:Ayia Napa, just one of the beautiful locations to visit with Cobalt flights twice weekly to Larnaca in Cyprus.

Ayia Napa has warned boozy lads' holidays that they are not welcome as it sets its sights on becoming the most cosmopolitan tourist resort of the Mediterranean.

The Cypriot coastal town developed a reputation for drunken debauchery from the 18-30 crowd in the Nineties, with groups of young men and women, often stag and hen dos, cavorting into the small hours.

But no longer.

The mayor of Ayia Napa, like his counterparts in resorts such as Magaluf, Ibiza and Hvar, has called time on the low quality youth market and asked for the police, tour operators and other visitors to help banish their loutish behaviour.

We shall not allow a small number of our visitors to turn away the remaining 90pc, with their negative actions and behaviours, said Yiannis Karousos.

We would therefore like to make it public that such inappropriate behaviour from certain clientele (low quality youth market) and all their related business partners (tour operators, nightlife event organisers, etc.) are not welcomed in Ayia Napa [sic].

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Karousos said a new CCTV system will be installed across the town to prevent and punish illegal behaviour.

He said the resort had welcomed vast investment in new hotels and apartments but more was needed to rid a style of tourism not in line with our future strategy and our vision. A new 220 million marina is set to open next year.

This is the one of the organised youth which misbehaves, does not respect the laws of Cyprus, and with their actions creates negative publicity and actually do damage [to] the reputation of the brand name Ayia Napa, he said.

Karaousos will have no doubt looked to Magaluf for inspiration after the Majorcan resort launched in 2014 an all-out war on the binge drinking and lewd antics that earned it the moniker Shagaluf.

Expand Close Ayia Napa, just one of the beautiful locations to visit with Cobalt flights twice weekly to Larnaca in Cyprus. / Facebook

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Now, well into a five-year regeneration plan, the resorts council says Magaluf has become an upmarket destination, rid of young travellers and more appealing to families and couples.

Magaluf has not been the only destination to announce crackdowns on loutish behaviour. Last July, the Croatian island of Hvar introduced fines for numerous alcohol-related misdemeanours, while the local government of Kavos, in Corfu, brought in strict late-night music restrictions.

Even in Sunny Beach, Bulgaria, a destination that thrives on its reputation for cheap thrills, authorities have launched a crusade against drunken tourists.

In August last year the deputy prime minister, Valeri Simeonov, joined a police raid on nightclubs accused of flaunting noise restrictions, before posting on Facebook: In our country there is lawlessness and bacchanalia - we will change it.

We will attract more solvent tourists, and we will have a better quality of tourism.

Last December Tom Smedley, managing director of Compare-Travel.eu, which counts ladsholiday.com among its portfolio, told Telegraph Travel that the days of the lads holiday were numbered.

Societys changing, drinking culture is changing. Early on the drinking was the main part of the holiday, now it is a part of it. Its reflective of the UK: increasing sophistication of society is driving it.

While the Magaluf authorities are clamping down on the culture, over time its working its way out anyway. I really think in five or so years, the lads holiday as we know it will be over.

Ayia Napa still has some way to go. On Ladsholiday.com the resort is still described as giving groups of lads exactly what they want.

The resorts blurb even says: Ayia Napa used to be a tiny, peaceful, fishing village. Not any more - Cyprus has embraced club culture and the island now actively encourages groups to come here and party hard in what is always a destination with a good, friendly vibe, and lots of like-minded lads and classy ladies.

But for how much longer?

Read more:

Read More

Telegraph Media Group Limited [2021]So is it time to delete your Facebook account?

Brian Acton thinks so. The co-founder of Whatsapp, who made 6bn from selling his messaging service to Facebook four years ago, this week tweeted:"The time has come. #deleteFacebook."

Like everyone else, he was disgusted about revelations over political manipulation on the social platform.

But saying you'll delete your Facebook account and doing it are two very different things.

Will any of us who are currently excoriating Facebook follow through with the ultimate sanction?

Even after all that we now know about being duped and misled with the ads and apps we see, do we mean it when we say we will pull the plug on a social network that 2m of us in Ireland use every single day?

The evidence suggests we won't.

Every year there's some sort of scandal. Every year we howl about our privacy being eroded.

Yet every year, our Facebook usage keeps going up and up. In Ireland, it's now more than two hours per day.

If we're honest with ourselves, we know the reason why. Convenience and social curiosity stop us asserting our own privacy.

Try finding an old friend without using Facebook. Or keeping tabs on what your mates and family are doing. It's awfully difficult.

Facebook is now a utility, like a phone or a car. It's our phone book, our photo album and community information service all rolled into one.

(Oh, and news. Don't forget news.)

If you really mean it, though, you can delete Facebook from your phone and laptop while keeping all the photos and messages you once put up there.

Not many people know it, but Facebook lets you download everything you've ever typed in or uploaded. The only catch is that it has to be on a laptop or PC.

In Facebook, just click on the top right of the page, choose "settings" and then you'll see a link that says: "Download a copy of your Facebook data." This includes all your photos, comments, messages, friend connections and other things that make the service personal to you.

Once this is done, you can go ahead and start nuking your account from the laptop or hone.

Go into "account settings", "general" and "manage account". Here, you can "deactivate" your account.

This isn't final, mind, but keeps your Facebook in a sort of limbo that can be reactivated at a future point.

The last step is the final option to "permanently delete" your account. Once this is done, there's no going back.

The evidence shows most people think twice before pulling the fatal trigger.

Will the current controversy cause a real exodus this time?

We'll soon know.Sisters Leah, Aimee and Keelin Gallagher, from Wellington Bridge, Co Wexford, made the most of the recent snowy conditions. Photo: Patrick Browne

Ireland is facing the prospect of Easter snow, with temperatures set to plunge again at the end of next week.

Forecasters in the UK are predicting a return of the Siberian chill dubbed the 'Beast from the East', even as we reach the end of March.

While it's unlikely the Easter Bunny will need skis to get around, Met Eireann forecaster John Eagleton said that the long-range forecast shows winds turning easterly on Holy Thursday, with temperatures dropping back to low single digits.

"It's not impossible," he said of snow falling over Easter. "But it's a long shot."

Forecasters across the Irish Sea at the UK Met Office, however, predict more wintry showers following a switch to more seasonal temperatures next week. Meteorologist Martin Bowles said that he doesn't think we will see a return to the same conditions that spawned the so-called 'Beast of the East' over a fortnight ago, or the 'Son of the Beast' conditions that left large swathes of the country under a blanket of snow last weekend.

"It's quite a different set-up than with the other beasts," Mr Bowles told the Irish Independent.

Blizzards

The last two storms that triggered blizzard conditions and heavy snowfalls were the result of a high pressure system drawing cold air over Ireland and Britain from Siberia, he said.

The current computer models show a low pressure system will build over the North Sea.

"We expect temperatures to be a few degrees below normal for this time of year," he said.

"It does look like there is the potential of wintry showers over high ground.

"But I'm ruling out the idea of widespread snow," he added.

Meanwhile, temperatures will be mild for a few days as rain sweeps in from the west this morning.

The rain will become widespread by tonight, with moderate daytime temperatures of between 9C or 10C, with gusty southerly winds. It will remain cold overnight, with temperatures dipping down to between 2C and 6C.

However, conditions will improve tomorrow, with sunny spells and mild daytime temperatures of between 7C and 10C.Islamist militants freed more than 100 kidnapped Nigerian schoolgirls, driving them back into the town where they had been captured a month ago. (Adam Davy/EMPICS)

Islamist militants freed more than 100 kidnapped Nigerian schoolgirls, driving them back into the town where they had been captured a month ago.

The captors from the Boko Haram group gave no reason for their release, which triggered celebrations and tears, but the government denied that a ransom had been paid. Some of the girls claimed friends had died in captivity and one was still being held.

The fighters, some shouting "God is greatest", drove the girls back to the northeast town of Dapchi in a line of trucks in the morning and dropped them off before leaving.

Some residents fled as the convoy rolled in.

"I don't know why they brought us back but they said because we are children of Muslims," said one of the freed girls, Khadija Grema.

After the release, in the nearby village of Jumbam, some of the girls held each other and wept, huddling on the ground in beige hijabs as residents stood around them.

Aliyu Maina, reunited with his 13-year-old daughter, said the fighters "stopped and blocked the road, they didn't talk to anybody, they didn't greet anybody".

"They said people should make space for people to recognise their children and I got my child."

Boko Haram has waged an insurgency for nine years in northeast Nigeria, during which tens of thousands of people have been killed, more than two million displaced and thousands abducted.

A 2015 military campaign drove the group from most territory it controlled, but much of the area remains beyond government rule, and insurgents still stage attacks from strongholds near Lake Chad.

The kidnapping of 110 girls aged 11-19 on February 19 from Dapchi was the biggest mass abduction since Boko Haram took more than 270 schoolgirls from the town of Chibok in 2014 - a case that triggered international outrage.

Dapchi residents said more than 100 girls had returned yesterday. The Nigerian government began transporting the girls by bus to Maiduguri, one of the largest cities in the northeast and the hub for the fight against Boko Haram.

"One girl is still with them because she is a Christian," said Grema, the freed student. "About five are dead but it was not as if they killed them - it was because of the stress and trauma that made them tired and weak."Playground politics seems to be the order of the day, with the prospect of a Trump v Biden takedown looming.

The US president and former vice president have been going at each other verbally, and Twitter users are imagining what a physical fight might look like.

Just so I'm clear, politics in 2018 is two septuagenarians threatening to beat each other up? https://t.co/Y6ooM8VZs5  DJ Judd (@DJJudd) March 22, 2018

It comes after Biden, 75, cited controversial comments about women made by Trump which were revealed during the 2016 presidential campaign.

The Democrat told an audience at the University of Miami on Tuesday: If we were in high school, Id take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him.

In true Trump fashion, Twitter was the retaliatory weapon of choice, with the president tweeting: Crazy Joe Biden is trying to act like a tough guy.

He doesnt know me, but he would go down fast and hard, crying all the way. Dont threaten people Joe!, the 71-year-old added.

Twitter users had other ideas

The Donald Trump/Joe Biden Feud As Explained By Those Old Muppets pic.twitter.com/Y903jvSs81  David Mack (@davidmackau) March 22, 2018

Is the Biden v Trump fight on pay-per-view? Anyone have a link to watch for free? pic.twitter.com/BbWdGvSSv1  Jake Scoggins (@takesjokes) March 22, 2018

Place your bets.President Donald Trump and former vice president Joe Biden are in a rhetorical fight over which of them would prevail in a brawl.

Mr Trump, reacting to comments Mr Biden made about him earlier in the week at an anti-sexual assault rally, tweeted on Thursday: Crazy Joe Biden is trying to act like a tough guy.

Actually, he is weak, both mentally and physically, and yet he threatens me, for the second time, with physical assault.

He doesnt know me, but he would go down fast and hard, crying all the way.

Dont threaten people Joe!

If we were in high school, I'd take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of himJoe Biden

At the University of Miami on Tuesday, Mr Biden cited lewd comments the Republican president made in a 2005 Access Hollywood tape about grabbing women without their permission.

If we were in high school, Id take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him, said Mr Biden, a Democrat.

He also said any man who disrespected women was usually the fattest, ugliest S.O.B. in the room.

Mr Biden, 75, made similar comments in the closing days of the 2016 campaign.

He has kept open the possibility of a 2020 bid for president and is gearing up to play a big role campaigning for Democrats running in this years midterm elections.

Mr Trump, 71, dismissed the prospect of a Biden run recently at the annual Gridiron Dinner with Washington journalists, calling him Sleepy Joe and saying he could kick his ass.

Mr Trump also attacked Mr Biden on Twitter in 2016, calling him Our not very bright vice president.The photo that the officers posted from the scene of the stabbing

Police officers have been criticised for taking a photo of themselves at the scene of where a young man was fatally stabbed.

The officers, who have not been named, have been accused of being "too busy posing for selfies" to catch criminals by outraged social media users.

The policemen, from East London's Forest Gate North's Safe Neighbourhood Team, posted for the picture outside of the Stratford Centre.

They shared the image on the forest Gate North Twitter account in the early hours of this morning, they captioned it: "Crime scene at Stratford mall today."

Benjamin Pieknyi (20) died at the same spot on Tuesday after being stabbed.

Twitter users have claimed that the police were insensitive, one person commented: "Have you caught the perpetrator(s) yet? Of course not, too busy posing for selfies."

Another said: "Quite a few murders in the capital this week. I know!!!  lets take a selfie by the crime scene."

The picture has since been deleted and Police in Newham have apologised.

They said in a statement: "We apologise for any offence caused by the selfie picture that was posted from the scene of a serious crime this morning.

"The officers showed a lack of judgement and sensitivity in posting this and they will be spoken to and reminded of how to use social media responsibly."European leaders are gathering in Brussels to discuss whether to rubber stamp the Brexit transition deal and clear the way for trade talks.

Theresa May told MPs on Wednesday that an agreement struck between Brexit Secretary David Davis and EU chief negotiator Michel Barnier would allow talks on the future trade relationship to be triggered later this week.

European Council president Donald Tusk said he had recommended that EU leaders welcome the transition deal "in practice" as it would "allow to delay all the negative consequences of Brexit by another 21 months".

Under the terms of the joint legal text agreed by Mr Barnier and Mr Davis, the UK will be able to negotiate and ratify trade deals with outside countries following Brexit Day in March 2019, to enter into force after the end of a transition period lasting until the end of 2020.

Mrs May told the Commons that for the first time in 40 years, Britain would be able to "forge our own way by negotiating our own trade agreements".

However, the PM faces warnings that the deal could be scuppered by her own MPs unless she tears up "unacceptable" proposals for fishing.

Some 14 of the PM's backbench parliamentary allies - 13 Conservatives and one DUP MP - have signed a joint letter denouncing the draft deal agreed by the Government earlier this week.A Danish inventor told police his mind was filled with thoughts of the 1990s serial killer film 'Se7en' as he cut off the head of Kim Wall, a Swedish journalist.

Peter Madsen (47) was defiant as Jakob Buch-Jepsen, the prosecutor, read records of a police interview in which Madsen described how the macabre Brad Pitt thriller sprang to mind as he decapitated Ms Wall on his submarine.

"I don't think that there's anything unnatural in that remark," he told the court. "In that film, there is a scene where a person's head is cut off."

Madsen, who was renowned in Denmark for his amateur submarine and space projects, stands accused of murdering Ms Wall to fulfil his violent sexual fantasies.

The 30-year-old journalist joined him on his submarine on August 10, 2017, to research an article on his amateur space project, but never returned.

Asked by the prosecutor whether it was a coincidence that he had searched for videos of beheadings online just days before cutting off Ms Wall's head, the inventor retorted: "Jakob, would you think it was strange if you had seen a film about a nuclear bomb and then a nuclear bomb exploded?"

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Madsen continued to maintain that Ms Wall died after a malfunction on his submarine filled the vessel's mess room with toxic exhaust fumes, after which he went into a psychosis and cut up her body to dispose of it.

He admitted to using a 50cm-long sharpened screwdriver to skewer parts of Ms Wall's body.

"I put some punctures in the body parts because I didn't want them to be inflated by gases ... I understand why you might want to think there was, but there was nothing sexual in it for me."

Madsen described how he had cut off Ms Wall's legs and arms in the vessel's toilet, and used a knife to cut off her head, describing the last act as "very unpleasant and not planned".

The trial is set to last for 12 days, with the verdict expected on April 25.

Telegraph Media Group Limited [2021]Kosovo opposition politicians release tear gas in the Pristina parliament to bring the session to an abrupt halt. Photo: Reuters

Two Kosovan MPs were injured when the opposition used tear gas several times to disrupt a parliamentary vote in the capital Pristina.

Lawmakers had to be evacuated from the Assembly building yesterday after the Self-Determination Movement party used tear gas in the hall where the vote on a border demarcation deal with Montenegro was due to start. The opposition used tear gas a second time when the session resumed.

Eight opposition MPs involved in setting off the tear gas were barred from taking part in the session when it restarts. Two people from the governing coalition were injured by the tear gas.

Opposition leader Albin Kurti said they were determined to stop the vote, which he considered "treason to the country". The session failed four consecutive times to hold the vote amid the chaos, but Speaker Kadri Veseli insisted it would still take place.

Police entered parliament and forced out a small group of opposition representatives who had refused to leave since the morning. Seven were taken to a police station for questioning.

Police also carried out detailed searches for every person entering the chamber.

The 120-seat parliament was expected to ratify the 2015 border deal, which was set as a precondition by the EU for Kosovo's citizens to freely travel within the visa-free Schengen zone. In order for it to be approved, two-thirds of MPs must support it.

The opposition party says the border deal will mean Kosovo loses 8,200 hectares of its territory.The Binnenhof buildings of the Dutch Government in the Hague

A 65-year-old man jumped several metres from a public gallery onto the floor of the Dutch parliament on Thursday with something tied around his neck, police said.

The man survived the apparent suicide attempt and was receiving medical treatment, police said in a statement.

Eyewitnesses said the man had been pacing about in an agitated state before tying something to a railing and jumping during a debate, the Telegraaf newspaper reported.

The paper identified him as an activist who had camped outside parliament for several weeks in a demonstration for the legalisation of hashish and marijuana.

"I had to do this to wake up the politicians," the Telegraaf quoted the man as having written in a post on Facebook.

Cannabis is technically illegal in the Netherlands, though it is widely available and police do not prosecute people for possession or sale of small amounts.

Shocked lawmakers could be seen in a public video feed rushing to assist the man, who hit the ground with a loud thump.

Photos on social media showed the man receiving first aid on a lawmaker's desk and later being carried out of parliament on a stretcher.A firefighter walks at the site of an explosion in a chemical plant in Kralupy nad Vltavou, Czech Republic (Petr David Josek/AP)

Six people were killed and two were injured in an explosion in a chemical factory in the Czech Republic, officials have said.

Thursdays blast occurred inside a plant located in the town of Kralupy nad Vltavou, north of the capital Prague.

Unipetrol, a Czech oil processor and plastics producer, said the blast took place inside one of the storage tank for fuels and additives in its refinery.

It was not immediately clear what caused the blast.

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Regional firefighters confirmed that six people were killed and that two injured people were sent to hospitals.

Spokesman Petr Svoboda said there was no danger of further explosions at the site.

Petr Holecek, the towns mayor, told Czech public television a tank with an unspecified substance exploded.

Speaking from the site of the explosion, Mr Holecek also said he believed there was no danger to the town.

No dangerous substances have leaked out, according to police spokeswoman Marketa Jonova.Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy has defended himself against the mad allegations that he accepted millions of euros in illegal campaign funding from late Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi.

Its an ignominious act, not (just) a lie, Sarkozy said during a live television interview. I owe the French people the truth: I never betrayed their trust.

The one-term ex-leader was handed preliminary charges on Wednesday in an investigation of his successful 2007 campaign for the French presidency.

The charges include illegally funding the campaign, passive corruption and receiving money from Libyan embezzlement.

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Im not above the law, but Im not below it either, Sarkozy, 63, said during the TF1 interview.

He was detained and questioned by anti-corruption police before he was given the preliminary charges by judges leading the probe.

Le Figaro newspaper reported on Thursday that Sarkozy said in his statement to the investigating judges that I am accused without any physical evidence.

He said he was living the hell of this slander since 2011 and denounced the accusations as lies, according to a text of the statement published by the newspaper. The allegations were first made in 2011 by Gaddafis son Saif al-Islam.

According to the text, the former president told investigators that the allegations even cost him a re-election bid in 2012 when they emerged during the campaign.

Investigators are examining allegations that Gaddafis regime secretly gave Sarkozy 50 million euros for his 2007 presidential election bid.

The former president was released on Wednesday night but placed under judicial supervision.

As Frances president from 2007 to 2012, Sarkozy put France in the forefront of the Nato-led airstrikes against Gaddafis troops that helped rebel fighters topple Gaddafis regime in 2011.

An investigation has been under way since 2013 into the case.

It got a boost when French-Lebanese businessman Ziad Takieddine told the online investigative site Mediapart in 2016 that he delivered suitcases from Libya containing 5 million euros in cash to Sarkozy and his former chief of staff, Claude Gueant.

Mr Takieddine repeated his allegations during a live interview with Frances BFM TV on Wednesday night.The Ukrainian parliament has stripped a celebrated former military pilot and presidential hopeful of her immunity as a politician, sanctioning her arrest on charges of plotting an attack on parliament with grenades and automatic weapons.

Nadiya Savchenko was served a summons minutes after the parliamentary session, where she denounced the Ukrainian government for killing and dividing the Ukrainian people.

A court was to consider putting her in custody later in the day.

Critics say the dramatic charges against Ms Savchenko were part of authorities efforts to get rid of a powerful challenger ahead of the next years presidential vote.

In Thursdays speech to politicians, prosecutor general Yuriy Lutsenko accused Ms Savchenko of plotting an attack on parliament with hand grenades, automatic weapons and even heavy mortars.

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Mr Lutsenko claimed Ms Savchenko was acting in cahoots with Russia-backed rebels in eastern Ukraine to stage a terrorist coup in the interests of Ukraines enemies.

He presented wiretapped recordings in which Ms Savchenko discussed smuggling weapons from the east and went over plans for the attacks.

Ms Savchenko said she was aware of being wiretapped, and that she talked about the attacks as a surrealist political provocation to mock the government that she said failed the public after Ukrainians staged huge protests that led to the ousting of its former Russia-friendly president in February 2014.

Russia responded to those developments by annexing Ukraines Crimean Peninsula a month later and has supported a separatist insurgency fighting the government in eastern Ukraine since then.

Ms Savchenko, who has declared plans to run for president in the March 2019 election, is regarded by many as a national hero and a symbol of resistance against Russia.

She was elected in absentia to parliament in 2014, months after she was captured by Russia-backed rebels in eastern Ukraine while serving in a volunteer battalion.

She then ended up in a Russian prison.

The Ukrainian government is the main evil in UkraineNadiya Savchenko

In March 2016, a Russian court sentenced her to 22 years in prison, saying she acted as a spotter for mortar fire that killed two Russian journalists in eastern Ukraine.

During her trial she sang the national anthem and raised her middle finger in a show of contempt for Russian authorities.

Russian president Vladimir Putin pardoned her shortly afterwards amid international outrage at her sentence.

She remains popular despite falling out with Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenkos government, accusing it of corruption and incompetence.

The Ukrainian government is the main evil in Ukraine, Ms Savchenko told booing politicians on Thursday.

The entire people of Ukraine think so.

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She accused Ukrainian authorities of profiting from the fighting in the east, saying that Ukrainians on both sides want peace.

She also mocked politicians for making an about turn and casting her as an enemy, displaying her Hero of Ukraines media, the nations highest award.

Shortly after the vote, Mr Poroshenko thanked law-enforcement agencies in a Facebook statement for preventing terror attacks and exposing the Russian special operation against Ukraine.

Volodymyr Fesenko, a Kiev-based independent political analyst, noted that Ms Savchenkos arrest came amid exacerbating political tensions.

Savchenko is very charismatic and unmanageable, and it just so happened that she was isolated ahead of the start of the presidential campaign in which she could challenge many politicians, Mr Fesenko said.

The story of her plot is a clear symbol of the current anarchy which reflects our political tradition, he added.Prime Minister Theresa May with the President of Lithuania Dalia Grybauskaite in Valletta, Malta (Stefan Rousseau/AP)

Lithuanias president has said she is considering whether to expel Russian diplomats over the nerve-agent attack on an ex-Russian spy in Britain on March 4.

The UK has expelled 23 diplomats over the poisoning attack on a former Russian double agent and his daughter in Salisbury.

It blames Moscow for the military grade nerve-agent attack which has left both Sergei and Yulia Skripal in critical condition.

Asked whether Lithuania would take similar action, Lithuanian President Dalia Grybauskaite said: We are considering such measures.

At a European Union summit Thursday in Brussels, Ms Grybauskaite also offered her full support to British Prime Minister Theresa May.

Former Soviet state Lithuania shares a border with Russias western Kaliningrad exclave.A teenage Palestinian girl who was filmed kicking and slapping an Israeli soldier in the West Bank accepted a plea deal and was sentenced to eight months in prison. Stock photo

A teenage Palestinian girl who was filmed kicking and slapping an Israeli soldier in the West Bank accepted a plea deal and was sentenced to eight months in prison.

Ahed Tamimi (17) became a hero to Palestinians after the December 15 incident, outside her home in the village of Nabi Saleh, was streamed live on Facebook by her mother and went viral.

The soldiers were on duty for a weekly Palestinian protest in the village against Israeli policy on settlements in the occupied West Bank, one of the most heated issues in the conflict.

Tamimi's trial began last month and she faced 12 charges, including aggravated assault.

"No justice under occupation," Tamimi, handcuffed and shackled, shouted out at court in the Ofer military prison, near the West Bank city of Ramallah.

Tamimi's lawyer said that under the deal, she will plead guilty to reduced charges and would be sentenced to eight months in jail and a fine of 5,000 shekels (1,100).US President Donald Trump was warned in briefing materials to refrain from congratulating Russian President Vladimir Putin on his re-election, but he did so anyway, a senior White House source has revealed.

Aides included a section in Mr Trump's briefing materials for his phone call to Mr Putin, stating: "DO NOT CONGRATULATE," said the official.

The White House said in a statement it would be a "fireable offence and likely illegal" to leak Mr Trump's briefing papers to the press.

It was unclear whether Mr Trump, who prefers oral briefings, read the talking points prepared by his national security team before the call. National Security Adviser HR McMaster briefed the president in person before the call in the White House.

Mr Trump's call of congratulations drew bruising criticism from members of his own party even before the 'Washington Post' first reported that aides had advised against it.

Mr Trump also said that he and Mr Putin might meet "in the not too distant future" to discuss the arms race and other matters.

What they didn't discuss on Tuesday was noteworthy as well: Mr Trump did not raise Russia's meddling in the US elections or its suspected involvement in the recent poisoning of a former spy in Britain.

"An American president does not lead the free world by congratulating dictators on winning sham elections," said Republican Senator John McCain, who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee and has pressed the Trump administration to respond aggressively to Russia's interference in the US presidential election.

Republican Senator Charles Grassley said: "I think Putin's a criminal.

"What he did in Georgia, what he did in Ukraine, what he did in the Baltics, in London...That's a criminal activity.

"I wouldn't have a conversation with a criminal."Shares in Reckitt Benckiser rose to the top of the FTSE 100 on Thursday after the firm announced that it has ended talks to acquire Pfizers consumer healthcare business.

The household goods giant, which is behind Durex and Dettol, said that it had wanted to acquire only part of the Pfizer division, which is worth a reported 20 billion US dollars, but this had proved impossible.

Reckitt boss Rakesh Kapoor said: Our priority remains organic growth, including the completion of the integration of Mead Johnson Nutrition and creating further value from reorganising into two new business units  Health and Hygiene Home.

We always approach inorganic growth opportunities in a rigorous, disciplined, and financially responsible manner to ensure long-term value creation for shareholders.

An acquisition for the whole Pfizer consumer health business did not fit our acquisition criteria and an acquisition of part of the business was not possible.

Shares rallied on the London Stock Exchange, jumping 5% in afternoon trading to 5,916p.

Investors took the news as a signal that Reckitt will begin focusing on reorganising its own business, leaving the path open for new favourite GlaxoSmithKline to pick it up.

Reckitt warned on sales last year after being hit by a cyber attack in June, which significantly disrupted its manufacturing and orders systems across a raft of markets, including the UK.

It has also been undergoing an overhaul to organise the firm into two divisions  its consumer health business, including recently acquired US infant formula company Mead Johnson, and a home and hygiene arm.

Russ Mould, investment director at AJ Bell, said: Given that the weight of evidence suggests most acquisitions destroy rather than create shareholder value, the market reaction looks very rational.Pro-Spain demonstrators march holding a giant Catalonian flag during a protest in Barcelona (Emilio Morenatti/AP)

Spains government has rejected a plan by separatists in Catalonias regional parliament to elect prominent secessionist politician Jordi Turull as Catalan president.

The secretary of state for territorial administration, Roberto Bermudez de Castro, said Thursdays vote in Barcelona is just another ploy in the regions frustrated attempt to gain independence.

He told the Spanish Senate the government will oppose the election of any candidate who faces legal proceedings.

Mr Turull is among ex-officials facing possible rebellion charges over the regional parliaments failed attempt last year to break away from Spain.

A Supreme Court judge overseeing the rebellion investigation plans to issue indictments on Friday.

Mr Turull is the third candidate proposed by pro-independence politicians since a December election.

The central government is running Catalonia from Madrid.Neil Woodfords investment vehicle has defended its strategy despite its equity income fund getting the boot from a key sector list after falling short on a benchmark measure for returns.

The 7.7 billion LF Neil Woodford Equity Income Fund failed to deliver a higher income than the FTSE All Share Index over a rolling three-year period, having come in just shy of the 3.6% yield threshold at 3.5% .

It means the star investors fund will now be knocked out of the IAs UK Equity Income sector into the IAs UK All Companies list.

He believes this strategy is in the best interests of his investors and he has never been willing to sacrifice capital to supplement income in the short term and his portfolio construction isnt dictated by yield considerationsWoodford Investment Management statement

But Woodford Investment Management played down the effective demotion, saying the funds focus was not on yield but on delivering a certain level of pence per pound.

Throughout his 30-year investment career, Neil has focused on delivering positive long-term total returns through a combination of income and capital growth for his flagship equity income funds.

He believes this strategy is in the best interests of his investors and he has never been willing to sacrifice capital to supplement income in the short term and his portfolio construction isnt dictated by yield considerations, the firm said.

It added that, during a consultation with the IA, it had recommended removing the headline yield target which it claims does not effectively capture the impact over dividend growth over the long term.

Neils focus for the LF Woodford Equity Income Fund (and his previous equity income funds) has been, and always will be, on delivering a particular level of income per share, rather than a specific yield.

From the outset, Neil said he would aim to deliver 4p based on the launch price of 1 and grow that income each year.

That commitment remains.

The top 10 holdings of Mr Woodfords equity income fund include the likes of tobacco giant Imperial Brands, pharma company AstraZeneca, financial firms like Lloyds and Legal & General, as well as house-builders Barratt Developments and Taylor Wimpey.

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UK stocks make up more than 90% of its holdings, while, on a sector basis, financials and healthcare top the list at 37% and 25% respectively

Laith Khalaf, a senior analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown, said the reason behind the funds lower yield was that Mr Woodford sees more opportunities in naturally lower-yielding companies than he has historically and is focused on long-term returns.

This includes investments in innovative, but higher risk, smaller and mid-sized businesses that lead, or have the potential to lead, their market, he said, pointing to healthcare firms working on groundbreaking treatments and consumer and financial firms using tech to pioneer new services.

These are companies that the manager has identified as potential drivers of long-term growth, but in the meantime their lower yield has an impact on the overall income produced by the portfolio as a whole.

Mr Khalaf noted that a number of income funds have been placed in the IAs UK All Companies sector, including two of Invesco Perpetuals income funds which were previously managed by Mr Woodford.

Though he has had a difficult period of late, Neil Woodford has turned 1 into almost 27 over his entire career, compared with the 12 from the UK stock market, and that long-term record shouldnt be ignored, Mr Khalaf added.Syria's President Bashar Assad driving himself to the newly recaptured areas of eastern Ghouta (AP)

Syrian rebels and their families were expected to leave a besieged town in the eastern Ghouta suburbs of Damascus, in an evacuation deal that will see the town handed over to the government following years of siege.

Rebels released 13 prisoners of war ahead of the evacuation.

The deal is the first such arrangement made for a town inside the beleaguered eastern Ghouta enclave, which has endured one month of relentless shelling and bombardment as the government, backed by its ally Russia, pushed to retake the area after seven years of revolt.

The agreement could serve as a blueprint for other towns in the enclave.

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State-affiliated al-Ikhbariya TV cast the deal as a victory for the country.

Its correspondent Rabieh Dibeh said 10 buses had crossed into the town of Harasta to transport the terrorists, as the government refers to all armed opposition fighters, to a rebel-held province in north Syria.

The camera showed dozens more buses waiting to enter Harasta.

Critics say it is a formula for displacement that lets the state choose its citizenry and expel those opposed to or fearful of President Bashar Assads authoritarian rule.

Some 6,000 civilians are expected to depart with the militants, some of them family members of the rebels and others activists, and other people afraid of the governments vindictive security services.

An unknown number of others have already been forced out of their homes or killed in the governments ferocious campaigns against Harasta and eastern Ghouta leading up to the deal.

The United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross are not facilitating the evacuations; they are being done in conjunction with the Syrian Arab Red Crescent.

The deal is modelled after others that have had rebels surrender territory around the capital and other major cities to the government.

In all cases, the arrangements followed indiscriminate campaigns by the government against hospitals, markets, and other civilian targets, driving thousands of civilians out of their homes.

Harasta appeared in ruins in a broadcast from al-Ikhbariya, and apartment blocks in the town looked gutted.

Monther Fares, a spokesman for the rebel faction Ahrar al-Sham, confirmed his groups fighters were preparing to depart.

The government-controlled Military Media Centre said 1,500 rebels and 6,000 civilians would leave Harasta on Thursday.

The 13 men released by the Syrian rebels ahead of the evacuation identified themselves to the media as soldiers and civilians attached to the Syrian army, who were captured by rebels in the fighting for Harasta.

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Whatsapp File picture from Syria's official news agency of Syrian government forces soldiers helping civilians who fled fighting between government forces and insurgents (Sana/AP)

In the TV footage, many cried in relief, thanking God, the Syrian army, and Mr Assad for their freedom.

Al-Manar TV, which belongs to the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, a key Assad ally, said the government released five terrorists to rebels, in exchange.

Mr Fares said the rebels agreed to leave because of civilian pressure resulting from intensive airstrikes and warplanes that do not leave the sky, adding that residents of Harasta have spent the last three months inside shelters.

Russia, a military backer of Mr Assad, was the guarantor of the deal, he said.

Also on Thursday, civilians streamed out of another part of the eastern Ghouta, continuing a trend that has seen close to 50,000 people flee across lines to the government for safety.

The Russian military said more than 1,000 civilians left rebel-held suburbs of the Syrian capital Damascus on Thursday morning.

Major General Vladimir Zolotukhin told Russian news agencies in Syria the civilians left through the Wafideen crossing.

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights monitoring group said some 4,000 people departed the besieged town of Douma in the last 24 hours.Somalis stand outside a destroyed building and destroyed cars after a car bomb in Mogadishu (Farah Abdi Warsameh/AP)

At least 14 people were killed and 10 others wounded in a car bomb blast near a hotel in Somalias capital, Mogadishu, officials have said.

Captain Mohamed Hussein said the explosion occurred near the Weheliye hotel on the busy Makka Almukarramah road.

The road has been a target of attacks in the past by the Somalia-based extremist group al Shabab, the deadliest Islamic extremist group in Africa.

Most of the casualties were passers-by and traders, Capt Hussein said.

The toll of dead and wounded was announced by security ministry spokesman Abdulaziz Hildhiban.

Al Shabab frequently attacks Mogadishus high-profile areas such as hotels and military checkpoints.

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A lorry bombing in October killed 512 people in the countrys deadliest-ever attack.

Only a few attacks since 9/11 have killed more people. Al Shabab was blamed.

Thursdays blast comes almost exactly a month after two car bomb blasts in Mogadishu shattered a months-long period of calm in the city, killing at least 21 people.

The Horn of Africa nation continues to struggle to counter the Islamic extremist group.

Concerns have been high over plans to hand over the countrys security to Somalias own forces as a 21,000-strong African Union force begins a withdrawal that is expected to be complete in 2020.

The US military, which has stepped up efforts against al Shabab in the past year with dozens of drone strikes, has said Somali forces are not yet ready.The Ukrainian parliament has stripped a former military pilot who became a national heroine after spending time in a Russian jail of her immunity as a politician on charges of plotting a military coup.

In Thursdays speech to politicians, prosecutor general Yuriy Lutsenko accused Nadiya Savchenko of plotting an attack on parliament with hand grenades and automatic weapons.

Mr Lutsenko claimed that Ms Savchenko was acting in cahoots with Russia-backed rebels in eastern Ukraine to stage a terrorist coup in the interests of Ukraines enemies.

He presented wiretapped recordings in which Ms Savchenko was talking about smuggling weapons from the east.

Ms Savchenko told politicians she was aware of being wiretapped and talked about such attacks as a surrealist political provocation to mock the government that she said has failed the publics hopes.The Capitol is seen before dawn Wednesday after a night of negotiating on the government spending bill (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

Congressional leaders finalised a sweeping 1.3 trillion dollars (917 billion) budget bill on Wednesday that substantially boosts military and domestic spending.

But it leaves behind young immigrant Dreamers, deprives president Donald Trump of some of his border wall money and takes only incremental steps to address gun violence.

As negotiators stumbled towards an end-of-the-week deadline to fund the government or face a federal shutdown, House Speaker Paul Ryan dashed to the White House amid concerns Mr Trumps support was wavering.

The White House later said the president backed the legislation, even as some conservative Republicans baulked at the size of the spending increases and the rush to pass the bill.

Talks continued into Wednesday evening before the 2,232-page text was finally released.

No bill of this size is perfect, Mr Ryan said. But this legislation addresses important priorities and makes us stronger at home and abroad.

Leaders still hoped to start voting as soon as Thursday. A stopgap measure may be needed to ensure federal offices are not hit with a partial shutdown at midnight on Friday when funding for the government expires.

Negotiators have been working for days  and nights  on details of the bill, which is widely viewed as the last major piece of legislation likely to move through Congress in this election year. Politicians in both parties sought to attach their top priorities.

Two of the biggest remaining issues had been border wall funds and a legislative response to gun violence after the clamour for action following recent school shootings, including the one in Parkland, Florida.

On guns, leaders agreed to tuck in bipartisan provisions to bolster school safety funds and improve compliance with the criminal background check system for firearm purchases. The bill states that the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention can do research on gun violence, though not advocacy, an idea Democrats pushed.

But there was no resolution for Dreamers, the young immigrants who have been living in the United States illegally since childhood, but whose deportation protections are being challenged in court after Mr Trump tried to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA.

Democrats temporarily shut down the government earlier this year as they fought for that protection. But the issue only rose to a discussion item when Mr Trump made a late-hour push for a deal in exchange for 25 billion dollars (18 billion) in border wall funds.

Instead, MrTrump is now poised to win 1.6 billion dollars (1.1 billion) for barriers along the border, but none of it for the new prototypes he recently visited in California.

Less than half the nearly 95 miles of border construction, including levees along the Rio Grande in Texas, would be for new barriers, with the rest for repair of existing segments.

In one win for immigrant advocates, negotiators rejected Mr Trumps plans to hire hundreds of new Border Patrol and immigration enforcement agents.

We are disappointed that we did not reach agreement on Dreamer protections that were worthy of these patriotic young people, said House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.

The core purpose of the bill is to increase spending for military and domestic programmes that have been sharply squeezed under a 2011 agreement that was supposed to cap spending. It gives Mr Trump a huge budget increase for the military, while Democrats scored wins on infrastructure and other domestic programs that they failed to get under president Barack Obama.February 13-18, 2016 marked Indias inaugural Make In India week held in Mumbai. Following Prime Minister Modis launch of the Make In India campaign in September 2014, the Indian government has consistently pursued its vision to invigorate the countrys manufacturing sector, which accounted for only 17 percent of Indias gross domestic product in 2015.

Each year, 12 million young Indian citizens enter the workforce. Most of them however, are low-skilled workers, which the Indian job market does not have the capacity to fill.

With these demographic challenges in mind, Modis government instituted Make In India in an attempt to shift focus to the manufacturing sector and create jobs for low-skilled workers. The Make In India week showcases the governments acknowledgement that major contributions from foreign investors are critical to the success of the endeavor.

Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion (DIPP) Secretary Amitabh Kant noted that the main aim of the event is to attract more Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) into the country. Indeed, 17 Indian states and 60 countries were in attendance.

Make In India represents important opportunities for foreign investors. There are 25 target sectors in which to invest, including chemicals, media, construction, food processing, pharmaceuticals, energy, tourism, and wellness.

Recent policy changes have also made it easier to invest directly in Indian companies. FDI (which is defined as investment by a non-resident entity or a person in the capital of an Indian company) is perhaps the easiest way to take advantage of the Make In India campaign. Individuals and companies can also invest by incorporating a company in India, forming a sole proprietorship, or establishing a branch office within the country.

If choosing the FDI route, companies and individuals can invest through the purchase of equity shares, convertible debentures, or through investments in limited liability partnerships. But each of these investment vehicles has limitations and requirements, such as pre-approval by the central Reserve Bank of India (RBI).

Hoping to attract more investment, the government has eased FDI requirements in 26 sectors.

India offers two routes for FDI: the automatic route  which does not require pre-approval by the government  and the government approval route. By allowing more investment under the automatic route, the government has made it easier to invest through FDI.

However, even in sectors where FDI is allowed through the automatic route, if FDI exceeds certain limits, automatic approval can convert to the government approval route or companies can be required to meet other thresholds, such as sourcing a significant percentage of their raw materials from Indian-based small and medium sized businesses. In fact, most sectors have additional strings attached beyond the automatic route arrangement. Further, the automatic route may not be available under some investment vehicles.

For more information on Indias Foreign Direct Investment guidelines, see Consolidated FDI Policy Circular of 2017.

Significantly, India has also raised FDI caps in more than a dozen sectors including defense, banking, insurance, medical, pensions, and construction. While there are still sectors in which foreign direct investment is not allowed at all, an increase in the FDI caps has opened several sectors that were closed previously. Although caps still exist in many sectors, they have been raised by 25 to 50 percent in most cases, making FDI both possible and more attractive.

Additionally, the government is offering incentives to encourage investment in Make In India. Among the incentives are:

Additional depreciation allowance of 15 percent to manufacturing companies that invest more than 1 billion rupees (US$14.6 million) in plant and machinery;

Incentives for businesses located in special economic zones, national investment and manufacturing zones, and special export oriented units;

Duty drawback and duty exemption/remission schemes;

Area-based incentives for northeastern areas as well as Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, and Uttarakhand states; and,

Sector-specific incentives.

The Indian governments Make In India program has certainly opened up the countrys long stagnating domestic manufacturing sector to foreign investment. While more improvements are gradually being made, these changes represent important opportunities for foreign investors willing to put in the time and attention necessary into finding the right sector and the right investment vehicle in India.The new issue of India Briefing magazine, titled Tax Incentives in India is out now and available as a complimentary download in the Asia Briefing Publication Store.

In this issue:

Tax Competitiveness in India: Changing Rules, Trends in Taxation

Indias Tax Structure: Incentives for Business, Industry, Exports

Q&A: Applying for Investment Incentives, Tax Breaks in India

India has prioritized tax reforms and investment incentives as key growth strategies in the last five years. Yet, the benefits of the reforms and relaxations, while welcome, seem limited when looking at Indias complex tax regime.

Here, foreign investors must be prepared to offset tax costs with benefits accruing from the lower cost of labor and resources or rapid growth and development of the market. The reason for current tax pains is that India is presently focused on expanding its formal economy, and reducing the imprint of its grey economy.

Major reforms  including the Goods and Services Tax, the Bankruptcy Code, and the General Anti-Avoidance Rule  are concerned with bringing more businesses into the tax fold and formal regulatory framework. At the same time, they bring transparency, accountability, and uniformity to the taxation regime in India. For too long, India has grappled with the challenge of tax avoidance, black money, and institutional corruption.

Investors and multinational companies looking to establish or expand their India presence will need to factor in this policy direction of the government, at least in the near-term. Analysts forecast that in the coming five to ten years, corporate taxes will scale down, as in more advanced economies.

In this issue of India Briefing magazine, we examine Indias corporate tax structure, analyze the latest trends in Indias tax system, and strategies that companies can use to offset their tax burden. We also explain the tax benefits that can be availed by business and stakeholders investing in India  by economic activity, industry, location, and size of firm. Finally, we answer frequently asked questions on applying for investment incentives in India.New Delhi, Mar 22 (IBNS): Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited (BHEL) has entered into a Technology Collaboration Agreement (TCA) with Republic of Korea for in-house design and manufacture of specialized components to be used in coal based power plants, the media reported on Thursday.

According to a release issued by BHEL on Wednesday, it has entered into a TCA with HLB Power for in-house design and manufacture of large Gates and Dampers for use in coal fired power plants, to be commissioned or retrofitted with high capacity emission control equipment.

In the presence of Atul Sobti, CMD, BHEL, the TCA was signed by Subrata Biswas, Director (E, R&D) BHEL and Dr. Jong Weon Kim, CEO and Director, HLB Power in a function at BHELs Corporate Office.

The release said that BHEL has been supplying conventional Gates and Dampers manufactured at its Boiler Auxiliaries Plant, Ranipet for over three decades.

This TCA will help in establishing the capability for in-house design, manufacture and testing of very large size Gates and Dampers, the company said.Indigenous Sarayaku leader Patricia Gualinga speaks out about her pursuit of environmental justice in the face of a threat on her life.

The struggle to protect the land and the environment in Latin America often costs lives. In 2017 alone, 116 environmental defenders were killed in the region, most of them for protecting their territories from activities such as industrial agriculture, mining, poaching and logging, according to the latest report by Global Witness. So when threats were made against land defender and Sarayaku indigenous leader Patricia Gualinga at her home in the city of Puyo, north of the Ecuadorean Amazon, it raised a red flag.

This is the kind of dangerous situation that community leaders face every day.

It was dawn on Jan. 5 when Gualinga was surprised by a man who broke the window of her room with a stone and threatened her.

The next time I will kill you, he told me several times, Gualinga said in an interview with Mongabay. Her husband and parents were also there. I was shocked, nobody had threatened me during my leadership.

A policeman passing by her house chased the attacker but never returned. The next day, Gualinga went to the provincial prosecutors office to file a complaint. It took some time, but eventually the crime report was registered.

In an exclusive interview, Gualinga spoke recently with Mongabay about that day.

I realized that it was a direct attempt, said the indigenous leader, who over the past 20 years has focused her efforts on fighting against violations of Amazonian peoples rights  people who are against the operation of extractive projects in their territories. In the past six months, Gualinga has settled in Puyo to take care of her father, and in November 2017 she joined the Climate Change Summit COP23 in Germany to talk about the situation for Amazonian communities.

According to the Attorney Generals Office, the crime was registered as intimidation under the law, punishable by up to three years in prison. The judicial office told Mongabay in a written response that it had proceeded To take witness testimonies, a recognition of the place of events, and a delegation for the operational investigation to the Criminal Investigation Unit of the National Police, directed by the prosecutor of the case.

Gualinga and her husband are now required to be part of Ecuadors witness protection program, which will give them semi-permanent police protection and psychological support.

What the government has achieved is that the police are now watching me in Puyo, Gualinga said. But the investigation has [shown] no results.

On the same day of the attack, Amnesty International issued an urgent appeal to the Ministry of Internal Affairs to publicly acknowledge the work done by Gualinga and all territorial and environmental rights defenders. It also urged authorities to carry out an immediate investigation and make the results public.

I believe that this is a key element to figure out the reasons behind this attack, a quick, immediate, exhaustive investigation, said Maria Jose Veramendi, Amnesty Internationals Americas researcher. These people must have a safe and propitious environment to carry out their work.

Gualingas name has been added to the list of threatened defenders called Speak out for Defenders project.



An emblematic struggle

The Sarayaku people live on the banks of the Bobonaza River, in the center of the Ecuadorean province of Pastaza. Their seven communities make up a population of around 1,400 people concentrated in the urban center. That center only corresponds to 5 percent of the 1,350 square kilometers (520 square miles) that their territory covers.

Seen from above, Sarayaku looks like a green carpet of forest connected to winding rivers, said Mario Melo, the communitys defense lawyer. The community lives in the middle of the jungle, Melo said. People are always friendly, they serve chicha [a purple corn drink] as an homage when you arrive, he said.

For Gualinga, its the area outside the urban center, closer to the primary forest, that she loves. Here there are small ranches where the Sarayaku usually go to pass the time with family.

Aerial view of the Sarayaku territory, located in the Ecuadorian province of Pastaza. Photo by Carlos Mazabanda.They are beautiful, Gualinga said. The forest is not being deforested, you can listen to the singing of the birds, and have medicinal plants at your fingertips. The trips she made with her paternal grandparents to the banks of the Rotuno River are particularly fond memories.

The depths of the living forest are home to many sacred spaces for the Sarayaku. These are the places where no human intervention is allowed.

There you can feel the presence of nature and the ecosystem, Gualinga said. There are lagoons that are home to a variety of lizards, fish and anacondas. The Andayacu, Ishpingo, Rotuno and Capahuari rivers also flow here.

But the community has struggled to keep its territory free of extractive activities, ever since the Argentine oil firm Compania General de Combustibles (CGC) obtained a concession in 1993 of what was then called Block 23. In 2002, CGC entered the community with the objective of beginning exploration activities and buried 1,433 kilograms (3,160 pounds) of high-power dynamite, known as pentolite, to determine how much crude lay underground.

They were very tense moments, the people of Sarayaku went into a state of threat, Melo said.

Ultimately, everyone came together to fight back, and in 2012 the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) ruled in favor of the Sarayaku in a case that the community filed against the Ecuadorean government, and that today is in the process of being monitored for compliance.

The people of Sarayaku have understood that this promise of development does not exist, it is false, said Tatiana Roa, of the Colombian environmental organization CENSAT Agua Viva. They recognize themselves as indigenous peoples who do not need to follow this promise of development and progress.

Roa described this struggle as emblematic of the Sarayaku people: through discourse, they managed to unite their entire community. Gualingas role in this has been fundamental, according to Roa. I think she has been a woman who has inspired many of these battles in Latin America today in the face of this extractive logic, she said.

She added that the interesting thing about Gualinga and her work was that it had not crystallized in individual terms, but in the representation of a group of people through her vocation as a Saramanta Warmikuna, or messenger of the Amazonian fight.

Now the community must protect its territory from the possible exploitation of Blocks 74, 75 and 79, granted to PetroAmazonas and Andes Petroleum during the 11th oil round that divided the southern center of the Amazon into 13 blocks, according to Melo.

The government has a moral and legal obligation to comply, he said.

Gualinga is saddened, though, by what has been lost already.

Aerial view of the Sarayaku territory, located in the Ecuadorian province of Pastaza. Photo by Carlos Mazabanda.We are no longer the peaceful community we were before, we are always on the defensive, she said. She added that it was not a fair match for them to face large, wealthy companies that were often protected by the government. Defending the territory has taken many years of her peoples lives, she said.

We have not claimed our lives back, she said.

The Sarayaku people have proposed to Ecuadors president, Lenin Moreno, that effective measures need to be taken to comply with the ruling. They have outlined a roadmap to involve the ministries of justice, the environment, hydrocarbons, the interior, defense and the treasury for this purpose. But according to Melo, this isnt a high priority for the government.



The work continues

I did not know I had this vocation, Gualinga said. I was dedicated to working and achieving success as a woman, on the radio and later as director of a tourism project.

But once the Argentine company CGC entered her peoples territory, she remembers feeling that she had no choice but to join the fight at the insistence of her people. She decided to take the risk without knowing the possible consequences.

At that time fighting against an oil company was impossible, she said. I got into Sarayakus issues and I never left.

She said the threats she faced earlier this year had revived her struggle and allowed people to become aware of what was happening with the oil blocks that interfered with her peoples territory.

They cant intimidate us, what I did is what I had to do, defend what was right, that gives me strength, the indignation that makes us fight again, she said.

Her strength, she added, also comes from her father, Sabino, one of the yachak or sages of Sarayaku; her mother, Corina Montalvo, and the many people who showed solidarity with her after the attack.

Gualinga said she was inspired to file a report about the death threat by many other women leaders in her community.

The Amazonian women have activated their fight again, they have begun to report their threats, she said.

This was the also case with Miriam Cisneros, elected president of the Sarayaku village in 2017, who spoke about the threats she has received and the theft of hard drives from her computers. Jose Gualinga, the oldest of Patricias four brothers, was also threatened when he presided over the community and now also advises the new authorities. His wife also received threatening messages at the time they were fighting the CGC. Other threatened leaders included Franco Viteri and Marlon Santi, two of the most visible authorities in the community.

Gualinga recalled that another decisive moment in her life was when lawyers for the community asked her to be a witness during the case presented before the IACHR, and to be a translator before the court. She also made the final petition for the case and prepared the witnesses that the defense chose.

I felt the weight of responsibility on me, Gualinga said. I felt the weight of Sarayaku in me.

Now the focus is on presenting a campaign that rescues the ancestral concept and the larger vision of this community, which seeks to show the rainforest as a living being and at the same time as the habitat of other human beings. For the community, this allows the balance between the elements of the universe.

Aerial view of the Sarayaku territory, located in the Ecuadorian province of Pastaza. Photo by Carlos Mazabanda.They require special consideration, and activities such as those by the oil companies showed that these beings can perish or leave the territory, Melo said.

The community in Puyo seeks to promote a public policy proposal that respects this sacred nature of the forest and that can be included in the national constitution, which already recognizes the rights of nature.

Gualinga said that in a few months she would leave Puyo to return to the sacred forests that fill her community with the necessary energy for their fight to continue.

Text and images credit: Mongabay

Banner Image: Patricia Gualinga/MongabayNew Delhi, Mar 22 (IBNS): Prime Minister Narendra Modi made a telephone call on Wednesday to Angela Merkel to congratulate her on assuming office as the Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany for the fourth successive term, officials said.

Prime Minister Modi lauded the strong leadership provided by Chancellor Merkel to Germany, and the pivotal role played by Germany in European affairs during her leadership tenure.

Prime Minister Modi reiterated his commitment to continue working with Chancellor Merkel for deepening and strengthening the Indo-German bilateral relationship.

Prime Minister Modi also said that he is looking forward to his forthcoming meeting with President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who will be on a State Visit to India on Mar 22-26."Formidable Supersonic Cruise Missile #BrahMos was successfully flight tested at 8:42 AM today at Pokhran test range, Rajasthan. The precision strike weapon with Indian-made seeker flew in its designated trajectory and hit the target with pin-point accuracy," the defence ministry tweeted.

Defence minister Nirmala Sitharaman congratulated the Defence Research and Development Organisation for the successful fight test and said it will be a further boost for the country's security. "Smt @nsitharaman congratulates @DRDO_India , the Armed Forces and Defence Industry for the successful flight test of the Supersonic Cruise Missile #BrahMos. The successful test will further bolster our national security," another tweet said.

The missile that flies almost three times the speed of sound is the result of an Indo-Russian venture and its range can be extended up to 400 km.

It is being called the world's fastest supersonic cruise missile..

According to reports, work is underway to integrate the BrahMos supersonic cruise missile on 40 Sukhoi combat aircraft.

The BrahMos has been inducted into the Navy and Army from 2006 onwards, but this version is more versatile because unlike warships, which are slow-movers, a fast-moving Sukhoi-30 fighter can travel at least 1,500 km towards a target before the missile itself is fired.



New Delhi, Mar 22 (IBNS): Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, on Thursday, reminded everyone about the importance of Jal Shakti (the power of water) on the occasion of World Water Day, which is celebrated on March 22 every year.

Tweeted PM Modi, "#WorldWaterDay is an occasion to highlight the importance of Jal Shakti and reaffirm our commitment towards water conservation. When water is conserved, our cities, villages and hardworking farmers benefit tremendously."

However, the BJP's arch rival, the Congress chose to take a dig at PM Modi on the occasion of World Water Day and tweeted, "On this #WorldWaterDay, let us remind PM Modi that Mother Ganga is still waiting for him to take some concrete action as opposed to his jumlas on the Namami Gange Programme."

International World Water Day is held annually on 22 March as a means of focusing attention on the importance of freshwater and advocating for the sustainable management of freshwater resources.

An international day to celebrate freshwater was recommended at the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The United Nations General Assembly responded by designating March 22 1993 as the first World Water Day.

India too joined the world on Thursday to highlight water conservation and the problems of water depletion.

The Rajya Sabha too observed World Water Day on Thursday with Chairman Vice President M Venkaiah Naidu underlining need for supporting conservation of fresh water resources through natural methods to ensure availability of sufficient potable water for the future generations.

"Our culture holds water and rivers in very high esteem equating it to life itself and lay great emphasis on its conservation," tweeted Gujarat Chief Minister Vijay Rupani.

Tweeted West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, "Today is World Water Day. Our govts Jal Dharo Jal Bharo scheme for water conservation is one of our most successful schemes. We have delivered 5 times more than what we promised. Our government is committed to providing clean drinking water to every block in West #Bengal."

"On this #WorldWaterDay, let's pledge to safeguard our water resources and secure a water-scarcity free future through sustainable practices< tweeted N Chandrababu Naidu, Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh.

According to media reports, a UNESCO report has said that India will be facing an intensified water crisis across the nation by 2050, with many parts of central India battling a withdrawal of 40 per cent of the renewable surface water resources.

Per capita availability of water has dipped from 5,177 cubic metres in 1951 to 1,545 cubic metres in 2011, said NDTV in a report.

The theme for World Water Day 2018 is Nature for Water.

According to experts, nature-based solutions have the potential to solve many of the world's water challenges. Planting new forests, reconnecting rivers to floodplains, and restoring wetlands will rebalance the water cycle and improve human health and livelihoods.



Image: UN-Water/twitterNew Delhi, Mar 22 (IBNS): German President Dr. Frank-Walter Steinmeier along with First Lady Elke Budenbender arrived in India on Thursday on a five-day state visit, according to media reports.

On his arrival at AFS Palam in New Delhi, the German President was received by Minister of State for Drinking Water & Sanitation, SS Ahluwalia.

This will be Dr. Frank-Walter Steinmeier's first visit to India as the President of Germany.

During this visit, the German President will be accompanied by a CEO delegation, Indologists and a media delegation.

Apart from Delhi, President Steinmeier will also visit Varanasi and Chennai.

According to a release from the External Affairs Ministry, he has visited India several times in his former capacity as the Foreign Minister and Vice Chancellor of Germany - in 2015 accompanying Chancellor Merkel to attend the 3rd Intergovernmental Consultations, in September 2014 and in November 2008.

The last German President to visit India was Joachim Gauck in February 2014. This visit is significant as it will be the President's first visit after the new German Government was sworn in on March 14, 2018, the MEA release said.

The release also said that after having established Strategic Partnership since 2000, successive governments of both countries have endeavored to broaden and deepen the relationship. This has found expression in having biennial Summit level Inter-Governmental Consultations (IGC), which Germany has with select countries only.

India-Germany bilateral economic cooperation has been robust, said the MEA release. Germany is Indias largest trading partner in Europe and the sixth largest trading partner in the world. India was ranked 24th in Germanys global trade.

Indias current priorities in most areas match with German expertise, such as renewable energy, skills development, Smart City, water & waste management, cleaning of rivers, railways, etc.

In 2016-17 the bilateral trade turnover was US$ 18.76 billion. In 2016-17, India exported goods worth US$ 7.18 billion to Germany and imported goods worth US$ 11.58 billion. Germany is the 7th largest foreign direct investor in India. Cumulative German FDI in India from April 2000 to December 2017 is USD 10.71 billion or 2.91% of total FDI.

There are more than 15,000 Indian students in Germany and around 800 German students are doing their internship or studying in India (2017), the MEA release said.

it also pointed out that 108,000 Indian national are in Germany (German Ministry of Interior, 2017) and the number of PIOs in Germany is about 73,000, mainly consisting of technocrats, small businessmen/traders and nurses.

On Wednesday, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi made a telephone call to Angela Merkel to congratulate her on assuming office as the Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany for the fourth successive term, officials said.

PM Modi also said that that he was looking forward to his forthcoming meeting with President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, media reported.

Image: PIBNew Delhi, Mar 22 (IBNS): President Ram Nath Kovind attended the concluding session of the Festival of Innovations and Entrepreneurship (FINE) at Rashtrapati Bhavan on Thursday.

He also witnessed presentations of recommendations of round tables held during the FINE - on Science and Technology led innovations for societal application; nurturing innovation ecosystem; role of government in scaling up and commercialization of innovations including start-ups; and innovations for sustainable agriculture with special focus on Bamboo and herbal medicine, aroma, fragrance and flavours.

Speaking on the occasion, the President said that the Exhibition of Innovations held at Rashtrapati Bhavan has demonstrated to industry, government and civil society how innovators are collaborating for a creative and compassionate India.

"But showcasing innovations is not the sole purpose of this Festival. We must translate innovative ideas into accessible and affordable products and services for our people. Otherwise ideas will remain only ideas  nice thoughts on paper and computer screens. It is important to connect the bottom of the innovation pyramid with the other layers. And to clear the path for grassroots innovations to be scaled up for mass adoption," he said.

The President said that an innovation in culture is not limited to science and technology.

"It is a cross-cutting endeavour. Innovation Clubs in Central Institutions of Higher Education are expected to re-double efforts in discovering, spreading and celebrating innovation and in mapping unmet needs of urban and rural communities," Kovind said.

The President said that "regions in our country that grow bamboo, aromatic and medicinal plants are, generally speaking, regions with developmental gaps and challenges."

"This year FINE has focused on pooling innovations in the management and processing of such resources. The goal is to push development in these regions, by better using the natural resources available there. This will have a direct impact on livelihoods," said he.

The President congratulated all participants and innovators for giving a glimpse of their extraordinary minds. He said that their stories are inspiring.

"It is now for all us to use that inspiration as a catalyst and convert their innovations into enterprises," said he.



Guwahati, Mar 22 (IBNS): Opposing the Assam governments move to downgrade the Assam Womens University (AWU) to a technical institute, the student community of the state has come out to the streets staging dharnas and protested against the government move.

The stand-off between the student community and the state government over the issue intensified with students from various colleges and Universities coming out to the streets.

On Thursday, students of several colleges and several organizations including Students Federation of India (SFI) staged protest against the state governments move.

The Assam Womens University (AWU), the first Women University in the state was established after an Act was passed in the Assam Legislative Assembly in 2013 and the University started in a makeshift renovated grain storage facility of Assam Agriculture University in Jorhat.

While the student community wants that the Assam Womens University to be declared a full-fledged university, the state government has taken decision to downgrade the university to a technical institute.

The students of various colleges demanded that the state government should maintain the university status of AWU and appoint a vice-chancellor.

Meanwhile, Assam Education minister Hinanta Biswa Sarma tweeted, I am not sure why the girls are on strike. We have not taken any decision so far. My only view is that one should not have a university and confer degree without even creating the post of vice-chancellor.

On the other hand, former Chief Minister of Assam Tarun Gogoi criticized the BJP-led Assam government and said that, the government is playing dual stand.

While the Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led union government campaigned Beti Bachao Beti Padhao vision across the country, the Assam government has planned to convert the lone Womens University in the state to a technical institute, Gogoi said.

Recently, over hundreds of AWU students went on a hunger strike in front of the Jorhat district Deputy Commissioner's office in protest against the government's decision to convert the university into a technical institute.

(Reporting by Hemanta Kumar Nath)Guwahati, Mar 22 (IBNS): Uncertainty looms over Panchayat elections in Assam after Deputy Commissioners of 11 districts sent a letter to the state election commission and said that it is impossible to hold the polls as maximum government officials are engaged with the updating process of National Register of Citizens (NRC).

The Deputy Commissioners of the 11 districts said in their letters sent to the state election commission that the Supreme Court had directed that, the work of holding the elections will not be at the cost of upgradation, preparation of the NRC and NRC updation works will continue as before with full deployment of manpower as on date.

"The apex court has directed to maintain the level of manpower already deployed for NRC works and ensure that they are not disturbed from NRC update works till publication of complete Draft NRC within stipulated timelines. The officers who have been already engaged for the updation process of the NRC cannot be engaged for the conduct of any election till completion of the NRC works," said in a letter sent by the Nalbari district Deputy Commissioner.

On the other hand, a top official of Barpeta district said that, the State Coordinator of NRC had reiterated that contempt proceeding will be initiated against the officers, who have already been engaged for the updation of NRC also perform election duties, as it will slow down the progress of the work of updation of NRC.

The government official further said that, NRC updation work is a time bound programme and it is being monitored by the Supreme court.

The Deputy Commissioners of Nalbari, Barpeta, South Salmara, Bongaigaon, Kamrup, Morigaon, Darrang, Sonitpur, Biswanath, Karimganj, Hailakandi districts have also sent letter to the Chief Secretary of Assam government and sought an intervention over the issue.

Over 90 per cent government officials are engaged in the NRC updation process going on across the state.

After publishing the first partial draft of NRC on December 31 midnight by including 1.90 crore people, the Supreme Court directed the NRC authority to publish the full draft by June 30 next.

Meanwhile, state election commissioner H N Bora said that, the state election commission has taken the issue very seriously and will file a petition before the Supreme Court shortly for seeking intervention from the apex court.

The Assam state election commission has prepared to hold the panchayat polls in the state between April last and first part of the month of May.

The state government has also sanctioned Rs 145 crore to conduct the panchayat elections.



(Reporting by Hemanta Kumar Nath)New York, Mar 22 (IBNS): Amid allegations of Cambridge Analytica data misuse, Facebook Inc Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday finally broke his silence over the issue and said his company committed 'mistakes' in how it handled data belonging to 50 million of its users.

He also explained the various measures his government will take to restrict developers access to such information in future.

"We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can't then we don't deserve to serve you. I've been working to understand exactly what happened and how to make sure this doesn't happen again. The good news is that the most important actions to prevent this from happening again today we have already taken years ago. But we also made mistakes, there's more to do, and we need to step up and do it," Mark said in a Facebook post.

Speaking on the Cambridge Analytica isue, Mark said: "In 2013, a Cambridge University researcher named Aleksandr Kogan created a personality quiz app. It was installed by around 300,000 people who shared their data as well as some of their friends' data. Given the way our platform worked at the time this meant Kogan was able to access tens of millions of their friends' data."

"In 2014, to prevent abusive apps, we announced that we were changing the entire platform to dramatically limit the data apps could access. Most importantly, apps like Kogan's could no longer ask for data about. a person's friends unless their friends had also authorized the app. We also required developers to get approval from us before they could request any sensitive data from people. These actions would prevent any app like Kogan's from being able to access so much data today," he said.

"In 2015, we learned from journalists at The Guardian that Kogan had shared data from his app with Cambridge Analytica. It is against our policies for developers to share data without people's consent, so we immediately banned Kogan's app from our platform, and demanded that Kogan and Cambridge Analytica formally certify that they had deleted all improperly acquired data. They provided these certifications," he said.

"Last week, we learned from The Guardian, The New York Times and Channel 4 that Cambridge Analytica may not have deleted the data as they had certified. We immediately banned them from using any of our services. Cambridge Analytica claims they have already deleted the data and has agreed to a forensic audit by a firm we hired to confirm this. We're also working with regulators as they investigate what happened," Mark said.

He said a 'breach of trust' has been committed.

Mark said he will take steps to 'fix' the trouble.

"This was a breach of trust between Kogan, Cambridge Analytica and Facebook. But it was also a breach of trust between Facebook and the people who share their data with us and expect us to protect it. We need to fix that," he said.

Speaking on some of the corrective measures his company will perform to prevent such incidents in future, Mark said: "First, we will investigate all apps that had access to large amounts of information before we changed our platform to dramatically reduce data access in 2014, and we will conduct a full audit of any app with suspicious activity. We will ban any developer from our platform that does not agree to a thorough audit. And if we find developers that misused personally identifiable information, we will ban them and tell everyone affected by those apps. That includes people whose data Kogan misused here as well."

He said Facebook will restrict developers' data access even further to prevent other kinds of abuse.



"Third, we want to make sure you understand which apps you've allowed to access your data. In the next month, we will show everyone a tool at the top of your News Feed with the apps you've used and an easy way to revoke those apps' permissions to your data. We already have a tool to do this in your privacy settings, and now we will put this tool at the top of your News Feed to make sure everyone sees it," he said.

Meanwhile, Mark said 'sorry' for the episode during an interview with CNN.

"This was a major breach of trust, and I'm really sorry that this happened," Zuckerberg told CNN.

Stories about US President Donald Trump's 2016 election campaign doesn't seem to die down. The latest to have emerged from that controversial election is the role of Trump campaigns data consultant, Cambridge Analytica, accused of using Facebook data wrongfully to influence the polls, even as the company Tuesday suspended its CEO Alexander Nix after a sting operation caught him discussing potential bribery and entrapment.

According to reports, the UK-based firm used data of millions of Facebook users without their consent to influence the 2016 US elections.

The Board of Cambridge Analytica Tuesday announced that it has suspended CEO Alexander Nix with immediate effect, pending a full, independent investigation.

"In the view of the Board, Mr. Nixs recent comments secretly recorded by Channel 4 and other allegations do not represent the values or operations of the firm and his suspension reflects the seriousness with which we view this violation.

"We have asked Dr. Alexander Tayler to serve as acting CEO while an independent investigation is launched to review those comments and allegations," the company said in a release.

"We have asked Julian Malins QC to lead this investigation, the findings of which the Board will share publicly in due course," it said.

"The Board will be monitoring the situation closely, working closely with Dr. Tayler, to ensure that Cambridge Analytica, in all of its operations, represents the firms values and delivers the

highest-quality service to its clients."

The statement was released ahead of airing of the expose by Channel 4 News in the UK.

Even though several other apps on Facebook uses user data, Cambridge Analytica has been accused of breaking the rules as it obtained the said data under a veiled motive, telling users that it was for academic use.

Image: Mark Zuckerberg Facebook pagePristina, Mar 22 (IBNS): The picture of the parliament turned worse in Kosovo on Wednesday as the Opposition party had opened tear gas to prevent voting, media reports said.

The tear gas was opened by the lawmakers of opposition party, Levizja Vetvendosje, to stop voting on the Border Demarcation Agreement.

The ratification of the border deal will facilitate the Kosovo citizens to experience visa-free travel to the European Union, Avni Bycyti, deputy chief of staff to Speaker, told CNN.

Regarding the halting of voting, Speaker Kadri Veseli told CNN, "The Border Demarcation Agreement will be approved by the parliament today, in spite of the attempts of a small opposition party to prevent the vote with violent means."

"We will not give up to violence and populism. This approval will serve to reinforce the sovereignty of our country and will unblock our path towards European Integration."

The border deal was signed with Montenegro in 2015.

The opposition party has offered resistance to the ratification of the deal saying it will hand over certain square miles of Kosovo's territory.

Regarding the incident, United States Ambassador to Kosovo, Greg Delawie, tweeted, "I would urge MPs to vote yes on the Border Demarcation Agreement. I encourage them to vote yes for Europe. I encourage them to vote yes for progress for #Kosovo. This issue has tied things up for too long now. It is time for Kosovo to move forward."

I would urge MPs to vote yes on the Border Demarcation Agreement. I encourage them to vote yes for Europe. I encourage them to vote yes for progress for #Kosovo. This issue has tied things up for too long now. It is time for Kosovo to move forward. https://t.co/qh0GZiDhPP pic.twitter.com/lpnFdPGQDi  Amb. Greg Delawie (@USAmbKosovo) March 21, 2018

Kosovo, a territory in Southeastern Europe, was declared as an independent state from Serbia in 2008.Male, Mar 22 (IBNS) : Maldives President Abdulla Yameen on Thursday lifted the 45-day-long state of emergency, imposed in the country to annul a Supreme Court ruling that quashed convictions against nine Opposition leaders, media reports said.

The emergency, which was imposed on Feb 5 for 15 days, was later extended for another 30 days with the parliaments approval, a move challenged by the Opposition.

During the emergency period, former President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, the chief justice, another Supreme Court judge, and a Supreme Court administrator were arrested on allegations of attempting to overthrow the government.

Amidst allegations of Maldives government targeting opposition leaders and jailed many including the veteran leader and former President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, the official statement announcing the decision on Thursday said the constitutional crisis that led to the Emergency was created by two Justices of the Supreme Court who conspired with political actors to violate both the Constitution and standard legal norms and practices in order to illegally overthrow a lawful Government, and whose actions constituted an imminent threat to national security.

The State of Emergency was declared by a Presidential Decree issued on 5 February 2018 for national security reasons. It was extended via a resolution of the Parliament on 20 February 2018 for a period of 30 days, applicable only to those under investigation for crimes relating to the Constitutional Crisis, the statement said.

However, former President Mohamed Nasheed has said, though a post on his Twitter account, that the state of emergency was lifted because President Abdulla Yameen no longer has any need for it.

"President Yameen lifts the SoE because he now has no need for it. He has overrun the judiciary and legislature, arrested hundreds unlawfully and introduced a new normal in the #Maldives - full dictatorship. We will not give up, we will fight and we will overcome," the tweet said.

Islamabad, Mar 22 (IBNS): Pakistan and Russia have expressed 'grave concern' over the growing threat of Islamic States terrorists in the region.

"Both sides expressed grave concern over the rising threat posed by Da'esh. While major successes had been achieved in the fight against Da'esh in Syria and Iraq, the returning Da'esh fighters from the conflict zones to countries of origin or third countries constituted a major security threat to various parts of the world, including this region. It was important for countries of the region to cooperate to counter this threat," read a statement issued by Pakistan's Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Both the nations expressed their concerns at the seventh meeting of the Pakistan-Russia Joint Working Group on Counter-Terrorism held in Pakistani capital Islamabad.

Pakistan and Russia also reaffirmed the commitment for promoting bilateral cooperation for 'countering terrorism'.

"They also agreed to cooperate at the United Nations and other international fora for combating terrorism," read the statement.

In the meeting, the Pakistan side was led by Ahmad Farooq, Director General, Counter Terrorism, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, while the Russian side was led by Ilya Rogachev, Director Department for New Challenges of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.Dhaka. Mar 22 (JEN): Security forces have arrested two Neo JMB members, including Hadisur Rahman Sagar, who allegedly supplied bombs during the 2016 Holey Artisan Bakery attack in Dhaka, media reports said on Thursday.

At least 20 people were killed in the attack.

The deceased included 17 foreign nationals.

The other arrestee Akram Hosen Niloy of Kishorganj is the alleged mastermind of the Hotel Olio International blast in Dhakas Panthapath on August 15 last year, sources at Counter Terrorism and Transnational Crime (CTTC) unit of the Dhaka Metropolitan Police (DMP) told The Daily Star newspaper of the country.

The arrested people will be produced before the court, police sources told the newspaper.

Terrorists attacked the Holey Artisan Bakery in Dhaka on July 1, 2016.Ottawa, Mar 22 (IBNS): Parents of a 20-year-old Canadian man, who is accused of plotting a terror attack in the New York City in 2016, are pleading for mercy of their son, media reports said.

The parents of Abdulrahman El Bahnasawy are waiting for the verdict to be pronounced by the federal court on Apr 9.

Interacting with CBC News, Bahnasawy's parents Khdiga Metwally and Osama El Bahnasawy said they understand the gravity of their son's crime.

The parents have also said their son was mentally ill during his teenage so Bahnasawy doesn't deserve to spend the rest of his life in prison.

"We were struggling for this sick boy, and he [was] struggling for himself," says Metwally, her voice shaking. "Other people try to manipulate him when he was so isolated on the internet, to do violence" parents told CBC News.

Abdulrahman El Bahnasawy was charged after he pleaded for being involved in plotting of a 2016 terror attack, targeting New York.



Last year, the U.S. Attorney's Office had revealed the entire details of the terror attack plan that had an alleged effort to detonate bombs in Times Square and the New York subway system.

Plans were also made to attack some concert venues, reports said.

The sealed information also stated that the accused had bought the bomb-making materials and manged to get a room closer to the city to build explosives.

Apart from Bahnasawy, Talha Haroon and Russell Salic, were also charged over the same allegations.

While Haroon is a 19-year old US citizen living in Pakistan, Salic (37) is from Phillippine.

Both were arrested outside the US. They are likely to be extradited to the US for prosecution.



Washington/Beijing, Mar 22 (IBNS): US President Donald Trump has hinted that his administration could impose sanctions against China on Thursday, after reports claimed that Beijing indulges in transfer and theft of intellectual property from US businesses.

According to findings handed over to the White House, China forces US firms to forge local partnership in order to enter the Chinese market, which in turn facilitates data transfer.

The report also said that it found evidence that China conducting and supporting cyber attacks.

The report is culmination of a recently concluded investigation ordered by Trump in August last year.

According to experts, If the USA does press sanctions against China, it will widen the trade war.

US media has reported that the White House is considering actions which include tariffs between $30bn-$60bn and other measures that would restrict investment.

The reports said that the Trump administration could also seek help from the World Trade Organisation.

Robert Lighthizer, America's top trade negotiator, told US Congress members on Wednesday that the US is looking to put "maximum pressure on China and minimum pressure on US consumers".

"It's an enormously important issue," he said. "We think it is perhaps the most important thing that will have been done in terms of rebalancing trade."

China however has warned the US that there would be no winner from a trade war.

On Tuesday, China's Premier Li Keqiang said that he hoped that both Beijing and Washington would remain calm and the latter would ease restrictions on exports of high-tech goods to China."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.That's the thing about conspiracy theories. They might seem harmless but some create dangerous aftershock. Then why do we get hooked? What is it about these theories that appeals to so many? Could it be something as simple as acquired paranoia or a predisposition towards all things anti-government?

anonews.co

In an interview with The BBC, a psychologist and a professor at the University of Kent, Karen Douglas puts it as, "In some ways, it is quite adaptive to be suspicious of other groups for your own personal safety." When asked why some people drift towards these theories more than others, Douglas spoke of the almost 'narcissistic need' to appear unique that drives these people.

Yet another reasoning talks about the comfort that comes from believing that powerful people can be behind such events. Usatoday.com summed up inputs from different psychologists and explained our tendency to believe these theories in three succinct points:

Confirmation bias: People's willingness to accept explanations that fit what they already believe.

Proportionality bias: The inclination to believe that big events must have big causes.

Illusory pattern perception: The tendency to see causal relations where there may not be any.

What probably confuses those on the fence about these things more is when some of these 'theories' turn out to be true. According to Post Radar, 'The Pentagon officially confirmed that there was a $22 million government program to collect and analyze anomalous aerospace threats."' So, now we're left wondering if it's only a matter of time before all theories are proven.

365.com.mk

Meanwhile here are some seemingly bizarre conspiracy theories currently doing the rounds:

1. Stephen Hawking died back in 1985 and was replaced by a lookalike because NASA apparently thought he was far too important to lose.

AFP

Apparently the Hawking lookalike is a regular old guy who only matches up to the renowned scientist in looks. NASA takes care of the complex astrophysics. It is said a team of astrophysicists typed out Hawking's words for him on his screen. But why go this extent? So NASA could use the public's trust to their advantage. Sadly, a little over a week back was when Stephen Hawking passed away. Considering how devastated people were by this news, it seems this theory has few takers. This Reddit thread meanwhile delves deeper.

2. SpaceXs historic Falcon Heavy launch wasn't real. It was all CGI

SpaceX





According to this tweet and the accompanying video, the blast allegedly illuminates the studio this CGI masterpiece was shot in. This tweet elicited a response from Elon Musk himself during a press conference: "You can tell its real because it looks so fake, honestly. Wed have way better CGI if it was fake." The rest is up in the air. The Flat Earth Society took things further with this statement on Twitter, "People who believe that the Earth is a globe because 'they saw a car in space on the Internet' must be the new incarnation of 'It's true, I saw it on TV!"

3. Last Thursdayism, the theory that claims your memories were created only last Thursday

NASA

Also know as Last Tuesdayism or Last Wednesdayism, not that that changes anything, but this one suggests that things around youlight from the stars, books, even your memories may have the appearance of looking older, more authentic (a billion years in the case of light from the stars) but came to be at the time of creation, i.e. last Thursday. The debate, as this page creatively puts it, 'has raged on ever since the creation of the universe last Thursday its inception.' What proof do you have that this is, in fact, not the case?

4. There's a whole different bunch of people living inside the earth's 'hollow' centre

The "Interior World" of Atvatabar from William R. Bradshaw's 1892 Sci-Fi novel The Goddess of Atvatabar/Wikipedia

Not just that, they even have their very own sun there. Accessing the Hollow Earth is pretty simple too: just climb in through the holes at each pole. According to Wikipedia, in the late 18th century, the scientific community dismissed this theory and this version of earth only finds a mention in folklore now.

5. Those white aircraft trails in the sky are really 'chemtrails,' a concoction of dangerous chemicals sprayed from planes in a bid to control the population and food supply

Jason Reed/Reuters

But... according to usatoday.com, 'a group of researchers surveyed 77 atmospheric chemists and geochemists to determine whether any evidence of chemical spraying from planes existed. 76 of the 77 scientists surveyed said there is no evidence that "chemtrails" exist.' So that's that.

6. People remember things differently because we live in a 'multiverse.' This is the Mandela Effect

space.news

The contradictory 'memories' allegedly only offer more proof that parallel universes exist. Yet others acknowledge this as a failure of collective memory. But can it be passed off as a simple trick of the mind? What only adds to the confusion are yet more theories that blame time travellers for the distorted version of history. 'Spiritual attacks' because of Satan, black magic or witchcraft also share part of the blame.

7. 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami was caused by the Indian government after it tested nuclear weapons underwater

Marina beach in Madras/AFP

Apparently our government was embroiled in an intense secret battle with Pakistan at the time. Unfortunately, 230,000280,000 people in 14 neighbouring countries lost their lives in what was eventually termed one of the deadliest natural disasters in history.It's not fair that the northern hemisphere gets to enjoy so much more of mother nature than just the end of winter - from breathtaking Northern lights to astounding cherry blossoms, they have it all.

Read more: Something Is Special About The Purple & Green Aurora That's Taking Over The Earth

cctv

One of the spectacles that has served as a popular drawcard for tourists from across the globe is the blossoming of cherry blossoms. People in millions flock to the region, to marvel at their beauty.

Cherry blossoms across China pic.twitter.com/rY8pbOYekO  CCTV (@CCTV) March 9, 2018



But when we think of Cherry Blossoms, we think of Japan, don't we? Albeit, it seems like China is here to claim the title.

Stunning sights of China in springtime captured in beautiful drone footage, with cherry, apricot and azalea blossom in full bloom. https://t.co/vTeVY8TM1t pic.twitter.com/D2rjpSEFAE  ABC News (@ABC) March 19, 2018

Cherry Blossoms have just bloomed in China and the entire region is covered in a gorgeous veil of colourful blossoms - in shades of pink, a little yellow, red and purple. This spring is going to be there until the end of next month.

...

Cherry blossoms in China 

: PDChina/Getty Images/VCG/National Geographic pic.twitter.com/m0twLixRrR  Gratitude Attitude (@GratitudeDNA) March 22, 2018



At Kunming Zoo in Yunnan Province is, therefore, hosting Cherry Blossom Festival, which is their 19th. In this festival that began on 7th March and will last till 7th April, the zoo will feature 5,000 flowering cherry and crab-apple trees.

Enjoy pink wonderland of cherry blossoms in China's Kunming pic.twitter.com/jeVxwtQpAM  China Xinhua News (@XHNews) March 21, 2018

That's just not all. Shanghai is about to host its biggest Cherry Blossom Festival from March 16th to April 15th in Gucun Park. It will showcase more than 12,000 cherry blossom trees of 82 varieties.From Hollywood adaptations and taking inspiration from foreign music to remixing old songs with latest beats, Bollywood is going through a lull phase, it seems. On one hand, people are NOT OKAY with the Bollywood remake of the cult film The Fault In Our Stars, and on the other hand, Jacqueline Fernandezs latest dance number EK Do Teen  which is a rendition of the classic Madhuri Dixit song is facing severe backlash.

(Also Read: Fans Arent Happy With The News Of The Fault in Our Stars Hindi Remake, Plead To Not Ruin It!)

Just yesterday, the director of Tezaab, N Chandra, the movie which the song belonged originally slammed the makers of Baaghi 2 calling the song a sex act as quoted by The Quint. He even said that he wanted to take an action against the makers.

On the other hand, Saroj Khan who had choreographed Madhuri in the original song refused to comment on the new song that is in the limelight now. Fans are also not happy. All in all, the song is facing more backlash than love.

Amid all of this, Salman Khan has extended support to the song.

Loved d song, Jackie has done full justice 2 d legendary moves of Saroj khan difficult to match Madhuri. Nice 2 see Varun n Jackie to our songs makes us proud n keeps d songs alive n fans listening, dancing n having a blast. Makes me proud . Enjoy Karo !https://t.co/qQ6nfnSAD1  Salman Khan (@BeingSalmanKhan) March 21, 2018

Heres what the hero of the movie, Tiger Shroff has to say about all the backlash the song is receiving.

I thought that was expected though. When you do a remake, you are bound to get mixed reactions. Over here the only idea behind Ek Do Teen was to pay tribute to the legend like Madhuri maam. Nobody can match up to her. Lets put that out there and make it clear. That being said, I think Jacqueline worked very hard and did a good job on her part. Ganesh Acharya did a great job choreographing. He was a dancer in the original song with Madhuri maam. So that being said, in no way we were trying to blow our trumpet. Thats not the idea. The idea is to pay homage to Madhuri maam and relive the tune of Ek Do Teen, Bollywoodlife quoted him as saying.

This is not the first Madhuri Dixit song that has been reworked. Remember Tamma Tamma from Badrinath Ki Dulhania? Madhuri had herself grooved to the remixed version.

What is your take on the song? Tell us in the comments section below.Taking a dig at actor Akshay Kumar, Maharashtra Navnirman Sena chief Raj Thackeray has made his point across. Thackeray was speaking at an MNS rally when he said that all Akshay Kumar is trying to walk in the footsteps of yesteryear actor Manoj Kumar, who was also popularly known as Bharat Kumar.

Twitter

MNS Chief also made a point and said that even though Akshay Kumar preaches about nationalism to Indians, he himself is an Indian Citizen. Thackeray said,

PTI

"But Akshay Kumar is not even an Indian citizen. He holds a Canadian passport and his Wikipedia profile describes him as Indian-born Canadian actor."

He went on to point out how Akshay's last two films 'Toilet Ek Prem Katha' and 'Padman' were not just films but they were proper propaganda for government schemes.

Reminding every one of Sridevi and the state funeral accorded to her, he further expressed his displeasure on the same. He said,

Why was she given the state funeral, wrapped with the national flag, what was her contribution, if this would have been done by any non-BJP CM, then the media would have tore in to him. Now, however, they are not doing anything as they are scared of the government."Ever since MEA Sushma Swaraj has given the news of the killings of 39 Indians, the families of the victims killed by IS in Mosul have been accusing the government of keeping them in dark.

The 39 Indians had been missing since 2014 and relatives of these people were pressing the government to bring their children back. But now the families have said that government may have known the reality since the beginning, but keep fooling us with false hopes.

The family of Jatinder Singh

We got to know about it through TV news channels. The government didnt even have the morality to tell us that our loved one is no more. I think government knew it from the beginning but MEA kept giving is false hopes. Every time in last three years we went to MEA, we were shown the letter of Iraq government by MEA Swaraj and were told that people are fine and they are doing their job, said Savendra Singh, brother-in-law of Kawaljit Singh, a resident of Gurdaspurs Roopawali village.

Kawaljit is survived by a five-year-old daughter.

Out of 40 Indian workers taken hostage in Mosul in 2014 by ISIS, only one managed to flee. Harjit Masih, the lone survivor has been claiming ever since he returned that all were murdered by IS, but the government didnt accept his argument.

The MEA Swaraj yesterday said since the government didnt have any proof of their death, it always hoped for them being alive. But if we see the events that took place in past, one can fathom that government did know the truth.

He left for Mosul in 2013-14. They had been saying that all of them are alright and now they say this. I don't even know what to say: Harjit Kaur, wife of Gurcharan Singh, who was among 39 Indians killed in Iraq's Mosul. #Amritsar pic.twitter.com/YMN2PxGATC  ANI (@ANI) March 20, 2018

AFP

Our blood samples were taken four months back and now the MEA tells that bodies were identified from mass graves which indicates that they knew about the deaths of our people. There has been no correspondence with families and we have got to know about it via news. This is really irresponsible on governments part, said Sukhjeet Kaur, aunt of Jatinder Singh, who belonged to Sialka in Amritsar.

Families had been visiting MEA ever since 2014 and if the statement of Savendra Singh is taken as truth, how could government show a letter claiming sent by Iraq government when parts of Mosul were still under IS control till better part of 2016.

Ranjeet Kaur, mother of Jatinder Singh hasnt stopped crying ever since she heard the news.

We are totally shattered. We dont have any hope left. The government didnt even bother to tell us the truth. They kept telling us that people are fine and they will be back, said Kaur.Does anyone remember Vishwa Bandhu Gupta? A retired IRS officer who became an internnet sensation a few years ago when a video of him giving an interview about cloud computing went viral.

Speaking about data safety Mr. Gupta went on to claim that there was some technology in US to record conversations from air and that data stored on your mobiles SIM card gets transferred to batteries and so on.

He also went on to question the reliability of cloud computing saying that it becomes ineffective at the times of rain etc.

Wondering why we are discussing this years old video here now? It seems like we got ourselves another brilliant 'scientist' who thinks digital data kept behind 13 feet high, 5 feet thick wall is safe from hackers.

At least that is what KK Venugopal, the Attorney General representing the government in the Aadhaar case told in the Supreme Court on Wednesday.

BCCL/ File

Arguing that the scheme was a serious effort to end corruption and not a fly-by night scheme to score brownie points, the top government lawyer said that all the details, including biometric data, are being kept at a complex in Manesar, near Delhi.

He even offered to show the five-judge bench hearing a clutch of petitions against Aadhaar a four-minute video of the complex by the CEO of UIDAI.

While we are not sure how convinced the SC judges are about the knowledge of Mr Venugopal about data safety and hacking, twitter for sure wasn't so amused at his gyan or the lack of it.

The @narendramodi Government protects electronic #Aadhaar data with commandos and a 13 foot wall as Attorney General KK Venugopal told the Supreme Court yesterday. And @NandanNilekani says There is 100% an orchestrated campaign to see how Aadhaar gets maligned?! #BinAadhaar  Fekuji ka Fan! (@kuriabraham1963) March 22, 2018

Being a Cyber Law Expert I fully endorse @tehseenp 's statement that this Govt does not know even a bit about data protection & AG KKVenugopal makes tall claims in SC that data of Aadhar is secured under 10' wall  Ravi vastava urbanmaoist (@ravi4354) March 21, 2018

AG, KK Venugopal to SC: "Data collected under #Aadhaar is secure. It's kept in a building that has 10-ft thick walls."

AG means 'Asylum General'.

As @UIDAI means 'Unlimited Idiocy Delivered by Authentic Idiots'.#DestroyTheAadhaar anyway to send all these Retards to Mars.  Sushovan Chaudhuri #DestroyTheAadhaar (@mesushovan) March 21, 2018

Data encryption is outdated, India developed '13 feet thick wall technology' to protect user data. Thanks to KK Venugopal, Attorney General of India.  Swapnil Suryawanshi (@swapnil_bs) March 21, 2018An Army jawan was allegedly shot dead by a person in full public view in a market in the Cantonment area in Bareilly, Uttar Pradesh, after the former opposed the sexual harassment of a fellow Army mans wife. Lance Naik Anil Kumar was shot at about 1 pm at BI Bazaar by Dhruv Chaudhary. Both are residents of Kori Mohalla in Sadar Bazaar of the Cantonments civil area. Anil was rushed to the military hospital where he succumbed to his injuries.

According to police officers, Dhruvs brother Rajesh had passed lewd remarks on a woman, who is the wife of an Army subedar, who Anil knew well.

reuters/representational image

Cantonment police station in-charge inspector Vijay Pal told TOI, The subedar was transferred to Arunachal Pradesh recently while his family lives here in rental accommodations. A week ago, his wife was buying groceries when Rajesh passed lewd comments on her. She informed her husband over the phone about this.

Pal added: The subedar told Anil about the incident. Two days ago Anil reached Rajeshs house but he was not there.

ap/representational image

Today, around 1 pm, Anil went to Rajeshs house again and warned him not to harass the woman. Rajesh informed his brother on the phone. Anil was halfway back home when Dhruv spotted him in the market. Dhruv confronted the Army man, abused him and shot him twice, Pal added.

Superintendent of police RS Sajwan said: After the murder, Dhruv arrived at Kotwali police station to surrender.

ap/representational image

We have recovered a country made pistol from him. Police lodged an FIR against Dhruv under sections 302 (murder) and 307 (attempted murder) of IPC on the complaint filed by Subedar Rajesh Kumar of Jat Regiment Centre.

Anil was a native of Khatima in Uttarakhand. He is survived by two children studying in class III and VI, and his wife, who live in Khatima. After the murder, all shops in the market downed shutters.bccl/gettyimg/representational image

Even as the government tries to push debit card use, banks continue to hit customers with unreasonable charges for incidents such as transactions declined for want of minimum balance. Read more

Here's more top news of the day:





1) Government Proposes To Restrict Surrogacy To Infertile Couples And Ban Its Commercial Use

BCCL/ Representational Image

The Union Cabinet has approved amendments to the Surrogacy (Regulation) Bill in 2016, effectively banning commercial surrogacy in India and provide ethical assistance only to needy infertile couples. Read more

2) Facebook Data Leak Hits Home As Links Between Cambridge Analytica's Indian Arm And Political Parties Emerge

AFP

As social media giant Facebook is trying to control the damage from the massive data leak and election manipulation scandal, the company behind is finding itself in more troubles. Read more

3) Vandals Respect None: Now Patel Statue Garlanded With Empty Soft Drink Bottles In Gujarat

Twitter

The streak of vandalism hitting statues in some parts of the country has touched Gujarat. A statue of Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, the first deputy Prime Minister of India, was garlanded with empty soft-drink bottles at a library in Shertha village of Gandhinagar on Wednesday. Read more

4) Full Education Of The Children Of Martyrs Will Now Be Funded By The Government And It's Great News

AFP/Representational Image

The government will now fully fund the education of martyrs' children, said a notification today from the defence ministry. Read more





5) Giraffes May Join The List Of Extinct Animals Due To Rampant Trophy Hunting

BCCL

With just 97,500 of the worlds tallest animal remaining, conservationists are insisting the US government officially classify giraffes as endangered in order to prevent their silent extinction. Read moreIndia today successfully flight-tested its precision strike BrahMos weapon, which is called the world's fastest supersonic cruise missile.

At 8:42 this morning, the BrahMos hit its designated target with pin-point accuracy in Pokhran, Rajasthan.

BCCL

"Formidable Supersonic Cruise Missile BrahMos was successfully flight tested at 8:42 AM today at Pokhran test range, Rajasthan. The precision strike weapon with Indian-made seeker flew in its designated trajectory and hit the target with pin-point accuracy," tweeted the defence ministry.

ALSO READ: The Booster For The World's Fastest Cruise Missile Brahmos Is Now Being Made In India

Formidable Supersonic Cruise Missile #BrahMos was successfully flight tested at 8:42 AM today at Pokhran test range, Rajasthan.

The precision strike weapon with Indian-made seeker flew in its designated trajectory and hit the target with pin-point accuracy.@PIB_India @MIB_India  Raksha Mantri (@DefenceMinIndia) 22 March 2018

Defence minister Nirmala Sitharaman congratulated the Defence Research and Development Organisation for the successful fight test and said it will be a further boost for the country's security.

ALSO READ: BrahMos Becomes Surgical Strike Weapon After Being Successfully Test-Fires From Sukhoi-30MKI

Smt @nsitharaman congratulates @DRDO_India , the Armed Forces and Defence Industry for the successful flight test of the Supersonic Cruise Missile #BrahMos. The successful test will further bolster our national security.@PIB_India @MIB_India @SpokespersonMoD https://t.co/v3mQEovNvC  Raksha Mantri (@DefenceMinIndia) 22 March 2018

Today's flight-test comes on the heels of another major milestone from last November, when the Brahmos was successfully test-fired for the first time from the Indian Air Force's frontline Sukhoi-30 MKI combat jet.

ALSO READ: India Is Looking For Customers For The Brahmos Missile, Showcasing It At Dubai Airshow

BCCL

BrahMos has become the preferred conventional precision strike-weapon for the armed forces. The sleek supersonic cruise missile flies at almost three times the speed of sound, at Mach 2.8. The armed forces have already inducted the 290-km range land and warship-based versions of the BrahMos missiles over the last decade.On March 19, the worlds last male northern white rhino, Sudan, breathed its last. The sub-species is now survived by two female white rhinos, with little chance of revival. The 45-year-old rhino named Sudan had been in poor health in recent days and was being treated for age-related issues and multiple infections.

He was then euthanised and put to rest.

As trophy hunting is becoming a famous wild game for human recreation, another species of animals is facing extinction.

The giraffe population in sub-Saharan Africa has seen a sharp 40 per cent drop in the past 30 years, largely caused by American tourists trophy hunting.

With just 97,500 of the worlds tallest animal remaining, conservationists are insisting the US government officially classify giraffes as endangered in order to prevent their silent extinction.

BCCL

Americans imported 21,402 giraffe bone carvings, 3,008 skin pieces and 3,744 miscellaneous hunting trophies over the past decade  souvenirs that cost 3,700 giraffes their lives, according to analyses of import data, reports Allthatsinteresting.com.

It is just not recreational hunting that is posing a threat to giraffes, but habitat loss, poaching and collisions with cars and power lines are killing them too.

The poaching crisis over elephants and rhinos is so big that it overshadowed the crisis faced by giraffes in the recent years.

Giraffes have seen a 38% decline in their numbers since 1985, falling from about 157,000 to 97,500 today. The species had jumped two IUCN categories from least concern to now vulnerable.

BCCL

Whilst giraffes are commonly seen on safari, in the media and in zoos, people  including conservationists  are unaware that these majestic animals are undergoing a silent extinction, said Julian Fennessy, co-chair of the IUCNs giraffe and okapi specialist group, as reported by The Guardian.

It is timely that we stick our neck out for the giraffe before it is too late, he said.

Sir David Attenborough said in June: These gentle giants have been overlooked. Its well known that African elephants are in trouble and there are perhaps just under half a million left. But what no one realised is there are far fewer giraffes, which have already become extinct in seven countries.

After conservationists focused their efforts on the cause, they finally realised the seriousness of the threat to giraffes has gone under the radar. Now, officials are shocked to realize that there are actually fewer giraffes than elephants roaming the African plains.

BCCL

The African grey parrot is one of the species at grave risk from hunting as it is prized as a talkative and long-living pet. In some regions, numbers have plunged by 99% but all international trade in the bird was banned in October.

There is still some hope that these creatures will repopulate their habitat and people will become more aware with more responsibility towards nature.Barely clothed or naked and perched suggestively on a bed or chair, the plastic dolls on offer in the most controversial "brothel" in Paris have led to accusations that they could encourage rape.

Since February, four silicone figures have been on offer at hourly rates of 89 euros (110 dollars) in a discreet apartment in the south of the city, far from the historic red-light district around the Pigalle area in the north.

AFP

Following complaints from women's groups and left-wing local lawmakers, the Paris council is set to decide this week whether to close the 21st-century newcomer to the world's oldest profession.

Xdolls operates from the three-room apartment as a games business, leading Communists on the Paris local assembly to ask city authorities to clarify whether the law has been broken.

AFP

The figures "present a degrading image of women and the noises they make could sound like rape," the head of the Communist group, Nicolas Bonnet-Oulaldj, told reporters this week, adding that he wanted the business closed.

Xdolls represents a regulatory headache, but police have investigated the owner and cleared him and there have been no complaints from neighbours, Le Parisien newspaper reported.The Sikh community has once again made India proud as the "We Are Sikhs" campaign has won the top US award for excellence in public relations programming to promote public causes. The campaign was launched to make Americans aware of who Sikhs are and what they stand for.

Sikh24.com





"It is indeed a great victory for the Sikh community across the US. I would like to thank each and every individual who contributed towards making this campaign a grand success," said Rajwant Singh, co-founder and senior adviser of NSC to PTI.

The purpose of the campaign

The purpose of the campaign was to educate Americans about Sikhism because the hate crime rate against Sikhs had increased. In April last year, "We are Sikhs" ad campaign was launched by the non-profit organisation National Sikh Campaign (NSC) to inform Americans about their religion.

Sikh Siyasat News

"Countless Sikhs have had to face bullying, discrimination, and hate crimes due to the lack of understanding of our faith and our values," Rajwant added.

Sikhs and Hindus funded it

The campaign was executed by FG1 Strategies for effectively projecting Sikhs as neighbours to everyday Americans because Sikh would face discrimination due to ignorance in people about their faith.

reuters

The campaign received the top 2018 PRWeek US award, nicknamed the "Oscars of the Public Relation Industry in category of public cause. The campaign was raised mostly by Sikhs, with some Hindus also making notable contributions.

The advertisements showed Sikhs are people who live their daily lives, professing patriotism and national values. It also showed love for TV series Game of Thrones and the childrens Sponge Bob Square Pants to counteract the mistaken negative perceptions because of the beards and the turbans which are a mandatory dress code for Sikhs.

"The campaign drove online conversation that reached more than 5.5 million voters and gained the attention of many of Washington's most influential organisations.

Rozana Spokesman

"A post-campaign poll proved the group moved the needle, with significant increases in the percentage of people who knew more about Sikhs and said the group had 'generally American values,' believed in 'equality and respect for all' and were 'patriotic'," PRWeek said in a statement.The details behind Facebook's unprecedented data breach and the whole Cambridge Analytica fiasco is unravelling really fast, and it can get pretty confusing to keep track of. Dont worry, weve got you covered.

Heres a quick breakdown of all the itty bitty pieces you need to know about.

1) In 2007 the Facebook Platform was launched, for apps and services built by third-party developers. It allowed developers access to user data, when people downloaded their app and authorized access.

2) In 2013 Cambridge University researcher Aleksandr Kogan created a personality quiz app called This is Your Digital Life that was installed by about 270,000 people. The app had access to those peoples data, as well as a list of who their friends on Facebook were. But because of how the platform worked at the time, Kogan also had access to the friends data, totaling around 50 million people.

3) In 2014, Cambridge Analytica was paid to use this data by the Ted Cruz campaign to make psychological profiles for US voters in order to influence them. Eventually, when Cruz dropped out of the running, their services were employed by Republican frontrunner Donald Trump.

Inside Facebook datacenter in Oregon, USA // Mashable

4) That year, Facebook also tightened its privacy policies. After that, apps had to get approval from Facebook when requesting sensitive data. Furthermore, if youre the one that installed the app , it wouldnt be allowed to request your Facebook friends data unless they had also authorized the same one.

5) In 2015, The Guardian exposed that Kogan had shared the data he gathered with Cambridge Analytica. Seeing it as a breach of their policies, Facebook banned Kogans app from the platform and demanded he and the analytics firm delete the data they had. According to Zuckerberg, CA here certified that they had deleted all the improperly acquired data.

6) Of course, on Friday last week, it emerged that Cambridge Analytica had not in fact deleted the data. If whistleblower Christopher Wylies accounts from when he left CA are to be believed, Facebook asked him to delete any user data he still had on his home systems, but never followed up with checks, Likely thats also what happened with the firm.

7) Not just creating psychological profiles of Americans either, it emerged that Cambridge Analytica had a classification system in place, allowing in to emotionally manipulate voters. According to its own claims, Cambridge Analytica helped Donald Trumps digital campaign propel him all the way into the Oval Office.

8) By Monday, Facebooks stock was dropping like a sack of potatoes, and Mark Zuckerberg had earned himself investigation and summons on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as a class-action lawsuit. Still, he and his COO Sheryl Sandberg remained silent.

9) On Tuesday, internal sources insisted Zuckerberg wasnt hiding out, but was trying to come up with a fix before making a statement. He eventually did just that early Thursday morning, owning up to his companys major ball-drop. We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we cant then we dont deserve to serve you, he wrote in a Facebook post.

CNN

10) Zuckerberg also laid out a plan to protect users from this type of privacy violation in the future. To do that, theyre auditing apps that may have had access to user data prior to the platforms changes. Theyre also building a tool that would let each user know what data an app theyve installed is accessing, and will begin removing developer access for apps you havent used in at least three months

I started Facebook, and at the end of the day I'm responsible for what happens on our platform, Zuckerberg wrote. We will learn from this experience to secure our platform further and make our community safer for everyone going forward.After being conspicuously silent for days as Facebook came under fire for the Cambridge Analytica controversy, CEO Mark Zuckerberg has finally come out to make a statement, easing some of the unprecedented pressure faced by the social media giant on its handling and protection of user data.

In a post today on the platform, he said the company is working on preventing similar abuses of privacy in the future. We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we cant then we dont deserve to serve you, Zuckerberg wrote.

Ive been working to understand exactly what happened and how to make sure this doesnt happen again. The good news is that the most important actions to prevent this from happening again today we have already taken years ago. But we also made mistakes, theres more to do, and we need to step up and do it.

Until now, neither he nor COO Sheryl Sandberg have commented publicly, even as the social network has begun falling down around their ears. Facebook On Tuesday told The Daily Beast that Mark, Sheryl and their teams are working around the clock to get all the facts and take the appropriate action moving forward, because they understand the seriousness of this issue. When his upcoming statement was announced earlier Wednesday, Facebook said the delayed response was because he wanted to say something meaningful rather than just rushing out.

Part of that plan involves regaining the trust of users that have been burned by this scandal. The first step, he says is removing developer access to data for apps you havent used in three months, just in case youve forgotten to remove some old sketchy apps from your profile. Facebook will also be auditing apps on its platform that had access to large amounts of data before it changed the rules in 2014. If any others misused user data, they will be banned.

I started Facebook, and at the end of the day I'm responsible for what happens on our platform, Zuckerberg writes.

Im serious about doing what it takes to protect our community. While this specific issue involving Cambridge Analytica should no longer happen with new apps today, that doesn't change what happened in the past. We will learn from this experience to secure our platform further and make our community safer for everyone going forward.

What is Mark Zuckerberg apologizing for?

Back in 2014 Cambridge Analytica harvested and misused Facebook data of over 50 million users to influence the 2016 US election. Other reports seem to indicate the company was also involved in the pro-Brexit campaign in the UK, as well as other shady activities over the past few years.

Facebook has long since tightened the reins on how developers can gather data on its platform, but its come under fire just as much as Cambridge Analytica, for having incredibly lax privacy measures in the first place. In addition, Facebook only banned the company from its platform a few days ago, four years after the unethical activity first began.

Across the world, people are calling for a #DeleteFacebook movement, with even Facebook-owned WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton calling for a boycott of the platform. Meanwhile, both companies involved are now facing investigations on both sides of the Atlantic. Both the FTC in the US and the Information Commissioners Office in Britain have summoned Mark Zuckerberg to explain himself, even as lawmakers reconsider tightening online privacy regulations. Going against consent decrees in the US can invite fines of up to $40,000 per violation, which means Facebook could stand to lose hundreds of billions of dollars.

They may not have stolen the data, but they didnt protect it well enough, and they certainly didnt confirm it was deleted from Cambridge Analytica archives when they found out about it in 2015.

In addition, Both Facebook and Cambridge Analytica are now facing class-action lawsuits in the US. All in all, this whole affair is so messy that the way user data sets are protected and handled by private entities (like Facebook, Amazon and Google) may be changed forever in the near future.March 21, 2018 - The ACLU Foundation of Northern California joins Sacramento community members in their outrage around the killing of 22-year-old Stephon Clark, who Sacramento police shot and killed on Sunday.

Clark appeared to be posing no threat when two Sacramento police officers entered the backyard of his home and fired 20 rounds at him. Though police initially said he was holding a weapon, he was actually holding a cell phone.Being a Black man in a hooded sweatshirt should not be a death sentence. Trained police officers should use the least amount of force necessary.We see stories like Clarks again and again. Police for too long have used excessive force against communities of color, killing Black people without justification and without consequence. Racist policing is a systemic problem, not a series of isolated incidents.We urge the Sacramento Police Department to release the body camera footage quickly as its own policies require, and the district attorney to conduct a swift investigation and bring all appropriate charges against the officers involved.Unfortunately, California state law makes the investigations into police killings and any resulting discipline, or corrective action, completely secret. That must change. The public deserves to get a detailed account of the actual investigation. The community has a right to know what happened. The residents of Sacramento deserve to know how police, who act in their name, came to take the life of an unarmed father of two in his own backyard.We demand accountability for the epidemic of police violence against Black people. We demand transparency from the Sacramento Police Department. We demand justice for Stephon Clark.Farm to Fork Friday, A Taste of Africa Blackagriculture [at] yahoo.com)

Thursday Mar 22nd, 2018 2:42 AM by Khubaka, Michael Harris

Farm to Fork Friday is an Agritourism part of the California Pan African Heritage Trail charged with identifying, documenting and preserving the contributions by people of Pan African Ancestry with regional food systems in the State of California.

Our Farm to Fork Friday, A Taste of Africa activities includes sharing the historical Pan African connections of our Stockton - Asaba Sister City to today's local food systems.



The founder of the African Baptist Church of Stockton final resting place is found within Block 27-Stockton Rural Cemetery along with many of the earliest pioneers of Pan African ancestry, both those formally born enslaved and free.



Early California Pioneers of Pan African Heritage endured separate and unequal treatment by law, for many, many generations.



Many current residents remember laboring in difficult Agriculture conditions and most have no intention of allowing their children to explore plentiful Agriculture jobs and lucrative careers.



The City of Stockton, California, is once again being considered to be designated an 2018 All-American City and putting a fresh face on Food and Agriculture public policy.



Our Stockton -Asaba Sister City is poised to help share our amazing connected shared historical legacy through our early founding mother's and father's of Pan African ancestry with the world.



Our Farm to Fork Friday, A Taste of Africa shares how food connects the distant past to a mutually beneficial future, let the church say, Amen.



Our broader proposed Agritourism California Pan African Heritage Trail is charged with identifying, documenting and preserving the contributions by people of African Ancestry while connecting with regional food systems in the State of California.



The historical meaning and knowledge of California Slavery and Jim Crow has changed over time yet, Etymology studies of the origin of words and how historical meanings change over time, is food for thought.



The Germanic word frei, thought to mean outside of the fundal system, beloved, friend, to love, clear of obstruction; sense of unrestrained movement has a very different historical context from the unspoken and taboo conversation about Chattel Slavery in the State of California.



What is freedom to someone not considered a human being?



Chattel slavery called property, not considered an enslaved human being thus this salient distinction remains the unspoken value and belief in question today.



In 1803, Reverend Jeremiah King was reportedly born in the low country of Georgia and his amazing life ended July 1, 1883 and his body was laid to rest within Block 27~Stockton Rural Cemetery.



Georgia was originally claimed as part of the Spanish Mission System, to include the costal Port of Savannah, GA aligned with St. Augustine, FL and the southern ports of Mobile, AL and New Orleans, LA with New Spain's headquarters now in Havana, Cuba.



The economic bonanza of free agriculture labor enslaved human beings from the West Coast of West Africa, todays Gambia, Senegal and Sierra Leone, Ghana, Nigeria and others utilized specialized regional agriculture skills to produce the highly profitable commodities of indigo and rice along the low county of Georgia and the Carolinas, prior to the invention of the cotton gin and King Cotton.



The unique West African foods and agricultural production methods helped facilitate retention of ancient African cultural traditions that we see in our profound historical legacy and contributions to the State of California.



By 1849, Jeremiah King and his wife are given freedom papers, gold and passage to migrate from bowels of chattel slavery in the deep south to join the California Gold Rush at Monterey, California.



Jeremiah King struck it rich in the southern gold mining district and settled in San Joaquin County by purchasing over 100 acres of land near today's City of Lathrop and a full square block in the Historic Stockton Waterfront District.



It is recorded that often Rev. Jeremiah King and his wife would travel 40 miles to Sacramento to worship in the basement of the Chinese Baptist Church, and birthed today's Shiloh Baptist Church.



Beginning September 1854 the African Baptist Church of Stockton was organized and began hosting weekly Church services.



In 1859, Rev. King successfully petitioned the founding father of the City of Stockton, Captain Weber, for church property on W.Washington St., while making plans to relocate the purchased church building from Rev. James Woods of the Presbyterian Church of Stockton. A historical marker marks the general location today.



During the US Civil War, Rev. Jeremiah King successfully petitioned the Trustees of Stockton Rural Cemetery to establish Block 27, a colored section as the final resting place for people of Pan African ancestry.



Today, the amazing historical contributions by people of Pan African ancestry remains an open secret, hidden with the grave markers within Block 27 ~ Stockton Rural Cemetery.



Our ongoing task to remove separate and unequal care, equity and equal opportunity seen at Block 27-Stockton Rural Cemetery while researching, documenting and preserving the authentic Pan African Heritage is a challenge.



Farm to Fork Friday - A Taste of Africa helps will build a brighter future for the City of Stockton, California, connecting our Pan African Heritage while strengthening the connection to Asaba, Delta State, Nigeria.



We remember and celebrate Rev. Jeremiah King and began identifying, documenting and preserving the community contributions of those early Pan African Pioneers interred within Block 27-Stockton Rural Cemetery.



Many of our friends in West Africa are delighted to find distant relatives, here in Stockton, California and throughout San Joaquin County sharing Egusi Soup and Pounded Yam.Bank of England keeps rates on hold, warns over inflation AP - 2 minutes ago LONDON (AP)  The Bank of England kept its main interest rate at the record low of 0.1% while warning Thursday that inflation is set to rise further over coming months largely as a result of a sharp... $SPX : 4,395.64 (+0.95%) $DOWI : 34,258.32 (+1.00%) $IUXX : 15,176.51 (+0.99%)

The Day After Market Tea Leaves - 1 hour ago Yesterday the markets after the Fed announcement, will that continue today?

NZDJPY Elliott Wave Analysis - Looking Higher Towards 82-84 Area EW-Forecast.com - 1 hour ago NZDJPY is trading bullish , ideally within a five-wave impulse from the March 2020 lows, mainly because of current slow price action and corrective wave structure with perfect support at the 50% Fibonacci... ^NZDJPY : 77.356 (+0.73%)

China's Ant Group shares credit data with central bank AP - 1 hour ago BEIJING (AP)  Chinas central bank will soon have access to private credit information of hundreds of millions of users of Ant Groups online credit service, in a move signaling more regulatory... $SPX : 4,395.64 (+0.95%) $DOWI : 34,258.32 (+1.00%) $IUXX : 15,176.51 (+0.99%)

USDCHF Retesting 61.8% Fib Retrace of Apr-Jun Slide Tradable Patterns - Thu Sep 23, 12:24AM CDT The USDCHF is trying to halt the consolidation since the beginning of the week, with a decisive rebound coming as early as today following the SNBs Monetary Policy Assessment and rate announcement at... ^USDCHF : 0.92485 (+0.12%) FXF : 97.65 (-0.23%)

Risk-Off Mode is Here! Alpine Trading - Wed Sep 22, 7:24PM CDT Is there any doubt now?Campbell Fuller, ICA general manager, told AAP that cyclone Debbie was second only to cyclone Tracey in terms of the extent of property damage," with the Whitsunday region bearing the brunt of Debbie's rage.

Fuller said the reason why Debbie's impact was worse than some category five cyclones was because the weather system also travelled down the eastern Australian coastline.

"Debbie actually affected NSW, Queensland, and Victoria before it gave New Zealand a smack," Fuller told the news agency. "This has been an extraordinary event."

Andrew Willcox, Whitsunday regional council mayor, said that although some companies have resumed operations, it was certainly not business as usual. Visitors, meanwhile, were just starting to return to the tourist hotspot.

"It's not quite as good as what it was before the cyclone, but it is still a magical area," Willcox told AAP.

According to ICA, roughly 95% of all residential building claims have been finalised. But A&A Motel owner, Leah Borghero said there had been a lot of problems.

"The cleanup of the actual town is still continuing which is a little bit disappointing for a lot of people," the Proserpine business owner told AAP. "There are still tarps on roofs."

Fuller said one reason why some homes remain unfixed was because people opted for cash settlements, meaning they had to do the repairs themselves.

Another reason was because half of all buildings in the Whitsunday region were up even before the national cyclone code came into effect in 1984.

Adding to the difficulty of getting repairs done is the remoteness of the area and the difficulty of getting tradespeople, Fuller said.

"Despite all those challenges, the insurance industry is running 20 to 25% ahead of the repair curve you would typically see of a disaster of this kind," Fuller told AAP.

Related stories:We are honored to have Insurance Business America among this years winners, enthused Kristi Dougherty of Nichee organisers Niche Media. Our judging panel was very impressed with Insurance Business Americas design and layouts, callouts to other resources and products, and content expansion using industry reports, surveys and more. It was a pleasure to award them the 2018 Best Niche B2B Magazine!

Tim Duce, president of Insurance Business publisher Key Media, was similarly upbeat.

This is great news on so many levels, he said. Obviously its fantastic that the hard work of the Insurance Business America team in shaping the insurance publication space and providing top-quality content has been recognised. But its also great to see that the insurance community in particular is being so well served by B2B publishing.

Insurance Business America is one of three magazine titles under the burgeoning international Insurance Business brand that also includes six leading websites (USA, Canada, UK, Asia-Pacific, Australia, New Zealand), three major awards evenings (Chicago, Toronto, Sydney) around 15 conferences and seminars and a full calendar of webinars.

Related stories:I cant speculate about where the market is headed, says Camille Dixon of the California Department of Insurance  one of the speakers in the session  when asked how lines of coverage will be shaped by the risks the emerging cannabis market presents.

She does, however, expand on the kind of new marijuana-related businesses that regulators will soon require to hold commercial coverage.

It depends on the type of license or licenses that an applicant is applying for, she explains. Insurance requirements will differ depending upon the licensing category and state and local licensing requirements. Cannabis business applicants are encouraged to review their local and state licensing agency regulations for specific insurance requirements.

Another important issue is the impact of cannabis on product liability, directors and officers, workplace coverage and general liability coverage.

As the cannabis industry matures on the regulated market, Dixon says, PL, D&O, and other types of insurance will become more commonplace in the industry.

And what about exclusions? What do underwriters and brokers need to be most aware of when placing cannabis coverage? Dixon has a straightforward answer.

Simply stated, if a policy is supposed to cover the cannabis plant, the policy should not contain cannabis exclusions, directly or indirectly, she says.

Find out more at the Cannabis Cover event.

Related stories:Yesenia Collazo, a lawyer of the Collazo Law Firm in Doral, Florida, has announced her intent to file a suit on behalf of the families of Alberto Arias, 53, and Osvaldo Gonzalez, 57  two of the victims who were fatally injured by the collapse, The Daily Beast reported.

We are attacking this lawsuit as a quest for information, Collazo told the Miami Herald. The family is asking very simple questions, and were not able to give them those answers.

Another law firm, Morgan and Morgan, is also suing on behalf of two other survivors  Marquise Rashaad Hepburn, 24, who was injured by falling debris while riding his bicycle; and Emily Panagos, 22, an FIU student who happened to be driving when concrete from the bridge crushed the rear part of her car.

The lawsuit alleges that FIGG Bridge Engineers and Munilla Construction Management were negligent in their construction of the bridge. The document, filed in Miami-Dade Circuit Court, also named inspection company Bolton Perez and Associates and NJ-based Louis Berger U.S., which reviewed the bridges design, as defendants.

If we assume that the facts that have been reported are true, then it appears that the building team might have had knowledge that the bridge was in a dangerous condition, did not close the roadway rerouting traffic and, ultimately, a failure resulted, said Morgan and Morgan attorney Matt Morgan in a press conference.

Related stories:Lemonade, the insurance company powered by artificial intelligence and behavioral economics, has launched in both Pennsylvania and Washington D.C. It announced the expansion on social media.

These mark the sixth and seventh states in which the company currently offers renters, condo and homeowners insurance, joining New York, California, New Jersey, Nevada and Georgia in its national expansion strategy.

Lemonade also offers renters and condo insurance in Texas and Rhode Island, as well as renters insurance in Illinois and Ohio. The company is continuing to roll out Lemonade in states as it is licensed, with a goal to be nationwide by the end of this year, a company spokesperson told Insurance Journal.

Lemonade is a licensed insurance carrier working to digitize the insurance process by aiming for zero paperwork.

It is also a Certified B-Corp, in which its underwriting profits go to nonprofits. The company takes a flat 20% fee, treating premiums as belonging to the insured rather than the insurer. It then returns unclaimed money during its annual Giveback.

Giveback is a feature of Lemonade in which leftover money each year is donated to a cause customers care about. The 2017 Giveback saw more than 10% of Lemonades revenue go to 14 different causes chosen by the Lemonade community, according to a company press release.

Related:

Topics Washington PennsylvaniaAon Benfield announced a new hire and expanded roles for its reinsurance team in Bermuda.

Matthias Meyenhofer will join the firm on Sept. 1, in accordance with his existing contractual requirements, as chief executive officer of Aon Benfield Bermuda, subject to Bermuda Immigration approval. Meyenhofer joins from Guy Carpenter where he was head of EMEA Global Clients, having previously held the position of chief executive officer at ACE Tempest Re Europe, as well as other senior positions within the industry.

In addition, Tony Fox, currently chairman of Aon Benfield Global ReSpecialty Bermuda, will move up to the role of chairman of Aon Benfield Bermuda, subject to Bermuda Immigration approval. Jonathan Davies, a member of the Aon Benfield Global ReSpecialty Executive in London, will relocate to the island on April 1 to become head of Aon Benfield Global ReSpecialty Bermuda.

Commenting on the appointments, Nick Frankland, UK CEO of Aon Benfield, who also oversees the firms Bermuda operations, said: Augmenting our resources in this way reflects Aon Benfields commitment to Bermuda, and is in recognition of the widening experience, skillsets and capital now available on the island.

The addition of these two experienced team members signals the beginning of the expansion of our Bermuda platform. Matthias and Jonathan will play key roles in helping to drive our strategic growth objectives, said Tony Fox, chairman of Aon Benfield Bermuda.

Bob Bisset, chief executive officer of Aon Benfield Global ReSpecialty, said: Aon Benfield has been a long-standing partner of the Bermuda market, recognizing the value it brings to our clients in terms of its diversified and highly rated capital and skills.

Related:

Topics Aon BermudaMarkets had already delivered their verdict before the European Unions data privacy watchdogs could express outrage toward Facebook Inc.

And while the social media giant lost as much as $60 billion in value earlier this week, Facebook is set to dodge tough new EU sanctions even if any violations in the Cambridge Analytica scandal are proven, EU Justice Commissioner Vera Jourova said in an interview with Bloomberg TV from Washington.

The new EU rules in place from May 25 will enable national regulators to impose much higher sanctions, which cannot be applied in this current case, because theres no retro-activity possible, Jourova said.

Fining powers currently vary from state to state, with possible sanctions in the U.K., where the regulator is investigating, capped at 500,000 pounds ($706,000). The new rules can lead to fines as much as 4 percent of global annual sales.

In the meantime, EU authorities will investigate to better understand what exactly happened and who should be blamed for what in the wake of allegations, she said on Bloomberg Markets with Vonnie Quinn and Mark Barton.

Vast Swathes

Regulators are examining whether vast swathes of data was illegally held by Cambridge Analytica after it was obtained from a researcher who shared the data without the social networks permission. According to published news reports, Cambridge University researcher Aleksandr Kogan created a personality-analysis app that was used by 270,000 Facebook users, who in turn gave the app permission to access data on themselves and their friends, ultimately exposing a network of 50 million.

Jourova said shes trying to meet with Facebook to ask serious questions, especially on how this could have happened, whether they had neglected the privacy rules, whether they were careful enough. She also met with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, which is said to be investigating whether Facebook violated terms of a 2011 consent decree with its handling of the data that was transferred to Cambridge Analytica.

In a tweet after the Wednesday meeting, Jourova said she had met with FTC Commissioner Terrell McSweeny and was reassured that they take all the allegations on the #Facebook scandal seriously.

Far-Reaching

EU privacy watchdogs on Wednesday vowed to collaborate in getting to the bottom of the very serious allegation with far-reaching consequences. The U.K. regulator, which is leading the probe into British-based Cambridge Analytica is seeking a warrant to search the firm, a process her office said theyre hoping to complete Wednesday.

Im not happy at all about this case, because in my view this is not only about data protection breaches, this is about a threat to democracy, Jourova told Bloomberg TV. This will serve as a precedent for the future.

Leaders from the 28-nation bloc will also discuss the matter at a regularly scheduled summit at the end of this week. Jourova said this is happening on the request of French President Emmanuel Macron.

Despite strong words by EU authorities in the last few days, they are currently virtually toothless in the face of technology giants with revenues measured in the billions of dollars. Its a David versus Goliath scenario, where they often have to rely on local courts to take action in dragged-out procedures that lose most of their effect by the time theres a decision.

New Rules

This will only change at the end of May, when the new EU privacy rules kick in across all member nations. Serious violations can from then on be punished with massive fines, and even U.S. companies that use or process EU user-data will be covered.

Cambridge Analytica has said that its been in touch with U.K. Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denhams office since last year and remains committed to helping the ICO and all other concerned organizations in their investigations.

Facebook said in a blog post on the issue over the weekend that it was moving aggressively to determine the accuracy of these claims. We remain committed to vigorously enforcing our policies to protect peoples information.

Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg broke his silence on Wednesday as Washington demands answers. In Europe too, hes been invited to the European and U.K. Parliaments.

Speaking from the U.S., Jourova said the allegations could change how the nation approaches privacy matters.

People I think in America should be more attentive about whats happening to their privacy, she said. When you look at the list of things which were monitored in case of every individual, the people are totally naked. Its amazing.

Jourova said she has worked with Facebook before and has always had a feeling that they take seriously their social responsibility, but added that now of course they will have to renew my trust.

Related:

Copyright 2021 Bloomberg.

Topics Europe UkA.M. Best has removed from under review with positive implications and upgraded the Financial Strength Rating to A- (Excellent) from B++ (Good) and the Long-Term Issuer Credit Rating to a- from bbb+ of Great Plains Casualty Inc. (Great Plains) in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

The outlook assigned to these Credit Ratings (ratings) is stable.

The ratings of Great Plains were placed under review on Oct. 13, 2017, in conjunction with the release of the updated Bests Credit Rating Methodology (BCRM). The ratings have been removed from under review, as A.M. Best has completed its analysis of Great Plains under the updated BCRM.

The ratings reflect Great Plains balance sheet strength, which A.M. Best categorizes as very strong, based on its limited size, as well as its strong operating performance, limited business profile and appropriate enterprise risk management (ERM).

Balance sheet strength is supported by the companys risk-adjusted capitalization being at the strongest level, excellent liquidity, modest underwriting and investment leverage, and strength of reserves. Surplus has grown steadily over the companys 10-year history at a compounded annual growth rate of 8.8 percent.

The ratings also consider the financial leverage and interest coverage of parent company, Hillcrest Holdings Inc., which had manageable debt levels as of Dec. 31, 2017.

Great Plains continues to report favorable operating performance, primarily driven by excellent underwriting results. The companys five- and 10-year average combined ratios outperform the averages for the commercial automobile composite by 30 points. Great Plains business profile is assessed as limited, due to its narrow market focus on the commercial auto sector and its reliance on a sister company, CRST International Inc. (CRST), for business.

Great Plains derives its customer base from the independent contractors affiliated with CRST, which provides transportation solutions and services to manufacturers and distributors in the United States and Canada.

Great Plains utilizes an ERM program that A.M. Best considers to be appropriate relative to its inherent risks. The company benefits from the expertise gained by having common management between Great Plains and CSRT.

Source: A.M. Best

Topics AM Best CasualtyA Southfield, Mich.-based oral surgery practice will pay $47,000 to settle an age discrimination lawsuit filed by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), the federal agency announced.

The EEOCs lawsuit charged that Professional Endodontics P.C. violated federal law by firing Karen Ruerat four days after her 65th birthday. According to the EEOCs lawsuit, Ruerat, who had worked for the company for 37 years, was terminated in January 2016 pursuant to a company policy which required employees to retire at age 65.

This alleged conduct violates the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (ADEA), which protects individuals who are 40 years of age or older from employment discrimination based on age. The EEOC filed suit (EEOC v. Professional Endodontics, P.C., Case No. 4:17-cv-13466 in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan) after first attempting to reach a pre-litigation settlement through its conciliation process.

The consent decree settling the suit, in addition to providing for the award of monetary relief to Ruerat, prohibits any similar discrimination in the future and requires Professional Endodontics to provide anti-discrimination training to its employees. The training will include instruction on the practices made unlawful under the ADEA.

Source: EEOC

Topics Lawsuits MichiganPolice in Arizona on Wednesday released a short video of a fatal collision between an Uber self-driving vehicle and a pedestrian, as investigators probe the accident that has put new focus on the safety of autonomous vehicles.

The video, taken from inside the Volvo XC90 sport utility vehicle that Uber has used for testing, shows the vehicle driving along a dark road when an image of a woman walking a bicycle across the road suddenly appears in the headlights.

The woman, Elaine Herzberg, 49, later died from her injuries.

Police have released few details about the accident that occurred on Sunday night in Tempe, Arizona, a suburb of Phoenix, while the SUV was driving in autonomous mode. Uber suspended its self-driving testing in North America after the incident and federal safety regulators are conducting their own probe.

Fall-out from the accident could stall the development and testing of self-driving vehicles, which are designed to perform far better than human drivers and sharply reduce the number of motor vehicle fatalities that occur each year.

The video shows the vehicle traveling in the right-hand lane of a divided four-lane roadway. The vehicles headlights illuminate a woman directly in front of it who is crossing the SUVs lane with her bike. The woman appears to be jaywalking as she is not in a crosswalk.

A photo released by safety regulators on Tuesday showed that the impact occurred on the right side of the vehicle.

The footage also shows a view of the vehicles interior and the driver at the wheel. The driver appears to be looking down, and not at the road, for two periods of about five seconds each. Just before the video stops, the driver looks upward toward the road and suddenly looks shocked.

The video is disturbing and heartbreaking to watch, and our thoughts continue to be with Elaines loved ones, Uber said in a statement. Our cars remain grounded, and were assisting local, state and federal authorities in any way we can.

The video is likely to be a key part of investigations of Ubers self-driving car technology and whether it was ready for testing on public roads.

Although the exact specifics of Ubers technology are not known, self-driving cars typically use a combination of sensors, including radar and light-based Lidar, to identify objects around the vehicle, including potential obstacles coming into range. While cameras do not perform well in the dark, radar and Lidar can work at night.

One question on regulators minds will be why the sensors did not pick up on the presence of Herzberg, who would ostensibly have already crossed three lanes of traffic before arriving in the path of the Uber vehicle.

One self-driving car expert, Bryant Walker Smith, said his first impression was of outrage viewing the video.

Although this video isnt the full picture, it strongly suggests a failure by Ubers automated driving system and a lack of due care by Ubers driver (and by the victim), said Smith, a professor of law at the University of South Carolina.

Another autonomous driving expert agreed with Smiths assessment.

The sensors should have detected the pedestrian in this case; the cameras were likely useless but both the radars and the Lidar must have picked up the pedestrian, said Raj Rajkumar, a professor at Carnegie Mellon.

Though no information is available, one would have to conclude based on this video alone, that there are problems in the Uber vehicle software that need to be rectified, he said.

Uber did not immediately respond to a request for comment on its systems.

OVERSIGHT?

The video is likely to renew calls for more oversight in a nascent industry that lacks standardized testing or safety definitions. Lawmakers have had to juggle the need to encourage innovations that promise to dramatically improve safety on roads with current public safety concerns.

Companies including Uber, Alphabets Waymo and General Motorss Cruise Automation have been testing their self-driving technology in Arizona, which has welcomed the industry with a lighter regulatory touch than in states like California, for example.

On Tuesday, Arizona transportation officials said they saw no immediate need to tighten rules on the testing of self-driving cars in the state.

Although some within the self-driving industry have suggested agreeing testing and safety standards for autonomous technology, there has been no concerted effort to do so.

Timothy Carone, an associate teaching professor at Notre Dame Universitys Mendoza College of Business whose research specialties include artificial intelligence and autonomous systems, said the question is whether Uber did enough testing before sending robot cars out onto streets alongside humans.

Did they jump the gun? he said. If their testing is found to be inefficient, that cannot be allowed to happen again because these systems have to be ready for road tests.

(Additional reporting by Paul Lienert and Nick Carey in Detroit; Editing by Rosalba OBrien, Peter Cooney and Cynthia Osterman)

Topics Auto Law Enforcement Arizona Sharing Economy Ridesharing Autonomous Vehicles UberCongress passed a bill to combat online sex trafficking that has split the tech industry, bringing one of the first measures to weaken legal protection for websites closer to becoming law as Big Tech faces a mounting backlash in Washington.

The legislation, which seeks to ensure that websites can be held liable if they knowingly facilitate sex trafficking, cleared the Senate 97-2 Wednesday after passing the House on Feb. 27. It now goes to President Donald Trump for his signature. The White House has supported the measure, while calling for some changes.

Major tech companies face increasing pressure in Washington on issues including their size and Russias use of social media platforms to meddle in the 2016 presidential election. Facebook Inc. has come under fire for revelations that a political data firm that worked for Trumps campaign retained information on millions of its users without their consent.

The legislation makes it a crime to operate a facility such as an internet platform with the intent to promote prostitution. It states that a 1996 law giving immunity to websites for content posted by third parties was never intended to protect websites that facilitate traffickers in advertising the sale of unlawful sex acts.

One of the first measures to chip away at the immunity, the bill is supported by Facebook and Internet Association trade group, which also counts Alphabet Inc.s Google and Twitter Inc. as members.

Harming Innovation

But other companies and trade associations have raised concern that the changes would harm innovation. Many tech advocates have said that operators of giant websites who were merely aware that bad actors used some corner of their platforms to sell children for sex could be accused of knowingly facilitating trafficking.

Democratic Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon said on the Senate floor shortly before the vote that the bill would curtail free speech, harm start-up companies and risk making sex trafficking harder to find and prosecute. He also criticized big tech companies for the spread of online conspiracy theories and other controversial content.

There was a time when the biggest internet companies had mottoes like, Dont be evil,' said Wyden, referring to Googles onetime slogan. Perhaps its time for them to aspire to a more modest motto: Dont spread evil.'

At the heart of many tech debates in Washington is the question of internet platforms moral and legal responsibility for the content posted by their users  a responsibility that many tech advocates worry lawmakers will now try to escalate.

Its going to open the door, said Daniel Castro, vice president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, an organization that focuses on innovation and has criticized the legislation for potential harm to the internet economy. If were going to hold these content platforms responsible for sex trafficking, why arent we holding them more responsible for intellectual property theft?

Castro said making social media platforms liable for users misdeeds is like putting the mayor in jail because theres crime in the city.

Backpage.com

The yearlong effort to pass the bill, H.R. 1865, arose from trafficking victims fight against Backpage.com. The site invoked websites immunity as it defended itself against accusations of providing an advertising platform for teen prostitution.

Early on, Google sought to kill the bill because it curtailed the liability protections. Facebook initially stood with Google, but on Nov. 7, it relented in a post by Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg. Days later, the Internet Association also signed on to changes in a related Senate bill.

The moves enraged some in the tech world. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit that focuses on civil liberties online, said Internet Association had endangered online activists and would gain a massive competitive advantage because the compromise would undermine upstarts.

Tech associations including the Consumer Technology Association and the Computer and Communications Industry Association also continued to warn against the efforts.

Walt Disney

Meanwhile, content creators such as the Walt Disney Co. supported the bill, as did portions of the tech community that host little public-facing third-party content, such as Oracle Corp. and International Business Machine Corp. Both sectors often find themselves at odds with the large platforms.

The measure passed Wednesday may prove the beginning of several high-profile legal battles on the issue.

Im happy that the framework is being built, said Annie McAdams, a Houston lawyer who has sued Backpage on behalf of victims. I dont think its enough to protect our children.

McAdams said traffickers had often first contacted her clients through Facebook or its photo-sharing site Instagram, and often Backpage directed users back to her clients profiles on the social media platforms.

Were just getting started, she said.An Arkansas bill amending language in the states open container statute to comply with federal law has been passed by lawmakers and signed by the governor.

Just last year the state passed an open container law making it illegal for the first time for passengers in a vehicle to have an open container of alcohol. But, unlike federal law, Arkansas 2017 law still allowed open containers in unlocked areas, such as a glove compartment or center console.

The recently passed bill, HB 1001, corrects that open containers may be stored in such areas only if they are locked. The law also adds a definition of an alcoholic beverage and specifies it applies vehicles on a highway or public right of way. The state was at risk for losing the ability to control millions in federal highway funding without the changes.

The Property Casualty Association of America (PCI) applauded the changes to the states open container law and commended Gov. Asa Hutchinson for signing the bill.

As the number of crashes continue to rise in Arkansas, it is important to keep a focus on the dangers of driving under the influence of alcohol. There is no reason for someone to have an open container of alcohol in the car, Joe Woods, vice president, state government relations for PCI, said in an announcement released by the trade association. We commend the legislature and Governor Asa Hutchinson for enacting the law on open containers and ensuring that it complied with the federal law.An investigation continues in east-central Oklahoma after deputies found about $250,000 in stolen property while raiding a burglary stash house.

The Shawnee News-Star reports that some of the stolen items discovered by Lincoln County deputies include several Purple Hearts, military items, a coffin, TVs and guitars. Some items have been identified and returned.

The search for a suspicious vehicle led to the search warrant that was served early Sunday at the home near Prague.

County Sheriff Charlie Dougherty said Monday that deputies were still on the scene and expect to work the search warrant for several days. He says that nobody was home during the raid, but that deputies are looking for a suspect they believe had been living in the home.

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Fraud Property OklahomaA Tennessee insurance agency operator has been fined $187,000 in civil penalties and had his producers licensed revoked for defrauding clients, according to the Tennessee Department of Commerce & Insurance (TDCI).

The disciplinary actions were the latest moves taken to protect consumers who were clients of John Oscar Wilson III of Antioch, Tenn., a former agency operator in Brentwood. Wilson is currently serving 52 months in prison after he was found to have defrauded five insurance clients, including many instances of forging client signatures to insurance-related documents, and the misappropriation of their monies, TDCI said.

In 2015, TDCI summarily suspended Wilsons insurance producers license because the continuation of his license was found to be hazardous to the public welfare. In 2016, Wilson pleaded guilty in federal court to two counts of wire fraud in connection with a fraudulent insurance/investment scheme.

Last year, Wilson was sentenced to 52 months in prison, followed by three years of supervised release for defrauding his clients and insurance agencies out of more than $800,000. Wilson was also ordered to pay $841,000 in restitution. Wilson is currently imprisoned in a federal penitentiary in Kentucky.

At first blush, these additional civil penalties and the license revocation might seem unnecessary given Wilsons guilty plea and his imprisonment, but, in fact, they are necessary steps to protect consumers and fully impose justice on behalf of Wilsons victims, while sending a message that TDCI will not stand for such actions in our marketplace, said TDCI Assistant Commissioner Michael Humphreys. That said, and because the victims come first, these penalties will only be collected after Wilson makes good on his ordered restitution. We urge Tennessee insurance consumers to turn to us if they ever have questions or suspicions about their investments or insurance policies.

TDCI said its investigators found Wilson defrauded his clients, many of whom were elderly or vulnerable, in at least three different ways. In order to be paid commissions as the owner and operator of Preserve Financial Group (PFG), Wilson would advise clients to cash in their tax-deferrable investments and purchase multiple insurance products  though he would not disclose the tax or financial penalties for doing so.

Wilson then convinced some clients to surrender insurance policies or annuities to him for investment in another insurance policy or annuity. Instead of investing the money, however, TDCI said Wilson deceived his clients and would deposit the funds into the PFG bank account he controlled where he could use the funds for his own benefit. Finally, Wilson convinced some clients to surrender insurance policies or annuities by deceiving clients into believing they were investing in PFG by purchasing stock in the company. In truth, there was no such stock and, instead, the money was deposited into the PFG bank account, which was then used for Wilsons own personal benefit. Wilson used a radio program entitled The Retirement Solutions Show to attract retirees to invest.

The Departments Initial Order imposing the above sanctions against Wilson in this matter became a Final Order on March 1, 2018.

Source: Tennessee Department of Commerce & Insurance

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics TennesseeA man exonerated of murder has reached a $7.5 million settlement with a Kentucky city he had sued for wrongful arrest and imprisonment.

Attorneys for Kerry Porter, who spent 11 years in prison after being wrongfully convicted in the 1996 slaying of Tyrone Camp, said in a statement March 12 that the settlement against the city of Louisville was recently finalized. Porter was exonerated in 2011.

The lawsuit said officers wrongfully conspired to convict Porter by fabricating evidence, using improper identification procedures and hiding evidence that would have cleared him.

Porter, now 56, maintained the sum total of the evidence presented against him at trial was a tainted and coerced identification. He also complained of the false testimony of two jailhouse snitches.

Josh Abner, a spokesman for the county attorneys office in Jefferson County, which encompasses the Metro Louisville area, told the Courier Journal that the settlement was completed last week.

Given the potential for continued expensive litigation, all parties agreed it was in their best interest to resolve the disputed claims at this time with no admission of liability, Abner said.

When a judge dismissed the case against Porter, he cited a statement from a man who said someone else had killed Camp and DNA at the scene that didnt belong to Porter.

The slaying remains unsolved.

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.Five women claimed in a lawsuit that the city of Provo, Utah and former Mayor John Curtis failed to take action to protect them from alleged sexual harassment and assault by the citys former police chief.

The city and mayor failed to prevent misconduct or discipline former Chief John King after allegations of harassment emerged in 2015 and 2016, the lawsuit alleges.

Curtis, who stepped down as mayor in November when he was elected to Congress, said in a statement Tuesday that he never protected a predator or abuser and acted responsibly with the information he had at the time. Curtis, a Republican, asked King to resign in 2017 because of a sexual assault complaint against the chief that prosecutors determined did not warrant charges.

Like most situations, in hindsight, perhaps there could have been things done better, Curtis said in a statement. At the time, with all the facts that I had, I believe I did the best I could and followed the protocols established by the City of Provo acting on the advice of the city attorney and human resources.

King has not commented on the allegations. A message left at a publicly listed number for King was not returned.

When King resigned in March 2017, he said the move was to to devote more time to his family.

Curtis revealed the sexual assault allegations against the former chief days later, saying at a news conference that a woman told city officials a month earlier about the alleged assault. After Salt Lake County prosecutors deemed the information was insufficient to bring charges, Curtis said he had asked King to resign.

In a statement issued by his congressional office Tuesday, Curtis called the allegations against King appalling.

His reported actions against the people that serve and protect our communities with honor are despicable and I strongly condemn them. The brave women who have come forward have my full support, Curtis said.

Curtis is not specifically named as a defendant in the lawsuit, though the women say he failed to take enough action when harassment allegations surfaced early on. The lawsuit alleges that in 2014 the former mayor held a meeting with police department supervisors and, with King at his side, told the supervisors that he did not want to receive any more complaints about King.

The city of Provo said in a statement Tuesday night that it would not comment on the lawsuits specific allegations because its legal team is reviewing the complaint and an internal investigation by the city into the allegations is ongoing.

Provo City does not and will not condone sexual harassment, nor does it condone intimidation or retaliation against employees for reporting misconduct or pursuing rights under the law, the statement said.

The lawsuit also claims the city hired King without investigating his sudden departure from his past jobs. Records from Baltimore County Police Department show the department in 2012 investigated allegations that King, then head of Baltimore citys policy training program, had groped a co-worker.

The records show King denied the allegation and resigned days later after six months on the job, the Daily Herald in Provo and Salt Lake Tribune reported.

The lawsuit also questions why King abruptly left his job as police chief in Gaithersburg, Maryland in 2010. The Gaithersburg Town Courier at the time reported King resigned days after city officials brought in a state trooper to serve as an interim police chief and met behind closed doors to discuss a personnel matter.

King did not comment at the time on his resignation but the Town Courier reported that city officials said he resigned to work in the private sector.

King became the Provo police chief in January 2014.

Records from the Unified Police Department, which investigated the Provo assault allegation against King, show the woman said she was afraid to refuse Kings advances because of his powerful position.

The records show King acknowledged having sex with the Utah woman who worked with him on department projects.

The Associated Press is not identifying the women because it does not generally name alleged victims of sexual harassment or assault.

Copyright 2021 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Topics Lawsuits Abuse Molestation Law EnforcementOffshore investing is often demonized in the media, which paints a picture of tax-evading investors illegally stashing their money with some shady company located on an obscure Caribbean island. While it's true that there will always be instances of shady deals, the vast majority of offshore investing is perfectly legal.

Offshore investing, despite its sketchy reputation, is a legal, effective way to invest in entities that are only available outside your home country.

Offshore Investing: An Overview

Offshore investing refers to a wide range of investment strategies that capitalize on advantages offered outside of an investor's home country. There is no shortage of investment opportunities offered by reputable offshore companies that are fiscally sound, time-tested, and, most importantly, legal.

Depending on your situation, offshore investing may offer you many advantages including tax benefits, asset protection, and privacy. Disadvantages include increasing regulatory scrutiny on a global scale and high costs associated with offshore accounts.

Pros of Offshore Investing

There are several reasons why people invest offshore:

Tax Advantages

Many countries (known as tax havens) offer tax incentives to foreign investors. The favorable tax rates in an offshore country are designed to promote a healthy investment environment that attracts outside wealth. For a tiny country with very few resources and a small population, attracting investors can dramatically increase economic activity.

Key Takeaways Offshore investing is beyond the means of many but the wealthiest of investors.

Advantages include tax benefits, asset protection, privacy, and a broader range of investments.

Downsides include high costs and increased regulatory scrutiny that offshore jurisdictions and accounts face.

Simply put, offshore investment occurs when offshore investors form a corporation in a foreign country. The corporation acts as a shell for the investors' accounts, shielding them from the higher tax burden that would be incurred in their home country. Because the corporation does not engage in local operations, little or no tax is imposed on it. Many foreign companies also enjoy tax-exempt status when they invest in U.S. markets. As such, making investments through foreign corporations can hold a distinct advantage over making investments as an individual.

Asset Protection

Offshore centers are popular locations for restructuring ownership of assets. Through trusts, foundations, or an existing corporation, individual wealth ownership can be transferred. Many individuals who are concerned about lawsuits, foreclosing lenders, or creditors collecting on outstanding debts elect to transfer a portion of their assets from their personal estates to an entity that holds it outside of their home country.

By making these on-paper ownership transfers, individuals are no longer susceptible to seizure or other domestic troubles. If the trustor is a U.S. resident, their trustor status allows them to make contributions to their offshore trust free of income tax. However, the trustor of an offshore asset-protection fund will still be taxed on the trust's income (the revenue made from investments under the trust entity), even if that income has not been distributed.

Confidentiality

Many offshore jurisdictions offer the complementary benefit of secrecy legislation. These countries have enacted laws establishing strict corporate and banking confidentiality. If this confidentiality is breached, there are serious consequences for the offending party. An example of a breach of banking confidentiality is divulging customer identities. Disclosing shareholders is a breach of corporate confidentiality in some jurisdictions.

However, this secrecy doesn't mean that offshore investors are criminals with something to hide. It's also important to note that offshore laws will allow identity disclosure in clear instances of drug trafficking, money laundering, or other illegal activities. From the point of view of a high-profile investor, however, keeping the information, such as the investor's identity, secret while accumulating shares of a public company can offer that investor a significant financial (and legal) advantage. High-profile investors don't like the public at large knowing what stocks they're investing in. Multimillionaire investors don't want a bunch of little fish buying the same stocks that they have targeted for large-volume share purchases. The small fry runs up the prices.

Because nations are not required to accept the laws of a foreign government, offshore jurisdictions are, in most cases, immune to the laws that may apply where the investor resides. U.S. courts can assert jurisdiction over any assets that are located within U.S. borders. Therefore, it is prudent to be sure that the assets an investor is attempting to protect not be held physically in the United States. On the other hand (see below), assets kept in foreign bank accounts are still regulated under United States law.

Diversification of Investments

In some countries, regulations restrict the international investment opportunities of citizens. Many investors feel that such restriction hinders the establishment of a truly diversified investment portfolio. Offshore accounts are much more flexible, giving investors unlimited access to international markets and to all major exchanges.

On top of that, there are many opportunities in developing nations, especially in those that are beginning to privatize sectors formerly under government control. China's willingness to privatize some industries, in particular, has investors drooling over the world's largest consumer market.

Offshore jurisdictions, such as the Bahamas, Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, and the Isle of Man, are popular locations that are known to offer fairly secure investment opportunities.

Cons of Offshore Investing

While domiciling investments and assets in an offshore jurisdiction has benefits, there are also drawbacks to consider.

Increasing Regulatory Scrutiny

In recent years, the U.S. government has become increasingly aware of the tax revenue lost to offshore investing and has created more defined and restrictive laws that close tax loopholes. Investment revenue earned offshore is now a focus of both regulators and tax laws.

The U.S. Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) is an example. FATCA requires U.S. citizens at home and overseas to file annual reports on any foreign account holdings.

According to the U.S. Internal Revenue Service (IRS), U.S. citizens and residents are taxed on their worldwide income. As a result, investors who use offshore entities to evade U.S. federal income tax on capital gains can be prosecuted for tax evasion. Therefore, although the lower corporate expenses of offshore companies can translate into better gains for investors, the IRS maintains that U.S. taxpayers are not to be allowed to evade taxes by shifting their individual tax liability to some foreign entity.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) also have rules that require banks to report information about their foreign customers, but each country complies with these laws in different ways and to different degrees.

There are still tax loopholes, but most are shrinking more and more every year.

Cost

Offshore accounts are not cheap to set up. Depending on the individual's investment goals and the jurisdiction they choose, an offshore corporation may need to be started, and that may mean steep legal fees and corporate or account registration fees. In some cases, investors are required to own property (a residence) in the country in which they have an offshore account or operate a holding company.

Furthermore, many offshore accounts require minimum investments of between $100,000 and $1 million. Businesses that make money facilitating offshore investment know that their offerings are in high demand by the very wealthy and they charge accordingly.

Special Considerations

More than half the world's assets and investments are held in offshore jurisdictions. Many well-recognized companies have investment opportunities in offshore locales.

Still, like every investment move you make, use common sense and choose a reputable investment firm. It is also a good idea to consult with an experienced and reputable investment advisor, accountant, and lawyer who specialize in international investment.

If you are looking to offshore investments to help protect your assetsor are concerned with estate planningit would be prudent to find an attorney (or a team of attorneys) specializing in asset protection, wills, or business succession. You need to look at the investments themselves and their legal and tax implications. Of course, these professionals come at a cost. In most cases, the benefits of offshore investing are outweighed by the tremendous costs of professional fees, commissions, and travel expenses.What Is a Merchant Account?

A merchant account is a type of business bank account that allows a business to accept and process electronic payment card transactions. Merchant accounts require a business to partner with a merchant acquiring bank who facilitates all communications in an electronic payment transaction.

Merchant account relationships are essential for online businesses. These account relationships involve added costs which some brick and mortar establishments may choose not to pay by accepting only cash for deposits in a standard business deposit account. Merchant accounts are a type of commercial bank account.

Key Takeaways A merchant account is a bank account specifically established for business purposes where companies can make and accept payments.

Merchant accounts allow, for instance, a business to accept credit cards or other forms of electronic payment.

Merchant account services often come with added fees, but also an array of services.

How Merchant Accounts Work

Merchant accounts are a key aspect of business operations for most merchants. Merchants have a variety of options when choosing a merchant account service provider with transaction costs being a key component in the decision. Merchant accounts are provided by merchant acquiring banks which partner with merchants to facilitate electronic payments.

If a brick and mortar business chooses not to accept electronic payments and only allows for cash, then they would not necessarily need to establish a merchant account and could rely on just a basic deposit account at any bank. Online businesses, however, are required to establish merchant account partnerships as part of their business operations since electronic payments are the only option for customers in making purchases.

Merchant Acquiring Bank Services

A merchant must establish a merchant account with a merchant acquiring bank if they plan to offer electronic payment options for their goods or services. Merchant acquiring banks play a key role in the electronic payment process and are essential for efficient processing and settlement of payment transactions.

Merchant acquiring banks and businesses establish merchant accounts through a detailed merchant account agreement that outlines all of the terms involved with the relationship. Key terms include the per-transaction costs the bank will charge, the banks card processing network, established fee structures with the network of card processors, and any monthly or annual fees the bank charges for various services.

Transaction Processing

In an electronic payment transaction, a business sends card communications through an electronic terminal to the merchant acquiring bank. The merchant acquiring bank then contacts the branded card processor who contacts the card issuer. The card issuer authenticates the transaction through various approvals that include fund availability checks and security checks. Once authenticated the approval is sent to the merchant acquiring bank through the network processor. If approved, the merchant acquiring bank authorizes the transaction and begins settlement of the funds in the merchants account.

All of the card communications occur within a matter of minutes and incur various fees for the merchant which are deducted from the merchant account. The merchant acquiring bank charges the merchant a per-transaction fee. The network processor also charges the merchant a per-transaction fee. These fees can range from 0.5% to 5.0% of the transaction amount plus $0.20 to $0.30 per transaction.

Merchant acquiring banks also charge merchants monthly fees as well as any special situation fees. The monthly fee on a merchant account is paid to the merchant acquiring bank for covering certain electronic payment card risks that might arise from a transaction as well as for the service of settling transaction funds.By Padraig Hoare

Irish women in the IT sector are the second-best paid in the world but still lag almost a fifth behind their male counterparts when it comes to pay.

That was one of the findings from a global survey on technology job platform Honeypot, which collected data on gender pay gaps in 41 countries in the EU and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

The survey found the US offers the highest wages to women working in tech at 61,492 (70,529) per annum, followed by Ireland at 42,996 and Switzerland at 41,911.

However in Ireland, women earn 17% less than the overall average of 51,991 for tech workers, the survey found. Just under 19% of workers in IT in Ireland are women, it said.

At 30%, Bulgaria has the highest percentage of women working in tech, followed by Australia with 28% and Romania at 26%.

Portugal, the US and Latvia offer the best opportunities for women in tech, with an industry gender pay gap around 6% to 7% less than the overall average wage gap in all industries in each country, the survey found.

The overall gender pay gap in Ireland has actually increased by 1% since 2010, according to the data collected.

Chair at Cork tech organisation IT@Cork, Caroline ODriscoll said the findings were further proof that more must be done to encourage young women into the science, technology, engineering and maths subjects, as well as addressing the slow progress of women in leadership roles.

Ms ODriscoll co-founded the Iwish organisation to encourage teenage girls to pursue a career in those subjects.

She said the level of pay in Irish IT jobs was somewhat encouraging but that the gender disparity was symptomatic of a wider problem, namely women not being promoted.

What is points to is not necessarily women being paid less in the general workforce, but more that there are larger numbers of men that are in senior roles.

Just 17% of boardrooms are women, and that is still a very poor number. A World Economic Forum report on gender parity found if the current pace of change continues, it will be 217 years before it is addressed. We cannot afford to have young women become discouraged from pursuing a career in science, technology, engineering and maths subjects because of statistics like these. This is why we need the likes of Iwish and other organisations encouraging young women into science, technology, engineering and maths subjects.

The likes of Facebook didnt exist 15 years ago, yet now we are asking virtual assistants like Alexa to tell us the time. Technology is moving at an extraordinary pace. These are the jobs of tomorrow, she said.

Ms ODriscoll said Cork and Ireland as a whole stood to benefit most as technology grew.

Cork stands to benefit hugely because we already have a fantastic pipeline with the IT industry co-operating with universities and government. Women cannot miss out, she said.

The Honeypot survey found the US has the highest number of women in the labour force overall. Lithuania has the highest percentage of female workforce at 51%, one of only two alongside Latvia at 50% countries in the index that have a higher percentage of women than men working.

Turkey has the smallest percentage of female workforce at around 32%, yet has the highest percentage of female graduates in science, technology, engineering and maths subjects at 37%. It has the lowest gender pay gap for tech jobs in the index, and the fifth lowest overall gender wage gap.

Honeypot cofounder Emma Tracey said: This would suggest that although there are cultural barriers working against women in Turkey, those that do work are paid more fairly for their contributions than many countries which consider themselves to be more equal such as Germany and the UK.

Ms Tracey said one of the most surprising findings was that Israel, the so-called Start-Up Nation with its Silicon Wadi, has only 26,000 women working in tech, accounting for only 11% of its IT industry.

With a technology gender wage gap of over 27%, it could be surmised that Israeli women are discouraged from joining the tech workforce when there is better pay to be found elsewhere, she said.By Stephen Cadogan

CAP reform efforts to better target direct payments and moves towards member state discretion in this regard were welcomed by Minister of State for Agriculture Andrew Doyle, as CAP reform in 2020 edged forward with a large majority of ministers in the EU Agriculture and Fisheries Council in Brussels last Monday agreeing conclusions on the reform.

Mr Doyle, representing Ireland at the Council, gave other indicators of how Ireland might approach reform, when he said some flexibility could be given at member state level to use the multi-million euro crisis reserve to deal with exceptional events. Farm inspections should focus more on rectification of unintentional errors, rather than on punishment, he said.

On higher environmental goals for the next CAP, the Minister of State welcomed recognition that farmers must be adequately remunerated.

The current focus on costs incurred and income foregone adds complexity to scheme design and approval and fails to fully acknowledge the real value of environmental measures.

He said generational renewal is a critical priority for the agriculture sector, and flexibility is needed at EU and national level for incentives to energise young farmers. The Councils conclusions on CAP reform were backed by 23 of the 28 member states, including Ireland. Only Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Slovakia did not agree with the conclusions.

Mr Doyle said: I recognise the new CAP must deliver greater added value, including by making the policy greener and more results driven. Of course well need a strong budget to deliver on these objectives.

Mr Doyle urged his EU colleagues to work hard together to ensure the new CAP will deliver real simplification for farmers and administrators.

He said greening and cross-compliance requirements must be streamlined.

The ministers conclusions call for the CAPs added value in delivering on new challenges to be enhanced; member states empowered to take local decisions; agricultural resilience to be strengthened; the contribution to environmental objectives to be fostered; and quality of life in rural areas to be improved.

Speaking on behalf of the European Union farmers organisations and agricultural co-ops, Copa and Cogeca, Thomas Magnusson said the conclusions support many of their demands, especially real simplification of the CAP for farmers.

The Commissions plan on the future of food and farming is a good starting point for us. The focus on smart farming is very positive as it can improve the competitiveness of the sector and enable farmers to produce more using less resources, he said. But both the new delivery model and the new green architecture still need further clarification.

Guarantees are needed to ensure the CAP truly remains a common policy without any renationalisation and that it is backed by a strong budget. Targeted support which goes to genuine, active farmers is underlined too, which is a priority for Copa and Cogeca, Magnusson concluded.By Gordon Deegan

Latest: Developer Johnny Ronans development group has stated that it is bewildered and disappointed by the Bord Pleanala decision to refuse planning permission for its 22 storey tower at George's Quay in Dublin.

The Ronan Group was responding to the decision by the board to refuse planning permission for the tallest building ever proposed for Dublin in spite of its own senior inspector, Gillian Kane recommending that planning permission be granted for what she has described as a "beautiful" building.

An artist's impression of the Tara House development

A spokesman for the Ronan Group said that Ms Kane acknowledged that our scheme as proposed would have been a valuable addition to the architecture of Dublins City Centre.

He said: Dublin needs beautiful, yet purposeful buildings along good transport links. Being adjacent to both the existing Tara Street Dart Station and the planed Metro station and Dart Interchange there is arguably no site in Dublin better served by transport links.

He said: Naturally we are disappointed by the An Bord Pleanala decision but we are also bewildered that the board would reject a scheme designed to the very highest international standards, endorsed by its own inspector and is fully compliant in terms of height with the recently-extended Georges Quay Local Area Plan."

The spokesman said that the Ronan Group and its advisors will consider the An Bord Pleanala decision carefully before deciding on its next course of action.

The group pointed out that the Government has clearly signalled its intention to bring out new policies to promote more sustainable forms of urban development including greater density and height in city centres and at public transport nodes and we look forward to reviewing the proposals for the site in the context of this new emerging Government Policy.

An artist's impression of the porposed Tara House development.

The spokesman pointed out that the proposed 22-story development would have given over 10,000 sq ft of much-needed office space in the heart of Dublin City Centre as well as a new 110-room hotel and a new entrance servicing the existing Tara-Street Dart station.

In its formal order, the board ruled that the 88-metre high tower would seriously detract from the setting and character of the Custom House, one of the citys most important architectural set pieces, and would also adversely affect the River Liffey Conservation Area and the OConnell Street and Environs Architectural Conservation Area.

The board went on to state: Furthermore, the proposal would, by reason of visual intrusion, have a significant and detrimental visual impact on a number of important views and vistas in the city including from College Green and the Trinity College Campus, as well as Lord Edward Street, the Five Lamps, Granby Row, Frederick Street North, Parnell Street North, Henrietta Street, Kildare Street and Harcourt Street.

As a result, the board stated that the proposed development would, therefore, seriously injure the urban character and visual amenities of the historic city core and would be contrary to the proper planning and sustainable development of the area.

The board has made its ruling in spite of Ms Kane concluding that the proposed development should proceed after giving the development a comprehensive endorsement at the end of an 82-page report.

On the towers visual impact, Ms Kane stated that she was satisfied that the proposed development, with its strong vertical emphasis and architectural treatment, protects the setting and the context of the Custom House.

On the impact on the skyline, Ms Kane stated that the height of the proposed building is acceptable. She said: There is a clear policy framework, one which I find reasonable and appropriate  for an 88m building at this location. That there would be an impact on the city skyline therefore, is inevitable.

On the height of the tower, Ms Kane stated: The principal of a taller building on the subject site has been robustly assessed and can be solidly defended.

She said: The site sits at a strategic location, adjoining a busy public transport node, at a key entrance point to the docklands, at a key visual marker on the River Liffey and directly opposite Liberty Hall.

Ms Kane stated: The time and place for debating the appropriateness of the site as a suitable site for an 88m building has passed. I am satisfied that the height of the proposed development is not only acceptable but is to be welcomed as a definitive realisation and implementation of a long-held City Council policy.

Johnny Ronan

ORIGINAL REPORT: An Bord Pleanala rejects Johnny Ronan's plan for Dublin's tallest building

Developer, Johnny Ronans plan of building the tallest ever building in Dublin has been turned down by An Bord Pleanala.

The appeals board has refused planning permission for the 22-storey tower on Georges Quay at Tara Street in spite of its own senior inspector, Gillian Kane recommending that planning permission be granted what she has described as a "beautiful" building.

In its formal order, the board ruled that the 88-metre high tower would seriously detract from the setting and character of the Custom House, one of the citys most important architectural set pieces, and would also adversely affect the River Liffey Conservation Area and the OConnell Street and Environs Architectural Conservation Area.

The board went on to state: Furthermore, the proposal would, by reason of visual intrusion, have a significant and detrimental visual impact on a number of important views and vistas in the city including from College Green and the Trinity College Campus, as well as Lord Edward Street, the Five Lamps, Granby Row, Frederick Street North, Parnell Street North, Henrietta Street, Kildare Street and Harcourt Street.

As a result, the board stated that the proposed development would, therefore, seriously injure the urban character and visual amenities of the historic city core and would be contrary to the proper planning and sustainable development of the area.

The board has made its ruling in spite of Ms Kane concluding that the proposed development should proceed after giving the development a comprehensive endorsement at the end of an 82-page report.

Ms Kane oversaw a two-day oral hearing into the proposal last October.

However, the board stated that it did not agree with Ms Kanes recommendation and its decision upholds Dublin City Councils decision to refuse planning permission last year.

In her report, Ms Kane concluded that the tower would integrate satisfactorily with the surrounding existing development and with the established character of the sensitive historic city centre, including the Custom House and including views and prospects towards the site along the River Liffey Conservation Area, College Green, the grounds of Trinity College and the North Dublin Georgian Quarter.

On the design of the tower, Ms Kane stated that it will be beautiful.

She added: It will however rely on its height to provoke a reaction, rather than a brave new design. The proposed building will not announce Dublin in the same way its international counterparts bring recognition to their cities. It will be a landmark in the Collins Dictionary definition of the word in that it will be a building that is easily noticed and one that can be used to judge ones position.

Ms Kane stated that the proposed design with its attention to detail and the palette of materials chosen are such that the building will be aesthetically very pleasing.

On the towers visual impact, Ms Kane stated that she was satisfied that the proposed development, with its strong vertical emphasis and architectural treatment, protects the setting and the context of the Custom House.

On the impact on the skyline, Ms Kane stated that the height of the proposed building is acceptable. She said: There is a clear policy framework, one which I find reasonable and appropriate  for an 88m building at this location. That there would be an impact on the city skyline therefore, is inevitable.

On the height of the tower, Ms Kane stated: The principal of a taller building on the subject site has been robustly assessed and can be solidly defended.

She said: The site sits at a strategic location, adjoining a busy public transport node, at a key entrance point to the docklands, at a key visual marker on the River Liffey and directly opposite Liberty Hall.

Ms Kane stated: The time and place for debating the appropriateness of the site as a suitable site for an 88m building has passed. I am satisfied that the height of the proposed development is not only acceptable but is to be welcomed as a definitive realisation and implementation of a long held City Council policy.

Mr Ronan has been contacted for comment on the ruling.People are being asked for their opinions on the proposed MetroLink in Dublin that will link Swords to Sandyford via Dublin Airport.

MetroLink, previously known as Metro North, is scheduled to be operational by 2027.

The plan proposes 25 stations, 15 of them brand new, and it is predicted that 15,000 passengers will use the service every hour during rush hour.

It also envisages the upgrading of the Luas Green Line to metro standard, which would link up to the metro services running north to the airport and beyond, to provide Dublin with a high capacity, high-frequency cross-city rail corridor.

Up to 4,000 jobs will be created during construction.

There are information evenings organised for people in Swords, Ballymun, Dublin City, Glasnevin, Ranelagh and Leopardstown.

National Transport Authority CEO Anne Graham said: "Thanks to MetroLink, there will finally be a rail link to Dublin Airport, and with easy interchange with other modes including bus, Dart and commuter rail, MetroLink will make it easier than ever to move into and around the capital.

We have modelled future passenger numbers and we predict that capacity for 15,000 passengers per direction per hour during the busiest peak times will be required along this corridor. We dont believe that a bus system or a standard Luas line would be able to accommodate that number of passengers and that is why MetroLink makes so much sense.

MetroLink will have the capacity for 30 trains per hour in each direction, so there is no doubt that it will greatly enhance the public transport offering in Dublin."A withdrawal treaty including any Irish border deal will have to be agreed by October, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar has warned.

The deadline was necessary to allow time for UK and European parliaments to ratify arrangements before Brexit a year from now, he said as he arrived at a European Council meeting of state leaders in Brussels.

Much of the remaining work remains on the vexed issue of the Northern Ireland border with the Republic of Ireland where there is relatively little detailed operational agreement.

Taoiseach Leo Varadkar sets October deadline for border deal. pic.twitter.com/ivKsaPawBv  michael mchugh (@mmchugh02) March 22, 2018

Mr Varadkar reiterated his firm stance on the importance of the backstop arrangement in which Northern Ireland would continue to follow EU regulations which affect the island if no other solution is found.

But he said that was not his preferred option.

"So the way it can be changed is for us to develop option A, which is a really close trading relationship between the UK and the EU, so close that many of the things that are in the backstop may become unnecessary if that makes sense."

He envisaged a deep free trade agreement between the UK and EU.

"Or for example, what has been talked about before, a customs union partnership between the UK and EU that would be so close to the customs union that it would not necessitate some of the elements that are in the backstop."

- Press Association & Digital DeskA Macroom filmmakers account of an epic Camino sea journey also serves as a tribute to one of the crew who has since died, writes Esther McCarthy

A FEW years ago, a crew of men embarked on an epic and audacious journey of the Camino  not by land, but by sea. The crew of explorers set out on a 2,500km journey from Ireland to northern Spain in a traditional

rowing boat, a naomhog, which they built themselves.

Poet Danny Sheehy, artist Liam Holden, musician Brendan Begley, and stonemason Brendan Moriarty spent six weeks of the following three years on the water, with Glen Hansard joining the crew as substitute on the final leg. The Camino Voyage  a remarkable account of their journey and its impact on them  will open the Dingle International Film Festival tonight.

The 12th Dingle International Film Festival is delighted to announce that this years Opening Night Film will be The Camino Voyage/Iomramh an Chamino! An epic 2,500km modern day Celtic odyssey, directed by Donal O Ceilleachair. To get your tickets go to https://t.co/bMIiX0jOCa pic.twitter.com/JX373rvAx1  Dingle Film Festival (@DingleFilm) January 12, 2018

For Macroom filmmaker Donal O Ceilleachair, the opportunity to document their efforts was too good to miss, even though he was busy wrapping another film at the time.

I was in my Dublin studio at the time, and Kevin Cummins from Claracha Gaeilge was there, and he said: These guys are going out and doing the Camino by naomhog. Theyre going out next week and youd be the perfect person to follow them.

Id felt I was in need of a sabbatical, I was planning to take a bit of time off. And when he told me who was on it, I said, I dont care if they only get as far an Dun Laoghaire, itll be interesting, he says, laughing.

Still, filming a documentary at sea for six weeks at a time over three years was going to present all sorts of challenges.

The crew of the Naomh Gobnait on their journey from Ireland to Spain on The Camino Voyage.

Logistics are a nightmare. A, theyre Kerrymen, so theyll never tell you where theyre rowing and when theyll get there, jokes O Ceilleachair.

B, youre a Corkman, so theyre trying to trick you all the time.

C, youre at sea, so they actually dont know where theyre going to be. Theyll have a plan to be at a certain place at a certain time, but depending on the winds, on the tides, on their own fatigue, they may or may not get there. It was a logistical nightmare, really. Plus salt, seawater, and technology do not go together. Wed a little bit of damage here and there but fortunately we didnt lose anything, which is a miracle.

For the most part, the two-man crew consisted of the director and cameraman Bob Kelly, a seasoned traveller and travel-documentary maker.

Filmmaker Donal O Ceilleachair

Its a charming film, packed with the personalities of the characters who inhabit it, and the friends they make along the way. I think there was something about this boat, it really sparked peoples imaginations, says O Ceilleachair.

The further we went, the more amazed people got. People pull into harbours all the time in big yachts, theyve come from all over the world. But nobody blinks an eye because theyre just another yacht, basically. But when four men like this, who are not young men, are rowing in those conditions, people are like, My God. And when theyd arrive, people would ask, What can we do for you? What do you need? That generosity of spirit was amazing. There is definitely something similar about the Celtic people, thats for sure.

The participation of Hansard adds a new dimension, and O Ceilleachair was impressed by the level of his commitment. Glens the real thing, hes a real genuine character. He pours himself 100% into whatever he does. He takes everything as a challenge and hes so generous in spirit. If hes playing music, hell try to get everybody into it. He brought a whole level of energy to it.

It was, agrees O Ceilleachair, a bonding experience for all involved, which made the death of Danny Sheehy last year all the more poignant. The poet had continued his naomhog journey south with a new crew last year, and tragically lost his life after the boat overturned.

Liam called me. It was like 12 oclock on a Friday night. I thought that was very late to be calling when I saw it in the morning and I called him straight away. He just said, Dannys gone. We both couldnt believe it because Danny is one of those eternal figures. I still couldnt believe it until I went to Dannys wake and I saw him in his house down in Ballyferriter.

Danny was really the one who brought everyone else together, and Danny was always the one who inspired everybody else. Danny was one of those genuine people. It was really great to be around him. Its a joy to see the film because Dannys so alive in it.

Dingle Film Festival: Other highlights

Michael Inside

Filmed mostly in the former Cork Prison, Frank Berrys remarkable feature centres on the experiences of a first-time prisoner and features a stellar performance from young actor Dafhyd Flynn.

Black 47

Lance Dalys gritty revenge thriller set during the famine, Black 47, will also screen at Dingle. It tells the story of Feeney, an Irish ranger who returns home from fighting for the English army, devastated to see the effects of famine on his country. When he discovers what has happened to his family, he goes on a murderous rampage, seeking out those involved.

Kissing Candice

Shot under the Irish Film Boards Catalyst Scheme, this marks the feature debut of well-known music video director Aoife McCardle. It stars Red Rocks Ann Skelly, above, as Candice, a 17-year-old who longs to escape the boredom of her seaside town, only finding solace in her vivid imagination.

Keepers of the Flame

The new feature-length documentary by Emmy Award winner Nuala OConnor, is her feature directorial debut and makes its world premiere at Dingle.

It tells the story of generations dealing with the consequences of war and civil war, of what is remembered and what is forgotten.

Bob Dylan: Trouble No More

The European premiere features a combination of live footage from his 1979 gospel tour and sermons delivered by actor Michael Shannon.

Animation Dingle

Industry and third-level participants unite to celebrate the best in class of animated content. The event is made up of conferences, screenings, workshops, and the International Student Animation Awards 2018.Ellie OByrne chats to Cork Sound Fair founder Conor Ruane

CORK Sound Fair is a new leftfield arts and music event taking place this weekend. Founder Conor Ruane, 27, and originally from Mayo, has lived in Cork for two years and combines his work as an events organiser and promoter with his day-job as an aquatic ecologist.

What is a sound fair and what can people expect?

A sound fair allows musicians, DJs, and producers to quite literally set out their audio stalls, Ruane says: Rather than the traditional festival or concert, its a snapshot of what people are producing. Ireland was run on fairs back in the day: People would set up stalls and sell their goods. This is the audio equivalent of that.

Fifteen Irish and international acts will perform short sets over two days. The only consistent theme is a passion for sound, and its all live and with an electronic element. Expect synths, drum machines and laptops.

How is it different from a music event?

We have a sound-art element in the installations, and acts like Dreamcycles and Robert Curgenven definitely consider themselves sound art. I would say theres a subtlety to it: regular music is more formulaic, but sound art is pushing the boundaries of what youd expect from music and it can also incorporate other things, like visuals. Theres very much the sense that a live exhibition is happening with you in the room.

Yes, but can you dance to it?

Yes, definitely! Some people might think itll all be low-key, but its going to be very energetic. Therell be lots of dance-y stuff: Autumns is post-punk electro, very upbeat and danceable; and Static, thats John Hennessy from Cork club night Sunday Times, has taken music from his own record collection and added this dub/techno vibe to it.

The first four acts in St Peters will be seated, so thats a more low-rhythm thing and then the seating will be taken away, so people will be able to move around and dance to the more up-tempo stuff.

Tell us about two of the main artists involved:

Headline act Beatrice Dillon, a UK-based DJ and producer, will play her Irish debut in Cork City Gaol with a corresponding visual installation by artist Cliona Ni Laoi, AKA Cli, who has produced light shows for global underground YouTube channel Boiler Room.

Beatrice is very much from a dance background. Its really exciting to be able to host her in Cork; part of what were doing with Cork Sound Fair is exposing people to international acts they may not have been aware of.

Performer Robert Curgenven

Cork-based Robert Curgenven is a classically trained organist who has released experimental electronic work on various record labels over the past decade.

Robert manipulates really low bass frequencies that almost shape the air around you. We have a custom-built sound system that isnt very loud, but which drives this constant wave of pressure and changes the physical feeling of the room. Were really excited to have Robert on board.

How important are the venues?

Venue is everything, Ruane says. Cork Sound Fair will be held in St Peters, a landmark former church and arts centre on North Main St, and in the atmospheric surroundings of the old Cork gaol, site of Corks first radio broadcast service and involuntary home to Countess Markiewicz for four months of her incarceration.

St Peters has a really unique acoustic, which is a challenge, but some of the acts are going to work with it. Its a cavernous, massive structure in the middle of the city and were lucky to have it. Cork Gaol was one of the first places to broadcast music in Cork, so its kind of cool that were making electronic music there.

Cork Sound Fair takes place tomorrow and Saturday. For details, see corksoundfair.comPoliticians and regulators are demanding answers from the social media giant in the wake of revelations about the use of users personal information, writes Ben Brody

FACEBOOK is struggling to respond to growing demands to explain how the personal data of millions of its users could be exploited by a consulting firm that helped Donald Trump win the US presidency.

The uproar over Cambridge Analytica, which has put Facebook under scrutiny by the data regulators, has sparked demands for answers on both sides of the Atlantic.

In the US, lawmakers in both chambers of Congress want Facebook co-founder and chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg to explain how his company has once again allowed its network to be abused for political ends.

Even before the latest revelations, there had been calls for social media CEOs to testify about their efforts to tackle ongoing meddling on their platforms by Russia, as well as attempts to inflame social debates in the US on issues like gun control. Now, its almost certain that some of these CEOs will be summoned for congressional hearings.

Facebook, which saw its stock value plummet by $60bn (48.8bn) since the revelations emerged, sparking an

investor lawsuit, sent lower-level executives to brief several congressional panels.

But thats unlikely to satisfy lawmakers who are calling for the inquiries to extend to other companies including Twitter and Google.

There are a lot of forces converging at this moment, said Marc Rotenberg, president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. Obviously, Cambridge Analytica is a hot button for many people, and stories that are associated with that company have raised more and more questions.

The furour started over revelations that Cambridge Analytica had siphoned data from some 50m Facebook users as it built a election-consulting company that boasted it could sway voters in contests all over the world.

While 270,000 users had authorised an academic to use their data for research purposes, according to reports, the researcher allegedly violated privacy rules when he handed the data off to Cambridge Analytica.

The firm, which on Tuesday suspended its chief executive, Alexander Nix, consulted for Trumps campaign.

The scandal was fanned by Nixs comments in an undercover video by Channel 4 News. Nix told the reporters, who posed as potential clients, that the firms services included the potential to try to induce targets with bribes, entrapment by prostitutes and spreading disinformation.

Cambridge Analytica has said the Facebook data at the centre of the uproar wasnt used as part of services provided to the Trump campaign.

Among the questions that Facebook will likely be asked are when it became aware that Cambridge Analytica had obtained the data and why users were not notified.

On Tuesday, Brad Parscale, who ran the 2016 Trump campaigns digital operations and hired Cambridge Analytica as a consultant, tweeted that unnamed people were taking credit for Trumps victory.

So incredibly false and ridiculous, he wrote. Let them say that under oath. Just an overblown sales pitch. Parscale has since been named the manager of Trumps 2020 re-election campaign.

Scrutiny of the issue is coming from the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the attorney generals of New York, Massachusetts and Connecticut. The FTC is investigating whether Facebook violated terms of a 2011 consent decree with its handling of the data that was transferred to Cambridge Analytica, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The FTC, which has a consumer protection mandate, reached that agreement in response to a complaint by EPICs Rotenberg. If the trade commission finds Facebook violated terms of the consent decree, it has the power to fine the company more than $40,000 a day per violation, which could open the door to millions of dollars in fines.

An FTC spokeswoman wouldnt comment on whether the agency was investigating but said that it takes any allegations of violations of our consent decrees very seriously. The people who described the FTCs moves asked not to be identified because the details arent public.

Facebook has said it rejects any suggestion of violation of the consent decree.

Without a national privacy law, it falls to attorneys general to enforce state data privacy statutes. New York State attorney general Eric Schneiderman announced on Tuesday that he and Massachusetts attorney general Maura Healey had sent a demand letter to Facebook as part of a joint probe stemming from the fallout.

Connecticut attorney general George Jepsen announced his own inquiry.

Facebooks mounting troubles dont end in the US. European regulators, concerned with how they can allow the data on European consumers to flow to this company could also take action, said Rotenberg.

The chairman of a UK parliamentary committee has announced he was requesting that Zuckerberg appear before the panel to supplement previous testimony by the companys executives.

Stricter European privacy rules kick in on May 25 under the General Data Protection Regulation. European Union justice commissioner Vera Jourova said she plans to discuss the matter with Facebook during a visit in the US this week. Italian telecommunications regulator Agcom also asked Facebook to provide information on its data use.

Australia has also opened an investigation into the matter, according to that countrys Information and Privacy commissioner, Timothy Pilgrim.

Facebook said it would conduct staff-level briefings of six congressional committees this week including the US House and Senate Judiciary Committees, as well as the commerce and intelligence committees of both chambers.

A key question will be their appetite for a public appearance by the companys leadership, especially Zuckerberg. The Facebook officials set to handle the briefings include the companys deputy general counsel and deputy chief privacy officer, said a congressional official.

Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said he wants to hear testimony from Zuckerberg, while Senator Richard Burr, a North Carolina Republican and the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, said any decision about calling Zuckerberg to appear before the panel is further off.

Senators Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat, and John Kennedy, a Louisiana Republican, repeated their bipartisan call for testimony by the CEOs of Facebook, Twitter and Alphabet before the judiciary committee.

The growing issues surrounding big social media companies arent going away, Kennedy told Bloomberg TV.

Mr Zuckerberg and the other CEOs need to come, he added. Some of Facebooks behaviour has kind of gotten creepy.

Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine, who also serves on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said she has grown increasingly concerned as were learning more and more about the manipulation of data, the harvesting of data from Facebook, the ads that were placed to sow the seeds of discord in this country.

White House spokesman Raj Shah demurred when asked if Zuckerberg should testify, but he said Trump supports investigations by Congress or the FTC into the incident.Robert Mercer and his daughter were key players in Trumps victory. But they will find a repeat performance difficult, writes Bette Browne

A US Supreme Court ruling that allowed corporations to pour unlimited cash into American elections was a key factor in the perfect Cambridge Analytica storm that propelled Donald Trump to the White House.

The Supreme Courts Citizens United ruling in 2010 declared that corporations could spend as much as they wanted to support candidates running for Congress or president as long as the contributions were not made directly to candidates.

The ruling overturned major portions of the 2002 McCain-Feingold political spending restrictions and rolled back centuries-old law on corporate spending in political campaigning.

In a key dissenting opinion, Justice Paul Stevens warned that the court made an error in treating corporate free speech the same as individual speech free and that opening the door to unlimited cooperate spending increased the chances of corruption in the political system.

It was exactly the ruling that hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah had been hoping for and they set about exploiting it in full by ploughing millions into the new super PACs (political action committees) that sprung up.

They particularly liked the political work being done by the billionaire Koch brothers, Charles, 83, and David, 78, and pulled out all the stops to back Republican Mitt Romney in his bid to defeat President Barack Obama in 2012.

When that bid failed, despite Romney outspending Obama by $100m, the Mercers were irate at what they saw as the ineffectiveness of the likes of the Koch brothers and began to look for better vehicles for their political

ambitions. Enter Steve Bannon and Cambridge Analytica.

Mercer was a major investor in Cambridge Analytica and was backing Republican Ted Cruz in the 2016 election. But Bannon had his eye on someone else.

He believed Trump would be the perfect vehicle to carry his and the Mercers rightist political philosophy into the White House.

He then went on to persuade Mercer to ditch Cruz and marry the Mercer money with Cambridge Analyticas tactics and row in behind Trump.

The Mercers didnt need that much persuading. They were already big investors in Bannons own far-right Breitbart News online network, which had spent much of its time supporting Trump.

In June 2016, according to US Federal Election Commission records, Trumps campaign hired Cambridge Analytica and paid it over $6.2m. By then, according to whistleblower Christopher Wylie, the company had created psychological profiles of some 230m Americans.

Thus, for all of them  Mercer, Bannon, and Cambridge Analytica  Trump was the perfect vehicle to test their theories that if someone could be branded as a populist outsider on the side of voters abandoned by the Washington swamp, that candidate could sweep to victory by tapping into anger and resentment, and even racism and xenophobia, and it wouldnt matter that much if he had no political experience.

In fact, that would be a bonus.

And they were correct. Yet, isnt that what much of politics is about  whoever fights hardest wins? And wasnt Obama doing the same in tapping into Facebook and other social media platforms? In some ways yes, but the factor that made the real difference  unlimited campaign spending by corporations  only really came into its own in the 2016 election.

There is also another factor: Unlimited spending by billionaires in US elections is skewing the political process in favour of Republican candidates. While there are many liberal Democratic billionaires like George Soros, there are far more conservative Republican or Libertarian-supporting ones like the Mercers and Koch brothers  and they also tend to be better-heeled.

David and Charles Koch have personal fortunes of $17.5bn (14.2bn) each, according to the Forbes billionaire list, while Soros has a net worth of $14bn. The oil refining Koch Industries is also the second-largest private US company with about $100bn in annual revenue. Soros is chairman of the hedge fund Soros Fund management with holdings valued at over $4bn.

Other figures, too, tell a bleak story for Democrats. In January and February of this year, for example, the main fundraising arms of the Republican Party took in roughly four times as much as their Democratic counterparts, raising $39.4m to the Democrats $9.6m.

In the years before the Supreme Court ruling opening the floodgates to unlimited spending, the picture looked more balanced for both parties. During the 2000 cycle, the Republican tally was $244m to the Democrats $219m; during the 2002 cycle, Republican funding was $250m to the Democrats $220m.

In addition, since the court ruling, power has begun to tilt away from the two main parties and towards an increasingly powerful group of ultra-wealthy donors with political agendas focusing on their own financial needs rather than those of society as a whole.

David Magerman, a senior employee at Mercers firm Renaissance Technologies, told the Wall Street Journal that Mercers political opinions show contempt for the social safety net that he doesnt need, but many Americans do.

Magerman added: He thinks society is upside down  that government helps the weak people get strong, and makes the strong people weak by taking their money away, through taxes.

While the Mercers keep a close watch on their political spending, they also keep a low profile and avoid the press. However, in the closing weeks of the 2016 campaign after the video emerged showing Trump bragging about sexually assaulting women, Robert and Rebekah Mercer issued a statement condemning Republicans who abandoned Trump.

Those among the political elite who quake before the boom box of media blather do not appreciate the apocalyptic choice that America faces on November 8th, it read. We have a country to save and there is only one person who can save it.

Whether their saviour can do it again in 2020 is less certain. The financial floodgates will certainly remain as open as they were in 2016 but some of the characters in the perfect storm that year will be either missing in action or licking their wounds.

Steve Bannon, for one, is now out in the cold. He was ousted from the Trump administration last August and after his attacks on Trump in the book Fire and Fury, he was pushed out of Breitbart  with the Mercers leading the charge against him.Two posters were placed on a placard outside the site along with business cards advertising the phone number for the service.

The name Josephine was handwritten on the business cards.

Excavations at the site uncovered significant quantities of infant remains in March 2017.

The Tuam Mother and Baby Home was operated by the Bon Secours Order and is one of the institutions under investigation by the Mother and Baby Homes Commission.

Barnardos apologised for any upset caused by the advertising but denied that its staff placed it there. Following a query from the Irish Examiner, the leaflets and business cards were removed.

Barnardos St Marys Tuam Advice and Support Service did not post the leaflets/business cards in this location, but nonetheless apologise for any upset caused.

The service has shared leaflets to a number of locations and groups in an effort to make sure people are aware of the service, and know how to avail of the supports it offers. Barnardos commits to removing the leaflets from this location as soon as possible, said a statement.

The service offers a confidential, professional helpline and email response to people affected by the Tuam Mother and Baby Home.

It is available to others who gave birth to babies at the home and their family members, people who were born there and any member of the public who has a query about the institution.

The service is funded by the Sisters of Bon Secours Ireland, which ran the Tuam Mother and Baby Home.

Secretary of the Tuam Home Survivors Network, Breeda Murphy, criticised the entire concept of a counselling service for survivors being funded by the Order that ran the home.

I dont know what planet they were on when they thought up this one. With respect, if the minister, the Government and the Orders fail to see how absolutely inappropriate this is, then there is little hope of ever achieving justice, said Ms Murphy.

At our last network meeting of February 11, it was agreed not to place notification of this meaningless service on our website, we will not endorse it as Minister [Katherine] Zappone has done on her page, but rather highlight it for what it is  an empty gesture, designed only to disempower and disable survivors.

The Mother and Baby Homes Commission has said it will be difficult to establish the facts surrounding the burials of children who died in all of the homes it is investigating.

In December, the expert technical group advising the Government about managing the Tuam site outlined five options for the Government.

These range from doing no further investigative work to conducting a full forensic excavation and analysis of all human remains.The remains of Mike Flynn, 50, originally from the Conna area in East Cork and who relocated to the US almost 30 years ago, arrived back in Cork yesterday, ahead of todays funeral ceremony.

Mr Flynn, who lived in New York and worked in construction, suffered fatal injuries while working on a building project in Florida last week.

It is understood he had travelled from his home in New York to help a friend who was working on a personal building job.

During the course of their work, Mr Flynn fell from a roof and suffered fatal head and neck injuries.

Emergency services were alerted but he was pronounced dead a short time later.

A source said his family and his wide circle of friends on both sides of the Atlantic were devastated by his sudden death.

Mr Flynn, who is predeceased by his father John, is survived by his mother Margaret, his sister Therese, his son John, who is a member of the US military, and Johns wife Lourdes, and his grandchild Emma.

A large crowd paid their respects last night as his remains lay in repose at Ronaynes Funeral Home in Fermoy.

Mr Flynns remains will be received into St Catherines Church in Conna before requiem Mass at 2pm today, with burial taking place afterwards in the local cemetery.In its operation targeting Phantom Secure Technology, CAB carried out three searches of professional offices in Dublin on Tuesday.

This followed the freezing last Thursday of two bank accounts linked to the company, which contained over $500,000.

CAB served orders on a number of financial institutions aimed at revealing the source and scale of transactions going through these accounts since the company set up in Ireland in 2011.

Sources said it was too early to estimate how much money was moved through the accounts, frozen under the Criminal Justice (Money Laundering and Terrorist Financing) Act 2010.

The boss of the Canada-based Phantom Secure was indicted in the US last week.

FBI documentation claims that based on reports from police in Canada, Australia, and the US that bank accounts and corporate ownership filings in Canada, Singapore, and Hong Kong show that Phantom Secure generated tens of millions of dollars in revenue by facilitating the crimes of transnational criminal organisations and protecting these organisations from detection by law enforcement.

As part of a FBI investigation, CAB officers raided the offices of Phantom Secure Technology at an address near Dublins Ormond Quay. This in turn led to two other searches.

The company is a subsidiary of a Canadian company, Phantom Secure, run by Vincent Ramos, who was arrested in the US on March 7 and charged with racketeering. Mr Ramos was listed as a director of the Irish subsidiary. Four of his associates abroad are also being sought.

Phantom Secure provided modified Blackberry devices to clients which allegedly included international drug traffickers and other organised crime elements.

International gangs that were clients of the company include the notorious Sinaloa Cartel in Mexico.

Sources here said they had no reason to suspect Irish organised crime groups were clients of the company.

The raid on Dublin followed raids in the companys offices across the US, in Canada, and Australia. The operation was led by the FBI after a long investigation.

Clients were provided with smartphones which had all the typical functionality of calling, texting, internet, and GPS removed. Instead an encrypted email system was installed which ensured complete privacy and insulation from any law enforcement investigations.

The system also allegedly was set up to ensure that if clients were arrested, all the data accumulated on the encrypted emails would be destroyed by Phantom Secure.

FBI estimate the company charged between $2,000-$3,000 per six-month subscription. Customers were only taken on if an existing client could vouch for them.

In Australia, use of the devices are being linked to at least two gangland-style murders in recent years.

Phantom Secure Technology originally operated out of an address in Dublin 7. For the last two years, it has been located in rented offices near Ormond Quay. A few years ago it advertised jobs for its Dublin operation, including for a software engineer.

According to security sources, there were no company personnel present when the office was raided and no arrests were made.

It is understood that no staff or employees attended at the office for some weeks. It is not alleged that anyone linked to the company here knew anything about these activities.

The international operation has effectively been shut down since the FBI and other law enforcement raids earlier this month.

Speaking after Ramoss arrest, FBI agent Nicholas Cheviron told Australian TV channel ABC: We learned that these phones have been used to coordinate drug trafficking, murders, assaults and money laundering.Eddie Mullins, of Fitzgerald Menswear, a business which has traded on the historic street for 160 years, said the restrictions, which come into effect on Tuesday, will cut off the lifeblood of the city and cause chaos.

This partial ban defies logic and will cause chaos and confusion, he said.

If you create confusion or vagueness at all when youre trying to appeal to customers, its a recipe for disaster.

We need people to come in to the city rather than scaring them away.

There seems to be a disconnect between City Hall and what goes on on the ground.

I and other traders, whove been giving out about the same things for years  improving parking, tackling begging and antisocial behaviour, and improving street cleaning  want to see them doing the basics right before introducing stuff like this.

City Hall has defended the move, insisting it will help buses run on time and is a key part of a wider traffic management plan that is required if the city is to grow sustainably.

A spokeswoman for Cork City Council said analysis shows that most of the vehicles using St Patricks Street is through traffic.

The street is not the destination itself. This traffic is not contributing anything to businesses on the street, she said.

The lifeblood of a city is footfall and pedestrians. Taking out the private cars should improve the environment for them.

And with the increase in traffic volumes, doing nothing isnt an option.

We have to give people more reliable public transport options. If the bus is more reliable and quicker, people will switch.

This change will take a while to get used to. But we have to start somewhere. This is one step in the direction we need to go if we are serious about growing Cork as a sustainable city.

So here's what you need to know about the #traffic restrictions beginning on St Patrick's Street from 3pm-6.30pm next Tuesday.... Vehicle access limited to public transport, taxis, cyclists and emergency vehicles. pic.twitter.com/zLfkDpvB1C  Cork City Council (@corkcitycouncil) March 21, 2018

City Hall confirmed yesterday that almost six years after the ban was first agreed as part of the Cork City Movement Strategy, the restrictions will come into effect from next Tuesday, with private cars banned from St Patricks Street between 3pm

and 6.30pm seven days a week.

Access will be restricted to public transport, taxis, cyclists, and emergency vehicles only.

The area will operate as a bus lane for the duration of the ban, with motorists facing a fixed charge fine of 60 for driving in the area during these hours.

Bus Eireann, which carried over 12.6m passengers across 2,630 daily Cork City services last year, operates 970 services a day on various routes from St Patricks Street.

The changes are being introduced over the Easter holiday period when the roads are quieter.

Inspector Finbarr OSullivan of the Traffic Corps said gardai will focus on raising awareness of the changes, rather than on enforcement, in the early stages.

He said they will monitor the impact of the changes closely and will provide feedback to City Hall in due course.

Banning private cars from the citys main street was agreed in principle in 2012 as part of the Cork City Centre Movement Strategy  a multi-pronged plan to deliver one of the single largest overhauls of traffic flow in the city in over 50 years.

However, initial proposals for a 12.30pm to 6.30pm car ban were shot down by city councillors in 2015 amid concerns over the length of the car ban period.

A year later, they voted to proceed with a reduced three-and-a-half-hour evening ban.

Meanwhile, the council said it is poised to start detailed design on the next three phases of the City Centre Movement Strategy, which includes proposals to make McCurtain St two way.Cork Simon Community has helped more than 850 people with a range of courses over the past decade, and its training and employment co-ordinator says the support is vital to help people move on even after they find accommodation.

Fiona Hagensen said some clients are so committed to their education that they sleep rough in Cork Simons day centre at night to turn up for training and courses during the day.

Attending education is a motivating factor. It is something they can control in their lives whereas they cant control their housing needs, she said.

Cork Simon began funding an education and training programme in 2009, supporting people on courses ranging from basic literacy programmes up to degree level.

Many clients have moved on from Junior and Leaving Certificate to complete further education courses at Cork Education and Training Board Colleges, or to diplomas and degrees at CIT and UCC.

We have noticed that our demographic has changed and we have fewer people doing Junior Cert, and more who want to go to post-Leaving Certificate courses, or to CIT or UCC, said Ms Hagensen said.

She will speak at a seminar today as part of the Cork Lifelong Learning Festival about work towards a learning city that is inclusive and equitable. This was one of the headings around which the Unesco international conference on learning cities in Cork last September called for global action.

As well as people who are homeless, those at risk, or who have recently been housed are helped by Cork Simon Communitys training and education services through agencies across the city.

They also help clients at the Cork City Council-funded Cork Foyer and Bishopsgrove, a new council-run housing project for young people at risk of homelessness.

We have found repeatedly that housing is just one of our clients needs and, that if we want to re-integrate people into communities, we need to help them move on from homelessness in more ways than one, Ms Hagensen said.

She said education and training provide a support network, providing meaningful use of their time and bolstering their physical and mental health.

Time and time again, we see how education builds self-esteem and helps people fully move on in their personal journey. Without education and additional supports, many people, even when they eventually have a roof over their head, dont move on psychologically, said Ms Hagensen.

Classes, exhibitions, tours and lectures are continuing across the city until Sunday as part of the Cork Lifelong Learning Festival.

www.corklearningcity.ieKenneth Hornibrook, of 3 Kilmore Rd, Knocknaheeny, has been repaying the fans since December 2016 and yesterday brought the outstanding balance of 338 to Cork District Court to compensate them.

That brought to 2,538 the total compensation he had brought to court, said Joseph Cuddigan, defending.

Inspector Ronan Kennelly confirmed payment of the full amount of compensation.

Sgt Clodagh OSullivan told Judge Olann Kelleher how the scam was carried out.

Hornibrook put adverts on DoneDeal showing he had tickets for sale for a Coldplay concert at Croke Park in July 2017.

In follow-up phonecalls he would tell the unsuspecting music fans to send the money by Western Union to various locations around the country in his name.

He called to collect the money that was transferred  something over 200 in each case to cover two tickets.

When the people who paid received no tickets, they made complaints to An Garda Siochana and an investigation was put in place.

Hornibrook pleaded guilty to 12 separate counts of theft, mostly related to pairs of tickets. Several were supposed to have been for Coldplay.

Others were for Andre Rieu, Red Hot Chili Peppers, a Liverpool match, and four tickets for Tommy Tiernan at Vicar St.

Despite payment of full compensation, Judge Olann Kelleher said the thefts still merited a jail term.

He sentenced Hornibrook to six months in prison. The sentence is to be appealed.Lawmakers and regulators in the US and the UK are now scrutinising the social media giant, whose shares have dropped more than 9% since the news broke on March 17. So whats it all about?

Who took what from Facebook?

During the summer of 2014, the UK affiliate of US political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica hired a Soviet-born American researcher, Aleksandr Kogan, to gather basic profile information of Facebook users along with what they chose to Like.

About 270,000 Facebook users, most or all of whom were paid a small amount, downloaded Kogans app, thisisyourdigitallife, which took the form of a personality survey.

Kogan collected data not just on those users but on their Facebook friends as well, if their privacy settings allowed it  a universe of people that reached 50 million.

The app, in its terms of service, disclosed that it would collect data on users and their friends.

Did Kogan have Facebooks permission?

In a general sense, yes. Since 2007, Facebook has allowed outside developers to build and offer their own applications within its space.

When Kogan offered his app, Facebook also allowed developers to collect information on friends of those who chose to use their apps if their privacy settings allowed it.

Then whats the issue here?

Facebook says Kogan lied to us by saying he was gathering the data for research purposes and violated the companys policies by passing the data to Cambridge Analytica. (Kogan has said the apps terms and conditions were written to allow commercial uses.)

Facebook says that after it learned of the situation in 2015, it removed Kogans app and demanded that he and all parties he had given data to destroy the data.

Facebook says it received assurances that the data was destroyed, though recent media reports say it wasnt.

Cambridge Analytica has maintained that it deleted all the data Kogan provided.

Why did Cambridge Analytica want the Facebook data?

The firm uses data to reach voters with hyper-targeted messaging, including on Facebook and other online services.

The company may have wanted the data to create psychological profiles that could be used to target voters during political campaigns.

The firm believed those profiles were better predictors of how voters could be swayed through targeted ads than traditional data on party registration and voting patterns.

Cambridge Analytica was funded by former Renaissance Technologies co-CEO Robert Mercer, a major supporter of Trump in 2016. Trumps campaign manager, Steve Bannon, served on the firms board.

Did Cambridge Analytica pay Kogan?

It covered his costs in creating his app  more than $800,000 (650,000)  and allowed him to keep a copy for his own research, the New York Times reported, citing company emails and financial records.

Did the Facebook data help Trump win the presidency?

Whether Cambridge Analyticas models really work is a point of contention; even some of the firms clients have said they saw little value in it.

Cambridge Analytica has denied it used psychographic modelling techniques on the Trump campaign.

But its not clear whether the firm used the Facebook data in other ways to better understand and target voters. Also unknown: how many of the 50 million Facebook users whose data were acquired were registered US voters.

Did any of this violate any rules?

That remains to be seen.

The UK has data-protection laws that ban the sale or use of personal data without consent.

And in 2011, Facebook settled privacy complaints by the US Federal Trade Commission by agreeing to get clear consent from users before sharing their material.

The FTC is now investigating whether Facebook violated the terms of that 2011 consent decree.

The company would face millions of dollars in fines if it were found to have violated that pact. Lawmakers in the US and UK are conducting their own inquiries.The major push-back took place as a Government minister lashed out at the attempt to gag the public last night, claiming any strategy to prevent a national abortion vote is an affront to democracy.

In a key second stage vote yesterday, the Dail voted by 110 TDs to 32 to support the referendum bill formally allowing an Eighth Amendment referendum.

The vote was repeated last night at committee, report and final stage, meaning the bill can be sent to the Seanad next week. However, although the bills passing means a May 25 referendum date remains on track, the level of opposition led to private concern in government and opposition parties last night.

While 32 TDs in total voted against the bill at second stage  including Fine Gael TDs Sean Barrett and Peter Fitzpatrick, Independent Alliance TD Sean Canney, six rural Independent TDs and Sinn Feins Carol Nolan  the most significant opposition came from Fianna Fail.

Despite party leader Micheal Martin being fully in favour of repeal and 12 weeks, 21 of his TDs voted against the referendum compared to only 20 in favour.

Speaking to the Irish Examiner last night, pro-life Fianna Fail TDs Bobby Aylward and John McGuinness said they still want a referendum but opposed the bill as it is a back-door route to 12 weeks, a view repeated by other party colleagues.

Mr Aylward, who in January publicly called for a pro-life meeting of Fianna Fail TDs, said while he agonised over the vote as he is a democrat to my core, he could not support the bill as it will open the door for potential 12-week abortion access.

Mr Aylward confirmed he and others have spoken with other TDs in recent days, and said Mr Martin should have known there would be a revolt from the very beginning.

A spokesperson for Health Minister Simon Harris last night only said he welcomes the passing of the bill, while a spokesperson for Mr Martin simply said Fianna Fail has a free vote.

However, the reality that half of Fianna Fail TDs have openly opposed Mr Martin has led to fresh concern the referendum and any future 12-week law will be blocked.

Skills Minister John Halligan accused those opposing the bill of an affront to democracy.

They are a disgrace. They are not fit to be in a modern government. The people have a right to be asked the question and to try and stop that from happening is nothing short of an affront to democracy, he said.Dr Mark Murphy, spokesperson for the Irish College of General Practitioners (IAGP), said the State spent 40m on antidepressants for GMS eligible patients in 2016 but just 10m on Counselling in Primary Care (CIPC).

CIPC, a HSE service for people with mild to moderate mental health difficulties, has limited availability around the country.

Prescribing rates of antidepressants reflect a lack of psychological therapies and a lack of social therapies and resources in society, including fragmented communities, isolation and austerity, said Dr Murphy.

He said lifestyle changes and psychological/social therapies should be the first port of call in treating depression.

But for a GMS patient, it can take six months to access psychological services.

I had a 15-year-old patient who had to pay 1,200 to access cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) privately. It would have been a lot cheaper to take antidepressants, he said.

Committee member and pharmacist, Fine Gael TD Kate OConnell, said she knew of a woman who spent 5,000 on CBT over six months because she did not want to go on antidepressants.

The committee, which gathered to discuss prescription pattern monitoring, heard all the evidence suggests GPs prescribe extremely appropriately in the context of a severe capacity shortage in general practice and primary care.

Professor Tom Fahey, RCSI Medical School, said he did not think Ireland was that out of kilter with other countries in terms of prescribing rates.

Dr Murphy said doctors were prescribing more now than 20 years ago, but they are doing a better job of it.

While the number of over-65s prescribed 10 drugs or more, (excessive polypharmacy) had jumped from 1.5% to 22% between 1997 and 2012, the odds of potentially inappropriate prescribing in 2012 (versus 1997) was 60% less, Dr Murphy said.

Professor Mary Horgan, president RCPI and consultant in infectious diseases, Cork University Hospital, said in terms of antibiotic prescribing, sometimes the courses can be a bit too long. Shorter courses can cure a lot of the infections that we see, she said.

Prof Fahey said a current challenge was that prescribing in many hospitals remains a paper-based activity.

Handwritten prescriptions are prone to errors in terms of identifying the medicine, understanding its indication as well as making errors in dosage more likely. This put patients more at risk of adverse drug events.

Prof Fahey presented anonymised handwritten prescription samples to the committee, one containing about 14 medicines with no indication of the patients conditions, and another in which the handwriting was illegible.

The solution to all of these issues is to develop an eprescribing platform in Ireland with appropriate training and education for all health professionals involved in prescribing, he said.Judge Brian OCallaghan said at Cork Circuit Appeals Court that he had to be mindful of the deterrent effect of sentencing as he affirmed the orders of the district court and said: I am very close to increasing the sentence.

William Condon, of Youghal, Co Cork, and no fixed address was described by his solicitor, Pat Horan, as having a bad anger management problem, which he was trying to address.

Detective Garda Myles Horan said the first incident occurred at The Gallows Bar in Cork. A female member of staff was behind the counter and two men were served pints as they played pool.

There was some row over a bet and the accused man was asked to leave the premises. He threw the pint glass  it missed the bar woman but caused 1,200 damage to a 65in TV screen in his premises.

The owner of Centra, Dean Roches Cross, Cork, Denis Whelton, said in the district court hearing that the defendant then came up to his shop with another man later that evening, August 30, 2017.

He said that what happened was the most serious incident in 15 years of running the family business.

Shams Rahman Parcha was working behind the counter when Condon and his accomplice got so difficult the member of staff had to call for the assistance of his employer who was upstairs.

Mr Whelton said: I strove to protect myself and the member of staff. I was headbutted. I was punched three times in the head. He spat in my face It has made me nervous.

Condon pleaded guilty to counts of assault causing harm to Denis Whelton and Shams Rahman Parcha.

Imposing eight months for a theft and 11 months consecutive for the assaults the judge described the case as exceptional and one that did not merit the sentences being made concurrent.

Mr Horan, solicitor, said the theft was one of driving off without paying for petrol. Judge OCallaghan refused an application to make that sentence concurrent rather than consecutive.

The judge said that families relied on their businesses for their livelihoods and that people driving off without paying for petrol was a serious matter which upset all of that.I do believe there is a need for a new form of engagement between Government and the Irish trade union movement, he said.

Mr Donohoe met yesterday in Dublin with the Irish Congress of Trade Unions.

He said any new agreement and talks with unions will not cover wage issues or annual spending by the Government.

I was very clear that I believe that the social partnership model of the past, where social partnership played a role in wage setting and where the primary role of government in relation to budgetary policy was shared, are not areas that I will be returning to.

The new partnership would build on the economic forum which has been meeting over the last two years.

Mr Donohoe said there are now strengthened institutions, such as the Labour Court, to deal with wage issues and separate negotiations on collective work negotiations.

He said the role of setting budgets should remain solely with the Government.

Key challenges ahead, such as Brexit, need to be prepared for, said Mr Donohoe. I believe that we should have an engagement regarding a specific number of big challenges and the opportunities that our country will have to deal with such as pensions and Brexit, that we find a new form of engagement between government and trade unions to look at the best response back and I invited them to share with the Government ideas about how we can do it.

A shared response with employers and employees to deal with new challenges is needed, said Mr Donohoe, adding that new talks and pressures would not affect wage demands.

He said an agreement with trade unions would deliver wage growth of between 1.5% and 2% each year.

He said that agreed growth is in line and slightly behind personal consumption increases and behind notional income growth in the economy.

Wage growth is affordable and sustainable and would not contribute to any overheating in the economy.

Nonetheless, Mr Donohoe did concede the housing crisis was fuelling pressure on the economy.

Instead, I believe the pricing pressures and heating pressures that we are seeing are being generated by difficulties that we are seeing in the supply of homes and in the availability of infrastructure elsewhere.Fianna Fail leader Micheal Martin lashed out at the situation during leaders questions, which also saw Mr Varadkar heavily criticised over the countrys escalating housing rental prices crisis.

Mr Martin said despite attempts to increase access to life-saving drugs amid negotiations with pharmaceutical firms, the Government is still struggling to address the issue.

Citing the case of Respreeza, a medication which slows progression of the lung condition emphysema, Mr Martin said 21 patients were given the drug by CSL Behring in 2010 as part of a compassionate outreach clinical trial programme.

Last September, the outreach clinical trial ended, leaving the patients without any medication.

Due to Department of Health and HSE negotiations with the firm over the price of administering the drug, the medications availability to those who were on the clinical trial was extended until May.

However, in the intervening period two people  Anna Cassidy and Marion Kelly  have died, a situation Mr Martin said is set to be repeated unless the Government acts decisively now and ensures people currently receiving Respreeza continue to do so after May.

The fact that they did is a very sad reflection on all concerned  company, Government, and our service. It should never have happened, he said. They died while there was an unedifying row and the drug was lying in a warehouse.

Mr Varadkar said the reality is the Government and HSE must try and find the most effective drugs for the most realistic price in order to ensure limited resources can help the most people.

He said he will ask Health Minister Simon Harris to again push for a long-term solution this May. He said this view is based on advice from the HSEs National Centre for Pharmaco-Economics and it is ultimately still up for negotiation.

Hitting out at the response, Mr Martin said the bottom line is two people have died, adding that while Mr Varadkar can talk about systems all he likes, more people will die if this is not resolved.

Meanwhile, Sinn Fein leader Mary Lou McDonald accused Mr Varadkar of ignoring the housing rental price crisis.

Citing the latest figures from the ESRI and Rental Tenancies Board, which show rents are now higher than during the Celtic Tiger era and that the average rent is 1,511 a month in Dublin and 1,054 nationally, Ms McDonald said rent certainty or rent affordability is clearly failing, the policy is failing.

Mr Varadkar said: I am very aware of the pressures people are under when it comes to rising rents.

He said the figures show rents are now increasing at their lowest rate since 2013, which he claimed is proof that the Governments policies are working.Bott & Co Solicitors, which handles personal injury claims, holiday claims and flight delay compensation claims, had alleged Ryanair damaged the firms business model, goodwill and revenues when it started directly dealing with customers claims that had been initiated by Bott on their behalf.

The court ruling states that Bott began handling flight delay compensation claims in February 2013, since then it has acted on some 125,000 claims, and its business model is based on the processing of a high volume of low value claims.

The average gross compensation received by a customer of Bott is about 327, while the average fee paid to Bott per claim is about 109.

While the firm used to deal with Ryanair, in February 2016 Ryanair instituted a policy of dealing directly with customers.

Bott no longer knew whether Ryanair was disputing or had paid a claim. In relation to claims that had been paid, Bott no longer knew whether the claim had been paid in the correct amount, the ruling stated.

This then left Bott in a situation where it had to follow up on claims with its clients, and it found that of the customers who had made a successful claim against Ryanair, only about 70% paid Bott for its work.

Given the small fees involved, Bott said it was not administratively or financially feasible to pursue enforcement proceedings against non-paying clients.

However, Judge Edward Murray ruled that Ryanair has established a straightforward and easy-to-use process for its passengers to make their flight delay compensation claims, either on-line or by correspondence, without the assistance of a third party.

Ryanair is not obliged to pay compensation directly to Bott in relation to claims submitted by Bott on behalf of its clients to Ryanair, said Judge Murray.

Ryanairs Kenny Jacobs said. This will help prevent claims chaser firms deliberately and needlessly dragging consumers through the courts so they can grab more than 40% of customers compensation, for providing no useful service.A briefing from Leo Varadkars strategic communications unit is warning that teams across the government may suffer five stages of grief, if told they had to revamp their websites, PR, and branding.

Last September, two senior officials from the unit travelled to The Hague to meet communication experts.

A report on the visit explained how some people would go on an emotional journey to let go of longstanding logos, branding, and internet homepages.

Dont underestimate the emotional journey that many need to go on, said the document.

One piece of advice was to treat it like a bereavement.

The report said: [One expert advised] that she could spot, within a few sentences, the stage each person was at (shock, denial, anger, depression, and acceptance) and adapted her approach to them accordingly.

As part of the plan, common branding and streamlined communications are to be introduced across all government websites.

The communications unit has faced criticism from opposition politicians, because of its 5m annual cost, amid further suggestions it will be used for party political purposes.

The visit to The Hague was the second international trip by John Concannon and Andrea Pappin, two senior members of the unit.

They had also travelled to meet the government PR team in the UK, in September, and said the approaches in Britain and the Netherlands were strikingly similar.

The report said work was citizen/user-led and that leadership spent much of their time campaigning the campaign.

It said the initial plan was focused on rationalising logos and websites, then getting people from different departments under one roof.

Once a government website rolled over to the new system, it said, a number of the departmental content team moved to a shared services team.

They sit together, each as their own department, and work together on devising and uploading content onto their respective departmental pages.

Directors of communications from each department also met every fortnight to discuss upcoming campaigns, campaign evaluation, and to share best practice.

The report also said there was an emphasis on the importance of research and buy-in.

The Dutch had commissioned two reports, showing there was a gap between citizens and the siloed approach their government had taken on communications. [It was] resulting in confusion, regarding services available to citizens and the work of government itself, the report said.

Like the Irish plan, they had first looked for a single logo project, a single website project, and a single mission statement.

The Department of the Taoiseach said that two overseas visits had taken place by the Strategic Communications Unit (SCU) so far.

A statement said: The Strategic Communications Unit will continue to consult with international counterparts to adhere to international best practice.

They said the unit would lead to more co-ordinated and cost-effective communications, which would generate efficiencies and increased value for money.In Person NGO Helps Water-strapped Communities Help Themselves

In Kakayo village, Irrawaddy Region, Lien AID staff survey a newly reinforced water catchment pond and hand pumps together with the village development committee. / Lien AID / Supplied

In the summer, Myanmars rural areas face water shortages almost every year. Government assistance and private donations help ease the strain, but they arent enough. According to the 2014 census, only 61 percent of rural areas have access to clean drinking water. In February, the government said it was aiming to bring clean drinking water to the entire country by 2030.

For the past five years, Myanmar has marked World Water Day every March 22. This years theme is Nature for Water and aims to encourage people to find ways to use nature to overcome problems stemming from too much water, too little water, and pollution. In mid-2013 the Myanmar government started reforming the countrys water sector  with the support of foreign governments including the Netherlands, South Korea, China and Australia  to educate people about water resource management across the country.

In the meantime, local and international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are also spreading awareness and teaching locals how to manage their water resources.

One of them is Singapore-based Lien AID. CEO Koh Lian Hock believes in equipping people with the knowledge and skills to solve their problems on their own.

A businessman-turned-development worker, Koh Lian Hock spoke with The Irrawaddys Nyein Nyein about his NGOs work in Myanmar.

As a Singaporean NGO, what brought you to Myanmar and other countries like Cambodia, Vietnam and China?

First of all, based on the UN report on water and sanitation, I think Myanmar needs support. Also, we have experience in developing countries, so we hope to do some work in Myanmar.

We were providing support after Cyclone Nargis in 2008-09, building some infrastructure projects. We came back in 2015 and have completed projects in Magwe Region and Bogale and Myaungmya townships in Irrawaddy Region. We will expand our programs to other parts of Myanmar in the near future, including Shan State.

What water management and sanitation programs does Lien AID have in Myanmar?

We work with the governments Department of Rural Development (DRD) and focus on capacity building. Together with the DRD, the village leaders and township departments we help them to be able to create programs for themselves. In five villages [in Magwe and Irrawaddy regions] we are hoping that the townships themselves can use these model programs and run the same programs on their own and to extend them. We work with some of the townships public health departments and schools. They can do these kinds of water and sanitation projects collectively, and over time they can repeat them themselves. Our approach is really capacity building, working with local governments so that hopefully they can sustain [the programs] after us.

Can you elaborate on your programs and capacity building?

In one of the townships, we did some research to understand the water issues in the area. Then, with the DRD, we identified what kind of challenges they faced and what other local NGOs wanted to work on this kind of water project and were able to mobilize the communities in the villages. We want to be able to work with village people. They are very motivated and willing to solve their own problems. We got them together in a forum and discussed the challenges they faced, their strengths and weaknesses, and identified some of the gaps and then mobilized them. We facilitated the discussion between the government, the CSOs (civil society organizations) and the local villagers and provided support in terms of knowledge, technical support and funding.

In the past the government did one thing, CSOs did their own (thing) and villagers did it in a different way. We try to bring them together to solve this problem as a group and try to solve the problem on their own. We facilitate this discussion.

If they need knowledge, we provide knowledge. If they need solutions or technical know-how or funding, we help them find funding to help them find a solution as a group. Because we believe this issue, in this location, is best addressed by the people. Although we have experience, when we come here the issues are different from what we have seen in other countries. What we can do is we can have discussions with them.

Myanmar has a lot of water resources because we have many rivers, tributaries and streams. But, sadly, we face water shortages every year, especially in the summer. Why do you think that is, and how could we prepare to overcome this problem?

It is because the monsoon season, which brings most of the clean water, is ending earlier, so that contributes to it. Also, the poor management of the existing water infrastructure causes pain for rural communities. In Irrawaddy areas, seawater intrusion, especially into the Irrawaddy River, is the other reason. What we believe is the way forward is to have all the various stakeholders  the local governments and non-profits and companies operating in Myanmar, and individuals and academics  (come together) to solve the problem. This is the big issue. The issue is also different for different locations.

The other angle to look at is the policy issue. The government may have a national policy, which is very broad. When it comes to the local, sub-national level, it brings benefit to little locations. Thats why its necessary to bring collaboration to the local communities, especially to the rural communities.

The program we are trying to work on now is really to work together as a team and understand the local situation and then find out what the gaps are in terms of knowledge, funding and capacity building. And from there we work as a team and make sure this issue can be resolved.

If you go to the [Irrawaddy] delta, there are so many ponds that have been built by many people. The problem is ongoing, how to make sure this infrastructure [the ponds] can be maintained. It is a big challenge we see, and it requires people on the ground and NGOs like us and various parties. This maintenance requires knowledge and making sure it is carried out on an ongoing basis. If you dont have people to maintain infrastructure all the time, the volume of water in that location will not be enough, especially in the dry season.

From your experiences traveling to villages in Myanmar, how do you find the water management knowledge of Myanmar people?

I have traveled to the villages about 10 times. We were having a discussion in a village house, through translation. This person asked me similar questions about water scarcity in the delta and how to solve it. A villager said he wanted to drill more wells in his village. I actually told him, based on my understanding that the village had a big pond every five or 10 meters, that they should be enough for the village. If they could manage the ponds and maintain the wells, they should be sufficient.

So I asked him, why do you want to drill the wells? He said because all the other international NGOs that had come there said that drilling wells was the best thing to do. Have you considered that if you dig wells you are potentially extracting very precious water currently in the ground and you may have no water in the next generation because the underground take thousands, if not millions, of years to form this water? Now the best way to manage water sources is base on rainfall and maintaining it well, and there is no need to spend money to drill wells. The villager told me, how come in the past nobody urged us to manage this water and said the first thing was to spend more money and drill more? That is from a short conversation we had.Asia Chinese Paper Says China Should Prepare for Military Action Over Taiwan

Military honor guards attend a flag-raising ceremony at Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall in Taipei, Taiwan, on Friday. / Reuters

BEIJING  A widely read Chinese state-run newspaper said on Thursday China should prepare for military action over self-ruled Taiwan, and pressure Washington over cooperation on North Korea, after the United States passed a law to boost ties with Taiwan.

Beijing was infuriated after US President Donald Trump signed legislation last week that encourages the United States to send senior officials to Taiwan to meet Taiwanese counterparts and vice versa.

US Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Alex Wong said in Taipei on Wednesday the United States commitment to Taiwan has never been stronger and the island is an inspiration to the rest of the Indo-Pacific region.

China claims Taiwan as its own and considers the self-ruled island a wayward province, which Chinese President Xi Jinping said on Tuesday would face the punishment of history for any attempt at separatism.

The Global Times said in an editorial China had to strike back against the law.

China can pressure the US in other areas of bilateral cooperation: for example, the Korean Peninsula issue and Iran nuclear issue. China can also set itself against the US in international organizations such as the UN, it said.

The mainland must also prepare itself for a direct military clash in the Taiwan Straits. It needs to make clear that escalation of US-Taiwan official exchanges will bring serious consequences to Taiwan, said the paper, which is published by the ruling Communist Partys official Peoples Daily.

This newspaper has suggested that the mainland can send military planes and warships across the Taiwan Straits middle line. This can be implemented gradually depending on the cross-Straits situation, it said.

The island is one of Chinas most sensitive issues and a potential military flashpoint. Underlining that threat, Taiwan sent ships and an aircraft earlier on Wednesday to shadow a Chinese aircraft carrier group through the narrow Taiwan Strait, its defense ministry said.

The Global Times said it was a misunderstanding to think that peaceful unification would be a harmonious, happy process.

Sticks matter more than flowers on the path to peaceful reunification, it said. Chinas hostility towards Taiwan has risen since the 2016 election of President Tsai Ing-wen, a member of the islands pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party.

China suspects Tsai wants to push for formal independence, which would cross a red line for Communist Party leaders in Beijing, though Tsai has said she wants to maintain the status quo and is committed to ensuring peace.Burma Jewelry Expo to Showcase Diamonds, New Production Techniques

A jade emporium in Naypyitaw in December 2017. / Htet Naing Zaw / The Irrawaddy

YANGON  Diamonds will be the focus of the 9th Myanmar International Gems, Jewelry and Watch Expo 2018 in Yangon, an industry association representative said.

The expo will be held at the Emporium Hall on Kabar Aye Pagoda Road from March 30 to April 2, said U Tun Hla Aung, secretary of the Myanmar Gems and Jewelry Entrepreneurs Association.

Most of the exhibits will be diamond items. Imported gemological testing devices will also be showcased. The expo is being organized by Asiaconnect Co., and we are assisting them, he said.

According to Asiaconnect, items of jewelry featuring rubies, sapphires, pearls, jade and the latest gemological technologies from Germany will also be on display.

The exhibition will feature more than 30 pavilions from Myanmar, Thailand, Hong Kong, Germany and India, U Tun Hla Aung said.

Asiaconnect Co. has brought in foreign merchants, as well as equipment for making gold and silverware. This is beneficial to local businessmen. The government still doesnt allow the display of gemstones, so only finished products will be showcased, U Tun Hla Aung said.

The Myanmar Gems and Jewelry Entrepreneurs Association hopes local businessmen will be able to pick up some of the latest techniques for making value-added products from jade and gems.

We have found that gold shops in Myanmar are usually crowded. Myanmar people love gems and gold. Thats why we have organized the exhibition, Asiaconnect Co. director Michael Khaniss said at a press conference on Tuesday.

Previous Myanmar International Gems, Jewelry and Watch expos have featured new technologies from the U.S. and Germany.

Translated from Burmese by Thet Ko Ko.Burma Muslim Houses Attacked After Interfaith Elopement

A Muslim house was damaged in the attack. / Myanmar Muslim Media

PATHEIN, Irrawaddy Region  Some 30 people attacked Muslim houses with stones in Irrawaddy Regions Lemyethna Township on Tuesday following an interfaith elopement.

A Buddhist woman ran away with a Muslim man on Feb. 11 in Eai Thabyu village. Her parents had demanded an official proposal from his Muslim parents for their marriage and a wedding reception according to village customs, but the Muslim parents did not show up even one month after the elopement, and angry locals attacked their home, said U Khin Zaw, administrator of the Eai Thabyu village tract.

The attack happened around 9:45 p.m. and ended around 10 p.m. A crowd of approximately 30 people threw stones at four Muslim houses, including the homes of friends of the Muslim man, U Khin Zaw told The Irrawaddy.

Three houses were damaged and a car windshield was broken. But no one was injured, he added.

According to the Eai Thabyu police station, the kiosk of U Tu Tu Maungs home; the kiosk, a cupboard and a fridge in U Bo Bos home; and U Kyaw Min Hans car windshield were damaged in the attack.

As soon as we heard about the attack, we went to the scene with riot gear. The attackers had left by the time we arrived. We saw the stones that they threw and took them as evidence in line with police procedure. We provided security for the whole night for fear that more attacks would happen, police officer Zaw Tun of Eai Thabyu police station told The Irrawaddy.

The interfaith couple was hiding during the attack, but afterwards, the Buddhist wife wrote on her Facebook page that she had run away with her husband of her own volition.

Myanmar Muslim Media, an online media site operated by Muslims, reported that police officer Zaw Tun and administrator U Khin Zaw urged the attacked Muslim families not to open a case. Police officer Zaw Tun denied that accusation.

Both the township administrator and chief of the township police force told them (Muslim families) that they could file complaints with the police station if they wanted to. But they didnt. It is not that we didnt open the case, but they didnt file a complaint, said police officer Zaw Tun.

The Lemyethna Township police force provided security in the village on Wednesday evening.

Translated from Burmese by Thet Ko Ko.Burma Reuters Reporters in Court 100 Days After Their Arrest in Myanmar

Detained Reuters journalists Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo are escorted by police after a court hearing in Yangon, Myanmar, February 28, 2018. / Reuters

YANGON  Two Reuters reporters appeared in a Myanmar court for the 11th time on Wednesday, which marked 100 days since they were arrested in December and accused of possessing secret government papers.

The court in Yangon is holding preliminary hearings to decide whether reporters Wa Lone, 31, and Kyaw Soe Oo, 28, will face charges under the colonial-era Officials Secrets Act, which carries a maximum penalty of 14 years in prison.

We have spent 100 days in prison, Wa Lone told reporters during a break in proceedings. Our journalism spirit was never down even after spending many days in there.

Wa Lones younger brother Thura Aung, 26, gave testimony on Wednesday, describing a police search of the family home on the evening of Dec. 13, the day after the journalists were arrested.

Thura Aung said that police who searched the house in north Yangon did not show a warrant, identify themselves or explain the reason for the search, during which a laptop, charger and bag, a hard drive and an old notebook were seized.

His testimony contradicted Police Major Soe Aung, who told the court two weeks ago that police had presented a warrant to Wa Lones family when they arrived.

Defense lawyer Than Zaw Aung told reporters after the hearing that under Myanmars Criminal Procedure Code police must identify themselves and explain the reasons for their search.

In the criminal procedure, the search officer must show the search warrant at the search place, he said.

Lead prosecutor Kyaw Min Aung left the court building before Reuters was able to put questions to him after the hearing. At previous hearings he has declined to speak to reporters.

Government and police spokespeople have declined to comment on the case, citing the ongoing court proceedings. The date of the next hearing was set for March 28.

Restaurant Meeting

The journalists have told relatives they were arrested almost immediately after being handed some rolled up papers after being invited to a restaurant by two police officers they had not met before.

Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo had been investigating the killing of 10 Rohingya Muslim men in a village in western Myanmars Rakhine State during a military crackdown in August.

The crackdown, which the United Nations has said was ethnic cleansing, has sent nearly 700,000 people fleeing to Bangladesh.

After the arrests of the reporters, the military admitted its soldiers took part in the killing.

They have been detained in Myanmar since December 12 simply for doing their jobs as journalists, Reuters President and Editor-in-Chief Stephen J. Adler said in a statement.

Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo are exemplary individuals and outstanding reporters who are dedicated to their families and their craft. They should be in the newsroom, not in prison.

Myanmars ambassador to the United Nations, Hau Do Suan, said last month that the journalists were not arrested for reporting a story, but were accused of illegally possessing confidential government documents.

Judge Ye Lwin declined a defense attempt to submit the Reuters report describing the killings at the village of Inn Din as evidence, citing a decision at an earlier hearing not to admit the story at this stage in the proceedings.

Senior United Nations officials, Western nations and press freedom advocates have called for the release of the journalists.

The US Embassy in Yangon tweeted: Today is the 100th day in detention from reporters Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo. Freedom of the press remains critical for Myanmars democratic transition.

Diplomats from countries including the United States, Canada, Sweden attended Wednesdays hearing.

The Danish Embassy, which has closely monitored the case, said the pair had spent 100 days behind bars for ensuring the publics right to information.

A statement from Swedens Embassy said: We believe they have done nothing wrong and that the charges against them should be dropped immediately.

EU Ambassador to Myanmar Kristian Schmidt, asked about the journalists reporting of the Rakhine crisis, said it was imperative to establish what had taken place there.

We all want to find out the truth of what happened, he said. I fear for the moment we have not seen the full truth of what has happened.News No Pension, Gratuity for Outgoing President

President U Htin Kyaw speaks during the opening session of the Asia-Europe Meeting summit in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, on July 15, 2016. / Reuters

NAYPYITAW  Outgoing President U Htin Kyaw, who resigned on Wednesday, is not entitled to a pension or gratuity or any allowance.

Only presidents who have completed their terms are entitled to a gratuity and pension, and a president who resigns for health reasons is still entitled to a gratuity. But U Htin Kyaw will not receive any entitlements as he did not meet either criteria.

In a short announcement on Wednesday morning, the Presidents Office said the president was stepping down as he wants to retire from his duties.

As he did not complete his term, he will not get a pension. As he is the president, he will not get retirement benefits. It is according to the law, U Aung Kyi Nyunt, an Upper House lawmaker for the National League for Democracy (NLD), told The Irrawaddy.

He praised U Htin Kyaws decision to resign from the countrys top job as courageous. He took responsibility and decided to resign when he was not able. No ordinary person can do like that, he said.

Lawmakers received considerable sums as gratuities under the U Thein Sein government, according to the law on emoluments, allowances and insignia for union-level officials enacted by the State Peace and Development Council.

During our term, our salaries were increased from 300,000 kyats [$224] to 1 million kyats, and we got a gratuity of around 5 million kyats calculated on two amounts. NLD lawmakers got less than us because they joined Parliament only after the by-election [in 2012], said U Ye Tun, a former lawmaker who represented Shan States Hsipaw Township.

U Htin Kyaw will move from the presidential residence to a one-story building purchased under the name of his wife, Daw Su Su Lwin, in Naypyitaws Ottarathiri Township. The building was bought in 2017, said U Kyaw Min Hlaing, a Lower House lawmaker who represents Ottarathiri.

U Myint Lwin, a lawmaker representing Yangon Regions Twante Township, said he had initially expected U Htin Kyaw to remain president for his full term but later learned that he would retire at some point because of health problems. He said he was sorry that U Htin Kyaw, whom he called an honest and righteous man, had resigned.

[State Counselor] Daw Aung San Suu Kyi has said that she would be above the president. So I dont think there will be big changes because of his resignation, he said.

He is an honest man and a hard worker. I think he retired because of his health. I have nothing to say about his performance. I would say he was dutiful as the president as he acted with honesty and righteousness, said U Thaung Aye of the Union Solidarity and Development Party.

According to the law on security for former presidents of Myanmar, which took effect during the U Thein Sein government, the Home Affairs Ministry will provide security for presidents who have completed their terms.

The Union Parliament approved U Htin Kyaws resignation today. On Friday the Lower House will elect a third vice president; one of the three will then be voted the next president.

Translated from Burmese by Thet Ko Ko.Thursday, March 22nd, 2018 (2:37 pm) - Score 2,392

Rural fibre optic ISP Gigaclear has handed the civil engineering contract for deploying their 1Gbps capable Fibre-to-the-Home (FTTH) broadband network to 10,000 premises in West Oxfordshire (England) to Lite Access (international contractor). The rollout is due to complete by the end of 2019.

The deployment in West Oxfordshire was finalised last October and actually reflects two agreements (here). The first project is an 8m plan to bring full fibre to 4,600 properties in the region, which is jointly funded by the West Oxfordshire District Council and Broadband Delivery UK (BDUK) to the tune of 3.1m (public investment), with Gigaclear adding 5m from their own pockets.

On top of that Gigaclear are also investing a further 8m to connect another 5,700 homes in the area, linking existing networks together and extending their already significant footprint in the district. Once both are completed then, when combined with existing networks, its anticipated that over 99% of premises in the district will be able to get superfast broadband (30Mbps+) or significantly faster.

Under todays deal Lite Access will carry out all civil engineering work and installation of the fibre cables, using modern techniques such as narrow trenching (this has the ability to trench in excess of 200 metres a day).

Brett Shepherd, Gigaclear COO, said: This new contract will enable Gigaclear to continue to roll out world class broadband, this time to homes and businesses in West Oxfordshire, using the very latest installation technology and equipment. Due to their experience deploying similar projects throughout rural Canada, Lite Access Technologies is the ideal partner for Gigaclear. This represents a fantastic opportunity to work with a really innovative construction partner and we are really looking forward to bringing ultrafast, reliable broadband to the residents of West Oxfordshire.

Dylan Griffiths, Managing Director of Lite Access UK, added: Lite Access UK is delighted to have been awarded the contract by Gigaclear. It gives us a great platform to utilise our years of experience of similar fibre deployment projects in rural Canada. It is also an opportunity for us to demonstrate the full capabilities of our unique, customised cutting blades and attachments which have been specially redesigned for micro duct deployment in the UK to deliver ultrafast Fibre-to-the-Premises broadband.

The build with Lite Access is currently due to commence in the Langford and Great Tew areas in the coming months (technically it actually began last year, albeit with a different contractor).Thursday, March 22nd, 2018 (7:10 am) - Score 2,289

Cable TV and ultrafast broadband ISP Virgin Media UK (Liberty Global) seems to be in hot water again after the Carlisle Magistrates Court in Cumbria highlighted 14 alleged safety breaches (locations), which relate to the Project Lightning network expansion in residential areas.

The charges themselves link back to the 1991 New Road and Street Works Act, which among other things was design to protect the structure of the street and the apparatus in it, as well as to ensure safety (both of workers and residents etc.) and to minimise the inconvenience for people using a street (particularly those with a disability).

Some may recall an article we wrote last July 2017, which highlighted how Virgin Medias network expansion in Carlisle had come under fire for its quality of work after 400 defects were logged in one year (here). The local authority also said that as a result of this they were having to inspect 90% (instead of the usual 10%) of related street works and instruct a lot of repairs.

At the time Rob Betton, an independent Councillor for Botcherby, said: Some of my constituents have fallen over these uneven pavements. In some cases, paving slabs are being left sticking up by as much as two inches. In many cases, the work has been done in conservation areas.

All of this stems from the operators announcement in 2016, which confirmed a plan to extend their 350Mbps capable broadband and cable TV network to an additional 22,000 premises in the city (here). Allegedly the locally based contractors were actually doing quite a good job but the other third-party ones, which Virgin Media had hired from outside of town, seemed to be less reliable.

Fast forward to last week and a hearing in the Carlisle Magistrates Court has revealed that lawyers for Cumbria County Council are attempting to prosecute the operator due to the state of street works on a number of residential roads across Carlisle. The News and Star lists these locations as follows.

The 14 Locations / Charges (One Count for Each Area) * Weardale Road, Caldewgate * Monks Close, Caldewgate * Dowbeck Road, off Wigton Road * Beconsfield Street, Currock * Thirlmere Street, Currock * Uldale Road, Upperby * Upperby Road, Upperby * Embleton Road, Upperby * Scalegate Road, Upperby * Kirklands Road, Upperby * Clementia Terrace, Currock * Upperby Road, Upperby [a second charge] * Lund Crescent, Upperby * Dunmail Drive, Morton

The council claims that Virgin Media, which was being represented by barrister John Boumphrey, is responsible for the work of their contractors. Apparently the contractors are accused of failing to adequately guard and light parts of the street that were obstructed by plant or materials. On top of that its alleged that they also failed to ensure the appropriate traffic signs were correctly placed, maintained or operated.

The operator has yet to enter any pleas against the charges and the case is now due to go before a district judge on 2nd May 2018. We did contact Virgin Media about this issue but they have declined to comment, which is unsurprising given that the action is on-going and theyve yet to enter any formal pleas.

At this point we usually say that building new fibre optic network infrastructure is a highly disruptive, as well as expensive, exercise. Similarly Virgin Media are by no means alone in causing the occasional problem for communities. In the end such disruption is typically a small price to pay for gaining access to an ultrafast broadband network and boosting local competition at infrastructure level.

However, the situation in Carlisle looks to be much more serious than weve seen elsewhere in the country, where most of the problems created by different broadband builders have tended to be fairly minor infractions or simple cases of temporary inconvenience.The European Commission has unveiled proposals for taxing digital companies across the 28-member bloc, with an interim measure which will be replaced by a more permanent alternative.

In a statement, the EC, the executive arm of the European Union, said the interim measure would apply to companies that have annual worldwide revenues of 750 million (US$925.6 million) and EU revenues of 50 million.

It added that a total of 5 billion could be collected if a 3% tax was applied.

This tax will apply to revenues created from activities where users play a major role in value creation and which are the hardest to capture with current tax rules, such as those revenues:

created from selling online advertising space;

created from digital intermediary activities which allow users to interact with other users and which can facilitate the sale of goods and services between them; and

created from the sale of data generated from user-provided information.

The proposal for a permanent measure encompasses companies that exceed 7 million in annual revenues in an EU member state, have more than 100,000 users in a member state in a taxable year or if more than 3000 business contracts for digital services are created between the company and business users in a taxable year.

Last Friday, US treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin said his country "firmly opposes proposals by any country to single out digital companies".

"Some of these companies are among the greatest contributors to US job creation and economic growth," he said, adding that officials in Washington "fully support international cooperation to address broader tax challenges arising from the modern economy and to put the international tax system on a more sustainable footing".

The two European proposals will now go up before the Council for adoption and then to the bloc's parliament for consultation.

Commenting on the proposals, Valdis Dombrovskis, vice-president for the Euro and Social Dialogue, said: "Digitalisation brings countless benefits and opportunities. But it also requires adjustments to our traditional rules and systems.

"We would prefer rules agreed at the global level, including at the OECD. But the amount of profits currently going untaxed is unacceptable. We need to urgently bring our tax rules into the 21st century by putting in place a new comprehensive and future-proof solution."

Pierre Moscovici, EU Commissioner for Economic and Financial Affairs, Taxation and Customs, added: The digital economy is a major opportunity for Europe and Europe is a huge source of revenues for digital firms.

"But this win-win situation raises legal and fiscal concerns. Our pre-Internet rules do not allow our member states to tax digital companies operating in Europe when they have little or no physical presence here.

"This represents an ever-bigger black hole for member states, because the tax base is being eroded. That's why we're bringing forward a new legal standard as well an interim tax for digital activities.

Complaints have been frequently voiced in countries around the globe that big American multinationals are siphoning off their profits to other low-tax havens like Ireland and Luxembourg.

Multinational tech companies, including Apple and Microsoft, have faced questioning in the Australian Senate over tax minimisation.Contact centre solutions company Genesys has appointed former Oracle senior executive David Janssen as vice-president of professional services for Asia Pacific and Japan.

Genesys says Janssen will be responsible for bringing the companys delivery and consulting sales teams together to help grow the business throughout the region.

Janssen was most recently with Oracle as senior practice director for Asia Pacific, Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Prior to this, he held a number of senior roles at Haley, PayGlobal, Technology One and SAS Institute.

Keith Budge, senior vice-president and general manager of Genesys Asia Pacific and Japan, said, in addition to providing expert counsel to customers and partners, Janssen will work closely with the senior leadership team to unify the services teams across the Asia Pacific, providing a seamless experience for Genesys customers.

With over 25 years of local and global IT experience, David brings an incredible wealth of knowledge in technology and leadership to the table, Budge said.

At Genesys, we understand todays digitally-driven ecosystem means customers demand a now response that solves their queries effectively and efficiently. David will lead our expert team to deliver the industrys best solutions to ensure our clients remain ahead of their competitors.

Janssen, who will be based in Sydney, said he was most excited by the prospect of joining Genesys, as it rises to a leader position in end-to-end customer experience solutions.

Im proud to join a team comprised of the best and brightest in the customer experience industry. Its an exciting time to join Genesys; the culture of innovation and its commitment to research and development is remarkable. We are in an enviable, market-leading position where were able to invest in the tools and resources to help our business grow across Asia Pacific.The Information Technology Professionals Association, an IT lobby group, has raised strong concerns that current practices to overcome skills shortages in Australia are seemingly facilitating recruitment to lower-end roles which could easily be filled by local graduates.

ITPA made its concerns known in reaction to the federal governments newly announced Global Talent visa scheme designed to attract highly skilled global talent and deliver innovation to Australia, with a pilot programme to be launched from 1 July.

ITPA president Robert Hudson says the announcement this week of the visa scheme served to broadcast the federal governments intention to once again fiddle at the edges of skilled worker immigration visas that are inevitably relevant to the IT industry.

Hudson said vigilance and independent oversight were required for the Commonwealths proposed new Global Talent Scheme skilled worker visa system announced by Alan Tudge, Minister for Citizenship and Multicultural Affairs, and Michaelia Cash, Minister for Jobs and Innovation.

The Global Talent Scheme has two streams  one for established businesses with an annual turnover of more than $4 million and another targeted at technology-based and STEM-related startup businesses.

Hudson said as a general principle, ITPA had no problem with importing high-end talent to bolster existing workforce availability where genuine skills shortages exist.

Australias IT industry has always seen skilled migrants brought in to supplement local shortages and to some extent this is still needed to keep growing, Hudson said.

But, Hudson said ITPAs support for skilled visa programmes stopped, however, with current practices that seem to facilitate recruitment to lower end roles.

Too often we see attempts by larger IT services and solutions integration organisations to deflect to the importation of niche proprietary skills that are already in existence elsewhere in the world at a lower cost, he said.

What we would like to see from government is positive solutions that deliver ongoing secure, full-time work for Australia IT professionals of all ages and experience.

For example, there needs to be more accessible incentives for employers of IT professionals to train and employ locals. There also needs to be rigid, independent oversight from regulatory bodies to ensure tech companies are doing the right thing and there needs to be penalties for organisations that are caught flouting the rules.

We need a government that facilitates genuine career development opportunities through encouraging in-demand industry training at tertiary institutions and internships for undergraduate students as well as graduate year and mentoring programs when they complete their degrees, Hudson noted.

He said there should also be support for re-education programmes that help existing IT professionals and graduates transition into new roles being created in high-demand areas of the IT industry where skilled work visas are being granted.

And, he says that if there is a genuine lack of local workers with the required skills, then IPTPA would support allowing foreign workers to be brought in under equivalent conditions to what would be required to hire a local resource.

Again, what we do not want to see is skilled workers from lower cost geographies moved to Australia at the lower-cost geography wages, Hudson cautions.

That is, we dont want to see skilled worker visas used as a cost reduction tool where lower cost migrants are parachuted into roles that will displace local graduates and professionals perfectly capable of doing the job or that can be quickly brought up to capability with a little training.

If the government is serious about delivering on its rhetoric around creating jobs for Australians, the IT industry is a prime example of where great progress can be made as demand for technology skills and services continues to grow.

Without seeing details on how this new pilot is planned and enforced, it is hard to gauge whether the governments claim that this new scheme will 'underpin business growth, skills transfer and job creation' as Mr Tudge claims in the release.

The offer of permanent residency after three years of a four-year visa would seem to fly in the face of this assertion and, for that reason, raises some concerns.

At the end of the day, the biggest concern we have about this announcement is that there is very little detail on how the applications will be checked and the rules enforced.

It is our strong belief that there does need to be some voice for experienced industry professionals  people who work daily at the coal-face  involved in the process of reviewing applications because, at present, it is too easy to circumnavigate the stated requirements.

So, we will be watching with interest to see who makes up the industry advisory group being assembled to provide ongoing guidance for the pilot as declared in the press release. This body needs to be independent and impartial with representation from IT professionals.

ITPA would be very happy to provide such expertise and advise government in this area. With over 18,000 members we have a broad range of skills and experience willing to help provide oversight to ensure the integrity of applications and ongoing compliance with the new regulations that are proposed.

While ITPA expressed reservations about the new visa, in contrast Australias peak national start-up group, StartupAUS, has lauded the governments move.

StartupAUS chief executive Alex McCauley hailed the changes as a breakthrough for high growth tech companies.

Being able to access the right kind of talent quickly is the core challenge for fast-growing technology companies and start-ups in Australia. A little while ago, the government flagged it wanted to do more to help trusted businesses access visas quickly and easily, McCauley said.

Typically in Australia that would mean big, established businesses. Thanks to input from StartupAUS and others, theres now a start-up stream which will help genuine startups access these new favourable arrangements too. Thats a real win for the sector and for companies looking to hire top quality global talent to help them grow. Its encouraging to see the government has really listened on this."Chinese telecommunications provider Huawei is facing another setback in the US, with the multinational electronics corporation Best Buy deciding to take its phones off their shelves in the next few weeks.

Technology website CNET cited a source as saying that the decision to end the relationship had been taken by the retailer. At the moment, the retailer still lists Huawei models.

No details were provided with Best Buy telling the site: ""We don't comment on specific contracts with vendors, and we make decisions to change what we sell for a variety of reasons."

Last year, Best Buy stopped selling Kaspersky Lab software shortly before a ban on the use of the software in the US public service was announced.

Huawei has faced plenty of problems in the US this year, with the most recent being when President Donald Trumpthe possibility of Singapore-based Broadcom buying processor maker Qualcomm because of what were claimed to be national security concerns. Broadcom's ties to Huawei were mentioned as a reason.

In January, a deal for AT&T to sell Huawei phones on plans was cancelled at the last minute.

And following that, Verizon was reported to have yielded to pressure from the US Government to stop selling Huawei devices.

In February, US intelligence chiefs warned against the use of Huawei equipment, with the head of the FBI, Christopher Wray, telling a US Senate hearing: "Were deeply concerned about the risks of allowing any company or entity that is beholden to foreign governments that dont share our values to gain positions of power inside our telecommunications networks."

An indication of the level of paranoia about Huawei in the US can be gauged from the fact that the NSA hacked into the company's servers in Shenzhen in 2010, according to documents released by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden in 2013.

The US has also put pressure on Australia to cut out the use of Huawei products in any future 5G deployments.

Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull was warned, during a visit to the US in February, not to allow Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei to supply equipment for any future 5G networks, indicating that there are security risks involved.

Canberra denied Huawei any role in supplying equipment to the country's national broadband network project about six years ago, following advice by ASIS, one of its spy agencies.

Last year, Australia put pressure on the Solomon Islands to drop Huawei as the main contractor for an undersea cable project. The project was later awarded to the Vocus Group.The Australian Labor Party has raised doubts about the reliability of the Telstra HFC cable network after it was reported that Foxtel would not be using HFC for transmission any more, but moving to satellite.

Labor shadow communications minister Michelle Rowland said in a statement that Foxtel was planning to ditch what she described as "(Prime Minister) Malcolm Turnbull's HFC network" due to concerns about reliability.

She cited a report from Mumbrella while making this claim. The news was first reported by the website EFTM.

Last month, as iTWire reported, there was said to have been a bid within the NBN Co, the company rolling out the national broadband network, to minimise the use of HFC because some signals from Foxtel channels were causing interference with NBN broadband data transmissions.

In November last year, NBN Cothat network issues affecting the HFC network suspended HFC connections and said they would be delayed by anything from six to nine months.

And in December, two network experts  Dermot Cox, an HFC expert and business consultant, and Damien Ivereigh, chief executive of Tasmanian ISP Launtel  told iTWire that there were a number of issues that needed to be sorted out before HFC connections could be resumed.

One of the conditions under which the NBN Co signed a deal with Telstra to use its HFC network is that maintenance of the network would be the responsibility of the broadband company.

NBN Co is paying Telstra $5 billion in infrastructure payments, $4 billion in disconnection payments and $2 billion in Commonwealth agreements for the HFC network.

At the moment, the Telstra HFC network is used by NBN Co, Foxtel and Telstra itself. The NBN signal travels at a low frequency, the other two at higher frequencies. Apparently, at lower frequencies the signal does not travel all that well.

Rowland also pointed to information disclosed to the Senate which said that use of HFC resulted in 29% more downtime than in the case of fibre.

Malcolm Turnbull thought he would stroll into government and switch on the HFC network like it was a toaster, she said.

Malcolm Turnbulls second-rate NBN is $20 billion over budget and four years behind schedule  with over a million HFC consumers still in limbo.NBN Co, the company rolling out Australia's national broadband network, will provide training and assessments for more than 2000 in-field workers on how to deploy, activate and maintain the network, using simulation as a teaching tool.

The company said in a statement today that it had opened new training facilities towards this end.

The first such facility, called a Network Simulation Lab, was opened at TAFE NSWs Lidcombe campus.

Trainees will have access to every fixed-line technology solution used to deliver the NBN network.

They will also be given real-time experience in connecting pits and pipes to homes and businesses, installing equipment before the network is activated and helping to resolve connection faults.

NBN Co chief network engineering officer Peter Ryan said: With more than 30,000 workers out in the field helping to roll the NBN Co access network out, we remain committed to the continuous development of a highly capable workforce, to ensure the network delivers the quality Australians expect.

Todays launch coincides with the peak build phase of the network with up to 100,000 new Australian homes and businesses being added to our footprint each month. This means we require highly competent, multi-skilled technical workers to not only deploy the network but also help deliver quality experiences for people who connect to and use the NBN Co access network.

There are lots of complexities which come up when working on a live network that can impact the way a technician needs to complete an installation or fix a fault. The benefit of these labs is that we can program problems and challenges for workers to deal with before they get out in the field. They can immediately see how their actions impact a live network and can start building their expertise from day one.

In the last year, we have increased our ability to deliver network installations right the first time from eight out of ten times to around nine out of ten today  the new NBN Co Network Simulation Labs are part of our plan to ensure we continue to improve."

TAFE NSWs head of Skillspoint, Technology and Business Services Dr Geethani Nair said: As the largest education and training provider in Australia, TAFE NSW is committed to providing high quality, industry-relevant training for the jobs of tomorrow.

TAFE NSW is focused on working in partnership with industry to design and develop new solutions to meet current and future need.

These facilities using our qualified trainers will equip NBN Cos infield workers across the country with the skills they need to successfully build, operate and maintain one of the nations most important projects.Reddit Email 203 Shares

By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) |  

This year, the merriment of Now-Ruz in Kabul was marred by a suicide bombing that killed at least 33 persons and wounded 68, according to the Afghani Ministry of Health. The perpetrator was allegedly a member of ISIL (which really needs another name, since it isnt an Islamic State and doesnt hold territory in Iraq or the Levant any more, and just seems to be a franchise for disgruntled terrorists dissatisfied with how moderate the Afghan Taliban are).

March 20 was the vernal equinox this year, the first day of spring and a time when people with a heritage in Persianate culture celebrate New Year (Now-Ruz). In Afghanistan, in Kabul and Herat, there was dancing and small childrens carnivals and family celebrations where people put out tableaux with seven things starting with the letter s in Persian. Now-Ruz, or the Persian New Year, goes back to pre-Islamic times and developed in the ancient Persian empires.

In Kabul, a crowd gathers every year for the festivities in the largely Hazara Shiite neighborhood at the Kart-e Sakhi shrine near Kabul University. The shrine is said once to have housed the relic of the cloak of the prophet Muhammad.



This horrific act of violence on Tuesday aimed at dividing Afghans. The hard line fundamentalist Salafi ideology of some Pushtun extremists finds everything about the scene at Kart-e sakhi to be distasteful. They dont like the Hazara Shiites, whom they see as wretched heretics (and in Afghan society the Hazaras have often been mistreated by other ethnic groups as a sort of menial lower caste). They dont like Now-Ruz, which they see as a pagan holdover. They dont like people dancing or being happy or women being in public.

In an ideal world, this horrible atrocity would be met with big anti-extremism demonstrations in Sunni, Pushtun cities like Jalalabad and Qandahar. Until all Afghans can identify with minority victims of extremism, the extremists will have a toehold.

(I figure that Hazaras are 22% of Afghans and Pushtuns are 44%).

And, of course, what the ISIL cells in Afghanistan are hoping for is that the Hazaras will form mobs and attack Sunnis, or Hazara elements in the Afghanistan National Army will take reprisals against Pushtun Sunnis, or that Pushtun Sunnis of a fundamentalist mindset will take up the cause of attacking Shiites or attacking Now-Ruz celebrations. They hope to polarize, as a pathway to power.

And until Afghans find a way to fight that polarization on ethnic and religious grounds, Trump can send all the extra troops he wants and can drop all the mothers-of-all-bombs he likes, but the Afghanistan war will grind on.Reddit Email 133 Shares

By Anne-Ruth Wertheim | ( Joop )

In addition to racism in our parts predominantly taking the guise of Islamophobia in recent decades, now all those moldy myths about differences in IQ between the races people are being dusted off. Not that horror stories about Muslims have vanished or any other prejudices about minority groups.

Discussions still focus on who can and who cannot be called racist, while the question what of racism actually is is fobbed off with vague descriptions in the direction of believing population groups to be inferior. Looking down on people is of course a terrible thing, but  although it is hardly ever talked about  jealousy is also at play. In the same way as what actually prompts people to utter their prejudices is seldom discussed. After all it is not just about what they say, it is mainly about what they prefer to keep to themselves. It is a dire necessity to see through the mechanisms at work, if for no other reason than to combat racism in such a way that racist violence does not break out in the future.

By unravelling these mechanisms, we make it possible to answer complicated questions. Questions such as: why are people of a different complexion who do important work in society initially belittled, only then to be criticized when they push ahead? Why are the offspring of guest workers and people from the former Dutch colonies put at a disadvantage when they compete in the labor market  often with a reference to habits which are attributed to the countries of their forefathers? Why after all these years is proportional representation in the media grossly lacking of people with a migration background? Why are politicians with a migration background continually pinned down on matters specifically concerning what people call their community, when they try to tackle issues which affect the whole of society? And why are they labelled disloyal when they set up their own party after established parties fail to offer them enough opportunities? And finally why is it that racism has not declined, now that so many people with a migration background have reached prominent positions in government, politics and all other societal domains, such as film, music, cabaret, architecture, sport, medicine, literature, journalism, law and ICT?

Racism is a hodgepodge

Racism is a hodgepodge to start with comprising two components: exploitation racism and competition racism. And to make it even more complicated  the proportion of each of these two components in racism as a whole is also shifting as time progresses. This shifting is an intriguing phenomenon, see illustration: How the guise of prevalent racism is changing as time progresses.

The distinction between the two types of racism comes from my father, a sociologist who specialized in south-east Asia Wim F.Wertheim. As a child, he experienced what it was like to be discriminated against as a Jew and as an adult in the colonial Dutch East Indies, he was struck by two totally distinct phenomena. He saw how the Indonesian population was exploited by means of the use of derogatory qualifications, whilst the Chinese mercantile minority was exposed to a form of racism which was strikingly similar to the anti-Semitism he knew from Europe. He named the first type exploitation racism and the second competition racism and described them in his academic work. Later I further developed these differences and integrated them into a chart in order to turn over in ones mind the reasoning, see illustration: Characteristics of the two types of racism. The two types differ in the following ways: the population at which they are targeted, the prejudices which accompany them, the motivation behind the prejudices, and the kind of violence which goes with it.

Exploitation and competition racism

Exploitation and competition racism target two totally different groups and there is a direct connection with the work they do and their economic position. Consequently, there is a difference between the kind of prejudices which are brought into circulation: disparaging or fearsome in nature. The enslaved, the black population of South Africa, the original inhabitants of colonized countries and Afro-Americans in the US were supposed to have a low IQ by nature and were considered lazy and childlike. And therefore mundane hard labour was the only thing they were capable of and supposedly what they preferred.

Stupid and lazy was the very last thing that would be used to describe the Chinese mercantile minority in Indonesia, they were said to be sly and untrustworthy. Besides they were henchmen for big scary China, which strove for world dominance. Jews were also said to be cunning, disloyal to the countries where they lived and hungry for world power. As proof a falsified document from bygone times was conjured up in which mysterious men were said to have used words to this effect. And now it is the turn of Muslims. To support the idea that they are not to be trusted and are disloyal, rumors are spread that they are controlled by the long arm of their mother country, with references to their dual nationality. And if that does not suffice, their holy scriptures are cited selectively so that they can be accused of wanting to establish Sharia law worldwide.

Motives behind racist prejudices, what do people prefer to keep to themselves?

The motives behind the prejudices circulating about certain population groups are wholly in line with what needs to be justified: in the first case exploitation, and in the second exclusion. But when asked about their motives is what people declare, what they actually say, really the only thing driving them? Could there be something else, which they would rather keep quiet?

People who look down on another population group will probably not readily admit how good it feels to raise themselves above others. In cultures and faith communities in which the dominating norm is that all people are equal, and this applies to by far the most, you may expect such a sense of superiority to be coupled with feelings of shame and/or guilt. All the more reason to find even more evidence that the other group is, in actual fact, inferior.

A similar phenomenon could be at play when there is a fear of a minoritys competitive power. People will probably not be inclined to reveal their envy, because in a capitalist society like ours there is effectively a taboo on jealousy. Moreover, it makes much more sense to keep it a secret when you think that a group is doing well, otherwise you might weaken your own groups competitive position. Its therefore a hundred times more profitable to state with great emphasis that the group is not to be trusted and is a great danger to society.

After all identifying a scapegoat for everything that goes wrong in society is generally not something to be proud about. People who do so will probably not like to acknowledge how they enjoy sharing the conviction with like-minded people around them that the cause of all misery should really be sought in the scapegoat group. In my experience in education, I often observed how consoling it can be for classes to experience a mutual sense of unity when bullying a scapegoat.

Different kinds of violence

In the case of exploitation racism, the group as a whole needs to be kept healthy and at work, but at the same time compliant and willing to endure the most wretched working conditions. When a few rise up in revolt and threaten to motivate others to do the same, the authorities endeavor to suppress it by publically punishing the rebels, in full view of all the others. In the case of competition racism, the whole rival group needs to be driven out of the region and this may start with the killing of a few members of the group, but soon turns into mass slaughter, pogroms. History has shown that such mass violence can be sparked when fearsome qualifications over a group are systematically circulated for long enough. It is not surprising therefore that the perpetrators of such violence always claim they acted in self-defense: if they had not killed the other person, they would have been killed. And wherever they occur, such outbreaks of violence are always preceded by a sharper demarcation of the group, accompanied by allusions to their expulsion and stronger emphasis on the recognizability of the members of the group.

There are situations however in which exploitation racism has been accompanied by mass violence, for instance during the enslavement of Africans and their transportation to the United States. Large numbers of people often died in the holds of the vessels in which they were being shipped. Rather than put an end to such an abuse, the perpetrators cynically solved the problem by fetching more people from Africa. As well as during the enslavement of people from Africa, mass violence was not seldom used in the colonies too, when people were forced to become coolies.

Shift in the proportions of exploitation- and competition racism in racism as a whole

When I carried out research into adult education in the 1990s, I observed a noteworthy phenomenon. My task was to register signs of racism during Dutch lessons for Dutch-speaking adults who had hardly attended school and during Dutch lessons as a second language for migrants. I discovered  to some extent concealed in expressions and gestures  that both disdain/self-conceit (exploitation racism) and jealousy, distrust and fear (competition racism) occurred. As a result, I wondered whether this mixture only occurred at this moment in this setting, or whether prevailing racism was perhaps changing. I put forward the hypothesis that a shift is taking place here in Europe, and therefore also in the Netherlands, from exploitation racism towards competition racism and discussed this with my father, who found it an interesting thought which he included in an article he was writing at the time for Dutch cultural monthly De Gids (1991), note 1.

In the meantime almost 30 years have passed and my hypothesis has not only turned out to be true, this phenomenon is still prevalent. The first guest workers and non-Western immigrants from the colonies predominantly suffered from the old, familiar colonial exploitation racism  they were looked upon with disdain. This disdain was still going strong in the 1990s and continues today. Disparaging prejudices are still targeted at people of color, and people who come from regions which are considered to be less developed are also seen in this light.

However, the more their children and grandchildren were able to compete, the more additional prejudices were circulated which belong to competition racism. More and more offspring from guest workers managed  often after overcoming severe underestimation and opposition  to complete their studies and gain a foothold in attractive positions in the labor market, making them rivals to the established population  especially those with good qualifications. Among the descendants of the guest workers it were particularly the Muslims who were a welcome target for the frightful prejudices which accompany competition racism. While the children and grandchildren of inhabitants from former colonies also received the same treatment, the more they became formidable rivals  in addition to the usual exploitation racism, which never disappeared and which has been on the increase in recent years. And now we have the non-Western refugees as well. They are said to steal jobs and get homes unfairly as well as being dangerous and not belonging here.

I predict that this shift will continue as the further emancipation of recognizable minorities progresses and with it the chance of mass violence will increase. But I hope and expect that people who want to halt this fatal development will be better equipped to do so when they are able to get to the bottom of the mechanisms at play.

Website Anne-Ruth Wertheim: www.Anne-RuthWertheim.com

Note 1. See W.F.Wertheim Koloniaal racisme in Indonesie, Ons onverwerkt verleden? (Colonial racism in Indonesia, Our unresolved past) in De Gids, issue 154 (1991): http://www.dbnl.org/tekst/_gid001199101_01/_gid001199101_01_0067.php

Anne-Ruth Wertheim is a journalist and the author of various books including De gans eet het brood van de eenden op, mijn kindertijd in een Jappenkamp op Java (The Goose Snatches the Bread from the Ducks, My Childhood in a Japanese Prison Camp on Java, 1994). An Indonesian translation of the book was published in March 2008.She works with the concepts of exploitation/colonial racism (contempt or condescension) and cultural/competition racism (envy and distrust).

Reprinted with the authors permission from Joop

-

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CGTN: Stranded migrants protest against racism in EuropeReddit Email 75 Shares

Middle East Monitor |  

Palestinian teen Ahed Tamimi is to serve eight months in an Israeli jail after reaching a plea bargain, Israeli newspaper Haaretz has reported.

Details have yet to be made public after the court held a closed session today, however the paper reported that Tamimi would plead guilty to four charges of assault and that the agreement must be approved by a military court.

Tamimi, 17, who was charged with stone-throwing and attacking soldiers, was arrested in December after a video showing her slapping Israeli soldiers and telling them to leave her property went viral. Israeli soldiers had invaded her home and shot her cousin in the head minutes before.

Her trial has been delayed some four times, during which she has been kept in police custody. Her case has gained international support, with international NGOs, British politicians and the UN calling for her release. An online petition protesting her imprisonment has been signed by more than 1.7 million people.

Israeli police have continued to harass the Tamimis since Aheds detention and have also arrested 10 members of her family, including her cousin Mohammed Tamimi, who was initially shot. During his detention, Israeli authorities also attempted to prove that her cousin Mohammed, who lost a third of his skull due to the impact of the bullet, actually sustained his injury from falling off his bike.

Via Middle East Monitor

This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.Reddit Email 340 Shares

By Morgan Currie and Britt S. Paris | The Conversation |  

After Donald Trump won the presidential election, hundreds of volunteers around the U.S. came together to rescue federal data on climate change, thought to be at risk under the new administration. Guerilla archivists, including ourselves, gathered to archive federal websites and preserve scientific data.

But what has happened since? Did the data vanish?

As of one year later, there has been no great purge. Federal data sets related to environmental and climate science are still accessible in the same ways they were before Trump took office.

However, in many other instances, federal agencies have tampered with information about climate change. Across agency websites, documents have disappeared, web pages have vanished and language has shifted in ways that appear to reflect the policies of the new administration.

Two groups have been keeping a watchful eye on developments. We both belong to the Environmental Data Governance Initiative, the organization behind the data rescue events. The initiative now monitors tens of thousands of federal websites with the help of specialized tracking software. In January, the group published a report that describes sweeping changes to federal web resources.

Meanwhile, Columbia Universitys Silencing Science Tracker documents news stories about climate scientists who have been discouraged from conducting, publishing or otherwise communicating scientific research.

These groups have documented four ways that climate-related information has become less accessible since Trump took office.

1. Documents are difficult to find

Documents on existing international environmental treaties and national climate policy have been buried or removed from departments current websites.

The State Departments Office of Global Change, for instance, no longer publishes Climate Action Reports, which the U.S. is obliged to produce under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The reports can no longer be found at their former addresses. Instead, they are archived at new addresses in the Departments Obama-era web archive, making the reports more difficult for the public to access.



Environmental Data Governance Initiative , CC BY



In another instance, the Environmental Protection Agency removed links to the Climate Change Adaptation Plan documents, which offer guidelines on climate change mitigation. While the web pages still exist on the EPA server, links from key access points on the site have been removed or redirect to a This Page is Being Updated notice.

2. Web pages are buried

Some administrative pages have disappeared from agency sites and can be accessed only from the Obama-era web archive.

The Bureau of Land Managements climate change page  which discussed the agencys climate-friendly approach to land planning  now exists only in archival form. State Department pages describing the Montreal Protocol, a global effort signed in 1988 to protect the ozone layer, are similarly displaced.

The EPA appears to have been hit the worst. Two hundred of the original 380 web pages on climate and energy resources for state, local and tribal governments are now accessible in archival form only. Whats more, the word climate is no longer in the official websites title.

The EPA also removed the website for the Clean Power Plan, a signature Obama-era regulation that the current administration hopes to repeal.

3. Language has been altered

Departments have scrubbed websites of environmental terms. The term climate change, for instance, no longer exists across certain web pages of several agencies, such as the White House, the Department of Transportation and the Department of the Interior.

Within the Department of Energy, the Clean Energy Investment Center removed the term clean from its title. The Government Accountability Office deleted an online warning that oil and natural gas development pose inherent environmental and public health risks.

In other cases, language has been changed to reflect the new administrations agenda. For example, the Bureau of Land Management removed Clean and Renewable Energy from its list of national priorities, adding Making America Safe Through Energy Independence and Getting America Back to Work instead.



Environmental Data Governance Initiative



4. Science has been silenced

But website changes and deletions are just the tip of the iceberg.

Columbias Silencing Science Tracker records 116 instances when scientists have been obstructed. The list includes budget cuts, staff cuts, unfilled positions and suspended funds. Climate-related research projects have been canceled and climate fellowships rescinded. In some cases, advisory boards and research centers have been dismantled entirely.

For instance, as of Dec. 31, 2017, the administration had filled only 20 science-related positions out of the 83 total. That pace falls short of both the Obama administration, who had appointed 63, and the Bush administration, who had filled 51, at the same point in time.

The silencing suggests that the administration values pro-growth policies over environmental goals and stands with industry, no matter the cost.

Why it matters

In most cases, its not possible to know who ordered and administered these changes, whether agency staff working independently or the Trump administration itself.

History shows us how public information on government activities has changed to reflect the policy directives of different administrations. The Bush era saw a similar chilling affect on scientific research and environmental regulation. Several scientists at the time came forward to accuse the administration of censoring public awareness efforts about climate change.

In recent years, the U.S. has reduced its own greenhouse gas emissions. And the Obama administration invested in combating climate change and making related information more available to the public. Now that information is being stifled, but climate change continues, whether its documented or not.

These changes are not just damaging to those trying to address climate change. In our view, burying climate science diminishes our democracy. It denies the average citizen the information necessary to make informed decisions, and fuels the flames of rhetoric that denies consensus-based science.

Morgan Currie, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Digital Civil Society Lab, Stanford University, Stanford University and Britt S. Paris, Ph.D. Student in Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.



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Center for Inquiry: Climate Change Denial in the Age of Trump | Michael MannVANCOUVER, B.C., March 22, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Corvus Gold Inc. (Corvus or the Company) - (TSX:KOR) (OTCQX:CORVF) announces it has received additional results from two holes which are evaluating the eastern extension of the Mother Lode deposit (Figure 1). The Company believes that these new holes continue to define a new high-grade area of the East Zone of the deposit as well as a possible new broad area of deep oxide mineralization even farther to the east (Table 1). East Zone mineralization is primarily hosted in the Upper Zone Tertiary units which is well mineralized to the west of the hole.

Hole ML18-049 represents the highest-grade intercept drilled to date in the Mother Lode system (7.62m @ 21.77 g/t Au). Results to date from the East Zone have now outlined a system at least 400 metres long running northwest from the eastern edge of the historic pit and hosted in the favorable Tertiary sedimentary rock package. The area remains open to the north and east and will be followed up with additional stepout holes.

Eastern Extension, Mother Lode Deposit

Hole ML18-049 is located at the northern end of the newly discovered East High-Grade (H-G) Zone and may represent a higher-grade, feeder zone that is part of the overall, large Mother Lode gold system (7.62m @ 21.77 g/t Au). The new high-grade mineralization is hosted in the middle sandstone unit of the upper plate Tertiary rock package, which hosts the bulk of the main deposit to the west. This new high-grade zone remains open and will be the target of further exploration in the coming months.

In addition, the bottom of hole ML18-048 intersected a broad zone of oxide gold mineralization in the Paleozoic carbonates that extended to the end of the hole (21.34m @ 0.77 g/t Au). This new zone of mineralization could represent the edge of a new deposit as the Company explores to the eastern edge of the Mother Lode deposit. Follow up drilling will focus on this new zone up dip to the west along a parallel trend to the East H-G zone. The Mother Lode gold system continues to grow in multiple directions.

Jeff Pontius, President and CEO of Corvus states This new bonanza grade discovery within the large Mother Lode system is significant as we believe it is beginning to outline what could be multiple zones with similar potential. It is a hallmark of a large sediment hosted system like those in the Carlin trend to have areas of higher grades which can form deposits within deposits. We believe this type of discovery enhances the overall Mother Lode potential and provides the Corvus geologic team with important exploration information on how and where to target additional bonanza grade zones in this expanding new Nevada gold discovery.

Table 1

Phase II - Mother Lode Significant Drilling Results

(Reported intercepts are not true widths as there is currently insufficient data to calculate true orientation in space. Mineralized intervals are calculated using a 0.3 g/t cutoff unless otherwise indicated below)

Drill Hole # from (m) to (m) Interval (m) Gold (g/t) Silver (g/t) Comment ML17-048 51.82 54.86 3.05 0.41 n/a East of ML17-037

Upper East Zone 210.31 214.88 4.57 3.61 n/a East H-G Zone AZ 085 dip-65 320.04 341.38 21.34 0.77 n/a New Far-East Zone inc 332.23 339.85 7.62 1.20 n/a >1 g/t ML17-049 230.12 237.74 7.62 21.77 n/a East of ML17-010

East H-G Zone 248.41 252.98 4.57 0.27 n/a AZ 085 dip-70 277.37 280.42 3.05 1.20 n/a

Qualified Person and Quality Control/Quality Assurance

Jeffrey A. Pontius (CPG 11044), a qualified person as defined by National Instrument 43-101  Standards of Disclosure for Mineral Projects (NI 43-101), has supervised the preparation of the scientific and technical information that forms the basis for this news release and has approved the disclosure herein. Mr. Pontius is not independent of Corvus, as he is the CEO & President and holds common shares and incentive stock options.

Carl E. Brechtel, (Nevada PE 008744 and Registered Member 353000 of SME), a qualified person as defined by NI 43-101, has coordinated execution of the work outlined in this news release and has approved the disclosure herein. Mr. Brechtel is not independent of Corvus, as he is the COO and holds common shares and incentive stock options.

The work program at Mother Lode was designed and supervised by Mark Reischman, Corvus Golds Nevada Exploration Manager, who is responsible for all aspects of the work, including the quality control/quality assurance program. On-site personnel at the project log and track all samples prior to sealing and shipping. Quality control is monitored by the insertion of blind certified standard reference materials and blanks into each sample shipment. All resource sample shipments are sealed and shipped to American Assay Laboratories (AAL) in Reno, Nevada, for preparation and assaying. AAL is independent of the Company. AALs quality system complies with the requirements for the International Standards ISO 9001:2000 and ISO 17025:1999. Analytical accuracy and precision are monitored by the analysis of reagent blanks, reference material and replicate samples. Finally, representative blind duplicate samples are forwarded to AAL and an ISO compliant third-party laboratory for additional quality control. Mr. Reischman, a qualified person, has verified the data underlying the information disclosed herein, including sampling, analytical and test data underlying the information by reviewing the reports of AAL, methodologies, results and all procedures undertaken for quality assurance and quality control in a manner consistent with industry practice, and all matters were consistent and accurate according to his professional judgement. There were no limitations on the verification process

About the North Bullfrog & Mother Lode Projects, Nevada

Corvus controls 100% of its North Bullfrog Project, which covers approximately 72 km in southern Nevada. The property package is made up of a number of private mineral leases of patented federal mining claims and 865 federal unpatented mining claims. The project has excellent infrastructure, being adjacent to a major highway and power corridor as well as a large water right. The Company also controls 194 federal unpatented mining claims on the Mother Lode project which totals 1,597 hectares which it owns 100% of.

About Corvus Gold Inc.

Corvus Gold Inc. is a North American gold exploration and development company, focused on its near-term gold-silver mining project at the North Bullfrog and Mother Lode Districts in Nevada. In addition, the Company controls a number of royalties on other North American exploration properties representing a spectrum of gold, silver and copper projects. Corvus is committed to building shareholder value through new discoveries and the expansion of its projects to maximize share price leverage in an advancing gold and silver market.

On behalf of

Corvus Gold Inc.

(signed) Jeffrey A. Pontius

Jeffrey A. Pontius,

President & Chief Executive Officer

Contact Information:

Ryan Ko

Investor Relations

Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Phone: 1-844-638-3246 (toll free) or (604) 638-3246

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements and forward-looking information (collectively, forward-looking statements) within the meaning of applicable Canadian and US securities legislation. All statements, other than statements of historical fact, included herein including, without limitation, statements regarding the rapid and effective capture of the potential of our new Mother Lode project, the potential for new deposits and expected increases in a systems potential; anticipated content, commencement and cost of exploration programs, anticipated exploration program results, the discovery and delineation of mineral deposits/resources/reserves, the Companys belief that the parameters used in the WhittleTM pit optimization process are realistic and reasonable, the potential to discover additional high grade veins or additional deposits, the potential to expand the existing estimated resource at the Mother Lode project, the statement that the zone of high-grade mineralization is encouraging for expanding the mineralization zones of the Mother Lode deposit west along the Fluorspar Canyon Fault, the statement that drilling results bodes well for the continued growth of Corvus Gold over the next several phases of deposit expansion drilling programs in 2018, the growth potential of the Mother Lode project and the potential for any mining or production at the Mother Lode project, are forward-looking statements. Information concerning mineral resource estimates may be deemed to be forward-looking statements in that it reflects a prediction of the mineralization that would be encountered if a mineral deposit were developed and mined. Although the Company believes that such statements are reasonable, it can give no assurance that such expectations will prove to be correct. Forward-looking statements are typically identified by words such as: believe, expect, anticipate, intend, estimate, postulate and similar expressions, or are those, which, by their nature, refer to future events. The Company cautions investors that any forward-looking statements by the Company are not guarantees of future results or performance, and that actual results may differ materially from those in forward looking statements as a result of various factors, including, but not limited to, variations in the nature, quality and quantity of any mineral deposits that may be located, variations in the market price of any mineral products the Company may produce or plan to produce, the Company's inability to obtain any necessary permits, consents or authorizations required for its activities, the Company's inability to produce minerals from its properties successfully or profitably, to continue its projected growth, to raise the necessary capital or to be fully able to implement its business strategies, and other risks and uncertainties disclosed in the Companys 2017 Annual Information Form and latest interim Management Discussion and Analysis filed with certain securities commissions in Canada and the Companys most recent filings with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (the SEC). All of the Companys Canadian public disclosure filings in Canada may be accessed via www.sedar.com and filings with the SEC may be accessed via www.sec.gov and readers are urged to review these materials, including the technical reports filed with respect to the Companys mineral properties.VANCOUVER, British Columbia, March 22, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Core Gold Inc. ("Core Gold" or the "Company") (TSX-V:CGLD) (OTCQX:CGLDF) is pleased to announce plans for a Phase 1 exploration drilling program at its 100% owned Copper Duke project in Ecuador. The Company has received the necessary exploration permit from the Ecuadorian Ministry of Mines and is in the process of posting the required environmental bond.

Keith Piggott, CEO of Core Gold commented The issuance of the drilling permit and plans for a Phase 1 exploration drilling program at Copper Duke is a milestone for the Company as it represents the beginning of testing of one of the worlds best undrilled gold-copper porphyry target. When we assumed control of the Company in late 2016 it was always a key objective of our team to drill Copper Duke and we are pleased to be proceeding with that plan. Our entire team is excited by the prospect of drilling this target and we hope to continue the exploration success that Ecuador has seen over the past two years with world-class projects such as Cascabel showing the potential of the country.

About Copper Duke

The Copper Duke project consists of 13 mineral concessions covering a number of gold and copper porphyry occurrences in an area of approximately 100 sq. km. The project is located in Catacocha (Paltas) county, Province of Loja, approximately 18 kilometers east of the Companys Dynasty Goldfield mining unit and 40 kilometers south of the Companys Portovelo processing plant.

Figure 1: Copper Duke Overview

To date, a major copper-gold porphyry complex, El Huato, and an additional four copper porphyry targets (Loma Redonda, Rio Catamayo, Landaluma and Barbasco) and two gold targets have been identified. The Phase 1 exploration program will focus on El Huato and will seek to test both the projects gold-copper porphyry potential and quartz gold bearing vein system. The Copper Duke targets are described below:

El Huato Target

The El Huato copper-gold porphyry system was discovered by a United Nations survey in 1968. Geologically the zone comprises Cretaceous volcano-sedimentary rocks intruded by diorite and granodiorite of the Tangula batholith. Copper and gold mineralization is related to sub-vertical to sub-horizontal veins and stockwork structures that occur following the stratification of the existing lithologies, having preferential southwest and southeast strike direction being extended for a known length of 3.5 km.

The zone comprises a central gold bearing porphyry and a southern copper-gold bearing porphyry. There are also significant copper and gold geochemical anomalies to the north of the area.

Figure 2: Copper Duke El Huato Drilling Targets

In its October 6th, 2006 news release, the Company reported significant assays from 481 rock chip channel samples taken from quartz vein swarms and stockworks located in a 8.5 sq. km area in the central sector of El Huato. Results indicated the presence of widespread high-grade gold mineralization, ranging from 174 grams per tonne (g/t) gold to 0.1 g/t gold and from 249 g/t silver to 0.1 g/t silver.

The sampled structure subsequently has been confirmed by a geophysical survey and results from 220 rock chip channel samples taken in the area since January 2007, which have been consistent with those previously reported; 73 of the new samples returned assay values in excess of 1 g/t gold with 36 samples returning values in excess of 3 g/t gold over widths varying from 4 metres to 0.1 metre, with maximum grades of 61.5 g/t gold over 3.9 metres. This stockwork zone is considered to be a prime drill target.

Additional sampling was also focused on the southern portion of the El Huato area - most notably on an area where a copper-rich porphyry is being cut by breccia dykes. Mineralization is disseminated in the porphyry. Channel sampling has been conducted in trenches, across outcropping veins, and across other outcropping mineralized structures. Trench sampling has returned values of up to 2.9% copper over 15 metres.

Latest results, as previously reported in the Companys news release dated May 22nd, 2007 are tabulated below. Results are shown as averages over the length of trenches (Table 1) and veins (Table 2), and as single rock samples from outcrop (Table 3).

Table 1: Southern El Huato - Trenches containing Copper

Sample number Au

(ppm) Ag

(ppm) Cu

(%) Mo

(ppm) Length

(m) Width

(m) D08031337-D08031343 1.3 4.2 2.9 40 15.05 0.7 D08031344-D08031345 0.7 0.9 1.5 6 3.65 0.7 D08031349-D08031363 0.9 1.3 1.5 5 5.0 0.7 D08031364-D08031366 3.6 4.9 2.1 21 4.80 0.7 D0903231-D0903232 0.9 1.4 1.4 17 7.40 0.7 D1503305-09 & D0903185-192 2.31 10.70 3.92 16.67 20.0 0.7



Table 2: Southern El Huato - Average Values over Length of Copper/Gold Veins

Sample number Au

(ppm) Ag

(ppm) Cu

(%) Mo

(ppm) Width

(m) Vein Length

(m) D08031232-D08031252 0.5 313.2 4.4 58 1.0 260 D08031236-D08031246 0.5 151.4 5.3 804 0.4 280 D08031239-D08031242 0.4 20.3 0.4 74 1.4 80

Table 3: Southern El Huato - Rock Samples Containing Copper

Sample number Cu

(%) Au

(ppm) Ag

(ppm) Mo

(ppm) Width

(m) D0903183 5.1 1.4 17.3 13 1 D0903193 3.2 4.7 6.2 14 0.4 D0903238 2.9 1.3 0.8 4 0.5 D0903184 2.6 0 3.8 24 5 D08031270 2.6 2.4 3.5 86 11.3 D08031265 2.3 1.9 4.8 94 2.9 D0831245 2.1 0.4 139.4 491 1 D08031266 2 1.2 6.1 60 2.5 D0903237 1.8 1 0.2 4 0.35 D0903182 1.7 0.3 2.4 5 1.2 D08031269 1.4 1.2 2.1 78 2.4 D0903194 1.4 0.4 1 20 0.3 D0903239 1.4 1.1 2.4 11 1.7 D08031268 1.1 0.7 3.9 44 2.4

Ningomine and Loma Redonda Targets



These two targets are located north and southwest of El Huato, respectively. They were discovered by the Companys geologists under systematic exploration works. Mineralization is mainly related to quartz veins and granodiorite dykes with moderate silicification and sericitization. Malachite has been found disseminated in the intrusive rocks.



On February 8, 2007, the Company reported assays results from 113 samples, taken predominantly from a 1.5 sq. km area in Ningomine, three kilometres to the north of El Huato, and from a 2.5 sq. km area in Loma Redonda, four kilometres to the southwest of El Huato. Significant results ranged from 17 g/t gold to 0.1 g/t gold and from 727 g/t silver to 0.1 g/t silver, over widths of 2.0 metres to 0.2 metres.



Additionally in 2007, a total of 20 channel samples were taken from Loma Redonda, of which half returned assay values in excess of 1% copper, to a maximum of 15% copper.



Rio Catamayo Target



Rio Catamayo lies south of El Huato along the same mineralized trend. This target was discovered by Company geologists after geological traverses through the area of study. Small porphyritic dykes outcrop along the river Catamayo. These dykes commonly contain stockworks of quartz veining, locally brecciated, with argillic alteration and local silica with copper carbonate, pyrite, chalcopyrite and iron and copper oxides. Geochemical sampling produced values of up to 2.15 g/t gold and 1.33% copper over 18 metres of continuous sampling.



El Palton Target



El Palton was discovered in February of 2007 by the Companys geologists working on the west of El Huato. This gold target contains highly oxidized and leached quartz-magnetite veins into wide zones of argillic alteration and showing local brecciated textures. The veins and veinlets are found in porphyritic dykes of up to 8 metres wide. These structures are aligned in a parallel pattern and also stockworks formed by fine quartz and stibine veinlets. The host rock corresponds mainly to weakly propylitized granodiorite. Rock geochemistry yielded values of 10.13 g/t gold over 0.5 metres and 19.07 g/t gold over 0.3 metres.

For more information on the Copper Duke project please refer to the Operations Overview section of our website at www.coregoldinc.com.

Qualified Person

Mr. John E. Bolanos, who is a qualified person under NI 43-101, has reviewed and approved the technical content of this news release and will continue consulting the Company for future press releases. Mr. Bolanos is a M.Sc. Mining Geologist from Camborne School of Mines (U.K.) and a Professional Geologist Eng. from The Central University of Ecuador (honours degree). He is a registered member (ID 4172671) of the Society for Mining, Metallurgy & Exploration (SME) of the United States; Director of the Ecuadorian College of Engineers in Geology, Mines, Oil and Environment; and a member of the Mining Chamber of Ecuador. He has 27 years of experience in the exploration and mining industry throughout the Americas.

For further information please contact:

Keith Piggott, CEO

Suite 1201  1166 Alberni Street

Vancouver, B.C. V6E 3Z3

Phone: +1 (604) 345-4822

Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Cautionary Notice:

This news release contains statements which are, or may be deemed to be, forward-looking information which are prospective in nature. Such information in this news release includes statements regarding the Company's interpretation of trenching results, the potential geological merits of the Companys projects and targets. Forward-looking information involves known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause Core Golds actual results, revenues, performance or achievements to be materially different from any future results, performance or achievements expressed or implied by the forward-looking information. Important risks that could cause Core Golds actual results, revenues, performance or achievements to differ materially from Core Golds expectations include, among other things, risks relating to the actual results of additional exploration activities; fluctuating prices in metals and other commodities; possibility of accidents, equipment breakdowns, labor disputes or other unanticipated difficulties with or interruptions in operations; exploration cost overruns; the geology, grade and continuity of mineral deposits; currency fluctuations; availability of capital and financing to maintain the Company's operations and plans; general economic, market or business conditions; regulatory changes; timeliness of government or regulatory approvals; and other risks detailed herein and as disclosed in the Companys filings as available on SEDAR at www.sedar.com. Other than in accordance with regulatory obligations, Core Gold is not under any obligation and Core Gold expressly disclaims any intention or obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

Neither the TSX Venture Exchange nor its Regulation Services Provider (as that term is defined in policies of the TSX Venture Exchange) accepts responsibility for the adequacy or accuracy of this release.420.5 feet assaying 11.4% combined zinc-lead; and 1.8 opt silver (TS)

Including 74 feet assaying 31.0% combined zinc-lead; and 4.1 opt silver (TS)

23 feet assaying 46.1% combined zinc-lead; and 7.0 opt silver (TS)

33.5 feet assaying 19.5% combined zinc-lead; and 6.4 opt silver (TDS)

VANCOUVER, B.C., March 22, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Arizona Mining Inc. (TSX:AZ) (Arizona Mining or the Company) announces strong results for three drill holes from the current program focused on expansion of the Taylor Sulfide Zone (TS) and Taylor Deeps Zone (TDS) located on its 100%-owned Hermosa-Taylor Project in Santa Cruz County, Arizona. The drill holes highlighted in this release are successful infill drill holes highlighting the continued potential for resource growth and increased grades, as distinct from the Updated Preliminary Economic Assessment (PEA) (see Press Release dated January 16, 2018).

Our infill drilling continues to confirm high-grade areas identified in the PEA, said Chief Operating Officer Don Taylor. In light of the strong success weve had in 44,000 meters of drilling completed since cut-off for the January 2018 Preliminary Economic Assessment last fall, we now plan to deliver the Feasibility Study in Q3 2018 to ensure as much of these high-grade results are included in the study as possible.

HDS-513 is an angled infill hole targeting Taylor Sulfide mineralization. The drill hole intercepted several mineralized horizons within the Taylor Sulfide Zone (Epitaph domain) with one very significant and robust zone. The Taylor Sulfide intercept extends the mineralization 100 feet southeast (up dip) of previously reported HDS-374 (see Press Release dated October 11, 2016). Significant mineralized intervals in the Taylor Sulfide include:

420.5 feet assaying 11.4% combined zinc-lead, and 1.8 ounces per ton (opt) silver (TS) including 74 feet assaying 31.0% combined zinc-lead; and 4.1 opt silver (TS) including 20 feet assaying 24.0% combined zinc-lead; and 4.1 opt silver (TS)



HDS-505 is angled infill drill hole targeting Taylor Sulfide mineralization. The drill hole intercepted multiple mineralized zones in the Taylor Sulfide (Scherrer and Epitaph), including one very substantial zone in the Epitaph domain. The Taylor Sulfide intercept extends the mineralization 300 feet northwest (down dip) of HDS-374, linking with HDS-513 for a strike length of 400 feet. Significant mineralization in the Taylor Sulfide includes:

269.5 feet assaying 9.0% combined zinc-lead; and 1.6 opt silver (TS)

Including 23 feet assaying 46.1% combined zinc-lead; and 7.0 opt silver (TS)

HDS-512 is an angled infill hole targeting Taylor Deeps mineralization. The drill hole intercepted two zones in the Taylor Sulfide (Epitaph) and one robust mineralized horizon in the Taylor Deeps. The Taylor Deeps intercept is 200 feet east of previously reported HDS-507 (reported March 15, 2018). The noteworthy mineralized interval was:

111.5 feet assaying 9.8% combined zinc-lead; and 3.4 opt silver (TDS)

Including 33.5 feet assaying 19.5% combined zinc-lead; and 6.4 opt silver (TDS)

For a full list of the mineralized intervals from these holes refer to Table I.

Table I. Drill Hole Assay Summary

DH_ID From (feet) To (feet) Interval (in feet) From (meters) To (meters) Interval (meters) Ag opt Pb% Zn% Cu% Zone* HDS-505 2038 2048 10 621.2 624.2 3.0 5.65 11.54 15.03 0.84 TS HDS-505 2143 2186 43 653.2 666.3 13.1 1.05 2.40 5.46 0.11 TS HDS-505 2390 2409 19 728.4 734.2 5.8 0.93 2.27 3.84 0.21 TS HDS-505 2644.5 2914 269.5 806.0 888.1 82.1 1.59 4.44 4.52 0.16 TS Including 2655 2678 23 809.2 816.2 7.0 7.02 21.45 24.66 0.93 TS HDS-505 2997 3062 65 913.4 933.3 19.8 1.55 3.80 2.78 0.05 TS HDS-512 2342 2401 59 713.8 731.8 18.0 0.91 2.19 3.02 0.10 TS HDS-512 2457 2467 10 748.9 751.9 3.0 2.00 5.27 5.82 0.20 TS HDS-512 2777 2786.5 9.5 846.4 849.3 2.9 0.49 1.63 3.53 0.01 TVS HDS-512 2825 2936.5 111.5 861.0 895.0 34.0 3.35 5.53 4.23 0.18 TDS Including 2903 2936.5 33.5 884.8 895.0 10.2 6.39 11.05 8.40 0.52 TDS HDS-512 3050.5 3056 5.5 929.7 931.4 1.7 8.20 7.45 10.65 2.01 TDS HDS-513 1869 1887 18 569.6 575.1 5.5 0.66 1.95 3.30 0.10 TS HDS-513 2132 2142 10 649.8 652.8 3.0 1.91 5.87 4.77 0.49 TS HDS-513 2301.5 2722 420.5 701.5 829.6 128.2 1.80 5.29 6.07 0.10 TS Including 2305 2379 74 702.5 725.1 22.6 4.06 13.01 17.99 0.30 TS Including 2537 2557 20 773.2 779.3 6.1 4.14 12.07 11.89 0.13 TS HDS-513 2867 2962 95 873.8 902.8 29.0 0.73 2.08 0.53 0.04 TS

Drill intersections with a combined zinc and lead grade of greater than 9% are bolded. Sulfide drill intervals from the Taylor Sulfide Zone and Taylor Deeps Sulfide Zone are down-the-hole drill intervals. Vertical drill holes are considered to be within +5% of true width based on the dip of the mineralized stratigraphy at 20-25 degrees. Angle drill holes are considered to be within +15% of true width based on the dip of the mineralized stratigraphy at 20-25 degrees.

*The exception to this are the intervals noted as veins. It is not possible to determine the true width of the veins based on the drill density and no representation is made here regarding true width of the veins. Zones shown include: Taylor Sulfide Zone (TS); Taylor Deeps Sulfide Zone (TDS) and Trench Vein System (TVS).

Figure 1. Drill Hole Location Map

Figure 2. Plan View of Taylor Deeps with ZnEq Grade Contour

Figure 3. Long Section of Hermosa Geology and Ore Deposits Figure 4. Land Status Map

Qualified Person

The results of the Arizona Mining Inc. drilling have been reviewed, verified and compiled by Donald R. Taylor, MSc., PG, Chief Operating Officer for Arizona Mining Inc., a qualified person as defined by National Instrument 43-101 (NI 43-101). Mr. Taylor has 30 years of mineral exploration and mining experience, and is a Registered Professional Geologist through the SME (registered member #4029597).

Assays and Quality Assurance/Quality Control

To ensure reliable sample results, the Company has a rigorous QA/QC program in place that monitors the chain-of-custody of samples and includes the insertion of blanks, duplicates, and certified reference standards at statistically derived intervals within each batch of samples. Core is photographed and split in half with one-half retained in a secured facility for verification purposes.

Sample preparation (crushing and pulverizing) has been performed at ALS Minerals Laboratories, an ISO/IEC accredited lab located in Tucson, Arizona. ALS Minerals Laboratories prepares a pulp of all samples and sends the pulps to their analytical laboratory in Vancouver, B.C. Canada for analysis. ALS analyzes the pulp sample by ICP following a 4-acid digestion (ME-ICP61 for 33 elements) including Cu (copper), Pb (lead), and Zn (zinc). All samples in which Cu (copper), Pb (lead), or Zn (zinc) are greater than 10,000 ppm are re-run using four acid digestion with an ICP  AES finish (Cu-OG62; Pb-OG62; and Zn-OG62) with the elements reported in percentage (%). Silver values are determined by ICP (ME-ICP61) with all samples with silver values greater than 100 ppm repeated using four acid digestion with an ICP-AES finish (Ag-OG62) calibrated for higher levels of silver contained. Any values over 1,500 ppm Ag trigger a fire assay with gravimetric finish analysis. Gold values are determined by a 30 gm fire assay with an ICP-AES finish (Au-ICP21).

About Arizona Mining

Arizona Mining Inc. (an augustagroup company) is a mineral exploration and development company focused on the exploration and development of its 100%-owned Hermosa Project located in Santa Cruz County, Arizona. The Taylor Deposit, a zinc-lead-silver carbonate replacement deposit, has a resource of 15.2 million tons in the Measured Mineral Resource category grading 4.0% zinc, 4.0% lead and 1.6 opt silver, or 9.6% ZnEq, plus 85.8 million tons in the Indicated Mineral Resource category grading 4.2% zinc, 4.3% lead and 2.2 opt silver, or 10.5% ZnEq, and 43.6 million tons of Inferred Mineral Resources grading 3.9% zinc, 4.8% lead and 3.4 opt silver or 11.9% ZnEq, all reported in accordance with NI 43-101 guidelines utilizing a 4% ZnEq cutoff grade. The Taylor Deposit remains open to the north, west and south over land controlled by the Company and will be aggressively drilled to test the limits of the resource. The Companys other project on the Hermosa property is the Central Deposit, a silver-manganese manto oxide project.

For additional information please contact:

Jerrold Annett

Senior Vice President, Corporate Development

Telephone: 416-366-5678 ext. 207

Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Susan Muir

Vice President, Investor Relations & Corporate Communications

Telephone: 416-366-5678 ext. 202

Email: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Information

Certain information contained in this press release constitutes forward-looking statements. All statements, other than statements of historical facts, are forward looking statements including statements with respect to the Companys intentions for its Hermosa Project in Arizona, including, without limitation, performing additional drilling, a resource update, permitting and a feasibility study on the Taylor Deposit. Forward-looking statements are often, but not always, identified by the use of words such as may, will, seek, anticipate, believe, plan, estimate, budget, schedule, forecast, project, expect, intend, or similar expressions.

The forward-looking statements are based on a number of assumptions which, while considered reasonable by Arizona Mining, are subject to risks and uncertainties. In addition to the assumptions herein, these assumptions include the assumptions described in Arizona Mining's management's discussion and analysis for the year ended December 31, 2016 ("MD&A"). Arizona Mining cautions readers that forward-looking statements involve and are subject to known and unknown risks, uncertainties and other factors which may cause actual results, performance or achievements to differ materially from those expressed in or implied by such forward-looking statements and forward-looking statements are not guarantees of future results, performance or achievement. These risks, uncertainties and factors include general business, economic, competitive, political, regulatory and social uncertainties; actual results of exploration activities and economic evaluations; fluctuations in currency exchange rates; changes in project parameters; changes in costs, including labour, infrastructure, operating and production costs; future prices of zinc, lead, silver and other minerals; variations of mineral grade or recovery rates; operating or technical difficulties in connection with exploration, development or mining activities, including the failure of plant, equipment or processes to operate as anticipated; delays in completion of exploration, development or construction activities; changes in government legislation and regulation; the ability to maintain and renew existing licenses and permits or obtain required licenses and permits in a timely manner; the ability to obtain financing on acceptable terms in a timely manner; contests over title to properties; employee relations and shortages of skilled personnel and contractors; the speculative nature of, and the risks involved in, the exploration, development and mining business; and the factors discussed in the section entitled "Risks and Uncertainties" in the MD&A.

Although Arizona Mining has attempted to identify important risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual performance, achievements, actions, events, results or conditions to differ materially from those expressed in or implied by the forward-looking information, there may be other risks, uncertainties and other factors that cause performance, achievements, actions, events, results or conditions to differ from those anticipated, estimated or intended. Unless otherwise indicated, forward-looking statements contained herein are as of the date hereof and Arizona Mining 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 applicable law.After Burundi in 2016, the Philippines decided this March 16 to pull out of the Rome Treaty which created the International Criminal Court (ICC). In both cases, the decision followed announcements by the ICC Prosecutor that she was opening preliminary examinations on alleged crimes committed in those countries, including by their political leaders. The withdrawal decisions come in a specific context which is not linked to the standoff between some states notably in the African Union and the Court. According to a number of experts, recurring threats from states opposed to ICC decisions should incite it to work harder, and especially better.

The Philippines said in its formal withdrawal letter to the UN on March 17 that it has its own legislation to deal with mass crimes. It became a member of the ICC in 2011. In October 2016, only three months after the election of Rodrigo Duterte who promised to free the country of drugs, ICC Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda issued a warning to Manila, provoking a first defiant response from the Philippines president. On February 8, 2018, the Prosecutor announced she was opening a preliminary examination  first step towards a possible full investigation  on alleged crimes committed since July 1, 2016 in the war on drugs launched by Duterte. It is alleged that thousands of persons have been killed for reasons related to their alleged involvement in illegal drug use, Bensouda said.

According to official statistics, nearly 4,100 suspected drug traffickers and users have been killed by police. NGOs say the figure is three times higher. This is the context in which on March 17 the Philippines gave official notice, after various threats, that it was pulling out of the ICC. Two days later, the Philippines president toughened his accusations, hoping to incite others amongst the ICCs 123 member states to do the same. He called the Court a body of white idiots of the European Union aimed at purging their sins from the colonial era. But Dutertes decision looks like an admission of guilt. This, in effect, is what the Philippines Coalition for the ICC says in a statement. The Filipino peoples hopes and dreams for holding human rights violators accountable should not be doused by a single mans fear of accountability, it says.

Race against time

The Philippines withdrawal from the ICC will become effective in a years time. But if the ICC Prosecutor decides between now and then to open a formal investigation, Manila is still legally obliged to cooperate with the Court. Withdrawal does not cancel out ICC judicial procedures. The Philippines will not therefore win easily by withdrawing.

Burundi has already lost this race against time, provoking the announcement in extremis in October 2017 of an ICC investigation and so accelerating the conclusion of the Prosecutors preliminary examination. President Rodrigo Dutertes aggressive reaction to the Court no doubt also motivated Fatou Bensoudas decision. From Libya to South Africa, the Courts history often shows that if states respect the Courts Statute, i.e. accept dialogue in its judicial proceedings or before its Assembly, they can avoid cut-and-dried decisions. After the Philippines withdrawal announcement, Assembly of States Parties President O-Gon Kwon invited it to stay and engage dialogue, while the Court encouraged the country to stay in the ICC family.

Such appeals are likely to fall on deaf ears. Withdrawal is a blow to victims and to the ICC. What it does is that it again exposes Filipinos to possible atrocious crimes without resort to justice and accountability, says Philippines Coalition for the ICC head Ray Paolo Santiago. Sadly, this move is anti-people.

The withdrawals regrettably damage the Court, says international law professor Morten Bergsmo. International criminal justice in its current form depends on the commitment and co-operation of States. Both enforcement of justice in specific cases and the desired deterrent effect of the ICC depend on States.

While it may seem that the withdrawals complicate matters for the Court, legally they do not make much difference, says Leiden University researcher Sergey Vasiliev. The point is that not the law but the political will to cooperate is the main obstacle. The ICC would have had to investigate remotely in any event, which is of course not an ideal scenario.

The extent to which states cooperate with the Court is a variable, including for its most enthusiastic members. From the Democratic Republic of Congo to Cote dIvoire, it depends on the interests of each one and of their allies.

Withdrawal as a counter-threat

Although drawing on similar rhetoric, the African states (aborted) withdrawals and that of the Philippines are rather different in their meaning and effects, says Sergey Vasiliev. The latter appears less menacing for the ICC and does not bring its credentials in question as much; on the contrary, it may end up playing into its hands by boosting its image as a principled anti-impunity agent that speaks truth to power and hears the power speak back.

The Philippines presidents calls do not herald a mass withdrawal. The ICCs existence, which is itself a threat, has provoked a form of counter-threat from states that do not like its decisions. In the Courts standoff with the African Union since 2009  triggered by ICC arrest warrants against Sudanese president Omar Al Bashir  the threat of a mass withdrawal has become a weapon of those who, rightly or wrongly, oppose its decisions. The threat is used both by those like South Africa who object to certain of its actions and those who are more opportunistic like Gambias ex- president Yahya Jammeh, who started withdrawal proceedings before they were reversed by his elected successor Adama Barrow.

So how should the ICC respond to these withdrawals? By raising the reputation of the quality of the Courts work and the integrity of its leaders, the Court and the Assembly of States Parties will make it harder for governments to withdraw, says Morten Bergsmo. A strong reputation provides better protection for the Court. Quality feeds a virtuous circle.

The Courts adversaries love to use its failings, whether it be the weakness of its evidence  such as in the Kenya cases , the number of verdicts handed down (only seven in 20 years of existence), controversial penal strategy choices or bad governance. The political cost of threatening the Court increases when the Courts reputation is strong, Bergsmo thinks. Its current vulnerability is not overcome by outreach and interventions by friendly NGOs and diplomats, but by the shield of quality justice.

In terms of the rhetoric or symbolic power the Court holds, it can preserve it only if it acts and is seen as truly impartial and does it work without fear or favour, says Vasiliev, including where it means challenging geopolitical hegemons where the mandate so requires.Philippine police said Thursday they had shot dead 13 drug suspects, just days after President Rodrigo Duterte moved to take the country out of the International Criminal Court over its inquiry into his deadly drug war.

The suspects were killed Wednesday in the northern province of Bulacan, an official statement said, an area where police have previously launched lethal crackdowns on illegal drugs.

Bulacan police are continuously and relentlessly implementing their intensified campaign against illegal drugs, the statement said, adding there had been more than 100 arrests.

The war crimes tribunal, based in The Hague, last month launched a preliminary inquiry into Dutertes bloody crackdown on narcotics, amid allegations Philippine security forces may have committed crimes against humanity.

Philippine police have said they have killed roughly 4,100 suspects who fought back during arrest, but rights groups allege the actual number is three times higher and accuse the authorities of murder.

The tribunal opened in 2002 to try abuses in countries where national courts cannot or will not prosecute. Manila in 2011 ratified the Rome Statute that created the court.

Manila gave official notice to the United Nations last week that it would withdraw, days after Duterte announced his country would quit the court over alleged baseless, unprecedented and outrageous attacks against his governments rights record.

Foreign Secretary Alan Peter Cayetano said last Friday the Philippines was pushing back against the well-orchestrated campaign to mislead the international community, to crucify President Duterte by distorting the human rights situation in the country.

The tribunal has urged Manila to reconsider its decision, adding that officially quitting the court requires a years notice and does not preclude its preliminary inquiry into the drug war killings, which have drawn international concern.

Duterte, who is buoyed by high popularity ratings at home, has fiercely defended the drug war as a battle to bring safety to the nations 100 million people.

He has frequently urged authorities to kill drug suspects while promising to protect police from legal sanction.A top UN official said Thursday the world body wanted Liberia to deal with the unfinished business of its long civil conflict, for which no one has ever been prosecuted for war crimes.

Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed was in Monrovia on the eve of the final departure of a UN mission first deployed at the end of the war in 2003 to guarantee the safety of the population.

Mohammed told AFP that as the mission wound down and the final peacekeepers leave on March 30, the UN was committed to working on sustainable development and therefore sustainable peace.

She said there would be an emphasis on the unfinished business, which really is about national reconciliation and the constitution, underscoring the risks of a fragile economy.

President George Weah was accused of sidelining war victims when he chose Vice-President Jewel Howard Taylor, the ex-wife of former rebel leader and president Charles Taylor, as his running mate in last years election.

Taylor is currently serving a 50-year sentence for war crimes in a British jail cell, although he was convicted of funding rebel groups in Sierra Leone, not the recruitment of child soldiers, killings, rape and pillaging of which he is accused at home.

An estimated 250,000 people died in the back-to-back 1989-2003 conflicts.

The president has not made specific commitments to reconciliation since taking power in late January, but on Thursday said his government must ensure that either we forget or justice is done to those justice needs to be done to.

He emphasised that perpetrators had to face their victims, but did not elaborate on how.

Weah meanwhile said the UN had the governments fullest commitment to the continued consolidation of peace in Liberia and would warmly welcome a continued partnership.

A Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) set up by former president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf to probe war crimes and rights abuses said a compensation scheme should be created alongside a war crimes court to prosecute eight ex-warlords for alleged crimes against humanity.

None of those measures has been implemented.233 Shares Share

The NHS is robust. And part of that is due to the passion of its workforce. Since its beginning in 1948, the service has met each new challenge with vigor. But never before has its existence been under such threat. And with it, the safety of a nation. And there is no one more qualified to save it than those who fight on the frontline. I sat down with Wendy Preston, head of nursing practice at the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) to learn how nurses can save the NHS.

Nurses are leaders

Wendy is inspirational. Dissatisfied with the limitations of patient care, she chose to take a senior role in designing new ways to help them. In her tenure as head of nursing practice, she has prioritized innovation as the key. And she is under no illusion that Nurses are well placed to deliver. She told me:

Nurses are leaders of patient care. We coordinate with social care and hospitals and act as an advocate for our patients. Sometimes this means putting new ideas forward to solve problems. The job reflects innovation, and we need the right people to do the job. Nurses lead local policy.

But with cuts to funding, record nurses leaving the profession and care increasingly privatized, innovation must be met with commitment. And in this case, investment. Wendy believes that all nurses can lead, and with the proper training, that their input could be invaluable. Designing new policies with such expertise and experience could be the solution to a rapidly worsening problem. She said:

We have a fantastic NHS, and we want to look after it. But we need funding. At the moment we do innovation on our own time, working extra unpaid hours. We have the power to lead, but need the apparatus to do it.

Nurses are experts

With the frontline so stretched, nurses are expected to care for patients and improve services. This is no easy feat, and requires self-sacrifice. But the combination of huge coal face experience met with savvy, and a business mind means a nurse can see the bigger picture. And who better to tell us what that means than campaigner and nurse Danielle Tiplady. She told me:

We work on the front line and see the end results of government policy. We know what works and what doesnt. We are degree trained, highly skilled and work with evidence. We are also the biggest workforce and know the patient from hospital to home.

But regardless of their expertise, it seems that the opportunities for nurses arent reflective of their potential. Low pay, inflexibility and work commitments prevent nurses from even being able to enter the race to making big change. But when you see Nurses like Wendy and Danielle, its clear that the NHS could benefit. Danielle said:

What we need to get nurses into senior positions is a change in wider society. We need to feel empowered, not demoralized, to make a change. We cant afford to take on extra training.

The saving grace

At about four years old I was sent to hospital. I have little memory of the stay, but one that stands out is the familiar uniform at my bedside. I was confused and scared, but this kind lady went a long way to reassuring a young child that everything would be OK. And my experience is just one of millions, be they young, old, dying or recovering, the reliable face of caring nurses works wonders.

But nurses are not simply a warm hand. Modern nurses are leaders, patient advocates and stoic bulwarks against system failure. Their dedication to using their knowledge to improve services is a no-brainer for designing future policy. The current issue with NHS design is a lack of accountability, bureaucrats behind closed doors. A genuinely open democracy mandates the inclusion of the workforce, and nurses are perfectly placed to have say.

So the answer is obvious. With a proven track record of patient care, leadership skills and a passion next to none, nurses are fundamental to saving the NHS. Its time we took their knowledge and placed it where it belongs, driving the NHS toward ventures practical and life-saving. And that means focussing time, money and trust in the nurses who strive every day.

And as any four year old would know, sometimes when you are scared, you need heroes.

I would bet on Wendy and Danielle any day.

Ben Janaway is a physician in the United Kingdom.

Image credit: Shutterstock.com11 Shares Share

Its been a great start for my new speakers bureau, Physician Speaking by KevinMD. We are a group of practicing physicians who can tell a story, command the stage, and inspire your audience.

This Spring 2018, were highlighting the following events:

Event planners!

We are booking events for this Summer and Fall, and into 2019.

Why choose Physician Speaking by KevinMD?

1. Direct interaction with Kevin Pho, MD. I will be your contact, guide you through the process, and match you with the physician speaker who best fits your event.

2. Topics that resonate. As a practicing internal medicine physician, and the founder of KevinMD, social medias leading physician voice, I know the issues that todays clinicians care about. My curated group of physician speakers communicate the topics that matter.

3. Amazing speakers. Your audience deserves the best: These dynamic speakers shine on stage. They keynote major conferences, garner historically high audience ratings, and win international speaking awards. And as practicing physicians themselves, their message resonates with your clinician audience.

4. Promotion. Your conference will be promoted on the KevinMD platform, which receives over 3 million monthly page views, and exceeds 250,000 followers on Facebook and Twitter.

Featured speakers

Jordan Grumet, MD

Jordan Grumet, MD is an internal medicine physician and a hospice medical director. He has worked in academic as well as private practices, served as medical director of several nursing homes, and created palliative care programs for skilled nursing facilities.

He is a writer and storyteller who has been published in Medical Economics, the Pharos, the Annals of Internal Medicine, and the Journal of General Internal Medicine. His book, I Am Your Doctor And This Is My Humble Opinion, was published in 2015, and followed by Five Moments: Short Works of Fiction in 2017.

Jordan shares his stories at conferences nationwide, highlighted by an acclaimed performance at the dotMD conference in Dublin, Ireland.

Jordan speaks about the following topics:

Bridging the intimacy gap between physician and patient

Caring 2.0: social media and the rise of the empathic physician

Hospice and the way of the master clinician

Doctor and society: an hour of storytelling

Lipi Roy, MD, MPH

Lipi Roy, MD, MPH is an internal medicine physician, board-certified in addiction medicine, clinical assistant professor at the New York University Department of Population Health, and the medical director of the Kingsboro Addiction Treatment Center in New York City. In her prior role as chief of addiction medicine for New York City jails, she oversaw substance use treatment and recovery efforts at Rikers Island, the nations second-largest jail.

She was previously a primary care physician to Bostons homeless population, where drug overdose was the leading cause of death. In addition to caring for incarcerated and homeless men and women, she treated the underserved in Nicaragua and India, New Orleans residents affected by Hurricane Katrina, and provided medical relief to earthquake victims in Haiti.

Lipis mission is to educate and empower the public to make healthy lifestyle decisions through nutrition, mindfulness, and addiction training. She has spoken at the Agents of Change Summit, appeared on CNN and Charlie Rose, and has been featured in the Boston Globe, Wall Street Journal, Cooking Light, and Oprah.com.

Lipi speaks about the following topics:

Addiction to opioids, alcohol, and tobacco (neurobiology and evidence-based treatment)

Homeless health (common medical and psychiatric illnesses; specialized approaches for management, including trauma-informed care)

Incarceration and opioid addiction (evidence-based treatment strategies and how the current lack of treatment in setting of mass incarceration is a human rights violation)

C. Nicole Swiner, MD

C. Nicole Swiner, MD, known as DocSwiner, is a family physician, two-time best-selling author, blogger, speaker, wife, and mother. She was voted as one of the 10 best doctors in North Carolina in 2017 and is also affectionately known as the Superwoman Complex expert and has written two best-selling books on the topic. She loves taking care of the family as a whole: from the cradle to the grave. Her interests include minority health, womens health, self-care and entrepreneurship.

She attended Duke University, went to medical school at the Medical University of South Carolina, and continues teaching as an adjunct associate professor in family medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. When shes not treating patients at Durham Family Medicine, shes speaking locally and nationally, blogging, teaching others to self-publish and spending time with her family.

Her passion is making medicine plain to her patients, so that all people, from all walks of life, can understand how to take better care of themselves and their families. In January 2016, she launched her inaugural womens health conference, called New Year, New You, and hosted a sold out crowd filled with 20+ vendors, live music, over 14 speakers, 2 panel discussions and giveaways. It has since been an annual event.

DocSwiner speaks about the following topics:

Working smarter and not harder in primary care

The Superwo(man) Complex and avoiding physician burnout

Tips on transitioning into private practice successfully

Physician entrepreneurship and becoming a best-selling author

Physician Speaking by KevinMD: Your audience deserves the best.There were 255 cases where children in Kilkenny, Carlow and South Tipperary were awaiting allocation to a social worker according to the latest figures as of November 2017.

Social Democrats TD, Roisin Shortall, asked the Minister for Children and Youth Affairs for the number of cases awaiting allocation to a social worker in each Tusla local office area.

The revelations come after a Health Information and Quality Authority inspection report for child protection and welfare services in Kilkenny, Carlow, and South Tipperary found major non-compliances.

The report also found children, who were given a high priority level, were likely to be allocated a social worker for assessment.

However children, who were given a medium or low priority level, were often placed on a waiting list for initial assessment, sometimes for over a year.

Some children and families who received a service after being on a waiting list, were not provided with the right service at the right time.

In a written response to Deputy Shortall, Minister Katherine Zappone said that addressing the number of children who are awaiting the allocation of a social worker is one of her key priorities.

She said: I secured funds in Budget 2018 which will allow Tusla to carry out the third year of a 3 year plan to provide for the allocation of a dedicated social worker to all children who need one.

An unallocated case relates to a case about a child who is deemed to need a social work assessment, but has not yet been allocated to a social worker.

Minister Zappone added: All urgent and emergency cases receive immediate attention by the local duty social work team.

The majority of unallocated cases are new referrals, however they may also include children living with their families who had an allocated social worker, or to a child in care, where there is now a social work vacancy.

I am informed by Tusla that a case awaiting allocation may be listed as active on duty.

Tusla indicate that this may include checking with professionals who see the child regularly, or visiting the child and family at home, getting additional information about the childs situation and, in some instances where a child is in care, organising a Care Plan Review and visiting the child.

Information about unallocated cases is published monthly on the Tusla website and the Minister said that the most up to date data available is for November 2017.

There were 24,445 open cases nationally at the end of November. Of these, 4,760 were awaiting allocation of a social worker.A staggering 42% of GPs in Kilkenny will retire in the next five to seven years.

The Irish Medical Organisation (IMO) released county by county data and after Leitrim, Kilkenny has the most number of GPs due to retire in the next few years.

General practice numbers have remained static for over 30 years .

Local GP, Dr Tadhg Crowley has claimed it is a crisis in local health care.

Patients will find it hard to access a GP, he said.

Dr Crowley said the basis of the Slainte health report last year was that general practice would be able to do more.

If the crisis is not addressed this will not be possible. This is not new information, this has been in the public domain for several years, he claimed.

The IMO has been trying to highlight this with successive governments over the last 10 years. None of these warnings have been heeded, he said.

As to the cause, he said new graduates were not being enticed to work in general practice as it is seen to be unviable.

The cuts during the financial emergency for GPs were twice as high as for other public servants and none have been returned to general practice, he said.

This is a hard point for people to understand but the proof of the pudding is there. Graduates are voting with their feet and staying abroad.

The cost of setting up in practice, running a business which is a SME with all its problems and over regulation of healthcare are seen as barriers to working within the Irish healthcare system.

The contract for GPs was devised in 1970, almost 50 years ago, it is not designed for treating patients in the 21st century.

We are training the brightest and the best to work on an out-of-date contract in general practice that does not allow you to use all the skills youve learned, he claimed.What's your idea of a perfect day, or perfect weekend out in Kilkenny?

Well out of a lot of possible perfect days,one very pleasant day would be getting up early in the morning, go for a run in the castle park, call across to the design centre and pick some breakfast, perhaps if needed,call into hair by Nigel & Co to get a little grooming, before making a visit to Nowlan Park to catch a game, then hurl the whole match again in one of the nearby bars, before making my way to The Grapevine,for a glass of gobillard and some divine tapas.

Who has made the greatest contribution to Kilkenny in your lifetime - and why?

In my very short lifetime I feel Eamon Langton has made the greatest contribution to Kilkenny, he has lit up the four corners of Kilkenny with fantastic businesses and premises,he must be one of the largest employers in Kilkenny in the private sector. He is extremely successful and remains humble and is always the gentleman. He is always helping out his team at weddings and local events, to me he is an amazing role model.

Whats your first Kilkenny memory?

.My first memory of Kilkenny is coming into O'Loughlin Gaels to play a senior challenge with my native Gortnahoe/Glengoole. Iwas a young minor at the time, I remember to our surprise Andy Comerford had togged out midfield, I was playing in the half forward line and there was an occasion where Andy had to drop back to the half back line,he was in possession,he went to clear the ball, me a strong young lad at the time attempted to hook him,and the force and strength of his swing, whilst connecting with his hurl, drove my hurl an unbelievable distance. Rumour has it, my hurl is still travelling in mid air since that day. We then grabbed some grub in Supermacs.

What's your favourite part of the county - and why?

My favourite part of the county is Inistioge. It has tranquility, space, greenery and some of the most amazing walks and views in the world,

What do you think gives Kilkenny it's unique identity?

To me what gives Kilkenny its unique identity is the strength of existence of past endeavors, thanks to some very proud locals who are determined to keep it amazing. The people take huge pride in the success of sporting heroes of past and present,the evidence is omnipresent,from the fantastic statue. Since Kilkenny Castle was handed over to Kilkenny by the Butlers in 1967, the theme and finesse of the city has been built around this incredible building which gives you a fantastic combination of the old and new, which is very rare in modern day Ireland.

Do you have a favourite local writer or author?

Of late Ive had the distinct pleasure of encountering some of authors Angela Byrnes work. Im also a fan of John Knox, his column almost brings you to smell the fresh cut grass of match day.

What's the biggest challenge facing the county today?

Parking - it needs to be more accessible for business owners, with my personal experience, our businesses brings a lot of capital to the city, we pay big rates, but yet still have to pay for parking outside our own premises,which to me seems unfair.A local mans world was turned upside down in 2016 when he suffered kidney failure. After receiving his shock health diagnosis, Owen Hanrahan (39), who lives in Killamery with his wife Therese and three sons, had to wind down his haulage business.

In July 2016, Owen was diagnosed with Nephrotic Syndrome and was in kidney failure. He spent over 10 weeks in hospital.

His kidney function had declined to less than 16% and he commenced dialysis treatment. Initially he underwent dialysis treatment three times weekly at Fresenius Dialysis Centre in Kilkenny and in recent months his three and a half hourly treatments have been reduced to twice weekly.

Although the dialysis is working well for him, he is very lethargic with his condition and is hoping to be accepted onto the transplant waiting list for a kidney transplant which would help turn things around for him and his family.

Now, Owen is organising an event for the Irish Kidney Association to raise vital funds for the work they do.

I was greatly heartened by my community which rallied around me and in a short space of time they raised 17,000, through a Truck Run, to help support me and my young family, says Owen.

This eased the financial burden which was thrust upon us as, like so many other formerly self-employed people, it was difficult to access disability or any other state allowances for almost a year after I ceased working.

I with the support of friends and some members of the Kilkenny Branch of the Irish Kidney Association, including Seamus and Arlene Carrigan, are making plans for a Motorcade and Motor exhibition at The Hub at Cillin Hill, Kilkenny which will include swift cars, trucks and motorbikes to raise funds for the Irish Kidney Association and awareness about organ donation.

The event will be held at the Hub, Cillin Hill on Sunday, April 8, from noon to 4.30pm  the end of Organ Donor Awareness Week. Anyone who would like to take part exhibition stand or enter a vehicle can email kilkennybigevent@outlook.

com.

"I would encourage everyone to consider organ donation, as like me, you never know when organ failure might visit a member of your family. Organ donation saves lives," said Owen.

"It is such a selfless decision for families to donate a loved ones organs so that other people like myself can benefit from the gift of life.A major conference for tech and coding will take place here later this year, with people expected to travel from far and wide to visit the Marble City.

Registration is now open for DojoCon Kilkenny 2018, the annual global CoderDojo Community conference. The event promises to be action packed, and will bring together the best of the Medieval city of Kilkenny and the global tech industry, with speaker events, workshops and a mega hackathon, which is free to all Ninjas aged 7-17.

The event is also open to the public, so people dont need to be involved in CoderDojo to register. The DojoCon team has confirmed an exciting line up of contributors including representatives from Microsoft, Pin Point Alerts, Red Lemonade, Expedia, Glasseye, Trademark Now, CipherTechs,Blacknight, and more. Companies in IT, security, VFX, animation and science sectors are also due to be announced over the coming weeks and months.

It will be an opportunity for those interested in technology to network with like-minded individuals and meet companies.

Some of the many topics for exploration over the weekend will include AI, robotics, accessible technological development, collaboration, programming and design thinking.

DojoCon events will be hosted in some of Kilkennys most historic and iconic locations showcasing the citys amazing design and innovations of the past while focusing on how Kilkenny has evolved as a creative and innovative centre of excellence.

Tickets are for sale here, or for more information, see www.dojocon.com.

Taster

Meanwhile, on Sunday, April 15, four Dojos  Coderdojo Kilkenny, Wexford, Tramore and Waterford  are collaborating for the very first time in organising Megadojo South East. Coderodojo Kilkenny is hosting the event in the Newpark Hotel.

Young people are invited to a Taster session of computer coding. It will bring together young people from several Dojos as well as those whove never attended a Dojo before.

Workshops will take place suitable for complete beginners, to advanced coders. Engineers Ireland is supporting the event.

Tickets are available now on Eventbrite.Children across Kilkenny will benefit from funding to support new and existing play and recreation facilities for children and young people, according to Fine Gael Junior Minister, John Paul Phelan, TD.

The news comes as progress continues to be made on a new play area in Ferrybank as well as plans for a skate park close to the brewery site in Kilkenny city.

The Capital Grant Funding Scheme for Play and Recreation will see the roll out of new and innovative play and recreation projects and the improvement of existing facilities. Minister Phelan strongly urged interested groups in Kilkenny to apply and to contact playandrecreation@dyca.ie for further information, an application form and criteria.

Every child needs access to modern, quality play areas which are inclusive, accessible and safe. These are all the more important in urban areas where many families are now living in apartments and have no outdoor play space of their own.

Play areas must give a sense of adventure. At a time when outdoor activities are often overlooked for hi-tech games, we must ensure our play areas are exciting, innovative and engaging for young minds.

The total amount of funding available in 2018 is 20,000 per local authority with matched funding from the local authority. This funding will provide state of the art play areas for all children in here in Kilkenny, encouraging them play in safe surroundings.

The deadline for the application is Friday, 13th of April, Minister Phelan said.Stuff reports:

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has delayed attending a state visit to personally receive a Greenpeace petition calling for the end of oil exploration. Standing in front of a series of posters of Labour leaders which had made high profile environmental decisions, Ardern said her Government was actively considering the issue. Although her statement was light on details and Ardern has previously refused to rule out ending offering new exploration blocks, the decision to walk to the front of Parliament was highly symbolic.

So much for regional development. Ban oil exploration and Taranaki will get hit hard.

But hey never mind if all those people in Taranaki lose their jobs  Labour will give them free tertiary degrees to compensate!

Ardern told the crowd she was supposed to be attending a state visit but had elected to receive the petition because of its importance. Behind her the Parliament flagpole was flying the Indonesian flag to mark the visit of President Joko Widodo. By 4pm Ardern appeared to walk back the comments, saying consideration of what to do with the process under which areas are offered for oil exploration was something that every government does around this time of year. National leader Simon Bridges said there was nothing in the announcement. I think this is a quickly-invented publicity stunt by the Prime Minister to distract from her week from hell, Bridges said, accusing Ardern of giving different messages to different audiences. By all accounts it seems the Prime Minister was trying to give an impression of high symbolism, of leaving a foreign leader waiting because this was such a pressing issue, Bridges said.

So it was virtue signalling.

If we are to transition to a low carbon economy, we will continue to need fossil fuels and particularly gas, just to keep the lights on.

If the Government plans to ban oil exploration within NZ, will they also ban oil imports? Otherwise all that would happen is we import more.

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TVNZ report:

The feisty exchange opened Parliaments Question Time today, with the National Leader attempting to put the Prime Minister on the back foot over the issue.

Does she stand by her statement that we have set a high bar when it comes to spending taxpayers money and if so does the fact that eight ministers flew to the Chathams to open a wharf last week meet that bar? Mr Bridges asked.

It would be quite appropriate for one or two Ministers to attend the wharf opening  maybe the Ministers of Transport and Regional Development.

But eight Ministers attending is just a junket taking advantage of taxpayer funded travel.Posted Thursday, March 22, 2018 10:15 am

Cities and corporations adore being on lists like Best City to Raise a Family or Best Company to Work For. But, beginning in 1988, there was a list that neither wanted its name on: the Federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification, or WARN, which provides details to communities facing impending plant closings.

The WARN law requires businesses planning a mass lay off or closing to notify the state where the layoffs will take place 60 days before the action. The idea was simple: advance notice would prohibit companies from padlocking their doors and would give states time to plan reemployment services.

Throughout the 90s and 00s, an ever-growing number of communities went on the list as the auto industry struggled with massive restructuring, trimming its workforce in half.

On June 2, 2008, Janesville, Wisconsin, found itself on the ignominious list. It began with a phone call. There was always a phone call. This time, Rick Wagoner, Chairman and CEO of General Motors at the time, placed a call to congressman Paul Ryan, who hailed from Janesville. His news was straightforward. Wagoner told Ryan that some 2,800 workers were headed to the scrap heap of unemployment and the plant would shutter by 2010.

Washington Post reporter and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Amy Goldstein tells the saga with compassion in her award winning book, Janesville: An American Story.

Goldstein, who covers social policy issues for the Post, had been covering the effects of the housing crisis and the middle class recession when she decided to look at the impacts of a major plant closing.

Most of what had been written was from a macro level. I wanted to look at it differently, Goldstein said. I was looking for a small city that had lost a lot of jobs and Janesville lingered in my mind. It was never in the Rust Belt and I didnt want to write about Detroit, an old union town.

She turned her focus to telling the story of a plant closing through the eyes of individual workers and their families, while putting the closure into the context of a dramatically changing political climate.

Initially, Goldstein spent five months identifying and talking with people in Janesville who would ultimately become the focus of her book. She would return numerous times and spend countless hours on the telephone.

I thought it was important to not just include workers, but also people coming of age. There was a lot of teenagers caught up in the closing and families tended to keep this private, she said. I got to know many more residents who would not fit in the book, but the characters in the book are representative of the community.

Goldstein delves into the post layoff lives and blues of a union official, housewives, recent and long- time UAW workers, community boosters, local and state politicians, educators, business leaders and family members.

As the author follows the individuals and families, the layoffs ramp up, supplemental benefits run out and savings are depleted. Workers enter retraining programs with great hope, but with little chance of an equivalent job.

Some, like Matt Wopat, become GM nomads  transferring to another GM plant, a four and half-hour drive away, returning home to their families on weekends.

Goldstein also tells how average folks step up. Amy Venuti, a high school teacher, helps manage a closet where teenagers who cant afford new clothes and toiletries go to when in need. Social worker Ann Forbeck helps starts Project 16:49, a program for the burgeoning number of homeless teenagers.

Goldstein is especially good at telling the dramatic story of two women, Kristi and Barb, who take classes at the local technical college to work as jail guards.

Theyre decent jobs, but the pay is less than one-half of a GM job. For a time their future looks bright, but soon Barb can no longer handle the job and leaves. Her best friend Kristi begins an affair with a prisoner and when she is discovered, commits suicide.

But there are slivers of hope. The Whitakers twin daughters, Alyssa and Kayzia, step up by taking two and three after-school jobs to earn extra money for the family.

In one emotional scene, the twins take their mother shopping using their hardearned money to splurge on things like meat, which had disappeared from the familys dinner menu.

Working with a local university to conduct a survey of worker attitudes, Goldstein confirms one of her worst suspicions: federal job training programs are ineffective.

Goldstein writes, Job retraining, it turned out, was not a path to more work or better pay in an around Janesville.

I also learned just how personal leaving work is. People are losing sleep; there are strains on the family, she said. The laid off workers take it personally even if it is not about them.

Another observation Goldstein makes is, falling out of the middle class is harder than being poor all along.

Eight years after the Janesville closing, the unemployment rate has dropped to 4 percent, but the author cautions that does not tell the whole story. Wages havent come back, she said.

The Goldstein event is the inaugural program in a lecture series exploring historical and contemporary topics relating to the auto industry, according to one of the events organizers John Beck, an MSU professor and chairperson of Lansings Motor Cities National Heritage Area.

The Lecture Series is co-sponsored by the Motor Cities and MSUs Our Daily Work/ Our Daily Lives.

The City Pulse Book Club selection for April is Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63, by Taylor Branch. The book is the first of a threepart series on the Civil Rights Movement.

Upcoming books include Slouching Towards Bethlehem, by Joan Didion (May) and Bobby Kennedy, by Chris Matthews (June).

Goldstein Appearances March 26 12:15 p.m. MSU Museum Auditorium

409 W Circle Dr. East Lansing, MI 48824 and March 26 7 p.m. R.E. Olds Transportation Museum 240 Museum Dr. Lansing, MI 48933 Free Books will be for salePosted Thursday, March 22, 2018 10:15 am

Too old and too white. Those are major reasons the Great Lakes Folk Festival wont return to East Lansing next year.

The main demographic for the festival is older, white and middle class, said Mark Auslander, director of the MSU Museum, which has coordinated the event since 2002. We can, I think, do better. We have diverse kinds of performance groups, but nowhere near the kind of diversity that reflects what greater Lansing has.

Its not out of step for Auslander. When City Pulse profiled the newly arrived museum director last year, he said museums should challenge themselves to tear down walls socially. Auslander was tasked in the late 90s to broaden the demographic of the Smithsonians Africa exhibit, which  before his adjustments  was criticized for feeling too voyeuristic and attracting few black visitors.

Were reimaging the planning process so that historically excluded voices are centrally involved in this. Its going to be fantastic, otherwise, its just the same old thing over and over again, Auslander explained. I dont think any of us want to be reproducing the same festival that existed in 2003. Art is like a shark, if it doesnt go forward it sinks.

Though a revamped version will appear in 2019, the Great Lakes name, according to the co-founder and longtime festival director, Marsha MacDowell, is likely to be retired for good. MacDowell said the museums new vision under Auslander will probably see an entirely different event rise from her festivals ashes.

Under her direction, MacDowell said the festival had been working hard to diversify its target audience  one of Auslanders key points of contention.

MacDowell offered several examples, such as sending fliers to black church bulletins, printing festival literature in several languages and providing festival information to regional Native American pow-wows.

MacDowell also cited the help she had promoting the festival from WKARs Spanish language radio host, El Chayo Cervantes, in hopes of reaching beyond a white audience.

But MacDowell wasnt too quick to jump onboard with Auslanders assessment that the festival was suffering from a lack of diversity. What Auslander hopes for, according to MacDowell, might prove more difficult than he imagines.

Its hard to do. Weve had studies done that gathered information that showed the demographics of the festival reflected the population of Lansing, MacDowell said. Cultural organizations in general can struggle to attract whats outside of their demographic.

If you look at past groups that have been onstage, they are not all old and they are not all white. The question is, How do you draw those communities in? said Ten Pound Fiddle booking manager Sally Potter.

Potter argues that the suddenness of the announcement and the bad taste left in the mouths of many, may harm Auslanders ability to retain community support through the reconfiguration process.

The irony is you need community members to help you. If youre gonna pull the rug out from under your community, you might not get any help when you need them, Potter continued.

While MacDowell and the greater Lansing folk music community worry the yearlong delay will crush public interest in future events, Auslander sees it as the only effective option. He believes that only taking a few months to reconfigure the festival would result in changes that are simply tacked on.

The problem is, when a group of well-meaning, privileged white people get together and say, Were going to add on a little bit of underrepresented folks, that is not a serious solution, Auslander said. A serious solution is saying, Were all going to learn together and the white folks involved are going to critically examine their own white privilege and class privilege. Auslander detailed the process of his solution as one where the board of organizers closely consults and integrates a group comprising diverse ethnic and economic backgrounds.

Sure, the easy thing is to keep doing the same thing with just a little bit of addition, Auslander said. But, if were serious about transformation, if were really going to change the nature of the cultural conversation, sometimes you have to slow things down to bring everybody together and move things forward.

But Auslander and the MSU Museum arent looking toward retooling the festival on their own. Auslander is pushing for stronger collaboration between the museum and the city, in an effort to create a mixed form of governance. Auslander said this entails discussions between the city, artists and the public about what can push the envelope and what needs to absolutely stay and be repeated.

Everyone is worried that there isnt going to be traditional music. In fact, we expect theres going to be a lot of folk and traditional music in the months ahead. Part of the planning process is creating jam sessions and juxtapositions of different performing artists, Auslander said. So we need music throughout the whole process. I think people will ultimately be pleased and excited with the results.Posted Thursday, March 22, 2018 10:15 am

Lansings top two elected officials are quick to justify the $5,000 fee the citys new ordinance is charging annually for medical marijuana facility licenses.

The enforcement and police effort are going to cost more than what we anticipate bringing in with the fees, Mayor Andy Schor said.

Lansing City Clerk Chris Swope said the city will at best break even on regulating the businesses paying the fees.

But press them on details and they get, well, vague.

The city has collected $725,000 from 145 applicants. It stands to keep as much as $562,500, and thats not a one-time potential windfall. Annual renewals are $5,000 as well.

The story that expenses will justify the fees traces back to City Attorney Jim Smiertka, according to City Council President Carol Wood. She said Smiertka had been noting the likelihood of costs exceeding revenues dating back almost a year.

Wood said determining the true cost of the additional work would require sanctioning a time study, which she said she assumed would back up Smiertkas narrative. That time study would need to demonstrate how city time will add up to $5,000 a year per marijuana business, presumably for policing and building inspections.

Smiertka did not respond to requests for comment. He could not be asked whether, for example, the fee is based not on anticipated expenses but on getting the city the maximum it could collect  which under state law is $5,000. As in, these businesses are rolling in it, so charge them the max.

Time will tell if the pot fee passes the smell test.

The license application process is ongoing, so it is difficult to say whether the amount of revenue received will offset costs to the city, said Valerie Marchand, communications manager for the city of Lansing. In other words, shes not sure the licensing fees will pay the citys full expenses.

If the fees are higher than actual costs, then they are not really fees. Theyre a tax, and a tax requires public approval in Michigan. Thats the result of a Michigan Supreme Court ruling from 1999 over Lansings rain fee that constrained how much a municipality can charge for fees before it becomes a tax, requiring voter approval. The city attorney who lost that case? You guessed it: Smiertka.

Heres where the citys haul is coming from: 85 applicants for dispensary licenses; 44 from growers; 14 from processors and one from a transporter; and one more for a testing facility. Those are the five types of licenses the new state law allows.

Half of the citys $5,000 fee will be refunded to applicants who are denied licenses. That will be the case for at least 65 of the 85 provisioning center applicants in this first round of applications, because of a ceiling the City Council put on the number of dispensaries. The city ordinance allows 25 dispensaries, but there will be a second round starting in November for the other five.

Eighteen applications  all provisioning centers  have already been denied, according to city records. These applicants may have appeals pending before the clerk or the citys Medical Marihuana Commission, which will hold its next meeting on April 20.

Requests for comment from the Lansing Police Department for the specific costs and added responsibilities of enforcing the citys marijuana facility licensing ordinance were forwarded to Marchand, who said LPD is working in concert with other city departments on enforcement measures related to marijuana.

The city has been able to determine one exact cost. To assist in the application review process, Swopes office brought in ICF Inc., to the tune of up to $80,000.

ICF is responsible for reviewing application materials like business plans and financial statements, as well as providing feedback on how licenses should be distributed.

Scoring the applications is a huge project, but theres also all the review of the applications by various departments of the city, Swope said. Are the buildings up to code, is their zoning correct  all those departmental checks to make sure that they meet the requirements of the city ordinance.

It costs even more to apply for a state license: $6,000.

And an applicant could be on the hook for additional state fees if the cost of processing the application exceeds the original $6,000, said David Harns of the Department of Licensing and Regulatory Affairs.

Harns said if an applicant was a large company with many individuals to investigate, or if they had a long legal history requiring an in-depth investigation, those additional fees might be necessary.

On top of $11,000 annually in state and city licensing fees, businesses will be required to pay a regulatory assessment fee to the state.

The fees for recipients of a Class A grower license  good for up to 500 plants  will be capped at $10,000. For all other facilities, this could run anywhere from $10,000 to as high as $57,000, depending on the number of licenses granted.Posted Thursday, March 22, 2018 10:15 am

The announcement Tuesday by Mayor Andy Schor that he has pushed the pause button on the sale and redevelopment of Lansing City Hall is rekindling a discussion to create a regional district court and police lockup facility.

Talk of combining Ingham Countys three district courts  54A in Lansing, 54B in East Lansing and the 55th for the rest of the county  started in 2010 as the local leaders looked for cost savings in the wake of the Great Recession.

Its time to have that conversation, 55th District Judge Thomas Boyd said Monday in an interview in his chambers. Previous discussions didnt go very far, said Boyd. But a review conducted by the chief judges of each court eight years ago showed combining the courts administration could save as much as $1.7 million.

The savings would come from eliminating duplicated positions such as chief clerk. The plan did not consider combining all the operations into one building.

I have been in many conversations about locations for Ingham County District courts over the past eight to 10 years, Boyd wrote in an email. He said sites that were brought up included the Frandor shopping center area and at Jolly and Dunckel roads.

East Lansing Mayor Mark Meadows said the previous recommendations did not find support from the East Lansing City Council or the Ingham County Prosecutors Office.

It kind of bit the dust, Meadows said, but he added, It's still a good plan.

Local leaders, such as Meadows, said they are open to possible partnerships in creating a combined district court lockup facility but caution consolidations could take years.

I've talked to Andy about what we would hope to achieve out of a consolidation and we're still taking a look at that, said Meadows. I think he wants to move on his City Hall decision, but what I've tried to make clear is that it's a complicated issue. It is not something that happens overnight.

Ingham County Commissioner Mark Grebner concurred with Meadows.

We're happy to cooperate, Grebner, an East Lansing Democrat and long-time commissioner, said. We've been pitching court consolidation over 20 years to the county Board of Commissioners. We could never get their interest.

Grebner said the city of East Lansings growing financial concerns give consideration of court consolidation more urgency.

East Lansing has suddenly noticed that the court is draining money from them, although with fake accounting they can pretend it's not, he said. And now they want to save a lot of money because they're desperate for cash.

Meadows said the city has been quietly discussing the courts as a cost-saving measure for some time but its been in the shadows.

It's something that you look at if you don't have the partners to actually accomplish it, then you sort of upset the court and everybody else with the idea that something might happen when it is far more complicated and difficult than people realize, Meadows said.

Cart before horse?

Schors decision delays a plan worked out in the last months of the Bernero administration to sell City Hall for redevelopment as a hotel by a Chicago firm, Beitler Real Estate. In turn, the city would move into the old Lansing State Journal building, on Lenawee Street on the south side of downtown.

The Bernero plan, however, did not determine what would happen with the citys district court or police operations, including a short-term lockup facility, which are housed in the City Hall complex at Michigan and Capitol avenues.

Four proposals for the sale and redevelopment of the complex were considered last year. Mayor Virg Bernero selected Beitler to redevelop the mid-century building. The developer told the Council that it was prepared to invest $42 million into developing the hotel.

Redevelopment of the LSJ building, also by Beitler, could cost as much as $50 million, Beitler Real Estate and city officials told the City Council in December.

City Council President Carol Wood said city officials last year said the lockup and courts building could cost an additional $40 million, But at the breakneck pace set by Bernero, the city would have found itself moving the courts and lockup at least twice before they got into a final location. Schor said that would be hard on the employees and the operations, as well as on citizens.

A critical City Council hammered Bernero administration officials about the missing plans for a police and courts during a Dec. 11 public hearing on the proposals. Grebner called the Bernero plan half a plan.

Whither City Hall preservation

The delay potentially jeopardizes preserving the current City Hall, considered a significant example of mid-century architecture in mid-Michigan.

Schor said his preference remains the Beitler plan, which of the four considered by the Bernero administration best preserved City Hall.

He said Paul Beitler, president of Beitler Real Estate, said he understood the reason for the delay and he said he is still interested in moving forward but we cant lock him into anything until we have an understanding of the timeline, but I still very much like his proposal and we will see what the future holds.

He cautioned, though, that you never know whats going to happen with the economy, whats going to happen with costs and things, so once we know, youll know and hell know and then he will let us know.

Moreover, Schor said that while his preference remains the Beitler plan, We had four submissions for this building and there could be others.

If he were to say at some point Im out, then we would consider other proposals.

Moreover, his preference for the Beitler plan is not enough to add additional costs.

The citizens of Lansing have to come first, and they have to have access to courts, we have to have a place to house our inmates. So to get out of this building in two or three months into a transitional space not knowing where the courts and the lockup are going to be I believe would be irresponsible on our part.

All he would say about the Bernero administrations decision to move ahead without a plan for the courts and the lockup was, They moved on their own timeline.

The only location Schor specifically mentioned as a location for the courts and lockup was the Veterans Memorial Courthouse, on Kalamazoo Street in downtown Lansing, but he did not preclude other sites.

He said the courts and lockup are separable, but I wouldnt put them too far apart.

East Lansings Meadows has previously said he had an interest in a shared lockup facility but expressed concern about the time it would take an officer off the road to transport a prisoner to the location. He opposed setting up a joint facility at the Veterans Memorial building, but he said would be interested in a location nearer the border of Lansing and East Lansing.

Grebner, who chairs the commissioners finance committee, notes that any deal would ultimately have to be a good deal for the county. That means the agreements will have to provide a solid and proven system to pay for the buildings and operations.

Schor said he is interested in having the Ingham County Sheriff s Office operate lockup. They can take on that liability because this is what they do, said Schor. I think in my ideal world the county would agree to do a lockup for district and circuit court.

Sheriff Scott Wrigglesworth has previously said he would not be opposed to that, but it would have to be a cost-neutral option. That means the city would have to foot the bill for deputies to staff the facility, cover insurance and other associated costs.The mishap at Hyderabad airport was caused after the IndiGo's 7117 flight, ferrying 73 passengers, suffered a tyre-burst at around 10:25 pm on Wednesday. (Representational image/ANI)

New Delhi, March 21: Budget carrier IndiGo on Wednesday rejected the report of collaborating with Qatar Airways to bid for Air India. IndiGo in a statement clarified that there are no ongoing discussions of such nature.

"There have been some Press reports indicating that IndiGo is partnering with an airline from the Gulf to bid for Air India," IndiGo said. "While IndiGo normally doesn't respond to rumours, in this particular instance, we would like to state that there are no ongoing discussions of this nature," it added.

As per some media reports, IndiGo and Qatar Airways were likely to make a joint bid for Air India. IndiGo is owned by Interglobe Aviation Ltd, while Qatar Airways is owned by the Government of Qatar."Advertisers will be prohibited from running political ads  electoral or issue-based  until they are authorised, Facebook said. (Photo Credits: Getty Images)

Mumbai, March 22: Himanshu Sharma, Vice-President  Ovleno Busines Intelligence (OBI), came out with a clarification surrounding the ongoing controversy of data-breach scandal in India, earlier today. The Vice President clarified that his organization believes in the ethical and legal system in India and their organisation had not taken any project with Cambridge Analytica, related to social media (especially Facebook).

Controversy in a nutshell:

According to an investigation done by a Britain-based Channel 4, Cambridge Analytica in association with India-based research firm  OBI  tried to influence the voters, and eventually the results, during the four crucial elections in recent years for their clients. The political clients mentioned on OBIs website are BJP, Congress, and Janata Dal-United (JD-U).

The UK-based analytics firm, Cambridge Analytica, was alleged to have breached data of over 50 million Facebook users.

Clarification:

In his clarification, Himanshu Sharma said, We believe in ethics & legal system of India. We are not denying our association with (Strategic Communication Laboratories) SCL / CA (Cambridge Analytica). We are a ground research company closely working with various media houses & not undertake any project with Cambridge Analytica related to social media (especially Facebook).

We are a ground research company closely working with various media houses & not undertake any project with #CambridgeAnalytica related to social media (specially Facebook): Himanshu Sharma, Vice-President, Ovleno Business Intelligence  ANI (@ANI) March 22, 2018

BJP vs Congress:

A day after the controversy broke out; politicians cut across party lines left no chance of blaming their opponents in the data-breach-scandal. Political parties  Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and Indian National Congress (INC)  left no stone unturned and shifted the blame on each other in no time.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg admitted making a mistake over this data-scandal and stated that the company needs to step up. In his statement, Zuckerberg said, We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can't then we don't deserve to serve you.

It will be interesting to see how far the acknowledgement from OBI and acceptance from Facebook founder will help the cause. For now, the political parties are embroiled in blaming each other; it will be interesting to see how the matter goes from here and if theres any substantial outcome from it!

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Mar 22, 2018 06:26 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).We are reading about climate change. We are suffering from the heat waves and cold storms because of global warming. We are aware of the day zero situations that we may soon have to face but we are still not acting upon it. Or whatever we are doing is not enough. The sea enveloping the land, drowning civilisations, dramatic weather conditions are all a little far but sooner is the extinction of your favourite food items. This climate change will soon take away your fun from weekends too. Amongst the many things that face the fear of extinction, there is beer and chicken tikka too! The latest report by WWF points out that chicken tikka as a dish will be transformed heavily in taste in the coming years. Let us look at the food items which will soon face extinction due to climate change:

Coffee

Dont you feel cranky if you do not get your cup of coffee before any important work? For habitual coffee drinkers, it is a potion. But coffee plantations are affected due to the warmness in the climate. The major coffee producing regions are threatened due to higher temperatures, longer droughts situations. Coffee requires very specific climatic conditions and a slight change can also make a huge difference. Indian coffee plantations went down by 30% in the year 2011. We may have started feeling it yet but can you imagine running to stores and being told no more coffee!

Chocolate

Its true, there is a prediction that the world will run out of chocolate in the next 5 years! The farmers in Africa are resorting to producing other crops than cocoa. 60% of the worlds cocoa production happens in Ghana. But the land quality has degraded, lack of available sustainable land has forced farmers to give up on the farming. So the almost $9bn cocoa industry is likely to face supply shortages. The amount of land under cocoa cultivation has decreased by 40% in the past four decades and in another decade, we might be running out of it!

Beer

Your weekend comfort partner is in much danger too and we are not kidding! Brewers around the world are struggling to find secure water supplies. Several parts of the world face the risk of day zero, a situation of no water left. The weather changes are also affecting the crops of malt barley. Along with water, your beer is at risk. Save water, Drink Beer will not work unless we save water!

French fries

And along with your beer, goes your beer snack to weather change- French fries. In fact, potatoes are at a risk of cultivation too. French fries are a popular dish across the borders and the consumption of potatoes is extensive given the growing population. The cultivation is not happening in the same vein and thus we face a risk of major shortage.

Chicken tikka

Those who eat non-veg, love gorging on chicken tikka masala and the similar dishes. But the latest reports will take away your cheer. By 2050, there would be no chicken tikka. By then the chickens will be fed on algae and insects and their production could be affected. By then not just chicken, we might also face a shortage of other ingredients used in the recipe like tomatoes, onions. So, the rates will surge naturally forcing people to opt for some replacements. In fact, UKs favourite fish and chips also pose the same risk.

It is time we start blaming the climate and realise how collectively we are all responsible for this. Your love for beer, chocolate, coffee or chicken tikka has to tone down and love for the planet needs to rise instead. Because you if hope for having a good coffee or your beer securely then we need to start acting up and protect the extinction. It is not a joke guys, climate change will snatch away your dearest food items and the feelings would be no less than the end of the world, before the actual end!

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Mar 22, 2018 05:18 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).* Brazils leading tile and water-container maker, Eternit, has filed for bankruptcy in Sao Paulo state. This comes after the supreme court (STF) made it illegal for companies to make products containing any forms of asbestos in September 2017 following recommendations from the World Health Organisation (WHO). Last year, Eternit was forced to pay R$500m (US$150,000) in damages from a court in the north-eastern state of Bahia and R$150,000 (US$45,000) in compensation to residents who became ill from asbestos poisoning.Laois native and popular RTE weather forecaster Evelyn Cusack is set to take up the top forecasting post in Ireland at Met Eireann.

Unfortunately, taking the Head of Forecasting position will see the Clonaslee woman signing off from TV duties. She became the best known face of TV forecasting over many years.

Ms Cusack is to take up the vacancy created following the retirement Gerry Fleming last year.

The Laois woman hails from Chapel St, Clonaslee. She attended national school in the village located in the heart of the Slieve Blooms. She family move subsequently to Dublin area with her family.

An occasional visitor he, herself and her sister visited Clonaslee last year.

The meteorologist is expected to take up the role in the coming weeks. She first appeared on RTEs Six One News in October 1988.

She played a key role the National Emergency Co-Ordination Group preparations and responses to the recent 'Beast from the East' and Storm Emma and Storm Ophelia last year.

She became Irelands Favourite Weather Forecaster at the TV Now Awards in 2009, the first time an RTE weather presenter won the award.

SNOW IN THE EASTER FORECASTRTE News correspondent for Laois and other Midland counties Ciaran Mullooly has taken leave of absence from his reporting role to fulfill a dream of travelling to Australia.

Notable from his absence from the station's St Patrick's Day parades coverage, the big Longford man is already enjoying the sights and sounds down under.

He tweeted on March 11: "And so the adventure begins - 18 years after we first planned it with my late brother Pat by our side. Thanks to Mick for minding the house - will be saying goodbye to this gadget for a while and savouring the memories in real time. Gday mate ..until we meet again"

He has already savoured the views from the world famous Syndey harbour bridge and tweeted a picture of Sydney Harbour.

We can look forward to following his journey over the coming months on twitter.

Well ....I said I would cross it when I came to it ....so here goes ....#Oz2018 pic.twitter.com/xrysDy5UTM  Ciaran Mullooly (@ciaranmullooly) March 20, 2018Offaly TD Carol Nolan has accepted her suspension from Sinn Fein is "regrettable" but that it was "unavoidable".

Dep Nolan, a likely candidate in the re-united Laois Offaly constituency at the next General Election, was suspended after she voted against a bill which legislates for the referendum later this year, a move that was contrary to her party's stated position.

She fell foul to the party's whip system and received a three-month suspension from parliamentary duties as a result.

"There's no animosity or ill will from me toward the party. This is the first time I've disagreed on a matter with the party and I foresee it being the last time such a disparity arises.

"I voted according to my conscience and did not vote in favour of the legislation put before me as it was greatly at odds with my strong pro-life values.

"The Bill put before the Dail yesterday proposed to delete article 40.3 from the constitution which seeks to remove the right to life of the unborn from the constitution. This is the only legal protection that the unborn have as the Supreme Court highlighted recently," said Dep Nolan.

In the wake of her decision, criticism in some quarters suggested Dep Nolan should have voted in favour of the legislation which paves the way for the people of Ireland to have their say on the issue, rather than strictly legislating for abortion itself. A number of commentators suggested that her position sought to bar the people from having their say at all.

In response to such claims, Carol said the proposed legislation was too open-ended, saying.

"The Bill also stated that 'provision may be made by law for the regulation of termination of pregnancy'." The government is seeking permission from the country to legislate for abortion but has not clarified the full extent of such legislation as of yet.

"To vote for this bill would have been endorsing the removal of the right to life of the unborn and endorsing abortion. I chose to take a principled stance based on my pro-life values to vote against the bill for those reasons."

"As a Republican and pro-life woman I firmly believe that the right to life of all unborn children should be protected and defended and that each and every child should be cherished equally. The right to life is after all a fundamental human right," she said.

"The Eighth Amendment must be retained in our constitution...repealing it would be a regressive step replicating the mistakes of England where 1 in 5 babies are aborted," she said.

The Government hopes to hold the Eighth Amendment referendum in May.The Dock, Carrick-on-Shannon is the place to be on Saturday, March 24 when Disco E Cultura host a vinyl-only party focusing on the music and cultures of Latin America, West Africa and the Caribbean islands.



DJs Mick Donohoe and Jeremy Murphy reside over a concept thats a little different from your standard club night. Disco e Cultura was originally a small label found on Latin American records during the 60s and 70s, and translates to the phrase Vinyl is Culture.



The concept is one of no fixed abode. Disco e Cultura prides itself on its exquisite musical choices guaranteed to get the crowd grooving in the warm glow of a carnival atmosphere.



The only thing these DJs care about is sharing their sonic wisdom and seeing happy dancers.



The idea of Disco e Cultura began in Sao Paulo and has visited location all over the world. It now has a home with regular nights in Dublin and Cork is fast becoming the stuff of musical legend.



Make sure you join the party when it comes to The Dock Arts Centre, Carrick-on-Shannon on Saturday, March 24.



DJs Mick t-woc and Jeremy Discobar Murphy will bring you musically journeying through South America, Brazil, West Africa and the Caribbean.



Disco E Cultura. Good vibes and great, great grooves are guaranteed.



Tickets are 8 and are available now through the ticket office, ph: (071) 9650828 or at www.thedock.ie

Read Also:

The Factory Girls are coming to The Glens Centre, Manorhamilton

Amazing return to the stage for The Acorn Players with 'Loophole' in Gorvagh Community CentreMar 22, 2018, 5 AM

The souvenir sheet for Great Britains RAF Centenary issue includes four stamps featuring photographs of the Red Arrows flying in different formations.

Aeronautical artist Michael Turner painted the aircraft images featured on Royal Mails new stamps celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Royal Air Force. A se-tenant pair of nondenominated first-class stamps shows the Lightning F6 and Hurricane Mk I.

One of Royal Mails first-day covers for the RAF Centenary issue is franked with a pane of Machin definitives from the prestige booklet.

Depicted on the 1.57 pair are the Sopwith Camel F1 and Nimrod MR2.

The Vulcan B2 and Typhoon FGR4 are illustrated on the pair of 1.40 stamps.

By Molly Goad

Great Britains Royal Mail recognized the worlds oldest independent air force in a new stamp set issued March 20.

The Royal Air Force, the United Kingdoms aerial warfare organization, was born when the Royal Flying Corps merged with the Royal Naval Air Service on April 1,1918.

Painted by aeronautical artist Michael Turner, six of the stamps depict aircraft covering RAFs first 100 years. These stamps are in three se-tenant (side-by-side) pairs.

Royal Mails RAF Centenary issue also includes a souvenir sheet of four stamps featuring the RAF Red Arrows Aerobatic Team.

A prestige booklet contains all 10 new stamps, Queen Elizabeth II Machin definitives, stamps from a 2015 issue, plus text and images related to the RAF.

The first two stamps in the se-tenant pairs are nondenominated, each with a 1st inscription indicating that they pay the basic first-class domestic letter rate (67 pence as of March 26; 65p on the day the stamps were issued).

The designs show the Lightning F6 and Hurricane Mk I. Royal Mail said of these two aircraft:

Lightning is touted as being the fastest British-made fighter of all time, and in 1959 it was the RAFs first supersonic aircraft. Theres no doubt, this fighter had power, with its two Rolls Royce engines enabling takeoff and rate of climb faster than any other jet. Later versions could reach speeds of twice the speed of sound. Lightning served as the RAFs main interceptor for 20 years.

The Hurricane is a single-seat fighter credited with winning the Battle of Britain and attaining more than half of the German losses. Hurricanes were a major player during the Dunkirk evacuation and saw action in the defence of Malta, North Africa and the Far East. The craft was also the RAFs chief night fighter facing German bombing raids in 1941 and 1942.

The se-tenant pair of 1.40 stamps showcase the Vulcan B2 and Typhoon FGR4. These stamps paid an international mail rate for letters up to 20 grams when they were issued; that rate increased to 1.45 on March 26. Under the new rate structure, 1.40 is the rate for domestic large letters weighing up to 250 grams.

Royal Mail described Vulcan B2: This iconic delta wing bomber was active from 1956 to 1984, with the more powerful B2 variant entering the service in 1960. Designed as a high-altitude bomber, it was part of the V-force made to carry Britains nuclear deterrent. When the Royal Navy submarines began handling nuclear deterrent in 1969, the Vulcans role shifted to tactical bomber. It was called into action in the Falklands Conflict of 1982.

Royal Mail called the Typhoon FGR4 a state-of-the-art multi-role fighter, adding that is the RAFs main aircraft in service today.

The Typhoon FGR4 was deployed to the RAF in 2003 and first saw active service in Libya in 2011. It can fly up to 55,000 feet and reach a speed of 1.8 mach. At full strength, the RAF will operate 160 craft, Royal Mail said.

The Sopwith Camel F1 and the Nimrod MR2 are pictured on the pair of 1.57 stamps. From the March 20 issue date through March 26, these stamps met the rate for letters to Europe up to 100 grams. The new rate for this service has been decreased to 1.55.

Introduced in 1917, the Sopwith Camel F1 is the oldest plane featured in the stamp set.

Royal Mail said of this single-seat biplane fighter: It was a complicated machine to fly, but it still became the best-known and most successful Allied WWI fighter and scout aircraft. Sopwith Camel pilots reportedly defeated 1,294 enemy aircraft in the air, but it was also triumphant on the ground. Camels also played a role in home defense, protecting cities from Zeppelin raids.

With sophisticated radar and electronic surveillance equipment in the extended nose and tail, the Nimrod was used for maritime patrol and anti-submarine roles starting in 1969, Royal Mail said.

The upgraded MR2 entered service in 1979 and was deployed in the Falklands Conflict and in the Gulf War. Its enhanced capabilities also permitted search and rescue operations. The Nimrod was retired in 2010.

Each stamp measures 41 millimeters by 30mm and is perforated gauge 14.5 by 14. Royal Mail Design Group designed the stamps using Turners illustrations.

International Security Printers printed the stamps in sheets of 60, sold in panes of 30 at most postal outlets.

Two of the stamps in the souvenir sheet are nondenominated first-class stamps, and the other two are each denominated 1.40. Starting on the left, the designs depict photographs of the RAF Red Arrows team in full flight during four formations: flypast, swan, synchro and python.

The Red Arrows have been displaying since 1965.

The website of the RAF said: Flying distinctive Hawk fast-jets, the team is made up of pilots, engineers and essential support staff with frontline, operational experience. Together, they demonstrate the excellence and capabilities of the Royal Air Force and the Services skilled, talented people.

Turner Duckworth designed the souvenir sheet, using photographs from various sources. The sheet measures 192mm by 74mm, and the individual stamps are 41mm by 30mm perforated gauge 14.5 by 14.

The prestige booklet contains five panes of stamps.

Three designs from the 2015 Battle of Britain 75th Anniversary souvenir sheet are repeated in a block of four on one pane: Pilots scramble to their Hurricanes (Scott 3416a), two examples of Supermarine Spitfires on patrol (3416b), and one Armorer replaces ammunition boxes (3416c). All are nondenominated, paying the first-class rate.

The Machin pane includes eight stamps and a se-tenant label: three each 2p and 5p, and two 1.17. The label shows the RAF roundel.

The stamps from the RAF Centenary sheets of 60 are presented as blocks of four on two of these panes: one with two each of the 1.40 Typhoon FGR4 and the first-class Lightning F6; the other with the first-class Hurricane Mk I, 1.40 Vulcan B2, 1.57 Sopwith Camel F1, and 1.57 Nimrod MR2.

Another pane contains the four stamps from the Red Arrows souvenir sheet in a se-tenant block.

The 26-page prestige booklet also includes photographs, illustrations, facts and stats relating to the RAF from its birth to the modern day, according to the Royal Mail.

A retail booklet contains six self-adhesive first-class stamps: the Lightning F6 and Hurricane Mk I from the new issue and four red Machin definitives.

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A second retail booklet scheduled to be issued May 11 will contain stamps featuring the Red Arrows.

For this RAF Centenary issue, Royal Mail also offered first-day covers, 11 postcards reproducing the designs of the stamps and the souvenir sheet, a presentation pack and more.

The stamps are available at the Royal Mail, Tallents House, 21 S. Gyle Crescent, Edinburgh, EH12 9PB, Scotland. Royal Mails two agencies in the United States are Interpost, Box 420, Hewlett, NY 11557; and the British Stamp Service in North America, 3001 E. Pershing Blvd., Suite 160, Cheyenne, WY 82001-5775.You could be forgiven for thinking that the bans on circumcision, kosher slaughter, and religious education are coming from the governments of Soviet Russia or Germany of the 1930s. But you would be mistaken. As Jews worldwide celebrate the festival of freedom this year, some of Europes most progressive, secular countries are challenging the fundamentals of Jewish faith and practice.

In February, a ban on the non-medical circumcision of minors, carrying a punishment of up to six years in prison, was introduced in Icelands parliament. If it passes, Iceland will be the first European country to enact such a law, but not the last. A petition for a similar bill is gaining momentum in Denmark, and religious leaders across the region are watching closely. After all, the Nordic countries made their sentiments clear in a 2013 statement condemning the practice as a violation of childrens rights.

In Sweden this month, the ruling Social Democratic Party proposed shuttering all publicly funded religious schools in order to prevent segregation of boys and girls. Kosher slaughter, deemed inhumane, has been illegal in most of Scandinavia since the 1930s.

The politicians proposing these laws may not intend to destroy Jewish life in the region. Indeed, the legislation appears to be aimed at a populace struggling to adjust to a wave of Muslim immigrants who do not speak their language nor share their worldview. Nevertheless, it poses a serious, and in some cases existential, threat to the Nordic Jewish communities, which range in size from Icelands tiny handful to Swedens 18,000.

The Most Important Thing

Two very different pieces of news highlighted Icelands 250 Jews earlier this year. In February, Chabad representatives Rabbi Avi and Mushky Feldman announced that they will be moving to Reykjavik this May, becoming the island nations first resident Jewish clergy. Around the same time, Jewish leaders from four Nordic countries released a letter stating that if the circumcision ban goes through, no Jewish community will be established [in Iceland].

The young couple hadnt anticipated that they would be stepping into a political firestorm in accepting the position, but they seem to be taking it in stride. Avi recently traveled to Washington, D.C., to meet with Icelands ambassador to the United States. His main objective in addressing the proposed ban is to educate people about circumcision and why it plays such a fundamental role in Jewish life.

Its the most important practice in Judaism, he says, pointing out that a brit milah can be performed on Shabbat and Yom Kippur, though it technically constitutes a violation of those holy days. Theres only one thing that overrides brit milah and thats the infants health. If the baby is not healthy enough, we postpone it. He emphasizes that Judaism places the babys well-being above all else.

If the ban in Iceland passes, says Rabbi Yitzchok Loewenthal, Denmark will be next. A Chabad representative in Copenhagen for twenty-one years, he knows one of the most secular countries in the world up close. This push for a ban is the result of sustained effort by anti-circumcision groups, he says. Its not just an anti-immigrant thing. Its more a lack of understanding of the importance of religion. Some 87 percent of Danes say they would support a ban.

The stigma around circumcision has real implications for Yitzchoks work in the community. Young mothers call me and say, Convince me to do a brit. Im being told by society that Im a primitive child abuser. Denmark, which requires a physician to be present during the procedure, recently passed a law requiring doctors to make their participation public knowledge. As a result, the rabbi says, it has become extremely difficult to find a doctor willing to attend.

The Jewish community, 8,000 strong, has mobilized to prevent a circumcision ban from being introduced. Jewish leaders from across the spectrum are working together, and liaising with Denmarks large Muslim community, to educate the public. The best response to the current situation? At the moment, the community can only pray. A chapter of Psalms, says Yitzchok.

Rabbi Avi and Mushky Feldman at a Chanukah party in Reykjavik (2018).

An Awareness of G-d

On December 9, nine masked men attacked a synagogue in Gothenburg, Sweden, with Molotov cocktails. As the courtyard caught fire, members of the youth group that had been meeting inside hid in the basement. An unexpected downpour put out the fire almost immediately, and no one was injured. Of the three men arrested shortly afterward, one identified as Palestinian and the other two were recent immigrants from Syria.

Sweden, which has the highest per capita rate of immigration in Europe, has seen an uptick in anti-Semitic incidents recently. While government officials have strenuously denounced hate speech and violence, they have simultaneously pursued policies that have made life difficult for their Jewish citizens.

As in Denmark, circumcision is heavily regulated, and it can be difficult to find a doctor willing to participate. Religious education, even in nominally religious schools, is allowed only as a supplement to the state-mandated secular curriculum. Now, even these schools are seen as a threat.

Rabbi Alexander and Leah Namdar, Chabad representatives to Gothenburg since 1991, have waged a seven-year legal battle to give their children a Jewish education at home. Leah sees the problem as a lack of knowledge and sensitivity in a country where eight out of ten people identify as non-believers.

Suppressing religious practice is not the way to make society safer, she says. Our government should be protecting the basic human right of freedom of religion, including the possibility of having a formal religious education, while at the same time granting protection from extremism that leads to violence.

Education that teaches an awareness of G-d should be encouraged, she adds. The recognition that every life is precious for having been created by G-d is what will make the world a place where people can live in harmony together, with their differences.Lunaticoutpost.com is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program , anaffiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.Amazon, the Amazon logo, MYHABIT, and the MYHABIT logo are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc. or its affiliates.Don't be a pest to the forum.No profanity in thread-titles or usernamesNo excessive profanity in postsNo Racism, Antisemitism + HateNo calls for violence against anyone..This website exists for fun and discussion only. The reader is responsible for discerning the validity, factuality or implications of information posted here, be it fictional or based on real events. The content of posts on this site, including but not limited to links to other web sites, are the expressed opinion of the original poster and are in no way representative of or endorsed by the owners or administration of this website. The posts on this website are the opinion of the specific author and are not statements of advice, opinion, or factual information on behalf of the owner or administration of LunaticOutPost.Com. The owners or administration of this website can't be hold responsible for content hosted on sites that posters link to in; including, but not limited to, posts, signatures, private messages and such. This site may contain content not suitable for minors and if you feel you might be offended by such content, you should log off immediately.This site may contain copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Users may make such material available in an effort to advance awareness and understanding of issues relating to civil rights, economics, individual rights, international affairs, liberty, science & technology, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material. The material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.In accordance with industry accepted best practices we ask that users limit their copy / paste of copyrighted material to the relevant portions of the article you wish to discuss (no more than 50% of the source material) provide a link back to the original articleIf you are a legal copyright holder or a designated agent for such and you believe a post on this website falls outside the boundaries of "Fair Use" and legitimately infringes on yours or your clients copyright please contact [email protected] This website is owned by :Marco ZwaneveldDrijfriemstraat 522516 XR The HagueNetherlands.I will not rent, sell, share or otherwise disclose your personal information to any third party.We might contact you from time to time regarding your purchases or the services (like forums and announcement lists) you have subscribed to.Some of the 3rd party advertisers on lunaticoutpost.com may use cookiesto track peformance and/or to serve relevant ads.If you wish to read more and/or opt out of such cookies, please visit: http://www.networkadvertising.org/choices/USS Juneau

(Image credit: AP/REX/Shutterstock)

Outside the Federal Shipbuilding Company yard in Kearny, New Jersey, on Oct. 25, 1941, the USS Juneau heads into open waters. The Navy ship was sunk by the Japanese during the Battle of Guadalcanal in 1942. Recently, wreckage from the USS Juneau was discovered in the South Pacific. [Read more about the discovery of the USS Juneau]

Lost in moments

(Image credit: Paul G. Allen)

On March 17, 2018, wreckage from the USS Juneau was located off the Solomon Islands by the Research Vessel (R/V) Petrel. The craft sank in 30 minutes after being hit by two torpedoes, killing 687 crewmen, including the five "Fighting Sullivan Brothers."

Resting in the deep

(Image credit: Paul G. Allen)

The USS Juneau was known for the "Fighting Sullivan Brothers," five brothers from Waterloo, Iowa, who refused to serve unless assigned to the same ship.

Evidence of time below

(Image credit: Paul G. Allen)

The Atlanta-class light cruiser sat about 13,700 feet (4,200 meters) below the ocean's surface near the Solomon Islands for 76 years before being found on St. Patrick's Day. The ship had been in service less than 12 months before the fatal battle.

Fast and furious

(Image credit: Paul G. Allen)

The five Sullivan brothers  George, Francis "Frank," Joseph, Madison "Matt" and Albert  were killed when a torpedo hit the USS Juneau on the port side; an explosion ensued, also killing most of the crew.

Unexpected find

(Image credit: Paul G. Allen)

According to the director of subsea operations aboard the R/V Petrel, Robert Kraft, "finding the USS Juneau on Saint Patrick's Day is an unexpected coincidence [allowing] us to pay final respects" to the crewmen of the vessel.

History and present meet

(Image credit: Paul G. Allen)

Using the R/V Petrel's autonomous underwater vehicle, the USS Juneau was identified by a side scan sonar. The Petrel's crew then used the ships remotely operated underwater vehicle to transmit video of the wreck for verification.

Tragic battle

(Image credit: Paul G. Allen)

During the Nov. 13, 1942 battle, following the sinking of the Juneau, the American task force was unable to search for survivors for several days because of dangers of more Japanese attacks.



Due to the delay, only 10 of as many as 125 survivors of the downed ship were rescued. [Read more about the discovery of the USS Juneau]

Thicker than water

(Image credit: Paul G. Allen)

The Sullivan brothers' refusal to serve unless serving together went against a naval policy. The loss of the five brothers became a rallying cry for the allied forces.

A legacy

(Image credit: Paul G. Allen)

In honor of the siblings, the DDG 68 was named USS "The Sullivans." According to the fifth commanding officer of "The Sullivans," the brothers "epitomize the service and sacrifice of our nation's greatest generation."

One of many

(Image credit: Paul G. Allen)

The Petrel is owned by Paul G. Allen, Microsoft co-founder and philanthropist. Allen has led expeditions responsible for finding several other shipwrecks: the USS Lexington (March 2018), USS Indianapolis (August 2017), USS Ward (November 2017), USS Astoria (February 2015), Japanese battleship Musashi (March 2015) and the Italian WWII destroyer Artigliere . The team also recovered and presented the bell from the HMS Hood to the British Navy.To lose weight, freeze your nerves? That's the idea behind a new approach that may hold promise for weight loss. By freezing a nerve that carries hunger signals from the gut to the brain, you can essentially trick the body to stop feeling hungry.

In a small-scale pilot trial, presented yesterday (March 21) at the Annual Scientific Meeting of the Society of Interventional Radiology in Los Angeles, researchers reported that the unusual procedure led to decreased appetite and weight loss in all 10 participants.

Still, both the study authors and outside experts agree that more research is needed. [The Science of Weight Loss]

"It's an interesting concept," said Dr. Lawrence Cheskin, director of the Johns Hopkins Weight Management Center in Baltimore, who was not involved in the study.

However, "this is a pilot study with no control group" to use as a comparison, Cheskin told Live Science. "We would need to do further studies comparing the treatment to other approaches to weight control to be more certain of a direct effect of the procedure performed," he said, adding that it's "worth further testing for sure."

The procedure targets a part of the vagus nerve called the posterior vagal trunk, which is located at the base of the esophagus and sends signals to the brain that the stomach is empty. To freeze the nerve, doctors insert a needle-like instrument into the patient's back and use a type of medical imaging called a computed tomography (CT) scan to ensure the instrument reaches the exact point they want to freeze. Then, surgeons release argon gas from the instrument. The gas cools the nerve to subzero temperatures, paralyzing it and ultimately preventing it from sending signals to the brain.

The study included 10 people, ages 27 to 60, with body mass indexes (BMIs) between 30 and 37, which qualifies for mild to moderate obesity ("normal" BMI ranges from 18.5 to 25).

According to lead study author Dr. David Prologo, an interventional radiologist at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, the patients lost, on average, 14 percent of their excess body weight (body weight above normal BMI), equivalent to about 3.6 percent of their overall body weight, within 90 days of the procedure.

"Thats exactly where you want to be at 90 days," Prologo told Live Science. "If you lose weight too quickly, you rebound. But this amount of weight loss is exactly in line with the recommendations of how fast a person should lose weight."

Other roles

Signaling hunger to the brain isn't the only function of the posterior trunk of the vagus nerve; the nerve also helps move food through the stomach. Once it is disabled, the transit of the food slows down, which keeps the patient feeling full longer, thus further decreasing the need to eat. [The Science of Hunger: How To Control It and Fight Cravings]

"The vagus nerve controls the gut's nervous system as well as other functions," Cheskin said. This could lead to "a host of side effects, including nausea and vomiting, but the study reported no significant side effects."

Prologo said that the procedure itself could cause bleeding. However, none of the patients involved in the study experienced any complications.

Proceed with caution

Still, Cheskin expressed doubt that the procedure "would work long-term, as the body has numerous other mechanisms to ensure we don't lose weight too easily." For example, a body may respond to weight loss by slowing down the metabolism.

Indeed, the effects of the nerve-freezing wear off within eight months to a year, Prologo said. During that time, the body's other mechanisms, mentioned by Cheskin, ensure that the patient doesn't completely starve himself or herself to death.

"The procedure doesnt completely erase the need to eat," Prologo said. "The nerve has an anterior trunk and a posterior trunk, we are only freezing one of them." Instead, the procedure is meant to decrease appetite.

This eight- to 12-month period of decreased hunger is, according to Prologo, enough time for a person not only to lose weight but also for the body to adjust to being at a lower weight.

"You are trying to lose weight, but the body rebels," he said. "It doesn't understand what you are doing  It fights back."

But by freezing the hunger nerve, Prologo said, the researchers believe that they can essentially trick the body, so that it cooperates with the participant.

Prologo said he and his team are already working with new patients and hope to publish more data soon.

Some critics of Prologo's study say that the procedure has led to a placebo effect. "We don't believe that, but in order to prove it, we would have to have a control group in a future," he said.

The findings have not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Originally published on Live Science.The skeleton, with a dramatically elongated skull and an underdeveloped jaw and face, was uncovered in Chile's Atacama Desert in 2003, and mystified scientists when it was first found.

Research published in 2013 offered some clues about the skeleton's bizarre appearance, but five additional years of genetic analysis have provided even more answers. Examination of the skeleton's entire genome revealed that it was Chilean and female, and that its misshapen skull and other deformities might be linked to a host of genetic mutations that affect bone development. Together, those mutations shaped an array of abnormalities that gave the remains an alien-like form. [Image Gallery: Odd Alien-Looking Skeleton Poses Medical Mystery]

Though the skeleton is the size of a 22-week-old fetus, it was initially thought to be a 6- to 8-year-old child with severe deformities. Nearly a decade later, a highly detailed analysis  including X-rays, computed tomography (CT) scans and DNA sequencing  showed that it was a fetus (and that it was definitely human).

It's hard to tell how old the skeleton is just by looking at it, but prior examinations found it to be about 40 years old, scientists explained in a new study. Despite the skeleton's minuscule size, previous analysis cast doubt on whether it was a fetus because its "advanced bone age" more closely resembled that of a young child, particularly in the structure of the skeleton's skull, with sutures that were already fused.

But that feature was a byproduct of a genetic mutation  one of many that caused its numerous skeletal deformities. And, in fact, the premature fusing of skull plates in the fetus is what gave the skull its pointed shape, the researchers reported.

A mummified specimen from Chile's Atacama region fueled speculation for a decade about its peculiar skull. (Image credit: Bhattacharya S et al. 2018)

The scientists extracted DNA from one of the skeleton's ribs  another anomaly that previously had fueled speculation about alien origins, as there were 10 pairs, rather than the 12 normally found in humans.

However, alien hunters will likely be disappointed to hear that "the specimen is shown here to have a purely earthly origin," the study authors reported.

Genetic anomalies, not extraterrestrial DNA

While the scientists found no evidence of alien DNA, they did find mutations in seven of the fetus's genes: COL1A1, COL2A1, KMT2D, FLNB, ATR, TRIP11 and PCNT. Mutations in these genes are known to play roles in premature joint fusion, abnormalities in rib development, malformed skulls, and diseases that inhibit the development of bone and cartilage, according to the study.

Taken together, the mutations expressed by these genes would explain all of the fetus's skeletal abnormalities, the scientists concluded. However, finding so many mutations that specifically affect skeletal development is unusual; in fact, it's never been reported before, and it is unknown what triggered this cascade of mutations, study lead author Garry Nolan, a professor of microbiology and immunology at Stanford University, told Live Science in an email.

The skeleton, which is about the size of an American dollar bill, shows evidence of an unusual number of genetic deformities. (Image credit: Bhattacharya S et al. 2018)

As bizarre as this skeleton may appear, it isn't the first example of remains that look mostly human but nevertheless invite comparisons to popular images of creatures from science fiction.

In 1999, excavations in a 1,000-year-old cemetery in Mexico yielded 13 human skeletons  many of them children  with skulls that were stretched and pointed in the back, bearing a distinctly alien appearance. But researchers determined that the skulls' unusual shapes stemmed from cultural practices that deliberately deformed the bone, similar to those seen in pre-Hispanic cultures in Central America.

And 14 elongated, alien-like skulls in Bavarian graves dating to 1,500 years ago also were traced to cultural practices of cranial shaping, this time in tribes from southeastern Europe, Live Science previously reported.

However, five so-called "alien mummies" from Peru  mummified humanoids with three-fingered hands  were widely denounced by experts as fabrications, perhaps even cobbled together from looted body parts belonging to real human remains. [In Photos: 'Alien' Skulls Reveal Odd, Ancient Tradition]

Genes working together

The bigger story is not about the skeleton's debunked "alien" origins but what its analysis reveals about how genes shape our skeletons as they develop and grow, and how they interact with each other to do so  successfully or not, Nolan told Live Science in an email.

"The era of single gene/single disease is just about over  it's now time to look at the more subtle effects when genes interact," Nolan wrote. "In isolation, a gene might have no effect ... but combined with other genes, the outcomes can be dramatic."

The idea of gene collaboration is not new to geneticists; it has been well studied for years in models derived from fruit flies, plants and yeasts, Nolan said. But now, researchers are compiling enough data to understand these genetic interactions in humans, and are exploring how they affect our biology.

"These studies show that certain gene mutations can 'vote' towards a given body plan or disease," Nolan said.

And the new study's findings about genetic control of bone development could help researchers reverse-engineer solutions to disorders that affect how bones grow, Nolan told Live Science in an email.

"Deeper knowledge about bone growth disorders will point to how normal growth must develop," he said. "It might offer understandings of how we can (say, with drugs) stimulate bone growth in cases of catastrophic accidents to help patients."

The findings were published online today (March 22) in the journal Genome Research.

Original article on Live Science.A rotten velvet worm (bottom) compared to its fossil counterpart. By watching the most primitive living vertebrates decompose, researchers can better understand 300-million-year-old fossils like this one.

Note to readers: In the scratch-and-sniff version of this article, you will smell rotting hagfish, dissected worm guts and a suitcase full of slime.

Don't worry  you won't need a gas mask to read it. But you might need one to visit Sarah Gabbott's lab at the University of Leicester in England, where a team of paleontologists is rethinking the way fossils form by watching the world's most primitive vertebrates rot in real time.

By studying how worms, eels and unctuous hagfish decompose, Gabbott and her colleagues are trying to answer a much broader question: When you look at an animal fossil, how much of that animal aren't you seeing? In particular, how can scientists piece together what the world's oldest vertebrates looked like when most of their skin, organs and other soft tissue cells rotted away to nothing before fossilization could occur? [In Images: Fossilized Dinosaur Brains Found]

"Interpreting the fossils of very primitive vertebrates is extremely difficult," Gabbott, a professor of paleobiology at the University of Leicester and co-author of a new study published March 20 in the journal Palaeontology, told Live Science. "These vertebrates are preserved in stone that's about half a billion years old, and they predate the [evolution] of the skeleton. They have no teeth. They have no skeletal hard parts. So, you don't know which parts of their anatomy are missing because they just rotted away, and which bits are missing because they hadn't yet evolved."

That's where the carcasses come in.

A suitcase of slime

For their research, Gabbott and her colleagues collected specimens from around Europe  blood-sucking lampreys from a river in Yorkshire, oozing hagfish from coastal Sweden, sundry worms and insects  and watched them rot in their Leicester lab. Here, the team monitors every decomposing carcass for at least 60 days; some specimens have been rotting in the lab for nearly 10 years.

Researchers watched this fish-like amphioxus rot in the lab to compare it to a 500-million-year-old vertebrate fossil found in Canada. (Image credit: Courtesy Mark Purnell, Rob Sansom, and Sarah Gabbott)

Why focus on the demise of oozing, eel-like bottom-feeders? According to Gabbott, soft-tissued creatures like lampreys and hagfish represent "the most primitive known vertebrates alive today" and look very similar to relatives that lived 300 million to 500 million years ago. By watching which types of tissues from these creatures decompose, and when, the researchers can better understand what types of tissues may be missing from the fossilized remains of ancient vertebrates.

The work has proved illuminating  and also really smelly. "Hagfish, it has to be said, stink when they rot," Gabbott said. They also ooze, even after death. While the team was transporting a suitcase full of dead hagfish back to Leicester from Sweden, the specimens produced so much slime that it broke through a plastic container and started leaking through the bag's zipper. Meanwhile, rag worms (small marine worms that fishermen use as bait) smell so nauseating as they decompose that the researchers had to wear "a special kind of gas mask" just to handle them, Gabbott said.

Fortunately, Gabbott added, these nasally challenging experiments are already producing surprising results. For starters, the order in which various tissues decayed was not as intuitive as the researchers predicted.

"We were expecting things like muscle tissues to decompose quite quickly, but they lasted a long, long time," Gabbott said. According to a previous study she co-authored in 2010, muscle tissue in rotting adult lampreys lasted more than 300 days. On the flip side, the researchers expected the cartilage that forms a lamprey's skull to decompose slowly, but in many specimens, it rotted away within just a few months.

To build a fossil

The surprising takeaway of these results, Gabbott said, is that fossils may form significantly faster than most of us imagine.

"Most people think fossils take millions of years to form," Gabbott said. "But with these animals that don't have any hard parts  no mineral, or skeleton, or teeth  everything is pretty much gone after 100 days. So, the fossilization process has to occur super quickly, before the entire body is all rotted away."

To turn soft tissue into fossil, minerals in the earth, like calcium phosphate (the same stuff your tooth enamel is made of), somehow become attracted to dying cells even as they're rotting away, forming a "mimic" of the tissue that was there, Gabbott said. The exact reasons for this remain a mystery  one that Gabbott and her colleagues hope to solve one day by creating a complete fossil from scratch in their lab.

In the meantime, there is much more work to be done with rotting bottom-feeders, Gabbott said. Luckily, you only have to buy a gas mask once.

Originally published on Live Science.By confronting the Soviet Union with military and technological competition it could not match, Ronald Reagan forced the Kremlin to adopt reforms that were fatal to the regime and won the Cold War without firing a shot.

At least thats the premise of this softball yet ultimately satisfying handling of what was arguably the highlight of Reagans time as president.

Baier, a Fox News correspondent, admits that conservative icon Reagan could be cool and distant behind his glad-handing facade. But otherwise he finds little fault in the 40th president. On the other hand, Baier is refreshingly slow to vilify anyone, even Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.

The three days in the title refers to the May 1988 Moscow Summit, which itself capped a series of summits with Gorbachev that Reagan pursued in his second term. Baier explains that Reagan had, even before he became president, reconceptualized the Cold War as a contest the U.S. ought to win, rather than be satisfied with detente or coexistence.

After Gorbachev ascended to power in 1985 and began preaching reform, Reagan gradually decided he could work with him and stopped calling the Soviet Union the evil empire. The two first met at the Geneva Summit in 1985, where Reagan shrugged off Gorbachevs objections to the Pentagons proposed Strategic Defense Initiative, or Star Wars anti-missile system. SDI arose again at the Reykjavik Summit a year later, stalling talks on a missile treaty. Gorbachev backed away from his objections a few months later (presumably having realized that the project, dropped in 1993, was largely science fiction) and they were able to sign a treaty at the Washington Summit in 1987.

Then came the three days in question. Visiting Moscow to ratify the missile treaty, Reagan acknowledged the end of the Cold War and gave a pivotal speech at Moscow University where he avoided criticizing the Soviet system, and instead encouraged the students aspirations.

The book fleshes out the timeline while remaining light on distracting facts. For instance, Baier refers to Soviet economic problems but trots out no figures. Beyond mentioning the Kremlins reaction to SDI, there are no examples of Soviet technological backwardness. Yet, the Kremlins dismay at the lopsided defeat of the Soviet-equipped Syrian air force by the Western-equipped Israeli air force in 1982 (not mentioned in the book) surely outweighed any concerns about SDI, which did not exist even on paper.

Instead, Baier builds a narrative of talking heads  excerpts from speeches, memoirs and interviews, mostly of people close to Reagan. Its a project that would be comfortable for a Fox News commentator, and a cozy read for his target audience. However, future historians trying to pick apart the Cold Wars ending will probably look elsewhere for deep insights.

More Information Three Days in Moscow: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of the Soviet Empire By Bret Baier HarperCollins, $28.99 See More Collapse

But for todays reader, Baier does offer a soothing glimpse of a time when we were led by an old-school gentleman who did not bully those who disagreed with him. Reagans favorite aphorism (displayed on the wall of Ronald Reagan High School) seems almost laughable today in light of whats going on in Washington: There is no limit to what a man can do or where he can go if he doesnt mind who gets the credit.Ronnie Crocker/Beer, TX

Breckenridge Brewery is sponsoring a Midtown pub crawl Thursday night to promote the Colorado brewery's beers and also raise money for the Rebuild Texas Fund for post-Harvey relief.

The pub crawl, part of an annual outreach to various cities, gets under way at 6 p.m. and will include an augmented reality feature in which participants can take a virtual ski trip with head brewer Jimmy Walker.A man arrested for theft and trespassing escaped from jail Wednesday afternoon, according to the Harris County Sheriff's Office.

Deputies are asking for the public to be on the lookout for Manuel Enrique Alvarez-Soto, 35, who was last seen exiting the downtown jail at 1201 Commerce.If simply stating two words - Round Top - gets your juices going, then you're ready for the annual spring Texas Antiques Week hitting the stretch of small towns along Texas 237 between Carmine and LaGrange.

The Texas Antiques Week - technically several weeks of antiques shows set up in tents, barns and other venues - is already underway, with the bigger shows -- Marburger Farm Antique Show and the Original Round Top Antiques Fair -- starting the first week of October.

Weekends in the country: Kimberley and Richard Rolland find a weekend get-away in Carmine.

In all, you'll find 2,000 or more dealers among an assortment of 65 or so venues set up over some 22 miles.

Lorie Woodward and Katie Stavinoha bought the Round Top Register in late 2014, and publish an annual Round Top Antiques Show Guide that you can find throughout the towns. It offers information on plenty of vendors.

The pair - college pals who met decades ago in a typing class required for entry into Texas A&M's journalism program - met recently with a couple dozen shoppers at the Renovate home decor store and offered a lot of great advice. Here's some of it:

New kind of pet: Houston couple builds a country retreat and gains a new hobby -- raising goats.

Where it is: Round Top is about 90 miles and about a two-hour drive from Houston. The town has a population of around 90 and is on Texas 237 between Brenham and LaGrange in Fayette County.

More Information Texas Antiques Week Original Round Top Antiques Fair What: the iconic Big Red Barn, annex and Continental Tent When: 1-6 p.m. Oct. 1, 9 a.m.-6 p.m. Oct. 2 and 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Oct. 3-6 Where: 475 S. Texas 237, Carmine VIP early-shopping pass: $20, gets you in early, 9 a.m.-1 p.m. Oct. 1 General admission: $10 on site or at roundtoptexasantiques.com (one ticket is good for the full run of the show) Marburger Farm Antique Show What: more than 350 dealers spread through nine tents and 12 historical buildings When: 2-6 p.m. Oct. 2; 9 a.m.-6 p.m. Oct. 3, 9 a.m.-5 p.m. Oct. 4-5 and 9 a.m.-4 p.m. Oct. 6 Where: 2248 Texas 237, Round Top Early buying: $25; 10 a.m.-2 p.m. Oct. 2 General admission: $10; buy tickets on site or at roundtopmarburger.com (online tickets are mailed, so allow enough time). Market Hill What: 19 vendors (including Renea Abbott's Shabby Slips) in a 119,000-square-foot, air-conditioned building (with restrooms) When: 8 a.m.-9 p.m. (hours are not set in stone) through Oct. 8 Where: 1542 Texas 237, Round Top Admission: free; markethillroundtop.com The Compound Antique Show What: A variety of European and American antiques scattered throughout several buildings When: 9:30 a.m.-6 p.m. daily through Oct. 6 (until 7:30 p.m. on Wednesdays) Where: 2550 S. Texas 237, Round Top Admission: Free; roundtopcompound.com Special event: Designer Dream Spree, 4 p.m. Tuesday Sept. 25 with Carson Kressley and nationally known interior designers, organized by Houstonian Julie Dodson of Dodson Interiors. $35; benefits local animal shelters See More Collapse

Getting there: Watch for speed traps on 290. Once you're on Highway 237, expect traffic to slow to a crawl as you get near the shopping sites.

Take: Sunscreen, a tote bag, measuring tape, cash, water and a good attitude. Wear comfortable shoes (see previous comment about "good attitude").

Big things: Serious shoppers bring their own trailers or drive trucks or SUVs to get things home. The major shopping sites all have professional shipping services on-site for delivery of large items. Most will have porters ready to help you load heavy things.

Money: You'll be shopping out in the country, where wi-fi can be sketchy. Debit and credit cards work, but taking cash is a great idea. I once wasted 45 minutes of precious shopping time waiting for wifi to cooperate to pay for a box of vintage Christmas ornaments when I'd run out of cash. If this happens to you, ask where the nearest ATM is. Seriously.

Food: If you need a snack along the way, the Weikel's Bakery on 290 in Brenham has fantastic kolaches and baked goods. The Mercantile store is known for its terrific deli sandwiches. New-ish restaurants include Mandito's and Lulu's, opened by Houston restaurateur Armando Palacios, who has a second home in the Round Top area. If you need to kick your feet up, order a glass of wine and a cheese plate at the Prost Wine Bar at Highway 237 and Bauer Rummel Road. In Round Top, count on good food at Royers Cafe and Royers Pie Haven; in LaGrange, try Back Porch BBQ, Celebrations or Bistro 108. At Henkel Hall's Celebrations Events and Catering try the pimento cheese or chicken salad sandwiches. The Compound is known for its green onion and artichoke chicken salad. The highly acclaimed Truth BBQ on 290 in Brenham has a long line and usually sells out of barbecue, so plan accordingly if it's on your trip's to-do list.

Etiquette: There are few rules, except those your mama taught you. Be nice. Say "please" and "thank you." Ask a vendor's permission before taking photos of his or her wares.

Prices: Feel free to negotiate, just don't flash a big wad of cash when you do. If you don't know how, simply ask: "Is this your best price?" If they're willing to come down 10 percent, consider yourself successful.

Pets: Bringing your pooch is not a good idea, even if they're so small they fit in a handbag. Not only do some of the venues not allow pets, but the grounds and fields are sprayed to kill fire ants. That may protect you, but it's not so good for your dog's paws.Albany

What would her husband have made of Donald Trump's presidency and the state of American politics? Elizabeth Moynihan laughed a bit at the question.

Wow, she said, before returning, later in the conversation, to an answer.

"He would have been 91 last week if he were still alive," she said. "And I'll tell you, I've missed him every day. But I'm glad now that he's gone and doesn't have to watch what's happening to the presidency."

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a four-term senator from New York, died 15 years ago Monday. It feels like the Democrat has been gone longer, given how much he stands in contrast with the boorish and blind tribalism of our time.

Moynihan, who said you're entitled to your own opinions but not your own facts, put country ahead of party, ideas before ideology. He was polite and thoughtful. He could disagree without being nasty about it. What a relic.

"He believed in public service," Elizabeth Moynihan said Wednesday, speaking by telephone from her home in Manhattan.

Even that term  public service  sounds outdated and anachronistic in this cynical age. Who still believes in such a high-minded ideal?

More Information Contact columnist Chris Churchill at 518-454-5442 or email cchurchill@timesunion.com See More Collapse

Moynihan did, so much so that he served (there's that ideal again) in the cabinets of every president from Kennedy to Ford. For the record, that's two Democrats and two Republicans.

Elizabeth Moynihan, who is 89, remembers her skepticism when Richard Nixon called to ask for her husband's help. You can't do that, she told him. But Moynihan wouldn't be dissuaded, saying he couldn't rightly be a serious person, a man of ideas who cared about bettering the country, if he didn't accept the president's request.

"Of course, he was attacked by the left for having done so," Elizabeth said. "He personally found Nixon good to work for."

Pat Moynihan is hard to pigeonhole. He was a working-class kid, raised by a single mother, who wore bow ties, adopted patrician mannerisms and wrote enough books to fill a small-town library. He was downstate, brought up in Manhattan, but as an adult lived mostly in upstate Pindars Corners, 70 miles west of Albany.

Moynihan is sometimes remembered as a Democrat's Democrat, but looking back with modern eyes, he doesn't fit nicely into our partisan boxes. He had a liberal's reverence for the good that government can do but a conservative's belief that culture and family matter most.

Wait, Moynihan supported vouchers for school choice, making the conservative argument that private schools offer a path from poverty? Yet he thought Ronald Reagan's determination to slash the public good was radical and dangerous?

What to make of this guy?

It might be that Moynihan's willingness to think on his own is exactly what makes him relevant today  why he is so frequently cited by liberals and conservatives alike.

"He's been dead for quite a while now," Elizabeth Moynihan said. "I'm amazed that he's so well remembered."

The suggestion here isn't that Moynihan was above the grubby realities of politics or that he was right about everything. Look back over his career and you'll find plenty of missteps. He was human, it turns out.

But what's stunning is how on target he was about so many of the things that matter most. Refusing to let ideology dull his intellect, he had the ability to really see what was happening.

Moynihan was among the first to sound the alarm about the breakdown of families, noting that increasing numbers of single-family households, particularly among African-Americans, would make poverty impossible to solve. Liberals called him racist, but time and the worsening of the problem have proven Moynihan right.

He warned about lowered standards of decorum and decency when he said the country was "defining deviancy down." His diagnosis seems right on target as bullies with little regard for truth reign in Albany and Washington.

Moynihan even fretted that politicians, especially Democrats, were losing touch with working-class concerns and values  a worry that seems downright prophetic after Trump rode populist anger to the White House.

How would Moynihan have responded to Trump? We can only imagine.

Elizabeth stressed that her husband tremendously respected the office of the presidency, no matter who occupied it. Yet she thinks he would have been appalled at how Trump has laid waste to norms and traditions, tweet by tweet, insult by insult, scandal by scandal. Pat would have hated the chaos, she said.

"The president, I think, does not understand the responsibility of being president," Elizabeth said. "You can't appoint a Cabinet and then fire them off the way he is. His reality show, 'The Apprentice,' I never watched that. But you can't perform that way as president."

Elizabeth doubted her husband could get anywhere in politics today, and that should keep us up at night. We need more people like Moynihan in government. We need more people who think, period.

cchurchill@timesunion.com  518-454-5442  @chris_churchillSome people look at old houses and see problems. Larry Litton of Cleveland sees potential and history.

Over the last decade, Litton has restored at least a dozen old homes in the Cleveland area, including the Hill and Sara McClanahan Home at 401 Austin St. and the Tom Hill House at 211 S. Bonham St., both of which are now recorded Texas Historic Landmarks.

When scouting for new properties recently, Litton, a former mortgage company owner who now invests in real estate, came across a house on Fostoria Road south of Cleveland that appears to be forgotten by time.

On the property are two houses -- one a small, wood-framed structure last occupied decades ago by the father of the man who owned the second house. Both are now deceased, said Litton, and it appears that many years have passed since anyone entered the father's home.

Litton, who now owns both homes, said the old wood-frame home is a time capsule of sorts. Old mail dating back to the 1940s sits on the dining room table. A calendar dating back to 1968 hangs on a wall. Tins and boxes of food items, long past their expiration date, can still be found in the kitchen cabinets and the previous occupant's meager clothing still hangs in a bedroom closet.

A stack of newspapers from two decades ago are the only sign that someone has been in the home "recently," according to Litton.

The home appears to have been left just as it was when the owner was alive. Though none of the contents have any real monetary value, Litton sees the house as a castle, at least for the previous occupant.

"Whether we realize it or not, each of us build a trail of what our life is like by the way we live, where we reside, how we spend our time and what we do," he said. "If you were to abandon your 'castle,' and suppose someone wandered upon it 35 to 40 years later to find it just as you left it, what would that someone think? Don't you think the home and its contents would tell a story and provide facts that would be of interest to those looking at what had become a 'time capsule?'"

Litton believes the natural inclination for anyone would be to wonder about the person who lived there and what happened to them.

"What was their occupation? Or maybe, what was life like in this old home for those who once lived here?" he said.

Litton explained that while he finds the old letters he discovered in the house to be interesting, he is content with them remaining a mystery.

He refuses to open the letters, which appear to be from a serviceman staying on Treasure Island in California around the same time as World War II and the Korean War.

"I just don't have it in me to read the personal mail of another. To me, it would be an infringement into the life of the one receiving the mail, as well as the writer of the letters," he said.

Instead he has gleaned details about the life of the occupant from the simple belongings inside the home.

"A man who liked to hunt once lived here," Litton said, evidenced by the hunting jacket still containing ammunition that he found on the front porch. "He also knew about the cross and the presence of a crucifix gives the impression of being religious. He also was someone who split logs for use in the wood-burning stove to keep the castle warm.

"An investment in a first-class cook stove causes one to think that good meals were part of the lifestyle of this home and perhaps used to prepare meals for a family or more than one person," Litton said.

Litton is still undecided on what will become of the home. He is contemplating restoring the home or selling it to someone who will bring it back to life.

"It would sure be shame to see it torn down because the house is still sturdy and definitely could once again become a castle for another family," he said.Seven malnourished cats were rescued Monday after a criminal investigation was launched on a home in west Harris County near Bear Creek.

Deputies with the Harris County Precinct 5 Constable's Office were called to the home by someone who said they saw an animal carcass through a window. They also reported a foul odor coming from the home.The Trump administration has been sharpening its budgetary ax for two years, waiting for the chance to chop away at funding for environmental protection and clean energy programs that had been darlings of the previous administration.

Late Wednesday, it was another swing and a miss for the White House.

The tentative $1.3 trillion deal to fund the federal government reached this week by congressional leaders forestalled drastic cuts to programs at the Environmental Protection Agency and the Energy Department that the Trump administration demanded in its latest budget request to Congress.

For Democrats who sought preserve energy and environmental programs held over from the Obama administration, the spending package represents a victory - at least until the next budget negotiation.

"Together, we rejected the Trump administration's proposal to make massive and dangerous budget cuts," Sen. Tom Udall of New Mexico, the top Democrat on the Appropriations subcommittee overseeing the EPA and related agencies, said in a statement Wednesday.

Even before President Donald Trump's election, many Republicans agitated for deep cuts into offices constricting companies with environmental rules and spending money on alternative energy research they regard as wasteful. For them, the budget deal kicks the can down the road.

Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., leader of the House Freedom Caucus, slammed the entire deal, saying that "wins for conservatives will be few and far between."

In general, the spending bill faces opposition from many fiscal conservatives in the GOP but is unlikely to be derailed given its support among moderate Democrats and Republicans.

The bill freezes funding for the EPA at $8.1 billion, the same amount the agency was given for fiscal 2017, whereas last month the Trump administration called for a more than 23 percent cut to the agency.

The bill preserves money for several programs targeted by the Trump administration, including full funding for the EPA's state and regional grants, although overall funding for EPA regulatory programs was reduced by $23.5 million below current levels.

The package also protects EPA staff, including scientists, from requested funding for large-scale buyouts, Udall's office said, though even without that money EPA chief Scott Pruitt was able to reduce staffing levels by 650 positions last year.

Lawmakers also boosted by $66 million appropriations for cleaning up Superfund sites, one of Pruitt's often stated priorities.

Energy programs within the Energy Department will get a $1.6 billion boost to a total of $12.9 billion in funding. Congress will increase funding for the department's Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, an energy technology nursery that the department's head Rick Perry called "impressive" and "simply a preview of our possibilities" last week, by $47 million for a total of $353 million. For two years in a row, the White House had called for eliminating the agency.

Another part of the department targeted by Trump for heavy cuts, the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, received $2.3 billion, or about a 14 percent increase in funding from current levels. The Trump administration wanted to cut funding for renewable energy and energy efficiency programs by nearly three-fourths.

In recent days, lawmakers have rallied to protect these energy programs. Just before the release of the spending bill, a group of 110 House lawmakers argued against proposed cuts to EERE while earlier this week 86 lawmakers released another letter calling for "strong funding" for ARPA-E.

"It's been a long time coming but Congress got it right with this bill by maintaining or increasing funding for energy efficiency programs despite the dramatic cuts proposed by the administration," said Ben Evans, vice president of government affairs and communications for the nonprofit group Alliance to Save Energy.

The bill would also boost money for national parks by about 8 percent, including a roughly $150 million increase to address the National Park Service's $11.6 billion maintenance backlog. Kristen Brengel, vice president for government affairs for the National Parks Conservation Association, touted the bill for providing funding "just as the National Park Service is preparing for another busy summer travel season."

Democrats also thwarted riders that would have blocked the EPA from enforcing Obama-era methane emissions rules, rescinded the Waters of the United States rule restricting farm runoff and other pollution from going into streams, and removed gray wolves in Wyoming and around the Great Lakes from the endangered species list.

Other riders slid their way into the bill, including one exempting farmers of livestock farms from EPA greenhouse gas regulations and another prohibiting the regulation of lead in ammunition and fishing tackle.Last April, the U.S. military set out to take on the Islamic State in Afghanistan. At the time, officials estimated the group had about 700 fighters in the country. The U.S. forces seemed confident they could extinguish the jihadists.

The United States targeted the fighters with the "mother of all bombs," which was dropped on caves in Afghanistan last spring. By June, the U.S. military said it had killed Abu Said, the head of Afghanistan's Islamic State affiliate, in an airstrike. A Pentagon spokeswoman predicted that the strike would "significantly disrupt the terror group's plans to expand its presence in Afghanistan."

That hasn't come to pass.

In the months since, the terrorist organization has managed to launch several high-profile attacks in Kabul and beyond. In December, the group claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing at a Shiite cultural center that killed 41 people. That month, Islamic State attackers stormed two different Afghanistan intelligence service locations in the span of a week. In January, a handful of gunmen claiming to be members of the Islamic State held up a Save the Children office in Jalalabad, killing four people in an hours-long siege.

And Wednesday, a suicide bomber detonated explosives near a major Shiite shrine in Kabul, killing 29 people on the first day of celebrations of the Persian new year.

No one thinks the Islamic State is as powerful as the Taliban, or that it might take control of significant swaths of Afghanistan as it once did in Iraq and Syria. But the group, also known as ISIS, still has the potential to wreak plenty of havoc. Here's a look at how the Islamic State won a foothold in Afghanistan, what it wants and whether it's succeeding.

Q: How long has the Islamic State been in Afghanistan?

A: It's hard to say, but U.S. officials started to hear rumors about the group operating in Afghanistan around 2014.

James Cunningham, who was the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan at the time, told Frontline that the group was using Afghanistan and Pakistan as a recruiting ground, trying to find fighters who would travel to Syria and Iraq.

But the Islamic State's high profile attracted dissatisfied members of the Taliban and other insurgent groups who were eager for a rebrand. They were drawn to the Islamic State, journalist Anand Gopal told Frontline in 2015, because of the attention it was getting in the media: "There's been increased dissatisfaction among certain elements of the Taliban, and with the media talking about ISIS all the time and the Afghan government playing up the idea of ISIS as a way of keeping the United States interested, all of that sort of set the ground for the groups to rebrand themselves."

It's not clear that there was ever much communication between the Islamic State in Afghanistan and key leaders in Syria and Iraq. The Afghanistan branch was more like a franchise, operating largely independently. "They embrace the label, and they swear allegiance to Baghdadi, but it doesn't appear there is any direction, control or instructions coming from Syria, Iraq or Baghdadi," Vanda Felbab-Brown, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told Frontline. She referred to Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

Q: What does the Islamic State in Afghanistan look like today?

A: It's hard to say exactly how many Islamic State fighters are in Afghanistan right now, but it seems their numbers have grown. Last March, the U.S. military estimated that about 700 ISIS fighters were in Afghanistan. By November, the top NATO commander in Afghanistan said that U.S. forces had killed more than 1,600 fighters on the battlefield. "It's like a balloon," he said. "We squeeze them in this area, and they'll try to move out elsewhere."

Michael Kugelman, a deputy director of the Asia Program at the Wilson Center, has called the group's resilience "quite worrying." Its fighters' strength, he said, lies in their ability to navigate Afghanistan's challenging terrain with ease, which allows them to evade strikes. The group is also aided by "a steady supply of recruits" from disaffected members of the Pakistani Taliban as well as radicalized Afghans.

The group operates mostly in the Nangahar province, near the border of Pakistan.

Q: What is the Islamic State's relationship to groups such as the Taliban?

A: Tense. For one thing, the groups have different ideologies and goals. As Akhilesh Pillalamarri put it in the Diplomat, "the hostility that ISIS bears toward the Taliban stems from the fact that the Taliban draws its legitimacy not from a universal Islamic creed, but from a narrow ethnic and nationalistic base. In other words, while ISIS fights to establish a Caliphate encompassing the entire ummah (Muslim community), the Taliban merely seeks to establish an Afghan state that they claim is ruled by Islamic Law."

The groups are also in competition for members and resources. Both rely, to some extent, on money from the heroin trade to fund their operations. As Frontline put it, "the fiercest fighting has not been between ISIS and the government security forces, but between ISIS and the Taliban."

That has created a deadly feedback loop that may at least partially explain the recent spate of attacks around Kabul. As Emily Winterbotham, a senior research fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, explained to Vice, when one group pulls off a particularly spectacular attack, the others might feel like they need to one-up the competition.

"In terms of the Taliban, this could be a strategic attempt to demonstrate their continued strength in Afghanistan through high-profile attacks, whether in order to test the strength of the Afghan government, or in an attempt to 'outbid' their competitors, most notably (ISIS)," she said.

Q: Will the newest U.S. surge in Afghanistan have any impact on the Islamic State?

A: Probably not.

As Winterbotham pointed out, violence in Afghanistan has continued to increase even as the United States has sent in more troops. In fact, violent groups have cited the increased presence of Americans as one of the motivations for their attacks. "It is worth noting that violence in Afghanistan actually increased hand-in-hand with increased foreign troop presence, even at the height of the surge," she told Vice. "Military action failed to beat the Taliban then, there is no reason to think that it will work now."

Haroun Mir, a political analyst in Kabul, also predicts that President Donald Trump's surge will lead to a jump in insurgent violence by the Taliban and the Islamic State. That's what happened when then-President Barack Obama carried out a much larger surge in 2009. "Instead of confronting NATO forces on the battlefield they opted for these low-cost terrorist attacks," he said, "and they have been very effective."WASHINGTON - Is the government going to shut down Friday? A majority of lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are motivated not to let what would be the third shutdown this year happen.

They may not have a choice, though. We're hours away from a midnight Friday deadline for Congress to appropriate money for a budget deal to which lawmakers agreed in February. Late Wednesday, lawmakers finally introduced a bill that would fund the government through Sept. 30, the end of the fiscal year.

There were last-minute holdups on big issues, like how much to fund President Donald Trump's U.S.-Mexico border wall and whether to include gun-control provisions.

"The issues outstanding have large political constituencies," Steve Bell, a former GOP budget analyst, said. "Without any immigration to really tempt Democrats, it will take some real dealing to get things done by Friday."

Another option is that lawmakers run out of time and have to pass another short-term spending bill, their sixth of the year, to extend the funding deadline through the weekend.

"It could happen," Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., told my colleague Erica Werner of the possibility of a shutdown or extending the deadline a few days.

If another stopgap measure or even government shutdown happens, here's how things will probably go:

House conservatives revolt

There's not a lot in this bill for conservatives to like. It boosts federal spending on domestic programs - a big Democratic get - and funds the Internal Revenue Service to help the agency enact Republicans' new tax bill.

Expect 20 to 30 House conservatives to vote against the measure on the principle that it raises spending too much.

"I have not heard anything from any of my colleagues that would give me a whole lot of hope that there will be conservative wins," House Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows, R-N.C., told my colleagues earlier this week.

That means House Speaker Paul D. Ryan, R-Wis., will have to rely on House Democrats to make up the difference and vote to fund the government. (The House vote will happen sometime Thursday, about 36 hours before the government could shut down.)

Democrats revolt on immigration

Another must-pass spending bill, another moment where Democrats find themselves with a sizable amount of leverage. And because this is likely to be the last must-pass piece of legislation before the November midterm elections (yes, really), Democrats are digging in on a few campaign issues.

Some of their demands, most of which got met in the final bill:

President Trump can have $1.6 billion for his border wall but not hundreds of new immigration agents to patrol the border. After some hesitation, Trump seems to have agreed to this.

Actually, they want most of that money to go toward repairing existing barriers or technological eyes in the sky and not for concrete barriers like the ones Trump has proposed. Trump seems to reluctantly have agreed to this, too.

They want some kind of gun-control measure in the bill. And it looks like they got it: Republicans agreed to allow federal funds to be spent on research for gun violence.

They want a vote on protecting undocumented immigrants known as "dreamers" from deportation. (A deal on that is looking less and less likely.) On Thursday, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., sent a letter to Democrats urging them to vote against the spending bill because House Speaker Paul D. Ryan, R-Wis., hasn't yet allowed a vote to protect dreamers. It's unclear how many Democrats could follow her lead, but if enough do, it could derail the entire spending bill.

One or two senators revolt over niche issues

While most of us were sleeping on the night of Feb. 8, the government shut down for a few hours after Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., seized the Senate floor, trying to force senators to vote on an amendment that basically says they failed to rein in federal spending when they passed their tax bill.

Paul isn't ruling out doing something like that again. He's the likeliest candidate to hold up this spending package, but there are others.

One senator who's likely to be particularly upset with this deal is Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine. She traded her reluctant vote in favor of December's tax bill for a future vote to shore up Affordable Care Act subsidies. Except Republican leaders haven't held up their end of the bargain, and it looks as though the House will vote on a bill that lacks health-care provisions. That means Collins may have lost her chance. But a filibuster from the normally congenial senator would be a big surprise.

And Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., is frustrated by the White House's attempts to block about $900 million in federal funding for a crucial tunnel linking New York City and New Jersey, although he seems to have accepted the White House won that one. Supporters of the Gateway project say they can get taxpayer funds elsewhere.

Speaking of the White House, here's our final hurdle to a shutdown. And it's the most unpredictable of all:

Trump revolts

He's getting some money for his border wall, but it's a fraction of the $25 billion he wants.

Trump tweeted "Democrats refused to take care of DACA. Would have been so easy, but they just didn't care. I had to fight for Military and start of Wall."

The spending bill is also likely to give the FBI hundreds of millions to combat Russian hacking, which is entirely incompatible with the president's stance that people in the FBI are out to get him.

Trump tweeted "Andrew McCabe FIRED, a great day for the hard working men and women of the FBI - A great day for Democracy. Sanctimonious James Comey was his boss and made McCabe look like a choirboy. He knew all about the lies and corruption going on at the highest levels of the FBI!"

Plus, Trump has mused in the past that shutdowns could be "good," both for the nation and for him politically.

"If a shutdown happens," said budget analyst and Forbes columnist Stan Collender, "it will only be because Trump wants it."

It seems like the present indeed hesitated for a moment Wednesday on accepting on the deal. But he appears to have come around to supporting it, which neutralizes the final hurdle to a shutdown.

Trump tweeted "Got $1.6 Billion to start Wall on Southern Border, rest will be forthcoming. Most importantly, got $700 Billion to rebuild our Military, $716 Billion next year...most ever. Had to waste money on Dem giveaways in order to take care of military pay increase and new equipment."Username: Password: or Register Thread Rating: 0 Vote(s) - 0 Average

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House approves GOP report finding no collusion between Trump and Russia LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: kaput

03-22-2018 11:59 PM











Post: #1 House approves GOP report finding no collusion between Trump and Russia

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It went through, Rep. K. Michael Conaway (R-Tex.), who has led the panels Russia investigation, said while exiting the committees secure facilities on Capitol Hill.



While the vote ends the Russia probe for the panels GOP majority, it only stoked the fury of Democrats, who have denounced their colleagues findings. The document  whose public release probably remains weeks away  also criticizes the U.S. intelligence communitys assessment that Russia sought to help Trump win the presidency.



[Its taken partisanship to a place its never been. Inside the House Intelligence Committee.]



The committees Republicans released a list of the 44 findings and 26 recommendations outlined in their report, which Conaway estimated to be 250 pages with annexes. It will be sent to the intelligence community for redactions on Monday at the earliest, he added  that being the deadline for Democrats to submit a statement of the minoritys view, which will be included in the final product.



Conaway said Thursday he hopes the intelligence community can complete its redactions within two weeks so the panel can release the report when Congress returns to Washington in April following a two-week recess.



The findings show a pattern of Russian active measures in the United States, both through cyber attacks and their use of social media to sow discord, Conaway said in a written statement, characterizing the threat to future U.S. elections as serious. The document also maintains that the intelligence community did not employ proper analytic tradecraft in assessing that the Russian government intended to help Trumps campaign.



There was no evidence that meetings between Trump associates  including Jeff Sessions  and official representatives of the Russian government  including Ambassador [Sergey] Kislyak  reflected collusion, coordination, or conspiracy, the findings state, referring to the attorney general, an adviser to Trump during the campaign.



The document says that possible Russian efforts to set up a back channel with Trump associates after the election suggest the absence of collusion during the campaign. That finding contradicts what Kislyak told Moscow, which is that the presidents son-in-law Jared Kushner proposed the back channel with Russia during a meeting in early December 2016. Trump donor and Blackwater security group founder Erik Prince traveled to the Seychelles in January 2017 for a meeting with a Russian official close to President Vladimir Putin, an encounter brokered by the United Arab Emirates.



The report acknowledges that some Trump affiliates had contact with outfits such as WikiLeaks that were ill-advised, and that campaign officials such as George Papadopoulos and Carter Page had attempted to make contacts with Russian officials. But the findings put some blame on the Republican national security establishments opposition to candidate Trump for creat[ing] opportunities for two less-experienced individuals with pro-Russia views to join the campaign.



The committee also recommended that Congress consider repealing the Logan Act, a law that states it is a crime for anyone without authorization to negotiate on behalf of the United States. The law is intended to preserve the United States ability to speak with one voice on foreign policy matters but has never been successfully used in court.



The panels top Democrat, Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), complained that the GOP insisted on holding the meeting in a closed session, which, he said afterward, was not the practice when the committee voted to release other documents pending declassification. Transcripts of those meetings were later made public.



Democrats, who opposed adoption of the report, have accused Republicans of prematurely shuttering the committees year-long Russia investigation  and willfully disregarding evidence, they argue, demonstrates there was collusion.







https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost...74f7739207 The House Intelligence Committee voted Thursday to approve a Republican-authored report stating there is no evidence that President Trump or his affiliates colluded with the Russian government during the 2016 U.S. election.It went through, Rep. K. Michael Conaway (R-Tex.), who has led the panels Russia investigation, said while exiting the committees secure facilities on Capitol Hill.While the vote ends the Russia probe for the panels GOP majority, it only stoked the fury of Democrats, who have denounced their colleagues findings. The document  whose public release probably remains weeks away  also criticizes the U.S. intelligence communitys assessment that Russia sought to help Trump win the presidency.[Its taken partisanship to a place its never been. Inside the House Intelligence Committee.]The committees Republicans released a list of the 44 findings and 26 recommendations outlined in their report, which Conaway estimated to be 250 pages with annexes. It will be sent to the intelligence community for redactions on Monday at the earliest, he added  that being the deadline for Democrats to submit a statement of the minoritys view, which will be included in the final product.Conaway said Thursday he hopes the intelligence community can complete its redactions within two weeks so the panel can release the report when Congress returns to Washington in April following a two-week recess.The findings show a pattern of Russian active measures in the United States, both through cyber attacks and their use of social media to sow discord, Conaway said in a written statement, characterizing the threat to future U.S. elections as serious. The document also maintains that the intelligence community did not employ proper analytic tradecraft in assessing that the Russian government intended to help Trumps campaign.There was no evidence that meetings between Trump associates  including Jeff Sessions  and official representatives of the Russian government  including Ambassador [Sergey] Kislyak  reflected collusion, coordination, or conspiracy, the findings state, referring to the attorney general, an adviser to Trump during the campaign.The document says that possible Russian efforts to set up a back channel with Trump associates after the election suggest the absence of collusion during the campaign. That finding contradicts what Kislyak told Moscow, which is that the presidents son-in-law Jared Kushner proposed the back channel with Russia during a meeting in early December 2016. Trump donor and Blackwater security group founder Erik Prince traveled to the Seychelles in January 2017 for a meeting with a Russian official close to President Vladimir Putin, an encounter brokered by the United Arab Emirates.The report acknowledges that some Trump affiliates had contact with outfits such as WikiLeaks that were ill-advised, and that campaign officials such as George Papadopoulos and Carter Page had attempted to make contacts with Russian officials. But the findings put some blame on the Republican national security establishments opposition to candidate Trump for creat[ing] opportunities for two less-experienced individuals with pro-Russia views to join the campaign.The committee also recommended that Congress consider repealing the Logan Act, a law that states it is a crime for anyone without authorization to negotiate on behalf of the United States. The law is intended to preserve the United States ability to speak with one voice on foreign policy matters but has never been successfully used in court.The panels top Democrat, Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.), complained that the GOP insisted on holding the meeting in a closed session, which, he said afterward, was not the practice when the committee voted to release other documents pending declassification. Transcripts of those meetings were later made public.Democrats, who opposed adoption of the report, have accused Republicans of prematurely shuttering the committees year-long Russia investigation  and willfully disregarding evidence, they argue, demonstrates there was collusion. LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 1337

03-23-2018 12:10 AM











Post: #2 RE: House approves GOP report finding no collusion between Trump and Russia

LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 1337

03-23-2018 12:18 AM











Post: #3 RE: House approves GOP report finding no collusion between Trump and Russia



https://www.politico.com/story/2018/03/2...ort-479406





Here is the report summary

https://intelligence.house.gov/uploadedf...ations.pdf



It looks like trouble for Yates, McCabe, Brennan and Clapper. "The committee voted to release a report that recommends a crackdown on leaks, including administering 'mandatory polygraphs' to some administration officials with top secret security clearances"Here is the report summaryIt looks like trouble for Yates, McCabe, Brennan and Clapper. LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 1337

03-23-2018 12:47 AM











Post: #4 RE: House approves GOP report finding no collusion between Trump and Russia

While at the same time proving collusion with the u,k LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 1337

03-23-2018 12:49 AM











Post: #5 RE: House approves GOP report finding no collusion between Trump and Russia

Same offense never even blinked at, nothing but a diversion, people are stupid LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 1337

03-23-2018 12:51 AM











Post: #6 RE: House approves GOP report finding no collusion between Trump and Russia

District maps will take care of this LoP Guest

lop guest

User ID: 1337

03-23-2018 12:51 AM











Post: #7 RE: House approves GOP report finding no collusion between Trump and Russia

Aermorica















Morgan County

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 Brittany R. Knox, 30, of Hillview was lodged in the Greene County Jail at 9:35 p.m. Tuesday on a domestic battery charge.

 Sara R. Gresham, 27, of White Hall turned herself in to authorities at 9:08 p.m. Monday on a Greene County arrest warrant on a petition to revoke probation.

 Adam M. Roberson, 24, of St. Charles, Missouri, was lodged in the Greene County Jail at 2:42 a.m. Sunday on a charge of driving under the influence.

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 Miranda S. Ahearn, 22, of Winchester was lodged in the Greene County Jail at 10:59 p.m. Tuesday on a charge of possession of a controlled or look-alike substance.

Compiled by Greg Olson, David C.L. Bauer and Samantha McDaniel-OgletreeAlzheimer's disease is among the most expensive illnesses in the U.S. There's no cure, no effective treatment and no easy fix for the skyrocketing financial cost of caring for an aging population.

Spending on care for people alive in the U.S. right now who will develop the affliction is projected to cost $47 trillion over the course of their lives, a report issued Tuesday by the Alzheimer's Association found. The U.S. is projected to spend $277 billion on Alzheimer's or other dementia care in 2018 alone, with an aging cohort of baby boomers pushing that number to $1.1 trillion by 2050.

Research so far has been stymied by clinical failures. By one count, at least 190 human trials of Alzheimer's drugs have ended in failure. No company has successfully marketed a drug to treat it, though many big pharmaceutical companies, including Merck & Co. and Pfizer, have tried. Biogen, a company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, saw its shares dive last month after it said it was expanding the number of participants in its trial for the drug aducanumab.

But significant cost savings can be achieved, according to the new report, by early diagnosis. Currently, individuals are typically diagnosed in the dementia stage, rather than when they have developed only mild cognitive impairment [MCI]. Identifying the disease early can allow it to be better managed, in part with existing drugs that treat its symptoms. In doing so, the study postulates, America could save $7.9 trillion over the lifetimes of everyone alive right now.

The Alzheimer's Association commissioned researchers at Precision Health Economics to study the potential savings of obtaining an earlier diagnosis. It used data from the Health and Retirement Study, a "nationally representative sample of adults age 50 and older" run by the University of Michigan and supported by the National Institute on Aging and the Social Security Administration.

The $7.9 trillion in savings was derived from a scenario in which all adults who develop Alzheimer's receive an early diagnosis in the MCI stage. The cumulative cost in such a circumstance is projected at $39.2 trillion-far below the $47.1 trillion that would be spent under current diagnostic patterns.

"We know that there's a spike in medical spending around the time of diagnosis," said Keith Fargo, director of scientific programs and outreach for the Alzheimer's Association. "It's actually quite expensive to do things that way.""You can save a significant amount of money just through better early diagnosis," he said.

For example, managed dementia is less expensive to treat because it reduces the chances of missing medication or incurring avoidable costs, Fargo said. It's more costly to be diagnosed in the later stages because that's likely to occur only after an expensive trip to the hospital.

Along with the increasing costs, the report also found Alzheimer's is growing increasingly lethal.

The cost of caring for Americans with Alzheimer's will rise by $20 billion this year, compared with 2017 spending. That doesn't include the burden that falls on unpaid caregivers such as family and friends, who last year provided 18.4 billion hours of unpaid care-which the report estimated to be the financial equivalent of $232.1 billion. The hours were calculated based on a follow-up analysis of results from the 2009 National Alliance for Caregiving/AARP national telephone survey, multiplied by an an average of the federal minimum wage and the mean hourly wage of home health aides.

Even worse is the reality that the disease's prevalence will rise over the coming decades. There are now an estimated 5.5 million Americans aged 65 or older with Alzheimer's. In 2025, that number is projected to be 7.1 million. By 2050, it could reach 13.8 million.

Along with the increasing costs, the report also found Alzheimer's to be increasingly lethal. It's currently the sixth-leading cause of death in the U.S., and deaths attributed to it jumped by 123 percent from 2000 to 2015, the report found. During the period, the number of deaths from heart disease-the top killer among Americans-decreased by 11 percent, the Alzheimer's Association said.

While early diagnosis is a good first step, Fargo emphasized that scientific research is the only way to solve this growing health crisis. "I really think that's a key call to action," he said.Last week, President Donald Trump reacted to a report that he had reached out to a potential new lawyer by denouncing it. "Wrong," he said. "I am VERY happy with my lawyers."

To borrow a phrase from Trump, this was fake news. Trump hasn't hired the lawyer he was allegedly pursuing, Emmet Flood, but since that tweet on March 11, he has hired another lawyer (Joe diGenova), unsuccessfully attempted to hire a second (Ted Olson), and now his personal lawyer John Dowd has resigned - with more changes possible in the days ahead.

Trump's tweet suggested changing things up would signal unhappiness, and he has now repeatedly changed things up (or tried to) and parted ways with one of the three lawyers he said he was happy with. The inescapable conclusion, based on Trump's own words: He's unhappy with his representation, and something is amiss.

And the current shake-up is perhaps a fitting crescendo for a legal team that often appeared to be as unwieldy and error-prone as its boss. Dowd's departure, in particular, underlines the discord playing out behind the scenes with Trump's legal team nearly a year into Special Counsel Robert Mueller's Russia investigation. He is Trump's lead personal lawyer for an inquiry that seems to be entering something amounting to its final stages, after all, and now he's out.

DiGenova's hiring appeared to be presage Dowd's exit, as The Washington Post previewed this week:

"The hiring of diGenova on Monday, first reported by the New York Times, infuriated Dowd, who responded angrily to the development, according to people familiar with his reaction, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share internal details. Dowd views diGenova as pushing him to be the second chair rather than top dog on Trump's legal team, these people said. But Dowd said in an email to a Post reporter that he's perfectly happy with the new addition: 'Love Joe.'

"Dowd, however, has lost the confidence of many in the president's orbit, both inside and outside the White House. ... One outside adviser described Dowd as "the weakest link" in the team."

Dowd's last major public act as Trump's attorney this past weekend described the disconnect. Dowd told the Daily Beast on Saturday morning that Mueller should shutter his investigation. After initially saying he was speaking on Trump's behalf, he later clarified that he was speaking for himself. After his departure Thursday, Trump's other longtime personal lawyer, Jay Sekulow, seemed to take a dig at what Dowd had said. "John has been a valuable part of the team and a friend," Sekulow said, adding: "We will continue to cooperate fully with the special counsel."

In December, Dowd also took the fall for an errant tweet sent from Trump's account suggesting that Trump had known that then-national security adviser Michael Flynn lied to the FBI when Trump fired him. That timeline risked furthering the idea that Trump had obstructed justice, given Trump pleaded for the FBI's lenience with Flynn shortly after his exit.

And there are myriad other examples of Trump's lawyers doing and saying controversial or questionable things, especially when you lump in everything Trump's longtime personal lawyer Michael Cohen has been involved in. (Remember the time Dowd and Ty Cobb were overheard by a New York Times reporter discussing the case at a Washington restaurant?) And Dowd isn't even the first Trump lawyer to depart the case - the first was Marc Kasowitz - and he probably won't be the last, with Cobb apparently on some thin ice.

The totality of it suggests that Trump senses trouble, that he can't attract top talent such as Olson or that he's a completely unmanageable client - or some combination of the three. The New York Times is reporting Thursday that Dowd grew increasingly frustrated by having his advice ignored. That seems to be going around.

And things may get messier before they get cleaner. While Sekulow's comments suggest a post-Dowd team may be more cooperative with Mueller, diGenova has been spinning conspiracy theories for months on cable news about the "deep state" trying to take down Trump. So it's not as though Trump has suddenly seen the light and is signaling a clear change for a legal team that has been riven by strategic divisions before.

And if the Trump White House has shown us anything, it's that change often leads to more chaos.WASHINGTON - President Donald Trump boasted during the campaign that he has the "best words." If the past 14 months in the White House are an indication, he and his team also have the worst spelling.

Among the many casualties of Washington's protocols in the Trump era has been a lack of rigor to the accuracy of the printed word - whether it's the president's typo-filled tweets or the White House's error-prone news releases.

"Special Council is told to find crimes, wether crimes exist or not," Trump wrote on Twitter on Wednesday morning to start off a posting in which he misspelled "counsel" three times and had five errors in the span of 280 characters.

As journalists and others poked fun at the mistakes, the president quickly deleted the tweet and posted an edited version. He successfully changed "wether" to "whether" and eliminated an inadvertent repeat of the word "the" - but he failed to correct the three inaccurate references to the title of his nemesis, Robert Mueller.

"If Trump directs Rosenstein to fire the special 'council,' I think we might be ok folks," cracked former U.S. attorney Preet Bharara of New York, whom Trump fired last summer, referring to Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein.

Amid all the chaos in the White House - including West Wing personnel drama, the Stormy Daniels scandal and Mueller's Russia investigation, some wayward spellings and inaccurate honorifics might seem minor. But the constant small mistakes - which have dogged the Trump White House since the president's official Inauguration Day poster boasted that "no challenge is to great" - have become, critics say, symbolic of the larger problems with Trump's management style, in particular his lack of attention to detail and the carelessness with which he makes policy decisions.

On Monday, for example, the White House rolled out an executive order from Trump aimed at cutting off U.S. investment in Venezuela's digital currency as a way to pinch strongman Nicolas Maduro's regime. But in the headline on the public news release, the White House wrote that Trump was taking action to "address the situation in America."

"Freudian slip????" wondered Rosiland Jordan, a reporter for Al Jazeera.

"It echoes a political quote I tell people a lot from [Ralph Waldo] Emerson: The institution is lengthened by the shadow of one man," said Rick Wilson, a Republican political consultant who has been highly critical of Trump. "The sloppiness and the looseness and the chaos and lack of rigor across all areas of Trump world reflects Trump. They do not care. They don't give a damn. But everybody needs an editor."

In Trump's world, Air Force One became "Air Force Once" 0n the president's public schedule. The White House sought "lasting peach" in a news release touting efforts to broker a deal between Israel and Palestinian territories. And another release announced the departure of an East Wing aide to work for Republican Rep. Will Hurd of Texas, who was reincarnated as Rep. Hill in the next sentence.

Last week, in a tweet, the commander in chief lauded his visit to the "Marine Core Air Station Miramar" in San Diego, prompting "veterans everywhere to facepalm," according to a headline in the Marine Times.

The steady stream of errors has prompted outlets as disparate as People magazine and Fox News to compile the White House's greatest hits - or whiffs, as the case may be.

Jason Silverstein, a political reporter, had been posting a "running list of typos" at the New York Daily News, noting in his introduction that Trump was "elected to lead, not to proofread." He reached 32 entries before departing the paper last October.

Asked Wednesday whether he had a favorite, Silverstein pointed to Trump's tweet in December 2016 in which the president-elect denounced the seizure of a U.S. Navy underwater glider by a Chinese warship as "unpresidented. "

"I always told our [editor] that that should be our front-page headline if Trump gets impeached," Silverstein said in an email.

Inside the West Wing, however, it was another mistake in January 2017, by a junior White House aide, that caused the most consternation - just a week after Trump took office. Announcing the visit to the White House of British Prime Minister Theresa May, the official schedule misspelled her name three times as "Teresa May," which the London-based Independent newspaper drolly noted is the stage name of a British pornographic movie actress whose oeuvre includes "Whitehouse: The Sex Video" and "Leather Lust."

The mistake reverberated throughout the West Wing and prompted then-Chief of Staff Reince Priebus to implement new procedures, building in extra layers of sign-offs before news releases were made public, according to a former White House official familiar with the fallout who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private matters. The main change was that official announcements would have to be cleared by the Office of the Staff Secretary, led by Rob Porter, who resigned last month amid accusations of abuse from two former wives.

"There was a lot of head-desk," said the former official, when asked how the White House press office reacted to errors that became public. Snarky reaction on Twitter "was usually the first indication that something got missed. Even having the staff secretary look at it was not foolproof. We're humans."

The mistakes hardly abated. The White House mangled the titles of foreign leaders and their countries. It called Prime Minister Shinzo Abe the "president" of Japan. After Trump held a high-stakes bilateral meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping at Mar-a-Lago in July, the White House readout referred to the "Republic of China," which is the official name of Taiwan. Xi is the leader of the People's Republic of China.

In a sign that the sloppiness might be infecting other parts of Washington, tickets to Trump's address to a joint session of Congress in January, distributed by the Office of the Sergeant at Arms and Doorkeeper, touted the "State of the Uniom."

White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders did not respond to a request for comment.

Liz Allen, who served as White House deputy communications director under former president Barack Obama, said in an interview that the press office under the 44th president sought to be as rigorous as possible. Releases typically were proofread for accuracy and content by at least four or five people. Announcements that dealt with domestic policy issues and foreign affairs were vetted by experts at federal agencies and the National Security Council, she said.

"We felt a burden and responsibility to get it right," Allen said. "We were acutely aware of the integrity of our platform. We took it seriously. No one should meet a higher bar than the White House. They are the ultimate voice."

That voice was a bit garbled last month when, according to the White House daily guidance, Trump was planning to address the Conservative Political Action Conference at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center in "Oxen Hill."

The proper spelling of the suburban Maryland jurisdiction is Oxon Hill, a mistake made more pronounced by the fact that the Gaylord resort is the home of the National Spelling Bee.

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Video Embed Code

Video: Misspelled tweets and typos in press releases are becoming the norm under President Trump, but critics say it points to a pervasive carelessness in the White House.(Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)

Embed code:Houston ISD trustees unanimously appointed Grenita Lathan as interim superintendent late Thursday, elevating the district's chief academic officer about two weeks after Richard Carranza announced he's stepping down.

Lathan, 48, will serve as acting superintendent starting Friday, then become interim superintendent on April 1. Trustees accepted Carranza's resignation, which takes effect immediately, on Thursday. Carranza is leaving to become chancellor of New York City public schools.

HISD board members chose Lathan after spending nine hours in closed session. Trustees referenced considering four internal candidates  Lathan, Deputy Superintendent Samuel Sarabia, Chief Student Support Officer Mark Smith and Chief of Staff Cynthia Wilson  before landing on Lathan. All nine trustees briefly spoke in favor of Lathan's appointment, which occurred shortly before midnight.

READ ALSO: Leaders recommending 3-year partnerships at long-struggling schools

"I think you exemplify the things we look for when we look at leadership," HISD Board President Rhonda Skillern-Jones told Lathan.

Lathan joined Houston ISD in 2015 as chief officer overseeing elementary transformation schools, reuniting with her former boss and then-Superintendent, Terry Grier. Following Grier's departure in 2016, Carranza elevated Lathan to chief academic officer.

"(It's) excitement and, I'll be very honest, validation for the work that's been done not only by myself, but our entire team," Lathan said.

Lathan served as superintendent of Peoria (Ill.) School District 150, home to about 14,000 students, from 2010 to 2015. She previously worked as interim deputy superintendent and chief elementary school improvement officer at San Diego Unified Public Schools, where Grier spent 18 months as superintendent. Prior to that, she held several positions, including teacher and principal, in North Carolina and Illinois.

Lathan will inherit the HISD's top spot as the district grapples with several unprecedented challenges.

HISD administrators are recommending the district temporarily surrender significant control over 10 chronically underperforming schools as part of their plan for avoiding major state sanctions. Lathan has taken a large role in the process.

District leaders originally recommended forming partnerships for six of the 10 schools, while closing and reopening four other schools. But on Thursday, they announced plans for partnering all 10 schools.

Under a partnership, the district would surrender significant control over each campus to an outside organization, such as a nonprofit or higher education institution. District leaders are recommending the partnerships last for three years.

Under a closure-reopen plan, the district would maintain control over the school, but each campus would only serve limited grade levels in 2019-20 and the entire staff would be replaced.

"That was a major concern under a closure-restart" proposal, Lathan said.

The four schools originally recommended for closure-reopen plans were Blackshear, Highland Heights and Wesley elementary schools and Woodson PK-8. The six schools originally proposed for partnerships are Dogan and Mading elementary schools, Henry Middle School and Kashmere, Wheatley and Worthing high schools.

HISD administrators are proposing "partnerships" in response to the threat of severe sanctions related to a law passed in 2015 known as HB 1842. Under the law, any school district with a campus that receives a fifth consecutive "improvement required" rating for poor academic performance this year is subject to one of two sanctions: closure of the chronically failing campus, or a state takeover of the district's locally elected school board.

HISD has 10 schools at risk of receiving a fifth straight "improvement required" rating in August. To stave off those punishments, HISD administrators have recommended one of two options at each campus: forming "partnerships" under a separate law, known as SB 1882, or closing and immediately reopening the school with limited grade levels and entirely new staff.

District administrators have not named any potential partners. Lathan said district leaders hope to announce those names on April 2, with trustees voting on partnership contracts on April 12. The district must submit contracts to the Texas Education Agency by April 30.

The district is also considering a change to its campus funding model, which has drawn mixed reviews.

HISD administrators have recommended moving from a decentralized model, which allocates money to principals based on student enrollment, to a more centralized model that sets relatively uniform staffing ratios across schools. The plan would reallocate resources among schools, with 184 campuses gaining money and 76 losing funds, administrators said.

District leaders have said the proposed plan would aid smaller schools, which often serve larger proportions of black and Hispanic students, and ensure vital staff are provided at all campuses. Dozens of smaller schools, particularly elementary schools, lack nurses, librarians and counselors.

However, many larger schools would see significant staffing and program cuts under the proposal.

All trustees agreed that the district's current funding levels are not enough to sustain high-quality education and services at all schools.

"Campuses are falling apart, and that's unfair," Trustee Diana Davila said. "If you want to know what inequities look like, visit a campus where it's happening."

A few trustees, however, questioned whether the district's proposed method has been fully vetted and complies with the board's governance policy. Several trustees also voiced frustration that the district has not provided a campus-by-campus breakdown of the plan's impact on funding and staffing.

"I really need to feel comfort that we've done our homework, that we've thought through all the implications, and I can't tell that," Trustee Anne Sung said.

Board members did not vote on whether to support the funding model change.A man has been arrested in connection to the death of a 24-year-old woman from West Texas.

Camille Garcia was found dead in a trash bin Tuesday in north San Angelo, San Angelo Standard-Times reported. Garcia's death is ruled a homicide.NEW BRAUNFELS  Just one day after a teenager opened fire on classmates at a campus in Maryland, about 100 Canyon High School students joined the nationwide push for stricter gun laws with a demonstration.

The reason we are walking out it is because we want to bring awareness to the lives that are being lost due to guns, especially those of young students, said Maria de La Cruz, student council president at the Comal Independent School District campus, in an email.

The students hoisted a large banner reading Enough is Enough at 11:05 a.m. outside the performing arts center, to which media members were denied access. Other signs held aloft were too far to read by reporters assembled beside the Interstate 35 access road.

The walkout was inspired by students in Parkland, Florida, who have publicly demanded the adoption of tighter controls over gun sales in the wake of a Feb. 14 shooting there that killed 17 people.

The local event occurred Wednesday because Canyon High School was on spring break last week when similar demonstrations occurred at campuses nationwide.

Organizer Bennet Emmons, a senior, said he favors more rigorous background checks for people trying to purchase firearms, and a longer waiting period for those approved.

Something needs to be done, instead of the nothing that has been going on, he said, noting some conservative classmates at the campus of roughly 2,700 students voiced disapproval of Wednesdays protest.

Based on his discussions with Principal Casey Whittle, Emmons said participants were expected to receive an unexcused absence for the class they missed, but no punishment.

Whittle could not be reached for comment.

We began planning it last month shortly after the shooting in Florida and basically we just want to do a public sign of disapproval for the current gun laws, said Emmons, 18, who reported counting 96 participants at the rally.

Senior Trevor Hopkins said he didn't participate because, I dont think it's accomplishing anything.

I dont think high school kids, in general, have a good enough understanding, or are politically aware enough, to make those kinds of decisions about gun laws, said Hopkins, 18.

He also reported anger on both sides among students and called on classmates to seek common ground.

There obviously is a problem with these school shootings, said Hopkins, who sees improved mental health services as one potential remedy to pursue.

Junior Amy Medina said she planned to demonstrate Wednesday with sister Natalie, a senior, because, We want to send the message that it shouldnt be a normal thing for shootings to occur at schools.

Their mother, Aristomelia Gil, endorsed their actions, saying, As they approach being grown-ups, I want them to make their own decisions.

She echoed Amys view that kids trying to learn shouldnt have to fear for their safety.

I feel Canyon High is a very safe school, and Comal ISD also, Gil said when reached by phone Tuesday.

Soon after the rally began, numerous Comal County sheriffs deputies parked their patrol cars near the school entrance on the I-35 access road, lights flashing. They departed about five minutes later.

Sgt. Corey Mueck said later the deputies were there to make sure it all stayed civil and under control.The following list includes recent reports from the Midland County Sheriff's Office and the Midland Police Department. Compiled by reporter Kelly Dame.

Wednesday, March 21

12:40 a.m. - Police were sent to a Hedgewood Drive address for a domestic assault.

Tuesday, March 20

12:23 a.m. - A Midland woman, 43, was arrested in Homer Township for driving while license suspended.

11:21 a.m. - Police assisted parole agents in the 200 block of West Ellsworth Street.

2:56 p.m. - A Jerome Township resident, 61, reported his neighbor, age 28, was stealing power. No power was being stolen, and the item the older man saw was a cable box installed by TDS.

3:36 p.m. - A motorist was arrested at Bay City and Waldo roads for second-offense driving while license suspended.

4:04 p.m. - A deputy was in the area of a report of a vehicle driving recklessly on U.S. 20 and M-30, and did not spot the vehicle.

7:42 p.m. - A Midland Township man, 63, reported receiving a scam phone call in which the caller threatened him to pay money due to multiple allegations against him. The man was told not to return the call.

7:46 p.m. - A deputy was sent to Sanford for a report of animal abuse. The dog was not hurt.

8:15 p.m. - A deputy was called to a mobile home park in Jerome Township after a driver was reckless there. Extra patrols were requested.

9:59 p.m. - A deputy went to a Jerome Township home to try to locate a person for the Department of Homeland Security. The person was not found.

10:36 p.m. - A deputy was sent to an Ingersoll Township home for a report of an argument, and arrested a 41-year-old woman on a warrant.

Monday, March 19

1:25 a.m. -- A deputy came upon an abandoned vehicle parked at a Sanford business, and found the vehicle had been reported stolen from Ashtabula County, Ohio. The vehicle was impounded and authorities in Ohio were contacted.

1:35 a.m. -- Deputies were sent to a noise complaint in Jerome Township.

2:39 a.m. -- Deputies were sent to Homer Township for a report of gunshots. Nothing suspicious was found.

10:34 a.m. -- Deputies assisted with an eviction in Midland.

12:30 p.m. -- Police assisted probation and parole agents in the 200 block of West Ellsworth Street.

12:58 p.m. -- Deputies assisted with an eviction in Lincoln Township.

4:19 p.m. -- Police assisted probation agents in the 200 block of Sycamore Street.

4:47 p.m. -- Deputies assisted at a Lincoln Township home while an eviction was served and the landlord changed the locks.

9:24 p.m. -- A deputy assisted a Gladwin County deputy with a drunken driving arrest near the county line.

9:35 p.m. -- A Greendale Township woman, 54, lost $488 in an online scam. There are no suspects.

10:58 p.m. -- A deputy was called to Lee Township for a report of a problem with a neighbor's animals harassing and injuring other animals. Animal control was notified for follow up.

11:16 p.m. -- A deputy went to Edenville Township to locate a person wanted by Midland Police for felonious assault. The person was not found.Award winning Fabiani of Longford are celebrating once again this week after the store was recently named Independent Retail Business of the Year 2018 in the inaugural Irish SME Business Awards.

Louise Brennan and Fabiani also won a coveted Top 5 Store of the Year title at the Retail Excellence 2017 awards.

The winners of Irish SME Business Awards were revealed following an online campaign which saw nominations flood in from across the country.

Fabiani is a contemporary lifestyle and clothing boutique with an in-house coffee bar, 'Mudshot', as well as an in store brow and lash bar, UB Brows. Yoga Classes are held in store three days a week.

Louise Brennan said she was delighted to receive the Independent Retail Business of the Year 2018 award.

The Irish SME Business Awards celebrate the hard work and determination of the best professionals and businesses in the Irish SME business sector.

The awards scheme is co-ordinated by Creative Oceanic, an events and marketing agency who are responsible for some of Irelands most successful and well known events such as The Irish Wedding Awards and The Irish Hair & Beauty Awards amongst others.

Irfan Younis, CEO of Creative Oceanic said: We would like to congratulate all of our nominees and winners for this years awards who have gone the extra mile to make Irelands SME businesses as strong as they are today and we look forward to seeing the industry grow and expand in the years to come.

ALSO READ:

Retail Excellence Award for Fabiani of LongfordPRIVACY POLICY



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Kerala  686001by Wendy Davis @wendyndavis, March 22, 2018

The industry's Trustworthy Accountability Group has now awarded certification "seals" to 80 companies, the organization announced Thursday.

The group, which aims to combat malware, piracy, fraud and other online threats, also said it has recertified 37 companies for 2018. Only two companies that were required to obtain recertifications in 2018 failed to do so on time, according to a TAG spokesperson.

"We are currently working with those two companies to get their paperwork in order and are confident they will be recertified soon," the spokesperson said.

Companies that will receive the re-certification for 2018 include GroupM, Horizon Media, IPG Mediabrands, Omnicom and Publicis Groupe. TAG also offers a searchable registry of certified companies.

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TAG awards various "seals" stating that companies comply with TAG's guidelines in different areas -- including fraud, piracy and malware. Overall, more than 530 companies from 28 countries including Australia, Chile, Israel and the Russian Federation have applied for TAG Registration and the TAG ID, which are required to participate in the certification programs. Around 400 of the applicants are based in the U.S.

Most of the companies that will receive seals have applied for "global" ones, TAG says. The group recently announced it is expanding in Europe by opening a new office in London. Mike Zaneis, TAG CEO, told MediaPost last week that the group aims to offer more in-market support to European companies that want to join.by Chuck Martin , March 21, 2018

Trials of self-driving cars are being at least temporarily halted following the fatal crash involving an Uber autonomous vehicle that hit a pedestrian in Arizona.

Toyota and others have put their self-driving programs on at least a temporary hold.

We cannot speculate on the cause of the incident or what it may mean to the automated driving industry going forward, said Toyota spokesman Brian Lyons in a statement to the AI & IoT Daily. Because we feel the incident may have an emotional effect on our test drivers, Toyota Research Institute has decided to temporarily pause its Chauffeur mode testing on public roads.

Uber already had grounded its self-driving cars in Phoenix, San Francisco, Pittsburgh and Toronto.

Two Boston companies, Nutonomy and Optimus Ride, were asked by Boston officials to halt their tests in the Seaport area following the Arizona crash.

"As a precautionary measure, we have temporarily asked Nutonomy and Optimus Ride to pause their autonomous vehicle testing programs on public streets in Boston," said Boston Transportation Department Commissioner Gina Fiandaca in a statement.

We have complied with the City of Bostons request to temporarily halt autonomous vehicle testing on public roads, a Nutonomy spokeswoman said in a statement. We are working with Boston officials to ensure that our automated vehicle pilots continue to adhere to high standards of safety,

Arizonas director for policy and communications at the states department of transportation, Kevin Biesty, told Reuters that existing regulations were sufficient and that the state had no immediate plans to issue new rules. We believe we have enough in our laws right now to regulate automobiles, Biesty said. There will be issues that the legislature will have to address in the future as these become more widespread.

In Arizona, a Department of Transportation spokesman told Fox News that no changes have been made or are immediately forthcoming regarding testing of AVs in the state.

Meanwhile, the Tempe police department released on Twitter the video of the accident recorded by the Uber vehicle.by Tanya Gazdik , March 22, 2018

Prudential is putting a concerted effort behind connecting with Millennials to understand their sentiments on financial wellness and their expectations of what the future will bring in order to identify how best to serve them.

Millennials continue to face a variety of challenges that could impact their overall financial well-being, including rising costs of debt, uncertainty about retirement, lack of comprehensive employer-sponsored benefit packages. At the same time, this generation is energizing the American economy, leading the charge on many of the notable technological advancements in recent history, according to Prudential.

The financial services company recently joined with Kantar Consulting to commission the 80-Year-Old Millennial study. It focuses on Millennials feelings about workplace trends, economic opportunity, technological advances and maintaining health. To launch the findings of this data, Prudential, in partnership with the Young Entrepreneur Council, developed an on-site activation at SXSW.

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Additionally, the company developed an ongoing interactive aptitude test that will determine participants persona (i.e., Futurist, Trailblazer, Contrarian).

Millennials are slowly finding their economic footing, but are uncertain of future progress, Prudential finds. They dont share the confidence of Baby Boomers and Gen Xers, who believed theyd be financially better off than their parents.

Nearly nine in 10 Millennials (88%) say people now in their 20s and 30s will need to work much longer than previous generations did to retire with the same level of financial security. Even if they do work for a longer period, 79% believe that by the time they reach 80 years old, comfortable retirement will be a thing of the past. At least 70% say thats because its impossible to save as much money each year as prescribed by current retirement planning tools.

The study combined expert interviews, a moderated online bulletin board and a quantitative survey of more than 1,000 Millennials to learn how the largest generation in the U.S. workforce today envisions progress over the next 50 years.

Millennials are at an important crossroads, having experienced some of the most significant economic booms in history, but also the Great Recession, said Vishal Jain, Prudentials Workplace Solutions Group financial wellness officer, in a release. Its incumbent on financial services companiesand any company that seeks to meet the financial and personal wellness needs of these constituentsto understand the changes that are driving behaviors within this generation.

Millennials are entering the next phase in their lives and increasingly focused on career and family. They are planning a financial future in an economy that has rebounded from the Great Recessionbut see a world that feels more volatile, uncertain and complex than ever before.

Most Millennials (63%) reported being extremely/somewhat nervous that they are heading in a direction in which wealth will be calculated based on ones personal data, digital possessions, and other forms of valuenot just money and traditional investments. And 71% say its likely that the next generation will live in a world without cash.

As Millennials age, they carry with them the tech first mentality to solving lifes problems both big and small. Having benefited from a proliferation of technology solutionsfrom apps to websites to wearablesMillennials expect the world to continue making life easier and more connected.

Millennials are beginning to recognize that, even though they were the original digital natives, people will struggle to learn and adapt to the digital tools and technologies that generations that came after them take for granted.by Tanya Gazdik , March 22, 2018

While dozens of brands aimed to cash in on St. Patricks Day merriment, a Detroit-area ad agency executive conducted a provocative experiment with the aim of simply getting people to think.

Dan Margulis opened the No Irish Pub for one day during Detroits huge St. Patricks parade and celebrations a week before the actual holiday. It treated the Irish like America used to treat Irish immigrants.

Local contractor Bill Johns, posing as a bouncer, gave voice to Americas No Irish Need Apply legacy, and refused entry to people of Irish heritage or anyone wearing green, who were claiming Irish ancestry for the day. He vocally criticized the Irish and provoked those walking by. People were handed a pamphlet after they had walked a short distance away from the bar explaining the project and social experiment.

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A 2-minute video directed by Chris Chynoweth and produced by Atlas Industries documents the experience and includes the many outraged reactions. The thought was the very folks who might have such a huge reaction to this prejudice might be the same people having fits about immigrants currently in the U.S., Margulis says.

The video was released on St. Patricks Day and quickly went viral on social media. A website, noirishpub.com, also features the video and background on the project.

The experiment, which essentially was performance art, was designed to shock people into empathy by having them experience the same discrimination suffered by many of their ancestors, Margulis says. The effort got people to react viscerally, not habitually, he adds.

I wanted to find a way to personally invest white folks into the divisive immigration conversation, he tells Marketing Daily. The goal was to shock people into empathy, and to refocus the debate from 'legal status' to 'human story.

Marguilis, most recently a group creative director at MDC agency Doner, conducted the project on his own time and with his own resources. The agency was not involved and it is not attached to any brands.

The story has been covered by NPR, Telemundo, Newsweek,The Drum, Complex, Univision, ABC, NBC, Fox, USA Today, MSN, The Detroit Free Press, The Irish Central, and local TV stations and news sites from Detroit to Texas, L.A. to the UK.

Margulis hasn't decided whats next for the project. It has been suggested that he take the activation around to other communities, but hes not sure it would resonate if not conducted around the St Patricks Day festivities. But hed like to continue raising awareness.

So many xenophobic and anti-DACA folks claim Irish heritage on St. Pat's without understanding A) the first wave of Irish came before America had immigration laws and B), we considered them dangerous scum from a shithole country, he says. Back then, Catholics were considered a threat to America the way Muslims are today. We hoped to get people to see that and realize their family origin story isn't much different than the Dreamers or even the illegals who sacrificed everything to get here.by Sara Guaglione , March 22, 2018

Google is investing $300 million over the next three years in a new suite of tools to help digital publishers fight the spread of misinformation, as well as grow subscriptions and readership.

Philipp Schindler, Googles Chief Business Officer, told Bloomberg: The last thing you want as a search engine is to see the open internet become a race to the bottom. The economics here are pretty clear: If our partners dont grow, we dont grow.

Called the Google News Initiative, the new suite includes a feature called Subscribe with Google, which will allow users to sign up for news subscriptions with the billing information Google already has on file, making it easier to subscribe to publishers.

Publishers will keep 85% to 95% of the revenue when readers buy subscriptions through Google, Bloomberg reported.

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The New York Times, The Washington Post, Financial Times and Gannett have signed up for the product.

Another new feature will highlight stories from publications a user already subscribes to in Googles search results.

Google is also teaming up with Harvards Kennedy Schools Shorenstein Center on what it is calling the Disinfo Lab, to work on combating the spread of fake news.

Ironically, one of the reasons publishers have these challenges is because the Google search engine platform is one half of what is called the duopoly, gobbling up more than half of U.S. digital ad spending.

Facebook, the other half of the duopoly, is working on its own initiative to boost publishers subscriptions.by Steve McClellan @mp_mcclellan, March 22, 2018

Industry veteran Jeff Fagel has been appointed senior vice president, head of marketing at agency Epsilon and its digital media arm Conversant.

Based in Chicago, he succeeds Tim Prunk as marketing head and reports to Bryan Kennedy, CEO Epsilon/Conversant.

The 20-plus year marketing vet was most recently chief marketing officer of Eyeview, where he helped position Eyeview as a leader in outcome-based personalized video marketing. Prior to Eyeview, Fagel was CMO for multiple brands acquired by Gannett Digital Ventures Group, the advertising technology services arm of Gannett (parent company of USA Today).

He spent the majority of his career on the client side in retail and CPG marketing posts at PepsiCo, Gatorade, Frito-Lay, ConAgra and Sears Holdings.

"I'm excited to add a marketing leader with deep data, digital, retail and brand experience to further differentiate the Epsilon and Conversant businesses from the competition, stated Kennedy. Today's marketers must provide a measured return in sales on every dollar they spend and Jeff understands this, having spent the majority of his career as a brand side marketer."by Steve McClellan @mp_mcclellan, March 22, 2018

Omnicom Media Group, which includes OMD, PHD and Hearts & Science, is taking a different approach to the upfront this year.

Instead of just making the rounds of the annual dog and pony shows put on by the media companies, it has summoned key media companies for three days of presentations at the Omnicom offices in New York this week.

The goal is to provide a holistic look at the 2018-19 investment marketplace, which continues to add more channels and platforms.

OMG believes its new approach will better enable its buyers, planners and clients to glean innovation and opportunities across all categories, a rep for the company said.

The meetings are being livestreamed for invitees that cant make it in person to the event.

On Wednesday meetings were held with Google, Meredith, Studio71, Hulu, AMC, Disney, Crackle and A&E. Today the company will hear from Scripps Networks, Discovery NBCU, Fullscreen, FB, Univision, Fox. Tomorrows presenters include Viacom, Turner, CW, CondeNast, AMC, CBS.

The Wall Street Journal had the story first.by Ray Schultz , Columnist, March 22, 2018

One of the many items stuffed into the U.S. spending bill  a bill that had to be passed by both houses of Congress by midnight Friday to continue funding the government  is the Clarifying Lawful Overseas Use of Data [CLOUD] Act. This would resolve the email privacy issue now before the Supreme Court in the case of U.S. vs. Microsoft.

As argued before the High Court earlier this month, the Department of Justice contends that Microsoft must disclose emails needed in a drug investigation that are stored in the cloud in Ireland. The Justices seemed to learn toward the DOJs view.

The CLOUD Act would allow law enforcement to access emails and other digital data even if stored overseas, through the use of search warrants.

Warrants could be utilized when seeking information from partner countries, thus skirting the normal treaty process, reports state.

According to Reuters, current mutual legal assistant treaties involve a formal diplomatic request for data and require the host country to obtain a warrant on behalf of the requesting country. That can often take several months and are considered burdensome by law enforcement.

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Microsoft approves of the legislation.

The CLOUD Act creates a modern legal framework for how law enforcement agencies can access data across borders, states Brad Smith, president and chief legal officer of Microsoft, in a post.

He adds that the bill also responds directly to the needs of governments frustrated about their inability to investigate crimes in their own countries, while ensuring appropriate protections for privacy and human rights.

The Senate bills co-author, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), states: "The CLOUD Act will create a clear, balanced framework for law enforcement to access data stored in other countries while at the same time encouraging our allies to strengthen their domestic privacy laws.

However, As MediaPosts Wendy Davis reported in February, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) argues that the CLOUD Act would give unlimited jurisdiction to U.S. law enforcement over any data controlled by a service provider, regardless of where the data is stored and who created it," the EFF writes.

The EFF adds: The breadth of such unilateral extraterritorial access creates a dangerous precedent for other countries who may want to access information stored outside their own borders, including data stored in the United States."

During oral arguments in the Microsoft case, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg observed that Congress can write a statute that takes account of various interests. And it isn't just all or nothing.

She inferred that rather than SCOTUS making a decision, it might be wiser for Congress to regulate this brave new world.

The $1.3 trillion omnibus spending bill, containing many controversial provisions, was passed by the House on Thursday morning. But it faced some opposition in the Senate.An innovative new method might allow scientists to translate the information coming from more than 1 million neurons at once, as well as decode the activity as it happens. Share on Pinterest The brain produces big data like no other organ, but can we tame it? Over the past few decades, the amount of data produced in everyday life has exploded. For instance, when you walk down the street, your cell phone will collect information about how many steps youve taken. When you purchase something in a store with your card, the bank knows what you bought, how much it was, and where you were. Likewise, the store knows whether youd bought something similar there before. Data can be harvested more efficiently than ever, but the challenge now is to understand what we should be doing with them (if anything). We have the numbers  but are they of any use to us?

A giant leap for neuroscience The situation is similar in neuroscience, in that huge strides have been made toward collecting vast amounts of data from the brain. Scientists are now able to listen to and communicate with a large number of brain cells at once. Although this advance has proven useful in diagnosis, treatment, and research, its full potential has not yet been realized. The speed at which data can be processed once theyve been collected is still a substantial stumbling block. Data processing is fast becoming a bottleneck to advances made in other areas of neuroscience. For instance, if data from the brain could be collected and understood in real time, huge leaps could be made in the control of robot arms in paralyzed people, or even in helping to predict imminent epileptic seizures. For these goals to be achieved, vast oceans of data must be analyzed and computed very swiftly. Researchers at the Neuronano Research Centre at Lund University in Sweden have been working on this problem. They have come up with a method that has the potential to communicate in real time with millions of nerve cells. Their findings were recently published in the journal Neuroinformatics. Not only could their system listen in to brain cells chatter, it could also translate it into a meaningful output almost instantly  within 25 milliseconds. The secret to this new capability is a specific data format called Hierarchical Data Format and a process known as bit-encoding. Recoding the nerve cell signals directly into bitcode dramatically increases the storage capacity. However, the biggest gain is that the method enables us to store the information in a way that makes it immediately available to the computers processors. Jens Schouenborg, a professor of neurophysiology, Neuronano Research CentreBreaking research published in the journal Nature describes a new anti-cancer protein. The finding could help to spot cancer earlier and treat it more effectively. Share on Pinterest Using cuting edge techniques, Swiss researchers find a new cancer-fighting protein. Each year, around 31,000 people in the United States develop liver cancer, also known as hepatocellular carcinoma. And, roughly 24,000 people will die from the disease. Worryingly, over the past few decades, rates of liver cancer have increased significantly. In fact, in the U.S., they have tripled since the 1980s. It is now considered the fastest-growing cause of cancer deaths in the U.S. While survival rates have improved, only 1 in 5 people survive for longer than 5 years after diagnosis. Often, liver cancer is diagnosed at a relatively late stage. By this point, the liver is already severely damaged, and the prognosis is usually poor. Finding a way to detect the disease earlier could significantly improve the outlook for people with liver cancer. Recently, scientists at the University of Basel in Switzerland  led by Prof. Michael N. Hall  made some headway into this problem. Their work could help to diagnose hepatocellular carcinoma earlier and, eventually, improve treatment. Their findings were published earlier this week.

The hunt for tumor suppressors In cancer, mutated cells grow and spread in an uncontrolled manner. Tumor suppressors are anti-cancer proteins that halt this out-of-control cell growth. In cancer cells, tumor suppressors do not work as they should. On the hunt for these elusive tumor-fighting molecules, the researchers concentrated on a mouse model of hepatocellular carcinoma. They analyzed more than 4,000 distinct proteins in tumor tissue and compared them with healthy tissue. One protein stood out from the crowd: histidine phosphatase LHPP. First study author Sravanth Hindupur notes, It is striking that LHPP is present in healthy tissue and completely absent in tumor tissue. They found that without LHPP, tumor growth was promoted in the mice, and survival rates dropped. Conversely, by reintroducing the genetic information for LHPP, tumor growth was prevented and liver function was maintained. The researchers also believe that LHPP might be useful as a biomarker for liver cancer. And, if this is the case, the disease could be caught earlier and treated more effectively. In order to further investigate this relationship, the scientists measured LHPP in human liver cancer patients. Hindupur explains, Similar to the mouse model, we also saw a striking decrease in LHPP levels in tumors of patients with liver cancer. They also showed that life expectancy and the severity of the disease both correlated with LHPP levels. In individuals who had no measurable LHPP at all, life expectancy was 2 years shorter. So, LHPP may also play a key role in assessing the severity of each specific case of liver cancer.International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination

Every year 21st March is marked as the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. This day is an opportunity for countries and people around the world to stand up against racial discrimination. The United Nations urges all Heads of State to take comprehensive measures to combat racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance. The theme for International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, 2018 is to promote tolerance, inclusion, unity and respect for diversity.Advertisement

The court was hearing two Public Interest Litigations (PILs) filed by advocates Arpit Bhargava and Gauri Grover on the failure of agencies to check the spread of these vector-borne diseases and seeking a time-bound action plan.The Delhi high court also asked the municipal bodies and the Delhi government if they have the policy to deal with the disposal of e-waste.The court sought assistance from environmentalist Sunita Narain and asked her to report in this regard.During the hearing, the bench also directedto inform if the waste management bylaws were being implemented in the areas under its jurisdiction on the next date of hearing, which is on April 11.The order came after DCB said it needed instructions from the ministry of defense to change any pre-existent practices.Earlier, the court also looked into the issue of solid waste management and ordered for the framing of waste management bylaws.The corporations informed the bench that they had uploaded the bylaws on their websites and had imposed fines on those violating them. They had already collected lakhs of rupees in penalties for violation of sanitary rules and the bylaws.Source: MedindiaAdvertisement

"The chemicals produced by cooking meats at high temperatures induce oxidative stress, inflammation and insulin resistance in animal studies, and these pathways may also lead to an elevated risk of developing high blood pressure," said Gang Liu, Ph.D., lead author of the study and a postdoctoral research fellow in the department of nutrition at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health in Boston. .The inner linings of the blood vessels were affected by oxidative stress, inflammation and insulin resistance and lead to the development of atherosclerosis. Atherosclerosis is a condition which narrows the arteries and increases the pressure of blood.This study only identifies the trend and does not prove cause and effect.The findings of the study were limited as it did not include certain types of meats (like pork and lamb) and cooking methods (such as stir-frying and stewing) and all the participants were mostly Caucasians."Our findings suggest that it may help reduce the risk of high blood pressure if you don't eat these foods cooked well done and avoid the use of open-flame and/or high-temperature cooking methods, including grilling/barbequing and broiling," Liu said.High blood pressure also known as hypertension, occurs when pressure of blood increases to unhealthy levels. This condition typically develops over a period of time due to narrowing of the arteries. The common symptoms of hypertension are headache, shortness of breath, chest pain, dizziness and blood in urine.Risk factors associated with hypertension are obesity,smoking, alcohol intake, high cholesterol,stress and diabetes.Source: MedindiaAdvertisement

Cystic fibrosis, diabetes and other conditions can be diagnosed using a new wristband-type wearable sweat sensor.The new wristband-type wearable sweat sensor stimulates the skin to produce minute amounts of sweat, quickly evaluates the contents and transmits the data via a cellphone to a server to analyze the results.: Exosuit is a lightweight, soft, wearable ankle-assisting exosuit that could help reinforce normal gait in people with hemiparesis after stroke.: is specially designed to help doctors monitor both heart rate and respiratory rate.The new technology is lightweight, robust and low-cost wearable biometric device. The device can collect and transmits data in real-time, enabling the medic to care for a greater number of casualties, providing more effective casualty triage to deliver improved patient outcomes., which is a wearable ECG monitoring system is comfortable, breathable and have non-irritating properties. They can be easily folded, and are skin-friendly. Compared to conductive gels, long-term use of fabric electrodes does not cause skin irritation. They are intelligent and accurate in detecting biological signals.Source: MedindiaWe all might die soon, yay! And, if that happens, we'll have to blame  or thank  China.

An out of control Chinese Space Station carrying 'highly toxic' chemicals could hit earth in just a few short days. China's first prototype station, Tiangong-1, has been out of service since all control over it was lost in 2016, but is now reported to be hurtling back to earth.

The 8.5 tonnes Space Station contains quite a bit of hydrazine, which is basically rocket fuel. Since it is traveling parallel to the equator at the most northern and southern points of its orbit, there is a high chance of it crashing into cities like New York, Barcelona, Beijing, Chicago, Istanbul, Rome, and Toronto.

 China Manned Space Engineering Office

While talking to MailOnline, Dr. Hugh Lewis, a senior lecturer in Aerospace Engineering at the University of Southampton said, The spacecraft is traveling around a more or less circular orbit, which is tipped with respect to the equator at 43 degrees. If you plot this path on a map of the Earth, it produces a sine wave pattern, with the slower curve of the wave in northern and southern latitudes and the faster straighter sections running from east to west.

He went on, We can't say precisely where, as we don't know which orbit it will come in on. At this point in time, it's very difficult to say. If you take how far in advance you make your prediction, the rule of thumb for error is around 10 percent. At the moment, that's roughly 10 days or 160 possible orbits. If we were to predict again with a week to go, this would narrow to less than one day or 16 possible orbits. My expectation is, what little of the craft survives the atmosphere, will impact the ocean.

 Twitter

Okay, I take back the 'we're going to die' thing because apparently no one has ever been harmed by space debris coming back to earth. Also, 10-40 percent of the satellite is expected to survive this re-entry.There is a very famous quote on the importance of history in our lives by George Santayana. He said, Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it. We cannot learn everything from self- experience alone, and sometimes we need to learn it from others' invaluable experience as well. The current havoc going on in different parts of the world like North Korea, Syria, and many other countries call for the need of looking at our past and learn from it.

Paul Allen, the 46th richest person in the world and the co-founder of Microsoft has always been fond of collecting World War II memorabilia.

 HistoryGarage

If you have not come across this, then let us tell you that since the early 90's Paul Allen has bought more than 31 WW2 aircrafts. He has now further expanded his collection to other types of military vehicles like tanks and trucks as well.

These vehicles are open for public viewing in the New Flying Heritage and Combat Armor Museum.

Now Paul and his team have a geological marker for a ship that harbored one of the greater tragedies of American soldiers in World War II, as per Gizmodo reports.

Allen's Vulcan, Inc. shipwreck exploration team announced they've located the USS Juneau, a cruiser downed during the Battle of Guadalcanal in November 1942. The ship was discovered 2.6 miles below the surface off the coast of the Solomon Islands, a sovereign country in Oceania.

It is said that the Juneau was remarkable in World War II history for having five brothers. They were stationed there simultaneously, a decision that later proved to be a disaster for everyone on the ship. All five brothers insisted that they wouldn't serve in the Navy unless they could serve together. Japanese forces launched two torpedoes through it and all the brothers were killed and 682 other sailors perished when the ship went down.

Currently, Allen's team have no plans to disclose the exact location of the ship so it can remain in the water in peace, but they might bring it to his museum sooner or later if he is able to acquire it.

They were able to locate the ship via a research vessel dubbed Petrel that performed a sonar scan of South Pacific waters and a remote-controlled vehicle made visual confirmation of the wreck over there.We have heard so much about everyone's Aadhaar information leaking, but don't worry, it's very secure. In fact, it's so secure that it's specially kept behind walls that are 13 feet high and 5 feet thick. Well, now that's the widely known benchmark for cybersecurity, isn't it?

No? Okay.

But, Attorney General K K Venugopal thinks so. He appeared in front of a five-judge Constitutional Bench of the Supreme Court to argue the fact that all the Aadhaar data remains safe and secure behind a complex in Manesar that has 13-ft high and 5-ft thick walls.

He defended the scheme saying that it is a serious effort to end corruption. Moreover, he even offered to show the judges a 4-minute video of the complex by the CEO of UIDAI, adding that the CEO has a Ph.D. in Computer Science and could answer all queries of the bench on issues like surveillance, data security, and exclusion in a power point presentation.

Everyone on Twitter is obviously very relieved because everyone's data is now so safe and secure.

The Great Wall Would Have Been Better

It is just as well that KK Venugopal didn't say that Aadhaar data is safe because of Rahul Dravid, the great wall.  Salil Tripathi (@saliltripathi) March 21, 2018

Hackers, Watch Out!

Leaked footage of a hacker who wanted to steal Aadhaar data, thwarted by UIDAI's wall pic.twitter.com/QumNRUBzfD  Rohin Dharmakumar (@r0h1n) March 21, 2018

Speechless Is The Word That Truly Sums It Up

In Supreme Court today:

Govt:

Will demonstrate safety precautions of Aadhaar. Our data centre has walls that are 13 feet high, 5 feet wide.



Speechless. #Aadhaar  Name can be blank (@shubHASHISH) March 21, 2018

Yes, Probably

Someone on WhatsApp wondered if that wall is as thick as the Attorney General.  https://t.co/eZvxithoxA  Mitali Saran (@mitalisaran) March 22, 2018

This Is It, This Is The Best One

payment just aaya A post shared by All India Bakchod (@allindiabakchod) on Mar 22, 2018 at 1:36am PDT

Mind It

And should #Aadhaar data ever leak through the 13 feet wall I'm sure Govt. has a team of masons available round the clock to plug the leak. Mind it you anti-nationals.   Sumanth Raman (@sumanthraman) March 22, 2018

The Best Wall

Your #Aadhaar data is behind these walls .. : AG

OG Lo-G Suno-G pic.twitter.com/slvpLjc2Da  Shuvankar Mukherjee (@shuvankr) March 22, 2018

See, They've Thought Of Everything

Phew! So relieved to hear that they don't keep any #Aadhaar data in the cloud; it could leak during the rainy season. https://t.co/5Fn4vBafK9  Anuradha (@anuradha_kush) March 21, 2018

Yes, This Is Exactly How It Works

10 ft thick* wall protecting Aadhaar data from the hackers.



*5' 11" rounded up to the nearest 10 pic.twitter.com/TCejnrEYZq  Anuradha (@anuradha_kush) March 21, 2018

Yep

87 year old senior , AG KK Venugopalan has said " Aadhaar data remains safe and secure, behind a complex that has 13-feet thick walls."



...... as are some superlative brains as well !#aadharFail pic.twitter.com/AneDWTLdQ8  kasturi shankar (@KasthuriShankar) March 21, 2018

Double Protection

#Aadhaar data is secure behind walls that are 13 feet high and 5 feet thick, the govt's top lawyer says. So hackers now need to first break walls before breaking into systems.  Ritesh Bhatia (@riteshb2) March 21, 2018

Exactly

Government saves data from hackers*



*with shorter ladders. https://t.co/o9qq4p4023  Karuna Nundy (@karunanundy) March 22, 2018

Hackers Will Have To Literally Break In Now

Stupid Facebook

Had Facebook secured the user data in a building that has 10 ft thick walls, like Indian Govt is doing for Aadhaar, data breach by Cambridge Analytica wouldn't had happened.



Stupid Facebook.  Jet Lee(Vasooli Bhai) (@Vishj05) March 21, 2018

ProbablyFrom March 5-20, when Chinas National Peoples Congress and the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference annual sessions were held in Beijing, the local government in Huade County ordered NPI producers in the region to stop sintering operations to curb air pollution, a north China-based NPI buyer told Metal Bulletin.Sintering is the first step in the process of transforming laterite ore into NPI. In this stage, laterite ore is heated to reduce its water content, but the procedure also generates a fine dust, called sintering dust, which can lead to air pollution.The production halt has decreased production of NPI with 8-12% nickel content in the area by 10,000-20,000 tonnes over the past two weeks. So far producers in Huade County have still not resumed production, which may result in a bigger shortfall, the buyer added.But [the halt] is unlikely to have a significant impact given the regions relatively small NPI capacity compared with the rest of China, the buyer concluded.Only around 2-7% of monthly production of Chinas total NPI production has been affected during the suspension, according to Metal Bulletins calculations.The 10,000-20,000 tonnes of affected NPI production is equivalent to around 800-2,400 tonnes of nickel metal, while China produced 34,300 tonnes of nickel metal on an average monthly basis in 2017, according to market data.Huade Countys NPI producers are negotiating with the local government to let them resume production, an NPI producer based in Inner Mongolia said.But local governments seem to have taken a stricter attitude toward environmental management after the major conferences ended on March 20, which has lengthened negotiations. I am not sure when these NPI producers will be able to resume production, a second NPI producer in Huade county said.The profits for producing NPI were good during the first quarter, so some NPI producers in other regions in China have managed to resume production in the first quarter, senior nickel and stainless steel analyst Lin Kaiwei from Chinas Galaxy Futures said.Meanwhile, NPI prices are still at discount compared with refined nickel prices, which also indicates that supply in the industry is not tight, Lin added.Chinese NPIs nickel metal production is projected to increase by 17% year on year to reach 120,000 tonnes in the first quarter of 2018, while nickel metal production from Indonesian NPI could double year on year to almost 55,000 tonnes, Investment Bank Macquarie predicted in its daily report on March 6.The reason for the rise in nickel pig iron production in China is ready availability of cheap nickel ore, which has made nickel pig iron production highly profitable, Macquarie added in its report.Metal Bulletin assessed high-grade NPI (8-12% nickel content) spot prices at 1,000-1,010 yuan ($158-160) per nickel unit on March 20, slightly lower than an assessed price of 1,010-1,030 yuan per nickel unit a week earlier, but still 11% or around 100 yuan higher than 890-920 yuan per nickel unit on December 19, 2017.The three-month nickel price stood at $13,515 per tonne as of 11.07am London time on Thursday March 22, 6% lower than highs of $14,420 per tonne on February 15 in the first quarter, but still 26% higher than the lows of $10,740 per tonne on December 06."We discussed the issue with [Brazilian] President Michel Temer and Brazil has decided to establish a system to monitor steel imports," Aco Brasil executive president Marco Polo de Mello Lopes said on Thursday March 22.Imports of all steel products will be monitored by a government agency in order to evaluate eventual trade defense measures."We must look at all imports through a magnifying glass on a daily or weekly basis to see if there is a surge of steel imports," Lopes said. "Our main concern is that we have agile trade defense instruments to prevent Brazil from becoming the destination of diverted steel trade."Meanwhile, the institute welcomed the decision by the US government to delay imposing the 25% tariff on steel imports from Brazil and other countries.The suspension will last for a minimum period of 30 days while negotiations are ongoing, according to Aco Brasil."We were able to send a message to the US government that Brazilian exports to the country have a peculiar characteristic," Lopes said, but warned that efforts by the Brazilian government and national industry should continue."I urged Temer to make a phone call to [US President Donald] Trump today or tomorrow," he said. "Trump is the only person in charge of a final decision."The institute is making arrangements for a third visit to the US, aiming to meet representatives of the coal and steel sectors and authorities."We want Brazil to be definitely excluded from Section 232 measures," Lopes said.The US tariffs - 25% for imported steel and 10% on aluminium - are set to go into effect on March 23 following conclusions from the Section 232 investigation on alleged national security issues related to such imports.Termer had said on Wednesday that the US duties would not be applied to Brazilian products before negotiations between the countries are concluded, with one trader expressing optimism that Brazilian steel, especially slab, would not be included Metal Bulletins weekly price assessment for Brazilian slab exports increased to $580-590 per tonne fob on March 16 from $560-570 per tonne fob a week earlier.BAD AXE -- In the Thumb area and beyond, the name Bill Denbrock is synonymous with music.

Denbrock, 88, of Bad Axe, died March 15, 2018. He will be fondly remembered for his lifelong devotion to music.

"He was an excellent musician -- just outstanding," said current Owendale-Gagetown Band Director Don Starks, who played in Denbrock's popular band, The Bill Denbrock Big Band.

Denbrock was born in Coldwater, Michigan, on June 23, 1929, to Bernard and Pauline Denbrock. He graduated from Marshall High School in 1947, before receiving both his bachelor's and master's degrees from Michigan State University.

He began playing the saxophone at an early age, with his talents eventually leading him onto the Michigan State Spartan Marching Band. After graduation, Denbrock became a band director and music educator and spent the majority of his career at Elkton-Pigeon-Bay Port Laker High School.

"He was a very good band director," said current Laker Band Director Samantha Corrion, who was a student of Denbrock's. "He didn't take any gruff and had high expectations for his classes."

Years later, Corrion began working with Denbrock as a colleague when Denbrock was judging band festivals.

"He had a lot of good insights," Corrion said. "He was an excellent musician -- he knew what he was talking about."

As a gifted saxophone player, Denbrock played in several musical groups, ranging from The Staccatos to larger ensembles like the Community Band and The Bob Olsen Big Band. Following the death of Olsen, Denbrock would take over and the band became known as The Bill Denbrock Big Band.

"He was a very good alto sax player," said Claude Mestack, who played alongside Denbrock in the band for 25 years. "He played alto sax and I played tenor sax, so I was always sitting next to him in the Big Band when we played together."

The 14-piece ensemble performed countless concerts, benefits and events throughout the area for more than 30 years, specializing in big band, swing, and jazz music.

Starks recalled time in the band, where Denbrock was at his musical best.

"In the band he was just on top of his game," Starks said.

Denbrock married his wife, Nancy, on April 17, 1996. Together they had a large, loving family. Another major highlight of Denbrock's life was spending time with his grandchildren.

A private memorial is currently being planned for Denbrock. And in perfect fashion, a memorial concert by The Bill Denbrock Big Band will honor the area icon at a future date.

"He was a great guy -- he will be dearly missed," Starks said. "He was just an all-around great guy."Legendary blues harpist James Montgomery and SNLs Christine Ohlman come together at 41 Bridge Street Live on Friday. Special guests include Cliff Goodwin (the Joe Cocker Band) and Tom The Suit Forst for an unforgettable evening of blues rock. This is a not to miss show with spectacular talent.

When Montgomery plays the harmonica, he brings you to the masters like James Cotton, John Lee Hooker, and Jr. Wells. Montgomery plays with authority and the experience of fronting for many big time musicians such as Kid Rock and Gregg Allman. Over the years, hes carried on the Chicago tradition and continues to be a vital presence in blues as one of the most dynamic performers on the scene.

Ohlman, the queen of blue-eyed rock n soul, grew up loving both the sweetness of a Memphis horn line and the raunch of an electric guitar riff, so she teased her blonde hair into a beehive (in honor of Ronnie Spector) and never looked back. Ohlman picked up a guitar and forged a career as a songwriter in the process. She tours relentlessly, torching clubs up and down the Eastern Seaboard. She spent time with the Saturday Night Live Band, and was featured with the B-52s during the recent SNL 40th Anniversary post-show concert. Always invited to major shows and celebrations, she continues to mesmerize the audience.

Special guest Cliff Goodwin is a native son of Worcester. He joined Joe Cocker as lead guitarist in 1976. Along the way, he worked with John Mayall, Steve Miller, and Robert Palmer.

Opener Tom The Suit Forst quit his full-time corporate job in order to pursue a lifelong dream of a career in music. Since then, he has gained acclaim as a guitarist, vocalist, and songwriter. In 2017, The Suit released his solo album, On Fire.

Saturday, Bridge Street has a Swing Dance Social for people wishing to glide across the dance floor.

The Tipping Chair Tavern has a full plate this week. Friday, its the Butch Taylor Duo at 5 p.m., followed by The Bernadettes at 8:30 p.m. Then Saturday, the Michael Cleary Band plays.

Sunday, the Tipping Chair brings in Roberto Morbioli from Italy. He will be joined by Liviu Pop for his Northeast tour.

Morbioli was born in Verona and started playing the guitar at an early age. At the age of 15 he discovered his greatest passion to be the blues. After several years of activity in the Italian music scene, playing in a few bands, he played at the biggest European festivals and at the historical places of the Blues in the U.S., such as Antones in Austin.

In 1991 he finally set up his own band MORBLUS, which has brought him much recognition and many awards, playing in all the biggest national and international blues festivals and events.

His personality and unique playing style are evident in all his interpretations while at the same time recalling the styles of blues greats such as the Kings, Albert Collins, and T. Bone Walker. Morbioli is a passionate and commanding guitarist, demonstrating great groove in every song he plays. He plays straight from his heart with a powerful voice.

On Wednesday, The Tipping Chair brings in the Royal Din Duo.

Infinity Music Hall in Hartford has a taste of Texas blues on Friday with the Fabulous Thunderbirds. The world-renown, Grammy-nominated outfit has shared the stage with a Whos Whos of blues and rock, from The Rolling Stones to Eric Clapton. Be there as the legendary Kim Wilson and company wail out your favorite T-Birds classics like Tuff Enuff, Wrap It Up, How Do You Spell Love, Why Get Up, and many, many more.

Saturday, Black-Eyed Sallys has the Nick Moss Band, which has added Dennis Gruenlings on harmonica to further enhance its Chicago sound. With Mosss guitar work, it promises to be a night of great blues.

Jeff Pitchell continues his Legends Live On tour with a Friday stop at The Stafford Palace Theater. Joining him will be Allman, Vaughan, and King.

A new group to Blues Beat is the 432 Band. It consists of Bloomer, Pelletier, and Busse. They will be at Butterballs Greenleaf Cafe on Friday and Saturday at Turning Tide.

Saturday, Smokin With Chris has Chris DAmato.

At Park & Oak on Friday, it is Jake Kulak for a solo show.

The Connecticut Blues Society is preparing for its 23rd Annual Blues Band Challenge. The preliminary rounds will be held at Black-Eyed Sallys at 2 in the afternoon during April and May. The finals will be held at the Black-Eyed and Blues Festival in Hartford on June 23.

The 3rd Annual New England Blues Summit is May 18 to 20. This is an all-inclusive weekend that provides lodging, meals and access to ALL N.E. Blues Society events and Summit shows.Tearing through the globe like wildfire, the 1918 pandemic known as the Spanish flu killed roughly 50 million people.

Many of those were healthy adults in their 20s and 30s, and the outbreak is said to have slaughtered more people than World War I, still raging that year.

The 1918 flu pandemic was one of the great public health tragedies in history, said Daniel Weinberger, assistant professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health. It hit around the world.

Now, as the global phenomenon nears its 100-year anniversary, the world is struggling with a robust flu season that has taken a huge toll in Australia and is threatening to do the same on this half of the globe. This might leave some wondering: Could a worldwide disaster like the one in 1918 happen today?

The answer, according to Weinberger and other health experts, is a flu pandemic is possible, but the circumstances would have to be just right.

Theres certainly always the potential of a new influenza pandemic, Weinberger said.

If certain strains of bird flu gained the ability to spread easily among humans, the viruses could really take off, he said.

A pandemic is defined as a global disease outbreak, whereas an epidemic is the spread of a disease over a smaller area.

More Information Four pandemics since 1900 The 1918 Spanish flu pandemic, the most deadly, is one of three other pandemics. 1918 Deaths: 50M* worldwide | 675K* U.S. 1957 Deaths: 1.1M* worldwide | 116K* U.S. Influenza A (H2N2) virus emerged in East Asia, triggering a pandemic. 1968 Deaths: 1M* worldwide | 100K* U.S. Influenza A (H3N2) virus. H3N2 continues to circulate seasonally worldwide. 2009 Deaths: 152K to 757K* worldwide 61M cases | 274K hospitalizations | 12K deaths* U.S. Influenza A (H1N1) virus detected first in the U.S.; spreads across the world. What to do if you get the flu Most people with the flu have a mild illness and do not need medical care or antiviral drugs. If you get sick with flu symptoms, in most cases, you should stay home and avoid contact with other people except to get medical care. If you have flu symptoms and are in a high-risk group, or are very sick or worried about your illness, contact your health care provider (doctor, physician assistant, etc.). Your doctor can prescribe drugs to treat the flu called antivirals. These drugs can help you feel better faster and may prevent serious complications. People at high risk of serious flu complications should get antiviral drugs. High-risk groups Children younger than 5 years Adults 65 years of age and older Pregnant women People with certain long-term medical conditions Residents of nursing homes and other long-term care facilities People who are very sick with flu (such as those hospitalized because of flu) See More Collapse

Dr. Zane Saul, chief of infectious disease at Bridgeport Hospital, said a new pandemic is possible  in theory.

Theoretically, with all the mutations and genetic shifts that are possible, (a new pandemic) is plausible, he said. But with all the technology we have today, I dont think it could happen, he said.

Flu is on the publics mind right now. On Friday, the state Department of Public Health strongly recommended residents get a flu shot, emphasizing it is not too late.

Overall, the most prevalent strain found in Connecticut this season has been Influenza A (H3N2), which typically causes more severe illness than other flu strains, according to the health department. As of the week ending Jan. 6, a total of 1,015 patients have tested positive for influenza, with 456 hospitalized.

Fifteen flu-related deaths have been reported in individuals ages 65 and older this season.

100 years ago

The 1918 Spanish flu pandemic spread across the globe, infecting about 500 million people  about one-third of the worlds population at the time.

Compare that to today, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report between 291,000 and 646,000 people worldwide die from seasonal flu-related illnesses each year.

Its still not entirely clear where the 1918 flu started, although theories are plentiful. France, China, Vietnam and even Haskell County, Kan., have all been named as potential grounds zero for the pandemic. Though it is not thought to have started in Spain, the Spanish press was the first to widely report on the outbreak, which is why it was dubbed the Spanish flu.

In Connecticut, it seems the virus popped up at the start of September in 1918, when several cases of the flu were reported at the naval hospital in New London, according to a report compiled in 1919 by staff from Yales School of Medicine. The report stated these cases came primarily from the Experimental Station and Fort Trumbull, where vessels from foreign ports had discharged patients.

Within the first 10 days of September, about 100 cases were sent to the New London naval hospital. The illness began to spread north and then west, hitting New Haven County, then Hartford County and eventually Fairfield and Litchfield counties.

In Connecticut, about 8,500 died in the outbreak, according to ConnecticutHistory.org, a program of Connecticut Humanities, which provides grants to historical societies for exhibitions and programs exploring the states history.

Amy Brenner-Fricke, of Montville, said she grew up in North Haven hearing stories from her great-grandmother about surviving the 1918 flu as a young woman in Orange. One such story involved a trolley car ride in which droves of passengers reportedly died between the time she boarded and the time she arrived at her destination.

She literally stepped over bodies on her way off the trolley car, Brenner-Fricke said. We thought she was exaggerating, and I later learned that she wasnt  that the flu was really that bad.

Past pandemics

Since the 1918 outbreak, there have been three more flu pandemics  in 1957, 1968 and 2009.

None has been as bad as the Spanish flu, but some took a massive toll. The latest pandemic took place when the H1N1 virus emerged in 2009.

It was detected in the U.S., then spread rapidly through the nation and the rest of the world, according to the CDC; it is estimated roughly 60.8 million cases and 12,469 deaths in the U.S. were due to the virus.

When the H1N1 pandemic hit, initially, people were very concerned it could be another 1918 flu, Weinberger said. Though the outbreak never reached that level, Weinberger said the threat is always there. He pointed to two strains of bird flu  H5N1 and H7N9  that have gained traction in recent years. Infections with both illnesses are typically linked to contact with infected birds.

Weinberger said if either of these illnesses were to mutate and become easily transmissible among humans, a pandemic would be possible. But he isnt sure when or even if that will happen. Its almost impossible to predict, Weinberger said.

The state Department of Public Health echoed that statement. Influenza pandemics are unpredictable, so we cant speculate as to whether something of this magnitude could happen today, said agency spokeswoman Maura Downes.

As for whether the virus that caused the 1918 pandemic could re-emerge from a natural source, the CDC argued in a 2014 statement it was unlikely. Influenza experts believe that a pandemic is most likely to be caused by an influenza subtype to which there is little, or no, preexisting immunity in the human population, the statement reads.

The report states todays antiviral medicines and vaccines would be effective against the 1918 virus.

Thats partly why Saul is not concerned about an imminent modern pandemic. He said there are more ways of tracking, preventing and treating flu than there were 100 years ago. That doesnt mean the flu should be dismissed. This years flu season has been more intense than normal nationwide, and Saul said the hospital has seen moderate to severe activity.

Though he doesnt think its the second coming of the 1918 pandemic, Saul did have some advice.

Just get a flu shot, he said.3 1 of 3 Rebecca Paterson/Facebook Show More Show Less 2 of 3 Dana Burke/Houston Chronicle Show More Show Less 3 of 3





A Texas mom's heartfelt thanks to a complete stranger is going viral in Facebook groups around the world.

Rebecca Paterson said in a March 19 post that she was shopping at Target with her two children when the unthinkable happened. Both the 2-year-old and the 2-month-old had simultaneous meltdowns, giving the universal signal for "It's time to leave Target immediately."MIDDLETOWN  Wesleyan Universitys Center for the Arts has appointed Rani Arbo as Campus and Community Engagement Manager as of Feb. 26.

Prior to joining the Center for the Arts on an interim basis in October 2016, Arbo spent seven months coordinating the Feet to the Fire: Riverfront Encounter festival, held in May 2016. She was a Vocal Music Teacher for the Center for Creative Youth in 2017, and a Fellow in the College of the Environment during the 2014-2015 academic year. Originally from New York City, she holds a Bachelor of Arts in English and Geology from Amherst College, where she previously was an Outreach Coordinator. She also works as a band leader and manager, freelance writer and editor. She has resided in Middletown for 20 years, where she has served as the Founder and Director of the Middletown Community Chorus since 2015.

The Center for the Arts opened in the fall of 1973, and includes the Adzenyah Rehearsal Hall, the 400-seat Crowell Concert Hall, the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, the 260-seat Ring Family Performing Arts Hall, the 400-seat Theater, the World Music Hall (a non-Western performance space), and classrooms and studios.

For more information about the Center for the Arts, call 860-685-3355, or visit http://www.wesleyan.edu/cfa.

Kenny scholarship applications available

NEW BRITAIN  The Robert T. Kenney Scholarship Program at the American Savings Foundation is currently accepting applications from current high school seniors, current college students, and nontraditional adult students enrolled in college for the 2018-19 academic year. Applications are due by March 31.

Applicants must live in one of the 64 Connecticut towns served by American Savings Foundation. Current high school seniors must be ranked in the top 1/3 of their graduating class or have a 2.5 GPA or higher. Current college students must be maintaining a 2.5 GPA or higher. For more information and to apply, students and parents can visit www.asfdn.org or call the foundation at 860.827.2556.

Goodspeed Musicals announces Andrew A. Isen Prize

EAST HADDAM  Goodspeed Musicals recently announced the establishment of The Andrew A. Isen Prize at Goodspeed Musicals. The prize, to be given annually, will recognize a young person between the ages of 20-29 who has demonstrated excellence in their work during the previous Goodspeed Musicals season. Each March, Goodspeed will award $5,000 to an honoree  chosen by committee  to aid in their pursuit of a career in musical theatre. The inaugural prize will be awarded in 2019 for candidates from the 2018 season. Application information will be made available to eligible candidates during their time at Goodspeed.

This award is funded by a gift from DC-based entrepreneur and musical theatre devotee Andrew A. Isen and was created to give young people who are in the early stages of professional development financial assistance and encouragement to focus on artistic excellence. The establishment of this award with Goodspeed Musicals will also serve to enhance Goodspeeds efforts to recruit exceptional apprentices, technicians, designers and other theater professionals.

Vocal Chords offer scholarships

MIDDLETOWN  The Middlesex Hospital Vocal Chords Executive Board is now accepting applications for its annual scholarships to be awarded to deserving students pursuing a career in nursing or music. They must have been accepted at an accredited college or university with one of these majors.

The Review Committee will consider academic record, extracurricular and community service activities, the students ability to articulate his/her career goals and the recommendations of the references. The scholarships will be paid directly to the student at the spring concert, Saturday, May 5.

All applications must be postmarked by March 26 and can be obtained at the Middlesex County high school guidance offices. For more information, call 860-349-2042.

Lions Club offer annual scholarship

EAST HAMPTON  The East Hampton Village Lions Club will offer a scholarship to a high school senior graduating in 2018. Students must be a resident of East Hampton to be considered.

For the past few years, the Village Lions have presented a monetary award to a student. The club considers the applicants financial need and service to their community and school as the two top criteria.

Applications are now available at the East Hampton High, Mercy High, Xavier High, and Vinal Technical Schools guidance departments or by calling Linda at 860-267-2012. Applicants are also required to write a brief essay about a topic they are passionate about. The scholarship committee is accepting applications until Monday, April 16.

College scholarships available

EAST HADDAM  The East Haddam Community Lions will award two $2,500 scholarships to deserving graduating seniors who meet the following criteria:

The candidates must be high school seniors at Nathan Hale-Ray High School or residents of East Haddam who attend another high school with plans to attend college or further his/her education in a planned program in the 2018-2019 year.

Recipients will be selected based on academic standing, financial need, extra-curricular activities and other criteria established by the East Haddam Scholarship Committee.

Applications can be obtained from area high school guidance counselors or contact the Nathan Hale-Ray guidance department at 860-873-5065. Applications must be received by April 27, 2018.

Military vehicles sought for Memorial Day Parade

CROMWELL  Interested persons with military vehicles are invited to participate in the annual Town of Cromwell Memorial Day Parade on May 30.

The memorial service will begin at 6 p.m. on the World War I Memorial Green on the corner of Main and West Streets. It will be immediately followed by the annual town parade along a parade route in downtown Cromwell. These events are sponsored annually by the Town of Cromwell and the American Legion Carlson-Sjovall Post 105. Interested persons should contact Parade Marshal Al Waters at 860-930-7812.As women enter ground combat fields in larger numbers, the military services are working harder to make gender-specific accommodations for their gear -- even down to tweaking protective equipment to fit around longer hair.

According to presentations prepared by the Army and the Marine Corps for the Pentagon's Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services, both services are making independent changes to ensure gear fits correctly for women with hair buns.

A presentation prepared by Army Lt. Col. Ginger L. Whitehead, product manager for Soldier Protective Equipment, shows a recently introduced version of the Female Improved Outer Tactical Vest, or FIOTV, includes a yoke-and-collar assembly that dips in the back to accommodate a hair bun, along with other fit improvements to offer better ballistic protection for women.

Feedback from soldiers is also leading to helmet improvements, the presentation shows.

Women in uniform complained that the "X-Back" design of the apparatus holding the chin straps interfered with hair buns, making it difficult for the helmet to fit securely on the head, with the straps in the proper places. According to the presentation, the Army is introducing a female-specific "H-Back" apparatus that includes an opening for a bun.

This solution, along with improvements to retention straps to keep them from interfering with peripheral vision and cutting into earlobes, was "widely accepted by [the] female soldier community," the presentation showed.

A number of recent improvements to the Army's body armor design have come through the human factors evaluation process, in which female soldiers provide feedback and critiques on their own personal protective equipment and test out new gear.

"Often, these HFEs compare new equipment and legacy systems side by side in a counter-balanced test design," Whitehead's presentation stated. "Testing personnel measure all Soldiers participating in user assessments and operational tests to determine their individual percentile rankings for various body dimensions and to initially size and fit the tested equipment."

The Army began these research efforts in 2010.

The Marine Corps, which began an effort to expand the size range of its stock of personal protective equipment as infantry fields opened to women in 2016, now aims to fit all Marines from the 2nd percentile of female troops to the 98th percentile of males. Previously, gear only had to fit the 5th to 95th percentile of men. The change means another 8,856 smaller-stature and 5,711 larger Marines will get gear that fits, according to a presentation for DACOWITS from Lt. Col. Chris Madeline, the Marine Corps' program manager for Infantry Combat Equipment.

The Corps' new Enhanced Combat Helmet, which is set to begin fielding this spring, has design features that better accommodate the hair bun, according to the presentation.

The Plate Carrier Generation III system, which is currently in the design and contracting process, is shorter and 25 percent lighter than its predecessors, with a more modular fit, according to the slides.

The Marines are also working on an improved adjustable pack frame designed to fit better around body armor and offer better fit options to cover a range of sizes.

For services in which women have historically had to contend with protective equipment designed for men that often left them contending with gaping armholes and too-long torsos, even small adjustments, like room for hair buns, represent progress.

The Army and Marine Corps are not the only male-dominated services with blind spots in this area. Just last year, the Navy changed a policy governing how to wear ball caps that allowed women with long hair to wear them comfortably for the first time.

So far, the Army and Marine Corps have opted to expand size range and improve fit for the primary body armor vest and protective plates, rather than to design a full range of gender-specific protective gear.

In 2017, Lt. Col. Kathy Brown, then-product manager for soldier protective equipment at PEO Soldier, told Military.com that research had shown that form-fitting protective plates for women created their own fit challenges, and the Army had ultimately determined that it was not the best approach.

That answer, however, does not satisfy everyone.

Last year, Rep. Salud Carbajal, D-Calif., told Military.com that he found the solution "100 percent unacceptable."

"Men would be the first to cry out that the military adapt appropriate body armor ... to them if it was first designed for women," said Carbajal, who served in the Marine Corps as a mortarman and left the service as a sergeant. "It's really important that we provide the same appreciation and support for female soldiers and Marines that we do for men ... as a Marine myself, I find it does not correlate to the values of the institution."

-- Hope Hodge Seck can be reached at hope.seck@military.com. Follow her on Twitter at @HopeSeck.If one service has made sufficient progress to use laser weapons in its arsenal in the next few years, it's the U.S. Navy, according to the former director of the Missile Defense Agency.

"The Navy right now is the most forward-leaning because they're the only service that has actually fielded an operational prototype weapon, the Laser Weapon System that they put on the USS Ponce," said Trey Obering, an executive vice president at consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton who leads the directed energy innovation team.

Military.com spoke with Obering, a former Air Force lieutenant general, fighter pilot and NASA space shuttle engineer, in the midst of this week's Directed Energy Summit hosted by Booz Allen Hamilton and the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

Getting the laser in the hands of sailors to survey how and when they would use the LaWS was critical to making laser weapons a reality in wartime missions, Obering argued. The Air Force and Army have struggled to do so.

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Obering recognized that each of the services operates in very different environments, which affect range and power levels. While the Army, "a close second to the Navy," he said, is looking to get directed-energy weapons on its Stryker vehicles, the Air Force has hit some speed bumps.

"For the Air Force, the challenge is size, weight and power," Obering said. "They need to be able to use them in either pods under the wings, or on unmanned drones."

The difficulty will be to get enough power for the size of the weapon should it be mounted to the aircraft.

Obering said he is pleased to hear the Air Force may test laser weapons on F-15 Eagle fighter jets this summer.

Citing a conversation Jeff Stanley, deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force for science, technology and engineering, had with reporters Tuesday, The Japan Times reported the F-15 will use 50-kilowatt lasers for drone zapping exercises as part of the Self-protect High Energy Laser Demonstrator project, known as SHiELD.

"The Air Force in the past has certainly been on the forefront in research and development, and put a lot of money into the Airborne Laser program," Obering said, referencing a now-defunct, multi-billion-dollar program dating back to the early 1990s.

"But they got a little gun shy  because of some of the limitations we found with that system," mainly how complex and restrictive it was for its awkward, massive weight and size, he said.

Obering's comments come as the military service secretaries have begun meeting to discuss how to better collaborate on technology, lasers included.

He noted, however, each service will have contrasting applications for laser tech no matter what conclusions are reached in those meetings.

"Anywhere you need the speed of light, it makes it ideal because the weapons operate at the speed of light," Obering said. "The ranges we're talking about, it's instantaneous  at 186,000 miles [per] second."

But "for the application, you may want a different lasing source: a different wavelength, a different frequency," he said.

"I don't see that everybody's going to go to the same lasing source, but they all have power requirements, they have to generate cooling capability, they're going to have size requirements, and power input requirements," Obering said.

The former MDA director said the Defense Department as a whole is well within a "three-to-five year" window to start prototyping more lasers.

"There's really not any physics challenges left, or engineering challenges," given how technology has sped up in recent years, he said.

It's just a matter of money. "Today, we're technology rich  and funding poor," Obering said.

But as officials such as Deputy Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan and Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Mike Griffin list direct-energy development as a top priority, Congress may put more funding toward the investment, Obering said.

"They've [DoD] been making great advancements, and dramatic breakthroughs on power generation and beam quality," he said.

Before service members get hyped for new, cool laser weapons as seen in films like "Star Wars," Obering says a more realistic benefit is putting lasers on systems for tracking purposes, such as monitoring ballistic missiles in their boost phase.

"Put a laser on a high-flying unmanned vehicle that would be able to counter a missile that's fired from a country like North Korea, and that could be very effective in reducing the numbers of missiles that the kinetic interceptors would have to deal with," he said.

instead of launching multiple, million-dollar missile interceptors into the air In a counterattack scenario, lasers could shoot down incoming missiles, he said.

To stop missiles from more capable adversaries such as Russia and China, laser tracking would have to be far out -- literally in space, Obering said. "That's not three to five years," he added.

"It's still an exciting time. These are weapons that can be used across an entire spectrum of conflict," he said.

-- Oriana Pawlyk can be reached at oriana.pawlyk@military.com. Follow her on Twitter at @Oriana0214.The Navy has completed developmental testing of an emerging drone-base mine detection system designed to identify surface mines and beach or coastal obstacles after launching from a Littoral Combat Ship, service officials said.

The Coastal Mine Reconnaissance system, now much closer to operational status, supports the mine-countermeasures mission package for the LCS, a collection of integrated technologies geared toward finding and destroying sea mines.

The CMR mission module consists of an MQ-8B Fire Scout drone and the AN/DVS-1 Coastal Battlespace Reconnaissance and Analysis, or COBRA, sensor. COBRA reached operational status last year after completing Initial Operational Test and Evaluation on the MQ-8B.

Operating aboard the USS Coronado, or LCS 4, the CMR conducted developmental testing by performing nine specific missions. According to a Navy statement, testing points consisted of mission-tasking from a shore-based commander, flying planned missions, and downloading and analyzing collected data.

The CMR also uses a web system called MINEnet Tactical, which supports mine warfare command and control, Navy developers said.

Given that the LCS is engineered to use its shallow draft, speed and maneuverability to conduct combat operations in littoral waters near enemy coastlines, having an improved technological capacity to find and detect enemy mines and submarines near the surface expands its mission envelope and provides needed protection for offensive ship operations.

Previously, such reconnaissance was possible only by putting sailors or Marines on the beach in advance of a landing, exposing them to casualties and revealing an intended landing zone, a Navy statement said.

The CMR is an integral part of the mine-countermeasures mission package for LCS, which also includes MH-60 Sea Hawk helicopters, undersea drones such as Knifefish, and unmanned mine-hunting surface vessels.

Alongside CMR, the Navy plans to deploy fast, high-tech surface drones equipped with advanced wireless technology able to find, attack and ultimately destroy underwater enemy mines, all while operating at safe distance from a larger manned surface host ship such as an LCS, service officials said.

Naval Sea Systems Command is working with industry to develop, assess and analyze mine-neutralization technologies for its emerging Mine Countermeasures Unmanned Surface Vehicle (MCM USV) -- a multi-mission surface drone countermine platform slated to be operational by 2019, Navy developers said.

"MCM USV will 'take the man out of the minefield' when it comes to Navy mine countermeasures operations," said Alan Baribeau, spokesman for Naval Sea Systems Command.

The current exploration of mine-neutralization technology is happening alongside the ongoing integration of advanced sonar mine-hunting payloads onto the USV -- the AQS-20 and AQS-24, Baribeau explained.

Overall, the MCM USV represents the next iteration of surface-drone technology, extending beyond the mine-detecting Unmanned Influence Sweep System (UISS) now going through testing and builders trials, Navy developers said.

The developing technology is part of a longer-term Navy effort to go beyond detection and succeed in destroying mines as well.The Pirates officially signed Mexican pitching prospect Luis Heredia for $2.6MM, according to Dejan Kovacevic of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Its the biggest bonus the Pirates have ever given an international amateur.

Heredias former team, Veracruz, will keep 75% of the bonus ($1.95MM) and Heredia will keep 25% ($650K). The 16-year-old right-hander already passed a physical and completed the agreement with the Pirates, though the sides have not yet officially signed the deal.

Many teams were interested in Heredia and it appeared in July that the Blue Jays had offered him $2.8MM. However, the Pirates' offer was competitive and Pittsburgh has long-standing connections to Veracruz and Heredia himself. It's been a breakthrough week for the Pirates, who signed right-handers Jameson Taillon and Stetson Allie before Monday night's deadline to come to terms with picks.Indians first baseman/designated hitter Mike Napoli and outfielder Rajai Davis will be able to opt out of their minor league contracts Thursday, according to Paul Hoynes of cleveland.com. Its unclear whether one or both will vacate their deals, though Napoli has seemed especially likely to do so since his late-February signing with the Indians, who dont have an opening for him in the majors. Asked Wednesday if Napoli could stay in the organization in a minor league role, manager Terry Francona said: The next step is for him to talk to (president) Chris (Antonetti) a little bit more to figure out what he wants to do and what is available as far as the organization goes. Obviously, we think a ton of Nap and respect him a lot. Theres just a lot of unknowns.

More on Cleveland a few other Central clubs:In fresh developments in the Uber autonomous crash case, a senior cop with Tempe Police, Arizona, has hinted that the taxi aggregator may not be at fault.

Tempe Police Chief Sylvia Moir in an interview to the Chronicle said: "Prima facie, it appears that Uber would likely not be at fault in this accident, adding that she does not rule out the potential to file charges against the backup driver as well.



Tempe Police Vehicular Crimes Unit is actively investigating

the details of this incident that occurred on March 18th. We will provide updated information regarding the investigation once it is available. pic.twitter.com/2dVP72TziQ

 Tempe Police (@TempePolice) March 21, 2018

The Police Department recently released footage of the crash, which reveals two views - one from the inside of the car and the other one of the backup driver who was behind the wheels just before the crash took place.

The victim, Elaine Herzberg, 49, can be seen pushing her bicycle in the middle of the road and suddenly emerged from the darkness.

Moir added that it was too soon for the driver to react. The driver said it was like a flash; the person walked out in front of them, she said. His first alert to the collision was the sound of the collision.

What is the case all about?

The accident took place on Sunday at around 10 pm local time in Tempe, Arizona when a female pedestrian crossing the street was struck by a self-driving car. The injured woman was later taken to the hospital where she died.

According to preliminary investigation police have found out that the car was travelling at a speed of 38 mph (about 61 kph), which was above the permitted speed limit on the street of 35 mph. However, a Google Street View shot last year clearly shows the speed limit was set at 45 mph, which means the autonomous car was travelling well below the maximum permitted speed limit.

Police said, at the time of the crash the car was in autonomous mode and the cars operator (backup driver) 44-year-old Rafaela Vasquez was behind the wheel.Rajat Bose of rajatkbose.com told CNBC-TV18, "In Jubilant Foodworks, I would put a stop loss below Rs 2,018 while Rs 2,294 and Rs 2, 319 are the targets. It is a positional call maybe until about say earlier part of next week this level of Rs 2,300 plus would be reached in the stock."

"In Hindustan Oil Exploration, my stop loss would be below Rs 113 while Rs 122 and Rs 128 are the two targets."

"In Oil India Limited, I would put a stop loss below Rs 337 while Rs 347 and Rs 349.50 are the two targets."

"In HDFC Bank , although my stop loss is Rs 1,853 and since the stock has already moved up you can push that stop loss to about Rs 1,857 while Rs 1,875 and Rs 1,882 are the initial targets. Once Rs 1,882 is crossed, it can move up to Rs Rs 1,894 HDFC Bank looks good once again and probably it is going to support partly the Bank Nifty in its movements," he added.live bse live

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The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) has registered a case based on a complaint filed by Union Bank of India against Hyderabad-based Totem Infrastructure, alleging it was cheated to the tune of Rs 303.84 crore by the company.

The complaint mentions promoters and directors Tottempudi Salalith and Tottempudi Kavita as the accused in the case. The company allegedly took a loan from a consortium of 8 banks, of which UBI was the lead bank.

The total dues outstanding for the consortium is Rs 1,394.43 crore. The account became a non performing asset (NPA) on June 30, 2012 after a default on the loan and interest payments.

Totem Infrastructure was in the business of road construction, building construction, and water works. It was also a sub contractor for the likes of L&T, RITES, and IRCON International.

It is alleged that expenses such as wages, against which the funds were given, were inflated. The funds were also allegedly diverted.

The bank said that the borrowers and promoters are currently absconding and that their present whereabouts are unknown. The CBI has tracked their location to Hyderabad and a search is currently underway.The divestment of Air India group, the largest strategic sale of an Indian public sector company, will happen in phases as the government gets ready to kick off the exercise with that of the parent airline along with Air India Charters, one of its five arms. Divestment process of the parent and its subsidiaries will all have a separate expression of interest (EoI) each and will not be bunched, an official familiar with the development told Moneycontrol.

Air India Charters operates low-cost flights between Kerala and West Asia under the brand name Air India Express. It wont be merged with its parent company, but the two will be sold as one unit to a single buyer, the official said.

Besides the parent and two subsidiaries that operate flights, there are three other arms that are all different businesses of varying scale. The business operations of the companies who will be interested in bidding for those subsidiaries will also be different. It wont be possible to undertake divestment exercise of all at the same time. Hence, all those EoIs will come at different times. The subsidiary businesses are much smaller. Their processes wont take time, the official said.

The Specific Alternate Mechanism, a group of ministers, looking into the modalities of the Maharajas divestment met on Tuesday to discuss the final contours of the EoI. Finance Minister Arun Jaitley heads the panel that is assisted by consultants EY and SBI Capital Markets.

A note will be prepared for Cabinet approval for the issue of the EoI. After that, the EoI will be issued. It should be out by the end of this month, an official said, going with Minister of State for Civil Aviation Jayant Sinhas statement on March 9 in Hyderabad that the EoI would be out in two to three weeks.

The government is likely to retain 26 per cent stake in Air India to have a board seat and thus have a say in the operations of the loss-making company, the official said.

Besides Air India Charters, Air India counts Air India Air Transport Services, Air India Engineering Services, Airline Allied Services and Hotel Corporation of India as its subsidiaries. It has a 50:50 joint venture - Air India SATS Airport Services - with Singapore Airport Terminal Services to provide ground handling services to airlines at certain metro airports.

The parent and its subsidiaries are provided ground handling services at more than 60 airports by its arm Air India Air Transport Services also. Another arm, Air India Engineering Services, offers maintenance, repair and overhaul services to Air India and its other units besides some other airlines as well.

Airline Allied Services operates regional flights under the brand name Alliance Air.

InterGlobe Aviation, the company behind IndiGo, is the only airline to have officially expressed its interest in buying Air India. Media reports have named Jet Airways as a likely bidder in partnership with Air France and US-based Delta.

In an interesting March 15 interview to foreign news agency Reuters, David Lim, general manager of the India unit of Singapore Airlines, refused to comment on whether the airline would bid for Air India in partnership with Tatas even as he expressed his interest in acquiring stake in the Indian state-owned carrier.

Singapore Airlines and Tatas currently operate the full-service carrier Vistara here. A source had earlier told Moneycontrol that Tata Sons could partner a Japanese airline in bidding for Air India. In response to a Moneycontrol query on whether the business house was in talks with a Japanese airline for the purpose, a company spokesperson had refused to comment, calling the information as market speculation.

A senior official with Vistara had on March 17 told Moneycontrol that the airline was focused on growing its business and was not aware of what its shareholders planned to do with respect to bidding for Air India.The VIP Industries stock had a stellar run till January but is now down 20 percent from its 52-week high in the last one month. Weakness in the rupee has hit their business as 70 percent of their revenue comes from soft luggage that is imported from China. In an interview to CNBC-TV18, Dilip Piramal, Chairman of VIP Industries spoke about the latest happenings in his company and sector.

The growth in aviation figures for February is 24 percent. Travel is something which affects us directly and aviation gives very accurate figures. So that is a very good barometer for us, he said.

We are doing quite well and demand is good, he added.

Our profitability has been much better, margins have been good, said Piramal.

Speaking of doubling the capacity of Bangladesh unit, he said that the doubling will happen by the end of next month.

Whatever we earn in Bangladesh adds to our bottomline, he further mentioned.

On airline traffic growth, Piramal said, We are looking at something like 15 percent plus. We are confident of doing 15 percent but it could increase also.

Post goods and services tax (GST), we have got some good market share from the unorganized sector, he said.Fortis Healthcare | Aberdeen Standard Investments (Asia) Ltd increased stake in company to 5.02 percent from 4.96 percent earlier via open market purchases.

Fortis Healthcare, India's second largest healthcare provider on Thursday informed stock exchanges that Pradeep Ratilal Raniga, Non-Executive Independent Director has resigned from the company's Board.

The company said Raniga resigned due to personal reasons primarily increase in other work commitments in Australia and other parts of the world.

With Raniga's resignation - Fortis Board is left with three directors that include Harpal Singh and Brian W Tempest. Tejinder Singh Shergill has been appointed as the Additional Director. Shergill's appointment will have to be ratified in the next AGM.

Fortis still retains quorum as the Companies Act allows a minimum of two directors to conduct Board meet, but any further resignations may impede the Board to transact business.

Raniga exit follows a spate of resignations of independent directors from the Board of the embattled hospital chain.

Two other independent directors that include Preetinder Singh Joshi and Joji Sekhon Gill have resigned earlier this month.

While Joshi's resignation was attributed to poor health, Gill tendered her resignation due to her occupation related responsibilities.

Earlier promoter directors Malvinder Singh and Shivinder Singh resigned from the Board last month saying they took the decision to insulate the company from the promoters' ongoing legal fight that was hurting the performance.

Trouble at Fortis started in January after Delhi High Court allowed Japanese pharma firm Daiichi Sankyo to collect Rs 3,500 crore ($500 million) award money from the Singh brothers.

A Singaporean tribunal had adjudged in favour of Daiichi that the Singh brothers had concealed information about Ranbaxy regulatory problems with US FDA, while selling its shares.

Fortis is also under investigation by SEBI and Registrar of Companies for possible violation of corporate laws after the company said its promoters took out USD 78 million out of the firm through questionable inter-corporate deposits.

"The resignation of independent directors doesn't absolve them from liability of any act of commission and omission by the company," said Amit Tandon, Managing Director of IiAS, a Mumbai-based institution investor advisory services firm to Moneycontrol.

In a separate filing to stock exchanges Fortis said it has received Delhi High Court orders that prohibit Singh brothers and their holding companies from making any transfer of equity shares or non-convertible redeemable preference shares (NCRPS) or optionally convertible debentures or from receiving payment of dividends.

The court also prohibited the company from permitting any such transfer or making such payment.

Singh brothers shareholding in the company is now drastically down to 0.77 percent, from 34.40 per cent earlier this year as lenders invoked the pledged shares.

Yes Bank is the largest shareholder in the company with around 17 percent stake.Representative Image.

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Even though most Indian information technology companies have been talking of increasing their share of the digital pie for at least the past two years, but even until now, there is no consensus on what constitutes digital business.

According to a report in Mint, Indias information technology industry body has said it will not come out with a broader definition for digital.

Most IT companies are using digital as an umbrella term for revenue generation from areas generally classified as social, mobile, analytics, cloud computing and Internet of Things, but the National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) believes it is not practical to have a standard definition.

Rishad Premji, vice-chairman, Nasscom, ws quoted as saying that instead of a standard definition, one should ask each of the companies to define digital and see how it is progressing over years, and that as long as there was an apple-to-apple comparison within the companies, it should be okay.

Most IT companies - from large to mid caps have been touting digital as the buzzword for several quarters now. While it accounts for close to a quarter of the business for large firms such as Tata Consultancy Services, Wipro and Infosys, the mid-tier firms such as Mindtree and Zensar have said digital business accounts for 40 percent and 35 percent, respectively, of their overall revenues, the report said.

Nasscom president R Chandrashekhar was quoted as saying that the industry body does not want a rigid and rigorous definition of digital business.

NASSCOMs position is significant because until now most equity and industry analysts and executives at IT firms have expressed hopes for a standard definition, the report noted.

As growth slows for the Indian IT industry with rising automation and global uncertainties, most of their clients are cutting costs on the legacy technology and software and bring in projects in newer areas such as data analytics, cybersecurity and so on, all of which get classified as digital.

In fact, even the top four Indian IT servies companies- TCS, Infosys, Wipro and HCL Technologies, define digital differently.

Analysts believe some companies are merely rebadging or reclassifying existing work as digital business, as despite claims of increase in profitability, most companies have seen a decline in revenue per employee over the last three years.

Since each company defines digital differently, most analysts are in a quandary when they try to draw comparisons between firms.Zensar Technologies has acquired US based company, Cynosure for USD 33 million. Prashant Nair caught up with Harshvardhan Goenka, Chairman of Zensar Technologies and asked him about the newly acquired company and the market opportunity.

Zensar in the last couple of years has decided to focus three primary segments  insurance, high-tech and retail, he said.

50 percent of our total business is insurance and we have been looking at opportunities as to how we can grow our insurance practice. We have some marquee clients in the US, in South Africa and Europe, he added.

Cynosure was a great opportunity, it is one of the leading Guidewire platform companies based out of Chicago with the back office in Bangalore, said Goenka.

He believes there were a lot of benefits by acquiring Cynosure. It has around 150 people, it is primarily in the property and the casualty space. It is a business which is massive in terms of size, he further mentioned.

According to him, there was a huge opportunity with insurance companies now wanting to become digital.

Cynosure has a good track record of growing by over 50 percent a year. We are hoping that this kind of growth can continue in the future, he said.

Speaking of funding this acquisition, Goenka said that a large part of this acquisition will be funded through internal accruals and some part through debt.

Below is the verbatim transcript of the interview.

Q: Can you explain the rationale behind this?

A: Zensar in the last couple of years has decided to focus and there are three primary segments that we are focusing on, one is insurance, the other is high-tech and the third is retail. 15 percent of our total business is insurance and we have been looking at opportunities as to how we can grow our insurance practice. We have some marquee clients in the US, South Africa and Europe and our desire was how to get into the Guidewire platform.

Much of the implementation that has been happening in the insurance space has been on the guidewire platform. Cynosure was a great opportunity, it is one of the leading guidewire platformed companies based out of Chicago with a back office in Bangalore. We felt that there were a lot of benefits by acquiring Cynosure. It has around 150 people, it is primarily in the property and casualty space. A business which is massive in terms of size and growing.

We also felt that there was a huge opportunity with insurance companies now wanting to become digital. There is the potential for customers to ask for an omnichannel offering and we felt by this acquisition not only would there be synergies in terms of customers, we could introduce Cynosure to our customers and vise versa but also we could take our offerings to the cloud and digital platform and the track record of Cynosure has been pretty good. It has been growing by over 50 percent a year and we are hoping that this kind of growth can continue in the future.

Q: Would the acquisition be earnings accretive immediately?

A: Yes. It will be. The turnover of Cynosure is about USD 20 million plus and the total amount that we will be paying will be around USD 33 million plus the incentives based on future guidelines.

Q: This will be funded via internal accruals?

A: A large part will be through internal accruals but some part will be through debt. It was earlier owned by a four partners led by Sid Wadhwa who was the largest shareholder and they will continue working within the organisation, Zensar organization, Sid Wadhwa will take over as the head of the insurance practice itself.

Q: Let us move on to other group companies. Let me begin with Ceat which has been leader in that particular space. Could you talk to us a little bit about the efforts underway at Ceat to go after the passenger car tyre market? More than a couple of years back Ceat was known as a truck and heavy vehicle tyre manufacturer, you moved aggressively into the two-wheeler space and now you wanted to do as far as the passenger car space is concerned. Where are we there in that journey?

A: We made a very conscious journey difference where we said we will more and more move to the consumer segment and the problem in tyre business is it was very much dependent on commodity prices. So the actual profit play is if we can convert tyres from a commodity to a consumer play and that is what we have been attempting in the last couple of years.

The emphasis has been primarily on two-wheeler and passenger car tyres and we have increased significantly our market share in both these categories. We are putting in significant investments. We have put up a new plant in Nagpur to make two-wheeler tyres. We are now putting up a large tyre capacity in Chennai for passenger car radial tyres, we are expanding our capacity in Baroda. So there is nearly a Rs 4,000 crore expansion which is going on at full speed. That on the one hand.

Q: That will be completed over the next two years or so?

A: In the next one year to one and a half years. On the other hand, we are also putting up a capacity for off-the-highway tyres primarily farm tyres meant for the international market. Even the passenger car tyres that we are looking at  a large capacity will be for the most sophisticated European market.

Q: Ceat maybe the most valuable business in the group right now, in terms of growth rates over the next couple of years when you said that you are bullish about the market and Ceat being the player it is in the industry, any projections you can make for growth at the company not just this year but the next couple of years?

A: What we are aiming for is not to be the largest tyre company but to be the most profitable tyre company. So I think the entire emphasis is how to grow profitability and that will be our objective in the future.

Today, the most valuable company within the group is KEC International.

Q: So you bring me to my next question which is KEC. There is very much a B2B kind of business, right?

A: Yes, KEC is primarily EPC player. Our major play is in power transmission where we are global leaders and we have plans not only in India but countries like Mexico and Brazil, we are doing projects around the world, in some of the most difficult terrains in Afghanistan and in Congo and in Africa, we are a leading player in Latin America, we are the largest players, so transmission is one part of the business, the second part is railway infrastructure.

Q: How quickly is that coming along?

A: It is coming along very well because it is a new business for us, which we started a couple of years back and I am very happy to say that the government has been very proactive giving a lot of orders in railway electrification, we are today clearly the number one player and our order book is nearly Rs 4,950 crore. So the railway business augurs extremely well for the future.In February 2018, Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched NASSCOMs Future Skills Platform where it is anticipated that 4 million Information Technology (IT) professionals will be trained in eight new skill-sets including artificial intelligence (AI), virtual reality, Internet of Things (IoT), big data analytics, among others.

During the event, Ravi Shankar Prasad, Union Minister of Law & Justice and Electronics and IT had said that with the advent of new technologies like AI, blockchain and IoT, it it important to reskill young professionals in the country.

While on one hand there is a rise in the number of courses available to cater to the demand for blockchain courses, on the other, institutes are seeing an increase in interest among both students and working professionals.

Vikalp Jain, co-founder and president of edutech startup AEON Learning said that it is a given that people are finding it difficult to survive in the market with basic skills.

The bar has been raised across corporates and automation has replaced a lot of regular processes that required human intervention, he noted.

The application of blockchain has extended much beyond the regular IT and technology companies. Sectors like banking and insurance are depending heavily on blockchain technology to simplify processes and make customer interface user friendly.

A blockchain can be defined as a set or list of continuous records, called blocks, which are securely linked using cryptography.

Large financial institutions such as ICICI Bank and State Bank of India (SBI) have stated that they are betting big on blockchain technology. In fact, a few months back, SBI said that it was looking to implement the technology in its know your customer (KYC) process. In 2016, ICICI Bank had executed transactions in international trade finance and remittance using blockchain technology in partnership with Emirates NBD, a leading banking group in the Middle East.

In 2017, Bajaj Allianz General Insurance launched Travel Ezee, an application that uses blockchain technology to disburse travel insurance claims even before a claim is reported.

Also, about 15 life insurance companies, including ICICI Prudential Life, HDFC Life and SBI Life Insurance, have partnered with IBM and blockchain solutions provider Cateina Technologies to come together as a consortium to share data with respect to medical records.

A report by job site Indeed had earlier said that there has been a big jump in the number of jobs related to cryptocurrency and blockchain had seen a rise of almost 300 percent in the June-November 2017 period. Further, they said that there was a 52 percent increase in the job searches using keywords related to blockchain and cryptocurrency.

The courses related to blockchain have seen a rise. Professional education institute Imarticus Learning has a programme called FinTech Prodegree (in partnership with Rise Mumbai) which includes a 30 hour deep-dive on blockchain.

Similarly, certification and training provider Simplilearn has a Blockchain Certification Training course, specially meant for developers.

Jain said that their blockchain certification course is primarily targeted towards IT sector specialists and developers. In the near future, they would add introductory courses to their platform.

Industry estimates suggest that India could need at least 30,000 to 50,000 blockchain experts in the near future across sectors. Salaries for these experts would also be at a 40-50 percent premium as compared to other professionals.The Ayushman Bharat-National Health Protection Mission (AB-NHPM) that was approved by the Cabinet on Wednesday is likely to have a ceiling of Rs 2,000 on the annual premium per family under which Rs 5 lakh health insurance will be provided. While this scheme is completely free for the families, the premium share between Centre and States will be 60%-40%. This scheme will cover 100 million poor families.

It is anticipated that in the first year of its implementation, a total cost of Rs 10,000 crore will be incurred, of which Rs 6,000 crore will come from Centre and the rest Rs 4,000 crore will be borne by the States.

A regular insurance policy of Rs 5 lakh will cost between Rs 3,500 and Rs 5,000, and excludes all pre-existing diseases. However, since this policy will include all existent ailments as well and a cap of Rs 2,000 is likely, it would be fair to say that the policy has been subsidised to quite an extent, a senior insurance official who was in discussions with the government officials on this scheme told Moneycontrol.

In a major step towards providing Universal Health Coverage - a promise made by the Narendra Modi government - Finance Minister Arun Jaitley in the Union Budget announced a National Health Protection Scheme (NHPS) providing Rs 5 lakh health insurance to 10 crore poor families.

From concerns being raised over how the scheme will be funded, the questions have now moved to the funding of the scheme. The Cabinet headed by PM Modi has also approved the continuation of the National Health Mission, with effect from April 1, 2017 to March 31, 2020 with a budgetary support of Rs 85,217 crore as Central share over this period.

Out of this, the Universal Health Coverage is also an important aspect and the AB-NHPM is a vehicle to further their goals on providing basic health facilities to all citizens of the country.

One area of concern has been the exclusion of outpatient expenses from the scope of AB-NHPM in the initial stages. The government has said that OPD that includes minor surgeries not requiring hospitalisation, diagnostic tests and consulting fees, may be covered in the future.

This, said sources, could also partially increase premiums, which will be borne proportionately by the centre and the states.

The AB-NHPM was in works for almost two years and the government had consulted several stakeholders including health consultants, insurance companies as well as hospitals to work out the structures of the scheme. Sources said that this scheme would be formally launched on August 15, 2018 during PM Modis Independence Day speech at Red Fort.

The centre has given the states two options to implement the scheme, having a trust route or tying up with insurance companies to provide health insurance. Sources that Moneycontrol spoke to, said, that apart from certain states (West Bengal for example has already stated that it will not be part of the scheme), most of them are likely to adopt the insurance route.

However, when it comes to states like Andhra Pradesh (NTR Health Insurance Scheme) which already have schemes running on the trust model, it is not clear whether they will continue this scheme.

It is much easier to have an insurance company on board who has dealt with health claims in the past. A formal tender process similar to the Rashtriya Swasthya Bima Yojana (RSBY) will be followed to select companies for each states, said a source close to the development.

With AB-NHPM coming into force, the erstwhile RSBY scheme that provided coverage of Rs 30,000 for premium of Rs 30 per family (rest was subsidy) will be discontinued. A formal process of that will begin soon, though it not clear whether a similar health card will be provided to all RSBY beneficiaries.

RSBY had in the past come under criticism because there were concerns about insurers outbidding one another and aggressively reducing costs to win the tenders. A cap of Rs 750 was set by the government for RSBY but average premiums that were actually paid by the centre and state were around Rs 500-600, with it falling to even Rs 450 in some states.

AB-NHPM is, while subsidised, may not be priced at unsustainable levels. The Pradhan Mantri Suraksha Bima Yojana which provides Rs 2 lakh of personal accident insurance at a premium of only Rs 12 per annum has led to heavily losses for general insurance companies, to the tune of 200-210 percent. Price revision in that scheme is imminent.

However, insurers said that one positive about the AB-NHPM has been that the scheme has clearly defined the beneficiaries as well as those from certain occupations who will be eligible for the scheme. Further, the set centre-state split has made the process clearer.British data analytics firm Cambridge Analytica is at the center of controversy in the United States and Britain after two newspapers reported on Sunday that the company harvested personal data about Facebook users beginning in 2014.

Best known for assisting the 2016 presidential campaign of US President Donald Trump, Cambridge Analytica is now facing a government search of its London office, questions from US state authorities, and a demand by Facebook that it submit to a forensic audit.

Here is some of what is known about the company.

How did it start?

Cambridge Analytica is an offshoot of SCL Group, a government and military contractor that says it works on everything from food security research to counter-narcotics to political campaigns. SCL was founded more than 25 years ago, according to its website.

Cambridge Analytica was created around 2013 initially with a focus on US elections, with USD 15 million in backing from billionaire Republican donor Robert Mercer and a name chosen by future Trump White House adviser Steve Bannon, the New York Times reported.

The company, which the New York Times reported was staffed by mostly British workers then, assisted Republican Senator Ted Cruz's presidential campaign before helping Trump's.

What do they do?

Cambridge Analytica markets itself as providing consumer research, targeted advertising and other data-related services to both political and corporate clients.

It does not list its corporate clients but on its website describes them as including a daily newspaper that wanted to know more about its subscribers, a women's clothing brand that sought research on its customers and a US auto insurer interested in marketing itself.

Britain's Channel 4 News reported on Monday, based on secretly recorded video, that Cambridge Analytica secretly stage-managed Kenya President Uhuru Kenyatta's campaigns in the hotly contested 2013 and 2017 elections. Cambridge Analytica denied the report.

The company's website lists five office locations in New York, Washington, London, Brazil and Malaysia.

When did it first get attention?

After Trump won the White House in 2016, in part with the firm's help, Cambridge Analytica CEO Alexander Nix went to more clients to pitch his services, the Times reported last year. The company boasted it could develop psychological profiles of consumers and voters which was a "secret sauce" it used to sway them more effectively than traditional advertising could.

Rival consultants and campaign aides, though, expressed doubts about the company's claims. Brad Parscale, who ran Trump's digital operations in 2016, said the campaign did not use Cambridge Analytica's data, relying instead on voter data from a Republican National Committee operation.

What is it accused of?

Cambridge Analytica beginning in 2014 obtained data on 50 million Facebook users via means that deceived both the users and Facebook, the New York Times and London's Observer reported on Saturday.

The data was harvested by an application developed by a British academic, Aleksandr Kogan, the newspapers said. Some 270,000 people downloaded the application and logged in with their Facebook credentials, according to Facebook. The application gathered their data and data about their friends, and then Kogan passed the data to Cambridge Analytica, according to both Cambridge Analytica and Facebook.

Cambridge Analytica said on Saturday that it did not initially know Kogan violated Facebook's terms, and that it deleted the data once it found out in 2015. Kogan could not be reached for comment.

The data, though, was not deleted, the two newspapers reported on Saturday. Cambridge Analytica said that the allegation was not true. Facebook said it was investigating to verify the accuracy of the claim.

What happens next?

Facebook said it was pressing Cambridge Analytica for answers, after getting assurances from the firm in 2015 that it had deleted all data. Facebook has hired forensic auditors from the firm Stroz Friedberg to help.

While Facebook investigates, the social network said it was suspending Cambridge Analytica, its parent SCL, Kogan and another man, Christopher Wylie, formerly of Cambridge Analytica, from its platform for violating Facebook rules.

Facebook's probe, though, may have to wait until government authorities complete their investigation. The UK Information Commissioner's Office is pursuing a warrant to search Cambridge Analytica's office and asked Facebook's auditors to stand down in the meantime, according to Facebook.

Attorneys general from the US states of Massachusetts and Connecticut have launched investigations into how the Facebook data was handled, and the attorney general's office in California, where Facebook is based, said it had concerns.live bse live

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Retail-focused private sector lender HDFC Bank has roped in a Citibank veteran Rahul Shukla to head its corporate and business banking business.

Shukla joins the second largest private sector lender after spending over 25 years with Citibank where he was heading the corporate banking vertical for South Asia.

Shukla will report to Kaizad Bharucha, executive director, who heads the wholesale banking business, which contributes about 45 per cent to HDFC Bank's loan portfolio.As benchmark indices have witnessed a correction of around 3 percent so far this year, the debate has shifted over whether the overvaluation in the market has mellowed. Is there more downside and can this level be called 'a comfortable one'?

It (the market) is certainly in a better zone than around mid-January levels, but I dont think valuations are at a place where it is comfortable, Sanjay Mookim, Director-India Equity Strategy at Bank of America Merrill Lynch told CNBC-TV18 in an interview.

In fact, from a broader markets perspective, the PEs could see an additional 10 percent fall. Having said that, the flows into the market is encouraging, he said, adding that he hopes that the trend does not reverse.

However, it may not be a respite from the markets fall further.

Speaking on risks from crude price rise, Mookim said that it could remain rangebound around the levels of USD 60 per barrel.

Among sectors, he is overweight on financials as growth will continue to work. The clear favourites are private sector banks, he said, adding that select PSU banks are also a buy call. On the IT space, he remains selective too as the overall sector is still an underweight call.

Mookim is bullish on the housing segment as several blocks and issues are now behind. There is price and time correction and realty demand is infinite, he said. Government policies are working, expenditure is taking place and hence the cumulative momentum could turn positive, he added.

Below is the verbatim transcript of the interview.

Anuj: All through last year you were complaining that there is absolutely nothing that you can do in this market, it has run-up so much. Has the correction now got us back into bit of a value zone?

A: It is obviously better than before or mid-January. But I dont think valuations have got into a territory where you can comfortably ask for people to buy yet. If you look at the Nifty it is still only back to where it was in December and in several midcap stocks and the midcap index price-earnings ratio (P/E) are not even back to where they were in December. So, yes, there is an anchoring biased, market has corrected from the top, but I wouldnt say that we are in comfortable valuation territory just yet.

Latha: The latest scare, incremental scare is this crude engine towards USD 70 per barrel. How would you interpret this as an investor?

A: Our House view isnt that crude will run away in a hurry. We think that crude remains range bound in the mid US 60 at best. However, it is a broader read across to India. If you remember India has outperformed emerging markets (EMs) dramatically in 2014. So, even after the recent weakness, we are still sitting on a fairly strong cumulative gain over EMs over the last three years in total. That gain had happened because of the favourable macro.

The macro is now deteriorating with the oil price, with reflation, bond yields and increase in political uncertainty if I am add. There is a lot for India to be worried about and none of this is going to change in the near term. So, we stick with our call. We think India will have trouble times. India probably continuous to underperform EM for the next several months.

Sonia: What about the flows? Domestic flows have been pretty good especially in the month of February that came in from Mutual Funds, how did you read into that and do you think that could be something that could continue through the course of the year?

A: Flows have been encouraging and that is a good sign. We were all comfortable on that count. We are hoping and all of us are that flows dont start to reverse because that could be very troublesome. But I have been arguing for many months now that institutional flows in themselves are not an indicator or a sufficient enough explanation for the market upside. That is what we are seeing now. Because even though the flows are positive, we are able to see correction in the market. This maybe because there has been enough issuances, so the flows have been absorbed by paper supply but also because the upside was probably more driven by retail and High Net-worth Individual (HNI) flow rather than institutional flow that we all daily look at. Yes, the flows being strong is a good sign, but they may not be insurance from downside.

Latha: What is valuations zone for you and are some stocks already their?

A: From a broader Index perspective you would look for about a 10 percent at least correction on PEs. Now this could happen either because earnings expectations get upgraded or with time as stock roll forward into earnings. On midcaps I think the downside is perhaps larger because the premiums to large caps today are still very elevated.

Now what I want to highlight is that it is not just the earnings growth, but the earnings expectations also that matters. If you are in an environment where you are seeing continued downgrades for a companies then it is very for those stocks to perform. So there is this narrative that everybody looks at growth and saying this growth is going to come back this year which it will, but is it going to be better than expectation is the key question to my mind. We still struggle to see that happening.

MSCI India, we think it is trading India about 17.5 times forward PE whereas the long-term average is about 15.5 that is why I said that we need perhaps about 8-10 percent correction to get to close to averages.

Anuj: In term of portfolio positioning now what is your view on the larger sectors? Let us start with financials and then of course I would also want to know your view on IT?

A: Financials, we are overweight, we keep arguing that growth is going to continue to work. Until we start to see a major global correction growth is the style that will continue to perform. Within the financials our clear favourite is for private sector consumer oriented. It is kind of boring, but I have been arguing that your portfolio should be a boring portfolio in India, safe avoid risk sort of an attitude. That is where I am not allowed to name names, but there are very staple, standard private sector banks which have done well which might continue to do well, on the financials.

I can anticipate your question on the public sector banks perhaps which we would still be very selective there. We have buys on some of them, but I do think that you need to see some resolution to the current issues before the stocks actually starts sustainable upside. So, very selective positioning in public sector banks.

On IT, again, we are selectively stock pickers. As a sector I am underweight on IT because I dont think you are in a growth mode in IT just yet. But expectations are improving in certain stocks and therefore there might be selective opportunities.

Sonia: I also want to check with you on what your view is on the housing theme? This was a theme that you had last year, the untapped potential in housing whether it is in cement, in paints, in real estate and that worked quite well. What is the status now, do you continue to be bullish here?

A: Yes, we are, we have done lot of work recently, reiterating our view on this and adding to those positions. Because we think that several issues or several blocks have fallen on place. Regulatory wise there is a lot more clarity with Real Estate Regulatory Authority (RERA), there is a price correction, time correction that you have seen with prices not really going anywhere for very long time.

The demand for real estate in India is infinite. I mean we dug up data, 40 percent of Indian households live in one room homes. This is not one BHK, it is just one room home. Even the average family size is 4.5 people. So, frankly, the demand is really not an issue. The government policies are working so it is not just talk, you are seeing numbers, you are seeing expenditure behind the housing schemes both in rural and in urban India.

Therefore, we do thin that cumulative momentum in housing is very likely to turn positive. You could play the real estate stocks, you could play the housing ancillaries, but on a two or three year theme we think this can be very powerful.

Latha: Have you all lately downgraded any numbers for the current year itself FY18 and have you all downgraded for FY19 at all? If yes which pockets?

A: FY18, we have seen a little bit of upgrades and this I think is because people have been marked to marking the December quarters numbers and how trends have been so far in March. As a consequence you have seen cuts to FY19 and dramatic cuts to FY19. MSCI India and in mid of December people who are looking at 27 percent growth for FY19 that is down to 18 percent already. So, significant reduction and I argue as a strategist that you might see a couple more percentage points of cuts for FY19 itself hopefully not more.

Sonia: What is your view on how the global setup is panning out? We got the FOMC policy, a lot of people indicate that it is not really a big deal whether it is three rate hikes or four from the US. We will be sort of moving on our domestic cues. Is that the feeling you are getting as well that India could decouple for the rest of the year?

A: No, I dont think there is any reason for India to decouple. Decoupling would happen if any variable in India were favourable either the macro or the micro which is earnings. I dont think that is going to happen, in fact even on the micro we are worse than the region where everybody else are seeing positive revisions, we are not. There is no case to be made therefore for a decoupling. If there is global uncertainty and increased global volatility, we will be joined at the heap to that phenomena.DHFL Pramerica Asset Management has appointed Rajesh Iyer as the Chief Executive of the fund house with effect from March 21, stated a press release from the fund house.

Prior to joining DHFL Pramerica AMC, Iyer was working as Senior Executive Director and Head  Investment Advisory Services & Family Office at Kotak Wealth Management. He had joined Kotak Wealth Management in 2006.

Iyer has been in the BFSI sector and has over two decades of experience in the capital markets industry. His expertise includes equity research, proprietary fund management for bank treasuries and investment advisory.

He was also associated with brands such as UTI-Nomura Securities, TAIB Bank EC and the National Bank of Bahrain.

DHFL Pramerica is a JV between DHFL, in India and U.S. headquartered Prudential Financial Inc. Pramerica.

DHFL Pramerica AMC is a joint venture between Dewan Housing Finance Corporation Ltd. (DHFL) and Prudential Financial. DHFL Pramerica AMC assets of more than Rs 25,622 crore across 22 open-ended funds.live bse live

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IDFC has begun discussions with IndusInd Bank and Citic CLSA, among others, to merge or sell its asset management company which has AUM of Rs 71,000 crore, according to a report in The Times of India.

A fourth of the AMCs assets under management (AUM) is equity, while the rest is debt. If the deal goes through, it would act positive for IDFC as it would improve its capital position.

Citic CLSA and private equity firms like Apax Partners have expressed early interest in a deal, the report stated. The deal will fetch IDFC about Rs 4,000 crore, 6 percent of the assets under management of IDFC Asset Management.

These exploratory talks would gain momentum only after IDFC allows potential bidders to conduct due diligence, sources told the paper. This could be either through a merger or a partnership deal,a senior official from IDFC was quoted as saying by the paper.

Post demerger, IDFC has been restructured with IDFC (parent) at the top. At the second level is the non-operating holding financial company (NOHFC). This NOHFC has four subsidiaries, namely, IDFC Bank, investment banking, asset management and alternative fund.

IDFC is in the midst of a merger process with Capital First, a non-banking finance company. In January, the private bank agreed to acquire Capital First in a share-swap deal valued at about $1.5 billion as part of efforts to boost retail loans.Punjab National Bank | ICRA revised rating on bank's Basel III Compliant Tier II bonds to AA (hyb) (Stable) from AA- (hyb) (Stable). (Image: PTI)

State-owned Punjab National Bank (PNB) has witnessed losses to the tune of Rs 14,500 crore due to fraud so far in this fiscal, Parliament was informed this week.

"PNB has apprised that the total loss reported by it due to frauds was Rs 341.03 crore in the financial year (FY) 2015-16, Rs 2,633.82 crore in FY 2016-17, and Rs 14,506.39 crore (including contingent liability) in FY 2017-18 (till date)," Minister of State for Finance Shiv Pratap Shukla said in a written reply to the Rajya Sabha on March 2o.

With regard to scam related to diamond trade, he said, PNB has submitted reports on fraud related to diamond traders to the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) through its Fraud Monitoring Reporting System.

"The total amount involved is reported as Rs 13,923.14 crore, which includes a report dated February 22, 2018 on additional amount involved of Rs 1,251.96 crore," he said in the reply made available today.

PNB has stated that it has adequate assets or capital to meet any liability which may crystallise on the bank, he said.

On the capital infusion, he said, the government has decided to pump in Rs 5,473 crore in 2017-18.

Government infused capital amounting to Rs 1,732 crore in 2015-16 and Rs 2,112 crore in 2016-17, he said.

He further said the Directorate of Enforcement (ED) has apprised that it has conducted searches at various locations relating to Nirav Modi and Mehul Choksi group, which resulted in seizure of valuables, and that it has also attached immovable properties.

Further, mutual funds and bank accounts have been frozen. Letter of Request to 13 countries have been issued by the court seeking details of properties, bank accounts of companies, etc, he said.Answer: Nissan.

The Tamil Nadu government informed the Madras High Court that it was ready to proceed with the hearing in the case it filed against Japanese auto-maker Nissan and that it need not be deferred.

Earlier, when the case had come up before Justice Anita Sumanth, senior counsel P S Raman, appearing for Nissan, had hinted at the possibility of an amicable solution with the government.

However, Advocate General Vijay Narayan, appearing for the government, today insisted that the court hear its plea to stall the international arbitration initiated by Nissan and grant interim relief.

"We are aggrieved by the international arbitration, there is some urgency on our side. We are ready to proceed with the hearing of the case and the court need not defer the hearing," he said.

To this, the judge asked, "What is the urgency when Tamil Nadu is not even a party to the arbitration? How is the application maintainable?"

The advocate general said the state government and Nissan had signed an arbitration agreement and "therefore, the application is very well maintainable".

But the senior counsel for Nissan pleaded with the court to post the hearing to June, after the summer vacation, as there was no urgency.

"Even the next hearing of the arbitration proceedings is scheduled only on November 6," he said.

Recording the submissions, the judge posted the plea to April 5 to decide on the maintainability of the application.

On March 16, Nissan had informed the court that the state had commenced talks with the company and urged it to defer the hearing of the plea.

As no one represented the state when the plea was taken up, the judge had posted the matter to today for the state to clear its stand.

In December last, the state government had moved the court, seeking an interim injunction against Nissan from proceeding with its arbitration against India over alleged unpaid tax refunds of nearly USD 770 million.

The state had alleged that Nissan invoked the international arbitration clause of the Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement between India and Japan to "coerce the Tamil Nadu government."

However, the Centre had filed an affidavit, saying the Tamil Nadu government did not have a locus standi to challenge the international arbitration proceedings initiated by Nissan against India.Not just for buying cars, refrigerators or washing machines but customers can now also take loans for going on holidays. Online travel agencies and hotel chains are working to offer customers instant credits for booking hotels and flights in order to drive customer stickiness and growth.

Online travel agency MakeMyTrip has launched a pilot wherein it is allowing customers to book a flight or hotel by just paying a fraction of the total cost. The rest of the amount can be paid later in tranches. It has partnered with non-banking financial company (NBFC) Bajaj Finserv and is open to align with fin-tech companies.

We today have about 29 million customers history who have transacted with us on all the three brands (MMT, GoIbibo and RedBus) and that is like a gold mine. Then there is data related to visits, traffic, search  so there is tons of data that we have and we are building intelligent platforms. Can we leverage our own data base to solve for consumers need with respect to the micro lending? The answer is yes, Rajesh Magow, co-founder and chief executive officer, India, MakeMyTrip, told Moneycontrol in an interaction.

So far about 300-400 customers have been offered these loans. According to Magow, the average ticket size is not different from the regular ticket sizes.

Currently, the offer is for hotels and will be extended to flights soon. It, however, would not be offering loans for travel packages or buses. This we are trying to do online first. So in packages I don't think we would offer. Again not buses because the ticket size we offer is too small, said Magow.

OTAs and hotel chains have always offered customers the option of booking hotels online and paying while checking out of the hotel.

However with the new plan, MakeMyTrip will be offering a pre-defined credit limit to its users. Customers will be given a timeline to repay this amount.

If you need funding and dont have a credit card then this will act as an instant credit. We will be able to see your history and would know if you would default or not. The third party fin-tech companies will come and give the loan and then subsequently collect, said Magow, adding that the offering should pick up speed by June.

Magow however said that it was too early to comment if the loans will also boost the number of transactions of the platform.

I think it should hopefully but will not happen this quarter. It is very hard to say. We will see if the trend is picking up because everyone is betting big on fin-tech. The jury will be out in a couple of quarters, he said adding that instant loan is expected to motivate customers and push impulse purchases.

MakeMyTrip has also started offering working capital loans to partner hotels in association with fin-tech startup Indifi. We are just introducing the company with the hotels. They are actually giving small six months kind of loans to the hoteliers, he said.

Budget hotel chain Treebo that raised USD 34 million in a round led by by Hong Kong-based hedge funds Ward Ferry Managementand Karst Peak Capital is also in talks with micro-lending firms such as LazyPay to offer lending to its customers.

There are already companies like LazyPay which extend micro-credits. We don't even need to do it from our balance sheet. This is their core business. All we need to do is to enable these guys to come on to our platform that we will do, Rahul Chaudhary, co-founder of Treebo told Moneycontrol in an interaction.

"If we see a big use case we are definitely open to testing it out. Thats not necessarily going to be amount like Rs 10,000-30,000 but will simply be for the transaction on our platform, he said adding that an average transaction cost on Treebo is Rs 4000-5000.live bse live

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Sun Pharma

Brokerage: Credit Suisse | Rating: Outperform | Target: Rs 640

The global brokerage firm said that MK-3222 approval should give medium-term visibility for cos revenue. Its analysis for Halols Form 483 indicates that a re-inspection is not needed for clearance. It expects Halol to be cleared by September 2018.

Brokerage: IDFC Sec | Rating: Outperform | Target: Rs 587

The drug clearance, IDFC Sec said, is a major milestone in the firms speciality foray. It expects Tildrakizumab to be commercialised in the next couple of quarters. It also believes that the company is placed better than its Indian peers currently.

Brokerage: CLSA | Rating: Sell | Target: Raised to Rs 445

Tildrakizumabs nod is on expected lines with a likely launch in H1FY19, it said. further, it estimated that peak sales of USD 330 million by FY22 is translating to NPV-based value of Rs 12 apiece. Estimate Sun to target 5% market share in the first year of launch. Having said that, inability to ramp up US sales is a key risk to Suns valuation.

Brokerage: Macquarie

The global research firm believes that the launch of the product will take place in a few months. The drug, it said, has the potential to generate USD 300-350 million revenue at the peak for the firm. The company believes that re-rating triggers are elusive and medium term pain cannot be ignored.

Brokerage: Jefferies | Rating: Hold

The brokerage house said that it is expecting Sun to launch Ilumya in the second half of this calendar year. Execution will be key & with this being sun's first foray in NBE.

Brokerage: Morgan Stanley

The research firm said that Ilumya should be the largest by sales in the years ahead. The nod is a milestone in transition from generic to a specialty firm. Assuming a market share of 5%, Sun could gross $300-500 m in sales over 2-4 Yrs.

Vedanta

Brokerage: Credit Suisse

Credit Suisse said that the management remains confident of taking full advantage of the India growth story. Moreover, further growth capex to help raise volume in zinc, aluminium, oil & gas assets.

Jubilant Food

Brokerage: Macquarie

Macquarie said that increasing affordability with improved product quality will drive same-store-sales growth. It highlighted that the company is its top pick in the consumer discretionary space.

PNB Housing

Brokerage: Credit Suisse | Rating: Outperform | Target: Rs 1,700

The global research firm said that the firm is benefitting from operating expenditure leverage. The stock is attractively priced in the most recent correction. The company is not seeing business impact from the recent events at the parent firm.

SBI

Brokerage: Credit Suisse | Rating: Outperform | Target: Rs 381

The management will look at non-dilutive options to boost capital levels, the brokerage said, adding that NIMs are expected to improve in FY19 on increasing LDRs. It also expects Q4 show to be weak.live bse live

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Shares of Hindustan Construction Company fell 15.6 percent intraday on Thursday, despite a clarification from the company on a report that its subsidiary Lavasa Corporation is planning to file for bankruptcy.

Lavasa Corporation is responsible for the development of India's first private hill city project Lavasa.

The Lavasa management is considering approaching the National Company Law Tribunal (NCLT) before the end of this month because of its difficulties in raising money for the project, DNA reported quoting sources.

The management is reportedly finding it nearly impossible to run day-to-day operations and has resorted to selling unessential equipment to meet immediate expenses.

Besides, people who have booked apartments and villas in Lavasa are also putting a lot of pressure on the company to refund their money.

Parent HCC, however, in a clarification to the exchanges said that the news of Lavasa going under is misleading and without any basis.

"Lavasa Corporation has been working jointly with the consortium of lenders for a financial solution for Lavasa. Due to RBI's recent notification on Insolvency & Bankruptcy Code, the process has been slowed down till further clarity on the finer nuances of the revised framework emerge," the company said.

The company is hopeful of a viable restructuring of is debt once the revised framework is deliberated on to the satisfaction of all involved.

At 14:42 hours IST, the stock price was quoting at Rs 24.60, down Rs 4.30, or 14.88 percent on the BSE.Representative image.

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Shares of Suven Life Sciences rose 3.4 percent intraday Thursday as company secured 3 product patents.

The company has been granted 1 product patent from Norway, 1 product patent from South Korea and 1 product patent from Singapore corresponding to the New Chemical Entities (NCEs) for the treatment of disorders associated with Neurodegenerative diseases and these Patents are valid through 2027, 2034 and 2036 respectively.

The granted claims of the patents include the class of selective 5-HT6 and 5HT4 compounds respectively and are being developed as therapeutic agents for major depressive disorders and for the treatment of cognitive impairment associated with neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimers disease, Attention deficient hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), Huntingtons disease, Narcolepsy, Parkinson and Schizophrenia respectively.

Venkat Jasti, CEO of Suven said, "We are very pleased by the grant of these patents to the company for our pipeline of molecules in CNS arena that are being developed for cognitive disorders with high unmet medical need with huge market potential globally."

At 10:55 hrs Suven Life Sciences was quoting at Rs 172.50, up Rs 3.30, or 1.95 percent on the BSE.

Posted by Rakesh PatilRepresentative Image

The average ridership of public transport buses operated by Delhi government has gone up to 41.90 lakh per day, Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia today said, presenting the first outcome budget for 2017-18 in the Assembly.

The target of average daily ridership of Delhi Transport Corporation (DTC) and Cluster buses was 40 lakh per day in 2017-18, which increased to 41.90 lakhs per day by December 2017, he said.

Comparing the increased ridership of DTC and Cluster buses with Delhi Metro, Sisodia said the fare hike has hit the rail service as well as the people of Delhi.

"Our government had protested the fare hike but the Centre went ahead with it. It has come to hit both the Delhi Metro and the people," he said.

Ten programmes of the Transport department were evaluated in the outcome budget 2017-18. A total of 102 outcome/output indicators were fixed out of which 89 were identified as critical indicators.

Out of the 89 critical indicators, 53 were 'on track' (more than 70 percent achievement) and 36 per cent were 'off track' meaning less than 70 percent achievement.

The critical indicator of 'number of DTC buses operational' showed that the public transporter owned 4,126 buses in 2016. But, the number of buses declined to 3,988 as per April-December, 2017 status, he said.

The output indicators denote the services or infrastructure that government departments are required to provide while the outcome indicators refer to benefit.

A total of 37.27 lakh Pollution Under Control(PUC) certificates were issued till December 2017, against the targeted 55 Lakh for 2017-18.

The department issued 22,706 challans for non-possession of PUC certificates against 18,401 in 2016- 17.Rank 7 | State/Union Territory: Arunachal Pradesh | Happiness score: 3.41 (Image: Getty Images)

The cabinet on Wednesday approved the North East Industrial Development Scheme (NEIDS), 2017, with a financial outlay Rs 3,000 crore up to March 2020, a government statement said.

Under the scheme, the government will provide necessary allocations for its remaining period after assessment before March 2020.

"NEIDS is a combination of the incentives covered under the earlier two schemes with a much larger outlay," a statement said.

It said the scheme will provide incentives to micro, small and medium enterprises in the region along with special incentives to generate employment through the scheme.

"All eligible industrial units, which are getting benefits of one or more components of other schemes of the Government of India, will also be considered for benefits of other components of this scheme," it said.

The scheme will provide reimbursements of up to the extent of central government share of CGST and IGST for five years from the date of commencement of commercial production by the unit.

Besides, reimbursement of centre's share of income tax for first five years, including the year of commencement of commercial production by the unit, would be provided, the statement said.

Reimbursement of 100 per cent on premium for insurance of building and plant and machinery for five years from the date of commencement of commercial production by the unit is also there, it said.

Under the transport incentives, the government will provide 20 per cent of the cost of transportation including the subsidy currently provided by the Railways/ Railway PSU for movement of finished goods by rail.

An incentive of 20 per cent of transportation cost for finished goods, for movement through inland waterways, the statement said.

It said that 33 per cent of transportation cost of air freight on perishable goods (as defined by IATA) from the nearest airport to the place of production to any airport within the country will also be provided.

"The government shall pay 3.67 per cent of the employers' contribution to the Employees Provident Fund (EPF) in addition to the government bearing 8.33% Employee Pension Scheme (EPS) contribution of the employer in the Pradhan Mantri Rojgar Protsahan Yojana (PMRPY)," the statement said.

Entrepreneurs will also get Central Capital Investment Incentive for Access to Credit (CCIIAC), which will be 30 per cent of the investment in plant and machinery with an upper limit of Rs 5 crore on the incentive amount per unit, it said.

A central interest incentive (CII) has also been provided which will be 3 per cent on working capital credit advanced by eligible banks and financial institutions for first five years from the date of commencement of commercial production by the unit, it said.The German justice minister Katarina Barley has reportedly summoned Facebook to clarify whether the personal data of 30 million Facebook users in Germany were protected from unlawful use by third parties.

Meanwhile, Brazilian prosecutors have said that they had opened an investigation into whether London-based political consultancy Cambridge Analytica acted illegally in Brazil.

Now, if you think Germanys concern for the personal data of its 30 million users makes sense then what is stopping the Indian government? This is because, as per the latest statistics, India tops the list of Facebook users with a massive user base of 250 million.

The Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data breach was quick to take a political turn in India with both BJP and Congress blaming each other for their alleged association with the controversial big data firm.

While Law and IT minister Ravi Shankar Prasad asked Congress to explain its connection with Cambridge Analytica, there is no concrete step from the government to ask Facebook about the fate of personal data of 250 million Indian Facebook users.Launching a stinging attack against the government, Congress president Rahul Gandhi today said it invented a story on data theft by the Congress to divert attention from the death of 39 Indians in Iraq.

The Congress president also accused the government of baiting the media.

"Problem: 39 Indians dead; Government on the mat, caught lying. Solution: Invent story on Congress and Data Theft. Result: Media networks bite bait; 39 Indians vanish from radar. Problem solved," he said on Twitter.

The Congress has been accusing the government of managing headlines to deflect the country's focus from the multi-crore PNB bank scam, the dilution of provisions of the SC/ST Atrocities Act and questions being raised by the families of those killed in Iraq.

Adding to the chorus of Congress criticism, the party's communications in-charge Randeep Surjewala said the government had lied to the families of the 39 Indians about their loved ones being alive even after evidence suggested they were killed years ago.

He also asked why the Modi government "misled" the country for four years on the killing of 39 Indians after their kidnapping in Mosul of Iraq.

"Families ask questions - Why did Modi Government and Sushmaji mislead them for 4 yrs? Why does the Government not reveal the date of death? What evidence did the EAM have of them being alive for all these years? Why is Government not agreeable to compensating the families?

"Another lie, Another spin exposed as truth unravels on Mosul Tragedy. All 39 Indians had died years ago as the evidence and witnesses suggested and corroborated now by Martyrs Foundation. Yet Modi Government lied, duped and deceived the families and the Nation!" Surjewala said.15:34 Lok Sabha was adjourned for the day after an uproar. The ruckus did not allow Speak Sumitra Mahajan to bring in the motion of no-confidence. The House will convene again On Tuesday, April 2. Thats all from our side. Thanks for staying tuned.

12:12 The House stands adjourned for the day. It will convene on April 2.

11:54 The

Lower House will convene at noon.

11:07 The Lok Sabha has been adjourned till noon, amidst ruckus.

AIADMK MPs were seen raising slogan we want justice, in the well of the House, as soon as it convened.

11:04 The Lok Sabha convened.

08:12 On Tuesday, four parties  Congress, YSR Congress, TDP and CPI (M) were expected to move the motion of no-confidence. However, the House was adjourned due to ruckus from AIADMK MPs. Earlier on Tuesday, TRS MPs, who had been protesting in the well of the House for a week, said they would allow the motion to be brought in.

08:09 Good morning! The blog will track the happening from the Lok Sabha. The Opposition parties are expected to move the motion of no-confidence, again.

13:58 The four parties are expected to move the trust vote again tomorrow. Thats all from our side, for now. Thanks for staying tuned.

12:13 The Lok Sabha will convene tomorrow at 11 am.

12:11 Speaker Sumitra Mahajan reiterated that she wanted to bring in the motion of no-confidence as she was duty-bound. However, the House was adjourned for the day as ruckus continued.

11:33 The Lok Sabha has been adjourned till noon after loud slogans of 'we want justice' were raised in the House immediately after proceedings began today.

10:41 Andhra Pradesh CM N Chandrababu Naidu will hold a meeting with representatives of all political parties of the state in Amaravati today. They are likely to discuss future course of action on their demand for special category status.

10:15 In what can be seen as a positive sign for the Opposition, reports suggest that the TRS have agreed to let the Lok Sabha function and that its MPs would not protest in the well of the House. However, it remains unclear if the AIADMK would do the same.

10:13 The lower House did not function as planned last week. Due to constant ruckus from MPs belonging to TRS and AIADMK, who were protesting in the well of the House, the Speaker had to adjourn the Lok Sabha repeatedly.

10:12 Last week, TDP as well as YSR Congress tried to move the motion of no-confidence one day after the other. Speaker Sumitra Mahajan said that she is duty-bound to bring in the motion. However, she said that the vote would be possible only if there was no ruckus in the House.

10:10 The Lower House will convene for the first time since Friday. The House had a scheduled holiday yesterday.

10:09 Good morning! This blog will track happening from the Lok Sabha. Congress, Telugu Desam Party (TDP), YSR Congress and now the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI-M) are set to move the motion of no-confidence against the Bharatiya Janata Party-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government in the Lok Sabha, as the proceedings begin at 11 am today.

15:42 YSR Congress and Congress have also submitted documents moving the motion of no-confidence against the NDA government. The Lok Sabha will convene on Tuesday, March 27, at 11 am. That's all from our side. Thank you for staying tuned.

11:23 The Rajya Sabha has also been adjourned till Monday after TDP MPs stormed into well of the House over the special status for Andhra Pradesh issue.

Remember, the motion of no-confidence can only be moved in Lok Sabha, not in the Upper House.

11:08 The proceedings of Lok Sabha opened with ruckus and was immediately adjourned till 11 am.

11:03 The Lok Sabha has convened.

10:52 TDP MPs have continued their protest in Parliament premises regarding a special status issue.

09:37 The Lok Sabha is expected to convene at 11 am.

09:21 Reports suggest that the Telugu Desam Party has sought support from TRS and AIADMK to let the House function and move the motion of no-confidence. TRS and AIADMK have been protesting in the well of the House for the last few days, creating ruckus that has resulted in constant adjournment.

09:19 The two parties have been attempting to move the motion for the last 3-4 days. However, constant ruckus in the Lower House forced Speaker Sumitra Mahajan to adjourn the House every day.

09:18 Good morning! This LIVE blog will track the latest developments from the Lok Sabha where the Telugu Desam Party (TDP) and the YSR Congress are expected to move the motion of no-confidence, again.

12:18 The Lok Sabha has been adjourned till tomorrow.

11:20 The Lok Sabha has been adjourned till noon.

10:58 After adjournment yesterday, YSR Congress YV Subba Reddy wrote to Lok Sabha Secretary General and gave him notice to include motion of no-confidence in the list of business for today.

10:57 Yesterday, the House convened at 11 am and was immediately adjourned to 12 pm as the ruckus continued. At noon, Speaker Sumitra Mahajan slammed the protesting MPs for creating a ruckus, but had to adjourn the House for the day, again.

10:50 Telugu Desam Party (TDP) and the YSR Congress are set to move the motion of no confidence against the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government today, again.

13:53 The motion of no confidence is likely to be move in the Lok Sabha tomorrow. That's it for now. Thanks for staying tuned.

12:41 YSR Congress YV Subba Reddy has written to Lok Sabha Secretary General and has given notice to include motion of no-confidence in the list of business for tomorrow.

12:11 The House was adjourned after continued ruckus. Speaker Mahajan said that she would not be able to take up the motion of no confidence if the ruckus continues.

12:09 Speaker Sumitra Mahajan has adjourned Lok Sabha for the day. The House will convene again on Thursday.

11:09 Minutes after convening, the Lok Sabha was adjourned again. The House will meet next at 12 noon.

09:26 Amidst ruckus in the Lok Sabha yesterday, Speaker Sumitra Mahajan said that she is duty bound to bring in the motion of no confidence moved by TDP and YSR Congress, before adjourned the House for the day.

09:25 YSR Congress issues whip, orders MPs to be present

Jaganmohan Reddys YSR Congress has issued a whip to its Members of Parliament (MPs), ordering all of them to be present in the Lok Sabha today. They will be moving the motion of no confidence, again when the House convenes at 11 am.

09:21 Good morning! This blog will follow the latest happening from Parliament where Telugu Desam Party (TDP) and YSR Congress are expected to move the motion of no confidence, again.

15:31 YSR Congress is expected to move another motion of no confidence in the Lok Sabha tomorrow and TDP is expected to follow suit. That's it for now. Thanks for staying tuned.

12:46 YSR Congress YV Subba Reddy has written to Lok Sabha Secretary General, giving notice to include the motion of no-confidence in the list of business for tomorrow.

12:18 Following ruckus, Speaker Sumitra Mahajan has adjourned the Lok Sabha for the day. The House will convene at 11 am on Wednesday.

12:15 Speaker Sumitra Mahajan says that she is duty bound to bring in the motion of no confidence moved by TDP and YSR Congress.

12:10 Lok Sabha has convened again. External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj is addressing the House over the death of 39 Indians in Iraq, amidst chaos.

11:48 Rajya Sabha has been adjourned for the day after ruckus in the House.

11:10 The Lok Sabha has been adjourned till noon after chants of 'We want justice' echoed in the House, immediately after proceedings began for the day.

10:38 Andhra Pradesh CM and TDP Chief Chandrababu Naidu has asked party MPs to coordinate with members of the Opposition, media reports suggest.

09:02 Recap: Yesterday, both TDP and YSR Congress moved the motion of no confidence. Home Minister Rajnath Singh, on behalf of the government said that they were willing to face the trust vote and debate about it.

Speaker Sumitra Mahajan however said that she cannot allow any such vote to happen unless the ruckus in the House stops, as it will make counting of votes difficult for her.

09:00 The motion of no confidence was to be moved on Friday and was postponed to for yesterday after the Lok Sabha was adjourned early then. Yesterday, again, the Speaker adjourned the Lok Sabha early after ruckus in the House.

08:57 Despite all efforts from Chandrababu Naidus TDP and the YSR Congress Party, the NDA seems to have enough numbers to succeed against any no confidence motion.

08:54 A key member of the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), the Shiv Sena said yesterday that it will abstain from voting when the motion of no confidence is moved today. Shiv Sena has 18 MPs in the Lok Sabha.

08:51 Good morning! This blog will continue to track the latest developments from the Parliament where two Andhra Pradesh-based parties  Telugu Desam Party and YSR Congress Party  are expected to move the motion of no confidence, again.

16:03 TDP and YSR Congress are expected to move another motion of no confidence in the Lok Sabha tomorrow.

15:10 Shiv Sena has said that it will abstain from voting in the motion of no confidence.

In the party mouthpiece Saamana, Shiv Sena has said, "The TDP wants to bring in the no-confidence motion for its personal political reasons and not for any 'nationalist' reason".

"In 2019, there will be a blast of resentment that is prevailing among masses today. That time, a no-confidence motion will be passed with a complete majority," the Sena said.

13:08 Members of Parliament from TDP and YSR Congress will be skipping lunch hosted by Lok Sabha speaker as they are upset with their no-confidence motion not being taken up, news reports suggest.

12:49 YSR Congress Member of Parliament YV Subba Reddy has moved no-confidence motion against the government for Tuesday.

12:14 Home Minister Rajnath Singh said before the Lok Sabha was adjourned that the government is willing to face the no-confidence motion. Singh also said that the government was ready to debate the motion.

12:11 Lok Sabha has been adjourned until tomorrow after ruckus. Speaker Sumitra Mahajan said that she would not be in a position to count the votes because of the noise inside the parliament.

12:09 Lok Sabha has convened, following adjournment.

11:59 DMK leader MK Stalin has said in the Tamil Nadu assembly, Andhra Pradesh CM Chandrababu Naidu to put pressure on Central government, has gone for no confidence motion, for the welfare of their state. I ask this (Tamil Nadu) Government to support TDP's no confidence motion.

11:24 Addressing TDP minority wing members, Andhra Pradesh CM and TDP Chief Chandrababu Naidu has said, You have always been supportive of TDP, but you were not happy that we allied with BJP. We have been working for welfare of Muslims.

We thought as an NDA member, BJP will do justice to the state, but nothing happened. We waited for four years, but of no use. Even in the last budget justice was not done, Naidu added.

It was TDP and not YSRCP who responded on Triple Talaq Bill. I told BJP leadership that criminalization of triple talaq was not correct. I was the first to oppose it, Naidu added.

11:16 The government has however expressed confidence that the notices, even if they are admitted, will be defeated given its strength in the Lok Sabha.

The current strength of the Lok Sabha is 539 and the ruling BJP has 274 members, more than the majority mark of 270, and enjoys the support of several allies.

With the 16-member TDP quitting the BJP-led NDA, the ruling alliance strength has reduced.

11:08 Recap

The YSR Congress was the first to give a notice last week for a no-trust motion after the Centre made it clear that it would not grant Special Category Status to Andhra Pradesh.

Not to be outdone by its main rival in the state, the TDP, a long time BJP ally, then decided to break its ties over the issue and brought a no-confidence motion of its own.

Both parties have been lobbying with opposition parties for support to their respective notices. A no-confidence motion notice has to be supported by at least 50 MPs to be taken up in the House.

11:06 FLASH | The Lok Sabha has been adjourned till noon due to ruckus.

11:05 YSR Congress YV Subba Reddy has written to the Lok Sabha secretariat to put his notice for the motion in the revised list of business for tomorrow. The TDP has also moved a notice for a no-confidence motion.

When their notices were not taken up last week, Parliamentary Affairs Minister Ananth Kumar had argued that they could not be due to the House being not in order, with members of several parties raising slogans in the Well.

11:04 TDP, YSR Congress to pitch for no confidence motion notices in Lok Sabha

Desam

YSR

Modi

Lok

Sabha

The TeluguParty andCongress will pitch for taking up their notices of no-confidence motion against thegovernment when themeets today, amid no signs of a let-up in the deadlock in its proceedings.British premium motorcycle brand Triumph Motorcycles said is re-evaluating its India plans after pleas to the finance ministry to reconsider the customs duty hike failed to draw a positive response.

The Union Budget saw an increase in customs duty on completely knocked down (CKD) kits to 15 percent on all types of vehicles including two-wheelers, from the earlier 10 percent. This has led to a direct and indirect increase in prices by up to 6 percent.

In an interaction with Moneycontrol, country managing director Vimal Sumbly said it is unfair that those manufacturers who import from Thailand are benefitting the most as they are taxed at the lowest level possible  10 percent.

In situations like these when I report to my headquarters in the UK, it becomes difficult to convince them to invest more in India. When the idea is to Make in India, a call given by the government, there is a hike on tax on CKD units whereas Thailand Free Trade Agreement protects other manufacturers, Sumbly said.

We had the option of importing from Thailand directly like others instead of making the bikes in India. But we went ahead to invest in a local facility here, added Sumbly.

When asked specifically if Triumph will rethink about its India plans Sumbly said, Yes certainly, now we would have to if the situation does not change".

Triumph is one of the several companies who are hit by the hike in duty as the company assembles its bikes through the CKD route from kits imported from the UK. Rival Harley-Davidson is also at the losing end since it also makes cruisers in India.

On the other hand manufacturers like Honda are benefiting indirectly from the hike in customs duty since they import from Thailand. In like-to-like comparison there is now a price difference of a minimum of Rs 50,000 between those bikes which are assembled in India and those which are imported from Thailand.

At least 90 percent of our products sold in India are assembled at our plant in Haryana. Last year 90 percent of our products were imported as fully built units from the UK, added Sumbly.

As an ad hoc arrangement the Indian government slashed customs duty on fully imported bikes last month to a flat 50 percent from an earlier 60 percent and 75 percent. BMW Motorrad, Benelli, Hyosung, MV Agusta, SMW, Honda, Yamaha, Kawasaki and Suzuki either have an assembly plant in the country or have plans to set up one soon.

The hike in duty has forced luxury car makers like Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Audi and Jaguar Land Rover to increase their prices too by around 3-5 percent.Representative Image

The European Union today unveiled new plans to make big tech companies pay more taxes in a move that would, if endorsed, hit online US firms like Google and Facebook.

Insisting that digital companies must pay their fair share, the European Commission said that EU member countries should be able to tax firms that make profits on their territory even if they aren't physically present.

It would concern any country where a firm's annual revenue exceeds 7 million euros (USD 8.6 million), or which has more than 100,000 users or more than 3,000 digital service business contracts in a tax year.

The plan also includes an interim measure that would allow countries to tax at a rate of 3 per cent companies with total annual revenue of 750 million euros and revenues in Europe of 50 million euros. The European Commission estimates that up to 150 companies could be affected, around half of them from the US.

Brussels argues that digital companies are growing faster than the economy as a whole, while corporate tax rules haven't kept up, meaning that some make significant profits in Europe yet pay very little tax.

It says that, on average, many digital businesses face effective taxes of only 9 per cent, less than half the 21-per cent tax rate for brick-and-mortar companies.

"Our pre-internet rules don't allow our member states to tax digital companies operating in Europe when they have little or no physical presence here," EU Economy Commissioner Pierre Moscovici said.

"This represents an ever-bigger black hole for member states, because the tax base is being eroded." But the 28 EU nations, which must endorse the plan, are divided and it might never see the light of day. EU leaders will discuss the proposal at a summit in Brussels starting on Thursday.

Big EU members, notably France, accuse tech firms of shifting profits through small members like Luxembourg and Ireland, while these minnows in turn see the European Commission's plans as a maneuver to redistribute Europe's tax cake in favor of their bigger partners.

In a statement, France, Britain, Germany, Italy and Spain backed the commission said that "in the absence of a global consensus" at international level over how to tax digital companies "we need to move ahead at EU level."

Some opponents also see the plan as an ill-timed move that could backfire by further undermining already-tricky relations with the US.

A potential trade war is already looming over President Donald Trump's new tariffs on steel and aluminum imports, while his unclear tax plans have left the EU mulling countermeasures. Trump's threat to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal would also hurt European businesses.

But Moscovici insisted that "it's not anything that could be considered aggressive toward our American friends." "Our proposal doesn't target any company or any country," he said. "We are addressing a structural problem with a structural solution." But the Computer and Communications Industry Association immediately branded the scheme "discriminatory and harmful."

"We encourage the EU to seek international tax reform through the OECD rather than pursuing discriminatory, unilateral actions with risks to Europe's digital economy and international trade relations," said Christian Borggreen, CCIA Europe's vice president.

The American Chamber of Commerce, representing US. businesses in Europe, also expressed reservations, saying "we believe that the conversation should take place in a multilateral context in order to ensure widespread agreement.If you carry a little extra weight around your waist then maybe the option of flying in business class on Thai Airways few flights ceases to exist for you.

The carrier has installed seatbelt airbags for additional safety in business class in its two new Boeing Dreamliners which it inducted into its fleet in September last year. The safety standard associated with the airbag means that people with waist sizes over 56 inches will not be able to fasten the seat belts.

That would also mean that people with young children would not be able to carry them on their lap as well.

Flt Lt Prathana Pattanasiri, vice president of THAIs aviation safety, security and standards department said last week that the regulation follows US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) safety standards.

Unlike the usual seat belts, these seatbelts cannot be extended because of the airbag.

However, this is not the first instance when the weight of a passenger has been made an issue by an airline. In November last year, a European carrier, Finnair started weighing its customers before checking in. The company at that time said that it was for research purposes.

The airline said it was surveying customers to check that the estimates used by them to calculate total weight, fuel and safety are accurate.

In the initial two days, they found 180 volunteers who agreed to weigh themselves, along with their carry-on luggage. The airline said it needed at least 2,000 volunteers to get a fair idea of their regular payloads.Whether or not government intervention in the market saves Canadians from themselves remains to be seen, but in the interim, Johanis says refinances are on the rise.

From my perspective, and my portfolio, what Im seeing is theres quite a few of my clients who Im rushing to do refinances not necessarily as a debt consolidation, but for renovations. Im noticing more clients are opting to stay put and do those renovations on their homes, and its shifting the percentage of my portfolio of purchase versus refinance or switch in transfer. Im seeing a few more of those than at this time last year.

Canadians reinvesting in their homes is what Johanis calls good debt.

Its a form of good debt. Theyre taking those proceeds and investing it back into their homes and renovating them. Sometimes its to increase their liveable space, but as a vehicle its also to help the curb appeal for when they do sell, so overall its a good strategy.

Theres no consensus on the gravity of Canadian debt, though. Yesterday, Scotiabanks Brian Porter regaled a University of Toronto conference with what he called a different perspective than the IMFs, stating that they should look at the other side of the balance sheet, which he says have remained apace, and in some cases exceeded, those overall debt levels.Three people from New Jersey have been charged over allegations that they used fictitious documents to fraudulently discharge their mortgages, according to the US Attorneys Office for the District of New Jersey.

According to the complaint, Melissa Reynolds had obtained a $417,276 mortgage from Financial Institution One. She later mailed a money order falsely claimed to have been issued by the IRS to the company as a payoff on the mortgage.

The mortgage business mistakenly accepted the payment and even mailed Reynolds an overpayment refund. The company later sued Reynolds to reinstate the discharged mortgage, but Reynolds argued in court that the mortgage had been paid and even submitted a false receipt for the money order.Walmart's legal victory allowing it to sell hard liquor in Texas doesn't mean people in the state will be able to go out and buy bottles of vodka and gin at the retail giant's stores anytime soon.

An industry association representing Texas' liquor store operators said Wednesday it will appeal the decision from Austin-based U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman, who found restrictions on liquor sales licenses enforced by the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission amounted to unconstitutional discrimination. Pitman issued his 50-page ruling Tuesday, but delayed its implementation until any appeals are resolved, and at least for 60 days.

Walmart already sells beer and wine in Texas, but sued three years ago over restrictions that prevented it from selling distilled spirits. Texas allows privately held businesses  but not publicly held corporations such as Walmart  to own package stores where hard liquor is sold. It also gives some retailers unlimited liquor permits, while restricting others to just five.

Bentonville, Arkansas-based Walmart still would have to build separate buildings with their own entrances next to its existing Walmart stores under state restrictions that ban liquor sales at grocery stores. Walmart didn't challenge that ban.

The Texas Package Stores Association, which represents about 2,500 liquor retailers and joined the state in opposing Walmart's lawsuit, said Pitman's ruling was disappointing and overturns laws dating back as far as Prohibition.

The Texas Legislature put a system in place to ensure safe access to alcoholic beverages in Texas, and that system has worked for over 80 years, the group's CEO, Lance Lively, said Wednesday. We will appeal the trial court's decision and continue to fight for family-owned liquor store owners against the world's largest corporate entities that seek to inflate their profits by upending sensible state laws that protect both consumers and small businesses.

Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission spokesman Chris Porter said only that the agency was reviewing the outcome with the Texas attorney general's office.

Walmart applauded the ruling. Restrictions on liquor sales licenses in Texas prevented us from fully serving our customers, spokeswoman Anne Hatfield said.

Texas is the only state in the nation that issues package store permits to privately owned corporations, but refuses to let publicly owned corporations participate in the retail liquor market, Hatfield said. Texas is also the only state that gives certain favored businesses unlimited numbers of package store permits, but limits everyone else to just five permits.

Walmart filed suit because these laws are unfair and hurt our customers.

Venky Shankar, director of research at the Center for Retailing Studies at Texas A&M University's Mays Business School, said the ruling is an important development in keeping balance between competition and the state's interest in encouraging Texas-owned businesses.

I think broadly speaking from the consumer point of view, it's good that the consumer has competition, Shankar said. Texas because it's a big state, it matters.  Somebody like Walmart is looking to have a very big market.Robert Earl Keen at Wagner Noel Performing Arts Center

A Texas music icon returns to Midland and this time, its not for the holidays. Robert Earl Keen has brought his Merry Christmas from the Fam-O-Lee show to town multiple times in recent years, but this time, fans will see him do what he does best. With his front porch, Texas-spun catalog of songs, he doesnt simply headline a venue. Keen has the kind of star power that not only is electric onstage, but also personal enough to make the audience feel like they are sharing something special.

8 p.m. Friday at 1310 N. Farm-to-Market Road 1788. $29-$54. wagnernoel.com.

Wall St. Antiques Treasure Hunters Expo 2018

Antiquers, garage sale fans and shoppers of all kinds likely can find what they are looking for -- or not looking for -- at this annual expo. Hunt through an eclectic collection of vintage pieces, repurposed decor and unusual tchotchkes for some added flair to your home. You never know what you need until you attend this huge shopping extravaganza.

9 a.m.-6 p.m. Saturday, 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Sunday at Horseshoe Pavilion, 2514 Arena Trail.

Portraits of Courage: A Commander in Chiefs Tribute to Americas Warriors closing

This exhibition at the Museum of the Southwest is a collection of President George W. Bushs works in oils that honors servicemen and women. The centerpiece of the exhibition is a mural of service men and women in their uniforms of all ranks. The show also includes works by his teachers who worked with him as he crafted his skill. The exhibition includes an audio component via a phone app that works in proximity to the show. Guests can bring headphones or they can be purchased at the front desk.

Open 10 a.m.-5 p.m. through Saturday, 2-5 p.m. Sunday. Closes Sunday at Museum of the Southwest, 1705 W. Missouri Ave. $5 daily admission, free on Sundays. museumsw.org.

The Jungle Book by the Pickwick Players.

Although not the Disney version with all the memorable songs, The Jungle Book has been a hot ticket for Midland Community Theatre. So much so, a Saturday matinee show has been added to its closing weekend. Get a ticket now as other shows have or are selling out.A teacher and city council member in a small town on the outskirts of Los Angeles became the subject of harsh criticism after a video of him criticizing the military was shared widely on the internet.

Gregory Salcido, who works at a high school in Pico Rivera, said in the video that members of the military fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan were "the lowest of the low," in a rant about how long the wars overseas have dragged on. The video was reportedly taken in the middle of a history class he was teaching.

"Because we have a bunch of dumb(expletive) over there," he said in the video. "Think about the people who you know who are over there. Your freaking stupid Uncle Louie or whatever. They're dumb(expletive). They're not like high level thinkers, they're not academic people, they're not intellectual people. They're the lowest of our low."

The video appears to have been surreptitiously recorded. It was published on Facebook by a woman who tagged the post from Connecticut, said the student who filmed it was a friend's son, and urged her followers to help her "make this go viral."

It spread widely after it was picked up by conservative media outlets across the country. The person taking the video appears to be wearing a Marines sweatshirt.

"So, if you join the military, it's because you had no other options," he said. "It's because you didn't take care of business academically because your parents didn't love you enough to push you and then you didn't love yourself enough to push yourself."

Kimberlie Flauto tweeted, "Help me make this go viral. My friends son was sporting his marine sweater while this liberal douche teacher rants about..."

Salcido spoke in loaded terms about the United States's foes, saying the military was losing to "dudes wearing freaking robes and chanclas (flip-flops)" in the Middle East.

"The data is in, we don't have a good military," he said. "We couldn't beat the Vietnamese. They're a bunch of people this freaking big throwing rice at us."

He also criticized military recruiters in public schools.

"It's a lie that our military is freaking bitching," he said. "Why after the national anthem do we have a killing machine fly over the freaking stadium? You know, the stealth bomber comes in. Everyone's all like, 'Yeah.' Like, 'That's what we kill people with, woo.' Why would that be something we celebrate?"

The video has now been viewed more than 6 million times, after it was picked up by Fox News, the Blaze and Breitbart, in addition to local news sites in California.

"I'm respectfully requesting a meeting with you @ArlingtonNatl Section 60, Grave 9927," wrote Karen Vaughn, whose son Aaron was killed in Afghanistan in 2011, to Salcido on Twitter. "I will pay all of your expenses. You and I should begin a conversation for the sake of all that's good."

"Instead of teaching the next generation how to read and write, many taxpayer-funded schools are teaching children how to hate America," conservative radio host Todd Starnes wrote on his show's website in a piece about the incident. "I salute this 17-year-old young man who boldly took a stand in his classroom by exposing his foul-mouthed, military-hating teacher. May God bless this great American patriot."

The Pentagon commented in a Breitbart story about the comments, as spokeswoman Amber Smith told the site that she had seen the teacher's remarks and that they were "very uninformed."

The El Rancho Unified School District did not respond to a request for comment.

"We acknowledge it is his voice based on the research of the incident so far and knowing it came from one of our classrooms," the district Superintendent Karling Aguilera-Fort told the San Gabriel Valley Tribune in a phone interview. "We cannot expose the disciplinary measures because it is a personnel matter, but there will be disciplinary measures taken."

Salcido did not return a request for comment sent to the email address on his biography page, which said that he was graduate of El Rancho High School, where he now teaches, and has served as the city's mayor three times. He also serves as a member of the city's History and Heritage Society Committee.

He told the Los Angeles Times that he had been receiving threats since the video was published.

"Because of the many vulgar and violent threats against my family I do not have any comment on the situation at this time," he said in an email to the newspaper.

A Facebook page that appeared to be Salcido's showed a long list of angry, abusive and vaguely threatening comments. Some posted the teacher's phone number, email address, and on Twitter, the addresses for what people said were his home and office.

"If you ever said some (expletive) like that to me you would be brain dead," the commenter wrote on Facebook.

One referenced the relative proximity of Camp Pendleton, a Marine Corps base located about two hours away from Pico Rivera.

"Camp Pen just down the road for Marines," the comment wrote. "You might want to move mother (expletive)!!!"

A person who identified himself as a former student of Salcido's wrote in to defend him.

"This 'man' is a wonderful educator," the person wrote. "Taught me to see the other points of view in the world, and know when to recognize ignorance when it arose."

A spokeswoman for the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department declined to comment.

"It's an ongoing situation," she said.

Pico Rivera, a predominantly Latino town of 63,000, was founded by veterans after World War II and maintains a strong connection to the military, the town's mayor, Gustavo Camacho, told The Washington Post.

"I and my fellow council members strongly disagree with Mr. Salcido's point of view," Camacho said in a phone interview. "Quite frankly, we denounce his statements."

Camacho estimated that at least 35 percent of people in town had veterans in their families.

"We have four veteran posts. Every family here is connected to an individual who has served or is currently serving," Camacho said. "There is no doubt that the majority of folks are disturbed by this, but as a family we'll overcome this."

This is not the first time Salcido has been in the news. In 2010, he was placed on administrative leave after a parent complained about his classroom conduct, according to the Whittier Daily News. About two years later, he was again placed on leave after the Sheriff's Department received a complaint that he struck a student, according to the Los Angeles Daily News.

The student who took the video is a 17-year-old senior at the school, whose father and two uncles are veterans, according to the San Gabriel Valley Tribune.

"It was so disrespectful to my dad and my uncles and all veterans and those still in the military," the student told the newspaper.

The video was taken in a history class earlier this month. The teenager said he was surprised by the attention it had received.

"It wasn't meant for anyone else, but my mom shared it with a few friends," he said, "and now it's this."Alex_Schmidt

A 31-year-old Opelousas, Louisiana, man died Tuesday morning in a two-vehicle wreck in the 2500 block of the West Interstate 20 north service road, according to a press release from the Midland Police Department spokeswoman.

Dustin Enos was eastbound in a Mercury Grand Marquis and was approaching a yield sign. A Peterbilt tractor-trailer was westbound in the same block and was attempting to enter the main lanes of the interstate. Enos failed to yield right of way and collided with the tractor-trailer, according to the release.Google Maps

LITTLEFIELD, Texas (AP)  Police in Littlefield, Texas have fatally shot a student suspected of stabbing three people at a community center, including his teacher..

The incident happened about 9 a.m. Wednesday at the Our Place Community Center in Littlefield. Angel Uolla, 18, was taking instruction for his high school equivalency certificate when he repeatedly stabbed his teacher, Norma Jean Bartley, 75, and slashed at two others, according to a statement from the Littlefield Police Department.The Odessa City Council will start keeping audio recordings of all closed-door meetings instead of written summaries, making it easier for the public to hold the officials to account if future violations of the Texas Open Meetings Act seem apparent.

The agreement stems from a settlement between the City of Odessa and the Odessa American in a lawsuit filed by the newspaper in June 2017. The suit alleged that the City Council violated the state open meetings law weeks earlier, when a majority voted to oust the head of the board overseeing economic development tax money following a closed-door discussion.

"We thought it was important not just from a media standpoint but from an open government standpoint to take them to task for not following laws that were created to keep elected officials from going into closed sessions to do whatever they want out of the public view," OA Editor Laura Dennis said. "For too long this council had skirted the open meetings act and it was time to take action. We won't stand for backroom deal making when the public has a right to know."

As part of the settlement, finalized Monday, the City Council "denies it violated the Act, or if it did, the violation was only technical and resulted in no harm" to the OA or the general public.

Now, the city will be required to keep the audio records for at least two years, allowing a judge to examine the records if future lawsuits allege violations of the open meetings act. Keeping audio recordings of closed sessions goes beyond what the law currently requires.

"It sounds like even though they might not be admitting any wrongdoing, they realize they could do a lot better," said Kelley Shannon, executive director of the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas, adding that a recording provides "indisputable evidence of what was discussed, if it comes up. Hopefully this entire episode helps those public officials better understand the Texas Open Meetings Act, which they must follow. It's the law."

After the May 9 vote, the elected officials who were in the room refused to provide an explanation for the decision to remove the volunteer appointee, Jimmy Breaux, from the Odessa Development Corp., despite his public requests. The City Council's closed door session lasted about 56 minutes.

At the time, the meeting continued a pattern of secrecy by the City Council, which spent almost half the time during their regular meetings behind closed doors as they had facing the public by that point in 2017.

"It's supposed to be exception that you are going into closed session, not the normal way of doing business," Shannon said.

In response to the public blowback from the May 9 meeting, the City Council began meeting less often behind closed doors.

In addition to the audio recordings, the settlement calls for the city to comply with requirements of the Texas Open Meetings Act and pay part of the OA's legal fees, $12,500.

"By settling this it is less costly to taxpayers than if we had forced it to go to trial -- where the city would have lost," Dennis said. "It was a clear violation and showed disregard for open government."

The OA alleged that at a minimum, the City Council had failed to announce the justification for the closed meeting as the law required before they went behind closed doors.

But the OA also argued that the City Council failed to provide the proper notice of the meeting by appearing to hide the true purpose of the closed session -- discussing Breaux's removal. The public notice before the meeting called for the City Council to "consider the removal of current ODC board members prior to the expiration of their terms."

District 3 Councilwoman Barbara Graff and District 5 Councilman Filiberto Gonzales had placed that item on the meeting agenda, purportedly to discuss removal of each of the five ODC members, even their own appointees.

Before the OA's lawsuit, the newspaper and television station KOSA filed a criminal complaint with County Attorney Dusty Gallivan alleging violations of open meetings law by the City Council.

"The meeting that was held, discussing the removal of Jim Breaux as the head of the Odessa Development Corp., violated the Open Meetings Act," Gallivan wrote in a May 25 letter to City Council members and former City Attorney Larry Long.

But Gallivan said the violations he found did not appear to rise to the level of a criminal offense, citing his own research and a review by a Texas Ranger. Before the OA sued, the May 9 meeting had already drawn rebukes from state open meetings experts.

"We hope other elected officials will take note that the public is watching," Dennis said. "Follow the rules and do what the law allows and don't try to keep public business out of the public's eye."

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